Chapter Text
title: they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul
author: eena
rating: R-ish, maybe? I don’t know, swears will be sworn.
category: Teen Wolf-Gender Swap
disclaimer: if I owned Stiles, I would never let him leave my bedroom . . . I mean, I don’t own any of the characters or plots from Teen Wolf. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to say.
spoilers: everything and all up to the latest season two episodes.
summary: Scott and Stiles have been friends since before either of them could remember. Stiles was there to roll her eyes and mutter ‘like that’s a secret’ when Scott confesses to liking girls in that way. Scott is there to nod and wrinkle her nose in confusion with a ‘so ADD, or ADHD, or some other alphabet combination?’ when Stiles’s hyperactivity goes from personality quirk to medical condition. There’s nothing they haven’t faced down together, side by side with Scott’s eyes wide and a sarcastic remark squirming past Stiles’s lips.
Lycanthropy, Stiles argues, should be no different.
notes: So, this is a Gender Swap fic with girl!Scott and girl!Stiles. I’m not really sure where this is coming from, but I know I want to write it real bad, and my tumblr friends are giving me copious amounts of encouragement-so yeah.
Wolf Moon-Part One
~0~
Scott is in her pyjamas, brushing her teeth, doing normal teenage things that normal teenagers do on a school night when she hears strange noises coming from outside her window.
And here’s the truly sucky thing about having the child of an overworked single mom: you fake independence and confidence whenever your mom is around, but turn into a gibbering mess at the first sign of danger. Like, sure she tells her mom that she’s totally okay with staying alone in the house when she has to, and normally she is okay, but any hint of imminent troubles do tend to zap her confidence stores right down to zero.
But it’s the twenty-first century, right? Girls aren’t supposed to jump at every shadow. They’re supposed to be aware, she knows, and that’s why she’s always got the old Louisville slugger at hand. Scott’s not exactly the star of the girl’s lacrosse team, but she’s been practicing and working out and she can swing the bat pretty damn hard. Her hands are kind of shaking when she grabs it, and her breath is coming out in shallow puffs as she eases her way down the stairs, but she’s not backing down. Her mom wouldn’t back down, and neither would Scott.
The noises seem to be coming from the front porch. She has to take a fortifying breath (or ten) before she can yank open the door and rush outside in a flurry of primal yells and threatening batting manoeuvers.
She doesn’t really expect to be met with a few hysterical screams from the intruder. Hysterical screams that sound really familiar.
“What the actual fuck, Scott!”
The panic fogs clears and there’s her best friend Stiles, hanging upside down and tangled up in her mother’s shrubs and giving Scott a look that suggested she’s the unstable one. The adrenalin recedes too quickly, and Scott ends up slumped against her front door and frantically searching the pockets of her pyjama bottoms for her inhaler.
“What are you doing, you freak?” and it would sound a lot fiercer if she didn’t have to speak around a handful of short-breathed rasps. She jams her inhaler between her lips, takes in a few greedy puffs, and counts down from ten to control her breathing. “We have a front door, Stiles! You have a key to it!”
Stiles’s “No I don’t” scoff is not entirely convincing, but that’s not the issue. “Whatever, help me down. I came here on seriously important business!”
“Doubtful,” Scott mutters, but obliges her nutcase of a best friend by walking over and tugging her out of the greenery. “So, what’s so seriously important?”
Stiles straightens her spine, not unlike the crack of a whip, and sends a truly frighteningly giddy look her way. “My dad got a call just now-they found a body in the woods. A body!”
Scott’s stomach sinks down to somewhere near her ankles. This was going nowhere good.
“You know, we have tryouts tomorrow-“
“Scott! Did you not hear me?” Stiles is looking slightly more bug-eyed than usual, dark blonde hair a scary mass of curls and leaves looming over them both. “A body-in the woods-a dead body in the woods. Here-in Beacon Hills-and we’re going to go see it. It’ll be super cool-“
“The hell it will! It’ll be a dead body! I don’t need those kinds of nightmares, all right?”
Stiles rolls her eyes so hard that her head tips back. “Come on! Scott, don’t be such a girl. We’re not going to have an opportunity like this ever again! And I need you to come with me-I mean, who else would even be caught speaking to me, let alone creeping into the woods in the middle of the night with me?”
“Nobody sane,” Scott grumbles and twists her lips up into a contemplative frown. “You’re not going to let this one slide, are you?”
Stiles leans in close, green eyes practically sparkling. “The call said they had already found a part of it. A part! The body is in parts!”
And then she’s screwed, because Stiles is looking like Christmas came early this year and she’s shit at telling her friend no.
“You have so many problems,” Scott glowers and viciously pulls some leaves out of Stiles’s hair.
