Chapter Text
Stiles was halfway between his bedroom and the bathroom when his vision started closing in.
At first, he thought the hallway light had flickered.
That made sense. The bulb had been doing that for weeks, dimming at random like it wanted to be dramatic instead of useful, and Stiles had been meaning to replace it every time he walked under it and then immediately forgetting because his brain stored home maintenance tasks in whatever folder also contained what he ate for lunch, dentist appointments, and every emotional consequence he did not have time for.
He continued to lose the edges of the hallway.
One second he was leaving his bedroom to go brush his teeth, thinking mostly about whether he could do the whole thing without getting distracted and wandering away with toothpaste still in his mouth, and the next the world had started pulling away from the sides.
He kept walking.
That was the part he would think about later.
He kept walking because the bathroom was just down the hall.
Because his hand could find the wall without looking.
Because stopping would mean something was happening.
The gray tightened.
He knew the steps there and back well enough to do them blind, which was convenient in theory and deeply disturbing now that his vision was doing exactly that.
Stiles’ fingers skimmed along the wall as he moved. He kept touching it just enough to keep the house from disappearing too. His heart gave one small uneven kick under his ribs, strange enough to register, but not strange enough to matter compared to the larger, louder fact that the hallway was turning into a dim tunnel. Whatever his pulse was doing got swallowed almost immediately by the bright, impossible problem of his vision closing down from the outside in.
He blinked.
It did not clear.
“Oh,” he said, and hated how small it sounded.
The hallway narrowed to a strip of carpet and wall in front of him. Everything beyond it faded, not black like a room with the lights off, but black like his brain had stopped receiving pieces of the world. His bedroom door disappeared behind him. The framed picture on the wall disappeared. The bathroom doorway became less a shape than a guess he was making from memory.
He kept walking anyway.
Two more steps.
Maybe three.
Then the strip of hallway shrank to a pinprick.
For one second, there was almost nothing.
Then not even that.
Stiles stopped.
Finally.
Not because he had made a reasonable choice, but because his foot brushed the raised edge of the bathroom threshold and some surviving animal part of his brain hit the emergency brake. Tile meant bathroom. Bathroom meant sink. Sink meant something to hold onto.
He reached forward through the dark, found the doorframe first, then the wall, then the edge of the counter with a fumbling knock of his knuckles against the cabinet.
The pressure of it helped.
Counter.
Doorframe.
Tile under his feet.
Something real.
Something that had not vanished just because his eyes had decided to resign without notice.
He blinked again, because some terrified, stupid part of him thought maybe he had closed his eyes without realizing it. Maybe that was all this was. Maybe his body had not just deleted the entire hallway.
Maybe he was being dramatic in the privacy of his own skull, which was at least familiar territory.
His eyes were open.
He knew they were open because he kept blinking, once, twice, three times, each one more deliberate than the last, like he was trying to reboot something.
The room stayed gone.
That was the part that scared him so badly he could not even make a joke out of it.
Stiles locked his elbows and held on.
Am I dying?
The thought arrived plain and cold.
No sarcasm. No clever little escape hatch. No internal commentary dressed up in jazz hands. Just the question, blunt and absolutely useless.
Am I dying right now?
He wanted his dad.
The thought hit fast and embarrassing, then immediately became less embarrassing because wanting his father while standing blind in a bathroom holding onto a sink seemed, actually, pretty reasonable. His dad was downstairs or at work or somewhere not here, and Stiles could not make himself call out because calling out would make it real. Calling out would turn a weird few seconds into a thing that happened.
So he held the sink.
He breathed. He couldn’t hear himself do it, beneath the roar of blood in his ears, but he could feel his chest expand and contract.
He waited.
His heart fluttered again, subtle and wrong, a skipped little hiccup beneath everything else. Stiles noticed it and immediately lost it under the dark, under the pressure starting to bloom behind his eyes, under the absolute roaring fact of not being able to see.
Seconds passed. Or maybe not. Time got weird when there was nothing to look at.
Then the world came back badly.
Everything rushed inward at once, shapes and light bleeding back in before his brain knew what to do with them.
Stiles stayed where he was until the bathroom stopped looking far away from him. His head throbbed behind his eyes, heavy and sudden, but the worst of it eased by degrees. The fear did not. It stayed in his chest, bright and ugly, looking for somewhere to go.
He did not have anywhere to put it.
So he made it smaller.
He hadn’t fallen.
He hadn’t passed out.
His vision was back.
His head hurt, but headaches happened.
Weird stuff happened.
His body did weird stuff more than most, even if no one had put a name to it yet, which meant this was probably just another thing in the long, stupid catalog of things he was apparently supposed to tolerate.
Stiles waited another minute, then reached for his toothbrush with one hand still braced hard against the sink.
Because that had been the plan.
Because finishing the original task made it feel less like an emergency and more like an interruption.
By the time his phone buzzed in his pocket, the event had already started turning into a story he could survive by editing.
Not blind.
Vision got weird.
Not collapsed.
Held onto the sink for a second.
Not scared.
Headache.
Scott had texted: you alive
Stiles stared at it from the bathroom doorway, headache pulsing behind his eyes.
He typed, almost went blind brushing my teeth lol
He looked at it then immediately deleted it.
Instead he typed, weird headache
Then he deleted that too.
Finally, he wrote, yeah
Then, because yeah by itself looked suspicious, he added, why
Scott replied: you weren’t answering
Stiles looked at the sink, the toothbrush still unused in his hand, and the bath mat under his feet.
He typed, was brushing my teeth
That part was almost true.
He set the phone down and went back brushing his teeth.
He would tell someone if it happened again.
Maybe.