Fic: When It All Comes Crashing, 2/3
Part 1
~~O~~
Stiles growled in frustration. He had been working on controlling his transformations for three weeks, and so far, all he had managed to do was change the color of his tentacles. No reducing their size, no making them go away at all, not even any new transformations. He could have done with some pointy teeth. All the better to bite of Derek’s arm with.
“Oh my god,” he snapped, interrupting Derek’s patient-well. Less patient than it had been three weeks ago-explanation that it took concentration and patience to master the transformation Stiles was trying for, more than the instinctive control that werewolves had on the basic shift. “Just…stop! Fucking stop, this isn’t working, and it’s stupid, and hello! I’m on fucking Adderall, what makes you think I have any kind of focus for this?”
Derek sighed. “Because you have to,” he said simply, and flopped backward onto the couch. Well. Sprawled? Yeah, that was definitely a sprawl, and oh god, Stiles really should not be looking. He turned away, and focused on a beam of light coming in the window to try and calm himself back down.
“Stiles…” he ignored Derek, trying to focus on the feel of his body, what it was like with the tentacles coming out, how they changed his balance, what they felt like moving around… “Stiles.” He took slow, even breaths, trying to push away any other thoughts but getting the tentacles to go away, have his normal shape back. “Stiles!”
“Oh my god, what?” Stiles snapped his eyes open, spinning to stare at Derek.
“…take a break.”
The quiet words broke something in Stiles and he sank to the floor where he stood. “Fuck, Derek, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve to have me being an asshole to you, to have to teach me how to control myself, none of it.”
He heard Derek get up and move across the room, and then felt the warmth of another person sitting near. “I know this is tough,” Derek finally said after a long few moments of silence. “I don’t blame you for being upset.”
Stiles sighed. “I always thought I’d be great at this stuff. Way better than Scott, you know? And it turns out I’m worse. I can’t even change my form. Scott could do that much.”
“This isn’t the same,” Derek protested. “You’re something…entirely different, and you were forced into this by a spell. It’s not the same at all.”
“I suppose,” Stiles said, unconvinced. He looked up, and saw Derek giving him an undecipherable look. “What?”
“I could bite you,” Derek said, but his expression was curiously blank.
Stiles blinked. “You…you could. You could turn me into a werewolf, and then this would all go away, because lycanthropy is totally the dominant shifter gene, and that would be awesome. I could be a part of your pack, and it would be awesome!”
“Or, it could turn you into a chaos monster werewolf with absolutely no control whatsoever, you could run through town and kill a bunch of people and the Argents would take you out, and have every right to do so. Or the bite could just kill you flat out,” Derek said, his expression still blank.
Stiles frowned. There was always the chance of death with the body rejecting the bite, and now he had the chaos monster thing to worry about. Well, he’d always had that, latently, hadn’t he? But now it was active, and he was… “Well, fuck,” he said with a sigh, realizing he couldn’t do it, and that’s what Derek was telling him. That Derek wouldn’t bite him because of the risk. He let his head fall back to his knees.
Derek stood. “I’m gonna get us some water,” he said, and headed for the kitchen. Stiles stayed where he was, curled up for the relief of just…being. His tentacles were wrapped around his legs, too, and he was one big ball of worried Stiles.
What if he never got the hang of this? Never getting control of how to deal with this, and he never got to see his Dad again, and had to walk around with his tentacles bound down, looking really weirdly bulky, and couldn’t do anything normal ever again? The thought was an unpleasant one, and he refused to live like that. Flat refused.
He frowned, and started breathing slow again, focusing on calming down his mind. Stiles didn’t have anything in particular in mind, other than making the tentacles go away, so he mostly just focused on calming down, breathing slowly, focus on the way his lungs filled with air, and emptied again, filled, emptied…
He yelped when he felt his skin prickle, but that was all he got out before he shrank down rapidly and was suddenly lost in miles of fabric. He flailed around, trying to find his feet, to get back to the surface when he felt vibrations. Footsteps. “Derek!” he tried to call, but found that whatever he’d done to himself, he didn’t have vocal cords. Fantastic.
“Whoa! Stiles?” the footsteps came close, and the fabric was very carefully lifted. Stiles shot toward the light, tumbling free of the denim of his jeans onto the carpet of the living room floor. “…well. You don’t have tentacles anymore?” Derek offered, staring down at him.
Stiles wondered just what the hell he was, because Derek looked huge. He tried to look down at himself but mostly just succeeded in doing a somersault. He huffed in annoyance, and a tiny puff of smoke curled up from his nose. He froze.
“What the hell,” he heard Derek mutter, and then careful hands were cupped in front of him. “Come on, let me show you,” and Stiles carefully walked into the hands. He closed his eyes as he was lifted and carried through the house, into the bathroom. “Look.”
Stiles opened his eyes and stared. In Derek’s hands was a small blue and green lizard. With wings. Tiny ones. He jerked his head in startlement, and the lizard did, too. “Oh, that’s just weird,” he tried to say, but while his mouth opened, only a strange croaking came out.
He crept forward on Derek’s hands until he could put his paws up on the mirror, and look at himself closely. This was weird. Possibly weirder than the tentacles, and then he realized that his coloring matched his tentacle coloring, with blue on his back and… he stretched up, walking up the mirror with his front paws to check, and yes, sure enough, his belly was the same pale green as the underside of his tentacles. Well, fuck.
