Work Text:
The first first time Stiles remembers his father, he remembers the color red.
Okay, maybe that came out weird. Time to try again.
The first time Stiles remembers his first father, he remembers the color red.
Better.
Stiles Sherwood was about five years old, and he was proudly holding a painting he had finished out in front of him. His father, a sheriff of ten years and an already old man, had taken the painting, murmured a "Interesting color choices, son," and had promptly thrown the picture into the red trashcan in their kitchen. Stiles had been absolutely crushed. When his father noticed his face, he knelt down and took his son by the shoulders. "Son, here's the thing about art. When you make it, someone will always want to destroy it. Not everyone will see the beauty in the things you create, and many will treat it as trash. But you must keep creating. You must not let the world suppress you. This is 1928, life is good, and as new creative people create new creative things, you must be ready to roll with the times."
Stiles had nodded solemnly, and then had continued to create paintings and drawing for his father for seven more years. The Depression hit, the Depression ended, and Stiles continued to give his father paintings until one day, instead of letting it flutter into their red trashcan, the one that had survived their poverty just a few years before, he took a magnet from the utility drawer and posted the painting to the refrigerator.
"Now that, son, is what it is to be appreciated for your art."
The painting wasn't really a painting. It was a charcoal drawing of the Sherwood's German immigrant neighbors. The family was small, always dirty, and for some reason always well-dressed. Stiles saw a sort of silly concept whenever he looked at the neighbors, with their nice suits and dapper ties and shined shoes standing in the middle of a ruined road of cracked cobblestones and going to dirty jobs that leave their faces blackened with soot and grime. The picture is drawn with shaky strokes and a lot of random dark smudges, but Stiles knows that he did something right when his father ruffles his hair affectionately before sitting down in front of their radio to listen to the nightly news.
His father died five years later, leaving him man of the house at age 17. He quit his college aspirations and worked to support his mother and three sisters, drawing his nights away and working at a railroad company by day. Then, one day, his drawing sold. A coworker saw him sketching on his break and said that he knew a man looking to hire someone to paint him a picture of New York at night. Stiles had never seen New York at night, but hey-whaddaya-know-I-have-a-photograph-right-here!
Stiles painted the picture with the last of his acrylics and showed up on the man's doorstep. He was paid $500 for it. Immediately he went out, bought himself some more paint, and began painting again, this time with purpose. It was one of the only things he was good at, and he was okay with that.
At the time, Stiles didn't know that he was a Reborn. But that was about to change.
He didn't live a full life. Stiles was married at 23 to a woman he liked but didn't love and never would grow to. He had no children with her, and at 35 he had a mild stroke and lived until 40 before stroking again and dying.
Stiles was dead, and thus Stiles was reborn.
Stiles never really knew what it meant to be a Reborn until it happened to him. It only took the first rebirth, but suddenly, when he was old enough to know what things were and remember things for more than a day, he knew what he was. He was reborn into 1963, and soon the Vietnam War escalated and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave his racial speeches. His birth name was Stillton Deare, but everyone he knew called him Stiles, the name he was given in his first life.
It was around this time of mixing races and bloody bombs when Reborns were starting to pop up. They weren't an entirely accepted concept, and many who knew what they were refused to come forth about it. But the thing was, Reborns can never hide from other Reborns. Stiles noticed this only ten years into his second life. Every time he looked at a person, they either had a light, dark, rainbow, or bright purple aura. The light ones were normal people who had good hearts, black were normal people who had ugly ones. The people surrounded in dark blue but covered in white were the ones that had been completely broken. The rainbow people were Reborns living their first life, and the bright purple were experienced Reborns.
Every time Stiles passed a purple aura on the street, he nodded at them. He knew long ago that he wasn't the first person to be reborn, and these people knew the same fact about themselves. Respect was all they could give each other, and when hate crimes began popping up towards Reborns, it was all they could ever afford to give each other.
Stiles was killed at age 25, standing in the middle of a peaceful protest against Reborn hate crimes. The assailant took a rifle from a nearby army guard and open fired. He was the only one mortally wounded.
Stiles was dead, and thus Stiles was reborn.
Kansas, 1988. That's where he popped out of the womb of a lovely looking woman and her very handsome husband. The couple coddled him and loved him and were very intrigued and understanding when a young, five-year-old Stiles (birth name Stylar Wess) told them that he was a Reborn. They carefully asked him if he wanted to look up his past families and friends and find out what happened to them, but Stiles had promised himself in his last life that he wouldn't interfere with anything, and knowing himself, that means not learning what happened to them. His parents are kind and understanding, and Stiles cannot wait to start his third life with them. His mother is already pregnant with another child and his father got a great job working as a newscaster for all of Kansas, not to mention Stiles's already growing talent as a clay sculptor. He made incredible things with his model clay and play-doh, and his parents enrolled him in art classes at six.
It's 1996 when the United States finally announces new laws about Reborns. There will be mandatory classes taught at school about them, along with new laws that say that killing a Reborn has the same penalty as killing a normal person. Before, if someone were to kill a reborn, no charge was brought up except a fine. Now the murderers faced life in prison or death. New evidence has shown that Reborns exist solely to affect the lives around them to make them more meaningful and will only stop being reborn after they find their human soulmate.
Stiles's parents threw him a small party that night, and they assured him that they would do everything they could to assist him in finding his soulmate. He cried and thanked them.
