Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Then stretched I forth my hand a little forward,

 And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn;

And the trunk cried, "Why dost thou mangle me?"

After it had become embrowned with blood,

It recommenced its cry: "Why dost thou rend me?

Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever?

Men once we were, and now are changed to trees[."]

Dante’s Inferno,

 Canto XIII, Longfellow translation.

seven.

When Stiles is seven, his dad gives him the Stranger Danger Talk. 

If a man (or woman, Stiles. Bad people come in all shapes and sizes, son, you got that?) approaches him, he is to scream, bite, kick, scratch - use whatever means necessary to draw attention to himself and make his captor work for it. 

His dad shows him how to kick out a taillight, how to cut through a seatbelt, how to break a zip tie with his shoelaces. He quizzes Stiles on what to ask if someone says they’re a family friend, what to do if they say his mom and dad have been in an accident and they have been sent to pick him up. 

By eight, Stiles knows how to use a stun-gun and for his birthday he gets his own switchblade. If there were a picture in the dictionary for Cop’s Kid, it would be Stiles. 

This is why, on a Tuesday in March, when he awakes to a woman hovering over him, he grabs for his knife and doesn’t think before aiming it at her torso.

His hand enters her midsection, glowing hazy blue as the edges of her silhouette shimmer lightly at the intrusion. She heaves a cold breath that fans across his face, almost reminiscent of a giggle, like he is tickling her instead of intending bodily harm. He just stares at his forearm, hand still wielding the pointed blade, sunk into her midriff yet looking as though nothing has happened at all. 

He blinks and retracts his blade, sheathing it back into the small metal hilt that has his name engraved into it - not his nickname but his full name. He holds it tightly to his chest while he falls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, his heart beating wildly.

He has so much more to worry about than strangers.

Chapter Text

thirteen.

When Stiles sees Talia Hale, it is so hot outside that everything looks hazy—the type of hot that makes you feel like the color orange, makes the asphalt on the neighborhood road look like it’s covered in water, like the ocean is just beside the street sign.

(He will remember this when recalling it later, because he’d thought, idly, that this day in particular felt like fire.)

The sun is spilling hot licks of gold between the gaps in the curtains, still managing to slip through even though Stiles has readjusted them several times. He has to squint his eyes against the sting, relishing in the temporary relief as he rustles the fabric, grimacing slightly at the way the light still beams through the spaces throughout the threads. It’s the suffocating, salt-slick cling of heat, the kind that makes you think of soap-sudded bath basins and the way lemonade sugar makes your throat gritty. It’s summer in Beacon Hills and everything feels like it may very well be this hot forever. 

His dad is asleep, his parents’ bedroom door cracked, and every so often Stiles can hear the loud exhale of the man snoring over the volume of the TV. He is recovering from a twenty-three hour shift.

Intermittently, Stiles’ attention is drawn to the gap in the door. He drags his eyes from the television when he hears a pause in his dad’s nonsensical sleep-grumbling, when the floor fan catches and makes a mechanical grinding noise because it’s old and the rotation gets caught every few minutes before regulating itself out. His dad won’t get a new one—if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

Last night, Stiles stayed up far beyond his bedtime, staring at the shadows of trees along his bedroom wall until he heard the telltale creak of the front door, the tinkling of his dad’s keys as they were placed on the hook in the foyer. He’d tiptoed down, careful to avoid the third to last step because it creaks, and watched as the man walked on dead feet to the bedroom.

His dad was asleep nearly as soon as his head hit the pillow, his body slumped with exhaustion. Stiles’ mom was splayed out on the couch, her head tilted back across the cushions in a way that would leave her neck sore the following morning, would make his dad smile because she’d complain about not being able to turn her head to one side. Last time, his dad shrugged his shoulders and laughed, loud and happy, said she was just like that damn floor fan. Stiles had taken a moment to make sure she was okay, craning his head to see her face where it was hidden by the arm slung over her eyes. Sometimes, she falls asleep in the living room when she’s waiting for Dad to come home. She worries about him. 

Stiles peeled the man’s socks off and deposited them into the overflowing hamper before shuffling him out of his uniform’s button-up. Something about it made an ice-cold coil of sadness curl up in Stiles’ chest, something that became heavier and heavier until it sank into his belly, settling there. His dad works really hard.

Stiles stood by the bed for a long time, his hand resting on the curve of his dad’s bicep, rising and falling along with his breaths. He watched his expression, making sure that his sleep remained peaceful. He traced his dad’s face with his eyes, taking in the deep laugh-lines, the creases along his forehead, the curves around his mouth, making sure they never curled with discomfort. 

A few years ago, while his mom was out running errands, Stiles’ dad exasperatedly passed him the remote to watch cartoons, desperate to quell his mindless babbling while he was occupied with a case. He’d insisted that Stiles indulge in the brain rot of Cartoon Network (“or whatever you want, kiddo, just get off your old man’s back for a second, yeah?”) as long as he didn’t tell his mom. She was a firm believer that you reap what you sow, what goes in comes out, so she was very adamant about Stiles' media consumption. Instead of settling on a brightly-colored, kid-friendly production, Stiles waited until his dad’s footsteps retreated to the dining room, held his breath for the telltale scrape of the second to last chair signaling that he’d sat down.

Stiles flipped through the channels, rebelliously searching for the grown-up movies where they have guns and car chases and pretty girls, eventually finding something about two cops tracking a bad guy together. They both died. He never told anyone, even though he had such bad nightmares that his mom ended up taking him to a child psychiatrist. But, he could never escape the images of his dad dying while he was at work, killed before Stiles even got to say goodbye. Stiles had never thought that before, that his dad could die. Parents aren’t supposed to die.

Now, Stiles lowers the volume on the television, pushing himself up from where he’s sitting criss-cross on the rug in front of the entertainment center. He walks cautiously on sock-soft feet to where his parents’ bedroom door is slightly ajar. He peeks in, squinting with sun-blind eyes into the dark, trying to make out his dad’s body bundled beneath the covers. The fan gets caught and whirrs, making him wince, glancing to see if the noise has bothered his dad yet. Once he registers the steady rise and fall of his silhouette, Stiles backs away, following the hall back into the living room. 

His mom is out on a grocery run, stocking up for the week. So, Stiles is essentially home alone. He is always home, which he makes a point to complain loudly and obnoxiously about at the dinner table, during Family Movie Night, and even in the car – wherever he can get his parents cornered. It took a lot of persistence, endless groans from his dad, his mom pursing her lips and shaking her head, but he is finally beginning public school this year. He's been homeschooled because his mom wanted to be the one to teach him how to read and write and think critically, to “make sure he is fully ready to succeed.” Lately, though, Stiles has been restless and his parents have been firm. But, if Stiles has anything, it's time. That and the ability to relentlessly complain. He knew he would wear them down eventually, knew they would cave if only to make him finally be quiet.  

Stiles was diagnosed with ADHD not too long after his mom started taking him to the child psychiatrist. Stiles has trouble processing what is being said when he is spoken to directly. He talks excessively, can hold a one-sided conversation about nothing at all, never ceasing unless prompted to. And, usually, not even then. He used to have to stand at the dinner table, unable to remain seated because he had the insatiable urge to fidget, hated having to sit down when he just wanted to be up. When the doctor suggested the diagnosis, Stiles’ mom had smiled with polite confusion, tilted her head saying, “Well, that’s just Stiles.” She wanted him to have a shot, didn’t want him to be chewed up and spit out by the education system before he could even really get started. That’s why he never minded it too much. She was just being a good mom. 

He thinks he would have hated it a lot more if he didn't have Scott. Stiles met Scott in a local childcare group that watched over kids in his age range while their parents worked. That was back when his mom was still a pre-school teacher and his dad was working mostly just morning and afternoon shifts. Scott is like his brother, his only friend. But, Scott is usually at his grandma’s house every other week or visiting his dad during the summer so Miss McCall can focus on her job.  

So, the best he can do on an unsupervised Tuesday afternoon is goof off in the living room while the television plays the best of nickelodeon, the glare from the sun on the screen rendering it pointless. He's sweaty, splaying himself over the couch before getting up and turning the volume all the way down, padding over to the radio instead. He has been promising Scott that he is going to burn him a super cool CD, one of the best, he'd self-proclaimed. He has a list of songs in his room on a worn piece of notebook paper, curled around the edges and speckled with suspicious stains. When he finally settles on a station, he turns around, nearly buckling to the ground at the sight of Talia Hale. 

She looks as out-of-this-world as all members of the Hale family do. Talia is tall and dark and really really beautiful. She reminds Stiles of the girls he sees on TV, the ones who always end up with the guys in the fancy cars. She used to make Stiles blush, cheeks flaming all the times he’s bumped into her, going crimson at how she always used to smile down at him and call him handsome while all he could focus on was how pretty her eyes are.

She’s young, for a mom of three - at least that’s what he heard his dad say. The Hales are a staple family in Beacon Hills, all of them crisply dressed with polite smiles at every function Stiles has attended. He’s really only seen them in passing, talked to them in fleeting intervals. He’s gleaned most of what he knows from his very limited interaction with Cora at events, since they are similar in age. Laura is the oldest, eighteen, and she is just as gorgeous as her mother, the same silk-shiny hair and pale eyes. Stiles sees her and Cora together often, usually at high school lacrosse games or the grocery store. They exude the type of physical beauty that makes you swallow hard and blink a few times just to make sure they’re real, just to make sure that it isn’t a trick of the light, mirages created by sun-spotted vision. 

Derek Hale is one of the prettiest people Stiles has ever seen, in line with Lydia Martin. Derek’s on the varsity lacrosse team, has been since his freshman year, even though the roster is reserved for juniors and seniors. The older boy smirks and walks around with his shoulders back like he knows that he’s better than everyone else, like he knows there are people just like Stiles who constantly wish they could be exactly like him. Stiles has tried to speak to Derek a few times, hanging back after games with Scott hovering beside him, blurting awkward jokes that tank at town events. He never knows what to say, thinks Derek exists in a different world entirely.

He remembers the first time he saw him. Stiles was eight, which would have made Derek eleven, and it had happened at the park’s sad water play-area. It had two fountains that gushed pitifully after you pushed the metallic button that became scorching under the press of the sun. He and Scott used to rock-paper-scissors over who'd have to do it, and Stiles has never had much luck in games like that. So, more often than not, he'd quickly stick his thumb to the metal and immediately pop the pad of his fingerprint into his mouth, sucking out the sting. His dad called it a "white trash water park," and said you'd have more fun with a sprinkler, or a kitchen-sink sprayer, but Stiles had never really known what that meant. He and Scott spent plenty of hot days running barefoot through the mist. Derek's swim trunks had a green chevron pattern on them, Cora was in a blue one-piece, and Laura wore a tank-top and denim shorts as she beelined for the swing set. Talia had sat their things down at a vacant picnic table under the shaded awning, a lunchbox cooler bouncing at her hip. Stiles remembers thinking that Derek looked like he would rather be anywhere else, hair curling at his temples as he began to sweat beneath the scorch. Stiles knew the feeling, he was already blistering pink, could feel the warmth of it along the bridge of his nose, threaded through his cheeks. His dad was mad at him for forgetting sunscreen again, rubbing aloe along the backs of Stiles' shoulder before slapping lightly, making Stiles hiss in betrayal as he laughed. He remembers that day, because he'd wanted to be friends with Derek so badly that the desire had burned a hole through his chest, an ant beneath a sun-soaked magnifying glass. 

Since then, Stiles has learned firsthand that even Derek’s scowl makes his breath hitch, as does the incredulous slant of his brows and the harshness of his scoff. The sound of his are you lost or something, Stilinski asked disinterestedly in response to Stiles’ attempts at conversation still makes his cheeks feel warm with embarrassment whenever he thinks about it, the way Derek’s focus was solely on him. How he changed Stiles’ previous belief that negative attention is still attention. 

Stiles is an acquired taste, that’s what his dad says. He knows that everyone thinks that he’s weird, or a freak, or whatever. He knows that when he talks under his breath to things no one else can see, or glances back over his shoulder when seemingly nothing is there, he knows it sticks. Stiles Stilinski is a fucking loser.

It doesn’t make his peers’ disapproval hurt any less, knowing that they couldn’t possibly understand. People like Jackson Whittemore would rather make him the laughing stock than extend any invitations of friendship. Even with Scott, who likes all of the things Stiles likes, he feels like an outcast, like maybe he’s missing out on something. He will never be like Derek, and for some reason it makes him feel hollow.  Makes him feel like he's sunburned at the water park all over again.

Talia Hale is in his house. Her clothes hang off her frame - a matching pajama set caked black with soot. Her face is smeared dark with it and smoke billows softly off of her person, rising up in thin gray tendrils that disappear within the beams of sunlight. She wavers, going fuzzy around the edges, like when it is so bright outside there are shimmering red glares in your peripheral. She smells like ash and fire and death. It makes him want to gag.  

He senses the blood draining from his head, can feel it seeping from the skin on his cheeks that is usually flaming. He feels cold, empty, the sweat beaded at his temples drips down the slope of his face, leaving ice-trails in their wake. He can imagine how he looks - pale-faced and wide-eyed. He can’t hear the music over his heartbeat pulsing in his ears. Somewhere far off, he hopes he isn’t missing a song that Scott would like. 

“Hey, Stiles,” she whispers, tone soft like the lines of her face, his name tinged with something heart-wrenching and maternal.

He absently rubs the heel of his hand over his shirt, trying to ease the ache in his chest. She lifts a palm out to him, waiting to see if he steps away before carding her fingers over his hair. He can’t really feel it, just a cool sensation across his scalp that sends a shiver down his spine, the dampened skin on his neck and shoulders pebbling.

It is so gentle, the only word he can think to describe it with is motherly; it makes Stiles think of how his mom did the same exact thing to him last night after he had eased her off the couch.

She just - she looks wrong. He hates this. Hates how he doesn’t think there is anything he can do to make it better. He feels useless, like he always does.   

“Hey, it’s okay,” she soothes, comforting him, her fingers still listing across his scalp. She smiles down at him, small, and it feels like how she used to, when she’d teasingly call him handsome. 

“I need your help, Stiles. Can you help me?” 

He nods quickly, eager to please. 

“I need you to keep an eye on Derek for me. Do you remember Derek?” 

He’s confused, he doesn’t understand why she would need him to look out for Derek. Her son is sixteen, three years older than Stiles, leagues cooler and way better-liked. What could Stiles possibly do for Derek? It almost makes him want to laugh.  

She clears her throat, mouth opening and closing as she struggles to find what to say. Suddenly, she starts coughing into her hand, removing her fingers from his hair. She’s exhaling these these raspy, painful sounding coughs, and each time she does a swell of black explodes from between the press of her fingers before dissipating into nothing. Stiles feels miserable, the smoke is suffocating him, stinging his eyes and clogging his throat. “I want you to let Derek know that it wasn’t his fault,” she croaks, finally removing her hand from her mouth. “He’s just a kid.” 

Stiles tries desperately to reel the room back into focus. “You need my help,” he repeats hollowly, the hand he was using to rub over his heart now clenched in his shirt, fisted in his collar at the base of his throat just to give him something to do, something to ground him. 

Talia nods, her eyes still trained on him. They are pooled with sadness. Stiles is drowning. 

“Your father’s an officer?” 

Stiles feels the tears that have been distorting his eyesight threaten to drip over, he blinks hard to keep them at bay. He nods shakily and sniffs one, twice. “He’s the sheriff’s right-hand-man,” he rasps. 

Talia huffs a small laugh and once again smiles softly. “I need you to tell him something.” 

Stiles blinks at her, waiting with bated breath. 

“I need you to tell him the suspect they’re looking for is Kate Argent.” 

“Yes ma’am,” he breathes, barely whispering, he’s scared to disrupt the emotional charge of the room. He still doesn’t really know what is happening, but he can guess. She looks how they always look.

He feels sick, like he’s too small for his body, like everything has shifted out of place. 

“Thank you, Stiles,” she curls her fingers at the nape of his neck, they’re still freezing.

When he blinks again, she’s gone. 

He waits and waits - the strips of light turning orange with time, his mom arriving home and unloading groceries and playfully flicking his nose before going to shower, the radio station playing older songs with long intermissions from the host - but he can’t get rid of the smell of smoke. 

He accidentally falls asleep slumped sideways on the arm of the couch, waiting for his dad to wake up. He blinks his eyes open slowly, disoriented by the glow of the television in the blackness of the night. The curtains behind him have been pulled open, the streetlight across the road flickering every so often, staining the living room with yellow-white flashes. He gets unsteadily to his feet, his dad must be awake now. He has to tell him. 

He follows the hushed voices to the kitchen, listening intently to the sullen whispers exchanged between his parents while his mom stirs a pot and his dad rinses silverware. Whatever they’re saying is drowned out by the sound of the tap, the gurgle of the drain. His steps falter when his eyes catch on the television, the news channel muted as a solemn anchorman speaks to the camera. He looks at the headline sliding through the banner at the bottom:

FIRE AT HALE MANSION, ALL DEAD BUT THREE.

Stiles stares at it, his ears ringing. He steps closer, craning his head while he reads the subtitles. We mourn the loss of Talia Hale and her family…  

Stiles stumbles back, shaking his head. He barely hears his dad say his name before he doubles over and vomits. 

Eighth grade isn’t what Stiles thought it would be.  

For all of his excitement about starting at the top of the middle school food chain, it turns out that among the eighth graders there is still a social hierarchy, and Stiles is still at the bottom. With Scott, at least. The other boy takes a harsh breath from his inhaler, letting it out in a ragged, medicine-scented exhale after he plops into the desk next to Stiles.  

Stiles side-eyes him while digging in the front pocket of his backpack for a pencil, setting it carefully on his desk before dropping his bag at his feet. He goes to ask Scott if he did the homework problems when Jackson Whittemore walks past, bumping Stiles’ desk and laughing when his pencil pitifully rolls off the edge. Stiles watches it as it clatters on the tile before sending an unimpressed look to Jackson’s back as he walks to the seat beside Lydia Martin.  

There’s something about Lydia that Stiles can sense is not quite right, in the same way that you walk into a room and forget what you were doing, but you know you were doing something. He can feel it, rattling deep in his bones, reverberating just out of reach. It pushes at the recesses of his brain, like he should just know. It’s familiar and though it irks him that he cannot place it, it doesn’t necessarily feel bad. It feels safe. In a strange, unassuming way.  

Lydia is beautiful, but more importantly she’s one of the smartest people Stiles knows. Or, knows of. She has this presence about her, like she knows she’s more intelligent than you, yet she dumbs herself down, makes herself smaller. Stiles knows how that feels, he really does - he has spent the better part of the school year with his shoulders curled forward and his head down - he just doesn’t understand why Lydia does it. She is easily the most popular girl in their grade, more than likely the entire school. She’s pretty and her parents are rich and she has a perfect grade-point-average. It doesn’t make sense when she blinks sedately after someone asks her for help on an algebra assignment, how she puckers her lips and giggles saying, I think you might use a factor box, but I’m not sure. Stiles has passed tests back, seen her full score emblazoned in red ink across at least a dozen pages. She is always the first to turn in her quizzes and she barely utilizes her calculator on exams.  

Stiles wouldn’t call it an obsession. He wouldn’t. The way he knows what her hair looks like when the sun gleams off of it, how she’s strawberry-blonde rather than redheaded. Or the way he rests his chin in the palm of his hand and thinks about the bow of her lips, how green her eyes are, the gentle lines of her nose. It’s not an obsession. He can just pick out her handwriting, the slopes of her letters from the delicate way she holds her pencil, knows what type of body spray she wears (floral, sometimes citrus), the shape of her side profile when he sneaks glances during class. He’s never known of anyone like her, so relentlessly smart and beautiful and seemingly unreal. Sometimes he thinks about it in the abstract, the arrangement of her features and the sound of her voice, the cosmic way things must align in order  to create someone like that. There is no one else like Lydia Martin. Stiles isn’t obsessed. 

He looks back at the two of them as he awkwardly bends over the desk’s metal bar to reach for his pencil, watches how Jackson’s throwing a paper ball around with Danny while Lydia primly clicks her fingernails on the wooden desk top, blowing a hot pink bubble with her gum. Lydia is wasted on someone like Jackson. Stiles huffs and straightens back up in his seat, triumphantly twirling his pencil between his fingers while he rubs his ribs with his other hand, those bars hurt. 

He looks over at Scott, who’s repeatedly clicking the lead out of his mechanical pencil before holding the eraser end down with his thumb, pressing the tip into the desk to make the wobbling stick of lead slide back into the plastic. Stiles watches idly as he does it a few times, littering the wood with shiny gray dots.  

“So,” he says, blinking himself out of the lull of watching Scott vandalize school property, “do you want to go to the lacrosse game tonight?” 

Scott settles for using the pencil to absently tap an uneven rhythm against the bar, the plastic making the metal let out a shrill clink that makes Stiles blink involuntarily with every hit. He shakes his head, mouth twisting into a small grimace. “I can’t. My mom checked my grades and she grounded me because I’m failing science.” He abandons his pencil to give air quotes, setting his face into a disappointed expression. “No video games and no Stiles until you have at least a B average, young man.” 

Stiles gives a low whistle. “Dude, that sucks. You know I’m always willing to help tutor you if you’re struggling.”  

Scott beams at him before ducking his head and rubbing at the back of his neck. “I know, I just - I always make you help me. I sort of wanted to try by myself, see if I could do it on my own, you know?” 

Stiles’ heart gives a slight tug. Scott has always been a little slow on the uptake, but no one learns in the same exact way. And Stiles thinks it is one of the more charming things about Scott, how his kindness outshines his intellect. Some of the kids here are mean for the fun of it, freely spewing hurtful words like it costs them nothing, and it probably doesn’t. But, Scott isn’t stupid, and it makes something in Stiles feel like it’s being constricted to think that he believes otherwise. 

He reaches over and playfully slaps the boy’s shoulder. “You’ll do fine, Scotty. The anatomy unit is the hardest we have learned so far. My grade has dropped a ton, but I think mom is going easy on me since this is my first year of public school.”  

It’s a lie. Stiles has one of the best class averages in science, something in the high nineties. But Scott doesn’t know that, and Stiles smiles, soft and reassuring, when he sees the tension bleed out of his best friend’s shoulders.

Scott nods along to what Stiles just said. “Yeah, I think you’re right. We just need to move on from anatomy and I’m sure I’ll start doing better.” 

“I know you will,” Stiles agrees easily, like he never had a doubt. “But I am totally going to miss you at the lacrosse game. It sucks going alone.” 

For the rest of the period, rather than taking notes on how to divide polynomials, Stiles thinks about whether or not it’s worth going by himself to the game. He knows it won’t be the same without Scott, but maybe his dad would want to go. Probably not.

When the bell rings, Stiles slowly packs up his things, glancing up and freezing at the look Lydia is fixing him with. Her eyes are hard, the soft slopes of her face pulled into a frown. She blinks and shakes her head lightly, finally gathering her own backpack before shrugging it over her shoulders. On her way past, she gives him another considering once-over before disappearing with the rest of the students.

Stiles sighs and drags his feet on the way to the door, relishing in the obnoxious squeak of his shoes on the tile. He says goodbye to Scott, who has science this period, while he heads to creative writing.

Outside of the classroom is a man in a crisp military uniform. He has been with Stiles for almost three days. He stands ramrod straight and his eyes are always alert, cataloguing every aspect of every room. When he walks behind Stiles, his footsteps are loud, feeling as though they shake the ground upon impact. He never speaks, the last time he opened his mouth his throat gurgled, a sick bubbling sound, before thick streams of blood pooled out, staining the light-colored carpet in the library nearly black with it. Now, his lips remain pressed into a tight line, cold like the rest of him.

Stiles has to ask him yes or no questions, relying on the shake of his head. He tried writing things on paper, questions with different answers for the man to point at, but he quickly found that he didn’t know the right things to ask. 

Last night, Stiles simply wrote out the alphabet on the back of an old practice test and instructed him to point at the letters to spell things out. The man stared at it for a long time before pointing to K, then I, clenching and unclenching his wavering fist, settling on A before stepping back and looking dully at Stiles, eyebrows raised incredulously as if to say well, I did what you wanted, happy now?

Stiles waited. He gave him five, ten seconds, before he gestured wildly at him, blurting out, “Really? That’s it? No shit you were killed in action, dude.”

He’d just blinked calmly at Stiles, tilted his head lightly to the side like it wasn’t his problem that Stiles doesn’t know what to do with him, before he backed up and walked straight through the wall.

“You know what,” Stiles seethed, loud, before he winced at the time on his alarm clock, lowered his voice to a frustrated hiss, jabbing his finger at the space on the wall where the man disappeared. “You know what. I didn’t want to know your name or why you’re here anyway. Enjoy choking on blood alone, you bastard.”

Now, looking at him, Stiles feels his cheeks grow warm with embarrassment. He clears his throat awkwardly and begins walking to class, the man falling into step beside him. When he thinks no one is paying him any attention, Stiles whispers under his breath, “I’m sorry for calling you a bastard.”

In his peripheral, he sees the soldier’s steps falter slightly, a small huff coming from his nose. He’s being laughed at by a dead guy. He can’t bring himself to feel embarrassed, he just gives the man a sidelong glance, a small grin twisting at his mouth while his shoulders slump. He watches as the man takes a half step closer, if he were real, their arms would brush each other. It feels a little like forgiveness. Stiles blows out a long breath, he’s just relieved the soldier isn’t upset with him.

During the next period, while his teacher drones on, Stiles zones out, doodling in the margins of his notebook. He looks up every so often to see if the man is still there. He is.

He’s staring out the window with his hands clasped behind his back, intermittently squeezing the wrist that is circled in his fingers. He looks strangely peaceful and Stiles gets caught up in studying him, the soft curve of his nose and the harsh set of his brow. When the bell rings for lunch, the man stays put, eyes tracking the small birds pecking at the trash spilling out of the can beside the benches. Stiles doesn’t bother him, just spares a few glances his way while he gathers up his bag and slings it over his shoulder.

Walking to lunch, Stiles thinks about him. The uniform looks modern, up to date. So he must have died recently, at most within the last three or four years. He came to Beacon Hills, maybe just for Stiles, or maybe because his unfinished business is here. Stiles makes a mental note to research the local obituaries later.

He huffs and slides into the empty seat next to Scott at their usual table.

“Hey, man,” Scott says, muffled by the mouthful of the food he’s chewing.

Stiles shoots him a little smirk and rifles around in his backpack for the ziploc baggies holding his own sandwich and enough cheese puffs to test the structural integrity of the seal.

“So, how did science go today?” He carefully shimmies one triangular half of his sandwich from the bag, turning to face Scott expectantly when he finally gets it.

Scott shrugs a shoulder, idly stripping his crust off in thin strands. “It was okay. I feel like I am starting to understand the material better.”

Stiles gives an overdramatic whoop of approval that causes a few of the heads at their table to turn and look at them. “That’s awesome, Scott.”

Scott blushes and redirects the conversation to some new game that he put on his birthday wish list. Stiles dutifully nods along, mms and ahhhs at the appropriate moments, but he can’t stop looking over through the cafeteria window, watching as the soldier crouches and extends his hands to the birds who continue pecking as though he isn’t there. Well. 

He blinks and drags his gaze back to Scott, who is still sloppily drawing out some really cool enemy that just got added in some new DLC pack. Stiles allows his eyes to wander, skipping almost lazily across the different kids at his table. There’s a guy highlighting a textbook, two girls sharing a set of earbuds, giggling with each other - a hint of a smile quirks at his lips at the sound of their laughter - and when he zones back in, he realizes he is staring across the room at Lydia. She isn’t looking at him, though, she’s focused on her hands. Stiles looks down, she is shuffling a deck of cards, splitting them in half and fanning them together before sliding them back into a cohesive stack, tapping them against the table to straighten them out. Stiles watches her thumb through them, picking three and sliding them face down on the table.

Scott bumps his shoulder, breaking his concentration. He turns to the other boy. “Yeah, man, that sounds super awesome. And you said that’s for Halo?”

Scott’s mouth falls open slightly, stricken, like Stiles just kicked a puppy. “No, Stiles. Were you even listening? It’s for Call of Duty.”

That gets his attention. “No way, man. Your mom won’t let you have Call of Duty.”

Scott’s lips tug up in a smug smirk. “She said since I’m turning fourteen in almost two months, I am old enough to choose to rot my brain with nonsensical violence.”

“Woah.”

Scott nods. “Plus, she said it’s incentive for me to get my grades up.”

Stiles tries to match his excitement, casting a brief glance back at Lydia. She is staring right at him, a crisp card held tight in her small hand. A chill spirals down Stiles’ spine, suddenly he feels cold all over. He feels like she can see him, really see him, down to his bare bones - like she knows exactly what he is made of, like she can see every insignificant particle that comprises his being.

He licks his lips and she averts her eyes, slips the card back into the deck.

Stiles turns his entire body back toward Scott. He doesn’t look away again.

His mom picks him up in the jeep. He has long since outgrown the humiliated flush that used to heat his cheeks, has learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of vehicle his parents drive, despite what Jackson might say. Being in school has helped teach him how to read people. Stiles can always tell when someone is rich, even if Jackson didn't wear it like a badge of honor, they would all still know. There's a certain look about them, the way their hair is cut, how it falls, the graceful lines of their face. Their clothes never look lived in, neither do their houses. Their lives are barely lived in, either, just another accessory designed for the sole purpose of flaunting. Nothing they own has been weathered by the everyday normalities of life. No scuffs, no wrinkles, no stains. There’s a certain smell to them: expensive, like when you get into the liquor cabinet and inhale beside a bottle’s lip after removing the twist-top, scrunching your nose, not sure if the notes of cinnamon make it better or worse. They have no time for meaningless mundanity - when Jackson talks, it is with intention, regardless of how pointless his words may be. When Lydia fixes her gaze on someone, it's with purpose. Rich people never do anything by accident, and they never ride shotgun in a jeep older than them with windows that have to be cranked open.  

Blinking from his unpleasant reverie, he claps a hand on Scott’s shoulder, gives him a small grin as goodbye and reminds him one last time that he can help with science if he needs it.

His mom reaches for the volume dial and quiets the music, waits patiently for him to set his bag on the floorboard and buckle his seatbelt while she hums along and taps a random rhythm on the steering wheel.

He turns his head to her when he is strapped in and she shoots him a goofy smile, yanking on the gear shift. “How was school today, kiddo?”

He tells her about the kid in homeroom who has green hair and how one of the girls on his dodgeball team in gym wore a Batman t-shirt today. He casually mentions that Scott is getting Call of Duty, nonchalantly turning to look out the window as they pass through town.

He hears her click her tongue, and when she speaks he can tell it’s with a smile. “Is that so?”

He clears his throat and nods. “Yep.”

“So, I suppose if Scott is old enough, that should make you old enough?”

Stiles sneaks a glance at her, reluctant to feel hopeful. “I think so.”

She side-eyes him, her mouth quirking into a small smirk. “So, if Scott were to jump off of a bridge…”

Stiles slumps into his seat, throwing his head back as he groans, “Mom.”

She laughs. “What? It’s always monkey-see-monkey-do with you two.”

He huffs and pointedly adjusts the air vents even though the air conditioning doesn’t work.

His mom sighs. “How about this: ask your dad if he’s cool with it, and if he is, then I’m cool with it.”

He groans again. “Dad is so not going to be cool with it.”

She smiles and reaches a hand to poke him in the side teasingly, tries to do it a second time when he curls his body away from her, trying not to laugh so he can maintain his sulk. “Not with that attitude, Mister Grumpy Pants.”

Her smile is contagious, it makes Stiles mirror the expression almost involuntarily. He looks back out at the road, still grinning, and nearly jumps. The soldier is in the back seat, he can see him in the reflection of the side mirror. He isn’t looking at Stiles, his pale eyes are silently tracking the trees as they pass. Stiles takes a deep breath to calm his racing heart.

They slow to a stop at the traffic light beside the cemetery. Stiles knows better than to look, he does. He allows his attention to drift there anyway. Beyond the gates, there are a handful of people walking idly past the gravestones, all shimmering at the edges.

His eyeline locks onto the Hale Memorial unconsciously. It’s a huge, polished piece of stone, engraved with a message from the city, thanking the family for everything they’ve done. He and his parents went to the service - his dad squeezed his mom’s hand when she cried, and when Stiles felt his throat begin to close up, she slid her free hand to rest on his shoulder, pulling him into her side. Stiles’ eyes slipped to Derek, then, where he sat stiff next to Laura Hale. He remembered how they don’t have a mother. Remembered how he was the last person to have ever laid eyes on Talia Hale. Swallowing against the urge to vomit, he’d reluctantly pushed away from his mom and kept his hands curled into the fabric on his thighs, scared that if they weren’t occupied he’d reach for her and never let go. He figured if the Hales couldn't be comforted by their mother, then Stiles couldn't either. 

He felt miserable the entire time, nearly suffocating on the potency of it. He’d wanted to tell them. Wanted to stand in front of them and lay everything bare. He gathered the courage, pointedly avoided looking at the three headstones that crowned piles of fresh dirt. But, when he’d stepped forward, just feet away from where the last of the Hales were seated, he locked eyes with Laura. She looked at him like she knew exactly how he was feeling, like nothing Stiles could ever say would be enough. 

The remaining Hales left Beacon Hills, after that. Fled for New York and remained gone for about half a year, radio silent and healing. Then, one day, Derek was back at the lacrosse games and Stiles saw Laura around town like they were never gone at all. He doesn’t know how they were strong enough to come back, he doesn't think he would have ever stopped running. 

Struck with a sudden, inescapable feeling of sickness, he looks away from the cemetery.

“You okay, kiddo?”

He gives his mom a shaky smile. “Never better. Tonight’s lasagna night.”

While his mom laughs and tells him about the new recipes she has been thinking of trying, his thoughts drift back to the Hales.

The night after he saw Talia, he didn’t know how to tell his dad about Kate Argent. He’d seen the articles, the exhaustion on his father’s face after working with the fire department, after having to sit with two teenagers and know that he didn’t have any suspects or a leg to stand on. But, what would Stiles have said? How could he have explained himself? Hey dad, I saw Talia Hale’s ghost and she said it was Kate Argent.

So, he kept his mouth shut until the first day of school. Waited until he could casually bring it up.

“I heard some kids at school today say Kate Argent is the person who burned the Hale house.”

His dad’s fork had clattered into his plate while he coughed. “Who the hell said that?”

Stiles froze, his own fork hovering over his plate. He felt his blood turn icy in his veins. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I just heard it.”

He watched the man spend weeks looking into the Argents, questioning them, speaking with extended friends and family. He never could get a warrant and he never did find anything.

“The Argents are squeaky clean,” the man said to his mom while they thought Stiles was occupied with homework. “No one’s that clean, you know. It’s - it’s suspicious, but there’s nothing I can do, Clauds. Having no record isn’t a crime, it’s usually the opposite.”

Stiles laid awake, stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars haphazardly stuck along his ceiling and wondered if he waited too long. If his dad would’ve caught the Argents had he just told him that night like he was supposed to. Stiles gave them time to cover their tracks. It’s all his fault. He thought of Talia on the other side, watching him mess everything up. It made him sick with guilt.

Months later, when the summer sun gave way for the skeletal trees of autumn, Kate Argent confessed. Laughed on the news, proud to have done it. Told the whole world that she should be praised for rightfully putting the dogs down. There still wasn’t any proof, and the Hales declined going to court, so now she sits comfy in an institution somewhere rather than rotting on death row, where she belongs. That’s the benefits that money can buy. And it's all because of Stiles.

When they pull into the driveway, he unbuckles his seatbelt and gathers his stuff silently. Stiles barely watches as the soldier slips through the car door, already making his way toward the house.

“Get your homework done, little dude, and then you can help me with dinner before I take you to the game,” his mom calls to him from the kitchen while he toes off his sneakers by the door.

He lets out an affirmative noise, heading up the stairs. When he slips into his room, the soldier is staring at one of the band posters on the wall. He closes his door softly and reaches for the paper on his desk. He sinks onto the edge of his bed and lays it in the space beside him.

“Look,” Stiles rubs at his neck, sighing, “I don’t know how to help you if you won’t let me, okay?”

The man tilts his head slightly toward Stiles but remains facing the poster.

“I just - you have to give me something. Anything.”

The man takes a step back, then two, three, before pivoting on his heel and coming to stand beside Stiles, towering over him where he is sat on the bed. Stiles studies him while the man stares silently, eyes jumping along Stiles’ face before eventually he nods, like he found what he was looking for.

He reaches toward the list, slides a transparent finger to C, A, and M before returning his hand to his side.

“Cam,” Stiles breathes, turning to look back up at the man. “Your name is Cam?”

He offers a curt nod.

Stiles gives him a small smile. “Thank you, Cam.”

When the man disappears into the floor, Stiles reaches into his bag to get his math homework.

Going back downstairs, he feels significantly lighter. He jokes around with his mom and snorts when his dad gets home and nearly trips while toeing off his shoes by the door. They eat dinner together and when his mom drips sauce down the front of her shirt, she gasps dramatically and clutches at her chest, groaning out that she has been shot, that they must figure out how to go on without her. 

His dad smiles, eyes going soft when he says, “You know I could never go on without you.”

Stiles pretends to gag when she leans across the table and pulls his dad in for a kiss, the sound quickly becoming laughter when she jumps at him and flicks his nose. Stiles rockets out of his chair and runs around the table, evading her hands while she grumbles like a monster.

“I’m too old for this!” he cries.

“Nonsense,” she growls, “no one is too old to have fun.”

He’s using the kitchen island as a shield when his eyes catch on the clock blinking over the stovetop. “Oh no,” he groans, “it’s almost seven. We’re going to be late to the game.”

His mom deflates, her chest heaving just like his. “No big deal, Mischief. Being fashionably late is all the rage these days, didn’t you hear?”

He rolls his eyes but it’s rendered useless by his smile. She tugs on the front of her shirt, gesturing to the stain. “I hope you don’t mind me sitting this one out. You’re going to have to do this mission solo, dude.”

“I think I can handle it, commander,” he promises, still grinning.

She makes a funny face and gives him a sloppy salute. “Let me grab my keys and we can hit the road.”

When he remains still she blows a raspberry at him. “Well? What are you waiting for? Get to stepping, man.” Her eyes take on a playful glint. “Last one to the car has to ride in the backseat!”

With that she snatches her keys off the counter and bolts for the door. Stiles calls, Hey, I can’t even drive! but he is already sprinting to catch up, laughter echoing around him.

He tucks his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie while he looks for an empty spot on the bleachers. The soldier - Cam - is behind him, so he has to make sure he sits somewhere with enough room for two. He isn’t sure if Cam would like to sit rather than stand, but Stiles can’t exactly ask him, so thinks it’s polite to give him the option. 

He brushes past students in face paint loitering on the steps and slowly walks toward the top where the crowd thins out. He overhears some girls talking about whose jersey they’d like to wear, others giggling over who they want to go to prom with, some of them holding handmade signs, the scattered glitter twinkling under the floodlights. A few people glance at him when he passes, never pausing their conversation, gaze darting over him for a fraction of a second before looking away. He’s an afterthought; no one’s world ever stops for Stiles Stilinski.

Stiles hunches his shoulders up and keeps his eyes down until he gets to the last row. He sits and tries to pretend he isn't waiting for Cam to get comfortable before he can breathe. He kicks lightly at the old sunflower seed shells that litter the footwell, digging the toe of his shoe into them until he hears them crack, trying to calm the burning in his chest. It's cool out - when he reaches a hand to wipe the tip of his nose, he can't feel it. He sniffs and twists his hands together where they rest in his hoodie, absently stretching the fabric forward as he leans until his elbows rest on his knees, eyes glued to the players practicing with each other on the field. In his peripheral, he sees Cam come to stand beside him. He doesn't sit.

His eyes find Derek almost immediately, conditioned to seek out the number four after all this time. Stiles swallows and guiltily drags his gaze away, opting to stare at the scoreboard, how the lights flicker on the left side because the bulbs haven’t been replaced in so long.

Since the memorial service, Stiles has been trying to push thoughts of Derek out of his mind. His mom has always teased him when it came to Derek - wiggled her eyebrows when Stiles brought up lacrosse or the way she always playfully shoved him toward the Hales at town functions. It’s a Mom Thing, Stiles thinks, to just intuitively know.

Years ago, when he was first experiencing panic attacks after working himself up about his dad’s job, she taught him some of the constellations. She pulled an old throw blanket from the linen closet and draped it across the grass in the backyard, tugged Stiles to sit beside her while she pointed toward the sky.

“The constellation behind Orion,” she said softly, “that’s Canis Major. He’s one of Orion’s dogs, you can sort of see how he is chasing after the hare in front of him.” She was laid back, flat on the grass, only halfway on the blanket as she pulled Stiles down with her. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Canis Major looks like a big dog, but he’s really just a puppy.” 

Stiles squinted up at the sky, reluctant to tell his mom that he didn’t see a dog, or a hunter, but he wanted to. He tried.

She glanced over at him, smiled gentle and soft, lips curled a little like she and Stiles were exchanging secrets, like this was just for them. “Do you want to know something cool?”

Stiles nodded, listened eagerly while he tried once again to see the dog. He wanted her to know that he was really trying. “Canis Major holds the brightest star we know of, it’s called Sirius. So, Canis Major is special, because he was trusted with it.”

Stiles stared up at the sky and all he saw was stars. Just stars for as far as his eyes could see. But, he was just happy to be there, happy that his mom had the power to turn stars into people. 

Eventually, his dad began flickering the patio light to signal they should come back in, his mom sighed.

“Think of it like this, Mischief. Panic is the hare, you know, the one Canis Major is chasing around.” She coaxed him up, pulling their blanket from the ground. As she shook it off, she told him, “Whenever you feel like you can’t breathe, remember that it’s just the hare.” She draped the blanket over her arm, blowing a raspberry to dispel the hair from in front of her face. “You’re big enough to catch a hare, don’t you think?” 

Then she had chased him around the yard until his dad stepped out, smiling, trying to feign exasperation as he told them they were loud enough to wake the man on the moon. 

Stiles feels a bit panicked now, sitting out here in the cold while lacrosse players dart around on the field. Sitting next to Cam, he feels like his head is underwater, like he can’t see anything clearly. He takes a deep breath, and when he forces it out, it creates a small curl of fog. He allows himself a moment to look again at number four, how Derek’s calves flex when his feet hit the grass, before leaning his head back to look for Sirius.

He gets a little lost, staring unseeingly at the white glow created by the stadium lights. It’s the kind of blinding light that illuminates all the little particles swirling around in the air, like strips of sunshine between plastic blinds. He listens to the crowd cheering, the players on the field, the chants from the cheerleaders. He allows it to settle around him, fade until it’s all just white noise, a muted rhythm behind the cadence of his heart in his ears.

He tries to think of a time when he wasn’t worried so much. In a way, he feels robbed. He’s thirteen, he isn’t supposed to be scared of ghosts. He isn’t supposed to have to tell Derek and Laura Hale that he saw their mother, that he knew who killed their family and didn’t do anything about it. He isn’t supposed to feel so alone. 

He’s supposed to have scraped knees from doing dumb things on skateboards to impress girls who don’t like him. He’s supposed to have a strained relationship with his dad because he is a deputy and Stiles does bad things like set off bottle rockets and key cars and steal candy from convenience stores. He’s supposed to be doing bad in math so he can yell at his mom about how school is stupid and make half-formed plans to drop out to be in a garage band that never makes it big. He’s supposed to be a dumb, good-for-nothing kid. Instead, he is sitting next to a dead man trying not to scream at the pressure he feels to help. 

Stiles drops his head back down and focuses on what is happening on the field. Or, he tries to. Cam moves suddenly in his peripheral and Stiles jerks his head sharply to look at him. The man isn’t looking at Stiles, though, his eyes are locked onto the team. Stiles tries to follow his line of sight, but he can’t pinpoint where his gaze is fixated with all of the players running around.

He bites down on his tongue as hard as he can without hurting himself when Cam steps into the aisle and begins walking hastily to the bottom of the bleachers. Stiles cautiously slides over until he can stand, trying to catch up without calling attention to himself. He sidesteps a few students standing by the rails, mumbling excuse me, sorry while keeping his eyes on Cam. When he gets to where the bleachers meet the grass, the soldier is about five feet in front of him. He comes to an abrupt halt and Stiles hovers by the side of the stands, if he goes any further on the field, he’ll interfere with the game.

Under his breath he hisses, “Cam.”

The man doesn’t acknowledge him. But, Stiles watches in horror while the grass at the man’s feet dips over as it becomes coated in red. Cam turns his head slightly and Stiles can see that his mouth is open, his chin dripping rivulets of blood that have stained his neck and the front of his uniform.

Stiles swallows and tries to calm his racing heart. “Cam,” he repeats, a little louder, a little more like a plea.

The man turns to look at him, they hold eye contact for a few loaded seconds. Stiles stares at the blood pouring from him, the distraught look in his eyes. Then, the man screams.

It is a harsh, grating sound of pure agony. Stiles flinches and brings his hands up to his ears, but he can still hear it through the gaps in his fingers. He screams and screams, it sounds like it gets louder, amplifying as the seconds go on. Stiles forces his eyes open and watches with ice where his heart should be as Cam marches onto the field. His screams are taking shape now, like he is trying to form words, like he just remembered how. Stiles forces his feet to carry him forward.

“Stop,” he croaks. “Stop it.”

He digs his fingernails into the hair around his ears, relishes in the bite. Cam’s screams sound wet, blocked by the blood. Stiles can hear what he is saying now.

“Isaac!” Cam screeches, walking right through number fourteen. The jersey reads LAHEY across the back. Stiles digs his fingernails in harder when Cam screams the boy’s name again.

Cam turns to Stiles, eyes wild. “He is hurting him!” he yells, words desperate like he is begging for Stiles to understand something.

Stiles closes his eyes against the tears threatening to spill. “No one’s hurting him, Cam. This is lacrosse, they’re supposed to be rough.”

Cam walks through Isaac again before he stomps up to Stiles. Stiles stumbles back, tries not to let the fear overtake him. He doesn’t know what to do. “He’s hurting him!”

Stiles takes in their surroundings. Notices how everything has stopped. The players are staring at him, some of them laughing, others concerned, their brows furrowed and mouths downturned. His eyes find Derek, knuckles white around his lacrosse stick, his net holding the ball. Derek was going to score. Stiles feels his hands shake.

Cam is still screaming in his face, nonsensical gibberish about someone hurting, gurgled through the liquid pouring from his lips. Stiles feels like he can’t breathe. He squeezes his eyes shut.

Panic is the hare. Panic is the hare. Panic is the hare.  

“You okay, kid?”

He can feel someone gripping his shoulder, shaking him lightly. Shifting to awkwardly pat his back while he tries to breathe.

“Kid? Are you okay? You got someone I can call?”

Cam is apparently done with his show, he has gone silent where he stands beside Stiles.

“Sorry,” he manages to get out. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—” he takes a deep breath and slowly lowers his trembling hands from his ears. “I’m okay, you don’t have to call anyone.”

“You sure?”

Stiles nods at the man, not daring to speak, afraid that he will make everything worse.

When he steps away, barking commands at the players, Derek Hale crowds him.

“What was that?” he grits out, right in Stiles’ face. Stiles is sort of tired of people being in his personal space. He takes a step back.

“Nothing. I’m just - it was nothing.”

Derek glares at him. “That was not nothing. Your heart—“ Derek swipes his tongue over his front teeth and rolls his shoulders. “You were afraid. What was scaring you?”

“I was not afraid,” Stiles spits. “I was just being stupid. It was nothing, I’m a spaz.” The last part comes out mocking, a cold mimicry of what everyone calls him behind his back.

Derek studies him for just a moment, then sets his jaw. “So you fucked up the game for nothing?”

Stiles bites the inside of his cheek until it makes his eyes water, until he can pretend that he isn’t about to cry. “I guess so.” 

Derek sighs, like this whole conversation is beneath him, like speaking to Stiles is the worst thing that could possibly happen. Aside from his entire family dying. Stiles harshly blinks away that thought. “Why are you even here, Stilinski?”

He grinds his teeth together, choosing not to respond. 

Derek opens his mouth again when the coach calls, “Hale!”

“Just go home,” is all the older boy says before he turns to jog back over with the other players.

Stiles sniffs and swipes his forearm over his burning eyes. “You just ruined everything for me, do you even get that,” he hisses bitterly to where Cam is standing, just to have something negative to say.

He glances back to the field, Derek is staring at him. Probably waiting for Stiles to leave like he was just publicly commanded to do. Stiles curls his shoulders forward and makes his way toward the parking lot.

The man walks right beside Stiles. He can hear blood dripping on the asphalt, droplets splattering in a way that echoes louder than gunshots around Stiles’ skull, he can’t think past the wet smack of the soldier’s boots.

Stiles stops abruptly and tugs at his hair, aims an exasperated laugh at the ground before throwing his head back to look at the sky. He is too high strung for this, after the onslaught of panic on the field and his confrontation with Derek. He cannot do this right now. He feels shaky all over, like his atoms are vibrating too fast, like the orbitals of his electrons changed direction or they unpaired or something and now he is offset by Earth’s magnetic field - he pauses for a second just to make sure he doesn’t vaporize. He squints, tries to focus on whether or not he is looking at Polaris or the blinking light of an airplane while he bites at his lip to stop it from trembling. There aren’t very many stars out, or, well, the stars are out and he just can’t see them. The air still looks like it’s covered in a thin layer of fog because of the stadium lights, all reflective and hazy. He stays like that while he talks, tries to will the tears to seep back behind his eyes.

“Do you think this is funny,” he croaks. He wants to be mean, spit acid just to purge it from his body, to make himself feel better. “I don’t know how to help you. I have tried so hard to figure out why you’re here and—” his voice breaks so he sniffs and clears his throat. “You made me look like I’m insane.” He tries not to scream at the thought of what his classmates are going to say, what the lacrosse team thinks of him now. What Derek thinks of him now.

When Stiles finally feels like he has things under control, like maybe his bones are solid and his feet won’t leave the ground, he brings his head down to face Cam, who is looking at a point beyond his shoulder. Stiles studies him, really, really studies him. The lines of his face, the clench of his fists, the way his nose has a bump in its bridge near the tip. Stiles takes a shaky breath and allows himself to deflate when he admits miserably, “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“He’s hurting him,” Cam repeats miserably.

