Curiosity Killed the Cat
Title: Curiosity Killed the Cat
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A fill for the Teen Wolf kink meme: In which, Derek was captured by hunters after his house burned down, and Stiles and Scott stumble upon him, half-feral, in a filthy cage, in some hunter's shady backyard shed. Original is here.
Pairing: Derek/Stiles
Warnings: Does Stiles need his own warning label?
Disclaimer: Oh, right. I almost forgot about this. I own these characters when I'm in Narnia.
A/N: So, chaosraven gave me a gentle nudge to stop procrastinating and put my kink meme fills in my journal so that they're easier to find. And then lj started this fuckery with no subject lines in comments, despite all the negative feedback they've had, so obviously the universe is telling me to get my shit together.
Stiles’ goal for high school is to explore all the creeptastic and abandoned structures in the woods around Beacon Hills. Like that Hale place that’s halfway incinerated and freaks Stiles out every time he goes there alone, because there’s something about the charred house that feels sad and lonely and somehow full, like ghosts actually exist and have taken refuge in the intact rooms. So since the Hale house (mostly) ruined his ability to explore these places alone, the natural thing to do is drag Scott along with him.
“Stiles, I think you got us lost again,” Scott says, lagging behind. “We should just go back.”
“Look that was only one time-okay, five times-and don’t be such a sour puss. Even if we are lost, the good news is that we’ve got water, so we can live a little longer. And you’ve got a full inhaler so we’ll probably starve to death before your body suffocates you,” Stiles says, and has to stop to begin the tricky extraction of his shoelace from a thicket.
“Thanks, Stiles, that’s really comforting,” Scott says.
“Dad mentioned an old hunting cabin out here, and one of the landmarks was a rock that I’m pretty sure is that one over there. Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said it looked like two sheep going at it, was he? That…that’s so awkward.”
He and Scott take a moment to stare at the rock, heads tilted to the side, before they move on. The rock marks the southern side of the cabin, and if Stiles heard correctly, they should be approaching the back yard.
“Success!” Stiles pumps his fist at the first glimpse of the yard. There’s an old Ford truck skeleton in the yard, so rusted that the entire frame is red, surrounded by tall grass.
He and Scott are at the edge of the yard when the growl starts.
“I thought you said this place was abandoned!” Scott says as they trip over themselves to back up into the woods.
“Dad said it was!” Stiles whispers, head twitching around like a hummingbird as he tries to find where the dog must be.
It stops growling, and Stiles still hasn’t seen it, so he creeps forward cautiously. Now that’s he’s actually looking at the yard, it’s mostly filled with metal junk and dirt, and there’s still no dog in sight.
“That’s…weird. Do you think we just had a shared auditory hallucination?” Stiles asks.
“I think we should get out of here before something kills us,” Scott says, taking a hit off his inhaler.
Stiles’ attention is finally caught when he sees movement from the corner of his eye, and he looks over to discover a cage that had previously been hidden from view by the Ford. There’s…there’s a dude. In the cage. This probably isn’t a good sign.
“Hey…man, you okay?” Stiles asks him.
He doesn’t look good, but he doesn’t look bad either. Mostly he just looks dirty and slightly scrawny in the big, dirty shirt he’s wearing, and his dark, short, dirty hair is sticking up all over the place. Did Stiles mention that he’s dirty?
The guy snarls and hurls himself at the cage bars, making the metal screech in protest, and that’s when Stiles notices what he should have noticed first: the fiercely electric blue eyes, the caveman-esque brow, the sideburns that have gotten out of control and trailed all the way up to the guy’s hairline, and oh, yeah, giant, jutting canines.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Stile’s life has just become a B-Horror film. He feels a bit faint.
“Oh my god,” he says, “oh my god, we can’t drink or do drugs or have sex and if you say ‘I’ll be back’ I will punch you.”
“What? Why can’t we have sex? I think Allison really likes me,” Scott says, then, “wait, why are you listing the Scream rules?”
Horror Movie Monster Man conveniently lets out a roar. Scott falls on his ass, and Stiles cowers in manly fear.
“What the hell was that?!”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a werewolf,” Stiles tells him.
Scott stares at him. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking,” Stiles says, looking at the guy who has actually been frothing at the mouth. “Oh my god am I not joking.”
Scott sits up enough to peek around Stiles’ legs, and then falls right back down. “Oh my god, I think that’s a werewolf,” he says.
“You’re so smart, Scott, how ever did you figure it out?” Stiles says in falsetto.
“I’m pretty sure it was the canines,” Scott says.
Stiles wonders how Scott has been his best friend since the first grade and is still oblivious to sarcasm sometimes.
