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“Are you in their pack?” Gerard asks. He cups Stiles’ jaw tightly and slides his thumb back and forth across the duct tape over Stiles’ mouth. “The Hales kept humans in their pack. Kept them like pets. Bred them to make more of their kind.”
Stiles holds very still, focusing on breathing. His nose is stuffy from tears of pain and panic, and every breath feels like it’s coming through one of those coffee straws that aren’t worth a damn. Probably because they’re for stirring and not sucking, but if if that’s the case, why are they hollow at all? God, he’s dizzy. If he passes out again, will he drown in his own snot?
“Focus, Mr. Stilinski,” Gerard says. He slaps Stiles’ cheek, right on the part that already feels like it got filed down with sandpaper.
“Ngh,” Stiles groans. It’s supposed to be eat shit, Mr. Burns. Oh well.
“What I don’t understand is why they’d want you,” Gerard says. “They can’t breed you. You’re clever, but please, you’re still a teenager. You’re a liability.” He chuckles. “Unless there’s more to Derek Hale’s interests than we ever suspected.”
With his wrists taped to the stair rail, it’s pretty easy to hold still. Stiles’ options are tug and strain his arms or kick out and probably get his feet chopped off. Gerard Argent seems to be just that homicidal. But Stiles shakes despite himself, because every instinct in him is telling him to fight, that he’s fighting for his life. (In the process, he’d sure as hell like to land a hit across Gerard’s thin-lipped mouth. That would be so great right now.)
“He never sired a litter,” Gerard says. He rubs Stiles’ head like he’s petting him thoughtfully. It’s like he practices Villainy 101 in front of a mirror. “But he was awfully eager to roll for my daughter. Though who could blame him.”
Stiles adds another thousand hours of future therapy to tonight’s existing tally.
“Mnnh,” he says, tasting blood. Kate Argent was, in fact, pretty hot, but that’s kind of an off limits thing for a dad to say, in his book.
And wait—what? Derek? And Kate?
Oh.
Damn.
Gerard slaps him right out of his train of thought. Stiles closes his eyes and cringes away, trying to tuck his face against his arm because it really hurts. It’s not like getting tackled on the field. It makes his head and face throb and it hurts in his gut with a twisted, exposed feeling. He knows it’s partially psychological, but knowing isn’t half the battle here. If the battle wasn't over when Gerard started kicking him in the ribs until his vision went red-gray with pain, it ended when Gerard taped him to the rail and electrocuted him until his screams got stuck in his throat like he was some kind of broken squeaky toy.
“Let’s try this one more time, and then you can leave,” Gerard says. “Allison will be home soon, and we can’t have her hearing your cries of distress.”
Gerard rips the duct tape off Stiles’ mouth. It feels like Stiles’ lips go with it and he sobs, still trying to hide against his arm. If he keeps his eyes closed, there won’t be any more pain and there definitely won’t be any more cries of distress and leave, yes, that sounds like a plan. Leave means not die.
“The trick is finding the right frequency. Too low, and you don’t make a peep. Too high, and you can’t. Somewhere,” Gerard muses, lifting Stiles’ jersey, “right in the middle.” He punctuates it with a jab against Stiles’ belly. Ha, Stiles thinks. You stupid motherfucker. Wrong frequency. Then it hits him, like a clap of thunder echoing the empty snap of a bolt of lightning. He screams, chokes, screams, sobs.
He’s under it, suffocated by the pain, blind with it, twisting, convulsing, screaming, screaming.
When it stops, Stiles hears his own low, long moans, a keening sound that barely registers as human despite the dim understanding that it’s singing out of his own raw throat. Gerard slices the tape at Stiles’ wrists. Stiles hits the ground in a slump and doesn’t move for a long time.
He cries quietly, trying to sniffle and choke it back.
“Ah well,” Gerard says. “It was worth a try.”
Stiles looks up. They all seem so tall, so monumental—Gerard with his sparking wand of pain, Boyd and Erica strung up from the ceiling and looking anywhere but back down at him.
“Get up, Mr. Stilinski. I’ll have someone drive you back to school.”
***
Later, Stiles helps save Jackson by barreling into him with his Jeep. None of it feels as satisfying as he hoped it would.
“He scratched my Jeep,” Stiles tells Scott. It’s not untrue.
