Chapter Text
T-0 Days
Rubbing at his face, Stiles lets the cover of the heavy-ass tome thump closed. All around him, other books and papers are strewn about Scott's room, crumpled paper balls and hastily-drawn symbols in Lydia's handwriting, layers of printouts burying the room in tents of white and flashes of color. Plates of food dot the paper landscape here and there, most half- or three-quarters uneaten. Stiles tries half-heartedly to remember when he had eaten them, or when Lydia had, but gives up. He doesn't care enough.
Instead, he stretches the last of the kinks out of his spine and unfolds to his full height. Muscles in his legs and back cramp, scatter into pins and needles as they move out of positions they've been holding for days; Stiles groans and tries to work out the cramps, shake the static away.
"You all right?"
He looks up. Mrs. McCall is in the doorway, leaning on the doorjamb like it's the only thing holding her up. Guilt strikes, quick as a cobra, through him; he averts his eyes, bends to pick up the book he'd just finished reading.
"Stiles?"
Stuffing the notes and Lydia's most up-to-date drawing of the starscape they need, Stiles says, "Yeah."
"Today's the day, isn't it."
Startled, Stiles meets Mrs. McCall's eyes again. They're liquid brown, the same color and shape as Scott's, and they hold the same piercing insight that made Scott so devastating sometimes, makes his mom just the same way.
He looks down again, can't give an answer. Can only give a shrug.
Mrs. McCall's sigh sounds like it comes from her marrow of her bones. Stiles flinches, not only at the sigh, but at the comparison. His brain... is not the best place to be right now. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her legs move backwards out of the doorway.
He's made it halfway out the door himself when next Mrs. McCall speaks. "You fix it."
"Huh?" Stiles looks up, meets those eyes again. This time, Mrs. McCall doesn't let him look away.
"I don't care what you have to do," she says. "As long as Scott's alive..."
"And my dad," Stiles interjects, stung. Scott wasn't the only one who—
"Oh, of course, honey. And your dad." Mrs. McCall looks contrite. Her hand rises, hesitates, falls away. She starts again, "As long as everyone's alive..."
Stiles subsides, nods his head sideways to the concession.
"...you do what you have to do."
For a moment, Stiles stands there. There's so many things going on inside of him that he can't put a name to any of it, can only struggle through a bare understanding. Mrs. McCall stands with him, her eyes fierce and looking, herself, a lot like a specter of vengeance or something. Absolution, maybe. Or maybe that's Stiles's grief speaking. He moves without thinking, has his arms around her, tight, squeezes his eyes shut against the fucking ever-present tears when she hugs him back just as tightly.
They stand there for a long moment, Stiles breathing in the scent in her hair, fighting against the tears that keep trying to well up. From the hitches in Mrs. McCall's breathing, he knows she's doing the same thing, and that makes his own fight harder.
At last, Mrs. McCall draws back. "Go on," she says, pressing her hand to her eyes. "That moon isn't going to wait forever."
Stiles emits a weak laugh. "No, it won't."
"Say hi to Scott for me on the other side," Mrs. McCall adds. "And make sure your dad is eating right."
Stiles's eyes sting again. "I will, Mrs. McCall." He takes a step, turns back. "Uh..."
Mrs. McCall's eyes soften. "You do what you have to."
He nods. "Yeah." He hugs her once more, breaks away to hurry down the stairs and outside. Lydia, a pale, bruised-eyed version of herself at the bottom of the stairs, falls into line with him.
"You ready?" he asks, not looking at her.
"As I'll ever be," she says, sounding distant and far away.
They don't say anything more, not when they get to the Jeep, not during the noisy drive, not until they get to the site. Then, for a brief moment, the both of them come alive again, for better or for worse, to do what must be done.
The nemeton is a dark shadow underneath him as he slides across its broad, cracked face. He imagines that there's a pulse of recognition from him to it, it to him, as he touches it, imagines that it warms under his hands the longer he's in contact with it.
"This had better work," he says despite himself, despite all the work they had done, all the time, hah, time they spent poring over getting the details exactly right, on making sure it would work.
"Of course it will work," Lydia says from where she's laying out the last of the green powder in place around the nemeton. She pauses, meets Stiles's eyes. "It'll work because it has to work."
Stiles holds Lydia's gaze, nods. He forgets, sometimes, that he wasn't the only one affected. Sure, Mrs. McCall, too, but also Lydia...and Isaac, who's coming through the edge of the clearing.
"There you are," Lydia says, evidently not surprised. "Get over here, hold the flashlight for me. It'll be easier to read if I don't have to juggle everything."
Stiles watches Isaac as he makes the trip across the clearing to Lydia's side. Isaac looks back at first, defiant, his shoulders hunching, then away, as Stiles's gaze becomes too heavy for him to bear. He accepts the flashlight Lydia hands him, obediently angles it where she needs it.
