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He waits until the GPS tracker has Scott at the bowling alley for twenty five minutes, then Stiles gets up, goes downstairs, and leaves. He drives over to the Yukimura house and almost turns around three times. He does turn around once, but then turns back around again, and when he gets to Kira's home, he parks next to the driveway and turns the Jeep off. He sits there, for long, silent minutes, hand going back up to his keys more than once.
Last weekend, he made it to the house but didn't stop, just drove right on by. The week before that, he tried coming over three times and turned around each time. Even if he decides to leave again now, he's making progress. If not this weekend, maybe next. If not now, maybe later.
"Fuck it," he finally says, and with a deep breath, Stiles gets out of the Jeep and heads for the front door.
--
Stiles doesn't even have to knock. As soon as he's three paces from the door, it opens. Noshiko looks out at him, expression placid, blank, but her shoulders are visibly tense and she's got her arms hanging loose at her sides, not crossed over her chest. She's ready for him, then, and something in Stiles that has only been papered over, a gaping wound that's been hidden and not healed, digs in a little deeper, weeps a little more fresh pain.
"Kira's not here right now, Stiles," Noshiko says. "If you'd like, I can tell her you stopped by when she gets home?"
"I'm not here for Kira," Stiles says, giving Noshiko a weak smile. "I know she's with Scott at the bowling alley." Noshiko raises one eyebrow and Stiles says, haltingly, "Saturday afternoons are buy-one, get-one on games. It's a cheap date and Scott said Kira likes bowling. Something about balance and aim, I honestly wasn't paying too much attention."
Stiles tries not to squirm under Noshiko's gaze but it's difficult; she smells like kin, is exuding warmth and the strong reek of a comforting ozone, feels like mentor and family and loveloveloathinglo--
Stiles looks away, coughs. He can feel his cheeks flushing. It's getting easier to push the nogitsune's memories back, push them down, but there are times it's almost impossible.
"A good second always knows how to find their alpha," Noshiko finally says, grudgingly impressed. "Did you follow them?"
"GPS tag on Scott's phone," Stiles admits. "Kira's, too. Most of the pack and their families. Not you, but your husband."
Noshiko snorts, a noise that takes Stiles completely off-guard at how weird it sounds coming from a woman with such poise. It relaxes him, though, and something in the way he starts to unwind makes Noshiko relax, like a feedback loop between the two of them until Stiles' grin comes easy and Noshiko's rolling her eyes and opening the door for him.
"I'll make tea. We can talk," she says.
Stiles wrinkles his nose as he enters the house, says, "Tea. Great," in such a dry voice that he almost hears foxfire crackling around the words. Still, he takes his shoes off at the door, turning his back to Noshiko and baring the nape of his neck to her as he does so. When he straightens back up, she's wearing the slightest smile and she inclines her head in his direction as she turns and heads for the kitchen.
--
Stiles didn't see much of the house the last time he was here -- or, rather, he didn't have the presence of mind to take it in and remember it. It's -- nice. Normal. Just a typical Beacon Hills home, though decorated with far more ancient artifacts than one might expect. It's light, though, and comfortable, and feels like home, like adoration, like family.
Stiles' house doesn't feel like this. It's probably why he hasn't been sleeping as much lately. He finds it hard to relax enough to sleep when every inch of his house tightens up his shoulders and sends his heart racing.
The kitchen is airy, with white-painted walls and a large window over the sink. Most of the colour comes from the fridge -- covered in magnets -- and the tile backsplash going from counter to cabinet, in a colour pattern Stiles is pretty sure is called 'fiesta' or something like it: turquoise and mulberry, bright yellow, the orange of violent sunrises and an adobe-brick red. It's enough colour to break up the white, though the cabinets have glass doors that show off the dishes inside and that helps as well. The kitchen doesn't really match the rest of the house but -- sometimes kitchens are like that. Sometimes kitchens are good enough the way they come, and they change slowly, later, one dish or coffee cup or appliance at a time.
The Yukimuras have barely been in Beacon Hills four months. Sometimes Stiles forgets that.
Noshiko busies herself filling the kettle and turning on a burner, getting things out of cupboards. Stiles ambles over to the fridge, glances over the magnets. A pizza place in New York, a dry cleaner's in Houston, a dentist in Jacksonville, an olive oil store in Missoula -- the history of a family, on this refrigerator door.
"Does it get easier?" Stiles asks. Noshiko doesn't turn to look at him, merely a makes a noise of inquiry. "Moving," Stiles says. "All these cities, all the people you must've met over the years. Does leaving get easier?"
"My husband likes to move," Noshiko says. Stiles glances at her, watches the way she turns to face him, leans back against the counter and taps a strainer -- delicate, bamboo, stained with years of use -- against one thigh. "Kira's expressed some displeasure before but it'll be good for her in the long run."
