[Teen Wolf] Dangerous Things (2/?)
Title: Dangerous Things
Characters/Pairing: Stiles/Derek, also some Scott/Allison and Lydia/Jackson
Summary: The Medieval AU where Derek is an incubus and Stiles is so, so far out of his depth right now.
Rating: NC-17
Chapter: 2/?
Word Count: 9200
Warnings: Dub-con, canon typical violence/horror, discussion of rape
Previous parts: Part 1
Stiles wakes up the next morning to Scott shaking him by the shoulder and calling his name. This can only mean his idiot of a best friend has forgotten there hasn’t been anyone in the tower in months who cares one way or another whether they’re up at the crack of dawn, and he’s wasting a perfectly good chance to sleep in. Maybe if Stiles lies here and ignores him a little longer he’ll figure that much out on his own and go away, leaving Stiles to snooze another half hour and bask in the tail-end of that amazing dream he was having. He can’t remember the last time he felt this warm or comfortable and Scott has no right to ruin it for him.
“Stiles!” Scott’s saying, “Stiles, Lydia’s awake!”
The words hit Stiles like a bucket full of ice. He sits up so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. “Lydia?” he croaks.
“She woke up!” Scott repeats. “About an hour ago. Jackson wouldn’t let me leave until dawn, he thought... Stiles, what happened? Are you...?”
Stiles hurriedly rubs his eyes and sits up. What’s he supposed to tell Scott? That he spent the whole time getting a great night’s sleep on Lydia’s wonderful mattress, with nothing more unusual to show for it than the best dream he’s had in... oh holy...
Did that really happen? But... he’s alive - he’s fine - he’s not even aching anywhere; if all that happened for real he’d at least still be feeling it, right? He’s neatly tucked into bed; his incense pot is sitting on the stool beside him in perfect order, and the shutters over the window are closed, the only light in the room coming from a lantern on the floor by Scott’s feet. Stiles’ hand goes to his shoulder - the incubus bit him there so hard it would’ve had to bruise, but there’s nothing. He tugs up the blankets and looks down at himself. There’s not a mark anywhere on his body - which he can see, because the lacy nightdress he’s still sort-of-wearing has been ripped in two.
“Oh my god,” he says. “That was real?” He badly needs a word for that thing that happens when some detail of a dream you’d almost forgotten on waking grabs you by the toes and the whole incoherent narrative comes crashing back over you, because he’s experiencing the hell out of it right now, with the added aaargh-factor of it not being a dream.
Scott swallows, his face the perfect picture of the same concern that Stiles is feeling knotted in his chest like the prelude to a heart attack. They must make such a picture.
“Is it...” Scott begins, “is it dead? What happened?”
Stiles shakes his head - not denial, he honestly has no idea. Scott’s nostrils flare, and Stiles wonders, a little helplessly, what an incubus smells like to a werewolf. He watches Scott pace the room, examining everything, then he throws the shutters open and peers out the window. He sniffs at the sill first, then he cranes his head outside.
“Stiles!” he calls, sudden and urgent.
Stiles is quietly glad that whatever Scott’s found out there has his full attention, because the mess he makes scrambling out of bed and tripping over himself while barely holding Lydia’s nightgown closed over his naked body is not his greatest moment.
“Do you see that?” Scott says, when Stiles joins him.
Stiles peers down, but he doesn’t have werewolf vision or the miraculous ability to find a single shred of clothing from his one-true-love left on a branch in the woods a mile away, and he has no idea what he’s looking for. “What?”
“There! Don’t you see it?” Scott turns on his tail and races for the door, leaving Stiles alone, barely clothed, and none the wiser.
Werewolves. Jesus.
***
He’s delayed in joining Scott outside by the need to find himself something to wear that won’t leave him exposed and freezing in the early morning wind. His hands are numb and his heart is beating like it isn’t counting on ever getting the chance again, and it all takes him far too long.
Scott has left the outside door open in his rush to get down there; Stiles calls his name the moment he’s through it.
“Over here!” Scott yells back, and Stiles has to run halfway around the tower to join him.
Lying in the dirt maybe fifty paces from Lydia’s window, Scott has found a body. It’s a dead incubus, features shrivelled like death aged it a thousand years before leaving it dry; its face twisted in a rictus of agony, the stone around it splattered and stained with an oily black fluid. It must have snowed in the night, leaving its skin dusted a thin layer of white crystals, and the effect is to make it seem almost as though it must have been here much longer than a few measly hours; like they’ve chanced upon a sculpture left in this spot to commemorate a victory over the forces of evil a hundred years ago.
If so, the sculptor was meticulous in his detail. There’s no missing how the membrane of one of its wings has been torn clean through, the remainder hanging from the elbow of the splayed wing like the banner of a fallen army, where it stubbornly refuses to flutter in the wind. Its throat has been ripped out, the wound so deep its whole head cants backwards at an unnatural angle. There’s not a freckle of skin paler than an ugly grey anywhere on its body; it looks inhuman and demonic in a way that shares nothing with whatever Stiles experienced last night whatsoever.
He can’t even begin to sort out what he’s supposed to make of this. Scott, being Scott, has missed this fact entirely.
“It worked!” he exclaims. He sounds awed, ecstatic - like even with Stiles and Lydia both miraculously alive, it’s only this that has him convinced of their victory. “Stiles, it worked!”
Stiles stares at the dead incubus and feels sick to his stomach. He doesn’t know what to think. He’s saved, at least temporarily, from having to make up his mind by the sound of two more sets of boots tramping briskly through the snow, followed by the sight of Lydia hurrying towards them, Jackson trailing puppy-like in her wake.
Her cheeks are flushed a vivid pink, and Stiles is fairly sure the oversized coat she’s wrapped in isn’t hers, or from the wardrobe of anyone else who ever lived in the upper floors of the tower. He’s also fairly sure the hint of cream showing at her neck is the same night dress she was wearing last night when Scott carried her downstairs. The open-mouthed look of horror on her face at the sight of the body has to be a mirror of Stiles’ own, except...
Except that it’s not, because Stiles has no more hope of understanding what’s going through her mind right now than he does anything else about what’s happened to them all here - doesn’t know how much Jackson or Scott have told her or how much she remembers, or how she’s supposed to have any hope of dealing with this when even Stiles can’t. And suddenly the fact that he doesn’t know feels like the greatest failure of his whole short life; so much it makes his heart ache for her and just about takes his breath away.
Lydia’s hands clench into fists at her sides. “Burn it,” she commands, her voice hardly shaking. “I want that - thing burned to ash before sundown.”
“Is that really necessary?” asks Scott, all kinds of uncertain. “They don’t - they don’t come back to life, do they?”
For several moments there’s silence between all of them, but for the whistle of the wind and the rapid exchange of looks.
“...I’ll start collecting firewood,” says Scott, looking decidedly spooked as he vanishes away around the curve of the tower foundations.
Lydia turns on her heel and marches back to the tower door. Jackson calls her name and steps towards her, but she sweeps straight past him without a glance. For a few seconds he hangs there, undecided, looking back and forth between her departing form and the body of the incubus lying in the snow, which clearly holds just as much morbid fascination for him as it does for everyone else. Then he throws Stiles one quick, desperate look that might even have been gratitude coming from anyone other than Jackson, and hurries after her.
Suddenly alone, Stiles sinks straight down to the earth beneath him and drops his head onto his knees. Something happened here last night; something he’s not nearly ready to process yet - maybe won’t ever be - and the understanding of just what hovers around the edge of his perception like a moth around a flame. Only he’s the moth in that metaphor somehow, and he has the unsettling feeling he burned up long ago and just hasn’t got to realising it yet.
He stays like that until the cold of the snow has soaked straight through the seat of his coat and his muscles have gone numb.
***
Stiles comes out of his funk because Scott - once again - has his hand on his shoulder. “Stiles? Are you okay?”
Stiles blinks at him blearily and decides standing up isn’t his best choice right now. “No. Yes. I don’t know. ‘Okay’ is possibly not the word I’d have chosen.”
“Stiles,” Scott looks at what’s left of the dead incubus and back again. “Did it... did it hurt you?”
“Not really?” His first instinct is to lie about it, but the real concern in the way Scott’s looking at him draws more honesty out of Stiles than he’d intended. “It was like something out of a dream and I don’t know how much of what I think I’m remembering even really happened.”
Scott gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze. He’s never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but on a good day he still gets when he’s not getting something important, and this is one of those days. “You wanna talk about it?”
Stiles shakes his head.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to,” Scott says quickly, then after a moment, sounding a lot less certain, and in a voice that suggests he’s trying to reassure both of them, he adds, “You know, messing with your head is what they do, right?”
Stiles takes a long look at the body.
“Oh yeah,” he agrees. “That’s what they do.”
***
Building a bonfire large enough to burn the incubus turns into a back-breaking slog of a job that Stiles is terribly, terribly grateful for, considering that no-one much wants to talk about what happened last night, and being left alone with his thoughts any longer would be all kinds of unpleasant. No-one wants to touch the body, not even to move it somewhere more sheltered, so they build themselves a wood pile right over where they found it. The firewood left to their stockpiles this late in the season was never laid down for cremating something the size of a human out in the wind, and the only comfort in being sent out into the woods for more at this time of year is that at least it’s too cold to be very damp. That and how they have Scott’s wolf-muscles to do the worst of the heavy lifting.
Some days, Stiles is really okay with having wasted most of his sixteenth year helping his best friend get over the urge to murder him every full moon, if this is what he gets to show for it in the long run.
Rebecca and Shantal, the Tower’s one maid and cook, show up later to gape at the slain beast for themselves, once Jackson coaxes them out of the kitchen. Stiles doesn’t even remember what he says to them, just the disbelief on their faces and how it becomes one more awkward new reminder that no-one, however much or little they might have been involved, is feeling much like celebrating their victory yet. Jackson tries to help once he’s herded them back inside again, but it’s pretty obvious his shoulder is still doing its best to drive him to distraction. The only thing keeping him out here is that he’s far too stubborn to own up to it whenever Scott or Stiles throw a subtle hint his way that maybe he should go lie down before he passes out. Mostly, he just gets in the way and makes the people doing the real work feel seriously uncomfortable. Less than twenty four hours gone, and already their emergency camaraderie is going sour. How unexpected.
Eventually, the three of them hit on a system - Scott drags and chops the largest pieces from the woods; Stiles carries and stacks the pieces around the body, and Jackson helps. If this mostly means that Jackson spends his time re-stacking Stiles’ work a pointed foot or so closer to the body than Stiles has any particular desire to get, then what the hell, he’s not complaining and everyone wins.
