Teen Wolf- "Picking up Strays (And Other Important Things)" (2/2)
Sometimes the Sheriff thinks he’s seeing things, that his vision is getting strange with age or that the lack of any significant animal protein in his diet is giving him hallucinations due to a sudden and debilitating iron-deficiency. He knew not eating meat on a daily basis would ruin him.
One Saturday afternoon he returns home from a double shift to find the kitchen covered in blood smears, trailing from the door, all along the floor and up the stairs. One of them looks like a handprint. Naturally, he has his gun out and is combing his way through the house without a moment’s hesitation, voice only slightly quavering as he calls out the boys’ names. He finds Isaac upstairs in the bathroom washing his arm under a heavy flow of water, looking kind of bruised and tired. Isaac’s eyes dart up when the Sheriff shows up in the bathroom wielding a gun, and when he sees it’s just Isaac, he quickly holsters the weapon and lunges forward, grabbing the kid’s arm to see the extent of the damage. His pulse is pounding in his ears in a dull roar and his mind is trying to remember that basic EMT training all of the Sheriff’s department staff had to take last year. But when he looks down, he sees absolutely nothing. Not even a scrape. The skin is smooth and pale and unblemished, just like it had been this morning.
“What the hell is going on?” the Sheriff demands, bewildered, while Isaac’s pulse thrums strong under the grip of his fingers.
Isaac frowns and looks down at the ground. The Sheriff abruptly remembers himself and wills himself to loosen his grip on Isaac’s arm. “Isaac?” he asks, lowering his voice a little bit. It shakes a little too, which is something that has only ever happened with Stiles and his wife - with his family -while he looks Isaac over for any other injuries that might explain the blood. “Isaac, are you hurt?”
“No,” Isaac answers quickly, too quickly, and the way he says it makes the Sheriff tack on an unspoken ‘not anymore’ to the words somehow, automatically.
“There’s blood all over…”
Stiles bursts into the bathroom then, looking a little wild. “Holy hell that was one heck of a nosebleed man!” he exclaims in dramatic accents, a roll of paper towels clutched under his arm. “Dude, did it stop? I didn’t think it was ever going to stop! I thought I’d have to donate blood to put in you to make up for all the blood coming out of your face.”
The Sheriff stares at Stiles. Stiles blinks as if he’s just noticed his father’s home. “Oh hey, Dad,” he says a bit too casually, and takes out the roll of paper towels from where it’s tucked up against his armpit. He thrusts it at Isaac, who takes it automatically and looks bewildered, like he doesn’t know what to do with it. “Sorry about the mess,” Stiles presses, without taking a breath, “Isaac got this monster nosebleed on the way back from Scott’s and like, it’s all over my car and everywhere. I wiped some of it up on the way back inside. Sorry about the living room rug though, that might have set. Hey, do you think maybe old lady Crabtree knows an old home remedy for getting blood out of things? I bet she does.”
Isaac blinks a couple more times then adds, “Sorry about the mess,” with absolute sincerity, and clutches the roll of paper towels in his hand free hand, eyes darting to where the Sheriff is still holding his arm gently, fingers rubbing it as if he expects to find some sort of major injury still, just under the skin. All the blood he’d seen downstairs couldn’t have possibly just come from Isaac’s face.
But then Stiles is grabbing him and pulling him out of the bathroom and asking if he can help him clean up the rest of the mess while Isaac finishes primping or recovering from anemia or whatever. “I’ll bet if we scrub hard enough it’ll come out of the carpet,” he insists optimistically, and by the time the Sheriff lets himself get led down the stairs, the bloody handprints he was certain he’d seen on the way in are just little puddles of red that look like they’d been attacked haphazardly with paper towels.
He sighs in exasperation. “This is you wiping up?” he asks his son, taking in at the chaos with a clearer head now.
