Chapter Text
The hand with which he holds the phone to his ear is trembling. Cramped into one of the hospital’s abysmal waiting-room chairs, John can barely make out what he’s hearing over the pounding in his head and three thousand miles distance. Helen is gone. Helen is gone and he feels uprooted and unhinged. He has lost his wife, his family, and his pack all in one.
“John?” Noah’s voice floats in his ear, concerned. Noah had gone through this, John tries to reason with himself. He survived. If he could, then Jon can too. It’s the reason Helen had told him to call Noah first.
“I’m here,” John replies.
“I’m sending Stiles up there. You shouldn’t be alone right now. Not through this.”
Noah doesn’t sounds as if he’s willing to take protests. Had Helen been pushy like this when her sister died?
“You don’t have to, Noah. I can take care of it.”
Even to his own ears he sounds mechanical. More than usual. More importantly, he isn’t sure if he can deal with losing Helen and having someone in his space so quickly.
“John. These two amazing women brought us together, lucky bastards that we are. Helen was with me after Claudia passed. We may not be blood-related, but you’re still family. You’ll always be family.”
John feels his throat tightening. Somewhere between clearing it and his vision going blurry, he accepts.
-
Noah’s son, the last time John saw him, was an anxious, jittery, fifteen-year-old who smelled of adderall, axe body spray, and hormones. The man who knocks on his doors that evening looks like him, except somewhere in the last three years Stiles had the time to hit a growth spur then have a truck reverse over him twice.
“Uncle John,” he says with a small, tired, smile.
John notes the way he leans against the extended handle of his suitcase. There’s something stiff in the way he stands. An injury or a sprained ankle. Or, maybe, John’s thinking too much and it’s just the effects of a six-hour flight across three different time-zones.
He pulls the doors open and Stiles steps forward into a hug that, at first purfectory, ends up with John signing into Stiles’ shoulder as the young man gives him a good squeeze. He still smells of adderall. It’s good to have something familiar to cling to.
“I’m sorry about Aunt Helen.” Stiles’ words are heavy, knowing, and genuine in that sort of way only someone who has also lost something important would use. John remembers that just as Helen had loved Stiles for being her sister’s son, so did Stiles love Helen for being one of the few people who’d known, and would talk, about his mother.
Stiles rolls his little suitcase into the foyer and leaves it at the doors with his backpack. When he straightens up, he’s almost as tall as John.
“You’ve grown,” John notes. He can’t believe Noah actually bundled him up on the first flight to New York. It’s heartwarming in all the ways John isn’t used to expect.
“Turned the famous one-eight a couple of months ago.”
John and Helen had been aware and sent over a gift since they couldn’t visit. But that isn’t what John meant when he made the comment.
The stiffness is still with Stiles when John walks him into the living room. There’s something jarring about the lack of converse sneakers and large, hanging, hoodies covering graphic tees. Even the shorn hair is gone. Stiles has changed, and he looks exhausted.
“Coffee? Or would you like dinner instead?”
Stiles gingerly sits down on the couch and accepts tea instead. Caffeine, he says, clashes with his medication.
Only when he’s in the kitchen, as he’s pouring how water over the teabags, does the scent finally hits John. Under sweat and a nauseating mix of people-smells, lays the scent of a werewolf. Stiles is covered with it. Reeks of it. How did he not notice until now?
John squeezes the handle of the electric kettle, making the plastic groan. He has to breathe through the shock, the panic, and his instincts which recognize danger. He’s vulnerable now and he’s been running on preservation mode ever since he left the hospital. John has to reminding himself nobody’s invading his home. It’s just Stiles, and Stiles is family. It helps that the scent isn’t coming from Stiles himself but from his clothes.
John has had enough time during retirement to get used to seeing creatures in everyday life, hurrying along New York’s crowded streets, heads down and going about their own day. It’s his terrible integration into the sunny side of the world that makes him paranoid. After all, while he had an account open in the Continental, he met more creatures in the same line of work as him then he’d met regular people. The two worlds aren’t so separate.