It takes far too much work and a whole bottle of perfectly good spirits to get the damn pyre to light and stay lit, gradually building into a good-sized blaze under a plume of smoke that funnels up with the wind. They’ve been pretty lucky the weather has stayed clear this long as it is. Stiles was expecting the incubus’s funeral pyre to reek of all the worst things about burnt or rotting flesh rolled into a nauseating stench, but it doesn’t smell of anything beyond the tang of damp wood, smoke and heat. Somehow, that’s almost worse.
He watches it burn, too tired to censor his own thoughts anymore, or to hold off facing the fact whatever it was that saved them, nothing about his stupid plan had worked. Something happened last night and he doesn’t understand what, but he can’t tell Scott that because he wouldn’t even know how to begin. They’re all alive - Lydia’s alive - and they’re all so relieved that Stiles can’t bear to touch that.
Lydia stares into the fire with a haunted look in her eyes until only the blackened bones remain.
***
With all the excitement it’s almost sunset before they remember it’s going to be a full moon tonight.
It’s been a year and more since the full moon was a problem for Scott, but with the threat still fresh in his mind, it’s no surprise that he’s antsy tonight in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. Lydia’s as close to being his alpha as anything he’s ever had, and that thing with how they dealt with the monster without Scott ever getting to lay a paw on it hasn’t done much to reassure his inner wolf that the danger is past. Scott-the-human may be happy to sit inside tonight in the spirit of solidarity, keeping Stiles and his nerves company, but Scott-the-wolf wants to go patrol the woods and howl into every shadow to let anything lurking out there know this home is guarded. Within an hour Stiles tells him to just go already, though not without a warning to be careful. The hunters are due back tomorrow and may already be close, and if they find him out there wolfing around they’re not going to ask questions first.
Scott vanishes out the door with a last, guilty look over his shoulder, and Stiles makes a spirited attempt at being so exhausted he falls straight into a dead sleep the moment his head hits the pillow.
An hour or two of tossing and turning later, he has to admit his plans aren’t showing a very promising trend lately.
The very idea of keeping himself from turning last night’s events over in his mind all night is laughable. It’s all he’s been trying not to do all day. The worst is the feeling that he should be able to piece it all together easily, but the truth remains that Stiles is one or two vital assumptions short of being able to make himself believe any conclusion he comes to. Nothing about this makes sense - starting with there suddenly being incubi in this part of the world at all. Further complications include the futility of trusting anything said, done, demonstrated or even obliquely implied by any member of a race of demon known for messing with your perceptions. He doesn’t know how much - if anything - of what he thinks he remembers from last night really happened; not except for the parts that proved how embarrassingly far he is from qualified to understand any part of anything that would explain the mysterious ways of the incubi.
Even if Stiles thinks he’s put it together... what if that’s just what the incubus wants him to believe?
He’s already dreading the conversation he’s going to have to have with Deaton next time he’s in this part of the country, which is pretty funny when he’d still seriously consider giving up a finger or two if it brought him his mentor tomorrow. Which is already kind of an improvement, because only hours ago he’d have gladly sacrificed a whole foot in return for ‘yesterday’.
He could ask the hunters when they make it back tomorrow, he supposes. Incubi are the kind of things they’re supposed to know about, even if they don’t see a lot of them locally around these parts. After all, there’s probably only an even-odds chance the hunters will decide Stiles’ story is a sign he’s still under the thrall of a malicious being, and will have to have its influence tortured out of him for his own good.
Even incubi only scare Stiles a little bit more than Christopher Argent does, let alone him and the rest of his family (saving only Allison, who was clearly found on a doorstep as a baby; possibly as some sort of heavenly gift entrusted as the saviour of lost souls).
Ordinarily, on a sleepless night, Stiles’ refuge is his hand and his imagination, but tonight that’s only doomed to lead him into recalling all those other parts of last night that he’s been trying so hard not to dwell on. He should have spent the day remembering what the incubus had done to him every time he moved. Every time he rolled his shoulder or moved a hip there should have been the reminder of exactly what sort of strenuous activities the they’d got up to last night. But there’s been nothing, until the very lack of awkward reminders proves his undoing and Stile finds himself worrying over the details of the encounter, terrified of losing something crucial before he ever gets close to making sense of it, until he gives up all pretence of maintaining any approximation of scientific detachment. Had there been a bruise when it bit him on the shoulder? Had it really taunted him with the threat of leaving him alone and frustrated mere moments after assuring him his choices were sex-and-death or sex-and-silence? What, exactly, had it been like when it kissed him? Already, it feels like something that happened weeks ago rather than only last night; or maybe a six-month-old fantasy worn long past its best days. Nevermind that after that the inadequacy of his hand is far more than he wants to deal with yet.
Sometime after midnight he finally drops off. He wakes barely an hour later from a vivid nightmare that the incubus is on him, only to see the hunters burst into the room, drag it off the bed and rip out its throat, then toss its body out the window. Before Stiles can decide whether to thank them or curse them and weep, they’re dragging him off the bed the same way, and when he tries to tell them they’re making a mistake his teeth feel wrong and his mouth won’t work, and when he looks down at his hands he sees claws protruding from the ends of shrivelled, blackened fingers.
‘Drenched in sweat with a heart beating like a drum’ doesn’t do justice to the state he’s in after waking. Deaton’s taught him a few things about the meaning of dreams over the years, but scholarly analysis would be wasted on material like that.
Eventually, Stiles gives in to the inevitable. He gets up, lights a candle, retrieves that thrice-damned book of poetry, and sets himself to pour over every line of the poem that got him into this mess for the slightest, subtextual hint of anything he might have missed. When that fails, he goes back over his other sources with the same level of scrutiny.
He’s still at it when Scott comes back to find him, shortly before dawn.
***
In the morning, Lydia takes to reasserting her authority over her life by ordering them all around like she’s not merely queen of the castle, but the queen who’s discovered her servants have been slacking off their duties in her absence (nevermind it was an absence of barely twenty-four hours, during which she never technically left the building). Neither Stiles or Scott have ever been very good at taking orders without giving lip, or really gotten used to this lean-times arrangement where they’re getting their instructions directly from the lady of the manor. Fortunately, Lydia seems to take their moaning as a sign everything is back to normal. (It’s not, and Stiles is a thousand miles away from believing it ever will be, and as a coping strategy what Lydia is doing is as transparent as glass. But when it comes down to it, reminding himself that Lydia probably has it even worse than even he does today is pretty close to being the best working distraction he’s got.)
As the hours drag on, there’s no sign of the hunters, and no-one’s happy about that - least of all Scott.
“You have that look,” Stiles tells him, poking Scott with the end of his broom. “It hasn’t been two weeks since you last saw Allison. You can wait a couple of hours longer.”
“That’s not it,” Scott protests.
“Then what? Enlighten me.”
Scott gives up on sweeping and leans awkwardly on his own broom handle. “They’re still not back. They’ve been out in the woods in the middle of nowhere all this time. What if Lydia wasn’t the first one it went for? What if it got to Allison first?”
“Allison?” This is such pure, classic Scott McCall that Stiles sort of wants to frame it and stick it on a wall somewhere. “The one out in the woods with a whole family of hunters?”
Scott has the decency to look a little bit embarrassed. “We don’t know they’ve ever seen a real incubus before.”
“Scott,” says Stiles, “I promise you that if our incubus was stupid enough to go after a hunter, we would not be having this conversation because it would be dead and we’d never have known it existed. It would be so dead that what we found in the snow yesterday would look peachy and energetic in comparison.”
Scott hunches a little and nods along to Stiles’ painfully obvious point. “I guess... if even we managed to take care of it...”
“See? The hunters will be back any time now. So relax and help me with these dust bunnies. Some of them have teeth, I swear.” It’s not a lie. It’s hardly even a lie of omission, and he’s telling it to make Scott feel better, so why does it settle in his stomach like a lump of lead?
Luckily for Stiles, this is the moment Lydia chooses to pop her head around the door and save him from what’s left of this conversation.
“Stiles,” she calls, with an elegant swirl of strawberry hair, “I need you upstairs.”
Stiles, naturally, manages to thank her for her timely distraction by blurting out, “What? Why?”
“Now,” Lydia pronounces, and flounces away around the corner.
Stiles shoots Scott a look, but his friend just shrugs at him. Stiles shoves his broom at him and hurries out after her, very nearly running head-first into Rebecca in the hallway as she bustles past with her arms full of bedclothes. (“If anyone asks, I burnt these like she told me to and the ones on my bed just look the same,” she hisses to him. Stiles holds up his hands and flattens himself against the wall to let her pass. Yeah, no-one’s escaping Her Ladyship’s rampage today.)
He doesn’t know what Lydia wants him for, but assuming Jackson’s not waiting for them up there - and that ought to be a safe bet - this will be the first time they’ve been alone together since she woke up. Does she want to thank him for saving her life? That would be pretty amazing, though also kind of awkward. Lydia’s hardly ever given him a second glance until now, but he’s never contributed to saving her life before either. He has no way of knowing how likely it is.
Lydia’s facing away from the doorway when Stiles peers around it, turned instead to inspect one of her bookshelves. “You... needed me for something?” he calls, and only then notices that the shelf she’s looking at is the one where all the remaining books are canted on an angle to fill the gap left when Stiles removed his three historical volumes two nights ago. “Oh... the books - I was going to put them away as soon as I was done, you know, researching what we were dealing with; I guess it slipped my mind with everything. I can got get them right now!” but he’s not even turned to go before reality checks in. “Except that if that was all you wanted, you would have told me downstairs and been done with it. So...”
Lydia turns on her heel and gives him one of her many Looks. “Are you quite done?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
Lydia leans significantly back against the shelves. “Stiles, I called you up here, because I need you,” she says, “to explain to me what happened last night.”
Okay. So he came up here not knowing what to expect, but that is officially not a question Stiles feels prepared for. “Didn’t Jackson fill you in already?”
“Just - humour me,” says Lydia, with that twitch of her chin she generally saves for dealing with the terminally slow. “You’re the man of the hour, aren’t you Stiles? I want to hear exactly how you killed the incubus - in your own words.”
Stiles takes a deep breath. He can do this. He can probably even do this without - technically - having to lie to her. “One of the books I borrowed mentioned this way you can trap them. Incubi prey on young women - that’s what they’re built to do - but the idea is if you can trick them into attacking a man they think is a woman, it messes up their magic enough that it weakens them and leaves them vulnerable. You can even kill them that way. So my plan was to - to borrow one of your dresses and put myself in your bed and see if it took the bait. Which it did, and the rest is history.”
Lydia listens through his explanation with the expression of someone whose patience is being tried to its limits. When he’s done, and has apparently exhausted his window to add anything more, she gives a short sigh and shuts her eyes. “No, you didn’t,” she pronounces.
