Joey McCoy is a total daddy's girl. (imanursenota__) wrote in vascaptiolog, @ 2013-12-16 11:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | joey mccoy, stiles stilinski |
WHO: Joey McCoy & Stiles Stilinski
WHAT: Experiment! (AKA: This isn't awkward at all, you guys.)
WHERE: Out in the woods, somewhere between the church and cabin 2.
WHEN: Day Thirty-Six, Midnight
WARNINGS: Language
STATUS: Closed, Complete.
Enthralls. That was the word Joey was getting ready to put down on the Scrabble board for a nice twelve points, working off one of Tate’s older words, all She was two spaces and one G shy of a triple word score by tacking on an ‘ing’ instead of an ‘s’ to the base word, and that was obnoxious, but twelve points wasn’t too shabby, if she did say so herself. She’d known she was tired, but she hadn’t realized she’d been pass out tired until she started to wake up. Tate must’ve decided to take the bed, after all, if she’d konked out in the middle of the game. She didn’t blame him. But then she really woke up and realized she wasn’t in his cabin still, at all. She was in the woods. In the middle of the night, no less. “...Tate…?” she whispered, knitting her brow. “Tate!” she hissed. Joey sat up and looked around, quickly noticing the form on the forest floor beside her and she fumbled for the Zippo ever present in her pocket these days. She flipped it open and struck the flint, immediately deflating in a mixture of frustration and upset. “Oh, God. Really?!” she muttered to herself, getting to her feet. Screw Stiles, she thought, he was on his own. Only, she took one step and stopped. She couldn’t just leave him passed out in the woods in the middle of the night all alone. Sighing, she nudged at him with one foot. “Stiles. Get up.” He grunted, eyebrows furrowing at the nudge. He opened his eyes, sitting up slowly and trying to figure out why the hell he was laying in the woods. His first thought was oh shit he’d been kidnapped -- again. Probably by Peter. Quickly he ran his hands up and down his arms, trying to determine if there were any bite marks. When he realized there weren’t and that he seemed to be in one piece, he relaxed but only a little, looking up to see Joey standing a couple feet away from him, not looking very happy. Stiles blinked, rising to his feet slowly and brushing off his pants. “Uh. Any idea how we got into the woods?” He didn’t have a good feeling about this. Everything about it felt wrong. Moments ago he’d been at Derek’s cabin, worrying about how Allison was doing at the church and now he was here, and he had no memory of the time in between. Either someone -- Peter or Piper -- was screwing with his mind again, or Management was screwing with his mind. Joey frowned as Stiles took his time sitting up. She wanted to make sure he was awake before she left, because even if she was mad at him, she didn’t want anything bad to happen to him out here. “No, I woke up out here, too. I was in the middle of something, actually,” she muttered, frowning. “But now you’re up, so I’m going,” she added and started away from him, getting only a few steps away before keeling over and grabbing her stomach with both hands, having yelped out in pain. It felt as though she’d been stabbed in the gut and when she’d taken a step forward to balance herself and keep from falling over, it felt like the knife that wasn’t actually there was being twisted. Dropping onto the forest floor again and curling into herself, Joey made a very conscious effort not to look at Stiles, because when she felt the tears prickling in her eyes, she decided she didn’t want him to see them. He would have been a little more concerned with her pain if a similar pain hadn’t just stabbed through his skull, so intense that he felt suddenly nauseous. “Oh my god, what the hell?” he mumbled. He’d thought Gerard Argent beating the shit out of him when he went all psycho werewolf hunter had been painful. That was nothing compared to this. He couldn’t stand upright, doubling over in pain, gasping. As soon as he was actually on the ground, the pain began to subside. But Stiles made no attempt to get up. “What the hell?” He stared up at the treeline for a long moment before turning his head to look over at Joey. “Are you okay?” There was concern laced in his voice as he tried to figure out exactly what was going on. Was there some kind of gas in the atmosphere that affected them if they were standing? He tried to think of gasses that caused pain, but chemistry wasn’t his strong suit. Squeezing her eyes shut and willing back the sob stuck in her throat, Joey nodded to buy herself a few seconds before she could find the voice to follow it up. “Yeah…” she breathed as the pain started to subside. “Oh, my God...what