There’s a distinctive thump of a human (well, sort of human) body falling onto a metal surface.
Scott is still being a chicken-shit with no sense of adventure, and Stiles still has too much cat-curiosity, so Stiles hedges forward alone. Horror Movie Monster Man Who is Actually a Werewolf is crumpled at the bottom of the cage, and the only movement he makes is his chest rising and falling.
“Dude, I think he passed out,” Stiles says. “Well, either that or he’s trying to lure us over there. In which case it’s working.”
“It’s working? Are you crazy? We’re not going over there!” Scott shoots up and tries to pull Stiles back towards the trees.
“Oh, come on! We’ve found a werewolf in a cage! Wow, that’s never something I thought I’d ever say. But look, he’s down and we may only get close this once. So man up and…just man up,” Stiles says.
“Inspiring,” Scott says under his breath, but he lets Stiles lead them on anyway.
They walk slower than Mrs. Jameson, that mummy of an old woman who takes five minutes to cross the street with her walker, but Horror Movie Werewolf Man doesn’t stir or growl or magically leap out of the cage and tear off their faces. That’s probably because of the thick, heavy chains and the most extreme heavy-duty padlock that Stiles has ever seen, and coupled with how the bars of the cage are also thick and sturdy and the only metal in the yard not rusted, Stiles feels safer than he did when he decided to check it out.
When they get about five feet away, Stiles can clearly see Horror Movie Werewolf Man’s face. He’s still awake, which gives Stile a moment of blind oh shit not passed out panic, but he’s also panting heavily and, just, the look on his face. The Michaels, Stiles’ next door neighbors, had a Golden Retriever named Harriet that had to be put down last year. Stiles can’t remember a time when she wasn’t there, licking his face through the fence, and when the Michaels asked him to be there for her last moments, nothing in the world would have stopped Stiles from being in that clinic. By then Harriet’s entire muzzle was grey and she was limp on the table, too tired to fight-but her eyes. Stiles remembers how she was still there in her eyes, the same dog who could keep up with his five-year-old energy, and that she had looked so afraid. It was the last time he went to the Hale house alone, where he curled up on the smoke-scented couch and cried because he felt like the house would understand his loss.
The werewolf’s eyes are angry and mean and more animal than human, but they’re mostly afraid. He snarls weakly at them, barely able to move his head.
“Stiles, we should go. Now,” Scott urges.
“I think he’s dehydrated,” Stiles says slowly. Yup, the signs are there: sunken eyes, baring teeth and gums that look dry, skin that was pinched against the cage slowly moving back into place.
“What?”
“I think he’s dehydrated,” Stiles repeats. “I want to give him some water.”
“No! Do you not see his teeth? He’ll rip you apart!” Scott yells.
Stiles doesn’t miss the werewolf’s flinch when Scott’s voice rises.
“Look, you can tell me ‘I told you so’ afterwards if he rips my arm off, but I’m giving him water,” Stiles says.
There’s a metal bowl in the far corner of the cage, completely bone dry, and it knocks some sense into Stiles. Someone has caged a werewolf. He didn’t magically appear in the cage, this isn’t a hallucination or a weird dream; someone deliberately caught and caged a werewolf. Stiles cautiously walks around the cage, but the werewolf doesn’t move, not even when he can’t see Stiles at his feet or when Stiles bravely (stupidly) reaches in and fetches the bowl. He has to tilt it sideways to get it out, but then he’s got it and he walks back to Scott carrying it like a trophy.
Scott looks incredibly concerned and dubious, but he obviously doesn’t understand how awesome Stiles is, especially since the werewolf is tracking Stiles warily but intently. Stiles slots the bowl into the cage, maybe a foot from the werewolf’s collapsed body, and then pulls a water bottle from his pocket. He has to give it to Scott to open, and they have a small but silent fight over Scott twisting off the cap, in which Scott judges him with his eyes and Stiles alternates between glaring and making puppy-dog eyes.
Finally, Scott twists the cap off and Stiles can pour some water into the bowl. It’s only a little, mostly because Stiles doesn’t know how dehydrated the guy is and he’s afraid if he gulps down the water then there will be werewolf puke all over. The werewolf manages to pull himself over to the bowl, but Stiles ends up tilting it so he can drink. He licks the bowl clean, and then pins Stiles with a stare.
Stiles really, really wants to run away or start babbling, because only mobsters and assassins and CIA operatives should have stares that intense, and why was this a good idea? But he stays strong long enough to be reasonably sure that this won’t turn into an episode of Puking Werewolf, and pours some more water. They repeat the cycle, as Scott hangs back about five feet and quietly freaks out, until the entire bottle is gone.
