Stiles looked at the symbol on the door, not sure what it meant. He wanted the symbol on the door to distract his mind, make him wonder, make him want to whip out his phone and try a search to see what it was, but he couldn't feel a damn thing.
He probably wasn't welcome here, but there was no other place to go. He started knocking on the door in the middle of the symbol. He didn't care if the blood on his hands got on the door and screwed up the message or spell or whatever it was that was here.
He knocked and knocked and knocked, because he knew that someone was here. That was why he drove here and not to Scott's house. He was tired of running around looking for people. He had done enough of that.
Derek opened the door and was shocked to see him standing there. Probably because he was covered in blood, or maybe it was because he stumbled a little bit getting here. "Don't worry, I'm fine", he said, stepping inside. "But then again, you don't worry about other people, right?"
"What the hell happened to you?" Derek asked
"I can't go home", Stiles told him. "It's not right. I shouldn't be able to go back there. I shouldn't have even driven my car over here. It was a gift from my Dad. Are Isaac and Peter here? Are they sleeping?"
"They're in another room, it's fine. Let me get you something."
"Gerard's gone", Stiles said.
"I know he is."
"He's not coming back."
"I'm not sure about that", Derek told him, handing him a bottle of water from the flat that was on the floor nearby. "He managed to get away. He might be."
Stiles let out a laugh. "No, I can safely say that he's not coming back. I killed him. He's just a pile of ashes in the river."
Derek nodded. "This isn't…you", he finished. "What happened?"
"I need you to help me turn myself in. I can't do it. I keep picturing my dad, and I can't."
"Stiles, slow down. You're not going to jail."
"I have to. I committed a crime. I murdered an old man- I have to pay the punishment for it. Do you have a sink? Can I wash my hands? I just…can't get rid of the smell."
"I have a shower", Derek told him. "You can go ahead and use it, I'll get you some clothes."
"If my clothes didn't fit you, I don't think that your clothes are going to fit me. And besides, this is evidence. It needs to go to the police."
There were days when he would help his father put together clues on nights when it seemed like he had been staring at the wall for so long that the words lost meaning. It seemed so far away now.
There was no going back from this. He had to keep his pride intact, he couldn't run. And he didn't want to force his father to deal with the consequences of something that Stiles had done. Not again.
"Did you get rid of all of the evidence?" Derek asked him
Stiles nodded. He didn't want someone else to get locked up for something that he had done. The cleaning up was instinct, something that he had learned from watching the crime scene photos, but he knew that it wasn't enough.
The good guys caught the bad guys, no matter how much they tried to cover it up. He knew that. Just like he knew that he was one of the bad guys now.
"Dad's never going to forgive me. Everything that he raised me with, every single lesson- he's going to think that I went against them completely, and I did. You know, he got fired when Jackson put a restraining order on me? I don't even want to know what they're going to do when they put me in jail."
"You're not going anywhere", Derek said sharply. "You're going to have a shower, you're going to spend the night here, and then you're going to go back home."
The blood was drying on his hands. There was soot stuck in his fingernails.
He was supposed to be applying to college in a year's time, and he knew that there was a checkbox asking if he had a criminal record. But then again, he didn't have a future anymore. This was it.
"I don't have a home anymore."
"Shut up." Derek told him. "You have a home. You have a family, and you have a future. Just stop, and tell me why you did this."
He was expecting worse from Derek- why was he being so positive? Didn't Derek hear properly? He killed someone.
"You want to know why? You don't want to report me to the police or kill me yourself like you've threatened a million times like a normal person, but you want to know why?"
"Doesn't look like you want to change or have a shower. You're chatty, which isn't surprising, so might as well ask."
"What is the matter with you?!" Stiles exclaimed. "You're in the same room as a murderer!"
"No, I live with a murderer, and I've killed people myself because of slip-ups during the full moon as a child. You're not a murderer, but if you wanted Gerard dead and you had a reason, you should have asked me to do it."
"I can handle it", Stiles said. "It was easier than I thought to kill a man. I thought I'd be terrified to do it, and I was, but it wasn't enough to stop me."
