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i.
Stiles’ pancakes taste a little off, like he’s chewed them before. It makes him think of baby birds, but he eats his pancakes anyway, because his mother smiles at him just so and her eyes are always tired. He adds more syrup, even though he hates how it sticks in his teeth for hours afterwards and he can’t stop poking it with his tongue. Everything tastes stale so he makes it too sweet.
His mother is humming a song he can’t quite make out, her curls bouncing off her shoulders as she moves on the balls of her feet. Stiles doesn’t really feel like smiling. Something is wrong. The pattern on the kitchen tiles is a little off-colour. The table used to have one leg shorter than the other. He wonders when the neighbours cut the tree down that blocked the morning sunlight streaming through the windowpane. It highlights the tips of her hair, the ones that got away. When she turns around her face is rotting inwards and her eyes are nothing but hollow holes and old, old skin, and Stiles tells her she looks beautiful.
ii.
When they were eight years old, a kid in their class asked Stiles why his mom had no hair like a boy, and a scrawny little thing with wiry glasses and too much hair squinted at him and said she was really pretty, and he wishes he were bald but his mom laughed at him when he asked to have it all cut off. Now Stiles’ mom is dead, and Scott doesn’t wear glasses. He’s also powerful, popular, and getting laid.
Just because situations changed, got older and new, Stiles didn’t think they’d changed, not really. There was a lot more teeth in their silent communication, but he thought that Scott got it. He’s been beaten up and bruised (ribs broken in two places, Stiles, you could have punctured a lung, just tell me who did this to you, please) and he was sad, so sad, but Scott quirked his lips in that way Stiles knows means, I’ve got you. Has always meant. Stiles’ eyes say, I’m tired. Scott’s say, I’ll watch over you when you sleep, brother. But it turns out that being a hero can change you more than the moon ever could and Stiles’ face is screaming I’m who I’ve always been, I’m fine, to Scott, and not help me. It breaks him in places he didn’t know he had. Scott says, hey buddy, what’s up, and Stiles finds he doesn’t have words to express the ache in his fingers and his lungs, because they’ve never spoken in words and now he doesn’t know how to talk to him anymore. Scott doesn’t get it.
Stiles waits in silence until he he feels like he’s going to fall inside himself, skin collapsing into the hollow spaces between his bones, and then Stiles goes somewhere he knows he won’t need words anymore. Where the fact he can’t speak a word of the truth, no matter how much he wants to, means jack shit, where the weird line between lie and good intentions was swallowed up by a fire long, long ago. He drives up to the house and Derek is stood barefoot on the porch, leaning on the door, face blank and perfect. Stiles says, “teach me how to fight,” and pushes past Derek through the doorframe and into the ashes.
They spar. Stiles never hits him, never manages to, isn’t sure he wants to, but Derek doesn’t hit him either and Stiles doesn’t really know what that means. They tackle and push, and grunt and pant, but they don’t say a word. There’s nothing to say. There’s a thousands things to ask, but no answers, so they stay somewhere between them, hidden in velvet leaves and raindrops that will turn into rivers.
iii.
“Jackson’s gone,” Lydia answers the phone with one day.
Stiles clicks his pen.
“Can you come over,” Lydia asks, her voice wavering, her heart stuck in her throat and bleeding onto her tongue.
(Stiles doesn’t.)
iv.
He dreams of the sea.
He’s looking up through the water at the moon. It breaks in the tide and Stiles wishes it were that easy, to plunge his hand through the surface and pick the moon from the sky and stretch it under his fingers, twisting it until it’s unrecognisable and sad. He wants the moon to know how he feels, but he can’t move. He’s immobile in the water. Deja vu.
He’s not breathing, because he doesn’t need to if he’s dead. It’s nice, being dead. It’s quiet. It’s wet and cold and lonely, but Stiles is used to that by now. He looked for his mom, at first, could taste her too-sweet pancakes somewhere on the back of his gums, but now all he can taste is salt.
It’s hard to swim when you’re a skeleton, waxy-pale and useless. The night sky filters through the water to where he lays, strips of flesh stuck to his femur and waving with the water. He wants to break his own bones to see if he remembers how to feel anything other than nostalgia. He knows the dead don’t get that luxury; knows that better than anybody.
He thinks he can hear a heart beating, wonders if it’s his own, wonders if maybe his dad or Scott is nearby, but it’s never more than the waves hitting the shore far, far above his nest.
v.
