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He’s back to normal. Honestly. Sure, you might have to skew your definition of “normal” a bit to accommodate for the nightmares, and the sleepwalking, and the general anxiety that has been a slowly building background feature of his life since the whole supernatural thing started, but his brain’s not shrinking, and his body’s not dying, so – normal.
It’s a low bar.
He doesn’t sleep much these days, but at least he can mostly tell his dreams from reality, so that’s an improvement. It doesn’t stop him counting his fingers obsessively whenever he wakes, but his dad has only caught him doing that twice, so it’s whatever. When he does sleep, he walks – mostly around the house, just his room if he’s lucky, but he finds himself on the streets a few times. Hey, if getting hit by a car in his sleep is the way he’s gotta go, then he’s made his peace with it. There are worse ways to die.
Like in a hospital bed next to a son you don’t remember. Like a sword through the stomach before you even hit legal drinking age. Car sounds good. Nice, normal way to die for a nice, normal boy – who is currently standing, in pyjamas with bare feet, in Beacon Hills preserve, under a sky too dark to see.
He calls Scott, because his dad deserves a good night’s sleep, and Stiles needs a ride home. Scott reminds him that he doesn’t have a car, and Stiles reminds him that he doesn’t care.
“I need you,” he doesn’t say. Scott understands anyway.
Scott gets to the preserve with terrifying speed, holding his warmest coat in one hand, and a pair of walking socks and beat up sneakers in the other. Stiles takes the coat from him wordlessly, roughly tugging it on, its feel familiar from all the nights he’s borrowed it walking home. There’s a warmth he knows should accompany its weight, but though his shivering slows, the cold stays. It does that, these days.
His feet are caked in mud and dry, dead leaf. His fingers shake as he attempts to pull the socks on, and he curses, trying to balance on one leg and falling unceremoniously on his ass. He’s keenly aware of Scott watching him in the edge of his vision, and the instinct to make some stupid remark to make something – anything about this situation better hits him immediately. But his brain is strung out and slow, and nothing comes to him.
“Here.” Scott softly takes the socks from his numb fingers, brushing dead plant matter from his feet with his other hand. Some of the shards of leaf have coagulated, held together in clumps. “I think you’re bleeding.”
“No, it’s fine,” and it actually is – later that night, Stiles will watch the dirt stream down the shower drain and uncover uncut skin beneath – but for now, he’s just aware that that is not his priority right now.
Scott pulls on the socks, and then the sneakers, tying the laces in a methodical double bow that leaves Stiles’ insomniac brain captivated at the deft, tender movement of his fingers. I love you, he thinks suddenly, and this realisation of something he already knew swallows him silent.
He rides on the back of Scott’s motorbike home, while the preserve passes them in an ink spill blur. The trees eventually thin out into streetlights, the earth gives way to tarmac, and Stiles only becomes aware of the exterior of his house when it’s right in front of him. There’s no light coming from inside, and even though the sight of it fills Stiles with some unnameable dread (that darkness, which means night, which means sleep, which means waking up and not knowing if it woke up, too) he’s still relieved – his dad can miss the double espresso shot tomorrow morning.
The clock as he enters reads 3am, and he cringes slightly to think of Scott driving home to get a sweet four hours of sleep before chem class tomorrow.
Stiles sleeps eventually, and counts his fingers come morning.
“You want to leave me with him?” Peter says, as though even saying Stiles’ name is beneath him. Because living in Beacon Hills means never catching a break, and werewolves have no respect for the concept of trauma recovery, which means despite it only being three weeks since he was, you know, used as a flesh puppet by an ancient spirit of pure chaos, Stiles is once again caught up in a supernatural conflict. The good news is, he has regained his role of useless human of the group. The bad news is, he has therefore been put on guarding Peter duty, because a rival werewolf pack is in town, and nobody quite trusts him not to run off and join it.
Derek’s expression is unmoveable. “Yes.”
“And what, exactly, is he supposed to do if we’re ambushed? Talk them to death?”
“Hey! I-“ but Peter apparently doesn’t care for Stiles’ (obviously extremely witty and intelligent) retort, because he interrupts him like he hadn’t even opened his mouth.
