#sorry sometimes the adhd takes hold and chokes me until i turn blue

[strawhatsoraya]

Who’s your favorite to write from One Piece?

OH MY GOD. THIS IS SUCH A HARD QUESTION. I don't think I can narrow it down to one but I'll try to limit the list lol.

Although I've only written two fics for him so far writing Zoro is very fun. In a way it comes very easy. He's a demon of a man and I like getting inside his head.

Sanji is without a doubt another one. I love him so much! He is so kind, and giving, and he deserves the world! I always picture his reactions in my head and they entertain me as I write.

I have been slacking on my one piece fics and haven't gotten to write much or at all for the straw hats and it is breaking my heart!! But honestly, I love writing for all of them or would especially Luffy and Nami (and more Usopp and ROBIN needs more love)

Outside of the straw hats writing wise Ace and Law are my faves. I recently wrote for Doflamingo and that unlocked a desire inside me I didn't know I had.

(ok this was very long winded but you can't ask me who is my favorite to write in One Piece and expect me to give a straight answer I can't ever do that)

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Stella and the Wolf - Chapter 3

You can read it here on AO3, or find the Tumblr Chapter Index here. 

Stiles winces as Derek snaps the handle on the back door of Deaton’s practice.

“Did he just break—” Stella begins, holding Stiles’s hand tightly. “Oh, and now he’s entering!”

Stiles has no idea where she gets her sass from. No idea at all.

They follow Derek inside.

“So, is there like a cure or something in here?” Stiles asks. He sent Scott some texts about getting the bullet and stuff, but the increasingly panicked responses he got back on the drive over here make him think that Scott is currently being cross-examined by the Argents, and probably has no hope of coming through for them. Which is understandable. Stiles has met Chris Argent. He’d thought he was the terrifying parent, right up until he’d met Allison’s mom. Jesus.

Derek doesn’t answer. He just lurches further into the building, bouncing off a wall on his way.

Shit.

Stiles fishes around in his pocket with his spare hand and calls Scott. It goes to messages. “Scott. We really need that bullet, buddy. Derek is not looking good.”

He follows Derek into the operating room, Stella at his side.

His phone rings. “It’s Scott.”

Derek grabs the phone from him. “Did you find it?” Stiles doesn’t hear Stiles’s response, but Derek’s expression hardens. “Look, if you don’t find it, I’m dead, alright?” A pause while Scott answers. “Then think about this. The Alpha called you out against your will. He’s gonna do it again. Next time you either kill with him, or you get killed. So if you wanna stay alive, then you need me. Find the bullet.”

He shoves the phone back at Stiles, and Stiles looks at the screen to see that he’d ended the call.

Derek stalks to the other side of the room and starts rattling around in the cabinets.

“Stiles,” Stella whispers in that too-loud way that all kids do. “What’s an Alpha?”

“Just…” Stiles swallows. “Just go wait by the door, okay?”

His worlds are colliding, and he can’t deal with Derek and Stella at the same time. Stella isn’t even supposed to know anything about this werewolf stuff, and now she’s right into the middle of it.

“You should phone Mrs. McCall,” she says, her eyes wide. “She’s a nurse!”

Stiles rubs a hand over his head. “It’s not… People medicine doesn’t work on werewolves.”

“Does dog medicine?” Stella asks.

Stiles tenses, waiting for Derek to roar at her for that, but he doesn’t. When Stiles looks at him he finds him looking back. The expression on his face is hollow, almost vulnerable, and Stiles has no idea what to make of it. Then Derek turns around again and keeps rummaging through Deaton’s stuff.

“No,” Stiles says, swallowing “I don’t think so.”

Derek turns on the water in the sink and cups his hands to drink. They’re shaking, and Stiles really doesn’t like Derek Hale very much, but it turns out he wouldn’t wish wolfsbane poisoning on his worst enemy.

And then Stella vanishes into the corridor, and comes back a moment later with a coffee mug. She crosses the floor to Derek, and holds the mug under the tap for him. She half fills it with water, and presses it into his trembling hands. “Dad says when you’re sick, you have to drink lots.”

Derek takes a sip and then sets the mug down again. “Thank you.”

It might be the first time Stiles has heard him say those words, and it makes something tighten in his chest.

“Dad says you have to drink water, but sometimes Stiles lets me have orange Gatorade,” Stella tells him. “That’s the best sort.”

“Yeah,” Derek agrees, his voice faint. He sinks to the floor then, drawing his legs up, and Stiles figures that the only thing they can do now is to wait for Scott to get back to them.

***

Stiles hates waiting. Stella is much better at it, but she doesn’t have ADHD. They lean against the wall, and watch Derek as he sits there, and Stiles shifts his weight from foot to foot and wonders what the fuck Scott is doing. How long does it take to go through the belongings of a family of trained killers?

Okay, when he puts it like that, he can accept that it’s probably not exactly a walk in the park. But at least Scott doesn’t have to stand here and watch Derek get progressively closer to death. The pallor to his face is definitely more gray than blueish now, and Stiles doesn’t like the look of it at all.

When his phone buzzes with an incoming text, Stiles almost drops it in his rush to unlock the screen. He reads what Scott sent him and then says, “Does Northern blue monkshood mean anything to you?”

If he wasn’t looking right at Derek’s face when he asked, he might have missed the flash of emotion in Derek’s eyes and the shadow flickering across his expression. It’s not fear. It’s resignation.

It’s gone again in a second, and Derek’s scowl is back.

“It’s a rare form of wolfsbane.” Derek’s tone is curt and clipped, like he’s not literally dying on the inside. “He has to bring me the bullet.”

