Chapter 5 — Scott McCall Comes to the House
Scott McCall showed up at eleven in the morning because Stiles had not answered his phone in thirty-six hours.
He knew something was different before he was up the walk. The house smelled wrong. Not bad — wrong. Milk and detergent and a soap he didn't recognize, layered over the smell of the house he'd been coming to since the third grade, and under all of it something new and small and warm that his whole chest reacted to before his brain caught up.
He rang the bell.
Stiles opened the door in yesterday's shirt with a dish towel over his shoulder.
"Hey," Stiles said.
Scott looked at him.
"What's on your shirt?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Stiles, what is on your shirt."
"It is a substance," Stiles said, "and it came out of a person, and that's as far as I'm willing to go on the front porch."
He stepped back and let him in.
Scott came into the living room and stopped dead.
There was a girl on the couch with a baby on her knees, and she was holding the baby's hands and moving them in a slow circle, and the baby was making a noise like an outboard motor.
The girl looked up.
"You're Scott," she said.
"I'm Scott."
"Hope."
"Hi." Scott's eyes went to the baby and stayed there. "Hi. Um."
"This is Mira," Hope said.
"Hi, Mira."
Mira blew a bubble.
Scott turned to Stiles.
Stiles had his arms crossed and was standing very straight, which he only did when he was braced.
"So," Stiles said. "Couple things happened."
They went out back.
It was cold and bright and the grass was still wet from two nights of rain, and they stood by the fence where the two of them had been standing since they were nine, and Scott listened to the entire thing without saying a word.
When Stiles got to the end, Scott said: "September second."
"Yeah."
"That's — " Scott did the math on his fingers, actually on his fingers, and then stopped. "That's while we were dealing with everything. That whole month. She was having a baby that whole month."
"Yep."
"And you didn't know."
"I did not know."
"Stiles." Scott looked at him. "You have a kid."
"I'm aware."
"You have a *kid.*"
"Scott, I've been aware for eleven hours, it's a very fresh awareness — "
"No, I mean — " Scott put both hands on his head and turned in a half circle and came back. "Sorry. Sorry, that's not — I'm happy. This is me being happy, it just comes out weird."
"It comes out a little weird."
"She's beautiful, man."
"Yeah," Stiles said. "She is, right? That's not just me?"
"No, she's — " Scott laughed, a real one, and then his face did something at the end of it and he looked away toward the fence.
Stiles saw it.
"What," he said.
"Nothing."
"Scott."
"It's nothing, it's stupid."
"Say it."
Scott put his hands in his jacket pockets.
"You didn't call me," he said.
Stiles didn't answer right away.
"You've known since midnight," Scott said. "It's eleven. That's eleven hours and I had to come over here because you stopped answering your phone, and I sat outside for a second before I rang the bell because I genuinely thought something bad had happened to you."
"Something did happen to me."
"You know what I mean."
"I know what you mean."
"So why didn't you call?"
Stiles leaned on the fence.
"Because I didn't know how to say it out loud yet," he said. "That's the actual reason. There's no better one. I've said it four times now and it still sounds like a thing that happened to someone else."
Scott nodded slowly.
"Okay," he said.
"I'm not managing you."
"I didn't say you were."
"You had the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face, Scott, you've had it since we were nine, it's very effective and I'd appreciate if you'd retire it."
Scott almost smiled.
Then he didn't.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Two nights ago. In the preserve."
Stiles's hands stilled on the fence rail.
"Yeah," he said.
"You went northeast. Off the rail line."
"I went where the tracks went."
"You went where the tracks went by yourself," Scott said, "after I said to stay in pairs."
"I know what you said."
"Malia found the tree."
Stiles didn't say anything.
"There's a two-foot section of bark missing off an oak up there," Scott said, "about four feet off the ground, and there's blood in the leaves under it, and there's a lot of it. Malia smelled it before she saw it. She said it was yours."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"It's mine," Stiles said. "Yeah. It got me. I got thrown."
Scott turned and looked at him.
"Take your jacket off," he said.
"Scott — "
"Take your jacket off, man."
Stiles looked at him for a second. Then he shrugged out of the jacket and pushed his sleeve up, and turned his arm over, and held it out.
