Author Note: The title is from Sylvia Plath's poem Mad Girl's Love Song. I can't claim to really know very much about mental institutions and I've only had 3 years of psych so I am far from being fully informed. This is really short and what not. I'm not sure on continuing it so I'm just going to leave it as complete unless people are interested in reading more.
i think i made you up inside my head
Ever since he can remember, Derek has always been there, a faded presence hovering just out of sight like if he looks directly at him, he'll float away only returning when his gaze shifts. When he talks, his mouth never moves, wispy voice carried on the wind, a half formed thought. He never blinks. Haunted green eyes swirling with unfathomable shadows follow his every move. The pallid skin stretching taut over his body is blackened and blurry around his rough, broken edges. In certain slants of moonlight, Stiles can see thick scar tissue creeping across his arms and torso, echoes of something truly horrific.
Derek is always there for Stiles, he always has been. When his mother died, late at night when he would tear into his wrist with his teeth to muffle the sobs, Derek would curl behind him, a cool gust of wind at his back until the crippling panic abated. When he was all alone in the great, big, empty house, Derek stayed until his dad came home, exhausted and face pinched when he saw Stiles was still up. He was there when he broke his leg trying to climb a tree, he was there when Lydia rejected him. There is never just Stiles.
But that is the problem because no one else can see Derek. No one else can hear him. Stiles knows Derek is real, he has to be. Though sometimes, just sometimes (late at night when the screams are the worst), Stiles can't help but think that maybe Derek isn't real. Maybe he really did make him up inside his head. The therapists and psychologists seem to think so. Then he sees Derek waiting by his bed and he knows (he knows) that he can't possibly be a part of his imagination because the medicine, all the pills they cram down his throat, they're supposed to help but they don't. They never do. And that, that is how Stiles knows he's not insane.
Because if they worked, Derek wouldn't be looking at him with his too bright, sad eyes. Derek wouldn't follow him around during the day and stand guard beside his bed at night. Derek wouldn't talk to him in soft whispers of the things he can remember (it's always the same burning, burning, burning and screaming, screaming, screaming and howling, howling, howling). Stiles is creative but half the things Derek tells him are beyond his imagination. They're always stories about claws and fangs and the pull of the moon and pack. For him they're pure fantasy, but for Derek, it's his life (or was his life, Stiles is never quite sure).
So Stiles knows Derek is real - except when he makes him up inside his head. He's sure he isn't insane - but then he isn't. He doesn't belong at Eichen House - despite the fact that he does.
And Stiles knows you're also not supposed to fall in love with your own hallucinations - no matter how beautiful. It's too bad no one told him sooner.