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laniew1Summary: If John and Melissa talked half as much as they profess to Rafe is sure he would have been tossed to the curb long before he was.
TITLE: Trials By Fire
RATING: R
PAIRING: John Stilinski/Rafe McCall, Rafe McCall/Melissa McCall, John Stilinski/Claudia Stilinski
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: If John and Melissa talked half as much as they profess to Rafe is sure he would have been tossed to the curb long before he was.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing Marvel, MTV, etc own everything but the idea to mesh them.
WARNINGS: Discussion of past mpreg (though nothing in depth), this is completely self-indulgent
FEEDBACK: Please?
Trials By Fire 1/?
If John and Melissa talked half as much as they profess to Rafe is sure he would have been tossed to the curb long before he was.
They were both his though, in different ways. Melissa the girl that his parents wanted him to marry and John the boy that he shouldn’t even want.
Shouldn’t even be considering wanting because his dad was already violent, hard, cruel man and if he had even the faintest clue as to the true nature of his sons relationship with John Stilinski he’s not sure which of them the old man would beat to death first.
********************************************************
The thing with Melissa is she’s gorgeous, she’s funny, she’s kind. He wants to love her and he thinks he does.
Just not as much as he loves John.
But John has an unfair advantage, he’s known Rafe since they were 2 and their mama’s were fast friends. They’re not fast friends anymore, Rafe doesn’t know what happened, his mama has always been close mouthed about it but while John has always been made to feel welcome the one time the women had met in public the air had been decidedly chilly.
********************************************************
They’re 17, they’ve never actually done anything more than some heavy petting. Rafe hasn’t ever been sure he’s willing to cross that particular bridge, even for John who he would lay his life down for. John almost always cedes to his wishes in that matter though there’s been a couple of times the buttons on jeans had been flipped open and hands had touched skin right below where they would normally sit.
They’re 17 and John has just been told that he’s going to Poland for two years with his mama because… well he’ll never be sure after the fact. He just knows that John is leaving and he’s going to be gone and Rafe is almost positive that he’s going to have been married off by the time John comes back.
John comes to say goodbye on a Tuesday, they’re alone in the house. His mama off to some church thing and his dad down at bar probably drinking away his paycheck.
They hide in Rafe’s room, the chair from his desk shoved under the knob and Rafe lays him down on his bed. They kiss until Rafe’s lips tingle and John’s look swollen, John is making whining noises in the back of his throat and Rafe wants…
He wants…
He cups his hand over John’s dick and squeezes and John makes a broken noise and sobs a little. The buttons have already been flicked open, Rafe doesn’t remember doing that.
The draw of the zipper down sounds loud, even louder than Rafe’s breathing and the noise John’s making.
He pushes his hand down them, wrapping it around him and John jerks like he’s been shocked. When Rafe looks at him, meets his eyes they’re wide and clear. His lips move and even though no sound comes Rafe knows what’s being said.
Please.
Rafe cups a hand to the side of his face and presses their lips together gently, closes his eyes and tries to breathe.
They can’t do this.
They can’t.
Then John bites his lip and Rafe growls and there’s a flurry of movement, clothes coming off and smooth skin rubbing together and there might be some stuff he uses on himself in his bedside drawer and he gets it on his finger and presses them into John.
One, two, three and John makes noise like he’s dying, like Rafe’s killing him and he knows better.
He does.
They’ve all been through the basic sex ed, you don’t ever have sex with someone without a condom. You don’t know their orientation, don’t know whether they’re a carrier or not but male carriers are beyond rare and besides Rafe…
Not exactly thinking with his upstairs brain and his downstairs brain is yammering about how good it’s going to feel and he puts his hands on John’s hips and pushes, stops, pushes and finally, after what feels like forever figures out how to get inside.
There’s pain on John’s face, Rafe tries to kiss it away but John turns his head and makes broken pain filled noises and Rafe wishes he were a better person, he sees the pain and hears the noise and he can’t seem to do anything but move.
John’s soft, nothing Rafe does gets him hard again and Rafe feels like the worst kind of person, even more vile then his dad when he comes.
First times aren’t supposed to be great, he knows this. He’d kind of hoped that because it was him and John that it would be though.
Maybe this is the sign that him and John aren’t supposed to be anything but the ‘friends’ they profess to be.
********************************************************
He’s got lousy judgment when he’s drinking, and John is gone, has been gone for weeks and that’s his only excuse.
He goes to a party and Melissa is there, she looks pretty in a blue dress and she tries to be John for him, takes his bottle away and cajoles him into playing darts with her.
He kisses her and she lets him and he pulls her into the backseat of his car and she lets him.
She never says no and he knows that he should stop, but John is gone and all he has left is his mama, who spends all her time at church; and his dad, who spends all his time drunk… and now Mel.
********************************************************
She gets pregnant, Rafe doesn’t even need to question when it happened. There was only the one time without the condom, after the party in the backseat of his car when he took her virginity.
When they both turn 18 he marries her, her belly is heavy with the baby, a boy she says, though they agreed to not find out.
The baby comes early and is sick right from the start, there are multiple stays at the hospital and illnesses to contend with and in the middle of all this, just shy of Scott’s first birthday John returns.
He has a wife and a baby that can’t be much older than Scott and Rafe gets so angry.
He was here, drunk and missing him and getting Melissa pregnant; and apparently the first thing John did when he got off the plane was find a girl and get her pregnant.
The boy’s name is not pronounceable, too many consonants not enough vowels though the name rolls of Claudia and John’s tongues with no problem.
Claudia and Melissa become the best of friends, while Rafe and John can’t manage to be in the same room together without sniping at each other.
Their friendship withers and dies with every angry word, and whatever might have been between them along with it.
********************************************************
The FBI recruits him right out of college and he jumps at the opportunity.
He leaves for training and then cases, and every time he comes back he finds that Melissa and Claudia and John are this insular little group and there doesn’t seem to be any space for him within it.
He looks at Melissa and thinks, you are mine and he looks at John and thinks the same thing. They’d both punch him if he said those words out loud.
He looks at Claudia and all he sees is the woman that stole something valuable from him that he didn’t even know was his to lose.
********************************************************
Scott and the boy become fast friends.
