The first thing Stiles noticed when he started drifting towards wakefulness was that his bedroom smelled funny. Like dust and grass and lawnmower oil. The air was strangely stale and close. Geez, his Dad was right, he really should clean in here and open a window or something. He was cold, and there was a dull ache throbbing behind his eyes as if maybe he was coming down with something.
Stiles' eyes blinked open slowly. What he saw didn't make sense. Dark shapes and shadows of unfamiliar objects. A watery ray of sunlight piercing air thick with swirls of dust motes. A row of ancient looking gardening tools hanging on a wall. He pressed his eyes shut and opened them again, hoping to dispel the illusion, but it remained. His vision was strangely blurry, his eyes aching when he tried to focus and igniting the ache in his head to a sharper, more gnawing pain.
Heart starting to speed up, Stiles clenched his eyes shut again, willing the unfamiliar surroundings away with every fiber of his being. He was in his bed. He was in his bed. He was in his bed!
But he wasn't... or was he? He peeked one eye open, but the row of unfamiliar tools on the wall continued to mock him unrepentantly. His stomach sank to his toes, knotting in fear. Not again. Not again. No, no, no! He thought he was done waking up in strange places he didn't remember going. Done losing time and not being sure what was and wasn't real. The nogitsune had been gone for over a month! ... or had it?
He shivered, gooseflesh rising painfully along his arms, panic starting to creep up the back of his throat like bile. What if he had only dreamed it? What if defeating and trapping the nogitsune had only been in his mind? An illusion to keep him occupied and under control when in truth he was still trapped in his own head, being used like a puppet by the demon to do God knew what? What if all that he thought he remembered was only another dream inside a dream?
Stiles' breath caught, fluttering uselessly in his chest as icy talons of fear dug into him like claws. He wished to hell he'd never seen Inception.
Fingers, fingers, how many fingers did he have? Stiles' eyes flew open again and he tried to pull his hands in front of him so he could look for extra digits and try to figure out what was real... but he couldn't. He couldn't see his hands, he couldn't move them; they were trapped in something. Stiles wasn't sure exactly what position he'd thought he was in, but all at once he realized that he was somehow already upright or, partially upright, anyway. He was on his knees, cheek resting against something hard, flat and rough, his arms stretched up over his head.
Badly disorientated, his head throbbing as he battled the first, paralyzing fingers of a panic attack, Stiles couldn't make any sense out of the position or why he couldn't move. He thrashed, jerking at his arms and shaking his head as if he could shake off the whole illusion of the room around him. Wake up, wake up, wake up! Please let this be the dream and not the other. Please, please, please...
The familiar dig of metal circles biting into his wrists helped ground him a little, giving him a much needed dose of understandable reality to hold onto. Handcuffs. He was handcuffed. That's why he couldn't move. He knew what cuffs felt like. He had played with them enough growing up, borrowing his dad's so he and Scott could try to play Houdini, or Batman, or cops and criminal mastermind geniuses. More often than not the games had ended up with one or the other of them getting stuck in awkward and embarrassing predicaments when someone lost the key or got the lock so jammed from amateur attempts to pick it that it didn't work properly anymore. His dad had continually gotten them sets of play cuffs to use, but of course, those weren't as fun as the real thing.
Stiles' fingers traced the familiar outline of metal encircling his wrists, trying to force his hazy mind to work around his fear and assess his situation. He was kneeling on the floor of what looked like some kind of old, dilapidated garden or toolshed. The hulking shapes in the shadows were an ancient lawnmower and stacks of boxes full of mason jars and other detritus. He was facing a thick wooden beam that disappeared into the dirty cement foundation, probably a structural support of some kind. His arms were wrapped around the beam as if he were hugging it, secured together in the back by handcuffs. His questing fingers found what felt like a long, rusty metal spike or spar of some kind between his hands. The sturdy rod disappeared into the beam. It had probably been used to hang things from at some point in the shed's history. Now, it was what was keeping Stiles' hands suspended above him. The chain connecting his wrists was hooked over the rod, keeping Stiles in his current, kneeling position where he was more or less dangling from his shoulders.
With that discovery, Stiles started to become aware of how much his shoulders and knees ached from the position. The beam was too high for him to be able to sit back on his heels; it held him almost fully extended. Wincing, he rolled his shoulders and tried to straighten up enough to take a little of the strain off. He felt both stiff and cold.
