better_yoda | [For Jacob] Debut

This is not where Stiles went to bed.

Bed being the operative word there, because there had been one—Nothing fancy, but more than adequate for sleeping and… probably other things, too, if Stiles ever actually gets around to those.

There's no bed now, adequate or otherwise, and Stiles thinks it pretty screwed up that his life has officially reached the point where, upon waking in a jungle in his jammies, his first thought is that someone, somehow turned him into a werewolf without his knowledge.

It's probably pretty screwed up, too, that Stiles just goes with it, stumbling gracelessly through underbrush as the panic steadily rises and then lodges in his throat. By the time he hits a pathway, barefoot and sputtering, leaves clinging to every part of his person as his arms attempt to flail them off like a Muppet, the anxiety has completely cleared away what was left of the cotton in his head.

This means he can look straight at the guy looming there on the boardwalk and immediately place him as Jacob Black.

So he's dreaming. That's a relief, because he was starting to think he'd been roofied and carried all the way to Mexico before his captors realized they'd grabbed someone of absolutely no value.

Stiles turns a wild eye to the trees on instinct, flotsam dislodging from his shirt and fluttering to the ground as he peers up, back, around both sides of the dude from Twilight. This is not unfounded paranoia, oh no. The night before his last big Spanish exam, Stiles been on the cusp of slipping his hand up Dream Lydia's shirt when Derek had sprung from the trees dressed like Pancho Villa and demanded that Stiles conjugate all forms of the verb morder. It had been utterly horrifying. Stiles still isn't over it.

"So, you're…" He turns his attention to Taylor Lautner with an abrupt swivel of his head and makes an aborted motion with both hands as he trails off. "What, Scott? That's what's going on here, right? You're bigger than he is, but it's sort of potato, potahto— Why are we in the jungle?"

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Jacob didn't normally manage to be around when new people showed up but he knew what it looked like. They were always kind of incredulous, in a weird way, and after being on the island for two years and some change, he could just tell.

Not to mention the crack about the jungle. Jacob smiled a little and shrugged. "I'm guessing you didn't go to bed in the jungle last night, huh? It happens to the best of us. I'm Jacob and you're a lucky guy. You just won a one-way trip to crazy island."

A breeze whips down the pathway, rattling the canopy and chilling the perspiration that's collected at the back of Stiles' neck. Mouth open and working wordlessly, he hesitates, casts a look down to his feet and then back up again. With utter clarity he registers that there is mud thick and cool between his bare toes, that the sunlight is warm where it slips through the trees and dapples his skin, that the fresh welts across his arms and cheeks are a constant low burn. It's an incredible amount of detail for any dreamscape, even if you're Stiles and endowed with the sort of hyperactive imagination that allows for more detail than most.

And sure, he's standing in the middle of an unlikely jungle and staring up at an even more unlikely Jacob Black, but his life has been a constant parade of the unlikely lately, and he and logic have been on the outs since his best friend turned into a werewolf.

The werewolf smiling down at him now is wearing a similarly gormless face, but Stiles knows sarcasm and Stiles knows crazy, and neither of those elements are making him feel very lucky right now.

"That is not remotely comforting, I hope you know," he finally says, eyebrows lifting for emphasis.

The island wasn't really a comforting place, at first, but Jacob had come to think of it as home. He gave the guy his best attempt at an apologetic smile and tried to decide which angle to come from first. There were so many, really, and it depended on his threshold for weird.

"I'm guessing if I told you this was a pocket universe that collects people and dumps them in tropical paradise for a while, you wouldn't buy it? I'm just trying to determine how immune you are to weird."

"Oh, I'm immune to weird. I— Let's just say that weird and I don't always get along, but we spend a lot of time together. Considerable amounts of time." Never quite like this, though, and Stiles is beginning to think he might need to take Weird off his buddy list because clearly Weird just doesn't know when enough is enough.

"We're not going to go to a church after this, are we? Because one, I am not ready to move on, and two, that was lame."

"Uh, I'm not exactly a Christian," Jacob said, giving him a blank look. He wasn't much of anything, really, but definitely not that. Not considering the things he'd seen that had nothing to do with Jesus or bibles.

"And I'm not your one man show or anything, so this is just facts. We call this place Tabula Rasa and it is a magnet for weird. What kind of weird are you used to?"

"Never mind," Stiles mutters when the Lost reference sails over Jacob's head. The guy spends his life jumping off of cliffs and fixing motorcycles without a shirt on, obviously he doesn't have time for one of the most highly-regarded television shows of all time.

"Magnet for— It's got the wrong guy, then, because I'm the sane center in an epic storm of weird." Why, oh why, hadn't this place, whatever it was, taken Derek instead? That guy was weird in ways that went WAY beyond him turning into a dog.

"Werewolves," Stiles spits out after a tick of hesitation. It's not like it's some big secret to Jacob, after all.

"Werewolves? There's a few," Jacob confirmed. "I used to be one, even, but it doesn't work on the island. I wish it did because it's boring as hell here without being able to phase."

Then again, it was nice not hearing Leah's every waking thought, so it was probably for the best.

"How do you know werewolves? Most people think we're imaginary."

"Yeah, I can see how that would be a bummer," Stiles says with a quick nod and a lift of his eyebrows. "Less fleas and people trying to kill you, though, so… maybe not a bad trade off—"

Stopping short, he rears back with an incredulous scoff. "What, I couldn't have been a werewolf?"

"Didn't you just say you were the sane center in the weird storm? That doesn't usually say werewolf to me," Jacob said, grinning even wider. It was amusing and he couldn't really even put a finger on why, exactly. Mostly because it'd been a long time since he'd met anyone new and fresh to the island.

"Although I guess if the other people around you are, like, vampires or something, the werewolf would be the sane one."

"I could be the sane one in a pack of weird wolves," Stiles counters, mostly for the sake of his wounded pride. His pride is wounded a lot, though, so he should probably just get over it.

"I wasn't," he admits after a pause. "A werewolf. I could have been, though. I declined." If anything wins him sanity points in that whole crazy mess, surely that's it.

Jacob arched a brow. "It's a choice, where you're from? Weird. We're just born this way."

Then again, his kind of werewolf didn't have anything to do with the moon or being bitten or all that crazy stuff but maybe this guy's did. "We just shape-change into wolves. It's been in my tribe for centuries."

"Yeah, I saw the movie," Stiles flippantly replies, brain still straddling that line between reality and fantasy and not quite parsing yet that the extremely tall boy before him is the place where the two meet.

"We have both," he continues, heedless. "You're infinitely more sane than both of the born werewolves I've known, so good job, man."

Edited 2012-06-18 18:28 (UTC)

"So, sane wolves are named Jacob so, what are insane wolves named? Something nice and romantic like Heathcliff or something?"

That had been a cartoon when he was a kid but Bella had informed him (with a smirk, no less) that Heathcliff was a character in Wuthering Heights, a book she and Edward apparently loved. Jacob...got the Cliff's Notes, barely passed the test and forgot it existed. It was better that way.

"Uh, Peter," Stiles replies, thinking this kid is perhaps weirder than he initially thought. "So, romantic if you're into nursery rhymes involving being locked inside pumpkins?" That's just the kind of thing Peter would do, too, the asshole.

"And, uh. Derek. That's with a D, for douche," he adds, drawing the last word out.

"Ohhh. Must be related to Sam. I could try to do a little rhyme thing but school and werewolves doesn't really mix. It's kind of hard to concentrate on vocab when there's vampires breathing down your neck. Well. Not breathing, they don't breathe."

Jacob shrugged, awkward. "Do they have vamps where you're from?"

[For Jacob] Debut

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