Scott lets him go, busy with Allison and Mr. Argent. Lydia is busy with Jackson. Derek and Isaac and Peter apparently-not-dead Hale seem busy too.
Stiles leans into the driver’s side door, shadowed behind the headlights, shivering. The final spooge of adrenaline that got him here has left the building. His legs feel like Jello and he hurts like somebody—well, like somebody beat him silly for two hours. There’s nothing Stiles wants more than his bed and about three days of sleep, and those things feel impossibly distant from this stupid, smelly warehouse.
“You’re crying.”
Stiles flinches away from the Jeep and looks at Derek, who is standing just shy of right up in his personal space. Instead of looking menacing with a side of uncomfortably sexy, Derek looks like a puppy someone smacked with newspaper. Repeatedly.
“You and Scott are uncanny with those werewolf senses,” Stiles says, as he wipes his nose viciously and immediately regrets it. Seriously? Even his nose hurts.
“Peter’s alive,” Derek says. His voice matches the blankness of his eyes. It’s really unsettling.
Stiles would be concerned if he wasn’t already concerned about everything. Every possible thing. He’s basically an intricate knot of concerns, wound and twisted so tight he’s not sure how he’s able to draw breath. The lack of fucks he has left to give bubbles a wet-sounding laugh out of him, and Derek’s frown grows darker.
“You’re hurt.”
“Yep,” Stiles says. “Your wolves are too, by the way. Gerard said they care about you too much to give you up, so they’re hanging out—literally—in the Argent’s basement. Maybe Mr. Argent can give you a hand with that now that Scott’s on the way to being his werewolf-in-law again. Unless Allison still wants you dead. I mostly only caught Jackson’s junk, and all that. So...”
Derek advances, and Stiles backs up, cringing. A spiky jolt of terror hits him, right in the chest. Stiles’ elbows bump against the Jeep, and he ducks his head and makes a soft, scared sound he’s not particularly proud of.
“Stiles!” That’s Scott, of course, close and concerned. “Dude.”
“I’m okay.”
“Derek’s not going to hurt you,” Scott says.
Stiles doesn’t look up. There’s this really interesting oil stain on the ground and his heart is thudding like it’s trying to stairmaster out of his throat. “Of course not. He didn’t just super stab Jackson five minutes ago. With a zombie werewolf I threw a firebomb at. So why would I even think that?”
Derek is a blur at Stiles’ peripheral vision, a bloody dark thing he’s not actually scared of at all. He doesn’t know what he’s scared of, exactly. It’s like the time he bit it rollerblading and broke his wrist and couldn’t bring himself to put the stupid things on ever again, even though they’d been a birthday gift from his mom. It’s like that.
He just really, really needs to not be here.
“Oh—my god,” he exhales, when Derek grabs his shirt and pulls it up. “Bad touch!”
“Stiles,” Scott says. They’re both too close, and Stiles snaps, punching Derek sloppily. Maybe it’s the element of spastic surprise or that numb, dead-eyed thing Derek has going on, but the punch lands. It lands like a car crash, mostly affecting Stiles’ knuckles. That doesn’t stop him though. He’s got momentum now. Stiles’ last stand, flailing every move he’s got against a bleeding werewolf and his best friend.
Scott crowds him against the Jeep, trying to grab his wrists, and Derek says something like, “No, let him,” that Stiles can’t quite process because he’s too busy losing his mind. He fights the way he would have fought if Gerard hadn’t caught him off guard, if the pain hadn’t grabbed him before he could figure out how to outsmart the crotchety bastard. He was smarter than that. He’s smarter than this.
He’s pretty sure he’s growling, and he’s definitely crying, and this must be what a nervous breakdown is like. After what feels like the Olympics of slapping and kicking, he ends up on the ground with Scott’s arms around him, and even though Scott’s arms are hurting him, they eventually feel like a hug and not a vise around his lungs.
Stiles goes limp.
It feels like he’s sinking into the cold concrete at his back. He opens his blurry, swollen eyes and sees that they’re mostly alone now. The others have either left entirely or at least walked away from the shitshow Stiles has been putting on. All that’s left is Scott, hanging onto Stiles like an octopus, and Derek, crouching nearby with the same dull frown.
