#yes the math is cool but can i talk about what tragedy looks like melted into the earth

[gascreates]

a new star

[edelwoodsouls]

all roads lead - ch. 5

When his mother dies, Stiles runs away, straight into danger - only to be saved by Peter Hale. Seven years later, after burying their alpha, Stiles and Malia return home.

Word Count: 3,292 | Also on Ao3 | Other Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4,

Chapter 5: SUNSHINE

The smell of cooking meat and spices fills the air soon after John shows them their room. It's relatively large, painted in cool tones of blue. A double bed, a desk and wardrobe. Large windows overlooking the back garden, which backs onto the preserve.

The window is noticeably easily to climb out of, the wrap-around porch and flower lattices a perfect ladder to the ground. Very useful for a werewolf, he thinks.

Malia splays herself out on the bed, testing its comfort. "It's no New York," she says seriously, as she bounces up and down, before burrowing into the covers. "But it'll do."

She's still sulking at the thought of going to school again. Peter had given up trying to make her school when she'd returned from Eichen House, homeschooling her instead, and allowing her to forgo any subject she decided she hated - math and history, mainly.

"You don't have to pass or anything," he'd reminded her. "I've got enough magic to handle cheating a few pop quizes. And maybe we can get in a study group, meet real teenagers. Get someone cute as a personal tutor, I'm sure you'll be a straight A student in months."

"I am a physical learner," she'd nodded sagely; he'd thrown a cushion at her.

Now he curls up into her arms beneath the covers. The duvet is thick but not too heavy, and the furnace they create almost chases away the cold in his fingers.

"Do you think your dad took that all a bit too easily?" Malia says softly, words muffled by his hair.

"Definitely," he admits. He's been steadfastly ignoring this fact until now. "Beacon Hills is a weird town, though. I'm sure he's seen all sorts of fucked up shit."

"He definitely knows about werewolves."

Stiles grimaces. "Yeah, probably. It's a bit hard to miss. Especially with a bitten wolf under the same roof."

"It's probably for the best."

"You think?" He shifts to look up at her dark brown eyes, unusually heavy with storm clouds.

"Now if he finds out, he's less likely to have a heart attack and die on the spot."

Stiles snorts. "I guess. He's already had a big enough shock with me coming back from the dead. The glowing eyes and fangs might be a bit too much to handle."

Under these warm covers, with Malia beside him, Stiles practically feels the shackles melt from his ankles. It truly is safe here, a perfect microcosm of everything he needs. He could never move from this place, with the steady rhythm of Malia's breathing to lull him to sleep, and die happy.

"Stiles," Malia says. There's something in her voice- not sharp, exactly. Not angry, it's too soft for that. Disappointed? He looks up to her again.

Her fingers rest lightly against his arm. Harsh black veins crawl up her skin, reaching high, disappearing beneath her sleeves. A grimace twists her lips.

Stiles goes suddenly cold. He reaches back along the bond, wrenches the pain she's stealing back into himself. He feels it hit him all at once, the breath vanishing from his chest for an instant.

But it is his pain, and it settles quickly back into his bones where it always sits. Where it has lived so long he has all but forgotten it exists there.

"Don't do that," he says sharply.

"I don't like seeing you suffer," Malia's eyes are fierce in that way he usually loves, that says she won't back down. "Especially not alone. Stiles, you're always in pain. You think you hide it well, but I see it. You haven't had a moment of rest since the nogitsune left, and if I can shoulder the burden long enough for you to sleep through a whole night, I'm going to do it."

"It's my burden to bear." My punishment. He may not have the scars to match, but the constant dull ache the nogitsune left behind feels right, feels good. This unnatural body, one that looks like his, but has never actually seen his childhood home, never hugged his mother, should not be comfortable.

"I'm your beta," Malia hisses, suddenly furious. Now she's angry. "You spent all that time bearing burdens Peter never even knew you carried for him, but you won't let me do the same? One rule for you, one for everyone else?"