Stiles shrugs. “Dude, priority was my upholstery,” he says like it should be obvious, though there’s a tilt to his eyebrows that seems kind of sad about something, or maybe even guilty. He only ever gets that look when he’s not telling the whole truth, and while the Sheriff calls him on it more often than not, he doesn’t want to force the kid to tell him anything. He likes to believe that if it’s important enough, Stiles will come clean on his own eventually.
He just has to clarify the important stuff and hope the rest rolls to even in the end.
“Stiles,” the Sheriff presses, “is Isaac okay?” That is the important stuff. Just that.
The tilt of Stiles’s eyebrows eases up at the question, and he smiles then, genuine and relieved and perfectly honest. “Yeah, Dad. He’s totally fine.”
The Sheriff will take that, because that matters. Isaac is part of his family now, he won’t deny it, but at the same time, he doesn’t want either of the boys to feel obligated to him simply because of that. His job is to keep them safe and happy and healthy. As long as they’re that, he tells himself he can let the details go.
“Okay," he says, and goes to get another roll of paper towels from the cabinet in the hall. “Okay. And you’re okay?”
Stiles nods.
That’s all he needs for now. The Sheriff takes a deep breath and says, “Then let’s clean this up.”
Stiles grins. “Thanks, Dad,” he murmurs, in a way that means more than just ‘thanks for the help.’
The Sheriff nods back and five minutes later, a sheepish looking Isaac is joining them as they huddle around a bloodstain on the rug, trying to figure out if club soda or Resolve will work better at getting it out.
~~~~~
Isaac buys them a new rug on payday when the club soda and the Resolve both end up failing.
~~~~~
After that it’s just little things that are strange about their lives every now and again, things like Isaac being able to instantly find the Sheriff’s stores of illicit beef jerky no matter how well he hides them, or the way Isaac recoils like he’s been shot whenever Stiles opens up the kitchen garbage to take it out. He also has this uncanny ability to shred two to five shirts a week. The ones he doesn’t shred come back through the wash with lots of ominous stains, dirt and grass and mud and once, something just black and slimy and impossible to get out. It makes the Sheriff wonder what kind of horrible, inhumane labor that crazy old cemetery keeper is forcing Isaac do in the dead of night, three times a week for California minimum wage. He resolves to investigate the guy sometime in the near future, just to make sure no child labor laws are being broken. Other than the shirt thing though, and the fact that he eats enough for two Stiles, Isaac gets good grades and plays lacrosse well and is always up for sneaky, sneaky burger runs on the nights when they’re both working late and the Sheriff can pick him up after his shift at the graveyard ends. Isaac only ever lets him have one patty though, with no cheese and no fries.
He’s a good kid, even if he gets a little moody and pissy and sometimes even outright nasty for a few days out of every month, and the regularity of it worries the Sheriff, except that Stiles laughs and jokes about it being Isaac’s male PMS.
~~~~~
They start finding bodies again in the middle of fall, two weeks before Halloween. They’re horrible to look at, dry husks of victims that had been full of life and healthy just days ago, when they’d been reported missing. The coroner is boggled by the complete lack of internal organs inside the bodies they find, stating that the tissue must have somehow been liquefied and then completely sucked out of the person beforehand, like they’d been used as some sort of grotesque juice box. “There’s just no way for all the insides to not be inside otherwise,” she’d marveled, before pointing at two small holes on either side of each victim’s neck. They looked a little like vampire bites from movies. “These are the only wounds that could have caused any bleeding,” the coroner explains, still sounding mystified. “According to the lab in San Francisco, the samples we took the from first victim suggests that the residue we found on the wounds seems to be some sort of organic poison, but they can’t tell if it caused the rapid deterioration of the organs and muscles or if it was simply the cause of death.”
“That is freaking weird,” Delaney, one of the Sheriff’s new deputies, marvels. He looks like he’s about to turn in his badge and his gun, which the department can’t afford, not when they’re already short staffed after Matt Daehler’s horrific murder spree in the spring. Part of the Sheriff thinks he only got his job back because there hadn’t been anyone left to fill it.
