#so full of joy seeing waves of humans blocking police cars

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Hunger - chapter 22

Hunger master post

Stiles doesn’t know where the clouds came from, but a few drops of rain spatter against the windshield of Chris’s SUV, and slide down the glass like tears.

The road is blocked by cars, and by six heavily armed men.

“If you get the chance to run,” Chris Argent says to nobody in particular, or maybe to all of them, “you take it.”

He opens the driver’s side door and steps out onto the road. Stiles hears the crunch of his boots hitting the dirt. He still has Kate’s firearm in his hand, but Stiles has no idea how many rounds he has left. And he’s massively outgunned.

The hunters walk toward the SUV, fanning out as they move.

“Rafa,” Melissa says, a soft warning.

Rafael McCall opens the front passenger door and steps out onto the road as well. He’s joined a moment later by Parrish with his rifle and Allison with her bow.

Stiles stares through the windshield at Haigh. Sheriff Haigh. He was a deputy back when Stiles knew him, and his expression when he looks at Parrish tells Stiles everything he needs to know: someone told Haigh that Parrish was supposed to be a dead man. He hasn’t just been turning a blind eye to Kate and Gerard. He’s in this up to his fucking neck.

“You brought Ally?” Gerard calls, his voice arch with disbelief, with disgust. “Did he tell you what those animals did to your aunt, Allison?”

Allison turns her head to look at Chris, and then raises her bow. “I don’t care.”

“They killed her!” Gerard shouts, the noise rising and cutting through the quiet of the morning. “They ripped her throat out!”

Across from Stiles, Peter gives a chuff that sounds very satisfied.

“Give us the wolves, Christopher, and at least let Allison walk away from here.” Gerard steps closer. “That’s what you always wanted, wasn’t it? For Allison to not be involved?”

Chris doesn’t answer. He doesn’t lower his firearm either.

“Allison.” Gerard’s tone is cajoling. “Come over here to me.”

“Let my friends go,” Allison says.

Gerard’s expression sours.

Stiles inches toward the back door of the SUV. He opens it with a soft click. “You can run,” he whispers. “When I push it open, you and Peter can run.”

Derek growls at him.

Outside, Gerard raises his voice. “Give me the fucking wolves!”

Melissa twists around in her seat. “Stiles, no! Don’t open it!”

Stiles pushes the door open, and climbs down onto the road. Scott’s shoes land in the dirt beside him.

“Stiles!” Melissa hisses. “Scott!”

The wolves leap down beside them. Derek bumps his head against Stiles’s hip.

“They’re not running, are they?” Stiles asks in a low voice.

Scott shows him a lopsided smile. “No.”

They round the back of the SUV and join the others on the road.

Stiles lifts his chin and stares at Haigh.

Remember me. Remember me, you fucking asshole.

He feels a stab of bitter joy when he sees the recognition flash over Haigh’s heavy features. It’s been four years, but Haigh hasn’t aged well. Stiles guesses that some people just aren’t up to the job of Sheriff. Haigh stole a job he couldn’t even fucking handle. Stiles hopes he hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in years.

Because Stiles sure as fuck hasn’t, has he? And his dad…

His dad probably hasn’t either.

“What?” Gerard asks suddenly. “What now, Christopher?”

It isn’t Chris who answers. It’s Rafael McCall. “FBI. Put your weapons on the ground.”

A ripple of unease goes through the hunters, and through Haigh. It unsettles them, but it doesn’t budge them. How can it? Agent McCall’s badge doesn’t mean anything here, just like Stiles’s dad’s badge didn’t mean anything four years ago, and Parrish’s didn’t last night. Gerard Argent and his men crossed that line years ago.

“You’re not the authority here,” Gerard growls. “I’m the authority here!”

“I’m not giving you the wolves,” Chris says, his voice steady. “I’m not giving you the boy, and I’m not giving you my daughter.”

“Give me the wolves!” Gerard bellows, his face turning red.

There’s a sudden roar of tires spinning on dirt, Stiles is knocked to the ground by Derek, and he twists his neck just in time to see Chris Argent’s black SUV barreling into the hunters, and crashing up against Haigh’s cruiser.

Metal crunches, and radiator steam rises like smoke.

Melissa! he thinks wildly. Holy shit!

The wolves launch themselves toward Gerard and the hunters, with Chris and Rafael and Parrish on their heels. Stiles hauls himself to his feet. He sees Scott flinch back as a hunter gets a shot off. Scott clamps his hand over his bicep, and roars, dropping to his haunches as his fangs and claws appear. Allison put a bolt in the hunter’s throat.

Shit.

Steam is still rising from the radiator of the SUV. Stiles heads toward it. He needs to get Melissa out.

The thin soles of his shoes skid in the dirt as he reaches the twisted mass of metal. His stomach churns when he sees the hunter trapped in the crush of the vehicles. He’s trapped from the waist down. He’s got blood coming out of his mouth. Stiles doesn’t need to be a doctor to tell he’s a dead man. Maybe not now, but give it a minute or two.

Stiles wrenches the driver’s door of the SUV open.

Melissa is in the front seat, hands clenched tightly on the steering wheel. She’s pale. Her gaze is fixed on the dying hunter and her expression is one of horror.

“Are you okay?” Stiles asks, flinching as he hears one of the wolves roaring behind him, and a garbled scream.

Melissa turns her face toward him. “Stiles! Look out!”

Stiles feels the press of a barrel against the side of his neck a moment before someone gets an arm around his throat. A hairy arm in a khaki sleeve. Haigh.

Haigh drags him backward.