the fuck…?” she gasped, wiping her face quickly with her hands before he could see. “I don’t know. I have no idea. Unless there’s some kind of poisonous gas in the air that’s affecting our central nervous systems.” He laid his head on his arm. “In which case we need to stay low to the ground.” “Is that even a thing?” she snapped unintentionally, still hugging herself as she looked over her shoulder at him. “I just...wanna go back to Scrabble, is that so fucking much to ask?!” Her question started out quiet and resigned, directed at Stiles, but it ended in a shouting match at the sky, directed at the Management. “I was fucking winning, you assholes!” He nearly asked if she had any better ideas, but when she started yelling at the sky, it dawned on him that it probably was Management. That this was their latest experiment somehow. Even if none of it made sense right then. Awesome. He blew out a breath. “All right, look, I’ll walk with you back to the museum and then head back to the church. Whatever the purpose of this stupid experiment is, I don’t get it.” “I’m not staying at the museum tonight,” she blurted out reflexively, face going red immediately after she said it. She shouldn’t have; now he’d ask questions and she could’ve just sent Tate a message to come back and get her. Too late now. Joey pulled herself back to her feet and grudgingly held a hand out to Stiles. “Let’s go then, just take me to the museum and I’ll figure it out from there. This is stupid.” He blinked a couple of times at her outburst, arching his eyebrows. “O-kay…” He reached out and took her hand, rising to his feet and looking at her for a moment. “Pain’s gone?” he asked carefully, rubbing his temple gingerly. Curling her arms around herself in a one-person hug, Joey slumped her shoulders. “Yeah, feels fine, now. I just wanna go back. Let’s just go back. I don’t wanna stand here and talk about it,” she said quietly, eyes downcast. Partially, she didn’t want to talk to Stiles about it, but partially, she didn’t want for either of them to give the Management the satisfaction of knowing whatever they’d been trying to do was working. “It’s no big deal,” she insisted, eyes drifting back up to meet Stiles’ face and she gave him a significant look that she hoped she didn’t have to spell out for him, since that would defeat the whole purpose. He sighed heavily, folding his arms across his chest. “Yeah. All right, let’s go.” He was tired, and his Adderall wasn’t in his pocket when he checked. Which meant he’d left it back at the church and he really could have used one right about then. Plus the longer they stayed in the woods -- especially at night -- the more likely it was they’d end up running into some kind of trouble. There was one particular trouble he was most concerned about, but he couldn’t really voice that. He wondered who else had been affected by this experiment, and he wondered if Derek and Lydia and Elle were worried about what the hell had happened to him. He just wanted to get back and maybe try and get a couple of hours of sleep so they could get on with this plan to get rid of the elder Hale. Plus it was pretty obvious Joey had no desire to be around him, and while he didn’t exactly blame her for that, it was frustrating. She didn’t know the whole story, and he couldn’t tell her. That wasn’t his fault. This whole situation just blew. Joey started off without Stiles when he finally agreed that they were going to go, even though she had no idea in which direction she should be walking. It didn’t actually matter, though, because she only got a few steps before the pain in her gut renewed itself and she let out another shout of pain, dropping down to her knees and letting a sob betray her. “Oh, my God, really?!” she whimpered. “What is that?!” And just that quickly the pain in his head was there again, throbbing and reminding him of the terrible pain that his mom had been in for so many weeks and months. He felt physically ill, and he slammed his eyes shut to avoid throwing up. “I think...it’s when we get too physically far apart. That’s when the pain starts.” Deciding to test his theory, he turned and moved closer to her and almost immediately the pain began to subside. Shit. Face scrunched into a pained grimace as she looked over her shoulder at Stiles when he spoke, Joey wiped at her face again feeling more tears welling up in her eyes and not wanting for Stiles to see them fall. She refused to let that happen. He was the last person she wanted to see her cry. But when he pointed out what he’d observed and proved his point by moving closer to her, Joey’s stomach pain dissolved into nausea. No. No...no, I can’t do this, I don’t want to. I won’t, she thought, frustrated. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…this is the experiment? We can’t go to the museum if that’s it. We’ll just go to whatever the nearest building is, sit it out for the night and figure it out in the morning, then,” she muttered, mostly to herself. Stiles’ eyebrows furrowed at her assertion that they couldn’t go to the museum if they couldn’t get more than a couple feet apart. “Uh, okay? Why can’t we? I’ve been there before,” he pointed out, looking every bit as confused as he felt. Then again maybe Piper and Carl had decided that he was permanently banned from the museum because they hated his guts. But he didn’t know what building they were the closest to and really he just wanted to go back to the church and check on Allison because they were supposed to be there together tonight. He also wanted to make sure that Lydia was doing okay with Derek and Elle, though he figured she was probably about as safe as a person possibly could be in Vas Captio, considering who her bodyguards were. Joey’s eyes shifted over to Stiles and she frowned slightly. “That was before, Stiles,” she reminded him. This wasn’t something she really wanted to rehash while they were in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night when she should be sitting on Tate’s living room floor kicking his ass in Scrabble. She held a hand out to Stiles again. “Hold my hand. I don’t want it to happen again; that really, really hurts,” she said, her face growing warm in spite of the fact that she was upset with him. “But I don’t want to be out here anymore. ...now that I know there’s werewolves, and all,” she added bitterly, looking away from him and waiting for him to take her hand and start their trek to whatever building they came upon. Stiles took her hand without really hesitating first. He didn’t really want to relive the pain either. “Before I was banned from the place?” he couldn’t help but ask. He grimaced when she mentioned that there were werewolves. “Yeah but keep in mind that no one’s been hurt.” Not even by Peter, unless someone was counting the claw marks in Stiles’ neck. Which he was but he was also fine. Joey ducked her head, her cheeks red and face drawn. She wasn’t supposed to like the way it felt to hold his hand; she was supposed to be angry and hate him, because that would’ve been so much easier. He asked whether he’d been banned and Joey wasn’t sure what to say. No one had said he wasn’t allowed to be there, but she, Carl, and Piper had all agreed: we don’t trust Stiles. She could only assume the subsequent ban was understood, except no one said it because if none of them trusted him and all of them were angry with him, there wouldn’t have been any reason for him to be there to begin with. The discussion would’ve been a moot point. She shrugged. “Before you decided it was more important to protect the big bad wolf than to let us know what we should’ve been protecting ourselves against,” she decided aloud, avoiding his question by redirecting it back into blame. “And yeah, nobody was, but we could’ve been.” She started to walk, then, dragging Stiles along beside her, because just standing there holding his hand and staring back at him in the dark while rehashing what exactly she was feeling about the way things had gone down when the new werewolf had shown up was not Joey’s idea of a good time. “...do you have your journal?” she asked, looking over at him. Tate’s going to worry...he’ll be the first to notice I’m gone… she thought, but decided not to tack on, just then. Now Stiles was getting annoyed and he was trying very hard to contain it. But between the accusing tone in her voice, and his lack of sleep and the fact that the very real plan to kill Peter Hale was now being put on hold because of Management’s latest experiment, it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. He walked alongside her. “You know, it wasn’t about protecting Peter. I couldn’t give a shit less about Peter.” The words die in a fire came to mind, but that hit a little too close to home and Stiles just wasn’t that cruel of a person. “There are people here who hunt werewolves, okay? And maybe I was trying to protect someone else that I care about --” Which was weird because when had he started caring about Derek Hale? Jesus his life was screwed up. “While simultaneously trying to protect everyone else by giving you a head’s up. Fine, I fucked up. I did it wrong. And no, I don’t have my damn journal.” He really wanted to pull his hand away, but more than that, he really wanted to just not be carrying around this burden for five minutes. “We wouldn’t have known the difference, Stiles!” she gasped out, trying very hard not to yell at him, even though she wanted to, because...well, they were still in the woods. “You