#i simply huff the junk link an inhaler

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Source - AmonSyd

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[thisdiscontentedwinter]

hunger - chapter 11

Hunger master post. 

 Stiles is surprised at how easily he fits in with Scott and Melissa. He doesn’t have that same feeling he did at the foster homes they put him in. Like he had to ask to use the bathroom, and was afraid to help himself to food out of the refrigerator, and he always felt like he was a guest in someone else’s house, always careful of what he said and did, and itching under his skin because he couldn’t just be him. He doesn’t get any of that here. The McCalls’ house is comfortable. It feels like it could be a home. He’s not treated like a guest here. He’s treated like he fits.

He misses his dad.

He misses the dog.

He cries himself to sleep more than once, but it’s okay. It’s grief. It’s not helplessness. His tears are cathartic, not desperate.

He has a pile of clothes that Scott has given him. It’s mostly stuff that Scott is growing out of. Stiles is skinny enough thanks to living on the streets that he fits them. He’s a little taller than Scott so the jeans aren’t quite the right length, but Stiles doesn’t care. Who’s he got to impress anyway?

He does a few chores around the house while Melissa is working and Scott is at school. He wonders how long it will be until it feels like the walls are closing in on him. A while yet, probably. The house is warm and safe. During the day he researches his dad’s case, and wonders if it will raise any red flags anywhere if he tries to order a copy of the transcripts online. Then he figures they’re not really what he needs anyway. He needs the notes from the initial investigation, not the prosecutor’s polished presentation. For that, he needs Rafa McCall. And for Rafa McCall to even think of giving them to him, he needs evidence.

He takes one of Scott’s unused school notebooks and makes a list of what he already knows. Which isn’t much apart from Kate Argent’s name, her brother’s address, G. Argent’s address—are they even related?—and how she shot his dog.

He thinks back to that, trying to divorce himself from the impending panic.

“Hello again, Derek. You don’t look so good.”

Except Stiles’s name isn’t Derek, and as far as he remembers he’s never met Kate Argent before in his life.

Derek.

The name snags in the threads of his memory like a hook, but Stiles can’t quite tug the memory free. He pushes it aside for now.

Stiles makes himself a cup of coffee—the caffeine helps settle the more annoying symptoms of his ADD—and takes it into the living room. He sits down on the couch and reaches for his notebook.

Scott’s laptop is open. Stiles was searching the Herald earlier. The elusive mountain lion still hasn’t been caught.

Stiles taps his pen against his chin, and thinks of Kate Argent again, and the exchange she had with Allison’s dad outside his house a few nights ago.

“I told Dad I’d check and see if you’d had any luck bringing down the alpha. Clearly you haven’t.”

Alpha. What is the alpha? First letter of the Greek alphabet. Term co-opted by asshole meninist PUAs. An episode from season six of The X-Files. And, in hunting terms, the foremost animal in a pack, right? Except that mountain lions aren’t pack animals. So what exactly is Chris Argent hunting?

Stiles sips his coffee.

What the hell is going on out there in the Preserve? Chris Argent is hunting something, and Scott got bitten by something, and all of it, every fucking thing, comes right back to those blackened ruins in the clearing, doesn’t it? Everything comes back to the Hale fire.

Maybe Stiles has been coming at this the wrong way.

Maybe he doesn’t need to prove Kate Argent framed his dad.

Maybe he needs to prove she had something to do with the Hale fire.

***

  Stiles likes helping Scott with his homework. He’s missed school. Not the other students or the teachers or whatever, but he’s missing learning. Stiles has always been wired a little differently than a lot of kids. Scott is basically failing Biology, and even though it’s been months since Stiles cracked open a textbook he falls easily back into the rhythm of studying.

“All I know is the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!” Scott says. “And I learned that from a meme!”

He looks so miserable that Stiles can’t help laughing at him. “It’s okay, Scotty. We’ll make sure you pass!”

“Thanks, dude. I need all the help I can get.”

Stiles chews his bottom lip for a moment. “Are you still hanging with Allison?”

“Yeah.” Scott flushes. “It really sucks that I can’t tell her about you, you know? She said that she keeps driving around town hoping she’ll spot you somewhere.”

Stiles’s breath catches. He tries to smile. “Hopefully not to hand me over to her aunt the cop, right?”

“No.” Scott holds his gaze. “Stiles, she says she hasn’t said anything to her aunt about even knowing you. I believe her.”

“Kate Argent set my dad up,” Stiles says. “Or at least helped whoever did.”

“What?” Scott’s jaw drops. “Seriously?”

“I don’t have any proof,” Stiles says. “But I heard her on the phone to my dad, warning him to drop the investigation into the Hale fire. So I’m guessing that she had something to do with the fire as well.”

“But that was an accident…” Scott trails off. “Wasn’t it?”

“My dad didn’t think so.” Stiles twists his hands together. The knot of anxiety in his gut is growing larger.

“Holy shit.” Scott’s gaze grows distant. “Cora Hale was the year above me in elementary school.”

“I didn’t know them,” Stiles says. “I went to Stuart, not Beacon Hills.”

“Ooh,” Scott teases. “A private school kid! Very swanky!”

