Epilogue:
Stiles Stilinksi wakes up.
He can hear his father in the kitchen; it seems only moments have passed since he tucked the nogitsune in at the couch. His father is on the phone and speaking in his softest, angriest voice, words like my son and thought better of and trust me to. Five minutes later the McCalls are pulling into the drive and another minute later so is Derek Hale. They congregate outside and mutter to themselves at the door. Loudly. The Sheriff stands in the open doorway, which makes it even easier to hear the tone and snatches of dialog, but it's all the same: worry, fear for Stiles, for the Sheriff.
Scott hurries over to Stiles by sliding through the doorway under the Sheriff's arm. If looks could kill, Stiles is pretty sure his father would have vivisectioned Scott for trying to keep him out of the loop, but Stiles sees Mrs McCall step once more unto the breach and Scott rushes to Stiles. "Omigosh, Stiles, are you okay?" he says.
Stiles looks up at him, squints, like he can see Scotty lie by peering closely enough. When that doesn't work, he examines Scott's wide, panicky eyes and pinched mouth. "Deaton's mountain ash barrier gave me a little jolt, but I'm all right," he says, ducking his head and looking up from under his lashes at Scott, who pales. "It's gonna be okay, now, Scotty. Promise," he says, and Scott huffs a little, shaky breath, like he isn't sure if he can trust Stiles, but can't quite help it. After a minute, he nods.
Derek walks straight into his space. Drops to his haunches, examines Stiles's eyes up close.
"Hi," Stiles says on the exhale, closes his eyes. "Hi, Sourwolf. I missed you, like, a lot."
"Hi, Stiles," Derek says.
"Are you sure?" he says, keeping his eyes closed, trusting Derek between him and the world. "I don't smell off or something?"
Derek leans in and stiffs Stiles's neck ostentatiously. "You smell human," he confirms.
"Funny. I keep thinking I'm like a container of milk left sitting on the shelf too long. Looks alright and smells okay until you pour it out on your cereal and then it's got chunks and it smells like old gym socks."
There's a pause. "You smell like Stiles Stilinski," Derek confirms. "Boy and lacrosse gear and anxiety and Adderall."
"Oh my god, thanks so much," he says, blinking his eyes open, and it's only a quarter sarcasm: the confirmation is soothing. He skims his gaze up: at Derek, who has broken through personal barriers to feed him, keep him, read to him, keep others safe from him.
He reaches out his hand and Derek catches it in his, squeezes it. And then, as if Scott can't really help himself, he reaches out to clutch Stiles's other hand, and Stiles's father's hand covers it, and Melissa's bring all of theirs together, and they are in a huddled ball of fear, relief and joy, and Stiles just marinates in the humanness of it, how real he feels now, not like a computer with faulty programming.
Stiles tries to remember that it was the nogitsune, not him, who kept feeling like it wasn't really real, like it wasn't itself; like it had no self, like it was no one, no-thing…
(Void.)
Stiles can't help but think that the only reason he's won is that he convinced the nogitsune to sidle away from its own fears: the fear of open arms, the way they indebt and confine and claim. A fox is nothing if not a wild thing, and in the end maybe the nogitsune was as horror-struck as it was sorry.
"Stiles," his father says. "Stiles, what is it?"
For an eyeblink, Stiles considers telling them everything. That part of him feels he's found these people, while the other insists he's reclaimed them. He pictures it, the way they would draw back from him if they knew what he really is. He isn't sure he could survive it.
"I'm just so glad to be here," he says, and buries his face in his father's shirt.
The memories fade.
They bleed together and expand and the edges wear away like smoke on the air. And sometimes Stiles actively buries them, throws sod on them and pisses on their graves in acts of defiant suppression.
Maybe it's because a trickster is a genius at the art of oblivion.
The memories fade.
They have to, if Stiles is going to survive them.
Stiles waits for Derek in his new apartment.
Part of the danger of being Stiles Stilinski (full time) is that he can and does look up just about anything, and he's easily bored. One, Adderall-fueled weekend on the 'net, a trip to the locksmith's and three days of practice later, and he can go wherever he pleases. He isn't so skilled that he's going to be embarking on a life of crime anytime soon, but it's the little things that come in handy.
(Like that time you did research on shrapnel bombs? Not all knowledge is good, Stiles.)
Stiles shivers. Derek keeps his apartment pretty cool, but he guesses that makes sense for werewolves, whose skin seems to run warm all the time (the pads of Derek's fingers along the vulnerable skin of Stiles's neck) and who have a penchant for leather. Maybe it's primal: wearing the flesh of a dead thing, wanting to show your mastery, your bravery, to anyone who looks and sees you beneath, wearing the skin of a conquered –
(.Stopstopstop.)
At first, Stiles thought Derek led the life of an ascetic, but renting the apartment is a step up from the railhouse, and now, it seems, there are a few books scattered here and there, an honest-to-God pillow on an honest-to-God sofa. If everything is in a many-shades-of-gray palette that make the apartment look like a spread of Emotionally Unavailable Bachelors Monthly, it's still – such a step up. (And insert Shades of Gray joke, here.)