Stiles looked down at himself. He was barefoot and in his pajamas, a soft dark blue tee and matching flannel sleep pants. It was too reminiscent of another time, of a different trap and panic started to seep back in. Everything about this felt very real, but then, the basement and animal trap had seemed completely real to him too. It was going to be a long time before he was able to completely trust his senses again, especially if the situation just didn't add up. He struggled to figure out how he could have gotten here, tried to pinpoint the last thing he remembered. It was a strange phenomenon that the harder you tried to think of something, the more jumbled and elusive it could become. The panicky, wild way his thoughts were darting all over the place every time he tried to concentrate wasn't helping either. He remembered eating dinner with his Dad, going to bed, playing games on his phone into the wee hours of the morning until he finally passed out...then... wait, the doorbell? There was someone at the door?
Stiles' mind retreated violently from the seemingly innocent memory of walking towards what looked like the front door to his house, his psyche recoiling in knee-jerk fashion from any mental reference to doorways in his dreams. No, no! Don't look at the door, don't touch the door! Don't, you stupid idiot, don't!
There was the sound of movement behind Stiles, pulling him back to the moment and he stiffened, every muscle going ridged. He tried to twist around and see who was there, but the cuffs were making him hug the pole too tightly, he couldn't twist enough to see behind his back.
"W-who's there? Who are you? Where am I?" His voice was scratchy and it trembled more than he might have liked.
There wasn't an immediate answer and his already thundering heart flailed harder in his chest. Terror made his head spin and he had to press his eyes shut to keep from being ill.
Footsteps in the dark. The hiss of that voice that went through him on every level, penetrating his soul, stealing his mind, twisting him into something he would rather die than become...
Behind clenched eyelids, Stiles got the impression that the being had come around beside him. If he opened his eyes, he would see. Stiles found himself paralyzed, unable to open his eyes, too afraid that he would see a rotting army jacket, a head full of bandages and a hideous shark mouth smiling at him. Do you want to hear a riddle, Stiles?
No, no he didn't. Not ever again.
Stiles felt physically unable to breathe. He couldn't bear to open his eyes and find his worst fears a reality. He couldn't take it if this had all been just one more illusion when he'd been so sure it was finally over and everyone was safe. His mind literally couldn't take it. The revelation would shatter him. Maybe that was the whole point.
"What do you want?!" Stiles demanded raggedly, trying not to sob, trying to force himself to open his eyes and face his fears.
"I want a lot of things, Stilinski. Right now it's kind of a tossup between wanting to make you pay for what you've done and getting the truth about why," an angry, male voice spoke from above him. "Let's start with the why and go from there."
Stiles' eyes startled open at the sound. He found himself staring at a pair of jean-clad shins and scuffed, worn sneakers. Not army boots. Not uniform pants. He didn't know the voice, but it was not the one he feared.
His shoulders sagged, terror ebbing away to leave him shaky and exhausted with relief. Admittedly, the relief was probably more than a bit premature since he was in fact still tied up in the middle of God-knew-where with a rather angry sounding person standing over him saying some highly disturbing and nonsensical things, so... yeah, maybe this wasn't exactly anybody else's idea of a good turn of events, but compared to what he'd feared? He'd take this, whatever this was.
Either sparked by the voice, or simply unblocked when his panic levels finally dipped somewhere below petrified, Stiles found the rest of the recollection's he'd unconsciously been blocking out before finally coming to him now.
It was Saturday. Dad was at work. Stiles was sleeping in late. The doorbell woke him up. He stumbled down the stairs in his pajamas to answer. When he opened the door, he had only a momentary impression of someone in sunglasses and a dark jacket or hoodie before he was hit square in the chest with sparking Taser wires. The massive electric charge had dropped him like a rock, sending him convulsing to the floor, then something hard slammed into the side of his head and the world folded in around him.
Stiles' eyes widened and he craned his neck back, struggling to see the person standing over him. The other man was too close to get a good look from this angle. Stiles was about eye level with the guy's crotch and only able to see his legs, part of his shirt and the underside of his chin. "Hey, you kidnapped me!" he blurted indignantly as the rush of memories finally coalesced into something that thankfully sort of made sense. "What the hell, dude?!"
The man leaned down and punched him in the side, hard.
Stiles jerked forward, nearly bashing his own head against the wooden beam a few inches from his face. "Ow! Crap! Was that really necess- ow!" He cringed, trying to pull away but finding nowhere to go as the man punched him in the ribs a second time before moving behind him, and delivering a vicious jab above his kidneys that brought tears of pain to Stiles' eyes and made him clutch desperately at the sides of the post.
"Hey! Hey! Come on, man, at least tell me what you want before you start with the hitting!" Stiles protested, voice tight around the pain. "If you just want a p-punching bag, I recommend the g-gym."
"I told you, I want to know why. I want the truth," his kidnapper said harshly. "I want to know what kind of dark, twisted shit you're into and who else is involved."
