Work Text:
∞
Maybe others will live out their lives with
no more than an occasional spill on the ice.
I live with this horror: when I tumble,
I go down into blood.
- Pablo Neruda
Stiles doesn't remember how he and Scott first met, mostly because he doesn't remember a time when Scott wasn't around. It's like - he was too young to have a firm grasp on his memories, but the moment he could hold onto something, the moment he could look back and recall specific details without the aid of a family member or an old home movie, Scott was just.
There.
He can't remember when they met, but he has held onto one day in particular, maybe a few months in. They can't have been more than five and there's nothing particularly extraordinary about the memory itself–he’s gotten old enough to the point where its sort of like seeing it through someone else's eyes. There's his mom and Scott's mom sitting on a porch with a pitcher of lemonade between them, cheeks flushed with happiness. Stiles never knows where their dads are in this memory - maybe his was at the station, and Scott's was probably at work too, but it doesn't matter - it's always just their mothers.
Scott and Stiles are drawing on the sidewalk with pieces of chalk - the Crayola kind, the proper ones that are massive and come in a rainbow of colors; Melissa says she splurged, a summer treat for the boys.
Scott draws a crooked, smiling sun. Stiles draws a house. Melissa laughs, and Stiles can't make out the details of his mother's face.
It always happens, in this one.
He knows what she looks like - of course he does. He has so many photos of her tucked in the pages of her high school yearbook, hidden away at the top of his closet, only opened at his weakest moments: her birthday, every year, what would've been his parents' fifteenth anniversary, when his dad wants a drink but doesn't take one, because Stiles still needs him alive and healthy and present.
He knows what she looks like but he can't do it on his own, can't describe her off memory alone - can't get the cadence of her voice down right, or know for sure if that beauty mark is above her right eyebrow or left. Not without digging through obsolete VHS tapes or flipping through a family album that's incomplete in more ways than one.
Sometimes it feels like his whole life is an hourglass and his mom is just slipping through the crack in the middle and he can’t do anything to keep her with him. He tells Scott this, the summer before they start high school. They’re in Stiles’ room, backs against the wall as they sit on his bed, bottle of Jack between them that Stiles snuck from the the back of the liquor cabinet that doesn't get used. He says that - I’m scared of forgetting her - and Scott - Scott makes a face, like he wants to cry, but can’t, because she wasn’t even his mom. And then he informs Stiles that if he’s an hourglass, then all he has to do is turn himself over.
They might have been drunk, at the time.
*
Stiles and Scott have gotten a 50/50 deal with their parents. Four people: one dead, one who might as well be, two still around who would give everything they have so long as it means Scott and Stiles will be safe, and loved, and alive.
A lot of things tie Stiles and Scott to each other. They were nerdy little kids, and then nerdy little wannabe athletes, and then they skirted around the popular crowd, and then somehow became part of the popular crowd. And they’ve battled everything - werewolves, kanimas, humans with cold, dark hearts, but this - family - this is the glue that holds their friendship together, in the end.
*
Scott's dad bails that same summer. Really, he's had a minor role in Scott's life long before that, but there's a difference between going through the motions and running away like a fucking coward. Scott doesn't cry, doesn't scream or yell or beg. He wants to be strong for his mom. Melissa, who works so hard and loves Scott so much, who took Stiles in and cupped his face in her hands that way mothers always seem to know how to do.
(When he was younger, it made Stiles flinch. Made him wish they were a different set of palms resting on his cheeks. But she held on, always, like she wanted him to know it was okay to miss his mom. Like she wanted him to know it was okay to keep going, too.)
The divorce is hard on both of them but Stiles remembers this most of all: Scott, fourteen and angry, standing in the hallway and kicking a suitcase by the door. Scott, standing in front of his father in a newly-minted almost-adult body and spitting out, “I wish you left before I had a chance to remember you.”
Memories are so inconsistent when you’re younger. It’s hard to differentiate fact from fiction, your mind from a story you’ve been told courtesy of an unreliable narrator. Maybe if he’d left earlier, when Scott was a baby, or a toddler, Scott would’ve been better, would’ve forgotten what he was like. Instead he had fourteen years of not-always-shitty experiences, and the knowledge that his dad didn’t even want him around for the good ones.
His dad grabs his suitcase, throws it into his car, and peels out of the driveway. Stiles is curled up in the corner of the sofa, silent for the first time in he doesn’t know how long, and Melissa’s voice trembles when she says, “He's still your father, Scott."