“I mean, he’s human. Not even that, he’s a simulacrum, and you want him to protect me?
The offense Stiles’ had been taking stutters, slightly. “Sorry, a what?”
“He’s not a simulacrum,” says Derek (also ignoring Stiles, thank you very much), but his unmoveable expression has been moved, to something a little too close to – well it’s not exactly concern, but it’s near enough to make the dread in his stomach do an amateur summersault. His eyes flicker over to Stiles, then guiltily dart away.
“What the hell is a simulacrum?” There’s a wavering panic in his voice that Stiles is semi-humiliated by, but at least it makes them actually look at him.
“It doesn’t matter,” cuts in Derek, too quickly, “you’re not one.”
“Oh, please.” Peter takes a step towards Stiles, all the better for gesturing at him, still very much talking only to Derek, and Stiles starts to feel like a museum display. “You didn’t see him crawl out of a pile of bandages from the floor. That – “ cue emphatic gesture, “– is not fully human.”
The dread has upgraded from high school gymnastics to Olympic-level diving into a pool of straight up fear. Stiles wants to talk, but his mouth is dry, so Derek does it for him.
“He is human, and he is staying with you. End of story.”
He sounds certain. Definitive. Final.
Stiles pretends he doesn’t see the curiosity in the look he gives him as he leaves.
Stiles spends most of the evening switching between his calculus homework and his phone, through which Scott is giving him constant updates of their Epic Werewolf Stakeout (not that he enjoyed his brief foray into the supernatural, but being the pack human comes with an awful lot of FOMO sometimes). Peter spends most of the evening sitting on the spiral staircase and reading a book, like a pretentious asshole.
Occasionally, Stiles will look up and see Peter watching him. He knows he wants him to ask, so he doesn’t.
He doesn’t look in the mirror much, these days.
The image that stares back at him is wrong in some intrinsic, undefinable way, and he can’t stand it long enough to figure it out. But it’s as if there have been hundreds of tiny alterations, individually too small for him to see, but collectively transforming his reflection into something alien and apart from himself.
Maybe it’s just the simple act of his face looking back at him – you don’t need a psychology degree to figure why that one would fuck him up.
Brushing his teeth, he makes eye contact with his reflection, registers the wrongness, spits into the sink, and leaves the bathroom with toothpaste still in his mouth.
He goes to Derek’s apartment instead of lacrosse practice. He doesn’t tell Derek he’s coming, principally because he’s not sure Derek owns a phone, but maybe also slightly because he’s intrigued to see what Derek does in his spare time when he’s not brooding. He and Scott have their bets – Scott says guitar, Stiles says model trains.
When the warehouse-esque doors open, Stiles greets Derek with the comment that “staring out the window with your arms crossed isn’t a hobby. It’s an affliction. You should see a doctor. Or better yet, join an arts and crafts group. I could really see you getting into origami.”
Throughout this stellar advice, Derek’s arms stay crossed. “Stiles,” he replies. “Don’t you have school?”
“Uh, no.”
“Scott has lacrosse right now.”
“Okay, one, the fact you know his timetable is kind of stalkerish, and two, I don’t have to do everything with Scott, you know? I’m my own person. I’m an individual.” He pauses there, and Derek raises an infuriating eyebrow. “Uh, that was actually…what I wanted to talk to you about.”
He takes a few paces forward into the apartment, and starts running his fingernails along the smooth rim of the buttons on his shirt cuffs. Derek uncrosses his arms.
“So I, uh, googled the word “simulacrum”. It wasn’t very helpful. Good word, though. Good SAT prep, actually.” He’s stalling, but Derek doesn’t call him out on it. He just watches, eyes round and with that same glimmer of concern from before – almost Scott-like, actually. Stiles is collecting a solid repertoire of concerned expressions, here. “Couldn’t find it in the bestiary either.”
“That’s because you’re looking in the wrong place.” Derek says. “It’s not a creature. It’s a classification.”
“O-kay…elaborate, please?”
