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"You got this.”
It’s one of those desperate lines that he says to himself, the kind that Stiles latches onto and repeats, over and over, while he white-knuckles his way through whatever Fucked Up Beyond All Reason situation he’s gotten himself into now. It’s a last little piece of hope, a whimpered prayer to whatever god might be watching and feeling particularly benevolent in Stiles’ general direction.
“C’mon, Stiles, you got this,” he says again, harsh under his breath, and glances over his shoulder to make sure the coast is still clear. He can hear running and alarms, but he’s got a gentle little spell (more of a manifestation of his will rather than an actual spell) over the door to his tiny, supply-closet hiding spot that will hopefully convince people to look somewhere else just long enough that he can pull this off.
Some stupid hunter setup, a veritable fortress . He honestly has no idea how they got him here, other than the obvious fact that he was drugged - which was pretty easy to figure out when he fell asleep in one state and woke up a few days later in what may actually be another country. He’s not totally sure, but everyone has a weird accent he can’t place.
The place is like Azkaban - it’s not easy to leave, that’s for damn sure. Stiles is one hundred percent sure that they don’t plan on letting him leave, at least not until he’s been brainwashed to want to murder everyone that he cares about for their very existence. They don’t have a mage, after all, and wouldn’t that just be an ace up their sleeves? That’s the stupid thing, though - they don’t even care about the Hale Pack, they care about Stiles and what he’s capable of. Murdering werewolves would just be a bonus.
“Oh, god,” Stiles knocks his head back against the wall gently, tries to psych himself up as much as he can for this. For one thing, it’s gonna hurt like a bitch. For another thing, there’s a very real chance that it either won’t work or will backfire horribly. He’s only working with his memory of the spell, after all, considering the book is back home, possibly an ocean away. Again, not terribly sure.
Boots run past again, and the spell over the entrance shivers against his mind, suggests that the hunters should look somewhere else once more. It won’t last forever. Stiles is damn lucky they don’t have a mage, that they don’t actually know what he can do. He hopes it’ll be enough, because he can’t keep that little bit of magic up while he does the big, scary one that might actually kill him.
That said - here goes nothing.
“Damn it, okay, you got this, Stiles.” He takes the knife he managed to grab when he made his daring escape, grits his teeth, and slices into his forearm - deep enough to bleed, not deep enough to do any permanent damage, he hopes. He’s shaky, it’s dark, and holy hell, it really, really hurts. It may not be the most effective, actually, but it’s quick and it’ll bleed, and that’s all Stiles really needs.
The little bit of magic over the door vanishes when Stiles starts to trace the spirals onto the wall. The words are, at best, cobbled together - slipshod and hastily created as he draws. They barely make sense in the traditional sense, but what matters is the intent , the raw power that Stiles is pouring into them. This will either work, or it will kill him, and at this point it’s too late to call the magic back.
He finishes the last of the spirals and breathes out, a single rush of breath. The door to the closet slams open just as he reaches for that last drop of magic, the only thread he has left to pull, and Stiles smacks his bloody palm against the triskele on the wall just as one of the hunters reaches to grab him.
Their fingers close on empty air.
Stiles doesn’t land softly. He actually doesn’t blink back into existence on top of anything at all - instead, he appears two feet above Derek’s kitchen table, hovers for a full two seconds, and then goes crashing down through it with a loud, thunderous crack.
“ Stiles! ” someone is calling when the ringing in his ears finally stops and the room comes into focus. Three faces above where he’s kind of precariously laying among the wreckage of the table - Lydia and Scott both look incredibly shocked, and Lydia’s got her hands on his arm where his flannel sleeve is rolled up to reveal the cut he’d had to give himself to teleport in the first place.
Holy shit, he teleported .
Big hands on his face. Stiles blinks to find Derek above him now, eyebrows knitted together and eyes wide in that expression he gets when Stiles has done something insane yet again - some strange mix of elation and terror.
“Stiles,” Derek says, urgently, pulls Stiles’ face to look at him.
“I teleported ,” Stiles breathes, and then, before his filter can catch up with him, adds, “Oh my god, I didn’t know if that would work !”
Derek looks up, over at Lydia, at something she’s saying, but Stiles is barely paying attention - the room’s started going fuzzy again. The werewolf looks down again at him, and Stiles is having trouble holding his own head up now, bone-deep exhaustion pulling him down fast and hard.
