It would probably always end up like this, Stiles mused silently as his foot disappeared to the knee in decomposing leaf litter then reappeared with a ginormous centipede attached to his shoelaces. He squawked, kicking said leg like a can-can dancer until the unwanted hitchhiker flew like Team Rocket blasting off again, he assumed a ridiculous karate-strike pose in the following silence.
“Bring it.” He murmured, so quietly he could barely hear himself.
In spite of his frankly uncanny ability to get into mischief, he had never actually been to the scene of a crime. He still hadn’t, which was clear as he continued to wade between the trees, steel baseball bat strapped to the side of his bag. Maybe it was the bodies, ostensibly that was it and although he had no more knowledge than any of the law enforcement, he understood what a new pair of eyes could do for any case. It definitely wasn’t the dreams haunting him of sprinting through the underbrush, adrenaline-filled, followed and surrounded by some kind of snarling things. They were hazy most of the time but the ones he remembered clearly showed an entirely different forest, somewhere less lush and green.
Often he was tackled, carefully to the floor in a topsy-turvy haze of giggles and banter. The others... he got a far more personal and in-depth viewing of the inside of his own diaphragm than he had ever wanted. Classic nightmare fare. So of course, into the woods. He wouldn’t have said no to some magic beans right around then, or that basket for Grandma. The satellite radio at his hip pinged his location once every eight minutes or so. He was just under a mile from the jeep after moving through the forest in sweeps, keeping to the grid he’d carefully measured out instead of doing his Cognitive and Bio Psych assignment, which was great because his stomach let out an unholy growl.
Stiles caught sight of the silhouette of someone backlit by the wan sunlight who appeared from around a nearby tree just to watch him skitter backward. His foot landed on what looked like the solid ground but the undergrowth again sunk away under his weight, the hidden roots beneath clutched at his ankle as he sprawled onto his butt with a yelp.
“Holy fucking Christmas cake Batman!”
