Light from a large full moon shone through the window with open drapes in Stiles' bedroom. The moon was positioned just right that it met his eye line and woke him from a particularly restful sleep that was thankfully not haunted by never ending nightmares.
Too lazy and tired to get up out of bed and close the drapes, Stiles turned over in his bed just when someone burst into his bedroom.
"Stiles!"
He jumped a few inches off his bed in surprise. "What the hell?" he said, sitting up to see who had just come in, even though he recognized the voice. "Lydia, what are you doing here?"
"Stiles!" She jumped onto his bed and he saw the panic on her face. She was out of breath and grabbed onto his hand for support.
"What's wrong? Why are you here? What happened?" He squeezed her hand and looked into her troubled eyes. She seemed absolutely terrified.
"I...," She paused to catch her breath,"I woke up screaming. I got scared, I didn't know what to do, so I came here." Lydia looked up at Stiles for some sort of comfort, but he didn't know what to do.
"It's okay, uhhhh..." He tried to come up with a way to reassure her, he reached his free hand around her and started stroking her back. "Everything is okay. I mean..."
"Last time this happened I found that dead body at the pool! I just- I didn't know what to do! I just came straight here." She leaned into him, resting her perfect head of strawberry blonde hair on his shoulder.
Stiles, still half asleep, couldn't think of anything to say about her death radar or whatever the hell it was. Maybe if he had been fully awake he could have come up with a plan to use her banshee powers again to find out what the scream meant, but at this moment in time all he could do was comfort her and tell her everything was going to be okay. He continued stroking her back, he even touched her hair a couple of times, and she didn't pull away from him. He reveled in having her this close to him.
After a moment or two, he asked her, "Do you want to try going to sleep?" Fully expecting her to get up and leave. He didn't want her to leave at all, just expected it.
"Yeah, okay." She pulled away from him but laid down on his bed and scooted, so there was enough room for him to lay next to her.
Stiles quickly looked down at his hands and counted his fingers real quick. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. All there.
He laid down slowly, barely believing this was happening. Lydia Martin was going to sleep in his bed. Granted, he had always hoped that when Lydia Martin was sleeping in his bed the sleeping would have followed something a lot more physical. But if Lydia wanted to sleep in his bed, for any reason, Stiles wasn't going to say no.
As soon as his head hit the pillow, Lydia moved closer to him and nestled her head on his chest. Stiles didn't know where to put his hands. Did she want him to cuddle her back? He assumed yes and wrapped his arm around her.
"Stiles?" She looked up at him with such an angelic face. He had never seen such sweetness in her eyes and he wanted to kiss her so bad. He wouldn't though. She might not want him to kiss her. Stiles just needed to be her friend right now.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. I don't know how, but you always seem to make me feel better...Stiles...I-" She cut herself off and looked at his lips. She started moving her face closer to his and he moved his as well, so they would meet in the middle.
Just when he could feel her warm breath on his lips, he jolted in his bed. Feeling like he had just been dropped ten feet from above onto the mattress with sheets and blankets tossed everywhere.
Stiles frantically looked around his room. Not really understanding what had just happened. Sweat pouring down his face and back, soaking his shirt.
It had been a dream.
He hadn't had any dreams, well couldn't remember any, in weeks.
But this one wasn't bad. It was just Lydia in his room. Nothing bad happened. It wasn't like the cryptic nightmares with messages from his subconscious like he had been having.
He tore off his sweat-drenched shirt off and threw it across the bedroom, not caring where it landed.
The alarm clock on his nightstand read 3:17 am. School didn't start for another 5 hours so he could go back to sleep.
Stiles closed his eyes and let himself start to drift off into another restful slumber. And when sleep was about to completely enclose him, he heard a whisper. Barely audible.
He focused his hearing for a few seconds, but heard nothing. He was imagining things.
Another whisper. He definitely heard something. Someone. In his room. Whispering his name.
"Stiles...Stiles...Stiles...Stiles...Stiles..." It was a whisper but it grew louder and louder.
Stiles was turned on his side facing the wall of his bedroom. He did not want to turn around and see anyone or anything in his room.
"Stiles...Stilessss...Stilessss...Stiles...Stilesssss...Stiles..." The whispering became more rapid each time and louder. He felt someone there. There was someone behind him. His body was shaking, he had never been more petrified in his life. He tried to get a hold of himself and turn around and face whatever was coming closer and closer.
He willed his body to jerk around as quickly as it could to catch anyone off guard. But he didn't move. Not an inch in the direction he wanted. He only continued to shake, more and more rapidly. Almost like a seizure.
He had no control over his movements.
It was like sleep paralysis.
