Chapter Text
I.
There is blood everywhere, and for a brief moment, Stiles does not comprehend what he is seeing. He cannot comprehend it, because it makes no sense. There is no way that Peter Hale just jumped in front of an Alpha and took the attack meant to end his insignificant human life. He would not do that. He is a conniving, sneaky, plotting bastard, and self-sacrifice is not in his plans. Not for Stiles.
Please, god. Not for him.
But there is no mistaking the way Peter is collapsing in front of him, insides definitely not inside of him where they should be. There is so much blood, and he is not healing quickly enough. “No,” Stiles breathes, collapsing to his knees beside Peter, not even noticing Kali who is staring down at them both bemusedly. “Not you. Peter!”
The older man’s too-pretty blue eyes find his, and Stiles is horrified to find Peter is smiling. He is dying, and he is smiling.
“Why?” Stiles demands, and he cannot stop the tears that are gathering in his eyes, or help the way his hands blindly start trying to find some way to get Peter’s guts back inside of his body, even though he knows it will not help, will never be enough to help. “This isn’t …why did you…oh god.” And he is all-out crying now, and he is only a second away from being hysterical. “You… why?” he asks him, almost plaintively.
Peter is still smiling at him, face almost gentle. There is blood trailing out his mouth and his left nostril, and Stiles knows the older man is choking on his own blood even if he is not making any sounds. One of Peter’s hands feebly grasps his neck and pulls him down, and he is so weak, so weak Stiles could break his hold without an inch of effort on his part, but he does not want that. He follows Peter’s movement, allows the dying man to pull him close enough that all he can see is his lively, fever-bright eyes.
“You,” Peter chokes out. “Always… for… you…,” and then Peter kisses him. It is a light kiss, gentle and sweet and absolutely, amazingly perfect, but for the taste of Peter’s blood and his own tears.
It is his first kiss.
II.
He already knows it is also his last.
III.
The taste of blood is still bitter in his mouth when he burns most of the Alpha pack to the ground with nothing but his rage and his will. Power pours fourth like wildfire, an inferno so complete that the Alphas have no time to realize their mistake, no time to turn and run: all they can do is burn.
Stiles wants that. More than anything, he wants to see their writhing bodies blacken and wither beneath the force of his devastation. More than anything, he wants to hear them scream in agony.
The man he has discovered far too late that he loves had been set on fire twice, once by Stiles’ own hand. Stiles thinks it is fitting retribution that those who killed Peter will know his suffering, will know the pain that drove him mad the first time Stiles had met him.
No one tries to stop Stiles, not even Scott.
IV.
The funeral is private. Peter Hale’s body is specially prepared by Deaton to prevent any more resurrections, and he is interred on the Hale grounds with the remains of his family. No one says any words, not to his grave or to Stiles.
They just stand there and stare, uncomfortable with being here.
He knows everyone is only here because of him, because he threw a fit when he realized the only one that had been going to attend Peter’s funeral besides himself was Deaton. Stiles knows they all had feared Peter and what the man had been capable of, and that no one trusted him. He knows that Peter had never been pack to them. But the man had saved his life, hadn’t he? No matter what else he may have been planning, Peter had given it all up for Stiles.
That alone deserves some kind of respect.
Right?
V.
Stiles spends a month in listless apathy. He eats and sleeps and attends school, but it is like everything exists in a fog. He dreams, sometimes, of Peter. Memories and fragments of truth, mostly, but sometimes he dreams of other things. Things that never were and now will never be. Things that hurt.
He knows he is being ridiculous, mourning Peter the way he is. He hardly knew Peter, could barely tolerate him most times he was being forced into his company, but…. But Stiles had always been drawn to him. Even at sixteen, terrified for his life and the life of his best friend, he had felt a strong pull to Peter. It was not because of the older man’s looks – though Stiles knows he had been a fine specimen of male breeding, he has never been blind – because looks alone did not do it for him. It had been the way Peter thought, his intelligence and his cleverness, his sly charm and witty comments that had drawn Stiles in. Even insane, Peter had an amazingly adaptable mind.
Even dead, the man had still been brilliant.
And part of him wishes Peter would pull another bunny out of the hat, wishes Peter would magically resurrect himself again, but most of Stiles knows if Peter had been capable of another resurrection, it would have had to have happened before Deaton had done his magic.
VI.
Always for you.
Stiles turns the phrase over and over again within his mind, trying to puzzle through the importance of the words. Peter never said anything without significance, he has come to understand, and these are the older man’s last words to him: they mean something.
And so he does what he does best: he researches.
