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There are stars hanging heavy in the sky, blooms and blossoms of bright light that still pale in comparison to the moons that spill white light across the stone courtyard. The sky is perfectly clear, so Stiles can pick off each one of the seven moons that spin through the night sky, holding out a finger and pretending to shoot them, miming a blaster.
His hands itch for something, but he has nothing here except for the glaive he wears strapped across his back and a single knife. It’s the poorest replacement for his saber, but when everything had happened the power cell had gone wrong and left him with angry burns up his saber hand and a ruined blade.
He flexes his hand without thinking, cracking his wrist. The force had made sure he didn’t die alone on this fractured planet, but it’s not exactly living either.
There’s a rustle of noise from the ruins he has his back to, and something tugs at the base of his mind. He slips the glaive from his back, and waits, eyes closed. When the shyrack finally crawls out from the broken stones and takes flight towards Stiles, it is a simple movement to spin to his side and slice the thing’s head off. Both pieces fall to the ground with wet, heavy thumps and Stiles opens his eyes to peer at it. It’s an old one, its tan skin almost grey, but it’s food, and that’s not something Stiles can really refuse right now.
He wipes the glaive off on one leathery wing and then starts cutting the shyrack to manageable pieces to take back to the tombs.
---
The roof of the temple is technically off limits, but Scott has been sneaking up here since he was an initiate and he’s almost certain that if the council were ever to bring it up it would only be Derek who saw it as a problem.
So instead a few times a month he sits down, crosses his legs, and leans back and lets the night air roll over his skin, full of amazing amounts of noise and artificial light spilling from towers that are so high they brush the reaches of breathable air.
Currently though he’s lying on his back, arms spread, and heaving sighs every so often. Someone had decided that he needed a padawan of his very own. When he was young he thought that this day would be the greatest of his life, but all he’s been doing is questioning the council’s decision. Scott feels too young, and Isaac is… rough. Not in skill, but in thought.
He’s rough like Stiles was rough.
Scott sits up and rubs at his forehead, willing the memory of Stiles from his mind. Eight years is too long to dwell.
“You’re going to get caught one day,” someone says from behind him, and Scott smiles, turning to watch as Lydia hoists herself the rest of the way out of the hatch, closing it softly behind her and padding over to him. Her feet are bare, almost silent on the ground. She had told him once than on her homeworld you were expected to be barefoot any time you were home, and this was her home.
Scott pats the space next to him and she sits down, staring out at the city with a wistful smile.
“It’s a bit of a shock to be back around all of this after a month off planet,” she murmurs, turning her face upwards like she’s trying to catch invisible rain on her skin. Scott misses the rain, but the current Chancellor is from a desert planet and so it hasn’t rained in years.
“How did everything go?” He asks.
“Fine, amazingly. Nothing terrible happened, the unrest had already figured itself out by the time we got there, and they sent us back with some actual, real home grown corn.” Lydia is silent for a moment before suddenly changing topics. “I head you were assigned a padawan.”
Scott groans and flops back down, squeezing his eyes shut.
“I’m not ready, and he’s not ready, and it won’t go well,” Scott mutters.
“Give yourself more credit,” Lydia chides. “There’s being humble and then there’s selling yourself short.”
“It’s going to be hard.”
“No one ever said training a future jedi was easy.”
Scott has to admit that Lydia is right. Padawans are likely the single most difficult thing in the galaxy.
---
When Stiles wakes up the air feels heavy and claustrophobic, and he rolls over in his hammock, pressing his face against the rough fabric. The burlap smells like the air, and a word coils in his memory – petrichor. Earth after the rain.
A memory lays itself on top of that, of an unburnt finger tracing the unfamiliar word on a screen, a young boy frowning at it. One of the librarians on duty had explained it to him, that it was a made up word for the smell after a storm.
Stiles grimaces at the memory of the library and forces himself to get up, staring around the small tomb that he’s picked out to be his home these last years. Luckily it had been uninhabited, and he hadn’t had to force out any shyracks or skeletons.
(The skeletons scare him more, because there is something dark in their bones that he knows has been seeping into his since his feet first touched the surface of this planet.)
