Chapter Text
Sitting in a dim room in the stillness of night, a minute to midnight, was a very unexpected thing. Peter waits patiently in the library, pretending to read by the low, lamp light. His eyes flicker occasionally to the clock, but it refuses to chime the new hour. He re-reads the same line, before looking back to the clock. Peter doesn’t want to admit that he’s been waiting, but anyone who’s met Peter knows how long it’s been - seven years. Anyone who knows Peter would know it’s been longer - his whole life. The thing that was unexpected, sitting in the dim room, sitting heavily in his chest – was hope.
The clock gives a feeble chime, utterly helpless in dissipating the tension. Peter places his book down beside him and brings his hand up to his face. There’s nothing, but he can wait just a moment longer. A shimmer of red, and Peter holds his breath. The shimmer runs through the air, as if light glinting off a thin wire; the only indication that it’s there, but soon Peter can feel it. There’s a light tug, and the red shimmers into being. A neat lasso tied to his little finger. Peter let’s all the air rush from his lungs, as the rest of the string begins to fabricate itself before his eyes. It’s pulled taught toward the open doorway, and Peter stands abruptly, lurching forward to follow. If only he could move faster, but at least he can move at all, he thinks. Peter makes it two strides across the room, before he’s tipping forward, the polished concrete is hard and subtly painful, below his cheek. Peter twists, looking down to his ankle, where the red string is tangled around multiple times. Peter pulls himself off the floor slowly, as the air alights with glistening lengths of red. He turns slowly to look about the room, as red runs around, over, along, and through, his string shimmering as it fills the space. Yards translates to years. Peter snarls viciously and does the only thing he can to lessen the time, he starts ravelling.
Stiles doesn’t have time to be humouring the Alpha, but it’s too late, he’d already answered his phone.
“If you were busy ravelling, then you wouldn’t have answered,” Derek growls, and Stiles concedes that the sour-wolf has a point. Stiles doesn’t point out that Derek isn’t ravelling either, doesn’t pry into yet another reason the wolf is the way he is.
“Fine,” Stiles mutters. “I’ll be over in an hour.” The red-string tugs harshly on his pinkie, jolting his phone, as if opposed to being ignored. Stiles hears a loud crash on the other end of the line.
“What is wrong with you?” Derek yells, but his voice is far enough away that he mustn’t be speaking to Stiles. There’s no reply that Stiles can hear. Derek growls in annoyance. “Be here in fifteen.”
“Not likely,” Stiles sighs, looking down at the mess of tangled string he’d accumulated around his limbs, but it’s too late, the line’s already gone dead.
That morning, Stiles had woken to the web of red that had been spun around him. At first, he’d thought hard to remember the project that had caused such chaos. The room was a casualty, the walls strung together with string. He follows no one particular thread to the calendar, pinned to his wall. February 14th is circled manically in marker, and realisation fights its way through the fog in his groggy mind. His first Valentine’s since turning eighteen, Stiles lets his eyes fall to one end of the string, tied in a neat knot around his little finger. It's exactly like the kind he uses to wrap little nooses around the heads of push-pins in his cork-board. Red for unsolved.
The string is meant to lead him to his soulmate. A clean, singular strand strung between two people in something that can loosely be considered a vector; Stiles’ string is less straight than he is. When he looks out his bedroom window, Stiles can see it crisscrossing across the street, and all through the neighbours rose bushes.
After detangling his limbs, showering, and grabbing some toast, Stiles is on his way to Derek’s apartment. While driving the now familiar route, Stiles takes the chance to map just how much his thread is woven throughout the town. It looks like he’s unravelled his mind across all of Beacon Hills. He can only hope it’s not the same for outside the city limits. Briefly, he imagines the entire world covered in his string, like a giant ball of wool in space. Stiles yells in unintelligible distress. There’s no way he’ll be able to ravel it in the remaining 14-hours; he’ll be spooling thread for the rest of his Valentine’s Days. Stiles wonders if he's ever going to untangle it all; if he's ever going to find the other end.
“You’re late,” Derek growls, when he answers the door, and Stiles is about to snark back when red catches his eye. The whole inside of Derek’s apartment is tangled up in his string, and Stiles groans. Stiles nearly hadn’t even made it out of his own home, when he’d almost tripped down the stairs. Navigating through the rooms in the loft without looking completely insane to Derek would be near impossible. There’s even a couple threads strung over Derek’s shoulder, and forgetting that the alpha cannot feel, nor see them, Stiles reaches out to pluck them off, one by one. When he’s done, Derek is left starring at him, offended and a little fazed.
“Uh, you had something, never mind.” Stiles grimaces, pushing past Derek into the loft. “So, where is he? Is he safe?”
“He’s acting strange, but I don’t think he’s dangerous. He won’t talk to me,” Derek supplies. That hadn’t been what Stiles had meant. At least Derek’s casual answer had subdued some of his concern for Peter’s wellbeing.
“What makes you think he’ll talk to me?” Stiles parries. Derek simply looks at him, clearly unimpressed. Underneath, Stiles can see an impatient worry, and sighing he decides to show mercy. At least Peter is a better conversationalist than his nephew. Stiles calls out to the apartment at large. “Peter? Talk to me.”