And then he realized he was sticking to the mirror.
“Uh,” Derek said as Stiles scrambled up, scaling the mirror in a matter of seconds. “Stiles…”
But Stiles wasn’t listening. This was fun. He kept running, off the mirror, onto the wall and up onto the ceiling, over to the door, down the wall to the lintel, around, and back up again, and across the ceiling some more. He stopped periodically and looked around, because the world was so different this way, upside down and tiny as he was. Stiles flapped his little wings, but he kind of thought they were just for show, because he didn’t really feel like he could support himself with them.
He ran right into the living room just in time for the front door to open and Isaac and Scott to tumble in. He froze, unnoticed, watching them.
“Derek? Stiles?” Scott called as he shut the door behind them. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” Derek said, coming down the hall. He was watching Stiles, still. “Stiles is…”
“Holy crap!” Isaac yelped, looking up curiously to find out what Derek was staring at. “Is that-“
“Yup,” Derek said shortly. “He just did it. Only, I don’t think he did it on purpose.”
Stiles snorted derisively. Of course he hadn’t done it on purpose. Though, as far as accidental transformations went, a weird gecko-dragon-thing was pretty cool. And then he got completely distracted by the smoke that puffed again when he snorted.
He snorted again experimentally, and was utterly delighted when more smoke puffed forth. If there was smoke, and he was a dragon…
“Stiles?” Scott said, walking across the floor until he was directly under Stiles. His head was craned back and he was watching his friend with curiosity. “Are you alright? What’s all that smoke?”
“Uh, Scott,” Isaac said, raising his hand. “Maybe you shouldn’t…”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence because Stiles managed to spout a gout of flame, straight down toward Scott. It wasn’t that long of a flame, all things considered, but it was a good foot long, and it was fire, which had Scott ducking away with a frantic yelp.
“Oh my god, what the fuck, Stiles!” Scott said from where he’d landed on his ass trying to get away.
Stiles wished he could grin. He really, really did. He made his way across the ceiling and down the wall, stopping halfway and looking expectantly at Isaac who was right next to him.
“Put your hand out for him,” Derek said when Isaac just stared at Stiles for a few moments. “I think he…yeah.”
Isaac frowned, but held his hand out to Stiles, who detached himself from the wall and walked across Isaac’s hand, up his arm, and across his head to perch on top. He crouched low and slitted his eyes closed as the warmth radiating naturally from the top of Isaac’s head warmed him.
“My best friend is a dragon, and he is perched on top of my other best friend’s head,” Scott said faintly as he picked himself up off the floor. “And I thought turning into a werewolf was weird.”
Derek shook his head. “Isaac, take Stiles to his room. Stiles…try and return to a bipedal, humanoid form, please?”
Isaac obediently carried Stiles into the small second bedroom that he had been staying in while he was trying to learn how to control his transformations. He reached up and carefully picked up Stiles off his head and set him down on the bed. “You…that was weird,” Isaac said. “Really…weird. Could you not do that again? Please?”
Stiles puffed a little smoke in agreement. He hadn’t meant to upset Isaac, it was just the warmest place… He concentrated. He had to get back to a people shape.
Ten minutes later, he was pulling jeans on. He was human again, actual real boy shaped with opposable thumbs and everything. And twelve tentacles. Apparently, those were going to remain a fixture for a while longer. He sighed, and they waved a little, curling in close around him the way they seemed to like to do, and headed for the kitchen.
“Hey! You managed to return to human!” Scott greeted him. “Don’t ever breathe fire at me again, dude, oh my god.”
Stiles snorted. “I make no promises. That was kind of fun. Plus, it was hilarious to watch you fall on your ass.”
“So you’re fully aware in those transformations?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah, fully aware. Not completely able to stop the instincts of some things…like the search for warmth. Sorry about landing on your head.” He headed to the fridge to get a soda and sat at the table.
“Glad I’m warm?” Isaac offered, looking a little awkward. “Seriously, though, You can control yourself but instincts still get the better of you? That…might be important.”
Stiles thought about it for a moment. Isaac had a point. After all, didn’t his tentacles keep doing instinctive things for him Like…reaching for Derek, yet again, seriously, what the fuck? He gently slapped the tentacle that was creeping across Derek’s thigh, and it pulled back. Stiles refused to consider how the tentacle seemed petulant and how Derek hadn’t even flinched, except to shift in his seat. He wondered if-
No, that way lay madness, and he was not going there. “So you think that maybe one of the reasons I can’t shift is because I’m still operating at an instinctual level?” Stiles asked Isaac.
“I’m not really thinking anything, except that it was interesting,” Isaac said.
“No, but you may be right,” Derek put in. “Think about it. How much of the wolf shift is instinctual?”
“Most of it,” Scott said. “It’s always more about learning to control the instinct than it is learning how to control the shift.”
“Oh!” Stiles blinked. “Really? Is…oh.” He looked at Derek. “Why didn’t you say that?”
Derek looked frustrated, but amused. “I did.”
“No, you were always talking about control and focus and learning to feel what the change did,” Stiles protested.
Derek nodded, raising an eyebrow at him. “Yeah. Never once did I tell you to control the shift.”