“Simulacrum is a term used by druids and other magic users. It’s the outcome of a specific type of spell, used to duplicate an object.” Derek is pacing as he speaks, and Stiles kind of feels like he’s watching a TED talk. “Creating an exact copy of something requires strong magic – the more complicated the object, the harder it is to clone it perfectly. A simulacrum is a short cut. It creates a duplicate that is still tied to the original object – the tie allows it to mirror the object almost perfectly, but the downside is, it’s not a fully independent entity. If the tie is cut – say the original is destroyed – then the simulacrum crumbles.”
“So it’s like sharing a google doc versus a word document?”
Derek looks at him blankly. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Whatever. Makes sense to me.” He bites his lip. “But that’s for objects?”
“Yes. It tends to be for duplicating rare artifacts or ancient texts. I’ve never heard of it being used on anything living.” And that curious expression appears again, the one that makes Stiles feel like a taxidermized exhibit. “Peter thinks the nogitsune used the same magic to split the two of you.”
“But hang on – you said if the original is destroyed, the simulacrum goes with it. The nogitsune was very much destroyed. And I-“ he gestures triumphantly at himself, “am very much here.”
“Exactly.” Derek smiles. “Look, Peter is talking out of his ass fifty percent of the time -”
“Only fifty?”
“- and he doesn’t know as much about druid magic as he’d like to pretend. Even if the nogitsune did create a simulacrum, the fact is that you’re here when it’s not. So, you must be the original.”
“Yeah.” Stiles thinks of darkness, of crawling up and out of it, of bandages dragging him down and sensation unfurling out of nothingness, of coming to consciousness in a dead man’s clothes. “Sure. The original.”
Simulacrum – noun.
- An image or representation of someone or something
- An unsatisfactory imitation or substitute
He can’t get away with skipping practice again, because even though both he and Coach know there’s no way he’s getting off the bench this season, discipline follows no logic, and Stiles’ absence receives a berating so spectacular he could almost believe he was a valued member of the team.
So he diligently goes through drills, and ignores the way people look at him. “Mysterious disappearance” and “Stiles Stilinski” apparently go hand in hand these days, and he really shouldn’t be surprised that his possession-induced hiatus from school landed him a prime spot in the Beacon Hills High rumour mill. He tries to tune it out – succeeds, pretty much, but Scott keeps sending people random death-glares across the field and Stiles can put two and two together.
Werewolf hearing. It’s a curse.
He doesn’t skip practice, but he does skip the changing rooms after. They’re going straight home anyway – might as well get a hot, private shower rather than a lukewarm, public one. Lydia, who stayed to give some math tutoring, meets them in the hall, and they wander down together.
Their dear fellow students have mostly given up gossiping about Lydia. Her naked wood wandering is old news, and besides, her intimidating combination of beauty, brains, and social savvy have allowed her to confidently maintain her position in the social hierarchy of American public school. You can say what you will about Lydia Martin, but ultimately, it’s coming from a place of jealousy, and everyone knows it.
Stiles wonders what they say about her hanging out with them. With him, specifically. Crazies going around together – maybe she hangs out with him for Psych extra credit? Heard he had to stay a night in Eichen House – freak. Wrong in the head, just like his m-
“Wait,” Lydia orders, and they stop walking at once. On their left is a trophy cabinet, and she’s looking at it with the same wide eyes that find dead bodies in the night. Scott and Stiles exchange a glance, then look at the cabinet in a useless attempt to see whatever Lydia can. There’s nothing – just a few sad, dust covered accolades of Beacon Hills’ past triumphs, and their reflections.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asks. Lydia is silent. She tilts her head, considering. Then she turns and looks at Stiles, eyes focusing on his lacrosse jersey. She turns back to the cabinet, then to his jersey. Then to the cabinet, then to them.
On instinct, Stiles looks down. His jersey looks normal – red, white, and mud-brown. Nothing amiss. “Lydia? If you have problems with my outfit, then you’re gonna have to bring them up with Coach, because I don’t get a say in the uniforms.”
“Look at your reflections,” she urges in that half-whisper reserved for matters of supernatural importance. It makes Stiles feel the cold he’s been trying to ignore.
“I don’t understand,” says Scott, and thank god, because Stiles doesn’t either.
“The wording!” Lydia hisses. “It’s not reflected. Look.”
