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There is no gradual fading back into awareness when Peter finally wakes from his coma. His mind is a hellish landscape of fire and pain and grief: unending, burning, on and on and on.
Until, suddenly, there is cold and quiet.
He feels the brush of his own eyelashes against his cheek, and for once the sensation isn’t another source of agony. It takes some time for his senses to focus, for him to truly see anything other than the blurry blue-white of a hospital room, or the chemical smell of antiseptic.
Eventually, his eyes catch on a smear that, slowly, takes the shape of a boy. Peter processes peach skin, brown hair, and not much more than that, with the boy pacing up and down Peter’s bedside so rapidly that he feels a little motion-sick. He thinks the boy is talking, but his ears are still ringing, and he can’t make out the words.
He is so tired. How long has he been like this? How long has his pack gone unavenged?
He needs to do something.
He needs—
He is so, so tired. It feels like he’s been burning for eons.
He feels the soft staticky hum of magic pass over his skin, and then he falls into the first restful sleep he’s had in years.
—
When Peter wakes again, his senses come back online much more quickly. He knows, even before he opens his eyes, that he is not alone. He can taste magic in the electrical undercurrent of the air. The tangy, almost floral notes he recognizes as healing spells, and he knows instantly that they have been used on him. He feels pink, and raw, and new. Strong.
But there is something else, too. Traces of copper, and a weight that clings to the edges of his awareness.
Someone has been engaged in very dark rituals indeed. Interesting.
Or, it would be interesting if he were in much of a position to defend himself, and didn’t owe whoever did this a debt for healing him. He has been in constant danger since before his family was murdered, and that, at least, doesn’t seem to have changed.
“Peter,” says someone. A boy— he sounds young. “Peter, I’m pretty sure you’re awake. You’ve got your plotting-while-fake-sleeping face on. Please just open an eye or threaten me or something so I know I didn’t fuck up the spell to heal you.”
…Not what Peter expected, but just as likely to be some kind of trap. Though… what someone would want to trap a random, apparently helpless omega for, he doesn’t know.
He does notice, though, that there is a certain intimacy in the way Peter’s name fits into the boy’s mouth; like he has said it many times before, with great affection. But Peter is certain that this person is a stranger to him. He debated internally, but finally opens his eyes, too curious to do anything else.
The boy can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen, and there is something vaguely familiar about the placement of the half-dozen moles scattered across his face.
“Who?” he tries to ask, but his throat makes a rough, dry sound and he chokes on the rawness he feels there.
How long has it been since he spoke?
The boy blanches.
“Hang on— hold up just a second. I’ll get you water. I’m sorry. You normally heal so fast. I haven’t done this before, and my magic is all weird in this body.”
‘You’ could possibly refer to werewolves in general, but Peter gets the feeling the boy means him specifically. He feels his heart beat a little faster, uncomfortable with his own lack of information.
The boy disappears from view, but Peter can still hear him shuffling. Peter tries to sit up, can’t, and his unease morphs into a wave of near overwhelming helplessness and terror. He is keenly aware that is throat is exposed. His stomach is exposed. The boy has had access to his unconscious body for an unknown amount of time, and the boy smells of dark magic.
He tries to shift.
Can’t.
His pack is dead and there is no one left to defend him—
He must make a sound, because the boy reappears in an instant. He looks… worried.
An act? He doesn’t smell like a hunter, doesn’t look like an Argent, and usually they stay away from magic users anyway, but he can’t be sure—
“It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m so sorry. Let me help you up, and I’ll give you some water. My magic is still healing you— it kind of rushed through a lot of steps, because otherwise your body was going to recover faster than your mind and you would start doing things like seeking power and building pack on instinct and it would have been a whole big mess that would have gotten you killed—“ the boy keeps talking even as he wraps his skinny arms around Peter’s torso and heaves him up, propping him against the wall where most beds would have a headboard.
It is strange, to be touched. Peter wants to pull away, but still nearly keens at the loss of contact when the boy does so first.
