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Two - (I Can Almost See)
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If Stiles had known about the rest of the house, he probably wouldn't have stayed last night.
It's super dark and gloomy, all exposed wood and unfinished walls. One room has a tarp spread across the floor; another holds a toolbox and scattered tools. Wires hang from the ceiling at random intervals. Crates and debris and laminate flooring are bundled away in corners. It's like a creepy murder house, and it's probably enough to make a horror movie location scout salivate.
Beyond that, it's no good for Stiles, personally. In his own expert experience, there's some truth to the legend that construction disturbs ghosts, and he's not really keen to see the dead Hale family manifesting all over the place.
But the thing is...it is really cold. And it's probably better to be uncomfortable and/or traumatized by spirits than frozen to death in the snow.
Derek shows him around the house, gesturing matter-of-factly to the different rooms, tersely explaining what he's done or is doing to them. It sounds like Peter isn't really helping as far as construction goes, though Derek doesn't much sound like he minds.
There are no full-blown people in the rooms, not like Cece and the boy. But Stiles once or twice hears the murmur of conversation, or faint music, always just out of earshot. Derek pretends not to notice him fidget, though, which is pretty cool of him. And the house itself is actually interesting enough that Stiles isn't always feigning interest.
"Dude, that's so old-fashioned," Stiles murmurs, running his hand along the ridges of the dumbwaiter Derek shows him. "And also a tiny bit creepy."
"Yeah. My youngest brother and I…" Derek frowns, his brows furrowing, and for a second it seems like he won't finish the sentence. "We used to play with it sometimes," he continues at last. "He was small enough to actually fit inside, so we'd sneak him around the house sometimes, like sending him downstairs to spook my dad when he was working alone."
"You weren't an only child?"
"Huh? Oh. No, I had two brothers, and a sister. And my cousins, Uncle Peter and Aunt Olivia's kids—Cece and Elliot. And Aunt Senna and her daughter Hailey. We were a big family. Uncle Rhys lived here with us, too."
"Oh," Stiles murmurs. "I'm sorry." He feels really dumb saying it, but then he remembers he's never been offended by someone saying it to him. And anyway, Derek shrugs it off.
"It was a long time ago," he murmurs.
A door opens somewhere down the hall. Stiles thinks it's just in his head until a familiar voice speaks. "The stray's still here," Peter says lightly. Stiles turns to find that his blue eyes are sharp.
"I'm not planning to be one," Stiles replies. "A stray, I mean. Or uh, I can, like..."
"I really don't care," Peter says, noncommittal. "What's your name, stray?"
"Stiles," he replies after a second of hesitation. He doesn't want anyone piecing things together and bringing him back to town, but he's not really planning to stick around long enough for that to happen.
Peter glances at Derek, who shrugs again. It seems to be his normal method of communication.
"Stay downstairs, Stiles," Peter orders, and then he disappears into the room from which he'd come.
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After that, Stiles makes himself scarce, leaving Derek and Peter to do whatever they'd been doing before he'd arrived. He restlessly paces the living room, or hunches and shivers against the front windows. Outside, the world is covered in white. The whole house feels like it's holding its breath, sealed up and silent.
Eventually, Stiles curls up at the bay window to watch the ghosts come and go.
Derek's brothers are his frequent companions, maybe because they're noisy and rambunctious and hard to miss. They come carrying lacrosse sticks and backpacks, or they sit in their pajamas and argue about movies, their mouths blue from sour candies. He doesn't catch their names.
Others come and go as well: occasionally, a young girl Stiles can never quite hear sits to argue with the boys. There's a man with salt-and-pepper hair who always passes through the room directly, like his mind is somewhere else. There's the sound of a woman humming in the foyer, and the smell of cleaning chemicals fills the air, but Stiles doesn't see her.
In the evening, Stiles returns to the kitchen to see what can be salvaged for dinner (black beans and rice, because there's not much else in the cabinet and there are enough spices around to make it palatable). It's then that he sees Peter's wife for the first time. He thinks it's probably her because she holds the girl from earlier, Cece, in her arms—though the toddler seems a tiny bit bigger now. Older.
The woman has a swathe of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and there's a sly twist to her smile that makes Stiles think she and Peter were probably good for each other. "I know you don't like it, Talia," the woman murmurs, rubbing Cece's back. "But I'm not sure it's good to stick your nose into it. You might just make things worse for Laura."
