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The sheriff’s family lives in the smallest house on the block, with the biggest, most extravagant garden. Everybody in Beacon Hills knows it. Marieke Stilinski does a nice job. Pity about the medical bills, really. Maybe they should vote the sheriff a pay raise in the next election cycle. (That’ll be the day.)
Stiles doesn’t remember a time before his mother was sick. She’ll tell stories sometimes, way-off fairytales about when she was a little girl, windmills and giants and wild college parties, and it’s always a little bit weird to remember that she could probably do things like hike up mountains or drink that much alcohol once upon a time. Parents aren’t supposed to have ever been teenagers. It’s just wrong.
Then, he knows, she got married and pregnant and stuck, and then just a couple of years after that came the endless rounds of chemo and remission, surgery and remission, new treatment and remission. So now she runs her blog and serves as vice president of the Beacon Hills garden club and bitches when Stiles doesn’t pick his shit up off the floor or forgets to walk the dog. She’s kind of a lousy cook and she refuses to admit that she knows how to hack a computer security system, or teach Stiles anything about how to do it himself.
She’s his mom. Sometimes she’s annoying as fuck, and she will not get off his back about homework even though she knows damn well that he could pull it all off at the last minute and still be getting straight A’s, and she’s totally the reason he gets weird looks when he goes to the DMV and every first day of school since he was born, but she’s still his mom. Fuck you if you think there’s something wrong with that.
The summer before freshman year of high school, Scott says, “I want to try out for the lacrosse team.”
“You have severe asthma,” Stiles answers automatically. “That’s a really terrible idea. No.”
“Dude, come on,” Scott pushes. “We’re going to be in high school. All of the cool kids are on the lacrosse team. Don’t you want to be cool?”
“Not as much as I want you not dead,” Stiles says easily, and Scott rolls his eyes.
“My mom is signing off on it,” he says. “You know, my mom, the trained nurse.”
“Yeah, because you promised her you’d spend the entire time sitting on the bench and ducking out of practice whenever you felt faint,” Stiles says, because he knows Scott, okay. “Which is going to last, what, a week?”
“They’re my lungs,” Scott says stubbornly. “I can’t believe you’re not with me on this.”
“You know what, you’re right,” says Stiles. “They’re your lungs, go out for lacrosse if you want to, but you’re doing it without me.”
Scott almost tries out for the swim team instead, which requires even more breath control and brings with it the risk of actual drowning, but he’s kind of a crappy swimmer and doesn’t even make the bench. They end up on the school paper, where the biggest asthma risk is all the dust piled up on the back issues in the storeroom that nobody’s read since 1963.
Stiles knows about love. Love means emotionally blackmailing the people you care about into doing things for their own good. Yeah it sucks to deal with, but nobody he knows can be trusted to take care of themselves. Stiles included.
The other night, Stiles’ dad brought home a pack of steaks to grill for dinner, and his mom said, “Oh, no. You remember what the doctor said.”
“It’s one night,” complained Stiles’ dad, and Stiles’ mom shook her head.
“No red meat,” she said. “We don’t need more heart problems in this family.”
“So you’re saying that, as a family, we should agree to always follow doctor’s orders?” Stiles’ dad asked. “No more red meat, no more beer, no more heavy lifting in the back yard—”
“I’m saying that Stiles and I are grilling those, and you’re getting chicken,” said his mom. “Like it or leave it, hon.”
“You know, as an elected government official who carries his own deadly weapon, not to mention the guy who actually went to the grocery store, I’d like to think I’m enough of an adult to decide on my own dinner.”
“If you made better decisions, we wouldn’t have to decide them for you,” Stiles chimed in, doing his homework at the kitchen table. His dad swatted at the back of his head but let it go, probably because a week before that, he’d told Stiles the exact same thing.
When Stiles was nine, his mom almost died, for real, closer than ever before. It wasn’t even the cancer that time. Immunosuppressive drugs. Opportunistic infections. Fucking bullshit, all of it.
Beacon Hills got a freak snowstorm that winter, just an inch or so dusting over the ground, and she bundled him outside to play for hours. She had to know she was going to pay for it later. She always knows that. She would’ve spent the next two days in bed even if she hadn’t caught that cold, that turned into pneumonia, that put her in the hospital for over a month.
She almost died. Stiles doesn’t like to think about that month, never if he can help it, not at all. The thing is, though, she lived. It didn’t kill her. Something will, someday, but nothing has yet.
“For a snow day,” Stiles remembers his father saying, a conversation he wasn’t supposed to overhear from the stairs the day after his mother finally got home. “You’d die on me for a snow day? That’s worth trading your life for?”
“That wasn’t the point. You know it.”
