A/N: I didn't realize until after I finished writing it that this chapter is just one long scene, lol. Whew.

Stiles hated essays. Okay, not really, or at least he didn't used to. There was a time when Stiles would write essays just for the fun of it, choosing topics out of thin air and making the essays as long as possible as a challenge to himself. He made some good money selling them online before his dad found out and made him stop, but he kept writing them anyway because he was always going to be strangely fixated on random subjects, he was always going to overthink them to the extreme, so why shouldn't he have something concrete and scholarly-looking at the end of it?

Now he stared at the blinking cursor of his laptop until it blurred before his eyes and couldn't make a single word come to his fingertips. He had had this assignment for three weeks and he still had barely more than an intro paragraph. It had never taken him so long to write anything ever, even on subjects he knew nothing about! This was a book he'd already read twice before, one he had thought he knew inside and out, but here he was with seventeen tabs of articles and peer reviewed journals and still not so much as a thesis statement in mind. The frustration was getting to him, making him itch all over, and yet again, he considered throwing himself out his bedroom window.

He sat back in his chair—yes, his actual desk chair at his actual desk, because Jackson had taken one look at him sitting on the living room floor and started nagging about his bad posture again in his strangely antagonistic way of showing concern—with a huff and absently twisted the ring off his finger.

He was getting better at it. He hadn't been able to put it down all evening, fiddling and frowning until a burst of inspiration led him to turning the rings upside down and twisting instead and everything fell into place. His whoop of triumph had been loud enough to have a recently returned Jackson running into his room in alarm. Stiles had been startled into dropping the ring and there had been some staring, some stammering, and maybe a little blushing before he'd scooped it up and said, "I figured it out on my own, I swear! No instructions needed!"

Jackson had snorted and called him a geek but he said it with a smile on his face and none of the usual heat, and when they climbed into bed together an hour later, Jackson had run his thumb along the smooth metal before lacing their fingers together.

Stiles shook the ring apart and took a moment to focus all his attention on that, eyeing the gentle curves and the way they sparkled in the light, feeling how the metal had warmed to his skin, hearing the gentle click of the rings together as he moved them carefully around each other. It took some finesse to get the fourth ring into place, squeezing it in between the others without bending it or shaking the rest loose, and he was still getting the hang of it. Watching it slot in to make a perfect whole was satisfying on so many levels that he couldn't even name and he slid the ring back onto his finger with a flourish for no one's benefit but his own.

With renewed purpose, Stiles dove back into his research. He was good at this, he reminded himself stubbornly. This was his thing and there was no way he was going to let a stupid little thing like...whatever the fuck his problem was...keep him from doing his thing. He was gonna come up with some clever shit and write the fuck out of this essay and be witty and insightful and he was gonna get an A+ and pass summer school with flying colors and and it was gonna be—

Stiles jerked back nearly hard enough to knock his chair over entirely as everything tilted around him. The air had gone thin and blackness crept into the edges of his vision until all he could see were letters—no, symbols— nonsensical shapes shimmering, sliding, crawling across his computer screen where the had been normal words just a moment ago.

A dream. It was a dream, it was all a fucking dream, just another twisted trick of the imagination and any second now he would scream himself awake to do it all over again just like last time because none of it was real.

His breath was coming in sharp gasps but it didn't matter. The pain in his chest wasn't any more real than the remembered tang of blood in his mouth, the rasp of cruel, inhuman laughter in his ear as he tipped himself over onto the floor in his panic. He barely felt the collision, wrapped up in the jarring certainty that it didn't exist in the first place, that there was nowhere for him to go, no way to escape from his own mind. All he could do was press his back against the wall, curl in on himself as tightly as possible, and cover his ears before the voice could start in earnest.

"It's not real," he told himself, squeezing his eyes closed because any minute now Allison would be there with her dead eyes, or Scott and the sword, or the river of blood that was the hospital massacre, and he couldn't see it again, he just couldn't. "It's not real, Stiles, wake up. Wake up, wake up, it's just a nightmare, just wake up."

