Ella!EnchantedAU - Stiles has the curse of obedience.
Scott smiled, taking his hand.
Stiles pulled him to his feet.
The next three words the floppy-haired boy says make Stiles’ faint smile falter completely.
“Be my friend.”
...
Thing is, Stiles could have chosen to hate Scott McCall. Some days, he very nearly did.
But Stiles was compelled to be Scott’s friend. If they didn’t speak for a few days, Stiles would begin to get painful hand spasms until he at least attempted to contact the other boy. By the third day -- Stiles enjoyed nothing if not knowing the limits of his curse -- Stiles’ body moved automatically, typing out messages or walking to Scott’s house without his consent.
Stiles wasn’t a very kind child, but he never turned his acidic tongue on Scott.
After all, even to people he liked Stiles was kind of a dick.
But when Scott said ‘let’s be friends,’ it seemed like the curse defined the word by Scott’s idea of ‘friends’ rather than Stiles.
That turned out to be a rather good thing, because Stiles was fiercely loyal and protective. Scott… wasn’t.
...
“Behave, Stiles,” the Sheriff would snap, and Stiles would.
“Just make dinner tonight, son.”
“Tell me the truth.”
...
Stiles glanced around, trying to come up with something that didn’t have him keeping the oversized manchild afloat for another hour and keep an eye on the Kanima at the same time.
Whiskey eyes landed on his phone.
Scott.
Derek followed his gaze, scowling harder than ever. “Don’t—“
Stiles dropped him before Derek could finish the order, swimming to the phone.
In the end, Scott was no help.
...
“You’re going to tell me where Derek is.”
Stiles grit his teeth. Like hell.
“Why would I help you?”
Peter stared at him for a long moment, eyes half-lidded. The mad glint has dimmed to something pitless. Hollow. Stiles didn’t trust it.
“Because I’m ordering you to.”
Stiles feels his heart rate pick up, his breaths quicken, his palms start to sweat. He swallows through a dry mouth.
Peter knows.
He knows.
But he hadn’t actually ordered yet.
As if hearing the thought, Peter goes on.
“Find Derek for me.” Stiles remains still, staring Peter down, eyes condemning for the first time. There’s a vicious fury rising in his chest, wild and uncontainable. The last time Peter dealt with fire, it hadn’t ended well for him.
“Find Derek Hale as quickly as you possibly can,” the man modified, gazing back at him calmly.
Specificity. Stiles’ worst enemy. He’s good at getting off on technicalities, at disobeying the spirit of an order while still completing it, but even half-mad Peter’s too smart for that.
Stiles’ body turned on autopilot. He snatched the laptop from Peter’s hands and swiftly logged in. He pulled up the browser with a keyboard shortcut and hacked into the wifi of the building next to them in a few short keystrokes.
He had the tracking information off Scott’s phone inside two minutes.
Peter looked at him, looked at the results, and smiled.
...
“He’s going to kill me!” She shrieks. “You can’t let him hurt me, Noah, you’ve got to protect me—“
Claudia might be having one of her good days, and then she’ll get a glimpse of her son and have an episode. Stiles notices, of course he does, and tries to stay away. But he loves his mother. He wants to be there whenever he can, whenever she’s lucid.
She’s the only one that knows about the curse. That knows him completely, and adores him whenever she can still recognize that he isn’t plotting to kill her.
On May 19th, Claudia looks at Stiles with tired eyes and says, “Kill me.”
It all makes a sudden, horrible sort of sense.
Claudia had known, had probably decided long ago, that Stiles would be the one to end her suffering.
Frontotemporal dementia doesn’t kill.
So Stiles does it for the disease.
...
“Team Free Will,” Dean Winchester says from the laptop speakers.
Stiles laughs so hard he cries.
...
He asks him.
It’s something that eats at Stiles, even after the man is dead and buried.
Peter didn’t give Scott a choice, and he could’ve easily taken away Stiles’. Instead, he asked.