“My mom taught there.” He looks down at the open Biology textbook. “We paid reduced fees. It was a Montessori school, which turned out to be a good fit for a kid with ADD plus zero social skills.” 

When he looks up again, Scott shows him an encouraging smile.

“Anyway.” Stiles closes the textbook. “I never met the Hales.”

“Cora was kind of scary,” Scott says. “I heard they never found her body.”

Just another thing that never added up about the Hale fire. Why would the Hales hide in the basement after a gas line explosion? And the fire investigator had said that the fire burned at such a high temperature that there was simply nothing to find of some of the bodies. Cora had never been found. Neither had one of the adults. And another one of the kids too. The teenage boy. The brother.

Derek.

Derek.

Stiles scrambles for Scott’s laptop.

Derek Hale. Sixteen years old.

Holy shit.

Stiles finds a picture online of a guy in a Beacon Hills High basketball uniform. A guy who looks absolutely nothing like Stiles.

“Hello again, Derek. You don’t look so good.”

Kate Argent must be crazy, or that’s her guilty conscience speaking.

He wonders, when she has people over, if she can hear a telltale heart beating from under the floorboards.

If she does, it serves her right.

 ***

 They order pizza because it helps with homework. That’s a scientific fact. They eat the pizza in front of the TV, which doesn’t help at all with homework.

“So you think Allison’s aunt had something to do with the Hales?” Scott asks.

“Yeah.” Stiles picks off a piece of pepperoni and eats it. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“We should really tell my mom,” Scott says. “And my dad.”

“Not without proof! If we tell your dad, then he’s obligated to do something about me being a missing person. And, you know, wanted by the police.”

Scott sumps back against the couch. “I can’t believe she shot your dog.”

Stiles feels the customary low burn of anger in his gut flare for a moment.

“Sucks, dude.”

Yeah. It really, really does. 

 ***

 They talk for a while about whether or not to tell Allison what’s going on. If her aunt has links to the Hale fire, than surely Allison is in the best place to try and discover some proof of that? Scott is sure that she can be trusted. Stiles isn’t willing to risk his freedom on that. Scott agrees that it’s Stiles’s call.

Stiles goes to bed just before midnight. He curls up under his comforter and thinks of all the times he sat in the alley with the dog.

Entropy.

Decay.

He has to act.

At the same time, he’s afraid. Everything is already so precarious that he’s terrified to make any move at all.

He tosses and turns for a while. He maybe dozes.

The basement has windows set high in the walls, at ground-level outside. The moon is a half-moon tonight, but bright enough that faint light filters through the windows. It fills the basement with a gentle glow.

Melissa says that if Stiles is allowed to stay, he can have the room next to Scott’s. But for now he shares the basement with the washing machine and dryer, and a shelf full of old board games, Christmas decorations, and assorted junk. He doesn’t mind that everything smells like fabric softener.

Stiles doesn’t think he’s asleep when the basement door opens, but he seems to jerk awake all the same.

“Stiles?” Scott whispers in the darkness. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” Stiles whispers back.

Scott’s footsteps creak down the steps.

Stiles sits up. Scott stands in front of the sofa bed. He’s shifting his weight from foot to foot, and even in the dim light he looks pale and wide-eyed.

“What’s wrong?” Stiles asks.

“Can you hear that?” Scott shakes his head like a dog after a bath under the hose.

Stiles listens in the silence for a moment. “Hear what?”

Scott wrinkles his nose, and tilts his head. “Howling?”

Stiles listens again. “Dude, I can’t hear anything.”

“It woke me up.” Scott’s breath is coming in short panicked gasps.

Stiles remembers Melissa checking with him before she went to work that he knew where his inhaler was. “Do you need your inhaler?”

“N-no.” The question seems to distract him from his rising anxiety. He sucks in a deep, uninhibited breath. “No, I think I’m okay.” Then his forehead wrinkles. “How am I okay?”

“Lets…let’s go up stairs and get your inhaler, okay?”

Scott nods. “I think there’s something wrong with me. Really wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” Stiles tells him.

Scott’s huffs out a laugh that sounds as though it’s bordering hysteria. “I can hear you lying!”

Stiles puts his hand over his fast-thumping heart. “That sounds really impossible, Scott.”

“I know.” Scott drags his fingers through his hair. “I know it does.” He freezes suddenly, and turns to stare up at one of the windows.

Stiles follows his gaze.

A shadow passes in front of the window.

“Did you—” he whispers.

Did you see that?

But the words don’t come.

Because when Stiles turns his head to look at Scott again, Scott’s eyes are glowing gold.

Sleep paralysis.

Imagination.

Frontotemporal dementia.

A nightmare.

Except Stiles knows in the pit of his stomach that whatever is happening now is a hundred times more terrifying than any nightmare, because he knows it’s real.

From outside, a howl tears through the night. It’s loud enough and close enough that Stiles feels the echo of it reverberating through his bones. The sound is big enough to swallow the world, and Stiles knows instinctively that he’s powerless in the face of this, whatever this is.

And then it’s gone again.

The shadow passes in front of the window.

Scott’s eyes are no longer glowing.

“It’s gone,” Scott whispers. “Holy shit. What was that?”

And Stiles stares back at him and thinks: What are you, Scotty?