I don't own Teen Wolf or any of the superhero properties mentioned here, obviously.
Enjoy and pretty please review!
Stiles wakes up tied to a chair in a dark, dank warehouse, with the clock ticking down from fifteen minutes.
"I'm Maggie Gyllenhaal," he says aloud, and he dies a little on the inside.
Stiles is ringed by barrels of oil. A web of wires spreads across the warehouse floor, weaving all the barrels together and connect them to a softly ticking slab of putty and circuitry. He's no tech genius, but he figures he's watched enough Die Hard to know exactly what's going on there.
This is the Dark Knight. He's Maggie Gyllenhaal. Life isn't fair.
If anybody had asked him (not that anybody ever asked him anything) which comic book lady he'd like to be, Stiles would have answered Captain Carol Danvers in a heartbeat. She's complicated and she kicks ass, and Stiles would like to think that he's a complicated ass-kicker.
But the universe seems determined to remind him that he's nothing special, there's nothing super about him. Which, fine. There are a lot of cool regular human ladies in the comics, too. Stiles could have been intrepid reporter Lois Lane, or wisecracking CEO Pepper Potts.
But no, he's the girl in the fridge. He's not even interesting, like the Emma Stone version of Gwen Stacy. He's Rachel Dawes. He's the Maggie Gyllenhaal version of Rachel Dawes. He's not even in the fucking comics.
Life isn't fair.
They had cornered Stiles behind the gas station 7-11, grabbing him by the wrist and twisting the car keys out of his fingers. "We're giving him a choice," the man with the crooked nose had said. "It's nothing personal," he'd added, almost apologetic, before he clamped a chloroform rag over Stiles' nose and mouth and held him close in a vise-like grip until his struggling body finally went limp.
The new guy is probably tied to an identical chair in an identical warehouse across town. The difference is, he doesn't need to be afraid. That guy is a born wolf, he's tactically valuable, and he's visiting Beacon Hills from one of the superpacks up in Oregon. Derek can't afford to let them blast that guy to the high heavens because the pack needs him. But Stiles isn't significantly more valuable in one piece than he is splattered to the roof.
He briefly entertains the notion that maybe this really is a Dark Knight type thing, and hopefully if Derek goes after the other guy he'll get Stiles instead. Instantly, something like shame pricks at his skin, and he wonders if maybe he doesn't deserve to be lit on fire after all.
A drop of dirty water falls from the rusting warehouse ceiling and splashes him on the nose. Stiles jolts violently and almost topples over the chair.
The water slides down his cheek. Nine minutes on the clock.
He's wasted six of what might be the last fifteen minutes of his life feeling sorry for himself.
Stiles feels a cold wave of panic wash over his brain. He knows it's useless to panic. In fact, it's dangerous to panic. He thinks of old Harvey Dent, who tips his chair and gets half his face burnt off and becomes one of the most famous super-villains in comic book history. He doesn't want to do that. He likes having both sides of his face.
Stiles can't help it. He feels his panic spread, chilling the pit of his stomach but electrifying his skin. He starts thrashing in the chair, and the rope burns his skin and pulls at his clothes until his shirtsleeve is smashed up against his wrist and something cold and hard touches his skin.
It changes everything.
Here's the thing about being the bumbling sidekick: nobody expects much. He's the guy who trips when he's getting chased and brings regular lead bullets to a werewolf fight. Nine times out of ten people can count on him to fuck up.
But today is the tenth.
They didn't think to properly search him. Stiles is the squishy human bait. He's not dangerous, so they didn't really search him. They didn't find the razor he keeps tucked into the hem roll of his shirt cuffs. He lives in Beacon fucking Hills, he'd be an idiot not to carry a sharp weapon around with him.
Stiles refuses to be the boy in the fridge. He refuses to dangle his life on the knife's edge of Derek's choices.
His heart pounds somewhere around his throat at twice the rate of the ticking clock. Stiles twists and twists and bends his fingers and wrists at unnatural angles, trying to get at the razor. His index finger brushes the blade edge, and blood blooms on his shirt sleeves.
