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2013-10-06
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The sound of silence

Summary:

Contrary to popular opinion, Stiles can shut up.

Notes:

LET'S CALL THIS BIT OF FOOLISHNESS ANGST x 1000. Like, it’s not Slave!Derek angst, just general It’s Hard To Be Alive angst, especially if people are always trying to kill you.

Spoilers for 3a. It all gets a passing mention, but I refuse to deal with the emotional ramifications.

Unbeta’ed because this was supposed to be 1000 words of self-indulgence posted to tumblr, then it got totally out of hand. Feel free to point out typos and glaring inaccuracies.

** Clearly listened to Simon & Garfunkel on loop while weeping and writing this.

Work Text:

 

 

Contrary to popular opinion, Stiles can shut up.

When looking back over the vast expanse of his mess of a life, Stiles can pinpoint the exact moment it started its general downward trajectory: the moment he uttered his first words. According to his dad, most of his early vocabulary, other than the usual mama and dada, were copied straight from late night television -- Stiles began cursing. A lot. Cursing at the grocery store, in front of the babysitter, in line with his dad at the bank. That horrible toddler saying shit-shit-shit in between delighted squeals? Was him. Stiles began his life of humiliating his parents early and with startling enunciation.

The point is that talking, thus far, has failed miserably to a) get him out of any trouble, ever, and b) improve the quality of his life (see: getting laid, also not having psychopaths try to maim and kill him). It takes the kind of willful ignorance that he’s not capable of not to notice a distinct pattern. Most of the worst moments of his life have been exacerbated by the fact that he can’t keep his fucking mouth shut. If there was a refrain to his life, it would be, “Sweet Jesus, shut up, Stiles.”

People take vows of silence for a lot of reasons - to commemorate tragedy, religious purposes, because they just get tired of hearing themselves talk; Stiles doesn’t know and doesn’t much care. He just -- he needs this. He needs the quiet, needs to think. He’s tried of being terrified and talking about prom instead, of going to the counselor and wondering how it’s going to bite him in the ass later, of being highly suspicious of his new math teacher. Anyone who loves calculus that much must be evil.

As for the other reasons, Stiles can’t really deal with those. If he stayed silent for all the hurts the past few years had piled on him, he might never talk again.

Stiles strains his ears crossing the streets, jumps at every loud bang, has to bite his bottom lip to keep from cursing a blue streak when he gets the bill for his Jeep repairs. Beacon Hills is a surprisingly loud place.

He lets himself shoot off one quick text to Scott: Tired of talking, bro.

Scott responds quickly with: ????????

But Stiles has already turned off his phone and slipped it into his desk drawer.

His dad, overwhelmed with the glut of information about the supernatural forces that have been secretly butchering people in Beacon Hills for the past ten years, has been staying late at the station every night, tediously working through a backlog of unsolved cases. The perpetrators won’t be brought to justice, though, because his dad can’t exactly arrest people on suspicion of being lizard monsters or evil druids. He wants to know just because, so he can beat himself up over the whole seedy underbelly of Beacon Hills that he never had the slightest inkling existed. So he can drink alone, thinking about how his investigative skills failed him, how he maybe failed his son.

Stiles doesn’t know how to make it right, so he stays silent.


---


Scott watches him during classes, brows furrowed.

Stiles chews the caps off all his pens, gets blue ink all over his teeth. His gut churns with anxiety and he wonders how young is too young to get stress ulcers, his shoe squeaks annoyingly on the linoleum as his leg bounces.

“Hey,” Scott says in the hall, shifting his books from one arm to the other. “So--this thing. We going to talk about it?”

Stiles glances at him, shrugs absently. He’s not sure what to say. He could say it’s been too quiet, he could say he’s been holding his breath for months and he’s exhausted from doing nothing while waiting for the other shoe to drop and squash them all like bugs. He could say he’s waiting for something evil to come and kill them all in their sleep, but that would be hugely overdramatic. Doesn’t mean it’s not true, though.

He could say all of it, but Scott wouldn’t get it. He’d nod along, sympathetic, but he wouldn’t understand. Scott’s a doer, a chosen-by-destiny Alpha. He’s the guy that pushes through pain, doesn’t let silly things like panic and fear stop him, that always wins against stacked odds. He’ll be a great Alpha eventually.

And Stiles will be -- that guy, the one that has panic attacks in school, the one that crashes into trees and uses a baseball bat when everyone else has claws. It’s hard not to feel like everyone else’s life is getting marginally better while Stiles is in the middle, stretched to maximum capacity, trying to hold his life together, and failing.


---


The problem with taking an informal vow of silence is the funny way your friends act around you. People either actively avoid him, uneasy, or they talk around him like he’s not there. In this fashion, he learns that Lydia and Allison’s periods are synced up (interesting; not something he explicitly wished to know),  Ethan’s dick is uncut (also interesting from a research point of view -- he’ll be sure to work that into his next research paper on circumcision), and strangely enough, Derek’s downright chatty when he doesn’t have a bunch of teenagers bitching and talking down to him.

