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“Why me?” Stiles asks, and Peter smiles like he’s a naive five year old asking why the sky is blue.
“Because it’s always been you,” he says, and then his teeth close on the sensitive flesh of Stiles’s wrist, and everything dissolves into pain.
---
Stiles wakes up draped across a rotting sofa. There’s a huge leather jacket laid over him, spread like a blanket. He inches his head to the left and sees decrepit floorboards and burned wallpaper. The room smells like ash and death and a deep-seated despair.
He’s in the Hale house. He’s in the Hale house and his wrist is on fire, and so is the fleshy part of his shoulder, and he doesn’t have to touch it to feel the sharp outline of Peter’s teeth where they sank into him, over and over again. Marking him.
Turning him.
“You’re awake,” Peter says softly. He looms out of the darkness, appearing more creepily than Derek has ever managed. He bends over Stiles and rubs his hand over the soft fuzz of his hair; he coos at Stiles soothingly, even as he pulls Stiles’s ripped and bloody collar down to inspect his own handiwork. “Good. The bite is taking.”
“You bit me,” Stiles tries to say. It comes out as a hoarse whisper. He coughs harshly, and a shiver wracks through his body. “You bit me a lot.”
“I may have gotten a little carried away,” Peter says, still petting Stiles’s head. He doesn’t sound remorseful. “But no matter, you’re safe here. This ends tonight, and then we can move on.” He places a kiss on Stiles’s forehead, chaste like a father.
Stiles struggles to sit up, fights to move, but his body is almost entirely unresponsive. He squirms until Peter places his hand over the bite and presses his body down into the uncomfortable remains of the sofa.
“Shh, don’t move. My nephew and the McCall boy will be here shortly, and then we have to deal with the Argent woman. I need you rested.”
Stiles twitches against Peter’s hold, but it’s like his whole body has turned against him: The moment Peter tells him not to move, he couldn’t. He almost doesn’t want to, like some small part of Stiles’s id has staged a coup on his higher brain functions.
Peter turns away and tilts his head as if he’s listening to something. Stiles strains to hear, and maybe it’s the bite set it in or maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks he hears talking from outside.
After kissing Stiles’s forehead again — less fatherly gesture and more animal marking its property — Peter straightens entirely. Stiles curls up until he’s almost entirely covered by Peter’s leather trench coat, because he can’t get up and run and he doesn’t have the energy to panic anymore. There’s too much whirling in his head; reality is shifting in and out, and it feels like a fever is burning him up, slowly and slowly gaining until he’s going to catch on fire, until he’s going to burn—
Then there’s shouting and a small explosion and more shouting, and then the unmistakable crack of gunfire has Stiles fighting against his alpha’s orders — against Peter’s orders — and dragging himself to his feet. The leather coat falls to the floor, forgotten. He sways, unsteady and near delirious, but he manages to get through the empty doorway and down the hall to the remains of the front door.
Peter is in his creepy wolf-creature form, ripping out Kate Argent’s throat with his teeth. There’s blood everywhere, and Stiles can see his teeth gleaming wetly under the waning moon. Scott is hovering over Allison, who is clutching her leg like something’s broken. Derek crouches near a tree, watching with wide eyes as his uncle kills the woman who ruined their lives. There are multiple arrows sticking out of him, and Stiles can, can smell the blood seeping from the holes, can smell Kate Argent’s death, can smell Allison’s body wash and the lingering hints of Scott’s dumb aftershave that he stopped using after getting bitten, months ago.
Stiles grabs the doorframe and pants uselessly, feeling the fire of the bite roll through him. He doesn’t need to look in a mirror to know that his eyes are probably glowing. Maybe being bitten multiple times speeds up the process, or maybe it’s because Peter chose him, and he chose Peter, but it’s coming on faster than it did with Scott, faster than his body can handle.
“Stiles?” Scott gasps suddenly, and then Peter and Derek’s attentions snapped to him instantly. Derek jerks when he sees Stiles’s face, while Peter growls approvingly. He tears another piece out of Kate Argent and howls.