And Stiles--well.
Being a werewolf changed you fundamentally. Stiles was willing to bet that even your DNA was altered.
He counted on it being enough.
It wasn’t.
He flashes preternatural blue eyes at himself in the mirror, a snarl curling his lips.
Hates just that much harder.
...
“Shut up!” Isaac shouted.
Stiles mouth clicks. Isaac looks surprised, but he smells of terror at whatever Stiles’ face is doing. Stiles bares human teeth at him and the boy’s pulse jumps. Isaac sneers, all bravado.
Stiles leaves before he wets himself.
...
Orders can counteract each other.
Sometimes, when Stiles really don’t want to do something, he’ll manipulate somebody into telling him to do the opposite.
The first time they’re alone, after, Peter looks at Stiles and says, “You don’t have to be friends with Scott McCall.”
A knot in Stiles mind relaxes, and then releases entirely. Stiles thinks of Scott, thinks of him without the shiny order that made him remember the good more than the bad.
He doesn’t hate Scott, though by now he had more than enough reason to.
But Stiles finds he doesn’t like him, either.
The black and white naïveté, the self righteousness, the way he ordered everyone around nowadays and Stiles was forced to comply.
Stiles stands abruptly, heart beating too-quick in his chest.
Stalks forward, staring intently into the preternaturally-blue eyes of Peter Hale. The man looks almost wary until Stiles leans forward, sets a hand on his shoulder, and drags it down the line of his arm.
Scent marking him.
“Thank you,” he acknowledges, and it comes out a pleased rumble, octaves lower than his usual register.
Peter blinks at him once, then quirks an eyebrow. He smells delighted and a bit astonished.
Stiles grins, eyes glowing.
“I’m leaving,” he says lightly, half an offer.
“Am I to presume that’s an invitation?”
Stiles flashes his fangs. “Presume away.”
He turns on his heel.
Peter follows.
...
Stiles’ life has never been simple, and that doesn’t change with Peter as a packmate.
Once, they stop mid-hike and Stiles peers over the cliff. There’s a few minutes of peaceful silence, and Stiles is enjoying the nature in a way he never had before, eyes closed, breeze fluttering through his growing hair.
He smiles. Steps that bit closer to the edge, enjoying the feeling of lightness and freedom.
Then hears, “Never kill yourself.”
Stiles feels the order snap into place. It is disproportionately light in comparison to the sensation of his stomach dropping out.
It’s the first order Peter has given him since that night in the parking garage.
Stiles digs claws into his skin hard enough that he begins bleeding freely, and slowly turns to Peter.
There’s a glimmer of apology in his eyes, but something in his scent betrays him. Maybe he’s genuinely apologetic for betraying Stiles trust, but he doesn’t regret the order.
Stiles snarls. His wolf whimpers and snaps in his mind, wanting to turn tail and bite into Peter’s neck at the same time. Stiles feels his teeth elongate to fangs and pulls his eyes from blue, staring over the cliff once again.
The view doesn’t seem half as beautiful as it had moments ago.
It wasn’t like Stiles wanted to kill himself. If he did, he would have a long time ago. But having that option--
“How dare you,” he whispers to the open air. He’s too furious to look at Peter, too hurt to address him directly or acknowledge that this level of self-righteousness in the air could give Scott a run for his money.
“I don’t mean to hurt you,” Peter says.
Truth.
It almost makes it worse. Stiles bares his teeth.
“I decided to trust you,” he says. “And you just spat on it. Pack doesn’t betray pack.”
Peter meets his gaze steadily. He looks wary, but he doesn’t say anything in his defense.
Stiles wants to rage at him, wants to use words to cut into that calm facade until he bleeds. ‘You and your niece are very alike,’ he almost says, but Stiles isn’t that hasty.
Isn’t that cruel, though he wants to be.
