Archive of Our Own

 

 

1.)  Haunted houses suck.

2.)  Danny Mahealani doesn’t.

3.)  (But Stiles has heard that he’s very good at it.)

4.)  They haven’t gotten to the sucking part of their relationship yet, due in large part to the aforementioned haunted house.

It’s probably the least romantic story in the history of epic un-romances.

It had to start somewhere though, which in this case was after college but before B.H.I.T.E., when Stiles was living at home with his dad, working twelve hours a week at Taco Bell and another twenty at the gas station, because the job market wasn’t a great place for General Studies majors.

(He had a problem in college where he wanted to learn everything about anything – well, the interesting anythings at least – and picking a specialty was like picking a favorite Pokémon. So he joined the General Studies program at the tired insistence of his academic advisor and never looked back.)

Stiles also spent forty hours a week researching, writing, translating, annotating, illustrating, and editing his very own bestiary – and his version was bullshit free. None of this hunting down the hallowed blood of a nun untouched by “any love but that of our Lord and Savior” bullshit that didn’t even work and ended with several broken bones and an uncomfortably itchy scalp.

He wasn’t the only one with an amorphous future, either. Allison bounced between receptionist positions because she had the kind of face that charmed half of her customers and the kind of disposition that cowed the rest of them. Businesses loved her because she was the best at collecting payments on time, but they fired her because she also scared people with her dangerous-sweet temperament.  

Allison hated it. She spent a lot of time shooting things and teaching herself how to build bombs. Her dad started in on her medieval weaponry education, side-eyeing Stiles when he tried to tag along. Because battleaxes. Neither of them was particularly adept at the flail, but Stiles did learn other useful skills. Like ducking. And dodging.

Unsurprisingly, though, it was Scott who came up with a solution to their job woes. The same Scott who held down a steady job with Deaton, rented his own apartment like a real adult, and had screaming matches with Derek every other week about when the acceptable time to call for backup was and for the record that is not at five a.m. right before I have to get up for work, DEREK.

It was after just such an experience that, according to Scott, he hung up in a huff, pulled his quilt over his eyes and willed himself back into the Land of Nod. Somewhere between ten and seventeen minutes later, Stiles bolted upright and knocked a glass of water off his end table trying to grab his ringing phone. He answered it with a groggy groan, eyes barely able to make out the caller ID.

“We should totally charge Derek for our help!” Scott said, words strung together in a rush, the way he got when his brain moved faster than his mouth and his mouth valiantly tried to keep up, but the words got mushed together anyway.

Stiles scrunched his eyes together and blinked them open, pawing at his mouth in an attempt to wipe the drool off. “What.”

“Dude,” Scott breathed into the phone. “We could be consultants.”

Stiles hung up because, duh, sleep.

That’s the short version of how B.H.I.T.E. was born – Beacon Hills Investigators of Terrible Events, that is. (Thank god for Scott, because Allison wanted to name it the perfectly ordinary and boring Beacon Hills Supernatural Investigators and Stiles didn’t have a single suggestion that didn’t involve puns or inappropriate jokes).

They lived on a literal diet of coffee and ramen noodles for a long time, Scott sleeping in the backroom of their office building because he couldn’t afford the rent on it and an apartment. But B.H.I.T.E. grew from a side project into a full time job, their success due in large part to the Sheriff sending people their way. Some of their early clients didn’t even have supernatural problems, but his dad really wanted to see them succeed, which was just sweet.

The business is quite lucrative now. Stiles thinks B.H.I.T.E. is lucrative at least – he is, after all, driving a Hummer down the highway.

Stiles pushes his sunglasses farther up his nose and glances over at Boyd in the front seat, his arms crossed over his chest and straining seat belt, eyes closed. Stiles can’t tell if he’s sleeping or not; Boyd’s job as navigator is mostly done so he’s earned a bit of shuteye. Stiles toys with the idea of hooking up his iPod so he can rock out to some Beyoncé, but the likelihood of Boyd decapitating him goes up by 200% when he sings, so he resigns himself to just the hum of the engine for aural entertainment.

His eyes flit over each street name as they pass, his foot hovering over the brake in case he needs to turn suddenly. He hates the GPS and its artificial voice, prefers the printout propped in the cup-holder instead, wrinkled from where Boyd held it earlier. 

Boyd shifts a little in the seat, settling in. Stiles envies him – it’d been an early morning with this consultancy and cleanup job in Washington state. It’s not the furthest Stiles has traveled (Germany has that particular honor) nor is it the earliest he’s dragged himself out of bed for a job, but Boyd napping while he can’t makes him yawn.

Clicking his tongue, he checks his watch. Scott should be anywhere between forty-five minutes to an hour behind them, depending how well his negotiations with Lydia about weaponry and potions went. She’s notorious for over-packing. 

The Audi in front of him slows even more, and Stiles doesn’t have the patience to deal with it anymore. He swerves sharply into the other lane and speeds past it, slipping back into his own lane. If the jerk of the car didn’t cause any noises of disapproval from Boyd, he must truly be sleeping.

It’s a pretty new development. Not many of Derek’s pack trust Stiles enough to let their guard down.

Lydia is on this case with them as an independent contractor and Boyd on loan from Derek’s pack. Stiles, Scott, and Allison can handle 80% of the jobs that come their way, but occasionally they need more manpower or magical expertise. Isaac does all their design work and marketing anyway, although Derek doesn’t like it.

“Hey, I think this is it,” Stiles says when he spots the green Barbera Boulevard sign, excitedly thumping Boyd’s shoulder. It’s like touching a boulder, or a concrete wall, or something else that’s really ripped.

Boyd rubs the sleep out of his eyes as Stiles maneuvers the Hummer up the winding gravel drive. The tree-lined road sends shadows flitting across the sunroof through the thick leaf cover. The house finally appears in front of them, trees thinning out to reveal an austere manor. Stiles snaps to attention, straightening the steering wheel as they come around the final curve.

“Wow-wie,” he whistles under his breath.

The house shoots forbiddingly over the wooded area around it. Stiles doesn’t know anything about real estate, but it reminds him of a rustic Victorian manor, built with grey brick and white columns, trimmed in rust and white. A giant porch wraps around the front and curves along the back, attached to a three-car garage. It’s easily the biggest house he’s seen in person, but something about it is unsettling, ominous. He snorts at himself – of course there’s something off about it, it’s a haunted house. 

His eyes catch on the second-floor balcony, specifically a set of glass double doors. Stiles blinks, trying to get the sunspot smudges out of his eyes, but his vision isn’t clear enough to make anything out. There’s what could be a face, blurry and shrouded in shadow, features white and smooth, but he blinks and squints again. Nothing, no matter how much he peers at it.

“Someone’s got dough to spare,” Boyd comments as Stiles puts the Hummer into park.

“Not quite,” Stiles says, attention focused on the front door. A brown-skinned woman with a pleasant smile and soft up-do walks toward them, a ruffled skirt brushing against her knees and sensible heels clicking against the pavement. “The owner met an untimely end so it’s going back on the market. We’re providing pest control.”

He glances one more time at the balcony, frowning and making a mental note of the room, before he follows Boyd out of the car.

~*~ 

Libby, the realtor, leads them around the yard to the porch where a platter of cookies and a pitcher of lemonade wait.

“Have a seat, Mr. Boyd, Mr. Stilinski,” she says easily, gesturing to a set of wicker lawn chairs. Stiles drops easily into one, reaching for a cookie and stuffing it into his mouth. It’s a bit of an act – it gives him a chance to survey their new location, his eyes skating across the groomed lawn, already picking out exits and strategic retreats – but also, the cookies are really good.

“I trust your drive was fine?” Libby asks, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. She clasps her hands together on the table in front of them, her manicured pink fingernails lengthening into claws. When Stiles meets her eyes, they’ve turned from hazel to supernatural gold.  

Stiles’ heart spikes, he can’t help it, no matter how much time he spends around werewolves, but otherwise his face and posture don’t change. If Libby’s transformation was nonchalant, Boyd tops it. His polite smile doesn’t twitch as his teeth lengthen into fangs and his eyes flash yellow, fading so fast it could have been a trick of the light. He stares back at her passively, one eyebrow raised.

Libby laughs, all lycanthropic traces leaving her body. She pours herself a glass of lemonade, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs, surveying them.

“Sorry about the pissing contest,” she says. Her voice is pitched lower than before, but it sounds more natural. “I had to make sure your business was the real deal.”

Boyd pulls out his smirk-smile and replies, “I understand. I just didn’t expect you to be so pretty.”

It’s totally a line from Derek Hale’s Playbook – the only line, if Stiles is being real – but the thing that floors him is that it works.

Boyd has Libby completely charmed in minutes, a process Stiles watches while steadily consuming cookies and lemonade. Boyd or Scott, even Allison, pull off the flirty act much better with their faces and voices that melt butter. As much as Stiles would like to assert his own charming persona, he knows he’s too much of a gawky asshole to make it work. He’s too jittery, leg jiggling, ready to jump into the case, all the preliminary small talk useless to him when all he can think about are how many cameras they brought and how many rooms they have to cover. 

When Boyd starts asking about her siblings, Stiles cuts in.

“As amazing as it is to get all this information about your life that is totally relevant to this job, why don’t you tell us how you heard about B.H.I.T.E.?” He snaps his teeth at the end. Boyd rolls his eyes; Stiles does it every goddamn time.

Libby clears her throat, smoothing the top layer of her skirt. “Right. Well,” she grins, and her voice dips, predatory, “I’m a werewolf. You have a reputation.”

“A good one?”

“Excellent. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, Mr. Stilinski. My firm is only interested in the very best.”

Stiles sits back, crossing his arms, and studies her over the table. “And what exactly is your firm?”

“We’re realtors.”

Stiles gives her a pointed look.

“We’re realtors with a… specialty. We flag hunter-free neighborhoods and communities, and then find houses that meet our clients’ specifications.  Everyone has needs. Lunar rooms, blackout windows, access to ponds, forests – we find it for them.”

Boyd smirks appraisingly. “This house, it was for a supernatural client?”

Libby nods and braces her elbows on her knees, leaning toward Boyd. “It sounds like superstitious bullshit, deaths throughout the years, mysterious disappearances, the like. I’ve only been handling this account since the last owner, Mr. Balmont, purchased it, but my company has handled the sale of this property since it was built in 1953. 

