What The Fuck, Scott?

Title: What The Fuck, Scott?
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG (discussion of disturbing canon events)
Word Count: 2,323
Warnings: Discussion of Hate Crimes

Summary: The morning after the events of S01 E04, Magic Bullet, Stiles and Scott talk about what happened.

No beta. A big thank you to HarleyJQuin for being my Teen Wolf Canon Wrangler.

Author Note: This story is dedicated to Jilly James, who opened my eyes to The Truth About That Awful Thing That Scott Said and who therefore prompted this story. Because I can occasionally multitask, it’s also her birthday gift 🙂 Happy birthday, Jilly!
Please note: I’m aware that Stiles’ logic is flawed. He’s reacting in anger, and his arguments have holes in them. He also jumps to conclusions a bit. Later, after he’s thought things through, he’ll do better.

---

Stiles listened with one ear to Scott’s latest diatribe about Derek while finishing up his chemistry homework. Harris wasn’t going to be cutting him any slack just because of werewolf shenanigans, after all. Never mind the trauma of having to nearly cut off Derek’s arm, not to mention that whole gross bit where Derek used the most unsanitary method Stiles had ever seen to heal himself.

“—scare me by telling me it was Allison’s family who burned down the Hale House! Like I’m going to believe anything he tells me!”

Stiles dropped his pen and looked up. “They what? Is he sure?”

Scott shrugged. “Well, he certainly sounded sure, not that it proves anything. But even if it’s true, then they must have had a reason, right?”

Stiles’ mouth dropped open. “A reason? A reason? You’re not serious, right?”

“Allison’s family wouldn’t just kill them, Stiles. The Hales must have been…I don’t know, planning something, maybe.” Scott’s face had turned mulish, a sign that he was getting ready to dig in his heels.

Stiles typically tried to circle around the issue when Scott got like this since pushing him rarely achieved anything, but some things just couldn’t be let go. “Scott, there were kids who died in that fire! A baby, not even a year old! What reason could there possibly be to murder them by burning them to death in their own house?”

“Maybe they didn’t even do it!” Scott replied defensively. “Why are you so quick to believe what Derek says, all of a sudden?”

“Whether Derek was telling the truth or not isn’t even the issue!” Stiles said. “You just…instantly tried to excuse the murder of an entire family. You don’t know anything about it!”

“Neither do you!”

“I know that there’s nothing anyone could say that would make murdering babies okay! No reason that can justify it!”

“We don’t even know that they did it!”

Stiles took a deep breath. Arguing the point was futile; Scott had chosen his stance, and the only thing continuing would achieve is a fight. Stiles didn’t want to fight. His dad was downstairs in his study, so if Scott ended up having any more ‘accidents’ with the drywall, it could blow this whole werewolf thing right open. He picked up his pen. “Thank god you didn’t say that to Derek,” he muttered, more to himself than to Scott.

Scott winced slightly.

Stiles’ mouth dropped open again. “You told Derek, to his face, that it was okay that his family was burned alive.”

“No! I just said that if it had happened, then Allison’s family must have, you know, had their reasons.”

Stiles put his pen down again. He felt weirdly calm; like he was slightly outside himself watching what was happening. This had happened to him before, but only when he mixed his adderall with diazepam.

Scott didn’t look hurt, and he hadn’t mentioned having to grow back any limbs overnight. Stiles wondered if he needed to reassess his evaluation of Derek’s self-control. Jessica Davis had once suggested that Stiles’ mother had deserved to die, and he’d needed three people to hold him back from murdering the bitch right then and there. It had resulted in a series of mandatory anger management sessions, and Jessica Davis had switched schools soon after, but Stiles had never regretted his reaction. Even Jackson knew better than to use Stiles’ mother as fodder for his taunts.

For Scott to come right out and say that to Derek…wow. Stiles was at a loss.

For the first time since Scott was bitten, Stiles wondered if the boy he’d known was even there anymore. It looked like Scott, it mostly acted like Scott, but the Scott Stiles knew, the one who had shared a red vine with a disconsolate stranger in a hospital waiting room, that Scott would never have said something so callous, so cruel.