The fact is that the creatures still rely on a veil of secrecy that separates them from humans, as much as it separates them from the world of crime under the table. The rules are untold but known. They must never reveal what they are and what more might exist to those uninitiated. It’s a service to people who cannot protect themselves and wish only to lead normal lives. John never had the necessity of having that talk with Helen. Now, John wonders if Stiles is aware of the mark he’s carrying on himself.
Resolving to not overthinking it and having calmed down, John carries back the tea. Stiles has, surprisingly, not moved from the spot. Dressed in dark pants and black too-large sweater that hangs off of his thin frame, and pale beyond words except for the dark bruises under his eyes, he looks like a statue.
Whatever energy he’d seen in Stiles three years ago is gone, sapped away, stolen, leaving gaunt cheeks and anemic fingers.
After Noah’s call, John had wondered what Stiles could do for him when he’d thought of him as just a regular teenager. Now, he wonders what this exhausted version of the boy can even attempt. They drink tea in unbroken silence.
“Dad sent me up here to help, but I don’t want to push my nose into something if you don’t want me to,” Stiles finally says after the tea is gone. “I assume Aunt Helen and you already had some kind of arrangements but you need to contact the funeral home if you’ve not already. And give the obituary. If you like I can handle coordinating between the morgue, the funeral home and florists while you call up the family for the wake.”
John takes a good look at Stiles. “You’re informed.”
Stiles’ mouth presses into a thin line as he shrugs. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I helped the department when Lahey went on that killing rampage at the station a couple of years ago.”
John remembers Noah mentioning that Stiles liked to be involved with the department. He also remembers Helen worrying about the two of them after she’d seen the news coming out of California.
For some reason the little town of Beacon Hills had become a murder hub for the few years Noah and Stiles didn’t visit them in New York. He is glad, if nothing else, that they are both safe.
The young man seems earnest in helping him. John supposes he should let him. Helen had told him to call Noah. To let him do what he always did best: help and reassure. Stiles is somehow different, but he’s family. Family. He still has that, John realizes belatedly. Stiles is here for him as much as he’s here for his aunt. Something in John settles.
“We should have the viewing in two days. Helen had been talking about this funeral home--”
Once John starts, he and Stiles end up spending a couple of hours talking about the arrangements. They realize it’s late only when Stiles’ phone starts ringing in an ear-piercing statement that ‘friendship never ends’ by an annoying female voice, which John only later recognizes is a song Helen used to like around the time they met.
Stiles visibly perks up. He excuses himself, chuckling to himself quietly, and goes to answer the phone. John makes a conscious effort not to listen in and focuses his attention on clearing up the dishes from the living room, checking the time as he passes to the kitchen. He should bring Stiles’ things up to the guest bedroom and let the boy sleep.
Whoever it is on the other end of Stiles’ phone, doesn’t waste words. Stiles pops his head inside the kitchen and says, “Sorry about that.”
John shrugs. As he’d planned, he shows Stiles the guest bedroom on the second floor, and carries his things up for him. They say goodnight, and John too retires for the evening. His feelings catch up with him only when he’s back in his bedroom, when he sees the empty bed, and knows that no amount of work will allow him to forget that he is, and will be, alone for the rest of his life.
-
As an outsider looking in, John had always considered relationships complicated. To him, family bonds were less pillars of support and love, and more parasitic cohabitation as means of survival. In exchange for serving, he was bound to Ruska Roma, who smuggled him out of Belarus. Him, John thinks, and all the other desperate children who had noone and nothing, and would have starved long before adulthood.
The Marine Corps were forced tolerance. He knew soldiers that called themselves brothers but there was no such familiarity between John and other men that served. The closest one that got to the semblance of it was Marcus, but they became friendly only after they spiraled into the world held firmly under the table. John found no warmth under Tarasovs after that. They were means to each other’s ends.
Helen had strong opinions when it came to family just like she had strong opinions about everything else. One of her favorite things she liked saying is that nobody messes you up more than family. At the time, she’d been particularly angry with her mother.
Watching Gretta now as she seizes up her grandson, John is inclined to believe it. After all, Helen had decidedly estranged herself from her after she’d disowned Claudia, Stiles’ mother. John never got the full story, according to Helen Claudia had always been a bit of a wild-child, but the straw that broke the camel's back had been her deciding to stay in California and marry.
