LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Teen Wolf and it's characters and storylines belong to MTV Broadcasting and it's subsidiaries. This is a work of amateur, speculative fiction and no profit was made nor ever intended to be made.
AN/WARNING: This is a very dark fic, it's rated M for a reason and it's not for sexual content. I strongly suggest that anyone who takes issue in general with darkfic forgo reading this. Otherwise, please note, this is rated M for graphic violence, unflinching looks at adult survivors of child abuse and other dark themes. You have been warned.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts, glowing or critical (just keep it constructive boys and girls), so leave a review... they can make a lady's day.
The Sins of the Father
(Chris Argent and Family)
Families are living, organic things, they have a life of their own that is greater than the sum of their parts. This ever growing life transcends the individuals that make up a family, a clan, or even a pack. When a family is healthy, these always changing and intricate bonds keep the whole thriving, keep it evolving and strong. But when a family is sick, when it turns in on itself, for any of a vast number of reasons, those bonds begin to choke out the life of the whole. Rip it apart and feast on whatever remains, leaving a husk behind.
So how does it start? What makes a family go bad? Is it inevitable, are some clans just cursed? No one really knows, but it usually starts small, something so tiny that it gets lost and when the survivors pick themselves up and survey the damage, they can't even remember the defining event. And maybe that's how evil continues to spread, always in through the back door with a whisper and a soft step, lulling everyone into a false sense of security.
All families, clans and packs die eventually, every single one, only to be replaced with another. Nothing lasts forever... not even a storied family of hunters.
XXX XXX XXX XXX
Christopher Argent prides himself as a man who adheres to a simple moral code. The innocent are protected and the guilty are punished. In a world full of shades of grey and countless nuances, this simple, almost elegant, mantra has gotten him through many ordeals. It got him through a childhood lived largely without a mother, a father who was at best distant, a sister who always seemed like she was on the edge of a cliff and a life's trade already picked out for him and set in stone. His life is so complicated that he needs the simplicity of this code and, up until recently, he's had no reason to consider leaving it behind.
Then his daughter falls in love with a werewolf. His sister is revealed as a hebophiliac, arsonist and mass murderer, his wife dies and his father starts acting even weirder than he usually does. And suddenly this simple rule to live his life by stops being so useful. Suddenly his life gets so top heavy with complications and hidden agendas and lies that he would give anything to go back to the time when he thought they were the truth.
However, all of that is nothing in comparison to the unsettling suspicion that his father is lying to him. Not just hiding an agenda, he's always done that for as long as Chris can remember. No, he finds himself suspecting that his father is actively deceiving him, that he's crafting a facade around what's left of the Argent family since Kate and Victoria died. He knows that asking his father directly will get him nowhere... so he waits.
The past two years have been difficult. Kate had always been a fanatic, always so eager to curry their father's favor, but Chris would never have suspected her of the crimes it was revealed she had committed. Victoria had always been a protective mother, most hunter women were, the Mama Bear instinct amped up by all the hidden threats they knew were real. But he never thought she would stoop to attempting child murder to protect their daughter from a threat that even Chris had to admit was rather low. Scott could be annoying, but he'd rather slash his own throat than hurt Allison and Chris can admit that now.
So many truths that he has never questioned about the non-humans are starting to unravel at his feet. This is bad enough for a man who has been taught to do one thing and do it well... hunt the guilty ones down and kill them. He has always known he has a stricter code as to who he will declare open season on. No human family members, no kids... not ever... no matter how non-human they are, no pregnant females, and don't kill the ones that aren't guilty. Chris is well aware that there are those who don't share the rules he lives by. His sister didn't and his father... well it's becoming increasingly hard to ignore that Gerard acts like there is no such thing as an innocent non-human.
He waits for three months.
Then one day his father drops off his truck on his way to a hunt in Nevada, and asks him to take care of it. His father is gone for two hours before Chris can no longer control the urge to go through it. At first there's nothing out of the unusual, it's a restored 1946 Chevy truck and beside some receipts, the thing is the picture of cleanliness. Chris is about to get out when he notices a piece of paper sticking up from the floor. He reaches down and slips his hand under the floorboard to pull the paper out. It's clear it's been down there for years, he opens it up... and what he reads makes the past come out of nowhere and assault him all over again.
