Archive of Our Own

Werewolves?

You bet your ass Stiles does his research.

At first he’s mostly just horrified because his best friend is starting to exhibit some serious anger-management issues and almost all werewolf folklore involves manifestations of pure evil and the dismemberment of children. When that’s over he starts to wonder what the fuck the French were drinking, because while the rest of Europe was screaming about witches, France was conducting criminal investigations into werewolves and then making folk songs out of them. Eventually he just becomes incredibly frustrated because the deeper he goes the more he keeps running himself into dead end academic deconstructions of Patricia Brigg’s novels.

He does notice that anything even remotely scientific treats lycanthropy as a disease. Usually of the blood, sometimes of the soul.

But according to the internet the disease is:

a)     contagious as hell.

b)     terrifying as hell.

c)     painful as hell and

d)    hell.

One site suggests that he can catch it simply through intimate contact with an infected party.

He considers giving Allison a fair warning and then decides better of it. If there were any credence to lycanthropy as an STD then Allison would definitely have started showing symptoms already. Besides, it’s not as though CVS makes a special brand of condom with canine-spermicide.

When traditional research fails him, Stiles turns to the other resources at his disposal.

He tries asking Derek questions, on the occasions when they run into each other and aren’t also running for their lives. Or when Derek is creeping. Or when Derek catches Stiles creeping. But those conversations don’t turn up anything much more useful than Google had:

“So…if you had to make a list of the ten most effective ways to disable, maim, or stop the heart of a werewolf…?”

“Shutup, Stiles.” 

Stiles doesn’t say anything, but he sort of suspects the real reason Derek is so closed-mouthed on the subject is that he doesn’t actually know much more than they do. 

He tries asking Deaton too, but the guy is inscrutable and determined to keep his secrets.

Stiles doesn’t ask Peter anything. Even after his life takes another unexpected turn and Peter turns out to be on their side, in the end, almost, maybe. Stiles just doesn’t consider it an option.

Some nights he still wakes up sticky with sweat and little streaks of blood from where he’s scratched his wrist raw again. 

He’s being a giant girl about all this, but he doesn’t care.

There are some things he picks up over time. The wolf’s bane bullets are a good idea. And Stiles has a suspicion that a rope soaked in the stuff, or a knife laced with it would work pretty good too. He has a few other ideas that are more crazy and less practical. He sort of wonders if it would be possible to convince a wolf to eat wolf’s bane. Those are things he experiments with after Peter offers him the bite. Until it becomes clear that he’s going to be spending almost all of his time protecting werewolves instead of fighting against them. 

After that he starts focusing his energy on finding something, anywhere, that paints wolves in a positive light.

It’s not all bad news. A gnarled old reference librarian informs Stiles that in many cultures wolves are associated with heroes. Other cultures considered themselves the descendants of wolves.

Although in Norse mythology Fenrir eats Odin and then the world ends, so Stiles keeps some of the things he finds to himself.

The thing is, there’s no way that Derek’s parents raised him on Little Red fucking Riding Hood. There must be another story out there somewhere. No parents would tell their kids that they are the way they are because of a blood/soul disease. No parent would do that.

Stiles can’t even imagine how that conversation would go.

“Mommy, why are my teeth like grandma’s teeth?”

“Because you have a genetic infection of the spirit that turns you into a child-hungry monster once a month, sweetie. Eat your asparagus.” 

Nope.

Besides, the more he thinks about it, the less sense “disease” makes. A disease is something that eats away at you, it gets all up in your shit and takes away the sparkle in your eyes and the strength in your muscles then in the end you die from it. Stiles knows a thing or two about the process. 

Werewolfism isn’t a process of degradation. It’s more like a superpower: great power = great responsibility and all that whatever. Your blessing is also your curse.

If he had to guess he’d say that was probably what the Hales told their kids.

There still has to be a better explanation though. Because Superheroes aren’t real but werewolves are.

