Archive of Our Own

At twelve, Stiles Stilinski discovered a mystery.

It started when he witnessed a crime. Well, he suspected it was a crime.  

He was on the Number 4 yellow school bus in the Beacon Hills Middle School parking lot, waiting for the other kids to board. As usual, he sat in the front seat, directly behind Mr. Lewiston, where he was less likely to be visibly punched or hazed. He hunched in his seat and looked out across the tarmac to the adjoining Beacon Hills High School parking lot, watching wistfully as the big kids clustered with their friends, smoked, roughhoused, before getting into their cars and driving away. Stiles admired the high school kids: they seemed large and sophisticated. They had cars. They could go wherever they wanted.

He spotted Derek Hale, who was a junior, shaking off his gaggle of friends and walking alone across the parking lot to his Camaro.

Stiles had never spoken to Derek Hale, but he knew who he was. He might have been a little fascinated with him. Derek's mom, Talia Hale, was the Beacon County Executive Officer, which meant that she was Sheriff Noah Stilinski's boss. Derek's dad was a software designer who made a lot of money – and Stiles was interested in both computers and money. He had a big house and a big family, brothers and sisters and cousins in high, middle, and elementary school. And Derek was nice to look at.

It seemed to Stiles that Derek wad a wonderful life: he was smart and handsome, he had friends and a nice car, he played sports. Most of all, he was surrounded by people who loved him.

Some day, Stiles thought, Derek was going to graduate and leave Beacon Hills for an amazing future, and he, Stiles, would still be stuck right here.

Mr. Lewiston started Yellow No. 4 with a shuddering heave of its diesel engine, and they pulled away from the curb, Stiles still watching as Derek Hale folded himself gracefully into the drivers' seat of his black Camaro.

The bus ride home always took a good forty-five minutes, because the Number 4 wended through the suburbs south of town before it turned back north and headed out towards Stiles's house. Stiles read The Diary of Anne Frank and ignored his fellow students as, in ones and twos, they got off the bus. He occasionally stared out the window, thinking about poor lonely trapped Anne. 

That's what he was doing when the bus, nearly empty now, stopped at a red light near the old abandoned railway depot. His attention was caught when he spotted Derek Hale's black Camaro on the deserted tarmac, shiny and incongruous behind some rusty old dumpsters. Why would Derek go there? No one ever went there, except homeless people and drug dealers.

(Stiles frequently spotted things that no one else saw, made connections that no one else made. It didn't seem odd when he was twelve. Later, it began to seem like a gift, or a problem – he could never decide which.)

He watched as Derek got out of the car and, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets, walked toward the depot. Toward a woman who was there. She looked even more out of place than Derek's car - she was beautiful, tall, with waves of honey-colored hair. Elegant in a slim skirt high-heeled shoes, there amid the litter and weeds behind the depot. 

Maybe there was something furtive about the way Derek glanced around as he approached her.

The woman smiled at Derek, held out her hand; he took it, and she led him into the old depot.

The bus grumbled and pulled away from the light. Neither Derek nor the woman seemed to notice the bus. If they had, surely the woman wouldn't have put her hand right on Derek's butt and squeezed it. Stiles craned around in his seat, watching until he couldn't see them anymore, his copy of Anne Frank crumpled in his hands.

It didn't surprise Stiles that Derek had a beautiful girlfriend with waves of shiny honey-colored hair.

It surprised him that she was old. She did not look like a teenager. From a distance, Stiles would estimate that she was at least in her mid-twenties. And while Derek was, to Stiles's eye, very mature, he was still only sixteen. A junior in high school.

The age of consent in the state of California was eighteen. It was illegal for an adult to grab a sixteen-year-old's ass like that. If he was right, Stiles had just witnessed a crime. 

Were she and Derek doing it? Because that was a felony.

Stiles was excited. He'd witnessed a crime! Probably! That would explain why they met somewhere like the old depot.