Stiles feels like he could begin vibrating at the sheer amount of helpless frustration coursing through his veins. He curls his hands into fists at his sides. “Who is hurting him, Cam? I don’t understand what you are trying to tell me.”

Cam’s nostrils flare like he has a right to be angry with Stiles, like Stiles is the one in the wrong. He levels Stiles with a look. “Dad.”

Stiles sucks in a breath through his teeth. His entire head feels hot. “Isaac’s dad is hurting him?”

Cam nods. “Our dad.”

Stiles' mouth drops open and when he goes to reply, he is cut off.

“Stiles?”

Laura Hale is standing at the gate’s entrance where the parking lot turns into the lacrosse field, Stiles can still hear the crowd cheering.

“Uh, hey,” he sniffs, rubbing the back of his hand across his nose to hide how he almost tacked on a Ms. Hale at the end. He doesn’t feel like he knows her well enough to call her Laura.

Her eyes dart around him suspiciously. Like she is looking for another person. Stiles feels his blood turn cold.

“Who are you talking to?”

“I’m just talking to myself.” He shrugs, tries to make it casual but it feels stiff and uncomfortable. “It’s a weird thing I do sometimes.”

Laura nods along slowly, but he can tell she isn’t buying it. She tilts her head to the side and narrows her eyes at him, like she wants him to know she is sizing him up, making it clear that she doesn’t believe him.

“So, on the field, was that you talking to yourself?”

Stiles nods his head, afraid that if he tries to say anything, he will spill the truth. Afraid he may start screaming, just like Cam, and never stop. Laura deserves to know about her mother - Stiles would never forgive her if their roles were reversed. Looking at her now, he wonders what the gentle lines of her face would look like contorted with anger, if her eyes would shimmer with rage like Derek’s.

She hums thoughtfully. “Does talking to yourself normally result in a panic attack or,” she leaves it open ended, raising her eyebrows in an invitation for him to confirm or deny.

Stiles rubs a hand over the back of his neck and squeezes. It feels like it is blistering with heat despite the cold. “That wasn’t a panic attack, I was just overreacting it’s—”

“Stiles.”

He purses his lips and looks over at her. She softens, her posture going lax and her face smoothing out until she looks nothing short of understanding.

“You’ll think I’m crazy,” he promises quietly.

She laughs and it sounds self-deprecating, mocking, but not toward Stiles. “I promise you, nothing you could say would surprise me.”

He takes a deep breath, it burns going down. He bites the bullet. “I saw your mother’s ghost in my house the day of the fire.”

Stiles was prepared for her to scream at him, to laugh, to get in his face and tell him that this isn’t a joke. Prepared for her to grip him by the shoulders and shake him, demand to know what he is playing at. What he isn’t prepared for is the way Laura closes her eyes. Isn’t prepared for how when she blinks them open, they’re blood red.

Chapter Text

sixteen.

Growing up, Derek was a kid who still needed training wheels on his bike, who always lost at hide and seek, who wanted so desperately to be like Laura - on his own accord, not just because she was the favorite - that it ate away at his insides. He was a kid who was embarrassed that the Hale name planted so many of the roots in Beacon Hills. Now, he’s Derek Hale. Which, to a bystander, or someone delivering an off-script aside to the audience, would technically be the same thing. Derek Hale and the easily flustered kid are the same person. But, really, they aren’t. Because this version of Derek is constantly clawing at the confines of his skin. This Derek feeds off of validation, reassurance. This Derek never really feels seen. 

His family loves him - there’s no disputing that. But, even with the grades, the accomplishments, his excellence with lacrosse, he never feels like he’s enough. It’s hard to take up space when you don’t feel like you deserve it. 

Derek is sixteen when he meets Kate Argent.

She works as a teaching aide at Beacon High. She is still relatively new, she joined their class in early January after they returned from Christmas break. She’s older - in her mid-to-late twenties - and when she looks at him, he feels like someone is actually looking at him. Like she’s reaching beneath the influence of his family name, helping him step out of the shoes he has been struggling to fill all these years. 

She’s pretty, in the way women generally are - how they have the air of mature confidence, the sure set in their shoulders, how they smell like expensive perfume rather than cheap body spray. She smiles at him sometimes and it feels like a secret, like the space between them is charged with electricity. He often leaves class buzzing with the remnants. 

On a particularly uneventful day in early May, close to the end of the school year, she tells him that he has impressive grades, but she could help tutor him in a couple of the subjects she has noticed him performing poorly in. She sets up a summer arrangement, politely works it around his lacrosse schedule with that same smile. 

When he steps into the threshold of his mother’s home office after school, quietly knocking his knuckles against the jamb, he tells her that he set up a routine with a tutor. She glances at him from over the top of her computer monitor and smiles, distracted, softly saying she is proud of him for taking the extra step to improve his academics. Then, she blinks back to the screen, resuming the clicks of her typing. A dismissal. 

At dinner, he concentrates on the grating scrapes of everyone’s cutlery, stares down at his plate while Laura and his parents talk pack politics, Cora chiming in wryly every now and then, causing everyone to laugh. Derek just focuses on stirring his fork counterclockwise in the potatoes until there is a hole in the middle. 

He excuses himself and rinses his plate in the sink before quietly slipping into his room. When he sits at his desk to start on his homework, tapping his pencil in a steady rhythm, his eyes involuntarily drift over to the schedule written in her cursive ink folded by his lamp. 

Derek wonders if he should ask Peter what he thinks. He supposes his uncle would know how he feels, that harrowing desperation to be loved. The man had chased after Claudia Stilinski until he had nowhere left to run, until it was clear that no amount of wanting it bad enough would finally make it happen. That for people like them, sometimes trying is all they can do. He decides to keep it for himself. He deserves to have something that’s just for him. 

The next day, they have a community lacrosse game - something stupid they do before the end of the school year to bring the town together. Derek plays hard, dripping with sweat and chugging water like he has never been so thirsty in his life.

When they take a break, he squints beyond the afternoon sun to search the stands. His family is there, his mother and father, Laura and Cora. None of them are looking at him, though, none of them seeking out number four with his same intensity. They’re smiling, and when Cora gets neon orange nacho cheese from the concession stand in Laura’s hair, they all turn red-faced from laughing. Laura playfully lunges at their little sister and the water turns to acid in Derek’s mouth. He forces himself to pull his gaze away, scanning further and settling his eyes on Stilinski. 

The kid’s buzzcut is as recognizable as Make Out Point - a landmark in Beacon Hills. He’s scrawny, all awkward limbs and seemingly misplaced knobs of bone. He moves like a ragdoll, like he has just learned to walk, like all of his mannerisms were randomized and drawn from a hat upon his creation. Derek has known of him for years, seen him at the town functions, always laughing or talking a mile a minute or knocking into something and blushing bright red. It's hard to miss someone like that. He isn't sure if that's good or bad. 

Stilinski’s with the McCall kid, they’re inseparable. It’s common knowledge, if you see McCall, you wait a beat for Stilinski to pop up beside him. Behind their backs, everyone calls them Twofer: two for the price of one. 

Derek has kept an eye on Scott McCall since he had a nearly fatal asthma attack at the annual Hale Fundraiser last year. He was certain that day that his mother was going to bite the kid with the rest of the town watching on. Stilinski had cried and cried and cried - his face blotchy and slick with it, and it made Derek feel off-balance, his gums itching to accommodate fangs, his body aching to just do something. Because Stilinski doesn’t ever cry, he mumbles jokes that tank and spouts nonsensical word-vomit and laughs like the sound is being forcibly ripped from him. But he doesn’t cry. That’s the only reason the memory sticks in his mind like a barb, making his chest feel oddly constricted when he thinks about it. 

The kid in question locks eyes with Derek as his eyeline skirts over him. He blushes crimson and Derek sees his throat bob on a swallow. Stilinski is always staring at him - never fails to set his eyes on Derek at events, games, or whenever they see each other around town - and the view of his blooming cheeks makes a smirk tug at Derek’s lips while he allows his gaze to continue on, if only to put the kid out of his misery. He knows better than to waste his time on Stilinski’s childhood crush. He’ll get over it.

Derek’s heart lurches when he sees that Miss Argent is in the stands. 

She’s already looking at him, and for some reason that makes his chest feel warm. Like maybe she came here to see him. Maybe she is watching him, maybe he impresses her. He shakes his head to rid it of that stupid thought. But, she smiles at him, that same smile, and he quickly takes another gulp of water, turning away when Coach Finstock blares the whistle, calling for them to get in position. 

When he crouches on the field, he aims another glance at the bleachers, buzzing through to his fingertips with electricity. 

He is nervous entering the library for his first tutoring session. 

He doesn’t want Miss Argent - Kate, call me Kate, Derek - to think he isn’t smart. He worries that the poor performance she wants to address with him makes her see him negatively. She probably saw his final grade in biology and laughed, thinking who could even do that badly on something so easy?

Suddenly, his palms feel sweaty. He doesn’t want to disappoint her. He can’t lose the only person who sees him. 

They agreed to meet at the tables by the references section. He seems to have gotten there first, the only other people around him being the elderly man seated in one of the tattered armchairs and a younger girl with her mother in the children’s section.

He heaves his bag along the table that sits beside a towering shelf filled with volumes of old encyclopedias and cracked SAT-prep booklets. He has a decent idea of what classes he’ll have during the oncoming school year, so he managed to snag some junior-level textbooks with help from Finstock. He pulls out a chemistry textbook and opens to the first chapter, tapping his pen against the page while he waits for Miss Argent to arrive. 

It isn’t like what he expected. She spends most of the time talking about herself - how school was for her, the subjects she liked, the social structure at the time and where she fit in. She asks Derek if there is a lucky lady in his life who gets to have all of his attention, and he blushes hot as he shakes his head. She smirks and moves to sit beside him, when she leans over to correct the scratchwork he did for precalc, he can smell her strawberry shampoo, see the bits of blonde threaded through her dark hair. 

He leaves feeling like he didn’t learn anything other than how to hold his breath. 

Miss Argent wears perfume that makes Derek think of Christmas.

She smells like the icing on red velvet cake and vanilla, sometimes like flowers or springtime or when you go outside and the dew makes the grass smell like water, if water had a smell. It reminds him of glittery tinsel, of shiny red ornaments, something saccharine and sweet.

She’s just so pretty. The way her hair shines harlow gold and coils down in loose curls, her smile showing perfectly straight teeth. How her eyelashes make her eyes look like they’re several different colors at once.

“You know, you really are a lacrosse star.”

He blinks himself out of his thoughts, glancing up at Kate where she is watching him convert units for a throwaway physics lab. He clears his throat. “Thank you.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t look like a smile. It looks like a grimace warped at the lips. She says, “You’re fit for a sixteen year old.” He inhales a surprised breath, feels hot behind his eyes. He doesn’t know how to read things like this, much less how to respond to them. “I’d say you’re almost inhumanly athletic.”

He feels his blood run cold. Just stop pumping, going stagnant and clogging his veins. She knows. She has to know. He feels ice cold fear drip from the base of his skull, down his body, and sink into his bones. She is looking at him like she knows and - 

She laughs, easy and joking, dispelling the tension. “Jeez, Derek, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” She leans back in her chair, relaxing her posture. Smiling a smile that looks like a smile this time. “I’m just saying, you’re really talented. You have a gift.”

He sighs and shakes his head, grinning small while he thanks her again. He feels his shoulders slump in relief as he does the calculations to turn miles per minute into kilometers per second. 

Derek thinks the worst part of being a Hale is the reputation. The inherent air of elite notability that trails him in public. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair at some inane town function, just there with his family for the sake of being there. We came, we saw, we conquered - or some shit like that. 

There’s a customary flute of champagne sitting next to his plate of dessert. It’s more of a statement than anything - I am at an important event. It’s not like he can get drunk. He picks it up and sips at it intermittently, merely out of respect while he listens to his parents make their rounds and chat up the Big Names of Beacon Hills. Laura remains silent by their side. She’s learning. Cora drops into the chair next to him, huffing with her arms crossed. “This is stupid,” she complains, moving to tug at the collar of her dress.

Derek shrugs and nods. Because she is right. He will never understand why they have to be here, stiffly dressed and shaking hands with people who have known him since he was a baby. He slides his dessert to her, because he’s not going to eat it, and a grin curls to replace the frown at her lips. He breathes a laugh and goes back to eavesdropping, not willing to move from his seat just yet. 

He hears Stiles before he sees him. That’s normally how it goes. He can hear the erraticism of the kid’s heartbeat, the way his too-big clothing rustles together while he fidgets, the tapping of his foot and the way his skin chafes when he scratches nervously at his cheek. Derek tilts his head, takes another futile sip of champagne to disguise his movements. Cora loves to call him out for being rude.

Everyone knows of the Stilinskis. And everyone has their opinions. Most commonly, everyone loves Claudia. It’s hard not to. She’s bubbly and smiley and she offers to hold others’ crying babies, coos at kids in strollers and makes funny facial expressions in mundane conversations. On more than one occasion, she has stopped Derek at these functions, gasped dramatically and said, “Do my eyes deceive me or is this handsome devil Derek Hale?” and he would grin despite himself, and she would rotate her finger in a circle, indicating for him to do a three-sixty. Then, she would exclaim, “Jeez Louise! What are they feeding you, kid?” She dresses brightly and she’s always red-cheeked like Stiles. Claudia Stilinski is friendly and kind, and it makes you feel like a piece of you is better just from knowing her. Derek can understand where Peter’s fascination comes from. 

Deputy Stilinski is also well-liked. He just has one of those nice faces, the ones with the laugh lines and the easy eyes. He jokes with all the lacrosse players, winks and says he won’t say anything to the sheriff about them drinking champagne at these functions. 

But, it is widely known that they make the best of a bad situation. Their house isn’t the nicest and Stiles’ clothes always smell like the cling of someone else, thrift-store stale and well-worn sour. Claudia wears summer-season dresses all year long, in the cold when they’re buy-one-get-one, a brightly-patterned antithesis to the winter’s dull. Deputy Stilinski works long hours, but being a cop doesn’t pay much, and it certainly doesn’t leave room for luxury, especially when he is the only one working. 

Derek has heard Natalie Martin insult them under her breath a few times, causing the white-collar leaches around her to laugh unkindly. It used to make Derek angry, cause him to grit his teeth, but now he knows they’re just jealous. No one will ever be like the Stilinskis.  

“Stiles, you can’t be glued to me the entire night, kiddo. I need some space to breathe,” Deputy Stilinski jokes in exasperation, but his words are gentle rather than chastising. 

“John, leave him alone,” Claudia scolds lightly. “Come on, Mischief, isn’t Scott here tonight?”

“No, his dad is in town for the week,” Stiles grumbles, and Derek allows his eyes to flit across the venue to analyze the exchange. Stiles is scuffing his shoes on the concrete path beneath the awning by the entrance. His parents exchange looks over Stiles’ head, both some iteration of a sympathetic wince. 

“Well, I think I saw Mrs. Martin earlier, maybe Lydia is here and you can—”

“Mom, everyone here hates me.”

Mrs. Stilinski’s throat clicks with how quickly her mouth falls shut, the words forcibly halted. The deputy sighs again. “Stiles, son, that seems a little dramatic, have you—”

“No one likes a freak, dad. They think I’m weird, okay?”

Stiles’ insistence that no one here likes him ceases all other protests. Claudia runs a gentle hand through his hair and Mr. Stilinski rests an affectionate palm on his shoulder, squeezing. “Alright, kid. Come on, I think they have a chocolate fountain by the dessert table.”

Derek tunes them out, looks down at his lap while something uneasy settles in his chest. Something he recognizes. Something he doesn’t want to think about. 

Instead, he perks up when he hears a familiar laugh. Miss Argent is seated at a rather large table, beside a bearded man who looks to be similar in age, with a young girl on her other side. Across the table is a red-headed woman and an older, balding man. The Argent family, it seems. He has never seen them all together, honestly, he didn’t even think they lived in Beacon Hills. Kate pauses in her laughter to sip from her glass, eyes connecting with Derek’s momentarily. She offers him a wink before looking away, delving back into her story with bright eyes. 

He feels his face heat up as he clears his throat and looks back at his own table. Cora pokes fun at him, teasing until their own family seats themselves around them. For the rest of the night, he refuses to let his attention wander, lest his eyes seek out blonde hair and a sparkling smile. 

The next tutoring session feels different. 

He keeps his head down, gaze averted. Hastily scribbles formulas and extensively writes out lab conclusions, including more detail than necessary. 

Eventually, Kate clears her throat, indicating she would like his attention. He reluctantly drags his eyes up, waiting. “Your family isn’t really involved with you, are they?”

He feels himself sit up straighter, become defensive. “My family loves me.”

She smiles at him, then, this sort of smirk-adjacent expression as though he has proven her correct. “That’s not what I asked.”

Derek just shrugs, uncomfortable with this topic of conversation. It feels distinctly not right, an overlap of two opposite aspects in his life. An intersection of two different types of hurt that he would rather keep separate. “I don’t know what you mean,” he admits honestly. Because he doesn’t. He isn’t sure what she’s implying or if he would even like to know. 

“All I’m saying is,” she begins, leaning back and crossing her arms as if this is casual, “I barely see them at the lacrosse games. Yet, your eldest sister has their unwavering attention, it seems.”

He can’t say, Laura is going to be my Alpha, cannot express that in their hierarchy, Laura will be assuming the family name and inheriting the height of pack-related authority. He cannot tell Miss Argent that, in the grand scheme of things, Laura means more than him. Holds precedence in their list of priorities. 

“Some things are not like they seem,” he says instead. “You don’t know my family.” 

Miss Argent’s expression twists unhappily at that, her eyes becoming cold, the relaxed nuance seeping from her posture until she is sitting cross-legged and straight-backed. She says, “I apologize for speaking out of turn, what did you get for number four?” And that’s that. 

Derek mulls over it, that night. He stares at his ceiling while the idealized vision he had of Miss Argent cracks to splinters. In part, it is his own fault, the way he built her up in his head as the height of niceness, as someone who saw him and decided he was worth it.  

He tosses and turns, uncomfortable with the thought of losing the only person who seemed to care that he existed. 

The next day, he gets a ninety-three on his practice physics exam. It feels like vindication. 

Kate doesn’t bring up his family again. 

For the next few sessions, it remains strictly formal with no outside conversation, until today she breaks the ice.

She looks nice, pretty. She’s wearing lip gloss and her hair is curled and she smells like lavender and vanilla wafers. They are flipping through his biology textbook, pausing on a few of the practice tests.

"You know," she starts, tapping the end of her pen against the page, right next to a diagram detailing the tertiary consumers of a food chain, "everyone always likens men to animals. Have you noticed that?"

Derek swallows. He hadn't noticed. 

She continues like she didn't need him to answer, "What they don't tell you is, the female of the species is usually deadlier."

He feels like something has exploded in his chest, like the debris has scattered around his skeletal structure, pieces of his ribs are now rattling in his skull. "Except for humans," he rasps, attempting to joke. His tongue feels thick in his mouth, like it is sliding down his throat and choking him. 

Kate smirks at him, baring her teeth in a semblance of a shark smile. "Especially the humans."

Derek can't imagine what he must look like, the terror that is probably etched into his face. Because she is smiling, and she still looks so pretty, but she is smiling and her teeth are straight and white and it feels like she is threatening him. She feels dangerous. 

Kate blows out a tinkling laugh, erasing the tenseness from the line of his shoulders. She teases, slyly, “Have you ever even had a girlfriend, Derek?”

He has his first kiss across the back seats of her car. It’s bright red, parked near the tail end of the parking lot that typically remains mostly empty. 

She wants to do more, tells him as much, runs cold fingertips beneath the leg of his gym shorts, but something feels wrong. What began as exciting, rebellious, has lost its flair and now he isn’t sure how he ended up here, in her backseat, breathing heavily with his shirt off. He feels too big for his skin, like pieces of him don't quite fit right.

For the first time, he feels desired. Wanted. Miss Argent wants to strip him bare and have all of him, even the bad pieces. In some far corner of his mind, he knows this is supposed to be the good part, the life-changing part, the happy ending to a sad movie, cold water over a blistering burn. This was supposed to be his chance. He ruined it, his stupid fucking head ruined it. He feels angry at himself, more than anything. But, it isn’t right. He can feel that it isn’t. He gets it, just a little bit. What she was saying about the female of the species. 

Miss Argent seems angry when he says he needs to get home, tells her that he had fun but he has to go. She drives him back to the library’s entrance, a frown curled at her lips. All he can think about is the skip in her heart that accompanied everything she whispered into his ear. How the cling of her perfume was suffocating rather than intoxicating. How nothing felt as good as he thought and he just wished he could be in his own room lying in his own bed. 

He texts Laura and asks if she can come pick him up. He normally walks home, but today he feels jittery, nervous. Like he doesn’t want to make the walk all by himself. Laura arrives around twenty-five minutes later in their dad’s camaro. She takes one look at him when he gets in and turns the radio up before twisting the air conditioning dial. He can only imagine how he looks, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, frantic and hard-edged. He appreciates the fact that he doesn’t have to say anything, she can probably smell the vanilla that has adhered itself within his skin.

When they pull into the driveway, he offers her a fleeting, barely-there thanks, Laur, at the front door’s threshold and takes the steps two at a time up to his bedroom. 

Derek spends a lot of time just thinking. Wondering why his lips burn and why he feels as though his body has been caked in dirt, filthy. 

He remains quiet, listening to his family carry on with their day as he feels frozen. He can hear his mother typing on her keyboard, taking sips from her glass through a metal straw that clinks every so often. His father speaks charismatically on the phone with a few different clients and Derek can hear it when he props his feet on the desk, the thump of his dress-shoes on the wood. He hears his mother say, teasing, “Michael, no shoes on the furniture,” and the man’s answering grumble while the client continues talking, unaware. 

He hears Laura start the shower, the water thrumming through the pipes in the walls. Can hear the scratch of Cora’s pencil on her paper as she does homework, the muffled sound of music in her headphones. 

Everyone’s life goes on. Nothing stops for Derek Hale. 

It makes him feel sick. He rolls over and tunes everyone out, relishing in the silence. 

All alone. 

At dinner, he feels things rise to the summit, teetering on the edge and threatening to plunge him into oblivion. 

He waits until Laura has excused herself, until Cora babbles enough nonsense to be prompted into going to her own room, all but alpha-commanded to finish the rest of her assignments. Derek idly scrapes his fork against his nearly-empty plate until his mother clears her throat and makes an expectant noise. Looking across the table at her, he is met with soft eyes and raised eyebrows. His father is scrolling through his phone, locking it and setting it face-down when his mother swats him on the arm. 

Derek sighs, he isn’t sure what he was meaning to accomplish with this. Almost opts to chicken out. “Do you guys ever—” he blows a breath out and sets his fork down. “Do you guys ever think I weigh you down?”

He hears the uptick in their hearts, sees the heaviness in their eyes as they exchange matching glances. “Derek, no,” his mother assures, gently. “What makes you say that, honey? You don’t weigh us down.”

He chooses to pick at his fingernails rather than look at her, rather than face the tightness in his chest and the way his throat feels like it has been kinked shut like a water hose. “Sometimes, it feels like no one sees me,” he admits. 

The way it goes quiet is answer enough, he thinks. How in his peripheral he can see his mother slouch and his father snake an arm around her shoulders. 

“Derek,” she begins, “I am so sorry that we made you feel like no one sees you. Or if we made you feel like you are dead weight.”

She stretches her arm across the table, rests her hand palm-up, waiting like an offering of peace. Derek sniffs hard and slots his hand within hers, allows her to tangle their fingers together and squeeze tightly. “I wouldn’t want you to be anyone else. I swear.”

The steadiness of her heart is the only thing that keeps him from breaking apart, from slipping between the cracks in the floorboards. He excuses himself from the table and while he showers he wonders why he still feels like there is nothing he can do to stop himself from drifting away, out of reach. 

When they were kids, much much younger, Derek used to mess around with Cora until she cried. Laura would snap at him and huff, “Derek, knock it off,” and he would laugh until Cora stopped crying and instead did her level best to claw and bite at him in retaliation. She would remain relentless in her attack until he pinned her arms and dramatically cried, “Oh, Queen Cora, I offer my sincerest apologies!” He would curtsy and tickle at her until she shrieked her forgiveness through bouts of laughter. 

The times they spent together as children hold tight to some of his best memories. 

There’s a lake near the preserve, all dark water and bushes that hum with insects. Trees that sway in the wind, creaking and homing the cries of birds. Their parents would take them there when it got insufferably hot. It was their property, so no one else was around - they were free to shift and scream loudly. That lake was the incarnation of the word uninhibited, and Derek realizes now that he took it for granted. That he didn’t know what he’d had, then.

He used to swim as far out as he could, way farther than Cora’s little feet could touch, and he would call out to her, convince her that he needed her to save him. It was cruel, he knows, just an older brother being mean because he could. He would wade all the way out, until he was on the tips of his toes to continue dragging the soft ground, his chin dipping below the gentle slopes of the current. He would pretend to drown, blow his breath out so that he sank down down down and he would smile at how Cora yelled his name.

Derek would open his eyes and look out into the blue, the way the sun sliced through the water, beaming through the darkness, how he could see the bubbles moving like dust particles in the morning, when the sun spills white-gold through the curtains. 

Derek underestimated her, though. When they got a little older, Cora became meaner, quick-witted and less likely to bare her belly just because he and Laura were bigger. That was when the fun began.

In one of their last family trips to the lake, she had reversed the roles. Derek had rushed to help and she laughed and laughed while he scowled, embarrassed at how afraid he had been. He remembers how, when it happened again the next time, he didn’t believe her. He was deep in the woods, idly carving shapes into trees, and he rolled his eyes and ignored her when she cried out for him. He remembers how she had screamed, then, how scared she sounded. Derek sprinted to the lake, evading low-hanging branches and struggling to keep his footing on the slip of leaves, blinded by the smothering heat of fear.

He remembers how terrified he’d been when he broke the treeline, watching her head dip beneath the water. She had sputtered and gasped and called his name with a voice that cracked with terror. The only thing he could hear was his own heart in his ears, his panic constricting his chest when he dove in and worried that he might be too late. He pushed through the water and fisted his hands into her t-shirt, dragged her to the bank and blinked spots from his vision while he stared up at the sky. 

He’ll never forget what that sounded like. How scared she had been, how she called for him like she knew he had her back. 

That memory is all he can think of while he stares at the plumes of smoke. How the forest is so, so quiet aside from the crackle of flames, the creak as his home’s beams give way and collapse. How the screams stopped what seems like hours ago, fizzled out while he tried to get through the mountain ash. 

He knows who did this, he can smell the cling of her perfume as though it was always there. As though it had never left his skin at all. He is paying the price, he thinks. This is the cost of being seen. The thing that makes him curl over and retch is how, weeks ago, he may have considered paying it. 

Everything passes with this jarring sense of non-linearity, then. He doesn’t know where Laura comes from, pale-faced and shaking. He doesn’t know how he ends up in a squad-car, how he finds himself seated at the station when it still feels like he’s stuck in front of the house, helpless to do anything. He wonders if Cora called for him and he never came. He thinks about how she trusted him to have her back and - 

He wishes that he hadn’t frozen in place until the woods around him were drenched with the flashes of red and blue, the preserve echoing with sirens rather than the screams. He couldn’t stop staring at the space where his bedroom was, where he went to sleep last night listening to Cora snore. He’s sitting with his hands clasped in his lap while he hears Laura crying behind the door of a deputy’s office. He has his fists curled tight, too tight, tight enough that his claws pierce the flesh of his palms, buried deep within the skin so no one can see them. He stares at a poster across the hall and closes his eyes when his gaze catches on the 1-800 number for the sexual assault hotline. He wishes he hadn’t froze. He wishes he could have learned if ‘wolves can die from smoke inhalation. Wishes that he would have gulped lungfuls of soot-stained air instead of allowing his breath to catch in his throat. He didn’t even cry. He should have cried. 

Derek wonders, idly, if the flashes from the squad cars will permanently damage his vision. If he has, embedded within his DNA, what it takes to heal something like that. If he has what it takes to heal from everything else. When he glances around, there is a residual glare in his eyesight from looking at them, tainting his world with red and blue light. He doesn’t think he’ll ever look at those colors the same way again. His ears are still ringing from the sirens, from the screams, from his blood roaring with every beat of his pulse. All he can hear is Laura crying, the receptionist on the phone ordering coffee, the deputy four desks down explaining over the phone that he has to work late and I’m sorry, honey, this is going to be a big case. Derek closes his eyes and wishes he were made of ash. 

He hates the memorial.

It’s a huge chunk of shiny stone, reflecting sunlight into Derek’s eyes as someone he doesn't know speaks into a crackling microphone. The stone is engraved with a special message from Beacon Hills’ City Council, thanking the Hale family for all they did for the community.

His family funded the local veterinary clinic, donated to various wildlife preserves surrounding them, and funneled money into anti-deforestation organizations. He wonders if those people are going to be angry with his family for dying. He bets they would not be as sympathetic, that there wouldn’t be nearly as many people here, if they knew that they were mourning a bunch of mutts.

The thought stirs something violent in him. Makes him want to smash windows and key cars, splinter bones and burst vessels.

There are three gravestones spaced out evenly in front of the polished block of pseudo sentiment. They are each the same size, except for Cora’s, which is marginally smaller and daintier. The font on hers is less elegant, less mature, and it forces Derek to remember that she was just a kid. It makes him feel sick.

Laura gives a speech, she’d insisted that Derek write something, too. 

“Don’t you have anything to say to them?” she’d spat, voice an antithetical quiet against her tone. Derek knew she was just as tired as him. He knew she didn’t want to fight. He didn’t either. 

He just said, “No. I don’t have anything good enough,” and she frowned, went teary-eyed and left him alone.

There’s an empty patch of grass by Cora’s grave. It sticks out, contrasting against the newly filled dirt of his family’s tombs. He stares at it. Two more people speak, they’re applauded and comforted as they step down, crying. He just stares. He sits by Laura while the people around them offer their condolences.

When he feels her go still beside him, he blinks and drags his eyes to follow her line of sight. Stilinski stands across the aisle, reeking of misery where he’s pale-white in his dark suit. His eyes are wide and sad, face sharp and gaunt. Derek looks at him, waiting for him to say something - anything - but his eyes catch on someone Derek doesn’t see before he ducks his head and shuffles away. When the people in attendance begin to make their way back to their vehicles, Derek just sits and stares at that patch of grass, knowing it’s meant for him. 

Eventually, Laura tugs at his sleeve. He stands obediently, robotically, and follows her to where she stops across from their headstones. She takes a shaky breath and says, “Thank you.” He knows she isn’t talking to him. She drops his hand and walks away, leaving him so he can say what he only has the courage to say alone.

He waits until she is far enough that he is certain she cannot hear. “I weighed you down.” He curls his hands into fists. “I hope you guys remember me as someone who tried really hard to become what I knew I couldn’t be.” He starts to say more before he goes quiet, toes at the dirt with his shiny dress-shoes. He has no other words to give. He closes his eyes and turns away, walks until he is seated beside Laura in the camaro, watching the trees pass by while every breath tastes like vanilla. He rests his arm outside of the car, swaying his hand in the wind the way children do, palm outlined by the soft orange of the sky. Gooseflesh pebbles up from the chill, making the hair on his arm stand straight, saluting the damp heat. He sighs and rests his head in the crook of his elbow, closes his eyes to the wind, letting it engulf his face until he doesn’t feel like he is on fire anymore. 

Derek is no longer be able to go to the grocery store, a gallon of milk tarnished by strangers looking at him as though he is going to crack apart. Leave pieces they can pick up and trade off like souvenirs - this is from the day he finally gave in. He can no longer walk the public trail around the preserve without the air reeking with trepidation, anticipation, everyone waiting for him to snap. Because how can you lose everything and still be okay? How can it not drive you mad? He can no longer order at a restaurant without the owner fumbling to give him a discount, to make his meal free, to Is there anything else I can get you? Anything at all? him to fucking death.

Derek doesn't trust anyone who has a borderline obsessive fixation on others' misery. He doesn't trust people who are fascinated by sadness, who poke around in grieving minds, who insinuate themselves within spaces where they are not welcome and declare, wow, this is interesting. Because it isn't fucking interesting. His family is dead. That is all there is to it. 

They expect him to come apart at the seams, to unravel. They crave it. And when neither he nor Laura give them the satisfaction, they wait eagerly by their mailboxes, scour the obituaries for the next person to fall martyr to mourning. 

He wishes he could just disappear.

Peter resides in a hospital room, now. He looks... bad. It hurts to see him. So, though it floods him with guilt, Derek scarcely visits. The last time he went, he sat in a chair across from the man, listened to the heart monitor beep and the intermittent laugh track of a sitcom play in the room across the hall. He swallowed against the lump in his throat and whispered, “I’m sorry if you screamed for me and I didn’t come.”

He doesn’t go back. He tells himself that it’s because Peter looks like a corpse, like a dead man with a heart beat. But, really, it’s because he cannot face the proof that someone needed him and he never showed. 

So what, if he’s a coward? There are worse things to be. 

Laura gets her GED online, streamlines the final things she needs and then packs them both up for New York. Their parents owned property upstate, they went every summer as kids until life got too busy. 

Laura wants to go there so they can get away. 

“Don’t you feel like Beacon Hills is suffocating, Der? Don’t you feel it? Isn’t it killing you?”

He wants to say that he died in the fire. That his soul sits stagnant with Peter. That it might look like he is standing in front of her, but really he’s at Beacon Hills’ Cemetery, wasting away. But, those things would only make her miserable, would only make him a monster. It would break what’s left of her heart, that’s all it would do. At this point, it’s either her heart or his, and he’ll always choose his. So, instead, he just nods. Because Laura genuinely believes she can fix them, and maybe that's keeping her together. That New York is the balm they need to ease the blistering burn of it all. Then, the same day of the next week, they are on a plane. 

New York is a welcomed change of pace. No one knows them, no one waits around for them to crumble. Laura was supposed to be Alpha, and while she learned everything she knows from Talia, she was not studying to be a mother. Derek can tell that it eats away at her, but he is bitter, too. They both want a mom, both try so hard to grasp at something within each other. They never talk about it, but some nights Derek clatters his cutlery against the table a little harder than necessary, and Laura will slam her bedroom door, and they both know. Even if the house didn’t reek like grief, they would still know. Anyone would. 

They fight because Derek lost every one of his anchors in the same day, and now all he has is anger. All he has is anger and Laura who looks a little too much like mom, a little too much like screams within the woods and long stripes of violent flames. So, all he has is anger.  

At dinner one night, it feels as though everything has come together and pushed him over the edge. He picks at his food and Laura frowns at him across the table, chewing slowly.  

“Derek, they wouldn’t have wanted us to—”

“You will never be her,” he snarls, sliding his seat back, away from her, the legs of the chair scraping against the floorboards. He wants to be mean, sometimes, he craves it. He wants to be the reason others hurt so that he doesn't have to hurt all by himself. 

Laura’s expression closes off, eyes going cold, but Derek can hear the uptick in her heartbeat, sense the heavy weight of emotion brimming up from the dredges. Good. 

“You think I don’t know that, Derek? You think I don’t feel like I’m fucking this up every single day?”

“I think that you can play pretend all you want, that you can lock us up here in New York for as long as you want, but there’s always going to be a shell of a home in Beacon Hills.” He's breathing raggedly, but he wishes he were calm. He wishes he could say monstrous things and not feel it. The point is that he isn't supposed to feel it. “We are never going to get away, so stop making me run with you.”

He sits in his room and listens to her cry until she falls asleep. He doesn't feel good anymore, doesn't feel powerful. He just feels like he is killing the last person he has left. The next morning, he tells her that he’s sorry with his head ducked low, shoulders slumping with relief when she slides her hand through his hair. Just like mom. 

Some nights, Derek hears pattering in the hall and his heart races with flashes of Cora, how her hair was always matted in her sleep-soft face while she tiptoed across the hallway to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. But everyone heard her. They always did. 

Derek stares at the moonlight on his wall while his heart pounds and pounds, constructing an intravenous lament for a person who did not deserve to die. He hears the pattering, and his door creaks open, and his room floods full of the cold feeling of Laura’s hurt, because he knows she is thinking of Cora's bedhead, too. He continues facing the wall, but he scoots over, pulls the covers back and creates a space big enough for her to slip into.

He keeps his eyes away while she breathes on his neck. Then, her throat clicks on a swallow and she says, “I’m not afraid.” Because when she would slip into their parents’ bed, the walls still rattling with nightmare-screams, that is what she would insist. Still just a prideful kid, even with tear-soaked cheeks. So, she crawls under the sheets beside him, and she whispers that into the space between them, and Derek breathes a soft reply: I’m not afraid, either. And neither of them mention how their hearts skip. 

This is their routine, most nights. 

Eventually, Derek stops banging forks and Laura stops slamming doors. Gradually, the space on the other side of Derek’s bed stays vacant all night. Every night. Rendering him cold and alone while the floorboards in the hall still creak with the patters. Just him and the light filtering through the curtains. It has to be like this, though. At some point they have to learn to heal on their own. Have to learn to hear it, because they will be hearing it forever. 

One evening, he works up the courage to ask what he has been dying to know. To seek relief for the cut that always bleeds. 

Laura is in her room, curled over her desk and writing neatly inside of a planner that makes her think she has it together. Makes her feel better about having no idea what she's doing. Derek wishes he had a planner. 

He knocks on the jamb even though he knows she heard him coming before he even went up the stairs. She slides her chair away from the desk and comes to stand, looking at him with a softness around her mouth and a weariness within her eyes. She can probably smell the apprehension leaking from him in waves. 

“Do you think you miss them more than me?”

“Derek.”

He scrubs a rough hand over his face to combat how his eyes sting. “I just - do you miss them more than me?”

Laura closes the distance, crosses the room and rests a hand on Derek’s shoulder. “I think we both lost a lot of people who we probably never imagined living without. And I think that we grieve for them in different ways, and that’s okay. I don’t think I miss them more than you, Derek. I might just miss them differently.”

Derek ducks his head, inhaling sharply. “They loved you more, you know.”

Her hand squeezes harshly, not expecting that. “They did not love me more.”

“They did. Sometimes I wished I was more like you. I think they did, too, even if they denied it.”

Laura pulls him into a hug, hooks her chin over his shoulder and rubs her hand along his upper back. “The only thing they ever wanted for you was happiness.”

He releases a shuddering breath against her neck, shaking but trying to hide it. He just says, “Me too.”

Derek doesn’t bring it up again. 

Kate’s face decorates newspapers and the screen of their television for weeks. The headlines read, “Lady Argent confesses to Hale House Fire!”

Laura wants to gun for the death penalty, wants to take it to court. Derek begs her not to, the only thing he has ever begged for aside from when he is alone in his room, the way he begs for the ability to undo everything he has done. He declines every outreach from every lawyer, every journalist. Blowing their situation up for public scrutiny would be more dangerous for them than anyone else. That’s the only thing he thinks pushes Laura to finally drop it. 

Derek picks up the local paper while he’s stopped at a convenience store for a bottle of water. He knows better, but he flips it open. Every iteration details how beautiful she is, how hard it is to believe that she could be capable of such evil. They dubbed her Lady Lucifer, the fallen angel. What a fucking joke. Derek sets it back on the rack, trying not to acknowledge how, a while ago, he had thought the same thing. 

He will never forget how her fingers felt in his hair, how her mouth tasted, the way she bit at his neck, whispered in his ear. He has scrubbed his skin, curled a fist around an oval bar of soap and used it to scrape at his flesh, to peel it away so he can get at his insides, so he can pull out the ropes of muscles, hold himself up by the ligaments and wash them clean. The lather never sinks deep enough, never seeps into the crevices that are filled with grime, that still smell like vanilla wafers. 

Every night, he stays in the shower until all he can smell is smoke, until the steams surrounds him and he has no choice but to get out or he will scream. 

The worst part is, he has fantasized about killing her. About setting her on fire while she sleeps. About flaying her alive and showing her that he can be deadly, too. But, it never helps. So, he tries again, imagines instead that he is ripping her limb-from-limb, scattering her through the woods for the scavengers to pick at. Nothing is ever satisfying enough. Nothing will ever feel like justice. 

Eventually, it becomes unignorable that New York isn’t going to fix them. That distance isn’t going to heal them. So, they pack up a second time, not even gone half a year, heading back to the same place they were running from. 

He re-enrolls at Beacon High, assimilating like he never left. Except, everyone looks at him like his family died. Like he lost everything and disappeared for months without a trace. He is placed in intermediate classes, giving him time to catch up on what he missed while he was in New York. 

Months of tutoring down the drain. 

Isaac Lahey and Vernon Boyd drop their trays across from him at lunch, silent and friendly. They were his favorite teammates before - well, before. Slowly, they fall back into the easy camaraderie they had before Derek went and lost everything that mattered to him. They offer a mindless distraction. They get him back into lacrosse, convince Finstock to put him back on the team, insisting they cannot sideline him for the death of his family. Which is a convenient loophole. The Dead Family Card. 

One thing he never thought he would miss is Stiles Stilinski. He’s still in the stands at every game, babbling incessantly to Scott fucking McCall. It’s almost like nothing changed. He’s still wide-eyed and baby-faced, but now he won’t look at Derek. His expression goes sad, guilty, and whenever they lock eyes he ducks his head. No more embarrassed flush and nervous jitters. In some ways, he’s glad. Derek was beginning to think Stilinski would never get over his weird hang up he had with him. Something that was probably an odd mix of admiration and genuine interest. But, he’s just a kid. Derek's got holes where his heart should be and Stiles still has that smile-splitting sense of wonder about him. Derek can't burn anything else.  

He and Laura stay in a small house just near the edge of the preserve, a piece of property that’s in their parents’ name. It’s not home, because nothing is ever really going to be home again. But, it’s enough, for now. It functions for what they need, and that’s all they can really ask for. 

Derek is showering and gearing up for his game tonight when Laura appears in the doorway of his room. She watches him lace up his shoes, no sound but the scrape of the strings and the grate of her breathing. 

“Do you want me to come tonight?”

He shrugs, staring down where he is slowly tying his shoes. “If you want to.”

“Derek.”

“What do you want me to say, Laura?” he asks, a little harsher than intended, looking up at her after finishing his right foot. “Of course it would be nice if you came. But, I’ll be fine without you.”

She fixes him with a look, a sad one. “I don’t want you to just be fine. I’ll see you at the game.”

He doesn’t release the breath he is holding until he hears her turn the shower on. 

Stilinski’s by himself in the stands tonight, hunched over and awkward. His eyes are darting across the field, attention occasionally drawn to the empty space beside him. Derek wonders where McCall is. 

Laura is four rows down, seated by some of the underclassmen who go all out with the signs and the face paint at every game. He says, under his breath, “I’m glad you’re here,” and she gives him a small smile in response. 

So far, it’s a good game. He is completely invested, sweating and breathing hard. It is a convenient distraction, it gives him something meaningful to focus on. Derek has this odd connection with Lahey and Boyd that helps them on the field, like they all know what one another is thinking. Derek finally has the ball, ready to score, when everything slows to a stop. 

He follows their eyeline, shocked to be met with a trembling Stilinski at the edge of the field. He has his hands clamped over his ears, eyes teary as he pleads with someone to stop. It makes the hair on Derek’s arms stand straight, makes his neck pebble uncomfortably. Because he sounds terrified. It awakens some primal urge within Derek, the same thing he’d felt in the woods when Cora was screaming his name. His heart is racing and Derek takes an abortive step closer when Stiles blinks his eyes open. When they catch on Derek, he freezes as Stiles goes rigid, shoulders curling. He looks miserable. 

Finstock breaks the moment, asking him if he’s okay. To which he shakily replies that he’s fine, that he doesn’t need anyone to come get him. When Finstock nods and steps away, Derek takes his chance, still feeling shaken and disoriented. 

Derek is angry that Stiles won’t tell him what’s wrong. Is so angry that he feels off-balance, that Stiles still smells so afraid that he cannot even think. He grinds his teeth together. All he has left is anger. Stiles needs to leave so Derek can think. He can’t even see straight, trapped in a haze. He shakes his head, biting, “Just go home,” before jogging to join the other players. 

He hears Stiles sniffle, the scrape of his sleeve against his nose while he inhales shakily. Derek sort of feels bad, turns back to maybe consider apologizing when Stiles grits out, “You just ruined everything for me, do you even get that?” to the empty air beside him. Like there’s someone standing in its place. Derek doesn’t see anyone. He glances back to Derek and his mouth twists, face sour, before turning abruptly and making his way toward the parking lot. 

“What a freak,” someone on the other team says, earning a laugh from a few of the guys standing around him. 

“Shut the fuck up,” he snaps, and Finstock calls them to the sidelines, discussing plays as they reset the field. Derek looks to the stands, eyes halting on Laura, who is watching Stiles leave the field. She stands and makes her way down the bleachers, following him. That is the only thing that makes him roll his shoulders out and lose the tick in his jaw.

Maybe Laura can make things alright. She always does. 

When they reassume positions on the field, Derek closes his eyes and hopes that everything won’t feel like this forever. 

He knows, though, deep down. It will never stop. 

Chapter Text

fourteen.

If Stiles thought eighth grade was bad, freshman year is so much worse. Infinitely worse. 

He keeps getting shoulder-checked in the halls - usually by Jackson and a few of the lacrosse players who remember him as the spaz who had a meltdown on the field. Derek is there, cold-eyed, glaring hollowly at him whenever they cross paths. 

There is something to be said about the things being unpopular can teach you. Sometimes, he thinks it may very well be anatomically impossible for someone like Lydia Martin to attempt to curl her shoulders in the way Stiles does, thinks she would cry out in pain, beg for mercy, before she allowed herself to shrink down that small, so small, until she’s as close to nothingness as Stiles always is. He knows how many tiles it takes to go from first to second period, from second to third, from the restrooms to the cafeteria. The tiles are the pale, pastel-speckled kind, the kind that look reminiscent of dixie cups, blues and purples splattered against a light backdrop. It’s like a crossword, of sorts: twenty-six down, five across, Miss Thompson’s art classroom. From there, if you pivot on your heel, thirteen down and three across would be the entrance to the gymnasium. Fifteen more steps along the hardwood court to the locker room, where Stiles is intimately familiar with the slats in his locker door, the small combination dial that he stares at while he dresses. 

He’s learned more about keeping his head low than anything geared toward his diploma. The perks of invisibility. 

There’s another ghost. A girl - younger than twenty but not much older than eighteen or nineteen. She woke Stiles in the middle of the night two weeks ago, standing over him while he slept. Her neck was marred purple and rough around the edges, likely signaling strangulation. She disappeared when Stiles sucked in a startled breath, his throat barely sealing off a scream. He has only seen glimpses of her since, almost-there shadows. She will not speak to him. He held out the paper filled with letters, like he did for Cam, and she seeped through the floorboards. He hasn’t tried to talk to her since. 

Telling Laura about how he can see ghosts like some bad rendition of The Sixth Sense is simultaneously the best and worst thing that has happened to him in a long time. In a way, he has felt lighter, as though a weight has been gradually eased off of his chest. There’s still pressure, but he isn’t so dreadfully alone anymore. 

Laura’s eyes flickered red and it felt like Stiles’ heart went completely, dreadfully still within his chest. She blinked and he blinked and they just looked at each other for a moment until the crimson coloring her irises fizzled out. Until they were just breathing to the tune of a cheering crowd. Looking at each other with a mutual understanding of things that cannot be repeated. 

She told him things he would have never believed were their circumstances different. 

In retrospect, the knowledge of werewolves didn’t shock him as much as he feels it should have. It would be hypocritical of him to freak out, he thinks, when Cam was standing right beside him, ramrod straight and dripping thick streams of blood onto the asphalt. He just stared at Laura’s eyes, took in her fangs and her pointed ears when she revealed to him the rest of the shift, gaping with a reverent sort of awe that made her laugh shrilly. She’d held her arms out beside her, palm-up, like, well, here I am. The first thing he’d blurted was, “Should Derek even be allowed to play lacrosse?”   

They sat on the curb and he kicked at the little rocks on the asphalt while Laura listened to his story in silence, how Talia caressed him like a mother, smelled like smoke and looked like sadness. When it was all said and done, Laura cried and he wiped at his own eyes and when she pressed her shoulder into the line of his own, it felt safe. 

"Beacon Hills makes monsters out of people, you know."

Stiles purses his lips, watching how the rubber end of his shoe-sole bends when he presses it into the concrete. "I don't think you're a monster," he whispers, words swallowed by the roaring crowd. 

When it is silent for a beat, he looks up, but Laura isn't looking back at him, she is staring at her hands. "I wasn't talking about me."

Taking a deep breath, Stiles studies the cracks in the pavement, choosing not to think about fire. 

Laura looked like she had pieces of him, talked like it, too. She reminded Stiles, in the smallest ways, of his mother. The way her perspective makes him feel like less of an outcast. Less like he is constantly clawing his way out of holes others have dug for him. 

Derek, however, is not so receptive. 

Stiles is sitting at the dining table, reading the assigned pages for history while his mom sleeps and his dad is out on the evening shift. The knock on the front door is so loud he jerks from the chair, listening hard to see if his mom awoke from the disturbance while his heart jackrabbits in his chest. 

She has been so tired, sleeping fitfully, squeezing in naps whenever she can just to function. He opens the door with a scowl that is promptly wiped away at the sight of Derek’s much scarier one. 

“What the fuck are you playing at, Stilinski?” he snarls, almost leaning across the threshold, towering over him.

Stiles winces and peeks back toward the cracked door of his parents’ bedroom before slipping outside. He waits until the door gently clicks shut to hiss, “My mom is finally asleep. What is your problem?” 

“My problem? My problem? You’re the one spinning sob stories so you can stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.” 

Stiles’ mouth drops open, but no words come out. He doesn’t know what he would say if he even could form a response. Sob story? 

Derek steps forward and Stiles involuntarily steps back to compensate, his shoulder blades bumping the door. Cam is beside him, watching with a frown, arms crossed over his chest. 

The older boy bends down so that he is right in Stiles’ face. “What? Does your dad have a little gun room, does your mom keep wolfsbane in her garden?” Derek pushes at his shoulders and they thump against the door. “Answer me!” Derek demands, pushing again. “You got a little jar of mountain ash? Is that it?”