“Pardon?”
“No, you didn’t,” Lydia repeats, “because that? Does. Not. Work. The myth that an incubus finds contact with a human male ‘distasteful’ derives entirely from a mistranslation of an account originally recorded in Latin over five centuries ago; likely popularised by a class of desperate young men who will stoop to trying to convince the objects of their affections that they’ll be miraculously made safe from incubi attacks simply by having a man sharing their beds. In reality, there are dozens of well-documented accounts proving that incubi are just as willing to pursue male victims as female. The correct translation attributes the incubus’ defeat to the lethal dose of arsenic its victim was fed before being laid out. When the incubus attempted to drain him of life, the poison reversed the effect and killed the demon instead. His being male had nothing to do with it whatsoever.”
Lydia folds her arms and raises her eyebrows at him. Stiles gapes in complete incredulity and more than a little awe. “How do you know that?”
“I read, Stiles,” says Lydia. “My Latin tutor felt an understanding of the risks one takes trying to translate the classic texts with a less than perfect appreciation for linguistic nuance was integral to my studies. It’s all in Scriptores Graci et Romani Commentarium Grammaticum, which I can’t help but notice is also missing from its shelf.”
Holy mother of god, thinks Stiles, why did Lydia have to be the one who was unconscious for the whole mess? She and her amazing brain could have saved them so much trouble.
“Now are you going to tell me what really happened,” Lydia asks, “or will I have to explain the full nature of your omission to Scott and Jackson - and the Argents the moment they get back?”
Stiles swallows around a lump in his throat the size and texture of a walnut. “Okay, so you’re right,” he admits, stepping a pace into the room and self-consciously tugging the door behind him mostly-closed. “There is stuff I didn’t tell...”
Two seconds worth of sudden and unaccountable vertigo are all the warning Stiles gets before the world blacks out.
***
The first thing Stiles notices when he wakes up again is that someone’s moved him down to the servants’ quarters, laying him out on his own mattress.
The second thing is the incubus is sitting in a chair across the room, watching him with an expression of furious intent.
“Holy god!” It takes the space of an instant for Stiles to go from lying down to halfway out of bed and trying very hard to melt into the wall behind him.
“Hello, Stiles,” says the incubus, smiling in a manner Stiles doesn’t find all that pleasant. With the useless clarity of a man about to die, Stiles has the impression of something different about it this time. It looks oddly paler in the late afternoon sunlight, leaking in through the window, and not in that appealingly human way that had so captivated him last time either. There’s the impression of wiry tension running through its entire posture, from its shoulders to the deceptively casual cross of its legs to the set of its jaw.
“You,” it says, and oh look, now it’s not even pretending to smile anymore, “broke our agreement.”
“Our what?” Apparently this is just how Stiles is going to deal with every confusing statement anyone throws at him today.
“You tried to tell someone about me.” The incubus pronounces each word very carefully, clearly hailing from the Lydia-school of dealing with the terminally slow.
“I nev... oh.” Jesus, this is humiliating. Stiles has spent how long going over everything that happened last night, and the part where the incubus made him promise never to tell anyone - that still slipped his mind? “But that was...” he protests. “I thought you were going to kill me anyway!”
“And since then,” replies the incubus, tone dripping with contempt, “nothing’s happened - nothing’s come to light - to make you wonder if you might want to reassess that.”
Stiles takes the opportunity to swallow, self-consciously slow. “Are you... going to kill me now?”
He could have done without the way it relaxes into something like amusement at the idea of Stiles’ mortality. “Fortunately, I don’t have to. You’d think someone who knew enough to set up that incense would have understood what it means to give your word to one of my kind. But you’ve found out the hard way by now, haven’t you Stiles?” and only then does Stiles get around to thinking back on what it had felt like the moment before he’d passed out.
“That was a - you put me under a geas? That’s why I passed out back there?”
“You put yourself under a geas,” says the incubus. “The moment you accepted my terms.”
“So when I was... oh, Jesus.” Stiles presses both hands into his forehead. “I am an idiot.”
The incubus waves a hand. “Do go on.”
Magnanimously, Stiles opts to let that comment go. “So, I literally cannot tell anyone about you. If I try, I’m out cold. Okay. Glad we got that cleared up.” He glares at the incubus over his fingers. “You know, Lydia’s not just going to let this go. I’m going to have to tell her something.”
“So you tell her a lie.”
“What lie? I don’t know how much of this you caught through your whole geas deal, but she’s not going to fall for just anything, and now she’s going to want an explanation for why I passed out too!”
“Not my problem.” The incubus gives a casual shrug. Stiles gapes at it.
“Seriously?”
The incubus fixes him with another look. “You think I came back to hand you a cover story? You’re going to tell her whatever it is you can make her believe. And you’re going to do it because you already know that you only get so many accidental slip-ups before the geas stops letting you off so easily.”
Stiles scrubs his hands through his hair. This is what he gets for dealing with incubi; locked in a bind where he has no choice but to wrack his brains for something Lydia will believe when she already knows he’s lying to her. Small wonder demons are known for being more trouble than they’re worth.
“Why does it matter to you so much that people don’t know about you, anyway?” he asks, a little desperately. “Are all the other incubi in town going to think less of you if they find out you let me live?”
The incubus elects to respond to this question by demonstrating that it can, in fact, carry on a whole side of a conversation with nothing more than a string of significant, sardonic looks.
A loud sigh whistles its way through Stiles’ lips. “Did you show up just to clear me up on all this? Because I’m pretty sure I would have figured it all out for myself by now if I didn’t have you looming at me from the corner over there.”
Rather than answer, the incubus stands up, a fascinating process which seems to run through every relevant muscle one by one, then positively stalks towards him.
“Oh,” says Stiles, all the heat in his body rapidly pooling southwards; he’d actually gone and forgotten, somehow, just what effect the incubus’s presence had on him. “Again? Here? Now?” By the last word it’s reached his mattress; Stiles has to crane his head backwards now to look it in the eye. The simple act of breathing is suddenly demanding far more of his concentration than it did a moment ago.
“Did you have other plans?” The incubus places both hands and a good deal of its weight onto either side of Stiles’ shoulders in meaningful fashion, leaving Stiles struck anew by the way his whole body sinks with the mattress - even his own thin, crappy mattress on his own thin, crappy bed - beneath its weight.
“No,” he says, “Definitely not,” and underlines his enthusiasm by shoving the blankets out of the way, distantly pleased that they go easily with no extra struggling. Seems Scott got as far as taking his shoes off and dumping him in bed, but stopped short of tucking him in or... wait, that might be a problem. “Um. Except-for-how-Scott-could-walk-in-here-any-moment,” he babbles, “That might not be so good for-”
There’s a brief flash of white teeth. “Your friend is taking your collapse after two nights without sleep as a natural sign of exhaustion,” the incubus tells him, as it climbs properly onto the bed. “He’s making sure everyone leaves you alone long enough to get some real rest.”
Stiles quietly retracts every horrible thing he ever said about Scott McCall; looks up at the incubus nervously and swallows again. God, it’s all so different in the daylight, now he can see it better. “You promise you’re not going to kill me this time?”
The incubus actually rolls its eyes at him. “I’m starting to think it’s the only way to stop you asking.”
“Hey, don’t blame me! You guys have a reputation,” Stiles protests, holding up his hands.
The incubus raises its eyebrows at him and generally looms. Damn, but it likes looming. Stiles likes how it likes looming. This is one incubus that can loom over him any time it likes. “Oh, because you’re some kind of friendly incubus who never kills anyone, and I should just be able to tell,” he babbles, with what is very little more than false bravado at this point.
The incubus, suddenly, doesn’t seem to be making eye contact anymore, and Stiles is just as suddenly aware how terribly he actually doesn’t want to know.
“Um,” he says, “Can we forget I asked that?”
“Stiles,” says the incubus, “shut up,” and kisses him.
The kiss is vicious and demanding; the incubus sucks on his tongue like it’s mad at him for ever wasting it on other uses (hell, caught in the moment it’s beyond Stiles to disagree) but if it was assuming it would be enough to shut his brain down for long, he’s going to disappoint it. When it gentles the kiss and begins to pull away from him, he thinks wow, and I could so get used to more of this, and then the words, “You know, if this is what breaking your geas gets me, I’m not feeling a lot of incentive to be more careful,” come out of his mouth the moment he has use of it again.
The incubus makes an exasperated noise and leans back to look him in the eye. “Too bad. From now on, you break it, you wake up alone.” It jerks its head for emphasis. “This isn’t going to happen again.”
It’s slightly possible this last declaration leaves Stiles even colder than the idea he’s possibly sleeping with a murderer, which is so much more than he’s going to let himself analyse any time soon. Somewhere during this kiss he must have reached for it, because his hands are clutching at the incubus’ sides, and he’s tightening his fingers to hold it here before he knows what he’s doing. “Why not?” One kiss, and he’s back to pleading.
“What exactly do you think this is, Stiles?” The incubus is definitely losing patience with him, though it pairs this with a shimmery sort of movement that sends muscle flexing under Stiles’ hands. You can’t hold me here, it’s saying, but all it does is make Stiles desperate to know how that would feel with his lips where his fingers are now.
“Okay, okay, let me rephrase,” he says, mind racing and far too much of his attention wasted on the feel of the incubus’ ribs under his thumbs. “So why now?”
This seems to go over better. Stiles gets maybe half a second to take in the wicked glint in the incubus’ eyes before eye contact is gone because it’s doing that amazing thing where it puts its mouth right up against the side of his neck and just breathes into his skin, warm and wet. Right under his ear, it tells him, “I was hungry,” and closes its mouth over the skin below his ear. Stiles moans.
The slide of the incubus’ lips working their way below his jaw is the best kind of distraction; it takes another half a minute or so for Stiles to even remember that there are still things he needs to know he understands here. “For... you mean for life force? Are you sure this isn’t going to hurt me?”
The incubus is abruptly not sucking kisses into his neck anymore. “Stiles, either I kill you or I don’t. There’s no halfway. Happy?”
“Then why don’t all... wait, waaaait, I get it - that’s why you’re still hungry, isn’t it? It’s because you didn’t kill me. Whatever it is you get from us, you don’t get as much if we’re not dead at the end.” Stiles grins, intensely pleased with this deduction.
The incubus glares at him. “You realise there are less difficult people I could go to for this.”
“No, no! I’ll shut up, I prom- no, wait, I still have to ask you something!” In a frustrated jerk of motion the incubus makes as though to leave the bed altogether. Horrified, Stiles grabs it by the upper arm and holds on. “No, don’t, it’s important! That other incubus, the one that attacked Lydia - you’re the one that killed it!”
