Chapter Text
Niklaus Mikaelson was a man with a lethal reputation. He was widely known for his foul temper and absolute willingness to destroy anyone who angered him, and he reveled in that role. After all, he'd had a thousand years of practice. His siblings were equally fearsome in other ways—Finn was bitingly intelligent; Elijah, forcibly polite; Rebekah, deceptively dangerous; and Kol was almost manically ferocious—but Klaus was by far the most dreaded of the Mikaelson family.
Elijah often thought that people who believed Klaus was the most dangerous creature in their family must have never met their mother, who had managed to trap her children and was currently spouting her latest diatribe about saving them from themselves. Her present plan involved cursing her children and metaphysically “burning” the vampirism out of them.
It would undoubtedly be an unpleasant experience.
Elijah gritted his teeth as his mother carved into his chest, the sting of the blade followed by a flare of heat. “I do this out of love,” she said, cupping her son’s cheek. “It’s because of my love for you that this spell is possible.”
“You might want to rethink your definition of love, Mother.” Niklaus said from beside his brother, grunting as Esther moved toward him with a particularly forceful stab near his heart.
“It’s my fault that you were turned into monsters, and it’s my responsibility to correct my mistake.” Their mother set aside the bowl containing Klaus’s blood and moved to Rebekah, who was hanging next to her brothers. “It's such a shame that Finn couldn’t be here as well; he always was the most sensitive child.”
“What have you done to him?”
“That’s no way to talk to your mother,” Esther snarled, slapping her daughter before picking up the knife once more. “He’s safe for the moment. He’ll be grateful when I make all of you better. You all will.” Rebekah’s breath hitched at the heat that flared through her body as her mother moved the knife against her skin.
After she had finished bloodying her children, Esther sighed. “It’s a good thing your brother Kol is already dead – he would have been so tiresome to catch.”
The siblings watched as their mother carefully combined the blood with some other unknown mixture before reciting an incantation that filled the room with smoke. Elijah could feel heat pulse through his body again, followed by a heaviness in his chest that wrapped around his heart like a vice; the others could feel it as well, judging by the grimaces on their faces.
“Now,” she said, pouring the mixture into glasses, "I'm sure this won't taste pleasant, but it will connect all my lovely children together long enough for me to make everything better."
"If you think you can make any of us drink that, you are sadly mistaken," Klaus snarled.
"I won't have to make you drink, Niklaus. All of you will be quite willing to drink for me very soon," she said with a smile. The tight sensation the siblings were feeling in their chests expanded down their limbs and spread through their veins. "Rebekah will likely burn first, because she's the most delicate," Esther said conversationally, as the girl suddenly struggled to breathe, "but think of this as accelerated starvation. It's ironic that the thing you crave will be the same thing that actually destroys your monstrous natures."
It only took a few minutes of burning from the inside out for the siblings to be reduced to nearly feral creatures desperate for survival. Esther was almost impressed about how long her children fought the spell, but in the end they were reduced to panting, growling creatures that were willing to take any meal given to them.
The moment her children were ready--she didn't want them to suffer needlessly--she carefully subdued Elijah, Niklaus, and Rebekah and helped them drink the potion. After watching them carefully for a few minutes, she went to her eldest son and fed him the potion as well. In a few hours, all of her beloved children would be completely human, no longer able to wreak havoc in the world.
"I'm doing this for all of you," she said, watching them twitch and writhe, gently brushing the hair from her daughter's face. "I know how you've struggled and now I'm going to give you peace."
Rebekah was dimly aware of her mother's voice as the effects of the spell rushed through her veins. She noticed when Mother brought Finn into the room, but Rebekah was in too much pain to take in the state of her brother. It seemed like hours before the burning finally stopped. She could hear her brothers breathing heavily around her, and she forced herself to open her eyes and look around.
Esther stood in the center of the room, watching her children with a wide smile. "My beautiful, beautiful children," she said, touching Finn, then Elijah, then Rebekah softly. They stiffened, but did nothing. "We can finally be a family again," She reached for Niklaus, only for him to yank his chains and and growl at her, fangs bared.
The fangs disappeared almost immediately, but their mother reared back in surprise, grabbing the knife she had used to bleed her children. "No, NO! You're all here, Kol is dead! It should have worked!" Esther paused, frowning. "It can't be. The only other child..."
Still weak from the spell, the siblings could do nothing but watch as their mother fumed. She paced the room, muttering under her breath, and the look of impotent rage on her face might have been comical had she not been trying to kill them. Suddenly, she stilled, and Rebekah flinched at the glint in her mother's eyes. "Clever witch, to think she could hide him from me. No matter, I'll find him eventually."
The Mikaelson siblings stared in exhausted surprise as Esther stormed out without another glance in their direction.