“Yeah, well," Scott licks his lips, eyes bright. “Who the hell needs a dad when I have you?”
Melissa makes a choked sob Stiles can't get out of his head for weeks.
*
Stiles knows Scott was angry; he always hides it, because Scott McCall Doesn't Get Angry, but he was. For a long time. He explains it once, when they’re fifteen, almost-sophomores, relaxing in Scott’s backyard while his mom’s on a shift 'til morning. Says it’s like a kind of resentment churning inside of him - he never lets anything get to him, never hates anyone, never hurts, and it kills him to feel so badly about something. But it’s a different kind of negative thought process - something he can’t help if he tries.
It’s this slow-building thing, this darkness that switches his perspective from who needs you, anyway to what is so fundamentally wrong with me that you couldn’t stand to be around it.
"I don't wanna be angry anymore, dude," Scott says, lying back on the grass and staring up at the sky, Stiles cross-legged next to him. “I’m, I don’t need him, you know? I don’t need some guy around to teach me man shit or what-the-fuck-ever, I don’t need a father, I have my mom and she’s - she’s it but sometimes I just get so - frustrated. I get frustrated because I’m thinking about him. And I don’t - I don’t get it. I don’t wanna be mad at him for leaving. I don’t wanna be mad at him for not being around for the rest of my life. But I am. And I’m mad that I’m mad.”
He squints at Stiles. “Does that even make sense?”
Stiles rips out a patch of grass. They are fifteen, and Scott is crying, and they might be drunk again because Stiles maybe broke into his dad’s stash of booze again. Stiles wonders what it must feel like, to have a parent who wants nothing to do with you.
Stiles' mom is buried in a cemetery and the last memory he has of her is her wilting away like a flower that hasn’t had enough water, softly saying love you, sweetheart - always and you watch over our deputy for me, okay? but Scott's dad - ?
He's alive. He exists, he breathes the same air they do, and he couldn't care less that Scott is his kid. And frankly, frankly, anyone who doesn't want Scott McCall as a kid - best friend brother son boyfriend neighbor anything, literally everything, ever - doesn't fucking deserve him and Scott knows that, he knows that because Melissa tells him and Stiles tells him but even then. Even then.
Stiles thinks it makes a lot of sense.
Sometimes parents fuck up so monumentally that their kids are the ones who end up paying for it. Sometimes they don't deserve that title at all - parent.
Guardian.
Sometimes people just don't love you the way they should. The way they're supposed to. And it's not fair. It's not okay. And somewhere out there, maybe, there's a world where sickness doesn’t exist, where asshole parents don't leave kids who are too good for them, anyway.
But that's not the world they live in.
Stiles hugs him - they don’t hug often, but he does now, flops down onto the grass, onto Scott, and all he can get out with his mouth mashed against Scott's shoulder is I love you, bud, I love you so much, you know? and.
If there's one thing Scott's always known - and Stiles is sure of this - it's that.
They're not a picture perfect nuclear family. They're just two kids with two single parents and enough emotional baggage to decimate whole lives, if they let it -
But they have each other. And that's what matters.
*
Sometimes - sometimes Stiles is okay about her dying. Occasionally, he can go whole days before an alarm goes off in his head, like a reminder during the most basic task - ding ding ding! put down that syllabus! someone you love is dead, Stiles.
They aren't coming back, Stiles.
You don't get any more moments with them, Stiles.
Those are the bad days. Those are the days when all he wants to do is stay in and lie in bed - his dad's gotten pretty good at figuring it out now, too, throughout the years; takes one look at Stiles a week after he starts tenth grade before saying gruffly, "I'll call in for you."
Stiles croaks out an I love you in response. He's not sure there's a more appropriate way to say thanks than that.
He texts Scott, and Scott ditches, climbs under the covers with Stiles - a couple hours, but never long enough to be qualified as wallowing, Scott doesn’t let him wallow - before he flips the blanket off and asks if it's real world time, yet. Smiles soft and says, can't stay in a blanket fort forever, dude, even if your favorite person is under it with you, right before he palms the crown Stiles' head and gives it a shake.
“You’re my best friend,” he says, and his mouth is wide and goofy, disarming Stiles’ grief with one lopsided flash of a smile. “You’re my best best friend. Okay?”
“I know.” Stiles raises an eyebrow. His voice is scratchy and there are dried tear tracks on his cheeks, but neither of them mentions it. “Is there a reason you’re informing me of this new and shocking detail of our friendship?”
Scott shrugs amicably.
(Scott does everything amicably.)