“We’re about to put the house back on the market. It’s prime real estate, you know, and will rake in a hefty commission. But there have been persistent problems and my firm wants it cleared before it goes up.”

“I did some digging,” Stiles interrupts. “And there were no reports of missing people or deaths related to this house.”

She raises up, spine straightening vertebrae by vertebrae, and looks at Stiles with narrowed eyes. “We are very good at our job.”

Stiles shudders but cocks his head, metaphorical hackles raising. No onechallenges his research skills, no one. He’d combed through hours worth of material and archives of newspapers looking for a little clue as to what they would be dealing with. As was the case with most of their jobs, their client didn’t know what supernatural beastie was raising ruckus for them. Stiles’ primary job, beyond general support and technology and communications, was using information and context clues to identify the problem and brainstorm ways to fix it. Using local newspapers was hit or miss, but deaths were usually well reported even if they weren’t accurate, and the name Balmont hadn’t turned up once.

“Mr. Balmont was found last month by the groundskeeper, gutted from the sternum down. The autopsy also revealed a cardiac event, even though he had impeccable health and diet.”  

“You said your clients were… not human.” Boyd says. It prompts Libby to break eye contact with Stiles, nodding at Boyd. Her eyes are sharp, challenging, and Stiles feels more comfortable when they’re off him.

“Yes. Mr. Balmont was part ghillie dhu and needed the solitude of the forest.”

“A Scottish tree spirit,” Stiles cuts in, answering Boyd’s unasked question. He turns to Libby again. “And the other deaths? Were they similar in nature? Were they all things that go bump in the night?” A bug flies into Stiles’ face but he bats it away, concentrated on her answer.

“From what we can tell, yes. The bodies were mauled significantly upon discovery, usually with great blood loss and accompanied by significant bodily trauma.” 

“And the wounds – not werewolf?” Boyd asks.

She shakes her head. “No. The pattern isn’t consistent. They’re too wide-set and large to be done by werewolf claws.”

Both Libby and Boyd turn their heads at the same time, focusing on the front of the house. Moments later, Stiles hears the rumble of their van and the clatter of displaced gravel. Stiles stands and trips over the leg of his chair, almost face planting into the lemonade pitcher, but he rights himself awkwardly against Boyd and keeps walking like nothing happened.

The air is thick and clammy with humidity. Stiles wipes his forehead with the hem of his shirt to clear off the sweat collecting on his brow and almost walks straight into the railing.

He blames the early morning.

They reach the front just as Scott gets out of the driver’s seat. He raises a hand in greeting and goes around the back to start unloading equipment. Lydia steps out of the passenger seat looking fresh like she hasn’t been traveling for hours, and Stiles waves a hand in greeting just as the drivers side back door opens and Danny Mahealani gets out.

Stiles gapes openly as Boyd walks over to throw an arm around his shoulder. Danny smiles sunnily at him.

Danny.

Danny.

The Danny Mahealani who Stiles hasn’t seen in years, the Danny Mahealani who Stiles didn’t know was coming.

He bounds down the steps, bypassing Lydia and heading straight to Scott who is lifting bags out of the back of the van with ease.

“Hey buddy,” Stiles says through gritted teeth. “How was the drive? Good? No, you know what, nope, don’t care. Why is Danny here?”

Scott frowns at him. “He’s moving back to Beacon Hills. I thought he could help consult with the tech end of things.”

“And you didn’t tell me because?”

“I didn’t think it would be a big deal, Stiles! It was kind of a last minute thing.”

Stiles brings his hands up and pantomimes strangling Scott, but then the motion turns into him throwing his arms up in defeat. 

“Let’s get started,” Scott says and claps him on the back.

~*~ 

It isn’t until he and Scott are walking the perimeter and setting up Ghost-O-Matic!’s (his own invention – kind of, a little bit, okay, he had the idea – that combines motion sensors, thermometers, thermal cameras, and a magic reader that feeds data and activity into their main computers) that it strikes him how isolated the house is, and just how creepy as well. It’s at least a mile off the main road, no visible neighbors, and surrounded on all sides by thick woods. No one to hear you scream, indeed.

“Think that’s good for the front?” Scott yells, loping back from the window he’d just finished.

“Yeah buddy, looks good,” he yells. They both start for the back of the house, following the stone foundation around. Small miracles – at least there isn’t a creepy basement. Stiles is tired of creepy basements. They usually mean trouble.

Scott stops and crouches, studying the concrete. The ends of his hoodie brush the ground when he leans forward to feel the stone.

“Whatcha looking at?” Stiles asks, feet stopping just in the edge of his vision.

Scott’s short fingernails trace the gouges in the cement. “Claw marks, I think. Not werewolf.”

Stiles analyzes them as well, but his vision can’t pick out the subtle differences that Scott’s can. They’re not immediately recognizable, but that’s not surprising; of the varieties of clawed creatures out there, each one carries its own claw pattern. There’s even variation within groups, making visual categorization difficult. Stiles snaps a picture of it anyway.

“C’mon. I’ll cross reference the bestiary later.” 

The entire rear of the manor is an elevated porch with two flights of stone steps leading down to a tiled patio area and a massive lawn. Above it, on the second floor, is the balcony Stiles saw around the front, wrapping around the whole house.

“There,” Stiles points. “We should put two cameras to cover the yard.”

“I got it,” Scott says, smiling, and grabs two of the devices. He jumps, balancing on the railing, and then uses the overhang to flip onto the balcony.

“Werewolves, I swear to god,” Stiles mutters.

“I heard that!” Scott shouts, looking entirely too satisfied.

“I meant you to!” he yells back.

~*~ 

The groundskeeper was supposed to give them a tour, but after calling her again and again, Libby had given up, forked over the blueprints, apologized, and run off to meet clients with a promise to answer any questions tomorrow when she checked in. She left one of her cards, a sleek red paper with Libby Bindra printed on it and three contact numbers.

What it all means is that when they’re finished outside, Scott and Boyd start patrolling each story, using their senses to pick out anything strange or unnatural, as any extra information before sundown will be better for them. Scott’s also supposed to scope out rooms and call dibs on the best one for them to share. When Allison joins them, they all share, a practice that gets increasing weirder the older they get, but one they’re unwilling to give up.

Stiles meanders into the kitchen, where Lydia has a veritable cornucopia of ingredients and bottles spread across the counter.

“Hey, Lyds!”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, but most of her concentration is on the granite cauldron (pink, of course) and a cloudy, viscous liquid she’s measuring out of a bottle. She looks like a lab technician, white coat over her peasant blouse and jeans, safety goggles obscuring her eyes.

“You know you love it.”

She dumps the mixture in, stirring twice, and then finally looks up at him, lips pursed, face unimpressed. “I really, really don’t. Now scram, this is delicate work.”

Stiles huffs in mock indignation, but he does scram. The last time he distracted her while she was mixing, he was hospitalized for three days. It’s not an experience he’s eager to repeat.

Poking around the rest of the first floor proves fruitful. He discovers a very nice breakfast nook, the kind he’s been badgering Scott and Allison about for the B.H.I.T.E. offices, and a hella sweet laundry room. The interior of the manor is vastly more welcoming than the exterior, and stocked to the brim with modern appliances, surprising given its age. He sticks his head into the dining room to see if it’s as cavernous as he’s picturing when he sees Danny, shirt riding up from where he’s bent over their bank of computers. 

“Oh, sorry,” he says and makes to leave, but then realizes how rude he sounds. “I mean, hey, how are you?”

“Fine,” Danny grunts through the bundle of wires in his mouth. He’s setting up their monitoring equipment on the banquet table. It mostly runs through duct tape and prayers, and the wiring is more particular than Allison with her weapons. Stiles can already see a few cords plugged in the wrong spot.

“Do you want any help, man? I mean, this is usually my job, so with you here I’m like, twiddling my thumbs and hunting dust bunnies.”

“Oh, um,” Danny hedges.

“It’s okay, I can go do paperwork or something,” Stiles says, pointing at the door with both his hands. He realizes it belatedly and stuffs them in his pockets.

“Some help with all these cameras would be nice…”

“Sure thing, captain. I can start upstairs? I’ll start upstairs. I like exploring, but I’ve already explored down here, so, upstairs?” 

“Yeah, sure, upstairs.” Danny smiles at him and it sends him right back into high school, when Danny used to smile at him like that, like he can’t tell if it’s flirty or mocking or something more. Stiles grabs a box of the small cameras, tosses some wires over it, and trips over the table leg.

“That thing came out of nowhere!” he yells and bolts for the door.

~*~ 

If Stiles had secretly hoped they’d finish everything up that first night, he would have been wrong.

After an afternoon spent napping, they congregate in the living room when the sun goes down. The enormous oak table dwarfs their surveillance equipment, which Stiles and Danny have each checked twice and is functional, but quiet.

“I really want a beer right now,” Stiles whines, bored and tired of losing the same level of Candy Crush on his iPad.

Scott frowns at him. “You know you can’t drink on the job.”

Stiles scrunches up his face and turns toward the monitors. Nothing has changed since the last time he looked thirty seconds ago. He hunches down in his seat and pulls up the bestiary, flicking through it aimlessly. He’d already scrutinized their database of claw marks but that time could have been better served eavesdropping on Lydia and Danny’s conversation. If he had more clues or specifics about their unknown, malevolent monster, he could at least start figuring out a plan, but as it is, his eyes gloss over the words. He doesn’t realize it, but he sighs every time he flicks the screen to flip the pages.

“God, will someone give him the junk food?” Lydia says, turning away from Danny. 

Boyd tosses the sack at his head. He tries to catch it but now that he doesn’t practice lacrosse every day his hand-eye coordination is pretty much shit, so it hits him in the face and granola bars (the chocolate covered kind – Allison is the best) scatter everywhere.

“Oops,” Boyd says, smirking.

Stiles munches pointedly on chips, which has the added benefit of keeping his mouth busy; in hindsight, that’s probably what Lydia was going for. He leaves the granola bars on the floor just to spite everyone. Scott is working his way through last month’s finances (a job he hates, but much less than Stiles does) and Boyd is pouring over the floor plan, head propped on one hand. Stiles feels annoying when he gets like this - annoyed at himself, fighting the urge to badger his friends for attention, confirming that they still like him when they’re obviously working. It makes him fidget, more strung out than usual.

