Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time a teacher finds knitting needles in Stiles’ backpack, she sends him to the principal. Stiles is sent to the principal a lot. 

Mom never gets mad at him for it. She says the worst thing he can do is ignore his magic and if it’s telling him to move around or talk or do something to get the Magic Buzzes out, then do it. Mom pretends she agrees with the school that Stiles is a “problem child” and then she takes Stiles out for ice cream after. 

But the day the principal presents the needles, Mom giggles. 

“Weapons are a very serious matter, Mrs.Stilinski,” the principal says. 

Mom pulls out a ball of yarn from her purse and hands it over to Stiles, snatching his normal knitting needles from the principal and handing them over.

Stiles starts a row of easy stitches and the world falls away.

Babcia taught him how to knit because he was bored. When he started finger-knitting his magic strings, she found him special needles. His strings didn’t like the special needles at first, but Babcia said magic is trials and errors and if at first you don’t succeed, try and try and try again. 

Dad says she never should have told Stiles that because he’s already “stubborn as a mule”. Babcia told Stiles lots of things, like that he is Magic’s trial and error incarnate. She told him that he has Buzzes because her magic was being passed down to him instead of Mom. 

Mom says nothing is a mistake. Dad says to clean up mistakes. Babcia told him to make all the mistakes and then make more.

After he normal-knits for the principal, it basically becomes a school rule for Stiles to knit in class (as long as his needles aren’t metal). The Magic Buzzes want him to use his strings but it doesn’t mind normal yarn if Stiles soaks magic into it at home. Normal knitting quiets down the Buzzes to a ticklish humming and he can mostly sit still and pay attention in class.

It takes a few trials and errors but Stiles tries and tries and he eventually figures out how to push magic into regular yarn. He succeeds first with a pair of Concentration Socks.

At home, he plays memory card games with Mom, has Dad quiz him on the Guinness World Book of Records, and spends hours focusing on drawing inside the lines in his coloring books. During every activity, he keeps yarn on him, hoping super, super hard for it to absorb his concentration like a sponge. 

Stiles starts pulling in A+s on his spelling tests with his new socks and Mom convinces Dad to drive them out to the big movie theater on the weekend.

“My sweet magic Mischief,” Mom says and kisses the top of his head.

Stiles knits Warm Scarves, Go-Away-Anger Headbands, Sweet Dreams Blanket, and his favorite—the hacky sack that helps take away his Magic Buzzes when he plays with it during recess. 

/☽\

“It won’t be so hard when you’re older,” Mom says. She rocks Stiles in her lap while he cries over his hacky sack exploding. “Your magic is too big for your body right now but you’ll grow into it.”

Babcia had said all ninety-six years of her magic went into his little body. His hacky sack only lasted four days. 

Stiles stops crying long enough to ask, “Am I going to blow up?”

“No, honey,” Mom says. She holds him tighter. It hurts a little but Stiles doesn’t say anything. “That’s why we have your special needles.” She presses a kiss to the top of his head. “Why don’t we work more with your real string, okay?”

Stiles sniffles. “Okay.”

Stiles’ real strings are invisible to other people, even Mom and Babcia. He’s tangled in glowing colors from head to toe like a mummy. Sometimes, certain colors fall out of the tangles and drag on the ground behind Stiles like a tail. 

“There’s lotsa red,” Stiles says.

“What does the red mean, honey?”

Stiles climbs out of Mom’s lap and follows the glow of red to where it ends a few feet away. He picks up the string and closes his eyes. Soft fur brushes against his legs and a tongue licks his arm.

Giggling, he opens his eyes and says, “Dog.”

Mom takes his hand. “We can watch All Dogs Go To Heaven and I’ll cook you some bacon.”

Stiles shakes his head. “No. I have to sit outside at night. The moon says so.”

“The moon?”

Stiles nods. “The red says the moon says so.”

Mom picks him up and holds him too tight again. 

She sits with him in the garden once the sun sets and Stiles shows off how fast his special needles move now. All the school hours of normal knitting has made magic easier and harder. The more normal knitting patterns he learns, the quicker his real strings transform. Keeping his special needles floating makes his head hurt now, though, because he’s becoming used to his hands doing the work.

It’s almost sunrise before his special needles fall into his lap. A grown dog the size of puppy nuzzles Stiles’ knee. The red string around its neck snaps off and winds back up Stiles’ arm. The dog licks his toes and then runs off, passing through the backyard fence like a ghost.

“Done,” Stiles says sleepily. He lifts his arms for Mom to carry him to bed.

“What kind of dog was it?”

“Like that movie with the snow dog. ‘Member Mommy? The others didn’t like him but,” Stiles yawns, “he got the medicine.”

“Balto?”

Stiles nods against Mom’s shoulder. He liked Balto. He wishes he could follow his Balto-dog but he’s too sleepy. He’s never made a dog before. He made a mouse once with purple string and the next day someone found their missing cat.

He hopes magic-Balto does something nice like that. The moon thinks he’s important so he must be a good doggy.

“My sweet magic Mischief,” Mom says, kissing the top of his head and tucking his Sweet Dreams blanket around him. She sounds sad. Stiles will normal-knit a Happy Beanie next. 

 /❀\ ❀❀❀❀

Babcia taught Stiles how to calm down. She taught him how to use knitting for magic. She taught him about life and said Mom would help him with the rest, of the things in-between. 

Most magic kids are supposed to have teachers, Babcia said, but Stiles is special, and not in the way that Mom says he’s special because he’s her kid and she loves him. Stiles is magic-special. 

Babcia said Stiles is lucky because most teachers are rules, rules, rules. She said Stiles is meant to go wild and play with his magic—trials and errors and try and try and mistakes.

Stiles is eight now and Babcia has been dead for two years and Mom’s sick. Mom is supposed to help him when magic fits his body and he is not big yet so she can’t be sick and that means this must be a mistake. 

Stiles is very good at fixing mistakes.

Stiles knits seven pairs of Concentration Socks, a pair for every day of the week. They don’t help Mom’s confusion and forgetting—error. He knits a new Happy Beanie with the bright yellow yarn he stuffed down his shirt on weekend picnics with Dad. The Beanie helps, a little—success. Sweet Dreams blanket works, too—success. Headband for Health soaked in cough syrup—error.  

Mom forgets to remind him about his special needles. Life is all normal yarn trials with no time for strings. The Magic Buzzes ache in his bones like those little zings that shoot up his legs when he jumps down from fences and his feet hit the ground really hard.

He can’t finish the Calm Mittens he’s working on because he’s too angry. Dad took Mom to the hospital and said Stiles couldn’t come along this time.

Stiles doesn’t like being home alone. He’d make a good evil villain. With all the loneliness and anger and sadness, he could knit Swatches Of Hurt to slip inside his enemy's pockets or pillowcases. 

Stiles’ only enemy right now is invisible. Maybe that means Mom’s sickness needs something invisible to fix it! Stiles touches his strings for the first time in days and spends hours sorting through all the different kinds looping around his limbs. None of them magic-speak about medicine or health.

The Magic Buzzes grow angrier and angrier so he finds the yellow string that pulsed with flowers and made his nose tickle with a sneeze. The house is loneliness and anger and sadness—he really would make a good evil villain—so Stiles goes outside to the garden.

He pulls weeds and soaks up sunshine while his special needles click-clack quietly next to him, creating a long daisy chain only he can see. The yellow string doesn’t slide out of his tangles and go away to wherever, or whoever, it’s supposed to go. It’s the first creation to stay with him—slithers around his ankle in a hug.

He keeps up his trials of pushing healing magic into normal knitting even though it is all error and mistake. The Magic Buzzes hurt too much to be ignored so he works with his strings again even though Mom doesn't sit with him anymore.

Stiles’ strings become obsessed with daisy chains made up of all kinds of colorful flowers. Every time he gets to the end of the string his special needles are knitting, the flowers wrap around one of his ankles. The daisy chains trail behind him everywhere he goes, like invisible toilet paper stuck to his shoe. 

They unwind off of Stiles’ ankles a year after his special needles touched the first yellow string. The tied together stems break apart and thousands of flowers float and spin around the hospital room.

Stiles climbs into the hospital bed even though the nurses get mad at him for it. He kisses the top of Mom’s head.

Mom looks up and her eyes follow the daisy twirling closest to them.

Stiles clutches on to Mom’s hospital gown and asks, “You can see my magic?”

Mom’s fingers twitch and a flower floats down onto her hand. She says those four words she hasn’t said in so long that Stiles almost forgot them. “My sweet magic Mischief.”

Stiles cries. The flowers slowly float down lower and lower until they cover her in a blanket.

/~\

Magic was Mom and Stiles’ thing.

Dad buys yarn of all types and colors but he doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t understand what Magic Buzzes means and doesn’t know what it looks like when the Buzzes get bad. He doesn’t like Stiles getting sent to the principal.

He buys more yarn and tries to ask Stiles what he sees. Stiles has stopped talking so he can’t yell that he “sees” with his real strings, his invisible magic. 

He knows Dad is trying but Stiles is done with magic and he wants Dad to try with normal things—pack his school lunches and work less and stop drinking and just be Dad. 

Strings pool around Stiles’ feet from neglect. The worst by far is the red. Red’s always been the one string that never ends, that creates and transforms into things without ever being all used up. The string starts somewhere tangled near his neck and knots around the strings by his chest.

The cluster of red grows bigger the more Stiles ignores it. 

Stiles fights the Magic Buzzes. More like Magic Lightning, now. The school counselor says his hands shaking are from anxiety. He doesn’t tell her that sometimes he wakes up shaking all over, that he has magic strings that burn his skin from neglecting them.

/(red)\

Stiles dreams of his old hacky sack that exploded and wakes up screaming. 

“Stiles, it’s okay. It’s okay,” Dad yells over Stiles’ screaming, “it was just a dream.”

Stiles fights Dad’s hug. “Magic Buzzes,” he gasps out. Since he stopped using his special needles, the burning strings have made him feel like he’s covered head to toe in blisters.

It’s not just the hug that hurts, though, it’s— 

“Hospital,” Stiles says. “Hospital. My magic.”

“Stiles, I don’t—”

“Mom would take me to the hospital,” Stiles says without thinking. It’s the first full sentence he’s said to Dad in months. It’s the first time he’s said Mom. 

