Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What do you mean, he’s leaving?”

Lydia looked at him like he was a moron, which, admittedly, was not an unusual thing, and picked at her salad.

“I mean he’s leaving, Stiles,” she said, voice sharp but low so it wouldn’t carry across the cafeteria to any of the poor, innocent high-schoolers with no knowledge of the supernatural death match they had missed out on over the weekend. “After all the bullshit he just went through, can you blame him?”

She had a point there. Stiles’ jeep still had a sizable, Jackson-shaped dent in the hood from where he had mown Jackson down just three days ago. And that had been the least traumatic part of the whole debacle.

“Well, yeah,” Scott said around a mouthful of chicken nugget that made Lydia blink at him in disgust—and only Lydia could make something as simple as blinking convey such disdain. “But what about you?”

Lydia pursed her lips like she might not answer but eventually said, “What about me?”

Scott stared at her. Stiles did too, a bit.

“You’re his soulmate!” Scott said, as if she didn’t know that.

Everyone knew that and had for years. Lydia Martin and Jackson Whittemore were their generation’s resident Perfect Match and had been since they met on the first day of sixth grade. They were inseparable, practically joined at the hip (in every way imaginable) and they were going to be together forever and ever, amen. For Jackson to flee the country and leave Lydia behind? Unthinkable.

And yet Lydia was chewing on her tongue, stabbing at her salad without actually picking the fork back up to bring any of it to her mouth.

“Soulmates don’t always stay together, Scott,” she said tartly, which was an evasion if Stiles ever heard one. “Look at you and Allison.”

Scott winced, eyes straying unerringly to the far side of the cafeteria where Allison was sat alone at a table, her books spread out around her to discourage friendly overtures. Her hair was up in a haphazard bun, dark circles under her eyes. She looked exhausted, and she didn’t meet Scott’s eyes even though it was obvious from the tension in her shoulders that she knew he was looking.

“Allison and I will work it out,” Scott said with the kind of faith that always made Stiles exasperated and jealous in equal measure. “We’re soulmates! We’re literally perfect for each other, made to be together.”

Stiles made a disagreeing noise in his throat.

“That’s not exactly what it is, Scottie,” he said, and not for the first time because Scott was just too idealistic to bother with the nuances of real life sometimes. “Just because two people understand each other perfectly doesn’t mean they necessarily work as a couple. You can understand someone and still not want to be with them.”

Lydia pointed to him, raising her eyebrows at Scott in triumph. Scott just frowned.

“But you and Jackson do want to be together,” he said, getting back on topic. “You’ve been together for years. And now all of the sudden, Jackson’s just fine with leaving his soulmate behind?”

Lydia looked away. She was pale, paler than usual, with those same tired circles under her eyes as Allison; for all that Jackson had been the primary victim in the whole kanima mess, Lydia had fielded her share of attacks recently too and it showed. She huffed a sigh and threw down her fork, sending it clattering across the table.

“He’s not,” she said, glaring at the fork like it had run away of its own accord.

Stiles picked up the fork and held it out to her, laying it gently down on her neatly folded napkin when she didn’t take it from him.

“He’s not...leaving?” he asked, confused.

Lydia’s eyes were red-rimmed when they met his.

“He’s not my soulmate anymore,” she said, voice catching in her throat like she might actually cry right there in the cafeteria.

Stiles got his hand over Scott’s mouth just in time to muffle his shout of disbelief, swallowing his own down only because he honestly wasn’t that surprised; after all, soulmates changed when people did, usually after a life-changing event. Like a botched werewolf bite and subsequent mind-controlled murder spree. Scott just shoved him off and leaned in towards Lydia like proximity might make her words make more sense.

“Your name-mark changed?” he asked, unreasonably horrified over something that happened more often than not, truth be told.

Lydia wiped at her eyes, nodding.

“I noticed when I got home Friday night,” she said. “I was taking a bath and… His name has just always been there, you know? Ever since we were little, before we even met. And now it’s just…”

Stiles felt a chill down his spine, some of Scott’s horror creeping into his mind as well at the possibility that hung in the air.

Lydia seemed to notice their concern because she shook her head quickly.

“It’s not gone,” she said. “Well, his name is gone. I have a new soulmate now, apparently. Some guy named Jordan. I don’t know him yet but I guess I will eventually. And that’s fine. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with changing soulmates. It’s just...different.”

Stiles slumped back in his seat, nearly boneless with relief on Lydia’s behalf.

“Thank god,” Scott said. “For a minute there, I thought you’d say you had no soulmate at all.”

Lydia bit her lip, starting up again with the salad-stabbing.

“Lydia?” Stiles asked slowly. “What’s with the face?”

She sighed.

“I don’t think Jackson has another name,” she said, almost a whisper.

Scott dropped his most recent chicken nugget.

“We only talked over the phone,” Lydia went on, “but it was obvious that he was upset. More upset than he would’ve been if his soulmate had just changed, like mine. And really, it makes sense, you know? With everything that he went through? How many people could really understand that the way a soulmate should?”

“Wow,” Scott breathed out, chicken nugget forgotten in the face of Jackson’s terrible, pitiable fate. “Poor guy.”

Stiles had to agree. He might not like Jackson very much as a person, but he wouldn’t wish no-name status on anybody.

Stiles had known his soulmate since he was two years old. They had had playdates together long before they’d been old enough to read the names written on their inner thighs in freckle-brown letters. Stiles had learned how to spell Heather’s name before his own—and not only because his real name was a Polish nightmare of a key-smash—and Heather had made her mom research the pronunciation of his name to make sure she had it right. They were peas in a pod as kids and no one ever doubted that they would be together forever, least of all them.

When they were nine years old, the two of them had sat down to have a very serious talk about the whole soulmate business. They were both thoughtful children, for all Stiles’ hyperactivity and Heather’s unrelenting idealism, and they decided that it would be best if they had a chance to grow as individuals before they committed to each other for the rest of their lives. There was no worry, they said, because they were perfect for each other and they always would be.

Some day in the future, when they were grown ups and knew what was what, they would be together for real. They would have their happily ever after, just later, when they were old and wise enough to appreciate it.

So they went to separate schools and had different groups of friends and stayed in contact via texts and emails and facebook and birthday parties. And it was good. There was something immensely reassuring, Stiles found, in knowing that there was someone out there who loved him unconditionally, who knew him right down to his core and would always just get him even when no one else did. Even if he didn’t see her very often, she was still out there, waiting for him just like he was waiting for her. They didn’t even really miss each other, not in the sad kind of way, because it was only a matter of time before they were together again, but for real this time.

Stiles thought for a while, though, that maybe it would be better to wait even longer than they had planned. With all the werewolves and rogue alphas and psycho hunters and molotov cocktails that had suddenly invaded his life, all he could think sometimes was that he was glad Heather hadn’t been dragged into it too. The distance between them had kept her safe so far, maybe it would continue to keep her safe. Hardly anyone knew they were soulmates, after all, and it wasn't like anyone was directly targeting Stiles like they were Scott and Derek. Heather would be safe as long as Stiles kept her out of it.

But that wasn’t fair. Stiles knew that if she had kept him in the dark about something like this, he would be beyond pissed. She deserved to know, to have the choice to stand and fight like he did. To stand by his side through it all. And if she was perfect for him like their name-marks said she was, then Heather would be every bit as brave, clever, and strong as she needed to be to survive the onslaught. Stiles knew she was, and it was about time that he gave her the chance to prove it.

Stiles was going to tell her everything. It was her seventeenth birthday party and he was going to tell her about the werewolves and hunters and the things that went bump in the night and they were going to be together for real and be the most badass monster-fighting couple ever and it was going to be great.

Heather seemed to have the same idea. Well, sort of the same idea. The finally being together for real idea, at least, considering she practically jumped him as soon as he walked through the door. Not that he was complaining about that in any way at all. He would tell her all the scary stuff after the party.

Or he would have if she hadn’t run off. Rude, but not unforgivable or anything. They had been moving a little fast, after all, and they were still young. Maybe she had panicked and changed her mind and wanted a little more time before they did the do and all that. That was fine! Stiles could wait, no problem, even though he would’ve appreciated a conversation about it instead of a kiss-and-ditch situation. It was fine and she would probably call him later to apologize and he would maybe tell her about the crazy stuff then.

Except she didn’t call. She didn’t call and her parents hadn’t seen her in two days and there was a gnawing worry in the pit of Stiles’ stomach that he couldn’t ignore even when there were bodies turning up at pools and Lydia doing weird shit and an alpha pack being all menacing on the horizon. And when Stiles found her body in the hospital morgue, he didn’t even have it in him to be surprised.

The numb shock of it followed him through all the craziness of the next few weeks. Everything was too fast and too much and he didn’t have a single moment to fucking breathe, not with Deucalion the demon wolf and Ms. Blake the vengeful druid and Boyd dead on Derek’s unwilling claws and Scott off the rails and his dad in the kind of danger Stiles had tried so hard to keep him out of. It wasn’t until everything was over, all enemies defeated and the danger passed, that Stiles finally noticed.

Heather’s name was gone. He knew that, had known it for weeks, knew it deep in his gut where all the darkness of the last year had settled. But in his grief, he hadn’t quite comprehended the blank space where her name had been. Blank. Empty.

Nameless.

Heather was gone and no one could ever really replace her, but this felt different. He was no-name, completely alone in a way he had never been in his life. No one was out there waiting for him anymore, no unconditional love and acceptance, no other half to make him whole.

Stiles was only glad that the running of the shower covered up the sound of his panic attack when even the water going cold wasn’t enough to shock him out of it.

Stiles didn’t tell anyone. Not his dad, not Scott, no one.

It wasn’t that being no-name was a bad thing. It happened to plenty of people, good people, all the time, and it wasn’t usually permanent. People changed and their name-marks changed with them; everything was fluid, even fate. So it was fine that Stiles didn’t have a soulmate right now, really, it was. It was fine. Soon enough another name would take Heather’s place, like Jordan’s name had taken Jackson’s when his and Lydia’s bond was broken.

Until then he would just keep it to himself. It was better than seeing the same awful, horrified look on Scott’s face as he had a few months ago. Stiles didn’t want Scott or anyone else pitying him like they did Jackson, looking at him with those sad fucking puppy-dog eyes and lamenting his tragic fate. He didn’t fucking need that, not on top of the crushing weight of Heather’s absence and the even heavier burden of loneliness that came with the featureless stretch of pale skin where she had been.

Scott didn’t ask. Just this once, he opted for tact and just didn’t ask what had happened to Stiles’ name-mark in the wake of his soulmate’s death. Whether it was out of respect for Heather’s memory and Stiles’ grief or because he didn’t truly want to know the answer to that question, Stiles didn’t know, but he was grateful for it anyway. And Scott was the only one of his friends who had known about him and Heather, although the looks that Lydia gave him sometimes made him think she had guessed. She didn’t say anything either.

His dad, too, was blessedly tight-lipped about it, but the dimness in his eyes and the way his rough-worn hand pressed against the back of Stiles’ neck was almost too empathetic to bear; it harkened back to the days after the illness finally took his mother, when his dad had buried himself in bottles to numb the pain of it. For the first time, Stiles understood the impulse.

But he couldn’t let himself fall victim to that kind of addictive escapism, no matter how much wanted to, so he did what he did best: he kept busy.

He did his schoolwork diligently, picked up extra credit work when it was available, did assignments ahead of time only to trash them and do them all over from the beginning. He went to lacrosse practice and did drills until his head spun and his heart stuttered in his chest, then stayed late to do some more. He stole esoteric books from Deaton’s office and read them all twice, scoured the internet for reputable sources on mythological creatures, tried to sort out the bullshit from the true lore.

But more than anything, Stiles focused on his friends, the ones that were still around. He let Scott talk about Allison and how he would win her back eventually—even though every mention of soulmates and fated bonds and true love made his stomach churn—and did his best to be a good best friend, to be solid and supportive even with the more and more frequent nightmares that left him feeling like the rug was being pulled out from under his feet inch by inch, a little more every night.

And when Kira caught Scott’s eye, Stiles heaved an internal sigh of relief. Soulmate or not, Allison was adamant that they didn’t work together anymore, and Stiles couldn’t blame her for that. Sometimes soulmates just weren’t meant to be romantic, sometimes they didn’t make it, and that was supposed to be okay. If Scott could be happy with Kira, and Allison with Isaac, then one way or another Stiles could be happy without Heather. With every besotted look Scott and Kira shared, Stiles fought harder to believe that, to make the iron bands around his chest loosen enough for him to breathe again.

It was Derek who gave him that first breath of fresh air, and not in a way he would have expected. Stiles hadn’t told him about Heather, hadn’t told anyone, but apparently he hadn’t needed to. Derek had taken one look at him and sighed. He put a hand on Stiles’ shoulder, smiled in a way that was so fucking sad it made Stiles’ throat close up just to see it.

“It gets better,” Derek said, soft enough that not even the other wolves could overhear. “Never stops hurting completely, but it does get better.”

Derek had been no-name for nearly eight years, ever since Paige’s name had vanished and none had taken its place. He had no soulmate, no one who could truly understand what all he had been through, and yet here he still was. Still standing tall in the face of a world that had shit on him again and again. Always pushing forward, always fighting even with no fated mate to fight for.

“I know it feels like you’re alone,” Derek told him, still with that hand warm on his shoulder, fingertips digging into the muscle just enough to ground him. “But you’re not. You’ve got a dozen people who care about you, Stiles, soulmate or no. Don’t let yourself forget that.”

Stiles stared after Derek when he walked away, watched as he stood apart from the rest, with the pack but not really a part of it. He wondered if Derek took his own advice, if he realized that all the people who cared about Stiles cared about him too. Somehow Stiles doubted it, but Derek held his head high anyway, watching them all with something like pride, like he was glad to be there with them despite what it had taken to get him there.

Even alone, Derek was stronger than anyone else he knew. That was the kind of strength Stiles could aspire to, and not just with being no-name. With the fucking nightmares, the hallucinations, the constant surreal terror nipping at his heels and howling to be let in. If he could just make it through, just keep pushing like Derek did every day, then he would be fine.

So Stiles went to lacrosse practice and did his homework—or tried to, at least, when the letters didn’t chase each other off the page. He didn’t let his eyes stray to the jarringly unblemished skin of his inner thigh, clenched his hands to keep from brushing over where the letters used to be. He gave Scott pep talks—or he thought he did, could’ve sworn he did, maybe that had been a dream too—and watched Isaac make cow eyes at Allison.

He counted his fingers every time the world skewed too much and gritted his teeth against another scream when he reached eleven.

Stiles couldn’t sleep anymore. Or maybe the problem was that he couldn’t wake up, maybe it was all just one long nightmare and sometime soon he would wake up screaming to find that everything was fine and Allison was alive and he hadn’t spent the last however long as a meat puppet for chaos incarnate. But then, waking up hadn’t been very effective of late, so even if he did it wouldn’t do him a lot of good.

The world—what he thought he knew of it, at least—was in shades of blood-tinted grey and counting his fingers did no good when he knew he couldn’t trust them.

They weren’t his. And not in the sense that they had done awful, horrific things outside of his control—swords and blood and a rush of savage pleasure, perverse and unforgettable—but they weren’t his. Not his hands, not his face, not his body. Everything that he was was fake, a magical construct vomited up by a demon and left to approximate life in a world that didn’t make any fucking sense to him anymore. He couldn’t look in the mirror, couldn’t look at the thing he had become and see It staring back at him with his face.

Stiles didn’t tell his friends any of that either. Sometimes he thought he could still taste their fear, could feel it like a sick thrill in his gut. The way his dad seemed ready to dive headfirst into a bottle of Jack Daniels every time he looked at Stiles. The way Kira was skittish and nervous around him. The way Lydia flinched sometimes when she caught sight of him before reminding herself that it wasn’t the same him. The blank look in Scott’s eye and the palpable grief that Stiles knew all too well—the loss of a soulmate, though Stiles knew that Kira’s name had replaced Allison’s on Scott’s thigh.

None of them seemed to notice how Stiles watched them, searching out their fingers to count when he could because he knew his own were unreliable. How he stared at books and fought down panic when the words shimmered and shifted before eyes that didn’t quite see the way they used to. How he scratched, clawed at the skin that dared to claim itself as his when it wasn’t, wasn’t even real, wasn’t him at all but something foreign and wrong and inescapable.

Stiles did his best to forget about it, covered up as much of himself as possible in layers and layers of plaid just so he didn’t have to see himself. He still showered when he had to, because it drew unwanted attention to him when he started to offend the werewolves’ noses, even though all that vulnerable, traitorous skin on display made him sick to his stomach, made his borrowed head spin.

Or maybe that was exhaustion, hunger, whatever; he wasn’t sure how long it had been since his last meal, whether his last real awakening had been that morning or a month ago, but what did it really matter? Even with the Nogitsune dead—and him along with it, the real him, anyway—he was still in the nightmare.

The skin still felt the same, at least, still transmitted all the same signals of pain and pleasure even if it was all felt through the heavy felt blanket that seemed determined to smother him these days. When his hands rubbed soap across his stomach—unscarred from the evisceration he could still feel sometimes, the buzzing of flies loud in his ears—he could feel the slip and glide of it, up his chest to his neck, along his shoulder and down one arm to the other hand. He didn’t let himself linger there; if he did, he would scrub until he broke skin trying to wash away the remembered slick of blood and the fresh blood it brought would send him into a new panic.

The hands were dangerous territory in a lot of ways, so he avoided those as best he could. Better to focus on the innocuous things, the few parts of him that had never been used to kill and maim and torture. Legs were relatively safe. Feet were fine, no guilt to be had there. Knees that only shook sometimes, thighs as blank and featureless as alw—

Stiles nearly slipped and bashed his head in trying to get a closer look because there was no way he had just seen what he thought he did. That spot had been empty for months, ever since Heather, and it had been weeks since his latest life-changing experience; why would it change now? Or maybe it wasn’t just now. He hadn’t been looking, after all. He hadn’t liked the reminder of his no-name status, had studiously trained himself not to see the evidence of his isolation, and the Nogitsune had sealed the deal, he thought; who could possibly understand him now? He hadn’t thought about his own soulmate status in a long time.

When Stiles finally managed to contort himself the right way without causing injury, he stared. And then he stared some more, long enough for the water to grow cold around him, wondering if this was part of the dream. Finally he decided that it had to be real only because his subconscious was not creative enough to come up with this.

There, in freckle-brown letters stark against pale skin, was the name Jackson Whittemore.

Stiles checked his thigh again the next morning—assuming he was really awake this time; he didn’t remember going to sleep the night before—but it was still there. Every time he checked, even when he was sure he was dreaming, Jackson’s name was staring up at him, something between a threat and a light at the end of some tunnel. It took four days for Stiles to convince himself that this was real, in every sense, and not some twisted figment of his imagination. Then he made his decision.

Lydia flinched when she opened her front door to find him standing there, disheveled and pyjama-clad and a rolled-out-of-bed type of non-threatening, and Stiles couldn’t help but step back, ready to throw it all away and leave right now if that’s what she wanted. But she frowned at her own reaction, raised her head and smiled at him determinedly, and that helped to remind Stiles that it wasn’t him she was afraid of, not really. That hadn’t been him, he wasn’t the Nogitsune, wasn’t what it had made of him.

She let him in, led him up to her room and sat primly on her bed, a queen holding court even in sweats and a t-shirt.

“What’s up?”

Stiles hesitated, clenching his hands in the extra fabric of his pyjama pants to keep them from straying to places that were sort of inappropriate in a public context just to check; what if it had disappeared? What if he had imagined it after all and he would find only pale skin and nothingness if he looked one more time?

No, he had made sure. He had checked over and over again, wasted days in pursuit of some kind of certainty. He was as sure as he could be of anything nowadays that Jackson Whittemore was his new soulmate. That was why he was here, standing like a moron in Lydia’s room with her staring at him and looking more and more concerned the longer he didn’t say anything. He opened his mouth to speak, had to clear his throat and try again.

“Do you still talk to Jackson?”

That was obviously not even on the spectrum of things Lydia had expected to hear from him, not that Stiles could blame her for that. He was still having trouble believing it too, and not just because reality was a relative thing by now. It was just...Jackson.

“Jackson?” Lydia echoed his thoughts, one eyebrow raised skeptically.

“Yes, Jackson,” Stiles repeated. “Are you still in contact with him?”

Lydia nodded slowly.

“Of course,” she said. “We were soulmates for a long time. We didn’t just stop caring about each other when the bond broke. We talk sometimes.”

“Good. Great. Um…”

Stiles scratched at the back of his neck, the strangeness of the moment translating into a physical sensation itching all over him, screaming at him that none of this could possibly be real. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, ignored it as best he could.

“I need to talk to him,” he forced out.

Lydia’s mouth fell open.

“You what?”

Stiles rolled his eyes, impatient; he had really been hoping that she would be quicker on the uptake, or at least that she wouldn’t ask questions. But of course she would, she was Lydia. She always wanted a hundred and ten percent of all the information on any given situation, especially ones brought directly to her doorstep.

“I need to talk to Jackson,” he reiterated through gritted teeth. “Is there a number I can call?”

“Why?” Lydia asked, eyes narrowed.

Stiles gripped his pant leg again, tighter; he wasn’t up for an interrogation right now. His skin was crawling, his head hurt from exhaustion, and he just needed to know that, in this if nothing else, he wasn’t crazy. He couldn’t get that from Lydia, no matter how smart and wonderful she was. The only person who could give him that was Jackson.

“Will you give me the number or not?” he snapped.

Lydia blinked at him in a different kind of surprise, this one tinged with hurt, and Stiles bit his tongue until it bled; it wasn’t the first time he had lashed out at someone recently, even though they were just trying to help. He couldn’t seem to stop himself nowadays, but he still felt like a giant sack of dog shit every time he did it. He was just so goddamn angry, all the time about everything, and it scared him. He could feel it sometimes, that anger, like a separate entity boiling inside him and fighting to get out. It was like the Nogitsune all over again, only entirely of his own making this time.

Lydia’s hand, small and cool on his arm, made him jump.

“Stiles, what’s going on?” she asked, gentler than her data-mining voice.