He didn't wake up. There was a growing pressure all around him, like the atmosphere itself was closing in, wrapping around him like a pane of glass too clean to be seen but he knew it was there, he knew it. He threaded his fingers into his hair and pulled but he barely felt it at all. Even the frantic snap of the rubber band on his wrist wasn't enough. He kept snapping, though, because what else was there? What else could he do when everything around him was a feverish illusion and the stupid rubber band between his shaking fingers probably didn't even exist in the first place and—

The next snap didn't connect. Something was touching him, something he thought might have been warm if such a sensation could reach him here, and it was pulling the band off his wrist entirely. Stiles tried to wrench himself away, to escape the phantoms, but there was nowhere for him to go, he wasn't strong enough, and a whine of panic made its way out of his throat.

It was a hand around his wrist, but it wasn't icy and blood-slick like Allison's or linen-wrapped like the Nogitsune's. It was clean and warm-ish and strangely gentle in its insistence as it pulled Stiles' hand away from his own arm, away from the scratches that barely registered as should-be-painful through the fog.

"—hear me? Hey, come on, can you hear me?" a voice was saying. It was hard to place over the rush and pound of his pulse in his ears, over the whisper of the shadows creeping in all around him even with his eyes closed, over the constant stream of not real, not real, wake up, nightmare, always dreaming, wake up, wake up, wake UP that were his thoughts.

"Come on, Stiles, look at me!" the voice said, but Stiles squeezed his eyes shut tighter and shook his head until it throbbed with the motion; it was so much worse to see everything look so authentic, so intricate in its construction, when he knew it was a fraud. At least this way he could pretend the dream looked like the hellscape it was, like it wasn't perverting what was left of his real life.

"You're not dreaming," the voice said—and Stiles must still be mumbling, still begging out loud for it to end, but his lips were numb and he couldn't be sure—tugging at his hand again. "Look: five fingers, both of us. You'll see that if you just open your eyes and look."

Stiles could feel a palm pressed against his own, steady and firm, fingers slotting into place alongside his. He whined low in his throat, certain that he would see a dozen fingers and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth grinning back at him, but a hand found the side of his face. It cradled his cheek, definitely warm and a little bit callous-rough against his skin, and a thumb brushed over the soft space behind his ear. Jackson, he realized with a shiver. That was where Jackson liked to tuck his nose, chasing his scent, and it was Jackson here with him now, making him promises.

Stiles pried his eyes open, fighting the blackness at the edges of his vision and struggling to focus on the face in front of him. Jackson was only a few inches away, kneeling on the floor and watching him with wide, worried eyes and that pinch between his eyebrows. When he saw Stiles looking, he tried to smile. His eyes seemed grey where they were usually a crystal sort of blue, but then everything was cast in shadow now and nothing looked right because it wasn't.

"Good, hey," Jackson said encouragingly. "That's good. Look at me, just me. Here."

He held up their hands, palm to palm, and he counted. One, two, three, four, five. Five fingers, he said, and then again. Then the other hands, five more each. Ten fingers for each of them, twenty in total. That was how many there were supposed to be, right? Ten fingers for reality, that was how it was in the real world, that was—

But the words. The words were wrong, the letters made no sense, it was wrong. It wasn't real, it couldn't be, no matter what the fingers said. Fingers could be wrong, he knew that better than anyone. And maybe Jackson's fingers were wrong too, or it was just another way of fucking with him. The dream was just evolving, finding more tricks.

He wasn't breathing. Or he was, and maybe he was breathing too much, but no oxygen was reaching his lungs anyway. His head spun and the room with it, tilting like a funhouse mirror, like the illusion it was, and the only steady point was Jackson's hand on his face.

"Look at me!"

Stiles opened his eyes—when had he closed them again?—and Jackson was right there, even closer than before.

"Look at me, Stiles, and nothing else. Just me, okay? I need you to focus on me," he said. "Can you do that? Tell me you can do that, say it out loud."

Stiles nodded, tried to speak but his mouth wouldn't open past another gasp for empty, useless air.