And Stiles has the audacity to do a little victory dance right there on the porch. “And the bestest best friend ever!”
“Wow, a BBF. Aren’t I special?”
But she grabs her keys from her room and locks up before following Stiles out to her crap-ass Jeep to go trolling through the dark woods in search of mutilated corpses.
Because, apparently, that’s what BBFs do.
~0~
“Have I mentioned that this is the worst idea ever!”
Stiles tosses a feral grin over her shoulder, barely discernible in the weak moonlight. Scott jerks up her flashlight, catches her friend right in the eye and blinds her. When Stiles stumbles into a tree with a high-pitched yelp ten seconds later, Scott’s not even sorry.
Okay, maybe a little sorry.
Of course, this being Stiles, the girl all but bounces off the tree and skips forward without missing a beat. Scott narrows her eyes at the jerky traipsing her friend does through the trees, figures Stiles either didn’t take enough Adderall, or did and immediately followed it up with a bucket full of candy. Neither scenario means anything good.
“So, exactly how many parts are we talking about here?”
“Two, or I guess just one,” Stiles spins on her heels and is suddenly very much in Scott’s personal space. “It was halved. Halved! So twisted.”
Scott looks back, wide eyed and exasperated. “I totally agree.”
And then Stile is off like a drunken rocket, skittering through the bush and generally making more noise than someone trying to be stealthy should be making. Scott grumbles under her breath and follows, though her progress is way more linear than Stiles’s, and she doesn’t fall down every forty-seven seconds either.
“Which half are we looking for, exactly?”
That puts a slight damper on things. Stiles stops and bites her lip. “Huh, didn’t really think about that?”
Scott sighs. “Of course not. And the killer? He or she is not still out here, right?”
Stiles laughs nervously, steps closer to Scott and tries not to look petrified. “Of course, I mean, dad didn’t say anything in particular about it, but every single damn cop in the BHPD is down here. It wouldn’t be smart to stick around.”
“Unless two idiot teenage girls come stumbling into the woods, all hyper and hostage-ready for said psycho, right?” Scott turns the flashlight on Stiles again, watches those green eyes widen as reason came barrelling back in before-
“Didn’t think of that,” and Stiles pushes off once again. Scott moans pitifully, but follows nonetheless. Stiles starts scrambling up a series of hills in a frenzy of awkward limbs and inappropriate for the situation black flats, and Scott knows it’s a bit of spite on her friend’s part. The climbing nearly does her in, has her sucking on her inhaler before scrambling over to where Stiles had thrown herself onto the floor. There are muffled shouts and beams of light cutting through the forest now, and suddenly the whole mess is entirely too stupid for her to stomach.
“Stiles, let’s go!” she tugs on Stiles’s sleeve, trying to be as quiet as humanly possible because she really doesn’t want Stiles’s dad to catch her out here. He’d just call her mom and they would both want to know why she had let Stiles talk her into stupidity once again, and Scott never really has a good answer for that question.
“We’re not going back,” Stiles slaps away Scott’s hands and then points to some random spot amongst the dark trees. “That way.”
And there’s no real reason for her to follow, because this is obviously another tactic Stiles has pulled from her ass in order to delay the inevitable. But she’s a loyal and long-suffering friend, so she gets up and catapults herself into pursuit. Stiles somehow manages to trip on, like, every blade of grass along the way and very soon ends up with her face planted in the dirt. Scott rushes to help, but Stiles scrambles up as quick as ever and then crashes back down onto her ass when she nearly bowls over a police dog.
“Holy shit!”
Scott spins, turns off her flashlight, and flattens herself against a nearby tree almost by instinct. Stiles has gotten her into enough sticky situations that she’s kind of had to learn to make herself small and unnoticeable until they had cruised their way out of the danger zone.
(And it’s worked every time except that one time Stiles convinced her that they needed to sneak into the boys’ locker room and cram Kaden Thompson’s locker full of the gardening’s club compost heap offerings. Sufficed to say, her mom, Stiles’s dad, and the senior boys’ varsity lacrosse team had not been too impressed with her that day.)
And then: “Hold up; this delinquent’s mine.”
Crap. The sheriff’s on the scene and not sounding very happy at all.
Stiles, bless her crazy heart, tries; she really, really tries. “Oh, hi Daddy!”
There’s a loud, almost indignant sigh. “Do you really spend your time listening in on my phone calls?”
“No,” Stiles is, again, entirely unconvincing, and whatever bravado she conjured for this evaporates quickly. “I also read all your text messages,” is said in a decidedly lower, dare-she-say, shameful tone.
There’s a painful silence. “Where’s Scott?”
