Reading Time: 86 Minutes

Title: The Second Change
Series: True Guardian
Series Order: 3
Author: Lalaith Quetzalli
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Genre: Angst, Crime Drama, Dimension Travel, Family, Pre-Relationship, Slash, Time Travel
Relationship(s): Peter Hale/Sheriff Stilinski, Pre-Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Past Peter Hale/Sheriff Stilinski/Claudia Stilinski
Content Rating: R
Warnings: Hate Crimes, Violence-Graphic, Minor Character Death, Murder, Discussion – Rape (Canonical, Kate Argent), Discussion – Torture, Kidnapping, Racism, Violence – Canon Level
Author Note: This story can, for the most part, be understood on its own. There are cameos and name drops from other fandoms, it’s not necessary to know them to understand the fic. Scott McCall dies in this one (I’m not tagging Major Character death, because he’s not a major character in these fics). While the death is not shown, the aftermath is, and throughout the story enough of how he came to be that way is pieced together. Which is where the Hate Crimes, Graphic Violence and Discussion of Torture comes in.
Beta:
Alpha:
Word Count: 21,304
Summary: It’s not rare for a person to believe that if they could only change one small thing, everything would be better. Most never stop to consider, what if things end up being worse instead? Grief and loss may burden Stiles, but they won’t stop him from doing what’s necessary to make things right.
Artist: Twigen

Chapter 1

When the new timeline starts taking shape, Hop at first cannot quite see what it is that’s supposed to be the change. He can see Scott McCall choose to let events happen as they did the first time around: he comes across the body of Laura Hale, is startled badly and falls down a hill, where a feral Peter Hale finds and bites him. So what’s the change then?

Hop doesn’t know. Though it’s clear there must be one. Otherwise they’d be back in the original timeline, instead of having a new one created.

But Scott did do something. Before he made the choice, the change that shaped the new timeline, he asked a question, and as he (and Alan Deaton) was in limbo at the moment, in that pocket of time and space, the universe answered…

The two got glimpses of a future, of the original future. First of the immediate events, following the surrogate sacrifice; and then fragments of the following days and weeks. They saw little more than flashes, pieces without background and context, and it’s impossible for Hop to tell how much they might have been able to comprehend. Yet it’s clear that there was something amidst it all that led to whatever choice Scott McCall has made.

It’s until morning comes, that what the choice was is made clear…

xXx

It’s the morning of January 10th, the first day of the Spring Semester (though how people can call it spring when they’re still in the middle of winter, Stiles cannot fathom!). Stiles Stilinski makes sure to get up early enough and be silent as he gets ready, so that when he loudly announces that he’s leaving, his dad barely has the chance to yell at him to return straight home after class (instead of the long speech about responsibility and safety and how Stiles shouldn’t be wandering the preserve in the middle of the night he’d have probably liked to give, again!). Stiles is still grounded, but at least he managed to avoid the speech!

He makes it to the McCall place, only to find out that his very best friend, Scott, has left for school already. That throws him because while, yes, Scott has his bike, and he does like riding to school sometimes when he’s having a good day. It’s tradition for them to go together on the first day of any given term. Before it used to be that either Stiles’ dad or Scott’s mom would drive them (depending on what shift each of them were working), but ever since Stiles turned 16 and got his permit (and the keys to his mom’s old Jeep) he’s been the one to drive them. So why would Scott go by himself?

Stiles can only assume Scott wasn’t too far ahead of him when he sees the other boy getting off his bike, right as Stiles himself is parking the Jeep in his preferred spot (under the shade, as he likes it, far enough away from the cars of douches like Jackson and other upperclassmen, but not so far away that he’ll give himself a heart attack if at any point he has to run to his Jeep for something). Then Stiles gets his bag and rushes to catch up to his best friend, who apparently didn’t see him arrive.

“Scott!” Stiles calls to him. “Hey bro, wait!”

Scott flinches (actually flinches!), and Stiles stops in his tracks because, what the hell?! He can only look at his best friend in shock and confusion. Just what’s going on?

“Hey man, are you alright?” He asks, honestly worried.

Did something happen in the preserve last night? Stiles is suddenly very worried. He tried to go back to look for Scott as soon as he was sure his dad was no longer following him in his cruiser (and he was so lucky his dad was busy enough to not decide to get into the jeep with Stiles, or worse, take it over and then conveniently not give the keys back… Stiles could have hotwired it, of course, he taught himself how to do that after someone decided it’d be very funny to steal his keys during gym class and hide them). But anyway, the point is that his dad did not get into the jeep with him, and Stiles turned back towards the preserve as soon as he was sure he wasn’t being followed anymore (and that he wasn’t in a neighborhood where a well-meaning busybody of a neighbor might think it a good idea to tell his father what he did…). And yet he couldn’t find Scott. He wasn’t in the general area where they were before Stiles ran to distract his dad and cover-up for his best-bud! And though Stiles kept looking for him until well past midnight, he never found the other teenager.

And now here’s Scott, acting extremely oddly and Stiles wants to know what’s going on!

“Yea…” Scott begins, only he trails off, as he apparently remembers something that makes him change his answer entirely. “No! You left me!”

“Scott…” Stiles begins because Scott’s gotta know, right? He’s gotta know Stiles would never leave him! He’s gotta know that Stiles went back for him, Scott just wasn’t there anymore!

“You left me!” Scott insists. “In the middle of the night, in the forest. Why would you do that?”

“Why would I…?” Stiles trails off for a moment, at a loss. “My dad was there!”

“Exactly!” Scott cuts him off before Stiles can finish.

Stiles makes an attempt to explain things to Scott, again, but the other boy refuses to listen to a single word he might have to say.

“I told you it was a bad idea, going looking for that dead body. I told you I wanted to get a good night’s sleep before practice…”

“And I told you that it’s not like sitting on the bench is such a grueling effort.” He’s not trying to be cruel, but Scott is aware that, as a severe asthmatic, he doesn’t stand a chance, right?

“I’m going to make first-line this year!”

Apparently not.

“Scott…” Stiles begins, trying to find the right words.

He loves Scott, truly, he does. The other boy is his best friend, his almost-brother. But sometimes he’s just so stubborn! And sometimes Stiles admires that stubbornness. Scott has managed a lot thanks to it, no doubt. But when it, and his enduring belief that if he denies something long enough it will eventually go away (in this case, his asthma!) makes him be reckless with his own life… that’s when Stiles really doesn’t like Scott being so stubborn anymore!

“No, Stiles,” Scott snaps at him. “You don’t listen, you never listen! I tell you I’m gonna make first-line and you say no, like I can’t, like I…”

“Because you’re a severe asthmatic Scott!” Stiles is about to lose his temper, for real.

“That doesn’t mean I cannot play! That I cannot be good at it.”

And that… that is crossing the line. For Scott to insinuate, to even think, that Stiles is, and has ever been anything but absolutely supportive of him! That Stiles hasn’t done anything and everything he could to ensure Scott got the chance to do everything, to be anything that he ever wanted!

“No,” Stiles isn’t angry, he’s furious, so much he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. “The fact that you’re always forgetting your inhalers, and losing them. That you don’t take your medication when the issues begin, when you could control them, and wait until you absolutely have to, until you can no longer breathe… that means you cannot play!”

“I will make first-line.”

It’s like everything Stiles says goes in one ear and out the other, like grand-aunt Penny used to say. Or worse, like he’s closing his ears to it all.

Stiles still tries, repeatedly throughout the day, to get Scott to listen to him. But it’s to no avail. And then the time finally comes for lacrosse practice.

Things go… well. Surprisingly (rather, unbelievably) well, actually. Which only makes Stiles worry more. He doesn’t want to think that Scott would be crazy enough (reckless enough) to do something like pop pills, either steroids, or some other kind of drug, in order to do well in lacrosse. But well, Scott has always wanted to make first-line, and it’s not like it’d be the first time he was reckless with his own health, his own life, would it?

Stiles doesn’t get the chance to confront him on the matter, though. Scott doesn’t allow it. Not that day, and not for the rest of the week. Even then, Stiles keeps an eye on his friend. Paying close attention to everything. Like the fact that Scott, for a change, doesn’t seem to have forgotten to carry his inhaler this time. And yet… he barely uses it anymore. And sometimes when he does, Stiles doesn’t even know why, he doesn’t seem to be needing it.

Stiles consults his old research on the matter, and confirms what he already knew. It is false that asthma disappears or that it can be cured. Some people do believe that children sometimes ‘outgrow asthma’, but it only happens very rarely, under very specific circumstances; and a good number of doctors agree that rather than saying the child ‘outgrew’ the asthma, it’d be more precise to say that the sickness ‘went into remission’ as there’s always the chance they might present symptoms again later on in life.

Also, the remission doesn’t happen as abruptly as it seems to have, for Scott. Which means that something else must be going on. And Stiles intends to find out!

It’s not that he doesn’t want his best-friend to be alright. Stiles honestly wishes that Scott could be entirely free of the asthma, that he could do all the things he’s always desired. Have fun, play games, play lacrosse, everything! But if he’s using some kind of drug… It’s dangerous! What if he has an allergic reaction?! What if he one day gets a batch that is faulty? Or that is laced with something else? Or just that doesn’t work and then his asthma comes back when he least expects it and has nothing and no one there to help him?!?!?!

Scott sitting with the rest of the popular crowd at lunch, makes it a tad harder for Stiles to keep an eye on him. Particularly since, after he ends up staring that way a bit too long one day, afterwards he’s accosted by Jackson Whittemore and a couple of his minions, all who claim that he was ogling their girlfriends. Please! As if he were interested in any of their insipid girlfriends!

Lydia Martin is a very particular case. Stiles can still remember the first time he saw her, or rather, the first time he noticed her. He was still in elementary back then. His mother had died not six months before, his dad was still drowning in grief (though not the bottle anymore, at least) and Uncle P was never around anymore. Between his own grief, anxiety, the panic attacks and his out-of-control ADHD Stiles missed a lot of classes (enough that he’d eventually be held back a year). Even when he did go to school, sometimes his ADHD made it so he couldn’t be still, or couldn’t shut up, and his teacher that year couldn’t really handle him, so he’d send him out of the classroom whenever he was having one of his ‘episodes’.

It was during his time sitting in the hallway, waiting on an adult to decide what to do with him (or for class to end so he could go to lunch, or home, or whatever) that he started noticing Lydia Martin. She was in the grade below him (the grade he’d end up in). She missed a lot of classes over the course of several days back then. Not because she was being sent out, or sick or anything like that, but rather because she’d apparently been chosen to participate in some sort of Math contest.

That was when Stiles found out that while Lydia Martin was the kind of girl who was always all dolled-up, trying to look all perfect, she wasn’t only that. She was also clearly very smart. Perhaps even a genius (at least in Math).

She totally won that contest!

When the new school year began and Stiles officially joined the same grade as Lydia Martin (and Scott) he would often turn to look in her direction, wanting to witness her genius. It never happened. It wasn’t that she never participated in class, she did, she did all the classwork, and homework, and even most of the exercise sheets they were given for extra credit, but she never called attention to any of it. She didn’t go as far as faking mistakes, but it was clear (at least to Stiles) that she was very careful to keep the number of times she participated in class in the average, and she made sure to never appear particularly eager about it.

At first Stiles thought it was just because, with it being still elementary, she found it boring (he did sometimes, not so much with Math, but with other subjects like English and History and the like). But then they got to Middle-School, and even to High-School, and it was the same. High-School was almost worse, in a sense, because they were more grown up, and it was no longer just that Lydia was clearly hiding her genius, but the way that she’d act like an airhead… And then she started dating Jackson ‘Jackass’ Whittemore! Stiles came to believe that she was purposefully dumbing herself down just so he’d date her. Like being on a jock’s arm was more important than being her gorgeous, brilliant self!

Well, Stiles does know that beauty is subjective and everything. And truth is, he’s never been interested in what people consider ‘classically beautiful’. Who cares if Trixie has long blonde hair and bright blue eyes? Lots of people do! Or that Gina is the only girl in the school with hair that shade of red? It’s dyed, anyway! And yeah, Susan has a more curvaceous figure than other girls in their class, but again, who cares? All those girls are beautiful in their own way, and Stiles doesn’t care about any of them!

