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If Stiles is being honest, everything starts when she’s around nine years old. Her mother’s just died and her father is too busy crawling into the bottom of whatever bottle he can find to pay attention to her, and she’s so alone.
She wanders Beacon Hills like a lost soul, listless and unnoticed, sometimes crying, sometimes just staring blankly at the concrete of the sidewalk as she walks. There are days where she doesn’t make it home, just curls up into a tiny, shivering ball in one of the many abandoned buildings in the city and just cries. She doesn’t sleep much in those months, doesn’t eat much either. She forgets to take her Adderall, forgets to go to school, forgets everything but the crushing sensation that everyone will abandon her. Some nights she lies awake and pleads and begs the God her mother believed in to send her someone who will never leave her, who will love her and hold her and keep her safe. Someone who will remind her to take her medication, who will help her remember why she should want to wake up each morning.
Someone who will keep her for always and forever.
No one is ever there to tell her to be careful about wishes.
On one of her midnight walks, she wanders into the long-term care-ward of the hospital, feet automatically heading towards her mother’s room. No one stops her, not a single night nurse even so much as glances in her direction. It shouldn’t be this easy to break into a hospital, shouldn’t be this easy to just wander wherever, but that’s par for the course in Stiles’ life right now. No one pays attention to her. She’s invisible, intangible, a gust of wind blowing uselessly against a window, wondering why she can’t get in.
There’s someone new in her mother’s room, an old woman who sleeps deeply and painlessly. Stiles stares for a long time, comparing that woman to her mother. She has precious few memories of her mother before her illness, but she remembers her face, calm and gentle, glowing with happiness and mischief. She backs out of the room, and quietly starts entering room after room, looking at all the patients, trying to find a trace of her mother in each one.
She never does.
But one man is not sleeping on his bed. He sits in a chair facing the window, full moon lighting his scarred face, highlighting the horrific damage done to him. That’s not why Stiles stares at him, though. She stares because when she opens the door, he turns to look at her, blue eyes lighting up like Christmas lights, all bright intensity and electric warmth. A low, rumbling growl escapes his lips. Stiles has been around enough alley-mutts by now to know the sound of a threat when she hears it, but she doesn’t move.
Can’t move, really. For the first time in what seems like years, her heart starts beating again as fear and adrenaline and curiosity light up her mind in equal measures.
He growls again, hands tightening like vices on the armrests of his chair, the solid wood creaking alarmingly under his grip. Common sense should tell her to flee, but instinct tells her that would just invite violence. She’s learned the hard way that when something feral feels cornered, you never run. Running invites the chase, the hunt. It doesn’t matter that this man is visibly human, because he clearly isn’t completely so – humans, after all, don’t have eyes that glow like a lava-lamp. So she does what she’s done before, even if only to half-starved mutts. She drops to her knees to make herself smaller and less threatening, averts her eyes and bares her neck.
For a long moment, there is silence. With her eyes averted, she can’t see the man or what he’s doing. She strains her hearing, but all she can hear is the thumping of her own heart. Which is why she startles so badly when suddenly there’s a hand gripping her hair and tugging her head back, baring her throat even more. The man leans in, stares her down, not a glimpse of anything human looking at her, before leaning in and clamping his teeth tight against her throat.
She waits for him to dig in, to tear her throat out and end her life, but he never does. He just lingers there, tongue flicking languidly against her pulse, teeth much too sharp to be human just shy of puncturing. Gradually, as she comes to the realization that he is not going to kill her, she relaxes. And that seems to be what he was waiting for, because he promptly releases her hair and unclamps his teeth. He snuffles against her throat, rumbling deep in the chest, moving along her jaw-line and up towards her ear. Once he gets to the little patch of skin behind it, he nuzzles in and licks her.
And then he’s gone, back in his chair like nothing happened, leaving her blinking and curious and highly unsettled, a strange twisting sensation lingering in her gut.
=
She spends two weeks researching the man in the hospital, digging into her dad’s sources without even a teasing hint of guilt. She learns that the man’s name is Peter Hale and that he’s twenty, ten years and two months older than her. She learns that he had been in the Hale house when it caught on fire, that he had been trapped on the upper level, which was the only reason he lived when the rest of his family burned to death.