Stiles doesn’t see auras like Mom could but he gets tingles, more so with her gone. The house has tingled with darkness for a long time. Dad’s hand is still on Stiles’ shoulder—burns, burns, burns—and the tingles feel like how Stiles’ heart hurt when the daisy chains broke.

Quietly, Dad asks, “Do you need your yarn?”

Stiles shakes his head. 

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Stiles summons his special needles from the back of his closet. Once they’re in the car, Stiles touches the red knot. It’s mad at him for abandoning it, pulsing fire and gnashing teeth. It tingles like the hurt of broken daisy chains, too.

“Long-term care ward,” Stiles says. Then, in a small voice, “I don’t want to explode.”

Dad talks in the same strong voice Mom used when she’d hold him too tight. “You’re not going to explode. I won’t let you.”

Stiles blurts, “My hands shake because of the Magic Buzzes.”

Dad takes a hand off the steering wheel but Stiles shrieks before he can touch him.

“Everything hurts!”

“Stiles,” Dad says, both hands on the wheel and knuckles white, “I need you to tell me everything about Magic Buzzes, right now. Everything.”

And Stiles does. If he doesn’t talk, he’ll think of the hacky sack. He explains his magic is too big and the invisible strings and the red knot.

“So, it helps people?” Dad asks. The tingles coming from Dad are shaky and scared and relieved.

“I guess. Mom said I’ll be able to knit what I want and learn other magic when I’m bigger.”

They pull into the hospital parking lot. Dad unbuckles his seatbelt and turns to Stiles. “What now?”

“The...the red knot says you stay here.”

Dad looks like he wants to argue. He didn’t get weird about how the red knot speaks so Stiles barrels on. “Magic protects me,” Stiles says, because he knows this in his bones and Babcia said so. “Whatever needs me in there, magic will make sure no one stops me.”

Dad takes a big breath and then nods. He nods again. “Okay.” He reaches to touch Stiles but remembers in time and stops. “Okay. I’ll wait here.”

The red knot trembles and Stiles scrambles out of the car. He takes a moment to grit through the pain and say, “Thanks, Dad.”

Chapter Text

Dad starts trying.

He’s not very good at it but a month after Stiles’ nightmare, it no longer hurts when Dad touches him. Dad’s so excited that he hugs Stiles and keeps reaching out for him like he’s making sure Stiles is still here. He ruffles Stiles' hair and pats his shoulder and the grip on the back of his neck when he gets in trouble is gentle now.

Dad still drinks and works a lot but he explains the hospital bills and it doesn’t make it okay—Stiles knows from the tingles that Dad’s relieved to have so much work away from home—but it’s better. He’s not good at taking care of Stiles physically but he works hard on understanding Stiles’ magic. He sits with Stiles for hours after long shifts and makes sure Stiles knits away all the strings that have been piling up for months. He drives Stiles to the hospital when he can and shows Stiles how to take the bus for when he can’t.

Stiles’ red string is a never-ending knitting project.

It led him to a man in some kind of coma. The red string shows fire and speaks a real word—Peter. Stiles was right—his magic makes sure he gets to where he needs to be. The nurses never see Stiles. It’s kind of awesome being invisible like his string. He wishes Mom was here because this is Big Magic outside of strings and he has to go through it all alone.

Well, not alone. He has Peter.

/~\

“You give bad tingles,” Stiles says one day. “It feels like my house does and daisy chains and like when I almost exploded before I found you.”

Stiles brings yarn and normal needles now. He’s getting stronger. He can magic-knit and normal-knit at the same time. “I’m making you Go-Away-Anger swatches. I’ll slip them in your pillow. Maybe I can work on making my Sweet Dreams blanket go invisible, too, and bring it here.” Stiles sighs. “I need magic books. Mom was supposed to teach me. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Like, what is that?”

He stares at his special needles working furiously above Peter. No matter how much he clears his mind and focuses on the red string, it tells him nothing other than Peter’s name. Every day, it knits the same large swirls that drop on Peter’s chest and sink into his body with a bright red glow. 

It’s awesome-looking. But weird. 

Stiles goes back to his Go-Away-Anger. “I hope it’s helping. The pain tingles aren’t as bad but you still feel angry and sad.” Stiles keeps his eyes on the dark blue yarn. He says, “I feel sad, too.”

/~\

A new kid moves to school. He wheezes and sits with Stiles during lunch. No one ever sits with Stiles—he had friends when he was the class clown that always got in trouble but then he became the Yarn Weirdo. Some kids call him Spinster, which is so funny that Stiles doesn’t correct them on how little sense that makes.

Green string forms around Stiles’ wrist as the new kid whines about how P.E. is after lunch. It makes Stiles pause his mindless finger-knitting between bites of a granola bar. Babcia said Stiles should run free with his magic.

Stiles hides his hands under the lunch table and ignores the yarn he had just wound through his fingers. Time for a trial.

He listens to the new kid and pictures how his special needles float in the air, careful to not actually summon them. He glances through the crack in the planks of the lunch table. The new green string twitches. It makes a sad little effort of slithering off of him before drooping back around his wrist. Error.

It takes weeks of floating his special needles at home after he’s done seeing Peter. His special needles hate hovering without purpose but Stiles is determined to figure out how his magic makes them float without strings.

Throughout the sleepless nights, Stiles discovers that the Magic Buzzes slip outside of his body in more places than just his fingertips, spreading his magic out all around him. Stiles pokes around the thrumming running through his bones, following the trail to a pulsing ball of energy around his ribcage. 

“It’s like my magic is a hamster and I’m the hamster ball,” Stiles tells Peter. “Like, the magic-hamster walks and pushes and controls where the me-ball goes.” Stiles gnaws on a normal needle, thinking. He brandishes the needle out of his mouth and points it in Peter’s direction, perking up. “I have to be the hamster and the ball. I have to control where the ball moves.”

Stiles deals with a lot of errors. This is the in-between Mom was supposed to help him with. But Babcia had told him to go wild and use mistakes as his teacher and Stiles refuses to be a lost cause.

The green string is kindly patient as he works on splitting his mind into two paths. One part focused on his energy source and one part focused on the image of lungs. 

Two months of sitting with the new kid, Scott, and Stiles finally figures it out on the day they’re being tested for how fast they can run a mile. Underneath the lunch table, the green string transforms without any needles. Stiles is teaching Scott how to whistle, how to blow air. Every time Stiles blinks, on the back of his eyelids he sees his green string stitching together.

The bell rings and the green lungs float up and disappear in Scott’s chest.

Scott finishes the mile in eight minutes.

Stiles passes out.

It’s pretty awesome.

/~\

Stiles tells Peter about it. “I’m going to keep using special needles with you because you’re too important to mess up.” Stiles lies in bed curled up next to Peter between the comings and goings of nurses. He’s exhausted from working on needleless magic so he doesn’t normal-knit today. “Do you think I can start my own strings? I can’t make him magic-lungs all the time but I could probably make his inhaler better.”

Stiles lifts his arm and runs his fingers through his strings like a harp. The stories they tell are murmurs of fuzzy images and the barest prickles of sensations. “I think I’m starting to be in control of what they’ll become.” Stiles drops his arm and tucks himself closer into Peter’s side. “It’s scary. I don’t know what to do.”

/~\

“I don’t think I like Scott,” Stiles admits. He paces, restless as his magic sorts itself out in his changing body. His bones hurt in a normal way, finally growing to fit his Magic Buzzes. “I feel bad that I don’t feel bad. It’s just he’s,” Stiles trails off and throws his arms up in the air.

“He’s like Dad,” Stiles says after walking several loops around the hospital room. “Well, Dad’s better because he knows about magic. But he doesn’t know-know magic, you know? I love Dad. But he’s also so...normal. Ugh,” Stiles groans and throws himself into the chair by Peter’s hospital bed. “Why is everything so confusing?”

Stiles works on the deep breathing exercises the school counselor taught him for panic attacks. He lets the world fall away into magic. 

He moves his mind alongside the magic wrapped around his red string that's forming swirls—triskelions, Stiles had learned.

He melts into whispers of Peter and becomes the string, feeling himself twisting and pulling into shapes of soothing and protecting and healing.

He spreads further, hears the tick-tock coming from the orange string that grew in class during his daydreaming about energy drinks. The string brims with the promise of caffeine.

Nestled in his magic, Stiles returns to settle in his body. His nose tickles with the electrifying zaps of the energy source buzzing in his chest.

He touches the tingles in the air with his hands, the emotions a wavy type of mist. The intensity of Peter’s emotions has dulled down over the past few years. 

“I’ll make you feel happy someday,” Stiles says. “Dad says I do magic to help people but I think I just like being needed.”

Stiles works on his homework due next month, mumbling aloud as he does so, and then climbs in bed with Peter. 

“Red string, red string, red string,” Stiles says under his breath. “Triskelion. Peter. Heal.” Stiles traces swirls on the back of Peter’s burned hand. “I’m glad you need me,” Stiles says.

/~\

Stiles controls his strings. 

He gets Nudges of suggestions as if Beacon Hills residents are flashing the Bat-Signal at him for help. He listens, sometimes—for the hungry children and tired workers and a bird out in the preserve with a broken wing.

He hears about his classmate’s kidnapped sister and weaves together multiple strings for the first time. He loses himself in a trance of strings threading together into an intricate compass. He sleeps for two days straight once he finishes.

When he wakes up, Dad hugs him and says they found the little Boyd girl, unharmed and safe.

After that, Stiles is fluent in string-talk, easily swapping images and sensations with them to create what he wants.

Staying grounded in the normal world becomes harder, his focus on the present hazier. He checks out the kid's section of the craft store, picking out other forms of string work than yarn. He buys kits for friendship bracelets, potholder looming, and lanyards. His mind sharpens with each new hobby, memorizing the new patterns and the new patterns within the patterns.

He tinkers with spilling his magic into physical forms, taking concepts like Concentration Socks and pushing the limits farther, better, steadier. Alcohol has noticeably gone down in the house after Dad accepted a mental health bracelet. Scott accepts Stiles’ friendship bracelet with a winning smile, not knowing it’s secretly an anchor for easy breathing.

Scott might not fit into Stiles’ world but he shows Stiles what it’s like to be a teenager and not a hamster ball. He sits with Stiles in their shared classes but hangs out with other kids during lunch and after school. That’s okay—Stiles works on his physical magic during lunch and he has Peter always.

/~\

Peter gets the brunt of Stiles’ try and try and try again. His ankles are covered in bracelets for different types of healing, anchors for relief against physical aches and negative mental health. 

