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It wasn't like he went looking for trouble. Stiles never actually, actively went looking for trouble, no matter what anyone said. Okay, so there was that time they went into the woods, and Scott got turned into a werewolf, and one could argue that they had gone looking for trouble then. But! Stiles totally hadn't been looking for trouble, he'd just been looking for the body of a dead girl, and that's totally not the same thing.
The point was, just because Stiles didn't go looking for trouble didn't mean that trouble didn't go looking for him. Or something like that, in some general configuration of those words, he really didn't have time to think about that right now because holy shit, he was flying through the air, and he was going to hit the ground and it was going to hurt. He was right because a split second later, he slammed against the ground, and mother fucker, he was going to be in so much pain tomorrow.
Stiles was up again, and running back in, bat swinging at werewolf skulls. There was no way in hell he was letting the alpha pack win, not even a little skirmish like this. His arms tingled as he connected with the wolf, and he smirked as she went down. "Yeah, that's right," he muttered, staring at the now unconscious wolf. "Don't fuck with my pack."
"Don't taunt, Stiles, it's uncouth," Lydia said, flipping the end of her braid over her shoulder. Her arm snuck around Jackson's waist, and she looked exhausted.
"It was a nice hit, though," Stiles protest, but subsided when Derek growled. "What are we going to do with him now that we have him?" he asked.
"Dunno," Derek said, crouching next to the prone form. "What's in that bat?" he asked.
"Mountain ash," Stiles said proudly. "It's more made of and then soaked in a wolfsbane solution. Deaton and I thought it up, when I was trying to come up with a way to help you guys more."
Scott made a sound of approval. "That's awesome," he said, looking at Derek as if he expected him to deny it. Scott may have agreed to work with the pack, and even grudgingly allowed himself to be considered a part of it, but he was still Scott, and still had to pick at Derek.
"Thanks, buddy," Stiles said, resting the tip of the bat on the ground, and leaning against the handle. "But seriously, what are we doing with the downed alpha?"
"Well, isn't this an interesting sight," said a new voice, and everyone spun to see a thin woman with dark hair leaning against a tree nearby. "Took down an alpha, did you? Well done, baby pack."
Derek growled, fingernails lengthening into claws. "Who are you?" he asked.
She smirked. "You don't want to know that. You want to know how I snuck up on you."
Derek frowned, but didn't answer.
"Awww, poor baby alpha doesn't know what to do when confronted with a witch?" she cooed, and sauntered forward. "I shielded myself from your senses, Derek Hale. Your senses aren't failing you, if that's what you're worried about." Her eyes flicked around the pack, seeming to measure each one of them. She settled on Stiles, and Stiles was incredibly unnerved to see her eyes go wide.
"What?" he asked her warily when she didn't say anything, just continued to stare at him.
“So, I heard plenty about Beacon HIlls and how there was a baby pack here working to regain what had been lost, and that all kinds of weird and strange things happened, but I never expected you,” the woman said, walking forward a couple of feet. She stopped at the collective growl from the pack, and chuckled. “Oh, they are protective of you, aren’t they?” she said. “Not that I blame them. I’d be protective of you, too.”
Stiles frowned at her. “What the hell are you talking about? Why should anyone be protective of anyone else?” She was kind of creeping him out, with her amusement and her staring. He felt like a bug under a magnifying glass.
She raised both eyebrows. “Well now, that’s interesting...” She studied him, glancing at Derek who was so close Stiles could feel his body heat. “You don’t actually know, do you?”
“Know what?” Stiles asked with irritation.
The smile that crept over her face was so unsettling that it sent chills down Stiles’ spine. The slow build of laughter that quickly turned into hysterical cackles. She doubled over with it, and that was even more unsettling. Stiles crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her. She was pissing him the fuck off, to levels that he had no idea anyone but Derek could make him reach. Nearby, he could hear Erica mutter that the look on Stiles’ face was possibly more terrifying than any of Derek’s glares ever could be. Stiles hoped so. He was pissed off.
“Oh, baby pack, you don’t know what you have,” the woman wheezed.
“What do they have?” Stiles snarled. “A human with a bat that he knows how to use? Werewolf packs have human members, big fucking deal.” He turned to Derek. “You’re the one that told me packs have humans in them, and that Lydia and I were welcome. Did you lie?”
“No,” Derek said shortly, looking at Stiles for a moment before turning back to the woman still cackling on the ground. “Humans are pretty normal in packs. They help wolves...remember themselves. Keep a grip on their humanity.”
Stiles turned back to her. “So what the fuck is your problem?” he demanded. “I’m not anything special.”
She stopped laughing, a smirk stretching her features in a way that made Stiles’ blood run a little cold. “Oh, but you are, child. Let it never be said that I blocked the world from having its truths known,” she said, and stretched out her hand.
The last thing Stiles remembered was her hissing words that sounded like bastardized Latin, searing pain, and warm arms wrapping around him with a startled shout. Then the world went black.
~~O~~
“Who took my bat to my head?” he asked groggily, trying to de-fuzz-ify the world by blinking. It sort of worked, and brought Scott’s face into focus, framed by the night sky. Oh, hey. And Erica. And Isaac. And the whole damned pack, what the fuck was going on?
“You got zapped by the witch,” Scott said helpfully. “And, uh...” he trailed off, and Stiles realized how incredibly freaked out he looked. How they all looked.
He tried to push himself upright, but it was like his arms wouldn’t work. He frowned and tried again, looking down as he managed to curl himself up enough to see. Oh. Oh. It wasn’t that his arms weren’t working properly.
It was that he had too many arms.
“Holy shit, what the fuck, why are there squiggly things coming out of me, oh god, those are not colors natural to a human being, I swear to god, what the fuck did she do to me?” Stiles yelped, as the...the...tentacles? Yeah, those were tentacles, oh god, he was now a living hentai video, and they were coming out of him, and they were wiggling and--
“Stiles!” Derek barked, short and sharp. Stiles’ eyes snapped up to the alpha, learned obedience to that tone long since drilled in. “Stiles, breathe.”
Stiles obediently took a deep breath, grateful to have someone else thinking for him for the moment. This was weird and terrifying and weird. “Why,” he said, after he had taken several deep steadying breaths, “do I have tentacles?”
“We don’t know. Erica, Allison, Isaac, Scott, take the alpha to the basement of the old house, and chain him up. Allison, call your father. See if he can get anything out of the alpha, and no, I don’t care how he does it. Sick of them trying to kill us. I’ve had enough,” Derek said, standing up. “Jackson, Boyd, finish the patrol you started. Lydia, you and I are taking the witch and Stiles to Deaton.”
Lydia snorted. “We can take Stiles,” she said, “but the witch slipped her bonds. Look.” She held up a leather belt, still looped closed.
Derek snarled. “Fine. We’re taking Stiles to Deaton.”
Stiles flailed, and smacked himself in the face with one his tentacles, fucking hell. “Don’t I get a say in this?” he asked, trying to get the squirmy things under some kind of control, and failing miserably. They kept squirming around, wriggling towards people, picking up rocks, pulling up grass, being weird.
Derek gave him an exasperated glare and a raised eyebrow that invited him to weigh in. At least, that’s what Stiles took it as.
“Take me to Deaton. He’s the only one that has a hope of explaining what’s going on,” Stiles said after a moment. “And someone help me up, I feel all off balance.”
Scott yanked Stiles to his feet, and then had to unwrap a couple of tentacles from his arms. “By the way, good hit the the bat, man. He’s still out.” Scott nodded at where the alpha was laying, unconscious, bound by wolfsbane infused rope. Stiles spared an absent thought that he was glad Lydia insisted that every member of the pack have it in their car, even if only three of them could touch it.
“Thanks,” Stiles said. He looked down at the blue and green tentacles swirling around his body and swallowed hard. At least he’d done that much?
“Let’s go," Derek snapped from his car. Stiles rolled his eyes as he turned and walked that way. Of course Derek was pissed off, that was his natural state of being. Stiles was the one with octopus appendages hanging off his body, and Derek was the one that was pissed off.
Stiles lifted one of the tentacles, examining it, and found that “octopus” wasn’t the entirely right comparison. There were some suckers, but nothing like what was found on the sea creature. These were more like...maybe fingers? Little suckers arranged on the ends of some of the tentacles, probably for help gripping. “This is so fucking weird,” he muttered to himself.
“You wanted normal?” Lydia said, coming up behind him. “Honestly?”
Stiles sighed and rubbed his hand and two tentacles over his face. Fuck that felt weird. “Sometimes, I just want something slightly less than completely fucking weird,” he said. “I mean I’ve come to expect the pretty much unexpectable, but this...tentacles... Lydia, this is really weird, even for Beacon Hills.”
Lydia climbed into the backseat of the Camaro, and waited until Stiles was settled in the front before answering. “Yeah, it is, but at the same time, if anyone’s going to sprout tentacles, it’s you.”
Stiles wanted to protest, but she really did have a point. He frowned to himself, considering that while they waited for Derek to see everyone off on their appointed task before getting in the car. He kind of understood what Lydia meant. Sort of. It was one of those things that he didn’t exactly want to get because it meant uncomfortable things about his life—running with a werewolf pack being the least of them—but really, she was right. The weirdest things always happened to him.
Derek got in the car, then, and interrupted his train of thought. He didn’t say a word, just started toward Deaton’s clinic, refusing to look at Stiles. Stiles wondered if he was repulsed, but rejected that pretty fast. Derek was a lot of things, but easily repulsed wasn’t one of them. And the tentacles were kind of pretty, in a clinical sense. If Stiles didn’t think of them as sprouting from his body.
They were all a deep, rich blue on their tops, fading down to a pale, spring green color on their underside. The gradient shift was gradual, in the sense that you didn’t quite realize you were looking at a new color right away. They were long and supple, curling around each other in a complicated tangle that felt weird if Stiles thought about it too long. They were sensitive, too. He stroked his finger down the length of one that had swirled over to press against his stomach, and had to suppress the shudder the motion caused.
It was right about then that he realized that he was topless, and blinked. “Where the hell did my shirt go?” he asked, mystified. He hadn’t been wearing a hoodie, the night air too warm for it, but his tee shirt was gone. He’d liked that shirt.
“It shredded,” Lydia said, when it was clear Derek wasn’t going to. “When you sprouted your. Your tentacles. It shredded, and was barely hanging on by the shoulders and collar, so Derek took it off you.”
“Oh.” Derek had taken his shirt off. Derek had had his hands on Stiles’ body, had pulled off an article of clothing, and Stiles had been too unconscious to appreciate it. His life sucked.
“Didn’t want you to strangle,” Derek said suddenly.
“What?”
Derek huffed a harsh breath out his nose, like he was agonized to have to explain himself. “Your—you kept pulling at the shirt, and making the fabric tight at your throat. Didn’t want you to choke.”
Stiles was a little off put at how sincere Derek seemed. “Oh. Thanks,” he said, blinking down at his bare skin. That was really…really nice. He wasn’t sure what to do with that. He liked it, he knew that, but it just added to his complicated pile of feelings, and he had way too many to consider right then anyway.
