xiii.

the docks

So turns out there's an alien bar in National City.

Stiles spends two weeks roaming aimlessly through the city with no leads, no clues, no nothing to show him where to go. He overheard a couple of aliens talking about the bar one night, though he's still putting together where it might be. It's not like he can just ask any of his alien friends about it, since he doesn't have any alien friends anymore. He's pretty sure Superdouche is avoiding him which Stiles supposes makes sense, considering the bombshell that is Stiles' dead boyfriend. Stiles would avoid himself, too, if he could.

Stiles massages his mostly healed forearm as he waits in a shadowy alley for an alien he can follow to the bar. He mildly regrets cutting off his cast so prematurely—a bit of a harrowing task since he almost sliced his arm open elbow to wrist—but he needed the skin space for his runes. The marks are healing slowly, leaving scars, and some of the deeper cuts still ache and burn if he moves too quickly.

His leg, however, seems to be more permanently fucked up. A stabbing pain goes through his knee with every step, and even when he's not moving, the thing aches something fierce. He rubs at the knee as he leans against the alley wall. A lit joint dangles from the fingers of his other hand—maybe not the stealthiest choice, but it dulls the roaring in his veins and limbs.

A woman with hair the color of sunlight walks past him, her eyes a white to match over the raised ridges across her cheekbones. Even without the markings, Stiles would know she wasn't human. She tickles that same part of his brain that Kara does every time he sees her. Stiles slips out of the shadows and follows her, staring at his phone as if fully absorbed in whatever is on the screen.

He's missed dozens of calls from his father over these past two weeks as well as a series of increasingly irate texts from Lydia—it didn't take her long to figure out that he's Void, and she definitely wants to chew him out about it. He doesn't hear from Scott or the others much. He knows they probably think it best not to overwhelm him with their concern, electing Lydia as the point of contact, but it still stings. He and Scott have been best friends since they were little. Part of Stiles expects a little more fight, a little more anger, from Scott. But Stiles probably burned that bridge when he wormed his way inside Scott's head all those months ago. He seems to be doing a lot of that lately.

He follows the woman for five minutes, into a neighborhood just off downtown National City. She steps through the metal door of an unmarked building at the dead end of a narrow, dimly lit street. Stiles doesn't go inside right away—wouldn't want to be too obvious, after all—scouting the area instead. The dumpster halfway down the alley is empty, and the streetlights flicker weakly above his head. He stretches out his other senses, easing a tendril of dark thought towards the bar. Ten people inside, none of them energies he recognizes.

He walks into the bar as unobtrusively as he can, the door creaking despite his best intentions, though only a few of the closest patrons glance up at him. The alien bar looks like any other dive bar that Scott and the others dragged him to over their college years. There's a pool table to his left, a game in progress between a couple of leather jacket wearing women, and dark tables fill the rest of the floor space. The patrons are the only marked difference. There are people with colorful skins, people too tall and too bulky to ever be human, even one with a tail, and people with eyes almost subtle enough to pass except when the light catches them just wrong.

"What can I get you?" the bartender asks, jerking Stiles' attention away form the rest of the room as he reaches a barstool. She looks human, but Stiles senses something else beneath her skin.

"What's good?" the thought of drinking still turns Stiles' stomach, but if he's going to blend in, he needs a glass in front of him.

"The Yistian lager is our happy hour special today," she says.

"Sure."

She grabs a glass from under the bar and draws a pint from one of the drafts in front of Stiles, a dark green liquid with a grey-black foam on top. She sets it down on the coaster and gives him a smile.

"Hey, can I ask you a question?" Stiles wraps his hands around the cold glass and draws it close but doesn't take a sip.

The bartender shrugs and picks up a polishing rag and a glass fresh from the dishwasher.

"Have you heard about any Essyolytes on the planet?"

She pauses in her polishing. "What are you, a cop?"

"Do I look like a fucking cop?" Stiles snaps.

"DEO agent, then."

Stiles curls his lip and scoffs. "No, fuck them. I wouldn't toss an agent a rope if they were dangling off a cliff."

"Then why all the questions?"

Stiles has asked one question. He could make her talk. It would be so easy—he's been feeling his power growing ever since he started using it properly, stretching up and out like a flower reaching for the sun, its roots digging deeper and deeper into his brain.

He smiles at her, runs a hand through his hair, messes around with her dials with a ghostly finger so that she'll trust him, be a little freer with her words. "Personal stakes. You know anything?"

