Chapter Text
“There you are!”
After not finding Peter in the house this morning and a resulting bout of almost-panic, Stiles had done the logical thing and sent the elusive wolf a message. It had only taken a few seconds before he’d gotten a one-word reply that prompted him to send a follow-up question.
As little as a week ago, Peter’s evasion tactics would have made him pause and likely keep his distance. Now, though, he pushed for closing the distance between them—both because he knew Peter wouldn’t mind and because he still needed the occasional reassurance that Peter was safe and doing well.
He wondered if they were slowly slipping into codependency, but this close after the kidnapping, he felt he was allowed to cling a little.
As it was, Peter didn’t look annoyed at having been found when he put his book down next to the half-empty cup of coffee and turned his full attention toward Stiles.
“Why does it feel like we’ve done this before?” Peter asked, provocatively raising an eyebrow. But Stiles had seen the smile, no matter how fast it had been hidden.
“Ohhh, are you having a déjà vu? Nice! That means there’s a free coffee in my immediate future.”
“I’m not sure if I should continue to support your sugar addiction.”
“So mean! And untrue. Neither am I addicted, nor can buying me two cups be counted as support. Not compared to my coffee intake on campus.”
“That doesn’t sound like you can go without, you know?”
“Can’t go without caffeine, sure. But sugar? I can easily enough prove to you that I don’t need it.”
“Do it, then!”
“Your treat?”
“If I absolutely must…”
“And that’s why you’re my favorite,” Stiles chirped, congratulating himself for this easy win.
He came back a few minutes later with a coffee that wasn’t as strong and as black as he drank it to keep himself awake for his assignments, but thanks to the lack of any sweetener, it’d still count as real coffee by Peter’s standard. He found it amusing how intently Peter was watching him while he sipped at it—probably hoping to spot even the slightest hint of a grimace. That wasn’t going to happen, though.
“So,” he allowed himself an eager grin as he leaned back to watch Peter back. “I’m about to make your day. What am I going to get in return?”
“What? Was the coffee not enough?”
“You agreed to treat me as a challenge, not as a repayment. You’ll have to come up with something new.”
“I’m not going to suggest a reward without knowing if your offer would be worth mine.”
“You’re driving a hard bargain! And here I thought you loved me.”
“That doesn’t equal spoiling you, does it?”
“Touché. Also, because I’m feeling generous today, I’ll accept your heartfelt thanks.”
“In return for what?”
“For this,” Stiles smiled, pulled Peter’s phone out of his pocket, and slid it across the table. “Now you can retire your burner until the next crisis comes knocking at our door.”
“Don’t you dare jinx it! But also: Thank you!”
“You’re welcome. When Jordan told me he found it, I was able to convince him that it wasn’t relevant to his investigation. It wasn’t even a lie, so he handed it over with minimal hesitation.”
“Uh… should you talk about that so openly in public?”
“You forget about the existence of magic, worry-wolf. Portable ward stones are a brilliant invention.” The object Stiles pulled out of his jacket pocket to show to Peter wasn’t actually a stone but a piece of almost opaque amber sea glass with an array of runes etched onto its surface. “This one hasn’t been made by me, but it’s Dad-approved, so you can trust it.”
“I trust you,” Peter replied with so much conviction in his voice that Stiles’ heart skipped a beat. “Anyway, where was it, then?”
“In Gerard’s office. The guy who nabbed you apparently wanted to have one of his tech-savvy buddies try to hack it. But then he forgot all about it, found it in his pocket later, dumped it on the boss’ desk for lack of anything better to do with it, and forgot about it even harder. If you can believe that. Only Jordan’s very pointed questions made him start to remember.”
“A hunter with a memory problem? And he hasn’t been taken down before now? Somehow, I can’t imagine Gerard allowing this kind of liability on his team.”
“That’s just the thing, though. It happened to Gerard, too. And only those two. Jordan thought it was highly suspect and talked to Dad about it. They figured there was nothing for the others to forget because they didn’t know about you.”
“About me? What do you mean?”
