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The man on the other end of the phone sounds genuinely stressed, his heartbeat, usually irregular and fast, sounds like it’s trying to vibrate out of his chest.
“How can I help you, Stiles?” Peter says calmly, putting his crossword down, it hasn’t been too long since they’ve spoken, and he expected it to be a while longer – Stiles doesn’t like being the one to call first. Peter understands, but it’s not a power move that affects him very much, in fact he appreciates it, with people Stiles doesn’t view as a threat, he’s not nearly as careful.
“I need a favour.”
Peter can hear books and clothes being unceremoniously shoved into a bag. He waits for Stiles to continue.
“I’m in some deep shit here, Peter.” He starts, speaking quickly. “And I'm thinking, where’s the place it’s going to be hardest to track to me to?”
“I hear the Arctic is nice and magically inert this time of year.”
“It is all year round, but funnily enough, I was thinking Beacon Hills.”
“It is warmer.”
“Also it has a nemeton, which I can hide behind. Well, hide behind its presence anyway, the woods aren’t exactly my favourite place to sleep.”
“What are you running from?”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m dealing.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re dealing.” Stiles wouldn’t be asking Peter like this if he didn’t absolutely have to. When it wasn’t urgent, he’d offer something first, usually a book, or the blood of something interesting.
“I can talk to you about it when I’m there. So, oh protector of the territory, or whatever, can I come stay?”
“If I say no?”
“Are you going to say no?” Stiles questions, and he’s out on the street now, Peter can hear cars and people speaking in… dutch maybe.
“I’d need something in return.”
“Just for letting me into BH? I would stay out of your way, no trouble, wouldn’t even know I was there.”
Peter had been making temporary plans for a problem of his, nothing concrete, just plans, he makes them all the time. Stiles, Peter’s first choice, doesn’t like staying still, and he doesn’t like Beacon Hills; but if he’s going to have a forcible stay in Peter’s lovely town, it would be almost rude of him not to take advantage of it.
“I need an emissary.”
Stiles scoffs, but Peter knows he has him, or they wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
“That shit’s permanent, Peter.”
“You know better than I do that it is not.”
There’s a mumble about tattoos. “Also, not an emissary, remember that?”
“Exactly, you’re more powerful than an emissary, you won’t be drawing on the pack’s power, it works for everyone.”
“Everyone, yeah, remind me when ‘everyone’ started meaning ‘Peter Hale’ again?”
“You’ve come to me for help, Stiles, and that is my offer.”
“Fine, but when I- when it’s safe for me to leave, I’m going.”
“Of course.” Peter says, as if it’s a done deal, something Stiles shouldn’t waste a moment of worrying on.
“You can pick me up from the airport, I’ll send you the details.” Stiles says, hanging up.
Peter makes a cup of tea then stands by the window to watch the sun rise. Now that he’s thinking it, he can almost taste the change on the cold morning air; Stiles coming to Beacon Hills, Peter’s emissary, finally – and he’d known that’s what Stiles would be the day he met the boy, and at 17, that’s what he’d been.
Stiles had been the one to track down Laura, to tell her that she was wasting the alpha spark her mother had given her as she’d died, and now left her territory defenceless. She’d come back then, quietly, and with Stiles’ help, given the spark to Peter.
Peter hadn’t known who he was; all Stiles had said was that he’d lived here once, and it should be protected by someone who’d cared. They’d stayed in touch ever since, traded favours and debts and the occasional barbed word – also the occasional handjob. But Stiles didn’t like to stay in one place for long, and Beacon Hills was full of memories, not that Peter had been told as such, but he wasn’t an idiot.
*
Stiles gets there a day later, eyes tense and watchful as he scans the arrivals room for Peter, he’s wearing a hoodie and has a bag on his back as his only luggage, Peter’s sure inside is nothing like what showed up on the x-rays when he brought it through security.
The bag is dumped on Peter immediately. “Werewolf strength.” Stiles mutters, rubbing at his eyes. He rocks on his feet for a few seconds, leaning on Peter’s shoulder for balance instinctively, Peter takes it as a good sign.
Stiles looks as he ever does, which is that he wouldn’t be out of place starring in a gay man’s well-loved porn collection, despite the layers of clothes hiding his body from view, Peter knows what those arms look like underneath – but the purple under his eyes is pronounced and his skin looks even paler than usual. He falls asleep as soon as Peter starts driving, not unlike Cora did when she was little; he doesn’t wake Stiles, the sleep looks sorely needed.
