Stiles wakes up with a headache forming behind his eyelids. The floor is cold under him and he wonders who got to him this time. He’s goddamn tired of being kidnapped for being the easy target in a werewolf pack. Not as easy as he used to be, but still easy enough that kidnappings are almost an annual tradition for him.
Once he opens his eyes he realizes he’s in a basement, and a quick body assessment turns up that he’s also got a foot shackled to a radiator. Awesome. Just what he needed: a Jigsaw copycat. He quickly scans the room for other people but he’s alone, no other Saw traps to be seen either.
He tries to unlock the shackles on his leg when a voice pierces through the silence, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
A robed woman walks down the steps leading to the basement without making any sound. The hairs on the back of his arms stand up immediately. Stiles sits up as straight as he can, his headache pounding as he does so.
“You know, I’d heard stories about the McCall-Hale pack and how powerful their Spark was, yet here you are. Hardly a threat if I do say so myself.”
“Look, buddy, there’s a reason you heard about the pack and not about the people we’ve faced,” Stiles said, a hint of pride tingeing his voice. “We’ve managed well enough.”
“Oh, but I have heard of the people you killed. I’ve watched you for years, darling boy. I’m not scared of your One True Alpha boyfriend. He’s just a man.”
A chill goes down Stiles’ spine, but then it dawns on Stiles: this person only knows about Scott. His heart beats faster at that. When Derek became a True Alpha by sacrificing himself, Stiles had brought him back without a second thought. That was one of the loves of his life, he wouldn’t let the man die just because. But bringing someone back from the dead changes them and in Derek’s case he’d become invisible for magic.
It was sometimes a problem if they needed his True Alpha spark, but otherwise, they’d manage just fine. Their pack was just special: two True Alphas and a Spark at the heart of it all.
Stiles realizes he's zoned out for a bit when the woman comes closer and grabs his face. It takes all of Stiles’ willpower to stop himself from using his own magic. He took a deep breath to try to relax, but it was difficult to do so when the woman was forcing him to look at her.
“I want you to take a good look at me. I want you to remember it was me who took your little pack away from you just like you took my family.”
Stiles knows it’s not good to taunt his captors, yet he finds himself smiling, “I don’t even know who you are. How am I supposed to remember who you’re talking about?”
She lets his face go, but presses a finger against his temple. “You will remember.”
A flood of images pass behind his eyelids: a group of people laughing while they have dinner, a run in the woods, people loading themselves for a hunt, twin sisters who can cast spells that feed on each other. More and more images about the twin sisters, cooking, dancing, crying. Then, a fight. Stiles recognizes Scott as he runs up to one of the twins casting a spell and snaps her neck; Allison and Erica throwing knives; Stiles, from the back, chanting and moving his arms to protect his pack.
The images stop as suddenly as they came, leaving behind a thrumming pain. He remembers that fight now, it was three summers ago, before Derek came back to the pack, before the sacrifice, before Stiles truly knew how to control his Spark. He also remembers why that fight went that way.
“We told you to leave the preserve more than once. It’s our territory. You don’t fuck with our pack” he defends.
“Your Alpha killed my sisters and brothers, wiped out nearly our entire coven, so I will take away his precious pack one by one.”
Stiles feels them before he sees them. He silently hopes the woman is not as good with a spell as she seems to think so they have a chance at sneaking up on her, but he’s not so lucky.
“They’re here.” She tilts her head to the side as if listening for something and her brow furrows. “That is not your pack. It can’t be.”
But Stiles knows better, he feels them through the pack bond, each of them with their own unique signature a steady presence at the back of his mind.
A door explodes upstairs with a loud bang and suddenly there’s the tell-tale steps of his pack entering the house. He doesn’t hear them all but that’s expected: Allison will wait outside with a vantage point ready to take out anyone from a distance, Boyd and Isaac will wait by the door. Stiles knows this because it is not his first kidnapping, they even have a back up plan in case everything goes to shit.