She tries not to, but she can’t help but imagine it over and over again; long, sleepless nights spent wandering about whether they died quickly or slowly, from smoke inhalation or the fire itself. She wonders, at times, if that’s why Peter’s gone feral, if the memories of his family’s deaths was so traumatic that he had no choice but to digress into a raging bundle of raw instinct.
She thinks about her mother, and how it felt to watch the woman slowly degrade into a living shell of what she had once been. She thinks about sitting beside her mother’s corpse, waiting for a nurse or a doctor or even her own father to notice. She thinks about how she’s drifted, lost within her own mind for so long.
And then, Peter.
It doesn’t take her long to decide to go back.
She sometimes goes in the mornings and sometimes in the evenings, but excepting the full moons, he doesn’t so much as twitch. His chart says he’s catatonic, but she wonders how much of that is real, and how much of it is Peter simply deciding a world without his family isn’t one he wants to deal with. Because despite the fact that she knows that some of his family is alive and well – his nephew, Derek, and his niece, Laura – no one ever comes and visits him. No one sends him get-well cards or flowers. He’s changed and bathed in the morning by an indifferent nurse, set in his chair, and left alone for the rest of the day to stare at the wall.
It’s not pity that she feels. It’s not quite empathy either. She’s not sure what she feels when she looks at the horrible burns crawling out of his shirt collar and up his face, or the empty bed-side table that’s supposed to hold get-well cards and flowers. She just knows that she never wants to meet Derek or Laura in the flesh.
They can go die in a fire, for all she cares.
=
She goes back every full moon. Enters Peter’s ‘den’ and gets nuzzled and licked and petted. Every now and then a claw will nick her, but the wounds are largely superficial, and don’t bleed much. The man’s hands and mouth wander into Bad Touch territory quite a few times, but the longer this thing progresses, the less Stiles minds. Whatever he’s doing, there’s nothing sexual about it, really. He’s clearly not even in the right state of mind for such a thing. She doesn’t have a prayer of understanding what’s going on in his head, but she thinks that it’s something he does to soothe himself, to remind himself that someone is there.
And it’s that thought that makes her want to cling to him harder. Because she at least has her father, despite the fact that the man barely realizes he has a daughter. Peter has no one but her.
He needs her, and that shouldn’t make her so happy, but it does. It does, because if he needs her, he won’t ignore her, won’t walk away from her, and won’t ever let her go.
=
She dreams about the fire some nights, where she’s Peter, screaming and crying from the pain of being burned alive, but more so the pain of feeling his family die one by one, an almost-audible snap echoing in his mind as each bond is severed too quickly, too soon.
Sometimes she dreams of swimming in a vast pool of dark liquid that smells and tastes so very much like blood, listening to screams and cries for help from young voices, glorying in the sounds, wanting more of them, more, more, more. Animalistic and hungry and angry, so very, very angry.
And sometimes she dreams of a light scent, honeysuckle and vanilla, and sweet passionate cries for more.
=
Years pass, and puberty becomes a thing.
So do hormones, and Stiles is highly ashamed the first time she gets aroused by Peter’s touches.
Following that incident, the dreams start.
They start off simple – Peter holding her and licking along her neck like he always does – but they progressively get dirtier as they go. One night she wakes up in the middle of the most intense orgasm she has ever felt in her young life, still caught in between the dream and reality, feeling Peter’s strong, calloused hands between her thighs, fingers clamped tight by her aching vagina. He’s not there, she knows he’s not there, but in that moment all she can smell is his heady, masculine scent. All she can feel is the blazing heat of his body curled around hers. All she can hear is his rumbling growls, low and satisfied.
She flits about her room for a week afterwards, waking every night with sticky thighs and a trembling body, refusing to go to the hospital and check in on him, because she feels like she’s using him in some way. It’s wrong, so wrong, but she can’t stop it either. She goes online, works around the blocks her dad had set up years ago, and starts watching and reading as much porn as she can, hoping that with something else to fixate on, she won’t embarrass herself around Peter.
It doesn’t work. Or rather, it works too well, because now she knows what’s possible, and now her dreams are less half-formed sensations and images and more explicit content worthy of being in any porn.
But the full-moon is approaching, and if there is one thing Stiles refuses to do, its abandon Peter during the time period he is actually conscious and somewhat aware of his surroundings. She shoves her wildly inappropriate feelings as deep down as she can, and goes to him.
