Chapter Text
Stiles has been running for a long, long time.
He's twenty-eight years old physically, and about fifty mentally, and that's before you count all the time spent wreaking havoc inside other people's heads while his body lay sleeping for scant minutes in the real world. His awkward edges have been smoothed out under Armani suits and Vacheron watches, he's died and woke up gasping more times than he can count and he's never, ever managed to shake the feeling that something terrible is about to happen.
----
The first time he goes under is a premeditated accident.
They’ve got the machine that gets them into each other’s heads, and there’s a drug that keeps them lucid, but nothing’s stable and the chemical cocktail makes them violently ill at least half the time. Professor Miles and his grad student, a broad-shouldered man by the name of Dominic-call-me-Dom Cobb, drink rocket-fuel coffee like it’s going out of style and have back-and-forth debates about architecture and dreamscapes where Stiles only understands every third word or so. Stiles’ job is mostly to collect the notes that they scatter everywhere, written on spare bits of notebook paper and old receipts, and try to assemble them into some kind of order.
It’s premeditated in the sense that Stiles could feel the itch building for weeks, just listening to them hammer out the theoreticals of it all - the same itch that once sent him into the woods after a dead body, that’s gotten him in trouble more times than he can count, that’s always told him to poke at something until it pokes back.
It’s an accident in that he didn’t expect to be so good at it.
----
He slides the needle into his arm and his eyes flutter shut as the Somnacin takes hold, dimming his view of the cluttered laboratory at George Washington University, the empty take-out boxes and ink-covered whiteboards.
He wakes up in Beacon Hills.
“Holy fucking shit balls,” he whispers to himself, spinning jerkily in a full circle in the middle of the forest. He’s alone, or appears to be, but he’s in the place he misses most and he knows it like the back of his hand - knows exactly where the path he’s on will lead him, knows where in town he’ll end up if he goes the other way.
He has no idea yet, about tokens and not building from memory. No one does. At first he’s hollering, screaming “Hello!” and “Can anybody hear me?” into the space around him, but his only response is the scolding of a nearby squirrel and the squawk of a bird taking flight. When that gets old, he spends what feels like ages wandering around the woods of the place that he misses most, running his hands along the tree bark and snapping off branches to marvel at how real it feels in his hand. The scent of the pine needles is exactly as he remembered it and he holds out his arm to admire the way the sunlight trickles through the canopy to play over his fingers.
“Scott, buddy,” he says to the woods at large, ‘cause it feels like Scott could come wandering around from behind that sycamore at any moment, “you should see this. This is in my mind, I am creating it with my mind, I am basically God right now. Jesus, Scott, this is so freaking awesome.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Stiles startles and drops the branch he’s been holding. Cobb’s entrance into his dream is about as smooth as anything else he does, which is to say not very - he comes stomping through the trees like an avenging vision of tweed, squinting furiously and jabbing his finger in Stiles’ direction.
“Do you have any idea what could go wrong here? No, wait, I’ll answer that, you don’t, because no one does, god fucking dammit you could’ve dropped into a coma, you could’ve OD’d on the fucking Somnacin, you could have died and we don’t even know what would’ve happened to you then, this is so fucking irresponsible of you-”
Stiles jumps back, startled, heart pounding as the consequences of what he’s just done catch up to him (he’ll be fired, he’ll be expelled, he’ll be thrown in jail for misappropriation of university equipment, oh god Miles will look at him) and he becomes aware of a sound in the distance.
He’s heard about this, listening in to Miles and Cobb's chatter. This fuzzy concept of the “subconcious,” your mind’s immune system, registering a foreign presence and trying to protect you from it. He’s heard it usually takes the form of jackbooted thugs, guys with guns, hostile civilians.
But there’s no mistaking that sound. Turns out, when Stiles’ mental white blood cells form, they take the shape of wolves.
Cobb hears the howling rising on the wind and just says “Jesus fuck,” but the timer runs out before he can get up close and personal with whatever’s crashing towards them through the trees.
----
Cobb and Miles take turns yelling at him after that.
It’s hard to take it seriously because Cobb’s scientific thirst for knowledge trumps his self preservation any day. He keeps forgetting that he’s meant to be scolding Stiles, not quizzing him.
“But how did you get it to smell like a forest? Did you envision the - not the point, sorry,” he breaks off, remembering himself abruptly, “the point is, that was very irresponsible, and you could have been seriously hurt! This is highly experimental technology - god, we shouldn’t even be testing it - and we have literally no idea how Somnacin reacts with different body masses or brain chemistries, it’s a miracle you’re not in a coma right now.”
“I’m not sure how I got it to smell like a forest, actually,” Stiles says, ignoring the rest of it. Cobb’s clearly already spaced out, revisiting his time in the dream and sketching out all the inconsistencies.
“Extraordinary, for a first-time dreamer, the level of detail. There was a house, right where I entered the dream, totally burnt out - is it that way in real life or did it present as dilapidated because you didn’t have the mental bandwidth, so to speak, to turn it into a fully developed - and you should be ashamed of yourself!”
Miles is much more effective.
“Mr. Stilinski, I hope you understand the gravity of your actions,” he says evenly. Stiles is about 85 percent sure that Miles’ interest is piqued just as much as Cobb’s and he’s only pretending to be disappointed, but the other 15 percent is trying to throw itself at Miles’ feet and beg for mercy.
“We placed our faith in you when we invited you to participate in this study and you have betrayed it most grievously," Miles continues, holding up a quelling hand when Cobb tries to interject again. "We may have no choice but to suspend your internship. Certainly we will need to reconsider your access privileges.”
“Yes, sir,” Stiles says, looking straight ahead, misty eyed. Cobb, in the background, fidgets.
“But can you do it again?” he asks.