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“You have no one then.”
Stiles stared up at the frown on Scott’s face. It was a little blunter than he would have put it but, yeah, ‘no one’ pretty squarely summed up Stiles’ life. For better or worse, there wasn’t a different answer to the equation. Stiles didn’t trust the twins and, for as much as Scott was a rose-colored glasses type of werewolf, neither did he. Team Scream was looking after Allison and PTSD Wolf was keeping an eye on Scott. Maybe if Cora were still around or, Stiles snorted – if he was being honest with himself – Derek, then there’d be a solution but they’d bailed.
Stiles couldn’t even blame them for it. If anything, he envied the fuck out of them. The town was a real life monster magnet and it felt like living in an episode of Scooby Doo that was perpetually five minutes from the end. No one ever took off their masks and no case was ever solved. There was just running around through an endless series of doors and hiding in vases while your mind splintered around you.
So, yeah, he was answerless and he might have just darkened up a treasured childhood memory to boot. He shook his head. Which meant the only recourse left was to lie. And he was getting pretty damn good at it, too. He folded his arms and concentrated on ramping up his heartbeat. It was just like outsmarting a lie detector test. All he had to do was keep the beats raised but level and the lies would fold in with the blanket anxiety.
“Maybe, yeah, no one.” Stiles licked his lower lip, biting into it slightly. “But I’m not a supernatural threat capable of dining on people’s insides or a werewolf hunter with a secret family history that’s trying to come back and bury me with it. Face it, in the whole darkness scheme, I’m just not that fun to play with.” Scott still looked skeptical and Stiles shrugged. “I’m not exactly safe as houses but safe as, like, a poorly constructed shed at least.”
Scott mirrored his position, arms crossed over his chest. “I don’t like leaving you on your own.”
Stiles leaned back in Lydia’s bathroom. The acoustics would hopefully fuck with the sound if anyone, like Isaac, was trying to listen in. No one liked that Stiles was on his own with this and any conversation about it felt like an accusation. Every one of them winced when he walked into a room like they were betraying him somehow but he didn’t blame them any more than he did Derek for leaving. This made the most sense, as fucked as it was. All Stiles could do was try not to make them feel like the monsters banging down their doors for it.
“What are you gonna do about it, Scott? I mean, it’s not like we can double up, not with the way this thing seems to feed off itself when we’re together.” And that had been fun, finding out that if he or Allison or Scott spent any real amount of time together the hallucinations fed and bred and twisted together until reality was whatever dark thing they collectively constructed. “It’s not pretty but it’s the best option.” Stiles’ lips twitched and he smacked Scott in the shoulder with the back of his hand, trying to bring back the carefree boys they’d been only a year ago. “You’re the Alpha now, welcome to your first of many no-win scenarios.”
Scott didn’t encourage the attempt at levity, eyes still hooded, dark. He’d followed Stiles in here with the purpose of making it heard how not okay with this he was. And Scott could put it in sky writing, it wouldn’t change the fact that it was going to happen. “Why does it seem like you’re always on the no-win end of it?”
Stiles sighed. “One, the puny human rarely fares well in the land of big bad wolves.” There were stories that painted it like humanity was the greatest triumph of all, the fierceness of the human spirit vs. true evil – everyone knew how that fable ended. And then there was reality that said two teenagers were ripped apart in the woods three days ago in a suspected ‘mountain lion attack,’ for no other reason than they were there and easy to kill. Stiles held up two fingers. “Two, we’re all losing this one, Scotty.”
“Maybe I’m tired of losing,” Scott said, mouth twisting grimly.
There was nothing to say that. Stiles wasn’t tired of losing. He was just tired. Beyond it. He was in the territory of micronaps and waking nightmares and Scott couldn’t know that because Scott couldn’t fix it. Scott, who wanted to protect the whole world, and Stiles knew he was at the top of that list – and touched to be there, it should be noted – but that wasn’t in the cards. Not this time.
“We’ll figure something out, Scott.” It was a lie and he didn’t even hide it well. That’s what happened when your comfortador was more broken than the person he was meant to be, uh… comfortading.
Scott didn’t look reassured and Stiles didn’t look surprised and that was their life now. Welcome to Beacon fucking Hills, the walls bleed red on Thursdays and the mirrors all talk back, enjoy your stay.
There were moments in life when terror crawled up your spine, clawed at your skin, and there was no identifiable reason for it but you knew safety was not the color of the day. It was the ‘home alone’ feeling times a number so high it wasn’t yet invented. The light in Stiles’ bathroom was harsh, that hospital white, and the tile was squeaky clean. The shower curtain billowed, a burst of cold wind suctioning itself to his hip and he turned so the water would warm it with a hiss.
The certainty about the known unknown entity in his house with him crept under his hairline, giving his scalp goosebumps. The opaque curtain swayed in. Fear choked him, like fishing line squeezing tight right under his chin. He could feel his adam’s apple running up against it, the string felt so real. He poked his head out of the shower but the bathroom was empty of anything other than a sterile feel. The cold air prickled every hair on his body.