"I hear there's one living down in the docks district." The bartender's eyes have gone a little glassy, the lines around them smooth and flat.

The docks. That's something at least, though having a name would be so much better. He drums his fingers against the counter then slides the bartender a twenty, giving her a little mental nudge to send her on her way. He starts to stand, lager untouched, but he catches a glimpse of familiar blonde hair as the door swings open.

"Shit." Stiles drops back to his stool and spins so his back is to them, throwing his hood up. He hears chair legs scraping against the floor just a few stools down from him, and he curses again, clenching his fists. Any way he tries to get to that door, they'll see him, and they'll want to know what he's doing here, how he found the place.

"Look, I know we haven't heard from that Void character in a few weeks, but we still need to consider him a high priority," the scary one says, the one with the vast mind and the stolen man's face. "He's dangerous. Unknown."

"And you don't like the unknown. We get it, J'onn," Alex interrupts, a hint of laughter in her voice.

"Look, I am several thousand years old, and I have never seen power like the kind he was throwing around. He had that same dark mental energy that I've been sensing all over the city, and those sigils in his skin…" He trails off.

Stiles starts building up his wall brick by brick before the alien can sense him in here, too.

"They looked carved into his skin," Kara says, voice crawling with unease, maybe a little bit of disgust unless Stiles' ears are deceiving him. "Who could do something like that?"

A lot of people, actually. He slips one last brick into place, and he thinks he sees J'onn glance up as he does so, but that might just be his paranoia deciding to make itself known. It grips his spine, one hand low around his vertebrae, the other up high, on his neck, talons digging deep into flesh, curling around bone. He needs to get out of here before he's recognized.

The bar door slams open before he can come up with a plan of action, and a man with tiny, button horns on his head stumbles through, blood streaming from a cut at his hairline. He flings a hand back towards the open door where white lights flash, muted by smoke and dust. The man's mouth flaps uselessly, but the bar gets the message. Half the patrons dive for the floor or under tables, and the other half stand in suspended animation, staring at the smoke wafting into the room. Only the Super Friends move with any kind of purpose, communicating an entire plan to each other in three looks, just like Derek and the rest of the Pack used to.

Alex and J'onn go out the front door, shoulder to shoulder, Alex's gun drawn, while Kara heads for the back, no doubt to ditch her townie clothes so she can appear as the hero once again. Whatever is out there, they can handle it. That's what they do. Stiles has the docks to investigate. And he yet finds himself standing, pulling his black mask from the deep inside pocket of his jacket, slipping it over his face as he strides out the door.

Stiles has never been able to stay away from a fight.

Chaos reigns outside. Smoke has swallowed half the alley, including the dumpster, and the wan streetlamps have been smashed, leaving only the half-hidden stars and thin, green laser beams to light the scene. Dark, bulky shadows move in formations towards the heroic tableau that Alex and J'onn make, arranged in front of the door with their feet planted wide and hips thrust forward.

"Stop!" Alex shouts, gun raised.

The marauders don't, of course, stop.

Kara—or rather, Supergirl—appears from above, drifting over the roof with her hands on her hips. "Who are you people? What do you want?" she calls down.

"Clearly, they're here to fuck up the bar." Stiles sneaks right up behind Alex and J'onn and is satisfied to see them jump. Alex can't seem to decide if she wants to shove her pistol in his face or keep it pointed at the approaching interlopers.

"Are you with them?" J'onn demands.

"Why the hell would I be with them?"

"You share a certain color scheme."

Rude. There's only one downside to his Void mask—the lack of sarcastic expression, which comprise about half of his communication lexicon. He snaps his fingers, though it's mostly just for the effect, and the bulky shadows slam to a halt as he releases the wall he's been hiding behind like a dam.

"What are you?" J'onn whispers.

"Aren't you more interested in what they are?" Stiles hops around the confused DEO agents and up to the mannequins in dark armor, frozen stiff. There are no insignias on their clothing, and each one wears a full, black face guard that reflects his own Void back at him. Stiles smacks the face mask off the asshole closest to him, and a plainly human face stares back at him, all furious eyes and frazzled hair.

"Ten bucks says their species-ist," Stiles says.

"What did you do to them?" Kara finally descends to earth, landing beside Alex, and crosses her arms, looking at Stiles like he's the next big bad alien she needs to squash under the platform heel of her boot.

"Just flipped a few switches."