'Natalie Silko, 33 Sycamore Rd. San Clemente CA. Gets off of work at 8pm, takes bus as car is in the shop.'
He supposes that Allison hopes in her 17 year old heart that her mother was Chris's one and only love, but one true love only exists in fairy tales and poorly written romance novels. Real life is never that easy, never that simple. He loved Victoria with all his heart, loved her completely, loved the family and the life they built together, loved raising their daughter together. He mourns Victoria immensely and he thinks that in some way, even decades from now, he always will. But she wasn't his only love.
Natalie Silko is his ex-fiance, his first real and deep love. He met her when he was 19 years old and taking college classes part time while being a full time hunter with Gerard and Kate. They met at a late night diner that many students from the local community college frequented and they soon became friends. Within the year he and Natalie were more than friends and two months into a romantic relationship with her, he realized he was in love.
Natalie was funny, could get a full belly laugh out of him faster than anyone he had ever known, she was smart... smarter possibly than his father. She was adventurous, she was no weak and shrinking violet... she could take care of herself and handily, as she had proven to Chris the one time a few junkies had decided to try their luck on rolling them when they were leaving a movie theater. He felt at ease with her like he felt with no one else, when they moved into a small apartment together when they were 22 he finally realized why it was werewolves defended their 'dens' so fiercely. The apartment was home and hearth, and nothing felt better than entering it after everything else in his life may have fallen apart. When they were both 25, he asked her to marry him, and she said yes without hesitation. He'd been happy, proud... but also nervous.
She had no idea that he was a hunter, no clue that some of the myths and campfire stories people told to get a good chill up the spine were real. Chris could not, in good faith, marry her in front of G-d and his family and friends without telling her the truth. It took him till just a scant month before the wedding to work up the courage to call her from a hunt in New Mexico to ask her to clear her calendar for the night he's coming home and that they need to have a long talk. Chris could only hope that she wouldn't leave him for lying to her for so long, that she would believe him and choose to marry him anyway.
Natalie wasn't there when he got back, he waited all night and she never came home. In fact he never saw her again. The only thing missing from their apartment was a small suitcase, her purse and the money she had on her at the time. She took no cash from their joint checking account and there was no credit card trail. Her car was never picked up at the mechanics and after 72 hours he and her parents declared her missing. Her old childhood savings account that was in her name alone laid untouched, and the trail grew cold, not that it had ever been very hot to begin with. She was gone and remained a mystery and an unanswered question ever since.
It took Chris years get though that. At first he was convinced something or someone had taken her, hurt her, maybe killed her. But then as time went on he admitted to himself that maybe she just didn't want to marry him and couldn't work up the courage to tell him that herself. A few years later he met Victoria, fell in love again and had Allison. Life was good, until it wasn't anymore.
All of this is swirling in Chris's mind as he looks at this piece of paper. It could just be that his father had gotten involved with the search all those years ago, but Gerard had never made a secret of the fact that he would have preferred that his son marry another hunter. Less risk of total exposure he'd said all those years ago. His father had eventually told him that regardless if she had left of her own free will or foul play was involved, she wasn't coming back. That human on human crime wasn't their jurisdiction.
At the time Chris hadn't thought much of his father's callousness, that was who Gerard was, in fact if he'd had given him a lot of emotional support, Chris would have been suspicious. Now though, as he traces his finger over the letters of Natalie's name, he's no longer so sure. He knows his father is lying to him, that something has been going on under the surface for years, maybe more years than he cares to admit to himself... and Kate is no longer alive to ask.
He doesn't even really think about it, he just turns the keys in the ignition and drives the 2 hours to get to his father's house and lets himself in. He's not even sure what he's looking for, but he starts tearing the house apart to find it. It's in the attic that he finds several cardboard boxes stashed up under the eaves, where no one would see them unless they were looking for something. One by one he takes them down into the kitchen and puts them on the table.