“Mari, if you died…I don’t know what we’d do, without you.” Stiles had never seen his dad sound quite that broken before, not even in his mom’s hospital room. “You’ve got to be more careful. You can’t do that ever again.”
“John,” Stiles’ mother said, quiet and firmly. “I don’t want to die over a stupid snow day, but if I’m not going to take a damn snow day once in a while, then what’s the point of still being alive?”
They were quiet for a while. Then Stiles’ mom said, quieter, so he had to strain to hear, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s a metaphor. I don’t want to leave you either.”
“You just have to be more careful.”
“I’m careful. I’m careful all the goddamned time. I’m the one living with all this—”
“And you think I’m not?”
“I think you can spend one fucking afternoon playing in the snow with our son. This is my life, John. My decisions. I know what I’m dealing with here, and if I want to stop being careful for once, I am the one who gets to decide.”
Stiles never heard his mother swear that much when he was around. His dad was always worse about letting his tongue slip, but even that was usually limited to a muttered ‘asshole’ in heavy traffic.
“I love you,” his dad said, raw enough to make Stiles squirm a little.
“Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting the pneumonia,” said his mom, startling a laugh out of Stiles’ father so genuine that Stiles finally unclenched his fingers from around the bars of the stair railing and crept back to his bedroom to sleep. Things were going to be okay.
When Stiles was ten, he started seeing a psychiatrist for his ADD. The Ritalin made school ten times easier, but it also made his head hurt and his stomach churn.
“You’re going to your appointments, kid,” his mom informed him. “Or I won’t go to mine.”
A year and a half later, they switched his mom’s medication up again, something that made her pick at her dinner and doze off in the middle of the day twice as much as usual. Stiles caught her staring at the prescription bottles, rolling one around in her hand, and grabbed his off the kitchen counter.
“Take them, or I won’t take mine,” he said. His mom looked at him for a long time without saying anything, before she poured her glass of milk and downed her pills, one by one.
Stiles was on the Adderall by then, which made the nausea better and the insomnia worse, except on days when he’d had too much caffeine or hadn’t slept at all, in which case there was a thirty percent chance that eating anything at all would make him throw up.
Every once in a while, Stiles and his mom still take cheat days together, because 100% med compliance is for losers. Not often, because it’s Stiles’ and his dad’s job to keep his mom honest when the treatments all suck, just like it’s his mom’s job to make sure Stiles’ history papers are actually about the right continent and century. But sometimes.
Sometimes, Stiles and his dad will eat burgers and curly fries in his dad’s office even though mom would yell at both of them if she knew. Sometimes, Scott and Stiles do things that will get them so fucking grounded it’s not even funny. Stiles’ mom is supposed to avoid elevated heart rate and physical exertion, but while Stiles never, ever wants to know anything about his parents’ sex life, he is forever scarred by the certain knowledge that they do in fact have one.
Every once in a while, you need a snow day.
This is what Stiles knows about life: there are always laws and doctors’ orders and shoulds. They keep bad things from happening. They keep you alive. There’s always going to be a smart thing to do, a responsible thing to do, and nobody ever wants to do it, him included, but it matters and it’s always there.
If his mom doesn’t keep up with her treatment plans, she ends up in the hospital again or worse. If Stiles cuts class and comes home in the middle of the day, he learns things he never, ever, ever wanted to know about the existence of his parents’ sex life. Consequences.
This is the other thing that Stiles knows about life: if you don’t cheat on the shoulds every once in a while, no matter what the people who love you say, it isn’t worth living.
Sometimes it’s a risk. Sometimes it’s a straight trade. Going outside of the should is always a bad idea, and that’s why the people who love you try to stop you from doing it, but it’s also life.
Stiles doesn’t listen in on his father’s phone calls because that is way outside the bounds of ‘should’, and, as such, he gets stopped every single time by his mother. Dad gets a call, and she sends him out to walk the dog.
That night Peter Hale, half-overwhelmed by a new alpha’s crushing need totake betas, rushes three Beacon County deputies and ends up gunned down by the collective firepower of half the sheriff’s department. Scott sleeps well. Stiles stays up later than he should, because his dad still isn’t home and his mom’s newest round of meds is giving her nasty insomnia, so they play scrabble and watch old zombie movies on Netflix until the clock passes midnight and she sends him to bed.
The next day, flush with new power he never earned, Derek Hale finds his sister’s body and buries her under a wolfsbane spiral. There’s nobody to dig her up.
Derek is the last, has to be the last. The power wouldn’t have come to him if he wasn’t. And there are hunters in town, and there must be more trouble coming, and he can’t do this alone.
Derek goes hunting.
Scott’s new girlfriend wants to know why her family has gone weird and uncommunicative. Scott wants to know how Isaac Lahey suddenly got so good at lacrosse. Stiles wants to know when Erica Reyes got hot.
