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The blood sticks. Not so bad as the guilt, but more visibly.
“He’ll live,” Cora says again. She’s restless, pacing, can’t fathom why they’ve stopped.
Derek couldn’t keep running with literal blood on his hands, though. The warehouse is drafty, leaking, and Derek holds his hands under the run-off where insulation and wood has been torn away. He cuts himself on his own claws in his vigor.
Cora sniffs, watches, accuses, “You said it was getting better.”
Derek’s lip raises, pointed teeth dragging against soft inner tissue.
Cora attempts to wait him out, gets impatient, huffs. Her feet thud across the floor, tread heavy and defiant. A few boards rattle near the corner, then: “Here’s a radical suggestion, we could talk about it.”
“No.” He’s not Dr. Phil-ing himself into a solution for losing his anchor, that’s not the way this works. Even if it were, Cora’s touch is about as light as her stomp.
“You’re not angry enough to use it as a totem any longer; that’s cause for celebration not—” she jabs a hand at him, “this. Whatever this is.” She smirks, perks an eyebrow. “Aside from the first step on a staircase towards forming an emo band. Third, actually. You’re already white and suburban.”
The animosity rankles, but it’s not entirely undeserved. Cora’s the one who struggles with moderation, the one who leaves shady supernaturals half-dead, not Derek.
Not until recently, that is.
If only it were as simple as that. His claws dig deep into his own palms as he balls his fists—if the blood’s sticking with him, he’ll be damned if it’s anyone else’s. “Anger isn’t the problem.”
“If that’s your anchor then—” She stops, backing up a step in her two-step solution to any potential roadblock: identify the problem, demolish the problem. “That isn’t your anchor.”
Derek clenches his jaw, muscle ticking.
It’s confirmation enough.
“And your anchor now is?”
—The last thing he wants to discuss. “Slipping.”
Cora rolls her eyes. “Okay, I’ll bypass the lack of a straightforward answer in order to move the conversation along; why?”
“I—” he stops, can only bring himself to admit as far as: “It’s not here.”
Which is apparently enough to decipher him, because even though Cora doesn’t know him, she knows his tells. And she’s seen enough to be able to read him. “He’s not,” she corrects.
Derek doesn’t answer.
Problem identified, she sets out to demolish it next. “We’ll go back.”
The snarl is instinctive. “We’re not going back.”
“If that’s what—”
“He isn’t there,” Derek cuts her off. Flexes his fingers. “I—I don’t know where he is.” It’s been three years since Derek left Beacon Hills but it’s still the first time Stiles has fallen off his radar.
Cora does the math on her own, too. “And you haven’t for the last few weeks.” She doesn’t wait for him to confirm what they both know and instead asks, “How were you tracking him?”
“Regular avenues; Facebook, Scott, his phone’s GPS.” It had been sobering, realizing he hadn’t left all of Beacon Hills behind. His tenuous control on that first full moon had been proof enough of that. Focusing on Stiles’ heartbeat, his scent, his safety had been enough to pull it back. Not knowing if those still exist—well, it’s led to his current predicament. “He stopped checking in.”
“Do you think he’s dead?” There’s no emotion associated with that. Cora’s not immune to death but she is fairly immune to forming bonds, and she hadn’t with anyone who was still alive back in Beacon Hills.
It had been easier for her to leave for a reason.
“No.” Cora gives him a look at his certainty and Derek shrugs. “He’s too stubborn.” His phone is heavy against his thigh and he pulls it up from his pocket, claws catching at fabric. He searches up his map application, carefully spreads the pads of his thumbs across it, enlarging the area he’s looking for. “The last place he—”
Cora tips forward and yanks the phone out of his hand. “Yeah, no, this is not a cross-country road trip of manpain and misery. If anyone gets that arc,” she places the corner of Derek’s phone at her breastbone, “I do.” She thumbs through his screens. “Stiles is the kind of idiot who takes a picture of every waffle he’s ever eaten, so, here’s a wild idea: reach out and ask him where he is.”
“His phone is—”
“You said he was using Facebook, right?” She hands him back the phone with the screen pulled up on Stiles’ profile page. She bats her eyelashes at him and says in a grotesquely peppy tone of voice, “Send him a message, with words, end it with a question mark, it will almost be like communication.”