"That's my job, to stick my nose where it doesn't belong," someone snorts from the living room. Around the corner, Stiles can see a dark-haired woman stripping a coat from her shoulders to throw it across the back of the sofa. "I snoop. And I interfere. I'm the Alpha."
"So I've heard," Probably-Peter's-wife says dryly. Cece squirms out of her arms and rushes over to the other woman, squealing for "Tally" to pick her up.
Talia obeys, pulling the girl close. Despite the fond way she tucks a strand of hair behind Cece's ear, there's something hard and businesslike in her face, something that gives Stiles the impression that Talia Hale is not—was not—someone to be messed with.
"Talia," the woman tries again.
"Olivia," Talia says warningly, matching her tone.
"I'm not telling you to let it go. I'm just telling you to let Peter look into it. That's what he does. It might be nothing."
"I don't understand why Laura hasn't said anything."
"Because she's as stubborn as you?" Olivia smiles. She slips past Stiles, and he catches the very faint scent of perfume. "She's seventeen. I'm sure she thinks she can handle an Argent hanging around her school."
Stiles perches on the counter as the argument unfolds, scooping dinner out of his bowl. He's so engrossed in trying to piece together the Hale family tree by first names alone that it takes him a while to realize Derek's back.
"Oh—uh, did you say something?"
"Is there more of that?" Derek asks, gesturing to the pot.
"Help yourself," Stiles returns, really glad he'd gone ahead and made way more than enough. "Dude, what do you guys normally eat?"
Derek shrugs. "Whatever's around."
They eat in silence—or at least, Derek does. Stiles half-listens to Talia and Olivia turn to gossiping about someone's date last night. When they're finished, Stiles puts the rest of the leftovers into tupperware in case Peter or Derek wants some later.
He closes the fridge and finds Derek staring at him. "If you're bored," Derek begins slowly, "I could actually use some help."
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Stiles doubts Derek could use help with anything, or at least anything related to home renovation.
The guy wades through tarps and tools with the practiced air of an expert, looking way more at home here in the back of the house than he had awkwardly fidgeting in the kitchen. So Stiles is mostly convinced that Derek asked for "help" because he feels the same thing Stiles does: there's too much space in the house and somehow not enough. It's both empty and suffocating all at once. And even so, the snow beats against the windows still, trapping them inside.
"Peter does consulting," Derek explains offhandedly. In the face of Stiles's incessant questions, Derek has slowly been working his way back from his usual shrugs to short sentences. He seems more than happy to let Stiles drift into silence whenever he gets distracted by a new sound, or a new someone, in the periphery.
"What kind of consulting?" Stiles asks. They're painting the wall of the new guest bedroom, a sort of neutral beige, and Stiles rubs flecks of paint off the back of his hand.
"For people like us," Derek says, and then more carefully: "People who...are worried about losing their families."
Stiles pauses, tilting his head. "Like, accident insurance? Or life insurance?"
"Something like that. Sometimes, you get the feeling something's gonna happen before it does."
"Did that happen with you guys?" Stiles asks after a beat, nudging one of the paint cans closer.
"No," Derek replies shortly. "No one knew."
Stiles was going to give him a break from questions after that—he's thoughtless with a lot of stuff, but thanks to his experiences after his mom's death he knows enough not to push on anything he'd hate to talk about himself—but the option is pretty much taken from him. There's a deafening crash of breaking glass from behind him; Stiles flinches hard and spins to face the window near the door, which he's sure must have somehow cracked in the wind.
The window's intact. The room is quiet again. There's nothing—it was only an echo. A moment from the past.
After a moment, he turns stiffly back to the wall, feeling Derek's eyes on him as he moves. Deliberately, he pulls the brush against the drywall.
"Thought I heard something," Stiles says, rubbing some warmth into his arms. He carefully doesn't look at Derek. "Must've been the storm."
Derek grunts and goes back to painting his corner, but he glances at Stiles often enough in the next few minutes to be conspicuous.
"Dude," Stiles sighs after a while, "I guess you can just ask. I probably deserve it. I've been hounding you with questions all day."
"Ok," Derek says finally. He hesitates, though, rolling the question around in his mouth like he's masticating it. "What's with you? With all the, like...jumping and stuff."
Stiles shakes his head. "I don't even know, man. We could start with the fact that I have the worst ADHD and I've been off my meds for months. But I guess, more than that, I get these, like...auditory hallucinations sometimes. The doctors had all these names for what's wrong with me. I was supposed to be in therapy for it back home, but now…" he shrugs uncomfortably.