It’s both an unmitigated disaster and a full-blown success. It’s a disaster in that she can’t hide it, not from Peter’s enhanced senses. It’s a full-blown success in that apparently Peter’s just been waiting on her to get with the picture. The second Peter gets to Bad Touch territory and she starts to internally freak out because she can feel how wet she’s getting, he stops for a long moment, head cocked, animalistic-eyes watching her curiously, nostrils flaring as he takes in her scent. She bites her lips, clenching her hands in his shirt, waiting.
And then he moves her, just a little, so that she’s straddling his pelvis instead of his legs, and…oh.
She gets off twice that night, rocking against him, head tucked into his chest as she whines and moans and cries out from the familiar and yet entirely new sensations wrecking her body. He holds her through it all, grip tightening hard enough that she’ll have bruises for a week afterwards when he finally reaches his own release.
She pants, shivering and trembling as she comes down from her high, only to feel him rub something warm and sticky onto her back. She frowns for a moment, wondering, and eventually realizes what’s he’s rubbing into her skin is his semen. He’s marking her, like a dog, but infinitely more pleasurable than peeing on her. She flushes, unable to contain the whine that leaves her throat at the thought.
=
It happens again.
And again.
Sometimes they’ll just cuddle, Peter curled around her, face buried in her neck breathing in her scent and rumbling happily as she languidly scratches her nails through his hair.
Sometimes he’ll spend hours licking her all over her body, wringing orgasm after orgasm out of her before straddling her stomach and stroking his hard cock. She’ll watch his hand avidly, oddly intrigued by the sight of his erection as it twitches in his grip. He’ll come all over her, splattering her skin with his seed before rubbing it all in. She reeks for hours like sex and Peter, and it’s all she can do to quickly hit a shower before her dad gets a whiff.
Sometimes he’ll drag her down onto all fours and rut against her, large body draped over her, teeth clamped at the back of her neck as he thrusts and thrusts. They’ll both be fully clothed on these incidents, because some part of Peter is aware enough to understand that she’s much too young.
But Stiles wants. And it’s not like all she wants is for him to fuck her. Oh god no, because that would be understandable even if it was so very, very wrong. No, she wants him to come inside of her, make her round and fat with his babies, and she doesn’t even know where the hell that urge is coming from, because she’s barely fourteen years old. She’s barely fourteen, having regular sex with a twenty-four year old coma patient who she can’t even really be sure is aware of what the hell he’s doing.
It twists her up inside like nothing else whenever she stops to think about it. But then, too, she remembers that if it wasn’t for Peter, she would likely still be wandering around Beacon Hills like a vagrant, if not dead from starvation and lack of sleep first. He makes her feel alive, makes her want to be healthy and whole, makes her mind and heart race at the merest thought of him.
And she wants.
=
But then, one night, everything changes.
She’s fifteen and it’s a full moon, but Peter isn’t there. It’s not the first time, so she’s not worried. Sometimes a nurse forgets to lock his window and he gets out, always back before too long as if he knows she’s there waiting for him. Sometimes his regular nurse, Jennifer, lets him out herself. (Stiles doesn’t like Jennifer, feels like sprouting teeth and claws of her own whenever she catches the sight of Jennifer touching Peter.)
But this night there’s something wrong.
The entire floor of the ward reeks of freshly spilled blood, and when she gets to the large double-doors and opens them, she sees why. There are corpses everywhere, bodies torn open and half-eaten. And at the end of the hallway, digging eagerly into Jennifer, is a large black beast with glowing red eyes. She must make some kind of noise, because the monster is suddenly look up at her, nostrils flaring as it scents her and growls, low and threatening.
She knows those eyes, vivid red now though they may be.
She knows that voice rumbling deep in the monster’s chest.
It’s Peter.
She knows that instinctively, no matter how much her mind rails against the information. She also knows that she’s incapable of running fast enough to save her life should Peter choose to give chase. So she does as she did the first time she met him. She drops to her knees, ignores the blood that soaks into her jeans, and averts her eyes, baring her vulnerable throat to whatever it is Peter’s turned into. Her heart is beating a mile a minute in sheer terror, and her breath feels like a giant ball caught in her throat, but she does it anyway.
