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laniew1So a change in viewpoints, for this chapter only.
Summary: Stiles goes to college and accidentally gets hired by SHIELD.
TITLE: Stiles Stilinski: Agent of SHIELD
RATING: PG-13 (for now)
PAIRING: Gen – but Stiles/Clint (eventually)
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: Stiles goes to college and accidentally gets hired by SHIELD.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing Marvel, MTV, etc own everything but the idea to mesh them..
FEEDBACK: Please?
Stiles Stilinski, Agent of Shield 9/?
Day One:
Crawford comes to in an ambulance, there’s a SHIELD uniform to the right of the medic and his head is throbbing in time with his heartbeat which is throbbing in time with his wrist and every other pain in his body.
“Stiles,” he yells, because there were hands on the Stiles’ arms pulling him away and everyone was screaming and panicking and no one was helping and then something had hit him.
And now he’s here, struggling against his arms and legs being strapped down. And there’s no Stiles.
“Calm down, sir,” the medic says, he presses a cloth to his forehead and he twists his head to see that there is already a bloody one to the right of him.
“Stiles? Where’s Stiles?” he asks, his heart feels like it’s up in his throat and the guy in the SHIELD uniform shakes his head. He’s pressing a finger to his ear which means he has an ear piece in.
“We’re looking for him,” the uniform says and the medic presses the cloth tighter to his forehead as he blinks away the moisture in his eyes that is not tears.
******************************************************************************
Steve gets the call because he’s team leader and it’s his job to break bad news to the team. He really hates that part of his job though normally it doesn’t mean anything because 3/4 of the time Tony intercepts whatever the calls is and breaks it in that ‘Tony’ way that he has.
Tony doesn’t intercept this one though; he kind of wished he had. He struggles with the decision, what to do and he decides that the mission is important enough that he needs everyone’s head in the game and focused. He doesn’t need them distracted by things they can’t change and information they don’t have.
So he waits until the job is finished, Tony making noises about going out for drinks.
They’re in stripped down versions of their uniforms, Bruce is stitching up a long gash along Clint’s shoulder blade while Clint continually tells him that he doesn’t need him to do so.
“So the thing is,” he starts, the room as a whole looks over at him with the exception of Tony who’s frowning at the wet bar like it insulted him personally.
“Cap?” Natasha says, she must see something in his face, hear something in his voice. She definitely knows whatever he’s going to tell them is bad news because her posture straightens and she’s got her hand already gripping her gun.
She’s not the one whose reaction he’s worried about though.
“Steve?” Tony prods, he’s got one of the little bottles of scotch in his hand, he’s not opened it yet, probably waiting for ice to be delivered or something.
“Someone grabbed Stiles off the street,” he says, he winces at the roar of denial. Bruce has one hand on Clint’s shoulder holding him down, the other pressed to the wound he wasn’t finished stitching up.
“Agent Coulson has us scheduled on the first transport out,” he says, Natasha moves to Bruce’s side, hand coming to rest on Clint’s arm.
“Who took him?” Clint snaps, he’s not trying to shrug off Bruce and Natasha’s hands any longer, Steve doesn’t let that fool him into believing he’s actually calmed down any.
“They don’t know.”
******************************************************************************
He’s not supposed to be home, he’d only come back to grab a folder that he’d left locked in his office and to grab a snack.
The one thing that Stiles did prior to leaving for college was train his deputies in acceptable and non-acceptable forms of food for their Sheriff. They watch him almost closer than Stiles ever had, and its times when his box of Ho-Ho’s disappears from his desk or they order in lunch, with the extra-large salad for him that he misses his boy.
They don’t search his house though, that’s Stiles’ domain and even though Stiles comes home infrequently he can have the house thoroughly searched from top to bottom for contraband food and beverages within an hour of walking through the door.
The homeless shelter and Stiles’ friends love that part of his return home because it means that all the food that Stiles’ doesn’t want going into his father’s body has to go somewhere that isn’t in their house.
He’s got the folder he needs in hand, has the last bag of chips in the house in the other and is just walking toward the front door when the doorbell goes off.
No one comes by, not unannounced and Scott has already been by once this week to check up on him so he knows that it’s not any of Stiles’ friends. They have a schedule, Isaac will be next.
He shoves the folder under his arm and opens the door to find two suits standing there, well-dressed, they both look somber.
His heart jumps up into his throat and he maybe whispers Stiles’ name.
“Sheriff Stilinski?” the one at the door, the one who rang the bell asks.
“Yes?” he says, he… just stands there. Scott comes around the corner of the house, running at breakneck speed and he looks, there’s something very wrong with his face.
“I’m Agent Coulson, this is Agent Sitwell, we’re from SHIELD.”
“Where’s Stiles?” Scott asks as he comes up on the porch; he leapt over the railing but that can’t be right, his face is normal now, no sign of whatever had been wrong with it just seconds before, he’ll ask the questions later but not right now.
“Mr. McCall,” Agent Coulson inclines his head. “And where’s the rest of your pack?”
“They’ll be here, they’re coming. Where is Stiles?”
“Sheriff, maybe we should take this inside?” Agent Coulson says and he nods, pushes open the screen door and Agents walk in, both calm, collected. Maybe there’s nothing wrong, maybe he’s reading something into this situation that isn’t there.
Scott puts a hand on his back and directs him towards the living room, pushes him gently down on the couch, leaves and comes back with water that he presses into his hand, a plate of cookies of that he sets on the coffee table.
The Agents sit there, perched in chairs that Stiles sat in; that he jumped off the backs off into his father’s waiting arms; chairs that he curled up in his mother’s arms in before she passed.
He blinks and Melissa is there, sitting next to him finger pressed to his wrist and it takes him a moment to realize that she’s not a figment of his imagination, and also she’s taking his pulse. There are others there too; loud noises and commotions while the Agents sit there silently, not telling him anything.