And suddenly, it’s painfully obvious. The translucent images of Scott and Stiles cast over a backdrop of lacrosse awards wear twin red jerseys, spelling out in block white capitals, S-L-L-I-H N-O-C-A-E-B and B-E-A-C-O-N H-I-L-L-S, respectively.
“Mirror image,” Stiles murmurs, but what he thinks is, Shadow.
At home, he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror. He raises his left hand, and where he touches the glass there is only the reflected image of his bathroom wall on the surface beneath his fingers. In front of him, the image of himself raises its right hand, and presses its fingertips flat against the other side of the glass.
He raises both hands. Makes himself symmetrical. Can almost pretend, like this, that he is normal.
So he’s sleepwalking, but it’s fine. People sleepwalk all the time, especially when they’re anxious, and anxiety is practically his defining character trait these days, so sleepwalking? Normal. Natural. Not a concern.
And he feels cold, but it is cold anyway, and Stiles is still working on getting back the body mass he had before the nogitsune decided food was a necessity he could do without, so yeah, he’s feeling the drop in temperature a bit harder this year.
And his reflection – well.
The walk back along the corridor had been one of the longest of his life, despite the fact he speed-walked about ten paces ahead of Lydia and Scott, leaving them with a curt “See you,” in a very unsubtle declaration that he would like to be left alone to freak out about this is peace, thank you.
The next day, neither of them mentions it. But he sees Scott’s eyes linger to every reflective surface, and his likeness is like an itch he can’t shake. It isn’t until lunch, the four of them sitting around a table for six, that Scott pipes up tentatively, “Hey, maybe we should –“
“So what’s the plan with the new pack?” Stiles interrupts, and Kira makes herself his favourite person on the planet as she immediately starts detailing their next moves. Oblivious to Scott’s troubled expression, Kira goes over what Scott and Derek have come up with, eager to an extent that borders on self-conscious. Stiles bites his lips, eyes drawn again to the empty space to Scott’s right.
Simulacrum – Synonyms: Imitation, effigy, substitute.
Kira talks, and Scott lets it drop. Across the table, Lydia shoots Stiles a look that says You can’t ignore this forever, and Stiles shoots one back that says, Try me.
As in all situations, time will prove Lydia Martin correct.
The plan with the rival pack, as Kira had explained, essentially amounted to having a dick-measuring contest with them until they came up short and backed down. For all that the motive seems extremely petty to Stiles (werewolf pack feels supernaturally emasculated by new kids on the block, basically), he can respect the simplicity of it all. They fight us, we fight them, and none of this ritual sacrifice crap.
The downside is that they have to face the pack as a pack, and while Stiles appreciates that his human status (currently under review) doesn’t exclude him, he does have other things to be doing on a Friday night – like, literally anything other than standing in a line in the woods waiting to be killed.
“This is ridiculous,” he mutters as they hit the 1am mark. “We might as well have ‘homicide victims’ stamped on our backs.”
“We organised this meeting peacefully,” Derek sighs, exasperated as usual. “This is an old pack. They won’t go back on their word. They respect tradition.”
“Somebody has to,” a voice echoes across the darkness, making Stiles jump – really providing stellar representation for all the humans-of-werewolf-packs out there.
The new pack emerge from the trees, their leader at the front of an impressive-looking V-formation that puts their little can-can line to shame. “Scott McCall. We’ve heard all about you.”
“We don’t want to fight,” Scott steps forward, in full peace-maker mode. Derek shifts subtly to flank him, and Stiles stays back, next to Lydia and Kira.
“Oh, but I do,” grins the leader (Stiles wishes he’d introduce himself with his name, like a normal, polite person). “I want to see the pack that took down Deucalion’s alphas. The pack that survived a nogitsune. The pack that decimated the Argents.” He says Allison’s last name in a hiss of reverence, lips curling back into a carnivorous smile. “And this is it? Five teenagers?” He spits. “Pathetic.”
“There are more of us,” Scott defends.
“Of course, of course. Your kind play fast and loose with membership, huh? All your little allies get a piece – hunters, other people’s betas, other people’s emissaries.” He’s starting to get riled up now, and Derek’s fingers twitch as the leader starts to close in on Scott. “Beacon Hills is sacred territory, and you – some kid turned at random – think you can saunter in, with your little freakshow of banshees and kitsunes and fucking humans, and claim it as your own? You think you have the right to guard to nemeton? The Hales earned their place to protect this land.”
