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[part one: Stiles]
There's a metal rod sticking out of the meaty part of his calf. It's not the first thing he realizes, not the last, but it's so unexpected, so bizarre, so unrealistic, that he just kind of focuses on that and forgets about everything else for the first few minutes that he's conscious again. Blood seeps out sluggishly where the metal has pierced through muscle and sinew, and his skin is torn, jagged and ugly. He jerks—an involuntary reaction—and the pain makes him cry out, except it comes out sounding like a grunted mewl, because he's—
Because he's buried alive, under four floors of cars and concrete, with a metal rod sticking out of his calf and white dust clogging his throat.
He's not going to panic. He wants to panic—can feel the fluttering in his chest and the heavy lightness in his limbs—but he won't. He can't; not here. He needs something to think about, needs a distraction to help calm him until he can start thinking again, past the sluggish dullness that he knows is a concussion.
"Stiles," someone says, and it's a whispered hiss, but loud enough that he jerks his head, hits it against a chunk of concrete and gets plaster in his eyes. "Stiles are you okay?"
He looks down again. The only reason there's light enough for him to see the metal rod is because there's a fire a little ways off, maybe twenty feet away (don't panic, he thinks, grits his teeth against the sob that wants to wrench it's way out of his throat, it's not that close yet. You're fine. It's only a little hot. Only a little.), past bent and twisted cars straining under the weight of concrete, so much concrete, and piles of rubble and wires that are sparking intermittently. Somewhere to his right, there's running water, but that's not what he wanted to do, not what the voice asked him—he wanted to check something. Wanted to—right. His leg.
There's a metal rod sticking out of it.
His right arm is pinned under a slab of concrete that's maybe the size of the new iPad Dad got him for Christmas, but his left arm is free, curled against his chest. His middle finger is bent at an odd angle, and his wrist is swollen, black and blue under the grime caked on his skin. His clothes are matted with something slick, and he only realizes it's blood when he dabs at the skin right under his sternum, holds his trembling fingers up and they shine red. He doesn't feel any acute pain, just a throbbing ache and a dangerous numbness all over.
"Stiles!" someone hisses again. "Fucking damn it, answer me." There's a pause, and he thinks he hears a sob. "Please."
"Allison." He remembers; he was with Allison and Lydia. He doesn't remember what they were doing though. It was something important, something to do with the—something.
His head hurts.
"Stiles?" There's the sound of rocks hitting up against each other. He moves his face towards the sound, suddenly realizing how silent it was before, how dead, and watches concrete and pipes start displacing themselves from a pile about five feet away until there's a sizeable hole, and he sees—
"Allison," he says again. Her face is covered in white plaster and brown dirt and red blood, hair matted on one side, and that's all he can see in the flickering light. "What happened?"
She's looking at him and her lips are trembling. "Stiles, your head—you're bleeding."
"Where's Lydia?" he asks. She takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"I don't know. Fuck, I don't know."
"I have a metal rod in my calf," he decides to add. Then, because she didn't answer the first time, "Allison what happened?"
"Earthquake," she whispers it like if she says it any louder there'll be another one. And maybe there will be—Stiles has been in earthquakes before; he knows about aftershocks.
"Oh," he says.
They were—are—in the parking garage downtown. The one that's two dollars the first hour and five dollars every hour after that unless you get your ticket validated. He's pretty sure they got their ticket validated, but every time he tries to remember his head feels like it's exploding, lights swimming in front of his eyes, brilliant and painful.
"I can't remember," he says, using his unpinned arm to push at the slab of concrete that's holding his other one down. "A lot. I think I've got a concussion."
The fire twenty feet away sputters out for a second, then sparks fly, and it starts up again.
"Is that fire? Can you get out, Stiles?" Allison sounds urgent.
"It's fire," Stiles says. When he pushes the concrete away, he ends up using his whole body, and then the pain starts; it feels like his body is being twisted, bones wrapping around themselves, muscles fraying and… it hurts, so he lets out a pitiful little whimper.
The slab's gone now, though, which means, technically, he's free, it's just that he's in a cocoon of concrete and car metal, the ceiling three feet above his head, walls closing in on him, and he doesn't know if he's going to be able to move.
He thinks Allison is trying to get free too, because he hears her grunting on the other side of the pile of rubble, French curse words spilling out of her mouth like they do only when she's really pissed.
He tries to move again. It doesn't go over very well.
"I think something's broken," he says. I think a lot of things are broken, he thinks.
"Cell phone. We need a cell phone or a—a something," Allison says, and her voice is different; it's harder, more determined.
They were with Lydia. Stiles hopes she's not dead.
"Stiles, do you have your cellphone?" Allison asks, words clipped and voice hard. Stiles leans his head back on the rubble behind him as he pats at his pockets.
"Nope," he breathes out when he's finished. Allison curses.
"All right," she says, "all right. Can you move? Even just a little?"
"I can," he says after thinking about it, "but it'll hurt."
"Okay, we need to get out of here—"
"—wow, astute."
"Good. Sarcasm. Keep being sarcastic." Allison's laugh turns into a coughing fit. "Can you help me with this rubble? Then we find Lydia. Then we get out."
In the official guide on how to survive being buried alive in an earthquake, there's probably something about getting out of the building as fast as possible, but he's not going to leave without at least seeing Lydia, and he knows Allison is the same. So he's for Allison's plan. More than for it; he wouldn't consider doing anything else.
God, what if she's—
"Yeah," Stiles croaks out. "Good plan."
In the distance—it's faded, soft even—he hears the sound of a siren.