“I’m gonna…” Stiles murmurs, doesn’t know if he’s actually talking out loud or just moving his mouth like he’s speaking. ““I’m gonna lay down and die for like a half hour, okay?”
He thinks Derek says something, panicked and scared, but at that point the world just kind of grays out until it goes black, and then Stiles doesn’t hear anything at all.
Stiles wakes in a familiar bed. It’s a much more comforting wake-up call than the one he’d received in the hunter Azkaban fortress, or whatever. This one is natural - he doesn’t feel like he’s clawing his way up from the cotton-filled depths of drugs in his system, for one thing. Here, he’s got the sunlight that peeks through the not-quite-closed curtains of Derek’s recently-rebuilt bedroom slowly creeping over him, the distant sounds of birds in the woods nearby, and the heavy weight across his waist that tells him he’s safe and in the arms of the werewolf that loves him.
He blinks his eyes open - he’s tired, god , but it’s not mind-numbing and stupor. It’s just good, old fashioned, used-too-much-magic tired. Stiles can work with that. His arm, he notices, is wrapped in neon blue Coban and feels an awful lot like it could hurt if he could feel anything other than tired.
More sleep would be ideal, but before that, Stiles desperately has to pee. He manages to slide out from underneath Derek’s arm without disturbing the werewolf too much, which speaks to just how tired Derek is too, actually. Derek doesn’t sleep well when Stiles is gone of his own volition, nevermind if Stiles has been kidnapped .
When he comes back, Derek is sitting up in bed, knees pulled up so he can rest his tired head on them, presumably waiting for Stiles to get back. Stiles closes the bedroom door behind him and stumble-walks back to the haven of blankets and pillows and Derek , taking the hand that Derek stretches out to pull Stiles back in.
They settle back into the mattress, Derek on his back with his arm keeping Stiles pressed to his side, his head pillowed on Derek’s shoulder and one of his legs tossed over one of Derek’s. It’s quiet for a long series of moments - Stiles blinks slow, considers how easy it would be to fall asleep, but also the fact that he’s hungry.
Finally, Derek rumbles out something between a sigh and a half-hearted growl. “You scared the hell out of me, Stiles.”
A proud, but utterly exhausted grin, stretches Stiles’ mouth. “I wasn’t sure it would work. I teleported .”
“You told me,” Derek says, “while you were half-passed out and covered in your own blood. It was a little traumatic for everyone involved. And then you slept through Peter stitching up your arm, and then for sixteen more hours after that. How much magic did you use , Stiles? I’ve never seen you that wiped out.”
That’s the thing with teleportation - it’s not smooth or kind. It’s the kind of last-ditch, hail-Mary spell you pull when your back’s against the wall and you’ve got no other options. There’s a good reason that it’s not anyone’s first choice in magical solutions, starting with the gash in Stiles’ arm and the sheer exhaustion in his bones.
Stiles breathes out, and then sucks in a yawn. He’s awake enough now that his arm’s actually starting to hurt again. He knows if he asks, Derek will be more than happy to help with that. “I mean,” he says after a moment. “I did kind of literally stop existing for a second before I started existing somewhere else. It took a lot to hold all of… me… together, I guess.”
Derek doesn’t respond for a hot second. “Christ,” he finally says, in that almost defeated tone that means he’ll be bottling that up and dealing with it later.
Silence sings between them for a while after that, broken only intermittently by some very happy birds outside the window. Stiles is most of the way asleep when Derek’s arm tightens around him.
“I didn’t even know where you were.” His voice is low and rough. “We had no idea how to find you, where to even start looking.”
“Well,” Stiles says softly, like he’s trying to gently console Derek, “lucky for us, I’m a pretty bad damsel in distress. I saved you the trouble of rescuing me by rescuing myself, like the badass that I am.”
Derek snorts. “You don’t have to tell me twice. You somehow used blood magic to teleport . How did you even-”
“I used you,” Stiles cuts him off. “Or, specifically, the bond between us… Blood is powerful, you know? I drew the triskele on the wall in blood, to represent you, and then sealed it with the other blood on my hand, and followed the thread of the bond home. In a nutshell, anyway.”
“Christ,” Derek says again - bottle it up, deal with it later.
“It was pretty exhausting.”
“In that case.” Derek’s arm smoothes over Stiles’, and the pain vanishes so suddenly that Stiles is a little dizzy with it. “Go back to sleep.”
“Best idea you’ve ever had,” Stiles says, like he’s not already halfway there.