Chapter Text
Sins of the Mother
A Dragel Universe/Teen Wolf Crossover
By Sif Shadowheart
Chapter One: Break Before You Bend
As Stiles fell to the chilling, implacable granite hardness of the Argent basement, pain shooting in sparks and shards and spikes up and down his body, he had a moment as he curled up instinctively to protect his now-bruised ribs to regret a questionable life choice or two.
Or ten, a metric strictly dependant on whether his ribs were only bruised courtesy of Granddaddy Psychopath aka Gerard Argent, septuagenarian patriarch racist asshole who apparently had the punch strength of a fuckin’ thirty year old.
The epic asshat.
There were quite a few points that Stiles thought might need a bit of review: helping Scott, his best-friend, sneak around and date Allison, Gerard’s granddaughter, was probably at the top of that list.
Because look: just because a member or two (or, like, all of them from what Stiles could tell at this point, with evidence to back it up both admissible in a court of law and otherwise) of a family tree were Class-A Psychos didn’t mean that a single person who happened to be related to them was bad news.
Everyone had that family member that they didn’t like or that they didn’t talk about.
(Though, to be fair, Stiles’s Great-Uncle Stanislav from his dad’s stories never burnt ninety percent of a family alive in their own home.)
But given that Allison had apparently had a psychotic break of epic proportions that started with falling in line with her dear doting grandpa’s genocidal agenda and now included hunting, imprisoning, and torturing (or at least being okay with torture going on) her own classmates as one of her hobbies, he had to say that any grace he might have had for anyone bearing the name Argent was officially done-and-dusted.
Case in point: not one but two of their classmates currently hanging from the homemade workshop of horrors that was an electrified chain link fence behind where Stiles was now huddled on the cold, unforgiving floor.
Okay, yes.
Those classmates were also werewolves.
And Erica had knocked Stiles out with a piece of his own car, defiling and near-fatally injuring his precious jeep Roscoe in the process.
There had been a few attitude issues from the newly-turned wolves, sure.
The dependence on leather (Derek’s influence occasionally being more questionable at certain points than others given the big-bad-alpha’s fashion choices) was concerning.
But none of it - none - was deserving of being served up to a man whose literal life mission was exterminating everything-and-anything non-human.
Or anyone who simply got in his way.
Like, say, Stiles.
Who’d been plucked away from his single shining moment of lacrosse glory, scoring the winning goal in the championship game, by Grandpa Argent and several of his goons.
A man and his lackeys who had held the safety of everyone at the lacrosse game, including Stiles’s father, against his coming with them without drawing attention.
The power cutting out literal moments after he spotted the geriatric bastard and his taser-and-gun-toting minions helped significantly.
Shit.
His dad was probably losing his goddamn mind.
Fuck, with everything that had gone wrong - to say nothing of the bodies that had dropped - since Peter Hale snapped out of his six-year catatonia to go on a murder-spree, there was no probably about it.
“What the hell, dude?” Stiles snarked, spitting out a mouthful of blood after he’d been hauled back onto his feet by Thing One and Thing Two for another round of Gerard’s version of a reality adjustment. “I thought Argents were all about wolves?” Mentally he apologized to Erica and Boyd watching everything at his back.
It was a fact that he’d latched onto about two seconds into realizing that wolfy company or not - there was no way out of the Argent basement.
Not at the current status quo.
Something would have to give.
And since his attempt to free them had laughably failed given the sheer voltage running through the chain link - which he could handle, maybe, long enough to get them down if they weren’t cuffed, with metal - he had a feeling that that something was going to come at a cost paid in blood.
His.
Either that or his faint hope of Gerard getting bored would bear fruit, but that was about as likely as Scott realizing that the world existed outside of his own personal dramas - so about a snowball’s chance in an Australian summer.
That if Derek knew that something was wrong with his betas the Hale alpha would’ve already torn through the torture-chamber hidden in the depths of Beacon Hills suburbia went without saying.
Stiles didn’t know what was up there, but he was hoping (for more than one reason) that the problem was one of the Argents knowing how to block pack bonds, not something more…gruesome.
If there was anyone on the planet that had already suffered far too much at the hands of the Argents, it was Derek.
Honestly, the fact that the broody sourwolf of an alpha still found the strength to put one foot in front of the other, let alone try and rebuild family and pack was far more impressive than Stiles had ever let on.
