#seikaze

Stiles turned around again, this time towards Roscoe, and took a couple of slow steps, each of them harder and more unstable than the last. He just needed to get back to his jeep. He just needed to sit down and start the engine and then-

He blinked when he suddenly felt the cold floor on his face, the pain pulsating through his whole body. He felt cold. Why was it so cold? He was wearing enough clothes that it shouldn't be cold, right? But he wasn't sure if he was still feeling his toes - or fingers, for that matter - which seemed like a very, very bad thing. Though he couldn't quite remember why it was bad that he was cold other than that he didn't like feeling like this. If he just curled up a bit more, he could surely get warmer and just… sleep the exhaustion off, right? Was he already curled up? Was that important anymore? He could just sleep. He would just close his eyes for a couple of minutes, regain some strength and then-

"Stiles!!"

Peter hadn't expected to come back to an empty warehouse with nothing but the boy lying motionless on the floor. He'd followed Gerard to take care of him and had only turned back once he'd been done to clean up whatever was left in the warehouse. He'd seen - and smelled - that Stiles had been hurt, but he'd also expected someone other than him to care. Obviously he had been wrong.

He kneeled down next to Stiles, hands gingery sliding over the boy's back up to his shoulders until his fingers pressed against the boy's neck, feeling for the pulse he could only hear in sluggish, weak beats. Making sure that he was hearing right, that there still was a pulse no matter how wrong it sounded. "…et'r?" Even Peter's superior hearing had almost missed what he would like to call a mumble but was too quiet to actually be considered one. The word had been nothing more than a breath leaving Stiles' lips. Then the boy's eyelids fluttered, though his eyes were entirely unfocused and had lost their sharp intelligence.

"Yes." Peter took a deep breath. He had to do something. Stiles was dying right in front of him.

He fletched his suddenly very sharp teeth and let his eyes glow red as he brushed a hand through Stiles' sweaty and dusty hair. "You are dying, Stiles… Do you want the bite?" Stiles' eyes closed and Peter felt his heart sink. But he could still hear a pulse, could still feel it below his fingers, no matter how slow it was. He hadn't lost his boy, yet.

"Y'renalpha?" He almost didn't understand the next mumbled words but as soon as he did he nodded. "Yes, I am." "…alright."

Peter breathed his relief in, leaned forward and carefully bit his new beta's shoulder. Now all he could do was wait.

Stiles hadn't expected to open his eyes again. He'd been so sure that he would die. He'd even hallucinated an Alpha Peter who was offering him the bite to save him.

Now, though, there was warmth all around him and the pain was gone. Instead there was something like reliefprideamusement humming in his chest, a feeling he couldn't help but bask in with a content sigh. "Finally awake?" a velvety voice brushed over his ears, quiet but with an audible smile. There were other noises, too. Someone washing dishes, a pair of voices discussing ingredients for dinner, a TV running on a sports channel, birds rustling in the leafs of a tree.

"What…?" Stiles mumbled and slowly opened his eyes, blinking against the sunlight coming in from the window. A page was turned right next to his ear, the sound fitting to Peter reading his book in a chair on the other side of the room. "What happened? …Also how the hell aren't you dead?" "You should worry about yourself, sweetheart," Peter answered without looking up, his voice still in that same weird quiet but loud way. "You almost died on me last night."

"Oh."

Stiles stared at the wolf, his brain working to understand what Peter was and wasn't saying. Or at least working at putting all the pieces together and actually forming a picture with all the bits and pieces he'd already collected.

He'd known that he was dying.

He hadn't wanted to, had tried not to, had ignored it the same way he ignored dirty clothes he wasn't quite ready to collect and wash yet. Peter spelling it out for him like this didn't give him the option to ignore it. He still could shove it aside and concentrate on all the other things happening, though. That sliver of anxiety and panic welling up inside him at the thought of leaving his dad alone was something he would look at once he was alone and could fall apart without an audience.

So instead he slowly sat up to look around and concentrated on what he could hear and-… and smell. He could smell Peter. He could smell the surprisingly strong scent of lavender in the pillows and the cover he'd been snuggled up in. He could smell the scent of vanilla and pine he associated with Peter, though he'd always thought the scent had more to do with Peter's favorite bourbon than with the wolf itself. But now he could smell the alcohol somewhere outside of the bedroom they were in and while it smelled similar to Peter, it was also entirely different.

"So… you bit me?" He'd wanted to ask 'who', but if Peter was here, then maybe, maybe what he'd thought to be a hallucination had actually been true. He didn't want Derek as an Alpha. He actually wanted no one as his Alpha. But if he had to choose, he'd prefer Peter over any of the Alphas he'd met. "Is that a problem?" A pang of hesitation and worry bloomed in his chest. Insecurity, too, if he understood the feeling correctly. Nothing of it showed on Peter's face or in his scent. Almost nothing, anyway.

