Chapter Text
“Also! I don’t appreciate you entering the territory unannounced, magic tree stump be damned, and I sure as fuck don’t trust you with our territory, no matter what Derek says,” Stiles yelled, mid-rant, arms waving in not so silent fury.
He breathed deep, winding up for another string of his aggressive tirade when he felt a shift. He stumbled, slightly, but continued, unphased, when it happened.
His mouth opened and a god-awful sound poured out, angry and harsh, like a rubber chicken in an industrial press.
He sputtered, arms flailing but in place of arms, large awkward wings flopped uselessly around. More of those stupid fucking clown noises squeaked out, carrying through the clearing.
The prim-looking young woman standing before the stump smiled sweetly. “Much better,” her smooth voice purred. Her finger reached out to bop Stiles gently on his newly acquired bill. He reared back, aghast. “You’re such a pretty asshole.”
Her suspiciously syrupy smile, deadly demure, stopped Stiles in his tracks, though he didn’t know why. “Swans are the prettiest assholes. So this really is the perfect shape for you! This should keep you out of my way.” She clasped her hands behind her back as her smart, black, perfectly polished shoes gleamed against the rough wood.
Stiles’ eyes raked up, from shoes to thick white stockings, simple black skirt, up to her smart-looking black vest, set with far too many gleaming, multi-coloured buttons, right up to her stupid fucking hat. She looked prim and pressed and too fucking dignified as she stood in their woods staring him down as if he were the interloper.
Stiles hated her with a passion.
“Oh! Give your lovely alpha my thanks, this is so much better than turning you into a frog or a deer. The whole Swan Prince angle works so much better, even the name fits!” She sighed. “Too bad he isn’t a real prince. But then, you’re no princess. So, we’ll all have to make do,” she rambled, fingers fiddling with the embroidery trailing along the hem of her immaculate white blouse.
Stiles’ beak flapped, flabbergasted, as the light breeze kicked up into something more. He hunkered down. He instinctively tucked his long, winding neck beneath his wing. Leaves and branches buffeted his feathers as a maelstrom of howling, shrieking wind threatened to pull his wings loose from his flanks.
When the wind cleared, he found himself on the end of a dock on a lake he didn’t recognize with no road, trail, or path to direct him back to civilization.
Stiles sighed. Time to go find Scott.
*
Stiles wheeled above Deaton's parking lot. It should have taken him far longer, but years of correlating police scanner calls with google map satellite imagery helped him gain and retain his bearings once he hit the clusters of commercial buildings that popped up like matted whorls of hair between the houses and trees.
Stiles landed with only the minimum amount of awkward scrambling. His head popped up from an assortment of feathers to survey the lot. Mostly empty of cars, completely empty of people.
Nobody saw. Good. Stiles roused, smoothed his feathers back down into place and sauntered across the blacktop.
He held his head high, secure in the knowledge that the 'Deats would have the 'deets on a solution for Stiles. He'd get their attention, then the de-swanification would commence, ridding him of his feathery features. The flying was nice. And technically he was a dinosaur, since birds are all technically dinosaurs, but he wasn’t the cool kind of dinosaur.
Besides, one landing was enough to prove that he wasn’t meant to live as a feathered bipedal anomaly.
Maybe Deaton would actually teach him something for once without all that Socratic method shit. He played it through his mind, the thought of Deaton with that long-suffering expression he always got when the situation forced him to dole out information without making people work for it.
Apparently, that was a Druid thing. And apparently it worked wonders for plenty of people, but none of those people were Stiles.
He, unfortunately, had absolutely no luck with teaching methods based in leading questions. He grumbled to himself, wrapped up in his own frustration when an invisible wall completely caught him off guard.
Stiles sprawled backwards onto the handicap spot, blocked from the sidewalk in front of the clinic. He got up and tried, once more, pecking and poking cautiously.
The damned thing was warded.