Just another point to chalk up on the scoreboard of lost moments he regretted.
(His mom died when he was a kid. There were a lot of lost moments that he regretted. Or maybe it was the lost potential for moments. Given the way she’d died…yeah. It was hard to say.)
The old man snorted derisively as he eyed the nearly-limp form of the disgusting sympathizer with contempt.
“Throw him back at the school.” Gerard ordered, turning and striding up the stairs to the main portion of his greatest disappointment’s house. If only Christopher had had a fraction of his sister’s - or even his unlamented wife’s - viciousness… Ah well. Perhaps that was why most Argent men were meant to be soldiers and not leaders. Not everyone could have Gerard’s strength, either of mind or purpose. “He can be a message to dear Scott about what happens when one doesn’t play by the rules…”
And with that, Gerard took his leave.
He had plans to complete, and a pack of mutts to wipe from the face of the earth.
Gerard couldn’t waste anymore time on yet another all-too-human disappointment.
Little did he know, but that?
That order, that dig at both Stiles Stilinski and Scott McCall, that casual - contemptuous - disregard for what he thought was an average human boy?
That would be the last mistake he ever made.
Even if he wouldn’t know that for some time to come.
Back in the basement, Goon One gave a vicious grin to Goon Two as they let the bruised and battered form of a weak little kid fall to the ground.
They were adamant followers of the Gerard Argent way of hunting.
The only good wolf was a dead wolf.
And humans who knew and didn’t follow that same train of thought?
Just as bad, and almost worse, than the creatures they hunted.
“Well, smartass,” Goon One snarled, pushed over his limit for sass hours before but kept on his leash by the old man’s presence. Now Gerard was gone and while, yes, he had left orders behind. There were some…gaps there where he could still play. If only a little.
Before picking up the snarky pain-in-the-ass, Gerard had been firm: no matter the provocation, Stilinski had to live. There might be plans in play to replace the good Sheriff, but they weren’t in place yet. And there was nothing so likely to cause complications and draw unwanted attention as the disappearance of a law enforcement officer’s kid. Especially a LEO as beloved in their community as Noah Stilinski.
A love that had doubled or tripled in the last couple days after a random high schooler decided to go on a murder spree using a fucking kanima as his weapon of choice.
With a third of the deputies and support staff - every unfortunate sucker who had been on duty when that idiot Matt Daehler decided that killing cops was a remedy for being a murder suspect - dead and Beacon Hills national news, the hunters had to watch their step more than usual.
It was a reality that kept the worst of the hunter’s proclivities in check.
If only just.
“You heard the man, gotta go and play a good little bitch and take a message to your pet mutt.” He snickered, his partner - never one for the same dramatics, merely a cold desire to end the threat of wolves (which was why they were paired together in Gerard’s actually-not-incompetent wisdom) silent as ever. Which was perfectly adequate. He didn’t need to speak to the wolves or their conspirators to complete his calling. “But first,” the talkative hunter flicked out his stun-baton, an illegal weapon to possess and carry in the State of California (if hunters cared about civilian legalities) and that was before it had the voltage amplified to take down werewolves. With their healing capacity and high tolerance for pain. He swiped his tongue across his lower lip, the sting from where the little bastard had nailed him with a crack of his skull before Argent had threatened the bystanders at the game stinging with every word from his mouth. “I owe you one.”
“Argent said alive.” The second hunter spoke up for the first time, drawing the first’s attention for a split-second off of the human boy crumpled at their booted feet.
Ignorant - or just apathetic - to the agony shooting through him.
Oh, not physically, though he certainly was smarting from Gerard’s tender mercies.
But tearing apart his emotions, digging at his heart and mind - maybe even his soul.
Stiles had never been a dumb kid.
He might act like it, a lot actually, but he had a high IQ and was raised in and around a police station for most of his formative years.
More than anything, he knew people.
Had seen them both at their bests, and their worsts, and everything in between.
So when Grandpappy Asshole mentioned Scott after trying and failing for hours to torture any-and-every bit of information Stiles might have about the Hale Pack out of him, it didn’t take more than a moment for his clever mind to put the pieces together.
And for the little bit of faith that he still had in him - that despite all the distance, the change in their friendship, the guilt and the blame - that despite all of that, they were still playing on the same team.
That they were still family, brothers in everything but blood.
That their bond was only bent rather than broken.