The wire of fear around his throat only tightened. He pulled back inside and tried to recall if his father was home. He couldn’t remember. And then the last time they spoke. He couldn’t remember. And then what he even looked like. He couldn’t remember. Stiles dug his hands into the hair on either side of his head and fisted the strands in wet fingers. His mind was breaking apart again and soon the cracks in the tile on the bottom of the shower would be widening to fissures, the water turning to slime and smelling like tar.
He sat with his knees drawn up on the floor and rocked, the water beating down on his back, while he waited for the volcano of hallucination and madness to erupt. He blinked up at the curtain, the plastic sticking repeatedly to the ball of his knee. The room outside his wet confines was still empty and jarring in its impeccable condition. There was a dark shape distorted by the shower curtain and he thought it might be the medicine cabinet above the sink. The front of it was a mirror and Stiles had learned early on not to trust those.
He moved his head back and forth, trying to get a view of it that wasn’t marred by the crease in the curtain but that only seemed to mutate the image until he was seeing slitted eyes and a wide, grinning mouth. He was making monsters out of shadows and he closed his eyes and counted to three.
When he looked back, the eyes were right in front of him, only the plastic between them and they were void and soulless and swallowing him.
Stiles jerked awake so hard he wrenched something in his shoulder. His room was still as a tomb and a creeping darkness lurked in every corner. He rubbed a hand over his eyes before dropping it down to dig his fingers under the shoulder blade on his opposite arm. Fuck, that had hurt.
A creak from the foot of his bed made his head snap up. There was someone sitting in the chair at his desk, leaning back in the seat with their feet propped up on the end of his mattress, looking casual as you please. People who were going to eat you didn’t generally sit down and make nice first. Right?
Unless they’re Hannibal Lecter. And it was kind of worrying how fast his brain had come up with that.
Stiles strained his eyes and the universe chose that rare moment to help him out – probably because it was busy fucking him over on every other front and it just couldn’t be bothered with something so small scale – and the branch outside his window shook in the breeze. The moonlight broke through more clearly and highlighted the man sitting in his bedroom like he had some right to be there.
“Jesus fuck!” Stiles burst out, dropping his head into his hands and pinching the bridge of his nose. He let out an angry rattling breath through it. “Feeling the rape-y vibes, Peterphile,” he said in a groaning sort of voice.
Peter drummed his fingers against the taut stretch of his stomach. He didn’t look particularly fussed with Stiles, or his reaction, but he was intent on scoping out his bedroom it seemed, his eyes pulling in every detail. The creeper. He made a humming sound in the back of his throat. “Everyone else has an insanity buddy but you.” He affected a frown and it was like someone had handed him a book on human emotion and how to express it. Textbook but not genuine. He was a bit overzealous in the delivery too, everything becoming just the slightest bit exaggerated until it was almost cartoon-y.
Stiles tried not to think about how Peter would know about that. Their Pack meetings were held almost exclusively at Lydia’s now since her parents were the most absent and the place was huge if not homey. Stiles didn’t think they’d discussed his lot outside of that. Looked like there was at least one no-longer-decomposing zombie-wolf who was still holding a torch. And Stiles would just bet that Lydia would scream to know it. He snorted to himself, eyes flashing as he glared at Peter across the darkness – ha! Pun! “You here to offer your services?”
Peter considered him for a long moment. His face was smooth, calm, and then a single brow arched up.
Fuck. Stiles tangled his fingers in his hair, fisting the strands, and he was sure he looked just as crazy as he felt. His mind was cracking all around him, falling to pieces, and Peter was the one who wanted to try to glue them back together. Peter? “Oh you have got to be kidding me,” Stiles groused, staring up at the ceiling. “This is my life? Peter – Peter – is going to pull my ass from the flames?”
Peter flicked something from the elbow of his jacket. “What a charming little saying.”
Stiles glared at him, undoubtedly only managing to look like an angry badger. “I’m not talking to you,” he snapped, voice quaking slightly. “I’m bemoaning my fate to the universe at large in a loud and carrying timber. You,” he pointed a shaking finger at Peter and glowered, “butt out and wait your turn.” He went back to staring up at the dark outline of his ceiling and grumbled, “Seriously, are you fucking kidding me? Peter?” He mouthed ‘Peter’ again while shaking his hands at the sky just so whatever entity that ran the universe – and Stiles’ money was on a skyscraper-sized platypi because that was some divine shit right there – would know exactly the magnitude of his displeasure. He turned back to Peter with defeat in the line of his shoulders. “You obviously know I’m not in any position to turn you down.”
Peter stared at his fingernails, carefully excising the dirt out from his undoubtedly already pristine nails. “I did think you might still make a show of trying.”