“I start for the school district next week,” Danny says to Lydia. He uncaps his water with deft fingers and takes a long swallow, lips stretched over the rim and neck straining temptingly. “It’s going to be a completely different environment from the startup.”

“But that’s what you want, right?” Lydia asks and Danny nods.

Scott is the actual best, the actual, literal best for sensing Stiles’ frustration and boredom because he pushes the pile of paperwork away from him and flops his torso onto the table. “I’m bored too,” he says, then perks up. “We could play Truth or Dare!”

There’s a collective groan. Scott’s favorite game is Truth or Dare. He’s a naturally honest person with a reckless streak – he always wins.

“Let’s not,” Lydia says, favoring him with her most unimpressed face. “We went to high school together, Scott, we already know all the stupid things you did.”

Lydia has a point, but the break in her conversation tunes her into the mood of the room. She casts a calculating look around before smiling. Stiles gulps.

“We do need to catch up, though. Anyone seeing anyone special lately?” she asks sweetly. Danny snorts, but tries to cover it by feigning a yawn.

Boyd’s focus on the ground plan narrows even more. There’s an uncomfortable shuffling around the table because it’s the kind of question that only people who are regularly participating in athletic sex like to answer, and none of them are regularly participating in athletic sex. Stiles can’t speak for the others, but B.H.I.T.E. consumes pretty much his entire life. His dad doesn’t understand why he can’t meet anyone on the job since he’s interacting with people like, all the time, but it’s hard to explain that victims of supernatural trauma are not usually the type of people he wants to date, or that want to date him. They’re the type of people that want to forget everything that happened and never speak to him again.

Lydia’s nails click against the wood ominously as she turns to Stiles like an information-seeking missile. “Stiles,” she says sweetly, “No one… new in your life?”

The way she stresses new makes it abundantly clear what she’s trying to say.

“I have a different dentist?” he says weakly. “She really knows her way around a set of teeth.”

“With her tongue?”

“With her pokey dentist instruments!”

Lydia cocks an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “Perpetually single still?”

Stiles huffs. “’m not perpetually single.”

“What’s your craziest un-single story, then?” she says, taunting, body cocked toward him.

Sometimes Stiles looks back fondly on the days when he pined after her and she ignored him. Now they’re more like competitive siblings who also talk about weird sex stuff.

He leans back in his chair, leveling her with an even look. She can read him well, though, and rises to his unspoken challenge. “I pegged Jackson once,” Lydia says. “Now you go.”

Stiles is an adult. Stiles doesn’t need to grace any of this with an answer.

“Fiiiiiine,” Stiles says. Lydia smirks. He sorts through his options for a moment, settling for the story that will get him the biggest reaction, even if it’s not his most risqué. “I fucked Derek once.” 

Scott’s eyes bug out and Danny leans in, very suddenly interested in the proceedings. “Derek Hale?” Scott asks, strangled.

“Once, ONCE, and never again. Dude was all quiet and intense and the Stiles finds it very hard to stay hard with that much eye contact, you know? And he couldn’t find my sweet spot,” he wiggles his eyebrows, “if I painted it neon and drew him a map." 

Derek had also cried, just a little, but Stiles isn’t going to mention that.

Danny still looks entirely too interested when he asks, “How big was he?” 

“Moderate? Nothing to write home about.”

Scott huffs, still looking scandalized, and demands, “When was this?”

Stiles winces because his answer is all too revealing. “My… eighteenth birthday?”

“You lost your virginity to Derek Hale?” 

He nods and stares hard at the table, tracing the wood grain to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. 

“Oh, honey,” Lydia says. Stiles bristles at that, because he doesn’t need her pity. Yeah, sure, his first time was a disaster, and sure, he came out of sheer spite and not because he was overwhelmed with Derek’s raw animal magnetism, but he’s had some smoking hot good times since then and believe him when he says Derek Hale is barely a blip registering on his radar. There was a threesome once, okay, with a yoga instructor and his nurse girlfriend. 

Lydia continues, “Really, Danny, you should’ve thrown him a bone back in high school and saved him from that.”

Danny shrugs, an uncomfortable half-smile on his lips. “I don’t think anything could have saved him from that.”

A lot of humiliating things have happened to Stiles, it’s a by-product of living. But one of the worst was the day after he came out as bisexual (for the first time, at least, because frustratingly enough, it’s not the kind of thing you do just once). Danny Mahealani marched up to him after cross country, still shirtless, and told him in no uncertain terms, “Don’t expect anything, Stilinski, just because we’re two people who like the same gender at the same school.” And when Stiles was still blinking at him, floored, he added, “And stop asking me if you’re attractive to gay guys.”

Yeah, he’d had a crush on Danny, a crush that had played a large part in him figuring out his sexuality, but it wasn’t because he thought Danny was sexually available.

A blaring alarm interrupts the uncomfortable silence and Stiles’ not-so-fun introspection, and they all jump, turning their attention to the computers. Danny and Stiles crowd over the monitors, parsing the readings to see the motion detectors around the front door going nuts. “Front door,” Stiles grunts and Scott and Boyd dash out, claws at the ready. Lydia hefts a machete she pulled from seemingly nowhere and the three of them spill into the main hall.

Just in time, as the double doors bang open. The woman standing in the entrance is grizzled and bundled up in unseasonable clothing, scowling and clutching a cane tightly. Her nails are ringed in dirt and she looks generally unpleasant, but for all that, she’s human. Scott’s claws recede and he relaxes his posture but his guard is still up. Boyd clasps his clawed hands behind his back to hide them from view, but he still keeps them out. Lydia coughs and lowers the machete, trying to look innocent.

“Who are you?” the woman demands, voice low and gravelly.

Stiles splutters. “Wha- no, who are you?”

Scott interrupts, planting himself more firmly in front of the group. “We’re the investigators. And you are?” he asks politely. 

“Bessie. ‘m the groundskeeper.” She looks at each of them, assessing, but must find them lacking if the mocking suspicion she radiates is anything to go by. She tromps back to the door, and turns in the doorway. “You’d better get out of here. For your own safety!” she growls, and then disappears down the steps.

“That was strange,” Lydia muses as she pulls the front doors closed. She turns the latch pointedly.

The rest of the night passes uneventfully. The alarms are silent but Stiles watches the detectors anyway while Scott patrols the halls every half hour. They climb into their beds at seven a.m. with no hint of anything, not even a floating candlestick or strange noise.

With Boyd downstairs, Stiles doesn't worry too much about the detectors set around the house, but he fiddles with his portable device anyway, propped up on a mound of pillows with blankets twisted around his legs. The little screen blares whenever one of their Ghost-o-Matic!’s picks something up. It doesn't give any specific readings like their bank of equipment downstairs does, but it's better than sleeping in the drafty dining room.

"All set?" Scott says. His hand is poised over the light switch, so Stiles nods and he flicks it off. Scott pads over to the window and pulls the curtains shut, tugging so the two ends overlap in the middle. Right now, the barest hint of light peeks through, but they want to stave off the sun as long as possible.

Stiles scoots over, giving Scott room to climb under the fleece blanket and when he settles, they curl up together and drop into sleep listening to their quiet breaths.

~*~

Danny wakes to a peal of thunder. It's still dark out, disorienting to his body. According to the blinking digital clock on the nightstand, it's midnight. His cell phone reveals it's just past three in the afternoon, which means the storm battering at his window knocked the power out, at least for a little bit.

His eyes are gritty from a fitful sleep and his stomach gurgling for food as he pads downstairs in a fresh set of clothes, hair lying flat on his head from the quick rinse he'd given himself. The house is chilled, markedly different from the day before, still and disconcerting, and Danny finds himself walking a little faster toward the kitchen.

He passes the open door to the dining room and sees Stiles hunched over a monitor, slapping it with his palm and swearing.

"Good morning," Danny says, his voice rough with sleep.

"Wha-fuck!" Stiles jumps and slams his hand too hard on the table, pulling it into his chest and rubbing it with his long fingers. "Oh, morning."

Danny smirks. "Everything alright?"

"No," Stiles scowls. "The power messed up our equipment and I can't get it to work." 

There's a sharp flash of lightning, almost on cue, and thunder rumbles a few seconds later. The pair of electric chandeliers lighting the room flicker. 

"It might not matter," Danny says. "Sounds like this storm is here to stay." 

Stiles sighs, shoulders slumping. Danny stares at the gentle slope of his spine, transfixed, until Stiles straightens up again. "I'm going to let this reboot. You hungry?"

"You have anything besides junk food?"

Stiles snorts. "I can unwrap a mean muffin. Gourmet-style."

They can hear the gusting wind when they get to the kitchen and Stiles goes straight for the window to part the curtains and peer out, cursing under his breath.

"Morning," Boyd says and Danny jumps. He's picking at a bowl of cereal with a book propped open in front of him at the island. 

"Yeah," Danny says and reaches for a bowl. "How'd you sleep?"

Boyd shrugs around a mouthful of Cookie Crisp. Danny opts for the Grape Nuts, shaking a decent amount into his bowl and topping it with milk until the pieces of granola are drowning in it.

"Libby stopped by around 8," Boyd says after he swallows. Stiles swings around the other side of the island and perches on one of the stools, staring at the boxes of cereal lined up. Eventually, he pulls them all toward him and mixes a small amount of each in his bowl. 

"What'd she say?" Lydia asks as she rounds the corner, stopping to ruffle Stiles' hair. They all mumble greetings at her as she shuffles over to the coffee pot.

"Not much. Just wanted to check in. I told her about Bessie, but she didn't have much to say."

Stiles snorts into a spoonful of cereal, spraying milk across the counter. "I doubt that."

Boyd rolls his eyes and flips a page in his book, signaling the end of their interaction.

"Is Scott coming?" Lydia asks.

"I woke him up before I came down," Stiles says through a mouthful of cereal. "He'll be down soon... if he hasn't fallen back asleep." 

"Right on time," Boyd says, nodding at Scott. Scott mumbles something and stumbles over to the island, leaning against it and rubbing his eyes. 

Danny takes his dishes over to the sink and rinses the last dregs of milk out of the flowered bowl. He parts the curtains with a dripping hand, frowning. The sky has darkened considerably and the trees are tossing in the wind. 