Scott looked at it.
Unmarked skin from the wrist to the elbow. No scab. No scar. Not even a bruise.
"Where is it," Scott said.
"Where's what."
"Malia said the amount of blood in those leaves was — " Scott stopped. "She said it was a body's worth of a bad day. That's her phrasing. And you're standing here with nothing on you."
"I got lucky."
"That's not what lucky looks like."
"Scott."
"I heal in about ten minutes and I still have a mark under my ribs from four months ago because it was deep," Scott said. "You're human. You bruise if Coach yells at you. So where is it?"
Stiles pulled his sleeve down.
"Most of it wasn't mine," he said.
Scott went quiet.
"What?"
"There was something else up there," Stiles said. "It was already hurt when it got to me. It bled all over the — that's why there's that much. That's the whole answer."
Scott stood there.
"Malia said it was yours," he said.
"Malia smelled me on a tree I got thrown into. Of course it smelled like me."
"That's not what she — "
"Scott, I'm standing right here," Stiles said, and held his arms out. "Look at me. Do I look like a guy who lost a body's worth of blood two nights ago? Am I gray? Am I on the ground? I made a bottle at six this morning and I'm up, so whatever happened up there, the version where I nearly died in the woods doesn't match the guy in front of you."
Scott looked at him for a long, long moment.
And because he was Scott, and because his best friend was standing in the sun in his own backyard with a dish towel still over his shoulder and a baby inside the house, he let it go.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
"But you don't go alone anymore."
"Scott."
"No, that's — " Scott pointed at the house. "That's not me being an alpha at you. That's the other thing now. You get that, right? That's not the same as it was three days ago."
Stiles looked at the back door.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I get that."
"Because two nights ago if that had gone different, somebody would have had to knock on your dad's door. And now somebody would have to knock on your dad's door *and* tell a girl who drove here from Louisiana that she came all this way to — "
"Okay. Yeah. I got it."
"I'm just saying it out loud once."
"You said it."
"Good."
They stood there.
"Hey," Scott said. "Can I hold her?"
Stiles snorted. "You want to hold her."
"I really want to hold her."
"You've been out here doing alpha voice at me for ten minutes and this whole time you've been thinking about holding the baby."
"Basically the entire time, yeah."
"Unbelievable."
They went back in.
Hope was on the floor with Mira on a blanket, and she looked up when the door opened and read both of their faces in about a second and a half, which Stiles noticed and did not comment on.
"He wants to hold her," Stiles said.
"Sit down," Hope said. "Not the couch, the floor, you're too tall."
Scott sat down on the floor immediately.
Hope put Mira in his arms, and Mira looked up at him, and Scott McCall's face went completely, helplessly open.
"Oh no," he said.
"Yep," said Stiles.
"Oh no, she's — "
"Yep."
"Stiles, she's so small."
"She's six pounds of pure opinion."
"She's looking at me."
"She does that."
Mira grabbed Scott's finger and Scott made a sound like he'd been hit.
Hope sat back on her heels and watched him, and then glanced up at Stiles, and Stiles caught it.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing," Hope said. "He's easier than I expected."
"He's the easiest person in the world," Stiles said. "It's a known issue."
"I can hear you," Scott said, not looking up.
Hope's phone buzzed on the coffee table.
She looked at it.
She did not pick it up.
It buzzed again, and stopped, and then started buzzing continuously.
"You gonna get that?" Stiles said.
Hope was looking at the screen.
"Hope."
"It's my aunt," she said.
"Okay. So?"
"So my aunt doesn't call. My aunt texts, because calling is for when texting isn't fast enough." Hope picked the phone up. "And that's the fourth one since nine."
She answered it.
"Freya."
Stiles could hear a voice on the other end, fast, not loud.
Hope's face changed by degrees.
"When," she said.
The voice again.
"No," Hope said. "No, tell him — Freya, tell him I'm *fine*, tell him I called you, tell him — "
She stopped.
She listened.
"How far out," she said.
Scott had gone still on the floor with the baby.
Hope lowered the phone and looked at the screen and then at Stiles.
"Okay," she said. "So I have some news about how the next part of your week goes."
"Hope."
"My father's coming."
Stiles stared at her.
"When?"
