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You don’t know why you’re surprised: you really, really don’t. Your life has been one giant supernatural clusterfuck since you were sixteen years old and you still get blindsided by it half the time, still can’t quite force yourself to automatically assume that everything that goes wrong in your life has, at its base, some association with the otherworldly. Your science teachers trained you good, you guess: you still get a little thrill whenever you see one of the wolves change, not out of fear or excitement anymore but instead from the sheer uncanniness of it, the fact that what you’re seeing should not exist. It doesn’t exactly faze you anymore, but you can’t shake that last remnant of your childhood, when people were people and animals were animals and there was no blurry liminal space between them.
So you joke with your housemates that the house you move into, junior year, is haunted: it rattles and creaks and generally makes a fuckton of noise at all hours of the night, regardless of whether or not it’s windy out. You don’t think much of it, on the whole: the house is old, and most of the time you spend inside of it is either dedicated to a) the enthusiastic abuse of substances or b) band practice, which routinely deafens you sufficiently that you can’t hear shit for hours after, even though you make sure to wear earplugs. (You study – you do! – but you can’t get fuck-all done in your room, and if you try to work in the kitchen somebody inevitably comes by to distract you with conversation, food, weed, or some combination thereof. You spend a whole lot of time at the library, is basically the point.) So on the whole, the noise isn’t much of a problem.
When food starts vanishing from the fridge and cupboards, you and everybody else you live with all assume you’re just accidentally eating each other’s food; there are a few little tiffs about it, between Brendan and Amy, who only bicker because they won’t admit to themselves that they really want to fuck (so says you, anyhow), but for the most part you all just buy more stuff. It’s not major enough to cause a serious dent in your funds, so you stop noticing, just automatically put a little more than you strictly need in your basket every time you go to the store.
Later, of course, you’ll wonder how you could possibly have missed the signs, how you could have been so totally clueless. But the fact of the matter is that you got the hell out of dodge, when it came to werewolves and witches and the easily resurrected, and everybody who wanted to kill them: you didn’t go far, but you left. You packed up your shit and left home; you made friends and figured some things out about your life; you developed interests and hobbies and skills that have fuck-all to with keeping the people you love from dying, because the people you love here, in Berkeley, aren’t at any greater risk of dying than anybody else in the country. Nobody’s out to get them, nobody wants to kill them for sport. It’s a fucking relief to not have to deal with that shit anymore, and there is honestly no part of you that regrets leaving, not anymore. Scott was sullen about it for a while, that first year; you felt sort of bad, but it didn’t really last – neither Scott’s resentment nor your guilt.
It’s weird to you, now, when you go home – seeing all those familiar faces, listening to them talk about all the same stuff in Beacon Hills, supernatural and otherwise. You’re majoring in psych with a minor in Spanish, went away to Barcelona in the spring of your sophomore year because that’s when Amy was going, and she was a year ahead of you. You spent most of the semester tipsy, boozing your way in and out of bars, up and down city streets, high on Catalan and Gaudi, working on charming local boys and girls with your imperfect speech, making out with strangers.
You came back from that brown and drunk on the world, and when you woke up in your old bedroom in Beacon Hills you didn’t quite know what to think, how to behave, anymore. The sound of English everywhere was upsetting in ways you hadn’t anticipated, the old familiar food in the grocery store suddenly woefully lacking. You spent the first week you were back listing off every single thing that was different in Spain: the size and feel of the money, the way you pay for food at restaurants, the way tomatoes taste, the price and relative quality of alcohol. Scott finally huffed, one day, told you everybody knew that Spain was different, did you have to keep talking about it all the damn time?
“I mean,” he said, a little guiltily, “not, like, everything, just – does it really matter that the money’s different, dude? Seriously.”
“Not really,” you mumbled, and Erica laughed, said something about how she was glad that was over, and you didn’t say anything else the rest of the night, just zoned out while they all screwed around Derek’s living room, cheerfully beating each other up like little kids impervious to the risks of pain and danger.
You went out to the fire escape-cum-balcony after a while, lit up a joint, and watched the alley below until Derek climbed out after you, shoulders hunched, not saying anything.
“Hey,” you said finally, taking pity on him. “What’s up?”
“I just,” he started, leaning back against the bars, clearly uncomfortable. “I just wanted to, um – you should feel. Comfortable. Talking about – whatever you want to talk about.”
You stared up at him, for a moment not quite following, then getting it. “You like my Spain stories, huh, buddy?” you said, smirking a little to cover up the fact that you kind of wondered whether anybody did, whether anybody gave a shit.
“Yeah,” he said, with a shrug. “I mean – I’ll listen. If you want.”
You stared up at him for a long moment, appraising. “Sit down, at least,” you said, gesturing magnanimously at the rest of the fire escape, and he squatted down before awkwardly pulling his legs up in front of him, feet pushed against yours.
“Um,” you said, suddenly not sure where to start.
“You don’t have to,” he said, defensive, but you were used to that, had been used to that for years. It was no big thing, coming from Derek.
“I dunno,” you said. “It’s kind of hard to explain. Being one place and – not being at home. I guess it’s not that different from going away to college, but it – it is, you know? I’d never been out of the country before, and it was – it was fucking incredible out there, not like – everything was better, but it was – so totally different. Like, little kids used to walk by me in the street, speaking Catalan, and it surprised me every single time. And I was there for months! It just seemed so crazy that little kids could speak better than I could, even though – I mean, I know that’s dumb, they’ve been doing it their whole lives, I’d kick their asses at English.”
He smiled a little, in the moonlight, in the dark. “Laura always wanted to go abroad,” he said, surprising you into inhaling too much. He waited for you to finish coughing, looking sort of amused, before he kept talking. “When we were in New York. She talked about Australia a lot.”
“You would do terribly in Australia,” you told him. “It’s all – sun, and beaches, and hot blonde guys. Or, um, so I’ve heard.”
“I like the beach,” he grumbled.
“I’ve never once heard you mention the beach in the four years I’ve known you,” you told him. “Not once. We don’t live that far away from the ocean, dude. You could live in Minnesota or something.”
He shrugged. “I guess I just never get around to it,” he said. “Going.”
“That’s fucking dumb as shit,” you said. “We should go, I’ll drive you.”
“Yeah,” he said dryly, “okay,” like he didn’t believe you. You were affronted, but you never did go: you didn’t really talk to him again all summer, after that, too busy with your job at the library and the independent study you’re doing, reading all sorts of crazy shit from Freud and Jung and Bleuler, all the people who’d fallen out of fashion. You were as interested in the history of the discipline as the biology behind it, liked the symbolism of Freud and Jung, the literary quality of their interpretations of the mind. That was something your mother used to say: life was a story. Science only explains the half of it.
Even less, you find yourself thinking that November, when your house goes up in flames and the fire department can’t for the life of them put it out. It doesn’t spread, even though it logically should, doesn’t cross the property line by so much as a millimeter, and the water they spray on it doesn’t do anything until you close your eyes and curl your hands into fists and will it to: you can take the boy out of the supernatural, you used to joke, but not the supernatural out of the boy. Well, one for two ain’t bad, you guess as the fire dies down, leaving a charred, collapsing structure behind it, your possessions nothing more than rubble.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Amy says wearily from next to you, huddled in her bathrobe, black hair dripping in strange, jagged patterns down her cheeks. Amy’s hair does not work without around thirty minutes of preparation.
“Yeah,” you sigh, and shoot off a text to Scott. House burned down, semester officially ruined.
fcuk, he texts back. u ok?
Fine, you reply, and send your dad a message in case he sees something on the news at work. He calls you right away, from the station, it sounds like. “I’m fine,” you tell him. “Seriously, just – all my stuff’s gone, which I guess kind of sucks, my term papers are going to be a nightmare and a half without all my notes, but I’m not, you know, dead, so.”
“Kid, you’ve got the worst luck of anybody I’ve ever met,” he says, which you understand to mean thank fucking god you’re all right.
“Tell me about it,” you say, meaning I love you, and he snorts.
You’re not really expecting the call from Derek, though you guess it’s not that weird: you’re still, nominally, pack, even if that doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore, more a ceremonial title than anything else.
“Hey,” you say when you answer, sliding the phone against your ear. “Scott told you, I guess.”
