Chapter Text
Stiles has 'DH' inscribed below his third rib on his right side.
The writing is small and looks more like it's been carved into him than written with a black pen, the way the edges are ragged only seem to carry that theory further - the D is slightly bigger than the H and both letter slant slightly to the right in a neat scrawl... or carving. A scrawled carving. It's inconvenient, Stiles figures, having his soulmark on his chest. He could never take off his shirt in front of his friends, always changing in the cubicles for PE and eventually lacrosse practise; it's a thing. Not showing people your mark. Under 18, it's generally considered inappropriate. Stiles sort of gets why.
Scotts is on his right arm. He showed it to Stiles the day he met Allison Argent, and the joined KY on his arm didn't match, but Allison has a SM on her right ankle. Scott told him it was in blue, an unusual thing for a soulmark, and it makes Stiles wonder.
DH.
When Stiles looks at the bigger picture, it's amazing how many soulmates there are. A 75% match rate of all the registered people on earth - 5,750,000,000 people matched. Another 10% are widowed, or their soulmate died before they found them, and the rest are waiting, or not waiting. It's a risk marrying the person that doesn't have that little part of you scrawled on their skin anywhere, but it happens. And Stiles must think it would eat away at you everyday, gnaw on your heart, knowing that out there there is someone for you. Just for you. Tailored and made and perfected and yours, all yours. But you chose someone else instead, and any minute you could find your soulmate. They could be married, too, or they could be dead. Or hurt. Or... or on the other side of the world.
There are stories. A man who saw his soulmate mark on the wrist of a girl in the background of a news program, coming out a rave. She was in Russia, and he was in America, and they found each other, and they couldn't speak, but they could love. And it tugs a bit at Stiles's heart strings, makes that soft bit of him that he likes to pretend doesn't exist pulse against his ribcage, long for someone with the unjoined initials of his name to show up at his door, smiling about some impossible situation where they saw his soulmark. He can't picture what they would look like, a grey anonymous figure in his head. A beautiful, non binary being of light? An older woman with a 9-5 office job, who can't cook but loves to hike. Someone with a sharp mouth who can keep up, or someone quiet and slow who doesn't mind being left behind, who only wants to listen.
He wants to brush it off as a fantasy, but it happens all the time. Everyday. People find their soulmate and every little atom of their being falls in love just a little bit, and keeps falling love until the day they die.
That's how his dad has described it. Said every morning he would wake up, and he would find something new about Claudia to love. The wrinkle of her eyelids, the way some of her eyelashes bent to the side rather than up, the rough skin she got on her knees when she didn't rub sweet smelling cream over them and the ragged end of her nails when she picked at them or tore them against something harder. He said it reminded him that she was alive and always changing, always giving him something more and different and her to love.
Sheriff Stilinski had been drunk at the time, but the tears welling up in his eyes and the red of his skin as it gripped against the tumbler told Stiles it was all true. All very real. The way his dad always is when he's had a few drinks.
So - Stiles can't pretend what he craves isn't real, doesn't happen. Can't say it's a film trope or a book hook, can't lie to himself and think it's just an exaggeration for poets and songwriters to angst over. He wants to, that self-destructive streak that's been there since his mum's death egging him on, he wants to rip it to pieces and stamp on it until it's dead and broken. Because he deserves that, because he robbed his dad of that love and he doesn't deserve to have that for himself.
It makes him feel ragged at the edges. Like he's bitter and tarnished and should never show his soulmark or try and guess, never subject imself to maybes (Domonick Havvok in the year above? Dana Houx, the french exchange student who stayed for 3 weeks? or-) or wish for more. Because his dad is cut in half, and Stiles should stay that way too, to make things fair. Even.
He can't look after his dad if he's out with lovesick eyes and dreamy thoughts, can't cook when he's out on dates, watch his dad's health while he's trying to match soulmarks on those white-and-blue dating websites.
He has to be responsible.
Besides, the person who gets Stiles as their soulmate is better off without him.