“We’re here,” Derek said abruptly, and Stiles looked up to realize he had zoned out, staring at his new appendages. They were already at Deaton’s clinic, a trip that should have taken ten minutes. That probably had taken ten minutes, if he was honest, he just wasn’t aware of them.
“Get out of the car, Stiles,” Lydia said in the gentlest voice he had ever heard from her. “Deaton’s waiting.”
Stiles obeyed on autopilot, registering the man holding the door open as he ran for it, trying to keep out of sight as much as possible. He made it all the way back to the exam room, and hopped up on the table, figuring that’s where Deaton was going to want him. He looked down at his hands, and then up again when he heard movement in the doorway.
The look on Deaton’s face was hard to describe. It cycled through incredulity, disbelief, resignation, confusion, and finally settled on vague amusement. Stiles was pretty sure there were a few emotions in there that he hadn’t identified properly—or at all—but he was slightly distracted by the tentacles creeping across the cool metal of the table and how that felt both really, really cool, and really, really bizarre at the same time.
“So, can you fix it?” he refocused in time to hear Lydia say.
“Fix what? You mean remove his tentacles?” Deaton chuckled. “No. Though, I must say, this does explain pretty much everything about you, Stiles.”
Stiles frowned at him. “What does? The fact that a witch decided to give me a dozen wiggly things sticking out of my torso?”
Deaton arched an eyebrow. “You think she gave those to you?”
“Well, how else did they appear?” he demanded. “She pointed her finger at me, croaked something, and the next thing I knew, I woke up looking like an octopus had been grafted to my stomach!”
“You can’t give someone something they don’t already have inside of them. You should remember this from your magic lessons, Stiles. All she did was release what you are.”
Stiles flailed, which sent tentacles spinning wildly through the air, including up into his cheek. He seriously had to stop hitting himself in the face. “What the hell do I have inside of me to make me sprout tentacles?!”
“You’re a chaos monster, Stiles.” Deaton’s words fell into the space of the suddenly silent room like lead.
“He’s a what?” Lydia asked, looking fascinated.
“A chaos monster. A baby one. Well. A young one of direct lineage, probably a few hundred years back. An ancestor was probably a chaos monster, procreated with a human, and he’s descended from those offspring. They probably continued to procreate with humans, further diluting the chaos monster aspect until no one knew what lurked in their genetics and you are as you have been.” Deaton looked at him in fascination, and now Stiles really felt like a bug under a magnifying glass. “Though calling you a monster is a misnomer, much like calling a werewolf a monster is inaccurate. Different magical species, same ridiculous quirk of the medieval period to turn anything unknown into a bad thing. Really, it—“
“Deaton,” Derek said, cutting the man off before he could get really wound up and ranting on his subject. They had all been subjected to a Deaton rant on the stupidity of the middle ages, the Dark Ages As They Are Rightly Called, Seriously, It’s Stupid as Scott had once referred to Deaton’s rants. “What does this mean for Stiles?”
“It means he’s a shapeshifter and he needs to learn how to control it,” Deaton said, immediately returning to his laconic, disinterested self.
“Wait, what?” Stiles asked startled. “I’m a shape shifter? I can control this?”
“Certainly. You can not only make those tentacles disappear, you can change your form entirely. Chaos is uncertainty at its very core, and what is shape shifting but an uncertainty at the core, uncertainty in a given form. Most shapeshifters are limited, such as a werewolf. They have a limited range of movement between their forms. A chaos monster has no such limitations, and is, in fact, only confined by the imagination. However,” and Deaton’s voice was firm. “It takes practice, and while sudden, unexpected transformations can and do happen, sometimes they are dangerous.”
Stiles went still. “Like…” He paused. “Did you see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Do you remember how the sea serpent came into being?” He waited for Deaton’s nod. “Is it like that, or…”
Derek frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Lydia raised her eyebrows at him. “I know that you did not spend your entire existence prior to coming back to Beacon Hills completely ignorant of modern cinema.”
“No, but I also haven’t seen that movie, either,” Derek said, frowning.
“In the movie, they go to an island based on fear, and anything that they can think up, anything they dread, comes into being,” Lydia told him. “Is that what you’re saying Stiles is, Deaton?”
“Of a sort. Basically, anything your fertile imagination can dream up, Stiles, you can become. And until you get control of that…” Deaton trailed off, waiting for Stiles to make the leap himself.
“I am a danger to anyone around me, oh my god, I can’t go home, I can’t be around my father, I can’t spend time around him, I can’t live there, I’ll kill him. Fuck my life, what am I going to do? I don’t want to like. Grow to be a thousand feet tall and crush him under the pile of rubble or morph into something with really fucking pointy teeth and eat him. That would be really bad.” Stiles knew he was starting to hyperventilate, but he couldn’t stop. His brain was supplying him with every horrifying mental image of all the things he’d ever imagined happening to his dad, and wow, he was freaking himself out.
“Stiles,” Derek said, and Stiles looked up to find Derek right there. Lydia was right next to him, looking worried. Derek was the one that reached out first and put a hand on Stiles’ shoulder, though Lydia wasn’t far behind. “Stiles, breathe.”
“Come on, Stiles, you’d never hurt your dad,” Lydia tried to assure him. “It’ll be okay.”
Stiles closed his eyes and tried to focus on his breathing again, trying to get himself back under control. Fucking control, something he’d never been good at, and now he really had to master it. Because this was going to go well.
It didn’t help that he kept getting distracted by the sensation of warmth, almost fever hot, and crisp but still soft hair, from more senses than he was use to. Or perhaps, more accurately, more sensory receptors. He opened his eyes, and saw that three tentacles had wound themselves around Derek’s arm, and one had squirmed its way under Derek’s shirt and attached itself firmly around Derek’s waist.
“Uhm,” Stiles said intelligently.
Lydia took a deliberate step back, and that’s when Stiles noticed that he hadn’t latched on to Lydia the same way. Huh. Not exactly a surprise, if Stiles was honest with himself (which he usually tried not to be, when it came to this). He knew he was over Lydia, except for the lingering vestiges of First Love Affection that would probably always be there, and he knew that he was incredibly attracted to Derek. At first, he had assumed it was moth-flame syndrome, the need to flirt with the danger that was Derek Hale.
Over time, he came to realize that it really wasn’t, that there was far more to it, and he was kind of afraid of how much more it was. He did what any teenager that regularly found himself in life threatening situations did: he repressed. He repressed like it was an Olympic sport and he was the two time gold medal winner, going for the third straight title.
Only now, going by the wiggly things sprouting from his body, and the grip they had on Derek, repressing wasn’t going to be an option much longer. Shit.
“I think that’s an excellent choice, Stiles,” Deaton said. “Derek can teach you control, defend against you should you transform into something threatening, and protect others as well as you while you learn your new abilities.”
“What?” Stiles asked, sitting up straighter. It pulled Derek a step closer, surprising both of them with the strength of his tentacles. “Whoa.”
“You’ve chosen Derek as your protector during this time, that much is obvious. Now, there is nothing I can do for you, so I suggest you take yourselves out of here before Stiles decides he feels threatened or uncomfortable, and spontaneously shifts,” Deaton said.
Stiles was about to protest, but Derek cut him off. “Thanks,” he told Deaton, and pulled Stiles off the table and to his feet simply by stepping backwards. Stiles would have stumbled if Derek hadn’t steadied him, and then he was just too confused by everything to protest.
Stiles had managed to unwind his tentacles by the time they were out of the clinic, which was good, because Derek had to drive. Stiles slouched into the passenger seat and stared out the window while Derek took them back to Lydia’s car, and then took Stiles back to his house. “I’m going to go get your jeep,” Derek said, parking the car in front of Stiles’ house. “Your dad’s on a night shift tonight, right?”
Stiles nodded his head. Fortunately. Night shifts were good for sneaking around at night, at least. As long as they weren’t anywhere that a patrol would be.
“Good. Go upstairs, pack, and catch what sleep you can. When I get back, we’ll go to my place.” Derek looked at him, and seemed to hesitate for a moment. “It…it’ll be okay, Stiles.”
Stiles let out a rude sound, and pushed open the door to the Camaro. “Whatever. I’ll see you later.” He didn’t wait for a response, just got out of the car and ran for the front door of the house under the cover of darkness. The last thing he needed was for the neighbors to see him waving around more than two arms.
Once he was upstairs, packing a bag to take so he could go live with Derek fucking Hale, seriously, what the fuck, he let himself think about what was currently stuck to his body. He paused in the process of throwing a shirt into his bag, and looked at it. This whole thing was about control, right? He’d been trying the entire drive home to think about turning back into a human, some kind of magic thought that would pull the tentacles back, but he had no luck. So, if he couldn’t make them go away, he could use them, right?
Slowly, one of the tentacles reached out and curled the tip into the fabric of the shirt. Another joined in, and then another, until there were four holding up the cotton. So far, so good, right? Stiles concentrated, and slowly started folding the shirt. First one arm, then the other, carefully and deliberately. He was excited and pleased when he got it halfway folded, but apparently that little lapse in attention was fatal. The next thing he knew, two of his tentacles were tangled in his shirt, pulling ineffectually at the knotted fabric, trying to free themselves.
“Stop!” Stiles said, half in fear for the shirt—in hindsight, maybe using his favorite one was a bad idea—and half because that actually hurt. He settled his hands on the trapped tentacles, which immediately froze. “Easy, guys, come on. Move slow. I know this is new, it’s new for both of us. You got this, though.” He slowly untangled himself, trying very hard not to think about the fact that he was treating his tentacles as independent beings, and got the tee shirt folded.
He didn’t stop experimenting, though, and quickly came to the realization that while he could replace hand motions with his tentacles, it worked better if they worked in concert with each other. A lot better. He got his entire bag packed up and on the floor, and realized that he reeked. “Right. Shower. We can do a shower, right, guys?”
A few of his tentacles waved as if in agreement, and Stiles headed for the bathroom. Warm water poured over his hand and a couple of tentacles, and wow, that felt weird. Not bad weird, just…weird. New. Different. Disconcerting. He stepped in and pulled the curtain, letting the water just cascade over him for a while. It was soothing in a way that little else was, the repetitive pounding of water on his shoulders and the back of his neck.
He reached for the body wash after a while, fairly sure that Derek would be back before too long, and poured some onto his hand. He took a deep breath of the comforting smell of Irish Spring, and let it back out again, trying to push out some of the tension with it. He closed his eyes and started rubbing his hands together and then over his skin, cleaning away the sweat and dirt still on him.
It took Stiles an embarrassingly long time to realize that it wasn’t just his hands helping clean him. As his fingers slid over his stomach, a warm, muscular something curled around his cock, and he gasped. His eyes flew open, and he stared down to see one of his tentacles slowly stroking him. The sensation was oddly doubled, not unlike when he used his hand to do this, but at the same time, completely different. The ring formed by the tentacle was more sensitive than his hand, for one, and for another, felt nothing like fingers. He watched, eyes wide, as the tentacle stroked up and down, slowly wrapping more and more around until his rapidly hardening dick was almost completely encircled by a rippling, slowly stroking tentacle.