By the time he makes his way back to the table, Scott looks brighter, more alert.

"Equipment's on the fritz," Stiles explains while he pours his second bowl of Franken-cereal. "The storm did it."

"You and Danny can work on it after breakfast," Scott says, looking to Danny for confirmation. Danny nods. The weather has other plans for them, because just as Scott finishes his sentence, the lights flicker and go dark.

"This blows," Lydia says matter-of-factly.

~*~

"Okay, team, let's split up and patrol," Scott says, sounding overly cheerful considering their situation. He tried, fruitlessly, to get ahold of Libby. Her card is lying on the dining room table in front of them, shiny and useless. "Stiles, Danny, and I will take the downstairs. Lydia, Boyd - you take the upstairs."

"Go us!" Stiles cries. He holds a palm out to Danny first, who ignores it, and then Scott, who gives him the high-five out of pity.

"Awesome," Boyd says, deadpan. 

~*~

The upper floor is dark, almost nighttime dark. The dark paneling and small windows only serve to smother any small amount of light coming through the windows. From far off, Boyd hears a light scriiitch, the third or fourth, and this time, he’s sure it’s not in his head.

“Is that you?” he asks.

“Is what me?”

“The scratching,” he says, gesturing to her nails where they’re closed over the flashlight.

Lydia pauses, head perked and breath still. “No,” she says after a minute, “and I can’t hear it so it must not be close. Rats maybe? And I bet a big place like this has a mouser somewhere.”

He hums in agreement, but he’s still not convinced. Lydia points her light at a door, which Boyd pinpoints as a library from the maps he memorized earlier. “Let’s check in there.”

The library smells fresh despite rows of old books but if he tries hard enough, Boyd can still pick out the musty scent of decay coming from the shelves. He flicks the light switch out of habit.

“The electricity is out.” Boyd can just make out the sharp incredulousness of her features in the dim light cast by the flashlight.

“Doesn’t hurt to check.”

She rolls her eyes before heading straight to one of the shelves, running her fingers over the spines and mouthing the titles silently to herself. She doesn’t seem impressed by the collection.

Boyd closes his eyes and lets his senses sharpen, pulls them up from that wild core in him, the one that houses the wolf. When he snaps back to reality, the room is sharper, illuminated, the smells more noticeable. He strains his ears, examining the room carefully, but nothing jumps out at him as out of the ordinary. No lingering scents other than those of the realtor and groundskeeper, no unusual noises besides the occasional scratch.

“This room is clean,” he says, gruff, and his voice still carries some of the wolf in it.

“Fine,” Lydia sighs, tearing away from the shelves. “They have crap books anyway.”

Lydia flounces forward a few steps into the hallway while Boyd closes the door behind him. She turns with a precisely placed hair flip, smirking at Boyd with her head tilted. “I’m bored,” she says, looking at him from under her lashes. “Let’s have sex.” Her teeth catch on her lips on the “v.” 

Boyd lingers on her eyes, wide and so green in this light, making sure she sees the interest before moving in closer. She shifts her stance in preparation, making room in her personal space for him to slot in close.

“Okay,” he breathes between them and stoops to kiss her.

Her lips part and she cranes up to meet him, hair like a cascade down her back, tickling his knuckles where they’re curled in the small of her back. Her lips are tacky and vanilla flavored from the gloss – he tastes it as he teases the seam of her lips.

Their kisses are like sparks, each one lighting up until the point of contact between their mouths crackles. 

He rolls her head gently back so he can whisper kisses down the column of her throat, working careful fingers down her jeans. He pauses, long enough for her to pull back and smirk at him and say yes in a hoarse whisper, and he pushes down until his fingers rub against damp cotton. Lydia gasps into his ear, a not-quite sound that thrills him. 

His arousal ratchets higher when Lydia takes him by surprise and walks them a few steps back so that he’s the one pressed into the wall, and rolls her hips into his hand, pressing into his fingers. The smell of her is branded into his nose, from the artificial cantaloupe of her hair, to the damp tang of her arousal, and they mix together until his brain is reeling with it.

Shaking, Boyd pushes her back far enough to work her pants open. 

“Yeah,” she mumbles into the space between their bodies. “Yeah.”

Lydia pulls their bodies back together with one leg hooked around his back, rolling her hips into him, biting the curve of his shoulder lightly. When she pulls away, he can still feel the press of her teeth through his shirt.

“I think that’s a bedroom,” she says, nodding to the door behind him. When he turns to look, she extricates herself and walks over to it, hips swaying.

Her fingers wrap sinfully around the knob, the sight of it imprinting on him immediately, and she looks over her shoulder. 

“Well?” Lydia purrs, mouth sinful.

~*~

“You’re not going to find anything in the fridge,” Scott says. Stiles can hear the disapproval even with his head stuck inside.

“I’m checking for food that might go bad!” Stiles protests, but he backs out and shuts the door anyway. It’s been emptied, the only remnants a few old bottles of condiments and a jar of gross floaty things.

Danny sighs. “Is this how all jobs go for you guys? Eating, sleeping, and snooping?”

Stiles and Scott look at each other and shrug. “There’s usually more terror,” Stiles says.

“And no one’s gotten mauled yet,” Scott offers.

They should know better, they should really, really, really know better by now because it’s not like they’ve been doing this professionally for five years and as amateurs for a significant number more. It’s always a jinx when someone says that, and then the mauling does happen.

Unfortunately, today is not an exception.

A screech pierces the air and it chills Stiles down to his bones, feeding fear into his marrow. He’s heard a lot of unsettling and downright scary noises in his years, but this is the first to make his skin crawl. His fingers slide to the dagger strapped to his arm, but there isn’t time before Scott is yelling his name and flinging him down next to the kitchen island.

“Why didn’t you smell it?” Stiles yells frantically.

“It doesn’t have a smell!”

“Danny! Where’s Danny!”

Danny drops to the floor next to them, sweating and panting. “Oh my god. Fuck. What is that?”

Under other circumstances, Stiles might take a small amount of pleasure in seeing Danny – calm, cool, dictionary definition of collected Danny – so rattled. But those other circumstances would preferably be mundane things, like dropping his ice cream cone, or snagging his favorite sweater. Fun things. Things that might not end in injury.

Stiles yanks the dagger from his arm strap and thrusts it at Danny. “Stab squishy bits like eyes if you have to, run while Scott and I distract it,” he says, but Danny still looks freaked. He may have some experience with werewolves and peripheral experience with the kanima, but he does not actively pursue beasties of the night for a living. Stiles grabs the sides of his face until he’s staring hard into Danny’s eyes. “Seriously. Run away, hide,” he says, until Danny nods shakily.

The screech sounds again, much closer, like it’s just above them, and Stiles fumbles two throwing knives out of his boots, palming them in sweaty hands. He turns to see Scott, his eyes two pinpricks of red glowing in the kitchen, dart up and around the island.

“Shit,” Stiles mutters and lunges after him. 

Melted bone is Stiles’ first impression. The longer he looks, the more grotesque it becomes; in self-preservation, his brain can only process parts of it at a time. A horror movie come to life, its head is a mask of melted bone, deep, jagged slashes cutting through it. On all fours, its body is also skeletal, but blackened flesh covered in boils and abrasions peeks through. While he watches, the creature’s head flips upside down. Its features don’t move, grinning and glowing a ghastly green.

Scott launches at it, slashing out and catching it across its hardened skull. He recoils, flexing his claws like they hurt. Stiles bites down on the panic surging up in him, clutching hard at his knives, because the monster appears completely unharmed and they’ve encountered very few things resistant to werewolf claws.

The monster snuffs, then flings itself at Scott, limbs moving awkwardly and puppet-like. It looks like it should be slow and lumbering, but when Scott dodges out of the way, it twists midair with surprising agility and rakes bone claws across his shoulder.

Danny chooses that moment to dart from behind the island and make a break for the door. Danny is fast and he’s in great shape, but this creature is impossibly fast. It jumps up and over Scott’s body and rams into Danny’s side in one leap. His body bows out, then crumples in a sickening pile.

The monster rounds to look at Stiles. Its eyes are deep, fathomless, alien and it's only training and fear that gives Stiles the strength to draw his hand back and throw his knives into the blackened flesh on its torso. The knives clatter to the tile, twisted and melted, and Stiles fights back a yell because those were consecrated daggers with rowan ash handles, a catch all for dealing with the supernatural. 

The creature still stares at Stiles, advancing slowly on twisted limbs, and he can't do much more than brace himself for the inevitable.

Scott appears around its back, rams into its backside and hisses when his skin starts to smoke where it makes contact. It works, though, and the creature's attention shifts. Stiles feels the spell break, muscles relaxing incrementally but under his control again. 

"Make sure Danny's okay!" Scott yells. He throws his head back and howls, a sound that vibrates into the air and gets swallowed up by the storm. The monster’s head creaks around to look at him and Scott takes off down the hall, the bone creature in hot pursuit.

~*~

 

 

~*~

 

Boyd sits heavily on the bed, watches with dark eyes as Lydia kicks off her jeans and sashays toward him, her shirt pulled low and askew, the top of her nude bra peeking over the collar. 

She straddles him, hair spilling across his shoulders, and guides his hand until one of his fingers pushes up against her clit. She squeezes and grinds and rubs, muscles fluttering around him, and Boyd can’t stop watching the ebb and flow of arousal on her face, tracing it through her breaths and heartbeats.

“I’m close,” she says, low, quiet. He slides his other hand through the bunches of fabric around her midsection and cups her breast through her bra, lacy and rough to his touch. 

Boyd always thought Lydia would be loud, like a soundtrack of pornographic moans learned to appease men like Jackson Whittemore, but she isn’t; she responds to pleasure exactly how she pleases. There are little cues from her body, upticks in breath, the occasional gasp or nonsense encouragement, but there is no inauthenticity here, none of the Martin Mask to hide behind. 

She’s stripped bare.

Her thigh muscles start to spasm first, stilling, then shaking with minute tremors. Lydia grabs his wrist with a firm hand, stopping the little strokes of his fingers so the only friction comes from the unconscious jerks of her pelvis. She keeps him there until her muscles relax and her mouth and eyes are soft with afterglow.

Boyd is almost surprised when she touches him, palming him through his jeans, but he's aching for her, for her firm, capable hands.