Once he’s sitting, Peter finds he can stay up without help, which calms him a little. Apparently, it’s just the moving-his-body part that’s an actual issue for him right now, and if he’s too weak to do that, it’s no wonder shifting is out of the question. Before he can do anything else, the boy is pressing a small paper cup to his lips and blessedly cold, clear water is pooling in the desert of Peter’s mouth. He swallows, and the experience is blissful to the point of being religious.
When the cup is empty, the boy tosses it into a nearby trashcan and stares at Peter with wide brown eyes, like he doesn’t know what to do next, or like he’s waiting for Peter to make the next move. Peter listens, and hears the sounds one would expect of a hospital at night. Staff members are moving quietly, other patients are sleeping, but no one is nearby or headed this way.
“Who are you?” he tries again, and this time he manages to speak, though it sounds like the words pass through a rock sifter on the way out of his mouth.
A flash of pain crosses the boy’s face, but he hides it so quickly that it might never have been there at all.
“I’m Stiles,” he says. “Stilinski. You might know my dad. Formerly Deputy Stilinki, but he became the Sheriff a couple years ago.”
Well. That would explain why the boy is familiar. Peter makes a point of knowing the names and faces of everyone in town that might be useful, and that includes the cops and their families. But he remembers Noah’s son being much younger than the young man in front of him, and he feels a shiver of renewed fear.
How long, he wonders for at least the third time, was he asleep?
And does this mean the police are aware of what he is? He’d thought the Stilinski boy was entirely human when he’d seen their little family around town.
He tries to smile, to hid the nerves and the vulnerability and the budding anger he feels at his own helplessness. His face is as stiff and traitorous at the rest of his body, though, and he can tell from the naked concern in the boy’s face that he doesn’t have what it takes to be suave or charming right now.
On the bright side, knowing the boy’s identity and his continued awkward earnestness makes it slightly more likely that he is acting in a role closer to potential ally than threat toward Peter right now.
Perhaps the better move would be to play up his vulnerabilities so that, if Stiles does turn out to be planning something harmful, Peter may at least have some element of surprise.
“How long has it been?” he asks.
Stiles frowns, and his hand twitches forward like he wants to touch Peter, maybe to comfort him.
“Almost six years. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
Peter manages to raise a brow, biting down the sarcastic thought that it would have been fucking nice if anyone came sooner. If anyone helped him at all. Six years. Holy shit. That’s most of his twenties, gone.
Time to process that loss later, when he’s alone. Instead he says,
“I wasn’t aware we’d met, let alone that I ought to expect you.” His voice was still hoarse, but every sentence was easier than the last. He could feel his spark working furiously to heal him, now that it had (apparently) been jump-started by Stiles’ magic.
“Oh. We, ah, haven’t. Met, yet.” The boy scratches his head, awkward. “It’s a long story.”
Yet. Perhaps the boy has the Sight? If so, it would have been more helpful for him to prevent the fire, but Peter can hardly blame him for not utilizing his powers well at— how old must he have been? Ten?
“I can imagine. Fortunately, I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“Yeah. Okay, fair. Let me get you some more water, first. My dad’s working night shift, so I’ve got time too. You want me to get you some food?”
Soon, Peter will likely be ravenous, but he isn’t yet, and he’s not comfortable eating in front of a stranger.
“No, thank you.”
Stiles shudders. He gets the water anyway, and holds it to Peter’s mouth.
“I’m not used to you being so polite. Not to say you’re rude, but… I don’t know. This is weird. Are you feeling okay?”
“Perhaps you might start by explaining how you know me.”
“Right. Yeah. So. I’m from the future.”
What.
But that—
“Future!You taught me some dark magic shit for if I ever thought I was going to die, so I could send my consciousness back into my past self and do things again, but better.”
“Magic like that requires sacrifice,” Peter comments. Human sacrifice. It’s not an accusation, so much as a fact. Anything approximating resurrection has a heavy price, though there’s more wiggle room when one has access to the right moon, or to a banshee. Either way, he has trouble believing that this bumbling barely-more-than-a-child could pull it off.
But then, Stiles goes totally still for the first time since Peter has seen him. His face loses its blustering awkwardness, and something menacing glints in his eyes. For a moment, Peter can picture him, totally natural, covered in blood and moonlight.