“No,” he says. “Just like reminding you.”
*
Scott gets the bite a few weeks later.
And if they were ever close to normal before, they’re not even in the same ballpark as it now.
*
They’re sixteen when Stiles suggests killing someone to solve a problem, sixteen when he means it, sixteen when they lose count of how many dead bodies they’ve seen. So many dead bodies, so much pain, so many things plucked right out of horror movies, and they haven’t even graduated high school yet.
They’re sixteen when the alpha pack comes to town, and everything goes to shit.
*
It strikes Stiles, the morning after what happened at the motel, that he and Scott aren't ever overly affectionate - they don't spend a ridiculous amount of time touching, barely hug at all, really, but - it's not always necessary. Stiles doesn't need the reassurance of a temple resting against his own, an arm slung around him, not always. Aside from Scott's mom and Stiles' dad, he's Scott's first choice, and Scott's his. Nothing and no one will ever change that. He can't imagine loving someone more than he loves Scott, loving someone enough to step straight into fire for them -
Or gasoline, as it were.
And that night - that night, Stiles would’ve been hard-pressed to admit it out loud, but he knew what he was doing when he stepped into that foul-smelling, fire-starting puddle. They couldn't shock Scott into snapping out of it with heat, so Stiles tried the next best thing.
He put his life on the line.
And it worked.
(Stiles will step into fire for Scott, yes - but Scott will always lead them out of it.)
*
Everything gets so much worse after the motel.
Stiles starts to have nightmares about everyone he cares about leaving him. His dad, Scott, Melissa, Lydia - the list continues, lessens as it goes surely, but it creates the same amount of fear in him, the same thing that makes his insides roll around fitfully every time one of his friends gets put into a situation they might not make it out of. That they don’t make it out of.
(There’s a litany in his head that recites names like prayers: taraheatherboydericamommommom - )
Stiles likes to consider himself brave. Smart. Resourceful. He can deal with a lot of things. He can deal with werewolves - psychotic or otherwise - with alpha packs, and druids, and darachs, and ritualistic suicides. He’s a fountain of information, the go-to guy, the one who knows his way around a handful of Boolean operators and a search engine.
He can deal with a lot, but the one thing that stops him dead in his tracks, every time, is having no one left to love.
*
And now he’s here, on a rooftop, watching Scott walk away from him.
Listening as he promises Stiles he’ll find his dad.
(They have to find him, they have to, because Stiles will fucking lose it if they don’t but also, also -
Mom would have believed me. That's what he told his dad. It came out like a confession, quick in a moment of hurtangerfrustration: his mother has been gone a long time, but bringing her up in the harsh lights of the same hospital she died in - that's the kind of thing that can reopen a wound. That’s the kind of thing that pours salt into it.
And he turned and walked away before he could see the pain on his father's face -
Didn't need to see it, Stiles has sat across from it nearly every morning since they buried her. Hell, he's seen it when he stares in a mirror.
Mom would have believed me.
That can’t be the last thing he says to his father. He won’t let it.)
Scott walks away, and Stiles says his name; it bounces oddly off the metal contraptions on the roof, forces him to hear the way his voice shakes, hear how desperate he sounds. Scott can’t join up with the very thing they’re trying to stop - he’d never -
Dammit, Scott just -
Turn around, please, for the love of God turn around and come back, there's always a way, there's always a plan b-through-z, a hail Mary pass in the form of a monstrous, murdering English teacher -
There's always something else.
But Scott disappears into the fog with Deucalion, and Stiles’ ears are too-human to make out anything else in the next moment but the wind. He swipes a trembling fist over his eyes and stands on the roof and
And Stiles figures sometimes -
Sometimes people become extensions of you, the relationship itself a piece of your body - the tightness of a shoulder, the delicate bones of a wrist, the strenuous arch of a foot that's traveled all over.
All important, none necessary to survival.
But his dad, Scott - panic claws up his throat and sets up for a long stay - they're his heart, all the gory bits of it, bloodied and battered with loss but still fucking beating, even after everything. His heart, and if they’re, he doesn't - he doesn't know what to do anymore. They’re the people he loves best - his dad, and the boy who was always meant to be his brother - and without them he's scared he might just be a shell.
“Scott?” he calls out, and his voice is so small now.
There’s no response. And there won’t be.
Stiles know that, deep down.
Scott won’t respond. Not if it means protecting his mom. Not if it means protecting Stiles’ dad.
Not if it means protecting them all.
(This is the plan b. And it’s terrifying.)