Stiles doesn’t even see it until it’s too late; the werewolf shoots out a hand as Stiles is withdrawing his, clamping tight onto his wrist. Stiles is panicking in a very, very obvious way, and Scott is asking him what’s wrong because from his angle he can’t see what happened, and oh god the werewolf really is going to rip off his arm.
Stiles is about almost to fainting point when the werewolf moves his face right over Stiles’ fisted hand and starts sniffing. But all he does is sniff, nose pressed against Stiles’ skin, and it occurs to Stiles that even with those crazy looking claws and fangs, the werewolf isn’t actually hurting him. He relaxes his arm slowly, and when his hand uncurls the werewolf rumbles happily and sniffs between his fingers.
He licks, a brief swipe of tongue on Stiles’ palm, and then a truck screeching to a halt scares the hell out of all of them.
The werewolf lets go of Stiles with a snarl, and Stiles and Scott make a break for it. Stiles stops twenty feet from the yard, hidden from sight by a tree, and watches the house. The werewolf is still snarling, but no one comes to check on him.
>>>
“Someone probably locked him up because he’s dangerous,” Scott says at lunch the next day.
“Yeah, I’m sure he licked someone to death,” Stiles says. Yay, chicken tenders day.
“We found him when he was so dehydrated he could barely move,” Scott says, “I’m sure at full health that would have gone a lot differently.”
“Okay,” Stiles allows, because yeah, probably, but, “did you see his eyes, though? He wasn’t crazy or murderous or out for blood.”
“Just drop it, Stiles. We saw a werewolf yesterday. I still think that I’ve gone insane.”
Stiles drops it in favor of letting Scott wax poetically about Allison, but he can’t stop thinking about that happy rumble or how the werewolf’s shoulders relaxed when Stiles relaxed.
>>>
Stiles holds out two days before he goes back, but this time he’s alone. He brings two bottles of water and an entire bag of beef jerky, because he couldn’t find anything else in the house to feed a werewolf. (Well, besides raw chicken, but Stiles is not carrying raw chicken through five miles of woods after driving to a little-used access road.)
He makes sure to spy on the front of the house first, and when there’s no truck or sign of someone inside he goes to the back yard.
This time the werewolf is eerily silent, watching Stiles with a stare that makes him feel like very, very small prey. But the werewolf relaxes the closer he gets, even leaning against the cage and sticking his nose out towards Stiles, and Stiles grins unwittingly. The bowl is still empty so this time, after Stiles has successfully twisted off the cap and done a little victory dance, he just pours the entire bottle into the bowl. The werewolf gulps down most of the bowl and then turns towards Stiles expectantly.
“Yeah, okay, you can probably smell the jerky, huh?” Stile says, pulling out the bag and sticking the strip between the bars. He’s barely got an inch through before the werewolf snatches it up with his teeth, and Stiles is still processing when a tongue laves the salt off his fingers.
But Stiles has always been highly adaptable, so he continues to feed the werewolf strip by strip, once again afraid that this will turn into Puking Werewolf: Electric Boogaloo. After about ten strips the werewolf suddenly surges towards him and growls so viciously that Stiles doesn’t just fall on his ass, he rockets onto it.
The werewolf is glaring at him, a look filled with a thousand fiery deaths, and Stiles thinks, small prey, small prey, feeding him meat was not a good idea. But besides the glare the werewolf doesn’t look particularly hateful.
Stiles narrows his eyes. “You’re trying to intimidate me, aren’t you? You ass, I’m not afraid of you!”
The werewolf glares harder, and then he changes his posture so that he seems to fill the entire cage, seems to be larger than life. Stiles wish he could be that badass. The werewolf looks like he could smack someone down like the hand of god. How did he ever think that the overly-large shirt made this guy look scrawny?
“Okay, so maybe I am afraid of you,” Stiles says, and then shoves five pieces of jerky between the bars.
The werewolf snatches them up, still glaring, but Stiles thinks that there might be a bit of amusement in the stare too.
>>>
“Are you insane?” Scott shouts at him the next day.
“Probably,” Stiles says. “Are you coming with me tomorrow?”
“Hell yes,” Scott says.
>>>
Apparently the werewolf doesn’t like Scott too much (Stiles tried calling him Clarence but the glare he shot Stiles made Stile’s balls try to climb up in his body, so he’s still ‘the werewolf’), but as long as Scott hangs back he doesn’t do more than glare his judgmentally at him. Stiles gives him water and fish tacos, which Scott has no right to make fun of because he puts ketchup on scrambled eggs. The werewolf has the tacos in the cage, instead of eating from Stiles’ hand, but he still glares until Stiles lets him lick whatever miniscule residue is on his fingers. Then, Stiles slides lock picks into the cage.