Stiles calls in every favor he has with Scott and his pack, the Argents, and what little remains of the Alphas. (Ethan, to no one’s surprise, had chosen Danny over his pack, because Danny is awesome, and even Ethan knew that one either kept the awesome or let it go. And werewolves? Possessive little fuckers. As for Deucalion, well. No one really knew exactly what went on in that man’s head, only that he and Scott had some kind of thing going on, and no one was touching that with a ten-foot pole.)
Stiles gathers beastiaries and grimoires and journals, forces Deucalion to explain werewolf behavior and pack dynamics in full gritty detail, and forces Deaton to start explaining Emissaries and Druids and magic. He roots through his father’s cold case files for anything and everything relating to the Hales, no matter how insignificant. He gets Danny to track down every last penny that has left the Hale accounts since six years before the fire, and gets Scott’s mother to get him all of Peter Hale’s medical records.
He reads.
He compares.
He learns.
And, oh, what he learns.
VII.
Derek calls him, once.
It is the first time Derek has called him since Peter died and he left, taking Cora with him.
He spends a long time breathing into the phone, listening to answering breaths. Stiles knows Derek is waiting for him to say something, but he cannot find the words. Stiles is unbearably, uncontrollably, angry with him. Derek knew, he knows. Derek knew exactly what could have been between Peter and Stiles, and had said nothing. He had known all along that there was a strong possibility that this would end exactly as it did – with Peter dying for Stiles – and had said nothing.
Eventually Derek clears his throat and says quietly, “Research mates.”
And Stiles wants nothing more than to throw his phone against the wall, because Derek is, as usual, late to the party. “I’ve already reached that part, thank you,” he says coldly. “Tell me Derek, when did you first know that I was the end-all, be-all of your uncle’s universe? Because inquiring minds would really like to know.”
There is a startled, shaky, indrawn breath. His hand tightens on the phone.
“The second I scented you in the woods,” Derek admits unsteadily. “You were standing right next to his first bitten, and Scott wasn’t even remotely agitated by you. Your scent, your support, was the only thing keeping him in control of himself. I knew then you were the alpha’s mate, even if I hadn’t known who the alpha was.”
“You bastard,” he breathes. Because he has read the combined beastiaries of the Hale and Argent families. He has mined every scrap of information out of Deucalion that he could on pack dynamics and bonds and the effects of those bonds on newly-made alphas. Stiles knows now exactly what Derek is admitting to, and it is more horrible to fathom than Kali’s claws shredding Peter in front of him.
He draws in his own shaky breath. “Don’t ever come back to Beacon Hills, Derek,” he says, voice as calm and emotionless as he can make it. “You won’t like the reception if you come back.”
There is a long, drawn-out silence, before Derek finally says, “I never planned on it.”
Stiles hangs up. Looks at his phone. Looks at the piles and piles of research he has sitting around him, detailing everything no one wanted him to know. Detailing things Peter had never wanted him to know, especially after he had lit the man on fire.
He screams.
VIII
Mates are rare, and always cherished. It is one of the few parts of the supernatural world that has successfully made the transition into the everyday life of the normal world. There are special laws and clauses in place for mates, because that pull, that drive does not care about race, gender, age, religion, or anything really. Mates are mates. It is all.
The thing is, aside from the magnetic pull he had felt towards Peter, he had not had a clue about what Peter was to him until he had done his research. Werewolves, like any supernatural being, felt the pull much more intensely, but humans generally were aware of their mates starting from puberty. Stiles had gone through puberty and felt nothing. He had always assumed that meant he did not have a mate, just like 95% of the population. It is only after he does his research and forces coherent explanations out of Deaton that he understands that his lack of awareness had been due to his spark – those possessing magic, apparently, do not start to feel the pull of mate until their late teens to mid-twenties, due to the instability of their inner core during puberty.
Apparently, puberty made magic do wonky things in general, and it is some kind of evolutionary fail-safe that prevents magic-users from adding a mating bond to all those hormone-driven shenanigans.
He spends long hours after that conversation wondering if Peter died thinking that Stiles had rejected him and the bond that could have been between them, that his willingness to kiss Peter was a simple act of kindness for the clearly dying.
IX.
Always for you.
And that is the sad truth:
It has always been for him.
March 15, 1995 – Peter has a run in with a rogue hunter pack. He’s a beta, completely on his own. He manages to kill every last one of the hunters, but not before taking three wolfsbane bullets to the stomach. Statistically speaking, he should have been dead long before the Hale fire took place. He almost did die. His sister and Alpha – one Talia Hale – found him too late to do anything but take him to Deaton for what she thought would be her brother’s final rights. But Peter survives, struggles to hold on long enough for the right type of wolfsbane to be found so it could be burned out of him. He fades fast and hard, and – according to Talia Hale’s journal – only through the grace of God did he manage to pull himself off the edge of death. Interestingly enough, Stiles recorded birth-time is almost to the minute exactly the same as Peter’s miraculous second wind.
