Chapter Text
Somehow, he never believed he was important enough to be at the center of it.
The skies had been clear, with the first autumn chill wrapping everyone in sweaters. Cozy seasonal drinks were appearing in every coffee shop. Pumpkins decorated porches. The UPS guys went from their summer shorts to long pants. Everything was cast in shades of yellow, orange, bronze.
Stiles had an English paper on his mind and for once, there was nothing supernatural stalking Beacon Hills. He should have taken it for a sign. Things had been just a little too ok for just a little too long.
Naturally, shit hit the fan on a completely generic, otherwise insignificant day.
That was karma: biting you in the ass when you took for granted that low-grade suckiness was as bad as things were likely to get.
They just got lucky.
Luck was all it took.
When they dragged Stiles into the back, he flailed hard enough to nearly break his own ankle.
“An honest-to-God rape van? Seriously? Seriously?! Are you guys even trying?”
They gagged him, after that. And then hit him in the back of the head with a tire iron which was only, like, the most overdone move ever.
Things sort of went downhill from there.
Numb was good. Numb was totally good.
The world swam in and out of focus.
It was a warehouse.
Of course it was a warehouse. Abandoned warehouses were apparently all the rage with hunters who were trying to fulfill every single stereotypical movie bad-guy trope.
The floor was dirty. There were damp puddles. Rusty smears of abandoned equipment and chains littered the surfaces. The windows were smoky and cracked in places and, presumably, the whole industrial complex was somewhere sufficiently remote to make yelling for help an absolute joke.
Stiles took the liberty of passing out for a while.
Stiles came to and saw movement off to his right. There was a pile of rusty chains and some sort of cage, but they were moving around. No, that wasn’t right—the cage wasn’t moving. The thing inside the cage was.
“Derek..?”
Red eyes flashed an answer. The muffled sound told him they had the werewolf gagged.
Fear stirred in Stiles’ gut for the first time since they’d grabbed him.
Awesome. So much for the rescue party.
The narrow world Stiles was in filled with snarls, growls, soft noises where skin broke. A crack or two. Ribs? Maybe. Definitely an arm. Or was it a paw at this point?
Crow bar. Part of a rusty pipe. Something that looked like it had been fashioned from the jagged edge of a shattered glass jar.
The stale air hung heavy with dust and the unmistakable smell of pain: iron, blood, sweat.
“You girl scouts want to pick on someone your own size?”
In retrospect, picking a fight while completely helpless was probably not the best idea.
“Hey, that’s a compliment. Girl Scouts are really tough. Have you seen the way they bully people into buying chemical-laden cookies?”
Apparently they didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. Everyone was a critic these days.
Either way.
The down side was that now Stiles had their undivided attention, and he was far less durable. He really should have thought that part through more thoroughly.
The first punch got him so hard that his vision swam, and the pain caught up with him a moment later. He spit blood and wondered if they were going to punch his teeth out.
He’d always had nice teeth. Never needed braces or anything.
“Dude, come on, I don’t want to be buying Poligrip by 17.”
His voice sounded a little weaker than he would have wanted, but then they punched Stiles in the stomach a few times and the whole ‘talking’ thing was sort of replaced by the whole ‘gagging and gasping for air’ thing, which sort of took priority and made it much more difficult to be snarky.
Hitting his ribs and stomach only entertained them until he threw up on the short bald one, and then they moved more to his flanks and up-strung arms.
Also kicking at his legs was apparently a thing.
“I appreciate the concern,” Stiles croaked out, “but it’s actually sort of chilly in here.”
Alright, so that was what he wanted to say. It came out more like a whimper, which was absolutely not a manly sound. Luckily, they didn’t give him too much time to worry about his quickly-disappearing sense of machismo, because the one with the moustache was a smoker and decided that the soft, tender skin of Stiles’ lower stomach made the perfect canvas for his cigarette burn art.
Stiles managed not to scream himself hoarse.
Not until they found a discarded box of tacks and started working them under his fingernails.
Stiles tried to find Derek’s red gaze, throat working convulsively as panic threatened to crawl its way out in a stuttered breath.
“Sourwolf, you still with me?”
There was a jangle of chains and a muffled noise, and that was clearly supposed to mean that yeah, Derek was there and he was totally super-close to finding a really awesome way out of this mess.
They’d taken the tacks out, at least. That was really nice of them.
“You guys must really have a soft spot for me,” Stiles said, choking on a wheeze when they shoved his arms down from whatever they’d had the handcuffs hooked to overhead. “I haven’t had this much attention since that time I fell into the river on my second-grade field trip. Which, by the way, you guys totally shouldn’t dump me into a river or anything. I mean, all that pollution, all this pretty skin, it’s just not a good combination, right?”
He tried to get his feet under him when they started to drag him across the floor, but his legs didn’t want to work right. When he struggled enough to nearly yank one of his arms out of the fat one’s grip, he got a boot in the ribs. It wasn’t even steel toe, but neither were his bones.
Stiles felt a crunch, but it was Derek who howled when Stiles tasted blood.
They had him over a barrel.
A rusty, empty barrel that had once contained something that started with “FE---“ and ended with “---TE,” if you went by what was left of the label that they had Stiles’ cheek shoved against, but that was totally not helpful. If they gave him his phone back, he could do a quick Google search and come up with the compound in no time flat. Not knowing gnawed on his mind, because that was what his mind did: sure, he was totally going to get murdered and probably poured into the barrel he was tied over, but what was really important was knowing its previous contents.