Peter takes the liberty of bringing Stiles to his own apartment, it’s not like there’s anywhere else in Beacon Hills he can go, unless he’s planning on a motel until he finds somewhere to rent.
Stiles startles awake on Peter’s couch a few hours later, Peter watches him over the top of his laptop.
“Can I have some food? Also we need to go to the nemeton. Maybe the other way round.”
Peter’s been hearing Stiles’ stomach grumbling virtually the whole time he’d been asleep, so he says: “We can do both at the same time.”
He receives a slow blink for his troubles, like Peter being nice is strange and unexpected, which it isn’t – with Stiles, anyway. Well, most of the time.
“Are you not going to thank me for picking you up? It would be only polite.”
Stiles drags himself off the couch and stretches, sadly not showing off any skin thanks to the shirt under his hoodie. “Peter, my gratitude to you is unbound and moorless, without you to light the way in my life there would be only darkness.”
The poetry could be called inspired, if the tone wasn’t as dead as Kate Argent – who has been decapitated, burnt to ash and cursed with enough power Peter doubts God himself could bring her back. They didn’t take any chances after the were-jaguar incident.
Peter tosses him an apple to tide him over, they’ll grab food on the way.
Once he’s in the car, with an awake Stiles this time, he asks what’s happened, because he’s really been patient enough.
In reply he hears the crunch of Stiles biting into the apple.
“I didn’t give you that so you could avoid speaking to me.”
“I’m just hungry, Peter, jeez. Give a guy a break.”
Peter turns to raise an eyebrow at him.
“Eyes on the road! Werewolves, no regard for safety.” Peter doesn’t relent. “Fine, fine. A vampire managed to bite me a while ago – just a little bit, it’s fine, or it would’ve been fine, but there was like ten others of them to fight off so I didn’t manage to kill it.”
Peter sighs. “I suppose I overestimate you; you’re not here to show me how often you’re only saved by luck rather than skill, or common sense. A dozen vampires by yourself? Really Stiles?” He can try and break Stiles out of those habits now, but he can’t bring himself to be overly mad at the situation that brought Stiles here, and he seems healthy enough now, if in need of a few more naps.
“It wasn’t exactly planned.” Stiles shoots back, acidly.
“…Well go on then.” Peter prods when he doesn’t continue.
“Fine. So then they had my blood and you know, there’s lots of stuff that can be used for, not good things, which was already bad, and I couldn’t fix it the usual way since any blood a vampire takes is fair game, according to stupid rules of magic, why are there even rules? It should be able to do anything, it’s magic.”
“Who’s looking for you?” Peter asks, this conversation could go on for a while if they get into the magic of it all.
Stiles winces. “The alpha of the Wilde syndicate.”
The Wilde syndicate was once called the Wilde pack, but it had branched too far beyond werewolves to resemble anything like a pack anymore.
“She must really want you if she’s willing to go to vampires.”
Stiles laughs coldly, slumping down in his seat. “I don’t want to talk about it, I did the right thing saving some people from their fucking savagery and yes I killed lots of them in the process and no, I don’t regret it.”
Peter kindly refrains from pointing out that it does sound like Stiles wants to talk about it.
“What if they suspect you’re here anyway?” Peter asks, because sure, he’s not letting go of Stiles now that he’s here, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to ignore valid concerns like the vampires out for his blood.
“That’s why we’re going to the nemeton, did I not explain?” He looks over at Peter. “No? Okay, well right now I'm in BH and vaguely trackable, even with this place being a hellmouth and confusing for magically inclined beings around the world.”
Stiles puts his finger up before Peter can say anything. “I know you’ve watched Buffy so don’t even pretend to be clueless. Beacon Hills… Hellmouth. We’ve even got vampire problems right now.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Uh huh. Anyway, if I become your emissary at the nemeton, then with the aid of some magic from the shit ton of reading I’ve been doing while running around the Netherlands, as long as I’m within the borders of Beacon Hills, or well, your territory, which is a bit bigger than Beacon Hills, then I’m hidden from the world!”
“So you’re telling me it was part of your plan to become my emissary anyway, Stiles darling?”