Scott blows him off for Allison, again.
It’s not that he didn’t expect it. It’s not that he’s angry.
“That’s ok,” he says, “you two go frolic in the woods and enjoy your daddy issues together.”
Scott doesn’t reel back, or flinch. His stupid uneven jaw sets his lips into a hard line and he steps back. Stiles has no idea what his expression is telling him. He doesn’t recognise the boy in front of him, who told him he wasn’t a bad person for not crying, who stayed up with him for endless nights when he wasn’t allowed in the hospital in a home-made blanket fort.
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” Scott says. Scott says, “Text me when you decide to be a real friend again.”
You’ll be waiting until my fucking face heals, then, Stiles wants to say. He wants to say, you’ll be waiting until I feel real. But instead he tells him to fuck off and have a nice life, and sits in the jeep until his hands stop shaking.
He drives to Derek’s without looking, gone there too many times, come back with less bruises than he went with. This time, Derek slides his fingers under his shirt, presses over his ribs, and Stiles watches with detached fascination as Derek’s veins trickle black and blue. It’s nothing less than overwhelming, feeling the hurt he’s gotten so used to slip away from him, and it’s not pleasure but it’s so far away from pain that Stiles’ mouth falls open with a thank you that didn’t mean to fall out, and it’s the only thing Stiles has done that hasn’t been cold and calculated in months, so when Derek smiles a small stretch of lips on teeth Stiles starts to cry and doesn’t stop until he hears howling echoing in his new ribs.
vi.
When Stiles wakes up he’s a wolf, and that’s when he realises he’s never really awake at all. The moon hangs below him in the sky, full for the fourth night in a row, and Stiles keeps falling and falling until he tears his lips on his fangs when he hits the ground (or does he hit the sky? everything feels dark and strange, but everything smells so good, like something he wants to touch, to eat, to roll around in until he’s rubbed his skin raw, healing over and over itself and trapping dirt inside him as his skin grows over it, like flowers you can’t control in the summer sun climbing up the wall of his house). He howls and howls because he can, because he’s wanted to, a secret kept hidden deep down in his veins since he caught Scott and Allison making out in the locker room, since Scott made first line. Since Scott.
His claws dig into the earth at the thought of him, his brother, howls out and out and out for him to come but he doesn’t. He wants to run with him, chase and be chased, nuzzle into his neck and breathe in the comfort.
But he doesn’t come. No one does.
He stays like this for what could be days, but the sun never rises, only hours tick and tock and he stares at the moon and she stares back. He tries to shift back, but can’t, because the human is scared and the wolf wants to find him. He knows he’s somewhere inside of this body he can’t quite work, so he takes his claws and rips through the skin on his stomach with the kind of strength he’s only ever fantasised about. He pokes around in his intestine, looks behind his kidney, but can’t find the human anywhere. He must be shy, the wolf thinks. The wolf thinks, I’ll get him to play with me, or at least it would if the wolf could think at all. He licks the blood off his hands as he heals and lays on his back and smells the earth around him, everything tinged vibrant with pain; the warm breath of wind, the blue-bottle of the sky. There’s no stars, not tonight, not here. Stiles smacks his lips and whines. His neck hurts, his jaw aches from holding such big teeth. He wonders if his eyes are blue, or yellow, and reminds himself to ask Derek when he finds him.
(It’s Derek who finds Stiles, in the end, and Stiles hears him from a mile away, angry and desperate. He hears his voice but not his footsteps, can see his aura but can’t smell him. He says his name over and over and over and when Stiles reaches out to touch him, his hand goes right through his chest, and Stiles realises Derek’s eyes are fixed on a point just by his ear. He presses his lips against his, pushes into his space, and falls through the other side.
"I thought you could see me,” Stiles says. It’s one of the most honest things he’s said since he was eight years old. It’s also one of the saddest.)
vi (and a half).
There’s hands holding him down, strong hands that are going to leave bruises. He gasps for air, because he’s not had any in a while; gets drunk on it. Hands move from arms up to shoulders and to his face, and Stiles thinks, this is nice. Only it’s not really, because he feels like he’s on fire from the tips of his toes to the fingers on his jawline. He presses his lips together and tries not to scream because he’s scared of what will come out of his mouth.
