Chapter Text
His mum had white wings.
Stiles knows this because he doesn’t think a single day ever went by when Claudia Stilinski was ashamed of their brilliance. She wore them like a crown, like a fucking halo, let them spread out behind her back, large and arched, the marginal coverts slick and shining where they rode up to just halfway up her neck. Her wings were soft, primaries long and elegant, secondary coverts tough but fluffy and scapulars neatly smooth down around the slight protrusion of the humerus bone. Stiles knows they’re always neat, always perfect and in order, because every morning John would stands behind his wife while she applied her make up, running the pads of his fingers through the slight feathers there. Stiles, young and wide-eyed, would watch his parents from the door, would feel at the small rise of bone by the middle of his back and wonder what colours would burst from his skin, whether someone would ever care for his wings like his father did for Claudia’s.
She promises him, one morning, that when his wings come through that she’ll groom them into place, sort them carefully and lovingly and that he’ll never have a feather out of line. It’s enough to make him feel warm and a blessedly safe, and he can only watch in awe as she sorts through the pots and pans in the kitchen, utterly unaware of herself. The yellow-gold haze of a setting sun trickles through the window, throwing her into abstract shadow - an outline of an angel, summer dress brushing at her knees and wings touching at her elbows. It’s - breathtaking, in the most innocent of ways. He scribbles the scene onto paper with a green crayon. She pins it on the fridge.
The night after she dies, wings withering away to dust on the hospital bed, face rough and sallow, Stiles cries to that memory, and the next morning when he comes down to breakfast, small and swollen and wretched in his tears, his dad is passed out at the dining table and the drawing is gone from the fridge.
He doesn’t look for it.
Stiles’s wings crawl their way from his skin when he turns fourteen, a full three years after Claudia had promised him they would. A year after his dad had patted him on the back and said, maybe not, Stiles. Pressure erupts at the center of his back, and his Maths homework crumples where it had been held in his hand, rips between his fingers as he arches forward and hisses in a sharp, breathless sound of surprise. His spine feels hot, like fucking lava, and he fumbles with the buttons of his t-shirt, half ripping the t-shirt from his body in his desperation to get it off. Part of his mind tells him that his dad isn’t in, is working a late shift again, and the other part numbly registers his t-shirt brushing at his low back as he shrugs off. For a moment, the warmth against his fingertips is inexplicable, a mystery, and then the scent of copper fills his nose and his mouth goes dry as he brings his hand away from his skin.
Blood.
It can’t -
The math homework drops to the floor, forgotten as both hands pitch backwards to feel for the new development hanging from his back, the pressure suddenly out of his skin and now sliding down his back, sickly slick and heavy. The stretch of his arms sends pain shooting across his back, pulling at his torn skin, but he doesn’t focus on that, can’t focus on that because in his awkwardly angled hands, desperately cleared of gore and still warm to the touch, is a very distinct, a very unmistakable, feather.
He has wings
For a long time after his mothers death, Stiles feels like he’s wading through water. His limbs seemed too heavy to function quite the way they should and every movement seemed to take an impossible amount of energy from him; he has days where he lies in bed, staring at the shadows on his ceiling and imagining the spectrum of feelings his mother must have experienced on her deathbed. Pain. Fear. Relief. He wonders - what if? And is quickly met with more imaginings of his father, all alone in the world, falling back to drinking or never getting to do the paperwork for his final, defiant unloading of his gun.
But he can’t. And while he lies in bed, weighted down with his own feelings, his ADHD buzzes under his skin like barbed wire, jerking his finger tips and yearning for something to do. He wants to get up and run fifty suicides, start his math homework or just talk - but he is a marble statue where he lies, and the urge to move paired with the solid ball in his stomach telling him to never leave his bed result in an itch at his epidermis that he can’t not scratch. He digs his nails in deep deep deep and he can’t get the buzz out, can’t break the electric circuit. The tang of salt mixes with copper, and he smothers his frustrated sobs into the crook of his arm, ignoring the dull weight of wings resting down on his back - a constant, unwelcome reminder of another thing he has to hide. Another bullet point in the list of things to be ashamed of.