“It’s a curse,” Derek snaps at him, arms folded over his chest like he’s the one that needs to be defensive.

Stiles rolls his eyes. 

“Then why give it to Erica and Isaac and Boyd? If all it is, is a horrible, very bad disease, why give it to other people? And why tell them how great it was? It’s not like super strength and ultra-hotness is a hard sell, Derek.”

“I needed them.” Derek bares his teeth but averts his eyes. “It was necessary.” 

“So you lied?” Stiles pushes. 

“I did what I had to.”

Peter is lurking in the shadows, watching them, with that little fucking smirk on his face.

Stiles ignores him and focuses on Derek because there is some shit he simply will not swallow.

“Maybe you did need them,” he says. Derek hands flex, like he’s itching to slam Stiles into something (he probably is). Stiles puts his hands on his hips and breathes out through his nose. “But you must have believed they needed you too, or you wouldn’t have chosen the people you did.”

Maybe it’s just a recessive genetic trait.

…a contagious recessive genetic trait.

Stiles puts his head down on his keyboard.

Stiles nicks himself shaving one morning and starts bleeding everywhere.  He doesn’t want to stain the towels and they’re almost out of toilet paper, so he strips down and sits in the bathtub with the shower on letting the blood wash over his chest and down the drain. The swirls are pink and red. He catches some from his chin into his palm and just paints it across his skin with his finger for a while. 

If it’s a blood disease then it should be transmitted through blood, but it’s the bite that turns you. And it’s not just saliva or Allison would be screwed (metaphorically and less literally, since Stiles is pretty sure that ship has sailed already, with confetti and banners). 

There’s something on the tip of his brain. It’s right there. Stiles can feel his heartbeat and he can smell iron and salt and water. And there’s something caught just behind his nasal passages, some good idea, it’s pushing on the back of his eyes trying to trickle out…

But if it’s not in the blood why was Lydia immune?

“What are you doing?” 

Stiles smashes his knee off the table leg spinning around. He grits his teeth and rubs his shin, glaring. Peter is standing over his shoulder with his arms folded behind his back. His eyes move over the pages of the book Stiles has open.

“What is it with you werewolf types and sneaking up on people?” Stiles asks and Peter grins. He takes a seat on the other side of the table.

“What are you doing?” he repeats, tapping the book. 

“This is a library,” says Stiles, gesturing around him. “I am reading. Also, none of your fucking business, psycho-pants.”

“You’re trying to find the origin of werewolves,” says Peter. “Why?”

The stupid thing is that, if Peter wasn’t such a best-friend biting, conniving son of a bitch who was prone to fits of maiming the innocent, Stiles would kind of like him. He’s got sass.

But Stiles can also still feel the warm breath on his wrist. And he can see the same white in Peter’s teeth every time he smiles.  And, even with all his Alpha powers ripped out, Stiles can sense that Derek is afraid of Peter. Like maybe he’s got something sharper than fangs hidden away.

“Do you guys not have your own creation myths or something?” He asks instead of answering the question. “History is written by the victors and all that shit, but isn’t there, like, an oral tradition or something?”

“Sure there is,” says Peter. “But it’s no more sympathetic than what the…victors wrote. In our stories it’s usually a punishment. For a crime committed against the nature of man.”

“Like what?” Stiles insists. 

Peter’s grin falls away. 

“Like murder. Like rape. Like pride.”

“By who?”

Peter looks at Stiles closely and leans back in his chair. The afternoon sunlight coming in the window falls on the side of his face and highlights the creases and the scattered gray hairs. He looks tired.

“I only have guesses.”

“Okay,” Stiles prompts. 

“Some Native American tribes idealized the wolf because he was the perfect hunter."

“Okay.”

“And while I wouldn’t call the Argents perfect hunters, they’re certainly dedicated. If other hunting families of the past were as blindly motivated and self-righteous as they are…maybe this is what happens when you become too much like the thing you hunt—,” Peter shrugs. “What better punishment is there?”

