fanfic: Intangibles 6/10 l Teen Wolf l PG-13 l Stiles Stilinski
Title: Inertia
Author: Roz
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Stiles, Isaac, Scott, Lydia. Brief mentions of Boyd, Erica, Jackson, Derek, Argent, Harris and Papa Stilinski
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Graphic talk of booby traps. But nothing else.
Summary: Isaac leveled Stiles with a look. “The sheriff’s kid - the sheriff who threw me in jail - just invited me to partake in an illegal activity. Everything’s illegal with you - you’re a horrible influence - aren’t you?”
Stiles went to therapy. He didn’t talk there. At first, he didn’t talk to his father either, but that wall was forcibly torn down when he woke up one night and saw his father sitting in his computer chair. He couldn’t see it in the dark but he heard it. The hitches in his father’s breathing. The sobs. The exhausted hunch of his shoulders. The next day, over dinner, he told his father about his day at school. Every single aspect, every single thing that had happened, even the trivial parts, and he pretended to not notice the surprised smile.
He talked at school too. Gradually, he collapsed back into that mask, that persona. The loud, funny one. The one who joked and deflected and didn’t really say anything of substance. He clung to the mask and wore it like a shield. But he talked the most at Derek’s. Encaged by the running water - to drown out super hearing - whispering in low, calm voices, he talked. It was a back and forth between him and Derek, because Derek wanted to know everything. Every single aspect. He interjected his own thoughts, what he thought would work better, and Stiles scrawled in his notebook, adjusting their plan. He added facts he got from Argent throughout the week as they came in.
He slept. He woke up screaming. He didn’t talk about it. It became a routine. Scott’s earlier enthusiasm at having his stone back began to wear off when it became apparent his stone wasn’t really back. Stiles wasn’t really the same. He hesitated before joke. He kept his thoughts and ideas to himself, even from Scott - unless they were at the Hale house. Unless the water was running.
And there was something else there too. When Harris made a remark on Stiles’s intelligence, Stiles didn’t care - he didn’t give pause before firing back a response. There was no sucking it up anymore. Stiles quickly became the most disruptive student in chemistry. He had straight As and he had detention every single day.
It didn’t feel like he was healing fast enough, either. It hurt to move. It hurt to lay still. It hurt to sit in a stupid chair in front of Harris for two hours. Two weeks after his release, his father dragged him to the gun range and put a gun in his hand, but the kick of the gun sent a shockwave through his entire body; so hard, he cried. His father seemed hesitant after that, when Stiles insisted on going back to the gun range again. He went back over and over again, until he could swallow his pain and his tears and shoot straight without going to his knees in pain. That was when he started buying wolfs bane bullets from Argent.
He also knew his father wasn’t completely buying the cover story for his attack. Since he wasn’t really talking at the time, Scott came up with the story. A senseless mugging. It sounded fine. Except if Stiles had came up with the story - he would have told Scott just how very low the mugging statistics were and how improbable such an attack truly would be. Especially since the wallet they recovered from him at the hospital still had money in it. But it was the story Scott pitched, so he was stuck with it. His father clearly thought there had been some kind of an attack though, because the shooting range became routine.
One night after dinner, Stiles asked his father if he would teach him how to fight. Real fight. The stuff he had to have learned when he went to cop academy or whatever. His father refused. Not in Stiles’s current state. The boy could barely walk up the stairs without having to pause at the top to catch his breathe and cringe in pain. Later, his father promised, when he healed.
Stiles did his research. That’s what he did - right? He knew it would take months for the wound to heal - for his skin to knit itself back together. It could take years for the inside of his stomach to fully heal. It could take years for the pain to completely go away - for the scar tissue to stop aching every time he moved too quickly. It could take an entire lifetime. This pain might be stuck with him forever. It wouldn’t be soon enough. He needed to know how to fight now - how to defend himself now. Jesus. He should’ve done this in the very beginning.
----
“Are you sure this will work?” Scott asked. He hovered over Stiles, from Stiles was squatted down in the Hale house. He had taken to referring to Derek’s house as the Hell house, actually, but never to his face.