The man in front of Stiles turns red-faced, veins popping in his forehead and neck as he struggles to free himself from the hold Stiles has on him and all the others, struggles to hit all the buttons Stiles turned off, tearing free movement away from them.

"Release them," Kara orders.

"So they can attack us? No, thank you." Stiles snorts and rolls his eyes behind his mask.

J'onn jerks his green chin at the straining man. "Let that one speak."

"You guys are really bossy, you know that?" Just like Derek, but less mean and more angry and disgusted. But he still snaps his fingers and presses a few buttons within the man's skull to allow him control over his mouth again.

The first thing the mercenary does is spit in Stiles' face, a thick, phlegmy glob that sticks to the cheek of his mask for a second before slowly sliding down to fall off his chin.

Stiles wonders what he could do to this man. Make him feel pain—make him feel agony—make him writhe on the ground—convulse until he goes blind—maybe even kill him.

Stiles takes a step back and away, though it's less from the shock of the thought itself and more from the shock that he doesn't seem to care.

"Who are you?" J'onn asks in his authoritative, scary-alien-man voice.

Stiles slips into the shadows. The old-him yearns to stick around for the interrogation, gather information, smoke out the bad guys, but the new-him doesn't think this is his fight. His fight is the Essyolyte and its master and however Deucalion and his warlock fit into it.

He puts the mercenaries on a timer set to release in twenty minutes—because apparently, that's a thing he can do—and he struts—limps—off down the alleyway. Footsteps follow him, a hand almost reaching to catch his shoulder. "Void…" Kara's voice, hesitant, choking on his masked name.

"Don't your friends need you?" Stiles asks. He stops but he doesn't turn around.

"Not right now. Who are you?"

"Who are you?" he counters. The end of the alley, along with his escape into the dark of the night, is so close, a mere dozen feet away.

"Fair point." Supergirl hesitates, and Stiles thinks he could make a break for it, but he knows he'd never outrun her. "Look. I have to ask. Whose side are you on?"

"You don't have to worry about me," he says because he's not going to be a total cliché and say, 'My own side.' "I'm looking for someone. Once I've found them, you'll never see me again."

"Who? Maybe I could help?

Of course she would offer help. She doesn't know Void, has only seen him covered in blood, setting werewolves on fire, and Stiles knows he scares her, freaks her out even, but she's putting that aside to look at him with too big, blue eyes.

"No, Supergirl." He almost calls her Kara. "I won't drag you into this. You belong in the light, and I will only drag you down into the muck." He dragged Derek down so far he got killed. He won't do it again.

"I'm sure that won't happen." She touches his elbow, and for a second, Stiles wants to cry. That's right where Derek used to nudge him every time he needed to squeeze past Stiles, and Stiles hasn't really been touched softly like that in what seems like an eternity.

"I can't risk it. Not again." The last bit slips out before he can stop it, and his face heats up behind his mask. "Look, I have to go." He moves on quickly, hoping Kara won't notice but knowing she'll catch it anyway. "You should finish dealing with those dicks."

Stiles stuffs his hands into his pockets and walks off. He's needed down at the docks, and he can't afford to be distracted. He can feel Kara's eyes on him, but after a moment, he hears her footsteps turn and head back towards the bar.

Once he's rounded the corner, he takes off the Void mask and makes it disappear into his jacket. The air is cool on his bare skin. It makes him feel vulnerable, too exposed to the world and any who might care to look upon his soul. He spent years barring himself to everyone around him, chattering at a near constant rate, expressions wide and open and rising easily to the surface. But now he's terrified of being seen, as if he might fall apart under the weight of too many eyes.

So he throws up his hood, hunches his shoulders, and radiates discomfort so that strangers' eyes jump over him. He takes the bus down to the docks district and has the three back rows all to himself as he repels all the other passengers.

It's nearing the witching hour by the time he reaches his final stop, and he's the last one on the bus as he swings down the steps and onto the streets. He sees the driver swallow and clench her hands around the wheel as he walks by.

It's started to drizzle, and the sidewalks glisten in the streetlights. Stiles wishes he could repel the water like he repelled those people on the bus, but his hoodie slowly grows damper and damper as he walks along until water drips off his fingers and his bad knee aches like someone's just taken a sledgehammer to it. The buildings out here are mostly warehouses, though it's hard to tell which are empty and which are in use; all of them have the same worn brick and darkened window façade.

