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He doesn’t know how long it’s been. A week? Five days? Maybe longer than that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know – he’s afraid of the answer.
The stretches of time when he’s left alone in the bomb shelter are punctuated by the occasional torture session (always a good time) and his jailer Jack bringing him soggy gas station sandwiches. Jack leaves the light on and changes out Stiles’ bucket-toilet, and he doesn’t get in on the beatings. Stiles would try to get him on side, try to play the fifth column angle to escape, but Jack’s deaf, and Stiles can’t sign. So far they communicate through exaggerated facial expressions and mime, and Stiles’ face isn’t up to any more of that any time soon. He doesn’t know how he’d pantomime ‘please betray your cronies and set me free’ anyway.
Gerard had taken to his face with a pipe the last time. Stiles passed out three blows in, and he’s grateful. There’s a gaping hole where his left molars should be, and he’s sure his jaw is broken. He can’t see much out of that side of his face, but really, there’s not much to see.
He just stays curled up on his cot (on his right side – it’s only bruised, nothing broken yet) and counts the seconds and minutes and hours down until he can pass out again.
--
Gerard must have been planning this for months. They grabbed Stiles straight off the sidewalk outside the grocery store, his eggs left cracked on the concrete. Six beefy hunters and Gerard bundled him into a van, but Stiles has played this game before. The alphas had kidnapped him six times by the time they were dealt with, so he wasn’t overly panicked. Mildly terrified, yes, but he chalked it up to a natural Pavlovian response to creepy geriatric psychopaths who have beaten him up before.
Derek’s pack is more functional now, and Scott and Derek have mostly worked out their differences – they manage to talk to each other without resorting to physical violence, at least, which Stiles counts as a major win. The last few plans had even been vaguely successful, and they’ve never failed to find him before. Stiles bitched to his guards about missing an English exam, but truthfully he was expecting to be home by the next night at the latest.
But the hunters didn’t stop driving. They switched off in shifts, and by the time they passed the state sign for Nevada Stiles was officially worried.
“What’s the plan, Grandpa?” he asked Gerard, who smiled in that condescending way he loves so much.
“Oh, I think you’ll find out soon enough, Mr Stilinski.”
The bastard didn’t say a thing to Stiles the rest of the drive to Colorado.
--
The shelter’s hatch swings open and Trey climbs down the ladder. He’s Gerard’s right hand man, the one who throws the punches when Gerard’s too tired or just feels like watching.
Stiles hates him with every cell in his body.
“How you feeling, sport?” Trey asks, broad smile as always fixed on his face. His acne scarring twists the expression into something nightmarish and hideous, and sweat breaks out on Stiles back.
“Chipper,” he manages to reply, but it hurts. God, it hurts.
Trey winces in fake sympathy and turns to start prepping the chair. The chair that they strap Stiles to when they start in on him. Not that they really need it right now, since Stiles couldn’t overpower a kitten. “Ooh, that looks bad. Didn’t know faces could turn that colour. Well, hope your pa likes the teeth, anyway.”
Stiles’ breath freezes and he feels sick. “What?”
“Your teeth what fell out. We sent them over to your house, along with a nice little note explaining the situation. Hope he appreciates all the work I did getting them loose. They go deep, the little bastards.”
Stiles wheezes. He imagines his dad opening that letter, the teeth falling to the kitchen table, stained with rust-brown blood. “What did you…”
He can’t say anymore, but Trey grins cheerfully at him. “If Boss can’t kill the animals himself, he’ll just have to get someone else to, now won’t he?”
Stiles knows in that instant what Gerard wrote in that letter. Kill the wolves, or Stiles gets sent back in pieces.
Trey lifts him up off his cot and straps him to the chair, and this time Stiles doesn’t try not to cry.
--
Gerard likes to hit him, or watch Trey do it, but when it’s just Trey, the knives come out. Thin, elegant things, that Trey handles like lovers.
He draws gossamer thin lines of red across Stiles’ skin, barely painful when there’s just one, but there is never just one. Tens and hundreds and maybe thousands of cuts spiral out like spiderwebs, and they burn. They burn and Stiles burns with them.
--
Jack smuggles him Tylenol, and Stockholm syndrome must be kicking in, because Stiles could honestly kiss him. It doesn’t do much, and Jack has to hold the cup of water for him to drink, but it takes the sharpest edge off the pain. Stiles will take what he can get.
