
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1052831.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major
      Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M, F/F
  Fandom:
      Teen_Wolf_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Derek_Hale/Stiles_Stilinski, past_Stiles_Stilinski/Lydia_Martin, Past
      Stiles_Stilinski/Heather, Implied_past_Kate_Argent/Allison_Argent,
      Implied_past_Gerard_Argent/Kate_Argent, Implied_past_Gerard_Argent/
      Allison_Argent, Implied_past_Peter_Hale/Derek_Hale
  Character:
      Derek_Hale, Stiles_Stilinski, Allison_Argent, Lydia_Martin, Chris_Argent,
      Gerard_Argent, Kate_Argent, Marin_Morrell, Victoria_Argent
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Fusion, The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo_-_Freeform,
      Past_Rape/Non-con, Graphic_Description_of_Corpses, Murder, Mutilation,
      Serial_Killers, Sexual_Violence, Violence_against_women, Misogyny, Incest
  Series:
      Part 1 of Razorblade_Smile
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-12-13 Updated: 2014-01-08 Chapters: 4/? Words: 9352
****** Razorblade Smile ******
by Nanoochka
Summary
     Fifteen years ago, Allison Argent disappeared from a family gathering
     on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Argent clan. Her
     body was never found, yet her father is convinced it was murder--and
     that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional
     family. He employs disgraced journalist Stiles Stilinski and
     tattooed, multipierced Derek Hale, a feral but vulnerable
     superhacker, to investigate. When the pair link Allison's
     disappearance to a number of grotesque murders spanning over twenty
     years, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But
     the Argents are a secretive clan, and Stiles and Derek are about to
     find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.
     (Teen Wolf/Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fusion AU.)
Notes
     Okay, so. I am going to put the notes and warnings at the beginning,
     because it is VERY IMPORTANT that you read them if you are not
     already familiar with Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
     trilogy, and maybe even if you are. Because the books come with a
     veritable laundry list of trigger warnings, so, too, does this fic.
     They include graphic descriptions of past murder, mutilation, and
     sexual violence against women, past rape/non-con, incest involving
     father and children and father and granddaughter, as well as between
     aunt and niece, descriptions of psychological trauma, and graphic
     descriptions of attempted murder and mutilation. More details about
     these triggers can be found in the notes at the end.
     If any of these triggers affect you, please stop reading now. I have
     chosen not to get into the same level of graphic violence as is
     depicted in the books or the movies, but it is still very much an
     overhanging feature of the story. The elements of sexual abuse,
     murder, and mutilation are still thematically very present. If you
     have any questions or comments about the above, please don't hesitate
     to let me know. I've done my best to warn for everything I can think
     of, but in general this story, like the source material, is not an
     easy read.
     In terms of how the source material is followed, I didn't want to
     reproduce the books or the movies exactly, so there are a couple
     things to note about that: firstly, that the first part of the series
     represents only Stiles/Blomkvist's POV and his scenes with Derek/
     Lisbeth. The second part of the series (whenever that happens) will
     cover Derek/Lisbeth's POV. Additionally, I have adapted some of the
     scenes and dialogue to work more with the story, as well as some of
     the characters (most striking, probably, is how I substituted Kate
     Argent for Martin Vanger, and Chris Argent for Henrik), to work with
     an American setting and the Teen Wolf cast. 
     Otherwise, my sincere thanks go out to dirtydirtychai for the amazing
     beta and her help with making this story coherent given the frankly
     bizarre structure I decided to follow, and to Slinkymilinky, who
     produced this amazing artwork of Derek in his tattooed, multipierced
     glory.
See the end of the work for more notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
                           Artwork by slinkymilinky
“The reason you can find no record of him,” Morrell had said after an
unexpectedly reluctant pause, “is because his records have been sealed. He’s a
ward of the State.” Expression blank, she’d met Stiles’s eyes levelly across
the desk and hadn’t elucidated further, and that had forced Stiles into
stillness, surprised silent. That in and of itself was a rare enough
occurrence. A ward of the State? Since when was the American government in the
habit of protecting twenty-nine-year-old criminals?
With confusion itching at his practiced, professional demeanour, threatening
the composure that’d been barely hanging on by a thread ever since he’d learned
his computer was hacked and a lifetime of secrets scattered to the wind like so
many dead leaves, Stiles had tried to read between the lines of what Morrell
was telling him. His back had been up since practically the second he walked
through the door into her office, out for blood and ready to take down anyone
standing in his way of some goddamned answers.
All he had was a name--Derek Hale. Stiles was good at digging things up on even
the most obscure subjects, but getting at this faceless, tech-savvy creep had
proven a challenge almost equal to finding Allison Argent’s killer. Once again
he felt like he was chasing a ghost, albeit one who’d nevertheless managed to--
very illegally--infiltrate every last corner of his life, but the look on
Morrell’s face was very different than a minute ago, stripped of its haughty
defensiveness and replaced with an expression he couldn’t parse, her brown eyes
intense and searching. Stiles had gotten the weird feeling he was being asked
to take a leap of faith for someone whom he’d never met, yet who knew
everything about him down to his sperm count. It’d been unnerving, to say the
least.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he’d asked, the words more harsh
than his tone implied. Grudgingly he had to admit the wind had been taken out
of his sails somewhat, and he’d been curious about Morrell’s explanation in
spite of himself.
“Derek’s had a rough life,” she said gently. “Can we not make it any rougher on
him?”
At the time, Stiles had no idea what that meant, but standing in front of the
run-down apartment building in Brooklyn Heights a day later, he was beginning
to suspect Morrell hadn’t been exaggerating. It was, he’d discovered, barely a
twenty-minute walk away from his own loft in Clinton Hill, but Hale might as
well have been living on another planet. While Brooklyn passed for trendy these
days, this neighbourhood looked as neglected and intimidating as the complex
itself. Although Stiles had detoured to a nearby cafe for breakfast sandwiches,
hoping to endear himself with food, he wondered if he would even make it to
Hale’s front door before he got mugged or murdered. Unlikely on a Saturday
morning, perhaps, but stranger things had happened in NYC. That Stiles was here
at all was proof enough that he couldn’t take for granted all the twists and
turns his life had assumed lately.
He let himself inside on the heels of an elderly woman returning with her dog
from their morning walk, and Stiles decided that if she seemed unperturbed by
the quality of the neighbourhood, maybe he shouldn’t be either. Still, his
conviction wavered as he dusted the snow from his jacket and jogged up the
stairs to the fifth floor, eyeballing the amount of water damage and graffiti
that darkened the walls. The place looked more like a government housing
project than a building of tenant-owned flats, the air smelling like a mix of
old socks and cigarette smoke. Hale’s apartment was located at the top of the
stairwell, its once-white door grimy and peeling in places.