Stiles grits his teeth and takes a deep breath in through his nose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Derek curls his hands into fists. “Stop playing dumb, Stilinski.” He steps forward, leans right into Stiles’ space. “You want me dead? You wouldn’t stand a chance against me.”

“I don’t—”

“And using my mom,” he slams his fist into one of the porch’s support beams, rattling it. Derek is shaking as well. Abruptly, Stiles realizes that he is talking to someone overrun by fear. Derek’s just a scared kid. “You had Laura fooled, but I know better.”

Stiles’ eyes trail to the side when Cam begins to move. He sidles up to Derek and attempts to push him. Again and again, breathing hard through his nostrils. The flickering glow surrounding his hands dissipates around Derek, his hands sinking into Derek’s shoulders, rendering his efforts useless. 

“What are you looking at?” he growls, and Stiles snaps his eyes away from where Cam is still grunting in frustration. 

Stiles swallows and pointedly doesn’t look back at Cam. “Nothing. Sorry.”

Cam screams through his teeth and Stiles can’t help but flinch slightly, his heart beating hard in his chest when his eyes dart over in surprise. When he looks back at Derek, the older boy is staring at him intently. 

“You can really see things.”

“Ghosts,” Stiles corrects weakly. 

Derek unwinds his fingers from their white-knuckled curl, stepping back with flaring nostrils. Stiles takes a cautious step forward, rolling his shoulders out when Derek makes no move to incite bodily harm. 

The older boy scoffs, looking to the side, pale eyes reflecting the tree in the front yard swaying and swaying and -

Derek pokes his tongue into his cheek and shakes his head, breathing out through his nose. “I just don’t get it.”

Stiles squints at him warily, unwilling to broach this conversation. He has just now started to feel like the rug is not constantly being pulled from beneath him. But, Derek keeps his eyes averted, clear that he will not initiate anything else before Stiles offers something up. 

“Don’t get what?”

“Why you got to see her. You didn’t even know her and I—” Stiles watches Derek’s jaw tick with how hard he grits his teeth. “You didn’t deserve it.” 

That’s what this all boils down to. Betrayal. Feeling like he was cheated out of something he had a right to, something he should have had first claim on. It makes Stiles feel guilty, then. Or, well, guiltier. Knowing he saw Talia when the people who loved her most are still riding on the coattails of her memory. Can’t think of her without hearing the screams. Stiles rubs the back of his neck, his face feeling hot, skin too tight. He looks down at the cracking floorboards of the porch. “I know.”   

Derek gives him a look, all angry eyes and downturned lips. Stiles just blows out an exhale and scrapes the toe of his shoe against where the paint is chipping. He repeats, quieter, “I know.”

Because he does, okay? He does know. He knows that Isaac Lahey is the one who should be seeing Cam, that Derek should have gotten to see Talia, that the girl in his room who looks so sad and remains so quiet deserves someone who can help her. He knows. 

Derek just says, “One day, the things you didn’t deserve are going to catch up to you.”

Stiles wants to grip Derek by his shirt-collar and scream. He wants to yell at the top of his lungs that he has no idea what he is doing or why he can see these people. He knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he cannot shut it off. He knows better than anyone that one day this is going to all come crashing down around him. He wishes it could have been anyone else, someone smarter, better - anyone but a kid who is little more than skin and bone, someone who barely exists. You can ask anyone: Do you know Stiles Stilinski? and they will say, distracted, disinterested, Who? 

He knows. 

Stiles just frowns, tries not to broadcast too obviously how much it hurts to hear that. But, then, he speaks without thinking, “I bet you’d know all about how things can catch up, wouldn't you.”

Before Derek can get at his throat, Stiles opens his front door, halting the other boy in his tracks. “I hope you have a good night, Derek,” is all he says before stepping over the threshold, gently shutting the door before plastering himself against it, breathing harshly while his heart pounds an erratic rhythm. 

He isn’t sure how long he stands there like that. But, he’s sure that by the time he can finally move, Derek is long gone. 

Stiles feels heavy when he opens the obituaries, Cam standing across the room from him. He blows out a breath and types in Cam Lahey. 

The picture that comes up is one of him in uniform. He looks brighter, healthier. Alive. There is a link to his memorial page and Stiles clicks it. He blinks at the name that comes up, whispers to himself, “Camden.” There are more pictures: baby photos, senior portraits, candids through his varying ages. His father is Nathan Lahey, known mostly as Coach Lahey from when he used to lead the swim team at Beacon High. 

Behind him, Cam is noticeably excited. He has this aura about him, a sort of vibrating source of energy. He’s looking at the photographs, too, peering over Stiles’ shoulder as he clicks through one after the other. He figures, in some ways, to a ghost, this must be vindicating. Cam stares at the pictures, and Stiles guesses he is thinking: that’s me, that is really me, I did exist, I did take up space, I have not been trapped in this realm of helplessness since the beginning of time. So, he slides his chair over, just slightly, so Cam can have a better look. So that, just for a moment, he can feel alive. 

There is one photo that stands out to him. It’s Cam and Isaac when they were younger, Coach standing right behind them. He has a hand at the back of Isaac’s neck, who can’t be more than five or six, frowning and looking so, so sad. Cam is smiling, tight. There is no mother. 

Cam reaches a semi-opaque finger to the screen, rubbing his fingertip gently across the lines of Isaac’s face. It’s a private gesture, so Stiles makes himself look away, stares at the strip of photobooth-film of him and his mom tacked to the wall above his desk. 

When Cam is done, he steps back, resting his hands at his sides. Stiles rubs at his jaw and closes the laptop. 

At dinner, he eats quietly, lost in thought. His mom and dad make low conversation, including Stiles every so often. 

Eventually, he gets the courage to croak, “Dad, can I talk to you about something?” 

His mom steps out, eyes tired, saying she is going to head to bed early. He knows that she is just reading the room. Stiles tells her goodnight and that he loves her, waiting while his dad pecks her on the lips and rubs a soothing hand over her hair. 

When it is just the two of them, Stiles struggles to find the words. “I think—” he shakes his head. “There’s a player on the lacrosse team. I think his dad hurts him.”

His dad enters Sheriff Mode immediately. He was elected shortly after the investigation of Kate Argent prior to her confession, praised for all of the digging he did on the family that led to supposed dead ends. “That’s a big claim to make, Stiles. Did the kid tell you that?” 

He shakes his head. “I just know. I can tell.”

The man looks dubious at that. “You can tell,” he repeats.

Stiles swipes his hand out, indicating that the last statement is to be forgotten. “I just know that his dad hurts him. He comes to school bruised.”

Cam is standing rigid beside him, watching Stiles’ dad like a hawk. 

He tilts his head, sighing. “He is a lacrosse player, Stiles. A few bruises are normal.”

“Not this kind, dad. I wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t sure.” 

“Okay, kid,” is all he gets in response. “I’ll look into it. Can you give me some names?”

Clearing his throat, Stiles glances at Cam. “Isaac Lahey.”

That makes his dad raise his eyebrows. “Coach’s kid.”

Stiles nods and his dad nods back. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do. Go to bed, kiddo. Get some sleep.”

He does, taking the stairs to his room with Cam close behind. 

Lying in bed, he whispers, “I am really going to miss you, you know. After we figure this out.” 

If we figure this out.

There is no sound, but he knows Cam hears him. 

Lydia is staring at him across the cafeteria. 

She has been staring at him all day, really. It makes him nervous - not in the gooey, butterflies-in-his-stomach way that it normally does. It’s unsettling. Because she isn’t staring at him like she likes him, or like she thinks he’s cute, or that she has finally begun to reciprocate his feelings. She is looking at him like she knows him, like she knows about him. It’s scary. 

He’s only half-listening to Scott talking about some new game in his ear. His eyes are stuck on Lydia, who is staring right back, unrelenting. His gaze flickers down when she moves her hands, shuffling the deck of cards deftly before plucking three and finally, finally, dragging her eyeline away from him. 

Scott bumps his shoulder, and Stiles focuses back in, tries to push Lydia from his mind. He knows, though, deep down, that the cards are for him. 

four of cups, upright. 

apathy, contemplation, feeling disconnected, indifference, discontent

Walking to his locker, Stiles curls his shoulders in. In his peripheral, he sees Cam stepping in time with him. He thinks he catches glimpses of the girl, flitting in and out of half-opened classroom doors and twisting between his classmates in the hall, but he can’t be too sure. He just feels alone. 

He doesn’t feel like he can talk to Scott about this, so, even though it makes him feel guilty, he has been keeping his distance. More and more lately, he is afraid of opening his mouth. Afraid that if he asks Scott for the homework problems due the next day, he’ll scream instead. He’ll start screaming and never stop. So, for now, no more Scott. 

It makes Stiles bitter, in some ways, that the only two people who know about him are out of his reach. He can’t talk to Laura because when he looks at her, he sees her mother, he sees smoke in his living room and smells the cling of ash. He can’t talk to Derek. He just can’t. It goes without saying. So, he is by himself. Always by himself. Maybe it’s better this way, minimizes the damage, keeps him under control, keeps him from hurting people. 

But, that night, while he lies in bed, stares at the ceiling after a quiet dinner, after Cam has slipped between the walls, the girl nowhere to be seen, he wonders. He wonders if it is an even payout, a balancing of the universe, that in order to keep from hurting others he has to continuously hurt himself. 

He hears Cam’s labored breathing carry through the air, wet and heavy. 

It takes him a long time to fall asleep. He has his answer. 

An uncapped inkpen bursts in his bag and stains most of the papers in the front half of his binder. His biology teacher says that’s no excuse, that he should’ve been more careful, and Stiles has to take zeros for all of the work due that day. The worst thing is, he can’t find it in himself to care. 

He chooses to go to the library for his free period. They’re on a weird block schedule this week because the seniors are taking some state-issued assessments.  

He typically sits near the back, tucked behind the encyclopedias and reference material. It is the best place to go to be alone, free of the scrutiny of others as he highlights through his textbooks. Today, though, he stops in his tracks. Derek is seated at the table Stiles usually takes. There are other tables, positioned a few feet from each other. But, it feels too much like he is encroaching on someone else’s territory. So, he clears his throat, cursing himself for the way his cheeks feel hot. Derek gives him an unimpressed look from where he’s scrolling through his phone. 

“You can sit back here.” He smirks, then, baring one sharp fang. “I won’t bite.”

Stiles thinks that’s cliché, and if he were any braver, he’d laugh. Because he knows that Derek Hale is just as scared as everyone else. Because of this, he doesn’t say what he wants, which is, I really would prefer not to. 

It feels like a challenge. Like Derek is egging him on, in a way. Like, I bet you won’t sit here, I bet you’re too afraid. And, he is. He really really is. 

For just a moment, he is struck with the thought that, if things were different, he would really like to be able to sit with Derek. He used to have these fantasies, back when he first started attending the lacrosse games, that maybe Derek had always seen him there. Maybe he’d cave in and let Stiles wear his jersey, the material would hang off of him, the HALE would rest between the wings of his shoulders. Maybe Derek would see that Stiles isn’t half as bad as everyone says he is. They could hold hands and go to the movies. Maybe Derek Hale could have been the one who made him feel like he wasn’t so dreadfully alone all the time. But, he knows deep down, these fantasies are less about Derek and more about himself. They are more for Stiles than anyone else. His cheeks flame when Derek cocks his head at him, like he can see right through Stiles’ skull, all those thoughts swirling around. 

He walks over to the table in defiance, setting his books down. Cam steps around it, stands tall and silent next to the chair opposite of Stiles, waiting. Stiles hangs his bag across the back of his own chair, plopping down bodily when Cam clears his throat, gesturing pointedly. 

Stiles rolls his eyes, planting his feet on the legs of the chair across from him, he kicks it out so Cam has ample space to sit. “There, you happy?” He smiles lightly when Cam nods, planting himself down stiffly, sitting straight-backed and staring dead ahead. Stiles just shakes his head, flipping open his biology textbook.  

He catches a glimpse of Derek, who’s staring straight at him, intense and speculative. Stiles clears his throat and mumbles, defensive, “He wanted to sit down, too.” 

He doesn’t look at Derek, but in his peripheral, Derek doesn’t look away. 

ten of wands, reversed. 

failure to delegate, shouldering too much responsibility, collapse, breakdown

During a week that feels like every other week, his dad texts him that mom’s headaches are getting worse, so she can’t pick him up. Scott wasn’t at school today since he had a check-up with his doctor, his asthma attacks are becoming more frequent. So, Stiles chooses to walk home. 

It rained last night, his footsteps sound slick against the sidewalk. Cam has not reappeared since Stiles left the library. Jackson Whittemore loudly calls him some creative names from where he is in the passenger seat of some upperclassman’s shiny car, swerving into a puddle and spraying water across Stiles’ legs. The chill of it adheres to his skin, sinks down into his DNA. The only thing that makes it worse is the black camaro that idles by afterward, rolling slowly to a stop at the stop sign. Stiles just pulls on his backpack straps, hunching his shoulders defensively before saying, “Yeah, laugh it up,” because he knows Derek can still hear him. 

When he finally gets home, the first thing he does is peek into his mom’s bedroom. She is curled under the covers, the curtains pulled tight so she’s enveloped in darkness. It tugs hard at Stiles’ heart to see her like that. There’s a shiny new floor fan across from her, one that never gets caught on the rotation, sways back and forth noiselessly. His dad bought it for her, said if anything would get him to replace it, it was the thought of causing her more discomfort. Stiles gently pulls the door shut and makes his way upstairs so he can shower. 

He’s gotten to where he tries to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He is nothing but knobs of bone, skinny where the others in his grade have started bulking up, lithe in places that should be lean with muscle. It just makes him sad. He doesn’t think he’s ugly, really. He just isn’t Jackson. Or Derek. 

Stiles pokes at his ribs, sticks the sharp of his pointer finger’s nail into his skin and drags it down, tracks the motion in the mirror as it jumps along the ridges. A red line rises in its wake, and he just looks at it, his other hand curled into a fist, bunched up at the hem of his shirt where he has it pulled up above his sternum. Slowly, he releases the fabric and it drags down, a gradual, sloping fall that he observes in the mirror. He watches it cover the press of his bones. Next, he leans forward, the edge of the counter digging into the space above his hips.

The terrain of his face is rough, still stretching, still growing. He has scars, faded, but shiny-pink under the right fluorescents. One across the bottom line of his chin, when he braked his bike too hard and slammed into the handlebars, cracked against the bolt right in between that secured them to the body of the bicycle. It bled more than you’d think something like that would. Stiles remembers thinking that he had never seen so much blood in his life, likely never would again. There’s another, just above his left eyebrow, reaching into the fine hair, creating a small patch of smoothness. That’s when he hit his head on his nightstand, rolled over out of his bed in the middle of the night, thought he could navigate without clicking on the lamp. He has texture - that’s what his dad would say. There are small bumps along his cheeks, he can feel the pebble of them beneath the catch of his fingerprint. He has a mole on the corner of his jaw, another one on the soft underside of it, where his neck meets the bone. One beside the point of his mouth, crowning the stretch of his grin. His mom says faces tell stories. Hers has laugh lines, crow’s feet beside her eyes. There’s a bump in the bridge of her nose where she broke it climbing a tree. Her bottom teeth are crooked, she wore a retainer on the top for the entirety of high school. The story hers tells is that she has a lot of love to give, a lot of reasons to smile. No reason to be ingenuine. She feels everything and she does it on purpose, that’s what her face says. 

Stiles tilts his head to the side and sticks his finger beneath his top lip, the pad pressed to the enamel. He pushes upward until his lip rests above his gums, slides his finger to curl into the curve of his mouth, gaping like a hooked fish. He stares at his teeth. The way the pointed ones on the end are stained a little darker. Stiles used to hate his top teeth, Jackson teased him, when they were younger. Used to call him Milk Teeth because he said they looked like they still belonged to a baby. He used to look in the mirror and practice smiling, making sure his lip didn’t raise up too much, didn’t show his teeth that seemed to only be half-there. He doesn’t really care, not anymore. But, now, looking at his reflection, he takes his free hand and pulls the other side of his mouth, forcing a smile. Looks right at his teeth and wishes he were anyone else. If only for a day.

He undresses, dragging his eyes away from the mirror as he drops his dirty laundry behind the door and turns the shower-dial as hot as it will go. After about thirty seconds, he tests the spray with his hand and it is still ice cold. He does the mental math, running a tally on his fingers, and sends a text to his dad: I think you forgot to pay the gas bill. After a couple of minutes with no reply, he takes a cold shower, curled over and shivering beneath the stream.

It feels like he just can’t catch a break. 

His mom wakes up while he is heating a cup of mac and cheese in the microwave. She steps out of her room, sleep-rumpled and soft, aiming him a small, guilty smile. “I’m sorry, Mischief. I didn’t mean to sleep for so long. I would have cooked.” 

He shrugs, smiling back at her. He hopes he doesn’t look as sad as he feels. “S’okay, mom, I wanted something cheesy anyway.” 

She smooths a hand over his hair and sits at the table while he stirs the noodles. He places another cup in the microwave for her. He tries not to look at her too much, because she has looked too-pale and too-thin and too-tired for so long he doesn’t really know what to do. The skin beneath her eyes is stained purple, even though all she does is sleep. Stiles doesn’t really remember how she used to look, when she was still mom. She’s been to a couple of doctors, all citing stress as the culprit. Stiles thinks it takes a lot more than stress to reduce a person to what she has withered into, but he isn’t a doctor.  

They eat sitting across from one another, silent in a way that family dinners didn’t used to be. His dad is still on the night shift, so the only sound is the scrape of their utensils against the plastic and his mom’s labored breathing. After a minute, she rests her spoon against the lip of the cup and stares down at her lap. Stiles finishes chewing his mouthful carefully, keeping his eyes on her. She sniffs, rubs the back of her hand across her nose and blinks up at the ceiling. Her lip wobbles when she says, wet and shaky, “I’m really sorry.”

Stiles sets his own spoon down, feeling sick. “Hey, no,” he reassures softly, leaning across the table to put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, mom. You don’t feel good, you don’t have to be sorry.” 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t pick you up today.” 

He wants to hug her, but she remains hunched in her seat. So, he just promises, “Hey, I promise it’s okay. I rode with Scott.” 

It’s a lie. But, she didn’t see him come inside soaked, was sleeping soundly through his shower.

She sniffs again. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah. He was telling me about a new Black Ops map, it’s really cool.” 

She smiles, small and trembling. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.” 

“I will,” he says. But, he knows he won’t. 

He swallows and she scoots away from the table, his hand falling limp as she gathers their trash. She rises, too, and insists, “I’ll wash up the dishes, kiddo.” It’s just two spoons, but Stiles doesn’t protest. 

He goes to bed, shaking with a cold that has nothing to do with the weather outside.

Lydia approaches him where he is seated in the cafeteria. Scott goes silent beside him. Stiles looks around the lunchroom for an explanation and is met with Jackson’s scowling face. The next table over, sat next to Isaac Lahey and Vernon Boyd, is Derek, who looks pale, staring over at them wide-eyed. 

She says, almost-urgent, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

He blinks, mouth opening and closing. “Uh. Yeah. Sure, yeah.” 

Her eyes flit to Scott. “Alone.”

Scott moves to stand and Stiles holds a hand out. “No, man. Finish your lunch.” He looks to Lydia and gestures to the doorway across the room. “Do you want to go out in the hall?”

She purses her lips and nods, indicating for him to lead the way. He has a bubbling feeling of excitement in his stomach, the kind where you can’t tell if you’re sick or if you have butterflies. He flips through a mental rolodex of all the things Lydia could want to urgently tell him. Alone. He feels half-crazed at the semi-formed ideas, his brain halting, when, by the lockers, she tells him point-blank, “I’m like you.” 

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Because, quite honestly, he was hoping she was going to confess, I like you. Momentarily, he is stunned silent, because it sounds a little like that’s what she said. But, she didn’t. His mouth opens and then closes as he grasps at words. He’d had his suspicions that they were alike - with the looks and the cards and the whole, you know. But, it feels weird to know he was right. He licks his lips, turns the words over in his head. “You can see them?”

“Not exactly,” she corrects, still frowning. “I can see things. Not spirits or entities, but events, I guess you could say.”

“So, you can see the future.”

“In some ways, yes. But, mostly I just get feelings. I don’t see them clearly so much as in pieces, blurry and scattered. Intuitively I can guess, from the feeling of them.”

He chews his lip, a little sheepish to admit he is a tad suspicious. Cam shifts beside him, distributing his weight from leg to leg. She looks at him seriously, stone-faced. “Your mom is really sick.”

Stiles blinks. “Yeah. I know.”

Lydia picks at her fingernails for a moment before blowing out a breath. “She isn’t going to get better.”

He knew that, too. Deep down, he really, really knew that. But, even knowing, he still had hope. He had still held onto the thought of well, there’s no way I could know something like that. Lydia just destroyed the last thing he had left. He swallows, his throat clicks with how his chest feels tight. “You don’t know that.”

Lydia raises her eyebrows. “Stiles, I saw her—”

“You just said you can’t see the future,” he interrupts, frantic, heart pounding painfully behind his sternum. “You just said—” 

“I can feel it. I know. I know that she—”

Stiles covers his ears, shaking his head. “Jackson put you up to this, you - there is no way you could know that. She’s just stressed, the doctors said—”

“I’m sorry, Stiles.” She doesn’t sound sorry, is the thing. There is nothing Lydia Martin likes more than being right. He wants her to be wrong, he wants her to be wrong so badly. For a moment, Stiles tries to conjure up how he felt about her just minutes prior, something to root him in reality. Nothing comes to mind. He squeezes his eyes shut when she says, “It wouldn’t have been right if I didn’t tell you.” 

He waits. He waits until her shoes squeak against the tile, until she is back in the cafeteria and he’s  just by himself. All alone. He opens his eyes and Cam is standing across the hall, wide-eyed and silent. Always silent. Stiles slides down the wall and rests his forehead on his knees, stares at the fraying threads on his shoelaces. His mom is going to die. Everyone’s mom dies. He thinks about Talia and grits his teeth against the urge to scream. 

One day, the things you didn’t deserve are going to catch up to you. 

He can hear Derek laughing in his head. 

It is funny that something as bothersome and incessant as a heart monitor can quickly become background noise. Can permeate Stiles’ brain and leave him feeling empty whenever he is home, leave him feeling like he should hear beeping, like he cannot sleep without the beeping.

He sits in his room by himself and he wonders if his mom knows that she is going to die. He wonders if she swallows spoonfuls of red jello and just knows that she won’t be leaving, that she will be trading a hospital bed for a casket. He doesn’t ask. 

More often than not, he is curled up in the chair by her side, absently doing his math homework while she breathes hard in her sleep next to him. All of his deadlines have been extended - even the ones for science - apparently, having your mom bite it from terminal illness is not without its perks. 

Everyone in town looks at him like they know his mom is going to die. They all look at him like he is going to break, like they are waiting for him to scream or cry or look up at the sky and yell about how life isn’t fair. 

Derek looks at him, too, sometimes. Fixes Stiles with this tense expression - downturned lips and furrowed brows. He looks at Stiles like he is complicated, like there is something hidden under his skin that Derek can’t see.  

It doesn’t take him long to understand the expression sick with grief. To see himself become shrunken and pale in the mirror, to watch his eyes get bigger and his cheekbones become sharper. It doesn’t take him long to look like he is dying, himself. 

How do you say goodbye to your mom?

He doesn’t get as long to think on that as he wants. 

the tower, upright.

disaster, destruction, upheaval, trauma, sudden change, chaos

It’s odd, how parts of your life can make you feel like you have tunnel vision, like you are moving too fast while simultaneously experiencing everything in slow motion. It’s funny how her heart monitor goes from spiking to flat, intermittent beeping traded for the low tune of the red line plateauing, how quickly her hospital room becomes an empty space at Beacon Hills’ Cemetery. 

Well, not so empty, now. 

He thinks back to a couple of weeks ago, in the boys’ locker room. 

“I’m a terrible person,” he whimpers, clinging to Scott like he is his only lifeline.

“No, you’re not,” Scott breathes softly, jaw moving against the crown of his head where he has his chin tucked tightly over Stiles’ skull.

“I just want her to die already,” he confesses. There it is, laid bare for everyone to see. He wishes his mom would just finally fucking die so he can move on, so he can stop waiting day after day to lose her. 

“I just want it to be over.”

Scott doesn’t say anything, he just rubs a gentle hand over Stiles’ hair until the bell rings.

The casket is huge. He thinks of his mom and how she would have only come up to his chin, how skinny she was, nothing but bones rattling, draped beneath the thin hospital blanket. He thinks of how small she must feel in that big, big casket.

It took her an hour to die. That’s sixty minutes, if you don’t count the period of struggle she endured before her monitors started shrieking. Which, within an abstract, conceptual frame of reference, feels like a very long window. Getting through sixty seconds sixty consecutive times, it should take a while, shouldn’t it? One hour should feel like one hour. But, death doesn’t respect the principles of time. So, between the moment she started to struggle to breathe and when the nurses arrived, it felt like Stiles had already lost so much, trapped in an hourglass where the sand just keeps slipping slipping slipping. Between the doctor’s arrival and the flatline, it could have been mere seconds. How is that fair? How is it fair that he lost her final hour to fear? No one seems to have the answer to that. 

One of the nurses had to grab him by the shoulders because he couldn’t drag his eyes away from her. How still she was. It didn’t look like in the movies, where they are pale-blue and bloody and gross. She still looked alive, like she would sit up and smile at any moment, so Stiles had to keep looking. Had to wait so he could smile back and everything would be fine. Because he can't live without his mom. The world must know that. It has to. So, she was going to sit up any second, he was so sure of it. But, the nurse broke his concentration and it made him so unbelievably infuriated. How dare she? She was asking him something but he couldn’t hear it, like he’d plugged his nose and blew a breath that popped his ears. He stared at her lips, the words they were forming. Then, through the ringing, he could make out, “Your dad is on the way.” But, what was the point? His dad couldn’t bring her back, and his dad wouldn’t be able to stomach the sight. Stiles and his dad existed in different worlds, then.

Stiles is forced to live with watching her die. His dad just has to live. 

Blinking at the casket, he thinks, this is what he wanted, isn’t it? He is getting exactly what he asked for. His mom is nothing but food for worms, now, and it’s all his fault. He stares straight ahead at the trees swaying in the summer breeze while they lower her down into the ground.

He thinks of how she must hate him, looking at him now and seeing the sag of relief in his shoulders. He isn’t crying, but he feels like he should be. He feels like he owes it to her to at least cry at her goddamn funeral. But, he can’t. Stiles doesn’t really feel much of anything.  

There was something she told him, once. Something that felt rigid and unforgiving against her usual softness. He’d thrown his backpack down, huffing, chest heaving, because nothing is ever fair for Stiles Stilinski. He had stomped past the kitchen, ready to go to his room and curl into a ball beneath the covers, pretend that he could will himself into nonexistence. She’d called out to him, asked him to turn around and talk to her. Tell her what’s wrong. She had a policy, for him and his dad, never be angry by yourself. Stiles cried into her shoulder and she rubbed a hand along his back, her wedding ring digging into the divots of his spine, up and down, up and down, as if she were playing a rubboard. She said, “Mischief, the world only treats you how you let it treat you.” He’d sniffled into her neck, at that, humming in miserable confusion. To which she’d continued, “If you don’t like it, change it. If you don’t want the world to chew you up and wear you down,” she pushed him back, a little, staring into his watery eyes, “then you stand up and demand that it stop.”

While his dad gives a eulogy that keeps causing him to choke up, Stiles wishes he could stand up now, wishes he could demand the world to stop, to release its bruising grip from his throat. Because, what did his mom do to the world to deserve this? He hates himself for thinking it, but briefly, the thought skitters through his mind before fizzling itself out. He wishes it were his dad instead. Thinks, momentarily, that he wouldn’t have been as hard to live without. Stiles feels his eyes well up, at that. He can’t help but wonder, as his dad breathes damp and heavy into a microphone, if the man is thinking the same thing about Stiles.

Panic is the hare, he reminds himself as his breathing turns labored. But, Stiles isn’t big enough to catch it anymore. He has never felt smaller. 

He allows himself to look around, affords himself a distraction. A lot of kids from school are here with their families. Scott is seated beside him with Melissa, Lydia with her mother across from them. Derek and Laura in the very back, shoulder to shoulder with their mouths set in a grim line. 

For some reason, seeing them makes Stiles angry. This fuming, all-encompassing sense of rage boiling under his skin. This is what he gets, isn’t it? This is payback, or revenge, or whatever you want to call it. An eye for an eye. 

During the duration of the service, he keeps his gaze trained forward, just staring at the trees. His mom loved trees, thought you could tell a lot about people by what kind of trees they liked. She liked sycamores. 

He hopes wherever she ends up is overflowing with them. He hopes all she can see right now is sycamores, on and on and on, extending well beyond the horizon. It is what she deserves. 

Stiles knows, for the rest of his life, he will only be seeing sycamores, too. 

When everything begins wrapping up, he sees Derek push himself to stand, straight-backed and rigid while Laura follows close behind him. Stiles watches them walk, fast-paced and near-frantic to the edge of the woods on the opposite side, away from everyone. He blinks away when he sees them break the treeline. He guesses they might have problems with attending funerals. 

He is silent on the drive home, slumped in the passenger seat of his dad’s cruiser while the other man grips the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles are pulled taut, stained white. Stiles has the window rolled down, his head stuck halfway out to catch the breeze, to get away from the smell of whiskey. 

When they get home, Stiles bypasses the door and makes his way around the house, coming to face the line of the forest beyond his backyard. He screams and screams into the trees until his voice cuts off, until he can’t anymore. Until all he can hear is how his ears are ringing instead of that goddamn machine flatlining, the way Melissa was sniffling beside him. He thinks maybe this is the reason sycamores have peeling bark, from instances like this where people scream into the forest and the trees have no choice but to hear it. Everyone screams and the sound adheres itself within the trunks, stinging hot like a controlled burn. In that moment, Stiles is responsible for the rinding on sycamores. 

When he is done screaming, chest heaving and legs shaking, something deep within the wood howls back at him. 

He goes inside and locks the door. 

The repast at his house is torture. He told Scott he didn’t have to stay, and after heavily reassuring him that he could go, Scott left. Stiles can’t keep smiling and shaking hands and pointedly ignoring Cam, who is standing in the corner, and the girl with the welts around her neck who keeps appearing in front of him before rippling away. They have no right to ruin this. No right to take this away from him on the day of his mom’s funeral. He snags a bottle of whiskey from his dad’s personal collection and sets off for the woods. He doubts anyone will even notice that he’s gone. His dad is already two flasks deep. 

He just stumbles along for a while, carelessly pulling from the bottle and hissing at how it burns. Eventually, he settles himself down on a well-worn space in the grass, circled by trees and not far from one of the paths that leads into the preserve. 

After a moment of uneasy silence, he realizes that he can’t see Cam. Or the girl. Or anyone. Surely someone has died out here. He laughs at himself. An entire family died out here. And he cannot see them. He’s all alone. Always alone. 

Stiles blinks down at the bottle he is passing from hand to hand. He hiccups. Oh. That must be what’s doing it. He giggles. “I can’t see you when I’m drunk,” he declares to no one at all, bringing the neck of the bottle up for another swig. “You’re all finally gone.”

He thinks on it, scraping his dress shoes along the dirt, watching it cling and dull the shine. Maybe his dad drinks to make the ghosts go away, too. He does not like that thought, immediately shakes his head to clear it. 

His mom never showed up. He hasn’t seen her, not even a passing glance, a brief glimpse. She died and Stiles has not seen her. He doesn’t want to think about what it would mean if she never shows up. He takes another burning sip. 

In hindsight, being so close to the preserve, he should have anticipated it when footsteps crunch the leaves behind him.

Stiles huffs a laugh and rolls his eyes, mumbles, “Here we go.”

“Stiles?”

He sloppily scoots himself around to face Derek, who is frowning down at him. “You caught me,” he says solemnly. 

Derek just frowns some more. He’s good at that. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

“Says the guy who’s also out here by himself.”

He can see the gears turning in Derek’s head, the physical toll it is taking on him not to lash out and get rid of Stiles once and for all, he bets. “This is private property. You shouldn’t be out here.”

“My mom is dead,” he sighs wistfully, blinking at the stripe of dirt on the bottom of Derek’s pantleg. 

Derek just says, quietly, “I know.”

“She’s dead and I can’t see her. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

Stiles pushes his thumb into the lip of the bottle, circles it around to feel the whiskey bead up on the pad of his fingertip and collect beneath his nail. 

Derek sighs and Stiles hears him shift his weight uncomfortably. “Your mother loved you, trust me.”

“If you could see them again, would you want to?”

The frown he gets in response is rigid. “No.”

He thinks Derek is lying, but Stiles allows him to think he believes it. 

“In a way this feels like karma,” he chokes out, huffing out a laugh devoid of humor. “Or revenge, or whatever you want to call it.” 

He can feel Derek looking at him, the other boy’s gaze burning into the side of his face. Stiles keeps his eyes trained on the tree in front of them. He wonders how it’d feel under his fingers, if the bark is rough enough to break his skin if he were to strip pieces off of it. Wonders if it would shred apart if he were to scream.

“I was the last person to see your mom and I held onto that because I was afraid. I knew who did it for weeks before telling my dad.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “Now, I’ll never see my mom again and—” he closes his mouth, purses his lips and bites down on them with his front teeth. 

He heaves a solid inhale through his nostrils and squeezes his eyes shut. “It feels like punishment.” Stiles puts his hands behind himself and leans back on them, curls his fingers into the dirt just to make sure he’s still here. He tilts his head back and stares at the sky, tries not to feel bitter about how bright blue it is through the gaps in the leaves. “Mark your calendars everyone: September sixteenth, the day Stiles Stilinski finally got what he deserved.”

Derek clears his throat and Stiles risks a glance at him. The other boy is staring down at the ground, fists clenched at his sides. “Stiles, when I said that—” he cuts himself off, shaking his head before trying again. “Sometimes, I just say things. That’s who I am. But, you didn’t deserve this. This isn’t what I meant.”

After a moment, Derek adds, “I don’t want revenge.”

Stiles shrugs, miming what can you do? He grins dopily at himself. “Either way, you got what you wanted. What’s another mom lost to Beacon Hills, huh?”

He watches Derek grind his teeth together at that. That’s right, Stiles thinks, get angry. 

Derek takes a step back, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Stiles.” Before he turns away, he gestures to the bottle. “Don’t drink yourself to death. I think enough people have died in this preserve, but you already know all about that.”

It’s a low blow, but Stiles deserves it. So, he just laughs. He watches Derek disappear into the woods and he laughs. He doesn’t push himself up from the ground until the bottle is empty. 

Chapter Text

seventeen.

Claudia Stilinski dies nearly three months before Derek’s seventeenth birthday. 

He remembers hearing Lydia draw the cards, the soft rustle of the deck as she shuffled. He remembers not knowing what she was doing, never paying too much attention, just watching idly as she stared at Stiles and laid them out, hearing her heartbeat spike and smelling her scent go sour. Jackson had picked up on her expression and scoffed, said through a mouthful of food, “Those cards don’t mean anything, Lyds. It’s all just bullshit.” Derek watched her walk to his table, how she followed him out into the hall. He knew exactly what she was going to say, had smelled the sickness for so long he couldn’t even pick up on it anymore. He knew the Stiles who stepped back in through those doors would not be the same one who left moments before.  

It made him think of what has not left his mind since he first heard it: the female of the species is usually deadlier.

Her funeral is familiar in a way that aches, in a way that has not healed yet. Will never heal. He stands next to Laura and watches the town lower yet another mother into the ground. Derek begins thinking, then, about how he still has Laura. About how he is always so angry with her for not being like Talia, for harboring none of her maternal grace or the ability to know exactly what to say. He watches Stiles pitch a handful of dirt over Claudia’s casket, movements stiff like the motion is something he has to consciously force, and realizes that he needs to stop losing Laura to the memory of someone who will never be coming back.  

He thinks about Peter, all alone in a hospital room. How he didn’t get to see Claudia. Will never get to say goodbye. 

Throughout the service, he itches to shift. Can sense the restlessness within Laura as well. Derek fucking hates funerals. 

As soon as people begin rising from their seats, Derek makes his way to the edge of the woods, skin pulsing with the need to run. Laura is just a step behind him, trailing closely. She says, low, “You can’t be angry with him forever.” He chooses not to reply, shifting as soon as he breaks through the treeline. 

He does a few laps around the preserve, dodging trees until he reaches a familiar clearing. He sits there for a moment, staring at the forest surrounding him. His hackles rise and his ears lie flat against his head when the trees echo with a sharp, jarring sound. He whines in the deep of his throat. Stiles. 

Stiles is screaming, pouring all of his heartache into it. It’s terrible, the waves of it splash rough into Derek’s ears, making him clench his eyes shut and grind his teeth. It goes on for minutes, it seems - he isn’t sure how many, maybe one or two. But when Stiles is finally done, Derek takes a deep breath, tilts his head to the sky, and howls back. 

The forest goes silent after that. Derek begins making his way home. 

He is nearly there, walking slowly, when he hears something disturb the woods. It’s too far out to be anyone they’re expecting. Then, he and Laura don’t have too many friends nowadays. Derek squares his shoulders and follows the sounds. 

october

Lydia Martin, though only a freshman, becomes a staple name at Beacon High. 

If Derek had a nickel for every time someone has mentioned her upcoming Halloween party, he would have enough money to build the time machine he dreams about.

Laura brings it up over dinner one night, likely seeing posts about it online. Lydia Martin is everywhere. She cuts into her chicken and brings her fork to her lips before pointing it at Derek. While chewing, she says, “You should go to that party.”

Here we go.

“What party?” Derek asks disinterestedly, hoping she will just drop it. 

She gestures her utensil with raised eyebrows as she swallows her food, wordlessly insinuating that he knows exactly what party. He does. “The one the Martin girl is throwing.”

Derek swirls his spoon in his mashed potatoes. “Why would I go?”

Laura taps the fingernails on her free hand against the table. “You should have some fun, Derek. You cannot stay cooped up here all the time. It isn’t good for you.”

Which is how he ends up leaning against the wall in Lydia Martin’s mansion, holding a red solo cup and trying to fight a migraine at the blaring music. 

He did not dress up, clad in a pair of jeans and a plain shirt. A girl dressed as Harley Quinn gets in his face and loudly asks what he is supposed to be while batting her eyes at him. Her breath smells like fruit and alcohol. Derek gives her a smile, all teeth, and says, biting,  “I’m an orphan.” 

No one else attempts to ask him. Frequently, Derek thinks, if no one interacted with him, he’d likely never speak again. Sometimes, when he opens his mouth, when his lips form the shapes of words, he wonders if he is making any sound at all. He’s scared, a fear that exists somewhere far-off in the back of his mind, that he may actually be screaming. 

He immediately straightens up when he hears a familiar voice. “Scott, no one is going to think our costumes are cool.”

“Well, we think they are cool. And that is all that matters.”

Derek squints against the party lights, trying to catch a glimpse of them. They finally break through the crowd of other high schoolers, dressed as video game characters, Derek guesses. Stiles is scowling, adjusting his costume while Scott looks around red-cheeked, grinning. 

Stiles looks around, too. He looks like he is glowing beneath the colored lights, lit up by one of those party projectors that’s sliding bright orange jack-o-lanterns and cartoon bones against the far wall. His costume looks homemade, like he and Scott worked to make them as accurate as possible. It’s cute, really. Derek blinks hard at that thought, feeling his face grow warm as he looks away. 

“I think we are supposed to dance!” Scott calls with a crooked grin, backing into the swaying crowd. 

Derek risks a glance, watches Stiles purse his lips and shake his head. “I would like to politely decline.”

Scott rolls his eyes and does one of those dance moves you only see in teenage rom-coms, the one where you act like you’re spinning a lasso, like you’ve looped the rope around your partner. Scott does it with all the enthusiasm and well-meaning of a child, hopping toward Stiles with his grip on the rope when the other boy makes no move to play along. 

“Come on, Stiles,” Scott teases, “don’t be a party pooper!” 

Reluctantly, Stiles follows his best friend into the mass of moving bodies, shoulders slumped and feet dragging in defeat. Derek feels a little like he just witnessed something that was for them only, a moment of easy friendship. He bites down on his tongue and chooses to look at the way the paper streamers are swaying beside the ceiling fan. 

Thankfully, Jackson Whittmeore draws everyone’s attention, levering himself to stand on the coffee table in front of the couch. “We are going to play Never Have I Ever downstairs, first come first served!”

Scott tugs Stiles toward the stairs, urging him along and insisting that they have to play. Derek trails behind, not too interested in having to drink when he cannot really get drunk. Surprisingly, not too many people are downstairs, and Derek recognizes a few faces in the circle of intoxicated teenagers laughing in the center of the room. 

He watches as Stiles pointedly does not sit in the circle, opting to push Scott into it instead, seating himself behind him. Derek stays close to the wall, feels more comfortable by himself. He doesn’t want anyone to notice that he is on his first refill of whatever was in the punch bowl, yet he remains perfectly fine. He takes another bitter sip. 

The game starts up, juvenile as ever. Never have I ever been stoned, smoked a cigarette, slept with someone in this room....par for the course. 

Then, on her turn, Lydia smirks. “Never have I ever failed a math test,” which earns some eye rolls and groans. Jackson Whittemore downs what is left in his cup before barking at Stiles, “Stilinski, drink up.”

Jackson is obviously drunk. His face is flushed and his eyes are wide, glassy. Stiles makes a face and replies, dry, “I’m good, thanks.”

Jackson scoffs. “What? You too good to have fun at a party?”

Derek narrows his eyes, watching as Stiles fists his hands in his lap. “I don’t like to drink,” is all he says. 

The memory of Stiles swallowing whiskey straight from the bottle out in the preserve, head tilted to the sky as he took sip after sip, flickers in and out of Derek’s mind. Flashes so quickly he blinks and it’s gone. Stiles had downed nearly the entire thing.

This, evidently, is the wrong thing to say. Because Jackson smiles, all teeth. Derek feels himself straighten up, anticipating the blow. “Yeah, I bet daddy does enough for the both of you, doesn’t he?” 

Stiles’ cheeks go blotchy, at that, and Derek takes an abortive step forward. It makes something heavy settle in Derek’s chest, the way Stiles just continues staring down at the floor, where he is sitting criss-cross. Stiles doesn’t say anything, a few of the other kids are laughing, unaware of how unfunny it is. Scott bites, “Shut the fuck up, Whittemore,” while Lydia reprimands, sharp, “Jackson, stop it.” 

Jackson goes quiet as asked, but smiles, poking his tongue in his cheek. Clearly aware that the damage has already been done. Derek huffs, and Jackson looks over at him for a moment before looking away. It’s his turn. He pulls the pop-tab on a new can of beer and takes a long swig before declaring, “Never have I ever liked an older woman.”

Derek’s tongue turns to ash in his mouth. He forces himself to swallow, forces his face to remain human. He aims a tight smile to the group - all of them watching with wide eyes - as he takes a slow sip from his cup. He doesn’t look to see if anyone else is taking a drink, he knows it was for him. When he is done, he runs his tongue over his teeth and raises his eyebrows. They all avert their gazes, and the kid next to Jackson loudly blurts out his turn, dissolving the tension. 

When Derek looks back, Stiles is staring at him, brow furrowed. They lock eyes and he doesn’t look away, not for a long moment. In some weird way, Derek feels connected to him. Like it is just them here, staring at each other. There has always been this pull, he thinks. A tug in his chest when he sees those eyes. Sometimes they’re gold, like the way honey is gold not the way jewelry is gold. Werewolf bronze. It makes Derek want to flash his own in response, satiating something deep inside to know that they match, that a small piece of Stiles is exactly like Derek. It makes him think of flickers of lightning, in a way. The bright blinding of the crackle, the way it fizzles yellow and burns out white-gold. He thinks that it’s a ‘wolf thing, the instinctual desire to protect what is weaker, the same way he feels about Cora, sometimes.

Felt.

Then, he blinks and looks down at his lap again. Derek clears his throat and crushes his empty cup in his hand, heading for the stairs. 

Next time, he hopes Laura minds her own fucking business.

november

Sometimes, Derek wakes up in the middle of the night because he can feel her fingers on him, the cool slither as they trail along his pebbled skin. He wakes up and he can’t breathe because she’s kissing him and it burns, but he pulls back, his viewpoint is shifted, he is on the outside looking in and she isn’t kissing him at all. She has her jaw unhinged, venom-fanged like a snake as she expels black smoke into Derek’s open mouth, as flames lick from her tongue to caress his skin. She is holding him in place but they aren’t kissing, she has him by the throat but they aren’t kissing. She reaches deep inside of him, her forearms encased by his trachea as she stretches so so far, grips so tight that it hurts, so tight that he screams. She pulls her hands back out, opens the sopping-wet curl of her fists, and ash spills out, billowing away. She is killing him. 

He always wakes up before he dies. That’s the part that makes it a nightmare. 

He sits up in his bed, dead-eyed. Derek can never go back to sleep after. It’s worse this time, Cora’s birthday would have been this month. She is a Scorpio. 

Was a Scorpio. 

Still sleep-drenched and reeling, Derek rubs hard at his eyes, so hard he sees stars rain down within the darkness. Cora used to look up those stupid compatibility charts and Derek would make fun of her for it. Now, Derek would pay any price, give anything, to have her go in meticulous detail about his sun, moon, and rising signs. Would listen to her talk about it forever if it meant having her in front of him - happy, breathing. Alive. 

Derek has to be himself every day. That’s probably the most unfair aspect of it all. When he wakes up, he is still Derek Hale, and his house is still gone, and his family is still dead. No matter how hard he wishes, every night, that when he wakes up it will be as someone else, it never happens. No all-knowing being ever hears him. The switch is never flipped. He has to wake up in his bedroom that has been stripped of all familiarity, a space that is more like a temporary hotel rental, the kind where they let people smoke cigarettes so the walls are yellowed and the atmosphere feels thick. The kind with too-cold air conditioning that makes you shiver through your sleep, reminds you that you’re somewhere foreign. Kate Argent took everything from him, and now nowhere is ever going to feel like home again. And she knows it. He knows she does. So, he wakes up in his room, brushes his teeth while looking at his reflection, goes outside in his preserve in his town that homes his loss. But, none of it is really his. That’s probably the worst thing she did, made him a passerby within his own life. 

He says to the wall, bitterly, “There is no part of me that you haven’t touched. You ruined me.” Quieter, “I want my body back.” 

It never makes him feel better. 

When the day finally arrives, Cora’s birthday, he curses every omniscient being who could be listening, because it feels just like every other fucking day. When everyone is dead, your own memory is what's hurting you. He heard that somewhere. He can't remember where, but he wishes he hadn't heard it at all. He leaves dandelions on her grave. He hopes, wherever she is, she can blow the tufts like she always loved to do.  

december

It is the Tuesday of the last week before winter break. Derek’s birthday. 

He walks through the halls and cringes at how Boyd claps him on the back, how Isaac gives him a cheerful and sincere, “Happy birthday, Derek.”

Because Stiles slams his locker shut and scowls, looks so mean beside Scott, who just appears sad and helpless. Derek knows how he feels, how unfair it is that everyone’s life just goes on while yours still feels as though it has fallen apart, the world you knew tilted on its axis. 

He watches Stiles walk down the hall with his shoulders curled in; he looks so small, in a way that takes up so much space. His face is sharp and the skin around his eyes is dark, knobs of bone and too-long limbs. He looks like grief. Derek knows exactly what that looks like.  

For the rest of the day, Stiles is a permanent fixture. Derek sees him in between classes, in the cafeteria, beneath the awning outside after school. He is everywhere. Derek feels like he just can’t catch a break. 

When he gets home, he sheds his clothes and runs, relishing in the freedom. The smell of the forest and the rustle of leaves. He returns, shifting and redressing with a heaving chest, coated in a sheen of sweat. He cocks his head to the side when he hears, in the distance, the crunch of leaves being disturbed on one of the paths. He tugs his shirt on over his head and cautiously heads for it, ready to tell off some stupid kids for being out where they aren’t supposed to be. 

He breaks the treeline and freezes. Stiles is lying on his back in the clearing, staring up at the sky. He turns his head at the noise and aims a lazy grin at Derek, unbothered. Suddenly, without warning, he misses the kid who used to be afraid of him, who used to go rosy-cheeked and starry-eyed. Derek knows all about how experiencing death can skew your fear. He clears his throat. “What are you doing out here?”

Stiles ignores him. “What is your favorite tree?”

Derek blinks. Unbidden, he thinks back to when he was a kid. 

“You guys see these?” his mom asks, holding out a handful of berries for each of the Hale children to ooooh and aaahhhh at. Cora blows a strand of hair out of her face and bounces on the balls of her feet. Laura curls forward and stares at the fruit. Laura has always been the smarter one - she asks the questions that make their mother smile the biggest. She states, with an air of knowledgeability that she most certainly does not possess at nearly eleven years old, “They look like miniature grapes.”

Cora sucks in an excited breath at that. She tugs Derek’s shirt until he bends down so she can whisper to him conspiratorially, “I love grapes.”

Mom just laughs. Then, abruptly, she crushes the berries in her hand, the juice dripping along the ridges in her fingers. Cora gasps. Their mother wipes her hand along her pantleg, staining the denim. “These are not grapes. They are poisonous.” She levels each of them with a look. “Do not ever eat these. Even if you feel like you are so hungry you could eat anything,” she tickles at Cora’s belly until she giggles, “do not eat these.”

For the rest of their walk, she shows them different plants, weaving a flower crown for Cora and Laura, playfully tucking one behind Derek’s ear and cooing at him for being so handsome. When night falls upon them, still in the deep of the preserve, she teaches them how to find their way back home with just the stars. 

She points at a cluster, one of the stars in the middle shining brighter than the rest. She then trails her finger down, so she is pointing at the towering tree in front of them. “See how those stars line up with this tree?” They all nod. “This is a grey pine. See how the leaves go outward?” She tugs a low-hanging branch, showing them the leaves while she runs a finger along the bristles. “Look for the grey pine that lines up with the stars. That’s home.”

Derek clears his throat. Trying not to feel like he just inhaled smoke. “Grey pine. Why?”

He watches Stiles mouth grey pine to himself before remaining silent for a moment. Then, he asks, quiet, “Did your mom ever read to you?” 

