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Stiles has been seeing ghosts ever since he left home; he can’t help it. Before he got this internship he was honestly thinking that college, at least on the other side of the country, was a mistake, that he should go home and keep playing second-fiddle human to a pack of werewolves - now he couldn’t imagine leaving, not when they’re so close to something so brilliant.
But that doesn’t mean he’s not desperately homesick.
He feels it like a punch to the gut when Mal strides up to the whiteboard, snatches the marker from Cobb's hand, and scribbles in the remainder of the chemical equation that Cobb's been agonizing over for two hours.
"Honestly," she says in disgust, filling in the Cl with a contemptuous flourish, "boys."
And just like that, they’ve got a chemist.
----
1.
Cobb doesn’t remind him of much of anyone at first. Stiles takes refuge in his company as a result, preferring to avoid the stabbing memory of Lydia every time Mal opens her mouth, or the way that Professor Miles’ fatherly concern and fondness for curly fries tugs at Stiles’ heart.
This ends up backfiring. The more time Mal spends dropping by her father’s lab to belittle their understanding of chemistry and tease Stiles for his fashion sense, the more Cobb’s lovestruck demeanor starts to remind Stiles painstakingly of Scott.
It doesn’t help that Stiles has struck up a friendship of sorts with Mal where she drags him shopping and demands his opinion on her garçon du jour, probably because Lydia pre-broke his spirit for this kind of thing and saved Mal a lot of work. The end result is that he’s become Cobb’s go-to for advice on how to woo Mal.
“Seriously, dude, your mooning over this girl is getting ridiculous, just ask her out already,” Stiles says finally, throwing up his hands. “I don’t know, take her to a museum or something! I bet she loves museums!”
“But what if she says no?” Cobb asks morosely, staring into his coffee with the air of a man who is facing an execution. Earlier Stiles caught him trying to sing along to Edith Piaf records, despite the fact that he speaks not a word of French, because Mal mentioned three days ago that they were her favorite.
“She won’t.” Cobb looks unappeased. Stiles rolls his eyes heavenward. “Good lord, you’re both pathetic. Have you tried giving her a pen?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
(Stiles’ advice about the sappy poetry is pretty much the same as it was with Scott, too - “Dear god man, burn it, burn it now if you ever want her to speak to you again.” “But I -” “She is French, dude, she grew up reading, like, Rimbaud or some shit, her poetry standards are ridiculously high; she seems to like you despite the fact that you have no romance in your soul but don’t go rubbing it in her face.”)
(Somewhere in the middle of all this, Cobb becomes Dom.)
(Dom does end up offering her a pen, after all.)
---
2.
It’s Mal who cleans him up, obviously, who takes him under her wing and shows him what it is to live with expensive taste.
“Woah, woah, are you kidding me?” Stiles blurts out when he catches a glimpse of the price tag, before the clerk whisks it away to join the growing pile of collared shirts that Mal has selected for him. “Mal, I can’t afford this! No one can afford this! I could buy, like, a whole dining room table for that - and, wait, actually, since I’m eating off of a TV-dinner tray right now, that would be really kind of preferable, can we make this a trip to Ikea instead?”
“Shut up, chéri,” she says, absentmindedly handing her credit card off to an attendant and then stepping back to eye his current outfit critically. “That shirt will take you places that no dining table ever could.”
“I hate you,” he grumbles, tugging uncomfortably at his new tie and pulling a face at himself in the mirror. Mal narrows her eyes at him and he drops his hands.
“One day,” she says with an overdramatic sigh, “one day you will appreciate all that I am doing for you, you philistine.”
Stiles submits for another two hours of her fussing; at first it’s because, hello, he’s tried arguing with Lydia before and he knows all too well that ends, might as well give in and save himself the headache. Then his brain catches up to itself and realizes its mistake; after that it’s because he’s too tired and homesick to do anything but give in to his fate as a human mannequin.
----
3.
The military, when they take over the project, is not particularly good to him. They put him through basic training - presumably so he’ll actually know the mechanics of hand-to-hand combat, so he can pass that knowledge on to the dream enemies he creates - and he quickly learns that a smart mouth and a drill sergeant is not the best combination. He learns, on pain of push-ups, to hold his tongue.
