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They’re kidnapped while Derek and Scott are out rescuing Boyd and Erica from the alphas.
Peter is lounging on the couch when the gas canisters roll into the middle of the loft. He blinks and stares at them for half a moment and Stiles is just opening his mouth on a “Wha--”
And then there’s a sharp flash of light and nothing.
---
When he wakes up, he’s looking up at a bland, gray ceiling. It’s perfectly flat and dull. Cement. He’s laid out on his back and before he does anything else, he takes the time to flex and shift his muscles and limbs to make sure everything’s in working order.
There’s no sour taste on the back of his tongue, no lingering tingling sensation in his body.
So wolfsbane and electricity are out. There are plenty of other things that would incapacitate a werewolf, but wolfsbane and electricity are a hunters’ bread and butter.
Peter turns his head to the side, honing in on the steady heartbeat next to him. He expects to see his captor. Instead he sees Stiles, lying mostly on his belly, half curled up with his arms tucked against his chest.
He blinks at the boy for a second, then lets his eyes drift around the room.
It’s entirely bare. No chairs, no tools, no chains, or even outlets. There’s only a naked bulb flickering in the ceiling and a small drain in the floor. They’re in a cement block. Bunker? Cell?
There’s a steel door on the wall behind Stiles with a peephole and a wide slot at the bottom where it lifts up.
Stiles groans as Peter finally sits up.
He tunes out the sound of the boy waking to try and hear anything beyond their room. There’s some distant echoes of an old ventilation system, maybe some voices, he can’t be sure.
“What…” Stiles is stirring, sitting up and propping himself against the door. “What the hell…?”
“We’re underground,” Peter realizes. Deep underground from the sounds of it. Under the surface of the earth everything tends to take this muted, dull quality. Things echo, vibrate, and generally feel different. He doesn’t like it, it makes his teeth itch and his wolf bristle. He can’t feel the moon from here.
“What happened?”
Peter gets to his feet slowly, rolling his shoulders. “Not sure. What do you remember?”
“I don’t know,” Stiles narrows his eyes and stares up at him suspiciously. “Why are you so calm?”
The wolf barely resists rolling his eyes. “Because I kidnapped you and now have you right where I want you.”
Stiles gives him a truly spectacular bitch-face and purses his lips. “You’re a jerk.”
Peter huffs.
“I remember gas I think?” Stiles says. “And...I think some people…?”
“Do you remember hearing anything?”
“No, do you?”
Peter shakes his head. So. They’ve been kidnapped. By the Alphas? By someone else? Who? They weren’t exactly hidden away, it wouldn’t have been too hard to track them down at Derek’s loft. He thinks there must have been a mistake though, some snatch and grab gone wrong. There’s no good reason to take him or Stiles.
Stiles is a human high schooler with no value other than being part of Derek’s pack. Peter, while he certainly has valuable information on many subjects, has been keeping a fairly low profile since his resurrection. Aside from his rebirth, there’s nothing that extraordinary about him. Yes, he has knowledge most don’t possess, but he can’t see that as a reason for abduction.
He figures this has to be some sort of play by the Alpha pack, some divide and conquer maneuver. He and Stiles are just unlucky pawns in a power struggle.
It’s a bit demeaning actually.
Except…
He frowns. It’s a reasonable conclusion. But something’s off about it.
“Shouldn’t we be being intimidated by now or something?” Stiles gripes.
Peter raises an eyebrow.
“Well, aren’t you wolves big on drama? I feel like someone should be bursting in right now and shoving me against a wall.”
Peter rolls his eyes, but the kid has a point.
And then he realizes what his assumption was missing. He doesn’t smell wolves.
If they were grabbed by the Alphas, they’d have left their scent. Alphas were...pungent, especially when excited. He should be able to catch their scent all over his clothes.
He takes in a careful breath and smells...nothing.
From what his nose is telling him, he and Stiles might as well have walked themselves into this room. And that’s a clue in itself.
“Could be hunters,” Peter says.
Hunters know how to mask their scent.
Stiles frowns. “Then why would they take me?”
Peter shrugs. “You’re a sympathizer?”
Stiles snorts and starts digging through his pockets. “Ugh. They took my phone.”
“Wouldn’t be very good kidnappers if they didn’t,” Peter says, patting himself down for his own phone. Nope. It’s gone too.