For 30 minutes he stares at them, makes himself a pot of coffee and wonders if he really wants the answers to the questions that won't stop whirling around in his brain. He's not really sure how he knows that opening these boxes will change everything, but he does. Finally, mug in hand, he goes over, opens the one closest to him and starts digging.
At first there's nothing much there, written accounts of hunts using methods that Chris doesn't approve of, but frankly, ever since Chris moved out and had a family of his own, he's never wholeheartedly approved of Gerard's methods. Some of the accounts drive that point home to him very clearly: there's a reason they rarely hunt together anymore. He's starting to think that maybe he's been worried for nothing, and then he opens the second box.
In it is a blank white envelope dated two days before Chris got home to discover that Natalie was missing. He opens it... and his hand falls downward, fingers nerveless as Polaroid photos fall to the floor. At first he can't move, he can't think, he can't do anything but stare into middle distance and clench his jaw over and over again. He has no idea how long he sits there like that, but finally he leans down and picks the photos up and looks at them.
It is Natalie, duct taped to a chair, wide eyed and terrified. She's disheveled, and it's obvious she's been crying. But she also looks resigned, like she knows what's coming and she's accepted it. The pictures have dates and times on them and he arranges them on the floor in order. He watches the progression from angry defiance to pants wetting fear to the resignation he's seen in the eyes of those who are going to die and have made peace with their fate. There is only one way his father would have these, and that's if he took them himself.
Chris is on autopilot now. He goes back to the box and takes everything out, there are some cassette tapes and a player and old projector reels. He methodically takes everything downstairs to the basement and pulls out his father's old projector and sets everything up. It is only after he has turned the lights off and has his finger on the power button for the projector that he hesitates. One voice is screaming in his head that he doesn't want to watch this, that he doesn't want to know. Another voice is yelling that if Natalie had live through whatever is on these reels, than he has the duty to watch it and not bow out due to cowardice. He turns it on and then turns on the cassette player.
The image is of Natalie, taped to the chair, head uselessly flopping on her chest. She's clearly asleep. Then a younger image of his father walks into frame and starts slapping her in the face to wake her up.
"Wake up sweetheart. Time to answer my questions."
At first Natalie doesn't respond and then Gerard hits her so hard that her head snaps back and even Chris winces at the noise. She blinks a lot, then as her vision clears, she looks around her frantically.
"Wh... what happened? Where am I? Oh G-d... what the HELL is GOING ON!"
She looks... angry that someone would dare do this to her. And that is the very first clue that Chris gets that Natalie may have been more than she appeared to be all those years ago. The normal response to waking up in the state Natalie is, is panicked confusion, instead Natalie gives Gerard a slow simmering look of anger.
"What the hell are you doing Gerard? This is kidnapping and G-d alone only knows what else. What have you done?!" Her voice is angry, but there is a hint of something else to it, confidence that she has this handled, even from where she sits, in a place of absolutely no power. Chris can't understand why she isn't more... terrified? Something isn't quite right about this.
Gerard steps closer and leans down, smiling, but without mirth. "Did you really think we had no idea what you are Natalie? Did you really think you could just infiltrate my family and we wouldn't figure out your game?"
Natalie looks at him like he's crazy. "What are talking about Gerard, because frankly I'm going to enjoy it when you try and explain what you've done to me to Chris."
At this point Gerard backs up and beings to pace slightly in front of her. "You know, hunting witches is a whole different ballgame than hunting weres."
Chris stares, open mouthed at the flickering images. A witch? Natalie was a witch? He has no idea what to think, no idea what to say to the emptiness of the room. What he can do is sit down heavily in the chair behind him as his legs stop doing their job of holding him up. What he can do is continue to watch this horror show till the end.
Gerard continues to speak and pace. "With weres there's this whole ferocity, this feral nature. It's brutal and it gets the blood pumping. It's a test of strength and skill and I'm not ashamed to admit that it's an adrenaline rush too. But your kind? No... you're different, you fit in better than a were ever could. Unless one of us is trained to spot you, trained to hunt witches, we can be your neighbor and never know. With your kind it's all about the subtleties, because if you can see us coming, we've already lost. And you'll either attack or go to ground so well that we'll never find you again. Hunting weres is short and brutal, hunting witches is long and a battle of wits."