Ever since first learning Derek Hale’s name and the meeting with Morrell,
Stiles hadn’t been able to form a mental picture of what Hale could possibly
look like. Because Derek was a scarily competent hacker, Stiles automatically
wanted to form an image of someone weedy and thin, partial to Buddy Holly-type
glasses and ratty cardigans and who didn’t get out much; but that was what
Stiles looked like, and he was lucky if he remembered check his email on a good
day. Plus if Derek was a ward of the State, had had “a rough life,” as Morrell
put it, and lived in a dump like this... well. Grimacing, Stiles’s fist hovered
in front of the door for a few seconds before he summoned the courage to knock.
At first there was silence, but then Stiles caught the faint sound of shuffling
on the other side of the door. A moment later, a rough voice said, “Who is it?”
Well, no backing out now. “Stiles Stilinski,” he answered, and there was
another long pause. Stiles grimly wondered if Hale was reacting with the same
sense of disbelief Stiles had upon learning someone had invaded his privacy,
but then again, it wasn’t every day the subject of an investigation showed up
on your doorstep either. A little awkwardness was probably to be expected.
There was a brief clatter of metal as the security bolt was unlocked. The door
opened a crack, and Stiles caught a peek of a pale, scruffy face and a single
green eye peering at him.
“Can I come in?” he added, offering a smile that he hoped looked encouraging
but probably came across as impatient, sardonic, curious, everything Stiles was
feeling at that moment. It galled him that he even had to ask--rude, seriously-
-because where this yahoo was concerned, clearly a face-to-face conversation
didn’t seem to be a given.
Sure enough, instead of the door opening wider, it began to close. Hale started
to say, “I’m not really up yet--” but Stiles had already had it up to here with
that shit, and he hadn’t even seen Hale’s face yet. He butted his shoulder
against the door to force it open. Apparently the element of surprise was on
his side, because Hale stumbled backwards as the door flew open and banged
against the wall.
“That’s okay. I assumed you wouldn’t have had breakfast yet, so I brought some
bagel sandwiches. And tomato juice. Good for hangovers. Where do you keep the
coffee?” Stiles held up the takeout bag and began to form another flippant
remark, stepping past the threshold, but he took one look at Derek Hale and the
words dried up on his tongue like snowflakes in the midday sun.
It was in a way a relief that Stiles hadn’t come here with any preconceived
notions about Hale’s appearance, because they not only would’ve all been wrong,
but so very, very inadequate. The man standing before him was perhaps an inch
shorter than Stiles’s own 6’1” but easily twice his size, muscular and
imposing. He was wrapped in a dark green blanket that, like the rest of the
flat, had seen better days. Pale and unshaven, as Stiles had previously
glimpsed, Hale’s soot-black hair was partially buzzed on one side of his head
and twisted into bed-rumpled elflocks on the other, his messy fringe blocking
out one eye as he glared at Stiles in a mix of imperiousness and surprise. He
had at least twelve piercings that Stiles could see--eyebrow, two through the
nose, and one through his lip, plus plugs through his earlobes in the shape of
spiky black spirals. Various other studs, hoops, and bars glinted in his ears,
and there was day-old eyeliner messily smudged around his eyes. A black hornet
tattoo stood out starkly against the pale skin of his neck on the shaved side
of his head, just below his ear. Stiles was willing to bet that wasn’t Hale’s
only ink.
“Hey, hey!” Hale said angrily, heavy eyebrows dark and intense, a perfect match
for his frown. Stiles barely made it two steps past him before Hale grabbed his
arm and jerked him back. His hand was firm around Stiles’s forearm, large and,
as Stiles might guess, capable of doing some damage if Hale put his mind to it.
“Who do you think you are?”
So much for politeness, but two could play at that game. Stiles yanked his arm
back with a sneer. “I’m the guy you know better than my closest friends do.”
He peered past Hale to the kitchen, taking in the flat’s sparse and shoddy, if
neat, decoration, but on the way there his gaze caught on the half-open bedroom
door, a sleeping girl he could see sprawled on the mattress. The fact that
Stiles noticed seemed to make Hale even angrier, stepping in front to block
Stiles’s line of sight, and Stiles plastered a sardonic smile across his
features in response.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he said cheerfully, “so why don’t you take a
shower, put on some clothes, and get rid of your girlfriend.”
Willing himself to ignore the force of Hale’s scowl and the way he stared after
him, Stiles marched into the kitchen and started digging around in the
cupboards for mugs, plates, and coffee, setting everything out on the counter
one at a time. After a second, he heard an exasperated sigh and what must’ve
been Hale stomping his way back into the bedroom, followed by a hushed
conversation.
There was no coffee maker, but the beat-up French press Stiles found above the
sink would do. He attempted not to eavesdrop--difficult, for a journalist--
while he filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove to boil, then
proceeded to set the table. It was probably more trouble than Hale ever
bothered to undertake for his own meals, and more effort than Stiles took for
himself when eating alone, for that matter, but it kept him busy and from
getting worked up over the reason for his visit.
He was pouring the boiled water over the coffee grounds in the French press
when Hale and the girl emerged from his bedroom. Stiles glanced up, curious in
spite of himself, and while he didn’t notice much about the woman beyond her
long dark hair and cropped top, he did happen to notice, as Hale slipped a
black T-shirt over his head, the massive wolf tattoo that curled over his
shoulder blade and down his back. It was remarkably detailed and seemed to
blend with another tattoo in the middle of his back, a design of three swirls
that to Stiles looked vaguely Celtic. He made a mental note to look it up
later, since he very much doubted Derek would be forthcoming with details about
its origins or his reasons for getting it.
He was still staring when Hale and his guest had completed their whispered
round of goodbyes and something that sounded like an apology on Hale’s part.
They didn’t kiss in parting. Stiles also couldn’t help but notice the taser
tucked into the back pocket of Hale’s jeans, which he must’ve picked up when he
went into the bedroom. That Hale expected Stiles to cause him trouble was a
thought he found both laughable and troubling, because Stiles doubted he’d last
two minutes against the guy in a fistfight.