There’s a voice attached to the hands, too, whispers his name and the sound rushes in his ears like the sea on the days his mother would take him out of school so they could go to the beach and make sandcastles, just because. It says he’s okay and Stiles lets himself believe that’s true.
“Hey Derek,” he licks his lips and can feel scratches of wood on his arms. “You can get off me now.”
Derek looks, as usual, furious and more than a little bit scared. Stiles blinks and Derek blinks back. The rest come into view, too, duplicate frowning mouths frowning at him.
“What the hell just happened?” Erica says.
“Stiles is crazy,” Isaac says. “I think.”
Derek shakes his head and Stiles can’t look away.
There’s a pause, then a silence. It’s heavy and Stiles wriggles away, wanting to leave, wanting to laugh until his lungs feel empty.
“I was just having a nap,” he says quietly. “I don’t know,” he says louder.
“So was Derek,” Scott says. “You don’t see him doing -- that.”
“That’s because Derek is always crazy,” Stiles says. Derek pushes him in the shoulder.
(So are you, Derek says, and it’s soft and quiet and meant only for him, but everyone else heard it, too. Werewolves.)
Stiles lays his head back onto the grass. Derek doesn’t move from above him.
“I think something might be after me,” he wriggles his fingers in the air and Derek catches them. “Voodoo magic or something.”
“Why?”
“Why are they after me? Picking off the weakest, I imagine.”
“No,” Boyd says slowly, crouches onto his knees by his head. “What makes you think they’re after you?”
Stiles thinks about it for a minute. He’s not sure what’s a threat and what’s just him, anymore. He is his own worst enemy, until supernatural killers get involved, after all.
“I keep having dreams.”
“Go on,” Derek urges, sits back on his heels. “What kind of dreams?”
“First it was my mother,” Stiles says. “then I was dead.”
Scott kneels down, too, followed by Erica.
“And just then? What did you dream about?”
“The wolf,” Stiles says without thinking. Derek’s fingers play with the hem of Stiles’ t-shirt, twisting. “You were there.”
Isaac says, “How did it feel?” and Stiles says, “Lonely.”
vii.
Scott asks Stiles if he wants to go get pancakes.
Stiles hasn’t had pancakes since -
no, thanks, Scott. Really.
viii.
The sun filters through the window frame, melted glass, hot and rough where they sit around the table. Stiles chews on a straw and peers over Lydia’s shoulder at her laptop. Allison smiles shyly over her book. Erica and Isaac are in the woods tracking a scent; Boyd is picking up breakfast burritos with Scott. Stiles sighs, the sound fluttering through the forest.
“This is useless,” Lydia slams the laptop shut. “All I’m getting is hocus-pocus nonsense about what dreams mean from second grade hippies.”
“I can’t find anything about dreams either,” Allison tells her. “It talks a bit about creatures that bite transferring memories that can be seen in dreams, but that makes no sense.” She chews on her lip.
“I’m telling you, it’s Freddie Kreuger,” Stiles flails and Lydia laughs. Scott narrows his eyes as he pushes open the door, dust obvious in the streams of sunlight. Stiles smiles at them, then at the greasy paper bag, and Boyd wrinkles his nose.
“All you think about is food, Stilinski. Even your name sounds like a pasta dish.”
Erica and Isaac appear not long after, noses twitching imperceptibly. Stiles would laugh, if he was that sort of person anymore. They sit around the table and eat in the quiet morning. The birds left a long time ago.
Derek doesn’t flinch when he opens the door, just raises his eyebrows and grabs a seat, taking Stiles’ half eaten burrito out of his hand. Stiles smacks him round the head.
“We didn’t smell anything,” Erica tells Derek. “Just us and Stiles. Not even any animals.”
“I’m not surprised,” Derek shrugs. “I know what it is.”
“What?”
All eyes are on Derek, apart from Stiles’, because he can feel Derek staring somewhere at his jaw.
“The bogeyman,” Derek says. “It’s the bogeyman.”
Stiles laughs for the first time in a long time, fizzling from his stomach to his mouth.
“You’re kidding, right?”
"I’m really not.”
Stiles does look at him, now, and grins.
“What’s next? You’re going to tell me that the tooth fairy is real?”
“Didn’t even offer to go dutch on our date,” Derek’s nose wrinkles. “And a surprisingly bad kisser. Too much teeth.”
“You can talk.”