"What's your name, Stiles?" Jackson said.

Stiles just stared, tried to breath, tried to focus on anything that wasn't dull and distant and distorted.

Jackson's other hand found the back of his neck, gripping tight, and he gave him a shake, rattling his teeth together.

"Stiles! I need you to answer me. Tell me your name."

Shocked into obedience, Stiles stammered out his name.

"Your whole name, Stiles, tell me."

"S-Stiles Stilinski," he said and the familiar words felt foreign on his numb tongue, complicated and heavy and difficult to form.

"Good. How old are you?"

Jesus, he felt ancient. Like he had lived a hundred years in the last few months alone, every day repeated over and over again in his mind. Did he age in dreams? How long had he been sleeping? Did it even matter?

"Stiles!"

Stiles shook his head, trying to keep hold of what little control he had, and forced out, "Seventeen," because it had been true the last time he checked. The last time he could be sure.

"Okay," Jackson said. "Say it again, both of them. Name and age, tell me."

"Why—"

"Just do it."

Stiles whined again, but Jackson's hand was hot against his skin and hadn't Jackson helped him before? Maybe those were dreams too, but he was almost certain that listening to Jackson had made him feel better and anything would be better than this. He said his name, his age. They came out a bit easier this time.

"That's good, Stiles. Now can you tell me where you are?"

"Dreaming," he said immediately. "Dreaming, it's not real, it's just a nightmare, it's just a—"

"No, Stiles, that's not true," Jackson said. "This is real, I promise, and I can help you believe that. Just look around and tell me exactly where you are right now."

Stiles forced himself to look away from the grey-blue of Jackson's eyes, expecting blood and mummified laughter and dark curls, but there were just posters and books and dirty clothes instead, every detail exactly as he remembered except not. Dim, off, wrong.

"It, uh...it looks like my room," he said. "But it's not, Jackson, it's not my r—"

"It is," Jackson said, no room for argument. "Repeat it after me, okay? 'My name is Stiles Stilinski. I am seventeen years old. I am at home in my bedroom. I am real and I am safe."

Stiles was shaking his head, cloying fear in his throat and that glass pane pushing into him from every side, cold and hard and heavy on his skin.

"Say it, Stiles, come on. Humor me here."

Stiles closed his eyes again, squeezed them shut against the wrongness of what his eyes were showing him, and gasped out, "My name is Stiles Stilinski."

"Good, Stiles. Keep going."

"I'm...I'm seventeen. Seventeen years old."

He got stuck, couldn't get the rest of the words out.

"Go on," Jackson said, encouraging. "Just say it. You don't have to believe it yet, just say it out loud."

"I'm in my...I'm home, I'm in my room. I'm…"

Stiles choked on the words, the lies, the impossibility of it getting stuck between his teeth. Jackson squeezed the back of his neck again, almost hard enough to hurt.

"This is real, Stiles," he said. "Say it for me."

"Real." Even though it wasn't. "This is real. I'm real and I'm...I'm safe." Not with the whispers in his ear and the smell of blood and the figures waiting just out of sight. "Real and safe."

"Again."

Stiles swallowed hard and made himself repeat it, the whole thing from start to finish, trying to string the words together in the right pattern. And when Jackson shook him again, made him open his eyes and look at him, Stiles said it again. And again. Over and over and over, and each time the words came easier. The shadows retreated around the tenth repetition, the whispers quieted after the thirteenth, and the blue of Jackson's eyes brightened somewhere around the twenty-second.

"Good, Stiles," Jackson kept saying, low and soothing as his thumb swept back and forth on the side of Stiles' neck. "Just a few more."

Stiles' hands were still shaking where they were twisted into the front of Jackson's t-shirt, holding on for dear life. Ten fingers, just the regular ten, and the posters on the walls said words that made sense now, so why did Stiles still feel so off-kilter? He hadn't woken up from this yet, fingers and words were fine; all signs pointed to real, but it still didn't fucking feel real. There was still the icy rush of terror in his veins, pervasive and irrational, and it wasn't fucking fair.