Then he goes back to standing in front of her and the smile is so without conscience, so without any sort of morality that Chris, even though his father is not here, even though this home movie he's watching is over 25 years old, shivers just the tiniest bit. The look on his father's face is evil. Why the hell did he never see this in him before? Because it's obviously been there, for at least 25 years, this evil has been there, inside him, looking out at the world.
Natalie goes very still. "And so you decided that the best thing you could possibly do is drug a witch and tie her to a chair... oh... I'm sorry, duct tape her? Gerard, I don't need to touch you to make your life a living hell. I don't even need to be in the same city as you, so why the dramatic reveal?"
"We hunt the ones who hunt us. And personally I take a much more... liberal interpretation of that. You started sniffing around my boy, you got in good didn't you? Now, as far as I can tell, you've killed no humans in the years you've been with Chris... but let's be honest with each other sweetheart. You're a witch, and it's only a matter of time, if you haven't already and just hidden it well. Your kind does that better than anyone else... hide things. Sometimes I think that a witch's true power isn't in their magic, in their psionics, it's in their innate sense of stealth and guile. You really are a master of that... aren't you Natalie?"
Natalie stares hard at Gerard. "I didn't know you were a hunter Gerard, I never had any inkling. I just fell in love with Chris. He called me the other day saying he was going to be back in town and that he needed to talk... I was going to tell him then. I think I know now what he wanted to talk to me about."
Gerard looks like her words aren't even penetrating, he's convinced himself of her guilt, even as Chris watches the video, he knows his father entered into this with Natalie's fate decided. He's never spent too much time hunting witches, weres are the Argent family specialty, but he knows enough to realize that if Natalie could have gotten herself out of this, she would already have done so already, the tape wouldn't be this long. Because she's right, a witch doesn't even need to touch you to make your life a living hell, and everyone who hunts them knows it.
"Sweetheart, let's stop with the games. You wanted what all you creatures want. You want a way in so that you can decimate hunters, so you get rid of us and have free rein with everyone else. Do you think that I'm stupid? You knew EXACTLY what you were doing, you seduced my son and wormed your way into his heart. Or at least... you thought you did."
Then he stops and crouches down beside her and smiles that smile again. "The best part of this whole thing is that you don't even realize how we strung you along, how we twisted you, how piece by piece you gave us all the info we needed. Did you really think Chris was in love with you, that he was actually going to marry you? He's been in on this the whole time. He always knew how this was going to end. With you duct taped to a chair and drugged so you can't use any of your powers."
He quietly laughs in her face. "Noticed that did you?"
Gerard shakes a bottle in front of Natalie, Chris can't see what it is due to the camera angle on the recording. But the look on Natalie's face tells him that his father drugged her with one of the few things that will clog up a witch's brain to the point where they can't use their powers. No wonder she's still sitting there.
She keeps up a good front though. "You're lying Gerard, and I don't need to be able to access my powers to know that. This is going to go the way of all captures... you want to turn me into an asset. Do you think I'm so green and wet behind the ears that I don't know how this game is played. You think I can give you intel on a coven you're hunting. There's the long road and the slow road to power... and some ladies are going the fast road and humans are dying... is that it? I hate to disappoint you Gerard, but as an asset I'm pretty useless. I left my coven years ago, before I even met Chris. I'm a solitary."
Gerard sighs and then pats her head like she's nothing more than sadly incompetent puppy. "You witches and your wars, it's like watching the CIA and the KGB fight it out during the cold war. Good covens versus bad ones, though personally sweetheart, I think you and I both know there's no such thing as a good coven, a good witch. And then there's the hunters policing it like the United Nations, except with a better handle on how to properly apply violence."
"It's all so covert ops, so Hollywood spy movie with talk of assets and turning them, double agents and the like. I understand the allure... for other hunters. But you see, I'm not one of those hunters. Battling witches was always a bit cerebral for me, not enough rush. It's not my specialty, it never was. Weres are my specialty and I've hunted nothing else since before my children were born."
