Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/1052831. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Category: F/M, M/M, F/F Fandom: Teen_Wolf_(TV) Relationship: Derek_Hale/Stiles_Stilinski, past_Stiles_Stilinski/Lydia_Martin, Past Stiles_Stilinski/Heather, Implied_past_Kate_Argent/Allison_Argent, Implied_past_Gerard_Argent/Kate_Argent, Implied_past_Gerard_Argent/ Allison_Argent, Implied_past_Peter_Hale/Derek_Hale Character: Derek_Hale, Stiles_Stilinski, Allison_Argent, Lydia_Martin, Chris_Argent, Gerard_Argent, Kate_Argent, Marin_Morrell, Victoria_Argent Additional Tags: Alternate_Universe_-_Fusion, The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo_-_Freeform, Past_Rape/Non-con, Graphic_Description_of_Corpses, Murder, Mutilation, Serial_Killers, Sexual_Violence, Violence_against_women, Misogyny, Incest Series: Part 1 of Razorblade_Smile Stats: Published: 2013-12-13 Updated: 2014-01-08 Chapters: 4/? Words: 9352 ****** Razorblade Smile ****** by Nanoochka Summary Fifteen years ago, Allison Argent disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Argent clan. Her body was never found, yet her father is convinced it was murder--and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced journalist Stiles Stilinski and tattooed, multipierced Derek Hale, a feral but vulnerable superhacker, to investigate. When the pair link Allison's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders spanning over twenty years, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Argents are a secretive clan, and Stiles and Derek are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves. (Teen Wolf/Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fusion AU.) Notes Okay, so. I am going to put the notes and warnings at the beginning, because it is VERY IMPORTANT that you read them if you are not already familiar with Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, and maybe even if you are. Because the books come with a veritable laundry list of trigger warnings, so, too, does this fic. They include graphic descriptions of past murder, mutilation, and sexual violence against women, past rape/non-con, incest involving father and children and father and granddaughter, as well as between aunt and niece, descriptions of psychological trauma, and graphic descriptions of attempted murder and mutilation. More details about these triggers can be found in the notes at the end. If any of these triggers affect you, please stop reading now. I have chosen not to get into the same level of graphic violence as is depicted in the books or the movies, but it is still very much an overhanging feature of the story. The elements of sexual abuse, murder, and mutilation are still thematically very present. If you have any questions or comments about the above, please don't hesitate to let me know. I've done my best to warn for everything I can think of, but in general this story, like the source material, is not an easy read. In terms of how the source material is followed, I didn't want to reproduce the books or the movies exactly, so there are a couple things to note about that: firstly, that the first part of the series represents only Stiles/Blomkvist's POV and his scenes with Derek/ Lisbeth. The second part of the series (whenever that happens) will cover Derek/Lisbeth's POV. Additionally, I have adapted some of the scenes and dialogue to work more with the story, as well as some of the characters (most striking, probably, is how I substituted Kate Argent for Martin Vanger, and Chris Argent for Henrik), to work with an American setting and the Teen Wolf cast.  Otherwise, my sincere thanks go out to dirtydirtychai for the amazing beta and her help with making this story coherent given the frankly bizarre structure I decided to follow, and to Slinkymilinky, who produced this amazing artwork of Derek in his tattooed, multipierced glory. See the end of the work for more notes ***** Chapter 1 ***** Artwork by slinkymilinky “The reason you can find no record of him,” Morrell had said after an unexpectedly reluctant pause, “is because his records have been sealed. He’s a ward of the State.” Expression blank, she’d met Stiles’s eyes levelly across the desk and hadn’t elucidated further, and that had forced Stiles into stillness, surprised silent. That in and of itself was a rare enough occurrence. A ward of the State? Since when was the American government in the habit of protecting twenty-nine-year-old criminals? With confusion itching at his practiced, professional demeanour, threatening the composure that’d been barely hanging on by a thread ever since he’d learned his computer was hacked and a lifetime of secrets scattered to the wind like so many dead leaves, Stiles had tried to read between the lines of what Morrell was telling him. His back had been up since practically the second he walked through the door into her office, out for blood and ready to take down anyone standing in his way of some goddamned answers. All he had was a name--Derek Hale. Stiles was good at digging things up on even the most obscure subjects, but getting at this faceless, tech-savvy creep had proven a challenge almost equal to finding Allison Argent’s killer. Once again he felt like he was chasing a ghost, albeit one who’d nevertheless managed to-- very illegally--infiltrate every last corner of his life, but the look on Morrell’s face was very different than a minute ago, stripped of its haughty defensiveness and replaced with an expression he couldn’t parse, her brown eyes intense and searching. Stiles had gotten the weird feeling he was being asked to take a leap of faith for someone whom he’d never met, yet who knew everything about him down to his sperm count. It’d been unnerving, to say the least. “What does that have to do with anything?” he’d asked, the words more harsh than his tone implied. Grudgingly he had to admit the wind had been taken out of his sails somewhat, and he’d been curious about Morrell’s explanation in spite of himself. “Derek’s had a rough life,” she said gently. “Can we not make it any rougher on him?” At the time, Stiles had no idea what that meant, but standing in front of the run-down apartment building in Brooklyn Heights a day later, he was beginning to suspect Morrell hadn’t been exaggerating. It was, he’d discovered, barely a twenty-minute walk away from his own loft in Clinton Hill, but Hale might as well have been living on another planet. While Brooklyn passed for trendy these days, this neighbourhood looked as neglected and intimidating as the complex itself. Although Stiles had detoured to a nearby cafe for breakfast sandwiches, hoping to endear himself with food, he wondered if he would even make it to Hale’s front door before he got mugged or murdered. Unlikely on a Saturday morning, perhaps, but stranger things had happened in NYC. That Stiles was here at all was proof enough that he couldn’t take for granted all the twists and turns his life had assumed lately. He let himself inside on the heels of an elderly woman returning with her dog from their morning walk, and Stiles decided that if she seemed unperturbed by the quality of the neighbourhood, maybe he shouldn’t be either. Still, his conviction wavered as he dusted the snow from his jacket and jogged up the stairs to the fifth floor, eyeballing the amount of water damage and graffiti that darkened the walls. The place