The red string continues knitting triskelions for Peter and Stiles mostly knits his other strings for Peter as well.

A hulk fist for power and strength.

A caterpillar cocoon for transforming into something new—just as good or better than before. 

Stiles even makes Peter daisy chains. He cries as he knits the flowers but he knows they brought Mom peace and Peter needs that. And maybe he needs to feel the release of daisy chains for the people he lost, too. The red string is more easily persuaded into talking with Stiles now and it reveals flashes of faces with the fire.

Stiles magically exhausts himself in knitting a new Sweet Dreams blanket at the slowest pace to pour in every ounce of magic he’s able to. He uses yarn that he cuddled while napping beside Peter.

/~\

Peter isn’t all work and no play. Stiles talks to Peter about everything and anything.

“You’re my best friend,” Stiles says and then fake barfs because that’s embarrassing. He laughs. “That means you have to listen to all my theories about how the moon landing was faked by magic—”

/~\

“I think I’m gay,” Stiles tells Peter after his first day of high school. “That was rude of me—hi, Peter, how are you, may the force be with your triskelion.” Stiles throws his backpack on the floor and sits on the edge of Peter’s bed. He waits a beat, feeling the red string for any kind of answer. It purrs the familiar Peter. “Okay, back to me. So, there’s this senior and oh my god, Peter, he is H-A-W-T hot.” 

/~\

“Actually, I’m bisexual,” Stiles says a few months later. “That means I don’t like just one gender. Maybe you know that. I wish you could talk to me.”

/~\

“Lydia’s been watching me. I think she suspects something. Is it bad that I’m excited instead of scared? 

“She feels like daisy chains and that was enough to turn me off of my crush but she’s not sick. I sat behind her in Chem and she feels...not-Scott, not-Dad, y’know, not normal. She feels like more.” 

Stiles paces. His energy source has centered since his last growth spurt, but he thinks magic will always be too big for his body to contain. 

“But she’s caught up in dumb normal shit like social hierarchies,” Stiles grouches. “And not the smart hierarchy of survival and predator, but the shallow kind of jocks and nerds.”

Stiles flops to lie on the floor. He taps into his magic center and stretches his mind outside of his body, weaving his strings into a navy sky on the hospital ceiling. He creates twinkling stars and a crescent moon that waxes to full.

“You’re more, too,” Stiles says. “Even if you’re not something. You’ll never be normal-normal because you’re Peter and red string and mine.”

/~\

Some days, Stiles likes to do nothing but lie next to Peter and zone out. He watches his special needles, only ever used for Peter now, and gives the triskelions his undivided attention. He fell down the rabbit hole of triskelion meanings years ago, prattled on all about it to Peter. It helped incorporate all types of symbols into his magic but he’s still unsure why his red string chose the triskelion. Three is the magic number, though, so Stiles figures it probably gives an extra kick of healing. 

Stiles' life can be boiled down to three things—himself, magic, and Peter. 

“Did you know pinky promises originally meant that if you broke the promise you were supposed to cut off your finger? Seems pretty fair to me.” Stiles hooks his pinky with Peter’s. “There’s also this thing—red thread of fate. There’s different interpretations about which finger the thread is tied to but it’s an East Asian legend of soulmates being connected to each other by a red string—red thread.” Stiles flushes and feels silly for it. “Um. Thought that was interesting...because string magic and...thread. Red.” Stiles curls his other hand around the red knot sitting on his chest. “I know my red string brought me to you for healing,” Stiles says, “but you’d be a good soulmate, I think. You’re a good best friend.”

When Peter’s triskelion session is done, the special needles falling onto Peter’s legs, Stiles slows the end of the red string flying back to him. He redirects it to wrap around his and Peter’s connected pinkies.

“I promise,” Stiles says, letting everything fill in the blank space. The red string hums Peter and returns to its tangled knot.

As he unhooks their pinkies, the urge to kiss the top of Peter’s head drifts up to the surface of Stiles’ thoughts. He always listens to his instincts, so he doesn’t resist the silly urge.

He kisses the side of Peter's head, lips brushing over the scars preventing hair growth. “I don’t know why I’m being so sentimental,” Stiles says. “But thank you.”

/☽\

Stiles is sixteen, the summer before sophomore year, when he wakes up to his special needles knitting above him. 

“Balto?”

The half-formed animal wags its tail. Stiles remembers him, remembers the moon and Mom’s hug. This time, Balto is huge. Like, horse-sized huge. And he’s a wolf, not a dog. 

Stiles’ needles speed up now that he’s awake and Balto is quickly finished. He licks Stiles’ face and Stiles laughs from the phantom feeling of slobber. He touches Balto, made primarily of red string with other colors stitched in. The strings that made up Balto speak of moon and hospital.

Stiles wishes his magic was less ghost and more corporeal so he could bury his fingers in fur and laugh. “Of course you’re Peter’s. Come on, let’s go see our keeper.”

Balto trots at Stiles’ side and shrinks to the size of a large dog to fit in Roscoe. When Stiles pulls into the parking lot, Balto grows again and bounds right through the car door. He crosses the parking lot, disappearing through the hospital wall near Peter’s section of the ward.

Stiles’ magic might keep him invisible from the nurses but, unfortunately, he can’t ghost through surfaces. He walks the familiar walk alone, wondering about the little Balto he created as a kid. He shoots Dad a text so he’ll know why the jeep’s gone when he gets home. It’s past midnight, after all.

“What the fuck, Peter,” Stiles mutters under his breath, a little cranky. 

Walking into Peter’s room feels like walking into a brick wall. Stiles forces himself through the thick air, goosebumps erupting across his skin. Peter’s dulled emotions are cranked up to the highest power and there are so many tingles. Every emotion across the spectrum, feelings that Stiles doesn’t recognize.

Balto’s lying on top of Peter. He’s more solid-looking than he’d been in the car, more real than any creation of Stiles’, but the menacing growl echoing in the room isn't coming from him.

Cold fear slides down Stiles’ spine, freezing his lungs. He tentatively side-steps his way to his chair at Peter’s bedside, afraid for reasons that have nothing to do with physical safety.

Balto lifts his head and Stiles’ breath catches at the sight of Peter’s face.

Everything makes a lot more sense. And also doesn’t.

Chapter Text

Outside of the full moon, Peter is back to his vegetative state. He’s different, though. Stiles feels it—in the tingles, in the red string, and in his bones.  

His endless red string slows down, knitting triskelions at a lazy pace. Peter’s awakened powers must heal himself better than Stiles can. It makes Stiles anxious and mad and scared.

Peter’s supposed to need him.

Balto comes over and nudges against Stiles whenever he spirals too far down that train of thought.

The magic-wolf mostly stays with Peter but sometimes he turns up in Stiles’ bedroom or even at school. It’s strange for a creation to stick around and not go off to who-knows-where or fade into someone/something. Balto’s becoming less holographic and more sentient, too. 

Stiles hopes Balto checking on him when he’s not at the hospital is Peter’s doing. On paper, Stiles is probably no different than a doctor or nurse. A (non-traditional) healer. But he’s been by Peter’s side for six years, keeping him company and going above the duties of a healer. That has to count for something. Right?

Stiles has to believe Peter is attached to him at least a little bit.

It’s a silly hope. 

Stiles can feel Peter’s emotional response to Stiles’ chatting. The day after seeing Peter in all his distorted facial wolf glory, Stiles entered the room blabbering away mid-rant about something he’d been obsessing over on the drive over. It took a full minute for Stiles to understand the new tingle in the room—confusion, an unpleasant ripple that made his skin itch. He clammed up and hasn’t spoken since. 

Stiles wonders if Peter’s memory stored anything Stiles said over the past years. He tries not to think about explaining the red thread of fate.

/~\

Stiles reads his history homework beside Peter, clenching his jaw to remind him that reading aloud is no longer an option. His concentration is shot to hell and his eyes keep making their way back to Peter, propped up in a wheelchair by the window.

Peter’s very handsome. He’s smart, too. The red string buzzes with gossip on Peter. He was valedictorian in high school and in the middle of his residency as a doctor before the fire happened. He’s so far out of Stiles’ league without taking into account that he’s a goddamn werewolf.

Like, how fucking cool is that! A werewolf. 

Stiles is a sixteen-year-old high schooler that has magic in the form of invisible strings and knitting. He has zero friends, has grades good enough to please his dad but lacks all ambition for anything academic, and he lives in his head more than the real world.

More than anything, Stiles wishes he could talk about his insecurities to Peter like he used to. All it takes is remembering Peter’s gorgeous, supernaturally shining eyes focused on him and all the words die in Stiles’ throat.

It's reminiscent of how he stopped talking after Mom died. He tries not to think about it like that but this new development feels like daisy chains all over again. Like he’s losing something important forever. 

Balto whines and burrows his head into Stiles’ lap. Balto doesn’t weigh anything but he can apply pressure whenever it suits his fancy. The defiance of physics is annoying when the magic-wolf sits on top of Stiles to make him go to sleep but right now his head in Stiles’ lap is grounding.

Every day Balto creeps closer to turning into a solid wolf with a reddish tint. No one else will ever see him, of course, other than Stiles and Peter.

Except once Peter fully heals, Balto might disappear from Stiles’ vision as well.

“God, would you fucking stop that,” Stiles snaps, all the words of the past two weeks pouring out of him. “It’s just angry tingles all the time! I’m going to fucking knit you a Go-Away-Anger Sweater.”

The irritation tingles that have been growing with every visit slide into amusement. The sudden shift is jarring and more than a little humiliating. 

Face flushing, Stiles turns his back to Peter, twisting his chair to face Peter’s empty bed. “Yeah, whatever, make fun of the dumb magic dude.” Stiles runs his fingers through his hair and pretends his heartache is Magic Buzzes. “I’d stop bothering you but the red string is still here so you’re stuck with me until I’m useless.” Sullenly, Stiles adds, “More useless than I already am.”

Placing his paws on Stiles’ slumped shoulders, Balto licks at his cheek. The slobber is still not-real, thankfully. It’s a ticklishly cold sensation. 

Huffing, Stiles wraps his arms around Balto and buries his face in the wolf's neck. He enjoys the feel of fur brushing his skin, and tries to hide his shaky breathing. The amusement hanging over the room has slid back to anger. It’s darker and meaner, bitter on Stiles’ tongue. Balto starts up a low rumbling growl and Stiles pulls away, thinking Balto’s fed up with him, too.

