Chapter Text
Truth be told, jail isn't quite where Stiles had planned to spend the tail end of winter, but he's nothing if not adaptable.
The whole thing is almost impressive, really. He might have spared a compliment to whoever is behind it if the ploy hadn't been aimed straight at him. The spoofed texts, the doctored camera time, the cloned car plates, even ballistics points straight at him since the report about his stolen off-duty pistol also went mysteriously missing. Someone out there really wanted him out of their way, and got exactly that.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who did it, at least in a broad sort of way, but proving it in a court of law is another thing entirely, especially when he's not quite sure how deep the whole operation runs, and even more after the FBI's legal team washed their hands off him like cutting their losses is worth more than investing a little time and money into proving one of their agents didn't murder the key witness to the case he's been working on for nearly a full year.
It makes him wonder if the hunters have someone on the inside, though the thought rings as paranoid even to him. It unfortunately makes sense that they wouldn't offer him legal representation, he's only been in the Joint Terrorism Task Force for a few years — fished straight from the academy thanks to agent Whitford, bless her tea-loving heart — and doesn't have the kind of work history that would lend his innocence enough credibility, not with every evidence against him handed to them in a silver platter.
Even more unfortunately, he didn't make bail, not with the charges being witness tampering resulting in death coupled with destruction of evidence, and especially given his well-documented history of poking his nose where it doesn't technically belong. The prosecution argued that he would likely attempt to interfere with his own case, which… well, is likely true, but he wishes they hadn't said it.
If that wasn't bad enough, the system apparently kept showing no available beds in the usual DC contract jails whenever the Marshal Service enquired about his placement, which means he ends up at a state prison by the end of the week. Stiles has his doubts about the legitimacy of the overcrowding claims, but there's very little to be done about it either way.
Millburn Correctional Facility looks as intimidating as every other jail he's seen, except it's amplified by the fact that he's being marched into it as an inmate this time. He doesn't show it, of course. It's bad enough to be a white twenty-five-year-old federal agent — the latter of which is thankfully not common knowledge — in a state prison where the best he can hope for is that his future cellmate has a minor felony instead of a murder charge to match his own.
He's not exactly holding his breath for it.
Medical goes by with minimal fuss, though the same can't be said about the PREA — standing for Prison Rape Elimination Act — questions, which mostly fill him with dread at a prospect he hadn't even considered panicking about yet. They offer him protective custody, but he waves it off. The isolation of it, too likely to be reminiscent of Eichen House for his comfort, would drive him to actual homicide — or worse — much faster than trying his luck with the general population. Stiles resigns himself to sharing a living space with the kind of people he's been working to put behind bars for the foreseeable future and signs the waiver they give him at his refusal.
He goes through the motions of being admitted into the prison with the kind of detachment he's learned to project in hostile environments, keeping his head down — thankfully much easier done now than in his teenage years — and trying not to fidget under the scrutiny of the new inmates who had arrived with him, all of which look just as hostile as he'd assumed they would. The thought of sharing a cell with any of them tells him he should be prepared for many sleepless nights, and is also what finally flips a switch in his mind about the whole incarceration issue, prompting a decision he'd been teetering on for a while.
Stiles hadn't really planned on using his abilities at first, but no plan survives contact with the enemy.
He won't be breaking his rules, of course. They're there to make sure he doesn't feel like he did back in Beacon Hills ever again, to assure him that he's not the fox, even if some of it latched onto his spark and stayed behind like so much contaminated residue — no, not that, he's not supposed to think about it like it's something tainting him, his therapist said so. Like pocket change, then. Leftover power that a thousand-years-old spirit barely noticed was left behind, but that apparently, in contact with his no longer suppressed potential — due to the end of the possession —, ignited that spark Deaton had mentioned once before into a steady burning flame.
So, yeah, he should probably get a shirt saying “I got possessed by a japanese demon and all I got were these lousy powers”.
Well, the nogitsune leftovers are lousy, anyways. The whole ‘ignited spark’ part of the deal is a lot cooler, at least in comparison. The fox's piece lets him feed on strife, chaos and fear just like the nogitsune itself — and hadn't that been a panic attack and a half when he figured it out — and he can't possess other people like it did, thankfully, but the ability to create illusions and increased strength, speed, agility, reflexes and healing factor did stay behind, slowly increasing as he passively fed on the chaos that always surrounded him in Beacon Hills until he finally couldn't deny that something had changed.
His denial skills are off the charts, so it definitely took a while.
Actually, it took one of his fellow FBI interns getting shot. He'd managed to keep swimming on that river in Egypt even after accidentally putting a fork inside his toaster to grab a stubborn piece of bread and not even feeling the electric shock, but It's kind of hard to deny the change when you accidentally pain-drain a friend and can see blackened veins visibly crawling up your arms. Good thing Yasmin didn't remember anything when he visited her in the hospital, because that sure would have been a doozy to explain.
