Listen, Stiles has been around a long time, alright? He comes from a very very long line of dragons. He isn't some steam breathing hatchling. He's seen empires rise and fall, watched as dictators and messiahs were born and killed, slept through great wars. He had been present for a lot of what humans consider important history.
Stiles has earned his spark, his fire, his wings. He's learned to fight, to fly, to fall. He's been bloodied and betrayed by enemies and friends alike. He's healed and killed some of those same people.
He has been and is and will be.
But above all that, there is one thing about him that is truer and more devastating than anything else in his life and that is this:
Stiles is tired.
It's not like he didn't know that being a dragon was sort of an unending and tiresome existence. Hell, he'd lost most of his elders under the claws of enemies too weak to deserve the honor, simply because they were ready for the peace of the empty. His own father had fallen in a simple skirmish just a few centuries ago.
Stiles wishes he could do the same, but there was one key difference between his elders and him and that was summed up in the aftermath of the fallen.
For instance, after his father went, his mother had packed up their human house and cleared their dragon cave, kissed Stiles on the forehead, and went to curl up under his father's pyre.
That was the way of dragons, of course. One died and their mate died with them.
And that is why Stiles can't throw himself into the empty just yet. Because out of all the things he's done and seen and been, he hasn't managed the most important in a dragon's life.
He hasn't found his mate.
-x-
It is early in the second millennium when Stiles finally gets lonely enough to seek out whoever is left on the human side of his family.
(Yes, sometimes dragons mate with humans and have soft, squishy offspring. It happens.)
He follows his instincts- and leftover familial connections- until he finds himself landing in a woodsy town in the northern part of California in front of a tiny blue house with tiny white shutters and a tiny white door.
(At least, that's what it feels like to Stiles whose dragon form is quite a bit larger than his human form and who also has awful, disorienting perception issues after transforming.)
After standing on the porch for an awfully long time, Stiles finally finds the courage to knock, yelping when it opens under his hand.
"Can I help you?"
Stiles stares into amber eyes so like his own, yet so different as they lack the internal spark of fire of dragons. He is both fascinated and devastated.
"Um, yes?" Stiles asks hesitantly. He digs deep into that part of his mind that is buzzing with clan and took a deep breath. "I'm looking for...Claudia?"
"That's me," A bright smile splits across Claudia's pale face. It's marked here and there with freckles and Stiles finds himself wondering if he has the same markings on his human face. He shakes himself out of his musings and follows Claudia when she motions him into the house.
"So, what do you need?" She asks once she has him settled at a rickety wooden table in the kitchen.
Stiles stares down at the cup of tea Claudia has made him- insisting that it was 'no trouble at all, really'- and watches the steam rise and curl in the cool early morning air.
"I know this might seem odd," he starts quietly, "but what do you know about your family?"
Claudia smiles at him wryly. "Well I know that my Uncle Kenneth looks way too young to have served in the first world war. I also know that my cousin Bridget willed my mother a huge spoon collection when I was little. If that's what you mean."
Sighing in relief, Stiles nods. "Yeah, that's what I mean."
"What's your name?" Claudia asks, nodding when he tells her. "And how long have you been alone?"
"It was just me and my parents for a while," Stiles hedges, trying to stay strong under Claudia's probing gaze. He sighs and stares into his mug blankly. "They took me to see the building of the Taj Mahal as a farewell trip."
Claudia makes a noise low in her throat, soft and hurt. If she'd been born with the spark, Stiles would call it a warble. "That was centuries ago!"
"Was it," Stiles says, flat and disinterested.
"You look young enough to be my son," she continues as she twists the ring on her left hand.
The hurt and uncertainty in her voice grabs at something in Stiles and he stares at her until she looks up. "I do," he agrees.
Claudia smiles, shaky and fond and beautiful.
-x-
Stiles learns that Claudia and her husband John- a quiet but loving man with a sharp sense of humor- can't have children. The doctors aren't sure why exactly but, until Stiles, Claudia had given up all hope for a child of her own. She decides that, since Stiles is family somehow, it's close enough. John concedes to her logic and life goes on.
They live together in the tiny house that slowly starts to feel not so tiny, filling it with life and laughter and love. Stiles starts to call Claudia and John Mom and Dad, ignoring both the sharp pain of loss in his own chest and the shameful mix of pleasure and grief that shines in his new parents' eyes.
He decides to embrace the human experience as much as he can and lets Claudia enroll him in a human school. He then learns that, while quite old and mature in his dragon form, he is rather young according to humans. He'll grow the more time he spends in this form, but decides to give Claudia and John the child they so desperately want, asking endless questions and crying at the slightest upset and refusing to eat his vegetables.
They're slowly learning how to be together, him and Claudia and John, but it's nice.
Mom takes him to school and helps him with his homework when he struggles to pay attention. She reads him stories before bedtime, changing it as it suits her so dragons are never the bad guys so he doesn't end up with nightmares.
(But if he does, she lets him crawl into bed with her and Dad and sings him back to sleep with Chicago and R.E.M. and Fleetwood Mac because lullabies are for babies.)
She bakes him cookies with raisins instead of chocolate chips and calls him weird but eats them with him anyway. She makes him eat all of his vegetables and hold her hand when they cross the street and make his bed every morning.
