Chapter Text
It’s not unusual for Stiles to wake up confused. Actually, he wakes up confused a lot of mornings. He sleeps in multiple places, and sometimes he needs drugs to achieve and maintain actual unconsciousness. He has bad dreams and often wakes up in the middle of the night. So all things considered, it’s fairly typical for him to wake up wondering where he is, how he got there, what time it is, or all of the above.
So when he wakes up on an only-vaguely-familiar bed and thinks ‘that’s weird’ he doesn’t make much of a note of it. He sits up and yawns, stretches, rubs a hand over his head. Had he fallen asleep in the guest room at the den? Shouldn’t he be at school? He could have sworn that he was at school. He’s still getting used to the new apartment.
He’s still pondering this when he sees a bright green piece of paper folded up on the nightstand next to him. It says ‘Stiles: Read Me’ in familiar handwriting. His own handwriting. Which is even weirder, because he doesn’t remember writing it. He picks it up and unfolds it.
‘Hi Stiles, it’s Stiles. You’ve been having some trouble with memory loss so I’ve started writing these every night so you’ll be less confused in the morning. You probably have a lot of questions. Let’s take them in order so you don’t have to bother everyone downstairs.
Shouldn’t I be at school? No. School’s out for the year. Today is May fifteenth.
How can it be May already? It seems like every night we’re forgetting a little more. We’re not sure how much in a night, maybe a month or two.
Where’s Derek? He’s probably downstairs. When you woke up with the pack you were upsetting them with your flailing and panicking, so you’ve been sequestered. Sorry about that, buddy.
Is he okay? He’s fine, everyone’s fine, aside from being massively freaked out.
What’s causing this? We’re not sure yet. It has to be magic of some kind, but we haven’t worked out how it would be happening.
Those are the basics. Go downstairs and the pack will give you the details.’
Stiles folds the letter and frowns. He fumbles around and finds his phone on the nightstand, swiping his finger across the screen and looking at the date. May fifteenth, just like the note had said. How can it be May fifteenth? It feels like school only just started. Had he really lost almost an entire year of time?
He crawls into his clothes and heads downstairs, in search of answers and breakfast.
~ ~ ~ ~
At first, they hadn’t realized what was going on. Stiles seemed to be forgetting some things he had said or done recently, but he was stressed, it was their last week of the semester, he was taking his finals. They hadn’t figured out that something was wrong until the a few days into their summer break, where Stiles had woken up panicking because he didn’t know why he was in Beacon Hills when he should have been at school.
“I have finals!” he protested to Derek, who was just blinking at him in confusion.
“Stiles, you did all your finals last week,” he said.
Stiles blinked back. “I did?”
He didn’t remember. And when Derek had sat him down and carefully questioned him, they realized that he had lost nearly three weeks of time.
They took him to the doctor. Except for being confused about the date, he did fine on the mental status exam. They did an EEG and an MRI, and both of them came back perfectly normal. There were no signs of head trauma, no fever, no new medications, no evidence of a stroke. He was given a clean bill of health and no answers.
When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t remember who Malia was, or that Peter had come back for a few days, or that they had been to Faerie.
They took him to Deaton. He put him in the copper circle in his basement and did a charm to dispel any magic that had been done to him. His memories didn’t return, but Deaton had been hopeful that he would at least stop losing time.
When he woke up the next morning, he was excited about the start of their spring semester.
They did the dispel charm again and then had him sleep in Deaton’s office, surrounded by mountain ash.
When he woke up the next morning, he was looking forward to Christmas break.
They sat down and did the math. He was losing a month or more every night, and they had no idea how to stop it.
~ ~ ~ ~
The problem, Derek said, wasn’t just that Stiles was losing his memory and they were all freaked out about it. The problem was that it was going to leave them, effectively, without an alpha. At the rate he was losing time, within a week, he would forget that he was their alpha, and one more night after that, and he would forget that werewolves existed at all.
He hears Stiles stirring upstairs, and digs his claws into the counter, reminding himself that he can’t go upstairs. The previous two mornings, he had scared the wits out of Stiles by pouncing on him as soon as he was awake, demanding ‘what day is it? did you forget again?’ until Stiles was practically hiding in the bathroom, threatening to stay there until Derek calmed down.
It’s worse for him – for all of them – than it is for Stiles. Because every time Stiles forgets, for him, it’s the first time. But for the rest of them, it’s a slowly building panic. While Stiles tackles every day as if this is a new problem, the rest of the pack are growing steadily more and more freaked out. It had been Stiles’ decision the previous night that he was going to start sleeping in the guest room and leaving a letter to himself to brief himself on the situation, and the others should stay at their homes, with their families.