Balto retaliates to Stiles retreating by clambering into Stiles’ lap, tipping the chair over with sudden pressure. They fumble to the ground and Balto flops on top of Stiles, keeping him pinned. He licks at Stiles’ face until he finally laughs.

Pleased, Balto presses his cold nose to Stiles’ neck. It’s only then that Stiles notices the tingles have shifted once again. The amusement is back but…quiet. Soft? Stiles isn’t sure if there are tingles of anxiety along with it or if that’s just Stiles’ own emotions clogging up his magic.

Closing his eyes, Stiles pets Balto, drifting out of his body and skirting along the magic surrounding Balto, the whispers of magic that were once his strings. An image comes to him of a shadowy figure pacing this room and talking.

“I...” Stiles blinks and slams back into his body. He tightens his fingers in Balto’s fur. “Do you want me to talk?”

The amused tingles spike, bringing goosebumps to his skin. 

“I thought you were laughing at me,” Stiles admits.

The irritation returns. 

“Were you mad that I stopped talking?” 

Balto licks Stiles’ face and rolls off of him. Stiles scrambles up, heart pounding, and he grabs his chair, pulling it up close to Peter. 

He’s not ready to meet Peter’s eyes so he watches his special needles hanging above them, knitting leisurely. “I missed you.” Stiles flushes. “Talking to you. I missed talking to you.”

The amusement is definitely soft. Stiles has a long way to go in learning the intricacies of tingles—developing the talent has never mattered much before now. He constantly feels two steps behind where he should be with his magic. 

“I just feel stupid,” Stiles says. “I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.” Anxiety tingles that aren't his spike and oh. Maybe Peter is a little attached to him. Gaining confidence, Stiles loosens his tongue. “Like, I say tingles and Go-Away-Anger and Magic Buzzes. It’s all kid words I made up but never stopped using. It’s so pathetic and embarrassing.”

Dark, bitter irritation.

“And you’re angry again,” Stiles says, throwing his hands up in the air. He fights the need to get up and pace. “I stole my mom’s aura magic but it’s not—I can’t even read the tingles right! It must suck not being able to talk and I can’t do anything useful about it when I should be able to. If I could just be better...”

Balto clamps his jaws lightly on Stiles’ elbow and tugs. Stiles had been yanking at his hair again. Maybe he should get a buzzcut. Stiles pulls his elbow out of Balto’s mouth and angrily scrubs his fists over his eyes. Blue string around Stiles’ wrist unravels in the way his strings worked as a kid. It’s his magic controlling him instead of the other way around. 

Making sure his special needles are handling the red string, Stiles worries about multitasking in his emotional state. Magic Buzzes shake through him, giving him no choice but to address the blue emergency. His head pounds as he extends himself through magic, weaving the string that speaks to him of flapping wings. Luckily, it takes less than a minute to knit.

“Pretty,” Stiles comments, pulling out of his magic. The blue butterfly flutters before him.  What matter called out to Stiles’ magic so urgently that it overrode his control?

The butterfly flies around the room and circles back to Stiles. A wave of calm flows through him the moment it lands on his shoulder and sinks inside him.

“Oh.” Stiles blinks. He’s lost in a haze of peacefulness he’s rarely felt. “This is what my magic feels like? S’nice.”

Amusement dances through the room, reminding Stiles of where he is and what’s going on.

“This hasn’t happened before,” Stiles says, frowning. “I didn’t know my strings could work on me.” Physically knitting himself magic worked, though less potent than when he made it for others. “Did,” Stiles licks his lips, “did you give it to me?”

Balto barks.

“I’ll take that as yes.” The butterfly’s calm smoothed out everything twisted inside Stiles. He’s still in a bit of a daze. “Wow. No one’s ever been able to do that.”

The tingles are...smug? Balto prances around the room in a ridiculous manner. Smiling, Stiles meets Peter’s unfocused eyes and wonders why he was ever scared. “You're okay with me sticking around?”

Balto barks. Stiles suspects the irritation tingles are Peter’s way of calling Stiles an idiot in a fond way.

/~\

The next full moon, Balto nudges Stiles to be the one to lie on top of Peter. Resting his head on Peter’s chest, Stiles listening to the werewolf's racing heartbeat. 

Strings waiting for a purpose decide they’re done waiting for Stiles to knit them. Several strings—apparently it’s not only the red that’s fond of Peter—unwind off his limbs and latch onto Peter’s arms.

It’s not something they’ve ever done before—found a purpose outside of being knitted. It’s awkward and clumsy but his strings jerk and yank Peter’s arms around until they are draped across Stiles’ back.

Mortified, Stiles whispers, “That was so embarrassing. Oh my god.”

Peter’s irritation is stronger in his charged state.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Yeah.” He smushes his face against Peter’s chest.

Stiles is wearing a thin sleep shirt, void of his usual layers, and the pinpricks of claws against his lower back send little sparks up his spine in a decidedly not-painful way.

“Yeah,” Stiles says again. 

Something like amusement-smug blankets the room.

/~\

Balto leads Stiles to a secret vault under the school. It’s filled with everything Stiles failed to find online, and he’d been using his strings for extra help in Googling.

Werewolves are amazing. 

Stiles holds onto his excitement, refusing to give in to his swell of insecurity. Peter doesn’t need Stiles’ baggage. He sent Stiles here for a reason.

Balto pads over and drops his head into Stiles’ lap when he’s zoned out at the page on werewolf anatomy for…Stiles’ has no idea how long. Time’s never really been important to him—life is in chunks of school time, Peter time, sleep time. Balto’s sensitivity to Stiles’ dark thoughts isn’t a fluke—turns out werewolves can smell chemosignals.

Balto isn’t Peter and he’s not a werewolf but he’s something in-between. He communicates with Peter somehow.

It’s strange learning Peter knows Stiles’ feelings like Stiles knows Peter's via tingles. He’s relieved Peter understands being unable to not know things, and won’t feel violated. Acknowledging tingles makes Dad go into talks about “lack of privacy”.

If Peter keeps Stiles around once he’s fully healed, maybe he can give Stiles pointers on deciphering emotions. Except, Stiles thinks, reading over the section on chemosignals, tingles are probably enormously different than scent. 

Whatever, Stiles is inferior to werewolves, he’ll get used to it. It’s fine.

Werewolves basically have super everything—hearing, strength, smell. The Hale books don’t go in-depth about healing abilities because there’s not supposed to be much to it. They get hurt, they heal. If the injury is severe, they heal an insane amount of time quicker than humans. 

Stiles is grateful he’s not with Peter when he learns about that. Balto turns into a whimpering mess from the rush of chemosignals Stiles broadcasted, full of anger and anguish.

Six years of healing with Stiles’ help...the amount of pain Peter had to have been in, the extent to which he had been hurt...

Stiles finger-knits all of his emergency pocket yarn to calm down. The long snake-like cord has to be stored in a plastic bag to contain the potency of rage saturated into the yarn. It goes in his Magic of Negativity Bin—mainly made up of anxiety and anger.

/~\

There are books on magic in the vault. Stiles itches to devour every word over and over again, learn real magic vocabulary. He resists, only flipping through for information helpful for Peter. He starts building a Supernatural Toolkit, adapting the constricting methods the books detail to fit his magic. 

A werewolf needs an identical version of the bullet they were shot with to burn out the poison? One, fuck that, Stiles can knit his strings into anti-poison or a replica of the bullet. Two, Stiles normal-knits a bunch of wolfsbane flowers soaked in his magic in preparation to burn over potential future wounds. Also, if the possibility of being hurt is anywhere on the horizon, Stiles will weave his strings into a weapon-proof vest.

Preventive measures, bitch.

This leads Stiles to the most important information he learns—Hunters. Balto drags over the journal recording the history of Hales and various Hunter families and it’s easy for Stiles to piece everything together. 

Again, Stiles is thankful Peter isn’t in the vault. 

Stiles suspects his Magic of Negativity Bin is going to expand as much as his Supernatural Toolkit is. 

/~\

“I’m sorry,” Stiles blurts, the apology exploding from him the moment he enters the hospital room. “I was so focused on learning about you through my strings and if I had looked at my dad’s files—it’s so obvious! I should have looked into it—no, don’t be irritated with me, I’m right.” Balto’s tail whacks Stiles. Scowling, Stiles pushes him away. “Every Hunter or person involved—I’ll fix this, Peter, I promise. I’m sorry.”

Peter’s never frightened him before, not genuinely, not even with the sudden fangs on the night Stiles learned he was more. But then Stiles gets whiplash from the air flipping into electric rage and Balto—

Balto roars. 

Scrambling backward, Stiles presses himself into the corner of the room. The mist of tingles are like chopped onions, burning Stiles’ eyes. He’s intimately familiar with holding back tears and that's not what this is. This is…

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Stiles chokes out. “I thought you’d want my help.”

The hair along Balto’s spine raises, everything enormous about him appearing even bigger. He stalks forward and Stiles flinches. Balto's growl shows off sharp teeth, deadly and so far from anything string-like. He cages Stiles against the wall and—takes on a protective stance. He's guarding.

Stiles’ special needles clatter on the floor, rolling off Peter’s lap after their sudden fall mid-knitting. The red string abandons the swirl it had started and zooms back to its tangles around Stiles’ chest. The entire knot trembles like when it led him to Peter for the first time. Stiles’ mind feels pulled in too many directions to hold a conversation but he tries—pressing his shaking hand to the red string. 

The red speaks loud, hurts his head like someone screaming would hurt his ears.  

It’s many things—phantom weight against his pinky, whole body shivers that have nothing to do with Magic Buzzes, fire, faces Stiles hasn’t seen before that are full of sneering and disgust—but what clicks most is an image, fuzzy because it’s imagined and not from memory, of Stiles tucked tightly inside a knitted red blanket.

Swallowing, Stiles thinks before he speaks. The electric air is rage but the onion-like quality to the tingles is underlying desperation. Stiles can’t begin to understand this foreign fear for him, and the baffling depth of it.

“I want to help,” Stiles says. He talks fast before Peter can freak out again, promising, “But I’ll be safe. I won’t do anything without you. I can just find the information on who. I swear on my mom’s grave I won’t track anyone down alone—I promise on my strings.”

Balto’s growling peaks in an almost-bark before fading. The volatile tingles falter slightly. 