Were Stiles in human form, he would have cursed up a storm, then tried some of his rudimentary spark bullshit to try to work a way around it. As it stood, his spark lay dormant, curled up asleep in his chest like the rest of him didn't have a care in the world. It was fucking purring, or might as well be, like it'd been wrapped up in a warm weighted blanket, fed soothing beverages and sung into such a profound state of contented, blissful slumber that he couldn't get through to tell the damned thing he needed its help.
Really, he'd need to have words with Deaton about how to prevent such inconveniences in the future. The fuck use was magic if all it took was a simple “go the fuck to sleep” from an enemy to silence it?
Stiles glared. He made his way over to Scott's glorified dirt-bike, flapped his way onto the seat, and waited. He'd get it resolved, just as soon as Scott left the clinic. All he had to do was sit and wait.
*
He was going to kill Scott. Shitting on his bike seat simply wasn't enough; it didn't adequately express his rage. It wasn’t enough of a payback to address the sheer magnitude of bullfuckery involved in that interaction.
Scott, dopey wonderful lovable brother from another mother Scott, walked out the front door of the clinic, ignored his damned werewolf nose, and fucking cooed over Stiles.
Like he was a pretty little pet!
He then did a single google search. One! And he decided, based on the top result, that Stiles was an invasive species. He didn’t even check other results, or try other searches, or– or anything! No, apparently “random swan suspiciously arriving at Scott’s place of work” meant it needed to be caught and rehabilitated.
He wasn’t even the invasive kind!
Even Stiles knew from his own reflection that he was a trumpeter swan, not a mute swan. Granted, he learned that from a math project that went just a smidge off the rails, (don’t ask) but the reason didn't matter!
The point was, Scott was wrong and Stiles wasn't invasive! He was 100% a native member of the Stilinski subset of the human species who just happened to be in the shape of a completely not invasive native North American bird. I mean, come on, he wasn’t even a swan, not really!
The worst part was, he couldn't communicate. The spell prevented him from so much as shaking his head no at Scott's wildly misplaced assumptions. He'd resorted to flailing around like an idiot, but that wasn't enough to clue Scott in to the identity of the big ass bird that was waiting for him on his bike like magic.
Like magic. Get it Scott? Because it was. Magic, that is, and he needed help.
But no. Scott chased him off, and Deaton took one look at him and said something about it being a learning experience.
Damnit. Stiles cursed up a storm in his mind as he swept his wings up and down, flying in an angry white whir of fury towards the loft. He'd get there, make a fuss, and the werewolves would either recognize that he wasn't just another swan, or he'd make them understand with the only tool he had available:
Terrible, horrible, clearly human devised, rage-inducing pranks.
Stiles settled on the balcony, prepping his throat as he waited for the pack to filter in.
*
A few hours later, Stiles still stood on the balcony, still honking his shitty little throat out. Thankfully, being a swan gave him a hell of a lot of throat to work with. He was intent on letting every single goddamned person in his pack know it, and he had. Yet somehow, despite his racket, it sounded like they decided on a course of action about the whole missing Stiles situation. Honestly, it was a marvel. He didn’t know how the fuck they came to any decision with the racket he made, but lo and behold, they filed out and off into the night.
The upside was that for all their usual inattentiveness, apparently they'd realized he disappeared. He hadn’t even been gone for twenty-four hours. It was nothing short of a miracle! Granted, Stiles was supposed to help Scott find a gift for Allison’s birthday tonight, but still. He was proud of Scott for noticing.
Unfortunately, nobody put two and two together to get swan. He bugled himself breathless as they discussed “that damned swan” and missing Stiles as two separate issues.
Ultimately, Derek told them to capture the bird if possible but focus on their search for Stiles. Stiles was affronted. He was insulted! Ok, he wasn’t that surprised, but he allowed anger to cover his disappointment that his pack was such a band of idiots. Now, they were streaming off to different parts of town.
And he couldn't follow them all.
Well fuck.
