DOWNPOUR

Summary: Rain threatened to bring everything crashing down.

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters and I do not intend to make a profit off this story. The characters described within belong to their respective creators.

I wished my Friday nights were more normal. Maybe I could have gone to the movies, a lacrosse game, or even, shocker of shockers, on a date. Instead they were inevitably spent dealing with supernatural creatures and their problems. I've never understood how I always end up more mixed up in these things than Scott, who actually was a supernatural creature, but somehow he was the one who had a girlfriend and an active social life. I had werewolves texting me demands for information and coming in through my bedroom window unannounced.

It must have been raining outside because when Derek opened the window a sheet of water splashed in. Luckily I had moved everything of worth out from underneath the window after the last time he had come in bleeding and broken. It had been hard to explain to my dad why I'd needed to rent a carpet cleaner.

I would have made one of my trademark smart remarks but he looked like shit. His black hair was matted down and all of his clothes were soaked. But besides the wetness his eyes were dark pits, the green staring out from underneath a weary brow. He slowly entered my room and settled himself next to my window. A small puddle started to form beneath him.

"Do you want a towel?" I asked. He glowered but nodded. When I got back he had taken off his leather jacket and slumped down beneath the window pane. He accepted the towel without comment and made a token attempt to dry off. "You're not going to shake it off then, huh."

He snorted. "Funny." I wanted for him to growl at me or slam me into the wall but he only rubbed at his face carelessly.

"So anyway, what did you need my help with?" I asked. My computer chair creaked as I sat down. It took me a few clicks to get enough search windows open to work on whatever mystery he had for me this time.

"I don't think this rain is exactly natural. I've tried doing some investigating on my own but it's dulling my senses." He hunched over into himself. His clothes were completely soaked, making his pale skin even lighter.

"Dude, I can throw your stuff in the dryer if you want. You might not get sick, but I'm sure that's not comfortable." Most of the time I didn't care about him or even give a thought to how he was doing. Derek seemed to be always lurking in the periphery, ready to swoop in when needed and unsure of his place when he wasn't. He didn't scare me as much anymore. I had gotten used to his scowling and short temper. Today he seemed to be almost at the end of his rope.

"I'll be fine. The roof of my house leaks so I'm used to it." He put his head against the wall and looked at me. "So do you think you can find out what might be doing this?"

I couldn't help myself. "That's all you've got-I think something's making it rain? You don't have anything else-weird footprints or funky smells?" I thought that might push him to react but he was remarkably calm.

"I wish I did Stiles. Then I might be closer to finding out what's going on. Things just feel wrong." He sighed and pulled himself back to his feet. "I'll let you know if I find anything else."

"Yeah, I'll see if I . . . " But he was gone.

I made a few half-hearted attempts to search for creatures that might cause rain and dull a werewolf's senses. It seemed like there were thousands of possibilities and so I wrote down the most likely suspects and wondered about sending the list to Derek. I decided against it until I found more information.

It was raining again the next day. While rain wasn't completely unheard of in Beacon Hills, it usually only lasted a couple of hours at a time. This was a steady oppressive rain that sucked out all life and motivation. It made the school day drag and drag past even the limits of what Adderall would let me tolerate. Scott had to keep kicking my chair because I'd keep drifting off.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Scott asked after the fifth time he'd woken me up. He'd finally resorted to whacking me in the head with his pencil.

"I can't concentrate. The rain keeps putting me to sleep." I said. And then I tried, I honestly did, to stay awake. All that got me was an extra homework assignment as punishment for sleeping in class.

"So are you doing anything after school?" Scott asked on the way out to his bike. "I'm probably going to try to study with Allison."

"Well I've got all of this homework to do now so I might as well work on that." He gave me a weird look but rushed off into the rain.

I threw my backpack into my Jeep and started to drive toward home. Halfway there I turned and went the other direction. Homework could wait.

It was foggy and damp in the woods. The air was full of the scent of moss and decay. I could see how that could be cloying and make it hard to distinguish individual scents. The Hale House looked even more forbidding in the rain. Derek hadn't been kidding when he'd said it leaked. I could see the holes in the roof and could only imagine what it would be like inside. The house smelled of decay and rot. The wood was turning black as it was taken over by the forest. The rain almost made it looked like a cave, a cavern in the middle of the wilderness.

Usually when I came by Derek would already be outside waiting for me. He wasn't.

The front door wasn't locked. I wondered if it still could be locked. It didn't look very stable. "Derek, are you here?" I called out into the hollowness. Maybe if he lived somewhere else, he could escape the oppressiveness of his house, his history, instead of wallowing in it.

He had been upstairs. When I looked up at the top of the staircase, he was there staring down at me impassively. Emotions outside of anger and resentment didn't come easily to him and his body was a line of tension. "What are you doing here?" he asked, his voice lacking its usual force.