She forces herself to hold very still when she hears the click-clacking of his claws against the tiled floor. There a gust of warm, rancid breath, and then savage teeth are digging into her throat, a slight squeeze from piercing.
She waits, forcing her body to relax even if she can’t do anything about the speed of her heart-beat, but apparently this thing her Peter’s turned into doesn’t care if she’s calm or relaxed. He tenses his jaw for a moment, and then she’s flying across the hall, slamming into the wall shoulder-first with a sharp thud and the feel of her collar-bone snapping like a dry twig. She’s too shocked to scream at first, the pain like a living brand beneath her skin, fire-hot and sizzling, and then she is screaming but for an entirely different reason: Peter’s bitten her.
Sharp teeth are buried in her middle, and oh god the pain.
She screams and keeps screaming even as he releases her, sniffing along her body and nuzzling against her neck. She keeps screaming even when large, bloody, hand-like paws picks her up and tosses her over his back like a sack of potatoes, showing absolutely no mercy for her broken collar-bone or ripped-open side. She keeps screaming when Peter bounds over to the open, shattered window and jumps, four-stories down and sheer suicide, but it’s not because the next thing she knows he’s bounding through Beacon Hills and heading towards the Preserve.
She stops screaming shortly after the pain gets to be too much and she thankfully drops into darkness.
=
She wakes slowly, inch by painful inch.
There is fire burning in her veins and on her skin and she screams, screams until her voice gives out.
Nothing answers, and she keeps on screaming, silently, writhing in broken agony until she finally passes out again.
=
The next time she wakes, the beast she knows is Peter is back, standing over her, clawed hand fisting his rigid erection, and she’s so emotionally and physically exhausted that all she can do is stare. She can’t even muster up the energy to feel fear or hate or anything else.
She’s numb, veins on fire but skin frigid to the touch.
He’s big. Too big. Part of her wants to freak out, because she has a suspicion she knows where that’s going, and she won’t be able to fit that, will break around him in ways that can’t be repaired or fixed.
But she can’t even muster up the energy for panic. Just lays there and watches as he brings himself to orgasm, coming over her and onto her like a hose, marking her. His come is almost too hot, and it reeks in much the same way his breath did, but all she can do is close her eyes and cry.
=
Alpha howls, calls for her, and she is helpless but to obey.
She runs to him, an odd, loping gait because her collar-bone is still fragile despite being healed.
He’s in a clearing, pacing back and forth, growling and rumbling, claws clenching on thin air like he’s just waiting for prey to find itself trapped in his grip. He paces and growls, his half-hard cock swinging freely, already leaking at the tip, and she feels a fire start low in her belly.
Alpha howls for her again, demanding and firm, and she answers, eager for him, always eager.
The second she passes into the clearing, she’s eating dirt, one of Alpha’s clawed hands wrapping around her hip and tugging her pelvis up, the other pressing hard against her head, pushing her face firmly into the ground. She whines, tilts her head enough to be able to breathe, but doesn’t struggle. Alpha wants, and what he wants, he gets.
The clawed hand leaves her head and rakes against her coverings, splitting them open and baring her slowly wetting cunt to his gaze. She fights the urge to wiggle – towards or away, not even she knows – and makes herself wait. She doesn’t have to do so for long. Alpha doesn’t even pause for a moment to ensure she’s properly lubricated before thrusting deep and hard into her, snarling as he thrusts, over and over again, driving his large cock into her tiny body, the sharp tang of blood threatening to overpower the heady scents of sex and alpha. She meets him thrust for thrust, though, despite the pain fissuring up her spine from being penetrated far past her body’s limits, rocking her hips back against his, delighting in the feel of him taking her and using her. She is Alpha’s, to do with as he wills, even if that means breaking her apart.
He drives deep one final time, and holds, growls turning into something akin to a keening whine, hips circling and rutting as if trying to get himself even deeper inside of her. She can feel him swelling inside of her, knot inflating swiftly, and howls, triumphant and elated, because she knows that this means he’s hers now as well. He mated her. Alpha mated her. She can’t feel his seed spill into her, but she can feel the pulses of his cock, can feel the cramping feeling in her stomach as she is filled to capacity and then some, forced to take it all. And she will, because she’s a good mate, and all she wants is to make Alpha happy and give him strong pups.