She starts to wiggle down his body, mouth pursed seductively, licking her lips to make them wet and shiny but Boyd grasps her wrist gently and guides her hand down, pressing her palm against him. As enticing as her mouth is, her hands have always been captivating.

He groans appreciatively when she pulls his zipper down. Lydia hums when she finally gets her hand around his cock, her first touches light and teasing. His head spins when she grasps him firmly and strokes in earnest, the pace and pressure too good.

He kisses her again and again and again until his head is light from the lack of oxygen and his body feels like a conduit, her nimble fingers feeding him pleasure and her lips drawing it from his mouth.

It's like diving into a warm pool, when he finally comes between her fingers in little spurts, slick and welcoming and like drowning and flying all at once.

They stay pressed together for long moments, Lydia still kneeling above him. They listen to the rain beat against the walls and let their breath settle. Boyd understands, watching her shimmy back into her jeans and straighten her blouse, that Lydia showed him precisely what she wanted to.  

~*~

The bone monster is dangerously close to Scott when he rounds the doorway and takes off down the hallway, jumping over a hall table at the last second in an attempt to trip it. A grotesque panting caresses his senses. Gooseflesh bursts across his skin.

Scott sprints straight for the main foyer, intent on leading the beast outside where Stiles and Danny won't be in danger, but as he skids down the hall and into the foyer, the beast is gone.

He sniffs experimentally. It doesn't help - he couldn't smell it when it first attacked either. He retraces his steps through the hallway, yanking doors open, but there's no monster and no piercing shriek to clue him in to its location. He makes his way back to the foyer to regroup.

Scott retracts his claws enough that he can fumble his phone out of his pocket – he's shredded too many pairs of jeans not to remember this part – and jams his finger into speed-dial three.

Nothing happens. No ringing, no beep, no voicemail.

"Frick."

There aren't any bars, which means no reception, which means no Stiles. He slides it back into his pocket, and only remembers the headset when his fingers brush against it.

It's a little Bluetooth that fits in his ear. Allison and Stiles always use them when they work, and Lydia and Boyd have one for this job, but Scott never wears his because it interferes with his hearing. It's more important that his senses be unencumbered than the ease of communication it allows, so he rarely remembers he even carries it. 

He fastens the nub into his ear, tapping the button twice to wake it up. A loud screech and then static greets him, and he pulls it out as fast as he can. Electronic noises at loud volumes are more irritating than any other kind, yet another one of the double edges that plague werewolf-hood. 

Scott sighs. He guesses he can pick up Danny and Stiles' scent in the kitchen and track them to their hiding spot.

Before that, though, Scott needs a moment to rest. He leans heavily on a paneled wall, sagging against it and touching his shoulder gingerly. The slash wound throbs angry-hot, the way healing wounds get when his body works to fix them. He just needs a second while it finishes. He pulls his shirt away from the slash so the blood won’t glue it to his skin while it dries.

Scott watches his skin knit together with a sick fascination. He never tires of this part, the way it closes together and disappears. When his shoulder is whole again, he rolls it to test its movement. It pops and Scott stretches, first forward, then back and his elbows bang against one of the panels. 

A click reverberates through the wall. He feels it rumble first from the floor, then up until the wall shakes with it. He’s too stunned to move when the section of the wall he's leaning on flips around, taking him with it.

All that's left is an identical wall, sans Scott.

 

~*~

 

 

~*~

 

"C'mon, we can hole up here," Stiles says, pulling open the door and urging Danny into the bedroom. There's only a small amount of light spilling through the window, the blinds are drawn and the clouds cut out any moonlight, but Stiles doesn't turn his flashlight on. 

They don't know anything about this bone monster. It could react to light or sound for all they know, and he isn't taking any chances, because he's never seen anything like it before.

He pushes Danny over to the bed and urges him down until he sits on the edge. Stiles grabs his head, tilting it up, fingers sliding through Danny's soft hair. It's grown out since the last time they saw each other and it tickles Stiles' knuckles as he studies Danny for injuries.

"I'm fine," Danny says, and it sounds mostly true. He isn't as shaky and he doesn't sound confused.

“What’s your name? How many fingers am I holding up?” Stiles asks rapid-fire. 

“Danny Mahealani. Your fingers are on my head. I can’t see them.”

“Do you feel nauseous?”

“Do we have to do this?”

“Humor me.”

“No. I’m fine, Stiles. Just sore.”

Stiles tips his head back further. “I’m going to shine the flashlight in your eyes now to check your pupils.”

“How do you know all this?” Danny asks, although as the words come out of his mouth, he regrets them. Of course he would, given his line of work.

“Scott’s mom, Melissa. She’s a nurse. Scott and I were reckless children. And teenagers.” He smooths Danny’s hair down. Surprisingly kind, Stiles says, “Besides the bump, looks like you’re fine. You’re a trooper.” 

Danny quirks a smile, like he has a secret, and rubs his ribcage. "Yeah, I'm a survivor." 

Stiles sits heavily next to him, adrenaline fading and leaving him jittery and sore. "Do you still have the knife?" 

"I dropped it in the kitchen."

"No weapons. Awesome. This went from fine to apocalyptic train wreck in no time. I think we set a record." Stiles sighs. 

"Is it really that bad?" Danny asks. He won't look at Stiles, staring at the closed door like it'll burst open any minute. 

Stiles knows that feeling.

"I don't have a fucking clue what that is. I practically memorized the bestiary and I can tell you there’s not a single mention of a fugly decaying bone thing.” Stiles pauses, raking a hand through his hair and jiggling his knee. “The last time something like this happened, we threw Lydia's potions at it until it melted." 

"What do we do now?"

Stiles buttons his plaid shirt up, something to do with his hands, but when he gets the last button done up, he starts to unbutton them again.

"Wait, mostly. We don't stand a chance without Scott or the others."

There’s another option – one he doesn’t mention to Danny. They could go find Scott, or try and get to Boyd and Lydia upstairs, but it’s a risky move and one they’re not desperate enough to make yet. Despite his protestations, Danny is injured and another encounter with the bone monster wouldn’t end well for either of them.

Danny laughs, a dry, bitter sound. "I was supposed to worry about the computers."

Stiles tries to sling a comforting arm across Danny's shoulder, but he shies away, pulling his legs up and hooking his arms around them.

"It's okay," Stiles says. It sounds completely false and empty to his own ears, but he's trying, okay? He's trying. "We've totally been in worse situations than this. There was a fairy this one time, it put Scott to sleep and turned Allison into a stuffed bunny. I honestly didn't think I'd make it out. And look, Scott's probably out there killing it and I bet Boyd heard it so he and Lydia are going to kick ass. Then they'll sniff us out with their super noses and voila! We'll get pancakes at IHOP or something."

"You can stop talking now."

Stiles does, mouth snapping closed almost immediately.

He experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance - because why not? He's in a dark room, on a four poster bed with drapery and he's been running for his life from another supernatural baddie, and werewolf shenanigans have hurt Danny, who apparently still doesn't like him, even though he's grown up and he's totally a better person and-

"Why don't you like me?" he asks point blank. He can tell the question startles Danny, who finally tears his gaze away from the door to look at him.

A flash of lightning throws the room into sharp relief for a moment. Stiles automatically catalogues as much as he can, but he can’t see much. He barely makes out deep purple bedding and cream wallpaper. The room is trimmed in the same dark wood as much of the rest of the house. But more importantly, it throws light across Danny's face. There's conflict in his expression, like the question is too complex for him to answer easily.

"You were an asshole to me in high school," Danny says, tone cautious and measured. "You made fun of me a lot."

At that, Stiles' jaw drops open, the sound of his breathing loud and annoying while he processes (and dammit, he hates the whole breathing thing, he knows its unattractive, he can't seem to help it.) But this seems like a good reason to breathe unattractively at Danny Mahealani, because HE, Stiles Stilinski, the lowest nerd of all the nerds, the person with the one friend through high school (although quality over quantity in this case), who didn't even gain incidental popularity when Scott rose to the top of the social ladder, made Danny feel shitty?

"What? You were so cool! You were like an autumn breeze, you were so cool." Stiles says, then cringes, because way to handle the situation with grace and aplomb, Stilinski.

"I was the only gay kid and I played trumpet in the marching band. How cool do you think I was?"

"I liked you!” Stiles says, because apparently it’s all-in time now. “I was ready to have your gaybies!"

Danny frowns, the creases along his mouth deepening. "It was comments like that. You were always teasing me, asking me if you were attractive, throwing my orientation in my face all the time. Like you didn't see me as a person, just a sexuality."

Stiles shifts uncomfortably at that, goes quiet for a long time before he speaks again. It's easy to see why Danny might have interpreted it that way - Stiles is a Class A Asshole with a special ranking in Sarcasm, and that means he comes off as a jag even when he's trying to be genuine. His last few years of high school were rough, not only because, you know, werewolves, but he was also grappling with his own burgeoning sexuality. He did the whole “am I gay, wait, no, girls are still cool” song and dance, went through a period of figuring out labels because there are a lot to chose from before he ultimately decided he was bisexual. And there was a whole year where he knew, but didn't tell anyone, until he thought he was going to burst with the secret.

"I was... dealing a lot with figuring my own sexuality shit out then. One of the ways I coped was sarcastic deflection,” he says finally. "So I'm sorry if I... made you uncomfortable? Or anything." 

Danny doesn't say anything, toying with the end of the bedding, twisting it between his fingers and releasing it. "It's okay," he says finally. "It was hard being gay in Beacon Hills. I can't imagine all the people calling you confused and desperate made being bi any easier."

At Danny's tentative smile, Stiles feels something unwind in him. "I'm glad we talked."

The lightning flashes again, this time accompanied by a loud crack of thunder, and something catches Stiles’ peripheral vision.

"Me too," Danny says.

"Wait, shh," Stiles says, putting a hand on Danny's chest. "What's that?"

He pats the bed until his fingers close on the chilled metal of his Maglite, fumbling it up and pointing it at the closet.

"I think it's a person!" Stiles says and flicks on the flashlight.

It is, kind of. He doesn't have more than a brief impression of it before he's urging Danny up and off the bed, pushing him to the door. What he could see was unsettling, to say the least. 