Derek takes a step in front of Scott, and the leader’s eyes snap to him for the first time in the conversation. “I am a Hale, and I say this pack can have Beacon Hills.”
“Derek.” The leader tilts he head, condescending. “I haven’t seen you since you were a boy. And yet, you’re still just as immature as you were back then. You’re not fit to inherit your family’s legacy.” He turns back to Scott. “And you certainly aren’t. So hand this territory to me. You know it’s right.”
“Scott McCall has proved himself more than capable- “
“Then let him fucking defend himself, huh, Hale?”
“You came here to pick a fight.”
“I came here to witness this – “ he gestures widely to their pack, turning back to his own with an exaggerated, imploring expression. “– insult to our traditions!”
“I didn’t mean to offend your traditions,” Scott says quickly, before Derek can get any more confrontational. “But my pack is my pack, werewolves or not. You can’t change that.”
“Yeah, right. I can try, kid.”
And that’s when the negotiating ends, and the fighting starts.
To give the pack their credit – something Stiles is reluctant to do – they at least make it a fair fight. The leader goes for Scott, and four other werewolves step forward to go one-on-one with each of them, while their (many) remaining pack members step back to enjoy the show. Stiles would appreciate this more, but his chances against one werewolf are pretty much the same as against ten – it’s just death, or death: abridged. Wouldn’t that be funny, he thinks, if after all the shit I just went through, this is how I go?
While Scott, Derek, and Kira are engaged in an expertly choreographed battle of supernatural awesomeness, Lydia and Stiles opt for the back-away-quickly route. Scott takes a moment to lock eyes with them and Stiles sees the pure panic in his expression, but he quickly has to turn away, narrowly avoiding the leader’s claws slashing across his neck. He yells something to Derek, who yells something back, and Lydia yells to Stiles, and Stiles runs.
The wolf is fast on his trail, and Stiles knows he really isn’t going to be able to hold out for long, but he just needs to give the others time. He thinks he hears Derek breaking away from his fight in the background and coming to Lydia’s aid, but the sounds are getting harder to discern under the thumping of his heartbeat. He tries to focus on it– his heart, which makes him human, which makes him a living breathing human being, something he intends to carry on being – and the feeling of his legs stumbling beneath him. He’s running so fast it feels automatic, like he can’t stop, and can only steer himself through the trees ahead of him. He remembers this feeling, something else in control of his body, limbs moving without him telling them to. He can’t think fast enough – his coordination won’t come, and he’s always been clumsy but maybe that’s not it, maybe it’s because he hasn’t slept well in over a month now, maybe he didn’t calibrate right, who knows, but he’s running and eventually – he trips.
He falls on his face. For a far-too-long second he lies there, forgetting he can get up, and that’s all the time the werewolf needs to catch up with him. She turns him over roughly, slamming his back into the damp earth and holding him there.
“Don’t need to guess at which the human one is, then.” Her grin shows off her teeth, slick with saliva and glinting in the dim moonlight. Her grip on his shoulder is a dead weight, and he can’t even get his breathing straight enough to mouth off at her, so he’s just stuck, useless, as usual, and afraid, as usual.
He is so tired of being afraid.
She slashes him with her claws, deep enough into his torso that he feels the resistance of his flesh when she has to tug her fingers out. As four parallel strands of pain begin to choke up all other sensations, his second thought is I hope I get some cool scars out of this, right behind his first thought, which is fuck.
His third thought, oddly, is of Melissa. Her little flashlight in her slightly shaking hands, her weak attempt at a smile when she said, “you’re definitely a real person” – because, yeah, this pain is real. It’s real as all hell, and it doesn’t give a flying fuck what way the wounds are gonna point in the mirror.