“He was in your protection, we let him stay because he wanted it and you assured us that he was under your protection,” Derek Hale is snarling. He doesn’t know when Derek showed up; he knows that he’s one of Stiles’ friends.
“Derek,” he says, his voice sounds rough and unused to his own ears and Melissa squeezes his arm, Lydia has somehow appeared on his other side and she lays her own hand on him. “Son, let them tell us what happened.”
Derek snarls, his eyes flash red which must be a trick of the light but there’s a movement in the corner of his eye and he can see Chris Argent standing there and when did so many people show up in his house, he doesn’t… where did they all come from, why are they all here?
“He was going Christmas shopping with a friend of his, Specialist Crawford,” Agent Coulson is saying. “They took a SHIELD transport into the city with other personnel; he was grabbed off the street. Specialist Crawford was knocked out during the fight, came to in an ambulance to a SHIELD medical facility, there were witnesses but none of them can agree on how many there were, we do know that taking Agent Stilinski was their motive.”
He closes his eyes, Melissa presses a hand to the back of his neck and it’s cool, comforting, Stiles mom used to do the same when it got to be too much.
This is too much.
******************************************************************************
Day Two:
Clint is not flying; they have a pilot that normally flies them because Coulson made some call years ago that said that Clint can’t always be the one behind the wheel.
He’s not flying, he’s sitting there, with his hands in his lap trying not to think about the fact that it’s been almost 24 hours since Stiles was taken.
Christmas shopping, he was fucking Christmas shopping and now he’s missing and Crawford has a concussion and a gash across his temple that took four stitches and two black eyes and broken arm.
“We’re going to the tower,” Steve says, he’s Steve right now, not Captain America even though he’s in uniform with the cowl down.
“Why? We could get more information on the Helicarrier?” Natasha asks.
“Coulson said go to the tower, so we’re going to the tower,” Steve says. His tone brooks no argument. Clint doesn’t feel like arguing, he feels like shooting something and he will as soon as somebody gives him a target and they let him have his weapons back.
******************************************************************************
They’re led to a conference room that he’s never been in before, and he realizes as soon as they enter why they came here instead of the Helicarrier. Stiles’ pack is huddled around one side of the table, there’s a man sitting there in a Sheriff’s uniform looking pale and shocked, Stiles’ father he thinks.
Not exactly the circumstances they’d thought to meet the remainder of Stiles’ family under.
“What do we know?” Steve asks, Clint knows that even though he sounds stiff and formal inside he’s furious. Someone took something that wasn’t theirs to take.
“We’re just waiting, for…” Coulson says and the door that had closed behind them opens again for Agent Hill and Crawford.
He looks…
The kid looks like shit, like he’s having the worst day of his entire life and it just keeps going on and on and on. He goes to the chair that he’s directed to and sort of folds into it, the rest of the Avengers spread themselves around the room.
Hale looks like he’s about four seconds from losing his shit and Clint can understand that. Natasha had said take things slow, be the nice guy, be his friend, don’t be a stalker.
And now Stiles is gone and they have no idea why or who took him.
“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” Coulson is prompting. Crawford still looks dazed and confused, obviously medicated to some degree; he rubs at the side of his head with his casted arm and winces.
“We were going Christmas shopping, he…” Crawford twines his fingers together. “He wanted stuff that he could take home with him that wouldn’t get him strip-searched by TSA.”
“Wait a minute; he was going home for Christmas?” Tony asks sounding all affronted, he’s got his cell phone out and is probably texting Pepper to change the date or something. “When did that happen, he’s going to miss the party.”
“He was always coming home for Christmas, it was part of our deal,” Lydia snaps.
“People,” Coulson says, he doesn’t yell, he doesn’t need to, the room quiets immediately.
“He’s been having stuff delivered to the house that wouldn’t fit in luggage,” his father says, there’s woman sitting next to him, hand wrapped around his wrist, Scott McCall is standing directly behind her hand on her shoulder. Probably his mother or another family member.
“Crawford,” Coulson prompts.
“We took the transport down,” Crawford says. “It was full, you know, Christmas and such, we took the stairs because the elevator moves like molasses. When we got down to street level I asked him what we were looking for and he said he had a list and he went for his wallet. I think he had it folded up in there, we’d stopped on the street and I was tightening my scarf and he was going for his wallet and…” Crawford’s voice breaks. There’s grief there.
“Do you know how many of them there were, son?” Steve asks gently.
“Three on the street,” Crawford says softly, he’s got a hand covering his eyes, probably hiding the fact that he’s crying or about to.
“There was another in the car, they moved…” he takes a deep breath and lowers his hand, his eyes are red but not wet. “They moved really fast, two of them had grabbed Stiles, the other one,” he shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “Stiles was yelling, struggling, I was going to,” he laughs harshly, bitterly. “I was going to try and help him and the third one just, he flew at me, knocked me on my ass, I think he must have had a knife or something in his hand because,” he waves a hand at his temple. “He knocked my head into the sidewalk and I don’t remember anything else until the ambulance.”
“You said they moved fast,” Hale says. “Did they look… odd?”
Crawford looks at him, blinks once twice. “The one that came at me had,” he makes a face, “his face looked weird… like he had facial hair but it was kind of wrong?”
“What about his eyes?” The other Hale, Peter, asks.
“Blue, I think, I didn’t really get that great a look at his face,” Crawford says apologetically, he looks down at his hands.
“Regular blue or…” Peter pauses, long enough that Crawford looks up and everyone else looks over.
Clint doesn’t think it surprises any of them that the kid almost tips his chair over to get away from the table. It’s more of a confirmation than any agreement or words would have been.
“So werewolves,” Hale says. “What packs do we know that expressed an interest in Stiles?”
“Which ones didn’t,” Peter says. “He turned down two Alpha’s, he’s like the holy grail of humans; add onto that the fact that he’s affiliated with SHIELD; this could either be a really messy way of someone trying to force an alliance with us or someone looking to trade him back to SHIELD for something else.”
