Work Text:
Scott would love to say that the weeks after they kill the Nogitsune are like nothing they’ve ever gone through before, but his life has sucked for a while now, so everything is more than a little familiar. The only difference is that this time, Stiles is in no condition to not let him help.
Which is why he’s sitting on the Stilinski couch at 5 AM, with a cup of tea in his hands that is just barely too hot for him to be holding but it doesn’t matter anyway, because the burn will heal and the pain is not enough for him to care. If he lets his mind drift, he can feel the pack like he’s a stake placed solidly in the ground and they’re connected to him by ribbons, like some sort of maypole thing Stiles told him about once, only it’s less ribbons and more a trail of scent, or live wire.
Stiles has his own ribbon or whatever it is, and Scott suspects it should be weaker than the rest except Allison’s, being human and all, but the fact is Scott’s been tracking Stiles’ moods and location for much longer than the pack has existed. If it’s a ribbon connecting them, then it’s more like one of those braided ropes you use for climbing, sturdier and trust-worthier than most. If Scott rests an imaginary hand on it, it sits still under his palm, telling him about Stiles’ calm breathing upstairs. He’s still asleep, no nightmares.
If he moves his imaginary hand to Allison’s ribbon, it ripples with distress, but gentler than it did a few minutes ago when it woke him up. She’s awake now too, after Scott pulled at the ribbon, so he takes his phone out of the pocket of his borrowed sweatpants and texts her, You okay?, just in case.
They text back and forth for a while, until Scott can feel the ribbon steadying under his hand. He wants to go back to bed, sling an arm over Stiles and bury his nose in his neck and not think, maybe even go back to sleep, but he can hear the sheriff stirring upstairs and Sheriff Stilinski might not technically be part of his pack, but he’s not not part of it. He’s family, and he’s been glancing at Scott over Stiles’ head for the past two weeks like he wants to talk to him, but not at the cost of ripping him away from Stiles.
So Scott stays on the couch, and drinks his too-hot tea, and waves at the sheriff when he comes downstairs, already dressed and fully awake somehow.
“Hey, Scott,” he says quietly, glancing upstairs like he might have already woken Stiles up with those barely-audible two words.
“Hey,” Scott replies, forcing himself to smile. Stiles is a light sleeper, but not that light– usually. Scott understands the sheriff’s worry, and it stings, another reminder of his failure to keep everyone safe. “He’s okay.”
“Is he really, son?”
Sheriff Stilinski’s eyes are shadowed and tired, face lined with worry in a way that hadn’t been even a few months ago. Scott can’t lie to him, so he looks down at his cup of tea and shrugs.
“He will be. He’s asleep.”
There’s a pause. Scott can feel the sheriff gearing up to say whatever has been eating at him for the past two weeks.
“I don’t know how to help, Scott,” he says, voice unsteady, and Scott’s hands tighten around his cup of tea, because he’s heard this one before. Almost ten years ago, also in this living room, only directed at his mom instead, in a whisper that was meant to stop Scott from hearing it. “This is– I’ve never seen Stiles like this before. Sometimes, when he– it’s like he’s a million miles away, and I can barely recognize him. I keep thinking–” he swallows, and Scott feels his heart break a little at this stoic figure of his childhood, his pseudo-dad, in tears because of him, because he failed at everything he had promised to protect. “I keep thinking, maybe this whole thing was just more than he could handle.”
But it’s not. But it’s not.
Sheriff Stilinski’s not a bad father. Scott would never accuse him of that, and maybe he’s got a low bar for parenting, considering his own dad, but– the sheriff is a good father, the same way Scott’s mom is a good mother. It’s just one of those facts in the universe. But Sheriff Stilinski was also half-mad with grief and overworking himself and, according to mom, drinking more than he should have been, last time something like this happened. He didn’t get to see as much of Stiles as Scott did, because most times Scott was the one dragging Stiles to sleepovers so he wouldn’t have to be home alone, curling up with him on the couch when he started shaking, breathing slowly with him through a panic attack.