“Of course I’m sure,” Stiles said dismissively. Then he reconsidered it. “Okay. Well, no. I’m not entirely sure. You can never be too sure. Einstein said something like that. Harris says it every detention. Dude has got a major hardon for Einstein and it ain’t pretty.” He shook his head.
“Okay,” Stiles said and blew out a breath. “Do you see what this is?”
Scott shook his head, clearly not expecting a pop quiz. “It’s an axe,” he said - and still somehow managed to turn that statement into a question.
“Right. It’s a weapon. Good eye, Scott. Now the art of booby traps is that you take objects people are more prone to picking up and you booby trap them. It’s all about being able to predict natural human behavior. We have ascertained that the alphas are actually hunters. They rely predominantly on weapons - probably because they want to either mock other hunters, or because they’re too stubborn to let it go. In a fight, you run out of ammo. So if you’re fighting in a house and you run out of ammo, what’s the first thing you do?”
“Look for ammo,” Scott said, quicker this time.
Stiles nodded, grinning at Scott. “Exactly. Now are you gonna pick up debris - sticks, boxes - the fucking couch, yeah I suppose that would work… - or are you going to pick up the closest blade you see? An axe. Something that’s sharp, that can sever limbs?”
“The axe,” Scott answered, but Stiles’s questions had already turned rhetorical.
“Exactly, the axe. Now see the axe isn’t actually rigged. You can use it just fine. But there’s a catch. I rigged the floorboard under it. If you pick it up, the removed weight triggers it.”
“A bomb?” Scott asked uncertainly. His hands were on his knees, and he was hunched over Stiles, but he perked up all the same. He was still in his lacrosse uniform. A few members of the team had already jump started their summer lacrosse camp practices, but Stiles could never really go, because he always had detention with Harris. And he was benched anyway. Running made him want to puke. It made him paranoid. More paranoid than usual, at least. He had to pick out the quickest exit every time he entered a room; he had to carry wolfsbane on him; he had to keep his head down and try to make himself invisible because if he got cornered, he was dead. there was no more running to safety.
Stiles laughed, grinning at Scott. “No, I already thought of that. It’s not a bomb. It’s an alarm.” He hit Scott’s chest enthusiastically. “Do you even know what booby traps were originally created for? Alarms. In the war. They were meant to make these loud noises that immediately gave away the position of the enemy. So you can find and kill them faster, because stealth is everything. Somebody goes for the axe - the alarm goes off. But - But - wait. We also have some goo left over from when Jackson was the Kanima and I totally covered the handle in it. So not only do you know their position - but they have the unfortunate pleasure of being paralyzed for an hour.” Stiles wasn’t even trying to restrain his proud grin now.
Scott reflected that grin easily. “That’s actually - that’s really genius.”
“I know, right?” Stiles chirped enthusiastically. He rose to his feet and peeled off his gloves. “I came up with it in detention. So don’t touch the axe.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Scott said pointedly.
Stiles discarded his gloves in a wastebasket and clapped Scott on the back. “Wanna see what I did to the walls? Or upstairs - I’ve been experimenting with different kinds of hallucinogens. Fact - we know wolfsbane’s like Kryptonite, different kinds do different things and one kind makes you hallucinate.”
“You’re really enjoying this way more than you should, you know that, right?” Scott asked skeptically.
Stiles shrugged, feeling the developing scar tissue tug unpleasantly on his stomach. “Who dictates what we enjoy? I do, however, feel that when the fighting starts, we should have a battle cry. Like, ‘For the shire.’”
“Or, ‘Avengers Assemble,” Isaac added, entering the room. Isaac was lean and tall. He was wearing his lacrosse uniform too. Whereas the uniform fitted Boyd and Scott better, it looked big on Isaac, and it wasn’t because he was a small kid. It was because he didn’t gain the upper body muscles like Derek and Scott. He stayed lean. He still hunched at the shoulders, never really standing up to his full height, too used to cowering. But he was wearing a grin that lit up his whole face.