Stiles thought about the last three weeks, and he had to admit that Derek was right. He hadn’t said control the shift at all. “Well…you never mentioned instinct,” he mumbled, but he closed his eyes and tried to focus.
He had kind of been hoping that now that he’d made the connection to what Derek had, apparently, been telling him all along, he’d be able to make sense of this transformation thing, figure it out, and go home. It didn’t happen that way, though. He sat there for five minutes, and all he managed to do was make himself itch. “Auuugh,” he said, opening his eyes.
They were all staring at him.
“What?” Stiles asked, and looked down at himself. He yelped when he discovered that he was now the same blue and green all over that his tentacles were. “Oh my god, what the fuck? This is getting ridiculous!” he said, poking at his skin.
“It’s a good look on you,” Scott said, starting to snicker.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Stiles said, and stormed out of the kitchen. All he wanted to do was go home. He was tired of having these wiggling things sticking out of him, and honestly, it was driving him a little crazy.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there. Enforced time with Derek Hale? Sign him up, weird as it sounded. He’d known that part would be hard. He’d been suppressing and ignoring his crush on the alpha werewolf for nearly as long as he’d known him. It had only gotten worse over the past few weeks with Derek helping him. To the point, if Stiles was honest with himself which he hated being when it came to this because denial was not just a river in Egypt, it had really gone beyond a crush.
That made it worse, though. Being here with Derek and not being able to act made it…a lot worse. It didn’t help that his tentacles kept reaching for Derek whenever Stiles was distracted, or that Derek didn’t appear to mind. At least, he never pulled away or tried to unwind them. Stiles tried not to think too hard about it, except when he was in the shower. Then, he couldn’t seem to stop, and he’d many more repeats of his first shower, post-tentacled-discovery.
He flopped down face first onto the bed and groaned into the pillow. No, all he really wanted, at this point, was to master this so he could go home, not kill his dad on accident, and maybe, somehow, control this thing on Derek before it got out of control.
“Stiles?” Derek tapped on the door. “Can I come in?”
No! part of Stiles was screaming, but he ignored it. “Yeah,” he mumbled into his pillow. He heard the door squeak slightly, and Derek come in, crouching next to the bed.
“You all right?” Derek asked softly. “I sent Scott and Isaac home. They…weren’t helping.”
Stiles sighed and turned his head so that he could peer at Derek. “I’m sorry,” he offered. “For losing my temper and for not getting this, and-"
“No,” Derek cut him off. “No apologies. This is a really big thing you’re trying to learn, and it’s not like lycanthropy. It’s its own thing, and trying to apply lycanthropic theory to it is…probably not good.”
Two months ago, Stiles would have said that was a long speech for Derek. That was before he’d lived with the man, though, and learned just how verbose Derek could be, if he thought a subject was worth his while. They’d had some incredibly long conversations about the reboot of Star Trek versus the original, for example (they both loved the new Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Kirk, and were both withholding judgment on Sulu and Spock).
“Is there such a thing as lycanthropic theory?” Stiles asked.
Derek shrugged. “Of a sort. Point is, the things that work for a werewolf aren't going to work for a chaos monster.”
“So what do we do?” Stiles asked. “Because I’ve adjusted to the tentacles, and I even kind of like them now, but I’d really like to be able to control things at this point.”
Derek studied him for a moment. “Will you let me try something?” he finally asked. “Do you trust me?”
“I trust you,” Stiles said immediately. He didn’t even have to think about it. Of course he trusted Derek implicitly.
“Close your eyes,” Derek said quietly, and settled his hand on Stiles’ bare back. He started rubbing gentle circles, and Stiles closed his eyes.
It was soothing. Incredibly soothing, in a way that Stiles hadn’t expected. It was comforting, sort of like when his mom had done it when he was sick as a kid, but at the same time, very, very different. This was Derek touching him, Derek comforting and soothing him.
He let himself float in the sensations, the gentle hum that seemed to build under his skin with the touch of Derek’s hand. He just breathed, slow and deep, not trying to control anything anymore. He just wanted to relax.
“Stiles,” Derek said quietly. “Open your eyes.”
Stiles blinked them open slowly, and saw Derek closer than before. “What is it?”
“I’m…may I kiss you?”
Stiles blinked. That’s not what he’d expected. His heart kicked into high gear, going from a normal, calm rhythm to something far more energized. Derek wanted to kiss him. Derek was stroking his back and wanted to kiss him. “Yeah,” he breathed, pushing himself up and leaning forward.
Derek’s lips were soft against his, hesitant and careful, but they felt better than Stiles would have thought possible. He focused on the feel of them moving against his own, gentle and soft and tentative in a way, and it felt good. It was an easy thing to focus on, too, this pleasure, because it wasn't demanding at all. It was just something new and kind of distracting and he could really do this for a long time. Derek was good at kissing.
His sides itched, though, and that was a little distracting. He wasn’t a fan of distracting, so he focused a little more on the feel of Derek’s mouth on his, of the barest hint of tongue pressing against his bottom lip, not enough to be asking for Stiles’ mouth to open. More like just taking a taste. Stiles liked it, and liked the feel of the stubble burning just a little around his mouth as they moved slowly together. It was good. Very good.