"I made a list of what might be causing this. I wasn't sure if you had any other clues."

Derek walked down the stairs slowly like it was taking all the energy he had, as if he might not be able to climb them again. The dark circles and bags under his eyes were more pronounced and his cheeks had grown hollow. "How many different things could it be?"

I put down my backpack and rummaged around inside it for the notebook I tended to use for supernatural shit. I flipped past the pages upon pages of notes I'd made on werewolves and werewolf behavior to the list of hundreds of creatures whose domain was water. Derek snatched it out of my hand. He read through it quickly, almost greedily, searching for an answer he didn't have. Finally he handed it back to me. His eyes were focused off to the side of where I was standing.

"Anything?" I asked. I expected a smart ass response. Instead there was just a weary acceptance.

"No, nothing," he whispered. Then he turned and trudged back upstairs.

I knew I had been dismissed but instead I found myself waiting until he'd gone out of view before following him. Each step was slow and deliberate. I didn't know which stairs creaked or which ones had rotted through so I was much more careful than I would have been otherwise. When I went upstairs the rain sounded almost impossibly loud. It sounded as if there was no roof and that all the water was spilling down and destroying everything below. And underneath that was the sound of water on metal. The combination of the two sounds together would have driven me crazy if I'd had to listen to it for long.

I tried to follow his steps but the second floor was as cavernous as the first. There was a bathroom with a bathtub slowly filling up with water and leaves that had dropped from above. Next were a few abandoned rooms with sheets covering random pieces of furniture. The sheets were soaked and clung to the outlines of the objects. In one room the roof had caved in completely and rain fell down directly onto the floor. The sound of water on metal grew louder-a constant tapping.

The last door I came to was half closed. Here was where the sound was loudest. I took a deep breath and pushed it open, hoping he'd forgive me. The floor was covered with pots and pans filling with water. A mattress that had seen better days sat in the corner. But that wasn't what dominated most of the room. The walls were covered with photographs of dark-haired children smiling and laughing-celebrations long done with and gone. There were tarps tacked up over some of them but they only served to make the water spill onto the floor and into cardboard boxes full of random objects. A thin film of condensation had formed between the plastic and the wall.

And in the middle of all of this was Derek.

He was sitting on his haunches facing away from the doorway with his hands over his ears. The rain had started to seep through his clothes making dark patches. As I watched I could see his shoulders start to shake as he fell down into himself. It seemed immensely private and I felt like I should leave him alone with his grief. But he should have sensed me long before it got to this point. I was sure that by werewolf standards I had been stumbling and banging around so much that he would have had to have heard me.

Yet when I touched his shoulder he acted startled as if he had no idea that I was there. His eyes were wet like he'd been crying but his expression hardened as soon as he saw me.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

There was a long pause filled with tension. He almost looked like he would crumble right there. "This is all I have left of them." He rubbed at his eyes weakly with the collar of his shirt.

I was at a loss for words. Some might have said that was a good thing. Derek probably most of all. For once I tried to slow down my thoughts and consider what I was going to say. Finally I just resolved to act.

I started with what looked like the oldest photos. The tarp I picked came down relatively easily and I wiped it down as best I could until it was at least sort of dry. Then I started to pull down the photos as carefully as I could and stack them on the tarp.

Derek watched me for a moment, his mouth open in shock, before he joined me in carefully taking down all of the photographs.

It took hours. He had taped or glued thousands of photos of his family to the walls of this room. I never would have thought that werewolves would take pictures of each other and be so refreshingly normal. There were snapshots from family vacations, candid shots of all of them together, and more formal shots of graduations and weddings. Derek actually looked happy in them. I don't think I'd ever seen him even make a half-assed attempt at a smile in quite some time.

I took great care to only touch the edges of the photographs, not the picture itself. If there was one thing I didn't want to do it was ruin the last records of Derek's family. I knew he'd never forgive me.

If looking at the pictures brought back any memories for Derek, he didn't let them show. His jaw was set in a grim line that twitched periodically as he worked. Though his clothes were soaked, he made no attempt to change into anything else. I soon found out why as we started moving the boxes. They were full of his clothes and assorted possessions. They were almost completely drenched with water. The bottom fell out of one of them and all the clothing inside splattered onto the floor. If he was angry with me for not being more careful he didn't show it.

"Are any of the rooms in the house dry?" I asked after we had taken most of them down. "And do you have any clothesline?"

He looked lost.

"To hang them up after we rinse them." He still didn't answer. "Look, we can at least try to save these. They might not come out of it looking the same but you'll still have them." I touched his shoulder and he didn't pull away. "It'll help, I promise. I spilled juice all over an album of pictures of my mom by accident once and I was able to clean most of the pictures up and keep it."

Derek's eyes searched mine for confirmation that I wasn't lying to him. Whatever he found there must have satisfied him because he gestured downstairs. "I think the dining room is still dry."