When he looks up, Stiles is staring at him expectantly.
“What?”
The teen gestures. “Aren’t you going to break down the door?”
Peter frowns. There’s no latch on this side of the door and it looks thick. “I’m not at my full strength,” he warns as he walks over. “And hunters would know how to reinforce--”
Stiles lifts his brows. “Derek can punch through a bank vault.”
Peter tries not to snarl. “He’s an alpha.”
“And you’re not,” Stiles says smugly. “I bet Scott could do it.”
Peter doesn’t bounce the teen’s head against the walls a few times and instead channels his frustration into trying to push the door open. Then he tries the hinges. Then he squats down and tries to open the slot at the bottom to get some kind of leverage. Nothing moves. At all. No matter how hard he strains. It’s embarrassing.
“Wow,” Stiles says blandly.
“This cell was made for a wolf,” Peter snaps, standing quickly. “I doubt even Derek could get out of it.”
“Awesome,” Stiles gets to his feet and brushes off his jeans. “So. We just, what? Wait?”
“Either for rescue or for our captors, yes.”
The teen pulls a face. “I hate being kidnapped.”
“Happen to you a lot?”
Stiles shrugs and settles down against the wall furthest from the door. His heartbeat is elevated, he smells nervous, scared, agitated. But there’s nothing to be done about it.
---
Peter paces. Sometimes he thinks he catches bits of conversations, cut off words, or blips of speech and static over some kind of walkie talkie, but things echo strangely and he can’t be sure how far away the sounds come from.
They wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Stiles eventually falls asleep; some anxiety induced stress-nap that he doesn’t seem to be able to fight against.
Peter isn’t too concerned for him, at the moment he’s more worried about himself. If they are being held by hunters then Stiles may get slapped around, but that’s it. He’s human and a child. But Peter? There will be nothing so gentle. He’ll likely be tortured until they get whatever it is that they want. Or they’ll just kill him.
He really hates hunters.
He’s never met one that wasn’t a stuck-up, pretentious bag of dicks that looked down on anything not their species.
But he’s clever, patient. The hunters will be cocky and selfsure. They’ll give him an opening and he’ll set his claws to their throats. He just has to wait.
With that in mind, Peter calms and starts to plan. No matter what, he’ll have to get Stiles out with him, there’s no getting around that. If he came out of this situation alone, then Derek and Scott would blame him for anything that happened and honestly, Peter just doesn’t want to hear the self righteous whining.
It’ll work out. The kids his nephew surrounds himself with have a knack for getting in and out of trouble with minimal damage and Stiles is clever when he wants to be.
He huffs and walks over to the sleeping boy and sits himself down in the corner closest to him.
He hates being patient.
---
Peter is jolted awake at the sharp screech of a heavy latch being dragged out of place behind their door.
He gets to his feet slowly, Stiles blinking groggily at his side as they both listen.
There’s a man; Peter has his scent, can hear his heartbeat. He seems to be standing just outside; waiting for something? Watching them through the peephole?
The slot on the bottom of the door pops open and a small silver sphere is rolled into their room.
Stiles barely gets out, “Hey, that’s the same thing from the loft--” before there’s a flash and Peter distantly feels his body crumble.
---
He wakes up in the same position he fell in, half curled up on his side against the wall. He grunts and blinks, slowly bringing a hand to his temple to rub out a headache.
Peter frowns and sits up--
“Stiles?”
--and is alone in the room.
He immediately stands and looks around like there might be somewhere new the boy could have hidden. The lightbulb above him flickers and goes out for a few seconds before blinking back on. He tilts his head and tries listening beyond these four walls, tries furiously to hear anything--
But there’s nothing. No boots outside his door, no bursts of conversation or static. There’s a new scent though. Two men from what he can tell. They vaguely brought in the smell of wolfsbane when they came in. Some type of medicine. A ham sandwich with swiss cheese. Cigarettes.
Peter starts pacing again.
It could be that they didn’t know Stiles was human when they grabbed them. It could have been a mistake. If so, then they’ve likely roughed Stiles up a bit and dropped him off somewhere on the side of the road; far enough where he’d be unable to find them, close enough to a payphone or a populated place to not get stuck wherever he was left.