“That is the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Stiles said, grabbing his laptop and booting it up. “I’m going to show you the file; you are going to look at the photos of the victims and tell me again that they deserved to die.”

Scott finally began to look guilty. “I didn’t say they deserved it—”

“You might as well have!” The calm feeling disappeared. “That’s what the subtext says, Scott! How could you say that? Or are you just dismissing them as victims because you don’t see them as real people?”

“They were werewolves, it’s not like—”

“You are a werewolf! Did becoming a werewolf mean that you deserve death?”

Scott gave him his best puppy dog eyes. “I didn’t really mean it, okay? I was just so angry with Derek. He was telling me that I should stay away from Allison, and I guess I reacted badly.”

Stiles shook his head, undeterred. He got up and dug around in his closet for the shoe that he’d stashed his private thumb-drive in. “I’m starting to think that Derek might not just be blowing hot air. This is as serious as it gets. You need to get your head out of the clouds and into the game before you get killed. We already know that Argents are trigger-happy, the fact that you haven’t done anything wrong isn’t going to stop them. Kids, Scott. A baby.”

“Allison wouldn’t do that!”

Stiles found the correct shoe, retrieved the drive and turned back to Scott. “Dude, you haven’t even known her three weeks. You have no idea what she will or won’t do.”

Scott looked affronted. “We’re soulmates, Stiles!”

Stiles raised his eyebrows. “Pretty sure your parents thought they were soulmates at one point, too. Didn’t stop your dad from knocking you both around and then taking off.”

Scott’s eyes flashed yellow, and his teeth lengthened. “Leave him out of this!”

“Wow, look at how pissed off you are,” Stiles said, checking that his baseball bat was within reach. Hopefully, with the study on the other side of the house and the floor soundproofed, his dad wouldn’t notice if there was an altercation. “Imagine if someone had burned your mom alive, and then some asshole came along and told you that she deserved it.”

Claws erupted from Scott’s fingers as he shifted fully. Stiles stepped back and reached for his bat. Scott growled, muscles bunching as he readied to lunge. Stiles was preparing to swing the bat when Derek dived in through the open window. He tackled Scott to the floor and held him down, snarling, with long teeth and electric blue eyes on display.

After several moments holding his breath and crossing his fingers in the hope that his dad hadn’t heard that, Stiles breathed a sigh of relief and carefully leaned the bat back up against the wall. Perhaps that hadn’t been the smartest thing to do.

Derek’s eyes and teeth melted back into his human visage. “Are you insane?” he demanded, scowling up at Stiles. “Taunting a newly bitten werewolf, one who already has shaky control, is stupid! He could have killed you!”

“It wasn’t exactly something I planned,” Stiles replied, trying to hide just how relieved he felt. “But it was stupid, you’re right. Thanks, for…” He gestured to where Derek was still holding down a struggling Scott. He walked over to the open window, glancing out to check that there wasn’t a ladder leaning up against the side of the house or something. Nope. “Because I’m grateful, I magnanimously won’t bring up the creepy, stalkery way you must have been lurking outside my window.”

Derek rolled his eyes.

Scott’s struggles ceased, and he lay on Stiles’ bedroom floor for several moments, breathing heavily.

“You in control?” Derek asked gruffly. At Scott’s nod, he stepped back, rising to his feet in a fluid motion that Stiles found more interesting than he was comfortable with. Not because it was a guy, but because it was Derek. The last thing he needed was another impossible crush on someone stratospherically out of his league.

Scott pulled himself up more slowly. His breathing had returned to normal, but he wouldn’t meet Stiles’ gaze.

The three of them stood there in silence for maybe three seconds before Stiles couldn’t stand it anymore.

“So, Scott doesn’t think it was Allison’s family who burned your house down,” he said to Derek. “Given all the shooting we’ve seen from them so far, I’m leaning towards believing you, myself. Do you have any proof it was them? I mean, other than they’re the most likely suspect? Like, do you know for sure?”

Derek scowled. “I know. Kate…” He hesitated. “She called me to gloat about it, right after. Made a point of telling me.”

Stiles winced. “Sorry, dude. You would have been around our age, right? That must have been scary. No wonder you and your sister took off.”

