Born from Darkness (Sterek)

Stiles' POV

The thing about being the only human in a pack of supernatural creatures? It makes you notice things. Like how the air shifts when werewolves get tense. How Lydia hears things no one else can. Kira's eyes spark with foxfire when she thinks no one's looking. And especially how Scott's eyes only really light up when Allison walks into a room.

It also means people tend to overlook you. Unless you're screwing up, then it's all, "Stiles, stay in the car," and "Stiles, don't touch that ancient cursed object," and "Stiles, how did you accidentally summon a minor chaos deity during study hall?"

And me? I'm just Stiles Stilinski. Sarcasm incarnate. Sidekick supreme. Human-shaped liability. Except... not entirely.

The mountain ash didn't move because I begged it to. It moved because I commanded it.

And then I passed out for six hours and woke up with a bloody nose and three people staring at me like I was either a god or a glitch in the Matrix.

"Yeah, I moved the ash," I mumbled when I came to. "No big deal. Let's not make it weird."

Spoiler: they made it weird.

That moment has been playing on loop in my head ever since. The roaring. The snarling. The heat of fear crawling up my spine like spiders in my hoodie—and then this pull. Like gravity, but internal. Like something deep inside me reached out and said, "No."

And the ash moved.

Mountain ash, mind you. Not sand. Not leaves. Not Legos. Freaking mountain ash—the supernatural world's version of "get out and stay out."

And I bent it.

Not broke it. Not disrupted it. I bent it. Wove it into a circle around us with a flick of my wrist like I was Gandalf on Red Bull. The Alpha Pack couldn't cross the line. And for the first time in what felt like forever, we weren't the ones running.

Derek was there. Watching. His expression unreadable—somewhere between impressed and annoyed, which, to be fair, is kind of his default setting.

That was the moment things changed. Not just around me, but inside me. Something had woken up, something old and powerful and mine.

And ever since that night, something else changed too.

Them.

The pack.

They've been... off. Different. Distant.

Not in the "we're all traumatized, let's hug it out" kind of way. More like the "Stiles might explode and none of us wants to be ground zero" kind of way.

No one's said it, but I feel it. The shift. The avoidance. The way they flinch just a little when I walk in. Like I'm a ghost who forgot he's supposed to be dead.

But it's Scott who's really got me spiraling.

My best friend—the guy who used to call me at 2 a.m. because he had a weird dream and needed someone to talk him out of believing it meant something. Now he barely looks at me. Unless it's to remind me I'm not in charge. Or to talk down to me like I didn't literally just save all of us with a circle of flaming anti-werewolf magic mulch.

He's been cold. Rude. Quiet in all the wrong ways.

And when he does talk to me, it's always this passive-aggressive crap about "responsibility" and "being careful" and how "maybe I'm not thinking straight"—which is rich, considering he's still walking around like he's one forehead kiss away from proposing to Allison.

Seriously, if he gets any deeper up her ass, we'll have to start referring to them as a single organism. Scallison. The beast with two swords and one functioning brain cell.