Air Enough to Breathe

"If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable—if the sea wants you and your time has come."
-- Tai-Pan by James Clavell

*

The orderlies always fed him and Peter twice a day, every day.

So far, Stiles and Peter had eaten sixty-seven meals.

That meant thirty-three and a half days—to the whiskey-eyed teen's knowledge, unless days had somehow been lost—they had been trapped here: no visitors, no doctors to see them, no signs or indications that the pack intended on rescuing Stiles and his current roommate. Just white walls to surround them both, the steady, constant heat of Peter curled against his back, and the vicious, knowing eyes of each of the orderlies as they dropped off the bidaily meals.

The miasma that bled and leeched into every inch of Eichen House pressed down upon the teen and, as each day passed, Stiles found that it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

Please let someone come tomorrow, Stiles whispered to himself each night as he fell asleep, Peter's arm a steady anchor as it settled around his chest. Please. Tomorrow. Please.

**

The night that everything had gone to hell had started like most nights for Stiles: he and Peter had been settled in Derek's loft, researching potential hits for the latest Big and Bad that had decided to visit Beacon Hills; the teen had been voting sphinx while the older werewolf had leaned more towards the monster being a guardian spirit gone rogue. Both options had been hotly debated over the pizza that Stiles had managed to talk Peter into buying for them, and things were—good.

Stiles still wished that Scott was more willing to take him out on patrols or join the rest of the pack during investigations, but the amber-eyed teen understood why that wasn't possible at the moment. There was still a lot of caution, a lot of distrust and wariness, that threaded through the pack after the Nogitsune's vengeance-filled rampage, and the teen got it. He did. He understood why he was still getting careful side-eyes, why no one was quite ready to sit next to him on the couch or at the lunch table during school days. He understood why there was a disconnect between himself and the others: knew, as well, that there was little enough he could do to change it. Understood—he did!—why Lydia couldn't yet be alone in a room with him.

But patience and proof that things were safe again—at least with him—would end up working out in the long run; it had always done before, and Stiles knew that he just... had to wait it out.

Until then, however, he was regulated to research assistant for Peter, and the more time Stiles was left alone with the older man, the more the teen realized just how easy it was to get along with the 'wolf; Peter was snarky and terrifyingly smart: always ready with a sarcastic comeback, and it was so easy to play off of the other. They bantered with one another, and Stiles found that he fell into an instinctive, almost meditative rhythm with the Beta as they worked their way through multitudes of books and pages upon pages of internet sites. It was simple to strike up a camaraderie with Peter, one that he had never managed to do with the others in Scott's pack, and it felt... nice. Reassuring, in a way that Stiles hadn't been able to settle into for months. The interactions between himself and Peter felt safe.

Of course, he should have expected, then, that things could—and would—go to hell in a handbasket at that shift in comfort and foundational realization.

Stiles had been staying later than usual at the loft: both he and Peter were on a research binge, pulling up page after page of findings and jotting down a multitude amount of notes to present to the pack at the next meeting within a day or two—and there was the fact, as well, that Stiles would have no one to go home to. The Sheriff was currently convalescing in a room at the hospital: even with the high levels of supernatural activity that went on in Beacon Hills, it was—shockingly—a robbery gone south that had finally put the Stilinski patriarch in the hospital. He was due to be released in a week or so despite there being no complications with the surgery to remove the bullet he had been hit with, and Stiles had taken to actively avoiding his house as much as possible over the past several days. The emptiness that awaited him was different than the silence that came while he dad was only away on a shift.