She did. She read everything: childrens’ books with funny voices, the side of cereal boxes, the comics folded up within the newspaper. Derek wanted to go to college and study literature, for a while, because of her. He doesn’t read much of anything, these days. He just says, “No.”

Either Stiles knows he is lying, or he doesn’t care, because he continues like Derek’s answer didn’t matter much anyway. “My mom used to read me her favorite things. She really likes Inferno.” He takes a shuddering breath. “Liked.”

Derek frowns. 

Stiles grins a little to himself. “The self-murderers were turned into trees.” He sighs, long and wistful. “My mom’s favorite tree was sycamore, she liked how the bark peeled. How it didn’t really look like any other tree.” Stiles chews his lip, thinking. “There was one outside of her house growing up. There’s a picture of her, somewhere, hanging off one of the branches, smiling with two missing teeth.” He huffs a laugh that suggests he doesn’t think any of this is funny at all. “I thought about it a lot. Ending up in some form of a negative afterlife, transformed into a sycamore.” Stiles clarifies, “That’s my favorite tree. Sycamores. Because she is my favorite.” Silence. “Was my favorite.”

While Derek grapples with what he could possibly give in response, Stiles expels an explosive sigh. “For those first few weeks after, I waited for a reason.” He laughs, self-deprecating, sending a glance at Derek to check if he’s listening, if he also finds this funny in an unfunny way. “A reason to become a self-murderer. I swore, if my dad so much as, I don’t know, breathed the wrong way, I’d do it.” He whispers the next part, “I would have used any excuse, I think.” While wringing his hands, he says, muted and bitter, “But, I don’t have what it takes.”

Derek isn’t sure what to say to that. Doesn’t think he has anything good enough to offer. They’re both still here. But, not really. He is still stuck in the fire and Stiles is still stuck in a hospital room. He just says, “I think we are doing all right.”

Stiles beams at him, and it looks odd. Misplaced. He beams and his eyes shine and he turns his head back to face the sun, coated in orange. He replies cryptically, serenely, “We’ve become trees.”  

Derek doesn’t tell him to leave. He just levers himself down across from Stiles, sitting with him while the forest makes noise to fill their silence. After a while, Stiles wordlessly hoists himself up, going back the way he came without a goodbye. After Stiles has long since disappeared within the woods, Derek hears a soft-spoken happy birthday nearly swallowed by the breeze. He draws patterns in the dirt with the tip of his finger, waiting until he can no longer hear the footsteps to head home. 

Chapter Text

fifteen.

Stiles’ mother doesn’t show up the day after the funeral. Or the week after. Or in the months following. 

He knows. He just knows. She doesn’t want to see him. 

It makes him want to scream, to curl his hands into fists and shatter something, to break something apart to try and make himself feel like he isn’t cracking to pieces. He thinks about it, late at night and all alone in his room, why she never came. They only appear when they have unfinished business, when they haven’t said what they needed to say. Maybe his mom didn’t feel like she had anything left to do, nothing to apologize for, no loose ends to tie up.

“He is trying to kill me!” 

His dad’s hands raise up, palm-out and placating. “Clauds, he’s your kid. He isn’t trying to kill you. It’s Stiles.” 

Stiles plasters himself to the wall, staring at her wide-eyed, heart pounding. 

“Get him away from me! Get him away!”

His dad curls an arm around Stiles’ shoulders, shaking his head. He keeps his voice the same, calm and kind.

Stiles feels like he is vibrating on a different frequency, seconds from shaking himself into nonexistence. A different plane.

“It is just Stiles, Claudia. C’mon, you know it’s just Stiles.” 

It’s just Stiles. 

He is looking at the woman beneath the thin blanket, coated in the soft glow of the bedside lamp. He looks at her and he can’t see his mom. It makes him feel guilty, immediately. He croaks, “Dad, it’s okay. I’ll go.” 

“No. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” 

But, Stiles is afraid. Has never been so scared of her, the same person who used to check his closet for monsters and tie his shoes for him. He shakes his head. “I’m just going to see what they have in the cafeteria. And then I’ll be back, okay?” 

His dad stares at him, sad. Eventually, he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.” 

When he closes the door behind himself, he hears his mom plead, “Please don’t let him back in. He’s going to kill me, John.” 

Stiles walks until he’s at the double doors, goes straight out into the parking lot and seats himself on the curb by patient drop-off. 

He doesn’t ever go back to her room and she doesn't ever remember why.

His dad is rarely home, he works more night shifts now. Can’t stomach sleeping by himself in a bed that was meant for two people. When he is home, he’s usually drunk. Stiles tries to tell himself that he understands, that he knows why the man does it, but he doesn’t. He scowls to himself.

One day, the things you didn’t deserve are going to catch up to you. 

Sometimes, Stiles forgets that she won’t be coming back. At night, on his way to the stairs, he habitually cracks the door open to the downstairs bathroom, just enough so the nightlight in the mirror-outlet shines through the gap. So she won’t trip when she stumbles there in the middle of the night. She used to wake him up, banging into the walls. One night, she’d knocked into the decorative hall table and shattered two picture frames. Dad thought someone had broken in, aimed his service weapon at her with bleary eyes while she laughed dazedly, still drenched in sleep-delirium. He thinks about it for a long time once he is in his bedroom, that there will be no more thumps during the night. He thinks about it and he cries. 

When he is bringing in groceries, he leaves the door open behind himself, even though his dad went in ahead of him, so she can walk through without difficulty. His fingers ache under the pull of the double-bagged milk carton, the bags laden with imperishable canned goods that his dad likely doesn’t know what to do with. He drops them on the tile floor by the oven and his arms buzz, go limp like noodles, like when he was a kid and he’d press them flat to the door-jambs and step forward so they’d float. He shakes his arms out and pauses, listening to the birds chirping from outside, the scrape of leaves against the asphalt driveway when the wind blows. No one else is coming in. Then, his dad looks over at him where he’s unpacking the dual roll of paper towels from their semi-opaque gray grocery bag - mom only used the reusable canvas kind, the ones with watercolor art prints on the front, but they won’t survive if every piece of their lives belongs to her, she can’t have the goddamn grocery bags, too - and he just knows. His dad knows and Stiles knows and the whole fucking world must know. And then he turns and forces himself to breathe while he shuts the door, swallows when he makes himself flip the deadbolt, tells himself not to turn the porch light on so she can see that they’re awake when she gets here. Because it’s just him and dad, now. 

Stiles remembers when he was a kid and his grandpa died. His dad's dad. He knows that his grandpa wasn't like dad, that he was mean enough sober, even meaner drunk. Some things are inherited - the things no one wants, it seems. Because if life were fair then everyone would want to live, and things like that don’t make for good TV. Regardless of what Stiles thinks he deserves, what he thinks his dad deserves, he isn’t God, and those aren’t his decisions to make. No one should hurt their kid. He remembers how his dad cried, how mom had to hold him for a while, how Stiles wasn't allowed in the bedroom for a couple of hours. Sometimes, scars run so deep that the only way for them to heal is for someone to die. It's a bit unfair how that works out.

“You look just like her,” his dad sighs out, one night that feels like every other night, time bleeding into an indecipherable sense of nothingness. There is just before and after, now. They’re living in the after. He rests one hand on the slope of Stiles’ shoulder-socket, but he’s drunk and it lands sloppily, sliding so it’s half-splayed along the juncture where Stiles’ neck meets the space above his clavicle. His palm drags down Stiles’ shirt-sleeve, pulling his collar taut against the side of his throat. Stiles swallows and the dip of his adam’s apple strains against the fabric. His dad’s hand falls down the rest of the way, skims his elbow, the knob of his wrist, before finally landing on the arm of the chair. He curls both of his hands around the ends of the arms, straight-backed. Morbidly, horrifically, Stiles thinks it looks like he’s in the electric chair. 

His dad just blinks placidly before dragging his eyes to stare at nothing. Stiles swallows, feeling like vomit is bubbling up his throat. He wants to laugh in his dad’s face, or press close so they’re nose to nose and just scream. He feels it, deep in his chest, a dull vibration, the energy straining at the confines of his bones, begging for a means of escape. This would be it. He wants to gnash his teeth, snap like a feral fucking dog, growl and kick and fucking roar like a wild animal. Because everything is her. Her chair by the couch, her framed pictures on the fireplace mantle, her paint on her walls, her bed in her room in her house in her world. Her things are everywhere and it still feels so fucking empty. 

His dad doesn’t know, is still just staring across the room at nothing. Maybe he sees mom. He blinks, slow, then slower, until he shuts his eyes and they don’t open again, fluttering lightly to the ragged heave of his chest while he struggles to breathe. Serves him goddamn right. 

Of course, it is mostly Stiles’ fault, isn’t it? The way his dad is as close to dying as one can get while still, technically, classifying as a living, breathing being. He thinks that sometimes his dad wishes that Stiles would die, just so he could put him six feet beneath the ground and finally fucking move on. So he can finally get a break from all the crying, all the I miss moms, all the misery he’ll never shake as long as he has to drag Stiles’ dead weight behind him. So he can finally barricade the sounds under all that dirt. Death is easy to get over, eventually. Tending to someone who can’t let it go, to someone as consistently and unrelentlessly sad as Stiles, well, that is harder to navigate. Is more difficult than grief. There isn’t a universal five-stage guide on how to deal with your fucked up kid. 

Stiles fights the blistering coil of resentment that builds up within himself, sticking to the valves of his heart like plaque. He doesn’t hate his dad. He doesn’t. Because his dad still asks for a grocery list, and he brings home dinner and doubles up on curly fries instead of ever just saying sorry. He washes Stiles’ bedsheets and replaces the bulbs in his bathroom. But, it wouldn’t hurt Stiles as much if he did hate him. He wishes he could.

“Mom’s dead, dad,” he croaks softly, punctuated by the sound of a vitamix blender being tested on the paid-programming channel in the background. “I just look like me.” 

After winter break ends, he gets switched into a different history class for the second semester. Their teacher went on maternity leave over break, so Stiles’ class got divided up and added to the other history rooms. Derek Hale sits in the third row by the windows, because of course he does. Because if things were easy for Stiles, there wouldn’t be very much for Beacon Hills to talk about.

When Stiles walks in, he can feel the other boy’s eyes on him, burning holes into the side of his face. He’s angry enough to turn his head and stare right back, to twist his mouth up in distaste, trying to inject every bit of poison he can into the expression. He wants Derek to tuck tail and run, he wants to make Derek feel like a goddamn dog. Derek blinks hard, like he can read Stiles’ thoughts, and Stiles deflates. That’s not the type of person he is. He will never be that person.

He takes an empty desk near the front, setting his bag down after the bell rings and no one claims the seat as their own. He just scribbles in the margins of his notebook for the first twenty minutes. Their teacher is also the football coach, so he puts on a movie and scrolls through his phone while they watch or do whatever they want. 

Some of the other kids have their heads down, sleeping. Some have their headphones in, others talking in low voices to each other. Cam comes to stand in front of Stiles and he tilts his head to the side, wordlessly asking what?  

Cam opens his mouth and blood starts pouring out, gurgling in his throat and splattering on the tile floor. Stiles barely refrains from jumping out of his seat. He says, under his breath, “Stop it.”

No one turns to look at him and Cam doesn’t stop. He says again, “Please, stop.” Then, “What’s wrong?”

He just stares at Stiles, like he should know what is going on. Well, he fucking doesn’t. The blood is pooling below his desk, so he moves his feet to rest on the support bars that hold the small cubby beneath his seat. 

When he begins to panic, his breath coming in short spurts, Cam dissipates, sinking into the floor and taking the blood with him. Stiles stares unseeing at the movie until he feels okay again. He looks back to make sure no one noticed anything, only to find Derek staring at him. Stiles just frowns, biting his tongue until he tastes copper as he turns back to face forward. He keeps scribbling in his notebook until the bell rings.

He sees the girl again for the first time in months.

Stiles rolls over in the middle of the night to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand. Grumbling, he clicks on his lamp and nearly falls off the edge of the mattress. She is standing by the bedside, staring down at him. He squints through the lamplight, swallowing nervously. “Hi.”

She tilts her head, brings a hand to press at her throat. He watches the muscles bob for a moment before she croaks, raspy and nearly indecipherable, like in the anti-smoking commercials where they have to talk through a device in their neck, “Help.”

Then, she is gone, pressing through the wall and disappearing from his sight. 

Scott invites him to come over to his house for what has notoriously been dubbed Spaghetti Night. 

He agrees, simply because he is tired of going home to a vacant house, of digging inside of himself for what it takes to fill the matching void in his chest and coming up empty. Also, he can’t remember the last time he attended a Spaghetti Night. 

It’s been a while since he’s been to Scott’s house at all. He feels guilty about it now, but he held a lot of misplaced betrayal close to his heart in those first few weeks. It was too hard to look at Melissa, to know that Scott went home to his mom while Stiles went home to nothing. He was tired of looking at Melissa and wondering why she got to live. If she even cares about trees. 

They all sit together at the dinner table and Melissa glances at him. “Stiles, how have you been, honey?”

Unbidden, Stiles gets the urge to ask her if she will ruffle his hair for him, run her fingers through it and lightly scratch her nails, just to see if it will feel like when mom did it. Or if that is another thing that got buried with her. He blinks and bites his tongue against my mom is still dead, but I’m alright. He just shrugs. “I’ve been better.” He’s never been worse. 

Her eyes go soft. “Stiles.”

Scott clears his throat, blurting, “I’m going to try out for the lacrosse team.”

Stiles balks, blinking against his disbelief. “What?”

His best friend grins at him, sheepish. “I was actually hoping we could try out together?”

Which is how Stiles ends up on the field, squinting against the sun while sweaty teenage boys slam into each other across from him. He has no incentive to perform well - not even under the disapproving look Derek has been aiming at him this entire time. Derek’s the captain this season, finishing off strong for his last year of high school. Stiles is here for Scott, his love for lacrosse is across town in the cemetery. He doesn’t really feel like digging it up. 

Jackson shoulder-checks him a few times, goes out of his way to rough him up and push him around. He barely feels it. Derek barks, “Whittemore, get on goal.”

He sputters. “What? Why?”

Derek raises his eyebrows and shrugs one shoulder, shakes out his sweaty hair. “Because I told you to.”

Jackson grumbles under his breath, stomping over to the net on the opposing side of the field. Stiles rolls his shoulders out and shakes himself off, scowling. He says, under his breath, “I don’t need you to fight my fucking battles,” because he knows Derek can hear him. 

Derek just tilts his head and smirks while Stiles rolls his eyes and goes across the field to put more distance between them. Lately, being close to Derek has been clouding his mind, makes him feel like he can’t think straight. He wants to remain mad, has nothing left to hold onto but the anger, these days. So he turns away and aims his frown at the ground, waiting for try-outs to finish up so he can just go home. 

Scott runs up beside him, panting and excited. “Dude, is this awesome or what?”

Stiles grits his teeth against biting out or what. He forces a smile onto his face. “Yeah, it is pretty cool. You’re going to make it for sure, Scotty.”

He can hear Scott’s breathing turn a little labored as he bends forward and braces his elbows against his knees. Stiles crouches beside him. “You okay, man? Do you need to stop?”

Scott fishes his inhaler out of the side of his shorts - which makes Stiles grimace in disgust - before taking two quick puffs and shaking his head. “I’m good.” With that, Scott bounces on his heels and beams directly into Stiles’ face. When he jogs back over to his spot in front of the goal on the home side, Stiles feels himself sag, souring. He can’t do this. 

When it finally wraps up, Derek stretches his arms over his head and rolls his neck. Stiles gets a little caught up in the way his biceps flex, the veins in his forearms. He blinks, looking away while Derek moves to wipe his forehead with the back of his arm and praises, “Great job, guys.”

A couple of them cheer, whooping and clapping Derek on the back while they pour water into their mouths, headed for the locker room. Stiles’ eyes track Jackson as he walks towards the stands and he feels his mood dampen at the sight of Lydia. 

He closes his eyes. 

The fascination he once held for her has shriveled up, was hung out to dry and forgotten, now sun-crisp and weather-worn. He tries to think of one redeeming thing, a single one. Reaches to dredge up even an inkling of what she used to stir in him, that near-frantic sort of admiration. The dark green pierce of her eyes, the plumpness to her mouth, the blush in her cheeks or the intellect embedded in her words. He can’t find it. The electricity is gone. His power’s been snuffed out. He looks at her, now, and all he can see is a carefully picked-out headstone, the way he and his dad struggled to select the font that would adorn the family tomb. He just feels hollow, like the sight of her scrapes out his insides and makes him feel it all over again. His mom will never stop dying. 

Your mom is really sick. 

She isn’t going to get better. 

He has to forgive Lydia at some point. But right now, Stiles can’t do anything other than remain bitter. That’s okay with him. It has to be.

“Stiles.”

He jumps, opening his eyes to find Derek frowning at him. Stiles gulps and looks back to Lydia, who is staring back with her lips pursed. In his peripheral, he sees Derek follow his eyeline, turning his head to face Lydia as well. Then, Derek steps directly into his line of sight, blocking her from view. 

Stiles crosses his arms. “What?”

Derek narrows his eyes, looking him up and down. Whatever he was going to say, he evidently decides against it. Sighing through his nose, he just says, “Good job out there.”

He scoffs at that, because Stiles couldn’t  have been worse if he’d tried. That was kind of the point. He turns on his heel, hiking his bag up his shoulder and making his way toward the parking lot. “Okay.”

He hears Derek following close behind. 

“Stiles.”

He rounds on him. “What?”

Derek blows out a breath, his cheeks puffing with it. Stiles can read it all over his face, what he is about to say, and he honestly doesn’t want to hear it.

“Let me guess,” he interrupts, tapping his chin like he has to think about it, “you feel bad. A sympathy card would be preferable. And more sincere, probably.”

Derek’s mouth twists itself up into a grimace. “I really am sorry. About what I said.”

Stiles cocks his head. He’s feeling low enough to hash this out right now. “So, are you sorry for all the shitty things you said to make sure I knew I didn’t belong? Or are you talking about when you told me I would get what I deserved and then my mom kicked the bucket?”

The older boy’s mouth falls slack.

Stiles smiles. He knows it looks mean. “Apology accepted.”

He makes his way to the parking lot and Derek doesn’t follow him. 

When he walks up to his dad’s cruiser, the man is on the phone. He can't really make out who's on the other line, guessing it is one of his deputies. He has it on speaker, his eyes haven’t caught on Stiles yet.

He’s getting frustrated, speaking hard into the receiver. Stiles can barely hear the conversation, muffled through the window. “He’s my kid, you got that? I don’t need help raising my kid.” 

“Sir, all I’m saying is that it would be healthy for him to—” 

“You don’t know one thing about my son. Not a damn thing.” 

His dad hangs up and Stiles watches him stare straight ahead for a second before he slips into the passenger seat. He puts his bag at his feet and says quietly, “Hey, pops.” 

The man shoots him a tight smile, backing out of the parking spot once Stiles clicks his seatbelt. He keeps himself busy toeing at the rubber mat on the floorboard, his foot jumping along the ridges. At a red light, his dad twists to look at him, face weary. “Are you happy?” 

He doesn't know what to say to that. He knows either answer - yes or no - is equally as upsetting. He drags the front of his shoe against the mat, rubs it back and forth until it squeaks against the mud from the field. He shrugs and whispers, “I miss mom,” even though he knows he isn’t supposed to say things like that. He’s the one inhibiting their progress. He is angry at his dad all the time, but Stiles is the one ruining everything. 

His dad sighs. Not frustrated, but conceding. Like he knew that was what was coming. He just says, “Yeah, kiddo. I know.” 

The drive home is quiet. Bad quiet. When they pull into the driveway, Stiles unbuckles himself and goes straight to his room. Shuts his door and turns his music up loud so his dad can’t hear how he cries.

Stiles sits out in the preserve by himself for a little while. 

It’s comforting, in some ways, to know that Derek likely knows he is out here but is staying away. It makes Stiles feel dangerous. 

He likes to be surrounded by trees because it makes him think of his mom. In the good way. Because everything makes him think of his mom: the floral wallpaper in the living room, the thrift-store dish sets with blue swirls on them, the way his dad’s eyes catch on her chair at the kitchen table. And it feels like he’s put a lightbulb in his mouth, because he read somewhere that, once you do that, you can’t get it out without breaking it. He’s got a delicate little glass bulb pressing against his tongue, scraping along the backs of his teeth, and whenever he swallows it creaks, so he stops swallowing. His mouth slicks up with saliva because it’s got nowhere to go, and he thinks, surely, he can pull it out. He doesn’t have to shatter it. 

Then his dad opens the fridge in the middle of the night, stumbling around, and Stiles forgets that he has something so fragile right under his molars. His dad slams the door by accident and Stiles bites down as hard as he can. 

So, now, he is sitting by himself in the forest, still chewing on glass. 

Stiles peers down at his hands, the lines in his fingers, and wonders if they mean something, if they foretold a life of quiet grief. If Lydia could have read them and told him that they said his mom was supposed to die all along. If they mark him as a killer. He squeezes his palms into fists and chooses instead to look out at the trees. He doesn’t know if any of them are sycamores, doesn’t care enough to squint at the bark. 

He pretends they are anyway, just in case his mom is here, too. 

He hasn’t gotten much out of Cam since the incident in history.

But, each day he sees Isaac in the halls - sad-eyed and wilting, Stiles’ dad glassy-eyed and red-cheeked at the dining table - he knows that Cam is never going to stop choking.

He brings it up, when his dad’s face looks a little clearer. He just says, sighing like Stiles is being difficult, “Nathan Lahey is spotless, kid. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Stiles opens his mouth and closes it, open and closed, open and closed. His dad would have never just - just thrown in the towel. He wouldn’t just give up. The Argents were spotless and he had still tried and tried and - but this isn’t his dad. Not anymore. He knows it and Cam knows it and the entirety of fucking Beacon Hills knows it, too. 

He doesn’t see Cam for a while, after that. 

The cemetery is some place he usually tries to avoid. Sitting in front of her grave, Stiles tries to ignore the spirits walking around him, through him. They don’t bother him, don’t ask for his help, but he still feels like he isn’t alone. Like he can’t mourn in front of them. 

“Hey, mom,” he croaks, picking at the bouquet across his lap. He wanted to bring her tiger lilies, the red ones were her favorite. But, they aren’t in season, so all he has is roses. She deserves tiger lilies. He pulls a petal off one of the flowers, sniffing hard against the burn in his throat. “I know you probably don’t want to see me. So, I am sorry if I am keeping you from resting. I’ll make it quick, I promise.” 

He heaves in a watery inhale, the dampness catching in his chest. None of the ghosts stop to look at him, but he feels like they are all watching anyway. He rubs the back of his palm across his eyes, blinking. “I just miss you. And, you probably already know but,” he thinks of empty beer bottles, microwave dinners and mindless television, “dad misses you, too. Maybe even a little bit more than I do.”

Stiles leans forward to rest the roses in front of her headstone before dusting off his hands and curling them between his thighs. “So, uh, if you can’t be with me, you should be with him.” Shaky exhale. “He needs you more than me, I think. So, it’s okay if you are with him. I just wanted to tell you that, you know, just in case you couldn’t already tell.” He swipes at his eyes again. “You should be with him.”

He sits there in silence for a while, staring at the flowers like he can will them into tiger lilies. Like he can make her want to see him if he just tries hard enough. If he could just fucking try. 

Suddenly, there is an audible crunch to the ground behind him. He turns, resisting the urge to frown at Derek. It is always Derek. 

He is holding tight to a bundle of wildflowers. They look hand-picked, Stiles guesses they are from the preserve. He wishes he could have gotten something other than roses. 

Derek clears his throat, giving a curt nod in an awkward greeting. “Stiles.”

Stiles inclines his head before turning to look back at his mother’s name, engraved in stone. He is so lonely. 

“Don’t you think it’s weird,” he blurts, wanting desperately for nothing more than someone to make him feel like he isn’t all by himself. “Don’t you think it’s weird that we bury them?”

“What?”

He shrugs, shaking his head and scoffing at himself. “I don't know what I am saying. I just - it’s weird that we bury them. They deserve something nicer.” Quieter, “She deserves something nicer.”

Derek clears his throat. “It is weird. But, not as weird as them being gone. Burying them doesn’t hold a torch to losing them.”

Stiles mulls over that, turns the words over and over in his head. “Do you think they are lonely down there?”

“I think that they’re dead, Stiles.”

He doesn’t say anything in response, just listens to the thud of Derek’s steps as he makes his way to the Hale Memorial.

A week before his sixteenth birthday, another ghost shows up. This time, it’s a man. 

He appears while Stiles is getting ready for bed, towering by the bedside, the shine of the floor lamp slipping through him. His neck is marred, jagged and purple. He looks at the girl - who Stiles has still not gotten another word out of - where she is idling by the wall, shimmering lightly. They exchange a loaded look. Their injuries are identical. Stiles tilts his head, mouth open while he tries to process what this means. 

The girl and the man just stare. They recognize one another, that much is obvious. But they don’t seem to know each other. Not personally. 

She looks to him and suddenly she bends backward, her teeth shifting into fangs, her ears elongating as her shirt rides up to expose her midriff. She just keeps bending - back and back and back - until her abdomen slices open across the middle. The man does it too, bowing his back and dividing in half with a face that looks just like Laura’s. It happens so fast, Stiles barely has time to process it before they both disappear, sinking into the floor and vanishing from view before the blood even hits the carpet. 

Cam looks at him from where he is standing in the corner, confused. Stiles falls back onto his bed, blinking up at the ceiling as he tries to make sense of what he just saw. 

This just got complicated. Really fucking complicated. 

When Stiles gets to school, Scott finds him in the hall, clapping him on the back. His best friend excitedly leads him to the trophy cases, gesturing proudly to the lacrosse team roster taped to the wall beside them. Scott’s listed beside the role GOALKEEPER, while Stiles finds his name next to the label of ALTERNATE. 

“We made it!” Scott grins, shaking Stiles’ shoulders.

Stiles bites his tongue against the urge to scream. 

Chapter Text

John hates the color yellow. 

It looks a little too much like the beaming sun, reminds him of things that are bubbly and sweet like cherry cola, like dripping condensation punctuating ice clinks.

His mom sits in the rocking chair on the front porch. It used to be white, before the coating chipped and the seat became well-worn with years of use, now it’s more wood than paint, more mom’s than anyone else’s. He sits on the slanted steps leading up to the deck, using his pocket knife to scratch at the dirt beneath his fingernails. He has his legs splayed out, one of them resting where two of the nails are pushing up, the culprit for the way it creaks when you step too close. It hurts, strains through the grit of his jeans until he can feel the pressure on the soft underside of his thigh. Until it’s all he can feel. 

The wind blows past, more water-vapor than air, and John closes his eyes against the cling of it, the way it catches in his chest when he breathes. Everything’s wavering with hazes of orange and swathes of indigo, the dull wave of heat on the horizon looking like the residual pulse of a plucked guitar string. 

It’s fucking hot. 

His mom sighs, long and wistful, her chair croaking as she shifts. He glances back, squinting in the low light. She’s wearing a yellow bandana, tied loosely around her head and billowing out with the coils of her hair. It sways in the breeze and you can see how the strands lighten up close to the root, how the bandana is a guise of youthfulness rather than a shield from the setting sun. John rolls his neck, shifting his weight as well, hissing through his teeth when the switchblade knicks his fingertip. He frowns, moving to press the pad of his thumbprint to the flat of his tongue, throat constricting against the copper tinge when his mom sighs again. 

“I was going to go to college.”

John slides his finger from his mouth, rubbing it harshly against his pantleg before tucking the knife-point beneath the nail on his pointer finger. “I know.” 

“Maybe your dad’ll let me go back. Let me try again.”

He leans back, the edge of the top step digging between the ridges in his spine. “Maybe,” he agrees softly. He’s glad he isn’t looking at her. That she can’t tell he’s lying. 

They sit in silence until he hears the old engine rattling from down the road. Knows he’s coming before the headlights even illuminate the street sign. John blows out an explosive exhale, pushing himself up to head inside. On his way by, he dips down to press a kiss to her head, his lips scratching against that goddamn yellow bandana. He grits his teeth. “‘Night, mom.” 

“Goodnight, John.” 

He lies awake, curled on his side, picking at the abrasion on his finger until he causes more damage than the original injury. He always causes more damage. 

The walls feel like they shake, swelling with the way his mom cries. How glass shatters in the kitchen before everything goes quiet. He tries to sleep to the symphony of thrift-store dish sets, his father’s critically-acclaimed sonata. The composition of late nights and hard days at work, of front porch rocking and missed opportunities. 

John feigns sleeps until his door creaks open, until he has to answer why he’s sleeping so damn much, boy. Until the only light in the room is Coors’ and the rough exhalations of breath smell bitter, like he could very well get secondhand shitfaced from it. 

When he blinks, one eye not able to open all the way from the catch of his father’s class ring, the throb behind his brow bone feels hot. Makes the space behind his eyelid look yellow. 

He wishes his mom had gotten to fucking go to college. 

He’s running late when she spills coffee down the front of his shirt. 

It burns, licks through his uniform like fire, and he hisses, pinching the fabric and pulling it away from his chest. 

“I am so sorry,” she apologies shrilly, grabbing fistfuls of thin brown napkins from the dispenser beside the to-go pick up area, rattling the cylindrical metal container that holds the straws. One of the baristas reaches to quieten it and John blinks back to the woman in front of him. She is dabbing frantically at his shirt, so he clears his throat and takes a step back. She blows a raspberry, bunching the napkins within the curl of her fist. He gets a little caught up in the red flush staining her cheeks, nearly misses it when she jokes, “Is this an arrestable offense?” 

His mouth opens and closes. “What?”

She gestures to his chest and he looks down, shaking his head when he’s met with gleam of his badge. “Right. Yeah.” She sputters a laugh and he feels himself go hot all the way to the tips of his ears. “Just graduated, actually. Not very much arresting happening on my end. Not yet, anyway.”

She winks. “Lucky me.” 

He’s staring, he knows he is. She has sticky-sweet eyes, syrupy and kind. Freckles dot the slope of her nose, follow the bridge all the way to the upturn at the tip. Her hair’s messy in the way that looks endearing rather than sloppy, makes you think of the crackle when clothes stick together after you pull them from the dryer. She looks like all of the happy, summery adjectives: sunny, radiant, bright. 

She looks yellow.

The woman thrusts her hand out, still folded around the soiled napkins. She huffs a laugh, transferring them to her other hand before extending her arm again, wiggling her fingers. “Claudia Gajos.” 

He purses his lips, considering, before sliding his hand into the outstretched slope of her palm. She shakes firmly, grinning when he mutters, “John Stilinski.”

They’ve gravitated toward the corner where the trash bins are. He’s so late. But, he can’t leave. 

“Stilinski?” she hums. “Is that Polish?”

He shrugs, says, “I don’t know,” because he doesn’t. 

Claudia doesn’t seem deterred. “That’s a long last name.”

It is. He remembers in high school he’d had to shorten it on his varsity jacket, how all his teammates called him Stiles. How his dad burned it in the backyard, screamed in his face until the embers went out.

“What,” his father spits, gesturing wildly with a fist clenched tight around a metallic-blue can, “you too good to be a Stilinski, now? Is that it?” 

John grits his teeth, poking his tongue in his cheek while he angrily aims his eyes away, trying to ignore how they sting.

“You better look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He shrugs. “Yeah.”

The radio clipped to his shoulder beeps, deputies talking in code through the crackle of the speaker. He gives Claudia a curt nod and a small wave. She tilts her head, smiling with all her teeth. “Have a good day, John Too-Long Stilinski. I owe you one for the coffee.”

He doesn’t say anything, trying not to feel like he’s running when he pushes through the door, the chime rattling obnoxiously to signal his exit. He didn’t even order anything.

Claudia teaches at the pre-school two blocks from City Hall. He only knows because he goes with a couple of other deputies to give a safety presentation to the kids. 

He steps into his assigned classroom and inhales a surprised breath when he sees her seated behind the teacher’s desk, scribbled crayon drawings stuck haphazardly to the front of it. She blinks wide honey eyes back at him, the only thing that stops him from feeling like this was more than a coincidence. 

John keeps getting distracted, faltering in his words every time she readjusts her hair clip, smiles softly and urges the kids to be quiet and listen. 

“You guys be nice to Mister Stilinski or else he will be very, very sad.” She gives an exaggerated pout, causing them to giggle at her. But, they remain silent, watching him with eager eyes as he finishes up his presentation. 

Before he leaves, Claudia pushes herself up from her criss-cross position on the alphabet carpet, walking him to the door. “You know,” she says, “they go to lunch in about fifteen minutes.”

He raises his eyebrows, because she says it like he is supposed to understand what she means. 

“I have a coffee maker in my office,” she adds, and he feels his mouth fall open before he jokes, “You trying to catch an assault charge this time?”

Claudia laughs, loud and unabashed, her nose crinkling with it. John smiles despite himself, feeling pleased at the jovial tint in her cheeks. He drinks cheap coffee from the thin paper cup she offers to him, seated in a tiny children’s chair in her cramped office. It’s the most fun he’s had in a while, he leaves feeling lighter than he has in a long time. 

John is pleasantly surprised to find out that Claudia drives a baby-blue jeep, “just a little eighties see-jay-five,” she brags before fisting a hand in his shirt collar and tugging him forward to lick into his mouth. “But,” she whispers when she pulls away, “I sure hope you aren’t here to talk about cars.”

Claudia wears cherry chapstick, it adheres itself within his stubble, makes his tongue taste like artificial fruit. She lays him back across the seats and undresses only as much as she needs to. He feels like he’s a teenager again, near-frantic, sneaking around just for the chance to get a taste, taking whatever he can get just to be able to say he got something. In the back of his mind, it idly registers that what they are doing is illegal. 

He stares at how the tendons in her neck shift when she cranes her head back, how sweat drips along the slope of her temple, trickling down so slowly while it feels like everything is going so fast. 

When they’re done, Claudia blinks with bleary eyes and pink cheeks, rising up and off him gently. She scoots forward minutely to rest lightly on John’s lower belly, grinning and ducking down to plant a chaste kiss on his lips. John just blinks up at her, feeling helpless as she leans forward out of his sight. He tilts his head back to see what she's doing. Claudia draws a sloppy heart into the fog on the car’s window, tracing a little C + J within the condensation inside of it before looking down at John and fucking giggling. He doesn’t know what did he to deserve this. All he can think of is how he can’t ever hold anything perfect without destroying it. How, deep down, he is just like his dad. 

The first time they fight, John puts his fist through the wall that separates the kitchen from the linen closet by the downstairs bathroom. John cries harder than Claudia does, sinking to the ground and staying there until he can’t hear the rattle of that fucking engine anymore. 

“It’s okay to be angry, John,” she soothes, sitting criss-cross beside him as she rubs her fingers through his hair. “You’re allowed to be angry.”

John stares down at the swell of his knuckles, the way the knobs of bone are blossoming with the tinge of purple. He knows, in a few day’s time, they’ll be yellow. He feels like he’s in The Tell-Tale Heart, like no one else can hear the heartbeat in the floorboards, no one else can hear the man he’d had to kill because he couldn’t stop staring at his hazy eyes. 

“It’s not okay,” he refutes, trying to shake her caress. “It’s not.”

“It is to me,” she promises softly, sliding her hand to rest on his shoulder. “You’re not bad.” 

It feels like he is, is the thing. 

“You’re just like me,” his father spits, laughing cruelly in John’s face.

“I am nothing like you,” he promises. But, he knows the real person he’s trying to convince isn’t the man across from him. 

“You’ve got alcohol in your blood, boy. That’s those Stilinski genes.” His dad takes a pull from his beer bottle. “One day, you’ll realize how hard this shit is. You’ll realize I was never the bad guy.”

He sleeps on the couch, opting to curl up under the light of the living room television. Because the bedspread in their room is mustard-colored and he doesn’t think he’s strong enough. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever be strong enough.

John is terrified of Stiles.

He’s so small. He has little feet and little hands and tiny fingernails. Stiles wears these teeny patterned socks and onesies that have funny things written on them like All Mommy Wanted Was a Back Rub because Claudia thinks they’re hilarious. 

John’s afraid of hurting him. Claudia rolls her eyes, bouncing Stiles on her hip and cooing. Stiles leans forward, gurgling happily at the way Claudia is speaking high-pitched nonsense to him. He plants his spit-slick lips on her throat, smearing them down to her clavicle before gumming contently at the bone. “Oh,” Claudia glances down in surprise, laughing. She moves her hands to wrap beneath his chubby arms, pulling him away as a string of saliva stretches between his mouth and her collarbone. “Well, that’s kind of gross,” she coos, making him screech excitedly in reply. 

“Come on, John,” she urges, holding Stiles out to him, who is blowing spit bubbles and happily blubbering gurgle-sounds. 

He reluctantly wraps his arms around their baby, cradling him gently against his chest. Stiles wriggles, getting comfortable before pressing his slobbery mouth into the juncture of John’s neck and shoulder, gumming at his t-shirt. 

“The worst you can do is kill him,” she quips and John hisses, “Claudia,” as she cackles, making Stiles kick his legs out in response. 

Later, when they’re curled up in bed, the baby monitor crackling with Stiles’ dream-grumbles, John turns to Claudia, “I love you, you know,” he whispers. 

She smiles, sleep-soft and dog-tired. “I know,” she whispers back. 

John releases a shuddering sigh. “I don’t want to be like him.”

He feels Claudia trail a comforting hand up and down his side over the barrier of the sheets. “You’re not like him, John.” 

“Not yet.”

“Stiles is more loved than any other baby in the world, I think.” She huffs out a quiet laugh. “No one thinks you’re like him.” 

“I just,” he closes his eyes, “I can’t lose you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He opens his eyes, nearly blinded by her grin. She sticks her pinky out from beneath the covers. “I promise.”

But, he knows, deep down, that that would be the catalyst. Knows intrinsically that the absence of Claudia would be the one thing to turn him into the monster in his closet. He can only hope that he doesn’t turn Stiles into the same scared kid John always was. 

Still, he hooks his own pinky around Claudia’s, smiling at how she shakes them. “You’re stuck with me, Stilinski.”

“I hope so,” is his low reply. 

“You’ve got me forever.”

He leans forward to press his nose into her hair. “That’s not long enough.”

She hums in response, thoughtful. “Then I guess I’ll have to give you whatever is left after that.”

“I’d like that,” he breathes, pressing his cheek to the crown of her head while she curls herself flush against his side. 

“Me too.”

He wakes before Claudia, walking on sock-soft feet to Stiles’ nursery. He has a steaming cup of coffee gripped in his hand, sipping from it intermittently as he watches Stiles fidget in his sleep.

Light pours in from the curtain-gaps, casting everything in the glow of the morning sun. John just stands there, staring at Stiles, feeling so full he could burst from the inside. 

He sighs, then, closing his eyes against the shimmer of sun rays, surrounded by the yellow walls around them. 

Chapter Text

eighteen.

Laura sits him down. 

She regards him seriously, hands folded over one another to dissuade how they are shaking against the tabletop. It uneases him, in a deep, grating sort of way, to see her so afraid. Laura isn’t supposed to be afraid, she is supposed to be the stronger of the two of them. She is supposed to be the one who lost their family and came out better for it instead of worse. She isn’t supposed to be like Derek, so scared all of the time that he can barely feel anything beyond the fear. 

“Someone is killing us,” she says lowly, matter-of-factly. 

Derek’s brow furrows. “What?”

“I have been in contact with a few of the surrounding packs. ‘Wolves are going missing,” she inhales a shaky breath, and when she exhales, it shakes as well, feels like it seeps through Derek’s lips on his own ragged intake, “and, out of nowhere, their connections are snapping.” As she says it, she snaps her fingers and the quick, solid sound of it makes Derek blink hard in surprise. He swallows while she continues, “No one has heard from them.” She looks at him, weariness embedded in the lines of her face. Abruptly, bizarrely, Derek feels like a monster. Like the animal he has always been. Laura shouldn’t have had to become his mother, her eyes should still glow harlow gold. She pins him with her tired eyes, the same color as Cora’s, as mom’s, as his own. Derek swallows around the thought of Hale Green. “You need to be careful, you hear me?”

He blinks against how much she reminds him of everyone who isn’t there. “I hear you, Laur.”

Senior year hasn't been what he dreamed of as a kid. 

In the movies, it looks like nothing but parties and underaged drinking and lots of slow, life-affirming sex. But, Derek can’t get drunk and he has no reason to insert himself within the party scene. Not after last time. 

Instead, Derek goes to school for four hours, he only has three periods and lunch since he completed all his requirements. It’s coupled with the fact that they just feel bad for him. Perks of having a dead family, he guesses. 

The same goes for Stiles, it seems, who has sat in on most of the upperclassman’s courses, sharing a few periods with Derek over the years. He doesn’t see him as much this semester, a barely-there shadow in the halls. Like a ghost. When Derek does see him, he looks bad. Really bad. Like, sunken eyes and jutting cheekbones type of bad. He looks like he’s sick, he looks how Derek feels. And, honestly, it’s kind of scary. Stiles is a reflection of the worst parts of Derek. He thinks that’s why they constantly find themselves within each other’s orbit. Because, what does Derek have left to lose?

He tries not to think about it. Derek is tired of being miserable all the time. 

When Finstock blows his whistle, Derek fights the urge to wince at the sound. He has sweat dripping from his temple, trickling down the line of his back and sticking his hair to his forehead. He squints against the burn and scrubs a hand down his face. He lifts his arms and locks his fingers together, cracking his neck between the cage of his biceps before rolling his shoulders out. He hears a quick intake of breath and his eyes snap to Stiles, hunched over on the bench, cheeks burning red and posture reeking of guilt. Derek looks away, but he can’t fight the twist of his smirk. Just like old times. 

“You guys suck!”

A few of the other boys rub the sweat off their forehead with a quick swipe of the back of their palm, squinting at Coach. The man seems to consider something before adding, “Except you, McCall. You’re actually doing kind of okay.”

Scott beams from his spot in front of the goal, eyes shining from where he is shielding them from the sun. “Thanks, Coach!”

Derek rolls his eyes, shaking his head. His gaze catches on Stilinski again, who is now drawing shapes in the dirt with the points of his cleats. He looks so small. Derek remembers when Stiles took up so much space, he was always so big. If Stiles was around, you could feel it in the air surrounding you. He isn’t supposed to be curled over on himself with his knees drawn up. He shouldn’t be like Derek. It feels wrong. 

“Hale!”

His eyeline snaps to Coach. 

“Don’t just stand there and look pretty, kid. You’re the captain, so get to, I don’t know,” he waves his hand, “captain-ing.” 

When Derek looks back to the bench, Stiles is already staring back. Boring into Derek with those eyes. He swallows hard and turns around, directing his teammates to their places so they can start running drills. 

He’s twisting the dial on his locker when Stiles appears beside him, wordlessly extending his hand. Outstretched in his grip is a worn-looking piece of paper, like he crumbled it up before deciding against throwing it away. Derek raises his eyebrows before slowly pulling it from his hand. 

“You don’t have to come,” Stiles says, rushed, before Derek is blinking at the frantic wobble of his backpack where it bounces with his steps, his heart racing as he walks down the hall with his fists clenched at his sides. 

In Stilinski’s messy scrawl, the paper reads: You’re invited to Stiles’ (Super) Sweet Sixteen. There is a drawing in the corner of a wolf with angry eyebrows. Derek guesses that it is supposed to be him. 

Derek just stares down at it, frowning. Because Stiles has no reason to want Derek at his birthday party. No reason to want Derek in his house, taking up space in his world. He knows what it feels like when home is your only realm of safety, remembers when it was the final frontier between himself and plunging into nothingness. He has this small, aching sort of feeling in his chest, the kind that tells him when he sees himself in other people. He sighs. 

He has no intention of going. Really, he doesn’t. Still, though, he carefully folds the wrinkled paper and stows it safely within the front pocket of his bag. 

He isn’t going. 

“You have to go.”

Derek sighs out through his nose. “I don’t want to go.”

Laura frowns over at him from where she is boiling pasta on the stove. “I don’t care. You’re going.”

He frowns down at his hands. “Yeah. Because the Halloween party was so fucking fun.”

She inhales sharply. “Don’t blame that on me, Derek.” She stirs the noodles harder, the bottom of the spoon scraping the pot. “I am not responsible for the fact that you are miserable all of the goddamn time.”

Derek’s chest feels like it has been set on fire. “Yeah. Because all the misery we went through is my fault, isn’t it?”

“That is not what I said. Don’t put words in my mouth to make yourself feel better.”

He thinks back to when she sat him down, when she was so scared for him. He feels the fight seep from his body. 

She scrapes the pot again, end of discussion. “We are never going to heal if you keep picking at scabs, Derek. Please just go to the fucking birthday party.” She sighs. “Please.”

Derek just nods, afraid to speak with how thick his throat feels. 

Derek swallows when he walks up the front steps of Stiles’ house. He hasn’t been here since - he doesn’t think about it. He already said he was sorry. He idly scrapes his thumbnail against the birthday card in his hand, rubbing the other against the denim on his thigh. Why is he so nervous? This is Stiles.  

He straightens his shoulders before ringing the doorbell, can hear it chime from inside, followed by Sheriff Stilinski’s groan and the reluctant scrape of a chair. When he opens the door, he looks bad: red-rimmed eyes, sloppy hair and a stained t-shirt. He doesn’t look like a sheriff, and he sure as hell doesn’t look like a father. “Well,” he draws out, “I must say, it’s been a while since I have seen a Hale in the flesh.”

Derek shoots him a tight smile, his nostrils burning against the smell. He guesses that it’s been a long time since the man has stared at something other than the bottom of a bottle. “Yeah. Me too.”

He steps to the side and waves Derek through. “Come on in, kid.”

Stepping inside, Derek takes a moment to look around. There are pictures everywhere. Some in frames, others just tacked to the wall, held to the fridge by magnets. In most of them, Stiles is a kid, gap-toothed and small. It looks like the pictures stopped when the house became a home to just two. He looks around. “Where’s Stiles?”

The sheriff gestures his hand toward the back door before seating himself at the table again and pulling from his beer. Derek’s eyes catch on a six-pack, haphazardly ripped open on the floor by the fridge. There is only one left. He suddenly feels very, inescapably uncomfortable. Like he isn’t supposed to be seeing this. 

Derek blinks at the obvious dismissal, anxious to step away, craving some fresh air. “Thanks.”

On his way past, he gently sets the card he brought on the end table beside the couch. It has an old, bulb-less floral lamp sitting on it. The kind of lamp you’d find in the thrift store for just under four dollars, if that. The kind of lamp someone who loves weathered antiques would cherish. The cord is worn and yellow-orange, the plug dangling, not connected to any outlet. He blows out a long breath at the implications, tapping his fingers once, twice against the soft-green envelope before making his way to the back door. 

It sticks when he tries to open it, creaking loudly when he finally pulls it free. The wood’s cracked around the handle like it has been hard to open for a very, very long time. 

Stiles is seated cross-legged on the grass, picking at weeds. He doesn’t look up at Derek’s arrival, just angles his head to the side. “You came.”

Something’s missing. Derek looks around the yard, overgrown like it needs to be mowed. “Where’s Scott?”

The other boy continues picking at the ground, shrugging. “His dad’s in town this week.” There is obviously something there, more to that statement. There is a heaviness to it that Derek isn’t sure how to read. 

Derek lowers himself into the grass, leaning back on his palms. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Stiles scowls. “It means he isn’t here,” he bites out. 

Believe it or not, Derek knows when to back off. So, he just says, “Happy birthday.”

Stiles scoffs. “My birthday isn’t until Thursday.”

Derek tilts his head, fighting the urge to smile at how badly Stiles wants to hold onto his anger. He knows exactly how that feels. “Well. Happy early birthday, then.”

A huff of a laugh. “Thanks.”

He thinks back to when they were in the woods, the way Stiles told him about the trees on his birthday. Unbidden, he wishes they were different people, wishes they could have been friends. 

They sit in silence, surrounded by the wind in the trees and the insects in the bushes. Stiles interrupts the quiet, tentative, “Do you ever feel like there are things that you know that no one else could possibly know? Like, even if you explained it to them, they still would never be able to understand?”

He thinks about the fire. How, no matter who he tells, no one will ever get it. He turns his head to look at Stiles. Well, maybe someone might get it. He sighs. “Yeah. It’s been a while since I haven’t felt like that.”

Stiles mimics his sigh. “I don’t think I will ever stop feeling like this.”

There it is again, the uncanny parallel. Every time he talks to Stiles, it feels more and more like he has crawled within Derek. Like he has reached his arms down Derek’s throat to rifle among his insides, digging for the pieces Derek would rather keep hidden as his teeth scrape helplessly along Stiles’ elbows, dragging against the skin coating the socket. He can see his spit pooling into the textured ridges of Stiles’ flesh, streaming in rivulets along his ulna, collecting at the knob of his wrist, like his fingers are drooling. 

He rubs at the dirt with his knuckle, eradicating such an unpleasant thought. Don’t you think it’s weird that we bury them? In his peripheral, he watches Stiles struggle with what to say next, his mouth opening before closing again. Something begins to eat away at Derek’s chest, a carnivorous, feral sort of feeling that constricts so tight he thinks he may very well suffocate. It’s lava-hot, slugging through his veins like magma. Every cell has been replaced with heat. He likes Stiles Stilinski. Not in the way people in books like other people, or the way the main characters become enamored in late-night television dramas, or the rhyming lyrics in chart-topping love songs. Because that isn’t who they are. Because Kate Argent ruined him. That’s not Derek Hale. Sometimes, to like things, you have to first despise them so fiercely that the feeling erupts, turns inside on itself until it vanishes, until the pressure produces a gemstone.  

Stiles breaks him from his startling revelation. “People like you are dying.” 

Derek’s heart freezes in his chest. “What?”

Stiles turns to look at him. “I can see them. ‘Wolves.” He looks away, eyes far-off as he squints at the sky. “There’s two of them. It’s on purpose.” Stiles lazily rolls his head back to stare at Derek, into Derek, to fix him with serious eyes that somehow manage to hold an air of empathy Derek has rarely been afforded, these days. “Someone is killing you guys.”

Someone is killing us.  

“How do you know? You can’t know that,” Derek insists, shaking his head. “You can’t see the future.”

Stiles smiles, like he is thinking of something else. But it isn’t happy, it’s tired. He waves a hand in front of his face. “The shift.”

