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Fourteen - A Door to Somewhere

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Darkness has crept over Derek so quickly that Stiles knows he must be locked in a nightmare, trapped somewhere in his own mind.

It stretches out of the water like a living thing, growing smooth and beetle-black over Derek's legs and chest, if draping him in a second skin. Stiles can't make out much in the burn of the amber bulb overhead, but the normal patches of Derek's skin are damp and pale against the somber grey metal, the fabric of his scrubs and shirt gone almost black where the water has soaked through. Little dark tendrils have rippled across his skin in spite of Stiles's tugging, slowing to a stop only when Derek's eyes finally close.

Hand shaking, Stiles fumbles for a pulse, half-afraid to touch the black vines that have settled around Derek's neck, but there's nothing there. Maybe just the faintest heartbeat, if Stiles isn't willfully imagining it. But none of this feels real, none of this seems possible—not until he catches sight of something out of the corner of his eye.

On the wall beneath the burning gold light is the red door. And Stiles suddenly knows it's for Derek.

Stiles realizes he's still whimpering. He chokes it back down, shaking Derek roughly as if that might wake him, as if Derek just needs to come out of a doze.

"He's already gone." The voice is low, quiet, and Stiles spins to find Alsina standing perfectly still in the water, just a few feet beyond the edge of the platform. Her clothes, too, have turned a glimmering black—only Stiles realizes it's not her clothes. It's her. Now that there's enough light to see her by, he can make out an odd elongation of one of her arms, the way the fingers drip down into black points. Black claws. Once again, there's something curious in her piercing eyes as she regards him coolly, like she's savoring this moment.

"Why?" Stiles snarls, his fear burning into desperate rage. "You said—you said you were going to take us both."

"I was," she allows, shifting in place, and the shadowy depths of the room beyond her seem to writhe and then still. "Before all of this happened. I can't procure anyone who's so...adamant about killing my buyers, and with such an innate ability to do so. It's bad for the reputation, you understand. Although…" Alsina trails off, peering down at her blackened, clawed hand. "I hadn't intended this. It's why I didn't want you down here, you understand; sometimes, it gets away from me."

"What do you...you couldn't control your own powers." Stiles realizes bitterly. He swears. "How could you think you'd control ours?"

Alsina levels Stiles with a cold glare that sends a chill down his spine. Then she moves forward, climbing the steps. The only sounds in the gaping room are the metallic clang of her footsteps and the quiet drip of water from the tips of her claws. "You, on the other hand, are still useful," she promises him as she begins to slick the water off of her blackened arm. Under her touch, the twisted, sharp hand lightens gradually, the dark tendrils rippling into the creamy beige of human skin. "As long as you want to be. You're not a danger, are you?" she croons.

Stiles finds he doesn't know the answer to that. His hands are still fisted in the fabric of Derek's shirt, and he leans a little into the werewolf's chest, unable to quite support himself. Now that he's looked away from Derek, he finds that he can't look back. He doesn't want to see Derek lying motionless beside him, isn't sure he can bear it. "What do you mean?" he demands.

"You'll see sense. You'll come with me." Alsina makes no move to approach him, just stands to one side of the platform. Patient. Knowing.

A familiar shot of fury races through him in the face of that confidence, at the idea that she believes for a second that he'll follow her after what she's just done to Derek. As if she's only cut away some small, unwanted addition to a valued purchase.

He stares at her and then away, looking toward the door. Swallows hard. An idea comes to him, but it settles heavy in his stomach. "Do you...do you see that?" he asks her, careful to keep the fear from his voice.

She blinks and then grows amused, as though Stiles is a child playing a game and she knows she's fast enough to catch the trick. Obligingly, she turns to look the rusted metal wall, and then her eyes slide back to him. "There's nothing there."

"Are you sure?" Stiles asks, staring at the red door. "Because when I look, there's something. One of my doors."

The doctor hums in mild interest, turning fully around. The fact that she's willing to put her back to him seems to be less a sign of trust and more a sign that she believes she can take anything he can throw at her. "What game are we playing, Stiles?"

"I don't think you actually understand what I can do," Stiles murmurs, a strange daring swelling in his chest, and then he climbs to his feet. "The kind of doors I can open."

"Is that so?" She is still facing at the wall as he crosses slowly near her, but he has the impression that she could slice him down in a heartbeat if he lunged. After all he's seen, he knows she's just indulging him, toying with him—because after all, doors are no threat. Stiles is no threat. And beyond that, she's curious. If he does have a trick, she'll want to see it. She'll want to sell it.

Without answering, he reaches the door and lays a hand on the knob. He hesitates for just a moment before pulling it open gently.

It's just as he remembers. Fine, blurred light spills through the near-darkness, casting an eerie silver glow across the stone floor. Whatever's inside seems to ripple and churn like water, like pale bedsheets in a breeze. A candle through layers of sheer silk. A rain of white petals fluttering through the air. Stiles can never make it out, and maybe that's why it seems like the view is always changing.

For some reason, it feels less frightening now. It's as though, in understanding what he can do, he's somehow changed the thing itself. The light is not so terrible; it's calming. It's constant. In some strange way, the sight of it almost seems to lend him strength.

Alsina could never see this door before, not upstairs in the hospital—and Stiles thinks he finally understands why. But if he's going to pull this off, if he's going to maybe save Derek, he needs her to see it. He grips the doorknob and considers Alsina, wondering how he can somehow lure her in.