looked more like a government housing project than a building of tenant-owned flats, the air smelling like a mix of old socks and cigarette smoke. Hale’s apartment was located at the top of the stairwell, its once-white door grimy and peeling in places. Ever since first learning Derek Hale’s name and the meeting with Morrell, Stiles hadn’t been able to form a mental picture of what Hale could possibly look like. Because Derek was a scarily competent hacker, Stiles automatically wanted to form an image of someone weedy and thin, partial to Buddy Holly-type glasses and ratty cardigans and who didn’t get out much; but that was what Stiles looked like, and he was lucky if he remembered check his email on a good day. Plus if Derek was a ward of the State, had had “a rough life,” as Morrell put it, and lived in a dump like this... well. Grimacing, Stiles’s fist hovered in front of the door for a few seconds before he summoned the courage to knock. At first there was silence, but then Stiles caught the faint sound of shuffling on the other side of the door. A moment later, a rough voice said, “Who is it?” Well, no backing out now. “Stiles Stilinski,” he answered, and there was another long pause. Stiles grimly wondered if Hale was reacting with the same sense of disbelief Stiles had upon learning someone had invaded his privacy, but then again, it wasn’t every day the subject of an investigation showed up on your doorstep either. A little awkwardness was probably to be expected. There was a brief clatter of metal as the security bolt was unlocked. The door opened a crack, and Stiles caught a peek of a pale, scruffy face and a single green eye peering at him. “Can I come in?” he added, offering a smile that he hoped looked encouraging but probably came across as impatient, sardonic, curious, everything Stiles was feeling at that moment. It galled him that he even had to ask--rude, seriously- -because where this yahoo was concerned, clearly a face-to-face conversation didn’t seem to be a given. Sure enough, instead of the door opening wider, it began to close. Hale started to say, “I’m not really up yet--” but Stiles had already had it up to here with that shit, and he hadn’t even seen Hale’s face yet. He butted his shoulder against the door to force it open. Apparently the element of surprise was on his side, because Hale stumbled backwards as the door flew open and banged against the wall. “That’s okay. I assumed you wouldn’t have had breakfast yet, so I brought some bagel sandwiches. And tomato juice. Good for hangovers. Where do you keep the coffee?” Stiles held up the takeout bag and began to form another flippant remark, stepping past the threshold, but he took one look at Derek Hale and the words dried up on his tongue like snowflakes in the midday sun. It was in a way a relief that Stiles hadn’t come here with any preconceived notions about Hale’s appearance, because they not only would’ve all been wrong, but so very, very inadequate. The man standing before him was perhaps an inch shorter than Stiles’s own 6’1” but easily twice his size, muscular and imposing. He was wrapped in a dark green blanket that, like the rest of the flat, had seen better days. Pale and unshaven, as Stiles had previously glimpsed, Hale’s soot-black hair was partially buzzed on one side of his head and twisted into bed-rumpled elflocks on the other, his messy fringe blocking out one eye as he glared at Stiles in a mix of imperiousness and surprise. He had at least twelve piercings that Stiles could see--eyebrow, two through the nose, and one through his lip, plus plugs through his earlobes in the shape of spiky black spirals. Various other studs, hoops, and bars glinted in his ears, and there was day-old eyeliner messily smudged around his eyes. A black hornet tattoo stood out starkly against the pale skin of his neck on the shaved side of his head, just below his ear. Stiles was willing to bet that wasn’t Hale’s only ink. “Hey, hey!” Hale said angrily, heavy eyebrows dark and intense, a perfect match for his frown. Stiles barely made it two steps past him before Hale grabbed his arm and jerked him back. His hand was firm around Stiles’s forearm, large and, as Stiles might guess, capable of doing some damage if Hale put his mind to it. “Who do you think you are?” So much for politeness, but two could play at that game. Stiles yanked his arm back with a sneer. “I’m the guy you know better than my closest friends do.” He peered past Hale to the kitchen, taking in the flat’s sparse and shoddy, if neat, decoration, but on the way there his gaze caught on the half-open bedroom door, a sleeping girl he could see sprawled on the mattress. The fact that Stiles noticed seemed to make Hale even angrier, stepping in front to block Stiles’s line of sight, and Stiles plastered a sardonic smile across his features in response. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said cheerfully, “so why don’t you take a shower, put on some clothes, and get rid of your girlfriend.” Willing himself to ignore the force of Hale’s scowl and the way he stared after him, Stiles marched into the kitchen and started digging around in the cupboards for mugs, plates, and coffee, setting everything out on the counter one at a time. After a second, he heard an exasperated sigh and what must’ve been Hale stomping his way back into the bedroom, followed by a hushed conversation. There was no coffee maker, but the beat-up French press Stiles found above the sink would do. He attempted not to eavesdrop--difficult, for a journalist-- while he filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove to boil, then proceeded to set the table. It was probably more trouble than Hale ever bothered to undertake for his own meals, and more effort than Stiles took for himself when eating alone, for that matter, but it kept him busy and from getting worked up over the reason for his visit. He was pouring the boiled water over the coffee grounds in the French press when Hale and the girl emerged from his bedroom. Stiles glanced up, curious in spite of himself, and while he didn’t notice much about the woman beyond her long dark hair and cropped top, he did happen to notice, as Hale slipped a black T-shirt over his head, the massive wolf tattoo that curled over his shoulder blade and down his back. It was remarkably detailed and seemed to blend with another tattoo in the middle of his back, a design of three swirls that to Stiles looked vaguely Celtic. He made a mental note to look it up later, since he very much doubted Derek would be forthcoming with details about its origins or his reasons for getting it. He was still staring when Hale and his guest had completed their whispered round of goodbyes and something that sounded like an apology on Hale’s part. They didn’t kiss in parting. Stiles also couldn’t help but notice the taser tucked into the back pocket of Hale’s jeans, which he must’ve picked up when he went into the bedroom. That Hale expected Stiles to cause him trouble was a thought he found both laughable and troubling, because Stiles doubted he’d last two minutes against the guy in a fistfight. “You’re awake. Good,” he said when Hale had locked the front door and returned to the kitchen, arms folded across his chest. His T-shirt read “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK,” across the front in all caps. Nice. It was also impossible