Back when he started announcing (rather loudly) his interest in Lydia Martin, Stiles had actually been too young to really know what it meant, to be attracted to someone. He knew she was smart, and as he soon realized, he was one of few who did; in fact, no one else their own age seemed to. When Stiles thought about her, about them dating, he thought about being with someone smart, that they could be equals, could talk about important things, without having to pretend to be interested in the boring things others their age seem to believe are so important…

But as he’s come to realize, Lydia is happy enough dumbing herself. Hiding her genius, just to fit among the popular crowd. Fitting in matters to her more than being herself. That’s not something Stiles will ever agree with. So he’s decided to let that old crush go. It’s not like it was ever more than an idea, anyway (an idea that deep down he knows would have never gone anywhere, not unless Lydia felt like she had no other option, or unless he happened to have something she really wanted…).

It’s not… Stiles won’t say he enjoys being alone, he doesn’t. Then again, he wasn’t truly alone until recently, was he? Or at least, that’s what he used to think. Scott was his friend, his best-friend, and even if it was only ever the two of them, that was enough for Stiles. How did he not see that he was never enough for Scott?

Yeah, he knew that Scott wanted to play lacrosse, to be one of the popular guys, but Stiles used to believe that it was simply so he wouldn’t be bullied anymore. It still happens sometimes, though a lot less since Stiles made the last boy who bullied him (Mike, back in 8th grade) pay. Somehow Stiles failed to see how badly Scott really wanted to be one of the ‘popular guys’, how far he was willing to go to fit in with them.

The way he turns away from Stiles during lunch after being invited to sit in with the lacrosse players and their girlfriends (and the new girl, Allison Argent, whom Scott keeps making cow eyes at) is bad enough. Yet the worst part is perhaps what happens on Friday Night…

Stiles doesn’t even know why he thought it would be a good idea, going to that party. He wasn’t even invited! And while an argument could be made that Lydia is always inviting ‘everyone’ to her parties, Stiles still remembers with painful clarity what happened the last time he and Scott thought such an ‘open invitation’ meant they could attend too. (It was absolutely humiliating!).

What happens that night ends up being even worse somehow.

Stiles knew going in that things probably wouldn’t be pretty. Yet he could have never imagined how bad they’d get. And yet… he was worried about Scott! He’d been acting off all week. Stiles would have never forgiven himself had he not at least tried…

There’s alcohol at the party! Which, okay, not exactly surprising considering… everything. But still, Stiles goes straight to Scott when he notices the other boy throw back the last of the beer in his cup before pouring himself another.

“Scott!” Stiles cries out, rushing to him. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Scott retorts in a nasty tone that Stiles doesn’t remember hearing from him, or at least not directed at him. “I’m having fun! Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at a party?”

“Yeah!” several people around them cry out their agreement (most of them sound quite a bit drunk).

“What are you doing here, Stilinski?” Jackson asks in a drawl. “You weren’t invited.”

Stiles ignores him completely, he knows exactly the kind of response pointing out that ‘everyone was invited’ would garner him.

“You shouldn’t be drinking alcohol,” Stiles states instead, looking straight at his friend. “You know that. It’s dangerous!”

“No, it’s not,” Scott snaps with the same mulish tone and expression he uses every time he’s in denial about something.

“Yes, it is,” Stiles presses, slowly approaching Scott, trying to reason with him. “It could interact with your asthma and make you have an attack…”

“I don’t have asthma anymore!” Scott hisses at him, pushing the other boy back.

“Asthma doesn’t just go away, that’s not how it works…” Stiles began.

“Just go away Stiles!” Scott practically snarls at him.

Stiles opens his mouth to say something else but then Scott shoves him. Physically. Hard enough that Stiles actually stumbles and goes sprawling on his back. Which of course makes everyone around them laugh uproariously.

Stiles doesn’t move for a little while. It’s not that he’s hurt, not really. What he is, is thoroughly shocked. Especially when Scott then goes into a rant. Stiles is too shocked to catch more than a few pieces of it, as Scott claims that Stiles has never been a ‘true friend’, that all he’s ever done is try to hold Scott back… And, what the…?! All he’s ever done is try to help Scott, to keep him safe. Stiles has done everything in his power to help Scott do anything, be everything he wants!!! And yet, according to Scott, Stiles is a terrible friend who’s only ever tried to stop Scott from being happy and popular and what-not! So now Scott has finally decided that Stiles isn’t a good friend for him, he isn’t ‘the right kind’ and has decided he wants nothing to do with Stiles again.

Stiles would like to think that it’s just the drink talking. That Scott is so sloshed he has no idea what he’s even saying. But the thing is, Stiles knows very well what someone drunk looks like. And Scott doesn’t look like that. He does look… off, in a way Stiles can’t fully explain. It’s… for one, Scott is angry, like, inordinately angry. As if Stiles had done something truly unforgivable, trying to be his friend and somehow apparently not being the kind of friend he wanted… Really, Scott looks to be about to go into a rage, like he’s truly so angry he’s almost shaking with it. But why? Since when is trying to protect, to look after someone you care about, such an unforgivable sin?!

Ever so slowly Stiles gets up. Never taking his eyes off Scott, trying to think of something he might be able to say, to do, to make things better. But for perhaps the first time in his life, his mind is blank.

“Didn’t you hear, loser, go away!” Jackson snaps nastily from somewhere behind him, “You’re not wanted here!”

“I don’t think he’s ever been wanted anywhere…” one of the girls says in a shrill tone, followed by a fake laugh.

In the end Stiles does leave. Because what else can he do?

That’s the last time he sees Scott; or at least, the last time he sees him alive…

Chapter 2

It begins with a phone call early on Sunday morning. Early enough that Stiles pretty much half-stumbles down the stairs and to the phone (the landline) his father’s holding out for him in the kitchen, eyes still more than half closed and wearing nothing but a pair of old sweats, a nearly threadbare shirt, a thick pair of socks and no shoes on his feet; he’s also carrying around a blanket (because it’s freaking cold and at such an hour as ass o’clock in the morning he should still be buried in his warm bed catching up on his beauty sleep!).

Then he hears Melissa ask the last thing he could have ever expected:

“Is Scott with you?”

“No…” Stiles hesitates, not sure how to even begin to explain to Mama McCall what’s going on.

“Stiles…?” And of course Melissa knows something’s off, she’s known Stiles long enough. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“I’m sorry,” Stiles murmurs quietly. “I haven’t seen Scott since Friday night.”

“Friday night!” That clearly surprises her. “But… yesterday… I thought he was with you! You’re always together and…”

“Mama McCall,” Stiles hates what he has to say, but he knows he can’t keep it to himself, not when Scott is missing! “Scott hasn’t talked to me since Monday, he barely even looked at me all week…”

It sounds like Melissa wants to say something, clearly as shocked and confused by that as Stiles’ own dad is, as he looks straight at his son. But Stiles just keeps on talking.

“I went looking for him at a party on Friday night,” Stiles goes on. “He… it didn’t go well. He didn’t want me there. No one did, really. We argued and then I left. I’m sorry to say I left without him.”

Not like Scott would have gone with him. Not when he was so happy to finally be fitting in with the popular guys, but still!

“A party?” His dad asks. “On Friday night? The one at the Martin house?”

Stiles just nods. He imagines his dad, or one of his deputies must have gotten called at some point during the night. Which means that they probably already know that there was alcohol at the party. Not like it’d be the first time. And it’s not like anything will happen, anyway. At worst, there will be a fine, and Lydia’s dad will pay it without even looking at it; at best they’ll get a metaphorical slap on the wrist and nothing more. And none of them will care.

In any case, that still doesn’t tell them where Scott was on Saturday, or where he is at that moment.

xXx

Scott is officially declared missing shortly before noon on Sunday.

There’s an initial ‘hasty search’ operation that lasts the rest of the day. Handled by around half of the deputies on duty (those not busy with one matter or another) as well as volunteers who go looking for Scott throughout the town, its outskirts, as well as the well-known running and hiking trails that run on the edges of the preserve.

They also begin working on arranging a proper Wilderness Search and Rescue mission for the next day. With it being January and the sun setting shortly after five; and the fact that there are areas in the preserve where the trees are big enough and close together enough to allow hardly any sunlight through anyway, they need to get started early in order to have as much time as possible to search.

Several well-known hikers and park rangers from not only Beacon Hills itself, but the rest of the county, offer themselves as volunteers to lead the searching teams. As does Derek Hale…

Stiles knows who Derek Hale is, of course he does! How could he not? He’s seen the file for the Hale Fire more than once. Both back in the early days, when his dad seemed to carry it around, and more recently. Stiles knows there were quite a few things regarding the case that really bothered his dad. They bothered Stiles too: From the rather arbitrary way the number of deaths were announced, without enough tests being done, or even most of the pertinent experts being called in (apparently the fire went hot enough that most of the bodies weren’t left intact enough to make identification easy, or even possible in most cases; and without the proper experts being called in some might even question if the number of victims listed was correct at all!). Then there’s the fact that the fire investigator closed the case and declared the cause an electrical malfunction in just three days! While it is not impossible for a fire investigation to be finished in less than a week, that only ever happens with simple/small fires, and certainly not ones that end up with the loss of lives (including children!). Also, Stiles at least thinks it’s rather suspicious that said fire investigator retired from the job just a few months later, and while he officially claimed it was for family, he’s a drunk divorcee, and rumor has it his ex-wife won’t even let him around their children without supervision, so…

So, the point is, Stiles knows who Derek Hale is, he knows all about the Hale Fire. He also knows that Derek Hale arrived in Beacon Hills on Monday and reported his sister missing. According to the file on that, he last spoke to her on the phone on Friday afternoon. She had been calling him every day since leaving New York. When she didn’t call on Saturday and didn’t answer her phone either, Derek decided to take the first flight to California. He found her Camaro in the parking lot at the start of one of the lesser known hiking trails into the preserve, but no sign of Laura herself.

Stiles knows at least his dad suspects that the dead body a couple of hikers found the lower half of might belong to Laura Hale, but since they haven’t yet found the upper half it’s next to impossible to tell. DNA tests are expensive and they hadn’t gotten to the point where they decided it was truly necessary when Scott went missing and priorities changed.

When questioned why the interest in aiding the search for a boy he doesn’t even know Derek seems almost offended:

“Do I need to know the kid to care?” He scoffs, then shakes his head. “Most of the preserve is Hale land. I know those woods better than most, if not all of you, even if I have been away for six years. Also, I have maps.”

He brings those out. They’re much better than anything the sheriff’s station or the rangers possess. Which shouldn’t be so surprising. Like Derek said, most of the preserve is Hale property. (Then again, a lot of the land in Beacon County, including that where all the public buildings and at least half the businesses sit, is Hale property, and people seem to forget that too, so…).

Nothing is found on the first day, which makes tensions grow. Everyone knows that the more time that passes, the less likely it becomes to find the missing person.

On Tuesday, Stiles insists on joining one of the search-teams, and his dad ends up agreeing (probably knowing that if he says no Stiles will go out anyway, on his own, and might end up putting himself in danger). So Stiles is put on a team with Tara, Mr. Hillside (the Music teacher at BH-High, who’s former military) , a park ranger and a hiker from Beacon Valley.

They don’t find Scott. What they do find is a number of trees with marks clearly made recently by bullets and arrows. Mr. Hillside is even able to point Tara to a spot on one of the trees, pretty close to the roots, where there is a bullet embedded, while Stiles finds a couple of broken arrows and a shell casing near a small stream.

Then, when they go out again early on Wednesday morning, the group comes across a group of armed men. Armed men! In the middle of the preserve! Tara reminds them that it’s forbidden to hunt in Beacon County, which they claim not to know; which Stiles doesn’t buy for a second (and it’s clear the rest of their little group doesn’t either). How can they not know when there are signs about it pretty much everywhere?! When Tara mentions calling it in, one of the men moves his finger dangerously close to the trigger of the rifle he’s carrying. Which prompts not only Tara, but also Mr. Hillside, to pull out their own weapons and point them at the hunters, while the park ranger and the hiker do their best to pull Stiles behind them as discreetly as they possibly can. He doesn’t even try to resist.