Derek looks down at his lap while Stiles continues talking. He didn’t realize how much he missed the Stiles who talked and talked and talked. It grates against his stubborn insistence that Stiles doesn’t know what he is talking about, could not possibly know, no matter what he sees. 

“I think you might be in trouble.”

Derek laughs humorlessly. “You think so?”

“I can feel it.”

“Well, I feel like I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I am being serious, Derek.” He meets Stiles’ eyes, shining copper, “You need to be careful. Both of you.”

He smiles with all of his teeth, purposely unkind, mostly to do with the rippling heat in his chest. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Stiles slumps, defeated, and Derek instantly feels like the dirt beneath them. Wishes he could take it back, could go back to when Stiles just wanted to talk. When he just wanted to listen. “Maybe not.”

“So,” he attempts to dispel the tension. “What is wrong with Scott’s dad that he won’t let him come to your birthday party?”

“Not much of a party,” Stiles mutters, but Derek ignores it. “His dad is an asshole.” Stiles shoots Derek a look, sheepish, before apologizing. “Sorry.” Derek misses when he used to feel guilty for saying swear words.  

“What’s so bad about him?”

Stiles’ scent goes sour at that, and Derek wishes that he never asked. The other boy picks at the grass again, plucking up a few of the blades harshly. “No one should hurt their kid.” Stiles glances briefly to the back door and Derek feels something well up in his head, like water filling his mouth, covering his ears, weighing him down and rooting him to his spot. He thinks of Sheriff Stilinski, drinking at the table.

His thoughts are interrupted when Stiles looks him in the face. “Can we try something?”

Unbidden, Derek’s eyes drop to Stiles’ mouth. The way his upper lip juts out a little in the center, how they are always baby pink. He thinks of all the things Stiles could possibly want to try with him, all of the things that used to make Stiles turn red in the bleachers. 

He clears his throat. “Yeah. Sure.”

Stiles pushes himself from the ground, brushing the dirt from his jeans. When Derek doesn’t move, still blinking at the spot where the other boy was sitting, Stiles crosses his arms. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

Stiles wrenches the door open and Derek’s eyes catch on the web of cracks near the handle again. He swallows, walking lightly behind Stiles, evading the Sheriff who is clicking through channels on the television, every other one resulting in static before the news of the weather filters through the room. He follows Stiles up the stairs, trying not to look at all of the family photos lining the walls. He feels like they are not meant to be viewed by anyone other than Stiles and his dad.  

When Stiles closes his bedroom door behind Derek, he raises his eyebrows. 

Derek frowns. “What are we trying?”

Stiles reaches under his bed and emerges with a Ouija board. Derek holds his hands out, incredulous. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?” Stiles challenges. “You scared or something?” 

Derek scowls. “Those things aren’t real.”

Stiles aims him a look, tapping his fingertips on the board, smelling smug. “Seems pretty real to me.”

When Derek doesn’t budge, Stiles heaves a sigh. “Listen. If these spirits are ‘wolves, they aren’t going to talk to me,” he shakes his head, “they haven’t talked to me. But, if you are here, maybe they will realize that I am not their enemy. You can show them that I just want to help.”

“How do you propose I show them that? I can’t see them.” Stiles gives him an expectant look. “What?” he gripes, “because I’m a werewolf I should be able to communicate with all other werewolves? I think there’s a word for assumptions like that.” But, Stiles isn’t deterred, he just smiles this deranged sort of smile. Which is how Derek ends up sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him while the other boy places his hands on the planchette.

Derek tries not to broadcast how much he thinks this is all bullshit, because he knows Stiles will pick up on it. Likely already has. Stiles takes a deep breath. “Who is hurting you guys?”

When nothing happens, Derek goes to sigh, gears up his venomous I told you so, before the room turns cold and Stiles’ heartbeat kicks up beside him. He watches in reluctant fascination as the planchette moves along the board. 

P.

The wind outside sounds louder, amplified. Like it exists outside of Derek’s heightened senses.

O.

He can hear the electricity humming in the walls, the energy in the coils of the bulbs in the overhead light above them. It rattles, as though itching to burst. The planchette moves slightly before sliding back. 

O.

Stiles inhales sharply, going rigid. 

L.

Derek looks around, sensing for the first time that maybe this is real. Stiles gulps beside him, voice cracking when he asks, “A swimming pool?”

No. 

Stiles asks them if they can be more specific, Derek can tell he is grasping at straws. 

H-I-T. 

Stiles’ heart picks up again as Derek shoots him a worried glance. He is struck with the sudden, unbidden image of someone killing an innocent teenage girl. Their hands around her throat, nylon rope digging within the skin around her neck. It fogs his head and remains embedded within his brain, like when you blink after a lightning strike and can still see the flashes. Stiles swallows, says, small and afraid, like he just saw the same thing, “I don’t want to talk to them anymore.” 

He says goodbye and scoots back, breathing hard before looking frantically at Derek. “I don’t know what they are trying to tell me,” he says helplessly. 

Derek clicks his tongue, trying to keep his composure. “A pool?”

Stiles’ mouth flattens into a grim line. “They weren’t drowned.” He sounds certain, so certain that Derek can’t help but believe him. 

“How do you know you are even talking to the right people? Aren’t Ouija boards just a bunch of…” he waves his hand, trailing off, trying to make Stiles feel better.

Stiles acts like Derek didn’t say anything, remaining quiet. After a moment of tense silence, Stiles voices, thinking out loud, “Maybe they were dumped in a pool of water?” He looks to Derek. “They were all alone, I’m sure of it.”

He thinks of Laura, by herself at the house. By herself everywhere. 

Someone is killing us.

Derek feels sick. “I have to go.”

He is out of the bedroom and taking the stairs two at a time before Stiles can reply. Mr. Stilinski says woah, kid, where’s the fire? when he bursts through the front door, making his way toward the tree line. 

He shifts, running as fast as he can to their house in the preserve, scared to breathe, scared to slow down. He reaches out but he can’t feel her. He can’t feel anything. His lungs burn but he can’t stop. He shifts back once he breaks through the woods, running through the outskirts of the property. 

“Laura!” he screams, frantic. 

No reply. He can’t even hear a heartbeat other than his own about to burst from behind his sternum. 

“Laura!”

The house is empty, he knows it is. He still checks anyway, runs straight to her room and still feels the burn when everything is where she left it. When the dishes are still in the sink and her blanket is still strewn along the couch. Everything smells like her, but she’s gone. 

She’s gone.

Chapter Text

sixteen.

The absence of Laura Hale rattles the entire town. There are search parties, volunteer groups posting flyers in the cities nearby, going door to door with her photograph. Her face is on the news, smiling and bright, followed by the rolling line of text at the bottom, encased in a red banner: If you know anything, please call the tip line at — he never bothers to read the number. 

But, Stiles knows. He does. They are never going to find her.

He thinks Derek knows it, too. 

Stiles’ shoulder blades scrape harshly against the vent slats of his locker as Derek pushes him back for a second time. “Where is she?” he demands again. 

He holds his hands up, aiming for placating, but Derek’s eyes don’t lose any of their flaming rage. He looks like the embodiment of all the cliché, overused weather epithets: electrifying, stormy, thunderous. Stiles is not talking to Derek, he’s talking to a natural disaster, he is talking to a kid who is afraid that he is all alone in this big, big world. So, he just grits his teeth and takes it. His mom’s voice echoes in his head, what she said about Canis Major. There are worse ways to cope with your grief, Stiles knows, especially when everything around him smells like Jack Daniels. 

“I told you,” Stiles repeats, quiet so the other kids can’t hear, “I can’t see her, Derek. I promise you I can’t.”

Derek huffs out through his nose, angry. “Why can’t you? Try harder, Stiles. You’re supposed to be able to see her.”

Stiles stops fighting, going slack in Derek’s grip. “It doesn’t work like that, Derek. I told you it doesn’t.”

The older boy pushes him farther into the locker, eliminating any iota of space between Stiles and the metal. It hurts, but Stiles welcomes it. He deserves it. Scott is out today, it’s his dad’s last day in town. So, it’s just Stiles. Cam is trying to intervene, making jerky movements in his attempt to pull Derek back. It is futile, Stiles knows it and he knows that Cam knows it, too. He still appreciates the effort for what it is. 

Derek’s eyes go gold around the edges, embers of anger. “Then how does it work, Stiles? You get to see my mom when I am still straining to remember her, but you can’t see Laura when she is the only one who—” he goes quiet, curling his fists tighter in the shoulders of Stiles’ shirt. “Can you even see anything at all? Or are you really just crazy?” It is a low blow, and Stiles feels it land somewhere within his chest. 

“Did you ever consider that I can’t see her because she is still alive?” Stiles doesn’t believe that, not for one second, but Derek seems to be too distracted to be meticulously detecting any heart-skips. “Your eyes aren’t red, Derek. You’re making a scene.” 

Derek steps back, then, his lips suddenly warping into a smile. All teeth. Stiles blinks at the cruelty embedded within the expression. “Oh, that’s right, my mistake,” he says, voice dripping with malice. “You can’t even see your own mother. Why would you be able to see Laura?” 

Stiles’ head goes blank, at that. He feels like he’s in a car, like all of the windows are rolled up and Derek is talking to him from outside, muffled by the glass. He feels this gaping, inescapable sense of dread coil up tight behind his sternum. 

Derek is just angry, he tries to remind himself. His mom wants to see him. She does. He will see her one day. Derek is just angry. 

He swallows hard, fighting the tears that sting his eyes when he blinks them away. “That isn’t fair,” he croaks before clearing his throat. “You don’t get to say things like that.”

Derek just scoffs, backing away with his fists balled up at his sides. “Grow up, Stiles.”

Stiles watches with his arms wrapped around himself as Derek stomps down the hall, a few of their classmates watching with wide eyes. When he feels like he can move, Stiles goes to the bathroom and just sits in the stall until it doesn’t burn so bad. Until his fire is put out. 

The jeep sits in the garage, the same spot it was parked for the last time. 

Its blue paint looks dull in the darkness, it’s a car that belongs in the sun so that you can see it next to the sky. But, it’s a car that belongs to his mom. It will always be hers. 

With a heavy heart, Stiles hopes that he can drive it someday. But, he won’t be holding his breath.

He knows who he needs to talk to. He doesn’t want to, would be fine with never speaking to her again. But, he owes it to Laura to do everything he can, after all that she did for him. 

Lydia purses her lips when he slides into the seat across from her. She’s tucked away in the corner of the library, a calculus textbook opened beside her notebook where she is neatly solving equations. The way she looks at Stiles irks him, rubs him entirely the wrong way. She has this aged sort of understanding in her expression, a tiredness that only comes with holding onto things you would rather not be forced to carry. 

Stiles' heart drops. “You know.”

She tilts her head, the ever-frustrating sign that she is about to play at coy. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Stiles tries to remember what he liked so much about her. She clicks her tongue, looking down to continue writing out her numbers. “I know a lot of things.”

He leans closer, lowering his voice but trying to inject a bite into it, trying to copy a page from Derek’s book. “You know that people are dying.”

Lydia’s pen falters, drawing the stem of the 4 she was writing a little too long, shaky at the end. She moves the point of it away from the paper. “People die every day, Stiles.” She winces a little after it leaves her mouth, which makes Stiles feel better. At least she isn’t a complete monster. 

He puts as much venom into his, “I know,” as he can. 

She caps her pen, sighing, “I don’t know enough to help. So, what is the point?”

“The point is,” Stiles fumes, looking around sheepishly before lowering his voice, “the point is, you know that there is someone out there murdering innocent people.” He waves his hand at the table, “and you are worried about calculus.” 

“That isn’t fair,” Lydia hisses, “what do you want me to do, Stiles? Walk around the woods looking for a killer? Go around town waiting until I can feel them?” 

When he stays quiet, she gives a slight nod, like she knows she is right. She is. He doesn’t know what he expected her to do. “And, how are you so sure that they are innocent?”

He thinks about the young girl, her neck marred and her eyes so, so sad. The way she shifted like it pained her to be who she is. The way that was mirrored within the man who showed up after her. He just knows. They didn’t deserve this. 

Then, Lydia makes it worse. “I am sorry your mom died. I am sorry that there was nothing I could do about it. But, you need to be careful about where you step, Stiles. They’re called killers because they kill.” She shuts her textbook. “Learn when to let sleeping dogs lie.”

He stares at her empty chair for a long time after she leaves, only moving when the bell rings to signal that the period is over. 

It is the middle of the night when Stiles opens up his dad’s laptop. His passcode is his and Stiles’ mother’s wedding anniversary. Once he is in, he can access the BHPD’s database. It isn’t criminal, he tells himself, he isn’t tampering with anything. Most of this stuff is likely public record anyway. 

He goes through the missing persons reports, all the scanned papers filed away into the online library, likely by dead-eyed deputies who haven’t given it much thought. Around here, children are the top priority, amber alert cases that are worked tirelessly until they are solved. Or worse.

Stiles clicks through the connections to missing persons in the surrounding towns, leads that went cold or tips that were documented but never utilized. He knows the two ghosts’ cases are related, he can feel it. He combs through it until he finds it. Her picture. 

Connie Evans, eighteen. Five-foot-eight with a slender build, dark-haired and dark-eyed. She lived just barely within Beacon Hills’ limits, but attended high school in Hollow Springs, the next small town over. It’s listed that this was her parents’ choice, the academics had a higher rating than BHHS. She was last seen walking through town with grocery bags from the local thrift way. No suspects, no breakthroughs. She was about to graduate, a full-ride to UCLA under her belt. Stiles swallows, clicking through the links of related documents. 

Anonymous tip. Called in at 14:37,  February 9, 2014. Transcription completed by Deputy Jordan Parrish. 

“Yeah, I saw her walking by herself. She was carrying a lot of stuff, groceries and the like, and I thought, damn, that girl must have a hell of a set of arms on her. I had seen her around town, of course, but we had never really talked. I knew her in the way that everyone knows each other in Hollow Springs. So, I slowed down beside her and rolled my window down, figuring the least I could do is offer her a ride. I mean, she looked like a kid. 

I said, ‘Hey, where you off to with all that?’ And she just replied, ‘Home.’ I didn’t ask her where home was, I just asked her if she would like me to take her there. She looked scared, you know, like I had spooked her. Which I understand, ‘cause she was just a girl and I am an old man. I just felt real bad for her. It was a little cold out, too. So, I just asked her if she would be safe on her own. She wasn’t even wearing a jacket or anything, just a t-shirt and jeans. She laughed like I told a joke. She had a really nice smile, I remember that. One of those bright-white, movie-star smiles, you know. And I just remember thinking, this ain’t a place for a kid like that. Then, I drove away. Now, I just can’t stop thinking about how scared she looked. How whoever was waiting for her at home lost their little girl to a grocery-run. That could have just as easily been my daughter. I just hope this helps. I should have given her a ride.”

Stiles is turning that information over carefully in his head when the hallway light clicks on behind him. He quickly closes out of it, his heart jackrabbiting out of his chest. He shuts the laptop in time for his dad to lean himself on the door jamb. His eyes are glassy, his hand wrapped loose around a brown bottle. He rakes his eyes carefully over Stiles - his flushed cheeks, ragged breathing - before dragging them to the desk. 

He clears his throat, gesturing with the bottle. “I was just getting something to drink before I went back to bed. And I noticed my office light was on.”

Stiles remains quiet and his dad continues, “Don’t you have school tomorrow, kid?”

Tomorrow is Saturday. Stiles swallows and just says, “Yeah.”

His dad tilts his head and sighs, this long-winded, tired sort of sigh. It sounds sad. “I’m sorry.”

Stiles’ throat closes in on itself. He blinks hard. 

“Your mom, she—” he uses his thumb and forefinger to rub over his eyes in slow circles, “she would have known what to do.” He doesn’t say what to do with you, but Stiles hears it.

The room feels suddenly, unavoidably dark, heavy in the way that things can only be heavy when all you can think about is who is missing. For a moment, Stiles hates his dad. He does. He looks at him, with his slouched posture and his beer bottle and his tired eyes, and he fucking hates him. It feels hot in his chest, like his blood has been replaced with acid that drips through his veins and eats away at everything good inside of him. He wants to grab his dad by the face and cry, scream through gritted teeth you filled me up with poison! But, he can’t. How do you tell your dad that you’d bury him if it meant having your mom back? He feels guilty at that thought, feels the sudden urge to apologize brew up behind his cranium. He doesn’t say any of that, though. It’d be futile, since his dad would likely forget it in the amount of hours you can count on one hand. 

So, instead, Stiles asks what he has been aching to ask. “Dad, do you believe in God?”

The man swallows, his adam’s apple dipping low before coming back up. He takes a slow pull from his beer, gritting his teeth and hissing low around the swallow. “I believe that if there is a good place for good people to go when they die, your mom is there. I believe in that.” 

Stiles wipes his eyes to hide how he wants to cry. They have been doing too much of that, lately. “Do you think she would be punished for the things she—” Stiles takes a shaky breath, “do you think God knows that she didn’t mean all of those terrible things she said?”

“I don’t think God would punish her for things she couldn’t control, son.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, expelling a harsh breath. “And if He would, well that doesn’t make Him much of a God at all, then.”

His dad finishes his beer before walking up to Stiles. He braces himself, waits coiled up tight with anticipation. Feeling tense all over. Finally, the man just places his open palm on Stiles’ shoulder, curled so that he can swipe his thumb softly along the nape of Stiles’ neck. “I believe that she loved you more than anything. And I believe that, wherever she is, she misses you. Misses us.”

Stiles sniffles and his dad squeezes lightly. He whispers with bud-light-bitter breath, “Go to bed, kiddo.”

He steps out then, and Stiles listens to his footsteps echoing down the hall. He waits until the light clicks off and his dad’s bedroom door creaks shut. He blows out a breath, wiping at his eyes again. He takes a moment to breathe before opening the laptop. 

He clicks through a few of the other tips before settling on the next one. 

Anonymous tip. Called in at 08:16, February 23, 2014. Transcription completed by Deputy Aaron Strauss.

“I had seen Connie Evans around town a few times, but she lived in my neighborhood. She had one of those faces, you know. One of the unforgettable ones. I used to see her mowing the grass or playing with her siblings in the yard. She was kind, very kind. She was always nice to my kids. One of those people who would never hurt a fly. When I heard she had gone missing, I wracked my brain for anything I could do to help. 

There was a man, a little on the elderly side, I saw him talking to her on her porch once. Her parents’ car wasn’t in the driveway, so I think she was home alone. She looked tense, arms crossed and stiff. The man didn’t seem deterred. I don’t know if they knew each other or not. I stepped out to see if I could hear what they were saying, I was in my pajamas and I had just put my kiddos to bed. I accidentally triggered the motion sensor on my security lights. When they lit up, he looked back, a little startled. I couldn’t make out too much of what he looked like. He left pretty much right after that and I didn’t see him come around again. But Connie seemed rattled by the exchange. I don’t know, it could be nothing. But, I do know that a week later she went missing. I doubt that is just a coincidence.”

There is a photo lineup connected to that, men between the ages of thirty-five and sixty who were placed near the neighborhood on the day described by the caller. The report beneath it details how they pulled the security footage from traffic cameras, ran some plates and came up empty. The woman who called revealed herself, said that none of the photos were the man she saw that night on Connie’s porch. The lead hit a dead end and wasn’t picked up again. 

After some more research, Stiles decides to go to bed in case his dad wakes up again. After brushing his teeth, protected by the shield of his covers, he conducts a few searches on his phone. He googles Connie’s name, followed by Hollow Springs. Dozens of articles come up, a few citing California as “a state shook by loss.” They don’t know the half of it. 

One thing stands out to him in particular, a link to a blog post. The header proclaims the owner as a true crime fan, their top posts including theories on nation-wide cases, warming up leads that are two-degrees from ice-cold. It directs him to the one they’ve posted about Connie, published shortly after her initial disappearance.  

The first line is an italicized disclaimer that they do not intend any harm via these observations, and they hope that she can return home safely very soon. Quickly, Stiles feels very, very awake. 

The weird thing is, upon hearing about her disappearance, it shook at something in my mind that had long gone stagnant. Like when you can remember only a handful of lyrics to a song, but never the full song, and it drives you crazy. That was what the first draft of the Connie Evans file did to me. 

So, I did some digging, and I was right. The absurd sense of prior knowledge sloshing around in my cranium was not unfounded. Back in the late ‘80s, there was a string of similar disappearances splattered along California’s coast, but they were never connected to a singular suspect. I actually have another post about it you can find here . But, it didn’t stop there. Bizarrely, in the mid ‘70s, there was a nearly identical set of disappearances in France, more specifically, around the outskirts of Paris. I tried calling this in to the tip line, but they thought I was a prank caller, insisting that they get Interpol involved in a small-town missing person case. They told me if I had any tact, I would stop harassing them while they mourn their loss. But, I know I’m right. Or, if I am not right, I am certainly warmer than the investigators are. 

Attached are a few articles, grainy photographs of the people who went missing in the eighties: Samuel Fischer, Jacob Hall, and Jessica Miller - all originating from the same central area, last seen somewhere very public. It seems almost like a game, having them sighted by several community members only to have no discernable lead on their disappearance. 

Most of the links detailing the cases in France are, unsurprisingly, in French. Stiles copy-pastes a few lines into google translate before giving up. He is letting this entire thing get into his head. This is all hogwash, as his dad would say. But, staring at it, he can’t help but think, once is an incident, two’s a coincidence. He looks between the tabs: Hollow Springs, the California coast, fucking France.

Three’s a pattern.

After school the next day, Stiles texts his dad that he will be a little late coming home, he has to stop by the library to work on a research project. It isn’t exactly a lie. 

The librarian at Beacon Hills’ Public Library, Miss Beth, has worked there since Stiles was a kid. She used to check out the children’s books his mom would help him pick out and she issued him his first library card. So, when he tries to casually walk up to her desk, she raises an eyebrow at him. “How can I help you, Stiles?”

He swallows, trying to paint on an easy smile. “What strings would I have to pull to access the newspaper archives?”

She rolls her eyes, pulling a key ring from a hook beside her filing cabinet before opening the small half-door that separates the space behind her desk from the rest of the room. He follows her down the creaky stairs to the dimmer basement area. She has him wash his hands first in the small adjoining bathroom, waiting outside as he scrubs mindlessly at the dirt beneath his fingernails. After he turns off the faucet, he looks at his reflection, makes an unpleasant face to himself before walking out. He gives her a tight smile and she guides him to a locked door. Her glasses slide down her nose as she flips through her keys, chewing absently on her gum as she slides one into the handle.

Upon entering, the only thing Stiles could liken it to is the evidence locker at the precinct. There are towering shelves filled with clear plastic bins of alphabetized media. Newspaper clippings, fiche, laminated photographs, rolls of microfilm. The bins are labeled by date-range, and he zeros in on the one marked 1985-1990. Miss Beth stops him, tutting. “We are working to digitize the rest of the physical media in here, so most of it can be accessed on our computers via the library’s database. But,” she points to the shelves, “I can remove anything you may need.”

He points out the bin he wants, indicating that he is looking for anything written near the late eighties about Samuel Fischer. She flips to the Fs, pilfering through before gently removing one clipping, passing it to Stiles. It is covered in a sort of plastic sheet. He grips the edges lightly.  

Samuel Fischer was approaching his twenty-fifth birthday. He had a fiancée and a loving family. The whole package, according to the journalist. The type of support system that takes a sizable blow following a disappearance like his.

When he’s done reading, he chews his lip, staring at the paper while seeing absolutely nothing at all. He passes it back to Miss Beth, clearing his throat. “That’s all, thank you.”

She replaces the newspaper clipping, hoisting the bin up to its proper place. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Call me if you need anything else,” she offers before checking her watch and stepping out. 

There’s a small table in the corner of the room, on one end sits a hulking microreader, on the other side is an archaic desktop monitor with a bulky keyboard. Stiles sits down, moving the mouse to wake the computer. Upon entering the database, his fingers touch feather-light along the keys, knowing he can’t go back once he gets started. 

He searches: Samuel Fischer.

Stiles doesn’t click on any of the articles, skimming as he scrolls through the highlighted text. The publications stop after 1989. 

He sighs, knowing he shouldn’t, before inputting Jacob Hall. Disappeared at a Los Gatos convenience store, allegedly bought two packs of potato chips and a soda. He was last seen the previous day attending church. He was nearly thirty-three, had a wife and two children. 

Swallowing, he clicks back, typing Jessica Miller. Last seen around Salinas, dropping her son off at a childcare program. She was twenty-eight. 

They’re all cold. All of them. No suspects, no justice. 

Suddenly, Stiles doesn’t want to be by himself anymore. He walks out of the special collections room, taking the stairs two at a time. On his way by, he thanks Miss Beth for helping him out before beelining for the table of public computers. 

Using his dad’s laptop to access information, he felt guilty. He doesn’t want his dad to face any repercussions or scrutiny. Nothing looks more suspicious than obsession. He sits himself down, clicking with a thick mouse at one of the outdated monitors. This time, he is looking closer to home, more information on Connie and the other ghost who showed up. Stiles searches through what he can see of the unsolved missing persons cases documented within the past three years, narrows it down by age and sex. Nothing. He switches sites, tries to find something more reliable, before conducting the same method of search. Nothing.

He sighs, going back to the library’s database to see what he can glean from the resources available there. Stiles finally thinks he has found something semi-promising when the mouse clatters out of his hand and he jumps nearly a foot in the air due to the skeptical, “What are you doing?” that sounds off behind him. His heart is racing when he comes face-to-face with Derek Hale. He laughs to himself, a little hysterical. Of fucking course. 

“What are you doing here?” he returns, relaxing his posture as much as he can. Stiles isn’t afraid of Derek, he doesn’t want to give the older boy the satisfaction of thinking otherwise. Honestly, Stiles hasn’t seen him much since their altercation in the hallway. Deep down, he hopes Derek feels bad. But, he’s not holding his breath. 

Derek looks almost embarrassed before his expression smooths out. He gestures to his phone, obviously aiming for casual. “I don’t have wifi.”

Stiles swallows. That’s right. Derek is all alone. He thinks about him, all by himself in that house. Again. All of the insurance money likely went to Laura. Who is gone. Derek has probably never had to pay a bill in his life. Stiles, suddenly, feels a deep dark swath of commiseration coat him from head to toe. He thinks about how he has to remind his dad to pay the bills through cold showers and dark bedrooms. 

“Oh.”

He returns his attention to the computer, blinking at the blue light. He filters the information again, scrolling. He tries to ignore Derek’s presence behind him when he finally finds it. 

Joshua Bates. Twenty-two. He was a teacher’s aide in San Francisco before returning to Hollow Springs to be with his mother following the death of his father. He transferred to Hollow Springs High. Stiles chews his lip, before writing down Hollow Springs High into his notebook and circling it for emphasis. Derek pulls out the chair beside him before sinking down into it. “What are you doing?” he asks again. 

Stiles taps his pencil against his paper in a rhythm that must be obnoxious to what he assumes to be hyper-sensitive werewolf hearing. But, Derek doesn’t snap at him to knock it off. 

“This is one of them,” he says, moving so Derek can see the picture on the screen. A happy-looking Joshua Bates, smiling with crinkled eyes.  

Derek blinks. “One of them…?”

“The ‘wolves,” Stiles whispers, and Derek sits up straighter. Stiles flips a few pages back in his notebook, sliding it to Derek so he can look over them. “This is the other one, the girl. Connie Evans.” He leans over and points to where he scribbled down that she attended HSH. “She went to Hollow Springs for school even though she lived in Beacon Hills. Which is why her information is in the BHPD’s database and our police department looked into her disappearance, but I am going to try and sift through HSPD’s site and see if I can find anything. These resources are really hard to access on a library’s Internet Explorer browser.”

Derek’s eyes are still raking over Stiles’ meticulous notes, so he feels the need to continue filling the silence. “The thing is - there is no shift in M.O. here, but rather a shift in victims.” Stiles waves a hand to Joshua’s picture. “Joshua was twenty-two, tall with light hair and light eyes. He wasn’t muscular, but he wasn’t exactly slight, either. Connie was eighteen, thin with dark hair and dark eyes. They are so different, the only thing that connects them is their placement at Hollow Springs High School.”

The older boy turns to look at him, his expression hard-lined and severe. He adds, grim, “And they were werewolves.”

Stiles traces the lines of Derek’s face for a moment before swallowing. He agrees, quiet, “Yeah. And they were werewolves.”

Derek turns to continue reading through what Stiles has written. Eventually, without looking up, he asks, “How do you know they are the only two?”

He pulls his gaze away from Joshua’s smiling face. “What?”

“How do you know there weren’t more? You say there is a stark difference in victim choice, but how do you know these are the only victims?”

Stiles opens his mouth and shuts it a few times while he struggles with how to answer, because, honestly, he doesn’t know. He thinks about Samuel, and Jacob, and Jessica. While he is still looking for the words, Derek adds softly, “Laura doesn’t look like either of them.”

“Derek—”

“I’m just saying,” Derek cuts him off, “maybe you don’t need to limit your search to just Beacon Hills.” He scoots back, the chair scraping as he slides Stiles’ notebook back toward him. “Maybe to find the pool, you need to start looking where there’s water.”

Derek doesn’t tell him goodbye or offer him another glance as he leaves. Stiles just continues staring at Joshua’s picture, wondering if he just looks hard enough, he’ll find Laura.

Stiles goes full murder-suspect, cleaning off the corkboard by his desk and setting it inside the floor of his closet. Luckily, his closet is a little on the roomier side, one of the key aspects of the house that he is sure would be pointed out heartily by any realtor. So, he can fit inside with the door closed and shine a flashlight to illuminate how he tacks Connie and Joshua’s grainy pictures to the board, connecting them with some red yarn leftover from a science project where he used it to connect the planets. He pins their respective newspaper clippings beneath them, leaning back to squint at his handiwork. 

He thinks about it long and hard. Pours over the details. 

Joshua Bates was last seen at Hollow Springs High, confirmed by several eye-witness testimonies, including reports from students and faculty. His disappearance shakes us all to our core, especially so soon after Connie Evans, reported missing not even fifteen months after her initial documentation. His car was found in the parking lot of the local Thrift Way, no signs of robbery or struggle. His groceries were still tucked away in the back seat, a gallon of milk and some frozen meals. It is likely that this was premeditated, not a spur-of-the-moment type of crime as originally indicated by the beginning details of the case. Something like this so close to home, so close to the disappearance of Connie Evans, is nothing short of a catastrophe. 

Stiles pauses where he is using scissors to cut up the article on Joshua, breath hitching while he reads over it. He double checks the date, just to be sure. 2015, not long after mom died. 

Sheriff Stilinski of Beacon Hills told the press: “These two cases are horrifying, to say the least. In a small town like this, as well as Beacon Hills, these types of crimes cut down to the bone. So far, there is no practical connection between these two disappearances and nothing to link them to the same suspect. But, we are all ears for anyone who may know anything at all that could help.” 

Hollow Springs residents are not happy with John Stilinski’s involvement, several members of the community as well as city council advocates citing him as a “a sloppy drunk and an even sloppier cop.” But, his track record is squeaky-clean, many are impressed by his investigation of Miss Kate Argent, who he helped to institutionalize in late 2013. It seems that prominent leaders of HSPD are happy to have him on board and guarantee that they have full trust in the man helping with the disappearances. 

Stiles decides not to tack that to the board, if only to spare himself the heartache. He moves onto Connie Evans’ article, scanning over what he has tacked below her photograph.

The sudden disappearance of Connie Evans has resulted in a city-wide search for the girl we have all come to hold close to our hearts. Last seen walking home from the Thrift Way, there are currently no leads on who her captor could be. There are several witnesses to her attendance at school that day, as well as her subsequent arrival home as attested by her parents. Her disappearance is truly an anomaly that we can only pray becomes easier to solve. If you have any ideas on her whereabouts or helpful tips, please contact the HSPD immediately. 

He chews his lip, thinking about it. With Joshua, there were no signs of struggle. No clues that point to distress or indicate any sort of physical altercation. He had obviously already loaded his groceries into the vehicle when he was approached by the killer. 

Stiles attempts to reconstruct it in his head. Joshua shows up to his job as a teaching assistant, likely on his way to becoming a real teacher, he goes through his normal routine. He stays a little late - to grade papers or prepare for class the next day, Stiles cannot theorize with certainty - before leaving and stopping by the store for a quick grocery run. It has to be a little late into the evening, he could be tired, seeing as to how school would have started early. He’s been up all day, his guard would be down. Hollow Springs is small, close-knit, any rogue or outside presence would be a red flag. At a grocery store, there are so many witnesses. 

Joshua knew whoever killed him.

Stiles flips back to Connie’s article, reading through the bits he didn’t pin onto the board. She attended school that day, was well-loved by the community. She was a teenage girl with a seemingly good family dynamic, her parents would have likely noticed any strange behavior. This rules out any secret trysts, hidden love interests. Too many people would have seen her meeting frequently with an outsider. He thinks back to the anonymous tips. She was talking with a man outside of her home, she looked uncomfortable but did not indicate any need for assistance. She had a good relationship with her neighbors, she could have screamed for help were the man bothering her. She was walking home from the grocery store when she disappeared. The same one that’s lot was housing Joshua’s abandoned car. They both knew whoever attacked them, she likely got into a vehicle and was driven away. She declined a ride from a man, as indicated by the anonymous caller, so she knew enough about staying away from strangers, even if Hollow Springs residents all knew each other in a polite, friend-adjacent sort of way. She did not yell for help, she was not forced into the car. That is their connection. Stiles is willing to bet that, whoever it is, they’re an upstanding member of the community. An unlikely suspect. 

Someone who works for Hollow Springs High. 

Cam seeps through the closet door, seating himself neatly on the floor next to Stiles before looking over at him expectantly. 

Stiles purses his lips and whispers, “We have a big fucking problem.”

He fishes his phone from his back pocket and thumbs through his contacts. He holds it up to his ear while the line rings. 

“Stiles?”

“Derek, how do you feel about going to prom?”

He is rushing to tell Derek his theory while they are huddled close by Stiles’ locker. Scott has slipped away to the bathroom. He has approximately three minutes to get it out. 

“Whoever did it. They work at the high school.”

Derek ducks his head and hisses, “Here?” 

Stiles shakes his head and blushes a little when he sees that some of their classmates are staring. Probably wondering if they imagined Derek slamming Stiles into the lockers, seeing how chummy they are now. 

“Hollow Springs,” he corrects. “I think whoever it was, we could catch them at prom.”

It’s Derek’s turn to shake his head. “How do you know that they still work there? If it were me, I would have quit.”

“It’s the ideal hunting ground,” Stiles explains, before wincing at his word choice. “If you think there were more victims, the killer has to have easy access. They wouldn’t pass this up by quitting while they’re ahead. People like that are cocky, self-assured.”

Derek looks him up and down, then. Stiles feels laid bare beneath his eyes, like Derek is seeing something that Stiles has been trying to keep hidden. “You got all of that from the case files?”

Stiles smirks, shrugging one shoulder casually. “Please, I’m a cop’s kid. I got all of that from reading the newspaper.”

The older boy smiles at him, with his teeth, like they are both in on the same joke, and for a moment Stiles feels like he is hanging the wrong way. Like how he would curl backwards over the arm of the couch when he was a kid just to feel how the blood rushed to his head, the way it made his face feel warm and his eyes sting with the heaviness. Derek makes him feel upside down. 

Before Stiles can overly evaluate what exactly is going on, Derek steps back, breaking the bond. “Scott’s coming.” Then, he is gone, and Stiles is staring at his back as he disappears down the hall. 

Scott slides up next to him, beaming. “Are you excited for the game Friday?”

Stiles tries to smile back, but he can’t stop thinking about being upside down. 

There’s a home game tonight, it’s the last game of the season since prom is approaching, and Scott is blabbering excitedly in Stiles’ ear as they gear up in the locker room. “Mom finally got to take off work to see me play!” he half-yells to be heard over all of the conversation. “She felt so bad because she couldn’t afford to miss a shift, but now she’s here!”

Stiles glances at Derek, who has his head turned slightly in their direction. Stiles aims Scott a distracted smile, trying to match his jovial energy as much as he can. It is exciting that Melissa is here, Stiles’ dad hasn’t shown up to a single game. But, bench warming isn’t worth missing a mortgage payment. Stiles gets that. He just wishes it didn’t hurt so badly. And all he can think is how he is haunted by people who will never be free as long as he keeps dragging his feet.

He doesn’t even know who they are playing tonight, his shoes kicking up dirt from the field as he slides his cleats along the grass. When he plops down onto the bench, he cranes his neck, looking for Melissa. She has a sign, covered in glitter that doesn’t shine nearly as bright as her proud smile. It makes something ache within Stiles, a gaping chasm that is shaped like mom. It says, outlined with multi-colored glitter-glue, GO 11 & 24 !! The sign is cut a little sloppily into the shape of a heart. It makes something well up in Stiles’ chest, clogging his throat. He has to look away before it engulfs him whole. 

Stiles startles when he sees Derek beside him, scowling. He takes a gulp from his water bottle before muttering darkly, “At least you have someone to bring a sign for you.”

When Derek jogs away, Stiles makes a petulant face at his back, feeling like a scolded child. Scott runs over to him, taking a quick, excited puff from his inhaler. “Did you see my mom?” 

Stiles gives him a tight smile. “I did, Scotty. She made us a cool sign.”

Scott responds with his megawatt grin, oblivious to how Stiles feels like gouging his trachea out while his eyes scan through the stands. “She did!”

It’s a close game. Derek takes his lead role very seriously, directing the other members of the team and ensuring that they play as best as they can. Stiles knows it is because this is the only distraction he has, the only thing drawing away from the fact that he has no one to go home to. In a deep, visceral way, it makes Stiles sad. He knows exactly how that feels. 

After a while, Coach Finstock plops down beside him on the bench, eyes wild with excitement. He shakes Stiles by his shoulder. “We might actually win this, Stilinski! Can you believe it?”

Stiles gives him a wry look. “I am just as shocked as you are, Coach.”

“Can’t believe we are about to lose Hale,” the man mutters regretfully. “That kid has got sports coded into his DNA.”

He doesn’t say anything in reply to that, about how Derek has an unexplainable evolutionary advantage, he just listens to Coach’s ragged breathing beside him until he shoots up off the bench to yell at Jackson for being useless. As soon as he moves, Cam comes to stand awkwardly beside Stiles, before sinking into the spot Finstock just vacated. 

Stiles offers, under his breath, “Isaac is doing really good.” He sneaks a glance at Cam, who is staring at the field, eyes tracking his little brother. Stiles sighs, picking at his jersey. “I am trying. I really am. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to do anything for you.”

In his peripheral, he sees Cam turn his head in his direction. After a moment, he feels a cool sensation on his leg. He blinks, looking at the curl of Cam’s shimmering fingers on the outside of his thigh. The man doesn’t say anything, he can’t, but Stiles hears what he means. It’s okay.

He swallows hard against the stinging in his eyes. “Thanks, Cam.”

Scott is probably giving his best athletic performance of the season. He has blocked nearly every attempt at a goal, Stiles can hear Melissa screaming every time he does. Stiles is happy for him, he really is. But, still, he feels this deep, dark curl of jealousy permeate his psyche. He wishes that were him, wishes it were his mom in the stands. He wishes she had gotten to come to one of his games, just to reassure him about how important it is to be a benchwarmer. 

He stares at the splay of his fingers, trying to remain rooted in place, when the crowd on the home side suddenly goes wild. He blinks at the scoreboard. They won. Stiles watches as the team lifts Scott up, carrying him across the field while he laughs. Derek’s chest is heaving, his muscles rippling under his jersey when he raises his forearm to wipe at the sweat on his forehead. Stiles just looks at him for a moment, drinking it in. He wonders what it would have been like if they’d known each other under different circumstances. 

Melissa appears beside him and pats him on the back, scaring him out of his reverie. She says, grinning cheekily, “Great job out there, Stiles!” and he can’t help but smile back at her, unable to stop the way his cheeks flush pleasantly. She grips him by the shoulders, shaking him a little as she leads them to where the team is depositing Scott onto his feet. “Let’s go pay our respects to Mister Popular,” she quips. 

When they finally reach him, Scott is rubbing his neck shyly, talking to a pretty brunette with deep dimples and kind eyes. Melissa makes a face at Stiles, eyebrows raised as though asking Stiles who she is. He shrugs back at her. 

Scott lights up when he sees them. It makes Stiles’ chest feel warm. “Hey, guys,” he gestures awkwardly to the girl, “this is Allison.”

Melissa quirks a brow. “Allison?”

“Yeah, she goes to Hollow Springs. Her friend’s boyfriend plays for the away team.”

Allison extends her hand to Melissa, smiling warmly. After, she extends the same hand to Stiles. He shakes it, resisting the urge to roll his eyes at the way Scott’s are nearly bulging from his skull. Then, it hits him. He clears his throat, “Hollow Springs?”

She nods. “I’m a sophomore.”

Scott perks up, if he had a tail it’d be wagging. “Us too! We are sophomores, I mean.” 

Her shoulders curl up, the knobs of bone coming to rest near her crimson cheeks. “That’s cool.”

But, Stiles wants to get back to his line of conversation. 

“Do you like it there? At Hollow Springs?”

Allison looks like she is seriously considering her answer, though she seems a little confused by Stiles’ off-putting persistence. “Yeah, I mean. It’s nice.”

That is not what Stiles wants to hear. He wants to know if she likes the faculty, if she has ever had problems with a teacher, if there is a creepy janitor who may have a penchant for killing innocent people. He deflates, he can’t ask more without giving himself away. While Melissa continues politely asking about Allison, Stiles slips away. 

He catches Derek straightening up the water bottles, getting ready to walk toward the locker room. Stiles waves a hand to the field, trying not to feel like he doesn’t belong here. “You were really good out there,” he offers. Derek shrugs, still looking down at his cleats. “Thanks.”

Stiles struggles to think of what else to say. He doesn’t want to be left alone. “That was your last game at Beacon Hills.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think—”

“Do you need something, Stiles?”

His shoulders slump as he tries not to feel gutted. “No.”

Derek looks at him, then, a bit of the fight leaving his expression. He just looks sad. They won the big game and Derek Hale is pouting by the benches. Stiles feels mean for thinking that, but it helps him to feel better. Derek breathes, “You should go home.”

Stiles can feel himself close off, the familiar sour twist to his mouth. “Yeah. Okay.” He rips his gloves off and stomps to the locker room. He figured Scott would be his ride home, but he doesn’t want to ruin his big win tonight, doesn’t want to be the damper on his best friend’s positivity. He changes quickly, stuffing his gear into his locker. He flips his phone around in his hand, gripping the corner between his thumb and forefinger as he spins it absently. His dad is at work, so Stiles isn’t going to call him. He pulls on his backpack, making his way to the parking lot. 

He walks home, surrounded by the sounds of the forest and the occasional car driving slowly down the road. The only consistency is the slick steps of Cam behind him, reminding him of that aching loneliness that he doubts he will ever shed. 

At lunch the following Monday, Stiles shoots Scott a sly look. “Allison, huh?”

Scott blushes and pushes at him, trying hard to frown against the beginnings of a pleased smile. “Shut up, Stiles.”

He raises his hands, indicating I surrender. But, he smiles back at Scott, happy that at least one of them remains untouched. Untainted. 

Lydia eyes him meaningfully from across the cafeteria, Stiles acts like he doesn’t see it. 

Stiles is still angry at Derek, despising him for his constant cold shoulder. The game was a little over a week ago, but Stiles isn’t going to let his petty feelings cloud what he owes to Connie and Joshua. And anyone else who may have been a victim, waiting for justice. 

And Laura, he thinks, before quickly clearing his head of it. 

Tonight is Hollow Springs’ prom night, and Derek is still supposed to accompany him. 

His dad squints from around his beer. “You’re going with a guy?”

Stiles groans, adjusting his tie in the hall mirror before rubbing his eyes in frustration. “I am going with a friend,” he corrects for the millionth time.

“Since when are you friends with Derek Hale?” He may be a drunk, but he is still a cop. Suspicion is in his blood. 

He takes a deep breath in through his nose. “I don’t know, dad.”

The man gives a noncommittal hum that may as well be a flashing neon sign over his head that reads, I think my son is fucking Derek Hale.  

Stiles shrugs helplessly. “Scott is coming, too.” It’s a lie, but his dad has already turned in for the night, in a thin t-shirt and old sweats. He won’t question it. 

“To third wheel.”

“To hang out, because we are friends.” Another lie. 

His dad stands and walks over before pulling Stiles into an awkward side hug. “Well, whoever you’re going with, you look real nice, kid.”

Stiles drops his head to rest on the man’s shoulder, sighing against his neck. “Thanks, dad.”

Derek shows up in the camaro, he doesn’t get out, which Stiles’ dad grumbles over, talking about how Stiles deserves to be walked to the car by his date. Stiles rolls his eyes and reiterates that they are just friends and he doesn’t need to be walked anywhere. Once he is shut into the tense atmosphere of Derek’s passenger seat, he deflates. Derek puts the car in drive and makes a surprisingly neat three-point turn to exit the neighborhood. 

Stiles picks at his dress pants. Derek adjusts the air vents and twists the volume dial back and forth a couple of times before finally resting his hand in his lap, the other gripped casually around the wheel. After a few silent beats, he shifts, draping his wrist over the curve of it while he lifts his free hand to rub along his jaw just for something to do. He looks good like that, illuminated by the dash lights, the planes of his face made sharper by the soft blue glow from the speedometer, a dark silhouette outlined by the screen that flashes the title of the song playing on the radio. He looks like the movies. When the camera pans out and shows a glimpse of the mysterious bad boy, the one who is tortured and hard-edged and smokes cigarettes beside the bleachers. And you just know, from the very beginning, that’s the boy the main character is going to fall for. No one can resist the injured eyes and the romanticized nihilism, certainly not a nobody who can never garner a second glance from anyone. 

For a moment, Stiles is struck with the thought that, were they any other two people on the planet, he would have loved Derek. Could have envisioned something real with him. Stiles fiddles with his seatbelt strap to avoid thinking that. That he is the main character.

Derek turns onto the highway, a bright green sign signifying that Hollow Springs is seventeen miles away, that there is a rest stop with a McDonald’s just before the exit. “Are you sure that we are going to find what you’re looking for?”

Stiles turns to look out the window, feeling more comfortable with studying Derek in the glass’s reflection. “I think I owe it to them to try.”

The older boy says nothing to that and Stiles counts the trees that pass and hums along to a repetitive pop song until Derek clicks his blinker, driving them through the city limits. It looks a lot like Beacon Hills, like a sleepy town where everyone is family, where the clerks at the grocery store can address you by name and the kids in your graduating class are the same kids you started school with. It’s an easy place for a killer.  

When they pull into the high school’s parking lot, Stiles does not unbuckle his seatbelt right away. Suddenly he is very inexplicably nervous. 

Derek makes a low noise of disapproval. “You can’t get cold feet now, Stilinski.”

Stiles frowns. “I don’t have cold feet.” 

He has cold feet. To keep them in the car a little longer, he stalls, “How are we going to get in? I was thinking they might have some side windows or maybe a back entrance.”

The car shakes a little as Derek shifts to reach into his back pocket, brandishing two slightly wrinkled tickets. Stiles balks. “How did you get those?”

Derek shrugs, smirking slightly. “A friend on their lacrosse team.” It sounds suspiciously like he threatened some poor kid to get them for him, but Stiles doesn’t question it. 

Derek takes the lead on the way to the front doors, Stiles trailing behind. When the girl manning the ticket booth pops her gum and says she hasn’t seen them before, Derek just says, “We’re new.” She quints at them for a moment before deciding that the struggle isn’t worth it. Then, they’re in. 

Stiles has only ever seen prom in movies, the same ones with the bad boy love interest. This is pretty much it. There is purple and red atmospheric lighting, a kaleidoscope of party strobes illuminating the faces of kids he doesn’t know. There is a foldout table with a couple of different punch bowls as well as some pre-made plastic plates holding various snack foods. On the stage are two makeshift thrones for king and queen. It is really nice, looks like a lot of effort went into it. Everyone seems to be having fun, nothing but smiles and laughter and funny dancing. It feels like a community event in a way that makes you wish you could be a part of it. Makes you wish you belonged. 

Beacon Hills is the type of town that leaves an imprint, scuffs you up so everyone knows you’re a nobody from nowhere. Stiles remembers the first time he saw a four-lane highway, the first time he saw a building taller than six stories, the first time he went to a mall that had escalators. Hollow Springs is smaller than Beacon Hills, if such a thing is even possible. If Beacon Hills is a pit stop between where you’ve been and where you’re going, then Hollow Springs barely registers on anyone’s radar as a town, more like when you were a kid and you’d play a game of house in your backyard. When you’d have the small, flimsy buggy you’d take to the grocery store you crafted beside the splintered wooden swingset, the sun-lightened plastic kitchenette with the pretend cash register balanced on it. That’s Hollow Springs. But, here, surrounded by the sounds of a community, it feels much, much bigger. Traipsing around where there aren’t enough people to fill five pages of a phonebook, searching for a killer, it feels endless. 

He leads Derek to the dancefloor, smiling slyly. His blood is pumping with an uncharacteristic sort of courage. He feels alive. Derek is vehemently shaking his head, trying to pull his hand from Stiles’ grasp. “No,” he insists to Stiles’ smiling face. “This is not what we’re here for.”

“Oh, come on, Sourwolf,” Stiles persuades, managing to insinuate them within the crowd, “live a little.”

Of course, this is when the music shifts, a slower tempo sounding throughout the gymnasium as everyone begins to change their pace, couples entering the dancefloor with heart eyes, girls twirling softly in their flowing gowns. 

Stiles swallows. “Uh.”

It is Derek’s turn to grin deviously, pulling Stiles in with a calculating glint in his expression. “What?” he asks lowly, playfully, the timbre of his voice vibrating in his chest, transferring to all of the places where he and Stiles are touching. “You don’t want to slow dance with me?”

He knows Derek can hear how his heart is racing in his chest, can likely see the pinprick of sweat on his brow, the ruddiness in his cheeks. He feels like a kid, like he is in the bleachers all over again, wishing that he and Derek existed within the same plane. That he was anyone other than Stiles Stilinski. 

“Come on, Stiles,” he teases, snaking a warm hand around Stiles’ waist as he begins to sway them back and forth, "live a little.”