Okay, this was a dream. It was only a dream and he could and would will himself to wake up.
It's only a dream, It's only a dream, It's only a dream. Wake up, Wake up, Wake up. He said it in his head over and over like a mantra, assuming it had to work eventually. But he was still in the same position on his side, shaking uncontrollably.
Stiles focused on his surroundings a moment and realized the whispering had stopped and he no longer felt a presence in the room with him. Maybe he had woken himself and not even realized it.
His shaking stopped, his body steadied, and his breathing slowed. He had regained control of his movements. Just as he was about to move and turn over in his bed, someone, centimeters away from his ear, whispered, "Stiles!"
He let out a scream from deep within his abdomen. His arms flailing around and body jerking, his hands scraped at dirt underneath him.
Dirt. Under his nails. He stopped screaming and quickly came to the realization he was no longer in his room.
He was in the forest. Laying on the cold, damp earth.
He turned his head to the left, already knowing what he would see. The Nemeton.
There it was. The enormous remains of what was surely once a magnificently, beautiful tree. Now all that was left was a stump.
Stiles inhaled and exhaled slowly. Trying not to go into total meltdown mode. How did he end up in the middle of the forest next to this damn tree stump. Had he been really walking here the whole time while he thought he was dreaming. He supposed it was possible.
An image of a chalkboard popped into his head quickly with no rhyme or reason. Then he remembered.
The last thing that he remembered doing. He had gone to the school, opened the chemistry closest with the mysterious key he had found on his key ring and then wrote on the chalkboard. He wrote on the chalkboard to match the writing that was already on there. His hand writing. A message he didn't remember writing. A message to kill Kira.
He had gone to the school the morning after Halloween. And at that moment, when he was laying in the middle of a clearing in the forest next to the reminisce of a powerful tree, it was pitch black. The middle of the night. Only a sliver of a moon to cast any light on the Nemeton a few feet away from him.
Stiles then knew that he didn't sleep walk there. He didn't get out of his bed in the middle of the night and walk there while he was still dreaming.
He walked there not being him.
The him that was not himself walked to the Nemeton and laid down on the ground and let him fall asleep and begin dreaming and wake up as him again.
How long had he not been himself? He had been up and walking while it was daylight and now it was dark. He had gone at least almost a full day not knowing what he was doing. Not being conscious. Not being in control of his own body.
He grasped frantically at his pants pockets looking for his phone. Thankfully, it was there in his right pocket. The clock and calendar when he clicked it awake said it was 4:02 am on November 2nd.
November 1st was gone. And he remembered only the first few morning hours.
He was in complete shock.
Stiles laid his body back down on the cold dirt. He didn't know what else to do. He could not accept this as truth. Yet, he knew it was.
He knew it was utterly true that he had no recollection of doing things and living through days that were now over. He knew it was truth, but did not want to accept it as such.
There were many truths he could live with. Like werewolves being real! Even things more frightening, like Kanimas and Darachs.
But he didn't want this truth to be a truth. Something was affecting him. Manipulating him into doing things he had no control over. Doing things that might not be so good. He didn't want to know this.
Stiles prided himself on being in control. When Scott, Isaac, and Derek could turn into savage monsters without warning and Lydia could drive blindly to a pool and find a dead body. When his friends were out of control, he could handle himself. He was in reality. But his mind had just broken all the rules. Nightmares were one thing. Not knowing if your sleeping or dreaming was one thing. Doing things without knowing you're doing them or remembering it afterward was a whole other thing.
And he wasn't passing notes in class or going to parties with his friends. No. He was hiding psycho killers in chemistry closets and leaving coded kill lists on chalkboards!
Stiles felt an eery calm overtake him and he was at ease. It was the same calming feeling that you get when the doctors give you anesthesia before surgery. Like everything is out of your hands, but you could deal with it. He felt like he did when he was seven and had been in a car accident with his mom. His arm was badly broken and they had to operate on it. He had been scared even though they let his mom stay with him and hold his hand until they put him under.
He had held onto her hand so tight and he didn't want them to put the mask on him to make him fall asleep, but only a few seconds after they did he wasn't scared anymore. He lost his tight grip on his mother's hand but for some reason he knew it was going to be okay, even though he was only seven and didn't really have a grasp on mortality.
They found his mom's brain tumor later that day while doing a precautionary MRI because she had hit her head on the steering wheel when they crashed.
She died a few years later, living longer than they had expected her to, but it was still too soon.
He was a calm and didn't know why.
A voice spoke to him. It didn't come from either the left or the right of him, it didn't speak to him from deep within the forest. It was in him. He heard it just as if he was talking to himself in his head.