While the woman is still recovering from the shock, Stiles takes the opportunity to cast a quick spell to break himself free from the shackles. It takes him a moment, but when the woman turns around to face him, he’s already free and standing up.
“You—”
“Yeah, yeah, I broke through your magic shackles, I’m not supposed to do that, etcetera. Now, what were you saying about my pack?”
The woman is about to start monologuing again when a scream tears through the house, breaking all the windows at once. At that point, she pales as she figures out there’s more to the McCall-Hale pack than meets the eye. The woman goes to the stairs searching for a way out but Derek and Scott are already there, waiting for her at the top of the stairs.
“No. That can’t be,” she repeats.
“I told you, sweetheart,” Stiles says. “You don’t fuck with my pack.”
Stiles focuses on his power, reaching deep for the Spark that’s fed by the Alphas in his pack. Power fills the room, making the air crackle with electricity. Stiles raises a hand and sends the witch flying to the back of the room. Derek and Scott make it down the stairs then, both half-shifted, red eyes burning.
The witch tries to stand up but before she can do so, Derek grabs her by her clothes and pulls her up. “I don’t associate happy thoughts with murder, but I’m gonna enjoy taking you down.”
Scott, for his part, goes to stand next to Stiles. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be better when we’re out of here,” Stiles replies.
Derek asks, “what do you want to do with her?”
Stiles considers this. The smart thing to do would be to kill her, but they can’t leave a trail of bodies that lead to them every time something happens. They could let her go, but she would only rebuild her coven and come back for them, stronger and with a bigger grudge. Then, an idea pops up in his head.
“Let me see her,” Stiles asks.
Derek moves out of the way so he can look into her eyes where he sees real fear starting to creep in. She knows there’s no way she leaves this situation unharmed. Stiles puts his hands on her temples, breathes in, focusing on his power, and breathes out sending tendrils of magic inside the witch’s mind.
“Stiles—” Scott starts.
“I need you to be silent for this one, babe.”
Scott shuts up immediately, making him smile. He continues pulling from his own power, then from the pack’s, until hundreds of magic tentacles slide inside the witch’s mind. Stiles looks around for his pack, but the witch is only thinking about her coven, making it difficult for Stiles to control what he needs to wipe. Taking a moment to weigh in his options, he decides to erase it all: her magic awakening, her coven, the fight against Stiles’ own pack, Stiles’ brief captivity.
The woman collapses when he’s done and Stiles barely has enough strength to keep her upright. His wolves are quick to catch her though, setting her down on the floor gently.
“What did you do?” asks Scott.
“Wiped us out from her memory.” Scott frowned, clearly about to start on the ethics of erasing someone’s memories. “Don’t start, Scotty. The other option was killing her and I’m tired of burying bodies everywhere we go.”
“You never do any of the work,” he replies.
“Can I just get a hug or something? I was just kidnapped.”
Derek is the first one to come closer, wrapping him in a tight hug, kissing the side of his face, then Scott joins them, hugging them both and nosing at Stiles’ hair.
“You smell like magic,” Derek says.
“Well, duh.”
“Are you guys okay?” Erica calls from upstairs.
“Yeah, we’re going up.”
Derek picks up the woman and brings her up in a fireman's carry. Erica is the first to greet him when they make their way up, giving him a long, loud kiss that was all tongue and teeth. The usual adrenaline fueled kiss they always shared.
The house is empty of any furniture but a tattered blue velour sofa, so they leave her there and exit the house where Lydia is waiting for them. Stiles runs down the front steps and lifts her when he hugs her.
“What took you guys so long?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you on the car ride back home. My head is killing me, I want to sleep for the next ten hours.”
When they get back home, everyone fusses over Stiles as if he’d been gone days when he was only out for a few hours. Stiles tries not to take advantage of it, but if he gets Erica’s delicious chocolate cookies, Derek’s wolf cuddles, and Lydia’s undivided attention, then no one says anything about it.