His therapist — a non-practicing psychic named Gloria who takes clients from all walks of life, supernatural or otherwise — had a field day with that one. Hell, she had a field month, but somehow managed to coach him into accepting that these changes were there to stay and there was nothing he could do about it but choose how he reacts to it. Whether they would control him, or the other way around.
Evidently, he settles on the latter.
Stiles had been glad to be away from the pack at the time. Figuring things out on his own in DC was much easier than if he had to worry about their reactions to exactly what sort of power had been left behind in his body. He'd dived into what he does best — research — and wrangled the leftover abilities into submission one at a time. Not to say it was without trial and error — sometimes to either hilarious or terrifying degrees — but figuring things out is what he does, and he wasn't about to let a measly thing like trauma stop him.
Gloria threw a handful of macadamia nuts at him when he told her that, but it was still worth it.
Telling the pack, in the end, had been harder than he'd expected but went better than he could have hoped. It helped that half the current pack hadn't even been around for the whole dark kitsune debacle, but Scott had displayed some much appreciated signs of growing up and decided to trust Stiles’ word that he had a handle on it instead of seeing the nogitsune's leftover powers as a threat. Peter had looked thrilled, which was always unnerving, and Derek- well, he wasn't exactly around to give an opinion either way. Alec had asked him for a demo of his powers, and that was that.
Lydia, who'd been the first to hear about it before dragging him to Gloria's doorstep, graciously refrained from saying an ‘I told you so’.
Also, it turns out that he didn't quite get a whole kitsune aura out of it, but he definitely got something. Scott called it a cloak, as if a minor version of such aura had decided to coat his skin. Liam said he looked like the enemy outline in a videogame if the color options included dark purple, which definitely helped him visualize better than ‘purple, kind of shiny’, and he didn't quite get the hang of it back then, but now he can control exactly when said aura appears and what sort of feeling it evokes on those around him.
That's probably what's going to help him the most in prison, he thinks during the walk to the cell. Nothing better to keep trouble away than an aura that spells ‘FUCK OFF’ in capital letters to everyone in a five foot radius.
Stiles catalogs the entrances and exits they walk by, eyes finding every camera like memorizing their positions is a matter of life and death — as far as he knows, it could very well be — and gaze flickering from officers to inmates every now and then, keeping track of their disposition in a spot of hypervigilance he feels is warranted. So focused on canvasing the environment, he nearly stumbles when they suddenly stop in front of the cells.
An officer whose name he didn't catch — a middle-aged white man with a mustache and a beer belly who couldn't look more like he'd rather be anywhere else — keys the door of cell C-214 and Stiles commits the number to mind.
The inside of the cell isn't any more impressive than the outside: two bunks, mesh shelves, toilet and sink combo. There's a vent at three o'clock in the furthest corner of the top bed, and a man already on the bottom bunk.
“Warfield, you're doubled again.” The officer says, motioning him into the cell. “Stilinski, top bunk.”
Warfield looks to be around his mid-thirties, with buzzed dyed-looking blond hair, a scarred eyebrow, tired brown eyes, an uneven stubble, shoulders that say he's been to the prison gym and a softer middle that adds he hasn't returned there quite enough times. Stiles clocks the tattoos during his quick once-over: a crude dice on the right forearm, initials over the left thumb. Half-sprawled on the bottom bunk, he's watching the officer's key ring more than Stiles himself.
He slips in before the officer loses his patience, dropping his stuff — the standard issue inmate starter pack of a set of clothes, shower shoes, bedclothes and toiletries — on top of his assigned bunk bed right as the cell door closes again.
There's a small impulse to introduce himself, and he manages to hold on to it for the few minutes it takes him to tidy up the bed and hide his toiletries under the mattress while the rest is tucked into the rolled-up blanket he plans to use as a makeshift pillow.
“I'm Stiles,” He offers eventually, once there's nothing else to be done and he's climbed up to his bunk.
A beat, then a reply. “Eddie,” a slightly raspy voice responds, then falls completely silent again.
Fair enough, it's not like he's dying for whatever passes for small talk in prison.
Only a few minutes in — or what he assumes are a few minutes, wishing they had a clock somewhere in the vicinity —, a correctional officer's voice calls “Count!” and Stiles nearly jumps out of his skin, feeling high-strung from the silence of the cell even with another person in it. Warfield — Eddie — doesn't look at him, just drags himself up and goes to stand at the door window.
Stiles drops the comb he'd been fidgeting with on the top bunk and slides back down, following his cellmate's example. The CO walks the rail, glancing at each cell. He stops at theirs, visually confirms ‘two’, and marks it on a metal clipboard. They keep standing there as he moves on, long enough for Stiles to lose track of time amidst metal ticks, radio hisses and shoe scrapes until an overhead call sets them free and sends them off to dinner. It makes something drop in his stomach, the realization that this is his life now.
It's gonna be a long few months.