The leader of the hunters, who introduces himself as Christopher Argent, snaps at the other one to not be stupid, but by then the damage is done. Tara calls in reinforcements and orders all the hunters arrested. They do not resist but it’s clear they don’t like it.

Also, there’s something about Argent that just keeps rubbing Stiles the wrong way and he doesn’t even know why. He just gets the feeling that the man is bad news. Dangerous, and not in a good way.

Scott is finally found that afternoon. Or rather, his body is. Deep in the preserve, in a zone that would have probably never been found by the search teams (or if somehow found, they would have had a hell of a time getting back to civilization) without Derek’s assistance. They find him with his back pressed against an oak tree; and an arrow seems to have gone through his stomach before getting embedded deep in the trunk of said tree. There are signs of electrical burns on both arms and his neck, and what looks like half-healed deep tissue bruising on his torso. The cause of death however is none of that, but rather a bullet, to the head.

Melissa’s desperate shriek echoes throughout the sheriff’s station after she learns of her son’s fate.

And Stiles. Stiles cannot even cry. He’s too furious for it. Too furious for words too. He doesn’t know when, he doesn’t know how, but he knows he will find the person (or persons) responsible for the death of his friend, and he will make them pay.

xXx

Stiles and his dad are trying to get Melissa to eat, perhaps even to rest a bit, when there’s an unexpected visitor at the McCalls’ door: It’s Dr. Alan Deaton, the veterinarian, and Scott’s boss.

He seems to be looking for Scott which, Stiles wonders if the man’s been living under a rock or something. Did he not know what happened to Scott? It’d be one thing for him not to have known about Scott being dead, but it’s clear he didn’t even know about him going missing, and Stiles cannot understand how that’s even possible with all the people who were involved in the search! Still, he at least seems to care enough to have gone looking for Stiles’ friend after he missed work three days in a single week. So that’s something, right?

It’s Stiles’ dad who explains what happened to him since Melissa is crying once again, and Stiles is doing his best to comfort her. It’s what Scott would have wanted, he thinks.

It really doesn’t help when Deaton asks how no one noticed before Sunday that Scott was missing. It’s really not her fault, she has to work a lot, just like Stiles’ dad. Both boys were aware of it and they never minded their parents working all the time. Stiles hates when people get all judgmental, they don’t know them, don’t understand!

“I don’t understand,” Melissa mumbles at one point, when the fight between Scott and Stiles at the party is brought up. “Stiles has always been there for Scott, and he knows it! He… before the two of them met, Scott never went anywhere. He couldn’t. My boy’s so forgetful, always misplacing his inhaler, and forgetting what foods affect his asthma… It’s why I was so grateful, when Stiles asked to learn all about it. To help Scott. To help look after him!” She swallows. “I know… I know it was a lot of weight to put on a little kid… but what else was I supposed to do? I had to work! The money Rafe sends isn’t enough and…”

“Don’t cry Mama McCall!” Stiles cries out, rushing back to the woman after he’d gone to the kitchen to get her a glass of water. “It wasn’t that big a burden, I promise you. I loved doing it! Scott’s my best friend… was… he was my best friend. I… I don’t understand what went so wrong!”

“Was it an animal attack?” Alan asks straight out.

That confuses the rest of them because, an animal attack? Yes, Beacon Hills is practically surrounded on all sides by forest but there haven’t really been any animal attacks, or at least none that were fatal, in years! Not since that, that mauling of that lady when Stiles was like, nine or ten!

“What…?” Melissa stutters in shock. “No!”

“It was a bullet,” Noah states, looking at Deaton through narrowed eyes.

It’s hard to tell what’s making Noah suspicious all of a sudden. If it was just Dr. Deaton jumping to conclusions, particularly when nothing of what they’ve said pointed in any way to an animal attack. Which, okay, that is suspicious; but it can be simply that, being a veterinarian, animals being the reason for pretty much anything is the man’s default, right?

Most of Stiles’ focus is on something else entirely, the true culprit of his best-friend’s tragic death…

“Christopher-fucking-Argent killed him!” he snaps.

Granted, he doesn’t have any actual proof just yet, but if asked Stiles would say he just knows, he can feel it deep inside. It’s all Argent’s fault!

xXx

As is eventually discovered, Stiles is very much right. Christopher Argent is guilty of Scott’s death. At the same time, it’s much, much worse.

A medical examiner is called in from Beacon Valley to handle Scott’s autopsy. It’s already been determined that Scott had been dead less than twenty-four hours when he was found by the sheriff, Derek and a couple of volunteers (And didn’t that almost break them all? To think the boy was still alive when the search for him began, and yet they couldn’t make it to him in time…). The people working on the autopsy make sure to keep the arrow as intact as possible and manage to recover the bullet that killed the teen too. It takes no time for Tara to be able to prove that the bullet that killed Scott matches the ones in one of the guns taken from Christopher Argent in everything from caliber to the materials they’re made of (some of which are quite uncommon in most bullets). It’s also discovered that the bullets contained small crushed flowers which are eventually identified as wolfsbane. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s also discovered that the arrow-tip had it as well. The poison itself is found on the teen’s system around the wounds, though not much beyond it, showing that while it got into his system, it wasn’t what killed him.

Christopher Argent is immediately arrested for the murder of Scott McCall. And a warrant to search his house for any and all possible weapons executed. What the team of deputies (led by Tara) sent to execute the warrant find in that house is enough to turn up so many red flags Noah is calling the FBI that very night. It’s not just that the Argents have a veritable armory in their basement; which is concerning enough, even if the man is a legal arms’ dealer. But then there are the poisons, the weapons that aren’t legal for even an arms’ dealer to own. And then there are the medieval weapons that not only are found in the same room, but as one of the younger deputies soon discovers, at least half of them turn up positive for blood trace!

When one of them then reports the fact that the bullets recovered from Scott’s body and the tree in the preserve have no striae, and not only Christopher Argent’s guns, but the ones that all of his hunter buddies were carrying have barrels modified in some way as to leave no striae on the bullets fired… that’s when things truly get insane.

Turns out that there are several dozen (perhaps as many as a hundred) unsolved murder cases across the country that happened in the last decade or so, where no suspects have ever been found. The cases have all sorts of victims, from a variety of ethnicity and socioeconomic backgrounds. The one thing they all have in common: the bullets used have no striae. Experts have long debated and theorized how such a thing could be possible. All guns leave striae when bullets are shot (or so it was believed, until then). One weapons’ expert in Miami, CSI Detective Calleigh Duquesne posited that it would be possible for someone with the right skill-set to modify the inside of a gun’s barrel to erase that which causes the striae in the bullets; that, or if they were to create the guns by hand. It wasn’t a theory that ever caught much interest because, well, who would ever do something like that?

All of a sudden, eyes from all over the country are on Beacon Hills. Representatives from criminology teams from nearly every state are sent to supervise or if at all possible participate in any capacity on the investigation taking place.

And then come the videos…

The video-files come from Mrs. Carlysle, or rather, her youngest son. Amelia Carlysle is an old widow, moved to Beacon Hills from Sacramento two or three years earlier. She lives in a relatively small townhouse, in a neighborhood just past the limits of what’s considered the ‘rich part’ of Beacon Hills. The house is small in comparison to most in the neighborhood, though still big enough for her to have a small garden, and two guest-rooms with bathroom on the second floor for whenever her children and grandchildren visit from out-of-state.

In an attempt to better ensure her safety, her youngest son, who works for a private security company in Nevada, had several security cameras installed both inside and outside of the house. All connected to Mrs. Carlysle’s phone, mainly so she can see when someone’s at the door (whether it’s one of her friends dropping by for some coffee and a gossiping session, or one of those ultrareligious fanatics looking to ‘help her save her soul’ and whom she’d rather not answer the door to…).

Her son happened to drop for a visit a week or so after Scott McCall’s funeral. When his mother told him about what had been happening in Beacon Hills, he immediately pulled out his laptop and went through the recordings of the security cameras. Because as it happened, Mrs. Carlysle’s place is just across the street and one house down the road from the house the Argents are renting. What was found in those videos was more (and worse) than anyone could have ever expected…

The videos have no sound, and yet what they show is definitely more than enough:

The first file is tagged as having been recorded late on Friday night; or rather, early on Saturday, as it was already past midnight. It shows a figure that’s later identified as Scott McCall walking towards the Argent place from somewhere off-screen, standing under a window and making some motions, maybe calling to someone inside? A light is turned on, and a figure that due to height and length of hair is determined to be Allison Argent, stands by the window for several minutes until another figure, most likely her father, comes at her from behind. The man yells something in the direction of Scott. Then the window is closed and the lights turned off rather abruptly.

And yet Scott McCall doesn’t leave. He stays where he is, every so often gesturing at the window. It is assumed that he must have been calling to the girl. Only he gets no response. Until the girl’s father, Christopher Argent, steps out of the house. He yells at the boy, probably threatens him. And Scott… still doesn’t go.

The sheriff, deputies and agents who eventually watch the video know all about the stupidity of teenagers, but this seems just a bit too much!

Then Scott either does or says something to Argent and he reacts, abruptly pulling a taser out from his back pocket and using it on Scott McCall. Then, as if that weren’t shocking enough, he grabs the teen and drags him into his house, not through the front-door, but through the garage, which he opens with an electronic key just for that purpose.

The next video is tagged for Tuesday, late afternoon (Tuesday! Two days after Scott McCall was officially declared missing and volunteers began searching for him everywhere, and not even a day before he was found!). It shows a bunch of SUVs and a couple of old-looking vans, all of them either black or in very dark shades of gray or green parked either inside or right outside the Argent garage. A group of men and women in dark clothes and visibly carrying weapons (most of them have with them guns and/or rifles of some kind, some even of high caliber, though a few seem to be carrying crossbows and blades of various sizes as well) pour out of the Argent house and into the vehicles. Then come two individuals carrying none other than Scott McCall out, before eventually throwing him into the back of one of the vans.

Scott looks quite the worse for wear. He’s still in the same jeans he was wearing in the video for Friday night, but the shirt he was wearing then is gone and while he is wearing the jacket it’s open. The quality of the video isn’t good enough to determine if he has any injuries, but the way he keeps stumbling despite his eyes being fixed to his feet and the ground underneath them tells its own story.

The last file in the USB Mrs. Carlysle’s son delivered is a very long video from the rest of the evening and night, which shows no activity. The armed people did not return during the entire night.

Then again, at least half of those people never had a chance to return, did they? Christopher Argent included. Because they were arrested after being found, armed, and supposedly hunting, in the middle of the preserve… Noah suddenly has a very bad feeling, and by the looks Tara and at least two other of his deputies (who were involved with that particular arrest) give him, he’s not the only one.

Hours later, Tara is going through the video showing the departure of the ‘armed thugs’, as she keeps referring to them in her mind, getting screenshots of all the faces she can, so they can look-up and get warrants for those who aren’t already sitting in their cells. And then she comes across something that takes her completely by surprise. Something she has no idea how everyone missed, though it’s clear to her they did (otherwise someone would have reacted to it already). She supposes it’s possible she only noticed it because of how focused she is on getting pictures of the faces of as many of the people to come armed out of the Argent House on Tuesday evening as she possibly can.

“What is it Tara?” Noah asks, going to her the moment she calls him.

For all answer Tara hands her the printed zoom of the still: one showing two women climbing into a blue Mazda 3 (one which would later follow after the rest of the vehicles with the armed thugs): Victoria Argent… and Allison Argent.

xXx

The addition of the charge of kidnapping to Christopher Argent, as well as ‘accessory to kidnapping’ and possibly to the torture and murder of Scott McCall to his ‘hunter buddies’, changes things. Then there is the growing list of accomplices, especially the inclusion of both Victoria and Allison Argent to the list.

With the addition of the two women to the investigation, a new search warrant is signed, this time to have them go through the parts of the house they might have left alone before, out of respect for the privacy of those who weren’t believed to have been involved in the crimes. What is found is… staggering and terrifying.

Two weapons caches were discovered during the execution of the first search warrant. One in a relatively small room (more closet than anything else), just beside the door leading to the garage. And of course the one found in the basement, that seemed to have even more weapons than some actual businesses (and which had not only modern, but also medieval weapons, and poisons).