Yes, he wants to say, because Peter never deserved the tragedy that piled upon his life, but Stiles does. And because he is not Peter. He loved Peter, but the man was never exactly a model alpha. His temper was too short, too violent. Sometimes too controlling. All easily explained away by his trauma, but not excused by it.

Malia deserves a better alpha. Better than Peter, better than Stiles, too- but he's the only one up for the job right now, and he'll do everything he can to live up to the role. He will not let her suffer on his behalf, though he knows she would throw herself on the pyre for him in an instant.

He wants to say all of this, but before he can form the words to make her understand, the front door opens with a loud thud, accompanied by a sudden maelstrom of footsteps and voices.

Stiles flinches, feeling Malia freeze beside him as they strain to listen.

Two new voices. Male. Excited, arguing playfully back and forth. Scott and Isaac.

Both unmistakeably werewolves.

"Showtime," Stiles mutters, as the voices go quiet, most likely sniffing out the two new, definitively human scents twined a floor above them. They listen as John comes out of the kitchen to explain the situation. What could he possibly say to make sense of it?

"We've got this," Malia murmurs, though her fingers are gripping his arm tightly now. "Should we look busy?"

"We already do," Stiles snickers, earning a sharp whack to the back of his head.

Steps thunder up the stairs, rocketing across the landing, almost falling over themselves. They come to a skidding halt just outside the door, as if remembering only at the last second that barging into a room is impolite.

A knock against the door, so tentative, as if scared any harder could break through the wood.

"Come in?" Stiles says, reluctantly extricating himself from the cocoon of Malia and bedding.

Whilst the years have not been kind to Stiles, or his father, Scott McCall wears his age like a mantel. Thick muscles wrap a straight-standing frame, unbent by pressure and trauma. His eyes are bright, his smile easy and so genuinely curious it seems to strike Stiles like lightning.

There are many differences, from the thick black bands tattooed on his arm, the scar on his cheek, to the overwhelming scent of power that curls off him in waves. But his jaw is still as crooked as ever, his expression like a cloudless, sunny sky.

That the world has not managed to break Scott McCall is a miracle Stiles is suddenly, desperately grateful for.

"Stiles!" Scott's voice is so much deeper than that ten year old he knew - of course it is - and filled with so much enthusiasm it almost smothers the confusion, the suspicion-

The hurt. Because his father isn't the only thing Stiles abandoned.

"Hey, Scotty," Stiles tries for a smile, finding it comes far more easily than usual. As if Scott has alleviated his burdens, too, for just a moment.

"Your dad said you just turned up today! Are you okay? What happened to you? Oh my god, it's been so long-" Scott stops suddenly, grins bashfully as he puts a hand over his mouth. "Sorry, that was a lot. I'm sure you'll talk about it when you're ready."

Stiles blinks, so stunned by Scott's unexpected restraint it takes a moment for him to realise the other boy is introducing him to someone. "-don't know if you remember him, he's living with us now that...well, he's living with us."

The boy in question is an incredibly tall bundle of blond hair and too-sad eyes. He hunches, as if to diminish his imposing figure. Stiles remembers, vaguely- Isaac Lahey, quiet and introspective, whose mother had been killed in a hit and run shortly after Claudia Stilinski died.

He remembers sitting with the young boy at the sheriff's station. Not talking, because what could words possibly say? But sitting together, sharing their grief. The memory brings up others Stiles doesn't like to consider, and he looks away quickly, even as he sees from Isaac's expression that they are sharing it.

Malia promptly pokes him in the ribs. "Am I just wallpaper now?"

"You're perfectly capable of introducing yourself, Mal," he snaps back playfully.

"Hm." Malia climbs out of the bed, shoving Stiles unceremoniously onto the floor in the process. "I'm Malia. Not Mal. Nice to meet you."

She sticks her hand out awkwardly, but Scott takes it all in stride, shaking it eagerly. "Nice to meet you, really. How do you know Stiles?"

Stiles is half expecting her to simply come out with it. He's my alpha. He murdered my father. Lying is not Malia's strong suit; every bone in her body rings with blunt honesty. But living with Peter and Stiles must have rubbed off on her at some point, because she simply smiles back and says, "We met in New York."