Stiles is sitting on a tree stump, nearly rotted hollow, knees pulled up to his chest, thinking morbid thoughts, when Derek sits next to him, slides in close. He’s surprisingly soft-spoken when he’s not pissed off.  

After the first time Derek tracked him here, he hasn’t asked about Stiles’ weird silence, though god knows what he’s telling Scott. The fact that Scott actually turned to Derek for help is probably the most frightening thing that’s happened in a solid six months. It should make Stiles feel better. It doesn’t.

Derek talks about a lot things -- his road trip with Cora, which Stiles can only assume was filled with long expanses of uncomfortable silence punctuated by Cora and Derek grunting stoically at each other, sometimes about plants, or bits of gossip he overhears in the grocery store. With his hearing, Derek always has the best gossip.  

Today isn’t any different. It always takes Derek a bit to start talking, like he’s out of practice and has to find his footing. Cora isn’t much of a talker, Stiles supposes, unless you count verbal assault.

Stiles can feel the warmth of Derek’s body pressed against his side, long hard muscles pinpoints of heat at each place they touch.

Derek is quiet for a while, the muscles in his jaw jumping every few minutes, thinking. “My mom,” he starts, then stops. After a few moments, he says, “My mom used to say silence was golden, when Laura and I were arguing.”

Stiles goes still, listening.

Derek sometimes talks about his mom, but it’s rare. He speaks hesitantly, voice low and raw, like every word is knife-edge scraping across a wound he’d only barely managed to survive. Stiles leans back and looks at Derek -- really sees him -- the slight downward turn of his lips, the dark smudge of eyelashes framing his incredibly sad eyes. Derek, who’s looking out over the preserve, the broad expanse of grass and trees, profile classically handsome in a way that Stiles will never be. It used to make him sick with envy, once upon a time. The more he learns about Derek, the less he feels it. It’s hard to be jealous of someone when you pity them.

Derek continues, “I just -- I know Scott thinks this is some kind of spell, I know that everyone’s worried and pestering you to talk, but I -- I didn’t talk for nearly a year after, you know. I guess I just wanted to say, I get it.”

He looks at Stiles then, eyes curiously clear, waiting.

When Stiles says nothing, Derek says, “You’ll talk when you’re ready,” and nods, like he’s answering a question he doesn’t even need to ask.

This is what Derek looks like, Stiles thinks, without the weight of a thousand worries and years of guilt weighing him down. It’s a good look.


---


His dad is at the dining room table, head pillowed on his arms, half-full tumbler of whiskey in front of him.

Stiles watches him for a while, touches the shell of his dad’s ear hesitantly, fingers light against the fragile pink skin. Eventually, he wakes him up, helps him to the couch, and throws a cover over his sleeping form. Stiles tucks it in around the edges like his mom used to do for him, years ago.


---


“I knew,” Derek says, fingers tapping a staccato beat against his leg. “I mean, in the way you can know and not know something. Jennifer was -- evil, but--” His voice goes low, rough, “--she tucked her hair behind her left ear when she was thinking.”

He laughs a little, a short bark of sound that doesn’t sound particularly happy. “Isn’t that a stupid reason to convince yourself you’re in love with someone?”

Stiles has heard worse reasons, actually. If you can’t fall in love with the little stupid things people do, what else is there? He fixated on Lydia because he liked the way she tapped her foot impatiently during class when the teacher was busy explaining things to the other, more stupid kids. It takes all kinds.

He thinks of Derek’s nervous fidgeting, the way he stops talking when the sun sets, pauses to watch it drip low, painting his face in orange and pink. The way he talks about his mom, but still can’t say Laura’s name, the way he never mentions Boyd or Erica. Derek may be a surprise talker, but he’s trapped in his own particular web of silence, one that he may never get out of on his own.

Derek’s breath hitches, and he takes a long, ragged breath. “I was just being stupid,” he says miserably. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

It doesn’t sound like a new mantra. It sounds like something Derek says to himself every night before he goes to bed, the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up in the morning, the thing that runs through his head when he stops at traffic lights and when he’s eating breakfast alone. A slow moving bullet shredding him from the inside out.

This could go one of two ways: Stiles could silently watch Derek let this eat himself up alive, let this twist Derek into something hard and ugly and defeated, or Stiles could --

He could stop feeling sorry for himself. It’s a shitty life, full of painful choices and overwhelming sacrifices, but it’s his shitty life and he’s obligated to make the best of it.

Stiles licks his lips, says, “Hey,” on an exhale, barely audible, and curls a hand around Derek’s arm, sure and steady.

Visibly startled, Derek turns to look at him, mouth slightly turned up, eyes crinkling at the corners. It has become, when Stiles wasn’t paying any particular attention, a painfully important expression, one that Stiles wants to see over and over.

Derek presses into Stiles’ touch, and answers back, “Hey, yourself.”






The end.