“Holy shit,” says Stiles.

Peter stands up.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish by all this. But maybe it would be better if you just let it go.” He reaches out to close the book and Stiles slams his open palm down on top of it. 

“Why?” he demands. 

Peter pulls his hand back.

“I just think you know enough,” he says. “I think when you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.”

“What?” 

Peter shakes his head and leaves.

So the stuff about abysses was a thing that some crazy ass old philosopher named Nietzsche said about who fucking knows what a hundred and seventy years ago. But he certainly wasn’t talking about werewolves.

Also, Peter is a crazy motherfucker and Stiles therefore reserves the right to treat all of his advice accordingly.

“What are you doing?” It’s Derek this time and Stiles doesn’t jump because he’s learned his lesson. He’s sitting at the kitchen table with his back to a wall when Derek comes blowing through the back door. Stiles takes off his headphones.

“I’m reading,” he says. “Not that it’s any of your business, sour-wolf.”

Derek leans on the tabletop and gets all up in Stiles’ business. “Well stop.” 

“Make me.”

Derek slams the laptop closed.

“Stop,” he snarls. Stiles throws his hands in the air.

“Why?”

“You won’t find anything.”

Stiles is really getting sick of how everyone he knows is a crazy, irrational lunatic. He wonders if there is some kind of Al-Anon for friends of werewolves.

“So what? If I don’t, I don’t. But maybe I do!”

“Peter thinks it’s a bad idea.”

“For obvious reasons, Peter is not the scale by which I measure my ideas.”  

“Stiles, why are you doing this?” Derek has these intense hazel-green eyes that would probably be really beautiful if the asshole ever smiled. He also has an iron grip and Stiles is starting to forget what it feels like to be bruise-free. He tries to twist his arm out of Derek’s hand and fails.

“Maybe I just think it’s psychologically a bad idea for you to be living like someone trying to outlast a malignant tumor,” he snaps. “A guy spoke at our school last year and he said that people who are happy are people who know who they are.”

“I know what I am,” says Derek.

“I said ‘who’ not ‘what’. I think it’s stupid that you treat this thing like it’s a handicap you need to overcome at all costs, and Scott’s whole I am more than my lycanthropy attitude is way too cancer-camp for my taste.” Stiles gives up on liberating his arm and glares. “This disease theory doesn’t make any sense. And curses are just depressing.”

“It is a curse and it is a disease. If it was a fucking gift don’t you think there’d be more of us? You’re acting like an idiot.” Derek is still holding him but his grip has loosened, like he’s forgotten he’s touching Stiles at all.

“Well, what a surprise that must be for you,” Stiles deadpans. “I give you permission to fuck off now.”

In May Stiles runs out of time to find an answer. In May the monsters come to town.

The first defensive maneuver they all take is to get the complete and utter shit beaten out of them.

Stiles stumbles back home at three o’clock in the morning with a shiny new black eye and a bleeding mouth. His shirt is stuck to his back in four long strips of canyoned flesh. Stiles kicks off his shoes and goes to the kitchen first, without turning the lights on, to grab a wad of paper towels and a garbage bag. He wipes up the blood he drips on the floor as he goes. 

He takes the hallway at a run on his tiptoes because if he bleeds on the carpet he is so busted. Dad doesn’t wake up. Stiles told him he was spending the night at Scott’s.

In the bathroom Stiles locks the door and turns on the shower. He drops everything but his shoes and his underwear straight into the garbage bag. He aches from head to toe. His hands are shaking. His face is a fucking mess and he has to check to make sure he still has all his teeth because he just isn’t sure.

Gently, because his knees are scraped raw, Stiles kneels down before the toilet and waits.

When the sickness comes, it hits him like a wave.

The vomit is tinged with pink and burns the back of his throat and his gums. Stiles grips the toilet seat and just holds on until his stomach is empty. Then he drinks water from the faucet, waits some more and throws it all back up again. 