Stiles was about to open his mouth for Derek, and deepen the kiss, when he lost his balance. Suddenly, his support was gone, and his balance pitched him forward. Fortunately, Derek’s quick reflexes kept him from toppling off the bed. “Stiles?”
Stiles looked down at himself and realized that not only was he normal peachy-pink-human colored again, he didn’t have tentacles. “They’re gone,” he said blankly. “The tentacles, they’re…they’re gone.” He looked up at Derek, a little wide-eyed.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Derek asked warily.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is, I just…wish I had been more conscious of it?” Stiles swung himself around so that he could sit up properly. His hands slid down his sides, feeling nothing but smooth skin, and that was just weird. Shouldn’t there at least be like…baggy somethings where the tentacles had stretched out his skin?
Derek shifted back so that he was sitting on the floor, knees spread, his arms hooked around his knees. “I thought that maybe distracting you was the better option,” he said. “Focusing hasn’t worked for you, and you said it yourself. You have a hard time focusing on anything. Having you act like a werewolf wasn’t working because you are chaos. You’re chaos literally, with your heritage.”
Stiles thought about that. Derek had a very valid point. He was a chaos monster, but beyond that, he’d always thrived in situations that were frantic, sometimes desperate. The final push at the end of a project was his best time, in part because the insanity of trying to complete so many things was something he fed on and worked best in.
“So…you think I was focusing too hard?” he said, trying to put it into words.
“Yeah. That, and I think you were denying yourself. Not consciously, just…with what we were trying, it was going against you true nature, a denial of how things need to work.” Derek looked down at his hands and that, and Stiles was pretty sure there was more to it at that, but there didn’t seem to be any lie.
He simply nodded, though. No need to focus on what else he was denying. “So let’s keep working on this, now that we have an idea of what the problem might be.” Stiles took a steadying breath, and was about to try again, when Derek spoke.
“How?”
Stiles blinked. “What do you mean how? I thought I’d just…think about having tentacles again, but not all the calming focusing thing. Just let my stream of consciousness take me where it would.”
Derek raised his eyebrow. “You do that, you’re going to wind up a bilgesnipe.”
Stiles snorted at the reference to The Avengers, another mutually shared favorite. They’d both wondered what a bilgesnipe would look like in reality, beyond Thor’s description of “massive, scaly, huge antlers, and repulsive”. “What do you suggest?”
“Look down.”
Stiles frowned as he did, and realized that he was slowly growing tentacles again. “How the hell do you keep managing that?” he demanded.
“I think what’s going on is that this is a more instinctive transformation than you’re willing to admit. Don’t think about it. Just do it.” Derek frowned. “Did that make sense?”
“No but…I think I get what you’re trying to say.” Stiles tilted his head down, studying the gently waving appendages as they tried to reach for Derek again. Human shaped, please, he told himself, and then deliberately looked away, focusing on something else.
It took a couple of tries, and Derek poking him in the foot, but he managed it. “So this is kind of exhausting,” Stiles said, yawning.
“You’re expending a lot of energy, changing your form like that,” Derek put in. He stood, and offered his hand to Stiles, pulling him up off the bed. “C’mon, let’s go make food before your blood sugar crashes.”
Stiles followed him to the kitchen. “Oh god, am I going to have a metabolism like you guys now? Eating everything in sight?”
Derek rolled his eyes. “We don’t eat everything in sight, but yeah, probably.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs, butter, and cheese, and nodded at Stiles. “Whatever you want in an omelet, get it.”
They spent the next half hour cooking and talking about why it took less control not more for Stiles to manage his transformations (with him practicing, too, while they talked. The longer they chatted, the better he got, until it was almost as soon as he had the thought to change), just how close to lycanthropy chaos monsterness was, and whether the law of conservation of matter applied to magical beings like Stiles.
“But, seriously, come on! I was that tiny little dragon thing, already, obviously it doesn’t apply!” Stiles said, waving his still cheesy fork around.
“I’m not arguing that,” Derek said with a roll of his eyes. “I’m only wondering why it doesn’t. It does to us, that’s why we’re the size and shapes we are, as werewolves. Why are you different?”
Stiles thought about that, taking another huge bite of his completely overstuffed omelet. “Maybe because chaos?” he offered. At Derek’s thoughtful frown, he continued. “Like, okay, so, I can’t really think about the transformation in order for it to work, right? An element of chaos. So what if the things I can transform into are the same deal? Subject to the whims of chaos, not physics and reality?”
“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Derek said. “And fits with what Deaton pointed out about you only being limited by your imagination.”
Stiles grinned. “it’s like I’m suddenly a member of the Green Lantern Corps, I just don’t have a ring! Or a lantern. Or…another planet to visit, okay, so it’s not a perfect metaphor, but it works!”
Derek rolled his eyes and finished his omelet, but there was a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “Sure it does, Stiles.”
They kept talking, with Stiles randomly spouting tentacles, changing skin color, and changing noses-“If Tonks can do it, so can I!”-until Stiles was yawning more often than he was talking.
“All right, go to bed," Derek finally said. “You’ve worn yourself out completely. We’ll practice for a couple more days, make sure you’ve completely got it under control, but I don’t see why you can’t go back home by this weekend.”
Stiles wondered why the words didn’t make him as happy as they should have. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? To go home? Be with his dad, take care of him, sleep in his own bed? “Awesome,” he said, not looking at Derek.