Stiles unclenched one hand from Jackson's shirt, snatched up the nearest object he could find, and threw it as hard as he could with a strangled cry. The book probably would've broken his window if Jackson hadn't snatched it out of the air before it could get that far, werewolf reflexes taking over at the unexpected movement. He looked back at Stiles in surprise and Stiles reached out to knock the book out of his hand just for spite, just because he wanted to hit something, to break everything he could get his hands on.

Jackson was closest. Stiles put both hands on his chest and shoved as hard as he could, sending the werewolf sprawling across his floor. He grabbed another book and threw that one too, uncaring of the dent he put in his wall, and reached blindly for something else. His fingers found the handle of his baseball bat and a savage sort of pleasure filled him at the thought of how much damage he could do with it. Maybe reality needed to be as broken as he was to make sense.

But then there were hands on his, peeling them away from the bat, and unyielding arms wrapping around him from behind, pinning his arms to his sides so firmly that none of his struggles did a damn bit of good. He kicked his legs and writhed and shouted, fear subsumed by the burn of impotent anger, but Jackson just held on and let him fight until he couldn't anymore, until he slumped forward and his heaving breaths turned to sobs. The second Jackson's hold loosened, Stiles was pushing him away, falling back to his pitiful corner of floor and pulling his knees into his chest so he could bury his face in them.

"Why is this happening?"

It came out as a cracked whisper so quiet that no human would have heard it, but Jackson was there in an instant, running soothing hands along his arms up to his nape again. It was warm and gentle and nice, but it didn't feel right. Nothing felt right and it hadn't felt right in a long time, not even on his best days.

"It's supposed to be over, " Stiles said, voice breaking. "Everyone keeps saying it's over so why do I keep feeling like this?"

He didn't voice the worst of his thoughts, the ones that sometimes left him huddled on the bathroom floor for an hour at a time, shaking too hard to stand and as wet from tears as from the shower's spray.

Am I insane? Have I lost my mind for good? Did it break me?

"Stiles, I know what this is."

Stiles jerked his head up so fast that only Jackson's hand on the back of his neck kept it from smacking into the wall.

"W-what?"

"I know what this is, and you're not crazy."

Of course he would know exactly what Stiles wasn't saying; he was Stiles' soulmate. Soulmates were meant to understand, truly understand. He'd gotten reassurances like this before—from his dad, from Scott, from Lydia and Derek—but none of them knew the extent of the problem. They didn't get it, not the way Jackson did. If anyone could actually help him, it would be Jackson.

His desperation must have been painfully obvious because Jackson sighed and sat back, apparently giving up on getting Stiles out of the corner and instead settling down cross-legged on the floor in front of him. The shift took Jackson's hand away from its place on Stiles' nape and Stiles chased after it, snatching the hand out of the air and gripping it tight in his. Jackson let him, threading their fingers together and scooching forward so they could rest comfortably on Stiles' upturned knees.

"It's called dissociation," he said simply. "It happens to a lot of people after some prolonged trauma—the normal kind, usually, but supernatural possession probably qualifies too."

"Wait," Stiles said with a frown, his mind foggy and slow to catch up, to place the vaguely familiar-sounding word. "Dissociation, like...isn't that multiple personalities?"

Jackson rolled his eyes.

"That's a really extreme and widely debated variation of it, yes, but no. Regular dissociation is just...you know, spacing out, usually, but like hardcore. Disconnecting. It can be a belief that the world around you isn't real, or that you aren't real. That you're in a dream or that you're a puppet with no control of yourself. Now, I haven't heard about everything that happened to you with that demon thing, but that sounds pretty familiar to me. I'd have been shocked if you hadn't come out the other side with these issues."

"This is—" Stiles had to stop, try to swallow through a paper-dry throat. "It's a thing that happens? To normal people? It's not—" Not magic of any kind, not traces of the Nogitsune left behind to torment him, not a literal darkness in his soul.