“Yeah,” Stiles says, and then he slides to sit on the uneven porch. He side is on fire as well, and that’s when he figures out, through the haze of allover pain, that Peter bit him there as well. Wrist, shoulder, side. “Yeah, Scott, I’m here.”
“Shit,” Scott swears. He rises like he’s going to go to Stiles, but then Allison is tugging him back down, staring with terrified eyes at Peter. “Shit, he bit you.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, because what else can he say? “I—I said yes. When he asked.”
Maybe he wouldn’t have, if he’d known it would hurt this much, but Stiles can’t change that now. Now he has to watch as Derek pries the arrows out of his own shoulder and legs and torso and lumbers to his feet. He edges towards where Stiles is sitting, stealing glances between him and his uncle.
“He asked?” Derek questions, his words carrying weight Stiles can’t parse at the moment. “He asked instead of—”
Whatever he’s getting at is lost because Stiles catches movement out of the corner of his eye, sees Chris Argent creeping up through the forest while everyone is distracted by Peter’s revenge. He sees the glint of a gun and the hard set of Argent’s jaw. Maybe Peter was right when he said Stiles was born to this, because he’s up and moving before he even makes a conscious decision, throwing himself between Peter and the bullet.
The bullet hits him in the stomach, right in the sensitive meaty parts. He feels it enter and exit, and then he feels it burn. He screams and collapses immediately, cursing as his body fights to heal. There was something wrong with the bullet; it felt like it had been coated in acid or something, and he realizes, as the stench hits him and Peter snarls, that it must be wolfsbane. Someone coated the bullet with wolfsbane.
He’s been a werewolf for less than thirty minutes, and he’s already dying from a wolfsbane bullet. There’s a joke in there somewhere.
Peter leaps at Argent, and Allison screams. Derek is suddenly at Stiles’s side, manhandling him so that he can look at the wound.
“It’s not poisoned,” Derek says, as if his uncle, his alpha, isn’t fighting the other Argent sibling just a few yards away.
“Then why,” Stiles pants, “does it reek of aconite?” He grunts as Derek pries away his hands from the bleeding hole in his front and pokes at it.
“They make their own bullets,” Derek says. “I’m guessing they made this batch with the same equipment they used for the others.”
“Great,” Stiles whines. He can feel his body flushing out the toxin, getting rid of the trace amounts that transferred from the bullet to his insides. It hurts. “Great, I’m getting killed by cross contamination.” Derek helps Stiles sit up properly, and their attention is pulled to the fight between Peter and Argent.
“Dad!” Allison screams as Peter’s claws catch on her father’s side. Argent grunts and dips away, clutching at the gashes with his free hand. By the end of this, he’ll either be dead or a werewolf himself.
“He won’t allow Argent to live,” Derek murmurs. He forces Stiles to find his feet and then drags him back, away from the danger. Stiles cranes his neck and sees Derek’s glowing eyes focused entirely on his uncle. The hair on the back of his neck raises as he registers Derek’s murderous intent, and he resists the urge to step in between his alpha and Derek.
God, Peter is his alpha now.
Scott holds Allison back as Peter pins Argent to the ground and bites him. He takes a huge chunk out of the hunter’s side, but then he backs off, blood dripping down his grotesque muzzle and staining his fur. He throws back his head and howls, and Stiles can feel his alpha’s satisfaction brewing beneath his skin. Argent takes one wet breath, and then another, and then another, and then everyone seems to realize the same thing all at once — he’s not dying.
The bite is taking.
Peter begins to change back to his human shape. Allison’s heartbeat is thunderous in the night’s silence, as is the scent of her terror and ocean of human blood. The only thing holding her up is the brace of Scott’s arms. Stiles holds his breath as Peter and Derek lock eyes across the clearing. Stiles can still feel Derek’s desire to kill Peter skimming across his awareness, and he knows that Peter feels it too. It’s a pack thing, a wolf thing.
“Stiles,” Peter says smoothly, his gaze never leaving his nephew. “Come here and let me look at that.”
Derek’s hands tighten on the back of Stiles’s neck, brushing too close to the bite on his shoulder. Claws curve against his skin, sending shivers down his spine.