“It was your talisman’s fault. Dad couldn’t do anything but theorize for the time he was in the hospital. But they finally released him about two hours ago, and the moment he was away from all that medical equipment, he examined Laura’s and Derek’s with a few funky spells. He’d have had a look at yours, too, but since you’d pulled your little disappearing act again—”
“Which isn’t pertinent to your story,” Peter interjected hastily, with a mulish expression he wasn’t even trying to hide.
“Really, Peter? It hasn’t been two full days yet since I found you in a warehouse after you’d last gone wandering around.”
“And yet, that’s got nothing to do with what Noah found out about the talismans.”
“Fine…” Stiles relented but vowed to himself that the last word about this topic hadn’t been spoken yet. He worried about the man, okay? “Since the results for the two available ones were the same, Dad’s guess is that they apply to yours, too. So you’re off the hook—for now. But it’s really the strangest thing. We all know they failed the moment Dad got sedated for his surgery. Laura felt hers fail while she was sitting in the waiting area. Derek came home spooked because of a comment someone had made. And you got recognized by a patrolling hunter.
“Dad had been sure that once people recognized you, that’d be it. They’d keep knowing. Because the way the talismans were designed, they ‘only’ hid you in plain sight while you were wearing them. But that’s not what happened. Instead, they started working again before he was back to full awareness. And they were stronger than before.
“That’s what got him stumped for a good while. His best guess is that his worry for the three of you was urgent enough that it influenced the intent behind the protection. And if what your kidnapper said can be believed, it must have happened as soon as the sedation wore off, even though he wasn’t able to make conscious decisions at the time, and fell back asleep almost immediately after.”
“So the opposite of what I feared was true,” Peter mused and leaned back in his chair with a rather complicated expression on his face. “I had a lot of time on my hands after waking up in that room. I kept going through everything I remembered Noah saying about how the talismans worked when we got them. And I tried to match that up with what I remembered happening that morning. The only explanation I got after a while was that there might have been some loophole nobody had realized was there—”
Stiles opened his mouth to defend his father’s honor, but Peter raised an eyebrow at him and kept talking.
“—Instead, I was working with too little information. I didn’t know that Noah was in the hospital. In fact, I kept on not knowing until later that evening when I wondered why he wasn’t coming back home after his shift ended.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t a shining moment for any of us,” Stiles winced. “I’d lost track of who knew what halfway through the day because it felt so much longer than it actually had been since you went missing. And Laura and Derek probably thought I’d told you… How long are you going to remind me of that?”
Peter’s sardonic smile wasn’t all that promising. Not that Stiles had any right to complain, considering he tended to be a little shit whenever he could himself.
“You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”
“That’s what I was afraid of. And if I made it up to you?”
“It entirely depends on your offer.” Peter leaned forward, tapping a finger against his lips as if deep in thought. Then he flashed Stiles a sly grin. “With the right incentive, I could be persuaded to let it drop.”
“Would giving you more information count?”
“No. But you’re going to tell me anyway. Because you’re a gossip at heart.”
“Pot. Kettle,” Stiles groused. “Just admit that you want in on the Argent drama, too.”
“So we know what that father-son-spat was about, now?”
“Yeah. Jordan finished interrogating the hunters this morning. He told us all about it right before I left to track you down.”
“Will you let that go already?”
“Hah!” Stiles all but crowed. Now he had the leverage he needed to force a truce! “If you let the thing with Dad’s surgery go?”
“... Fine. Now tell me!”
That had almost been too easy. Stiles allowed himself to sound smug as he dove into what he’d learned earlier.
“So the juiciest part is that the Argent clan doesn’t exist anymor and that it hadn’t been a matriarchy ever since Gerard’s wife died.”
“Are you telling me Gerard didn’t hand over the business once his precious Kate was of age? After he trained her thoroughly enough to make her the best hunter there is?”
“Best hunter after himself, you mean. The guy apparently still seems to think he knows best in all things. That’s hubris for you. Things might have imploded far sooner than this if Kate hadn’t always been so focused on her killing sprees. Had she ever seriously wanted to take over, it’d have been carnage, no matter—or maybe even because of—how much he’d formed her in his image.”
“True,” Peter nodded. Then he paused with a frown and backtracked. “And what’s that about the clan not existing anymore?”