Stiles sees everything in flashes.

Chris is on the ground, one of the hunters on top of him. The hunter is brandishing a knife.

Peter roars, and launches himself at the hunter.

Scott is bleeding. He’s hunkered down, his face twisted with pain. Allison is standing in front of him, her bow keeping the hunters at bay.

Rafael McCall slams a hunter’s head into the ground, lifts it up again by the hair, and slams it down again.

Gerard is pointing a gun at Derek. Derek, growling, looks ready to pounce.

Parrish is running for them.

Stiles’s heart is in his mouth as Haigh drags him off into the line of trees at the side of the road.

“You shouldn’t have come back here, Stiles.” He tightens his arm, and Stiles struggles for breath. “You should have left it alone!”

Stiles claws at his arm desperately. His eyes sting with tears. His lungs burn.

Once, in another universe, Haigh worked on the candyfloss stall at the Beacon Hills’ Sheriff’s Department Family Fun Day. He hadn’t done it before, and he didn’t know when to stop, and Stiles had been delighted when Haigh had presented him with a stick full of candy floss as big as a beach ball.

“Don’t tell your dad,” Haigh had warned him with a laugh.

“I won’t!”

It had been totally worth the sugar high followed by the sugar crash and the stomach ache.

Stiles doesn’t have many good memories from the dark months following the death of his mom, but that was one. That was such a bright one, and now Haigh has poisoned it.

Stiles struggles, and Haigh adjusts his grip.

“Don’t ever be an accomplice in your own murder.”

Stiles drops his chin while he can. Still gripping Haigh’s arm, he steps to the right. He lets go of Haigh’s wrist with his left hand and drives his fist behind him into the man’s groin. Haigh doubles over, and Stiles brings his elbow up sharply and slams it into his chin.

Haigh rears back, and Stiles breaks free.

Those dinner time hypotheticals with his dad?

They’d sometimes turned into practicals.

Stiles hasn’t got time to celebrate yet though. Not with a firearm in the mix. He has no idea how far away anyone else is. He has no idea if they can even see what’s happening. He turns quickly, dropping into a crouch as he scoops up a handful of dirt and leaf litter and flings it in Haigh’s face. Okay, so his dad never taught him that move. Indiana Jones did, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Haigh splutters and waves his gun around wildly.

Stiles launches himself at him, knocking him onto the ground and straddling him while they struggle for the gun. One of them isn’t going to get up from this. Stiles really hopes it’s Haigh.

And then, just when he’s sure he’s wrong, there’s a slavering wolf beside him, growling and snarling, and snapping its jaws.

Haigh goes limp.

“Yeah,” Stiles gasps, wrenching the gun from the man’s fingers. “My friends are scarier than yours, aren’t they?”

Derek growls, his eyes flashing blue.

Stiles presses the barrel of the gun into Haigh’s chest, and watches the man’s eyes widen. The gun barrel clinks against the metal of the sheriff’s badge that this fucker has no right to be wearing, and it would be so easy to just kill him right now.

So easy, and so deserved.

“You framed my dad,” Stiles says. “You ruined my fucking life!”

And a small insidious voice in the back of Stiles’s mind whispers back that now’s his chance to ruin Haigh’s life too. 

 ***

 The wolf’s boy is bristling with anger. His tears smell close to the surface. The wolf wants nothing more than to rip the throat out of this man who hurt his boy. He wants to tear him into tiny pieces. He wants to help the boy taste his enemy’s blood.

But then the human is back, and he is forcing the change, and the wolf’s claws retract, and he reaches out his hand to curl it over Stiles’s. To draw the gun away.

“No,” he says, his voice quiet. “No, Stiles, he needs to tell the police what he did.”

Stiles is wide-eyed. Wild-eyed. “Will he? Will he though?”

Derek stares down at the man. “He will,” he says, “or Peter and I will tear him apart.”

The fear flashes in Haigh’s eyes.

“My friends are scarier,” Stiles whispers, his breath shuddering out of him. “Der, are we winning?”

 ***

 A man like Gerard Argent doesn’t let himself get taken alive. Stiles knows, as soon as he stumbles back toward the road, how it’s going to play out. The other hunters are either dead or lying bleeding on the road, but Gerard Argent is holding a gun to Allison’s head.

He’s not using her as a shield though. He’s left Chris a clear shot.

“What are you, Christopher?” he taunts. “A coward?”

Except he’s the one not man enough to end it himself, isn’t he?

Chris’s face is as expressionless as always. There’s a crimson line of blood running from his temple down his cheek. His gun is raised.

Gerald lifts his chin. “Katie wouldn’t have hesitated. She knew what had to be done. She was always better than—”

Chris fires.

 ***

 The wolf—the man? He doesn’t know—watches as death picks her way among the wounded and the dying. She catches him watching, and smiles. Her face is pale in the sunlight. Her hair is dark. Her smile, today, is all Laura’s.

“Der,” Laura had said before she died. “I’ll always be with you.”

But when he opened his mouth to respond she was already gone and death was in her place.

Guilt and culpability and self-recrimination were too complex for the wolf to untangle, and so he let them walk beside him. He let death wear his sister’s face.

And now, he thinks, death is no longer hungry.

Now, he thinks, she has had her fill.

She doesn’t need to wear Laura’s face.

She doesn’t need to be his shadow anymore.

Stiles falls to his knees beside him. He exhales slowly and leans into him.

The man, the wolf—Derek—reaches out and laces his fingers with his boy’s.

His boy. Pack. Stiles.

When he looks up again, death is gone.