The werewolf’s face is still judgy and scary, but it’s the closest thing to a gleeful expression that Stiles has seen him make. Stiles thinks he’s happy.
Scott, on the other hand, is nowhere near happy.
>>>
“Look, if he’s human enough to pick the lock then he’s human enough to deserve to escape,” Stiles says as they walk back home. “Give me one good reason that we should go back and take the picks away from him.”
“Raptors!”
“Where?!” Stiles spins around, arms pinwheeling.
“Not here, man; I meant raptors as an example. They opened doors so they could eat people. Ow!” Scott rubs the back of his head. “What the hell was that for?”
“You can’t use Jurassic Park as a reason, you dumbass. That’s like trying to woo a girl by watching Conan the Barbarian or something. Raptors don’t even exist anymore!”
“Neither do werewolves!” Scott says.
“People claim that they see werewolves all the time. Have you ever been on the internet? No one claims they see dinosaurs,” Stiles says.
“I’m not going to be sad if he gets out and eats you. Slowly,” Scott tells him.
“Deal,” Stiles says.
>>>
Stiles goes up to the cabin two days later. The cage door is swinging in the wind, creaking and dragging the chains in the dirt.
Stiles grins.
>>>
Two weeks later, Stiles is not grinning.
He wakes up gradually to the feeling of something rubbing against his shoulder blades. The smooth pressure is nice, kind of like a massage, and Stiles drifts, half-asleep, until he realizes that he really is awake and something really is rubbing against him.
As soon as he tenses the rubbing stops, and Stiles squeezes his eyes shut, sends a quick prayer to the ninja gods that he’ll pull this off, then tries to flip over while flailing his elbow backwards.
He flips over, but he doesn’t actually take down whatever was on him with an amazing hit to the face. The ninja gods have deserted him once again.
He’s surprised to find a guy on top of him. He’s slightly back-lit by the yellow of the streetlights, but Stiles can make out the dark hair and hazel eyes. There’s something familiar about the curve of his cheekbones, the line of his shoulders, but mostly Stiles’ brain is shouting, guy rape! Guy rape! Do not let him take off your boxers!
Stiles flails, which is something he’s pretty good at, if he does say so himself, and nearly catches the guy in the eye with an errant hand. The guy snatches his wrists firmly and growls, glaring down at Stiles.
Wait. Wait.
Stiles peers up at him and yes, that’s the glare that makes him feel like his masculinity has fled two states over. Oh my god, this is his werewolf.
“So this is what you look like as a human,” Stiles blurts out, then winces when the werewolf (can Stiles still call him a werewolf when he looks like a human?) glares even more. Stiles should shut up.
“I should shut up, shouldn’t I? That’d be the smart thing to do right now since you’re getting pissed and pinning me down and…and now you’ve got the whole eyes and fangs thing going on, oh god don’t eat me, Scott will never let me live it down if you eat me.”
Apparently, Stiles is incapable of shutting up.
But it’s okay, since the werewolf takes the choice out of his hands when he leans down until Stiles can feel his breath on his cheek. Stiles is so scared that he might be in danger of pissing himself, and as he closes his eyes he finally understand why people do that all the time in horror movies. If he can’t see it, it’s not happening.
Stiles is waiting for the werewolf to rip off his face, or maybe even call him chicken-shit, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, he rubs his cheek against Stiles’ and makes that happy rumble again. He trails his nose down Stiles neck, lapping at his pulse-point, then rubs his cheek against Stiles chest, noses into both his armpits. Stiles squirms when the werewolf’s breath tickles him through his shirt but otherwise stays still, waits it out. The repetitive motion of rubbing lulls him, and despite all the questions running through his head, Stiles can feel sleep tugging at him. The werewolf settles against his side, the concave of the bridge of his nose fitting against the curve of Stile’s jaw. Stiles falls asleep to the steady puffs of breath against his neck.
>>>
The next day, Stiles gets out of school to find the werewolf leaning against his Jeep’s passenger door, face set in its usual glare. Stiles barely knows the guy, and he’s already figured out that it’s his version of a happy face.
“Derek Hale,” the werewolf says when Stiles reaches the Jeep, and Stiles trips over his own feet in shock. Hale? As in the burned Hale house?
“Stiles,” he says.
The werewolf-Derek, wow, no wonder he hated Clarence-nods, glares at Stiles, and then opens the passenger door. “Let’s go,” he says.
Okay. Stiles can flow with this. He gets in, revs his baby up, and grins over at Derek. “Where to?”