Which...was fine. Better. Peter wouldn’t have to hear him complain.
But it didn’t bode well for the wolf. Stiles would probably tell Derek what happened when (and if) he returned from rescuing his betas. But it was unlikely anyone would come for him immediately, that anyone would be in any shape or even care enough to come immediately. Peter will have to look out for himself for the time being.
---
The next time he wakes up (he’d barely gotten a look at the flash bomb before it went off), Stiles is curled up in a small ball at his side.
Peter blinks in confusion and sits up. It takes him a few moments to shake off the lingering disorientation and he settles himself slowly, listening to the boys’ heart, his lungs. He sounds alright, there’s a bit of a stutter; something Peter has always associated with people on certain medication.
He catches the scent of freshly laundered clothes, a woman, the same two men from earlier, and more cigarettes.
Stiles twitches in his sleep--a full body shudder that jolts his heart for a few beats. Then he shifts closer to the wolf.
Peter stares at him, looks at his arm where his sleeve has ridden up. There are bruises on his wrist, scattered up his forearm to the crook of his elbow. Handprints?
He reaches forward and tugs at Stiles’ collar where there’s another mark, bright red and swollen. He uncovers it enough to see a blister in the middle with black edging around it.
The wolf frowns. Electrical burns.
Stiles stays asleep for the next...Peter isn’t sure how long. It feels like a few hours. He lets the boy rest while he thinks.
This shouldn’t have happened. The hunters, every hunter, has a code that in someway protects humans. While some may bend that code, he’s never seen one completely break it. At the most, Stiles should have been slapped around, beaten maybe, left on the side of the road somewhere to be found by some random good samaritan. There’s just no reason to hurt the boy.
Is there?
Peter frowns and goes to crouch beside Stiles. He hesitates only a moment before reaching out and shaking the teen’s shoulder.
Stiles jolts awake with a ragged gasp that raises the hair on Peter’s arms.
His eyes skip around quickly before they steady on Peter.
The wolf stays still, watches Stiles as Stiles watches him.
Finally, Stiles swallows and sighs and lays back down on the floor, using his folded arm as a pillow.
“What happened?”
Stiles presses his lips together. “There’s this guy...not a hunter. Some doctor or something. And. This woman.”
Peter waits patiently while a tremor goes through the boy.
“They didn’t even ask me anything.”
Peter frowns. “Did they say who they were with? Who they were working for? Did you see anything helpful?”
Stiles just shrugs and after a moment, rolls onto his other side and faces the wall.
Peter lets him sleep.
---
A while later someone comes up to the door. Peter listens to them breathe on the other side before he hears the latch slide open.
---
The next time he wakes up (honestly fuck those flash bombs), he’s tied pretty securely to a gurney. He blinks up at the dim lightbulb above him before craning his neck to the side.
There’s a young, handsome woman there that smells strongly of cigarettes standing a few feet away from him. She’s very tall, taller than Boyd, with long red hair and a scar drawn up from the corner of her mouth to the corner of her eye. Her throat and collarbone also bear scars. Maybe from a wolf, maybe something bigger. Peter is honestly just impressed that someone was able to reach that high.
They stare at each other for a few moments while Peter collects himself and assesses his surroundings. He’s in another bunker, bigger than his cell. There are surgical instruments next to him that he studiously ignores and an open doorway behind the giant female.
She smiles politely and the pull of the scar makes it look crooked.
Peter is about to say something when an older man walks in. He’s focused on a clipboard and dressed like he just came back from a jog, which admittedly throws Peter off for a few seconds.
“Is this the part where I’m interrogated?” he asks blithely.
The man looks up and gives a tight smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It looks like he pulled something. Like he’s not used to using his face to form any type of expression.
“No,” he clips. “I’m going to hurt you.”
Peter blinks. This...is expected yes, but the way the man informs him is just off.
“You’re going to lie to me,” he continues, standing by Peter’s side. “That’s just what people do. And that’s okay, I want you to know that.”
Peter just stares at him. “Well, I suppose we could try and work something--”
The man shakes his head. “No. I’m going to hurt you. It’s nothing personal--”
Peter can’t help but let out a huff of disbelief.
The other man shrugs. “It isn’t. But I know you’ll take it personally. I just wanted you to know where we stand, it’s the same thing I told your friend.”