This new search warrant reveals that Victoria’s walk-in closet hides, behind a layer of fancy clothes, even more weapons, poisons and what looks like veritable torture implements. Perhaps the most upsetting, however, are the weapons found in Allison Argent’s room, which include a staff, a pair of ring daggers, several other blades and, most concerning of all: a recurve bow with a quiver filled with arrows, arrows which look exactly like the one found in Scott McCall…

To say that the discovery is upsetting for Noah would be an understatement. It’s not like he knows the Argents or anything like that. But they just looked like such a normal family. When Christopher was first arrested he worried, at how his wife and daughter might react, what they might have to endure when the town found out (wife and daughter of a child murderer? Yeah, the town would not be kind to them). And yet he never imagined… Noah honestly has a really hard time grasping what could possibly make a teenage girl shoot a boy her own age. And especially someone who’d been sweet on her. Will he now have to worry about the Martin-girl trying to kill his son next time he professes his love for her?! (Though, now that he thinks about it, his son hasn’t really mentioned her for weeks now… A thought for another time he supposes).

And then they discover an absolute treasure trove: in a guest bedroom which Victoria had previously explained held stuff that belongs to her sister-in-law, who travels around all the time and keeps a room wherever they live for when she takes breaks (and thinking back on it, there was never any mention of what said sister-in-law does for a living, was there?). Aside from a few clothes, half-filled bottles of perfumes and toiletries, and old jewelry, there’s a shelf full of notebooks, journals.

Noah picks one at random (one marked with the year 2004-2005, and a hand-written ‘Beacon Hills’ on the cover… it probably wasn’t quite at random, but anyway) and flips through it, reading a few lines here and there, until he comes onto something that has him reacting almost viscerally.

“Grab all of these,” he orders the deputy with him. “Put them in my cruiser.”

“Sheriff…?” the deputy (Carlos Robles, one of his most experienced deputies, but one who’s never been interested in Noah’s own job) hesitates, just for a moment.

“I don’t yet know if these journals might tie Miss Katherine Argent to the crimes we’re currently investigating,” Noah explains to his deputy. “What I do know is that they tie her to another crime, one we’ve never managed to truly solve: the burning of the Hale House…”

“But that was an accident,” Carlos blurts out before going quiet.

Truth is Noah’s far from the only one who’s never fully believed that particular cover-up.

“I’ll get these to your cruiser,” Carlos eventually agrees.

Hours later Noah slams the journal closed. He’s… confused, and shocked and horrified and so angry he’s almost scared of it, of himself. Noah has never considered himself a violent man. Not to say he doesn’t get angry, that he doesn’t have impulses. He is aware of having thrown stuff during his drunken rages at least twice, in the weeks following his wife’s passing. And yet it was nothing like what he’s feeling at that moment. As he looks at the closed journal laying on his desk, as he remembers all he just read… There’s a part of him that really, really wants to pull out his gun and start shooting some people! Starting with Katherine Argent, or Katie Vermeil, or Katja Silverstein, or whatever other name she might be going by or have gone by before and since then!

He knew that the Hale Fire wasn’t an accident! He knew and yet… and yet he never had proof… not until now.

Except, does he have proof? How could he ever submit those journals as proof of a sociopathic serial killer? Even if the amount of detail she gives were enough to have her truly charged for it, any lawyer worth his salt would be able to use those very same journals to have her declared insane. Because what else would any normal, sane, person think when seeing her write about werewolves and hunters and magic, but that the woman is nuttier than a fruitcake (than one of his wife’s fruitcakes even, and she loved adding way more nuts than usual to those cakes of hers!).

Doesn’t change the fact that he’s a perfectly sane, rational man (or so he thinks) and he does believe that werewolves exist. He believes that the Hales were wolves, that Derek, and Peter and whoever else might be left are too. Whether Katherine Argent belongs to a family who’s been hunting werewolves for generations he doesn’t actually know. Doesn’t change that she believes it, and used it as an excuse to murder the Hales (and whoever else she might have murdered, before and since).

It’s then that Noah actually has to stop and ponder. Does it change anything for him? Knowing that the supernatural is real, that beings like werewolves and witches and the like live among all of them, humans? Not really. It kind of reminds him of being a younger man, in the army and posted to Poland. He met Claudia on his very first leave. She basically tripped over him. After that first time he kept coming across her every time he got a chance to leave the base. He remembers joking with her about how she did it, how she knew every time he left the base… She joked about it being magic. Except, was it a joke?

He no longer knows, not for sure, and the uncertainty is going to drive him crazy! So he pushes it aside, forces himself to focus on what truly matters in this moment. Whether Claudia was or wasn’t magic won’t change a thing, she’ll still be dead. He needs to focus on the here and now, on the people he can still help, and the ones he can still bring to justice.

Some time later Noah is still in his office. He has his notepad in front of him and has been making and discarding plans on how to handle things. How to make justice for the Hales (and everyone else Katherine and the rest of her psychotic family have murdered in cold blood) and not allow them to escape the charges by a technicality like an insanity plea; or worse, have someone declare him insane and lose all credibility!

He leafs through the journal once more, re-reading a few passages, wondering if he might be able to convince whoever he brings the journal to, that Katherine is using words like werewolf, shifter, druid, magic and the like as a way to justify her murderous tendencies and she doesn’t actually believe that she’s some holy warrior put on the earth to protect humans from monsters…

The thing is, even if he could convince someone in the FBI about it, what are the chances he’ll manage to convince everyone who’ll end up being involved? It would be preferable if they knew the truth; though of course only if they have the same morals and sense of justice he does… But still, even though he’s still debating telling Derek that he knows (a part of him thinks that it’d be better to let the boy come forward and reveal the truth once he trusts Noah enough, but what if that never happens? Also won’t it be worse if it comes out that he knew and did not share that with Derek, letting him worry about keeping the secret even though he’s been living at the Stilinski home since the discovery of Scott McCall’s body… or rather, since Noah learned where exactly Derek had been spending his nights and the father in him refused to allow it).

The last thing he expects is for Agent Hotchner (Hotch, as he prefers to be called) to come into Noah’s office, his eyes going straight to the open journal on Noah’s desk. He seems to have managed to read something, despite the notebook being upside down, as he abruptly turns to stare at the sheriff. Noah can tell that a great many thoughts run through his mind very quickly (though he cannot follow them all), and then Hotch straightens up and murmurs:

“Dave, you’re needed in the sheriff’s office…”

Noah is about to ask the agent if he wants to use the office phone, or the intercom, or just send someone to get his teammate, when suddenly Senior Agent David Rossi is stepping right into the office, closing the door behind him without saying a word.

“What’s going on?” The older, but lower ranked agent asks his team-leader.

“He knows,” is all Hotch says.

Agent Rossi’s eyes go to the still open journal just for a moment, not even a full second and while he barely reacts to whatever he manages to read there (and in that moment Noah has no doubt that he could in fact read the journal without issue even from the distance and with it being upside down), he still stares at Noah and asks the question that begins a landslide of things Noah never expected:

“How long?” he asks.

“I don’t…” Noah begins.

Even if his suspicions are right and the two agents are well aware of the supernatural, Noah refuses to be the one to betray the secret, just in case it still is one. He might have failed the Hales before, when the fire happened, but he won’t fail those that still live again.

“Your intentions are commendable, but pointless,” Rossi states evenly before flashing red eyes at Noah.

The sheriff… has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. And while he doesn’t say a thing, somehow the agents, or at the very least Agent Rossi, seems to realize this, and are clearly taken aback by this.

“Lying to me is pointless because I can tell when you’re lying,” Rossi elaborates. “I can hear the skip in your heart. Just like I can also smell the chemosignals you exude. Your nervousness, your exhaustion, your protectiveness…” His tone softens as he adds: “I can tell all this because I am an alpha werewolf. That’s what my red eyes mean.”

Noah swallows: okay, so it’s all true then. He suspected already, but still!

“So I’ll ask again,” Rossi continues. “How long have you known about the existence of the Shadow World, Sheriff Stilinski?”

There’s a part of Noah that wants to ask a dozen questions. Alpha werewolf? Are they like the alpha wolves in the wild? Also, red eyes? Are there other colors? What are they? And what do they mean? And the term Agent Rossi used: ‘the Shadow World’, that was nowhere in Katherine Argent’s journal. What does it mean? What else exists besides werewolves and hunters and magic?

Yeah, not everyone might realize it, but his son came about his curiosity, his need to ask all the questions, to know everything and then some, honestly. It came as no surprise to Noah when he first started solving cold (or ‘on the edge of going cold’) cases on his free time; working things through at his own pace, from whatever he got from the files he filched from Noah himself, and whatever else he found out asking all sorts of questions to people. He’s always made a point of calling in the necessary clue to solve the case anonymously, and while Noah has no doubt that at least half of his people must know, or at the very least suspect what’s going on, they’ll never say a word about it. Not as long as things are kept above board.

If they manage to put a few more criminals behind bars and make justice for the victims, who cares who solves the cases in the end?

Noah takes a deep breath, then glances at the clock on the wall before finally answering the question:

“Ninety minutes, give or take,”

The two FBI Agents are utterly incapable of hiding their absolute shock that time.

Chapter 3

Derek Hale knows it’s not a good idea to see a gift-horse in the mouth. And yet he cannot help himself.

Life is currently good for him. And perhaps that’s the problem, because who’d ever expect life to be in any way good to him after what he’s done?!

Laura never made a secret what she thought about him. The fact that she saw him as a burden. The little brother she had to look after, that she kept around because she had to. Because she was the alpha and he was her beta, and so she was stuck with him. She even implied a few times that it was because of him that their Uncle Peter ended up in that hospital all alone. She could protect one or the other but not both, and she chose Derek because that’s what she had to do. And she didn’t even know the worst part!

Laura didn’t know that Derek was the whole reason they were in the position they were in, in the first place. It was because of him that their pack was attacked, was murdered. Because of him, the one who set their house on fire knew how to do it, and how to ensure that their family, their pack, wouldn’t be able to get out! It was his fault that she, that Laura, had to become an alpha and give up all her dreams to take care of her basket-case of a younger brother.

It was all because he was stupid enough to believe himself in love with a psychotic bitch who only ever wanted to use him to go after his family, his pack!

More than once Derek has wished he’d died in the fire. More than that, that he’d died and his family lived. That’d have probably been a fair exchange, right? He knows his sister certainly thinks so! Or rather… thought so. Because Laura is dead now too. She’s dead and Derek… he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do without her.

The moment his bond to her broke, Derek spiraled. First into shock, then into despair. For a while he actually thought that it might have been intentional. That maybe, just maybe, she’d finally grown tired of him, decided that it wasn’t worth it, that he wasn’t worth it, and cut him off, cut her bond to him, once and for all. Even while thinking that, he couldn’t help but fear for her, so he packed a bag, bought a ticket and got on the first flight to California.

He didn’t fully know what brought Laura back to Beacon Hills, at first. She’d said something about a deer and a revenge spiral, but Derek looked it up and there were no news or official reports anywhere about such things. So how did she even find out? If it was real at all, that is. Though he supposes the Argents moving in might confirm at least that part.

By the time he finds Laura’s Camaro abandoned in the parking lot leading to the start of several of the better known and most often used running and hiking trails in the preserve, Derek has begun to believe that something is wrong. That Laura might not have just abandoned him after all. And it’s not just because she’d have never abandoned the Camaro (their father bought her that car, it was her 18th birthday present and Laura absolutely loved it); it’s just that, if she had left him, but were still alive, he’d know, right?

And then he finds her body. Or rather the upper half. Regretfully a group of hikers found the other half and the Sheriff Department retrieved it before he could do so. Derek is at a bit of loss when he decides to take Laura’s body, bury her behind the burnt shell of their old family house with a rope made of twine and wolfsbane, as is tradition. He’s so focused on what he feels is doing right by his sister, giving her what he can of the traditional wolf-rites, that it doesn’t occur to him, how it might look to outsiders. That if the Sheriff or his deputies ever realize what he’s done they might think it was done for the wrong reasons (and why would they think otherwise?).