Stiles’ profile picture has him half out of frame, huge grin rounding out his cheeks, eyes squinted, his finger and thumb cocked and pointing at the—person next to him. Derek recognizes the scene, tauntaun legs on the lower half and the costume changing at the waist to Luke’s flightsuit. The person’s face is dyed blue and painted with frost and there’s something they’ve rigged to keep the upper tauntaun half above them so it looks as though Luke is breaking out of its stomach, Alien-style.
Cora huffs at his lack of movement, grabs his phone again, taps at it and shoves it back.
The chat bar has been pulled up and, in it, she’s typed:
Where are you?
“It would be fatally stupid to let you lose all control of yourself just because you can’t use your words.”
Derek stares at the white space under the message. Wills it to fill with the dots of an incoming response. He’s still staring when the screen goes dark.
“I hear patience is a virtue,” Cora says with a certain smugness, throwing his own words—many times over—back at him.
Cora finds them a safe enough place to bed down and Derek spends a diligent half hour scrubbing all the blood from his skin. He settles back against the wall with his phone on his chest and lets his eyes droop. It chimes a little after two the next morning. The Facebook chat is still up on the screen, but there’s nothing in response to his original message. He pulls down his recent activity and finds a text message from an unfamiliar number.
Tapping on it leads into another application. Google Maps loads a dropped pin location in Burt County, Nebraska.
Cora rolls over from her space next to the door. “Where?”
Derek stares at it, willing it to be something less inscrutable. “Nebraska.”
She snorts; Derek can’t decide if it’s amused or derisive. The next words don’t make it any clearer either. “He’s investigating crop circles, I’d bet money on it.”
Derek manages to hold off until just after five before he starts rummaging around, packing up his bag, brushing his teeth, winding his charger. Cora joins him outside the door, squinting at the steam rising on the pavement. “Is this a thing where you want company?”
Derek stares at her. She’s equal parts opposition and independence and he knows she’s only asking for him. She’s been trying to care about him despite the fact that there’s nothing in her past that lends her to it—nothing that hasn’t been bored out and replaced with agony and Alphas at least. The last person she let herself care for died on the claws he can’t keep retracted.
It would be selfish to tell her yes, so Derek doesn’t. The gesture is nearly enough on its own.
He’s nearly out of range when she says, “Hey.” Derek turns back towards her, opposite ends of the road and so far away he can’t quite make out her mouth moving. “It’s an anchor, you’re meant to stay tethered to it.” He hears the unspoken words that there’s no shame in this working exactly as it’s designed to.
Derek nods, says, “Keep in touch, Cora.” And means it.
She doesn’t answer, but there’s a text message waiting for him almost fifteen hours later when he gets off the plane in Lyons, Nebraska. It’s a Youtube link and tapping on it leads to Rick Astley’s, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” video. Only Cora, who’s perpetually at least a decade behind any fad, would rickroll him to establish communication.
Derek snorts, types back, I’m not looking forward to your discovery of Grumpy Cat.
Cora texts back quickly, I’m Googling that immediately.
He backs out of her message thread, pulls up the pin and chooses the ‘navigate to’ option. He rents one of the only cars they have on hand, a Volvo with decent gas mileage and what turns out to be a sputtering air conditioner in the ninety-degree heat. Derek sheds his jacket and buys gold aviator sunglasses from a kiosk in the airport. Long stretches of empty field, hourly texts with nothing more than pictures of Grumpy Cat, and a one-lane highway eventually lead him to a pit stop with what looks like a reappropriated General store, the sign proclaiming in fading paint and alternating letter sizes:
Dracula, the Original Bat-man
Museum and Inn
Derek frowns, checking his phone again, and steps inside when he confirms it’s the right place. The woman behind the counter at the ‘admission desk’ looks up with a bright smile and the question, “How can I haunt you today?”
Derek is nearly too stunned by the entire existence of this place to answer but manages to speak to her like she’s a normal human being, “I—uh, I think I’m supposed to be meeting someone here?”
The woman mirrors his frown, coiled gray hair trapped behind one lens of her glasses. “We only have one guest staying here, so I suppose it must be him you’re looking for. Just continue on through to the back and there’s a guest suite outside in the next building over. Now, you will be wandering through the museum so unless you mean to pay admission, I suggest you keep your eyes on your feet.”