“You’re awake. Good,” he said when Hale had locked the front door and returned
to the kitchen, arms folded across his chest. His T-shirt read “FUCK YOU, YOU
FUCKING FUCK,” across the front in all caps. Nice. It was also impossible not
to notice how tightly the black cotton stretched across his broad chest and
shoulders, obscene enough to reveal the shape of a nipple ring through the
fabric. Unable to stop his mind from straying to wholly unsafe territory, such
as what else Hale might have pierced beneath his clothes, Stiles shook his head
with a quiet noise of dismay and took a seat at the table, then started pouring
the coffee. “Breakfast is ready. I guess I alarmed you, showing up like this.”
“If you touch me, I’ll more than alarm you,” Hale grunted. He didn’t move to
come closer, though Stiles caught him eyeing the place settings.
The words brought a smile to his face, even if Stiles didn’t doubt for a moment
that Hale was sincere. “That won’t be necessary.”
He kept smiling until Hale shuffled over to the table and pulled out his own
chair, because Stiles knew that, despite his many fuckups and failings as a
person, he had what a lot of people called kind eyes. Until he’d been publicly
branded a libelist, they’d done him a lot of favours in getting interview
subjects to warm up to him. Maybe Hale was a harder nut to crack than most, but
he’d started to poke inside the wrapped sandwich Stiles had placed on the plate
in front of him.
As he began munching away at his own bagel, Stiles gestured to the stack of
papers that sat on the table next to him. Mouth full, which he couldn’t help
but notice made Hale cock an eyebrow at him in disgust, he said, “Your report
on me was quite detailed, but for me not very entertaining.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Hale deadpanned, face unreadable.
Stiles continued, shrugging. “When I write about people, I try to entertain the
reader.”
There was no change in Hale’s expression or lack thereof. “Jackson Whittemore
wasn’t entertained.”
Jesus, tough crowd. It was obvious which side Hale fell on when it came to
Stiles’s reporting on the Whittemore scandal. Trying not to let the irritation
show in his voice, Stiles swallowed his food and said, “Your boss Morrell tells
me you only work on things that interest you. I guess I should be flattered.
She also says you’re the one she goes to for jobs that are... ‘sensitive’ is
the word she used. I’ll use ‘illegal,’ since that’s what it was when you hacked
into my computer.” Hale’s eyes met Stiles’s across the table, silent and
moodily unresponsive, and they studied each other for a moment. “I’m not going
to do anything about that,” Stiles eventually admitted. “I could, but I won’t.
What I’m going to do is tell you a story. If it entertains you, maybe you’ll
decide to help me research it further. If it doesn’t, I’ll wash the dishes and
leave.” He eyed Hale’s breakfast, unwrapped but still untouched. “Are you going
to even touch your food?”
“What kind of research?”
At that simple question, however lifelessly delivered, Stiles couldn’t deny the
wave of relief that swept through him. He knew he had Hale’s attention at last
and didn’t plan to lose it. Setting down his own sandwich, he folded his hands
on top of the table and held contact with that pale green gaze.
“Derek--can I call you Derek? I want you to help me catch a killer of women.”
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
     Please see notes at the beginning of Chapter 1, including trigger
     warnings.
         There was a dead spider frozen against the snow-covered windowsill of
Stiles’s cottage. The Argents, his current benefactors, had bestowed him with a
three-room guest house located on their private island just off of Martha’s
Vineyard, and in the dead of winter it was as bleak and frigid as the North
Pole. He’d never have noticed the spider if the cat hadn’t begun pawing at the
glass one day, frantically trying to get at the spindly brown body trapped in
the ice. It became a kind of morning ritual for them; the cat would scratch at
the front door, mewling to be let in, and after finishing the breakfast Stiles
had set out for it, would proceed to bat its paws against the window as if it
forgot the spider’s existence each evening, only to remember it again with the
dawn. Possessing no television, Stiles tended to observe this interminable game
while he drank his coffee, as surely as the cat’s antics provided a suitable
distraction when the research was going nowhere.
     Stiles rarely felt a need to explain the oddities of feline behaviour to
anyone, but found himself wanting to do just that as Kate Argent stared at the
cat rattling the window panes from inside. It looked like it was trying to dig
its way to freedom despite the open front door.
     “It it... possessed?” Kate asked slowly, and Stiles snorted.
     “Depends on who you ask,” he answered. He still didn’t know the Argents
that well, but Kate didn’t strike him as much of a cat person. Or an animal
person, really. She was considerably more friendly than the other family
members Stiles had met so far, and beautiful, yes, but that didn’t mean she
wasn’t still creepy. Stiles wished he could put his finger on what about the
woman rubbed him the wrong way, but a little chill ran up his spine every time
he met Kate’s hazel eyes or witnessed the brilliance of her too-bright smile.
     But Kate had already lost interest and was looking off into the distance,
seemingly uncaring that it was freezing outside and a thin layer of snow had
already begun to collect on their clothes. As much as Stiles desperately wanted
to go inside, he didn’t dare suggest it.
     “My family is impossible,” Kate said gruffly. “It’s why the company is
such a mess. Please accept my apologies for my sister-in-law’s behaviour.”
     “It’s all right,” Stiles said automatically. There was no denying the
Argents were as fucked-up as they came, with Victoria Argent heading the pack.
But he wasn’t about to tell Kate that.
     “It’s not all right,” challenged Kate. “She’s unbearable. But it has
nothing to do with you. It’s between her and my father... She lost it when
Allison died. The drinking--her state of mind--it all got so bad that Dad took
us away and left her alone in the old house on the other side of the island
like she was excommunicated. She’s never forgiven him.”
     A furiously twitching muscle in the man’s jaw made Stiles want to question
how much Kate had agreed with his father’s actions, because he knew Kate still
saw Victoria regularly despite the apologies she made for her. So Stiles just
nodded like he understood, though he didn’t at all.
     It appeared Kate wasn’t finished. Stuffing her hands into the pockets of
her jacket--for warmth, Stiles assumed--she continued, “You have to stay and
keep working. You’re my brother’s last chance at some kind of resolution. Put
this to rest for him one way or the other, and I’ll try to keep his wife away.
But, please, do it as quickly as you can.”
     Stiles bobbed his head in another nod, feeling like a puppet. “I’ll try--”
     He broke off as the angry growl of a motorcycle shattered the silence of
the night; the stretched beam of a headlight bounced off the snow on the
driveway as someone rounded the corner. A moment later, the bike appeared and
pulled up to a stop a few feet away, and the engine cut out. Derek--and of
course it had to be Derek--climbed off and removed his helmet, flicking the
wilted fringe of his mohawk out of his eyes with an impatient toss of his head.
He unstrapped a duffle bag from the back of the bike and shouldered it as he
strode towards Stiles and Kate.