Stiles wrinkles his nose at the endearment, which Peter, God help him, finds endearing in itself. “Well, yeah. But I couldn’t just give you everything you want on a silver platter, got to let you work for it sometimes.”
“It didn’t cross your mind that I could already have an emissary?”
“You? An emissary that’s not me? C’mon Peter, when have you been known to give up on anything?”
They pull up at the drive thru, which is closed, so Stiles runs inside, and when he comes back, with a burger, milkshake and fries, he ignores Peter in favour of devouring them.
Peter stops at the preserve. “Lead the way.” He says, motioning forward into the woods. The nemeton may be on his territory, but that hasn’t meant he’s able to find it. He’s looked, he’s sent his betas to look. They hadn’t found it. The last time he’d seen the tree had been with Stiles himself, when he’d fought the nogitsune for his soul and won.
Stiles starts walking immediately, the wrappers from his food turn to ash with a swirl of his hands and he throws it out onto the ground.
“Would you care to enlighten me on how it’s found?” It’s not like werewolves are incapable of magic, after all, just generally don’t have the talent for it. But if it’s something Peter can do, he wants to. Talia was strong, but she never cared for what she considered ‘emissary business’. And look what happened to her.
“Hush, I’m thinking.”
It’s not like Peter to obey a command like that, but he does, though he makes sure his displeasure is showing on his face, and Stiles rolls his eyes, though true to his word he is concentrating very hard on something.
They arrive at the stump not long later, Stiles humming something that is suspiciously like the Imperial March.
It’s growing, Peter notices immediately, the stump is the same size as it was, huge and imposing – but ultimately, cut down. But there a sapling in the middle growing out of it. Maybe sapling isn’t the right word, it’s taller than both Stiles and Peter, but it’s thin, nowhere near the circumference of what’s below it.
“Are you going to explain now?” Peter asks, as neutrally as he can.
“Sorry, it’s just… you have to not think about the nemeton, so I needed to walk and think really hard about anything else and then we were here.”
Peter almost growls, it can’t be that easy, they were looking for weeks .
“Relax, there’s a knack to it, I’ll teach you. Now, did you design something cool or not?”
Whilst being predictable in this is galling, it’s good that Stiles knows Peter’s put effort into the mark that’s going to be on his skin. No hastily picked triskelion for his emissary, thank you.
“I’m ready if you are.”
“You’re not going to show me it before I’m stuck with it forever?”
“If you wanted to be more prepared you could’ve told me what the purpose of going to the nemeton was first. And by now you should trust that my taste in this sort of thing is a lot better than yours.”
“That better not be mocking of the batman tattoo.”
Peter wisely chooses not to comment. “Shall we?”
“Right, yes. If I just--” Stiles starts tracing symbols in the air with his finger, it leaves charcoal looking marks hovering round the nemeton as he circles it. Partway through he pulls out his phone and squints at it as he reads the runes off from there, which Peter will admit looks slightly less impressive, but it would be unfair of him to expect Stiles to spend all his time memorising sequences when he could copy them just as easily and use his mind for much greater tasks.
When Stiles is back where he started, he draws the last one, it interlinks with the first, and then the marks all fade, and Peter’s eyes tells him that they probably weren’t there at all, he was seeing things. He ignores that voice, he would anyway, but Stiles grinning like he’s been gifted the knucklebones of a thrice killed kanima – and Stiles had hunted down a group of goblins that had been terrorising the town with nary a complaint after Peter had given him that, and no one liked going near goblins – tells him something powerful had just happened. Most likely something Stiles had cobbled together from three and a half sources and only half-thought would work.
“Okay, start bleeding, alpha-man.”
With one of his claws Peter draws blood from his arm. “Could I trouble you for a paintbrush?”
Stiles raises his eyebrows but he’s still smiling and he hands a paintbrush over. From the look of it it’s one that had been in its place in Peter’s apartment a few seconds ago.
The nemeton kindly reaches a branch out towards Stiles and he wraps one hand around it and puts the other palm up next to Peter’s.
Peter takes it, gently but firmly, and dips the brush into the ink, his blood. Stiles hand is hot in his and Peter can feel his conscious effort to keep still. He angles Stiles’ hand away from himself so he can’t see what it looks like, Peter wants the first time to be when it’s stark and irreversible and stuck there forever. Stiles could stop being Peter’s emissary, sure, for all it’s never going to happen, but the mark of Peter’s pack won’t leave him.