“Two Alphas?” the older man in the corner of the room asks, Clint thinks that’s Chris Argent, one of the two Hunters allied with Hale’s pack that hadn’t been allowed in Laurentville. “Since when did Stiles turn down two Alphas?”
“Peter offered before, you know, we killed him,” Scott says the room as a whole turns to look at where Peter is very much alive and smirking, “I remember Stiles telling me about it. I don’t remember him mentioning anyone…”
“I offered him the bite,” Hale says, “when he was trying to decide whether to go away for school or stay locally,” he scowls. “He laughed at me.”
“Dr. Deaton and I have been discussing young Mr. Stilinski and we don’t believe that even if he had accepted the bite that it would have taken,” Peter says, he links his fingers together behind his head and smiles at the room like he knows a secret that no one else does. Clint wants to punch him in his smirking face.
“You think he’s immune?” Argent asks. “Like Lydia?”
“I think he’s something else already.”
“He’s human,” Tony says. “We did tests, normal ones, don’t look at me like that Coulson, he’s just a normal, regular, really smart human that happens to know a whole bunch of shit about the supernatural.”
“Scott, you remember the rave yes? I wasn’t, hmm, around then. But Deaton has told me that he gave Stiles a task. A very specific task that only he could carry out.”
“The mountain ash circle,” Scott nods, though his face makes an odd pained expression. “Because he’s not a werewolf and he could handle it, yeah I remember it.”
“He wasn’t given enough.”
“He completed the circle,” Hale says. “I know because I had to have him break it in order to get to Scott.”
Argent looks away, the young woman who must be his daughter looks at the ground and bites her lip.
“He wasn’t given enough,” Peter says. “It was a test of something that Deaton had long since suspected.”
“He’s human,” Tony insists stubbornly. Bruce is nodding his agreement from next to Natasha.
“He finished the circle,” Hale says, Clint looks to his father and Stiles’ dad has his head bent.
“He finished the circle because he believed he could. He walked the line and he knew he could do it, the power of belief, the strength of his conviction that this was his task and he would not fail at it.”
“He’s magic,” Clint says quietly. “A witch, a wizard something like that.”
“Something like that, they don’t have wands or staffs, they don’t set up covens and there are no schools, they are, like most supernatural creatures, infinitely more dangerous than their literary counterparts. They are also very hard to find because while they have distinctive scents they very rarely ally with other creatures, they prefer a solitary existence. This is something that would have been passed through a bloodline,” Peter says, he looks over at where the Sheriff still has his head bent.
“It’s a diluted bloodline,” the Sheriff says. “There’s not enough power to do much of anything.”
“I beg to differ, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“This is all well and good but it still doesn’t help us find Stiles or figure out who took him,” Steve says.
“The Laurentville pack,” Hale mutters.
“We checked, their pack Alpha, Darren is still there, he’s not left the town in months.”
“Then someone else with the pack,” Argent says.
“Do you know something, heard of movement in the city?” Hale asks.
“There’s four packs in New York City, none of them would have dared move on Stiles since we have treaties with all of them for Stiles to be here,” Danny says.
“It’s someone from Laurentville,” Argent says insistently. “My gut says Laurentville is the key here.”
“Do we have a list of the pack members from Laurentville?” Coulson asks, there’s a flurry of motion and Stark has his phone out, probably hacking the network to get the information faster.
“Tulliver, Cromley, Abbott, Masters, Dreymona, Sullivan,” Tony reads off.
“Wait, what?” Argent holds up a hand and takes a step forward.
“What?”
“A name you said,” Allison’s eyes are wide as she looks at her father.
“Abbott, Masters, Dreymona.”
“Dreymona,” Argent says, he looks over at Allison. “Isn’t that the name that?”
“Yeah,” she nods and she’s nudging Danny out of the way to get to his laptop.
“Stiles asked Allison to look for a Hunter family by the name of Dreymona,” Argent says as Allison’s fingers fly over the keyboard. “Said he’d hear the name somewhere.”
“We have a journal for someone named Dreymona,” Crawford says slowly. “Stiles has been working on translating it but it’s in some form of code in a language base that neither one of us is familiar with.”
“There’s no Hunter family named Dreymona, not anymore,” Allison says. “They were mostly killed in Poland during the war, there was one surviving family member, a girl, Sylvia but she vanished off the radar in 1937.”
“How does a family of Hunters become a family of werewolves?”
“One werewolf, Ferris Dreymona, poor kid,” Tony says. He does something with his tablet and the picture of the kid, because that’s what he is, a kid, maybe eighteen or so, flashes on the wall.
Clint stares at it, ingrains it into his memory.
Because there’s his next target.
******************************************************************************
“Why would he take Stiles?” he asks, Steve is sitting with him while the others get something to eat. It seems slightly surreal to be sitting here with Captain ‘call me Steve’ America both of them worrying about his son.
At least the worrying about Stiles thing is something he’s familiar with; he can do this with his hands tied behind his back.
“Death wish?” Steve asks and he laughs a little. Because he’s probably not wrong, you take someone like Stiles. Someone who’s day job is working for SHIELD and whose side job is apparently being one of the humans in a pack of werewolves, well you’re putting a target on your back and just waiting for the inevitable bullet.
“My son,” he shakes his head. “If there’s a bad situation, if there’s something awful and wrong going on he’s going to be right smack in the middle of it. I used to, I used to worry that he was in a gang or doing drugs, I used to worry that he was going to get himself killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time all the time and I’d end up burying my son like I buried my wife,” he covers his face with his hands.
“We’re going to find him, and we’re going to find whoever took him and we’re going to make sure they pay for taking him in the first place,” Steve promises.
He believes him; he has no choice but to believe him.
******************************************************************************
Day Three:
Clint is shooting arrows at targets in the range because it’s the only place that he’s being allowed weapons.
