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thisdiscontentedwinter · 5 years ago

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Bad Blood - Chapter 19

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

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Stiles doesn’t sleep well. He’s sure there was something at his window earlier in the night, so he dozes in the darkness, and it feels like he wakes up every few minutes to check there’s nothing there. He must sleep in the end though, because he doesn’t hear Gerard and Kate get back. Instead, he’s jolted from his sleep by the sound of an argument coming from the kitchen.

He creeps out of bed and down the stairs.

“No, I haven’t forgotten there was a wolf at my house,” Chris bites out. He sounds tense. Well, more tense than usual, and that’s saying something. “I’m just saying there’s no indication he was going to hurt anyone.”

Kate’s laugh is incredulous. “You’re joking, aren’t you? A fucking werewolf was sniffing around your daughter, and you don’t think it was going to hurt her?”

“Look, Kate, just tell me what you’ve got on the Hale pack, okay? Have they killed anyone, or haven’t they?”

“Jesus! What are you even implying?” She pauses. “Oh, wait, I think I know what’s going on here. You’ve been talking to the good sheriff, haven’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous? Where’s all this coming from then, Chris?” Kate huffs out a breath. “I tell you what. Dad will be back soon. How about you ask him exactly what we’ve got on the Hale pack?”

There’s silence then, and Stiles’s stomach clenches.

He remembers what it’s like to question Gerard. He remembers why he only did it a few times. He remembers exactly how it feels to have that old man’s smile turn suddenly cold. He remembers bracing himself for a beating that felt like it never ended.

Stiles is a man now, but he’s still afraid of Gerard’s anger.

He creeps silently back up the stairs.

There’s the thing they used to do with elephants, he remembers. They used to put a chain around a baby elephant’s leg, and hammer the chain into the ground with a metal stake. And the baby elephant tried to pull it out and get free, but it couldn’t. And then it stopped trying. The elephant never knew it was strong enough to pull the stake out, even when it was fully grown, because it had stopped trying so long ago.

Chris could easily take Gerard in a fight. Maybe Stiles could too.

But both of them, he thinks, stopped trying way back when they were still small and weak.

Stiles crawls back into bed and falls asleep with his hand over the place on his mattress where the photograph of him and his mother is hidden.

***

Dad’s being super weird again, Allison texts him early the next morning.

Stiles doesn’t know how to respond, so he leaves her message on read.

***

Stiles is eating his oatmeal in the morning when Gerard walks into the kitchen.

“Stiles,” Gerard says, and smiles his rictus grin “Have you been for your run yet?”

Stiles nods, “Yes, sir.”

“Good,” Gerard says. “Don’t overdo it, hmm? We have a hunt coming up.”

Stiles’s skin prickles with anticipation. “When?”

“In a few days,” Gerard says. “It’s time we showed these dogs their place. I want you and Chris to go through the inventory today. Make sure we’re locked and loaded.”

“Yes, sir,” Stiles says, ignoring the clench in his gut.

He’s not going to think of Derek.

He’s not.

What happened at the party was an aberration—in more ways than one—and Stiles isn’t going to second-guess everything he’s been taught just because of one kiss. Because of one kiss, and because Peter stopped from killing him, and because of the look on his father’s face, and—

No.

Stiles isn’t going to second-guess.

Not now.

Not when he’s so close to proving himself worthy of Gerard’s exacting standards.

He can do this.

Gerard puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes.

He can do this.

***

There’s a routine that Stiles falls into easily when Chris arrives and joins him down in the basement. Routine is comfortable. Gerard tells them there are six other hunters being brought in for this hunt—men Gerard has worked with before in the US—and while it’s not up to the Argents to supply these men with weapons and gear, they’ll do it anyway in case there are backups needed. There’s a reason the Argents have a reputation as the best. They operate with military precision. Every contingency plan has a contingency plan. Every fallback has a fallback of its own.

Stiles checks his own gear first: gloves, boots, kneepads, vest, webbing, pouches and belt. Then his headlamp, his night vision, his comms earpiece. Then he moves on to ammo, and a firearm. His primary weapon will the Kel-Tec PMR-30 he keeps under his bed, but he selects a Glock as his backup weapon. He knows Glocks.

He glances up to find Chris’s gaze on him.

“You good with that?” Chris asks, nodding at the Glock.

“Yes, sir.”

Something flickers in Chris’s gaze. “You spend a lot of time at the range?”

“Not since we’ve been here,” Stiles says, “but I’m a good shot. I know how to handle myself.”

He wouldn’t be allowed on hunts otherwise.

Chris lifts an eyebrow, and reaches for an empty clip to fill. “It’s different on the range than on an actual hunt.”

“I know that,” Stiles says, trying to keep his annoyance out of his tone. “This won’t be my first hunt.”