“Scott? Oh, she’s at home, the scaredy-cat. Said she wanted to get a full night’s sleep or whatever, because tomorrow is like the first day of school. The girl’s a travesty.”
A circle of light appears in the trees directly in front of Scott. She sucks in a breath and holds almost deathly still while the sheriff called for her. “Scott? Are you out there? Scott? Scotia?”
Stiles tsk-tsks quite loudly. “Dad, you know she hates that whole full name thing. It’s a good thing she’s nowhere near by to hear it.”
The police dog takes this moment to bark again, and Scott flinches against the tree at the sudden noise. “Sir?” comes from the young-sounding deputy, and it’s tinged with such confusion that she knows the man is new to the station. Only people who have never met Stiles before get so utterly dazed in her presence. Scott is pretty sure Stiles could induce a brain aneurysm in others if she put her mind and mouth to the task. And in that way, the ADHD is almost a blessing. Scott is pretty sure that if Stiles could actually develop a significantly long attention span, then the next step would surely be world domination.
“It’s okay, I got it,” the sheriff sounds a little less pissed to high holy hell. “I’m just going to escort this little pain in my neck back to her car. And on the way, we’re going to have a long conversation about the criminality in invasion of privacy.”
Stiles manages to get a “but the government gets away with it,” out before there’s some rustling and the sound of slowly fading footsteps. Scott remains hiding behind that tree for a while longer, just until she no longer hears the barks of the dogs or sees the flashes of police flashlights.
After what is probably a century or two of waiting, the woods around her are quiet. Dark and quiet, and she’s now officially on her own. And without a ride, if the sheriff actually did take Stiles all the way back to the Jeep and waited until his daughter drove away. Scott makes a long list of things she wants to shout at her idiot best friend the next time she sees her and then moves out of hiding.
It doesn’t take her long to get as lost as fuck, and she’s down to cursing Stiles in both English and Spanish while trying to coax her phone to work in the middle of shit-nowhere. When the phone doesn’t comply, Scott adds that to the list of things to blame on Stiles before picking a random direction and moving that way.
The forest is still really dark and creepy. It’s full of weird and sudden forest noises, like the snapping of twigs under her feet and the shrill cries of some unidentifiable bird. Scott walks and walks and walks until she’s standing in the middle of the woods, totally creeped out by the sudden disappearance of all noise. The silence rings in her ears loudly, and then the groumd starts to shake. It’s either an earthquake or a genetically re-engineered Tyrannosaurus Rex; knowing her luck, it would probably be both.
She’s not really expecting a panicked herd of fucking deer, that’s damn certain, and she has to duck pretty quickly out of the way. The hooves seem endless and she doesn’t know how she escapes being trampled, just does, and can’t really be happy about it because her foot twists on top of loose soil and suddenly she’s tumbling down a hillside like Jack and Jill.
Scott stops with twigs in her hair and dirt in her mouth, and when she tries to get up and move, she notices she’s right by a freaking dead girl.
And only half a freaking dead girl at that.
Scott jumps up with a scream, one that’s barely heard over the cacophony above. Her feet trip over one another and she’s slamming back down into the dirt just seconds later. Her feet keep moving, desperate to put some distance between her and dead-girl, and she ends up crab-walking away from the body whilst still shouting her head off.
The deer are still charging up ahead, panicked as fuck and that’s not helping her calm down. She pitches herself forward, onto her hands and knees and pushes her body up off the ground. She’s running almost too soon for her body to handle, and her hand goes for her inhaler straight away. Her mad dash brings her to a clearing thankfully devoid of both crazed deer and mutilated corpses and it’s a good thing because the tightness in her chest has her nearly keeled over.
Shaking fingers pry off the lid of her inhaler and it drops somewhere among the dirt and leaves. But she doesn’t care because she just saw a fucking dead body and her throat is closing and she needs to breathe so bad. Scott puts the inhaler to her lips, sucks greedily at the first pump, and tries to block out the image of a wide-eyed girl who was missing the lower half of her body.
When she hears it, she really hears it. Another silence had fallen over the forest after the deer had gone, and that first hint of rustling and low-pitched growling reaches her ears unhindered. She stops pulling on her inhaler, drops her arm to her side, and debates turning around to find the source. Survival instincts battle with that good old fight-but-no-definitely-fly response, and it takes her three seconds too long to come to a decision.
A twig snaps somewhere behind her and she turns in time to see a large, dark shape and two red eyes before something slams into her with all the force of a Mack truck. The growling intensifies and her inhaler goes flying from her hand and she can’t even scream before pain explodes in her side. Blinding, stabbing pain and she can feel its teeth digging deeper and deeper into her skin.
Her breath comes back to her and Scott screams up into the night sky in abject terror.