The nuance of the incubus’s glare seems to be saying, please tell me you didn’t only just figure that out now.
“Yeah, so that was pretty obvious. I just - why?” Even if it does cost him his second chance at sex, he needs this much before he goes mad wondering. “It wasn’t for me; you didn’t even know who you were going to find in there. So why?”
“Maybe he was muscling in on my territory,” suggests the incubus, testily.
“Your territory?” Stiles coughs out half a laugh. “We don’t have incubi out here! There hasn’t been an incubus seen this far west in - in ever. Suddenly there’s two outside the same window in the same night?”
The incubus is close enough that when it gives an impatient huff, Stiles feels it against his skin. “Yes, Stiles.” It sounds furious now, “Suddenly there’s two, and one of them is leaving bodies lying around in their bedrooms - letting himself be seen by people who aren’t even his prey, just to toy with them - and leaving his prey enthralled and unconscious for a whole day. Like he wants every hunter within a hundred miles turning the country upside down to find him and every last one of us out there besides!”
Hearing it that angry should be terrifying, except that for the first time today, Stiles has a pretty good idea that what’s upset it doesn’t have anything to do with him.
It occurs to him all in a rush to wonder how people are supposed to know there aren’t any incubi in a place where they don’t leave bodies behind - when even he’d woken up the morning after convinced the whole thing had been a dream. His hand is still resting on its bicep, not gripping anymore, and he stares dumbly at it for moment, wondering anew that it’s even real. “Oh. Oh. Then you were - you’ve been... how long have you...?”
“How long have I what? Lived here? Been tracking him?” The incubus resettles itself in a manner that, to Stiles relief, no longer suggests it’s three seconds from giving up and leaving. Its voice deepens to a low hiss. “Let’s say long enough.”
“You saved my life that night,” Stiles breathes, and maybe for the first time he really believes it too. “We’d all be dead if you hadn’t...”
This gets him a satisfied smirk. “Feeling grateful?” it asks, and for once Stiles is lost for words. He should be dead but instead he gets this - it doesn’t make any sense, and the only answer he can come up with is to get a hand up behind its head and tug it down so it can lick its way into his mouth again, slow and wet.
“That’s the idea,” it murmurs, once it has Stiles so out of breath he has to come up for air or suffocate. It’s on him again before he’s even done panting, leaving him light-headed and giddy; the only thoughts left in his head the ones that go yes and I should have died, how am I so lucky? This is maybe not the best time he could have chosen to face just how close he came that night, but there’ve got to be worse ways to spend the rush of adrenalin and relief. For just now, it’s no effort to forgive the incubus for being an incubus - he can even forgive it for being a sardonic asshole who’s only here to use him for sex. Stiles is feeling more grateful than he has any idea what to do with if he can’t share it.
The next thing to matter enough to pull him back down to earth is the incubus working on the belt around his tunic, then tugging him up so Stiles can help rid himself of the rest of it. It slides down his body to tug his pants down and away, and the little space and air that puts between them turns out to be exactly the perspective Stiles needs to find himself newly rapt by how it moves, developing a whole new appreciation for the way the light plays over its weird mottled skin. He needs to go back to Deaton’s anatomy lessons and learn the names of all those muscles. Who cares if it’s mostly thrall speaking right now or whatever; who could ask for a better way to celebrate being alive?
“Do you have a name? I mean, you don’t have to tell me,” he amends, quickly, when the incubus gives him another one of its looks. “I know how that can be bad news. But if there’s something I can call you, I could, you know, call you that. While we do this. If you like.”
The incubus freezes, like Stiles has it trapped in his gaze, and for a long moment he can’t begin to guess what it must be thinking. He itches to touch again, but it’s sitting just out of easy reach. If all he’s going to get for his trouble is a snide refusal, he wishes it would put him out of his misery already.
“Call me Derek.” The name comes out in an almost-growl, and it takes Stiles a moment too long to understand.
“Derek?” Stiles echoes. “You want me to call an incubus ‘Derek’?”
Derek-the-incubus gives him another one of those looks. “You asked. No-one’s forcing you to use it.”
“Yeah, but...” Several questions die on Stiles’ lips as he watches the-incubus-who-may-or-may-not-answer-to-Derek lower its nose to his chest and rub its cheek into the skin around his naval - luxuriating in it, almost - before trailing down further, dipping into the crease of Stiles’ hip. Stiles has barely time to think what is he doing before what he’s doing turns into mouthing the base of Stiles’ cock with a look of utter contentment.
The noise Stiles makes is hardly a moan, it’s almost a squeak.
The incubus flicks another one of those wicked looks up at him and Stiles’ breath catches - he’d been so ready to see mockery after that noise he just made, and there’s nothing like it there at all - but that’s officially all the reprieve he gets before the incredible slick heat of the incubus’ mouth is back again. Stiles can only stare, completely fascinated, as Derek drags up his length to mouth the head, tongue dragging against the foreskin in a way that makes it very, very hard to sit still. This is lewd in ways he can’t begin to deal with; he’s on his back on his bed in the room he used to share with six other people and that he still shares with Scott; there’s sunlight coming in through the window; and he’s never in his life felt this naked. There’s a demon that looks like a human to Stiles in all the ways that matter to him and none of the ways that don’t, with its mouth on a part of him the town rectors always told him he’s not supposed to even touch more than he absolutely has to - looking like it’s never tasted anything better in its life. He. Like he’s never enjoyed anything so much before in his life. He just gave Stiles a name, and even if Stiles can’t quite make himself think of an incubus as ‘Derek’, there’s no way you can think of a Derek as an it.
Stiles is trying so hard not to move, partly because he thinks he’s not supposed to, but mostly because he knows the moment he does - arches into this or thrusts - he’ll lose what little clarity he has left and it’ll all be over so much sooner. He feels himself bump against the back of its throat and somehow he keeps going, the incubus swallowing around him, and that has to be wrong, how is that even possible to be that far inside and it’s like it’s urging him to thrust even deeper, is this something regular humans can even do? God, Derek - Derek goes right on swallowing around him the whole time he comes.
It’s a little confusing, at first, for Stiles to find himself awake afterwards, once he’s back to where he can do confused again, but definitely the good kind of surprised, even if ‘awake’ is officially the most effort he’s going to be up to for a little while. Derek is licking his lips and looking terribly pleased with himself. “Sounds like you’ve got the hang of it to me.”
Belatedly, Stiles remembers having yelled that name at least a couple of times towards the climax of events back there. There may have also been some begging. Whatever - he’s gracious enough to let Derek have that one uncontested.
“Oh good,” he says, distantly, “whadya wanna do now?”
Derek exhibits no hurry whatsoever in crawling back up the bed to kiss Stiles again, languid and slow. There’s a new taste in his mouth that Stiles would probably hate under any other circumstances, but right now, knowing where it came from, he can’t get enough of it, even... Jesus, he can’t be getting hard again already, it hasn’t hardly been sixty seconds.
“Roll over,” says Derek.
“Huh?”
“That’s what we’re doing now,” Derek’s thumbs trace the skin around his naval in a distracting manner. “But it’s going to be a little different this time.” Stiles definitely doesn’t bother to resist as Derek guides him to roll onto his stomach, then tugs him up onto his hands and knees. They’re still shaky and shouldn’t be up to taking his weight, except that if he lets his posture dip even a little he might lose that telltale press of warm skin against his back and between his thighs, the awareness of Derek’s body over him that’s the only sense he’s got left, heightened even further now Stiles can’t see what Derek’s doing.
As usual - and seriously, this is becoming a theme for them - Derek’s in no hurry. He takes his time to settle himself; to wrap an arm around Stiles’ shoulders and drag his hand slowly over the most sensitive parts of Stiles’ neck as he mouths the bumps of Stiles’ spine just below his hairline. Derek’s cock is resting between the cheeks of Stiles’ ass, but he’s not doing anything with it, not unless you count casually driving Stiles slightly insane. He feels Derek sigh against his skin, and say, “Did you ever wonder if I’d have still climbed through that window if I’d known it was you in that room? If you’d been there and if Lydia was in the next, who would I have gone for?”
“You didn’t seem all that disappointed,” Stiles grumbles. He’d swear to god he’d hardly thought about that one in more than passing, so it irks him immensely that Derek is technically right.
“Which do you want it to be, Stiles?” The words make Stiles shiver. Derek has his hands on his ass, running the pads of its thumbs down the inside of his cheeks, so close and so far from where he wants them. “Do you want this to be what you earned by putting yourself in her place - the reward for your useless bravery - or do you want to hear that I’d have gone to you with all the tower to choose from?”
The question makes no sense. Stiles didn’t want this until he had it, and now he has it he wants it both ways and neither, any way he can have it. He doesn’t want to know; he doesn’t want to ask and get an answer he doesn’t like. “Haven’t exactly been losing sleep over it,” he says, caring how steady his voice is.
“No,” Derek muses, thoughtful, “I think the one that’s going to stay with you is, will it ever be like this again? Will there ever be another man, or even a woman, for you anywhere who can give you what I can?” Stiles starts to pant. He can feel Derek moving, lining them up, spreading his thighs. Good thing he got all that extra air in early; when Derek starts to push inside Stiles doesn’t breathe at all until he’s done. He starts to thrust, steadily, and Stiles lets out a sob. He can’t believe he’s come once already. “I promise you, Stiles,” Derek whispers, “there won’t be.”
Something inside Stiles clenches tight; his heart, maybe. He wonders if Derek can feel that, wrapped up in Stiles the way he is right now, but if so it doesn’t seem to bother him. In the moment it’s way too easy to believe Derek’s promise will be the truth.
“Every time, it’ll be different - with every person, it’ll be different - and every time, you’ll remember it’s not me,” Derek whispers in his ear. He curls his hand around Stiles’ cock, not moving it yet, just holding, and the sensation is already next to overwhelming. This is waves of pleasure breaking over a baseline of awe almost too intense to bear. Derek is inside him and over him, a solid presence holding the whole rest of the world at bay. For all those awful promises, all Stiles can think is, how could it ever be like this for you either? and if that sounds foolish even within the confines of his own head, incubi don’t come back to just anyone, do they? What does that even mean? He knows there’s so much Derek’s not telling him and he wants all of it. Even if he doesn’t know what this is between them, Stiles can’t think of this as the end; knows already he won’t be able to face that until the bed’s long cold without him.
“Derek,” Stiles moans, and Derek drives into him hard, so Stiles says it again. Derek responds the same way, and it turns into a rhythm for them, all the way until Stiles feels Derek tense up and come inside him with a hiss.
He definitely comes with Derek’s name on his lips; remembers a hand resting soft against his belly after, easing him down and rolling him to his side before leaving him there to sleep.