“Home,” Derek says.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A fill for the Teen Wolf kink meme: In which, Derek was captured by hunters after his house burned down, and Stiles and Scott stumble upon him, half-feral, in a filthy cage, in some hunter's shady backyard shed. Original is here.
Pairing: Derek/Stiles
Warnings: Does Stiles need his own warning label?
Disclaimer: Oh, right. I almost forgot about this. I own these characters when I'm in Narnia.
A/N: So, chaosraven gave me a gentle nudge to stop procrastinating and put my kink meme fills in my journal so that they're easier to find. And then lj started this fuckery with no subject lines in comments, despite all the negative feedback they've had, so obviously the universe is telling me to get my shit together.
Stiles’ goal for high school is to explore all the creeptastic and abandoned structures in the woods around Beacon Hills. Like that Hale place that’s halfway incinerated and freaks Stiles out every time he goes there alone, because there’s something about the charred house that feels sad and lonely and somehow full, like ghosts actually exist and have taken refuge in the intact rooms. So since the Hale house (mostly) ruined his ability to explore these places alone, the natural thing to do is drag Scott along with him.
“Stiles, I think you got us lost again,” Scott says, lagging behind. “We should just go back.”
“Look that was only one time-okay, five times-and don’t be such a sour puss. Even if we are lost, the good news is that we’ve got water, so we can live a little longer. And you’ve got a full inhaler so we’ll probably starve to death before your body suffocates you,” Stiles says, and has to stop to begin the tricky extraction of his shoelace from a thicket.
“Thanks, Stiles, that’s really comforting,” Scott says.
“Dad mentioned an old hunting cabin out here, and one of the landmarks was a rock that I’m pretty sure is that one over there. Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said it looked like two sheep going at it, was he? That…that’s so awkward.”
He and Scott take a moment to stare at the rock, heads tilted to the side, before they move on. The rock marks the southern side of the cabin, and if Stiles heard correctly, they should be approaching the back yard.
“Success!” Stiles pumps his fist at the first glimpse of the yard. There’s an old Ford truck skeleton in the yard, so rusted that the entire frame is red, surrounded by tall grass.
He and Scott are at the edge of the yard when the growl starts.
“I thought you said this place was abandoned!” Scott says as they trip over themselves to back up into the woods.
“Dad said it was!” Stiles whispers, head twitching around like a hummingbird as he tries to find where the dog must be.
It stops growling, and Stiles still hasn’t seen it, so he creeps forward cautiously. Now that’s he’s actually looking at the yard, it’s mostly filled with metal junk and dirt, and there’s still no dog in sight.
“That’s…weird. Do you think we just had a shared auditory hallucination?” Stiles asks.
“I think we should get out of here before something kills us,” Scott says, taking a hit off his inhaler.
Stiles’ attention is finally caught when he sees movement from the corner of his eye, and he looks over to discover a cage that had previously been hidden from view by the Ford. There’s…there’s a dude. In the cage. This probably isn’t a good sign.
“Hey…man, you okay?” Stiles asks him.
He doesn’t look good, but he doesn’t look bad either. Mostly he just looks dirty and slightly scrawny in the big, dirty shirt he’s wearing, and his dark, short, dirty hair is sticking up all over the place. Did Stiles mention that he’s dirty?
The guy snarls and hurls himself at the cage bars, making the metal screech in protest, and that’s when Stiles notices what he should have noticed first: the fiercely electric blue eyes, the caveman-esque brow, the sideburns that have gotten out of control and trailed all the way up to the guy’s hairline, and oh, yeah, giant, jutting canines.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Stile’s life has just become a B-Horror film. He feels a bit faint.
“Oh my god,” he says, “oh my god, we can’t drink or do drugs or have sex and if you say ‘I’ll be back’ I will punch you.”
“What? Why can’t we have sex? I think Allison really likes me,” Scott says, then, “wait, why are you listing the Scream rules?”
Horror Movie Monster Man conveniently lets out a roar. Scott falls on his ass, and Stiles cowers in manly fear.
“What the hell was that?!”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a werewolf,” Stiles tells him.
Scott stares at him. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking,” Stiles says, looking at the guy who has actually been frothing at the mouth. “Oh my god am I not joking.”
Scott sits up enough to peek around Stiles’ legs, and then falls right back down. “Oh my god, I think that’s a werewolf,” he says.
“You’re so smart, Scott, how ever did you figure it out?” Stiles says in falsetto.
“I’m pretty sure it was the canines,” Scott says.
Stiles wonders how Scott has been his best friend since the first grade and is still oblivious to sarcasm sometimes.