Derek hums. "Sucks," he says at last, and Stiles is grateful to hear how casual his tone is.
"Sucks," he agrees.
"Where's home?" Derek adds after a second.
"Here," Stiles says before he can think about it. He regrets it instantly, mostly because he's not supposed to be giving out too much actual info about himself. But neither Peter nor Derek seem like the type to drag a stupid kid back home, and they're reclusive enough to be fodder for the town rumor mill themselves. "Well, not here here, but Beacon Hills. I grew up there."
"What are you doing sleeping in the middle of nowhere out in the Preserve, then?"
"Asking the hard questions, man," Stiles mutters under his breath. Then, he adds, "My mom died when I was a kid, and my dad and I...well, there was stuff going on. So I took off."
Derek doesn't immediately respond. He's mostly done now, just touching up some areas before the second coat. "Seems like it's better to stay with him then coming out here in the dead of winter."
"It wasn't the dead of winter when I came," Stiles counters. "It's been...I don't know, actually. I guess a while." He's been spreading paint over the same section, over and over again, so he puts the brush down.
Derek is looking at him now, like he means to say something, but he turns away at the last second instead.
"Come on," he says gruffly. "There's some lumber you can help me move."
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To Stiles's great surprise, no one kicks him out. Even when he takes advantage of the indoor plumbing for a hot shower that probably takes way too long. Although in his defense, it's been ages since he'd been that warm, or that clean. And maybe the Hales just don't want him to trudge through the house like a literal dirtbag.
But no one kicks him out the following day either, even when the storm fades and the world becomes quiet outside the windows once more.
He thinks it's maybe because he's been making all the food. Pancakes again for breakfast, and then for lunch a stir fry mostly made of canned vegetables and boxed rice. Afterward, the shelves are mostly empty, but Peter (who Stiles didn't even realize had left) returns in the afternoon with two bags full of household staples "for dinner," and Stiles bewilderedly accepts it all.
And then no one kicks him out the day after that. He sees little of Peter, who still calls him "the stray" in the brief moments when they run into each other, but doesn't seem to mind his presence one way or another. Actually, the only reason Stiles knows that Peter's eating the leftovers Stiles saves for him is because they disappear, replaced by dirty dishes in the sink.
He and Derek finish painting the guest bedroom and start work on the upstairs bathroom. Stiles knows nothing about building construction—his dad has always been too busy to do handiwork around the house, so they've always just called in specialists like everyone else. But Derek shows Stiles how to lay foam insulation, run caulking between seams, hammer lumber for the new walls. Stiles has Derek double-check everything he does, because he knows he's mostly useless with this kind of thing.
Derek doesn't seem to mind, though. And he doesn't even seem to mind it when Stiles rattles on about everything from major league baseball stats to the role of DNA in catching serial killers. Or when Stiles is distracted, quietly lost somewhere in the past.
A granite slab is delivered for the countertops. Some guys come in to do electrical work. In the middle of mounting the bathroom sink, Stiles realizes he's been here a week.
It feels normal. Easy. He wonders if he should offer to go, but he never does. It's freezing outside, and he's not built to sleep in the snow. And Peter and Derek, he quickly learns, are both blunt enough that Stiles thinks they'd ask him to leave if he's really bothering them.
Derek lets him borrow his laptop when they're comparing cabinet hinges for an upcoming order. And then he lets Stiles hang onto it while they're waiting for another coat of paint to dry, which gives Stiles the chance he's been waiting for.
He looks himself up in an incognito tab. He skims the article but can't stomach reading the whole thing.
Sheriff, Police Still Searching For Runaway Teen
Sheriff Stilinski's Son Last Seen Fleeing Eichen House
He closes the page. After a moment of hesitation, he does a different search, morbidly curious about misfortunes besides of his own.
As it turns out, the Hale House fire killed eleven people: Peter's sister Talia and her husband. His sister Senna and her daughter Hailey, his brother Rhys. Derek's brothers and sister. Peter's wife Olivia and their two children.
Stiles thought that when Derek said "rebuilding," he'd meant rebuilding what was left of the Hale House. But as he looks at the pictures, Stiles realizes that this isn't the case. He can make out the position of the Hale House from the natural landmarks, but there's not a wall standing in the photos. All of it has been burned to ash, right down to the foundations—meaning they're rebuilding totally from scratch. He wonders, tensely, how hot the fire must have burned to do something like that.