How does one find an alien and its master? Wander around and hope to stumble on something? Doesn't seem very likely. He rifles through his pockets as he walks. He has the makings of a tracking spell, but without anything belonging to the Essyolyte, it's useless. He'll just have to be systematic, check every building until he finds something.

So that's what he does. Every night. For five nights. He charts his progress, ticking off buildings on a homemade map and dropping roaches at every street corner. He crawls through windows and picks locks, using his magic powders to gum up any rudimentary security systems, and he sweeps each warehouse thoroughly, leaving no room, no cabinet, no cubby unsearched. The occasional night guard doesn't notice a thing.

Stiles gets all the way down to the water without finding anything, rage bubbling up inside of him until the streetlights flicker with his passing. He stops at the edge of the wharf, the water three feet below him, and stares out across its expanse. It's flat and black, swallowing up the stars and the moon, and he can feel its depths calling to him, a siren's song of a gentle descent into the safe, cool arms of oblivion.

His toes nudge the edge. He would no longer be a burden, one less thing for Kara and the others to worry about, one less murderer roaming the streets, one less monster to haunt the dark. He sees a werewolf entombed in Greek fire. Screaming. Dying. His skull showing through his melting flesh. There were kinder ways to kill him. More humane ones, but Stiles chose to make him suffer like that because he wanted to deal back some of that pain that the Alpha Pack had caused him and his friends. Without Scott's perfect, pretty Pack rules to keep him in check, it's funny how quickly he falls into the same patterns of darkness they used to fight against. One more fall, and he could put it all right.

But before he can tip himself forward that final inch, he hears something crash in the unsearched warehouse to his left. He takes a step back from the edge. It could be the Essyolyte. He can always kill himself once this is over.

As Stiles crosses the street, he puts the mask back on, and he's safe again, emotions sliding back into the darkness where they won't distract him any more. He spots a broken window up on the second floor and scoots up the fire escape to the rusty, rickety landing that creaks loudly under his weight. He pokes his head through the window, though his eyes struggle to see through the shadows. The dark vision rune on the inside of the mask is clearly losing power.

He slips through the window into the second floor and closes his eyes, tapping the side of the mask to activate the heightened hearing rune. Rats skitter across the metal, wind rattles through a broken pipe somewhere on the other side of the building, and somewhere on the first floor, a creature breathes.

The grin that cracks Stiles' face would be more at home upon a skull, and he lets Allison's knife drop from his sleeve into his hand. He treads quietly through the warehouse until he finds the stairs, which creak under his feet as he descends. The breathing hitches, but Stiles is okay with that; he wants the Essyolyte to know who's coming for it. As he reaches the last few steps, he pulls several baggies of powder from his pockets and mixes them together in his palm, flinging the finished product into the air so that it floats about the room on the gentle breath of wind and begins to glow.

Boxes litter the floor, but they've all been shoved to the sides to block the ground level windows and create a wide, open space in the center of the warehouse. Standing in the middle of it all is the Essyolyte, hulking and large and reptilian. Its flat, black eyes flash in the lightning bug dust motes, and it roars as Stiles comes into view, claws fully extended at its sides.

"Do you know who I am?" Stiles growls.

Images flash in his mind—his headlong rush at the creature in the forest, their meeting in the alley; Stiles eyes blaze in each instant with blackened flames that dance in the sockets and drift out behind him as he moves.

"Then you know why I'm here."

He sees Derek's broken, bleeding body stretched out on the ground like a thing thrown out the car window. Stiles fills with rage at the sight of it because nobody deserves that, especially not Derek.

"Where's your master? Take me to them."

But the Essyolyte shakes its head. Stiles wonders if it's a case of can't or won't. If he were a good person, and if he weren't dealing with a telepathic alien, he would offer to help free it from its master, but he's no hero. Both of them will die, one way or another.

"I'll find out anyways," he says as he strides towards the Essyolyte.

The alien bellows its acceptance of his challenge and barrels towards him at a ground-rumbling run. They crash together in two ways; blade and claws vying for flesh, minds scrambling for dominance over the other. Stiles' knife skitters across the hard scales, and a claw scratches his mask, the sparks bursting across his vision and igniting a wildfire in the mindscape upon which they batter each other. Stiles takes control of the landscape and flings the raging fires at the Essyolyte, forcing it to backflip, backflip, backflip, landing on a stack of crates.