not to notice how tightly the black cotton stretched across his broad chest and shoulders, obscene enough to reveal the shape of a nipple ring through the fabric. Unable to stop his mind from straying to wholly unsafe territory, such as what else Hale might have pierced beneath his clothes, Stiles shook his head with a quiet noise of dismay and took a seat at the table, then started pouring the coffee. “Breakfast is ready. I guess I alarmed you, showing up like this.” “If you touch me, I’ll more than alarm you,” Hale grunted. He didn’t move to come closer, though Stiles caught him eyeing the place settings. The words brought a smile to his face, even if Stiles didn’t doubt for a moment that Hale was sincere. “That won’t be necessary.” He kept smiling until Hale shuffled over to the table and pulled out his own chair, because Stiles knew that, despite his many fuckups and failings as a person, he had what a lot of people called kind eyes. Until he’d been publicly branded a libelist, they’d done him a lot of favours in getting interview subjects to warm up to him. Maybe Hale was a harder nut to crack than most, but he’d started to poke inside the wrapped sandwich Stiles had placed on the plate in front of him. As he began munching away at his own bagel, Stiles gestured to the stack of papers that sat on the table next to him. Mouth full, which he couldn’t help but notice made Hale cock an eyebrow at him in disgust, he said, “Your report on me was quite detailed, but for me not very entertaining.” “It wasn’t meant to be,” Hale deadpanned, face unreadable. Stiles continued, shrugging. “When I write about people, I try to entertain the reader.” There was no change in Hale’s expression or lack thereof. “Jackson Whittemore wasn’t entertained.” Jesus, tough crowd. It was obvious which side Hale fell on when it came to Stiles’s reporting on the Whittemore scandal. Trying not to let the irritation show in his voice, Stiles swallowed his food and said, “Your boss Morrell tells me you only work on things that interest you. I guess I should be flattered. She also says you’re the one she goes to for jobs that are... ‘sensitive’ is the word she used. I’ll use ‘illegal,’ since that’s what it was when you hacked into my computer.” Hale’s eyes met Stiles’s across the table, silent and moodily unresponsive, and they studied each other for a moment. “I’m not going to do anything about that,” Stiles eventually admitted. “I could, but I won’t. What I’m going to do is tell you a story. If it entertains you, maybe you’ll decide to help me research it further. If it doesn’t, I’ll wash the dishes and leave.” He eyed Hale’s breakfast, unwrapped but still untouched. “Are you going to even touch your food?” “What kind of research?” At that simple question, however lifelessly delivered, Stiles couldn’t deny the wave of relief that swept through him. He knew he had Hale’s attention at last and didn’t plan to lose it. Setting down his own sandwich, he folded his hands on top of the table and held contact with that pale green gaze. “Derek--can I call you Derek? I want you to help me catch a killer of women.” ***** Chapter 2 ***** Chapter Notes Please see notes at the beginning of Chapter 1, including trigger warnings.          There was a dead spider frozen against the snow-covered windowsill of Stiles’s cottage. The Argents, his current benefactors, had bestowed him with a three-room guest house located on their private island just off of Martha’s Vineyard, and in the dead of winter it was as bleak and frigid as the North Pole. He’d never have noticed the spider if the cat hadn’t begun pawing at the glass one day, frantically trying to get at the spindly brown body trapped in the ice. It became a kind of morning ritual for them; the cat would scratch at the front door, mewling to be let in, and after finishing the breakfast Stiles had set out for it, would proceed to bat its paws against the window as if it forgot the spider’s existence each evening, only to remember it again with the dawn. Possessing no television, Stiles tended to observe this interminable game while he drank his coffee, as surely as the cat’s antics provided a suitable distraction when the research was going nowhere.      Stiles rarely felt a need to explain the oddities of feline behaviour to anyone, but found himself wanting to do just that as Kate Argent stared at the cat rattling the window panes from inside. It looked like it was trying to dig its way to freedom despite the open front door.      “It it... possessed?” Kate asked slowly, and Stiles snorted.      “Depends on who you ask,” he answered. He still didn’t know the Argents that well, but Kate didn’t strike him as much of a cat person. Or an animal person, really. She was considerably more friendly than the other family members Stiles had met so far, and beautiful, yes, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still creepy. Stiles wished he could put his finger on what about the woman rubbed him the wrong way, but a little chill ran up his spine every time he met Kate’s hazel eyes or witnessed the brilliance of her too-bright smile.      But Kate had already lost interest and was looking off into the distance, seemingly uncaring that it was freezing outside and a thin layer of snow had already begun to collect on their clothes. As much as Stiles desperately wanted to go inside, he didn’t dare suggest it.      “My family is impossible,” Kate said gruffly. “It’s why the company is such a mess. Please accept my apologies for my sister-in-law’s behaviour.”      “It’s all right,” Stiles said automatically. There was no denying the Argents were as fucked-up as they came, with Victoria Argent heading the pack. But he wasn’t about to tell Kate that.      “It’s not all right,” challenged Kate. “She’s unbearable. But it has nothing to do with you. It’s between her and my father... She lost it when Allison died. The drinking--her state of mind--it all got so bad that Dad took us away and left her alone in the old house on the other side of the island like she was excommunicated. She’s never forgiven him.”      A furiously twitching muscle in the man’s jaw made Stiles want to question how much Kate had agreed with his father’s actions, because he knew Kate still saw Victoria regularly despite the apologies she made for her. So Stiles just nodded like he understood, though he didn’t at all.      It appeared Kate wasn’t finished. Stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket--for warmth, Stiles assumed--she continued, “You have to stay and keep working. You’re my brother’s last chance at some kind of resolution. Put this to rest for him one way or the other, and I’ll try to keep his wife away. But, please, do it as quickly as you can.”      Stiles bobbed his head in another nod, feeling like a puppet. “I’ll try--”      He broke off as the angry growl of a motorcycle shattered the silence of the night; the stretched beam of a headlight bounced off the snow on the driveway as someone rounded the corner. A moment later, the bike appeared and pulled up to a stop a few feet away, and the engine cut out. Derek--and of course it had to be Derek--climbed off and removed his helmet, flicking the wilted fringe of his mohawk out of his eyes with an impatient toss of his head. He unstrapped a duffle bag from the back of the bike and shouldered it as he strode towards Stiles and Kate.      “Derek,” said Stiles, unable to hide the awe in his voice or the way his cheeks flushed instantly. It’d been days since he’d heard anything from the man, and he’d sort of begun to assume Derek had lost interest in their project. He gestured uselessly. “This is Kate Argent.”      Kate inclined her head and gave Derek a slow once-over, frowning in a way Stiles didn’t think he liked, taking in the hair, the eyeliner, the tattoos, the leather. “How do you do.”      “Fine.” Apparently the scrutiny bothered Derek not at all; he brushed past Stiles and Kate and into the cottage without a backwards glance.      Casting an unreadable look at Stiles, Kate lifted her eyebrows and all but purred, “Boyfriend?”      Stiles grunted and tried not to let his face betray his surprise. “Assistant,” he corrected.      There wasn’t much left to say after that. It seemed unlikely that Kate bought Stiles’s explanation, judging by her sly smile, so they said their goodbyes and Kate crunched off through the snow back to her own vehicle. Stiles sighed and followed Derek inside the cottage, closing the door behind him.      Derek had already managed to unpack half his things--he’d cleared the coffee table of most of Stiles’s old dishes, books, and papers, making room for his own laptop and charger. The open duffle bag sat next to him on the couch, and Stiles had to bite his tongue to keep from asking if Derek was planning on moving in. For a moment, he could only watch in silence as Derek booted up the computer and immediately began tapping away at the keyboard, ignoring Stiles.      “Any trouble finding the place?” he asked eventually.      Without looking up, Derek grunted. “Everyone in town knows who and where you are,” he said.      Stiles shifted uncomfortably. “That’s comforting,” he answered after a pause. “Are you hungry? Want a sandwich?”      “No.”      There was no reason why Stiles should’ve felt compelled to make conversation when Derek so clearly wasn’t interested in anything he had to say, but Stiles and silence weren’t exactly the best of friends. He felt awkward and useless just standing there, and so blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I used to have a motorcycle,” he said. Emphasis on the past tense; he’d gotten rid of it after the millionth time Lydia complained about how dangerous it was, and how very stupid Stiles had looked on top of it in all his gangly limbed glory      “I know.”      Face impassive, Derek finally glanced up at Stiles in order to hand him a dog-eared bible and a piece of paper, which Stiles belatedly recognized as the list of names and initials he’d given Derek at their first meeting, the one Allison had made.      “The five cases from Allison’s list,” Derek explained, nodding at the paper. “And five more she missed--three I’m sure about.”      At that, Stiles frowned. Five more women? It was bad enough the list Allison made already had a half-dozen murdered girls on it. Stiles opened his mouth to ask for clarification, but Derek had already turned back to his laptop, where Stiles could see he was bringing up a slew of police reports and crime scene photos. At first glance all he could see was blood and sightless eyes.      “Rebecca was the first, like you thought,” said Derek coldly. “M.H. is Marie Holmes--a prostitute from New York--murdered in 1984.” He gestured at the bible in Stiles’s hands. “Leviticus verse twenty, line eighteen.”      Almost dropping the bible in his haste to turn to the correct verse, Stiles ran his finger down the page until he got to the part Derek was talking about and began to read. “‘If a man lies with a woman having her sickness, he has made naked her fountain and she has uncovered the fountain of her blood.’” Confused and resisting the urge to gag at that mental picture, he furrowed his brow. He could tell from Derek’s expression he was trying very hard not to roll his eyes as he made the connection for Stiles.      “She was raped and stabbed, but the cause of death was suffocation with a sanitary napkin.”      At that, Stiles did gag, and then sat down heavily on the sofa next to Derek, who glared at him momentarily and shuffled sideways before pulling up more crime scene photos on the laptop. Stiles felt the blood drain from his face at the sight of more blood, more dead faces.      Derek continued running through his findings. He’d been busy. “R.L. Rachel Landon, 1987. Cleaning woman and part-time palm reader, tied up with a clothesline, gagged, raped, head crushed with a rock. Leviticus 20:27.”      Again, Stiles scrambled for the verse. He read, “‘A woman who is a medium or a sorcerer shall be put to death by stoning--’” Stopping as Derek withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, Stiles watched him take one out, light up, and suck in a long drag. “No smoking inside,” he said.      A stream of smoke was blown in his face and Stiles refused to cough, though he did gape for a moment. Rude.      “Sara Witt, 1994,” continued Derek. “Daughter of a pastor. Tied to her bed, raped, charred in the fire that burned down her house. Leviticus--”      Stiles was one step ahead of him this time. He turned to verse 21:9. “‘The daughter of any priest who profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her father and shall be burned with fire--’”      “Magda Louise Samberg, 1990--” said Derek on top of Stiles’s last word. His fingers flew over the trackpad as he brought up more pictures, this time of a dead woman and a dead cow. “Found in a barn, stabbed and raped with farm tools. A cow in the next stall with its throat slit, its blood splashed on her, hers on it.”      Leviticus 20:16. It’d been years since Stiles had touched a bible but he somehow knew just where to look. “‘If a woman should lie with any beast, you shall kill the woman and the beast, their blood upon them...’”      “Leah Pearson, 1992--” The first photo Derek opened was of a pretty girl in riding gear, petting a horse, followed by several more of her dead, naked body on a wet cement floor, surrounded by tropical fish. When Derek blew out more smoke, it sounded angry. “Found by her sister in their pet shop--raped, beaten. The killer uncaged the animals, smashed the aquariums. There was a parakeet inside her. Leviticus 26:21/22.”      Stiles started to turn to the correct verse, but Derek was already moving on. Yeah, Stiles saw the pattern, almost. He was as tired of this game as Derek obviously was.      More photos of murdered girls were appearing on the laptop screen, almost faster than Stiles could keep up. Derek kept a running commentary going, fingers vicious and heavy upon the keyboard as he continued to share his findings. “Eva Gustavsson, 1990. A runaway. Raped, strangled, a burnt pigeon tied around her neck. Lena Anderson, 1997, a student. Raped, stabbed, decapitated--”      The accompanying photo had Stiles retching uncontrollably--thankfully nothing came up--and holding a hand in front of his face. “Okay--”      “I’m not done.”      Jesus, that much was obvious. “I get it,” Stiles snapped. “We’re looking for a serial murderer, but what does it have to do with a sixteen-year-old girl on an island?”      For a moment Derek looked at Stiles blankly, remaining silent so long that Stiles eventually remembered Derek wasn’t paid to be an analyst. Stiles had asked for his help conducting the research, a test Derek had passed with flying fucking colours. But Stiles had asked for his opinion, and thought it probably came through in his expression how very badly he wanted Derek to weigh in.      