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When Derek cracks the door to check up on him, he doesn’t bother to stop the huff that fills his chest and escapes through his sharp teeth. Stiles is green today. A sort of deep, glowing green that speaks of jasmine plants during the height of summer. He’s leaking the almost cloyingly sweet scent of the night blooming variety from the creases of his elbows and knees, as if bending his joints has bruised the tender petals of the flowers and released a gust of fragrance into the air.
That answers Derek’s unvoiced question about lunch.
Stiles’ is not allowed outside when he’s like this. Not when his skin shimmers that particular vibrancy of a shade. Not that he would. Go outside that is. No, not like this. Mostly because it wouldn’t occur to him. He’s in the throes of research, buried too deep in the computer terminal in front of him, in the papers and charts spread around his arms like the petals of a passion flower.
No, that particular rule was put in place to stop other, well-meaning friends from pulling Stiles or the other researchers out. To prevent staff members from deciding that the researchers might need a lunch break or a breath of fresh air. For their own good.
It wasn’t good for them. Not when they were flushed with information and seeping knowledge.
Derek is fully aware of the rules, the reasons behind them, and the consequences of breaking them. He knows that once Stiles flushes another color, he needs to see things through to the end, won’t be able to let it go until whatever it is completes. That the answers are at the tip of his tongue, building in the pads of his fingers. That he can’t stop, not until the patterns and correlations that became new spells and rituals could be downloaded and stored. The proper protocols followed. The right labels affixed.
Stiles, after all, works for The Archive. He breathes protocol, just like they all do.
He’d been tapped for it when he was just a kid. Back when he couldn’t pay attention in class, but could stare at a book or a chart for hours and make leaping connections. Back when he believed in nonsense and impossibles and was convinced that a tree elf was tapping on his window in the dead of night to tell him tall tales of small people in exchange for words associated with little bugs with even smaller legs. Back when he’d been a Fool.
Even then his skin had occasionally tingled with the input, his forearms itching with possibilities. Even then he’d flush with excitement, prompting his parents to ask if he was feeling quite alright?
The school counselor had given him a battery of tests to find out just what was wrong after a particularly spectacular series of outbursts and uncontrolled behavior in class. After the third time the teacher just couldn’t get him to shut up.
The counselor hadn’t known to secure the location. She hadn’t been that kind of counselor. The subsequent fire had peeled away everything with even a touch of mauve in the test-room before a hastily assembled containment team had finally succeeded in safely pulling Stiles out of his letters and away from his books.
Because – as unexpected as the counselor found it – Stiles was one of the ones whose eyes would simultaneously go bright and glassy when given a certain kind of quest and a stack of books. Who, when the answer was there, just out of reach, would start changing colors to match the subject of inquiry while his skin perfumed the air with unexpected notes that dropped into tiny balls to roll across the ground, likely to explode if they ran up against each other.
So, he’d been tapped by the director of The Archive. Tapped with a small note on his upper arm that informed anyone who read the signs that he belonged to that venerable institution. Preferably in a room whose number when squared turned into a palindrome. They were, after all, the only rooms round enough to stop him from getting trapped in a corner.
Stiles’d only started actually working for The Archive after his graduating thesis had flushed his skin a liquid blue while sea salt had flaked from his watery-green hair until the fish in the soothing-tank set into his class-room’s north-facing wall and been able to swim away through the air toward the windows. They’d had to be corralled back into the tank later, but there were several amphibious salt-water selkies who now spoke of Stiles the Researcher with a special kind of reverence.
Derek’s involvement with Stiles hadn’t started then. He hadn’t even known Stiles when Stiles’d been assigned his first office.
No, not then. Derek’d had been floors away, working in query acquisitions. Had been one of the ones who approved requests for research.
That was before Stiles had to be contained and assigned a permanent handler to keep him from entering bookstores or libraries unsupervised. Before he’d flushed like a daffodil - bright yellow with rings of golden-orange - in the middle of a crowded shopping center’s bookstore. When he’d turned an out-sider in.
She’d had the misfortune of being nice. Had touched his arm after he’d started glowing and asked if he was quite all right. His burning eyes had caught hers and he’d proceeded to talk, horror of horrors, until his newest flash of inspiration about reading lights and phosphorescent jellyfish had been fully expounded. The poor person had never quite regained her equilibrium, her cells not formatted to contain that particular spell – any spell really. Her base materials had been copied, of course, but the Archive’s staff in Materials hadn’t been able to remove it. The woman’s fingers and chest were still libel to start glowing whenever she looked at any kind of text.
She now worked at The Archive. Her talent was actually quite useful in storage when bewildered aspects of some pieces of contained magic staged their occasional mutinies and stole the electricity from the electrical wiring. She could still find things while the archivists worked on talking the bewildered aspects down and re-spooling them comfortably back into their appropriate tomes. She was invaluable, really, on the occasions when the resulting mess took days to pacify.
Stiles’ lapse was the mark of too much magic stored in his head, so much that his neurons firing could spark it, could encourage leaps and new connections that bounced on unexpectedly. For someone like Stiles, after all, once magic was read, it seeped into his skin and got stored in his spine. It just turned out that Stiles was more receptive with a particularly very high saturation point than anyone had anticipated. And he boiled easily. It wouldn’t do to let just anyone catch the fumes.
Magic, after all, that spark, was a strange mix of free-form poetry and a volatile chemistry set. Like with Stiles’ accidental victim, the unexpected could happen.
Hence the rules. Hence the guided quests to hone his research – to center his creativity and focus the information.
Hence the handler. Someone who was magic but didn’t have an aptitude to do magic and could therefore provide a stopgap in case the information stored along Stiles’ vertebrae and in his nerve endings should ignite unexpectedly when he glanced at a billboard and got a sudden idea.
Who knew what to expect really? His symptoms were, after all, just common side effects for an uncommon group of people.
Which leads back to why Stiles is green today. Derek knew from dinner the night before that it has to do with grounding and poison. Has to do with requests for antidotes from dangerous flowers. Derek can smell the aftermath of when Stiles was putrid, likely just a moment ago. It’s possible that he’ll change again, cycle through other tones once or twice before he settles. If he settles. Doesn’t loose focus and let all of the work tumbles down into a messy pool on the floor.
Either way, when he’s done. When he stands and opens the door. The alert will trip and Derek will know to be at the building’s entrance to see him out. Walk him home and get a plate in front of him.
Derek looks forward to it.
Because Stiles will be endlessly surprised to see his handler. Delighted that Derek is there again. Will clutch his arm, slide his hand down to intertwine their fingers and start to talk about his work, rant about his research and prater on about the beauty of patterns.
Stiles will smile as Derek nods and grunts, rolls his eyes and raises an eyebrow. Will laugh as he gets dragged for food, to the movies, out to the beach.
Derek had only been permanently re-assigned as handler after a string of others had tried to keep pace with Stiles. He’d been temporarily tagged. But then. Then Stiles flushed a rich caramel and his clothes stuck uncomfortably to his skin because of the sugar leaking from his pores. He’d clutched Derek’s hand and started talking. The sweet smell of Stiles’ skin had filled Derek’s senses while he’d taken in every word.
Arguably, he’d never stopped.