The small door at one end had been blow open by the wind at some point, and he crouches down, staring out at the wide walkway the tomb sits at the end of. The stones are slick with rain, although the storm is moving past and there’s sun peaking around the edges of the clouds. Already there is mist rising into the air, and Stiles knows it will be hot, as it is every day. Hot when the sun is up, too cold when the moons are out. He’s learned to deal with it.
He dresses in the simple robes he had found in the temple (he’d been there twice, which was two times too many) and scales the mortuary complex at the other end of the walkway, hands and feet finding familiar cracks and divots in the right most pillar. He stares out at the ruined landscape, watching the mist rise, before he pokes around for a round stone and then uses it as a ball with the end of his glaive, slamming it away on the hardwood and then calling it back with his mind. It’s relaxingly repetitive, calming.
Stiles needs more things that are calming. When he’d first started using the glaive he had gone through training patterns, but he’d found himself getting angry at the strange weight and how useless it was for the style of combat he’d been studying at the temple, not being much of a defensive weapon. So instead he’d made simple little patterns with the glaive that were routine, the same over and over again.
When the sun is at its highest point in the sky he shelters in the shade of a chunk of monolith that was probably once a statue on the roof and slowly chews his way through a few pieces of smoked shyrack.
Stiles has always known that there was something just a little to the wrong side of the dark inside him somewhere, known since the very first day of the academy when they sit you down and tell you the history of the Order. However, here, surrounded by the remains of the Sith (and something else) he feels like all he can do is sit still and breath and remember.
He remembers a lot of things. He remember Scott’s impossibly wide smile, he remembers Lydia’s hair (and he remembers when she had shaved it in mourning after her first master had died, how long it took to grow back), and he remembers the calming glow of the stacks in the library.
He breathes out slowly and twists his hands on his glaive, wishing that it was metal under his palms and fingers instead of wood. He’s spent a long time wishing for that familiar hum, the bright glow, the fizz at the edges of the blade’s field. But he’d fried his power core and that had shattered the crystal. He’d been too young, and too angry, and fighting ghosts on a world that wasn’t even in the maps anymore.
“What an idiot,” Stiles mutters to himself.
He knows there are crystals on this world, hidden deep under the temple in false mines for dark jedi who hadn’t wanted to leave, even for something as important as that, but he refuses to go the temple and refuses to use the crystals.
He hasn’t given up quite enough yet to have a blade that glows like his blood pumps.
---
Scott finds Isaac at a gym on the ground, pushing a practice droid around with angry sweeps and jabs of his hands and feet, frustration pulsing around him like a cloud. He watches him for a few minutes before Isaac finally slams the droid into the opposite wall and it starts sparking.
“You’re a bit hard on the furniture,” Scott says, and Isaac whips around, unsteady on his feet, panting and sweating. “You could have worked out at the gym at the temple.”
“People stare when I do,” Isaac murmurs, looking down for a moment before clearing his throat and then looking back up at Scott.
“Most of those people fight with a saber,” Scott points out. He’s aware that Isaac is perfectly fine with a blade, but for some reason he’s become a fan of using his body as a weapon instead. Scott hasn’t stopped him, there’s no harm in it, assuming Isaac doesn’t run across an opponent with a blaster.
Isaac goes over to the sparking droid and pokes at it almost apologetically before pulling it away from the wall, where it’s left a dent. It makes an angry beeping noise and Isaac drops his hands away, running them through his hair instead.
“I’m sorry,” Isaac whispers, and Scott knows that Isaac was hoping that he wouldn’t hear that, but the fact is Scott’s got incredibly good hearing. That used to drive Derek nuts, even though Derek was the one who taught him to use the force in that particular way.
“Let’s head back, yeah?” Scott asks, and Isaac nods, following him through the halls and out onto the streets. It’s always strange being down here, as close as you can get to the planet’s natural surface without entering the sub-space bellow the streets. Scott’s been down there a few times, unfortunately. Laura had taken him with her once on a Stiles rescue mission, after he’d found a way into the garbage pits, because that was just what Stiles did. Not to show off, or cause trouble, but to learn something new. Stiles was always on the hunt for knowledge, and when he wasn’t butting heads with Laura over combat styles he was showering her with facts he’d pried out of the library.