From the looks of things, they definitely can’t blame the murders on a mountain lion this time, and after throwing out the impossible solutions (like vampires), he realizes the only rational explanation remaining is that there is a human being out there who does this to other human beings. The thought makes him want to vomit, but he holds it together as he ducks out of the morgue, and later, when he’s putting together profiles of all the missing persons reported in the area in the last fifteen days, he suddenly realizes that all they are all male and anywhere between 15 and 29 years of age.
Discovering the pattern is like a punch to the gut, and when the Sheriff gets home the following morning, he corners Isaac and Stiles in the kitchen before school and makes them promise to come home early tonight, to stay in, and to have their friends stay in, until whoever is doing this is caught.
They share a strange look, like maybe they don’t quite buy why he’s so freaked out, possibly because he can’t share the details of the case with them yet, and even if he could he’s not sure he would, because they’re terrifying and he loves them too much to scar them for life with that kind of knowledge. He hardly knows if he’s ever going to sleep again.
Which is probably good, because he and the rest of the department are supposed to comb the woods over the next twenty-four hours, looking for clues and suspects and any sort of link that can tie these bizarre murders together. It’s going to be a hell of a double shift, but hopefully with the remainder of the force out all night, it will deter whoever is doing this from trying to strike again.
Stiles and Isaac must sense his deep seated misgivings about his latest case because eventually, they nod and promise to stay out of trouble. Isaac even calls out of his shift at the graveyard that evening in front of him, and really, just hearing the kid say he’s not going makes Sheriff Stilinski feel infinitely better about the whole thing. He hugs them both, maybe a little impulsively, and then turns and stalks upstairs to grab a shower and a three hour nap before he has to be back at work.
~~~~~
He doesn’t see who or what hits him in the woods, and the last thing he remembers before blacking out is Delaney shrieking and the whole world exploding into stars as something slammed into him, knocking him to the ground and bouncing his head into the dirt rather painfully.
When he wakes up his head is pounding and he can’t move a muscle, tied up from head to toe in something white and sticky and incredibly solid. He tries to shift around to see if he can find Delaney, but it’s too dark to really see anything properly. He shakes his head a little to try and clear it of cobwebs while hoping it isn’t a concussion.
He thinks he’s probably been kidnapped, maybe because he’d been in the way, or getting too close to finding something, because he definitely does not fit the profile of the other victims. Delaney does, though.
“Delaney?” he whispers, keeping his voice low and sharp when he realizes. “Delaney, are you there?”
There’s no answer. Cursing internally, the Sheriff tries to struggle out of his bonds because they don’t look that strong. They look like those fake spider webs that come in bags from Halloween stores. He knows because they’d gone to one a two nights ago, shopping for candy to hand out to the trick-or-treaters. They’d also gotten a Batman costume for Stiles while they were there, because that kid will always be mentally twelve at best.
The cobweb looking stuff doesn’t end up breaking under the Sheriff’s impressive straining efforts; it just kind of stretches uncomfortably around him a little, like elastic pushed to its limit. His wiggling does manage to get him to roll a little though, which ends up being a mistake because he’s suddenly falling, tumbling down a slope and into a pit filled with something wet and sticky and disgusting.
He does find Delaney though.
Or what’s left of him. The poor guy is blinking vacantly from inside his cocoon of white threads, his skin leathery and gray and his face sunken in. There are two holes in his neck just like all the other victims, and a weird, bubbling sort of purple liquid is oozing out of the wounds. It reminds Sheriff Stilinski of the sizzling noises he’d heard back in high school, when they’d had to use hydrochloric acid in chemistry and it was busy burning through everything around it.
