PIECES OF A PUZZLE THAT WON'T SEEM TO FIT
"I'M not just letting you leave her here." Stiles said to Peter, referring to the unconscious redhead beside him who looked like she was practically bleeding out.
Stiles had been quick to find them after Peter had bitten a chunk out of Lydia's side, which explained Lydia's lack of consciousness.
Aspen just stood there, speechless, still reeling from the information that Peter and Derek Hale both somehow knew Ace, and they knew him well enough to know about Paige.
Her hands were shaking at the sight of the chunk of Lydia's side that had been bitten out by Peter.
"You don't have a choice, Stiles. You're coming with me." the Alpha demanded.
"Call your friend." Peter sighed irritably. "Tell Jackson where she is, that's all you get."
Aspen grabbed Stiles' phone and dialled Jackson's number, seeing as she didn't have her phone on her and Stiles, for obvious reasons, didn't have Jackson's number saved.
"J-Jackson?" she yelled into the phone.
"Aspen I did something, something ba-"
"I don't care." she cut him off. "You need to come out to the lacrosse field now, y-you need to take Lydia to the hospital."
"What happened? "Jackson's panicked voice said through the phone.
"Just get here, now, please."
She hung up the phone, not knowing what else to say, her heart was also racing so fast she felt like she could pass out any second.
Aspen handed Stiles back his phone, and turned to Peter with hatred burning in her eyes.
"You can stay here." Peter told her. "I only need one of you."
"Fine, take me." she was quick to snap, not thinking twice before instinctively protecting Stiles. "Let Stiles take her to the hospital and I'll go with you."
"Aspen don't." Stiles said calmly. "I'll go, I don't want you getting hurt."
"I don't want you getting hurt!" she was now crying, while Peter stood back and watched this unfold between the two teenagers.
"Stay. Here." Stiles repeated, an unusual calm to his tone. "If something happened to you because I let you alone with that..." he lowered his voice, not that it mattered seeing as the alpha had supernatural hearing, "psychopath..."
"I can still hear you, idiot." Peter spoke.
"Stay here, wait for Jackson, and help Lydia." Stiles said to Aspen, taking both of her hands in his to try and stop them from shaking.
Aspen wanted to fight him on it, but she could see from the look in his eyes that he wasn't asking.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.
And then he and Peter were gone.
...
"Where is she?" Aspen and Jackson yelled into the hospital corridor at the same time.
The two had barely had a chance to talk between dragging Lydia's limp, unconscious body to the hospital.
"Hey!" Sheriff Stilinski shouted, ore at Jackson than it was to Aspen. "What the hell happened to that girl?"
" I-I don't know." Jackson stammered. "We went out looking for her-"
"What, you just happened to wander into the middle of that field and you just found her there like that?" Sheriff Stilinski said skeptically. "Don't lie to me, son."
"No, I-""Hey! What happened to her?"
"This isn't his fault, sheriff." Aspen spoke up, her voice was still evidently shaky and hoarse.
"She's your girlfriend!" Sheriff continued to snap at Jackson. "That's your responsibility!"
"No, she's not, okay?" Jackson replied. "She didn't go to the formal with me."
"Then who'd she go with?"
"Do you really wanna know?" Jackson pressed. "She went with Stiles."
"What?" Sheriff Stilinski couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Aspen stayed quiet again, feeling her whole body fill up with exhaustion.
"Stiles took her." Jackson clarified.
Sherriff Stilinski turned around to face multiple doctors and members of the sherif department."Somebody better find my son."
Then, the exhaustion caught up with the brunette. Aspen felt her head go light and her vision blur, and before she knew it, she had fallen unconscious on the hospital floor.
...
"I like you, Stiles." Peter said sinisterly after Stiles had reluctantly helped him track down Derek.
"Since you've helped me, I'm going to give you something in return."
Stiles's eyes narrowed.
"Do you want the bite?"
"What?"
"Do. You. Want. The. Bite?" he said slowly. "If it doesn't kill you-and it could, you'll become like us."
"Like you?" Stiles said, disgusted.
"Yes, a Werewolf. Would you like me to draw you a picture?" Peter said sarcastically. "That first night in the woods, I took Scott because I needed a new pack. It could've easily been you. It could've easily been Aspen, too, but that's a more interesting story."
Stiles wondered what the hell he meant by the latter part of the sentence.
"You'd be every bit as powerful as him. No more standing by his side, watching him become stronger, and quicker, more popular, watching him get the girl... You'd be equals. Maybe more. Don't you want to get the girl for a change?
Oh wait, that's right, you can't even choose which girl it was is that you want, can you?"
"Leave Aspen out of this." Stiles gritted through his teeth.
"Yes, or no?" Peter ignored him.
"I don't wanna be like you." Stiles said with false confidence, because deep, deep down, the idea of having power appealed to him, like it would anyone. But just because he liked the idea of power, doesn't mean he'd go to these lengths to take it.
