"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." The Celtic Twilight by W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
He used to have dreams like this. Dreams where he was running. Running through the underbrush-branches snapping in his face and leaving stinging tracks across his cheeks and tangling in his hair. Under his feet the leaves crunched with the sound of fall and heavy winter to come and he was running-running until he had no breath left and his chest heaved, curling a sick wet keening sound beneath his breast bone and before his lungs.
On those nights he'd wake up with a scream in his throat, and he'd run on the balls of feet all the way to the foot of his mother's bed. She was always, always already awake. Every night, she took his hand. She made him a cup of warm milk with a spoonful of vanilla syrup and a few drops of blue food coloring. Just enough to taste; just enough to see. It was important. She wrapped her arms around him and they watched the sky turn light from their kitchen window. He could smell the soap she used, feel her heart beat. He calmed-perhaps the only time he ever really felt calm. Willing to stay still. She never asked what scared him.
Their late nights ended too soon, and now there was no one to wake up to.
He stepped, felt his breathing strangle against his throat, and then his ankle shifted-flinging him sideways and down until he was on his face and rolling into the moist underside of fall leaves, breathing in dirt and rot, as he crashed off the path and down a side bunker.
Rocks. Wet leaves. The sound of rustling, restless, feet and loud voices. Stiles sucked in air through his mouth and felt it come in as a clucking wheeze.
"Where did he go?" He knew that voice. Chris Argent.
The other was muffled, though, intelligible. A negative, though, because Stiles was still here. Stiles was still crunched down on one side-nocrouched. Crouched sounded better. Like he had planned this all along and not like he had slipped and fallen.
"Damnit." Chris again. Allison's father. Stiles tried to breath through his nose and almost choked on his own throat. Everything hurt. Allison. Where was Allison? Scott. What about . "That one was human."
"I didn't know."
"Yeah. Of course you didn't." The sound of a scuffing shoe. "Just a room full of fangs and fur and you happen to stuff a handful of flowers "
That was right. A room full of fangs. A meeting. Derek and Scott and Allison and even Lydia all packed in together with all his new were-pups on what was left of the subway cars. He had been trying not to notice the blood stain on the seat, trying to ignore the way Scott was getting right in Derek's face and growling.
Hadn't he been telling them before how important setting ground rules were? Ground Rules. Rules with the ground in them. Rules that everyone had to follow. Which, really, was likely how they got into that mess in the first place. Who would bring a hunter's daughter to forming-pack meets and not expect her to be followed eventually.
No one could expect them to not try to break up their little parties at some point. They had people combing the cameras in the city for crying out loud.
"Alright, everyone, break it up!" Stiles was probably the least threatening of all of them but he was also the least intimidating. .
Well. Most of the time. Derek's teeth snap just shy of his shoulder and he yells, shoving his hand right into Derek's face and pushing. "Come on, you guys just going to sit around and growl at each other or are you actually going to get something done today." Stiles looked at his hand and fake-gagged, wiping the spit onto his pants. "Because I don't know about you but Buffy reruns are waiting for me at home if this is just going to be a repeat episode of Big Wolf on Campus with the addition of ass-sniffing."
Jackson bit down a laugh as Erica stood up and swung, shimmied from her seat in the back. "Well, what do you have in mind then, Stiles?"
Or maybe that was part of the dream because Lydia was also talking and then there was the clatter of tin on rusted metal floors and smoke. Smoke. And coughing. Scott calling for Allison. Lydia gasping. Babbling. Not again. Not again. Not again.
And then the sound of cracking, growling-the taste of greenery and lavender in his face, on his tongue. Fingers forcing it down his throat he was going to throw up. Where the fuck was anyone?
This always seemed to happen-and then there was a growling sound and the person behind him was ripped away, cracking against the subway car walls and into the smoke that obscured everything.
There was a hand on his arm and it was full of claws and then he was being drug through the smoke.
"Scott-you take him. Stiles. Get them out of here." Derek's voice without Derek and Stiles was stuck spitting out foliage and sputtering until his ass hit the subway car step and he tumbled out into the open air.
"Come on. Come on, Stiles, we gotta go." Scott. It was Scott. And the others were there, too. Lydia. Allison-though Allison was yelling something and running the other way. To her family? To explain? He couldn't catch that, but he could catch the mournful look Scott sent his way.
Then, Boyd grabbed him around the waist and sent him to his feet. "I'm going to help get Derek out, you get out. We'll meet you later."
Which meant text. Did he even still have his phone? He was better than this. Normally, he was scattered but he still had everything he needed-knew where it was. He spat out red-yellow flower petals and lurched into Lydia who gave him a shove over to Erica.