The... thing is tall and cloaked in large swaths of cloth that obscure most of it from view. Only its face, or what should have been a face, is visible – smooth, marble skin with large indents where eyes should be and nothing else.

Stiles slams into the door, Danny right beside him. He gropes at the lock. He can't get it open because he keeps looking over his shoulder at the figure advancing slowly toward them. It doesn't seem to have legs or feet, just glides over the ground, and with his heart pounding, he notices it isn't totally opaque, the windows just visible through its midsection.

Danny bats his hand away, undoes the lock, and pushes Stiles into the hall in a tangle of limbs.

"Shit," Stiles says, trying to get his bearings. He should’ve spent more time figuring out the layout. "Shit." 

"The dining room," Danny says and starts running towards it. "That's where the weapons are, right?"

They careen down the hall and Stiles almost trips over a darkened hall lamp when he glances behind him. The figure ghosts out of the bedroom as they round the corner. Danny reaches the dining room first, yanks heavily on the door, arms straining through his t-shirt, and when it pops open, he yells.

The monster is right in front of them. This close, Stiles can see the black veins webbing under its skin and the grey cast of the air around it, pulsing lightly. While he stares in fascinated horror, the figure pulsates, growing larger each time it throbs, and the air starts to crackle with magic that screams across Stiles’ nerves.

Danny backs away as fast as he can. He elbows Stiles in the gut, but doesn’t have time to react because a dark light is starting form around the creature and he doesn’t want to stick around and find out what that light does. Death comes to mind, pain at the very least. He and Stiles stumble against each other in their haste, righting themselves clumsily and taking off down the hall, slamming through a door into a different room.

“Are you kidding me?” Stiles says, thin and reedy, when the creature materializes through the door, the air around it zapping and warping as it pushes through the wood. Danny tugs, pulling him up by his plaid over shirt, and they break through a door to the en-suite bathroom.

The bathroom gives way to the master bedroom with a large fireplace on the far wall. There’s another door, and Danny veers straight to it. Stiles hesitates, picking up a solid iron poker where it leans against the hearth.

He doesn’t dare look behind him at the creature, instead dashes after Danny who fumbles the door open and trips in, Stiles right after him. 

It isn’t until they slam the door shut that they realize it’s a closet. 

~*~

Scott runs his claws across the walls, trying to find a seam, something to latch onto and pull, but it proves ineffective. The wall is completely smooth where it meets the paneling. He cracks his back, considering the wall, wondering if it would crack under brute force… instead, Scott starts tapping random points on the wall. If there’s anything Scooby Doo has taught him, it’s that there might be a hidden switch. Nothing happens, though.

He turns to the dark passage, more worried than before. His senses can’t pick anything up beyond the sturdy concrete of the walls. Stiles and Danny are out there unprotected, and Lydia and Boyd could be in any amount of trouble and he’d have no idea.

The passage, based on its position, must run parallel to the hallway on the other side of the rooms, between them and the outside wall. Scott starts down it – his options are limited. He scans the walls, but despite the location, there aren’t any visible doors.

He almost stumbles when his feet run into the bottom step of a staircase, his attention so focused on the walls that he didn’t notice it. He follows it up, stepping carefully. The passage turns left and at the end of another hallway, he spots a door with warm light spilling out the bottom. Scott listens, but doesn’t hear any of the noises he associates with humanity, beating hearts or breathing lungs or little fidgeting noises, so he grabs the knob and pushes, blinking in the sudden flood of light.

Scott has a brief impression of monitors and beakers before his world spins and he blacks out.

~*~

“Nothing here,” Lydia announces. “There’s nothing anywhere. This is a waste of time.”

Boyd follows her into the hall, latching the door behind him. Her scent lingers, an intoxicating combination of her and him, all tangled up in each other, and his chest warms with it. 

She stops and matches his smirk, as if she knows what he's thinking. She probably does, as intuitive as she is. They stare at each other, smirking, for long moments, the darkness masking most of her face, threading long shadows like ink through her hair.

"C'mon," she says, and she breaks into a real smile, grabbing his shoulders and pushing him forward. Suddenly, she stops dead, playfulness draining from her expression. "Did you hear that?"

Boyd silently shakes his head, craning for any sound beside the storm outside.

"It's like... a chair scraping on the floor."

"I don't hear anything."

Lydia purses her lips, head cocked and expression distant.

"This is the last on this floor," Boyd says, pointing at the door at the end of the hall. "Let's finish and meet the others downstairs."

“Wait,” she says. “What are those?”

She points to the wall, near the baseboard, where three horizontal gouges have been raked through the drywall. She kneels, running her fingers across them.

“They’re probably from furniture,” he says. He stalks forward, intent on the last room.  

Two things happen simultaneously – Boyd hears two loud bangs from downstairs, and when he turns around to ask Lydia, she’s gone. 

~*~

“This might help.”

Stiles finishes drawing the protection sigil with shaking hands. He digs into his pocket for a granola bar, opening the wrapper as quietly as he can manage, and hands half of it to Danny.

“I don’t want it.”

Frowning, Stiles pushes it towards him more insistently. “Freaking out and running for your life uses a lot of energy. Eat it. You’ll thank me the next time we’re freaking out and running for our lives.”

Danny grabs the granola bar and jams it in his mouth, chewing and swallowing quickly. It feels thick and heavy in his mouth, tasteless. His body, still flooded with adrenaline, protests and he fights down a wave of nausea.

Stiles is jittery, pacing the limited space they have. He jolts up and starts rooting through the closet, picking through empty boxes. He picks up an iron, cord dangling. "Too bad we can’t iron our way to justice." His tone reeks of false bravado, but Stiles has gotten much better at faking it since high school.

"What's the worst job you've had?" Danny croaks, anything to distract him from their current circumstances. After all, he is literally locked in the closet with Stiles Stilinski. It's like Beacon Hills High School all over again. Plus, he thinks it might be reassuring to hear about circumstances worse than their current ones.

Stiles plops down right next to Danny even though there's plenty of room. The heat of him, the realness, feels good and he shuffles closer until their shoulders touch.

"Not this one," Stiles says, with a little laugh-sigh at the end. "I broke a leg and my collarbone, this job in SoCal. Some idiots summoned a demon for shits and giggles. Thought it could help them pick up chicks. We thought it was something low level, so just Scott and I went, but these kids managed to call in one of the big guns, this one named Marchosias, the freaking Marquis of Hell. Only reason we cleaned that job up was with the help of a local coven and pack of were-bears."

Stiles keeps reaching out to touch the heavy iron poker, his fingers seeking it out where it rests between them, within easy reach.  

"Allison did a cleanup by herself once. Closest we ever got to losing her." Stiles is concentrated on the door, staring intently at it, muscles tensed. White edges his lips. "When we started B.H.I.T.E. we thought we'd be dealing with Beacon Hills level stuff. We were wrong. Some people accuse us of having too much firepower for some of the cases we deal with, but we know better. We might not need it for every job but I’d rather be over-prepared."

They lapse into a silence that’s not quite a silence, filled with the storm beating against the house. It’s mostly white noise, though, not as loud as the rattle of Stiles’ breathing or the rub of his clothes when he fidgets. Thunder cracks in the distance. Danny jumps – he can’t help it.

"So are you seeing anyone right now?" Stiles asks.

Danny frowns at him.

“What? I’m trying to keep our minds of th-the thing!” he says, waving violently at the door.

Danny doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about the weird ghosts left from his time with Ethan, or the reasons he left Beacon Hills and didn’t come back after college. The things that kept him restlessly tied to a dull but safe life. And he doesn’t want to talk or think about the ways Stiles is reminding him of the best parts of his old life and maybe justifying, a tiny bit, why he came back.

"Not for a while," he answers finally.

Stiles waggles his eyebrows. “Tough out there for a playa, huh?” Stiles leers until Danny’s withering glare (that secretly hides amusement, Stiles knows, he can tell) loses a bit of its sting. 

“Why’d you come back?” Stiles asks, folding his legs under him and leaning back, arms beside them and weight resting on his palms. His hand is close, so close, to Danny’s.

Danny shrugs, resisting the urge to study the sharp shadows of Stiles’ profile in the harsh light from the flashlight. “It was time. I had some loose ends.”

“Loose ends?” 

“It’s complicated,” Danny replies, because he’s more focused on Stiles than their conversation.

“Okay, I’m just going to say it, because I’m not good with subtext and shit. Is there something happening here? Is this frisson just my wishful thinking?”

“Stiles, ” Danny says, exasperated, and hauls him up by the front of his shirt to kiss him.

On the mouth. 

Stiles pulls away to stare wide-eyed at Danny, gears turning, before he pinks and says, “Not wishful thinking, got it!” He grabs Danny and kisses him again, this time with tongue, and does the best starfish impression he can muster, wrapping himself around Danny until they’re plastered together – but in a sexy way, not a sweaty way.

He thinks Danny is charmed in spite of himself.

“Hoooly shiiiit,” Stiles groans when Danny finally removes his lips from Stiles’ person. And they’ve explored a lot of new places on Stiles’ person in the last few minutes. Fun places. Danny rolls his eyes, but there’s a hint of a smile tugging at his lips.

“No, really,” Stiles insists. “I think this is brain matter dribbling out of my ear. Or it’s your saliva, both are equally probable.”

“You’re making me regret this.”

“No! No regrets!” Stiles cries, and kisses him until his toes curl.

The only warning they get is a sudden drop in temperature, so steep that ice crystals form on Stiles' lips. The sigils on the door, drawn in a mixture of Stiles' blood and saliva, freeze solid and crack, raining little crystals on the floor.

Danny lunges for the poker, both of them scrambling to their feet in time for the hooded figure to rip the door from the frame.

"Shit," Danny says.

A mouth suddenly appears on its smooth face, a perfect O ringed with two rows of teeth, and it cranes toward them as if scenting them. Repeated exposure isn’t making the monster any easier to handle. All of Danny’s muscles tense, his fight or flight instincts telling him to get the fuck out of there.

"Stiles," Danny says urgently. "I think I’m going to stab it with the poker."

He sparks into motion, grasping the handle with both hands and hefting it. With all the strength he can muster in his tired arms, he pushes the pointed tip through the monster’s midsection.

The poker phases through the creature with an electric humming noise and the longer Danny holds it there, the more transparent the creature gets.