“Holy fuck,” he gasped at the first rippling squeeze and let his head fall back. And then spluttered when he wound up with a face full of water. “Augh, way to go, Stilinski,” he muttered to himself, and shifted the showerhead so that it was spraying more to the side. He went back to focusing on his cock and the tentacle massaging it—he had no other word for what was going on, other than holy god, that felt good, but that was like. Five words, not one.
Stiles groaned when a second tentacle curled around his balls and massaged there, the tip tickling right at the base. He hadn’t considered how good this might feel, or that this could even be done, but wooow, he could stay here for hours doing this. Or not, because Derek was coming back, damn, and he didn’t need an alpha werewolf finding him jerking off in the shower with tentacles going every which way.
“Oh fuck!” he yelped as one of his slippery new appendages slid down the crack of his ass and teased his hole. That felt…really good, fuck. It wasn’t like he hadn’t fingered himself before; he was a curious person by nature, and once he figured out that he liked boys as well as girls, he’d experimented with that, too.
This, though…this was different. Very different. It was still just himself, he could feel that because the pressure around the tip of the tentacle was the same as it was on his finger. It wasn’t the same, though, the same way the one around his cock wasn’t the same. The way it wiggled and worked its way into his ass was at once completely foreign and incredibly erotic, and wow, Stiles hadn’t known he could get any harder.
He shifted how he was standing so that he could rest his arms against the wall and lean forward a little, legs spread wide for balance and for access. He closed his eyes and moaned as the tentacle behind him pressed in a little farther, stretching his hole slowly but steadily. It fucked in and out slowly, using the body wash for lubricant, which…okay, so that was bad, but he didn’t have anything waterproof, and he didn’t want to stop right now.
Stiles brought one hand down off the wall to gently twist and play with one of his nipples. All of his nerve endings were on fire, it seemed like, in the best way. He groaned as the tentacle in his ass started to curl in on itself, widening and stretching, and holy god, that was his prostate. “Fuck!” he moaned, rocking forward into the tight warmth undulating around his cock. “So good,” he mumbled, wondering if he could manage a rhythm of this. If he could, he’d come in no time, because Jesus fuck.
No sooner thought than said, and he could seriously get behind this subconscious control of his tentacles. The one in his ass settled into a quick steady rhythm of rubbing the knotted up end over his prostate while the one around his cock matched the speed with rippling strokes. Stiles was panting, open mouthed in no time, with his orgasm building rapidly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he moaned as he came, white coating his tentacle before slowly getting washed away in the backspray from the shower.
He leaned against the wall for a little while longer, letting himself come back down. He did watch the tentacle slowly uncurl from around his cock, and moaned when the one in his ass slowly slid out. He felt…good. Far better than he had since he woke up with extra appendages, definitely. Stiles took a deep breath, finished washing himself, and got out of the shower before he could delve into that thought too far. He knew he couldn’t avoid it forever, but he also just wasn’t ready to consider the fact that he was fucking part chaos monster.
After the most interesting drying experience he’d ever experienced—he made a mental note to tell no one that his tentacles were ticklish—he pulled on a pair of basketball shorts and flopped face first down on his bed. Stiles knew Derek would be back anytime soon. He knew that he really should be ready for him when he did. The problem was, he was exhausted, and his bed was soft and fuck, it felt so good to be horizontal…
And then Stiles was blinking his eyes open to the sound of the front door and early morning light coming through his window. He groaned and pushed himself out of bed, making a brief pit stop in the bathroom to piss while he rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes while he yawned, and then padded downstairs to the kitchen.
“Morning, Dad,” he said, still rubbing one eye. “How was your shift?”
“Quiet,” Sheriff Stilinski said, placing the coffee carafe back in the coffee maker and turning to face his son. “Really qui—WHAT THE FUCK?!” he yelled, dropping his coffee mug.
“What? What is it?” Stiles asked, jumping and flailing. Doing so smacked himself in the face with a tentacle, and he froze. Oh. “Uhhhh.”
The sheriff snorted with what looked like involuntary laughter, if the look on his face was any indication. Torn between horror and amusement, and Stiles flailed again, because oh god, why did he have to put that look on his dad’s face? Unfortunately, flailing again had the same result, and once again, he slapped himself in the face with a tentacle. “Dammit.”
The sheriff outright laughed at that, a burst of startled laughter. “I’m sorry! I don’t think I should be laughing, I’m a bad parent, laughing at you when you’re…when you…” He took a deep breath, mastering his laughter. “Is there something you wanted to tell me?”
“Aren’t I the one that should be asking you that?” Stiles asked, a slightly hysterical edge to his voice. He hated himself for it, because really, staying calm in the face of this was a good thing, no need to turn into a gigantic, father-eating monster. “I mean. Apparently, this shit is genetic?”
“Don’t look at me, you knew your mother was weird,” the sheriff said. He rubbed his hands over his face. “Stiles. Son. What. The. Fuck.” His father stared at him, eyes wide. “You have…you have tentacles. Sticking out of your armpits.”
“They’re not sticking out of my armpits,” Stiles protested, kind of irrationally annoyed by that comparison. He raised his arms. “See? They’re coming out of my sides.”
The look the Sheriff gave him probably could have killed him had visual expression been capable of that kind of thing. It very plainly told Stiles that his father was Not Amused. “Stiles…” he said warningly.
“Auuuugh,” Stiles said, and collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. He buried his face in his arms. “So. I’m kind of…part chaos monster?” he mumbled into his arms.
“You’re what?” his father said.
Stiles didn’t hear footsteps, but something started gently stroking his hair. It took him a moment to realize that it was his tentacles. He was being pet by his own tentacles. They were comforting him. He blindly reached up and patted one. They were good tentacles. “Chaos monster,” he repeated.
The sheriff obviously went back for more coffee because Stiles could hear the carafe again, and then the chair next to him was scraping on the floor, and his dad sat down. “Stiles,” the sheriff began, but they were interrupted by the backdoor opening and heavy boots hitting the floor. Stiles knew that tread. Wonderful, his werewolf protector was here.
“We need to tell him, Stiles,” Derek said quietly. Stiles groaned as his tentacles paused in their petting of his head and shoulders to wave at Derek.
“Ship has sailed, dude, if you hadn’t noticed,” Stiles told his arms. “He can kinda see them.”
Derek rolled his eyes. Stiles knew he did, he could practically hear it. “Not that, Stiles,” Derek said. “The other, equally as important part in all of this.”
Stiles sat bolt upright, and stared at Derek. “I thought you didn’t want to tell him because it would put him and the rest of the department in danger,” he said. “I fully supported this plan.”
“You’re sitting at the kitchen table with a dozen tentacles sprouting out of your body. I don’t think we can really keep it from him anymore,” Derek pointed out.
“Boys, I am right here,” the sheriff broke in. “And now you have to tell me whatever it is because if you don’t, I’m going to arrest you. For something. I will come up with something, and I will arrest you, so kindly explain why my son is explaining that he is a chaos monster, whatever the hell that means, and why, Derek, you look quite so murderous all the time.”
“He looks like that because he’s an asshole,” Stiles said automatically, and then winced. “Sorry, Derek.”
Derek gave him a slightly surprised look. “It’s…fine. I am kind of an asshole.” He took a deep breath. “Sheriff Stilinski, all of those unexplained animal attacks actually have one very good explanation that you’re not going to want to believe, but I promise you, it’s the truth. I am a werewolf. So is Scott McCall, and a few others. None of us caused the deaths that you have in open investigations, but we were involved in the situations that lead to them.”
The sheriff stared at Derek for a long moment. Long enough that Derek had to strongly suppress the urge to fidget. Stiles could tell, he’d had to suppress the urge often enough himself. Finally, “Prove it.”
Derek blinked, and a moment later, had glowing red eyes, fangs, claws, and a serious need for a razor. He didn’t move, letting the Sheriff examine him from a distance, taking in the details and fitting them against what he already knew. “So, what I’m looking at is a werewolf.”
“An alpha werewolf,” Stiles said with a sigh. His tentacles went back to petting him. “The one in charge of the whole pack.”
“So…there’s a pack of werewolves running around Beacon Hills, not actually responsible for the problems we have, but involved in them, and my son is a chaos monster,” the sheriff said. “That about sum it up?”
Stiles winced. “Yes…but there’s also the fact that I have to go live with Derek for a while.”
The sheriff stared at him. “You what.” His voice was flat, no query in the tone at all.
“It’s not just tentacles that I’ve got. I mean. That’s all I’ve got right now, but that’s not all I could have in the future. I apparently have the ability to turn into anything that my imagination can dream up, up to and including things that could…uh. Hurt you or eat you.”
“So you’re going to go live with Derek, who is, as far as I know, also edible?”
“Well…yeah. He’s edible. I mean, like. Oh god, none of this is coming out right,” Stiles groaned and buried his face back in his arms. His tentacles patted him gently.
“What Stiles is trying to say, sir, is that I have the strength and ability to keep him from hurting other people, and I can also teach him to control his shapeshifting abilities,” Derek said. His matter of fact tone surprised Stiles a little, but then again, he was probably the one closest to freaking out over this.
The sheriff sighed. “Legally, I can’t stop you, Stiles. You’re eighteen. That probably is the best place for you to learn control, by the sounds of it. And don’t think that part of the conversation is over yet, either of you. There are a lot of damned answers I think you owe me. We have bigger problems right now, though. Stiles…” he stopped and shook his head. “You’ll be back, right? That’s part of the plan, right?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Stiles said, sitting back up. “It is.” He fully intended it. That’s why he was going to a college he could commute to when he had to be on campus, and otherwise, was registered for online courses. He wasn’t leaving his father alone for a long time.
“Then go and live with Derek, Stiles. Learn to control this.”
Stiles went to his dad to hug him. And it was one hell of a hug, considering all twelve tentacles got involved.
~~O~~
“Oh my god,” he snapped, interrupting Derek’s patient—well. Less patient than it had been three weeks ago—explanation that it took concentration and patience to master the transformation Stiles was trying for, more than the instinctive control that werewolves had on the basic shift. “Just…stop! Fucking stop, this isn’t working, and it’s stupid, and hello! I’m on fucking Adderall, what makes you think I have any kind of focus for this?”
Derek sighed. “Because you have to,” he said simply, and flopped backward onto the couch. Well. Sprawled? Yeah, that was definitely a sprawl, and oh god, Stiles really should not be looking. He turned away, and focused on a beam of light coming in the window to try and calm himself back down.
“Stiles…” he ignored Derek, trying to focus on the feel of his body, what it was like with the tentacles coming out, how they changed his balance, what they felt like moving around… “Stiles.” He took slow, even breaths, trying to push away any other thoughts but getting the tentacles to go away, have his normal shape back. “Stiles!”
“Oh my god, what?” Stiles snapped his eyes open, spinning to stare at Derek.
“…take a break.”