Scott comes home from school all excited about the boy, who is apparently going by Stiles now.
“’Cause Ms. Landstrom couldn’t say his name,” Scott says. “It’s real easy, I don’t know why she can’t.”
The name rolls off his tongue, just as easily as it rolls off Claudia and John’s, Rafe’s lip curls and Melissa lays a hand over the top of his. He shakes it off; he doesn’t need to be managed or coddled and crosses his arms over his chest.
“What do you do at school today sweetie?” she asks, she narrows her eyes at Rafe and he just looks back at her.
********************************************************
The thing with Scott was an accident; he was rambunctious on the best of days though his asthma kept him from losing control too badly.
Melissa throws him out and he knows she’s on the phone with John before the door even closes behind him. He’d fight to stay, this is the only family he has left, but he leaves instead.
He leaves because he can’t ever be his old man, can’t turn into that.
He keeps tabs on Beacon Hills even though it’s nowhere in his jurisdiction, John joins the police department. He’s told by friends of his mama that Scott and Stiles are still the best of friends, pretty well inseparable.
He tells Melissa that he doesn’t want Scott playing with that boy and even through the phone line he can hear her eye roll.
“They think of each other like brothers,” she doesn’t add on, though it’s very loudly unspoken that their relationship is nothing like his and John’s.
********************************************************
Claudia gets sick, really sick, really fast. One minute she’s fine and usurping his territory and the next she’s laying in a hospital bed dying while the boy, Stiles watches. The night she passes she’s alone with the boy, John is not there, apparently on a call.
He doesn’t go back for the funeral, he thinks he should even though Claudia was no friend of his; he wants to be there for John but Melissa tells him in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away.
So he does.
********************************************************
He still keeps tabs, half the town doesn’t know anything about the things that go bump in the night, a different team goes to the town when there’s a fire that claims the majority of the Hale pack.
Three of them survive, the oldest daughter becomes the new Alpha, her brother her first beta. Their uncle lays catatonic in a hospital bed then a home and Rafe can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the man to be stuck in that house listening to the screams of his pack as they died around him and then against all odds surviving.
********************************************************
When John gets elected Sheriff of Beacon Hills there are arguments about whether to bring him up to speed. But with the Hales either dead or having moved out of the community and the Argents following suit it is decided that it’s not needed for the newly elected Sheriff to be brought in.
Rafe wonders, briefly before they’re sent off to Phoenix to end a standoff between two newly formed packs if that’s not a mistake.
********************************************************
The taskforce he’s assigned to is small, there’s only eight of them and they keep tabs on the whole of the United States.
He’s always so busy, which he likes, it keeps him from thinking about the things he’s missing, the people he’s missing.
But it also means that he’s so busy all the time that he misses birthdays; all of them, though he tries to remember to send cards, shoving a couple of bucks in each one as he mails them off. Sometimes they’re on time, sometimes they’re late.
He’s almost positive that his son hates him and probably burns them in the backyard without even opening them.
He talks to Melissa on the phone and dials six of the numbers that would call John. He never actually manages to punch the last one in and he doesn’t call himself a coward, Melissa does that for him every time he manages to actually get through to her.
********************************************************
“Problems in Beacon Hills,” his partner says, Davis is new, barely even has a year under his belt.
“What kind of problems?” he asks, there’s been a ball of fear forming in his stomach since he hasn’t managed to get hold of Melissa for her weekly diatribe on his ability to actually man up.
He’s not sure why she wants him to man up now, doing so would mean actually talking to John and attempting to get him to forgive him for at least his part in the things that went wrong between them.
“Sheriff’s missing.”
********************************************************
John’s son still goes by Stiles and since he can’t find Scott or Melissa and John is missing Stiles is the only one left to talk to.
The boy looks at him with barely concealed disgust and he’s fairly sure that’s mostly on Scott’s behalf, he shouldn’t know anything about the relationship between him and his father that went down in flames before he was even born.
“You know I just want to help,” he says, or tries to say. Stiles isn’t listening to him, not a word.
********************************************************
They’re found before Rafe has even got started putting a search party together, the kids find them and apparently there was another parent missing that he hadn’t heard about.
The Argents have made their way back to Beacon Hills, as have what remains of the Hale pack. Which is just Derek Hale now.
He makes the calls and prepares to figure out how he’s going to manage to live in this town when John and Scott hate him and Melissa thinks him a fool for not having fixed things before now.
“Did you think I really cared?” she asks him one night, they’ve got a bottle open, sharing it between them. Scott had taken one look at them sitting at the same table for dinner and muttered something about having plans with Stiles.
“Cared about what?” he asks, even though he knows.
“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “I knew about you and John before you knew about you and John. And he’d actually talk to you if you got your head out of your ass and just tried a little bit.”
He thinks she’s wrong, and he wouldn’t even know where to begin if John let him.
********************************************************
Stiles goes missing on a Tuesday; Scott tells him later, after Stiles has been missing for six hours, that he had a panic attack in the boys locker room and fled.
There’s an amber alert and road patrols and John having what Rafe can only describe as his own panic attack in his office.
“We’ll find him,” Rafe says, he has his back to him, studying the map for places to look.
“He’s not a runaway,” John says angrily and Rafe turns.
“I didn’t say he was…”
“We have an agreement, especially after…” John takes a deep breath. “We have an agreement now, he tells me if he’s needing space and I let him have it so long as I know he’s with one of the others.”
“Others?”
“Scott, Isaac, Alison…”
“We found his jeep,” Parish comes bursting in and John pushes back from his desk so fast that the office chair he’d been sitting on goes slamming into the wall.
********************************************************
The jeep is dead on a back road, driver’s side door still open, blood on the seat, steering wheel and the ground right outside. There is evidence of a struggle and John makes a noise that sounds like an animal dying and Rafe takes control.
“You can’t be here,” he says, grabbing John’s arm and pulling him away.
“Don’t you even think…” John snarls.
“This is a crime scene, you are emotionally invested in the victim and you cannot be here,” Rafe says, slowly. “I won’t keep you out of it, I’ll keep you in the loop as much as I can but you can’t be here.”
“Rafe,” John says, it’s the first time John has said his actual name since they were kids, he doesn’t actually heave a sigh of relief that maybe they can fix things because John’s world is going to shit and this is definitely not the time or the place.