“Or, Leeeeeroy Jennnnnkins,” Stiles continued, turning his own grin upon Isaac. Things hadn’t exactly been smooth between him and Isaac, since the Kanima issue had wrapped - or hell, before the Kanima issue had wrapped. Isaac had been a dick, and tried to kill Lydia just because Derek told him to. Sure, Stiles liked Lydia but there was also the fact that Lydia had been innocent, and a survivor of a traumatic event that everybody seemed intent on ignoring.There was also the fact that Isaac had shoved Stiles to the ground so hard that his shoulders had bruised almost as badly as his ego. Isaac, and by extension Erica, had primarily only served to remind Stiles how very human he was. Yeah. Stiles wasn’t much for forgiving and forgetting but at this moment, they were all in this together and a bit of that residual tension had lifted.
Scott thrust his fist in the air and joined in. “For Freeeedom!”
They dissolved into misplaced laughter that really hurt Stiles’s gut but it made his chest feel lighter. “Don’t touch the axe, by the way,” he told Isaac once they’d sobered.
“What axe?” Isaac asked, frowning. The frown was more like an attribute. It wasn’t something Stiles noticed - it was more like, he noticed when the frown was missing.
“That axe you threw into the woods. I found it in a tree. Also found a hand - that’s fun. Downright nightmare inducing. Nice shot, though - it was completely dark out, dude, and there was an arrow and you could’ve probably just dodged it…It was a nice shot.” If Isaac blushed, Stiles pretended he didn’t notice it. Jesus. Did this guy never receive compliments? Ever? “So I took it and booby trapped it, naturally, so don’t touch it.”
“Got it,” Isaac agreed. “What else are you booby trapping?”
“Everything,” Stiles said with a devilish grin. “As I see it - this house is our Gettysburg. It’s Alpha hill. If we lose it, we lose the war.”
“Oh god,” Scott groaned, gearing up for another one of Stiles’s speeches. He did this. Or he used - before all the werewolf crap. He used to give pump up speeches before everything. Even video games.
Stiles ignored him. “And they will come for us. With their weapons, and their claws, and when they cut us - do we not bleed? And when they come, Grasshopper, what shall we say? Not today. That’s what we shall say. Not today. Aye?”
Isaac cocked an eyebrow and said “Aye?” uncertainly.
“Aye,” Stiles agreed enthusiastically, thrusting his fist in the air. “So we batten down our hatches. We stand our ground. We use our own weapons, our own claws. And we eviscerate them. Aye?”
“Aye,” Isaac said, less uncertain this time.
Scott rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, Stiles, we got pract-”
Stiles tilted his head slightly. “Don’t fight for your kind and don’t fight for your kingdoms. Don’t fight for honor, don’t fight for glory, don’t fight for riches, because you won’t get any. This is your city - Stannis - er, the Alphas - mean to sack. That’s your gate he’s ramming. If he gets in, it’ll be your houses he burns, your gold he steals, your women he’ll rape. Those are brave men knocking at our door. Let’s go kill them!”
“That’s a pretty good one,” Scott said in retrospect, defeated. He clapped. “Good pump up speech. Kinda weird that you memorized an entire speech from a show though…”
Stiles grinned. “You haven’t even heard my west wing speech yet.” He clapped Isaac on the shoulder. “Wanna learn how to make a bomb?”
Isaac leveled Stiles with a look. “The sheriff’s kid - the sheriff who threw me in jail - just invited me to partake in an illegal activity. Everything’s illegal with you - you’re a horrible influence - aren’t you?”
Stiles grinned and shrugged. “No but seriously, you want to, don’t you? We’re going to make history, Isaac. I’m going to school you all, and we’re going to be prepared for once - for once in our freaking lives - we’re going to have the upper hand. Now what we’re going to do is plant bombs in the forest. You know how they used to have catapults and shit that would just plow right through the competition? That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to connect them all through a trigger. Strings that run back to us - on Alpha Hill. And take them all down, one by one, when they get too close to our bombs. Homemade catapults, but underfoot. And we can control the blast. Do we want to damage their feet - without feet they’re not doing shit - or do we want to blow them apart?”