The quiet words broke something in Stiles and he sank to the floor where he stood. “Fuck, Derek, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve to have me being an asshole to you, to have to teach me how to control myself, none of it.”
He heard Derek get up and move across the room, and then felt the warmth of another person sitting near. “I know this is tough,” Derek finally said after a long few moments of silence. “I don’t blame you for being upset.”
Stiles sighed. “I always thought I’d be great at this stuff. Way better than Scott, you know? And it turns out I’m worse. I can’t even change my form. Scott could do that much.”
“This isn’t the same,” Derek protested. “You’re something…entirely different, and you were forced into this by a spell. It’s not the same at all.”
“I suppose,” Stiles said, unconvinced. He looked up, and saw Derek giving him an undecipherable look. “What?”
“I could bite you,” Derek said, but his expression was curiously blank.
Stiles blinked. “You…you could. You could turn me into a werewolf, and then this would all go away, because lycanthropy is totally the dominant shifter gene, and that would be awesome. I could be a part of your pack, and it would be awesome!”
“Or, it could turn you into a chaos monster werewolf with absolutely no control whatsoever, you could run through town and kill a bunch of people and the Argents would take you out, and have every right to do so. Or the bite could just kill you flat out,” Derek said, his expression still blank.
Stiles frowned. There was always the chance of death with the body rejecting the bite, and now he had the chaos monster thing to worry about. Well, he’d always had that, latently, hadn’t he? But now it was active, and he was… “Well, fuck,” he said with a sigh, realizing he couldn’t do it, and that’s what Derek was telling him. That Derek wouldn’t bite him because of the risk. He let his head fall back to his knees.
Derek stood. “I’m gonna get us some water,” he said, and headed for the kitchen. Stiles stayed where he was, curled up for the relief of just…being. His tentacles were wrapped around his legs, too, and he was one big ball of worried Stiles.
What if he never got the hang of this? Never getting control of how to deal with this, and he never got to see his Dad again, and had to walk around with his tentacles bound down, looking really weirdly bulky, and couldn’t do anything normal ever again? The thought was an unpleasant one, and he refused to live like that. Flat refused.
He frowned, and started breathing slow again, focusing on calming down his mind. Stiles didn’t have anything in particular in mind, other than making the tentacles go away, so he mostly just focused on calming down, breathing slowly, focus on the way his lungs filled with air, and emptied again, filled, emptied…
He yelped when he felt his skin prickle, but that was all he got out before he shrank down rapidly and was suddenly lost in miles of fabric. He flailed around, trying to find his feet, to get back to the surface when he felt vibrations. Footsteps. “Derek!” he tried to call, but found that whatever he’d done to himself, he didn’t have vocal cords. Fantastic.
“Whoa! Stiles?” the footsteps came close, and the fabric was very carefully lifted. Stiles shot toward the light, tumbling free of the denim of his jeans onto the carpet of the living room floor. “…well. You don’t have tentacles anymore?” Derek offered, staring down at him.
Stiles wondered just what the hell he was, because Derek looked huge. He tried to look down at himself but mostly just succeeded in doing a somersault. He huffed in annoyance, and a tiny puff of smoke curled up from his nose. He froze.
“What the hell,” he heard Derek mutter, and then careful hands were cupped in front of him. “Come on, let me show you,” and Stiles carefully walked into the hands. He closed his eyes as he was lifted and carried through the house, into the bathroom. “Look.”
Stiles opened his eyes and stared. In Derek’s hands was a small blue and green lizard. With wings. Tiny ones. He jerked his head in startlement, and the lizard did, too. “Oh, that’s just weird,” he tried to say, but while his mouth opened, only a strange croaking came out.
He crept forward on Derek’s hands until he could put his paws up on the mirror, and look at himself closely. This was weird. Possibly weirder than the tentacles, and then he realized that his coloring matched his tentacle coloring, with blue on his back and… he stretched up, walking up the mirror with his front paws to check, and yes, sure enough, his belly was the same pale green as the underside of his tentacles. Well, fuck.
And then he realized he was sticking to the mirror.
“Uh,” Derek said as Stiles scrambled up, scaling the mirror in a matter of seconds. “Stiles…”
But Stiles wasn’t listening. This was fun. He kept running, off the mirror, onto the wall and up onto the ceiling, over to the door, down the wall to the lintel, around, and back up again, and across the ceiling some more. He stopped periodically and looked around, because the world was so different this way, upside down and tiny as he was. Stiles flapped his little wings, but he kind of thought they were just for show, because he didn’t really feel like he could support himself with them.
He ran right into the living room just in time for the front door to open and Isaac and Scott to tumble in. He froze, unnoticed, watching them.
“Derek? Stiles?” Scott called as he shut the door behind them. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” Derek said, coming down the hall. He was watching Stiles, still. “Stiles is…”
“Holy crap!” Isaac yelped, looking up curiously to find out what Derek was staring at. “Is that—“
“Yup,” Derek said shortly. “He just did it. Only, I don’t think he did it on purpose.”
Stiles snorted derisively. Of course he hadn’t done it on purpose. Though, as far as accidental transformations went, a weird gecko-dragon-thing was pretty cool. And then he got completely distracted by the smoke that puffed again when he snorted.
He snorted again experimentally, and was utterly delighted when more smoke puffed forth. If there was smoke, and he was a dragon…
“Stiles?” Scott said, walking across the floor until he was directly under Stiles. His head was craned back and he was watching his friend with curiosity. “Are you alright? What’s all that smoke?”
“Uh, Scott,” Isaac said, raising his hand. “Maybe you shouldn’t…”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence because Stiles managed to spout a gout of flame, straight down toward Scott. It wasn’t that long of a flame, all things considered, but it was a good foot long, and it was fire, which had Scott ducking away with a frantic yelp.
“Oh my god, what the fuck, Stiles!” Scott said from where he’d landed on his ass trying to get away.
Stiles wished he could grin. He really, really did. He made his way across the ceiling and down the wall, stopping halfway and looking expectantly at Isaac who was right next to him.
“Put your hand out for him,” Derek said when Isaac just stared at Stiles for a few moments. “I think he…yeah.”
Isaac frowned, but held his hand out to Stiles, who detached himself from the wall and walked across Isaac’s hand, up his arm, and across his head to perch on top. He crouched low and slitted his eyes closed as the warmth radiating naturally from the top of Isaac’s head warmed him.
“My best friend is a dragon, and he is perched on top of my other best friend’s head,” Scott said faintly as he picked himself up off the floor. “And I thought turning into a werewolf was weird.”
Derek shook his head. “Isaac, take Stiles to his room. Stiles…try and return to a bipedal, humanoid form, please?”
Isaac obediently carried Stiles into the small second bedroom that he had been staying in while he was trying to learn how to control his transformations. He reached up and carefully picked up Stiles off his head and set him down on the bed. “You…that was weird,” Isaac said. “Really…weird. Could you not do that again? Please?”
Stiles puffed a little smoke in agreement. He hadn’t meant to upset Isaac, it was just the warmest place… He concentrated. He had to get back to a people shape.
Ten minutes later, he was pulling jeans on. He was human again, actual real boy shaped with opposable thumbs and everything. And twelve tentacles. Apparently, those were going to remain a fixture for a while longer. He sighed, and they waved a little, curling in close around him the way they seemed to like to do, and headed for the kitchen.
“Hey! You managed to return to human!” Scott greeted him. “Don’t ever breathe fire at me again, dude, oh my god.”
Stiles snorted. “I make no promises. That was kind of fun. Plus, it was hilarious to watch you fall on your ass.”
“So you’re fully aware in those transformations?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah, fully aware. Not completely able to stop the instincts of some things…like the search for warmth. Sorry about landing on your head.” He headed to the fridge to get a soda and sat at the table.
“Glad I’m warm?” Isaac offered, looking a little awkward. “Seriously, though, You can control yourself but instincts still get the better of you? That…might be important.”
Stiles thought about it for a moment. Isaac had a point. After all, didn’t his tentacles keep doing instinctive things for him Like…reaching for Derek, yet again, seriously, what the fuck? He gently slapped the tentacle that was creeping across Derek’s thigh, and it pulled back. Stiles refused to consider how the tentacle seemed petulant and how Derek hadn’t even flinched, except to shift in his seat. He wondered if—
No, that way lay madness, and he was not going there. “So you think that maybe one of the reasons I can’t shift is because I’m still operating at an instinctual level?” Stiles asked Isaac.
“I’m not really thinking anything, except that it was interesting,” Isaac said.
“No, but you may be right,” Derek put in. “Think about it. How much of the wolf shift is instinctual?”
“Most of it,” Scott said. “It’s always more about learning to control the instinct than it is learning how to control the shift.”
“Oh!” Stiles blinked. “Really? Is…oh.” He looked at Derek. “Why didn’t you say that?”
Derek looked frustrated, but amused. “I did.”
“No, you were always talking about control and focus and learning to feel what the change did,” Stiles protested.
Derek nodded, raising an eyebrow at him. “Yeah. Never once did I tell you to control the shift.”
Stiles thought about the last three weeks, and he had to admit that Derek was right. He hadn’t said control the shift at all. “Well…you never mentioned instinct,” he mumbled, but he closed his eyes and tried to focus.
He had kind of been hoping that now that he’d made the connection to what Derek had, apparently, been telling him all along, he’d be able to make sense of this transformation thing, figure it out, and go home. It didn’t happen that way, though. He sat there for five minutes, and all he managed to do was make himself itch. “Auuugh,” he said, opening his eyes.
They were all staring at him.
“What?” Stiles asked, and looked down at himself. He yelped when he discovered that he was now the same blue and green all over that his tentacles were. “Oh my god, what the fuck? This is getting ridiculous!” he said, poking at his skin.
“It’s a good look on you,” Scott said, starting to snicker.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Stiles said, and stormed out of the kitchen. All he wanted to do was go home. He was tired of having these wiggling things sticking out of him, and honestly, it was driving him a little crazy.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there. Enforced time with Derek Hale? Sign him up, weird as it sounded. He’d known that part would be hard. He’d been suppressing and ignoring his crush on the alpha werewolf for nearly as long as he’d known him. It had only gotten worse over the past few weeks with Derek helping him. To the point, if Stiles was honest with himself which he hated being when it came to this because denial was not just a river in Egypt, it had really gone beyond a crush.
That made it worse, though. Being here with Derek and not being able to act made it…a lot worse. It didn’t help that his tentacles kept reaching for Derek whenever Stiles was distracted, or that Derek didn’t appear to mind. At least, he never pulled away or tried to unwind them. Stiles tried not to think too hard about it, except when he was in the shower. Then, he couldn’t seem to stop, and he’d many more repeats of his first shower, post-tentacled-discovery.
He flopped down face first onto the bed and groaned into the pillow. No, all he really wanted, at this point, was to master this so he could go home, not kill his dad on accident, and maybe, somehow, control this thing on Derek before it got out of control.
“Stiles?” Derek tapped on the door. “Can I come in?”
No! part of Stiles was screaming, but he ignored it. “Yeah,” he mumbled into his pillow. He heard the door squeak slightly, and Derek come in, crouching next to the bed.