But…this?
Working for Gerard?
(And it had to be for, no matter what bullshit Scotty had tried to tell himself or however he’d rationalized betraying everything they were supposed to be about. They were supposed to be on the good side. Maybe not entirely good or righteous or innocent. But not hunters. Not the Argents. Not the same kind of people who could light a match and burn down a house with eleven people inside after trapping them with mountain ash. People like Gerard Argent, who trained Kate, who may not have literally put the match in her hand but sure as hell would’ve if he’d had the chance. People like Gerard didn’t have allies. Especially with the same type of supernatural creature that they’d spent their entire lifetime hunting. They had pawns.)
That was a choice that there was no coming back from.
And the jagged tears of the broken shards of more than a decade of friendship ripped through Stiles in a cold northern California basement with all the ruthless efficiency of razor wire coated in acid.
Shattering everything in its wake.
Even - as Stiles keened faintly in the back of his throat, keeping the scream that threatened to tear out of him inside by nothing but sheer will and the determination to not give his captors the satisfaction - things that were never meant to come undone.
Despite the fact that the bindings themselves had been loosening and fraying for more than a year - no matter how much Stiles had tried to ignore it or deny it.
But then, when those bindings were laid down, no one - even his mother - had really been planning for someone like Stiles to be the one to bear them.
Or the detour his life would take that would leave him broken and bleeding on an icy concrete floor and reaching out for something - anything - to make him feel whole again after having his world torn apart with five little words:
“...a message to dear Scott…”
Words that played over and over in his mind on repeat.
Words that managed what losing a dozen men and women that he’d known for years in most cases hadn’t managed. If only because Stiles hadn’t seen Matt kill them. No matter what that vicious little fucker had said about Jackson being the killer. As a kanima, Jackson was little more than a murder puppet. Those deaths were on Matt - may he rot in whatever hell Gerard had sent him to.
Now if Stiles had seen, that would have been a different scenario altogether.
Maybe one or more of them would’ve lived, if Stiles had known what was going on just outside his father’s office as they searched for actual evidence of Matt being the mastermind behind Beacon Hills’ latest round of serial killings. Before Daehler more than doubled-down on his psychopathy and murdered a station full of sheriff’s deputies, anyway. Those deputies, that Matt had ordered killed with no more concern than swatting a fly and then left in gruesome piles of bloodied and torn corpses in the same halls that Stiles had spent learning to compile evidence and pick locks, had been friends to Stiles. Caregivers, aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.
They’d been his.
If Gerard hadn’t killed Matt, none of Scott’s sermonizing about what Scott considered acceptable would’ve mattered to Stiles.
He would’ve handled it himself.
If Gerard hadn’t killed him, if Stiles had seen the deaths happening, if if if.
If Scott hadn’t decided to betray everything they were supposed to be…
If, if, if.
Stiles was tired of what ifs.
He was tired of fighting to keep down the beast inside of him. The one that wanted blood. Whether that beast was of his own making - his darker urges and impulses that he’d learned through osmosis weren’t exactly acceptable for day-to-day life - or something different, he didn’t know.
He’d always been this way, always been fighting against what his instincts said - either in a whisper or a scream.
It was a part of him.
Albeit: a part that had gotten more and more insistent about speaking up lately.
Something had to give.
Something had to change.
So, exhausted, beaten down, but bone-deep enraged beneath it all: something did.
Even if that something sounded like a roar of rage that was distinctly inhuman - and worse, came from none other than his own throat.
Far away, protected in a nevermore realm, Harry Potter-Nott of the Gorgens-Nott Circle frowned in confusion as he felt something click into place deep inside of him.
It wasn’t a soulbond, not yet.
But it was the promise of something.
A mere moment later, a notification from the central dragel records office of Nevarah, specifically the department in charge of recording dragel inheritances lit up and chimed in the corner of his eye.
Huh.
Imagine that.
When he’d been notified years ago - more than sixteen according to the earth-realm calendar - that he’d been assigned to a potential mentoring position, he’d been stunned.
It could happen to anyone, in theory.
The magic and enchantments powering the inheritance records finding a suitable correspondence between the magic of an adult and a newborn were rarely wrong and had a reach that was almost unparalleled.
But then the day that marked his mentee’s sixteenth birthday had come and gone - and Harry hadn’t received a notification with the kid’s address or location to go help with an imminent inheritance.