John presses a hand to his chest and breathes. “He’s all I have left, if he’s…”
“He’s not all you have left, you have me, you have Mel, and he’s fine, we’re going to find him.”
“Rafe.”
“We’re going to find him,” he promises, his voice thick with emotion, as much as he didn’t like Claudia this is John’s son. “He’s going to be fine.”
********************************************************
They don’t find him, there’s only Stiles’ blood at the crime scene and he sends it off for processing for the things that they don’t tell people they’re testing for.
He’s fairly sure that Stiles is 100% human. John is, he’s pretty sure Claudia was, but he’s been wrong a handful of times before so now he checks just to back up his own conclusions.
“Dad,” Scott is waiting in the conference room that he’s made his office and he looks like just what he is, a child scared that his best friend has been hurt or worse and not what he actually is, an apparent Alpha werewolf that has just lost a human member of his pack.
“Can you sense him?” he asks and Scott blinks at him.
“What?”
“I don’t have time for this, Scott. You’re a werewolf, I understand that and while we’ll have a lengthy discussion about it all later I need to know if you can sense Stiles through the pack bond.”
“Um,” Scott glances over his shoulder and he sees that Scott isn’t alone. Derek Hale is standing in the doorway with dark narrowed eyes.
“Pack bond, Scott,” Rafe snaps his fingers to get Scott’s attention back.
“I don’t…” Scott shakes his head and Rafe picks up his phone.
“This is Agent McCall, badge number RM5629SO, I need to speak to Asset 57 or have her in Beacon Hills as quickly as possible.”
********************************************************
Asset 57 is Hester Avery, she’s the youngest psychic the FBI employs in Special Operations and the only one that isn’t locked up in a padded room. She’d managed to train herself to block out anything she didn’t want to see or hear and has managed through sheer willpower to keep herself from going crazy and only trying to slit her wrists twice.
Her three sisters and one brother weren’t so lucky.
She arrives in Beacon Hills six hours after Rafe makes his call; she is accompanied by her two handlers and Agent Patrick Dunfry.
The sight of Dunfry makes Rafe’s blood run cold because Dunfry has been heading up a special task force that is actively searching for over 60 missing boys and girls and he truly doesn’t want Stiles’ name added to that list because none of those kids has been found alive or at all.
Hester raises an eyebrow at him and Rafe just rolls his eyes at her because she’s 24 but acts like she’s 50 and his mama.
“I need to talk to you,” Dunfry says, he’s got a file folder in his hands and Rafe knows he really doesn’t want to see whatever is inside it.
He gestures towards the conference room he’s taken over, it’s not soundproofed so he knows that Scott and Hale will be listening in and relaying any pertinent information to John and Melissa and the other non-werewolf members of the pack.
He still closes the door behind them though.
“How are you holding up?” Dunfry asks and it stops Rafe short, because it wasn’t what he was expecting to come out of his mouth.
“I’m… fine,” Rafe says he waits to see if more information is forthcoming and Dunfry just stands there with an understanding look on his face.
“No one would have pulled you from the case if you’d said it was your son, we might have sidelined you and had someone else running point but you would have…”
“What are you talking about? My son is standing outside pretending that he’s not listening to this conversation.”
Dunfry looks at Rafe then down in the folder in his hands, he doesn’t wait for the explanation, just takes the folder when it’s held out.
It’s not the file he was expecting, it’s a genetic work up and there’s enough markers in common that it indicates that Stiles is related by blood to…
His brain crosses the dots pretty quickly and he goes from worried for John’s sake to completely infuriated in under a second.
He flings open the door and ignores Scott’s shocked face and Hale’s raised eyebrows as he storms past, John’s door is open and he and Melissa have their heads bent together talking quietly.
“You god damned bastard,” Rafe snarls, Melissa glares at him and John doesn’t even look up. Just puts his hands over his face.
“Back off Rafe,” Melissa says.
“My son, he’s my fucking son and you didn’t say one god damned word about it, were you ever planning on telling me?”
John looks at him and his eyes are red and tired and his face is white and drawn.
“No.”
********************************************************
Rafe is still fuming, but now there’s an actual undercurrent of fear. He has something else to lose, a child he didn’t even know about.
He knows Mel had to know, that Stiles was the reason that all those discussions on whether or not to have another child, to give Scott a sibling had never actually resulted in that child happening.
Now instead of just one kid hating him he’s got two and the second one doesn’t even know that as much as he calls Scott his brother, Scott is actually his brother.
“Don’t do this now,” Mel snaps at him, she’s got a grip on his arm tugging him away from John. Scott looks like he might pass out, Rafe hadn’t even known wolves could go that white.
“This is actually a good thing,” Hester pipes up, she’s twisted her hair in a haphazard bun and is watching them like they’re the most interesting thing she’s ever seen.
“Why?” Hale asks, he’s watching Scott with narrowed eyes, probably trying to determine if he needs to tap Scott out or let the family drama play out.
“Sibling bond, pack bond, it’ll make any connection I can get that much stronger, I should, you know, barring unforeseen complications be able to maybe pinpoint a location,” her eyes dart to Dunfry then back to Hale and Scott, Rafe wouldn’t even have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking at her.
“You think he’s been taken by your cult people,” he says, Dunfry makes a noncommittal noise.
“He has the markers in his DNA, we still don’t know how they’re even finding these kids, but every single one of them has the same DNA marker. They’ve never actually grabbed a kid that had any ties to the supernatural community though which might be our first actual break.”
“You’ve never been able to get anything from the others?”
Hester shrugs, “little stuff, just enough to know they’re mostly all together, split into three groups, I got the most from this new girl Theresa, she was the last one to be taken before, um, Stiles? I guess. They’ve set her up as sort of control type person…”
“She’s working with them?” Rafe asks incredulously.
“They wipe them all, the kids, they use a whole lot of procedures that have definitely not been approved by any medical organization, these kid are performers on a stage and they’re all blank slates.”
Scott is making a sound, pained and panicked.
“They’re reprogrammed to whatever identify they pick out of the hat, who knows how they decide who’s going where.”
Rafe doesn’t question that, can’t think right now about where these kids end up.
If Stiles is now being counted among them, he’s sure he’ll find out.