It’s been five days since Gerard sent the letter, and every few days when Trey comes he gives updates. The Sheriff opened it at work, he says, and went home to smash every dish in the kitchen. Stiles doesn’t know how they know, but he has his theories, and hopes with every aching part of him that Scott and the others smell out hunters stalking his dad.
Every day that Trey comes kills that hope a little more.
Jack is spooning oatmeal into Stiles’ mouth when Trey drops down through the hatch. He’s looking even more manic than usual, and Jack won’t meet Stiles’ eyes.
“It’s the big day, Junior,” Trey crows, and Stiles hates the nickname they’ve given him. “Day five. You know what happens now?”
Stiles doesn’t.
“We sent him teeth, you know that. What comes after teeth?”
Stiles just wants to sleep. Either that or hack at Trey with a machete until that smarmy grin is smeared across the bunker’s concrete floor.
“Fingers! Just the one, but it’s a start, right?”
Stiles faints before he’s even tied to the chair.
--
At least it was the pinky, Stiles thinks, staring at the bandage on his hand. A giggle bursts out of him before he can stop it, and it’s with that sick sound that he realises that he’s given up.
He’s not getting out of here, and the thought is freeing, even as he imagines his dad’s face when they send him his heart.
--
“Bad news, Junior. Daddy isn’t playing ball, I’m sorry to say.”
Stiles loves his dad so fiercely in that moment it burns hotter than the line Trey is drawing along his bicep.
“He’s trying to find you,” Trey says, cooing a little. He always sounds drunk when he’s working with his knives, like the sheer pleasure of it is drugging him. “He’s not doing as he’s told.”
“Good,” Stiles snarls, the first thing he’s said since they took the third finger. His ring finger on his left hand. He’s never going to be able to get married, now. The thought made him laugh until he was sick, Jack holding a bowl for him.
Trey looks him in the eye and the knife digs deeper, but Stiles just smiles. Smiles when Gerard comes down and starts hitting him again, like he hasn’t in a week. Smiles when they start talking about taking the whole hand, next.
--
Stiles knows something is wrong when Jack doesn’t bring him breakfast. He can chew things again, barely, but oatmeal is still almost the only thing he gets. Gerard put a clock in to make him miserable, and Stiles watches the hand go around and around until it’s three in the afternoon and no one has come down yet.
He hopes the wolves found them. He hopes they’ve torn them to pieces.
--
He tries to climb the ladder to the hatch only once.
It’s locked from the outside, and Stiles finds to his surprise that he has more tears left.
--
He waits, drinking from the bottle by his cot and staggering to the sink to get more when he needs to. He fumbles with the faucet and nearly passes out when he jolts the stumps of his fingers, but he manages.
Starving, after all, is better than death by dehydration.
--
The hatch flips open.
“Stiles!”
It’s his dad’s voice, and all he can do is croak back, but it’s enough. His dad scrambles down the ladder so fast he almost trips, and he’s at Stiles’ cot in the next second. He’s aged years since Stiles saw him. Has it been years?
“Dad,” he says, and his father holds him and sobs.
--
The interviews at the hospital in Boulder are endless. Local police. Psychologists. Trauma counsellors. FBI. Homeland security, for fuck’s sake. All Stiles wants to do is go home. If he can’t do that, yet, then he wants to sleep.
The doctors stitched him up, set his bones (had to re-break his arm, and hadn’t that been fun) and bandaged him from head to toe. Stiles still hasn’t seen his body, the scars that ribbon his skin from head to toe. He’s missing three fingers, and his right ear is a mess, and he can’t stand to be in small dark spaces, but he’s alive.
His dad hovers like he thinks Stiles will be snatched again if he goes more than ten feet away, but Stiles doesn’t mind. He thinks he’s had enough of solitude for a lifetime.
--
It’s two weeks before they let him go home, and there’s a Welcome Home! banner in poster paint and glitter waiting for him. Scott hugs him for a full minute before he lets anyone near, and Allison cries. So does Lydia, shocking the world at large and Stiles maybe most of all.
Stiles smiles through the scarring on his face (punches split more than lips) and loves them all.
--
The panic attacks aren’t a surprise. In Boulder Stiles took his first opportunity with a computer to google PTSD and prepare himself for what to expect. Getting used to typing with seven fingers was easier than he’d thought.