April 26, 2001 – The Hale fire. The whole house circled in mountain ash, the windows bared with silver, the air filtered with powdered wolfsbane. The house is a veritable death-trap. There is no way out, no way for any living werewolf to get out. The humans die relatively quickly from combined aconite poisoning and smoke inhalation. The werewolves scream for hours. But one werewolf manages to get out. Peter Hale claws his way through a silver-bared window and somehow manages to break the circle of mountain ash. He manages to get out. He does not see the paramedics or the firefighters or even his own family – he just keeps going, almost mindlessly, stumbling towards the road. He barely gets twenty steps before his injuries take him down. The medical professionals call it shock. Coincidentally, around the same time Peter is clawing his way out of his basement, Stiles is busy getting shot at the tender age of six in a convenience store robbery gone very, very wrong.
November 27, 2010 – Stiles gets bored one night as he waits with Scott for Mrs. McCall to finish her shift. Stiles is spending the night over, because his dad has slipped off the bandwagon and gotten drunk again, and he does not like being home when he gets like that. So, he is bored. He leaves Scott (who is preoccupied with Angry Birds), and just starts exploring. Stiles walks through the hallways, eventually finding Peter Hale’s room. The older man is still in his chair, his nurse having apparently not yet gotten around to preparing him for bed, staring fixedly at the wall. Stiles does not know what possesses him to do it, but he goes in. He goes in and opens a window, and starts chattering. He does not say anything in particular, just introduces himself, tells the catatonic man how much he thinks it must suck to have to be forced to stare at a wall all day, every day, and how if he was the man’s nurse, he would at least position him so that he could look out the window. (Stiles does not know until after he is putting all the evidence together why any of this is significant. But looking back, he can tell you that shortly after that visit, his father had on record a lot of calls coming in about a naked man running amok every full moon.)
August 31, 2011 – Peter Hale, newly made Alpha, completely insane from the combined pain from the over-zealous healing and the overwhelming instinct to create pack, bites Scott. Scott, who is wearing Stiles’ hoodie. Scott, who must practically reek of Stiles’ scent, considering how touchy-feely the two of them have always been.
Just four incidents in a large sea of them. These are the biggest ones, the ones that stand out the most, the ones that will catch the attention of even the most oblivious when laid out in a straight line for others to observe. But there are other incidents, little things, little presents, unexpected windfalls for Stiles and his father when things grew tight and weird between them, not to mention the trust fund set up for him for college that he had always thought came from his grandparents. All traceable through Peter’s accounts.
Always for you.
Peter had known. Peter had known what Stiles was to him from the very beginning. Peter had been drawn to Stiles with the same intensity that Stiles had been drawn to him in turn.
And Derek knew. Derek, who led Stiles to fight against Peter, who told just enough truth mixed in with his lies on pack dynamics to get Stiles to lead Scott away from Peter, to deny Peter his beta and thus deny the alpha any hint of mental stability. Derek, who knew just enough of the pull mates felt towards each other to never fully trust Stiles with anything, especially not after Peter resurrected himself. Derek, who said nothing, and condemned his uncle and Stiles to death because of it.
Had Stiles and Peter actually been fully mated, Stiles would linger for a year, perhaps, if he struggled against the pull of death. Because they had not, Stiles will linger longer, possibly for decades. He could go on dates, get married, and have children of his own, but he will never be fully whole, never be able to fully commit to another. And while the prospect of lingering alone for so long honestly terrifies him, the mere idea of such a half-hearted commitment is somehow even worse.
X
Stiles learns many things from many people.
He graduates high school and goes to college, because life goes on. He smiles and goes out and makes new friends, but he never really feels it. All he feels anymore is empty and incomplete, like he is hollow. But in the shadowed depths of his vacant heart, there lingers something vaguely anticipatory, a feeling like he is waiting for something, so he keeps going through the motions.
Stiles is a 26-year-old virgin with a consulting firm of his own that specializes in supernatural incidents when Lydia - for the last time - tries to set him up on a date with a wizard from Seattle.
Stiles smiles when he breaks Lydia’s nose.
XI.
There are precious few that Stiles loves, and because of that there are even fewer people that Stiles hates. He is aware enough to know that in order to truly hate a person, one must first love that person, and he loves precious few. Which, as it turns out, is probably a good thing. Stiles dislikes many people, and he could, would and has sacrificed the lives and happiness of others for those few he cherishes.