********************************************************
“I just need you to breathe,” Hester says, she has Scott’s hands in hers, thumbs running over the backs of them gently.
John is sitting in a chair by the door watching intently, Hale leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, scowling.
“What do I need to do?” Scott asks, his voice is soft, wavering over the words. He sounds terrified.
“Absolutely nothing, I’m going to do all the heavy lifting,” Hester smiles at him reassuringly. “All I need you to do is breathe and stay as calm as possible.”
“Okay,” Mel moves forward, lays her hand on Scott’s shoulder and squeezes. Rafe stands next to Dunfry and waits.
“Here we go,” Hester whispers, she closes her eyes and the only sound in the room is breathing.
Rafe opens his mouth, looking over at Dunfry and the other man shakes his head, holds up his hand. He’s watching Hester intently.
He can tell the actual instant that Hester makes connection with Stiles through Scott, her whole body jerks then goes completely stiff, her breathing is completely irregular and she’s muttering ‘oh god, oh god, oh god’ over and over in a thin reedy voice.
He’s not sure how long it is, it feels like hours but is probably only a few minutes before she breaks the connection, she pushes herself away from Scott so fast that the only thing stopping her from sliding across the room is Hale appearing right behind her.
She looks terrified, confused when she looks over at them.
“Hester?” Dunfry asks, he takes a step forward and she stands, holding out her hands to ward him off. “What did you see?”
“They,” she clears her throat, coughs once, “they… it’s never been this fast before,” she says.
“What’s she talking about?” Rafe asks.
“What did you see, Hester?”
“They normally wait, there’s normally like a window of a couple of weeks before they…” she looks at them, straightens her shoulders and takes a deep breath. “They were sending him up into the Glade, he’s part of Group A in the Maze Trials.”
********************************************************
“Group A is stuck in the middle of a Maze, they’re definitely not on this plane anymore, god only knows how they got enough witches to work together to make the portal.”
“You’re talking about an alternate dimension.”
“Kind of, maybe an alternate timeline, we’ve managed to get a few operatives close enough to see it, but they can’t get any closer and we can’t seem to get any hard data to help us figure out a way to get to them,” Dunfry has pictures tacked to a board.
Rafe is the only one in the room, though he doesn’t delude himself into believing that Scott and Hale aren’t listening to every word and relaying it verbatim to the others.
“The maze your boy is in is all boys, they send a new one up about every 30 days, different ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, never any commonality between them other than…”
“The DNA marker in their bloodstream.”
“Yeah,” Rafe studies the pictures on the board, there are too many of them and Stiles’ picture has joined the group on the board.
“How long?”
“Three years,” he taps a picture of a young black man, “This boy, he calls himself Alby was the first one that we know about, there might have been more but…”
“They’re crazy, all the ones that aren’t being kidnapped and wiped and then sent out to be tormented and killed think they’re living in some apocalyptic future and the kids are their only hope to find a cure.”
********************************************************
He offers his help and is shot down so fast it stings a little; he knows it’s because Dunfry’s already got two whole teams worth of people looking for anything and everything to get to the kids and not because one of the kids is his, but it still rankles a little bit.
Dunfry packs up leaves town with Hester and her handlers in tow and a promise that he’ll let Rafe know as soon as they find something, anything.
The door to John’s office is closed when Rafe can’t take the silence in his head anymore, he goes back to the tiny apartment that he’s renting by the month and stares at a bottle of jack before he brushes his teeth and goes to bed.
********************************************************
Mel is cleaning his refrigerator when he stumbles into the kitchen looking for coffee. The bottle of jack is still sitting in the middle of his kitchen table.
“I didn’t know when he came home about Stiles,” she says. She looks over her shoulder at him.
“When did you find out?”
“Claudia said something and I started putting things together, when I finally asked him about it he didn’t deny it. Originally Claudia was just supposed to come with him to help him take care of Stiles, but when he got here you’d married me and there was Scott.”
“He never planned to tell me.”
“No, though I think his original intention was to tell you when he got home,” Mel looks at him, really looks at him and just rolls her eyes. “He didn’t do any of this to hurt you and you need to not act like he did. He can’t deal with the stress of it, not right now.”
“He lied to me Melissa,” she opens her mouth and he knows exactly what she’s going to say so he cuts her off before she can. “Omitting the truth is still a lie.”
“You can go back to sniping at each other when Stiles is back safely, but for now…”
“He hates me, it was bad enough when it was just Scott hating me and his friends hating me by association. But to know he’s my son and that he probably hates me even more then Scott does.”
********************************************************
“They’re out of the Maze,” Dunfry says when Rafe picks up his phone.
“Where is he? Is he okay? We can be there…” Rafe is already pulling his jacket on and trying to figure out how many people he can reasonably smuggle into whatever safe location Dunfry will have set up.
“They’re out of the Maze but they didn’t come through the portal, they’re still on the other side,” Dunfry says, Rafe collapses back into his chair, puts a hand over his face and takes a few deep breaths to try and calm his racing heart before he has a pack of werewolves standing in his doorway.
“Your boy is alive, most of the others, the group fractured towards the end and half of them went through the maze, some of them stayed behind in the glade…”
“And some of them died.”
“Yeah, boy that came up into the glade right before yours did, Chuck, he died; a few others.”
“What do we do now?”
“I think your boy is the key to getting them out of there, they’re out of the maze that’s something. I was hoping that maybe we could have Hester try again with your other boy? See if she could manage a longer connection now that they’re not in the maze anymore.”
“Do you think it’s risky? If they know we’re trying to gain contact with Stiles, will they hurt him?”
“I think they’re already trying to, I think they whole idea of sending him into the glade in the first place was their way of trying to use whatever natural inquisitiveness they couldn’t clear out of him to kill him without getting their own hands dirty.”
“He’d go into the maze and be killed by those creatures.”
“The grievers, yeah. I think their intent was he’d go into the maze and the grievers would kill him. Instead he survived a night in the maze, killed a griever and it seems like him and one of the others figured out how to get them out of there.”
“I’ll talk to his mom,” Rafe says. “I can’t make that decision.”
********************************************************
“I’ll do it,” Scott says. He doesn’t even pause, or think about it. Just… “I’ll do it, he’s my brother, right? I mean he’s always been my brother, but now he’s my actual brother so yeah, I’m doing it.”