Isaac nodded, staring at Stiles intently. “It’s extremely creepy, that you’re still smiling.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the Molotov cocktails yet,” Stiles said. He really did sound enthusiastic. But this was something he could do. This was something Derek was letting him do. He felt sure of this. Like maybe - for the first time - the odds weren’t so pathetically stacked against them.
“No, I have this all planned out. We got Molotov cocktails, wolfs bane bullets, trip wires - I even know how to shoot a gun now - and mountain ash. Plus I have a little bit of the kanima’s venom left. What if I could douse a few bullets in it. The wolfs bane will keep them from healing, the venom will knock them off the board entirely. And they’ll just be there, sitting ducks. It’ll make it easier to take them down one by one while attacking them all head on at the same time. That’s a good plan.” Stiles squeezed Isaac’s shoulder, as if Isaac had actually helped with it.
They planted bombs. and Stiles explained everything to Isaac. Isaac listened to him. There were no pop quizzes, or trick questions but Isaac listened. Then Boyd, Jackson, Isaac and Scott left to go to their after school practice, and Derek practically had to drag Stiles out of his house just to get the boy to go home.
So he went home.
He turned on the Goonies and sprawled across the couch. Even in quieter moments, watching a movie, doing home work, Stiles couldn’t focus. He couldn’t loosen the vice like grip around his heart.
He finally dragged himself off of the couch to eat dinner with his father. His father was working a double shift. It set Stiles on edge, but his father still made time to eat dinner with him before disappearing out of the door again. His father squeezed his shoulder, rubbed a hand over his head and murmured, “Get some sleep, Kiddo, I’ll be back in the morning,” before leaving.
Once his father had left, it felt like the house was closing in around him, suddenly small, suddenly toxic. Stiles was halfway up the stairs, hand pressed to his stomach, breathing hard, when there was a knock at the door. He froze. It was a stupid, irrational reaction but he stayed there for a moment. He stayed there until he stopped trembling, until goosebumps broke out across his arms. Then he turned around and went back down the stairs.
He opened the door and stopped again, because Lydia was right there. She looked uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like the last time. She wasn’t crying. She shifted uncomfortably before brushing past him and into his house. “Uh okay,” he muttered and closed the door. “What’s up?”
This wasn’t like a tv show. They weren’t magically friends just because he accidentally confessed his love for her. They hadn’t talked a lot since she’d come to him for help with Jackson. It was probably his fault, to be honest. He hadn’t really talked to many people.
“I want you to tell me what’s going on,” Lydia said.
“About what?” Stiles asked. He switched off the TV.
Lydia scoffed. “Don’t play stupid with me Stiles. I know something’s up, just tell me what it is. For once - can someone just tell me what it is. Do you think you’re protecting people by keeping things from them? You’re not. You’re abandoning them to their own ignorance. It’s selfish and frustrating. Tell me what’s going on. Now.”
Stiles was quiet for a moment. What he’d told Scott about his fifteen year plan had been a lie. He knew - with crushing defeat and overwhelming apathy - Lydia loved Jackson. This… it never had a chance. He knew that in the beginning - and then they’d gone to the formal and he thought that just… just maybe he had a chance, but it was evident now that he didn’t. It was okay. He’d made peace with it.
“Okay,” he said, because she was right. They’d neglected telling her anything, even after Peter had attacked her. And she’d turned around and helped resurrect him simply because she had no idea what was going on. They should’ve told her sooner. “There’s a pack of Alphas in town and we’re going to kill them.”
“And that’s all?” Lydia asked, her tone clipped. She crossed her arms over her chest. “There’s nothing else?”
Stiles sighed. “What do you want me to tell you, Lydia?”
“Everything you know,” Lydia said automatically. “I want to know everything - you know that.”
Stiles rubbed a hand over his head. Derek was going to kill him for even thinking about cluing Lydia in, but he knew it was a lost cause the second she knocked on his door. He would tell her anything. He sighed again. “Well c’mon, then, little Grasshopper.” He turned back toward the stairs, toward his room. “We got some things to learn you.”
