Chapter Text
The arrow whizzed past his ear before he could finish yelling, “ALLY, DON’T!” Stiles cursed as he threw up the mountain ash he had in his pocket before the werewolf could gain on them.
Allison was already notching another arrow, heedless of his warning. As she took aim, Stiles stepped in front of her. “I’m trying to get him off her!” The first arrow had only been meant to distract the werewolf from its prey so that Stiles could try and save the girl as Allison continued shooting. Even laced with aconite, one arrow wouldn’t stop a wolf in its tracks.
“Take two seconds and look.” The werewolf, blue eyes and bared teeth, hadn’t advanced on them. But not just because of Stiles’s barrier. He wasn’t attacking the blonde girl on the ground, he was putting pressure on a wound and his arm was riddled with black veins that had nothing to do with the poison that started to leak into his bloodstream.
They were lucky she had only hit his arm.
Allison’s breath hitched as she realized her mistake. “He has blue eyes,” she defended hotly. They had run into the scene looking for a rogue and caught a werewolf hunched over a bleeding body with clear signs she’d been mauled. Allison acted immediately when his eyes flashed.
“Yours would be too if you were one,” he reminded her, trying not to snap too harshly. This was a talk for another time. Not when someone was dying and they’d only made the situation worse. “Give me the aconite.” He reached his hand out and Allison tossed it over without any resistance.
The blue-eyed werewolf was growling at them, jaw tight as he tried to concentrate on too many things. Pulling pain from the girl, holding her wound together, fighting back the pain of the arrow, their conversation. He looked confused and rightfully cautious underneath all the ridged brow and extra hair and snarling lips.
“Try not to bite my hand off,” Stiles said, pouring some of the brown powder into his palm. “I’m just going to undo what she did. Which, sorry. Ally, keep a lookout.” He didn’t want her freezing in her own panicked guilt. Allison was trying so hard to change not only her ways but that of the entire Argent family. Shooting a bystander, no matter how he first appeared, would have her reeling if she didn’t focus on her new motto of protection.
Stiles stepped over the mountain ash at the same time he lit the aconite in his hand. The surprise of the small fire with no clear sign of what caused it was enough to keep the werewolf from attacking. He has slowed from the poison already and was more confused than before. He didn’t think to lunge at Stiles until Stiles had already wrapped his free hand around the arrow shaft and in one swift motion yanked it out and slammed the charred aconite into the puncture wound.
The werewolf cried out. Stiles could only imagine how painful it was. It must have been more than he could handle at that moment because he teetered backward, exposing the girl. Her eyes flashed gold and Stiles cursed some more. She had a deep gash along her collar as if someone had gone for her neck and missed. And she wasn’t healing. Was their rogue an alpha? Was this an internal pack issue? Was it something other than a wolf that attacked her? Stiles shook his head. He didn’t have time to spiral out. Research mode was turned off.
The blue-eyed wolf had passed out. Small miracles. Maybe it was a good thing Allison shot him. Stiles doubted he would have convinced the guy to back off and let him help this fast. Without the other werewolf holding her down, she convulsed on the forest floor. In a matter of moments, Stiles pinned her best he could with his human strength and prayed what he was going to do would work. “Hope this doesn’t leave a scar,” he said, hand already heating with the same spark of magic that burnt the aconite.
It was in that position, Allison with her bow at the ready, Stiles holding down werewolf while another was unconscious by his side, and the scent of burnt flesh stinging his nose, that the local alpha showed up flanked by two of her betas.
“This looks much worse than it is,” Stiles said.
There was a brief moment where everything stilled, air stifling. The smallest movement would sound like a gong. Then it shattered into a flurry as Stiles scrambled to the ring of mountain ash. Dirt kicked up into the air and the betas rushed to their fallen pack mates, disregarding Stiles and Allison completely. The alpha, however, stood like a statue, red eyes glowing like brightest coals as she stared at the hunters.
Stiles’ heart pounded in his chest. The betas could have grabbed him if they wanted to during his mad dash to safety. Relative safety. The barrier would hold, but how long would the alpha stay there? How long would Allison and Stiles be able to stick to such a small space with no provisions beyond poisons and arrows? He didn’t want to find out.
“I was trying to cauterize the wound,” Stiles sputtered, unable to keep his nervous energy inside. “She wasn’t healing.”