Stiles can’t not push now that he’s been given an inch. “I’ll bring the files and my laptop here tomorrow.” He reassures, “I’ll only work on it when I’m with you in this room.”

The irritation is sharper than the soft fondness Stiles has become used to but he’ll take what he can get. 

/~\

It’s trials and errors but creating the list of who is responsible behind the fire isn’t too difficult. It would have been much easier if he could have worked outside of the hospital but he promised Peter.

He also gets side-tracked from the vendetta by working on Peter’s mental stability. Peter’s disgruntled-grumpy tingles—Stiles is slowly parsing through Peter’s language of irritation—make Stiles hide a smile. His worries about his magic being immature are all but forgotten. 

“You should have seen this coming,” Stiles snarks. He maneuvers Peter into the Go-Away-Anger Sweater gently. “I warned you I’d make it. I haven’t waited six years just for you to go feral on me, Peter.”

Stiles read about Omegas. He knows from his few social interactions at school that he doesn’t exactly have tact but he at least knows not to explicitly bring up pack until Peter’s less…volatile-fragile. Outside of revenge, pack is only hinted at in terms of insanity.

The only part about Peter having blue 'wolf eyes that Stiles cares about is that it means he's not an Alpha. An Omega isn't a death sentence but...it also sort of is. Not that any of that matters because Stiles has been managing Peter's shit mental health for ages and going feral is simply out of the question. 

Urges pulse through Stiles to cross his arms and purse his lips. The unexpected pass-along-message from the red string has Stiles nearly falling apart in laughter. “Are you pouting at me?”

Balto, watching them from the bottom of the bed, gives Stiles a downright sulking expression with narrowed eyes. The urge for Stiles to cross his arms grows stronger. 

Stiles flops down on top of Peter, newly dressed in Go-Away-Anger, completely useless to do anything but laugh. Other than Balto’s cheering up tricks, Stiles doesn’t think he’s laughed like this in…He doesn’t know if he’s ever laughed like this.

It’s not a sad realization—he’s always made himself laugh and found amusement in magic and chatting to comatose Peter but this is…

It’s bright sunshine of lovely warmth combined with the affection of someone pressing their hand to his forehead to shade his eyes.

/~\

Stiles reads more about pack bonds after a full moon where Balto has to lie on top of Peter again. Stiles was still needed but he had to be a safe distance away from gnashing teeth and twitching claws. He curled up on the pillow above Peter’s head.

Stiles worries that without him and Balto, Peter will go on rampages during the full moon. He hasn’t gained back daily mobility, yet, but with every moon, the power of his ‘wolf grows. In a werewolf moon-craze, Stiles is confident that Peter can power through getting up and moving no matter how much it will fuck him over in pain and further injury the morning after. It’s especially likely for Peter to attempt to now that they have their hit list and a few of the henchmen live in Beacon Hills.

Peter isn’t allowed to lose himself as an Omega. Stiles won’t allow it.

Similarly stubborn about keeping Peter, the red string offers Stiles flashes of a dozen faces. It repeats two faces in particular, a boy about Stiles’ age and a girl a few years older than him.

The Hale fire is a mystery to Stiles, having happened some time after Mom’s death. His memory is completely blank starting from her funeral to him meeting Peter. He’s heard snippets of school gossip referencing it, usually cruelly indifferent about the tragedy. He knows someone other than Peter lived, something about what a shame that hottie skipped town.

Stiles finds it in the parts of the files he rejected as irrelevant—Laura and Derek Hale. Peter’s niece and nephew. They hadn’t been in the fire at all.

Knitting one of his strings into a bloodhound the size of his fist, Stiles begins his search on his laptop. In ten minutes, his bloodhound hops off his keyboard and evaporates, revealing windows upon windows overlaying each other. Stiles clicks through them, sorting methodically through bits and pieces of information. 

The Hale runaways attempted to stay under the radar with different names and constant moving. However, no one can escape what other people post online. And no one can escape Stiles’ magic.  

Stripped down to what matters, Derek’s attending NYU, tagged in several Facebook photos, and Laura works at a bakery close to campus. 

New York. All the way across the country.

The two Hales are older than the memory-images the red string flashed, Peter's last reference point of them.

Stiles needs more than finger-knitting. He pulls out his plastic lanyard strings. The first few stitches and lacing of a new lanyard annoys the shit out of him. It’s good for taking his anger out on, which is why there are way too many keychains in his Magic of Negativity Bin.

Why do I know nothing about them, Stiles finally allows the floodgate open as his fingers fly with movement, yanking hard with every stitch to cinch the plastic strings together tightly.

Save for a handful of days here and there, Stiles has been by Peter’s side every day for more than six years. He’s watched a number of nurses come in and out of Peter’s room. 

Not once has Peter had a visitor. 

There’d been a couple of times where someone started to walk into the room and Stiles, pre-Peter werewolf wake-up, had been scared a family member was coming to take Peter away. But it was a fluke each time, someone else’s visitor who got the wrong room number.

By the time Stiles’ lanyard’s finished, he’s emotionally exhausted in the way that panic attacks usually leave him. He spares a glance at his laptop. He’s too disgusted to magic-knit his way into hacking the hospital records to see if there’s a call history. As far as he’s concerned, they abandoned his Peter. 

Reflexively, Stiles presses his hand to his chest, remembering how mad his red knot had been the night of his hacky sack nightmare.

/~\

With Derek and Laura as dead ends, Stiles goes to investigate the ruins of the Hale house. 

The thing with tingles—or empathy, Stiles guesses if he has to get technical like the vault’s magic books say—is that it leaves imprints. Over six years have passed and the tingles of the Hale house remain strong.

It’s too much for Stiles to go within a hundred-foot radius of.

Alright, error, Stiles thinks after he wakes up from his tingles-blackout on the forest floor.  

No big deal—he'll try a different angle to accomplish his goal. It will be a crazy commitment to an exhausting amount of mistakes but once he figures it out—and he will—it’s going to be the best goddamn thing ever. 

/~\

“Nag, nag, nag,” Stiles says, climbing into Peter’s bed. He’d like to pretend he doesn’t know what Peter’s irritation is about, but he’s improving at tingle-language—empathy, whatever. When he picks up an emotion fast, he gets hints of pride from Peter. 

Stiles is kind of addicted to it. 

It’s not his fault it’s the only emotion that tastes sweet. Like cotton candy that fades too fast on his tongue.

Stiles won’t admit it but being forced to nap is worth the burst of sweetness he got from connecting an entire message together. The heavy air had been disapproval and the slippery quality of the irritation meant worry and the metallic taste in his mouth didn’t represent blood but actual metal, a solid weight for an opinion or command. Peter knows Stiles is sleep-deprived, is upset about it, and wants him to sleep.

“Why aren’t you prancing?” Stiles grumbles at Balto. This is supposed to be Smug Bastard time. Instead, Peter’s fond-irritated-impatient. 

Stiles glances between Balto trying to tug the Sweet Dreams Blanket off the bed and Peter sitting in his wheelchair by the window. Stiles has always napped beside Peter. Stiles says, “But you didn't want to lie in bed.”

Peter is somehow both fonder and more irritated.

Stiles absolutely hates the way his cheeks heat up. “I’m not sleeping in your lap!”

Eyes firmly shut, Stiles ignores the softness in the amusement-smug. Balto hops onto the bed and worms his way under the blanket.

/~\

They don’t speak about Stiles magic-knitting Self-Esteem for Peter.

Admittedly, a mirror might not have been the most subtle symbol to knit his strings into…

Peter can’t see Stiles’ strings but his irritation zeroed in on Stiles as soon as his body absorbed the mirror. The vanity-content-acceptance of the mirror had been a tad stronger than Stiles intended. Or more accurately, Peter is more perceptive than Stiles wants him to be. 

Peter catching onto Stiles trying to be sly isn’t the reason they don’t speak of it—it’s what Stiles said next, flustered and unapologetic.

“Stop being a whiney piss baby about your looks,” Stiles snapped. “It’s just wasted anger! You’re so handsome it’s annoying!”

Peter can’t talk with his mouth but the startled tingles were equivalent to a silence where you can hear a pin drop.

Peter thinks about it, Stiles knows. There’s the dark shadow of Peter obsessing over his burn scars but now it’s cut off by amusement-fond-smug. Peter’s suspiciously respectful to the Do Not Speak Of It, not pushing the emotions onto Stiles to tease him.

Stiles hadn’t known life could be so embarrassing. He understands insecurity embarrassment, like his magic compared to werewolves, but even that is weird for him—caring about someone’s opinion. 

Peter is handsome, it’s a plain fact, what is there to be shameful in stating that?

It’s the way Peter reacts that’s opened up the door to a whole world of humiliation that Stiles previously had the pleasure of never meeting.

It’s like an overload of pride sweetness. Stiles doesn’t know what to do with it and it makes his stomach squirm and that makes Peter’s amusement have the laughing-condescending tint that means Stiles is being made fun of and—

Peter’s lucky Stiles likes him so much because dealing with this for months has been torture. 

/~\

Balto follows Stiles everywhere. 

It’s been a gradual process of him spending less time at Peter’s side with every month that Peter heals. They’re coming up on the eighth full moon and Balto’s always underfoot, going so far as to try following Stiles into the bathroom.

Stiles drives to the craft store and buys a shit ton of various types of red yarn. He knits two rings, pettily ignoring Peter’s genuine irritation as Stiles knits while staring intently at Peter without blinking or talking.

Stiles slides one ring on his middle finger and the other one on Peter’s thumb. He grins and crows a petty HA! at the instant transferring of tingles. There isn’t a magic string connecting the rings but if Stiles extends his mind through his magic, he finds a thin line of tingle-mist from one ring to the next.

“Creeping is a two-way street, Peter,” Stiles taunts.

The constant feed of Peter’s emotions takes awhile to get used to. He acts annoyed when Peter learns how to project specific emotions. 

Stiles has no answer for his science teacher demanding to know what’s so funny when he bursts out laughing in the middle of a lesson. Stiles giggles too hard to properly breathe and he can’t exactly say his magic-ring pinged with what feels like fingers tickling his ribs.

Stiles hadn’t knitted the rings as a two-way connection but he focuses on projecting annoyance, hoping Peter will get it. 

Tingles of smugness bounce back. Balto, unseen to the rest of the class, prances around the front of the classroom.

At least Stiles knows Peter’s safe, even if he is an asshole.

