Rating:
Explicit
Archive Warnings:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Categories:
Gen, Multi
Fandom:
Teen Wolf (TV)
Additional Tags:
Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, kind of, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Powerful Stiles Stilinski, Pack Feels, Pack Bonding, Pack Family, Magical Stiles Stilinski, BAMF Stiles, Graphic Description of Corpses, Blood and Violence, Aftermath of Violence, Gore, Blood Magic, Nemeton, Major Character Injury, Angst with a Happy Ending, Handwavy Magic
Summary:
Tilting his head back he can see the blur of magic, his magic in fact, waving like a flag in the air, too big for the tree to blot out. It's too giant to have ever fit inside him, surely.
He reaches out his hand to it because he's loopy as hell and it's really pretty and it cranes towards him, soaking into his skin and clogging his throat with tears as it opens his airways a bit more. The rush of oxygen lets him realise – he's dying, his heart working at a mad pace as it tries to find blood that just isn't there anymore. His skin is pulled tight over his bones, the gasping sound in his ears coming from deep in his own chest. But his magic is here, pumping his heart for him in the gaps where it's starting to falter, churning what's left of his mind up like silt in a pond. He lurches back to the Nemeton, bracing himself hard when he almost slams down into its roots.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Goddammit. Fuck this. FUCK. THIS.
Notes:
So this has been sitting on my computer for a long ass time and I found myself coming back to it kind of absently lately so I finally just buckled down and finished it.
The tags are real though, so please be careful with yourselves!
"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."
― J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
(See the end of the work for more notes.)
The tree is huge, a leering thing that's somehow beyond his vision as he stands at its base. He can see fragments of it; the gnarled shadows and the glinting red leaves shaking in the still air. He's freezing, the bark of the tree burning under his palms where he holds himself up, the blood soaking into the wood until his hands are dry and pale again.
The ground is watery, the tree rooted gleefully in the ley line and writhing as it stretches out. It's still hungry, starving actually, growling for more. It demands to be fed until it's fat and gorged, the creaking of branches sharp in the silence. Gasping, he gives it more until the world's all floaty. There's a flood of magic washing around him now as he lets the tree suckle and feast at the claw marks down his arms and lap at the shallow cut over his eye, the touch of its power like a tiger's rough tongue over his skin. Slumping against the trunk he makes a hollow, hurt noise, the dream darkening. At last the wood just can't absorb any more blood but then it's not just him it's taking from.
All around the clearing are bodies piled high, flickering between people and animals, some of the corpses strange, fantastical and horrific with sharp angles and soft faces where their eyes stare out blankly. His head is fuzzy as he drags himself to a dead Derek, the werewolf's hands clawed but his face human-smooth, looking lost and wounded; he's lying next to a curled up Cora, her arm wrapping around her head like she's just trying to sleep in a noisy place. There's only tiny smears of blood over their mouths after the drinking the tree has done but there are black stains drenching their clothes and arms that are just as horrifying to him.
Farther away there's Scott covering a head with dark hair and he isn't sure he wants to know whether it's Allison or Kira. Maybe it's Melissa, he thinks dazedly as he struggles to his knees. Chris is to one side of the clearing, flayed open from sternum to hip, Peter's claws lodged in the wendigo's scalp with a grimace of agony and grief seizing up the were's features.
And, there – the person with Scott must be Melissa because there are the girls, entwined together beside a facedown Deaton. Allison's fingers are tangled in Kira's hair, her lips smearing mud over the kitsune's forehead and forgiving her for the katana lodged in her chest. Kira's face is buried in Allison's shoulder, her arms clutching tight at her back. It almost looks like she could just be grieving if not for the bowie knife jutting from her back and the stillness of the embrace.
Over by Chris and Peter, Lydia's spray of hair is as brilliant as poppies on a burnt field where she's crammed between the eviscerated wendigo and two gutted harpies, her mouth torn up the side of one cheek. Her throat is an open, bloodless gash that makes Stiles' stomach curl up into a ball. Isaac's body is spattered in black as well, an arrow lodged in his throat. The witch that cursed Allison to do it is close by, folded over the missing portion of her body where Cora shredded her middle out. A small black cat – her familiar – is lying over his father's knee with bullet holes poking through it like a tiny black baked potato, the Sheriff's chest ravaged by a dead tatzelwurm's claws. He's sandwiched between the two cats, a strange look of peace on his face where it faces the sky.
