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oh, flower it would

Summary:

So if I lay down and let the roots grow 'round

 

Would it make me whole again?

 

And if barren wood could touch this ground,

 

oh, flower it would

 

or

“I won’t—,” Stiles tries to say, but his voice breaks. “I won’t see you anymore.”

Peter stares.

“My mom is gone,” Stiles continues. “So, we won’t be back. I’ll miss you, though. And you won’t ever be alone again because I was here. I was here.”

or

5 Times Peter Helped Stiles and 1 Time Stiles Helped Peter

Notes:

This fic (and the requester) really stretched my comfort zone. I am a huge fan of the side characters normally so honing in on Peter and Stiles forced me to really consider what it would look like if they grew together. I'm glad I got this assignment. Huge thank you to Shey, thanks to my fellow gifters, and thank you to cywscross. I hope you enjoy.

Chapter 1: prologue: you were a phonograph, i was a kid

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

So if I lay down and let the roots grow 'round

Would it make me whole again?

And if barren wood could touch this ground,

oh, flower it would

 

2004

His mom is dying.

Stiles knows that. Nobody will come out and say it but he knows. Especially since everyone else in this place, in Beacon Hills Assisted Living - Hospice Wing, are dying people. They all smell weird and have skin like paper and red-rim eyes and they all grab his hand when he follows the nice nurse, Jennifer, as she does her rounds.

Jennifer has a pretty red ponytail but she’s kind of mean. Stiles thinks it’s funny.

He’s following Jennifer again, his dad is in mom’s room, washing her with a cloth and a big bowl of hot water. Jennifer passes him one of the Atomic Fireball candies she keeps in her pocket as they leave the hospice wing. It always smells weirdest there and the Atomic Fireball chases the smell out of his nose.

“What even is hospice?” Stiles asks, wincing around the spicy candy.

“Hospice is where people go when they won’t get better,” Jennifer says around her own Atomic Fireball. Her ponytail bounces as she walks. “They go there to be comfortable as they pass.”

“My mom’s in there,” Stiles says.

“Yes,” she replies simply.

They do Jennifer’s rounds and she lets Stiles pump her blood pressure machine on the patients until he gets bored. They’re in P. Hale’s room when that happens and he pokes around P. Hale’s things where they perched sparsely on a rolling dresser. They’re mostly boring things like a watch and a photo of many dark haired people and one card that says Merry Christmas!.

“This card is from you guys,” he notices. “Why doesn’t he have any from his family?”

“There’s lots of reasons a person may not have cards from their family,” Jennifer says. She’s combing P. Hale’s hair with a comb and it makes a hushed raking sound. “Maybe he has no family.”

“Maybe he’s a bad man,” Stiles says, turning to peek at the gnarled, shiny scars on the man’s face. His eyes are blue, blue like the hyacinths his mom used to plant in spring.

“Maybe,” Jennifer hums. “Bring me the silver sulfadiazine ointment.”

P. Hale has a purple plastic tub of medicine and ointment and stuff so Stiles finds it easily enough. Jennifer takes it and sets it on a little rolling table beside P. Hale’s wheelchair. Jennifer pulls a pair of rubber gloves from her apron and then she hesitates, looking at Stiles with her brown eyes, dark and shiny like beetles.

“Do you want to apply it on him?” Jennifer asks in a hush.

“Uh,” Stiles blurts and he looks down at the man. “What’s his name?”

“Peter,” Jennifer says.

“Okay,” Stiles says, curious to feel the texture of the man’s scars. His heart picks up speed. “Peter.”

Jennifer hands him the gloves and Stiles pulls them on. They’re too big and his hands look weird in them. The ointment lid is already off so Stiles dips his fingers in and then he hesitates.

“It seems, sometimes, like we are alone in the world,” Jennifer says. She’s looking at the other side of Peter’s face. “Peter seems alone.”

“Yeah.”

“But you and I are here, aren’t we?”

“But we’re not his family.”

“You and I are here,” she says again. She looks at Stiles this time. “Peter is not alone.”

Peter is old, like his mom. But he’s not in the hospice wing so that means he’s going to get better. His mom has someone taking care of them, someone who isn’t paid to do it, and she’ll never get better. He tries to imagine being so mad at his mom he wouldn’t take care of her and he can’t. He can’t imagine it. Peter’s family must be really bad people.

Stiles isn’t paid to take care of Peter. He can do it because Peter deserves someone to make him not alone. Stiles smoothes the white cream on Peter’s cheek carefully. His skin is bumpy but slick under Stiles’ fingers and the burn cream. Peter’s eye blinks when Stiles’ fingers get close to it but other than that he’s like a big doll.

