Chapter Text
The thumb brace helped for exactly four days.
On day five, Stiles was halfway through typing a paper when he discovered that his thumb was apparently capable of finding new and creative ways to be unstable.
Stiles was typing when he noticed that specific dull ache had settled into the joint, deep and wrong in a way that felt off in a way he couldn't name for several minutes.
Then he'd taken a quick inventory of his body and realized, somehow, despite the brace, the thumb was sitting slightly out of place again anyway.
Which felt less like a medical condition and more like being haunted specifically by connective tissue.
“You unbelievable little traitor,” Stiles muttered at his own hand.
Scott looked up from his homework on the floor. “You okay?”
“No, my skeleton’s crowdsourcing new ways to inconvenience me.”
He ripped the brace off and grabbed his thumb and yanked.
Scott winced, “I hate when you do that.”
“I’m not doing anything besides fixing it,” Stiles snapped.
Scott went back to his homework after that, though Stiles could still feel him looking up every few minutes whenever the typing stopped for too long.
The brace stayed on for another twenty minutes before that familiar dull ache settled back into the joint again.
Stiles froze mid-sentence then started ripping the brace off. “…you are SUCH an asshole.”
Scott eyed him, "The thumb? Or the brace?"
Stiles tossed the brace aside and snaps, "Both!"
Stiles almost brains himself putting on gym shorts.
It wasn’t even dramatic.
He got one leg through fine, shifted his weight to step into the second side, and immediately realized his left hip had tightened sometime during the school day because the second he lifted his knee high enough the entire joint pulled wrong and his balance vanished with it.
“Whoa, shit—”
He caught himself on the locker before he fully went over, hopping once awkwardly while several people looked over.
Greenberg started laughing instantly because of course he did.
“Did you just almost lose a fight to pants?”
“Mind your business,” Stiles snapped, steadying himself carefully.
The front of his hip still felt tight and weird, not sharp exactly, just stubborn in a way that made lifting the leg feel wrong.
Coach glanced over while Stiles was still standing there working his leg experimentally.
“Stretch before practice.”
“That narrows it down enormously.”
Coach ignored him and kept writing something on the clipboard while Stiles carefully tried lifting the knee again.
When that didn't work, he tried again, sucking in breath because he'd learned a long time ago, simply enduring the pain until it went away was all you could do.
That's when he noticed Coach was still looking at him, visibly annoyed now that Stiles was apparently still malfunctioning in his vicinity.
“Your hip flexors are tight.”
“What?” Stiles blinked at the man, because that sounded—competent.
“Front of the hips.” Coach gestured vaguely with the clipboard. “Stretch before practice.”
“I do stretch.”
Coach looked at him for a long moment.
“Okay,” Stiles admitted, “I stretch the same way raccoons wash food.”
Which earned him absolutely no reaction whatsoever.
Coach shifted one foot forward and leaned into a shallow standing lunge so slight it barely looked like a stretch at all.
Stiles stared at him. “That’s it?”
“You’re loosening the muscle, not auditioning for Cirque du Soleil.”
Suspicious, Stiles copied the movement carefully.
The front of his hip pulled immediately.
Then eased slightly.
Stiles blinked. “…what the hell.”
Coach straightened. “Stretch before practice.” Then he walked away like he hadn’t just fundamentally altered Stiles’s understanding of his own body in under thirty seconds.
Which was annoying mostly because apparently the man had been right.
By the end of the month, Stiles’ search history looked deeply concerning.
Thumb instability.
KT tape patterns.
SI joint pain.
Rib instability.
Why does standing still feel exhausting.
Hypermobile joint support.
Apparently that last one was a mistake because after searching it exactly twice, every website immediately started advertising support products at him with the terrifying confidence of a man who had read his medical chart.
Compression gloves.
Ergonomic desk setups.
Electrolyte mixes and pickle juice blends with names that sounded vaguely e-sports lite.
One ad for a full-body posture support thing that looked like somebody had invented suspenders specifically for connective tissue. The fact it was called Body Braid just made it seem more suspicious but curiosity won out.
Stiles clicked on it once, stared at the pictures for a solid minute.
“How the hell—okay, this can’t be real.”
By day three it had followed him onto three separate websites and Instagram.
“I think Google knows my pelvis is unstable,” Stiles informed Scott one afternoon.
Scott glanced over from where he was pretending to study. “That sentence feels illegal somehow.”
“I searched SI joint pain one time and now the internet’s trying to cyberbully me into buying orthopedic accessories.”
“Maybe it’s just targeted advertising.”
“Targeted advertising should not know this much about my musculoskeletal integrity.”
Scott leaned over enough to look at his phone. “What even is that thing?”
“This thing apparently works by wrapping straps around multiple joints at once. I mean, how does this even work?”
Scott tilted his head at the images. “That honestly does look complicated.”
“Exactly. The SECOND a hip moves weird I’m trapped in some orthopedic escape room.”
Scott snorted.
Stiles kept scrolling.
Most of it looked exhausting honestly. Expensive too, which somehow made the whole thing feel ruder. Every website acted like casually dropping several hundred dollars on support gear was a completely normal thing for a teenager to do.
He leaned back in his chair and pulled up Instagram on his phone. That’s when ads for something called Monkeybody started to show up, promising that they understood EDS bodies and could help you do a form of PT made for bendy bodies. Only they wouldn’t actually list a price anywhere, which in Stiles’s experience usually meant the number would psychologically damage him. So Stiles signed up for a ‘consult’ just to see if he could get a price, which he didn’t. So he canceled it because if they wouldn’t give him even a hint of the cost, it was definitely not covered by insurance and out of his budget.
Then the ads for Jelliebend started showing up.
At first he ignored it because by that point the algorithm had become medically overfamiliar and he no longer trusted anything being advertised to him online.
Then it showed up again.
And again.
Eventually curiosity won.
The thing looked disappointingly unimpressive in person.
After the internet had stalked him across six websites and three social media platforms, Stiles had apparently expected futuristic exoskeleton technology or at least something with the emotional presence of medical equipment.
Instead it mostly just looked like fabric.
“Fantastic,” he muttered. “I’ve been cyberbullied into buying medical shapewear.”
It was definitely not shapewear.
Probably.
For the first hour wearing it, he was pretty sure it wasn’t doing anything.
Which honestly felt insulting after how aggressively the internet had marketed it to him.
At the end of the school day, he swung himself into the driver seat of his Jeep and tossed his backpack onto the passenger seat. He sat there waiting for the complaints to come in.
He kept waiting.
His SI joint, hips, and ribs all stayed—silent.
He shifted cautiously in the seat.
They still kept their little traitorous mouths shut.
“Huh.”
Derek noticed first.
Which honestly felt unfair.
Stiles had made it almost three full hours at the loft before Derek looked up from cleaning blood off a machete and said, “You’re standing differently.”
Stiles blinked. “That is an insane sentence.”
Peter glanced up from the couch immediately interested. “Oh, he is.”
“I’m leaving.”
Derek frowned slightly, still watching him. “You’re not pitching forward anymore.”
“What?”
Derek gestured vaguely. “Usually you lock your knees backward and your hips follow. You compensate by leaning forward.”
“Firstly,” Stiles said carefully, “that’s deeply upsetting that you know that.”
Peter tilted his head at him. “You do stand like a baby kangaroo.”
“I hate you both so much right now.”