It takes… a while for him to crawl his way over to Allison. She's not far away, exactly, but every time he moves a hot lance of pain shoots up his leg, down his arms, centers right where his heart is and makes it hard to breathe. It takes a little while for him to get accustomed to it, then all he can concentrate on is the dirty-wrong vibration of the rod in his leg as it scrapes against the floor.
So it takes a while.
Allison's hand is broken. Or sprained. Or it's hurting, because when he pulls himself close enough to be able to see her, she's favoring it, using the other one to push at the rubble. Her leg is caught under the concrete, jeans shredded and torn to reveal scraped, dirty, bloody skin.
"Your leg," he says numbly.
"It's fine," Allison says. "Once you get me out we'll be fine."
She says 'fine' like she's trying to convince herself it's true.
[part two: Allison]
They ate lunch. That's why they were downtown. It was new—Morrocan cuisine or Mexican cuisine or something with an M, Allison doesn't really think the specifics are important now. Or maybe they are—maybe it's important to remember—but she can't make herself think about anything other than right now. It's probably gone, anyway, the restaurant, smashed into the ground like the garage they're in.
There's nothing supernatural about this. No magic. No hunting. Pain. No… what did Stiles call it once? Werewolfitude? There's nothing like that. This is a very human, very normal (abnormal) disaster.
Her leg is definitely broken—fractured—and Stiles is covered in his own blood, eyes half mast, expression distant and woozy. There's a fire twenty feet away (a fire!?), and they're incased in concrete and car parts, so densely compacted that Allison doesn't know how they're going to leave the area they're stuck in.
She doesn't know how they're still alive, actually. Some errant pillar stopped this floor from collapsing all the way and now there are maybe four feet between her and the ceiling, and Allison feels determined. Not weak, not powerless. She's scared—terrified—but she's alive, she can walk (somewhat), so there has to be a way out of here.
They have to get out before there's an aftershock.
They have to find Lydia.
Oh god Lydia. She was right here, right—standing right by Allison when the ground started to shake. She screamed, lost her balance and fell to the ground, then Allison started pulling her, started running towards the nearest source of natural light. Just, her instincts took over and they ran and the last thing Allison remembers before something hit her in the back of the head is Lydia's hand slipping from hers.
"Can you move now?" Stiles is out of breath. His leg looks bad. From the way he's favoring his right side—Allison doesn't even think he's aware that he's doing it—it looks like he's got a couple of broken ribs, too. Internal bleeding, maybe.
Her leg is mostly uncovered, and she moves it, breathing out hard and biting the inside of her cheek against the pain as she does so. She doesn't want to walk on it, but they need to get out of here, so she's going to have to.
Or, with the ceilings as low as they are, crawl.
"Yeah," she says, nodding as she uses her arms and her other leg to push backwards. "Yeah, I can do this. I've got it."
"We've dealt with,"—Stiles takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then starts trying to pull himself up, using the rubble that was originally on top of Allison's leg as support—"with bigger shit, right? An earthquake's got nothing on alpha packs and darachs and…"
He trails off with a gasp and Allison glances over to see his eyes closed and lips pressed together in a thin line. "You were saying?" she asks, and it's meant to be, you know, a joke, but it might come out a little—
Stiles sputters out a laugh. "Fuck, dude, I've got a rod. In my leg. This is disgusting."
Allison stands up, resting the majority of her weight on her good side, and moves to help Stiles stand. She thinks he nearly blacks out once or twice, but eventually they're upright, or as upright as possible, the top of their heads brushing up against the rubble ceiling above them—it's painful, bended at the waist like this, which probably means her insides are injured.
But that's not important. Once they're out, they'll be fine.
Once they find Lydia, they'll be out. That's what Allison forces herself to believe, anyway.
"Okay," Allison says, adjusting her grip around Stiles's waist as he does the same with her. "Start moving?"
"Yeah," Stiles says, uses his free arm to point at the only way they can go, past where the fire is still burning—it hasn't gotten any bigger, but Allison figures that's the least of their problems—and takes a tentative step. She hears the aborted whimper he lets out as he puts his weight on the leg with the metal rod in it, but she doesn't say anything about it. "I've—" he takes a deep breath. "In disaster movies they always… they ignore the pain. I don't think I'm going to be able to ignore the pain, Allison."
Allison breathes in through her nose. "You got captured by those hunters," she reminds him, starts pushing them both forward as subtly as possible (it's not really subtle), "got tortured. You lived. This is going to end. With us outside, in an ambulance, getting injected with the strongest pain killer available."
"You'd make an awesome sci-fi heroine," Stiles says, and Allison has no idea what that means, so she doesn't respond, concentrates on getting them both to move. Hard doesn't begin to describe the experience. There's a numbing pain all over, sharp and cold almost, a constant distraction that makes it impossible, really, to think about more than one thing.
At the moment, their priority is to move, so she repeats that in her head—keep moving, keep moving, don't think about anything else, just keep moving Allison—and it works, kind of. They move, but it's a slow process, every step like agony. Her vision tunnels, zeroes in on a patch of light (faded, so faded, dark even, not bright enough for the way out to be close) hitting a Mustang on top of what used to be a purple van, it's rear bumper where the van's middle seat used to be, and she uses that as her end point, tells herself—and maybe Stiles; she's not sure if she actually vocalizes it, though—that once they're near it, she'll let them rest.