She has book club meetings and volunteers at the animal shelter and spends her Saturdays in the garden. All that stuff is boring to Stiles, but that's okay because then he gets to spend time with Dad.
Dad's a little more strict with Stiles than Mom is but they still have fun together. Sometimes he has to sit quietly and read when they're at the station, but then Dad will take him out on the back roads and let him turn on the sirens. They go to the burger place after, the one Mom doesn't like because 'everything's too greasy', and sneak into the house like guilty dogs.
On the Saturdays Mom lays around in the garden, Dad takes him fishing and doesn't complain when his fidgeting scares the fish away. They pick up fish from the market on the way home and Mom pretends like she doesn't know.
They're a family. They hug and kiss and laugh and cry. They spend every day apart and every night together. They love each other. It's good.
And then Mom gets sick.
-x-
It takes two long, torturous years for Mom to slip away. Honestly, it feels like the longest two years of Stiles's life.
She goes in late November and Stiles grows up. He doesn't want to be a little kid anymore. Not without his mom there to scare away the monsters and kiss his sores. Certainly not with his dad struggling to take care of himself, let alone his young son.
Stiles tries to ask, just once, if Dad wants him to leave, but the hopelessness shining in the blue eyes so unlike his own chokes him. Instead, he grows up overnight and helps his Dad look for a new job, somewhere far enough away from the memories.
They finally settle on Beacon Hills in early January.
-x-
Two weeks into their new life as widower and teenage son, Stiles is restless.
He hears the whispers when he goes into town, from the old ladies at the grocery store to the punks that hang out at the old playground. It's grating and it makes him want to transform just to claw all those would-be sympathizers into tiny pieces.
His dad takes him to the gun range instead and makes him learn the standard service pistol- a sleek little Glock 22- inside and out. It takes the shakes out of his hands and leaves ringing in his ears, just enough to sleep at night.
It's not until the middle of February that his restlessness kicks off into urgency. He snaps awake in the middle of the night and almost throws himself out of his bedroom window, focused only on the frantic tugging leading him into the woods. When he slides the glass pane up, he can smell it.
Fire.
Not the fire of his family, warm and thriving. No, this is poison. Cold and deadly poison. And something is screaming at him to stop it.
His wings burst out, shredding the thin skin of his human form, but he ignores the pain and takes off. The flight is a blur until green and grey and brown smear into blue and white and orange. Dimly, in the back of his mind, he realizes that it's burning faster and hotter than a regular human fire. It doesn't matter, humans can't produce anything near as hot as dragonfire and Stiles has walked through that a hundred times.
He lands next to a human woman, attractive if not for the malicious smirk twisting her face and the way she smells of poison, just like the fire. Reaching out, Stiles grabs her by the throat and throws her into a tree, knocking her unconscious. He'd rather stick his claws in deep and pull out her lungs but now that he's so close to the fire he can tell that it is actually a house and there are children crying inside.
Catching sight of a woman in the front window, Stiles runs over, sliding slightly as his claws catch in the smooth dirt of the forest. He throws the door open and the woman runs out, followed by a man who grabs her and pulls her close when they clear the fire.
"Children," the woman gasps out and Stiles snaps his head around, vaguely aware of his eyes going yellow and slitted. "In the basement."
Stiles dives through the open door, wings held high around him. By the time he reaches the basement, his rage and helplessness are practically boiling over.
There's four children in the basement, two teens- a boy and a girl- with a younger set of twin girls, identical right down to the tears streaking their dirty cheeks.
"Back," Stiles growl through a mouthful of sharp teeth. His tongue flicks against his lips and any other time he'd be scared at how quickly he is losing his human mind to his dragon body but right now all he can focus on is outoutoutOUT. He wraps his wings around the children such tiny delicate creatures and punches through the window.
He lifts the girl first and then the boy before straining to pick up both twins at once. He curls his claws around the window sill and growls again. "Go around. Out."
"But Peter," one of the twins protests, but her brother already has a hold of her and is running like Stiles told him. The older girl follows with the other twin.
Closing his eyes, Stiles tries to push the rage and despair away, tries to concentrate on the outoutpleasegodoutplease echoing through him. Tilting his head makes it stronger so he heads left, down a small tunnel where a man is laying on the ground, barely breathing and burning at the edges but still futilely pushing at the tunnel grate.
Stiles roars and rushes forward, throwing himself against the grate. It takes a few tries to loosen it, his shoulder aching and warm and wet, but when he does he picks the man up, cradling him in his arms carefully, and busts them out.
He barely makes it to the front of the house where the rest of the family waits before collapsing and curling around the man while his whole being screams matematepainmatehealmate. He does the best he can, smoothing his clawed hands over his mate's burns carefully, crooning and warbling until blue eyes snap open, flashing in the flickering light.
"...the Hell?" the man croaks, staring up at Stiles. "Who're you?"
"I'm Stiles," Stiles answers promptly. He nods when the man's eyes slide from his face to his wings. "I'm a dragon."
And that's pretty much when the shit hits the fan.
A/N: this was a prompt i received on my tumbr (stilesthesasswolf) and it ended up waaay longer than i was planning, but here it is. i know the ending is abrupt and vague but i already have ideas of making it a verse or multichapter story. hope you guys enjoyed it.
~S.