Chapter Text
The spell was a longshot at best.
Probably impossible.
But he was a spark. A damn good one. Impossible didn't mean a thing when he put his mind to it.
Most of the time.
No, he was not thinking about that time he accidentally turned his jeep into a jaguar—the four-legged version, not the expensive car—or the time he maybe, kind of sort of meant to turn his mate blue. (It was a prank damn it! Not the end of the world. Honestly, some people were just so damn sensitive. And well it was only supposed to be blue for a couple hours not a whole week.)
Thinking over his failures—incredibly rare failures, he might add—wasn't going to answer the question on whether this spell had worked or not.
Stiles opened his eyes warily.
He was slightly nonplussed to find himself sitting on the floor of his childhood bedroom.
Um.
Okay, then.
He glanced down at his hands before looking around the room. It was a little bit different to the room he'd grown up in and it was nowhere near the room his dad had redecorated for visitors once Stiles had moved out. Did that mean the spell had actually worked?
That he'd changed the past?
He frowned as he glanced around the room again.
He'd only changed one thing. A small thing actually. He hadn't even really expected the change in the timeline to affect his own life. Yeah, yeah, he was aware of the butterfly effect. Change one thing and ripples… stone in a pond… alter one moment, alter everything… lalala, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, too many theories and none of them ever proven.
He glanced around the unfamiliar-familiar room again.
Okay, he was willing to accept that preventing one car accident, one death of a person he'd never even met, might affect his own life a little bit if that person interacted with a person or people who'd interacted with him in later years. It even made a strange kind of sense.
Yeah. He could deal.
Because it made sense.
He climbed to his feet and glanced around the room, bothered by something but unable to discern the cause.
The house was quiet. That wasn't unusual. Even when Stiles came to stay for a few days to spend time with his dad there was always at least one case where the sheriff's presence was required. Stiles didn't mind. It was just a part of the Stilinski life. And it wasn't as if Stiles couldn't entertain himself.
He usually used the time to check in on Scott and Melissa anyway.
He reached for his phone, comforted at least to find it in his back pocket where he always kept it.
But it was a different brand than he was used to. And it had a cracked screen.
Yeah, that wasn't a nice ripple effect at all.
He unlocked the screen—at least his passcode was the same—and scrolled through his contacts. There were several names he didn't recognize and many more that were missing.
Okay, yeah, this was just getting annoying.
He dialed his mate's number from memory. It was actually the only one he knew off the top of his head—smart phones had definitely made him lazy—but since it was the number for the most important person in his life he decided to think of it as a win.
"Leave a message."
That was a far less friendly greeting than he remembered his mate recording, but he recognized the voice so he went ahead and left his message.
"Hey, babe. I just… I just needed to hear your voice." Pathetic, so pathetically needy, but his mate was used to his nonsense. "Maybe, um, call me back when you have a moment?"
He hung up. Well he tried to, but for some reason the phone didn't seem to recognize the thumb swipe he'd used a million times. He glanced down, kind of bewildered before he remembered that, yeah, this wasn't the phone he'd had before he'd changed the timeline. In fact, it was a rather shitty, cheap thing that made his two-year-old smart phone look like it belonged on a starship. He stabbed at the cracked screen, cursing under his breath until it finally registered and disconnected the line.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket before wondering how wise it was to basically sit on a cracked piece of glass. Stiles spent a few minutes worrying and imagining how embarrassing it would be to have to explain how he ended up with a sliver of glass in his butt cheek before trying to set the thoughts aside. He had far more troubling things to worry about.
It took an embarrassingly long time to realize he could probably catch himself up on the past few days by checking his text messages. He'd seen Scott's name on his list of contacts and since Stiles was apparently visiting his dad in Beacon Hills it was likely he'd texted his old friend before arriving. They always tried to have a drink together and catch each other up on the bigger changes in their lives.
But instead of the "i'm in town wanna grab a beer" messages he usually sent once or twice a year he found a whole string of conversations.
Stiles grinned—he'd lamented losing contact with Scott over the years so it was probably a tiny perk to the new timeline—until he started reading through the messages.
Did Scott know about the supernatural?
It certainly seemed so judging by the comments he was making. Hopefully he was just referring to an online game they played together or something. Surely if Scott actually knew what was going on in the supernatural world he wouldn't be silly enough to put shit like that into text messages. It was why Stiles had never explained any of it to his childhood best friend in the other timeline.
Scott couldn't keep a secret to save his damn life.
And since lives literally depended on humans not knowing about the supernatural Scott was the last person Stiles would have confided in.
Except, apparently in this timeline Stiles had.
Yeah, that might be a problem.
~*~
Peter frowned at the familiar voice as he played back the messages from calls he'd missed earlier. There was a time when he would have given his left nut to hear Stiles speak to him so affectionately, but those days were long gone.
Besides the kid wasn't actually talking to him. (Yeah it was way easier to think of him as a teen with a bad buzz cut than to remember the sort of man he'd grown into over the past fifteen years. Peter wasn't going to apologize for that little bit of self-preservation.)
Peter sighed as his thumb hovered over the delete key. Stiles had probably butt dialed. That definitely seemed like something the clumsy, perpetually flailing pup would have done. There was no way that message had been meant for Peter.
But it didn't stop him from pressing the save button.
Despite knowing he'd hate himself for it tomorrow.
Yeah, that was future Peter's problem.