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He thinks it's a routine fight. The call comes in as a disturbance in the alley behind the lone seedy bar in Beacon Hills, and he's closest, so he takes it. The siren is usually enough to break apart brawlers. When it doesn't this time, he's careful. Climbs out of the car with one hand on his gun, staying behind the open door as he peers down the poorly lit alley. His view is blocked by a dumpster and, as he cautiously approaches it, there's a yowl and a scrawny cat darts out from beneath it, runs over his foot and drags his attention from the men fighting, long enough for one of them to go flying into the other side of the dumpster and send it careening into him.
John goes down hard, cursing under his breath as his shoulder dislocates and he crumples on his side. White hot pain slams him, and he gasps helplessly, but once his mind clears enough and he's able to draw in enough air, he hears it.
Snarling, growling.
Animalistic noises that shouldn't have any place in a fight between men.
Wincing, he pulls his gun from beneath him, thankful his left arm is the one injured and not his right, and pushes himself up to his knees. The world spins, the pain nearly makes him vomit, but he holds it in and slowly, so slowly peers around the edge of the dumpster.
Two large men--at least they have the basic shape of men, but their bodies are...distorted somehow--are fighting not even ten feet away, but it's too dark to make out what's wrong about them.
John just knows there is something wrong. They're human, of course they are, but they don't...look quite human. Their muscles don't quite move like human muscles. And the sounds...
As the blows they exchange grow harder, the growls sound louder, joined by what sounds like biting and tearing of flesh, and into a pool of light from the lone bulb next to a door splatters blood.
So much blood.
One of the men goes down, the other crouches over him, hunched and growling so deeply John can feel the sound reverberate in his bones, and then--seemingly out of nowhere--a third person dives for the crouching one, knocking him aside.
"Leave him alone!"
John recognizes that voice. His heart clenches in his chest, falls to his stomach, and bile rises in his throat, because that's his son kicking one of the men and defending the other, and there's a knife gleaming in his hand.
As he watches, horrified, his training deserting him, Stiles plunges the knife into the throat of the man he tackled.
The other man, the one he saved, rasps out his name, the sound wrong, as if there are too many teeth in his mouth, and Stiles turns and just collapses. Wild sobs fill the air and the knife clatters to the cement. The smell of death floods John's nose.
He does vomit then.
His son killed someone.
John misses something, because the next thing he hears is Stiles sob "no" and then he's at John's side with Derek Hale of all people. "You weren't supposed to be here. Why are you here? Oh fuck, no, dad, no, oh God..."
Wiping his mouth and pushing himself up from the pool of vomit, John faces his son and barely recognizes the wild-eyed man before him. He flicks his eyes to Derek and he watches dumbfounded as red bruises on his face fade and the bleeding cuts across his nose, beneath his chin disappear. There's blood drying on his fingers.
They're blood drying on Stiles' fingers, too.
His son is crying silently now, tears dripping down ashen cheeks, and Derek's is squeezing his shoulder, trying to comfort him, and John...
All he wanted to do was break up a fight.
"Sheriff, let me reduct your shoulder and get you home, warm, safe. We need to talk."
John's eyes drift past them to the body and slowly he nods.
He should arrest his son, his baby boy, but he can't, and if that makes him an accessory, he'll face it. Manslaughter, maybe. Stiles saved Derek. Maybe Derek started the fight, he doesn't want to know the truth about that, but Stiles saved him because that other man was gong to kill him.
Stiles did not murder someone in cold blood. John couldn't live with that if he had.
And...
The growls, the tearing of flesh from something other than a blade, the red eyes he can now admit to seeing, the too big for men shapes.
And the vanished wounds.
Everything coalesces in his mind at once and he snaps to clarity. "Werewolves?"
Stiles stops crying, stares at him in shock.
Derek nods and helps him to his feet.
Werewolves.
Everything suddenly makes so much more sense.
End