Part 3
Characters/Pairing: Stiles/Derek, also some Scott/Allison and Lydia/Jackson
Summary: The Medieval AU where Derek is an incubus and Stiles is so, so far out of his depth right now.
Rating: NC-17
Chapter: 2/?
Word Count: 9200
Warnings: Dub-con, canon typical violence/horror, discussion of rape
Previous parts: Part 1
Stiles wakes up the next morning to Scott shaking him by the shoulder and calling his name. This can only mean his idiot of a best friend has forgotten there hasn’t been anyone in the tower in months who cares one way or another whether they’re up at the crack of dawn, and he’s wasting a perfectly good chance to sleep in. Maybe if Stiles lies here and ignores him a little longer he’ll figure that much out on his own and go away, leaving Stiles to snooze another half hour and bask in the tail-end of that amazing dream he was having. He can’t remember the last time he felt this warm or comfortable and Scott has no right to ruin it for him.
“Stiles!” Scott’s saying, “Stiles, Lydia’s awake!”
The words hit Stiles like a bucket full of ice. He sits up so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. “Lydia?” he croaks.
“She woke up!” Scott repeats. “About an hour ago. Jackson wouldn’t let me leave until dawn, he thought... Stiles, what happened? Are you...?”
Stiles hurriedly rubs his eyes and sits up. What’s he supposed to tell Scott? That he spent the whole time getting a great night’s sleep on Lydia’s wonderful mattress, with nothing more unusual to show for it than the best dream he’s had in... oh holy...
Did that really happen? But... he’s alive - he’s fine - he’s not even aching anywhere; if all that happened for real he’d at least still be feeling it, right? He’s neatly tucked into bed; his incense pot is sitting on the stool beside him in perfect order, and the shutters over the window are closed, the only light in the room coming from a lantern on the floor by Scott’s feet. Stiles’ hand goes to his shoulder - the incubus bit him there so hard it would’ve had to bruise, but there’s nothing. He tugs up the blankets and looks down at himself. There’s not a mark anywhere on his body - which he can see, because the lacy nightdress he’s still sort-of-wearing has been ripped in two.
“Oh my god,” he says. “That was real?” He badly needs a word for that thing that happens when some detail of a dream you’d almost forgotten on waking grabs you by the toes and the whole incoherent narrative comes crashing back over you, because he’s experiencing the hell out of it right now, with the added aaargh-factor of it not being a dream.
Scott swallows, his face the perfect picture of the same concern that Stiles is feeling knotted in his chest like the prelude to a heart attack. They must make such a picture.
“Is it...” Scott begins, “is it dead? What happened?”
Stiles shakes his head - not denial, he honestly has no idea. Scott’s nostrils flare, and Stiles wonders, a little helplessly, what an incubus smells like to a werewolf. He watches Scott pace the room, examining everything, then he throws the shutters open and peers out the window. He sniffs at the sill first, then he cranes his head outside.
“Stiles!” he calls, sudden and urgent.
Stiles is quietly glad that whatever Scott’s found out there has his full attention, because the mess he makes scrambling out of bed and tripping over himself while barely holding Lydia’s nightgown closed over his naked body is not his greatest moment.
“Do you see that?” Scott says, when Stiles joins him.
Stiles peers down, but he doesn’t have werewolf vision or the miraculous ability to find a single shred of clothing from his one-true-love left on a branch in the woods a mile away, and he has no idea what he’s looking for. “What?”
“There! Don’t you see it?” Scott turns on his tail and races for the door, leaving Stiles alone, barely clothed, and none the wiser.
Werewolves. Jesus.
***
He’s delayed in joining Scott outside by the need to find himself something to wear that won’t leave him exposed and freezing in the early morning wind. His hands are numb and his heart is beating like it isn’t counting on ever getting the chance again, and it all takes him far too long.
Scott has left the outside door open in his rush to get down there; Stiles calls his name the moment he’s through it.
“Over here!” Scott yells back, and Stiles has to run halfway around the tower to join him.
Lying in the dirt maybe fifty paces from Lydia’s window, Scott has found a body. It’s a dead incubus, features shrivelled like death aged it a thousand years before leaving it dry; its face twisted in a rictus of agony, the stone around it splattered and stained with an oily black fluid. It must have snowed in the night, leaving its skin dusted a thin layer of white crystals, and the effect is to make it seem almost as though it must have been here much longer than a few measly hours; like they’ve chanced upon a sculpture left in this spot to commemorate a victory over the forces of evil a hundred years ago.
If so, the sculptor was meticulous in his detail. There’s no missing how the membrane of one of its wings has been torn clean through, the remainder hanging from the elbow of the splayed wing like the banner of a fallen army, where it stubbornly refuses to flutter in the wind. Its throat has been ripped out, the wound so deep its whole head cants backwards at an unnatural angle. There’s not a freckle of skin paler than an ugly grey anywhere on its body; it looks inhuman and demonic in a way that shares nothing with whatever Stiles experienced last night whatsoever.
He can’t even begin to sort out what he’s supposed to make of this. Scott, being Scott, has missed this fact entirely.
“It worked!” he exclaims. He sounds awed, ecstatic - like even with Stiles and Lydia both miraculously alive, it’s only this that has him convinced of their victory. “Stiles, it worked!”
Stiles stares at the dead incubus and feels sick to his stomach. He doesn’t know what to think. He’s saved, at least temporarily, from having to make up his mind by the sound of two more sets of boots tramping briskly through the snow, followed by the sight of Lydia hurrying towards them, Jackson trailing puppy-like in her wake.
Her cheeks are flushed a vivid pink, and Stiles is fairly sure the oversized coat she’s wrapped in isn’t hers, or from the wardrobe of anyone else who ever lived in the upper floors of the tower. He’s also fairly sure the hint of cream showing at her neck is the same night dress she was wearing last night when Scott carried her downstairs. The open-mouthed look of horror on her face at the sight of the body has to be a mirror of Stiles’ own, except...
Except that it’s not, because Stiles has no more hope of understanding what’s going through her mind right now than he does anything else about what’s happened to them all here - doesn’t know how much Jackson or Scott have told her or how much she remembers, or how she’s supposed to have any hope of dealing with this when even Stiles can’t. And suddenly the fact that he doesn’t know feels like the greatest failure of his whole short life; so much it makes his heart ache for her and just about takes his breath away.
Lydia’s hands clench into fists at her sides. “Burn it,” she commands, her voice hardly shaking. “I want that - thing burned to ash before sundown.”
“Is that really necessary?” asks Scott, all kinds of uncertain. “They don’t - they don’t come back to life, do they?”
For several moments there’s silence between all of them, but for the whistle of the wind and the rapid exchange of looks.
“...I’ll start collecting firewood,” says Scott, looking decidedly spooked as he vanishes away around the curve of the tower foundations.
Lydia turns on her heel and marches back to the tower door. Jackson calls her name and steps towards her, but she sweeps straight past him without a glance. For a few seconds he hangs there, undecided, looking back and forth between her departing form and the body of the incubus lying in the snow, which clearly holds just as much morbid fascination for him as it does for everyone else. Then he throws Stiles one quick, desperate look that might even have been gratitude coming from anyone other than Jackson, and hurries after her.
Suddenly alone, Stiles sinks straight down to the earth beneath him and drops his head onto his knees. Something happened here last night; something he’s not nearly ready to process yet - maybe won’t ever be - and the understanding of just what hovers around the edge of his perception like a moth around a flame. Only he’s the moth in that metaphor somehow, and he has the unsettling feeling he burned up long ago and just hasn’t got to realising it yet.
He stays like that until the cold of the snow has soaked straight through the seat of his coat and his muscles have gone numb.
***
Stiles comes out of his funk because Scott - once again - has his hand on his shoulder. “Stiles? Are you okay?”
Stiles blinks at him blearily and decides standing up isn’t his best choice right now. “No. Yes. I don’t know. ‘Okay’ is possibly not the word I’d have chosen.”
“Stiles,” Scott looks at what’s left of the dead incubus and back again. “Did it... did it hurt you?”
“Not really?” His first instinct is to lie about it, but the real concern in the way Scott’s looking at him draws more honesty out of Stiles than he’d intended. “It was like something out of a dream and I don’t know how much of what I think I’m remembering even really happened.”
Scott gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze. He’s never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but on a good day he still gets when he’s not getting something important, and this is one of those days. “You wanna talk about it?”
Stiles shakes his head.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to,” Scott says quickly, then after a moment, sounding a lot less certain, and in a voice that suggests he’s trying to reassure both of them, he adds, “You know, messing with your head is what they do, right?”
Stiles takes a long look at the body.
“Oh yeah,” he agrees. “That’s what they do.”
***
Building a bonfire large enough to burn the incubus turns into a back-breaking slog of a job that Stiles is terribly, terribly grateful for, considering that no-one much wants to talk about what happened last night, and being left alone with his thoughts any longer would be all kinds of unpleasant. No-one wants to touch the body, not even to move it somewhere more sheltered, so they build themselves a wood pile right over where they found it. The firewood left to their stockpiles this late in the season was never laid down for cremating something the size of a human out in the wind, and the only comfort in being sent out into the woods for more at this time of year is that at least it’s too cold to be very damp. That and how they have Scott’s wolf-muscles to do the worst of the heavy lifting.
Some days, Stiles is really okay with having wasted most of his sixteenth year helping his best friend get over the urge to murder him every full moon, if this is what he gets to show for it in the long run.
Rebecca and Shantal, the Tower’s one maid and cook, show up later to gape at the slain beast for themselves, once Jackson coaxes them out of the kitchen. Stiles doesn’t even remember what he says to them, just the disbelief on their faces and how it becomes one more awkward new reminder that no-one, however much or little they might have been involved, is feeling much like celebrating their victory yet. Jackson tries to help once he’s herded them back inside again, but it’s pretty obvious his shoulder is still doing its best to drive him to distraction. The only thing keeping him out here is that he’s far too stubborn to own up to it whenever Scott or Stiles throw a subtle hint his way that maybe he should go lie down before he passes out. Mostly, he just gets in the way and makes the people doing the real work feel seriously uncomfortable. Less than twenty four hours gone, and already their emergency camaraderie is going sour. How unexpected.
Eventually, the three of them hit on a system - Scott drags and chops the largest pieces from the woods; Stiles carries and stacks the pieces around the body, and Jackson helps. If this mostly means that Jackson spends his time re-stacking Stiles’ work a pointed foot or so closer to the body than Stiles has any particular desire to get, then what the hell, he’s not complaining and everyone wins.