What is a surprise is the voice coaxing him back to himself, and the eyes staring back when he manages to look up.
Derek doesn’t say anything, doesn’t offer any comforting words, just squeezes Stiles’ shoulder and leaves.
--
They’re treating him like he’s going to shatter at any moment, and it’s pissing Stiles off.
“Guys, seriously. If Gerard couldn’t break me, do you really think anything else is going to?”
It’s apparently the worst thing to say, and things deteriorate until they’re shouting and when Scott throws up his hands Stiles flinches. Scott looks like he wants to die right there and then and Stiles just has to get out.
He winds up at Derek’s (an actual apartment now, what a change a year makes) because no one will look there, and Derek doesn’t act like Stiles is tight walking above an alligator pit because he went to the fucking store.
Derek opens the door, and he looks just as pissed and constipated as he would have before this whole clusterfuck.
Stiles grins, and Derek rolls his eyes and steps back to let him in.
--
Sometimes Stiles just wants to scream, to rip his shirt and go Hulk on everything in sight. He’s so angry. Nothing helps, and his therapist just says this is normal and it will pass and all that fucking useless shit. He hides it from his dad, because his dad got his body parts in the fucking mail, he shouldn’t have to deal with Stiles' PTSD, too.
He does his best to fake it, to play along to the role he’d carved for himself, but jokes are hard and they fall flat when he tries.
When it gets too much, he drives out to the middle of the woods and screams himself hoarse.
Sometimes, a wolf howls back.
--
It becomes a habit before Stiles even notices. Whenever Stiles starts to feel closed in, like he can’t breathe without someone flinching, he runs to Derek’s. They never do anything, really. Sometimes Derek orders pizza, sometimes he cooks. They play Derek’s PS3 and watch his cable, and Stiles makes jokes about him entering the modern era. Sometimes Stiles just does his homework at the kitchen table and Derek does housework. Seeing Derek damp-dust ranks as Stiles’ sixth most surreal experience. Until he’s seen him fold underwear, at least.
It’s not until the Sheriff asks him what Derek wants for Christmas that Stiles even really thinks about what the hell is going on.
“What?”
His dad shoots him a look that is one hundred per cent sassy bitch-face. “Stiles, come on. Give me some credit. Do you really think I’m an idiot?”
“Uh. Is that a trick question?”
Stiles stumbles through the conversation feeling drunk – his dad decides on a Macy’s voucher, and Stiles nods vaguely before stumbling upstairs to wonder when his life had spiralled out of control.
Oh right. Kidnapping and torture. That’ll about do it.
--
There are nightmares, naturally. Sometimes it’s his dad in the chair while Stiles can only watch helplessly from his cot as Trey works. Sometimes it’s Scott, or Lydia, or Ms McCall, or even one of Derek’s boxcar kids.
It’s never Derek, though. On good nights, Derek drops from the hatch and tears Trey apart before he can lift a knife.
Stiles doesn’t mention these dreams to his therapist. There are some things he’s happy to let his subconscious deal with.
--
“Dad wants you to come for Christmas Day,” Stiles says later that week when they’re watching Deadliest Catch.
“Fine. I’ll bring dessert.”
Stiles misses the moving tribute of the fishermen to their lost leader because he’s too busy choking on store-brand soda.
“Learn to swallow, Stiles,” Derek says when he’s recovered, and that’s that.
--
The scars that Trey left range from ropy and angry red to thin and white. They’re over every inch of him except his face (those are all Gerard) and (thank fuck) his dick.
Stiles has never felt particularly attractive, but now he knows he’s Quasimodo.
Still, he’s never bowed to convention. He’s not locking himself up and hiding from the world.
People stare, but fuck them. He wears short-sleeved shirts and doesn’t put his hands in his pockets, doesn’t hide his scars and the shiny stumps where his fingers used to be and the world will just have to deal with it.
And if sometimes he runs his (remaining) fingers over lines of numbed skin and cries himself to sleep, then that’s between him and his pillow.
--
Christmas isn’t weird, which is the weirdest part of all. They all have a beer, and there’s turkey and ham and so many potatoes, and Derek brings a pudding with coins in it, and his dad doesn’t make any threats at all.
It’s nice, and it freaks him out a little.
--
Scott shows up on New Year’s Eve to drag him to a party just as a panic attack latches its icy claws in Stiles’ chest.