The first time it happens, Stiles finds himself up till four am the next day, trawling through diagnostic criteria on government run health websites and Yahoo answers. He finds nothing but a locked article on co morbidity, an unanswered Yahoo question from 2 years ago by GFinacoma (Disturbingly titled - What’s wrong with me?) and some sixty page thread on a pregnancy website which the resolving answer was to a) give birth and b) go back on Adderall. Stiles can’t do either of those things - wombless and Adderall-full as he is, so the internet is a lost cause.
He tells his dad he’s ill everytime the big black dog drops down on his chest, and as far as Scott or any other Werewolf is concerned, his illness dissipate too fast for them to scent on him.
The name for people like him, unofficially, is abomination. Or freak, as preferred by the kids on the playground who are too young to pull off a multi-syllable word but old enough to be filled mindless with hate from the mouths of their parents, from childhood magazines and the headlines of mummies favourite newspaper. The official name, the ones scientists used in their biased case studies and lab experiments was - Homo sapien alatus . A mutation from Homo sapiens idaltu.
Mum had always said they were angels.
But then, Claudia had said a lot of stuff that wasn’t quite true. She couldn’t hide her wings, big and magnificent as they were, so her only option was to wear them loud and proud, to refuse to back down and to garner whispers and stares at every street in every city in every country she ever set foot in. She told Stiles not to be ashamed, to embrace who he was, that he was beautiful and special and different.
Bitterly, Stiles thinks that might have been easy for her to say, given that her wings were the white described in Holy books and painstakingly etched into stain glass windows besides stars and crosses. Her wings spoke of purity, of innocence, of cleanliness and goodness - or that’s what they say, the priests and the pastors and every nobody in a white robe saying the word of God. His mother was called an angel, and the gleam of her wings reflected the flash of her smile, and as being a Homo sapien alatus goes, she had it pretty good. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth to think of his mother like that, but there are moments when he hates her, just a tiny bit. For passing this on to him. For giving him false hope. For doing all of that and then leaving him all alone with all these questions and a broken father.
Stiles’s wings are a soft grey, dappled with fine prints of white that had been stained red for the first two weeks since the muscle and bone crammed itself out its slot between his ribs. They are small, fitting without fuss into the dip of his back between his shoulder blades, his primaries brushing at the band of his jeans. He doesn’t know if they will grow with him, if there is some kind of second stage where there is pain and then more - or if they’re like this forever, small and unassuming - easy to hide and easy to forgot.
Grey wings signify conventional, dependable, boring and expendable. A red shirt aboard the Enterprise. He was born to be the sidekick, the extra, the adviser at a kings side. He is a shade too dark to be the hero, the protagonist, and despite the speckles of white in his wings he entertains too much shadow to pull a sword from a stone. He’d much rather destroy the stone, anyway, and use the sword to cut down anyone who dare to lay a hand on the people that matter to him.
If Scott was a freak, an abomination, Stiles thinks his wings would be as white as snow.
But he’s not.
He gets bitten, instead.
Despite werewolves, despite kanimas and banshees and best friends forever, Stiles does not tell anyone about his wings.
He can’t.
They hang from his back, limp and dull, and they remind him with every shift of feathers of his mothers smile, the feel of her primaries in his small hands and how everything had seemed to big and wonderful and faultless back then. They are reminders, reminders he binds tightly to his ribs with ace bandage and reminders he twists into the dip of his spine. Crushes to his skin. The resulting ache, the cramp of powerful muscle and pull of hollow bones is a remedy, a self medication for his prescribed guilt, his self-assured insecurity and for the darkness that dwells in the apex of his heart. It hurts in a way that tells him he doesn’t deserve to be his mothers son, that, on him, wings will never be anything but reinforcement of his utter lack of anything worthwhile.
He is no angel.
In his mirror, the painted glass casts him as ordinary. He stares at the dip of his collarbones and the slight curve of his stomach, at the slouch in his shoulders and the bones of his knees. And then - he turns, and they grey of his wings shimmers against the pale of his skin, the white dapples glinting in the slight light of his bedside lamp. He stretches his wings out, and a sweet pain trills down the bandages as they reach out past his arms, the ends turned slightly up. There is no arch to his appendages, no suggestions to angels, his are wings for soaring - the feathers spread apart in larger clumps, less crowded than his mothers and with a thicker layer of marginal coverts.