But from somewhere behind, an odd pressure has begun to creep forward, the same suffocating warmth he's felt a thousand times here in the deepest halls of Eichen. He has a hard time mustering the courage to turn, but when he does, he finds that the light overhead has disappeared, a void of darkness pressing in on him from all sides. It draws Stiles instantly back into the panic he feels when the darkness surrounds and suffocates him, when he senses it closing in, ready to devour. And for a moment, raw fear short-circuits his mind.

Somewhere farther off, he knows, Derek lies motionless—dying, or dead—atop the hard floor. Is he really just a few feet away? Or is that place in another realm entirely?

And then Alsina comes to stand behind him. He has a hard time recognizing her, only because her darkness has once again crept over her, pressing into her skin just as it seeps into the air around them. Her clothes have blackened in patches, her eyes grown dark, and her pale face is the only thing that's clear—but she stares with fervent curiosity at the silvery light. Where it meets her blackened features, it casts a disquieting glow.

Stiles is in her way. He could stay where he is, or simply move her aside—because in truth, this threshold isn't one she's meant to cross right now, and he knows thatsomehow. But as his fear dissipates once more, he finds a sullen sort of wrath overtaking him, settling into his very core, and so he does neither of those things.

Instead, he tugs her arm, flinching just a little when he finds it's turned back to the elongated, monstrous claw. The same claw she'd used on Derek. Even so, he pulls her closer, and she doesn't so much as protest when he directs her toward the silvery stream.

"It's for you," he says, his voice hoarse, and he pushes her in.

As with Clem before her, the light seems to swallow her like water, bit by bit. Alsina's darkness never bleeds back into skin, but the strange glow takes her regardless. For a moment, Stiles thinks he can still see her just beyond the surface, a vague patch of darkness turned grey and then white—and then she's gone. Stiles stares for a long moment, swallows, then shuts the door behind him. His breaths ring loud in the silence.

When he turns back, he finds that the unnatural darkness of the cavern has receded completely. In fact, he's in another place entirely—or maybe, rid of Alsina's warped magic, the room can finally appear as it truly is. It's no longer a gaping tunnel: he stands in a wide basement, mostly empty but for a few shelves and storage crates lining the walls farther off. It's still dark, with just a few lights overhead, but it's normal darkness. The natural darkness of the world, the ordinary darkness of shadows. Child's play compared to the darkness Stiles has known.

He's not alone, though. Around the room, still and silent, are a dozen or so people who stare past Stiles at the red door. It's enough to make his heart skip a beat until he recognizes their clothes: they all wear the same blue hospital scrubs that he's wearing now. The same clothes that Clem wore.

Patients. Some of the so-called "transfers."

Hesitantly, he turns and opens the door again. By some unspoken signal, they slowly creep forward, filtering through the portal one by one. He thinks he recognizes some of them: a lady who used to knit by the piano in the mornings, a man with two gold false teeth. They come with their animals, as Stiles now realizes they always must. A starling perched on one shoulder, a snake around the wrist. One has a black fox trotting at her heels.

They don't look at him as they approach, staring instead at the ethereal light from the door. Stiles wonders what would happen if he tried to touch them—if his fingers would settle on their skin or simply pass through them like air.

It's only as Stiles glances around that he realizes that Derek's there as well, lying exactly as he was, a little further off near a storage chest. His eyes are closed and his skin deathly pale. Stiles sprints over and shakes him again, but this time his skin is cold to the touch. His heartbeat is gone. Stiles checks for any sign of the darkness that once spiraled over his skin, but he finds it hard to see over the angry blur of his tears.

The red door still lingers on the wall, insistent, and Derek shocks the hell out of Stiles by slitting his eyes open a fraction. With great effort, the werewolf cranes his neck back to look toward it.

"That's not for you," Stiles tells him, fighting back tears. "You can't go. It—it's a trade. She goes, and you stay." He tries to turn Derek's face away, toward him, but Derek's head weakly flops back toward the door. Something in his eyes reminds Stiles of the fanciful, transfixed look his mother once gave it, of the urgent curiosity on Alsina's face.

"I love you," Stiles chokes, and his words are swallowed up in the open space of the dim basement. "Please don't go."

But his words do nothing. Stiles glances around helplessly, thinking he might simply shut the red door to see what happens, thinking that there must be something he can do. Derek is maybe here, maybe—gone. And Stiles is completely alone now, the waiting dead and their animals vanished into the mist.

At this thought, though, Stiles pauses, an idea occurring to him for the first time. Those animals aren't dead, and they aren't familiars. A part of him knows—has always known—what they are. And now he knows what it could mean. He turns back to Derek, whose eyes are fluttering at half-mast. "You can't," Stiles murmurs again. "I won't let you."

Stiles isn't sure if what he hopes is possible, if Derek is too far gone—but that doesn't seem to matter now. He has to try. Stiles is the balance between life and death. And what's the point of that if he can't bend the rules for this one thing?

He closes his eyes and presses a hand to the cold patch of skin over Derek's heart.

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A/N: My poor babies D:

I must have rewritten this chapter five times, but I think it's finally as close as possible to what I was going for. AND the good news is that I'm gonna try to get the last chapter out by this weekend so check back in soon! (And send me good luck 'cause I need it)