Stiles tilts his head, looks back at the fridge. A magnet for the Detroit Institute of Arts, in a blue that matches the sky. "And you?"
"Foxes -- have issues with permanence," Noshiko says, as if she's admitting a great weakness. "Permanence of place has never been something we -- something I require. We have ourselves and each other. We rarely need more. It was -- hard. At the beginning, the first few uprootings, the first few deaths. They are never really less hard. But the feelings begin to come and go much faster. Eventually the grief becomes fleeting."
Stiles is familiar with the five stages of grief. He's been told about them by countless therapists. He still mourns his mother. He still, sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, after he's been up for days, tries to bargain with the darkness. He still feels fury at the way she left him, at the way she left his dad. He doesn't think he'll ever accept that she's gone, not really, not deep down at the core of him. She left too much behind to ever really be gone.
Perhaps he's still a little human where it counts. Perhaps he can look forward to losing that last little bit of humanity someday. It would be nice to not feel so empty when he only pulls out two plates and cups and sets of silverware for dinner on the rare nights his father agrees to sit across the dinner table from him.
"Kira still grieves?" he asks.
"She has," Noshiko says. "She will again when she leaves Beacon Hills."
Stiles hums, isn't sure what to say to that when there are so many options flooding through his mind. One saving grace of the nogitsune and its legacy; he finds he has no more need for Adderall, no real driving force to speak and move and jump through dizzying spirals of thought. He can choose, now, when to act and when not, when to speak and when to keep his mouth closed. The thoughts still come but they're quicksilver, now, like waterfalls that he skates across, light and dancing, rather than getting caught by the undertow and dragged along without his consent.
The kettle goes quiet, prelude to whistling, and Noshiko takes it off the burner, turns the stove off. She pours water into black teapot; the smell of bergamot and lavender starts to seep into the air. Noshiko lifts a tray, then, and Stiles moves out of her way so she can go past him. With one last look at the plethora of magnets on the refrigerator, Stiles follows her out of the kitchen.
--
Noshiko sets the tray down at the head of the table. Stiles dithers, unsure where to sit, but Noshiko pulls out the chair on the head's left for him. He narrows his eyes and she looks at him -- challenging, he knows, but he doesn't know how he knows just like he doesn't know why she's suddenly got her hackles up. Stiles doesn't say anything, just nods once and sits down, lets her push the chair in like he's a child before she sits at the head and pours tea. Her wrists are slender, elegant, and every move is woven through with practiced grace. There's a hint of ceremony to it, enough to relax him, as he watches her spin the cups and twist the pot to make sure no droplets spill.
He takes the offered cup with both hands when she passes it over: a small thing, holding slightly less than a demitasse. The plain ceramic warms up slowly between the heat of the tea on the inside and the heat of his hands on the outside. Stiles lifts the cup to his nose, closes his eyes as he breathes in. Kumquat peel, he thinks, under the thick bergamot oil and lavender.
Stiles sips, lets the taste soak into his tongue and cheeks and the roof of his mouth, and swallows, feels the heat sink in as it goes down his throat. He opens his eyes, sees Noshiko watching him, and tells her, "It's better than the chamomile."
His dry comment surprises a laugh out of Noshiko, who pushes the tray back a little and leans forward, shaking her head and smiling as she takes a sip from her own cup before setting it down.
"Why are you here, Stiles?" she asks, the amusement slipping from her expression, giving way to something a little deeper than mere curiosity. "Why seek me out when I'm alone?"
Stiles rests his elbows on the table, still holding his cup, looking down at the way the tea glimmers in the low light. "Because the others are still wary of me," he says. "They still see the nogitsune when they look at me. They flinch when they see me, and they avoid me, and they've cut me out of the pack. Understandable, but --." He trails off, shrugs one shoulder. "I've changed. Deep down, intrinsically, I'm not who I used to be. I might not be coming to terms with that, but at least I can admit it. They're still -- mourning. This isn't the time for more change, not while they're still getting used to everything else."
"Scott would not forgive me for saying it," Noshiko says, quietly, "but the world will not mourn the loss of another Argent. Too many have been hurt by them. Allison might have changed, might have grown beyond the legacy of her mother and aunt and grandfather, but our world knows that Argent blood runs true. Even the best of them are worse than the worst of us." She pauses for a moment, looks down into her cup as if drawing strength -- or maybe divining the future. "When others learn that your face was responsible for her death? For the death of an Argent matriarch? You'll have far more friends than enemies. It won't always matter that it wasn't you, in the end, when it was still because of you."