His fourth thought is that the werewolf is no longer on him, and he can see, out of the corner of his eye, two figures going at it – Scott, he thinks. His moan breaks halfway into a sob, and he lets his head fall back against the ground. Then he realises he should probably move, or else Scotty’s gonna think he’s dead when he gets to him, and the thought of Scott having to go through that again, even if just for a second, is as good a motivator as he’s gonna get. Getting himself up to sitting, he pulls up the tattered remains of his shirt to survey the damage. The werewolf has left four angry red divots running across his stomach. It’s hard to see with only the moonlight, but he leans down closer, because there’s something…odd caught in them. Something white and thread-like.
And multiplying.
His fingers get sticky with blood as he holds the biggest cut open to see what’s happening, ignoring the twinges of pain, and the itching sensation that has definitely arrived far too early in the healing process. He’s watching his skin knit itself back together, little white-pink fibres growing over the wound in a criss-cross pattern, literally weaving over it like his skin is fucking fabric. Like his skin is –
Bandages, he realises. It looks like bandages.
The blood’s still there, but the cuts are gone in minutes. He scrubs at the skin, smudging it crimson like his body will re-open and accept the blood that should either be inside it, or coming out of it, rather than just being here, only serving the purpose of reassuring Stiles that he’s not going completely mad. (No, it’s his body that’s betraying him this time, not his mind – how nice to have variety.) The skin there feels normal, fleshy and smooth, but it feels normal in the way that four five-inch slash wounds should not, and Stiles can’t do this again. He can’t be in a body like this again, with legs that walk when he sleeps, with a reflection that doesn’t act like it should, with a mind he can’t trust to know the difference between what it perceives and what it creates.
This body. This body. This body that his mother never held. It makes him feel sick.
He wants to throw up, but he’s scared of what will come out of him.
“Stiles!” He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there – he’s lost time again – but the battle’s over, and Scott is stumbling over to him. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, hand automatically attempting to cover the bloody mess that is his shirt, but Scott’s already seen it. His eyes widen.
“You’re bleeding – “
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not, let me see it – “
“It’s fine!” He doesn’t even realise he’s yelled until he registers the hurt and bare expression on Scott’s face, and his hands on Scott’s wrists, having pushed them away. Guilt swells in his throat like bile, but he swallows it down – it’s a familiar feeling by now.
He releases Scott’s hands and then holds his apart, like a surrender. The rips on his shirt stretch open with the movement, showing the skin beneath.
“See? It’s fine, Scott.” His voice breaks slightly. “There’s nothing there.”
Scott is studying his bloodied shirt with the same hurt expression, all concern and confusion. “Then how…” He looks up, and Stiles holds his gaze. There’s fear there, and the openness of it makes Stiles feel ill. He collapses inward again, and pulls his jacket shut, dulling the buttons with blood as he forces his shaking fingers to do them up. Derek is emerging in his peripheral, no doubt because they still have negotiations to do.
“Come on,” he mumbles, getting to his feet. “Don’t you have werewolf bridges to build?”
He tosses the shirt in the trash when he gets home, and puts his phone on silent for the weekend.
He’s not… hurting himself.
Morrel would have a field day with this, he’s sure, but given that she threatened to shoot him up with a deadly dosage of pancuronium bromide last they spoke, he hasn’t been overly proactive about organising any more sessions with her.
(His dad thinks he should get a therapist. “What would I tell them?” works to shut him up, better than the other, perfectly valid, “How would we afford it?” and the probably less valid, “I’m fine, really.”)
He holds the knife above the skin of his thumb. It’s the little wooden handled one they use to cut vegetables. He heard once that it takes the same strength to cut through a human finger as it does a carrot. He’s not planning on testing that. He’s not hurting himself. He’s just…testing a theory.
He has to do it quick, to stop himself anticipating it too much. Before he can think about it too hard, he moves, sharply, and a closely localised pain blooms diagonal across the back of his thumb, as the deep gash he made starts to bleed.
And he watches it until it is gone.
The fibres begin to stretch across the cut only thirty seconds after it was made (was it quicker because it was smaller? Or does it get faster each time? Is he changing? Is he still changing? Has he become something, or is he becoming?) – they grow in number, multiplying quick across each other, until a fabric the shade of his skin is unmistakably grown into him. In mute fascination, Stiles watches the fibres grow smaller and faster, until the texture of fabric is indistinguishable from the smoothness of flesh.
