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Peter hasn’t been sleeping. Not properly.
The apartment hums too loud at night, the refrigerator clicking on and off, the pipes shifting in the walls, the city outside breathing in through the windows and back out again.
He catalogues it all instead of resting. It isn’t a problem. But it is irritating.
He takes the trash out because tasks with clear beginnings and endings are preferable to lying awake counting the seams in the ceiling.
The bins have been knocked over again. Green plastic tipped onto concrete, the lid cracked along one edge.
He bends to right it.
The hiss comes first. The pain follows a split second later, sharp and precise.
His hand jerks back on instinct, a thin red line open across his knuckles. He looks down.
The creature inside doesn't retreat.
Black fur, mostly, though whole patches are burned away like something tried to erase her and lost interest halfway through. One ear tipped clean. The other folded wrong. One eye gone. The remaining one sharp, furious, and deeply unimpressed.
It balances on three legs as if the fourth had been unnecessary from the start.
It doesn’t look the least bit frightened. It just bristles its crooked tail behind it.
No, it looks… insulted.
Peter bares his teeth in response.
The creature bares theirs.
They regard each other in silence long enough for something unspoken to settle between them.
The creature breaks it first, clamping its teeth into cold half eaten triangle of pizza.
Then it leaves, slipping beneath the stairs without haste.
Peter watches it go. He glances down at the blood on his hand, the skin already knitting back together.
“You're welcome,” he says to the empty lot.
He rights the bin and goes inside.
He does not examine the small, inconvenient fact that the feral little thing did not run.
He tells himself it’s coincidence when he sees it again two nights later.
The bins are upright this time. The evening is quiet. He would have missed it entirely if not for the faint shift of weight on plastic.
It’s perched on the lid, waiting. The single eye catches the light first. The rest of it slowly after, the missing patches of fur breaking up its outline in strange, uneven constellations.
Peter stops a few feet away, trash bag hanging from his hand.
The creature’s gaze drops, slow and deliberate, to the bag.
Not to him.
To the bag.
Understanding settles within. This is no longer scavenging. This is anticipation.
He shifts his weight forward a fraction, testing the boundary. The creature simply adjusts its balance, claiming the lid without dramatics, occupying exactly the space required to prevent him from lifting it without contact.
Efficient.
Peter studies the arrangement as he might a chessboard mid-game, considering angles, leverage, intent. Whatever chaos marked their first encounter has been replaced with structure.
He lowers the trash bag to the concrete beside the bin instead of attempting to open it.
Only when he steps back does the creature descend. The movement is fluid, economical, three-legged and certain. It tears into the plastic where the seam is weakest, as though it has already mapped the construction of the bag itself.
Peter watches without interfering.
The next time is three days later. Peter steps out the door and stops, not in surprise but in calculation.
The door closes behind him, and the sound of the latch seems to travel farther in the quiet than it should. The creature’s head turns toward it immediately, not toward his hands or the bag but toward the door itself, as though that is the cue it has been waiting for.
That’s different.
He steps forward without breaking eye contact this time, and the creature doesn’t adjust its position on the lid. It doesn’t need to. It already has the high ground.
Peter could insist on opening it.
He doesn’t.
He places the bag beside the bin, just like before. When he steps back, the wretched thing descends and starts to rummage through the bag to find its prize.
Peter glances up at the stars. He'd always enjoyed them. He's is surprised when something brushes against his ankle.
He looks down.
The little mongrel is winding around his legs, tail curved, making a slow pass before slipping away again into the shadows.
Peter finds a reason the following night to take out the barely filled trash. When it circles his legs again, his hand moves before he thinks better of it.
He doesn’t remember deciding to do it. One moment his arm is at his side, the next his fingers are brushing the black fur between its ears.
The fur is warmer than he expects.
It doesn’t bolt, but it does stiffen under his hand.
He lets the touch linger a breath too long.
It tolerates the touch for exactly three seconds before it slips away, vanishing back into the shadows as if nothing happened.
Peter eyes the bins.
When he goes back inside, he writes “Cat food” on the grocery list he has tacked to the fridge door. He tells himself it’s to get his bins back.
The following week, he buys a cat dish. He tells himself it’s to keep his matching set of ceramic bowls from getting broken. The color, navy, has been discontinued, and he has no intention of hunting replacements down on eBay.
He doesn’t remember when it changes.
There isn’t a moment he can point to that brought him here. It’s more gradual than that. Incremental. The kind of adjustment that happens so quietly you only notice it after it’s already settled into place.
He comes home one evening later than usual, shrugs out of his jacket, and drops his keys onto the side table by habit. The apartment is dim except for the light over the stove he forgot to turn off that morning. He moves toward it automatically—and stops halfway there.
There’s a shape in the hallway.
Not near the door. Not pressed against it as if reconsidering escape.
Just there.
The creature sits with the same composed patience it had claimed the bin lid with, tail wrapped around its feet, watching him as though this arrangement has always been obvious.