Chris’s forehead creases. “What do you mean?”

Stiles slides a magazine into the Glock and feels it click into place. “My first hunt was a few weeks ago in the Czech Republic.” He straightens his shoulders. “I made a kill.”

Chris stills. “You did?”

“Yes, sir.” Stiles lifts his chin. “You can ask Kate and Gerard. I’m not just some kid.”

“I never said you were,” Chris says evenly.

Semantics. Stiles knows he’s thinking it.

Stiles doesn’t like Chris. He doesn’t trust him. He barely knows him, and those few times they’ve met he hasn’t liked the way that Chris looks at him. He never quite knows what Chris is thinking, and so he fills in all those gaps with his own insecurities and disapproval.

He does the same with Victoria.

Jesus, it’s amazing how they managed to produce a daughter as open and bright as Allison, when both of them are nothing more than silences and glances and closed off expressions.

Stiles puts his head down and keeps working.

He can feel Chris’s gaze on him the whole time.

***

Allison breezes into the house at lunchtime.

“Don’t you have school?” Chris asks her.

She stares back at him. “Don’t you have work?”

Stiles flinches, but Kate laughs at that, loud and boisterous.

“I have a spare,” Allison says at last. “I bought curly fries, and then decided I wanted to share them with Stiles. Stiles, are you busy?”

They hurry upstairs to his room.

“He’s being such an asshole,” Allison complains minutes later when they’re sharing curly fries on his bed. “And he’s always been cagey, but now he’s being cagey with Mom too, which makes her more of an asshole, which is…” She blinks. “Which is mathematically impossible, probably.”

Stiles snorts.

“I mean, I love my mom,” Allison says, and then doesn’t seem to know where to go with that.

“But she’s a total hard ass,” Stiles finishes for her.

“Right?” She huffs out an exasperated sigh. “Ugh.” She eats another curly fry and wrinkles her nose. “I need a soda.”

“I’ll get some,” Stiles says, pushing himself up off the bed.

On his way to the kitchen he notices that Gerard’s study door is open. He steps inside, drawn to the map of Beacon Hills on the desk. There’s a circle in the warehouse district, and Stiles’s pulse quickens. Is that where the Hales are holed up? Are six mercs enough to contain them in that grid, and then tighten it?

The map shudders where Stiles is touching it. His hands are shaking again. Stiles flexes them, jams them into his pockets, and heads towards the kitchen.

He hears low voices before he gets there, and slows his steps.

“So this is what it comes to,” Gerard is saying. “I shouldn’t even be surprised, should I? I let you have your space. I agreed to let you keep Allison out of things until she finished school. I let you take a step back, Christophe, and how have you repaid me?”

Stiles’s heart clenches, and he freezes a few feet from the kitchen doorway.

“It’s not what you think.” Chris’s voice is low but calm.

Stiles hears the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor, and then Kate speaks. “Who’s the text to, Chris?”

Silence.

Gerard grunts. “No answer, hmm? Nothing to say for yourself at all?”

“One thing,” Chris says. “Did the Hales ever hurt anyone, or did Kate burn them alive for nothing?”

“Now who would put an idea in your head like that?” Kate asks.

There’s silence again, and then Chris says, “No.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Gerard says. “I’ll make sure Allison is looked after.”

Stiles feels a cold chill. He thinks of Allison, tied to a chair in the basement for hours. Thinks of her being forced to run when she can hardly breathe. He thinks of her being punched in the face until she falls down and can’t get up.

He hears the pop of a silenced shot, and a grunt of pain.

And then chair legs again, and a shout, and the sound of something smashing. Then another shot, no silence on this one.

Stiles moves.

He runs for the stairs, and meets Allison coming the other way.

“What’s going—”

“Move,” Stiles tells her. “Go back. Back!”

He pushes her back up the stairs, back into his room. He closes the door behind her.

“Stiles, what’s happening?”

Stiles grabs his box out from under the bed, his thumb slipping on the combination lock before he gets it open. He grabs his firearm out.

“Oh my god!” Allison exclaims. “Stiles?”

From downstairs, Stiles hears another shot. Allison jerks like she’s been hit, and covers her mouth with her hand.

Stiles pushes her toward the window. “We have to go! We have to get out of here, now.”

Allison stares at him, at the gun, at him again.

“My… my car keys are downstairs.” She blinks, and tears slide down her cheeks. “What’s happening?”

“We don’t need your keys,” Stiles says. “We’re gonna run, okay?”

“Stiles!”

“Ally,” he says, grasping her wrist with his free hand. “Do you trust me?”

She nods, pale.

“Then we have to go,” he says. “Please.”

He follows her out the window.

#sterek #steter senior #discontentedwinter #bad blood #my fics

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