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Part I: Fractures
The sound of the clock was the loudest thing in the room. Tick, tick, tick—like claws scratching at tile, like the Nogitsune’s laughter, echoing through every corner of Stiles Stilinski’s head.
He sat hunched at his desk, a single lamp casting long shadows against the walls of his bedroom. His notebook lay open in front of him, its pages filled with scribbled names—people he had hurt, directly or indirectly, during the possession. Some names were underlined twice. Others were scratched out so violently the paper had torn.
Beside those names, Stiles had scrawled apologies that no one would ever read.
His hands shook when he closed the notebook, pressing it flat as though sheer force could keep the pages—and his own mind—from spilling open.
Scott had said it gently, as gently as betrayal could be said:
We can’t trust you, Stiles. Not after everything. Not with what you still might be.
Those words had gutted him. The pack had been his family, his anchor after his mom died, his whole damn reason for believing in good things. And they had cast him out like he was nothing more than an unstable liability.
And his dad—God, his dad—
Stiles’ vision blurred as he remembered the sound of the gun hitting the floor, Theo’s smirk, the stillness of his father’s body. No heartbeat. No miracle second chance. Just absence.
His anchor. His compass. His reason. Gone.
There had been nights where he had stared too long at the knife on his desk, nights where the pills in the bathroom cabinet had whispered promises of silence. One night, he pressed the blade’s edge against his skin until blood welled up, stinging and sharp, grounding him. A reminder he was still here, even if he didn’t know why.
But he had never gone further. Not yet.
Because some tiny, stubborn part of him wanted someone—anyone—to fight for him.
The floor creaked.
Stiles froze, heart lurching. His first thought was that the Nogitsune was back. His second thought was that maybe he’d finally snapped.
But then a familiar voice cut through the silence.
“You look like hell.”
Stiles whipped around. Peter Hale leaned casually against the doorframe, hands in his pockets, eyes faintly gleaming gold in the dim light.
“Jesus Christ,” Stiles snapped, nearly falling out of his chair. “Don’t you knock?”
“You weren’t going to answer anyway,” Peter replied, stepping into the room. His gaze slid immediately to the knife on the desk. “And considering what you were considering…” He tilted his head. “Breaking and entering was the safer option.”
Stiles grabbed the knife, shoved it into a drawer, and slammed it shut. “Great. Now you’re my babysitter. How the mighty have fallen.”
Peter’s mouth curved. “Not a babysitter. More of an… intervention.”
“I don’t need saving,” Stiles bit out.
“Everyone needs saving at some point,” Peter said. His voice was quiet, too quiet, and something about the softness made Stiles’ throat tighten.
Because Peter Hale didn’t do soft.
They sat in silence for a while. The only sound was the steady tick of the clock and the ragged rhythm of Stiles’ breathing.
Peter didn’t crowd him, didn’t move closer, just leaned against the wall with the patient stillness of a predator.
Finally, Stiles muttered, “Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be off somewhere plotting your next betrayal?”
Peter smiled faintly. “The pack isn’t what it used to be. Scott and his merry band are too busy playing heroes to see who they’re losing. I’ve… chosen a different path.”
Stiles barked a laugh, brittle and sharp. “Since when do you choose anything except revenge and manipulation?”
“Since I remembered what it was like to lose everything.” Peter’s amber eyes locked on him. “And realized you’re walking the same path.”
The words landed heavy. Stiles’ throat closed around a laugh that wasn’t funny. “So what, you’re saying you care?”
Peter’s lips twitched. “Don’t push your luck.”
That night, Peter drove him out past the Beacon Hills city limits. The roads blurred under the moonlight, the woods hemming them in on both sides.
Stiles sat rigid in the passenger seat, fingers twisting in his lap. “I don’t get it. Why me? Why now? Why you?”
Peter kept his eyes on the road. “Because you’re smarter than all of them combined. Because you deserve more than to be their scapegoat. And because…” He hesitated. “I know what it feels like to be haunted.”
Stiles turned to stare at him. “You’re saying you care.”
Peter’s mouth curved, sharp but weary. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
They pulled into the gravel drive of a cabin deep in the woods. Smoke curled from the chimney, firelight flickering behind the windows.
Stiles tensed immediately. “If this is where you kill me, I’m going to be so pissed.”
But when the door opened, Stiles stopped breathing.
Because standing there, alive and whole, was Derek Hale.