He shudders at the thought, and tries to nudge his deputy with a shoulder. “Delaney, we’re okay,” he insists, even as Delaney blinks at him in a manner that clearly says it’s agony to move. His breathing comes out in wet sounding rasps, and the spit the gathers at the corner of his mouth has the same bubbly consistency as the ooze coming out of the purple wounds on his neck.
The young deputy manages to wheeze out a terrified sounding, “M-m-monster…” at the Sheriff. Which makes zero sense. Sheriff Stilinski is pretty sure Delaney’s been poisoned. He doesn’t know how long the guy has. They have to get him to a hospital. Now.
“Don’t talk. Just… just keep breathing,” the Sheriff soothes, and Delaney blinks again and nods, giving this rattling, stuttering sigh that causes more spit to bubble up grossly at the corner of his mouth.
The Sheriff starts looking around for something sharp, a rock or a tree root maybe, that he can try and cut himself free on. There are little sacs of something white and covered in a thin layer of the same stuff tying him up in the corner. He rolls towards them to see if there’s something underneath that he can use, but his movements are clumsy and strained, and he ends up rolling onto one of them accidentally, feeling it pop into a wet, slimy mess under his weight. A white, viscous goop pours out from the busted sac underneath him, the insides looking like he’d just squashed one of those Cadbury Eggs Stiles likes to eat on Easter.
He feels sort of sick when he realizes that maybe it had been an egg of some sort, and the rest of them are probably eggs too, covered in a gauzy layer of what looks like spider webbing for protection. He realizes that it’s like he’s suddenly in the middle of one of the boy’s cheesy horror movies, because maybe Delaney hadn’t been entirely delusional just now, when he’d muttered about monsters. It’s certainly where the Sheriff’s head is going, despite everything. Then again, maybe he’s just concussed.
Beside him, Delaney croaks and wheezes and underneath the horrible sounds of a good man dying, the Sheriff hears footsteps pounding towards them from somewhere in the distance, a frantic, heavy beat echoing off the stone walls that either means he and Delaney are about to be rescued by the rest of the department, or that whoever or whatever attacked them is back and looking to finish the job.
He turns to Delaney, and murmurs, “We’re going to be fine,” with the same stubborn determination he’d used to get from day to day with his crazy, hyperactive kid in the days while his wife was dying.
Delaney blinks once again, smiles softly like he believes the Sheriff implicitly, and then closes his eyes and stops breathing at all.
The Sheriff curses, just as the footsteps come to an abrupt halt, just above his head. Two figures kneel over the edge of the pit he’d fallen into, and he can’t quite make them out, but he hopes it’s Smith and Juarez and that they’ve brought reinforcements and EMTs.
“Dad?” Stiles’s voice calls out, frantic and shrill and enough to make the Sheriff want to strangle something. That means the other figure is Isaac. Smith and Juarez and the rest of the department aren’t here.
“Stiles, what the hell are you doing?!” the Sheriff demands, filled with so much red hot anger he can barely see straight. “Get out of here now! Go get help!”
“Help is already on the way,” Stiles answers, even as he pitches himself over the edge of the pit and skitters down it without a second thought, Isaac not far behind him. The Sheriff would shout at him not to come closer, but there’s a terrified, haunted look to the kid’s face that makes him swallow the words whole. Isaac looks the same, except angry too, the kind of angry that makes him look grown up suddenly, and not like the lost kid who’d been staring forlornly at his phone on the Stilinskis’ front lawn just a few months ago.
“Help me get him out of here. Holy crap this is disgusting,” Stiles babbles, hands reaching out to touch the stringy white cords keeping the Sheriff immobile.
“Stiles, you need to leave,” the Sheriff grits out, because he’d been worried before, but now, with the two of them here, he’s terrified. He’s not beyond begging at this point.
A skittering noise up above their heads keeps him from getting there, though. Isaac freezes and turns his head towards the sound, eyes closed as he takes in a deep breath, as he listens to something that Stiles and the Sheriff can’t quite make out.