“You ok?”
Scott blinks at looks at Isaac, his face a strange color of grey-purple in the lights from the bars and assorted other seedy establishments that lined the streets.
“I’m fine.”
“You were frowning, like you were thinking too hard.”
Scott just shrugs, and puts his hands in the pockets of his robe.
“Thinking isn’t a bad thing,” he points out.
“You look like you miss something,” Isaac says, and Scott nearly startles at that, but when he looks at Isaac out of the corner of his eye Isaac is staring into the far distance, and Scott can feel the tendrils of something caught between missing and memory that are coiling around him.
“Do you?”
“Just a… a pet, basically, from so long ago that it’s beyond stupid.”
“Show me?” Scott asks, stopping and extending a hand towards Isaac.
“I shouldn’t be troubling you, you’re my master, and I’ve cause-“
“Isaac, I’m too inexperienced and too young to be your master. Just show me as a friend.”
Isaac shifts his weight from foot to foot before he reaches out and touches the back of Scott’s hand, and –
It’s badly wrapped, something strange-shaped that’s too hard to wrap anyway and it’s got a green ribbon and his mother’s smile and her eyes as she twirls the soldering iron and finishes and it rolls across the floor happily chirping, this little box on wheels and he chases it down their street laughing as it smiles and trills happily in the open air and crying and crying and he wants Box to come with him and he doesn’t understand and his father is cold and hard and unmoving and he draws Box on his new wall, above his bunk, in clean chalk and the others want to see him and he can’t show them because he’s somewhere strange and his mother isn’t here to build Box again and
Scott is suddenly aware the lights and the bars and the people once again, and there’s Isaac, looking strange.
“It’s stupid,” Isaac says.
“It’s not,” Scott says fiercely, and Isaac nods tightly, “that’s never stupid.”
They walk back silently, but Isaac’s shoulders are a little less angry and in the lift he even exhales slowly, slumping against the wall and smiling out at the city as it flies by the glass wall.
Maybe Scott isn’t as bad at this as he thought he would be.
---
When the box shows up on his makeshift doorstop, Stiles thinks about Laura for the first time in a long time and it hurts.
He knows who sent the box, because he’s always there, lurking somewhere just out of sight.
“Got tired of haunting Lydia, huh?” Stiles says to nothing in particular, and he bends down to stare at the box, to run his fingers over the perfectly smooth wood. It’s the same wood he made the staff of his glaive out of. He can’t imagine there’s much of it, there are no trees he’s found and the glaive was made from a ruined desk in the temple.
Oh no, I do that too, the planet seems to breath with that, and Stiles clamps down on himself, anger flaring across his face. He hates when this happens, when words coil out of nothing, and it’s like someone is slicing him open from the inside, burning away at his spine.
“What’s in the box?” He says, not looking away from it.
You already know.
He does. He knew the minute he saw it. The crystals inside have an unmistakable signature, no matter where they’re from, and it’s radiating through the polish wood.
You should really stop doing the noble martyr thing and just get on with it, you’d look good in red. Great for your complexion. Just a –
Stiles moves almost without thinking, fluid and calm and angry all at once, the glaive sliding through air so fast it hums in Stiles’ hands and for one moment he remembers his feet on the soft ground of the training gym, and of the warm metal in his hands as Laura tells him to get it together, a smile on her lips but hardness in her eyes.
The stance he lands in is not the one that he was taught to, not the safe defensive one. Stiles wonder when he got good enough at form VII in his head to be able to replicate it in his real life. Probably when the fury that’s currently thrumming through his body started to materialize.
There’s nothing there of course, but the voice has finally stopped.
Stiles leaves the box on a shelf originally meant for a burial shrouded body against the back wall, and doesn’t touch it, just throws it there with a flick of his wrist and then goes for a run through the tombs, jumping over anything broken in his path. It’s only when his lungs burn and the air is ice cold he finally feels like he can go back.
It sits there for a month, a month in which Stiles starts training with the glaive again in a style that he’s only read about and goofed around with a few times, that Laura said wasn’t a good idea for him. He forces himself to get angry and then deal with it, watching the head of the glaive and running over facts in his head to keep himself on the edge of calm at the same time.