“Well, seeing how the only active Argents were Gerard and Kate, and they’re both accounted for, now—”
“Wait! Kate’s accounted for? She’s here?”
“Ah, no. She’s recovering from a near-fatal injury somewhere in Illinois. May still lose a leg, in fact. She’s not going to be a problem for a good while. And Dad and Jordan are already trying to make sure she’ll be dealt with in the near future. If mundane laws fail them, they’ll find a different way. Dad had a pretty savage glint in his eyes when he promised Laura as much.”
Peter seemed to have forgotten how to breathe over the length of Stiles’ explanation. He only sat there with widening eyes and a slowly-spreading smile.
“Kate’s injury was the reason Gerard came here, by the way, not the upcoming anniversary of the fire,” Stiles continued. “Because Kate went down under friendly fire, and the guy who was responsible for it defected. They haven’t yet figured out why he decided to hide here of all places, but that’s what he did. Maybe he thought it’d be the last place Gerard would check. Might even have worked if he hadn’t left a trail for his ex-boss to follow.”
“Sometimes I seriously question the intelligence of hunter henchmen. One would think that staying under the radar is one of the first things they teach in hunter boot camp.”
“Hunter boot camp?” Stiles laughed, causing Peter to shrug in response.
“Most hunter clans do their best to appear like paramilitary groups. Wouldn’t surprise me if they trained their members that way, too.”
“Point taken.”
“So, Gerard and Kate are down. And how is it that they were the only ones still active? Chris was at the warehouse, too. He might have helped you then, but doesn’t he have a daughter? Now would be the perfect time to return to being a matriarchy.”
“Remember when I guessed that he hasn’t been a hunter for years? Turns out I was right. He’s been disowned because he kept refusing to introduce her to the hunter business. The way I understood it, Gerard would have taken her under his wing at any point, but Chris is out for good. His wife, too. She’s convinced he’s made the wrong decision, but she’s also big on family unity. Also, Allison does know about the family business and their primary prey. But she actually sides with Chris, so that’s where Victoria’s loyalty lies, too. And I bet she’ll be glad she didn’t fight him on it now. Because the clan is toast, one way or another. Even if they tried to reform with a less fanatic approach—even if they truly followed the Code going forward—the name is tainted now.”
“This feels surprisingly anticlimactic,” Peter said, blinking a few times and looking vaguely troubled. “All those years, they’ve been the monsters under our beds—our worst nightmares. And now they’re just gone? Because they accidentally stumbled across me?”
“Well, they’re not completely dealt with yet. Gerard might still try to cause trouble. But yeah, this time, they made some fatal mistakes. It didn’t start with you, though,” Stiles replied, making sure to keep his tone light and a smidge teasing. “Their first mistake was that they were caught trying to get to their deserter. That’s when Dad got involved and subsequently downed, leading to your capture. It was simply a series of unfortunate events. Although I find it highly amusing how fast the tables got turned here. They must have felt so lucky that they ran into you, getting the chance to tie up loose ends. But kind of before they could blink, they were the loose end being tied up. Karma’s a bitch, and for once, it worked in our favor.”
As he watched Peter mulling over all he’d learned, Stiles took another sip of his coffee—or he would have, had the cup not turned out to be empty already. When had that happened?
He got up to get himself a new one without Peter seeming to notice. Stiles, on the other hand, noticed that Peter’s cup was empty, too. He grabbed it with Peter still not noticing, and walked up to the counter to place his order. Time for him to treat Peter for once.
Peter looked confused for a second when Stiles put the new cup in front of him a few minutes later.
Welcome back, Stiles thought and hid his entertained grin.
“Is this going to be drinkable?”
“Why so suspicious,” Stiles asked, feigning offense. “I thought you trusted me. You said so yourself, not that long ago. Besides, the barista knows your usual. I didn’t even have to ask.”
“Are you trying to butter me up for something?”
“You mean I can’t just treat you when you’ve been treating me twice in the span of only a week?”
“You can,” Peter replied, finally smiling again. “It’s just not your modus operandi.”
“I call it personal growth. And,” and now Stiles couldn’t help the serious note that stole itself into his voice, “it turns out I want to please you these days.”