“You all right?” Derek asked softly. “I sent Scott and Isaac home. They…weren’t helping.”
Stiles sighed and turned his head so that he could peer at Derek. “I’m sorry,” he offered. “For losing my temper and for not getting this, and-"
“No,” Derek cut him off. “No apologies. This is a really big thing you’re trying to learn, and it’s not like lycanthropy. It’s its own thing, and trying to apply lycanthropic theory to it is…probably not good.”
Two months ago, Stiles would have said that was a long speech for Derek. That was before he’d lived with the man, though, and learned just how verbose Derek could be, if he thought a subject was worth his while. They’d had some incredibly long conversations about the reboot of Star Trek versus the original, for example (they both loved the new Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Kirk, and were both withholding judgment on Sulu and Spock).
“Is there such a thing as lycanthropic theory?” Stiles asked.
Derek shrugged. “Of a sort. Point is, the things that work for a werewolf aren't going to work for a chaos monster.”
“So what do we do?” Stiles asked. “Because I’ve adjusted to the tentacles, and I even kind of like them now, but I’d really like to be able to control things at this point.”
Derek studied him for a moment. “Will you let me try something?” he finally asked. “Do you trust me?”
“I trust you,” Stiles said immediately. He didn’t even have to think about it. Of course he trusted Derek implicitly.
“Close your eyes,” Derek said quietly, and settled his hand on Stiles’ bare back. He started rubbing gentle circles, and Stiles closed his eyes.
It was soothing. Incredibly soothing, in a way that Stiles hadn’t expected. It was comforting, sort of like when his mom had done it when he was sick as a kid, but at the same time, very, very different. This was Derek touching him, Derek comforting and soothing him.
He let himself float in the sensations, the gentle hum that seemed to build under his skin with the touch of Derek’s hand. He just breathed, slow and deep, not trying to control anything anymore. He just wanted to relax.
“Stiles,” Derek said quietly. “Open your eyes.”
Stiles blinked them open slowly, and saw Derek closer than before. “What is it?”
“I’m…may I kiss you?”
Stiles blinked. That’s not what he’d expected. His heart kicked into high gear, going from a normal, calm rhythm to something far more energized. Derek wanted to kiss him. Derek was stroking his back and wanted to kiss him. “Yeah,” he breathed, pushing himself up and leaning forward.
Derek’s lips were soft against his, hesitant and careful, but they felt better than Stiles would have thought possible. He focused on the feel of them moving against his own, gentle and soft and tentative in a way, and it felt good. It was an easy thing to focus on, too, this pleasure, because it wasn't demanding at all. It was just something new and kind of distracting and he could really do this for a long time. Derek was good at kissing.
His sides itched, though, and that was a little distracting. He wasn’t a fan of distracting, so he focused a little more on the feel of Derek’s mouth on his, of the barest hint of tongue pressing against his bottom lip, not enough to be asking for Stiles’ mouth to open. More like just taking a taste. Stiles liked it, and liked the feel of the stubble burning just a little around his mouth as they moved slowly together. It was good. Very good.
Stiles was about to open his mouth for Derek, and deepen the kiss, when he lost his balance. Suddenly, his support was gone, and his balance pitched him forward. Fortunately, Derek’s quick reflexes kept him from toppling off the bed. “Stiles?”
Stiles looked down at himself and realized that not only was he normal peachy-pink-human colored again, he didn’t have tentacles. “They’re gone,” he said blankly. “The tentacles, they’re…they’re gone.” He looked up at Derek, a little wide-eyed.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Derek asked warily.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is, I just…wish I had been more conscious of it?” Stiles swung himself around so that he could sit up properly. His hands slid down his sides, feeling nothing but smooth skin, and that was just weird. Shouldn’t there at least be like…baggy somethings where the tentacles had stretched out his skin?
Derek shifted back so that he was sitting on the floor, knees spread, his arms hooked around his knees. “I thought that maybe distracting you was the better option,” he said. “Focusing hasn’t worked for you, and you said it yourself. You have a hard time focusing on anything. Having you act like a werewolf wasn’t working because you are chaos. You’re chaos literally, with your heritage.”
Stiles thought about that. Derek had a very valid point. He was a chaos monster, but beyond that, he’d always thrived in situations that were frantic, sometimes desperate. The final push at the end of a project was his best time, in part because the insanity of trying to complete so many things was something he fed on and worked best in.
“So…you think I was focusing too hard?” he said, trying to put it into words.
“Yeah. That, and I think you were denying yourself. Not consciously, just…with what we were trying, it was going against you true nature, a denial of how things need to work.” Derek looked down at his hands and that, and Stiles was pretty sure there was more to it at that, but there didn’t seem to be any lie.
He simply nodded, though. No need to focus on what else he was denying. “So let’s keep working on this, now that we have an idea of what the problem might be.” Stiles took a steadying breath, and was about to try again, when Derek spoke.
“How?”
Stiles blinked. “What do you mean how? I thought I’d just…think about having tentacles again, but not all the calming focusing thing. Just let my stream of consciousness take me where it would.”
Derek raised his eyebrow. “You do that, you’re going to wind up a bilgesnipe.”
Stiles snorted at the reference to The Avengers, another mutually shared favorite. They’d both wondered what a bilgesnipe would look like in reality, beyond Thor’s description of “massive, scaly, huge antlers, and repulsive”. “What do you suggest?”
“Look down.”
Stiles frowned as he did, and realized that he was slowly growing tentacles again. “How the hell do you keep managing that?” he demanded.
“I think what’s going on is that this is a more instinctive transformation than you’re willing to admit. Don’t think about it. Just do it.” Derek frowned. “Did that make sense?”
“No but…I think I get what you’re trying to say.” Stiles tilted his head down, studying the gently waving appendages as they tried to reach for Derek again. Human shaped, please, he told himself, and then deliberately looked away, focusing on something else.
It took a couple of tries, and Derek poking him in the foot, but he managed it. “So this is kind of exhausting,” Stiles said, yawning.
“You’re expending a lot of energy, changing your form like that,” Derek put in. He stood, and offered his hand to Stiles, pulling him up off the bed. “C’mon, let’s go make food before your blood sugar crashes.”
Stiles followed him to the kitchen. “Oh god, am I going to have a metabolism like you guys now? Eating everything in sight?”
Derek rolled his eyes. “We don’t eat everything in sight, but yeah, probably.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs, butter, and cheese, and nodded at Stiles. “Whatever you want in an omelet, get it.”
They spent the next half hour cooking and talking about why it took less control not more for Stiles to manage his transformations (with him practicing, too, while they talked. The longer they chatted, the better he got, until it was almost as soon as he had the thought to change), just how close to lycanthropy chaos monsterness was, and whether the law of conservation of matter applied to magical beings like Stiles.
“But, seriously, come on! I was that tiny little dragon thing, already, obviously it doesn’t apply!” Stiles said, waving his still cheesy fork around.
“I’m not arguing that,” Derek said with a roll of his eyes. “I’m only wondering why it doesn’t. It does to us, that’s why we’re the size and shapes we are, as werewolves. Why are you different?”
Stiles thought about that, taking another huge bite of his completely overstuffed omelet. “Maybe because chaos?” he offered. At Derek’s thoughtful frown, he continued. “Like, okay, so, I can’t really think about the transformation in order for it to work, right? An element of chaos. So what if the things I can transform into are the same deal? Subject to the whims of chaos, not physics and reality?”
“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Derek said. “And fits with what Deaton pointed out about you only being limited by your imagination.”
Stiles grinned. “it’s like I’m suddenly a member of the Green Lantern Corps, I just don’t have a ring! Or a lantern. Or…another planet to visit, okay, so it’s not a perfect metaphor, but it works!”
Derek rolled his eyes and finished his omelet, but there was a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “Sure it does, Stiles.”
They kept talking, with Stiles randomly spouting tentacles, changing skin color, and changing noses—“If Tonks can do it, so can I!”—until Stiles was yawning more often than he was talking.
“All right, go to bed," Derek finally said. “You’ve worn yourself out completely. We’ll practice for a couple more days, make sure you’ve completely got it under control, but I don’t see why you can’t go back home by this weekend.”
Stiles wondered why the words didn’t make him as happy as they should have. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? To go home? Be with his dad, take care of him, sleep in his own bed? “Awesome,” he said, not looking at Derek.
Why didn’t he want to go?
~~O~~
How was Stiles suppose to know that he would weigh five hundred pounds when he had gone for seven feet tall with tentacles like Ursula?
Still, the only casualty had been the coffee table, and Derek had insisted that it was a dumpster find anyway, seriously, don’t worry about it, Stiles. Two days later, Stiles was headed home. And he still didn’t know why he didn’t want to go.
Well, okay. That wasn’t true. If he was being completely honest with himself, he knew damned well why he didn’t want to go. Here, there was Derek, warm, comfortable, comforting Derek, who had far more patience than Stiles had ever given him credit for, and was willing to try unique things in order to help Stiles gain control.
Stiles paused in his packing, his fingers finding their way to his lips. He felt ridiculous, but he couldn’t stop himself. Derek hadn’t kissed him again since he had done so to distract Stiles. Not for lack of trying on Stiles’ part. He had been hinting and suggesting obliquely, sitting close to Derek on the couch, and nothing had worked.
So now he was going home, and part of him was hoping that absence would make the heart grow fonder, or some bullshit like that, or that getting out of his immediate space would give Stiles a chance to resort his feelings about Derek, trample them back down and go back to ignoring them.
He heard Derek’s phone ring, heard Derek answer it, but he kept packing. He was almost done, the last of his tee shirts getting crammed into his duffle, and then he was going to the bathroom for his toothbrush and soap, back to his room, and hey, wow. Derek.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, knowing the set of shoulders far too well. “What happened?”
“Damned alpha pack grabbed Scott. Allison followed, but they’ve got him in some kind of ring that she couldn’t get past.”
Stiles frowned. “Like a magical containment ring? Against a human?”
“Something like that. She’s on her way here. She’ll describe it for you, see if you can’t find something about it online. I’m going to take Boyd and Erica, see if we can’t get him out.” Derek gave him a steady look. “Promise me you’ll stay here. I need to know that you’re safe, and I need you to do the research. You’re the best at it, even better than Lydia.”
“I won’t ever tell her you said that, but thank you,” Stiles said, going for his backpack and his laptop that were already in there. He blessed the foresight that had been involved in convincing Peter to give him a copy of his bestiary, and Allison’s at convincing her father that they needed to digitize theirs. That might make this easier. Might.
“She should be here shortly. Stiles…” Derek hesitated. “The other reason I want you here is to protect. I told Allison to text Lydia, get her here, too, and I want you to protect the girls if it comes to that.”
Stiles stared at him. “You realize that both of them are far more capable of protecting me than I am of them, right?”
Derek shook his head. “As you were, yeah. But you’ve got control of your transformations now, and if necessary, I know you can become something that will rip people apart. You love the girls like sisters, the same as you love Scott like a brother. You’ll destroy anyone that tries to hurt them.”