Hysterical laughter cracks Stiles' chest open as the tree looms over them all, its red leaves like all the stolen gallons of blood in the clearing, thick and heavy as they sway. Nothing makes sense, the ground meeting the sky in a sickening crush of dulled colours he can't make out anymore. He just wants to sleep, but he's already in a dream and the thought of not being able to just rest makes him want to sob. Lying against Nemeton and letting his eyes wander from where Derek and Cora lay beside him, he drifts a little, coming back when he catches sight of something bright.
His hands are stark white like bleached bones in his lap, black bile sticking his clothes to his body. There is a nightmare building pressure as he blearily looks at them. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. The movement of his chest is a dry heave, the stench of the dead stinging his throat and eyes until he can't breathe. He can't even cry anymore as he keeps counting, the numbers running together into a mishmash of weak murmurs until he's tempted to just break a finger off so it won't be real; just make it the wrong number, just tear it off and none of it will be there when he wakes up.
Tilting his head back he can see the blur of magic, his magic in fact, waving like a flag in the air, too big for the tree to blot out. It's too giant to have ever fit inside him, surely.
He reaches out his hand to it because he's loopy as hell and it's really pretty and it cranes towards him, soaking into his skin and clogging his throat with tears as it opens his airways a bit more. The rush of oxygen lets him realise – he's dying, his heart working at a mad pace as it tries to find blood that just isn't there anymore. His skin is pulled tight over his bones, the gasping sound in his ears coming from deep in his own chest. But his magic is here, pumping his heart for him in the gaps where it's starting to falter, churning what's left of his mind up like silt in a pond. He lurches back to the Nemeton, bracing himself hard when he almost slams down into its roots.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Goddammit. Fuck this. FUCK. THIS.
There's barely any blood left on any of them but he reaches down and smudges his fingers clumsily into the claw marks that trace emptily down from his shoulders to his wrists, digging tiredly until a tiny few drops squeeze out from under the layer of spongey fat. Looking up at the stupid damned tree he slaps his blood to the bark and tries desperately not to mangle his words. All of this - he never thought the Nemeton would be an option, never imagined the level of carnage it would take to sate it after so long, like a lion before the gladiators. But apparently it's this much, and he can honestly say he's never been more relieved to have a nature that requires unnecessary amounts of knowledge on most likely useless subjects.
Because if he'd ever been satisfied, had ever taken a 'no' seriously in his life, he might not have discovered his magic. He might have never known the strength of his own will.
And that would've been a great tragedy¸ he grins to the waves of power in the air, his fingers gently curling around in it like the softest merino wool. It soothes something in him to touch it, calms him down a little from where his head has floated up, brushing over his wounds and sapping some of the animal fear. Instead it strings out between his hands like a cat's cradle, weaving under his fingernails and around his thumbs, tickling his fluttering pulse as it wraps firmly around his wrists. It has to wriggle to fit between his palm and the tree bark but finally it's corded through his fingers and up his arms, shrouding him like a glittering web of silk and starlight. Not that the magic is soft – it actually burns, scalding tiny red welts onto Stiles' skin where it sits over his arms and hands, wrapping his throat up in weals from the heat.
Ignoring the pain like he's ignoring dying, Stiles breathes as deeply as he can in between verses. His blackened fingertips dig into the bark so hard little bits flake away and speckle the tops of his hands, tangling into the threads as he starts anew. Leaning forward to try and stop the dizziness Stiles feels the tree skate around his consciousness. He finds it difficult to blame the Nemeton for all of this, can't really fault it because it's just something trying to survive the only way it can. It's not malicious, isn't cruel, it's just taking what it can get. It pulled the witches here, called the magic in the hag's mind until the woman had crawled over its roots on her hands and feet like an animal. Once it had the hag dead it dug down and drew out the tatzelwurms from their burrows, even enticed the two harpies away from the ridges to the north in its desperate hunger.
Only the wendigo had been happenstance as far as Stiles knew. Hell, it'd probably been hunting the witches, come to think of it. Following them and finding what it thought was a greater prize in the Nemeton. Fucking idiots, all of them. Stiles was a fucking idiot too, not even realising where the fight had led them until it was too late and witch number one had seized hold of Allison. From there it had been an unrepentant clusterfuck. Isaac had gone down with his claws bloody from ripping apart her familiar as the falcon attacked him, Chris had gone after the wendigo with Peter backing him up only to go down under the sudden weight of a fully grown harpy as she tried to lift off with him in her grip.