Stiles rolled his eyes. “The dramatics are kinda killing me if you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t really got the heart for it these days.” He sat back against his headboard. This was a bad-fuck idea but Team Wolf had dwindled down to murderers and weirdos and Peter was both. Stiles might as well just accept that Peter was basically one of the gang. At least while it had the potential to benefit him. He wasn’t deluded enough – no thanks to the Nemeton – to believe he was about to get something for nothing though. “What exactly would I owe you?”
Peter’s eyes flicked over him, assessing but bored. “The payment will have to wait until I know what you’re capable of offering.”
Dick. Fine, Stiles could handle that. It was pretty much the last thing he’d wanted to hear, he’d much rather know what he was in for, but he wasn’t exactly coming to the bargaining table from a position of strength. In fact, he was coming at it from the position of ‘I have a big fat goose egg and I still need shit.’ Not the best place to be when trying to make a deal with the devil.
But, hey, we all knew how well those stories worked out, right? Faust was totally a role model he should be striving to live up to.
Stiles laughed out loud. “This is a really fucking bad idea.” He rubbed a hand against the back of his head, ruffling up his hair and it was greasy under his fingers. Mark that down as one of the first things to go when your mind decides it needs to be focusing on shit that’s not really happening. Personal hygiene, he didn’t really have time for it to the regret of his olfactory senses. “Promise me that’ll make it into the epitaph so people know I wasn’t a complete idiot?”
Peter didn’t look particularly impressed with that comment. Fine, whatever. Stiles wasn’t here to fucking entertain him. He was here to make a few things painfully clear though.
“I don’t trust you, I don’t like you and there’s a really good chance I’ll advocate for your death if someone makes a play for it but,” he laughed softly to himself because, yeah, that’s exactly where he was. Stuck in the realm of ‘but.’ Not crazy but not sane. Not alone but with no one at his side. Not evil but not always sure what his hands had been up to, “that fucking but – I need you.” That was the truth, as terrible and giant as it was, he needed the help of Peter fucking Hale. He genuinely did want that written on his gravestone somewhere if this ended where he suspected it might. ‘I asked Peter fucking Hale for help. Be honest, who’s surprised?’ He shook his head, trying to clear it of the thoughts that weren’t pertinent to this moment right here. “You’re right, I’m insanity buddy-less and my dad is down the hall with no idea of how little of his son is left in this head. This job, it comes with a mortality rate.” He fixed Peter with a stare and was a bit discomfited to see how hungry his was. “Mine. I so much as look like I’m going to hurt anyone and you put me down, no questions asked.”
The light in Peter’s eyes dimmed and he leaned back, uninterested all over again. “Grotesquely predictable. I’m almost disappointed, Stiles. I always thought the selfless heroics were more Scott’s schtick.”
Stiles huffed, scrubbing at his face. “Yeah, well, sorry I don’t have the fortitude for a show-stopping number right now. We’ll be sticking to the script until further notice.”
Peter’s brows rose. “I expected better from you.”
Stiles snorted. Peter was going to have to break that habit right fucking now. “I don’t even have a great grasp on whether or not this is actually happening,” Stiles told him, grossly sincere, “so you’re going to have to lower that bar or prepare to spend your every waking moment in a state of sheer disappointment.” He shrugged. “One or the other, I don’t really care. Your happiness and job satisfaction stretches all the way out to Greenland on my list of concerns. So long as you keep me from killing anyone, we’re all good and you get whatever it is you want from me whenever you decide you want it.” Which was still a fairly terrifying reality to be living in and he honestly couldn’t say if it was better or worse than the one he’d been muddling through five minutes earlier. At least he wasn’t as alone in this one.
Peter stood without so much as giving him a nod of solidarity – which, yeah, Stiles probably should have seen that one coming. It wasn’t like he was getting a partner in crime out of this so much as he’d just contracted his own killer. You didn’t exactly make friends with that guy.
“Hey,” he barked out, breaking the ease of Peter’s retreat, “Rasputin,” Peter actually chuckled at that and Stiles counted that as a win, “this is blanket permission,” he told him firmly. Not that Stiles really thought Peter had a conscience but, just in case, he thought it was only fair he covered that base too. “If it’s the only way to stop me, then kill me.” No flowery language there or talking around it. He wanted Peter to know, all systems were go on his end. He smirked to himself and lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to hold it against you.”
Peter’s smile was sharp. It glinted like a blade in the darkness.
Stiles hitched up the straps of his backpack, sticking close to Scott’s side while he could get away with it. He flared out his fingers, still gripping the loops over his shoulders. “All I’m saying is that there are doors you open and doors you seal shut like the fucking Kraken might make a tentacle-grab from behind it.” He lowered his voice when two girls turned to stare at him and hissed, “We shouldn’t have even been in the vicinity of the knob on this one.”
Scott was doing that thing where he wasn’t really paying attention, lost to trying to find the Ethics classroom. Nevermind that he’d had a class in the same room only last year. “And you think Deaton wanted us to open it?” he replied, only half his focus on it.
