Chapter Text
It started with a bar. A bar and too many memories, which Stiles was failing to drown in his third glass of the same golden hued Bourbon his father used to drink.
The twenty-something man sat at the stained walnut bar, sticky and unclean. It seemed to Stiles an allegory of his own life. Once beautiful and full of promise, but now damaged and dulled, a shadow of what it once was. Reduced to existing in some dive bar where nobody really came and those that did barely looked each other in the eye.
Stiles stared down into the depths of his drink, the amber liquor a constant swirl around a mini vortex as his hand shifted, keeping it moving counterclockwise. Occasionally he stopped to take a sip, but not often. He no longer enjoyed the feeling of drunkenness. He knew all too well the dangers inherent in losing control. This glass was his third and it would be his last. He wanted to make it last. Wanted to stretch out the time until his inevitable departure. This nameless bar may be a dump, but it was still far better than the empty apartment that he laughingly called home. Its two bedrooms mocked him now, standing in silent judgement on all his carefully laid plans. It was proof that, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't control everything. Now they were all gone and Stiles was left alone. Far from his real home with a life that was devoid of any real meaning or purpose.
He had been thinking all night. Trying to work out when it had all gone so horribly wrong. Yet, there didn't seem to be a point. No one single factor that had turned them down the wrong path. Stiles just wished with all his heart that things had turned out differently. That somehow he'd been able to do something better, smarter, different.
He ignored the footsteps until they stopped beside him and a beautiful, older woman took the next stool. With perfectly manicured, pearlescent pink nails long enough to almost be called talons, she removed a paper napkin from her neat snakeskin purse and laid it out smooth on the counter before her.
Stiles took a sip of his whiskey and said nothing.
"Buy a lady a drink?" Her voice was rich, with just an edge of a husky purr, designed to raise his interest, Stiles presumed,but Stiles wasn't here to pick up women, and he'd long ago learned that his kind of loneliness wasn't cured with one night stands. The meaningless company only served to highlight just what he had lost, putting it under a spotlight, rather than chasing it temporarily into the shadows.
"Not interested," Stiles said gruffly, not even bothering to look over. Like as not in this place she was a whore, looking to find her next john. All she'd find was his badge, habitually clipped to the right side of his belt, proclaiming his status as a detective in the San Francisco police department.
He caught her careless shrug out of the corner of his eye, seemingly unconcerned at his rejection as she signalled his order at the bartender, who reluctantly put down her phone with whatever game she'd been engrossed in long enough to pour the woman the same brand of Bourbon that was sat before Stiles.
The woman sighed contentedly at her first sip, setting the glass down before her, cradled in those pink talons. "Ahhh, a man of good taste," she said, ignoring Stiles' body language, all of which practically screamed that he wanted to be left alone.
"It's what my father drank," he told her. He frowned, not knowing what had made him offer up such a personal piece of information to a complete stranger.
"Then good taste must be genetic. Like father, like son. Was he a policeman as well?"
Stiles looked up, surprise finally getting her his full attention. She must have been in her mid-forties, wrinkles starting to show at the corners of her clear green eyes and full lips. High cheekbones gave her an almost regal appearance, especially with the way her jet black hair fell in soft waves around her face. She smiled, seeming amused, and flicked a talon toward the slight bulge where his gun was holstered beneath his jacket, then another to his beltline, where the shining edge of his badge was just visible.
"He was a sheriff," Stiles said, slowly.
"Ahhh," she purred once again. "Small town boy, come to the big city? There's a story in that, I bet."
"Not one that I generally tell," Stiles said, going first gruffly. It made something pang inside him. A reminder of someone who was far better at gruff than he had ever been able to master.
"But a story nonetheless," she surmised. She took a leisurely sip of her drink, plump lips resting at the edge of the glass as the golden liquid slid into her delectable mouth. Stiles told himself that he neither noticed nor cared, though his throat felt suddenly dry enough that he knocked back half of what he had left in his own glass, feeling it burn its way down to his stomach. "How is life working out for you in the bay? Is it everything you ever dreamed of?"
Stiles didn't answer her, but clearly he didn't need to as she continued, "The thing people don't always appreciate about dreams is that they are so often actually nightmares. Life can turn out not the way you wanted, but the way you feared."
"What do you know about my life?" Stiles snapped, fear and suspicion rising like bile in his throat.
"Very little," she said in a nothing tone that did little to settle him. "Save that you are a young, handsome man sitting alone in this bar looking as though all meaning and joy has disappeared from his life. Are you asking yourself where it all went wrong? Trying to devise what you would have done differently?"