Stiles swallowed, confused and uneasy about the plethora of possible directions this could be going. "Um... could you maybe be a little more specific and a little less creepy? That's kind of vague."
A hand fisted in his tousled hair and jerked his head back. The edge of something sharp, probably a knife pressed against his throat. Stiles got an upside-down view of his attacker's forehead and a set of bloodshot, murderously intense eyes.
"Six weeks ago, two men in ninja costumes and masks rampaged through Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital, killing four people and wounding twelve. Ringing any bells?"
Stiles swallowed, the motion making the blade bob against his exposed throat. Oh yes, it rang a lot of bells, all of them sounding like warning klaxons in his head. Still, Stiles still wasn't entirely sure what this guy was after. "Y-yeah, of course, everybody knows about that. People in the same get-up attacked the Sheriff's office too that night. Totally weird shit, man."
"And that's all you know about it?" his captor demanded, pulling back harder on the knife.
Stiles squeaked in protest and tried to lean back as far as his bonds allowed. "I-I don't understand what you're asking!" he lied.
"Don't even try to give me that," the kidnapper pulled the knife away and let go of Stiles' hair, only to smack him hard on the side of the head with an open palm. The harsh clap made Stiles reel sidewise, his ear drum ringing painfully. There was something a little frenetic about the way the man was acting. He didn't seem terribly together.
"I know better. I was there that night. I was at the hospital. Those costumed freaks almost killed me and they weren't alone. You were there. I saw you with them, following the bloody trail they left like they were your personal motherfucking executioners. People were fucking dying and you were fucking smirking like it was the best show ever you demented piece of shit!" The man kicked him hard in the back of the thigh.
Stiles felt his stomach drop right back to his toes again. Well, crap. The nogtisune had done a lot of damage while wearing his face. It was perhaps inevitable that some of it would come back to bite him, but this was definitely not sounding good.
"Everybody talks about the ninjas, nobody talks about you," the kidnapper continued. "I thought it was weird your picture was never on the news. Even if I'm the only person who noticed you amid the chaos, it's a hospital, you know? They have security cameras. The whole thing had to be on tape. So you know what? I looked into that, and you know what I found out? The police say the security tapes were blank. Somehow they got wiped, allegedly before they were confiscated. But you know what else I found? I found a picture of you with the Lacrosse team. I found out who you are, and that your father is the Sheriff." The man's voice dripped with venom and disdain. "Very convenient, that. I guess that's why the police are covering it all up, huh?"
Stiles felt chilled from more than just the cool weather and poorly insulated structure. The man was both right and wrong. Stiles' father had wiped the hospital tapes, because they did show someone who looked exactly like Stiles in the company of the rampaging Oni, but it hadn't actually been Stiles. They'd known it was possible someone might remember seeing him there, and they had his alibi all worked out... but he had a feeling it wasn't going to go over very well with crazy-eyes, here.
"I mean... ninjas with swords?! Who does that kind of crap? What's the point?!" The man was still ranting. "That's what I want to know. I want to know what the hell it was all about, and who those masked men were. I want to know what's so Goddamn important that so many people could die and everybody just pretends to not know crap! Because somebody has to, stuff like this just doesn't happen!"
Stiles swallowed again, trying to choose his words carefully. "Look, I don't know what to tell you, but you've got the wrong person. Maybe you saw someone who kinda looked like me, but I wasn't anywhere near the hospital that night. I was with friends, there were witnesses, you can ask them –"
Stiles was thrown sideways as an angry fist clubbed the side of his head, showering sparks across his vision. Kicks and blows rained down fast and furious, peppering his head, back, sides and legs in a disordered frenzy that seemed to have no clear plan behind it other than to cause pain. It succeeded.
"Oh, like they wouldn't lie for you? Just like everybody else?" the man shouted. "I know what I saw!"
Stiles couldn't escape the punishing barrage. He hunched in on himself, elbows trying to protect his head as he leaned as close to the pole as he could, attempting to limit the area of body available for abuse. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and nose, tasting coppery on his tongue.
"No!" his attacker practically screamed. "No more lies! All anybody ever does is lie to me! She told me I'd never have to go back to living in hell holes and having the shit beat out of meand it was lie. They told me she was going to be okay and they lied! Everybody fucking lies and I'm sick of it!"
The rant wasn't making much sense, but there was so much raw emotion in it that Stiles physically shrank away from the force of the rage being directed at him. Bound as he was, there wasn't much of anywhere he could go. His eyes widened, gut tightening when he saw his attacker snatch a wooden baseball bat from somewhere on the floor of the shed. Whether he'd brought it with him, or it was part of the general shed debris, Stiles didn't know, but the guy held it like he knew how to use it, like he intended to use it. Despite his own mixed experiences with the reliability of such a weapon, Stiles knew that it would break most of his relatively fragile human bones just fine if applied with enough force.