Six minutes.
He hooks an index finger and drags the razor out carefully to his thumb. If he twitches and drops the razor, he really is dead.
Finally, he grips the blade with three fingertips. He holds his roped wrist against the razor, dragging it back and forth.
Four minutes.
Stiles saws right through the rope and cuts into the tendon of his wrist. He ignores the blood splattering to the floor and rips his arms and shoulder out of the ropes. They coil to the ground like dead snakes.
Three minutes.
He tries to stand up, and swears. Fuckers have tied his legs to the chair.
Stiles leans over, muscles screaming, and starts hacking at the ropes binding his ankles. The hem of his jeans is wet with oil spilled over the concrete floor.
"Come on, come on, come on," Stiles mutters.
One minute.
He rips the last strand of twine holding the rope together and stumbles forward, kicking the chair back into the oil drums. He can't feel his legs, he doesn't even know how he's standing.
Sirens split the night air and reverberate against the metal walls. The police are coming.
Should he slice the wires? It might defuse the bomb. It also might set off the bomb.
Thirty seconds.
He swears again. His jack-rabbiting mind costs him too much time.
Stiles scrambles for the door, trying not the slip on the oil. The ticking follows him.
Twenty seconds.
He bodily smashes the door. The door, thankfully, is unlocked. He slams the door with his shoulder again and it screeches in protest, giving him just enough space to slide through. Stiles is suddenly grateful that he's skinny.
He bursts free into the clean night air. He can see a ragtag group of police officers and deputies heading for him, his dad and Scott in the lead.
"Go back," he yells, his voice cracking as he barrels forward.
He sees his dad stumble maybe seventy yards ahead of him, eyes wide in shock.
"GET BACK," Stiles screams, and the bomb blows.
A wall of heat slams into his back, throwing him head over heels. Stiles his the ground with a crunch.
The world is ringing, all he can hear is ringing, and it's a wonder his head is still attached to his neck.
"Stiles, Stiles," Scott says urgently, from very far away.
He's not far away at all. Scott is crouching right there by Stiles' side, hands fluttering over his leg.
Stiles looks down and feels a powerful wave of nausea. His jeans are purple with blood and that's definitely bone poking out of torn skin.
"Derek called us, he told us he'd gone after you first," Scott says, panic still straining his voice. "He said we'd probably only have time for one and he thought he was saving you, we thought we'd be too late for the other guy here, we would have been too late for him, we weren't expecting you."
"They switched them," Sheriff Stilinski says. "They meant for Stiles to die." Stiles could cry with relief, hearing his dad's voice. His dad presses his fingers to the gash in Stiles' wrist.
"The Dark Knight. They ripped off their evil plot," Stiles jokes feebly.
"Shut up," Scott says, his voice strangled. "Shut up." His eyes are wet.
"Don't cry," Stiles says. "I'm fine."
He suddenly thinks of Derek, bursting into the warehouse and stumbling in horror when it turns out to be the other guy. He pictures Derek dragging the other guy out anyway into the open air and roaring, howling up at the night sky when the warehouse blows.
Maybe once the ambulance gets here, someone will have the sense to give Stiles a phone so that he can call Derek.
They'll take him to the hospital and Nurse McCall will dope him up with the best painkillers and Dad and Scott will put their heads together to come up with a good lie to put in the official books.
Maybe later Derek will crawl through the window still smelling like smoke and push himself right into Stiles' personal space, because Derek is like that when he's mad at himself. Stiles decides that if Derek does that, he's going to tangle his fingers up in Derek's stupid beautiful hair and kiss him like the world is ending. Derek chose Stiles, after all, and he figures that means something. And if Stiles is wrong? His bones are literally outside of his leg right now. Scott won't let Derek get too mad.
But that doesn't matter, right now. All of that comes later. The important part is that he's breathing right now and Scott his at his side and his dad is flagging down the paramedics.
Because he's not Maggie fucking Gyllenhaal. He's Stiles Stilinski.