Except—
"Stiles." The ground is moving, and Allison remembers that scene in Jurassic Park where the two kids see the glass of rippling water right before the T-Rex comes. There's that same sense of foreboding, that same sense that something bad is coming, and it's inevitable. "Stiles," she says, and her voice is surprisingly calm. "It's an—"
"—aftershock," he gasps out, and his head hits her shoulder as he swings his head, looking around for— "Triangles. Right? That's what they say? Is that true—"
"We don't have time," Allison says, drops down to the floor and pulls Stiles down with her just as everything starts to shake. She curls herself into a ball, and even though it's dark, so dark, she can see little pebbles on the floor underneath her nose bouncing against the ground.
The sound is deafening. Terrifying. World consuming. Like—god she's thinking in a lot of metaphors today—but like that initial feeling you get when a roller coaster does a loop; powerless, so scared and exhilarated, body pumped up with adrenaline, that you don't necessarily care anymore.
Concrete slides against concrete, metal twists and screeches, the building itself rumbles.
Allison thinks she screams.
[part three: Scott]
"Mom." Scott keeps his voice level—calm—puts a smile on his face when Mom looks up from the intake form she's been staring at for the ten seconds Scott has been staring at her.
"Scott," Mom says, and he winces at the way her eyes water up, does his best to ignore the trembling in her hands when she pushes herself to stand, walks around the counter of the nurses station and grabs him, hugs him tight.
He doesn't need to feel guilty about this—earthquakes are natural; there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing he could do to cause it—but he does. God, he feels responsible, but he lets himself have a moment (no one is answering their phones; there's no internet; no TV; he couldn't find a radio in the mess of the house; the roads are ripped up and cracked, buildings damaged, a couple razed to the ground like fucking… toys, or something, and Scott is scared) hugs Mom and takes in the scent of home and family, lets himself calm down a little.
"Was this—?" she asks, eventually, and he shudders, pulls back as he shakes his head.
"No Mom. No this wasn't—I can't. I can't reach anyone on their phone and the house is… there's damage and I didn't know what to do so I—" He pushes a hand through his hair and it comes out covered in dirt.
"Okay, okay." Mom puts her hands on his shoulders, breathes in deeply, then out, "Okay Scott, I know. I've been trying to reach you since the backup generator kicked on but—" she sighs. "I don't know anything, baby."
"You haven't heard anything?" Scott asks, just to make sure. What the fuck is he going to do? He doesn't know where to start. No one is answering their phone; Derek is—that's an option, he could go to Derek's. Stiles is— "Stiles? The Sheriff? You haven't seen Sheriff Stilinski?"
"No, hon." Mom pats his cheeks, and then someone starts screaming about an accident on Jacobs Street and heart failure and Mom curses, makes eye contact with a nurse nearby—Todd? Bob? Don?—and he nods, rushes off towards the entrance to intercept the medics. "You stay here, I just—I need to—"
"Go, mom, I'll try to uh…" Do something. He looks around and the hallways are still chaotic, still crowded with the injured, even though the people taking up space are different than the ones he passed on the way here. The lights are flicking on and off at random intervals. He hadn't looked closely before but everything is dirty, the walls are visibly cracked and the entire place smells of fear.
He flexes his hands and wills himself not to wolf out, takes his phone out of his pocket and tries Allison again. It doesn't even connect to voicemail. Stiles's does the same, and then Lydia's, and Isaac's, and Derek's—
"I got something!" A voice interrupts his attempts, and Scott looks up, sees a dude over in the waiting room crouched in front of one of the tables, pointing at a radio and then looking around like —
"—8.7 on the Richter scale. Aftershocks are expected to have magnitudes as high as 7.3. Governor Diaz has declared a state of emerge —" Scott pushes forward, along with a dozen or so others, and gets a place near enough so that he can hear without putting any effort into it.
"A Tsunami is expected to reach Hawaii within four hours. Residents are encouraged to seek high ground. Representatives at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center expect the wave to be as high as 10 feet, 20 on western facing shores—"
A crackle of static interrupts the transmission, and Scott smells it before he feels it; a deep, old smell, something like minerals and hot, sweet friction. It's in the atmosphere. Cloyingly thick, almost thick enough to choke on, just like it was before—
Fuck.
"Get down!" he yells. A couple of people turn to look at him, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, and then the shaking starts.
Scott, in theory, knows they should be outside—plaster's falling on his head, big chunks that hurt, and he can hear someone screaming, can feel each beat of his heart like it's lasting for an hour, each contraction of his lungs, the creak of his fingers as his hands curl into fists—knows that there's a good chance the hospital's going to collapse around them.
Mom, he has to get to Mom.
He stands, sniffs at the air but all he can smell is fear and earth and dust, runs on unsteady legs towards the hallway and gets pushed into the wall when a gurney (empty) rolls past, presses his back flat against the vibrating wall and looks down the hall, and there's no Mom but—
"Derek?" Scott yells, and Derek jerks, turns around where he's crouched by the emergency entrance doors. He shifts to the left, and there's Mom, against the wall with Isaac and Boyd next to her.
They're all fine, which pisses Scott off. He doesn't—Allison is missing. And Lydia. And Stiles. And they're in the middle of a fucking catastrophic earthquake, and human bones break under too much pressure, don't heal within the hour. Human muscles snap and don't regrow. Human skin is fragile and Scott passed too many collapsed buildings sprinting here.
Maybe it's not—maybe he's worrying too much.
Scott pushes the gurney away with a little too much force just as the shaking stops, ignores the gasps and stuttered out sighs of relief as he jogs over to help Mom up, brushes dirt and plaster off of her already bloodied scrubs.