So it just…lingered, the magic that marked them for each other waiting in limbo until the kid turned twenty-five and aged out of being able to inherit as a dragel, the potential inside them turning truly dormant instead of waiting for them to grow strong enough to survive it coming to the fore.
Now it was active, and more it was calling.
Firming his lips, Harry acknowledged receipt of the notification and then rose to gather up a few of his bonded to travel with him.
At least one question of why Harry? Had been answered.
The kid - and wow, Harry wasn’t even going to try to pronounce that name - was from Harry’s old home: the Earth Realm.
Given his preference, it was a place he’d never return.
Given the preferences of his Circle, well, he certainly wasn’t going to travel alone.
Not if he didn’t want more than a dozen bonded chasing his tail and breathing metaphorical - and not so metaphorical, depending on which bonded was involved - fire over him putting himself in potential danger.
There were realms less welcoming to dragel and dragel-kin than the Earth-Realm,Terra.
But they weren’t many.
No, no, he’d bring backup.
For his own sanity, if nothing else.
Watching as hunters beat the shit out of one of the bravest - maybe to the point of stupidity, but brave - boys she had ever met was a worse torture than the taser burns and the wolfsbane as far as Erica Reyes was concerned.
Yeah, sure - Derek had explained the risks that came with the Bite, but Erica hadn’t really known what she was getting into.
Hadn’t really cared, to be honest.
Epilepsy was killing her - one way or another - and she would’ve made a deal with the devil themself for even a shitty paranormal-romance plot’s worth of a chance to escape the fate that her body had caged her within.
What Derek had promised had been way more believable than that, complete with negatives to balance out the positives.
And, whoo boy, did she underestimate just how deadly serious Derek had been about those negatives.
Just as serious as he’d been about the Bite curing her epilepsy as it turned out, and wasn’t that bit of reality slapping her in the face right about now.
If Derek’s rough-and-ready (but fucking effective, have to give the grumpy bastard that) training hadn’t been the wake up call she’d needed after the sudden power-trip of her new-and-improved wolfy self, the first go-around with a lizard-creature that was paralysing and killing people to go with the apparently constant threat of hunters had been.
And fuck: she knew she’d made a mistake leaving Derek, dumping everything on him and blaming him, but she’d been terrified.
For the first time in years, she’d actually been afraid to die.
Which wasn’t a surprise: for the first time in years, she’d finally been able to live.
And then…Stiles went down, limbs twitching and body spasming under voltage that she knew could take down a werewolf.
When he didn’t get back up right away, she wasn’t surprised.
Infuriated, torn to pieces with emotional anguish, but not surprised.
They’d wanted information on Derek, on the Pack, and Stiles, stubborn, nosy, impossible Stiles had refused to play ball.
He walked off threats from werewolves like they were nothing, held up Derek - who was no featherweight - in a pool along with himself for hours, and had a mouth that took no prisoners.
But at the end of the day: Stiles was only human.
Or at least that was what she thought.
A fact that had been as solid and real to her as the sun rising in the east. Werewolves were real. Wolfsbane could both kill and heal. Stiles was human. Basic tenants to keep in mind in her new life.
When he laid on the unforgiving floor and she heard his heart stop beating, it rammed that home even deeper than before.
Erica - any wolf - could and would survive things that would and could kill a human.
Could and would kill Stiles.
She would’ve sworn by it.
Right up until his heart started beating again, his eyes flashed open - but, but they weren’t right - and he stood back up with an enraged roar that even Derek himself would’ve been proud of.
In that moment, Erica felt the few bits of solid fact that she’d been balancing herself on shatter and break away.
Because, that Stiles?
That Stiles was anything but an average human.
Though what he was…that was a different question entirely.
One that she hoped she lived long enough to get answered…and with the way Stiles was literally tearing through the hunters…she might just manage that after all instead of dying in a hunter’s torture chamber.
Less than a mile away in an abandoned warehouse, several werewolves turned their heads in confusion.
They thought they heard…but no.
That was impossible.
They all knew the monsters that plagued their small town - almost all of which were right in that room.
There wasn’t anything else roaming their not-so-peaceful streets…
Was there?
One of them - though he couldn’t be called a werewolf anymore, strictly speaking - wasn’t confused.
Ah, Stiles, he thought, I do like you.
If, for no other reason, than you keep things interesting.