     “Derek,” said Stiles, unable to hide the awe in his voice or the way his
cheeks flushed instantly. It’d been days since he’d heard anything from the
man, and he’d sort of begun to assume Derek had lost interest in their project.
He gestured uselessly. “This is Kate Argent.”
     Kate inclined her head and gave Derek a slow once-over, frowning in a way
Stiles didn’t think he liked, taking in the hair, the eyeliner, the tattoos,
the leather. “How do you do.”
     “Fine.” Apparently the scrutiny bothered Derek not at all; he brushed past
Stiles and Kate and into the cottage without a backwards glance.
     Casting an unreadable look at Stiles, Kate lifted her eyebrows and all but
purred, “Boyfriend?”
     Stiles grunted and tried not to let his face betray his surprise.
“Assistant,” he corrected.
     There wasn’t much left to say after that. It seemed unlikely that Kate
bought Stiles’s explanation, judging by her sly smile, so they said their
goodbyes and Kate crunched off through the snow back to her own vehicle. Stiles
sighed and followed Derek inside the cottage, closing the door behind him.
     Derek had already managed to unpack half his things--he’d cleared the
coffee table of most of Stiles’s old dishes, books, and papers, making room for
his own laptop and charger. The open duffle bag sat next to him on the couch,
and Stiles had to bite his tongue to keep from asking if Derek was planning on
moving in. For a moment, he could only watch in silence as Derek booted up the
computer and immediately began tapping away at the keyboard, ignoring Stiles.
     “Any trouble finding the place?” he asked eventually.
     Without looking up, Derek grunted. “Everyone in town knows who and where
you are,” he said.
     Stiles shifted uncomfortably. “That’s comforting,” he answered after a
pause. “Are you hungry? Want a sandwich?”
     “No.”
     There was no reason why Stiles should’ve felt compelled to make
conversation when Derek so clearly wasn’t interested in anything he had to say,
but Stiles and silence weren’t exactly the best of friends. He felt awkward and
useless just standing there, and so blurted out the first thing that came to
mind. “I used to have a motorcycle,” he said. Emphasis on the past tense; he’d
gotten rid of it after the millionth time Lydia complained about how dangerous
it was, and how very stupid Stiles had looked on top of it in all his gangly
limbed glory
     “I know.”
     Face impassive, Derek finally glanced up at Stiles in order to hand him a
dog-eared bible and a piece of paper, which Stiles belatedly recognized as the
list of names and initials he’d given Derek at their first meeting, the one
Allison had made.
     “The five cases from Allison’s list,” Derek explained, nodding at the
paper. “And five more she missed--three I’m sure about.”
     At that, Stiles frowned. Five more women? It was bad enough the list
Allison made already had a half-dozen murdered girls on it. Stiles opened his
mouth to ask for clarification, but Derek had already turned back to his
laptop, where Stiles could see he was bringing up a slew of police reports and
crime scene photos. At first glance all he could see was blood and sightless
eyes.
     “Rebecca was the first, like you thought,” said Derek coldly. “M.H. is
Marie Holmes--a prostitute from New York--murdered in 1984.” He gestured at the
bible in Stiles’s hands. “Leviticus verse twenty, line eighteen.”
     Almost dropping the bible in his haste to turn to the correct verse,
Stiles ran his finger down the page until he got to the part Derek was talking
about and began to read. “‘If a man lies with a woman having her sickness, he
has made naked her fountain and she has uncovered the fountain of her blood.’”
Confused and resisting the urge to gag at that mental picture, he furrowed his
brow. He could tell from Derek’s expression he was trying very hard not to roll
his eyes as he made the connection for Stiles.
     “She was raped and stabbed, but the cause of death was suffocation with a
sanitary napkin.”
     At that, Stiles did gag, and then sat down heavily on the sofa next to
Derek, who glared at him momentarily and shuffled sideways before pulling up
more crime scene photos on the laptop. Stiles felt the blood drain from his
face at the sight of more blood, more dead faces.
     Derek continued running through his findings. He’d been busy. “R.L. Rachel
Landon, 1987. Cleaning woman and part-time palm reader, tied up with a
clothesline, gagged, raped, head crushed with a rock. Leviticus 20:27.”
     Again, Stiles scrambled for the verse. He read, “‘A woman who is a medium
or a sorcerer shall be put to death by stoning--’” Stopping as Derek withdrew a
pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, Stiles watched him take one
out, light up, and suck in a long drag. “No smoking inside,” he said.
     A stream of smoke was blown in his face and Stiles refused to cough,
though he did gape for a moment. Rude.
     “Sara Witt, 1994,” continued Derek. “Daughter of a pastor. Tied to her
bed, raped, charred in the fire that burned down her house. Leviticus--”
     Stiles was one step ahead of him this time. He turned to verse 21:9. “‘The
daughter of any priest who profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her
father and shall be burned with fire--’”
     “Magda Louise Samberg, 1990--” said Derek on top of Stiles’s last word.
His fingers flew over the trackpad as he brought up more pictures, this time of
a dead woman and a dead cow. “Found in a barn, stabbed and raped with farm
tools. A cow in the next stall with its throat slit, its blood splashed on her,
hers on it.”
     Leviticus 20:16. It’d been years since Stiles had touched a bible but he
somehow knew just where to look. “‘If a woman should lie with any beast, you
shall kill the woman and the beast, their blood upon them...’”
     “Leah Pearson, 1992--” The first photo Derek opened was of a pretty girl
in riding gear, petting a horse, followed by several more of her dead, naked
body on a wet cement floor, surrounded by tropical fish. When Derek blew out
more smoke, it sounded angry. “Found by her sister in their pet shop--raped,
beaten. The killer uncaged the animals, smashed the aquariums. There was a
parakeet inside her. Leviticus 26:21/22.”
     Stiles started to turn to the correct verse, but Derek was already moving
on. Yeah, Stiles saw the pattern, almost. He was as tired of this game as Derek
obviously was.
     More photos of murdered girls were appearing on the laptop screen, almost
faster than Stiles could keep up. Derek kept a running commentary going,
fingers vicious and heavy upon the keyboard as he continued to share his
findings. “Eva Gustavsson, 1990. A runaway. Raped, strangled, a burnt pigeon
tied around her neck. Lena Anderson, 1997, a student. Raped, stabbed,
decapitated--”
     The accompanying photo had Stiles retching uncontrollably--thankfully
nothing came up--and holding a hand in front of his face. “Okay--”
     “I’m not done.”
     Jesus, that much was obvious. “I get it,” Stiles snapped. “We’re looking
for a serial murderer, but what does it have to do with a sixteen-year-old girl
on an island?”