Which is A, a lie, and B, brings up a whole host of new questions. But still. Progress.

Stiles was a year bitten when he met Malia Tate - not in the far flung starlight of New York, but right here in Beacon Hills.

His life had changed drastically since that first day, when a stranger with sharp eyes had offered him the freedom he could only dream of.

He knows he probably should feel guilty for running, for how quickly he left with Peter - for how easily he’d allowed werewolf to become the excuse he needed to cut ties. But he was a child desperate to flee, haunted by the scent of whiskey and his mother’s perfume. And the newborn wolf inside him was already howling for home in a way that had nothing to do with Beacon Hills, and everything to do with the alpha cleaning his wounds.

So when Peter Hale said New York,  there was no answer except yes.

Of course, he was still a ten year old boy, uncomfortable with the idea of comfort after so long spent in crisis. He got angry, a lot. Frustrated. Threatened to leave. And Peter, twenty-one years old, buried in guilt and responsibility and absolutely not ready for any of it, reacted in kind.

And Stiles did the only thing he knew how to do. He ran away.

Usually he fled into the woods, exploring it just as he had the preserve - he really hadn’t learned his lesson on that one - or lost himself in the sounds and scents of the city. He always came back after a day or so.

This time was different. Your father, Peter had begun, and the wall Stiles had built between himself and Beacon Hills had come crashing down.

Shot in the line of duty. The words ricocheted through his head, endlessly, repetitively, until Stiles’ feet drove him out of the door to think, to breathe, to try to escape them.

He hadn’t left with the intention of coming here, and yet where else would he have gone?

Looking back now, he hears the careful words Peter chose, how he danced around things such as killed and dead. How he let Stiles grieve without ever having to dirty his hands in a lie. A convenient omission that Stiles does not know how to judge. To spare him the pain of having a living but abandoned father? To tie Stiles tighter to him, to New York, so he'd be less likely to leave?

The lie turns over and over in his head in a maddening refrain, all the worse for the fact that this is the one riddle he will never know the answer to.

Stiles had gotten buses most of the way back to Beacon Hills, dropping him at the northern edge of the preserve. He needed to walk the rest of the way, to feel the pain this pilgrimage had cost him on a bone-deep level. He left his phone buried deep in his backpack, ignoring the angry buzzing that started up on day three. He was hungry, and tired, and yet his feet drove him on.

He hiked through the preserve for two days. His old memories of the forest felt like little more than fuzzy, black and white photographs in the face of what his wolf could sense. Even that first day, everything had been so much, too much, ending up blurred just the same.

Now he walked with his head turned to the sky, taking in every leaf and branch in the canopy. Listening to each rustle of twigs, his mind racing as two legs  became four legs became coyote, twenty feet to the left, hiding in the bushes.

Hiding. Because for Stiles there was nothing to fear, now. He was the scariest creature in the forest.

The thing that struck him most was how different these woods were to the ones he traversed in New York. Older, certainly. More alive. There was a pressure in the air, a presence that existed everywhere at once, directionless. Every rustle of leaves, every breath of wind, sounded more like a murmured voice than the creak of trees. Did that voice belong to the trees? To the spirits winding in between their trunks? To the dead?

It took him several minutes, distracted by his awe, to realise that the coyote was following him. At a distance, moving through the underbrush with the fluid movements of something used to being invisible.

But not to Stiles. He could smell its hunger seeping into the air, the ravenous desperation of an animal willing to try anything. He tried to stay calm, keep his pace and breath as relaxed as they had been before. But all he could think of was the last time he had been alone in these woods. The scent of blood was thick in his nose, the echo of pain sharp against his leg.

He could take a coyote, couldn't he? He had never been in a fight, never faced any danger except that first bite. He had become so comfortable in his own rush of new power, he had forgotten the world was still willing to do him harm. The wolf inside him less of a wall than a veil, still easily perforated. Like his skin, fragile, though it healed quickly.