"Run," Danny says, holding the poker in place. The buzz grows louder and the iron freezes under his hands, so cold he’s not sure how much longer he can hold it.

Stiles does run, straight through the creature. He gasps, but comes out the other side. Danny drops the poker and follows him, system short-circuiting as he goes through the incorporeal thing, like ice and electricity all at once.

Stiles grabs him by the wrist and pulls him to the door and into the darkened hallway, running full tilt toward the dining room.

~*~

Boyd’s serious face swims in his vision.

Scott can feel hands on his shoulders, helping him sit up, but his brain and his body don’t feel quite attached. His head is throbbing though. It takes a while for the words he’s hearing to connect to Boyd’s moving lips.

“Are you okay?”

“Let me get back to you on that one,” Scott mumbles. The words feel huge in his mouth.

“What’s going on? Where’s Stiles and Danny?”

“I don’t know! Where’s Lydia?" 

“Fuck,” Boyd says. He stands, then holds out a hand to help Scott to his feet. He scrubs a palm across his buzzed head and swears again. His fangs lengthen and claws extend, senses focused. Scott feels dizzy, too dizzy to cast his senses out, but he has to try anyway. The human members of his pack are out there.

“Do you feel that?” Boyd asks, breaking his concentration. 

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Me either. It was like this earlier in the library, with Lydia – dampened, like trying to see through fog.”

Boyd considers the foyer for a moment, anchoring a hand around Scott's waist, taking most of his weight. The veins in Boyd's capable arms bulge, streaked through with black, and some of the buzzing in Scott's head disappears. 

Scott jerks away. "Thanks," he says, sincerely, in his completely Scott way, "but I don't want you hurt because of me." 

The house is quiet, so quiet, for all but the storm outside. "We need to find them."

The first few steps have Scott stumbling into the umbrella stand but he gets his feet under him and the two set off down the hall.

And run straight into Stiles and Danny.

It would be comical, if the situation weren't so serious - rounding the corner, the four of them simultaneously jumping, Stiles rearing back and pin wheeling his arms to keep his balance - but Scott can smell the mold of fear all over them even with his senses impaired, and they're both rumpled and wan.

"Oh thank fuck," Stiles breathes, a hand pressed against his heart.

Scott resists the strong pack-urge to check them over for injuries, but just barely. "Are you guys okay?"

"We're fine," he says, then adds weakly, "my hero, come to rescue me!"

Danny breaks in. "Where's Lydia?" 

"I- We were upstairs. I looked away for a second and then she was gone-" Boyd starts, but a screech interrupts him.

Lightning flashes, briefly illuminating the end of the hallway. In the door fame, the bone monster crouches, sharp contrasts between the gleaming bone and rotted flesh in the light and Boyd stiffens, mutters a drawn out curse under his breath. It screeches again, head twisted grotesquely, and lumbers down the hall toward them.

"Dining room. Weapons. Now," Scott says, pushing Stiles into motion. Stiles' hand snakes out, wrapping around Danny's wrist, and they make a break for them room, Boyd and Scott close behind.

~*~ 

They pull the blindfold off of Lydia while her eyes are still watering from the chloroform-potion concoction they used to dull her senses and disguise themselves, so she doesn’t get a look at them. The effects weren’t as long lasting as her captors hoped for, though, and Lydia is in full possession of her faculties by the time the sound of clacking footsteps is no longer audible to her ears.  

Potion makers have a tolerance for fumes.

She takes a moment to study her surroundings, a storage-room-turned-cell. The shackles around her wrist are new and she tugs on them a few times to check their sturdiness. Given their hurry, she doubts her captors will be back, but she waits a few moments anyway before springing into action.

Lydia Martin may be a fashionista, but she has a special affinity for clothes that toe the line between cute and functional, a preference that has served her very well as the go-to consultant for B.H.I.T.E., and continues to serve her in her present circumstance. It’s awkward to maneuver her fingers into her bra, bound as they are with metal bands, but the padded compartment of her special-order bra gives way to her secret store of potions, the ones not taken from her by her captors.

It takes a few tries to find the correct vial, and when she does, uncapping it without spilling is a bit challenging. The mixture hisses when the cork finally comes out and she stretches the chain tight and drips half the vial onto it. 

Lydia grins through the steam while her potion eats through her manacles. It reeks something terrible, but she’s creating a formula that will smell like Chanel No. 5. Right now, the closest she’s gotten is fresh rain. She’s working on it.

The haze clears, though the scent lingers, and Lydia pulls the melted chain from the bands. They aren't thick and her wrists are mobile - she could drip a little of the potion on the hinges and free herself from them entirely, but that kind of precision is better done under controlled conditions.

Her legs aren't bound, so she stands with relative ease, stretching and rotating her wrists to make sure blood is flowing right. 

She casts one last look around the makeshift jail cell. "Please. This isn't amateur hour," she tells the camera lens in the corner and saunters out of the garage and into the main hall. She has a pack to save. 

~*~

The dining room is brighter than any of the other rooms in the house, due in large part to the bank of windows against the outside wall, revealing the grey-black of the sky.

Their equipment is untouched. Boyd goes straight for their cache of weapons, combing through a variety of knives, guns, and other equipment. With shaking hands, Stiles draws out the sigils he used earlier on one of the doors while Scott guards the other.

"They helped last time, for a while," he explains, the cold mixture of his blood and saliva dripping down his fingers. "Anything to buy us time."

Danny puts a hand on his shoulder. "Let me do the other door."

Stiles shakes his head, not pausing while he draws out another symbol. "Thanks, but it has to be my blood. It has to be me."

Danny nods and stalks to the middle of the room where it feels safer. Boyd presses a hefty knife into his hand, which he accepts, and he stifles a laugh when his fingers brush Boyd's claws, startled by the incongruity of it.

Stiles finishes the second door and hurries over to the table, where Scott is crouched over their iPad, flipping through the pages of their electronic bestiary, a blue cast over his face.

Boyd hands Stiles a small gun. He nods, checks the safety and the clip, and holds it loosely in his hand as he reads over Scott's shoulder, occasionally reaching over to flick a finger over the screen.

"So what's the plan here?" Danny asks.

"We find Lydia," Scott says, at the same time Stiles says, "We stay here." 

"We can't risk getting separated again," Boyd points out, crossing his massive arms over his chest.

Both Scott and Boyd have a point. Stiles shivers, wishing not for the first time for the hoody tossed over his suitcase upstairs. Scott shrugs out of his jacket and hands it to him. 

"Look, with the power out, I can't do any research beyond what's on the tablet,” Stiles says as he pulls the extra layer on gratefully, “and Lydia has most of the potions, which I think are our best bet at this point. These monsters seem pretty werewolf proof. I could try to find some incantations..."

The hooded figure materializes outside the bank of windows, the white of its face just catching in the edges of Stiles’ vision when the lighting flashes. For a moment his vocal chords are frozen. He points, stuttering, until the others look toward it.

“Can it-?” Scott starts.

“It can!” Stiles says, right as it materializes through the thin glass with a familiar zapping noise.

With a roar, Boyd overturns the heavy oak table, flinging it at the monster. It slides right through the figure until it skids to a halt by the wall. Stiles points his gun and fires a few bullets that sizzle as they pass through it, smoking when they get lodged in the wall. Boyd roars again, bares his fangs in challenge, and launches himself at it.

“Do you have any iron?” Danny yells.

“The case!” Scott points at the far wall, where their weapons are stashed. “Second row of knives!”

The bone monster’s screech reverberates through the house, loud and piercing, and thundering footsteps start to get closer. Scott and Stiles turn to each other, nod, and square themselves off at the door scant moments before the beast crashes through it, sending splintered wood everywhere.

The sight is no less chilling than before. “C’mon, you freaking uggo!” Scott yells.

Stiles unloads the rest of his clip into it while it surveys the room with its upside down eyes, his finger on the trigger a reflex more than a conscious choice. The bullets stick in its skin, little round holes that ooze tendrils of black, but it otherwise doesn’t appear to feel them.

At Scott’s signal, the two of them dive behind the upturned table, cringing every time the beast rams into it. The heavy oak holds and the monster seems too lost in rage, or hunger, to think of scaling it.

"I have to tell you something, Scott," Stiles says, changing the clip in his gun with trembling fingers.

"Stiles. We do this every time," Scott replies. And they do, kind of – the whole I-love-you-bro-take-care-of-my-family-smash-my-laptop-see-you-on-the-flipside schtick. Stiles has a speech he can rattle off in fifteen seconds on one breath. It’s practically incomprehensible, but Scott knows. And Stiles does too.

"I like Danny!" Stiles says, rushed and loud over the thump of the monster ramming their shield. "Like him like him. Like... like him." 

"Shit, Stiles, not right now, okay-"

"-And he kissed me on the mouth so I think he likes me likes me too!"

Scott rolls his eyes. "We can talk about your habit of talking about feelings at the worst possible moment later, when we aren’t about to be eaten by a freaky nightmare monster! But also-” Scott raises a palm and they share the highest of high-fives, just as the wood splinters right down the middle of the table. 

They jump up, no plan, not even a Hail Mary pass to save their asses, claws and gun at the ready, when Lydia Martin appears in the shattered doorway like the angel she is, not a hair out of place, and throws the contents of a jar on the bone monster.

There’s one heart-pounding moment where the monster freezes in its tracks, hissing, globs of the potion dripping onto the floor with little plops. But almost like a video game boss, it collapses in on itself, slowly at first, then all at once, melting down until a gross mixture is all that’s left staining the carpet.

“Lydia!” Stiles shouts, a little hysterically, a little joyously.

He doesn’t let himself get too jubilant, because there’s still another monster to deal with. Boyd and the hooded creature are facing off, and from Boyd’s pattern of movement, he must be keeping it away from the rest of them. 

“It needs to be solid,” Lydia says. She says more but Danny doesn’t hear it, intently considering the knife – the iron knife – in his hand. The fireplace poker had also been iron. Danny isn’t sure if the poker made it corporeal or not, but he does know that it at least made the creature pause.

Danny darts forward, and for the second time that night, stabs it right in the middle of its back, the iron blade sinking in with a sickening noise. He holds it there desperately and his fingers are freezing, like the cold is being sucked through into his lungs, and he’s not sure he could pull the knife out even if he wanted to.  