     For a moment Derek looked at Stiles blankly, remaining silent so long that
Stiles eventually remembered Derek wasn’t paid to be an analyst. Stiles had
asked for his help conducting the research, a test Derek had passed with flying
fucking colours. But Stiles had asked for his opinion, and thought it probably
came through in his expression how very badly he wanted Derek to weigh in.
     Derek sighed, and shamelessly stubbed his cigarette out against the coffee
table next to the laptop. His eyes, when they met Stiles’s, were outraged but
steady. “Allison was looking for him, too.”
     Needing a break and a chance to process everything Derek had just dumped
into his lap--that it was at Stiles’s behest didn’t matter--Stiles jumped up
from the sofa and paced for a bit until he decided to go make himself a
sandwich. There was no missing the disapproving look Derek shot his way, like
it was unbelievable that Stiles could even think of his stomach after what
they’d just seen, but Stiles was a notorious stress eater and refused to
apologize for it. This time he didn’t bother to offer Derek anything, and after
a moment the other man grabbed his cigarettes and went to go smoke outside.
     Derek still hadn’t returned even once Stiles finished making his sandwich.
Abandoning it on the cutting board, Stiles made a point of grabbing his jacket
this time as he went outside. Derek was standing under the light on the front
porch, looking off into the darkness and letting his cigarette burn down almost
to the filter. Surprisingly, considering he wore nothing but his black jeans,
boots, and a T-shirt, Derek didn’t seem cold, though he did have his arms
crossed firmly over his chest in a way that made the muscles of his hairy
forearms bunch. Stiles, on the other hand, found himself shivering for a
multitude of reasons that had nothing to do with the weather. He wondered if
the island might really be as haunted as it felt, or if he was simply still
feelings the effects of the gruesome photographs they’d looked at.
     His presence outside went unacknowledged by Derek, which Stiles was
beginning to take as expected, so he just began talking. “Rape. Torture. Fire.
Animals. Religion.” He shifted uncomfortably and crammed his hands into his
jacket pockets. “Anything I’m missing?”
     No answer was immediately forthcoming as Derek lifted the cigarette to his
lips and took a drag. His profile seemed shrouded and unreadable even under the
bright porch lamp. “The names,” he said at last. “They’re all Biblical. The
first woman, the whore, the Virgin Mary--Sara, Rachel--all from the Old
Testament.”
     Glancing in the direction of the big house that loomed from across the
compound, the one that still had Gerard Argent’s name on the deeds, Stiles
shivered again. All Jewish names. It didn’t warrant pointing out that “Argent”
definitely wasn’t. His research into the family history had been pretty
perfunctory outside of the family members who were still living, but one thing
that had become very clear was that the Argents had been around for a long,
long time. The family had moved to America from Nazi-occupied France after
WWII, and before then the name had survived countless wars and always seeming
to come out on top. Gerard, for instance, had been born before the outbreak of
WWII, and from what Stiles could tell, hadn’t lived a hard day in his life.
None of the Argents had. This wasn’t a family accustomed to being persecuted so
much as they were the persecutors. The thought sent a shiver down his spine and
he wondered how much of this was coincidence. No doubt a great many families
with dark pasts had fled Europe following the downfall of Nazi Germany.
     Seemingly done with the conversation, or perhaps uncomfortable with it,
Derek dropped his cigarette into the snow and stalked back inside. Stiles
waited a while longer before he followed; how much time passed, he couldn’t be
sure, but he remained outside until his fingers and toes felt properly numb,
enough to drive him out of the cold. He discovered Derek crouched before the
fireplace, attempting to coax the embers into producing more warmth and heat.
Stiles’s sandwich sat on the coffee table with three large bites taken out of
it. He sighed and narrowed his eyes at Derek’s back.
     “I can see why Morrell values you so highly,” he said with some
reluctance. “Your work is really good.”
     Face inscrutable as usual, Derek pushed off his knees to an upright
position and closed the grate, appearing satisfied with the flames he’d managed
to rekindle. “It interests me,” he said simply, then crossed the room to pick
up a blanket from the back of a chair.
     “I’ll take the couch,” Stiles protested, realizing what Derek was doing.
He closed the short distance between them and grabbed the edge of the blanket
in his fist, tugging gently. “You can have the bed.”
     Derek didn’t budge or release his grip. “I can sleep on a couch,” he said
mulishly.
     “So can I.” Stiles didn’t know why he was making a big deal out of it, but
couldn’t immediately bring himself to back down from Derek’s stubborn glare. It
was a bit ridiculous, two grown men fighting over a sofa, but the staring
contest went on another at least another full minute before Stiles gave an
exasperated sigh and let go. “Fine,” he groused, waving his hand then started
to head off in the direction of the bedroom. “And, um. There might be a cat--
anyway. Good night.”
     “Night.”
     The lamp in the living room switched off a short while later, just after
Stiles had removed his clothes and was crawling beneath the covers in his
boxers. He lay there in the dark and listened to the sounds of Derek settling
onto the couch when Derek said, “Allison’s name isn’t.” His voice was muffled
through the double doors that separated the bedroom from the rest of the
cottage.
     Stiles jerked in surprise. “Isn’t what?” he asked, after a second.
     The couch springs squeaked as Derek got comfortable. “Jewish.”
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     See Chapter 1 for general notes and trigger warnings. Please see the
     end of the chapter for more specific trigger warnings.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
         When Stiles dragged himself out of bed the following morning, groggy
from a night of bloody nightmares that were surely the result of looking at
those damn old case photos before bed, he immediately regretted it. The air
inside the cottage felt like a million degrees below zero, so cold that his
skin instantly prickled with goose bumps all over in a near-painful shiver. He
could’ve sworn he saw his breath misting in front of him even though he had
built up the wood fire last night, and snatching up the wool blanket from his
bed to wrap around his shoulders did almost nothing to fight off the chill.
Fucking New England in fucking winter. The Argents were probably snug and warm
up in their various mansions around the island, but apparently it was too much
to extend the same courtesy of central heating to a paid employee.
     As he shuffled into the cottage’s main room, where Derek had spent the
night, he found the other man sitting up in a tangle of blankets on the couch--
on his laptop, naturally. For a second, Stiles’s gaze caught on the crazy riot
Derek’s hair had twisted itself into in sleep and the snowy-pale skin of his
shoulders and back, seeming all the more stark and white next to the aggressive
black lines of his wolf tattoo. Then his eyes fell to the computer he could
just glimpse from over Derek’s shoulder, and Stiles registered, in slow
succession, that Derek was scrolling through a set of photos that looked
incredibly like Stiles atop his old motorcycle, Lydia seated behind him with
her arms around his waist, and secondly, that the laptop didn’t belong to Derek
at all.