The way Stiles is behaving– it’s not new. It’s worrying, sure, and Scott hates hates hates seeing him this hurt, had promised himself years ago that he’d never let it happen again and now it has and it’s the worst, but there’s nothing new about it. It’s just how Stiles copes when really bad things happen, when his usual ways of joking around and shoving it all down and pretending he’s fine aren’t doing it. Sometimes his brain just goes somewhere else for a few minutes at a time, and sometimes he feels off, like he’s not himself, but he always comes back. Scott can always bring him back. Stiles always lets him.
It doesn’t mean he’s changed. It doesn’t mean something in him has been irreparably broken. Scott would know if that were the case. And he always tries so hard to be gentle, but there’s no gentle way to say this, so he just does.
“It’s not new.” He looks up at the sheriff even though it hurts, because he’s got to make sure he understands. “It’s– he’s gone through something like this before, he behaved the same way then. When– when we were eight,” he adds, and watches understanding dawn on the sheriff’s face. His eyes are brighter, but Scott can’t decide if it’s tears or if the spark’s back into them. “He’s going to be okay.”
“You’ll take care of him, Scott,” Sheriff Stilinski says, softly.
It’s not a question, but Scott nods anyway.
“I will. I am.”
The sheriff smiles at that, actually smiles, and Scott melts a little on his seat from relief. They meet each other’s eyes and Scott can feel it, the understanding that it’s them against the world when it comes to keeping Stiles safe, that it’s been that way for years. That there’s no one else they would trust to do the job but themselves and each other.
“You shouldn’t have had to, all those years ago,” the sheriff says. He smells of regret and apologies and pain, and Scott shakes his head before he can help it. “No, son– it was my responsibility, and you were just a kid.”
“So was Stiles,” Scott replies, putting his cup down on the coffee table. He doesn’t even like tea that much anyway. “No one deserved what happened. It shouldn’t have– it just sucked, for everyone, but especially you and Stiles. I wanted to help.”
Sheriff Stilinski laughs quietly, rubbing his forehead with one palm like it’s hurting.
“You’re a good kid, Scott.”
Scott’s heard that one before, mostly from his mom but also from a lot of adults, and he can often see it reflected off other people’s eyes too, Stiles and the rest of the pack and people they meet on the way. It usually comes with surprise or awe, like he’s some sort of hero for doing whatever he was doing that made him look like such a good person. Scott doesn’t know how to tell them that he’s not, not even close, he just doesn’t want to be like his dad or see people hurt, that it’s all selfish and he keeps failing–
So he lowers his gaze and shrugs, and says goodbye to the sheriff when he leaves, grabbing a pop-tart from the cabinet under the sink that he doesn’t think Stiles knows about. He does, but Scott doesn’t tell the sheriff that, and neither will he tell Stiles that his dad had an unauthorized pop-tart this morning. He never does.
He goes back upstairs and lies down beside Stiles, who immediately shifts closer, eyes closed but heartbeat half-awake.
“Go back to sleep,” Scott whispers, rubbing his shoulder over the faded band t-shirt that probably belonged to him at some point.
Stiles makes a noise of agreement, and as his heartbeat slows, Scott lets his own eyes fall shut.
It’s not always easy, but Scott’s been down this road before.
Three days later and Stiles stares into the nothingness over the dinner table, bleary-eyed, exhaustion in every line of his body. He slept fine, Scott made sure of that, but he’s been having one of those days where the memories won’t leave him alone and his own thoughts are poisoned against him.
Scott spends most of his time carving out spaces in their lives for Stiles to feel safe in again, one by one. He started with Stiles’ bedroom, a few days after everything ended, and he’s now all the way to the school building. But that one’s still a work in progress, and it’s been a long day.
He meets Sheriff Stilinski’s eyes across the dinner table and desperately tries to open a telepathic communication line. The silence is too thick and uncomfortable, and it’s drawing Stiles deeper into himself, but Scott can’t focus on Stiles and talking at the same time. This is why he keeps insisting on meeting as a pack often. It always ends up noisy, no matter their original intentions or anyone’s mood, and that helps.
Miraculously, the sheriff’s eyes flick to Stiles and then back to Scott, and he starts talking about his new deputy Parrish and how his training is going.