For now, Stiles is still the alpha, and what he says goes. Derek gets the sense that Stiles is trying to make decisions now, plan ahead now, in case he’s incapable later. And that frightens Derek more than anything else.
So he forces himself to take a deep breath and look up as Stiles enters the kitchen. He’s showered and dressed and looks normal, but the fact that he didn’t run downstairs shouting ‘hallelujah, I remember everything!’ means that he probably lost another month or so. He sees the questioning look on Derek’s face and says, flatly, “I’m back to about September.”
Derek lets out a breath. “You remember Cora?”
“Yeah. And everything that happened with Deucalion. It feels like we left for school a couple weeks ago.” Stiles rubs a hand over his hair. “Run me through it.”
“Okay,” Derek says, and starts telling him what’s happened so far. He tells him about the day in the hospital, which both of them detested. Stiles hates hospitals as a general rule, and this set of tests reminded him very much of his mother. He never talks about her very much, but Derek gets the impression that she had some similar things done when she was diagnosed with the disease that had taken her life.
So that day had been long, tense, and uncomfortable. And when everything had come back clear, the doctor had said it was probably stress related, he just finished his first year of school, take some time off to relax and odds were it would come back to him.
Stiles frowns as Derek sums up the fact that Deaton had done both a dispelling and had him sleep in mountain ash. “If neither of those worked, how the hell could it be magic?” he asks. “And I have the protection charm, too.”
“We don’t know. He doesn’t know.” Derek takes another deep breath and reminds himself that he has to stay calm, for Stiles’ sake. But it had shaken him to see the Druid/veterinarian so clearly puzzled by something. “He tossed out some theories, but none of them seem likely. As for the protection spell, yesterday you said you were going to e-mail Rebekah about it. Has she replied?”
“Oh, that’s what this is,” Stiles says, pulling out his phone. “Yeah, she e-mailed me back saying she would want to see the charm just to make sure it was intact and had retained its potency. Road trip, I guess.”
Derek nods. A road trip is good. Everything they think of that’s something to do, some lead to follow, keeps him calm. “Okay. Let’s head to Los Angeles, then.”
“Let me call my dad,” Stiles says, and Derek watches him as he pours himself a cup of coffee and dials. “Hey, Dad, it’s – no, no dice. September.” A long pause. “Okay, well, Rebekah wants to check out my protection spell and see if anyone’s tampered with it, so Derek and I are heading to LA for the day. We’ll be back around dinner time. No, I feel perfectly safe to drive. Okay. Love-you-bye.” He hangs up the phone and turns to Derek. “Breakfast?”
“Sure,” Derek says, grinding his teeth so hard that he’s surprised they don’t break. Seeing Stiles so cavalier about this when he’s literally one step away from breaking down is making everything worse. But it’s still somewhat of a relief to see Stiles in his element, whipping together a batch of scrambled eggs and pancakes, humming to himself.
Derek tells himself – as he tells himself every hour at least – that even if Stiles loses his memories, he’ll still be Stiles. He won’t lose his alpha. He will never lose his alpha.
“This is some Fifty First Dates shit, huh,” Stiles says, his mouth full of eggs.
Derek snorts into his coffee. “Yeah. Something like that.”
“If I’m back in, like, September, now . . .” Stiles stops and considers. “I’m losing more each night, aren’t I.”
Derek closes his eyes. He didn’t want to go into this, didn’t want to scare Stiles. But he asked, and he can’t bring himself to lie. “Yeah. At first it was only a few weeks at a time. Then it was a month. And if you think it’s September now, that means you lost nearly three months in one night. We can assume the trend will continue.”
“Yeah.” Stiles is quiet, and Derek knows exactly what he’s thinking, and what he’s going to say next. He knows because Stiles has done the exact same thing the past three mornings in a row. Done the math and the calculations, figured out how much time he has before he forgets being the alpha, forgets the pack, forgets Derek. “That means – ”
“Don’t say it,” Derek interrupts. “Jesus, Stiles, just – don’t say it, okay?”
Stiles looks momentarily surprised, but then figures out what Derek means. He looks away. “I’ve said it every morning, huh?”
Derek rubs a hand over his face. “Yeah.”
Stiles shoves his plate aside. “Let’s head to Los Angeles.”