It takes far too much work and a whole bottle of perfectly good spirits to get the damn pyre to light and stay lit, gradually building into a good-sized blaze under a plume of smoke that funnels up with the wind. They’ve been pretty lucky the weather has stayed clear this long as it is. Stiles was expecting the incubus’s funeral pyre to reek of all the worst things about burnt or rotting flesh rolled into a nauseating stench, but it doesn’t smell of anything beyond the tang of damp wood, smoke and heat. Somehow, that’s almost worse.
He watches it burn, too tired to censor his own thoughts anymore, or to hold off facing the fact whatever it was that saved them, nothing about his stupid plan had worked. Something happened last night and he doesn’t understand what, but he can’t tell Scott that because he wouldn’t even know how to begin. They’re all alive - Lydia’s alive - and they’re all so relieved that Stiles can’t bear to touch that.
Lydia stares into the fire with a haunted look in her eyes until only the blackened bones remain.
***
With all the excitement it’s almost sunset before they remember it’s going to be a full moon tonight.
It’s been a year and more since the full moon was a problem for Scott, but with the threat still fresh in his mind, it’s no surprise that he’s antsy tonight in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. Lydia’s as close to being his alpha as anything he’s ever had, and that thing with how they dealt with the monster without Scott ever getting to lay a paw on it hasn’t done much to reassure his inner wolf that the danger is past. Scott-the-human may be happy to sit inside tonight in the spirit of solidarity, keeping Stiles and his nerves company, but Scott-the-wolf wants to go patrol the woods and howl into every shadow to let anything lurking out there know this home is guarded. Within an hour Stiles tells him to just go already, though not without a warning to be careful. The hunters are due back tomorrow and may already be close, and if they find him out there wolfing around they’re not going to ask questions first.
Scott vanishes out the door with a last, guilty look over his shoulder, and Stiles makes a spirited attempt at being so exhausted he falls straight into a dead sleep the moment his head hits the pillow.
An hour or two of tossing and turning later, he has to admit his plans aren’t showing a very promising trend lately.
The very idea of keeping himself from turning last night’s events over in his mind all night is laughable. It’s all he’s been trying not to do all day. The worst is the feeling that he should be able to piece it all together easily, but the truth remains that Stiles is one or two vital assumptions short of being able to make himself believe any conclusion he comes to. Nothing about this makes sense - starting with there suddenly being incubi in this part of the world at all. Further complications include the futility of trusting anything said, done, demonstrated or even obliquely implied by any member of a race of demon known for messing with your perceptions. He doesn’t know how much - if anything - of what he thinks he remembers from last night really happened; not except for the parts that proved how embarrassingly far he is from qualified to understand any part of anything that would explain the mysterious ways of the incubi.
Even if Stiles thinks he’s put it together... what if that’s just what the incubus wants him to believe?
He’s already dreading the conversation he’s going to have to have with Deaton next time he’s in this part of the country, which is pretty funny when he’d still seriously consider giving up a finger or two if it brought him his mentor tomorrow. Which is already kind of an improvement, because only hours ago he’d have gladly sacrificed a whole foot in return for ‘yesterday’.
He could ask the hunters when they make it back tomorrow, he supposes. Incubi are the kind of things they’re supposed to know about, even if they don’t see a lot of them locally around these parts. After all, there’s probably only an even-odds chance the hunters will decide Stiles’ story is a sign he’s still under the thrall of a malicious being, and will have to have its influence tortured out of him for his own good.
Even incubi only scare Stiles a little bit more than Christopher Argent does, let alone him and the rest of his family (saving only Allison, who was clearly found on a doorstep as a baby; possibly as some sort of heavenly gift entrusted as the saviour of lost souls).
Ordinarily, on a sleepless night, Stiles’ refuge is his hand and his imagination, but tonight that’s only doomed to lead him into recalling all those other parts of last night that he’s been trying so hard not to dwell on. He should have spent the day remembering what the incubus had done to him every time he moved. Every time he rolled his shoulder or moved a hip there should have been the reminder of exactly what sort of strenuous activities the they’d got up to last night. But there’s been nothing, until the very lack of awkward reminders proves his undoing and Stile finds himself worrying over the details of the encounter, terrified of losing something crucial before he ever gets close to making sense of it, until he gives up all pretence of maintaining any approximation of scientific detachment. Had there been a bruise when it bit him on the shoulder? Had it really taunted him with the threat of leaving him alone and frustrated mere moments after assuring him his choices were sex-and-death or sex-and-silence? What, exactly, had it been like when it kissed him? Already, it feels like something that happened weeks ago rather than only last night; or maybe a six-month-old fantasy worn long past its best days. Nevermind that after that the inadequacy of his hand is far more than he wants to deal with yet.
Sometime after midnight he finally drops off. He wakes barely an hour later from a vivid nightmare that the incubus is on him, only to see the hunters burst into the room, drag it off the bed and rip out its throat, then toss its body out the window. Before Stiles can decide whether to thank them or curse them and weep, they’re dragging him off the bed the same way, and when he tries to tell them they’re making a mistake his teeth feel wrong and his mouth won’t work, and when he looks down at his hands he sees claws protruding from the ends of shrivelled, blackened fingers.
‘Drenched in sweat with a heart beating like a drum’ doesn’t do justice to the state he’s in after waking. Deaton’s taught him a few things about the meaning of dreams over the years, but scholarly analysis would be wasted on material like that.
Eventually, Stiles gives in to the inevitable. He gets up, lights a candle, retrieves that thrice-damned book of poetry, and sets himself to pour over every line of the poem that got him into this mess for the slightest, subtextual hint of anything he might have missed. When that fails, he goes back over his other sources with the same level of scrutiny.
He’s still at it when Scott comes back to find him, shortly before dawn.
***
In the morning, Lydia takes to reasserting her authority over her life by ordering them all around like she’s not merely queen of the castle, but the queen who’s discovered her servants have been slacking off their duties in her absence (nevermind it was an absence of barely twenty-four hours, during which she never technically left the building). Neither Stiles or Scott have ever been very good at taking orders without giving lip, or really gotten used to this lean-times arrangement where they’re getting their instructions directly from the lady of the manor. Fortunately, Lydia seems to take their moaning as a sign everything is back to normal. (It’s not, and Stiles is a thousand miles away from believing it ever will be, and as a coping strategy what Lydia is doing is as transparent as glass. But when it comes down to it, reminding himself that Lydia probably has it even worse than even he does today is pretty close to being the best working distraction he’s got.)
As the hours drag on, there’s no sign of the hunters, and no-one’s happy about that - least of all Scott.
“You have that look,” Stiles tells him, poking Scott with the end of his broom. “It hasn’t been two weeks since you last saw Allison. You can wait a couple of hours longer.”
“That’s not it,” Scott protests.
“Then what? Enlighten me.”
Scott gives up on sweeping and leans awkwardly on his own broom handle. “They’re still not back. They’ve been out in the woods in the middle of nowhere all this time. What if Lydia wasn’t the first one it went for? What if it got to Allison first?”
“Allison?” This is such pure, classic Scott McCall that Stiles sort of wants to frame it and stick it on a wall somewhere. “The one out in the woods with a whole family of hunters?”
Scott has the decency to look a little bit embarrassed. “We don’t know they’ve ever seen a real incubus before.”
“Scott,” says Stiles, “I promise you that if our incubus was stupid enough to go after a hunter, we would not be having this conversation because it would be dead and we’d never have known it existed. It would be so dead that what we found in the snow yesterday would look peachy and energetic in comparison.”
Scott hunches a little and nods along to Stiles’ painfully obvious point. “I guess... if even we managed to take care of it...”
“See? The hunters will be back any time now. So relax and help me with these dust bunnies. Some of them have teeth, I swear.” It’s not a lie. It’s hardly even a lie of omission, and he’s telling it to make Scott feel better, so why does it settle in his stomach like a lump of lead?
Luckily for Stiles, this is the moment Lydia chooses to pop her head around the door and save him from what’s left of this conversation.
“Stiles,” she calls, with an elegant swirl of strawberry hair, “I need you upstairs.”
Stiles, naturally, manages to thank her for her timely distraction by blurting out, “What? Why?”
“Now,” Lydia pronounces, and flounces away around the corner.
Stiles shoots Scott a look, but his friend just shrugs at him. Stiles shoves his broom at him and hurries out after her, very nearly running head-first into Rebecca in the hallway as she bustles past with her arms full of bedclothes. (“If anyone asks, I burnt these like she told me to and the ones on my bed just look the same,” she hisses to him. Stiles holds up his hands and flattens himself against the wall to let her pass. Yeah, no-one’s escaping Her Ladyship’s rampage today.)
He doesn’t know what Lydia wants him for, but assuming Jackson’s not waiting for them up there - and that ought to be a safe bet - this will be the first time they’ve been alone together since she woke up. Does she want to thank him for saving her life? That would be pretty amazing, though also kind of awkward. Lydia’s hardly ever given him a second glance until now, but he’s never contributed to saving her life before either. He has no way of knowing how likely it is.
Lydia’s facing away from the doorway when Stiles peers around it, turned instead to inspect one of her bookshelves. “You... needed me for something?” he calls, and only then notices that the shelf she’s looking at is the one where all the remaining books are canted on an angle to fill the gap left when Stiles removed his three historical volumes two nights ago. “Oh... the books - I was going to put them away as soon as I was done, you know, researching what we were dealing with; I guess it slipped my mind with everything. I can got get them right now!” but he’s not even turned to go before reality checks in. “Except that if that was all you wanted, you would have told me downstairs and been done with it. So...”
Lydia turns on her heel and gives him one of her many Looks. “Are you quite done?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
Lydia leans significantly back against the shelves. “Stiles, I called you up here, because I need you,” she says, “to explain to me what happened last night.”
Okay. So he came up here not knowing what to expect, but that is officially not a question Stiles feels prepared for. “Didn’t Jackson fill you in already?”
“Just - humour me,” says Lydia, with that twitch of her chin she generally saves for dealing with the terminally slow. “You’re the man of the hour, aren’t you Stiles? I want to hear exactly how you killed the incubus - in your own words.”
Stiles takes a deep breath. He can do this. He can probably even do this without - technically - having to lie to her. “One of the books I borrowed mentioned this way you can trap them. Incubi prey on young women - that’s what they’re built to do - but the idea is if you can trick them into attacking a man they think is a woman, it messes up their magic enough that it weakens them and leaves them vulnerable. You can even kill them that way. So my plan was to - to borrow one of your dresses and put myself in your bed and see if it took the bait. Which it did, and the rest is history.”
Lydia listens through his explanation with the expression of someone whose patience is being tried to its limits. When he’s done, and has apparently exhausted his window to add anything more, she gives a short sigh and shuts her eyes. “No, you didn’t,” she pronounces.