He reminded himself that he didn't know enough yet. Sometimes innocent things only looked like crimes. Maybe she was a teen, and just looked older. (Technically it was also illegal for two sixteen-year-olds to be doing it, but Stiles's dad had explained that the purpose of the law, really, was to prevent kids from being victimized by adults.)

He needed to investigate. He wouldn't bring this to his dad's attention until he had evidence. Dad would be so impressed.

It didn't really occur to him to wonder about how Derek Hale felt. About being the victim of a crime, or about being investigated.

Stiles had a strong memory of the time his mother, drying his tears, told him that sometimes smart wasn't enough.

He'd suspected that his daycare's pet rabbit, Mrs. Carrots, had not been sent to a farm to be with other rabbits, as he'd been told, but had probably died. He'd accused the worker of being a liar and possibly a rabbit killer, and gotten thrown out of daycare.

"You need to be wise as well as smart," his mother had said. "You need to learn to think about consequences." 

She was gone now, and Stiles was in middle school. He prided himself on his independence. His dad was an important man. Sheriff Noah Stilinski couldn't be around much - he had a lot of responsibilities – but Stiles was now old enough to be home alone and to take care of himself. To Stiles, making his father proud meant not bothering him. So he did his own laundry and made his own lunches and got himself to his seventh grade classes on time. Got good grades. When he found he couldn't focus and the kids in his class started calling him a hyper spaz, he researched hyperactivity online and discovered that many of the medications for ADHD were (counterintuitively) stimulants, and launched himself upon a lifetime's addiction to caffeine. It helped, a little. 

When he was bullied, he either fought back or submitted, depending on the bully and the situation. He hid his shame and his bruises. He didn't go to an adult for help with his problems, not even Scott's mom, who was really nice. Because then his father would find out, and his father would be exasperated at having his important work interrupted. His father was busy.

Stiles wanted to be a cop like his dad, so he exhausted the library's supply of mystery novels.

When he stumbled upon the mystery of Derek Hale and the older woman, he didn't remember his mom's words, about being wise as well as smart. He also didn't bother his dad with it. 

His dad was busy.

That Sunday, Stiles rode his bike out to the old railway depot. At one time there had been a lot of transients and homeless people who hung out here, but a few years ago his dad had orchestrated a sweep and found a lot of drug use and dealing, some stolen property. There had been some arrests. People rarely hung out here anymore,

Stiles spent nearly an hour casing the exterior of the joint - or "innocently playing" - before he was satisfied that it was truly deserted. All the doors were padlocked, except for the back door Derek and the woman had gone through. That door was secured with a chain and a padlock, but the hasp of the lock had been neatly snipped. You couldn't tell unless you really looked. Mindful that he was visible to vehicles stopped at the nearby traffic light, Stiles chose his moment and slipped inside.

The old depot was creepy, cluttered with mechanical debris, and lit only by slanting light filtering in through the dirty windows. But it wasn't hard to find what he was looking for.

"Aw, yes," he said, his voice loud in the echoing depot. "What have we here?" In a corner of the depot, behind a screen of stacked wooden pallets, was a mattress, some pillows and folded blankets, some bottles of water and half-burnt candles. Perfect for an illegal tryst. "I do believe this is what you call a love nest," he answered himself.

Stiles spent most of his time alone. He talked to himself a lot.

After doing a little dance of triumph, he reminded himself that this proved nothing. He needed to be sure. So he set up a tiny camera, cunningly disguised in one of the old palettes. It was programmed to start recording at about the time school got out, and to stop at nine. (That would be enough time, right?)

Now he just needed to wait.

On the bus ride home on Monday, he saw Derek's Camaro at the depot again.

Stiles wasn't a straight-A student with essentially no adult supervision because he lacked discipline. He did his homework, ate a peanut butter sandwich and washed his plate so his dad wouldn't have to deal with it when he got home tonight at eleven. Only then did he set up his laptop and click on the saved video file from the depot.

There, on his laptop screen, Stiles witnessed Derek and the woman. Doing sex things.

After, Stiles went to the bathroom and washed his face with cold water.