Stiles looks over Derek’s shoulder, trying to control the aching feeling in his chest. Derek is just messing with him, making fun of his childhood infatuation because he genuinely believes it has been put behind them. So, Stiles directs his attention for anyone who might be suspicious, swallowing against the burn in his throat. 

“I’ve never been to a school dance.”

Stiles blinks, pulling his distracted gaze back to Derek, who is studying him seriously. “Hmm?”

“I’ve never been to a dance.”

“Oh.” Stiles tilts his head. “Me neither.”

He wants to say more. Like how he was homeschooled for most of his school years, so he couldn’t have gone to a dance even if he’d wanted to. Or, how, if it weren’t for Derek, Stiles would likely have never gone to prom, or homecoming, or whatever. Would have spent his entire academic life being the loser, Stiles Stilinski: the kid who freaked out on the lacrosse field. He sincerely doubts that Derek would find this as special as Stiles does. So, he just opens and closes his mouth a couple of times before keeping it shut. He doesn’t want to ruin it. 

Derek rolls his eyes at Stiles’ hesitance and pushes him out a little, giving Stiles an awkward spin that makes him laugh to hide his low-level embarrassment. Derek doesn’t seem embarrassed, though. He actually seems like he might be having fun, his eyes bright and lips quirked at the corners. It looks nice on him. Derek Hale deserves to have a good time for once in his goddamn life. 

Derek pulls Stiles back in and continues rocking them back and forth. 

“It’s kind of nice,” Stiles breathes, not wanting to disturb the careful energy that has been created around them. 

The older boy just keeps smiling, looking past Stiles' shoulder. “Yeah. It is.”

Unwillingly, Stiles’ eyes drop to Derek’s lips, the way they look cherry red in the light, the small peek of his front teeth. Stiles wishes he had what it took to kiss him.

Derek’s breath feels like it turns labored beneath the press of Stiles’ hands as he stares back. The older boy’s eyelashes feather against his cheekbones when he looks down at Stiles, swallowing. He slides a hand up Stiles’ arm, resting it at the juncture of his neck. “You look good tonight,” he murmurs, and Stiles inhales sharply, Derek’s eyes raking over the ripple of his throat. Everything feels blistering hot. “Thank you,” he breathes. “You do, too.” He can feel the vibration of Derek’s low laugh, watches as he curls forward. He’s so close, so so close, and he’s looking at Stiles how he imagines he’s looking right back at Derek. And Derek’s eyes dip to Stiles’ mouth and tracks the way he licks his lips. Stiles doesn’t breathe, because he knows how one ripple can disturb the entire lake. He doesn’t breathe or move and Derek comes closer and closer and closer, and Stiles has never been kissed before, and - 

A giggling couple knocks into them, smelling like the tingle of alcohol. Derek takes a quick step back, giving a curt nod when they apologize through their laughter.

The song ends, and Stiles pulls himself away, trying to clear his head. It still feels like Derek is so close. He says, verging on hysteria, “I’m just going to go grab us some punch,” before making as quick of an exit as he can. At the catering tables, he tries to calm his racing heart, pulls a bottle of water from one of the coolers and presses it to his flaming face. For just a second, he wishes that they were those other people. Those people who exist in the same plane.

Stiles wishes he were subtler, that his existence were quieter. Which is saying a lot, considering that his presence has never been much too loud in the first place. But, in that moment, he wishes he were smaller. He wishes he were endearing and immersive and charming. He wishes he possessed that silent, enchanting sort of interest, the kind that would have made someone like Derek Hale want to kiss him. He wants to ask, is aching to ask, that if Derek could pick anyone, would he pick Stiles? But, he is more afraid of the answer than he is desiring of it, that’s the only thing that stops him from turning on his heel and yelling it across the gymnasium, screaming it so the words rasp against his throat, can be heard over the music. So that Derek will be forced to make his reply just as loud, so everyone will know. 

He knows how Derek Hale feels about love. Everyone must, by this point. So, he gets it. He really really does. But, Stiles is tired of questioning whether or not he is lovable. Because he is. Derek Hale could love him, he’s sure of it. Stiles is an acquired taste, and Derek has had years to build up a tolerance. Derek is afraid of him, and, laughably, the thought makes Stiles giddy.

Stiles shakes his head a little to dispel that thought, because it is wrong of him to think like that. He knows it is. But, he thinks about it again, the power he possesses that he has never really been able to keep a grasp on before. He thinks of all that time he spent thinking if he just wanted something bad enough, it would happen. That Lydia Martin would value his persistence over his personality. That Derek would be eroded enough to push Stiles' sediment into the places where he's cracked. But, Stiles is a cop's kid. He knows right from wrong, and he knows that there is glory to be found in doing the right thing. Which, in this case, would be leaving it the hell alone, to stop poking sticks at sleeping beasts. But, it also means, in instances like this, that he has a hard time admitting that sometimes he purposefully chooses the wrong. The thing about it, though, is as vindictive as he would like to be, as much as he would like to put Derek on the spot and make him writhe like a salted slug, to make him lose his composure, Stiles knows that deep down, Derek is not a bad person. There lies the root of the problem.

He looks to the chaperones lining the wall, squinting against the lights, trying to get a look at the men who could have possibly killed Connie and Joshua. 

“Stiles?”

He jumps, knocking his water bottle loudly off the table as well as a small bowl of wrapped peppermints. He is hastily shoving the handfuls of candy back into the container when he looks up at Allison. He clears his throat, blinking. “Allison.”

She smiles at him in undisguised confusion. “What are you doing here?”

Stiles looks around, as though a lie will appear out of thin air to help him. He just shrugs helplessly, his excuse coming out more like a question. “Your prom is better?”

Her grin burns a little brighter. “Oh. Well, is Scott here?” She hefts up onto her tip-toes a bit, looking around, a little hopeful in her search. 

Stiles slumps. “No, he is at home.” 

Allison mirrors him, deflating as she plants her feet flat on the ground. “Oh,” she repeats before perking up. “Well, have fun. I have to find where my grandfather ran off to. It was cool to see you.”

She seems to mean it, so he gives her a tight smile before filling two plastic cups with the hot pink punch. He returns to where he and Derek were dancing, spotting him at one of the empty tables. He doesn’t seem like he is going to say anything about earlier, so Stiles opts to remain silent on it as well. Stiles takes a seat across from him before sliding one of the cups over. Derek takes a cautious sniff before wrinkling his nose in distaste. “This smells awful.”

Stiles grins, moving his eyebrows up and down. “Hopefully that means it’s spiked.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “You’re sixteen.”

He shrugs, joking, “Like father like son.”

Stiles immediately wishes he hadn’t said that, with the way the air around them goes tense. He scrapes his thumb along the thin tablecloth, feeling the ridges bump along his fingernail. “Sorry.”

Derek just shrugs before taking a long sip, as though challenging Stiles. Like he is trying to make him feel better. The way he coughs after swallowing makes Stiles jump, startled. Derek immediately spits the excess into his napkin, eyes watering while his face goes red. 

“What’s going on?” Stiles hisses frantically. He thought Derek would be able to handle alcohol. 

Derek crumbles the napkin and keeps his voice low, it’s raspy and strained while he continues trying to subdue his cough. “Wolfsbane.”

Struggling with what to do, Stiles starts coughing as well, making a bit of a show out of it. “God, that tastes awful,” he declares loudly. 

The werewolf grabs his arm with an iron grip. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I am helping you, dumbass,” he replies, coughing exaggeratedly into the crook of his arm. Everyone knows that Stiles Stilinski could not possibly be a supernatural creature that howls in the night. “Boy, this must be spiked!”

Suddenly, during his dramatic display, the fire alarm goes off, the siren blaring loudly and flashing along with the party lights. Some of the kids start screaming, making all sorts of noise as they push to exit the gym.

Feedback from the microphone on stage rings through the chaos. “Everyone remain calm and evacuate!”

Stiles doesn’t think there is any fire at all, Derek would know if there was fire. He pulls Derek by the arm to one of the side doors leading into the hall. “It’s a trap,” he insists under his breath.

Derek seems a little out of it, still gagging lightly and coughing, but he nods along to what Stiles is saying. Stiles pulls them into an empty classroom, seating them behind the teacher’s desk. “You’re going to be okay,” he promises, patting Derek awkwardly on the back. He watches helplessly as Derek retches, nothing coming up as he dry heaves. “The killer was definitely here tonight.”

They sit there, the fire alarm sounding off around them. It has to be hurting Derek’s ears. Stiles covers them for him while he curls over the small trash can beneath the desk. 

Suddenly, the classroom door slams open, crashing into the wall. Stiles recognizes the man in the threshold in some far-off, adjacent way. Like when you see someone in your dream and you know that you have seen them before, but you can’t place where. The side of his face is scarred, shriveled around where it is raised up and a little bit shiny. His eyes are glowing red. 

“You would not believe how hard it was to find you. Who attends prom at a high school they don’t even go to?”

Derek’s head jerks up, his expression disbelieving as he studies the man with foggy eyes. “Peter?”

The man just smiles before closing the classroom door behind himself. 

Chapter Text

nineteen.

Peter tilts Derek’s world on its axis, looking every bit like the man he was trying to leave behind. He feels an inescapable churn in his stomach that has nothing to do with the wolfsbane. 

Peter loves Cora, that much is obvious. Derek loves her, too. Has never felt so full in his entire life. Like he is bubbling from the ground up, like he has tapped into a spring that will never run dry, like he can keep reaching inside himself over and over and over and never come up empty. It is different from how Derek loves Laura. 

Cora coos at Peter, kicks her feet that are so so small, so little in the curl of Peter’s hands. She has tiny fingernails and her nose crinkles when she slobbers over her sticky fist. She blinks these huge eyes, Hale Green, and it makes Derek feels like he is looking into the preserve. He’s sitting criss-cross with the two of them outside beneath the canopy of a magnolia tree, listening to her babble incessantly. She’s lying on her stomach, trying to crawl around on the blanket Peter’s laid out for her. She sticks out her grimy hand and grips a handful of dirt. 

Peter raises an eyebrow, pointing to her hand. She stops, hand half-raised to her open mouth, blinking curiously at him. “Do not eat that,” he warns, leaning forward to tap his finger against the fold of her palm. 

She smacks her lips, gurgling, before shoving her fist into her mouth, cheeks hollowing as she licks at her fingers.

Peter waits, smiling vindictively as she sputters, scrunching up her face in disgust. She looks at him sharply, stricken and betrayed. Derek laughs as Peter clicks his tongue, tutting, “Don’t look at me like that, I tried to tell you.” 

She rubs her hand as clean as she can against the blanket, back to babbling at Peter like they are engaging in a particularly interesting conversation. Derek picks at the grass around him while Peter nods along, humming his agreement every time she pauses to make sure he is still listening, gauging that he and Derek are taking this as seriously as she is.

Derek looks up to the sky, smiling. 

His uncle strides into the classroom, messing around with the various knick knacks on the teacher’s desk. Then, he says, idly, “Do you think I will get in trouble for pulling the fire alarm? I am trying to keep a low profile.”

But, Derek’s eyes are glued to the man’s face, the raised skin around his right eye, the way each of them glows red within the lines where he still hasn’t healed after all these years. Derek hasn’t healed from the burns, either. He blinks, so sure that the wolfsbane is making him hallucinate, that he aches so terribly from being alone that he’s manifested an illusion. But, looking at Stiles, the younger boy seems to be just as shocked, if not more, his mouth opening and closing as though struggling for words, struggling for air. He knows the feeling. 

Derek swallows, repeating raspily, “Peter?”

His uncle holds his arms out, smirking, “In the flesh.” Then, he frowns, looking a little contemplative. “Well, most of my flesh, anyway.”

Eventually, the fire alarm cuts out, ringing shrilly for a final time, and Peter sighs out a long and exasperated sigh. “I think you should get Stiles home. It is getting rather late, don’t you think?”

Derek knows what he means, though. That Peter wants Derek to take Stiles home so he and Derek can talk in private, likely entirely unaware of just how deep in this Stiles actually is. Derek wants to keep it that way, some selfish part of him desiring something just for himself. He’s not sure what he will even say to Peter once they are alone, not certain that he has the words in him to apologize for leaving his uncle by himself. For being too much of a coward to face the consequences of his actions. 

So, he nods, pushing himself up from the floor and motioning for Stiles to do the same. The other boy hasn’t said a word during the exchange, his heart beating hard and fast in his chest. Derek figured, if anything, he should take Stiles home for his own sake. Just so that he doesn’t have to worry about him. 

Derek drives Stiles back to Beacon Hills with an iron grip around his steering wheel, his throat burning like wildfire while he tries not to feel like he’s slipping out of his own skin. Stiles is sitting perfectly silent in the passenger seat, tensed up like he thinks Derek is going to do something terrible. He wants to. He thinks about screaming and just never stopping. He thinks about crashing just so it can all finally be over, because he doesn’t understand how he can undergo so much pain without just. Ceasing. 

He rolls his jaw a few times, runs his tongue over his teeth and debates digging the claws of his free hand into his thigh just to make sure he’s still alive. He says to Stiles, low and scathing, “I thought you were supposed to catch the killer.” Because he wants to be a dick, he wants to revert into the person everyone assumes him to be. Bitter and cruel. 

Derek, deep down, knows he can’t be mad at Stiles about Peter. The boy seemed just as surprised by his arrival, equally as confused by the glowing eyes and the devil-may-care demeanor. Stiles shifts in his seat, inhaling sharply. “He was there. I know he was.”

“Oh,” Derek scoffs, flexing his fingers around the wheel, “so it’s a he now? You sound sure. Did one of your little ghosts tell you that?” 

He’s being mean, just wants to hurt Stiles so that they can both hurt. He’s tired of being the only one who’s always vulnerable.  

Stiles scowls out the window, Derek can see it in the reflection, lit up by the soft dash lights. “I am not talking to you if you are going to act like this,” he mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.  

Derek huffs a condescending laugh. “Like what? You can’t talk to someone if they aren’t wallowing at your feet because of what you lost? Is that it? Your mom’s dead? Well, so is mine, Stiles.”

Stiles’ scent goes sour and he turns to face Derek, making direct eye contact. “Stop the car.”

He rolls his eyes and says, “Yeah, okay,” while staring straight ahead and Stiles repeats, “Stop the fucking car, Derek.”

Derek pulls to the shoulder of the highway while Stiles wrestles himself out of his seatbelt, breathing hard. He wrenches the door open and Derek balks as he levers himself out of the car. 

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Stiles,” he calls, exasperated as the younger boy begins walking in the bike lane, illuminated by the flashes of Derek’s blinker, “you’re being ridiculous.”

Stiles rounds on him, his face blotchy, chest heaving, “I’m being ridiculous?”

Derek decides to keep his mouth shut at how shrill Stiles sounds, how hard-edged and frantic his words spill out. 

“You - you danced with me. And you held me and twirled me and you smiled. You smiled and agreed that it was nice to be there with me. You came to prom with me to help me catch this killer because you believed me. You got us tickets and you,” he inhales a ragged breath, the intake sounding damp as it catches in his chest and he hiccups, face crumpling, “you looked at me. And I felt it.”

Then, in the dim light of the moon, where the nighttime makes everything around them look wet and foggy, Derek feels like a monster. Like the creatures hiding in a kid’s closet, like dirt beneath Stiles’ heel. 

“You don’t get to make me feel like that and then treat me like everyone else,” Stiles whispers, small and miserable, before turning on his heel and stomping away. 

Derek curses under his breath, shifts the car into drive, keeping pace beside Stiles. “Stiles. Get in the car.”

The boy says nothing, staring straight ahead as he continues walking. “Get in the car, Stiles.”

“No.”

Derek jerks the gearshift into park, turning his hazards on before stepping out and leaving his door open. He blocks Stiles’ path. 

Stiles is chewing his lip, shifting from foot to foot like he is seconds from running. Derek would catch him, they both know it. He thinks that’s the only thing keeping Stiles in place. “I know I’m not crazy,” he croaks before clearing his throat. “You were going to kiss me.”

Derek shakes his head. “Stiles,”

“You should kiss me.”

“Stiles,” Derek huffs, “I can’t.”

Stiles frowns, still shaking, that is obviously not what he wanted to hear. “Why not?”

Derek looks down at the asphalt, the way it turns orange beneath the flashes of his blinker. He doesn’t know how to tell Stiles that it feels like he has had a lifetime of experience with this. That, for all intents and purposes, Stiles is just a kid, really. He has no idea what this would do to Derek, what this will do to him if he keeps it up. Derek does not want Stiles to end up just like him, so hollowed out and empty that the only things left are the bad parts. There is already too much of what ruined Derek laced throughout the slump in Stiles’ shoulders, the press of his ribs against his shirt. Derek needs to quit while he’s ahead and Stiles needs to quit before he can’t. 

“I know it’s there, Derek,” he spits petulantly, crossing his arms. “I know I’m right.”

Derek shakes his head again. “Not about this.”

Stiles’ face goes red as he looks away, staring into the dark forest, jaw rigid as he clenches and unclenches it. Derek can hear the scrape of his back teeth as the enamel grinds together. “I guess you were just messing with me.”

He knows there is no way to win. Stiles doesn’t know how to deal with this. Derek’s been learning to deal with it for what feels like millennia, he has an unfair advantage. He just shrugs, conceding, “I guess so.” But, he doesn’t mean it. And Stiles knows it. 

”Then,” Stiles throws his hands up, grasping at straws, staring helplessly into Derek, “then just tell me that if you could pick someone, you would pick me.”  

Derek just remains silent, because he can’t tell Stiles that. He doesn’t want to be the beast lurking in the dark, he can’t be that for Stiles. He is poisonous. When he touches people the only way he knows how - carelessly - he leaves them dark and infected in his wake. That is the type of person Derek Hale is. Stiles needs this hurt, he needs to have this right now before there is no way to go back, to undo it. It is safer for Derek to be feared than loved. He can't have anything else taken away from him.

“I know what she did to you,” the other boy releases softly, unprompted. Derek feels like he has been plunged underwater, like he’s drowning. Like everything is on fire all over again. 

“Stiles, be quiet.”

”I know how you feel,” Stiles presses his pointer finger into his chest, indicating his heart with big, big eyes, “on the inside. How the guilt feels like it eats away at everything until there is nothing left.” Then, he says, so sure, so certain, “I know it wasn’t your fault.”

Derek closes his eyes. “You don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“I know that you could love me,” Stiles bites. “I know that it scares you.”

Derek inhales sharply, at that. His throat clicks on a hard swallow. Stiles is right, in a way. Secretly, unwillingly, Derek would like to love him. Wants to so badly that it peels his skin back to gnaw away at his bones. But he can’t. Wanting something badly enough doesn’t make you entitled to it, doesn’t materialize the desire within your hands, give you something solid where everything else slips through like sand. If you want something and you cannot have it, then maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it means you have to want something else. He needs Stiles to want something else, it’s going to have to be Stiles, because Derek is always going to be stuck.

For just a moment, he doesn’t know what to say. Stiles has this thing about him, where he says things that no one else would ever say, cuts your tongue straight from your mouth so you can’t speak even if you wanted to.

But, Derek has things he would like to tell Stiles. Things that are racing through his head, adhering themselves to the walls of his skull so he can’t ignore them. But, he can’t admit to Stiles what’s plaguing his thoughts: thinking you should love someone isn’t the same as loving them. 

In the end, he settles for the truth. His truth. “What do you want me to say, Stiles? I’m not allowed to love anyone, Kate Argent lives in my fucking head,” he taps hard at his temple, gritting his teeth, rapping his knuckles right against the bone where the image of her breathing black into his lungs never leaves his mind. “Get in the car.”

Stiles sniffs hard and rubs the back of his hand across his nose. “No.”

Derek’s getting frustrated. He tugs at his hair a little to create a source of pain other than the one blooming helplessly in his chest. “I take everything, Stiles, don’t you get that?” He feels a little bit insane, nearly hysterical. “If you give an inch, I will take whatever is leftover until you have nothing. That is who I am.” Smaller, quieter, he admits, mostly to himself, “I am a fire.” 

Stiles blinks at him with those fucking eyes. “Is that what you would do to me, Derek? Consume me?” 

He deflates, then, studying Stiles, who’s staring right back, almost defiantly, even as his heart beats erratically in his chest. He just looks at Stiles’ eyes, the upturn of his nose, the smattering of marks on his cheeks beneath the crimson flush. He would take everything, and whatever is left after that. “You have no fucking idea.” 

He scrubs a hand down his face, blocking Stiles’ shellshocked expression from his view. He feels tired, so tired. “You’re not everyone else. Please get in the car, Stiles.”

Stiles has no more objections, it seems. Hs wordlessly lowers himself back into the passenger side of the camaro, no more dramatics. When Derek finally pulls them onto the highway, Stiles says, quiet, “It’s okay if you’re angry, Derek. But you shouldn’t only feel anger, it’s tearing you apart.”

Derek stares straight ahead at the road. 

“You’re not riling me up, you’re just being mean. You don’t get to be mean to me in place of being mean to yourself.”

Derek just replies, “Okay,” and Stiles doesn't offer anything else. The car ride is stilted, silent and awkward, all he can hear is Stiles’ ragged breathing over the hum of the radio. Turning onto Woodbine, Derek feels like he was supposed to have something to say to Stiles, something to erase how he just fucked up. Instead, he just taps the wheel while the other boy gathers his things and opens the door to the humid night air, filtering in the clingy haze of darkness. 

He clears his throat, searching for anything at all he could speak into the silence, but then Stiles looks him in the eyes and quietly says, “I am worth loving. Have a good night, Derek,” before he shuts the door and Derek is enclosed in the muffled space all by himself. He blows out a breath, watching Stiles fiddle with his key ring before stepping into the dark house. 

The drive home feels suffocating, a tightness resting in his chest. For the first time in longer than he can remember, he cries. Heaves these humiliating, grief-ridden noises at the implication of Peter’s red eyes, the fact that the only family he’s got is a man he’d left to rot in a rehabilitation center. The fact that Laura died without knowing how much Derek appreciated everything she did for him. How Stiles thinks he is cold and incapable of love. He screams through his teeth because he knows no one can hear him. To a passerby, it’d be swallowed up by the radio, drowned out by the crunch of rubber on asphalt, the hum of his engine. But, regardless of whether or not anyone can hear it, he screams. He screams and cries and screams some more. He is making up for all the screaming and crying he didn’t do when he should have, the sobbing that should have taken place by the fire, the tears that belonged at the funeral.

The grip he has on the steering wheel is so tight, he is sure that pieces of his skin have seeped within the textured grit. If someone were to swab it and put it on a slide beneath a microscope, it’d come back more Derek than pleather. They’d have to look really hard to find the polyurethane beneath all the anger.  

When he gets home, the fact that it doesn’t even feel like home only makes it worse. He walks through the doors, dragging the sleeve of his blazer across his nose, trying to hide the evidence of just how much everything feels like it is crashing down around him. 

Peter turns to look at him from the couch, leaned back with his legs crossed, looking comfortable as he clicks absently through the television channels. The scarring on his face is gone, replaced by smooth, unblemished skin. Peter blows out a breath. “Please tell me you aren’t wasting your time on that Stilinski kid.”

Derek scowls back at him, sniffing. “You don’t know him.”

Peter looks back to the TV, the volume turned all the way down as subtitles slide across the screen. He gives a disbelieving hum. “You know, I remember when Stiles Stilinski seemed to be nothing but a mouth that just blabbered on and on and on.”

“Don’t,” Derek starts, hard, before softening his posture and saying, quieter, “don’t talk about him like that.”

His uncle tilts his head, evaluating Derek. “Touchy, are we?”

He replies, short, “Just drop it.”

Peter huffs out a laugh. “I suppose you’re lucky this one lets dogs hang around, hm? Still young enough not to know that you never feed strays.”

Derek takes an abortive step forward, a growl building up in his chest before he decides to let it go. 

Peter picks at his fingernails, unbothered. “I figured you of all people would know better than to place your trust in a human.”

That brings Derek back to a time long before he lost everything. When he was just a child and Peter would tease him under the reprimand of Talia. He would tell Derek these horrible, scary stories, hide in Derek’s room or sneak around the house to jump out at him. Peter was always the one Derek wanted to be like, a role model of sorts. He just wanted Peter to like him, to think he was worth it. That he wasn’t just some frightened little kid. Sitting here with nothing to say to defend himself against Peter, it feels a little like the fire never happened at all. 

Derek just sags. “Get out.”

Peter tilts his head. “Oh, come on, Derek.”

He feels like a trapped animal. When you’re surrounded by quiet for long enough, the presence of one person speaking sounds off like a crowd of people shouting. Peter’s words grate in Derek’s ears. He fists his car keys in his hand, knuckles going white as the metal rattles lightly. 

“Fine,” he grits out, “then I’ll go.”

Derek turns, resisting the urge to shift because he feels like it will just make Peter feel more vindicated. He was a fucking idiot to think that Peter would be different. But, he is all Derek has left. 

“Fine. I will leave. Will that make you feel better, Derek? To push away the last person you have?”

He just keeps walking, opens the front door and stalks past the camaro, headed to the treeline. He continues staring straight ahead even as Peter seems to follow. 

“Did you treat Laura like this?”

Derek stops and turns around, barely resisting sinking his claws into Peter’s goddamn throat. “You do not get to talk about Laura,” he seethes, pointing a finger into Peter’s chest, his eyes stinging. “You do not get to fucking talk about her, do you understand me?”

Peter takes a step back and holds his hands up, placating, even though he is smirking like he thinks it’s funny that Derek’s upset. “Laura did more for me than you ever have. You don’t get to talk about her like you’re the same, she was better than you could ever hope to be, Peter. So just fucking leave.” Quieter, “Please.”

His uncle, thankfully, seems to understand when to pick his battles. He’s a dick, but he can recognize when it’s time to back off. He scoffs, gives a curt nod like Derek is just being dramatic, just some run-of-the-mill moody teenager who is resisting authority. He acts like Derek is his problem and not the other way around, like he hasn’t been absent for bordering on three years. Derek just stands there, chest heaving, as he struggles not to cry. Not to just curl up and bare his belly and beg for someone to fucking be nice to him, to put him back together. He clenches his jaw and stares past Peter’s shoulder, holding it even as the man steps out of sight and begins walking away. He sits and waits until he can’t hear the footsteps anymore. 

When it is quiet, just Derek and the preserve and the insects humming in the trees, he walks back toward the house, reluctant to admit that maybe having Peter there would have been better than being all alone. 

Peter has a loft across town, as far away from the preserve as you can get while still remaining within city limits. It unsettles Derek, makes the primal pieces of him press beneath his skin, anxious to seep out. He feels like he isn’t home. He hasn’t been home in a long time. 

He is having to reacquaint himself with the man. He has been back for verging on two weeks, and Derek still isn’t sure how to act. If he should treat him like his alpha, or if he should treat him like his family. He is a month and a half away from Berkeley’s move-in date, and he wonders if he will be able to leave this behind. If he can finally be free. 

Derek stands awkwardly by the front door as Peter unpacks groceries, just tracing and retracing the lines of the man’s silhouette as he pulls a gallon of milk from his reusable bag, turning to tuck it into the refrigerator. When he closes the door, he turns to Derek and crosses his arms, leaning against the appliance. “Say it.”

He swallows, averting his eyes. “What?”

Peter tilts his head. “Whatever you came here to say. Just say it.” He gestures a hand to the groceries. “The ice cream is melting.”

Derek frowns. “I just don’t understand.”

He can’t see it, but he knows his uncle rolls his eyes, senses the man changing his posture in his peripheral. “I’d like to buy a vowel.”

He scowls, aiming a blistering look that just makes Peter smile. His uncle shrugs, unapologetic. “I can’t figure out what you’re trying to tell me when you speak in half-sentences, Derek.” 

“I just don’t understand,” he bites out, “how you’re pretending everything is normal.”

“Pretending?” Peter scoffs. “Everything is normal. What do you want me to do? Wallow in misery? That seems to be your job.” 

Derek’s shoulders curl up, defensive. Why did he even come here? He shakes his head and starts to turn for the door when Peter groans, “Oh, come on, Derek. Why do you keep picking battles that you don’t want to fight?” 

“Do you even miss her?” he demands, ashamed at how small his voice sounds. 

Peter throws his hands up. “I had three years to miss her. I sat by myself in a wheelchair and missed her. Every day. What do you want me to do, spend the rest of my life sitting around missing her?” 

He swallows, feels his throat dip against the that’s what I’ll be doing that threatens to spill out. 

“I just expected you to act like you give a fuck.”

Peter expels a scathing laugh. “Oh, like you gave a fuck? Like you gave a fuck when you visited once and then never showed your face in that hospital again?” Peter grits his teeth. “Stop attacking me to hide the fact that you are a goddamn coward.” 

“I put you there!” His chest is heaving and his gums itch. He feels like an animal in a cage. Peter has stuck his fingers through the bars a few too many times. “I did that to you. I thought you would rather be alone than have no choice but to see me day after day when I took everything from you.”

He inhales a quivering breath, repeating, quieter, “I took everything from you.”

Peter steps forward, pointing a finger as he hisses, “Kate Argent took everything from me.” He turns back to the counter, putting things away and slamming the cabinets harshly. “The only thing you took from me was my nephew.”

Derek doesn’t say anything to that, just turns and leaves before the abyss swallows him whole.

Derek hasn’t heard from Stiles since prom night, almost a week ago, so he is surprised to hear the crunch of grass outside, the erratic heartbeat and unsteady breathing. He is already waiting at the door by the time Stiles knocks, opening it before he gets the chance to rap his knuckles a second time.

“Stiles.”

Stiles’ lips part, hand still raised. He lowers it slowly, swallowing. “Hey.”

Derek blinks. “Hey.”

He watches as Stiles laces his fingers together, shifting from foot-to-foot and looking anywhere but at Derek. Stiles scrubs a shaking hand down his face and says, “I just wanted to say sorry.”

What. 

“What?”

Stiles palms his buzzcut nervously. “I overreacted. The other night. You were just - I wasn’t thinking.”

“No,” Derek insists, confused, because he said some things that were unforgivable. He still sees the look on Stiles’ face whenever he closes his eyes, it stains the back of his eyelids like when you look at lightning flash and you can still see it when you blink. “I was being a dick.”

Something about Stiles is setting Derek on edge, the anxious lines of his posture, the way his scent has gone thick and dark, like the air before it rains, when it’s still hot and the cling of storm-cloud darkness makes everything feel like sickness. Stiles blows a long, trembling breath out through his lips. “No one is looking for Connie Evans.”

He tilts his head, wracking his brain for what that has to do with the two of them, with what happened in the car. He just says, “Right.”

Stiles chews his lip, gesturing his hands with a sense of urgency, like he is silently begging Derek to get it. “No one is looking for her. She was just a kid and everyone in town loved her and no one is looking for her. Just me. So, I was thinking, maybe she had one too many prom night arguments. Maybe she didn’t apologize when she should have. Maybe she had too many almost-friends who were mad at her before she went missing.”

Derek’s mouth opens and closes as he struggles to find something to say in response. "I'm not mad at you,” is what he settles on, but it doesn’t feel like enough. He feels like Stiles is trying to tell him something, but Derek can’t hear it. He can never fucking hear it. 

The other boy continues, “So, I am sorry for what happened at prom. And I am sorry about seeing your mother, and not seeing Laura, and I am sorry for the fact that my dad hasn’t done a single fucking thing to help you.” Stiles looks at him, then, eyes blown wide, glistening like honey in the fading sunlight, turning deep amber beneath the swipe of his lashes when he blinks. “Would you notice if I died?”

So, that is what this is really about. The huff of incredulous laughter leaves Derek’s lips before he can stop it. “What kind of question is that?”

The younger boy shakes his head, cheeks coloring. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m just,” he waves a hand, “yeah.”

Derek tries to gather up the courage to step back and invite Stiles inside, anything to cover up how he looks so much smaller in the door frame, like a kid. Like Connie Evans. Suddenly, Stiles jerks a thumb over his shoulder, “I have to get back home.”

He clears his throat. “Yeah. Okay.”

But, Stiles stays standing there for a moment, like he is waiting for Derek to say something else. Anything else. Like he wants Derek to hear the things he didn’t say. When he doesn’t, Stiles repeats, “Okay,” and turns a bit stiffly on his heel, making his way across the preserve, shoulders hunched as he approaches the line of the forest.

Derek rolls his shoulders, he needs to grow a fucking backbone. He steps onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind himself. “Stiles!” 

Stiles turns, lips pursed. He cocks his head and calls back, “What?”

He doesn’t know what he wants to say. He just wants to get a better look at Stiles, the press of his ribs beneath his shirt, the way his cheeks sink in, how his buzzcut doesn’t look as childish as it used to. How this isn’t the Stiles he has always known. 

Derek just says, “I believe you.” 

Stiles’ mouth goes slack and Derek adds, “I believe the killer was at prom. I believe you.”

With that, Stiles nods and gives a small semblance of a smile, his lips quirking up slightly. He gives Derek an awkward, two-fingered wave and continues his stride toward the treeline, disappearing between the leaves. 

Derek blows out a breath, deflating. He stays out there for a while, standing in the humid evening air while the breeze blows warm and pleasant around him. The door is still slightly ajar, but he doesn’t mind. He just tilts his head and looks up at the sky until the too-fast heartbeat finally fizzles out. Until he is all alone and he can wonder if Stiles heard what he didn’t say, too. 

Derek hasn’t gone into Laura’s room.

Her door is still cracked, open just slightly, and when the light shines through her windows he can see the rays of purple from her curtains spill out into the hall. But, he hasn’t gone in there. He can’t.

He thinks about what Stiles said. How everyone loved Connie but no one is looking for her. His gaze drifts to the purple rays of light shifting on the wall in the hallway and he knows, he just knows, he should be looking for Laura. She is never coming back, when Peter blinks it’s with red eyes and when Derek comes home it’s alone with a heavy heart, but he owes it to her to fucking look. To have the decency to bring her back to where she belongs. 

Because the sink still has her mug, the one with the butterflies on it that Cora got her for her fourteenth birthday. And the television still has all of her favorite shows set to record to the DVR. And Derek still can’t sit on the left side of the couch, her side, because she is not afraid to fight him for it.  

Was. 

Her hair is still stuck to the shower wall and her laugh still haunts the quiet and she is still everywhere but she is never coming back. None of them are ever coming back. 

Derek stares at the fucking wall and thinks long and hard about that. About how heavy the quiet feels, how the color purple looks like caskets and condolence cards and journalists just happy to get an inside scoop. He slips his phone out of his pocket and toys with it for a moment, pinches it between his thumb and forefinger, spinning it absently.

He thinks of all the things he hasn’t said that he’s hoped everyone could still hear. He dials the newest number in his contact list, digs his fingertips into the denim grit of his jeans in tandem with the ringing. 

Ring.

Derek wonders if he should hang up. If he should just live with the not-knowing.

Ring. 

He doesn’t know if he wants answers. Doesn’t know if anything could make him feel better. 

Ring.

Derek doesn’t -

“I figured you deleted my number soon after I programmed it into your phone.”

He takes a deep breath. “Would you miss me if I died?”

The line goes abruptly, eerily silent. Silent in a way that is not commonplace for Peter. In a way that makes Derek want to hang up the phone. 

“Is this your suicide note?”

Derek sighs, what was he expecting? “I should have known you’d turn it into a joke. Have a good night, Peter.”

He moves to end the call when Peter offers, “Of course I would miss you. If that’s what you’re really calling about.” 

Peter has this thing about him, where he knows without really knowing at all. Derek mentally turns over his options, whether or not he really wants to do this right now, after last time. Then again, what did he call for? 

“Do you think she knows we aren’t looking?”

Peter goes quiet again, but this time it feels antagonistic, a little biting. “Looking for what, exactly?”

“Her.”

“I don’t know about you, Derek,” Peter slights, “but I have no desire to recover another Hale corpse.”

He winces at that word. Corpse. It dehumanizes her. Then, he thinks of someone killing her because, to them, she was a fucking animal. She doesn’t deserve to be dehumanized twice.

“It’s not a corpse,” Derek pushes out from between his teeth, “it’s Laura.”

“So, the tombstones in the cemetery aren’t tombstones, that’s our family?”

Derek knows what this is. How this is. Peter is grieving, in his own way. This is how he handles it, by not handling it. By removing himself from it entirely until the scope of it no longer includes him. The way Derek always wished he could be. But, he’s not. So, he heaves a sigh, expels all of the anger and resentment and the millions of things he would like to say. He just opts for, “Goodnight, Peter,” before hanging up, because if he knows his uncle at all, he knows the man will think about this all night. Knows that he doesn’t really think that Laura is just a corpse, or that the headstones are just pieces of rock. 

The sun has disappeared, taking all of the purple with it. Derek walks up to Laura’s room and pulls the door shut. Finally.

Stiles finds him between the shelves at the library. 

He’s starting to wonder how many times they can wind up within each other’s orbit before it stops being a mere coincidence. 

Derek could hear him approach, the barely-there press of footsteps, so he doesn’t jump when a hand fists itself within his shirt sleeve and tugs him into the alcove by the references section. 

He blinks, adjusting himself in Stiles’ hold while the other boy studies him seriously. “It doesn’t make any sense,” is what he says, and Derek blinks again. Unbidden, he hears Peter’s voice in his head I can’t understand you when you speak in half-sentences. 

“You don’t make any sense,” Derek harshly whispers back, listening to the other library patrons walking around on the other side of the shelf.

“What was Peter doing in Hollow Springs?” Stiles hisses back. “Doesn’t that seem suspicious?”

“Why are we hiding in the corner like we’re fucking criminals?”

He’s deflecting. Derek can’t say that he hadn’t thought the same thing, but it would kill him if he lost the last thing he has. He deserves to have Peter, however inadequate that may be. 

“He just happened to show up in Hollow Springs?” Stiles raises his eyebrows, as though showing Derek see? do you see how stupid you look? “He just woke up,” he gestures his hands in an ambiguous display of mockery, “and trekked more than twenty miles to a different town for no reason?”

The clench of Derek’s jaw has grown familiar with Stiles, over the years. “He came for me.”

Stiles clicks his tongue, wrinkling his nose like he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t have to believe it, it’s the truth. 

“Say it,” Derek demands, the familiar coil of anger wrapping itself around his chest. 

The sound of Stiles’ breath catching is satisfying, only for a moment. He looks exactly how Derek imagined himself looking when Peter had said the same thing.

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is that you’re trying to say. Just say it.”

The other boy’s eyes catch on something over Derek’s shoulder, but when he looks, there’s nothing there. 

Stiles shrugs, making himself smaller as he admits, “I just don’t think it was a coincidence that he was there when we were trying to catch a killer.”

Derek crowds him, just because he can, because there is something viscerally satisfying in the way Stiles just goes, the way the wings of his shoulders thud against the shelves through the fabric of his t-shirt. “You know who else was there, Stiles?” Derek questions, giving the other boy a tight smile as he waits with no answer. “Half of fucking Hollow Springs.” He backs away, choosing to ignore how Stiles’ shoulders slump with relief, the way he releases a sigh. 

Derek turns to leave, feeling a little too big for his skin, when Stiles spits petulantly, “You want me to look where there’s water and then you get angry with me for getting wet.” Stiles tilts his head, then, eyes cold and mean. “I am beginning to suspect that Derek Hale just never knows what the fuck he wants.” 

He throws his hands up in agitation, unsheathing claws. “You know what I want? Beacon Hills’ token psycho to leave me the hell alone. Maybe ask your Ouija board if Peter murdered his niece while he was in a coma before you interrogate me in the library again.” 

It doesn’t feel as vindicating as he thought it would when Stiles’ face closes off, eyes shuttering. If there’s one thing Derek’s good at, it’s making husks out of whole people. Shaking his head and walking away, fists clenched by his sides, he wonders how much longer until the rest of Stiles becomes a shell. 

“You know,” Peter says off-handedly while Derek rummages around the man’s bookshelves just for something to do, “Berkeley will have a million little Stileses running around.”  

Derek offers a noncommital hum in reply, Peter has no idea what he is talking about. The man persists, “Don’t be foolish enough to let him trap you here.”

Too late, Derek thinks, unbidden, before blinking it away. Peter’s insistence on this makes him angry, he doesn’t understand the half of it.

“You don’t know him,” Derek refutes, grabbing a book and flipping open to a page within the middle in a form of dismissal.

Peter does not heed it. 

“Oh, trust me, Derek,” Peter laughs out harshly, “I know all about how those Gajos eyes can imprison you.” 

He slams the book closed, still facing away.

Peter draws in a sharp breath, Derek can hear the rush of it between his teeth, the way it swirls through his lungs. His uncle coughs to cover it, but Derek knows. He knows. “Everyone seems to die when you have no choice in the matter, don’t they?” 

Derek gently places the book back in its place on the shelf, turning to face Peter. “You couldn’t have saved her,” he isn’t sure if he means Laura or Claudia, or two of the tombstones who fueled the flames, perhaps for Peter, they are one and the same. All Peter has now is Derek and all Derek has now is ashes. 

“Perhaps not,” his uncle concedes, staring off at a spot beyond Derek’s shoulder. “But, it’s awfully nice to believe you could, isn’t it?”

Peter clears his throat and drags his eyes back to the television, smirking, “All I’m saying is, don’t let Stiles make you feel like you have no choice.”

Stiles makes Derek feel a lot of things - makes him feel like a person, makes him feel human. Of all the things Derek feels, helpless isn’t one of them. He takes a moment to study Peter, to drink in the lines of his face, the way his eyes shine Hale Green and his side profile looks like mom’s. He tries to see a killer, tries to find the man who could have butchered Connie Evans, could have sliced her and Joshua Bates in half. Tries to find the man who’d have it in him to drag Laura through the woods. 

Peter’s eyes continue tracing the subtitles of some innocuous foreign film and Derek can’t find him. He can’t find the killer. Eventually, he sits himself on the couch. The left side - her side. For the remainder of the night, he doesn’t do anything other than make himself remember how to breathe. 

Derek’s walls are covered in posters and pictures, testimonials to a time when he held interest in things like that, the inane pleasures of mundanity. Now, though, the framed photographs and movie posters are placed strategically, hiding the fist-shaped holes in his walls, the ones where he just wanted to watch his knuckles bleed. Wanted to feel any other type of hurt but the one that constantly lives inside of him. He wonders what Stiles would think if he saw them. If he’d be disappointed or afraid or if he would do that thing where he curls his shoulders and opts to say nothing at all, too scared to disturb the water. 

The thing he hates about being all alone is the thinking. The endless fucking thinking. He thinks about how the preserve feels so big when you’re by yourself. How the quiet is never actually quiet, he can still hear everyone, what’s missing. He thinks about Stiles, how the stinging scent of alcohol is embedded within the threads of his clothing, how his nose scrunches when a ghost has his attention, how when he looks at you, it feels like he is really looking. Derek thinks about the cut of Stiles’ cheekbones and the flutter of his lashes. His over-expressive eyes, the soft curve of his jaw. He thinks of the pink in his lips and the plush softness of his smile. 

It makes Derek’s heart feel heavy, like someone has their hand gripped around it, tugging it down down down. He thinks about prom, how Stiles went red in the face about dancing, how he made bad jokes and the way his eyes looked neon beneath the colored lighting. His laugh is loud and unapologetic, his humor is stupid and his grin is sometimes too big for his face. Stiles is just good. Too good. Too good for this world and definitely too goddamn good for a disaster like Derek.

He’s been thinking about it a lot. How he should have just fucking kissed him at prom. How he always looks for Stiles. Even before. How he’d raked his eyes over the bleachers, seeking out a buzzcut. Searching in between classes, in the slam of lockers and too-quick heartbeats. How, now, he looks for him in the library, in the aisles at the grocery store, hidden by the trees in the preserve. The embers have been there, waiting for ignition. 

Derek isn’t sure he can survive another fire. 

So, he lies on his back and thinks about that. Thinks through the silence and about what could keep him in Beacon Hills. 

In the end, he only sees one thing. He only ever sees one thing. 

On the coffee table in the living room, there’s a journal. Laura’s journal.

Derek passes it every day, barely looks at it anymore. But, today, he stops. It’s floral, the cover worn down from years of use. There’s a shiny silk ribbon holding her place, shining beneath the overhead light. She was close to the end. It makes Derek feel sick, to know it will never be finished. 

He gently lowers himself onto the couch, her side, and just looks at it. Experimentally, he hooks a finger under a random page and flips it open. Her handwriting is elegant, all sloping letters and soft edges, pieces of her mind jotted down in purple ink. He stares, eyes unfocused, because he isn’t sure if he wants to read it. 

He takes a deep breath.

August 14, 2013. 

Derek is sad. 

He’s supposed to be sad, I know. All of the parenting books say that grief is normal, that if he weren’t miserable then that would be the real problem. 

I know that New York isn’t going to fix him, or me. It may not fix anything at all. But, Beacon Hills was drowning us. 

I’m sad, too. There’s no one here to cut the crust off my sandwiches, or tease me about boys. There’s no one here to take care of me when I’m not feeling well, to make sure I’m getting plenty of rest and eating right. There’s no one here to teach me how to be a mom. But, I’m trying to learn. It’s hard, but I owe it to Derek to learn. 

At the bottom of the page, there is a sentence that has been crossed out. He carefully traces his fingertips over it before holding it up to the light. 

I’m supposed to be the Alpha. 

Derek swallows, feeling sick around the growing desire to read more. He catches glimpses. 

I thought I saw Cora in the grocery store today. 

The cashier at the gas station looked a little bit like dad. I cried in the car all the way home.

Derek hasn’t been eating. I’m worried about him.

Sometimes, I wish I could run away. I wish I could just escape it all. 

He flips past a page and immediately turns back.

December 7, 2015.

Hollow Springs has a lot to hide. It feels like Beacon Hills, in that way. 

I talked to a few residents, some women at the library, a young man at the thrift store, the older gentleman using the tire pump at the car wash. Everyone seems to know everything yet nothing at all.

Adrian Harris rubs me the wrong way, though. The way he spoke about the disappearances as though the victims were inconveniences rather than people, like they were dogs rather than humans. It left a bad taste in my mouth, my tongue feels bitter just writing this.

But, being an antisocial dickhead isn’t a crime. If it were, Peter wouldn’t be in one of the best rehabs NoCal has to offer. I can’t stop looking. Why does everyone always stop looking? 

Derek makes a mental note of that, pulling out his phone and opening up a new message to Stiles.

D: what do you know about adrian harris 

S: ??? 

He heaves a frustrated sigh, pushing to his feet and making his way outside. Derek weaves through the preserve with nearly two decades of practiced precision, breaking the treeline exactly where he needs to be. 

The window is unlocked - of course it is - and when Derek levers himself in, Stiles startles, flailing out of his desk chair. “Jesus, Derek! I thought you were a killer,” Stiles hisses, brows furrowing while his cheeks go blotchy. 

Derek looks to Stiles’ computer, where he has ever-so-studiously google searched: Adrian Harris Hollow Springs.

He rolls his eyes. “You should join the FBI.”

Stiles huffs, his scent going a little lemon-sour with embarrassment. “Shut up,” he grumbles as he pushes himself up from the floor. “It’s a work in progress,” he defends, picking up his laptop and hiding the screen from Derek while he makes his way to the bed. He plops down, blowing a raspberry into the air.

Derek seats himself in Stiles’ desk chair and looks over at the other boy expectantly. Stiles releases a breath and moves his laptop to the side. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something.” 

He raises his eyebrows at Stiles, indicating that he should just spit it out. The other boy leans and jerks open his nightstand drawer, recovering a spiral-bound notebook with tons of different colored sticky tabs protruding from it. Stiles thumbs a green tab that is marked by a sharpie-scrawled A, flipping open to the page it's holding. “I did some digging,” he begins, turning the notebook so that it’s facing Derek. But, he keeps his hand curled around it while he talks, so Derek can’t quite make out what is written on the page. “There’s this girl, I met her by coincidence. Scott likes her, it’s - there’s just a thing. You know.” Stiles’ face is open and determined, like he genuinely believes in what he is saying. “I ran into her at prom, and I thought it was so weird to meet someone from Hollow Springs in the middle of this,” he waves an all-encompassing hand, “just. All this.” 

Stiles still hasn’t really said anything at all. But, Derek stays quiet. Has long since learned that being around Stiles requires patience. 

“But, she works at the grocery store,” he says with utmost certainty, “the grocery store. The one I was telling you about, with Connie and Joshua, remember?” Stiles doesn’t wait for confirmation from Derek that he remembers. “She works there, and she was at prom, and the lacrosse game, and it just feels like I have seen her too many times for it to be meaningless. She is president of the student council, she’s a mathlete and she started an archery club.”

“She goes to school there, Stiles,” Derek tries to be the voice of reason. “Of course she is involved in the fanfare.”

Stiles looks at Derek, looks at him like he’s looking into him, begging him to understand the connection. “I think she’s next.” 

And, Stiles does. He does sincerely think that, with the way his heart pounds steady in his chest while he just keeps looking. Like if he stares hard enough, Derek will get it. 

“I know I’m right,” he insists. “I’m so close.”

Finally, he releases the notebook and Derek curls forward to pull it from his grasp. Immediately, his chest goes tight and he rises to an abrupt stand, Stiles scrambling up to match him. 

“Allison Argent?” he growls out, feeling cornered. 

Stiles swallows, like he’s scared, and Derek relishes in it. Hopes that, in that moment, Stiles is afraid. 

“This is why I think Peter might—”

Derek cuts Stiles off, “The Argents are the killers.” He’s fuming, internally talking himself into going for the window. 

“Derek,” Stiles aims at placating, “please.”

“They are killers,” he insists, rage thrumming familiar through his veins. “Or have you had the luxury of forgetting why the preserve still smells like smoke?” 

“Derek, please,” Stiles repeats, pleading, “this isn’t you.”

“Have you ever considered that perhaps you don’t know me, Stiles?” he grits out. “Have you considered that maybe you only know the fire?”

Stiles, evidently, does not know what to say to that, his mouth twists down unhappily.

Derek injects as much bite as he can into his next words, “I don’t care if the killer peels Allison’s skin from her bones, if they bury her alive or slice her in half or shoot her in her fucking head.” He’s breathing hard, his lungs struggling to expand beneath the confines of his ribs. “If I had the chance to kill Kate Argent, I'd do it, with my bare hands. I wouldn’t even blink, don’t you get that?” 