"Isaac..." Stiles starts.
"You're not the only one who needs everything to change," Isaac bites, still not meeting his gaze. "We may not be best friends, Stilinski, but this is a bad situation for everyone. I'm not standing on the sidelines and just letting things happen anymore."
Right, because he lost everything with Scott's death and Allison's leaving, too. Stiles looks away, into the shadows on shadows darkness of the preserve, and listens to the woods grow still, listens as the trees wait with bated breath.
"Time," he says in a voice far away from his own ears. Lydia immediately begins chanting, the cadence of her voice reading the Archaic Latin syllables alternatively soft and loud. Light, phosphorus-green and curling like smoke, glimmers from the base of the nemeton, inches slowly up its roots, the stump, towards Stiles. At the first touch, Stiles has a flash of sensation: strong fingers on his shoulders, a soft reassuring voice: "You've still got me, kiddo. You've still got me."
"Dad!" Stiles cries out, his arm automatically reaching. But the sense-memory fades, his dad's hands and voice retreating from him. Oddly, the feeling - half-choked grief, relief and the warmth of fierce love - doesn't vanish. Stiles hangs onto that feeling like a lifeline, as the pale, pale green light steals in through the legs of his jeans, creeps over his waist and under the hem of his shirt.
"Stiles." Lydia's voice echoes strangely, like tinnitus. Turning his head, he startles slightly; she is lit up by the green of the smoking light, her eyes catlike as they peer at him. "Scott was a True Alpha. Deucalion may have killed him, but power derived by will rather than by might follows different rules. Remember that."
What? Stiles opens his mouth to say, but the light chooses that as an opportunity to pour into him. Swallowing, Stiles tries to gag, but it's too thick. It coats the back of his tongue and throat, seeps downwards to his lungs.
The world blurs. He blinks, feels rather than sees his eyelids slide over a flexible pane over his eyes. Pale green covers everything he sees, Lydia and Isaac, the trees at the clearing's edge (so, so still, frozen in the hope that if they don't move, he won't notice them there), even his hands when they slowly lift into view.
Lydia is back to the book in her hands, her mouth moving silently over new words. Isaac is staring, but slightly off-center of Stiles. He seems caught between morbid fascination and horror, as if he can't make up his mind which he would prefer to feel. Stiles would say something about that, but the words slide away from him, filter out of his brain like water through a hole in the bottom of a reservoir.
"Stiles," Lydia says again, clear as a bell. He finds his vision swinging slowly to her, traveling over the (still as stone) trees, the shadows in between (hiding everything and nothing; the life it could have sheltered within has fled for the safety of distance, an illusion no creature could withstand the call of even with knowledge of its deceptive nature), Lydia’s face. She looks like she is a reflection in water, rippling, ebbing, eddying back. Then it straightens out, sharp against the soft edges of everything else, and he feels like he sees her, all of her, for the first time.
For the first time he begins to understand the shape of the Darach's word for her, banshee reverberating through him as she stares boldly at him, into him, through him. "Don't forget us," like a command, a bullet, a strike of lightning through him –
White sears into his mind, through it. Pain upon folds of pain assault him, drive deep fissures into his brain. Lydia's and Isaac's faces fracture into shattered mirrors. The ground falls away and spins him, adrift, into the darkness surrounding. He opens his mouth to –
Nothing left. He’s nothing but pain, as the white sear starts to move downwards, behind his eyes, down into the cavities behind his nose, burning into his chest, towards his heart –
He knows, suddenly clearly, that he’ll be nothing but ashes when the burning white is done with him. He’s almost glad, can almost see where this is going, almost hears Scott’s voice shouting his name, can almost see Erica’s wild curls, Boyd’s unimpressed stare. Almost, almost there, except –
Except. Bubbling up against the searing white is that feeling again. The knotted hollow ache, the hot seething scald of alive, she left me, she left me, but I’m not alone, "You've still got me, kiddo" a drumbeat against the abyss, a thm-thm-thmp, thm-thm-thmp, thm-thm-thmp rhythm in his ears.
The rhythm rises up and overtakes him, sweeps him away before it. He falls against it, lets the wash take him where it will, knowing nothing of anything but the choke of grief and the surge of love as he stumbles through the shadows, farther and farther from everything. The Void opens wide before him; with a snap, it closes shut around him, swallows him whole.
The laser of white still sparking through him, grief-choke and warmth-love blossoming outwards, Stiles closes his eyes and doesn't think of what's to come.
:~:~:~:
When the doctors at Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital examine the John Doe’s MRI scans, they notice a very strange buildup in one part of his brain – namely, the pain centers. Naturally, this discovery is very concerning to them, for not only is it a lesion in the Doe’s brain, but it has also complicated the Doe’s case. They’re already baffled by the way the Doe won’t wake up, by the damage to his throat as if he were screaming for a very long time, and how every so often the Doe twitches, sometimes spasms in a manner similar to epileptic seizures.