And here is where Chris sees the fear blossom in Natalie's eyes. Hunter's that exclusively kill weres don't turn captures into assets, they torture them for information and then they kill them. Case closed. He can see her realize that her chances of survival are very low right now. She has no access to any power that could save her, no coven to know she's missing... and he's not there. He can see her being to wonder if he knows about this, has betrayed her by doing nothing. That thought, that thought right there, is like a punch to the gut. Natalie sat in that chair and considered the possibility that Chris had never loved her, had betrayed her, had been in on this from the very beginning. It's one of the hardest realizations that he's ever had.
For the next little while what happens is almost typical. Gerard uses all the methods he would use on a were, but since Natalie is a witch, it's like using a baseball bat where a surgical scalpel would be better. She tells him nothing, and though she grunts and sometimes sheds tears in pain, she never screams for Gerard. Chris can tell that as time moves on, something sadistic in his father is not being fully satisfied by this. He needs to hear the screams, he needs to enjoy her pain... and Natalie is giving him very little enjoyment.
A few times as Gerard presses the electrodes into her skin, Chris thinks he can see some sort of sick sexual gratification in his eyes, on his face. He pants a little too hard, he breathes in just a little too ragged. It makes his son sick to know that there is every possibility that his father may very well have gotten off on causing his fiance agonizing physical pain, mental too most likely. He can only imagine that on some level it must hurt a witch to have no access to the part of her brain that makes her what she is. Everytime he thinks his father has reached a crescendo on his insane psycho-sexual ride, Natalie's lack of screaming seems to destroy it for him. How has he never realized how ill his father is?
Chris doesn't time the torture, doesn't note the time stamps, he just knows that it goes on longer than a human could have endured it. It's still a hurdle for his mind to jump, that Natalie was never human, a small part of him has separated itself from this orgy of violence to wonder what his reaction would have been had she been able to tell him what she really was. It's not unheard of for a hunter to leave the game because they go off the reservation and fall in love, but it's never been very common. And the social repercussions are high. Too high for a lot people to risk it. He wonders if he would have... he will never know.
Eventually two things happen, Gerard realizes that he is going to get nothing out of Natalie, and Natalie stops being afraid and starts being calmly resinged to the inevitable. Chris can see it in the image of her face, but he keeps hoping, hoping that his father let her go and that she's alive somewhere and stayed away out of fear. He's not that lucky however... and neither is Natalie.
His father backs up and visibly regains control of his emotions. "I see you're as tight lipped as most of your sisterhood usually is. Well sweetheart, time is running out and soon those drugs are going to wear off. Can't have you getting your revenge now can I?"
Natalie doesn't say much, just levels a piercing gaze at him, waiting for him to finish it. How he finishes it is something so terrible that not even Chris can fathom anyone being this cruel. He's hunted and killed many guilty creatures over the years, and his kills have always been clean. He doesn't go in for torture, he doesn't go in for slow death. He's always been a very one shot, one kill sort of man. His father is clearly not and there is no possible way to ignore that ever again.
Gerard picks up a large can of kerosene and dowses Natalie completely with it.
She just gives him a look of loathing and a sardonic smile. "I want you to know that nothing you did made me scream. I'm going to die loud, but it's going to be because of the fire, not you."
He just smiles condescendingly at her and lights a match. "You know what they say... burn the witch." and then he drops it.
Nothing burns faster than kerosene, nothing. Natalie goes up like a dry Christmas tree. And she screams, high pitched, desperate, dying in agonizing pain. She thrashes in her bonds, human instinct to survive... somehow, to stop the pain any way it can takes over, till abruptly it stops. She might still be alive, but she's been burned too severely to scream anymore.
Chris stands so fast that the chair he's on tips over and falls to the floor. "NO!"
It's the sound of man grieving for his lover, his hand reaches out to her image, like he can stop this somehow, like he can save her. But as his hand moves in front of the projector and the image of the flames flickers over his skin... he realizes; this was 25 years ago. This happened before he ever got home and realized that she was missing. Natalie was dead before he ever even stepped in the door of their apartment. This is old news to his father, something he thinks he's successfully hid forever, and wherever Natalie is, this is old news to her too. The only one who's grieving... is him.