It’s not exactly a short drive, and Derek knows that Stiles being gone for the entire day is going to set their already-anxious pack on edge. “We should take a few people with us,” he says, and when Stiles gives him a questioning look, he says, “They haven’t had a lot of pack time lately. We don’t know what’s going on, so . . . we’re being cautious, that’s all.”
Stiles nods. “Makes sense. Let’s bring . . . no.” He chews on his lower lip and then looks at Derek. “Who needs it the most?”
Derek thinks back over the past few days, who’s been the most edgy. “Lydia,” he says slowly. “She doesn’t like puzzles she can’t solve. She’s spent a lot of time with her head buried in books and . . .” He doesn’t bother to finish the sentence. What does it matter? Stiles will forget it by tomorrow. “And Isaac,” he finishes. Isaac has always been very dependent on pack, since he has no family support system to fall back on, like Boyd or Mac.
“Okay, tell Lydia to drive over to Scott’s – Isaac is at Scott’s? – and we’ll pick them up there.”
Derek nods and gets on the phone. He exchanges a few words with Lydia and then with Isaac, tries not to think about the palpable relief in their voices at the idea of spending some time with Stiles. About half an hour later, they’re on the road. Stiles has put some rock and roll on the radio, but he keeps it down.
“Now, we’re sure it’s not a medical issue, right?” he says, and Derek closes his eyes and fights the intense urge to scream.
Lydia is the one who answers. “Yes. And not just because all your testing came back clean. Neurology is a fascinating, complex subject. If you were losing memories randomly, in chunks, or if they were coming and going – then maybe. But this . . . gradual progression backwards. Nothing natural causes that.”
“Okay.” Stiles chews on his lip. “Memory and knowledge are usually two separate systems, right?” he asks.
“Yes, and before you can ask me to quiz you on some things that you learned last semester . . .” Lydia lets out a breath. “You’re losing knowledge, too.”
“Shit. I hope I don’t have to take the classes over again,” Stiles says.
“Well, you won’t, because we’re going to figure out what’s causing this and then we’re going to fix it,” Lydia says firmly.
“Right,” Stiles says, and nobody says what they’re all thinking, and have been thinking for days: even if they can find a way to stop this from progressing, there’s no guarantee that he’ll get any of his memories back.
“Turn up the music,” Isaac says, when the silence grows unbearable. Derek complies.
Stiles had gotten up early enough that they reach Los Angeles in the early afternoon. They go through a drive-through to grab some lunch and then head for Harvest, the store that Rebekah works out of. She greets them cordially, gives the nervous werewolf a reassuring look, and leans forward to examine the charm that Stiles wears around his neck, rather than asking him to take it off.
“Well, the magic is sound,” she says, in her creaky voice. “I don’t sense any sort of tampering.”
“Can they just . . . become ineffective?” Stiles asks. “I mean, when you met us you asked a whole bunch of questions about us, and sometimes the answers change. Like, I was a virgin when you made me this, and I’m not anymore.”
“The spell is magically linked to you,” she explains. “As you grow and change, the spell grows and changes with you. So nothing like that should cause a problem. Now, some protection spells do lose potency over time . . . but not mine. And certainly not so quickly. Even a mediocre protection charm will last up to a decade or so.”
“Even if the person has endured magical attacks?” Lydia asks.
Rebekah waves a hand and says, “It might degrade faster under those circumstances, but if that had happened, I would be able to sense the problem.”
Stiles thinks about all of this for a long minute, and Derek wishes he could pace. There are ways around protection spells, sure, but all of them, Stiles in particular, are very, very careful about avoiding them. He tries to limit his attachment to any physical possessions. The only thing that he uses enough that it might actually be something with magic value is his phone, and he still has that. All of his childhood treasures and photographs are in a locked safe at the sheriff’s station, and Sheriff Stilinski says they’re all accounted for.
As for something physical, it’s unlikely. He never brushes his hair or cuts his nails anywhere but their apartment at school, or the den. When he needs a haircut, Lydia gives him one, and they burn all the remnants afterwards. They’re careful to the point of paranoia, primarily because they’ve had a few bad experiences with sorcerers and nobody has any desire to go through something like that – or something like this – again.
“You never take it off, right?” Rebekah asks.
“Never,” Stiles says. “I wear it when I’m sleeping, when I’m in the shower, always.”
“And you never took it off in the past? Not for any reason?”
Stiles thinks back. “I don’t think so? I guess it’s possible. I mean, I could have done it and then not even remember,” he says, shaking his head. “Do you think it’s possible I took it off and someone cast some sort of, of timed spell on me?”