"Don't you dare lie to me again,"the man raged, pressing the end of the bat threateningly against the back of Stiles' head. In this position, one good swing would fracture his skull easily. "I will fucking make you pay."
Stiles felt like his mouth was suddenly full of ash. This guy was 31 flavors of crazy and the thought that he could in fact die here felt suddenly very real and possible. He didn't wantto die, not now, not like this. He had been willing to die not so long ago if it had been the only way to put an end to things and maybe there was a part of him that couldn't help wondering how much better it might have been for everyone else if he had. Especially when he saw the pain in Scott's eyes or the way Lydia sometimes brushed her fingers across Allison's locker when she thought no one was looking.
However, Stiles was practical too. He knew there was no guarantee that his death actually would have changed anything. Even if Melissa and Rafael McCall hadn't found him that night in the preserve and he'd succeeded in his half conscious effort to kill himself and the thing taking over his mind, the nogitsune could have just taken a new host or reanimated his corpse as Stiles had since learned it had done to its previous host. The logical part of his mind knew that it did no good trying to weigh impossible questions like whether his dying could have saved Allison, and whether it might have devastated fewer people to lose him instead, although that didn't mean he never thought about it.
So maybe... maybe he would have at least considered trading places with Allison if it would bring her and the others back, if it could undo all the evil the nogitsune had used his hands to work. But this? Hell no. This was just pointless. Sure, he felt guilty as sin about everything that had happened, but he didn't want to pay with his life for the things the demon had done. It wasn't fair. He may not be wholly innocent, but neither was he guilty in the way crazy-eyes thought he was.
"I'm not lying!" Stiles protested vehemently, craning his neck around hard in a futile effort to see something more than the legs of his attacker's jeans. "L-look, you're right, I think the whole thing is totally weird and suspicious as hell too, but it wasn't me! You're making a mistake, I swear!" It was as close to the truth as Stiles could get, the only story he had to stick with. This man already thought he was lying, if he started attempting to explain about Oni and kitsune and werewolves and Japanese demons, that would really increase his believability.
His assailant was not mollified; he seemed even more enraged by the denials. Grabbing the hair on the back of Stiles' scalp, he slammed the teen's head against the solid wooden beam to which he was bound. Pain exploded through Stiles' skull again, flashing in bright pulses of light behind his eyes and ringing like the whine of microphone feedback in his ears. A little more blood trickled from the corner of his nose, although thankfully the sturdier, flatter area of his forehead had absorbed more of the blow than his face. It throbbed like it was probably going to bruise spectacularly, if he lived that long.
Now was probably not a great time to suddenly be thinking about the different ways he'd read that pathologists determined which injuries were antemortem and which were peri, but naturally, that's exactly where his mind went, and, seriously, fuck his mind sometimes.
Dazed from the blow, it took a moment for Stiles to understand the words being hissed by his ear. It took only a moment longer to register the frightening sight of the fat end of baseball bat resting meaningfully against his right elbow. "You a righty or a lefty, Stilinski? Which one do you think I should start with?"
Stiles' gut lurched like he was barreling into the initial plunge of a rollercoaster. Ironically, this threat terrified him even more than the slightly less tangible fear of death. A good whack or two at that angle would completely shatter his elbow joint, and once they started going down that road... Stiles trembled, feeling physically ill with dread. He twisted his arms desperately against the cuffs, but all it got him was more bruises and abrasions around his already sore wrists. "No, please don't, please don't, please don't!" he begged, tears rising unbidden to his eyes. The bat moved outward and he hunched, curling into himself as much as he could, but he could neither protect himself nor move away. The helplessness fueled his fear. It was like being a prisoner in his own body again and that was still too recent a wound.
"Then you tell me. You tell me who those men were and what the hell you were doing! You tell me! You fucking tell me why she had to die! I deserve to know that much don't I? All she ever did was help people! Why did she have to die?!" It wasn't just anger in the voice; it was pain – a universe of soul shattering pain leaking through the places where the tone cracked and broke.
Something inside Stiles turned to ice, the surface fracturing painfully. He didn't need to understand the question to understand the emotions behind it. He had no truth he could offer that would be believed and faced with the raw agony in that question he couldn't even bring himself to try to come up with a convincing lie. "I'm sorry," he whispered raggedly instead, the tears stinging his eyes escaping down his cheeks as he ducked his head. "I'm sorry. If I could undo everything that happened I would. You have no fucking idea how much I would... Please... Oh God! Please, no! No, no, no!" His voice rose and cracked in panic, body tightening and hunching against the impending blow as the bat swung out and then viciously back in again.