He goes back to the temple for round three and tries to ignore the ghosts that pick at his edges, fraying his seams, long enough to do more reading. In the end he brings home a stack of books, actual paper books because of course the temple hasn’t had powers in years and years, and puts them in the corner, under the box.
He’s missed learning. He feels like there might be balance creeping back into his life, despite the darkness that’s settled into every last corner of his being at this point.
Laura always said that was his best quality, his ability to know. She said it was also something he needed to work on though, because when she had asked him once if he knew who he was, he had been at a loss for words.
Scott had always known. When Stiles had asked him the same question he’d responded so perfectly that Stiles wanted to laugh.
“Of course I know who I am, I’m Scott,” he’d said, and looked at Stiles like he was crazy. “It’s not that hard.”
Stiles stops mid pattern, faltering, the glaive dropping and skidding across the stones of the mortuary complex roof, memories of Scott crisscrossing his mind.
He misses Scott. It hits him hard in the chest. Stiles misses Scott, misses him more than Laura, misses him more than the temple, the actual temple, not the angry broken one on this planet, misses him more than Lydia or Derek or any of the others.
That night, for the first time in eight years, he goes to the crash site. The mound where he’d buried Laura is, absurdly, growing flowers. There aren’t any flowers on this godforsaken rock, and Stiles just smiles as he sinks to his knees next to what was once Laura.
“You’re awesome, you know that?” He says, because she’d have to be, to get flowers to grow here, where there’s so much darkness. “And you’re going to hate what I do next.”
The wind picks up at that, tugs at the hem of his robes and pushes his hood from his head. It doesn’t feel angry though, it’s not the hard wind that usually blows through the valley, but something softer, warmer.
Something that smells like tiny purple flowers from a mid rim planet light years away that Laura had once told him about.
---
Scott makes the comm officer repeat what he’d just said one more time, just to make sure that he wasn’t mishearing completely crazy things, not that it was possible with the way Lydia was digging her hand into his shoulder like she had claws.
“A long range reconnaissance probe traveling the Kamat Krote lanes picked up a force signature on a dead planet that pinged as someone in the MIA database, and it showed up as padawan Genim Stilinski.”
“That’s – Stiles is dead,” Scott says, because that makes sense. Stiles is dead. They’d never been able to find him, or to track him, and Scott had known the moment he’d died anyway because he’d been sparing with Derek and he’d gone over sideways with a gasp at the moment Laura had faded from the galaxy. It had been a shuttle crash on an uninhabited world, they knew that. Scott had come to terms with that years ago.
“Someone’s going to have to check it out,” Lydia says quietly, calmly, deadly in a way. “Isaac should be fine to go on a training run.”
“Stiles is dead,” Scott repeats. Scott has spent his whole life training to not be an emotional wreck, but right now that’s hard. He’s dully aware of Lydia navigating him through the halls, leading him to his chambers and sitting him down on his bed.
The next thing he distinctly remembers is a crowd of appreciative initiates cheering when he eviscerates a practice droid in the gym, his saber clenched so tightly that his knuckles are the same blue white as his blade.
“You’re a bit hard on the furniture,” someone says, and Scott turns to see Isaac smiling at him. Scott takes in a deep breath, pulls himself back, puts himself back in his head and kills the blade, letting it rest in one hand.
“That was a terrible example,” Scott says as the initiates wander off to where two masters have come in to spar, much more interesting than some crazy knight on a grief trip.
“I know. But it was also cool. Erica told me that you were one of the best swordsmen at the temple, I’d just never seen it.”
“That’s not true, and also ridiculous.”
“It’s fine. I understand the bad example. Lydia told me.”
This is how they end up on a tiny freighter bound for the outer rim. Scott sequesters himself in the hold for the first few hours, legs crossed and hands on his knees, somewhere deep in mindspace to try to get all the way back to reality. He hasn’t a fracture of calm like that since that match with Derek that ended with Scott holding Derek up as he shuddered like a leaf getting kicked around in a gale. Scott spent a long time after that trying to understand what it felt like to feel a family member die, and it gave him nightmares and left him spinning and slashing in the gym, a practice saber in each hand and an audience that seemed to be halfway to afraid.