“Stiles,” he says, sounding strained. “Stiles, you’re – are you –”
“Whoa, dude,” you say. “It’s good, it’s cool, I’m totally fine. I mean, my house is not, and I’m not really looking forward to the argument we’re going to have to have with the landlord about how we didn’t start the fire – it was always burning, yada yada yada – but anyway, I’m mostly focused on being alive right now. Which I am! So, uh, no need to worry.”
“I thought –” he starts, and he sounds – lost, vulnerable. You haven’t heard his voice in months, barely talked to him the last time you were home, even, the weekend before you left for school. Everybody got together at your house for a barbecue but you spent most of the time talking to Erica and Allison, occasionally catching his eye across the lawn and grinning before getting distracted again. “I saw something – on the news –”
“Yeah, they’ve got vans,” you say. “I don’t think it would have been a story except that it took so goddamn long for them to put it out.”
“I thought,” he says again, and you remember all of the sudden that his entire family burned to death, which hadn’t entered your mind at all until just this moment, because you’re apparently a huge fucking asshole.
“Oh, Jesus,” you say before you can stop yourself. “Oh, shit, Derek. I didn’t – seriously, dude, I’m fine, the smoke detectors went off and we just, like, walked down the stairs and out the door, no drama involved.”
“Okay,” he says, sounding a little strangled. “Okay.”
You don’t say anything for a while, but you don’t hang up, just stand there looking at the burned wreck of your house listening to Derek breathe on the other end of the line. It’s – weird, it should be weird, but it’s – not, really; it’s kind of nice, in a way. Amy and Brandon are huddling a few feet away, whispering to each other, and Josh is sitting on the curb, talking to his mom on the phone. It’s nice to not feel – alone, you guess.
“I’m coming up there,” he says suddenly, firmly, and you start, jerked out of your stupor.
“No, dude, you don’t have to – you don’t have to do that, it’s not – I’m fine, all right, the school’s putting us up in some dorm somewhere – probably with a bunch of freshmen, ugh – and I’ll, you know – it’s really no big deal, honest to god.”
“I’m coming,” he growls, and you can’t help but roll your eyes – he can’t see you, so whatever.
“Look, I’m going to be really busy anyway,” you tell him. “I’ll be back in town in a few weeks for Thanksgiving, you can check to make sure all my parts are in order then.” You’re not sure why you’re protesting so much – it wouldn’t be so bad, to have Derek visit, to watch his sure-to-be-bewildered reactions to – everything, frankly, everything from your friends to the places you go out to eat to fliers plastered around campus for forums on things like radical sexuality and the problems of ethnocentrism in the hard sciences. But it would be – weird, too, Derek without a buffer, even for a single day. Derek doesn’t actually talk, like, ever, which is all right with the rest of the pack around, or for short periods of time, when you can just fill the space with endless verbiage, but you usually don’t actually say much, when you talk.
Not at home, anyway; it’s different, here, with people who haven’t known you forever, who don’t think of you as the sheriff’s son, the crazy hyperactive kid with the dead mom, the accident-prone human in a pack of practically infallible supernatural creatures. Here you’re just – well, you. You’re the drummer guy, the psych-and-Spanish guy, the encyclopedic-knowledge-of-all-sexual-kinks guy, the guy who spent his entire teenaged existence hiding pot and lube (and wolfsbane, though you don’t ever bring that one up) from his cop dad and who therefore knows all the best hiding places, all the best secrets to avoid getting busted. You’re the guy with the Bolaño fixation, who can argue about the minutia of any David Cronenberg movie, who will sing karaoke to literally any bad nineties song if you get drunk enough. You are your own, here.
You have no idea how Derek would get along with this new person, this other Stiles, whether you’d still count as pack if he knew you weren’t really the boy he’d known as a teenager, not anymore. You’re honestly not sure you want to find out.
“I’m coming,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument, and you shudder, thin t-shirt insufficient in the November evening.
“Okay,” you say. “Sure thing.”
*
He texts you the next day at noon, saying I’ll be there a little after 4. Where exactly there is, he doesn’t specify; you roll your eyes.
Well I’m in class until 5, you text back.
I’ll meet you, he replies. Where will you be?
You reply with directions, finish with If you need help just ask anybody where Tolman is, but are somehow not remotely surprised when your phone buzzes in the middle of your lecture with a text that reads, I have no idea where the fuck I’m supposed to be going.
Go to the big tower in the middle of campus, you reply, trying not to roll your eyes. It’s like the Washington Monument, you can’t miss it.
You find him standing right at the base of the Campanile, shoulders hunched, hands stuck way down into the pockets of his jeans. You see him before he sees you, frowning absently down at the ground, and it’s a weird thrill, watching him when he doesn’t know you’re there. You’ve always wondered what it would be like to watch Derek when he was alone – really alone, not out in public, and not in some – creeper way, or anything, just – well, isn’t that what everybody wishes they could do? It’s the fantasy of really knowing somebody, of finding the truth of them that they’ve hidden away somewhere. Which is bullshit, obviously; you’re not stupid. Knowing it’s bullshit doesn’t stop you from wanting to know, though, wanting to see if maybe some hint of his residual misery comes across more clearly when he’s on his own, when he doesn’t have to pretend for other people that he’s fine. Probably not, you think: if Derek let any hint of that out, the metaphorical floodgates would open, and you don’t think he’s ready to deal with that, not now, maybe not ever.
At a certain point he must smell you, or some other funky werewolf thing, because his head snaps up and he turns to stare straight at you. You wave and make yourself smile, but he doesn’t smile back, just keeps staring at you without even blinking.
“Hey, dude,” you say when you’re close enough. “Fancy meeting you here.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at you with this big-eyed, terrified expression that makes him seem like a kid. Derek, you know, is always afraid; you didn’t ever quite realize how much, until now.
“Um,” you say. “I’m – I’m really okay, buddy. See? All working parts in order.” You wave your arms around a little, spastically, and feel your face heat – but he doesn’t laugh at you, or roll his eyes, just makes this abortive little movement with his hand like he wants to reach out and touch you but doesn’t think he should.
“What, you wanna scent mark me?” you say, waggling your eyebrows as though this is something funny, which it isn’t. You hate yourself, briefly: you’re not actually so bad at emotional intimacy, anymore, but with Derek it’s different; with Derek you are an awkward teenager again.
He flinches, pulls farther back into himself.
“Wait, I’m – I’m sorry, that was – I’m being dumb, sorry,” you say, all in a rush. “Will it – make you feel better? I really don’t mind. Like, seriously.”
“I,” he starts, and then doesn’t seem to know how to continue. His hand is hanging awkwardly between you, as though it doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be doing. Before you can talk yourself out of it you reach out and grab it, pull it closer to you until it’s resting on your shoulder.
It just – sits there, for a moment, his hand, on top of your jacket, and you’re about to say some not-especially-funny thing to fill the silence when he squeezes, fingers pressing carefully against your shoulder. He stays that way for a moment, breathing long and deep, before sliding his hand over, a little, pressing his thumb against your collarbone and stopping, finally, when his wide warm palm is curled around the side of your neck. You can feel the blood beating there, loudly, obviously. When you swallow, his hand moves with your throat, up and down.
He looks drugged; you feel drugged. He’s staring at the skin under his hand like he can’t quite believe it’s there, unbroken and alive, and his fingers are trembling a little.
You curl your hand around his and hold it there for a moment before pulling it slowly away. “I’m fine,” you tell him. “I’m – I’m really, really fine. Nothing happened to me.”
He takes a long, shuddering breath. “Okay,” he says, and you realize you’re still holding his hand, and drop it quickly, clearing your suddenly clogged throat.
“Um, so,” you say. “I need to – go back to my room, to drop off – stuff. You can… come, I guess, and then – food? Is a thing. We could get. Uh.”
He just nods, so you lead him toward the dorm they’ve put you up in until the end of the semester, across campus. You chatter about nothing, some bullshit about your classes that may actually be nonsense, while he tries to pretend he’s not staring at all of the buildings as you pass them.
“It’s better in the spring,” you say. “I mean, it’s still nice, obviously. But man, in the spring it’s – it’s great.”
“I’ve never been before,” he says, and you blink, almost stop in your tracks.