But there’s no evidence of epilepsy in the Doe’s brain that they’d expect, and the buildup that is there looks like nothing the Memorial Hospital surgeons have seen before. Their only course of action is to try several drugs and techniques to try to reduce the buildup, and if nothing happens, to resort to open-brain surgery.
Of course, just as they’ve decided on this, the John Doe opens glowing red eyes and begins to scream.
:~:~:~:
They work for two days to stabilize the Doe's condition. Not consecutively, for the seizures and the lucid intervals (if you can call the screaming periods “lucid”) only occur in fits, spaced wider and wider apart over time, until forty-eight hours exactly after the first scream, the seizures stop altogether. The doctors remain on watch for another twenty-four hours, but the fits don't return. When they run another scan on the Doe's brain, they find that the lesion in the pain centers of the brain is gone, just as if it never existed.
Strange, they say, scratching their heads. Well, we're going to figure it out, they reassure themselves. Not like John Doe is going to go anywhere in his medically-induced coma. We might as well get some sleep and come back to this problem with fresh eyes and brains.
Six hours later, the head surgeon is woken up from a deep sleep cycle to the hysterical voice of one of the nurses. She jumps out of bed, to the complaints of her husband, and rushes to the hospital, sliding to a stop outside of the John Doe's room. There, she stops for breath, only to lose it again when she takes in the sight in front of her.
The IV is disconnected. The sheets are half-torn off the bed. There's the hospital gown printed with general geometric shapes puddled on the floor. One of the blinds on the window has been pulled down and now lies in a heap near the door, nearly ruined. The window itself hangs crazily in its frame, the bottom half pushed out and slightly bent upwards, despite the steel frame and the flexible glass.
It looks like a bomb went off in there, the head surgeon thinks. Or a localized hurricane. A very small localized hurricane. The only thing it needs to complete the picture is splatters of blood everywhere, across the walls, the bed, the window, and all over the patient, who would look up with empty eyes from the serrated knife in his hand, and say, The voices made me do it.
Except. There’s no blood. There’s no serrated knife, no dead body on the floor, its eyes glassy and limbs distorted, its neck slashed. There’s no patient with empty eyes, who has voices in his head that demand a murder sacrifice. In fact, the surgeon thinks, as she looks around, sluggish, there’s no patient at all.
The John Doe is gone.
:~:~:~:
The woods aren't the ones the wolf is used to. Or they are, but they are younger, smell differently than he remembers. He doesn't like it. These are his woods, but they aren't. Now they are someone else's; the stench is ingrained into them, rubbed and scratched and pissed into them, potent now where only stale traces, ghosts, remained in his territory-that-was.
He shakes his head with an irritated growl. Focus, an echo tells him. Yes, that's what he has to do. He has to find the ones who are the source of the stink on the trees and the earth, and he has to warn them. He has to warn them about....
The trees flash by. He skids to a stop in a clearing, crouches down. Another wolf, growling with eyes glowing amber, pops up, snarls at him and slashes the air at him with sharp claws. He doesn't have claws, nor does he have the fangs the beta bares at him, but he is unafraid, for he is stronger. One roar and the beta's skittering back, fear and shock in its eyes. He likes that, wants more of that, wants to take the beta's throat into his mouth and clamp down, demand submission or wreak death.
The beta bares its fangs at him again, fear jack-rabbiting its heartbeat like a song in his ears. Suddenly it bursts into a howl, loud and ringing through the trees. Snarling, he launches at the beta and swings at its head. But the beta fends him off and throws him across the clearing; he lands with a grunt and then has to scramble out of the way as another beta, different from the first, puts its fist where his head used to be. He gets to his feet and hustles to get on top of a rock, whereupon he whirls on the betas and draws himself to his fullest height.
The betas instinctively crouch into attack positions, but they don't come closer. One of them snarls something at him. He snarls back, jerks forward as if to snap the beta's head off. The beta flails back; the other one tries to take advantage of his momentary inattention and leaps. He simply drops underneath the assault, kicks out wildly, and connects solidly, sending the beta with a yelp into a pile of leaves. He swings around with bared teeth at the first beta, but the first beta hangs back rather than rush in.
The second beta is up again in a flash, his kick having done nothing but surprise, but it and the first beta freeze in the next second. He has one second to tense before something bulls into him, sending them both into the ground and tumbling over. He fights to get the thing off his back, manages a wild punch and a grunt from the newest enemy. Then he's flipped over and red eyes, red eyes, fangs, claws, it's an Alpha, a real Alpha, not like him, and its power, its power is overwhelming, pressing him down and scaring him witless. The Alpha roars in his face and gets a hand around his throat; somehow he finds his hands yanking at the Alpha's wrist, and he's baring his teeth and growling at the other Alpha. But this is a token resistance. He knows deep-down the other Alpha is stronger than he is, but he won't go down without a fight. It's just that he has to warn....