He felt nauseated. He stared at his face in the mirror, and desperately wished he could un-see it.

"That was a bad thing," he said aloud to his reflection.

The only sex Stiles had ever seen was movie sex: Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a Model T in Titanic; Ryan Gosling peeling off Rachel McAdams's stockings in The Notebook. In the movies he'd seen, it was tender, with lots of kissing and loving gazes.

What had passed between the woman and Derek Hale in the train depot wasn't like that at all. It had looked hard, somehow. Derek and the woman didn't smile at each other, they didn't undress each other, they didn't kiss. She opened his pants and took him; she pulled his hair and put her hands around his neck and rode him, and it seemed wrong and desperate and cruel.

What if it was like that when it was his turn to have sex? If it was like that, he didn't think he would be able to do it. He couldn't believe Derek could do it.

Stiles liked and admired Derek. He'd thought that Derek had a good life, but now he thought that maybe Derek wasn't okay, and it was this woman's fault. Derek didn't look very happy in the video. Stiles hoped he was wrong. Maybe it was actually really nice, different from how it looked. Or maybe it wasn't good, and maybe the woman had some kind of control over him.

It was a crime for a reason, thought Stiles. And crimes had victims. For the first time, he realized that Derek might be one.

Stiles thought about what to do next. 

He needed to confirm whether the blonde woman was an adult. If she was an adult, as he strongly suspected, then he was more determined than ever to put a stop to this. Because there were reasons for the laws. Because Derek deserved tender Notebook sex, not ... what that was. 

He had evidence of a crime. But that wasn't enough. He needed her identity.

Finding out wasn't going to be easy.

He took several screengrabs from the video and cropped them to isolate her face. They were grainy and poorly lit, but he got several reasonable views of her - pointy chin, light eyes, long wavy hair. But then he didn't know what to do with them. He couldn't go around showing people the pictures and asking who she was. He was a kid. People would wonder where he got them. He didn't want word getting back to his dad. Worse, he doesn't want word getting back to the woman in the picture that he was sniffing around. He was officially afraid of her.

A few minutes' experimentation told him that facial recognition searches on the internet were bullshit, and he didn't have access to the police facial recognition software. (Yet. He would get it someday, oh yes.) He trawled through LinkedIn and Facebook pages for Beacon Hills residents, but even though it was a small town there were just too many, and no good way to isolate people by geographic region. He thought about hanging out at the grocery store, on the theory that everyone eventually went to the grocery store, but he simply didn't have the time to do a proper stakeout.

He was still up, clicking through Facebook profiles, when his dad came home after eleven. He listened to him put his keys in the dish by the door, take off his jacket, cross into the study to put his weapon in the safe. 

Stiles longed to go to him and say, I saw something awful. I think someone needs your help. Look at this video, this is not okay. Someone should do something.

But then it occurred to him, too late, that the filming had, in itself, been thoroughly illegal.

("You need to think about consequences, Stiles.")

He was an idiot.

After Dad went to bed, he rode his bike back to the depot that night and, under cover of darkness, removed the camera.

Stiles found out who she was by accident.

He was way ahead in his English class, so his teacher, Ms. Burke, wrote him a pass so he could take some materials over to Ms. Polchin at the high school. Happy to be out of class, he cradled the stack of binders in his arms and ran down the covered walkway that separated the Middle from the High School. (Stiles tended to go places at a full run.)

He handed his pass to the office lady, who pointed him towards Ms. Polchin's classroom. He was just turning away when, behind the secretary, a tall woman in high heels and a slim skirt, with wavy honey-blond hair, emerged from an office.

Stiles immediately tripped over his own feet and wiped out. Binders flew out of his arms and skidded across the shiny linoleum as he sprawled, his blood running cold with shock. 

"You okay?"

He looked up to see the woman, her light eyes sparkling with laughter, crouching beside him.

"Uh huh," he said.

She helped him pick up the binders and, ignoring his tongue-tied silence, walked with him to Ms. Polchin's room. "There you go," she said cheerfully.

"Thanks," he managed to say.