Stiles looked away at that. He hadn’t realized he was so transparent. Derek was right, though. He did love the girls like sisters—Erica, too, terrifying as she was—and the boys like brothers. Well. Jackson was more of the asshole stepsibling that no one wanted to really deal with, but he was usually there when the shit hit the fan, and whatever else you said about him, Stiles could respect that.
“I’ll stay,” he said. “I’ll research and I’ll protect them while you go out and rescue my idiot best friend, but I swear to God,” and Stiles paused to take a deep breath. “Derek, if you get yourself killed, I will come after you, resurrect you, and kill you again, is that fucking clear?” And then he was crashing their mouths together in a fierce, desperate kiss.
It wasn’t even that good of a kiss, all sharp edged teeth and bumping noses, but Derek held on just as fiercely as Stiles did, and kissed him back, and that’s what made it worth it. Derek finally was the one to pull back, taking in a deep drag of breath.
“I’ll be back. With Scott.” And he turned and left.
Stiles headed out to the kitchen with a deep breath. He set his laptop down on the table, and while it booted out of hibernate mode, he went to grab a soda. And then thought about it, and grabbed a bunch, bringing them back to the table. The girls were going to need some, and he needed fortification.
By the time Allison arrived with Lydia, Stiles had done some preliminary research on protection circles, and so far, couldn’t figure out why the hell Allison hadn’t been able to get across. Everything he was finding implied that a human being would be able to cross any kind of line, unless they were supernaturally inhabited by something like a demon.
“Hi, you’re either an impossible something or they used an illusion on you,” Stiles greeted Allison with, and took a drink from his can of Coke.
Allison frowned at him and sat next to him at the table. “What are you talking about?”
“Derek said that you told him that there was a barrier of some kind that you couldn’t cross over. So I have been looking at supernatural barriers, trying to figure out what it was that you might have come across, and I have to say, unless you’re a supernatural being, you imagined that shit.”
They both blinked at him, and then Lydia stole his computer, muttering something about incompetent males. Stiles rolled his eyes and let her research while he asked Allison some questions.
Two hours later, they had reached the same conclusion Stiles had before: either Allison had something inside of her that made her supernatural, or they had used an illusion on her that made her think she couldn’t cross the line.
“What I don’t get,” Allison said, fiddling with the tab on her third can of Sprite, “is how they would do that. How could they set up an illusion so powerful that I would think it was real and be physically restrained from crossing the line?”
“Witchcraft,” Lydia said. She looked up from the computer. “Witchcraft can do a lot of things from light a candle to making a long dormant heritage appear to making you think something that isn’t actually true.” She tilted her head. “It’s also possible she was managing to restrain you by like…making the air thicker. How did it feel?”
Allison frowned. “What do you mean, how did it feel?”
“Did it feel like you were running into a wall, like you were being held back, like someone had put their hand on your chest and not allowed you to go any farther?” Lydia ticked off on her fingers. “How did it feel?”
“Oh. Uhm. It felt like someone had put their hand in the middle of my chest and wasn’t letting me walk forward. Not quite paralyzed, because I could move back or sideways, I just couldn’t go forward anymore.”
Stiles and Lydia nodded at the same time. “The witch,” they said together. “She was using spellwork to make you think you couldn’t go any farther, that there was something stopping you.”
“Do we think it was the same witch that changed Stiles?” Allison asked.
“I don’t see why it wasn’t,” Stiles said. “Changing me would have unbalanced the pack, right? If she’s working for the alpha pack, then she’s going to want to weaken our pack as much as possible. Changing me, taking Scott, keeping you from him…” He flailed a little, very glad that he had learned how to control his tentacles because otherwise he’d have been hitting himself in the face again.
“In short, we have to get rid of her,” Lydia said. “Though I’m not convinced this is an alpha pack.”
Stiles and Allison both looked at her, confused. “What do you mean? We’ve seen them. We’ve seen the glowing red eyes, the alpha forms,” Allison said.
“Oooooh,” Stiles said suddenly, getting it. “You think they’re a regular pack, and just have their pet witch working some mojo for them that makes us think they’re alphas?”
“That is exactly what I think,” Lydia said. “All of this has been sneak attacking, nothing like the actual alpha pack that we dealt with. They were stealthy, yes, but when it came time for confrontations, they were right there, in your face, active. These guys have been subtle, using their witch, being sneaky. That one alpha you took down, Stiles, with the bat? That was too easy. He couldn’t really have been an alpha.”
Stiles made a wounded noise. “Are you saying that I’m not good enough to take down an alpha with a mountain ash bat soaked in wolfsbane solution?” Though really, he’d wondered about that himself. Like it had been too damned easy.
“No, I’m saying that it was way too easy,” Lydia said, unknowingly echoing him. “It should have been more of a fight to take them down, and it wasn’t.”
“My dad never told me the results of his questioning that alpha he caught, but he did come home pretty fast, looking pissed off,” Allison said, looking a little worried. “It wasn’t much of a fight to take them down, it didn’t take dad long to question, comparatively, so obviously, this is not what we think it is. If they used an illusion to make me think i couldn’t get to Scott, what says they aren’t using magic to enhance themselves?”
“I think you’re right,” Derek said, making all three of them jump and look toward the doorway. “Pretty sure it’s a normal pack, trying to take control of a new territory.”
Stiles was looking at Derek in horror. “Oh my god, you look like you went ten rounds with a bear!” he said, standing up. He took a couple of steps toward Derek, but Derek stopped him by holding up his hand.
“Allison, Lydia, Jackson’s downstairs with Scott. He’s going to take him home, and leave you there with him, Allison, if that’s what you want. Lydia, he’ll take you home after that.”
“We’ll follow in my car,” Allison said, standing. “Stiles will tell you what we found. Let him take care of you.” She grabbed her bag and the last soda, jerking her head at Lydia to get her to move.
Once they were gone, Derek dropped his hand and sagged against the doorframe. Stiles made a sound he couldn’t describe later, and rushed to him. He was glad he hadn’t put a shirt on when he got to Derek, as his tentacles came slithering out, gently touching the scratches and bruises marring the Alpha’s torso.
“Why aren’t these healing?” Stiles asked, fingers ghosting over the edges of a gash that stretched from Derek’s collarbone down to his sternum.
“They were done by an alpha. They’re healing, just slowly.” Derek closed his eyes, and grimaced slightly. Stiles consciously asked himself to ease up on the pressure of his tentacles, since it looked like Derek had at least bruised ribs, if not flat out broken ones.
“I thought you said they weren’t an alpha pack?” Stiles said, distractedly.
“They aren’t, but they still have an alpha. She was there, guarding Scott. She looks worse than I do, to be honest. They retreated, and we got Scott back, but this isn’t over. We’re going to have to face them at least once more.” Derek winced a little, but not as badly as he had a moment before, so Stiles counted it as a win.
He studied all of the bruises and cuts he could see, and decided that none of them were life threatening, as bad as they looked. “You got lucky,” he said, starting to calm down, now that he’d reassured himself that Derek wasn’t going to die on him.
“Yeah,” Derek said, and then he made a strangled sound. “Stiles…”
“What?” Stiles asked, and then realized that he was feeling denim. He looked down, and realized that two of his tentacles had managed to undo the button on Derek’s jeans, and were now trying to undo the zipper.
He took a deep breath. Okay. His tentacles were really good about showing him what he wanted when he didn’t want to consciously think about it, but right now he was on board. He just had to make sure that Derek was. “If you don’t want this, tell me now,” he said, looking back up to search Derek’s face for a trace of anything that would tell him this wasn’t what Derek wanted.
“We shouldn’t,” Derek said. “I’m still older than you, even if you’re legal now.”
“I’ve been legal for months, Hale, don’t even. And you’re really not that much older than me, whatever you may think.”
“It could put you in danger.” Derek gasped as the zipper gave under the gentle tugging of tenticular manipulation.
“I’m already in danger, simply by being a part of the pack, and even more now that I am what I am. Last chance, Derek.” Stiles didn’t look away from Derek’s face, but he wasn’t finding any revulsion or rejection, things he had expected to find.
Derek didn’t say anything for a long moment, in which Stiles’ tentacles gently pulled back the denim and pushed it down. Not enough to make his jeans fall, but enough to give both of them some room, if Derek gave the word. Which, of course, he didn’t, being a bigger fan of action than words. He kissed Stiles instead, pulling him close and kissing him deeply.
Stiles groaned and gave up on keeping himself retrained. As his tongue invaded Derek’s mouth, his tentacles slipped into Derek’s underwear and curled around his cock. The deep, shuddering breath Derek took was gratifying, and Stiles set to making Derek feel as good as he possibly could, given the still healing wounds he was sporting.
One tentacle slowly curled around Derek’s erection the way Stiles had come to love when he was in the shower, doing this for himself. Judging by the blown pupils in Derek’s eyes when Stiles pulled back to breathe, he loved it, too. Stiles grinned, and started the massaging motion that he just knew—
“Holy fuck,” Derek hissed, and his head fell back against the wall with a thud. “Stiles…”
“Like that?” Stiles asked, mouthing gently at Derek’s jaw, learning what it meant to have lips that were all stubble burned, but just flat-out not caring.
“Yes,” Derek said on a long breath so that it sounded like a hiss.
Stiles grinned and took a slow step backwards, making sure that Derek was coming with him. He didn’t have much choice, wrapped around him the way Stiles was, but no need to cause pain when pleasure was the intent. “I’ve got lube in my room,” he said, smirking a little. “That’ll make this feel a whole lot better.”
They walked down the hall like that, kissing and touching each other. Stiles was seriously glad for tentacles at this point, because wow, did Derek really respond to them, but it also gave him fingers to be touching Derek’s impressive shoulders, sliding across his chest, up his back, all while stroking his cock and slowly unbuttoning and unzipping his own jeans.
“Tentacles are awesome,” Stiles said, and pushed his jeans and underwear off his hips, stepping on the legs to pull them off, so incredibly glad he’d been barefoot as well as shirtless. He tugged at the remains of Derek’s shirt--really, the collar of a tee shirt attached to one shoulder, and hanging pieces of cotton--and pushed at jeans, getting Derek as naked as he was, while one tentacle unzipped the duffle sitting on his bed and rummaged for the tube of lube that was in there.
Once he found it, the bag was knocked to the floor and Stiles was pulling Derek onto the bed, cushioning Derek’s fall with his own body. He grunted at the impact, but he was sturdier than he looked, and anyway, he now had Derek Hale naked and on top of him, cock wrapped in one tentacle.
“Stiles,” Derek groaned, burying his face in Stiles’ neck and sucking lightly.
“Ahhh, no marks that I can’t hide under a shirt,” Stiles protested, popping the lid on the lube. “I won’t tell you you can’t mark me, just...nothing I can’t hide.”
Derek growled, but moved his mouth down to Stiles’ shoulder, so he counted it as a win. He squeezed lube onto his fingers, and wormed between their bodies, somehow getting it on Derek’s cock and his tentacle so that the slide eased and the friction eased back from the painful burn it had been approaching.
