Work Text:
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Here is the start of a story:
The Hale house burns.
Here is the start of their story:
Claudia Stilinski counts her fingers and wakes up screaming. Stiles sits with her as she dies.
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Children are born to terror. To blood in their mouth and their mother’s screams. Stiles is not born kindly, and he rarely acts kindly. It isn’t until later years that his birth becomes a black truth, a punchline no one understands until the end comes and goes in a wash of blood.
His mother loops in his memories, existing only in moments; the distance in her gaze as he huddles close, laughs, catches strands of her dark hair brightened to auburn in the sun; the softness of her hands as she tends to scrapped knees even as Stiles fails to cry, even as her hands stain briefly with blood.
Stiles remembers her death, the slow agony of it, and what came about because of it.
He is born too soon and too blunt and too much.
It’s a tragedy, to be sure, but it’s never quite his until they make it so.
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So that's your whole plan, huh? says Stiles, breath quick and panting. Killing the ancestor of everyone who pissed you off way back when? Yeah. He laughs hysterically. Never heard that one before.
He's just seventeen, full of bravado and desperate in his faith, heart in his throat and fingers crossed under the table. It's still a game to him.
(It won't ever be again.)
Even if your dysfunctional scooby gang can save you, you're still dead, Stiles, the nogitsune tells factually. You think you can just revert back? I will devour every corner of you before my work is done.
Your mother learned that.
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It is Monday and Stiles wakes up screaming in Derek Hale's arms.
The hunters leave on Friday.
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Not yet, Stiles, whispers Lydia, distant and fierce, when it is over. Not yet. It can't be now. We have to wait.
We need to let them think they've won, Stiles murmurs. He follows her path a step further, deeper into the woods.
There is nothing left for them but patience now.
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Lydia Martin slings her hair up in a ponytail as they cross the Texas state line, her tiny perfect feet are settled on the dash of Stiles' jeep, bare and so vulnerable that Stiles has to remind himself to breathe. Her head is back against the seat, eyes turned inwards, as deep as they could go without Lydia devouring herself. Music crones from the radio, something quiet and southern, and the sun bakes them through the open windows, the skies a bright flag-blue intercut with white clouds. Stiles' long fingers were twitching on the steering wheel, sweat sticking his shirt to his skin. His face is white, eyes dark and shadowed, hollowed, when he sees it in the rear-view mirror.
"What brings you two kids to Texas?" a motel manager asks when they check in. There's a leer on his face, and what felt like decades ago Stiles would have gone bright red.
Shrugs.
Lydia smiles, sickly-sweet. "Summer road trip."
You can all but taste the love in the air, another employee laughs.
Stiles hums. He hasn't tasted anything but ashes and smoke in seven months.
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On the night before they leave town, the sheriff hugs Stiles goodbye, bone-crushingly tight and lingers in letting go. We both need a break. A platonic break, dad, jesus, Stiles had explained. He doesn't know what Lydia tells her mom. Just that she's there in his jeep, their bags packed.
They buy the tequila in the fifth store they see (and the only one, Stiles knows from his dad's griping, that will serve them.)
"I feel like we should be playing I never," Stiles jokes feebly. His hands are white on the steering wheel.
Across the car, Lydia looks at him with distant eyes. There is a cut splitting her lip like lightning, still raw months later. She licks it before, with a cold calm, lifting the bottle, "I never thought I would kill someone."
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No one has ever seen Stiles coming. He's skinny. He's defenseless. He's sixteen and not stupid, but still human. Scott's the heart and the liver and the kidneys, always cleansing, always bleeding. Derek's the muscle and the skeletal structure. And Stiles is the eyes and brain. Lydia is the lungs. Lydia is diamonds and steel and fire. Lydia burns and raises herself, raises the dead. (Lydia screams and scream and screams -- )
Stiles should have seen it coming.
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The first hunter is in New York. He's young, barely older than Allison had been, and lives in a shitty apartment building that Lydia calculates the angles of the security cameras to hide her face and charms her way into. She's pretty and apologetic when she gets the wrong door, screams when Stiles pulls the fire alarm. The hunter grabs her arm, says wait, as the hall floods with terrified people, as Stiles strikes on the head and drags him back into the apartment.
Wow, we're really good at this, Stiles says. He's breathing heavily. Sweat sticks to his skin, greasy and fake, fake, fake -- no, real, real, real. Lydia looks ready to retort when the hunter's head rolls, you. I know your voice, it's you --
Lydia Martin brings her sharp-red heel down on his face, precise, crisp, clean, and the hunter sinks away again. Stiles stares at her stupidly, heart blackening, crumbling, to black ashes -- black ashes, he thinks hysterically, a joke that had never been funny.