"All the time," Jackson told him, and for once Stiles wished he were a werewolf just so he could hear the steadiness of his heartbeat and verify that it was nothing but truth. "It's one of the most common mental disorders, and there are plenty of people who never get it diagnosed because they don't recognize the symptoms for what they are. It's hard to see from the inside."

"Did you?"

Because Jackson wore a rubber band too. Jackson had nightmares about his own prolonged trauma. Jackson checked himself for scales and knew just what Stiles was worried about because he worried about it too. He understood.

Jackson let out a little huff that might have been a bitter laugh and scrubbed a hand through his hair. Without its usual gel, one tuft got stuck up at an angle. Stiles had the urge to reach up and smooth it back down, but that would require letting go of Jackson's hand, and when everything was still a little hazy, a little distant, Jackson's hand in his felt like the only thing keeping him on the ground.

"No," Jackson admitted. "No, I didn't."

"Then how do you know all this now?"

Jackson chewed on his tongue, battling his own reluctance. If Lydia was right, then Jackson didn't just talk about things like this, not easily. This was admitting to a weakness in front of someone with the ability to hurt him, laying himself bare and making himself vulnerable just for the sake of maybe helping someone else. But he looked at Stiles for a long moment, bottom lip caught between his teeth in an uncharacteristically uncertain expression, before letting it go with a sigh.

"After the whole...thing," he said, eyes settling on their intertwined hands so he didn't have to maintain eye contact. "My parents didn't know what to do with me. They were even more out of their depth than I was with the supernatural shit, and now they had a traumatized no-name werewolf son covered in secondhand blood. They did the most normal thing they could think to do: they sent me to a fucking therapist."

Stiles raised his eyebrows.

"A therapist?" he asked flatly. "What the hell kind of therapist handles this stuff?"

Jackson gave him a weak smile.

"None that they could find," he said. "I couldn't actually talk to this lady about practically anything that had happened to me—not the important parts, anyway—so it was kind of pointless. But we did talk some about this. About how...how I still feel like someone else is calling the shots some days. Like I'm not the one in control of my actions. How I lose hours at a time, these big blank spaces in my memory where I zone out so hard that there's just nothing, and that sends me into a panic because that's what happened when Matt sent me after someone and how would I even know if it was happening again?"

Stiles squeezed his hand because Jackson was breathing hard, eyes unfocused and darting around aimlessly, looking like he might be on the edge of falling into those memories again. Jackson looked up at him and for a minute his breathing stopped, held tight as he pulled himself back. He let the breath out slowly, nodding. He squeezed Stiles' hand in return.

"The therapy itself didn't do me much good, but she did tell me about this and some ways to, you know, deal with it. There's two kinds of dissociation," Jackson said matter-of-factly. "There's depersonalization—feeling like you aren't real—and derealization—like everything else isn't real. Most of the time, what I get is the first one, because for a while I legitimately wasn't me. You, though."

"Derealization," Stiles said for him. "Dreaming. Living in a nightmare."

"Because that thing fucked with your head," Jackson said by way of agreement. "It locked you in actual dreams, made it impossible for you to get out. But it's not here anymore and what's left is just your own mind getting confused. You just need to find ways to remind yourself of that until the feeling passes and you can get your feet under you again."

"Like the questions?"

"Yeah. A mantra, a list of facts that you can repeat until you believe them again."

"And the ring," Stiles' said with half a smile. "Focus on something hard enough to head it off before it really starts, right?"

Jackson smiled back, rubbing a thumb over the ring on Stiles' finger.

"I thought that might work for you," he said, sounding almost shy. He cleared his throat. "And the finger counting," he went on. "That's a good one."

Stiles' smile died, something in his stomach going sour as the itch crawled along his spine. He found himself shaking his head. He thought of the rubber band, of the sting-burn of snapping it, but Jackson had taken it off him earlier. And even if he still had it, it would mean letting go of Jackson's hand. He just gripped harder.

"Stiles?" Jackson asked when he didn't get a response. "Is that not a good one? It seems to work for you, at least with the nightmares."