“Scott,” Melissa starts and Scott looks at her, her mouth twists.
“Stiles was always trying to protect me, now’s my turn to protect him.”
********************************************************
TITLE: Trials By Fire
RATING: R
PAIRING: John Stilinski/Rafe McCall, Rafe McCall/Melissa McCall, John Stilinski/Claudia Stilinski
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: If John and Melissa talked half as much as they profess to Rafe is sure he would have been tossed to the curb long before he was.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing Marvel, MTV, etc own everything but the idea to mesh them.
WARNINGS: Discussion of past mpreg (though nothing in depth), this is completely self-indulgent
FEEDBACK: Please?
Trials By Fire 1/?
If John and Melissa talked half as much as they profess to Rafe is sure he would have been tossed to the curb long before he was.
They were both his though, in different ways. Melissa the girl that his parents wanted him to marry and John the boy that he shouldn’t even want.
Shouldn’t even be considering wanting because his dad was already violent, hard, cruel man and if he had even the faintest clue as to the true nature of his sons relationship with John Stilinski he’s not sure which of them the old man would beat to death first.
The thing with Melissa is she’s gorgeous, she’s funny, she’s kind. He wants to love her and he thinks he does.
Just not as much as he loves John.
But John has an unfair advantage, he’s known Rafe since they were 2 and their mama’s were fast friends. They’re not fast friends anymore, Rafe doesn’t know what happened, his mama has always been close mouthed about it but while John has always been made to feel welcome the one time the women had met in public the air had been decidedly chilly.
They’re 17, they’ve never actually done anything more than some heavy petting. Rafe hasn’t ever been sure he’s willing to cross that particular bridge, even for John who he would lay his life down for. John almost always cedes to his wishes in that matter though there’s been a couple of times the buttons on jeans had been flipped open and hands had touched skin right below where they would normally sit.
They’re 17 and John has just been told that he’s going to Poland for two years with his mama because… well he’ll never be sure after the fact. He just knows that John is leaving and he’s going to be gone and Rafe is almost positive that he’s going to have been married off by the time John comes back.
John comes to say goodbye on a Tuesday, they’re alone in the house. His mama off to some church thing and his dad down at bar probably drinking away his paycheck.
They hide in Rafe’s room, the chair from his desk shoved under the knob and Rafe lays him down on his bed. They kiss until Rafe’s lips tingle and John’s look swollen, John is making whining noises in the back of his throat and Rafe wants…
He wants…
He cups his hand over John’s dick and squeezes and John makes a broken noise and sobs a little. The buttons have already been flicked open, Rafe doesn’t remember doing that.
The draw of the zipper down sounds loud, even louder than Rafe’s breathing and the noise John’s making.
He pushes his hand down them, wrapping it around him and John jerks like he’s been shocked. When Rafe looks at him, meets his eyes they’re wide and clear. His lips move and even though no sound comes Rafe knows what’s being said.
Please.
Rafe cups a hand to the side of his face and presses their lips together gently, closes his eyes and tries to breathe.
They can’t do this.
They can’t.
Then John bites his lip and Rafe growls and there’s a flurry of movement, clothes coming off and smooth skin rubbing together and there might be some stuff he uses on himself in his bedside drawer and he gets it on his finger and presses them into John.
One, two, three and John makes noise like he’s dying, like Rafe’s killing him and he knows better.
He does.
They’ve all been through the basic sex ed, you don’t ever have sex with someone without a condom. You don’t know their orientation, don’t know whether they’re a carrier or not but male carriers are beyond rare and besides Rafe…
Not exactly thinking with his upstairs brain and his downstairs brain is yammering about how good it’s going to feel and he puts his hands on John’s hips and pushes, stops, pushes and finally, after what feels like forever figures out how to get inside.
There’s pain on John’s face, Rafe tries to kiss it away but John turns his head and makes broken pain filled noises and Rafe wishes he were a better person, he sees the pain and hears the noise and he can’t seem to do anything but move.
John’s soft, nothing Rafe does gets him hard again and Rafe feels like the worst kind of person, even more vile then his dad when he comes.
First times aren’t supposed to be great, he knows this. He’d kind of hoped that because it was him and John that it would be though.
Maybe this is the sign that him and John aren’t supposed to be anything but the ‘friends’ they profess to be.
He’s got lousy judgment when he’s drinking, and John is gone, has been gone for weeks and that’s his only excuse.
He goes to a party and Melissa is there, she looks pretty in a blue dress and she tries to be John for him, takes his bottle away and cajoles him into playing darts with her.
He kisses her and she lets him and he pulls her into the backseat of his car and she lets him.
She never says no and he knows that he should stop, but John is gone and all he has left is his mama, who spends all her time at church; and his dad, who spends all his time drunk… and now Mel.
She gets pregnant, Rafe doesn’t even need to question when it happened. There was only the one time without the condom, after the party in the backseat of his car when he took her virginity.
When they both turn 18 he marries her, her belly is heavy with the baby, a boy she says, though they agreed to not find out.
The baby comes early and is sick right from the start, there are multiple stays at the hospital and illnesses to contend with and in the middle of all this, just shy of Scott’s first birthday John returns.
He has a wife and a baby that can’t be much older than Scott and Rafe gets so angry.
He was here, drunk and missing him and getting Melissa pregnant; and apparently the first thing John did when he got off the plane was find a girl and get her pregnant.
The boy’s name is not pronounceable, too many consonants not enough vowels though the name rolls of Claudia and John’s tongues with no problem.
Claudia and Melissa become the best of friends, while Rafe and John can’t manage to be in the same room together without sniping at each other.
Their friendship withers and dies with every angry word, and whatever might have been between them along with it.
The FBI recruits him right out of college and he jumps at the opportunity.
He leaves for training and then cases, and every time he comes back he finds that Melissa and Claudia and John are this insular little group and there doesn’t seem to be any space for him within it.
He looks at Melissa and thinks, you are mine and he looks at John and thinks the same thing. They’d both punch him if he said those words out loud.
He looks at Claudia and all he sees is the woman that stole something valuable from him that he didn’t even know was his to lose.
Scott and the boy become fast friends.
