Chapter 16: A Family Tradition To Follow

Summary:

Stiles arrives at the storage facility where his mother left him a boatload of Grimm items.

Or rather family heirlooms, but not the type you'd show it to anyone else.

There's no dialogue; more of Stiles' inner monologue that's happening right now in this chapter. It'll be a good chapter but there's no back-and-forth talking because it's only Stiles in the chapter.

Chapter Text

Stiles POV:

After chilling at home for the rest of the night. I decided that with a new day I should go to the address my mom gave me and see what she left. I start the jeep though it takes a few tries, and I drive on down to the address. It's actually, funnily enough, close to Derek's abandoned building loft thing.

Like it's on the way there, but you take a left turn somewhere along the way. It's a storage yard, there's a bunch of storage lockers, some bigger ones that probably cost a lot of money to keep and then smaller ones, and there are even smaller lockers. It's the classic look of a storage container with that ugly orange paint and gray steel doors. I pull into a parking spot and take out the key to the locker.

It's number 473. I get out and look at the map, and apparently, it's one of the bigger lockers. And it's on the opposite side of the front entrance. It's far enough to drive over, but I'll leave my car here since I'm just looking for it now. I don't really plan to take anything with me at this point.

I'm just going to look through the stuff and see what's important and see what's useful on my last day. I'll stop by back here and pick it up and put it in my car so that I can make my way to Portland. Or maybe whenever I pick someone to watch the locker for me, I will move stuff that day. Because I feel like if I'm going to explain to someone what a is Grimm and they don't know what a Grimm is then, I'm going to have to show them some proof and I'm pretty sure whatever I find in this storage container is going to be proof enough.

It takes me a while to get to the locker, but eventually, I'm standing in front of storage container 473, it's one of those big lockers that you have to unlock at the base, and you have to lift up and then let go, so the door hits the ceiling. I wonder how much stuff my mother could have possibly gathered in her lifetime to fit in this big of a container. Or maybe she just needed a room. I don't know I'm just ready to open this up and see what's inside, so excited. I put the key in the little padlock, and I turn it once, and it opens.

Good thing; otherwise, I would have a huge problem. I mean, one could, of course, just pick the lock, but it's better that I have a key just in case there are security cameras around. Once I open the door, it's just filled with boxes. There is a table in the middle. It's like a picnic table without the benches, and it's white wood. It's actually a pretty sweet table, aesthetic wise, but I have no use for it. There's a bunch of boxes all along the walls that have little labels.

The labels are weirdly out of place in the room. Because of all the dust and cardboard boxes and emptiness, the pink flowery labels don't really match the aesthetic. The boxes are labeled with a bunch of different names, some in English some not, I'm pretty sure I see French, German, Latin but they're a bunch of languages that I also don't know. I think I'm going to have to sit in here with a computer and Google translate for a while. It's not really a chore since this is just up my alley, I am the researcher after all.

Or I guess I was the researcher, in this case now I'm more like a hunter. Though I will not be gung ho murder like what happened to the Hales with the Argents. So in retrospect, I'm not exactly like the Argents either. I'm not exactly a hunter, more so a special kind of species of my own. Considering that I have unique eyes or whatever. I got to read up on Grimm's history because I have a jist of it. On my plane ride over, I read up on the Grimm brothers, but I feel like I need a more in-depth read. A proper research session, I believe, would suffice. So that'll take me like hours, so not right now.

At the boxes that I could read the labels of, I found one labeled books; it wasn't labeled in English; it was written in Polish, which I know a little bit of. The extent of my Polish is the extent of my knowledge of Grimm's, which isn't much but I have some simple understanding of it. I remember my mom teaching me when I was younger, but that was so long ago. And after I started school, the lessons weren't as frequent anyway. But at least I remember the word for books.

I take out my little X-Acto knife; it was something that was allowed to be taken off the plane since it was so small, and its part of those tool kit things that you have a keychain that you can attach to your bags and whatnot. I flipped open the knife, and I started opening the box since all of the boxes were ducted taped closed. After a bit of prying, and a bit of a struggle I don't want to admit that I had, I finally got the box open. In the box were several books, since the box itself was pretty heavy and pretty big, it was chocked full of books. I guess considering that box was labeled in Polish, I should've known that all the books would've probably been written in Polish as well.