Derek sighed, and shamelessly stubbed his cigarette out against the coffee table next to the laptop. His eyes, when they met Stiles’s, were outraged but steady. “Allison was looking for him, too.”      Needing a break and a chance to process everything Derek had just dumped into his lap--that it was at Stiles’s behest didn’t matter--Stiles jumped up from the sofa and paced for a bit until he decided to go make himself a sandwich. There was no missing the disapproving look Derek shot his way, like it was unbelievable that Stiles could even think of his stomach after what they’d just seen, but Stiles was a notorious stress eater and refused to apologize for it. This time he didn’t bother to offer Derek anything, and after a moment the other man grabbed his cigarettes and went to go smoke outside.      Derek still hadn’t returned even once Stiles finished making his sandwich. Abandoning it on the cutting board, Stiles made a point of grabbing his jacket this time as he went outside. Derek was standing under the light on the front porch, looking off into the darkness and letting his cigarette burn down almost to the filter. Surprisingly, considering he wore nothing but his black jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, Derek didn’t seem cold, though he did have his arms crossed firmly over his chest in a way that made the muscles of his hairy forearms bunch. Stiles, on the other hand, found himself shivering for a multitude of reasons that had nothing to do with the weather. He wondered if the island might really be as haunted as it felt, or if he was simply still feelings the effects of the gruesome photographs they’d looked at.      His presence outside went unacknowledged by Derek, which Stiles was beginning to take as expected, so he just began talking. “Rape. Torture. Fire. Animals. Religion.” He shifted uncomfortably and crammed his hands into his jacket pockets. “Anything I’m missing?”      No answer was immediately forthcoming as Derek lifted the cigarette to his lips and took a drag. His profile seemed shrouded and unreadable even under the bright porch lamp. “The names,” he said at last. “They’re all Biblical. The first woman, the whore, the Virgin Mary--Sara, Rachel--all from the Old Testament.”      Glancing in the direction of the big house that loomed from across the compound, the one that still had Gerard Argent’s name on the deeds, Stiles shivered again. All Jewish names. It didn’t warrant pointing out that “Argent” definitely wasn’t. His research into the family history had been pretty perfunctory outside of the family members who were still living, but one thing that had become very clear was that the Argents had been around for a long, long time. The family had moved to America from Nazi-occupied France after WWII, and before then the name had survived countless wars and always seeming to come out on top. Gerard, for instance, had been born before the outbreak of WWII, and from what Stiles could tell, hadn’t lived a hard day in his life. None of the Argents had. This wasn’t a family accustomed to being persecuted so much as they were the persecutors. The thought sent a shiver down his spine and he wondered how much of this was coincidence. No doubt a great many families with dark pasts had fled Europe following the downfall of Nazi Germany.      Seemingly done with the conversation, or perhaps uncomfortable with it, Derek dropped his cigarette into the snow and stalked back inside. Stiles waited a while longer before he followed; how much time passed, he couldn’t be sure, but he remained outside until his fingers and toes felt properly numb, enough to drive him out of the cold. He discovered Derek crouched before the fireplace, attempting to coax the embers into producing more warmth and heat. Stiles’s sandwich sat on the coffee table with three large bites taken out of it. He sighed and narrowed his eyes at Derek’s back.      “I can see why Morrell values you so highly,” he said with some reluctance. “Your work is really good.”      Face inscrutable as usual, Derek pushed off his knees to an upright position and closed the grate, appearing satisfied with the flames he’d managed to rekindle. “It interests me,” he said simply, then crossed the room to pick up a blanket from the back of a chair.      “I’ll take the couch,” Stiles protested, realizing what Derek was doing. He closed the short distance between them and grabbed the edge of the blanket in his fist, tugging gently. “You can have the bed.”      Derek didn’t budge or release his grip. “I can sleep on a couch,” he said mulishly.      “So can I.” Stiles didn’t know why he was making a big deal out of it, but couldn’t immediately bring himself to back down from Derek’s stubborn glare. It was a bit ridiculous, two grown men fighting over a sofa, but the staring contest went on another at least another full minute before Stiles gave an exasperated sigh and let go. “Fine,” he groused, waving his hand then started to head off in the direction of the bedroom. “And, um. There might be a cat-- anyway. Good night.”      “Night.”      The lamp in the living room switched off a short while later, just after Stiles had removed his clothes and was crawling beneath the covers in his boxers. He lay there in the dark and listened to the sounds of Derek settling onto the couch when Derek said, “Allison’s name isn’t.” His voice was muffled through the double doors that separated the bedroom from the rest of the cottage.      Stiles jerked in surprise. “Isn’t what?” he asked, after a second.      The couch springs squeaked as Derek got comfortable. “Jewish.” ***** Chapter 3 ***** Chapter Notes See Chapter 1 for general notes and trigger warnings. Please see the end of the chapter for more specific trigger warnings. See the end of the chapter for more notes          When Stiles dragged himself out of bed the following morning, groggy from a night of bloody nightmares that were surely the result of looking at those damn old case photos before bed, he immediately regretted it. The air inside the cottage felt like a million degrees below zero, so cold that his skin instantly prickled with goose bumps all over in a near-painful shiver. He could’ve sworn he saw his breath misting in front of him even though he had built up the wood fire last night, and snatching up the wool blanket from his bed to wrap around his shoulders did almost nothing to fight off the chill. Fucking New England in fucking winter. The Argents were probably snug and warm up in their various mansions around the island, but apparently it was too much to extend the same courtesy of central heating to a paid employee.      As he shuffled into the cottage’s main room, where Derek had spent the night, he found the other man sitting up in a tangle of blankets on the couch-- on his laptop, naturally. For a second, Stiles’s gaze caught on the crazy riot Derek’s hair had twisted itself into in sleep and the snowy-pale skin of his shoulders and back, seeming all the more stark and white next to the aggressive black lines of his wolf tattoo. Then his eyes fell to the computer he could just glimpse from over Derek’s shoulder, and Stiles registered, in slow succession, that Derek was scrolling through a set of photos that looked incredibly like Stiles atop his old motorcycle, Lydia seated behind him with her arms around his waist, and secondly, that the laptop didn’t belong to Derek at all.      “What are you doing?” he asked groggily, brain struggling to parse what possible use Derek could have for his old photos. Before he could get closer, Derek closed the album with seemingly no more than a swipe of his finger, returning him to a screen with Stiles’s annotated police files and the iMovie of the old Thanksgiving Day parade he’d been studying for clues, one of the last places Allison Argent had been seen alive years ago.      Derek acknowledged him with the barest of glances cast over his shoulder, and Stiles thought he saw him scowling. Surprise, surprise. Every time he saw that grumpy expression on Derek’s face, he wanted to make a comment about how it was liable to get stuck that way.      “Going over your notes,” Derek answered with the usual amount of gruffness, then said nothing more, finger tapping against the trackpad every so often as he rewound or fast-forwarded through sections of the film.      Well. Apparently Derek had helped himself to everything on Stiles’s computer. That was… alarming. Though it wasn’t like there was much dirt left for him to dig up, was there? Fucking asshole. “They’re encrypted,” Stiles pointed out weakly as he took a seat next to Derek on the sofa, and was rewarded with a painfully dry look.      “Please,” Derek scoffed.      Of course. Stiles wondered if it’d even taken Derek longer than a minute to hack his way in, if maybe he’d had a laugh at the expense of Stiles’s pitiful attempt at privacy.      “Have some coffee,” Derek said, jerking his chin in the direction of the kitchen, though his eyes didn’t leave the laptop screen.      The suggestion so took Stiles aback that he couldn’t immediately formulate a reply, his mouth working soundlessly while Derek continued to browse through his private files, totally unperturbed. Eventually he managed to get ahold of himself. “I will,” he said defiantly, dragging himself back up off the couch. “And then we’re going to have a talk about what’s yours and what’s mine.”      He was stirring liberal amounts of cream and sugar into his cup when Derek said, apropos of nothing, “It’s amazing what you figured out from the parade photos,” and Stiles found himself needing to sit down in shock for the second time in the few minutes that’d passed since he’d risen from bed.      “Thank you?” he said uncertainly, then wandered back around to sit beside Derek again. He tried to hide his blush behind his coffee cup when Derek’s eyes tracked silently over his face, but then he gestured at the screen, dragging Stiles’s attention back to the matter at hand.      “Too bad you don’t have hers.”      “Whose?”      Without specifying, Derek simply played the iMovie again, letting a few seconds pass before he stopped on a frame with Allison at its centre. Her head was turned, though it was hard to tell if she was purposely looking away from the camera or merely looking at something outside the frame. Stiles expected Derek to point out something about the position of her head, but instead he gestured to a young couple standing among the crowd of people behind her. The woman had a Polaroid camera in her hand.      “Her.”      He advanced to the next frame: the woman had raised the camera to her eye. In the next, Allison had turned her head while, in the background, the flash of the woman’s camera flared brightly.      At first, all Stiles could do in response to Derek’s discovery was gape, both at the fact that he’d failed to notice something so fucking obvious, and what it actually meant. He’d never thought any more of what the film had showed him at face value, too intent on watching Allison’s movements to pay much attention to a random woman taking snapshots of the parade, while meanwhile she could have inadvertently photographed whatever--or whomever--Allison had seen in that moment across the street. Something or someone that had made her turn away and immediately leave the scene looking sick to her stomach. Stiles had been wracking his brain for clues as to what that might have been, covering what he thought was every possible angle, and here it’d been staring him in the face the entire fucking time.      “Give me that,” he rushed out, making grabby hands at the laptop so that Derek would hand it over.      He took the computer and spent a few moments fumbling through various file folders and emails--he could feel Derek growing more and more tense beside him as he bumbled around--but then found what he was looking for, a folder containing the latest set of parade photos to have been couriered over, ones that weren’t in the iMovie. Stiles had scanned them onto his laptop before Derek arrived at the cottage. Thinking them unimportant, since Allison had already left the parade, he hadn’t bothered to include them in the big iMovie file.      In the first photo, the young couple with the camera was moving off the other way, and in another, they were getting into a parked car. There was a license plate. Stiles zoomed in and sharpened the contrast of the picture, hoping to make it out, but the rear plate was only half-visible and too small to make out, not even squinting.      “Can you read that?” he asked Derek.      Dutifully, Derek leaned closer and squinted too, his arm and shoulder pressing into Stiles’s. Christ, he was warm, skin almost hot to the touch, and his bicep was as solid as a rock. “Massachusetts plates. A, C, G, 3--the rest is blocked,” he said after a moment. He pointed to a small decal on the car’s back window, where the letters were even smaller and blurrier. “C--something-- I--L--M--A--R--”      “Chilmark?” Stiles interrupted. “That’s a town on Martha’s Vineyard. Like, an hour from here.” He squinted again at the photo, trying to make out what it said underneath. He traced under the letters with his thumb and guessed, “Carpentry? Is that a phone number?”      “Too small to read,” Derek said. Abruptly, he stood up, and as the blanket fell away, Stiles got his first look at the huge, intricate phoenix tattoo that swirled and twisted up Derek’s right thigh, disappearing beneath the hem of his boxer briefs. The amount of detail that had gone into the design’s linework was incredible and must have taken hours and hours to complete--Stiles realized he was gawking at it, and maybe a little bit at the bulging muscle and thick, dark hair of Derek’s leg, too.      He looked up to find Derek staring at him, eyebrows sharply raised, and then he made a grumbling sound deep in his chest and snatched his pack of cigarettes off the coffee table, startling Stiles out of his momentary lapse of propriety. Oh, so now he was prepared to heed Stiles’s order to smoke outside, right when they were in the middle of a huge discovery.      Without quite knowing why, Stiles dumped the laptop on the cushion beside him and hurried after Derek, clutching his blanket to his chest. “I have to go to Chilmark,” he said at Derek’s back, then promptly slammed into him as Derek threw open the door and stopped dead in his tracks. He recoiled, reversing hurriedly into Stiles with a brief, alarmed sound. Stiles, who was unused to seeing Derek act alarmed about anything, furrowed his brow and tried to see over Derek’s shoulder at what had caused the sudden holdup.      And immediately almost threw up.      