Author: Roz
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Characters: Stiles, Isaac, Scott, Lydia. Brief mentions of Boyd, Erica, Jackson, Derek, Argent, Harris and Papa Stilinski
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Graphic talk of booby traps. But nothing else.
Summary: Isaac leveled Stiles with a look. “The sheriff’s kid - the sheriff who threw me in jail - just invited me to partake in an illegal activity. Everything’s illegal with you - you’re a horrible influence - aren’t you?”
Stiles went to therapy. He didn’t talk there. At first, he didn’t talk to his father either, but that wall was forcibly torn down when he woke up one night and saw his father sitting in his computer chair. He couldn’t see it in the dark but he heard it. The hitches in his father’s breathing. The sobs. The exhausted hunch of his shoulders. The next day, over dinner, he told his father about his day at school. Every single aspect, every single thing that had happened, even the trivial parts, and he pretended to not notice the surprised smile.
He talked at school too. Gradually, he collapsed back into that mask, that persona. The loud, funny one. The one who joked and deflected and didn’t really say anything of substance. He clung to the mask and wore it like a shield. But he talked the most at Derek’s. Encaged by the running water - to drown out super hearing - whispering in low, calm voices, he talked. It was a back and forth between him and Derek, because Derek wanted to know everything. Every single aspect. He interjected his own thoughts, what he thought would work better, and Stiles scrawled in his notebook, adjusting their plan. He added facts he got from Argent throughout the week as they came in.
He slept. He woke up screaming. He didn’t talk about it. It became a routine. Scott’s earlier enthusiasm at having his stone back began to wear off when it became apparent his stone wasn’t really back. Stiles wasn’t really the same. He hesitated before joke. He kept his thoughts and ideas to himself, even from Scott - unless they were at the Hale house. Unless the water was running.
And there was something else there too. When Harris made a remark on Stiles’s intelligence, Stiles didn’t care - he didn’t give pause before firing back a response. There was no sucking it up anymore. Stiles quickly became the most disruptive student in chemistry. He had straight As and he had detention every single day.
It didn’t feel like he was healing fast enough, either. It hurt to move. It hurt to lay still. It hurt to sit in a stupid chair in front of Harris for two hours. Two weeks after his release, his father dragged him to the gun range and put a gun in his hand, but the kick of the gun sent a shockwave through his entire body; so hard, he cried. His father seemed hesitant after that, when Stiles insisted on going back to the gun range again. He went back over and over again, until he could swallow his pain and his tears and shoot straight without going to his knees in pain. That was when he started buying wolfs bane bullets from Argent.
He also knew his father wasn’t completely buying the cover story for his attack. Since he wasn’t really talking at the time, Scott came up with the story. A senseless mugging. It sounded fine. Except if Stiles had came up with the story - he would have told Scott just how very low the mugging statistics were and how improbable such an attack truly would be. Especially since the wallet they recovered from him at the hospital still had money in it. But it was the story Scott pitched, so he was stuck with it. His father clearly thought there had been some kind of an attack though, because the shooting range became routine.
One night after dinner, Stiles asked his father if he would teach him how to fight. Real fight. The stuff he had to have learned when he went to cop academy or whatever. His father refused. Not in Stiles’s current state. The boy could barely walk up the stairs without having to pause at the top to catch his breathe and cringe in pain. Later, his father promised, when he healed.
Stiles did his research. That’s what he did - right? He knew it would take months for the wound to heal - for his skin to knit itself back together. It could take years for the inside of his stomach to fully heal. It could take years for the pain to completely go away - for the scar tissue to stop aching every time he moved too quickly. It could take an entire lifetime. This pain might be stuck with him forever. It wouldn’t be soon enough. He needed to know how to fight now - how to defend himself now. Jesus. He should’ve done this in the very beginning.
----
“Are you sure this will work?” Scott asked. He hovered over Stiles, from Stiles was squatted down in the Hale house. He had taken to referring to Derek’s house as the Hell house, actually, but never to his face.