The joy of working for the school newspaper is, investigating totally falls within the bounds of ‘should’. Your nose actually belongs getting poked where it doesn’t belong. It’s a beautiful system. Stiles enjoys it a lot.
Stiles is a good investigative talent. Who uncovered that whole expired cafeteria meat scandal last year? Okay, people will tell you it was Greenberg, but Stiles put in all the legwork on that one. And seeing how far he can push articles so that the managing editor will still run them but the student body might actually want to read them is a great use of his major bullshitting powers. He’s seriously got to start thinking about going into journalism after high school. Start Chloe Sullivan’ing it all up in here. If only enough bizarre things happened in this town for Stiles to start building his own Wall of Weird.
Well, now they have, and Stiles knows exactly where his mom keeps the sticky tak. He was born for this. Bring on the crazy, Beacon Hills. Bring it on.
It gets brung.
When all of this is over, Stiles and Scott are going to have a long talk about Scott’s taste in girls.
Probably it’s going to be followed by a long talk about Stiles’ ability to get himself into trouble. Scott doesn’t entirely subscribe to the Stilinski Family System of caretaking via blackmail and emotional manipulation, but he’s got the concern-for-the-welfare-of-others thing down. And the puppydog eyes.
Scott’s a good friend. Allison and her crazy fucking family are so bad for him, contraindicated in every possible way, with their guns and their lies and their entire secret crusades, but Scott goes after her like she’s the only shining thing in the entire world.
Scott isn’t usually the more reckless one of the two of them. Stiles is the one who can look the rules full in the face and willfully decide, just this once, to break them. But Scott’s definition of the right thing to do has never actually been the thing that keeps you safe.
Stiles doesn’t actually know what it must be like in Scott’s head, where he obviously has lines of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that he doesn’t expect as a foregone conclusion to someday cross. Other people are kind of weird, sometimes.
Stiles’ house is small and very very neat, with dog hair everywhere because Mom totally uses fatigue as an excuse to get out of vacuuming. (Stiles and his dad can so tell the difference between his mom genuinely tired and his mom faking it. All you have to do is suggest going out for ice cream.) It smells faintly like mud and mulch for most of the year, and fresh flowers from March through November. Stiles’ mom never does as well in midwinter, when it’s cold and wet and gross outside. They’re lucky they don’t live in a place where it snows more often.
His mom grins at his Wall of Weird and nags him to carry his dirty clothes down the hall to the laundry room. Stiles talked about it more with her, before he figured out how it all actually came together. It seemed less dangerous then.
Now Stiles has Derek Hale creeping through the backyard to his bedroom window demanding answers to questions Stiles hadn’t even known to ask, and Allison asking if she can stash evidence of her parents’ past hunts underneath his bed, just in case, and those two days where everybody thought Isaac Lahey had killed his father where Isaac hid behind Stiles’ door and slept half-under his bed. It’s a whole wide world of weird out there, and Stiles is smack in the middle of it.
If you end up caught in a situation you probably shouldn’t be in for totally innocent reasons, neck-deep until the only way out is through, then the smart, responsible thing to do is to learn all there is to know about werewolves and conspiracies and whoever is running around Beacon Hills now. Stiles doesn’t have to cheat to get involved.
The thing about cheating is, as much as you have to do it sometimes, bending the rules too much gets people dead. Kate Argent broke the code, and Stiles still doesn’t like to think about what happened when she got caught. Derek bit Isaac, Erica, Boyd, even though he shouldn’t, and it worked out fine, but he bit Jackson and more than a dozen people died.
Stiles hasn’t skipped a dose on his meds since the whole werewolf thing started. As far as he knows, neither has his mom.
According to cancer survivorship statistics, the number one reason that treatment plans fail is because patients don’t adhere strictly to their medication and treatment routine. It’s been more than ten years of hopping from one brand new medical discovery to another, adding six months here and a year and a half there. This is a family that knows why the rules matter.
Stiles’ mom overextends herself trying to dig out a new bed in the back of the yard, and spends two days without the strength to get up. Stiles brings her soup and vacuums the living room and folds his laundry, and researches werewolves and wolfsbane poisoning and suvivorship rates, and tries to figure out where the hell the supposed to is for this.
The facts and figures on werewolf bite survivorship are woefully anecdotal. Everything Stiles researches seems to indicate that your chances of living go up if you’re physically strong already, go up if you’re under the age of 25 and way, way up if you’re between the ages of 12 and 20, go up if you have something that Stiles’ dusty old research books call “a hunter’s spirit”.