“Nothing,” Stiles lied. “I just need to talk to Jackson.”

Lydia let out a soft sigh, her disappointment clear, and Stiles turned his face away. Her hand tightened for a second, nails sharp against the softness of his inner forearm, before she let go.

“Fine,” she said shortly. “But eventually you’re going to tell me everything. Because it’s definitely something.”

Stiles thought about protesting again, but she had already snatched his phone out of his pocket and there wasn’t really any point in arguing with Lydia Martin anyway. He watched wordlessly as she programmed a number into his contact list.

“Long distance rates apply,” she warned him, as if that would deter him. Then she held the phone out but snatched it back when he reached for it, face expectant.

“Fine, I promise,” Stiles said, too tired to fight anymore. “I’ll tell you, I will, just...not now, okay?”

He must have looked like a kicked puppy or something because Lydia’s pursed-lip look melted away.

“Okay, sweetie.” She leaned up to press a kiss to his forehead and put the phone in his hand, squeezing his fingers in hers for a moment. “Get some sleep, Stiles.”

Stiles gave her a wan smile and let her shepherd him to the front door and out. He sat in his jeep in her driveway for a long time, clutching the phone in his hand and wishing it were that easy.

It took Stiles another two weeks to work up the courage to actually make the call. Two weeks of curious, impatient glances from Lydia and waiting to get the same from the others even though she swore she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else. Two weeks of his friends’ vague concern over his new twitchiness on top of all his other behavioral issues, though no one risked asking directly. Two weeks of checking his phone again and again to make absolutely sure that the number was still there, that he hadn’t dreamed it up.

It came down to fear if he was honest with himself, which he had taken to being if only because he could never be completely sure that anyone else was at this point. He was afraid to call Jackson because what if he didn’t have a matching name-mark? What if some celestial wires got crossed and Jackson was Stiles’ soulmate but Stiles wasn’t his and he told Stiles to fuck off? Or what if Jackson told him that he was still no-name and it turned out that Stiles was just so lonely and pathetic that it was all one long, self-pity-induced delusion?

But he had to know. He needed to know one way or another or he would keep thinking himself in circles, drive himself even crazier than he already was, which he really couldn’t afford to do with his grip on sanity tenuous at best these days. And wouldn’t it be worth it in the end, if he was right? If it was true and he had a soulmate again, someone who could understand him completely, wouldn’t that be worth any risk?

If Jackson matched, that is. If he cared. Hell, maybe Jackson had noticed the mark change months ago and just ignored it because he was disgusted at the prospect of having Stiles as his soulmate; they had never exactly gotten along before, were always at each other’s throats, always fighting. But there was an equal chance that he had just not seen the new name-mark, like Stiles.

Stiles had his phone in hand before he could talk himself out of it again. His dad had just left for another back-to-back night shift—anything, apparently, to get away from his son, to get out of the oppressive atmosphere that had descended on their house—and he was sat on his bed alone, staring down the barrel of yet another night of finger-counting and over-thinking if he didn’t do something.

He pressed the little green call button.

It rang for a worryingly long time, long enough for Stiles to decide twice that he was going to hang up and then change his mind both times. By the time a familiar voice came over the line, Stiles was considering throwing himself out his bedroom window and wondering if he would die or just wake up again.

“Who is this? How did you get this number?”

Jackson sounded just the way he used to, snappish and demanding. Stiles swallowed hard, all his words tangled up and lodged in his throat now that he had his opening. The hand holding his phone was shaking.

“Hello? Whoever you are, you shouldn’t have this number,” Jackson said. “If you keep calling, I’ll—”

“I got it from Lydia,” Stiles choked out because it sounded like Jackson was going to hang up and he would never be able to make the call again if he let that happen, he just wouldn’t.

There was a pause where Stiles held his breath and waited for the click of disconnect, but it didn’t come.

“Stilinski?” Confused, disbelieving.

Stiles cleared his throat, gripping one of his pillows hard enough for an uneven fingernail to make a run in the fabric.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

“Why the hell are you calling me?”

Stiles closed his eyes; now or never.

“I need you to check your name-mark.”

That statement was met with stunned silence. Not unexpected, but not promising either. And it gave Stiles far too much time to panic. He took deep, slow breaths to force it down; there was no reason to freak out just yet, none at all, no reason to—

“What the fuck, Stilinski?”

Stiles heart dropped. Jackson sounded angry. Like, really genuinely angry, which was not one of the reactions that Stiles was mentally prepared for.

“I always knew you were kind of a jerk, Stilinski,” Jackson spat, “but I never thought of you as cruel. Did you seriously call me up just to rub my no-name status in my face?”

“No!” Stiles said immediately, knocking his pillow off the bed entirely as he scrambled forward like he could actually physically reach out over the phone somehow. “No, Jackson, that’s not what I’m doing at all!”

“I don’t need this shit, okay?” Jackson said, talking over him. “This is the whole reason I left in the first place, so dicks like you wouldn’t have the chance to—”

“I wouldn’t, Jackson, I swear! I would be the last person to mock you for this.”

“Oh really?” Jackson sneered. “And why’s that?”

“Because I’ve been no-name for months, okay?”

The words almost got stuck on their way to his mouth, coming out strangled and hoarse; he realized abruptly that he had never said it out loud before.

“My soulmate died,” he pushed on—another first—because he needed Jackson to understand. And Jackson should understand, if this was all real and not just the start to a whole new kind of nightmare. “She was...she was murdered. Ritually sacrificed, actually. Back in September.”

“Oh.”

Stiles snatched his pillow back off the floor, wrapping his free arm around it and holding it tight against his stomach, over the place where the shard of Noshiko’s tail had pierced his other body. Somehow this felt more invasive.

“I get it, okay? It sucks, being alone,” he said, his voice breaking. “I would never do anything to make that worse for you, man, I promise.”

There was a shuffling noise like maybe Jackson was sitting down on his bed too. Stiles shifted to the edge of his, hoping that having ground under his feet would make him feel more solid, less unmoored. It didn’t really work, but there was something comforting in having a physical parallel between them, even if it was only in his imagination.

“Look, I’m sorry or whatever,” Jackson said eventually. “About your soulmate. But what does that have to do with me?”

“I told you,” Stiles said. “I need you to check your name-mark.”

Jackson huffed.

“Why the hell should I? There’s nothing there, there hasn’t been in over a year.”

“Jackson, please, just—”

Stiles cut himself off, running a hand through his hair and pulling hard. He was getting that feeling again, the itching, creeping numbness that threatened to drag him down and lock him away. He pulled on his hair harder, needing the sting to keep him focused for another few minutes. Just long enough to get his answer.

“Please, can you just check?”

“Hey, are you okay?” Jackson asked, stilted and awkward. “I can hear your heartbeat going nuts.”

Stiles laughed a bit, strangled and a little hysterical; he was surrounded by werewolves on a daily basis and the only one to really notice his distress was the one on another continent. Maybe the others were just too used to it by now, like the frog in boiling water only he was the frog.

“I don’t know,” he said, honest for once. “I don’t— Please.”

Jackson sighed, and it wasn’t in the melodramatic way he used to, either, but a real, genuinely tired-sounding sigh.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine, I’ll fucking check.”

More shuffling of fabric, a staticky crackle that was probably Jackson putting the phone down on the bed, the metallic snick of a zipper being pulled. Stiles clutched at the side of his bed until the tips of his fingers throbbed with his heartbeat, counting the pulses and timing his breaths to them as he waited. He got up to twenty-six before he heard a muffled, “What the fuck…”

Then there was a lot of white noise that he assumed was Jackson scrambling to pick the phone back up and get it to his ear.

“What the fuck, Stilinski?”

“Is it there?” Stiles asked, and he didn’t have it in him anymore to be ashamed of how desperate he sounded.

“How the— That’s not possible! I was no-name for a reason, no one should—”

“My name, is it there?” Stiles asked again, voice cracking.

“Yes, but it shouldn’t b—”

The tears hit Stiles like an oncoming train, as painful as they were unexpected. He stuffed his fist into his mouth to try and muffle the sound but there was no way Jackson didn’t hear, not with his werewolf ears and not when the sobs made Stiles’ ribcage ache with the force of them.

Stiles’ numb fingers gave up their grip on the phone and it fell as he bent forward, head between his knees like that could somehow stem the flood now that the dam was broken, but the tears just kept coming because they matched. They matched and he wasn’t nameless anymore. He had a soulmate again, but this time that soulmate was Jackson Whittemore and Jackson didn’t want him and never would and even with fate on his side, Stiles was still alone.

He had been wrong before, when he’d thought this would be worth the risk. How had he not realized how much his soulmate’s rejection would shatter him? He should have seen this coming—it was Jackson, for fuck’s sake—but he hadn’t and now he would be left to pick up what pieces of himself were left. He wondered if he would be able to put them back together or if every bit of him was already too broken to fit.

By the time the waterworks died down and he could finally get some breath back into his starving lungs, feeling cramped and raw and like they didn’t quite fit inside him, Stiles expected Jackson to be gone. Surely he had hung up, disgusted by Stiles’ neediness, driven away by the pathetic weakness he had seen in Stiles even back in freshman year. But when Stiles wiped at his face with the back of his hands, rubbing at gritty eyes until he saw stars—because at least those were the innocuous kind of hallucination—he could have sworn he heard a voice, tinny and indistinct. He squinted down at his rumpled bedding for a moment, doubting his senses even more than he usually did, but he heard it again.

Stiles threw his comforter back, hands already scrambling amongst sheets and pillows, but there was a clunk and a muffled thunk that told him the phone had gotten thrown somewhere. He found it stuck down between his bed and the wall and scraped the back of his hand on the siding as he fished it out again.

“Stiles?” Jackson was saying, and his voice was hoarse like maybe he’d been saying it over and over again, loud and insistent, trying to get his attention. “Stiles, are you still there?”

“Yes,” Stiles said, letting the side of his face rest against the wall where it was cool and soothing and stable. “Yeah, I’m—I’m here.”

He heard Jackson give a shaky sigh.

“Jesus, Stiles,” he said. “What the hell happened to you?”

And wasn’t that just the million dollar question? Heat crept up the back of Stiles’ neck, a flush of shame. He dragged himself upright, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the ruined mess that was his bed, and sniffed.

“How much has Lydia told you?” he asked.

“Not much,” Jackson said, sounding strangely subdued now. “We don’t really talk about Beacon Hills stuff.”

Stiles could understand that. If he had gotten away, gotten out, then he wouldn’t want to know anything about this place either. He would do anything to keep from getting dragged back in, would cut all ties if he had to, drop everything and never look back. Jackson was the lucky one, really, and Stiles couldn’t honestly say that he hadn’t contemplated following in his footsteps and hopping on a fucking plane. But he couldn’t do that to Scott, to his dad, to Derek and Lydia and Malia. He couldn’t leave them all behind to fend for themselves, even if it killed him to stay. And with the way things were going, it was looking more and more likely that it would.

“It’s, uh...sort of a long story,” he said. “Does it matter?”

He didn’t want to tell it. He didn’t want to drag it all up again, try and force it into some kind of coherent narrative when so much of it was still a blur of horror and fear, for the sake of someone who didn’t really care. Jackson had never had any sympathy for him or his problems before, why should that change now? Name-marks didn’t mean all that much if the people marked didn’t want to make it work, so there was no point in going into his sob story. Stiles would only end up doubly hurt; he didn’t know why he had even made this call in the first place.

But then Jackson said, “Of course it matters!” And by some miracle, he sounded like he meant it.

Stiles had to pull the phone away from his ear to check that he was still connected to the person he thought he was. Jackson’s name was on the screen, however little sense that made. His head gave a particularly unhappy throb and he tried the eye-rubbing thing again. It didn’t do anything to alleviate the growing pain, sharp and real in the one moment he might have actually welcomed the feeling of bodily disconnect he had come to dread so much, nor the anger that rose up to drown the hollowed out feel of exhaustion both mental and physical.

“What do you even care, Jackson?” he bit out. “You don’t want me as your soulmate, so why should you—”

“I never said that.”

Stiles’ next words died a quick death before they made it past his lips. His breath gusted out of him like he was a deflating balloon, taking his anger with it.

“But you...you just said I shouldn’t be.”

Shouldn’t be Jackson’s soulmate, shouldn’t be taking up space on Jackson’s skin where he wasn’t wanted.

“I didn’t mean it like that, I meant—” Jackson stammered, tripping over his words in a way Stiles had never heard before.

Stiles bit his lip, scratching a hand through his hair again and no doubt leaving it sticking up all over.

“Meant what?”

“I just meant…I mean, you know what happened to me,” Jackson said. “After the kanima and everything, I was no-name because no one could possibly know what it was like. Soulmates are supposed be able to understand each other, but this. Jesus, Stiles, what happened to you to make you understand all that?”

Stiles fought to swallow against the tightness in his throat, eyes stinging like they would tear up again if they could.

“There, uh...there might have been a possession involved,” he confessed. “Lot of fighting and bloodshed, you know, the usual.”

Jackson swore, quietly but with a lot of feeling, then said, “And now we’re—?”

“Yeah, seems like. Sorry.”

Because apologizing felt like something Stiles should do, though he wasn’t quite sure why. For forcing this connection on Jackson? For butting into Jackson’s self-imposed exile and dragging him back into the Beacon Hills drama? For getting possessed and getting them in this mess in the first place?

“No, I’m sorry,” Jackson said, successfully shocking Stiles out of his shame spiral in a way nothing else could. “I know how awful all that is. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Stiles sniffed again and picked at a loose thread on the cuff of his pyjama pants, tugging on it until it bunched up the fabric around it. He didn’t really know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. That was sort of his go-to response lately, so very different from his previous fake-it-til-you-make-it style of rambling to relieve the tension.

Jackson cleared his throat.

“So are you...okay?” he asked slowly, like he wasn’t sure how to form the unfamiliar words. “I mean, how are you, you know, coping?”

Stiles laughed, unable to stop himself.

“I’m not,” he said through his inappropriate chuckling. “I’m really, really not. God, I am so fucked up, I can’t even tell you.”

There was silence on the other end of the line and Stiles thought maybe he’d finally scared Jackson off, sent him running for the hills like Stiles expected from the start. Then—

“I’m booking a flight home.”

“What? ” Stiles yelped, nearly knocking his elbow on his bedside table in his flail of surprise.

“I said I’m booking a flight,” Jackson repeated, like it would be less bizarre the second time.

“Yes, I did hear you say those words,” Stiles said, “but what I do not understand is why.”

“Because you’re my soulmate,” Jackson said with something of his old haughty possessiveness sneaking back into his tone. “And believe it or not, that means something to me. I’m not going to let my soulmate go through something like this alone.”

Stiles mouth worked soundlessly as his tired, overwrought brain struggled to catch up with what was happening. Something of his distress must have carried over anyway because Jackson made a quiet noise that might have been frustration.

“Look, I know we’ve never exactly been the best of friends,” he said with a gentleness that sounded odd and out of place in a voice Stiles had only ever heard angry or disdainful before. “And I know that was more my fault than yours. I was a real jackass back then, to everyone, for a lot of stupid, immature reasons. And I was a shit soulmate to Lydia, I realize that now. I don’t want to make that same mistake again.”

“You actually want… You’re not, like, mad or anything?” Stiles asked faintly. “Earlier, you said you were no-name for a reason.”

“Not because I don’t want a soulmate,” Jackson said. “Because I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I did or feel the way I do. But you did and you do, and I can’t change that. All I can do is try to help in whatever way I can. I can be a better soulmate to you than I was to Lydia.”

“You really want that?” Stiles asked, disbelieving. There was a dangerous swelling in his chest of something he hadn’t felt in a long time, something like hope. He didn’t know what to do with it.

“I want to try. If you’ll let me.”

Stiles bit his fist to fight down another laugh; as if he would turn down his literal soulmate, the person destined to be his perfect fit. Just the thought of having someone like that, someone who didn’t look at him like he was some alien thing to be handled with the utmost caution or otherwise avoided, was dizzying. He had to clear his throat twice before he could answer.

“I think I’d like that.”

Chapter Text

Stiles couldn’t hide it from the pack after that. Not only because he had promised to tell Lydia everything—and finally did so after she came to his house and backed him into a corner with her finely manicured and very pointy fingernail digging threateningly into his chest—but because Jackson was actually coming back. He was leaving London and coming back to Beacon Hills just for Stiles, so that they could maybe be something. And as tempting as it was to keep it to himself and let Jackson just show up one day, Stiles figured it would probably be best to give the pack a heads-up about it.

He wasn’t sure what reaction he was expecting, but the several seconds of open-mouthed staring from the pack members who had known Jackson before he left was both intensely awkward and a little bit insulting. Those who hadn’t known him were obviously confused by Scott’s shock and bafflement, but they just smiled and nodded and offered him bemused congratulations on his new soulmate, whoever he was.

Derek was the first to ask whether Jackson intended to join the pack, whether he even wanted anything to do with them, which made sense. Derek had been the one to bite Jackson, which hadn’t exactly gone to plan, and then he had very deliberately tried to kill him (and Lydia) multiple times. If Jackson wanted nothing to do with Derek, he would be pretty justified in that, and he had had issues with Scott long before the whole werewolf thing started. Joining the pack would mean submitting to him, acknowledging Scott as his alpha, which he may well not be willing to do.

Stiles didn’t have an answer to give them on that front, so he just shrugged.

He had no idea what Jackson would do when he got back. He would join them back at BHHS for their senior year, but it was summer break now so they didn’t have to worry about that yet. The Whittemores, for whatever reason—Stiles hadn’t asked—had elected to stay in London and let their son come back alone, so Jackson would be staying in the Stilinskis’ guest bedroom for the time being, under custody of the Sheriff until he turned eighteen and could get an apartment of his own. It was all very quick and very strange and Stiles didn’t know what to do but go along with it and hope for the best.

So now here he was, standing in the airport terminal, checking the text from Jackson one more time to make sure he was in the right place, and waiting for the plane to disembark. Everything was big and loud and busy, so Stiles kept his head down and his eyes on his shoes, nudging along the pattern of the terrible airport carpet and following the garish swirls across the floor until he lost track of which was which and had to start over.

The thump of a suitcase on the floor to his left made him jump, the conditioning of the last two years insisting he was under attack, but there was no threat. It was only Jackson in jeans and a green peacoat, hair gelled to perfection and hands stuffed in his pockets, standing there and looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Uh, hi,” Stiles said, once he realized that this was the point in the interaction where he was probably supposed to say something. What he said was lame, but it was, in fact, something. He tried to think of more—some kind of welcome, or a thank you for coming maybe?—but came up empty.

He cursed himself; it had been so easy on the phone. Well, not easy, per se, considering the topic of discussion and how much crying had been involved, but it had been a hell of a lot easier with some distance between them. Actually seeing Jackson in the flesh, standing face to face with him, was a whole ‘nother experience. The face carried a lot more memories with it than the voice did, especially when the voice had been soft and new and different.

“Hi,” Jackson echoed, very much the same old Jackson from before, snobbish and faintly mocking. His eyes roved over Stiles from head to toe, that one eyebrow still hiked up. “You look like shit, Stilinski.”

Stiles swallowed.

“Thanks.”

Well, this was off to a great start so far. And it wasn’t likely to get any better if they just stood there and stared at each other, so Stiles grabbed the handle of Jackson’s fancy rolling suitcase and turned back toward where he had parked. The damn thing was heavy though, and it caught on every crease in that stupid, ugly carpet. He gave it a frustrated yank and accidentally tipped it over entirely, tripping over one of the wheels and nearly sending himself sprawling.

Jackson huffed and snatched the handle back from him, gesturing expansively for Stiles to lead the way unhindered. Stiles bit his tongue and walked, head ducked low so maybe Jackson wouldn’t see the flush of embarrassment high on his cheeks.

Yeah, this was going great.

The ride back to town was quiet. Uncomfortably so. Jackson didn’t even complain about the jeep, which had been one of his favorite pastimes ever since Stiles had started driving it. He just sat in the passenger seat with his phone in hand, occasionally glancing over at Stiles but never saying anything. Stiles nearly bit clean through his tongue to keep from telling him to just take a picture because that was not the way he wanted to start this thing off. They were going to try. Jackson had only just got here, it was normal for them both to be a little wrong-footed. They had plenty of time to get better at this. Whatever it was.

His dad was waiting in the entryway when they got to the house, ready with a pasted-on smile and a handshake.

“It’s good to see you back in town, kid,” he said in his Official Business voice, as if Jackson were some important person he needed to schmooze instead of his son’s frenemy-turned-grudging-soulmate.

Jackson shook his hand and said, “Thanks for putting me up,” with an equally forced expression of politeness.

“No problem,” the Sheriff said with a shake of his head. Then he paused. “That, uh, restraining order, though. That’s been cleared up, right?”

Stiles could see the clench of Jackson’s jaw even from behind him.

“Taken care of, sir.”

“Then we’re all set. You’ve got the run of the house, you’re welcome to anything in the fridge, and the guest room is all set up for you.”

Jackson thanked him again and accepted another handshake because neither of them seemed to know what else to do in the excruciatingly uncomfortable moment.

Stiles stayed where he was, his back against the closed front door. His dad didn’t acknowledge him, but then that was par for the course lately. Ignoring problems until they went away was an inherited trait, it seemed, and one that had definitely come from his dad’s side of the family. Stiles—and all the pain, fear, and cognitive dissonance that came with him—had become a problem his dad didn’t know how to solve and was therefore best swept under the rug.

Stiles didn’t begrudge him that, didn’t fight for his dad’s attention, because the avoidance was better than the drinking that inevitably happened when his dad tried with him. His dad already felt enough like a failure without Stiles rubbing it in his face that nothing he tried to do for his son helped. Let his dad not look too closely if it helped him pretend that Stiles was maybe, somewhat, kind of okay. It was better for both of them that way. It wasn’t like Stiles remembered how to talk to his dad normally anyway.

It was Jackson who said his name, turning back to him and jerking his head toward the stairs. Stiles licked his dry lips, pushed upright, skirted around his dad in the small space of the entryway without making eye contact. Jackson followed him up without commenting on how ratty the wallpaper got up here, rolling suitcase thumping loudly on every step.