“Derek,” Peter says warningly. He watches as Derek carefully unclenches Stiles from his grip, not shedding a drop of blood or even breaking the skin. Not that it would really matter now if he did; Stiles’s body is healing his wolfsbane-tainted bullet wound faster than any human body could.
Stiles shuffles to his feet with a groan and steps obediently towards his alpha. Scott makes a noise in the back of his throat, but Stiles is honestly too exhausted and hurt to bother translating it. He can guess. He can guess exactly what Scott is thinking; Scott never wanted the bite, and he hates everything it’s brought into his life. He’ll never understand how Stiles could want this, especially from Peter.
Peter, who casually grabs the remains of Stiles’s dress shirt and rips it from his body like it’s nothing. Peter, who bends on his knee to see the wound and then licks around it. Peter, who turns him around and does the same for the rapidly closing exit wound.
Derek growls, and there’s really no brain power needed to translate that.
“Stiles is hurt,” Peter scolds, as if his nephew is a rebellious puppy. “Are you honestly going to challenge me now, here? With an Argent Turning a few yards away and another one planning our deaths?”
“You killed Laura,” Derek snarls. He’s fangs are out, and his eyes glow electric blue. Stiles wonders, absently, what color his own eyes turn.
“Yes,” Peter answers. He pulls Stiles in closer, and it isn’t until Stiles is behind that he realizes what Peter was doing. Putting himself between Stiles and Derek. Between Derek and Argent, and Derek and Scott. Protecting the pack.
“Yes, Derek, I did,” he repeats. Peter doesn’t shift. Doesn’t even twitch. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Jennifer is the one who set the trap; she’s the one who set Laura up.”
It doesn’t feel like a lie. Derek apparently thinks so too, because he rocks back on his heels and just stares at his uncle, his mouth hanging slightly open to accommodate his fangs. Werewolf underbite. Stiles uses their family staring contest to check on Argent, who is still breathing and bleeding. Stiles kneels by his side, ignoring the pain that spikes through his torso when he lowers himself to the ground. The hunter opens his eyes as Stiles brushes his hand along the bite.
“Kill me,” he gasps, hushed as if he’s trying to stay unnoticed. Stiles is a brand new wolf, but even he can tell that whispering is futile. He hears every word loud and clear, and so can every other werewolf in the area.
“I don’t think death is in the cards for you tonight, dude,” Stiles says. Watching flesh knit itself together is disgusting and fascinating. He’s too squeamish to watch his own skin regrow, but on Argent, it’s like watching a clip from a really high-budget movie. A really gross high-budget movie, with far more torture porn than Stiles is all together comfortable with, despite what his life has become.
“It’s not,” Peter says, kneeling at Stiles’s side. Apparently, he’s the winner of the staring contest. Dominance display. Stiles shivers as the urge to lay down and roll over rushes through him.
“Welcome to the pack,” Peter says, and then he knocks Argent unconscious.
Scott grunts as Allison finally frees herself from his grasp with a well-aimed kick. She skids just short of Peter, who looks up at her with radiant red eyes. Peter’s hand snakes out and settles over Stiles’s bite, the one on his shoulder; Stiles melts into it before he can stop himself.
“You turned my dad into a werewolf,” Allison says. She has one of her arrows clutched in her fist, as if that’ll do anything against one of them, alpha or not.
“I did,” Peter replies calmly. He glances over at Scott, who has gotten to his feet and is moving to pull Allison away again. To protect her from Peter. “Scott, sit down next to Derek.” Stiles can feel the command roll over him, and he watches as Scott staggers under the weight of his alpha’s order. This is possibly the most in control Peter has ever been, Stiles realizes. And that’s why Scott can’t fight it like he did before. Peter is more grounded now than he was hunting down those that murdered his family.
“Now, Allison,” Peter continues. “You have a choice: You either join your father and become a werewolf like your boyfriend — or die in the process, either one — or I kill you and leave your body for your mother to find.”
“Hey now—” Stiles starts to protest, but then Peter is squeezing where the shoulder bite is, and Stiles can’t form words. It’s pleasure and pain and agony and affection all in one, all pounding at him, all digging teeth in and chewing. Stiles comes back to awareness a few moments later to his own screaming and the sound of Scott’s furious yelling.