Coulson has already stopped in once, peering at him, nodding once and walking away. If he finds that he’s been removed from the mission roster he’s going to be pissed.
“He talks about you,” he hears from behind him and he lets the arrow fly before he turns, he already knows where it’s going to hit.
He’s got a printout of Ferris Dreymona taped to his targets, head shots all of them, even though Coulson won’t authorize a headshot.
“Who does?” he asks, even though the only person that Allison Argent would be talking to that would mention him would be Stiles.
Allison just rolls her eyes at him, it was a silly question.
“He’s got me working on projects that I really don’t have time for, but Stiles says please, and thank you, and not many people do.”
“Arrow heads,” he says, because that’s what it has to be. The arrow heads that he requested that Stiles has never once mentioned.
Allison just twists her lips at him.
******************************************************************************
The four packs in New York City are looking for him, Derek knows this, he still thinks he should be on the street as well.
This is one of his packmates in trouble, one of his humans, he snarls and Pete raises an eyebrow at him.
“You never told me you thought Stiles had magic,” he says, instead of explaining his frustration at their non-movement.
Scott could track Stiles faster, Jackson and Isaac as well. They know his scent already. To be refused the opportunity to join in the search… it just seems asinine. Stiles would be annoyed and prodding Derek to search regardless of what the other Pack Alpha’s said.
“You can kind of smell it on him,” Peter says, he crosses his arm over his chest. “Faint but there, the smell of something other. It took me a while to place it, because he smells like his father as well as the pack and none of that is not normal.”
“You should have said something,” Derek says, Peter just shrugs noncommittally. Nothing Derek says is going to change what is already done.
“Why do you think the boy took him?” Peter asks, his face is full of speculation, he has ideas.
“The boy was from a line of Hunters made into a line of wolves, if he’d been taught his Hunter heritage it could be a death wish to end the line,” Derek says.
“Or it could be something much more complicated.”
The door flies open and Derek takes a defensive position, Peter right beside him.
“We found him,” Scott says breathlessly, “We found him.”
******************************************************************************
Day Four:
Tony had apparently bugged his phone; Coulson hadn’t seemed at all surprised at that fact. The only bad thing was apparently the bug would only work when the phone was turned on and Stiles had turned it off, most likely when they were on the transport and not had the opportunity to turn it back on.
Clint is sure that Tony will be working on that issue or implanting Stiles with something permanent once this is resolved.
Coulson makes them wait while they get cameras in place, agents going to ground. Derek’s and his wolves are taking point and nobody bristles because in a fight with wolves they probably want wolves to pit up against them.
“No shots unless ordered,” Coulson says, he says it to all of them but he’s looking directly at Clint. He makes a face but nods his agreement.
“And no killing him unless we have no other recourse,” Coulson says this to the wolves; Hale scowls as if to say ‘you are not the boss of me’. Clint thinks he has every intention of gutting Ferris Dreymona, Coulson’s orders be damned.
They’ve got him in a warehouse, at least that’s where the signal from Stiles’ phone is coming from. So there’s hope that he’s still there alongside his phone.
The wolves filter in and Clint finds a ladder and gets himself to a second floor landing. Creeping along in the dark on light feet, bow at the ready.
Somewhere on the other side of the building is Natasha. The warehouse is partitioned into four distinct areas; it is empty and dusty though he can hear noise coming from the back half so that’s where he heads. Swinging under and over pipes and beams.
He smells blood pretty much as soon as he crosses into the back area, it almost stops him and there’s a thin line of dread trying to creep up his spine into his brain.
There are little to no lights going in this area, but it’s lit enough that he can see a chair in the center of the room, Stiles chained to it. There’s blood on his face, dark spots on his shirt and jeans, a puddle of it on the floor.
He taps his earpiece twice ‘agent found’ and hears a tap back ‘confirmed, sending reinforcements’.
It’s a silent mission, no voices because the one thing they learned about Laurentville was that the werewolves could hear things being spoken through their earpieces.
He notches an arrow, takes aim, doesn’t take the shot because he needs a vocal cue or three taps.
There’s movement and someone moves into his line of sight, he waits for them to shift further into the light and it is Ferris Dreymona, he looks angry and his finger twitches to release the arrow when Dreymona hits Stiles.
Stiles doesn’t make a sound, he’s clearly unconscious, it doesn’t seem to matter to the wolf who hits him again. And again.
He’s going to take the shot, regardless of the fact the order hasn’t come, he’s going to because Stiles is down there chained to a chair, being used as a punching bag by a werewolf who clearly has some anger management issues.
Hale is there suddenly, snarling and angry, he can see his bright, glowing red eyes from the distance and Dreymona turns snarls wordlessly back before Derek leaps.
They go down in a tangle of limbs and claws and there’s a moment where Derek’s head tips back and he howls, it’s eerie and sends shivers down his spine, there are answering howls so he knows that its purpose is most likely to call the remainder of his pack to him. He claws at Dreymona and draws blood.
He obviously intends to kill the other wolf; Clint can’t find it in himself to really care. He’s so focused on watching the fight, not really even listening for a verbal cue or three clicks of the radio anymore that he misses Stiles’ coming to.
Stiles will tell them later that it was Derek’s howl calling the pack that sank into the darkness after him, he’s not a wolf but he’s still pack.
“Derek, stop,” he hears and his eyes fly to the right where Stiles’ eyes are barely open. Derek snarls.
“Derek,” Stiles whispers, Clint can barely hear it where he is but Derek stops, hand halting where he obviously had been going to plunge claws into Dreymona’s chest to rip out his stomach or something.
They’re looking at each other and then Stiles’ head drops, chin touching his chest, passing out from the pain and the blood loss, Derek howls again and Clint lowers his bow because he’s not going to shoot anyone.
Not yet anyway, he reserves the right to put an arrow in Hale if he lays a hand on Stiles in any way like Stiles insists he doesn’t anymore.
But until then.