“Seriously?” you ask. “It’s not that far away from home.”
He shrugs. “We didn’t really ever go anywhere,” he says. “And then – after, we, uh – we left pretty quick.” He pauses. “It’s – it’s really beautiful. I’ve seen pictures, but it’s not the same.”
“What, did you get all up in Google maps, trying to imagine me here,” you say, teasing, but he doesn’t say anything, just ducks his head, ears red, and you gape at him for a long moment, unbelieving.
“Oh my god, you did,” you say, delighted and terrified. “That is some serious dad shit, right there, my friend. Except that my dad has actually, you know, been here, and also probably doesn’t know how to use street view.”
“I was curious,” he mutters mulishly. “Everybody else was – staying around. So.”
“Yeah, I know,” you say, smiling, suddenly wanting to throw your arm around his neck like you would have done to Scott, when you were kids – like you still do, sometimes, when you’re screwing around at home.
He has to sign in at the desk, and some part of you is impossibly charmed when you watch him write his name in ridiculously tiny, neat print in the log book. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen you write anything before,” you say, peering over his shoulder. “Just, you know, received lots of scowly texts.”
“My texts aren’t scowly,” he says, aggrieved.
“Are too,” you say absently, and grin at Marcel, your freshman year security guard, who looks like he’s trying hard not to laugh as you pass him.
Derek raises his eyebrows at the flyers in the elevator bay but doesn’t say anything about them, or anything at all on the ride up to the seventh floor, where you have been tragically relegated for the remaining month-and-a-half of the semester. You hate dorms – all the people can be nice, sometimes, but they are also smelly and loud and, if they are freshmen, do not know jack-squat about how to safely consume alcohol, which is annoying in terms of both noise and copious, copious vomit in the bathroom every Saturday night. You’re pretty sure that you’re going to be a misanthropic old man, eventually, yelling at kids to get off your lawn.
“Sit down,” you say when you get into your room, dropping your new bag on the floor next to your desk. “I gotta e-mail a professor about a thing, but it won’t take that long, and then we can, you know, vamoose.”
Derek sits on the very edge of your bed, carefully, like he doesn’t want it to break. “You can smell my pillow, if you want,” you toss over your shoulder, flippant; you can feel him glare without having to turn around.
Amy opens your door and sticks her head in without knocking a couple minutes later. “I need dental floss,” she says without preamble.
“Mine’s still sitting in the rubble of our former home,” you tell her, and she makes a face.
“Mine too,” she says. “Ugh, this is such crap.”
“Well, I hear floss is pretty cheap,” you say. “All things considered.”
“I know, I’m just lazy,” she says easily, before turning to Derek. “Who are you?”
“Oh, uh, this is Derek,” you say, suddenly nervous. You shouldn’t be – Amy isn’t even that weird, by Beacon Hills standards of weirdness; is downright average in comparison to the Berkeley population as a whole. She’s got a couple tattoos and a tongue piercing and a weird haircut and that’s pretty much it, but even so: Beacon Hill’s a liberal town, but a boring one; you’ve never exactly imagined Derek or any of the rest of them being the picture of open-mindedness. Your dad had a kind of studied polite thing going on, when he met her, like he really had to think about it, and he kept staring at her mouth when she talked, even though he was clearly trying not to. It was… awkward.
It could, of course, have been worse; you could be best friends with Sam Furman, who was in the history of sexuality lecture you and Amy took first semester sophomore year, and who was so spectacularly, successfully genderqueer that neither of you could tell whether they were biologically male or female. “I know it doesn’t matter,” Amy had often said, guiltily, “I would totally fuck them either way. It’s just –”
“Which is it?” you’d groaned, agonized. “I need answers. I need my fantasies to be as accurate as possible.”
(You never actually spoke to Sam Furman, and didn’t find out either way. The mystery will probably haunt you forever.)
“Hey,” Derek says, totally unfazed. Oh, you think, feeling small and stupid all of the sudden.
“Amy Chung, nice to meet you,” she says, looking at him appraisingly. “Who’d have thought, Derek Hale, here, in the flesh.”
Derek blinks.
“Um,” you say, trying to telegraph to her psychically something along the lines STOP IT RIGHT NOW; it doesn’t work.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she says, smirking, and Derek… raises his eyebrows. “Stiles talks about you a lot,” she explains.
“That is – that is a bald-faced lie, I do not,” you huff, because you don’t, you hardly even think about Derek that much. Like, at all. Ever. Except when it’s relevant, or whenever you see a hot dude in a Henley. You’re not fucking made of stone, Jesus.
“He does,” Amy tells him.
“That’s… good?” Derek says, at a loss.
“If you say so,” Amy says, and vanishes. She does like to make an exit.
“Um,” you say, staring intently at your computer while you wait for your face to get slightly less blindingly red. “That’s. She’s. Um. She’s a handful. Sometimes.”
“Okay,” Derek says, and you focus very hard on e-mail writing for the next five minutes while trying not to breathe too outrageously loudly.
“Done,” you say, and spin your chair around. He’s moved, is leaning against the headboard, now, sock feet up on the comforter. He still doesn’t look comfortable, exactly, just – less on edge, maybe, than before.
“I like her,” he says a moment later, thoughtfully.
“Me too,” you say. “I don’t know if you could tell from that incredibly telling exchange, but she pretty much runs my life.”
His lips quirk. “Yes,” he says. “I could tell.”
“Figures,” you mutter. “It’s a good thing I’m very comfortable in my masculinity.”
“Uh huh,” he says, dry.
“I am,” you say, mock outraged. “I am so manly, you have no idea.”
“I’m sure you are,” he says, looking – very, very fond, and you swallow.
“Oh, I was going to tell you,” you say suddenly, grasping for the first thing at hand to stop this now, immediately, before you have time to actually think about it. “Sorry to be – I mean, this is kind of insensitive, but do you know of any, um, supernatural causes for house fires? Cause I’m pretty sure there was some kind of supernatural interference going on, in that, uh, situation.”
All the humor goes out of his face: you hadn’t realized how soft he looked before, now that he’s all sharp, tense angles again. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” he asks, looking almost furious.
“I dunno, it wasn’t the top of my list,” you tell him, peeved. “The top of my list was not dying, and second was not having any clothes or worldly goods except my phone and computer. I didn’t even have chargers, dude.”
“Was it hunters?” he asks bluntly, hands curling into fists on his thighs.
“I don’t think so,” you say, “and besides, what would they want with us? We’re not exactly risks to the community; we mostly just get stoned all the time.”
“You’re pack,” he says, “which makes you dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, even if there were crazy hunters out to get me, they probably wouldn’t use magic to do it.” You pause. “I think – this sounds kind of nuts, but – do poltergeists exist? Or, like, ghouls, or something? The Weasleys definitely had a ghoul living in the attic, and yes, I know that Harry Potter is not a real guide to the supernatural, you don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never encountered one, but I suppose it’s – possible.”
“Because that house made way more noise than it should have,” you tell him. “Like, way more. And our food kept going missing – I thought somebody else was just eating some of my stuff, but I don’t think anybody was, actually. Which sounds, you know. Pretty poltergeist-y.”
“Maybe,” he says, terse.
“Also the fire, like, wouldn’t stop burning. I had to, you know, do my magical mojo thing before the hoses worked on it. And it didn’t spread, even though it went on for a seriously long-ass time.”
Derek closes his eyes, reaches up to rub the bridge of his nose. “Stiles,” he says from behind his hand. “I’m going to say it again: why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Uh,” you say, feeling a whole lot less self-righteous than you did a moment ago. “I forgot?”
You think you hear him mutter god save me before he’s swung his legs around, off the bed, and is pulling on his shoes again. “We’re going to check it out,” he says.
“What, no dinner?” you ask, mournful.
“It’s quarter to six,” he says. “We can get food after. You’ll live.”
“I’ll live unless a poltergeist kills me,” you mumble, just to be a dick, and he swats the back of your head when he passes you on his way to the door.
*
It’s unsurprisingly disturbing, walking along your old street – you’ve been up and down here countless times, on foot or on your bike, at every hour of the day, but there’s always been a home waiting for you, a kind of shitty little house squashed between the slightly larger ones on either side, a few half-hearted trees trying to sprout up in-between them.