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Part II: Revelations
Derek Hale stood in the doorway like a ghost pulled from the ashes of a burned-out house. His shoulders were broader, his face steadier, but his eyes—those sharp, sad eyes—were the same.
Stiles froze on the cabin steps, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. “You’re—you’re supposed to be—”
“Dead?” Derek finished flatly. “Yeah. That’s a theme with me.”
Stiles’ throat worked. “Scott… he said—”
“He didn’t know,” Derek said. He stepped back, gesturing inside. “Come in.”
The warmth of the cabin hit Stiles like a slap. A fire crackled in the hearth, throwing light across familiar and unfamiliar faces. Cora sat at the edge of the couch, arms crossed, watching him with wary eyes. Jackson sprawled like he owned the place, rolling his eyes at Stiles’ shock. Ethan leaned against the wall, posture guarded but not unfriendly.
Stiles’ knees wobbled. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to collapse or bolt.
Peter brushed past him, his hand brushing lightly—deliberately—against Stiles’ back as he moved inside. A grounding gesture. A claim.
“Surprise,” Peter said, voice velvet over steel. His eyes flared crimson. Alpha crimson.
Stiles stumbled back. “No. No, no, no—you’re an Alpha again?”
Peter’s grin was sharp enough to cut. “You sound surprised.”
“Of course I’m surprised! Last time you were Alpha, you—” He swallowed, hard. “You lost your goddamn mind.”
Peter’s expression didn’t falter. “And this time, I intend to use it wisely.”
Jackson snorted from the couch. “As wisely as Peter Hale can manage, anyway.”
“Shut up, Jackson,” Peter said without looking at him.
Stiles couldn’t do this. He shouldn’t be here.
“You don’t want me,” he blurted, his voice cracking. All eyes swung to him, and he flinched. “I—I’m poison. Everything I touch falls apart. My dad—” His throat closed.
Peter turned toward him, slow and deliberate, like approaching a wounded animal. “Theo killed your father,” he said, voice low and deadly. “Not you. And I already took care of him.”
Stiles’ head snapped up. “You—what?”
Peter’s eyes glowed like twin embers. “He begged before the end. Pathetic, really.” His smile was a knife in velvet. “But he won’t hurt anyone again.”
Stiles swayed, the room tilting. Theo was dead. Dead by Peter’s hand. A part of him felt relief so sharp it was almost pain. Another part was horrified—because Theo had been his monster to hate, his scapegoat, and now that was gone too.
“You—you killed him?”
“Yes,” Peter said simply. “For you.”
The words lodged in Stiles’ chest, jagged and unmovable.
That night, Stiles couldn’t sleep. The nightmares were worse here, more vivid—maybe because hope itself was dangerous, stirring shadows he’d tried to bury.
He woke gasping, drenched in sweat, the Nogitsune’s laughter still echoing in his ears.
And Peter was there. Not hovering, not pushing—just sitting silently in the chair near the door, eyes glowing faintly in the dark. Watching.
“You should be afraid of me,” Stiles rasped.
Peter tilted his head. “You’re not the monster, Stiles. You’re the boy who fought the monster, and survived.”
Stiles laughed bitterly. “Survived? I’m barely holding it together.”
“Then let me hold it with you.”
The words silenced him.
Days bled together. The pack—this pack—trained, hunted, built routines. Stiles wasn’t forced to join in, but Peter kept nudging him, pulling him into strategy discussions, making him use his brain the way he used to with Scott.
And slowly, Stiles found himself breathing easier.
But the guilt never left.
One evening, he sat outside the cabin, knees pulled to his chest, staring at the setting sun. Peter found him there, quiet as the shadows.
“You think you’re not worth the effort,” Peter said.
Stiles didn’t look at him. “Because I’m not.”
Peter crouched in front of him, forcing their eyes to meet. “You are. You’re worth every ounce of trouble, every fight, every risk.”
Stiles shook his head. “Why do you care? Why me?”
Peter’s eyes burned crimson. “Because for the first time in years, I want more than survival. I want a life. And I think you do too.”
Stiles’ breath hitched. He couldn’t look away.
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Part III: The Choice
He fought, at first, with the only weapon he truly believed he owned: doubt. He told himself he was dangerous, that his history made him a ruinous thing, that even if Peter could take him in, he would eventually turn and bite. The Nogitsune had taught him how to turn his compassion into self-attack; it had scorched the map of his identity so sometimes he only recognized himself by the absence of a name.
