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Peter looks down at Stiles, who is positioned on a steel table in the back of the vet clinic. Then he glances around the room, lip curled. “I think you all greatly overestimate the extent to which I love him.”
“It’s the only option,” Derek reminds him, as though he and Peter hadn’t just spent the past half hour prying every tiny detail about the curse out of Deaton that they could. The witch, unfortunately, is dead, and thus unable to remove the curse. Breaking it the traditional way, Deaton claims, is the only thing they can do to fix the problem.
“Debatable,” Peter says.
“Actually, ” Deaton hedges, “it really isn’t.”
Stiles croaks mournfully. His throat extends in a huge, half-translucent bubble, mouth parting in a gaping grimace that splits his face in half. It’s positively horrifying. His giant, bulbous yellow eyes blink in a stuttered, irregular fashion, one semi-opaque eyelid getting stuck before oozing back into place.
“Greatly overestimating how much I love him,” Peter reiterates.
The sound echoes throughout Peter’s apartment, eerie and sonorous. It’s a sorrowful tune, better fitted to the nadir of a particularly angst-filled film, when the love interest has just died, or the protagonist gone missing, or the world descended into tumultuous, depressing chaos, than it is to Peter’s tasteful, mid-century inspired decor. Deep bellows transition smoothly into haunting high notes, a constant pattern that pulls at the heartstrings Peter doesn’t like to acknowledge the existence of. It resounds through the rooms, loudest at its origin, but inescapable no matter where Peter goes.
He sighs, removes the pillow from its ineffective position over his face, and heads to the bathroom.
He opens the door and takes two quick strides to the bathtub. He flings the curtain back and frowns down.
“I’ll admit, you show impressive control for one who has only had possession of that particular set of vocal cords for less than twenty-four hours,” Peter says. “However, the answer is still no.”
Stiles releases another doleful, reverberating ribbit. Peter can practically see the way the sound waves bounce off the side of the tub, a ricocheting shot directly to his eardrums.
Peter narrows his eyes. “Don’t play the victim here.”
Stiles rolls his ungainly body over, mottled skin sticking to the bottom of the tub. He flops into the pool of water around the drain and splashes pitifully.
Generally speaking, Peter appreciates Stiles’ manipulative streak. It’s half of why they work so well together. This, however, is, “Just sad, honestly.”
When the phone rings at lunch, Peter lifts his eyebrows in surprise. He’s shocked. He never thought he would see the day when Scott McCall’s name lit up his phone screen. But then, Stiles’ loyalty to his idiot of a best friend, and the ensuing blight that is Scott’s presence in Peter’s life, is one of his worst traits. Peter sighs and answers the call.
“I’m not doing it.”
There’s a half-second pause, then Scott’s petulant voice breaks in,“But Deaton says —”
“Deaton says a lot of things. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.”
“But you’re —”
“Hanging up now, yes.”
Peter does just that. He tosses the phone down at his side, then flinches when a startled, half-squished squeak-peep sounds from the couch cushion.
Stiles glares up at him, if such a creature is capable of glaring.
Two days into the curse, Peter is beginning to realize that he may, in fact, be doomed to reenact what he considers to be the most repellant of all Grimm’s fairytales.
“I would have taken a sliced-off heel, a la Cinderella’s step-sisters, or been perfectly willing to shove the witch into her own fire,” Peter comments idly. He flips through the grimoire they stole from said witch’s home. “But she didn’t try to lure you in with gingerbread or candy, now did she? Instead she went with the tale that requires my lips to touch that, that —skin.” He grimaces. “You could’ve done me the decency of at least transforming into something less repugnant. A tree frog, for example, would have been preferable. Instead of—” he gestures in Stiles’ general direction, “— whatever this is.”
The toad extends a slimy foreleg from beneath his blubbery, rotund body. Sticky finger pads suction to the page of the grimoire, just above Peter’s thumb. He blinks huge, pleading eyes up. However, any sympathy-stirring effect his expression might’ve had is ruined by the way his tongue darts up and licks along the side of one eye.
Peter wrinkles his nose, then opens his desk drawer to get out the letter opener. He slips it carefully under Stiles’s fingers until they unlatch, then slides the book a few feet away. “Being transformed into an amphibian does not exempt you from the repercussions of dirtying my literature.”