“They’re stable,” one of the betas said.
The alpha didn’t take her eyes off Stiles and Allison as said, “Take Erica home. Text me if she hasn’t started healing by then.”
One of them, the larger one with dark skin and broad shoulders, lifted Erica like a porcelain doll at risk of falling apart. It was kind of heartbreaking to watch. Then he was off, speeding towards the west. Stiles tried to mentally map out where their home might be, but his attention was quickly taken back by the groaning of the blue-eyed wolf.
“She didn’t mean to shoot him,” Stiles he said. “Well, she did, Allison’s too good with a bow to accidentally hit someone - ow!” Allison had punched his arm. “BUT she didn’t mean to shoot him, we mistook him for someone else.”
“She mistook him for someone else,” the alpha corrected. “I heard you two. She shot him, you saved him.”
“We’re just looking for the rogue,” Allison said.
The alpha nodded. “We caught scent of him. Wanted to catch him before he could do any damage.”
“Any more damage,” Allison corrected. “We’ve been tracking him from Oregon. He’s killed three people.”
“I still have two betas out searching but he’s probably found a hiding spot for the night after he attacked Erica. He knows we’re after him.”
The staredown between Allison and the alpha was making Stiles antsy so he turned back to the other werewolves. The one Allison shot was being helped to his feet by the tall curly-haired one. The shine of his blue eyes was somehow more intimidating than the red of his alpha’s. Stiles’ heart skipped a beat or two or three and then stuttered into overdrive. He distantly heard Allison asking if they wanted to go after the rouge on their own or let hunters assist. After what just happened, it was a fair offer. Before Allison could even finish, the wolf she shot, the one Stiles couldn’t take his eyes away from as his lips curled and his teeth sharpened, growled. “Get out.”
“Derek,” the alpha warned.
Derek. Stiles recognized something behind Derek’s eyes. The kind of haunting that came from being cursed.
“She’s an Argent,” Derek spat. “She’s more danger than the rogue.” He stumbled forward with his threat, almost falling out of his pack mate’s grip. It only emphasized Derek's concerns. Allison had shot him after all.
Laura stared at the necklace Allison wore then lifted her eyes to meet Allison’s. “We’ll take care of the rogue. Allison Argent? I’ve heard about you, but,” she shook her head. “You’ve got a long way to go to gain our trust.”
Just after Allison’s 16th birthday, she crafted a bullet with the crest of her family out of silver. The bullet was a right of passage for an Argent. A proof they’d learned the ways of the hunter, from the ways to kill to the reasons they do. We hunt those who need to be hunted.
His family, his mother’s lineage that fated Stiles to be raised to hunt, didn’t have a motto or a crest. They didn’t have something to show themselves as kin; hunters who keep the world safe from threats of supernaturals. His family had a spark, which set them apart from other hunters. But they also had a curse. That was his right of passage.
When Allison was twenty-two, she melted down her bullet and crafted it into an arrowhead. She had become the matriarch of the Argents. It was her show of change in her family. They weren’t hunters who tracked down any inhuman creature and took their lives as thoughtlessly as a bullet could. Yes, they needed to know how to hunt, but the skill was for a different reason. We protect those who cannot protect themselves.
When Allison showed the arrowhead to Stiles, he sliced his finger open. Not much, but enough for a large drop of blood to swell and trail down to his palm. He thought it was poetic that he would bleed by that arrow, thinking of the Argent’s former motto and the fact that Stiles was hunted. Hunted by time and a past older than himself.
“You think my mom was like that?” Stiles asked as he pulled out a bandaid. “Ignoring any sense of code? Killing families, kids… humans? Just because they were in the way?”
“Don’t think like that,” she said. It wasn’t a yes or a no. They had no way to find out. Stiles was the last of his line. He could be born of mass murderers and he would never know.
“I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re cursed. Probably because we pissed off the wrong thing. It’s strong magic to curse a whole bloodline. At some point, we had to have done something horrible to make someone go to those lengths.”
Allison gripped his shoulder. “You can’t think like that. You’re not them. We’re not them.”
“Did we do the right thing?” Allison asked, ultra-focused on the freeway in front of her.
