Halloween Hills

A/N: Inspired by a prompt by jennthereaper! post/129625333137/has-anyone-done-a-teen-wolfnightmare-before

I didn't fully explain all the plot points I took from Nightmare, so it would probably benefit to have seen it recently. This is only a sketch of how the TW characters would fit into the movieverse.

Stiles has been a supernatural creature for as long as he can remember - which is a long, long time. Scott is the mayor of Halloween Hills, and Stiles is his right hand man, the gangly, uncanny face of the party they put on every year as the guardians of Halloween.

He loves the festival, of course. He loves scaring people, he loves being the hollow-eyed face of darkness. It's what he does. It's what he is. A skeleton.

But just occasionally, he's struck with the feeling that he was meant to be more. That he was once something more? That he could be something more? That there's somewhere else... if only he could get to it... where there's more to life.

Sometimes when Stiles is driving, he'll get lost in thoughts like this and forget to watch where he's going. Occasionally he'll run over an animal or something, but there's always a witch glad to take a little gift like that off his hands and use it in their cauldrons. More often, Roscoe will take over, headlights shifting curiously as he explores the woods.

Roscoe's honk startles him out of his musings today, to see that it's almost dawn, and there's a ring of very tall trees in front of them. Enormous trees. He gets out, and walks around.

There are doors. Doors with little gold knobs. All different shapes and colors.

Something inside Stiles recognizes them.

But there's one that's just a stump, no more door to be found. On the wide, cut-down surface, there's a mark, three spirals joined together.

The shadow lurking in the left side of his ribcage knows that place, but so do the hollows that long to be filled. He'd step through that door if he could, but it's gone.

The tree with the door shaped like a fat, fanged pumpkin, he knows too, like the back of his hand. He knows that would take him back to Halloween Hills, and he'd have gained nothing.

But the door with the green, triangular tree with the star on top... that one feels... like being warm. Like being full. Like not letting the wind whistle through his ribs anymore.

Stiles... opens it.

Every time Derek looks at his hands, he's reminded of what he's lost.

He's sewn together out of torn and singed pieces of other ragdolls, and he knew them all. His right hand was once his father's, but the fingertips, from the last joint, they were his mother's. His whole left arm, up to the elbow, was once part of his sister Laura.

He stays with Kate because she's got the rest of the pieces that were recovered after the fire, always promises to do her best to make them live again, make them part of something Derek can call family again. But she never does, and all Derek has is his own self, the limbs and patches and stuffing that have become Derek.

He'd like more help, he'd like to know what happened to his house and his family, but Mayor McCall always seems so busy, so flustered, always brushes him off for more urgent business. Stiles is the only one who's really seemed curious, in this town full of the terrible and macabre, but Stiles's area of expertise, his responsibility, is really the Festival, and that's so important. It's what the whole town works towards every year. Derek doesn't want to get in the way of that.

Derek is only a broken doll, and Stiles is the face of darkness.

So Derek sneaks out of the lab that has become nothing but a sick memorial to his family's remains, lurks on the edges of the planning and the celebrations, catches glimpses of Stiles as he works his magic with the town, but in the end, he has no company but the purring of his sleek black baby, and she's not much of a conversationalist.

Whatever this place is, it's great. Everything is fluffy, sweet, sparkling, glowing, or otherwise radiating cheer. It's remarkable.

Stiles is used to the black voids of his own eyes, but when he looks at his reflection in the window and the colors and glints of decorations line up to fill in the dark of those eyes, something about it feels right.

He looks more like the people here. He looks almost... human.

As far as Stiles knows, he sprang into being as an adult void creature but something about this town and normality and joy feels like it's what he's been missing forever.

There's an enormous green tree in the middle of town with a great colorful starburst on top, and he feels drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

"The hell am I?" Stiles mutters to himself. And as if in answer, a sign rears up in front of him.

Beacon Grove: Home of Christmas.

When Stiles comes back, he's babbling about fluffy water and decorative mint candy and changing the whole festival and what it's about.

That can't be good, so Derek takes his right hand (the one that bears his mother's fingertips) and he asks where this is heading.

It plucks a flower, and shows him.

Fire. Burning trees.

he's always been afraid of fire, afraid of his thin fabric and dry-as-tinder stuffing going up in flames again. So this vision fills him with more dread than he can say.

He has to warn Stiles.

"Stiles, this is wrong!" Derek tells him again.

"Nah, I planned this perfectly! It'll all be okay!" Stiles's eyes are big and black and hollow and his laugh is deranged. Derek feels sick.

But Stiles is determined to go through with his plan, and Derek knows nothing he can say will stop him.

Derek can't save people. Not even the ones he loves. He can only watch them as they disintegrate.

"We'll shut him in a freezer," says the tall thin boy with the unruly reddish curls.

