Chapter Text
In the eighteen years since Stiles was born, the Survival Games have been held eighteen times. He sometimes thinks that it’s interesting, that they started the year that he was born. Is it a sign that he’s going to be chosen? He supposes that it can’t be. He’s far from the only eighteen year old in the running, and he didn’t get chosen any of the last three years.
His camp has never had a winner in those eighteen years, which isn’t really surprising. He doesn’t know exactly how many slave camps there are, but it’s well over two hundred. It takes a lot of slaves to support a population of tens of thousands of werewolves. A lot of grain to harvest, a lot of livestock to raise.
Camp Forty-Two, where he’s lived his entire life, is attached to a steel mill. His father has worked there since before Stiles was born, and Stiles has been working there since he was twelve. He’s got a job as a cleaner. There are only a few people small enough to fit into the vents and the innards of the machinery to clean it out. Most people grow out of it, but Stiles didn’t. It’s because of malnourishment, or so he assumes. For every hour that a person works, they get chips, which are exchanged for food and other necessities. But his mother hasn’t been able to work since she fell ill when he was seven. They’ve survived on just his father’s chips since then, and it hasn’t been easy. That’s why he had started working so young, but even then, he had only gotten paid half of what the adults got paid.
He vividly remembers when his mother had first gotten sick, when she had still been herself. He remembers when she had begged his father to kill her, rather than waste his chips feeding her. His father had stalwartly refused to hear anything about it. Instead, he worked longer and longer hours, and ate less and less. It wasn’t until he collapsed at work and nearly wound up taken out with the trash that he had agreed to reconsider. He ate enough to keep himself healthy, and if Stiles and his mother felt the shortage, neither of them ever breathed a word of it. Even so, when the boys around him were hitting puberty and growing like beanstalks, Stiles had been left behind. He didn’t even come up to his father’s shoulders.
Some people would have been upset, but Stiles didn’t mind. It meant he could keep his job as a cleaner, which was far less arduous and dangerous than actually working on the mill floor. The thought of his size and strength affecting him in the Survival Games has never really crossed his mind. They’re from a big camp, with over a thousand people. He was entered into the pool at fifteen, and he’ll stay there until thirty-five, barring death or debilitating injury. That’s only twenty times he has to beat the one-in-a-thousand odds. Twenty in a thousand. Zero point zero two percent. He has a better chance of being crushed or cooked alive at work.
Which is what he’s vaguely thinking until the wheel spins and the name is withdrawn and his stomach drops because he knows it’s him. He knows from the look on the announcer’s face. The faint confusion over being confronted with a tongue-twister instead of a name. He even glances over at his shoulder as if to ask some nonexistent person behind him if this is real, before clearing his throat and saying, “Mikey . . . slaw . . . Stilinski?”
The thought of correcting him on the pronunciation is nowhere near the top of Stiles’ mind. He stands there, frozen. There’s a faint murmur through the crowd, an unhappy one. Stiles is well known around the plant. Both he and his father are well-liked. Besides, nobody likes it when someone young is chosen. It feels unfair.
Someone squeezes his shoulder and gives him a gentle shove, and that breaks him out of his shock. He takes a few shaking steps forward, looking around for his father. The crowd parts to let him through, up onto the narrow stage. The announcer, clearly relieved that ‘Mikey-slaw’ had recognized his own name, goes into his practiced spiel about the honors of the games and how this young man could bring glory to all of them.
“Stiles – Stiles!” His father is trying to break through the crowd now, but several of the other men are holding him back. “Damn it, get off me – Stiles!”
Stiles is ushered out of the room before he can see what happens. He knows he’ll get a chance to say goodbye to his father. He just hopes his father doesn’t do anything stupid. He’s not really thinking about anything else, about the games or how he’s going to survive them. It feels like a bad dream, and he’s waiting to wake up.
“You’re a scrawny one, ain’t ya?” the werewolf in charge of their camp greets him, and starts laughing.
“Must be because I grew in a cave like a mushroom,” Stiles shoots back, without thinking about whether or not sassing the werewolf guard is a great idea. It’s marginally true. He’s been outside a half dozen times in his life, and never for very long. The barracks are attached to the mill, and they’re never allowed to go anywhere else, so why would he need to go outside?