He does report her missing. Not knowing if that will change anything or not, but it feels like something he should do. He answers all the questions that are asked of him and then… he leaves. Having left his number so the Sheriff will call him if there is any news. Derek considers very briefly taking off. Fleeing Beacon Hills before someone realizes that the half body in the county morgue belongs to Laura, and the authorities start looking into him, suspecting him of her murder. Before they find the rest of Laura’s body and, upon realizing what Derek did, blame him for it all. He didn’t do it, but how can he possibly prove that? How can he tell them he’s not to blame with everything he’s done wrong since finding it?

Scenting a new wolf in the air changes everything. At first it’s just the scent of pack. Hales have lived and run and died in Beacon Hills for so long (since before there was even a place called Beacon Hills!) that it’d be impossible for the preserve, the rest of the forest, and even the town not to hold at least a little of their scent, even after six years.

Which is perhaps why he has no trouble picking out the scent of a new wolf in the air. He’d wondered, about Laura’s death. Because her throat was torn out, in a manner that was consistent with a wolf having done it; and yet the way she was cut in half… It showed the use of a blade, and only hunters do that. And with the Argents having moved into town… Still, with the addition of a new wolf Derek is left wondering if perhaps a wolf did kill his sister after all, took her alpha power, and now they’ve gone and turned someone else… Which would mean there’s a new wolf somewhere in Beacon Hills; probably alone and vulnerable.

The last part of his assumption comes from the fact that while he can smell the new wolf around town, he can only smell the alpha in the preserve and near the Old Road, and even then, a very limited section. Either they were just passing by and have since left, or they’re keeping themselves hidden. Which means there’s a brand new wolf left alone in the town… Derek decides he might as well find whoever the baby wolf might be.

He fails.

He isn’t fast enough, isn’t good enough. He fails to find the baby wolf before the hunters do. Even then, he never expected him to be quite so young…

When he hears about the search and rescue operation being organized, how people are preparing to go looking for a missing teenager in the preserve, of course Derek offers his help, how can he not? He’s a Hale, this is what they do. He can still remember, when he was very young, his dad was always the first to volunteer to join whatever search parties were to be sent out when children and teenagers went missing (usually after a dare of some kind, or while chasing a ball, or an escaped pet). Derek was even able to find copies of some of the maps of the preserve and the forest that his family would use on such occasions.

He does not take it kindly when one of the deputies questions his desire to help, simply because he does not know the boy who’s gone missing:

“Do I need to know the kid to care?” He scoffs, then shakes his head. “Most of the preserve is Hale land. I know those woods better than most, if not all of you, even if I have been away for six years. Also, I have maps.”

In the end Sheriff Stilinski is grateful for Derek’s assistance, even insisting that they be in the same team. So it matters very little what Deputy Haigh’s opinion might be.

Even with all the clues there might have been, in hindsight, Derek doesn’t realize that the missing boy, Scott McCall, and the baby wolf he’s been searching for on and off are one and the same until the team he’s leading (despite the sheriff being in the same team, he insists that Derek knows the area better, so he should lead) follow the traces and find the body of the dead teenager essentially nailed to a tree, so deep into the preserve Derek’s sure the others would have had a lot of difficulties making it back out without assistance. They certainly would have never found the point where the more obvious tracks began were it not for Derek’s preternatural senses. And the fact that there were obvious tracks left at all, that there was a (whole) body there to find, tells Derek more than he’d wish about just how long the kid’s been dead, even before the medical examiner is brought in. It makes him feel even more of a failure, thinking that if he’d been just a bit faster he might have made it in time…

Learning that the boy was a captive of the Argents for four days before… Well, the general consensus seems to be that he was released into the preserve and then essentially hunted down by the three Argents and their crazy friends for psychopathic reasons. Finding that out makes things both better and worse at the same time.

Knowing that the boy was held captive forces Derek to accept that it was not on him, being unable to find him. By the night of the full moon, when he knew for sure there was a baby wolf out there, it was already too late. He still feels bad because… well, they’re hunters, Derek can only imagine what they must have done to the poor boy those days, and it’s not something he can imagine wishing to anyone, especially not a child who might not have even known what was happening to him, if he was turned without consent or knowledge of the supernatural (as he suspects happened).

It’s also clear to Derek that the hunters must have tried to use the boy as bait to get the alpha who turned him. But either said alpha was just passing through and is gone already, he’s so feral he couldn’t even sense his own beta and everything going on with him. Or he’s simply so crafty he managed to slip all the hunters… Derek doesn’t think even for a second that the hunters caught him, if that were the case one of the teams would have come across the body while searching for McCall.

Derek… isn’t quite sure how he ends up living with the Stilinskis. Okay so, the sheriff asked, and Derek said yes (was he supposed to say no?), but still, he doesn’t understand what prompted the older man to even offer his house, to open his home to someone like Derek… Yes, they’ve known each other before. Sheriff Stilinski was Deputy Stilinski back when the fire happened, he was the one who sat him and Laura down and explained what had happened, how Peter was the only survivor… Derek also knows that the man (and his wife) used to date Uncle Peter, though he seems to have mostly forgotten that for some reason…

Still, Derek is… grateful, for what he’s been given by Sheriff S… Noah. The man keeps insisting that Derek ought to call him Noah. It feels… not wrong exactly, but like he’s not giving the man the respect he deserves. Sometimes Derek almost feels like the man should be an alpha, like he’d be one, were he a wolf. At the very least he’d be a Pack Elder. Cared and respected for his knowledge and experience, for everything he’s done and keeps on doing for others.

Derek suspects that the sheriff wants to reopen the Hale Fire Case. It’s… some of the questions the man’s asked, Derek knows they’re not mere curiosity. He’s also not blaming Derek at all, but somehow he knows that someone most definitely is to blame. Despite what the official documents might claim, and how Laura always insisted that they couldn’t go to the authorities because no one would ever believe them… Derek has a feeling that Sh… Noah, will.

The last thing the werewolf expects is to go into Stiles’ bedroom on a random day… Noah called earlier, warning he’ll be late for dinner, and Derek offered to cook so neither Stilinski would have to worry about it. The casserole is now ready (and Derek made a lot, there will probably be leftovers) and Noah should be home any moment so Derek went up to get Stiles so he could wash up for dinner. He wasn’t expecting what he found upon opening the teenager’s door:

There are two big cork-boards hanging on Stiles’ walls, right in the corner, by the windows. Each with several photos and pieces of paper, some look like photocopies, others handwritten, there are even a few post-it notes scattered around. And then there are the strings of various colors tied to the pins keeping everything in place, connecting one thing to another, not just in one board, but also one across to the other, and even a few things that are on neither of the boards but instead just taped to the walls, yet judging by the connections they’re clearly part of things nonetheless.

Derek starts paying attention to the pieces on the boards, almost without noticing he’s doing it. There’s a copy of what looks like a notepad page, with a handwritten ‘Harris’ in Stiles’ messy scrawl in a corner. That one is connected, through a green piece of thread, to copies of several pages of what looks like an official report, in another part of the same board. It’s also connected, through a yellow piece of thread, to a business card for an old home service business (Derek thinks they might have done some remodeling at the old Hale House the year before the fire…), which in turn is connected, through green threads, to the pictures of several men, two of them leading to yet other things, one back in the same board: a copy of what looks like a rap-sheet, or at least part of one.

Derek’s attention is distracted by that when he notices, not far from the rap-sheet, and actually besides the chemical formula he first noticed an image he finds familiar, it’s yet another photocopied paper, this one with a drawing of what looks like a rather strange, old-looking pendant. He thinks he’s seen that pendant before, even if he cannot pinpoint where, exactly. And then he sees the yellow thread leading from it, to something on the other board. There are a bunch of pictures all together. Half seem to be of groups: the swim-team, a school assembly, what looks like the teacher’s lounge, there are even a couple from what he recognizes as his basketball games. The other half of the pictures are close-ups. Several of them are focused on the neck of someone, a woman, one who’s wearing the very pendant from the hand-drawn picture on the other board (or if not, one so similar as to be inconsequential); the others are closeups of a face, one that is terribly familiar to him, he sees it every day and night, in his nightmares…

Derek just freezes, he just… His mind goes completely blank, he doesn’t think he’s even breathing. He never quite blacks out, and yet, he’s not truly there either.

Next thing he’s aware of, he’s on the floor, his back against a wall, the scent of cinnamon, peppermint and petrichor all over him (such a relaxing scent, why hadn’t he noticed that before?), his legs are straight out in front of him and there’s a body on top of him… No, not just a body, it’s Stiles. And he’s not just on top of him, he’s pretty much sitting on Derek’s lap, basically draped over Derek, and Derek… his own face is pressed into the teenager’s neck, his very nose on that spot where the neck meets the shoulder, where scent is strongest. He can feel, almost hear the blood rushing through that very spot, and Stiles’ heartbeat. It doesn’t sound rushed at all. The boy’s not nervous, or scared, he seems… perfectly relaxed actually. It’s then that he realizes that the scent of cinnamon, peppermint and petrichor belongs to Stiles. It’s almost enough to make him freak out all over again.

“Hey, hey!” Stiles murmurs, tightening his hold on Derek when it feels like the older boy might try to flee. “Easy, easy, everything’s okay, we’re both okay.”

As if the situation weren’t already bad enough, Derek realizes in that very moment that his claws are out. His arms were around Stiles until a second ago and his claws are out and…

“Hey!” Stiles practically yells.

Before Derek can do something he’ll probably regret for the rest of his life, Stiles kisses him.

It’s… not what Derek would call a good kiss, at all. Still, it seems to serve its purpose because Derek inhales sharply as Stiles pulls back and he… not quite relaxes, but at least he’s no longer about to push Stiles away and flee into the woods, never to come back. He doesn’t think.

“Easy, easy,” Stiles keeps murmuring, softly. “You didn’t hurt me, sourwolf, I’m alright.”

It takes what feels like a couple of minutes, (might have been less, might have been more), but Stiles talks Derek through taking a good look at his hands (the claws are gone now) then at Stiles’ own body, especially his back, there’s no blood, there aren’t even any marks on Stiles, or his clothes. Whenever the claws came out, a part of him was still aware enough not to hurt the boy… or perhaps it was just an instinct deep inside.

“How long have you known?” Derek asks, quietly.

“About Miss Vermeil or about you howling at the moon?” Stiles asks quietly, gently.

“Both,” Derek answers honestly.

“I used to watch you back then, you know?” Stiles says, apropos of nothing. “Mom loved basketball and took me to a few of the high-school games, before her sickness got worse. I saw her, Miss Vermeil, the way she looked at some of the boys, at you even. I told mom and she said she would tell dad, but I’m not sure she ever did. She might have forgotten, what with her sickness… I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s not your fault,” Derek hurries to reassure him.

“It’s not yours either,” Stiles states.

“It kind of is,” Derek doesn’t believe him.

“No, it is not!” Stiles insists, strongly. “I mean it Derek. You were a teenager, she was an adult. She was older than you, in a position of authority. And don’t think I don’t remember about Paige.”

Derek loses his breath all over again, which prompts Stiles to press against him once more.

“Sorry, I…” Stiles takes a deep breath. “Sorry, I can be a little blunt, and I don’t always think through what I’m saying before I do and…”

“It’s okay,” Derek cuts him off.

“The point is,” Stiles continues, though more gently, carefully, this time. “You were hurt, were grieving. She took advantage of that to get close to you. She abused your trust Derek. Also, well…” He hesitates, only speaking again at Derek’s prompting. “If even half of what I’m finding out about her is true. The Hales aren’t the first family she’s done this to, probably not the last either.”

“Oh Gods…” Derek gasps.

Because that… that’s so much worse! Could they have stopped it? If he had come clean from the start? If he’d gone against Laura’s orders and told the Sheriff’s Department what little he knew back then? Would they have been able to stop Kate back then? Or would everything be exactly the same (only, he’d probably be dead, Laura would definitely have disavowed him if he’d gone against her orders)?

