There was one light.
One light above the boy. He strived towards it but wasn't quite sure how to get closer.
He shielded his eyes. Too bright. Too bright. So the boy turned back to the comforting darkness. It was easier to be away from the light.
Suddenly, a hand pushed its way out of the quivering mass of brightness. A hand that was as familiar to Stiles as his own. It was Scott's.
The other boy kept pulling himself downwards, towards Stiles, as if being birthed again from the Sun.
But a part of the newcomer was missing. His ears.
Another hand started pushing out of the blinding mass. And another. Soon, more hands than Stiles could count were reaching, desperate and blind, for the frozen teenager. Alison, his father, Lydia, Derek, Peter.
Stiles started to run away from the light. Away from his friends and family. Into the ever-darkening expanse in front of him.
Scott started to chase him.
And the throng of gawking people started to follow too, stumbling like newborns.
"Stop!" Stiles yelled, turning only briefly to see that they were gaining on him, maybe only twenty feet from his heels. "Don't!" His voice cracked with panic.
But they couldn't hear. After all, they had no ears.
He kept running, stumbling, lurching, until black nothingness gave way to stones and stones gave way to water and he was wading helplessly through something thicker and murkier than any water ever could be.
"Just stop…" Stiles murmured to no one.
The oddities had halted where the pebbly beach gave way to cresting, ominously dark waves. They were all watching, dead looks glazing their dark eyes. The boy could tell, however, that they weren't looking at him. They were looking past him. To the horizon.
Stiles turned, shaking from cold, and saw a Sun rising along the vista. It threw another painfully luminous glow about everything and it was then that the boy realized he was wading through blood. Thick and bubbling and almost black. Darker than you would expect it to be. But it was blood, all right, and the metallic smell, suddenly overcoming the boy, pained him on the deepest level.
"What do you want?" He whined weakly at the sky.
An ugly, putrid mouth formed out of a cloud and the sky repurposed itself, light and clouds forming into lines. Strips, if you will. Of bandages.
"Stiles." The mouth hummed.
The ugly, graying sky condensed, then, into a single entity. A horribly familiar one.
"All I want is you." It murmured, the foul lips never really closing. "Yes. I want you. All of you. Every thought and memory… every single piece of your consciousness. Every. Last. Bit. And then, dear boy… then I want chaos. And strife and destruction and death. You… Yes, you, dear Stiles, will help so much. Won't you?"
The boy gaped, at a loss for words. Tears brimming along his sore eyes.
"No, I-I… I can't…" Any other words died on his tongue.
"Oh, but you will." The mummified terrorist assured him. "You will. I promise. You'll kill all sorts of people for me. And cause the death and chaos and strife that I crave so very much. I'll have plenty to thank you for, Stiles."
"Stop." He choked. "Stop it…"
"Stop what?" the beast asked coyly. "Stop telling you the truth? Stop warning you of what's to come? You should be thanking me!" its growling voice grew to a crescendo, "I'll give you power and strength beyond your imagination! You'll be GOD. AMONG. MEN. CAN'T YOU SEE, YOU STUPID, WORTHLESS IDIOT? I AM THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU. AND NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. WHAT YOU SAY. I. WILL. OWN. YOU."
"No." Stiles mumbled through a tight, constricting throat. "No, please…" the gruesome creature approached the boy, an arm raised and the taciturn audience behind him started humming, getting louder and louder and louder. "PLEASE." He started screaming, his throat raw and sore. "PLEASE, NO. No, no, no…"
His pleas faded to pitiful, mourning whimpers as his defiler waded closer and closer to him, the blood staining his graying bandages red and the humming behind him reaching a zenith, the sound consuming him completely until he felt the grovelling drone with every fiber of his being.
Finally, something inside the boy snapped. "STOP." He screamed.
And everything stopped.
The boy sprang awake, gasping for breath, instantly aware of the fact that he'd been crying in his fitful sleep.
But a hand on his shoulder was instantly there to push him back into the pointy bed of whatever he was lying on.
Stiles blinked stupidly up at the darkened figure above him. He wasn't scared. He knew – though he was wrong – that nothing in his world could hurt him as much as the things did in his dreams. His lips mumbled wordlessly until his itchy, wet eyes adjusted to the darkness and the face grew shape.
It was Derek.
The boy let his head drop to the floor. Trees focused, lining his vision of the blue-black sky. He was in the forest. On a bed of leaves and needles, he guessed. He tested his voice, croaking out a low, broken note. It was sore. He blew shortened breaths out his nose, trying so very hard to remain composed but the booming words of his emulator echoed painfully through his skull and his eyes started leaking once again, tears tickling his cheeks.
Derek stared at the pathetic heap of a boy. The kid was chewing his lip, his eyes staring into a horrifying nothingness. Moonlight caught his eyes and his tears, lighting spots of his red, wet face with silver. It was painful, what Derek had just witnessed. They were only maybe fifty feet from the man's house, but it was enough. The repellant screams were barely human. More primal and pure than anything Derek had ever heard and, though he may not admit it, the screams had scared him. Stiles had scared him. He'd found him writhing and moaning and sobbing into the pine needles and dirt; raw, throaty screams ripping themselves from the broken boy's chest. Derek didn't know what was wrong, but he knew it was bad. The kid wasn't right in the head.
A new, soft hum escaped the boy's lips. He was chewing them raw, his eyes still void.
"Stiles," Derek hummed.
The eyes flickered to meet Derek's and the man was unprepared for what he saw. They were wide and dewy, long eyelashes clinging together, with tears still gripping the pink brims. And they were absolutely terrorized. They were wild and flitting and held more fear than Derek had ever seen concentrated. It hurt him. Stiles was too young, too innocent, to have eyes like that.
"It's alright…" Derek tried again, awkwardly letting his hand fall on the boy's arm.
He almost tugged it back when Stiles flinched as skin touched skin, but the boy relaxed and so did he. Derek swallowed audibly and rubbed the boy's arm soothingly. He hummed words of comfort and Stiles whimpered one last time before curling into a defensive little ball, twigs and leaves clinging to his thin, sweat-soaked t-shirt.
Derek cleared his throat again, unsure of what to do or say. But the boy made no move either, so the man lay down beside him, catching the boy's eyes with his own.
"I don't know what you see," the man started lowly, "but I do know that you're good, Stiles. You're just. You're innocent, above all. And nothing can change that about you."
"He wants to take my mind," Stiles murmured, his voice high and cracking and rough. "He wants to take my memories… my consciousness… he wants to take who I am." The boy moaned, eyes tearing once more.
Derek took the boy's pale, feeble arms in his hands and stared him in the eyes. "We won't let him."
But Derek didn't know who 'he' was.
Derek didn't know what 'he' was.
And his words were empty. They were paper.
"Don't let him get me," the boy mumbled against the man's shirt.
Derek smoothed the boy's soft brown hair, bringing his forehead to his lips and hushed him like a newborn.
"You're safe." Derek affirmed.
Derek was a liar.