It was a gentle voice. Stiles thought it sounded like his own voice. "I'm only borrowing it from time to time. When I need it. Don't worry." He wasn't worried. Not in that moment when the voice spoke to him.
Then the voice went away and Stiles didn't feel calm anymore. He felt sick. Bile came up through his throat and into his mouth involuntarily. He spit it out as far away from his body as possible.
The voice had made him feel calm. It had forced his body into a reaction it wasn't having naturally and now he was throwing up.
The voice was not good. He may have perceived it as gentle in the moment, but it wasn't. He could feel it now, like a poison attacking his blood. He wanted to claw out whatever was inside of him. Scratch at his skin and dig deep into his body until he grabbed onto whatever had nested inside and yank it out. And then smash it repeatedly with an aluminum baseball bat until there was nothing left but dust.
He go onto his feet. He couldn't lay there and wait for it, whatever it was, to invade his mind again. He had to do something. He needed to move.
Stiles pulled his phone out of his pocket again, it was dead this time. He hadn't even checked to see how much battery life he had left the first time he checked it.
He shoved it back into his pocket. Not really caring that he couldn't call or text anyone. He didn't want anyone to know right now. He didn't completely understand it. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation. Like a medical explanation. He needed to get to the hospital.
This could all just be something wrong with his physical brain. A tumor, like his mom had.
Something slipped into his head, a taunting voice, "It's not." And then it left just as quickly as it had come.
He pretended he didn't here.
Stiles inhaled deeply and started making his way out of the small clearing with the Nemeton and into the woods where most of the sky was blocked by the trees overhead. He was happy that he at least knew how to find his way out of the forest from where the Nemeton was.
It was going to be a long walk and was thankful that he was wearing his favorite pair of Converse. They were worn in perfectly. Stiles then looked at the rest of his clothes and noticed it wasn't the same things he had been wearing on Halloween or when he went to the school yesterday morning.
He tried to push any concerning thoughts out of his head. But it worried him that he had no clue what had happened yesterday and what the him that wasn't really him had done.
He thought he heard the voice laugh, but he chose to ignore it.
It's not real.
Stiles told himself that it wasn't real over and over while he weaved through the trees. He was walking pretty fast through the forest so he tripped or slid on moist soil every so often, but always stayed on his feet. Grasping onto nearby trees to keep his balance when he needed to.
He didn't know what time it was exactly, but the sun had started coming up. Faint rays of sunlight poked there way through the trees and lit his way.
He made it to the edge of the forest not long after the sun started shining and he sighed in relief when he saw his jeep parked right behind the single chain that stopped any cars from driving deeper into the forest.
It still frightened him that he had no memory of driving there, but he was relieved he didn't have to continue walking along the road and hope he could make it all the way to the hospital.
Stiles climbed into the driver's seat and was comforted by the familiarity of it. He let himself sit for a minute, running his hands over the steering wheel as a way to relax before he started the car and made his way down the road in the direction of the hospital.
He didn't really notice whether he passed many cars while driving for the first few minutes. He was driving completely on auto-pilot while his mind was somewhere else. When he focused again on the road and realized he had drifted somewhere he wasn't sure where his mind had gone or what he had been thinking about. And that scared him to death.
He clenched the steering wheel the rest of the way to the hospital, almost as a way to tie his mind down and keep it focused. He needed to be in control.
He parked sloppily, but didn't bother to correct it. He had more important things to worry about.
The world started to slow as he walked through the doors of the emergency room.
Stiles felt as though he was moving in slow motion while everyone around him was in hyper speed. Every time he moved his foot forward it felt like there was a brick tied to it. He felt his shoulder's drooping, but his eyes were wide and frantic.
He made it to the front desk and saw Scott's mom. He was so happy to see her, he had never been so happy to see her in his entire life.
He inched closer to the desk and she looked up from what she was typing into the computer. She first had a general smile she would have for any patient coming into the ER. But her smile dropped and her eyes grew wide when they met Stiles' face.
"Stiles? Are you okay?" She had such motherly concern in her voice. She stood up from her chair.
"I don't know." Stiles was barely able to mutter before the room started spinning and his head slammed against the floor.
Thanks for reading this! I haven't written anything in a long, long time so I guess I'm pretty pleased with how this first chapter turned out. I'm just excited I finished a chapter! Even if it isn't very long. I hope I can continue with this. It's pretty hard for me to write a fanfiction that is based off a current plot/storyline and then go in one direction while the actual show is going in a completely different direction. I know exactly where I want to go with this story though, soi guess I'll see how well I stay motivated! And I love reading any sort of reviews! Short or long! They really motivate me! So if you want to read more or have anything you want to say, please leave me a review! :)