“Why’d you decide to live off-campus?” Derek asks you as you walk down the sidewalk, shivering under your jacket.
“One of my roommates knew the guy who lived here last year,” you tell him. “I dunno, it seemed kind of – exciting. And I didn’t really want to go back to the dorms, after living on my own in Spain.”
“I thought you were with a family,” he says, and you blink.
“Well – yeah, I was,” you say. “But I pretty much, you know. Did my thing.”
He hums, peering ahead into the darkness at something you can’t see.
“I’m surprised you remembered,” you say, sort of in spite of yourself.
He shrugs. “You told me,” he says, as though it’s that simple.
“Huh,” you say. “I guess I did.”
The house, when you finally get there, is nothing more than a charred skeleton, the rubble still piled up inside the foundation, everything blocked off by caution tape. You stop on the sidewalk, under a streetlight, and shudder in spite of yourself.
Derek raises his head next to you, sniffing experimentally – wolves, you think, trying not to roll your eyes – and freezes suddenly, head cocked to one side exactly like a dog’s.
“What is it?” you ask, peering at it.
“It smells like magic,” he says, and steps forward, pulling the caution tape up easily, and turning back around to look at you expectantly.
“What kind of magic?” you ask, not moving.
“I don’t recognize it,” he says impatiently.
“Well, then, I don’t think we should be walking into it –”
“Come on, Stiles,” he huffs, cutting you off, and you sigh, grumbling to yourself as you follow him, ducking under the tape with considerably less grace than he had managed. Figures.
“If everything collapses on top of us and we die it is all on you, buddy,” you mutter as you step through what used to be your front door.
“Noted,” he says drily.
“I don’t think you’re taking this appropriately seriously,” you tell him. “This is why you have such a bad track record of terrible shit happening to you, you know. You’re like a kid who can’t help trying to eat everything that comes across his path, regardless of whether his mom tells him it’ll make him sick.”
“Would you rather let whatever this thing is come after you in your dorm?” he asks, maddeningly calm.
“I’d rather assume that this thing doesn’t want anything to do with me at all,” you grumble. “You have no proof that my living here and this – magical aura or whatever the fuck are in any way related.”
“So it’s just coincidence,” he deadpans.
“Yep,” you say. “Total, one-hundred percent coincidence.”
You would keep going, but you start coughing instead, inhaling obnoxious little flakes of ash and dust. He reaches out and thumps you on the back a couple of times before leaving his hand there, rubbing up and down absently while he sniffs experimentally again. He doesn’t move it even after you stop coughing, but you don’t say anything.
“Is there a basement?” he asks suddenly, startling you.
“Uh, yeah,” you tell him. “The stairs are – over there, the door’s gone.” And, indeed, in the next “room” is a gaping hole leading down into the dark.
“There’s something down there,” Derek says, looking down at the unwelcoming stairs.
“Okay,” you say dubiously, “should we, like, call Deaton, or something? Maybe he knows people in San Francisco who could help –” But he’s already stepping forward, onto the first step, and then the next, so that you have no choice but to make an inarticulate, distressed noise and follow him.
“You fucking idiot,” you hiss as you try to make your way down the cement stairs without falling and killing yourself. Your eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness, but then the moonlight coming in from where the roof should have been helps, just a little bit. “Derek? Derek, I can’t fucking see you, you asshole –”
“I’m right here,” his voice says, directly to your left. His eyes glow for a moment in the darkness, and you reach out instinctively to grab at him, hand landing somewhere around his upper arm.
“This is officially the stupidest idea you’ve ever had,” you tell him, trying to keep your voice from getting too shrill. “And I’m including everything that happened between January and April, 2014.”
You can feel him wince, under your hand; it’s very satisfying.
“I can see fine,” he mutters, churlish.
“Well, I can’t,” you tell him. “I’ve got, like – vague shapes, and shit, but that’s pretty much all.”
“Don’t you have a lighter?” he asks, and you realize that… you do, actually.
“Fuck off,” you mumble as you fish it out of your pocket with your free hand, flicking it a few times before it catches, lights. “You’re lucky I smoke so much weed, dude.”
He snorts. You can see him, now, the blurry yellowish cast of him, in the flickering light of the flame.
“So,” you say. “Here we are.”
“It’s definitely… here…” he says vaguely, turning his head this way and that. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“And the plan for dealing with this mysterious creature we know nothing about would be…” you prompt him, not optimistic about what you’re going to get as a response.
“Intimidation,” he says, and you groan.
“I don’t know how you’re still alive,” you tell him. “I seriously, seriously have no idea how you have managed to survive in the world this long, dude.”
“Me neither,” he says, except that he’s not joking, and your fingers tighten automatically on his sleeve.
You’re about to say something – you don’t know what; anything – when there’s a sudden ominous, rattling creak from somewhere across the room, and his head snaps around, following the sound.
“Derek?” you whisper. “I’m serious, this – is starting to seem like a really bad plan –”
He shushes you, still staring into the darkness, and you feel it, the way he goes totally stiff, the muscle under your hand insanely taut, before you see it – the thing – clawing its way out of the rubble –
“Oh, Jesus,” you whisper, and Derek starts to shake. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh, fuck –”
Kate Argent’s face is looking a little worse for the wear, which isn’t really a surprise, since she’s been dead for four years: she’s missing some hair and some teeth, and one of her eye sockets is mottled. When she grins up at Derek, you’re pretty sure her jaw dislocates. The flesh on her arms is rotten and scabby, but as she pulls herself closer, you see it begin to close up, smooth over, her teeth looking progressively less decayed and her hair growing back so fast it makes you nauseous just to watch it.
“Derek,” you say, shaking his arm as hard as you can. “Derek, Derek, come on, we need to get out of here –”
But he doesn’t listen to you, just stares fixedly at the creature in front of him, with an expression on his face that looks, as best as you can tell, like a very small boy’s, a very small boy who is waiting for punishment.
“Derek,” you say, but nothing you do or say can distract him. She’s getting closer and closer, so you do the only thing that comes to mind: you shove him aside with all the bodily force you can muster and put yourself in-between the two of them. You have no plan: you just know you need to stop – whatever this is from happening.
“Fuck off,” you tell her, voice shaking along with your hand, which is making the light do weird things with the shadows in the room. She looks up at you for a moment, blinking her oddly reptilian eyes, and then – she’s gone –
“What,” you start, and then you stop, because – because it’s not Kate Argent after all, how could you ever have thought that? It’s your father, paler and more fragile than you’ve ever seen him, sitting in a wheelchair with an IV next to him and an oxygen tube hooked up to his nose. He’s wearing a hospital gown exactly the same color as the one that – that she used to wear – and he’s looking at you with this desperate expression, that says help me, help me, please.
“Dad?” you croak, reaching out to him with your free hand, fingers trembling. “Dad, what –”
“Stiles,” Derek says from somewhere behind you, but you ignore him – he doesn’t matter right now, the only thing that matters is your dad and whatever’s happening to him, whether there’s anything you can do to help – he’s reaching out to you and you reach back, your fingers almost touching when Derek howls and gets his claws in the back of your jacket, hauling you away and in the direction of the stairs.
“Get off,” you shout at him, trying to dig your heels in the rubble, but even as you watch your dad vanishes and is replaced by Kate Argent again, standing up this time, looking a whole lot less dead.
“Oh,” you say, suddenly understanding, and then: “oh, fuck,” as you push Derek up the stairs, scrambling after him, the ghostly sensation of fingertips at your back until you spill out into what would be the main floor of the house, stumbling blindly out to the street until you’re on the sidewalk, both panting, dirty, shaking.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” you croak, wiping the back of your hand against your damp eyes. But Derek looks even worse for the wear, all the blood drained out of his face as he stares down at his empty hands.
“Derek, it’s all right,” you tell him. “We got out, it wasn’t – it was just some thing that was pretending to be them, it’s – we’re fine, right? We’re both fine.”
He doesn’t react to you at all, so you reach out one tentative hand to rest on his back, and he flinches away like he’s been burned. You drop it, feeling irrationally slighted, but you can’t keep it up, not when he twitches and looks up at you like he doesn’t know where he is, like he’s drowning, like he’s lost somewhere very far away from you and doesn’t know how to get back.