"Have you guys heard anything?" he asks, eyeing the way Derek clenches his fists at the question, furrows his eyebrows and glares down the hallway like the people picking themselves up off the floor did something to offend him. Which—this is Derek—they probably did.
"Sti—" Derek clears his throat, "No one else is here?"
"We haven't heard from them, Derek," Mom says. Isaac is gripping at his right elbow, looking at the wall opposite them, a tick in his jaw.
"He… this morning, at the loft," Derek says, and it would be funny, the way he's suddenly avoiding Mom's eyes, if they weren't in the middle of… this, "He went to do something downtown with Allison and Lydia. Scott, you haven't? Allison's not—"
"They went to lunch," Scott says, "We need to find them. I—" the building shakes a little, and there's an aborted scream from down the hall. Scott waits until it's over to continue talking. "Mom you need to get out of here, and Derek—we need to find them."
"I have a job to do, Scott," Mom says. "I'm not going anywhere."
"You haven't heard from the Sheriff?" Boyd asks, pushing himself away from the wall and straightening his mussed up t-shirt. Someone starts crying two hallways down.
"Mom, what job? The building is going to come down." Scott gets a hand on Mom's shoulder like maybe if he grabs onto her she won't do whatever it is she thinks she needs to do.
"No, we haven't heard anything," Mom says. "There's no phone service."
"Mom."
"The building is going to come down," Mom says, sighing, "Or, it's not going to come down but it might, Scott, and there are still patients hooked up to life support, still patients that are unable to move without help, so I'm going to help with that, because it's my job and it's important—" Scott hates it when Mom gets reasonable, which is… all the time. But still. He can dislike this. He's allowed to.
"—so you're going to go find Allison, Lydia, and Stiles,"—Scott perks up at that, notices that Derek, Isaac, and Boyd perk up as well—"and help them if they need help. If they're… uninjured, you come back here and fill me in, help move patients if we're not done by then. After that…" Mom sighs. "After that hopefully there's cell phone service. Maybe internet so we can figure out what's going on."
"The radio." Scott gestures back at the waiting room with his thumb. "Before the aftershock someone got it working. It was an 8.7 and the aftershocks are going to continue."
"And you just remembered that now," Derek says.
"Yes." Scott glares.
"That's bad, an 8.7," Isaac says, "I don't think I've ever heard of—"
"They're rare," Boyd agrees.
"You're each getting a walkie talkie," Mom says. "We've got tons and I can finagle a couple out of the supplies closet upstairs, probably."
"That's a good idea," Scott says, voice a little breathless because he's starting to feel like maybe they can do this. Maybe he'll find the others and they'll be fine. Maybe he'll come back here and help Mom, maybe convince her to leave. Maybe after that… fuck he doesn't know what happens after that.
[part four: Lydia]
Back in Massachusetts, Lydia has a post-it on her fridge with the beginnings of an equation that, if she could figure out how to fit in all the variables, would prove Beacon Hills to be some kind of geographical exception. Another Bermuda Triangle or South Atlantic Anomaly or... something like that. The problem is that there's too much randomness—too many factors that depend on time and people and personalities that even before she set x as Beacon Hills and y as Werewolves she kind of suspected it was one of those things that not even math could solve.
But that's not—that's not important right now, is it?
Earthquakes aren't supernatural. Or, scratch that. At present, Lydia believes that the earthquake that made the building around her collapse was naturally occurring, but only because she hasn't been able to think of anything supernatural that could cause something like this. So, this is—this isn't a problem of why or how. At least not at the moment. Lydia can't sit here, as much as she wants to, and hypothesize and plan, because as much as it's going to hurt (she thinks her clavicle is fractured, knows she has at least a slight concussion, and suspects that adrenaline is making the pain she should be feeling dulled) she needs to do something.
She needs to move.
She needs to find Allison and Stiles (find their bodies, something hisses at the back of her mind), and she needs to get out of here.
The last aftershock—there have been three since Lydia woke up, the intervals between them becoming increasingly longer—made the pile of rubble to her left collapse enough that there's a hole in the middle. She can only see it in dulled greys and blues, because her cell phone and most of the contents in her purse, have been smashed to smithereens, so no lights, but there's a breeze ghosting across her face that wasn't there before.
Lydia is about eighty percent sure the rubble isn't load baring—there's already a hole and nothing has crushed her—so she lifts up her right leg, and kicks out. She's wearing the pair of Jeffrey Campbells Dad got her the last time she visited, and she hears, more than feels, the heel break off.
… she can always get a new pair.
The second kick chips away at one of the large slabs of concrete blocking her way out. The third makes the hole a little wider. The fourth makes the columns above her head creak dangerously, gets dust and plaster in her eyes and mouth. She stops to cough, wipes her face, only a little surprised that her hand comes back wet.
She's not crying—no, it's not an expression, she's not—but there's dust and plaster and probably asbestos in the air, so her eyes are definitely irritated, definitely leaking. At least for this, she doesn't have to see, so for now it's fine.
Lydia moves a little to the right, shifts her body so she's resting against the rubble, feels along the bricks and pipes and—metal? She thinks it's metal—until she finds the opening. She starts pushing, pulling, concentrating on the sound of concrete grating against concrete so she doesn't have to listen to her own labored breathing.
She thinks about destruction, mostly, and tries to remember how long it usually takes for emergency services to reach disaster areas. Probably a while, in relative terms; too long for her to just sit back and wait.