It takes a while for Stiles to help him calm down again, more or less. And by the end of it Derek is back on his feet, by Stiles’ side, listening as the teenager explains everything on his boards. It’s hard at times, especially everything connected to the fire, and to Kate. But at the same time it’s… liberating, in an odd way. Because hearing, and especially seeing it all put together like that. Learning about the formula Kate used that could burn stone and couldn’t be traced; about the historical blue-prints of several Hale properties that Kate (and several other people, half of whom could be connected to her directly or indirectly) drew from the archives in the Public Library in the months preceding the fire. Learning all the tiny little details that went into the Hale Fire that he never knew about serves to show him not only that it’s not all on him, but that the attack on his family, on his pack, is something that would have happened, whether he’d been dating Kate or not. She was always going to go after his family. What she did to him was just an aside…

“I don’t know if she’s truly an ephebophile,” Stiles murmurs thoughtfully in the end. “If it was about you being a teenager, or…”

“Or me being a wolf,” Derek finishes for him.

A beast, an animal, like so many hunters insist on calling them. And wouldn’t that be worse, in a sense? Her getting off on having sex with what she sees as an animal, rather than a teen-aged boy? Or was it simply because she doesn’t see him, see them, as people so… Does it even matter? It changes nothing in the end, nothing of what she’s done, what she keeps doing, so…

“Or if she’s simply so sick she gets off on torturing people, rather than, you know, actual sex,” Stiles adds for good measure.

“Well boys, it seems you’ve been having an interesting day,” It’s Noah’s voice that announces that the man’s standing behind them at that moment.

Derek didn’t even hear him arrive! And in fact it’s until right then, as he begins actually paying attention, that he notices Noah isn’t the only new person in the house, there are two more people downstairs. One is the FBI lead agent Derek saw one day at the station, and the other… the other is a wolf! Derek’s eyes go wide as he stares at Noah, who seems to be picking up on any minute change in Derek’s face.

“Right, brought a couple of guests for dinner,” Noah states sheepishly, though with an undercurrent of something else. “Hope that’s alright?”

“It’s fine,” Derek says, almost automatically. “How long have you known?”

“A few hours,” Noah doesn’t even try to pretend he doesn’t know what Derek means. “We executed the new search warrant on the Argent house and let’s just say some of the things we found were rather… illuminating. Also, absolutely disgusting.”

“If it’s anything like some of the things I’ve found, I bet they were, daddio,” Stiles deadpans.

Noah seems to take that moment to take a proper look at his son’s crime boards. Doing a double take at a few things.

“Son, I think our guests would like to take a look at this, if you don’t mind?” Noah murmurs.

“If they don’t mind the mess, sure,” Stiles shrugs.

The room isn’t quite that messy, actually. Stiles has made a point of washing his clothes and cleaning up the trash every so often, at least so it won’t start to really smell.

While they never got around to talking about it, Stiles began putting the clues together regarding the whole werewolf thing since he managed to get his hands on the real medical examiner’s report on Scott’s death. Stiles knows that’s probably not something his father ever wanted him to see (though he won’t be surprised that Stiles got to it, either). The mention of aconite on both the bullet and the arrows and in some other parts of Scott’s body, didn’t make a lot of sense. Why would hunters, even psychopathic ones like this bunch, use such an obscure poison on what were already pretty lethal weapons, unless it meant something? Which eventually led to him finding out that aconite is also known by other names: monkshood, and wolfsbane…

That led to yet another spiral, tangential from what he was researching regarding the fire (and he kept everything he found about werewolves and the supernatural completely separate, and in a spot where it wouldn’t be easily found). The point is, he knows that the supernatural is real, that the Hales are werewolves, the Argents hunters, and the world is a lot more insane than he used to think it was. He’s known for over a week now.

And apparently, so does his dad now. Stiles wonders if that’ll change anything in the long run. Not in the way his dad treats Derek, of course not… unless his dad gets even more protective over the guy (though how he could be ever more protective of him than he already is, Stiles doesn’t know!). Though certainly in how his dad handles the Argent case going forward. And judging by the looks exchanged between the two FBI Agents that go up into his room to look at his crime boards, and the looks Derek keeps giving them… yeah, the world is definitely a lot more insane than he ever thought!

Chapter 4

Noah is the first one to suspect Peter of being the new alpha.

Stiles probably doesn’t get there first only because he’s been focusing more on connecting Kate Argent to other fires, and on finding out as many of her accomplices as he possibly can (with the FBI now fully aware of his involvement in the investigation and one of them, usually Dr. Reid and/or Agent Jareau supervising him, and taking over whenever he needs some official information to add to something; he’s in fact marked down as a confidential civilian consultant, or something like that, mostly so it’s all kept legal and yet his identity remains protected). Thus far they’ve managed to pin down Victoria Argent (nee Dubois) as well as several hunters from that particular family who apparently followed the woman when she married into the Argent family (a slightly unhinged part of Stiles’ brain wonders if they were some kind of dowry or something, in hunter terms), as well as Gerard Argent (Katherine and Christopher’s father) and a list at least three dozen long of both hunters and ‘civilian’ criminals who were involved. He’s also been following a thread for other crimes Gerard has been committing, in connection to the murders.

So apparently shifter families possessing considerable amounts of real estate is pretty normal (though Stiles hasn’t yet found any who have quite as much as the Hales do… at least not among the Argents’ victims, both potential and proven). In any case, Stiles discovered that, some time after the family dies, Gerard comes in (with a different name every time) supposedly representing the interests of some international conglomerate, looking to buy property. He either cajoles, bribes, blackmails or outright threatens people until he manages to acquire the properties he’s after (the very same that used to belong to the supernatural families) at well below market price, then he leaves town. The properties are then either resold or usually rented out to other particulars (usually hunter families) at average-to-top market value. A few of them have been turned into what look like safe-houses/armories for the Argents. It’s clearly a very lucrative business for the man.

In any case, it’s probably because of that particular tangent he went on, that it never even occurred to Stiles to try and find who the alpha who turned Scott might be.

As for Derek… both Stilinskis suspect that if he did not ‘know’, it’s because he didn’t want to. Because being truly aware of it, of the fact that Peter’s the alpha, means also having to accept that Peter, his favorite uncle, and the person they left behind (whom Laura forced him to abandon) killed his sister. As well as turning an innocent boy who was later tortured, hunted down and murdered…

“He’s not culpable,” Rossi states gruffly one day.

“What…?” Stiles blurts out.

They’re in a big space on the second level of what was originally a warehouse, then gutted to turn into loft apartments, yet the project didn’t finish before the company handling it went bankrupt. Thanks to one of the many Hale Programs that still ran (despite no Hales being around, there were good people in charge of most of those) that building, along with several others in similar enough circumstances had been bought by the Hale Trust, to give the company some money so it could handle the debts owed before legal issues arose. Derek was still learning about everything he, as the only legal, adult Hale remaining has access to. He was remodeling the top floors of the building to turn into apartments, one for himself and others, perhaps, for future members of the pack. He was the one who offered the level that had been half-reworked to serve as a set of offices (for a company that had decided to settle in Beacon Valley instead after the Hale Fire) to the FBI when Hotch thought it might be best for the Federal investigation to be moved out of the Sheriff’s Department (something that became very necessary when one of Stiles’ tangents in his early investigation revealed that the Argents had at least one mole in the Department…).

Stiles was actually grateful when JJ (Agent Jareau) suggested that they move his crime board(s) to the new building. They’d long since surpassed the space of the actual boards and were getting a bit unwieldy for the space he’d available in his bedroom. He was given a whole corner of the new space; there were a few offices at the back of the floor, then there was a bigger space that was clearly meant to serve as a conference room, an area with basics for a cafeteria/lunch-area, and the middle was probably supposed to have cubicles or something, only they were never properly done. Stiles was set up in what would be the conference room (except for how there were only half walls and no glass, so it wasn’t truly separate from the rest of the space, just yet).

The way they all handled things, as long as none of the agents got into one of the two actually finished offices and closed the door, it was understood that they were all welcome to get involved.

“Peter Hale,” Rossi clarifies.

“What do you mean he’s not culpable?” Derek inquires, and it’s hard to tell if he sounds annoyed, hopeful, or just all-around upset.

“Culpable is defined as being deserving of blame,” Reid states promptly. “It means that the individual has done something that is deserving of punishment.”

“Peter Hale doesn’t qualify,” Hotch gets to the point. “We got the results from the tests the team of in-the-know doctors and magic-users did. The things Peter Hale went through…” He exhales. “On the medical side of things, we’ve been able to determine that the man was doused with some sort of accelerant, one modified with both mistletoe and wolfsbane. Whether the burns were caused by proximity to the fire or one of the UnSubs actually set him on fire we might never know, but it makes little difference in the grand scheme of things. The Burns Unit, which is surprisingly good considering the size and general economic situation of this town let me tell you, they did what they could but in the end the options were very limited. Especially when there was no healthcare proxy or next of kin who could make the necessary decisions. So in the end the hospital could do little more than keep him alive and as comfortable as humanly possible. Then comes the issue of the poisoned cream…”

“What…?!” Derek blurts out, clearly not expecting that.

“The burn ointment used on Peter was adulterated with mistletoe,” JJ explains. “It’s a homemade cream, and we’re still working on tracking down its origins. It’s not easy since it was registered as a donation along with some other stuff. Also, truth is that even if someone had thought to check its composition, one of the uses of mistletoe is as pain relief and to help with inflammation, in humans, so they’d have seen nothing wrong with it being a component of a burn-ointment.”

“Was it meant specifically for Peter, or for anyone?” Stiles asks, eyes narrowed.

That calls everyone’s attention, though only Reid, whose eyes widened, seems to understand what Stiles means by that.

“I mean, you say the ointment was donated, and that it was with other stuff,” Stiles clarifies. “Was every item in the donation meant for him, was just the ointment meant for him and the rest for other specific people, or for anyone. Or was the whole donation meant for anyone and Peter was just unlucky that they decided to use it on him.” He pauses. “He’s not the only patient who’s ended up in the hospital due to burns, we know that. But we also know he was the only burnt patient who ended up in the Long Term Ward so…”

“I’ll call Penelope,” JJ announces. “Have her check on that.”

“Is that everything?” Derek asks, feeling more than a little restless.

“No,” Hotch admits. “That was just the medical side. Well, that, and the fact that, as we discovered, the most recent hire of the Long Term Ward, Nurse Jennifer Hall has turned out to be a serial killer herself. She’s what we call an Angel of Mercy. Penelope and Reid have found thus far nine deaths that took place in four different hospitals and long-term-care facilities while she was working there. There might be more. She was only truly suspect in three of them, but since she agreed to a transfer every time, the hospitals opted not to pursue the case…”

“They didn’t want to risk it getting out,” Stiles hisses. “The bad publicity it would give them. And possibly the families suing them for the deaths of their loved ones.”

“Yes,” Hotch agrees. “One actually did, anyway. Nurse Hall is wanted by the State of Montana. Since that’s the only place where there’s an actual warrant against her and…”

“And whatever she did to Peter you won’t really be able to prove it,” Stiles finishes in a drawl.

“That too,” Hotch agrees. “So we might allow Montana to handle this one.”

It’s not a bad idea, all things told. As long as she doesn’t know about the supernatural… Which, as Hotch informs them later on, the woman apparently had her suspicions, since Peter did not die with whatever she gave him, but Agent Prentiss (their magic-user) has suppressed those suspicions, so things should be alright on that front.

“Then we have the supernatural side,” Hotch continues, taking a deep breath, it’s clear he’s not sure how to explain things.

“The loss of over a dozen bonds almost simultaneously, most of them to deaths full of pain and despair, was almost enough in and of itself to kill him,” Rossi speaks up then. “It’s suspected that it was that trauma which led to the alpha spark going to Laura Hale instead of him, even though he’d have been the better option.”

Even Derek doesn’t dare oppose that assessment. Everyone in the room knows what Laura did the moment she had the alpha spark. How she cut-off the pack-bonds to not only Peter, but the two non-Hale wolves who hadn’t been at the house that morning and thus survived the fire; they were forced to deal with the pain of the loss of a pack twice over, and then having to find a new pack before turning completely into Omegas. Even Derek doesn’t know what happened to them, only knows that they survived, as he allowed JJ to tell him that much, before stopping her from saying more, as he didn’t think it to be fair, not if they didn’t share the information themselves with him.