“We’ve got Stiles, Dreymona is down and unfortunately still alive.”
******************************************************************************
Summary: Stiles goes to college and accidentally gets hired by SHIELD.
TITLE: Stiles Stilinski: Agent of SHIELD
RATING: PG-13 (for now)
PAIRING: Gen – but Stiles/Clint (eventually)
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: Stiles goes to college and accidentally gets hired by SHIELD.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing Marvel, MTV, etc own everything but the idea to mesh them..
FEEDBACK: Please?
Stiles Stilinski, Agent of Shield 9/?
Day One:
Crawford comes to in an ambulance, there’s a SHIELD uniform to the right of the medic and his head is throbbing in time with his heartbeat which is throbbing in time with his wrist and every other pain in his body.
“Stiles,” he yells, because there were hands on the Stiles’ arms pulling him away and everyone was screaming and panicking and no one was helping and then something had hit him.
And now he’s here, struggling against his arms and legs being strapped down. And there’s no Stiles.
“Calm down, sir,” the medic says, he presses a cloth to his forehead and he twists his head to see that there is already a bloody one to the right of him.
“Stiles? Where’s Stiles?” he asks, his heart feels like it’s up in his throat and the guy in the SHIELD uniform shakes his head. He’s pressing a finger to his ear which means he has an ear piece in.
“We’re looking for him,” the uniform says and the medic presses the cloth tighter to his forehead as he blinks away the moisture in his eyes that is not tears.
Steve gets the call because he’s team leader and it’s his job to break bad news to the team. He really hates that part of his job though normally it doesn’t mean anything because 3/4 of the time Tony intercepts whatever the calls is and breaks it in that ‘Tony’ way that he has.
Tony doesn’t intercept this one though; he kind of wished he had. He struggles with the decision, what to do and he decides that the mission is important enough that he needs everyone’s head in the game and focused. He doesn’t need them distracted by things they can’t change and information they don’t have.
So he waits until the job is finished, Tony making noises about going out for drinks.
They’re in stripped down versions of their uniforms, Bruce is stitching up a long gash along Clint’s shoulder blade while Clint continually tells him that he doesn’t need him to do so.
“So the thing is,” he starts, the room as a whole looks over at him with the exception of Tony who’s frowning at the wet bar like it insulted him personally.
“Cap?” Natasha says, she must see something in his face, hear something in his voice. She definitely knows whatever he’s going to tell them is bad news because her posture straightens and she’s got her hand already gripping her gun.
She’s not the one whose reaction he’s worried about though.
“Steve?” Tony prods, he’s got one of the little bottles of scotch in his hand, he’s not opened it yet, probably waiting for ice to be delivered or something.
“Someone grabbed Stiles off the street,” he says, he winces at the roar of denial. Bruce has one hand on Clint’s shoulder holding him down, the other pressed to the wound he wasn’t finished stitching up.
“Agent Coulson has us scheduled on the first transport out,” he says, Natasha moves to Bruce’s side, hand coming to rest on Clint’s arm.
“Who took him?” Clint snaps, he’s not trying to shrug off Bruce and Natasha’s hands any longer, Steve doesn’t let that fool him into believing he’s actually calmed down any.
“They don’t know.”
He’s not supposed to be home, he’d only come back to grab a folder that he’d left locked in his office and to grab a snack.
The one thing that Stiles did prior to leaving for college was train his deputies in acceptable and non-acceptable forms of food for their Sheriff. They watch him almost closer than Stiles ever had, and its times when his box of Ho-Ho’s disappears from his desk or they order in lunch, with the extra-large salad for him that he misses his boy.
They don’t search his house though, that’s Stiles’ domain and even though Stiles comes home infrequently he can have the house thoroughly searched from top to bottom for contraband food and beverages within an hour of walking through the door.
The homeless shelter and Stiles’ friends love that part of his return home because it means that all the food that Stiles’ doesn’t want going into his father’s body has to go somewhere that isn’t in their house.
He’s got the folder he needs in hand, has the last bag of chips in the house in the other and is just walking toward the front door when the doorbell goes off.
No one comes by, not unannounced and Scott has already been by once this week to check up on him so he knows that it’s not any of Stiles’ friends. They have a schedule, Isaac will be next.
He shoves the folder under his arm and opens the door to find two suits standing there, well-dressed, they both look somber.
His heart jumps up into his throat and he maybe whispers Stiles’ name.
“Sheriff Stilinski?” the one at the door, the one who rang the bell asks.
“Yes?” he says, he… just stands there. Scott comes around the corner of the house, running at breakneck speed and he looks, there’s something very wrong with his face.
“I’m Agent Coulson, this is Agent Sitwell, we’re from SHIELD.”
“Where’s Stiles?” Scott asks as he comes up on the porch; he leapt over the railing but that can’t be right, his face is normal now, no sign of whatever had been wrong with it just seconds before, he’ll ask the questions later but not right now.
“Mr. McCall,” Agent Coulson inclines his head. “And where’s the rest of your pack?”
“They’ll be here, they’re coming. Where is Stiles?”
“Sheriff, maybe we should take this inside?” Agent Coulson says and he nods, pushes open the screen door and Agents walk in, both calm, collected. Maybe there’s nothing wrong, maybe he’s reading something into this situation that isn’t there.
Scott puts a hand on his back and directs him towards the living room, pushes him gently down on the couch, leaves and comes back with water that he presses into his hand, a plate of cookies of that he sets on the coffee table.
The Agents sit there, perched in chairs that Stiles sat in; that he jumped off the backs off into his father’s waiting arms; chairs that he curled up in his mother’s arms in before she passed.
He blinks and Melissa is there, sitting next to him finger pressed to his wrist and it takes him a moment to realize that she’s not a figment of his imagination, and also she’s taking his pulse. There are others there too; loud noises and commotions while the Agents sit there silently, not telling him anything.