He swallows. His saliva tastes like liquid, but his tastebuds are fabric too, so he can’t trust them much. Not even human. Pile of bandages in the shape of a boy. Simulacrum. Simulacrum. Simulacrum.
Against his palm, he feels the cool hilt of the sword as he twists it. Scott writhes on the end of the blade. He twists again, and the image flickers – Allison, staring at him in mute shock. Twists again, and the image is Adien, bleeding black. Again, and it’s himself, cracks running down his face. Again, and it’s – his front door.
He blinks, and stares at the doorknob in his hand.
“Stiles,” his dad says from behind him, and Stiles becomes aware of the warmth of his palm on his shoulder – he must have been shaking it. In the yellow hallway light, every crease on his face is a thick, dark shadow.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hey, kiddo, none of that.” Dad smiles, which does nothing to cover his exhaustion, and squeezes his shoulder. “You were sleepwalking.”
“Yeah.” He lets the front door click shut – he hadn’t managed to open it that far anyway. “I figured.”
“Is this – “ his dad pauses, squinting like this is a case that can be figured out, instead of what it is, which is something so far beyond both of them. “I mean, it’s gone, isn’t it? This is normal?”
Stiles supresses a laugh. “I don’t know if I qualify for normal anymore, Dad.”
“Aw, kid.” He pulls him into a hug, and they stand there, together, for long enough that Stiles can willingly mistake his dad’s warmth for his own.
On Saturday, his dad lets him sleep in, and he spends the rest of the day indoors, doing his homework like a good, diligent student, and finally killing the day at half one when the base level of fatigue he’s become accustomed to crosses the line into mild delirium.
He dreams he is unravelling. He picks at his fingers until they dissolve into spools of dirty bandages, until he no longer has fingers to hold himself together. A voice wakes him, and he’s checking immediately – fingers; he has them, and he counts, three times.
“Stiles.”
Ah. The voice belongs to a person, and that person is Scott. He’s not sure what to do with his hands now that he’s verified their full existence, so he curls them self-consciously into fists, and lets them hang at his sides.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, looking around and noticing that “here” is the preserve, because of course it is. To be fair to Scott, he does seem to spend ninety percent of his time here, so maybe his presence isn’t all that unreasonable.
“Following you.”
“What, so you just hung out here all night hoping I’d show up? Not to sound hypocritical, but when do you sleep?”
“Chemistry.”
Stiles scrubs at his faces. “Seriously, dude. This is my problem, not yours. You have better things to do.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Yeah? What else is new, Scotty?”
“You could have gotten hurt!”
“So what?” Stiles laughs in panicked staccato. “It wouldn’t matter anyway.”
“It matters to me, Stiles!” His shout burns across the silence of the preserve, and he looks so damn hurt that Stiles pauses, suddenly intensely aware that Scott is out here, on a Saturday night, because his friend has gone off the rails and he is Scott McCall, and he cares. Stiles loves him, and it makes the guilt in his chest just burrow deeper.
“That’s not what I meant,” he mumbles.
“You meant that you’d heal.”
Stiles bites his lip and lets the silence that follows speak for itself.
“I know something’s going on with you. And I know we’ve had other things to focus on recently, but dude, you have to talk to us.” He takes a step forward. “To me.”
There’s always been something about Scott – an earnestness that got him labelled a “real sweet kid” by Stiles’ dad after the first time he came over, when they were six and their biggest problems were being the weird kids at school who talked too much or not enough.
Scott gives him that look, and it’s all it takes; Stiles gives in. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he admits. “The nogitsune – it had my body, and we destroyed it, and I don’t think this thing it left me with is – I don’t know what I am anymore, Scott, god, I – ” His voice drops into a whisper, like if he can say it quiet enough, it doesn’t have to be the truth. “I don’t even think I’m real.”
“You’re real,” Scott’s reply is immediate. “Stiles, no matter what it did to you – you’re real. Okay?” He’s waiting, so Stiles’ echoes back a weak, “okay,” and Scott repeats it, takes it from him and makes it concrete.
“Okay. So we’ll figure this out,” and then he smiles, kind and crooked, the same smile it’s always been. “You and me. We’ve done it before. We’ll figure it out.”