"I thought it would take me longer to forgive you," Stiles says, abrupt. He doesn't want to think of how bloody the Argent legacy is, doesn't want to think of strangers thanking him for ending it. He doesn't want to remember how devastated Scott was, holding Allison in his arms as she died, doesn't want to think of the utter betrayal ricocheting across Isaac's face as he watched Allison's last love confession, doesn't want to remember how his ears rang with Lydia's screams or the few sobs that Chris let out before he gathered himself back under tight control.
He was in the tunnel with Lydia. He still saw. He still heard. He still knows.
"You already have?" Noshiko asks.
Stiles blinks, shakes off the memories. "I thought it was stupid," he says. "To summon a nogitsune and not expect to be tricked, to bargain with it for vengeance and then stop it halfway through the process just because you didn't like how it was getting that vengeance. I thought you were an idiot. I mean, over eight hundred years old and yet --." He stops, exhales through his nose and taps his fingernail against the ceramic cup as he sets it down. "But I get it. The memories -- when we split, I took more than just me. He made this body for him; it only makes sense he'd prime it. He wasn't expecting me to take it or he wouldn't have put so much into it."
"More you than the nogitsune," Noshiko murmurs.
Stiles nods. "'More me' implies something of the fox. None of my clothes fit the same. My hair's just a shade lighter, my teeth feel weird -- a different bite pattern, I think. I don't really like the taste of cauliflower anymore." Stiles looks at Noshiko, really looks, and sees nothing that would harm him. He shifts, takes his phone out of his left back pocket, unlocks it and opens the photo gallery to one specific picture, offers her the phone. "I took that four weeks ago," he says.
Noshiko's looks at one of Stiles' selfies. He was going to send it to Scott, to prove that he was still alive when Scott texted, asking for a wellness-check. He had to spend forty minutes editing it first. There's no mistaking the aura flaring up around him.
She looks up at Stiles, back down at the phone, back up again. "You hide it remarkably well," she says, as she hands the phone back. "You didn't assume it was residue? Something leftover that would disappear?"
"That was four weeks ago, and I enjoyed that week of denial. Three weeks ago, I woke up from a nightmare," Stiles says. He shoves his phone back in his pocket and then rocks to the other side, pulls something out of his right back pocket. There's no way it can fit in there, he doesn't get how it works, but what he takes out and lays on the table is a kanabō, just about the size of his baseball bat, which -- it's fitting, in a twisted way. "I was holding that."
"Your first tail," Noshiko says. She doesn't reach to touch the kanabō, just looks at it for a long moment before gesturing for Stiles to take it back. "Congratulations, Stiles. Do you know how you earned it?"
Stiles winces, says, "I said I woke up from a nightmare. I never said it was my nightmare."
Dream-walking is a curse and what Stiles saw -- well. He hasn't pressured his dad to acknowledge his existence much, lately.
He puts the kanabō back in his pocket, or starts to, anyway, before whatever extradimensional space it lives in takes it back. "I've done a lot of research on kitsune," he says. "I have a lot of memories that aren't mine and that's -- not fun, but I'm dealing. I'm sorting through them, learning a lot from the nogitsune, from its hosts," and that finally gets a reaction from Noshiko, her eyes flashing in interest as her scent blooms with trepidation. Stiles ignores it, doesn't call her on it. "But I need to know what I am now and how I'm supposed to deal with that. Kitsune, I know," he says, when Noshiko opens her mouth, "but there are seven kinds I could've been reborn as. Thirteen in total, take away the void and the celestial, that leaves eleven, and I can knock off four more for sure."
For a moment, for just a split-second when he woke up from that nightmare and realised he was holding a tail, he thought -- but he's checked. His aura's a completely different colour, he can't feed off pain, and causing chaos does nothing for him. He remembers what it felt like, when he and the nogitsune shared bodies, when they shared a mind so dangerous and devious that they planned the death of millions together and -- it would almost be easier because he knows how to work around being a void fox, but --. He's not a nogitsune and he's not sure if he's relieved or upset about that; since he can't do anything to change it, he'll unpack all of those feelings later.
Maybe in a century or two.
"Not yako, then," Noshiko says, "and too young to be celestial. Which others?"
"Thunder, ocean, time, and spirit," Stiles says.
Noshiko studies him, then sits back a little, picks up her cup and intermittently sips at her tea as she thinks out loud. "If any kitsune manages to call their first tail into a weapon, which is rare, then it speaks more to personality than type, an eagerness to stand and fight rather than run and regroup. Most are blades, but, then again, most foxes will reach for a blade if their cunning fails and they're compelled to pull a weapon. A kanabō speaks to force, a willingness to get involved, a bludgeon when a slice will fail."
Stiles can't hold back the flickering smile. "My weapon of choice up to this point has been a baseball bat, so. This one wasn't really a surprise."
"A moving force," Noshiko goes on. "Unwilling to be pushed aside, battering down any barriers in the way. Strong and decisive, capable of shattering any opponent."