“How much is admission?”
“Five dollars,” she says, back to brilliant smiles with the potential of a sale in her future.
Derek gives her a five and walks the ‘L’ through the shop to the back door without so much as glancing at the countertops or cardboard placards nailed to the walls. He can hear the heartbeat now, familiar and wild, winging away at the edges of his mind.
The ‘guest suite’ is a shed with the number ‘4’ tacked on it… for reasons that don’t appear to be reality-based as it is the only shed on the property. Derek raps his knuckles on the door, the four falls into the dirt, and the door swings wide.
Stiles stands in it, casual and confident and with teriyaki jerky half-hanging out of his mouth. His hair’s on the longer side, greasy and pressed into a lazy faux-hawk, not as though Stiles has styled it that way as much as he was left to entertain himself for an hour and he started in on his hair in minute ten.
His feet are bare and light-washed jeans that are tattered at the hems are slung low on his hips. His torso is long, naked, and lean with the kind of tone that comes from running rather than training. Moles scatter his skin and scar tissue rides the ridge of his collarbone.
He glances down at the shades hooked in the collar of Derek’s shirt. “Nice shades.” His mouth hitches into a playful smirk, though there’s a bit of meanness to it. “I genuinely did not think you’d come,” he offers. “Or that you’d be a lizard person if you did show up, which is definitely still on the table.”
“What are you doing here, Stiles?” Derek asks, as though he has some right to know. He’s fallen right back into their dynamic of trying to boss him into being smarter about his own well-being.
Stiles leaves the door open as he retreats back inside. “It’s the Cornhusker state, why wouldn’t I be here?”
Derek follows him in, closing the door on the stifling heat outside only to be baked by the dead air inside. There’s a fan that’s not doing much more than pushing more dust into the room. The bed doesn’t seem to adhere to any regulation size and Derek would guess it was smaller than ‘Twin.’ There’s a table with a single drawer, a laptop on top of it, the window with the fan and no blinds. “Scott doesn’t know where you are,” Derek points out.
Stiles nods, seeming distracted. He closes his laptop on the table and says, “He told me Jazz was the best Transformer. Unironically.” Stiles looks back at him, expression dour. “Of course I had to take some space to reevaluate our friendship.”
Derek clenches his hands at his sides but there’s no threat of claws, of sprouts of fur or fangs. He’s himself, more so than he usually is. “Why are you really here, Stiles? If something’s—”
The seriousness must be obvious in his voice because Stiles laughs, says, “I’m here because Googling ‘Is Dracula real?’ on a Saturday night led me to the best discovery there is—This place. Did you look at that ‘museum’ in there?”
Derek narrows his eyes, as if to say ‘of course not.’ Because… of course not.
“There’s a rubber bat with googly eyes strung up with fishing line that is a, ‘likely accurate rendering of his animal state.’ Their containers for the ‘exhibits’ are just clear plastic tupperware turned upside down. They have the ‘stake that killed Dracula’ and it is a branch that’s not even sharp with strawberry jam smeared on one end. I’m here because this is the greatest place in existence. This is my Disney World. I want my ashes spread here. Side note: there is categorically no proof that Dracula’s ashes don’t exist in the dirt in this very parking lot, as I’ve been told. Multiple times.”
The excitement lights up Stiles’ face, his hands weaving through the still air, sweat gathering in the happy trail below his navel and Derek says, “I love you.”
Stiles freezes, foot mid-step, and hands about to narrate a sentence he’s just dropped. He lowers his heel to the ground and says simply, “Seems like you should spend less time walking away from me then.”
Derek takes a step closer, heart beating hard and smirking to cover it. “Right direction?”
Stiles’ smile builds back up again, slow and easier, and he closes the space between them. “I suppose I could meet you halfway, less confusion that way and you’ve proven you need the help.” Stiles’ thumb brushes Derek’s lower lip, then his mouth does, then his tongue. The kiss is impatient and passion and Stiles and he pulls back with a heavy breath, resting his forehead at Derek’s temple. “If this whole thing works out? We’re getting married next to the jam branch.”