Derek looked at the floor. “Fifteen. I’d just turned fifteen. Laura was nineteen. She didn’t want to chance me being sent to child services, so we didn’t even stay to bury them. We spent the first three years, until I turned eighteen, constantly moving. That’s why we had to leave Peter behind.”

Talk about eye-openers. Stiles tried to imagine how Scott would deal if they’d lost everyone but each other and then had to go on the run, in fear for their lives. Then, to finally return home and have Stiles murdered almost immediately. Shit. He exchanged a glance with Scott, who, he was relieved to see, looked appropriately horrified.

Derek’s only support had been killed less than a month ago. He was on his own, living in the burnt-out shell of the home his family had died in, under threat from the same hunters who had killed them. No wonder Derek was perpetually grumpy.

“Dude, why are you still here?” Stiles breathed. “Why haven’t you high-tailed it out of town to somewhere safer?”

Derek’s shoulders hunched slightly. “Scott needs someone to teach him control. If I left, either the alpha or the Argents would end up killing him. He’s only been through one moon; I can’t go. Then there’s Peter. I need to take him away from here, but with the Argents constantly watching, nowhere I go would be safe.”

Scott was looking at Derek like he’d never seen him before. “I didn’t realise.”

Stiles could relate. It was like, in the space of a conversation Derek had transformed from an angry, threatening man trying to intimidate a teenager; into a scared, grieving man, doing his best in a shitty situation and trying desperately to help someone that continually resisted his efforts.

What a god-awful mess.

“I’m sorry for what I said about your family,” Scott said, startling Stiles out of the introspection he’d fallen into.

Derek gave a stiff, uncomfortable-looking nod. “It’s the full moon soon,” he said abruptly. “If you don’t want to lose control and kill someone, you need to train.”

Scott frowned and opened his mouth, then stopped and closed it again. He glanced over to Stiles, and then to the baseball bat leaning against the wall. Finally, he sighed. “Okay.”

To Derek’s credit, he didn’t rub it in. “I’ll see you at the house tomorrow morning.”

“Uh, no,” Stiles broke in. “I get that it has the advantage of being all private and secluded and everything, but dude, Kate already knows where it is. You need to find somewhere else to train.”

“There is nowhere else,” Derek said impatiently.

“There is nowhere else that you know of,” Stiles corrected. “Anyone want to bet that I can’t find somewhere safer by this time tomorrow?” He was almost proud of the way that Scott and Derek rolled their eyes in unison. “Until then, you should stay here.”

“I’m sure your father, the sheriff, would be thrilled,” Derek said dryly. “It would just end up putting the two of you in danger.”

“Dad won’t mind, not after I’ve talked with him.” Stiles decided not to mention that his big selling point was going to be Derek’s current homelessness. “And danger comes hand in hand with being the son of the sheriff. Go get your stuff, I’ll go tell dad you’re moving in and get the spare room set up.”

Derek’s absence would give him time to have that talk with his dad. He was also considering telling him what Derek said about Kate, that she called him immediately after the fire. Maybe that file could be reopened or something. There was no denying that this whole crazy train ride would be a lot easier with some adult help, and if the Argents were psycho enough to burn an entire family alive, kids included, then there wasn’t much they wouldn’t stoop to.

As much as Stiles didn’t want his dad mixed up in all this, the armed killers in town kind of made it law enforcement’s business. If they could kill babies, then ignorance of what was really going on wasn’t going to keep his dad safe.

Derek’s glare had lost a lot of its fearsomeness now that Stiles was thinking of him as a slightly older, angry goth Scott.

“Just go with it,” Scott clapped Derek on one leather-clad shoulder. “When he gets that look on his face, his mind is made up. He’ll get his way eventually anyway, and it’s just easier to give in and save some dignity.”

Stiles flipped him the bird. “Funny. Derek, you should probably go back out the window, but from now on consider using the door. Scott, you can either help me make the spare bed or go with Derek to get his stuff.”

Scott elected to go with Derek, as Stiles hoped he would. He would prefer not to have an audience for the discussion he was about to have with his dad. As soon as they’d gone, he made his way downstairs to his dad’s study.

Squaring his shoulders, he knocked before opening the door.