The wolf tenses up. “Isn’t that against your code? Torturing a human child?”
The man shrugs again. “I’m no hunter. This is my profession, not my creed.”
Peter sneers and opens his mouth--
“You don’t have to talk,” the man cuts him off and waves to the redhead behind him. She comes closer and starts to take off her belt.
It’s thick and hard leather and she folds it in half before shoving it in Peter’s mouth. He gags, tries to twist away, but the straps hold him down firmly and don’t give him any room to escape. He struggles only briefly before the woman pins his head in place and cinches the belt tightly.
Peter glares at her as she backs off.
“This is for your convenience, your dignity,” the man continues. “I don’t want to be rude.”
Peter tries very hard to gnaw through the leather, but realizes only after his tongue starts going numb that the belt must be coated in a thin wolfsbane solution. He grunts and pulls again at the straps, panting with the strain. He’s been caught by hunters before, tortured; even when Talia was alpha, hunters hadn’t had a code they followed to the letter. And Peter was the type to step over the line they drew on more than one occasion.
The man waits until he has Peter’s full attention again.
“As I said. I’m going to hurt you. Probably for a long while. I don’t expect you to speak because you’ll most likely lie and I don’t want to waste time. When I think you’re ready, we’ll try having a discussion,” he sets down his clipboard and eyes the medical instruments. “We used electricity and compression on the boy, but it’s not often I get to work on someone like you. You’re healing abilities will be...interesting to watch.”
Peter swallows thickly and grits his teeth.
---
When he opens his eyes again, he’s groggy, sick, and dizzy. He’s on the floor of his cell again and Stiles is sitting next to him.
“I hate that guy,” Peter mumbles.
Stiles grunts. “Yeah.”
They stay quiet for a few minutes.
“You’ve got red on you,” Stiles points at his shirt.
Peter sits up with some difficulty and leans against the wall behind him. His clothes are pristine, laundered. They smell of Gain and lavender softener and the red haired woman. There’s only one spot on the bottom of his shirt that has a drop of his dried blood.
“Guess she missed a spot,” Peter mutters.
“It’s hard to find good help these days,” Stiles agrees.
They’re quiet again after that until they hear the scrape and clang of the latch being open. The slot on the bottom of the door flips open and two bottles of water and two saran wrapped sandwiches are shoved inside.
Peter and Stiles stare at them while the slot is locked down again and the footsteps recede.
“Poisoned?” Stiles asks.
“Worse,” Peter turns to look at Stiles gravely. “It’s tuna.”
Stiles blinks at him and then huffs a laugh. “I like tuna.”
“You would.”
---
It continues like that.
Each day a flash bomb goes off and one of them is taken and the other is left unconscious until it’s their turn. The man, their torturer, never says anything beyond “No, we’ll talk later” and “Don’t worry, we’re almost done”.
The woman carries them back afterwards and then another man brings them food and water. While they’re out, their cell is cleaned of waste and smells of chemicals strong enough to make even Stiles sneeze.
It’s...difficult. More so on Stiles than Peter. Peter healed, slower than usual, but still healed. Stiles didn’t. Everyday there was a new bruise, a new twitch, a longer recovery time. They didn’t break any bones on the boy, from what Peter can tell, but Stiles had handprints around his throat and swelling on his wrists that he didn’t even try to hide.
From what Peter gathers from the scents Stiles puts off, the woman is the one that squeezes the hell out of him. There’s burn marks from cigarettes along the boys’ arms, electrical sears on his feet and his fingers, and his right leg keeps jerking out of his control at odd moments.
There’s nothing Peter can say or do to help. They have to be patient.
But Stiles talks less, moves less, eats less as time passes.
Peter thinks it’s been a couple weeks, but he can’t be sure.
---
“What’s your name?”
Peter doesn’t answer at first, too busy trying to swallow bile that continuously shoots up his throat.
The doctor (that’s what Stiles has dubbed him) leans over so that he’s easier to see.
Peter’s vision blurs for a moment.
“What’s your name?”
“...” he opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He’s belatedly surprised to find that that fucking belt isn’t shoved between his chops again. He’s not sure when it was removed.
The wolf blinks a few times, then glances to the side, watching the woman warily. He knows from experience that she’s not the one to fear, not the one in charge, but he still fights a shudder whenever she gets near him.