The last time John had seen Gretta was at Claudia’s funeral, and he would have been glad to never see her again. With a glass of wine in her hand, and another full of sharp red nails, with large stylized glasses on the tip of her nose and wearing an offensive amount of perfume, she looks like she has always appeared to John -- vicious, petty, and intentional. All of that combines in her gaze now which she brandishes at Stiles as if he’s ready for culling. It’s the same look she’s been giving him since the moment she’d turned up at the house. It tells John she’s been keeping tabs.
At eleven in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table, Stiles looks like a particularly energetic piece of vegetation, meaning that the most he does is sway in his seat and clamp his mouth around his decaf coffee mug which he’s at this point re-filled twice.
John wonders if it’s better playing obtuse and ignorant.
“I did not think you would have house guests,” Gretta says, her nail clinking against her glass.
“Stiles is helping me with the preparations.” John’s tone, as always, is even and calm. It does not keep Gretta from scowling.
“ Please . If you needed help you know one of us would have been more than willing to assist you. That is why I am here.”
Streaks of grey hair are tucked behind one large golden-earring holding ear. John tries to determine whether Gretta’s distaste for Stiles comes from the fact that he’s the monument of Claudia’s disobedience or that she can’t throw her weight around, can’t dominate him, considering he knows nothing of the world John and Gretta share.
“I’ve found being willing and being there to be two separate things,” Stiles says before John can insist on having urgent business, and Gretta inevitably finding some way to offend him.
Her stare snaps back to Stiles. “And how is your father?”
Stiles’ face pulls into a smirk. “He told me I should avoid the family reunions. Said rudeness runs in the family. On my mom’s side.”
Gretta positively bristles. John, despite himself, finds it slightly amusing.
Out of her luxury handbag Gretta pulls out a swathe of documents. “The... family is going to front all the funeral costs. We just need your signature. You need not worry about any arrangements.”
John looks up from his coffee and the papers, directly at Gretta. Audacity comes hand in hand with being an alpha, being a head in the Assembly, and yet, John is surprised and baffled. “No,” he says.
Gretta, for all of her confidence, actually looks surprised. “Excuse me?”
“No,” John repeats.
A vein on her forehead, usually hidden under her makeup, starts pulsing. “John,” she hisses, “I buried one daughter, and I’ll bury Helen too.”
Her teeth grind together as she speaks. No doubt, her wolf has been drawn out by the anger.
“Actually, as far as I remember, you refused to make an appearance,” Stiles offers nonchalantly, between sips of coffee. “Which was a courtesy call even then, considering you disowned mom.”
Gretta stands. For a moment, John imagines her pulling Stiles across the table and shredding into him with her claws. She slaps the table, and stuffs the papers back into her purse. “I don’t have to take this from a brat .”
She turns and, heels clack on the wooden floor, sweeps out of the kitchen. John goes after her only because she is, in the end, Helen’s mother. When he catches up to her she’s already by the front doors.
With one hand on the doorknob, she grabs John’s hand with the other and says, “Are you really going to let him help you and not me ?”
“You’re not helping, Gretta. You’re bribing your conscience.”
Her hold on his wrist turns to iron. Her hazel eyes flash, overrun with primal, primordial red. She needed him to bend for her because she is alpha, because she needs to feel powerful and in control, because John should be an easy target. He has no pack. His abilities are far overshadowed by her own. But John had never been under her influence, regardless of her alpha status.
A moment passes, then another, and her anger cools, red retracting back to brown. Gretta leaves with a guttural noise of disgust ripped from her throat.
-
The dissonance between seeing Helen, alive, in the hospital bed but sapped, pale and weak, and seeing her dead, but painted so she looks as if she could just climb out of the coffin, is startling and devastating all at once. He can barely avert his gaze from her prone form, but when he does, he cannot force himself to look back.
The stream of people coming in for the viewing is neverending, and John shakes more hands than he has, he feels like, in his entire life. At least, he thinks, they don’t linger. Some had flown in and, jetlagged, are craving their hotel rooms. Others, like Gretta, are there to make a statement.
Today, she wears lilac clasp earrings that are jarring against her black ensemble. She’s surrounded by relations, as if they traveled the hajj to see her.