He flapped his wings, chest suffused with frustrated annoyance. They were looking for Stiles? Stiles was right fucking there! At this point, he might end up wasting the rest of his life waiting for the dumbfuck wolves to realize that the magical fancy fucking goose was actually the annoying human whose disappearance left them all heartbroken.
Ok, maybe heartbroken was a bit of an exaggeration. The general consensus was that Stiles fucked something up, and would come back once he unfucked it, and several members made it pretty damned clear that no, actually, they didn't really miss him.
They had a point.
But! They went along with the whole search thing. Between Scott and Derek, none of them would get any peace until Stiles returned, so they all left. They were still looking for him. So that had to count for something, right!?
He would be touched if he weren't doubly irritated that nobody actually seemed worried. Apparently, Stiles disappeared while trying to do magic in the woods while a suspicious interloper traipsed through said woods translated to he fucked himself over, probably, but it'll all work out in the end to the pack. It was insulting. Sure, there was the thing with the buckthorn, or the hair incident, or the time with the sparrows… But it wasn’t his fault this time, and he wouldn’t come back.
That said, Derek seemed more troubled than usual. Stiles wasn't sure how that was fucking possible, but he definitely was doing a lot more of the whole brooding thing than usual. As in, he was back to pre-peter's death brooding levels instead of his new slightly less severe broodery.
Hah, broodery. It was the perfect nickname for the loft! He'd need to save that one. It'd probably stick.
Stiles flapped his way off of the wing-crowding balcony and back to the sky. He flew forward, caught some air, and circled the place. He eyed the imposing building, mind running through the cataloged list of weaknesses he’d found in the alpha’s lair when he noted the faint line of the skylight stark against the evening sky. Had he eyebrows, they would have shot up. As it was, his body did a weird pleased little dance all of its own accord as he landed on the roof above Derek’s room.
Stiles wished he could grin. He was certainly grinning in his heart of hearts. He knew, from experience, that the skylight didn't even have fucking mesh to keep the bugs out. Because apparently, “Werewolves don’t get mosquito bites, Stiles,” meant that Derek didn’t give a flaming shit about bugs. Which, rude! There were humans in his pack. Sometimes it felt like every mosquito in a twelve mile perimeter wanted nothing less than to take a bite out of his sweet, juicy ass.
If only people felt the same.
So, no netting. Usually, Stiles would be annoyed, but tonight? Tonight he was glad of the alpha’s idiocy for once. Because tonight, Stiles was getting into the loft.
Derek would live to regret it.
Still, it wasn't easy. He shimmied and shied, squished and squeezed his way through the gap between the pane and the sill. Swans were stupidly huge birds. It would be so much easier as a sparrow or a crow, but no. He had to be a twenty-five pound fancy goose squeezing like an octopus through a too-small space.
Seriously, inconvenient much?
He slid through the gap, finally dropping into the room below. He landed in a flutter of awkward flapping wings. His feathers rustled as he righted himself. Wings tucked themselves neatly back where they belong as he took stock of his surroundings.
The loft was empty. He honked in victory.
Those scarves were his.
Stiles sauntered on through like he owned the place. For all intents and purposes, he did, for now. He’d fill the place with his scent and maybe leave a few indications that he wasn’t a damned animal.
In retrospect, trusting Scott’s nose was a dumb move. You couldn’t rely on Scott’s sniffer for anything but Allison. If you wanted a sniffer you could count on, you needed Derek. He'd get one whiff of Stiles, wrinkle his dumb fucking nose, and bark at the others to help figure out how to fix him with concerned glare #5, then he’d be an even bigger asshole to make up for the whole ‘being helpful’ thing.
Either that, or the damned spell dampened his smell. For now, he decided to be cautiously optimistic.
>In the meantime, Stiles was stationed in the loft with time to kill. It took half a second for anticipation to turn to impatience, and about a full minute for impatience to turn to full-out soul-consuming boredom. What's a bored dude turned swan to do in a loft full of annoying beta belongings?
Raid time!
He stayed away from Erica’s stuff. Erica was abjectly terrifying. Same with Boyd, but also because you don't fuck with Boyd. You fuck with Boyd, he fucks with you, and he is objectively superior at it in every way possible.