“What if hunters capture me? Torture me? What if I go mad from it? I don’t even get the option of biting off my own tongue now, Peter?”
“I would come for you,” the man says quietly.
Stiles roars.
Peter’s eyes widen, and he takes a short step back before standing his ground. He smells concerned and surprised, but not apologetic.
“Don’t follow me,” he snaps, shaking with the urge to destroy.
Stiles is a very angry individual.
Having no say will do that to you.
...
“Take it off,” Stiles snarled, pulling Peter’s hair harshly.
The man met his gaze, blue eyes dazed and dilated. Then, after another long moment of staring, shook his head.
“Can’t lose you,” he rasped from between fangs. “I won’t.”
Stiles’ laugh edged on manic. “You already have, you fool.”
When Peter woke in Deaton’s shop four days later, Stiles was long gone.
...
There have been moments.
Moments when Stiles was absolutely certain he was about to die.
Like when Jackson sneered, “Kill yourself,” and Stiles’ hands found the closest sharp object and aimed it unerringly at his carotid artery. Like when his dad—
Well. He tries not to think of his dad.
But somehow this—emotion—is harder to manage. The level of betrayal that can only mean he trusted Peter in the first place.
Stiles’ world crashed down on a pleasant autumn day during a walk with his packmate.
And the ruins continue to burn for a while yet.
...
“As you can imagine, I don’t like people taking away my ability to choose,” he says, almost lightly. “When I was nine my mother made me kill her. When I was twelve my dad almost killed me by saying something careless when he was drunk. I was forced to be Scott’s friend for eleven years.”
“None of them set out to hurt me,” Stiles acknowledged. “But they all did. I trusted each one of them, and they came so close to tearing apart the fundamentals of who I am.”
Stiles’ eyes blazed red when he turned to Peter.
“You know that kid who never did anything he was told? That’s who I am inside. The only person I should have to answer to is myself, but that was taken away from me a very long time ago.” Stiles sighs warily. He suddenly looks far older than his twenty-two years. “You’re the first person I willingly offered my trust to in years, and you shattered it. And you weren’t sorry, not really, or at least not until later, when you realized what it cost you.”
Peter swallowed heavily. He smelled tired, and very, very sad. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice little more than a rasp. “I am, Stiles. You can kill yourself. You can do anything you want. I’m sorry.”
Stiles huffed a laugh, not sounding very amused at all, and Peter felt a displacement in the air just as Stiles appeared in front of him, red eyes boring down into his blue.
“You think I would return before breaking the curse?” he said wonderingly. “I trust no one that much, Peter.”
Peter swallowed heavily, awaiting the inevitable blow. He bared his neck, just a bit, even knowing what was coming.
Peter jerked when a cold nose brushed against his neck, rubbing up the line of his carotid. He felt like his heart was in his throat, jumping wildly and very audibly.
“You…”
“I,” Stiles agreed, more than a touch mockingly. He sighed at whatever look was on Peter’s face at that, and pulled him in closer. “You’re an idiot. I can do whatever I want now, Peter.”
Peter shifted as fingers combed through his hair. Peter made a strange sound, a mix between a purr and an engine revving. “I love you, though.”
Peter stared at him.
“Oh.”
Stiles huffed a laugh, leaning forward to brush their cheeks together. Scenting.
“And here I thought I was choosing such an intelligent packmate,” he said, more fond than mocking this time. When he pulls back the smile in his voice is gone, his eyes back to their normal honeydew. “Don’t think my loving you will change anything, Peter. Betray me again and I will rip your throat out.”
Peter whines, high and embarrassing. Stiles makes a low, rumbling noise in response and leans in, kissing his forehead lightly.
“And I’ll rip out the throat of anybody who threatens you, of course.”
The noise subsides, and Peter sighs, smelling content, confused, aroused. Stiles soaks in the scent without any intention of remedying the confusion for a while yet.
The arousal, however, he can do something about.