“Sorry,” Stiles says, muffling it against Scott. He glances at Derek with a look that hopefully indicates that he’s not as sorry to him, but the venom seeps right out of it when he sees that Derek looks almost as bad as he feels, in a more chiseled, furry way.
“What happened?” Scott asks, helping him up to sit with his back against the Jeep’s front tire.
“It was just some guys from the other—”
“Don’t lie to him,” Derek snaps, his voice thin. “It was Gerard.”
Stiles scowls at him. “Shouldn’t you guys be doing something important? Like finding Jackson some pants?”
Total exhaustion is the only thing that keeps Stiles from yelping when Derek reaches out and grabs his shoulder. “Were you frequently dropped as a baby?” Stiles asks. “I thought we just went through this.”
Derek’s fingers slide under Stiles’ shirt at his collarbone. Stiles looks at Scott, hoping he’s got some insight into why it’s sudden molestation time. Before Stiles can formulate a question, a gradual sensation creeps at him, unsettling until he recognizes it as pain relief and holy shit, that’s heady. If this is what drugs are like, he can see why just saying no is a load of crap.
“What?” he slurs.
Derek keeps his fingers against Stiles, moving them along Stiles' throat to his jaw. He turns Stiles’ head and breathes out an unhappy sound, and Stiles is past caring because he’s dizzy with the ability to take a long, clear breath without his ribs screaming at him.
“I would kill him for this,” Derek says, “but I'm pretty sure Scott took care of that for us already.”
Stiles chuckles. Derek is being so weird.
Then he passes out, because hell, why not.
***
The last time Scott drove the Jeep home, Stiles was puking in a Trader Joe’s bag in the passenger seat. This time doesn’t feel much better. His headache is definitely bigger.
“No more werewolf drug stuff?” Stiles asks. He would need a long, bulleted list to catalogue all the parts of him that hurt, including his pride.
“What?” Scott focuses on the road. His werewolf skills haven’t improved his ability to drive a stick.
“That thing," Stiles says, touching his jaw where Derek's fingers had been. "With the not hurting.”
“I need both hands, sorry.”
“You can do it too?”
Scott makes a face. “Dr. Deaton showed me.”
“You didn’t show me, dude.”
“I thought it only worked on dogs.”
Stiles snorts. “That would be dumb.” He shifts in the seat and wipes his sleeve at the smudge mark from his cheek against the window. The Jeep is going to need some serious TLC after what he’s put it through tonight. “Where’s Allison?”
“Her dad drove her home. And Lydia and Jackson.”
“Where’s Derek?” Stiles isn’t sure why he’s asking. Thinking about Derek already gave him a lot of weird, conflicted feelings, and now he has the memory of surprisingly nice werewolf drug sensations to add to the list.
“He left with Isaac and... Peter.”
“So, he’s not dead, huh?” Stiles asks.
“It’s complicated.” Scott steals a glance. “Are you okay, dude?”
“No,” Stiles says. It feels good to admit it. No. Nope. Not okay.
“It was pretty cool when you ran over Jackson.”
“I’d call it more of a strategic impact than running over,” Stiles says, grinning enough to make his lip sting. “But yeah. It was pretty cool.”
The quiet night-sound of the Jeep lulls Stiles back to sleep, and he doesn’t wake up until Scott’s lifting him out of the passenger seat. Scott’s strength is something Stiles has never gotten used to. Scott still looks like kind of a runt, and it feels extra silly to be mostly carried by him to his front door.
“Stiles.” And... that’s his dad. Crap. “What the hell is going on?”
“Sorry, sir,” Scott says. “He came over to talk me out of beating those guys up, and then he fell asleep. I think he has a concussion.”
“Dude,” Stiles says, shooting Scott a weak glare. Scott smiles crookedly, turns Stiles over to his dad, and jogs off.
This time, Stiles’ dad doesn’t fall for any bullshit. He draws a chair up next to Stiles’ bed and offers him four Advil and a glass of water and a plate full of Oreos. And then he doesn’t leave, no matter how many times Stiles grumbles that he’s fine.
“You really thought I was a hero?” Stiles asks, hours later. It’s really dark in his room, and his dad is rubbing circles on his back, haltingly, like he’s falling asleep.
“I always have, son,” his dad says quietly.
Stiles is about a light year away from being okay, but for the first time in longer than he can remember, he falls asleep letting his dad chase away every monster in the shadows.