Scott reaches out and takes Stiles’ hand. It’s on top of the table, fully in view, and Stiles has to let go of his fork– but he wasn’t eating anyway, and it’s not like their parents don’t know they do this kind of stuff with each other. It feels like more, lately, because they’ve moved on to doing things normal friends definitely don’t do instead of things they just usually wouldn’t, but it’s not like the sheriff can get all that off this one gesture. And it’s not like it matters, anyway. They’re ScottandStiles. They’ve always been weird, and they have a fair amount of leeway to do weird stuff already.
Plus, Stiles’ eyes are back in focus, and he’s blinking down at their hands, looking like people lost at the sea when they catch sight of a rescue helicopter.
Sometimes, it’s enough to give Stiles something to come back to.
“I can’t do it, Scotty,” he says, the next morning.
They’re lying on Stiles’ bed because Scott stayed over again, since his mom wasn’t coming back from her night shift until they had to be at school anyway. Later, if the day doesn’t suck too bad, they’ll drive over to get some curly fries and burgers for everyone, meet up at Derek’s loft, and then stay over at Scott’s for the night so his mom gets her allotted checking my son and pseudo-son are okay time.
But now Stiles’ heartbeat is stuttering and he smells like fear and shame, and it’s a full twenty minutes before they’re supposed to wake up for school, but here they are, awake and having a crisis already.
At least it’s only the one, so far. Scott’s already checked on the rest of the pack, brushing his imaginary hands over the ribbons one by one, stopping for an extra second on Allison’s just in case.
“Can’t do what?” Scott says, even though he has his suspicions. He tries to project a sense of doesn’t matter what, I’m here, it’ll be okay with his voice, and Stiles’ heartbeat steadies just a bit.
“Can’t do the whole school thing today.” He rolls over to face Scott, eyes wide and trusting. A lump forms in Scott’s throat, because he’s more than aware of how rare that is for Stiles, even with him, to show vulnerability like that. “I really, seriously can’t. I can’t focus on anything, and I keep having all these fucked up thoughts– and don’t even say it, it’s not like you can hold my hand twenty-four fucking seven, Scott.”
Scott doesn’t say he would if he could, because he knows Stiles knows. Sometimes Stiles can’t handle Scott touching him until his worries have been addressed, so Scott has to wait until he’s done thinking and has managed to say something useful. But Stiles looks lonely and too small in front of him, hands shaking, and mornings are not kind on Scott’s brain power, so he reaches out anyway, hopefully, and smiles when Stiles lets him take his hands in his.
It’s a good sign, so Scott leans in and kisses him, slow enough to be pushed away if necessary. But Stiles doesn’t, he follows the gentle movement of Scott’s mouth with his own and digs his nails into Scott’s palms.
Dumb as it sounds, it helps Scott think.
And he thinks about the way he can tug on the ribbons bonding him to his pack when he’s lost, or trace the ink of his tattoo and remember who he is, what he’s fighting for. That’s what Stiles needs, he realizes. An anchor.
“Hey,” he says, voice light with the relief of having figured it out. “Do you still have those plastic strings from when you were trying to make a friendship bracelet for Lydia?”
Stiles stares at him like he thinks he’s gone insane, but he trusts him enough to shrug and half-smile.
“Dude, that was years ago.” At Scott’s judging eyebrows, which have really been getting a workout since he met Stiles, he snorts and crawls off the bed. “Probably.”
He digs in his closet for a good five minutes, kneeling on the floor in his pyjama pants and threadbare shirt, even though he has no idea why Scott’s asking this of him right after he’s admitted to having a shitty day. Scott gets slammed in the chest by a wave of fondness and love and protectiveness, so strongly that it feels a bit like being struck with a hammer by a particularly angry werewolf. But it’s the good kind of hurt, so it doesn’t matter anyway.
He sits up on the bed and watches as Stiles unearths a plastic bag from the bottom of his closet, peeks inside, and walks back to him, dropping heavily on the spot beside him. There’s still tension on his shoulders, but he’s looking at Scott with open curiosity as he passes the bag over, waiting to see what he’ll do, how he’ll fix it this time.