“Derek?” you say, more quietly. “Derek, can you hear me?”
He blinks and stares at you, uncomprehending, shivering, and you reach out again, let your hand fall gently on his shoulder and not taking it away when he flinches, just – to see, to see what happens.
After a moment he closes his eyes and lets out a long, shuddering breath, and when you go to remove your hand whimpers, a little, so you put it back, and reach out the other one to pull him closer, until your dirty, soot-streaked bodies are pressed against each other’s, his face nestled in your neck as his shoulders shake under your hands. “I know,” you whisper. “I know, I know.”
His breath is shaky and damp against your skin, and you run your hands up and down his back, along his ribs and spine and over the sharp angles of his scapulae. He curls his fingers tentatively in the fabric of your jacket, like he’s not sure whether he’s allowed, so you wrap your arm around his shoulders and pull him as close as you can, burying your nose in his hair.
“It’s all right,” you murmur, rubbing your thumb against the clammy skin of his neck. “It’s going to be fine.”
Eventually he pulls away, but the look on his face is still open and confused, young, so you put your hand in his and lead him away from the house, down to the main road, and by some miracle manage to flag down a taxi to take you back to campus, keeping your fingers knotted together on the seat in-between you, as he hunches his shoulders and stares vacantly out the window.
You pay the driver what you’re pretty sure is a totally exorbitant tip when he drops you off, but you don’t really care, too focused on getting Derek inside to care much. “Come on,” you murmur, and he follows you unquestioningly. You wave your hand at Marcel when you walk in, and shake your head when you point at Derek; he frowns, concerned, but lets you up without any fuss.
When you get back into your temporary room, Derek just stands there in the middle of the floor, seemingly at a loss for what to do while you strip off your coat and your outer shirt, both covered with ashes. When you’re done, you stare at him for a moment, nervous, before walking up to him and slowly easing him out of his leather jacket.
“This okay?” you ask, and he doesn’t react at all for a moment, only nodding when you stop moving your hands.
Once you’ve gotten the jacket off, you toss it over the back of the desk chair, and reach up to brush some of the detritus from the house out of Derek’s hair.
“See,” you murmur, “all in one piece.”
He lets out a small, aching sound when you run your fingers through his hair, and you take your hand back, nervous.
His hand twitches again, like it did earlier, and he seems like he’s coming back to himself at least a little, running his eyes up and down your body like he’s trying to convince himself you’re fine. You reach out and grab his hand, press it against your neck, against the pulse there, before moving it down so that it’s over your heart, or the place where you think, vaguely, your heart is.
He stares at it for a long time, keeping it pressed there against your chest even when you let your hands fall to your sides. He raises it up to your face a moment later, the tips of his fingers ghosting over your cheekbones, your jaw, the line of your nose. You shiver, in spite of yourself, and he leans forward to press his lips against yours, weirdly chaste, like a little boy in love who’s seen kissing in the movies, and then wraps his broad arms around your comparatively skinny body, holds you tight.
You’re frozen for a moment, but instinct eventually kicks in, and you hug him back, fingers scrabbling against his Henley, trying to breathe in all you can of the smell of him, his particular musk beneath the overlying scent of your burnt-out home.
“I’m here,” you tell him. “I’m all right. Nothing happened to me. Nothing happened to either of us.”
He just tightens his arms a little more, and you close your eyes.
*
You wake up in your bed, despite having no memory of how you got there, with your face mashed into Derek Hale’s bare, unfairly muscled shoulder. You’re drooling on him in a way that is really not cute, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed.
You really, really have to go to the bathroom.
“Derek,” you mumble, pushing ineffectually at him. He’s got his arms around you, apparently, and just tightens his grip. You can feel your face heating up.
“No, seriously, dude,” you tell him, voice scratching. “I am probably going to piss on you any second if you don’t let me up.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Or is that some weird werewolf thing?” you say, mostly to yourself. “Werewolves: super into watersports. Remind me to never ask Scott about that, ever. Ever.”
“We’re not into watersports,” he mumbles into the pillow.
“Well, then, let go,” you tell him. “I am not making an idle threat, here.”
He finally tugs his arms away, and you shuffle back, teetering awkwardly on your knees before you climb over him and out of bed. His arms thwack heavily down where you were, stretched out futilely; you stare for a second before remembering your Urgent Bathroom Emergency and practically sprinting out the door down to the communal bathroom, where somebody is – charmingly – puking in an adjacent stall.
“Seriously?” you say to the kid when he stumbles out, eyes bloodshot. “It’s only Friday.”
He stares for a moment, utterly disoriented. “Who are you?” he asks.
“Never mind,” you tell him, waving him off with one wet hand. “You’re making me feel old.”
You linger in the doorway when you get back to your room: your heart is beating too fast, sheer nerves working you up. You have – okay, so you maybe have spent, um, a fair amount of time, in your life, jerking off to the thought of Derek Hale, but not really in – a while, at least not regularly. A few times, over the summer, when you were still a little stoned, or – tipsy, or – neither of those things, once or twice. But you’re not – you and Derek, you aren’t a thing. Derek’s just some – some guy, some guy you thought was hot in high school. You never thought about, like, cuddling him, about drooling on him in bed. You never imagined that he’d be all that upset if anything happened to you, any more than any normal person would. This whole thing is – unsettling, to say the least. You glance down at your empty desk – Amy has left a bright green post-it note there, that reads, HELLO LOVEBIRDS. STOLE YOUR COMPUTER. NOT BRINGING IT BACK UNTIL AT LEAST 1, HAVE LOTS OF SEX BEFORE THEN. XO.
She really is a menace.
You hear Derek shift so you look over at him, propped up on his elbows, looking at you woozily, sporting a case of truly magnificent bedhead. He squints against the light coming in through the window blind and yawns, face stretching and crumpling in a totally unflattering and deeply charming way, and you give in and walk back to the bed, crawl over him, and settle down into the warm spot you left a few minutes ago. He lets out a sort of – weird rumble in his chest, almost like he’s purring, and rearranges himself so that you’re almost tangled up in each other, knees knocking together, his toes pressed against your foot.
“This is weird,” you manage. “This is totally weird; you’re gonna be weirded the fuck out when you actually wake up.”
“M’awake,” he mumbles, eyes closed.
“You are so not,” you tell him, borderline hysterical, “you are not awake at all, and you are going to murder me violently when you come to your senses.”
He cracks one bleary eye open, looking at you.
“You have, um, really pretty eyes,” you blurt out without thinking – he does, you haven’t ever seen them this close before, you don’t think, not close enough that your noses are almost touching – and them promptly feel an intense desire to kill yourself.
“Thanks,” he says, sounding somewhere between baffled and amused. You stick your face into your half of the pillow. The rickety twin bed in this dorm room is so, so not built for two people, especially not when one of them has Derek’s bulk.
“I want to die,” you tell the pillow, voice muffled.
Derek hmms in what you’d assume, normally, to be assent. His fingers brush against the short, springy hairs in front of your ear, around the curve of the shell, and finish by resting against the protuberant bone behind it, rubbing gently back and forth. You shiver, in spite of yourself, and his thumb follows the line of your neck, all the tendon and muscle built up there, down to your collarbone. When he’s finished he rests his big warm palm against the spot between your shoulder blades, and hmms again, deep in his chest.
“Okay,” you say, shifting so you can actually look him in the face. “I need to know what exactly is going on, here.”
He looks – shy, suddenly, uncertain.
“I mean, I’m not complaining,” you continue hastily. “But, like – I was not expecting snuggling out of this visit, let me tell you.”
He scowls. “I’m not – we’re not – snuggling,” he protests, and you feel your eyebrows shoot up toward your hairline.
“Dude,” you tell him. “Come on. There is nothing about this that is not snuggling.”
The tips of his ears turn bright red; it shouldn’t be half as delightful as it is.
“I,” he starts, looking lost. “I just – I wasn’t – I mean, I didn’t plan on – on –”
“Jesus, don’t strain yourself,” you tell him. “Don’t worry, I was never under the impression that you were, like, harboring a tragic emotional boner for me, or whatever. Or, um, any kind of boner, metaphorical or otherwise.”