When he finally wanders up to the mess, steady on his feet and as grounded as he supposes he’s going to get in this situation, he finds Isaac playing a card game with Morrell (who he knows was specifically sent along to keep an eye on them) and the woman he supposes is the captain reclining in a chair, reading a book in what he’s decently sure is Old Corellian. It’s supposed to be a dead language on Corellia, but Stiles could speak the basic bits of it even if he’d left when he was two, so Scott’s willing to bet that it’s not nearly as dead as it’s claimed to be.
“I apologize for vanishing, I’m-“
“Jedi Knight McCall, I got briefed on that.” She looks up, marking her place with a finger, and Scott’s first impression is that she’s really quite pretty. His second impression is that there’s something just a bit deadly in her smile. “Captain Argent, but you’re welcome to call me Allison.”
“Scott,” he says, “I’m Scott.”
“Excellent. I actually wanted to talk to you about taking you all the way to wherever it is that you’re going, it’s not worth stopping off at a space station in the middle of nowhere, you might not get anyone going that direction for a while.”
“Plus she wants the extra credits,” Isaac calls over, and when Scott looks over Isaac is grinning and Morrell has one eyebrow arched.
“Plus I want the extra credits,” Allison says, smiling.
“That’s fine,” Morrell says. “It makes more sense anyway.”
“Except for the part that it’s on a Sith hyperspace route,” Scott points out. “That’s dangerous.”
“Well, it’s a good thing that the Sith are dead then, huh?” Allison says. “Don’t worry about me, it’s fine. I’ve been through much more dangerous parts of the outer rim.” Something in that smile of hers tells Scott that she’s not lying.
Allison goes back to her book, and Scott joins the card game. He’d been distracted from the whole Stiles mess for those brief few moments, because he’d wanted to reach out and run his fingers through Allison’s hair. It’s strange, Scott supposes, the people you run into somewhere between the rims.
---
The box had contained everything but a belt ring. All that was left of Stiles’ saber had been his belt ring, which he’d kept, hanging phantom in the air with nothing to hold onto. He pulls it off of his belt now, working on soldering it to the base of the grip. This is how he’d built his first saber as well, totally by hand, touching each and every last part. A few of the other padawans had thought he was nuts, they were finished much faster than him, but Scott and Lydia had done it the same way, sitting with Stiles in a workshop down on one of the sub-levels until odd hours of the morning.
The crystal from the box had felt wrong rolling between his fingers, but it was all he had, and he needed this.
He’s left with three parts – the head, the body, and the crystal. He runs his fingers over them, neatly arranged on the ground in front of him.
“Sorry,” he says to no one in particular, and then picks them up one by one with the force, closing his eyes and he feels them slip between his hands, rotating and moving together, heavy in the empty air.
The tomb drops away, the air, the wind, everything, until he can feel every last little part of the saber that he wants, what this will become. There is energy between his hands, stardust, coiling and curling, and his fingers claw up as he pulls at it all, pushes it forward, holds it until something clicks and Stiles is aware of breathing again and he climbs back up out of memory and into knowing.
He sags down a bit, letting out a long breath, and holds the saber in the air with one hand, his other braced on his knee. It’s a little bit rough around the edges, he doesn’t exactly have all the machining equipment he needs, but the saber floating in front of him is perfect in his mind. He finally reaches out to take it, the weight and cool metal in his hand like a promise that he’s been waiting years to make to himself.
All he does is run his hands over it for a long while, before finally touching it to his forehead in a simple gesture that Laura had taught him, a gesture that meant sorry and thank you and acceptance and other things that Laura could only say in her first language, things that had no words in basic.
Are you thanking me?
The hair on the back of Stiles’ neck stands up and he’s instantly slammed from calm contentment into a wall of rage, that sends shadows swirling around in his mind like smoke.
“You will never get a thank you,” Stiles says quietly.
That’s a bit rude, don’t you think? I found you everything you needed for your new toy, after all.
“Go away.” Stiles can feel his skin buzzing.
“How can I, when I’m nowhere?”
Stiles doesn’t think, he just gets up and goes outside, where there voice has finally materialized into the tall, thin man standing on the cobblestones, smiling serenely in all black, his arms outward and raised in a symbol that might be a mockery of openness.