Scott comes home from school all excited about the boy, who is apparently going by Stiles now.
“’Cause Ms. Landstrom couldn’t say his name,” Scott says. “It’s real easy, I don’t know why she can’t.”
The name rolls off his tongue, just as easily as it rolls off Claudia and John’s, Rafe’s lip curls and Melissa lays a hand over the top of his. He shakes it off; he doesn’t need to be managed or coddled and crosses his arms over his chest.
“What do you do at school today sweetie?” she asks, she narrows her eyes at Rafe and he just looks back at her.
The thing with Scott was an accident; he was rambunctious on the best of days though his asthma kept him from losing control too badly.
Melissa throws him out and he knows she’s on the phone with John before the door even closes behind him. He’d fight to stay, this is the only family he has left, but he leaves instead.
He leaves because he can’t ever be his old man, can’t turn into that.
He keeps tabs on Beacon Hills even though it’s nowhere in his jurisdiction, John joins the police department. He’s told by friends of his mama that Scott and Stiles are still the best of friends, pretty well inseparable.
He tells Melissa that he doesn’t want Scott playing with that boy and even through the phone line he can hear her eye roll.
“They think of each other like brothers,” she doesn’t add on, though it’s very loudly unspoken that their relationship is nothing like his and John’s.
Claudia gets sick, really sick, really fast. One minute she’s fine and usurping his territory and the next she’s laying in a hospital bed dying while the boy, Stiles watches. The night she passes she’s alone with the boy, John is not there, apparently on a call.
He doesn’t go back for the funeral, he thinks he should even though Claudia was no friend of his; he wants to be there for John but Melissa tells him in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away.
So he does.
He still keeps tabs, half the town doesn’t know anything about the things that go bump in the night, a different team goes to the town when there’s a fire that claims the majority of the Hale pack.
Three of them survive, the oldest daughter becomes the new Alpha, her brother her first beta. Their uncle lays catatonic in a hospital bed then a home and Rafe can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the man to be stuck in that house listening to the screams of his pack as they died around him and then against all odds surviving.
When John gets elected Sheriff of Beacon Hills there are arguments about whether to bring him up to speed. But with the Hales either dead or having moved out of the community and the Argents following suit it is decided that it’s not needed for the newly elected Sheriff to be brought in.
Rafe wonders, briefly before they’re sent off to Phoenix to end a standoff between two newly formed packs if that’s not a mistake.
The taskforce he’s assigned to is small, there’s only eight of them and they keep tabs on the whole of the United States.
He’s always so busy, which he likes, it keeps him from thinking about the things he’s missing, the people he’s missing.
But it also means that he’s so busy all the time that he misses birthdays; all of them, though he tries to remember to send cards, shoving a couple of bucks in each one as he mails them off. Sometimes they’re on time, sometimes they’re late.
He’s almost positive that his son hates him and probably burns them in the backyard without even opening them.
He talks to Melissa on the phone and dials six of the numbers that would call John. He never actually manages to punch the last one in and he doesn’t call himself a coward, Melissa does that for him every time he manages to actually get through to her.
“Problems in Beacon Hills,” his partner says, Davis is new, barely even has a year under his belt.
“What kind of problems?” he asks, there’s been a ball of fear forming in his stomach since he hasn’t managed to get hold of Melissa for her weekly diatribe on his ability to actually man up.
He’s not sure why she wants him to man up now, doing so would mean actually talking to John and attempting to get him to forgive him for at least his part in the things that went wrong between them.
“Sheriff’s missing.”
John’s son still goes by Stiles and since he can’t find Scott or Melissa and John is missing Stiles is the only one left to talk to.
The boy looks at him with barely concealed disgust and he’s fairly sure that’s mostly on Scott’s behalf, he shouldn’t know anything about the relationship between him and his father that went down in flames before he was even born.
“You know I just want to help,” he says, or tries to say. Stiles isn’t listening to him, not a word.
They’re found before Rafe has even got started putting a search party together, the kids find them and apparently there was another parent missing that he hadn’t heard about.
The Argents have made their way back to Beacon Hills, as have what remains of the Hale pack. Which is just Derek Hale now.
He makes the calls and prepares to figure out how he’s going to manage to live in this town when John and Scott hate him and Melissa thinks him a fool for not having fixed things before now.
“Did you think I really cared?” she asks him one night, they’ve got a bottle open, sharing it between them. Scott had taken one look at them sitting at the same table for dinner and muttered something about having plans with Stiles.
“Cared about what?” he asks, even though he knows.
“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “I knew about you and John before you knew about you and John. And he’d actually talk to you if you got your head out of your ass and just tried a little bit.”
He thinks she’s wrong, and he wouldn’t even know where to begin if John let him.
Stiles goes missing on a Tuesday; Scott tells him later, after Stiles has been missing for six hours, that he had a panic attack in the boys locker room and fled.
There’s an amber alert and road patrols and John having what Rafe can only describe as his own panic attack in his office.
“We’ll find him,” Rafe says, he has his back to him, studying the map for places to look.
“He’s not a runaway,” John says angrily and Rafe turns.
“I didn’t say he was…”
“We have an agreement, especially after…” John takes a deep breath. “We have an agreement now, he tells me if he’s needing space and I let him have it so long as I know he’s with one of the others.”
“Others?”
“Scott, Isaac, Alison…”
“We found his jeep,” Parish comes bursting in and John pushes back from his desk so fast that the office chair he’d been sitting on goes slamming into the wall.
The jeep is dead on a back road, driver’s side door still open, blood on the seat, steering wheel and the ground right outside. There is evidence of a struggle and John makes a noise that sounds like an animal dying and Rafe takes control.
“You can’t be here,” he says, grabbing John’s arm and pulling him away.
“Don’t you even think…” John snarls.
“This is a crime scene, you are emotionally invested in the victim and you cannot be here,” Rafe says, slowly. “I won’t keep you out of it, I’ll keep you in the loop as much as I can but you can’t be here.”
“Rafe,” John says, it’s the first time John has said his actual name since they were kids, he doesn’t actually heave a sigh of relief that maybe they can fix things because John’s world is going to shit and this is definitely not the time or the place.