“Good,” Jennifer says after a few moments. “Throw those gloves away and then you can help me brush his teeth.”

And Stiles learns how to floss a comatose person’s teeth.

He returns to Peter when he can’t look at the gray thing that calls him son. He returns to Peter with or without Jennifer. Sometimes he brushes Peter’s hair or cuts his nails. Sometimes he just curls up on the ground under Peter’s hospital bed.

On the day his mom dies, he goes to Peter with a handmade card clutched in his sweaty hand. Goes to the still room with the still man and kneels at Peter’s feet. He cries on Peter’s lap until there’s a wet splotch on the man’s thigh and then he cries until the tears dry up. Peter doesn’t move, doesn’t comfort him.

Peter’s just there.

When he’s done and he feels like he’s emptied his guts out at Peter’s feet, he stands up and wipes his face dry on his shirt sleeves. Peter is staring at his chest, blue eyes staring fully ahead.

“I won’t—,” Stiles tries to say, but his voice breaks. “I won’t see you anymore.”

Peter stares.

“My mom is gone,” Stiles continues. “So, we won’t be back. I’ll miss you, though. And you won’t ever be alone again because I was here. I was here.”

And he leans down and presses a dry kiss to Peter’s scarred cheek, sets his card up next to the lone Christmas card and then he goes back to his dad.

***

The loud kid is gone.

Peter only remembers him around the edges, his bright sweater sleeves moving as he smears creams on Peter’s face, his teeth, his hair.

He remembers the smell of tears, of wetness on his leg.

He remembers a kiss, chaste and sweet.

He remembers whiskey eyes watching him but only when he sees a second card on his dresser, one written in the careful hand of a ten-year-old boy with the word good-bye in big, wobbling letters.

And then, after someone puts away the cards, he doesn’t remember him at all. He doesn’t remember anything.

 

2014

Everything is muffled now.

Colors, sounds, tastes. It is all far from him. Side effects of Gerard kicking his face into the wooden steps of the basement. Things get fuzzy now or too sharp. His left ear doesn’t work how it used to. Time escapes him even, leaving him adrift in conversations. Reading hurts his head, TV hurts his head, standing up hurts his head. If he stays absolutely still, the pain moves around him. If he doesn’t speak, pain moves around him.

Stiles is trapped in more ways than just physical.

He’s alone again, in his room. Eternally in his room, just how he wants it. He had Erica take all the posters down once when a migraine was onsetting, the colors burning his eyes until they were crammed in his closet. And, as it turns out, Boyd is a pathological tidier and he’d kept the rest of the space spartan and clear of clutter. His room is a bed and a desk and grubby, tack-poked walls.

Drifting, Stiles runs his fingers over the red crust of his cast, the hard plaster coating his leg from hip to toes. It hides a puckered map of scars, left behind by the razor shards of bone and the metal pins of stability bars. The cast rasps against his fingertips and he scratches it gently over the place where Lydia had written her name across his knee.

Erica’s name is across the inside of his thigh, a messy scrawl with a heart over the i that almost makes Stiles smile when he sees it. Isaac had signed across his foot. Boyd had refrained from signing Stiles’ cast but he had helped his dad install the hoist they use to get Stiles in and out of bed and that had been just as good.

Allison’s is written up his shin with a lopsided smiley face beside it.

That’s it.

While Stiles was still in the hospital, Scott’s mom had dragged him off to stay with her family in Mexico for three months in hopes that it would fix everything. Stiles hasn’t heard from him since.

He’s not even sure he wants to hear from him. Scott had left him in the dark with the mountain ash plan, and had kept it from him. He hadn’t even explained what happened with Gerard and Jackson in the end, Lydia had. Stiles had been in the dark for months. And being in the dark had brought him to that basement where everything changed.

Gerard had changed Stiles in many ways. There’s a metal plate in his skull to replace the bits of bone Gerard had chipped out with his steel-toe boots. Staple scars picking their way across his scalp. Lingering headaches and double vision.

The doctors had to fuse Stiles’ knee. Knee arthrodesis. That means they’d removed all the tendons, all the ligaments, the ends of his femur and tibia and knee. The bones are fused and bolted together. That means his right leg is 3 cm longer than his left. That means it’ll never bend again. That means Stiles will never score another lacrosse goal.

Not after Gerard had so thoroughly crushed his kneecap and the surrounding bone ends.

“How about a shower today, buddy?” His dad asks, leaning down to press a hand over where Stiles is picking at Lydia’s signature.

“No,” Stiles murmurs. He shakes off his dad’s hand.