He wonders again at Peter's line of work. Protecting people like us, people worried about losing their family.
Then, he closes the page and wipes the browser history.
"You don't want to hang onto it?" Derek asks, accepting the laptop Stiles holds out to him. He's surprised enough that one eyebrow quirks upward. "I thought you'd be the...I don't know. A researcher. Like Uncle Peter."
"I used to be," Stiles admits. "But lately, I started to realize there's a lot of stuff I don't want to know."
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Laura's old room has no paneling, just wood frames on its skeletal walls. But today, just for now, Stiles can see how it once was.
A scuffed wooden vanity in the corner is covered in bottles of makeup and nail polish. The sloping ceiling features band posters and scribbled drawings that Stiles assumes must have come from Laura's siblings and cousins. A trio of dust-covered dolls, relics of childhood, sit on her shelf beside a CD player and trophies. It's easy to remember that she would have been the same age as he is, only seventeen.
Laura herself sits with her back to the sunlit window. It's open, the casement panes swung outward to reveal the pale, budding branches of a now-dead tree. In her palms, Laura cradles an old phone (Or maybe new? It's five years ago. Or it was five years ago. Whatever.), frowning down at it as she flips it open and closed. Stiles sits in the corner, bored enough to not feel creepy about spying.
She looks like Derek. It's always been kind of weird to Stiles, how someone can look enough like you that people can tell you belong together. Stiles has never had that, not really: he has his dad's jawline, maybe, and the dark brown hair is his mom's. But he doesn't take after either of them enough to spark recognition. Never has anyone looked at him, and then his parents, and said Oh, of course.
But for the Hales, it's different: there's something of Derek in the furrow of Laura's brow, and her long, dark hair, and the slant of her nose.
"Mom, I'm not watching Elliot and Cece!" Laura bursts out suddenly, making Stiles jump. She rushes over to throw the door open so she can speak to someone down the hallway. "You said I could go out with my friends, remember?" Stiles can't hear the response, since he seems to only be getting Laura's ghost or whatever, but Laura grumbles, "I'm not taking a tone with you."
It's very teenager-of-any-decade. It's something Stiles would have said himself, to his own dad. If he were still at home, anyway. He swallows hard.
At the window, the flip phone starts to ring. Laura's eyes dart to it instantly, magnetized, and she shouts, "Okay, I've got them the rest of the week—okay, Mom!"
She shuts the door, peeking guiltily at the bed. For the first time, Stiles realizes there's a small figure huddled under the blankets. It's hard to say which of the kids it's most likely to be; all he can make out is dark hair fanned across a pillow. At any rate, the sound of gentle snoring seems to be a relief to Laura, and her sullen mood (which is very Derek of her) washes away almost instantly as she bounds back to her perch. She flips the phone open and leans as close to the window as she can without falling out of it. "Hey. Hey, what's up?...No, just at home, still waiting for—what? Oh, no, she said I can come out with you, if you still want to...oh, cool."
Laura's voice is very low, and she's pulling her fingers through her hair as she speaks, chin tilted upward like she's trying to be...confident. Nonchalant. Huh, Stiles thinks curiously. A date or something? He can't imagine what it might have been like, trying to keep a relationship on the down low in a family as big as the Hales. (And anyway, he can't imagine what it must be like keeping a relationship a secret in general, as it's never exactly been something he had to worry about.)
At the window, Laura laughs, muffling the sound with her fist. "Yeah, I know. Anyway, you know I can't really talk, especially here," she adds, rolling her eyes. "Where are we meeting?...Are you serious? That's not rebellious, it's—okay, okay, fine." She sighs, long and low. "They'd kill me. They'd kill you. And that's—it's not funny! Do you want to—?"
Another slam of the door, but this time, it's somehow closer, more real. Stiles jumps to find Derek—today-Derek, not five years ago Derek, though Stiles isn't sure what that would look like—at the threshold. Staring.
"What are you doing in here?"
Stiles glances back toward the window, which is now closed. The sky outside is grey, as it's been for days, with the threat of more snow. Laura's gone. The room is dark.
All at once, he realizes how creepy this probably looks, sitting all by himself in an empty, abandoned room. He drags his eyes back to Derek. "Just, uh...got a little lost. On my way to...the bathroom."
Derek gives him a weird look. "Okay."