He just keeps looking at you, face getting pinker and pinker, and you feel your mouth drop.
“No,” you say. “No fucking way, you are totally screwing with me right now.”
“Um,” he says, looking desperately anywhere but your face. “I don’t – I mean, that’s not – exactly – um –”
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to give me a minute,” you tell him, pressing your hand against his chest, fingers splayed out over one of his stupidly defined pectoral muscles. “My entire worldview just got turned on its head; I need some time to reorient myself.”
He scowls. “It’s not – I mean, I don’t see why it’s that surprising –”
“Um, it kind of is,” you tell him. “I had zero game in high school, all right? Less than zero. Negative game. Which is, need I remind you, when you were actually interacting with me on a semi-regular basis.”
“I didn’t want to – I – not when you were in high school,” he says, sounding scandalized. “I’m not some kind of – cradle robber –”
“When did this start?” you demand, leaning even closer, trying to look as intimidating as it’s possible to look while lying in a too-small bed with an impossibly hot dude. “I want details, man. I want dates.”
“You are impossible,” he tells you, huffing; you grin.
“Was it my post-Spain look?” you ask. “My sexy Spanish-by-proxy body?”
He shifts uncomfortably. “No,” he mumbles.
“Before then?” you say, incredulous. You really want to touch him, run your palm against the grain of his stubble, feel the thin, fragile skin of his eyelid under your finger, scrape your fingernails against his throat – but you wait. You need to know, for some reason. You need to make sure this is actually happening.
“When you –” he starts, and swallows, nervously. Somehow you missed his hand moving down to the small of your back, his thumb rubbing over your vertebrae; it’s making you shiver. “When you, uh, came home your – winter break. Freshman year.”
You remember that vacation: it was weird, after you’d only been home a couple of days at Thanksgiving, to be stuck in Beacon Hills for weeks again, trying to get used to the fact that nothing had changed but you. Mostly you just dicked around your house, watching TV – on New Year’s, though, all the pack went to the old Hale house, got drunk and high on some insane drug Scott stole from Deaton. You and Derek wound up sitting on the porch in the moonlight, smoking your respective joints: you think it was the first time you ever saw him look truly, genuinely relaxed.
“Oh,” you say, “oh,” and lean forward to kiss him.
He seems – weirdly surprised, given the entire direction this conversation has taken, but you think that’s probably just Derek, who despite looking like some sort of ridiculous Greek god has always seemed genuinely baffled whenever anybody expresses some kind of serious interest in him. You remember well the saga of Carla the Diner Waitress, who spent many a shift trying to hit on Derek and utterly, utterly failing; you and Scott used to snicker about it, amongst yourselves. Madeleine, the omega who came through town for a few months your senior year, spent that entire time relentlessly trying to woo Derek in weird-as-shit werewolf ways, by which he seemed equally as baffled as the rest of you.
“What the fuck is her deal, man?” you asked him once, after she’d come over to his house and touched everything in sight, spent the whole time doing weird things with her neck. You were looking something up on Peter’s old database, trying to collate information, and she hadn’t paid you the slightest bit of attention.
“I don’t know,” he said, consternated. “I think she thinks – our pack was pretty, uh, liberal, we didn’t go for – all that.”
“Not super into shows of dominance and submission, huh,” you said, dry, and he just shook his head, baffled.
In fact, you can’t think of anybody Derek’s been interested in, in the whole time you’ve known him – not seriously, anyway. He had a kind of sad-sack crush on some lady who worked at the gym – you remember that distinctly because it was hilarious – but he never really did anything about it, just pined. As though Gym Lady wouldn’t have been all over that, honestly. Then she moved away, Derek was extra bitchy and mopey for a month, and the whole saga was never spoken of again.
Some part of you had always assumed that his mysterious, mythical New York period had involved a whole lot of sex with a whole lot of people, but you realize now that that assumption makes absolutely no sense in light of the hard evidence, which is that a) Derek has never, as far as you know, picked up anybody in Beacon Hills, unless he suddenly got busy once you moved away, and nobody else noticed, and b) that he doesn’t seem to entirely know what he’s doing with his tongue. It’s – it’s not bad, your toes are fucking curling and you’ve already decided you don’t want to do anything except make out with him for the rest of your life, but – really. You’ve had sex with a whole lot of people, and made out with a whole lot more: you know what you’re doing, and how to read the signs from your partner, and the signs are telling you that Derek is totally fucking clueless.
The thought does something weird inside of your chest, breaks something open: you hook your ankle around his and pull him closer, hand crawling up his back. He looks kind of dazed, pupils blown wide, and there’s a thin line of spittle connecting your mouths that should objectively be gross but seems, instead, kind of charming. You want to curl around him and keep him safe from predators, kiss him until he forgets whatever awful thing happened to him to make him so terrified of intimacy. You want, you realize, to keep him, and the thought makes you shiver.
“Okay,” you mumble against his lips once you think the bottom half of your face is just one massive stubble burn. “I would, um, love to – take this somewhere, but I think if I don’t put some food in my stomach immediately, I’m going to pass out.”
His stomach rumbles, loudly. Point: made.
*
Predictably, Derek orders the healthiest thing on the diner breakfast menu, some kind of whites-only omelet with spinach that makes you want to throw your hands up in the air, despairing. Instead you order chocolate-chip pancakes and slather them with syrup even though you’re normally a savory type, at brunch.
“So,” you say around a mouthful of pancake, “that – thing – was definitely a boggart, right, which means you can’t ever make fun of me for using Harry Potter as a reference guide ever, ever again.”
Derek huffs, but doesn’t try to argue.
“Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of getting rid of it,” you continue.
“What, you can’t just point your wand at it?” he asks snidely, and you cackle, in spite of yourself.
“Would you look at that,” you say, “it made a joke,” and he kicks you under the table.
“No, seriously, though,” you tell him. “I can’t exactly point a stick at it and yell ‘riddikulus’ or 'expecto patronum,' as much as I wish Harry Potter were actually, in all respects, reality.”
Derek just shrugs, cutting off another ridiculously tiny piece of omelet and spearing it carefully on his fork. You have a sudden vision of what he must have been like as a little kid, his mother teaching him how to use his knife and fork, and you have to look down at your pancakes suddenly, to distract yourself from the trip of your heart in your chest.
“I thought boggarts weren’t even supposed to be like that,” you say, to distract yourself. “More like – sort of dickish household spirits who are annoying but not actually – dangerous.”
“They are,” Derek says. “That’s what you said it was doing before – with the food, and the noise.”
“Yeah,” you say. “But then it tried to set fire to the house and turned into – well, bad stuff, anyway.”
“Did any of you do anything to make it angry?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” you say dubiously. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly thinking about not offending our live-in supernatural pest, since I didn’t know it existed, but – no? I really can’t remember anything that would have set it off?”
“Maybe it was trying to annoy you enough that you’d leave the whole semester,” Derek suggests. “And then when you didn’t, it just – lost it.”
“Yeah, but there have been people living in that house for as long as the house has existed, since that is its fundamental purpose, and it didn’t burn down until last week.”
“You were probably bothering it,” Derek says with a shrug.
“Were you not just listening to everything I just said? Presuming it’s been there for a while, it wasn’t bothered by anybody before –”
“You’re not human,” he says casually, like it’s no big thing, and takes another tiny bite of his omelet.
“Excuse me,” you huff, “I am extremely human –”
He rolls his eyes. “Technically,” he tells you. “But you’re not – I mean, any supernatural entity won’t recognize you as such.”
“Why the hell not?” you ask.
He blinks. “You’re pack,” he says blankly.
“Oh,” you say. “Oh, I didn’t – I thought that was just, you know, pack as fun social club.”
He looks at you with such an expression of disgust that some part of you wants to slide down under the table.
“I didn’t know!” you say. “You didn’t tell me I was going to, like, smell weird forever!”
He closes his eyes and leans his head against the back of the booth. “You don’t – smell weird,” he manages.
“I smell werewolfy,” you say, because you are nothing if not persistent. “I smell werewolf-adjacent.”
“Shut up,” he mutters. “For the love of god, just shut up.”
“Nah, man,” you say, reaching out for the syrup to drizzle even more on your pancakes; it’s that kind of morning (early afternoon). “Now that I know you like me, I am never fucking shutting up again. Not shutting up is part of my unique charm.”