“The Arachne is coming back,” he says softly, with an undercurrent of ice in his tone that is deeply unsettling simply because of how calm it is. He frowns a little, then seems to come to a decision. “I have to keep her busy until Derek and the others get here.”
Before the Sheriff can protest what a horrible idea that is, Isaac’s eyes flash yellow and fangs sprout from his mouth. Out of nowhere.
The Sheriff recoils in fear, immediately trying to knock Stiles out of the way or behind him, to safety.
But Isaac, or whatever Isaac is, doesn’t move. He just nods minutely in Stiles’s direction, fangs and claws and hair making him inhuman and terrifying looking. Then he turns to the Sheriff and offers a small, regretful smile, like this is the end of something important, like he always knew it would come. In that moment, it’s his eyes that remind the Sheriff that it’s Isaac he’s looking at, and that he’s human somewhere in there still, underneath it all.
Before he can say anything, Isaac launches himself out of the pit in a single jump, a snarl on his lips that chills the Sheriff to his very bones.
Stiles is suddenly at his side again, hands reassuring on the back of his father’s neck. “I know,” he says, also looking regretful, “I know it’s weird, Dad, but I promise, it’ll be okay. I’ll explain everything once we’re out of here. We just have to get out of here.”
And then he has his keys out and he’s trying to cut through the bonds with the edge of one while the Sheriff tries to figure out what he’d just seen.
He can’t. There’s no way he can, and he thinks that it probably doesn’t matter right this second. It isn’t something that’s important.
The minute he’s freed he struggles to his feet and has his hand on his holster, where his gun still is. “Stay here,” he growls at Stiles, and then starts to climb up out of the hole, because Isaac is up there and Isaac is fighting whatever an Arachne is, and Isaac is doing it alone, until Derek and whoever else is involved in this mess gets here.
Sheriff Stilinski is pretty sure he has three rounds left.
~~~~~
Stiles doesn’t stay in the hole because Stiles is incapable of listening to his father, and by the time he and the Sheriff both crawl out of it, it’s just in time to hear Isaac’s pained whimper as he’s tossed aside like a rag doll. He hits the side of whatever cave they’re in with a thud that shakes the entire rock wall. Underneath it all is the sound of a crack that definitely means bones are broken.
The Sheriff sees what threw him then, in the faint moonlight leaking in through the entrance. A giant spider with the face of a woman and pitch black eyes stares back at him, her mouth a mess of fangs oozing purple venom. She shrieks when she sees them and skitters towards them faster than the Sheriff has ever seen anything move in his entire life. He manages to fire off maybe two shots before the thing is bearing down on him with deadly intent.
Isaac roars dully and springs up from the ground at the last possible second, tackling her sideways before she can sink her teeth into the Sherriff’s face.
The Sheriff whirls and tries to aim his gun at the Arachne as it struggles with Isaac, but it’s still dark as hell in here even after his eyes adjusted, and he doesn’t want to chance hitting Isaac in the melee by accident.
An eerie howl splits the air in the distance, and the sound of it makes Isaac’s lip curl upward as he and the Arachne circle each other warily, the kid looking like this fight is just about over despite the fact that his left arm is hanging limply at his side, broken, and blood is dripping from the corner of his mouth and leaking slowly out of his ears. An angry, purple bite mark is oozing out dark, bubbling blood from his side as well, but he moves like none of that matters, carefully keeping his body between the Stilinskis and the monster at every turn.
A second howl, and then a third and a fourth echo through the night air. They make the Sheriff wince, make him turn his gun towards the sounds. Stiles’s hands are on his then though, and he shakes his head. “Help is coming, Dad,” he says, sounding relieved for the first time all night.
The Sheriff has no idea how the sound of circling wolves is supposed to be a good thing, but he trusts his kid, dammit, and trains his gun back towards the Arachne instead.