Usually that’d just make Scott feel small and inadequate, but it’s Stiles, so it’s fine, even though his idea is feeling stupider by the second. This is why he’s not the one who makes the plans.
He pulls the plastic strings out anyway and starts braiding, fingers clumsy and weak under Stiles’ gaze. Blue like Stiles’ room has been since they were six, red like Scott’s Alpha eyes and Lydia’s hair when the sunlight hits her just right, yellow like Stiles had once told him used to be his mom’s favorite color. He ties it off at the ends and presents it to Stiles, whose face has gone blank.
“Isn’t it a bit too late to claim me as your best friend?” he says, shaky and amused.
Scott can’t tell if he actually thinks that’s what he’s doing, or if he’s just saying it to lighten the tension and distract Scott from everything about him that will let him read his feelings even easier than he used to. Scott can do a lot to ignore sounds, but scents are harder. Stiles smells like the beginnings of tears and relief.
A lot lately has been about claiming, Scott’s mouth on Stiles’ neck and sweat and sex if the mood takes them, but this isn’t it. Stiles is too smart not to notice, and he knows Scott too well not to understand.
“It’s sort of a recurrent thing,” Scott says, and lets himself smile, wide and honest. “Can’t have you going around like that, making people think you don’t have a best friend.”
“Can’t have that,” Stiles agrees, never looking away from the braided strings, and wordlessly offers Scott his right wrist.
Scott ties the bracelet around it as tightly as he dares, and eagerly tracks the sharp dip in the smell of distress surrounding Stiles, the steadying of his heartbeat.
“I think we should skip English,” he says, watching Stiles curl the fingers of his left hand around the bracelet. “Just make some pancakes or something, be on time for Math. I’ve already done all the reading anyway.”
“You always have the best ideas, Scotty,” Stiles replies distractedly, but he’s smiling, a weak little curve of his mouth that keeps growing by the second.
Scott leaves him to it, because he usually wants to shower when he’s having a shitty day he wants to fix, and goes downstairs to hunt for the pancake mix. It’s definitely a chocolate chip pancake day, and that happens to be his specialty.
They’re late for Math too, but it doesn’t really matter.
Not when Ms. Fleming is off sick and they’ve got a very scared-looking substitute teacher, who just waves them in and goes back to staring at his phone, leaving the class to their own devices. Most importantly, Scott got Stiles to laugh for real during breakfast, mouth full of pancake he kept making sex noises around, and his steps are still lighter than they’ve been in a few days as he makes his way to his seat.
Scott sits beside him, waving at Lydia and Malia, and they work quietly on the exercises the board says, side by side but not together, even though the quiet chatter around them suggests they are allowed to. Stiles works better alone when he’s in this mood, and Scott wants to try understanding the work by himself first.
“D’you think the new guy can be convinced into giving us extra credit if I tell him we found a mistake in the book?” Stiles asks half an hour later, frowning at his notebook. “Because this is definitely wrong. Like, glaringly.”
“Lydia probably already found it then,” Scott replies, and feels the spike in her heartbeat that tells him she’s heard him, but she doesn’t say anything, head bent over her book in the seat in front of his. “But you can try.”
Stiles considers this for a moment, tugging at the bracelet on his wrist, and slides out of his seat, approaching the teacher desk with a determination that the substitute guy should be scared of, if he has an ounce of sense in him. Scott watches him argue with the guy over the desk, knowing he looks stupidly fond to whoever might be glancing at him and not caring one bit.
“Have you two seriously been making friendship bracelets?” Lydia says, twisting gracefully in her seat to face him. “Is that why you skipped English?”
She’s looking over her shoulder at Stiles, forehead creased in curiosity and incredulity, and Scott has to smile. He doesn’t know how he can possibly explain that the bracelet is just sort of an extension of the braided cord that bonds him to Stiles in his mind, like the ones that bond him to everyone else in the pack. He doesn’t know how to say the word anchors and make it make sense in this context. He wouldn’t bother to try with most people, but Lydia’s smart, Lydia gets things, and most importantly, Lydia needs to know things like everyone else needs to breathe, and she’s already been having a rough time lately and Scott’s not evil, okay, he can’t do that to her.