/~\

The first time Stiles walks into Peter’s room to find him standing up, Stiles screams. If his magic didn’t cloak his sight and sound, nurses would be barging in here with a cavalry.

“You’re, that’s, how, I’m,” Stiles splutters. 

Pride—not the sweet kind for Stiles but a smugness of salted caramel—and pain tingle in the air. The pulses of aching Stiles thought he was imagining through their ring connection intensifies.

Stiles gasps as he connects the dots. “That’s why you’ve been in pain! From secretly practicing—you—you fucker! Do you know how stressed I’ve been? I sewed." Stiles waves his bandaged fingers. "I made you that weird wheelchair cushion by sewing together a bunch of potholders for different types of pain relief! And—and I’ve been string-knitting healing triskelions in my classes!”  

Peter cocks his head at Stiles’ rant. At the end of it, he responds with a softly enunciated, “Thank you.”

Stiles’ knees buckle at the two words and he has to press back against the closed door to stay standing. His brain is slow on catching up with the weight behind the words, still trapped in hurt that’s now tangled in confusion. “What?” he asks.

“I’ve been practicing what first words I wanted to say to you,” Peter says. Slowly, he repeats, “Thank you.”

Strings shake restlessly up and down Stiles’ body. His red knot stays in place, his special needles not coming out, but the end of the red string glides down Stiles’ right arm and wiggles around his wrist in a comforting gesture. 

Peter—Stiles’ Peter stands at the edge of his hospital bed looking achingly soft with his hair curling at the end by his ears and wearing the first sweater Stiles had knitted him. Stiles has no idea how Peter got it—that sweater had been in the back of Stiles’ closet, a weak error for Power-Boost. The blue-green color goes well with his eyes.

His eyes that focus clearly on Stiles without any werewolf electric-blue help. 

Without help.

Peter’s not even leaning against the bed for support. Stiles is the one who can’t stand on his own.

“I must admit,” Peter murmurs—and god, he’s talking with words, maybe that’s why Stiles can’t understand, “I thought your reaction would be more excited.”

Balto presses against Stiles in his time to herd the human nudge, but nope. Nope. Stiles is never leaving this door. Ever.

“You’re upset.” Peter frowns and—oh. He’s scenting the air. “You smell angry but,” Peter taps the red ring, “this feels like betrayal.”

Stiles should have never opened the two-way connection. 

Balto nudges him to no avail. 

Peter steps forward.

“Stop,” Stiles blurts out, his voice wobbly and too loud.

Stepping back immediately, Peter radiates emotional hurt along with the tingles of physical pain.

“I,” Stiles' throat clicks. He swallows. “You’re in pain. The—the walking, it hurt you. It’s not, not that I don’t want you. I mean, don’t want you stepping toward me. Not that I don’t not want you, I do want you, but not like—I don’t mean want you, like, I mean—”

“Stiles.”

The tingles are soft amusement and that’s—that’s familiar. That’s normal. Stiles clings on to that and sucks in a large inhale of the emotion, soothing the back of his throat. Blue string materializes over the red on Stiles’ wrist, unspooling onto the ground, and it shocks a small smile out of him. “Are you making me a butterfly again?”

“The making is all on your part, sweetheart,” Peter says, sitting down on the bed.

Stiles half-shrugs, face heating up at the hint of sweetness-pride. “It’s nothing special.”

Balto catches Stiles by surprise, finally sending him tumbling forward a step. With no wall to press back against, fighting Balto is impossible. In a handful of seconds, Stiles falls into Peter’s lap.

“Sorry,” Stiles says, grabbing on to Peter’s arm to pull himself up, “sorry.”

Peter’s hands settle on Stiles' hips. “Don’t be. How’s this any different than you lying on me during the Full?”

Stiles doesn’t have a concrete answer to that other than it just is. Pushing the issue will just be more embarrassing so Stiles resigns himself to minimal squawking as he's directed into properly sitting in Peter's lap.

Peter’s arms wind around Stiles’ ribs, holding him in a way that the frustrated-disgruntled tingles communicate isn’t tight enough. Plastering his chest to Stiles’ back, Peter says, “Triskelion.”

Stiles stretches his neck backward, resting his head on Peter’s shoulder. He feels hazy, like the time with the butterfly. The blue string lies limp on his wrist, no butterfly made, so this fuzzy feeling is all Peter. “Huh?”

Peter chuckles, mildly shaking Stiles’ body like his growls do. Maybe this isn’t so different than the full moon after all. Stiles certainly is the same sleep-drunk he is on those nights.

Peter’s breath is hot against the side of Stiles’ neck as he repeats, “You’ve mentioned triskelions, darling.”

Sweetheart. Darling. Peter’s voice is...well, Stiles never imagined how it would sound other than nice.

It’s way better than just nice. 

It tastes expensive, like the chocolates Dad got after winning the Sheriff election, a rich and creamy taste, not dark chocolate, no it’s soft and milky. At least, that’s how his magic categorizes it. Stiles isn’t quite eloquent with putting things into human words. 

Medium-deep voice spoken in a quiet way that’s not born from shyness but rather like honey—wait, no, that’s magic-speak. Suave?

“I’m lacking in magic-speak," Peter murmurs, "but I’d say your voice is like a blueberry.”

Stiles’ magic doesn’t communicate with Stiles often outside of his strings but its most definitely judging Peter’s blueberry comment. Blueberry. The fuck does that mean.

Stiles is less judgmental and more horrified that he said that all out loud. There’s that familiar tightness in his lungs over that he always ignores for Peter’s sake. He can wallow over how pathetic he is on his own time.  

“I like blueberries,” Peter says. He’s all over Stiles, arms wrapped around him, hands splayed wide to cover as much of Stiles' abdomen as possible, his face turning to press into Stiles’ throat.

Balto barks. Stiles is too boneless to startle.

Peter’s sigh sends a small shiver through Stiles. “You’re right. I’m being overwhelming.”

It takes several moments for Stiles to connect that Peter’s talking to Balto. Stiles does that frequently but hearing Peter do so is endearing in the silliest way.

Stiles’ eyelids are drooping and he’s distantly aware of Peter moving them horizontal. Stiles ends up half-draped on top Peter.

“Butterfly,” Stiles mumbles.

“Good.”

Stiles’ eyes are closed but he feels his strings reaching out and twining around Peter’s arms, helping Peter cocoon Stiles in a tighter hold. The red string thrums with Stiles’ joy at Peter correctly translating butterfly to peaceful-content-this-is-nice-yes.

Stiles drifts to sleep with Peter saying something about Stiles needing to be taken care of.

Chapter Text

Stiles asks if he can spend the night.

“Won’t your father be worried?”

Stiles sits up to stretch after his impromptu nap. Peter stays lying down and makes up for the loss of contact by snaking his arm around Stiles’ waist. His hand slips under Stiles’ shirt to weakly grip his hip. Stiles knows without looking that his strings are helping Peter move his limbs and he’s too embarrassed to figure out if it’s him influencing the strings or if his strings are listening to Peter’s command.

Peter’s thumb brushes back and forth over Stiles’ skin so if it is Stiles forcing him to touch-feel-hold, Peter doesn’t seem to mind it. 

“Nah,” Stiles says. He glances at his backpack across the room, dropped right by the door. “I guess I should send a text.”

The tingles are hard to sort through and hard to translate from magic to human terms. Stiles blocks out as many of the complexities as he can and searches for emotions that have become familiar since Peter first started communicating with him. It feels like confusion-worry with an extra something. Peter’s constant low profile of irritation rises into anger.

Stiles frowns—Peter’s feeling protective? He considers what he’s said, trying to find a trigger. It takes an embarrassingly long time to figure out that most parents probably would be worried about their kid not coming home and want more than a courtesy text. 

Stiles toys with his blue string, feeling it whisper about flapping wings. He waits for the tingles to simmer down before saying, “He’s not a bad dad.”

He’s too scared to ask if Peter heard anything Stiles talked about growing up. He’s not sure if it would be better or worse for Peter to have heard Stiles’ rants on his relationship with Dad. 

“He knows that magic makes me do weird things,” Stiles clarifies, “and understands that it’s like him, like a job that needs me to go places.” 

Like how being a Sheriff keeps Dad constantly away from home. The words sound as shitty outside his head as it does inside. But is it fair to blame Dad for choosing work when Stiles chose to spend his childhood growing up with a comatose man? 

Which one of them walked away from the other first?

“He forgets you’re human,” Peter says. 

Stiles jerks a little at Peter’s voice. It shocks him out of his spiraling thoughts. It’s going to take time getting used to Peter replying verbally. And getting used to his touch—Peter’s grip tightens. Maybe he had heard Stiles talk about Dad over the years. 

“I am more magic than human,” Stiles weakly defends. “He’s a good dad for magic. He helped me with the Magic Buzzes after Mom—after. And he never gets mad when I ditch school because of my strings. He makes sure I have knitting supplies and that I’m not neglecting magic. I’m seventeen and he still sits with me once a week while I work my strings. That’s, like, equal to a parent cutting up their kid’s sandwiches into fun dinosaur shapes.”

Peter hums a low soothing sound. Stiles’ strings, which had grown agitated and squirmed around him, go lax at the noise. 

The building crescendo of Magic Buzzes falters and fizzles out.

Peter’s thumb presses the slightest bit harder as he keeps soothing Stiles’ skin. He asks, “Did he ever cut up your sandwiches when you were a child?”

Dad never made Stiles sandwiches, period. “No, but—”

“But you’re human,” Peter cuts Stiles off. “He’s a parent to a magic-user.”

“That’s what I said,” Stiles says. 

The anger sinks back into normal irritation and the tingles become sadness-worry-somethingclosetofond.

“No, sweet boy, you said ‘dad for magic’.” It’s the quiet way Peter’s voice hushes that gets to Stiles, has him trembling. “You’re not magic.”

Stiles rears back. His strings abruptly slither closely back to him. Peter barely manages to keep a hold on Stiles without their help, his fingers catching the waistband of Stiles’ jeans. That answers one question at least. Peter wants to hold Stiles regardless of how much magic influences him or not. 

When it comes down to it, though, Stiles is the one who owns his strings. If Stiles isn’t going to be recognized for the magic he is then Peter doesn’t deserve to be touched and helped by his magic.

Twisting to face Peter instead of the window, Stiles dislodges Peter’s touch completely. “I’m not a boy,” he snaps. “I’m not a kid. I’m seventeen and I am magic. What the hell do you think these are for?” He holds his hand out and summons his special needles, satisfied to have a visual use of magic that Peter can see.