He collapses to his knees and cries, the cries eventually turn into wracking sobs as he grieves Natalie for the very first time. Angered that he never got the chance to do so when she died, to bury her. He's a realist, he knows he never could have saved her, he wasn't even there... but to know his father most likely threw her body in some random and unmarked hole somewhere makes him shake with as much rage as his grief stricken sobs shake him with sadness.
When he finally gets back up, the projector has long since run out of tape. He shuts it off and then methodically goes back upstairs to the kitchen and goes through ever single box. What he finds are things too terrible to contemplate that they were committed by his family. His father has murdered and tortured all over the country and into Canada and Mexico. He's taken trophies, as there are pictures of them, Some of the creatures he's killed are very guilty and deserved to die... but not the way Gerard apparently chooses to kill when not around his son. However many, if not perhaps most are innocent, their only crime being non human. The evidence is as overwhelming as it is sickening... his father is a serial killer, the only reason he's never been caught is because his victim preference is non-human. Non-humans keep the lowest profiles they can and when they go missing, their respective communities figure it's by hunters and so no one reports anything. It's like a regular serial killer murdering prostitutes... because it's usually safe.
In the last box he finds something rather cryptic. A notation in a ledger of his kills: 'Tovah has abandoned me to her morals.'
It can only mean Tovah Levine, a very old and now very retired hunter. She served in World War 2 as an army nurse who was with the troops who liberated Auschwitz, and she is very fond of saying that humans are every bit as capable of evil as non-humans, we just don't have a justice system equipped to deal with the non-humans. She's in her 90's now and lives in an assisted living facility in Detroit, Michigan. He calls and asks her what the notation means.
"Are you sure you really want to know Chris? Somethings can't ever be unlearned, no matter how badly you want to." Her quavery voice is laden with warning.
"I just saw an old home movie of my father burning my fiance alive 25 years ago, because she was a witch, one that had killed no humans as far as he could tell. So I think I'm pretty well past the point where more terrible revelations about the man are going to shock me Tovah."
He can hear her take an deep breath over the line and then she starts talking... and he wonders if there are any depths left for his father to sink to.
"It was the last active hunt I went on, in retrospect I was too old even then and should have never been involved. But... I was the best tracker in the area at the time, so your father didn't mind that I wasn't going to be very much help if we were attacked."
"Anyway, we were hunting down a were with a taste for killing children on the full moon, we found him, we killed him and we buried him and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. I still don't know why your father never once tried to hide from me what he was doing, or why he dragged me along... but he did, and when it was over, I told him to forget he knew me."
"You've seen a lot of evil Tovah, what could he possibly do that was worse than the Nazis?" Chris interjects. He realizes his father is evil, but he still has to wonder what he did that made Tovah Levine flinch. After all, she is a woman famous for not flinching.
"It's very rare for per-pubescent children to shift. Most weres won't bite anyone that young and and born weres rarely change before the onset of puberty, but it does happen. And when it does they still need to be educated, they still need to be prepared to live a life. In an area where there are some child weres a special school will be up and running. You can't put child weres in a regular school environment, they just don't possess the control to make it in that setting. There was one in in the basement of one of the many abandoned industrial plants in Detroit. There were five children being taught there. Michigan is very active when it comes to weres; packs, prides and other groups make their homes there, so while five would be a lot from any one group, the school was being operated for the entire region. It was a cooperative effort with three teachers."
For a little while Tovah doesn't say anything and Chris can tell she's a bit lost in her memories. He also can tell where this is going and he doesn't want to hear... but at this point he can think of no excuse to hide from bad intel now. The verdict is in, he just wants to know how many people knew it before he did.
"He firebombed the whole thing, burned it to the ground, The fire was so hot, due to the chemicals that had been at the plant that the fire department had no choice but to contain it and let it burn itself out. All five children and the three teachers died in the blaze. Unlike what the movies will tell you, it's very rare for a body to incinerate completely and leave no trace. But these bodies did, thanks to the chemical nature of the fire and amount of time it was allowed to burn." Her voice wavers, not in age but in emotion. That fire had been on the news, and in the years since, it's clear that Tovah has never forgotten a moment of it.