He covers his face with his hands.
“Okay,” you say. “So, we could just – leave it? Right? I mean, if no other – supernatural entities or whatever move in, it should be fine?”
“I don’t know,” he says, lowering his hands and sighing. He looks tired, even though you both got a ridiculous amount of sleep last night. “It looked pretty – hostile.”
“Maybe that was just us, though,” you point out.
“Maybe,” he says dubiously.
“I’m just saying, if I don’t have to subject myself to – that, again, that would be totally fine by me,” you tell him, though honestly you’re thinking more about him, about the look on his face when Kate Argent started clawing her way out of the darkness. You don’t want to see that again: you’d do a lot, you think, to keep that from happening.
“We should call Deaton,” he says. “See what he knows.”
“That’s what I said yesterday,” you tell him. “In case you’ve forgotten.”
He ignores you.
“Ugh,” you say, with feeling. “Jackass.”
He shrugs and takes another bite of his food, but one of his feet hooks around yours underneath the table, so you decide, magnanimously, that all is forgiven.
*
You spend that afternoon holed up in your room, Googling “how to get rid of a boggart,” among other supremely unhelpful things, on your re-appropriated computer.
“We have to ask it to stay out as long as the hollies are green,” you tell Derek, who rolls his eyes. “Other suggestions include banging pots and pans, because that makes tons of sense.”
“How do they do it in the book?” Derek asks.
“Make it into something funny,” you tell him. “Which, to be honest, seemed a lot more straightforward in theory than it does in practice.”
“I’m trying Deaton again,” he grumbles.
“Maybe he’ll actually pick up this time,” you mutter. “God, it’s like he’s got a job or something.”
He waves a hand at you to get you to shut up.
Deaton does actually pick up, this time; you don’t pay attention to the conversation, though, because any conversation between Derek and Deaton consists of Deaton saying a lot of mumbo-jumbo mysterious things and Derek grunting tersely; terse grunting in and of itself is… not all that informative, as it turns out. You wind up, instead, trawling through horrible Yahoo Answers posts and genuinely mortifying Harry Potter fanfiction, neither of which seems likely to help much in the long term.
You look up at Derek after he hangs up and find him glaring at the ceiling. “Not good, then?” you ask, and he huffs, aggravated.
“He says that now that we’ve – gotten its attention – that it won’t leave us alone,” he says. “So we basically – have to do something about it.”
“And his suggestions for that were…?” you prompt.
“He didn’t have any,” Derek grumbles.
“Seriously? He knows what the thing’s gonna do, but not how to get rid of it?”
“Apparently not.”
“I fucking hate that dude,” you say with feeling. “I mean, Jesus Christ. You know, I bet he does know, and just wants this to be, like, a learning experience for us, or some bullshit.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Derek sighs, rubbing a hand over his eyes and tossing his phone down to the end of the bed.
You watch him for a moment, indecisive, before you shut your computer – there is seriously nothing on there worth looking at – and get up, stretch, and crawl onto the bed next to him, which is sort of uncomfortable and sort of nice. He blinks at you owlishly, so you turn toward the ceiling, lacing your fingers over your chest.
“Okay,” you say. “We could try putting iron over the opening, who knows, maybe that’d work. But it’s probably something to do with – emotion, right? I mean, the thing turns into whatever you’re most afraid of, so it follows logically that getting rid of it would have something to do with, you know, not being afraid anymore.”
“I guess,” he says, shifting minutely so your shoulders are aligned more comfortably.
“Right,” you say. “But barring, like, many many years of therapy and, probably, some kind of frontal lobotomy – which we don’t do anymore because it’s fucking stupid, don’t look at me like that – you’re not gonna stop being scared of Kate Argent anytime soon, and I’m not going to stop being afraid of my dad dying. And I’m pretty sure neither of us has any way of making those things funny, either.”
“I’m not really sure where this is going,” Derek says.
“Gimme a second,” you say. You can feel the tendrils of an idea forming in your brain, your mind skipping from one thing to the next, but you’ve got to wait for it, to feel it out. “So… it turns into something you’re afraid of… and it tricks you into thinking that it’s real… but it’s not. That’s got to be it – somehow – it’s not real, but whatever it is, is so terrifying that your brain can’t process that and goes into some kind of crazy adrenaline overdrive instead.”
“So we’re fucked,” Derek says gloomily, and you roll over awkwardly, so that you’re on your side, facing him.
“No,” you say. “I refuse to be fucked any way except sexually, by you, in the near future; this little shit’s not getting the best of me.” You watch, satisfied, as his cheeks heat up.
“I think,” you say slowly, “if we could – if we could somehow remember the whole time that it’s not real – that it can’t be – we could – I dunno, do something to – beat it? Like, okay, my dad’s in pretty decent health, aside from the fact that he totally eats shit all the time now that I’m not there to stop him. But beyond that, when it was being him – that wasn’t even what my dad would look like, if he got sick. He was wearing the exact same hospital gown my mom had to wear, when she was in the hospital for treatment, and – did you notice, the wheelchair and IV and everything were outdated, they looked like they were from ten years ago, when she was sick. It’s – it’s irrational, right, it’s a confabulation of, of fear and memory in a way that’s – it’s emotionally persuasive but it doesn’t make sense.
“And Kate Argent! Like, I know the dead don’t always stay dead in Beacon Hills, but – that lady? So fucking dead. Desiccated corpse levels of dead, six feet underground. Even if she were going to rise from the grave like some kind of zombie, it wouldn’t be in the ruins of my old house, and I’m pretty sure she couldn’t manage the re-growing-my-own-flesh trick that creature was pulling.”
“But,” he huffs, frustrated. “That’s – fear is irrational, Stiles, that’s – that’s why it works –”
“I know,” you say. “Obviously. But if there were some way to – to remember that it wasn’t – to have something more persuasive than fear to remind you that it’s just – nothing, really, nothing more than an idea. To – to fucking defeat it with logic, basically.”
He looks at you – he really does have incredibly pretty eyes – for a long, long time before finally admitting, “I don’t think I could do that.”
“Well,” you say. “I think I can.”
*
You were never actually any great shakes at magic, despite being the requisite human hanging around with the wolves all the time. Deaton tried to teach you a few things, back in the day, before giving up at getting you beyond the most basic levels of competence. You’re only any use if the situation is absolutely fucking critical, and/or if you have vast quantities of mountain ash in your possession, which is only helpful insofar as it keeps things that go bump in the night at bay long enough for you to either call the cavalry or run the fuck away.
You keep a whole lot of it around, anyway. Amy found it once and, after a brief moment of panic wherein she thought you were some kind of crazy secret pyro with a gunpowder kink, became totally convinced that you were dealing vast quantities of some fancy new drug to the entire student body. (You had horrifying visions for fucking weeks about finding her snorting some experimentally. You don’t actually know what would happen to anybody stupid enough to do that, but despite your normally self-destructive curious streak, you really have no desire to find out.)
Derek gets predictably stiff and uncomfortable when you get it out, packing two mid-sized pouches into each of your coat pockets and another two in your pants pockets, just to be safe.
“Cool it, dude,” you tell him. “I’m not gonna, like, box you in and then cut and run.”
“I didn’t say that,” he grumbles in a tone of voice that makes the fact that he’s lying through his teeth about his soul-deep conviction that everybody will ultimately abandon him pretty damn obvious. You go through cycles, with all his repressed emotional issues: sometimes they’re frustrating, sometimes they’re almost unbearably depressing to think about, and sometimes they’re just sort of endearing. You haven’t taken any of Derek’s issues personally in years – they’re so obviously, obviously not about you that it’s hard to stay mad at him when he gets all closed off and paranoid.
“You were thinking it,” you say, easy, so he knows you’re not upset.
You stand up, ready for anything, and catch a glimpse of a sort of sad, desperate expression on his face before it shutters, like he wants to tell you something but can’t quite make himself do it, can’t quite find the words.
“It’s okay,” you tell him. You reach out to ruffle his hair instead of touching him more seriously, instead of putting your hands on either side of his face and looking at him and telling him you aren’t going to leave him alone, but you have your own limitations.
“Come on,” you say. “Let’s go kick some paranormal ass.”