And because he has nothing else to say, Stiles says, “Okay.”
They walk back in silence – Scott brought him shoes and a jacket again – until halfway home Stiles asks, “How did you even find me? It’s not a small preserve.”
“I knew you’d be here. You – Derek and I found your tracks the other day. You always follow the same route.” He pauses. “It’s like you’re going somewhere.”
And hell, if they’re figuring this out, then why not. “Maybe next time you should let me.”
Contrary to popular belief, Deaton’s animal clinic is, in fact, an animal clinic, and actually has clients of the dog-and-cat variety to be treating on a Sunday morning. Which is probably a good thing, because Scott is involved in treating said clients, which (Stiles has to remind himself) is why he actually gets paid, rather than that just being for providing Deaton with his weekly dosage of Beacon Hills Bullshittery. Scott texts him to come round during his lunch break, so at midday Deaton leaves a “Be Back In Thirty minutes” sign at the front desk, and leads him into the back room.
Stiles lists it all off – the sleepwalking, the cold, the reflection, the healing – and finishes, “Peter called me a ‘simulacrum’.”
“You know what that means, I take it.”
Stiles looks at Deaton, who’s expression, as usual, gives nothing away, exuding levels of stoicism Derek could only dream of.
“Yeah.”
“But you said Derek said you’d have to be linked to your original body still,” Scott steps in, “and since that’s, uh…” he glances awkwardly at Stiles, who shrugs “gone, he can’t be the copy, right?”
“Not necessarily.” Stiles shuffles under the scrutiny of Deaton’s stare. “When building simulacra, the image is projected over an artificial skeleton to support it. From what I can tell, yours would be the gauze the nogitsune produced from itself. That being mental in origin, it could perhaps tie you to the nogitsune’s conception of your body, rather than the body itself.” He tilts his head. “Perhaps.”
“And the healing?”
“Parts of the source material show through when the image is disrupted.”
“Huh.” He laughs, soundless and edging on hysterical. “Tutankhamun has nothing on me.”
“Wait, but what about aging?” Scott pipes up, worried. “If he’s um…” he looks apologetic as he continues “based on an image, and that image can’t be changed, can he like…age?”
“Yeah, wait, what?” As if he couldn’t be any more stressed about this, but Deaton quickly dismisses his concern.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. From what I can gather, Scott’s mother found you to be physically human in all ways. You still carry out human physical processes, such as breathing or reflex reactions, so aging should act in the same way. It is just certain aspects of your body that are able to circumvent the general rules of physics.” He stops to ponder for a moment, then shakes his head. “But this is all only speculation. I’m afraid nobody is quite sure what you are, Stiles.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nogitsune possessions are rare. Of everyone I’ve spoken to, I’ve never heard of someone surviving one. You may be an entirely unique phenomenon.”
“Yay, me.” He feels ill. “I’ll put it on my college app.”
In his dreams, he walks a straight line down the centre of a blank, white room. In reality, he walks the preserve, Scott following anxiously at his side. In both, he arrives at the same place.
The nemeton breaks through the white tile floor and demands to be seen, so Stiles obeys. He approaches it like an animal, or an altar – slow and respectful, he lays a palm flat against the surface of the stump. The damp wood pulses like a cold but living thing – like attracts like.
The nogitsune is thousands of miles away, somewhere deep in foreign ground, but the box is made of this wood, and Stiles can feel its fury through the bark. There’s a tie there that can’t be severed, between simulacrum and original, reflection and image, shadow and shape.
Its anger is a low buzz, seething and slow, well-nourished after seventy years of captivity and already biting at the bit in the face of seventy more. He feels the nogitsune – formless and furious at it, hungry for something bigger than this box to hold it; a reflection without a mirror.
A body is a beautiful thing. It is an artwork of flesh and blood and bone, and pain most of all. Stiles remembers how they had taken that pain into their body, and in those moments their fractured minds blurred through joint sensation, and unified into a fully realised being. Their body – his body- a body that is no longer either of theirs, but that both of them crave like high.
His fingertips tracing the rings of the stump, he whispers, “You have made me like you.”
The room blinks out into the darkness of the preserve, and though Stiles is awake, the buzzing in his mind remains.