“Pardon?”
“No, you didn’t,” Lydia repeats, “because that? Does. Not. Work. The myth that an incubus finds contact with a human male ‘distasteful’ derives entirely from a mistranslation of an account originally recorded in Latin over five centuries ago; likely popularised by a class of desperate young men who will stoop to trying to convince the objects of their affections that they’ll be miraculously made safe from incubi attacks simply by having a man sharing their beds. In reality, there are dozens of well-documented accounts proving that incubi are just as willing to pursue male victims as female. The correct translation attributes the incubus’ defeat to the lethal dose of arsenic its victim was fed before being laid out. When the incubus attempted to drain him of life, the poison reversed the effect and killed the demon instead. His being male had nothing to do with it whatsoever.”
Lydia folds her arms and raises her eyebrows at him. Stiles gapes in complete incredulity and more than a little awe. “How do you know that?”
“I read, Stiles,” says Lydia. “My Latin tutor felt an understanding of the risks one takes trying to translate the classic texts with a less than perfect appreciation for linguistic nuance was integral to my studies. It’s all in Scriptores Graci et Romani Commentarium Grammaticum, which I can’t help but notice is also missing from its shelf.”
Holy mother of god, thinks Stiles, why did Lydia have to be the one who was unconscious for the whole mess? She and her amazing brain could have saved them so much trouble.
“Now are you going to tell me what really happened,” Lydia asks, “or will I have to explain the full nature of your omission to Scott and Jackson - and the Argents the moment they get back?”
Stiles swallows around a lump in his throat the size and texture of a walnut. “Okay, so you’re right,” he admits, stepping a pace into the room and self-consciously tugging the door behind him mostly-closed. “There is stuff I didn’t tell...”
Two seconds worth of sudden and unaccountable vertigo are all the warning Stiles gets before the world blacks out.
***
The first thing Stiles notices when he wakes up again is that someone’s moved him down to the servants’ quarters, laying him out on his own mattress.
The second thing is the incubus is sitting in a chair across the room, watching him with an expression of furious intent.
“Holy god!” It takes the space of an instant for Stiles to go from lying down to halfway out of bed and trying very hard to melt into the wall behind him.
“Hello, Stiles,” says the incubus, smiling in a manner Stiles doesn’t find all that pleasant. With the useless clarity of a man about to die, Stiles has the impression of something different about it this time. It looks oddly paler in the late afternoon sunlight, leaking in through the window, and not in that appealingly human way that had so captivated him last time either. There’s the impression of wiry tension running through its entire posture, from its shoulders to the deceptively casual cross of its legs to the set of its jaw.
“You,” it says, and oh look, now it’s not even pretending to smile anymore, “broke our agreement.”
“Our what?” Apparently this is just how Stiles is going to deal with every confusing statement anyone throws at him today.
“You tried to tell someone about me.” The incubus pronounces each word very carefully, clearly hailing from the Lydia-school of dealing with the terminally slow.
“I nev... oh.” Jesus, this is humiliating. Stiles has spent how long going over everything that happened last night, and the part where the incubus made him promise never to tell anyone - that still slipped his mind? “But that was...” he protests. “I thought you were going to kill me anyway!”
“And since then,” replies the incubus, tone dripping with contempt, “nothing’s happened - nothing’s come to light - to make you wonder if you might want to reassess that.”
Stiles takes the opportunity to swallow, self-consciously slow. “Are you... going to kill me now?”
He could have done without the way it relaxes into something like amusement at the idea of Stiles’ mortality. “Fortunately, I don’t have to. You’d think someone who knew enough to set up that incense would have understood what it means to give your word to one of my kind. But you’ve found out the hard way by now, haven’t you Stiles?” and only then does Stiles get around to thinking back on what it had felt like the moment before he’d passed out.
“That was a - you put me under a geas? That’s why I passed out back there?”
“You put yourself under a geas,” says the incubus. “The moment you accepted my terms.”
“So when I was... oh, Jesus.” Stiles presses both hands into his forehead. “I am an idiot.”
The incubus waves a hand. “Do go on.”
Magnanimously, Stiles opts to let that comment go. “So, I literally cannot tell anyone about you. If I try, I’m out cold. Okay. Glad we got that cleared up.” He glares at the incubus over his fingers. “You know, Lydia’s not just going to let this go. I’m going to have to tell her something.”
“So you tell her a lie.”
“What lie? I don’t know how much of this you caught through your whole geas deal, but she’s not going to fall for just anything, and now she’s going to want an explanation for why I passed out too!”
“Not my problem.” The incubus gives a casual shrug. Stiles gapes at it.
“Seriously?”
The incubus fixes him with another look. “You think I came back to hand you a cover story? You’re going to tell her whatever it is you can make her believe. And you’re going to do it because you already know that you only get so many accidental slip-ups before the geas stops letting you off so easily.”
Stiles scrubs his hands through his hair. This is what he gets for dealing with incubi; locked in a bind where he has no choice but to wrack his brains for something Lydia will believe when she already knows he’s lying to her. Small wonder demons are known for being more trouble than they’re worth.
“Why does it matter to you so much that people don’t know about you, anyway?” he asks, a little desperately. “Are all the other incubi in town going to think less of you if they find out you let me live?”
The incubus elects to respond to this question by demonstrating that it can, in fact, carry on a whole side of a conversation with nothing more than a string of significant, sardonic looks.
A loud sigh whistles its way through Stiles’ lips. “Did you show up just to clear me up on all this? Because I’m pretty sure I would have figured it all out for myself by now if I didn’t have you looming at me from the corner over there.”
Rather than answer, the incubus stands up, a fascinating process which seems to run through every relevant muscle one by one, then positively stalks towards him.
“Oh,” says Stiles, all the heat in his body rapidly pooling southwards; he’d actually gone and forgotten, somehow, just what effect the incubus’s presence had on him. “Again? Here? Now?” By the last word it’s reached his mattress; Stiles has to crane his head backwards now to look it in the eye. The simple act of breathing is suddenly demanding far more of his concentration than it did a moment ago.
“Did you have other plans?” The incubus places both hands and a good deal of its weight onto either side of Stiles’ shoulders in meaningful fashion, leaving Stiles struck anew by the way his whole body sinks with the mattress - even his own thin, crappy mattress on his own thin, crappy bed - beneath its weight.
“No,” he says, “Definitely not,” and underlines his enthusiasm by shoving the blankets out of the way, distantly pleased that they go easily with no extra struggling. Seems Scott got as far as taking his shoes off and dumping him in bed, but stopped short of tucking him in or... wait, that might be a problem. “Um. Except-for-how-Scott-could-walk-in-here-any-moment,” he babbles, “That might not be so good for-”
There’s a brief flash of white teeth. “Your friend is taking your collapse after two nights without sleep as a natural sign of exhaustion,” the incubus tells him, as it climbs properly onto the bed. “He’s making sure everyone leaves you alone long enough to get some real rest.”
Stiles quietly retracts every horrible thing he ever said about Scott McCall; looks up at the incubus nervously and swallows again. God, it’s all so different in the daylight, now he can see it better. “You promise you’re not going to kill me this time?”
The incubus actually rolls its eyes at him. “I’m starting to think it’s the only way to stop you asking.”
“Hey, don’t blame me! You guys have a reputation,” Stiles protests, holding up his hands.
The incubus raises its eyebrows at him and generally looms. Damn, but it likes looming. Stiles likes how it likes looming. This is one incubus that can loom over him any time it likes. “Oh, because you’re some kind of friendly incubus who never kills anyone, and I should just be able to tell,” he babbles, with what is very little more than false bravado at this point.
The incubus, suddenly, doesn’t seem to be making eye contact anymore, and Stiles is just as suddenly aware how terribly he actually doesn’t want to know.
“Um,” he says, “Can we forget I asked that?”
“Stiles,” says the incubus, “shut up,” and kisses him.
The kiss is vicious and demanding; the incubus sucks on his tongue like it’s mad at him for ever wasting it on other uses (hell, caught in the moment it’s beyond Stiles to disagree) but if it was assuming it would be enough to shut his brain down for long, he’s going to disappoint it. When it gentles the kiss and begins to pull away from him, he thinks wow, and I could so get used to more of this, and then the words, “You know, if this is what breaking your geas gets me, I’m not feeling a lot of incentive to be more careful,” come out of his mouth the moment he has use of it again.
The incubus makes an exasperated noise and leans back to look him in the eye. “Too bad. From now on, you break it, you wake up alone.” It jerks its head for emphasis. “This isn’t going to happen again.”
It’s slightly possible this last declaration leaves Stiles even colder than the idea he’s possibly sleeping with a murderer, which is so much more than he’s going to let himself analyse any time soon. Somewhere during this kiss he must have reached for it, because his hands are clutching at the incubus’ sides, and he’s tightening his fingers to hold it here before he knows what he’s doing. “Why not?” One kiss, and he’s back to pleading.
“What exactly do you think this is, Stiles?” The incubus is definitely losing patience with him, though it pairs this with a shimmery sort of movement that sends muscle flexing under Stiles’ hands. You can’t hold me here, it’s saying, but all it does is make Stiles desperate to know how that would feel with his lips where his fingers are now.
“Okay, okay, let me rephrase,” he says, mind racing and far too much of his attention wasted on the feel of the incubus’ ribs under his thumbs. “So why now?”
This seems to go over better. Stiles gets maybe half a second to take in the wicked glint in the incubus’ eyes before eye contact is gone because it’s doing that amazing thing where it puts its mouth right up against the side of his neck and just breathes into his skin, warm and wet. Right under his ear, it tells him, “I was hungry,” and closes its mouth over the skin below his ear. Stiles moans.
The slide of the incubus’ lips working their way below his jaw is the best kind of distraction; it takes another half a minute or so for Stiles to even remember that there are still things he needs to know he understands here. “For... you mean for life force? Are you sure this isn’t going to hurt me?”
The incubus is abruptly not sucking kisses into his neck anymore. “Stiles, either I kill you or I don’t. There’s no halfway. Happy?”
“Then why don’t all... wait, waaaait, I get it - that’s why you’re still hungry, isn’t it? It’s because you didn’t kill me. Whatever it is you get from us, you don’t get as much if we’re not dead at the end.” Stiles grins, intensely pleased with this deduction.
The incubus glares at him. “You realise there are less difficult people I could go to for this.”
“No, no! I’ll shut up, I prom- no, wait, I still have to ask you something!” In a frustrated jerk of motion the incubus makes as though to leave the bed altogether. Horrified, Stiles grabs it by the upper arm and holds on. “No, don’t, it’s important! That other incubus, the one that attacked Lydia - you’re the one that killed it!”