“You don’t mean that," it sounds like he believes it, voice wavering like he is scared of the implications of Derek being honest. "I know you don’t.”

“You don’t know anything, Stiles. Not a goddamn thing.” He makes his way to the window, slamming it open. He promises, with his back still turned, “Good luck on your wild goose chase, because you’re on your own.”

Derek pretends he can’t smell the panic while he approaches the woods, pretends not to hear the trembling breaths and the damp exhalations. He shifts when he breaches the first line of trees, resisting the urge to howl until the pain in his chest dissipates. 

“Trouble in paradise?” Peter quips as soon as Derek steps through his door. 

“Did you kill her?” Derek demands wetly, his throat clicking on a hard swallow. 

Peter blinks and Derek grabs the vase on the end table beside him, listening to the glass shatter as he throws it at his uncle, who sidesteps it easily. 

“Derek,”

“Answer me!” he screams, reaching for anything else he can get his hands on. “And don’t lie,” is croaked out in addition, his voice spilling thick through his lips, “I’ll know if you lie.”

When Peter remains silent Derek lunges. Suddenly, he is blinking up at the ceiling, rasping harshly against the way his breath has been knocked out of him. He thrashes against Peter. “You fucking coward,” he struggles within the hold on his arms. “Let me go.” Derek writhes, feet sliding against the floor as he tries to push himself up, his fangs scraping against his lips in a way that stings unpleasantly. Peter smells like pack and home and all of the things Derek will never get to have again. Peter looks a little like mom and laughs like Laura and sometimes when he quirks his eyebrows Derek can see Cora doing the same thing. Peter embodies everyone and Derek has no one at all. He continues pushing, this time harder, feeling trapped and all alone and like he just can’t take it anymore. Derek sinks his claws into the man’s forearms. “Let me go!” 

“Derek, stop it,” Peter growls. 

“Let me go,” he repeats pitifully, his thrashing movements growing weaker as he gets too tired to feel better.

“Stop.”

When he doesn’t, still fighting pointlessly, Peter’s eyes ink red, staring down into Derek’s own. “I said stop it,” he commands, the Alpha authority making Derek immediately go rigid, stock-still and breathing hard. 

Finally, Peter releases his hold, his forearms coated in blood from Derek’s claws, spreading in thin rivulets like rivers on a map. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he promises. He pushes a hand into Derek’s chest. “Derek, look at me. I would not kill Laura, do you hear me?” He grabs Derek by his face, his thumb pressed into the hollow of one cheek while the rest of his fingers curl into the other, forcing Derek to meet his eyes. “I would never have killed Laura, Derek. You have my word.” 

Derek squints up at him, sniffling. He pushes his tongue into his cheek for a moment before jerking out of Peter’s hold. “What about Allison Argent?” 

His uncle pauses. “What about her?”

“Would you kill her?”

He leans back on his haunches, head tilted. “What do you think I do all day?”

When Derek doesn’t budge, Peter sighs. “No. I think we have already had far too much interaction with the Argents. Wouldn’t you agree?” 

His heartbeat is steady, and Derek can’t think of a single reason Peter would have to lie. 

Derek falls asleep on Peter’s couch, listening to the paid programming channel while his uncle moves around in the kitchen. He just lies there, facing the couch-back until everything goes quiet, until he can finally rest. 

When his phone rings, Derek struggles to remember where he is. He squints through the darkness, feeling around for the source of the shrill sounds, the incessant vibration.

When he finally retrieves it from between the couch cushions, he is frustrated, even more so by the contact name.

“Stiles, it’s two in the fucking morning.”

“I found it,” is whispered shakily from the other line. “Derek, I found it.” 

The blood in his veins turns ice cold, freezing fear dripping down his spine. “Found what?”

He hears faint rustling on the other end, the crunch of earth and slight gushes of night-soft wind. “Stiles? What did you find?”

“The pool.”

The line goes dead, ringing monotonously like a flatline in Derek’s ear. He is up immediately, already out the door and within the forest, running running running.

But, he’s not fast enough. He’s never fast enough. In the house on Woodbine, there is no one home. In the trees around the preserve, there is no racing heartbeat. Derek looks all night, scours every fucking inch of Beacon Hills until the sun rises, until his nails are black with the grit of dirt and his shirt is soaked in the blister of wet morning-heat.

He sees it in the window of the local electronics store, broadcasted in blue light among the display for refurbished televisions.

The news is playing on every screen, the sheriff looking more sober than he has in years, issuing an APB on Stiles Stilinski.

Chapter Text

seventeen.

It starts at Scott’s house.

Stiles has the crosshairs of his computer-generated sniper rifle aimed on an enemy player lying prone when Scott mumbles, around a mouthful of potato chips, “Yeah, dude. Allison has a job. Isn’t that so cool?”

He nods along absently, making his character sprint for cover while he reaches his own hand into the chip bowl, rubbing his crumb-dusted fingers on his shorts before returning them to curl around the thumbstick. “That’s very cool,” he agrees easily, licking the salt from his lips.

Scott heaves a wistful sigh, his character idling on the top half of the split-screen. “I wish I had a job.” Stiles glances at him out of the corner of his eye before returning his focus to the television. Scott continues, “Working at the grocery store must be nice.”

Stiles coughs, sputtering a cloud of chip dust. He rubs his chest and his screen bleeds red as an enemy kills him, causing their team to lose the game. “What?” 

His best friend looks at him with wide eyes, mouth slightly open at Stiles’ loud disruption. Scott tilts his head to the side, clearly confused. “Allison works at the grocery store?”

He sits up straighter, Scott’s eyes tracking the movement. “Which grocery store?”

“Uh,” Scott raises his eyebrows, “like, the only one in Hollow Springs.” 

Stiles thinks about it. A pretty and successful young girl in Hollow Springs. Involved with the school spirit displays, attends lacrosse games and showed up at prom when she was only a sophomore. She works at the grocery store. The grocery store. It’s too perfect, dangerously perfect. Get-you-killed type of perfect. He swallows, looking at Scott who is staring back helplessly. Stiles probably looks sick.

“Stiles?” Scott ventures, leaning forward to peer into Stiles’ face. “You okay?”

He clears his throat and tries to paint on his most convincing smile, but even to him it feels shaky, like it’s crumbling to pieces. “Yeah, never better,” he croaks before clearing his throat and rotating to face the screen again, selecting a new match. In the corner of his eye, he can see Scott continue to watch him for a moment, only turning away when the countdown for the game begins.

Stiles is killed and out of the round immediately. He blows out a trembling breath and tells Scott he has to go home, after that.

It takes an hour for Stiles to walk to Hollow Springs, give or take. He takes a couple of shortcuts, a trail through the woods outside of Beacon Hills that opens up near the end of the highway, just before the on-ramp for the Hollow Springs exit. Then, he sneaks around the fence behind the rest stop’s convenience store, cutting through until he comes out at Hollow Springs’ First Baptist Church.  

By the time he gets there, the sun is  glistening low in the sky, casting everything in soft orange, the rays wavering in the distance. He’s sweaty, a cool dampness clinging to his temples and the nape of his neck. He takes a long swig from the water bottle in his backpack’s side pocket before replacing it and continuing his trek. When he reaches the Thrift Way, he just stares at it for a moment. How the neon red R in THRIFT is flickering unsteadily, the buzz of the sign humming loud within the evening’s quiet. He closes his eyes and thinks about it. Connie walking away with her groceries, Joshua loading up his car, the way neither of them knew they wouldn’t be making it home.

He takes a deep breath and wrings his hands where they’re dangling at his sides, striding forward and stepping through, the sliding doors rattling upon his arrival. A cold burst of air conditioning blows from a unit above the entrance, rustling through his hair, making the sweat coating his skin become a douse of ice water. 

His eyes squint a little beneath the harsh fluorescents while he scans the cashiers operating the registers. 

There’s a sudden disturbance, a small crash of boxes within the otherwise stagnant atmosphere. Stiles’ attention is jerked toward it and he goes stock-still at the sight of Allison restocking cardboard cartons of oatmeal. She clears her throat while her cheeks dust pink, offering a sheepish sorry with a shrug to the older man in an embroidered polo standing beside her. He smiles and shakes his head before walking toward the back of the aisle. 

This is it. Confirmation. Allison works here. Stiles turns on his heel and heads out, met with the harsh and near-suffocating humidity once he exits. He walks forward and seats himself on the curb crowning a line of parking spaces. He fishes his notebook from his backpack, clicking his pen and jotting down what he’s observed.

Seems to have worked there for a while (maybe).

Friendly relationship with coworkers (from what I saw).

Unsuspecting and innocent, prime candidate for the sights of the killer. Fits within the predicted profile of victims (?)

He puts an asterisk beside the question mark, drawing an arrow to connect it to a small key at the bottom, scratching down a matching symbol before tapping his chin with the end of his pen, mulling over what to say. Finally, he settles, scrawling is she a werewolf ??? beside it. He leans back and looks over his notes. 

• attended prom

• very kind and friendly

• likes supporting HSH’s sports teams

• seems to be the kind of person everyone enjoys being around (aside from her affiliation with the Hale Fire)

Stiles thinks, if Allison were a werewolf, Derek would have to know, wouldn’t he? But, Derek didn’t even know that Peter inherited the Alpha status, dead set on Laura’s safe return home. He flips to a new page, creating a chart. On one half he puts WOULD KNOW, on the other he jots WOULDN’T KNOW. He thinks about where Derek stands on either side.  

Beneath WOULD KNOW, he adds:

• they seem to be able to sense each other (?)

• hypersensitive sense of smell (could possibly sniff out another werewolf) 

• territory discrepancies (?)
• knowledge of surrounding packs

Under WOULDN’T KNOW, Stiles considers:

• doesn’t appear to know too much about werewolf systematics aside from basics (at least from what I have gathered so far)

• has no one to teach him these things, Peter seems supremely unhelpful 

• has no interest whatsoever in the Argent name (understandably) so could very likely be out of the loop

He releases an explosive sigh, drawing a connection between the chart and the words Allison = werewolf. 

Tapping his pen against the page, he debates calling Derek and asking if he would be willing to come pick him up. He slips his phone from his pocket and toys with the idea, thinks he could really use the support. But, he and Derek aren’t like that, have never been like that. They don’t just call. In the end, he decides against it. At least for now. He doesn’t have enough concrete evidence on this, so he doesn’t want to stir up unnecessary trouble. Especially not with Derek.

He carefully shimmies his notebook back into its spot within his bag before pushing himself up from the curb. Dusting his hands off on the front of his jeans, he releases a long breath from his nose, beginning to walk back toward Beacon Hills, hoping it’ll clear his head. 

In the safety of his room, Stiles sits on his closet floor and scrolls through articles on his laptop. 

The Hunt for Laura Hale Has Not Ended! 

He winces at the wording, wondering if Derek has read over any of these. Stiles read the articles about his mom, after, the social media posts and the the notes on her grave with wilting flowers. Sometimes, it feels like he and Derek may very well be the same person. Like they are made up of the same things and then got split in half. But, that would make them some iteration of soulmates. The thought makes Stiles huff a humorless laugh.

He continues scrolling, copying down the relevant information into his notebook, tearing the pages out and pinning them around Laura’s picture, her smiling face lined up beside Joshua and Connie. 

When he is finished, a highlighter pressed between his lips, the striking details of all three disappearances coated in neon ink, he just pours over what he has. Guiltily, he swallows and clicks away from the articles on Laura, opening up a new tab. Hesitantly, he types in Allison Argent.

Allison Argent Founds Hollow Springs High’s First Archery Club! 

There’s a photo attached to the article, Allison smiling with bright eyes, standing tall and proud with a bow gripped in her gloved hands. Stiles just stares at her, looks at her straight white teeth and her pink cheeks and her nice eyes. He tries to find Kate Argent within her, that spark of evil. It isn’t there. She’s just a kid. Kids don’t deserve to die. 

He traces his finger along the screen, trailing her silhouette. Dark hair and dark eyes, just like Connie. Stiles’ heart drops, and he exits the tab, his screen switching back to the search results for Laura Hale. He closes out of that, too, until he is just staring at his desktop’s wallpaper, his mom smiling with him when he placed second in his first-grade science fair, two of his front teeth missing from his grin. He shuts the laptop, blanketed in darkness aside from his bedroom light leaking in beneath the closet door. 

He thinks long and hard about the type of person who would be able to do this. Would like to imagine them as some looming, grotesque creature with jutting bones and sallow skin, sour-smelling with rows of sharp teeth. Stiles thinks of the killer and he wants nothing more than to be looking for a monster, doing the world a favor by snuffing a beast. Stiles, The Hero. But, deep deep down, he knows. He knows that he is looking for something - someone - with whom he shares more commonalities than differences. He’s looking for someone who used to be a kid, who played pretend and loved their mom and probably had a pet dog or a goldfish. Someone who gets angry at slow drivers and probably likes the colorful soap at car washes and has a family. The scariest part is that Stiles is looking for someone who holds pieces of himself. The real monsters never lurk in the dark. He wants the killer to be ugly, to be gross and multi-eyed. The scariest part is that when Stiles finds them, he knows they’ll look just like him.

He sits there, slumped, and tries not to feel like someone has gutted him, replaced his insides with rocks that rattle when he breathes.

Eventually, when he feels like he can move again, he carefully pushes himself up from the floor, slipping out of his closet. The house is quiet, just the sound of the electricity thrumming within the walls. He pads on gentle, sock-soft feet to the stairs, walking on the edges of his heels and remaining mindful of the steps that creak. He’s making his way to his parents’ - his dad’s - bedroom, before stopping short. His dad is splayed out on the recliner, his head lolled back while he exhales open-mouthed snores. The light from the television spills across the living room, adorning everything in shaky blue light. For just a second, Stiles is struck with a feeling of deja vu, of being thirteen and sneaking in to watch his dad sleep just to make sure he was alive.  

It makes a dark, pressing sort of sadness well up in his chest. This inescapable, bone-deep heaviness dripping into his cells and altering his genome. A sort of misery that feels like it may very well be life-long. He steps up to the recliner, trailing his fingertips gently across the man’s arm, monitoring the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. 

His eyes catch on the handful of empty bottles on the coffee table. There was a time, which seems so long ago now that it exists out of his reach, when Stiles used to think he would be lucky to feel a love like the one that flowed electric between his parents. But, now, looking at his dad slack against his aged recliner, old and stained and perfunctory like everything else at this point, he thinks he never wants to feel love like that. The kind that makes you miserable. The kind that kills you when they die.

Stiles sighs, shaking his dad by the shoulder. “Dad,” he whispers, “you’ve got to get up.”

The man grumbles in response, smacking his lips and expelling bitter breath. Stiles wrinkles his nose, shaking him again. “C’mon, dad. You will feel better if you sleep in a bed.” 

Stiles snakes his hands to wrap around his dad’s biceps, coaxing him upward while he mutters nonsense under his breath. He blinks awake with bleary eyes, an arm flexing beneath Stiles’ hold as he reaches to scratch sloppily at his chest. “Stiles?”

He nods, still trying to urge his dad into standing up. “Yeah. It’s me. You’ve got to go to bed.” 

His dad releases a small laugh, eyes crinkling. Stiles feels himself grin small in response. “What?”

“S’just funny, that’s all,” he replies off-handedly as Stiles finally gets him to his feet. He makes sure to steer him carefully so he doesn’t bump into any furniture. “What’s funny, dad?” 

He wraps an arm around Stiles’ shoulders, gripping a little tightly when he stumbles and regains his balance. “You taking care of me,” he replies, huffing another laugh, “when it’s supposed to be the other way around.” 

Stiles isn’t sure what to say to that. His dad fills the silence. “Clauds would hate me for this.”

A sharp inhale rakes its way through Stiles’ lips as he turns to look at his dad. He isn’t looking back, still staring ahead with glassy, unseeing eyes. The thing is, you are supposed to do right by people when they are still around to see it, not when they're already in the ground. Stiles sniffs hard against the way he wants to scream. “She would never have hated you for anything,” he promises, guiding him to the bedroom. 

His dad shakes his head. “She’d never forgive me for this. Ruining our kid.”

Stiles swallows down a trembling breath, his vision going watery. “You didn’t ruin me.” 

“Feels like it. Sometimes,” is mumbled back.

He seats his dad on the edge of the bed while he pulls the covers back. He rubs his forearm against his nose and sniffles a couple of times. “Well, you didn’t. Okay?” 

“Okay,” comes his reluctant concession.

Once Stiles gets him comfortable, he steps out to retrieve a glass of water from the kitchen. Stiles places it on the nightstand and his dad rolls over, facing away. Stiles goes to leave, when the man says, to the wall, “Sometimes I forget you lost her, too.”

Across the room, Stiles fixes his eyes on the floor fan. He fantasizes, just for a second, about curling both hands around the base and smashing it into the floor. He doesn’t. Instead, Stiles keeps walking, scared of what will happen if he stays. So sure that he would sink into the floor and never claw his way back out. He clicks his dad’s door shut before cleaning up the living room, quietly depositing the bottles into the trash bin and folding up the throw blankets. 

He goes to turn the television off before pausing. Stiles glances back to his dad’s door, a swarm of guilt settling deep in his abdomen. He gently sets the remote back down, the weather channel playing quietly in the space around him. He pulls one of the blankets he folded from the basket by the couch before curling up in his dad’s recliner, facing the bedroom so he can easily hear any disturbances. Eventually, he falls asleep like that, noting that his dad is still snoring and tomorrow there is a seven percent chance of rain. 

Stiles knows, if Derek were to ever find out that he was thinking this, he’d be a dead man. 

He flips to an empty page in his notebook and begins mapping it out. At the top, he writes, Peter Hale.

There are just too many unexplained variables. How was Peter able to wake up from his otherwise immobile state? He draws an arrow, connecting that thought to Werewolf Healing. But, that just creates more questions, particularly on the dependability of healing, how far it extends. Derek can scrape his knee and it will mend immediately, but Peter remained in a coma for years, his face shriveled. 

That leads to more confusion, so Stiles decides to put a pin in it, writing Alpha Spark? beside it before moving on. Then, Peter was in Hollow Springs, he was at prom. He just happened to be there the night they were looking for the killer? There is no way that it was purely coincidence. He swallows, mentally correcting himself, unless Laura was killed on prom night. But, that makes him wonder about the sincerity behind Peter’s actions. Personally, Stiles doesn’t know him that well. But, he knows how power can skew someone’s decision-making, has studied enough collapsed monarchies within his history classes to form an educated guess. Peter remained close with Talia, who inherited the Alpha power from the Hale name. Peter was most likely second-in-command. He was younger than Talia, not by much but enough that it’s notable. Werewolves don’t seem to be matriarchal. Maybe Peter was lying in wait for his turn. 

Stiles erases some of his earlier notes and draws a line between that and Hale Fire. Laura got the Alpha Spark after that, which might have made Peter angry. But, he was in a coma at this time. Stiles blows out an explosive sigh and writes beneath that, in all caps, LYING ABOUT COMA?

If he were lying, then he would have some incentive to kill Laura. Then again, why would he have faked being comatose for so long? It also doesn’t really explain the deaths of Joshua and Connie. Peter doesn’t seem to have any strong connection to them. Which then raises the question, was Laura’s death separate from theirs? He jots that down in the margins, circling it a couple of times. 

He peers down at his handiwork, reading over it. There is enough here, he thinks. Enough to at least raise the suspicions of anyone who looked into it. Maybe enough to convince Derek. But, Stiles isn’t so sure about that. If someone were to come to him and tell him that his dad was a murderer, that his dad had killed his mom, he would never believe it. Not for all the evidence in the world. Peter is all Derek has, and Stiles is reluctant to ruin that. 

Fishing his phone from his back pocket, he begins composing a new message, the little flickering line idling as he thinks about what to say.

S: Can we talk?

He stares down at the screen, watching the minutes of the time tick past until finally the three dots appear. 

L: That depends. About what?

Which is how he ends up in a booth at Beacon Hills’ Diner, watching Lydia sip a strawberry milkshake that he paid for. She primly wipes whipped-cream from her lips when Stiles probes, “So, you,” he waves a hand, wincing a bit sheepishly, “feel things.”

Lydia aims him a blank look. He tries to elaborate, “I mean, did you…” he awkwardly slides his own milkshake toward himself and takes a long pull. “Have you felt anything weird within the last couple of months?”

She tilts her head, considering him. “Weird in what way?”

He swallows a mouthful of chocolate sprinkled with malt. “Like death.”

Lydia coughs, pushing her milkshake away while she covers her mouth with the back of her hand. She inhales sharply through her nose, hissing, “What?”

“I don’t know,” he replies shrilly, a little frantically, “I just mean, like, I don’t know.” He shrugs, playing with his straw. 

“I felt something cold,” she offers, and Stiles straightens up as he listens. “So cold that it woke me up. But, not cold like,” she gives a theatrical shiver. “More cold like…” she looks out the window beside them, face sloping soft and solemn, “like sad,” she whispers, eyes tracking a car pulling into a parking space. She turns to look back at Stiles. “Really, really sad.”

He nods along, indicating that she can continue. 

“I was crying, I just couldn’t stop. I felt so alone.” She chews her lip. “I’ve never felt like that before. So afraid and all by myself.”

Stiles leans across the table, lowering his voice. “Like betrayal?” he asks, thinking about Peter, supposed to be Laura’s loving uncle. 

She shakes her head. “No. Like, I knew.” She waves her hands. “I know that doesn’t make any sense. But, it felt like confirmation. I don’t know how else to describe it, I just feel things.”

He looks over Lydia’s shoulder where Cam is standing by the front entrance, staring through the glass and out into the lot, where birds are pecking at old food on the asphalt. “Yeah,” Stiles breathes, “me too.”

They finish their milkshakes, the rest of their time spent talking about school and college and Jackson Whittemore. 

When they go to part ways, Lydia looks at him seriously. “You need to be careful.”

He nods. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do,” she refutes. “I don’t want you to make me wake up cold, Stiles.”

That makes him swallow. “I won’t,” he promises, walking away while she makes her way to her car. He doesn’t ask for a ride and she doesn’t offer one. All the way home, he thinks about what she said, tasting bitterness that has nothing to do with his ice-cream covered tongue.

After the altercation with Derek in the library, Stiles reevaluates what he has.

In the moment, he’d wanted to put his fist through the wall separating the A-C authors from the D-F ones. He wanted to feel the drywall cave to the pressure of his bones, tear it apart just to know what it’s like to break something. Just to see if he could. Just to show Derek see, it’s not only you.

He didn’t do any of that. He just stood there like a coward. Because that’s all he has ever been able to do. 

Derek seems so sure, so so certain that Peter had no involvement in Laura’s disappearance. And, Derek knows Peter better than Stiles does. 

But, thinking about Allison, the implications of the Argent name, Stiles isn’t convinced. He doesn’t think he is going to tell Derek. Not yet ready to make things worse. 

When he thinks he has enough evidence, he tells Derek about Allison. As predicted, it didn’t end well. 

But, long after he has left, when Stiles’ panic ebbs out into numbness, he continues looking into Adrian Harris. He doesn’t make a bad suspect. He teaches chemistry at HSHS, seems to be a bit of a hard-ass if ratemyteacher.com is any indication. Harris looks mean, narrow-faced and weasley. Even so, he doesn’t look like he could kill anyone, least of all Laura Hale. 

Stiles thinks back to what his dad said, all those years ago. Bad people can come in all shapes and sizes, son. He opens a new tab and searches the website for Hollow Springs High. He clicks through a few different banners until he finds the Faculty and Staff page. 

Immediately, his heart stops. Beneath the heading PRINCIPAL is a picture of a man smiling, old and graying. 

Gerard Argent. 

Suddenly, Harris doesn’t seem so innocent. An Argent is the principal, so maybe Harris knows that Allison would be the ideal victim, knows that too many people would think the Argents had it coming, because of Kate. Killing werewolves because, if it ever circled back, Harris would be the last one questioned. He spoke with Laura before she died, he knew she was sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. She was right there, she knew he was suspicious. 

Stiles gets to his feet and starts shoving things into his backpack. He grabs his notebook and slips into his closet, taking a photo of the corkboard on the floor, making sure that he can see all of the evidence. 

When he’s finished, Stiles zips up his bag and takes the stairs two at a time before stepping into the garage, staring at the jeep. His dad is out at work, pulling a double, so he wouldn’t know. There’s no way he’d know. Stiles walks forward and lightly presses his fingertips to the hood, tracing them up to the side mirror, leaving dust-lines in his wake. The keys are hanging on a hook beside the garage door, his mom’s rainbow keychain still dangling from the ring. He has his license, received it in his dad’s cruiser on one of his Sober Days. He could do it. He could.

He grabs the keys and unlocks the driver’s side, slipping in. It smells stale, like old air. It also smells like the little tree air-freshener wrapped around the rearview mirror - her favorite scent was Lemon Grove, the neon-yellow one that turned pastel as it became sun-worn. It still smells a little bit like her, the cling of her coconut blossom body spray, the dry shampoo she used whenever they were running late. The steering wheel still has her bright-colored cover on it, a polaroid of his dad holding Stiles as a baby pressed into the dash beside the speedometer. She is everywhere, and Stiles feels like he may very well die from breathing it all in. He could crank the ignition, sit in there while it ran, and her memory would get to him before the carbon monoxide. 

The garage door opener is still clipped to the visor. He takes a deep breath and clicks the long button in the middle, listening to the door rattle as it drags open behind him. Buckling his seatbelt with shaking hands, he backs into the driveway before he can talk himself out of it. 

The drive takes twenty minutes, a striking difference from his hour-long walk to the Thrift Way. He feels like he is experiencing everything outside of himself, the wobble of the road beneath the tires feeling foreign without his mom there to sing along to the radio, to reach over and poke Stiles at red lights. He read about the Argent Mansion in the articles, not so much a mansion as it is just a house with more than three bedrooms within a small town. He hopes Gerard lives there, hopes that this isn’t just a wild goose chase like Derek had sneered. 

As he makes his way through Hollow Springs, he can see a few pedestrians glance at him twice, doing a double-take at the baby-blue jeep. The turn onto Maple Lane encases Stiles within trees, the road winding through a long stretch of forest. It reminds him a little of the preserve, in a way. 

When he finally pulls up to the front of the house, he has lost traction. He feels nervous and jittery, overcome with the thought that he could be wrong, that this is going to be like his freak out on the lacrosse field all over again. 

He pulls the keys from the ignition and walks on the gravel path to the front door, the rocks crunching beneath his shoes. Taking a deep breath, he rings the doorbell. 

The air around him is eerily quiet. He can hear the chime of the doorbell echo within the house before he is blanketed in pseudo-silence, birds chirping and the almost-quiet rustle of trees behind him.

He startles when the door jerks open, revealing a man who is not Gerard Argent. Stiles blinks. He’s tall, has ruffled dark hair and bright blue eyes. His lips are warped into a scowl as he squints at Stiles. “Can I help you?”

Stiles clears his throat. “Is Gerard Argent here?”

The man crosses his arms. “Who’s asking?”

Pursing his lips, Stiles wonders if he should just leave. “My name is Stiles. Uh, Stilinski.” He shakes his head. “Stiles Stilinski. I really need to talk to Gerard.” 

Suddenly, a hand appears on the man’s shoulder, accompanied by a kind laugh. “Chris, please don’t terrorize children on the front lawn. It’s bad for publicity.” 

The man - Chris - grimaces, stepping aside to unveil a smiling Gerard. “I heard you were looking for me?” 

Chris reads that as his dismissal, cataloguing the expression on Gerard’s face before retreating into the house. Stiles looks around grasping at straws before deciding to just bite the bullet. “I think Allison is in trouble.”

Gerard’s face goes stoney, losing all of its friendliness, and Stiles asks, “Are you her…dad?” He looks too old to be any teenager’s dad, but Stiles doesn’t want to step on any toes. 

He steps out onto the porch, closing the door behind himself. He doesn’t answer Stiles’ question, instead asking, “What makes you think she’s in danger?” 

Here goes nothing. Swinging his backpack around, Stiles reaches in and retrieves his notebook, handing it over. Gerard slowly takes it from him, flipping it open while his eyebrows rise up. 

“I think the same person who killed Connie and Joshua may have killed Laura Hale.” 

Gerard looks up sharply at that, hard-eyed. “Killed? They’re just missing.”

Stiles shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I think they were killed. And I think Allison is next.” Even though he isn’t sure, Stiles adds, “I think it could be Adrian Harris.” 

The lines of Gerard’s posture relax significantly while he releases a breath. “The chemistry teacher?” 

He nods his confirmation, pulling out his phone. “I made this board,” he turns the screen toward Gerard, zooming in, “they’re all connected. Pretty much everything is written in my notes.”

The older man steps back, gripping the notebook tightly, mouth set in a grim line. “Thank you for telling me, Stiles. I am genuinely appreciative of how you’re looking out for my Allison.” He gestures with the notebook. “Do you mind if I hold onto this?” Stiles doesn’t want to leave it, thinking of all the unexplainable things written in on the pages, when Gerard adds, “I think it would be helpful to have if I question Harris. To show him that we have him cornered.” 

“Yeah, sure,” he croaks. “I’m sorry to just,” he motions to the jeep, “show up on your property like this. But, I didn’t want to wait and then be responsible for anything that happened to Allison.”

Gerard gives a tight smile. “Thank you.” He tilts his head, indicating the house. “I have to get back to dinner. But, I am grateful that you decided to stop by and let us know your concerns.”

He steps within the house, dismissing, “Have a good night, Stiles.” Then, Stiles is all alone on the porch, blinking at the empty space. 

His backpack feels lighter without his notebook. Stiles can’t help but feel like something is missing. When he buckles up in his jeep and goes to make his way out of Maple Lane, he sees the blinds in the front window fall closed. He shakes his head and clicks his blinker to turn back onto the road, ready to head toward Beacon Hills. Once he gets to the end of the lane, he hesitates, jerking the wheel in the opposite direction. He’s tired of feeling useless, of just sitting around. He drives two minutes and pulls into the lot of the Thrift Way, levering himself out of the car. 

Connie Evans was leaving with her groceries. He looks toward the entrance, trailing his eyes in the direction she would have taken home, remembering the anonymous tips, the articles. He begins heading toward the road where cars are lazily dragging by. Suddenly, in the distance, just before the woods, he sees her. A shimmering haze wavering in the night. She stares across the lot at him, tilting her head. Then, she turns, disappearing into the trees. He picks up his pace, walking as fast as he can without running, trying not to draw too much attention to himself. He hears noise behind him, glancing back he sees Joshua, who has not reappeared since Stiles first saw him, following close behind. 

The low-hanging branches catch on his flannel overshirt, scraping at his face and neck, but he continues, running now that he is out of view. Then, he trips, soles slipping on fallen leaves, and when he pushes his arms to catch his fall, he is face to face with Connie. His first instinct is to cry out, startled, but she brings her finger to her lips in a shushing gesture, motioning her head in the opposite direction before slowly getting up. Stiles quietly follows her as she weaves through the foliage, the leaves around her remaining still as she passes through them.

Finally, they break through into a small clearing. Stiles blinks hard through the darkness, his eyes adjusting. In front of them, there’s a small shed, almost like one of those tiny homes you see for sale in big-city lots. There’s a dim light shining from the window, but otherwise it seems unoccupied. Connie steps in front of him, blocking his view. She croaks, “Help,” before turning and walking toward the front door, vanishing into it. Stiles turns, looking for Joshua, but he’s gone. 

He listens - for voices, signs of life - there’s nothing. When he gets to the door, it’s locked. Stiles sighs out through his nose, stepping back and looking around. He is a cop’s kid, god damn it. Where is the best place to hide a key? 

Stiles crouches down, picking at a few rocks, pulling at the front steps. No dice. He lifts the mat and parts the leaves of the bushes with no luck. 

By accident, he notices the trim of the left side of the doorframe has a crack in it. The house is nice, well cared for. Surely, the owner would fix a crack that noticeable. Carefully, he pulls it back and it snaps out easily. On a loose nail, there are two shiny keys dangling. Swallowing, he grabs them, holding them carefully so they don’t clink together. 

The first one he tries doesn’t fit, making the second key rock forward and knock against the door knob. Wincing, he grabs it, fitting it into the lock instead. It slides through smoothly, unlatching the lock and making the door pop lightly as it unseals. Stiles squeezes his hands into fists, allowing his nails to scrape into his palms. He slowly opens the door so it doesn’t creak. 

He slips inside and closes it behind himself, replacing the latch. He turns around and goes rigid. The walls are covered, every inch, from floor to ceiling. There are clippings from newspapers, photographs, things written on sticky notes, various forms of media all push-tacked. Stiles sucks in a breath and leans forward to the wall closest to him. The photograph is of a man, a little older, smiling. His picture is covered in a large red slash, a piece of red string tied to the pin holding it up. Stiles follows it, it leads to another photograph. A woman in her mid-twenties. Also crossed out. He keeps following it as it jumps around between dozens of photos. His blood runs cold as squints to read what is beneath the next one - Samuel Fischer has been missing since January 11, 1987. If you know anything please - the rest of the sentence has been blacked out. The top of the article is dated as October 4, 1987. It’s the same for the other pictures, several of them dating back as early as 1983 to as recently as this year, all of them missing from various cities around California. Finally, Stiles’ eyes catch on the picture. 

Joshua Bates. Fangs drawn onto his smile, his picture slashed out.

Stiles jerks his head, doing a full turn. The entire room, red X after red X. There’s a table in the middle of the floor, surrounded by chairs, as if people meet here all the time, proud to be surrounded by their trophies. Stiles walks around the table, there’s just one lone laptop in the middle, plugged into an extension cord. He curls forward and lightly taps his fingers against the touchpad. Suddenly, a green light blinks, coating the room in white as a projector projects the screen onto a thin sheet that’s covering the wall. 

There’s a photo displayed, a young girl’s yearbook picture. Beneath it, it reads in bold font, CATHERINE THOMSPON, 19. Lower, Last spotted working at the convenience store outside of the SAN FRANCISCO EXIT on HIGHWAY 5. Finally, underlined in red, REWARD - $1,000,000.00.

Suddenly, it clicks to another picture.

$755,000.00.

Another.

$1,500,000.00.

Another.

$975,000.00.

Then, the screen changes entirely, titled in gold lettering, HIGHLIGHTS. 

It shows a picture of a man named Jacob Baldwin, listed as twenty-eight years old, then a photo of another man with a crown icon edited onto his head. The bottom reads, successfully completed by ROBERT WILSON, $1,000,000.00.

Next is Theresa Coleman, completed by Richard Bennett.

Mark Washington, completed by Patricia Diaz.

Jennifer Bell, completed by Nicole Garner.

It clicks in Stiles’ head, then. He gets it. He finally found it. 

This is the pool. 

He looks down at the keys in his hand, staring at the one that didn’t fit. Glancing around the room, he sees a lockbox, tucked into the corner and semi-hidden from view. He walks over to it, crouching and sliding the key within the lock. It glides easily, clicking as it undoes the latch. Stiles swallows, carefully pulling it open.

Money. It’s filled top to bottom with stacks and stacks of banded one-hundred-dollar bills. He closes it before pushing himself from the floor. He needs to get out of here. 

Before he can leave, though, his heart drops at the next picture on the screen. Stricken by her happy face, the pleased flush in her cheeks, how her eyes glow green like the preserve. 

LAURA HALE, 21.

Stiles drags his eyes over to the next words. Completed by [not pictured] GERARD ARGENT, $2,000,000.00.

It settles in his abdomen like a lead weight, making him feel heavy and immovable. It all comes together. The Argent name, Kate’s learned hatred, the convenience of being the principal at Hollow Springs High. The way they disappear after visiting the grocery store - the store where Allison works. He’s probably there all the time. Stiles can see it in his mind’s eye - Connie arguing with Gerard on her porch, maybe he threatened her, maybe he was asking questions she couldn’t answer. Gerard following her after she left the grocery store, asking her if she needed a ride. He would have only had to get her into the car, the shed’s just within the woods beside the highway. He would have had a hand in hiring Joshua Bates, maybe that’s the only reason he hired him, maybe he knew all along. He is a werewolf hunter. 

That is why none of their families are looking for them. Why there’s no trace. This could get them killed, too. 

And Laura. Laura was poking around too close to home, meeting with Adrian Harris. Maybe Gerard heard it through the grapevine, that Laura was looking to catch a killer. After all, what’s another Hale snuffed by Argent hands? She wouldn’t have seen it coming. Maybe she got as close as Stiles did. Maybe she’s in the woods like everyone else. 

Stiles is so fucking stupid. Derek is never going to forgive him. 

The panic makes his chest feel like it’s on fire, like his trachea has gone ablaze and when he breathes it dredges up embers. Stiles claws at his throat, fumbling for his phone. It blinks at him, signaling that he has no service. He stumbles, unlatching the door and staggering outside. After a few steps, he checks again. One bar.

He dials one of the only numbers he knows by heart.

“Stiles, it’s two in the fucking morning.”

“I found it,” he whispers, still struggling to breathe. “Derek, I found it.” 

The wind shakes the leaves around him, makes his skin pebble up in response. He hears Derek suck in a breath. 

“Found what?”

Stiles can see headlights shining from the opposite side of the shed, framing it in a blinding silhouette. He can never let sleeping dogs lie. 

“Stiles? What did you find?”

He hears a car door slam. “The pool,” he breathes before hanging up. Derek doesn’t need to be deeper into this than he already is. This is Stiles’ mistake. He’s the one who needs to suffer the consequences. When he sees the outline of two people coming toward him, he turns and runs, making his way through the trees in the opposite direction.

The scattered beams of flashlights surround him as they follow, branches snapping. Covered in shaking streams of light, Stiles just hopes that Lydia doesn’t wake up cold. 

He makes it a couple hundred feet before the tip of his shoe embeds itself beneath a tree root, halting his movement and causing him to fall forward. He scrapes his hands against the pine straw coating the ground as he tries and fails to push himself back up, to regain his momentum. A scream rips its way through his teeth at the sound of the gunshot, the way the bullet is buried in his left leg. 

The leaves around him turn bright under the shine of their flashlights. He can’t move. He’s crying and he can’t move and no one is ever going to find Joshua or Connie or Laura. Derek will never look for him. No one is going to look for him. 

Stiles tries to crawl, digs his fingertips into the ground and grits his teeth against the pain, attempting to drag himself forward. He does not want to die in these woods. A hand wraps around his ankle, accompanied by a cruel laugh. He’s pulled backward, his shirt riding up, the dead leaves and errant sticks scraping against his exposed stomach. 

“Your journal was very cute,” Gerard sneers in his face, pressing his boot against Stiles’ chest to keep him trapped against the ground. “I enjoy a little bit of arts and crafts every now and then, myself.”

“You’re a killer,” Stiles spits, squirming against his hold. Gerard removes his foot, pressing it instead against the wound in Stiles’ leg. He cries out, white-hot agony working itself through his nerve-endings. He barely hears the gun click before another shot scrapes by his other leg. His scream goes raspy as he cries, turning and rubbing his face into the dirt, trying to get away from the hurt he can never escape. 

“What are you doing? He’s just a kid!” is hissed frantically from behind Gerard. Stiles squints through the pain, met with a pale-faced Chris. 

“He’s no better than a dog,” Gerard bites, twisting the heel of his shoe deeper, making tears track down Stiles’ face as he writhes, pleading helplessly. 

He loses time, catches glimpses of the dark forest passing blurrily around him. He keeps slipping in and out, the pain making bile rise up in his throat before bubbling back down. The burn is nice, it distracts him from the scorching hot hurt in his leg. 

Stiles wakes up in a chair, aching and tired. For just a moment, he thinks dying might be nice, if only for it all to be over. Maybe he’ll get to become a tree. 

The thought makes him giggle deliriously and Gerard kicks the leg of the chair to get his attention. Stiles blinks placidly at him. He can’t feel much of anything. He barely registers that they’re back in the murder-shed, surrounded by reminders of all the innocent people who have died. 

Gerard crouches down so they’re eye-level. “You know, I never did anything wrong.” He waves an arm to the walls. “It’s considered ethical to euthanize mutts.”

Stiles feels sick. “You killed Laura,” he slurs, struggling weakly against the binds. 

“I did,” Gerard agrees. “You know what I did? I strangled her. Wrapped a rope tight around her neck and felt her thrash until she went still.” He heaves a shuddery, pleased sort of sigh. “If only you knew what it feels like when they go still.”

Stiles curls forward and pukes, dull-colored bile coating the ground at Gerard’s feet, sprinkling along his boots. 

Gerard pays him no mind, continuing, “Then, I sliced her in half. Split her abdomen in two and scattered her in the woods. Where she belongs.”

“Connie was only eighteen,” he blubbers, vomit drying on his chin. 

“You know, you got so close, Stiles. It’s a shame, really, that things have to be this way,” he tuts. “A brain like that could have cured cancer.”

Stiles feels the blood drain from his head, a molten-hot trickle of sickness webbing out beneath his ribs. He flinches when a phone rings, echoing loudly within the quiet space. 

Gerard steps back, pulling it from his pocket and barking out an, “I’m busy.”

Whatever is said on the other line gives him pause, dragging his eyes to Stiles, then Chris, before stepping away, out the front door. 

Stiles stares straight ahead, slumped pitifully. He watches the pool cycle through the hits again. Closes his eyes when Laura’s picture pops up on the highlights. 

“I’d never kill a child,” Chris says with conviction, making Stiles force his tired eyes to look over at the man who is staring down at his hands. “I’d never hurt a kid,” he says, nodding to himself like he is solidifying it in his own mind. 

“You know,” Stiles breathes out, “I thought Allison was next.”

“What?”

“I came to your house to warn Gerard. I thought the killer was going to get Allison.” Stiles closes his eyes, feeling pleasantly warm. “There were so many common variables. I was so sure.” He looks up, staring across the room at the picture of Joshua. “They didn’t deserve to die.”

“I didn’t kill them,” Chris promises.

Stiles tilts his head. “Didn’t you?”

He tracks the dip of Chris’ throat as he swallows hard, looking away from Stiles. “If I die, you have to make sure they don’t bury me next to mom,” Stiles hums out. “Don’t let my dad bury me next to her. It’d kill him.” He squints at Chris. “Promise me.”

“You aren’t going to die,” Chris hisses, “he is just scaring you.”

Sitles ignores him, rolling his head back so he can stare at the ceiling. “What’s your favorite tree?”

“You aren’t going to die,” he says again. But, Stiles is already thinking of sycamores. Of late-night lasagna and never being too old to play pretend. 

The door opens and Gerard steps back in. “Let’s go, Chris.”

Chris balks, gesturing to Stiles. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“We’ll come back,” Gerard dismisses. “Victoria tracked Lorelei Barnes. There’s a million dollars on the line, let’s go.”

Stiles tilts his head down, pressing his chin against his chest when Chris aims him one last look, reluctant to leave Stiles behind. 

He’s blanketed in silence, all alone. He can hear the car start outside, the headlights shining through the window. Nothing hurts anymore. When he pries his eyes open, Connie is sitting criss-cross on the floor across from him, expression sad as she looks at Stiles’ legs. Cam is standing behind her, mouth set in a grim line. Joshua is still gone. If Stiles dies, they can never be free. 

Connie brings her hand to her heart, her thumb pressed to the outside of her fist as she circles it in front of her chest. 

Sorry.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, going slack. He feels good, a buzz settling beneath his skin. He’s so tired, he just wants to go to sleep. Stiles knows you aren’t supposed to sleep, but he feels so heavy, feels like he is already dreaming. 

He goes in and out. Laura’s picture appearing intermittently. He is going to die, he just knows it. He can feel it, like when the air smells like rain before it storms. He wonders if they will tack his picture up, if they’ll cross him out. 

Stiles keeps his eyes closed, but he has things he still needs to say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help Isaac,” he apologizes to Cam. “You’ve been with me for so long and I just - I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry you can’t be free.”

The next one is for Connie and Joshua. And Laura. “I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough. That I didn’t try hard enough. You deserve to be found.”

It ebbs out, then, the buzzing. He just feels like heat. It feels good. He never wants to stop feeling it. He hopes he gets to see mom. Stiles is ready to be with his mom.

Breathing gets a little harder, then, a heavy pressure on his sternum. He can’t feel his legs anymore. He smiles, thinks it’s funny. 

He’s losing time. When he blinks it feels like it’s been hours, like he will stay in the same place for eternity, like he’s been there forever. 

A light slap to his face startles him. His eyes can’t focus. He thinks Gerard is back. They came back to kill him.

He’s slapped again, on the other side, and he blinks as hard as he can, trying to find clarity. Peter is level with him, squinting.

“There we go,” he cheers. “You’re alive. Wonderful.”

He unties Stiles, who crumples to the floor, groaning. Peter carefully hefts him up, assessing the damage. “They shot you in both of your legs? That seems a little excessive.” 

Stiles looks around. “Derek,” he mumbles.

Peter clicks his tongue. “Derek isn’t here. He doesn’t know how to control himself.” 

He’s levered into an awkward bridal carry, which he would joke about if he had it in him. “He killed Laura,” Stiles says, lolling his head on Peter’s shoulder. 

“I know,” is sighed out, he can feel the vibration of it beneath the press of his cheek. 

“I don’t want to be buried next to mom.”

“No one is burying you.” Stiles is jostled, a little roughly. “Stay awake. We’re not burying you.” 

Peter lays Stiles down in his back seat, wrapping his hands around Stiles’ shins. He hisses, because that fucking hurts, then goes lax as Peter’s veins begin inking black. He feels like he’s floating, surrounded by warmth. He blinks at the blood caking his pants, the way they’re dark and stiff with it. It’s a lot of blood, it makes him think of when he was a kid and he’d busted his chin on his bike, the reason he has the scar. Remembers thinking of it as his gauge for an insurmountable amount of blood. He grins dopily at the thought that he broke his own record. It probably has more to do with the fact he can’t feel much of anything anymore. Just the frantic giddiness.

“What’s that?” 

Peter says nothing, Stiles can see his jaw clench as the black seeps higher. Stiles giggles a bit. “Pain drain,” he coos, allowing his head to fall back against the seat. 

He slips in and out, remembers the light filtering through the window, the sound of the blinker, the way the road whooshes beneath the tires. He’s so sleepy. He knows he isn’t supposed to sleep but he’s so fucking tired.

When he wakes up, he has to close his eyes. The fluorescent lights burning him. It smells like antiseptic and soup broth. Like mom, before. When he can see, he squints at the television showing some nameless sitcom, the laugh track playing softly in the background. Everything looks tinted blue, in that bright way that only hospital rooms can achieve. His dad is asleep in the uncomfortable side chair, one leg half crossed over the other, his chin pressed into his chest as he snores. He looks exhausted, graying at the temples. But, he also looks clear, a little put-together, which makes something like hope bubble up in Stiles’ chest. 

His legs are bound tight in bandages, an intravenous drip hanging from a pole beside him, pumping him full of clear fluid. He startles when he realizes Peter is standing on the other side of the room, facing the window.

“Welcome back,” he quips lowly. Stiles doesn’t reply, wary of the man now that he is of a clearer mind. 

“You know,” Peter continues, “you look a lot like your mother.”

At first, Stiles’ defenses go up, because he thinks Peter is making a dark slight about his mother being in the hospital. About her dying. Then, he sees that Peter is not smirking, or laughing. He just looks sad. 

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” he hums, careful not to disturb Stiles’ dad. “How you can never really say goodbye.”

Stiles swallows. “You knew my mother?”

Peter breathes a disbelieving laugh. “Everyone knew Claudia Gajos.” 

Not sure what to say to that, caught up in how Peter said Gajos instead of Stilinski, Stiles offers, “Thank you for saving me.”

“I didn’t save you,” Peter huffs, shaking his head, still refusing to look away from the window. “I saved her.”

Stiles drags his eyes back to the TV, watching the end credits roll as a new episode queues up. He scratches his thumbs into the edge of his hospital blanket, choosing what he wants to say next. “Is Derek mad at me?”

A scoff. “He can hardly fault you for getting shot in the legs.”

“You know what I mean,” Stiles huffs, crossing his arms, tucking his palms in the creases of his elbows. 

“Derek is never angry at anyone but himself.”

That’s unhelpfully cryptic, but Peter doesn’t elaborate, turning from the window. “I know you thought it was me. The killer.”

He swallows, gearing up to apologize when Peter says, “You know, you’re smart to have thought that. I saw your notebook.” He taps his fingers against Stiles’ bed railing, he can feel the thud of the impact through the mattress. “You made some pretty intelligent connections.”

Stiles feels his throat click on a swallow, his cheeks dusting red. Peter finally steps back, making his way toward the door. “The Hales are lucky to have someone like you on their side, I’d say. If your judgement weren’t skewered by your nearly-fatal injuries, I’d offer you the Bite.” He nods his head toward Stiles’ dad. “I spent a lot of time despising him for getting what I couldn’t ever have. But, he looked everywhere for you.” A soft sigh. “He’s a good man.”

Then, Stiles is alone, just him and the sitcom and his dad snoring lightly in the bedside chair. Stiles doesn’t wake him, leaning back into his pillows and pressing the button that trickles more morphine into his IV. He listens to his dad’s breathing, the heart monitor’s rhythm, the low sound of the nurses talking outside the door. 

When his eyes grow heavy, he sees Cam through the window, walking around with the birds. He doesn’t see Connie. Or Joshua. 

He falls asleep, choosing to believe that they finally get to be at peace. 

There’s a knock on the front door that permeates the quiet. 

Scott just left close to an hour ago, playing video games with Stiles and telling him that he will be able to brag about his scars, that when they go to college he’ll get to impress girls by telling them he got shot. 

“In both legs,” Scott emphasizes, wiggling his eyebrows up and down.

“Yeah,” Stiles rolls his eyes, “nothing screams chick-magnet quite like getting chased down and shot by an old man.”

“Damn right!”

Stiles pushes himself up from the couch, motioning for his dad to sit back down when the man rises to help him. His dad hasn’t touched a drink since Stiles woke up in the hospital. It’s different, but not in a bad way. Stiles is glad to have him back. He pushes his crutches beneath his arms, wobbling as he tries to regain his balance. One of the bullets barely grazed his right leg, leaving him pretty much completely mobile. He has to attend physical therapy every other day for his left leg. But, it isn’t so bad. He looks to Cam, who is watching the baseball game with Stiles’ dad. It could be worse.  