“Of course I’m sure,” Stiles said dismissively. Then he reconsidered it. “Okay. Well, no. I’m not entirely sure. You can never be too sure. Einstein said something like that. Harris says it every detention. Dude has got a major hardon for Einstein and it ain’t pretty.” He shook his head.
“Okay,” Stiles said and blew out a breath. “Do you see what this is?”
Scott shook his head, clearly not expecting a pop quiz. “It’s an axe,” he said - and still somehow managed to turn that statement into a question.
“Right. It’s a weapon. Good eye, Scott. Now the art of booby traps is that you take objects people are more prone to picking up and you booby trap them. It’s all about being able to predict natural human behavior. We have ascertained that the alphas are actually hunters. They rely predominantly on weapons - probably because they want to either mock other hunters, or because they’re too stubborn to let it go. In a fight, you run out of ammo. So if you’re fighting in a house and you run out of ammo, what’s the first thing you do?”
“Look for ammo,” Scott said, quicker this time.
Stiles nodded, grinning at Scott. “Exactly. Now are you gonna pick up debris - sticks, boxes - the fucking couch, yeah I suppose that would work… - or are you going to pick up the closest blade you see? An axe. Something that’s sharp, that can sever limbs?”
“The axe,” Scott answered, but Stiles’s questions had already turned rhetorical.
“Exactly, the axe. Now see the axe isn’t actually rigged. You can use it just fine. But there’s a catch. I rigged the floorboard under it. If you pick it up, the removed weight triggers it.”
“A bomb?” Scott asked uncertainly. His hands were on his knees, and he was hunched over Stiles, but he perked up all the same. He was still in his lacrosse uniform. A few members of the team had already jump started their summer lacrosse camp practices, but Stiles could never really go, because he always had detention with Harris. And he was benched anyway. Running made him want to puke. It made him paranoid. More paranoid than usual, at least. He had to pick out the quickest exit every time he entered a room; he had to carry wolfsbane on him; he had to keep his head down and try to make himself invisible because if he got cornered, he was dead. there was no more running to safety.
Stiles laughed, grinning at Scott. “No, I already thought of that. It’s not a bomb. It’s an alarm.” He hit Scott’s chest enthusiastically. “Do you even know what booby traps were originally created for? Alarms. In the war. They were meant to make these loud noises that immediately gave away the position of the enemy. So you can find and kill them faster, because stealth is everything. Somebody goes for the axe - the alarm goes off. But - But - wait. We also have some goo left over from when Jackson was the Kanima and I totally covered the handle in it. So not only do you know their position - but they have the unfortunate pleasure of being paralyzed for an hour.” Stiles wasn’t even trying to restrain his proud grin now.
Scott reflected that grin easily. “That’s actually - that’s really genius.”
“I know, right?” Stiles chirped enthusiastically. He rose to his feet and peeled off his gloves. “I came up with it in detention. So don’t touch the axe.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Scott said pointedly.
Stiles discarded his gloves in a wastebasket and clapped Scott on the back. “Wanna see what I did to the walls? Or upstairs - I’ve been experimenting with different kinds of hallucinogens. Fact - we know wolfsbane’s like Kryptonite, different kinds do different things and one kind makes you hallucinate.”
“You’re really enjoying this way more than you should, you know that, right?” Scott asked skeptically.
Stiles shrugged, feeling the developing scar tissue tug unpleasantly on his stomach. “Who dictates what we enjoy? I do, however, feel that when the fighting starts, we should have a battle cry. Like, ‘For the shire.’”
“Or, ‘Avengers Assemble,” Isaac added, entering the room. Isaac was lean and tall. He was wearing his lacrosse uniform too. Whereas the uniform fitted Boyd and Scott better, it looked big on Isaac, and it wasn’t because he was a small kid. It was because he didn’t gain the upper body muscles like Derek and Scott. He stayed lean. He still hunched at the shoulders, never really standing up to his full height, too used to cowering. But he was wearing a grin that lit up his whole face.