“He was in your protection, we let him stay because he wanted it and you assured us that he was under your protection,” Derek Hale is snarling. He doesn’t know when Derek showed up; he knows that he’s one of Stiles’ friends.
“Derek,” he says, his voice sounds rough and unused to his own ears and Melissa squeezes his arm, Lydia has somehow appeared on his other side and she lays her own hand on him. “Son, let them tell us what happened.”
Derek snarls, his eyes flash red which must be a trick of the light but there’s a movement in the corner of his eye and he can see Chris Argent standing there and when did so many people show up in his house, he doesn’t… where did they all come from, why are they all here?
“He was going Christmas shopping with a friend of his, Specialist Crawford,” Agent Coulson is saying. “They took a SHIELD transport into the city with other personnel; he was grabbed off the street. Specialist Crawford was knocked out during the fight, came to in an ambulance to a SHIELD medical facility, there were witnesses but none of them can agree on how many there were, we do know that taking Agent Stilinski was their motive.”
He closes his eyes, Melissa presses a hand to the back of his neck and it’s cool, comforting, Stiles mom used to do the same when it got to be too much.
This is too much.
Day Two:
Clint is not flying; they have a pilot that normally flies them because Coulson made some call years ago that said that Clint can’t always be the one behind the wheel.
He’s not flying, he’s sitting there, with his hands in his lap trying not to think about the fact that it’s been almost 24 hours since Stiles was taken.
Christmas shopping, he was fucking Christmas shopping and now he’s missing and Crawford has a concussion and a gash across his temple that took four stitches and two black eyes and broken arm.
“We’re going to the tower,” Steve says, he’s Steve right now, not Captain America even though he’s in uniform with the cowl down.
“Why? We could get more information on the Helicarrier?” Natasha asks.
“Coulson said go to the tower, so we’re going to the tower,” Steve says. His tone brooks no argument. Clint doesn’t feel like arguing, he feels like shooting something and he will as soon as somebody gives him a target and they let him have his weapons back.
They’re led to a conference room that he’s never been in before, and he realizes as soon as they enter why they came here instead of the Helicarrier. Stiles’ pack is huddled around one side of the table, there’s a man sitting there in a Sheriff’s uniform looking pale and shocked, Stiles’ father he thinks.
Not exactly the circumstances they’d thought to meet the remainder of Stiles’ family under.
“What do we know?” Steve asks, Clint knows that even though he sounds stiff and formal inside he’s furious. Someone took something that wasn’t theirs to take.
“We’re just waiting, for…” Coulson says and the door that had closed behind them opens again for Agent Hill and Crawford.
He looks…
The kid looks like shit, like he’s having the worst day of his entire life and it just keeps going on and on and on. He goes to the chair that he’s directed to and sort of folds into it, the rest of the Avengers spread themselves around the room.
Hale looks like he’s about four seconds from losing his shit and Clint can understand that. Natasha had said take things slow, be the nice guy, be his friend, don’t be a stalker.
And now Stiles is gone and they have no idea why or who took him.
“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” Coulson is prompting. Crawford still looks dazed and confused, obviously medicated to some degree; he rubs at the side of his head with his casted arm and winces.
“We were going Christmas shopping, he…” Crawford twines his fingers together. “He wanted stuff that he could take home with him that wouldn’t get him strip-searched by TSA.”
“Wait a minute; he was going home for Christmas?” Tony asks sounding all affronted, he’s got his cell phone out and is probably texting Pepper to change the date or something. “When did that happen, he’s going to miss the party.”
“He was always coming home for Christmas, it was part of our deal,” Lydia snaps.
“People,” Coulson says, he doesn’t yell, he doesn’t need to, the room quiets immediately.
“He’s been having stuff delivered to the house that wouldn’t fit in luggage,” his father says, there’s woman sitting next to him, hand wrapped around his wrist, Scott McCall is standing directly behind her hand on her shoulder. Probably his mother or another family member.
“Crawford,” Coulson prompts.
“We took the transport down,” Crawford says. “It was full, you know, Christmas and such, we took the stairs because the elevator moves like molasses. When we got down to street level I asked him what we were looking for and he said he had a list and he went for his wallet. I think he had it folded up in there, we’d stopped on the street and I was tightening my scarf and he was going for his wallet and…” Crawford’s voice breaks. There’s grief there.
“Do you know how many of them there were, son?” Steve asks gently.
“Three on the street,” Crawford says softly, he’s got a hand covering his eyes, probably hiding the fact that he’s crying or about to.
“There was another in the car, they moved…” he takes a deep breath and lowers his hand, his eyes are red but not wet. “They moved really fast, two of them had grabbed Stiles, the other one,” he shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “Stiles was yelling, struggling, I was going to,” he laughs harshly, bitterly. “I was going to try and help him and the third one just, he flew at me, knocked me on my ass, I think he must have had a knife or something in his hand because,” he waves a hand at his temple. “He knocked my head into the sidewalk and I don’t remember anything else until the ambulance.”
“You said they moved fast,” Hale says. “Did they look… odd?”
Crawford looks at him, blinks once twice. “The one that came at me had,” he makes a face, “his face looked weird… like he had facial hair but it was kind of wrong?”
“What about his eyes?” The other Hale, Peter, asks.
“Blue, I think, I didn’t really get that great a look at his face,” Crawford says apologetically, he looks down at his hands.
“Regular blue or…” Peter pauses, long enough that Crawford looks up and everyone else looks over.
Clint doesn’t think it surprises any of them that the kid almost tips his chair over to get away from the table. It’s more of a confirmation than any agreement or words would have been.
“So werewolves,” Hale says. “What packs do we know that expressed an interest in Stiles?”
“Which ones didn’t,” Peter says. “He turned down two Alpha’s, he’s like the holy grail of humans; add onto that the fact that he’s affiliated with SHIELD; this could either be a really messy way of someone trying to force an alliance with us or someone looking to trade him back to SHIELD for something else.”