So he reaches out towards her and Lydia reaches back automatically, which makes Scott feel warm all over, but mostly in the parts of him that belong to the wolf.
“It’s like this,” he offers, when their hands touch, and tugs at her ribbon in his mind with careful imaginary hands, thinking about that warmth she just made him feel, about safety and fondness and calm.
She closes her eyes briefly and sighs, and by when they pull their hands back a second later, she’s almost smiling. She understands. Of course she does. But then her eyes turn shrew and focus on him with razor-sharp focus and– oh no, here they go.
“You’ve been practicing,” she says, with an undertone Scott recognizes he should be wary of.
“It’s just been easier lately,” he replies, smiling weakly and unconvincingly, but there’s nothing he can do about it.
He’s never been good at lying, only at obscuring the truth by side-stepping it, and Lydia’s unerringly good at catching that. She’s also, unlike Stiles, pretty good at letting it go. She’s staring at him in a very specific way, the one that says they should both know she’s realized what he means, that there was no practice involved. That she can practically hear what he’s not saying, I’ve just been feeling the bonds a lot more lately because, y’know, everyone is horribly distressed at all times and tugging at me from all directions, and it’s sort of impossible not to notice.
But it’s Lydia, and she knows how to leave things alone, so she twists back in her seat with a brief smile and says nothing. Fingers tapping lightly on her desk, she goes back to her exercises, radiating what Scott can only describe as fondness and approval. It makes something in Scott untense, dizzy with relief. If Lydia thinks he got it right, then he did.
When Stiles gets back to his seat, having successfully wrangled some extra credit for both of them, Scott bumps their shoulders together and watches him smile, chest full.
The bracelet lasts almost a week and a half into December.
It might have lasted longer if literally anyone else on the planet had been wearing it, but it’s Stiles, and Stiles is restless even with medication, and he keeps picking at it when he’s nervous or happy or scared or he just needs something to do with his hands, which is often. Plus, to be fair, the plastic Scott made it with is years old, and it had been crappy even back then.
So he gets to watch Stiles picking at the edges of the bracelet when he thinks Scott’s not looking, a worried crease between his eyebrows, like he’s wondering what he’ll do when it inevitably breaks.
Scott’s not letting it get to that point.
He goes to Deaton and Derek, mostly texts them a lot with Stiles on his lap or somewhere close by, but also manages to actually meet up, stealing moments with Derek while the rest of the pack chats in the loft and dropping by the clinic under the guise of working, which to be fair, he does end up doing. Derek’s the one who gets him the dog tag with the same engraving as Scott’s tattoo, a circle within a bigger circle, and Deaton’s the one who does the magic on it, or whatever it is. It sounds complicated, for all Deaton insists it’s one of the most basic things to do, if too old to be used often, and Scott doesn’t really care as long as it works.
He wears the dog tag under his shirts for as many days as he can get away with before Stiles’ bracelet falls apart completely.
They’re in Stiles’ living room, curled up around each other while watching a Buffy rerun, laughing about how many things it gets wrong. Stiles has been having a good day, but he’s also been restlessly picking at the bracelet for most of it, as if he can feel that it’s got barely any time left and he wants to speed it up so he can get over its loss faster. This is not just Scott making stuff up in his head. He knows Stiles, this is a familiar pattern of behavior.
And yet, when the bracelet finally comes apart between Stiles’ fingers, he freezes in his seat, glancing down at his hands and then at Scott with panicked eyes, like he’s just killed someone and there’s blood all over his lap and he’s waiting to see if Scott will help him or leave him behind. Which is stupid, because he should know better, but Scott doesn’t blame him for doubting it anyway.
He takes the bracelet from Stiles’ hands and gently places it on the arm of the couch. Then he grabs the dog tag by the chain and pulls it off his neck, slipping it around Stiles’ instead.
“Here,” he says, grinning, and presses the dog tag against Stiles’ collarbone so he can feel it. “Early Christmas present.”