It’s a concerning image, given that Peter is all-but-helpless right now. Concerning, too, since this means the boy isn’t a boy at all, but a man of unknown age, who managed to get Peter’s future self to trust him enough to teach him magic that was that twisted.
“Yes,” the boy/man says. Nothing else.
Peter won’t push. Yet.
“And how do we know each other?” he asks, instead.
Stiles softens back into his awkward, kinetic self. His fingers tap restlessly against his thighs, and he shifts his weight back and forth in an endless, waving rhythm.
“Well, originally we met a few months from now. You healed enough to start running on full moons, but you weren’t… right. You started seeking revenge, but you weren’t thinking clearly. Eventually you ki— you made yourself an Alpha, and after that you were able to plan a little better, but you still weren’t anywhere near as stable as you are now. And then… a lot of stuff happened. The Alpha Spark got passed around, and we ended up in a pack together.”
The word “pack” sends a shiver of longing through Peter, and for a second he looks at the boy with hungry eyes. God, the pain of the fire, of the loss, has been his constant companion for years, but almost equal to his suffering in the face of that is the irrefutable loneliness that plagues his every moment.
Then his brain catches up, and he shuts down the tentative hope that Stiles’ words momentarily brought him. He didn’t know this boy when he really was a boy, let alone what sort of man he has become. All he knows for sure is that he has killed people in order to be here, and that the patchwork of a narrative he’s cobbled together has about a million plot holes. It doesn’t inspire trust.
With as much subtlety as he can, he tries to shift in his seat, to extend and retract his claws. He can move a little more easily already, but he still isn’t strong enough to shift (or fight back).
“I wasn’t aware your family had any involvement with the supernatural.”
Stiles shrugs and pulls up a chair, so he can sit with his knees pressed against the sad cot the hospital has saddled Peter in.
“Oh, no. They don’t. I brought myself into the know after you bit my best friend and didn’t hang around to explain what was going on.”
Peter stiffens.
“I did what?”
“Bit a random sixteen-year-old in the woods without his consent? Yes. That’s why I prioritized healing your mind over your body. Things got really messy, and I’d prefer that he not be involved this time. Or, if he does want the bite, he should at least have a choice.”
Peter feels hollow, disgusted. Did some version of him really do that? He wants to believe that Stiles is lying (a creature with as much magical ability as he clearly has would be able to lie to a werewolf with ease), but … if he was running on pure instinct? There are two things in the world that Peter wants more than anything else, and those are vengeance and pack. He knows he cannot have one without the other, and he is desperate for both. If he felt the same burning need that he feels now, but without logic to restrain him…
“Shit,” he says, and finds the strength to raise a hand and rub his eyes. “And I just let you join up, but stay human?”
That’s one part that doesn’t make sense. Packs ought to contain at least three betas. If he was as mad as Stiles claims, he doubts he could have made himself stop after one.
“Not… exactly. Scott fought you. He wouldn’t submit, and I think you were too focused on managing him and Derek to bring in someone else who might cause additional infighting. Plus, the more time that passed, the more coherent you seemed— at least from what I’ve been able to piece together, and what you told me after. By the time we were alone together, you offered me the bite, but you didn’t force it when I said no.”
There is almost too much information to process. He feels a pang at the rejection, but more importantly, he hears his nephew’s name and reaches instinctively for his pack bonds.
In an instant, he flinches back. Touching the frayed ends of his bonds with his Spark is like touching the stump of a limb that has been roughly hacked off. It is gruesome, unnatural, infected. He is boundless; nothing remains.
So how can Derek be alive?
Cold horror swirls in his gut. Did his family survive, only to abandon him? He’d assumed he hadn’t healed because they were all dead.
“Derek is alive?” He asks, and he cannot hide the hurt or the hope or the anger from his voice.
The boy— Stiles— looks confused, before understanding dawns, and then grief. He reaches, slowly, toward Peter. When Peter doesn’t pull away, he touches the backs of Peter’s knuckles with fingers that are slender and almost cool compared to the heat that Peter naturally radiates. The way he touches Peter is so gentle, so caring. No one has touched him like that in a long, long time.