Stiles texts Scott the happy news.

***

Things go downhill very quickly. Derek’s trembling turns into full body shudders, and the tendons in his neck all cord and strain as he grimaces whenever a new wave of pain hits him. Stiles oscillates between panicking about that and panicking about Stella seeing that, and if Derek’s going to die, can’t he go and do it somewhere else?

Stiles stands in front of Stella when Derek stumbles to his feet at last.

He lurches over to a cabinet, opens it, and then grabs something and thrusts it at Stiles.

“Is that—” Stiles blinks. “Is that a bone saw?”

“Yes,” Derek says through clenched teeth. “Take it.”

“I really don’t think I want to,” Stiles says, but it’s either take it wear it apparently, so he grabs it before Derek can impale him with it.

Derek strips off his leather jacket, and then his shirt.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says, and not because of his abs. Because of the bullet hole in his arm, and the black veins spider-webbing out from it like cracks in a windshield.

Derek grunts at him, and rattles through Deaton’s things for a moment longer. He eventually produces a length of thin cord, which he wraps around his upper arm and tightens with his teeth like he’s a junkie getting ready to shoot up. “Scott’s not going to make it in time,” he says, the cord clenched between his teeth. “I need you to cut it off before the poison reaches me heart.”

“Cut…” Stiles blinks at Derek, blinks are the bone saw, and then blinks at Derek again. “Your arm? Oh, my God. That’s why you got me to bring you here. What if you bleed to death?”

Derek releases the cord, and pulls himself up onto the operating table. “It’ll heal if it works.”

“Ugh.” Stiles stomach registers its disapproval of this plan by trying to force it’s way up his throat and choke his brain. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Derek glares at him. “Why not?”

Stiles gapes. “Well, because of the cutting through the flesh, the sawing of bone, and especially the blood!”

There’s a hint of a sneer on Derek’s sweaty face. “You faint at the sight of blood?”

“No!” Stiles waves the bone saw at him with more bravado then he feels. “But I might at the sight of a chopped-off arm!”

And then Derek growls and there are threats, and black bile dribbling down Derek’s chin , and Stella’s pale, terrified face in Stiles’s periphery, and Stiles can’t do this. He can’t. He can’t cut Derek’s arm off in front of his little sister. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to do it even if she wasn’t here, but she is, and Stiles is not going to force her to take a front seat in the latest offering from the Saw franchise, okay? Stella is here, and it’s not a question of what Stiles can’t do, it’s a question of what he can’t do in front of her. And he’s sorry. He’s sorry, Derek, but no.

“Stiles,” Stella says, and Stiles realises exactly how much of that rambling, frantic inner turmoil has spilled out in words. “Don’t be scared.”

Don’t be… he chokes back a near-hysterical laugh.

Stella reaches for his free hand. “Is Derek going to die if you don’t do it?”

Stiles holds Stella’s gaze, and wonders which scenario here will make him look the least monstrous in her eyes.

He lifts the bone saw.

Oh god.

He’s really going to do this, isn’t he?

He can’t just let Derek die.

He’s going to do it.

And then Scott bursts through the door with the bullet and Stiles almost collapses with relief.

***

“Where does Derek live?” Stella asks later as Stiles makes her scrambled eggs for dinner. The sushi, he’ll scrape out of the Jeep once Stella’s in bed.

“At his house,” Stiles says, and doesn’t tell her it’s a burned-out husk in the Preserve. He really doesn’t want to talk about Derek right now, but he knows better than to try to get Stella to drop a subject. She’s as stubborn as he is.

“Will his dad look after him tonight?” she asks.

Stiles stares hard at the eggs in the pan. “He doesn’t have a dad anymore.”

“Oh,” Stella says. “His mom then?”

“Derek’s a grownup,” Stiles says, and hates himself for misleading her with that answer. “Go and pour a juice. The eggs are almost done.”

Stella goes to the refrigerator. “Why did Scott go with Derek?”

The answer—werewolf stuff—is on the tip of Stiles’s tongue, but he bites it back. “I don’t know. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

Stella appears at his elbow, a glass of juice in her hand. “What’s an Alpha and why does it want Scott to kill people? Is Scott a werewolf too?”

Jesus. Stiles slips and his hand hits the edge of the pan. He swears, and pivots for the sink. He holds his hand under the cold water to soothe the burn. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“Nope,” she agrees. “Is your hand okay?”  

“I think so.” Stiles pulls his hand out from under the water, inspects it, and figures he doesn’t need any burn cream. The eggs might, though. They’re literally smoking.  Shit. He dives for the pan and takes it off the heat before he burns the house down. He pokes at them with a fork, and wonders if they’re salvageable.

The doorbell rings.

“I’ll get it!” Stella says, and dashes away.

By the time Stiles sets the pan in the sink so he doesn’t set fire to anything else and heads down the hall to see who it is, the door is already closed and Stella is on her way back to the kitchen. She’s holding two boxes from the sushi place and, balanced precariously on top of them, two orange Gatorades.

“Derek says thank you,” she announces, like those words twice in one day aren’t totally unprecedented and possibly a sign of the apocalypse. She sets everything down very carefully on the kitchen table, catching a bottle as it rolls toward the edge, and then flashes a grin at Stiles. “I hope he got us California rolls!”

Stiles reaches for the other bottle of orange Gatorade.

Weird day.

Really weird day.

But it turns out Derek did get California rolls—and half the rest of the menu—so on balance Stiles is going to chalk the day up as a success.

He’s rapidly learning that when it comes to werewolves in general and Derek Hale in particular, it’s important to count the small victories.