Derek had been one of those people. The things Stiles has done for Derek Hale, the things he has suffered, still leaves him gasping awake from nightmares more often than not. He knows Derek almost as well as he knows himself, had thought of the older man as something between a friend and a brother, had done everything he knows how to do to keep Derek alive and relatively sane, if not happy and content. Derek, to Stiles’ way of thinking, had suffered enough: he did not deserve half the shit that kept happening to him.
And then this.
The sheer magnitude of the betrayal is overwhelming. And Stiles is not just talking about Derek’s betrayal of him. Because it is not about Stiles, not completely. It is about Peter: a man who had been abandoned shortly after the fire that stole almost everything from him; a man driven mad by memories, inescapable pain, and the rejection of his new alpha. Yes, Peter killed Laura, and there is no excuse good enough for that, but Peter had every chance to do the same to Derek, and never had, not even when he had been a psychotic alpha.
But nothing is more poignantly driven home than the fact that Derek may have kept the knowledge of the bond from Stiles, may have misled him deliberately in the beginning about pack bonds and how they were developed and what they meant to a new alpha, but in the end it is Stiles who did not do his research.
It is Stiles who chose to remain ignorant to the truth until it had been much too late to do anything about it. It is Stiles who had ignored the strong pull he had felt to Peter. It is Stiles who with his every breath and spoken word and action fought that pull.
In the end, Stiles hates Derek because he cannot blame Derek fully anymore for the empty mockery his life has become. He only has himself to blame.
XII.
Stiles is 30 when he finally hits pay-dirt.
His consulting firm is one of the best in the business, and business grows every day. He does not earn much in the way of money, but what he does earn is worth more than money can buy anyway. Most of his consulting is done for information and knowledge, and one might be surprised about that if one was not aware of the supernatural world. Unlike the normal world, where anything worth knowing can be found within a few moments on Google, the supernatural world is excessively stingy with its knowledge. The Argent family, for example, is not the only family of hunters out there, and each one has its own beastiary, and each beastiary is completely fucking different.
And that does not even get into the other stuff. Grimoires in particular are extremely hard to come by – so hard to come by, in fact, that Stiles has only three in his vast collection. See the thing about Grimoires is that they have to be passed on willingly, by one of three ways: by right of blood, right of conquest, or by right of succession. Of the three he has, one had been left to him by Deaton once he had passed on (right of succession), one had been Jennifer’s (right of conquest), and the third had belonged to his mother (right of blood, and that had been a particularly nasty shock).
The fourth comes to him purely by accident, but is legally his by conquest, much to his client’s rage. He could give it up, there is nothing in particular that he needs anymore that he cannot find elsewhere, but for the feeling se gets as he holds it in his hands. He has lived his life because of a nagging feeling in the back of his head, something that told him he would find an answer to his empty heart and lackluster life if he just held on. And when he holds that fourth Grimoire in his hand, he feels nothing but pure anticipation.
It is in this Grimoire, so much more ancient than the other three he had, that he learns something that could change everything.
He learns how to bend time.
XIII.
There are restrictions, of course.
He cannot take anything back with him. He cannot tell anyone currently living about what he is going to do. He is only able to go back to a specific point in time, and will only be able to affect things for a period of 48 hours, if not shorter. He will not ever be able to speak of the future he comes from, and at the end of his time, he will simply fade out.
Most importantly, though, in order to go back, he will have to die here.
The decision is not even remotely hard.
Stiles may not be able to save his Peter; he may not be able to live a snarktastical life with him; knows that if he does manage to save Peter there is no guarantee that his past-self and Peter would ever be more than allies at best. There is too much history, too much pain for that to happen.
But he can see to it that his past-self will at least have the option, and the knowledge no one else wanted him to have. He can try to spare his past-self the emptiness that comes from losing a mate he had never known he had until it was too late.
He sets his affairs in order. Calmly selects which of his many employees will inherit his position as head consultant. Impeccably ties wards into every book in his office to be tied to the company, so that no one could steal the knowledge he had so painstakingly coaxed out of the world around him. Quietly returned home to Beacon Hills and said his goodbye’s to his father and his pack.
No one questions him.
Everyone in the know had known it had only been a matter of time.
Mates did not do death very well, even if those involved had never actually gotten to the mating part.
XIV.
Stiles does the ritual in the same spot where Peter died for the final time. He thinks it fitting that the beginning of a new world will begin in the same spot where his current one had ended.
He smiles, truly smiles, for the first time in fourteen years.
He breathes in and…
…closes his eyes.
Exhales and…
…falls.