“Or, Leeeeeroy Jennnnnkins,” Stiles continued, turning his own grin upon Isaac. Things hadn’t exactly been smooth between him and Isaac, since the Kanima issue had wrapped - or hell, before the Kanima issue had wrapped. Isaac had been a dick, and tried to kill Lydia just because Derek told him to. Sure, Stiles liked Lydia but there was also the fact that Lydia had been innocent, and a survivor of a traumatic event that everybody seemed intent on ignoring.There was also the fact that Isaac had shoved Stiles to the ground so hard that his shoulders had bruised almost as badly as his ego. Isaac, and by extension Erica, had primarily only served to remind Stiles how very human he was. Yeah. Stiles wasn’t much for forgiving and forgetting but at this moment, they were all in this together and a bit of that residual tension had lifted.
Scott thrust his fist in the air and joined in. “For Freeeedom!”
They dissolved into misplaced laughter that really hurt Stiles’s gut but it made his chest feel lighter. “Don’t touch the axe, by the way,” he told Isaac once they’d sobered.
“What axe?” Isaac asked, frowning. The frown was more like an attribute. It wasn’t something Stiles noticed - it was more like, he noticed when the frown was missing.
“That axe you threw into the woods. I found it in a tree. Also found a hand - that’s fun. Downright nightmare inducing. Nice shot, though - it was completely dark out, dude, and there was an arrow and you could’ve probably just dodged it…It was a nice shot.” If Isaac blushed, Stiles pretended he didn’t notice it. Jesus. Did this guy never receive compliments? Ever? “So I took it and booby trapped it, naturally, so don’t touch it.”
“Got it,” Isaac agreed. “What else are you booby trapping?”
“Everything,” Stiles said with a devilish grin. “As I see it - this house is our Gettysburg. It’s Alpha hill. If we lose it, we lose the war.”
“Oh god,” Scott groaned, gearing up for another one of Stiles’s speeches. He did this. Or he used - before all the werewolf crap. He used to give pump up speeches before everything. Even video games.
Stiles ignored him. “And they will come for us. With their weapons, and their claws, and when they cut us - do we not bleed? And when they come, Grasshopper, what shall we say? Not today. That’s what we shall say. Not today. Aye?”
Isaac cocked an eyebrow and said “Aye?” uncertainly.
“Aye,” Stiles agreed enthusiastically, thrusting his fist in the air. “So we batten down our hatches. We stand our ground. We use our own weapons, our own claws. And we eviscerate them. Aye?”
“Aye,” Isaac said, less uncertain this time.
Scott rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, Stiles, we got pract-”
Stiles tilted his head slightly. “Don’t fight for your kind and don’t fight for your kingdoms. Don’t fight for honor, don’t fight for glory, don’t fight for riches, because you won’t get any. This is your city - Stannis - er, the Alphas - mean to sack. That’s your gate he’s ramming. If he gets in, it’ll be your houses he burns, your gold he steals, your women he’ll rape. Those are brave men knocking at our door. Let’s go kill them!”
“That’s a pretty good one,” Scott said in retrospect, defeated. He clapped. “Good pump up speech. Kinda weird that you memorized an entire speech from a show though…”
Stiles grinned. “You haven’t even heard my west wing speech yet.” He clapped Isaac on the shoulder. “Wanna learn how to make a bomb?”
Isaac leveled Stiles with a look. “The sheriff’s kid - the sheriff who threw me in jail - just invited me to partake in an illegal activity. Everything’s illegal with you - you’re a horrible influence - aren’t you?”
Stiles grinned and shrugged. “No but seriously, you want to, don’t you? We’re going to make history, Isaac. I’m going to school you all, and we’re going to be prepared for once - for once in our freaking lives - we’re going to have the upper hand. Now what we’re going to do is plant bombs in the forest. You know how they used to have catapults and shit that would just plow right through the competition? That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to connect them all through a trigger. Strings that run back to us - on Alpha Hill. And take them all down, one by one, when they get too close to our bombs. Homemade catapults, but underfoot. And we can control the blast. Do we want to damage their feet - without feet they’re not doing shit - or do we want to blow them apart?”