Stiles huffed, trying to make Scott care about this as much as he did. “I mean, that warning, it was a little on the short side, right?” he said imploringly, swooping his face into the side of Scott’s. “I would’ve preferred, like, a Cialis-length concern or at least an anti-piracy intensity. We got neither. He practically shoved it down our fucking throats.” That got Scott to turn towards him, brow raised skeptically and Stiles backpedaled because he could see how that could be considered hyperbole to a laughable degree, but it was true. “What conscience-burdened individual is going to let their parents die no matter how personally risky the save is?” he argued. “There was no other answer, only the illusion that there ever was one. I just don’t think he should go down on the ‘A-Okay Dudes’ list. He should be totally untrusted, the opposite of… trusted.”
Scott stopped walking and perked both eyebrows at him. “You’re not making much sense,” he said, almost disappointed, as though he wanted to believe Stiles, he was just making a particularly shit case.
And, okay, Stiles could work with that. He ran a hand through his hair, admitting, “Okay, yes, that last sentence was a little wonky but I stand by the rest of it.” They walked past the open door of the classroom Scott was looking for and every head snapped around to face them. Really freaky choreography if Stiles said so himself. As one, their hands raised to begin signing. Stiles let out a sound of pure exasperation and stared up at the ceiling. “Yeah, I got it,” he snarled at the lot of them before turning to Scott and holding out his hand all Vanna White-ish as if to say, ‘Can you believe this crap?’ “Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like people think I’m totally brain-dead, signing the same thing at me over and over again.” He rubbed at his forehead before biting out to the room at large, “I have eyeballs, I’ve got it, ‘when the door closes, don’t open it.’ The advice is a little late,” he gave an exaggerated thumbs up, plastic smile on his face to match it, “but it’s burned into my fucking brain so I hope you’re pleased with yourselves regardless.”
Scott grabbed Stiles’ shoulder and there were claws pricking through his shirts. “What are you talking about?” he said, voice tight, almost scared.
Stiles sighed, drawing his arm across the room of kids still signing the same thing over and over and over again. “The sign language that’s been following me around everywhere I go,” he narrated, rolling his eyes at the fact that they still hadn’t stopped. “Yes, thank you, shut up. And I mean that in the metaphorical sense seeing as how you’re already—” Stiles waved a hand, giving up on that line of thought entirely. He was in trouble only a few words into that. It’s not like they could hear him qualify it anyway.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Scott said, tone hard.
Stiles frowned, pulling the pieces together while he stared at the signing kids. “You don’t see any of that. Right, so this probably isn’t—” Something pierced into his abdomen and Stiles bent over himself, instantly coughing up blood onto his shoes. He could feel it dripping down his chin. When he turned back to Scott, it wasn’t Scott standing there but Peter. Peter with an ice pick in his hand and a wide smile stretching his mouth.
His hand twisted, shoving deeper, and he said softly, “It’s nonny time.”
Pain exploded in Stiles’ guts and it was so intense his eyes rolled back. He blinked them hard and when he could focus again, the blur no longer making everything seem removed, he realized he was in the blackness of his bedroom, sheets twisted up around his waist, and heart thumping hard.
He sat up slowly, skin drenched in a cold sweat, and thought about how long it had been since he’d changed his sheets. There had to be weeks’ worth of panicked sweats, drool and semen caked into them. He was living in his own filth and it wasn’t even the shittiest thing that had happened to him this week. The roots of his hair were wet and there was little that was as gross as that.
He dug his fingers into his closed eyelids, making different starbursts of light explode behind them. He huffed and tipped his head back when he thought to check. Peter was sitting in his desk chair again, flipping through a magazine.
The picture he made was so domestic it made Stiles snort. He shook his head and said sincerely, “Hey, thanks for not stabbing me with an ice pick.”
Peter didn’t even look up. “The night is young.”
Stiles let out a breath of a laugh and rested the crown of his head against the bumpy wall of his bedroom. Peter didn’t seem very interested in him, invested in whatever magazine he was reading as he was. So Stiles stared at him, arching an eyebrow. “Enjoying yourself?”
Peter’s voice was serene, unbothered. “I thought it would be more interesting, watching you fall apart at the seams, but it seems to be largely internal.” Finally he met Stiles’ eyes and said simply, “You’re boring.”
It was odd, but Stiles actually totally appreciated the lack of concern Peter was displaying. Insults weirdly put his mind at ease. “Gee, thanks,” he said sardonically. “Sorry my REM behavior was shockingly normal.”
Peter shrugged, as though he was sorry too but there was nothing to be done for it now. “I found ways of entertaining myself.”