“Two Alphas?” the older man in the corner of the room asks, Clint thinks that’s Chris Argent, one of the two Hunters allied with Hale’s pack that hadn’t been allowed in Laurentville. “Since when did Stiles turn down two Alphas?”
“Peter offered before, you know, we killed him,” Scott says the room as a whole turns to look at where Peter is very much alive and smirking, “I remember Stiles telling me about it. I don’t remember him mentioning anyone…”
“I offered him the bite,” Hale says, “when he was trying to decide whether to go away for school or stay locally,” he scowls. “He laughed at me.”
“Dr. Deaton and I have been discussing young Mr. Stilinski and we don’t believe that even if he had accepted the bite that it would have taken,” Peter says, he links his fingers together behind his head and smiles at the room like he knows a secret that no one else does. Clint wants to punch him in his smirking face.
“You think he’s immune?” Argent asks. “Like Lydia?”
“I think he’s something else already.”
“He’s human,” Tony says. “We did tests, normal ones, don’t look at me like that Coulson, he’s just a normal, regular, really smart human that happens to know a whole bunch of shit about the supernatural.”
“Scott, you remember the rave yes? I wasn’t, hmm, around then. But Deaton has told me that he gave Stiles a task. A very specific task that only he could carry out.”
“The mountain ash circle,” Scott nods, though his face makes an odd pained expression. “Because he’s not a werewolf and he could handle it, yeah I remember it.”
“He wasn’t given enough.”
“He completed the circle,” Hale says. “I know because I had to have him break it in order to get to Scott.”
Argent looks away, the young woman who must be his daughter looks at the ground and bites her lip.
“He wasn’t given enough,” Peter says. “It was a test of something that Deaton had long since suspected.”
“He’s human,” Tony insists stubbornly. Bruce is nodding his agreement from next to Natasha.
“He finished the circle,” Hale says, Clint looks to his father and Stiles’ dad has his head bent.
“He finished the circle because he believed he could. He walked the line and he knew he could do it, the power of belief, the strength of his conviction that this was his task and he would not fail at it.”
“He’s magic,” Clint says quietly. “A witch, a wizard something like that.”
“Something like that, they don’t have wands or staffs, they don’t set up covens and there are no schools, they are, like most supernatural creatures, infinitely more dangerous than their literary counterparts. They are also very hard to find because while they have distinctive scents they very rarely ally with other creatures, they prefer a solitary existence. This is something that would have been passed through a bloodline,” Peter says, he looks over at where the Sheriff still has his head bent.
“It’s a diluted bloodline,” the Sheriff says. “There’s not enough power to do much of anything.”
“I beg to differ, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“This is all well and good but it still doesn’t help us find Stiles or figure out who took him,” Steve says.
“The Laurentville pack,” Hale mutters.
“We checked, their pack Alpha, Darren is still there, he’s not left the town in months.”
“Then someone else with the pack,” Argent says.
“Do you know something, heard of movement in the city?” Hale asks.
“There’s four packs in New York City, none of them would have dared move on Stiles since we have treaties with all of them for Stiles to be here,” Danny says.
“It’s someone from Laurentville,” Argent says insistently. “My gut says Laurentville is the key here.”
“Do we have a list of the pack members from Laurentville?” Coulson asks, there’s a flurry of motion and Stark has his phone out, probably hacking the network to get the information faster.
“Tulliver, Cromley, Abbott, Masters, Dreymona, Sullivan,” Tony reads off.
“Wait, what?” Argent holds up a hand and takes a step forward.
“What?”
“A name you said,” Allison’s eyes are wide as she looks at her father.
“Abbott, Masters, Dreymona.”
“Dreymona,” Argent says, he looks over at Allison. “Isn’t that the name that?”
“Yeah,” she nods and she’s nudging Danny out of the way to get to his laptop.
“Stiles asked Allison to look for a Hunter family by the name of Dreymona,” Argent says as Allison’s fingers fly over the keyboard. “Said he’d hear the name somewhere.”
“We have a journal for someone named Dreymona,” Crawford says slowly. “Stiles has been working on translating it but it’s in some form of code in a language base that neither one of us is familiar with.”
“There’s no Hunter family named Dreymona, not anymore,” Allison says. “They were mostly killed in Poland during the war, there was one surviving family member, a girl, Sylvia but she vanished off the radar in 1937.”
“How does a family of Hunters become a family of werewolves?”
“One werewolf, Ferris Dreymona, poor kid,” Tony says. He does something with his tablet and the picture of the kid, because that’s what he is, a kid, maybe eighteen or so, flashes on the wall.
Clint stares at it, ingrains it into his memory.
Because there’s his next target.
“Why would he take Stiles?” he asks, Steve is sitting with him while the others get something to eat. It seems slightly surreal to be sitting here with Captain ‘call me Steve’ America both of them worrying about his son.
At least the worrying about Stiles thing is something he’s familiar with; he can do this with his hands tied behind his back.
“Death wish?” Steve asks and he laughs a little. Because he’s probably not wrong, you take someone like Stiles. Someone who’s day job is working for SHIELD and whose side job is apparently being one of the humans in a pack of werewolves, well you’re putting a target on your back and just waiting for the inevitable bullet.
“My son,” he shakes his head. “If there’s a bad situation, if there’s something awful and wrong going on he’s going to be right smack in the middle of it. I used to, I used to worry that he was in a gang or doing drugs, I used to worry that he was going to get himself killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time all the time and I’d end up burying my son like I buried my wife,” he covers his face with his hands.
“We’re going to find him, and we’re going to find whoever took him and we’re going to make sure they pay for taking him in the first place,” Steve promises.
He believes him; he has no choice but to believe him.
Day Three:
Clint is shooting arrows at targets in the range because it’s the only place that he’s being allowed weapons.
Coulson has already stopped in once, peering at him, nodding once and walking away. If he finds that he’s been removed from the mission roster he’s going to be pissed.