Why didn’t he want to go?
Part 3
~~O~~
Stiles growled in frustration. He had been working on controlling his transformations for three weeks, and so far, all he had managed to do was change the color of his tentacles. No reducing their size, no making them go away at all, not even any new transformations. He could have done with some pointy teeth. All the better to bite of Derek’s arm with.
“Oh my god,” he snapped, interrupting Derek’s patient-well. Less patient than it had been three weeks ago-explanation that it took concentration and patience to master the transformation Stiles was trying for, more than the instinctive control that werewolves had on the basic shift. “Just…stop! Fucking stop, this isn’t working, and it’s stupid, and hello! I’m on fucking Adderall, what makes you think I have any kind of focus for this?”
Derek sighed. “Because you have to,” he said simply, and flopped backward onto the couch. Well. Sprawled? Yeah, that was definitely a sprawl, and oh god, Stiles really should not be looking. He turned away, and focused on a beam of light coming in the window to try and calm himself back down.
“Stiles…” he ignored Derek, trying to focus on the feel of his body, what it was like with the tentacles coming out, how they changed his balance, what they felt like moving around… “Stiles.” He took slow, even breaths, trying to push away any other thoughts but getting the tentacles to go away, have his normal shape back. “Stiles!”
“Oh my god, what?” Stiles snapped his eyes open, spinning to stare at Derek.
“…take a break.”
The quiet words broke something in Stiles and he sank to the floor where he stood. “Fuck, Derek, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve to have me being an asshole to you, to have to teach me how to control myself, none of it.”
He heard Derek get up and move across the room, and then felt the warmth of another person sitting near. “I know this is tough,” Derek finally said after a long few moments of silence. “I don’t blame you for being upset.”
Stiles sighed. “I always thought I’d be great at this stuff. Way better than Scott, you know? And it turns out I’m worse. I can’t even change my form. Scott could do that much.”
“This isn’t the same,” Derek protested. “You’re something…entirely different, and you were forced into this by a spell. It’s not the same at all.”
“I suppose,” Stiles said, unconvinced. He looked up, and saw Derek giving him an undecipherable look. “What?”
“I could bite you,” Derek said, but his expression was curiously blank.
Stiles blinked. “You…you could. You could turn me into a werewolf, and then this would all go away, because lycanthropy is totally the dominant shifter gene, and that would be awesome. I could be a part of your pack, and it would be awesome!”
“Or, it could turn you into a chaos monster werewolf with absolutely no control whatsoever, you could run through town and kill a bunch of people and the Argents would take you out, and have every right to do so. Or the bite could just kill you flat out,” Derek said, his expression still blank.
Stiles frowned. There was always the chance of death with the body rejecting the bite, and now he had the chaos monster thing to worry about. Well, he’d always had that, latently, hadn’t he? But now it was active, and he was… “Well, fuck,” he said with a sigh, realizing he couldn’t do it, and that’s what Derek was telling him. That Derek wouldn’t bite him because of the risk. He let his head fall back to his knees.
Derek stood. “I’m gonna get us some water,” he said, and headed for the kitchen. Stiles stayed where he was, curled up for the relief of just…being. His tentacles were wrapped around his legs, too, and he was one big ball of worried Stiles.
What if he never got the hang of this? Never getting control of how to deal with this, and he never got to see his Dad again, and had to walk around with his tentacles bound down, looking really weirdly bulky, and couldn’t do anything normal ever again? The thought was an unpleasant one, and he refused to live like that. Flat refused.
He frowned, and started breathing slow again, focusing on calming down his mind. Stiles didn’t have anything in particular in mind, other than making the tentacles go away, so he mostly just focused on calming down, breathing slowly, focus on the way his lungs filled with air, and emptied again, filled, emptied…
He yelped when he felt his skin prickle, but that was all he got out before he shrank down rapidly and was suddenly lost in miles of fabric. He flailed around, trying to find his feet, to get back to the surface when he felt vibrations. Footsteps. “Derek!” he tried to call, but found that whatever he’d done to himself, he didn’t have vocal cords. Fantastic.
“Whoa! Stiles?” the footsteps came close, and the fabric was very carefully lifted. Stiles shot toward the light, tumbling free of the denim of his jeans onto the carpet of the living room floor. “…well. You don’t have tentacles anymore?” Derek offered, staring down at him.
Stiles wondered just what the hell he was, because Derek looked huge. He tried to look down at himself but mostly just succeeded in doing a somersault. He huffed in annoyance, and a tiny puff of smoke curled up from his nose. He froze.
“What the hell,” he heard Derek mutter, and then careful hands were cupped in front of him. “Come on, let me show you,” and Stiles carefully walked into the hands. He closed his eyes as he was lifted and carried through the house, into the bathroom. “Look.”
Stiles opened his eyes and stared. In Derek’s hands was a small blue and green lizard. With wings. Tiny ones. He jerked his head in startlement, and the lizard did, too. “Oh, that’s just weird,” he tried to say, but while his mouth opened, only a strange croaking came out.
He crept forward on Derek’s hands until he could put his paws up on the mirror, and look at himself closely. This was weird. Possibly weirder than the tentacles, and then he realized that his coloring matched his tentacle coloring, with blue on his back and… he stretched up, walking up the mirror with his front paws to check, and yes, sure enough, his belly was the same pale green as the underside of his tentacles. Well, fuck.