The columns over her groan—the noise is grating, but it's not like anything about this whole situation is not grating—and dust and little bits of concrete start dropping down onto her head. She pushes harder, harder, harder, gets her nails in the rubble and squeezes, breaks one and ignores the sharp pain, just keeps moving forward. She gets her head through, has to shimmy forward to get her shoulders through and almost blacks out when the movement disturbs her fractured rib—or ribs, maybe it's plural.
The pain feels like it's plural.
The rubble to her left starts moving, rocks and concrete and pipes start shifting, so she grunts, hisses, curses in a couple dozen languages and shimmies the rest of the way until she's out and the concrete is collapsing behind her. There's less space outside of the… the alcove she was in, so she can't really do anything except pull herself forward with her arms, avoiding sharp rock and metal as much as possible.
She's glad she didn't wear the Balenciaga skirt today; glad she's wearing a pair of jeans that offer at least some protection from the shit she's crawling ov—
"Lydia," someone calls, and Lydia freezes, because that sounds like—
"Allison!?" she yells back, and her voice echoes through the rubble, bounces off metal and sends dust up into her face. She coughs, spits out bitter tasting saliva and curses a few more times.
"Lydia!" And yes, yes, it's definitely Allison, and she's alive—she's alive—and she's here. Lydia can hear her, and her voice sounds… it sounds close.
"Allison! Allison, I'm here—I don't—I can't see you." Lydia calls out.
"I can hear you." God, she sounds close. She sounds—damn it. Lydia pushes herself forward, even though she can't see, even though Allison sounds like she's standing above Lydia's head.
She doesn't sound like it, Lydia corrects herself; she is.
"You're above me!" Lydia yells, turning around so she's laying on her back, staring at the dusty blackness that is, in theory, the ceiling.
"Oh God, oh shit, okay." Allison sounds closer, and Lydia hears a thump—sounds like a body—and feels the vibrations of someone (something) walking over her. "Is there anywhere I can get down there, Lydia, is there a way to get you out? It looks smooth—I can't— there's not enough light and I can't fucking see."
"Not here," Lydia says, and she takes a deep breath in, tries to calm herself, tries not think about the circumstances—how she's trapped underneath tons and tons of heavy building material, how there may be no way out, not without machinery—and thinks. "Not here, Allison, but… can you,"—dust gets caught at the back of her throat, and she coughs until it's hard to breathe—" can you see anything up there?"
"I—I'll look," Allison says. "How injured are you?"
"Fractured ribs, fractured clavicle, probably more I can't feel yet," Lydia yells, waits a beat. "You?"
"My leg," Allison says, "but I'm good. I can handle it. We can handle. Just—just wait there." And then Lydia hears bits and pieces of her talking, "Stiles—here–you need to—just stay there."
"Stiles!?" Lydia yells.
"He's—" Allison answers, "We're fine, Lydia." She says it like they're anything but fine. Lydia gets it though; she doesn't press.
It's probably not the best time to press.
Instead, she crawls. Or, well, she's on her back, so it's more of a shimmy as she pushes herself over concrete and dirt, the jagged edges tearing at her blouse and scratching at her skin, staring wide-eyed at the slate darkness above her, surrounded by the sound of her own wheezing and the groaning of the structure around her.
Once or twice, she feels the building shake. She moves faster each time she does, well aware that she doesn't know where she's going to or what she's doing—she just needs to move. She needs to feel like she's doing something.
The air seems lighter over here, anyway; not so full of dust and the smell of stagnation.
(Or maybe she's losing her sense of smell… that happens, right?)
At least Allison and Stiles are alive. At least they have a—
"Lydia!" Allison yells, and Lydia's stomach drops. She inhales, once, shakily, then clears her throat.
"Fine," she yells back, hopefully loud enough for Allison to hear, "I'm fine."
"There's a breeze coming through here." Lydia curls her hands into fists, breathes out what is definitely relief. "I think I can—I think I can move enough of the rubble, but I don't know where you are, or if you'll be able to—"
"Just do it," Lydia yells up at her, "Do it and I'll find you. We don't have a lot of time, so just… hurry."
[part five: Derek]
This morning, Derek woke up to Stiles sleeping next to him, the covers kicked halfway down the bed and the sun shining, bright and dreamy and giving the skin of Stiles's back a warm orange glow, dips and curves and hard angles throwing shadows to make everything seem unreal. Stiles's face had been hidden—smashed into the pillow he had brought back from Berkeley, head angled so his hair was brushing against Derek's shoulder—and his arm had been strewn over Derek's chest, fingers twitching against the skin just below his collar bone.
It had been nice, Derek remembers now. Comfortable. So peaceful that at the time, Derek's breath had kind of failed him. It does that sometimes, when he wakes up late or eats dinner or whenever he catches the soft look Stiles gets on his face when he's sleeping.
It's a side effect of the shit Derek has been through—he gets that, wouldn't change it for anything. He likes being made aware of what he has and how easily it could all go away, except… except today it might be reality.
Today Stiles left the loft after waking up and sucking a hickey into the side of Derek's neck, drove his jeep downtown to do something with… apparently with Allison and Lydia, and then the world shook and Derek doesn't know where he is, doesn't know if he's injured or dead, doesn't know if he's buried underneath unmovable rubble, his bones crushed to dust, blood leaking out over dirtied concrete, eyes blank and—
"They're alive, Derek," Scott says, and Derek jerks his head from where he's been staring at the opposite wall to glare at Scott's shoulder. Melissa is searching for spare walkie talkies, and they're here… waiting.
It's been three minutes.
… three minutes too long.