Looking at them, he seems something predatory to the cut of the feathers - the way they are sharp at the their ends, tapering off harsh and blunt, and how the edges are sudden and steep. It’s unsettling, nauseating, the way shadows drape down their edges and lurks in every small dip and shift of his surface plumage. It - it reminds him of Halloween costume stores; the brush of fake cobwebs against the skin of his 10 year old self, the smell of aerosol from the bottles of glitter stacked up in the binary coloured ‘girls’ section, aggressively pink and unnecessarily feminine, and the deep feeling of wrongness that settled uncomfortably in his chest when he looked up at the collection of wings. The backing of the display was black paper, devil horns to one side and halos to the other, and the wings were made of some tacky plastic that felt like something dead and hardened when he pressed a small hand to it, ridges and bumps in the surface a sick mockery of life. The feathers were sharp against the back of his fingers and the quills were far too fluffy to keep water out, or be anywhere near aerodynamic.
Lifeless, useless, wrong things.
That’s what he sees now with his own wings. Plastic looped over his arms, dead tissue and frail, fake bone hanging down from the midpoint of his back - pulling at his spine and dangling unnaturally. He sees the same tilt in his wings that he spots in that of murderous snapshots plastered over CNN; haughty and half-rotten limbs rising above the heads of killers and rapists like the outline of the grim reaper standing at their shoulders, lack of life resulting in a utter abyss of colour - an abyss which sucked at the light in their eyes, the flesh in their cheeks and the warmth from their sallow, dry skin.
He wakes from dreams, again and again, where he is small and vulnerable, where he stumbles down the stairs a little boy, and the picture of his mother is gone from the fridge and his father watches a TV that occupies where she used to sit on at the table. His dad turns, a nameless drink in his shaking hand, and Stiles sees himself on the screen. Bracketed by red and blue headlines, he stares back at his older self, now with eyes dark and something horrible and grey bearing at his shoulders, winding around his chest. Below the picture, the deathly pastiche, reads:
BOY KILLS OWN MOTHER.
Stiles always wakes up screaming.
There are flashes - brief moments - where Stiles feels like he belongs to the rag-tag bunch of teenagers and emotionally crippled adults. Sometimes, there’s this warm feeling where Derek grips his arm, or Scott assumes he’s going to Pack meetings (because of course he’s Pack) and Jackson doesn’t take an opportunity to make a disparaging joke about him when it could have been so, so easy. It’s Derek, especially, who instigates the most of these strange, fuzzy moments of bonding.
Stiles likes to watch him work. Derek is a good at making these intricate little carvings that somehow looks more real than life-sizes hyper realistic acrylic paintings, and when not otherwise occupied he works almost on automatic, skimming away shavings of wood with fluid ease that stokes that can entrance Stiles for minutes at a time. The wood is beautifully dark and well-aged, creates this honey and gold contrast to the tone of Derek's skin that sends thrills through his body. Stiles struggles to describe it in a way that isn’t anything but that fierce feeling of this is where I need to be that rises up in those peaceful lulls of his life.
And then Derek will do something horrendous, like meet his eyes and smile, or ask him to make some coffee in a way Stiles knows is the equivalent of anyone else offering coffee. It makes his heart do funny things, but Stiles is sixteen and his heart always seems to be leading him in the wrong direction.
He always smiles back, though, just in case.
It’s three am, and his eyes feel heavy with sleep he isn’t getting. There’s a bite to his bones that suggests a drop in base body temperature, but he woke up only an hour ago to Scott panting down the phone about a Harpy and getting to the Hale house now because they needed a plan. Stiles had felt useful for the whole rushed twenty minute journey, wearing yesterdays jeans and the DC t-shirt he sleeps in, coffee stains included.
As it turns out, Stiles had arrived just as the Pack had been about to leave. Lydia having gotten there first, and already talked through a plan with Peter. At least, that’s what Stiles manages to piece together after entering the house and spotting a still-open laptop and an unmistakably Lydia handbag. They’re in too much or a rush to even give Stiles the time of the day, Scott skipping out on shooting Stiles his patented Sugar-and-Spice-and-all-things-nice ™ look - it aches in a familiar way, sending up lights in the part of his mind that has been telling him he’s not a member of the pack for some while. Intellectually, he knows. He just wishes after some kind of lost courtesy.