Stiles’ laugh sounded kinda high to his own ears. When he lifted his gaze, he could see Derek staring back at him, his face too bloodied for Stiles to be able to make out much of his facial expression—not that he usually had one. Besides, they had a rag shoved into the werewolf’s mouth and his eyes looked unfocused enough that they must have doped him with something serious.
“We’re going to be alright,” Stiles assured him, until he saw the guy with the overabundance of personal firearms start undoing his belt.
No, that was too fucked up even for him.
Stiles regretted not having taken up Uncle Bad Touch on the whole werewolf offer. If Erica was anything to go by, he would have totally had the sex appeal necessary to take care of his v-card ages ago.
“What, no foreplay?” he managed, glancing up at the one with all the tattoos.
Then his mouth was full of unwashed cock and that was really not an experience he’d ever expected to rush into.
Something normal. Something familiar. Tan and gold and blue and brown and green with little freckly speckles. Really pretty eyes to go with a really surly disposition and a preponderance of anger management issues.
The pocket knife they used to cut his jeans off was dull, and it took forever. It gave Stiles plenty of time to feel the cold seeping into his knees, the pain from the beating he’d received, the throbbing in his fingertips.
Derek was trying to say something, his lips pale from the pressure he was applying to the rag in his mouth. Stiles should have said something before. Something like hey, you know that you’re really hot, right? Or maybe: I have a masochistic crush on you because you’re an emotionally-constipated asshole and I’m apparently into that. Or even just something along the lines of wanna help me decide once and for all if I’m bisexual?
There was never a right time. And Derek didn’t just have a hang-up or two—he had an entire bagful of drama that he clearly wasn’t working through very well.
And Stiles didn’t really want to get his face slammed into any other hard surfaces again, which seemed sort of a joke in retrospect.
The really fucked up part. The really fucked up part was that when the bald guy spit down and shoved his cock unceremoniously into Stiles’ ass, all he could think was I’m sorry.
And the sobbing noise that forced its way out of Stiles’ throat was nothing compared to the destroyed noise that Derek made, barely ten feet away.
Apparently non-stop chatter wasn’t a turn-on for any of them because someone pretty much had a cock down his throat the entire time, with a break here or there to slap his face, come on it, or—extra special—spit in it. He was sure he wasn’t ever going to get the bitter taste out of his mouth, and half the time he was choking so hard that his eyes watered and his head hurt, but it wasn’t like his participation was necessary.
Also teeth weren’t appreciated, so he got clocked upside the head for that.
He blacked out again, compliments of the concussion they’d undoubtedly gifted him with when they did the whole tire iron thing in the parking lot.
Regaining consciousness meant a different guy on each end. And that whole thing about lube being important? Very true, and these guys didn’t seem to get the memo. Stiles tried to point that out, but with someone’s balls against his chin and another set slapping into his ass with the wet, burning sensation of his own blood easing the way—and ‘easing’ was absolutely all on their end—all he could manage was a few throttled whimpers.
After the Gerard-beating-him-to-send-a-message scenario, maybe he should have picked up on it faster. He figured this was all because he’d opened his mouth to get the attention off of Derek but the sheer amount of care they were putting into smearing everything around on his skin made it clear that they were marking him.
Marking him to what, prove to Derek he couldn’t protect him? Stiles knew he wasn’t part of Derek’s little burgeoning pack. He was, in essence, inconsequential.
There was the total disregard for Stiles’ privacy or personal space, or for the fact that hey, maybe he was in the middle of something and wouldn’t appreciate having a werewolf randomly show up in his bedroom while his father was home. Or ever.
But Derek got his sense of humor, even if he was too much of an asshole to ever laugh at his jokes. And ironically, Derek had become far more dependable than Scott ever since Scott had gone all hormonal over Allison.
So maybe Derek did care, sort of, in some kind of abstract way that only a brooding wall of man-angst could comprehend. Stiles was sure he could come to a conclusion regarding that, but they kicked him awake.
Or at least to ask why they didn’t say anything. Not one fucking word, which made it all the creepier. Something, anything. The warehouse contained nothing but the sounds of flesh, their low grunts, Derek’s constant horrifying growling and Stiles’ own choked-out breathing.
Beyond that there was only the dull, hollow dead-space sound of concrete that absorbed everything. It was stifling.
It was worse than the blood smeared down the insides of his legs.
For a moment or two, Stiles’ bruised mouth was free, and he could swallow three, four shuddering breaths that actually filled his aching lungs to capacity.
His head swam.
There was an exchange of gunfire.
Screaming, but most of it wasn’t his own.
And a raw, overpowering roar that made Stiles feel like his chest was going to vibrate apart from the reverberations it caused through his personal rusty barrel.
Had he passed out again?
Wet noises.
Crunching, and a few keening whimpers.
Stiles’ eyes met Derek’s red glare, and the werewolf’s muzzle was smeared with crimson. Beneath him, one of the hunters was still moving as Derek leaned down and burrowed his muzzle up through the man’s torn chest wall.
Bubbles of blood formed at the corners of the hunter’s mouth.
When Derek surfaced, he had the man’s trachea between his teeth, and Stiles was pretty sure that was a tongue on the end of it, somehow.
He vomited nothing but bile and semen, and most of it all over himself, because he was awesome like that.
Everything hurt, and there were teeth in his skin and fur somewhere. Maybe everywhere.
His heels were dragging on the ground, and his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. When Stiles lifted his broken hands to try ineffectually clutching into the slickblack fur of Derek’s ruff, he came away with still-warm blood and part of an ear.
So there was that.
And the world went back.