Chapter Text
The possessive thing in Peter’s chest snarls for him to sink his teeth into Stiles Stilinski, but he waits. His heart beats fast when he is on his knees at Peter’s feet on the lacrosse field, and it is not only from terror. He doesn’t have the time to bite him now, since he needs to find Derek. The beast inside of him disagrees - he bit the wrong one before, in the woods. He shouldn’t let this opportunity pass him by. Peter is human enough now to win over that voice, so instead he lets Stiles call emergency services for the redhead (his perfect contingency plan) and makes him drive Peter to the parking garage.
Stiles’ scent is almost pure fear, and his heart doesn’t stop racing from the adrenaline, but Peter can sense what’s underneath. He can sniff out the want , the desire laced with shame and a sour undercurrent of self-loathing. He’ll fix it, though, once Stiles gives him the information he needs. Coming out of the coma, the beast was fully in control. Peter has some of it back, now - he can have some measure of patience.
He has no patience for Stiles’ lies, though. His loyalty to the accidental beta is admirable, and Peter knows that it means he has made a good choice for another mate. He gets his hands on him - takes a pause to breathe in that delicious burst of arousal-fear - and forces him to give the information that he needs: Derek’s location.
When he has what he needs, he goes to leave, but his mouthy, brilliant mate stops him. Asks if he’s going to die. Peter turns very deliberately, cocks his head to the side, and asks, “You don’t get it yet, do you - I am only killing those that are responsible. I am not the monster here.”
He is a monster, he knows, but not for his vengeance. For what he does next, perhaps.
He steps closer, takes Stiles’ arm in his hands and delicately folds the sleeve up to his elbow, revealing pale, smooth skin dotted with marks. He lifts Stiles’ wrist to his mouth and locks eyes with the boy, whose scent has turned sharp with interest. The stink of fear is still there, yes, but Peter’s touch lights something up inside of him. He’s so beautifully responsive - another good indication of things to come.
“Do you want the bite?” He asks, his double-meaning clouded. He will turn from it, yes, but the mating bond will not be completed until Stiles bites him back. There’s still a choice for him - or at least, the illusion of one.
“What?” He blurts out in response, and it’s all Peter can do not to roll his eyes. Stiles isn’t dumb, and playing it doesn’t suit him.
“Do you want the bite?” He asks again, over-enunciating his words as if speaking to a child. “It would make you faster, stronger, healthier. You’d have no reason to be jealous of Scott.”
Peter says the name with derision. He knows that Stiles is loyal to the boy, but he can’t help how unequivocally unimpressed he is with his first beta. Once he bites Stiles, though, he’ll have what he needs to enact his revenge, and then he can build a real pack, based around himself, Derek, and Stiles.
“No,” Stiles says, though. “No, I don’t want to be like you.”
“You’re lying,” Peter growls once, in warning. It doesn’t matter what Stiles says now. Peter is going to bite him, regardless. But he’d rather hear the truth - that Stiles is willing, that Stiles wants this, first.
“I wouldn’t call it lying,” Stiles says, even as the rabbit-quick pace of his heartbeat (prey, the wolf snarls) gives him away. “More dissembling than anything, really, even a bit of light obfuscation of the truth. But it doesn’t matter: I said no.”
“You’re right,” Peter agrees, and watches as relief and disappointment flash across Stiles’ face before his fangs lengthen and he finally bites, “it doesn’t matter.” There is blood on his lips and a victorious roar tears out of his chest as he gives in to that possessive thing. Then, carefully and even gently, he picks Stiles up - the boy isn’t unconscious yet, but he is in shock - and lays him in the backseat of the nurse’s car. He has business to attend to, now.
In another life, Peter would have charmed the boy. He would’ve worked up to the reveal - made it a long, slow seduction - and felt absolute victory when Stiles inevitably gave in. But this is not that life. The monster inside of him - the monster that he is - doesn’t care for this line of thinking. It’s satisfied that Peter’s done the right thing, and Peter doesn’t have the energy to fight against it.
Peter speeds recklessly out to the detritus of his family home, deep in the preserve. He’s done his share of careful plotting, but his pack, his nephew, his Derek is in immediate danger and he won’t stand for it any longer. He abandons the car not far from the house, but not so close as to put Stiles in unnecessary danger. He can distantly hear Scott and Derek running out from the tunnels, and decides to move inside the house and plot. He can smell wolfsbane and gunpowder - and it's fresh, not just whatever torture Kate has set up for Derek in the basement. The Argents are here, and Peter is so, so close to having his revenge.
He waits, somehow maintaining his last shreds of patience, as he hears the attack start to unfold. It's when Kate directs Allison to kill them, rather than just take them down even as her brother points a gun at her and demands that she stand down, that he leaps into action. He startles the two of them - Allison and Kate, but not Chris, though, who must've been expecting this - by pulling the door open, slowly. He hears Allison ask in fear, "What is that?" and Scott's response of, "The alpha," before he rushes at the group.
Peter tosses them around - just knocking them off-balance, really - until he gets to Kate. He drags her into the remains of his old home, kicking and screaming. He has a moment to regret that Allison sees Kate die, but realistically, no apology was ever going to be enough. Besides, Peter watched his whole pack, nearly every single person alive that he loved, burn to death. Burned nearly to death himself. Allison will be just fine.
He has bigger concerns, though, as both Derek and Scott step up to fight him. Scott, he knows, is reckless and angry and easy to defeat. Derek is pulling his punches. He's angry, too, but it's Peter. That still means something to him. Good. He'll need that faith, even if it's only a sliver, dull and strained by time and pain, for what's to come.