“Fuck,” Derek hissed against Stiles’ shoulder, and Stiles was pretty ready to echo that sentiment. This felt amazing, on a level that he couldn’t have anticipated.
Stiles pulled his hand free and it was immediately wrapped up in two tentacles that squirmed and wiggled and then one went for his ass, the stretchy burn familiar by now. The other...
“Derek, if you don’t want that...particular intrusion, tell me now,” Stiles said, feeling the warmth of the tentacle sliding across Derek’s ass.
In answer, Derek spread his thighs so that he was straddling Stiles’ hips more fully. Stiles groaned, and tugged at Derek’s hair, wanting to get at that mouth, that unbelievable mouth. He kissed Derek deeply as the tentacle penetrated, slowly pushing into Derek’s ass. It was tight, hot, and it felt amazing. He whimpered, thinking about what it might feel around something else, if Derek ever let that happen.
He felt Derek shudder, and groaned as the tentacle that had been wrapped around Derek’s erection unwound and retwisted, pressing Stiles up close to Derek. Hot and hard and perfect. “Derek,” he groaned.
“Stiles, fuck. How does that...feel so good?” Derek growled, and pushed himself up to look down at Stiles. His hips were rolling, forward against Stiles’ cock, back against the tentacle slowly fucking him. “Didn’t expect this.”
It took Stiles a minute to realize what Derek had said. He expected forgiveness for that; he was in bed with Derek Hale and there were tentacles involved. Who needed rational thought. “You’ve thought about this?”
Derek flushed, but he looked at Stiles steadily. “Yes. I have. I’ve thought about what your tentacles feel like everytime they touch me, how they’re not at all wet or slimy, but instead soft and smooth like your skin. How they’re warm and strong, and having them curl around my wrist or my waist is comforting like I haven’t ever felt before.” Derek’s hips were slowly moving faster now, and the tentacle buried in Stiles’ ass was working to meet the same rhythm.
“But you’ve thought about this?” Stiles asked, rocking up to add to the rhythm Derek was setting.
Derek hissed out a breath. “Yes, damn it. I’ve thought about what it be like to see you spread out before me, fucking yourself open with your tentacles, more than one, spreading you open, while one stroked you off. What it would feel like to have them buried in my ass, wrapped around my cock. To be wrapped in them while my dick is buried as deep in your ass as it can go. Fuck, Stiles, I’ve wondered what it would be like to have your mouth...your fucking mouth on my cock while your tentacles fucked me open, balled up into a knot that stretched me so wide I couldn’t do anything but come down your throat.”
Derek Hale, purveyor and lover of dirty talk; who knew? Stiles couldn’t breathe as he came, white hot sparks shooting down his spine. Derek’s words rolled over him, so much filth but oh god, he wanted it. He wanted every last inch of it, and he wanted it as often as Derek would give him. He crushed his mouth to Derek’s as Derek tensed, too, the warm spill of Stiles’ come caught between them, making the thrusting even more slick.
They lay still together afterward, tentacles slowly withdrawing from both of them, and melting away into nothing, until all that was left was the Stiles of old, fully human looking, but now flushed and sated. Derek’s face was pressed against his throat, hot breath ghosting over his skin.
“Derek?” Stiles finally asked. “You all right?”
“Mmm,” Derek hummed, and gathered himself to move off Stiles. Stiles clung to him tightly, refusing to let him move. “Uh.”
“No, stay,” Stiles said. “I don’t...I don’t want you to go yet.”
Derek pushed up again, resting on his elbows, so he could look down at Stiles. “Why?”
Derek’s words made him blink. “What? What do you mean, why?”
“Why now? You’ve been here for a month, or nearly. Why haven’t you done anything until now?”
Stiles frowned. They were apparently going to do this. Seriously? “Because you didn’t give me anything telling me that you might be interested?” he offered, frowning a little.
Derek frowned back. “I kissed you.”
Stiles stared at him, incredulous. “And told me it was to distract me!” He’d have flailed if he wouldn’t have hurt one or both of them.
“It was! But that wasn’t the only reason.” Derek frowned harder, looking pissed off about something.
Stiles suddenly wasn’t feeling this any more, all warm, fuzzy glow after his orgasm leaking away. he bucked his hips and pushed a surprised Derek off him, and was rolling off the bed, reaching for his jeans. “Is the only reason you wanted me because I’m suddenly not as breakable as you thought, that I’m now a freak that can do special things for you?”
Derek stared at him. “Are you fucking serious?” he asked, his voice an incredulous growl.
“What the hell else am I suppose to think?” Stiles asked, jamming his feet into the shoes sitting next to his--the bed. He reached for his duffle, grabbing out the nearest shirt to the top and yanked it over his head. “You don’t do anything until after I sprout fucking tentacles, you don’t say anything at all, and you tell me that you’ve been fantasizing about them. Not me, them.” He picked up his duffle bag. “That’s fucked up, Derek,” he said, and left the bedroom.
He ran to the kitchen, shoving his computer, cord, and mouse into his backpack, snatched up from the floor so fast that he gave his fingertips friction burn. Stiles was yanking the zipper closed when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Stiles,” Derek said, and Stiles felt his shoulders knotting up.
“What.”
‘That’s not...that’s not what I meant,” Derek said.
Stiles slung the strap of his backpack over his shoulder and turned to face Derek. “Which part, Derek? Because while I’m glad that you’re so accepting of my new little quirk, I don’t need a pity fuck.”
Derek flinched. Derek actually, seriously flinched, and for one horrible second, Stiles thought that maybe he got it wrong, maybe Derek is actually attracted to him for being him, that he’d missed the signals previously, and that he’s only now picking them up because he’s lived here for a month. In the next second, though, it was gone, and Derek visibly shut down.
“Don’t forget it’s about unconscious control,” Derek said, turned and walked back down the hall, slamming the door behind him.
It’s not until Stiles was in the jeep on the way home that he realized that Derek hadn’t stopped to put clothes on.
~~O~~
Point was, the world wasn’t fair, Stiles was a chaos monster, and he didn’t have days. He didn’t even have hours. About twenty minutes after he flopped down onto his bed, in his room at his father’s house--and how hard was it to call it home? Why was it so hard?--he was up and running for his jeep, phone pressed to his ear.
“Yeah, I’ll pick up Deaton on the way. Are you sure? Scott, I need you to focus. Scott. Scott, give me just two seconds of your time, god damn. He’ll heal, I promise. Because Isaac is a werewolf, too, and has super speeding healing just like you, and even broken bones don’t last that long. See? He’s already getting better.” Stiles was already in his car, racing toward the clinic, hoping that they’d warned Deaton to be ready for him, because he wasn’t fucking waiting. “Just tell me where you are, Scott, and then hang up. No, like. Actual--thank you. All right, I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
Stiles thumbed off his phone and dropped it into his cup holder, taking the route as fast as he dared. While his father might now know about the whole werewolf thing, the deputies didn’t, and he really didn’t need to be pulled over right now.
He skidded to a stop in front of a clinic, gratified to see Deaton waiting outside, case in his hand. He nodded to the vet as Deaton leapt inside, shutting the door and reaching for his seatbelt in one smooth maneuver. “Do you know where they are?”
Stiles nodded shortly, already back on the road at full speed. “Scott was able to give me directions around his hysteria at Isaac being injured.”
Deaton gave him a sharp look. “Isaac was injured? Erica didn’t mention that when she called me.”
“One of the wolves threw him into a tree, but he twisted mid air and it broke his arm. It started to set itself while I was on the phone with Scott, and should be fully set by the time we get there.” Stiles took a sharp turn, switching from pavement to dirt path, heading back into the woods. “We’ve got about three minutes before road runs out and we’re stuck with our own feet, Doc, you gonna be okay with that?”
“I’m probably in better shape than you are, Stiles,” Deaton said dryly, and opened his bag to take out a little bottle. “Here, hold onto this.”
“What is it?” Stiles said, taking it automatically. He glanced at it, but it was a dark blue bottle, and didn’t really give him any clue as to the contents other than it was a liquid.
“It’s a healing potion, believe it or not. I don’t know if you have the same healing abilities as the wolves, but now that you’re supernatural yourself, there are certain things that will work on you that would have just poisoned and killed you before.” He nodded at the bottle. “Drink it, it should keep you from anything but a fatal wound.”
“Oh, well. Anything but a fatal wound. Let’s just keep me from getting stabbed, shall we?” Stiles said, and managed to get the little bottle open, draining it in one gulp. “Auuuugh, that’s awful!”
Deaton took the little vial back, and popped it into his bag. “What, you expected candy?”
“I didn’t expect that!” Stiles slammed on the breaks as they hit the end of the road, and threw the car into park, yanking the keys out of the ignition, and throwing himself out of the jeep. Deaton was keeping pace with him as he moved, so that they both hit the trail running at the same time.
“Well, let’s just say I have a vested interest in keeping you alive,” Deaton said, and then there was no more talk because they needed all their breath for racing headlong through the woods.
The closer they got, the more Stiles could hear, and the more he heard, the less he liked it. Snarls and howls, yelps and whimpers, a few human like shouts, and all of it sounding like they were closer to too late than in time. Stiles and Deaton crested a ridge and were unable to stop, skidding down the otherside on a waterfall of leaves, mud, and other forest detritus. Fortunately, it wasn’t steep, or they’d have been nursing broken bones themselves.
Stiles was the first to find his feet, and he bounced forward, all awkward limbs as he took in the scene before him. Scott hovering protectively over Isaac, Erica in front of them, crouched, shifted, and ready to spring. Boyd nearby, but not so close that he’d hinder, Allison several steps back, crossbow at the ready, knives strapped to her thighs. Jackson between Allison and Derek, Derek fully wolfed out and looking pissed off.
Across from them, six wolves stood, crouched, transformed and snarling, while at their center, a woman stood, head tilted as she took in the new arrivals. Off to one side, Stiles saw the witch that had cursed him, and he had to forcibly drag his attention back to the more immediate threat. There would be time enough to attack her and beat her head bloody against a rock.
A little startled at the bloodthirsty nature of his thoughts, Stiles wandered forward and stopped next to Derek. “Hey, guys, what’s going on? Didn’t Derek send you home, Scott?”
Derek growled in his chest, shifting one step to the side as if he could protect Stiles somehow. The woman at the center of the wolf line smiled, sharp and knowing.
“So, alpha’s got himself a little bitch does he?” she drawled, hip cocked out as her arms crossed in front of her. “Didn’t expect an alpha of the Hale pack to go for a human, but I guess everyone has to go for the dregs when they’re at the bottom.”
Stiles laughed, sharp and bitter. “Lady, what are you smoking? I’m not anyone’s bitch, nor am I anyone’s dregs.”
Two of the wolves ranged behind her growled and took a step forward, but she halted them with a simple hand gesture. “Now, now, boys, the human doesn’t know any better. He’ll learn his place soon enough, or he’ll die like the rest of them.”