He’s not dumb enough to think he can make it to his bed yet. He cleans himself off as well as he can in the shower (and vomits) and then bunches up all the towels on the floor and sleeps right there.

In the morning his dad grounds him for the rest of his life because Stiles tells him it was a bar fight and a bad hangover.

“Stiles, you’ve pulled some stupid shit, but this? You are smarter than this. I should lock you in the attic and feed you through a cat door!” Stiles doesn’t disagree. It would be safer, at least.

He sits with his back against the tiles while his dad screams his head off because he’s still mostly naked and he can’t let his dad see the mess between his shoulder blades. He’s a little worried the new scabs will have rubbed off and there’ll be blood on the wall. But when Dad orders to his room and Stiles wobbles to his feet the white tile is clean. He edges around his father and backs around the corner. 

His dad must throw away the garbage bag without looking inside because he just leaves for work instead of stomping back up the stairs with peroxide in one hand and 911 in the other.

Stiles sleeps away the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon. Dozes really, because Stiles is used to sleeping on his back but every time he tries to roll over—

Eventually he crawls into some pajama pants and a t-shirt. He goes downstairs and eats three bowls of Frosted Flakes.

It’s a rainy day. Which figures. The rain is tapping against the windows and making sounds in the gutters. There’s no wind, really, just heavy water falling from the sky. Stiles listens to it, the noisy noiselessness. He feels shitty and his stomach is in knots, but it’s less horrible now that he’s eaten.  

There’s a small part of him that can’t believe he’s still alive. But there’s a bigger, louder part that can’t believe he wasn’t more prepared for this.

In fact he was prepared for this. But somewhere along the way he’d forgotten.

Stiles goes back upstairs. There’s a shoebox in the back of his closet. Inside is a small hunting knife, his mother’s old mortar and pestle, a plastic bag of dried up wolf’s bane and some ginger root.

Lycanthropy is also considered a purely psychological condition. Legitimately. It can be a manifestation of psychosis, sometimes on its own but more commonly associated with some other psychological problem, like schizophrenia or clinical depression. Or sometimes it seems to be an unusual delusion in drug users. But it’s a real thing. There are case studies and medical records and everything.

Stiles wonders if there’s a real difference between the belief that one is a wolf and actually being one?

Apart from superhuman strength and perpetual bitchiness, of course.

Intestines smell terrible. They actually, literally, smell like shit. And like fresh, warm meat. Like absolute, mind numbing terror and bile. Stiles sort of distantly hopes he’s not making it worse somehow because he is crying his eyes out and snot is dripping off his chin onto the back of his hands, mixing with all the blood from Scott’s stomach where Stile’s is trying to hold his guts in and he’s not sure that this is the kind of thing even a werewolf can recover from.

The hole is like a mouth, and Stiles is just trying to push the wound back together with his hands and keep everything inside from spilling out all over. But Scott is convulsing and vomiting blood everywhere and Stiles can’t even breathe. He just keeps telling Scott to hold on, to hang in there, that if he dies now he’ll never get Allison back.

Ten feet to his left are the vicious sounds of a fight as Derek and one of the Alpha pack rip each other to pieces. On his left are squealing tires and it’s Isaac in Stiles’ jeep. He and Erica are shouting at Stiles to help them get Scott and get up, because they have to get out of here.

It’s hard to hold onto the flaps of Scott’s belly. The blood and the black make it so slippery. Stiles has a crazy moment where he thinks his teeth might get a better purchase. “We can’t move him,” he says. If they try to pick Scott up, he will actually unravel.

Then there’s a needle in his vision. A big, wicked looking sliver of steel, and thick white thread in steady brown hands.

It’s Deaton. Oh thank God, they brought Deaton. He sews Scott back up like a rag doll and then wraps him up like a sliced thumb and helps Isaac haul him to the jeep.