Stiles hops a few inches closer.
Peter snatches up the book and leaves the room.
He’ll keep researching.
He comes back ten minutes later, Stiles’ current mode of transportation — a newly purchased bucket— in hand. He’s not about to be responsible for the sad eyes Scott will give him if Stiles ends up splatted on the floor of his office as the result of a too-daring attempt to leap down on his own.
Outside the vet clinic, Peter takes the bag from Deaton with careful, tightly pinched fingers. He fights down his nausea. “This is the only thing I can give him?”
“Unless you choose to end the curse, yes. Or intend for Mr. Stilinski to starve to death.”
Admittedly, these are both undesirable alternatives.
The bag wiggles in Peter’s hand.
He holds back a shudder.
“And I just… release them?”
Deaton nods. “I suggest you place the bag in the terrarium I gave you before opening it. And be sure Stiles is already inside as well. His instincts will take care of the rest.”
That evening, when Stiles’s wet, fleshy tongue shoots across the terrarium and thwacks a fly before retracting with a snap into his cavernous maw, Peter fails to hold back the ensuing shudder.
The next morning, Peter awakens with newfound resolve. He misses his boyfriend. He also misses the ability to sleep through the night without his boyfriend waking him up with noises more suited to a swamp than an apartment.
Peter opens his eyes, rolls out of bed, and determinedly makes his way to the bathroom. He throws open the door and heaves a sigh at Stiles’ subsequent garbled trill-croak of greeting. “The things I do for you.”
He steps up to the edge of the tub and peers down at Stiles, seated on a rock inside the terrarium. There are still remnants of his dinner scattered around him. A viscous bubble pops along Stiles’ back, trapped air excreting through his mucus-slick skin. “Dear god,” Peter mutters. “Let’s get this over with.”
He reaches down, flips open the lid, and plucks Stiles out of the terrarium before he can talk himself out of it. When his hands and his semiaquatic boyfriend are level with his face, he closes his eyes. In theory, this will make the experience more manageable. In practice, it means he overshoots the kiss and manages to drag his entire chin along Stiles’ face before his lips make contact.
He pulls back as quickly as he can, hastily wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.
The toad is looking at him.
“Did it wo—” he starts to ask, but he gets his answer almost immediately as Stiles’ body begins to warp.
It’s quite disgusting, truly.
Thankfully, he isn’t able to focus on it for long, on account of his own body shrinking and distorting.
It’s disorienting, Peter finds, to look around his bathroom from the height of approximately three inches off the ground. The perks of new 360-degree vision do very little to appease the displeasure he feels upon realizing what has happened to him.
“Didn’t Deaton mention?” Stiles asks, after a distressing few moments of Peter panicking about his existence and Stiles stretching into his newly-regained human limbs. He looms up above Peter, a giant with an overly loud voice and much too much mischief in his expression. “The curse was two parts — now it’s my turn to prove my devotion to you.”
Stiles glances around the room before looking back at Peter. He crouches, resting his forearms on his knees as he balances on the balls of his feet. Even lowered as he is, he still towers over Peter. “Unfortunately, I’m feeling as though the extent of my love for you has been, hmm — greatly overestimated.” He sucks in breath through his grin. “Looks like you’re gonna have to get used to hopping around for awhile, darling dearest.”
Peter lunges up, summoning all of his strength to leap. He strains for Stiles’ lips, his back legs extending, forelegs thrust into the air, willing his body forward.
He falls short by a good two feet.
He’s made it perhaps an entire three inches off the ground.
The wet, sticky smack his body makes as it flattens in brown, toady pancake is a mocking soundtrack to his misery.
Stiles laughs. “Good try, hot stuff – or well, no, you’re coldblooded now – oh, hop stuff, that’s good.” He shakes his head, the ridiculous, insolent human that he is, then smirks down at Peter. “Remember, I’ve gotta be the one to initiate contact. And I owe you a solid three days of amphibianhood. Or, what was it you’re always telling me —” His smirk turns maniacal as he pauses, “— make sure to collect interest?”
Peter groans, or tries to. A truly atrocious, disgracefully depressing croak is all that emerges.
“You’re right,” Stiles says. “Excellent idea. Five days it is.”
He cackles as he leaves the room.