Feeling decidedly rejected, he slumps into the sofa chair in front of the coffee table and immediately winches away from the twinge of pain. The rush had meant he’d only had time to stuff his wings into a cheap binder he’d bought off amazon - one that he had bought via his dads credit card before his growth spurt, and as a result his wings were strung up against his back in an awkward position. Feathers decidedly ruffled, he worms his hands up the sides of his t-shirt and pulls his binder down to the thinner areas of his waist, using one hand to keep the material still and the other to gently tug his wings out from under it, mindful of the already twinging limbs. Bathing in the relief and novelty of having his wings free, he lazily looks up to Peter’s laptop as it flicks onto a screensaver (a bland stock picture of Los Angeles) and catches a glimpse of a sketched winged figure.
Quick as a flash, he darts forward to touch the pads of his fingers to the computers mouse board and the image flicks up again. It’s a crude hand-drawn humanoid figure, crouched to the ground with scaly, skeletal wings protruding from its back. Besides it, are the instructions to rip off its wings to make it unable to fly away (scribbled in the margin is 'very fast fliers’ with a small arrow pointing to the text) and that, apart from it’s unusually thicker skin, talon-like nails and sharp teeth, it can be killed by 'standard methods’. The book also notes some can let out a high-pitch screech that can disable creatures with more sensitive hearing, but is fine for humans.
Stiles touches a hand to his own wings as he reads, his skin feeling tight at the notion of ripping off someones wings. Christ. He briefly wonders what Harpies could even do to deserve that kind of fate, before his mind latches onto the concept that - that he could be in here. Heart feeling too real against his ribcage, he presses forward a few pages, skipping over more information on the Harpy and shorted entries on Hellhounds, Hippogriffs and Hobgoblins.
Homo sapien alatus turns out to be an entry only a page long, no picture and very sloppy, loopy writing.
'Not prone to aggression or killing, live well with humans. No outward mutations that are advantageous in a fight. Wings can be troublesome in a hunting scenario. Shoot on sight only if it is otherwise armed.’
It.
He sits back again, this time letting his wings spread out from his spine so they’re not trapped between him and the chair, and stares emptily at the dimly lit screen.
A beast. In the bestiary.
Would Allison consider him one, if she knew? Chris? Hell - Peter might see him as one, Derek too. He’s never really - asked any of them about their stances on his kind. If they want him strung up on a cross or allowed to live normally. It seems too suggestive to even bring up the topic with them, that they could ask if he’s one. Though given his mother, he doubts they would be outwardly disapproving of it if he did ask. Just sort of… distant. He shuts his eyes and rubs his knuckles against the lids harshly, registering flashes of dull colour in his sight line but feeling too abruptly overwhelmed to pay them much mind.
All this time he has been worried about how Scott would react if he ever found out - if he would stay his friend, his brother; when really it’s the others he should have stayed up worrying about, should have made contingency plans for. Would Peter kill him? Would Derek hunt him down? Would Chris string him up with wires and hold a knife to his throat, or worse, out him and his hideous discoloured appendages to the town? He can imagine his dads face if he were to ever find out that way - disappointment, a hint of sorrow at what Claudia’s legacy had become and a trace of guilt because he’d think something unbelievable like Stiles not trusting him enough to tell him or-
He cuts off his train off thought, lowering his hands to his lap and staring unseeingly at the contrast between pallid skin and woven cotton.
Ten minutes later, he drives home.
He doesn’t tell his dad.
The Nogitsune, when it finds this memory, laughs and laughs and laughs, the sound echoing back off the cold walls towards him as he curls up in the only scrap of himself that he has been allowed.
They’ll never accept you.
It loves these shards, these hints of inner chaos that makes it representation in his mind burn all the brighter, blinding him where he watches out of the locker slits. It taunts him, throws his caged self into scenarios where Scott discovers, his face twisting into something unfamiliar and cold. Times where his dad kicks him out, turns to the bottle, all the while reality eating at the edges of these false realities - Scott, crying out and pinned to a table at the clinic in a TV screen, Lydia’s panicked breathing playing out over a song on the radio.
Stiles doesn’t know which one is worse.
Then -
He murders Allison.