“Bathroom’s there,” Stiles said, gesturing to an open door halfway down the hall. “That’s me. And you’re in here.” More pointing, to his room and the guest bedroom respectively. Then his hands fell to his sides, swinging back and forth a few times until he made them stop.

Jackson was still watching him, eyes flitting back and forth between his face and his restless hands in a way that only made Stiles want to fidget more.

“It’s late,” Stiles said abruptly, needing to get out from under those eyes before he crawled out of his skin—before it started to feel like not his, like something else, like it would crawl away on its own—and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m gonna go ahead and...go, um. Sleep. Dad’s got a shift so just...lemme know if you need anything, or whatever.”

He escaped into his room without waiting for a response and leaned against the door for a long time, wondering why the fuck they had thought this was a good idea. He had to strip off his pants and trace the name on his inner thigh with his fingertips to make sure, just one more time, that they hadn’t gotten this wrong. He took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out slowly enough to make his head spin. Then he flipped off the lights and climbed into bed, straining to hear the soft sounds of Jackson in the next room and praying to whatever god there might be that he wouldn’t sleep that night.

The hoarseness of his own screams was almost pleasant after the slick sound of torn flesh that echoed through his dreams, the death rattle of a hundred friends or more as they piled up at his feet. Stiles fought against the darkness that twined around his limbs like a physical force, the roots of the Nemeton reaching out to strangle him, to drag him down into the river of blood that flowed from Allison’s open mouth as she lay dead in Scott’s arms, eyes glassy and empty and damning.

He fought and he kicked and he screamed, trying to get free, escape, drown out the noise of the Nogitsune’s creaking laugh in his ear, but the pressure on his limbs didn’t disappear. There was a weight across his chest, steady and insistent, and warmth around his wrists that stopped his blows from connecting with anything. And when his voice gave out, screams giving way to raspy pleas, he heard a new voice, louder than the dusty mutter of demons in the dark.

“Sh, sh, Stiles, it’s okay,” it said. “It’s okay, you’re safe. You’re fine, I’ve got you.”

Stiles clutched at the arm around his waist—not the Nemeton’s root like he had thought, or the Nogitsune, or even his dad—and gasped in as much air as he could get, air that smelled like teenage boy and fabric softener instead of copper tang and acrid fear. The breath came out on a sob, harsh and violent and as sharp as the blade the Nogitsune had wielded with his hands, and Jackson tightened his hold.

“You’re awake,” he said, low and insistent, lips pressed right behind Stiles’ ear where he could feel the movement of them, feel the warmth of breath across his flushed skin, sheened with cold sweat. “You’re awake, Stiles, and you’re safe. You’re just in your room, Stiles. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t real. This is real, okay? I’m real and I’m right here. You’re not alone.”

Another sob forced its way out of Stiles’ throat, this one of relief. His struggles slowed and then stopped, the rush of adrenaline leaving him shaky and dizzy, and it was all he could do to turn his head and bury it in Jackson’s shoulder. Jackson let him burrow closer, shifted around so that he could pull Stiles into his lap like he would a child, wrapped both arms around him and held on tight.

It was another minute or two before Stiles realized that he was talking, babbling through the tears he could never hold at bay after a nightmare like that.

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “God, I’m sorry, I can’t—”

He said it over and over again, muffling the words in the thin cotton of Jackson’s t-shirt when he found that he couldn’t stop them from coming.

Jackson just rubbed his back, apparently unconcerned by the mess Stiles was making with his tears or the vise grip Stiles had on him, tight enough that it would leave bruises for days on a human but probably not enough to really hurt a werewolf.

“Sh, Stiles,” he said again, reaching up to pet his hair. “It’s okay. It was just a nightmare, but it’s over and you’re safe.”

He was right, of course. There was no blood here, no bodies, no mummified corpse whispering taunts or evil magic tree invading his mind. There was just his bed, comforter thrown off and sheets twisted and sweat-soaked, his desk and chair, posters on the walls and bookshelves full of knick-knacks. Just him and Jackson, wrapped up together in the dark because Stiles had lost his fucking mind over a stupid goddamn nightmare, again.

Stiles tried to pull back, to peel himself away from the heat of Jackson’s body and maybe preserve a tiny shred of his dignity—as if he had any of that left by now—but Jackson didn’t let go of him. He just tightened his hold, one hand on Stiles’ waist and the other on the back of his neck to keep him where he was, and leaned in to rub his cheek against Stiles’ throat. It was a very wolfy thing to do, and surprising enough in its intimacy that Stiles drew in a sharp breath.

This time when Stiles leaned back, Jackson loosened his grip, though he didn’t let go of him entirely. He kept Stiles’ hand, his own trailing down the length of Stiles’ arm to take hold of it. Stiles stared down at it, squinting at the faint silhouette of their fingers tangled together on his mattress.

“Sorry,” he said again, sniffing, glad for the darkness of the room so that Jackson couldn’t see what a wreck he was, red-faced and splotchy and gross. Then he remembered that, with his wolfy eyes, he probably could and ducked his head further. “I, uh. I probably should’ve warned you that happens sometimes.”

Jackson squeezed his hand.

“I figured it would,” he said. “I have them too.”

Stiles looked up at him then, but it was too dark for him to make out Jackson’s face. He pulled his sleeve down over his free hand and wiped it over his own cheeks, scrubbing at the wetness until his skin felt raw. His throat felt worse, like he had swallowed sandpaper; he was used to the sensation by now, but that didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

“Sorry I woke you up,” he whispered. “It, uh, it won’t be the last time. I’m sorry, I can find you a hotel in the morning, or maybe someone else has a room that you can—”

He tried to tug his hand out of Jackson’s, to release Jackson from his stop-Stiles-from-hurting-himself-in-his-completely-irrational-panic obligations, but he didn’t get more than a millimeter before Jackson was rolling his eyes so hard that even Stiles and his weak, night-blind eyes could see it.

“Shut up, Stilinski, don’t be stupid,” he said. Then he reeled Stiles back in, pulling him flush against his chest and manhandling them both down onto the bed properly. “Now go back to sleep.”

Within the span of maybe two seconds, Stiles found himself lying on his side, under the covers, being aggressively spooned. Jackson was pressed up behind him from chest to knees, a solid and undeniably real presence, with his chin hooked over Stiles’ shoulder and both arms wrapped firmly around his stomach. Stiles stared blankly at the wall for a moment, too exhausted and stunned to process it all.

“Jackson,” he started, “you don’t have to—”

“Shut up,” Jackson said again, gruff. “And stop apologizing. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

Stiles let out all his breath at once, the last of the terror-induced tension leeching out of his muscles until he felt boneless and sore all over. Tentatively, his hand found where Jackson’s were linked together over his stomach, tracing the ridges of his knuckles. Surrounded by the warmth of another body and with Jackson’s heartbeat slow and steady against his back, Stiles was starting to feel the pull of sleep again, which surprised him; he could never sleep after a nightmare like that, no matter how hard he tried. Dreams like that were the reason he usually slept maybe twenty hours in a week these days.

But his eyes were closing, his thoughts going slow and fuzzy in a way that was pleasant instead of frightening for once. He let himself relax completely in Jackson’s arms, let his thumb rub circles into the back of Jackson’s hand, and muttered, “Thank you,” into the dark quietly enough that Jackson could reasonably pretend he didn’t hear.

Instead he got a quiet, “Go to sleep, Stiles.”

And, by some miracle, he did.

Stiles woke up slowly—a wholly unfamiliar experience by now—awareness coming back to him sense by sense: the glow of mid-morning sunlight through closed eyelids, rosy and soft and just bright enough to sting after the blackness of sleep; the scratch-sweep sensation of cotton sheets against the skin of his back where his shirt had ridden up; the peeping of a bird somewhere to his right, probably perched on the tree outside his window, and the distant rumble of traffic; the familiar scent of his favorite pillow where his face was mashed into it.

It was the first time in a long time that Stiles had woken naturally, without the cold jolt of fear and disorientation that had followed him into what may or may not have been the waking world for the last however long it had been since this whole thing started. There was none of that in this moment, no doubt about where he was or what was happening. He was in his bedroom, waking up from a peaceful sleep like the normal person he used to be.

The only cause for confusion was that he was alone in his bed. He could have sworn he remembered Jackson coming in last night—Jackson holding him, gentling him like a startled horse, petting his hair and murmuring reassurances, talking him down and telling him it was okay—but there were no arms around him now. Stiles sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and wondering if that part had been a dream. If so, then at least it had been a nice one. He could use more nice dreams like that.

But the pillow beside his had a head-shaped dent in it and when he ran his hands over the rumpled sheets behind him, they were still warm to the touch. So Jackson had definitely been there, and not long ago. Stiles let out a sigh of relief, a ball of something warm and sweet settling into his stomach because that happened. Jackson’s presence had actually given him a good night’s sleep. Scott hadn’t managed that, or Malia, or even his dad. But Jackson had.

Maybe there was something to this whole soulmate bond after all.

Stiles clambered out of bed regretfully, half-wishing he could sink back into it and find more of that actual rest that had eluded him for so long. A glance at his bedside clock told him that he had been out for seven hours straight—he hadn’t slept that much in a single night in weeks, months even. With a jaw-cracking yawn, Stiles lifted his arms over his head, leaning one way and then the other. Every muscle in his body, sore from the tension he carried with him like a coat, protested the movement but the stretch felt sinfully good. A last shake of his head and he was officially awake.

Stiles went through his normal morning bathroom routine and made his way downstairs, cautiously optimistic. The door to his dad’s room was closed, so the Sheriff was home from his shift and probably passed out by now. Stiles ran his fingers across the door as he walked by like he always did, following the smooth tracks worn into the wood by years of the same motion, and moved on without disturbing him.

The smell of coffee met him halfway down the stairs and Stiles picked up his pace. He skipped down the last few steps and rounded the corner into the kitchen to see Jackson leaning against the counter with a steaming mug in hand, one of his dad’s generic ones re-appropriated from the station. He had changed out of his t-shirt from the night before and into a tank top instead, tight enough to ride up a bit on his stomach—a lovely and distracting counterpoint to the pyjama pants still slung low on his hips. He looked like he had rolled off the front page of some bed ‘n breakfast magazine.

Stiles hesitated in the doorway, shoulder braced on the frame and eyes fixed on Jackson’s long fingers curled around his mug, pale against the blue ceramic. Those fingers had been on Stiles’ skin last night, firm and gentle and coaxing, and now Stiles didn’t know what to do. Jackson Whittemore was standing in his kitchen drinking coffee like it was a normal thing and it seemed twice as surreal in the light of day.

“Morning.”

Stiles’ twitch of surprise meant he knocked his elbow against the doorframe, sending shooting pains up his arm. The yelp that engendered had him flushing again and he was starting to think that would be a regular thing around Jackson, unfortunate as that was. He rubbed at his sore elbow and stepped away from the door because apparently it was hazardous to his health.

“Uh, yeah, morning,” he said.

Jackson was watching him again, wordless and inscrutable. It made Stiles stand up straighter, rock back on his heels, scratch mindlessly at his forearm until it hurt and he could stop.

“Coffee,” Stiles announced, as if he had just noticed it there.

Jackson stepped aside, giving him access, and Stiles busied himself with pouring. He wished he took cream and sugar and a hundred other additives so he could spend more time on it, but unfortunately he was a black coffee man at heart and the task was over far too quickly. That left him standing next to Jackson with a mug of too-hot-to-drink coffee and a growing, nagging feeling of guilt in his gut.

“I really am sorry about last night,” he found himself saying, wincing when it came out far too loud in the strangely homey silence. He pushed on anyway; he was of the opinion that acknowledging awkwardness only made it twice as awkward. “I was serious about the hotel thing. There are plenty of places around that rent long-term, we can put you up somewhere you won’t have your eardrums blown out every night.”

“I said it’s fine,” Jackson interrupted him. “I don’t mind.”

Stiles turned toward him, leaning his hip against the counter and cocking his head to the side.

“How can it be fine?” he asked, disbelieving. “I mean, I’m loud, okay? I know that. It’s why my dad works night shifts at every possible opportunity now. It can’t be good for your sensitive wolfy ears.”

Jackson snorted into his coffee.

“My wolfy ears aren’t that sensitive. They can handle it,” he said dryly.

Stiles swallowed hard and looked away, back down to his own coffee, a frown finding its way onto his face; he wasn’t sure why he felt like he was being mocked, like the implication was that he was too sensitive, that he couldn’t handle it. That was stupid, he told himself. Stiles was the king of witty retorts, so he knew they weren’t always meant in a mean way. He snarked at his friends all the time, in the most loving way possible, and they all knew it was fine.

But Jackson’s sarcasm, even if it was just an innocuous quip, carried its own sense memory. In his experience, Jackson’s particular brand of sarcasm was always mean, always cutting, always meant to tear him down. It wasn’t this time, Stiles was almost sure, but he found himself scratching at the back of his neck anyway—chasing the itch of strangeness that came with the juxtaposition of those feelings, those memories, with the Jackson he had seen last night, the strangely tender one that had taken care of him when he’d needed it.

This Jackson jostled him out of the way of the coffee maker to pour himself another cup, a self-entitled bull in the china shop that was Stiles’ kitchen. Stiles fell back to the little round table in the corner—the one where he used to eat breakfast with his mom on Sunday mornings when she was still alive, rarely used anymore—and took refuge in the furthest of the three chairs around it, back to the wall and mug still clutched in his hands like a lifeline. He watched the dark liquid swirl when he tilted it, watched the steam rise and dissipate into nothing.

He had felt so good when he woke up, better than he had in a long time. That felt like a dream now, a figment of his imagination, too good to have been true. Stiles tapped his fingers against the tabletop—one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four five, one, two—and stared down at his coffee like that might be enough to keep him from floating away.

“Heads up.”

Stiles was slow to react, far too slow to do anything about the banana that came flying toward him. It hit him in the chest, a solid thump of impact that somehow managed to shock Stiles back into the present while simultaneously scaring the everloving shit out of him, and Stiles barely avoided knocking over his coffee mug with his useless flail. When he finally had the offending fruit in hand, he looked up to see Jackson smirking at him.

“Still can’t catch,” he said. “Good to know that hasn’t changed.”

Stiles threw the banana down on the tabletop and muttered, “Asshole.” Whatever appetite he’d had upon waking, it was certainly gone now. He kind of just wanted to crawl back into bed, but with the itchy-numb way his fingers were tingling, he already knew nothing good would come of that. He flexed his hands, spread them wide, pressed each fingertip to his thumb—three, four, one, two, three—

A bowl clattered onto the table right in front of him. It was cereal. Cinnamon Toast Crunch, actually, which was his favorite. A glass of orange juice followed, settling down between the bowl and the abused banana, and Stiles followed the line of Jackson’s arm up to his face. Jackson was looking at Stiles’ hands where they were splayed out in his lap, surprised into stillness, with a frown. The frown intensified when he noticed Stiles’ looking at him.

“You need to eat more,” he said. “You’re scrawnier than usual. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

The tone was sort of harsh, considering Stiles was pretty sure Jackson had just made and served him breakfast of his own volition and was implying that he cared about Stiles’ health and eating habits. Stiles opened his mouth but no words came out. Jackson just sent a very pointed look at the cereal bowl. It took a moment for the expectation to register, but then Stiles obediently took up the spoon.

Apparently satisfied, Jackson nodded. His hip nudged against Stiles’ shoulder, just a quick press of warmth, before he moved off to get food for himself.

Stiles let himself focus on eating, on taking one bite at a time and chewing carefully and swallowing it down, instead of on Jackson’s continued presence. He could still feel eyes on him occasionally though, especially when Jackson sat down across from him at the table with a bowl of his own, so he didn’t stop when he normally would have. By the time he finished his cereal and half the banana, he felt almost uncomfortably full; he knew he had lost weight in recent weeks, but he hadn’t realized he’d been forgoing meals often enough that his stomach had actually shrunk.

That thought was unnerving, made his palms itch with something almost like guilt. He pushed the last of the banana away and sat back in his chair, fighting down a pang of nausea at the sudden awareness of his body—not his body, not really, maybe this stomach had just always been smaller than his real one, how would he even know the difference?—and scratched, dragging his fingernails across the back of his other hand until it stung.

A particularly sharp clack of Jackson’s spoon against the bowl drew his wandering attention. Jackson’s eyes were on him again, on his hands, watching him. When Stiles looked down, he saw that there were angry red lines on his skin, vivid and impossible to mistake for anything but claw marks. Stiles coughed, stuffed his hands between his thighs and the seat of his chair both to hide them from Jackson’s view and to keep himself from doing it again.

“The pack wants to meet up with you,” he said, because he was supposed to be at least a semi-functioning human being. Whether or not his body was his didn’t matter, he told himself. Just because his skin wasn’t real, that didn’t stop him from seeing his friends, from putting one foreign foot in front of the other, from plowing through his day until he either fell asleep or woke up again. He could at least pretend to live his real life in his fake body.

Jackson snorted.

“Yeah, right,” he said into his cereal.

“They do,” Stiles said with a frown. “It’s been a long time since they’ve seen you, they want to welcome you back. And the newbies want to meet you.”

“Sure they do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jackson slurped down his last bite of cereal and downed the rest of his OJ in quick succession, then scooped up his bowl and glass and dumped them in the sink.

“Look,” he said to the faucet. “I get that you guys are all touchy-feely and inclusive nowadays, but I’m not here for that. I didn’t come back for a pack and I don’t want one, especially not this one. No offense.”

That was definitely a little bit offensive, but Stiles held his tongue on that front.

“Jackson, if you would just—”

“I’m a lone wolf, Stilinski,” Jackson said, turning back to him with arms already crossed over his chest. “And I like it that way. So you can go have your puppy pile if you want, but I’ve got shit to do.”

He snatched up his mostly empty mug of coffee, almost certainly gone cold by now, and disappeared out the kitchen door before Stiles had a chance to point out that real lone wolves were rarely lone by choice and they were never happy about it.

Stiles stabbed half-heartedly at his laptop’s keyboard, getting through another half-sentence before deleting the last paragraph entirely with a huff. He shoved the computer back until it nearly skittered off the other side of the coffee table and pulled the reading packet closer. The words made sense, they did. All the letters were in the right order and they even stayed still and everything, they just weren’t sticking in his head. Really, that probably had as much to do with his ADHD and his shitty mood as anything nightmare-related, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating when he had a deadline for this essay.

Fucking summer school. Stiles had never needed summer school before, hadn’t been below the 98th percentile in any of his classes since he had had his ADHD diagnosed and gotten properly medicated for it, and it chafed at his pride something fierce to be subjected to it now. And it seemed so disgustingly mundane after spending two years fighting for his goddamn life to be tutted at by teachers and told he needed to do better. Fuck them, they didn’t know jack shit.

Stiles buried his face in his hands and sighed.

Really, it was a miracle he hadn’t flunked junior year outright. With the way his grades had taken a spectacular nosedive in the second semester, convincing the necessary teachers to let him make it up over the summer and still move on to twelfth grade in the fall had not been easy. His dad had called in some favors, dropped a few names, thrown his weight around. They had leaned heavily on losing Heather as an excuse—not something that sat well with him, but a soulmate’s death was undeniably traumatic and garnered sympathy like nothing else—and then Allison too, as well as citing some fabricated changes in his ADHD medication and the equally fabricated side effects that came with it.

So now he had summer classes to make up for his abysmal english and algebra 2 grades last semester, all online thankfully. He’d managed to skate through his final exams in history, economics, and biology by virtue of already having an unnecessarily large knowledge base in those subjects before the Nogitsune had taken him over and forced him to completely abandon all his real life responsibilities, but english and math had stymied him. It was all the reading, the way the letters and numbers needed to be in the right order to make sense. He just couldn’t make that happen sometimes, even now.

It didn’t help that he had already been in a bad mood when he’d sat down for this little study session. The meeting with the pack had gone about as well as he’d expected it to, which meant there was a lot of very uncomfortable tension. Scott was still side-eyeing him for being bonded to Jackson Whittemore, of all people, his former nemesis. Lydia kept patting him on the arm whenever she passed him with this smile that was half-pitying and half-supportive. Kira asked very well-meaning questions, expecting him to be as excited and dewy-eyed about his new soulmate as she was about hers, and Malia. Stiles loved Malia, he really did, but she still hadn’t gotten the hang of the whole tact thing yet and by the third time she said, “Well, he sounds like a dick to me,” he was about ready to punch her.

There was just altogether too much attention on him, like a spotlight hot enough to give him a sunburn, skin feeling tight and itchy. So he’d left the meeting early. It had only been an excuse for his friends to snoop and pry anyway, not like they had any official business to attend to or anything, so he didn’t feel bad using his english essay as an excuse and heading out. Jackson hadn’t been there when he got home, which he wasn’t sure if he should be disappointed or grateful for, so actually working on the essay had seemed like a good idea.

He was regretting it now. Stiles sort of wanted to smash his head through the coffee table and set all his reading materials on fire, and he was almost certain that the words on the page were starting to shift around again. Maybe math would be better. If nothing else it would be different, and it couldn’t really get a whole lot worse anyway.

He was just spreading out his various reference sheets and lists of equations when he heard the front door open. His dad had just headed out a half hour ago, so it had to be Jackson. Stiles didn’t know what Jackson had been doing all day, but he didn’t really have it in him to care at the moment; Jackson was every bit as aggravating as his stupid essay and twice as confusing. It would probably be best to avoid contact for the time being.

Unfortunately Jackson didn’t seem to share that sentiment. He sauntered into the living room and threw himself down onto the couch, leaning over Stiles where he was sat on the floor, back against the couch’s foot.

“What’re you doing?” Jackson asked. He wasn’t particularly loud or anything, by normal standards, but Stiles was already tired and cranky and his head hurt just enough for every little sound to be grating.

“Working,” Stiles said shortly, mechanical pencil creaking in his grip.

Jackson hummed consideringly, looming further over Stiles’ shoulder and throwing shadows across his papers. Stiles clenched his teeth.

“Do you mind?” he ground out.