"How do you know that?" Derek asks. Isaac and Boyd are outside, helping to load some girl up into the ambulance so she can transfer to an undamaged hospital. Good for them, he thinks bitterly. Fucking great. "How do you know they're not—?"
"They're not dead, Derek," Scott says, and his jaw is clenched now. If Derek wanted to, if he closed his eyes and took a deep whiff, he could probably smell the anger coming off Scott in waves. It's a stubborn anger, the kind of anger that breeds denial—Derek knows the feeling, felt it before with Laura and then Erica and then Cora and then Jennifer and, just, he's so sick of losing people and—
"This isn't,"—Scott takes a deep breath—"I would know if Allison were dead. I would know. And she's not, and Stiles isn't either, and it's impossible to kill Lydia. We're going to find them, Derek—downtown is small for us. It'll be easy. We can do this."
"How can you be so fucking sure—" Derek stops because his voice is breaking and he's not going to let it. He can't do this again. He can't.
Not again.
Please.
"Derek." Scott grips his shoulder. "I know. Trust me."
Derek wonders if his entire life he's going to find parallels in everything, or if the trauma of today is just making him exceptionally… cerebral.
Stiles would like that he used that word. Cerebral.
Damn it.
"We should split up," he says, ignores it when Scott rolls his eyes. "You go with Isaac and I'll go with Bo—"
"You really think that's going to work? Splitting up never works. What if there's another big aftershock?" Almost as if on cue, the building shakes for a couple of seconds. If Derek was less invested in this—if he could separate himself like he could've done before… before Stiles—he would roll his eyes. "We stay together. We work together. We treat this like everything else we've been through, Derek, and we work it out," Scott says.
Derek breathes in, breathes out, nods his head to show that he agrees when Scott just keeps staring at him, his grip on Derek's shoulder tightening to the point of pain. "Okay," he says, "We can do this," and then, because maybe if he repeats it, he'll start believing it, "We'll work it out."
Scott grins. "All right, dude," he says. "It'll be fine."
Fucking Christ, sometimes Derek feels like he's the younger one.
Melissa comes back then, before Derek thinks of a suitable response or Scott starts giving him another pep talk, and she's holding five walkie talkies, her shoulders stiff and her whole demeanor obviously nervous, even without the smell of it thick in the air.
"All right," she says, shoving four of them at Scott, who shoves one of them at Derek. "You know how these work? You press to talk, release to listen. I already got them all on the same channel, just,"—she looks up, meets Derek's eyes for some unfathomable reason—"you tell me the second you find them. You tell me where, and you tell me if they're in one piece."
"Mom," Scott says.
"Scott," Melissa says, jerking her chin towards the doors, where Isaac and Boyd are walking towards them, "Go."
So they go.
They run. Sprint. Jump. Whatever. Derek is over the acrobatics. There are collapsed buildings—they pass a couple within five minutes of leaving the hospital—but it's not… it's not—
Derek wishes he could say that it looks like the end of the world; that it looks like how he feels. Like devastation and paralyzing anxiety, like everything is smashed and turned over, collapsed to smithereens, broken and bent.
It doesn't. It looks bad, but the destruction is almost disappointing when there's a possibility that Derek's world has already ended. When there's a possibility that Stiles is dead—that he's crushed, maimed, whispering or yelling or screaming for someone to save him except no one can hear—and the realization makes Derek angry that this wasn't… more.
If Derek has to suffer—again, and how many times is life going to get back at him for his mistakes?—then he figures maybe it'll be less soul-crushing, less… just less if the rest of the world suffers with him.
Not like he can cause another earthquake; not like he really wants to. The thought is comforting, though. More comforting than the thought of… of anything else.
More comforting than anything real—
"Derek!" Scott yells his name, and Derek stops running, looks over to the left where Scott is standing down the street perpendicular to him and grimaces at the sight of a building that's almost completely collapsed. It looks like a parking garage. Or, looks like it used to be a parking garage. There's no one around, and that's understandable, maybe, because it's been an hour since the initial quake and twenty minutes since the last aftershock—the streets are covered in white dust and debris, abandoned cars and okay here it looks like the end of the world, even though this is the only building that he can see that's completely collapsed in on itself.
(It's not this bad over on his side of the city. The loft, when it happened, had sounded like it was going to come down, but by the time Derek had jumped from the balcony and was standing on asphalt, it was over. Everything was still standing. But this—there are cars smashed in between concrete, flattened, and pipes protruding up and out, twisted at dangerous, sharp angles—is bad.)
"I think I—" He's already running over before Scott finishes, so he sees it, when Scott's mouth clicks shut, when he rears back, when he trips over a crack in the asphalt and goes down hard, sits there and looks at whatever it is that's making his expression crumple in on itself, his eyes go wide and his heartbeat stutter.
Derek slows down to a walk, swallows hard, ignores the feeling in his gut that's screaming for him to stop, turn around and run the other way. He forces his feet forward. He looks, and he sees… blue? Crumpled blue metal that he recognizes as a car—an old one, scratched up even before all of this, one that's used for off-roading or as equally detrimental to a paint job—and a black bumper, a wheel that's punctured by—
A license plate. 60GM387.
"Derek," Scott says, and Derek looks down at him. Scott swallows, rubs a trembling hand over his mouth. "That's Stiles's—"
"I know," Derek says. "So he's… in there."
"You don't know that," Scott says, maybe a little too quickly. "We don't know that. He's not—" He jumps up, starts waving his hands and Derek looks back (everything is slow; it feels like he's moving through something dark and viscous and painful), sees Isaac and Boyd running towards them.