She winked and put her hand on his shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. "Careful out there."

Ugh. She was creepy creepy creepy. Stiles promised himself that he would wash that shoulder seven times and escaped into Ms. Polchin's room. As he gave her the binders from Ms. Burke, he asked casually, "Who was that lady who showed me how to get here?

"That's Ms. Argent," said Ms. Burke.

"Is she new? I've never seen her around before."

"She's worked here for about two years. But she's not a teacher, she's in administration - she specializes in grant writing and things like that."

"Oh, that explains it. Thanks, Ms. Polchin!" 

Back in class, he used his school tablet to look up the Beacon Hills High School's staff directory. Oh yeah, there she was: Katherine Argent, Assistant Human Resources Specialist. Katherine Argent was on LinkedIn: "Driven HR professional with strong communication, organizational, and customer service skills." On Facebook she was Kate – lots of smiling selfies. Lots of beautiful information, including her high school graduation year. And if she was eighteen when she graduated, she was now, OMG, thirty-one years old. 

If he'd had a way to get home other than the school bus, he'd have skipped the rest of the day. He'd found her. He'd found her. She was an adult. She worked for the school district. Her thing with Derek wasn't just icky and gross, it was most definitely against the law.

"Ah-ooooh," he sang, impatiently waiting for the school day to end. "Got you where I want you."

That evening, Stiles created an anonymous Gmail account and used it to send a letter to the Beacon Hills Sheriff's department. Attached to the email were screenshots from social media platforms identifying Katherine Argent; screenshots that identified Derek Hale, including his age and status as a high school student; and, finally, the entire railway depot video.

It was, if he did say so himself, beautifully damning.

He clicked send.

Then he sat and worried, staring at his computer screen.

What if it wasn't enough? What the Sheriff's deputies didn't bother reading anonymous emails from anonymous email accounts? What if they decided to do nothing, because the film was illegally obtained and therefore not admissible in court?

"Not gonna let that happen," said Stiles.

The sheriff's department couldn't be his only recourse. He found the email address for the editor of the local newspaper, and sent the email (including attachments) to him. The newspaper wouldn't be able to print it, but they might investigate.

He wondered if that still wasn't enough.

He found the email address for the superintendent of the school district - Kate Argent's boss - and sent it to her. He sent it to each member of the school board, to the principal of the high school, and to the high school's head of Human Resources.

Then, since he was on a roll, he sent it to the mayor, and the county District Attorney's office, and the County Administrator. 

As he was firing off emails, his only thought was to make sure - to make sure - that someone read the email. Someone had to click through to the attachments, someone had to see what was happening. Someone needed to put a stop to it.

If asked, he would have said he was doing it for Derek Hale. But - as he would later have cause to remember, and regret - at no point did he really think about Derek Hale.

The next day, school was in a total uproar. No one was getting any work done. No one was even pretending to go to class. Students, teachers, even custodians and office staff were clustered around phones, watching something, talking excitedly.

"What's going on?" he asked Scott.

"Dude," said Scott, pulling his phone out of his pocket. "You've got to see this."

The video of Derek Hale having sex with an adult woman had gone viral. It, or screenshots from it, was on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Everyone had seen it.

People were talking in hushed tones – they seemed scandalized, horrified, but titillated, too. Some kids claimed to find it disturbing, but some said they thought it was hot. They knew it was Derek Hale in the video. They knew it was Ms. Argent, who worked in the office at the high school. Most people seemed to think that Derek Hale had accomplished something amazing and admirable.

Most people laughed.

Somehow Stiles had not foreseen this. He bit his lip, staring at Twitter. A Tweet containing a .gif of Ms. Argent unzipping Derek Hale's fly had gone live about two hours ago and already had over three thousand likes and five hundred retweets.

"This is – Hey, this is illegal," he said, weakly. Jackson Wittemore called him a virgin. "I'm twelve," Stiles responded, but Jackson just shoved him and walked away, laughing.

