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Scott was whimpering, that was the first thing Stiles noticed when he drifted to wakefulness. The second thing he noticed was that Scott was all but plastered to his body, clinging like a pup to a favored sibling. The third thing was that the heart wrenching whimpering was accompanied by a weird hitched sound. As Stiles became more aware of the world around him, he felt Scott's nose pressed to a spot just behind his ear, sniffing with an almost desperate air. Stiles was being held tightly to Scott's chest, Scott's arms twined around him like he thought he could protect Stiles from the world.
"Scotty?" Stiles's voice cracked with sleep and the trauma of the last few days. Scott froze, abruptly stopping his frantic scenting, the whimpering coming to a halt. But his nose stayed firmly pressed to Stiles's skin.
"Go back to sleep." Scott's own voice was hoarse, like he'd been crying, "You need to rest."
Knowing he couldn't let his best friend deal with whatever this was alone, Stiles sighed and rolled over so he was facing him, not commenting on the way Scott's arms tightened around him at the motion, like he was scared Stiles would leave. Or disappear in a cloud of black smoke.
"Talk." Stiles said, tired eyes meeting Scott's. Scott's gaze was tender yet searching, seeming to look for something in his shadowed brown eyes. The low moonlight spilling through the window highlighted the exhaustion in Scott's face, the stress of the last few days, the emotional toll the nogitsune took on him. On them both.
"I... you..." Scott couldn't seem to get the words out, "I just... I need to..."
"Scott, you know you can always talk to me." Stiles couldn't quite muster up a reassuring smile, but he leaned his head into Scott's shoulder, feeling Scott bury his face into his hair and inhale deeply. Stiles's scent, tinged with exhaustion and grief but no longer foreign and vile and wrong, seemed to calm him enough to gather his thoughts.
"I nearly lost you." he finally managed, "You almost died."
"But I didn't." Stiles pointed out, still kind of unsure whether or not that was a good thing. Scott could sense it and it terrified him.
"When it revealed itself... when I looked into your eyes and saw nothing but a hunger a-and a deviousness that wasn't yours... when it used your voice to taunt me..."
"Scott-" Stiles tried, but Scott needed to talk.
"And it kept smiling, and it was so wrong on your face. That wasn't your smile, that was a mask that didn't fit. It made me sick to see it."
"You and me both, buddy."
"God, this almost destroyed the Sheriff." Scott whispered.
"I know." Stiles's voice cracked a little, remembering how his father seemed to have aged ten years from this ordeal, the way he'd pulled a gun on Argent without hesitation to protect a monster simply because it wore his son's face.
"And then we finally got you back." Scott's voice was far away, kneeling next to a pile of bandages and a trembling, precious human, "But you were dying and then Lydia was taken and I-I couldn't-"
"Scotty, it's over now."
"When you collapsed after we trapped it, I thought 'This is it. This is when I lose him forever.' I thought you were gone. I was so panicked I couldn't even smell properly." he pressed closer to Stiles, the memory alone making him feel cold, "I almost couldn't take it, Stiles. If you had died, I wouldn't have been able to take it. After A-Allison and Aidan... I would've snapped, I would've broken, I would've-I would've gone feral or-or-" he stopped and took a deep breath, letting the scent of Stiles, alive, brilliant, witty, fragile, too-skinny, defenseless Stiles, fill his nostrils again, letting it calm him.
"I couldn't handle the thought of losing you." he confessed, "I just couldn't handle it."
"Christ, Scotty, don't say things like that." Stiles moaned, shoving weakly at Scott's side. Scott frowned at the feebleness of the shove, the tremor to Stiles's hands that hadn't gone away yet.
"You're my best friend, Stiles, and I love you more than anything." Scott said sincerely, "And I realized recently that I haven't told you that enough."
"Is that why you're smelling me?" Stiles managed to inject some teasing into his tone. Scott's arms tightened minutely around him, inhaling almost reflexively.
"You smell like you". Scott said honestly, bumping his nose against Stiles's cheek for emphasis, "The nogitsune corrupted your scent, made it... bad. Wrong. You still smelled like you, sort of, but your scent was hidden behind ash and rot and... something that just smelled evil. But now you're clean. Stiles. You smell like you again, and your eyes are yours and your smile isn't cold."
"You're weird, Scotty." Stiles deadpanned. Scott laughed, a hollow, defeated sound, and reburied his face into the junction of Stiles's throat, pulling him close.
"And you're you." he said, a current of reverence hiding in the words, "Stay you. Don't ever change."
"Change is a given, my guy. It's inevitable." Stiles yawned, nestling into Scott's clingy embrace with only minor difficulty. He wasn't sure if Scott was aware of the contented noise he made, but he didn't point it out.
"Then I'll change too," Scott murmured, finally starting to drift off with his best friend safe and warm in his arms, his familiar and much adored scent in his nose, "So we'll match. And that way we'll never have to say goodbye."
"God, you're a sap." Stiles complained, brown eyes fluttering shut as he toyed with the idea of simply staying awake to avoid the nightmares. But with Scott's arms wrapped securely around him, the shadow of the nogitsune was beginning to recede from his mind, at least for tonight.
"You can't protect me from everything, Scott." Stiles murmured, feeling sleep pulling him under. He wasn't sure if he imagined the soft utterance of "can and will" from Scott's lips, but he was asleep before he could bother to analyze it.