"Why did you track him down to begin with?"
Stiles rubbed his hands together, trying to get some of the caked on blood on his fingers to come off. Flecks of red were on the table.
"It's not so much why. More like for who", Stiles started. "First, I did it for me. But you didn't know about that, did you? I never told you, and Scott doesn't know."
"Didn't tell me what?"
"Did you even ask yourself where I was while you guys were trying to get Jackson from the morgue? Did you wonder why I wasn't there, or why I was injured when I hit him with my car when Lydia was fine?"
Derek started to get mad. "What did he do?"
"Kidnapped me after the Lacrosse game. He took Erica and Boyd too, tried to torture us to get your location. They didn't slip, and he was hoping that I would. But I was sarcastic instead, and he thought that he'd teach me a lesson. Chris Argent let me go because I was human."
Derek was silent for a moment. "You should have said something."
"You should have asked", Stiles threw back. "I did it for Erica and Boyd, who were tied to the ceiling with electrical wires. They had an active current flowing through their bodies, and I had no idea how long they were they for."
"They what?"
"I did it for Scott", Stiles continued. "Because he couldn't. I did it for Allison because Gerard was manipulating her and making her want to kill you. I did it for Jackson and Scott's Mom. And I did it for you."
"I could have handled him if I wanted to", Derek told him. "I can fight my own battles."
"The way he was making Allison his own little soldier- I could tell that was how he was raising Kate. I don't know what kind of person she could have been without his influence, but he's the one that raised a daughter who thought that it would be okay to lock a family of innocent people in their own home and burn them alive. He needed to pay for the consequences of his actions", Stiles said bitterly. "I couldn't let him get away and then strike back."
"We're going to fix this", Derek told him. "You're not going to jail. We don't have to talk about it, you didn't do anything wrong. He was going to die of cancer anyway, and he was already weakened from the bite and wolfsbane."
"Scott should have told you what he was planning. He should have told someone, he should have told me. If he told me, you would have known about it. I swear you would have. If he wanted to kill Gerard, he should have done it himself instead of forcing you to do something. I did and I'm not one of you guys. But I guess this makes you trust humans even less now."
"What makes you think that?" Derek asked
"We've all killed or wanted to kill, and I want this to all just go away, but it can't."
"You saved us", Derek told him. "You stopped him in a way that Scott couldn't have, in a way that I couldn't have."
Stiles slammed his fist on the table. "Why couldn't I stop myself from killing him? I'm no better than he is. I'm turning into him. What's wrong with me? There has to be something wrong, something that got screwed up. Scott didn't go after him, he just let it go, but I couldn't."
"Get up", Derek instructed, and he said it with so much force that Stiles did so automatically.
Stiles felt himself being grabbed and hoisted up by Derek. "What are you doing?" He asked, not knowing where he was being carried to.
Derek didn't say anything, just kept walking until he heard the shower start to run. Stiles felt his shoes being pulled off and being dropped in there fully clothed, with Derek right behind him.
Stiles looked down as he felt his clothes sticking to his body and the trail of blood running from him to the drain.
He stared at Derek as he started scrubbing the blood from his hands and arms. He was concentrating on the area, and all Stiles could think of was how Derek must have done this for himself once or twice.
Suddenly, there was an overwhelming emotion that Stiles had destroyed a form of innocence in himself that he would never be able to get back, that it was something that only Derek could understand.
The emotion hit him, and even though Stiles wanted to hide it so that he could be miserable by himself, he couldn't control it. He couldn't stop it from happening. His body gave out on him and he started crying.
And Derek must have seen it, because he moved Stiles away from the direct blast of the shower head, the majority of the water hitting him and flowing freely down his body. He stopped scrubbing and held him up, wrapping his arms around him.
Stiles grabbed a soggy part of Derek's shirt with his fist and started sobbing uncontrollably, wondering what he was going to do now.
"I've become a monster", he let out.
"No you're not, and you're not going anywhere", Derek said just loud enough for him to hear over the sound of the water. "We need you here."