Eventually Principal Ramirez gave an announcement over the intercom, saying that it was time to stop gossiping and buckle down to study and improve their minds. Even the teachers disregarded this.

By the end of the day screenshots of Ms. Argent straddling Derek Hale had been printed and taped up all over Beacon Hills Middle School. By the end of the week, they were tacked to every bulletin board in town, taped to every streetlight, stapled to every telephone pole.

Another thing Stiles hadn't foreseen: everyone wanted to know who had made the video, and why. Several people were outraged that Derek had been filmed with his hot older girlfriend, and vowed that whoever had done that deserved to be punched in the face.

At some point the rumor swept through the school that Derek had made and posted the video himself. Rumor also had it that Cora Hale attacked the person who said that and got expelled.

Stiles chewed his fingernails down to the nub. If the middle school was this excited, Stiles could only imagine what was going on at the High School. What was it like for Derek, to see this picture, this video, everywhere. Seen by everyone.

Later, he learned that Derek's parents took him out of school early. And that he never went back.

When he got home from school, his dad was there, along with deputies Thibodeaux and Eldridge.

"What were you thinking," demanded Sheriff Stilinski. He was pale with fury.

They'd traced his anonymous email address. (The first thing he did, when it was all over, was learn how to prevent this.) Stiles was brought down to the station for questioning. And even though he had known Thibodeaux and Eldridge for years – they were his father's colleagues; they had been at his mother's funeral - it was still scary when they sat across from him in the interrogation room.

His father was there, ostensibly for his protection, but he was so palpably furious with Stiles that Stiles was not comforted.

Quailing, Stiles explained what had happened: he'd witnessed a crime; he'd gathered evidence; he'd turned it in.

Thibodeaux asked gently, "Were you aware that it's illegal to film someone without their permission?"

"Yes." He shifted nervously in his chair. "I knew it would be inadmissible in court. But I hoped it would start an investigation."

"You broke the law, and your concern was that it would be inadmissible in court?"

He shifted nervously in his chair. "Yes," he said.

Eldridge was less gentle. "Maybe you thought, because your father was the sheriff, it didn't matter if you broke the law."

"No!" He stole a glance at his father, who was stone-faced. "I just thought the, um, the adult having illegal sex with a minor was more important."

They asked more questions. Thibodeaux was the nice cop, encouraging and understanding. Eldridge was harder, and, Stiles noticed with mounting dismay, kept asking questions about Stiles's dad: did he know? Had he helped? Stiles's answers – that of course his father didn't know, his father was never home – only made Eldridge's face stonier, and his father colder and more furious.

"So you didn't intend for everyone to see the video?" asked Thibodeaux.

"No," he said earnestly, willing them to believe him. "Never. No way."

"Do you hate Derek Hale?"

"No."

"Are you jealous of him? Was he ever mean to you?"

"No! I wasn't – this wasn't about him."

"How could it not be?"

"I mean – " he stammered. "It was about him, because he was the victim of a crime. What she was doing. I just wanted her to stop. To face consequences."

"Did you know," said Eldridge, "that creating and distributing child pornography is a felony in the state of California, punishable by up to six years in prison?"

Stiles gaped at him, speechless.

His father's gun belt creaked as he shifted in his chair. "Stiles is twelve years old," he said, with velvety quietness. "I assumed he didn't need a lawyer for this interview. Was I wrong?"

Eldridge looked straight at his father. "I think we're done for now. But CPS will want a word. And Sheriff – don't leave town."

After Stiles finished stress-vomiting, they talked to Child Protective Services, and then they talked to a lawyer, and then they talked to the DA.

No charges were pressed. Stiles wasn't removed from his father's care. But that wasn't the end of it.

Talia Hale was the County Administrator, and her child had been harmed. Stiles heard from Scott, who heard it from Lydia who'd heard it from her mom, that Ms. Hale was actively questioning people, trying to uncover who'd first leaked the video. Stiles had sent it to so many people she was never able to pinpoint one person. Her anger was eventually focused on one person, though: she asked for Sheriff Noah Stilinski's resignation.