"Isaac, you handsome devil," says the girl all in black leather with black-striped tights. "That's inspired. But freezers are a bitch to carry around. Why don't we just hit him in the head with a car part or something."

"Why a car part?" the heftier boy asks.

"I just like destroying people's cars, okay? Two birds with one stone."

"You're wicked, you know that, Erica?" Isaac comments with a wide smile.

"I'd really like to run him over with a zamboni."

"That's great, Boyd," says Erica, "but messy and impractical. Try to think of more than the framework of the plan?"

"Peter won't like it if we get blood on his furniture." Isaac shivers.

"That's true," Boyd says glumly.

"Well, why don't we scope him out," says Erica thoughtfully, "and see how fierce this mythical lobster man really is? Then we can pick a plan."

Stiles has been shot out of the sky. Stiles is going down in flames. The festival, the thing Stiles has devoted his life to, is crumbling before the town's eyes. Because the fool skeleton messed with things he shouldn't have.

Well, if he can't save Stiles, maybe he can still save the festival.

Derek really hates going to the burnt-out shell of his family's home, hates the bogeyman that's sprung up there since he left. All the creepy-crawlies had worked their way out of the woodwork, forming into something hardened and bitter and cynical and, above all, cruel. But the worst part of it all is that they've taken up residence in his uncle Peter's skin, in the rags that Kate had told him had been too scorched to save.

The Treaters call him Peter, but he isn't the man Derek knew.

Still, Derek doesn't want to be the one to pull out all his thread and watch him unravel the rest of the way, not when there's so little left of his family. Not while that fabric bears a face he used to know.

But he has to save the man being held prisoner there, the protector of that other mysterious town, with his kind ruddy face and commanding presence. The man Stiles wants so badly to be like, though he's too thin, too pale, too uncanny.

So Derek ventures inside, to face the creature who makes his heart ache so much.

In the end, it's Stiles, wonderfully alive and back and himself, who comes to the rescue and rips open Peter's skin, sending all the vermin inside crawling away.

The man in charge of Christmas glares at Stiles for a while before ruffling his hair and calling him "son." Then he does the same for Derek, before leaving to put everything to rights.

The whole town is in an uproar of relieved celebration, but Derek has other things to do. He goes to the graveyard, bearing the tattered remains of the fabric that was once his uncle.

Once it's buried, and the place has been marked, there's nothing to do but sit there and wonder whether he's going to do something about the rest of his family, or finally bury them and let them rest.

Well, there's one thing for certain. He's not going to lurk by himself and wait for things to happen anymore. He's going to ask for help.

And he knows just where to get it.

He stands up, turning just in time to see Stiles come through the gates, and that doesn't surprise Derek. Stiles has been wanting to escape the crowds and drama of the festivals for years now, and now Stiles recognizes that. It was a hell of a hard lesson to learn, but everything turned out all right.

"Hey," Stiles greets, and Derek nods in return, giving the skeleton the barest smile. "So... that wasn't a good idea. I probably should have listened to you."

Derek gives him a pointed look.

"Okay, yeah. I really should have listened to you. But I was just really excited! Okay? Because, this town I visited, the Christmassy one, it was just really great, okay? Because, there were, like, people sitting down and eating food together and giving each other hugs and just kind of taking care of each other, you know?"

"I think that's called family," says Derek. "And it can happen here, too."

Stiles reaches his hand halfway to Derek's face, then stops short. "You look so sad," he says.

"You were in Beacon Grove for one day. And when you came back, you needed what you saw there. I had a family. Parents, sisters, uncles, cousins. A whole house full of us. And they've been gone for years. So I get why you would do so much to have more of that. I'd do so much to have people like that again."

Stiles smiles gently. "I know I'm not one of the Hale dolls," he says, "but maybe you could start with me?"

Derek leans in and kisses him, soft and dry as fall leaves. "I'd like that," he says.

Derek moves into Stiles's house the next day.

It's not always easy. Derek is just beginning to accept that the rest of the Hales aren't going to come back, and he has to say a final goodbye.

But it's so much better than just waiting, being a hollow place waiting to be filled up. They have good times. They have bad times. But most importantly, they have each other.

"We share a joint brain," Kate tells her latest construction thoughtfully, looking at the scarred, patched-together face. "I think that's what I'll call you. J. B. And you'll never run away, will you?" Kate pats the brain matter smugly before closing the lid of her skull. "Because I'm the only one who understands how beautiful you are... on the inside."

The witch stirs up one of her favorite brews in her cauldron, wolfsbane cider. The new addition of mistletoe is definitely adding something, and she can't wait to debut it at next year's festival.

"Lydia!" whisper the bugs in the dark corners of her house. "Lydia, my witch. You're going to help me. You're going to help me come back."

A/N: So this was a super quick sketch just to give an idea of how things line up in my mind, but I'm not going to do any more with it. If anyone else wants to (you can see I set it up for a sequel or two!) feel free to run with it!