Why do they even have the fucking walkie talkies if no one is going to use them, he thinks.
"He's not dead, Derek," he hears Scott say, and it's faint, muted, probably because Derek doesn't want to hear him, is purposefully blocking it out. "He's not going to die from a fucking earthquake. None of us are."
[part six: Allison]
She pulls Lydia out from a hole that's taken two aftershocks and time that Allison hasn't been following to dig, and maybe she grips hard enough to bruise Lydia's hips but it's fine, she doesn't need to feel sorry because Lydia is gripping at her waist and pulling her in and taking in deep breaths that are pained and desperate. Lydia is whispering thank you, thank you, thank you in her ear and Allison suspects she's whispering back it's okay, Lydia you're alive we're going to be okay this is okay everything is okay.
She kind of realizes it's all very dramatic and heartfelt and angsty, but then she really doesn't care, because she's alive, and Lydia is alive, and Stiles is… alive.
"—ish," Stiles wheezes out. He's behind them, where Allison had laid him out against the flat door of a Mini Cooper (that is not actually attached to said Mini Cooper), and he's a mess of red (blood) and white (plaster) and… hah, no, she's not going to say blue. He's bruised; broken and scarily silent, face pinched and tense. He's looking up at her—at them—with a half-smile, half-sneer that makes her cringe. "Alive-ish," he says again.
"Your leg," Lydia says, and then she's scrambling over, dropping to her knees, her hands hovering over the bloodied bar sticking out of the meaty part of Stiles's calf. "You didn't—you need to wrap this. Keep it elevated. You're bleeding out, Stiles."
Allison should've done that. She should've—should've known. Fuck, she knows first aid. Of course he needs it wrapped and—
"Allison, come help," Lydia says, and she takes off her jacket and rips it into shreds. Allison kneels down, except Lydia isn't—
"I think you should tear away the fabric nearest the wound." Stiles sounds like he's reading off of a pamphlet, and Allison jerks, looks up to see that he has his eyes closed, is probably going to faint soon which is… no. He can't. She can't carry him. Not like this; not with her leg.
"Shut up Stiles," Lydia says, and then pauses. "Or. Keep talking." She tears at Stiles's jean leg, throws the rags over to Allison. "Rip those into strips. I think we need to—Stiles? What do we need to do?"
"I'm awake. You don't need to coddle me," Stiles hisses. Lydia just glares at him, and he lets out a shuddering sigh. "Wrap the—wrap it. With my jeans, I guess. And keep it in place?"
Allison is already handing Lydia strips of fabric as he says it, and they do a pretty good job—good enough for the circumstances. It's tense, silent, frustrating work, and then Lydia is helping Stiles stand up, and Allison is ignoring the pained little gasps that are escaping all of their mouths and turning around to…
To do what? Where can they go? Up? Left? Right? Everything is dark and grey, like they're trapped inside a world post-apocalypse with blinding ash curling in their hair and coating their throat. It's suffocating and disorienting and she—
"This way," she says. "I think I feel a breeze."
"Oh a breeze," Stiles mutters. She thinks he's trying to be funny, but it comes out sounding shaky and maybe a little bitter.
"At least none of us threw up," Lydia says. It's probably a minute or so later but it feels like an hour—every step is agony, made worse by the panic that's gripping Allison by the throat and the… just the sheer fucking ridiculousness of all this. She lets out a choked out laugh anyway, though.
"If I still had my purse," she says, adjusting Stiles when he starts sliding down her side, heavy and covered in sweat, shivering and mute. He's only just barely awake, and it's bad—Allison knows it's bad—but there's nothing they can do except… keep going. Keep searching for a way out. "If I still had my purse," she says again, because she lost her train of thought. "I had a flare gun in there. Some rope. That bow that I used to—"
"You're going to shoot your way out of this?" Lydia asks, breathless because they're climbing through a particularly small opening, and the breeze is stronger here, the air different. Which—Allison isn't going to let herself get optimistic.
"I was going to shoot myself out of this," Allison points out. "Now I'm—we're—going to, uh, climb our way out."
"That makes no sense," Lydia says, "but I agree."
Stiles lets out a pained huff of air that Allison recognizes as a laugh, and manages to grab on to a nearby column while Allison hauls herself up a steep pile of crushed car and concrete, pulls and cajoles and whimpers a bit as she gets the other two to follow.
There's ten minutes of silence, of darkness that is gradually getting… less dark, and then she—
It's not really that dramatic, at first, when she sees the sky. It's—Allison thinks it's probably the shock that makes it more numbing than it should be; that makes her not do anything drastic like start crying or collapse to her knees or… anything. She just stares at it—it's a hole the size of her head, directly in front of them after they turn a corner, just past a Toyota that's bent in two. Motes of dust are floating in the air, and if she was feeling charitable or romantic about anything, she would say it was kind of pretty.
Lydia says something in Latin that sounds reverent; Stiles sinks down, almost collapses, but Allison grabs him before she loses him completely. She takes a deep breath, steels herself against… something that she can't name but makes it feel like there's suddenly something heavy constricting her chest, her lungs, her head, and starts walking.
[part seven: Stiles]
The light hurts Stiles's eyes. Being awake hurts his everything. He's just… he's in a lot of hurt and it would be great if it would stop.