Stiles sits in the back with Scott cradled in his lap. Scott is the grossest, vilest, ravaged piece of living flesh Stiles has ever seen. And Stiles has pieces of his best friend crusting onto his clothes and pooled in his shoes.

But Scott lives. And Derek gets the hell out of there as soon as they do.

No one dies.

Stiles spends a few nights just thinking wolf-like thoughts. He does some pretty gross things, like imagine really hard what raw flesh and blood taste like. Tries to understand the feeling of bones snapping between his jaws. He sits on his bed in the dark and looks at the moon and thinks about violence without anger. What it would be like to have the instinct for it, to feel the desire to hunt and maim the same way he feels the urge to run when he’s frightened, or eat when he’s hungry.

It doesn’t really help him much. But it doesn’t hurt much either.

Peter catches him at the library again (Stiles knows it’s Peter because it smells like Peter—he always uses the same aftershave). Stiles is reading a translation of a 16^th century medical treatise by some Italian monk who imprisoned a twelve year old boy believed by the Church to be a werewolf. The phrases are a little fuzzy; Stiles can’t tell for sure if the kid was bitten by a wolf or raised by one. But the first few paragraphs made reference to the phrases of the moon, so he’s slogging on.

Stiles doesn’t look up when Peter sits down. He rubs his wrist absently and keeps reading.

For a while Peter just sits there. And it’s like he’s keeping Stiles company or something. 

“Still think it isn’t a disease?” he asks eventually. His voice is so gentle that Stiles does glance up. And Peter is giving him an odd look. A little bit like regret and little bit like I told you so, and a little bit like something else. Like surprise.

“Fuck you,” says Stiles. “Have I told you that lately?”

He doesn’t quite get to the kettle in time, so it’s howling when Stiles slides into the kitchen. He kills the flame and carries the kettle carefully over to the French press.

“Stiles, what the fuck is all this tea about?” His dad asks from the dining room table. He’s sitting with a tumbler of whisky in his hand; glasses on the bridge of his nose. Stiles pauses. The ash-like substance at the bottom of the press is green and gray and purple.

“You haven’t made any yourself, have you?” he asks. He read all the recipes very carefully and half of them were in Chinese and if it’s not prepared exactly right this stuff can make you really sick. Like really sick. Like you will not be ruing your poor brewing skills the next morning because you won’t be waking up.

“No,” Dad says. “It smells like poison and old socks. What the hell is it?” 

“Herbal tea. Want me to make you a cup?” His dad is working nights this week. “It’s very, uh, bracing.”

Dad stares at him.

“No thanks.”

Stiles shrugs. He pours the hot water into the press and shuts it quickly, trapping the steam inside. It curls and turns a little darker (not purple, thank goodness, that would be hard to explain).

“Stiles,” Dad says. “Are you okay?”

“What?” Stiles puts the kettle down. He touches his face and can’t remember, for a minute, if he looks beat up or just feels that way. He licks his lips to feel for cuts. “Why?”

“You seem more manic than usual lately,” Dad says. “You’re practically feral.” He says it with a lopsided smile but Stiles feels like he’s been slapped.

“I’m fine,” he says too quickly.

“Stiles?”

“I’m alright, dad,” he says. “Just, y’know, going through some things.”

It was only a matter of time before they realized that Stiles was the weakest gazelle.

Stiles is barefoot. His red jacket is gone. He’s tearing through the woods, under no illusion that they’re actually letting him escape but unable to do anything but run anyway. He thinks about screaming for help. But it won’t do any good. Either Derek is close enough to get to him before it’s too late or he isn’t.

His chest is on fire. He thinks he’s probably got a cracked rib or two, his toe is definitely broken and that’s a bitch but it’s run or die so he’s not thinking about that right now. The soles of his feet are rags. His knuckles are all swollen and scraped. There’s a bruise the size of a softball on his forehead and a split through his eyebrow.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to tell his dad this time. If he survives.

Which is unlikely.