He comes across a book with a swath of tape along the spine and picks it up. Stiles flips the book open – poetry. "Figures Sourwolf would read poetry," he jokes (to who, the voice in your head, Stiles? really,) but he doesn't set it aside. Instead, he backs to Derek's couch and begins to read. As it does so often with Stiles, casual interest slips to obsession, slips to sprawling across any flat surface and absorbing the information as if it might be the key to future survival, which, hey, Beacon Hills, one never can tell, which slips into sleep and dreaming.
Derek comes home, plucks the offending text off of his slumbering chest, and he stirs.
"Hi, Sourwolf," he says, stretching his arms above his head. He still has moments like this, where his mind seems to float free, like a boat come unmoored from the dock. He can tell by the way he barely has any control of the words that come spilling out of his mouth.
Derek pauses for a moment, shoulders going taut, before relaxing and returning the book to its place on the shelf. "I haven't seen much of you lately," he says. "I said I would train you and I meant it. If you want. You're always welcome here."
"Nothing feels like home anymore," Stiles says, and he hadn't known that he felt that way until the words were tumbling from his mouth.
Derek returns to the couch to crouch in front of Stiles, looking up into his face. His gray-green-blue eyes catch the light no matter where he is, the bastard. He says nothing, though, and the silence works: Stiles keeps babbling.
"Sometimes Scott shoots me this look. Like he's afraid I'll tear him limb from limb, and leave the bloody, twitching pieces."
"He isn't afraid of that," Derek says, eyes going sad around the edges. "He's afraid of what your father and Lydia are afraid of. That you'll disappear on them again."
Stiles snorts. "Pshyeah."
"They don't know you the way I do," Derek says, quiet.
"Do you?" Stiles says, giving Derek a wary, cautious look out of the corner of his eye. Which is weird, because he could swear he trusts Derek now more than any other human being. Even Scott. Even his Dad, and he knows that's wrong but it's still true.
Derek lifts his hand in response, then stops the motion a foot from where Stiles wants it.
Stiles swallows and bares his neck, tilting his head to one side.
"See?" Derek says, pressing his hand to the juction between neck and shoulder. "We know one another."
Stiles throws his arms around Derek and clings, which is also weird because he's pretty sure they don't touch one another like this, but Derek clings just as fiercely, then swings him a bit side-to-side, like he's rocking Stiles, and Stiles huffs out something that sounds a little like a laugh and a little like a sob.
"I want it both ways," Derek says, pulling back. "I want you to be better, but… I want you to need me."
"They're not mutually exclusive," Stiles says, burrowing his face into Derek's neck again.
"They are when you don't remember needing me most of the time," Derek says. He closes his eyes and the fan of dark lashes out onto Derek Hale's cheek does something to Stiles's guts. He reaches a finger out to brush them against the other man's cheek, which turns into stroking the skin over Derek's cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. "Sometimes I wish I could forget, too. I think I envy you."
"I remember – things. Bits and pieces," Stiles says, and suddenly he wants to kiss Derek Hale, which is new. Sure, Derek's always been wildly attractive – and Stiles means that in both senses of the phrase – but it's always been in the abstract, before this moment. Suddenly, Derek seems his to touch, to kiss. Seems close enough that, were Stiles to try to bridge the gap, Derek would meet him halfway.
But he has to stop thinking that, because it's not true. Derek might belong to Stiles, but not to him. Never to him.
Insane troll logic, but it causes Stiles to take a sliding step back from Derek and clear his throat. "I mean, um, I thought that maybe we could read some. I was having an awesome nap, you know?" His voice lowers. "And I like the sound of your voice."
"Yeah," Derek says, and he retrieves the book from the shelf, settles on the couch.
Stiles flips onto his back and wriggles until his head is in Derek Hale's lap, which he would never do in real life. That, and the mention of poetry makes Stiles decide that he must still be asleep.
He must still be dreaming.
Derek's hand settles in Stiles's hair, which he still hasn't bothered to cut, big hand weaving through the strands and giving a gentle tug.
Stiles feels like purring.
And in the dream, Derek begins to read:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
A/N:
Thanks so much for reading this one! It curled up in my brain and wouldn't leave. :)
Most of Stiles's (and later, the nogitsune's) parenthesized thoughts are direct quotes from Wikipedia... although I stole from several other articles as well, especially when it came to Jung and Shadows. All of the poems come from a collection called 'The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart', and it really is an awesome compilation. Buy it now, but not from Amazon, as they are a bunch of bad, bad people.
I'm primed to release a lot of other fic - I had an explosion of creativity after the Nogitsune storyline. Well - minus the 'cool' Japanese elements (sorry) and more along the lines of identity and what on EARTH they're going to do with Stiles's character next. I've never had any issues with being Jossed, so I will probably keep on with stories even if/after they've been made invalid by new plot.
Now you lurkers, it's time to weigh in! Even if your comment is "it was good" or "I read five chapters but despised every moment" please take the time to leave a review, although ones with details about what worked for you will win many internets and be petted and adored.
-K