"Stiles," says Lydia. She looks at him from across the room. Not compassionless. Not compassionless. They ruined us, Stiles, she had told him before they had gone further than thoughts, than black bottomless rage. "It's time to light the fire."
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Why you? demands Melissa McCall, eyes wild and broken. Why are you alive and not my son?
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Peter Hale, says Lydia Martin in Texas like she had never known vulnerability, like she had never screamed her throat roar or crawled out of the woods, made me think I was losing my mind. Don't say you're sorry, she says suddenly, acid sharp, neither of us gets to be sorry.
Stiles sits transfixed. He remembers: Lydia Martin the fiercest star in a sky filled with burning white; Lydia Martin staring into the shadows and losing her quick-flare mind over a wire of lies thicker than Stiles’ spine.
He made me drag him out of his crappy grave and bring his loser ass back to life. The liquid sloshes in the bottle and Lydia shakes, back straight, and Stiles sears. "I never thought I would miss that."
Not Peter.
Stiles closes his eyes. Swallows. "You forgot sketchy, skeevy . . ."
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Peter Hale, murderer.
Derek Hale, victim and ally and a bite, a graze, of more in those three days: after: before.
The nogitsune had shown them what real evil was.
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Stiles doesn't sleep anymore. He doesn't trust it anymore, especially not -- not with Lydia so close. His skin stretches across bone, white, bruises under his eyes. He snatches sleep when it's Lydia's turn to leave the motel room and wakes as soon as she closes the room, goes back to his research, the list of names and dates and locations. It's easy when you're as clever as Stiles is, as brilliant as Lydia, to hack into social network sites. Find out when and where and who.
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"Neither of us are capable of seeing the future, Stiles," Lydia tells him quietly. Somewhere between Beacon Hills and Texas.
Stiles pulls a face he doesn't feel and lets it fall like a shed skin; dead skin; snake skin. "You're just saying that because you like me now."
"I'm saying it because I'm Lydia Martin, and I'm never wrong."
Their roles are tired.
We aren't who we used to be anymore, Lydia says later, firm, ever the Mathematician.
Tremble, laughs Stiles from somewhere, for we are reborn.
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Stiles doesn't sleep anymore.
He paces, from wall to wall, in front of Lydia's bed as she sleeps. Sometimes Lydia watches him, strawberry blonde hair loose around her shoulders, and solves him like an equatio. She sleeps in his clothes now, lines imperfect and softened, and still makes his breathe hold strangely, like it's smoke, magic, caught in a glass. They pretend to be young and in love, and it's easy for Stiles to remember, it's horrible for Stiles, in brief flickering moments, to forget.
"I never," says Stiles, "forget I'm awake."
The next morning he shakes her awake and dodges Lydia's lazy swing. They dress, and Stiles counts his fingers as Lydia smoothens her lines, reflexive, until she folds her fingers through his and forces him still. In the diner Stiles orders coffee, a burger, and Lydia picks at a wilted salad and steals his fries.
They wait.
Him, Stiles says suddenly. There is a man, tall and dour, thickset, at the counter: coffee, black. The one who had put his foot on Stiles' chest until his ribs cracked and said stay. Stiles says now: What are our chances?
Lydia's eyes were unfathomable. The same as always.
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Will you see it coming? Stiles asks on the night before the worst of things. It is Wednesday. He is on his back, in his bed, and feels too weak to hold himself up, to stop himself from looking at her. Lydia Martin was gazing at his Murder-Board, red hair loose and wavy, feet bare.
See what coming?
Stiles remembers sleeping outside of her hospital room, remembers kneeling in her blood and saying please, please, please to the monster that had done that to her, remembers Peter Hale's mouth parted and red with blood, ravenous. Stiles remembers looking at the absolute precision of her when they were both just in third grade and thinking wonderfully, thinking terribly, she could destroy me.
Stiles has always loved dangerous things. Stiles had gone into the woods at sixteen to see a dead body and turned his best friend into a monster. There has always been something wrong with Stiles.
"If it comes back . . . " Stiles says and thinks me.
There were dark circles under Lydia's eyes, expertly hidden. Somehow Stiles thinks Derek, Scott, weren't the only ones, waiting for him, cleaning up after him, hiding the bodies. Stiles cringes from that thought; there's a reason Lydia is here, that Scott isn't hovering and Derek isn't lurking. Lydia knows.