“Don’t interrupt me, Stiles,” Peter says gently. Stiles goes limp and useless against the ground as the sensations subside. Peter pats him affectionately and turns his attention back to Allison. “As I was saying, either you turn or you die. You really don’t have any other options.”
“You’ve already killed my aunt a-and turned my father,” Allison says, refusing to be cowed by Peter’s display. She’s braver than Stiles is, braver than anyone Stiles knows at the moment. She sneaks a little glance down at Stiles’s prone body and then over at her own father’s. She doesn’t look back at Scott, but her attention shifts there, briefly. “Isn’t this enough for you?”
“No,” Peter says simply. “Now choose.”
“Yes,” Allison growls, sounding like a wolf herself. She tosses aside the arrow and lifts her chin defiantly. “Fine. Go ahead.”
Peter bites her left side, making her a mirror image of her father.
---
Derek drives Scott and Stiles home. Peter stays behind to watch over the Argents — the alive ones and the dead one. Derek doesn’t want his uncle to leave his sight, but Peter insists that Stiles go home and rest and check in with his father.
“The man is the sheriff,” Peter says, “and considering that your date to the formal is probably either in the morgue or the hospital, it would be wise to let him know you’re all right.”
The dance feels like it was years ago, but Stiles still flinches at the reminder. Lydia. Hopefully, she’ll wake up a werewolf. Hopefully, she won’t die.
Hopefully, Peter won’t have killed her too.
“He needed at least three betas in his pack,” Derek explains in the car. He’s gripping the steering hard enough that Stiles can see almost every bone in his hands outlined in stark relief. It’s amazing he hasn’t bent the poor thing out of shape. “It only takes one bite for an alpha to create a werewolf, and asking is not the norm.”
He glances at Stiles with absolutely no subtly whatsoever, staring at the blood soaked into various parts of his borrowed shirt. Side, shoulder, wrist. An unholy trinity of smeared blood on the once white t-shirt.
“Getting bit multiple times,” Stiles says, asking the question Derek wants to answer, “is it some kind of freaky werewolf bonding thing?”
“Yes,” Derek growls, turning his attention back to the road. He adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and takes a turn at a highly illegal speed.
“What does it—” Stiles starts to ask.
“I can’t believe you said yes,” Scott says, speaking for the first time since Peter ordered him into Derek’s car. “He asked you, and you said yes.”
“Yes, I did,” Stiles snaps. “I get it. Now can I finish asking some pretty relevant questions here?”
“It means that he owns you now,” Derek says. The speedometer indicates higher and higher speeds, and if Stiles didn’t now have first hand experience with the increased acuteness of werewolf reaction time, he’d be scared shitless. He is, actually. “It means that he has a claim on you. Did you not think before you said yes?” Derek demands.
“Hey,” Stiles protests. “It’s not like he gave me a heads up beforehand!”
“You said yes!” Derek shouts. The car screeches to a stop in front of Stiles’s house. “What did you think was going to happen?”
“I didn’t really have a plan, asshole,” Stiles says. He carefully doesn’t think about what Peter said to him in the parking garage, just a few hours ago — power and strength, the ability to protect those he loves, the bonus of being special.
You’re already special, Peter’s voice says from his memories. You’re loyal and strong. The bite will make you more so, will make you better. Make you faster and physically stronger. And you’ll always have a family with me and with our pack.
“You—” Derek’s eyes burn blue, and he looks two seconds away from wolfing out completely. Stiles very calmly opens the door and climbs out, motioning for Scott to climb over the seats and follow him.
“Go away, Derek,” he says tiredly, and to his surprise, Derek does.
---
Stiles sneaks back to the Hale property on a Friday.
There’s a big mess of an investigation over the next few weeks after the dance — Stiles doesn’t see the Argents during it, not even Allison, but he finds out that Chris is giving Peter an alibi for pretty much everything, and Kate is declared a fugitive of the law. An alive fugitive of the law. Due to some creative evidence tampering, the Argents made it look like Kate and some of her goons are the ones who kidnapped Stiles away from the dance after attacking Lydia, and that she’s on the run, despite being, you know, dead.