The witch barked a short laugh, but she didn’t say anything else. Stiles wondered about that for a moment; The woman, the pack alpha, kept referring to him as a human, and yet the witch knew he wasn’t. She’d made sure of it herself. So why didn’t the female alpha know?
“I think you’re the one that doesn’t know any better if you think that I'm going to let you harm my pack,” Stiles said, forcibly putting himself in front of Derek. It took a lot of force; the man was like a granite block when he didn’t want to move. “See, these? Are my friends, my brothers and sisters. They are my family. I found them all by myself. It’s a small family, little and broken, but good. Still very good.” Behind him, he could hear Erica stifling a bark of laughter and Jackson muttering, “Disney? Seriously?” but he ignored them. “I’m not letting you hurt my family any more than you already have, you spiteful bitch, so I suggest you clear out.”
The woman laughed long and hard at that, nearly doubling over in her mirth. “Oh my god, aren’t you precious?” she wheezed, finally straightening. “Being the alpha’s mate has given you some balls, little one. I think I’ll keep you. You’re good for a laugh.”
“First of all, no one’s keeping me. Second of all, I’m not the alpha’s mate, I’m just his friend.” Stiles felt Derek tense right behind his shoulder, and had to be incredibly stern with himself so that he didn’t elbow the man in the gut.
The woman gave him an incredulous look that slowly morphed to pity. “My god. You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Stiles ground out, starting to get really irritated with her.
“You reek of him, boy,” she said. “Your scents are so deeply mingled that I can’t actually tell the difference between you, now that you’re standing so close. Only mates smell like that.”
Stiles shrugged. “I spent the last few weeks at his house while we tried to work on this little problem you presented us with. Of course I smell like him.”
The alpha rolled her eyes. “Not the kind of scent that comes from spending time around each other. The kind of scent that develops when two people are meant to be together, meant for each other on a deeper level than anyone can consciously comprehend. It’s called mates, and you’re it for him. That kind of scent takes months, years to develop.”
Stiles went very, very still. Years. Months and years. Much, much longer than Stiles had been aware of his chaos monster side. Derek had tried to tell him, but Stiles had panicked, hadn’t listened....for what? Why? What was so scary about knowing that Derek was attracted to him?
“Awww, you really didn’t know!” cooed the woman, giving him a nasty smile. “It’ll be that much sweeter to kill him now, and keep you alive to amuse me, knowing that I’ve taken away your mate and you’ll never have that love again.”
Stiles stared at her. “Derek, move back three steps, and get the pack to move with you,” he murmured.
“Stiles...”
He could feel the negative response at his back, the tension, the fear. Stiles needed Derek to trust him on this, though. “Please,” he said. His eyes never left the alpha, whose grin was widening.
It took a moment, but Derek did take the requested steps back, and barked at the rest of the pack to do the same. Stiles was left standing alone, seemingly vulnerable, a large space around him.
Exactly like he wanted.
The alpha studied him. “So, what? You’re going to be the sacrifice?” she asked, taking a slow step forward. “Offer yourself up for the life of your pack? You’d do that to your mate?”
Stiles smirked and peeled off his tee shirt. “First of all, I don’t make sacrifice plays. Those are bullshit, and usually avoidable.” He toed off his shoes, glad that his habit of not wearing socks at home had stuck. “Second of all, my pack doesn’t need me to give my life up for them. They’re very strong, capable of defending themselves, and shredding the pack you’ve built around you.”
“Then why, little human, are you standing there, stripping, while your pack looks on?” the woman purred, standing just out of arm’s reach.
Stiles gave her a smile that he knew was blood curdling and cold. “Because they also know that they don’t need to take you down when they have me. And by the way, I’m not human.” He quickly shoved down his pants as he transformed, huge and menacing with a mouthful of row after row of sharp, serrated teeth. His four arms were tipped in dagger like claws, a foot long each, and curved. His height was now topping twenty feet, and his sheer bulk made him look twice that. He looked down at the woman now staring up at him in abject horror, and smiled.
She staggered backwards, one step quickly changing to half a dozen, then she was in the middle of her wolves who were also scrambling backwards, horrified. Stiles reached down, quick as breathing, and snatched her up. He held her in one hand, bringing her up to eye level, and smiled at her some more. She was now hanging a good eighteen feet above the ground, legs kicking uselessly.
“Put me down,” she wheezed, trying to breathe around the grip Stiles had around her ribcage. “We’ll go. Never come back. Put me down.”
“Swear on your honor as an alpha that you will never again invade Hale territory, or that of any of our allies,” Derek said, appearing next to Stiles and glaring up at the woman. “that you’ll take your pack immediately and leave, and you will never return.”
“I...swear,” she wheezed again, and her face was starting to turn a slightly alarming shade of red.
“Stiles,” Derek said, gently laying a hand against the massive leg next to him. “Let her go.”
With another sickening grin, Stiles opened his hand and let her fall to the ground. She hit with a crunch, but her pack didn’t even wait to see if she was okay before one had her up and over his shoulder, and they were running, far, far away from Stiles.
Stiles looked over at the witch who was now approaching slowly and cautiously, her eyes on Stiles’ massive form. He bared his teeth, fully prepared to rip her apart.
“Please...Alpha, would you be so kind as to ask him to return to his normal form? I have an apology to give him,” she said, sinking to her knees in a show of submission.
Derek looked up at Stiles, leaving the choice up to him. Stiles considered for a long moment, looking down at her, and then slowly, he pulled himself back, putting himself back together in a more human form. He immediately stepped back into his jeans and pulled them up. He refused to think about the fact that his pack had just seen his bare ass, and focused instead on the witch still on her knees. “What?” he asked her, glaring.
“I’m so sorry I forced you into this life,” she said. Her tone was far, far different than the arrogant witch from before, or from the day that Stiles had become what he was now. “Jennifer held my life in her hands, and that of my coven and family, and I didn’t know what else to do. She was forcing me to boost her pack, make them seem like an entire pack of alphas when they weren’t, and I couldn’t do anything.” She stopped, glaring impotently at the ground before taking a deep breath and looking back up at Stiles.
“When we came across you, when I saw what you were, and how your pack revolved around you, I hoped. I hoped for the first time in three years. I knew you and your pack could defeat her. I knew you could win. I just had to give you the means to do so.”
Stiles stared at her. “So what you’re telling me is that you did this to give us the advantage over the alpha who was holding you and your coven hostage, because you thought it would give me the chance to defeat her?” he asked, incredulous.
The witch winced but nodded. “Yes. it wasn’t fair to you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything you must have gone through, how you feel about all of this...everything.” She looked up at him, eyes pleading. “Can you ever forgive me?”
Stiles stared at her helplessly. She was actually asking for his forgiveness? After all of this? He looked at Derek, but Derek wasn’t any help, his face blank. Stiles looked back at the witch, aware this was his decision, and his alone.
“Thank you for your gift,” he finally said. “I don’t thank you for how you did it or the pain you caused, but...thank you for your gift. Now, get the fuck out of our territory and never come back.” He watched her scramble to her feet and run. He hoped her family and coven would be okay, but frankly, he just couldn’t think about that anymore.
He had bigger fish to fry. Stiles took a deep breath, and turned, not to Derek but to the rest of his pack. He looked at them, taking in expressions ranging from flat out shock (Jackson) to fear (Allison) to awe (Isaac).
“Was that Herman?”
Stiles blinked and focused on Scott. “What?”
“Was that Herman? That you turned into?” Scott grinned. “Because if it was, that’s awesome.”
For a moment, Stiles just stared at his oldest friend on the planet. And then he started to laugh.
“Who’s Herman?” Derek asked, coming to Stiles rescue when his laughing threatened to knock him over.
“The monster under my bed from when I was little,” Stiles managed to choke out. “I didn’t even...I just went for the scariest thing I could think of in as short a time as possible, and didn’t even realize what I’d turned into.”
“That was the monster under your bed?” Erica asked, looking disbelieving.
Scott snickered. “Yeah. He use to draw pictures of Herman in kindergarten, and the teachers would call his mom because they were so disturbing.”
Stiles gave him a lopsided smile. “I told you he was scary.”
Isaac frowned consideringly. “Why Herman?”
“My mom,” Stiles said, looking down for a moment. “She told me that if I gave him a name that wasn’t scary at all, he wouldn’t be so scary.”
“Fascinating as this peek into Stiles’ psyche is, I’d like to take all of you that fought back to the clinic for a check up,” Deaton said. “And we’ll let Derek and Stiles have a private moment.”
Somehow, he got the whole pack herded up and moving back toward civilization--Stiles wasn’t even going to consider whose car they were going to wind up in--leaving Stiles alone with Derek.
“So...” Stiles said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.
Derek studied him, looking impassive.
Stiles blew out a breath, because he knew this was on him. “So, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot and an asshole, and I panicked. I completely panicked, because you’re hot and you’re you and why the hell would you want someone like me, how could you want someone like me, unless I had something unique and weird and fetishy and--”
“Stiles, shut up,” Derek said, and Stiles’ jaw snapped shut. “It’s partially my fault. I didn’t say or do anything to make you think differently. I never told you how much...how much I’d come to depend on you. How much you were always on my mind.”
“You didn’t pull an Edward Cullen, did you?” Stiles asked suspiciously.
“No, I didn’t lurk in your room, watching you sleep,” Derek said with a snort. “But I did find myself wanting to be around you when it was unnecessary. Just to be around you. But I didn’t do anything about it, because I thought you hated me.”
Stiles took a deep breath. There was a lot circling in his head, going round and round and round, and it wasn’t very fair of his brain to pick now to stop working. “You love me?” he finally said.
Derek’s jaw muscle twitched. “I’ve loved you since you refused to cut off my arm.”
Stiles stared at him. “You asshole,” he hissed, hitting the arm in question. “We could have been having sex all this time!”
Derek stared at him. “That’s really what you’re taking from this?”
“Well, it’s that or beat our heads against the nearest tree for being stupid. I’m sorry I was an asshole. I forgive you for being an emotionally constipated mess. I think, all told, we even out.”
Derek seemed to consider that, and Stiles found himself holding his breath. If this didn’t work... but then, Derek was up in his space, crowding him, and nuzzling in for a kiss that was at once achingly tender and fiercely possessive. Stiles groaned and gave as good as he got, biting at Derek’s lower lips while his fingers tangled in Derek’s hair, curled around the back of Derek’s neck.
“Let’s go home,” Derek mumbled against Stiles’ mouth.
That made Stiles pause. “I..all my stuff is at my Dad’s,” he said, pulling back far enough he could see Derek’s eyes. And then he realized that yeah, Derek’s apartment was home now. Had become that when he wasn’t looking. Well. Fuck.
“Then stay the night with me, and in the morning, we’ll figure out the rest?” Derek offered. “I don’t...want to let go of you yet.”
Stiles rubbed his nose against Derek’s. “All right. I’ll come home with you. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You fuck me.” The growl Derek let out at that went straight through Stiles, and his cock pressed against his fly uncomfortably. “You fuck me while I’m fucking you.”
And then he was upside down over Derek’s shoulder, being carried through the woods to his jeep. Definitely a win.