The moon was full two days ago and it’s starting to wane now, but there’s still enough of it that the shafts coming through the trees look like daylight to Stiles’ desperate eyes. He jumps the carcass of an old oak, stumbles through a patch of thorns that snag at his skin and his clothes. He breathes though his teeth and runs.

A flash of red eyes ahead of him. He stumbles and tries to switch directions before he realizes the wolf is black.

“Derek!” he shouts.

Unkind arms wrap around his chest from behind and yank him back. Furious claws at the top of his throat push against his soft skin and tender pulse. Stiles feels hot breath on his shoulder.  Derek slows his charge to a walk. He’s human when he steps out of the shadows. 

Stiles is shaky and weak. He’s been feeling ill for days. He thinks it’s probably the tea.

“He’s human,” Derek says and Stiles doesn’t like how much the words sound like a plea. “Let him go.” Derek’s eyes flicker sideways. Stiles wonders if Peter is nearby?

The thought makes him feel a little better. His life is so fucked up.

“I can smell that,” the Alpha’s saying. His name is something arcane and ludicrous, like Romulus or Sköll. His lips are acid against Stile’s flesh. 

“He’s your pack, isn’t he?” rumbles another to Stiles left. Stiles doesn’t what know his name is but he hopes it’s something stupid. Like Sue. And there’s a third wolf, a short guy with wide shoulders and a broken nose. “Why leave him so vulnerable?” Sue asks. 

Idle scraping of teeth on his neck. Stiles shudders. The arm around his chest is a vice.

“It’s not right,” says Romulus softly. “It’s not proper, to leave one of your own at such a disadvantage.” The first layers of Stiles skin part, tiny trickles of blood run down his collar. Derek is staring at Stiles’ throat, pale-faced.

Stiles yanks against the alpha’s grip because this shit is ridiculous. He is nobody’s collateral damage. There’s a low rumbling in his own chest and the back of his mouth. His hand is working under his ruined shirt, down the side of his jeans. His little knife is there, tucked against his hip by his belt and some duct tape.

When the teeth bite down Stiles kicks out and yanks his knife free. He feels it the minute the Romulus discovers just what he’s bitten into. The arm around him goes suddenly slack and there’s a choking sound in his ear. A ragged gasp.

Stiles breaks away and spins, snarling. He cuts a smile into the alpha’s stomach with his poison knife. Cuts it wide and honest and open, the same way they cut Scott.  He reaches in and tangles his fingers with the entrails and rips them out.

It’s the second time Stiles has seen the inside of a human (humanoid) body.

Peter comes hurdling into sight and Sue takes his charge in the face.

As Romulus falls to his knees, Stiles slices open his jugular vein like a hose. Then he turns, about to fall upon the one still standing. The gray and white shadow that’s halfway between wolf and man, crouching back onto his haunches to pounce. 

Stiles has his knife. His hands. His teeth. He is not defenseless.

Derek swipes the wolf in the face, nearly all human, before grabbing Stiles' disgusting hand in his own and hauling him away. 

Then Stiles is running again. Pulled on by Derek. Tripping and gasping because this kind of speed is not something he’s capable of on his own. If Derek let him go he’d just fall right on his nose.

Howls erupt behind them. One sounds like Peter.

Stiles doesn’t realize he’s slowed down, tried to go back, until Derek yanks at him again and shouts,

“He’ll be fine. Move!”

So they run away. It’s not very wolf-like. But it’s incredibly human.

The Hale house isn’t exactly a fortress. But it has older, quieter protections than walls. And Derek and the others have been slowly renovating it back into livable conditions. It has a functioning kitchen now and water that even sort of gets hot if you let it run long enough.

The bathroom is a solid box of tile and a door that locks. Derek practically carries Stiles inside and slams the door.

“I can stand,” Stiles grumbles and pushes himself away. He reaches over and turns on the shower while Derek’s hands brush over his back and his sides, looking for the worst of it. Stiles grits his teeth when Derek finds his busted ribs. He hisses when Derek touches his forehead. He slaps Derek’s hands away when a thumb ghosts at Stiles’ bitten lip.