“They asked us to leave, Ally,” Stiles reminded her. “They can handle a rogue. You gave them your information in case other hunters try to come into the area and go after them. We have other things to go after.”
There were rumors of a kitsune who was losing control out east and a lone wendigo prowling in the woods somewhere in between. They considered camping out south of Beacon Hills for a few days in case the rogue slipped by the Hale pack but decided it might seem rude to them - assuming they would fail.
Allison toyed with the arrowhead between her fingers, careful as to not cut herself. “Kate went through there,” she said tonelessly. They knew there was a chance there were more packs Kate had murdered than they already knew of, but they had no way of finding out. It was only chance that brought them to Beacon Hills. “I should be able to do more than make promises of being better to the families she destroyed.”
“Maybe,” Stiles shrugged. “But we don’t know what that is. All we can do is do better. And if they ask us to leave,” Stiles thought about Derek’s haunted eyes and hated himself for the words coming out of his mouth, “we leave. If they can trust us to do that, they might actually contact us when something is wrong.”
“But-”
“I’m twenty-six, Ally. Almost twenty-seven. You’re not the only one who has to make up for their family history and I have less than four more years to do it. Let’s move on when they ask us to.”
Killing a wendingo wasn’t something Stiles reveled in, but it had to be done in that moment. The kitsune in New York was almost too out of control to reason with - she’d grown more powerful than her mother and was losing sense of self with each passing second, but they managed to bring her to the skinwalkers who nested in the Catskills.
After that, Stiles traveled by himself for a while. Allison had to go be a leader and what not. He loved her like a sister and supported her with everything he had, but he didn’t want to be around the whole hunter world more than he had to. He was half raised by the Argents and it fucked him up.
“Where’s home?” a guy asked once, buying Stiles a drink. “Nowhere,” Stiles told him.
Home wasn’t with the Argents or the house he lived in as he trained to kill. Home wasn’t the vague impressions of life with his mother. Throwing knives in the backyard to the scent of fresh-baked cookies. Learning the bare roots of magic as she withered away in and out of the hospital until the time she never came back. Home wasn’t the Jeep he should trade-in at a junkyard but didn’t because it was the closest thing to home he had.
He shut the guy up with a kiss and never talked about home again.
Stiles wasn’t the type of guy who was lucky enough to have a home. He didn’t have enough time to make one at this point. His hands shook as he raised his fist to knock at the apartment door. But maybe it wasn’t too late to try.
The man who opened the door had silver hair and deep wrinkles in his forehead. He was starting to bald and spot with age, but his eyes were the same ones Stiles saw every time he looked in the mirror.
“Mieczyslaw?”
“I go by Stiles.”
His dad’s eyes welled up and pulled Stiles into a hug. “I haven’t seen you since… how are you? What have you been doing? Stiles?”
Stiles held him, unsure of the emotions fighting in his chest. “Wanted to keep something of you,” Stiles answered. His mom had taken him away when his dad disagreed with her training him to be a hunter. Stiles couldn’t have been more than five at the time, still struggling to say his own name. He hadn’t seen his dad since, afraid of showing what he had turned into. Afraid to make a connection that he wouldn’t get to keep.
“Sorry it took me so long.”
“I looked for you,” John said. “I should have been able to find you. I was the god damned sheriff. And I couldn’t.”
“Homeschooled. Moved around a lot. Mom went by a different name.”
“And when she died?” Because he knew that much, even if he wasn’t around for it.
“Chris Argent took me in. Mom wanted that life for me.”
It was a few hours and a couple of beers later that his dad brought it up. “You’re almost thirty.”
Stiles nodded. “I never planned to see you. I didn’t want,” he shrugged. “I didn’t want to do this to you.”
“To me?” The pained smile on his face was like throwing his heart into a trash compactor. God it hurt. “Stiles, seeing you, for however briefly, is the best thing that could have happened to me.”
“I should get going.” He had more to do. He was twenty-eight and he had more to do. Falling into a lull with his father he never really knew would only distract him. “I, uh, I’m glad I came by though.”
“Me too, kiddo.”
A distant memory surfaced and Stiles smiled at the missing years they could have shared together. “Maybe I’ll come by again. If I’m in the area.”
“I’d like that, son.”