And then he realized he was sticking to the mirror.
“Uh,” Derek said as Stiles scrambled up, scaling the mirror in a matter of seconds. “Stiles…”
But Stiles wasn’t listening. This was fun. He kept running, off the mirror, onto the wall and up onto the ceiling, over to the door, down the wall to the lintel, around, and back up again, and across the ceiling some more. He stopped periodically and looked around, because the world was so different this way, upside down and tiny as he was. Stiles flapped his little wings, but he kind of thought they were just for show, because he didn’t really feel like he could support himself with them.
He ran right into the living room just in time for the front door to open and Isaac and Scott to tumble in. He froze, unnoticed, watching them.
“Derek? Stiles?” Scott called as he shut the door behind them. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” Derek said, coming down the hall. He was watching Stiles, still. “Stiles is…”
“Holy crap!” Isaac yelped, looking up curiously to find out what Derek was staring at. “Is that-“
“Yup,” Derek said shortly. “He just did it. Only, I don’t think he did it on purpose.”
Stiles snorted derisively. Of course he hadn’t done it on purpose. Though, as far as accidental transformations went, a weird gecko-dragon-thing was pretty cool. And then he got completely distracted by the smoke that puffed again when he snorted.
He snorted again experimentally, and was utterly delighted when more smoke puffed forth. If there was smoke, and he was a dragon…
“Stiles?” Scott said, walking across the floor until he was directly under Stiles. His head was craned back and he was watching his friend with curiosity. “Are you alright? What’s all that smoke?”
“Uh, Scott,” Isaac said, raising his hand. “Maybe you shouldn’t…”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence because Stiles managed to spout a gout of flame, straight down toward Scott. It wasn’t that long of a flame, all things considered, but it was a good foot long, and it was fire, which had Scott ducking away with a frantic yelp.
“Oh my god, what the fuck, Stiles!” Scott said from where he’d landed on his ass trying to get away.
Stiles wished he could grin. He really, really did. He made his way across the ceiling and down the wall, stopping halfway and looking expectantly at Isaac who was right next to him.
“Put your hand out for him,” Derek said when Isaac just stared at Stiles for a few moments. “I think he…yeah.”
Isaac frowned, but held his hand out to Stiles, who detached himself from the wall and walked across Isaac’s hand, up his arm, and across his head to perch on top. He crouched low and slitted his eyes closed as the warmth radiating naturally from the top of Isaac’s head warmed him.
“My best friend is a dragon, and he is perched on top of my other best friend’s head,” Scott said faintly as he picked himself up off the floor. “And I thought turning into a werewolf was weird.”
Derek shook his head. “Isaac, take Stiles to his room. Stiles…try and return to a bipedal, humanoid form, please?”
Isaac obediently carried Stiles into the small second bedroom that he had been staying in while he was trying to learn how to control his transformations. He reached up and carefully picked up Stiles off his head and set him down on the bed. “You…that was weird,” Isaac said. “Really…weird. Could you not do that again? Please?”
Stiles puffed a little smoke in agreement. He hadn’t meant to upset Isaac, it was just the warmest place… He concentrated. He had to get back to a people shape.
Ten minutes later, he was pulling jeans on. He was human again, actual real boy shaped with opposable thumbs and everything. And twelve tentacles. Apparently, those were going to remain a fixture for a while longer. He sighed, and they waved a little, curling in close around him the way they seemed to like to do, and headed for the kitchen.
“Hey! You managed to return to human!” Scott greeted him. “Don’t ever breathe fire at me again, dude, oh my god.”
Stiles snorted. “I make no promises. That was kind of fun. Plus, it was hilarious to watch you fall on your ass.”
“So you’re fully aware in those transformations?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah, fully aware. Not completely able to stop the instincts of some things…like the search for warmth. Sorry about landing on your head.” He headed to the fridge to get a soda and sat at the table.
“Glad I’m warm?” Isaac offered, looking a little awkward. “Seriously, though, You can control yourself but instincts still get the better of you? That…might be important.”
Stiles thought about it for a moment. Isaac had a point. After all, didn’t his tentacles keep doing instinctive things for him Like…reaching for Derek, yet again, seriously, what the fuck? He gently slapped the tentacle that was creeping across Derek’s thigh, and it pulled back. Stiles refused to consider how the tentacle seemed petulant and how Derek hadn’t even flinched, except to shift in his seat. He wondered if-
No, that way lay madness, and he was not going there. “So you think that maybe one of the reasons I can’t shift is because I’m still operating at an instinctual level?” Stiles asked Isaac.
“I’m not really thinking anything, except that it was interesting,” Isaac said.
“No, but you may be right,” Derek put in. “Think about it. How much of the wolf shift is instinctual?”
“Most of it,” Scott said. “It’s always more about learning to control the instinct than it is learning how to control the shift.”
“Oh!” Stiles blinked. “Really? Is…oh.” He looked at Derek. “Why didn’t you say that?”
Derek looked frustrated, but amused. “I did.”
“No, you were always talking about control and focus and learning to feel what the change did,” Stiles protested.
Derek nodded, raising an eyebrow at him. “Yeah. Never once did I tell you to control the shift.”