"Do you know what I heard just then?" Peter smirked. "Your heart beating slightly faster over the words I don't want. You may believe that you're telling me the truth, but you are lying to yourself."
Stiles didn't answer.
"Soon, you might be the only human left."
...
"You know what? It's good that we're in a hospital, because I'm gonna kill you." The Sheriff seethed at his son.
"I'm-I'm sorry. I lost the keys to my Jeep. I had to run all the way here." Stiles lied, not being able to tell his father the real reason he wasn't here.
"Stiles, I don't care!"
"Is she gonna be okay?" Stiles' voice shook, his mind racing back to Lydia and his blood-covered state. "And where's Aspen?"
"They don't know about Lydia... partially because they don't know what happened. She lost a lot of blood, but there's something else going on with her." The sheriff explained, not answering his latter question.
"What do you mean?" Stiles asked.
"The doctors say it's like she's having an allergic reaction. Her body keeps going into shock." Sheriff Stilinski continued."Did you see anything? I mean, do you have any idea who or what attacked her?"
"No. No, I have no idea." Stiles lied again in defeat. "You didn't say where Aspen was, is she here?"
"Yeah, she is." the Sheriff remained vague, trying not to worry his son. "What about Scott?"
"What do you mean? What about him?"
"Did he see anything?"
"What do you- Is he not here?" Stiles was now panicking."What are you talking about? I've been calling him on his cell phone. I've gotten no response."
"Yeah... you're not gonna get one." Stiles muttered.
Then he realised his dad had still avoided his question.
"Dad... where's Aspen?"
His father looked defeated as he simply nodded his head in the direction of the hospital hallway, signalling that the brunette was in one of the rooms. Stiles' legs instantly shot off the ground and dashed down the hall, his head poking in every single room trying to find the brunette.
He found her, and through the window he saw she was either asleep or unconscious on the hospital bed. She was still in her dress from the dance, which means it hadn't have been serious enough for her to be clad in a hospital gown, to which a small amount relief flooded him.
He slowly opened the door, only to find Jackson in the chair in the corner of the room. His chin rest in his hands, as did his elbows on his knees.
"What happened to her?" Stiles asked him.
"They say she just passed out from exhaustion." Jackson replied, but he was shaking.
"Then she's going to be fine, right?" Stiles pressed further, trying to figure out why he looked so shaken up. It was probably the fact Lydia had half of her side missing, he thought.
"Yeah, yeah she will be." Jackson sighed.
Stiles closed the door behind him and sat on another vacant chair next to him. There was an awkwardness looming between the two, for obvious reasons, but Stiles couldn't help but worry about his current state.
"You shaken up about Lydia?" he asked, trying to diffuse the awkward tension, but also trying to help him in his own way, even though he hated the guy.
"Yeah, that and..." Jackson trailed off, as if he was holding back on telling Stiles something.
"And...?"
"I did something stupid that she's probably going to be really mad at me for..." Jackson muttered. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."
"Well... what did you do?"
Their interaction was interrupted when someone else had entered the room. A tall man with a piercing expression, and he was glaring at both boys.
"Boys... I was wondering if you can tell me where Scott McCall is." Chris Argent spoke.
"Scott McCall?" Stiles said nervously. "Umm, I haven't seen him since the dance. Jackson, you?"
"Uh...I-" Jackson froze, looking nervously at the Argent man he had spoken to earlier that night.
When he told him about Scott, he told him where he was, he did the stupid thing he didn't think Aspen would forgive him for.
He sold out her best friend to the hunters.
"Oh, for the love of God." Stiles sighed in annoyance.
Next thing they knew, the two teenage boys were whipped away from Aspen's hospital room, and locked inside another vacant one, being treated by Chris Argent and his backup.
"Let's try this again-" Chris spoke, locking the door. "Where is Scott McCall?"
...
When Aspen woke up, she oddly felt better than she had before. She didn't know what caused her to pass out like that, whether it really was exhaustion, whether it was all the shock she was experiencing at once, or maybe it was about what Peter had said.
The thought that Ace had known the Hales was driving her to the brink of insanity, trying to wrap her head around all different kinds of conspiracies.
Her eyes fluttered open to find herself in an empty hospital room.
This gave her a moment of peace and quiet alone, which usually she would love, except this time she wasn't truly alone.
She was burdened with spinning thoughts running around in her head.
Her brother knew the Hales.
Peter knew about Paige, and he knew that Ace loved her. Peter knew who Paige loved more than her brother.
Derek also knew Ace, could the two of them have been friends, even?
She tried so so hard to piece things together, it all seemed like pieces of a puzzle that won't seem to fit.
She felt like she was adding two plus two and coming up with seventeen.
And even if she could make sense of it all, was any of it truly relevant?
The brunette shot up out of her bed, thinking about what was relevant at that moment in time.
Lydia.
...
Aspen exited her room in search to check on the Martin girl, she had to know that she was breathing, damnit.