The guard opens his mouth, but then Stiles’ father pushes his way inside, grabbing Stiles in a rib-crushing hug. “You’re not taking him,” he says to the guard, clinging to Stiles. “I don’t care what that damned lottery says, you’re not – ”
“Dad,” Stiles says, his voice muffled in his father’s shoulder.
“Be quiet, Stiles, let me handle this – ”
“You’re going to be handling these in a minute,” the werewolf says, waving his claws in Noah's face.
“Dad, stop,” Stiles says, pushing away. “You can’t stop them from taking me.”
“Like hell I can’t,” Noah says, his voice cracking. “You’re my son, my only son, they’re taking you over my dead body – ”
“Which is exactly what’s going to happen! And then they’ll take me anyway!” Stiles swallows the lump in his throat, tries not to look at the agony etched into his father’s face. “Dad, please. Please . . . don’t do this. I don’t want them to hurt you. Okay?”
His father tries to say something, but can’t. Instead, he hugs Stiles again, burying his face in the crook of Stiles’ shoulder.
“I’ll be fine,” Stiles says, trying to sound like he believes it. “I’m not strong, but I’m quick, right? Being quick is good.”
“Quick and clever,” Noah manages to say. “You’ll be the smartest person there.”
“Right,” Stiles agrees. “I can win, okay? I can – I can at least try.” A thought occurs to him, and he feels a little bit of hope for the first time since the announcer butchered his name. “Look, the winner gets the honor of the Bite, right? For their entire family. I can – I can give it to Mom. It’ll get her better. Make her well again.”
Noah stands back, his hands resting on Stiles’ shoulders, looking his son in the face as if he wants to memorize it. “Listen,” he says, and his voice cracks, but then steadies. “You’re going to put in a lot of situations where you aren’t sure what the right thing to do is. You’re going to face people who are just as desperate to survive as you are. They aren’t your enemy, and you know that, in here.” He gently touches Stiles’ chest. “But you still have to fight. You have to survive. No matter what, you have to survive. Not for Mom, not for me, but for yourself. Okay?”
Stiles nods and whispers, “Okay.”
His father hugs him again, so tightly that it hurts, and he won’t let go. The werewolf starts to give a low growl, and two of his father’s friends come in and gently pry him off.
“I’ll see you in a couple months,” Stiles says, as if this is just a vacation and everything’s going to be fine. The door shuts behind his father, and he hears the thump as he hits the floor, the hoarse sobs that follow. He squares his jaw and swallows his tears, turning his attention to the werewolf. “Time to go?”
“This way.” The werewolf can tell he’s not about to make a run for the exit, so he doesn’t bother to grab him. Stiles follows him down a narrow hallway and outside.
Outside. The last time he was outside was at least two years ago. The sunlight stabs at his eyes, making him wince. The interior of the camp is fairly dim, and he has excellent night vision, but daylight hurts. He manages to look around and see a car. He’s never been in one, never needed one. He can’t keep his curiosity to himself. “These things run on gasoline, right? Are there slave camps that work on oil rigs? How do you get gasoline from crude oil?”
“How the fuck should I know?” the werewolf asks, shoving him into the backseat.
“Where are we going?” Stiles asks. “I mean, obviously we’re going to the capitol, right? But how do we get there? Do we drive the whole way? How far is it?”
“Hey, kid, you wanna shut up?” the werewolf retorts. He gets behind the wheel and starts driving.
Stiles knows approximately what’s going to happen now. The games aren’t shown at the camps in their entirety, but they get a ‘highlights reel’ every year, which is generally framed to show the eventual survivor as a protagonist and focus on their struggles. He knows that there will be at least eight or ten rounds to get through, each one different. Some of them will last several days and focus on survival skills. Others are simple one-on-one fights. Sometimes they fight other contestants; sometimes they fight some mythical monster that the werewolves caught. Sometimes they’re put on teams, only to have to fight their comrade in the next game.
The winner gets the ‘honor’ of the Bite, along with their immediate family and, depending on how many people that is, a few others they choose from their camp. They’re brought to one of the werewolf settlements to live real, enjoyable lives.
Stiles has never been entirely sure why they do that. He’d think that survival would be enough of an incentive for any of the contestants to fight. He’s sure there’s a reason for it, and not for the first time, wonders what it is.
The camps don’t really hear much about what’s going on in the games in real time, but if their contestant is killed, they’re notified. So everyone at the mill will be on edge for as long as Stiles can survive. Stiles is determined to make that a long time. He knows that there are long odds. But hell, there were long odds against him being chosen in the first place. And yet, here he is.