Stiles scrubbed a hand over his face. “If I find one picture of me drooling on the internet I’m going to skin you and wear your pelt as a coat.” He was only slightly joking. He would find some way of making Peter pay for that if need be. Peter chuckled and tapped the front of his magazine. It was difficult to make out in the dark but eventually Stiles gathered enough to be able to guess: “Is that a porno mag?” Peter’s answering smile showed teeth. Stiles rolled his eyes. “It’s the golden age of porn and you’re waving ‘hello’ to it from Mesopotamia. I wish I could say I was surprised that you’re so out of touch but you were in a coma for six years and then dead for not nearly long enough so, yeah, it’s kind of amazing you’re as on top of it as you are.” Stiles tipped an imaginary hat to him.
Peter seemed wholly unruffled by the entire speech and said with a hint of sly jeering, “I think a more appropriate audience for this lecture is down the hall.”
It took a second for the penny to drop, and when it did Stiles felt betrayed by the world in general. More so than usual. “Oh my God. Oh my God. You’re looking at my dad’s porn? Oh my God.” He screwed up his face, his stomach roiling uncomfortably. “You are ruining my image of the man. He’s like the angels from Dogma. Totally sexless, okay?” He put a hand against his own chest. “And I’m here by immaculate conception. You are killing the fantasy, man.”
Peter clucked his tongue. “Speaking of your father and fantasies…”
Stiles threw his extra pillow at him before diving underneath his own and covering his head with it. “Oh my God, no,” he wailed into his mattress, warning, “I will start crying.”
Peter just laughed and he may only be a Beta but he was an Alpha in being a bag of dicks.
It was completely ironic that Stiles’ insanity buddy sometimes made him feel about an entire universe’s worth of more insane. It had taken him a week to figure out what the uncomfortable prickle raising the hair on the back of his neck was for and, when he finally did, he started laughing so hard he was afraid he’d never be able to stop. Peter had apparently been following him like the world’s most hulking shadow in broad daylight, likely because Stiles had so far proved to be an horribly uninteresting crazy person. Or maybe just to make sure he didn’t need gutting. So far so good on that front.
Stiles had finally noticed him staring through the window of his classroom from across the lacrosse field. Apparently stalking was a Hale trait. It was almost cute how socially inept the lot of them were. That’s when Stiles had started laughing like he never meant to stop.
He’d been sent to the principal’s office. He’d just left instead. It was hard to care about shit like detention when you were losing your mind to the creeping-crawling darkness creepy-crawling around inside your head.
He walked right up to Peter and said, “I hope this was supposed to be really fucking obvious. Because it was. Really fucking obvious.”
Peter stared down at him, unimpressed. “Would you like a gold star?” he drawled.
Sarcastic bastard. Didn’t he know that was Stiles’ shtick?
There were big hulking dead things and then there was the Nemeton. Stiles could enjoy that thing being about 1000% deader if he was being honest with himself. The roots still seemed invested in soaking up nutrients and whatnot, whatever trees did – he was pretty sure photosynthesis and chlorophyll were in there somewhere, the aiders and abetters of the microbiological world – but the trunk of it was still chopped clean through.
Stiles kicked at the stump. Yeah, take that, insanity. That was a small kick from Stiles, and a huge blow to your general self-esteem, you evil plant.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling pretty damn good about that badassery, when the ground… rippled, for lack of a better word. It rolled under his feet and made him fall forward, his knees slamming hard into the rough bark where the roots disappeared into the cellar. He planted his palms on the flat face of the Nemeton to lever himself back up, aftershocks still running through the earth beneath him, when he noticed something in the very center ring. Something swaying, almost like it was waving at him.
He squinted. It was a shoot, a stalk, with a small leaf attached to its top, green as the first blades of grass in spring were. Only it was winter and this fucking thing was growing. It was alive. Very much with the not even being a little bit dead. Why did nothing ever fucking stay dead here?
Stiles grabbed the whole of it in his fist, almost so small he couldn’t grip it, and yanked. It came up easily but it just… kept coming, one long vine unraveling from the center and it was being pulled from the rings until it was like he was dragging up the spiral around Laura’s grave all over again and he knew better this time. Only he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He had to see how it would end.
He was nearly to the last ring, leaves and dirt and vine piled up behind him and hands bloody from the thorns on the stalk, when the ground rocked again and he was thrown backwards.
“Ow, motherfucker,” he hissed, hitting his funny bone on something painfully hard and falling back onto his ass. He looked up and was surprised to find himself staring into the face of Peter Hale.
Peter’s eyes flickered away from the electric blue. “Oh, awake again, are we?” He sounded annoyed by Stiles’ entire existence.
“Apparently,” Stiles muttered. He didn’t have a pile of tangled vine behind him nor were his hands bloody. Pluses all around. But he was outside, in the dirt, and he had whanged his arm into the Nemeton, which he was sitting next to like they were old pals catching up on where Stiles’ most recent hallucinations – which it had graciously provided – had led him. “Hey, so, I notice I’m not in my bedroom.”
Peter shrugged. “I wanted to see where you would go. You’ve been spectacularly boring up to this point.” At Stiles’ incredulous look, he rolled his eyes. “I didn’t let you snap anyone’s necks along the way if it makes you feel better.”