He drove. Bullets and broken subway cars were behind him. He could almost hear the ring of an Alpha's roar follow them, but then the road was before him. It stretched out as far as he could see. Beyond the veterinary clinic. Beyond Scott's house. Beyond the school.
There were woods.
And talking. He normally liked talking but, then, he normally felt a lot more connected than he did right now. With all the voices crammed into the back of his jeep. He shouldn't have more than three passengers, his dad said. Three. And he had Scott, Lydia, Erica, and Isaac.
"Stiles."
Where was Jackson? He had his own car.
"Stiles."
A hand was on his shoulder and on the shoulder of the road there was woods. Woods. And he needed to get out. Suddenly. Desperately. He needed to be running. Running. Running.
The car swerved. The girls screamed. Scott grabbed him by the shoulders, yelling in his ear, "What was that for?"
And then he was out of the car and running with all the voices and all the questions chasing behind him.
"What is it?"
"What's going on?"
"I don't know. I don't know. Hold on. Allison's texting me." A break. Pause. Quiet. "Her dad's on the way. We gotta get out of here."
"What we're just going to leave-"
And then there were trees and leaves smashing their voices into the hush.
No one is there when he wakes up again-was he ever asleep?-and he feels cold and stiff like how he felt after the Kanima paralytic wore off.
Chris, if Chris was there, is gone and there are no flashlights. Or howling. Or sounds of lurking wolves with faces that speak of judgement. What were you doing, Stiles?
What were you thinking?
He got asked that a lot. Coming home from school with a teacher's note about acting out. Speaking too loud. Not staying still. Moving things. Always. Always moving things. His mother kept each one in a box that he pretended he didn't notice but, once, she caught him staring.
"I'm not keeping them to remind me of how bad you are," she had chided him gently. His eyes were her eyes but her hair was long and thick. Manageable in the way his often wasn't. "I'm keeping them to remember all of you."
His mother was gone long before she was gone. But, then, there had always been something special about her-and not just by the way a little boy sees his mother as the most beautiful, the most magical, woman alive. There was a kindness and a quietness about her that set his boundless energy to peace for moments at a time.
And one time, just once in all their midnight meetings with blue vanilla milk and sometimes banana or apple slices, she spoke to him. She had been thin, then. Too thin. Wasting away before his eyes even as she ate fruit chips and the healthiest grain crackers he could find at the grocery store with his dad. Stiles would have done anything to keep her, would have bought anything if it turned out to be the magic cure-even the worst of the worst tasting whole grain pancakes. No syrup.
"I had dreams like yours." She had said, wiping his lips with a white paper napkin. "I had them when I was a child. I dreamed I was running-and you know where I ended up?" He shook his head, his eyes on the patch of grass and forgotten vegetables in their backyard. She smiled and brushed her fingers through the buzz of his hair. He imagined he could feel every bone caressing his. "I was running through the woods and I ran right through a fairy circle. And when I got out of it I ran to you."
The sound he had made was strangled but it only made the strange smile on his mother's lips grow wider and he turned his burning eyes into her bony shoulder. She pressed the napkin against his shoulder and it was full of red-purple pollen.
Stiles never stayed asleep long enough to run into anyone. He always woke in the middle.
But this wasn't a dream and he was choking on dirt.
Stiles got to his feet and stumbled back away from the incline he had rolled down. The main road was too risky. He'd have to go another way. His ankle ached and burned. He turned and walked into a mushroom field.
There's a certain look to someone having a seizure. There's a certain experience to it, too. Erica knows it intimately-the latter more than the former but watching Stiles body jerk is trying to even out the score.
Or maybe not-because while he is jerking (and she doesn't want to touch him, doesn't want to be on this side of someone seizing out) he also seems to be coughing and gasping and half-coordinately grabbing at the rubble around him.
"Don't go into the woods."
And then he speaks. It's garbled and unclear, clutched and cluttered, but Erica had a crush on Stiles. She sat behind him in math class and stared and listened and hoped-just like any other girl would who was too fucking scared to speak to their crush. She's not that girl anymore, but she remembers it the way she remembers seizing-like she's just watching it through some asshole's cell phone cam.
"Derek." She calls Derek first because he's her Alpha and though Scott's Stile's supposed best friend he's not the one to call in an emergency. "I found him."
"Mom." Stiles has gone still as Derek crashes through the trees with Scott right behind him. His eyes are red and Erica steps back quick, involuntarily. "Don't go into the woods."
He blinks. Slow. Up into tree limbs and pre-dawn blue.
"Stiles." Derek crouches, nose flaring, and taps Stile's face with the tips of his fingers. "Look at me." He holds up three fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
Stiles seems to conclude he needs to do anything but continue his one-man conversation by trying to swipe the offending hand away and frowning back up into the sky. "Oh, man." He sucked in air and let it out again. "How long have I been in the woods?"