“Derek, and Laura, and Cora. And… well, other family that you might not remember. Derek and Laura are in New York. Cora is in South America. She doesn’t know anyone else survived.”
Peter’s fist clenches. How could they not know? How could they leave him here? He— he would have healed so much more quickly, if he’d had a pack to cleave to.
He feels his eyes flash. His claws start to extend, though they immediately retract.
Stiles seems unfazed. He reaches further, cups Peter’s trembling fist between two hands.
“You’ve blocked a lot of details out, about the night of the fire. Trauma will do that. But, there are bits you pieced together later, and, well, you’re a pretty cryptic guy, but I can put two and two together.”
“What are you talking about,” Peter snarls. It’s not really a question. He doesn’t want this boy touching him, or staring at him tenderly. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything, if he has been abandoned.
“The house was burning around you. You couldn’t get out. Everyone was going to burn to death. You were going to burn to death. Did you want to feel your pack mates die? Did you want them to feel you die?”
“Of course not.”
And the knowledge comes to Peter, hazy and distant and so horrible it shouldn’t be possible. He remembers choking on smoke, the feeling of his skin starting to melt, and being trappedtrappedtrapped. He remembers killing the children, splitting up with Talia so that they could snap the necks of as many pack members as they could before the pain got too bad for them to move. And then, as he watched himself char, air thick with smoke and death, mouth too dry to scream, Peter felt still more of his family dying.
It was too much. They could feel him dying too, he knows now, and knew then. So he’d destroyed the pack bonds himself, cut himself apart from everyone he’d ever loved, to protect them from one last hurt.
“Do they even know I’m alive?” He asks, after considering this. “How am I alive?”
“Derek and Laura know. They couldn’t help you though, with the bonds broken, and with you unconscious, they couldn’t renew them. And Cora was too young for her bonds to anyone to have properly developed.”
Anger and grief. Grief and anger. Is that all Peter is made of, anymore? It feels like is veins pump the bitter combination of the two, circulating through his heart, his lungs in a constant cycle. He tried to save his family, tried to save himself, and in doing so he forced them to abandon him. Do they feel abandoned too? Do they understand?
Stiles is still talking.
“—can’t be sure whether it was luck, or cleverness. I tried not to pry too much about that night. But according to the police reports, you were in exactly the right part of the house, that you managed to survive—“
And how could this happen?
If they’re alive, have they avenged the fallen Hales? Peter has been counting on this— the hope for vengeance has been the one thing that sustained him through years of torment. How hollow, now, to know that those responsible may have been made to pay while he slept here. Alone.
“Peter?” Stiles says, his tone tentative, his hands still gently squeezing Peter’s fist. Peter pulls it away. By now, he thinks he could likely stand, perhaps walk a short distance. Stronger and stronger all the time, and still nothing to fight or protect but himself.
“Why are you here?”
“I— What? I told you, I died, but I’d completed that horrible fucking ritual and it sent me back—“
“Yes. And why did you come here and find me? Surely there are others you ought to be more concerned about.”
“I wasn’t just going to leave you here to suffer when I could help! What the hell? I just told you that you’re pack to me, and you think—“
But what does pack mean to a human? The thought is bitter, but then, so is Peter.
“But we aren’t pack,” Peter cuts him off. If his tone is decisive, cruel, then perhaps that’s Stiles needs. “I don’t have any pack, and whatever version of me you knew isn’t who I am now.”
Stiles gapes at him. The moonlight in the open window catches his wide eyes, and they look almost amber. His brows twist, miserably, and Peter tells himself that hurting this human has made him feel better, not worse.
“Of course we’re not, yet, but the bond is there on my end. You just have to reach out and take it. But you… don’t want to. You don’t want me. Of course not.”
Peter does. Of course he does. The boy is powerful, and interesting, and Peter is a wolf. He was never meant to be alone— he needs someone.
But this is all too much, and he can’t just trust someone on their word alone. Not when Stiles knows so much about him and he knows nothing about Stiles. Not when Stiles seems too perfect to be genuine, based on the little he’s been able to put together.