Peter froze. Then he looked from his coffee to Stiles and back again a few times, obviously trying to come up with something to say.
Stiles decided to beat him to it.
“So… this new, uh, development… My MM blabbed—”
A bit more haltingly than he’d like, and maybe a tad nonsensical. But he was nervous. That should give him the right to fumble a little.
“MM?”
At least it teased a reply out of Peter. Stiles counted that as a win.
“Magical Mentor. She hates it when I call her that, especially when we’re out in public. Hence the abbreviation.”
“Does she like that any better?”
“Hah! No. But when has that ever stopped me? Anyway, she got me an impromptu lesson on bonds after I managed to latch onto you the way I did. So I know that part of… this… is because my magic amplifies it. But I’m still only human, meaning that the impetus was yours. And—”
“I’m sorry.”
“Huh? What for? I’m not saying that I hate it, so stop looking so dejected. I was trying to say that I’m flattered… and humbled, actually. I know now that it takes a special kind of trust to open yourself to someone who hasn’t been born with a pack instinct.”
“Eh, it’s not like it took a lot of effort. Not in this case, at least. You may be human, but you still understand pack mentality. And you’ve always acted accordingly, even back when we barely knew each other. It kind of crept up on me, but at some point, I realized that of all the people I know, I trust you the most. You’ve made it impossible for me not to.”
“Are you implying that I’m some kind of catnip for werewolves? Wolf-nip?”
Peter dared to roll his eyes at the quip, the heathen!
“If that were true, don’t you think Laura and Derek would feel the same?”
“Are you one hundred percent sure that’s not true?”
“Absolutely. We are a tightly-knit pack, but not that tightly. And I also don’t share well. No matter if it’s with family or not.”
“Ooooh, possessive-wolf! I probably shouldn’t be as pleased about that as I am.”
“That might be the bond’s influence. It aligns your thought patterns even more closely to that of a wolf. Although… Now I wonder just how early all of this started. Maybe it’s been there all along, and we just didn’t know?”
“Would it be so bad if it was?”
“Depends on how you feel about potential coercion, I guess.”
“Look, the way I see it, my magic could just as much have coerced you. Or maybe it was a mutual thing. Who knows? I only know that Diane said our bond could only reach this depth because we’re uniquely compatible with each other. And because we both must have craved this kind of connection. I’ve been a clingy brat even before I met you. You have no idea how much I’d wanted someone to be there for me after Mom died.”
“Didn’t you have Noah?”
“That’s a tricky question to answer. For one, Dad was heavily grieving himself. For another, he still had his job and couldn’t just drop everything and fill the void Mom left behind. I may only have been a child, but I understood that even then. And then there’s the part of me that came to the horrifying conclusion that if one parent could be taken from me that easily, who was to say the other wouldn’t be gone just as easily at any point? So I tried to distance myself emotionally and wished for an alternative.”
“Not that any new friend would have been exempt from that same fate.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that far back then. But then there were suddenly three new people in my life, and I latched on hard. Because they seemed to be the answer to my prayers. One more so than the others.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to describe… I guess you could say I’ve always been sensitive to… uh… compatibility? Like, I’d meet someone, and I could tell almost immediately if I’d get along with them or not. Almost like a premonition or something. Come to think about it, it might very well have been a manifestation of my magic.”
“Is that why you tend to decide for others on how they feel about you?”
“If I were deciding it for them, it’d imply manipulation, wouldn’t it? No, I can simply sense their feelings or the potential for those feelings to develop. Not my fault if some people are deeply in denial, right?” he winked at Peter.
“Are you accusing me of something here?”
“You? No. I knew right away you were comfortable around me. Nobody else had ever been that much at ease with me upon our first meeting before. Nobody else has been ever since.”
“You’re right about that. The ease, I mean. I woke up in a strange place, in pain and still reeling from the loss of so many pack bonds. But there was this kid I immediately felt safe around. It confused the hell out of me. That’s one reason I tried to keep my distance at first.”
“One reason. So there were more?”
“Sure. It scared me how protective I was of you from day one. And the worst thing to me at the time was your scent.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Not what I meant. To the best of my knowledge, you were an ordinary human. Yet, once my senses started to slowly improve, I kept being drawn to your scent. And I couldn’t understand why that was.”