The nuance of the incubus’s glare seems to be saying, please tell me you didn’t only just figure that out now.
“Yeah, so that was pretty obvious. I just - why?” Even if it does cost him his second chance at sex, he needs this much before he goes mad wondering. “It wasn’t for me; you didn’t even know who you were going to find in there. So why?”
“Maybe he was muscling in on my territory,” suggests the incubus, testily.
“Your territory?” Stiles coughs out half a laugh. “We don’t have incubi out here! There hasn’t been an incubus seen this far west in - in ever. Suddenly there’s two outside the same window in the same night?”
The incubus is close enough that when it gives an impatient huff, Stiles feels it against his skin. “Yes, Stiles.” It sounds furious now, “Suddenly there’s two, and one of them is leaving bodies lying around in their bedrooms - letting himself be seen by people who aren’t even his prey, just to toy with them - and leaving his prey enthralled and unconscious for a whole day. Like he wants every hunter within a hundred miles turning the country upside down to find him and every last one of us out there besides!”
Hearing it that angry should be terrifying, except that for the first time today, Stiles has a pretty good idea that what’s upset it doesn’t have anything to do with him.
It occurs to him all in a rush to wonder how people are supposed to know there aren’t any incubi in a place where they don’t leave bodies behind - when even he’d woken up the morning after convinced the whole thing had been a dream. His hand is still resting on its bicep, not gripping anymore, and he stares dumbly at it for moment, wondering anew that it’s even real. “Oh. Oh. Then you were - you’ve been... how long have you...?”
“How long have I what? Lived here? Been tracking him?” The incubus resettles itself in a manner that, to Stiles relief, no longer suggests it’s three seconds from giving up and leaving. Its voice deepens to a low hiss. “Let’s say long enough.”
“You saved my life that night,” Stiles breathes, and maybe for the first time he really believes it too. “We’d all be dead if you hadn’t...”
This gets him a satisfied smirk. “Feeling grateful?” it asks, and for once Stiles is lost for words. He should be dead but instead he gets this - it doesn’t make any sense, and the only answer he can come up with is to get a hand up behind its head and tug it down so it can lick its way into his mouth again, slow and wet.
“That’s the idea,” it murmurs, once it has Stiles so out of breath he has to come up for air or suffocate. It’s on him again before he’s even done panting, leaving him light-headed and giddy; the only thoughts left in his head the ones that go yes and I should have died, how am I so lucky? This is maybe not the best time he could have chosen to face just how close he came that night, but there’ve got to be worse ways to spend the rush of adrenalin and relief. For just now, it’s no effort to forgive the incubus for being an incubus - he can even forgive it for being a sardonic asshole who’s only here to use him for sex. Stiles is feeling more grateful than he has any idea what to do with if he can’t share it.
The next thing to matter enough to pull him back down to earth is the incubus working on the belt around his tunic, then tugging him up so Stiles can help rid himself of the rest of it. It slides down his body to tug his pants down and away, and the little space and air that puts between them turns out to be exactly the perspective Stiles needs to find himself newly rapt by how it moves, developing a whole new appreciation for the way the light plays over its weird mottled skin. He needs to go back to Deaton’s anatomy lessons and learn the names of all those muscles. Who cares if it’s mostly thrall speaking right now or whatever; who could ask for a better way to celebrate being alive?
“Do you have a name? I mean, you don’t have to tell me,” he amends, quickly, when the incubus gives him another one of its looks. “I know how that can be bad news. But if there’s something I can call you, I could, you know, call you that. While we do this. If you like.”
The incubus freezes, like Stiles has it trapped in his gaze, and for a long moment he can’t begin to guess what it must be thinking. He itches to touch again, but it’s sitting just out of easy reach. If all he’s going to get for his trouble is a snide refusal, he wishes it would put him out of his misery already.
“Call me Derek.” The name comes out in an almost-growl, and it takes Stiles a moment too long to understand.
“Derek?” Stiles echoes. “You want me to call an incubus ‘Derek’?”
Derek-the-incubus gives him another one of those looks. “You asked. No-one’s forcing you to use it.”
“Yeah, but...” Several questions die on Stiles’ lips as he watches the-incubus-who-may-or-may-not-answer-to-Derek lower its nose to his chest and rub its cheek into the skin around his naval - luxuriating in it, almost - before trailing down further, dipping into the crease of Stiles’ hip. Stiles has barely time to think what is he doing before what he’s doing turns into mouthing the base of Stiles’ cock with a look of utter contentment.
The noise Stiles makes is hardly a moan, it’s almost a squeak.
The incubus flicks another one of those wicked looks up at him and Stiles’ breath catches - he’d been so ready to see mockery after that noise he just made, and there’s nothing like it there at all - but that’s officially all the reprieve he gets before the incredible slick heat of the incubus’ mouth is back again. Stiles can only stare, completely fascinated, as Derek drags up his length to mouth the head, tongue dragging against the foreskin in a way that makes it very, very hard to sit still. This is lewd in ways he can’t begin to deal with; he’s on his back on his bed in the room he used to share with six other people and that he still shares with Scott; there’s sunlight coming in through the window; and he’s never in his life felt this naked. There’s a demon that looks like a human to Stiles in all the ways that matter to him and none of the ways that don’t, with its mouth on a part of him the town rectors always told him he’s not supposed to even touch more than he absolutely has to - looking like it’s never tasted anything better in its life. He. Like he’s never enjoyed anything so much before in his life. He just gave Stiles a name, and even if Stiles can’t quite make himself think of an incubus as ‘Derek’, there’s no way you can think of a Derek as an it.
Stiles is trying so hard not to move, partly because he thinks he’s not supposed to, but mostly because he knows the moment he does - arches into this or thrusts - he’ll lose what little clarity he has left and it’ll all be over so much sooner. He feels himself bump against the back of its throat and somehow he keeps going, the incubus swallowing around him, and that has to be wrong, how is that even possible to be that far inside and it’s like it’s urging him to thrust even deeper, is this something regular humans can even do? God, Derek - Derek goes right on swallowing around him the whole time he comes.
It’s a little confusing, at first, for Stiles to find himself awake afterwards, once he’s back to where he can do confused again, but definitely the good kind of surprised, even if ‘awake’ is officially the most effort he’s going to be up to for a little while. Derek is licking his lips and looking terribly pleased with himself. “Sounds like you’ve got the hang of it to me.”
Belatedly, Stiles remembers having yelled that name at least a couple of times towards the climax of events back there. There may have also been some begging. Whatever - he’s gracious enough to let Derek have that one uncontested.
“Oh good,” he says, distantly, “whadya wanna do now?”
Derek exhibits no hurry whatsoever in crawling back up the bed to kiss Stiles again, languid and slow. There’s a new taste in his mouth that Stiles would probably hate under any other circumstances, but right now, knowing where it came from, he can’t get enough of it, even... Jesus, he can’t be getting hard again already, it hasn’t hardly been sixty seconds.
“Roll over,” says Derek.
“Huh?”
“That’s what we’re doing now,” Derek’s thumbs trace the skin around his naval in a distracting manner. “But it’s going to be a little different this time.” Stiles definitely doesn’t bother to resist as Derek guides him to roll onto his stomach, then tugs him up onto his hands and knees. They’re still shaky and shouldn’t be up to taking his weight, except that if he lets his posture dip even a little he might lose that telltale press of warm skin against his back and between his thighs, the awareness of Derek’s body over him that’s the only sense he’s got left, heightened even further now Stiles can’t see what Derek’s doing.
As usual - and seriously, this is becoming a theme for them - Derek’s in no hurry. He takes his time to settle himself; to wrap an arm around Stiles’ shoulders and drag his hand slowly over the most sensitive parts of Stiles’ neck as he mouths the bumps of Stiles’ spine just below his hairline. Derek’s cock is resting between the cheeks of Stiles’ ass, but he’s not doing anything with it, not unless you count casually driving Stiles slightly insane. He feels Derek sigh against his skin, and say, “Did you ever wonder if I’d have still climbed through that window if I’d known it was you in that room? If you’d been there and if Lydia was in the next, who would I have gone for?”
“You didn’t seem all that disappointed,” Stiles grumbles. He’d swear to god he’d hardly thought about that one in more than passing, so it irks him immensely that Derek is technically right.
“Which do you want it to be, Stiles?” The words make Stiles shiver. Derek has his hands on his ass, running the pads of its thumbs down the inside of his cheeks, so close and so far from where he wants them. “Do you want this to be what you earned by putting yourself in her place - the reward for your useless bravery - or do you want to hear that I’d have gone to you with all the tower to choose from?”
The question makes no sense. Stiles didn’t want this until he had it, and now he has it he wants it both ways and neither, any way he can have it. He doesn’t want to know; he doesn’t want to ask and get an answer he doesn’t like. “Haven’t exactly been losing sleep over it,” he says, caring how steady his voice is.
“No,” Derek muses, thoughtful, “I think the one that’s going to stay with you is, will it ever be like this again? Will there ever be another man, or even a woman, for you anywhere who can give you what I can?” Stiles starts to pant. He can feel Derek moving, lining them up, spreading his thighs. Good thing he got all that extra air in early; when Derek starts to push inside Stiles doesn’t breathe at all until he’s done. He starts to thrust, steadily, and Stiles lets out a sob. He can’t believe he’s come once already. “I promise you, Stiles,” Derek whispers, “there won’t be.”
Something inside Stiles clenches tight; his heart, maybe. He wonders if Derek can feel that, wrapped up in Stiles the way he is right now, but if so it doesn’t seem to bother him. In the moment it’s way too easy to believe Derek’s promise will be the truth.
“Every time, it’ll be different - with every person, it’ll be different - and every time, you’ll remember it’s not me,” Derek whispers in his ear. He curls his hand around Stiles’ cock, not moving it yet, just holding, and the sensation is already next to overwhelming. This is waves of pleasure breaking over a baseline of awe almost too intense to bear. Derek is inside him and over him, a solid presence holding the whole rest of the world at bay. For all those awful promises, all Stiles can think is, how could it ever be like this for you either? and if that sounds foolish even within the confines of his own head, incubi don’t come back to just anyone, do they? What does that even mean? He knows there’s so much Derek’s not telling him and he wants all of it. Even if he doesn’t know what this is between them, Stiles can’t think of this as the end; knows already he won’t be able to face that until the bed’s long cold without him.
“Derek,” Stiles moans, and Derek drives into him hard, so Stiles says it again. Derek responds the same way, and it turns into a rhythm for them, all the way until Stiles feels Derek tense up and come inside him with a hiss.
He definitely comes with Derek’s name on his lips; remembers a hand resting soft against his belly after, easing him down and rolling him to his side before leaving him there to sleep.
Part 3