“I never knew I had so many cousins,” Stiles says, voice dry, shifting next to him. They’re sitting in one of the peers. Stiles had led him to sit down after the main stream of people ended. They didn’t come to see him after all.
“Gretta is the oldest of five,” John recites what Helen had once explained to him. “At this point, the family has over a hundred members.”
Between pressed lips, Stiles intones, “How interesting mom only ever talked with Aunt Helen.”
John wishes he could explain werewolves, pack and pack loyalties to Stiles, to soothe him. But there’s nothing to soothe. Stiles’ proverbial feathers aren’t ruffled. His gaze is calculating, knowing, mouth twisting into a little smirk, as if he’s measuring all the other people and finding them uninteresting, unimportant. Background.
Stiles’ mother died a long time ago. It’s already been eight years. The pain must have passed, in some ways, numbed by him growing. It’s always easier on children. John has nothing else to look forward to but growing old, alone, and it holds no sweetness and no interest for him without Helen.
“Your mom knew how to pick people,” John replies.
Stiles snorts. Then he stands, prepared to poke the beehive. John turns back to where Helen lays, and notes that the florist did a good job. There are daisies everywhere.
-
“I’m so sorry I won’t be able to be there, John,” Noah says tiredly into the phone. “The office has kidnapped me and handcuffed me to the chair. We have unsolved murders that need to be dealt with ASAP. It’s a mess.”
“Trouble?” John asks, staring at his funeral suit. It must be an ungodly hour on West Coast.
The weather has decided to stay grim and overcast since yesterday, only now with the addition of showers of rain. New York spring is as tumultuous as ever.
Noah tells him something while John considers the shoes, and wonders if they’ll withstand the weather. They’re from the same manufacturer he’d been wearing during jobs, and he’d stepped in worse than water. In truth, the whole ensemble reminds John too closely of what used to be his uniform while he was employed. He can’t shake the association any more than he can shake his training, much as he’d like to do so.
“...talking about trouble,” Noah’s voice swims back into his ear. “Stiles isn’t pushing it is he? I know he can be a lot.”
“No, he’s been helpful. Unquiet. It’s...kind of nice.”
John considers the way Stiles had completely ignored Gretta and went to socialize with his distant family, as if it were only to spite her. Helen, had she been able to see it, would have laughed her heart out.
“Oh,” he hears. Then a quick stuttered, “Well. That’s good. But feel free to tell him off if he crosses any boundaries alright? He’s very good at stepping on toes.”
“He said something similar actually,” John replies, deciding to stop stalling and start getting dressed. The procession can’t start without them, and he can already hear Stiles in the living room starting to pace.
Though he’d been quiet the first night, energy returned to the young man the next day. The limp was gone as well. John shouldn’t have worried, it really was just jet lag after all.
“Well, I won’t be keeping you anymore. Just--” There’s a tired sigh, and a squeaking of a chair in the background of John’s call. “It will be fine. You will be fine. Eventually.”
“Thank you Noah,” John says in lieu of goodbye.
John dresses and descends down to the kitchen where Stiles is, enthusiastically, abusing the decaf John had bought for him. John had refused catering but Stiles had convinced him that it would be easier to organize something small for the reception after the funeral, without thinking about food arrangement themselves, and he has obviously been eating the sweets. Stiles found someone good but cheap, through what he self-described as google-fu. Jon hadn’t be sure if he should have been embarrassed on his part.
The food does smell good, fresh. That’s the best he can ask for really.
“Ready?” Stiles asks. He’s wearing, John notices feeling emotions rolling in his gut, the bowtie Helen had given him for his fifteenth birthday. Printed on a black cloth were small dots that, when inspected closely, were in fact daisies.
John nods and Stiles gives him a look that, had it been pitying, would have made John feel pathetic. But it isn’t. He pats John’s shoulder in encouragement. It tells him Stiles understands this is difficult but that he will be there for him.
In that moment, John doesn’t consider how an eighteen-year-old can understand what he needs and what to do to calm him. He doesn’t remember to ask. Instead, he and Stiles get into the Mustang, and drive to the funeral home.
It is too soon, he feels like, that he’s standing in front of the grave and staring at the six-foot wooden box they’d lowered his life in and are about to burry. It’s pouring rain, but John can’t make himself cry. It would be better, he knows, to let it out. But he’s never been the type to show what he’s feeling on his face.