“Here I am,” he mutters, as the car starts down the road.
To which the werewolf says, “Shut up, kid.”
~ ~ ~ ~
The atmosphere in the tiny Hale den is tense as Derek paces around and Cora sits at the table and scowls at her plate. Peter’s forbidden them from eating until Laura gets there. They’re hungry, but that’s not why they’re tense. It’s never a good thing when Laura is late getting home. The possible reasons for her tardiness are numerous, and none of them are good.
“Cover the food before it gets cold,” Peter says.
“But Uncle Peter – ” Cora begins, and then stops when he gives her a look. She mutters an apology and takes out some towels to drape over the plates.
“How about we pass the time with the next chapter of the Canterbury Tales?” Peter asks, going over to his small collection of books. They’re his most precious possessions. He tosses the book to Derek, who nods and sits down in the corner, pulling Cora down alongside him before he begins reading aloud. Cora is restless, but she settles.
Laura comes in about half an hour later. She’s muddy and soaked and obviously exhausted, but not injured. Derek and Cora both immediately start fussing over her, but Peter doesn’t. Laura is fine. There’s no need to worry. “You didn’t need to wait for me,” she says, as she sits down at the table and pulls the towel off her food.
“Whatever,” Cora says, and Peter doesn’t reply at all. They always wait until Laura gets home to begin their meal, and she always tells them not to. Peter insists. There are certain rules of pack behavior that he’s not willing to let go. The Hale pack is small, and broken, but they are still a pack. If they give up on protocol, they won’t even be that anymore. He won’t allow that to happen. Nobody eats until the alpha eats. But Laura’s token protest is fine. She understands why he does what he does, but she still needs to act like a big sister. Her siblings are young, and frightened, and need a sister’s reassurance more than an alpha’s command.
He might not be an alpha, but he does what he can to fill the role. There are times he bitterly wishes that Talia had not left this responsibility to him, but he understands why she did. He understands that he’s the only Hale who could possibly keep her children alive after what had happened. If Talia’s dying wish was for him to protect her children, he’ll do that, even while resenting every moment.
They’re good kids. He still thinks of Laura as a child even though she’s twenty-one now, to his thirty, and Derek just turned eighteen. Cora is only fourteen. Talia’s death, along with the rest of their family, is three years behind them. For three years, Peter has struggled to keep their heads above water. At least Laura is capable of pulling her weight now. He wishes he could spare her the shame of her position, as the Omega of Alphas. The other alphas order her around, give her tasks to do and errands to run that they could easily do themselves, use her as a whipping post every time something happens that they don’t like.
It’s protocol, hierarchy, and to be honest Peter had never thought much about how humiliating the position was until his pack had fallen into it.
He’s spared the worst of it, partly because he’s a beta, but also because the settlement depends on him and he knows it. He doesn’t have an official position, but he’s the fixer – the one they call when one of the slave camps isn’t being productive and they don’t know why. Intellect isn’t exactly prized amongst werewolves. They’re physical creatures, and that’s what most of them focus on. Peter was born a werewolf, but his father was human, and he sometimes thinks that’s why he’s different. Derek seems to have inherited the same tendencies.
Because of that, Peter is by far one of the most educated people in the entire settlement. His father had saved as many books as he could find over the course of his life, both fiction and non-fiction, and Peter has read them so many times that he has some of them memorized. He understands humans better than any other werewolf living, now that Talia is dead. He has a passable understanding of biology, physics, mechanics, and agriculture.
The werewolves don’t like admitting it, but they depend on the humans to keep them alive. The slave camps are responsible for the vast majority of the food the werewolves consume, not to mention mining for raw materials, building furniture and electronics, making their clothing, and, of course, providing entertainment.
Since they depend on the camps, they also depend on Peter. When a camp falls below expectations, he gets to go find out why. Sometimes it’s a simple, easy fix – one camp was riddled with scurvy because the werewolf in charge forgot to request citrus in their rations. Sometimes it’s difficult, like the camp that went into full rebellion after too many people had died on unsafe equipment. And sometimes it’s impossible to explain to the werewolves. He vividly remembers one time that a camp had fallen behind after the death of a child everyone had loved, and how the werewolves couldn’t understand why that would affect production. Werewolves are pack oriented, almost a hive mind in some ways. The death of an individual should be mourned, surely, but after a day or two they put it behind them and focus back on the pack. Humans aren’t the same way. Tragedy strikes them harder, on a personal level. Peter’s explanation hadn’t satisfied anybody, particularly the part where his advice was just to wait it out, that punishing the humans for their grief would only make the situation worse. But they took his advice. They always took his advice.