Stiles’ face scrunches up as he thinks, probably wondering if this is why Scott hadn’t said anything about the new chain that had suddenly started peeking out from under Scott’s shirts a few days ago. His hands grab at the solid metal of the dog tag, blindly feeling the outline of it and the circles engraved deep on it. It’s been warmed up by Scott’s own body heat, and it will feel exactly like that whenever Stiles is losing himself or panicking, even if he himself is cold, which is great because Stiles is always cold lately.
“So I’m an honorary dog now, is what I’m getting?” Stiles says, but he’s grinning.
“Don’t let Derek hear you saying that,” Scott snorts. “Honorary werewolf.”
“Cool.”
His fingers are wrapped tightly around the dog tag, and when he grips Scott’s shoulder with his other hand and pulls him closer, Scott lets him. Kissing gets the point across easier than their usual silent conversations or awkward fist bumps, not that they’ve stopped doing those. But– kissing is nice. Not nice like kissing Allison, but nice like kissing Stiles. Which makes sense.
“Deaton helped,” Scott says quietly when they pull apart, their short-hand for there’s some freaky magic stuff involved. He’s not sure they’ve ever used it in a non-life-threatening context, and he can see that it throws Stiles in for a loop too. “We figured– well, you’re pack, but you’re human. So I can read you, y’know, I told you about that–”
“Yes, with the creepy sniffing and listening for my blood rushing or whatever,” Stiles interrupts, mouth twisting into a smirk. “Hard to forget.”
“No, I mean– the other type of reading. Like, the maypole one, remember?” He waits until Stiles’ eyes widen and he nods, suddenly smelling more attentive. They’ve talked about the way Scott feels pack bonds only once, and they were rather distracted at the time, so Scott knows Stiles must be dying to learn more about it now that he’s remembered it’s a thing. “So yeah, I can feel you through that, but you’re human, so– you can’t really feel me back? Or at least I can’t help you do it yet? Deaton said it might work better when I– anyway. He made this into sort of a– conduct material?” he says, pressing down on the dog tag. Stiles’ fingers wrap around his like an octopus changing preys, and their hands fall on Scott’s lap, intertwined. “It helps make the bond more equal, like it goes both ways? Like if you were a werewolf.”
“Gonna start ordering me around, Scotty?” Stiles grins, but he smells happy and teary and safe.
Scott laughs, feeling joy bubble up in his chest like the cheap champagne his mom and Sheriff Stilinski toast with in New Year’s when they manage to synchronize their shifts. Stiles always takes the chance to sneak a few glasses behind their parents’ backs, who pretend they don’t notice, but Scott rarely joins him, because he doesn’t like the sharp feeling of the bubbles going down his throat. He’s an idiot. It’s official.
Maybe Stiles-induced joy bubbles are just way better than anything someone could shove into an alcohol bottle.
“As if anyone could ever order you around,” he says, kissing the top of Stiles’ nose in an irrepressible impulse that leaves him a puddle of embarrassment, and Stiles just amused. “Just close your eyes and focus on the dog tag. See if you can feel it.”
“Aye aye, Alpha,” Stiles sing-songs, eyes already fluttering closed. The silence lasts for a few seconds, and then Stiles’ eyes fly open and he stares straight into Scott’s, a sharp smell in the air that Scott can only read as shock. “Fuck. I can– is that you, dude?”
“What is it?” Scott asks, curious despite himself. No one’s ever told him how the pack bond feels for them when he isn’t actively trying to send something through it.
Stiles shakes his head, more another sign of restlessness than a denial. He’s blushing, Scott realizes, amused. It’s a rare sight, because Stiles generally doesn’t feel any shame, or at least not the kind that translates into blushes. Scott has always known and kind of admired this, but he’s still delighted at how many more opportunities to see Stiles blush keep popping up since they started behaving even weirder than usual together. It feels familiar and right, when they kiss and touch more intimately than they have before, but it also feels new, and Scott can tell sometimes it leaves Stiles floundering, looking for even footing.