“I don’t have time for games, Peter,” Stiles says. “You’re a shadow.”
Peter makes a tsking sound.
“It’s Master Hale, where have your manners gone, Stiles?”
“You’re dead. And evil. That kind of negates any rank you had.”
“I’m rather corporeal for being dead, don’t you think?”
“It’s a trick,” Stiles says, and that’s how he’s rationalized it, because that makes sense. He’s been living with ghosts for eight years, this is just another one.
“Here’s a trick - do you have any idea how much fun Lydia’s mind is to play with? Oh, she’s a delight, her dreams are so excellent. Maybe I should start – what did you call it, haunting? – Scott as well. We’ll all be one big nightmare family.”
Stiles can’t tell where his anger and Peter’s meet, or end, or even crash together. It all churns and cracks, like a storm at sea. The broken stone around them is sunset colored and Stiles transfers his saber to his dominant hand, his burnt one, and the grip fits perfectly into his palm.
“I don’t want to be part of your freaky nightmare family, and if I know Lydia I know she probably hates you now, and I’m pretty sure Scott could crush you.”
“How do you know any of that?” Peter asks, and he holds up a lock of red hair. “Such a touching gesture, no? She was so upset.”
His saber is in both hands now, close to his chest, and there are flowers on the wind when he leaps forward and fires up the blade in the same heartbeat, the same breath, calm and controlled, and the blade makes the narrow walkway and the tombs and his skin glow the color of the dying sun.
---
Derek and Boyd are out on assignment a few sectors away on an agro planet, so Scott calls them because he feel he owes it to Derek. He waits until everyone has drifted off to sleep before gathering up his holocomm and walking quietly to the mess. He realizes as he sets the comm down that he hasn’t actually talked to his former master in a while, he and Boyd keep running around putting out fires here and there and it’s been a while since they’ve been back to the temple. Derek and he hadn’t always gotten along, which is what lead to him eventually having Deaton as his master, but Laura was Derek’s sister, and he should know. It stood to reason that if they found Stiles, they’d find where Laura was buried. Scott can’t imagine that Stiles has done anything less for his master than afford her a proper burial, on this dead world where there probably wasn’t enough wood for a pyre.
The little blue hologram of Derek blinks into existence on the table as Scott settles down on a bench. He’s wearing, somewhat amusingly, what seem to be farming clothes, but his crossed arms speak volumes about what he thinks of his outfit.
“Scott, this is a surprise.”
“I know. I unfortunately have another for you.”
“Oh?”
“We possibly located Stiles.”
He sees Derek suck in a breath, rub a hand over his face. The hologram wavers, but doesn’t go out, Derek must have squeezed it with his other hand.
“And Laura. Or – Laura’s,” he stops, his face contorting for the briefest of moments, black hair running down his jaw line and eyes flashing what Scott knows is red before his face returns to the one he wears as a human.
“Yes,” Scott says. “I thought you’d like to know.”
“I do, I…” Derek looks over somewhere to the side, frowns, and then turns back. “I have to go. Can you send me the coordinates?”
“The minute we find them I will,” Scott assures him, and when Derek brings a hand up to gently touch his forehead with his fingertips, Scott knows what this means to him more than if he’d said anything.
Scott stays staring at the table for a long time, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe, before he hears footsteps and looks up to see Allison leaning in the door. Her hair undone from her earlier up-do and rolling down around her shoulders, which are bare except for the straps of the thin tank top she wears.
“So do you guys not sleep?” She asks.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I don’t know if that’s a dig at Corellians or freighters.”
“My best friend is a Corellian.”
“Freighters are very nice people.”
Scott finds himself smiling, and Allison mirrors his expression before coming to sit next to him. She reaches out, turning the holocomm on its edge and spinning it around like a top.
“This Corellian… is this who we’re on a rescue mission for?” Allison asks eventually.
“It’s a bit late for a rescue mission,” Scott says, because he’d looked up the planet that Stiles had ended up on and Scott isn’t sure how you spend eight years around dark Jedi and Sith ghosts without becoming one yourself. Stiles was always teetering as it was, that’s why Laura never wanted him to study Juyo. Scott personally thinks that it might have been ok, because sometimes you could teeter and study it and end up finding a perfect balance, somewhere on the tip of a mountain.