"No," he said, turning back to stare once more into the depths of his drink.
"No?" She sounded intrigued, leaning forward, her low cut top showing a little too much cleavage. "You think you'd make all the same choices?"
"Yes," Stiles said, firmly. He'd thought about this, far too much most probably. "Everything I did, everything choice I made, it was the right one for what I knew at the time. Who I was then."
"But if you were the you now, making those choices?" she prompted.
"But I'm not," Stiles said, slamming the rest of his drink down his throat and getting up, ripping his wrinkled overcoat from the back of the barstool and pulling it on, preparing to head out once more into the dark and rainy San Francisco night. Leave this woman and her useless 'what if' questions behind.
She caught his arm, talons shifting to grip tight enough that he stopped. Instinct froze him, prey assessing an unknown predator, suddenly wary. "You could be," she said, her voice dropping. He swallowed, thinking about the exits and his chances if he made a break for it. "You're not happy, Stiles." Of course, she knew his name. He was a fool - one who should have walked away the moment she sat down. "You've not been happy for a long time."
"Well, since you clearly know everything about me…" Stiles said, shifting slightly as he prepared to make a break for it.
"I know very little about you other than your name and your heart's desire. You called to me, Stiles. Your pain and your wish that things could be different. And they can be."
He hesitated, knowing she'd caught him. His curiosity and need to know had always been his weakness. "It's all in the past, gone," he said though it felt like a weak defence.
"And if it wasn't? You're a different person now, Stiles. Would you have made the same choices, with who you are now?"
He wouldn't, he knew. He couldn't. He couldn't be suspicious of people he'd come to know and love. He couldn't be accepting and friendly towards those who would end up seeking to cause harm to him and his. He didn't have to admit that though, not to her. "What about the space-time continuum? Don't we have to worry about ruining it? All that timey wimey bullshit?" he quipped, falling back of his old trick of joking his way out of a situation.
"There are millions of realities. An infinite number of possibilities in this universe."
Stiles snorted. "So, you have the power to… transport me to an alternate dimension. To relive my life. Knowing what I know now. So I can try and make things turn out better?" His tone dripped cynicism like hot tar, yet she seemed unmoved, treating his question as serious.
"Not knowing what you know now. You wouldn't retain memories of this future. I would transport you to a reality that mirrored this one to the point of your arrival. For all intents and purposes, you would have lived your life to that point. You would share the same memories of the past and the same hopes and dreams for the future."
"So what's the point then? I already told you that I wouldn't change the decisions I made at the time I made them. If I don't know any better, then you'd just be dooming me to make the same mistakes all over again."
“You won’t know everything,” she promised him though her talons were still gripping his arm with an intensity that suggested that she would have drawn blood if it weren’t for his layers. “But it’ll be different.”
Stiles curled his hand into a fist, testing her hold on him, but it seemed like iron. An escape route was of no use if he couldn’t even get out of her clutches. “Different how?” he ground out, every muscle tensed against the hold.
“I can give you a do over, but you won’t know exactly how things went wrong the first time. What do you know about dementia?” she asked him, cocking her head to the side in a way that sent her long, dark hair waterfalling over one shoulder.
“My mom died of frontotemporal dementia,” Stiles replied tightly. And thank you so much for that particular memory.
She didn’t seem at all fazed by the news, instead smiling and inclining her head. “Then you know,” she said, pushing forward enthusiastically. “When you get dementia, your memories may go, but the way your experiences make you feel will remain. It will be like that. You won’t remember living this life before, but the connections. The instincts. They will guide you.”
Stiles narrowed his eyes and twisted more in her iron grip. “Dementia? Is that what you’re offering me?” he ground out. “A future where I’ve lost my mind? Living in an imagined past when I’m actually surrounded by people who just think I’m crazy? Trying to remind myself I’m twenty-seven, not seventeen? That’s no offer at all. I’d rather deal with the reality of life than some imagined, rose-tinted lie.”
“No,” the woman said firmly, tugging on his arm and pulling her bodily toward her with more strength than her slight frame would have suggested was possible. “No lies. A new reality. The effects without the disease.”
Stiles shook his head, not believing her promises - they had to be empty. The one thing that life had always held constant was that there was only one chance. Once that had gone wrong, as it had in his so many times, that was it. You lived with the consequences.
“You don’t believe me - but you need this, Stiles Stilinski. So, I’ll give you what you need.”
Before he could even protest, she pulled him in, knocking him off balance and careening toward her. She caught his lips in his. They were soft, intoxicating and he melted into the kiss as the world around him faded away.