But the days began to collect small mercies: Derek watching the horizon with a dog’s patience, Cora bringing extra bread, Jackson explaining movies with dramatic flair, Ethan leaving an extra blanket. Peter did things with a careful hand: he’d check bandages without commenting, step in between a memory and its ruin. His alpha-dom was not about dominance with Stiles; it was patience and watchful vigil, which was almost worse in its dignity.
One night they sat near the fire after everyone else had gone to bed. The flames painted shadows on Peter’s face, revealed the ridge of his jaw. Peter looked older in those light-cuts, not by age but by a wear that had taken up residence in his bones.
“You don’t have to decide today,” Peter said softly. “But if you stay, we’ll work on it together.”
Stiles watched the way the flames licked and died and then lifted again. He thought of the list of names in his notebook, of apologies he'd written and then crossed out because he’d decided they were useless. He thought of his father, of Scott’s voice when it still held the echo of their childhood, of all the days that had been stripped to their skeletons by what the Nogitsune had done.
“What if I mess it up?” he whispered, honest as a confession in the dark.
“Then we’ll clean it up together,” Peter said without the glint of sarcasm Stiles normally expected. He sounded like someone who meant the words with everything he had.
Stiles laughed once, a small, wet sound. “You’re insufferable.”
“And yet,” Peter murmured, turning toward him, “you’re still here.”
Stiles had been living on a knife-edge for months; hope had tasted like vertigo. But there was a steadiness in Peter’s voice that held him in place the way glue holds paper. For the first time in a long time, being alive felt like a project, not a sentence.
He let his edge dull, a degree at a time. He answered Derek’s questions without flinching. He helped Cora pick herbs. He and Jackson mapped out a ridiculous plan to prank the next town over, and for once he could skewer his shame with laughter instead of letting it swallow him. When he woke screaming from a dream about black ink and laughter, Peter’s hands were already on his shoulders. The touch was practical—get water, breathe, count backward—and somehow it knitted him back into the world.
It wasn’t overnight and it wasn’t perfect. Sometimes Stiles still had mornings where the bed felt like a trap and his chest was a fist. Sometimes the old resentments surfaced like weeds. But then someone—Derek, or Cora, or even Jackson—would say something, do something, and it would remind him that he had been offered a place to belong.
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Epilogue
Healing is not a tidy process. Stiles learned that the hard way. The mistakes he had made stayed in the back of his throat like a series of broken teeth he still had to learn to chew past. He missed his father in the way that made him feel cold in his own skin. He missed the pack he’d been cast out of in a way that was a slow, constant ache.
But there was motion now—a direction that wasn’t just forward because it had to be, but forward because the people beside him chose it. Peter had saved him in a way that didn’t translate to one dramatic rescue; it translated into a series of decisions—a hand to pull him up, a refusal to let the dark swallow him, the quiet assertion that he was worth the trouble.
Sometimes at night, when the wind carried a sound that used to be a song, Stiles thought of a line the Fray made famous and let it sit in his mouth like a foreign vowel: “Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend.” That night, though, the line had an answer. Not all losses were neat endings. Some were openings. Some were reasons to regroup, to learn and to keep loving a life that had teeth but also had room for tenderness.
Peter was dangerous, yes. He had been cruel and selfish and brilliant at manipulation. But he was also a creature of fierce loyalty when he chose to be. That was his alpha, and it was also the man who, in the quiet between heartbeats, held Stiles’ shaking hands in his and told him, without theatrical flourish, that someone would stand there with him.
Stiles couldn’t promise the future. He couldn’t erase what had been done. He could only stand, day by day, and take the small offers of care that came in the form of coffee mugs, extra blankets, training partners, and a hand that reached for his in the dark. That fidelity—mundane, real, relentless—felt like rescue.
Peter had saved his life in the way that mattered most: by making a place for him to keep living. Stiles had no illusions about easy endings. He knew grief would come back sometimes like tide-wet sand. He also knew there were people who would scaffold him when it did.
He found, quietly and stubbornly, that he wanted to keep trying—not to prove anyone right, not to become someone else’s idea of worthy, but because the small, ordinary fact that he could wake up and make a cup of coffee and laugh at a terrible movie made the mornings easier. Because fingers across his back when the nightmares came made the darkness manageable. Because someone—dangerous, complicated, and terribly human—had chosen him.
And maybe, some days, that was enough.