She’s completely ignoring him while tapping away on her phone.
“I asked you a question,” the doctor says. He frowns. Like he’s disappointed.
“Peter,” he gets out. “It’s...Peter.”
Peter hesitates. The word doesn’t sound right. But he knows his name, he’s not that far gone.
“Hello Peter,” the doctor smiles that strange puppet smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Peter feels incredibly lost and tongue tied. He thinks he should know what to say in this situation, but nothing comes to him. So he just lays there.
The doctor frowns again. “Alright.”
And that’s the end of that.
---
“Do they ever talk to you?”
Stiles slowly shifts his gaze from his half eaten sandwich to Peter. The boy had complained earlier about always getting stuck with the tuna on the rare occasions that there was another choice available. Peter hates tuna. He’s not trading.
“What?”
Peter lets the boy lean closer to share some of his heat. “During...or after, or anything like that, do they talk to you?”
Stiles furrows his brows like it takes most of his concentration just to focus on the conversation. “...no? I don’t think so?”
He stares at the wolf for a few moments.
“Did they say something to you?”
Peter shrugs. “Asked my name.”
“Oh.” Stiles looks at the rest of his sandwich, then sets it aside. “Sometimes they play music.”
Peter blinks at him. “What?”
“Taylor Swift. Juvenile. Rolling Stones.”
“...that’s...huh.” Peter has nothing.
A shudder goes through the boy, one of those uncontrollable ones that are starting to happen more often. Peter watches him cross his arms over his chest and settle in. He listens to his heart, listens to his lungs, takes in his scent. Stiles is getting thin. He’s eating and drinking less. Talking less.
Peter sighs and holds out what’s left of his peanut butter and jelly. “Here, just eat the rest of mine--”
Stiles is asleep.
Peter frowns and sets his food down before pressing his palm to the teens’ forehead. He feels cold, sweaty.
He sits there for a few minutes, then takes both sandwich halves and puts them to the side. He’ll make sure Stiles eats them when he wakes up.
---
One day, when Peter regains consciousness, Stiles is gone. Which isn’t so unusual, he thinks. But he doesn’t remember a sphere rolling in to knock him out and it’s not like he has anything else going on that would have absorbed his attention enough to not notice it. It disturbs him a little that he might actually be forgetting things like that, so he tries not to think about it.
He’s taken later, as usual. There are no questions asked this time.
When he wakes up in his cell again, Stiles still isn’t there. And that’s...not right.
There’s a schedule. They wake up, stretch, wait, Stiles gets taken first, then Peter, when Peter returns, Stiles is already there, and then they’re fed. That’s what it’s been since they got here. It’s how Peter tells time. If the hunters aren’t sticking to schedule, how is he supposed to know how much time has passed?
The slot on the door scrapes open and one sandwich and one bottle of water is shoved through.
Peter’s insides go cold.
Before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s banging on the door, yelling for answers, yelling for Stiles. He feels rabid, infuriated, wild and trapped in a way he just wasn’t during this whole time. He’s an idiot; he shouldn’t have been so complacent, so at ease with letting his captors run the show. The doctor, the woman, they muddled his priorities, made him focus solely on them and what they would do.
He’s wasted so much damn time worrying about being tortured and waiting to be rescued, that he hadn’t even tried to come up with a plan of escape.
And now Stiles is gone. Just gone. No warning, nothing.
By the time the wolf calms down, he’s scraped his claws into bloody nubs against the walls and door, he’s kicked his (fucking tuna) sandwich to pieces all over the room, and gnawed on the bottle of water until it burst in his mouth.
There’s bits of plastic and tuna scattered everywhere.
It’s not his proudest moment.
With some considerable effort, he reins himself in. Catches his breath. Thinks.
Stiles has either been killed, released, or rescued.
Peter settles himself against the far wall and closes his eyes.
If something happened and Stiles was killed, he assumes that the hunters would either kill him, or abandon their hideout and leave him to die. But, they still brought him food. So either that was his last meal, or they plan on keeping him. Despite all that’s happened, he still doesn’t think that the hunters would have killed an innocent sixteen year old boy. There’s just no reason for it that he can see. And if he’s honest, he doesn’t think that that’s his torturers’ style.
