Not Alone
Author: vampthenewblack
Title: Not Alone
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/s: Gen: Sheriff & Stiles
Character/s: Sheriff Stilinski, Stiles Stilinski, minor appearances by other characters
Summary: The scent hangs in the air where the sheriff walked, and Stiles can almost reach out and touch it, can almost see the shape of his father-red, like blood, a swirling, blurring mist-as all his senses become confused and overwhelmed.
Warnings: Canon-Typical Violence
Submission Type: Fic
Word Count: 2309
Prompt: #110: Thirst
Author’s Notes: Set in my post 3a Wake Up Dead series (between 'Pretty Sure Vampires are Illegal' and 'Never Free'). Stiles is a vampire. The series is Derek/Stiles, but that’s peripheral to this installment. This is more of a Stilinski Feels kind of deal.
The scent hits him outside the station, overpowering all others. It hangs in the air where the sheriff walked, and Stiles can almost reach out and touch it, can almost see the shape of his father-red, like blood, a swirling, blurring mist-as all his senses become confused and overwhelmed. His gums ache and his throat is dry, despite the blood of three werewolves in his veins.
Glutting himself on them was the only way he dared to venture here. They fed his hunger, but the thirst is another thing entirely. It desiccates his throat, his skin, makes his eyes dry and scratchy. Surrounded in his father’s scent like this, there’s only one thing that can quench it, and anyone that comes between them is in danger.
Parrish meets him at the door, surprise evident on his face. “You’re back,” he says, because the official story is that Stiles ran away from home. “Does your dad know you’re here?”
Stiles’ eyes fall on the twitch in the deputy’s throat that might soothe his parched mouth just a little. He shakes his head. “You think you can clear these guys out?” he says, eyes moving over the two other deputies in the room. “So I can talk to my dad?”
Parrish narrows his eyes, a crease forming between his brows. “Sure,” he says.
Stiles walks past the deputy. “Thanks,” he offers, as the scent pulls him toward his father’s office.
The door barely makes a sound as he slips inside, closing it behind him, and the sheriff doesn’t look up. Stiles presses his body back against the door, straining to stay as far away as he can, fighting to keep from losing his mind. “Hi, Dad.”
The sheriff’s head jerks up, and his eyes go wide, pupils contracting to tiny dots. “Stiles.” His hands hit the desk, fingers splayed out wide as he pushes himself back, instinctively putting a few more inches between Stiles and himself. His heart starts to race, and his eyes move rapidly around the room, though there’s obviously no one but Stiles here with him. “Where’s Derek?”
“Asleep,” Stiles says. “They’re all asleep. I had to, Dad. They’d get in the way.”
The sheriff’s eyes flick up to the glass partitions, blinds closed against the outside. The sound of movement and voices are fading.
“Don’t call out,” Stiles says. “Let them go. They’ll only get hurt.”
The sheriff looks back at Stiles, and the fear on his face fades to sadness. “I missed you, son.”
Stiles’ heart isn’t beating, but it breaks. “I missed you, too.” The urge to go to his father, for different reasons, is almost impossible to resist, and he gouges deep lines in the door behind him as he struggles to hold on. He can’t, can’t let go, not yet.
With his eyes fixed on Stiles, the sheriff starts to move out from behind his desk.
Stiles jerks back against the door, and the walls shake. He snaps an arm out, palm forward. “Don’t move,” he snaps. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Why not?” The sheriff takes another step. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Another step closer. “I’m not gonna fight you, kiddo.”
Stiles closes his mouth to block the scent, but his lungs are working without his consent, sucking air in through his nose, dragging it down his throat, searing it as dry as the desert. “No,” he growls, and drops his head, looking away so he can’t see the vein pumping in his father’s neck.
The sheriff stops, half way across the room. “You’re fighting it, Stiles,” he says. “You’re winning. You can leave, just walk away.”
Stiles lifts his head, and he can’t stop the tears now. “I can’t,” he says. “It’s too late, Dad.”
“Okay.” The sheriff takes another step toward Stiles. “Just tell me one thing, first. Was it you?”