Howling, the oldest Beta had leapt up the Nemeton and slammed them all back down to earth, the second harpy closing in with a war cry as Peter cut down the first one. Chris managed to empty a cartridge into the new threat before the wendigo arrived to attack.
Lydia had screamed long and loud and terribly when Isaac died, tears streaming down her face as they all felt the sound in their bones. The wolf had crumpled, the arrow jerking him back until he slipped down with a wet sigh, his features turning human and soft around the obscene sprout of the black arrow slipping into the top of his throat. When she stopped to breathe the banshee turned to the writhing soil and shrieked at the first three tatzelwurms until their eyes caved in under the assault.
It was the fourth that first reached her, raking its claws up her thigh and catching on her pelvis before Derek could savage it. She'd gotten the fifth, sixth, even the seventh and eighth before her lungs had to refill, the ninth raking its teeth over her face as its claws opened up her throat. Derek had been in the middle of them as a wolf, his fur bristling as he tried to stem the flow from the ground. Stiles wasn't sure how many of the things there had been but they quit coming after Derek had killed another six. Hopefully they had gone back to their deep caves, had escaped the pull of the Nemeton.
It was the second witch that eventually got Derek and Cora, her magic that raised Chris' failing muscles to shoot them full of holes. Stiles could never be anything but grateful that the hunter had been unconscious by then, on his way to death even as Peter sliced the wendigo open from groin to ear. Slippery ropes were entangled under the monster, Peter's fist gripping his hair, claws sunk into his crown in a vicious fury for killing the hunter beside them. Cora had kept the witch occupied until then, darting in to score cuts when the woman had to turn to face Stiles.
Where Stiles had come to the clearing were the crumbled golems and the single kobold the witches had been working with. It had taken him valuable time to cut the golem's runes, during which the wiry, fur-covered kobold had taken the chance to build its power up. It had stalled Stiles long enough that when he'd beaten it there had been precious little to defend. Everything happened too fast in a fight like this, chaos reigned until silence took over and Stiles was left fighting a pair of tatzelwurms on one side and the second witch on the other.
The moment the witch got a blow in the cats had been on him, desperately clawing at him like housecats in a bath. In that moment he felt nothing but pity and fury; not for the Nemeton, he'd realise later, no, for the idiots who had never taken care of it. It had dragged these creatures up from where they lived, had forced them into the open with its maddening, screaming call for food. Now they were here, in pain and panic, trying to stop whatever it was that was hurting them. Climbing all over him and pulling at his arms with their claws until he had to burn them off, tossing them bodily into the witch and holding them there until they all sputtered out.
Then the quiet came. He stood there as Peter hacked up black bile from some unseen wound. Probably a careening shot from Chris during the fight with the harpies but it was too late now for anything but mercy, black lines webbing out over his face. Stiles came to him and whispered a numb goodbye before shoving a knife into his chest and slipping the tip against the wolf's pounding heart. From there it was his own breathing in the sudden silence, raspy and heaving with pain so thick he couldn't speak enough to sob.
Any of these enemies would have posed no threat, had they come alone, had they had any warning. Instead they had gotten a panicked call from Scott that his mother had never shown up to work the previous night and a trail that made no sense. Turns out the witches had every intention of feeding the Nemeton, but they hadn't planned to be part of the meal. They had also underestimated just how hungry the tree had been. They had planted the trap for Scott and the wolves, not the wendigo that showed up first.
'A plan never survives contact with the enemy'. Stiles is hard-pressed to find a truer statement of fact, feeling the give of the trunk as his words run out and the haze clears a little from his head. He has no plan here, no real thought besides asking the Nemeton for help now that it's full, not that he expects an answer.
It could be that it feels some sadness on his behalf, it could be that it's only curious, but something answers him, in a way. There in his gut there's a tug, a slip of power between his ribs and suddenly he's aware of all of his magic at once, pulsing, pounding out a beat in his head.
And he seizes it, grips it hard and yanks it close, all the cords over his arms going taut as he believes.
What he believes is more a memory than an imagined ideal; a month ago when the pack had had the first dinner night after the spring semester ended, piling into Derek's flat and having a potluck. His dad and Melissa had been there with Chris, none of the kids daring to ask what was happening there for fear of mental images. Peter had been by Stiles' side, one hand holding his wine, the other on Stiles' knee to keep it from jigging up and down. Derek had been sitting with Kira, the two of them talking to Lydia and Cora while Allison leaned on the kitsune's shoulder, exhausted from jetlag. Scott was talking to his mom and Isaac as the Sheriff was arguing with Stiles over whether or not it was a special enough occasion to have more than one slice of pie.