John presses a hand to his chest and breathes. “He’s all I have left, if he’s…”
“He’s not all you have left, you have me, you have Mel, and he’s fine, we’re going to find him.”
“Rafe.”
“We’re going to find him,” he promises, his voice thick with emotion, as much as he didn’t like Claudia this is John’s son. “He’s going to be fine.”
They don’t find him, there’s only Stiles’ blood at the crime scene and he sends it off for processing for the things that they don’t tell people they’re testing for.
He’s fairly sure that Stiles is 100% human. John is, he’s pretty sure Claudia was, but he’s been wrong a handful of times before so now he checks just to back up his own conclusions.
“Dad,” Scott is waiting in the conference room that he’s made his office and he looks like just what he is, a child scared that his best friend has been hurt or worse and not what he actually is, an apparent Alpha werewolf that has just lost a human member of his pack.
“Can you sense him?” he asks and Scott blinks at him.
“What?”
“I don’t have time for this, Scott. You’re a werewolf, I understand that and while we’ll have a lengthy discussion about it all later I need to know if you can sense Stiles through the pack bond.”
“Um,” Scott glances over his shoulder and he sees that Scott isn’t alone. Derek Hale is standing in the doorway with dark narrowed eyes.
“Pack bond, Scott,” Rafe snaps his fingers to get Scott’s attention back.
“I don’t…” Scott shakes his head and Rafe picks up his phone.
“This is Agent McCall, badge number RM5629SO, I need to speak to Asset 57 or have her in Beacon Hills as quickly as possible.”
Asset 57 is Hester Avery, she’s the youngest psychic the FBI employs in Special Operations and the only one that isn’t locked up in a padded room. She’d managed to train herself to block out anything she didn’t want to see or hear and has managed through sheer willpower to keep herself from going crazy and only trying to slit her wrists twice.
Her three sisters and one brother weren’t so lucky.
She arrives in Beacon Hills six hours after Rafe makes his call; she is accompanied by her two handlers and Agent Patrick Dunfry.
The sight of Dunfry makes Rafe’s blood run cold because Dunfry has been heading up a special task force that is actively searching for over 60 missing boys and girls and he truly doesn’t want Stiles’ name added to that list because none of those kids has been found alive or at all.
Hester raises an eyebrow at him and Rafe just rolls his eyes at her because she’s 24 but acts like she’s 50 and his mama.
“I need to talk to you,” Dunfry says, he’s got a file folder in his hands and Rafe knows he really doesn’t want to see whatever is inside it.
He gestures towards the conference room he’s taken over, it’s not soundproofed so he knows that Scott and Hale will be listening in and relaying any pertinent information to John and Melissa and the other non-werewolf members of the pack.
He still closes the door behind them though.
“How are you holding up?” Dunfry asks and it stops Rafe short, because it wasn’t what he was expecting to come out of his mouth.
“I’m… fine,” Rafe says he waits to see if more information is forthcoming and Dunfry just stands there with an understanding look on his face.
“No one would have pulled you from the case if you’d said it was your son, we might have sidelined you and had someone else running point but you would have…”
“What are you talking about? My son is standing outside pretending that he’s not listening to this conversation.”
Dunfry looks at Rafe then down in the folder in his hands, he doesn’t wait for the explanation, just takes the folder when it’s held out.
It’s not the file he was expecting, it’s a genetic work up and there’s enough markers in common that it indicates that Stiles is related by blood to…
His brain crosses the dots pretty quickly and he goes from worried for John’s sake to completely infuriated in under a second.
He flings open the door and ignores Scott’s shocked face and Hale’s raised eyebrows as he storms past, John’s door is open and he and Melissa have their heads bent together talking quietly.
“You god damned bastard,” Rafe snarls, Melissa glares at him and John doesn’t even look up. Just puts his hands over his face.
“Back off Rafe,” Melissa says.
“My son, he’s my fucking son and you didn’t say one god damned word about it, were you ever planning on telling me?”
John looks at him and his eyes are red and tired and his face is white and drawn.
“No.”
Rafe is still fuming, but now there’s an actual undercurrent of fear. He has something else to lose, a child he didn’t even know about.
He knows Mel had to know, that Stiles was the reason that all those discussions on whether or not to have another child, to give Scott a sibling had never actually resulted in that child happening.
Now instead of just one kid hating him he’s got two and the second one doesn’t even know that as much as he calls Scott his brother, Scott is actually his brother.
“Don’t do this now,” Mel snaps at him, she’s got a grip on his arm tugging him away from John. Scott looks like he might pass out, Rafe hadn’t even known wolves could go that white.
“This is actually a good thing,” Hester pipes up, she’s twisted her hair in a haphazard bun and is watching them like they’re the most interesting thing she’s ever seen.
“Why?” Hale asks, he’s watching Scott with narrowed eyes, probably trying to determine if he needs to tap Scott out or let the family drama play out.
“Sibling bond, pack bond, it’ll make any connection I can get that much stronger, I should, you know, barring unforeseen complications be able to maybe pinpoint a location,” her eyes dart to Dunfry then back to Hale and Scott, Rafe wouldn’t even have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking at her.
“You think he’s been taken by your cult people,” he says, Dunfry makes a noncommittal noise.
“He has the markers in his DNA, we still don’t know how they’re even finding these kids, but every single one of them has the same DNA marker. They’ve never actually grabbed a kid that had any ties to the supernatural community though which might be our first actual break.”
“You’ve never been able to get anything from the others?”
Hester shrugs, “little stuff, just enough to know they’re mostly all together, split into three groups, I got the most from this new girl Theresa, she was the last one to be taken before, um, Stiles? I guess. They’ve set her up as sort of control type person…”
“She’s working with them?” Rafe asks incredulously.
“They wipe them all, the kids, they use a whole lot of procedures that have definitely not been approved by any medical organization, these kid are performers on a stage and they’re all blank slates.”
Scott is making a sound, pained and panicked.
“They’re reprogrammed to whatever identify they pick out of the hat, who knows how they decide who’s going where.”
Rafe doesn’t question that, can’t think right now about where these kids end up.
If Stiles is now being counted among them, he’s sure he’ll find out.
“I just need you to breathe,” Hester says, she has Scott’s hands in hers, thumbs running over the backs of them gently.