Stiles finally tugged his hand free, pulling it back down into his lap so he could stare at it. Nothing came out of his mouth when he opened it, so he closed it again. He didn't notice he was scratching at his forearm until Jackson stopped him. He tugged the ring off Stiles' finger, shook it apart, and dumped the disassembled thing in his palm with a pointed look. Stiles was just fidgety enough to take the alternative gladly, working the thin rings around and around until they fell back into place, then shaking it apart to do it again.

"Come on, Stilinski, don't clam up on me now," Jackson said, pushing lightly at his knee. "What's wrong with the finger thing?"

"It's just that—" Stiles started, but the words really didn't want to come out. Saying them aloud felt like too much, like admitting to some kind of sin that wasn't even his doing. Admitting that he wasn't human, and not in the supernatural-creature way like the various were-things and banshees and kitsunes in his life. Admitting he didn't exist anymore.

"Just what?"

Jackson's tone was unusually gentle, coaxing, like he was wary of spooking Stiles and sending him running. It wasn't an unwarranted fear, honestly, but Stiles didn't run no matter how much he wanted to. Because this was his soulmate. And if there was ever anyone he could tell this to, it should be him, right? He bit his lip, sniffled, dragged the back of his hand under his eyes to wipe away the wetness he'd hardly noticed there. He cleared his throat, twice.

"It doesn't really work all that well anymore," he admitted in a hoarse whisper. "Not since it— They're not m—" A deep breath, held until his lungs hurt and let out slowly, quelled a bit of the tremor in his voice. "They're not my fingers anymore," he finally forced out. "And I know that sounds like the...the dissociation or whatever, but it's not. They're literally not mine, I'm not...I'm not me. Not anymore."

"Why do you say that?" Jackson asked, just curious enough not to sound pitying or like he was humoring him.

Stiles told him: the Nogitsune invading every inch of him, seeping into each crack in his mind, taking over his body until he hardly knew who was in control when; Scott and Lydia crashing in to rescue him, to wake him up from the nightmare; the demon spitting him out, recreating him as a facsimile of himself, identical but not; finally killing it, and destroying the body that used to be his in the process.

"And now I'm stuck as this," Stiles said, spitting the word out like the poison it was as he stared down at the fingers splayed out on his knees. They were as unhealthily pale as the rest of him, shaking, the rough of callouses catching and dragging on the fabric of his jeans. "A clone of myself made out of dark magic. The real me is dead."

Jackson was quiet for long enough that Stiles had to look up, even though every bit of him quailed at the thought of what sort of expression he might find on his face when he did. But Jackson didn't look horrified or disgusted or afraid, not like he should. He actually looked sort of confused, maybe. Stiles had to fidget under that look, unaccountably flustered.

After another moment of staring, Jackson said, quite bluntly: "That doesn't make a damn bit of sense, Stilinski."

Stiles' mouth fell open, but Jackson kept talking before he could manage to rally himself for a response.

"What about any of that made you think you were the clone in that situation?" he demanded. "Really, Stiles, I know you're capable of better reasoning and logic than this. If the Nogitsune just wanted to steal your body for itself, then why would it craft a whole new body for you? It already had your body, had complete control of it. All it needed to do was squash out your consciousness and it would've been set. It didn't need to go to all the trouble of using its own power to create a brand new identical body just so that you could continue living independently. Stiles, you were just a template."

"A template?" Stiles repeated faintly, too fuzzy to immediately grasp the slew of words, to wrap his head around what Jackson was trying to say.

"You weren't the clone, Stiles," Jackson said. "You were just the pattern it built itself around. It built a new body around yours, then spit out the real you when it was finished and didn't need you anymore. That's the most logical explanation."

Stiles stared at him, trying to catch up. He was good at logical thinking, he had always prided himself on that, but it was hard to be levelheaded and reasonable when every one of his senses was screaming at him that logic was wrong, when his skin prickled and buzzed like an electric current was coursing along it. He realized that he had fingernails against his left forearm and yanked them away before they could inflict any damage, reaching for his wrist instead but the skin there was already red and hot to the touch from earlier and Jackson still had his rubber band.