The chances go down if you’re past the age of thirty, go down if you’re weak, if you’re scared, if you don’t fight. Ironically, it looks like biting with consent is actually more deadly, not less, although the book’s attempts at statistics are pitiful. Probably there’s centuries of rogue alphas dropping their dead mistakes in rivers and burying them in the woods that the book doesn’t know about.
Stiles’ mom switches treatments again, and all of the sudden she has a ton more energy but she can’t stop her hands from shaking, and some mornings she’s too dizzy to get up. They hang out in the living room, dog sprawled across Mom’s feet, while Stiles does homework and plays water-glass-getter and insists on ordering pizza or Chinese or at least subs from Jimmy Johns when his dad is on shift through dinner.
“Hypothetical situation,” he says, drumming his pen against his history book. “Say there’s this experimental treatment. Totally unsure but really high mortality rate, like, greater than fifty percent, but if it works then everything’s fixed. No relapses, no complications, no nothing, just a straight-up cure.”
“Seriously?” his mom asks. “You’re so much better than that old cliche. If you’re going to give me a hypothetical, at least put some effort into it.”
“But just what if,” Stiles pushes. His mom stretches her fingers, cracking her knuckles casually; she’s been blogging again, typing as fast as Stiles on a caffeine binge, and she gets sore. “Two choices. Either you die or you get your whole life back. Is it a risk worth taking, or not?”
“Get my life back?” she asks. “What the hell do you think I’ve been for the past third of my life, some kind of undead zombie?” Stiles winces and looks away.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” says Stiles.
“You have got to learn to watch what comes out of your mouth.” So his parents have been telling him for years.
“I’m sorry,” Stiles says. “But just, if?”
“You don’t get to spend fifteen years as the undead by jumping at every underresearched kill-or-cure treatment that comes along,” his mom says, and then, “how’s that history paper coming?”
Having now known several werewolves, Stiles is pretty sure that zombies are cooler anyway.
But werewolves. Werewolves actually exist. And maybe Stiles wasn’t only interested for his mom.
Stiles’ little world keeps getting bigger and bigger now. He started with Stiles-and-his-parents-and-Scott, but now there’s Allison, and Isaac and Erica, Boyd and Lydia and even Derek. And that means that every time he turns around things are getting more complicated: Allison’s subtle war of attrition against her parents, the betas’ full moon killing reflexes, Jackson’s murder spree and Lydia’s grim new rebellious phase, complete with flamethrower. Scott’s studying some kind of freaking magic healing with Dr. Deaton, Stiles’ dad is getting called in on weird supernatural crime after weird supernatural crime, and sometimes it seems like the only thing that hasn’t changed in Stiles’ life is his mom’s dog.
The ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ keep getting harder to figure out, and even keeping on the right side of the line doesn’t always save everyone. Someday, it might not even save Stiles.
Stiles isn’t a naturally responsible and upstanding kind of guy. Nobody in his family is. He’s a guy who’s afraid enough of getting his ass killed that he does the smart thing most of the time whether he wants to or not, but nobody can be smart and responsible forever. That’ll kill you just as sure as throwing the rules out the window entirely, just a little bit slower and a lot more painfully.
What Stiles knows about life is, if you’re going to do something stupid sooner or later, pick your time, and make it count.
Derek and his gang are mostly holed up in an actual apartment these days, albeit an abandoned one with a gaping hole in one wall. Baby steps. Stiles shows up in the middle of the afternoon when he knows only Derek will be around.
“You made me an offer once,” Stiles says to Derek’s blank expression, suddenly nervous. “About six months ago. I wanted to know if it was still on the table.”
Derek looks at him dispassionately, no sign of a smile. Of course, he’s not throwing Stiles out, either, so that can only be good. “Why now?” he asks. “Argent’s still around. With the alpha pack coming, it’s only going to get more dangerous from here.”
“Danger’s pretty much inevitable from where I’m standing,” says Stiles. “Why not now?”
He’d wanted it when Derek first put the offer on the table, but it was a bad idea. It’s still a bad idea, a freaking terrible one, and that spike in survivorship for healthy teenagers still doesn’t reach anywhere near 100%. Derek’s a crappy alpha at best. Of course, Derek seems to consider Lydia and Stiles to be honorary members of his pack already anyway, while Scott and Allison are a dangerous couple of close hangers-on, so nothing’s really going to change there.
Stiles wants it. He wants the speed, the confidence, the power, the coolness, the security of knowing that he will never need or be able to responsibly cut werewolves and their crazy shenanigans out of his life again. “If the offer’s still available, I want it,” he says. “I accept.”
Derek still looks doubtful, but he’s not about to turn down a potential new beta when one walks right through his front door. “What exactly went through your head today?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Stiles says truthfully. “I woke up still exhausted, and I looked out the window and realized it was time for a snow day.”