When he finally gets to the door, swinging it open, he pauses. He hasn’t seen Derek since that night in his bedroom when he made it clear how he felt about Stiles’ concern for an Argent. Stiles was sure, so sure, that he would never see him again. 

But, here he is, standing on Stiles’ porch like he belongs there. Like he didn’t make Stiles think that he hated his fucking guts. 

“Derek—”

“I would notice if you died,” Derek blurts, breathing hard. “I never answered you when you asked me, because I thought - I don’t know what I thought. But, I would. I would notice.”

Stiles purses his lips, considering the sight before him. Derek with his fists clenched at his sides, his nostrils flaring on every inhale. He thinks about what Peter said, about who Derek is really angry at. Imagines Derek all alone, thinking that if Stiles died, he never answered the question. 

He wants to be upset. To scream at Derek for making Stiles feel like no one would miss him. But, Stiles knows what fear looks like. He knows that Derek is scared. 

When his dad groans at the television, grumbling about the pitcher on the opposing team, Stiles considers Derek for a moment. He rocks on his crutches, hopping a step back and opening the door wider. “Do you like baseball?” Stiles asks, an invitation. 

Derek looks at him, eyes trailing along Stiles’ face. Finally, he nods. “I do.”

“Well, get in here.” He watches as Derek steps through the threshold, looking around at all of the memories decorating the walls. 

Stiles hobbles to the kitchen, pulling a cup from the cabinet so he can get himself something to drink. Derek stands in the foyer awkwardly, and Stiles shoos him. “Go sit on the couch or something.”

When Derek makes no move, Stiles adds, “But, not the left side. The left side is mine and I will fight you for it.”

That makes a ghost of a grin quirk at Derek’s lips. “I prefer the right side, anyway,” he replies, and it makes Stiles feel like he is missing something. But, Derek goes toward the living room, and Stiles hears his dad call a surprised, “If it isn’t Derek Hale!”

He presses his plastic cup into the refrigerator’s water dispenser, staring at the picture of him with his mom on the Fourth of July two years before she died. He hears his dad laugh at something Derek says, feels his own lips stretch into a smile. 

Returning to the living room, he slowly seats himself on the unoccupied end of the couch, feeling a little bit like he can finally breathe. 

Chapter Text

twenty.

It’s almost seven in the morning when they find the jeep in the Thrift Way parking lot. 

It’s on the news. High-quality camera footage showing the sheriff hunched over by the driver’s side. It’s a raw display of utter devastation, how he cradles his face in the cup of his hands. The way he slumps forward against the door, pressing his forehead against the window while his shoulders shake before suddenly the camera angles down and all you can see is a badge beneath the name Parrish. 

The deputy hisses, “That’s his son, you fucking vultures. What the hell is wrong with you?” and the footage cuts out, the screen changing back to the news anchor. 

Peter clicks the television off, turning to Derek. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on.” 

Derek can’t stop staring at the screen, looking absently at his distorted reflection as he thinks about the implications of the jeep being in that parking lot. About how Stiles sounded so afraid on the phone. How Derek never got to tell him that he smells a little bit like cough drops sometimes, how it makes Derek’s nose tingle. How amber eyes are what he thinks of when he smells syrup, how grateful he was to have gotten a prom, even with the wolfsbane. 

Would you notice if I died?

Derek feels sick, dizzy, like whenever he blinks things just get blurrier. Murkier. 

Peter repeats himself and Derek swallows. “Stiles knows.”

He watches as Peter swears under his breath, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Oh, that’s great, Derek. I think it is splendid that I wasn’t permitted access to that information. I’m overjoyed. Ecstatic, really.” Peter paces, shaking his head. “What does he know, exactly?”

“He knows about us,” another swallow, “and he sees…things.”

“Things.”

Looking down at his hands, he stretches his fingers out before curling them into fists. “Ghosts.”

“For fuck’s sak—”

“He was trying to solve the disappearances. In Hollow Springs. He called me in the middle of the night, he—”

“He what?”

Peter isn’t listening, walking with a purpose toward the door, grabbing his keys from the hook in the foyer. 

“Where are you going?” Derek demands.

“I have to make a trip to the police station to make sure the sheriff hasn’t received any recent inclinations to kill werewolves.”

Derek steps to follow him.

“No,” Peter orders, cold.

“That is Stiles,” Derek grits out, as close to pleading as he is willing to get. 

“No, that’s the sheriff’s kid. And you’re a conflict of interest.”

Peter goes to leave again but Derek keeps his pace. “What was all that bullshit about Gajos eyes, then? Huh? Just talking out of your ass so I won’t hate you?” 

“Derek, you need to calm down.”

“I’m coming.” 

”Fine,” Peter hisses, stepping forward to point a finger into Derek’s chest, “but believe me when I tell you that being over-involved only makes it worse.”

Derek grits his teeth, falling into step behind Peter, who is already walking away. “There’s no way it could get worse.”

He watches the back of Peter’s head as the man scoffs meanly, “You think you know everything. There is always a way it can get worse.”

The drive to the station is uncomfortably silent, stilted. Derek is staring out the window, watching the trees pass as he wonders if Stiles is all alone. If he is dying or dead. If he’s scared or hurt. He feels this itch in his veins, the same one that sunk beneath his skin when Laura was gone. 

When they pull into the parking lot, Peter blows out a long breath. It’s busier than Derek has ever seen it. Busier than the night of the fire. When they step through the entrance, the phones are ringing, the deputies are flushed and their hearts are racing. A few of them are answering calls, clarifying you think you saw Stiles Stilinski where? and could you please repeat that for me?

He can see through the glass into the sheriff’s office, where the man is speaking firmly to a thin, cold looking man. Derek hears one of the deputies behind him ask lowly to another, “Is he still questioning Harris?”

Derek blinks. He talks under his breath so only Peter can hear him, “It’s a diversion.”

“What?”

He motions his head to the office, feeling panic well up. “Adrian Harris. Laura talked to him.” Derek swallows. “They’re distracting them.”

Peter hisses, “Who?”

“The killer.”

Peter follows close behind him while Derek whispers frantically, “He thought the next victim was Allison Argent, but I wasn’t thinking— ”

“God damn it, Derek.”

“I just,” Derek feels like he needs to defend himself, like he needs to solidify that this isn’t his fault. Even though he knows that it is, knows that he’s always gripped onto anger in his need for an anchor. “He was—”

But Peter is already walking past him, the sound of his ringer echoing while he punches a number into his phone. Derek listens to the line ring, following helplessly as Peter makes his way to the car.

The line clicks. “Peter?”

“You have approximately fifteen minutes to meet me outside of the preserve or I will set your goddamn house on fire.” 

He hangs up, rounding on Derek. “Go home.”

“No.” 

“Oh? You really want to do this right now? Don’t make me force you to submit, Derek. I have no qualms exerting my authority.” He flashes his eyes, reiterating, “None.” 

“You would have given anything to save Claudia.” Derek knows that it’s a low blow, but he feels like he is out of options. “Anything.”

He hears Peter’s breath catch in his chest, the way his throat sticks. “You don’t want to start throwing around names, Derek,” Peter hisses, scathing, “I have a handful I doubt you’d like to hear, and my aim is far more fine-tuned.”

The way Derek’s mouth falls shut would be comedic under any other circumstances. He decides to keep quiet, whether for Peter’s sake or his own, he chooses not to speculate. 

His silence is what lands him with his hands tucked into his jacket pockets, standing stiffly next to Peter as a red tahoe stops twenty feet away, leaving plumes of dirt in its wake. It reminds him of smoke, but mostly, it reminds him of her. He can’t take his eyes off the car. It looks the exact same. 

A dark haired man steps out, looking shaky and tired. Smelling scared. The man frowns at them and Peter scowls right back.

“Well, I’m here,” the man says, gruff. 

But Derek can smell Stiles all over him. The acrid cling of fear, the grape-soda sweetness. He moves to lunge when Peter catches him by the shoulder of his jacket, harshly holding him in place.

“How much?” Peter asks, words biting. Derek can feel the shake of his uncle’s fist where it’s clenched in the material covering his shoulder blade.

“What?”

“How much did they offer for Stilinski’s son?”

The man swallows, Derek tracks the dip of his adam’s apple with blazing eyes. “Listen, I didn’t know that - Gerard, he said he just wanted to scare him. He said that Stiles was going to hurt Allison.”

It clicks, then. This is an Argent. 

The man scrubs a shaky hand down his face. “He wasn’t supposed to get hurt.”

Peter stops Derek from saying anything, curling his hand in the back of Derek’s jacket, between the wings of his shoulders. “Where is he, Chris? You don’t want to be like her.”

Chris shakes his head. “He—”

Peter is on him before Derek can blink, hands fisted in Chris’ shirt collar. “John Stilinski is in his office right now interrogating a fake suspect.” Peter twists his hands, gripping tighter as the fabric of Chris’ shirt pulls taut over his chest. “He has no one else.” Peter releases him, pushing roughly so Argent stumbles. “He’s a kid, Chris. You’re not a kid killer.”

“Bullshit,” Derek fumes, going quiet at Peter’s red gaze. 

“There’s a shed,” Chris confesses. “In the woods, on our property. It’s - we only kill the ones who kill.” He sounds desperate, like the person he really wants to convince is himself. 

Peter turns, walking briskly toward the trees. Derek follows, knowing that they’re both thinking of the smell of smoke, the way everyone screamed. 

When they break the line of the forest in front of the house, Peter looks him in the face, eyes blazing. “You are staying here,” he injects all of his authority into it and Derek grits his teeth at the way he goes helplessly rigid while Peter loads up his car. He feels like he is seconds from vibrating out of his skin, his fangs are pushing into his bottom lip, close to drawing blood. He digs his claws into the sides of his thighs to distract himself. 

“Where are you going?”

“I think it’s time I got to save a Gajos, don’t you think?” 

Derek squeezes his eyes shut. “You can’t make me stay here, Peter. Please.”

“Derek, look at yourself,” Peter huffs. “You aren’t in control. When this is over, you’ll thank me.

He would like to laugh at that. To cage such a sentiment and poke at it through the bars for his own enjoyment. Because, right now, it feels like he will never forgive Peter for this.

Then, Peter’s gone and Derek’s left shaking, surrounded by swaying trees and chirping birds. He can’t move until the sound of the engine is long gone, until the morning chill makes way for the warm glow of the afternoon. Until he can’t blame the forced stillness for the way he’s trembling.

Would you notice if I died?

Being in the hospital reminds Derek of Peter. Before. 

The way he didn’t have what it took to face what he’d done. It feels the exact same, looking at how small Stiles seems beneath the thin white blanket, how gaunt he looks in the cast of the fluorescent lights. For just a moment, he wishes they could have known what it’s like to be more than friends. Wishes he would have kissed Stiles at prom, leaned over the console in his car and told him that he could love him and it does scare him. There are pieces of Stiles within him, errant debris from the years of crashing into one another and picking up splintered pieces. He wonders what of himself exists within Stiles. He takes a breath. 

The sheriff is at the police department, backup coming in to help interrogate Gerard and Chris, a full-blown investigation of the Argent family and their involvement within the Hollow Springs’ cases in its beginning stages. Derek can hear it on the television in the nurse’s lounge, live feed detailing what’s going on inside the station. 

He just watches the rise and fall of Stiles’ chest. The way his heart monitor peaks, the red line slowly tracing up and down.  

The doctor said he’s being pumped with painkillers, that they were surprised he’d retained some level of consciousness when he got there. They couldn’t believe he was awake in the midst of that threshold of pain, to which Peter had winked slyly to Derek behind the man’s back. 

Now it’s just him and Stiles and the low volume of the television on the wall, the scattered noises Derek can hear outside of the room. 

He walks to the foot of the bed, lightly resting his hand against the line of Stiles’ left leg, allowing his veins to ink black for a moment. “You know,” he begins, soft, “I’m not very good at talking. But,” the sound of his deep breath feels like it echoes around them, “I have a lot of things I’d like to tell you.”

Pursing his lips, he admits, “I know it makes me a coward to say things when you can’t hear them. But, I still mean them. So that has to count for something.” Huffing a laugh, he rubs his thumb up and down the outline of Stiles’ calf. “Besides, I’m no stranger to being a coward.”

Derek takes a moment to consider where to start. “I never really let myself think about it. But, it probably started with you in the bleachers.” Stiles stirs and Derek goes completely still until he settles again.

“You had a laugh,” he continues, “one of those ones that seems like it could be heard for miles. And you didn’t care if no one else thought it was funny, you always laughed like it only mattered that something brought you happiness.” He takes another deep breath. “And I think I envied that about you, more than anything,” stopping the path of his thumb, he brings his arms to rest at his sides, digging his fingertips into the grit of his pants, “your willingness to find the things that were worth laughing about.”

He can hear someone pushing a meal cart out in the hall, focuses on the squeak of the bad wheel while he tries to find it in himself to keep going. “Every time I get a hold of something good, it slips between my fingers,” he confesses softly, clearing his throat at the way it feels as though it is closing, kinking shut like a waterhose, making him think of Cora running through the sprinklers and the way Laura always made the best lemonade. “I feel like I have only shown you the worst parts of me, and I don’t want you to think that’s all I am made of.” He swallows. “The bad.”  

Derek just stands and breathes and tries to orient himself, tries to feel like he is here, like maybe he can have something. Because when the blistering coil wraps itself around his chest, engulfs his heart and ignites his veins, he wonders if he is even alive at all. If he exists outside of this hurt. If he continued living beyond the time when the fire was real, when it was right in front of him. Curling his hands into fists, he feels like he is being licked by flames. This is proof, he thinks. The fire has always been inside of him. 

“I think what I am getting at,” he breathes, “is that it has been a really long time since someone thought I was good. And I don’t want to ruin it for you,” he aims his eyes to the ceiling so he doesn’t have to look at Stiles, “being in love.”

He takes a step back. He has to get out of here before he is trapped. “I would notice if you died,” he finally answers. He thinks back to how they worked tirelessly until Stiles was found.  “I don’t think you realize how many people would notice,” he laughs. “But, you deserve to hear it from me. And at some point I will have what it takes to tell you. For now, though, I just need to say it. For myself.”

Blowing out a breath, he taps the end railing. “You were right. You are worth loving, Stiles. I would notice if you died.”

He makes himself walk through the door, each step through the hospital feeling lighter and lighter until he can finally breathe.

Until his fire is finally put out. 

Peter finds him out by the lake. 

Derek’s been here for a while, thinking about Cora’s shrieking laughter and the way Laura’s swimsuits always had nice floral patterns on them. The way his mother rolled her eyes when his father would poke at her before pecking her on the lips, rubbing a gentle hand over her hair.

He swallows against the memories as Peter sits himself in the grass beside Derek. It’s silent, just insects in the bushes, the occasional ripple from fish in the water. It smells like smoke, even out here. Derek curls his fingers where they’re resting on the ground, feeling the grit of dirt embed itself beneath his nails. 

“He killed her,” Peter says softly, words swallowed by the creaking of tree trunks as the wind sways them. 

Derek takes a deep breath. He had a feeling, but his insides still go dark like he’s been deposited within a different plane, like his existence resides within another world entirely. She is gone. He wishes he could get away from it, this hurt. 

“Do you think she’s in pain?” he croaks, blinking to squint beyond the sun, looking at the shimmer of the lake. 

“No,” Peter shakes his head, “she’s somewhere with no fire. They all are.”

He feels like he can’t breathe. “Do you think we’ll ever get there?”

Peter turns to look at him, the weary lines of his face sloping soft. “I think we already have.”

Derek’s throat sticks when he swallows, breath catching in his chest as his eyes sting. 

“I looked for her.”

He jerks his head sharply to look at his uncle, who is staring straight ahead. He imagines Peter, all the times he smelled like heartache and pine needles, like the scrape of dirt and the stench of panic. Laura was the first. Derek thinks back to when Cora was a baby, the way Peter stared at her like she was the only thing in the world. He tries to visualize Peter playing with Laura, just the two of them until Derek was born. 

“You asked me if she knew no one was looking for her. But I was. I looked everywhere.” 

Derek returns his gaze to the water, thinking of splashing and smiles and watching the sunset. When Laura would steal food from his paper plate with pruned fingers, the way she would work with their father to push mom into the lake as she laughed and laughed. How he and Cora would sword fight with tree branches, how their mother would knight the winner. 

He looks at the lake and all he can see is its emptiness. The way things will never be the same. As he cries, Peter says nothing. But, when his hand comes to rest on the curve of Derek’s shoulder, he knows that he can breathe. That he is somewhere with no fire. 

twenty-one. 

Berkeley has been a welcomed change of pace. 

It’s weird, but not in a bad way. It reminds him of what Laura moved them to New York to accomplish. It feels like an escape from Beacon Hills. But, this time, he isn’t running from what he can’t face. This time, he can go back home. Wants to go back. 

He’s had a lot of time to reflect, being so far away on his own. Marin Morrell runs a therapy practice not too far outside of the city, giving some under-the-table help to the supernatural. Peter reached out to Alan Deaton on Derek’s behalf, as Alpha to former-Emissary, and got him connected with her. 

She has helped him in redirecting the anger, diminishing the survivor’s guilt until it doesn’t feel like it’s eating him alive anymore. Derek feels so much lighter without it. 

Having a clearer mind has given him a newfound appreciation for Stiles, who texts him nearly every single day. There’s a somewhat easy camaraderie between the two of them now, an established understanding that they’re a lot more alike than they are different. And Stiles is, as much as Derek hates to admit it, funny. He texts Derek ridiculous things that make him think of the kid at the town events, who blushed red and blurted out awkward things as a defense mechanism. It reminds him of a different time entirely. It seems a little like Stiles finally feels as though he can just be Stiles.

It gives Derek something to look forward to, even if he acts like it bothers him. It reminds him that there are things tying him to Beacon Hills.

But, nothing has come of it. After Gerard, Stiles never said anything. Derek’s sure that whatever infatuation the other boy had held for him was just some childhood crush, some idolization that ebbed away as he got older. Sometimes, though, it feels like something might be there. Like maybe Stiles doesn’t talk to everyone like he talks to Derek. He feels like he missed his chance, too much of a coward to bring it up now that Stiles is about to graduate. 

Today, as he is leaving his biology lecture, his phone buzzes twice from its place in his pocket, signaling he received a text. He grins, anticipating some nonsense from Stiles as he slides it out. 

It’s Scott. 

Scott has insinuated himself within Derek’s life, sticking like a parasite. After Derek went to see Stiles during his recovery, Scott showed up in the preserve, knocking on Derek’s door with an erratic heart. Demanded to know what the fuck Derek was playing at, toying around with Stiles after everything he’s been through. He stepped into Derek’s space, fiercely loyal, loyal enough to instigate a fight. He pushed at Derek’s chest, goading him. 

It ended with Derek’s blazing eyes, pointed fingers gripped tight into Scott’s shirt collar, pricking against the flutter of his heart hammering beneath the lines of his neck. 

“You know,” Scott starts, tapering off while he absently picks at the grass, choosing his words carefully. He breaks a few blades with a dull snap and turns back to look at Derek, squinting against the sun. “All Stiles wanted was for you to see him. He - he knew he was weird. Us weird kids, we just - we always know, okay? You were Derek Hale and he was getting shoved into lockers.”

When Derek opens his mouth to speak, Scott shakes his head, dropping the grass and holding his hand to indicate for him to remain silent. “That kind of stuff sticks with you. You don’t just forget things like that.” 

Sighing, Scott fists his hands into the grass again. “You were angry about your family. You had a right to be angry. But, who you are when you’re angry is still you.”

McCall: prom is this weekend !!

McCall: stiles does not have a date 

McCall: by which i mean u should be his date

McCall: in case that was not obvious 

Derek rolls his eyes.

D: stiles doesn't want me to take him to prom

McCall: ur stupid

When Derek doesn’t respond, his phone buzzes again.

McCall: tix are $35 a piece (: 

He spends his next class thinking about it. About slow dancing and gross punch and bad pop songs. About Stiles.

When he gets back to his dorm, he goes to the BHHS website, clicking through the links until he finally gets to the spread on prom. Reluctantly, he selects two tickets, locking his phone before he can go through with the purchase. 

He tosses and turns for almost two hours, mulling it over. Finally, he groans, reaching to his nightstand and opening his phone, the page still pulled up on the screen. He buys them before forcefully replacing it, slamming it face-down. 

Derek pulls nervously on the collar of his dress shirt, wiping his palms on the thighs of his pants after he pulls up to the house on Woodbine.  

Scott told Derek that Stiles was planning on going to prom, that he made sure to tell Stiles not to buy a ticket. Derek leaves the camaro running, taking a deep breath before levering himself out, walking the familiar path to the front door. 

He knocks and waits, can hear Stiles say that must be Scott before telling the sheriff that he’d better not eat all of the cupcakes while he’s gone or else. 

Stiles opens the door, grinning wide. He looks really good. Happy. His hair has grown out from its buzzcut, his jaw shadowed and more defined. He goes still when he realizes who is standing on the porch.

“Derek.”

“Stiles.”

The younger boy balks for a moment. “What are you doing here?”

Derek reaches into his back pocket, feeling the same as he did two years ago, brandishing two tickets. This time, they’re printed from his dorm’s printer since he bought them online. But, the sentiment still stands. “I was under the impression that tonight is prom night.”

Stiles is still staring at the tickets. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“We’re going to prom,” Derek says simply, rolling his eyes. “I don’t think there will be a killer there, this time.”

The suspicious look he gets tells Derek all he needs to know about how Stiles feels about this. He holds his arms out. “What? Was it so bad last time?” Stiles gives him another withering look, at that. It makes Derek want to smile. 

Stiles grabs his blazer from the hook beside the door before stepping out onto the porch with Derek. “Fine. But you have to ask me.” 

He raises his eyebrows. “Ask you?”

“Yes, Derek Hale. You must ask me to prom.” Stiles is goading him, a mischievous twinkle in his honey eyes. It feels like they’re kids again. For a moment, Derek wonders if they’re flirting.  

Derek adjusts his tie, pursing his lips as he pretends to think about it. Finally, he relents, “Stiles Stilinski, would you bestow upon me the honor of attending a normal prom?”

Stiles brings his hand to his chest, as if he were a swooning maiden. “You think I’m normal?”

Which is how they end up seated in the camaro. It feels the same as the last time, yet nothing like it. Stiles is messing around with the radio, coated in the passing beams of streetlights. He looks really good. Good in a way that Derek has never really been able to fully appreciate before. The upward slope to the end of his nose, his shimmering eyes, the way his eyelashes are so so dark, the pink tint to his lips. 

Stiles has always been good looking, in some adjacent way that existed only in the back of Derek’s mind. The only difference is, now Stiles knows it. He catches Derek looking and purses his lips as though to keep from laughing, even as his cheeks flush red. 

“See something you like?” he teases, wiggling his eyebrows.

Derek swallows. “What if I do?”

That earns him an eye roll as Stiles continues fiddling with the controls on the dash, like he thinks Derek is joking. He’s not, debates telling Stiles that he would like nothing more than to pull over and kiss him. 

It is nearly impossible to find a parking spot, the front and back lots all completely full. He passes Jackson Whittemore’s porsche, Lydia Martin’s electric-blue prius. Finally, he finds a spot near the back, close to the lacrosse field. 

They unbuckle their seatbelts and Derek walks to Stiles' side of the car, opening his door for him. 

“Wow,” Stiles quips, “and they say chivalry is dead.”

“Shut up.”

Stiles mimes zipping his lips and locking them, throwing away the key. Derek huffs and leads them to the side entrance of the gym, where music is blaring and streaks of multi-colored light are spilling out as students open the doors. Stiles still walks with a bit of a limp, wincing in discomfort every now and then. Derek wraps a hand around Stiles’ arm, acting as though he is helping him walk when really his veins are inking black out of Stiles’ sight. They give their tickets to the teacher’s aid who is operating the booth, he waves them in and tells them not to party too hard, laughing lightly at his own joke. 

Then, they’re in, surrounded by the strobing lights and acrid stench of cheap alcohol. Derek can confidently say he has not missed high school. 

He turns to Stiles, trying to make conversation as the other boy’s eyes are scanning the crowd. “You graduate soon.”

Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s shoulder and leans in, almost-yelling, “I can barely hear you!”

Derek uses that as an excuse to get closer, to bring his lips right beside Stiles’ right ear. He can almost feel Stiles’ heartbeat from here, relishing in the way it speeds up. “I said you graduate soon.”

The sound of Stiles swallowing is viscerally satisfying, the subtle uptick in his breathing. It feels just like old times. 

“Yeah,” Stiles sputters before regaining his composure. “Might follow you all the way to Berkeley.”

Derek tilts his head as Stiles’ attempt to goad him into saying something mean. “I’d like that.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and bumps his shoulder into Derek’s. “Whatever.”

“I would,” he persists. “I don’t know where you are getting the idea that I don’t want to be around you.”

“Uh,” Stiles looks at him incredulously, “probably from all of the years you did not want to be around me.”

“I wanted to be around you,” he insists. He doesn’t know how to tell Stiles that being around him was scary. That, for a minute there, they were too much alike. “Trust me, I did.”

Stiles grins at him, nose scrunching as he teases, “Are we trauma bonding right now?”

Derek just shakes his head in exasperation and pulls him into the crowd. “Do you want to dance?”

“As long as you don’t mind if I step all over your toes.”

“If I remember correctly,” Derek continues leading him through the bodies, “you weren’t so bad.”

The upbeat pop song shifts into something slower, softer. Derek feels an inescapable sense of deja vu. “Come on, Stilinski,” he teases, “live a little.”

He pulls Stiles toward himself and he just goes. The other boy sways with him, chews his lip before saying, “You know, last time, it meant a lot to me that you went with me.”

“Yeah?”

Stiles nods. “Yeah. I didn’t want to tell you because I thought I’d ruin it. You were being so nice to me. But, it was probably one of the best moments of my life, when we danced.”

That makes a swath of guilt swipe down Derek’s spine. “I’m sorry, you always seemed to be caught in the crossfire.” He exhales an explosive breath. “I never really knew how to deal with this thing between us.”

Stiles gapes. “Do you hear yourself?” He whispers the next part, a little bitter, “You couldn’t even kiss me.” Stiles shakes his head. “This thing wasn’t there.”

Derek just looks at him. The way his cheeks are blotchy, how his hair is growing back. He trails his eyes from Stiles’ lips, to his neck, before returning to his eyes. He swallows. “It was always there.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, like he doesn’t believe a word that Derek’s saying. “Oh yeah? Then what have you been doing this whole time?”

He blinks, knowing he has to tell the truth. “Waiting.”

Stiles just stares at him, and Derek stares back. Doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of staring. Because Stiles has soft eyes, like an amber lullaby. He looks familiar, anchors Derek where he is. Stiles looks like Beacon Hills, so Derek looks. Eventually, he repeats, “I’m sorry.”

Stiles shrugs a shoulder, dipping his fingers beneath the folds of Derek's shirt-collar. “I remember your chevron swim trunks at the water park.” He laughs at himself, like he thinks what he’s saying is ridiculous. Derek doesn’t think it’s ridiculous. “I spent a lot of my childhood thinking you were bad, that bad people don’t deserve forgiveness. But you’re not bad, Derek. You're just like me.”

The way Stiles looks at him makes his skin feel like it is being stripped away, like he is splayed open and rubbed raw, like all of his secrets are displayed above him in huge, flashing letters. Because Stiles looks at everyone like he is appraising them, critically assessing their value, calculating their worth. If anyone should be feared, Derek thinks, it should be Stiles. Not the Argents, or fires, or the things that bump in the night. You cannot hide from Stiles, and that’s fucking terrifying. 

Stiles frowns across at him. “When my mom died, I didn’t want to ever love anyone. Or even really like anyone. I know it’s different, but I thought it wasn’t fair,” a deep breath, “to replace the love I had that belonged to her.”

Derek’s chest tightens. He’s felt the same for years. So scared to love, afraid to expend the last bit of it he has left, the pieces that are reserved for people he will never see again. He swallows. “Yeah.”

“But,” Stiles says, words tight, “I would be willing to let some of it belong to you, too. If that is okay with you.”

Derek inhales a sharp breath and Stiles’ eyes drop down to his lips. 

“I think a part of why you feel like you’re drowning is because of the weight of the mundanity.”

Derek looks away, stares out the window in Morrell’s office. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means,” she continues gently, “that your routine is crushing you. I think you could benefit from some spontaneity, Derek.”

This is his chance. Surrounded by colored lights, reflective streamers and giggling couples, Derek knows that he will never be able to do this again if he walks away. He is tired of being overrun by fear. 

“Can I kiss you?” he breathes out, searching Stiles’ face.

Stiles nods before he looks away. “I’ll probably be bad at it.”

Derek slides his hands up to cradle Stiles’ jaw and kisses him. Pulls him forward and presses their mouths together, surrounded by former classmates and bright-colored formal-wear. It bubbles on his tongue like pop rocks, coating his throat with the taste of something sticky-sweet, like flavored ice under the beaming sun. Like finally running cool water over a blistering burn. This means something. Because Derek can feel it, kissing Stiles. Stiles bites at his lip and he feels surrounded by the green of the preserve, he pants along Derek’s face and he sees those peeling sycamores and shimmering lake-water. Stiles digs his nails into the small of Derek’s back and it smells like earth, damp soil, feels like home in the way that dirt-stained knuckles and scraped knees feel like home. Stiles kisses him and it tastes like Beacon Hills. 

When he pulls back, Stiles is flushed, swiping his tongue over his lips with glassy eyes. 

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” Derek asks, trying not to feel like he’s pleading, trying not to feel wild. 

Stiles nods, swallowing, and that’s that. Derek drags him out of the gym, all the way to the car. Stiles goes to open his door and Derek presses him against it. He grabs his face, hands cupped on either side, stares right into Stiles’ eyes before dipping forward and licking into his mouth like he has wanted to do since - since forever, it seems. Stiles groans and slides his fingers into Derek’s hair, twisting at the strands and scratching his fingernails into the skin. Derek shivers and releases a noise that rumbles from the base of his throat, digs his thumbs into the hinges of Stiles’ jaw, trying to press deeper, kiss harder. He will never be able to get close enough and it makes his chest feel tight, like he is about to crack open and bleed out. 

After a moment, Stiles pulls back, panting. “I think we should maybe find a bed. Probably. If this is what we’re doing.”

The drive to the preserve feels familiar. Almost the same as last time, when Derek had screamed and cried and buried his laments in the footwell. He feels it swarming around inside of himself, a hard-edged, near-frantic pulse of energy humming in his bones. He kind of wants to scream again, wants to see if it would frighten Stiles to know that he has no real grasp on his control, that he is constantly toeing the line. 

He’s breathing hard, staring straight ahead because if he looks at anything else, if he looks at Stiles, he will break apart. In his peripheral, he can see Stiles’ leg bouncing up and down, up and down, the fabric of his pants rustling against the cloth seat. 

Derek breathes and Stiles’ pants scuff against his seat’s edge and he feels like he is going insane. 

When he pulls in front of the house, he kills the engine and slowly leans against his backrest. Waiting. Stiles is opening and closing his fists where they’re resting in his lap, staring down while his heart beats so so fast. He uses one hand to absently trace over the lines in his other palm before once again curling both into fists, turning to Derek. He blows a raspberry, scrunching up his nose. Derek just looks at him, and he looks back. For a minute they just look. It’s dead quiet and they’re each breathing so hard it feels like it echoes around them. Then Derek blinks, and Stiles blinks, and then he is slamming the car door so hard the entire vehicle shakes, pulling Stiles from the passenger side with a trembling grip fisted in his blazer. 

The stretch of distance between the car and the front door can’t be but a handful of meters, less than two dozen feet, if that. Trying to get there with Stiles sliding his hands wherever he can reach - under the collar of Derek’s shirt, along his shoulders, flat-palmed down his chest - it’s verging on fucking impossible. A miles-long trek. So, they stop, and Derek licks a stripe along the flexing tendon in Stiles’ neck, then they pull apart and stumble a little closer. Then Stiles leans in and kisses at the corner of Derek’s mouth before sliding his lips along his jaw, tickling up the hinge to tease breathily, “Are we ever going to make it inside or are we going to have sex in the woods?” 

Derek presses the sharp of his claws into the scant space between Stiles’ ribs, pushing lightly just to hear how the other boy’s breath hitches. “You are so frustrating,” Derek murmurs, “but I can hear how fast your heart is beating.” He curls forward to mouth at Stiles’ throat, teething up along the column, he can feel the patter of Stiles’ heart against the press of his lips. He pulls back, smiling a shark smile with his hands fitted at Stiles’ waist. “Do I make you nervous, Stiles?” 

They slam through the front door, the sound rattling the frame before ebbing away, leaving just the small noises Stiles is making and the way Derek can’t seem to stop groaning. Stiles’ blazer is on the floor by the kitchen’s entryway, and Derek thinks his may very well be on the ground outside. He knows how many steps it takes to get from the foyer to the stairs: seven. The first step, he has a hand twisted at Stiles’ nape, his tongue caressing the backs of his teeth. By step three, Stiles has Derek’s face cradled in his palms, breath searing hot as he expels it into Derek’s space. Step five finds Derek shirtless, his dress shirt draped along the end table by the living room’s hallway. By the seventh step, Derek has lifted Stiles, because he won’t last if they both have to make it up the stairs. 

Derek’s never given much thought to his bedroom. Everything is still how he left it when he packed up for college. The bed is rumpled from where he’d haphazardly made it up, not thinking that the next time he entered this room he wouldn’t be alone. 

He swallows, glancing to Stiles, suddenly nervous to have him in a space that has only ever seen Derek. But, when he looks, Stiles isn’t looking at the bed, or the nightstand’s minor disarray, or the stacks of books on his desk. Instead, he is looking right back at Derek, eyes liquid-soft like melted pennies. Then, Stiles nods, seemingly to himself, before shaking his hands out and beginning to unbutton his shirt. Derek’s tongue suddenly feels thick in his mouth, like it is pushing at the confines of his teeth, trying to slither down his throat. Once Stiles’ shirt hits the ground, he begins fumbling with his belt buckle, and Derek quickly does the same. 

After what feels like seconds, they’re staring at each other again, two feet of space expanding into something so much bigger. Then, they’re on the bed and Derek is bent over Stiles, pushing his fingers into the hinges of Stiles jaw, smiling to himself at the way Stiles obediently pops his mouth open. He moves to the hollow of his cheeks, before sliding his pointer finger beneath Stiles’ upper lip, tracing it upward to reveal his top teeth. Because Derek feels like he needs to see them. Stiles huffs and playfully nips at Derek’s fingertip. He just keeps smiling in response, still looking. 

He doesn’t know how to say that he wants to feel around and find the seams in Stiles’ skin, wants to pull until he finds a loose thread, until he can unravel Stiles and crack him open. Derek wants to peel away his flesh and look at his composition: the way his muscles adhere to his bones, the liquid pump of his hammering heart, the air flowing like fluid through his trachea before seeping into his lungs. Derek wants to see it. He doesn’t have the words he needs to express such a visceral desire, so instead he forces himself to keep moving.

He eases down, running his knuckles gently along Stiles’ throat, the dip between his collarbones, across the skin-coated knobs of his sternum, before stopping where he can feel the jump of Stiles’ pulse in the space above his stomach. 

Stiles just watches, blinks placidly at Derek whenever he looks to check and make sure he hasn’t lost him, that Stiles is still interested, still blushing and wild-eyed. 

Derek blows out a heavy breath and circles his fingers around the raised scarring on Stiles’ left leg, where it is light-colored and semi-smooth. He remembers when he went and saw Stiles after, when they watched baseball. He remembers curling his hand around Stiles’ leg later that night, the sheriff snoring in the recliner, taking the pain while Stiles had his eyes squeezed shut, shuddering where he was pressed into the couch.

Derek had asked if he could look beneath the bandaging. Derek has a memory, one of those ones that is dredged up from so long ago it makes him wonder if it is a memory at all, if it’s just the barely-there remnants of a childhood dream. But, he has a memory of a human friend he played with as a kid. He’d had a scrape along the outside of his forearm. It was scabbed up, then, not the peel-away, deep-red sort of scabbing, rather the yellowed kind, the kind that looked painful, like it flaked with too-stretched movements. Derek remembers, morbidly, wanting nothing more than to stick the tip of a clawed finger beneath it, to roll it away and watch it lift from the skin. 

It’s gross. Derek feels gross, staring at the scars on Stiles’ leg and wanting nothing more than to peel at them until they’re gone. He clears his throat, looks up again to where Stiles is pressed up on his elbows, eyebrows raised. 

Derek shrugs helplessly. “I want to see your bones.”

For just a moment, Stiles’ mouth goes slack and a sharp breath rakes its way through his nose. Then, he smiles, eyes crinkling, and laughs this tinkling, near-hysterical sort of laugh. “Well, I wish you would hurry up and let me see your bone.” 

Derek rolls his eyes and crawls up the bed, kissing a path up to Stiles’ mouth, hovering so they’re nose to nose. 

“You know,” Stiles whispers, blinking at him, the flutter of his eyelashes touching feather-light to Derek’s cheeks, “this is, like, totally a thing.”

“A thing?”

“Taking your date’s virginity on prom night.”

Derek huffs a laugh. “You’re taking mine, too.”

“You’re fucking with me.” Stiles slaps Derek’s shoulder. “What the hell have you been doing at Berkeley, then?”

“Learning,” Derek insists, pressing their lips together. He licks slow and hot into Stiles’ mouth before ghosting a hand down to rub into the front of Stiles’ boxers. 

He isn’t sure how long it takes to go from touching to gripping, the dripping knobs of his knuckles sliding along scorching skin, the way Stiles makes noise like no one can hear him, like it isn’t tearing Derek apart to see how his throat ripples when he moans. When Derek presses inside Stiles, he isn’t sure how much time has passed, between the click of the trigger and the sound of the shot. 

They’re close, so close. Stiles pants out through his nostrils and it tickles at Derek’s face. So close that Derek can see where flecks of black are scattered into Stiles’ honeyed iris. Caramelized and sugar-coated. Sticky-sweet and when Derek dips down to kiss him again, just because he can, it makes his teeth ache. 

Stiles says things, strings words together into a semblance of begging that makes Derek feel like he is swallowing razor blades, like each breath is so hot it burns on the way down. He says god, please, and oh, Derek, and right there, please right there. Derek has to smear a shuddery sigh into Stiles’ bare shoulder just to get away, just to retain the last bit of control he still has. 

Stiles groans and slides his fingers into Derek’s hair while Derek shivers, turns his head and releases a shaky breath that fans across Stiles’ throat. He drags his lips down Stiles’ neck for something to do other than stare into his face like he’s been doing this entire time. He sucks at Stiles’ pulse and drops his forehead between the his collarbones. Stiles moans and rocks upward, fingertips digging deep into Derek’s biceps. He is overwhelmed and ready to explode. Stiles pulls at his hair, coaxing his head up, breathing into the space between them, “Hey, let me see you.”

He wants to laugh at that. Wants to turn his head to the ceiling and smile or cry or scream or something. He wants to look Stiles in the eyes and tell him that he already does see him. Has always seen all of him. And it is fucking scary. He wants to see Stiles’ fucking bones, the splay of his veins, he wants to taste his blood and see if it tastes like the copper in his eyes. Derek wants to cradle Stiles’ jaw, press their foreheads together and whisper into his mouth, I am so afraid of you that it makes me sick sometimes. 

Derek’s helpless to how his throat sticks on a swallow. Clogged with words he can’t speak, nothing he could offer would ever convey what he really means. He has never been able to say the right thing. Stiles keens high and loud when Derek begins moving faster. He has to bury his claws into the mattress, fingers encased by cotton-filling, to remind him of something rough, to give him something to ground him before he fucking slips away.

This is something unlike anything he’s ever had. Derek hasn’t been granted many opportunities to hold onto things like Stiles, has never held something perfect without destroying it. 

When Stiles comes, it’s with his eyes screwed shut and his fingernails embedded so deep between the divots of Derek’s spine that it stings. Derek watches, open-mouthed, rocking faster, deeper. He snakes a hand down just to feel Stiles shiver, to feel him shake and whine with the aftershocks until he leans up to kiss Derek on the lips. Tugs the bottom one between his teeth, tasting Derek’s groan when his hips stutter until they stop.

They’re lying beside each other. Stiles is running his fingers through the hair at Derek’s nape as they both breathe hard and damp. 

He traces Stiles' face with his fingertips, taking a deep breath. “I think I might be in love with you,” he whispers, words swallowed by the ceiling fan. 

Stiles’ lips lift into a slow smile. “Finally,” he whispers back, teasing. “I feel the same, I think,” he whispers back. “But you already knew that.” 

”I would pick you,” Derek confesses. “If I could pick someone, I would pick you.”

They go quiet as Stiles traces his fingertips up and down Derek’s arm. “Tree bark,” he hums, and Derek makes a questioning noise in response. “You’re a grey pine.”

Derek blinks up at the ceiling, focusing on the feel of Stiles’ fingers. He lolls his head, looking at the cluster of moles on Stiles’ arm. Spots that look like galaxies. 

Look for the grey pine that lines up with the stars. That’s home. 

Chapter Text

nineteen.

Stiles is accepted into Berkeley’s anthropology program with no problems. Scott bags San Francisco State’s school of veterinary science, right alongside Allison, who will be studying environmental science with a focus on wildlife conservation. 

Overall, things had a way of working out. 

He found his mom’s old portable radio in the garage, a scuffed up mint-blue piece of what is probably junk, now. The antenna is extended all the way out and the station fizzles every so often with a static crackle. 

It’s playing the pop hits of the twenty-tens, and while Stiles is cleaning out his dresser drawers, his lips quirk at the beginnings of the familiar guitar. He’d know it anywhere. What makes his eyebrows rise to his hairline is the way Derek’s foot starts tapping the floorboards along with the rhythm.  

Stiles turns, trying to suppress his smile as he places his hands on his hips. “No way.”

Derek freezes, pausing where he’s carefully rolling some of Stiles’ knick-knacks in bubble wrap. “What?”

“You know this song.”

His boyfriend balks before saying, deadpan, “Yes, Stiles. I own a radio.” He shakes his head, adding, “and I had two sisters.”

Stiles cackles, curling his hand into a fist, creating a makeshift microphone. He twirls around Derek, stepping around the criss-cross of Derek’s legs as he rolls his eyes at the ceiling. “You make me,” Stiles shakes his hips back and forth, dipping down and shimmying his shoulders as Derek begs every unseen entity to put him out of his misery. “Feel like I’m living a,” he pokes at Derek with his foot, extending his big toe through his patterned sock to nudge at his little tummy through his t-shirt. He adds, with feeling, “teenage dream.” Stiles laughs because he thinks it’s funny and Derek bares his teeth playfully before circling his hand around Stiles’ ankle, tugging him to the floor. Stiles yelps the rest of the lyric on his way down, and then Derek has him pressed into the accent rug that hasn’t been vacuumed since - well. Just hasn’t been vacuumed. Stiles screeches, pinching at Derek, who is an immovable force. 

“I don’t know if I want you to follow me to Berkeley,” Derek taunts into the juncture of his neck, nipping. 

Stiles jabs his knee into Derek’s ribs, to no avail. “Whatever. You want me to follow you so bad.” He bats his eyes. "Like, so bad." 

He can feel the stretch of Derek’s smile against his skin. “Yeah,” he concedes, planting a kiss to the place he was biting. “I do.” 

When Derek pushes himself back up, Stiles just smiles, with all his teeth. “My heart stops when you look at me,” Stiles sings along softly, gazing up at Derek through his eyelashes. He’s never felt like this before. 

Derek is propped over him, staring down with equal intensity. He drags the knuckles of one hand along the column of Stiles’ throat, so so gently. “Just one touch, now baby I believe,” he finishes, grinning at how Stiles snorts, still unwilling to believe that Derek knows the lyrics to Teenage Dream. 

When he’s finished, Derek leans down and kisses him square on the mouth. Stiles gets a little lost in it before he remembers that he’s actually supposed to be doing something. 

Stiles slaps him on the shoulder. “Get off of me. This stuff isn’t going to pack itself.”

While he is packing up his boxes, Derek helping him sort his things, Stiles looks out the window at Cam, who’s walking around with the birds. 

As far as Stiles knows, Isaac is still living in Beacon Hills, working in the bakery of the local cafe. Stiles remembers hearing something about how he didn’t make it into UCLA. He could very easily get a bakery job near Berkeley.

“Derek,” Stiles asks absently, staring outside. “Are you still friends with Isaac Lahey?”

Derek looks up from where he is now picking through Stiles’ things, thumbing through his journals and looking in his photo albums. “Yeah, why?”

Stiles shrugs, reaching for the tape so he can close off the box he just filled up. “I just think we could use another roommate. You know, split the rent three ways instead of just two.”

He grabs the sharpie and labels it T-SHIRTS. As he’s recapping the marker, Derek nods. “Yeah, I’ll ask him. That could be nice.”

Stiles walks over, crouches down and pecks him on the lips. He goes to pull away and Derek fists a hand in his shirt, tugging him back down, fingers curled at the nape of his neck. Stiles laughs, squirming in his hold as Derek licks playfully at the seam of his mouth. He dramatically sputters, wiping his lips on his forearm. 

“Gross!” he cries, attempting to get away.

Derek turns his head, pecking at Stiles’ neck, easily keeping him from moving.

“My dad is the sheriff,” Stiles gasps out, stricken. 

The other man smirks at him. “Your dad isn’t home.”

Which is how Derek ends up crowding him over to the bed, pushing him into the mattress as Stiles laughs and laughs. 

When Derek finally lets him up, Stiles flushed and panting, Cam is gone. Nowhere to be seen as the birds peck at the ground.

He makes a quick stop by Scott’s house, gripping the worn plastic case in his hands. He knocks, swallowing against the lump in his throat.

Scott opens the door with a beaming grin, inviting Stiles to his room. There’s boxes everywhere, the same as Stiles’ bedroom, all scrawled on with sharpie and haphazardly taped shut. It’s weird, seeing all the posters taken down, the bare walls covered in light sunspots from years of displaying Scott’s interests. All of his pictures are gone, too, even the one of him and Stiles when they went camping for Scott’s eighth birthday that has been on his nightstand since he framed it. 

His best friend plops down on the ground, raising his eyebrows and blowing a raspberry. “What brings you here on this fine evening?” he asks in a funny accent.

Stiles rolls his eyes to hide how he feels a little bit like crying, holding out the case for Scott, who accepts it cautiously. “I’m scared,” he jokes and Stiles huffs, poking him in the side with his foot. “Just open it.”

He does, and Stiles can see it from here, he can also see how Scott’s breathing stutters. It’s the CD, Stiles’ thirteen-year-old chicken scratch reading: Stiles’ Super Cool CD for Scott.

“I finally finished burning it for you.” 

“Dude,” Scott breathes, running his fingertips over it before smiling up at Stiles, “I know this is going to fucking suck.” 

Stiles kicks at his legs where they’re folded criss-cross. “Hey! I worked tirelessly to curate the list for you.” 

He’d found the old, wrinkled-up piece of notebook paper when he was packing his own things, as well as the still-blank CD he’d already titled. It just felt like he had to do it before they part ways. 

Scott’s smile goes soft. “Thank you, Stiles.” He stands and pulls Stiles into a tight hug, rubbing his hand up and down his back. “I’m going to miss you.”

”We’ll only be, like, an hour away from each other.”

”Still,” Scott mumbles, chin moving against Stiles’ shoulder, “that’s one hour longer than we have ever been.” 

“Well,” Stiles sniffs, backing away and clearing his throat, “now you will have this CD to remember me by.”

Scott groans. “I can’t wait to play it in the car on my drive to campus.” 

“There’s, like,” Stiles inclines his head toward the CD case, “three Eminem songs on there.”

”Of course there is,” Scott shakes his head. After a moment, he sighs, gesturing to the room. “Want to help me finish packing?” 

They hitch a storage-trailer to Stiles’ jeep - now named Roscoe - to load up the boxes. 

His dad stands on the porch with his hands clasped behind his back, trying to appear nonchalant. Stiles steps up to him, pulling him into a hug. 

“I’m gonna miss you, daddio,” he breathes out, chin hooked over the man’s shoulder.

“I’m gonna finally get some peace and quiet,” his dad jokes, voice cracking as he pats Stiles’ back. “I won’t know what to do with myself.”

Stiles pulls back, looking at him seriously. “No junk food,” he pushes his finger at the man’s chest, “I mean it, pops. I have eyes everywhere.”

“You wish,” he huffs, pulling Stiles back in for another hug. 

Derek lets Stiles control the music on the drive to their apartment off campus. Isaac is meeting them there, it only took him one day to pack up his things and all of it fit inside of his car. The thought makes Stiles feel sad, but he looks forward to what the future will bring for them. 

When they pull into the rest stop to grab snacks, Stiles sees Cam standing in the parking lot. He’s facing away, but he looks more relaxed than he ever has. There is a softness to the usual rigidity in his shoulders, like he is breathing a sigh of relief. 

“I’m going to look out for him,” Stiles promises quietly. Cam turns on his heel, his light eyes boring into Stiles. “He’s not going to hurt anymore.” 

The ghost straightens, standing tall as he brings his hand up, saluting Stiles. He steps back across the lot and Stiles knows. A white van drives by, then, and when it passes, Cam is gone. Stiles knows that he won’t be coming back. 

He opens the crackers he bought, tossing a few on the ground for the birds. 

Derek takes over driving the rest of the way. 

Stiles keeps dozing off, his head drooping forward and startling himself every time his eyes fall shut. Derek huffs a laugh each time it happens, and Stiles grumbles in embarrassment, leaning back against the seat. 

“I’m excited,” he says softly before yawning and rubbing at his eyes.

“Me too,” Derek looks over at him with a small smile before returning his gaze to the road. 

Stiles smacks his lips together as they stretch into a grin. He turns to stare out the window while they slowly drive past the forest, a long stretch of sycamores. They’re stopped at a red light when he sees her.

She’s in a bright yellow sundress, Stiles’ favorite one. Barefoot like when she used to run through the sprinklers with him. Her hair is down, flowing in soft waves like it always looked after they’d been to the beach, curled by the ocean. He’d know her anywhere. 

She spins, her dress billowing. She looks beautiful. Happy. Twirling beneath the sycamores where she belongs. 

Stiles closes his eyes against the sting. When he opens them, she is gone. He feels the image burrow itself in his heart, the Lemon Grove tree still dangling from the rearview mirror. 

He’s free.