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Stiles Stilinski had lived his entire sixteen-year existence in Beacon Hills, and he liked it. Sure, growing up with a cop for a father could be difficult, but it also had its perks. He knew most everyone in town, and thanks to his detective skills (thanks, Dad), he knew more about the town and its residents than people twice his age.
His mother had loved the town, too. She told Stiles about how the forest surrounding the town was magic, and how the town itself was a little bit magic, too. Stiles and his mother would go on picnics and search for pixies in the Preserve, spend hours "hunting" for information in the library (and reading histories and mysteries and adventures and fantasies), and plot out the "totally epic senior summer road trip" that the family was going to take the summer before Stiles graduated from high school. Every Sunday night at dinner, the Stilinskis would pull out their collection of road maps and debate the best route to take from California to Maine; after all, seventeen was a few years away, but everyone agreed that it was never too early to plan a vacation.
Two months into the start of kindergarten, Stiles met Scott McCall on the monkey bars, and a lifelong friendship was born. Stiles had an awesome family and a great friend. Life couldn't be better.
Stiles was in second grade when his mother got sick. At first, the symptoms were hardly noticeable--misplaced keys, grilled cheese left on the skillet too long--but less than a year later Claudia Stilinski was living out her last days in the hospital, a pale imitation of the woman she had been before the dementia.
By the time she died, Claudia hardly recognized her only child, and eight-year old Stiles had convinced himself that his mother's illness was all his fault. This wasn't a problem that he could solve with his wits or his magic, but he faithfully visited the hospital even as his world was falling apart. All of the happy memories he had made with his mom were wiped away by disease, and his father, the Sheriff, drowned himself in work and drink to cope, leaving Stiles alone to deal with his own grief.
Stiles, determined to protect his mom's memory and keep his dad safe, taught himself to cook and clean so that his dad wouldn't worry about it. What was laundry, when his dad was out saving people's lives? And, if Stiles cooked, he could help keep his dad healthy, so that he wouldn't end up in the hospital like his mom. Anything that Stiles could do to help his dad, he would do without question. After all, taking care of his dad was one of the last things his mother had ever asked him to do (when she still knew who he was), so he would definitely try his hardest to make her proud of him.
That was why, when Ms. Blake had captured Mr. Argent in preparation for the final sacrifice, Stiles experienced his first panic attack in years. Just the thought of losing his dad, who he had worked so hard to protect for the last eight years, was enough to make his heart pound and his throat constrict with worry.
It was so unfair! He had done everything he could to protect the only parent he had left, and his psychotic former English teacher had kidnapped his dad, and Scott's mom, and now Allison's dad so she could get some magical power-up out of the deal.
The knowledge that he could have stopped Ms. Blake himself if he wouldn't have given up magic after his mother died only made him sick to his stomach. He had even turned down the chance to study under Scott's boss; when Dr. Deaton had offered to help him after the mountain ash incident, he had played dumb, never quite answering the other man's queries.
His only hope now was that Deaton could come up with a plan to save their parents.
Scott turning into a werewolf a few months ago was only the beginning of the drama that was now Stiles's life: his friend Derek's sister was dying, his father had been kidnapped by his evil druid English teacher, and his brother had briefly decided to align himself with a self-proclaimed “Demon Wolf” to kill said evil druid English teacher.
Scott had given up his ill-advised partnership with the Wolf fairly quickly, but Stiles's faith in his best friend had taken a hit. Right now, Stiles trusted Scott only a little more than he trusted Deaton, and Deaton was one of the most cryptically unreliable people he had ever met.
Even if the man’s plan was risky, though, doing something crazy to help his dad was better than doing nothing, or waiting for someone else to take charge of the situation. Sure, a magical veterinarian was probably not on most people's go-to list for dealing with kidnappings, but druids weren’t all that common, either.
“What’s the plan?” Scott asked.
“Essentially, you, Stiles and Allison are going to be surrogate sacrifices for your parents," Deaton said.
“We die for them?”
“If it goes right, the three of you will be dead for a few seconds. But there’s something else you need to think about; this is a dangerous thing for more reasons than one. You’ll be giving power back to the nemeton, a place that hasn’t had power for a long time. This kind of power is like a magnet. It attracts the supernatural. The kind of things that a family like the Argents can fill the pages of a bestiary with. It will draw them here. Like a beacon.”
“It doesn’t sound any worse than anything we’ve already seen.” Stiles said, berating himself silently for tempting fate.
“You’d be surprised with what you have yet to see.” Deaton replied simply, and Stiles resisted the urge to roll his eyes.
Stiles, Scott, and Allison agreed without hesitation to do the ritual to save their parents; after all, each of them was down to one parent as it was. They would be held down in tubs of freezing cold water until they died, but would hopefully be brought back with knowledge of how to find the nemeton, where their parents were being held. Deaton would do most of the preparations, but each of the teenagers had to find a talisman--something that tied them to their parent--to act as a focus for the ritual.
Later that day, Stiles would clutch his father’s badge and think of family while he drowned.