Stiles can barely think, let alone try to figure out what his father is asking him.
“All these deaths.” The sheriff takes another step, comes within arms reach. “All these new murders that look like vampire kills. Is it you? Are you killing people?”
The scent of his father’s blood blocks out everything else, creates a need within him so strong that he can’t focus on anything beyond the walls of the office. But he can feel it. Deep down inside it tugs at him. “He’s here,” he says, and his voice is high and thin and reedy. “He’s right here.”
The sheriff’s face falls, twists in pain, but Stiles only sees it for a second before the door bursts inward, pushing Stiles out of the way with a strength that even he doesn’t possess.
It throws him forward, right into the arms of his father, right into the swirling mass of scent, that, so close, burns like fire to resist. The sheriff cries out in pain as they both hit the desk behind them and crumple, together, to the floor.
Stiles scrambles back on all fours, away from the pain, the blood that would ease it. And then he walks through the door.
He’s tall, with dark hair and skin as pale as Stiles’ own. He smells like spilt blood and asphalt and he’s the one who’s been killing people.
Twisted up inside Stiles is the need to protect his father-and the need to keep his father’s blood all to himself. His fingernails dig deep into the linoleum floor as he prepares to spring, and the growling coming from deep in his chest is like nothing he’s ever heard before, even from one of the werewolves. At the edge of his awareness, he knows this is as bad as it gets, that he might never come back from it.
The vampire looks down at him, tips his head to the side. “Stiles.” He offers his hand, and then pulls it back as if afraid Stiles might bite it off. “I didn’t think I’d find you here. You’ve saved me a trip, you know that?”
Stiles pulls himself to his feet, moving slowly. He puts himself between the vampire and his father. “Stay away from my dad,” he hisses. “I’ll leave. It’ll be easier far away. You don’t need to do this.”
The vampire tips his head to the other side, looks at Stiles like he’s trying to figure him out. Then he pushes past him, drops into a crouch. “Sheriff Stilinski.” He holds his hand out again, and when the sheriff doesn’t move to shake, he places it on his knee.
Stiles tries to move him, but he can’t. He’s been a vampire less than a year, but he’s gotten used to pulling punches, slowing down, because he’s so much stronger than anything they’ve come across. But even when he puts all his weight behind it, Alexander barely shifts.
“My name is Alexander,” the vampire says to the sheriff, who glares up at him defiantly from the floor. “I’m older than your son, by a lot of years. That makes me stronger than him.” He looks back at Stiles. “Especially considering his maker has mysteriously disappeared. He’d be far stronger now if he’d stayed with him.” He rises to his feet, walks toward Stiles, pressing him up against the desk. “I can give Stiles that. Make him stronger. He doesn’t have to be alone.”
“I’m not alone,” Stiles spits.
Alexander looks down at the sheriff on the floor. Watches, as the sheriff pulls himself to his feet and rounds the end of the desk to put a barrier between them. “His human attachments won’t help him. He must sever them. Knowing your blood is out there somewhere will only torment him. The best thing for everyone is to end it now.”
It is a kind of torture, constantly knowing that if he lets his guard down for a moment, he could drink his father dry in seconds, but it keeps him alert. “I won’t.”
Alexander shrugs. “You’re doing well to resist. I know how hard it is, believe me. I know how much it hurts you.” His head snaps back around to Stiles. “Imagine how much more it would hurt if his blood was spilled, if that much more of the scent was in the room.”
His arm darts out, too quick for human eyes to see. Stiles sees only a blur. He screams, but he can’t move fast enough to stop it.
A red line appears beneath the sheriff’s jaw, the skin split apart over over the artery. Blood wells and starts to run and the scent fills the room, choking Stiles with it.
The sheriff claps his hand over the wound, but it’s too late. His eyes fix on Stiles, wide and alarmed, and he takes a few stumbling steps back.
Stiles is up and over the desk before the sheriff reaches the wall. His eyes lock on the blood on his father’s fingers, and it’s not enough to be life threatening, except that it is, because of the scent, thick waves of it that fill Stiles’ nose and throat and make the thirst more than he can bear.