=
When she next awakes, it takes only a moment before the memory of the previous night enters her head. He was in her head. He was in her head and he could control her, could make her do things she wouldn’t have done on her own. He fucked her, hurt her, and made her like it. He, oh god, he came inside of her.
She’s not aware of the tears streaming down her face, or the broken, high-pitched, keening whimpers leaving her mouth, or even the way she’s curled up in a ball, shaking and trembling. She’s not aware of Peter (in his human form) grasping her tight and rocking her in his arms. She’s not aware of him speaking to her, voice calm and steady and soothing, trying to get her to calm down enough to talk to.
She’s not aware of anything but the pain in her heart and the lingering pain in her body.
She doesn’t even hear when Peter finally sighs, or feel when he lifts his claws to the back of her neck and punctures.
=
“You’re mine now, Stiles. There’s nowhere you’ll ever be able to hide. I’ll always find you and claim you again.”
She wakes in her bed, heart racing in fear, her thighs sticky and body trembling in release, unable to remember her dream or the man to whom the voice belonged.
=
Stiles starts to grow sharp fangs and wicked claws when she gets irritated or frustrated, and doesn’t know why. She spends the hours she should be sleeping researching her symptoms, leading her to believe that she is some sort of werewolf, though how she came to be that way eludes her. She’s had too many close calls, too many times almost wolfing out in public and slaughtering people left and right. The last thing she wants is for her own father to have to arrest her for murder.
She quickly figures out that if she wants to keep this surprising change in her humanity a secret, she’ll need to learn how to either control herself or contain herself. And because control has never been her thing, she chooses to contain it, holding in her anger and her irritation until late in the night when she can prowl around the Preserve and attack defenseless trees.
It takes her months before she has any kind of control over herself, and the full-moon constantly threatens to tear her fragile control apart. She’s learned to give into her instincts as much as she can without giving away her abnormality – allowing the wolf in her to do as it wills to a certain extent. This usually means that she is more touchy-feely with her father than usual, constantly ensuring that he bears her scent. This sometimes also means prowling the streets at night, running her hands along the buildings as she goes, marking her territory.
Sometimes this means finding a random man and forcing him to fuck her until he’s sobbing from the pain.
=
No matter where she goes or what she does, there is always the lingering sense of being watched.
=
She meets a man on her one night on her restless wanderings who isn’t quite like the rest. The man, Peter Hale, is smart and funny with a wonderfully sassy nature that makes her laugh for all the wrong (right) reasons. He has bright blue eyes and a full head of slightly curled hair at just the right length to fist her hands in. He has large, strong hands and the kind of muscles most girls would kill to be allowed to touch, and yet despite his strength is unfailingly gentle when he touches her. He is also much older than her – by at least ten years – but she doesn’t mind.
Peter reminds her of someone, but she can’t remember who. It nags at her, a little whispering voice in the back of her mind telling her that she knows this man. That little voice tells her to be wary of this man, to hold him always at arm’s length, to never trust him. But how can she listen to that little voice when he makes her feel safe and wanted, makes her want to crawl inside him and make herself at home? It’s why she lets him take her to his apartment and fuck her, at first tender and gentle, coaxing her through various firsts she’d never let anyone take from her. By the end of the night, however, Peter’s fucking into her hard and deep and exactly the way she didn’t even know she wanted.
It’s not until he’s swelling inside of her that she learns that he’s like her. He can change just like she can, and it fascinates her to watch as she’s stuck on his cock, his eyes gleaming like fire, claws ripping into the mattress as he ruts against her. It should scare her, should make her terrified, but all she does is bare her throat and whine until his unnatural teeth are digging deep into her throat.
=
Stiles meets Peter for coffee and goes back to his place three times within the next week, eager and drawn to him in a way she doesn’t know how to explain and isn’t sure she wants to. He teaches her about what she is, coaches her through exercises that help with her control and her raging instincts, and initiates discussions about what a pack is and how it can be both weakness and strength.
And after every lesson, he takes her to his bed and tries his damnedest to fuck her through it. He takes her, claims her, uses her like he has the right to, and oh god does she love it. She loves the feel of him in her and on her, loves the feeling of his knot expanding within her sore cunt, loves the thought that he’s breeding her.
It’s only two months into their association before it takes, and the day she shows up at his apartment, bag of clothes in one hand and a suitcase stuffed full of her laptop and various family mementos she couldn’t bear to leave behind in the other, nervous and breathless, he doesn’t even pretend he doesn’t know why she’s here.