Isaac nodded, staring at Stiles intently. “It’s extremely creepy, that you’re still smiling.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the Molotov cocktails yet,” Stiles said. He really did sound enthusiastic. But this was something he could do. This was something Derek was letting him do. He felt sure of this. Like maybe - for the first time - the odds weren’t so pathetically stacked against them.
“No, I have this all planned out. We got Molotov cocktails, wolfs bane bullets, trip wires - I even know how to shoot a gun now - and mountain ash. Plus I have a little bit of the kanima’s venom left. What if I could douse a few bullets in it. The wolfs bane will keep them from healing, the venom will knock them off the board entirely. And they’ll just be there, sitting ducks. It’ll make it easier to take them down one by one while attacking them all head on at the same time. That’s a good plan.” Stiles squeezed Isaac’s shoulder, as if Isaac had actually helped with it.
They planted bombs. and Stiles explained everything to Isaac. Isaac listened to him. There were no pop quizzes, or trick questions but Isaac listened. Then Boyd, Jackson, Isaac and Scott left to go to their after school practice, and Derek practically had to drag Stiles out of his house just to get the boy to go home.
So he went home.
He turned on the Goonies and sprawled across the couch. Even in quieter moments, watching a movie, doing home work, Stiles couldn’t focus. He couldn’t loosen the vice like grip around his heart.
He finally dragged himself off of the couch to eat dinner with his father. His father was working a double shift. It set Stiles on edge, but his father still made time to eat dinner with him before disappearing out of the door again. His father squeezed his shoulder, rubbed a hand over his head and murmured, “Get some sleep, Kiddo, I’ll be back in the morning,” before leaving.
Once his father had left, it felt like the house was closing in around him, suddenly small, suddenly toxic. Stiles was halfway up the stairs, hand pressed to his stomach, breathing hard, when there was a knock at the door. He froze. It was a stupid, irrational reaction but he stayed there for a moment. He stayed there until he stopped trembling, until goosebumps broke out across his arms. Then he turned around and went back down the stairs.
He opened the door and stopped again, because Lydia was right there. She looked uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like the last time. She wasn’t crying. She shifted uncomfortably before brushing past him and into his house. “Uh okay,” he muttered and closed the door. “What’s up?”
This wasn’t like a tv show. They weren’t magically friends just because he accidentally confessed his love for her. They hadn’t talked a lot since she’d come to him for help with Jackson. It was probably his fault, to be honest. He hadn’t really talked to many people.
“I want you to tell me what’s going on,” Lydia said.
“About what?” Stiles asked. He switched off the TV.
Lydia scoffed. “Don’t play stupid with me Stiles. I know something’s up, just tell me what it is. For once - can someone just tell me what it is. Do you think you’re protecting people by keeping things from them? You’re not. You’re abandoning them to their own ignorance. It’s selfish and frustrating. Tell me what’s going on. Now.”
Stiles was quiet for a moment. What he’d told Scott about his fifteen year plan had been a lie. He knew - with crushing defeat and overwhelming apathy - Lydia loved Jackson. This… it never had a chance. He knew that in the beginning - and then they’d gone to the formal and he thought that just… just maybe he had a chance, but it was evident now that he didn’t. It was okay. He’d made peace with it.
“Okay,” he said, because she was right. They’d neglected telling her anything, even after Peter had attacked her. And she’d turned around and helped resurrect him simply because she had no idea what was going on. They should’ve told her sooner. “There’s a pack of Alphas in town and we’re going to kill them.”
“And that’s all?” Lydia asked, her tone clipped. She crossed her arms over her chest. “There’s nothing else?”
Stiles sighed. “What do you want me to tell you, Lydia?”
“Everything you know,” Lydia said automatically. “I want to know everything - you know that.”
Stiles rubbed a hand over his head. Derek was going to kill him for even thinking about cluing Lydia in, but he knew it was a lost cause the second she knocked on his door. He would tell her anything. He sighed again. “Well c’mon, then, little Grasshopper.” He turned back toward the stairs, toward his room. “We got some things to learn you.”