Chapter Text
He wakes up in a box.
Actually, 'wakes up' puts it way too mildly, it makes it sound peaceful, sedate and serene, the kind of thing you do on Sunday morning, covered in warm thick blankets and liquid sunshine. This is nothing like that. This is the antithesis of anything that comfortable, and it only brackets the notion that he has no idea how he even knows what Sunday or blankets or sunshine are.
He begins to exist in a box.
It's dark and it stinks, really stinks, the scents so tangled together that he can't tell what's organic from what's mechanical. He can't sort out the tangle of burnt oil and rust and blood and canvas and sun-baked dirt, and he's still trying when the box suddenly lurches, one side and then the other, and begins to rise. This is how he discovers that he's been standing up, because the motion flings him straight to the filthy floor of his box. He wonders if being born the usual way is as terrifying as this is. The half-formed question in the thought seems so ridiculous and out-of-place inappropriate that he laughs, and then he's startled by the sound of his own voice bouncing around inside the metal walls of the box. He sounds young.
The motion of the box is giving him vertigo so he doesn't try to stand up again, he lays on the floor of it and feels the crosshatch of the floor grill press into the softness of his cheek. He can't see much of anything inside of the box and after a while of unsteady, high-speed ascent he decides there's no point in straining his eyes. Instead he closes them and tries to take stock of what he knows.
He's male. He has some kind of internal notion of his gender which is easily confirmed when he squirms around on his belly and puts a hand down his pants to examine the configuration there. Definitely male. His skin is pale, his hands broad-palmed with long fingers and short fingernails. Here and there he can see the dark spot of a mole or a freckle on his arms, and rolling over to ruck up his shirt reveals more of the same over his chest and belly. He's old enough to have a half-hearted showing of body hair on his chest and under his arms, trailing down from his belly-button and over his forearms. It's all dark, which probably means the hair on his head is dark too.
His name isn't Stiles, it isn't , he knows that, but he also knows that Stiles , Stiles with an I , is what he goes by. His true name is locked up in some arcane tower with the rest of his memories, anything at all that could tell him what the hell a Stiles even is. With any useful knowledge, anything that can't be distilled down to recent clinical observation about his body or his surroundings.
He breaks out into a clammy, uncomfortable sweat, head spinning. He settles onto his back, spreadeagle over the floor of the box, and waits. Discovers that his body is bad at waiting. There's always some part of him twitching if he doesn't focus on keeping it still, and there's just too much of him to focus on all at once. He gives up on it and twitches his way endlessly upwards.
Time is a broken concept. It's years but only minutes when the box slams to a stop, and he's grateful that he was already laying down because the force of it jostles his body an inch or two off of the grill before he clatters back down with a groan. That same gratitude is immediately seared away when the top of the box splits down the middle and then opens on outer hinges and the absolute darkness is replaced with the bright noonday sun staring directly down into his face. He brings both hands up to cover his face and shield his eyes with his picket fence fingers.
His fingers prevent him from seeing anyone coming until the box shudders beneath an impact and there are hands fisting into his shirt, pulling him roughly to his feet. Stiles staggers, arms pinwheeling, and finds he has to grasp onto the arms pulling him upright to keep from toppling back onto his butt. He blinks his tearing eyes until they clear and turns his focus on the owner of the hands.
It's the cheekbones that stand out most, sharp and dominant, like the rest of the boy's face had been built around the concept of these particular cheekbones. They nearly distract from the piercing, almost cold-blooded look in his sharp eyes. Nearly. “Come on, Whelp. Naptime is over.”
A chorus of dry chuckles brings Stiles' attention up to the rim of the box, where a crowd of people has gathered. Gawking is the wrong word for what they're doing; they are too subdued and reserved for that, a pack of tired, sun-kissed faces peering down at him from above. No. Not sun-kissed. Sun-frenched, maybe. Thoroughly sun-loved. Sun-debauched. Stiles distracts himself abruptly with worrying over where he could possibly have learned what french-kissing is, much less what lies beyond it. Oh hey , looks like he has an incredibly active imagination.
He's still contemplating that when the boy in the box with him changes his grip, shuffles him around to hold Stiles by the ribcage, under his arms. There isn't enough time for him to figure out what Cheekbones is doing before he has been physically lifted into the air and flung with superhuman strength at the crowd.
Stiles determines mid-air that he was never meant to fly. He doesn't clear the box's height. Instead, he hits the edge of the box and his vision whites out in spots. The sharp metal digs mercilessly into his stomach and Stiles makes a frantic, pathetically distressed noise in the back of his throat as gravity starts to reclaim his body. His feet kick uselessly against empty space, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the ground, and someone in the crowd laughs a bitter, sadistic laugh at his predicament. Stiles makes a mental note to find the owner of that voice later and avoid the crap out of them.
After what seems like an eternity of being stuck on the edge of the box, someone reaches down to grip his upper arms. The cold-eyed boy who threw him catches his wildly flailing feet and pushes up against the soles of them; between the three of them—mostly with minimal input from Stiles—he ends up on his back on the ground beside the box, chest heaving with exertion and the burn of pain in a line across his stomach from the rough metal lip.
There's no fanfare or production when Cheekbones jumps out of the box. He just does it, bounding up what must be a seven foot height as if it is a matter of inches. No one comments or acts as if this is the least bit strange. Instead, Cheekbones lands neatly on his feet by Stiles' head and nudges one side of Stiles' pounding skull with the toe of a shoe. “What the Hell was that, Whelp?”
Stiles doesn't answer. He's too busy trying to suck enough air into his lungs to keep from passing out. A second boy, head covered in sand-colored curls, lurches into his field of view until he dominates it, although the boy's eyes are elsewhere. Off-camera. How do I even know what a camera is? “Jackson, don't be a dick.”
Cheekbones—no, Jackson—snorts derisively, like he has a lot of practice at it. Like his nose is made for derision. “Why, Isaac? You gone on him already? Claiming him? Gonna scent mark him before the boss gets back?”
“No.” Isaac's voice is sharp-edged, laced with a gravity that doesn't match his words. “Use your nose, idiot. This guy's human .”