Peter’s making that low soothing sound again. The frustration crawling over Stiles’ skin, the insecurity and hurt, leaves him as quickly as it came. 

“Stop that,” Stiles says, trying to grasp back onto his anger. “It’s—how are you controlling me?”

Peter stops his humming and gazes up at Stiles. It’s not intense the way he stares but the way it feels comfortable and right to be looked at—that is intense. Peter lies slightly propped on the pillow and Stiles has the impression that even if Peter had the energy, he wouldn’t sit up. Despite Stiles being the one higher up, the one looking down, Peter’s the one in control.

“That’s the pack bond, sweet one,” Peter says. It’s less quiet and back to his plain way of speaking. “It’s why you’re so tired and emotionally charged.”

Stiles bites back that he’s not emotionally charged. Peter dropped the boy comment and Stiles doesn't want to risk Peter's view of him by throwing a childish tantrum. And honestly, Stiles is grateful for an excuse to blame on the tears prickling his eyes.

“You’ve read about bonds,” Peter says. Stiles nods—with his obsessive researching he’s become an expert on pack relation. “Then you know they’re not about control. It’s like your strings. People are constantly reaching out for help and sometimes you choose to answer with your beautiful magic. It’s a mutual transaction.” A new wave of soothing-calm-comfort flows through Stiles. Peter says, “You’re distressed and reaching out to me for comfort. I’m simply responding to your request. Not controlling.”

Stiles' strings twitch like fingers wanting to touch. They like being understood perfectly; Peter summing up the metaphorical Bat Signal that calls out and Stiles filters through. Rationally, he knows Peter would never dare to control him. It’s just...being on the receiving end of what he imagines Peter’s been feeling these past seven years from Stiles’ magic—it’s uncomfortable and foreign and weird. 

Compared to the array of mental health anklets decorating Peter, the wave of calm Peter sends is small. That doesn't make it feel any less monumental in Stiles' world.

“The,” Stiles takes a breath, “the bond.” That is a truth bomb to unpack later, alone. “Books say it connects us like a tether. Can you see it?”

Forgiving Peter, his strings return to clinging onto the werewolf. Peter sits up with their support looping around his abdomen. He takes Stiles’ hand easily, no hesitance that Stiles will reject his touch, and lifts it in the air to chest level.

“A little to the right and below,” Peter says, letting go of Stiles’ hand.

Stiles moves his fingers through the air, unsure of what he’s feeling for. The red string slips off his wrist and winds tightly around his pinky with the end of it pointing upward. Stiles listens, fingers twitching up and—

It’s there. A thick tension bumping against his hand.

Wow, Stiles mouths the word, breathless. Peter’s gaze is heavy in the background of Stiles’ surging excitement.

The bond is different from how his strings communicate. Its language is slippery, similar to how he’s not the best at translating the nuances of tingles. The bond pulses pure emotion into him rather than showing flashes of sensations and images or bending the air to give each emotion a particular taste.

No, it gives him the emotion directly. His burst of frustration earlier—that had been him absorbing Peter’s irritation.

Fascinated with the foreign magic, Stiles pokes around the bond. He finds an echo of his own feelings, frayed at the edges and overwhelmed. It’s sort of like a two-way road with Stiles’ side full of traffic while Peter’s side has only one car cruising along. All of his other cars are pulled over to the side, momentarily paused.

Overlaying Stiles’ emotional traffic is calm as if Peter’s reaching over and taking the keys out of Stiles’ cars. From his own experience of warping emotions into physical magic, Stiles recognizes that Peter’s calm is carefully crafted and projected. He really is soothing because Stiles is asking for it. 

Stiles’ embarrassment car putters for a second before quieting. He lets his cars stall and focuses on the peaceful cruising of Peter’s car. His tightened muscles relax and breathing comes easier. 

Yeah, getting used to this sounds wonderful in theory. But it’s so unknown and new and Stiles isn’t sure if it’s worth how skittish it makes him feel. To be seen so clearly and cared for when it should be the other way around.

He distracts himself by continuing to poke around—Peter’s amusement racing down the bond tugs Stiles’ lips up in a smile before he can suppress it. 

The air glimmers and the line of tension Stiles plucks at flares gold. It heats up under Stiles’ fingertips, stretching out of his chest and connecting to Peter’s. 

It’s thicker than Stiles’ strings and sturdy, not bendable. 

Mouth dropping, Stiles slips out of his magic and looks at Peter. “Do you see it?”

The raspy, wonderful sound of Peter chuckling captivates Stiles. He’s too distracted to keep track of sneaky hands and sneakier strings. He falls prey to Peter’s clutches, yelping at the hands slipping under his shirt and dragging him backward into the V between Peter’s legs. Supported up with his back against the bed frame, Peter wraps his arms around Stiles’ stomach and buries his face in Stiles’ neck.

Again, he touches with zero hesitance and Stiles marvels over how it’s not arrogant or confident. Peter’s faith in Stiles welcoming him is frightening in how not frightening it is. Again, it feels right. Like breathing.

Clearing his throat, Stiles says, “You really like sitting like this.”

Peter hums against Stiles’ skin and Stiles stiffens in an effort to stop the shudder running up his spine. His tensing up isn’t subtle based on the surge of amusement tingles. 

“Go back to sleep, sweet one,” Peter says. “I’ll allow you to miss dinner tonight but only because the bond is still completing.”

The drowsiness that’s crept through the bond digs deep into Stiles’ chest. He has a million questions but he’s not going to get answers until he’s fully awake and sharp enough to catch Peter’s diversions.

He fights leaning into the rightness, forcing his mouth to work out mumbled syllables asking if Peter will be okay. 

Peter laughs softly. If anything is a “blueberry”, it’s that sound. Stiles imagines sitting outside with a bowl of washed blueberries, breaking the slight resistance of the fruit skin with his teeth and sinking easily into the soft flesh of the fruit. That’s what Peter’s laughter is. Stiles wants a bowl of it to eat sweetly. 

“Let me watch over you for once,” Peter says.

Stiles doesn’t like it—doesn’t like how much he likes it—but he’s too tired to fight back now. He melts into Peter’s warmth.

/~\

“We’re pack,” Stiles says, forcing the words out as not a question. He’s wrapped in Peter’s arms, awake and inspecting the bond closely. The sensitivity settled and his magic absorbed it into his ball of energy while he slept. 

“Yes,” Peter says.

Stiles hardly breathes around the questions crowded inside his mouth. He chooses the vaguest. “What does that mean?”

“It means we have each other,” Peter says. His words are slurred, not drunkenly, but like he has a lisp. Stiles hadn’t noticed it before but then again, he’s been pretty out of it. “Pack doesn’t leave pack.”

Stiles flips in Peter’s hold, ready to face him. The overwhelming relief that Peter won’t leave him emboldens Stiles to squeeze an arm between their flush bodies and press a finger to the sharpened point of an incisor tooth. They’re cute, so small next to the dropped canine fangs.

Smiling, Stiles glances up at Peter’s regular blue eyes and says, “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

Chapter Text

Getting out of the hospital is a breeze. Like Stiles told his dad the night he got out of the car and walked into the hospital, his magic will take care of everything.

“My magic takes care of everything,” Stiles says to Peter, pushing his wheelchair out of the long term care ward. None of the passing staff spare them a glance. At the foreign wave of curiosity blooming in his chest, Stiles clarifies, “Strings are mine. Making magic physical, like sweaters, is me and magic working together. The rest, like this, we don’t question. We just trust that magic takes care.”

“I believe, sweet boy,” Peter says.

Believe what? Stiles wants to ask. He grumbles, “Not a boy.”

Tingles of condescending-amusement ripple between them. “I think it’s going to take time adjusting to understanding each other.”

“I understand you,” Stiles protests hotly. He helps Peter into the passenger seat of the jeep. The condescending-amusement moves differently through the bond than it does as tingles—it feels closer to fondness. The translation difference is confusing and his shoulders slump. “I don’t want to adjust. I hate always being behind.”

With the jeep’s large tires adding height to the car, Peter has a few inches on Stiles. He reaches an arm down and cups Stiles’ lower jaw, tilting his head up. “Learning a new piece of you is a privilege. It’s like getting to read my favorite book for the first time again.”

Balto barks from the backseat of the car and Stiles reluctantly steps out of Peter’s touch to close the door. Putting the wheelchair in the back, Stiles attempts to recover from the first part of what Peter said. He doesn’t understand privilege, not fully, doesn’t understand how Peter called his magic beautiful earlier. Stiles resigns to pushing it away to examine later by the time he slides into the driver’s seat. 

The bombardment of emotions from pulling out of the hospital parking lot doesn’t faze Stiles. Years of experiencing Peter’s erratic mood changes keep him from swerving or slamming on the brakes. Balto whines in the back.

Stiles does what he usually does when Peter’s sinking into a dangerous headspace—he rambles. “I’d rather it be like a favorite series and every new thing I learn is a new sequel that’s even better than the last book. Like, getting to read your favorite book for the first time again would be awesome but that means you forgot it. I don’t want you to forget me.”

Peter’s turmoil dials down. “I could never forget you, darling boy. You make a fair point. The bond is the newest installment of the series and I can’t wait to open you up.”

Stiles brakes a little too hard at the stoplight. “Peter! I’m bad at talking but even I know that’s not how you say things.”

The heavy caramel on Stiles’ tongue belies Peter’s innocent tone. “Why not?”

“I don’t think I like you talking,” Stiles lies. “Also, not a boy.”

Peter points out, “The light’s green, darling one.”

Stiles tears his eyes away from Peter’s lips that tease a secret smile. Driving through the intersection, Stiles fights back the heat rising to his cheeks.

Caramel smugness blankets Peter’s darker emotions. At least Stiles’ embarrassment is good for one thing.

The fatigue in the pack bond heavies as Stiles drives through Beacon Hills. Peter rests his head against the car window and Stiles nudges a string to quickly form an invisible cushion to keep Peter’s head from bouncing against the glass. 

“How do you feel about downtown BH?” Stiles asks. He switches his focus from the bond and tunes back into tingles, getting the equivalent of what? from Peter. 

“Just passed by the deputy car stationed off the main road. Most tickets come from people not slowing down going into the residential area. Buuuuut,” Stiles turns down the street lined with small shops, “we are not turning down the white picket fence rich neighborhood. Seems like magic’s leading to downtown. Probably the new apartments. There was construction going on forever but it finished, like, two years ago? Anyway, it’s fancy and rich. Seems up your alley.”