A few nights later the family went out to eat: Stiles, his parents, and his baby sister. They were assaulted in the parking lot of the restaurant, where the man held a gun to Stiles's head, screamed "We are unnatural! We must all die!", and shot the boy in the chest before taking his own life. Stiles choked up the blood pooling in his lungs as he hugged his parents with his tiny arms for the last time, the sirens in the distance growing increasingly fuzzier.
He didn't even hear the last words his mother said to him.
Stiles was dead, and thus Stiles was reborn.
This time, he finds himself reborn into a comfortable suburban lifestyle. His mother a teacher, his father a sheriff once again, and both absolutely loving. He's gifted with an impossibly pronounceable Polish name and instead goes by a nickname brought upon by his last name Stilinski...Stiles. As a young boy, Stiles finds himself plagued by fits of restlessness, and is diagnosed with ADHD. Only his parents are aware of his status as a Reborn, and his mother is incredibly supportive of his quest to find his soulmate.
At age ten, his mother deteriorates and dies from a brain disease he's still too inexperienced—even after three lifetimes—to truly understand. His father drinks, but his first father was worse so Stiles thinks nothing of it. He's created incredible bonds in this lifetime. His father, a boy named Scott who lives a few houses down, a girl named Lydia he can't keep his eyes off of. Stiles falls in love with this lifetime, and wonders if it is his last one.
Like in his other past lives, Stiles attempts to find his talents. Unfortunately there are no evident ones. His drawings are less than mediocre and his writing, while superb, is not magical like it was back when he was a protester. He cannot sculpt nor weave beauty, so he uses his smarts to accelerate himself in this life, keeping his secret from everyone except the very few who share it. There's a specific boy in his class, Danny, who is living what he claims to be his fifth life. That makes him a lifespan older than Stiles, but the young man is down to earth and kind, and he and Stiles often find themselves lost in musings of the past and future, for both are forever doomed to relive their numerous lives until a soulmate saves them.
Danny claims that they're the lucky ones. Most humans live their entire lives searching for their soulmate and never find them: Reborns get chance after chance after chance until they finally get to live that happiness. Stiles understands where his friend is coming from, but can't really share his optimism on the same level.
He continues living this way, happy with this life and the bonds he's created, until one day when everything changes. He's getting into trouble—again—by trespassing on this beautiful piece of land that supposedly no one lives on. The Hale family used to inhabit it, but the only people left from the terrible fire is two of the children, Laura and Derek, and their vegetable of an uncle, Peter. They moved to New York almost immediately after the fire and haven't been back since, so Stiles startles when he hears "Hey! This is private property!"
He scrambles up in distress, skin prickling with sweat. "I'm sorry, no one's lived here in a long time." He answers, gathering his notebooks and homework.
The man who yelled at him is coming forth, and Stiles studies his face quickly. He's attractive—very attractive—and has dark hair and dark stubble. He looks darker than his voice, but the part that is the most attractive is the man's dark aura. Not only does it mark him as a Reborn, but it also has a gorgeous red hue around it that makes Stiles want to stand close and see if he can feel the vibrations. He notes that there's a hint of white surrounding it, and Stiles wonders what broke this man.
The man looks at him curiously, not mad in the slightest. "No one has," he agrees.
"I'm Stiles," he says, standing and holding out a hand despite the books overflowing in his arms.
"Derek," he says. He knows that Derek can see his aura, and when their hands touch Stiles yelps and drops his books. "I..." He looks down at his own hand and then at Stiles's. "Is this...?"
"Oh wow." Stiles says. "I think...I think this is it." Derek nods mutely. He forgets the scattered chemistry and Spanish books at his feet and steps towards the Reborn again. "Can I..." He trails off, holding out a hand hesitantly.
Derek nods, holds up his own hand. Stiles can feel it when their auras connect, bringing them together as a unit, as a whole. Stiles never understood how empty and alone he was before now.
And without saying anything else, the two know what they are. Soulmates.
-
The two don't really know what to do with this information except spend more time together. There has never been a Reborn soul bond involving two Reborns in recorded existence, so at the moment everything is unknown. They don't tell anyone, just brush off everyone's comments about their relationship with jokes of giving up hope and using this as a "temporary solution."
In reality, they have no clue what will happen next. When they die, will they die for good because they've found their other half, because they are completed? Or does that only happen with human soulmates? Will they be reborn again, forever doomed to try and find each other, over and over again?
-
"I love you," Derek whispers a week after they meet.
-
"Don't ever leave me," Stiles says at week 3.
-
"You're the most important thing to me," Derek smiles into their hundredth kiss.
"You mean everything," Stiles replies.
-
"You're such a sourwolf." Stiles declares.
"What does that even mean?"
"Means that you look like the big bad wolf, and you always scowl," Stiles says sweetly.
"Dork," Derek rolls his eyes.
-
"You know my coffee order!" Stiles gushes.
-
"Will you marry me?" Derek asks from down on one knee.
"Of course." Stiles sobs.
-
"Let's have kids," Derek decides.
-
"Isn't she beautiful?" Stiles asks from the hospital bed.
-
"Isn't he perfect?" Derek asks three years later, looking down at Stiles.
-
Sometimes there are no words.
-
"Sourwolf," Derek says one day.
"What?" Stiles laughs.
"That'll be my social media pseudo name. If we are reborn, that's how you can find me."
"I'll always find you, sourwolf," Stiles beams. "And I'm your chatterbox." He winks.
-
"I want us to live a thousand lifetimes together," Stiles says, old and frail, curled up against Derek's chest.
The rumbling response comes immediately, darkness falling on the bedroom. "We will."