"There's nothing in the nogitsune's mythology that suggests it will, Stiles."
Stiles wets his lips. Voice rough: "What's the first law of spiritual transference?"
Lydia looks at him, and Lydia thinks. He sees it, feels it across the stretch of his skin, the clockwork race of her mind, shifting facts like cards; his mom; his fake diagnosis; the link -- it is believed in a majority of cultures that a soul inhabits the nearest life-form after its hosts' death. The soul is thus reborn, and a new animal is formed.
Fact: There has always been something wrong with Stiles Stilinski.
Lydia blinks once then her eyes went wide, distant, as she looks beyond him. Stiles waits for a noose, for an axe. "We're surrounded by death, Stiles," she says simply. "Sometimes there is nothing else."
To Beacon Hills, thinks Stiles, or to us?
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"I never," says Lydia Martin, "thought I would kill someone."
And Stiles thinks: Liar.
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In Texas the last hunter screams at Stiles as the fire climbs up his legs; "You were the one -- you sent us there -- "
They watch him burn.
It should change everything.
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It's Thursday night, and the stray wolves have chased them, staggering and terrified, through the woods to the Hale house. Howls split the dark, deep and wild. "But they weren't like normal werewolves!" Scott protests when Derek roars at him, "They were way too strong -- no matter what we threw at them, they just kept getting up again -- even Allison's arrows barely seemed to slow them - "
"You can't let Omegas invade your territory," Derek growls. "It makes you look weak. Do you have any idea what an Omega would do for a shot at becoming an Alpha? They're flocking to Beacon Hills for a chance to kill you. You're a true Alpha, Scott, of course they're determined -- "
Another day in paradise, thinks Stiles.
"I personally think we can blame the Nemeton for this one. Beacon Hills is like freaking Sunnydale 24/7, it's probably like steroids to creatures of the night. It's the end of days, dude," Stiles tells Derek but his fingers moved erratically, unsettled. On the stairs, Kira wheezes, and Allison clamps her hands to the slash across her stomach, and Lydia paces the floor. It's bad, it's really bad. "Hannibal has crossed the alps, Lassie's foaming at the mouth -- "
"Charming," says Peter Hale, and then he says, "Wait," nose flaring, eyes widening.
The windows explodes inward in a roar of noise, a spray of glass lancing through the air. Stiles smashes to the floor, blind and deaf and dumb, pain searing across his senses, under the sound of Lydia's scream, and Scott's howl, and Derek's roar. Bullets flew over his head, shattering plaster and wood, and light flashes blinding all of them. Stiles tastes smoke. Stiles tastes ashes. Stiles hears then, over and under all of the chaos, the hysterical confusion, the delicate sound of shattering glass -- a bottle -- and then the fwomp of fire catching light, and then, and then of fire devouring oxygen, wolf-ravenous --
Scott's screaming. When Stiles looks, Scott is burning on the floor, skin melting off bone like water, put down by a bullet in the leg. And then Stiles is being thrown, being shoved through the window as the fire climbs the walls and staring at Derek Hale's grimacing face, his mad wrecked face, as his pack burns again and he howls.
Stiles is on the grass, black sky whirling above him, gray smoke twisting to the stars. Lydia Martin is beside him, blood pouring red as she bites through her lip so as to not scream their deaths. Stiles is rising to his feet --
-- a hunter kicks his legs out from under him, and as Stiles falls, cracks his ribs with a foot and says stay.
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Stiles gets out of the hospital and goes to Lydia in the woods where there had once been a house. Let them run, says Lydia. Let them be surprised. In the weeks afterwards, Stiles walks around with a bruised imprint of Derek Hale's hand on his skin and as it begins to fade, gorges it back into his skin.
And stays.
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Lydia Martin drives on the way out of Texas, music crackling unsteadily from the radio, and she takes them to the sea. They leave the radio on as the sun beats down on their backs, as they sit on the car hood and let their legs dangle in the air. Stiles can taste the ashes of the dead hunter, the last hunter, still in his mouth.
He's dead, Lydia says solidly. Her hands are white, shaking, but she looks ahead of them and across the waves. Stiles copies. It's done. They're all dead, Stiles.
Almost, he counters. Stiles' hands are empty and then they are not. Lydia Martin looks at him finally with nothing in her face. A charged moment lingers in the air, buzzing like electric running through copper. I'm not.
There is a knife in Stiles Stilinski's hand.
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The Hale house burns.