#Gerard never bothers to learn pidgin because he thinks it's beneath him

[theslowestpoke]

Today's useless teen wolf AU is everything is essentially the same except they live in Louisiana instead of California.

Stiles' dad is the sheriff of their parish, somewhere inoffensively middle-north like Rapides so they're surrounded by the national forest and still close to the Red River. It's a perfect place to hide a giant magic tree, for the record, and the bayou is no place for two teenagers to go stumbling around looking for a dead body. Best case you find it before the gators find you; worst case, your best friend gets his ass chomped by a rougarou.

Everyone knows the legends - the stories older siblings tell you with a lot less warning than your grandmother ever did - but they're just stories, right?

Except now that Stiles is really paying attention, there's way weirder stuff in the medicine cabinets at the vet clinic than you'd really need for dogs and cats and the bright blue paint on the outside of the building might be more than just an aesthetic choice for the doctor who always seems to know more than he's willing to tell.

When a family comes to town with their pretty daughter and French last name, Scott's already head-over-heels before Stiles can point out that there's bigger fish to fry. Lydia Martin is hosting the annual crawfish boil at her family's manor ("for charity," like they don't have their hands dirty from running a chain of river-boat casinos on the Red) and Scott needs to get his new claws in check if he's wants to steer clear of Argent. The hunter's been asking around in quick, clipped creole about all the recent rumors of black panther sightings, but Stiles knows that's not what he's really asking.

When the kanima starts wreaking on the town, Deaton sends Stiles to the graveyard to fetch a bag of dirt from his own mother's grave. He promises it will protect them and keep the kanima from escaping the rave, but only after Stiles accuses him of trying to use Claudia's memory in a curse. It works, but nothing else does, and Stiles has to break the line of goofer dust to let Isaac and Erica escape. He's definitely remembering that for the future.