The human paces a few steps, hugging himself with his arms. He’s wearing torn jeans that run a little high on the ankles, and a blue flannel over a black shirt for a band that Peter doesn’t recognize. His shoes are coated in dirt.
The boy huffs out a breath and gives up his aimless pacing, instead moving around the room with purpose, gathering materials. There is an incense stick which had stopped burning long before Peter woke, a bowl of clear water, several bundles of herbs, and in every corner of the room are little rune-covered statues meant to boost the power of healing magic.
All of these (except the water) Stiles dumps into a ratty backpack. The bowl he empties first in the sink, and then starts to dry with a handful of paper-towels.
“Do you want me to write Derek’s number down for you?” he asks, not making eye contact. His shoulders are hunched like he’s in pain. Emotional, rather than physical—Peter would know, being intimately familiar with both. “I’m pretty sure the one I have memorized is the same as the one he used in New York.”
What does it mean, that Stiles knows Derek? Was Derek in their pack too?
He wants to ask, but Stiles no longer looks so receptive to his questions. He’d wanted to drive him off, wanted space to recover, but it now occurs to Peter that if he’s wrong about distrusting Stiles, then he’s pushing away a much needed ally.
Peter grits his teeth. He needs more time to process his situation before he can determine how he feels about his niblings, so he doesn’t bother responding to the offer for Derek.
“What do you get out of helping me?”
Stiles makes a noise like he wants to scream in frustration, and is barely holding it back. Peter doesn’t mind. He used to get that reaction from Talia a lot.
“You’re not the only one who could use a friend, you prick. You were one of the most important people in my life for years.”
Stiles’ voice cracks, and he moves quickly toward the door with his bag still only half-packed. Peter can taste faint traces of salt on the air.
“Stop. It’s not that I don’t—“ he can’t make himself keep talking. He wants Stiles to leave. He wants him to stay. He wants to get up and hurt someone. He wants to go back to sleep. He doesn’t know what he wants.
Stiles still looks smaller, somehow, than he had at first, but he does stop packing his things and takes a moment to really look at Peter. He sighs again, rubs his skinny arms up and down, but he looks like he understands something of the line that Peter is walking. Perhaps he pities the older man for his volatile feelings.
“Okay. It’s okay. I’m sorry if I pushed… Do you want to get out of here? I bet you’d feel better in a house, rather than a hospital, and like I said, my dad won’t be home until late in the morning.”
Peter frowned. He could probably make it out of the hospital by now. He felt… well, hideously weak, but less like one wrong shift in his weight was going to send him toppling to the floor.
He really did want to get away from the hospital-smell, though, which he now associated with ash and burnt meat, from the way his memories had blended with his reality for the last few years.
“That’s generous of you,” he said.
Stiles shrugged.
“Like I said: you have pack if you want it.”
“Hm.”
When Peter tries to stand it… doesn’t go well. He staggars, starts to fall, and would have crashed to the ground if not for the speed with which the boy catches him. He lands with his nose at Stiles’ neck, their bodies pressed together.
Stiles smells electric, like magic, but also like paper, and ink, and sage, and a little bit of healthy sweat. It’s a delicious combination, and he presses his nose closer to Stiles, snuffling like a foolish pup. Stiles only holds him closer, in the seconds before Peter catches himself and pulls his face away.
“Don’t be mad,” says Stiles, “but a wheeled chair might be a good idea, for now. You’re going to need a while before you’re back to normal. By tomorrow or the day after you should be as strong as a human, and you should be your usual self by the end of the week, but…”
Peter is still hanging onto Stiles, an uncomfortable weight for weak, human arms. He clutches at the soft flannel Stiles wears, frustrated, but eventually nods his consent. There is a chair waiting in the corner of the room. Peter can almost remember being wheeled outside on it, now and then, in order to get a little sunshine. Or perhaps he’s making that up.
“How old are you, anyway?” Peter asks, as they sneak through the halls. Stiles is doing his best to avoid any nurses, and knows a the hallways here surprisingly well. Did he memorize these routes for Peter, or does he have others who have required care here?