“He talks about you,” he hears from behind him and he lets the arrow fly before he turns, he already knows where it’s going to hit.
He’s got a printout of Ferris Dreymona taped to his targets, head shots all of them, even though Coulson won’t authorize a headshot.
“Who does?” he asks, even though the only person that Allison Argent would be talking to that would mention him would be Stiles.
Allison just rolls her eyes at him, it was a silly question.
“He’s got me working on projects that I really don’t have time for, but Stiles says please, and thank you, and not many people do.”
“Arrow heads,” he says, because that’s what it has to be. The arrow heads that he requested that Stiles has never once mentioned.
Allison just twists her lips at him.
The four packs in New York City are looking for him, Derek knows this, he still thinks he should be on the street as well.
This is one of his packmates in trouble, one of his humans, he snarls and Pete raises an eyebrow at him.
“You never told me you thought Stiles had magic,” he says, instead of explaining his frustration at their non-movement.
Scott could track Stiles faster, Jackson and Isaac as well. They know his scent already. To be refused the opportunity to join in the search… it just seems asinine. Stiles would be annoyed and prodding Derek to search regardless of what the other Pack Alpha’s said.
“You can kind of smell it on him,” Peter says, he crosses his arm over his chest. “Faint but there, the smell of something other. It took me a while to place it, because he smells like his father as well as the pack and none of that is not normal.”
“You should have said something,” Derek says, Peter just shrugs noncommittally. Nothing Derek says is going to change what is already done.
“Why do you think the boy took him?” Peter asks, his face is full of speculation, he has ideas.
“The boy was from a line of Hunters made into a line of wolves, if he’d been taught his Hunter heritage it could be a death wish to end the line,” Derek says.
“Or it could be something much more complicated.”
The door flies open and Derek takes a defensive position, Peter right beside him.
“We found him,” Scott says breathlessly, “We found him.”
Day Four:
Tony had apparently bugged his phone; Coulson hadn’t seemed at all surprised at that fact. The only bad thing was apparently the bug would only work when the phone was turned on and Stiles had turned it off, most likely when they were on the transport and not had the opportunity to turn it back on.
Clint is sure that Tony will be working on that issue or implanting Stiles with something permanent once this is resolved.
Coulson makes them wait while they get cameras in place, agents going to ground. Derek’s and his wolves are taking point and nobody bristles because in a fight with wolves they probably want wolves to pit up against them.
“No shots unless ordered,” Coulson says, he says it to all of them but he’s looking directly at Clint. He makes a face but nods his agreement.
“And no killing him unless we have no other recourse,” Coulson says this to the wolves; Hale scowls as if to say ‘you are not the boss of me’. Clint thinks he has every intention of gutting Ferris Dreymona, Coulson’s orders be damned.
They’ve got him in a warehouse, at least that’s where the signal from Stiles’ phone is coming from. So there’s hope that he’s still there alongside his phone.
The wolves filter in and Clint finds a ladder and gets himself to a second floor landing. Creeping along in the dark on light feet, bow at the ready.
Somewhere on the other side of the building is Natasha. The warehouse is partitioned into four distinct areas; it is empty and dusty though he can hear noise coming from the back half so that’s where he heads. Swinging under and over pipes and beams.
He smells blood pretty much as soon as he crosses into the back area, it almost stops him and there’s a thin line of dread trying to creep up his spine into his brain.
There are little to no lights going in this area, but it’s lit enough that he can see a chair in the center of the room, Stiles chained to it. There’s blood on his face, dark spots on his shirt and jeans, a puddle of it on the floor.
He taps his earpiece twice ‘agent found’ and hears a tap back ‘confirmed, sending reinforcements’.
It’s a silent mission, no voices because the one thing they learned about Laurentville was that the werewolves could hear things being spoken through their earpieces.
He notches an arrow, takes aim, doesn’t take the shot because he needs a vocal cue or three taps.
There’s movement and someone moves into his line of sight, he waits for them to shift further into the light and it is Ferris Dreymona, he looks angry and his finger twitches to release the arrow when Dreymona hits Stiles.
Stiles doesn’t make a sound, he’s clearly unconscious, it doesn’t seem to matter to the wolf who hits him again. And again.
He’s going to take the shot, regardless of the fact the order hasn’t come, he’s going to because Stiles is down there chained to a chair, being used as a punching bag by a werewolf who clearly has some anger management issues.
Hale is there suddenly, snarling and angry, he can see his bright, glowing red eyes from the distance and Dreymona turns snarls wordlessly back before Derek leaps.
They go down in a tangle of limbs and claws and there’s a moment where Derek’s head tips back and he howls, it’s eerie and sends shivers down his spine, there are answering howls so he knows that its purpose is most likely to call the remainder of his pack to him. He claws at Dreymona and draws blood.
He obviously intends to kill the other wolf; Clint can’t find it in himself to really care. He’s so focused on watching the fight, not really even listening for a verbal cue or three clicks of the radio anymore that he misses Stiles’ coming to.
Stiles will tell them later that it was Derek’s howl calling the pack that sank into the darkness after him, he’s not a wolf but he’s still pack.
“Derek, stop,” he hears and his eyes fly to the right where Stiles’ eyes are barely open. Derek snarls.
“Derek,” Stiles whispers, Clint can barely hear it where he is but Derek stops, hand halting where he obviously had been going to plunge claws into Dreymona’s chest to rip out his stomach or something.
They’re looking at each other and then Stiles’ head drops, chin touching his chest, passing out from the pain and the blood loss, Derek howls again and Clint lowers his bow because he’s not going to shoot anyone.
Not yet anyway, he reserves the right to put an arrow in Hale if he lays a hand on Stiles in any way like Stiles insists he doesn’t anymore.
But until then.
“We’ve got Stiles, Dreymona is down and unfortunately still alive.”
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Date: 2012-10-15 07:37 pm (UTC)