“So you opted for a strategic retreat.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Another thing we have in common, then. Apart from you, and to a lesser degree Laura and Derek, I’ve kept my distance even from people I sense good things from.”
“Like that perpetually optimistic kid who tried to befriend you in middle school? I remember you had him faithfully follow you around for a while.”
“Yeah, around that time, I began telling myself that the more people I get attached to, the more I can get hurt when I inevitably lose them. And I ended up being right with that one, didn’t I?”
“Because he went to live with his father a couple of years later.”
“Did he? And how do you know that?”
“Met his mother in town at some point. I still remembered her from the early days of her son trying to win you over. And because I hadn’t seen the kid around for a while, I asked.”
“So you’re better at being social than me. That makes me oddly proud of you,” Stiles laughed.
“You say that as if you had anything to do with it.”
“Maybe I did? Maybe being around me made you a more extroverted person? Stranger things have happened.”
Peter snorted. “Hardly.”
And then they lapsed into silence.
It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, at least—it rarely was for them. But still, how had they gone from serious talk to banter to… this?
Maybe it was the emotional toll this whole conversation was taking on them. He didn’t think they’d ever shared that many secrets between them. They’d essentially handed each other weapons to severely hurt each other with if they so wished. That was a pretty scary thought, wasn’t it? And yet, he still felt safe around Peter, which went a long way to keeping him from freaking out.
“You’ll have to go back to college soon.”
Okay, scratch that! Now he was starting to freak out. How had this thought never occurred to him during the last two days? How was it that he needed Peter to bring it up for him to realize they might be having a problem on their hands?
“That’s the scariest thing you’ve ever said! And now I kind of want to say fuck college. Who needs a higher education anyway?”
“The part of me that loves instant gratification wants to agree with you. But I think we both know it’d be the wrong decision in the long run.”
“I hate that you make perfect sense. So… what do we do?”
“Didn’t you say that tapping into the pack bonds comes a lot easier to you now? Wouldn’t that help?”
“That’s not the same,” Stiles whined. “And I realize how selfish I sound right now. It’s just… Two days, Peter! I know that we’ve probably been bonded this deeply for years already, but we’ve still only known about it for two days. That’s so awfully short!”
“There’s also this intriguing invention called a smartphone. It allows you to text and to call, to video call even, if you so desire,” Peter smiled at him, probably thinking about the video calls they’d had before, which had tended to be more amusing to Stiles than to Peter. “I could visit every other weekend. And if all else fails… I could always spend my days in full shift and pretend to be your service animal.”
That suggestion shocked a laugh out of Stiles. Trust Peter to come up with the most outlandish idea possible. Even though—
“Wait a minute! Since when can you do a full shift?”
Peter’s smile dimmed but didn’t fade completely.
“I used to be able to do it… before. I’d lost that, like so many other things, to the fire. Thought it’d be permanent, just like everything else.”
“When—“
“Last night, actually. It was overwhelming enough that retreat felt like a good idea to me.”
“That’s why you came here.”
“Yeah.”
“Congrats, man!” he exclaimed, but seeing Peter’s eyebrow rise, he realized how that must have sounded and hastily amended, “On the shift, I mean. Not on the other thing.”
“Thank you, Stiles.”
And now the man was sassing him. It was deserved, admittedly, but still…
“Just to be clear, though, the service animal suggestion was a joke, right?”
Peter only stared back at him, his expression carefully blank, as if challenging Stiles to figure it out on his own.
“Right?” he repeated emphatically, waiting for an answer.
It didn’t come in words, though. Instead, Peter’s shoulders began to shake. And then Stiles heard him chuckle—a deep and highly amused sound.
“Your face!”
Yeah, yeah! Stiles knew. He could be hilarious sometimes. But hey, their bond was thrumming with happiness. And while the next couple of years would likely be challenging because of the distance, his earlier almost-panic was gone now. Because Peter was right. They had options.
Minus the service animal one, granted, but options all the same. Maybe online classes were feasible as well. So…
They were going to be okay.
And once he was done with college, they’d simply have to make up for lost time.
Stiles was already looking forward to that.