The Arachne is clearly getting more and more nervous from the sounds of the approaching wolves and makes another crazy dash towards Isaac, fangs going straight for his throat in a bid to kill him and get out of here before reinforcements arrive. Isaac manages to keep her from sinking her teeth into his neck at the sacrifice of his right shoulder, and the Sheriff feels a stone cold hatred settle in his stomach at the sound of Isaac’s pained whimper when her fangs sink into him. He fires the remainder of his clip into the Arachne’s side and sends it skittering back with an annoyed hiss, long enough for Isaac to stumble backwards, looking dizzy and covered in blood while his shoulder oozes putrid smelling poison. Stiles and the Sheriff catch him before he hits the ground, and the Sheriff throws them both behind him as he reloads his gun, despite knowing now that all the bullets really do is irritate the creature.
He gets a single shot off before five sets of angry flashing eyes descend on the caves abruptly, a low chorus of rumbling growls echoing through the chamber as several shapes melt out from the shadows.
Stiles lets out a huff of relief. “About time!!” he shouts at the forms, and those are all the words he can get in before one of them takes a flying leap at the Arachne from behind, followed by two from its flanks. One of the newcomers drops into a crouch in front of the Sheriff as well. And this one is familiar, mostly.
“Scott?” the Sheriff blurts, mind boggled when he takes in the familiar mop of hair that can only belong to his son’s best friend, the kid hunkered low like a stalking lion in front of him.
When Scott turns to look at the Sheriff over his shoulder, he notes that Scott’s features look morphed somehow, sharper and wilder on his face but clearly still him despite it all. Scott just nods at him once and murmurs, “It’s going to be okay, Mr. Stilinski,” as he stays between the source of the danger and the…well, the cavalry, for lack of better word.
The Sheriff watches, feeling somewhat numb, as Derek Hale charges to the forefront of the battle seemingly out of nowhere, deadly and graceful and ferocious as he avoids the Arachne’s flailing, spiked legs and sinks his teeth into her throat. There is a wet ripping sound and then a spray of the Arachne’s arterial blood against the wall of the cave. The blow sends the Arachne stumbling under the weight of its other attackers, all of whom are kids the Sheriff is pretty sure he’s had over at his house at one point or another, whenever Isaac and Stiles wanted more epic than usual movie nights.
The Arachne stumbles and gives one last, long, earth-shaking shriek before it goes quiet again, completely still and quiet.
Silence.
And then the Sheriff feels his knees buckle after a moment of unadulterated relief. He thinks he’s going to pass out now, because he still has a head injury, and because the adrenaline keeping him upright is probably wearing off. Either that or the whole world has suddenly just shifted on its axis without warning and he can’t keep his balance anymore. Stiles is there to keep him from falling down though, catching him even as he stumbles under the weight of his father’s exhaustion and disbelief.
“Dad?! Hey Dad!!”
As his vision starts to fade around the edges and Stiles’s voice goes tiny and distant in the background, the Sheriff tells himself that he is grounding the boys for the rest of their lives.
~~~~~
When the Sheriff wakes up it is a few hours later and he is on the couch in his living room. His living room is also currently filled with people who are all watching him intently. Stiles is the face immediately in front of his own, crouched on the floor at the edge of the couch like he’s been waiting there for him to wake up the whole time.
The Sheriff groans.
“Dad!” Stiles breathes, relief evident in the shakiness of his voice. “How do you feel, are you okay? Water. Can someone get him some water? Maybe food? I don’t know. Is there food for a concussion?”
The Sheriff winces at the shrill volume of it all.
“Stiles,” Derek mutters, from where he’s lurking kind of uncomfortably to Stiles’s left side, “Shut up.”
The Sheriff thinks that maybe this means he and Derek can be friends, checkered past or no. It helps that he saw Derek rip out the throat of the monster that was trying to eat him and his kids for dinner.
He sits up on the couch with Stiles’s hands hovering nearby and mutters, “So. It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
Stiles manages a watery smile and shakes his head. “Nope, no dream. Not a nightmare either, even though it probably felt like one.”