"I tried to stop him, they were children, elementary aged children and three teachers who we still don't know if they were weres or not. And even if they were, no evidence was there that said they had ever killed anyone. Your father didn't care, he murdered eight innocent people for no other reason than that they weren't human. It was chilling Chris... and it was something I couldn't live with."
Chris agrees. "The fact that my father has had fewer and fewer friends as the years go by tells me that he's spent a lifetime doing things that plenty of people couldn't live with."
Tovah makes a non-committal noise and then continues. "More and more people have left the famed Gerard Argent on what is becoming his increasingly barren island."
"Why didn't you tell me what he'd done Tovah? You should have contacted me, why keep it a secret?"
"How could I know you weren't in on it?" she asks
"You know me Tovah, I go by a stricter version of the code than most. Why would you ever think that I would approve something, anything, like the things he's done?"
Then she levels a bombshell that shouldn't really still be a bombshell. "Your sister was there, why wouldn't I think you were in on what looked like an Argent family battle plan?"
"Kate was there?" his voice hitches. He knows what she was, what she did to Derek Hale and his family, but it's still painful to deal with, it's still a mystery how she went so bad.
"Look... Chris, I don't want to cast aspersions on the dead, and if something was going on than it was far more his fault than hers... but something was not right between the two of them."
What do you mean?" he asks.
"The way he looked at her, the way his touch would linger on her. The way she depended upon him, looked to him. It wasn't the way a father and daughter should behave. Keep digging Chris, whatever you've found, there's more there."
Then she hangs up the phone and Chris is left with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. His father is a serial killer, someone who murdered the woman his son loved and then 25 years later pressed that same son to kill his wife, a sexual-sadist and now a child murderer as well, the thought that there could be more isn't so much sickening as it is exhausting.
Exhausting though it may be, Chris gets back up and searches the only room remaining. His father's bedroom; and what he finds there finishes hollowing out the hole in his chest that he's positive he can never fill back up again.
It's long past nightfall, around 10 pm when he finds the secret drawer in the small chest that the TV set rests on. Inside are stacks of home burned dvds with dates written on them. Chris does not want to watch from the beginning, and something inside him refuses to even reach for the ones dated in the years of his childhood. Instead he picks one dated two years ago, from about four months before Kate came to Beacon Hills and puts it in the dvd player.
Almost immediately he's retching and reaching for the wastebasket. On the tv screen is his father and Kate... naked... his father on her... in her... calling her sweetheart... defiling her... violating her. He was wrong, there were new depths for Gerard to sink to.
He vomits till there's nothing left but dry heaving into the wastebasket. His family is a mockery, he's been living a lie all his life. His father is evil, his sister was destroyed before she ever had a chance to be normal and sane... the first dvd was dated the year she was 7. His first love died in a way no one should die... his life and his family are a lie. There's nothing left.
Then as he wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt an absolutely horrifying thought comes to him... Allison. She spent most of last year with Gerard, his father twisting her, she had started acting and behaving just like Kate. His father called her sweetheart...
Years later Chris will say that the next twelve hours are a blur. Kate and their father aren't the only ones who know how to set a fire that will never come back on them. Thankfully his father's house is isolated, so no one sees him as he stands in front of the burning wreck of the Argent family home. As the blaze lights up the night, Chris is positive that there is a litany of sins his father committed that he will never know about, and he's okay with that. The one's he's found out about are difficult enough to live with.
Then he calls Deaton, of all people, to ask him to stay at the house with Allison, that's he's going to be gone for a small bit and he doesn't want her alone. After that he's in his father's truck, driving to Nevada. It's a long drive and he never turns on the radio.. just sits there alone with his thoughts. An enraged former lover, husband and brother, a terrified father too scared to even contemplate what his own father may have done to his daughter.
AN: This is another 2 chaptered fic. There will be a Kate prequel posted afterward. The lovely Erika has nicknamed this saga as the Argent Family Clusterfuck of Feels... and I hope you all think it lives up to the title.
Also, a hebophiliac is a person who is sexually attreacted to pubescent children. Not a pedohiliac, who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescanet children. A hebophiliac is an adult who is sexually attracted to teenagers.