I exhaled and nodded. "Ok. We're going to need paper towels and clothesline. And you're going to have to keep that room dark, no sunlight."

As we were taking the last of the pictures downstairs I looked at the last thing in the room. The mattress had a giant puddle right in the middle of it. "Have you been sleeping there?" I asked. It echoed in the emptying room.

He laughed derisively. "I haven't been doing much sleeping lately."

And that was all that we said to each other.

It took until way past my curfew to get things set up and drying in the dining room. Everything already in the room had been covered with a fine layer of dust. We wound up doing a lot of vacuuming and dusting to get things somewhat clean. Derek layered sheets over the windows to block the sunlight and then we put the photos wherever they would fit in order to dry. He did not speak, absorbed as he was in trying to make sure that all that he had left of his family would stay intact.

I tried to be as quiet as I could but I didn't have much practice at it.

"I think that's as good as it's going to get for right now," I said. "They just need time to dry." Derek continued to place pictures onto the paper towel. These were of him and Laura and looked fairly recent. His hands were shaking. I couldn't stand to see him like this. "If you want once they're dry I could scan them and put them on a flash drive for you."

Nothing. I took his silence as dismissal and picked up my backpack to go. Muscles that I didn't know that I had started to hurt and I winced in pain. It was going to be worse tomorrow. Before I knew it, he had his arms around me and his head buried against my shoulder. I froze. This could be the precursor to any number of things. Most of the time when Derek touched me it was never anything good.

"Thank you," he whispered. His voice was hoarse and strained. The hug lingered a little longer and then he pulled away.

"No problem," I said. There were a thousand things on the tip of my tongue but I forced myself to stay quiet and headed home.

Only to remember I still had homework to do.

The rain lasted through most of the next day and then slipped over into sunlight. Everything was still damp and smelled of earth. The sidewalks dried out and then the storm drifted into a distant memory.

All I could think about was Derek. I wasn't averse to a good bro hug. Scott and I sometimes would exchange that or a hand clasp if we'd done something especially noteworthy. Derek's hug had been like I had saved his life. I wanted to believe that if anyone else had seen him like that they would have helped him but I knew that wasn't true.

I didn't see him for at least a week after the rain stopped. Things seemed like they had dried off for the most part and Scott said that the fuzzy cotton feeling in the air had left. He could smell again. I let myself be carried away with school work and hanging out with Scott. If I thought about Derek it was only in passing. I figured that I must have done a good job helping him because he didn't come and attack me. And I didn't have any late night visits.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I went into the woods to find him.

The house looked like it was crumbling down into itself. Vines had started to spread along the siding and in through the broken windows. The trees around outside were alive and green. At one point there must have been an attempt at a flower garden in the front yard because tulips and tiger lilies were popping out from underneath all of the leaves.

The front door was open. I could barely see inside the house even with the help of the sun. I knocked on the doorframe. "Derek, it's Stiles. Are you here?" I waited for a minute. All I could hear was the wind blowing through the trees. Finally I resolved to act. "Please don't hurt me," I whispered to myself.

I went straight to the dining room. Through the half-opened door I could still see pictures hanging up on clotheslines and placed on paper towels. They looked like they had dried. Sunlight blazed against the sheets tacked up over the windows, giving the room a hazy glow. I shakily pushed the door open. Derek was sitting in the corner with a few pillows and a sheet carelessly arranged nearby. He had his eyes closed but at my approach they sprang open-flashing red.

I'm not proud. I jumped back. "Whoa, calm down!" I squeaked. "I tried knocking but nobody answered."

He slumped back down on the floor. If he had been able to sleep it must not have been for very long because he still looked bone-weary. Exhaustion was spread all over his features. "Why are you here?" he said quietly.

Why was I here? We weren't exactly friends and we didn't have all that much in common. "I wanted to make sure that you were doing all right. And that the pictures made it." I took a quick look at them. Some of them looked like they had faded or smeared, but the majority of them looked like they had before.

Derek closed his eyes. "Some of them are damaged, but I think most of them are okay." He sighed. "Thank you again." It felt like there was so much more he wanted to say but it was locked up behind years of repression. I chose to ignore it.

I tried to keep my voice neutral. "Don't worry about it. I understand. I'm sure anyone else would have done the same."

At that he growled, his eyes red again. "No. That's not true." I wished that I could have erased all the things that had happened to him and made him distrust the world.

I edged away from him a bit and found a spot next to him to sit down on the floor. He moved over so I had more space. "So did you ever figure out what it was that caused the rain?" I asked.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "No. Things feel better now, so maybe whatever it was is gone. At least it stopped."

I touched his arm and forced him to look me in the eyes. "There doesn't always have to be a reason behind things. Sometimes rain is just rain."

He slowly took my hand in his and nodded.