Chapter Text
The Nogitsune was gone. Stiles knew what it felt like to share brain space, to fight for control of his own thoughts and his own body. He knew the difference between his own personal strength and the will of the supernatural monster that had taken over control. He knew what it was like to lose. He remembered.
So when he started blacking out, ending up in the woods with no recollection of how he got there or even where he was, Stiles didn't blame the fox. He knew it wasn't a trick. He just ended up stuck in his own head, in a world of black and dark. No lockers. No classrooms. There was nothing testing him. There was something very, very wrong. And it was all him, just Stiles Stilinski and the Russian roulette better known as genetics. The problem was, they had already chased down the mental problems of his mother's and it was expensive. The nogi had fooled the machines and the bloodwork and image analysis. They couldn't afford to do it all again, and even if they could, the only diagnosis would be paranoia and delusional behavior, munchausen syndrome at best and insurance fraud at worst. Stiles would just have to accept that he was going crazy. Great.
"Stiles?" A familiar voice brought him back to himself. It was far away, behind a racket of noise and bright sunlight. A harsh thumping sound got steadily louder like drums or... Was that a heartbeat? If it was, it was panicked and fast. The voice saying his name got louder too. A hand shook his shoulder then and it was like his whole arm lit up in a shadow of pain from the pressure. Then the voice came in to better focus again and the noise all faded. "Stilinski! Are you okay?"
He blinked in the daylight and tried to focus. Stiles realized he couldn't breathe and figured out he was having a panic attack. From dead-nothing to an overloaded panic attack. Oh crap was he in trouble.
"Stiles? Calm down. You're safe-" Stiles twisted suddenly to find the source. It was Derek. And Stiles was breathing again, startled out of panic and then calmed by the familiar.
"Where am I?" It was the first thing Stiles thought to ask and even Derek caught the oddity of it.
"Look around," said the werewolf. He was a werewolf. He probably never got lost, relying on senses and awareness levels that came with teeth and ears and stupid sideburns. Stiles tried to look away from him but everything was too bright to see clearly. He shielded his eyes and tried again, squinting until he could focus. He stood right at the ravine edge in the preserve, just a foot away from a fatal fall. The trees were behind him and he stared out at an open air clearing, big open space and a high vantage point that overlooked the valley.
"I think the more important question is how you got here," said Derek. "And where you've been for the last twelve hours. You're soaked, Stiles."
Surprised at the revelation, Stiles looked down at muddy, still-drying clothes. He was a mess. An actual, literal, mess.
"Twelve hours?" he asked.
"Your dad said you ran out of the house like you were being chased. That was last night around nine. You left your lights and computer and stereo on and took off," said Derek.
"I've got a headache," said Stiles. It was clouding up recall. But he knew he had the headache when he left the house, too. It just hadn't gone away. And now on top of the headache, his whole body hurt. And it was covered in mud. "What time is it?"
Derek glanced out over the valley and shrugged. He handed his cell phone over to Stiles without bothering to look. "About nine am, I'd guess. You need to call your dad. Call off the search. So far it's just the pack. But he's panicked."
"I don't know what to tell him. Where is he?" Stiles didn't want to touch the phone, just stared at his muddy hands, trying to figure out how he had gotten that way. He heard the steady drumming sound again, was convinced it was a heartbeat. Maybe it was his own. But then he heard a second one at a different rhythm. He thought about his dad and a third beating sound layered over the other two, this one quieter and faster and it worried Stiles. He tried to listen harder and the sound of the river tried to drown everything out. Birds screamed in his ears. He thought he heard squirrels but he couldn't tell because everything was so loud. It all hurt and covered up the heartbeats in layers that just stacked higher, more and more sounds as his vision went white. "Too much light. I'm going crazy."
***
"No! Scott, don't!"
Stiles was pretty sure the voice in his head had been talking to him before that, but he hadn't heard it. Not until he heard the panic in it. It snapped him back and brought him back and he realized he had been tackled into a hug he couldn't catch. He was a muddy sack of potatoes and made his attacker trip. Scott. It was Scott. Smelled like Scott. How did he know what Scott smelled like? Again with the panic attack...
***
When Stiles woke up again, he was in a car. He was pretty sure it was a car. Otherwise it was the middle of an earthquake and nothing like any earthquake simulator he had ever been on. He clapped his hands over his ears and wrenched his eyes shut to try to make sense of the noise. Someone or something got in his face, trying to get his attention, and Stiles jerked away, hitting the restraint of a seatbelt and then the door.
"Hey! Woah! Scott! Give him space!" Again, Derek's voice made sense. It broke through the noise and the pressure and Stiles could focus on it. So he did.
"Derek!" Stiles winced and had to start over when he realized he was yelling over the noise in his head and that only made it worse. "Talk? Please? Recite the alphabet or something. Anything-"
"What the hell does that even mean?" Derek asked from the front. He was driving. Stiles figured out he was in the backseat and Derek was driving. He leaned forward but was very careful not to touch anything.
"I can hear you. Please, just talk?"
Stiles heard Scott's voice beside him, quieter and less painful than it had been but it was still too loud and booming to make out any words. Stiles bent over his knees to try blocking more sound. Whatever Scott said worked because Derek started talking.
"Look, we don't know what's going on with you, Stiles... We called your dad and we're going to meet him at the hospital..."
"No! No hospital!" There was no way Stiles could handle it. "Too much noise."
"Fine, we'll get you ear plugs then," said Derek.