Stiles was shaky and emotional and perhaps not dealing with the realities of his family’s curse as he best possibly could but if he was going to be the last one to bear it, he was going to right as many wrongs as he could. He couldn’t do that from the comfort of something as common as a home.
“Don’t you think,” Allison once asked, “that you’d be righting a wrong by repairing your relationship with your father? You’d be righting a wrong by not letting this curse ruin your life.”
“It’s already ruined my life,” Stiles told her. “And there are bigger injustices I can help out with.”
She called him a martyr and he didn’t argue her point, but her words echoed in his mind as he walked back to his Jeep from his dad’s apartment complex. It was almost enough to distract him from the chill that ran up his spine. He was too delayed to pull out his mountain ash and stop whatever was approaching from getting too close, but his reflexes were still fast.
Stiles turned on his heel to face the threat as he was grabbed and shoved into the side of his Jeep. The eyes like blue lightning held just as much sway over him as the first time Stiles saw them. “I thought I told you to leave,” Derek growled, a touch of his claws pricking the skin of his neck.
“That was two years ago,” Stiles said. “I’m not here for you but if you don’t back off I don’t think you’ll survive a bullet to the gut.” His gun was pressed against Derek’s abdomen, his last-ditch attempt to protect himself when caught by surprise.
Derek snarled, but didn’t move. “Tell me why you’re in town and maybe I’ll let you go.”
“I’m not. This is Beacon Valley, not Beacon Hills.”
That wasn’t a good enough answer, apparently. Stiles gave him props for sticking his ground at least.
“Visiting my dad.”
“Another hunter?” Derek questioned.
“Former Sheriff. Stilinski? We’re estranged. Feel gratified knowing he didn’t want me raised this way.”
A few shallow breaths were shared between them, then the pinpricks of his claws were replaced with the blunt edge of his nails. Stiles felt as if he were being tested, judged, analyzed to the bone by those glowing eyes. A part of him wanted to lash out, to prove him right. Stiles was trying to do good, but he didn’t like being cornered. There was still a threat to the hand on his neck. Derek could crush his throat as soon as slit it open.
Stiles clicked the safety on slid his gun back into its holster. “What are you going to do, Derek? Be the thing hunters were created to fight?”
Derek snarled as he dropped his hand and took a step back. “You don’t know me.”
“And you don’t know me,” Stiles challenged. “I’m just trying to fix some of the bullshit in the world.”
“By killing people?”
Stiles couldn’t say no. He had killed people. He tried to leave it as a last resort in self-defense, but sometimes he knew going in that death was the only way out. “Only when I have to.”
Derek looked up to the building with a frown. “Sheriff Stilinski is your father?”
“Yeah.”
“He lives in my building.”
Stiles looked up the front of the apartment. “You live here?” He assumed Derek lived at the Hale house. Maybe he’d moved in the last few years.
Derek ignored him, staring at the window that led to John’s apartment. “And you’re just passing through?”
Stiles looked over the cut of his jaw, the furrow of his brow, the color of his eyes now that they weren’t a lustrous light against the night sky. “Unless there’s something you need me for. Yeah, I’m just passing through.”
Derek was barely two feet away. He was still hesitant, looking between Stiles and the building and a little bit of nowhere. “We have Allison’s information. She wants to be our savior like it isn’t fifteen years too late. If I can avoid it, we’re never inviting her back.”
Stiles nodded. He understood. “Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I can’t and won’t try to control what you do, Derek. It’s your pack. Allison and I, we just want to help where we’re needed.”
Derek gave him that look again, judging his soul against a feather. His arms crossed, uncomfortable posturing that surprised Stiles. Derek’s shoulders rose in strained tension and his nose flared in a way that Stiles wasn’t sure had to do with scenting or not. Then he said: “We don’t have your contact info.” He looked away and back at the building while Stiles leaned against the Jeep in shock. “I should know if you’re coming back to see him. We deserve to be alerted to hunter presence no matter the reason.”
Stiles wanted to smirk but held it back. He didn’t think Derek would take the gesture lightly. “Sound logic.” Stiles reached for his phone and Derek only flinched a little bit before it was proved not to be his gun. He tossed it over and waited for Derek to hand it back. “If you ever need me in the next year, feel free to reach out.”
“Only the next year? Allison’s offer was open-ended.”
Stiles shrugged. “She has the luxury of time.”