“It’s been a minute, kid,” his dad tries.

“No.”

“Tomorrow then?” His dad lies.

“Maybe,” Stiles says.

***

The sleeping medication doesn’t really work. Stiles doesn’t tell his dad because night is the only time he gets to himself.

Tonight, it's been one month since Gerard left him for dead in the basement. It’s been one month since Chris Argent carried him up to the street and left him laying on the street for the ambulance, breathing through bubbles of blood. Since Erica and Boyd scrambled through the basement window and stayed with him until the ambulance came.

It’s been one month since his dad beat the ambulance by two minutes and had wept over Stiles, holding his face with careful hands while Stiles made the only noise he could, a guttural gagging sound.

One month.

Erica and Boyd had stayed close in the aftermath. They had forged some survivor’s bond with Stiles, explained everything to his dad while Stiles was still in his coma. They’d get over it eventually. Isaac had started coming around once Scott left. He’d leave once Scott came back.

Allison was there out of guilt. Worse than all the others.

***

She’d first come over two days after he’d been delivered home. Her hair scraped back in a haphazard pile on the back of her head and her face pale and sans makeup. Her father had lurked silently in the hallway behind her, just as wan.

“I owe you, Stiles,” she’d sniffled. “My family owes you.”

“You didn’t bash my knee in, Allison,” Stiles had said. His head swam from the pain pills. “Or my brains.”

“The Argent family owes you a debt,” she’d continued. “We want to pay for your college tuition.”

“College?” Stiles had laughed. College seemed impossible. It seemed galaxies away. “How about therapy? How about someone to help me walk again?”

“Done,” Chris said from the doorway. “Consider it done.”

“How about a new knee? Or brain?” Stiles had spit, voice hoarse. “How about a new fucking life?”

“I think it’s time for you two to leave,” his dad had intoned loudly from the hallway behind the Argents.

But she’d come back the next day.

“Your dad gave me a copy of the exercises the hospital wants you to do,” she’d said, lifting the packet of papers. “Let’s get started.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles had said lowly.

“That’s fair,” she’d said, nodding. She looked at the ground, swallowed. “But I owe you this. I let— I let him twist me into a monster. I let him turn my head the other way while he stole from you. I hurt Erica and Boyd. Badly. I can't take that back. Let me help you with this. Please.”

And then she’d broken down in his bedroom, arms straight at her sides and exercise instructions clutched in her hand. The crying had folded in on itself, expanding into a full blown, bald-faced weeping. He remembered that she’s lost her mom, too. That her life’s carpet had been ripped away, too. Her crying hiccupped into hyperventilating and Stiles had watched her, feeling more helpless than ever.

“Allison,” he’d snapped finally. “Get over here.”

And she’d walked, stiff like a robot, until she was close enough that he could reach up and catch her hand. And she’d crouched down and pressed her forehead to their clasped hands and eventually her sobs turned into small, hurt noises and she’d lifted her face again.

“Please, let me do this.”

“Fine,” Stiles had said. “But I want the college tuition too. And a real physical therapist when I’m allowed to start walking.”

“I promise,” Allison said, nodding. “I promise.”

***

According to Erica and Boyd, she’d given them similar apologies and they’d all hedged a tense truce for the time being. Erica and Boyd still avoid Stiles’ house between two and three in the afternoon and Allison sends Stiles a text before she drops in.

Her guilt will fade eventually.

Tonight, Stiles looks out his window and remembers how it felt to score in that last lacrosse game.

***

He feels like he should be rotting. He feels like his outsides should match his insides. Mint blooms of mold and soft peach patches where someone could push their fingers against him and break through. He hates his red cast. He wishes it were any other color. He hates his room.

He hates the sound of his own breathing. He hates the ache in his leg of bone knitting together. He hates Allison for having a grandfather and he hates himself for being weak enough to get caught by him.

Allison comes and when she tries to rouse him for his ankle flexes and hip exercises he ignores her until she finally gives up and leaves. He ignores everyone, drifts through a gray nothingness until night falls and then he does it again.

And again.

And again.

He wants to rot.

Notes:

title for this chapter from from Big Black Bar by Gregory Alan Isakov. he's known for If I Go, I'm Goin from the house on haunted hill season finale. both songs are from his very lovely album, This Empty Northern Hemisphere. Big Black Car was the first song on the playlist for this fic and really helped shape where i was going with it. the thesis of this work is loneliness is as lethal as a brain bleed or maybe we are never alone or maybe we are always alone until we reach our scabbed, shaking hands out to the people reaching for us. i think about being alone a lot. i feel alone a lot.