John is sitting in a chair by the door watching intently, Hale leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, scowling.
“What do I need to do?” Scott asks, his voice is soft, wavering over the words. He sounds terrified.
“Absolutely nothing, I’m going to do all the heavy lifting,” Hester smiles at him reassuringly. “All I need you to do is breathe and stay as calm as possible.”
“Okay,” Mel moves forward, lays her hand on Scott’s shoulder and squeezes. Rafe stands next to Dunfry and waits.
“Here we go,” Hester whispers, she closes her eyes and the only sound in the room is breathing.
Rafe opens his mouth, looking over at Dunfry and the other man shakes his head, holds up his hand. He’s watching Hester intently.
He can tell the actual instant that Hester makes connection with Stiles through Scott, her whole body jerks then goes completely stiff, her breathing is completely irregular and she’s muttering ‘oh god, oh god, oh god’ over and over in a thin reedy voice.
He’s not sure how long it is, it feels like hours but is probably only a few minutes before she breaks the connection, she pushes herself away from Scott so fast that the only thing stopping her from sliding across the room is Hale appearing right behind her.
She looks terrified, confused when she looks over at them.
“Hester?” Dunfry asks, he takes a step forward and she stands, holding out her hands to ward him off. “What did you see?”
“They,” she clears her throat, coughs once, “they… it’s never been this fast before,” she says.
“What’s she talking about?” Rafe asks.
“What did you see, Hester?”
“They normally wait, there’s normally like a window of a couple of weeks before they…” she looks at them, straightens her shoulders and takes a deep breath. “They were sending him up into the Glade, he’s part of Group A in the Maze Trials.”
“Group A is stuck in the middle of a Maze, they’re definitely not on this plane anymore, god only knows how they got enough witches to work together to make the portal.”
“You’re talking about an alternate dimension.”
“Kind of, maybe an alternate timeline, we’ve managed to get a few operatives close enough to see it, but they can’t get any closer and we can’t seem to get any hard data to help us figure out a way to get to them,” Dunfry has pictures tacked to a board.
Rafe is the only one in the room, though he doesn’t delude himself into believing that Scott and Hale aren’t listening to every word and relaying it verbatim to the others.
“The maze your boy is in is all boys, they send a new one up about every 30 days, different ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, never any commonality between them other than…”
“The DNA marker in their bloodstream.”
“Yeah,” Rafe studies the pictures on the board, there are too many of them and Stiles’ picture has joined the group on the board.
“How long?”
“Three years,” he taps a picture of a young black man, “This boy, he calls himself Alby was the first one that we know about, there might have been more but…”
“They’re crazy, all the ones that aren’t being kidnapped and wiped and then sent out to be tormented and killed think they’re living in some apocalyptic future and the kids are their only hope to find a cure.”
He offers his help and is shot down so fast it stings a little; he knows it’s because Dunfry’s already got two whole teams worth of people looking for anything and everything to get to the kids and not because one of the kids is his, but it still rankles a little bit.
Dunfry packs up leaves town with Hester and her handlers in tow and a promise that he’ll let Rafe know as soon as they find something, anything.
The door to John’s office is closed when Rafe can’t take the silence in his head anymore, he goes back to the tiny apartment that he’s renting by the month and stares at a bottle of jack before he brushes his teeth and goes to bed.
Mel is cleaning his refrigerator when he stumbles into the kitchen looking for coffee. The bottle of jack is still sitting in the middle of his kitchen table.
“I didn’t know when he came home about Stiles,” she says. She looks over her shoulder at him.
“When did you find out?”
“Claudia said something and I started putting things together, when I finally asked him about it he didn’t deny it. Originally Claudia was just supposed to come with him to help him take care of Stiles, but when he got here you’d married me and there was Scott.”
“He never planned to tell me.”
“No, though I think his original intention was to tell you when he got home,” Mel looks at him, really looks at him and just rolls her eyes. “He didn’t do any of this to hurt you and you need to not act like he did. He can’t deal with the stress of it, not right now.”
“He lied to me Melissa,” she opens her mouth and he knows exactly what she’s going to say so he cuts her off before she can. “Omitting the truth is still a lie.”
“You can go back to sniping at each other when Stiles is back safely, but for now…”
“He hates me, it was bad enough when it was just Scott hating me and his friends hating me by association. But to know he’s my son and that he probably hates me even more then Scott does.”
“They’re out of the Maze,” Dunfry says when Rafe picks up his phone.
“Where is he? Is he okay? We can be there…” Rafe is already pulling his jacket on and trying to figure out how many people he can reasonably smuggle into whatever safe location Dunfry will have set up.
“They’re out of the Maze but they didn’t come through the portal, they’re still on the other side,” Dunfry says, Rafe collapses back into his chair, puts a hand over his face and takes a few deep breaths to try and calm his racing heart before he has a pack of werewolves standing in his doorway.
“Your boy is alive, most of the others, the group fractured towards the end and half of them went through the maze, some of them stayed behind in the glade…”
“And some of them died.”
“Yeah, boy that came up into the glade right before yours did, Chuck, he died; a few others.”
“What do we do now?”
“I think your boy is the key to getting them out of there, they’re out of the maze that’s something. I was hoping that maybe we could have Hester try again with your other boy? See if she could manage a longer connection now that they’re not in the maze anymore.”
“Do you think it’s risky? If they know we’re trying to gain contact with Stiles, will they hurt him?”
“I think they’re already trying to, I think they whole idea of sending him into the glade in the first place was their way of trying to use whatever natural inquisitiveness they couldn’t clear out of him to kill him without getting their own hands dirty.”
“He’d go into the maze and be killed by those creatures.”
“The grievers, yeah. I think their intent was he’d go into the maze and the grievers would kill him. Instead he survived a night in the maze, killed a griever and it seems like him and one of the others figured out how to get them out of there.”
“I’ll talk to his mom,” Rafe says. “I can’t make that decision.”
“I’ll do it,” Scott says. He doesn’t even pause, or think about it. Just… “I’ll do it, he’s my brother, right? I mean he’s always been my brother, but now he’s my actual brother so yeah, I’m doing it.”
“Scott,” Melissa starts and Scott looks at her, her mouth twists.
“Stiles was always trying to protect me, now’s my turn to protect him.”