He invites her in, clears out a space for her clothing in his dresser, and that’s that. He re-arranges his study to fit in another desk and a few more bookshelves, and buys her more clothes, and then spends the next few days deciding whether or not he wants to gut the guest bedroom or the room he’s been using as a home gym for the nursery.
They have a serious discussion about the legalities of things three weeks into their cohabitation, because like it or not, she isn’t even seventeen yet, and the age of consent is eighteen in the state of California. It’s different for werewolves, or so Peter tells her, but even still, she’s not even really considered old enough to breed by their standards.
“I want this,” she says to Peter, half-afraid he’ll turn her out, turn her away. It’s a ridiculous fear, because Peter on a good day is highly possessive of her, and now that she’s carrying his child, woah.
“I’ll work it out, baby girl,” he murmurs against her skin, hands pressed tight against her still-flat stomach.
And he does.
=
“You’re an alpha?” she asks him quietly one night, staring at the half-burnt book Peter had pulled out from a chest that smelt like ashes and heart-break. She doesn’t ask about the chest, and Peter doesn’t volunteer answers, but the information within that chest? That she can ask about.
This book details a bunch of things about pack dynamics, but also too about alphas and their instincts. She re-reads the same passage three times, before something clicks within her mind, and she remembers.
Everything.
“Yes,” he answers absently.
“How long?” she asks, voice like sand in her throat as she remembers that first mating, the way a large monster ripped her open and took and took and forced her to like it, made her want him despite the pain of being torn apart.
Something in her tone makes Peter look at her from where he’s seated across the room, going over the plans for the house he’s going to build her. He looks at her, and she looks back at him, wondering how she’d never connected the dots, how she could be so stupid.
Wondering how she could still want him despite what she knows he’s done.
Peter stares at her for a long, long moment, gaze calculating and cold. And then he smiles, slow, mischievous, cruel. “I think you know how long.”
She can’t look away from him, can’t even begin to try, even though she wants to. “How long were you going to lie to me?”
“Oh, Stiles,” Peter croons, cruel smile gentling just a bit. “I’ve never lied to you.”
“Lies of omission are still lies,” she says quietly. Her mother taught her that, so long ago.
“Were you not happy?” he asks her. “I took that memory from you because that first time was…” he hesitates, clearly fishing for some way to avoid saying the word ‘rape.’ “…not what it should have been,” he finally settles with.
“‘Not what it should have been?’” she hisses, can feel the shift flow like pouring water, the wolf in her growling, itching for blood and flesh beneath her claws, her teeth. She wants to deal him even a small fraction of the pain she felt that night, wants to make him bleed as much – if not more – than she bled that night.
She doesn’t get the chance.
As soon as the words leave her mouth, Peter is hauling her by her neck off the couch and across the room, slamming her against the wall. She struggles against the tight grip, unable to stop the frightened whines that escape her lips or the tears that fall from her eyes as she meets Peter’s crimson gaze.
“You will listen to me,” he rumbles in a voice that is all alpha.
She submits with a quiet whine, instinctively and before she can even process what it is her body is even doing. She wants to be furious with him, wants to tear his eyes out, but she – knowingly even – acknowledged him as her alpha and mate, and although the ‘mate’ portion of their relationship gives her more lee-way then if she had been a regular beta, he is still her alpha.
That she had chosen him unknowing of the fact that he had already claimed her, and had likely been influencing her through their already-existing bond, meant nothing in the end.
The crimson hell-fire fades out, leaving the bright-blue eyes she’s come to – dare she say it – love, and something in his face softens the longer they stare at each other.
“I was little more than an animal for so long,” he finally murmurs, eyes never leaving hers, gaze intense. She listens to his heartbeat, waits for it to dip or stutter so that she can catch him in a lie and finally get the push she needs to rip the bond between them to tiny shreds.
But it doesn’t stutter. It doesn’t dip or speed up or even slow down. It stays an even, steady sound in the back of her head, the same, steady sound she used to soothe herself to sleep on nights when the anxiety of being a pregnant 16-year-old runaway werewolf threatened to drive her mad.