“Twenty four,” Stiles replies, as they round a corner. “I knew you for eight years.”
Twenty four. That’s a year older than Peter— or, well, that’s not right. He’s lost six years. He’s twenty nine, now. The two of that have it in common, he supposes, that their mental age doesn’t match their exterior. He looks at his hands, sees that the veins are more prominent than he remembers, and wonders what his face looks like. Does he resemble his father more, now, than he had the last time he looked in a mirror?
Later, he tells himself. His mourning for his family is unending, but he hasn’t even begun to mourn the loss of the version of himself that he knew. In many ways, he is as much a stranger to himself as Stiles is. He wonders, briefly, what parts of him have burned away forever, and what will rise from the ashes, and then he sets that thought aside too.
“And what was I doing while you conducted the dark magic that brought you here?”
“…You died about six months ago, my time. We didn’t see it coming, so we didn’t have anything in place to resurrect you. But, don’t worry about it too much. I can prevent it pretty easily, this go-round.”
Peter feels a little sick. He tries to reassure himself that Stiles might be lying (and at this point, Peter increasingly doesn’t think he is), and if not, his death is still preventable. On the other hand, he’s already feeling weak and exposed, and this new knowledge doesn’t help.
“What happened?”
“The same thing as always,” Stiles’ voice is faux-causal. “A combination of hunters and not-so-rare monsters. You, ah, you took a hit meant for me. I’m sorry.”
“Ah.”
Eventually they make it outside, to a rusted blue Jeep. Stiles helps Peter out of the chair and into the passenger seat, even as Peter questions his choices. It smells like fritos in the car, but the air coming in through the window is cool and sweet.
His skin tingles where Stiles touches him. He feels like a body of water, rippling with the aftereffects of each moment of contact, from that first time Stiles helped him sit up to now, helping him in and out of the car.
“So, you’re helping me because I saved your life,” he says, like he’s sure. They both know it’s a shot in the dark, that he’s uncomfortable because he can’t trust Stiles’ motives.
“Nah,” says Stiles. “We saved each other’s lives all the time. No point in keeping track.”
Peter has no answer for that.
He watches the road as they drive. It must have rained, yesterday, given the way the headlights glimmer wetly on the pavement. He can hear the rattle of the engine, taste the fumes of every part of the vehicle that needs fixing. The moon hangs, round and heavy in the cloudless sky. It’s a nice night, made all the more beautiful when set in contrast to every moment he spent in that hospital, in that coma, and still he finds he cannot allow himself to relax and enjoy it.
“What about the people that killed my family?”
He has a thousand questions, but this is the most important. It has been pressed against the back of his teeth, begging to be asked, since before he woke up. He has only held it back for so long because the answer is so important, and he hates to be obvious with his vulnerabilities.
“In my first timeline, you killed them, but you were sloppier than you could have been, due to your instability. We’ll do it better this time.”
“We?”
“Well. You can do it on your own, if you want, but I could save you a lot of time researching, and at this point I’m pretty good at disposing of bodies.”
Peter swallows. He doesn’t know why, but this offer hits him harder than any of the I-care-about-you we-were-pack bullshit Stiles has sold him prior to this. Perhaps it is because his own nieces and nephew have failed to seek vengeance, where this stranger is willing. Perhaps it is that Stiles has nonchalantly stated his willingness to give Peter the thing he values most in the world (other than pack, which cannot be given). Either way, he feels something inside him crack open, and his eyes feel suddenly hot.
Later. The offer is meaningful, yes, but there is no need to make a fool of himself. He can cry in private.
“That would be useful.”
Stiles snorts, eyes on the road.
“I try.”
Peter spends the rest of the drive watching him, trying to decide whether he is a fool for considering offering him any form of tentative trust. His body is younger than Peter would go for in a romantic partner, they are both adults, mentally. And he can see potential there, in that mole-dotted skin, and the pleasing curve of his upturned nose. He is cute, now, but he will be beautiful. And there is something attractive about the strength of him, about his willingness to pay ugly prices in order to achieve his goals: Peter may never feel safe again, but with Stiles at his side, perhaps he can come close.