“Everyone can be rescued as long as they’re still alive, and then it’s just a recovery mission. This best friend still alive?”
“Yeah, he’s alive. We think, anyway.”
“That’s good then,” Allison says, leans back against the wall, letting her head tip back and her eyes close. Scott studies the curve of her neck and the line of her jaw, and again gets the sensation in his gut that he should run his fingers through her hair.
They’re quiet for a moment before Allison opens her eyes and turns her head to the side, a small smile turning up the edges of her lips.
“I have faith in this kid,” she says, and Scott knows that he does too, that he always has somewhere in the back of his mind. He doesn’t stop her when she twines their fingers together on the bench, and when she smiles at him he squeezes her hand and reaches out to run his fingers through her hair.
---
Stiles can feel the moment the freighter touches down near the ruined spaceport, on the other side of the valley. It makes his breath catch, and his eyes flutter closed, and he says something he hasn’t said in a very, very long time.
“Scott.” Scott is here. Scott and two force users he doesn’t know and another human. Scott and one of the force users snake their way though the ruins on the temple and then the tombs and graveyards and when they get to the last row of Stiles’ section they stop. Stiles stands on the top step of the mortuary complex and watches them as they find Peter, where Stiles had left him, on his back with his heart burned out, sunken eyes forever staring at the stars and the moons and the sun but not seeing a single burst of light.
Stiles still isn’t sure if Peter was ever real, that second time. But Scott and the other person see him, and Stiles has to wonder. As the two come towards him Stiles’ heart starts jackhammering in his chest, these two real people from a real place, not made of shadows and memory.
They stop at the bottom of the steps and look up at him, Scott and the kid that Stiles realizes must be his padawan (how has it been that long?), and there is something on Scott’s face that is unreadable, but the gesture he makes with his fingertips to his forehead is unmistakable. Derek taught him that, Derek must have taught him that. Stiles lets out a little breath and then moves as fast as his feet will take him.
Stiles takes the steps by two and Scott grabs fistfuls of his cloak and they crash against each other, and they cling together for probably just a little bit too long but it’s Scott, and he’s here, and he’s probably a little bit taller and his hair is longer and there’s no padawan braid for Stiles to tug on but it’s still Scott, and he smells like home.
“You were dead,” Scott says, his voice muffled by where he has his face pressed into Stiles’ shoulder and Stiles can only shake his head.
“No, I never was, I promise.”
They walk back too close together, shoulders rubbing, refusing to move away from each other.
Derek and Boyd land that night in a sleek little government issue transport that Derek probably intimidated out of the local chancellor, and the tiny hold is packed full of dry timber. They carefully pick the flowers growing thick over the grave and then Derek pulls Laura from the ground, bleached bone by bleached bone, the acid in the hostile ground making them the color of the moons.
Stiles leads them to the courtyard where he had hunted sometimes, knowing somehow that the shyracks won’t go near the fire. They pile the flowers on top of Laura and offer her to the sky, to the stars, ash and sparks traveling upwards with the flame towards the black of space.
It is late, so far past dark that the morning is closer than the night, when they finally drift away.
“Did you ever find her saber?” Derek asks Stiles, and he shakes his head. He’d pulled Laura from the fire after the crash, and he’d always assumed that it had been burnt up with all the rest of the wreckage. For a moment he thinks that he sees sadness etched into Derek’s face, but it’s gone just as quickly.
Stiles sits in the open hold of the transport as the sun comes up, knowing that there’s a very good chance he’ll never see this sun again. Scott finds him eventually and sits down next to him, watching with him.
“You feel different,” Scott says after a long stretch of silence. “But you feel like you, too.”
“That’s good,” Stiles says, and Scott can feel that there’s relief in his words.
“You ready to go home?”
Stiles looks over at Scott, and just smiles.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for being here.”
Stiles looks back at the sunrise for a moment, thinking of the red of his strange new blade that fits in his hand a bit too well, and then turns back to Scott.
“Yeah, I’m ready to go home.”