At first, I thought it was just something cute my mother did because she spoke Polish, but now she was actually very good at labeling boxes. I flipped through some of the books. They were not unlike what my dad gave me. It was a lot of writing. I think some of it was my mother's handwriting, and there were pictures really well-drawn, of what I'm assuming are wesen. Most of them that were in this particular book that I'm reading or ones that I had not seen so far not that I'd seen many, and they were unlike the ones in my other books. At this point, if I'm going to live in Portland, I might have to ship a lot of the stuff with me.

At least the books. If I'm going to have to hunt wesen, hunt being under construction as what that means for the moment, I'm going to have to have these things at the ready. And I don't want to have to keep coming back to Beacon Hills just to do some research. I'm going to have to open a storage locker may be in Portland. And how much is it going to cost having to transport all that stuff to Portland from California?

The dust in here is pretty thick; I guess it's been closed for more than ten years by now. I guess my mother knew she wasn't going to come back in here again since it's all so nicely cleaned up and put away. I wonder why my father never came back here? Did he even know this place existed?

In retrospect, now that I think about it, I guess we never really left Beacon Hills. We never went on vacation; we never went out of town for my dad's work. He's always just stayed here. I guess there was no reason to look at it if he was never going to reencounter Wesen as long as he remained in Beacon Hills. According to the curse or at least of what I've read of it. I did research the curse by going through my father's books before I left.

But the only journal entry about the curse on Beacon Hills is written by my father, considering it's in his handwriting. And I only got what he understood of it.

Maybe I'll have to research it on my own. And I'm guessing my father never really went in and questioned the werewolf population about the curse. Or I guess the supernatural community as a whole. Because according to my mother's letter, my father's family didn't really follow the path of friendly Grimm's.

Apparently, my mother's family is unique in that they didn't actively hunt Wesen; it was more life of if they caused trouble or if they went out of line and started killing people, only then did my mother's family step in. And I think I'd like to keep up family traditions and follow my mother's way. Maybe I've been influenced into this way of thinking because I already know werewolves exist.

And that I'm friends with quite a few of them. I'm curious as to why my family didn't train me. Because in the book that I'm looking at right now, I'm pretty sure my translation may be off, but it talks about how the gene of the Grimm is passed down through the family.

If you know your child is going to inherit, the inability wouldn't you prepare them for it. I wonder if my father never said anything. But I guess I can't really ask him now. I shake that thought out of my head, and I continue to look at the labels to see what other interesting boxes there are.

The next box that catches my interest is labeled in German. I took out my phone to start translating the labels. And I took my pen and quickly on the boxes that I thought were interesting wrote the English for each of them so that I don't have to do this again. And the box that I came up across was in German; it was labeled poison.

Considering my mother was supposed to be a friendly Grimm, the poisons kind of give you A different impression. So I guess no matter how friendly Grimm's are, there is always a reason to protect yourself. I suppose that counts even now in a place where there's no wesen at all, just being a human in a world full of supernatural creatures. I'm lucky that I am even alive right now.

Inside the box full of poisons were obviously bottles of poison. Not all of it luckily was written in German. Most of the poisons were labeled in English. Or at least their names were English in origin. I'm surprised after all this time they still look usable if that's the right word. It's not like they've hardened, or there is a weird consistency from being on the shelf for too long. They look at how I assume they were supposed to look.

I opened one up, and I regret it because it smelled very foul, and it made me question if they were actually good anymore. I put the box back where I found it and did not touch it anymore. I think with more experience; I could dive into the poisons of the Grimm world. But for now, I think I could skip it and learn something else.

Go in the storage container there were many boxes I didn't want to open them all and just leave them all spewed around the room in a mess. I tried to move all the stuff that I thought was too advanced to dive into right now into a corner in the far side of the room. And everything that was something I needed to look at before I left to Portland I put in another pile and stuff I was actually considering bringing with me I put it in another corner of the room.

At this point, I'm thinking of just making a road trip down to Portland in a car rather than a plane. Because of the amount of stuff that I want to bring with me, there is no way any of this is coming on a flight. Considering the number of weapons that I am thinking of maybe bringing with me. And I know I said I wasn't going to hunt and be violent, but it's always good to have something. Also considering that Nick is a grim and that if I do go back, I may end up working for the Portland Police Department, I may have to start working with him on more than just police work.

And if that's the case, then I'll need more than just my fists. I'll also need to start going to a gym because I am almost confident that at the moment, I am not strong enough to take on any wesen. Grimm eyesight aside, I'm just an average human. I have to make sure I play this right. Otherwise, I'm in for a world of hurt. And that is not how I want to see the rest of my life.