Jackson ignored him, tugging one of the equation sheets out from under Stiles’ elbow and held it up and out of reach so he could examine it at his leisure.

“Is this homework?” he asked, incredulous. “Like, summer school make-up work?”

Stiles leaned up to snatch it back, nearly ripping the paper in half with the force of the gesture, and said, “So what if it is? What’s it to you?”

Jackson held up his hands in faux surrender, shrugging.

“Just never thought I’d see you fail a class,” he said, which managed to both compliment and denigrate Stiles at the same time—so much potential, it implied, and all of it wasted on a fucking disappointment like him.

“Well, excuse me,” Stiles snapped, “for being a bit behind. You see, a literal demon took my body out for a joyride mid-semester. The little stuff tends to fall through the cracks when things like that happen. Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to actually get some shit done.”

Jackson leaned back, waving a hand out in front of him.

“I’m not stopping you,” he said. “Don’t know why you’re sitting on the floor, though. Seems like it’d be easier at an actual desk but, you know, whatever works for you, Stilinski.”

Stiles turned resolutely back to his array of papers, taking up the majority of the coffee table’s surface. He would’ve been at his desk, but it was too cluttered for him to spread out like this and he just needed to be able to switch between sheets quickly and efficiently. And besides, sometimes being uncomfortable helped him to keep his mind on task. It wasn’t exactly working now, but he didn’t have to admit to Jackson that he couldn’t feel the fingers around his pencil anymore, numbness edging up his limbs and pushing him away from himself.

He threw down the pencil, pulling both hands through his hair and rubbing roughly down his face like that might bring him back. It helped a bit and Stiles scratched at the back of his neck with blunt nails, chasing the clarity the sting of it brought. With a hard shake of his head, he leaned into his laptop, pushing mindlessly at buttons in the hopes that some coherent words might come out of it.

“You’ll fuck up your back sitting like that, you know.”

“Oh my god!” Stiles burst out. “It’s not even my fucking—”

He cut himself off before he could let the words not even my back out of his mouth. It was the truth, an absolute and inescapable fact, but saying it out loud would make it real, more real than anything else about him. He couldn’t stand to say it, not when he could already feel it so deep in his bones, chilling and biting and so wrong it hurt. Every inch of him was wrong, from the twinge of soreness in his lower back to the creepy-crawliness of the skin that furrowed and gave under insistent fingernails as he scratched along his arms.

“What is with you right now?” Jackson asked. He sounded almost impatient, but the pinch of his forehead as he slid down into Stiles’ personal space didn’t match up with his tone.

Stiles shoved him away.

“Will you just—”

He didn’t know what he wanted Jackson to do. Get out of his face, out of his business. Stop fucking watching him so closely with those pale, sharp eyes that seemed to see all the things Stiles didn’t want anyone seeing. Leave him the hell alone or—or maybe get closer, wrap him up in warmth and steadiness and hold him until he felt like himself again. Stiles wanted everything and nothing, wanted to be okay, to feel normal, to feel anything at all as he raked his nails across his—

“Jesus, Stiles, will you fucking stop that? You’re gonna draw blood!”

Suddenly Stiles’ hands were caught up in Jackson’s, held tight and pulled away. Stiles’ forearms were a mess of criss-crossed scratches, a few of them actually beading red already where he had managed to break the skin. Stiles stared at them; he hadn’t meant to do that, had hardly realized he was even doing it. He’d hardly felt any of it either, at least not as pain. Not in a bad way.

Jackson was swearing under his breath, turning Stiles’ left forearm this way and that while keeping a tight hold of his right. He looked up at Stiles, mouth set in an unhappy moue.

“If I let go of you for a minute, will you refrain from mutilating yourself any further?”

Stiles thought he might’ve nodded, but everything was muffled and distant now and he couldn’t be sure. Jackson seemed satisfied with his response, whatever it was, and let his hands drop. Then he disappeared out of Stiles’ line of sight and Stiles didn’t turn to see where he’d gone, just looked down at the hands in his lap that were supposed to be his. They didn’t feel like his. They weren’t, not really, even if he could move them like they were.

It was probably only thirty seconds or so before Jackson returned to kneel at his side, but it felt like longer. Jackson had a damp paper towel that he pressed to one of Stiles’ forearms, swiping back and forth over the scratches, washing the abused skin with surprising gentleness before switching to the other arm. When he was finished, Jackson tossed the paper towels onto the coffee table with a sigh, then sat back on his heels to look at Stiles, still with that crease between his eyebrows that looked more like concern than anything else. Stiles looked back, too heavy-limbed to fidget for once.

Finally Jackson nodded to himself. He pulled a rubber band off his own wrist and worked it onto Stiles’ instead, settling it just above the bony knob where hand ended and forearm began. A thumb swept over Stiles’ palm, just once, light and a bit ticklish, and then Stiles was jerking in surprise.

It took a moment for the reason to get through to him, filtering in past the haze, but eventually he realized that Jackson had pulled the rubber band and let it snap back into place. It took another second or two for the pain to register, a blooming sharpness that faded into a duller kind of ache. Stiles blinked a few times, pulling his scattered thoughts together enough to comprehend what was happening. He looked up at Jackson.

“It’s better than scratching,” Jackson said. “If you really need something to focus on and bring you back, then do this instead. It’s the pain and the shock without the real damage. Just don’t do it too much.”

Pain without damage. Something to bring him back.

Jackson wasn’t trying to get him to stop. Well, he was, but not completely, he was… Jackson knew what he was doing, and why. Jackson wasn’t trying to take anything away from him. No, Jackson was giving him something, something better, something safer.

Stiles reached for the band. It took him a few tries to get a hold of it with the way his traitorous fingers were shaking, but he managed to pull it far enough away from his skin to feel the burn when it snapped. It shivered through him, some mixture of heat and cold that somehow translated into real. Stiles squeezed his eyes closed and snapped the band again, drawing in a shaky breath that no longer felt like it was full of grit and sand. One more snap and then Jackson’s hand was on his, holding the band down.

“Not too much,” he muttered again.

Jackson had been wearing the rubber band already, had had it around his own wrist since Stiles had picked him up at the airport. Stiles hadn’t really noticed it before, hadn’t known its purpose or its significance, but it had been there. There was a faint line of pink on Jackson’s skin, right in the bend of his wrist, like he had used it recently. Stiles reached out to touch, wanting to see if there was any heat left in the mark.

Jackson jerked away before he could, drawing his hand in against his chest. He stood up abruptly, nearly knocking into the coffee table with his elbow, and cleared his throat.

“You, um...you should find a better place to study,” Jackson said again, as if none of the last ten minutes had happened.

It was a good thing he didn’t wait for a response, just swept out of the room without a backward glance, because Stiles didn’t know what he would’ve said. He just sat on the floor, surrounded by the remnants of his botched schoolwork, and watched Jackson go with the low thrum of pain in his wrist and a tangle of thoughts too loud to ignore.

Chapter Text

Stiles was exhausted by the time he headed up to bed. He had managed to plow through most of his math homework for the week and he was relatively confident that it was right and not just a mass of roman numerals or some shit. He hadn’t made any progress on the essay though, even when he moved his laptop to the kitchen table instead—Jackson had been kind of right that sitting on the floor really hadn’t been doing him any favors, back-wise, even if the better accommodations hadn’t helped him with the rest of his issues.

Jackson hadn’t bothered him the rest of the afternoon, either to stick his head in to mock Stiles’ study habits or to protect him from himself again. Stiles worried at the rubber band Jackson had given him, frowning at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t need to use it, not right now, but it felt good to have. It felt good to remember that Jackson had given it to him, to have some tangible proof that his soulmate did care about him at least a bit. He ran the flat of his palm over the scratches on his arms—itchy now as they started to heal—and turned away from the mirror.

Stiles intended to collapse into bed and see if he could eke out a few hours of real sleep before the nightmares caught up with him, but he stopped short in his doorway.

Jackson was in his room, already dressed for bed, standing in front of his bookshelf like he was perusing the limited collection. He didn’t seem to notice Stiles’ appearance though, an unusual thing for a werewolf who could hear a heartbeat coming from a mile away. He was just staring blankly at a row of the magical reference books Stiles had stolen from Deaton, eyes unfocused. His right hand was rested on his left upper arm, just below the shoulder, rubbing back and forth. Stiles watched as it slid lower, lingering in the crook of his elbow, and came down to his wrist. Jackson had found another rubber band for himself in the last few hours, to replace the one he’d given to Stiles, and he fingered it now the same way Stiles had done a moment ago.

“You okay?” Stiles asked.

Jackson jumped, head snapping toward him with the urgency of someone expecting a threat. He only found Stiles, though, and he looked away, eyes falling to his hand. He let go of the rubber band.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rough. He stopped to clear his throat, nodding. “Yeah, I’m—”

He seemed like he might deny it, might wave it off and say he was fine, but then he met Stiles’ gaze directly and held it this time. Something that might have been a smile, small and brittle, tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“I was just checking,” he said.

Stiles didn’t know what he meant at first, cocking his head in confusion, but then an image of the kanima, sinuous and reptilian, flashed before his eyes. Oh. Jackson was checking for scales, checking to make sure that he was still human.

Stiles slumped further against the doorframe, something hot and unwieldy in his chest making him want to reach out, something that he couldn’t name. He fixed a grin on his face instead and shrugged.

“You look alright to me,” he said, for what that was worth; it probably wouldn’t help, certainly wouldn’t have helped him to get a grip, but he figured some outside validation couldn’t exactly hurt.

Jackson smiled again, more honest than anything Stiles had ever seen from him before. Then he dropped his head again, licked his lips, and Stiles could see the mask slide back into place. When Jackson looked back up at him, the smile was a much more familiar smirk.

“You like you what you see, Stilinski?”

Stiles’ mouth fell open, surprise rendering him temporarily speechless.

It wouldn’t have been half as shocking if it was a sneer instead of a smirk, a taunt meant to humiliate him, but it wasn’t. No, there was nothing mean-spirited here. Stiles might have been a little lacking in the romance department so far in his life, but he wasn’t so sheltered that he didn’t recognize flirting when he saw it. He just never expected Jackson to actually flirt with him.

Should he be surprised by that? Jackson was his soulmate, after all, and he’d traveled all this way just to be near him. True, soulmates weren’t always romantic in nature, but the majority of them were. Was it so outside the realm of possibility for Jackson to be interested in that sort of relationship with him? Just...it was Jackson.

Not that Stiles was necessarily opposed to the idea, it was just that it hadn’t occurred to him as a real possibility. There had never been any question that Jackson was ridiculously attractive, it had just always been an intimidatingly, unapproachably perfect brand of attractive.

Now, though. Now Jackson’s hair was clean and fluffy and unstyled, his skin less tanned than Stiles had ever seen. He was in slouchy pyjama pants and a t-shirt with a hole in it, barefoot with toes wiggling in the carpet. There was nothing unapproachable about him standing in Stiles’ bedroom, looking tired and worn down, and yet he was still every bit as beautiful.

Stiles didn’t say any of that out loud. He felt like he spent a lot of time nowadays with words caught between his teeth, intentionally held back, but these ones just didn’t know how to escape. He wasn’t sure yet if he wanted them to.

“Uh, what are you doing in here anyway?” is what came out as he ran fingers through his hair, head ducked to hide a telling blush. “I’m pretty sure your room is next door.”

Jackson shrugged, smirk still in place. He pulled a random book off Stiles’ shelf, flipped through it without actually looking, and put it back just to show that he could.

“We both know I’ll end up in here eventually,” Jackson said. “Figured we might as well cut down on travel time.”

“Oh.”

Stiles grit his teeth against the familiar burn of shame, the same one that swamped him every time his dad walked out the door for the next in a long line of overnight shifts at the station because he knew he’d get no sleep if he stayed home. All because Stiles was such a fucking mess that he couldn’t keep it together for a few hours at a time, bad enough that Jackson felt the need to babysit him all night long.

“You don’t need to do that,” Stiles said. “It’s not every night, and I’ll probably be awake all of tonight anyway so you can just go get a full night’s sleep somewhere else and I’ll be fine.”

Jackson rolled his eyes like Stiles was being terribly unreasonable, but his hand strayed back to his arm, not scratching like Stiles did but just rubbing insistently without him seeming to notice he was doing it.

“I’m not leaving, dumbass,” he said. “So unless you wanna try and make me—”

He waved at the bed with his free hand, the one with the rubber band. The rubber band he used to bring himself back when he got lost in his memories, just like Stiles. And the night before, hadn’t he said he still had nightmares too? Stiles took in Jackson’s jutting chin, the stubborn set of his shoulders, and wondered if maybe Jackson had other reasons for wanting to stay, if he needed this too, if maybe Jackson had slept better last night than he had since before he was bitten.

Jackson must have been able to see the capitulation on his face because he took Stiles by the front of his shirt and reeled him in, flipping the light off in the same werewolf-graceful motion, and before Stiles could catch up he was already being pushed into the bed. Jackson crawled in behind him, all grabby hands and manhandling, until they were spooned up together like they were the night before. Stiles wiggled around a bit, uncomfortable—not physically speaking, they actually fit together worryingly well in that regard, more emotionally—but froze when he felt something warm against the back of his neck.

It was Jackson’s nose. Jackson was nuzzling—legitimately nuzzling—Stiles, burying his face in the junction of neck and shoulder and rubbing his cheek back and forth across the exposed skin where his t-shirt was pulled askew. He was also pretty sure that Jackson was smelling him, considering he pushed his nose into the soft space behind Stiles’ ear and just left it there. It was all very animalistic-feeling and Stiles just couldn’t resist asking.

“Are you... scenting me?”

The huff Jackson let out was hot across his skin and Stiles shivered.

“N-no, really!” Stiles stammered. “Is that a wolf thing? Because the others have gotten really cuddly lately too and I’m just curious if that’s—”

“Shut up, Stilinski.”

Stiles clamped his mouth shut before any more awkward rambling could make its way out. He stayed very still and just let Jackson have his way, nuzzling and rubbing until Stiles’ whole shoulder was tingling and his face was probably red enough to double as a traffic light, because it wasn’t a bad feeling. It was kind of nice, in a strange way, if he wanted to admit it to himself.

Jackson finally settled as he had last night, arms latched around Stiles’ waist and chin hooked over his shoulder, and let out a breath that sort of sounded like relief. Like it was soothing to him for Stiles to be covered in his scent, for Stiles to smell like his.

That thought almost had Stiles squirming again, but he didn’t want to dislodge Jackson when the position they were in was so warm and comfortable and cozy. He just turned his face into his pillow and found Jackson’s hands on his stomach, letting his thumb rest on each finger in sequence and counting them off almost absentmindedly. He only got through four sets of ten before he was asleep.

Stiles must have dozed off or something because he didn’t remember anything Mr. Harris had said so far. It wasn’t surprising, considering how fucked up his sleep schedule was lately, and honestly he had been falling asleep in class long before his nightmares started. He sat back in his seat, shaking his head to clear the fuzz from it, and turned around to find Scott on his right like usual.

“Hey, buddy,” Stiles whispered. “What’d I miss?”

Scott didn’t answer, didn’t turn around, didn’t even glance at him.

Stiles huffed and turned back to the front of the class, slouching low and tapping both feet against the floor in a way that was sure to get him reprimanded soon. He felt weird, restless and twitchy, and his eyes kept skating over his classmates. Was it his imagination or were they usually this quiet and well-behaved? And on second look he could swear they were different, far more girls with long hair than there had been a minute ago, but Harris droned on unconcerned.

Harris. Something wasn’t right about that either, but Stiles couldn’t put his finger on why, just bit his lip and set his pencil to tapping on the desktop. Another glance around and all he could see were heads of long dark hair, all identical. That definitely wasn’t right and Stiles reached up to scratch at the itch on the back of his neck.

“Scott,” he said, dread creeping up to strangle him. “Scott, I think I’m—”

Scott turned to face him. There was blood dripping from his mouth.

“Why did you do it, Stiles?” he asked, and his voice came out raspy and grating, not his voice at all.

Stiles scrambled out of his seat, crashing into a half dozen other desks on his way, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the sword imbedded in Scott’s gut. The grip was ribbed leather, coated in red, and Stiles could feel it in his hands, slick and hot.

“Problem, Mr. Stilinski?”

Stiles spun toward Harris—dead, he remembered, Harris had been dead for months and this wasn’t real, couldn’t possibly be—and the blackboard behind him was gibberish, a mass of incomprehensible letters and symbols in white chalk that shimmered and swam before his eyes.

“Not real,” Stiles whispered, wiping clammy hands on his jeans to try and shake the persistent feeling of blood that wasn’t there, not now. “This isn’t real. You know it isn’t real, Stiles, wake up. Wake up.”

It felt real, every bit of it. It was vivid and sharp and close, looming over him until he couldn’t breathe. He felt like there was an iron band around his chest, tight and unmoving.

“Everyone has it…”

Stiles turned again, cold sweat on his brow as that fucking voice, the one he could never manage to escape, sounded so close it was practically purring in his ear.

Allison was everywhere. A hundred of her, filling every desk in the classroom, all of them glassy-eyed and bloody as they stared up at him and spoke with the Nogitsune’s voice.

“...but no one can lose it.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Stiles muttered, backing up until he hit the wall. “Not real, wake up. Wake up, Stiles, come on, wake up, wake up!”

There were so many of her, and there was Scott still, watching him with the empty, damning eyes of the grieving, surrounded by his dead soulmate. Stiles shook his head, squeezed his eyes closed against the sight, but he couldn’t block out the sounds. The chant rose up, louder and louder, drilling the riddle into his head until he couldn’t even hear the pounding of his own heart or his own desperate pleas to just wake up.

He reached up—to pull at his hair, try and wake himself up, or maybe just to cover his ears against the noise, he didn’t know—but caught sight of his hands. Fourteen fingers.

He screamed.

He screamed and screamed until his breath ran out and he had to gasp for air and then he screamed some more because if he stopped then he would hear it again, that voice and that stupid fucking riddle taunting him, goading him. The classroom was gone, and Allison and Scott and Harris with it, but the voice was still there, echoing in all the hidden recesses of his mind until there was no room left for rational thought. He lashed out on instinct, a primal drive to fight or flee, but there was nothing to fight against and nowhere to go.

The iron band was still there, crushing his chest, compressing his lungs until he had no more breath left for screaming. He clawed at it, but it just tightened its grip and spread further, blanketing him until his arms and legs were pinned down by an inescapable heat. Stiles turned his face away from it, terror keeping his eyes glued shut; it was the Nogitsune, it had to be, or else some extension of the Nemeton come to grab him again, hold him down and take control of him, force him to open the door, the goddamn door, don’t open the door, don’t—

“Stiles!”

That voice was clear and smooth, nothing like the Nogitsune’s rasp, and it cut through the panic like a scythe through wheat.

“You’re awake,” it said, close and loud. “This is real now, Stiles, you’re awake. You’re not dreaming anymore.”

“I’m always dreaming,” Stiles gasped out, eyes open and roving but it was too dark to see, too dark to check the posters on his wall for coherent words, too dark to make out the face looming over him. “It’s not real, it’s not real, I’m not—”

“Yes, it is, Stiles,” Jackson said, letting go of Stiles’ wrist to put a hand to his cheek instead, forcing Stiles to look up at him. “Look at me. I’m real.”

Stiles just shook his head, breath coming in frantic gasps because this couldn’t be real either. Jackson was gone, had been gone for months, he was in London and Stiles was no-name and alone and this was just another way for his mind to play tricks on him. The room was spinning around him and the shadows, the blackest shapes in the corners, were reaching out, each and every one of them a spectre wrapped in bandages with a gaping maw.

The spinning redoubled as Jackson yanked him upright and Stiles found himself in Jackson’s lap, a strong arm holding him in place and keeping him steady while the other cupped his face again. The touch was warm even against his overheated skin and it certainly seemed real, but so had the blood on Allison’s face, the smell of it still stuck in his nostrils.

“Focus on me, Stiles,” Jackson said, firm and insistent, giving him a shake. “Just look at me and nothing else, okay? What do you need? Stiles, this is real. What do I need to do to prove that to you?”

It took Stiles a minute to process the words, to make his eyes stop straying to the door of his closet and the void beyond it, and another to find his voice and force it past the broken glass feeling of his throat.

“Fingers,” he croaked. “Y-you have extra...extra f-fingers in dreams.”

“Okay,” Jackson said. He caught Stiles’ wrist and pulled it between them. “Okay, come on. Count.”

Stiles tried, he did, but his hand was shaking so badly it looked like there were dozens of fingers anyway, just a dim blur in the darkness. He still couldn’t catch his breath and there were figures in the shadows, he knew it, creeping closer with every pounding beat of his heart to tease just at the edge of his vision, stalking him.

“Count with me, Stiles,” Jackson said, louder, and he tightened his hold on Stiles’ hand, steadying it. “Look! One, two…”

He held each finger individually, making sure Stiles could see. And he did, he saw five fingers on the hand. Five shaking fingers, just like there were supposed to be, but he could still feel blood. He couldn’t see any, but he could feel it because these hands had had blood on them before, Scott’s blood pumping out over five fingers that didn’t exist anymore. No matter that the fingers curled into a fist when he told them to, they weren’t his fingers and he couldn’t trust them.

“What is it, Stiles?” Jackson asked, curling his hand over the trembling fist Stiles had made. “What can I do?” He sounded afraid and the shivery feeling of remembered pleasure, of the Nogitsune glutting itself on the terror and pain of dying men, slithered down Stiles’ spine, making him shudder.

Jackson’s hand, though. It was right in front of him, solid and pale and warm against his. Stiles scrabbled at it with his free hand, fingernails dragging against the skin in a way that had to hurt, but Jackson let Stiles pull it free. He obediently splayed it out, fingers spread apart, and said, “Okay. Okay, see? I’ve got five just like you do. Count them with me.”

Stiles took a shaky breath and nodded, holding tight to Jackson’s wrist with one hand as he matched Jackson’s fingers to his on the other. One, two, three, four, five. He did it again, with a breath for each matching digit. Then he tugged Jackson’s other hand from its place on his back and counted that one too—one, two, three, four, five, one, two—and again, and again, until the tightness in his chest loosened and the figures in the shadows began to recede.