That, and the Argent basement. They didn’t talk about the Argent basement. They had a mutual ‘don’t fuck with each other’ pact.
But mostly, because they’d probably eat him if the scent thing didn’t pan out.
The thing is, they didn’t know the swan was Stiles, ergo, they would probably eat him alive. Literally. Ok, they’d probably kill him first, but the eating of the Stiles might be a tangible reality if he wasn’t careful! He would bet actual money that Boyd owned at least one fantasy cookbook with instructions and recipes that included details about field dressing and cooking up a swan for delicious unintentionally cannibalistic consumption.
Friends didn’t let friends become cannibals.
So no, he didn't fuck with Erica or Boyd’s stuff, which left Derek and Isaac.
He squeaked gleefully as he waddled into Isaac's room, designs of mischief dancing in his mind. He hobbled over to the scarves and pulled them out, one by one, into the living room. He thought it would make a half-way decent nest, but looking at it now? Nope. Not even half-way decent, they made a terrible nest. It was lacking.
He sat back and surveyed his work. The scarves were nice, but it needed a foundation. Something to give it structure. Heft. Thickness. Warmth.
That something was clearly Derek’s henleys.
Stiles waddled off to Derek's room with a spring in his step and glee in his heart. It took some finagling, but he successfully pulled out every damned Henley the man owned. Now he was talking! A soft scarfy lining atop a sturdy Henley base made for an excellent nest. He was comfortable. He was proud. He was looking forward to the look on Isaac’s face when he saw how Stiles had used his scarves.
Stiles settled in, content to wait for the wandering wolves to return home.
Honestly, Stiles could sorta see why Isaac liked scarves. They were soft and comfortable. Granted, wearing them in California in the summer wasn't exactly a pro move. It was weird. And not Stiles style weird either, just, weird. Like, sure fashion was a thing, but so was heat stroke, and werewolves ran hot. He didn't get why the guy hadn't ditched the fucking things. But no, apparently scarves were Isaac’s thing and wouldn’t be abandoned even in the sultry summer sun.
Man, Isaac. What a weirdo, he thought, as his leathery inhuman feet slapped along the floor.
Still. They made for excellent nest material. He started dozing off. The assortment of Henleys in the shape of a nest lined with Isaac's scarves made for the best sleep he'd had in gods knew how long. He settled in with a smile in his heart, imagining their faces when they realized Stiles wasn’t just some fucking swan, no.
He was the master criminal they had all come to know and love.
And if Derek’s nose failed him, he’d keep this shit up until they recognized the genius intellect behind Stilinski brand swan pranks. Stiles drifted off with fond thoughts of all the terrible, clearly human pranks he could pull before they realized he wasn’t what he seemed. It wouldn’t take long, he was sure, but it would be hilarious while it lasted.
*
An ungodly screeching erupted from the doorway. Stiles ruffled his feathers, blinking his way back to consciousness. Erica gushed. He preened. Boyd stood beside her, bemused. Isaac came behind them and in the rear, Derek. Isaac glared, enraged, howling about dumb animals. Derek tried, and failed, to scare Stiles into some semblance of submission with his angry alpha eye trick.
That cleared up the scent question. Stiles flapped up from his nest, prepared for battle as Isaac rushed him. He saw his opportunity. He fluttered to the side and let loose a raging honk of battle as his beak grabbed the back of Isaac’s shirt. He ran around like a raging bull as Stiles clung, buffeting him with his wings. The other two betas laughed like the assholes they were.
Chaos reigned, overseen by the trio in the doorway until Derek stepped in to wrangle Stiles off his beta but Stiles, oh, Stiles was too smart for him.
He deftly dodged an outstretched swipe of a hand, slid beneath Derek and out the door under Erica’s sharp-toothed gaze.
He had the distinct impression that she only let him go because he made her laugh. Thank god. She still looked like she was five seconds away from pouncing so he got the fuck out of dodge, walking and flapping his way out of a window, onto the balcony and off into the wind.