Next to him, Stiles is not as stoic. Even over the torrent John can smell the salt of his tears on his tongue. The viewing, and the funeral, John thinks, are a blood letting. A way to let out the poison of grief, of bitterness, of heartache and helplessness. A way to heal oneself. But John is immune to the practice. He’s been bled dry already by people far less deserving. Grief, John knows, he will be carrying around with himself like Helen’s picture in his wallet.
People thin out, heading either for the airport, their home, or John’s house. The funeral people are waiting on him to finish filling the grave. But John can only stare at the six foot rectangle.
If anybody deserved to die, it should have been him. He earned it so many times over: for the times he killed, for the times he didn’t, for all of his blood-money that laid foundation to his new life. Helen didn’t.
“John,” Stiles says after a while. Despite himself, John startles. He’d not realized the boy still with him. “I’ll be waiting for you in the car, alright?”
John nods. He hears the splashes of feet behind him, and he turns to watch Stiles amble back to the parking, passing by and eyeing a familiar figure.
Marcus catches his look and John feels beckoned over. There is nothing else he can do for Helen now.
Once, Marcus explained to him how his new world operated, what the rules of it were and how distant they were from the rules that bound him as a creature and a wolf. The underground was distant from the supernatural society but cut from the same cloth. Thin threads connect them together in shapes of whispers, bedtime stories, wives’ tales.
Now, Marcus stands and has no explanation for his new world, for the real world, in which death means something, and is more valuable than golden coins.
“Why are you here?” John asks. He always infers a motive from people like him. But Marcus only gives him a look, shoulders sagging. John doesn’t think he has anything in him left to give.
“Just checking up on an old friend,” he says. There’s something poignant in his gaze which John cannot discern. It softens when he says, “Goodbye, John.”
-
The funeral sapped more from him than he’d originally thought. Even as he drives, John feels shut off, mechanical, and he cannot speak. In the house, with so many people around, it’s worse. He wishes he could just shout for everyone to get the hell out, let him grieve, and give him a chance to consider what the hell he’s going to do with the rest of his life now that it stretches ominously in front of him in a threat of endless torment.
The past three days Stiles had been an unobtrusive guest and a helping hand, even with his mandatory 3 a.m. coffee calls. Now, he wrangles Helen’s family and the few friends they have over at the reception. John doesn’t follow him with his eyes, but whenever he looks in a direction, there’s Stiles with a bottle of wine to refill glasses, or to offer some food, or to chat, and always, it seems, to steer people away from John.
Unlike Stiles, John thinks as he watches Gretta sit down on the couch beside him, he can’t fight off a mourning alpha werewolf.
The proximity enhances the severity of her perfume, making John wish he could gag, then wish he could douse her with water.
“Look at him,” she says quietly, as if they’re continuing a conversation they’ve had just moment before. “Thin, frail. I’m sixty-seven John, and I could snap him in half.”
John leans forward and curls himself around his glass of bourbon. He brings it to his nose, and for a few moments, all he can smell is the alcohol and whatever wood they’d used to barrell it in.
“You, John, I never liked. I wanted so much better for Helen. A stable pack to bring into the fold, a good nice beta. God knows the Assembly could have offered a better candidate than an omega. At least you weren’t afraid. You were never afraid of me.” She repeats it again then scoffs, as if she’s above being offended. As if being unafraid is something he should be ashamed of. But he understands what their little community thinks of him, a loner.
Wolves were never supposed to go without a pack. Jon is only a little better than a human, and only because he’d been born into his powers rather than made. He’s the scum on Gretta’s shoes, and every other alpha like her, who was born into power and family. It’s not dissimilar to children born into powerful families that hold a seat at the Table. It’s why he has never been intimidated. He’s already made a deal with one of the devils.
“At least you’re a wolf, I kept saying to myself.” Gretta continues to talk but John tunes her out, focusing instead on his drink, and the clock ticking. He knows everybody needs this to say goodbye to Helen as much as he does, but he wishes he could have been left alone with his grief.