“Anything’s possible,” Rebekah says.
Isaac leans over and says, “But Dr. Deaton did a dispel on you, right? That should have cancelled out any magic that was done on you previously.”
Rebekah frowns and says, “Yes, that is correct.” She sighs and adds, “But one thing to always remember about magic is that nothing is set in stone. Protection spells can be circumvented with simple, raw power. I made that spell for you, and I’m powerful. But there are people and other creatures out there who are more powerful than I am.”
“But then how does it get through the mountain ash circle?” Lydia asks. “Magic can’t get through a mountain ash circle.”
“Were you alone in the mountain ash circle?” Rebekah asks.
Stiles looks at Derek for the answer, since he doesn’t remember. Derek shakes his head. “No. It was at Deaton’s clinic. He was there. So was I, and Scott, and I think Jackson was there for at least part of the night, doing stuff with the animals. He’s still working there over the summer.”
“Plus Deaton has any number of magical artifacts and foci in his possession,” Rebekah says. “That could have been part of it.”
“So put him in a circle by himself,” Lydia says.
“That’s the next thing I would try, yes,” Rebekah says.
“What if I stay up all night?” Stiles asks. “It’s happening while I’m sleeping, so maybe I just shouldn’t sleep.”
“You can’t stay awake forever,” Lydia says.
“Well, no, but I ought to be able to manage one night,” Stiles says, but then shakes his head. “We have to be methodical about this, right? Because if we try two things at once, and it works out, we won’t know what the difference was. So I guess I’ll sleep in a mountain ash circle tonight. Fun, fun.”
“Yeah,” Derek says quietly, trying not to think about the fact that if it doesn’t work, it’s another night wasted. If it doesn’t work, it’s another month, three months, who-knows-how-many-months lost. If it doesn’t work, when Stiles wakes up in the morning he won’t know who Cora is, or why he has a round scar the size of a bullet on his abdomen. If it doesn’t work, Stiles won’t remember the words his grandmother said to him that changed his attitude about the things he’s had to do.
If it doesn’t work, it’s just another night closer to when Stiles forgets him.
But Derek doesn’t say anything of that. He just nods and agrees because it’s a reasonable plan and Rebekah knows what she’s talking about. They drive back to Beacon Hills, they get dinner, they stop and check in with other pack members, giving everyone some alpha time. Then they go back to the den with Allison and Scott.
“Nothing in the circle with you at all,” Derek reminds Stiles.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stiles says, grumbling. “No pillow, no blanket, no glass of water. I might as well just try to stay up, because I’m sure not going to fall asleep easily.” He’s stripping off his clothes as he speaks. “I don’t have any magical marks on me anywhere, do I?”
Derek glances up at this. It’s something they haven’t thought of, haven’t checked. “Put your arms up,” he says, and Stiles does. Derek circles him slowly, undisturbed by Stiles’ nudity, only looking for anything out of place. But there’s nothing. “No. You’re clean.”
“Okay.” Stiles kicks his pants aside and lets Allison surround him with mountain ash. Then he plops onto the ground. “Well, you guys might as well keep me entertained until I fall asleep.”
Nobody really wants to talk to Stiles about all the things he’s forgotten, because summing them up over and over again is getting old at this point. Scott brings the television out of the rec room and puts it on the living room floor so they can watch a movie. When it’s over, Stiles is still full of energy and getting somewhat twitchy. They put on another, and then another.
“You should get some sleep,” Scott tells him.
“Dude, look,” Stiles says, “I’m naked, sitting on a tile floor, with no cushions or pillows. Would you be able to sleep?”
“I guess not,” Scott admits, somewhat reluctantly.
They put on another movie. Stiles is curled up on the floor, looking only moderately miserable. Derek just watches him. His eyes are bright and focused on the movie, and Derek can practically see the gears turning behind them, as he continues to try to work out what’s going on.
He almost misses it when his eyes go a little vague, and it doesn’t occur to him that it’s important. It’s late, he’s tired, and despite his discomfort, he’s eventually going to fall asleep. Stiles can fall asleep just about anywhere, in any position, so sleeping on a floor without a pillow isn’t out of the bounds of reason.
But when Stiles gives a sudden twitch and then his head jerks as he tries to regain his bearings, Derek demands, “What? What is it?”
Stiles looks around the living room, bewildered, and asks, “Why am I sleeping on the floor?”
Derek looks at Scott and says, “You explain it,” and walks out of the room before he can break down completely.
~ ~ ~ ~