Stiles's dad's last action in office was the arrest of Katherine Argent. Not just for statutory rape, but also for the insane shit they found when they executed a search warrant of her apartment. She had notebooks full of weird scribbles about the Hales being monsters. She had detailed dossiers on every member of the Hale family, including the children: names, birth dates, photographs, hobbies, schedules. She had complete blueprints of the house, annotated with everyone's bedrooms. She'd made keys. She had the PIN for the security system. And she had a duffel bag full of homemade nitroglycerin pipe bombs. The blueprints showed little red stars where she'd planned to place the bombs: around the load-bearing walls in the basement, in the garage near the propane tanks, in the children's bedrooms.

In the children's bedrooms.

Kate Argent wasn't just boning the Hales' minor son. She was planning to exterminate the Hales.

Stiles went back to school.

It was a mistake.

All the Hales had been pulled out of school, but they had plenty of friends, and word had got around that Stiles was the one who had made and distributed the film. He investigative genius was not appreciated.

No one spoke to him. He was shunned as completely as if he was a dead person, walking through the halls. He hadn't been popular before, but he hadn't been a complete pariah. Now he was frozen to the core by the universal silent contempt of the other students.

The teachers looked at him like a bug. He only once had the courage to raise his hand in class, but his Civics teacher's eyes passed right over him.

Scott shot him one apologetic glance in the hallways and kept his distance. When they were nine they'd cut their hands and pressed their bloody palms together, promising to be brothers forever. But Scott was scrawny, perpetually ill, and he'd obviously calculated the permanent harm he'd take if he publicly stood by Stiles, and quietly backed down. Stiles didn't really blame him, but it still hurt.

No one spoke to him, but that didn't mean he didn't hear things. Ugly, angry talk at the other cafeteria tables. Vicious stares in the hallways. They said he was a nasty brat. They said he was a creepy little weirdo who got his jollies filming other people's private time. They said he needed a good thrashing to teach him not to be so disgusting.

After school, headed across the parking lot towards the bus, he heard a taunting call – "Hey perv! Take a picture of this!"

Stiles turned, a clever retort on his lips. The fist plowed into his face before it came out. His head snapped back from the force of the sucker-punch, he tripped over his feet, and then he was down on his knees and they were kicking him.

By the time a teacher arrived the other kids were gone, and Stiles was bleeding onto the pavement.

Stiles realized, halfway home from the hospital, that his father was drunk.

Noah Stilinski seemed to be driving okay. No speeding or obvious swerving. But he smelled of whiskey, and he was tapping on the steering wheel with his thumbs. Dad always tapped things when he'd been drinking.

It was his father who'd told him about the evidence-based studies on drinking and decreased reaction time. His father who'd shaken his head with regret over fatal accidents. Now his father was driving. Based on the smell and the tapping, Stiles judged he'd had at least three whiskey-and-sodas.

Stiles didn't say anything.

They got home safely, and Stiles's dad immediately fixed himself another whiskey. Stiles made a noise of protest and, for the first time, Noah Stilinski looked at him directly.

"I wish your mother was here," he said. "Maybe she would know what to say to you."

Belatedly, Stiles realized that his father was furious.

"It wasn't my fault," he said. "Some kids jumped me."

"Not your fault?" His dad took a long drink. "You spread child porn all over Beacon Hills – you target the son of the most powerful family in town - I suppose it's my fault. That's the consensus, right? I was a neglectful parent. I called it trust, but they call it neglect. That's the ones who don't think I held the camera myself."

"Dad," whispered Stiles.

"And now," Dad yelled, "you've got a broken nose, a sprained wrist, bruised kidneys, and a medical bill that I can't pay, since thanks you I've lost my job!"

Stiles's heart hammered. He couldn't seem to breathe. His father never shouted at him.

"I've got no medical insurance! You ever think of that, kid?" roared his dad. "Fucking Christ, the ambulance ride alone will be more than I've got in savings! What the fuck am I going to do?"