     “What are you doing?” he asked groggily, brain struggling to parse what
possible use Derek could have for his old photos. Before he could get closer,
Derek closed the album with seemingly no more than a swipe of his finger,
returning him to a screen with Stiles’s annotated police files and the iMovie
of the old Thanksgiving Day parade he’d been studying for clues, one of the
last places Allison Argent had been seen alive years ago.
     Derek acknowledged him with the barest of glances cast over his shoulder,
and Stiles thought he saw him scowling. Surprise, surprise. Every time he saw
that grumpy expression on Derek’s face, he wanted to make a comment about how
it was liable to get stuck that way.
     “Going over your notes,” Derek answered with the usual amount of
gruffness, then said nothing more, finger tapping against the trackpad every so
often as he rewound or fast-forwarded through sections of the film.
     Well. Apparently Derek had helped himself to everything on Stiles’s
computer. That was… alarming. Though it wasn’t like there was much dirt left
for him to dig up, was there? Fucking asshole. “They’re encrypted,” Stiles
pointed out weakly as he took a seat next to Derek on the sofa, and was
rewarded with a painfully dry look.
     “Please,” Derek scoffed.
     Of course. Stiles wondered if it’d even taken Derek longer than a minute
to hack his way in, if maybe he’d had a laugh at the expense of Stiles’s
pitiful attempt at privacy.
     “Have some coffee,” Derek said, jerking his chin in the direction of the
kitchen, though his eyes didn’t leave the laptop screen.
     The suggestion so took Stiles aback that he couldn’t immediately formulate
a reply, his mouth working soundlessly while Derek continued to browse through
his private files, totally unperturbed. Eventually he managed to get ahold of
himself. “I will,” he said defiantly, dragging himself back up off the couch.
“And then we’re going to have a talk about what’s yours and what’s mine.”
     He was stirring liberal amounts of cream and sugar into his cup when Derek
said, apropos of nothing, “It’s amazing what you figured out from the parade
photos,” and Stiles found himself needing to sit down in shock for the second
time in the few minutes that’d passed since he’d risen from bed.
     “Thank you?” he said uncertainly, then wandered back around to sit beside
Derek again. He tried to hide his blush behind his coffee cup when Derek’s eyes
tracked silently over his face, but then he gestured at the screen, dragging
Stiles’s attention back to the matter at hand.
     “Too bad you don’t have hers.”
     “Whose?”
     Without specifying, Derek simply played the iMovie again, letting a few
seconds pass before he stopped on a frame with Allison at its centre. Her head
was turned, though it was hard to tell if she was purposely looking away from
the camera or merely looking at something outside the frame. Stiles expected
Derek to point out something about the position of her head, but instead he
gestured to a young couple standing among the crowd of people behind her. The
woman had a Polaroid camera in her hand.
     “Her.”
     He advanced to the next frame: the woman had raised the camera to her eye.
In the next, Allison had turned her head while, in the background, the flash of
the woman’s camera flared brightly.
     At first, all Stiles could do in response to Derek’s discovery was gape,
both at the fact that he’d failed to notice something so fucking obvious, and
what it actually meant. He’d never thought any more of what the film had showed
him at face value, too intent on watching Allison’s movements to pay much
attention to a random woman taking snapshots of the parade, while meanwhile she
could have inadvertently photographed whatever--or whomever--Allison had seen
in that moment across the street. Something or someone that had made her turn
away and immediately leave the scene looking sick to her stomach. Stiles had
been wracking his brain for clues as to what that might have been, covering
what he thought was every possible angle, and here it’d been staring him in the
face the entire fucking time.
     “Give me that,” he rushed out, making grabby hands at the laptop so that
Derek would hand it over.
     He took the computer and spent a few moments fumbling through various file
folders and emails--he could feel Derek growing more and more tense beside him
as he bumbled around--but then found what he was looking for, a folder
containing the latest set of parade photos to have been couriered over, ones
that weren’t in the iMovie. Stiles had scanned them onto his laptop before
Derek arrived at the cottage. Thinking them unimportant, since Allison had
already left the parade, he hadn’t bothered to include them in the big iMovie
file.
     In the first photo, the young couple with the camera was moving off the
other way, and in another, they were getting into a parked car. There was a
license plate. Stiles zoomed in and sharpened the contrast of the picture,
hoping to make it out, but the rear plate was only half-visible and too small
to make out, not even squinting.
     “Can you read that?” he asked Derek.
     Dutifully, Derek leaned closer and squinted too, his arm and shoulder
pressing into Stiles’s. Christ, he was warm, skin almost hot to the touch, and
his bicep was as solid as a rock. “Massachusetts plates. A, C, G, 3--the rest
is blocked,” he said after a moment. He pointed to a small decal on the car’s
back window, where the letters were even smaller and blurrier. “C--something--
I--L--M--A--R--”
     “Chilmark?” Stiles interrupted. “That’s a town on Martha’s Vineyard. Like,
an hour from here.” He squinted again at the photo, trying to make out what it
said underneath. He traced under the letters with his thumb and guessed,
“Carpentry? Is that a phone number?”
     “Too small to read,” Derek said. Abruptly, he stood up, and as the blanket
fell away, Stiles got his first look at the huge, intricate phoenix tattoo that
swirled and twisted up Derek’s right thigh, disappearing beneath the hem of his
boxer briefs. The amount of detail that had gone into the design’s linework was
incredible and must have taken hours and hours to complete--Stiles realized he
was gawking at it, and maybe a little bit at the bulging muscle and thick, dark
hair of Derek’s leg, too.
     He looked up to find Derek staring at him, eyebrows sharply raised, and
then he made a grumbling sound deep in his chest and snatched his pack of
cigarettes off the coffee table, startling Stiles out of his momentary lapse of
propriety. Oh, so now he was prepared to heed Stiles’s order to smoke outside,
right when they were in the middle of a huge discovery.
     Without quite knowing why, Stiles dumped the laptop on the cushion beside
him and hurried after Derek, clutching his blanket to his chest. “I have to go
to Chilmark,” he said at Derek’s back, then promptly slammed into him as Derek
threw open the door and stopped dead in his tracks. He recoiled, reversing
hurriedly into Stiles with a brief, alarmed sound. Stiles, who was unused to
seeing Derek act alarmed about anything, furrowed his brow and tried to see
over Derek’s shoulder at what had caused the sudden holdup.