Jackson kept counting, though he never took his eyes off Stiles’ face. He counted until Stiles finally let go of his hands and tried to sit back. When Stiles swayed, light-headed, Jackson caught him and pulled him close again.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, you’re okay. You’re gonna be alright now.”

Stiles’ head was pounding and he felt sort of like he’d been hit by a truck, but the voice had gone quiet and there was no slickness of blood against his palms anymore, so he was more alright than he had been. He slumped forward, collapsing against Jackson’s chest so that he could feel the heartbeat against his cheek and let every pulse convince him of reality. The sweep of Jackson’s hands across his back, through his hair, was gentle and soothing.

“What else do you need?” Jackson asked.

Stiles almost didn’t say anything, almost shook his head and gritted his teeth and told Jackson to go back to sleep and not worry about him, but the residue of panic was still heavy on his tongue, pressing against his eyelids and flirting at the corner of his vision, imagined whispers in his ears. He twisted his hands into Jackson’s t-shirt, bunching up the fabric so that he could feel warm skin.

“Just...talk?” he managed, his voice almost gone. “About...about anything, I don’t care, just…”

“Whatever you need.”

Jackson lay back down on the bed, pulling Stiles along until his head was resting on Jackson’s chest, just right to keep that grounding heartbeat in his ear. He pulled the blankets up and tucked them around Stiles snugly, then wrapped arms around his shoulders.

And he talked. About London, mostly. What he had done there, how difficult it was to transition to a new country, how strained the relationship with his parents had been after the whole werewolf revelation. He talked about the other wolves he had met in the city and how none of them wanted to take in a blue-eyed stray. He talked about the view from the London Eye and how it was almost always cloudy over there.

He talked until Stiles stopped listening to his words, until his eyes went heavy-lidded and exhaustion pulled him back down. He was still talking when Stiles fell asleep.

Breakfast that morning was both more and less awkward than the one the day before. For starters, this one included the Sheriff, just back from a particularly tiresome night shift. He hesitated in the doorway when he came in to find Stiles and Jackson hovering in silence at opposite ends of the kitchen, but apparently his need for food overcame his desire to avoid the awkward situation. So he ended up sat at the little table with Stiles while Jackson served up french toast because apparently he could cook and was determined to make sure Stiles ate food on a regular basis even if he had to insult him into eating it.

Silverware clacking was the only sound for a while, the three of them trading uneasy glances among them and pretending they didn’t notice the others looking. It was actually really good french toast, the kind Stiles hadn’t had since before his mom died, and he was glad that he was in a good enough mood to savor it. He was firmly planted in reality at the moment, all traces of his midnight scare washed away, and the surreality of Jackson’s presence was wearing off. Stiles was more awake and present than he was used to being.

For the second night in a row, he had slept unusually well after the first nightmare had passed, and there was no denying that it was because of Jackson’s presence. As much as Stiles hated that Jackson was seeing him at his worst, his lowest point, he knew he wouldn’t put up even a token protest if Jackson showed up in his room that night. For all their clashes during the waking hours, Jackson was undeniably comforting at night and Stiles wanted him there.

With just one slice of toast left, Stiles cleared his throat. Jackson and his dad both looked at him, somewhat wary.

“Uh,” Stiles said—eloquent, as always—eyes darting back and forth between them indecisively before settling on Jackson. “The pack is getting together again today. Just to hang out, you know, as a group.”

Jackson rolled his eyes, attention falling back to his breakfast because apparently a pack gathering was too plebeian for him to waste his precious time on.

“They’d really like for you to come,” Stiles said anyway. “I know Derek especially was hoping to talk to you at some point, apologize for everything that went on before.”

“You mean when he tried to kill me?” Jackson asked pointedly.

Stiles winced.

“Uh, yeah, then. And some of the menacing-ness that went on before that. I mean, technically, you were his first beta!” he said. “Even if he’s not alpha anymore, he’d like a chance to make things right with you.”

“Right,” Jackson said, and it was definitely sarcasm rather than confirmation.

“And Scott,” Stiles soldiered on, determined to at least finish making his pitch before Jackson shut him down this time. “Scott wants to welcome you, formally offer you a place in the pack. No one cares about the kanima thing, if that’s what you’re worried about. Bygones are bygones, water under the bridge, forgive and forget! And if it’s just because you don’t like Scott, well he’s grown up a lot in the last two years, you know. We were all kinda dicks sophomore year and Scott is fully willing to own up to his own dickishness, shake hands, and move on if you are—”

“I really don’t care,” Jackson interrupted him. “I already told you, I’m not interested in being all buddy-buddy with you guys. I don’t care about your packmates.”

Stiles gritted his teeth, frustration making him grip his fork hard enough to hurt. His dad was quiet, a bite of toast paused halfway to his mouth as he watched them both with one eyebrow raised. He looked ready to dive for cover, or else hide under the table just to get away from the awkwardness of an argument he didn’t have any part in. Stiles pushed his dad’s glass of orange juice closer to him, chewing on his lip and preparing to play his trump card.

“Not even Lydia?” he asked, and Jackson immediately dropped his own fork, snatching up his plate and escaping to the sink just like he had last time.

Maybe it was a low blow, bringing her up. They still talked sometimes, but Stiles knew as well as anyone that phone conversations from an ocean away were very different from hanging out in person all afternoon, and maybe that was something Jackson wanted to avoid. Maybe...maybe he was still hung up on her. Maybe the idea of being around Lydia when she was just starting up a real thing with her new soulmate—the guy who had replaced him—was too painful for Jackson to deal with.

Stiles couldn’t even blame him, if that were the case. It made perfect sense for Jackson to still be in love with Lydia because she was beautiful and brilliant and wonderful, and Stiles was none of that. He was a fucking mess, damaged and broken, a burden of a soulmate, and it was bad enough that Jackson had to put up with him without rubbing what he’d lost in his face too.

Stiles blinked back the burn in his eyes, forced away the unexpected jealousy; he already had far more than he’d ever thought to have again and he should be content with that. It was beyond him to harbor any ill-will for Lydia anyway, and none of this was actually Jackson’s fault.

“She misses you,” Stiles said, because they still cared about each other and they deserved to be in each other’s lives one way or another. “She really misses you, Jackson, and I know she’d love to have you th—”

Jackson dropped his plate with a heavy thunk and spun around with a noise of aggravation.

“For fuck’s sake, Stilinski, I don’t want to be in your fucking pack! So will you just let it go and leave me the hell alone?”

Stiles didn’t even try to stop him this time when he stormed out the door, because apparently that was Jackson’s favorite way of ending conversations. He just shoved his mostly empty plate away, appetite definitively gone, and rubbed his hands roughly over his face.

“So,” his dad said into the ringing silence. “I take it the whole soulmate thing isn’t going too well?”

Stiles sighed heavily, dropping his hands and letting his head fall back as far as it would go without hitting the wall. With the last two days being what they were, and considering the majority of his and his soulmate’s interactions ending in yelling and/or tears in one way or another, he figured that was an understatement. They were supposed to be trying, he reminded himself, trying to make this work, but he honestly wasn’t sure this qualified.

“It’s a work in progress.”

His dad hummed into his orange juice. He didn’t leave, though, didn’t pick up and make a run for it as soon as he and Stiles were alone like he’d taken to doing. The quiet between them wasn’t entirely comfortable, but it wasn’t half as strained as it usually was nowadays. Maybe because this problem was a normal one, something that regular teenagers dealt with on a daily basis, and nothing to do with demons and delusions and murder sprees. Just his son having boy troubles, something he was relatively equipped to deal with.

“He done anything I need to shoot him for?” the Sheriff asked, light and almost teasing like Stiles hadn’t heard in well over a year. “‘Cause, you know, I just got a new case of wolfsbane bullets in, so I could.”

Stiles snorted. And then he laughed, like really laughed, because his dad was essentially defending his honor against his new boyfriend—with a little twist for the werewolf thing—and it was silly and overprotective and the first real conversation they’d had outside crisis situations in months, and it felt good. When he brought his head back up to look, still chuckling, he found his dad smiling around another mouthful of french toast, and that was even rarer.

“Uh, no,” Stiles said. “Not yet, at least. Not really the top of our priority list right now. But, hey, I’ll be sure to let you know when we get there.”

His dad made a face.

“Please don’t,” he said. “There’s some things I don’t need to know about my kid.”

Stiles laughed again, shaking his head and abruptly fighting back tears again. God, he missed this. He and his dad had always been close and he’d give anything to have this kind of banter back in his life.

A hand ruffled through his hair, a quick brush as his dad passed him by on the way to the sink, and Stiles wondered if it was possible for his heart to swell enough to actually choke him. If so, he figured that would be a pretty acceptable way to die.

“Don’t worry, kiddo,” his dad said as he tried and failed to scrape maple syrup off his plate with a butter knife. “Jackson will come around. Just give it some time.”

Stiles nibbled on the side of his thumbnail, searching for the optimism that used to come to him so readily and finding a sea of doubt instead. He smiled anyway when his dad clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, I know,” he said bracingly. “We’ll get there. You go get some sleep, old man.”

His dad flicked his ear, giving him a you-deserved-it look when he voiced his indignation, but Stiles couldn’t deny he would gladly take a hundred ear-flicks if it meant his dad would go to sleep with a smile on his face for once.

Just because Stiles didn’t want to heap all his relationship woes on his dad did not mean he didn’t want to bitch to someone, so he found himself laid out on Lydia’s bed with his legs tossed over hers and his head dangling backward over the edge.

“Jackson is just so damn frustrating,” he said with a groan that he was willing to admit might have been a little melodramatic. “I mean, I’m getting serious mixed signals here.”

Lydia hummed absentmindedly, turning a page in the thick book she had propped up on Stiles’ calves.

“And!” Stiles said, an emphatic wave of his hand setting the whole bed to bouncing and earning a huff of exasperation from Lydia. “And he never seems to leave my house! Or when he does, I have no idea where he’s going or what he’s doing. I mean, if he doesn’t want to see anyone in the pack and Danny’s not in town anymore, then what? He’s just gonna hole up in my spare bedroom and never see anyone ever? What is up with him?”

“You know, for someone who’s supposed to be his soulmate, you’re being surprisingly obtuse,” Lydia said flatly.

Stiles levered himself upright with some difficulty just so that he could make sure she saw his expression of indignation.

“What?” he yelped. “He’s being weird! How am I supposed to make sense of this? One minute he’s being an asshole, the next he’s all caring and nice and shit, and then boom, he’s back to being a total dick again! He’s like the embodiment of that stupid Katy Perry song!”

Lydia snorted, closing the book with a roll of her eyes and tossing it onto her bedside table. Then she leveled him with a look and raised an eyebrow.

“And that’s surprising because…?”

Stiles made an inarticulate noise of frustration.

“Because I’m supposed to be able to understand him, and I don’t! ” he said. “I’m his soulmate, aren’t I? I should get this, or at least get where he’s coming from, and I do understand the nightmares and all the other stuff, but this? What kind of shitty soulmate am I if every other thing he does baffles me?”

Lydia frowned at him.

“Stiles, it’s been three days,” she said chidingly. “And you’ve both been through a lot. It’s not surprising that you didn’t click instantly. These things take work. You’re his soulmate because you’re capable of understanding the things about him that no one else can, no matter how much they try, the parts that come from the very specific type of trauma you’ve both endured. But you have to know that what you’re up against now doesn’t stem from that.”

“What do you mean?” Stiles asked, fighting the urge to pout and also that little niggle of jealousy in the back of his mind because someone else knew his soulmate better than he did and that wasn’t fair. But Lydia had been Jackson’s soulmate for years, it was perfectly logical that she would know him inside and out, would have no trouble deciphering his strange behavior. They were born soulmates, after all, and she would probably always be a better match for him than Stiles would, no matter what their name-marks said. He was trying really hard not to let himself be bitter about that.

“I mean that it’s not exactly a new problem,” Lydia said with a shake of her head. “He was doing this kind of thing long before the whole kanima episode. See, here’s the thing about Jackson—”

“Oh god, yes, please. Give me the Gospel of Jackson, you glorious and eminently helpful creature, you.” Stiles would take any scrap of wisdom she could offer him if it meant he was less likely to let Jackson down.

Lydia smacked him in the leg, but she was fighting a smile; she’d been smiling since he showed up, actually. She’d taken one look at him and pulled him into a hug without further explanation, but Stiles didn’t need one. He knew he hadn’t been doing well lately and had looked it—sleep deprivation and weight loss from lack of appetite would do that to a person, especially with a cherry topper made of anxiety, paranoia, and possible hallucinations—but two nights of real sleep and a few full meals must have done him a lot of good for her to be able to see it on him right away.

She didn’t seem to want to stop touching him. For weeks, Stiles had been avoiding human contact, every touch making his skin crawl and reminding him that he wasn’t like them, wasn’t made of the same stuff, wasn’t real. But he was having a good day and for once he didn’t feel the need to shy away. So Lydia had dragged him onto her bed and promptly pulled him closer, letting him sprawl out practically on top of her, and even now she kept their legs tangled together and took one of his hands in hers just because he let her.

“Jackson isn’t really as complicated as he seems,” she said sagely, and Stiles hung on her every blessed word in the hopes that they would fix this clusterfuck of a relationship he and Jackson had going on so far. “The thing to remember about Jackson Whittemore is that, above and beyond all else, he is horrendously insecure.”

Stiles blinked at her in surprise.

“Jackson?” he asked flatly. “We’re talking about the same Jackson here? The one that peacocks approximately twenty-three hours out of every day and pompously declares himself ‘everyone’s type’?”

“Yes, Stiles, the Jackson that truly believes that if he’s not physically everyone’s type then no one will ever love him because he’s not worth loving for anything other than his looks and his parents’ money.”

Stiles opened his mouth, found that he had nothing to say, and closed it again.

Lydia just nodded, her smile turning sad.

“It’s not entirely uncommon, I think,” she said. “In adopted children, I mean. Some of them doubt their own worth because they feel like their birth parents didn’t want them, whether that’s true or not. They overcompensate, try to be perfect so that their new parents don’t throw them away or send them back. Jackson has always wanted so badly to be perfect, to be the best at everything, because then his adoptive parents wouldn’t have a reason to not want him.”

“But his parents always doted on him,” Stiles said, remembering Mr. and Mrs. Whittemore from every lacrosse game they ever had, always front and center and cheering on their son. They were always at every parent-teacher conference, every award ceremony, every extracurricular activity. They showered him with presents and bought him anything he wanted. They were the parents everyone wished they had.

“Didn’t matter,” Lydia said. “He never really believed them. And now…” She shrugged, biting her lip.

And now they were still back in London. They had opted to let their beloved seventeen year old son move out of the country without them. Stiles half-remembered Jackson’s whispered confessions from the night before, when he had talked Stiles back to sleep after his nightmare, about how hard his parents had taken all the supernatural shit, how uncomfortable they were with it. God, how much must that have hurt Jackson? If Lydia was right—and she undoubtedly was—then all Jackson had ever wanted was his parents’ love and acceptance, and to have the whole werewolf-and-kanima thing take that away from him? Doubly traumatizing.

“Jackson has this thing about vulnerability,” Lydia went on. “And by that I mean, he is terrified of it and will do literally anything to avoid it, even if it makes things worse for him in the long run. Case in point.”

She waved at Stiles and he frowned back at her in question.

“You said he’s been helping you through nightmares, right?” she asked, and Stiles nodded. “Let me guess: he made you breakfast the next morning but insulted you as a way of making you eat it.”

“Uh, yeah, actually,” Stiles admitted. “How’d you know that?”

“It’s what he does,” Lydia said simply. “He wants to do nice things for you but doesn’t want to admit that because it’s somehow a show of weakness. You know he gave me a Valentine’s present once? Beautiful necklace, roses and chocolates, the whole nine yards. And I didn’t see him all day, not once. He left it on my bedside table and then went AWOL because otherwise he would have had to acknowledge that he had done something romantic for me.”

“But why is that a bad thing?” Stiles asked, thoroughly confused.

“Because when you admit to someone that you care about them,” Lydia said, slowly and clearly like this was of the utmost importance, “you open yourself up to the possibility that you care more about them than they do about you. With vulnerability comes the possibility of rejection and being hurt. And that scares Jackson more than anything else.”

“So...he’s afraid that I won’t like him?” Stiles asked with a huff of disbelieving laughter. “The real him that’s not all puffed up and obnoxious and slathered in hair gel? The him that gives people flowers and talks them through panic attacks and makes french toast in the mornings? What’s not to like about that guy?”

“I certainly liked him,” Lydia reminded him. “I loved him. But then our bond was broken and there is no doubt in my mind that Jackson feels like it was his fault. Like he wasn’t good enough or that he failed me somehow.”

Stiles remembered that first talk they’d had, the call that had started all this and spurred Jackson into coming home. Jackson had said then that he knew he was a shit soulmate to Lydia, that he wanted to do better this time. But Lydia didn’t seem to think that at all; it was obvious how much she cared about him, how much she missed being with him, how very much she didn’t blame him for anything even though he had been a dick toward the end of it all.

“So, what, now he’s gonna lock himself away in my house and never talk to anyone ever just to make sure that he doesn’t fail anyone else, is that’s what’s going on here?”

Lydia rested her chin on her bent knee and sighed, her eyes distant and mouth downturned just a bit.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Even after all this time, there are still things he does that I can’t fathom.” She smiled then, giving Stiles’ hand a squeeze. “Maybe you can do better than I did, hm?”

Somehow Stiles doubted it—after all, if Lydia Martin couldn’t riddle you out, then who could?—but he squeezed her hand back. He would just have to try. After all, the real Jackson, what glimpses of him he had seen, was worth that.

It was mid-afternoon by the time Stiles made it home. The house was quiet, his dad still fast asleep, and Jackson seemed to have taken off again. Or maybe he hadn’t been back since that morning when he ran out after breakfast—after saying very emphatically that he wanted nothing to do with Stiles’ friends, his pack, the most important people in his life. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t there because, no matter how much Stiles’ worldview had shifted where Jackson was concerned thanks to Lydia’s revelations, he was still kind of rubbed the wrong way from that.

Stiles threw his backpack down by the couch on his way through the living room; he’d had Lydia check over his math homework just to make sure it was done right, since he didn’t trust himself to be able to tell. She had found a few places where he’d devolved into just scratch marks, tallies that almost looked like letters or even faces at certain angles, and Stiles had had to excuse himself for the bathroom to hide the way his hands started shaking. The snap of the rubber band on his wrist had helped and by the time he went back, Lydia had erased all the weird shit so he could do it right.

Stiles bounded up the stairs toward his room, intending to shower and change clothes and maybe take a risk and try for a nap, but the door to his room was pushed halfway open. He hesitated; he was pretty sure he had closed it that morning. He always closed his door. He closed all doors now, actually. Open doors made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, made him itch all over, watching and waiting for something else to come crawling through.

Stiles nudged the door with his toe, wincing at the way the old hinges creaked, but there was nothing inside. Just his room, bed unmade and clothes strewn all over the floor, bookshelf disheveled but loosely organized, desk a mess of papers and reference books and chewed up writing utensils. As far as he could tell, everything was exactly as he had left it.

Except not quite. A glint of metal caught his eye, something small and shiny on his bedside table. He crept closer, still the tiniest bit wary, but all he found was a ring sitting on top of what looked like an instruction packet and a sheet of computer paper with a note in spidery handwriting that he didn’t recognize.

The note said:

It’s a puzzle ring. It comes apart and you can put it back together again. Seemed like something you might like. Might help you focus when things get to be too much. It makes for a good distraction. There’s directions on how to put it together, but knowing you, you’ll probably want to try and figure it out yourself first. Good luck with that.

Stiles had to read it four times through to make sure he wasn’t getting it wrong, but then he dropped the note and snatched up the ring in question. From the looks of it, it was actually four separate rings all threaded and woven together, and it nearly fell apart in Stiles’ hand. He caught it before it could collapse entirely and carefully jostled the pieces back into position, and he realized there was already a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. When he slid the ring onto his finger and found that it actually fit just right, he found himself grinning outright.

Jackson had bought him a present. Jackson had bought him a present and left it on his bedside table and disappeared so he wouldn’t have to admit to doing something nice, just like he used to do with Lydia. Only this wasn’t just something pretty and useless like flowers, but something that was actually meant to help him. For when things got to be too much, the note said, when he was overwhelmed by the world or his own mind and needed something to distract him.

And, Stiles had to admit, it also kind of felt like an apology in absentia for being such a dick that morning. If this was a way of making it up to him, it was totally working.

Stiles took the ring off and held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, examining it closely inside and out. He sat down on the edge of his bed and clicked on his bedside lamp so he could get a better look, trying to trace the way the rings fit together. Jackson had been right to think Stiles would want to figure it out on his own—instructions? Who needed instructions? He didn’t need no stinkin’ instructions—and the little booklet with the diagrams stayed right where it was.

Stiles cupped the ring in both hands and shook it like he would dice, hearing the jingle of it as it disengaged and tapping his feet against the floor in excitement. His first attempt to put the thing back together was a complete and utter failure, but that was fine. He just picked a different ring to work around and tried again, and again, and again. With a humph, he laid the rings out as flat as they would go and tried to mentally map out the possibilities like he would a chess strategy, thinking three steps ahead.

Every combination he tried failed and he frowned in frustration, but he wasn’t upset. It was the good, clean kind of frustration that came with a tricky puzzle, with actually having to think and finding himself thwarted and challenged. Simple as it was, it was the most fun he had had in a long time. He didn’t even realize how absorbed he had become until the creak of his bedroom door startled him.

“Hey, kiddo,” his dad said, leaning through. “Whatcha got there?”

“Oh,” Stiles said, taking a minute to shake himself out of the zone. “It’s, uh, something Jackson got me. A puzzle ring.”

He held it up by one ring, the other three dangling and clinking together. His dad raised his eyebrows, looking impressed.

“Right up your alley,” he said. “Figured it out yet?”

“Not quite. But I’m getting there.”

“Uh huh, sure,” his dad said with a smirk. “How long you been sitting there?”