As outrageous as it sounds, he thinks the doctor would find killing...uncouth. Unnecessary. Boring.
If Stiles was released, as Peter had previously thought he would be, then maybe he’s on his way to getting help. He doubts that the boy was rescued. Not because he assumes that whoever rescued Stiles would come for him too, but because the hunter dropping off his food hadn’t smelled anxious.
So either Stiles had been moved to a new cell for some reason, or…
Or Stiles had been hurt and had been dumped near a hospital and was unconscious and no help would be coming and Peter was just stuck here forever in this hell of torture and tuna sandwiches.
He palmed his face roughly, trying to scrub away his agitation. He needed to focus. He needed to think his way out of this.
---
The next time he wakes up strapped to the gurney, he twists his head away from the woman and her belt and blurts, “Where’s Stiles?”
The doctor blinks at him, then looks down at his tools and clipboard like he’s confused as to why things are going differently today.
“Infirmary,” the woman answers.
Her voice surprises him. He realizes he thought she couldn’t talk because of the scarring on her neck. But she speaks with a low, thick Southern drawl; words slurred slightly in an accent that Peter would place somewhere in Louisiana. Which is just...odd. He’d never thought about where these people were from.
“What happened?” Which, okay, he knows as soon as it leaves his mouth that it’s a stupid question his torturers.
The woman frowns and shoots a hard glance out the doorway. “Some of the local folk ‘round here weren’t too happy with how we go ‘bout our business. Think it’s too slow an’ such. Thought they’d go on an’ take matters into their own hands, hired some newbies.”
The doctor shakes his head and grumbles as he straightens his utensils. “They’re rude.”
Peter almost laughs. “And Stiles?”
The woman pats him on the shoulder like they’re old buddies and she’s offering comfort. He swallows the urge to bite her.
“They don’t think he’s nearly as funny as I do,” she says. And before Peter can ask, she’s thrusting her belt into her mouth and wrapping it around his head.
The doctor sighs and gazes at his tools. “This will be our last session, I think.” He sounds sad, wistful. “Such a waste. These new ones, these kids, crop up every year. They think torturing is all about brass knuckles and blood. They don’t understand that this is art, that it takes time.”
He frowns and looks down at Peter like they’re sharing a moment in lamenting the youth of America.
Peter has never wished so hard that he had laser vision before.
---
When he wakes up in his cell, Stiles is curled up next to him.
For a few brief, confusing seconds, he is absolutely relieved and overjoyed. He sits up and leans over the boy, intent on waking him up--
And then sees the condition Stiles is in.
There are an array of new bruises covering his arms and neck and the side of his face. His mouth is busted and bleeding, his eye is swollen, there are a multitude of cuts all over him. Peter is actually most surprised that his clothes are dirty. They haven’t been laundered and carefully put back on, there’s no smell of Gain or cigarettes. He supposes that means that the woman and doctor have already left and taken their odd aftercare behaviour with them.
Peter doesn’t wake Stiles. He just sits closer and pats him awkwardly on the head.
---
Their new torturers aren’t nearly as professional as they think they are. They’re loud, obnoxious, rude, and so fucking obviously new to the scene that Peter wonders how they even got hired.
The differences between the doctor and these dickbags are like night and day.
They chain him up (honestly, so old hat) and take turns beating him with things he’s pretty sure they just found lying around. There’s no breaks taken where Peter’s carefully cleaned and offered a sip of water and a breather; no polite consideration for his dignity; no set schedule where they leave him to recuperate in his cell.
He’s just beaten. When they pause, it’s to high five each other and crack obscene jokes. They’re cruel, but they have no experience.
He didn’t think he’d ever miss the doctor’s strange way of preserving his self-worth.
---
Stiles gets the worst of it. Like a pack of wolves, ironically enough, these men see him as the weak link. From what Peter gathers, they taunt him, humiliate him, give him just enough leverage to try and fight back before beating him to the ground.
He has no illusions that they aren’t the type to kick when someone’s down.
Their schedule is shit now. They’re kept until they aren’t wanted, then tossed back into their little prison. They’re still fed and watered, but their cell is no longer pristine when they return and their wounds are no longer looked after.