Jackson's hand settled over his, steadying, and Stiles tried to still the useless fluttering of his hands.

"I know you can't believe that right now," Jackson said. "But later, when you're feeling better, it'll make sense to you. You are real, Stiles, and it might take a long time for you to believe that, but you will. I promise, eventually you will."

Stiles shook his head. New tears clouded his vision but he could still see the blue of Jackson's eyes.

"I don't know if I believe you," he said. He wanted to—God, how he wanted to—but there was that churning ball of anger in his stomach and the darkness that gripped his chest and he couldn't imagine feeling like himself again. He hardly remembered what that felt like anyway.

The smile Jackson gave him was sad.

"That's okay," he said. "For now, though: are you still feeling off?"

"That's one way of putting it," Stiles said with a weak smile of his own, or at least an attempt at one. He rubbed at his face again, trying to wipe away the evidence of tears as if that might somehow make him feel less like shit in a million different ways. By the time he looked back up, Jackson had gotten to his feet and was holding out a hand to him.

"I want to try something," he said briskly. "If you'll let me."

Stiles eyed him with something like suspicion, but he was too exhausted to properly maintain that level of skepticism. Besides, all of Jackson's ideas had been helpful so far, on some level of another. What did he have to lose by trusting him? He let Jackson drag him to his feet without question and waited for further instruction.

"This might be a little...weird," Jackson admitted, shifting on his feet and studiously avoiding Stiles' eye. "For us, at least. But it might be good for you, so..."

"What is it?"

Jackson bit his lip, let it roll back out from under his front teeth slowly as he steeled himself to actually say words out loud.

"I want to give you a massage."

Alright, so maybe Stiles could understand why he hesitated.

"If you're not comfortable with that, then it's fine," Jackson hurried to say, like he thought Stiles might start ranting and raving about how inappropriate a proposition it was. "It's just that physical sensation can help to ground you in reality and I thought maybe—"

"Okay."

Jackson stopped abruptly, mouth hanging open for a second or two before it snapped shut again.

"Really?" he asked, incredulous.

Stiles felt a smirk tug at the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow quirking up.

"I trust you to keep the bad touch to a minimum."

He was treated to the utterly delightful sight of pink creeping onto Jackson's cheeks and fervently wished he didn't still currently want to claw his skin off so that he could properly bask in the glory of having actually made Jackson Whittemore blush. Maybe he could make it his goal in life to recreate the moment at a time when he could fully appreciate it. As it was, he still took some pleasure in the way Jackson ran his fingers through his hair, coughed, and made a flaily sort of gesture that was much more characteristic of Stiles himself.

"Right," Jackson said. "Uh, massage, so..."

Stiles obediently pulled his t-shirt over his head, letting letting it take up residence on his floor with the rest of his wardrobe, glad he had already been barefoot and in sweatpants for his afternoon in. He let Jackson push him down onto the bed to settle on his stomach, cheek pillowed on his arms. That meant he was perfectly situated to see the lingering pink marks that crisscrossed the vulnerable skin of his forearms, stark and accusatory, and his fingers twisted themselves into the sheets of their own accord. He closed his eyes.

They snapped open again when a heat settled across the backs of his thighs; Jackson was straddling him. A big portion of him—the portion that was still primarily a horny teenage boy—acknowledged that it was a highly suggestive position and should probably either be horribly awkward or a huge turn on, not quite sure which. The rest of him, a not insignificant part in itself, felt strangely grounded by the weight, like it was anchoring him somehow. He didn't protest, even though Jackson was clearly waiting for him to do so. He just wriggled a bit, jostling Jackson into a more comfortable spot, and tried to forget the fact that he was shirtless, that so much of his skin—the skin that was supposed to be his, that Jackson insisted was his, whether it felt like it or not—was on display.

The first touch of Jackson's hands on his back made him flinch, gentle as it was. Jackson didn't pull away though, just rested lightly along Stiles' shoulder blades, cupping the jut of bone in his palms.