They take him out of basic training and drop him back in the lab with Cobb and Mal, whose architect and chemist roles spared them from learning how to fire a gun and kill a man with their bare hands. Mal tuts over his shorn hair and hugs him close; Cobb presses his shoulder reassuringly against Stiles’ while he pages through the notes that he and Mal have amassed over the last nine weeks.
Stiles features heavily in the military dreamshare training program because he’s “inventive,” “unpredictable” - the soldiers invading his dreams get attacked by wolves, ripped apart by anthropomorphic lizards, skewered on arrows and burned alive. Every time the general pats him approvingly on the back and tells Dom how “imaginative” his protege is, Stiles swallows back a hysterical laugh.
The soldiers on base are hostile at worst, and avoid him at best, since none of them know how to react to this dreamshare stuff but it’s hard to let go of the fact that they keep dying inside his head. Stiles tells himself that he’s not bothered. He prefers it this way.
He also pretends it doesn’t bother him that the army taught him virtually none of the tactics that he uses to kill people in his dreams.
He’s quiet, communicates mostly in monosyllables and grunts. He avoids everyone who is not Dom or Mal like the plague, and one day he catches himself snarling “Get your goddamn hand off me if you do not want to lose it” at a soldier who tries to grab his arm in the hallway. To his surprise, it works.
Oh god, he realizes in the lab two hours later, I’m Derek. Dom and Mal are somewhat alarmed when, out of the blue, Stiles starts laughing until tears roll down his cheeks.
----
4.
Stiles’ name changes the day he leaves the army, fakes his own death and makes a sprint for Madagascar.
In three months, he will be thoroughly Arthur. In three months, he will have the bare bones of a reputation; he’ll have begun working his way across the shadiest dream dens in Africa, heading north. He will be offering his services as a sort of dreamshare-handyman; he will research marks, fine-tune Somnacin compounds, repair PASIV’s, build worlds, bring them crashing down inside other people’s heads. Arthur will have made a name for himself, and become Stiles' name in the process.
But for now Stiles is running scared and barely even remembers the name on his fake passport. He more or less stumbles into Lucienne’s den several weeks later, following the whispers of a place where your fantasies can be your reality, for a time, for a price.
“You here to dream?” A woman asks him in accented English as he staggers through the door, taking in the deathgrip he’s got on the case, the tremor in his hands and the too-loose but expensive suit that has seen better days. Stiles takes a deep breath and shakes his head.
“Then get the fuck out, vazaha,” she says without further preamble, turning back to the magazine in her hands. Stiles can see the outline of a pistol tucked into her lamba.
“An audition,” Stiles squeaks out. The woman raises an eyebrow but doesn’t look up. “I can be anything. Architect, extractor, point man, chemist - you name it, I’ll do it better than anyone you can find in this place, I’ll kick ass, dude. I’ll work for cheap. I just need some food, and frankly a shower, and maybe a place to sleep while I figure out what the hell I’m doing.” He swallows and follows his outburst up with a desperate “please,” probably the last one he’s got left. The woman - Lucienne, he finds out later - sets her magazine down with deliberate slowness and meets Stiles’ eyes.
“Your pitch is terrible.”
“What?”
“I’ll take a shot on you, vazaha, ‘cause I have a suspicion that you might actually mean what you say, but try to tone it down, yeah? Nobody’s going to shoot you. Not right away, at least.”
Lucienne bares her teeth in a smile. Stiles tries to smile back, but his knees are wobbly from hunger so the best he manages is a grimace.
“What is your name, zanaka?”
“St- Arthur.”
“Okay, Arthur,” she says, tucking her smile away like she’s holstering a gun. “I’m Lucienne. Let’s see what you got.”
Lucienne is an imminently practical woman, and in no time Stiles is manufacturing dreams for her myriad clients in exchange for food and a place to sleep. In the meantime, she shows him the ropes - how to cover his tracks, how to spot those that need bribing, how to make himself understood in a language he doesn’t speak, how to pick locks, how to win at poker. Kind of.
“How? How are you doing this?” Stiles demands with a groan as Lucienne bluffs him out of another day’s worth of chores. “Is it witchcraft, because if it is I would not be surprised and also that’s cheating and you should forfeit immediately.” Sylvano, one of Lucienne’s other strays and ten years old at most, giggles at Stiles’ indignation, the cheeky brat.