Scott’s clawed fingers curl around his shoulders, pulling him away even as his limbs feel laden down and lethargic, and Lydia douses the creature with the rest of the contents of the jar while it’s still anchored in place.

When the monster is nothing more than another stain on the carpet, Danny finds his way to Stiles, standing close for reasons he doesn’t analyze. Stiles smiles wanly and bumps their shoulders together.

“So we didn’t need to find Lydia after all,” Stiles says weakly.

She flicks her hair over one shoulder. “Please, like I needed someone to rescue me. You, on the other hand…"
 

She looks pointedly around the room with her glossed lips pursed. Boyd ignores her, strips off the tatters of his shirt and pulls her into a hug. Stiles pretends he doesn’t see the flush on her cheeks.

When he pulls away, she clears her throat. “Good work with the iron, Danny.”

Wrinkling his nose in distaste at the smell, Scott hands the empty jar back to Lydia. “What is that?”

Stiles surveys the damaged room, the broken furniture, the stained carpet, and groans. “What the actual hell were those things?”

He’s continually surprised at how often “throwing potions at monsters until they go away” ends up being a valid strategy. Not for the first time, he wants to talk to Lydia about joining B.H.I.T.E. full time as their resident genius, but he knows she loves her job as pioneer in the magi-chemistry field far too much to give up her research.

“I think I know,” Lydia says and strides out the door, leaving the rest of them to scramble after her. 

~*~

She leads them outside through the rain and across the yard to the garage. Ignoring Stiles’ badgering requests for information, she points to Boyd and then the door. His muscles slick with rainwater, he shoulders against the door until it splinters at the hinges and he can pull it away.

She marches in, hair swinging damp against her shirt, and Scott follows right after her, claws still out, eyes still glowing red.

“This is familiar,” Scott says, looking over a bank of monitors and TV screens. Each shows a different room of the manor from a different angle, including a shot of the destroyed dining room. A large table in the corner is filled with magic paraphernalia, some of it only marginally recognizable, but most damning are the small models of a variety of monsters, including miniature bone monsters and hooded figures.

Lydia stalks over to a circle drawn on the floor in red chalk where two melted blobs are surrounded by herbs and candles. She doesn’t cross the outside line, and instead reaches for a branch to sift through the herbs from a distance.

“It should look familiar, Scott,” Libby says from behind them. “You got in here before we could stop you.”

Scott whirls around, eyes glowing fierce red, to find Libby and Bessie, the groundskeeper, behind them. A terrible comprehension starts to dawn. 

“Have you figured it all out?” Libby asks.

“Mostly,” Lydia admits warily. “There are still some gaps.”

Stiles gapes at the scene while Boyd, partially shifted, shoulders his way in front of Danny and Stiles.

“I noticed this tincture in the fridge while I was brewing yesterday,” Lydia explains, setting the empty jar on the floor next to her. “It seemed out of place, given how much of a magical dead zone this house was. I didn’t place it at first, but the dampening spells started to wear on my senses the longer I was here.”

Something triggers in Stiles’ brain, and he starts to put the pieces together as Lydia continues. “I started to think that the storm wasn’t natural, given the very specific way it came in and how conveniently the thunder and lightening masked their senses,” she gestures to Scott and Boyd. “It also kept us isolated from one another.”

“The power,” Boyd says suddenly. “It was turned off, wasn’t it?”

Lydia nods. “The water still worked. And an isolated place like this has a well, and almost certainly an electric pump.” 

“I saw it when I was setting up cameras,” Danny adds.

“How am I doing so far?” Lydia says acidly to Libby.

“So did they kidnap you?” Scott asks thickly through his fangs. Every muscle in his body is taut, ready.

“I noticed too much,” she explains. “There were claw marks in the upstairs hallway. When I examined them, I saw a small speaker set in the baseboard, projecting scratching noises. Something small, keeping us distracted and away from everyone downstairs.

“I also saw one of their cameras, and that’s when I started to put it together,” Lydia says, nodding at the monitors. “The only thing I don’t know is why.” 

Her tongue darting out to wet her lips, Libby says, “Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Libby Bindra and I am the founder and creator of the first haunted house for supernatural creatures. After all, everyone deserves their own nightmares, especially the people who go bump in the night. Bessie is my business partner, although she’s in costume for our dress rehearsal.

“We’re trying to create an immersive experience, almost like a video game. While the ultimate goal of the house is to scare people, there are clear objectives and different scenarios. Participants collect items to help them win, like the iron fireplace poker or the tincture in the refrigerator, while dodging threats.”

“And we were your test subjects?” Lydia asks, disgusted.

“Who better than supernatural investigators? If we could fool you, we could fool anyone. You’ve given us lots of wonderful feedback,” Libby assures them, eyes gleaming yellow for a moment.

“That’s...” Stiles starts.

“Brilliant?”

“Awful!” Scott yells. “They could have been hurt! Danny did get hurt!”

“It was an unfortunate miscalculation,” Bessie breaks in. “There are still some bugs to work out with the simulacra magic.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?”

Libby motions to the screens. “We have every room monitored at all times. At the first sign of real danger, we have a failsafe.”

Boyd pales and asks, “Were you watching us the whole time?” Libby winks at him.

“The monsters. They were magical, weren’t they,” Stiles breaks in. It isn’t a question. “That’s why we couldn’t hurt them.”

“You got it,” Libby replies, then waves expansively at the room. “No harm, no foul?”

“You guys realize this entire situation reads like a Scooby Doo episode?” Stiles points out. “You would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for us meddling kids!”

Danny is standing too close to him. So close, that when he leans in to speak, his breath warms Stiles’ neck. “There’d be more pot references if this was Scooby Doo,” Danny says.

“Yeah, but Lydia is totally Daphne and Velma combined. Scott is a million times Fred...” Stiles trails off.

Danny chuckles, low and smooth. “I think that makes you Scooby Doo.”

“Ugh,” Stiles says. “I refuse. I categorically refuse.”

He starts toward the dining room to pack their stuff. Danny yells behind him, “Scooby Doo, where are you?” and laughs some more. Stiles feels a smile threaten to crack his jaw, but he doesn’t turn around so Danny can see it.

~*~ 

After food, naps, a bucket load of ibuprofen, their equipment loaded and tense goodbyes said, Scott and Stiles veer for the van. It was their first company vehicle, and it’s an unspoken tradition – the two of them and Allison driving it home, bruised, bloody, traumatized, triumphant, filled with adrenaline or regret, processing, decompressing, and taking strength from each other.

It’s quiet. Contemplative. Stiles alternates between watching trees blur past the window and staring at the check in his hand, fingers crumpling the paper.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Stiles says hoarsely. “Taking this money. It wasn’t even a real case.”

“Sure it was. Unconventional, but it counts.”

They both fall silent, miles slipping under their tires like sand, before Scott speaks again, voice fierce. “I’m going to check on them again, before they open. They can’t hurt people like that.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, nodding. It feels like a paltry response. “Yeah.”

They stop for gas in a sleepy off-the-highway town, the type with a cluster of restaurants, a motel, and a gas station clumped together, maybe a couple blocks big either direction, but not much else. Stiles texts Lydia for an update and wanders around the lot while Scott uses the bathroom. 

The mood is different when they pull back on the highway, lighter, easier. He keeps catching Scott side eyeing him, Scott’s way of subtly fishing for information, and Stiles knows the clumsy attempts at conversation are next.

He decides to get it over with. “Sooooo… about Danny… I, uh, like him.”

Scott smirks at him, uneven jaw making him look more mischievous. “I know. Why do you think I talked him into coming?" 

Stiles gapes. “Scott McCall, you devious little butterfly.” 

~*~ 

To Danny Mahealani, sent 5 days ago

Danny

Hey Danny

Daaaaaaaaaannyyyyyyyy

Oh danny boy the pipes the pipes are calling

jk

Just wanted to see how you were doing? 

~*~ 

“You’re totally transparent,” Lydia tells him over coffee.

“So are you,” Danny shoots back. He absently stirs his cooled chai with his finger. “I see those hickeys. Spent the night with Boyd again?”

“I acknowledge those hickeys and raise you one pining. Who knew Stilinski could get under your skin now, when you’re wiser and older and immune to his… charm?”

“Yeah, well,” Danny mutters. He doesn’t have an answer to that.

“So what’s the problem?”

“I’m just… not sure? I guess? That it’s going to work out, that moving back to Beacon Hills was a good idea, that his job is going to be a problem…”

“That’s dumb,” Lydia says bluntly.

“I think I need a little more time to figure it out.”

“Don’t wait too long. Allison says he’s driving them nuts with all this manic energy. Just think of all the places and positions he could channel that.”

“That is more than I ever needed to hear from you about that,” Danny says, looking down to hide his pleased flush. “Don’t I need to grill you about Boyd now?”

Lydia looks down at her bare wrist in mock surprise. “Oh, well, if you wouldn’t look at the time! I have some experiments to attend to, I’ve let them sit far too long!” 

~*~

To Danny Mahealani, sent 2 days ago

Message me back! Just wanted to check in!

To Danny Mahealani, sent 35 minutes ago

I hope you’re recovered. Scott says to call him if you need anything.

~*~

A week and a half after the job, Danny stands outside the offices of Beacon Hills Investigators of Terrible Events. The facade is freshly painted; he can even still smell the lingering traces of paint. For the business that it houses, the building is nice, framed by an accounting service and an antique store. Their sign only says “B.H.I.T.E.” with a pair of fangs bracketing the letters, something so very Stiles that Danny has to smile. He wonders how many people wander into the building misunderstanding their services. He can only imagine Allison fending off the rubberneckers.

Stiles stumbles out the front door. "Hee-eeeey, Danny!" he says, surprised and falsely bright.

Danny raises a hand in greeting. "Hi."

"What, um, what brings you here?" Stiles asks, jamming his hands in his pocket.

“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood…”

“Really? Cool.”

"Uh, are you going somewhere?"

"No! Well, kind of. Allison kicked me out of the office because I keep rearranging the furniture. And the files. And the desks. And the bookcases. I’m kind of annoying everyone." 

Danny draws in a breath and says, “You wanna get some coffee and talk?” 

“Yes!” Stiles says quickly and loudly. He hesitates, then asks, “Is this… friend coffee?”

Danny smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners. “We can talk about that.”