Stiles inclined his head. "Perhaps a reflection of the oni, too," he points out. "And I've always been ready to get up close and personal if needed. A kanabō isn't a long-range weapon."
Noshiko takes that in. "And so if the weapon holds no clues, we turn to personality. Loyal yet manipulative. Intelligent. My husband says you can be silver-tongued when you want, and that you're comfortable in the background. Supportive yet sly. Strategic, with an eye for picking out patterns. Capable of stepping forward and making difficult choices when no one else will."
Stiles hums, half-surprised. He hadn't realised that Noshiko and her husband talked to each other about him -- but of course they would, once they knew he was possessed by the nogitsune. Noshiko would want to know everything about him so she could formulate the best plan against him. And even then, she either hadn't known enough or she hadn't believed enough of it to win against the combined force of Stiles and the void fox.
"Derek once told me," he admits, "that when a person gets bitten by an alpha, the creature they become reflects who they are inside. I always thought that if I was bitten, it wouldn't be a wolf taking up residence in my body." He breathes a few times, doesn't look at Noshiko as he adds, quietly, "When I was a child, I couldn't say my first name. The closest I came was 'mischief,' so that stuck. I had to change the nickname when I started school; they didn't want a boy with ADHD running around saying his name was Mischief, so that's when I became Stiles, but -- yeah. Fox. I think that even if this body had a choice in the wake of the split, if it was even up to me to choose what I would become, it always would've been fox."
Noshiko gestures at the teapot and Stiles nods, holds out his cup for a refill. She pours, fills up his cup and then hers, and asks him, "Do you know what I saw, when you summoned me to the McCall house and demanded I bring my oni to test you?"
"A wreck," Stiles says with a laugh. "God, I was so cold. Everything hurt and I was so cold."
"I saw a force of nature," Noshiko says. "So, I say: if not ocean, then river. If not thunder, then wind. If not time, then mountain. I think there would have been a sign if you were fire or music, and I think the nemeton would have bonded with you already if you were forest or earth."
Stiles sighs. "I'd narrowed it down to river and wind, too," he says.
--
The two sit in silence. They both sip at their tea, listen to the traffic outside: a few cars, some children on bikes and tricycles, a couple people running with dogs, car alarms and sirens and horns farther away. It's peaceful and comfortable, part of the world without being in it, as if Noshiko has carved out a little pocket of space just for them to sit and think. Perhaps she did; Stiles doesn't know what nine hundred years of being a kitsune is like, doesn't know what it means, at the core, to be celestial. Someday, maybe, he'll get the chance to decide for himself, to submit to Inari or not -- but that chance, if it comes, is centuries of learning and experience and living away.
There are moments when the thought of living that long doesn't scare him. There are moments when it feels too good to be true.
Eventually, minutes or hours later, a car pulls into the driveway. It's not Scott and Kira, Stiles thinks he'd be able to recognise them coming from a mile away, and his guess is correct when Mr. Yukimura comes in the door and calls out a greeting.
"In the dining room," Noshiko says in return.
Stiles doesn't turn to look, but he can feel the weight of Mr. Yukimura's gaze on him when his teacher pops his head around the corner.
"Everything all right?" Mr. Yukimura asks, tense but not anxious, more -- gently concerned. It's the same type of feeling Stiles gets from the man every time Mr. Yukimura holds someone back to talk about their grades.
"Yes, thank you," Noshiko says. "Could you give us just a few more minutes to finish up, please?"
Mr. Yukimura makes a noise of agreement, says, "Of course. I'm just gonna go get changed."
He doesn't wait around, pads off the other side of the house toward, Stiles assumes, his and Noshiko's bedroom.
Some of the memories he has don't like that. Some of him feels like he's just been punched out of the safe space this quiet dining room had become.
"I had been intending to send Kira off for training, now that she's awake," Noshiko says. "I'm not too far with the negotiations. If you like, I could include you as well."
Stiles doesn't want to leave his dad, doesn't want to leave Beacon Hills, but --.
But.
So many things have changed now, all encapsulated in that one little word.
But.
"If it's not too much trouble," he says, standing up. Noshiko starts to stand as well and Stiles puts his hand out, tells her, "I can see myself out. Thank you, though."
Noshiko looks at him, sits back down, slow and careful, and says, "Come see me next weekend, Stiles. When Scott and Kira go bowling. We'll have tea and talk some more."
Stiles returns her gaze, nods, and says, "I will. Thank you, Noshiko."
She doesn't chide him for the familiar address. Instead, she smiles: a small thing, holding the promise of wide, vibrant blossoming affection.
"Mischief," she calls him, names him, and for the first time in a long time, it --
-- it doesn't hurt.