“No cheating, my friend,” Lucienne says with a slow blink and a slower grin as she rakes in her winnings. “You are far too expressive for this game you are playing. That is why you keep losing.”
“What, at poker? That’s a little harsh, dude, I win sometimes,” Stiles protests, making a face at Sylvano when the little guy scoffs in disbelief.
“Tsia,” Lucienne says, shaking her head, “I am not talking about poker.” She hands her cards off to Sylvano so he can practice his shuffling, then leans back and deliberately stares Stiles down. Stiles shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
“Arthur, my friend,” she begins slowly, “where you’re going, the cards are going to be stacked against you for a long time.”
Stiles startles. “I’m not going-”
“Tais-toi, do you think I am stupid? I know what a packed suitcase looks like, up here,” she says, tapping her head with one finger. “I am an old woman; I grant people their fondest wishes, I earn a living, I am content. Do you think the rest of dreamshare is happy with ‘content,’ when they could be rich beyond their wildest dreams? When they could play God with another man’s mind? You are talented, Arthur, but this is what you’re getting yourself into.”
Stiles is reminded of another room, far away, where a woman looked him in the eye and told him to keep going. The deck slips from Sylvano’s hands in a shower of cards, and the boy ducks beneath the table with a muffled exclamation to gather them back up.
“You are going to be playing for impossibly high stakes against people who have every advantage, and none of that can show,” Lucienne continues quietly, “not in your face, not in your body, not in your actions, not if you want to stay alive. You could be dealing against generals, warlords, billionaires, or just little Sylvano here, and it’s all got to look like it’s the same to you or you’re done, you’re blown away. You need to look,” she adds, smirking around the words and spreading her arms out wide to encompass the space between them, “like you do not give a fuck who is sitting at your table.”
It’s a lesson, and Stiles aims to learn it. When he leaves only scant weeks later, he can beat Lucienne at poker at least three times out of ten. She eyes him critically and declares him a work in progress: “But you’ll do. Izao ndana mandeha any, vazaha, before I grow tired of your face.”
He spends the next few months becoming the sort of person he thinks Arthur should be, and when he finally finds Mal and Dom again in Istanbul it’s because they’ve unknowingly hired him for a job. He almost collapses from relief when he walks through the door and sees their faces, winces when Mal lets out a delighted shriek at the sight of him. Mal punches him in the shoulder and cries; Dom can’t stop ruffling his too-long hair; neither of them question it when he introduces himself to their new forger as “Arthur.”
---
5.
Arthur has been seeing ghosts ever since he left home; he can’t help it. Scott’s the only one he keeps in touch with, the one he trusts to trust him when he says “don’t come looking” (Dad, he knows, would’ve been putting together a case file on his son’s whereabouts and calling in favors from the first postcard; it’s safer this way). The rest of them he misses like an extra limb, even all these years later, but he has too many enemies to consider going home. He makes do with what he can find.
Mal is a dead ringer for Lydia and Dom’s alternate fits of brilliance and utter stupidity keep him on his toes as much as Scott ever did. He and Lucienne still cross paths from time to time - her slow smile and enviable ability to not give a fuck remind him of Boyd’s easy sureness, combined with Miss Morrell’s tendency to give him a much-needed tongue lashing. He’s met Jackson over and over again in the self-entitled hotshots that think they’re god’s gift to dreamshare. He himself is quieter, trigger-happy to a fault, talks less, snarls more - the only thing standing between him and a leather jacket (which he's always secretly thought would be badass) is Mal's insistence on Armani.
But Eames, now, Eames is like no one he’s ever known.
He’s atrociously and apologetically poorly dressed, loud-print shirts unbuttoned to show more skin than is entirely necessary for autumn in Barcelona. He’s charming, he’s whip-smart and he seems uniquely unburdened by any sort of existential angst (a refreshing change, in Stiles’ experience).
“If you ever tell me to carpe diem again, Mr. Eames,” Stiles tells him without looking up, “I will shoot you in the foot.”
“Point taken, darling,” Eames purrs in his ear. “I shall leave you to your studies.”
He snatches an apple off of Arthur’s desk - that was his lunch, dammit - and bites into it with a smirk, sauntering away to bug Cobb about one thing or another.
Then again, maybe Eames does remind him of someone.
----