They pull into a small suburban neighborhood, and then into the Stilinski driveway. Their house is less well maintained that the others in the neighborhood, and it’s a little too cramped to be considered anything above lower middle class. Peter can tell immediately upon entering that no woman has lived here in a long time. He can tell, also, that someone in this house drinks too much, and it isn’t Stiles.
He doesn’t comment, even as he is reminded of his own negligent parents. Does Stiles know about them, already? If he pursues this, is he pursing a relationship that will be forever unbalanced by how much more Stiles knows about him than he knows about Stiles?
The possibility rankles, and it is only in his displeasure that he realizes how seriously he has started to consider Stiles’ implicit offer of friendship.
Damn him, Peter wants it, and he decides it’s time to see what happens if he gives in to the offer… if it’s even friendship that Stiles is offering. Best to clear that up, now.
“We were pack,” says Peter, leaning heavily on Stiles’ shoulder as Stiles helps him through the living room and up the stairs. His skin itches pleasantly where they touch.
Stiles nods, breathing heavily under Peter’s weight.
“You loved me,” Peter says, following a hunch. They’re pressed against each other, so there’s no hiding Stiles’ flinch.
“Yes.” Stiles sounds strained, and Peter feels a rush of jealousy for this other version of himself.
“I loved you back?”
“I— er— I think so? But we weren’t together, or anything. I think you were worried about the age gap, at first, and then there was always so much happening… the timing was always wrong.”
From the corner of his eye, he can see that Stiles face has flushed a pretty shade of pink, and Peter grins, feeling more like himself than he has since he woke up. If they were never involved romatically, that relieves him of much of the resentment he was beginning to feel toward his alternate self.
“We wouldn’t have to worry about those things now,” he says, once they’re safely upstairs. He’s immediately glad he waited, given that Stiles almost drops him.
“Well, you’re back to your mean self.”
Peter grins.
“I’ve never heard such an accusation.”
“Mean and full of shit. You’re lucky I like assholes.”
Stiles drags Peter into his bedroom. It smells stale, much less clean than Stiles himself, but after the chemical wasteland of the hospital, Peter finds he doesn’t mind. He flops onto Stiles’ bed with a waggle of his eyebrows. Stiles blushes harder as soon as he realizes the innuendo he’d inadvertently made.
“Shut up. What else do you want to know? Are you hungry yet? I could order pizza.”
Peter isn’t a big fast-food guy, but this seems like an occasion worth indulging.
“I wouldn’t say no to pizza. As to what else I want to know… do you have a plan for moving forward?”
“With what? The fact that I kidnapped you from the hospital? Killing Kate—“ fucking Argents— “and her conspirators? Getting you a place to stay?”
“I can manage plenty of that on my own, but I am curious how you’d prefer to manage things, given that you’ve lived this once already.”
Stiles blows a raspberry while he pulls up dominoes on his phone. He doesn’t ask what Peter wants on his pizza. He gets it right anyway.
“Well. I won’t push you about accepting me into your pack, but if not, we should reach out to Sourwolf and your nieces sooner than later. I put a lot of work into stabilizing your mind, but it won’t last if you stay an omega.”
Peter snarls a little, in reflexive reaction to the hurt that comes whenever he considers the bonds. But then… Stiles seems just as serious about being in his pack as he had been every time he’s mentioned it. And if Peter is going to trust him…
“Fine.”
Reluctantly, he closes his eyes and reaches to that place inside himself where the jagged remains of his bonds live. He feels sick, even acknowledging them, but forces his mind open anyway, feeling for anything different.
And there, gleaming like a candle in the darkness, is the buzzing magical cord of Stiles’ Spark, reaching out to him. He can feel it wavering, flickering: unattached, but ready to bind them if he only extends himself in return.
Peter is so tired of feeling nothing but pain. He wants someone who can protect him. He wants someone who will come find him when he’s alone and suffering. He wants revenge. He wants pizza, and snark, and an excuse to see the beauty in the world around him again. He wants someone to hold him when later comes calling and he finally has to address every feeling he’s been burying.
He wants to try living again.
He grabs at his own Spark of power, and reaches for Stiles’.