     And immediately almost threw up.
     On the front porch of the cottage was the cat--why hadn’t Stiles paused to
wonder where the damn thing had gotten to this morning? Most days, he could
barely put the coffee on before it was yowling to be fed--its bloody corpse cut
up and arranged in the shape of a Swastika. Instinctively glancing around for
any sign of an intruder, all Stiles managed to locate was the cat’s head, which
had been severed and mounted atop the seat of Derek’s bike.
     “Fuck!” he shouted, voice shrill and hysterical and embarrassing, but
Derek was already moving, guiding Stiles off to the side with surprising
gentleness before he went to grab his camera. Heedless of the cold and the fact
that he was only in his underwear, Derek started framing close-ups of the cat
parts and its head, clicking away like this all was perfectly normal.
Meanwhile, Stiles flailed and covered his mouth in an attempt to stave off the
bile that wanted to rush up past his throat.
     The closest horizontal surface was the floor, so Stiles sat down on that,
all but collapsing in a heap against the wall with the blanket pulled tight
around him. You’d think after having looked at crime photos every day for weeks
that the sight of blood would bother him less, but that sure wasn’t the case.
Adrenaline levels probably through the roof, Stiles couldn’t do more than sit
there and shake until Derek finished snapping photos and came to kneel in front
of him. He placed a hand on Stiles’s shoulder and lightly slapped his cheek
with the other, making Stiles look at him.
     “Stiles. This isn’t important,” he said firmly, forcing Stiles to hold eye
contact. Stiles was surprised Derek didn’t shake him to emphasize his point.
“It just tells us what we already know, okay, that you’re close to uncovering
information someone out there doesn’t want you to find. So get up, drink your
damn coffee, and go to Chilmark. Find out who’s in those photos, who Allison
saw that day. Let whatever asshole’s doing this know you aren’t fucking around.
Then they’ll really have a reason to send us a message.”
     “Is that supposed to make me less terrified?” Stiles yelped, of a mind to
be stunned that Derek was even capable of putting so many words together at
once. He licked his lips, finding them painfully dry, and Derek’s gaze dropped
to his mouth briefly before it flicked back up to Stiles’s eyes.
     “No,” he said, and something in his voice made a chill run down Stiles’s
spine. “It’s supposed to make you angry.”
Chapter End Notes
     This chapter also includes a warning for graphic violence and
     descriptions of murder and mutilation of animals. Please proceed with
     caution if this is a trigger for you, or turn back here.
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
     Please carefully review the trigger warning (posted at the start of
     Chapter one and at the end of this work).
     Stiles was running.
     Ever since his and Derek’s discovery about the parade photographs and the
damn dead cat on his doorstep, he’d spent the last two days racing halfway up
and down Cape Cod in search of the woman with the camera and the owner of the
Chilmark carpentry shop. After several fruitless leads--Chimark Carpentry
hadn’t been in operation for years, as it turned out, and Stiles was damned if
locals took kindly to answering questions from a journo who’d been exposed as a
fraud and a libelist on the international stage--Stiles had tracked down the
couple. Well, after a fashion: the woman, Mildred Bremner, was now a widow, but
still in possession of those photographs and willing to loan them out
temporarily so Stiles could make copies.
     It was almost an unprecedented victory for them, given how badly things
had been going lately. Those photos could blow this whole damn case wide open
if Stiles could just make sense of it all, fill in the remaining blanks--but
now he was really running, the crack and whizz of bullets flying past him in
the near-dark, his forehead already ablaze with agony. There’d be time to
puzzle over those pictures later, if he survived the night. At this rate, the
odds weren’t looking good.
      Derek was right, he thought deliriously as he tried to scramble over the
icy terrain, making for higher ground. Someone must have found out they were
close to a break, that they were unearthing things meant to stay buried.
Turning up the same answers Allison had probably found just before she was
murdered, and didn’t that just bode well for them?
     Acting on an inexplicable hunch about the disappearance of Gerard Argent
years before--Allison’s grandfather, and the victim of an apparent drowning--
Stiles had been investigating the old boathouse down by the beach when the
first bullet had ricocheted off a post and nicked his head. But who the fuck
would shoot at him out here? Stiles hadn’t told anyone about their recent leads
or even the dead cat--no one, that is, except for Kate Argent and her brother,
Chris. But Chris had hired Stiles in the first place, so surely he wouldn’t…
and Kate was Allison’s aunt, seemed to genuinely have cared about the girl and
her disappearance. No, Stiles was fairly certain they wouldn’t go through all
this trouble to help him if they planned on shutting him up for good. Not that
he was going to stick around to find out who else it might be. Blood and sweat
streamed into his eyes as he stumbled around in the vague direction of his
cottage and safety. And Derek.
     The cottage door was locked when Stiles made it back, half-blind and
shaking--stinking, probably--with fear at the notion of getting ripped apart on
the front stoop just like the fucking cat. For a moment despair was poised to
overcome him at the thought that Derek wasn’t even here, that he was still off
running whatever errands had compelled him to go back to New York the day
before, roaring off on his bike with no more than a backward glance and a vague
promise to be back soon. Stiles was going to get shot and gutted like a
goddamned animal on the cottage stoop, left as yet another message for Derek to
find on this fucked-up island Stiles suddenly wished he’d never set foot on.
Then he realized Derek’s motorcycle was still parked out front, just off to the
side and under a tarp to protect it from the snow, and Stiles all but sagged
against the door in relief, fists banging frantically against the wood.
     “Derek!” he called, voice wrecked, hoarse. Had he been screaming this
whole time? “Derek, open the fucking door, it’s me--”
     Stiles pitched forward when the door suddenly gave way beneath his
shoulder, but Derek was there to catch him, propping him up before Stiles could
sag to the ground. He pried Stiles’s other hand away from his head, both their
fingers coming away bloody, and the way Derek’s face went shockingly pale made
Stiles’s heart leap in his chest.
     “It’s that bad?” he croaked.
     Without answering, Derek dragged Stiles inside with a hand fisted in the
front of his sweater. Stiles went, mewling a little in protest but otherwise
making no move to resist, not even when Derek shoved him into the bathroom and
stripped him of his jacket, then started tugging at the hem of his shirt,
trying to pull it up and over Stiles’s head.
     This was not how Stiles had pictured this happening. Okay, yeah, Derek
walked around shirtless a lot and it wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty of
reasons to be shameless about his body, which was awesome, but c’mon. Even if
Stiles might have spent some time thinking about it despite his better
judgement, about what it might be like for Derek to look at him with something
other than a scowl for once, the expression of worry and the rushed rending of
Stiles’s clothing wasn’t exactly his idea of romantic.