But instead she walked in on a scene between Chris Argent and Stiles Stilinski, where Jackson appeared to just be observing, not doing anything about it.
"Let me ask you a question, Stiles... Have you ever seen a rabid dog?" Chris said as he had Stiles' collar in the grip of his hand.
"No. I could put it on my to-do list, if you just let me go." Stiles retorted with sarcasm.
"Well, I have. And the only thing I've ever been able to compare it to is seeing a friend of mine turn on a full moon. Do you wanna know what happened?"
"Not really... No offense to your storytelling skills..."
"He tried to kill me, and I was forced to put a bullet in his head. The whole while that he lay there dying, he was still trying to claw his way toward me, still trying to kill me, like it was the most important thing he could do with his last breath. Can you imagine that?"
"No." Stiles was quick to say. "And it sounds like you need to be a little more select-"
"Did Scott try to kill you on the full moon? Did you have to lock him up?" Argent cut him off.
"Yeah, I did." said Stiles. "I had to handcuff him to a radiator, and he ended up saying some really mean stuff to me, actually..." he trailed off, getting sidetracked. "Why? Would you prefer I locked him in the basement and burned the whole house down around him?"
The Whittemore boy's jaw dropped, as did Aspen's.
She would've cut in by now and yelled at Allison's father to put him down, but it didn't appear that he would actually harm Stiles.
"I hate to dispel a popular rumour, Stiles, but we never did that." the hunter argued.
"Oh, right. Derek said you guys had a Code." Stiles spoke back. "I guess no one ever breaks it..."
Aspen now noticed she was definitely out of the loop about the Hale fire and who had set it.
"Never." Argent seethed.
"What if someone does?"
"Someone like who?"
"Your sister."
As the last words left Stiles' mouth, his eyes caught a glimpse of a red dress further down the hall, and immediately locked eyes with the brunette. He could see the shock in her eyes, as she had just heard that Allison's aunt had been the one to set fire to the Hale house.
But he also noticed that she looked a lot better than she had the last time he saw her, which settled him slightly.
"Let go of him." the brunette demanded, quickly approaching. Argent surprisingly listened to the teenage girl and let go of his grip of Stiles' collar, and then took his men and left in what looked like a foul mood.
"Are you okay?" they both asked at once, checking each other as if expecting to find bruises or scratches, but both of them were perfectly fine.
"I'm okay." she nodded.
"Yeah, me too." he replied. "
She turned away from Stiles to face Jackson, who wore an uncomfortable expression, like a mix between nervousness and fear.
"Are you okay?" she asked him with concern, but his gaze kept flicking between her and the boy next to her, because Stiles knew exactly why he looked so scared.
"Do you wanna tell her or should I?" Stiles said calmly.
"Tell me what?" her head snapped back to look at Stiles.
Jackson looked at her, defeated, while Stiles' expression was unreadable. When he realised Jackson wasn't going to speak, he sighed.
"He sold Scott out to the hunters." Stiles said after a brief moment of silence.
"You did what?" the fiesta brunette drew her attention back to Jackson, who looked almost ashamed.
He knew he had fucked up big time, he was just scared.
"I'm sorry, I- I just..." he hesitated, trying to come up with an excuse that didn't make him sound like a traitor or a coward.
Because Aspen Carter would never keep either around.
The brunette girl sighed, not wanting to deal with all of this right now. Because she did feel slightly betrayed. She knew Jackson never liked Scott, but to sell him out to the Argents, a family of hunters, was low.
"We need to find him." she muttered, so quietly it was basically a whisper to Stiles. "We need to find Scott, come on." she nudged his arm.
"Aspen wait-" Jackson reached out his arm to stop her, terrified that this was something she wouldn't forgive him for.
"Just-" she snapped slightly. "Just... stay with Lydia, stay here, stay out of it."
Jackson could tell by the look in her eyes that she felt betrayed.
Before he could beg her to hear him out, she was already jogging down the hallway with Stiles next to her.
Had he lost her before he even truly had her?
...
Aspen and Stiles sat in silence as they drove to the Hale house.
Stiles wanted so desperately to ask about Jackson, but stopped himself because it was nor appropriate or any of his business.
Aspen on the other hand, was simply wishing for her trusted Doc Martens to be on her feet, instead of the stupid high heels she was forced to wear from the dance.
But needless to say, at least she was getting better at walking in heels.
The drive was short from the hospital to the burnt-down house in the woods, mainly because Stiles was going over the speed limit by about forty.
When they finally got there, it looked like a war zone.
...
sooo.... Jackson did a dumb thing...
this chapter was highkey a bitch to write because it's basically all just the episode word for word, but I needed to get the actual TW storyline in.
Also once I'm done with season one which I should be by the end of the week, updates will slow down a lot because
dun dun dun....
going back to school
I will still try to post at least once a week, hopefully twice, but that's why I've been so frequent with updates recently, because they are going to slow down big time.
there will probably be two more chapters of part one , maybe three i'm not sure.