Soon enough the bourbon is gone, and Stiles appears by his side to top of his glass, like a little house god of good intentions. He doesn’t touch John, but John feels the metaphorical hand on his shoulder when Stiles asks, “Are you alright?”
John’s good as long as he keeps drinking the good bourbon with wolfsbane in it. Werewolves might not be able to get drunk off of the regular stuff, but the plant cuts right through him.
He nods in response, and Stiles moves to Gretta. “More wine?”
Gretta scoffs and says, “Nothing from you.”
John lifts his head up enough to watch as Stiles’ eyebrows quirk and a fake smile appears on his face. “Maybe water would be better.”
Gretta takes an inconspicuous sniff, more for the snobbish effect than anything else, and John can actually see when Stiles’s scent, or rather lack thereof, connects with her. After he switched the black jumper for a proper suit the scent of wolf disappears, exchanged for the perfume of hair gel, after shave, and clothing detergent. Nothing particular. Nothing that would have helped John, or any other werewolf, to pick him out of the crowd.
After Stiles leaves, Gretta picks up her monologue. “Plain,” she says, “just like his father.”
John waits until she’s finished and finally turns towards her. “She would have said no.”
Gretta’s eyebrow lifts, creasing her forehead. “You have to speak up, John. You’re not making sense.”
“Even if you wanted to give her the bite, she would have refused. Just like Claudia refused.”
He waits for an outburst. Gretta was always that kind of person. But it comes in a different way. They can’t shout here, can’t throw words, and she can’t threaten him even though it had always been ineffective.
Instead, with as much cloying sweet venom as she can muster up, she says, “She could have lived if you’d let me bite her. Better a live wolf than a dead human. But it’s you who has to live with the consequences of your inactions.”
She sets down her glass of wine on top of the table and stands. She’s the first one to leave. The rest of the family starts trickling out: first the Stein’s, following after their alpha, then John and Helen’s friends. By the time the house is empty and Stiles nudges his foot with his shoe, John is ready to go to bed.
“I’ll clean up--” Before Stiles can finish the doorbell rings. He looks towards the foyer then follows up with, “--and you get the doors?”
In hindsight, it’s a good decision he brings the dog into the hallway where he reads the letter because it would have been quite something for Stiles to come upon him in the living room crying his heart out.
Helen had always known what she meant to John, because he’d never shied away from telling her. She’d understood him. She’d seen him. And now she’s managed not only to give him her family as support but also someone who is going to love him, and who John can love in Helen’s stead. She couldn’t give John a mint-new pack, but in her own way, she’d given him another family member. A dog that he can grow old with. John can even smell Helen on the letter when he brings it up to his nose, and he doesn’t know if he’s better or worse for it.
As it is, John manages to collect himself after a while, take a few fortifying breaths, clean his face. He leaves Stiles to finish cleaning up and heads for the bedroom. He can deal with everything else tomorrow.
It’s still somehow calming to hear noise from the kitchen, on the clock, at three in the morning, the espresso machine wringing out a pot of coffee that Stiles appears to subside on.
-
“How come I never knew you had a dog?”
Stiles is, somewhat expectedly, enamored with Daisy. He’s also dressed up in regular clothes: jeans, hoodie, the sneakers John had missed from before. He looks marginally more of an eighteen-year-old than before.
“Are you leaving?” John asks, tactless.
Stiles continues playing with Daisy as he answers. “Well, I was planning to but then Dad reminded me that I needed to looks into colleges here anyways.” He looks up at John quickly, as if he’d done something wrong. “If you don’t mind me hanging around for a day or two more.”
“Not at all.” He moves over to get cereal, and realizes he doesn’t have any dog food. ”She was delivered yesterday.”
He doesn’t even have to consider letting Stiles stay. Helen wouldn’t have blinked an eye. She always had a soft spot for him when it came to family repertoire, and after yesterday John is certain he’s becoming one of John’s favorite people as well. Not to mention he’d managed to clean up the house so well, John can’t even smell Gretta’s perfume on the couch anymore, though he’s convinced she’d sprayed some on there on purpose.
“Neat, thanks.”
Stiles continues petting Daisy, squatted on the floor as if he’s a child looking at ants, even as John goes about finish up his breakfast.
“I’m going out to the shop. I’ll drive you to the city,” John offers. He doesn’t get any opposition.