The Sheriff gratefully accepts a glass of water that Erica hands him, her features sweet and young and curious and not at all fanged out and dripping with the blood of her fallen enemies anymore.
The Sheriff glances around the room as he takes a perfunctory drink. Then says, “Where’s Isaac?” when he realizes someone is missing. Something a lot like dread starts to well in his stomach then, because the last he’d seen of the kid, he’d been beat to hell and poisoned with something that apparently liquefied people’s organs so that crazy spider monsters could drink out their insides through their necks.
Isaac better not be liquefied. He can’t be.
There’s a moment where everyone sort of freezes, and the Sheriff feels his heart plummet into his stomach and his fingers go boneless, so that he’s dropping the glass of water. Boyd manages to save it before it shatters against the floor. His reflexes are great.
The Sheriff swallows. “No. Tell me he isn’t… that wasn’t…”
Scott and Jackson look guilty and suddenly shift sideways, from where they’re standing in front of the staircase. Their movement reveals Isaac, sitting at the base of stairs, kind of hunched over and staring down at his own hands nervously, like he doesn’t want to be there at all.
The Sheriff looks him over from across the room, and Isaac looks him over back, slowly, like he’s gearing up to be tossed out of the house and wants just one last moment to remember it all. Everyone else goes a little bit tense as they wait for the Sheriff’s reaction to everything, and there’s even a low rumble coming out of the back of Derek’s throat, like he’s ready to throw himself between Isaac and the Sheriff if he needs to, if it gets ugly.
The Sheriff ignores Derek’s posturing and everyone else’s tension. He gets up and hobbles over to Isaac so that he can crouch down in front of him, and stare him in the eye. “Are you okay?” he asks.
Isaac flinches a little when they’re close like that, like the calm façade he’d been building up while waiting for this isn’t meant to stand up under such close scrutiny. His lips curl up on one side, in a self-deprecating smile. “So I’m a werewolf,” he admits after a beat, eyes flicking down at the ground instead of staying on the Sheriff.
The Sheriff huffs and fights the urge to roll his eyes. “That is not what I asked,” he says, and reaches forward, rests a hand on the back of Isaac’s neck, and forces the kid to look at him. “Isaac, are you okay?”
Isaac seems puzzled. “I’m fine.”
The Sheriff lets out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding, because now he knows all the important stuff is taken care of. They can worry about the rest, the details, later. “Okay,” he says, and stands up again, groaning a little because his knees ache and his back is a mess. He’s too old for this.
Everyone just kind of stares at him. “I’m going upstairs, and I’m going to bed,” he says, and steps around Isaac to head up the stairs, but not before reaching out and ruffling the kid’s hair a little first. “Tomorrow we talk.”
“Tomorrow,” Stiles and Isaac say at the exact same time, in the exact same dubious sort of way.
This makes the Sheriff smile a little, because Isaac may be a werewolf, but obviously he’s more Stilinski inclined than anything else.
“Tomorrow,” he says again, firmly, and disappears down the hallway, looking forward to collapsing into his bed and dealing with everything that remains in the morning. It won’t be pretty, and he’s fairly certain there will be yelling involved, but for now, the important stuff is handled, and he is tired as hell.
Back downstairs, he hears Scott's indignant cry of, “That’s it?!” follow him to bed.
~~~~~
Apparently Isaac is a werewolf because Derek made him one. Isaac and Stiles both agree that Derek makes terrible decisions the next morning over a giant breakfast of pancakes and bacon. The Sheriff watches them both inhale food like perfectly normal teenagers while he sips his coffee and savors the two pieces of delicious bacony goodness that Stiles had magnanimously agreed to let him have this morning after his trauma the night before.