Stiles is enjoying himself, Peter can smell it, whether it’s all the physical sensations, Peter’s hand tight around his own, the brush tickling along the sensitive nerves, just their general proximity, even. Or if it’s that someone, Peter, is proving that he wants Stiles, wants to keep him, which he’s always known Stiles wants, even if he’d never admitted it. Most likely it’s all of the above.
When he’s done he tucks the paintbrush into Stiles’ jeans front pocket and locks their fingers together, palms touching, the blood won’t smudge.
The words don’t need to be specific, just a… general meaning. “Will you be mine, Stiles?” He says, and for once won’t even deny that his smile can be described as wolfish.
“Your emissary, you mean?” Stiles asks cheekily.
“Mine. Like I said.”
“Yeah, sure, why not? Let’s do it.”
Peter holds his hand for longer than is generally appropriate for this kind of thing, but if his aunt who’d taught him this ritual was here to see the rampant sexual tension he’s sure she’d understand.
He lets go and watches the dark red lines fade from Stiles hand. “It better not be on my arm, it would fuck up my sleeve.”
“A travesty that would be I’m sure.” Peter says and he’s about to continue, say something about how it couldn’t go on top of skin that’s already taken, which Stiles surely already knows, when it appears, slowly, Peter’s mark writing itself onto to Stiles permanently in beautiful harsh lines – bigger than how it had been painted.
He stares.
“Peter? What’s wrong.”
It’s on his face.
Peter’s tattoo is on Stiles’ face .
Peter had hoped for the neck, maybe, high up enough not to be easily covered up. But he’d never-
“Stiles you… darling . What devotion you’ve been hiding.”
Stiles’ mouth is opening and closing, he can’t see it, obviously, but Peter’s not taken his eye off where it starts under Stiles left eye and curls round his cheek to his chin. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to take his eye off it again.
A mirror shimmers into existence in front of them, or not a mirror, but it’s reflective, Peter hadn’t been watching Stiles hands, what with being occupied on staring at something else, but they would’ve moved for the spell.
Stiles looks gobsmacked, frozen and surprised and slightly terrified. His loyalty being put on show for all to see.
And Peter can’t wait, everyone will know it, even humans who don’t know a thing about werewolves or the supernatural.
Peter takes Stiles’ face in his hands and the mirror vanishes, he traces the tattoo with his thumb, the deadly nightshade flower, looking beautiful and deadly and meant to be.
“I suppose I’ve been caught out a bit.” Stiles says, voice returning. Peter doesn’t doubt some of the placement is due to his own wishes, he’s wanted Stiles to be visibly his for years. But really – on his face – he couldn’t do that if Stiles’s heart wasn’t beating along to the same tune as Peter’s own.
“You didn’t make it up about the Wilde syndicate, they are after you?” He asks, pushing forward to kiss one of the flowers on Stiles cheek, then when he's trailed down along leaves he presses another to the corner of his mouth.
Stiles laughs breathlessly. “No, it would’ve been cool if I did though, very manipulative.”
“But you’re not leaving when we’re done with them.” He says against his lips, because with Stiles at his side, the Hale pack can take down one of the biggest supernatural organisations in North America, he’s sure of it.
“No.” Stiles replies, even though Peter hadn’t asked a question.
“Are we done here, darling? Ritual completed?”
“Oh, yeah, all good.” Stiles murmurs, then kisses him, with tongue, obviously bored of waiting for Peter to do it.
“Best we leave the clearing then.” Peter doesn’t exactly wholly trust the nemeton, and he doesn’t want to have to be on his guard while he fucks Stiles into tears.
Stiles shrugs. “The grass is plenty comfy.”
“No it isn’t, you’ll complain about your back all week. I’ve been patient for a long while, I can wait a few moments longer.”
“Fine, this better not just be so you can get off on seeing other people stare at my face first.”
What a wonderful idea. “I have just remembered I have to buy coffee, and the pack should also be briefed on everything. We can’t have them unaware they might run into vampires.”
“I suppose you’ll make it worth my while later?”
Peter bites Stiles on the chin, over part of the stem of the tattoo, because he can. “You suppose correctly.”
The walk to the car is more like a run. Peter’s patience has worked out, but that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly a saint.