Chapter Text
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
He doesn’t really know how it all started. He was curious, he supposes, the way he always is and the thing about his curiosity is, that once his mind has latched onto something he just can’t let it go, it’s like an itch that just won’t go away until it literally drives him nuts so that he has to satisfy his curiosity no matter what.
That’s how Stiles finds himself in Eichen House, in the secret prison tract where they keep the monsters. And Peter Hale.
It took a lot of wheedling, charming and bribing until they would let him in, and even now he’s not allowed to actually enter the cell they’re keeping Peter in but at least he is allowed to look through the window of the door into Peter’s cell. It’s stupid really, the place and especially this tract give Stiles the creeps. He’s got bad memories of this place, really bad memories, but he just had to see that Peter was still here, had to see him with his own eyes. Maybe it’s because this place gives him the creeps, because he knows what they do in here that he needed to see Peter, he doesn’t know.
Now that he’s here, it’s rather anticlimactic. Peter’s lying on his cot which looks exactly like the one in Stiles’ room during his stay here. Peter’s restrained – five-point-restrained, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Oliver’s whispers in Stiles’ mind – and he’s mumbling to himself. He looks rather pathetic in his sweaty T-Shirt, hair plastered to his forehead, and not at all like the criminal mastermind who killed so many people and managed to come back from the dead. He just looks… broken. And insane. Like he belongs here.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asks the orderly who accompanied him down here.
The man just shrugs. “Drugged to the gills.”
The answer leaves Stiles feeling faintly uneasy as he looks back through the window at the restraints, the pallor of Peter’s skin and unbidden his own memories come back of waking up on a tiled floor after Brunski rammed a syringe filled with sedative into his ass.
“Peter?” he calls out softly and then repeats himself a bit louder when Peter doesn’t react. Peter’s mumbling stops for a moment and he slowly turns his head to the side, eyes blinking before his body suddenly tenses and he throws himself against the restraints, snarling. Stiles jerks back and stares in horror as Peter starts screaming in panic, eyes wide and staring at something only he can see.
“Time’s up.”
Stiles had all but forgotten about the orderly and flinches violently at his words. “What… what’s wrong with him? Why’s he screaming?” What horrors could drive a man like Peter Hale to scream like that?
“Don’t know, don’t care,” the orderly says. “It’s what he does. It’s what they all do. Now move or I’ll make you move.”
Peter’s screams seem to follow Stiles all the way out of Eichen House and he can’t shake the feeling that whatever happened to Peter in there – or, God forbid, maybe is still happening to him – is something not even a monster like Peter Hale deserves.