“And then he was kind of a douche for a few weeks, but then he got control of the power tripping, and then he helped Scott during the championship, and then we were dealing with the Alphas for a while, who were snobby douches until they realized that Derek makes bad decisions with good intentions, and then they left. That was around when Isaac moved in, and then you liked him, still like him, and then I researched the Arachne after that first body and when you didn’t check in, Isaac tracked you like a freaking bloodhound, and we found you, and last night Boyd, Jackson, and Erica had to go back to the nest and smash the eggs and clean it all up. And so here we are.”
Stiles sums it all up with an incredibly blasé twirling of one hand over his head while he grabs the syrup and drenches his pancakes in it with the other.
The Sheriff shakes his head, because werewolves, and Arachnes, and the fact that Stiles very obviously gleaned over the fact that the others cleaning up the nest might have also meant dealing with Delaney’s body, which he’s going to have some stern words with Derek about the next time he sees the idiot Alpha of this idiot pack.
Jesus. The Pack. The Sheriff is so lost in thought that he accidentally eats his last piece of bacon without even really tasting it, which is a damned waste.
Isaac is mostly quiet the whole time, concentrating on his food. The Sheriff notes that the injuries he’d sustained last night seem to be all but gone, Isaac’s arm working perfectly and the scrapes and bruises from his impact with the wall completely missing. Apparently his shoulder is still a little sore as his freaky werewolf healing abilities work the last of the Arachne’s poison out of his body, but it’s nothing debilitating, and Deaton had assured him over the phone that werewolves were mostly immune to giant man-eating spiders.
Isaac gets all the extra bacon to help with the healing process just in case, and the Sheriff isn’t even inclined to argue about Stiles playing favorites, because he agrees so much.
They finish breakfast and then the Sheriff soundly grounds them through Halloween, because it’s only fair.
They both whine that it’s not because Lydia is throwing a party, but after a few minutes of the Sheriff blinking back at them in a totally unimpressed sort of way, they give up trying to argue with him and go outside to rake the leaves because chores that they hate are just another part of the grounding process.
The Sheriff watches them tumble around in piles of leaves like idiots for the rest of the afternoon.
Once he’s reassured that they’re safe, that they’re still happy and healthy and okay with everything despite their lives and the world being far scarier a place than they could ever have imagined, the Sheriff goes back upstairs and stands in the hallway between the boys’ rooms like he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. He thinks that his kids are way stronger than he could ever be, because he is really, really freaking out right now.
Werewolves. Jesus Christ.
~~~~~
Two weeks after the Arachne incident, Erica and Boyd show up on the Stilinskis’ front porch one morning, covered in mud and scratches and looking miserable. The Sheriff eyes them as he wordlessly holds open his screen door and watches them collapse, exhausted, right onto the rug that Isaac had bought to replace the one he had irreparably bled all over. They’re probably ruining this one beyond repair too.
He silently goes to start breakfast, and by the time he’s done with the first batch of pancakes, Jackson is there too, muddy and gross and curled up on the couch because he is still a little shit who doesn’t care about anyone else’s stuff getting gross so long as he’s comfortable.
The Sheriff wordlessly sets another place at the table.
~~~~~
By the time he comes home one night in late November to find Derek rifling through his fridge like he owns it, the Sheriff has already resigned himself to Pack Dad status with a kind of fond equanimity. He just tells Derek not to drink directly out of the carton again or he’s grounded, and then grins at Derek’s sour expression as the big bad Alpha grudgingly goes to get a glass out of the cabinet like a civilized human being. Duty thus performed, the Sheriff trudges upstairs to go face plant into his bed until the next Beacon Hills crisis arises, supernatural or otherwise.
This is just his life now apparently. Werewolves, spiders, hunters, teenagers and all.
He smiles against his pillow as he falls asleep, and even though he doesn’t ever say it out loud, he thinks Isaac was the best idea Stiles has ever had.
END
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On to Grounded
UGH I need to sleep C/P functions are clearly beyond me right now. Hopefully I at least got this kind of right.