Stiles had to look at his bedside clock. He pulled a face.

“About two hours,” he admitted. “But I’m making progress!”

“I’m sure you are, son,” his dad chuckled. “When you decide to take a break, I think Jackson made dinner.”

“He’s here?”

“Doesn’t seem to be, but there’s spaghetti and meatballs in the kitchen and since you’ve been up here all afternoon, I imagine you didn’t put it there.”

Stiles tried not to show his disappointment. It was what he was expecting anyway, but still, he’d have liked to actually thank Jackson. That might make Jackson uncomfortable, though, so maybe he would just not make a fuss over it. He’d wear the ring—once he could figure out how to put the damn thing back together again—and hopefully that would be enough to show his appreciation without drawing attention to the gesture for what it was.

“Jewelry, Italian food, and a smile on your face,” his dad said. “I’d say things are looking up already, wouldn’t you?”

Stiles ducked his head, unaccountably embarrassed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, maybe they are.”

Chapter Text

Stiles hated essays. Okay, not really, or at least he didn’t used to. There was a time when Stiles would write essays just for the fun of it, choosing topics out of thin air and making the essays as long as possible as a challenge to himself. He made some good money selling them online before his dad found out and made him stop, but he kept writing them anyway because he was always going to be strangely fixated on random subjects, he was always going to overthink them to the extreme, so why shouldn’t he have something concrete and scholarly-looking at the end of it?

Now he stared at the blinking cursor of his laptop until it blurred before his eyes and couldn’t make a single word come to his fingertips. He had had this assignment for three weeks and he still had barely more than an intro paragraph. It had never taken him so long to write anything ever, even on subjects he knew nothing about! This was a book he’d already read twice before, one he had thought he knew inside and out, but here he was with seventeen tabs of articles and peer reviewed journals and still not so much as a thesis statement in mind. The frustration was getting to him, making him itch all over, and yet again, he considered throwing himself out his bedroom window.

He sat back in his chair—yes, his actual desk chair at his actual desk, because Jackson had taken one look at him sitting on the living room floor and started nagging about his bad posture again in his strangely antagonistic way of showing concern—with a huff and absently twisted the ring off his finger.

He was getting better at it. He hadn’t been able to put it down all evening, fiddling and frowning until a burst of inspiration led him to turning the rings upside down and twisting instead and everything fell into place. His whoop of triumph had been loud enough to have a recently returned Jackson running into his room in alarm. Stiles had been startled into dropping the ring and there had been some staring, some stammering, and maybe a little blushing before he’d scooped it up and said, “I figured it out on my own, I swear! No instructions needed!”

Jackson had snorted and called him a geek but he said it with a smile on his face and none of the usual heat, and when they climbed into bed together an hour later, Jackson had run his thumb along the smooth metal before lacing their fingers together.

Stiles shook the ring apart and took a moment to focus all his attention on that, eyeing the gentle curves and the way they sparkled in the light, feeling how the metal had warmed to his skin, hearing the gentle click of the rings together as he moved them carefully around each other. It took some finesse to get the fourth ring into place, squeezing it in between the others without bending it or shaking the rest loose, and he was still getting the hang of it. Watching it slot in to make a perfect whole was satisfying on so many levels that he couldn’t even name and he slid the ring back onto his finger with a flourish for no one's benefit but his own.

With renewed purpose, Stiles dove back into his research. He was good at this, he reminded himself stubbornly. This was his thing and there was no way he was going to let a stupid little thing like...whatever the fuck his problem was...keep him from doing his thing. He was gonna come up with some clever shit and write the fuck out of this essay and be witty and insightful and he was gonna get an A+ and pass summer school with flying colors and and it was gonna be—

Stiles jerked back nearly hard enough to knock his chair over entirely as everything tilted around him. The air had gone thin and blackness crept into the edges of his vision until all he could see were letters—no, symbols— nonsensical shapes shimmering, sliding, crawling across his computer screen where the had been normal words just a moment ago.

A dream. It was a dream, it was all a fucking dream, just another twisted trick of the imagination and any second now he would scream himself awake to do it all over again just like last time because none of it was real.

His breath was coming in sharp gasps but it didn't matter. The pain in his chest wasn't any more real than the remembered tang of blood in his mouth, the rasp of cruel, inhuman laughter in his ear as he tipped himself over onto the floor in his panic. He barely felt the collision, wrapped up in the jarring certainty that it didn't exist in the first place, that there was nowhere for him to go, no way to escape from his own mind. All he could do was press his back against the wall, curl in on himself as tightly as possible, and cover his ears before the voice could start in earnest.

“It's not real,” he told himself, squeezing his eyes closed because any minute now Allison would be there with her dead eyes, or Scott and the sword, or the river of blood that was the hospital massacre, and he couldn't see it again, he just couldn't. “It's not real, Stiles, wake up. Wake up, wake up, it's just a nightmare, just wake up.”

He didn’t wake up. There was a growing pressure all around him, like the atmosphere itself was closing in, wrapping around him like a pane of glass too clean to be seen but he knew it was there, he knew it. He threaded his fingers into his hair and pulled but he barely felt it at all. Even the frantic snap of the rubber band on his wrist wasn’t enough. He kept snapping, though, because what else was there? What else could he do when everything around him was a feverish illusion and the stupid rubber band between his shaking fingers probably didn’t even exist in the first place and—

The next snap didn’t connect. Something was touching him, something he thought might have been warm if such a sensation could reach him here, and it was pulling the band off his wrist entirely. Stiles tried to wrench himself away, to escape the phantoms, but there was nowhere for him to go, he wasn’t strong enough, and a whine of panic made its way out of his throat.

It was a hand around his wrist, but it wasn’t icy and blood-slick like Allison’s or linen-wrapped like the Nogitsune’s. It was clean and warm-ish and strangely gentle in its insistence as it pulled Stiles’ hand away from his own arm, away from the scratches that barely registered as should-be-painful through the fog.

“—hear me? Hey, come on, can you hear me?” a voice was saying. It was hard to place over the rush and pound of his pulse in his ears, over the whisper of the shadows creeping in all around him even with his eyes closed, over the constant stream of not real, not real, wake up, nightmare, always dreaming, wake up, wake up, wake UP that were his thoughts.

“Come on, Stiles, look at me!” the voice said, but Stiles squeezed his eyes shut tighter and shook his head until it throbbed with the motion; it was so much worse to see everything look so authentic, so intricate in its construction, when he knew it was a fraud. At least this way he could pretend the dream looked like the hellscape it was, like it wasn’t perverting what was left of his real life.

“You’re not dreaming,” the voice said—and Stiles must still be mumbling, still begging out loud for it to end, but his lips were numb and he couldn’t be sure—tugging at his hand again. “Look: five fingers, both of us. You’ll see that if you just open your eyes and look.”

Stiles could feel a palm pressed against his own, steady and firm, fingers slotting into place alongside his. He whined low in his throat, certain that he would see a dozen fingers and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth grinning back at him, but a hand found the side of his face. It cradled his cheek, definitely warm and a little bit callous-rough against his skin, and a thumb brushed over the soft space behind his ear. Jackson, he realized with a shiver. That was where Jackson liked to tuck his nose, chasing his scent, and it was Jackson here with him now, making him promises.

Stiles pried his eyes open, fighting the blackness at the edges of his vision and struggling to focus on the face in front of him. Jackson was only a few inches away, kneeling on the floor and watching him with wide, worried eyes and that pinch between his eyebrows. When he saw Stiles looking, he tried to smile. His eyes seemed grey where they were usually a crystal sort of blue, but then everything was cast in shadow now and nothing looked right because it wasn’t.

“Good, hey,” Jackson said encouragingly. “That’s good. Look at me, just me. Here.”

He held up their hands, palm to palm, and he counted. One, two, three, four, five. Five fingers, he said, and then again. Then the other hands, five more each. Ten fingers for each of them, twenty in total. That was how many there were supposed to be, right? Ten fingers for reality, that was how it was in the real world, that was—

But the words. The words were wrong, the letters made no sense, it was wrong. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, no matter what the fingers said. Fingers could be wrong, he knew that better than anyone. And maybe Jackson’s fingers were wrong too, or it was just another way of fucking with him. The dream was just evolving, finding more tricks.

He wasn’t breathing. Or he was, and maybe he was breathing too much, but no oxygen was reaching his lungs anyway. His head spun and the room with it, tilting like a funhouse mirror, like the illusion it was, and the only steady point was Jackson’s hand on his face.

“Look at me!”

Stiles opened his eyes—when had he closed them again?—and Jackson was right there, even closer than before.

“Look at me, Stiles, and nothing else. Just me, okay? I need you to focus on me,” he said. “Can you do that? Tell me you can do that, say it out loud.”

Stiles nodded, tried to speak but his mouth wouldn’t open past another gasp for empty, useless air.

“What’s your name, Stiles?” Jackson said.

Stiles just stared, tried to breath, tried to focus on anything that wasn’t dull and distant and distorted.

Jackson’s other hand found the back of his neck, gripping tight, and he gave him a shake, rattling his teeth together.

“Stiles! I need you to answer me. Tell me your name.”

Shocked into obedience, Stiles stammered out his name.

“Your whole name, Stiles, tell me.”

“S-Stiles Stilinski,” he said and the familiar words felt foreign on his numb tongue, complicated and heavy and difficult to form.

“Good. How old are you?”

Jesus, he felt ancient. Like he had lived a hundred years in the last few months alone, every day repeated over and over again in his mind. Did he age in dreams? How long had he been sleeping? Did it even matter?

“Stiles!”

Stiles shook his head, trying to keep hold of what little control he had, and forced out, “Seventeen,” because it had been true the last time he checked. The last time he could be sure.

“Okay,” Jackson said. “Say it again, both of them. Name and age, tell me.”

“Why—”

“Just do it.”

Stiles whined again, but Jackson’s hand was hot against his skin and hadn’t Jackson helped him before? Maybe those were dreams too, but he was almost certain that listening to Jackson had made him feel better and anything would be better than this. He said his name, his age. They came out a bit easier this time.

“That’s good, Stiles. Now can you tell me where you are?”

“Dreaming,” he said immediately. “Dreaming, it’s not real, it’s just a nightmare, it’s just a—”

“No, Stiles, that’s not true,” Jackson said. “This is real, I promise, and I can help you believe that. Just look around and tell me exactly where you are right now.”

Stiles forced himself to look away from the grey-blue of Jackson’s eyes, expecting blood and mummified laughter and dark curls, but there were just posters and books and dirty clothes instead, every detail exactly as he remembered except not. Dim, off, wrong.

“It, uh...it looks like my room,” he said. “But it’s not, Jackson, it’s not my r—”

“It is,” Jackson said, no room for argument. “Repeat it after me, okay? ‘My name is Stiles Stilinski. I am seventeen years old. I am at home in my bedroom. I am real and I am safe.”

Stiles was shaking his head, cloying fear in his throat and that glass pane pushing into him from every side, cold and hard and heavy on his skin.

“Say it, Stiles, come on. Humor me here.”

Stiles closed his eyes again, squeezed them shut against the wrongness of what his eyes were showing him, and gasped out, “My name is Stiles Stilinski.”

“Good, Stiles. Keep going.”

“I’m...I’m seventeen. Seventeen years old.”

He got stuck, couldn’t get the rest of the words out.

“Go on,” Jackson said, encouraging. “Just say it. You don’t have to believe it yet, just say it out loud.”

“I’m in my...I’m home, I’m in my room. I’m…”

Stiles choked on the words, the lies, the impossibility of it getting stuck between his teeth. Jackson squeezed the back of his neck again, almost hard enough to hurt.

“This is real, Stiles,” he said. “Say it for me.”

“Real.” Even though it wasn’t. “This is real. I’m real and I’m...I’m safe.” Not with the whispers in his ear and the smell of blood and the figures waiting just out of sight. “Real and safe.”

“Again.”

Stiles swallowed hard and made himself repeat it, the whole thing from start to finish, trying to string the words together in the right pattern. And when Jackson shook him again, made him open his eyes and look at him, Stiles said it again. And again. Over and over and over, and each time the words came easier. The shadows retreated around the tenth repetition, the whispers quieted after the thirteenth, and the blue of Jackson’s eyes brightened somewhere around the twenty-second.

“Good, Stiles,” Jackson kept saying, low and soothing as his thumb swept back and forth on the side of Stiles’ neck. “Just a few more.”

Stiles’ hands were still shaking where they were twisted into the front of Jackson’s t-shirt, holding on for dear life. Ten fingers, just the regular ten, and the posters on the walls said words that made sense now, so why did Stiles still feel so off-kilter? He hadn’t woken up from this yet, fingers and words were fine; all signs pointed to real, but it still didn’t fucking feel real. There was still the icy rush of terror in his veins, pervasive and irrational, and it wasn’t fucking fair.

Stiles unclenched one hand from Jackson’s shirt, snatched up the nearest object he could find, and threw it as hard as he could with a strangled cry. The book probably would’ve broken his window if Jackson hadn’t snatched it out of the air before it could get that far, werewolf reflexes taking over at the unexpected movement. He looked back at Stiles in surprise and Stiles reached out to knock the book out of his hand just for spite, just because he wanted to hit something, to break everything he could get his hands on.

Jackson was closest. Stiles put both hands on his chest and shoved as hard as he could, sending the werewolf sprawling across his floor. He grabbed another book and threw that one too, uncaring of the dent he put in his wall, and reached blindly for something else. His fingers found the handle of his baseball bat and a savage sort of pleasure filled him at the thought of how much damage he could do with it. Maybe reality needed to be as broken as he was to make sense.

But then there were hands on his, peeling them away from the bat, and unyielding arms wrapping around him from behind, pinning his arms to his sides so firmly that none of his struggles did a damn bit of good. He kicked his legs and writhed and shouted, fear subsumed by the burn of impotent anger, but Jackson just held on and let him fight until he couldn’t anymore, until he slumped forward and his heaving breaths turned to sobs. The second Jackson’s hold loosened, Stiles was pushing him away, falling back to his pitiful corner of floor and pulling his knees into his chest so he could bury his face in them.

“Why is this happening?”

It came out as a cracked whisper so quiet that no human would have heard it, but Jackson was there in an instant, running soothing hands along his arms up to his nape again. It was warm and gentle and nice, but it didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right and it hadn’t felt right in a long time, not even on his best days.

“It’s supposed to be over, ” Stiles said, voice breaking. “Everyone keeps saying it’s over so why do I keep feeling like this?”

He didn’t voice the worst of his thoughts, the ones that sometimes left him huddled on the bathroom floor for an hour at a time, shaking too hard to stand and as wet from tears as from the shower’s spray.

Am I insane? Have I lost my mind for good? Did it break me?

“Stiles, I know what this is.”

Stiles jerked his head up so fast that only Jackson’s hand on the back of his neck kept it from smacking into the wall.

“W-what?”

“I know what this is, and you’re not crazy.”

Of course he would know exactly what Stiles wasn’t saying; he was Stiles’ soulmate. Soulmates were meant to understand, truly understand. He’d gotten reassurances like this before—from his dad, from Scott, from Lydia and Derek—but none of them knew the extent of the problem. They didn’t get it, not the way Jackson did. If anyone could actually help him, it would be Jackson.

His desperation must have been painfully obvious because Jackson sighed and sat back, apparently giving up on getting Stiles out of the corner and instead settling down cross-legged on the floor in front of him. The shift took Jackson’s hand away from its place on Stiles’ nape and Stiles chased after it, snatching the hand out of the air and gripping it tight in his. Jackson let him, threading their fingers together and scooching forward so they could rest comfortably on Stiles’ upturned knees.

“It’s called dissociation,” he said simply. “It happens to a lot of people after some prolonged trauma—the normal kind, usually, but supernatural possession probably qualifies too.”

“Wait,” Stiles said with a frown, his mind foggy and slow to catch up, to place the vaguely familiar-sounding word. “Dissociation, like...isn’t that multiple personalities?”

Jackson rolled his eyes.

“That’s a really extreme and widely debated variation of it, yes, but no. Regular dissociation is just...you know, spacing out, usually, but like hardcore. Disconnecting. It can be a belief that the world around you isn’t real, or that you aren’t real. That you’re in a dream or that you’re a puppet with no control of yourself. Now, I haven’t heard about everything that happened to you with that demon thing, but that sounds pretty familiar to me. I’d have been shocked if you hadn’t come out the other side with these issues.”

“This is—” Stiles had to stop, try to swallow through a paper-dry throat. “It’s a thing that happens? To normal people? It’s not—” Not magic of any kind, not traces of the Nogitsune left behind to torment him, not a literal darkness in his soul.

“All the time,” Jackson told him, and for once Stiles wished he were a werewolf just so he could hear the steadiness of his heartbeat and verify that it was nothing but truth. “It’s one of the most common mental disorders, and there are plenty of people who never get it diagnosed because they don’t recognize the symptoms for what they are. It’s hard to see from the inside.”

“Did you?”

Because Jackson wore a rubber band too. Jackson had nightmares about his own prolonged trauma. Jackson checked himself for scales and knew just what Stiles was worried about because he worried about it too. He understood.

Jackson let out a little huff that might have been a bitter laugh and scrubbed a hand through his hair. Without its usual gel, one tuft got stuck up at an angle. Stiles had the urge to reach up and smooth it back down, but that would require letting go of Jackson’s hand, and when everything was still a little hazy, a little distant, Jackson’s hand in his felt like the only thing keeping him on the ground.

“No,” Jackson admitted. “No, I didn’t.”

“Then how do you know all this now?”

Jackson chewed on his tongue, battling his own reluctance. If Lydia was right, then Jackson didn’t just talk about things like this, not easily. This was admitting to a weakness in front of someone with the ability to hurt him, laying himself bare and making himself vulnerable just for the sake of maybe helping someone else. But he looked at Stiles for a long moment, bottom lip caught between his teeth in an uncharacteristically uncertain expression, before letting it go with a sigh.

“After the whole...thing,” he said, eyes settling on their intertwined hands so he didn’t have to maintain eye contact. “My parents didn’t know what to do with me. They were even more out of their depth than I was with the supernatural shit, and now they had a traumatized no-name werewolf son covered in secondhand blood. They did the most normal thing they could think to do: they sent me to a fucking therapist.”

Stiles raised his eyebrows.

“A therapist?” he asked flatly. “What the hell kind of therapist handles this stuff?”

Jackson gave him a weak smile.

“None that they could find,” he said. “I couldn’t actually talk to this lady about practically anything that had happened to me—not the important parts, anyway—so it was kind of pointless. But we did talk some about this. About how...how I still feel like someone else is calling the shots some days. Like I’m not the one in control of my actions. How I lose hours at a time, these big blank spaces in my memory where I zone out so hard that there’s just nothing, and that sends me into a panic because that’s what happened when Matt sent me after someone and how would I even know if it was happening again?”

Stiles squeezed his hand because Jackson was breathing hard, eyes unfocused and darting around aimlessly, looking like he might be on the edge of falling into those memories again. Jackson looked up at him and for a minute his breathing stopped, held tight as he pulled himself back. He let the breath out slowly, nodding. He squeezed Stiles’ hand in return.

“The therapy itself didn’t do me much good, but she did tell me about this and some ways to, you know, deal with it. There’s two kinds of dissociation,” Jackson said matter-of-factly. “There’s depersonalization—feeling like you aren’t real—and derealization—like everything else isn’t real. Most of the time, what I get is the first one, because for a while I legitimately wasn’t me. You, though.”

“Derealization,” Stiles said for him. “Dreaming. Living in a nightmare.”

“Because that thing fucked with your head,” Jackson said by way of agreement. “It locked you in actual dreams, made it impossible for you to get out. But it’s not here anymore and what’s left is just your own mind getting confused. You just need to find ways to remind yourself of that until the feeling passes and you can get your feet under you again.”

“Like the questions?”

“Yeah. A mantra, a list of facts that you can repeat until you believe them again.”

“And the ring,” Stiles’ said with half a smile. “Focus on something hard enough to head it off before it really starts, right?”

Jackson smiled back, rubbing a thumb over the ring on Stiles’ finger.

“I thought that might work for you,” he said, sounding almost shy. He cleared his throat. “And the finger counting,” he went on. “That’s a good one.”

Stiles’ smile died, something in his stomach going sour as the itch crawled along his spine. He found himself shaking his head. He thought of the rubber band, of the sting-burn of snapping it, but Jackson had taken it off him earlier. And even if he still had it, it would mean letting go of Jackson’s hand. He just gripped harder.

“Stiles?” Jackson asked when he didn’t get a response. “Is that not a good one? It seems to work for you, at least with the nightmares.”

Stiles finally tugged his hand free, pulling it back down into his lap so he could stare at it. Nothing came out of his mouth when he opened it, so he closed it again. He didn’t notice he was scratching at his forearm until Jackson stopped him. He tugged the ring off Stiles’ finger, shook it apart, and dumped the disassembled thing in his palm with a pointed look. Stiles was just fidgety enough to take the alternative gladly, working the thin rings around and around until they fell back into place, then shaking it apart to do it again.

“Come on, Stilinski, don’t clam up on me now,” Jackson said, pushing lightly at his knee. “What’s wrong with the finger thing?”

“It’s just that—” Stiles started, but the words really didn’t want to come out. Saying them aloud felt like too much, like admitting to some kind of sin that wasn’t even his doing. Admitting that he wasn’t human, and not in the supernatural-creature way like the various were-things and banshees and kitsunes in his life. Admitting he didn’t exist anymore.

"Just what?"

Jackson's tone was unusually gentle, coaxing, like he was wary of spooking Stiles and sending him running. It wasn't an unwarranted fear, honestly, but Stiles didn't run no matter how much he wanted to. Because this was his soulmate. And if there was ever anyone he could tell this to, it should be him, right? He bit his lip, sniffled, dragged the back of his hand under his eyes to wipe away the wetness he'd hardly noticed there. He cleared his throat, twice.

"It doesn't really work all that well anymore," he admitted in a hoarse whisper. "Not since it— They're not m—" A deep breath, held until his lungs hurt and let out slowly, quelled a bit of the tremor in his voice. "They're not my fingers anymore," he finally forced out. "And I know that sounds like the...the dissociation or whatever, but it's not. They're literally not mine, I'm not...I'm not me. Not anymore."