He shook his head, then got distracted by how loud his hands seemed to scratch over the cover, and stared at his clawed fingers. "I'm glad it's you," he mumbled anyway as he pulled his claws back in, too fascinated by his own changes to see the relief cross Peter's face.

"What the hell Stiles?!"

Stiles groaned when he heard Scott's voice through the phone. He was lying in bed, still half asleep, with Peter at his back growling against his neck.

He'd thought it might be something important. Maybe a new threat, maybe something else. Otherwise there was no reason for someone to disturb his and Peter's Sunday ritual of cuddling and dozing until late in the day when the hunger was luring either or both of them out into the kitchen.

"Is that all you have to say to your defense?!?"

Stiles sighed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, Scott. Why are you even calling? It's certainly not an emergency."

"I'm talking about the huge billboards in front of the mall with you and Peter!! And don't you dare tell me that that's not the two of you! I'm not falling for your Doppelgänger-spiel again!"

Stiles mouth snapped closed and he sighed still slightly tired. Of course today was the day when Scott was starting to actually remember which stories Stiles liked to tell often.

"I still don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Scott. What billboards?"

He looked over the shoulder to Peter and narrowed his eyes when he saw the satisfied smirk on the wolf's.

"...Oh no, you didn't!"

"What? What did he do to you, Stiles?! I knew you should have never trusted him, he's-"

Stiles groaned once again and hung up without letting Scott speak any further. When the phone rang again just seconds later, he muted it and put it down on the night stand, turning into Peter and snuggling against his chest.

"Do I want to know what you did to the billboard at the mal, Zombiewolf?" he sighed against his husband's chest. "It has to be something, if it's getting Scott this riled up after more than 15 years."

When Peter didn't answer and just hugged him closer, Stiles glanced up, suddenly suspicious.

The wide smirk on his husbands face said everything and Stiles groaned.

"Oh god, you didn't put the-?"

"Yes, I did put the-"

"NO. You did NOT put the pictures of that photo shoot on that billboard!"

"Oh, darling, you should know me better by now."

Stiles was sitting across the Nogitsune in front of a well known Go-board. He could see its grin getting wider as blue flames were dancing around them. Its face was changing, the bandages falling apart around his own sunken in and exhausted looking face. Only moments later it was swallowed by the flames, shrieking "You can't kill ME" as it burned.

He shot up, his ears still ringing from the scream. Around him was darkness with only some light coming from the window where he could only really see the frame and the shape of a figure sitting on the windowsill, eyes glowing supernaturally blue.

Peter.

Stiles relaxed and sank back into his pillow, heart still hammering in his chest. He wasn't sure when Peter had become one of the only people he felt safe with. One of the only people he trusted now that he always felt so weak and hollow.

The wolf had just appeared after- After everything. After Allison had almost died, after Stiles had burned from the inside out, blue flames - his magic, Peter had told him - swallowing not only the Nogitsune but also the Oni, had burned and burned and burned until Stiles hadn't been more than a hollowed out husk of a man.

It hadn't helped that his dad had been adamant to keep people away from him. To "keep him safe" without understanding anything at all and without listening to those who had tried to explain. Without Peter he probably wouldn't be here.

Maybe that was what had finally driven home that he really was special to the wolf who had snuck into his room every night to lie beside and hold him through panic attacks, nightmares and the really bad nights where he was almost catatonic and just staring against the ceiling without seeing or hearing anything. He couldn't even remember those nights - and days - but he knew they'd happened a lot in the beginning thanks to his dad panicking about his state more than once.

But just like now his dad had been absent for a lot of these nights, too. Other than Peter who, just like now, had always come to him, pulled him close and cradled him against his chest like something precious.

"Nightmare?" Peter asked quietly and Stiles just hummed as he pressed his face against the wolf's chest to breathe in the warmth and earthiness that made up most of Peter's scent. He felt a kiss being pressed into his hair and just relaxed into Peter's secure hold.

"You want to talk about it?" Stiles shook his head, getting a quiet hum in return. He knew he couldn't get away with not talking forever, that Peter wanted him to speak to a professional, but right now Stiles… couldn't, still was too empty, too exhausted to even do much aside from lying in bed all day.

Though Peter helped. Having pack helped, even if it was just one singular bond that whatever had been left of his magic had latched onto. He wasn't in the right state of mind to think about what that meant, had pushed questions about his dad, about Scott and the others into a box in his mind and shoved the box below a mental wardrobe to look at at a later date. Or maybe never, if Peter would allow him to. He probably wouldn't, but that was future-Stiles' problem, not his.

His problem was to recover enough to function. Not that he even realized that in his current state.