#save yourself has been referred to in as many words by gerard as a cousin to famous last words

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

Famous Last Words -> Surrender The Night -> Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Bad Blood - Chapter 17

You can read it on AO3 or find the Tumblr Chapter Index here. 

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Stiles wakes up sometime late on Friday night when his phone buzzes. He rolls over to grab it off his bedside table, and squints at the screen. It’s from Allison: Get in loser, we’re going shopping. That… Stiles doesn’t get that reference. He texts back: What?

A moment later her answer comes: I’m parked up at the gate on Northwood St. Hurry up.

Stiles rolls out of bed and dresses quickly in his jeans, Converse, and a black hoodie. He listens in the darkness for a moment, but can’t hear any movement in the house. He opens his window carefully, and drops down onto the garage roof. From there it’s easy enough to get onto ground level.

Ten minutes later he scales the fence near the gatehouse on Northwood Street, and jogs toward Allison’s little silver car.

“We’re not really going shopping, are we?” he asks as he gets into the passenger seat.

She raises her eyebrows. “You don’t watch many movie, do you?”

There’s a hint of a smile on her face, and Stiles hasn’t seen one of those from her in days. It makes his chest ache, so he disguises his swell of sudden emotion by fumbling with the seatbelt.

“Not really,” he says. He used to, he thinks. He loved movies and TV and comic books and gaming, but he has to focus on his training now, and Gerard says anything that takes away from that is a waste of time. “So where are we going?”

“We’re going to get milkshakes,” Allison says, and puts the car into gear.

Stiles glances out the window as she drives, and wonders if he should at least text Kate and let her know he’s out with Ally. He doesn’t think she’ll mind. Or at least he doesn’t think she’ll mind enough to punish him for it. If Allison is going to be sneaking out, better to do it with Stiles at her side than on her own, right? Even Gerard will have to agree with that.

But he doesn’t send the text, and he’s not sure he wants to think about why. Of all the ways he’s betraying Allison’s trust, this is probably the smallest. But it’s also the only one Stiles has control over. Maybe that’s the reason he doesn’t want to tell.  

In the days following Scott McCall’s death in the woods, Allison has become a fixture around the house. On one hand, it rankles because Stiles hates lying to her. On the other hand, he loves Ally and feels a certain kinship with her—he’s a liar, and she’s being lied to, and both of them are powerless to do a thing about it. They’re the kids being kept from the adults’ table, even though Stiles is supposed to be a man and a hunter. That rankles too.

“How was school?” he asks as she drives.

She rolls her eyes. “You sound like my dad when he’s trying to make awkward conversation with me.”

Things have been strained between Allison and her parents. She thinks they’re angry she was seeing a boy and didn’t tell them. She thinks they’re horrible for not letting her go to Scott’s funeral. She’s so caught up in being the teenager whose parents don’t understand her that she doesn’t see the lies she’s being told are covering up a far larger truth. Chris and Victoria aren’t just coming down on her for arbitrary reasons, but that must be what it feels like.

“Hey!” Stiles exclaims. “That’s not fair. When your dad does it, he’s being weird and awkward, but I’m asking from a place of genuine curiosity. Home schooler, here. I want to know all about bad cafeteria food and pep rallies. What is pep, and why does it need its own rally?”

She laughs at that, and Stiles doesn’t know whether to feel pleased or guilty, or a weird sickening mix of the two.

“We don’t have pep rallies every day,” she says. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a school that had a pep rally.”

“Well, so much for you being my inside source,” Stiles tells her.

She laughs again.

They drive a little while longer, and then Allison pulls in to the parking lot of an all night diner. It’s a dinky little place that looks straight out of the 1950s. Stiles half expects to see waitresses on roller skates, but apparently the retro-flair starts and ends with the décor, not the staff.

They get a booth, and Allison orders a chocolate milkshake. Stiles orders strawberry, with a side of curly fries. He hasn’t had curly fries in—

His mind stutters over it.

He hasn’t had curly fries since the last time he lived in Beacon Hills and his father bought them for him. Jesus. It was possibly even this exact same diner.

“Are you okay?” Allison asks.

Stiles grips the edge of the table until his dizziness passes. “Yeah. Low blood sugar or something, probably.” He forces a smile. “Guess we’re in the right place to fix that, huh?”

Allison’s answering smile is cautious, and Stiles wonders how long it will take for her to realise that he’s part of the conspiracy of lies wound as tightly around her life as the web of a spider, slowly constricting the fluttering moth caught in the middle.

When his milkshake comes, it doesn’t taste as nice as he thought it would.