“Then of course, we have the breaking of the bonds of the pack once Laura Hale took over,” Rossi continues, not measuring his words in the slightest (it’s no secret what he thinks of Derek’s former alpha). “It’s believed that sent him into a state very close to catatonia. It’s… for the most part those of us who are born wolves, there’s no distinction between the wolf and the human, not like with those who are bitten. With him I think the trauma caused a sort-of… not disassociation exactly, but it’s the closest I can come to describe it. Essentially, the part of him that was human was hit by the worst of it all, which caused it to basically hide away; the wolf side of him reacted defensively, trying to protect the human part, and stayed aware, taking the pain so the human could recover.”

“But that means…” Stiles is at a loss.

“I… I don’t understand,” Derek admits.

“It means that while Mr. Hale has been, in truth, catatonic these past six years, that’s only true for the human side of him,” Hotch clarifies. “The part of him that’s all wolf has always been there, aware. It’s what’s endured the loss and the abandonment and the torture these last six years. That’s what led to Peter Hale being effectively feral upon ‘waking up’, following Nurse Hall’s attempt on his life.”

Because his wolf side was already awake, it was what dealt with things, what allowed him to survive. But it was also completely savage after almost being murdered by the nurse. Was it any wonder that it would go after the first threat it came across, an unknown alpha? And really, even if he had been able to recognize Laura at all, all the wolf in Peter would have known was that there was the alpha that abandoned him, that left him to pain and grief and torture for six years! Perhaps they should be more surprised that they didn’t end up with several dozen dead or something along those lines! Then again, Peter was never one to kill without reason, was he?

Derek remembers hearing some of the aunts and uncles who’d talk about Peter behind his back, about his blue eyes and what they meant. But Derek also remembers his dad telling him that Peter only ever killed when it was truly necessary, when it was to protect the pack… It made Derek wonder if Peter ever had to kill someone he didn’t want to, someone he liked, but he needed to, for the sake of the pack. If that was what led to his blue eyes… Or perhaps, perhaps it was even something like what gave Derek his own blue eyes, giving someone something they truly needed, even if it brought them pain… It’s not a question he’ll ever dare ask.

“What can we do?” Derek asks, very quietly. “To help him, I mean.”

“Would you?” Rossi asks, eyes narrow and looking straight at Derek. “Would you help him?”

“Of course!” Derek exclaims immediately.

“Really?” Rossi presses. “Will you accept him, even after everything he’s done? Even though he’s still the one who killed Laura Hale, your sister, your alpha?”

“I,” Derek swallows, then takes a deep breath and answers, with absolute honesty. “Yes. I… I will mourn Laura, because she was my sister, and I love her. But even though I love her, I do know she wasn’t a good alpha, not to Peter, or to Carly and Trystan, and… and not to me. I’ll always love her as my sister but I… I understand why Peter’s wolf did what he did. And… And in the end he’s still family. He’s still my uncle…”

For a moment no one answers and then.

“Well nephew, gotta say I wasn’t expecting to hear that from you, but I’m glad for it nonetheless…”

xXx

Peter Hale’s return to Beacon Hills, awake, fully healed and with no scars at all is the talk of Beacon Hills. Pretty much everyone is talking about it. The fact that the news of his return was closely followed by chatter about just where he was first seen: at the Sheriff’s Station, specifically, entering the Sheriff’s office, the fact that neither of them came out for over two hours, and rumors of ‘what all’ went down during that time…

There’s also the fact that when Peter was first taken out of the Long-Term Care facility, following the arrest of Nurse Jennifer Hill the FBI opted to keep things on the down-low. So much that only a single doctor and nurse (both in-the-know regarding both the investigation and the supernatural) were truly aware of what was going on). This led to the rumor of Peter Hale going ‘missing’.

It also led to the capture of several hunters when they went into the facility, seeking to ‘finish off’ Peter Hale (probably before he could wake up and implicate them all in various crimes), half of whom had pending warrants already, as they’d been identified in Mrs. Carlysle’s video.

In any case, Stiles isn’t exactly grateful for the way everyone in high-school suddenly seems to be interested in him, the whole opposite in fact.

“Most would be delighted by the attention,” Derek points out.

He’s picking up Stiles in the middle of the Old Road, where Stiles ran to, after leaving the jogging paths near the high-school, when he got tired of waiting for people to get away from his Jeep long enough for him to get in it and leave the school.

“Not me,” Stiles shakes his head. “I mean, it’d be one thing if they were actually interested in me. Like, if I had just, I don’t know, won some academic prize, or the lottery, or made the winning goal in the lacrosse championship…”

“There are no upcoming academic prizes, you aren’t old enough to buy a lottery ticket yet, and last I heard, you quit lacrosse,” Derek lists calmly, giving Stiles the time to calm down himself.

“I know,” Stiles nods with pretty much his whole body before exhaling, loudly. “Point remains. They’re just after me because of all the rumors that Dad and Uncle P are dating.”

“Well, those aren’t just rumors,” Derek reminds him.

“No, they’re not, but still, it’s none of their business. Dad and Uncle P’s private life is just that, private. And it’s one thing for the old ladies like Mrs. Carlysle and Mrs. Jones to chat about them and giggle and reminisce about how they used to see the two of them and mom together ‘back in the day’, and how good it is that they’re together again, even if mom’s gone… With them I know that they say things with good intentions. They’re happy, for dad and Uncle P. I mean, yeah, they’re gossiping old ladies, but they’re not mean about it. Lydia and Tracy and the rest of the people at school on the other hand…”

“Your dad says you used to have a crush on Lydia Martin,”

“The key words there are ‘used to’. That was back when I was a kid. And it’s not… I don’t think it was ever a crush like most kids have. And this is not me saying I’m a special snowflake or anything like that, but rather, I wasn’t drawn to her because of any physical beauty. Not saying she’s not pretty, she is, like, I mean, I know lots of girls are pretty, I just don’t care about it, about them. What drew me to Lydia is… I was curious about why she hid her intelligence so much. Used to believe that one day, when she was ready, when we were old enough, she’d reveal it, and it’d be magnificent. I was so eager to watch everyone be shocked by it. And then… it just didn’t happen…”

“Heard you even got into a fight with some other kids over it all…”

“Jackson and his cronies. He never liked my interest in his girlfriend. And he really didn’t like when I told him that he wasn’t worthy of Lydia. Of course he took that like I was stating that I was worthy of her, but that was never the point. Back then I used to wonder why Lydia just didn’t reveal herself, her genius. When I realized that she cares more about fitting in with the popular crowd, that she’d rather dumb herself down to be seen as one of them than be herself… I lost all interest.”

“I think your dad’s worried that you’re just… pushing everyone away, with what’s going on.”

“It’s not like I’ve ever had a lot of friends at school. Really, I only ever had Scott and he was… he was my best friend, when he wanted to be.”

And a terrible one the rest of the time. Still, it doesn’t feel right, talking ill about someone who’s dead, so Stiles would rather keep such things to himself. Though he’s come to terms with the fact that even if things hadn’t ended so tragically between him and Scott, their friendship probably wouldn’t have survived for much longer.

It’s… if he hadn’t died, if Stiles had found out about the supernatural, and more than that, had known what had happened to Scott in time to help him, Stiles would like to think he’d have found a way to protect Stiles. And yet… How long would he have managed with Scott’s obsession with Allison Argent? He’d been gone on the girl from day one, before he’d known her more than a couple of hours even, and to think how that ended… Stiles would have tried to help, of course, but stubbornness was always Scott’s greatest quality and most terrible flaw, both at the same time.

Things with Peter were a bit tense at first, precisely because of Scott. It’s not that Stiles has ever forgotten who is truly to blame for the death of Scott, of course not. He blames the hunters in general and the Argents in particular from the moment the whole thing began, and he always will. And yet, back when he was first learning about werewolves, a part of him thought that the alpha who turned him might be to blame as well, because well, clearly he wasn’t there to help Scott. Did Scottie even know what had happened to him?! Probably not. And yet after hearing from Rossi and Hotch everything that Peter was put through, after reading the reports himself (at his own insistence and their allowance)… how could he blame the alpha for any of it? In the end it all came back to the hunters…

And also… Well, Stiles would never admit it out-loud to anyone who isn’t the FBI-approved in-the-know therapist that he’s been made to see a few times (along with Derek, his dad and Uncle P), but he also blames Scott, at least a bit. It’s just… It’s clear to Stiles now that Scott was angry with Stiles back on Monday, angry because Stiles left him behind. He probably saw it as Stiles leaving him to be attacked by P… the feral alpha. But the thing is, because Scott chose to be angry with Stiles, and more than that, to not even tell Stiles what it was he was angry about in the first place, Stiles never had a chance to help him. Stiles… he’d have done anything to help Scott, but he was never given a chance. And that’s been playing havoc with Stiles’ mental state.

“In any case,” Stiles forces himself to focus back on the conversation. “I’ve never really had what you call friends at school. Most people see me as nothing more than the weird geeky kid with a dead mother and ADHD. Even the teachers can barely stand me sometimes.” He takes a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking things over, and I think I can talk to Ms. Jenkins, the school counselor. Every year she reminds me that if I apply myself just a little bit I could easily get the credits I need to catch up to my grade. She’ll probably be happy when I tell her I’m finally taking her up on it. And even if it’s too late to get it done this term, I’ll just do it in the summer, and go straight to senior year in the fall.”

Either that, or maybe he could even look for early graduation. He’s pretty sure he could do it, though he doesn’t yet know if he wants to. He’s actually happy right now. With his dad, and Uncle P, and Derek… The investigation on the Argents is almost over. Things started moving much faster, once Uncle P recovered and they took his own statement of what happened, not just the day of the fire, but afterwards. There was little he was fully aware of, but he gave his authorization for the FBI to use everything they’d discovered on the things that were done to him during those six years.

In an utterly predictable, and equally ridiculous move, Kate Argent enters town, about six weeks after Scott’s death, and the beginning of it all. She’s wearing a uniform and tries to claim to be from the CSI Office in Kansas (specifically, a city where a family of shifters was lost in a manner similar enough to the Hales, not even six months before, and which Stiles had just managed to connect to the Argents). Worse even, she’s using the same alias she used during yet another of her attacks (this one in Idaho). She clearly expects that with so many individuals from over a dozen different agencies and offices involved, no one will be able to figure her out, might not even get around to doing her background check before she does whatever she wants. She’s wrong.

Peter and Derek both get the satisfaction of watching Kate enter the temporary investigation HQs with a shit-eating grin on her face, which quickly turns into confusion and then shock as, instead of being guided to one of the desks that hold the various pieces of the investigation, one of the younger agents cuffs her as he begins reading her her rights. It’s only then that she realizes how out of her control the situation is.

Though of course, because this is Kate and she just refuses to surrender, before the agent can secure the second cuff properly she twists around, knocking the agent down at the same time she takes his own gun, shooting without even properly aiming. She manages to get three shots off before bullets fired by half the people in the room have her going down in a hail of bullets. Of those bullets two go wide, the other goes into Noah’s gut, who has the misfortune of having just stepped out of the closest office at exactly the wrong moment…

Talks had been had and accords been reached before that moment, precisely in case something like that happened. From the moment Peter Hale made his reappearance, healed and whole, and Derek, Noah and Stiles agreed on being his pack, the two Stilinskis also agreed that while they were happy enough being human, if it was a matter of life and death they wanted Peter to bite them. So that was that.

So Kate Argent is dead, her brother and niece are in prison, where they’ll stay for a very, very long time. Allison’s case is a very particular one, her charges were pretty serious: accessory to kidnapping, torture and murder. A small number of DAs ADAs and Judges have been read in on the supernatural, specifically so they can handle cases like the one against the Argents, and they decided that if the hunters wanted to treat a teenager as an adult, and said teenager was happy enough with that, they’ll do the same. Also, with Allison being seventeen already, and such serious crimes, it’s highly likely that even a purely human court would have chosen to judge her as an adult anyway.