He made a mental note to stop by the clinic again to shit on Scott’s motorbike. (He refused to call that hunk of junk a motorcycle.)
But first, off to find Lydia. In retrospect, he should have visited her first. If anyone in this Stiles-forsaken pack could get them to realize the obviously out of place swan was Stiles, it was Lydia.
He spread his wings, flapped towards the afternoon sun, and tilted his way towards the Martin house.
*
Lydia sunned herself in her pool, for once, blissfully free of the inane chattering of the idiots who considered themselves her peers. Even Jackson. He wasn't done sucking up for dumping her and wouldn't be for a long, long time, even with the whole true love scene.
In fact, the whole pack was on her shit-list today. She couldn't believe how stupid they were. She knew, she just knew there would be trouble when that woman showed up. Not from the women, no, but from Stiles, and Derek.
She should have done something about the tremendous amount of UST permeating the pack, from Erica and Boyd, to whatever was happening between Allison, Isaac, and Scott.
That didn’t even factor in her own more complicated relationship with Jackson. She wouldn’t kick his ass to the curb for being bi, despite Jackson’s inability to accept that. Then, they had whatever was going on between Jackson and Danny, and Jackson’s inability to accept that she wouldn’t kick his ass for being in love with his best friend too.
It was a mess. She hated it, but it couldn’t be rushed.
One of these days, Jackson would finally get sick of hiding and come out, and on that day, things would get complicated for precisely five minutes until she uncomplicated them.
But today? Today was all a Derek and Stiles shitshow. She wasn't stupid. A mysterious woman magically appeared in the middle of a pack meeting, claiming that she had some grand task with a magic tree.
Fine. Whatever. But the moment that woman locked eyes with Derek, Stiles got that look in his eye. She fucking knew he'd make an ass of himself. Nevermind that there was no guarantee the woman, whatever she was, would leave them a way to undo whatever havoc Stiles wrought.
Whatever she was, she wasn't a threat. She arrived in the midst of a pack meeting, announced herself, declared her intent to fix some damned tree in the preserve, then she’d fucked off back to whatever the hell she was staying.
The meeting, at least, went well. She had a feeling, the moment she saw the woman, that some obnoxious plan was afoot. A strange glee flicked through her face as she witnessed Stiles and Derek interact, like a fangirl spotting proof of her favorite ship.
All the pack knew was that she was here for some magic tree, but Lydia? Even if she hadn’t guessed, she had insider information. The woman was in match making mode. She wasn’t sure the woman’s plan would work. Still, who was she to argue? She would enjoy the schadenfreude after everything Stiles put her through.
The woman appeared in the passenger seat as she’d pulled away from the loft. A short conversation later and she knew for a fact that Stiles would, at least, be something large enough to track and obtrusive enough to stand out like a sore thumb.
Now to wait for the idiots to figure out the cure. She gave them exactly three weeks before she'd storm in there and force them to kiss and make up before she personally made plans for roasted swan.
The telltale sound of wings drew her from her reverie. She ignored it and sat, delicately sipping a glass of the wine from a floating cooler full of ice to her side. She struggled not to sigh as Stiles made a great flapping racket trotting over to the poolside table.
Stiles trumpeted, a god-awful racket that made her want to tape his beak shut. Huge leathery feet trotted. The rest of his feathery form waddled into her field of view, holding her phone.
She didn't even bother to tilt the sunglasses that hid her look of scathing disapproval. "I wouldn't do that if I were you, Stiles. Why are you here? I thought you’d be at The Jungle, harassing Jackson." The swan made an affronted half-strangled noise around the weight of the phone in his mouth.
Now she didtip her sunglasses. "I told you not to fuck with her. You're on your own. And if my phone has so much as the slightest scratch, you're werewolf chow. I know where Boyd keeps his wild game cookbooks."
She settled back, enjoying the sound of one very flustered swan before he took off into the afternoon light.