Chapter 6 — The Man on the Porch
He came at four in the afternoon, which nobody expected.
Stiles had spent the entire day braced for midnight. He had cleaned the kitchen twice. He had found the crib in the attic exactly where his father said it would be, in the corner under a bedsheet, and he had carried it down and put it together in the guest room with an Allen key and a bad temper, and when he was done he stood there looking at it for a while with his hands on his hips.
At three he ran out of things to do.
At three-forty he started doing them again.
"Stiles."
"Mm."
"You've wiped that counter four times."
"It's a dirty counter."
"It is a surgical counter," Hope said. "You could deliver a child on that counter."
"Funny."
"I thought so."
She was on the couch with Mira on her chest, both of them half asleep in the flat yellow light coming through the front window, and she had been watching him circle the ground floor for six hours with a patience he found genuinely unnerving.
"How are you this calm?" he said.
"I'm not calm."
"You look calm."
"I grew up in a house where looking calm was a survival skill," Hope said. "Ask me what my heart's doing and I'll lie to you about that too."
Stiles came around the counter and dropped onto the other end of the couch.
"Okay," he said. "Brief me."
"On what?"
"On him. Give me the — I want the packet. What do I say, what do I not say, where do I stand."
"There isn't a packet."
"There's always a packet."
"Stiles." Hope turned her head. "You cannot prepare for my father. People have tried for a thousand years. The ones who prepared the hardest are the ones he liked the least."
"That's not helpful."
"It's the truth."
"The truth is supposed to be helpful, that's the whole selling point — "
A car door shut outside.
They both went still.
It had not sounded like a car pulling up. There had been no engine. There had been nothing at all, and then there had been a car door, close, right out front.
Hope sat up slowly with one hand behind Mira's head.
"Okay," she said.
"That's him."
"That's him."
"You said tomorrow."
"I said Freya said tomorrow."
Footsteps on the walk. Unhurried. One set.
The doorbell rang.
Stiles stood up.
"Hey," Hope said.
He looked back.
"Don't perform," she said. "That's the only advice that's ever worked. He can smell it from the street."
Stiles opened the door.
There was a man on the porch in a dark grey coat with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the street rather than at the door, as though he had rung the bell and then found something more interesting in the neighborhood. He was not especially tall. He did not look like anything in particular.
He turned around.
"Hello," he said.
"Hi."
"Is she inside?"
"Yeah."
"Both of them?"
"Yeah."
"Good." He looked at Stiles for the first time, properly, for about a second and a half. "May I come in?"
"Yeah. Yes. Come in."
He came in.
He stopped two steps into the living room and did not look at Stiles at all. He looked at Hope, sitting on the couch with the baby against her shoulder, and something in his shoulders dropped by about an inch, and he did not seem aware of it.
"Hi, Dad," Hope said.
"You didn't call."
"I called Freya."
"You called Freya on Tuesday and told her you were in Alabama, and then you were not in Alabama." His voice stayed pleasant the whole way through. "Do you know what I did between Tuesday and Wednesday?"
"I can guess."
"I stood in the courtyard at three in the morning and had a very long conversation with myself about the difference between trusting my daughter and finding her."
"Which won?"
"Neither. That's why I'm four hundred miles later than I intended to be." He crossed the room. "Give her to me."
Hope handed Mira over.
The whole room changed.
Klaus Mikaelson took the baby out of his daughter's arms, and he turned her around against his forearm with the ease of a man who had done it every day for three months, and his face did something Stiles was not prepared to see on a stranger.
"There she is," he said.
Mira, asleep, made a small noise.
"Yes," he said. "I know. It was a long way."
He looked up at Hope.
"She's lost weight."
"She has not lost weight."
"She feels lighter."
"She feels lighter because you haven't held her in six days and you've been dramatizing it the entire time."
"I do not dramatize."
"You built her a crib with your hands."
"That's craftsmanship."
"It's dramatizing with a chisel."
And Klaus smiled — quick, there and gone, aimed at the floor — and Stiles stood by the door and watched the most dangerous person he had ever been in a room with get openly, effortlessly handled by an eighteen-year-old.
Then Klaus turned around.
"Now," he said. "You."
"Me."
"You're Stiles."
"That's — yeah. It's a nickname. My actual name is — "
"I know what your actual name is." Klaus said it mildly. "I know a great deal about you. I've had four months and a considerable budget."
"Dad."
"I'm being transparent. She prefers it." He shifted Mira up against his shoulder. "Your father is the county sheriff. Your mother passed when you were nine. Your grades are a work of abstract art. You have one close friend, who is a great deal more than he appears, in a town which is a great deal more than it appears, and you have been at the center of a number of incidents in the last two years which the local records describe as *animal attacks*."
Stiles didn't say anything.
"That's not an accusation," Klaus said. "That's the file. Files are dull. I'm more interested in the parts nobody writes down."
"Such as?"
"Such as why a young man with everything you have on your plate got in a car in June and drove twenty-two hundred miles to a city he'd never been to."
"I needed a week."
"From what?"
"From being the guy who knew things," Stiles said.