"Dude, this house is really big."
"Don't call me dude," Derek replies, grimacing, but he doesn't move away—just stands there, hand on the doorknob as he peers about the quiet space. "This used to be my sister's room. Laura's."
"Oh," Stiles says, his surprise unconvincing to his own ears. "Your older sister?"
"Yeah," Derek replies gruffly.
There's a long pause, in which Stiles wonders what he sees when he looks at this room, whether his mind creates its own ghosts to fill in the space. And then the memory of social niceties hit him like a freight train. "Oh. Oh. Should I, like, not be in here? Yeah? Yeah. This is weird, sorry. It's your sister's room, and..." He picks himself up quickly, dusting his pants leg off. "Or like, I probably made it weird. I was just, you know, sitting or whatever, but if this is, uh...you know, a special place or something—"
"No, it's not." Derek's face is doing that grimace-y thing, where Stiles can't tell if he's angry or if it's just his face. "No more special than anywhere else, anyway."
That doesn't seem exactly true, from the way Derek looked at this place, but Stiles doesn't call him on it. "Ok, cool. It's, uh, it's a nice room," he adds lamely.
Derek doesn't seem to mind his weirdness, just peers around again, his eyes weirdly vacant. The silence lingers, but just when Stiles is about to try to make his escape, Derek says, "We were pretty close."
Stiles pauses. He's got plenty of questions—when does he not—but usually he bottles them up. It's one thing to be chilling out in the house of a couple of tragedy survivors, and it's another thing to be hounding them with questions about their dead family all the time. Stiles doesn't have a ton of tact, but he does have that much. But...Derek's the one who brought it up. "How close were you guys in age?" he asks tentatively.
Derek sags against the doorframe a little, like he was just waiting for the right moment to relax. "Two years apart."
"Oh," Stiles says. "Were you guys close because you were close in age, or was it the same with all your siblings? And cousins too, I guess."
"No, I mean...we were all close. We did everything together, lived in the same house together, played in the woods together...stuff like that. But Laura and me, I always thought we were almost like twins, except the age difference. We were the oldest two of the kids, so we did a lot of the firsts together. First party, first all-nighter for a paper, for the same class, actually...we shared everything." He stops. Frowns. "Almost everything."
It's the most words Derek has ever strung together in his presence. "She seems like she'd be really cool," Stiles replies, pushing his hands into his pockets with a shiver. "Was she, like, a straight-A-student or a rebel-without-a-cause kinda sister?"
Derek hums. "Little of both. She was smart, but she didn't always care about her grade if she wasn't interested in the subject. Drove my mom crazy." He smiles distantly—an actual smile, so Stiles tries very hard to stay still and not spook it off his face. "But she was never too cool for us, you know? She'd still hang out with the family, even though I guess most people don't do that during the high school."
"Huh. I guess that...makes sense. You guys were all close, so...yeah." He doesn't realize he's frowning until he registers Derek's stare.
"Are you close with your dad?" Derek asks quietly.
Stiles shivers again, and only partly from the cold. "I dunno. I mean, yeah, of course. It's just me and him, so we'd have to be, wouldn't we?"
Derek blinks owlishly. "I don't know. I'm just asking."
"Yeah, that was...I mean, we are. It's just that—after my mom died, we should have been really tight, but it just kind of messed up whatever we had. Obviously. And he was always at work, and I was busy with school, and we'd just...miss each other. Literally, like we were living in the same house, but not at the same time."
"You miss him," Derek observes, and Stiles isn't really sure how he got that out of his little rambling monologue, but there it is.
"Yeah. I guess I do. Yeah."
Derek shrugs one shoulder. "At least you've still got him," he murmurs, and then he glances Stiles's way, like he hadn't meant to say it at all.
There's no bite in it, but Stiles feels like there should be. Only it doesn't matter, because he can't go back, anyway. Because the thing is, he can't figure out how to go back, without lying, and without going back to Eichen. He can't figure out how to get back to his dad without losing this piece of himself, this very real thing that he can do, this thing that he is.
"Come on," Derek says at last, when Stiles takes too long in replying. "You look cold. There's no heating in here."
"There's no heating in half the house," Stiles mutters, though he slips past Derek and into the hallway.
"Peter keeps calling it a money pit," Derek agrees, "but it's what we have, and we haven't given up on it yet."
And then he closes the door behind them, so quietly that it makes barely a sound.