“There’s no non-creepy way to say this–” Stiles starts, nervously twisting his hands in Scott’s, and scowls when Scott bursts into laughter. “Hey! Hey, shut up, man, I’m tryin’ to–”
“I know,” Scott manages in-between wheezing. “I know, I’m sorry. It’s just– oh my god, is this how you normally talk to people who aren’t me? I–”
“Oh, like you don’t miss about a thousand social cues every time anyone says anything,” Stiles snaps, letting go of his hand to cross his arms over his chest. He doesn’t actually smell or sound irritated, so Scott grins at him, and he rolls his eyes back. “I was there when that guy at the froyo place was obviously flirting with you and you kept making small talk like an idiot and asking about his non-existent girlfriend. Face it, dude, we’re both awkward. That’s why we’re stuck with each other.”
“Yeah,” Scott says, still grinning. He’s got a lot to say about the froyo incident, but he’d rather let it go for now. “Sounds great.”
He was just joking– or, he meant it, obviously, but he was just making it sound like a joke, but something in Stiles’ posture softens anyway. He uncrosses his arms and looks down at his hands on his lap, half-smiling.
“It feels– steady. That’s dumb, but yeah. Feels like a part of my mind is lying on my bed, all comfortable and in your warm spot, and you’re downstairs making pancakes and doing that dumb humming thing you do–”
“I do not–”
“Yeah, you totally do,” Stiles replies, shoving his shoulder into his. “Shut up, dude. I just mean– it feels like you’re there. So I guess that means I can finally kick your ass to the curb,” he adds, swiftly swerving into jokes.
Scott lets him, because he knows how it works, but Stiles really should’ve expected the tackle that follows.
He wasn’t, and he goes down on the couch with Scott’s weight on top of him, laughing like he can’t help himself, uselessly shoving at Scott with hands and feet and elbows and knees. They wrestle for a while until they get tired, or rather, Stiles gets tired and elbows him in the ribs with more impatience than amusement, and then they pull themselves back into a seating position.
Buffy’s been playing in the background the whole time, but a new episode has just started. Well, new. It’s a really old one that they’ve watched a thousand times already, so Scott doesn’t protest when Stiles crawls into his lap, blocking his view for a minute as he gets comfortable.
“I get it now,” he suddenly says, thoughtful.
“Get what?” Scott replies, distracted.
On the screen, Buffy’s talking about how happy she is about not having anything supernatural to worry about. Scott can relate, but he also knows how the rest of the episode goes, so– not fun.
“Why everyone keeps randomly doing that thing– you know, like yesterday. When Malia was freaking out in Bio and she closed her eyes, and kind of breathed out, and suddenly she looked like someone had slipped her a Zoloft.” He squints at Scott, who tenses up. He knows where this is going. “That was you, wasn’t it? You’ve been doing that for everyone.”
“Yeah,” Scott admits, hesitantly.
He’s never been more glad that Stiles doesn’t know the true extent of the pack bonds yet. He’ll definitely get a lecture about not being a self-sacrificing idiot when Stiles learns of it, and it’s sort of unavoidable because Stiles has always worried way too much about people he cares about, but he’s still not looking forward to it.
“So we’re all drawing strength from you,” Stiles goes on, eyes shrewd in that dangerous way of his, smelling of suspicion and worry and anger, “but what about you?”
“You give me strength too,” Scott replies, smiling, because it’s the truth, and he doesn’t care if he sounds like a middle-aged lady who’s a bit too much into crystals and peyote. Not much anyway. “Why do you think there’s anything there to draw from in the first place?”
Stiles raises his eyebrows at him like he disagrees, like he wants to argue that strength is something intrinsic to Scott or something, but he doesn’t. Even though Scott can tell he believes it with his whole heart, because Stiles is always thinking his best when it comes to Scott even when he should really know better, and Scott loves him for it.
“Yeah, okay,” Stiles finally says, rolling his eyes. He drops his head backwards onto Scott’s shoulder, baring his throat. Whether it was intentional or not, Scott can’t help but put his mouth there, half-kissing and half-biting. Stiles makes a pleased noise anyway. “Are we still on for movie night at Derek’s? I can’t believe we’re doing that, by the way.”
Scott takes stock of the way Stiles is all but melting into a puddle in his lap, the quietness of the pack bonds in his mind. Maybe Buffy got even more things wrong than they originally thought. Maybe they can have a break, for once.
“Yeah,” he says, pleased, nuzzling the chain around Stiles’ neck. “We’re on.”