Work Text:
Danny swung open his apartment door, saw Scott standing in the hallway with a shoebox and an innocent expression, and then immediately slammed it back closed and threw the lock. "No!"
A pause, and then another round of desperate knocking. "Come on, Danny, it's important!" Scott yelled. "It's life or death, man!"
"I'll take cake!"
"Please!"
Just in case he'd missed some sort of life- threatening wound that would get the neighbors involved, Danny looked out through the peephole and verified 1) Scott wasn't injured, and 2)Stiles wasn't in evidence—always a bad sign, because it meant that Danny didn't know what Stiles was up to. An absent Stiles was about a thousand times more trouble than a present Stiles. He could be anywhere, doing anything. In fact, that was almost definitely what Scott was upset about. Nothing got Scott upset like Stiles in danger.
Still, an absent Stiles was a Stiles also not in Danny's house, eating his food and explaining the latest disaster happening on the supernatural side of Beacon Hills. That was a bonus not to be missed. But the longer Scott stood in the hallway looking pitiful, the higher the chance of Stiles showing up and something trying to eat someone.
Making a face, Danny slowly unlocked the door and opened it again. He leaned out just enough to verify that Stiles wasn't clinging to the ceiling the Spider-Man or something. Since the coast seemed clear, he stepped back and waved Scott in. "Where's Stilinski?"
Scott blinked and clutched a battered shoebox to his chest. He didn't move deeper into the apartment, just stood on the little tile entry point looking completely out of place on the 127.0.0.1 mat. "Uh, that's kind of complicated. Here? Sort of."
Danny froze. Looked down at the shoe box. Up at Scott. "No."
Incredibly, Scott had the gall to look hurt. "I haven't even asked you yet!"
"You don't need to." Danny pointed at the shoebox. It was just a shoebox. Completely normal, a little worn at the edges. Except there was no reason for Scott to be carting around a shoe box at any time of day, much less at three in the morning. "Whatever's in there, I don't want anything to do with it. I don't care if it's a portal to Narnia, or a pile of gold that makes more gold or another freaking bottled djinn. The answer is no."
"It's Stiles and Derek."
Danny stared. "That's even worse!" Throwing up his hands, he turned and marched toward the kitchenette for a beer. If he was going to have his late-night Warcraft session interrupted, he was damn well going to get a beer out of it.
Of course, Scott followed, carrying along—fuck him—Stiles and Derek. "It's not what you think," he explained earnestly, in that way only Scott could when things like people in shoeboxes came up. He set the box carefully on the kitchen bar, curling his arms around it like he was five seconds from hugging it again. Now that it was settled, Danny could just make out tiny scraping noises coming from inside. "Malia got attacked by this magic book thing and—"
"No, McCall, let's try this again. I. Don't. Care." Bending over, Danny pulled out a beer from the fridge and popped the top off the bottle pointedly, staring at the shoebox of questionable contents. Stiles and Derek. Fuck his life. He took a pull. "Find someone else to do it."
"It's just for a few hours," Scott begged. "Maybe even less. Deaton said the spell is really weak. It'll wear off as soon as we take out the thing that did it. You just have to watch them for a little while." He sagged downward, like he was on his way toward his knees. Which, okay, was one of those fantasies of Scott Danny had had more than a few times in high school. But that had been in high school, when hot boys who were actually murderous creatures of the night were a passing kink rather than depressing norm.
Another drink. It was really all he had. "Why don't you do it? Or one of your pack?"
"We have to go find the book demon, and we can't just leave them at Derek's house. He has cats." Scott said it like it was the most logical thing in the world.
The scratching had gotten louder in the box, accompanied by the occasional squeak. On a hunch, Danny reached over and carefully lifted the box lid. Inside was some sort of sawdust bedding and a scattering of pellets. Two brownish-gray mice were huddled together in the far corner. No, not huddled. They were—
"Jesus Christ!" He slammed the lid down before his delicate eyes could be permanently scarred. "What the hell, Scott?"
"They do that a lot," Scott nodded, apparently completely at ease with carrying around a shoebox full of gay mouse porn. "You won't have to do anything—they have food. Please, Danny?"
Danny tried. God, how he tried. But Scott was staring at him, and Danny had a history of weakness when it came to dark-haired boys with big brown eyes. "Fine," he grumbled, looking away.
"You're the best." Werewolf reflexes in full gear, Scott grabbed Danny over the bar and hugged him before he could escape. "I'll come get them as soon as I can, okay? Thanks again!" One more squeeze, and then Scott was running. Before Danny could even think about changing his mind, Scott was out the door and down the hall, leaving the shoebox on the bar.
Sighing, Danny looked down at the box. The sounds had, if anything, only gotten louder. Out of sheer masochistic curiosity, he lifted the lid again.
Yup. Still fucking.
Damn it.
Tossing back his beer, Danny put the lid back on, put the empty bottle on top for security and then went back to his game. At least those werewolves he could deal with.
When Danny looked away from his monitor again, sunlight was shining through the window and his back had achieved a state somewhere between river of agony and fossilization. Wincing, he straightened up, wincing when fireworks popped off up and down his spine and across his sore shoulders. As carefully as possible, he eased out of his computer chair, rocking back and forth to get up the momentum to rise without necessarily using most of his muscles. The desk worked as a weight to pull himself up once he reached critical velocity, and then as an anchor to keep him from falling over when Newton had his say.
One day he was going to have to get a better chair. Preferably before his back froze permanently.