“Fight,” his father says. “You can beat this.”
Stiles shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s too strong.”
There’s a minute shift in the sheriff’s posture as his eyes flick up. “Then drink,” he says.
It takes a fraction of a second for Stiles to parse his meaning, the tension in his body, the way his attention shifts. It takes half that again for Stiles to shove away from his father, to turn and jump back across the desk. He gets a glimpse of the satisfaction on Alexander’s face before his surety turns to rage, but it’s too late.
Stiles’ hands come down on the vampire’s shoulders, dig in like claws. His knees hit the vampire’s soft belly, and his momentum carries them both to the floor. It’s only with the element of surprise that he can strike, and once Stiles’ fangs are embedded deep in the artery, once the blood is draining out of him and down Stiles’ throat, Alexander’s strength drains quickly. Stiles holds on, takes the blows as Alexander fights him with everything he has, until the vampire might as well be human for all the good it does.
Even when he’s full to bursting, Stiles keeps drinking. Even when it trickles to nothing, Stiles sucks him dry.
On the periphery of his awareness, Stiles hears the werewolves come, and only then does he pull away. “Get him out of here,” he says, and scrambles backward as Isaac leads his father out of the room. Scott stands guard over the weakened body of the vampire who came looking for Stiles and left a trail of corpses behind him.
Derek comes at Stiles, comes fast, and Stiles does nothing to stop him. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he growls, and Stiles doesn’t begrudge him his anger because he drained Derek almost completely, hit him hard enough to knock him out. “What made you think you had to do this on your own?”
“He would have killed you,” Stiles says. “But he wanted me to kill my dad.”
Derek turns his head. Looks at the door. Then he looks back, and his eyes have softened. “You didn’t.”
Stiles swallows. Drinking Alexander dry did little to calm the thirst for his father’s blood. He drops his eyes. “I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I still want to.”
Derek stares into his eyes for long moments, and then leaves him there as he spins to face the fallen vampire. “Kill him,” he says.
Scott looks up, and there’s conflict in his expression. He can’t do it.
Stiles steps forward, drops to his knees, grasps Alexander’s head in his hands and looks down into sunken eyes. “I’m not alone,” he says, and he twists the vampire’s head clean off.
“Why can’t it be like it is in the movies?” the sheriff says, looking down at the sticky red stain on the floor of his office. There’s a bandage covering the scratch on his throat, more to mask the scent of his blood than anything else, because the wound isn’t deep. “It’d be much easier if they turned to dust when they died. Who’s going to clean this up?”
Scott pushes past him, a bucket and mop in his hands, offers the sheriff a smile as he passes.
“He’s not dead.” Stiles stands off to the side of the room, back pressed against the wall, Derek close enough to touch. He’ll never stop Stiles if he lunges, but it helps Stiles’ focus to have him there. “Leave him out in the sun. He’ll burn.”
Isaac shoots Stiles an incredulous look, wraps the remains in plastic just a little more carefully.
“You’ve been doing some reading?” the sheriff asks.
Stiles looks up at his father. He nods. “A little, yeah.”
The sheriff never takes his eyes from Stiles’ face. “Can you guys give us a minute?”
Derek is a little more reluctant to leave, but he follows the others when Stiles nods. He doesn’t go far from the open door, however.
“You did good, kiddo,” the sheriff says, as he takes a step into the room.
Stiles presses himself closer to the wall, raises his hand, palm out in the universal sign for ‘stop’.
The sheriff nods. “Okay.” He side-steps, leans back against the doorframe, puts his hands in his pockets. “It’s a start, though. It gives me hope. One day I’ll get to hug my son again.”
Stiles gives him a tight smile, nods, then wipes tears away with his fingers. There’s a lump in his throat, made worse by the intensity of his thirst, and there’s no way he’s going to be able to speak without sobbing.
“Okay,” the sheriff says, mirroring Stiles’ tense smile and nod, then he backs away out the door.