“I got this,” he barks. Except Derek doesn’t look much better than he does. He’s covered in blood up to his elbows (and either there were other wolves before Derek got to Stiles or else Stiles is the most disgusting person on the planet right now.) There’s flesh and fur stuck under his fingernails. His face is pallid and his eyes are hollowed. Stiles wonders how much sleep Derek has gotten since the A-Team came to town?

“We are vile,” Stiles announces.

Derek face shifts and Stiles would swear to God that little tip in his mouth is a smile. Then Derek steps closer and starts gently undressing Stiles like it’s his business. No big deal. He doesn’t say a word.

It’s less weird than it should be. After all they’re both covered in blood and gore and there’s only one shower.

He helps Derek with his shirt, peels it off like a bandage. And they duck behind the shower curtain on each other’s shoulders.

The hot water is hell for a second and then it’s just bliss. Stiles, his head full of distance and fog, starts brushing the blood away from Derek’s skin, washes his face clean. The red sluices off like paint. The black he has to scrub away. He spends two whole minutes trying to get a dark smear off Derek’s clavicle before Derek pulls his hand away and Stiles realizes it’s a bruise.  

“Close your eyes,” Derek says. Stiles does. He stands still under the water while Derek gets the mud out of Stiles’ hair. Cleans the grit out of the split on his brow. Spends too much time washing Stiles’ fingers. And then brushes that wandering thumb of his over Stiles’ mouth again. By then they’re just two beat-up but clean dudes standing naked in the shower together.  

Stiles leans, exhausted, against the wall and lets the water pound over his neck where he was bitten. Derek’s fingers trace the mark.

“What did you do to him?” he asks.

Stiles feels the sting of his busted mouth smiling.

“I poisoned him. The ancient Chinese used wolf’s bane for medicinal stuff.”

Derek’s hazel green eyes flash up to Stiles’ face.

“Wolf’s bane is a poison to anyone,” he says. 

“Yeah. But you can de-poison it if you steam it with ginger. Sort of. I invented a tea.”

Derek stares at him for a minute. His palm is resting on Stiles shoulder, covering the shallow bite (shallow enough, Stiles thinks, that he won’t require an incredibly trustworthy barber anytime soon) and then he startles Stiles by laughing. He props himself against the wall of the shower and laughs and shakes and the water runs over his face. His hand slips down to Stiles’ arm, warm and casual.

When Derek opens his eyes again his gaze flickers down to Stiles’ mouth, over his bruised and blue chest. “Are you still poisonous?” he asks. Stiles shrugs.

“My blood probably is, but since you’re not a vampire…” he grins and risks a painful wink. Derek’s smile crumbles.

“It is a curse, Stiles,” he says softly. And they are so not starting that shit again. Stiles shoves Derek against the wall and kisses him before the words can get any further. Before they can build momentum and splinter his carelessness apart. He pushes his way past the Alpha and the Wolf and the battered guy beneath and insinuates himself against warm skin. And then for good measure he sucks whatever remaining words might exist right off of Derek’s tongue and swallows them away.

Derek breathes through his nose and pulls him closer. Carefully. His hands are soft, contentious of every single place that Stiles is in pain.

“You’re underage,” he murmurs. Stiles must have missed a word or two.

“Shut up,” he says, and goes back to get the rest.

If lycanthropy is a disease, then so is being human. Both conditions kill you at the same unpredictable speed. Both spread up from the chest like a fever. Both settle in your bones and metastasize, worming through the back of your brain and whispering things like: ‘If only you were better…”

It makes people crazy. It makes them dangerous. It makes them dark and ruthless and cruel. It makes them hunters. Sometimes it makes them killers.

So what the hell is the difference between a werewolf and a man?

There isn’t one. Even their skeletons look the same.