Peter starts demanding answers when he’s taken. He thinks if he just knows what these fucking people want, then they could get somewhere. But from day one, there’s never been any clear demands. He has no idea what their intentions are, why he and Stiles were taken, what faction has kidnapped them, there’s just nothing.
It frustrates him, and he thinks it frustrates his torturers as well because they take it out on him. He takes it because he must and in the back of his mind he thinks that if they tire themselves out on him, that they’ll leave Stiles alone.
---
Peter can’t think of a way to escape. Well, he can, but all those plans need an opportunity, an opening. And he hasn’t had one yet.
Beside him, Stiles is pale, his eyes are red and sunken, he’s listless and quiet. Peter watches him for a few minutes, taking in his scent and his heartrate.
“I can’t,” Stiles says softly.
Peter shifts closer.
“I just can’t,” his eyes are wet.
Peter sighs. “We’ll think of--”
“I’m tired,” Stiles mutters.
Peter listens to him as he drifts off to sleep. Their food has remained untouched for the past few days, both too exhausted to even bother with eating. The wolf knows that they have to keep their strength and forces Stiles to at least drink something.
But the beatings get worse. And Peter thinks that watching Stiles lose hope is the worst thing he’s ever had to do.
---
Peter knows the moment that Stiles gets the idea in his head. If their roles were reversed, he doesn’t think it would have taken him so long to give in. But Stiles is stubborn.
He wakes up with Stiles staring at him, that unaskable question giving his eyes light.
Peter rolls onto his side and ignores him.
---
“Peter,” Stiles whispers one night.
“Fuck off,” Peter answers.
---
“Please,” Stiles says.
Peter pretends to not hear him.
---
Stiles stares at him, that last bit of hope run out and dulling his eyes again.
Peter stares at his hands for a moment before sighing. “Just give it one more day.”
Stiles takes in a shuddering breath, surprised. “Thank you,” he says softly.
---
Stiles closes his eyes and Peter tightens his grip. It doesn’t take much force. Wolves are strong and even as weak as he is, it takes barely any effort on Peter’s part to squeeze and apply just the right amount of pressure high enough on the spinal cord.
In the movies, snapping someone’s neck leads to immediate death.
Quick and painless so you don’t have to hate the protagonist fighting for his family or freedom or country.
It isn’t though.
There’s a heavy popping noise and Stiles’ body goes limp. He makes a small noise, an involuntary sigh, and is then silent. Peter listens to the boys’ lungs stop, listens to his heart stutter. It’s painless, but still takes a few minutes. Without the lungs working, the brain starves for oxygen and renders Stiles unconscious in under thirty seconds. His heart still struggles though, still tries to beat on.
But two minutes later it gives out and everything about Stiles is still and gone.
Peter sighs and leans his head back against the wall. He feels both heavy and disconnected, too tight in his skin. He doesn’t know what his captors will do with him now that he’s taken one of their playthings. He thinks distantly, that whatever is is, whatever other torture they can come up with, he’ll withstand it.
He thinks maybe he’ll even deserve it.
No one comes to collect the boys’ body. The next day, one of the men that brings their food hesitates outside the door.
At first, Peter thinks the hunter is glancing through the peephole, seeing that Stiles is laid out in a corner of the room with Peter sitting across from him.
Peter’s only vaguely concerned with the mans’ heartbeat until it increases dramatically. He expects that there will be some sort of disbelief, anger maybe. Instead there’s a harsh burst of static and he tunes into the voices only to catch the last bit of- “Perimeter is bro-”
And then there’s a sharp grunt and a clatter of metal.
Peter blinks and stares at the door.
Someone is on the other side, someone new with a steady heartbeat and measured breaths. It’s quiet for a few long seconds, then there’s a jingling of keys and the loud screech of the lock being slid back.
Peter honestly doesn’t expect to see Chris Argent. They stare at each other. Then Chris’ gaze shifts to Stiles laying in the corner.
His lips thin and he swallows. “He’s…?”
The wolf just blinks at him. Chris goes to the corner to check for himself and stays kneeled beside Stiles.
“His spine was snapped.”
Peter stares at the opened door and feels too weary to care. He doesn’t know how long he’s sitting there before Chris steps into his line of sight.
“You killed him.”
Peter nods.
“They were torturing him.”
Peter nods again.