He cries out when Lydia and Allison push him through the hole after they make it big enough to crawl through, then there's the pain in his eyes to add to the pain everywhere else, and he thinks he loses time, a lot of time, because suddenly someone is speaking, their voice professional, closed off—the voice of a stranger, with a title that he knows is important, that'll make it easier to understand what's happening, but he can't remember what it is now, and there's pressure on his face, a synthetic smell clogging up his nose. His lungs are screaming in pain as too much oxygen is pushed into them. His chest is cold. Colder than it was. He—he's being lifted up, tied down—he knows because he feels the pressure against his skin—and everything is blurred sound and blackness because he can't open his eyes again, can't move his limbs, can't—
He gets that he's being taken care of, but there's something hilarious about how his body waited until he was out of the black, out of the rubble, out of that claustrophobic shitville, to start shutting down. Poetic, kind of.
"Stiles!" It's Lydia, and her voice is close, a beacon—hah! Beacon—in the darkness, and damn it, Stiles must be out of it if he's being unintentionally verbose. He thinks he grunts, or moans, or whimpers, because she keeps talking like she knows he's listening. "Stiles you'll be fine. We're safe—we're going to the hospital, and we're going to find the others, and you're going to live do you hear me—"
"Ma'am, you need to—"
"Oh God, Lydia, Lydia. It's them, it's—" Allison's voice, coming from a little farther off, then a shout, farther than that and damn it, Stiles doesn't know what's happening but the sun is shining through his eyelids and everything hurts and he can't move, can't breathe without the air being forcibly pushed into his lungs and he just wants blissful, dark, quiet, cold.
Things fade again. So, there's nothingness, a gaping maw of black, deep space, and when he comes back up, it's to the knowledge that he's inside something that's flying—can feel the vibrations underneath him, can hear the deafening roar of an engine and the sound of wind rushing past. There's a hand squeezing his. A hand that's trembling slightly, that's smooth and warm and so familiar and—
He opens his eyes. It probably takes longer than it seems to, but then he's staring up at Derek through a haze of… he doesn't know what. It's probably medication and pain, considering what happened. But he's seeing—his eyes are open and he's alive and Derek is looking at where their hands are clasped together so maybe he doesn't notice that Stiles is fucking awake and wants to look at his eyes, see that this isn't just an illusion, a hallucination.
He grunts, squeezes the hand that's in his and tries to say something, gasp out a hello or a fuck you. There's a breathing tube in his mouth, wires and… stuff all across his chest and he wants to gag but they must've given him muscle relaxants because he can't and to the other side there's a paramedic, sitting across from him in—he's in a helicopter.
"Stiles," Derek kind of whispers, and Stiles looks back from where he's craning his neck—his head is encased in one of those… those things. The things they put it in to stabilize it. Derek is looking at him; looking at his eyes. His hand is squeezing Stiles's and his breath is coming in reedy puffs of air that he's trying to hide but Stiles knows his tells; has known them for a while.
When he turns his head again, the paramedic is there, checking his vitals and muttering something about a collapsed lung and loss of blood and that he's been stabilized and is being flown to—somewhere, he doesn't know where, but it's somewhere—for more surgery, and that he shouldn't be awake.
He wonders how much time he's lost, in between the light burning his eyes and now. It seems like a lot; it seems like he should remember more. But Derek is here and he's alive, which shouldn't surprise Stiles, but it does.
"Everyone's fine," Derek says, and he leans closer so that Stiles can hear, or… or so he run his hand up Stiles's arm. It's nice to see, but Stiles is numb—so numb, which is terrifying, but also amazing—so he can't feel it. He knows what it's supposed to feel like (warm, smooth fingers, pressing down just enough for Stiles to know that this is real), though, which makes it good enough. "Everyone is… alive. We were looking for you when you—" Derek winces. "We followed the ambulance."
Stiles blinks once, slowly, to show he's getting it, attempts to form his hand into a thumbs-up. Derek sees it and lets out a choked off huff of air, covers it with his hand and squeezes again, smiles down at Stiles with that scarily soft smile that he still doesn't think he's ever going to get used to.
"You're going to be fine," Derek says, "Everything's going to fine." His mouth keeps moving but Stiles is falling asleep again, so he doesn't catch anything else.
[part eight: Melissa]
Melissa is—she's fine. She's great. She's alive, and unharmed, and clean. She slept last night, called Scott, who's refusing to leave the hospital, is sitting by Allison's bed and staring at her with a look that's half heartbreak and half… something else. It's quiet in the house without him. It's not that—she's used to it, because he gone most of the year; college (and how the hell did that happen so quickly?). But it's a different sort of quiet with half the furniture gone—broken and taken out to the side of the road by Isaac and Boyd sometime yesterday when she was still at work—and there's just… it's a different type of quiet.
Like she's waiting for something.
It's probably not all useless paranoia that's making her expect the house to come crashing down around her. There's a high likelihood that the aftershocks aren't done—it's been two days since the initial quake, and warnings flash across her TV screen, make her phone beep in her pocket, every couple of hours. Fifteen hundred people died two days ago; she gets to be a little paranoid.
She should be less numb to that—fifteen hundred is a lot—but she's so… so terrifyingly happy that none of those dead are hers that she can't really compute anything else. Allison and Lydia are walking—Lydia with crutches; Allison with crutches and Scott doing everything but carrying her—and Stiles, damn it Stiles is in Nevada and he's broken, but he's awake—the Sheriff flew out yesterday, saying something about pulling Derek out of the room and into a shower by force, if necessary— and that's all that matters right now.
Maybe all the… all the crap Scott put up with in high school has paid off; maybe the universe is done with them.
Melissa doesn't let herself think about it too much, though, because she's fine; she's alive. The house is still standing, and the power came back surprisingly quickly, and she's not expected to work for at least sixteen hours, so she's fine.