On the front porch of the cottage was the cat--why hadn’t Stiles paused to wonder where the damn thing had gotten to this morning? Most days, he could barely put the coffee on before it was yowling to be fed--its bloody corpse cut up and arranged in the shape of a Swastika. Instinctively glancing around for any sign of an intruder, all Stiles managed to locate was the cat’s head, which had been severed and mounted atop the seat of Derek’s bike.      “Fuck!” he shouted, voice shrill and hysterical and embarrassing, but Derek was already moving, guiding Stiles off to the side with surprising gentleness before he went to grab his camera. Heedless of the cold and the fact that he was only in his underwear, Derek started framing close-ups of the cat parts and its head, clicking away like this all was perfectly normal. Meanwhile, Stiles flailed and covered his mouth in an attempt to stave off the bile that wanted to rush up past his throat.      The closest horizontal surface was the floor, so Stiles sat down on that, all but collapsing in a heap against the wall with the blanket pulled tight around him. You’d think after having looked at crime photos every day for weeks that the sight of blood would bother him less, but that sure wasn’t the case. Adrenaline levels probably through the roof, Stiles couldn’t do more than sit there and shake until Derek finished snapping photos and came to kneel in front of him. He placed a hand on Stiles’s shoulder and lightly slapped his cheek with the other, making Stiles look at him.      “Stiles. This isn’t important,” he said firmly, forcing Stiles to hold eye contact. Stiles was surprised Derek didn’t shake him to emphasize his point. “It just tells us what we already know, okay, that you’re close to uncovering information someone out there doesn’t want you to find. So get up, drink your damn coffee, and go to Chilmark. Find out who’s in those photos, who Allison saw that day. Let whatever asshole’s doing this know you aren’t fucking around. Then they’ll really have a reason to send us a message.”      “Is that supposed to make me less terrified?” Stiles yelped, of a mind to be stunned that Derek was even capable of putting so many words together at once. He licked his lips, finding them painfully dry, and Derek’s gaze dropped to his mouth briefly before it flicked back up to Stiles’s eyes.      “No,” he said, and something in his voice made a chill run down Stiles’s spine. “It’s supposed to make you angry.” Chapter End Notes This chapter also includes a warning for graphic violence and descriptions of murder and mutilation of animals. Please proceed with caution if this is a trigger for you, or turn back here. ***** Chapter 4 ***** Chapter Notes Please carefully review the trigger warning (posted at the start of Chapter one and at the end of this work).      Stiles was running.      Ever since his and Derek’s discovery about the parade photographs and the damn dead cat on his doorstep, he’d spent the last two days racing halfway up and down Cape Cod in search of the woman with the camera and the owner of the Chilmark carpentry shop. After several fruitless leads--Chimark Carpentry hadn’t been in operation for years, as it turned out, and Stiles was damned if locals took kindly to answering questions from a journo who’d been exposed as a fraud and a libelist on the international stage--Stiles had tracked down the couple. Well, after a fashion: the woman, Mildred Bremner, was now a widow, but still in possession of those photographs and willing to loan them out temporarily so Stiles could make copies.      It was almost an unprecedented victory for them, given how badly things had been going lately. Those photos could blow this whole damn case wide open if Stiles could just make sense of it all, fill in the remaining blanks--but now he was really running, the crack and whizz of bullets flying past him in the near-dark, his forehead already ablaze with agony. There’d be time to puzzle over those pictures later, if he survived the night. At this rate, the odds weren’t looking good.       Derek was right, he thought deliriously as he tried to scramble over the icy terrain, making for higher ground. Someone must have found out they were close to a break, that they were unearthing things meant to stay buried. Turning up the same answers Allison had probably found just before she was murdered, and didn’t that just bode well for them?      Acting on an inexplicable hunch about the disappearance of Gerard Argent years before--Allison’s grandfather, and the victim of an apparent drowning-- Stiles had been investigating the old boathouse down by the beach when the first bullet had ricocheted off a post and nicked his head. But who the fuck would shoot at him out here? Stiles hadn’t told anyone about their recent leads or even the dead cat--no one, that is, except for Kate Argent and her brother, Chris. But Chris had hired Stiles in the first place, so surely he wouldn’t… and Kate was Allison’s aunt, seemed to genuinely have cared about the girl and her disappearance. No, Stiles was fairly certain they wouldn’t go through all this trouble to help him if they planned on shutting him up for good. Not that he was going to stick around to find out who else it might be. Blood and sweat streamed into his eyes as he stumbled around in the vague direction of his cottage and safety. And Derek.      The cottage door was locked when Stiles made it back, half-blind and shaking--stinking, probably--with fear at the notion of getting ripped apart on the front stoop just like the fucking cat. For a moment despair was poised to overcome him at the thought that Derek wasn’t even here, that he was still off running whatever errands had compelled him to go back to New York the day before, roaring off on his bike with no more than a backward glance and a vague promise to be back soon. Stiles was going to get shot and gutted like a goddamned animal on the cottage stoop, left as yet another message for Derek to find on this fucked-up island Stiles suddenly wished he’d never set foot on. Then he realized Derek’s motorcycle was still parked out front, just off to the side and under a tarp to protect it from the snow, and Stiles all but sagged against the door in relief, fists banging frantically against the wood.      “Derek!” he called, voice wrecked, hoarse. Had he been screaming this whole time? “Derek, open the fucking door, it’s me--”      Stiles pitched forward when the door suddenly gave way beneath his shoulder, but Derek was there to catch him, propping him up before Stiles could sag to the ground. He pried Stiles’s other hand away from his head, both their fingers coming away bloody, and the way Derek’s face went shockingly pale made Stiles’s heart leap in his chest.      “It’s that bad?” he croaked.      Without answering, Derek dragged Stiles inside with a hand fisted in the front of his sweater. Stiles went, mewling a little in protest but otherwise making no move to resist, not even when Derek shoved him into the bathroom and stripped him of his jacket, then started tugging at the hem of his shirt, trying to pull it up and over Stiles’s head.      