Chapter Text
It had been fifteen days, six hours, twenty seven minutes and fifteen seconds since the last time Scott McCall had pulled someone else’s pain into his body. Sixteen…seventeen…eighteen… Stiles made him keep track of the time like it was an accomplishment, celebrating every tiny milestone and helping every time he slipped. His friend treated each day like Scott had won something and whenever he screwed up, he was there with gentle admonishment and words of encouragement until the werewolf couldn’t help but believe him. He always trusted Stiles, even when he couldn’t trust himself.
Pain made you human, what was he now that he didn’t feel anything at all?
Scott’s hands shook and he squeezed them into fists, but kept the claws from breaking through. He felt like he was an addict, the need to feel something almost a physical ache. He was numb, moving and breathing and speaking like nothing was wrong but so distant from the world that he felt utterly disconnected. Allison was gone. Aiden was gone. Isaac had left town with Chris. The world should have stopped, but the sun stubbornly rose and life kept moving forward, pulling Scott along unwillingly. Everything around him was a blur of color and sound, muted and unimportant.
Everything except Stiles.
His best friend would clamber through his window at night uninvited, not like he ever needed permission to invade Scott’s space. What belonged to one belonged to the other, and that included heartbreak. The world would become clear beneath those hands, his skin slightly cooler against Scott’s werewolf heat. He would be able to focus on the space between them, muscles tensed tight enough to snap that eased just enough to sleep and grief could finally filter through the void. He could break because he knew that Stiles wouldn’t be afraid to cut himself on the jagged pieces as his friend helped to rebuild him.
It hadn’t taken long for the relief of Stiles’s hands and the comforting weight of his body to turn into more, wet lips dragged over skin and little breathless gasps as his body responded even though his heart couldn’t. The transition was so easy, Scott hadn’t noticed until he stopped in the bathroom one morning to admire the quickly fading bruises sucked into the skin of his neck, running curious fingers over the painless marks. Something in his chest did something. It hurt and it didn’t hurt and that night his lips had met Stiles’s with mirrored desperation.
Fifteen days, six hours, thirty one minutes and twenty three seconds. Twenty four…Twenty Five…
Stiles had made him a mix tape of the worst 1980s hair metal ballads he could find “to show you how I feel, Scotty” and Scott had finally laughed. Their fingers would entwine across his kitchen table as they reviewed history notes and the words seemed to finally make sense on the page. At night when the house was too quiet with his mother at work and Isaac gone forever, the racing heartbeat of his best friend as he pressed his mouth against the hollow of Scott’s throat set a rhythm like music. And as he came, wrecked and shuddering with Stiles working him slowly, it was like two pieces of one whole finally put together again.
Derek had always taught him that pain was the thing that anchored you back to your humanity, the thing that kept you vulnerable and safe from becoming a real monster. As long as you could be hurt, you still had a heart, but Scott had always tried to find another way. He had anchored himself in love and in willpower until he lost both and the pain was the only way to reconnect to what had been taken from him, but it was killing him. He could justify it all he wanted under the guise of helping people and maybe he did some good with it, but Stiles would remind him that being a hero didn’t always mean selling off pieces of himself. If the hero sacrificed everything, who would be left to protect them all? Sometimes you had to save yourself before you could save anyone else. Maybe sometimes you had to let yourself be saved.
It didn’t stop the need, it was always there in the back of his head and in the jangling of his nerves. The little twitch to his fingers when Stiles stubbed his toe on the edge of the couch or when Lydia sprained her wrist or when Danny pulled his hamstring in lacrosse. He could have taken their pain, reaching out to let the ache settle into his bones, but he’d managed to control himself for fifteen days six hours, thirty four minutes and eight seconds…nine…. Maybe the feeling would always be there, but Stiles would always be there too, ready to chase it away. If there was one thing in his life he was completely certain of, it was that he was stuck with one Mr. Stiles Stilinski for the rest of eternity. At least that’s what it said when he would wake up sometimes with promises scrawled across the dark skin of his chest and left in a thousand brightly colored post-it notes around his room (right next to the little smiling dick doodles).
Scott stared up at his ceiling and counted out the seconds. It didn’t seem like much, but each one was a victory. The human shaped burrito curled beside him smacked him sharply across the stomach and the wolf oomfed, giving Stiles a shove.
“You’re doing the thing.”
“The thing?”
“Yeah.” Stiles said sleepily, mouth drawn into a petulant pout. “That thing where you’re worrying instead of being my blanket. Bros don’t let bros freeze to death in bed, Scotty. Now, unless you want me to actually wear something to bed from now on…”
“God forbid.” Scott chuckled, wrapping his body around the boy who greedily tangled himself in knots around him.
“Stop doing the thing and go to sleep.”
They were both so far from okay, Stiles was still haunted by the Nogitsune and the dreams where he lost himself and Scott could feel the need for the simple rush of pain to help calm him whenever things got too stressful, but they were healing. It would take time and they’d slip, but they’d get there together. There were each too stubborn to give up on the other.
“Scott.”
“Shut up, dumbass. I’m sleeping.” Scott kissed Stiles into silence and let himself drift, secure and loved. Pain might work, but his humanity was right here in his arms.