"I want you to follow my hands, okay?" he said. "Really try to feel them everywhere they go. Feel the heat and the pressure. Feel each individual fingertip. Try to identify which muscles I'm working, maybe name them. See if you can move that one muscle by itself. Can you do that?"

Stiles made a noise of assent that was muffled in the crook of his elbow, but he knew Jackson heard it because he went right to work.

Stiles had never consciously examined Jackson's hands before, even though he'd spent the last few days practically clinging to them, but obviously he had been missing out. They were wide and long, fingers slim, and when he spread his fingers those hands spanned Stiles' entire back, folding over and wrapping around his ribs. It was still instinct on some level to cringe away from the contact, from the touch of anything on skin that didn't sit right on his body, but Stiles forced himself to be still and do as Jackson had said.

He kept his eyes shut, turned his attention inwards. Or outwards maybe, he wasn't really sure which was which at this point, but it didn't really matter. He chased the sensations, the warmth of Jackson's skin that seemed to grow hotter by the minute. He tried to count Jackson's fingers as they lay against his side, fitting into the spaces between his ribs and finding the ache that settled there with every new breath. He squirmed when Jackson's thumbs dug into the thick muscles on either side of his spine, dragging upward toward the base of his skull and the knot of pain that lived there.

While he worked, Jackson kept talking, just low murmurs that weren't half as important as the steady drone of his voice, and Stiles found himself half-dozing. He followed Jackson's instructions sleepily, shrugging a shoulder when Jackson tapped on it, spreading his arms out to the sides and then folding them back in, flexing one muscle and then another and another at Jackson's request. Like this, in the close heat of the moment, it was easy to sink into it, to forget anything but the push and sweep and ache of the strong hands on him.

Stiles might have actually fallen asleep, he couldn't be sure, but when he next opened his eyes the itchy-numb, crawling sensation had faded completely and so had most of the light from the window. The weight of Jackson on his legs had disappeared too, sadly, and Stiles frowned into his pillow. Halfheartedly, he tried to shift onto his side, to get a better look around and see where the werewolf had gone, but his limbs were too heavy to cooperate and he gave up pretty quickly, sinking back into the bed with a sigh.

A chuckle came from somewhere; not the raspy kind that haunted his nightmares, but a light one he didn't recognize but knew anyway. Jackson knelt down by the bed, nudging his shoulder until Stiles opened bleary eyes once more to look at him. A brightly colored straw entered his field of vision, sunk into a glass of orange juice, and Stiles let Jackson coax him into drinking some of it, the tang fresh and cool on his tongue.

He should say something, he thought. A thank you, maybe, or a comment on Jackson's potential career as a masseuse. Apparently, though, his mind and body had unanimously decided that it was bedtime, despite the fact that his bedside clock showed they hadn't even hit nine o'clock in the evening yet, and had given up any and all pretense of functionality for the time being. He did manage to mumble out something, but he didn't think it was actually coherent.

Jackson just laughed again, quiet and sort of fond. One of those lovely and talented hands came out to push the hair off Stiles' forehead, smoothing it back and scratching gently across his scalp in a way that sort of made Stiles want to purr like a very large and contented cat.

"Go to sleep, Stiles," he said.

He made to get up, but one last burst of energy let Stiles catch hold of his hand before he could, tugging at him with a noise somewhere between a whine and a groan. Jackson looked down at him in surprise, like he somehow hadn't expected Stiles to want him to stay. Something open and sweet stole across his face, the curve of a smile barely there and no hint anywhere of the smug asshole persona he wore like battle armor, and he pulled Stiles' hand off his wrist to tuck it back into the blanket that had somehow found its way around him when he wasn't paying attention.

If Stiles didn't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his dreams were never so kind, he might have thought he imagined it when Jackson leaned in and pressed his lips against Stiles' forehead. The last thing he heard before sleep overtook him was Jackson's whisper of: "Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere."

A/N: In case you're wondering what Stiles' trigger was, in his researching he accidentally clicked on an article in Russian. The unfamiliar symbols didn't register for what they were and reminded him forcibly of the way it was in his dreams/hallucinations when all writing turned into illegible lettering.