"Why do you say that?" Jackson asked, just curious enough not to sound pitying or like he was humoring him.

Stiles told him: the Nogitsune invading every inch of him, seeping into each crack in his mind, taking over his body until he hardly knew who was in control when; Scott and Lydia crashing in to rescue him, to wake him up from the nightmare; the demon spitting him out, recreating him as a facsimile of himself, identical but not; finally killing it, and destroying the body that used to be his in the process.

"And now I'm stuck as this," Stiles said, spitting the word out like the poison it was as he stared down at the fingers splayed out on his knees. They were as unhealthily pale as the rest of him, shaking, the rough of callouses catching and dragging on the fabric of his jeans. "A clone of myself made out of dark magic. The real me is dead."

Jackson was quiet for long enough that Stiles had to look up, even though every bit of him quailed at the thought of what sort of expression he might find on his face when he did. But Jackson didn't look horrified or disgusted or afraid, not like he should. He actually looked sort of confused, maybe. Stiles had to fidget under that look, unaccountably flustered.

After another moment of staring, Jackson said, quite bluntly: "That doesn't make a damn bit of sense, Stilinski."

Stiles' mouth fell open, but Jackson kept talking before he could manage to rally himself for a response.

"What about any of that made you think you were the clone in that situation?" he demanded. "Really, Stiles, I know you're capable of better reasoning and logic than this. If the Nogitsune just wanted to steal your body for itself, then why would it craft a whole new body for you? It already had your body, had complete control of it. All it needed to do was squash out your consciousness and it would've been set. It didn't need to go to all the trouble of using its own power to create a brand new identical body just so that you could continue living independently. Stiles, you were just a template."

"A template?" Stiles repeated faintly, too fuzzy to immediately grasp the slew of words, to wrap his head around what Jackson was trying to say.

"You weren't the clone, Stiles," Jackson said. "You were just the pattern it built itself around. It built a new body around yours, then spit out the real you when it was finished and didn't need you anymore. That's the most logical explanation."

Stiles stared at him, trying to catch up. He was good at logical thinking, he had always prided himself on that, but it was hard to be levelheaded and reasonable when every one of his senses was screaming at him that logic was wrong, when his skin prickled and buzzed like an electric current was coursing along it. He realized that he had fingernails against his left forearm and yanked them away before they could inflict any damage, reaching for his wrist instead but the skin there was already red and hot to the touch from earlier and Jackson still had his rubber band.

Jackson's hand settled over his, steadying, and Stiles tried to still the useless fluttering of his hands.

"I know you can't believe that right now," Jackson said. "But later, when you're feeling better, it'll make sense to you. You are real, Stiles, and it might take a long time for you to believe that, but you will. I promise, eventually you will."

Stiles shook his head. New tears clouded his vision but he could still see the blue of Jackson's eyes.

"I don't know if I believe you," he said. He wanted to—God, how he wanted to—but there was that churning ball of anger in his stomach and the darkness that gripped his chest and he couldn't imagine feeling like himself again. He hardly remembered what that felt like anyway.

The smile Jackson gave him was sad.

"That's okay," he said. "For now, though: are you still feeling off?"

"That's one way of putting it," Stiles said with a weak smile of his own, or at least an attempt at one. He rubbed at his face again, trying to wipe away the evidence of tears as if that might somehow make him feel less like shit in a million different ways. By the time he looked back up, Jackson had gotten to his feet and was holding out a hand to him.

"I want to try something," he said briskly. "If you'll let me."

Stiles eyed him with something like suspicion, but he was too exhausted to properly maintain that level of skepticism. Besides, all of Jackson's ideas had been helpful so far, on some level of another. What did he have to lose by trusting him? He let Jackson drag him to his feet without question and waited for further instruction.

"This might be a little...weird," Jackson admitted, shifting on his feet and studiously avoiding Stiles' eye. "For us, at least. But it might be good for you, so..."

"What is it?"

Jackson bit his lip, let it roll back out from under his front teeth slowly as he steeled himself to actually say words out loud.

"I want to give you a massage."

Alright, so maybe Stiles could understand why he hesitated.

"If you're not comfortable with that, then it's fine," Jackson hurried to say, like he thought Stiles might start ranting and raving about how inappropriate a proposition it was. "It's just that physical sensation can help to ground you in reality and I thought maybe—"

"Okay."

Jackson stopped abruptly, mouth hanging open for a second or two before it snapped shut again.

"Really?" he asked, incredulous.

Stiles felt a smirk tug at the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow quirking up.

"I trust you to keep the bad touch to a minimum."

He was treated to the utterly delightful sight of pink creeping onto Jackson's cheeks and fervently wished he didn't still currently want to claw his skin off so that he could properly bask in the glory of having actually made Jackson Whittemore blush. Maybe he could make it his goal in life to recreate the moment at a time when he could fully appreciate it. As it was, he still took some pleasure in the way Jackson ran his fingers through his hair, coughed, and made a flaily sort of gesture that was much more characteristic of Stiles himself.

"Right," Jackson said. "Uh, massage, so..."

Stiles obediently pulled his t-shirt over his head, letting it take up residence on his floor with the rest of his wardrobe, glad he had already been barefoot and in sweatpants for his afternoon in. He let Jackson push him down onto the bed to settle on his stomach, cheek pillowed on his arms. That meant he was perfectly situated to see the lingering pink marks that crisscrossed the vulnerable skin of his forearms, stark and accusatory, and his fingers twisted themselves into the sheets of their own accord. He closed his eyes.

They snapped open again when a heat settled across the backs of his thighs; Jackson was straddling him. A big portion of him—the portion that was still primarily a horny teenage boy—acknowledged that it was a highly suggestive position and should probably either be horribly awkward or a huge turn on, not quite sure which. The rest of him, a not insignificant part in itself, felt strangely grounded by the weight, like it was anchoring him somehow. He didn't protest, even though Jackson was clearly waiting for him to do so. He just wriggled a bit, jostling Jackson into a more comfortable spot, and tried to forget the fact that he was shirtless, that so much of his skin—the skin that was supposed to be his, that Jackson insisted was his, whether it felt like it or not—was on display.

The first touch of Jackson's hands on his back made him flinch, gentle as it was. Jackson didn't pull away though, just rested lightly along Stiles' shoulder blades, cupping the jut of bone in his palms.

"I want you to follow my hands, okay?" he said. "Really try to feel them everywhere they go. Feel the heat and the pressure. Feel each individual fingertip. Try to identify which muscles I'm working, maybe name them. See if you can move that one muscle by itself. Can you do that?"

Stiles made a noise of assent that was muffled in the crook of his elbow, but he knew Jackson heard it because he went right to work.

Stiles had never consciously examined Jackson's hands before, even though he'd spent the last few days practically clinging to them, but obviously he had been missing out. They were wide and long, fingers slim, and when he spread his fingers those hands spanned Stiles' entire back, folding over and wrapping around his ribs. It was still instinct on some level to cringe away from the contact, from the touch of anything on skin that didn't sit right on his body, but Stiles forced himself to be still and do as Jackson had said.

He kept his eyes shut, turned his attention inwards. Or outwards maybe, he wasn't really sure which was which at this point, but it didn't really matter. He chased the sensations, the warmth of Jackson's skin that seemed to grow hotter by the minute. He tried to count Jackson's fingers as they lay against his side, fitting into the spaces between his ribs and finding the ache that settled there with every new breath. He squirmed when Jackson's thumbs dug into the thick muscles on either side of his spine, dragging upward toward the base of his skull and the knot of pain that lived there.

While he worked, Jackson kept talking, just low murmurs that weren't half as important as the steady drone of his voice, and Stiles found himself half-dozing. He followed Jackson's instructions sleepily, shrugging a shoulder when Jackson tapped on it, spreading his arms out to the sides and then folding them back in, flexing one muscle and then another and another at Jackson's request. Like this, in the close heat of the moment, it was easy to sink into it, to forget anything but the push and sweep and ache of the strong hands on him.

Stiles might have actually fallen asleep, he couldn't be sure, but when he next opened his eyes the itchy-numb, crawling sensation had faded completely and so had most of the light from the window. The weight of Jackson on his legs had disappeared too, sadly, and Stiles frowned into his pillow. Halfheartedly, he tried to shift onto his side, to get a better look around and see where the werewolf had gone, but his limbs were too heavy to cooperate and he gave up pretty quickly, sinking back into the bed with a sigh.

A chuckle came from somewhere; not the raspy kind that haunted his nightmares, but a light one he didn't recognize but knew anyway. Jackson knelt down by the bed, nudging his shoulder until Stiles opened bleary eyes once more to look at him. A brightly colored straw entered his field of vision, sunk into a glass of orange juice, and Stiles let Jackson coax him into drinking some of it, the tang fresh and cool on his tongue.

He should say something, he thought. A thank you, maybe, or a comment on Jackson's potential career as a masseuse. Apparently, though, his mind and body had unanimously decided that it was bedtime, despite the fact that his bedside clock showed they hadn't even hit nine o'clock in the evening yet, and had given up any and all pretense of functionality for the time being. He did manage to mumble out something, but he didn't think it was actually coherent.

Jackson just laughed again, quiet and sort of fond. One of those lovely and talented hands came out to push the hair off Stiles' forehead, smoothing it back and scratching gently across his scalp in a way that sort of made Stiles want to purr like a very large and contented cat.

"Go to sleep, Stiles," he said.

He made to get up, but one last burst of energy let Stiles catch hold of his hand before he could, tugging at him with a noise somewhere between a whine and a groan. Jackson looked down at him in surprise, like he somehow hadn't expected Stiles to want him to stay. Something open and sweet stole across his face, the curve of a smile barely there and no hint anywhere of the smug asshole persona he wore like battle armor, and he pulled Stiles' hand off his wrist to tuck it back into the blanket that had somehow found its way around him when he wasn't paying attention.

If Stiles didn't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his dreams were never so kind, he might have thought he imagined it when Jackson leaned in and pressed his lips against Stiles' forehead. The last thing he heard before sleep overtook him was Jackson's whisper of: "Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere."

Chapter Text

Stiles woke slowly, slowly enough to feel every part of himself metaphorically reboot and come back online one at a time until he was something close to fully conscious. It took several long minutes for him to recognize the simple fact that he had slept through the night. He had slept through the entire night without a single bad dream, hours and hours of uninterrupted sleep the likes of which he hadn’t had in longer than he liked to admit. Now he was waking up, for once, without feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all, without the persistent dragging feeling of fatigue.

And he was so utterly, thoroughly comfortable, swaddled in blankets that were the perfect temperature and tucked in just right to be snug without being constricting. The light from his window wasn't hitting his face yet, a dim enough glow against his eyelids that it couldn't be past mid-morning. There were birds chirping cheerfully somewhere nearby, the low rumble of traffic drifting up from the street, and his soulmate breathing softly behind him.

The warm puff of it in his ear almost startled him; he'd never woken up with Jackson still there before. The previous three times they had shared Stiles' bed, Jackson had always woken up before him and been downstairs making breakfast by the time Stiles got up, but here he was, still fast asleep and wrapped around Stiles like a clingy octopus.

Very slowly and carefully—and with some measure of reluctance—Stiles wiggled his way out of Jackson's grip, nudging at the arm around his waist until it finally gave up and retracted. When he managed to turn around, there was a pout on Jackson's face, like even in sleep he was offended that someone would dare take his teddy bear away from him, and Stiles had to smile at that. And at the way Jackson immediately scooped up as much of the loose blankets as he could, hugging those to his chest in Stiles' place. It was undeniably cute.

Jackson looked so much younger asleep, more like the seventeen year old that he actually was than the mature adult he tried so hard to be. Without the haughty sneer he painted on for the audience, there was nothing to detract from the softness that lingered around his otherwise sharp features. The diffuse light danced across his face, caressing the jut of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw, the hollow of his throat, and Stiles fought the urge to reach out and touch.

God, but he was beautiful. And like this, relaxed and unguarded, there was no trace of the terrible things he’d experienced, no mark to show that he’d suffered through and survived so much. Stiles had to wonder if the same could be said for him, if in those few precious hours when his sleep was calm, something of his old, unmarred self shined through. He hoped so.

And he wondered if Jackson had ever had anyone to do for him what he was doing for Stiles, if there had been anyone to talk him down from his nightmares and hold him until the panic had passed, to offer reassurances and support, to tell him he wasn’t crazy and things would be alright. From what little Jackson had told him, it didn’t sound like there had been. The thought made something in Stiles break a little, that Jackson could have gone through all the same things he was but completely alone, without the meager comforts that were familiar surroundings and people who cared, all with that added burden of alienation that came from being no-name.

Stiles couldn’t help but lay a hand on Jackson’s cheek, as softly as he could to keep from waking him. Still, Jackson turned his head into the warmth of Stiles’ palm, the little upset crease between his eyebrows smoothing out into something more peaceful, like his soulmate’s presence was a simple comfort in and of itself.

Stiles wished he could have been there. They hadn’t been soulmates back then and he wouldn’t have understood like he did now, but Stiles liked to think he might have been able to do something, anything at all to lighten the load. Would he have been enough? Probably not, he thought, but then even just a few days ago he had thought that he and Jackson would never work and yet here he was with more hope than he’d had in months. He wasn’t fixed, not by a long shot, but the gaping hole that had engulfed his chest since he’d lost Heather, the one that had grown and twisted and darkened with every tragedy since, didn’t feel quite so empty just now.

Jackson made a very endearing snuffling noise, cuddling the blankets more aggressively, and Stiles had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. Almost like he sensed it, Jackson tilted his face up toward him and Stiles’ thumb brushed against the swell of his bottom lip. Stiles froze, drawing in a breath and holding it, waiting to see if Jackson would wake. He didn’t, just settled right where he was, unmindful of Stiles’ touch.

Stiles should probably move. He was being creepy, touching Jackson like this while he was asleep, but he couldn’t bring himself to lift his thumb from where it rested. Jackson’s lip was soft and pink, a little bit damp, and there was no way the urge that rose in Stiles could go unacknowledged, not when it made his stomach flip-flop and his pulse kick into overdrive. He couldn’t help but lick his own lips, his thumb swiping back and forth across Jackson’s in a feather-light caress, and Stiles was leaning forward before he could think better of it.

Jackson’s eyes opened.

Stiles pulled back so quickly that he knocked himself off the side of the bed entirely and ended up in a groaning heap on the floor. Somehow he managed to drag half the blankets down onto the floor with him, most of them falling on his head and getting tangled up in his flailing arms until he seriously considered just lying down to accept his fate and die of embarrassment. But then they were being tugged off again and Jackson was peering down at him over the side of the bed, bleary-eyed and still half-asleep but also vaguely annoyed.

“You’re a danger to yourself and others, you know that?”

“Uh, yeah,” Stiles said helplessly. “Yeah, that’s come to my attention before.”

He was suddenly very aware of his own chest, still bare after last night’s massage. It was sort of interesting to experience the sort of vulnerability that came with being physically exposed instead of emotionally so, but he still scrambled for a floor-shirt that passed the sniff test, pulling it on in his usual graceful manner. Jackson was smirking at him when he surfaced, lounging on the bed—Stiles’ bed, damn it—like he knew exactly how good he looked, and it really wasn’t fair that Stiles was so affected by the sight of him when they’d been all tangled up together sharing that bed just a few minutes ago.

“I’m gonna go, uh...” Stiles clapped his hands together, following it up with the ever-reliable finger guns. “Pancakes! How ‘bout that?”

He fled in the direction of the kitchen before Jackson could answer because, really, who didn’t like pancakes? Besides, it was about time Stiles did something for Jackson, after three days and nights of Jackson doing things for him. And not just the yummy breakfasts, he thought as he threw ingredients into a mixing bowl and set the stovetop to heating. The rest of it too. After the nightmares and the episodes of dissociation—and god, it was astounding how much of a difference a little thing like a name could make—it just sort of felt like all Stiles was doing in the relationship was taking. Jackson was already doing him so much good, there had to be some way that Stiles could help him in return.

Problem was, Jackson didn’t seem to be half as out of control as Stiles was, even if he had similar issues. Stiles frowned as he poured out the batter, trying to sift back through the haze that was the previous night to remember the actual conversations they’d had. Jackson had said he had nightmares sometimes, even if he hadn’t in the last few days, and he still depersonalized, but Jackson had had a lot longer to come to terms with all this and to find coping mechanisms that worked for him. For all that he was obviously still struggling, he seemed to have things comparatively well in hand in that regard. The only pressing problem was—

“Coffee?”

Jackson was still bare-chested and sleep-rumpled as he ambled into the kitchen, scratching at his jaw and sniffing the air in a very dog-like fashion that Stiles might have poked fun at had he wanted to lose a limb. Wisely, Stiles chose to just point his spatula at the coffee maker and the werewolf made a beeline for it.

Stiles chewed on his lip, flipping one pancake after another as he thought through a tentative strategy and put his words together carefully; he probably only had one shot at this and he couldn’t fuck it up, for Jackson’s sake.

“I’m gonna be headed out to the loft again soon,” he said, just a passing comment, light and unconcerned. “Whole pack will be there probably.”

Stiles could practically hear Jackson roll his eyes even with his back turned.

“I’ve got shit to do,” Jackson said.

“Right, right,” Stiles said agreeably, not that he believed Jackson in the slightest. “Just thought you might swing by if you had a free minute, just to say hi or whatever.”

“I told you,” Jackson snapped. “I don’t want to say hi. I’m not joining your pack.”

Stiles flipped the last of the pancakes onto the serving plate and twisted the dial on the stove with more force than necessary, but he made an effort to keep his tone as light as possible.

“I’m not asking you to join,” he said, dropping the plate on the table in front of Jackson and heading back to the pantry to find the syrup because maybe if he didn’t make eye contact Jackson wouldn’t get quite so defensive. That was a thing, right? Eye contact as a direct challenge? “Though I would like for you to prove you exist, at least. The newbies are starting to think I made you up.”

“How many times do I have to say, I’m not interested?”

That, the uncalled for reiteration when Stiles wasn’t even pushing, cemented it in Stiles’ mind. He doth protest too much, far too much for someone who truly didn’t care. Abandoning the syrup search for more important matters, Stiles turned back with arms crossed over his chest.

“Really?” he asked. “Because all the other werewolves I’ve ever encountered have been desperate for a pack, it’s in their nature. Why are you fighting that instinct so hard when there’s a pack right here, waiting with open arms?”

Jackson bristled, fingers clenching dangerously tight around the blue mug he had claimed for his own.

“Maybe this particular pack just isn’t worth being in,” he sneered, and if Stiles hadn’t known that jab was coming it might have hurt. But now he recognized it for the deflection that it was, a way to avoid answering the real question by lashing out at the person asking it. But Stiles wasn’t giving up now because if Jackson was pushing back, it meant Stiles was close to the root of the issue. And if Stiles knew anything at all, it was that Jackson was only hurting himself in this.

“The pack is better and stronger now than it was before,” Stiles pointed out—no offense to Derek’s alpha-ing. “Back when you wanted the bite.”

“I wanted the power, not the pack,” Jackson shot back, and he had to drop the mug for fear of breaking it. His hands gripped tight onto the tabletop instead, and Stiles could see how tense he was in the flex of his abs. “I don’t need all this hierarchical pack bullshit, okay? I’ve been on my own for a long time and it’s better that way. I’m omega for a reason, Stiles.”

“Oh, like you were no-name for a reason?”

Jackson reeled back like he’d been slapped, eyes wide and unguarded as his own words from their first conversation hit home. Then he was shoving away from the table, rushing for the door, intent on ending this the way he always did. But this time Stiles caught him by the arm before he could escape, holding on because he couldn’t let that become a pattern, not if they were going to get anywhere.

“If this is about the kanima thing, then it’s stupid,” he said, tone too close to pleading to be as harsh as the words were. “No one blames you for that any more than they do me for the Nogitsune. And you’re my soulmate!” he pressed on as Jackson tried to pull back again. “You’re practically in the pack already just by virtue of that! If it’s bec—”

“For fuck’s sake, Stiles, I don’t want to be your plus-one!”

Jackson did snatch his arm out of Stiles’ grip this time and Stiles was too surprised to stop him. Then the words sunk in and confusion took over.

“Wait, what? My plus-one?”

“I don’t want—” Jackson stopped, teeth gritted and hands clenched into fists at his sides. But he didn’t bolt this time. He let Stiles step into his space, though he turned his face away.

“Don’t want what?” Stiles asked, low and cautious. He didn’t reach out to touch, no matter how much he wanted to. That would be going too far, pushing too hard when Jackson was already so on edge. He waited, as quiet and still as he could manage, just close enough that he was sure Jackson could feel his body heat and hear the steady beat of his heart.

“I don’t want a pack that just tolerates me for your sake,” Jackson finally said, and his voice broke. “They’re not my friends, Stiles, they’re yours. They’re not my pack, they’re yours. I’m not gonna follow you around like a lost puppy and let everyone pretend they want me there when they don’t. I don’t want their fucking pity.”

“Jackson,” Stiles said, momentarily at a loss for words. But then Jackson made for the door again, apparently having reached his limit for vulnerable moments, and Stiles did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed Jackson by the hand one more time, pulled him back around, and kissed him.

It wasn’t a particularly great kiss, too unexpected for them to fit together properly, and it didn’t last long, but it was more than enough to make Stiles’ heart stutter. Jackson’s lips were every bit as soft as they looked, and his eyes were wide when Stiles pulled back. He looked a little lost, almost afraid, and Stiles knew that feeling all too well. He remembered the way having Jackson’s full weight on top of him after a nightmare had anchored him, made him feel grounded and safe and protected, so he pushed in close. Jackson let Stiles walk him backwards until he hit the wall, didn’t protest when Stiles leaned in further until they were flush together from chest to knee, his elbows braced against the wall on either side of Jackson’s face.

“You’re no one’s charity case, Jackson,” Stiles said, slowly and clearly to make sure it got through his thick head. “That’s not what this is.”