He’s started taking Derek with him on these trips, because Derek is smart and eager to learn. He doesn’t have Peter’s cunning streak, but for this, he doesn’t really need it. If he understands the camps, he’ll become indispensable in the event that something happens to Peter. He can’t do much for Cora, who rejects his books and his training, but she’s a fighter. The werewolves respect that. She could survive if she was sent to the rings.
“Earth to Peter,” Laura says, and he blinks at her, coming out of his thoughts. She laughs a little. “Where did you go?”
“Just thinking my thinks,” he says.
“Hey, Uncle Peter, why do we say ‘earth to someone’?” Derek asks.
“Excellent question, Derek.” Peter puts down his fork and says, “Did you know that the humans actually went into space at one point? They landed on the moon.”
Derek’s eyes go wide. Even Cora is interested. “The moon in the sky?”
“Do you know of any other?” Peter asks.
Cora wrinkles her nose at him. “You can go there?”
“Well, we can’t,” Peter says. “Not even the Druids can. But the humans did. They built a rocket that propelled them out of the atmosphere, and it took them all the way to the moon and back.”
“That’s amazing,” Laura says.
“So when they were on their rocket,” Peter says, keeping things simply for the sake of brevity, “if the humans here wanted to talk to them, they would use their radio and start with ‘Earth to rocket’ to let them know who was calling who.”
“Neat,” Cora says, going back to her dinner.
“I can’t believe that people who could build rockets to go to the moon lost a war with us,” Derek says, scowling. Peter doesn’t respond. As he’s gotten older, Derek has expressed more and more curiosity about The War of the Wolves, and Peter hasn’t wanted to encourage it. Asking too many questions about how the werewolves came to power is never a good idea. He might have to rethink that soon. Derek’s probably old enough to understand now, and his curiosity isn’t going away.
Laura is the one who replies. “Don’t let anyone else hear you say that, little brother.”
Derek growls but nods. Peter isn’t worried about that, at least – Derek has an anti-social streak a mile wide and bitterly resents the other werewolves for the way they treat Laura. He has no friends, so there’s really nobody outside the pack that he talks to. He would probably never leave their den if Peter didn’t make him.
Werewolves might not be intellectuals, but there are enough in the settlement that aren’t stupid to make it dangerous. Peter knows that the official story they tell around campfires, that the wolves were strong and fierce and crushed the humans with their power, are utterly untrue. But he knows why they tell the stories, too, not just to the humans but to the younger werewolves. Imagination is more powerful than knowledge. If the werewolves believe they’re strong, then they are. If they find out that the werewolves only won the war because of the Druids – and that the Druids only chose their side because of rampant xenophobia among the humans – then they might start to doubt their position of power. With the humans still in active rebellion, that’s dangerous. The war is only barely fading from living memory now. There are still some older werewolves and humans who remember it, even if they were very young when it happened.
“Oh, hey, don’t the games start tomorrow?” Laura asks.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Yes.”
“Are you going to go watch?”
“No.”
Laura hesitates. She’s never been comfortable giving Peter her orders, and he probably wouldn’t take them if she did. Instead, she says cautiously, “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I can skip out on the first game. It’s a survival game and it’ll last several days, to weed out the weakest of the contestants. Nobody sticks around for the whole thing anyway, and nobody will care whether or not I show up.” Peter finishes the last of his steak and reaches for another roll. “Most of the ‘wolves don’t care until the second or third game.”
“Okay,” Laura says, clearly relieved that Peter has put thought into it and she doesn’t have to question his judgment. She’s well aware that Peter hates the games, and in fact he’s told the courts that from the standpoint of human psychology, they’re a terrible idea. Productivity always drops during them, and the court gets annoyed, and he’s explained repeatedly that they’re just borrowing trouble.
‘It’s a show of our strength,’ is what they always reply. ‘We can go in and take whoever we want.’
‘Nobody who has to show their strength is truly strong,’ Peter says, ‘and if you give the humans enough time, they’ll figure that out.’
He’s probably lucky they didn’t execute him just for saying that.
Although, in the grand scheme of things, the night is young.
~ ~ ~ ~