Scott coughs. He raises his eyebrows at Stiles, and says a lot with the corners of his mouth and the crinkle of his eyes. This time, Stiles knows exactly what he’s asking. Stiles ignores him.
“I dreamed about her again, this time,” Stiles offers the table.
Lydia covers his hand with her own. Allison swallows.
“I’ve had the same dream,” she says. Stiles stares at her and Derek shifts away, turning his head. “About my mom. She was wearing a crown of canines.”
“Does she always die in yours?” Stiles leans closer over the table, chewing on the string from his hood.
“Yeah,” Allison says.
ix.
It’s quiet. Stiles is getting used to that. He kicks a rock into the river, legs dangling over the side of a small mound of sticks and stones. A shadow slinks by, sits down next to him.
“Hey,” the shadow says.
“Hey,” Stiles says back. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“On the contrary, this is my most frequent haunt.”
Stiles stays quiet, thinking .
“Isn’t my bed a little too big to be hiding under? Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the challenge?”
“Well usually I hide in closets,” the shadow’s voice is deep and amused. “But yours is kind of full.”
“Haha,” Stiles’ deadpans. “Low blow.”
“You’re fun!” The shadow bounces, shows teeth in the abyss of its face. “You don’t fight back. You just take it. That’s much harder.”
“Stiles Stilinski, doormat. I’d almost forgotten, thanks.”
“Even doormats can be broken,” the shadow would grin if it could. “if you stand on them enough. Wear them down.”
“Good to know,” Stiles says, and jumps into the river, the shadow’s laughter flickering in his ears like smoke.
x.
Stiles hits Derek for the first time. Derek smiles.
“You’ve gotten better,” he claps his hand on Stiles’ back and this time, Stiles doesn’t even wince. “Maybe you won’t die now.”
“That was my new years’ resolution,” Stiles’ hand twitches, wanting to touch but not sure where he can. “Try not to die.”
“It’s a good one. Maybe this year you can have ‘don’t get haunted by supernatural creatures.’”
“Hey,” says Stiles, points a finger and presses it into the centre of Derek’s chest. “Maybe I like some supernatural creatures.”
Derek gives him an odd look.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
xi.
There’s a pile of letters on the table, the smell of pancakes in the air.
He kisses Lydia on the cheek, and says, there’s no place like home. When he looks himself in the mirror he runs a hand through his hair and his face is nothing but a black, scribbled mess, spilling over the lines.
There’s a wedding ring on his finger; married at 23.They had a big ceremony; Lydia wore white, the bridesmaid’s wore coral. There’s a photo on the mantelpiece; Scott is kissing Allison on the cheek and one of her curls is tickling his nose; she’s laughing at something Lydia said, who is smiling at Stiles, who is smiling back. It used to be Stiles’ favourite picture in the world, but now when he looks at it sometimes Scott’s eyes are glowing yellow and Lydia looks like she’s crying. He avoids looking at it. Tries not to fidget with his wedding ring because sometimes it’s not there. The photo sits next to Lydia’s award, gathers dust because neither of them can be bothered to clean.
Stiles was going to work in the Sheriff's department, like his dad, majored in criminology and everything. But then his dad got hurt and Stiles looked at him in the hospital and he decided, no. Lydia was so angry at him for wasting a degree but now he’s a teacher and she says wicked things in bed about it, sometimes, so Stiles is guessing she got over it.
They have a new year’s eve party. This is their fourth in a row.
Scott and Allison come, who bring Scott’s friend from the vet’s, Isaac, and Allison’s fellow instructors at the college. She teaches archery, which Stiles will always find hilarious, because no matter how much Scott says it is a manly job, Stiles, it’s full of blood and growling, he can’t hide the fact that Scott hordes puppies in their house and hopes Allison won’t notice, and Allison hordes lethal weapons. Boyd is the lacrosse captain and Erica specialises in rock climbing. Stiles feels very small in comparison. Stiles teaches 2nd grade.
His dad comes, too. He took early retirement and smiles a lot more. He has Stiles’ mom on his arm and she looks happy, which makes Stiles happy. Sort of. Recently, when he looks at her, he feels like he’s done something wrong and doesn’t know what.
His dad brings the new Sheriff, who Stiles vaguely remembers being a deputy when he was younger and leaving for college. He gave him a good luck card. He looks uncomfortable, being surrounded by so many people. Stiles knows how he feels.