     “You could’ve just asked if you wanted me to get naked,” he tried, and was
cut off by Derek’s sharp “Shut up.”
     Once Stiles’s shirt was off, bunched up and tossed carelessly into a
corner, Derek moved away from him to the bathtub, turning on the hot water tap
and then the cold, letting it run over his hand for a second to test the
temperature. A moment later he pulled the switch for the shower.
     “Get in,” he barked. Glancing back at Stiles, and held a hand out, but
with a sudden flash of uncertainty, Stiles took a half step back.
     “Is it still bleeding?” he asked, then lifted his hand to his forehead and
prodded the wound. He pulled back with a hiss when the expected sting of pain
followed. Blood coated his fingertips still, red and wet and sticky. It didn’t
look like the blood flow had slowed even slightly, and Stiles had never thought
a head wound could bleed so freaking much. Not unless it was serious and Stiles
was about to hemorrhage to death from his face.
     Clearly exasperated, Derek jerked him forward by the wrist and shoved him
into the tub still half-clothed, pushing down on Stiles’s shoulders until he
flailed his way into a sitting position, legs hanging over the side of the tub
like an overgrown child.
     “It’s still bleeding,” he mumbled dumbly, staring at his hand with
something like shock. He showed it to Derek, who slapped it away before he
turned his back and grabbed a toiletries bag off the sink that he began rifling
through. When Derek turned back around, Stiles asked in a plaintive voice, “Why
is it still bleeding? Wait, is that... dental floss?”
     “Yes.”
     In addition to the floss, which Derek had started to unspool in great,
long pulls, Stiles also noticed Derek had found a needle somewhere and stuck it
between his teeth. He had no idea what else was in that fucking toiletries bag,
or why Derek carried a needle around with him in the first place, but had a
sinking feeling he didn’t want to know. Without acknowledging Stiles’s bleats
of protest over what might happen next, Derek split the dental floss into two
thinner lengths with his chewed fingernails, then proceeded to thread the end
of one through the eye of the needle.
     “What is that?” Stiles demanded, though he knew--and knew Derek knew he
knew--it was a needle. “Is that necessary?”
     Derek’s eyes flicked up to his, and he managed to keep his face a lot more
expressionless than Stiles was accomplishing at the moment. Again, he said
simply, “Yes.”
     “Are you a fucking doctor? We can’t just tape it?”
     “No.”
     A small noise escaped from the back of Stiles’s throat and out his mouth.
He’d driven a motorcycle for years, been in schoolyard scraps, asked too many
questions of the wrong people and taunted one too many thugs with that big
mouth of his, and yet he’d never once found himself in a position to require
stitches, much less from a tattooed, monosyllabic hacker wielding a needle and
dental floss like he’d just graduated at the top of his class from Harvard
fucking Medical School.
     “Did you sterilize that, even?” he demanded.
     One of Derek’s eyebrows lifted, seemingly of its own volition. Not for the
first time, Stiles was a bit in awe of how much he could communicate with those
things. “No.”
     “You didn’t?”
     With a huff, Derek handed the needle and dental floss--er, thread--to
Stiles, then pushed himself up from the tub and stomped into the kitchen.
Stiles heard the freezer door open and slam closed again, and a second later,
Derek reappeared in the doorway brandishing a bottle of vodka, which he
unceremoniously unscrewed and poured a generous amount of over the needle. As
if in afterthought, he also splashed some on Stiles’s head, ignoring the
startled yelp and the fact that most of the vodka landed in the tub.
     “Now drink,” he ordered, holding the bottle out to Stiles. Too afraid to
disobey, Stiles did as he was told, spluttering midswig when Derek barked,
“Drink some more.”
     He was still coughing back the taste of the alcohol when Derek braced his
head with one hand and plucked the needle from Stiles’s gasp, and this was
officially it. Stiles was going to escape getting shot by some whacko with a
hunting rifle, only to receive an impromptu lobotomy with a sewing needle in
the hands of a hot-like-burning madman.
     “Careful, it’s my eye,” he whined as Derek’s hand--and the needle--moved
closer, but Derek shushed him with an impatient hiss through his teeth.
     “Don’t move.”
     It took every ounce of willpower Stiles possessed to hold still and not
twitch, but even that wasn’t enough for the moment Derek first stuck the needle
through the skin of his forehead, swooping in and out and immediately pulling
the dental floss--fucking dental floss, seriously, how was this Stiles’s life--
through. Unable to stop himself, he jerked away with a groan, and Derek was
surprisingly patient as he looked at Stiles and nodded at the bottle of vodka,
silent permission for him to take another swig, to steel himself.
     Stiles had barely lowered the bottle from his mouth before Derek pierced
him a second time and drew the floss through. Once more he allowed Stiles to
drink, and once more he resumed his silent torture without bothering with so
much as a courtesy warning. The third time and the fourth, the fifth, it didn’t
seem so bad. Maybe Stiles got a little bit lost in watching the serious set of
Derek’s expression as he worked, while his own was probably arranged in a
rictus of dread and dumb, drunk-sloppy gratitude.
     The entire time, Derek’s eyes remained focused on his work, but once, and
that was all it took, they glanced briefly to Stiles’s, who quickly lowered his
gaze and blushed hot. He muttered a token “ow,” hoping to distract Derek from
the obvious hero-worship in which Stiles was currently partaking, but all that
earned him was a particularly sharp jab of the needle.
     It figured. Worst bedside manner ever.
End Notes
     More in-depth trigger warnings include the following: in conversation
     with Stiles as they are investigating Allison's disappearance and the
     serial murders that took place over the last couple of decades, Derek
     graphically describes the past murder, mutilation, and sexual
     violence against multiple women at the hands of Gerard and Kate
     Argent (even if he doesn't know who the perpetrators are at the
     time). Later in the story, Kate drugs Stiles and ties him up,
     planning to rape and kill him, and then Derek. She is later attacked
     and killed by Derek.
     There are also incest warnings are for past (implied) rape between
     Gerard Argent and Kate, Gerard and Allison, and Kate and Allison, as
     well as implied past Peter Hale/Derek. Although Stiles and Derek find
     out that Gerard was raping his daughter and granddaughter, and that
     Kate later raped Allison, these events are not described in detail;
     nor is Derek's revelation that he was abused by his uncle Peter, whom
     he subsequently tried to kill.
     Please heed these warnings and do not read the story if they upset
     and/or pose a risk of triggering you.
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