Stiles runs after it, knife held low, bad knee barely holding out, and the alien leaps towards him. Stiles lets a powder fall into his hand from a capsule up his sleeve, and he carves a symbol through the air, the powder slipping through his fingers. The symbol glows in midair and erupts when the Essyolyte strikes it, flaring green and flinging the creature back, and Stiles uses the pathways of pain to worm his way into his mind, searching for any shred of its master. The Essyolyte throws Derek's face back at him, sticky, tentacle fingers seeking to drag him back to that day, but this time, his rage is stronger than his guilt. As the Essyolyte falls through the air, Stiles falls through its mind, both of them trapped in slow motion.

He can't reach the Essyolyte's dials like he can with other humans, can't turn up its pain levels, and his pathway through the Essyolyte's mind are growing narrower and narrower. He feels like he's close, but then the Essyolyte strikes the ground, and he's jolted back into his own brain. He blinks, stunned, and the alien lies in a pile of broken crates.

He needs the chaos of the Nogitsune—the black unpredictability of not caring about any consequences, of chaos for chaos's sake, then he'd be able to destroy this fucking thing once and for all, destroy everything that took Derek from him. The Nogitsune gave him this power. Maybe it left something else behind as well.

That thought shocks him back two steps, and he slams into a stack of crates. Well, at least there's still some part of him with a shred of morality left. The Essyolyte tackles him, throwing him through the crates, and they crash to the ground and roll, claws ripping the Void mask from his face and shredding skin. Stiles gets one leg between them and kicks, but it's his bad leg, and his knee screams—or maybe that's actually his mouth.

It tumbles off him, and Stiles flips over, crawling away as fast as he can. Claws catch his pant leg, and he falls, smacking his chin on the stone floor. He's dragged backwards, and he rolls over, twisting his knee, and scrawls a rune across his hand in his own blood. He fires a blast at the Essyolyte, but the rune is misdrawn, and it careens past the alien's ear, searing his palm.

The Essyolyte rears up and raises its talons, bellowing, but Stiles' head is spinning, and he can't stop it. Something red and blue rams into the Essyolyte's chest and knocks it away just before it can eviscerate Stiles, and Stiles lets his head thump to the ground in relief. It only exacerbates his throbbing headache.

There's a crash and a roar, and then someone is crouching over him, blonde hair falling across his forehead. "Are you okay?" Kara asks, hands fluttering over his bleeding face.

Stiles groans. Does he look okay? And where did his mask go? Is it lying out in the open, waiting to incriminate him? His head hurts too much to turn it to look. "I'll live." Probably.

Kara helps him sit up and turns his chin to look at his cuts. "What are you doing all the way down here?"

Stiles is getting tired of lying. "Was on a walk. Got jumped. Thanks, I guess, for swinging by."

"Let me get you to the hospital," Kara insists. "That looks bad."

Stiles has spent far too much time in hospitals, not to mention how word will get back to his father and the others, and then Maggie will be on his ass again about this, that, and the next fucking thing. "It's fine."

"It'll scar."

So his outsides will match his insides. Good.

"You know, you're allowed to not be fine." Kara looks him over with those too sincere eyes. Derek had told him the same thing many, many times, but it was a lesson he'd never managed to learn.

"I know. Could you take me home? Please?"

"Sure." Kara helps him stand and gives him a light pat on the back.

"I just need to find my phone. I dropped it when that thing jumped me." He limps away and spots his mask about ten feet away, hidden by the shadows of another crate stack. He blocks Kara's line of sight and crouches awkwardly to pick it up and stick it back in his sweatshirt. "Got it."

"Where are we going?" Kara asks, and Stiles is impressed that she actually remembered to keep her cover. So he gives her his address—their address—and she gently picks him up, bridal style. Derek carried him that way every time he was even a little bit injured, refusing to grant him any shred of dignity, and Stiles dips his head into her firm shoulder to pretend that it's Derek holding him once more. Kara lifts into the air, and soon, they're high above the city, the wind whipping through Stiles' hair and stinging his cuts. If only he could be anyone else. Someone named Charles or Tony. People named Charles and Tony never betray their friends or try to murder aliens or lose their boyfriends. If he pinched the nerve in Kara's neck just right, she would drop him, and maybe he would hit he ground before she could catch him.

But they landed before he could try it, Kara setting him down on his balcony. Stiles shoves his window open and groans as he wedges himself through. "Thanks, Kara," he said and shut the window behind him, slouching tiredly to his room and flopping to the bed, still covered in blood, ignoring the tap-tap-tap at his balcony window.