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The first time it happens, Stiles just thinks it’s another twisted game. He knows it isn’t from anyone else because there’s still dirt under his fingernails. Just because he doesn’t remember waking up in the middle of the night to pluck a bunchle of flowers doesn’t mean that his body didn’t decide to do it for him under the influence of that little something other in his mind.
The petals are pretty and pink, and Stiles blinks at them with an extra drowsiness he doesn’t usually feel. Frowning, he pushes himself up in bed, and while the contrast to the dark blue of his bedding is nice, there has to be something more than just their elegance about them. He leaves them on his pillow and slips from the sheets, padding over to his desk where he flips open his laptop and types in what he can.
Stiles isn’t quite sure where the actual fuck the Nogitsune managed to find Oleander in Northern California of all places, but he knows that touching it is probably a bad idea. Instead he plucks up the pillow, flowers balanced delicately against them, and carries them downstairs to the trash bin. There’s a pang of regret as he shoves his whole pillow into the plastic can, and he knows it isn’t just at the loss of a fantastically crisp pillow case.
Honestly, though, he’s just too tired to care.
The next time, it’s a talisman. He has no idea what the hell it does, but he’s certain it won’t create perpetual sunshine and rainbows. He takes it to Deaton the second he’s finished getting dressed.
The veterinarian is, naturally, aghast. He handles it with a delicate care, and asks Stiles where he got it.
“Found it,” he says. "Is it important?“
"Very,” Deaton nods. "Do you mind if I keep it?“
Stiles shakes his head, but he does it with reluctance. ”Um… What— I mean, what does it do?”
"Something very important.” Deaton mutters, moving away from him distractedly.
Stiles huffs out a sharp breath, calling after him with something like annoyance and amusement all wrapped up into one. ”Always nice to hear some good vague undertones, Deaton! You have a great weekend too!”
Deaton doesn’t reply. Stiles tries not to feel a loss as the talisman moves further and further away.
By the third time, when he wakes with a dead bird resting on his desk, Stiles takes it for what it is: a gift.
The Nogitsune is leaving him presents. Whispering sweet things to him while he sleeps but his body moves, and leaving him to wake up with something that the Nogitsune might consider romantic. For a moment, just as the realization dawns, Stiles feels sick. A moment after that, he feels nothing but warmth.
The bird is a Kingfisher. Brightly colored and neatly killed, laying on his desktop. When Stiles looks it up, he finds out that it is a sign of warmth, sunshine, prosperity, and love. He knows, logically, that the idea should sit unwell with him. The idea that the Nogitsune is leaving him things, professing his love in the only actions he knows how to make.
It doesn’t though. Stiles stares at the bird for a very long time. It isn’t until his phone buzzes with a text from Scott that he blinks out of his haze. Picking it up carefully, he cradles it against his palms and carries it out to the back yard where he lays it underneath a tree. He wishes that he could keep it, but there’s no excuse for letting a dead bird stink up his room.
The fourth and fifth times accompany notes. Stiles recognizes lines of poetry on them. Whitman and Plath.
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
The Plath is just a bit too morbid for his tastes.
With the sixth comes the dream.
Stiles is in that white room. He’s laying back against the Nemeton, and he feels it thrum beneath him. Alive. Pulsing. It’s scary, but Stiles is too tired these days to feel much of anything.
And then he’s there. Or she. He’s not sure if thousand year old spirits have a gender. But the Nogitsune is wearing his face, and a gentle hand ghosts through the dark of Stiles’ hair. Stiles shivers. The other Stiles, the not Stiles (notStilesnotStilesnotStiles) smiles at him.
‘My sweet boy.’
Stiles wakes with a gasp and tacky boxers. There is a flower next to his head. White and bell-shaped. Lily of the Valley.
Stiles wonders if it’s a promise that things are going to get better. Worries that it means things will only get worse. He hates the way his stomach twists with want.
When he gets in the shower, he jerks off thinking about the other that gives him things and calls him sweet. He gives in. The Nogitsune is triumphant, and Stiles feels it in his very bones.