There’s a distinctive thump of a human (well, sort of human) body falling onto a metal surface.
Scott is still being a chicken-shit with no sense of adventure, and Stiles still has too much cat-curiosity, so Stiles hedges forward alone. Horror Movie Monster Man Who is Actually a Werewolf is crumpled at the bottom of the cage, and the only movement he makes is his chest rising and falling.
“Dude, I think he passed out,” Stiles says. “Well, either that or he’s trying to lure us over there. In which case it’s working.”
“It’s working? Are you crazy? We’re not going over there!” Scott shoots up and tries to pull Stiles back towards the trees.
“Oh, come on! We’ve found a werewolf in a cage! Wow, that’s never something I thought I’d ever say. But look, he’s down and we may only get close this once. So man up and…just man up,” Stiles says.
“Inspiring,” Scott says under his breath, but he lets Stiles lead them on anyway.
They walk slower than Mrs. Jameson, that mummy of an old woman who takes five minutes to cross the street with her walker, but Horror Movie Werewolf Man doesn’t stir or growl or magically leap out of the cage and tear off their faces. That’s probably because of the thick, heavy chains and the most extreme heavy-duty padlock that Stiles has ever seen, and coupled with how the bars of the cage are also thick and sturdy and the only metal in the yard not rusted, Stiles feels safer than he did when he decided to check it out.
When they get about five feet away, Stiles can clearly see Horror Movie Werewolf Man’s face. He’s still awake, which gives Stile a moment of blind oh shit not passed out panic, but he’s also panting heavily and, just, the look on his face. The Michaels, Stiles’ next door neighbors, had a Golden Retriever named Harriet that had to be put down last year. Stiles can’t remember a time when she wasn’t there, licking his face through the fence, and when the Michaels asked him to be there for her last moments, nothing in the world would have stopped Stiles from being in that clinic. By then Harriet’s entire muzzle was grey and she was limp on the table, too tired to fight-but her eyes. Stiles remembers how she was still there in her eyes, the same dog who could keep up with his five-year-old energy, and that she had looked so afraid. It was the last time he went to the Hale house alone, where he curled up on the smoke-scented couch and cried because he felt like the house would understand his loss.
The werewolf’s eyes are angry and mean and more animal than human, but they’re mostly afraid. He snarls weakly at them, barely able to move his head.
“Stiles, we should go. Now,” Scott urges.
“I think he’s dehydrated,” Stiles says slowly. Yup, the signs are there: sunken eyes, baring teeth and gums that look dry, skin that was pinched against the cage slowly moving back into place.
“What?”
“I think he’s dehydrated,” Stiles repeats. “I want to give him some water.”
“No! Do you not see his teeth? He’ll rip you apart!” Scott yells.
Stiles doesn’t miss the werewolf’s flinch when Scott’s voice rises.
“Look, you can tell me ‘I told you so’ afterwards if he rips my arm off, but I’m giving him water,” Stiles says.
There’s a metal bowl in the far corner of the cage, completely bone dry, and it knocks some sense into Stiles. Someone has caged a werewolf. He didn’t magically appear in the cage, this isn’t a hallucination or a weird dream; someone deliberately caught and caged a werewolf. Stiles cautiously walks around the cage, but the werewolf doesn’t move, not even when he can’t see Stiles at his feet or when Stiles bravely (stupidly) reaches in and fetches the bowl. He has to tilt it sideways to get it out, but then he’s got it and he walks back to Scott carrying it like a trophy.
Scott looks incredibly concerned and dubious, but he obviously doesn’t understand how awesome Stiles is, especially since the werewolf is tracking Stiles warily but intently. Stiles slots the bowl into the cage, maybe a foot from the werewolf’s collapsed body, and then pulls a water bottle from his pocket. He has to give it to Scott to open, and they have a small but silent fight over Scott twisting off the cap, in which Scott judges him with his eyes and Stiles alternates between glaring and making puppy-dog eyes.
Finally, Scott twists the cap off and Stiles can pour some water into the bowl. It’s only a little, mostly because Stiles doesn’t know how dehydrated the guy is and he’s afraid if he gulps down the water then there will be werewolf puke all over. The werewolf manages to pull himself over to the bowl, but Stiles ends up tilting it so he can drink. He licks the bowl clean, and then pins Stiles with a stare.
Stiles really, really wants to run away or start babbling, because only mobsters and assassins and CIA operatives should have stares that intense, and why was this a good idea? But he stays strong long enough to be reasonably sure that this won’t turn into an episode of Puking Werewolf, and pours some more water. They repeat the cycle, as Scott hangs back about five feet and quietly freaks out, until the entire bottle is gone.