Utilizing the furniture to its best advantage, Danny painstakingly made his way to the kitchen. Coffee. Breakfast. Then stretching until he stopped feeling like something carved from wood. Probably. It would get better if he kept moving, he knew. Actually following through on that was always the hard part.
He was gratified to see that the beer bottle was still sitting atop the Shoebox of Horrors. Reaching out, he rapped the top gently in passing.
Nothing happened. No scurry of startled rodents ducking for cover. No claw noises. Not even the endless bedspring-squeaks of mouse sex. Just, nothing.
Danny paused, fingers still resting on the cool cardboard. A deep sense of foreboding loomed over his shoulder, developed through a high school career of dodging creatures that went shank in the night. Carefully he moved the beer bottle aside, then slowly lifted the corner of the lid.
Inside the box was completely normal—bedding, food, water. And a hole in the corner where the cardboard had been chewed out.
"FUCK!"
The wonderful thing about adrenalin was that it made everything else secondary. Danny forgot all about his aching spine as he searched the apartment for any sign of mouse infestation. There were plenty, once he was looking. His fruit bowl had been pooped in and a package of crackers he'd left open had been nibbled. What there wasn't was an obvious mouse hiding spot.
Google suggested cabinets, vents and furniture with hollow areas, of which there were only approximately fifty thousand in Danny's living room alone. When he'd been shopping for furniture, he hadn't exactly considered mouse-proofing it.
"It's okay," he told himself reassuringly, leaning down to peek under the ruffled edge of the battered green sofa his grandma had given him. "It's okay. Derek's a werewolf, and Stiles is—Stiles is Stiles. Scott said it would be less than a day. How much trouble can two mice get into in a day?"
Cats, his traitorous subconscious whispered. Poison. Traps. Birds. Other mice. Other girl mice.
"Oh God." Stiles and Derek were going to become rodent baby daddies and then die. Scott wouldn't blame Danny. Scott was too nice for that.
But he'd be sad.
A sad Scott.
A sad Scott because he didn't have Stiles.
Danny pressed his head to the hardwood and tried to breathe. "Oh God." Pulling back, Danny fisted his hands in his hair and thought. The couch wasn't looking promising, but it was a relatively small apartment. He just had to go about it logically.
Logically. Logically was easy. What did mice want?
Food.
"Kitchen," Danny muttered to himself. "Mice. Food. Kitchen." Pushing up, he scrambled for the kitchen and started opening cabinets one by one. Anything that could remotely hide a rodent he pulled out and shook until it failed to squeak. Once the cabinets were done, he checked behind the fridge, and then in the odd crannies where the bar had been installed weird.
Nothing, nothing and nothing.
Kitchen a bust, he started working his way out. First, the dining room, which had essentially nothing to look in but he did anyway. After that, the living room, piece of furniture by cranny-filled furniture. Chairs, shelves, electronics. He finally discovered evidence of his missing rodent problem by the TV. Or, more specifically, he found the chewed remains of an HDMI cable and—of course—more poop.
He counted himself lucky that it wasn't mouse spunk and kept searching. Desperation started to set in more with every empty corner. Danny had no idea how easy or hard it might be for a pair of mice to escape outside, but he suspected it was easier than he wanted to know. If they got outside, he might never find them. Not even their lifeless little furry bodies.
Would they know to avoid predators? He doubted it. Neither Stiles or Derek had ever really shown much by way of self-preservation instinct. A species change wasn't likely to change that.
Somewhere between the back of the bathroom cabinet and the edge of despair, he heard a creak coming from the bedroom. He froze, holding his breath. Another creak sounded, followed by an ominous crack. A muffled curse.
The crash echoed through the house in a wave. Danny jerked, smacking his head into one of the pipes as he tried to back out of the cabinet as fast as he could wiggle. He climbed to his feet on the run, using the door frame as a pivot to skid out of the bathroom and around the sharp corner into the bedroom. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he skidded to a stop, eyes darting between the wreck that used to be his ceiling and the two naked men on his floor. "What the fuck?"
White dust hung in the air like fog. Crumbles of broken drywall spread out over the floor in a disaster radius that took up nearly the entire bedroom, mixed in with chunks of overhead fan and dangling electrical wiring. In the middle of it was Stiles and Derek, sprawled-face down and butt-naked other than a thick coating of plaster. Where the dust touched it turned their hair gray, and made their skin seem faded and weirdly soft.
"Haven't you ever seen Cinderella?" Stiles coughed and pushed up onto his elbows, head hanging between his shoulders. The bands of plaster-faded black around his arm flexed over muscles that, Danny had to admit, definitely hadn't been there when they'd shared a locker room in high school.
"You're paying my security deposit," he told them. "And repairs. I know exactly how much you're worth, Hale. I did your taxes." And had helped funnel money here, there and the other place a few times. Danny didn't want to tell Melissa why the bank had "accidentally" forgiven her mortgage, but he wanted to not lose his apartment even more.
"Shut up. I'll take care of it," Derek groaned, finally moving. It was only to roll over on his side and then fall forward on his face again, but it was a sign of life. There was plaster dust in his chest hair. Life was so unfair. "Did we really eat—"
"Still tasting it," Stiles answered, then coughed again and rubbed at his mouth. "I think I have fur in my teeth. Hey, Danny, mind if we use your shower?"
"Do you promise not to have kinky mouse sex in it?" As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Danny thought better of them. "You know what? Never mind. I don't want to know if you do. Have a blast, I don't care." Turning, he marched back into the living room. Someone was pounding on his front door. Probably the sup wanting to know what the hell the noise was. Or the cops, if he was lucky.
Scott owed him so fucking much.