This was not how Stiles had pictured this happening. Okay, yeah, Derek walked around shirtless a lot and it wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty of reasons to be shameless about his body, which was awesome, but c’mon. Even if Stiles might have spent some time thinking about it despite his better judgement, about what it might be like for Derek to look at him with something other than a scowl for once, the expression of worry and the rushed rending of Stiles’s clothing wasn’t exactly his idea of romantic.      “You could’ve just asked if you wanted me to get naked,” he tried, and was cut off by Derek’s sharp “Shut up.”      Once Stiles’s shirt was off, bunched up and tossed carelessly into a corner, Derek moved away from him to the bathtub, turning on the hot water tap and then the cold, letting it run over his hand for a second to test the temperature. A moment later he pulled the switch for the shower.      “Get in,” he barked. Glancing back at Stiles, and held a hand out, but with a sudden flash of uncertainty, Stiles took a half step back.      “Is it still bleeding?” he asked, then lifted his hand to his forehead and prodded the wound. He pulled back with a hiss when the expected sting of pain followed. Blood coated his fingertips still, red and wet and sticky. It didn’t look like the blood flow had slowed even slightly, and Stiles had never thought a head wound could bleed so freaking much. Not unless it was serious and Stiles was about to hemorrhage to death from his face.      Clearly exasperated, Derek jerked him forward by the wrist and shoved him into the tub still half-clothed, pushing down on Stiles’s shoulders until he flailed his way into a sitting position, legs hanging over the side of the tub like an overgrown child.      “It’s still bleeding,” he mumbled dumbly, staring at his hand with something like shock. He showed it to Derek, who slapped it away before he turned his back and grabbed a toiletries bag off the sink that he began rifling through. When Derek turned back around, Stiles asked in a plaintive voice, “Why is it still bleeding? Wait, is that... dental floss?”      “Yes.”      In addition to the floss, which Derek had started to unspool in great, long pulls, Stiles also noticed Derek had found a needle somewhere and stuck it between his teeth. He had no idea what else was in that fucking toiletries bag, or why Derek carried a needle around with him in the first place, but had a sinking feeling he didn’t want to know. Without acknowledging Stiles’s bleats of protest over what might happen next, Derek split the dental floss into two thinner lengths with his chewed fingernails, then proceeded to thread the end of one through the eye of the needle.      “What is that?” Stiles demanded, though he knew--and knew Derek knew he knew--it was a needle. “Is that necessary?”      Derek’s eyes flicked up to his, and he managed to keep his face a lot more expressionless than Stiles was accomplishing at the moment. Again, he said simply, “Yes.”      “Are you a fucking doctor? We can’t just tape it?”      “No.”      A small noise escaped from the back of Stiles’s throat and out his mouth. He’d driven a motorcycle for years, been in schoolyard scraps, asked too many questions of the wrong people and taunted one too many thugs with that big mouth of his, and yet he’d never once found himself in a position to require stitches, much less from a tattooed, monosyllabic hacker wielding a needle and dental floss like he’d just graduated at the top of his class from Harvard fucking Medical School.      “Did you sterilize that, even?” he demanded.      One of Derek’s eyebrows lifted, seemingly of its own volition. Not for the first time, Stiles was a bit in awe of how much he could communicate with those things. “No.”      “You didn’t?”      With a huff, Derek handed the needle and dental floss--er, thread--to Stiles, then pushed himself up from the tub and stomped into the kitchen. Stiles heard the freezer door open and slam closed again, and a second later, Derek reappeared in the doorway brandishing a bottle of vodka, which he unceremoniously unscrewed and poured a generous amount of over the needle. As if in afterthought, he also splashed some on Stiles’s head, ignoring the startled yelp and the fact that most of the vodka landed in the tub.      “Now drink,” he ordered, holding the bottle out to Stiles. Too afraid to disobey, Stiles did as he was told, spluttering midswig when Derek barked, “Drink some more.”      He was still coughing back the taste of the alcohol when Derek braced his head with one hand and plucked the needle from Stiles’s gasp, and this was officially it. Stiles was going to escape getting shot by some whacko with a hunting rifle, only to receive an impromptu lobotomy with a sewing needle in the hands of a hot-like-burning madman.      “Careful, it’s my eye,” he whined as Derek’s hand--and the needle--moved closer, but Derek shushed him with an impatient hiss through his teeth.      “Don’t move.”      It took every ounce of willpower Stiles possessed to hold still and not twitch, but even that wasn’t enough for the moment Derek first stuck the needle through the skin of his forehead, swooping in and out and immediately pulling the dental floss--fucking dental floss, seriously, how was this Stiles’s life-- through. Unable to stop himself, he jerked away with a groan, and Derek was surprisingly patient as he looked at Stiles and nodded at the bottle of vodka, silent permission for him to take another swig, to steel himself.      Stiles had barely lowered the bottle from his mouth before Derek pierced him a second time and drew the floss through. Once more he allowed Stiles to drink, and once more he resumed his silent torture without bothering with so much as a courtesy warning. The third time and the fourth, the fifth, it didn’t seem so bad. Maybe Stiles got a little bit lost in watching the serious set of Derek’s expression as he worked, while his own was probably arranged in a rictus of dread and dumb, drunk-sloppy gratitude.      The entire time, Derek’s eyes remained focused on his work, but once, and that was all it took, they glanced briefly to Stiles’s, who quickly lowered his gaze and blushed hot. He muttered a token “ow,” hoping to distract Derek from the obvious hero-worship in which Stiles was currently partaking, but all that earned him was a particularly sharp jab of the needle.      It figured. Worst bedside manner ever. End Notes More in-depth trigger warnings include the following: in conversation with Stiles as they are investigating Allison's disappearance and the serial murders that took place over the last couple of decades, Derek graphically describes the past murder, mutilation, and sexual violence against multiple women at the hands of Gerard and Kate Argent (even if he doesn't know who the perpetrators are at the time). Later in the story, Kate drugs Stiles and ties him up, planning to rape and kill him, and then Derek. She is later attacked and killed by Derek. There are also incest warnings are for past (implied) rape between Gerard Argent and Kate, Gerard and Allison, and Kate and Allison, as well as implied past Peter Hale/Derek. Although Stiles and Derek find out that Gerard was raping his daughter and granddaughter, and that Kate later raped Allison, these events are not described in detail; nor is Derek's revelation that he was abused by his uncle Peter, whom he subsequently tried to kill. Please heed these warnings and do not read the story if they upset and/or pose a risk of triggering you. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!