Stiles had fallen asleep in the middle of The Martian, had woken to Peter lifting him up and carrying him to bed in the room Derek kept for them. He remembered seeing his Dad still sitting there with Melissa, Chris' feet in his lap while Mel gently carded her fingers through his hair. It had been strange but so good to see him happy, to see Derek happy too, sandwiched between Allison and Kira, Scott sitting at their feet with one hand around Kira's ankle while he gave her a lazy massage.
The magic is searing now, coils of it blistering at his fingers until he can feel them splitting open. There's hardly any blood; he's mostly running on his magic now until his body gives out. All of that he ignores. He pushes away any and all thoughts of grief, doesn't have room for it in the deep core of belief that he's building. He discards the way his knees crumple, the way his hands tear open as he rakes his palms down the Nemeton. The sensation of hard roots becomes the warm strength of Peter's bicep and shoulder, the cold body his head hits changes into the gentle kiss on his temple the Peter always gives him when he carries him like this.
Blood sacrifice is powerful, Stiles understands from his reading. He's never done any serious work with it beyond his own body and what he could safely experiment with. He might take a couple drops from people when he keyed them into wards, but no more. He doesn't need to; it's so potent he could build foundations as steady as bedrock with a thimble-full. The amount of blood the Nemeton has fed on could suck every building in Beacon Hills – even further, the whole of Beacon County, directly into the ground like a stone in water if he tried. But that's not what he wants, and the tree wouldn't give him that much even if he tried to force it. Instead he just wants one thing. He believes in one single moment.
The moment he leaned his head against Peter's collarbone and decided to let his boyfriend carry him to bed. In that single moment Stiles pours every drop of blood the tree will let him have, and then he wrenches and focuses, and tells himself, "That. Right there. That is where I am. I'm going to blink a little and I'll see the pictures on the wall in the hallway, smell the popcorn, the cologne Peter likes to wear. I'll feel his shirt against my arm, his beard brushing my foreheard as he kisses me, the feel of his breath on my face. I'll hear the TV, the end of the movie credits as Derek and Allison discuss going to the lake this weekend. I'll hear Melissa laugh at something Dad says, Lydia dryly answering something Cora's muttered to her and the smack of a hand connecting with the back of Scott's head when he tickles Kira's foot. That is where I am."
He squeezes his eyes shut, then relaxes because why is he so tense? Peter pauses, leaning down closer, "Sweetheart? Are you alright? I'm just taking us to bed."
Stiles mumbles something sleepily and the beta laughs under his breath, dismissing the tension when Stiles goes limp again. He arranges them in bed, stripping off Stiles' jeans and shirt until they're curled up in their underwear beneath the covers, Peter pulling Stiles' glasses off and putting them on the side table. He can tell that Stiles isn't quite asleep but it doesn't worry him. Instead he kisses him again, this time on the corner of his mouth, before closing his own eyes.
Stiles stays awake, not really aware of much besides keeping himself from crying out. One advantage of – what happened – was his heart hadn't automatically given him away, being as deprived of blood as it was. Instead he lays there, clutching at Peter gently until he thinks the wolf is asleep, his face lax and smooth in the light coming in from under the door to the hallway. In the morning he'll have to talk about it, he can't keep this from his pack, not from Peter or Derek or his Dad, not even to spare them. He learned a long time ago, the hard way, what keeping secrets did. So he'll talk to them, he'll tell them what happened, he'll convince them it wasn't just a nightmare, that it was real and horrible and still all too possible.
Peter and Derek will help him with the Nemeton, Deaton will help him master getting everything he can out of the exchange, will help make sure the power doesn't grow wild. They'll cultivate the link between the pack and the web of leylines the Nemeton has always been sitting on, will tie them all together to be so much stronger than before.
They'll stop it before it happens, and none of them, not even the stupid fucking witches, will die in that clearing because of a starving tree that nobody cared for. That's not to say they lived, for all Stiles cares the wendigo could have them, but they didn't darken Beacon Hills, and that satisfies him.
For now though he's going to listen to the rush of ecstatic blood in his ears, the sounds of his pack in the living room, and the feeling of Peter breathing against him. Because in another life he might have been dying in a clearing with his pack in pieces around him, but now he's here, right where he belongs.
Notes:
This is more my typical style of writing, not what I was experimenting with when I wrote small steps so the pacing might be a little off but I hope you like it anyway!
Thank you for reading!