Klaus's head tilted very slightly.
"Go on."
"There's not a lot to go on. Everybody in my life had something happen to them, and I was the one who kept the research and made the plans and remembered where everybody was standing. And I was good at it. And in June I was so tired of being good at it that I got in the Jeep and drove until the road stopped mattering." He shrugged. "That's it. That's the entire mystery. I wanted to be nobody for six days."
"And instead you met my daughter."
"Yeah."
"Who is also, generally, trying to be nobody for six days," Klaus said. "It runs in the family. It never works."
He walked to the window with Mira and stood looking out at the street.
"Sit down," he said, without turning around. "Both of you. I'm going to say a number of things and I'd rather not say them to people standing at attention."
They sat.
"I have two questions," Klaus said. "The first is procedural and you'll find it insulting, and I'd like you to answer it anyway."
"Okay."
"What do you intend to do?"
"About — "
"About her." He turned around. "Not this week. Anyone can do this week. This week is novelty and adrenaline and your father carrying her around at four in the morning because it makes him feel twenty-three again. I'm asking about March. I'm asking about the Tuesday in March when she has a fever of a hundred and three and you have not slept and there is no one in the house but you. Where are you on that Tuesday."
Stiles looked at him.
"In the house," he said.
"That's a short answer."
"It's the only one that means anything." Stiles leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "I can't tell you I've got money, because I don't. I can't tell you I've got a plan, because I've had this information for a day and a half and anybody who hands you a plan in a day and a half is lying to you. All I've got is that I'm not going to be somewhere else. That's it. That's what I've got."
Klaus watched him.
"Hm," he said.
"Is that a good hm?"
"It's an hm." He came back from the window. "Second question."
"Okay."
"What are you?"
The room went quiet.
Hope sat up.
"Dad — "
"It's a fair question, sweetheart."
"It's not — "
"Hope." Klaus did not raise his voice. "In four days that girl on my shoulder is going to be in a house in a town where things attack people in the woods, and I am going to be four hundred miles away for some of it, and I would like to know what her father is. That is not hostility. That is arithmetic."
"I'm human," Stiles said.
"No."
"Excuse me?"
"You're not." Klaus's voice was perfectly conversational. "I have been in the presence of human beings for a thousand years. I can hear your heart from the porch, and I could hear it from the porch, which is why I stood out there an extra moment before I rang the bell. It's wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"It's steady," Klaus said. "You've been terrified since I got out of the car, which is appropriate and I don't hold it against you, and your heart has not moved. Not once. Not when I said your mother's name. Not when I asked about March." He shifted Mira. "The body doesn't lie. Yours does."
Stiles said nothing.
"And there's the other thing," Klaus said.
"What other thing."
"You have no scent of injury on you and you have been injured," he said. "Recently. There's old blood in the seam of that jacket by the door and it's yours, and there is nothing on you to explain it. And under all of it — " he stopped, and for the first time something in his face changed, a small flicker, quickly put away — "there's a note I don't recognize. I recognize everything. It's one of the few genuine privileges of the condition."
"Maybe you're wrong."
"I'm not wrong."
"People get things wrong."
"Not this." Klaus took a step closer. "I'll tell you what I do recognize. I recognize a young man who has decided, in advance, that he's going to be the one standing between everyone he loves and whatever comes. I've known a hundred of them. Ninety-nine of them are dead."
"And the hundredth?"
"Is holding a baby in your living room," Klaus said, "and would very much like to know how you plan to be different."
Stiles stood up.
He was aware, the entire time, that he was standing up in front of something that could take him apart, and that it would not matter, and that being the only person in the room who knew that was the loneliest feeling he had ever had.
"You want an answer," he said.
"I'd like one."
"Then here's what I'll give you today." Stiles held his gaze. "There is nothing in this world that can take me away from her. Not an accident, not an animal, not a person, not you. I know how that sounds. I know you've heard some version of it from every idiot who ever wanted to sound brave in front of somebody's father. I'm not being brave. I'm telling you a fact about me, and it is the single most true thing I have ever said out loud in this house."
Silence.
Klaus looked at him for a long moment.
"Say it again," he said.
"Which part?"
"The last part."
"There is nothing that can take me away from her."
Klaus's eyes did not leave his face.
"Your heart didn't move," he said.
"No."
"People's hearts move when they lie. They also move when they mean something very much." He said it slowly. "Yours did neither. That's a third thing, and I've not met a third thing in some centuries."
"Dad," Hope said quietly.
Klaus held up one hand.
"I'm not going to press him," he said. "Not today."
He turned and walked back to the window, and stood with Mira's head against his jaw, and looked out at the grey afternoon street.
"I'll take the room over the garage," he said.
Stiles blinked. "What?"
"The room over the garage. It's unheated and full of boxes, I can see it from the front walk. I'll take it."
"You're — staying?"
"My granddaughter is in California," Klaus said, "so I am in California. That was decided before I got in the car." He glanced back over his shoulder. "The rest of them arrive Sunday."
"The rest of — "
"My family."
"How many is that?"
"It varies," said Klaus, "by the week."