Stiles doesn’t even see it until it’s too late; the werewolf shoots out a hand as Stiles is withdrawing his, clamping tight onto his wrist. Stiles is panicking in a very, very obvious way, and Scott is asking him what’s wrong because from his angle he can’t see what happened, and oh god the werewolf really is going to rip off his arm.
Stiles is about almost to fainting point when the werewolf moves his face right over Stiles’ fisted hand and starts sniffing. But all he does is sniff, nose pressed against Stiles’ skin, and it occurs to Stiles that even with those crazy looking claws and fangs, the werewolf isn’t actually hurting him. He relaxes his arm slowly, and when his hand uncurls the werewolf rumbles happily and sniffs between his fingers.
He licks, a brief swipe of tongue on Stiles’ palm, and then a truck screeching to a halt scares the hell out of all of them.
The werewolf lets go of Stiles with a snarl, and Stiles and Scott make a break for it. Stiles stops twenty feet from the yard, hidden from sight by a tree, and watches the house. The werewolf is still snarling, but no one comes to check on him.
>>>
“Someone probably locked him up because he’s dangerous,” Scott says at lunch the next day.
“Yeah, I’m sure he licked someone to death,” Stiles says. Yay, chicken tenders day.
“We found him when he was so dehydrated he could barely move,” Scott says, “I’m sure at full health that would have gone a lot differently.”
“Okay,” Stiles allows, because yeah, probably, but, “did you see his eyes, though? He wasn’t crazy or murderous or out for blood.”
“Just drop it, Stiles. We saw a werewolf yesterday. I still think that I’ve gone insane.”
Stiles drops it in favor of letting Scott wax poetically about Allison, but he can’t stop thinking about that happy rumble or how the werewolf’s shoulders relaxed when Stiles relaxed.
>>>
Stiles holds out two days before he goes back, but this time he’s alone. He brings two bottles of water and an entire bag of beef jerky, because he couldn’t find anything else in the house to feed a werewolf. (Well, besides raw chicken, but Stiles is not carrying raw chicken through five miles of woods after driving to a little-used access road.)
He makes sure to spy on the front of the house first, and when there’s no truck or sign of someone inside he goes to the back yard.
This time the werewolf is eerily silent, watching Stiles with a stare that makes him feel like very, very small prey. But the werewolf relaxes the closer he gets, even leaning against the cage and sticking his nose out towards Stiles, and Stiles grins unwittingly. The bowl is still empty so this time, after Stiles has successfully twisted off the cap and done a little victory dance, he just pours the entire bottle into the bowl. The werewolf gulps down most of the bowl and then turns towards Stiles expectantly.
“Yeah, okay, you can probably smell the jerky, huh?” Stile says, pulling out the bag and sticking the strip between the bars. He’s barely got an inch through before the werewolf snatches it up with his teeth, and Stiles is still processing when a tongue laves the salt off his fingers.
But Stiles has always been highly adaptable, so he continues to feed the werewolf strip by strip, once again afraid that this will turn into Puking Werewolf: Electric Boogaloo. After about ten strips the werewolf suddenly surges towards him and growls so viciously that Stiles doesn’t just fall on his ass, he rockets onto it.
The werewolf is glaring at him, a look filled with a thousand fiery deaths, and Stiles thinks, small prey, small prey, feeding him meat was not a good idea. But besides the glare the werewolf doesn’t look particularly hateful.
Stiles narrows his eyes. “You’re trying to intimidate me, aren’t you? You ass, I’m not afraid of you!”
The werewolf glares harder, and then he changes his posture so that he seems to fill the entire cage, seems to be larger than life. Stiles wish he could be that badass. The werewolf looks like he could smack someone down like the hand of god. How did he ever think that the overly-large shirt made this guy look scrawny?
“Okay, so maybe I am afraid of you,” Stiles says, and then shoves five pieces of jerky between the bars.
The werewolf snatches them up, still glaring, but Stiles thinks that there might be a bit of amusement in the stare too.
>>>
“Are you insane?” Scott shouts at him the next day.
“Probably,” Stiles says. “Are you coming with me tomorrow?”
“Hell yes,” Scott says.
>>>
Apparently the werewolf doesn’t like Scott too much (Stiles tried calling him Clarence but the glare he shot Stiles made Stile’s balls try to climb up in his body, so he’s still ‘the werewolf’), but as long as Scott hangs back he doesn’t do more than glare his judgmentally at him. Stiles gives him water and fish tacos, which Scott has no right to make fun of because he puts ketchup on scrambled eggs. The werewolf has the tacos in the cage, instead of eating from Stiles’ hand, but he still glares until Stiles lets him lick whatever miniscule residue is on his fingers. Then, Stiles slides lock picks into the cage.