Stiles knows that Lydia Martin and Jackson Whittemore are soulmates. He knows because he's seen Jackson's back when he's changing for Lacrosse practice. Jackson doesn't hide, doesn't cover the elegant rise and fall of 'LM' on his back. Not like Stiles does. Jackson always strips as soon as he gets into the locker rooms, like he wants everyone to know that him and Lydia Martin are a forever kind of deal, even though no one ever questions it.
And Stiles slinks off into the cubicles, staring down at his pasty, skinny body and wondering what kind of person carves their first initials into something rather than writes it. In other places around the world, where writing equipment isn't rife, the original way of finding soulmates still exists. The first mark that person makes on the world, the first thing that is innately their own - a tattoo, a scarification, or even a small cut they get while doing something that means a lot to them. It's funny, and strange, because their soulmates always gets it before they do. It happens here, too, with children who can't write or hold a pen. They fall while trying to colour in a drawing of their mum, and cut their arm but then the scar never fades away and turns to black, or blue or whatever other colour the mark takes. And their soulmate is born with that little scar, and it's a beautiful wonder.
He wonders if his soulmates lives somewhere far away where they carve their writing into wood, or into stone. The initials are in english script, so they're not from... hell. Stiles doesn't know where around the world they use different scripts. He doesn't know anything because he hasn't looked into it. He doesn't want to know.
He doesn't.
So, he pulls his jersey over his chest and takes a moment to just breathe, listening to the talk and clash of the rest of the team getting ready. His forehead is pressed against the cubicle door and it's cooling, and an immediate pressure in a way that'll become uncomfortable soon.
The more he tells himself he's not worthy of it, should just forget about it and move on, the more he seems to think about it, the more his eyes seem to catch the marks of those who don't hide it. He sees couples, now, more than ever, together, pressing marks or holding hands or just existing in eachothers space. It aches. It aches because he wants it, but not because he won't find it, but because he can't let himself have it.
He could be the 25%. They could be dead and gone. You never know, when they die. The mark doesn't fade away, you don't get some mystical dream and you don't just know.
But somehow, that hurts less.
Stiles doesn't even think about Derek Hale until he throws Scotts inhaler at his chest.
"Dude, that's Derek Hale," he says to Scott and then... DH? And his heart speeds up a little, because it fits. It's in the age range that soulmates tend to revolve around, within seven years, and he isn't from fucking france, and he's totally scary and badass enough to carve his name into stuff. Like, onto knives. He's also very, very attractive and very, very male, which Stiles is happy about because he's not sure how he feels about women. Other than Lydia Martin.
Stiles wouldn't mind.
Derek probably would.
The man turns back briefly at Stiles next words, about the fire, and he locks his gaze with him, all smouldering angry and probably more repressed issues than Stiles could count on ten sets of hands.
Yeah.
Better off not knowing.
Except he can't stop thinking about it.
With Damien and Dana and the other handful he tries not to remember, he looked at them and felt nothing, only held an idea of their possibility. Of their potential to mean something. But that was a soulmate was - a potential for perfection. A rich, deep potential, people call it. Stiles doesn't know what that's supposed to feel like, but it feels wrong to attribute that to the mild interest he's had towards the others.
And, Derek?
Well.
Stiles really wouldn't mind.
It's all physical, for while the others are average to good looking, Derek is model material. Derek has a symmetric face and a sleekly trimmed beard and this beautiful, straight nose and an absolute brow and a jaw that's so precise it could cut glass. Stiles wants that face between his legs, tongue slick against his skin, and he wants that face pressed against his neck while Derek fucks him. Hard. So hard he cries and has like, an epiphany about life.
He's pretty sure he could have an epiphany about life on Derek Hales dick.
And when his mind wanders to cuddling, how warm he bets Derek always despite how cold he seems, what sort of movies Derek likes and whether he reads a lot or not at all - when his mind does that, he buries his face into his warm and bites down on his skin until all he thinks about is the pain.
Stiles is good at taking things in his stride.