The basement of the house is moderately less ominous in the daytime: the only light is coming in through the opening above the stairs, but it’s enough that you can see the dust and ashes covering old power tools, bike frames, and other housekeeping ephemera. You stop on the bottom step, Derek behind you, and pour a fine line of mountain ash around the base of the stairs and along the side as far as you can reach before closing your eyes and imagining with every fiber of your being that it reaches all the way to the wall.
“It work?” you ask Derek when you open your eyes, and he grunts what you think is an assent.
“All right,” you say, trying not to sound as anxious as you feel, though you know it’s a futile effort: you can hear your own heartbeat thudding in your ear, so you have no idea what it must sound like to Derek. He reaches out and puts one steadying hand on your shoulder.
“Hey!” you shout to the basement at large. “Hey, uh – boggart? Is there something you want to be called? I’m pretty accommodating, all things considered.”
Nothing happens.
“It is here, right?” you mutter to Derek, peering into the darker shadows of the basement, the ones too far away for you to see clearly.
“I think so,” he replies.
“You think so?”
“I mean, it feels the same as before –”
“That is so not the level of specificity I am looking for, here –”
“It’s not exactly a science,” Derek begins, affronted, before stopping suddenly, hand gripping your shoulder so tightly that you’re pretty sure you’re going to have bruises there tomorrow.
Kate Argent’s standing in front of you, just a couple feet away from the mountain ash, smirking up at Derek like there isn’t an impenetrable barrier separating them, like she could just reach out and dig her teeth into him. Derek’s the one with those terrifying canines, but you’d take him on before you’d go within a ten foot pole of the woman in front of you – if, that is, she weren’t dead. Because she is: she is in the ground. This is not her body.
“Hey, sweetie,” she says, grinning. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Derek’s shaking behind you; you reach out a hand and grab whatever part of him you can reach. “It’s not real,” you tell him. “Don’t look, don’t listen, closer your eyes –”
“Look at this cute kid you’ve found yourself,” she says gleefully. “I wonder how long it’ll take him to figure out what I did, huh, that you’re just not quite good enough in the sack to be worth keeping around –”
Derek lets out a low sound, equal parts wounded and angry, and you actually twist around to look up at his slack, anguished face, to grab his neck and force him to look down at you instead of at the demon in front of you.
“Close your eyes,” you tell him. “She’s not really there. She can’t do anything to hurt you.”
He stares at you for a long moment, naked fear etched across his features.
“Close your eyes,” you say again. “I’ll still be here when you open them.”
He closes his eyes.
When you turn around your father is gazing plaintively up at you.
“Stiles,” he says. “Stiles, what’s going on? Why are you up there? Why’s Derek crying?”
Part of you wants to step down, to go kneel down next to him, to take his hand and tell him that he can’t be sick, he can’t be sick, can’t die; part of you wants to tell him that you need him, still, even know, that if he dies you don’t know what you’ll do. And another part of you wants to close your own eyes, just to make it stop, but ignorance has never been bliss, not when it comes to you: you have your eyes open and will stare into the dark heart of the world for as long as you have to. And closing your eyes may silence the ghost of your father, but the fear will still be there, in the dark, and the boggart will still be breathing down your neck, ready to set you alight once again.
“We’re here to barter,” you tell the thing wearing your father’s face, and for a moment, you see it: the split second of utter, genuine confusion that doesn’t belong to him, to your father, but to some other thing.
“To barter what?” your father asks, hurt and bewildered, but it is not the same as what you just saw: it is human. It doesn’t matter, though: that one moment was enough.
“We wish you no harm,” you tell it, even though you really kind of do, given the fact that it burned your house down. Whatever: supernatural diplomacy is totally a thing you can do. “I am a representative of the Hale pack, and this is our alpha. You have infringed on our territory by living here without our alpha’s explicit permission, and we request that you leave immediately to shelter elsewhere.” Berkeley is definitely not Hale territory by any stretch of the imagination, but you don’t give much of a shit: the closest pack is in Frisco and if you’re right about this… thing, then it doesn’t much matter what you argue so long as you argue it.
Another expression crosses your father’s face that doesn’t belong to him. “But –” he starts, and even his voice doesn’t sound quite right, a little distorted. You feel a thrill run through you when you hear it. You’re winning.
All of the sudden Kate’s there again, looking furious, pressed up against the barrier created by the mountain ash, a mere couple of feet away from you. You turn around and glance up at Derek, who’s clutching your shoulder and still has his eyes closed.
“You think you can get away from me so easy, baby?” she says. “You think I’m not there anymore when you close your eyes? I know you’re listening. You’ll listen to every single word I say to you, won’t you, because somewhere, deep down, you want to, don’t you? The last time we met I didn’t even have to gag you, did I, you just took it.” She pauses, an inhuman glint in her eye that might belong to her or to the thing wearing her skin. “It’s ‘cause I’m right, and you know it. Every single thing I told you, about yourself. You believe all of it.”
You’ve never gotten a full explanation of what happened between Kate Argent and Derek, before the fire; since she died, you don’t think you’ve heard him mention her a single time. When you were a kid you never thought about it: there was, after all, so little reason behind her senseless act of slaughter that it didn’t seem worth trying to parse how it had happened. But you’ve thought about it, since then, thought about how terrified Derek has always been of Allison – even now that Allison and Scott have been dating for what feels like forever, are doing one of those endless engagements while she finishes her degree at Irvine and Scott racks up credits at BHCC. He’s not as afraid of her as he once was, rarely openly hostile, but he tenses up whenever she’s around, avoids speaking to her at any cost. You’ve wondered about it, about how old he was when his family were all put in the ground, about what Kate was like, the things she’d done. You’re not surprised, exactly, but there’s a sick rush of fury in your belly to hear her shade talk about him so casually, exactly as Kate herself would have, you’re sure.
But still: he’s got to open his eyes.
“Derek,” you say, quietly, as kindly as you can. Part of you wanted him to stay behind, but when you suggested it he glared at you like you were suggesting walking into a lion’s den without protection. He’s never quite managed to grasp that some things are beyond the physical, that sometimes his brawn simply won’t do him any good, that he can bulk himself up as much as he wants but that muscle is no match for fear. For somebody so incredibly fucked up, he does a mighty fine job of denying that emotion actually matters.
“She’s not real,” you whisper to him. His pallor is bad, paler and clammier than you’ve seen it in a long time: it reminds you, out of the blue, of the sight of him in Deaton’s office, so many years ago, his wounded arm resting between the two of you.
“Does it really matter, though?” she says from behind you. “Even if I’m all in little Derek’s head – that’s damning enough, isn’t it? You can’t get rid of me, sweetie. I’m gonna be in there forever, whispering in your ear, keeping you on your toes.”
“Derek,” you tell him, and reach up to touch his cheek. “You have to stop believing in her.”
“It’s not – it’s not that easy,” he whispers, voice small, and you run your thumb over one of his dark eyebrows.
“It is,” you say. “Today, right now, it’s exactly that easy.”
He shakes his head, eyes still firmly closed.
“Derek,” you tell him. “She’s dead. You’re alive. Do you hear me? You’re alive. You can do anything you want. That’s how it works.”
“I – she should have –” he chokes out, and you raise your other hand to settle it on his other cheek, doing easily what you found so inexplicably difficult earlier today.
“I’m so glad you’re alive,” you tell him, and you are, you are so, so happy that he was the one who survived, the one who somehow escaped. “I would have missed you, if you’d died, even if I didn’t know what I was missing.”
His eyes snap open out of pure surprise, and Kate makes a high, angry sound behind you, but he doesn’t look at her, just stares at you, confused.
“You need to bargain with it now,” you tell him. “Because I really don’t want to have sex with you in the burned-down remains of my old home, I think you’ll agree that it’s not exactly appropriately atmospheric.”
That shocks a weird, snuffling little laugh out of him, and you grin. Kate’s screaming something behind you, but it doesn’t even sound like words anymore, just inchoate rage.
“I am the Hale pack alpha,” he says, voice trembling. He hasn’t looked away from you, eyes wide and gold and green as he stares at you like you’re some strange magical thing he’s discovered, when you know that in fact the opposite is true. “And you’re trespassing on my territory.”