Stiles stared up at him, blinking. “Did I try to?”
“No. I told you, you’re boring.” He sounded terribly put out by Stiles’ lack of murderous tendencies. Which, yeah, was about par for the course with Peter.
Stiles shrugged, trying not to let on how pissed he was that Peter hadn’t even tried to wake him up. Granted, neither of them knew if it would have worked but even a paltry attempt would have been welcome. He stood up and wiped the dirt from his palms off on the thighs of his pajama pants. “So, why here, what’d I do?”
“You stared, literally the least interesting thing anyone could do anywhere,” Peter told him dryly. “I pity you and your dullness.”
Stiles shook his head, ignoring him. “I don’t know if I’ve made it clear, but the only way you get your unrestricted and unnamed favor at some random point in the future, is if you stop sucking at this. Having an insanity buddy means not waking up in the middle of a field next to a stump. It doesn’t mean seeing what I’ll do because it sates some quest for adventure in your own lame afterlife.” Stiles’ voice was starting to rise, true fury rather than his mask of sarcastic indifference beginning to crack the edges. He calmed himself, panting into level-headedness. And wasn’t that a fucking joke.
Peter smiled sharply at him. “Then you picked the wrong buddy.”
Stiles watched him walk off with a snort. “Don’t I fucking know it.”
Stiles didn’t expect to see Peter again, if he was being honest with himself. And honesty was about the last thing he had, even if he didn’t know how grounded in reality it was, so he strove to provide it for himself. He couldn’t sleep either way. His head wouldn’t become a safe enough place for him to feel comfortable closing his eyes. The walls were tearing themselves down and building themselves back up again, over and over and driving him round the bend, and his bed was on some sort of weird axis where he felt he might fall off it at any moment. And who knew what the fuck was waiting for him beneath it?
“You do know the history of Rasputin, don’t you?”
Stiles’ head snapped up. Peter was standing just inside his door like it hadn’t occurred to him that maybe he had reason not to be. Stiles wasn’t sure he fared any better with Peter there – for all he knew, it was worse when he was – but he couldn’t deny that he liked not having to be alone through all this.
He let out a strangled laugh and then realized how batshit he’d just sounded and tried to fight down the ‘bonkers cat lady who beats people with her purse’ mentality he was nosing into. He shrugged up his shoulders, eyes heavy-lidded. “Enough,” he said. “Religious kook, credited with ‘healing’ that hemophiliac heir by his deluded mom,” he fixed Peter with baleful eyes, “stupidly hard to kill in an era where people tripped over pebbles and that was all she wrote.”
Peter nodded, a sly smile playing around his mouth. “Emissary to the Feodorovna Pack,” he slid in easily.
Stiles’ eyes widened as he shot up, back ramrod straight. “You’re shitting me?” he demanded, knowing Peter was most likely lying but, still, this promised to be a fantastically good story. “Tell me everything!” he said greedily.
Peter settled into Stiles’ desk chair – which was almost more Peter’s desk chair these days – and told him all about how the whole yarn was there to be unraveled in the suspect terms every text used to describe him. Mystic and occultist and healer. All different words for the same thing, according to Peter. From there, Stiles drew about sixteen different parallels until Peter was confirming that Bob Dole was a centuries-old werewolf.
Which was less and less surprising the longer it simmered in Stiles’ brain. Dude was massively out of touch, and he referred to himself in the third person, that implied he wasn’t exactly sitting pretty in the center of the normal-o-meter.
Stiles wasn’t any closer to sleep by the time Peter was finished but at least the walls had decided to hold off on the constant destruction and reconstruction. He rubbed at his eyes and gave him a drowsy grin. “Yeah, okay,” he challenged, “well let me tell you a little story about a man named Piotr Rasputin, who is an integral part to the fastball special, went by the name Colossus for a large chunk of his life and came back from the dead.” He grinned wider. “I think you’re going to see a lot of parallels here.”
And with that he was off describing the entire backstory of the mutant academy and Piotr’s Soviet upbringing and his connection to the bloodline of Grigori Rasputin.
Peter left just as the sun was beginning to stream in through the crack in Stiles’ curtains. Peter managed to toss over his shoulder, “You never speak to me about the X-Men,” he mocked in an infantile voice, “again. Otherwise I take the first opportunity to slash your throat open.”
Stiles didn’t raise his voice when he snarked back, “I promise nothing.”
Something sharp, piercing, was digging into his neck, in more than one place. He flexed his throat against it, his adam’s apple bobbing past the depression that’s pressed in deepest. His side gave a twinge of pain and he could feel something dripping down his torso and the pain there was more intense, more real and the haze around his mind cleared.
Peter’s neon blue eyes were burning phosphorescent in the dark, his teeth bared, the ends of them going the slightest bit pointed. Not quite fangs, not yet. They were claws, pinching the skin of his neck but barely breaking skin, if at all. The ones in his side though, those were dug in deep.