"It always smells like death. No. Just go home. I wanna go home." It was almost down to just road noise. The realization was relaxing until he noticed Derek had gone quiet. "Keep talking and driving. But talking happens."
"How about you talk?" returned Derek. "Where were you? What's going on?"
"If I knew I could fix it! But I dunno!" The panic in his voice would have to do because Stiles had lost the ability to words under the anxiety of being afraid the noise would come back. He was afraid to open his eyes, glad he could only smell the smudges of dirt on his face and the stale scent his clothes had dried with. Derek was the only voice that made everything else quiet and Stiles had no way of telling him that without sounding like an idiot.
***
By the time they got to the Stilinski house, Stiles was better. Things were still loud, still bright, and he swore he was going to knock Scott in the teeth if his friend tried to touch him again, but they were better. He was afraid to take a shower because he didn't want to know what the water would do to his skin. It would be too hot or too cold and stabbing him like needles either way. So he changed clothes and tried to ignore how harsh he smelled.
His dad wanted to know what was going on, why had he taken off, where had he gone... Stiles had no answers for him. He was distracted, his mind working the same case as the sheriff's, and just as empty. Even as his dad berated him, Stiles dug in to Derek's jacket pocket - without asking, but Derek was the idiot wearing a jacket in summer - and took the man's cellphone. He didn't know where his was because it wasn't in his room. He needed to talk to Lydia.
"Important life or death yes or no, Lydia... Do you get... White outs? Like everything turns white and you can't hear anything and you can't move..."
She didn't say anything for a long moment. "Why?" Lydia finally asked.
"Because it happens to me and it's getting worse. I white out and then I can't see or hear or smell anything. But I can hear voices and when they talk it makes things clearer. Like when you scream, it makes things clearer..." Stiles trailed off at more quiet. "What?"
"You're not a banshee Stiles. There's nothing wrong with you..." she told him. Stiles could hear her fine, she was even a little loud, but she was some epic levels of wrong.
"There's nothing wrong with you either, Lydia, but there is definitely something wrong with me," he said. His dad was paying attention by then and looked to Scott.
"Did you bite him? Was he bit? Is that-"
"No! Nobody bit anybody," said Scott quickly.
"I wasn't bit!" added Stiles. He winced because he yelled and it hurt his head.
"But you're you again," came Lydia's voice through the phone. "You're just Stiles. You're okay."
She was determined to believe it and might as well have been talking in riddles. It didn't help Stiles figure anything out.
"I gotta go," he muttered and then ended the call. He stared at the phone until Derek held out his hand to take it back. Stiles passed it over, reluctantly, and Derek caught his attention.
"She's right, Stiles. You're you. There's nothing wrong with you. You look the same, you smell the same as always. And like you went swimming in the creek," he said. "But still definitely just you. Nothing else in there."
Stiles looked at Scott for confirmation and his friend nodded. "You don't even smell sick, man. You're not dying or anything."
"So I'm just crazy?" Stiles asked. He looked from face to face and ended up on his dad. He looked worried. Finally he shook his head.
"This is nothing like what your mom went through," he said. "So if you're crazy... You're your own special kind."
"Maybe you should try taking a bath, getting a little less special," added Derek. The taunt was said with a small grin, trying to rile him. Scott thought it was funny. Stiles hardly managed to glare at him. He realized he was hungry and thinking on an empty stomach was always doomed to fail. He needed food. Food first. He'd kill the stupid werewolves later.
***
The problem with eating was that the first bite of leftover potato salad tried to kill him. It had mustard in it. Paprika. Salt. And Stiles had to drink half a gallon of milk straight from the carton under the watchful, worried fussing of his father and two very confused werewolves. He wanted to kill them just because he loved potato salad. He loved food. And this was the last straw. It didn't help that when his dad tried the food he had no reaction to it at all. Other than to ask if maybe they should consider an exorcism.
"I've now had a banshee and two werewolves assure me I'm fine. So the one thing I do know right now is that I don't need an exorcism," Stiles said, growly as he tried to get over the shock of a spice overload. And that was the thing: It was like everything was overloaded. Every sense.
In the month since the Nogitsune, little things would happen that would trigger headaches. A loud sound would knock him down, turning on a light in the middle of the night felt like needles in his eyes, and the occasional malfunction of the shower plumbing would chase him out of the tub sometimes seconds after it went too hot or too cold. His room was clean because if he left the dirty laundry lying around like usual, it smelled like something had died in it. Stiles had blamed the bitter burn from the stolen whiskey on being too depressed to drink the night of Allison's funeral, but maybe it wasn't mental. Maybe he was physically overloaded. Maybe this was the leftovers of a possession, some kind of delayed response, like a build up. Maybe he just needed to clear the cache.
"Okay, how do we do that?" his father asked, giving it reasonable thought. Stiles was just too relieved they hadn't laughed at him because the idea seemed stupid when he said it out loud. "You can't exactly run a defrag on your brain to help free up space, kiddo. You ran to the preserve in the middle of the night. It doesn't get much quieter or darker than that. I'll buy that this is the leftovers, but that's not enough. What else is there to fix it?"
Stiles shook his head, fingers tangled in his hair to help him hide behind his arms. "I... I dunno. I got nuthin."
"Then go take a bath or shower or something, whatever you can handle?" his dad said. "While you do that, I'll figure out food that is completely bland and boring and you'll hate it but at least it won't kill you. And then you sleep and we'll figure this out after that. Whatever it is. Okay?"
Stiles reluctantly nodded and shuffled off to go try it. Maybe he was just tired and his dad was right, it would all be better after he slept.
***