The rest of the hunters to have been captured aren’t being charged with the murder of Scott McCall, most aren’t even considered in the torture charge, just the kidnapping one. At the same time, more than half of them have already been connected to a variety of other crimes across the country (mostly thanks to traveling logs, credit card statements and the like, since they all seem to use modified Argent guns). And the team still working in the continuously growing investigations has no doubt that, sooner or later, they’ll be able to find something on most, if not all the others as well.

Victoria Argent is dead too. Hers is a very particular case, as she was found dead in her own cell, shortly before she was to be formally arraigned. The cause? Poison. Specifically, ricin. Due to the lack of evident symptoms and how fast it all happened the medical examiners are pretty sure it was injected, even if they couldn’t find an injection point.

The whole investigation into Victoria’s death while in holding is a hell of a mess as everyone in the Sheriff’s Department, as well as all the representatives involved in the investigation are investigated in minute detail. When that gives them no answers, then it’s on to the civilian personnel who had any access to either location (secretaries, receptionist, janitors, delivery people, etc). When even that fails, they turn to the lawyers, and that’s where they finally hit paydirt.

Turns out Victoria’s lawyer is, or was Hugh Davenport, he’s a well-known lawyer on the East Coast, he’s also the husband of Victoria’s younger sister: Vanessa Davenport nee Dubois, a woman who’s publicly known as the CEO of one of the biggest cosmetics companies (as well as being the third daughter of the fourth largest Hunter Family in North America). The day Victoria died was the only time the man actually had an in-person interview with his client, despite having been listed as her lawyer pretty much from the moment she was arrested, before there were even formal charges!

The only reason they haven’t gone after him yet is because they still lack proof. Even after combing through the recording of the interview, they still can’t find how he might have injected the poison into Victoria. Still, there’s no doubt in anyone that he’s behind it. They just need the proof. At the same time, the knowledge that Victoria was murdered by her own brother-in-law, probably even by order of one of her sisters… (since the hunters have all that ‘the women are the ones who give the orders and the men follow them’ thing going) it’s a sobering thought. In any case, while they might not be able to go after Hugh Davenport, or any of the Dubois just yet, it’s a sort of open secret that an investigation into that particular family will be kicking off as soon as they’ve finished wrapping things up with the Argents.

As for the last of the Argents… Gerard is dead. And neither the FBI, or anyone in Beacon Hills was involved with that one. In fact, no one really knows who it was that killed the bastard.

“Rumor has it that a hit was put out on him,” Peter announces to the room at large one day when they’re all gathered together.

“Who?” Stiles is the first to ask the obvious question.

There are actually several snorts.

“I think it might be easier to say who didn’t,” Rossi points out.

“A great many people, on both sides of the divide, have wanted the bastard dead for a hell of a long time,” Seth Johnson, the right-hand (and younger brother) of one of the alpha-pair from the Smith-Johnson pack in the Olympic Peninsula, speaks up. “For a great many reasons.”

Seth Johnson is there as his elder sister’s representatives, as well as to speak for one of the few survivors of Kate’s crimes, who sought asylum with the Smith-Johnson pack a couple of years earlier after the loss of his own.

So yeah, bottom line, lots of people wanted Gerard Argent dead. One, or quite probably lots of them, put out hits on the man. And well, whether it was one assassin or several involved, it matters little. There isn’t even a body! The only reason they know the bastard is actually dead, at all, is because the assassin(s) whoever they might be, left a message, loud and clear, as to this, along with Gerard’s head, with a symbol carved onto the center of his forehead that looked like a letter M, with a letter V overlapped (making the middle of the ‘M’ look longer and deeper) and a D crossing the elongated part of the V.

Stiles is pretty sure he’s seen that symbol somewhere, he just cannot recall where. He’s been pouring through texts: on packs, on magic, on the Shadow World, and so many other things, he sometimes cannot remember everything he’s read.

The important part is that Gerard is dead. And with that, the Argent case is as good as over. All they’re missing is the official sentencing for Allison and a few others. But the main part is as good as finished. Finally. Justice has been served.

So Stiles can finally turn his attention to school, and to his future, and what exactly he’s gonna do. He won’t lie, there’s a part of him that’d love to be part of a team like the one led by Agent Hotchner. But at the same time, he cannot help but think that he wants to be able to stop the problems from happening, not just get there when people have already suffered and died and all that can be done is try and fix what’s already been broken.

Also, he’s pretty sure that the insistent buzzing he’s been hearing in the back of his head lately is in some way connected to the nemeton. Agent Prentiss (the magic user for the team) says there is one in the preserve, that it’s really important, and… a lot of stuff Stiles is still researching. Also, it seems she cannot go anywhere close to it, because the nemeton has been hurt and will only allow its guardian, or guardians close… Stiles has a very bad feeling that he knows exactly what that means. And if he’s truly meant to be the guardian of some uber-powerful ley node he doubts it (they?) will allow him to just fuck off to the other side of the country with the FBI so…

He doesn’t yet know how he’s going to handle that, but he’s working on it! Maybe he can negotiate? Promise that if he can go to college and to get some proper life experience then he’ll come back and be a better guardian for the nemeton, do a better job than if he were to try and do it as the weak and inexperienced teenager he is right now (he might not like it, but he’s not in the habit of lying to himself, especially after learning how big and insane the world truly is!). But still, how does one even go around negotiating with a fucking tree?!

xXx

The one thing no one in the brand new Hale Pack is expecting, is when Alan Deaton of all people drops by for a visit. Because, why even?

Well, no one but Peter, maybe. But Stiles knows that even when Uncle P doesn’t actually know something is coming he likes to pretend he does, because it helps his image if people think that he knows everything and is always a dozen steps ahead of pretty much everyone.

“I know exactly who you are, Druid Alan Deaton,” Peter tells Scott’s former boss in a hiss. “I know who you were to my sister, Alpha Talia Hale. It was under your ‘guidance’ that a damaged nemeton was allowed to languish instead of being healed.”

“I wasn’t yet emissary at the time the nemeton was poisoned,” Deaton states, he sounds so calm that Stiles has to wonder if he’s truly that relaxed, or if it’s all faked.

“True,” Peter agrees, fake amiably. “Though it was your decision not to seek a cleansing or healing for it. Instead allowing it to remain damaged, rotting…”

“Some things are just meant to be,” Deaton replies in a perfectly even tone. “Above all things, the balance must be maintained…”

At least two people snort at that.

“That’s stupid,” Stiles finally cannot help himself.

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect one such as you to understand, Mr. Stilinski,” Deaton tells him.

“One such as him?” the sheriff asks in a warning tone, really not liking the way the other man is referring to his son.

Really, until that moment Alan Deaton has been nothing but the local veterinarian to him. He saw the man a few times a year, in connection with the K-9 unit, and whenever they had issues with wild-animals… Though as Noah thinks about that he has to wonder why he ever thought a veterinarian, a man who worked with pets, would be more helpful with wild animals than, say, a park ranger.

“A mundane, a human with but the barest connection to the supernatural,” Deaton elaborates.

Noah’s attention returns to the current conversation as his lover doesn’t just snort, Peter outright cackles, loudly. Which in turn makes both Stilinskis, as well as Derek, turn to look at him.

“Is that what you call the only son of the most powerful enchantress on the West Coast?” Peter scoffs.

Neither Stilinski can help but react to the mention of Claudia. They’re both well-aware that there are things they’ve forgotten. Peter’s still recovering, and has stated that he won’t try to unseal the blocked memories for them until he’s sure he won’t hurt them more in the attempt, and the Stilinskis are willing to wait. They know it’ll be worth it. And in the meantime they’re happy enough hearing from Peter about the things they have forgotten.

“Druids,” Peter says the epithet like its poison. “You hide your negligence, and your selfishness and your cruelty and call it serving the balance. But it wasn’t balance that allowed another alpha to bite a human with magical potential, resulting in rejection and death.” He’s talking about Paige, they know, that’s what made her reject Ennis’s bite, she had the potential to be a magic-user, maybe a druid, or even a witch. “It wasn’t balance that let a huntress close enough to hurt my nephew. That gave her the chance to burn my entire family, my pack, alive! It wasn’t balance that allowed a young, untried alpha to run away. That left me to my hurt and despair for six fucking years!”

“I wonder…” Noah’s quiet voice interrupts Peter, calling everyone’s attention instantly. “I mean. Is it really about balance?”

“What…?” The question takes them all by surprise.

“I mean, are you truly that obsessed with something as subjective as balance,” the sheriff elaborates. “Or is that just an excuse to try and hide ignorance?”

“Oh…” Unsurprisingly Stiles is the first (if not the only one) to get what his father means.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Noah continues. “When things happen, good things, but especially bad ones, and there’s nothing you could have done. Either due to lack of knowledge, of power, of courage, whichever… It’s easier to claim that it’s all about balance, about allowing what must happen, to happen, than to admit you’re just not… capable enough.”

Peter stares at his lover, then at Deaton, for a moment saying nothing, then he breaks into loud guffaws.

“There’s one thing that still bothers me though,” Noah goes on. “Scott. Was it ignorance, gross negligence, or something darker?”

“I’m afraid I do not understand the question, sheriff,” Deaton states, with clearly forced calm. “And if I’m being questioned, should I avail myself of an attorney?”

“I’m sure you realize this isn’t the kind of question that I can ask in my official capacity,” Noah waves the matter off. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be asking here, but down at the station.”

He probably could open a formal investigation, but he almost doesn’t want to. They just finished the mess with the Argents! Also, he’s pretty sure that even a full investigation will show that it was all down to incompetence more than anything else, so what’s the point?

What Noah could not have planned for, is his son:

“Did you knowingly get Scott killed?” Stiles demands.

Noah just exhales. He’s… not exactly surprised Stiles would ask. He’s wondered the same himself, to be honest. But at the same time, he feels it’s like trying to blame Peter. The alpha is not to blame because he was truly insane when he bit Scott that night; whatever Deaton might or might not have done… It doesn’t change that it was the Argents who killed Scott in the end.

“See, I’ve been trying to figure it out,” Stiles rambles a bit as he paces from one side of the room to the other. “How I missed it. I knew there was something different with Scott. The way he suddenly didn’t seem to need his inhaler as much, and even when he used it, it was almost like he was just… like it was out of rote, you know?” He shakes his head almost violently. “I knew something was off, I knew… but whenever I tried to get close, Scott would push me away! Like he didn’t want me involved. I… I could have helped him. I would have helped him!”

“Stiles…” Derek goes to the teenager instantly, doing his best to sooth him.

“We know son, we know.” And it’s the truth, Noah does know, they all do.

“The thing is,” Stiles forces himself to continue talking past the knot in his throat. “The thing is, I would have helped him if I’d known. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t. Yet what about you?” He’s looking straight at Deaton. “Peter’s explained what an emissary is. If even I could tell that there was something off with Scott, you must have definitely noticed. You’ve always been more than just Scott’s boss, I know that. We all do. Yet you didn’t help him, why?”

There is no answer, because of course there wouldn’t be one. And what answer could have ever sufficed after such a question?

xXx

Days later Hop is watching the Hale pack take position around the stump of what was once a great tree, preparing to begin a series of rituals meant to purify and secure the nemeton, the pack and the territory as a whole. Again… Does it count as again when this is a completely separate timeline? Universe? Whatever!

Halfway through the ritual Hop turns their attention away from the pack and to someone else: Alan Deaton. The nemeton has to wonder if the man will once again try to do something to avoid the final thwarting of all his schemes. And as it turns out, he is! Though it’s not quite what Hop would have expected of him, not at all what he’s done before. No, this time the man isn’t trying to use Scott McCall. In fact, he seems to have given up on the boy entirely. No, this time he’s attempting to go back in time, himself.

It’s clear that Alan Deaton does not realize that the only reason the previous two changes to the timeline happened at all was because of Hop, and not for any particular talent or ability of the druid, or his protege (or rather, the boy he was manipulating). And yet, when Hop realizes where it is the druid intends to go, the nemeton cannot help but be curious. Already these two timeline have proven to be so much better than the original one. And Hop cannot help but wonder how much things might yet change. Of course not in any way that would favor Alan Deaton, but that’s a given… And so, Hop pushes a tendril of their own power at the druid, and allows the ritual he’s attempting to take effect. And off the man goes, hurtling through time… again.