Stiles thought about the last three weeks, and he had to admit that Derek was right. He hadn’t said control the shift at all. “Well…you never mentioned instinct,” he mumbled, but he closed his eyes and tried to focus.
He had kind of been hoping that now that he’d made the connection to what Derek had, apparently, been telling him all along, he’d be able to make sense of this transformation thing, figure it out, and go home. It didn’t happen that way, though. He sat there for five minutes, and all he managed to do was make himself itch. “Auuugh,” he said, opening his eyes.
They were all staring at him.
“What?” Stiles asked, and looked down at himself. He yelped when he discovered that he was now the same blue and green all over that his tentacles were. “Oh my god, what the fuck? This is getting ridiculous!” he said, poking at his skin.
“It’s a good look on you,” Scott said, starting to snicker.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Stiles said, and stormed out of the kitchen. All he wanted to do was go home. He was tired of having these wiggling things sticking out of him, and honestly, it was driving him a little crazy.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there. Enforced time with Derek Hale? Sign him up, weird as it sounded. He’d known that part would be hard. He’d been suppressing and ignoring his crush on the alpha werewolf for nearly as long as he’d known him. It had only gotten worse over the past few weeks with Derek helping him. To the point, if Stiles was honest with himself which he hated being when it came to this because denial was not just a river in Egypt, it had really gone beyond a crush.
That made it worse, though. Being here with Derek and not being able to act made it…a lot worse. It didn’t help that his tentacles kept reaching for Derek whenever Stiles was distracted, or that Derek didn’t appear to mind. At least, he never pulled away or tried to unwind them. Stiles tried not to think too hard about it, except when he was in the shower. Then, he couldn’t seem to stop, and he’d many more repeats of his first shower, post-tentacled-discovery.
He flopped down face first onto the bed and groaned into the pillow. No, all he really wanted, at this point, was to master this so he could go home, not kill his dad on accident, and maybe, somehow, control this thing on Derek before it got out of control.
“Stiles?” Derek tapped on the door. “Can I come in?”
No! part of Stiles was screaming, but he ignored it. “Yeah,” he mumbled into his pillow. He heard the door squeak slightly, and Derek come in, crouching next to the bed.
“You all right?” Derek asked softly. “I sent Scott and Isaac home. They…weren’t helping.”
Stiles sighed and turned his head so that he could peer at Derek. “I’m sorry,” he offered. “For losing my temper and for not getting this, and-"
“No,” Derek cut him off. “No apologies. This is a really big thing you’re trying to learn, and it’s not like lycanthropy. It’s its own thing, and trying to apply lycanthropic theory to it is…probably not good.”
Two months ago, Stiles would have said that was a long speech for Derek. That was before he’d lived with the man, though, and learned just how verbose Derek could be, if he thought a subject was worth his while. They’d had some incredibly long conversations about the reboot of Star Trek versus the original, for example (they both loved the new Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Kirk, and were both withholding judgment on Sulu and Spock).
“Is there such a thing as lycanthropic theory?” Stiles asked.
Derek shrugged. “Of a sort. Point is, the things that work for a werewolf aren't going to work for a chaos monster.”
“So what do we do?” Stiles asked. “Because I’ve adjusted to the tentacles, and I even kind of like them now, but I’d really like to be able to control things at this point.”
Derek studied him for a moment. “Will you let me try something?” he finally asked. “Do you trust me?”
“I trust you,” Stiles said immediately. He didn’t even have to think about it. Of course he trusted Derek implicitly.
“Close your eyes,” Derek said quietly, and settled his hand on Stiles’ bare back. He started rubbing gentle circles, and Stiles closed his eyes.
It was soothing. Incredibly soothing, in a way that Stiles hadn’t expected. It was comforting, sort of like when his mom had done it when he was sick as a kid, but at the same time, very, very different. This was Derek touching him, Derek comforting and soothing him.
He let himself float in the sensations, the gentle hum that seemed to build under his skin with the touch of Derek’s hand. He just breathed, slow and deep, not trying to control anything anymore. He just wanted to relax.
“Stiles,” Derek said quietly. “Open your eyes.”
Stiles blinked them open slowly, and saw Derek closer than before. “What is it?”
“I’m…may I kiss you?”
Stiles blinked. That’s not what he’d expected. His heart kicked into high gear, going from a normal, calm rhythm to something far more energized. Derek wanted to kiss him. Derek was stroking his back and wanted to kiss him. “Yeah,” he breathed, pushing himself up and leaning forward.
Derek’s lips were soft against his, hesitant and careful, but they felt better than Stiles would have thought possible. He focused on the feel of them moving against his own, gentle and soft and tentative in a way, and it felt good. It was an easy thing to focus on, too, this pleasure, because it wasn't demanding at all. It was just something new and kind of distracting and he could really do this for a long time. Derek was good at kissing.
His sides itched, though, and that was a little distracting. He wasn’t a fan of distracting, so he focused a little more on the feel of Derek’s mouth on his, of the barest hint of tongue pressing against his bottom lip, not enough to be asking for Stiles’ mouth to open. More like just taking a taste. Stiles liked it, and liked the feel of the stubble burning just a little around his mouth as they moved slowly together. It was good. Very good.
Stiles was about to open his mouth for Derek, and deepen the kiss, when he lost his balance. Suddenly, his support was gone, and his balance pitched him forward. Fortunately, Derek’s quick reflexes kept him from toppling off the bed. “Stiles?”