Werewolves are a thing, that exists. He doesn't let it go that he guessed it right before Scott, even if it was a joke (Derek almost smiles sometimes when he brings it up, and Stiles bets he heard him say it,) and humour is the thing that he has to cling through to make everything feel alright. Banshees, kanima, dead people, disappointing his dad.
Because his dad almost loses his job, and it's all Stiles fault. First he takes his mother from him, then he tries to take his job away, and it's a wonder that is was any hallucination at all that yelled at him at Lydia's party, and not the real thing. Though he knows his dad is too good for that, will take it out on himself before he ever takes it out on his son. He knows because he did the same when his mum died, drank and muttered to himself but never said a bad thing to Stiles, despite it being all Stiles's fault.
But Stiles still manages to make jokes, to make his dad look bad in front of everyone. Can't stop getting himself in trouble - if the Sheriff can't look after his own kid, keep him in line, how is he supposed to take care of the whole town?
His dad is a better man than him, and that's something he knows for sure now. Because Stiles could kill someone, now, and not feel bad if they were evil enough. He could kill someone and he could torture someone, and he would do anything for the people he loves, even he if he ends up on the other side of the law than them. It's his medium ground with Peter, the mutual recognition that Peter isn't inherently bad for protecting and avenging his family. The sick realisation that Stiles probably would have done the same in his place, would have torn through person after person to nail Kate Argent into the ground, maybe even raze her family to their very foundations in some kind of eye-for-an-eye deal, if he could. If he was Peter.
And he would kill Peter, too, for hurting Lydia. For hurting Scott. Because they are precious to him now, in ways he never thought they could be. Because you're not a true best friend until you kidnap people together, until you try and kill for them. And Lydia - Lydia isn't a stupid crush anymore. Lydia is fierce and beautiful and not for Stiles, not in that way. Because he knows now that while they're not romantically entwined, would never be after she met Jackson, they are friends. Good friends. And Stiles will protect his friends.
They are better than him, purer than him, and he's dirty and ragged and guilty, and he'll keep taking the punches for them, to keep them brilliant and alive.
Even if it lowers him in their eyes, sometimes. Even if they don't know it.
The Nogitsune takes this capability in him, the willingness to kill and hurt, and it maximises on it. The others, they act like - like the Nogitsune is a totally different being taking over Stiles body, storing him conveniently away. But no, no no. There are holes in these lockers where he's been shoved, gaps where he leaks through and the Nogitsune wraps around it. Twisting the knife in Scott - resentment. Ever since Allison, Stiles has been a second thought to him, a briefly beneficial sidekick to his plot arch. Scott never asked why Stiles had a split lip and a bruised cheekbone, never thought to ask how Stiles felt when the Sheriff was temporarily out of play. Because Scott was the hero, the main character, so Stiles listens to the squelch of his organs as they are cut by the blade they hold.
He's glad Jackson is in London, because he thinks he'd kill them. They'd kill him. The Nogitsune wants to kill everyone.
And being alone with Lydia? God, Lydia. His feelings, the old ones, are dug up and twisted into some perverted and ugly. The things the Nogitsune wants to do - they want to do. Stiles bangs against the metal door in his mind and begs it, no, no. He can feel his breath fanning against Lydia's cheek, can feel the way she's trapped and how her hair slides between his fingers. He can do anything. It wants to do everything. And there's that tiny piece of Stiles that wants to, too. And that's what makes it so sick, so fucking wrong. This is why he's never the hero, because he could be the villain. So easily. One wrong move and he could be the bad guy, and he'd never know because it would look right, to him.
But this isn't him.
This isn't him.
It can't be.
But in the end, it's still Scott that saves the day. That saves Stiles from this version of himself. But now that Stiles knows it's there, even as it shatters in front of his eyes, he won't forget it. It's in him somewhere, rotting so slowly it'll never quite fade away - waiting to get a grip, to stuff out the fever. And he hates himself for it. Because it's nothing more than himself, his possibilities. It repulses him, makes his skin crawl, and he locks it away carefully, shovels the rot into a strong wooden box and locks it with padlock after padlock. But he still knows it's there.
Still hates himself that tiny bit more.
And then, he sees it.