Then the Alpha ducks downwards and fastens its teeth on his neck. He bucks at first, off! off! off! screaming in his brain, but the Alpha bites down harder, not enough to break the skin, but enough to make him freeze. Breathing hard, he requires a second warning squeeze from the Alpha before he pries his fingers off the Alpha's wrist and spreads them against the ground, a third before he turns his neck, hating having to do it while he does. The Alpha rears up in a flash and before he can do anything to get out from under the Alpha or to defend himself, the Alpha's hand collides with his face and he's out.
:~:~:~:
He's in a room. A room trapped by mountain ash. Snarling, he lunges forward, only to be yanked to a stop. Restraints! He growls. Whoever has him caught will pay for this. Pay for keeping him from his goal.
Movement; sound. Intruder. He flashes his eyes, growls. Intruder: flash of surprise. A quick blip of the heartbeat, then settled. Slight trace of nerves. No fear. No fear?
He turns his eyes back, sniffs. Familiar. Dark skin; bald head; scent of disinfectant, animals, traces of herbs. Veterinarian. Druid. Emissary.
Not his goal, but connected. He stops the growling, uncurls his fingers from claw-like projections. No claws yet, still, but unnecessary. Stares at familiar/not familiar. Veterinarian, druid, emissary. Not a threat, not a comfort. Neutral, but uneasy.
Noise spills from the emissary's mouth. Words? Questioning. Cautious, but calm. At home. Emissary's territory, yes. He is intruder. His shoulders hunch, he needs to make himself smaller. Apology for rudeness.
The emissary seems to understand. More indecipherable noise from his mouth. Except: Hale. Yes. Hale.
"Hale," he repeats. Noise is strange in his throat, rasping his throat. Not a growl, but not the way emissary speaks. Emissary startles, steps forward. He tenses. Attack?
Hands, emissary's. Palms up. Relax of body. No attack. Surprise only. He settles.
"Hale?" emissary asks.
Yes. Hale. His goal. "Hun-ters." He bares his teeth. Murderers. "Here. Hale, not-safe."
"The Hales are not safe?" Alarm, emissary's heartbeat increasing. Good.
"Not-safe," he insists. "Ar..." The rasp gets tangled up at the back of his tongue. He snaps his teeth at himself.
"Are?" Emissary asks. Hands lowered, not threat. Concerned. "The hunters are?"
No. Not are. He must finish name. "Ghent," he grits. Not the true word, but as close as he can approximate, as he is now. "Ar-ghent."
"Arghent?"
"Yes." Close enough. If emissary thinks, will get name. "Ka-te. Ar-ghent."
Emissary stills. "Kate Argent?"
He snarls, bares teeth. His eyes film red, claws curl. "Yes."
"I...see." Emissary's heartbeat pounds once, twice, then steadies. Control is impressive. "Thank you for telling me. I will inform the Alpha, Talia Hale. I imagine she will want to speak to you as well."
He preens. Goal: accomplished. He will keep an ear up, to make sure the emissary passes on the message, but for now he may rest. He has come far to get to this point; his strength is still depleted.
He nods to the emissary, who seems to expect an answer to his last words. The floor is not comfortable, but he wiggles himself into a better position, minding the restraints, and closes his eyes.
Emissary's footsteps exiting the room underscore the fade of his senses as he relinquishes consciousness.
:~:~:~:
When he dreams, it's mainly of being encased in the earth. He can feel the worms wriggling in the soil all around him, how the air whooshes down the trails they leave. The earth has a lot of ways that it gains nutrients and lives, he knows, and that's one of them.
Just as he knows there are more things in the earth than worms and moles.
The bodies can't move, yet they cry out for him. They can't see, but they turn in his direction. They can't feel, yet they know injustice was committed. For all that they don't tell tales, the dead never do like injustice.
He should be scrabbling, pushing against the earth, trying to get out. It’s what Peter did (Whoever “Peter” is - the name brings him feelings of dread, of being reluctantly impressed, and bone-deep discomfort - he doesn't want to cross “Peter's” path again). Yet he's pinned in place not by the earth or by anything physical, but by something more powerful.
Red eyes peer back at him from the water that drips down on him. He blinks, sluggish, dirt dislodging from his eyelashes into his eyes, but the red's still there. He wants to scream, suddenly, to open his mouth and let rip, to know he can, but he doesn’t, can’t. He's still, unmoving, lying pinned and immobilized as the water drips, the red eyes stare, the dirt gets into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. When he closes his eyes against the dirt (or thinks he does – it’s hard to tell), the red follows. It always follows.
Gaze not long into the abyss, lest the abyss also gaze into you.
End Chapter One