Sterek One Shots (boyxboy)

Soulseeker

Soulseeker by alisvolatpropiis
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Stiles glares at the clock, his Sunday morning appointment now twenty minutes late. He sips at his tea and double checks his leatherbound appointment book again, reassuring himself for the third time that he has the date and time right. Sunday the seventeenth, nine am, Derek Hale, beta werewolf. The appointment is written in his own hasty scrawl, a stark contrast to Lydia's neat print filling the rest of the pages; he scheduled this one himself, because the client's sister, Laura, an alpha, had the connections to track down Stiles' direct phone number.

She wouldn't take no for an answer when he informed her that there was an eighteen-month waiting period for his services, and after a week of increasingly aggressive-but-not-quite-outright-threatening phone calls, he had relented and scheduled a weekend appointment, the first time ever in the seven years since he publicly shared his gift and opened Soul Stiles. And now, here he is on his precious day off after a particularly exhausting, fifty-hour workweek, and this alpha woman's brother has the balls to be late.

Irritated, Stiles closes the calendar and tosses it aside, reaching for another leatherbound book, this one a simple journal, one of dozens just like it filed away on shelves in the basement, hand-written records of all of his appointments since his very first. He uses the time to get caught up on recording Friday's sessions, quickly jotting down the basics of his visions for each client.

Joaquin R., male human. A female pixie named Veronica, with blonde hair and green eyes. Will meet in two years.

Alexandria L., female faerie. A genderqueer witch named Rylan. Crying of Lot 49 tattoo on their neck. Met thirteen months ago.

Matt M., male beta werewolf. A male werewolf named Connor with black hair and blue eyes. Will meet in four months.

Lucinda F., female human. A male vampire named Marcos with a beard. Will meet in thirty-two years.

Stiles sighs heavily writing that entry, annotating it with a small x to indicate that he didn't tell Lucinda, a sweet, twenty-three year old elementary school teacher, that she wouldn't meet her soulmate until she was fifty-five years old. He rarely withholds information from his clients, but he just couldn't bear the look of shocked disappointment she would have made, so he lied and told her the vision wasn't very strong, that he only saw his face and his name but didn't get a sense of when they would meet. She was still incredibly grateful, of course. His clients always are.

In the nine since years since he discovered his gift and in the seven years he's been in business, Stiles has never been wrong, and has never failed to see someone's soulmate when he touches them.

Half-witch, half-human, Stiles first discovered his ability when he was eighteen, just after igniting his spark after years of training with his mother to be a mage. They were prepping a spell in the herb room in the back of Stilinski Spellwork, and his magic already buzzing, Stiles placed a hand on her shoulder, reaching across the workbench for chamomile flowers, and he was struck with his first vision: his long-dead father, the man whose face he only knew from photographs. He had died when his mother was pregnant, killed in the line of duty trying to mediate a vampire territory dispute.

But he image of his father that he saw in his vision wasn't of any of the photos he had grown up with; his dad was younger, and smiling in a way that none of the photos had ever captured, and Stiles, his magic coursing through him stronger than he'd ever felt, suddenly just knew that he was looking at a man named John, twenty-five years ago, seeing him the very first time he laid eyes on Claudia Zoldak, witch, high priestess of the goddess Nyx, and his soulmate.

"You've found your gift," his mother had smiled when he told her. "It's incredibly rare, Stiles. There hasn't been a natural soulseeker for generations. Many think the spark for it has died out."