“There was nothing in me but pain and anger, the memories of my family burning even as I burned. I was mad with the rage, feral with the need to hurt and rip and tear and kill.” His mouth twitches in a small smile. “And then this little slip of a girl barged into my room and submitted to me without a sound, quiet and still and absolutely perfect. I wasn’t any more rational, or any saner, and I still spent every waking moment plotting the death of all who had dared put me into that state, but now also there was the growing need to make you mine.”
He leans in and nuzzles against her neck, and habitually, she arches it for him, displaying the claiming bite that he had given her shortly after she had moved in. He rumbles happily at her, scenting her, hard grip softening.
Now would be the time to strike, if I’m going to do so. The thought no sooner crosses her mind before she already has his neck in her claws. He leans back, slowly, but doesn’t tense or try and remove her hand. He doesn’t growl or try and cow her into submission. He simply looks at her, watching her with that small little smile, face soft and eyes bright.
Inexplicably, she starts crying, even as her claws tighten on his neck, and she watches through her tears as small beads of blood blossom against each claw.
“Stiles,” Peter says, and his voice is just as soft as his face is. “It’s alright. I hurt you; I hurt you badly. I knew it once the bond had settled, once I regained my mind, my humanity. I knew it when no matter what I did, what I said, I couldn’t get you to stop screaming or crying. I took the memory because that wasn’t what I wanted your first impression of me to be. I didn’t want a mate terrified that I would hurt her like that; I didn’t want a pup conceived in violence and an animal’s want.”
She opens her mouth, to say what, she doesn’t know, but all that escapes her is a thin wail of pure anguish. She hates him, fears him and what she now knows he could become, what she now remembers he is capable of. But also too does she love him, animal and man both. She doesn’t know what she wants, what she needs.
And Peter simply stands there, still holding her against the wall, with her claws imbedded in his throat, and she can see in his eyes the understanding that part of her wants nothing more than to rip it out and send him to his grave. What she also sees in his eyes is a soft sort of resignation, the knowledge that he has earned this, that – if his death is what she needs – he will submit to this with dignity and grace and even a great sort of affection, if not love.
It’s that look in his eyes, the way he watches her as if she strung the moon and the stars in the sky just for him, which makes her loosen her grip. She can’t stop crying, can’t stop the ugly wailing noises escaping her throat, but she also can’t bring herself to kill him either. She unclenches her hand and gingerly pries her claws out of his flesh, crying harder at the sight of the shallow wounds as they heal before her eyes.
Peter pulls her into his arms and holds her, crooning wordlessly in her ear.
=
They lay in their bed on their sides, curled into each other, Peter’s greater form wrapping her securely in his arms as they whisper little secrets and personal impressions of shared memories together.
Stiles haltingly tells him of those first few months after her mother’s death, how she had been a listless, lifeless doll roaming the streets, dying slowly inch by little inch. She tells him of how that first meeting between them sparked something to life inside of her, and how she had felt unable and unwilling to resist going back, not even when she’d begun to desire him in ways she had technically been too young to even consider.
And Peter whispers back about the long two years spent trapped in his own head, unable to move, not even on the full moon. How he’d been trapped within his own mind, healing inch by painful inch. How he had eventually healed enough that he had been helpless to the pull of the full moon, and how the scent of honeysuckle and vanilla, sweet and childish, had roused what little remained of what was human in him. How it was that little sliver of his humanity that prevented him from claiming her the very second she’d walked into his room reeking of pheromones and unconscious need.
Stiles tells Peter about the dreams she’d had, the ones were she was him, and also of the ones where, despite knowing that he’d never been anywhere near her, she could still feel his touch, smell his scent, hear his voice.
And Peter whispers back the ultimate truth: that she was always going to end up as his. Scratches from a born wolf, regardless of status, if deep enough, can change a person. Not enough to turn her, but one scratch alone can temporarily induce a mental and/or physical connection beyond the norm; repeated applications only make that link more permanent.
“It’s likely that connection, in addition to my scent on your skin, that saved your life that night,” he says. “If it weren’t for that, I very likely would have torn out your throat and remained a mindless monster.”
Stiles curls further into him, unable to stop the shiver that crawls down her spine. She doesn’t respond, can’t respond, really. The trauma, freshly remembered, is too fresh, too soon. Part of her is glad that the monster Peter had been isn’t running around hurting other people; most of her just wishes he had torn out her throat and left her for dead.