-
After dropping Stiles off, John goes to buy kibble, dog toys, towels. He meets a group of Russians, and John’s afternoon isn’t ruined as much as he’s reminded that nothing has really changed. Helen isn’t here, John’s world has imploded, and assholes still roam around in their stolen cars blasting pop music. New York has become apathetic. There’s too many of them to mourn.
-
Whether it’s because he’s in a different headspace or because he’s just always been bad with social cues, John doesn’t question it when Stiles sends him a text message telling him he’ll be coming home late. He’s there at three in the morning making coffee.
The reason why John wakes up in concern the next night, Stiles gone to the city again, is the lack of noise coming from the kitchen downstairs. His phone has no messages.
Laying in the bed, John considers a dozen or so scenarios, from gruesome death to drunk slumming, before he forces himself to roll out of it, much to Daisy’s distress. He needs to make sure. If not his mind, his wolf needs to do something about this break in routine.
John pads his way over to Stiles’ guest bedroom which is made-up and empty. He crack the door open and the scent inside rushes John’s senses, almost overwhelming when compared to the near-sterile scent Stiles usually carries. As if, John thinks as he slips inside, all of Stiles’ smells were being held in this room. It makes John uncomfortable, hair standing on edge. Something isn’t quite right but he does not know what.
Stiles’ backpack is gone but his suitcase remains. He unceremoniously flips it open and the scent that hits him then is of mountain ash. It’s so strong John has to lean back and cover his mouth. He smells wolfsbane as well and it’s not the kind that you drink.
However, whatever carried that scent is not in the suitcase. Jon searches it thoroughly but there’s nothing inside except regular clothes. The real problem now is how John could have missed so much wolfsbane entering his house, and the question immediately after, what does Stiles need so much of it for?
He straightens the suitcase, then walks out of the room. John thinks as he heads to the kitchen, but Stiles scent remains contained within the four walls of the guest-bedroom. It’s nowhere in the house. Stiles weirdly smelled of nothing. He scent-cleaned the house the same way.
John knows charms that can do that. In their society scent is almost the most important factor: eyes can fail, and perfume can attempt to mask, but you know a creature when you scent them. The only ones who wish to hide their scent are those who are not looking to be found or found out. Has John become so sloppy not to recognize another creature under his roof?
And yet, only so many people carry around so much wolfsbane, and only a few creatures can touch mountain ash. Those who do tend to be hunters.
John feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand just before something connects with it. It’s hard, metal. John topples to the floor, recognizing the feeling of a bat a moment later.
It connects with his ribs next. Had he not braced, they would have shattered. John can’t get his bearings right, can’t even get a breath in before a foot connects with his face, breaking his nose. His vision is hazy, swimming around the edges. His healing is focusing on the head injury. It’s critical time the assailant, whoever they are, uses to bash him up.
How did he not hear them? How could he not even smell them? A terrifying thought occurs to John: hunted by his own family in his own home. He feels someone’s heel hit right between his ribs and he groans in pain.
Someone turns on the light. John’s gaze focuses. His eyes hurt for a moment from adjusting so quickly. He notes the weapon first -- bat as he’d thought. Two -- no, three -- men. He can’t take them. Not right now. Hunters? Is Stiles one of them?
They start speaking Russian. Oh, John knows now what this is about. That doesn’t make it any less easy when he hears Daisy squealing and it makes it all the worse when he hears her sudden squealing stop. The silence is a horrible sound. Then, he hears the front doors close.
John listens intently as Stiles shuffles in, a strange tempo to his gate as if he’s dragging his feet. The Russians take positions by the wall, while one of them watches over John.
His nose may be broken, but even through it, he can still taste the scents from Stiles in the air, twisting and turning, into a nauseating concoction. Wolfsbane, blood, something else, worse. He smells like bodies left out in the sun to rot. In the next instance, all of those smells are gone, as Stiles walks into the room. Halfway through saying his name, there’s another crack, the bat connecting with the back of Stiles’ head. John, for the first time, considers that this Stiles might die. John has healing, but Stiles does not.
Clinging to consciousness, all John can consider is whether he has just let some bastards kill everything Helen worked so hard to give him.