Scott calls Derek, and Stiles realises then and there that whatever the hell is going on between the two of them is big. Huge. Enormous. Immense.
Derek calms him down, and the three of them head to a party out in the woods. There’s a bonfire. Stiles feels Derek tense and he grabs Derek’s hand without thinking.
There’s a heart-stopping moment when Derek’s hand is slack beneath his, before his fingers uncurl from their fist and twine with Stiles’.
Stiles smiles so hard his face aches, and it feels amazing.
--
It’s a week later, and Derek is cooking them pasta for dinner. Stiles is cramming for yet another make-up test and it’s so fucking domestic.
“What the hell is this?” he finally yells when he can’t take it anymore.
“Carbonara. Didn’t you want bacon?”
“Derek.”
Derek puts down the wooden spoon and turns to face him. “Stiles.”
“What are we doing? Are we friends? Are we dating? Is this some kind of weird wolf thing? What?”
Derek shifts and shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I. It isn’t.”
“Use your words, Fido. Full sentences. Why didn’t you kick me out that first time I came?”
Derek narrows his eyes. “It was guilt. At first. But you’re not as annoying as you used to be.”
Stiles stares. “Wow. I’m sure there’s a way to say that that would make me feel more shitty, but I’m drawing a blank.”
Derek just huffs and pulls his hands out of the pockets again, crossing them against his chest. “You got taken because of me. Of course I felt guilty. Do you know how many times Scott suggested swapping me for you?”
Stiles blinks, but Derek goes on before he can reply.
“A lot, okay. And your dad wouldn’t hear it, so I figured I owed him on top of what I owed you, so of course I wouldn’t fucking kick you out when you came here.”
Derek scrubs his hands through his hair and starts to pace. It’s like now he’s started he can’t stop, and he has to get all of this out before he clams up again. “I found that Trey asshole, did you know that? He smelled like blood and I thought he’d know where to find you. One flash of fang and he crumpled. So I knew what he’d done to you, but he said you never broke. Never told him a single thing about us.”
Stiles bristles. “Why the fuck would I?”
Derek looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Do you know what that meant to me? And then you came home with scars and missing fingers and that mess on your head,” he says, gesturing at Stiles’ graunched ear.
Stiles fingers it gingerly, embarrassed.
“They took you to pieces, but you’re okay. You’re not great, not even good, but you’re okay.” Derek’s voice cracks a little on the last words, and Stiles is so at sea in this conversation.
“In what world am I okay, Derek? I have panic attacks and nightmares and my left arm doesn’t move right and my body looks like it went through a wood chipper. My dad is so paranoid he put a lo-jack on my jeep and thinks I don’t know about it. I flinched away from Scott. I am missing three fingers and an ear! I am not okay,” he shouts, and Derek pulls him to his feet.
“Yes, you are, because you’re alive and you’re talking and you’re not hiding from the world. You face it.”
“I hide from steak knives!” Stiles yells, waving his arms to punctuate the point.
“Yeah, well, I can’t even look at candles without wanting to puke, so welcome to my world,” Derek snaps, and Stiles has to laugh.
Once he’s started he can’t stop, and there’s something like a smirk on Derek’s face.
“Okay, so we’ve established that we’re both ridiculously traumatised. Wow. Important conversation,” Stiles says.
“Shut up, Stiles.”
“No way. Now I know I can just chase you with a candle next time you’re mean to me. Your intimidation factor is gone.”
Derek rolls his eyes, and Stiles smiles before sobering. “Seriously, though. Do you want me here? Do you even like me? Really, not just out of some guilt or debt thing.”
Derek shrugs, and he’s so awkward and emotionally stunted it makes Stiles look like a well-adjusted adult. “When you’re here, I’m not angry.”
Stiles knows what that means, for people like them.
He smiles, lifts a hand and settles it against Derek’s cheek. The stubble is spiky and rasps against the raised scars on his palm.
Derek closes his eyes and presses into the touch. “You make me want to be okay, too.”
Stiles swallows, and his mouth is suddenly dry. When Derek opens his eyes, Stiles feels laid open with nothing to hide.
It’s not as scary as it should be.
Derek settles his hands on Stiles’ hips, and when they kiss it’s like falling asleep: easy and natural and inevitable. Derek is warm and real against him, breath a little sour in Stiles’ mouth, and for the first time Stiles feels like he’s really free.
--