The werewolf’s face is still judgy and scary, but it’s the closest thing to a gleeful expression that Stiles has seen him make. Stiles thinks he’s happy.
Scott, on the other hand, is nowhere near happy.
>>>
“Look, if he’s human enough to pick the lock then he’s human enough to deserve to escape,” Stiles says as they walk back home. “Give me one good reason that we should go back and take the picks away from him.”
“Raptors!”
“Where?!” Stiles spins around, arms pinwheeling.
“Not here, man; I meant raptors as an example. They opened doors so they could eat people. Ow!” Scott rubs the back of his head. “What the hell was that for?”
“You can’t use Jurassic Park as a reason, you dumbass. That’s like trying to woo a girl by watching Conan the Barbarian or something. Raptors don’t even exist anymore!”
“Neither do werewolves!” Scott says.
“People claim that they see werewolves all the time. Have you ever been on the internet? No one claims they see dinosaurs,” Stiles says.
“I’m not going to be sad if he gets out and eats you. Slowly,” Scott tells him.
“Deal,” Stiles says.
>>>
Stiles goes up to the cabin two days later. The cage door is swinging in the wind, creaking and dragging the chains in the dirt.
Stiles grins.
>>>
Two weeks later, Stiles is not grinning.
He wakes up gradually to the feeling of something rubbing against his shoulder blades. The smooth pressure is nice, kind of like a massage, and Stiles drifts, half-asleep, until he realizes that he really is awake and something really is rubbing against him.
As soon as he tenses the rubbing stops, and Stiles squeezes his eyes shut, sends a quick prayer to the ninja gods that he’ll pull this off, then tries to flip over while flailing his elbow backwards.
He flips over, but he doesn’t actually take down whatever was on him with an amazing hit to the face. The ninja gods have deserted him once again.
He’s surprised to find a guy on top of him. He’s slightly back-lit by the yellow of the streetlights, but Stiles can make out the dark hair and hazel eyes. There’s something familiar about the curve of his cheekbones, the line of his shoulders, but mostly Stiles’ brain is shouting, guy rape! Guy rape! Do not let him take off your boxers!
Stiles flails, which is something he’s pretty good at, if he does say so himself, and nearly catches the guy in the eye with an errant hand. The guy snatches his wrists firmly and growls, glaring down at Stiles.
Wait. Wait.
Stiles peers up at him and yes, that’s the glare that makes him feel like his masculinity has fled two states over. Oh my god, this is his werewolf.
“So this is what you look like as a human,” Stiles blurts out, then winces when the werewolf (can Stiles still call him a werewolf when he looks like a human?) glares even more. Stiles should shut up.
“I should shut up, shouldn’t I? That’d be the smart thing to do right now since you’re getting pissed and pinning me down and…and now you’ve got the whole eyes and fangs thing going on, oh god don’t eat me, Scott will never let me live it down if you eat me.”
Apparently, Stiles is incapable of shutting up.
But it’s okay, since the werewolf takes the choice out of his hands when he leans down until Stiles can feel his breath on his cheek. Stiles is so scared that he might be in danger of pissing himself, and as he closes his eyes he finally understand why people do that all the time in horror movies. If he can’t see it, it’s not happening.
Stiles is waiting for the werewolf to rip off his face, or maybe even call him chicken-shit, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, he rubs his cheek against Stiles’ and makes that happy rumble again. He trails his nose down Stiles neck, lapping at his pulse-point, then rubs his cheek against Stiles chest, noses into both his armpits. Stiles squirms when the werewolf’s breath tickles him through his shirt but otherwise stays still, waits it out. The repetitive motion of rubbing lulls him, and despite all the questions running through his head, Stiles can feel sleep tugging at him. The werewolf settles against his side, the concave of the bridge of his nose fitting against the curve of Stile’s jaw. Stiles falls asleep to the steady puffs of breath against his neck.
>>>
The next day, Stiles gets out of school to find the werewolf leaning against his Jeep’s passenger door, face set in its usual glare. Stiles barely knows the guy, and he’s already figured out that it’s his version of a happy face.
“Derek Hale,” the werewolf says when Stiles reaches the Jeep, and Stiles trips over his own feet in shock. Hale? As in the burned Hale house?
“Stiles,” he says.
The werewolf-Derek, wow, no wonder he hated Clarence-nods, glares at Stiles, and then opens the passenger door. “Let’s go,” he says.
Okay. Stiles can flow with this. He gets in, revs his baby up, and grins over at Derek. “Where to?”
“Home,” Derek says.