His heart raced despite himself as his thoughts began to spin; he could feel the moment the other animal sensed his temperament.

The moment he became prey, about to bolt.

It sprang from the bushes suddenly, so fast even Stiles was unprepared. He was on the ground in an instant, a tangle of fur and claws. He tried to snarl, to push back against the creature, but desperation made his moves sloppy where it made the coyote powerful. Claws and teeth sank into any flesh available.

The worst thing wasn't the pain, or the certainty that fate had merely waited an extra year to claim him. It was the heat, the breath on his cheek, the coarse fur scratching against him. The feeling of something alien against his skin, violating the carefully constructed barriers around himself in such an open, direct way.

He stopped struggling. He still can't say, even years later, why he found himself staring at the cold daylight through the canopy, watching a pair of blackbirds whirling through the sky, utterly still. The world felt distant and unimportant.

And just as sudden, the weight vanished from him. He heard animal yelps, the gut-wrenching, slick sound of teeth tearing into flesh. A whimper- then silence. The rustling of leaves brushed away by a tail.

Slowly, he inched his body up. Blood, fresh and brighter than he thinks blood should be, soaked his jumper. Every movement felt like a new slash across his skin, and the world wheeling and shifting at an alarming rate.

He threw up water and blood, the only things left in his stomach.

Across the clearing was a coyote- not the one that had attacked him, he knew somehow, though he never saw the first. This one was larger, fur sleek in shades of grey and pale yellow; blood dripping steadily from its maw, though it made no move to clear it. It watched him with an intelligence that startled him.

The other coyote lay in a crumpled heap, leaves half-heartedly kicked over its fur.

Stiles knew all too well what that felt like. He retched, but there was nothing left to expel.

When he looked up again, shivering, the coyote was right beside him. Slowly, as if testing his reactions, it pushed its nose against his hand, leaving a smear of blood against his pale skin. He felt his wolf eyes flickering automatically, ringing with liquid gold. The coyote stared at him with deliberate, widened eyes.

Which glowed an icy, bright blue.

He had never met a full shifter except Peter, whose true form had been brutalised by his madness. This creature looked no different from the coyote under the leaves, save for that supernatural blue.

The one thing Peter had made clear, over and over again, as if afraid Stiles might forget: do not trust other shifters. Do not trust creatures who do not share your pack, share that bond closer than blood he could feel thrumming somewhere deep and hot inside his soul.

Looking into Malia's eyes then, those words had risen up in his mind. They had become meaningless already. He was tired of mistrust, though it had chiselled itself deep in his bones.

And where that singular, bright flame he knew to be Peter's bond had been, he felt a second flicker to life, tying him to the creature now curling close against his wounds, lending its warmth and companionship as he felt himself, every so slowly, begin to heal.

They had been inseparable ever since. Codependent, Peter used to scoff, an accusation that fell half-heartedly short in the face of their closely knit family unit.

Besides, there had been no one else.

No one else, except these ghosts that Stiles had let himself forget beneath a haze of anger. Just because the clouds eclipsed the sun doesn't mean it wasn't there.

"New York?" Scott asks, face so open and curious Stiles feels the words tugging at his tongue in an instant. This is a face he would tell his darkest secrets to, if asked.

A dangerous face. But one Stiles wants to let below his guard nevertheless.

"I ended up there for a while," Stiles shrugs, steadying his heart against prying ears. "Malia's a life saver, pulled me from the fire more than once. Some things just stick you together for life, y'know?"

Scott glances at Isaac, and Stiles is sure he does know. They're both thinking of that rope-tight bond between pack, a fire in itself. Indescribable to those who have never felt what it is to let another soul make a home in your heart.

Maybe this can work. Even with two packs, two alphas under the same roof. Because they all have that fire. And they all share loss - inextricably entwined with the love written in every line of their faces.

And maybe that shared understanding is enough. No more spilt blood.

No more spilt blood, Stiles promises, and allows himself a smile.

He only hopes it lasts a little longer this time.