Stiles is sitting outside.
The summer night is still pleasantly warm even in shorts and a worn sweatshirt several sizes too large. It's nice, and Stiles idly wonders for the trillionth time what he would be doing if Peter hadn't bitten Scott that night. It's one of those nights where Stiles only has himself for company, and all he wants to do is forget.
He sighs. He can feel the grass prick against his skin, like small, blunt, bendable needles.
Needles like the ones they stuck into him once, twice, again, too many times to count.
Like the needles they attached to his mom, a never-ending cycle of retract, insert, retract, insert. A little more here, a little less there, a tweak in the myriad of medicines, to keep her there, alive. With Stiles and his dad.
It didn't keep her alive. In the end, nothing did.
Stiles shakes his head like a dog after an unwanted splatter of water to get rid of the thoughts.
This is a good night. No relatives to save, no getting caught in a pissing contest between the Beacon Hills rag-tag group of unsupervised teenage creatures and the Monster of the Month, no Stiles being used as a life-sized chew-toy or shooting target, no running for his life, for his friends' lives, for his dad's life. Just Stiles, the wind, and the prickling grass on the Stilenski lawn.
He glances down and runs his fingers across the need-to-get-mowed-soon grass. It's reassuring, feeling it, something, anything . It's reassuring in a way that is only possible after your body has been taken over by a fox, who wears you like a condom and takes your body for a joyride. And look at how amazing that little stunt went. Scott lost Allison, Isaac's gone, Lydia lost someone, had them in her arms again, and where's Stiles? Right there, smack in the middle of it with blood on his hands and a trail of dead friends to show him exactly how much he's lost, has made his friends lose.
Stiles doesn't tell Scott or Lydia, or anyone really, that he still remembers the voice in his head so clearly that it sometimes still feels like it's there, bubbling up from beneath the surface. He doesn't tell them that his dad found him in shatters at the bottom of the shower because the steam – the steam from the water that wasn't hot enough for Stiles to wash the death away, not hot enough, never hot enough – was too much like that dank place where Stiles had to fight in his own mind. That he woke up in his dad's iron grip with empty lungs last week, that most of the time, he doesn't sleep at all, perhaps just a wink. He doesn't tell them any of it. Scott still gets lost in his thoughts at times, only to be dragged back by Kira. Lydia copes and moves on with the powerful veneer that only Lydia Martin has the ingredients to create. They're moving on in their own ways, away from the nightmare Stiles unwillingly created. Everyone else has gotten off but Stiles is still riding the crazy train like the Adderall-addicted bundle of tangled threads he is. It's a smart choice on their part, a small voice in Stiles' head tells him.
Stiles leans down and lies on his back. He shuffles his feet a bit, moves his head from side to side to get comfortable. There are birds making noise somewhere in the distance, he idly registers. His eyes are open but he doesn't see anything.
Stiles just wants to forget.
To be honest, there is someone Stiles has told. Not everything. Just bits and pieces that fly out like pus from a wound when Stiles is too upset, too scared, or too fed up. It's like, he gets too frustrated with everything, with how life seems to have turned into a seagull which enjoys leaving droppings of supernatural shit on Stiles' head, and he does what he always does – ramble.
Only there's those times when Stiles doesn't ramble about how stupid the packs excuse of a plan is or about the Monster of the Month. When it happens the first time, Derek only looks at him with that broody, unfairly handsome face of his, and while Stiles recovers quickly with a good squeeze of his very own brand of Stilenski Sarcasm and Sardonic Humour, Derek gives him the look . Derek doesn't do Feelings; everyone who's been within a ten foot radius of him knows that. But then it happens again, after the legendary fuck-up-almost-got-everyone-sacrificed-incident that was the Nemeton, and Derek gives Stiles another look . Stiles can survive getting looks from devastatingly handsome sourwolves but then Derek decides to open his mouth and tell Stiles that he can, you know, if there's- if he needs someone to listen, because Derek's lost people, too. Then he walks off into the sunset – out of the animal clinic, really, but Stiles is allowed artistic freedom – and Stiles can only stare.
It starts like that, with Derek and his awkward, terrible, really, way of reaching a hand out to Stiles. And it doesn't make sense, not at the time, not now when Stiles looks back. But it felt like it did, like Stiles mattered more than as best-friend-of-alpha or freak-but-planner-and-researcher.
It takes time, far too many near-death experiences, and awkward shuffling around, and sneaking into Stiles' bedroom through his window when his dad is out, but they manage it.
Derek, somewhere along the way, in between threats and rescues, manages to chisel out a Derek-shaped hole in Stiles. In the nights where Stiles lays his head on the arm Derek has curled around him and traces invisible patterns against the palm of Derek's hands with his fingers, when Derek whispers against Stiles' skin, Stiles believes he's managed to make a Stiles-shaped place in Derek, too.
It doesn't end well.
Of course it doesn't, because when does anything ever end well for Stiles when it comes to people he cares about? Stiles should have seen it coming but he didn't, and neither did Derek.
So Stiles watches helplessly when Deaton says there's nothing he or any human doctors can do, that Derek won't be able to heal this time. Stiles watches the poison leak out of Derek like everything they ever had, could have had. He watches it stain Derek's clothes, spill across the metal slab and down onto the tiles they're standing on.
There's arms holding him. Stiles struggles, screams, cries, kicks, yells, and flails before he falls to his knees. He can't take the looks they give him; he only has eyes for the corpse that is, used to be Derek. Derek who's leaving him.
Stiles feels how his Derek-shaped hole shatters and spills from his eyes.
He shakes and screams into Scott's jacket until he can't any more. After that, all he feels is empty.
Stiles adjust himself again on the grass with a wince. He doesn't know how long he's been outside but there are goosebumps on his skin and his face and body feels stiff from the cold.
He gets up and walks inside, upstairs, and sits on his bed. He fiddles with the sleeve of the sweatshirt, pretending like he has a choice, before he crawls beneath the covers.
The curtains flap in the light breeze from the open window.
Stiles lies in the right side of the bed and stares at nothing, surrounded by memories and fabric which should smell like Derek. But it doesn't any more.
Stiles exhales shakily as his fingers absent-mindedly, automatically runs across the space beside him.
Stiles wants to forget because it's on nights like these that everything about Derek hurts more than it ever made him happy.