didn’t have to say, ‘hey, there’s other werewolves, but you know, just the one is dangerous,’ or anything, God...” Great, he didn’t have his journal and she’d left hers at the museum. Or maybe it was in Tate’s bedroom. She couldn’t actually remember if she’d taken it with her after she’d agreed to meet him, because she hadn’t any reason to take it, really. So, both of them were going to have to figure out a way to navigate through the woods that neither of them knew very well — at least to her knowledge — to find somewhere to stay for the night, while everyone they cared about was completely oblivious to them being missing with the exceptions of the people who would’ve noticed their absence. Those people would be worrying themselves sick. Joey found herself wondering idly if Tate would have gone looking for her. Some part of her wanted to think that he had. The other part hoped he hadn’t. She gave Stiles’ hand a squeeze without realizing she was doing it. “I’m sorry. Okay? Can we not do this right now…? I know I brought it up, but I’m sorry, okay? Let’s forget it. There’s more important things.” “I think you’re seriously underestimating people’s ability to connect the dots here, Joey,” he muttered. How difficult would it be for someone to have thought -- oh hey, that Peter guy is a werewolf and he’s from Beacon Hills, where Stiles and Derek and Lydia and Allison and Erica are from -- I wonder if they’re all werewolves, too. He rubbed his free hand over his face, trying to ignore the very serious headache that was developing. He needed to rein in his anger because he wasn’t angry with her. He was just angry period. And he was frustrated and scared and really damn tired. “Yeah. Fine.” He looked down at their hands for a moment, but didn’t say anything as they finally made it out of the woods, and Stiles spotted the church in the distance. “My journal’s in the church.” He sighed. “I can write a message in it or something and maybe someone can bring you yours.” Since he was apparently not allowed at the museum anymore. Which he supposed didn’t matter since he didn’t have any friends that stayed there anyway. Joey opened her mouth to respond but closed it again. She’d asked him to drop it; responding to defend her position would be doing the opposite. She blamed Stiles for the fact that she could’ve been in danger. She blamed him for the fight that broke out between Carl and Piper that caused them both to abandon her without a second thought. But she didn’t blame him for being out here in the middle of the night, stuck to her the way he was. He couldn’t help that any more than she could and if this was the experiment, then they were going to have to make it work. “Nobody’s going to notice I’m gone,” she replied quietly. “Not in the museum, anyway. They think I’m out with someone else. There’s no point in worrying them if I don’t have to,” she sighed. She thought maybe knowing that she was tied to Stiles the way that she was just then might actually be more worrying than the fact that she had been taken for experimentation. As far as experiments went, as much as she didn’t want to be with Stiles any time soon — between being upset about the werewolf thing and still feeling stupid that she was interested and he had very clearly shut her down — it was a hell of a lot better than being left for cat food in the woods, the way her last experiment had gone. She looked over at him briefly and opened her mouth to say something else when a rustle in the bushes behind them caught her attention and she squeezed his hand again, this time keeping her grip tight. “...what was that?” she whispered, eyes wide as she fought the urge to stop in her tracks to listen more closely. He glanced at her sideways in the darkness, wondering who she’d been out with. Or supposed to be out with. But it wasn’t his place to ask because it wasn’t any of his business. “Allison’s at the church. She’ll know I’m gone,” he admitted. She was probably worried if he’d literally vanished into thin air right in front of her. He sighed but before he could say anything else, he stilled at the rustling sound, too. “I don’t know. But let’s not stick around and find out.” With his luck it would turn out to be Jackson Whittmore in freakin’ kanima form. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful? Stupid lizard jackass. He squeezed her hand in return, an almost involuntary reaction. “Come on, let’s move.” Joey almost asked where Lydia was, but decided that was none of her business. “Tate will be looking for me…” she said, chewing her bottom lip and picking up the pace a little when Stiles basically said exactly what she was thinking. Neither of them wanted to wait around to find out. Turning her hand in his so that she could lace her fingers with his, Joey felt a little bit more secure with the extra tight grip that came with doing so. She ignored the fluttering in her stomach, writing it off as nerves from the noise in the woods, refusing to acknowledge that anything else at all could be the cause, most especially not holding hands with Stiles. “Is that it?” she asked, breath catching in her chest as she thought she saw the steeple of the church through the trees a little ways ahead. “Please say that’s the church I’m seeing…” So she was hanging out with the new guy. Stiles hoped he didn’t turn out to be crazy or evil. The people in his life seemed to have an issue with picking out the exact wrong kind of person to spend time with. But he supposed if it came down to it, they could say the same about him. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Thank God. Come on. Not much farther.” He thought it was probably just the wind, or maybe some kind of animal, but he really wasn’t sure and he didn’t see the point in trying to figure it out. It was dark, and he and Joey were both very much ordinary humans with no super powers to fight against whatever was there if it was anything to be fought against. At least at the church they’d be safe with Allison on guard with her bow. It didn’t take terribly long to get back to the church, considering they were all but running, the closer it got. It was a gradual increase in pace, but a very definite increase, never the less. Joey hadn’t been to the church in a while. Now she felt uncomfortable and unwanted there, given the way she’d been treating Stiles — which, she rationalized, he sort of deserved — and she wasn’t sure how well Allison’s reception would go over. She hadn’t, after all, seen the other girl in person since the night Lydia had arrived and that had been all sorts of awkward and uncomfortable. She’d been unwanted then, too, even though it was under her roof. “How are we gonna work out...sleeping?” she wondered aloud as they approached the church. Her stomach was tight and churning with nerves because this was the last place she wanted to be. He almost sighed at her question. Sleeping was basically the last thing on his mind, especially now. “You sleep. I’m not sleeping tonight.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve got some clothes you can lay on. It’s not a lot but it’s better than nothing.” It definitely wasn’t like the mattress she’d grown accustomed to sleeping on at the museum, that was for sure. Joey pursed her lips against the urge to point out that she highly doubted tonight was going to be the only night they’d have to worry about it. If the whole experiment was being invisibly tied to him, she really doubted that it was going to be a quick, one night deal. She was pretty sure neither of them was that lucky. “Fine,” she said in a low, resigned voice. She wondered how well she would be able to sleep on a pile of clothes that smelled like Stiles instead of the mattress at the museum or the bed in Tate’s cabin, but she didn’t think she was going to sleep much at all anyway, so she supposed it didn’t matter. Looking over at Stiles, Joey opened her mouth again to speak, but bit the insides of her cheeks and closed her mouth again when she remembered that they weren’t friends anymore. She’d put an end to that when she’d started ignoring him like a child angry over some perceived slight. Joey was more mature than that and she knew it; if not for the awkwardness surrounding the fact that, in spite of everything, she still wanted him to notice her, she probably would’ve handled the whole situation differently. In fact, she probably would’ve ended up with Piper and Carl angry with her when she defended him. She supposed none of that mattered, because he’d chosen his path and she’d chosen hers. She still missed him, though, which was a weird thing to think since he was holding her hand and standing beside her. “We’re just...gonna have to make the best of this, I guess. Hopefully, it won’t last long and then you can go back to whatever you were doing and I can do the same and you won’t have to see me anymore and everything will be back to normal,” she said quietly, still chewing on her bottom lip as they made their way into the church. They were going to have to make the best of it. She was right about that. But she’d been the one to end their friendship, not him. He wasn’t going to call her on that because he was just too damn tired of fighting with people he cared about. And talking about it more right now would just lead to more fighting. He just didn’t have the energy for it. They’d just deal because at the end of the day, that’s all that anyone could do. And in a place like this? They just didn’t have a choice. |