Stiles couldn't breathe, couldn't think. His father was waving his arms wildly, his speech slurring, and all Stiles could think to do was to hide.

His father didn't seem to notice. "Claudia!" he bellowed. "Claudia! What do I do now? What do I do with your son now?"

Stiles genuinely thought he was dying. He hid in the pantry in the kitchen, curled up on the floor, breath whistling in his lungs, until his father stopped screaming and went to bed with his bottle. 

Stiles spent another hour in the pantry, his panic slowly subsiding, before silently creeping off to his room, listening to his father's intoxicated snores.

In the morning, they didn't speak of it.

Kate Argent's trial was scheduled for summer. Before it could happen, the Stilinskis moved out of Beacon Hills. No one seemed sorry to see them go.

Stiles's dad got a job as a beat cop in Sacramento. It was a demotion, to be sure, but it was a full-time job with benefits, and having work settled him, made him calmer. He drank less. They never talked about it, but Stiles thought maybe his drunken rant had scared him almost as much as it scared Stiles.

They had half of a duplex a block east of Stockton Boulevard, with barred windows and a sun-blasted yard. Things more or less went back to the way they had been before: Dad working late, Stiles studying alone, providing his own meals. He didn't ride his bike around like he used to, partly because their place was in a somewhat scary part of town. School was big and crowded, and he didn't have any friends, but that was okay; that only meant he couldn't fuck up anyone's life too badly.

Stiles had learned his lesson. He kept his head down. He turned thirteen, graduated from seventh grade and, that summer, started the readings for eighth. Just for something to do.

Sometimes he still saw things that others didn't see – noticed things that other people didn't seem to notice. Like the fact that the lady who lived in the other half of their duplex was probably selling drugs, and the substitute teacher for algebra dressed more expensively than she should have been able to afford, and the dad's new partner, Officer Jordan Parrish, was definitely keeping some kind of secret. Stiles said nothing about any of these things. His days of investigating were over.

Both Stilinskis obsessively followed the Kate Argent case in the news and on blogs. Public sympathy was solidly with Kate Argent, a possibly troubled woman, who hadn't actually hurt anyone, and who'd engaged in a technically illegal but entirely consensual relationship. Her privacy had been cruelly violated; her young lover had said nothing in her defense. Derek was despised for letting her take the blame for something they'd both done. On social media a new slang term emerged: a Derek was a coward, someone who cravenly left someone else holding the bag. Man up. Don't be a Derek.

In July, Kate Argent was convicted of several counts of stalking and possession of a destructive device. She was not convicted of statutory rape, even though the evidence and the law were clear.

There were pictures from Kate's sentencing hearing. She looked pretty there in the courtroom, in a dawn-pink dress, her honey-colored hair drawn softly back in a bun at her nape. She got three years in prison, but the commentary Stiles read suggested that if her behavior was good she would probably get out sooner.

It shouldn't have surprised him, but it did: Derek was a big strong teenager, but he was a child in the eyes of the law. Didn't that count for something? Didn't they see the video? How bad it looked? The way she'd held Derek's throat, the way he'd turned his head away and closed his eyes? Stiles chewed his lip, plagued with self-doubt. Stiles must have been wrong. Everyone thought he was wrong, and he guessed they were right. Kate and Derek had been a romance. It had looked horrible to Stiles, but Stiles didn't know anything about sex.

(If he was wrong – if sex was just like that - he was never going to do it.

But he didn't think he was wrong.)

Stiles was walking home from the bus stop when he was grabbed.

He always hurried: this was not a great part of town, all strip malls and fast food places, mattress stores and desperate-looking motels. They'd planted palm trees in the center median strip, which were nice, but they couldn't distract from the empty shop fronts and weeds growing up through crumbling concrete.

So he was walking fast, head down, past an out-of-business Chinese restaurant when someone seized his arm, yanked him into an alley, and slammed him up against the cinderblock building.  Stiles gaped up at the furious face of Derek Hale, who pinned him to the wall with a forearm across his throat.