=
Stiles grows round and heavy with Peter’s child, and slowly but surely works through the multitude of feelings she has towards her alpha.
He hasn’t touched her since the night she remembered what he had done, though she knows he positively aches with the need to claim her again. He sleeps on the couch and doesn’t pressure her in the least, not even during the full moon when his instincts are the fiercest they’ll ever be. She’s grateful for his silent support and continued vigilance with her inevitable mood-swings.
This pregnancy would have been tough enough without the added trauma of what she had gone through at his hands. And, realistically, it’s not even the physical trauma that affects her the most. The violence, had that alone been all she’d suffered, she could have gotten over.
She has gotten over it, really.
Stiles knows Peter would never hurt her again. Not like that.
What gets her, what keeps her awake at night once she wakes up screaming herself hoarse, is the fact that he had been in her head. He had called her on the full moon and took her, and made her want it, want him. He had taken her memories of that night, and stalked her for months afterwards. She will never be sure how much of her feelings for him are her own or are influenced by him. She will never be sure that he hasn’t stolen some other memory from her.
She wants to be free of this though. Her body aches for his touch, and her heart breaks a little every time Peter forcibly restrains himself from touching her because she can’t help but flinch back. And even then, there’s a little voice in the back of her head telling her that this craving she has for him is because he wants her to feel that way.
She can’t live like this. She can’t pretend that things aren’t different now, that she will ever do anything but second-guess everything she feels and thinks. She can’t do it.
So she does the next best thing.
“Take it away,” she tells her alpha the second he comes in the door.
He pauses, holding the bag of curly fries he went out to get her because she had a craving, and stares at her. He looks down at the bag, and then back up at her, as if to say ‘really’?
She makes ‘gimmie’ motions with her hands, because damned if she’s going to pass up curly fries, even though she isn’t really craving them anymore.
“I want you to take away the Memory,” she clarifies once he hands her the bag. She sets it on the table beside her and grabs his hands. It’s the first time they’ve touched in almost four months, and something inside of her breaks at the thought. “And this time don’t just block it.” She meets his gaze, holds it steady. “Take it from me permanently.”
And he just stands there, watching her.
“I can’t live like this,” she says sadly. “I can’t keep second-guessing every thought and every action. I can’t keep second-guessing you. Take it away from me. I don’t want it.”
Peter simply looks at her for a long, long time. “Are you absolutely sure this is what you want?” he finally asks her.
“I want to be happy again,” she whispers, tearing her gaze from his and staring at their hands. She tightens her grip. “I want things to go back to how they were.”
And Peter doesn’t make her go on, doesn’t make her say the shameful reason she really wants this: if he takes the Memory from her, then there is no guilt for loving a man who murdered and ate half the residency at the hospital in addition to kidnapping her, forcibly changing her species without her consent, and raping her both physically and mentally before blocking the memory and stalking her for months. She’s not stupid. She knows that none of that is the behavior of a mentally-stable man. Just as she knows that his passiveness and obsession with her isn’t exactly healthy either. She knows that there’s something in him that barely qualifies as human, something more monstrous than merely being an alpha werewolf entails. She even suspects she knows how he became a alpha – a suspicion she will never seek a confirmation for, regardless of how this night ended.
“Please.”
Peter doesn’t ask her again. He trails his hands up her arms and up through her hair, then back down to the nape of her neck. His eyes glow crimson. She shivers, breaking out in a cold chill as she fights the instinctive reaction to claw at the threat standing before her, clenching her teeth and digging her claws into her thighs to prevent any… accidents.
And then his claws are slipping into her neck, and all she knows is pain.
=
That night he fucks her hard and desperate, over and over again, until the bed is so covered in their various fluids that they eventually end up on the floor, Peter clutching her to him like she had threatened to mate with someone else. And she doesn’t understand his desperation, his insatiable hunger for her, but she also doesn’t comment on it or ask about it.
Something tells her she wouldn’t like the answer.
So she keeps quiet and lets him use her body as much as he wills, grateful for the accelerated healing that is part of being a werewolf. She keeps quiet and responds to him like he obviously needs her to, moaning for him when he hits all the right spots, begging him when he doesn’t; all the while trying to ignore the niggling sensation in the back of her mind that something’s not right.
After all, she has her mate and alpha, and a child on the way.
What could possibly be wrong?