Peter glances back at the door. Shut tight and locked.
When he looks at it again, it’s still there.
He continues into the kitchen. It doesn’t scramble out of the way or retreat toward the shadows. He has to adjust his path slightly to avoid brushing against it.
He doesn’t comment on that either.
He rinses a glass at the sink and turns off the stove light. When he glances back toward the hallway, the creature is no longer where he left it.
By the time he steps back into the living room, it has relocated to the back of the couch, balanced along the narrow ridge of expensive leather like it was designed for it. The single eye tracks him without urgency.
Peter studies the angle automatically. From there it can see the door. The windows. The length of the hallway.
He sits on the couch without comment.
He eyes the thing.
It’s two inches above him.
Of course it is.
He sits up straighter.
That doesn’t change a thing.
Peter narrows his eyes at the ugly little menace.
"You scratch my expensive leather and we'll have words."
It yawns.
It fucking yawns.
Peter raises a brow at it. For a split second, he could swear it mirrors the gesture.
He let's it go.
Later, when he rises to go to bed, he becomes aware of it again only because it moves first—slipping down from the couch and padding ahead of him down the hallway, as if it already knows where he’s going.
In the bedroom, Peter expects it to jump onto the bed.
It doesn’t.
It disappears beneath it.
Peter turns off the light and lies on his side, listening to the quiet shift of movement below the frame before sleep finally takes him.
He wakes sometime in the middle of the night because something changes. The space beneath the bed has gone still in a way that empty space is missing life. A moment later the mattress gives the slightest dip behind him.
He doesn’t open his eyes. He knows what it is.
There’s the faint drag of claws through fabric, like it’s stretching. Then Peter feels the light jump and the slow, deliberate climb up the outside of his thigh.
It reaches his hip and stops there, weight settling as it tests how solid Peter is underneath it. There’s a small adjustment—claws catching briefly in the fabric of his duvet before releasing again—and then the pressure evens out, warm and steady.
Peter doesn’t look, he keeps his eyes shut, breathing slow, aware of the solid presence resting on top of him. It isn’t curled in like it’s cuddling, or tentative like it’s scared. It’s simply positioned, angled in a way that leaves its attention pointed toward the bedroom door.
He shifts slightly, testing the arrangement without making a big production of it.
The creature makes a small croak at the back of its throat in annoyance before it adjusts in return and remains where it is.
Peter opens one eye to check and sure enough, the wretched thing has its one eye glaring at Peter.
He huffs before closing it again.
“Excuse me, your royal highness.”
Peter thinks he hears it huff. Maybe it was a sneeze.
He sighs and lets it be, falling back to sleep again.
Stiles stares at the little eye staring right back at him.
His brain has stopped.
He’s not really sure what he’s looking at because there’s no way Peter Hale has a fucking cat.
The mental math alone on that makes his head hurt.
“Why is there a gremlin sitting on your couch? Did you forget and feed a Mogwai after midnight?”
“She has a name,” Peter’s voice carries from the kitchen.
Stiles stills.
“You named it.”
“Yes,” Peter appears drinking his coffee as he leans against the wall.
Stiles’ head turns from the cat to Peter.
Several times.
“You named it.”
“Did I stutter?” Peter asks as he disappears into the kitchen again.
Stiles blinks back at the little thing.
When Peter holds a cup of coffee out to Stiles, he's surprised and almost forgets to take it.
Once he has the mug in hand he continues staring between Peter and the cat.
His brain halts even more when the thing moves to take up a spot behind Peter’s shoulder on the couch.
“You have a cat.”
Peter raises a brow. “Yes Stiles. I have a cat.”
“A cat.”
Peter waits. He knows Stiles’ brain is trying to process and he admits, if he was walking into this he’d be in the same position.
“When? Why? Wait—can wolves have cats?”
Peter shrugs to each one.
“How—how does this work? You’re a wolf?!?”
Peter glances back at the one eyed cat and shrugs, “It outranks me.”
Stiles splutters at that.
“It— what do you mean it outranks you?”
Peter takes a sip of his coffee like this is a perfectly ordinary hierarchy discussion. “It’s been very clear on the matter.”
Stiles looks between them again, recalculating everything he thought he knew about Peter Hale.
The cat’s tail flicks once, settling over Peter’s shoulder, like a benediction.
Stiles points weakly at the scene. “You've tried to kill me.”
Peter hums.
"Several times!" Stiles adds.
Peter shrugs the shoulder not draped in the cat's tail. “Different pecking order.”
Stiles blinks again at Peter.
"You and Scott were loud and not exactly housebroken."
Stiles opens his mouth to fire back, then stops. Peter isn’t defensive or sharp, not prowling for an opening. He’s steady.
Stiles swallows. “...You’re not gonna like— I don’t know— wolf out and eat it, right?”
Peter looks mildly offended. “I told you, it outranks me.”