He finds them all back outside, and doesn't fight it as the shift overcomes him. He's always been in control, but all of his agony is fresh. Killing Kate didn't relieve him of the burden he's felt every day since the Hales burned. He doesn't...he doesn't know where to put it, now. It was the arsonists. The investigator. The fucking high school chemistry teacher. Then finally, finally, he put it all into killing Kate Argent. And it's still not gone. He doesn't...he hadn't planned for this. The fight picks up, and Peter is the alpha. He's so strong. But he's outnumbered, by hunters and werewolves alike, and suddenly his odds don't look so good anymore.
When he catches on fire, when he burns, his first thought is of how much of a betrayal it is. How these people don't know him, but they could still decide his fate so callously, without any consideration for what he's gone through. His second thought is of Stiles, still passed out and a few miles away. He won't make it here to save Peter, if he'd even try. And his last thought is of Derek - above him, hesitating. He doesn't want to do this. He has to do this. He tries to give his blessing (he bit the girl, he has a plan.) even though it comes out choked and stilted, and Derek slashes through his throat with his claws. It's a clean blow. Peter dies right away.
Only...
Only he's not that dead. His body is, yes. His heart has stopped beating and his brain is dead and his lungs have no more air and there is no blood pumping through his veins; it all rests dormant. But that's all it is: a rest. Well, he's oversimplifying it, as he does. He's in...well, there's really no word for the state that he's in.
The first flashes are brief, which makes sense, even if he hadn't originally accounted for it. His connection to the physical world is at its very weakest point. But he catches glimpses - Stiles and Scott fighting over something he can't quite parse. Derek making his first bite of his own - another teenager, in the cemetery, because Derek is nothing if not a cliche. He's even wearing a leather jacket, for goodness' sake.
As his connection to the banshee - Lydia, she has a name, Stiles was very insistent about that after Peter bit her, like he was worried about disrespecting her more than her dying - strengthens, so does what he gets to see; what he gets to know . And to his great displeasure - he sees a lot of StilesandDerek. He would be fine catching glimpses of Stiles, and glimpses of Derek, and even some of them together. Derek is Stiles' alpha now, at least in this interim (Peter tries not to hate it too much, and know that he's still the one who bit Stiles, the one who changed him, the one who made him), and Stiles needs to learn control. Derek is...at least a bit better at teaching Stiles (and Isaac, the other one, Peter learns) than he was at first with Scott, but he's still Peter's hopeless nephew. Not meant for the alpha power. Not fit for it.
It doesn't stop him from using it, though, Peter finds. Derek bites two more teenagers - what the hell is this pack going to be like by the time he returns - and it's a mess. There's dead omegas in the woods. Gerard Argent is in town. And then, Peter sees the goddamn lizard monster for the first time. The Worm Moon can't come soon enough. Peter needs to be back in Beacon Hills, alive.
Lydia, luckily, isn't very resistant to him at first. He knows his presence confuses her, the way he disappears and reappears so easily, and she's smart. She figures out quickly enough that this isn't normal. But it doesn't matter. She doesn't know what she's doing, exactly, with Peter in her head. There will be time to teach her, time to help shape her into an asset for their pack, when he's alive again. He can do her no good until that time comes.
Every day that passes, he gets stronger, and sees and hears and feels more. And the need to be back grows , the need to reclaim Stiles and Derek for his own grows stronger every single day. Like the bond between the two of them does, too, apparently. Stiles and Derek are together all the time when Peter sees them, now. He never sees anything untoward. But the thought of it always crosses his mind, and it makes him sick, the idea of them growing that close without him there. They wouldn't have any of this without him. He's the catalyst for it all. Where's his respect? Where's his due?
The party that Lydia hosts is painful to watch, as they all hallucinate. Peter can't see what they're seeing; doesn't know what's going through their minds. But he knows it is the first time he sees Stiles' control - which appears impeccable, despite not being taught by Peter himself - truly start to slip. Whatever he sees breaks him, hurts him in a way that Peter would've said before Stiles was too tough to be hurt. He hopes not to see him like that ever again. But the good news is that his plan is almost complete. He's so close. The moon approaches, and Derek makes it nice and easy for him by bringing his entire pack - minus Scott, of course, because he doesn't believe in being part of the pack, which really just makes Peter roll his eyes and question how he could've chosen so poorly to bite Scott in the woods and not Stiles - to the abandoned train depot he's squatting in. Dear lord. His nephew desperately needs his guidance - or to return his rightful alpha spark.
The night is - of course - a disaster, but Lydia comes along and knocks out Derek and Stiles both, dragging them back to the Hale house under Peter's directive. She's played her part so well. Technically, Peter only needs her and Derek for this, but he wants Stiles there to witness his resurrection. He wants things to be as they should - with Derek, Stiles, and Peter all together. Always.
Coming back into his body is...an experience. It's not as painful as dying was in the first place, but it's certainly not the relative peace that he's had since dying. He's disoriented and overwhelmed at first, but the presence and sounds and scent of both Derek and Stiles close to him helps. Stiles slapping him hard across the face, hard enough that his jaw aches and at least a few teeth are now loose, does not help, unsurprisingly. He sits there, dazed, as Stiles helps Derek and Lydia up, who are both staring down at him, underneath the ruins of his old home, with disgust.
"Welcome back, asshole," Stiles spits. "Now stay the hell away from us."
Well. It appears Peter has a lot of work to do.