He looked down and saw that Peter wasn’t the only one jabbing into skin. His fingers were wrapped so tightly around the hilt of a knife plunged deep into Peter’s gut that they ached when he flexed them.
“Oh God,” Stiles breathed, staring down at the blood coating the carpet between them. He pulled his hand away, his whole arm shaking as he tried to step back. Peter didn’t let him go. He held tight, choking Stiles more firmly even as his claws retracted some.
His other hand was fisted in Peter’s shirt and he slowly pulled that away, too.
“Oh God,” he said again, dazed.
Peter’s eyes faded to a much quieter blue and Stiles had never known that was the natural color too. Peter scoffed. “Boring in this, too. Can’t you say anything else?”
Stiles gaped at him. “Peter, I—” Stiles swallowed because even though Peter undoubtedly deserved to be six feet under, maybe even a few more just to be sure, Stiles had never wanted to be the one to actually do it, “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Shut up,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’ll heal. I’m going to put away the claws. You’re going to step away. I’m going to take out the knife. Simple enough for your pea-sized brain to follow?”
Stiles let out a trembling laugh. “I don’t know.” His voice quaked, vacillating between highs and lows. “Can we go through it a few more times just to be sure?”
Peter glowered at him and Stiles felt the claws in his side retract and then the constricting grip on his throat was gone. He took a step back and watched with grim fascination as Peter wrenched the knife from his gut and tossed it to the floor. Stiles couldn’t pretend not to be surprised when he didn’t hold on to it, or at least kick it further out of reach. He supposed Peter had weapons at the ready but still, he shouldn’t want Stiles to be within such easy grasp of one. He’d already proved what damage he could do given the opportunity.
“Shit, there wasn’t wolfsbane on it, was there?”
Peter perked a dark brow at him. “Are you in the habit of keeping wolfsbane-laced knives around, Stiles?”
“No,” Stiles admitted, “but I’m not really in the habit of keeping knives around, period.” He scraped his sweaty hands down the thighs of his pants. The left one came away bloody. Drawing attention to the wound made it give a violent throb and he realized exactly how much pain he was in. His legs threatened to give out from under him but he managed only to stumble and stay upright. He stupidly tossed out the hand coated in his blood to catch himself on the wall. That was going to be a difficult one to explain. “How in the hell did I get my hands on a knife?”
Peter was staring down at the hole in his stomach. He lifted his shirt, watching the skin knit back together. “I didn’t realize you were asleep,” he said simply. “I thought you wanted a glass of water or something equally uninteresting. Imagine my surprise when you come back up the stairs with a knife.” He looked up and smirked. “And I’d all but given up on you.”
Stiles snorted, even though he felt half-sick rather than amused. “Glad I could restore your faith in my inhumanity.”
“So am I,” Peter agreed with a tight smile. Stiles brought up a wobbly hand to touch his temple, propping himself up against the wall. Peter frowned at him. “You’re going to keep losing blood.” He nodded to Stiles’ bleeding side. “You need to tamp the wounds.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Stiles said sarcastically, pressing his right hand tight against his side, as hard as he could stomach it. He sucked in a sharp breath until he felt he could move without losing his feet. He leaned up against the wall, using it to support him as he walked into it and against it as much as down the hall. He staggered into the bathroom, peeling off his shirt and turning on the shower. The blood was tacky, the fabric of his clothes sticking to the wounds and making him hiss as he drew it away.
It wasn’t fatal, far from it, but it would bleed like a stuck pig. The water was starting to steam up and Stiles fumbled with the catch of his jeans and stepped out of them and his boxers. His footprints left behind red smudges on the tiles as he pulled back the curtain, leaving a pink, viscous smear on it, and stepped under the spray.
He drew in a breath through his teeth as the warm water hit his skin. He was careful to keep his injuries angled away from the spout even as he washed away the blood from his skin as gently as he could. Every individual mark of Peter’s claws pulsated in time with the thump of his heart and the pain was starting to climb to dizzying levels.
Which was when he felt a hand touch his shoulder. The building sting and twinge faded just as it was reaching its crescendo. He turned to find black lines twining up Peter’s forearm. “What are you doing?” he asked breathily. Fuck, the ache in his bones was already beginning to feel like it had never been there.
It should’ve made him want to jump out of his skin, Peter getting an eyeful of such a large expanse of it but, somehow, Stiles was astoundingly at ease about the whole thing. And maybe it was just a ‘don’t bite the hand that’s currently making you blissfully unaware of how hurt you actually are’ thing but he decided not to question it either way.
Peter’s face was drawn, serious for once. “Pain isn’t a badge of honor,” he told Stiles easily. “Those who suffer it will tell you it’s a trial to overcome. Those who inflict it will let you in on how pointless it really is.”
“Let me guess,” Stiles drawled, “you’re firmly set up in the camp of the latter?”
Peter eyed him for a long moment. “I think I’ve experienced both sides of that to an equal extent.”