Amusement-sass-surprise-fond-irritation. The connection between their knitted red rings projects more sass while their pack bond simply relaxes.

“You’re posh, don’t even try and deny it,” Stiles says. “This might be a new sequel but I have the first book of you memorized.”

Peter's response is a unique mix of sensations and feedback. It's the same feeling Peter had when he said Stiles’ voice is like a blueberry. Stiles will sort out the translation later but it’s delighted confusion melded with fondness and also trying, maybe, if that’s an emotion.

Stiles grins as the new apartment building comes in view. He starts looking for a parking spot but his hands are turning the wheel of their own accord and he finds himself parking in a spot reserved for residents.

Balto jumps through the car, hanging onto the ability to ghost through surfaces. He bounds into the building.

Unbuckling his seat belt, Stiles says, “I’m going to knit my strings to scope out the building.” Bitter irritation. “Oh my god, don’t get snappy with me. I’m not coming up with busy work as an excuse for you to rest. I’m way more subtle than that.” Amused-judgement. “Oh, piss off, I’m sneaky!” Stiles is extremely familiar with Peter’s brand of tingles that mean he's pouting. “No, I’m ignoring you now.”

Fond-fond-fond-fond. Stiles smiles to himself and works on communicating with his strings. He ends up working out two creations, a pair of goggles for him and a cash register scanner. 

The goggles latch over his eyes and it takes a moment for Stiles to realize he’s seeing through Balto’s eyes. Laughing, he tells Peter, “I’ll explain later but, uh, okay we have an apartment on the first floor. It’s a little—oh, okay, our neighbor is the bakery owner, that’s cool. And, hold on.” Stiles watches Balto barging through all the apartments on the first floor before rounding back. “Old lady, okay that dude’s weird, boring, come on, Balto, faster. Oh! Okay, and on the other side of us, the apartment is empty. Sweet.”

Stiles blinks and the goggles dissipate. He shifts his mind to the chatter the cash register scanner has been giving during the Balto tour. It's an onslaught of information and gossip.

Peter’s irritation builds again and Stiles reluctantly slips fully into his body. “Okay,” he says, releasing the last of the scanner’s string from his wrist. He circles through its infodump three times before he allows it to disappear. “So, the building is all clear. Landlord seems like a dick but I can fix any issues that come up. Ready?”

Avoiding Peter’s burning gaze, Stiles fiddles with his keys. The agitation is heavy on his tongue, the helplessness aching in his ring, and whatever is running through the bond makes him nervous. 

“You have no idea, do you?”

Peter speaking verbally tricks Stiles into looking up and meeting his eyes. The thinnest ripple of salty smugness hints that Peter had talked precisely for that. 

“How powerful you are,” Peter goes on. Stiles opens his mouth but Peter cuts him off before he can verbalize his protest. “You’re magnificent, sweet boy.”

Stiles busies himself getting out of the car, hiding his flushed face like he can’t hide his emotions. “Geez, Peter, if you wanted to get out of the car you could have just said so. No need to push buttons and call me boy.”

Stiles gets the wheelchair and opens the passenger door. Peter reaches to touch his jaw again, saying, “You need to read the author’s notes of this book.”

Stiles’ magic rears its head of judgement again. “I don’t know what that means but a Sparks Notes on Peter Hale would be helpful. Now, come on, let’s check out your new place.”

“Our place,” Peter says.

Right, Stiles thinks, like a pack home. He’s glad they’re only a pack of two—he doesn’t want to share Peter’s apartment with anyone else.

/~\

The apartment is nice. Peter’s disgruntled at first, not surprising considering the Hale house was a mansion. Along with Hale bearer bonds, Peter has his own giant secret stash of cash in the vault. Add that to the insurance from the fire and Peter can comfortably buy the building if he wants.

“Better than the hospital,” Stiles says, not bothering to coddle Peter. The comment stings but Stiles doesn’t pay it attention, his mind racing with all the possibilities of a new place.

Yeah, maybe it’s small to Peter with only one bedroom, but the bedroom is double the size of Stiles’ room, and the joined bathroom has a shower and a bathtub. The closet isn’t big but that’s what dressers are for. There’s no small room for an office which is slightly disappointing but it’s nice having the large space when you first walk in, no walls closing off the basic kitchen off to the far right. Stiles’ mind is already spinning a dozen different ways they can transform the main room. 

The large window at the back of the wall is good—Peter needs sunlight and he likes watching out windows. They face the woods behind the building and not the street. They can hear the street traffic, though, so that’s a downside of being on the first floor despite it being helpful for accessibility.

“You can muffle outside noise with your strings.”

Stiles whips around to face Peter. He’s out of his wheelchair and running his hand along the wall—scenting? The layers of feedback in their numerous forms of connection have disappeared from anger and slipped into something leaning toward peaceful. Stiles wonders when he missed that shift. “What?” he asks.

“For the street noise,” Peter says. “You were complaining about it.”

“Oh, shit,” Stiles rubs a hand over the back of his hair, “sorry. I keep forgetting I don’t have to talk out loud anymore.”

Peter makes an inquisitive noise. 

“You know, since you can talk now. I don’t have to, like, make up for your silence and stuff with all the blabbering.”

“I like listening to your thoughts,” Peter says. 

Stiles focuses on sorting his excited strings, hoping he’s not glowing too brightly through the bond from such a simple compliment. 

Peter takes his time doing his own inspecting, scenting the walls and fiddling with the electric stove. Fatigue edges around the collective emotion-feed but Stiles only finds minor pain-ache in tingles. When Stiles helped him out of the car, he had touched Peter’s anklets for pain, adding a pulse of magic into them. It seems to have done the trick in rejuvenating his werewolf.

Stiles worries about inadequacy in being pack but based on books he’s read, he’s a pretty awesome provider. Speaking of providing, Stiles loops back to the front door and grabs the Supernatural Toolkit he lugged out from his jeep. 

Balto ghosts through the door, surprising a little laugh out of Stiles. Running his free hand through soft fur, Stiles gives Balto a nudge. Balto follows his thought easily, darting off to saddle up next to Peter for support. 

Watching Peter lean against Balto, idly scratching Balto’s ear, fills Stiles up with a thrilling sense of contentment. It’s tempting to lose himself in the feeling but he forces himself to gather his wits. He has work to do.

Sitting on the floor, Stiles touches the strings that spoke out to him at Peter’s suggestion of muffling street noise. Before he gets too lost in his magic he asks, “How muted do you want it?”

Peter hums and Stiles’ fingers twitch restlessly. Magic Buzzes start up a low rumble. Stiles ignores it—he likes waiting, at least in this case. A pleasant warmth settles in his gut over Peter being thoughtful about what Stiles will create. Peter hadn’t asked if it was possible to muffle noise, he was the one to point out that Stiles could do that. He believes in Stiles. There isn’t any doubt.

“I’ll need to practice honing my hearing,” Peter says.

“Hearing—oh, like, werewolf hearing?” Cotton candy pride bursts on Stiles’ tongue. He flushes and scrambles to keep his brain online. “Um, so—oh, superhearing, right, huh. Okay, what if, like...sound is just a tiny bit quieter than how I hear things, like normal-human hearing. And then when you want to work on your werewolf ears, the magic-muting will switch off.”

Stiles unwinds purple off his leg as he talks. It’s familiar work, untangling. While his fingers work from muscle memory, he scrutinizes Peter. Balto bullied him into sitting on the ground against the kitchen cabinets. His eyes are sharply focused on Stiles’ rapidly moving fingers. 

The purple collects in a neat pile on the ground and Stiles twitches with impatience now, ideas forming and itching to be created. 

Peter smiles softly and says, “I can wait for the details. Go ahead and knit whatever you’re thinking of.”

Stiles lets out a whoosh of an exhale, quick to follow Peter’s order. He hopes his impatience wasn’t too heavy in the bond. He’s buzzing with excitement over his idea, experimental like the goggles had been. 

“I’m making gloves,” Stiles says, squinting as he works the purple into knitting itself, pushing power into the stitches. He sticks his tongue out, quieting for a few minutes as he figures it out. Finding the rhythm, Stiles perks up and looks to Peter. “So, you know clap lights?”

Peter dips his chin in a nod. “I can’t decide if those are tacky or a luxury.”

“Rich boy,” Stiles says. “The gloves will go on your hands and sink into your skin like the butterfly did on me and your triskelions. I bargained back and forth and the magic should stay so that everything will muffle but if you clap your hands, the muffle-spell or whatever will pause. And when you want to mute sound again, clap your hands again."

The itching curiosity is a distant tickle on Stiles’ skin as he finishes up the gloves. Peter repeats, “Bargained?”

“Yeah, you know, with my strings. I’m asking for them to do a little more than they’re used to.”

“To do the volume-clap?”

Stiles frowns at Peter’s confusion. “No, that’s obvious. The staying with you part for multiple uses and not just a one-and-done deal is what was argued.”

“Why not create a remote or earmuffs?”

Stiles halts his knitting to stare at Peter. He parses through their emotion-feed for extra information but he can’t find any insight into how Peter’s suggestions make sense. Eventually, he asks, “What?”

There it is again—delighted confusion-fondness-trying. Peter says, “I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that thinks like you.”

It’s not an insult but the condescending-amusement that follows it makes Stiles self-conscious for a second. The bond radiates pure fondness, however. Stiles shrugs and lamely offers, “It’s just magic-speak.” The gloves finish and he sends them off toward Peter. “Tell me if you feel them. If you don’t, I’ll tell you when to clap.”

Peter flinches the smallest bit when the purple slips onto his hands. Balto shuffles forward on the floor to press his face into Peter’s stomach. “It...tickles,” Peter says.

“Ugh, tell me about it, dude. I’m covered all over in that. Okay, now clap!”

Peter dutifully claps once. Stiles doesn’t notice a huge difference but Peter immediately slouches into Balto and some of the ache leaves the tingles. The purple sinks into Peter’s skin.

Stiles grins, more than a little proud. He’s got this whole providing thing down. “Cool. Keep trying it out so I know if it works past today. Now,” Stiles opens up his toolkit and pulls out a bundle of papers tied together with twine, “time for your new ID and money and other society stuff.”

Stiles’ one-track mind almost misses the cotton candy sweetening the back of his tongue.

Almost.