Sterek Library (a03 Edition)

How I Met Your Emissary

By: terminallybored on a03

It’s not the Betas aren’t grateful. Derek’s tactic of ‘leave money for pizza’ every time he’s away for the night makes him pretty much the best Alpha ever. But he and Stiles have been away at some sort retreat in the woods to learn something about balancing nature magic and the moon or… something. The point is, it’s day eight and not even Isaac can look at another slice of pizza.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Boyd asks, watching Isaac and Erica eagerly flip through one of Stiles’ cookbooks.

“We’ll pick an easy one,” Erica says, running her finger down a list of ingredients. “Is this one even in English?”

“I think that’s a Polish one.” Isaac flips through another one and grins. “Hey, this is one he did that thing in,” he says, laying it on the counter and pointing to a recipe. “He crossed out all the bad ingredients and wrote in healthy shit. I thought his dad burned all of these.”

“Maybe he saved one. Or just got another book and re-did it after he moved in here,” Erica shrugs. There’s actually an equal chance of either. “Here, this one is for spaghetti. That’s easy, right?”

Boyd shrugs. “As long as we use canned tomato sauce, yeah. It’s easy.”

“What other kind of tomato sauce is there?” Isaac asks, and Erica gives him a look of pity before she snatches the book away.

“Okay, so we need an onion, garlic, oregano, a pound of ground hamburger and…” Erica tilts her head, then flips the book on its side. “Are these runes?”

Boyd looks over her shoulder. Amid all the tiny, crammed in writing about using ground turkey and whole-wheat pasta, there’s a line of tiny runes written along the edge of the page. “Yeah. Stiles probably got bored while he was waiting for the water to boil or something.”

“He’s so weird.” Erica says so quite fondly because Stiles is their Emissary, whether he’s weird or not. But he’s weird. “All of them don’t write runes in their cookbooks, right?”

“Maybe.” Isaac sets a 5lb package of ground hamburger on the counter. “Maybe Emissaries are all like drummers, like how they tap a rhythm on everything because they can’t help it because they’re drummers?”

“I’m pretty sure Scott would have mentioned by now if Deaton wrote runes and spells all over his appointment sheets.” Erica rolls her eyes, wrinkling her nose. The runes make the paper smell like it's made from ancient trees. It makes her nose prickle. “It’s probably just a Stiles thing. Derek must find that annoying, finding these everywhere.”

“Nah. They’ve been through way too much shit together for him to care where Stiles doodles his new spells,” Isaac says. “You know how they met, right?”

The werewolves they let sit. The cages make them more violent. Stir crazy. Especially when they’re locked away deep in the basement tunnels where the moonlight can’t reach them. Derek hasn't seen the sky in… a long time. It wasn't until tonight that he figured out how long. 9 days, or thereabouts. The guards have been coming by to check on his more frequently for the past two days. They run their batons along the steel bars whenever they came and went. They made sure to come at all hours of the night, to throw buckets of water into the cell so that the air was cold and damp and the stone floors were colder for being wet. They've stopped bringing food. He's been cold and hungry and without sleep for at least two days if the guards are running eight hour shifts. That means it's almost his turn. And he's an Alpha, they're not going to waste him on anything less than a packed house. The full moon is getting close.

The humans, they bring in just before. Humans have a tendency to despair when they're in a cage for too long. They get listless. They become hopeless. Their energy is best right after capture, when they still think someone is coming to save them. Show them a wolf more than a week in the cage, wet and in a miserable state, and the stupid ones will actually think they can win. Means they'll give a damn good show.