“Please,” Jackson tried to scoff, but there was a tremble to his voice that gave him away. “They don’t want me there. No one wants a blue-eyed wolf in their pack.”

That actually got a disbelieving laugh out of Stiles.

“That’s what concerns you?” he asked. “Jackson, we have more blue-eyed wolves in our pack than not-blue-eyed. Derek has blue eyes—I don’t know if you ever saw his wolf eyes before he was alpha. Peter, obviously, was kind of a serial killer for a while there, so very blue for very good reason. And Malia, one of the newbies, eyes also blue. And if I were a werewolf,” Stiles added, letting his forehead rest against Jackson’s, “mine would be too.”

Jackson frowned at him like he might protest that, as if the thought that Stiles could be judged for the Nogitsune’s actions was somehow less acceptable than him being blamed for Matt and Gerard’s.

“The McCall pack has no shortage of blue eyes,” Stiles said. “And none of us is condemned for them because we all had pretty thoroughly extenuating circumstances. Well...except Peter.”

Jackson laughed weakly, barely a halfhearted chuckle, but he didn’t exactly look convinced. What he looked like was a damn mirror for Stiles’ own guilt and irrational self-loathing. He let Stiles kiss him again though, soft and tentative, with that same half-confused, half-awed expression like he couldn’t believe Stiles actually wanted to.

“In case you haven’t noticed, Jackson,” Stiles said with a rueful grin, “we’re a pack full of misfits and strays. You’d fit right in.”

“They don’t like me,” Jackson insisted, sounding small and sad and jeez, how had Stiles never realized this before? Why had it taken Lydia’s explanation to make him see how desperate Jackson was for approval?

“Lydia likes you,” Stiles pointed out. He traced his thumb over Jackson’s cheek because he could, because he got a combination eye-roll-and-reluctant-half-smile out of him. “I like you,” he said, with a raised eyebrow and the unspoken caveat of well, I do now at least. “And the rest of them? Jackson, they don’t know you. You haven’t given them the chance to. You spend all day out doing god knows what all on your own, making excuses to avoid everyone. Why are you so determined to be alone?”

He didn’t expect an answer—not when he already knew what it was likely to be, and how hard it would be for Jackson to say that out loud—and he didn’t get one. Jackson looked away again, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Stiles used the hand on Jackson’s cheek to turn him back, ducking his head to make sure Jackson met his eye despite his reluctance.

“Give us a chance,” he said, earnest. “Give them a chance to see the you that I’ve seen these last few days. Because him? There’s nothing not to like about him.”

Jackson stared at him, wide eyes darting around Stiles’ face, searching. Stiles let him look as long as he needed, just resting against him. The physical closeness of it—chests flush together, their breathing synced, Jackson’s hands settled lightly on his hips like he was unsure of his welcome there—was soothing and he would happily stay there all day if that’s how long it took for Jackson to be satisfied.

It was only another minute or two before Jackson lifted a hand slowly off his waist to lay it on the side of his neck instead, over his pulse point, thumb brushing over the line of his jaw. Stiles’ made a soft noise in his throat, a shiver going down his spine, and the corner of Jackson’s mouth twitched like he might smile. Instead he kissed Stiles, a gentle brush of lips like he was testing the waters. When Stiles didn’t push him away, he did it again, more confidently.

If someone had told the Stiles from a year ago that he would one day find himself kissing a half-dressed Jackson Whittemore in his kitchen on a lazy Sunday morning, he probably would have had them Baker Acted for their own safety and the safety of others who might hear their delusional tale. Now he couldn’t think of anywhere else he would rather be. The itch in his skin was absent, the voice in his head quiet for now, and Jackson was warm and present and real and it didn’t even matter that the pancakes were going cold on the table behind them.

There was a pang of sadness, though, at the memory of Heather, the thought that he never got to have this with her. But it wasn’t all-consuming like it used to be, didn’t suck him down into that vortex of grief and loneliness and fear that left him holding onto reality by his fingertips. He missed her, of course he did, and he would always regret that they were too slow to be what they could have been, but the universe had seen fit to grant him a second chance. He could only be grateful for that—for this—and make the most of it while he could.

They broke apart for air but neither of them moved away, as if abandoning the little intimate bubble they had made for themselves in that moment might break them. They just stayed close, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s air and waiting. Waiting to see if the feeling held steady. Until—

“Running.”

Stiles pulled back enough to look Jackson in the eye, surprised into a laugh. There was a tinge of pink on Jackson’s sharp cheekbones and this time Stiles could revel in it.

“What I’ve been doing all day,” Jackson explained. “I do a lot of running in the preserve, when I’m not job hunting. It’s...easier to not think that way.”

Stiles nodded; he thought, if he’d had the stamina for it, he might have taken up the same hobby. Running was mindless and repetitive, an easy way for some people to lull their brains into merciful silence. Unfortunately, Stiles had never been one of those people, far too uncoordinated for running to be anything but an accident waiting to happen.

“Bet it would be even better if you had someone to run with,” he told Jackson. “Not me, though. I’d keel over in minutes, or trip and go rolling headfirst down a hill into a ravine because that’s my luck.”

Jackson snorted.

“No one has ever accused you of being graceful.”

Stiles pinched Jackson in the side and was treated to an indignant and undignified yelp that had him throwing his head back in a laugh. Jackson pinched him back, but it wasn’t enough to override his amusement.

“Shut up, Stilinski!”

Stiles just kissed him again, because he could, because the pout on Jackson’s face was adorable, because for the first time in a long, long time he felt like things might actually be okay.

“I may not be able to keep up with your wolfy speed and agility,” he said when most of his giggles had passed, “but the others could. I know they’d be more than happy to run with you sometime. If you’d let them.”

Jackson rolled his eyes, pout going strong, but it looked more petulant than actually upset now. And his whole demeanor was belied by the fact that he had hooked his fingers into the pockets of Stiles’ sleep pants to keep him close.

“I guess some company wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he grumbled.

Stiles beamed at him.

“Does that mean you’ll come to a pack meeting with me?” he asked, mentally crossing his fingers and toes and arms and eyes and everything that could conceivably be crossed. “Because Lydia’s getting very impatient. Honestly, she’s been crowd-sourcing reliable siege engines on Amazon, dude, she’s this close to storming the gates and dragging you out by the hair.”

Jackson shook his head in exasperation but the smile fighting its way onto his face was fond.

“I guess if she’s that desperate,” he said magnanimously, and it was Stiles’ turn to snort.

“She’s been pining for you something fierce,” he said with the utmost sarcasm, finally tearing himself away from Jackson’s heat in favor of their abandoned breakfast. “Up in her tower, writing sappy poems and breathlessly awaiting your triumphant return. Let’s not keep the poor dear waiting any longer lest she wither away entirely.”

They were definitely the last ones to make it to the loft—syrup-sweetened kisses were very distracting, and Jackson was surprisingly willing to indulge Stiles with as many as he wanted—and for a minute Stiles really thought the sight of all the cars plus Scott’s motorcycle might be enough to scare Jackson off. But when Stiles raised an eyebrow at him in silent question, Jackson swallowed hard and shook his head.

By the time Stiles had gotten out of the jeep and come around to the passenger side, Jackson had pulled on his armor, the same cocky smirk and too-cool-for-you tilt of the head that he’d hidden behind for years. It didn’t have the same ease to it anymore, shaky with cracks in the foundation from all the hits his confidence had taken over the last year, but that was okay. Just having him there at all was proof of his courage, and he even let Stiles take him by the hand to lead him inside.

They made it up the first flight of stairs before Jackson balked, his hesitation pulling Stiles to a stop too. When Stiles looked back, Jackson’s eyes were turned upward toward the ceiling. No doubt he could hear them all upstairs, the six relaxed heartbeats, the easy way they all passed familiar jokes back and forth as they waited. Judging by the way his lips pressed into a thin line and his fingers tightened around Stiles’, it was daunting.

Stiles pulled at Jackson’s hand until he looked away from the ceiling. Then he tugged some more until Jackson huffed and came closer, close enough for Stiles to loop an arm around his waist. He still had that haughtiness wrapped around him, like he was deigning to let Stiles hold him like this, but Stiles knew better than to believe that. It was there in the way Jackson rested his hands on Stiles’ biceps, the way he swayed forward into the embrace, the way the tense line of his shoulders relaxed just a bit at Stiles’ touch.

“Hey,” Stiles said quietly. “It’s gonna be fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Jackson scoffed, very convincingly.

“Uh huh,” Stiles said skeptically, and Jackson shot him a dirty look that he ignored in favor of pulling him in that little bit more. “Whether you’re worried or not, you are gonna go in there and charm the pants off everyone because you’re Jackson Whittemore and that’s what you do.”

“Damn right,” Jackson said with that same old smirk, the one Stiles remembered from years past when Jackson had still been a one-dimensional caricature of a bully in his mind. Before, it had made him want to smack the look off his stupid, pretty face. Now it was kind of endearing, like a kitten with its claws out, and left him feeling warm and a little sappy.

“And I,” he said, pausing to make sure Jackson met his eyes, “am going to be right by your side. Because I am your soulmate, and that’s what I do.”

Jackson’s smirk softened, gave way to something genuine and a little shy.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah,” Stiles echoed, tightening his hold on Jackson. “We’re trying, remember? We both are. And soulmates stick by each other. So wherever you are, I’ll be there too. From here on out, whatever we face, we face together because neither of us has to be alone anymore. You got that?”

“Got it,” Jackson whispered, leaning in for a kiss that Stiles was only too happy to return. That is, until Jackson pulled away with a grimace and another upward glance. Stiles bit his lip, holding back a laugh.

“They’re all listening in, aren’t they?”

“I’m pretty sure McCall just broke something,” Jackson said resignedly. “Derek’s bitching at him about it.”

Stiles groaned theatrically and dropped his forehead to Jackson’s shoulder. Jackson made a noise of protest but gave himself away by turning his nose into Stiles’ hair, and Stiles had definitely been right in thinking that his scent was somehow, some-why a source of comfort because more of the tension eased out of Jackson’s frame with every inhale. Stiles smiled into the fabric of Jackson’s ostentatiously colored peacoat before he pulled away.

“Come on,” he said, leading his way up the next flight of stairs. “Before Scott breaks any more of Derek’s stuff, the poor guy doesn’t have that much to start with.”

Stiles waited until he was in front of the loft’s heavy front door before he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure Jackson hadn’t chickened out and taken off the minute his back was turned. He was still there, just a step behind, looking a strange combination of aloof and nauseous in the way that only he could manage.

Stiles gestured to the door with his head and Jackson rocked back on his heels for a moment before stepping up beside him. Really, Stiles couldn’t blame him for his reluctance. This close, even he could hear the pack’s chatter, the kind of well-meant bickering that only came with people who were close to each other. Stiles knew from experience that it was damn near impossible to break into that kind of clique. It took an invitation, and Jackson didn’t feel like his was genuine, no matter that Stiles had practically engraved it in marble and put it in his hands with a bow wrapped around it.

“They don’t bite,” Stiles told him, bumping their shoulders together. Then he pulled a face. “Well. Derek did bite you that one time but, in all fairness, you were kind of asking for it.”

Jackson took one look at his shit-eating grin, shook his head in dismay, and said, “You’re such a fucking nerd.”

“Ah, but you like it,” Stiles countered. He indulged in an internal whoop of victory when Jackson did not argue that point but raised a hand to knock.

The door swung open before he could to reveal a Scott who couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted to smile at them or keep gagging over the earlier display of affection he’d eavesdropped on. Jackson froze with his arm still raised, looking very much like the proverbial deer in headlights as his careful facade crumbled. It sort of felt like the moment of truth. Stiles held his breath and waited for fireworks.

“Jackson,” Scott finally said, the smile winning out on his face. “It’s really good to see you.”

Stiles could practically see Jackson straining his ears, searching for any blip in Scott’s heartbeat that could indicate that he was lying, that it wasn’t good to see him, that Scott had actually been dreading this moment and was only putting on a show for his best friend’s benefit. He must not have heard anything suspect because his arm fell down to his side, hands immediately shoving into his pockets, but he didn’t run away or start firing off insults as he was wont to do when feeling threatened.

His eyes skipped over Scott’s shoulder to where the rest of the pack was arrayed: Derek over by the wall of windows, standing over the shattered remains of what might have been a coffee mug; Kira cross-legged on the floor in front of the one arm chair, like she had been leaning back against Scott’s legs before he had gotten up; Malia sprawled out across the couch, taking up as much space as possible; Lydia perched on the couch’s arm; even Peter lurking on the spiral staircase like the creeperwolf that he was. Stiles could admit that, even to him, all the eyes turned their way were a bit intimidating.

Several seconds passed in strained silence, Scott’s sunny smile faltering a bit as Jackson continued to stare blankly and not say anything, though his breathing was picking up like he might actually panic. When it became painfully obvious that Jackson was too frozen on the spot to answer, Stiles scooted closer to him, enough to press their sides together from shoulder to hip. Jackson looked at him then, something a little desperate in his eyes. It looked like a plea for help. Stiles smiled at him, trying to project confidence and encouragement, leaning against him more firmly to show that he was there and he wasn’t going anywhere.

A bit of the fear faded from Jackson’s expression, softening the razor-sharp edges. After another second or two, he nodded—more to himself than to Stiles—and faced Scott again with his head held that much higher.

“Hi,” he said resolutely, and Scott positively beamed at him.

“Come on in!” Scott said eagerly, stepping aside to clear the doorway. “We’ve been hoping you would come by. It’s been way too long, man.”

Jackson side-eyed Scott on his way past, his doubt obvious even without his muttered, “Seriously?”

Scott shrugged, kicking the door closed behind them.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “You kind of fled the country, dude. It’s been a whole year since the last time we saw you.”

“Yeah, but…”

Jackson licked his lips, eyes flitting around the room again uncertainly. They lingered on Derek, skipped over Lydia as quickly as possible, and came to rest on Stiles again like he was drawing strength from the mere sight of him. The thought that that might be true made Stiles’ chest feel warm and fuzzy and full. He liked the feeling.

“The last time you saw me wasn’t exactly a positive experience,” Jackson said to Scott. “Neither were any of the times before that. I was kind of a jerk back then.”

Scott’s smile faded away then, replaced by that look he had started getting in recent months, the one that was strong and kind and reassuring all at once in a way that might have seemed hokey or fake on someone else but fit so well on Scott’s face. Stiles liked to refer to it as the True Alpha Look, no matter how many times Scott rolled his eyes when he did, because that’s exactly what it was. It was that charisma and strength of character that gave Scott the wherewithal to build his own pack without violence or coercion, to draw people to him with nothing but their faith in him. He certainly didn’t used to have that much confidence, back when he was scrawny and asthmatic and loser-y, but he exuded it now. Honestly, Jackson seemed a bit stunned at the transformation, having missed most of the in-between bits.

“The past is the past, Jackson,” Scott said solemnly. “We were all kind of jerks back then: you, Derek, Stiles, me. But we’re not the same people we were back then, none of us are. And if we can forgive Derek for being a total creeper and throwing me through a few walls—” Derek made a noise of indignation, but Scott just grinned at him unapologetically before facing Jackson again with all the earnestness his optimistic little heart could muster up. “—then we can certainly forgive you for stuff that wasn’t even your fault.”

Scott sidled over to throw an arm around Stiles’ shoulders.

“And besides. Stiles has always been an annoyingly good judge of character,” he said brightly. “So if he says you’ve changed for the better, then you’re probably a pretty decent guy and we should all trust his judgment on that.”

“Oh, now you’re gonna start trusting my judgment of people?” Stiles said, too pleased by the shock on Jackson’s face to be as exasperated as he wanted to be. “What about when I said Matt was the one controlling the kanima? Huh? Where was the trust then?”

Scott pulled an exaggeratedly offended face, hand on heart and everything.

“I am learning from that mistake!” he said. “Life is a learning process, Stiles, and I am learning! See?”

Stiles gave him a shove, which Scott graciously pretended was actually enough to knock him over, grinning all the while. He retaliated by aggressively ruffling Stiles’ hair, his stupid wolfy reflexes meaning that Stiles wasn’t fast enough to escape the onslaught and could only groan melodramatically at the loss of what little styling his hair had had. It might have devolved into an ill-advised and very uneven wrestling match if Derek hadn’t stepped forward to put a hand on Jackson’s shoulder.

“What these two idiots mean,” he said with no small amount of fondness in his tone, “is welcome back. And I do mean that, Jackson. Welcome. ”

Jackson looked up at him with wide eyes, all traces of aloofness long gone from his face. In that moment, he looked young, like he had that morning when Stiles had watched him sleep. Young and open and painfully hopeful, and Stiles wanted to wrap Jackson up in his arms right there on the spot because obviously that boy had not been hugged enough in his life. He restrained himself, though, for the sake of Jackson’s dignity, and glanced over at Lydia.

Her eyes were suspiciously bright, shining with unshed tears, and there was a brilliant smile on her face that showed every bit of love she still had for her former soulmate. Stiles couldn’t help matching it and the two of them shared a long look. Lydia nodded at him and it felt like Stiles had gotten her official stamp of approval, like she was formally passing on the duty of loving Jackson to him because he’d proven himself worthy of it. He laughed a bit at the uncharacteristic poeticism of his own thoughts and Lydia’s smile turned sly in an instant, the wink she sent him after that both thrilling and alarming.

Lydia sniffed, threw her flawlessly styled hair back over her shoulder, and got primly to her feet before making a beeline for Jackson. Basking in his former alpha’s positive attention as he was, Jackson didn’t notice until she planted herself firmly in front of him, somehow shouldering Derek out of her way—Stiles suspected that Derek was just smart enough to remove himself willingly from her path—so that she could stare Jackson down. Knowledgeable as he was of Lydia and her temper, Jackson was understandably wary.

“Um...hi, Lydia,” he said slowly.

Her cross expression broke into something much more smug and she reached up to actually, legitimately, pinch his cheek.

“It’s about damn time you got your cute little butt over here.”

The statement was funny enough on its own but in conjunction with the absolutely scandalized expression on Jackson’s face, it was hands down the funniest thing that Stiles had ever heard in his life. He honestly worried that he might pull a muscle laughing and he ended up leaning his full weight against an equally hysterical Scott in the hopes that they would hold each other upright. Every time he thought he might be getting his breath back, he would catch another glimpse of Jackson, looking more and more affronted by the second, and it would set him off again.

When Stiles finally managed to rein it in a bit, still assaulted by a stray chuckle every once in a while, he sent Jackson an apologetic look. His soulmate was scowling at him, cheeks flushed a darker pink than Stiles had managed to coax out of him that morning, and he’d crossed his arms defensively over his chest. Stiles tugged at his arms until he released them with a grumble, taking hold of his hands.

“We’re done,” he promised. “I swear we’re done. But, just so you know…” Stiles couldn’t help the wicked grin that made its way onto his face. “...it is a cute butt.”

That sent Scott off into new gales of uncontrollable laughter and even Derek was snickering now. Jackson turned red, eyes the size of dinner plates, and the only way Stiles could keep from losing it all over again was to kiss the shock off his face. Malia whooped in the background, whistling and catcalling, and Jackson pulled back embarrassedly.

Just when Stiles thought that it might really be too much for him, that he might have to devise an escape plan for them before the pack ate them alive and Jackson decided he never wanted to come back ever, Kira—bless her empathetic little heart—took Jackson by the arm. She led him gently to the couch, grabbing Malia by the foot and unceremoniously yanking her off it onto the floor to make room for them to sit down together.

Stiles made a mental note to buy Kira a fruit basket because her sweet nature and soothing presence was enough to pull Jackson back from the edge of bolting. She introduced herself, asked questions about London, got a little lost in her own awkward rambling, and didn’t seem to mind that Jackson was too overwhelmed to actually contribute to the conversation. She seemed content to let Jackson sit in silence while she and Malia bickered good-naturedly. Lydia sitting down on his other side worked wonders on his obvious nerves.

Scott retook his place in the armchair a few minutes later, only too happy to throw in anecdotes from their shared past on Jackson’s behalf, all with a wry smile despite their past enmity. It wasn’t long before he’d drawn Jackson out of his shell just by virtue of setting himself up for the snarky one-liners Jackson specialized in, the same way he was used to doing with Stiles.

Stiles stayed by the door, letting his pack close ranks around their newest member. And there was no doubt that Jackson would be an official pack member soon, whether he wanted to be or not, because now that he was here they were not going to let him go. The puzzle ring rattled in Stiles’ cupped palms as he shook it apart, leaning his back against the wall and letting the sounds of happy chatter wash over him as he turned the rings around and around until they clicked back together. A whole made up of disparate parts. Fitting, he thought as Kira laughed and Malia punched her in the leg for whatever joke she had made.

Warmth at his shoulder reminded Stiles that he wasn't the only one out of the huddle. Derek was watching the pack with much the same pride as he was, hands in his pockets and a soft smile lingering on his lips.

“He'll fit in well,” he said, eyes on Jackson as the beta rolled his eyes at something Scott said with far less disgust than he ever had before.

“Yeah, I think he will.”

Derek put a hand on Stiles’ shoulder, squeezing just a bit the way he had all those months ago, when Stiles had first lost Heather. It was just as comforting now as it had been then, even without the desperate loneliness clawing at his insides and begging for release. With one last smile, Derek left him alone to go lean over the back of the couch instead, ruffling Jackson's hair and laughing when Jackson swatted his hand away.

Still Stiles stayed where he was, just observing and fiddling with his ring. Not because he needed it—he was blessedly grounded for the time being, his body his own and the intrusive thoughts at a minimum—but because he liked it, because his soulmate had given it to him, because it made him happy.

And he was happy. In that moment, with his pack around him and a budding something with the last person he would have expected, he was feeling pretty damn good. It wouldn't last forever, he knew better than to think that. Despite the fragile happiness blooming on his face, Jackson was already showing signs of fatigue; he’d been alone for so long that all the attention was wearing him down. Stiles estimated he had maybe another twenty minutes in him before he crashed hard, and Stiles had no doubt his own demons would rear their ugly heads again soon.

But for now things were good. And when Jackson glanced up at him, a small smile playing on his lips, Stiles knew they would only get better.