Stiles sips it, and thinks of a hundred different ways to tell Allison the truth. A hundred different ways he’ll say it, and she’ll hate him for having lied to her. Scott was a monster,he wants to tell her, but he can’t even bring himself to say the words, let alone fully believe them.

Because Scott was a werewolf, but maybe that’s not the same thing.

The milkshake sits heavily in his roiling stomach.

***

“What happened to your neck?” Allison asks as they’re walking back across the parking lot to the car.

Stiles reaches up and touches the bandage on his throat. The wound is healing quickly, but Stiles has kept wearing a bandage because he doesn’t like to look at it. He’s been hurt before, but not like that. Not with such slow, careful intent. And that’s not even the part he doesn’t like to think about. It’s the way that Derek saved him. The way that the other werewolf, Peter, just stopped when Derek said his name. That’s not how werewolves, mad with bloodlust, should act.

“A mole,” he says. “Well, I’m covered in them, but this one was weird.”  

Allison’s brows draw together. “You didn’t say anything about it.”

He shrugs. “It was last week, in the middle of everything. I didn’t want to worry you.”

He feels a rush of hot guilt at the way her expression softens.

“Oh, Stiles,” she says, and grasps his hand. “We’re friends. You should have told me. Is it all okay now?”

“Yep,” Stiles says. “Turns out it just looked weird, but it wasn’t a melanoma or anything.”

He tugs his hand free of Allison’s before she notices that he’s shaking.

“Come on, he says. “You’d better get home before your parents notice you’re gone.”

***

In the morning, Stiles wakes later than usual. He heads downstairs to find the house empty, and checks his phone to find a message from Kate. Her and Gerard have headed to LA to make a pick up. Of reinforcements or weapons, Stiles isn’t sure. He feels like he’s being treated like a child in Beacon Hills, when at least back in Kroměříž he’d been treated like a hunter. The lowest one in the chain of command, sure, but a hunter still. It has to be because they don’t trust him. Because they think that being back in Beacon Hills, back in a place thick with the memories of a childhood spent with his father, that he’s more susceptible to his father’s weaknesses. That he might succumb to the same treachery.  

And a part of Stiles is afraid that maybe they’re right. He hasn’t felt as unsure of the ground underneath his feet in years.

Stiles makes oatmeal in the microwave, and pours a glass of water to take his Adderall with. He’s still in his sleep pants and an old t-shirt when the doorbell rings. He pads to the door and opens it.

Chris is standing on the doorstep.

“Chris,” Stiles says, and moves aside to let him in.

“I’m not coming in,” Chris says. His gaze drops to the bandage on Stiles’s throat, and then he lifts it again to look him in the eye. “I followed Allison last night.”

Stiles doesn’t react. He can’t read Chris as well as he can Gerard and Kate. He knows Chris doesn’t like him—he gets narrow-eyed whenever he looks at Stiles—but he’s never felt like the man’s actually going to hurt him or anything. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time Stiles was wrong.

“I want to know what you two talked about,” Chris says.

“School,” Stiles tells him. “Teenage stuff. And Scott McCall.”

An emotion Stiles can’t name flickers in Chris’s blue eyes. “What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything,” Stiles says. “I let her vent.”

“And that’s all?” Chris asks.

Stiles nods. “That’s all.”

Chris stares at him without saying anything, and Stiles tries not to fidget under his scrutiny. He knows the stories. Stiles’s father and Chris Argent were legends, once upon a time. They were heroes. And then Stiles’s father left, spitting on hundreds of years of proud history, and Chris Argent—his best friend, his hunting partner, the man who’d been so close to Janusz Stilinski that he’d married his cousin—was tarred with the same brush. Chris was no traitor, but the facts never got in the way of speculation. Mud sticks. Who knows that better than Stiles?

Stiles wonders if Chris hates him for being his father’s son, or pities him for it.

“You wouldn’t have to follow Allison if you told her the truth,” Stiles says, lifting his chin. “She’s an Argent, and one day she’s going to be head of your family and—”

Chris takes a sudden step forward.

Stiles flinches back.

Chris stops. For a moment he looks puzzled, and then a weary sort of resignation overtakes his expression.  He nods, and takes a step back, as though he’s dealing with a small, frightened child, and not a fellow hunter. His gaze settles on Stiles’s bandage again. “Take care of yourself, Stiles.”

Stiles flushes.

“I’m glad Allison has you as a friend,” Chris says at last, and then turns and walks back down the front path toward his SUV.

Stiles closes and locks the front door behind him.

Then, his unfinished breakfast forgotten, he heads downstairs into the basement and spends the next hour unloading his fear, his shame, and his uncertainty into a punching bag. He works it until his muscles ache and he’s too tired to think.

And then he keeps going.