Stiles looked down at himself and realized that not only was he normal peachy-pink-human colored again, he didn’t have tentacles. “They’re gone,” he said blankly. “The tentacles, they’re…they’re gone.” He looked up at Derek, a little wide-eyed.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Derek asked warily.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is, I just…wish I had been more conscious of it?” Stiles swung himself around so that he could sit up properly. His hands slid down his sides, feeling nothing but smooth skin, and that was just weird. Shouldn’t there at least be like…baggy somethings where the tentacles had stretched out his skin?
Derek shifted back so that he was sitting on the floor, knees spread, his arms hooked around his knees. “I thought that maybe distracting you was the better option,” he said. “Focusing hasn’t worked for you, and you said it yourself. You have a hard time focusing on anything. Having you act like a werewolf wasn’t working because you are chaos. You’re chaos literally, with your heritage.”
Stiles thought about that. Derek had a very valid point. He was a chaos monster, but beyond that, he’d always thrived in situations that were frantic, sometimes desperate. The final push at the end of a project was his best time, in part because the insanity of trying to complete so many things was something he fed on and worked best in.
“So…you think I was focusing too hard?” he said, trying to put it into words.
“Yeah. That, and I think you were denying yourself. Not consciously, just…with what we were trying, it was going against you true nature, a denial of how things need to work.” Derek looked down at his hands and that, and Stiles was pretty sure there was more to it at that, but there didn’t seem to be any lie.
He simply nodded, though. No need to focus on what else he was denying. “So let’s keep working on this, now that we have an idea of what the problem might be.” Stiles took a steadying breath, and was about to try again, when Derek spoke.
“How?”
Stiles blinked. “What do you mean how? I thought I’d just…think about having tentacles again, but not all the calming focusing thing. Just let my stream of consciousness take me where it would.”
Derek raised his eyebrow. “You do that, you’re going to wind up a bilgesnipe.”
Stiles snorted at the reference to The Avengers, another mutually shared favorite. They’d both wondered what a bilgesnipe would look like in reality, beyond Thor’s description of “massive, scaly, huge antlers, and repulsive”. “What do you suggest?”
“Look down.”
Stiles frowned as he did, and realized that he was slowly growing tentacles again. “How the hell do you keep managing that?” he demanded.
“I think what’s going on is that this is a more instinctive transformation than you’re willing to admit. Don’t think about it. Just do it.” Derek frowned. “Did that make sense?”
“No but…I think I get what you’re trying to say.” Stiles tilted his head down, studying the gently waving appendages as they tried to reach for Derek again. Human shaped, please, he told himself, and then deliberately looked away, focusing on something else.
It took a couple of tries, and Derek poking him in the foot, but he managed it. “So this is kind of exhausting,” Stiles said, yawning.
“You’re expending a lot of energy, changing your form like that,” Derek put in. He stood, and offered his hand to Stiles, pulling him up off the bed. “C’mon, let’s go make food before your blood sugar crashes.”
Stiles followed him to the kitchen. “Oh god, am I going to have a metabolism like you guys now? Eating everything in sight?”
Derek rolled his eyes. “We don’t eat everything in sight, but yeah, probably.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs, butter, and cheese, and nodded at Stiles. “Whatever you want in an omelet, get it.”
They spent the next half hour cooking and talking about why it took less control not more for Stiles to manage his transformations (with him practicing, too, while they talked. The longer they chatted, the better he got, until it was almost as soon as he had the thought to change), just how close to lycanthropy chaos monsterness was, and whether the law of conservation of matter applied to magical beings like Stiles.
“But, seriously, come on! I was that tiny little dragon thing, already, obviously it doesn’t apply!” Stiles said, waving his still cheesy fork around.
“I’m not arguing that,” Derek said with a roll of his eyes. “I’m only wondering why it doesn’t. It does to us, that’s why we’re the size and shapes we are, as werewolves. Why are you different?”
Stiles thought about that, taking another huge bite of his completely overstuffed omelet. “Maybe because chaos?” he offered. At Derek’s thoughtful frown, he continued. “Like, okay, so, I can’t really think about the transformation in order for it to work, right? An element of chaos. So what if the things I can transform into are the same deal? Subject to the whims of chaos, not physics and reality?”
“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Derek said. “And fits with what Deaton pointed out about you only being limited by your imagination.”
Stiles grinned. “it’s like I’m suddenly a member of the Green Lantern Corps, I just don’t have a ring! Or a lantern. Or…another planet to visit, okay, so it’s not a perfect metaphor, but it works!”
Derek rolled his eyes and finished his omelet, but there was a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “Sure it does, Stiles.”
They kept talking, with Stiles randomly spouting tentacles, changing skin color, and changing noses-“If Tonks can do it, so can I!”-until Stiles was yawning more often than he was talking.
“All right, go to bed," Derek finally said. “You’ve worn yourself out completely. We’ll practice for a couple more days, make sure you’ve completely got it under control, but I don’t see why you can’t go back home by this weekend.”
Stiles wondered why the words didn’t make him as happy as they should have. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? To go home? Be with his dad, take care of him, sleep in his own bed? “Awesome,” he said, not looking at Derek.
Why didn’t he want to go?
Part 3