Stiles swallowed. Right, the whole almost being burned alive thing, and the losing his entire family thing. Though some of that rested firmly on his own doorstep, lined up neatly with his welcome mat, and Stiles refused to feel all that guilty for a guy who pretty remorselessly killed people. Still, it was probably best not to antagonize anyone who had been up close and personal with his insides and was now taking away most of the painful evidence that it had ever happened.
But it ate at him. Of course it did. Because he was a remarkably curious dude and that had led him to all kinds of amazing discoveries – some he did genuinely wish he could take back, like clicking on that donkey show link, that was one he wanted back right there, but his Nacho Cheese Doritos and peanut butter sandwich combination was well worth every misstep that had come before it. And this was just… it didn’t make sense and now that the agony was all but a memory, he could focus all his attention on exactly how much sense it didn’t make.
He worked his throat and then went for broke. “Why didn’t you finish it?” he asked bluntly. He frowned with his whole face. “All it would have taken was a clench of your fucking claws and you could have eviscerated me.” Peter didn’t look inclined to answer, expression as impassive as ever, so Stiles plowed on. “I told you to do it if I tried to hurt anyone.” He waved a hand back towards Peter in an all-encompassing fashion. “Much as it may pain me to admit it, you sort of count as ‘anyone.’ You have a pulse at least… I think. How does that whole thing work actually?”
Peter ignored him, tilting his head and staring down at the marks his claws had made in Stiles.
Stiles shook his head with a huff. “You know, I thought I was finally getting a handle on what made you tick.” His mouth pinched, angry that Peter seemed to defy explanation because Stiles had liked boxes once upon a time: good, evil, black, white, and he would very much like to get back to that if he could. Back to simplicity. But, come to discover since his mind had started cracking apart, that there was so much fucking gray in the world. Peter was practically drenched in it. “I was wrong the first time,” he said and he should get mondo-points for that because what sixteen-year-old could admit they were ever even maybe slightly off base? And here he was full out owning up to being wr-wr-wrong. He snorted. “Thought you were like a rabid, wild thing, just trying to bite through the thin leash that kept you tethered to anything that even resembled restraint or humanity, that kept you from committing random acts of senseless violence.”
Stiles grinned, a bit proud of himself for seeing past that, he could admit. “But you’ve never been guilty of anything random or senseless. It all makes sense to you. Your brute force kind of hides that so well done, you,” he said with exaggerated praise. He shrugged. “You’re reliable in that you can be trusted to do whatever serves your self-interest. What would have served your self-interest best was killing me before I could shove the knife in. So, why in the hell didn’t you?” he asked finally. The question gnawed at his insides because he didn’t have a single, plausible answer to it.
Peter smirked and Stiles knew he wasn’t going to get one either.
“Yeah, yeah, crueler not to tell me,” he brushed off, not even mad about it because it was so predictable of Peter to leave him twisting in the wind on this. Stiles slumped down against the tile, away from Peter’s euphoria-inducing hand and, yeah, propriety was so far from a concern it was laughable. He’d thought maybe it was just the adrenaline, the gratitude, keeping him from feeling any sort of embarrassment but he was simply too exhausted for it no matter what the situation. Stiles looked up at Peter who was watching him, gauging, like he was waiting to be proved right. Stiles shrugged and popped his mouth, saying warmly, “So, I’ve proven to be delightfully homicidal.” He smiled slightly and advised, “Now’s the time to take your pound of flesh because I’m asking you to uphold your end.”
Peter didn’t bother dignifying the statement with even a moment of consideration. “I know you’re a teenager,” he said snidely, “but this melodrama is spectacularly idiotic even for your generally impetuous and hormone-driven age group.” He made a show of rolling his eyes. “You should pride yourself on surpassing the stupidity of children who post about their drug use and crime sprees on Facebook.”
Wow, ouch, that had inflicted wounds. He had wounds. Stiles laughed a tad hysterically when he realized he was wounded and it was because of Peter. Fuck, his life.
Peter now just looked completely annoyed with him. “Stand up, Stiles. I’m not going to kill you.”
“Not even just for fun?” Stiles tried halfheartedly, the water was starting to get cold and he stood up carefully.
Peter grinned, sharp and dark. “It didn’t occur to you that it’s immensely more fun to watch you suffer rather than put you out of your misery?”
Stiles let out a huff of a laugh and banged his head back against the tile with a sigh. He rubbed at his eyes and said weakly, “It can’t last forever, right?”
Peter laughed, properly and loud. “This isn’t a Hallmark movie of the week.” He tipped his head up. “Of course it can.”
Stiles’ insanity buddy, ladies and gentleman, for better or worse. He didn’t really help, he sure as hell hurt – Stiles’ torso throbbed as a reminder of that, and he only knew how to make things seem even darker than black. Stiles found he really didn’t mind all that much. Because he was profoundly better than nothing.
Er, right?