(If he can see Lydia’s old boyfriend, her prom king, placing his hand on the small of her back and sliding it slowly down her dress, fingering the seams, he pretends not to notice and gets another drink. He hugs his mom and she feels empty in his arms).
“Hey,” the Sheriff says. “Remember me?”
“Yeah,” Stiles says. “But I can’t remember where from.”
The Sheriff gives him that odd look he knows he’s seen somewhere before. He tries to remember - was he at the wedding? - but then there’s suddenly very big, very male hands on his face and he chokes on the thought.
“Uh -”
“You have - glitter. On your face.”
Theres a thumb that swipes his eyebrow. He doesn’t step away when he knows he should.
“Oh - I uh, teach second grade.”
He steps even closer. Stiles’ throat feels like it’s full of water.
“No, you don’t.”
Stiles’ mouth falls open; the Sheriff puts his finger on his lips and traces where he’s bitten it. He fumbles on words, and Derek laughs.
“Derek! You’re - you’re Derek.”
“I guess so.”
He counts down from three and kisses him. Stiles feels odd; like he’s floating, like he’s holding a dead weight in his arms. He wants to say, I’m married - aren’t I?- but suddenly there’s teeth on his tongue and biting through and his mouth is full of blood, and he tries to pull away, to push, but there’s nothing there, and it keeps on biting and biting until his tongue is ripped away from his mouth, and there’s only a shadow in and all around him. It laughs into his slippery mouth, the sound slick through the gaps in his teeth.
Mommy I kissed a monster, it says. Stiles can’t say anything at all.
He runs and runs, memories rushing back, running with Derek’s hand in his and tumbling over logs, laughter, the birds flying away from them. Derek howls and Stiles howls with him, pressing his thumbs into hipbones and smiling. Sticky little fingers and strawberry hair and soft curves and loan repayments fade, until he’s just a boy running with wolves.
He runs until he bumps into his mom, her cardigan scratchy on his skin.
“Look at what you did to me,” she says. It says, “I love you, son.”
Her face is nothing more than that, features smooth and blank and unhuman. He wrenches out of her grasp and tries to work his useless mouth around I love you, I love you, don’t leave me, but words never did him any good. She laughs and laughs at him, shakes his shoulders, begs him to cry for her. Her eyes are wrong.
He thinks, wake up. He thinks, I’m not afraid of this anymore. I watch her die every second I close my eyes. He thinks, you can’t hurt me because there’s of me nothing left to hurt.
It screams and screams and screams at him and Stiles runs until the sound fades and there’s nothing but silence and darkness and memories, and then he runs until he finds dawn.
xii.
Fingers trace up his spine, soft and lazy, under his shirt.
“Hey,” Stiles says.
“Good to have you back,” Derek says.
“I guess.”
They lay like that, Stiles blinking away sleep and Derek’s mouth soft and relaxed. The sun rises in the sky and they sink into the dirt, light pouring through the trees. The birds come back, and Stiles asks them to sing him anything but a lullaby.
Derek tells him: I couldn’t figure it out. Stiles says, “what?”, and Derek says, I didn’t know if it couldn’t get to you because you were scared of too much, of everything, or not scared of anything at all.
Stiles asks him if he figured it out. Derek says, “does it matter?”, and Stiles decides, no, not really. Not anymore.
xiii.
It’s late evening, and Stiles is tired. Lydia rests at his side, her hair tickling his skin, and Stiles remembers years spent between them, years he felt with every stitch in his bones, but she knows nothing of. He remembers their first kiss, their favourite restaurant. He tries not to stare at her hands, where he knows a ring should be.
Derek sits next to him on the floor, on their makeshift blanket fort. Boyd brought extra pillows, Isaac, blankets. He hands him a plate. Scott and Erica made pancakes. Jackson hangs back, awkwardly, until Lydia blows him a kiss and he slides next to her on the old mattress. Allison slips between Stiles’ legs and leans backwards. Stiles feels warm.
He takes a bite. They taste fine; soft and buttery.
Derek’s hand finds his where no-one can see, fingers wriggling into the spaces. He’s nothing but bones and skin, restless youth inside a body too big for him. Scott’s face tells him, you’ll grow into it. Stiles’ says he’s sorry, and this time, for the first time, he means it.
Somewhere, a clock strikes thirteen. But not here, not tonight.
He rests his head on Derek’s shoulder and drowns in a dreamless sleep.