Stiles had been bullied and beaten before, but always by kids more or less his own size. Derek loomed hugely over him, his eyes wide and hot with fury, his teeth bared, and for an instant Stiles truly believed that Derek Hale was going to kill him. 

"Why did you do it?" Derek whispered.

"I'm sorry," said Stiles immediately. "I'm so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to turn out like it did."

"What did you hope to gain?" demanded the other boy. "Did you tape other people, or just me? Were you after my family too? Are you just malicious? Did you –"

"No. No! I just –"

"Give me one reason not to rip your lungs out," growled Derek, and Stiles nearly wet himself.

"Please! I just wanted –"

"What? What?" Derek had him by the front of his shirt and shook him, slamming him back against the wall. And was it Stiles's hysterical imagination, or were his eyes glowing? "What did you want?"

"I wanted to save you!" cried Stiles.

Derek gasped. His eyes were glowing, flashing in an entirely unnatural way, his face was different –

"Nephew," said a quiet voice, and Derek froze.

An older man had a hand on Derek's shoulder. He said, very softly, "Control, Derek."

Derek closed his eyes, bowed his head. He still had Stiles pinned, but his spine curved, and he almost put his head on Stiles's shoulder as he shrank into himself. Stiles looked past him at the older man – another Hale, by the family resemblance. He had his hand on Derek's chest and was patting him there, over his heart; he met Stiles's eyes over Derek's shoulder.

"All right?" he murmured.

Stiles nodded. Derek nodded, too, and Stiles bit his lip, realizing that the man hadn't been talking to him. The man quirked a smile at him and tugged at Derek, pulling him away. "That's enough now, Derek."

"You followed me," said Derek, his eyes still lowered with what looked like shame.

"Yes, boy, I did. Go to the car and wait for me. Let me have a word with young Mr. Stilinski." Derek balked, snarling, and Peter said, "I'll be along in a minute."

"Peter –"

"Derek," said the uncle, command in his voice. "Go."

Derek released Stiles, not without another seething glare, and stalked across the parking lot, towards the familiar black Camaro, and the silver Porsche that was parked next to it. Leaving Stiles alone with the older man.

Elder Hale regarded him, heavy-lidded. He was wearing a suit and a tie that matched his eyes. He was just as terrifying as Derek, even though he was smiling.

"I …" said Stiles. "I'm sorry, I didn't –"

The older man said, "Here is your lesson for today, Stiles Stilinski: discovering a problem is easy. Identifying the correct solution is much harder."

He pulled a business card from his breast pocket and extended it to Stiles. Peter Hale, it said. And there was a phone number.

"Your instincts were good," continued Peter. "Your work was … Well, let's say your work was thorough. But you picked the wrong solution to the problem. Imprecise, messy. Collateral damage to the innocent is always regrettable. Don't you agree?"

Stiles nodded dumbly.

"And," added Peter, with a kind of controlled savagery that was more terrifying than Derek's threats, "the bitch only got three years. But that's on my docket now; I will take care of her. In the meantime, my family owes you a debt."

"You do?"

"Oh yes," said Peter. "Did you have the opportunity to examine her notebooks? No? You uncovered her just in time. She was planning to make her move against us within the week. Against my pregnant wife, my daughter. She might well have succeeded, but for you. And you know, I am very annoyed at the way she used my nephew to get to us." Stiles couldn't quite suppress a shiver at the menace in Peter's tone. "But that's no longer your concern. Do you plan to go to college?"

"Um," said Stiles. "I want to be a cop?"

Peter made a disapproving sound. "Think bigger, Mr. Stilinski. Work hard and apply to good schools, even the ones you can't afford; your tuition will be handled by the Hales." He taps the card in Stiles's hand. "And if you ever identify another problem in need of a solution, consider calling that number. You will find that I am at your disposal."

He walked away.

Stiles looked at him. His brain clicked over clues. A business card that listed no business. Eyes that glowed, a face that changed. The way Peter Hale said us. Control. Notebooks that called the Hales monsters.

Think bigger.

At twelve, Stiles Stilinski discovered a mystery.