"He left last night."
"*Last night?*"
"He doesn't drive," Hope said. "He doesn't take commercial flights either, so it's somewhere in between, and Freya says he'll be here by tomorrow."
Scott looked up from the floor. "Is that bad?"
Hope did not answer him.
She was looking at Stiles.
"He's going to be polite," she said. "For about nine minutes."
"And then?"
"And then he's going to want to know exactly who you are," Hope said, "and my father is very, very good at finding out things people are holding back."
The phone buzzed again in her hand.
Nobody said anything.
In the middle of the floor, Mira let go of Scott's finger and started, with real commitment, to cry.
Hope crossed the room and scooped her up off Scott's lap in one motion, and the crying dropped by half and then stalled out into a wet, offended hiccup against her shoulder.
"She does that when the room goes quiet," Hope said. "She hates a quiet room."
"Yeah," Stiles said. "Okay. Sure. That's normal. That's a normal thing for a baby to hate."
Scott got up off the floor and stood there with his hands out like he wasn't sure what to do with them now that there wasn't a baby in them.
"So I'm gonna ask the obvious question," he said.
"Don't," said Stiles.
"How bad is her dad?"
"Scott."
"No, it's a fair question," Hope said. "And the honest answer is that it depends entirely on how the first ten minutes go."
"What happens in the first ten minutes?"
"He decides." Hope adjusted Mira. "That's all it is. He looks at a person and he decides what they are, and then he doesn't revisit it for about a century."
"And if he decides wrong?"
Hope didn't answer that.
Scott looked at Stiles. Stiles was looking at the window.
"Okay," Scott said slowly. "Then I'll be here."
"You will not be here," Hope said.
"Why not?"
"Because you're an alpha in your own territory and he's exactly the kind of man who notices that on the way in the door," she said. "And because if there are two of you standing in the living room, he'll read it as a position. And because the second he thinks anybody is managing him, he stops being polite eight minutes early."
Scott's jaw set. "I don't love that."
"You don't have to love it."
"Stiles is my best friend."
"And he's my daughter's father," Hope said, "and I've spent eighteen years learning how to keep my family from breaking the things I like. Let me do the part I'm good at."
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Stiles turned from the window.
"She's right," he said.
"Stiles — "
"She's right, Scott." He pulled the dish towel off his shoulder and folded it, badly, and set it on the arm of the couch. "You're the guy who walks into a room and makes it about whether everybody's safe. That's your whole thing, it's the best thing about you, and tomorrow it is going to read as a challenge to a man who has not lost one of those in a very long time."
Scott stood there.
"Then what do you want me to do?"
"Take your phone off silent," Stiles said. "That's it. That's the whole job."
"That's not a job."
"It's the one I'm giving you."
Scott exhaled through his nose. He looked at Mira over Hope's shoulder, and something in his face went soft against his will, and he pointed at her.
"I'm coming back the day after," he said.
"Fine."
"With food. Melissa's going to want to send food, and if I show up without it she'll drive it over herself, and then you'll have my mom in your kitchen asking when this baby last saw a pediatrician."
Hope's head came up.
"That's a real question, by the way," Scott said. "My mom's a nurse. She'll ask it in about four seconds and she won't be rude about it but she will not let it go."
"Two weeks ago," Hope said. "In Mobile. There's a folder in the car."
"Okay. Good. She'll love that. Tell her that in the first minute and you'll have her for life."
He got his jacket off the back of the chair.
At the door he stopped.
"Hey," he said. "Stiles."
"Yeah."
"Two nights ago."
Stiles's shoulders went a fraction tighter. "Scott."
"I'm not doing it again," Scott said. "I'm just saying — " he shook his head once. "You've been off since before the preserve. Like, weeks before. And I kept figuring you'd get to it."
"There's nothing to get to."
"Okay," Scott said.
He opened the door.
"There's usually something to get to," he said, and left.
Stiles stood in the middle of the living room and looked at the closed door for longer than he meant to.
"He knows," Hope said.
"He doesn't know."
"He knows something's there."
"That's different." Stiles rubbed his face with both hands. "That's been true since we were nine and it's never once cost me anything."
Hope watched him over the top of Mira's head.
"It's going to now," she said.