It started innocently enough. Stiles honestly thought his dad had been just working himself to the bone, pulling double shifts to sort out the latest supernatural mess the Nemeton and its affiliates had caused. Sheriff Stilinski had a history of doing long hours, ignoring his own needs (and the needs of his son), and surviving on coffee, whiskey, and spite until the case was solved. Now, though, he didn’t quite manage anymore and Stiles figured his exhaustion was finally catching up and making him take a day off.
So, Stiles made a giant pot of chicken noodle soup, hid the whiskey, and, after a short but vicious debate with himself, replaced the regular coffee grounds with decaf. Because no matter what his dad said, his cholesterol levels and blood pressure were a serious issue and more important than Stiles’s daily fix of black, bitter, and overly strong.
He had to admit that the case they were working on was a tough one. A particularly haughty coven of witches had decided they had a right to the Nemeton and Derek had, of course, politely declined. And by polite, Stiles really meant he’d threatened to rip them to pieces. The witches hadn’t taken it well and the result had been a hissy fit that had reached literally biblical proportions, what with a swarm of locusts and tap water turning into blood.
Stiles wasn’t sure why the witches had chosen to go with the Exodus stuff but he’d rather not see what wild animals or diseased livestock would mean so close to the Nemeton’s range.
Usually, the Sheriff consulted Derek (unless Stiles already managed to read the files and do his own research), but this time it took Derek, Stiles, and—surprisingly enough—Peter to handle the supernatural while the Sheriff dealt with the legal side of the investigation. They’d made some headway and actually succeeded in cracking one of the curses and saving Beacon Hills from thunderstorm, hail, and fire. Afterward, both Derek and Peter had looked quite green for several days, enhanced werewolf healing or not.
Case in point, Stiles thought it was stress. Or perhaps his dad had the flu. Anyway, he thought he’d just mother-hen the fuck out of his dad, force him to rest and guilt him to eat a pot or five of chicken soup, and everything would be fine.
He thought wrong.
Stiles didn’t want to dwell on it, not really. His dad was taking his sweet time getting better, so what?
The mere thought of losing his dad made his insides freeze up and squeezed his throat so that he was having difficulty to breathe. But he pushed his panic down and stubbornly kept on insisting that his dad was just tired, everything was fine, yeah, okay Scott, lay off.
He didn’t want to face the facts until he came home from school and found his dad lying on the kitchen floor in a puddle of his own sick.
It was both a curse and a blessing that Peter happened to be the one driving him home after Roscoe had busted a tire. A blessing because Peter was the one who carried his dad to bed. A curse because when he came back, he stripped his shirt off with urgency Stiles had rarely seen and proceeded to scrub his hands and arms with the industrial-strength cleaner he snapped Stiles to get from the trunk of his car.
Peter’s skin had turned ugly red with blisters from places where his skin had come to contact with the Sheriff’s vomit and Stiles knew what it meant.
His dad had been poisoned.
And it was all his fault.
He didn’t remember much about the days after that. The days blurred together into one, grey-tinted mass of guilt; guilt about binge-researching when he should’ve been by his dad’s side, guilt about being by his dad’s side when he should’ve been trying to find a cure, and—most of all—guilt about ever letting his dad get in the know of the supernatural.
No matter how many hours Stiles poured over the books and the occult sites online, he couldn’t find anything. Deaton was his won unhelpful self, although he seemed to be genuinely sorry. After some excessive bullying, he agreed to help to try to trace the poison but the results were nonexistent: the Stilinski house was clean and with the coven mysteriously gone, figuring out the poison components was practically impossible.
Stiles tried pleading him and when that didn’t work, he tried threatening him. It worked just as well and on top of that, Stiles ended up crying uncontrollably when Deaton clasped his shoulder and said there was nothing he could do.
His dad was dying and Stiles was useless.
Of course, his dad being his dad, he tried to drill it into Stiles that the poisoning wasn’t his fault. He tried to remind Stiles that they were more alike than Stiles wanted to admit and even though Stiles had never told his dad about the Nemeton and werewolves, he would’ve found out eventually.
Stiles nodded, blinked away tears, and stewed in his guilt.
If there was something Stiles was glad, it was that his dad slipped into a coma and died three days after Stiles had found him in the kitchen. He was fervently grateful that the poison hadn’t been the kind that made the victim scream themselves hoarse while the poison burned them from the inside out.
At least his dad hadn’t suffered.
The funeral went by in a haze Stiles didn’t really register. The pack helped to clean up the house and organize the memorial, and Stiles trailed along like a wraith. He couldn’t believe he was an orphan now, a sad bundle of rage, pain, and sarcasm wrapped in a fragile sack of brittle bones. He went through the motions with barely a word, unaware and uncaring of the worried glances the pack shared around him.
And after, he sat on the saggy couch in their living room, stared at the black screen of the TV, and wondered what he was supposed to do next.
Did it even matter?
Their next threat was a small group of wendigoes who wanted to worship the Nemeton as their god and treated humans as a threat. Stiles ignored the pack’s warnings and pleas to stay aside, just grabbed his trusted aluminum bat, and went to battle.
After all, he had nothing left to lose.