Chris seems to think about this and slowly crouches down so Peter doesn’t have to strain his neck to hold his gaze.
“He’s only been dead a day.”
Peter closes his eyes at that. Just a day. One day. They could have held on for one day, couldn’t they? No one had come to drag them out of the room. There hadn’t been any interrogations. They had just had to hold out.
Chris shifts and when Peter opens his eyes there’s a gun in his face. He stares at the barrel for a second before focussing on the hunter behind it. He can smell the wolfsbane and sees the steel in Chris’ gaze.
He lets his eyes stray to Stiles’ still form.
He nods.
Chris carries Stiles out of the compound. It’s a cement structure a few hundred yards long and about a mile underground and looks like a military base. How it came to be abandoned, Chris doesn't know. How it came to be taken over by a small band of rogue hunters is an even bigger mystery.
His men come and go through doorways, gathering any information they can. No one stops him. Seated and ziptied lining the hallway are the other hunters. A few are glaring at Chris, most are unconscious. Some have bullet wounds. Stiles is heavy in his arms, but he refuses to let himself pause as he brings the boy to the surface.
---
His team is done within the hour and they report in as he sits in his SUV. Stiles is laid out in the back seat wrapped up in a spare blanket.
They had wasted so much time. They had been so sure that the Alpha Pack had taken Peter and Stiles hostage. They had hunted the entire pack, every last wolf, so fucking certain despite the denials they heard.
A month later, to find out that it had been his own people--
“Sir?”
Chris looks up from where his hands are gripping the steering wheel. One of his men, a cousin through marriage, is waiting for him.
“Burn it,” Chris says.
“And the other hunters?”
Chris starts the engine. “Burn all of it, collapse it.”
The other man nods and steps back as Chris pulls out and drives off.
He’ll have to call Derek soon. Stiles and Peter were his pack and he deserves to know. Together they’ll have to decide what to tell the Sheriff; decide whether or not to tell him the truth or to think of something else. Peter’s been listed as a missing person since he left the hospital, so there’s no issue there. But the sixteen year old son of a well-liked public figure going missing will need some sort of cover story.
The Sheriff drinks, Chris has smelled the whiskey on his breath on occasion. They could make a plausible story of Stiles running away. Kids get stressed in broken homes where a single parent works too long and drinks too much. Teens run away and get into bad situations all the time; trust the wrong people, get mugged, get murdered. It wouldn’t be that hard a sell.
And there’s always the option of not bringing Stiles’ body back. He would just be another missing child. There’d be a search of course, but between him and Derek, he’s sure they could hide Stiles where no one would ever find him.
Chris has to pull off the highway, has to jerk the car to a stop on the side of the road across from a late night diner. He swallows thickly and closes his eyes.
He thinks about how Peter looked before Chris put a bullet between his eyes. Thinks about how weak the wolf was and about the rooms they found with gurneys and blunt tools and blood.
He rubs a hand over his face and makes a decision.
If he were in Peter’s position, he knows he would have done the same. He won’t hold what happened against the wolf. Not if one of the last things he did in life was spare another person suffering.
Stiles’ neck was snapped, there’s no way that it will be overlooked. But no one needs to know that Peter did it. The others wouldn’t understand. They’ve never been tortured. Never been in a situation where there’s no hope, no escape.
He won't tell them everything because they won't appreciate as the kindness that it was. He doesn't think he can explain to a group of bright eyed teenagers how an act of murder can also be an act of compassion. He doesn't know how to say that sometimes you just can't see an end, a light at the end of a tunnel, sometimes you just give up and sit in the dark. And if he's honest, part of him is grateful that Stiles didn't have to be alone to make his decision. Even poor company is still company.
All they'll hear is that if Peter hadn't killed Stiles, then they both would have been found the next day.
Peter wasn’t a good man, but he doesn’t deserve how the others would view him after knowing what he did.
Chris will tell them that the rogue hunters killed them both. The compound has been buried and destroyed by now, his men will disperse and stay silent. No one will know.
He'll tell Derek the truth. All of it, even his part in it. The last Hale has had too many Argent lies forced on him, he deserves at least to know what happened.
He will leave the decision of what to tell the others up to him.
Chris sighs and pulls back onto the road. He has a long way to go yet.
And Stiles deserves to go home.