Lydia still isn’t waking up, and Stiles is freaking the fuck out.
His car has been taken into evidence, and Scott is understandably trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with Allison and her dad, so Stiles pulls on his hiking boots and heads out to the Hale house. Peter, after falsely proving to the authorities that he wasn’t a murderer, turned around and bought his family’s property back. He also bought two trailers and had them installed on the edge of the clearing around the burned out husk of a house.
Stiles hasn’t seen Peter in person since he sent Stiles and Scott home. Sometimes Derek will drop by and brood for a while before passing on a message — usually praise for not murdering anyone with his new wolf teeth — but no more than that. It’s probably due to the investigation and the fact that the FBI have come sniffing about a few times, but it still makes Stiles nervous.
Does Peter regret giving him the bite? Does he have second thoughts about his...claim on Stiles? Derek won’t stay, and Scott can barely talk about Peter without wolfing out, which. Stiles understands, even if the wolf part of him wants to growl and defend his alpha.
Because despite it all, despite the abandonment and betrayal and Lydia, oh fuck, Lydia, Peter is still Stiles’s alpha. He still owns Stiles.
So, two weeks after Peter kills Kate and turns Allison and Christ Argent into werewolves, Stiles pulls on his hiking boots and walks out to the Hale property. He cuts through the woods, letting his nose guide him on and off the trails until he’s at the tree line, staring at the cheep wooden porch built in front of Peter’s trailer.
The door to the other trailer opens, revealing a shirtless Derek. Once, Stiles might have stared, but right now, Derek is about as interesting as dirt. Stiles can smell his bitterness and the barely controlled lust for violence floating around him, and while he feels for the dude — well and truly feels — the shiny new primal part of his brain only cares about what that means for their alpha.
(Stiles wants to hate himself for that, but he was good at compartmentalizing, even as a human.)
“You should leave, Stiles,” Derek growls.
“Derek,” Peter says, opening his own door and leaning casually against the frame. “We’ve talked about this.” He meets Derek’s eyes across the small gap between their trailers. The sight of Peter’s glowing red alpha eyes makes something in Stiles shiver, from the top of his scalp all the way down to his toes. “I’m the alpha, and that means—”
Derek snarls, and without another glance at Stiles, slams the door closed. With him on the inside.
“Uh,” Stiles says intelligently.
“Well?” Peter says, standing aside slightly. “Aren’t you going to come up?”
Stiles hesitates, thinking of Derek’s implied warning, but in the end, he does as his alpha says. He can feel the bites throbbing slightly underneath his clothes. They don’t hurt anymore, but they’re constant reminders of what he said yes to. Of Peter and his possible place in Peter’s pack.
“We have a lot to talk about,” Peter says as Stiles brushes past him into the trailer. He places a hand on the back of Stiles’s neck, and his whole body relaxes for the first time since Derek drove him home.
“Yeah,” Stiles says evenly. “We do. Starting first with whether this ownership thing is a two-way street.”
Peter chuckles lightly, kicking the door closed and bringing his other hand to the press against the bite on Stiles’s side. “Of course it’s not,” he says, pushing Stiles further into the living room. His voice is low against Stiles’s ear. Stiles’s whole body is lighting up, slow and steady, with bursts of heat that wash through him like fire.
The two of them are around the same height, even if Peter is broader and stronger. He manhandles Stiles into a factory-new arm chair and then kneels in front of him. Peter holds his wrist to Stiles’s mouth and tilts his head at him. He smiles fiercely. Stiles can feel his own eyes lose their humanity as they stare at each other.
“You’re mine, Stiles,” Peter says. “I know I haven’t been able to be there for you these last few days, but that’s going to change. Just give it time. But in the meantime, I want you to know that you are mine.
“And,” he continues as if Stiles’s heart isn’t going like a jackhammer, “I’m yours.” He presses his wrist forward until it’s in Stiles’s mouth, and after one last moment of hesitation, Stiles surrenders to his instincts.
He bites.