Chapter Text
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche
During the middle of his senior year Stiles got kidnapped. This time by a group of trigger-happy hunters who wanted to know if Stiles had any information – “given his associates” – about the invading Alpha pack. Tied to a chair, Stiles hadn’t seen why he should tell them that he didn’t know shit. Couldn’t know shit when Derek had told him to stay the hell away and Scott was trying to be ‘normal’ (Stiles wanted to know when he had ever been normal).
Stiles just didn’t trust hunters. Not after the last time and the weeks it had taken his ribs to heal. Certainly not after what they’d done to Boyd and Erica. Instead of doing his body a favor and getting killed faster or freed sooner by informing them ever-so-politely that he didn’t have any information, he told them how to judge a body's health based off the components of its shit and asked if the proper name for a group of hunters wasn’t a ‘murder’, “sort of like crows.” That question had perhaps been the inspiration behind hunters creative use of their knives that had resulted in the nerve damage in his right arm. It had definitely been the impetus for the stunning array of color that had immediately begun to blossom around his right eye.
Chris had arrived shortly after, Allison in toe, and put a stop to it. He'd even used his angry face at the other hunters. Told them that the kid didn't have shit to say and blathered on about protocol, about Beacon Hills being his territory. With all the flying words, it had taken some time before anyone had finally doing something about Stiles' arm and tried to bring color back into his increasingly pallid cheeks. Stiles felt justified in comparing himself with a drooping damsel. Even with the drooping, Chris had waited to let Stiles go after the other guys (two men, three women) were across state lines. Far enough that any statement to the police wouldn’t cause problems.
The doctors told Stiles that with to the delay he was lucky to still have the use of his arm. Lucky that there was only a permanent tremor.
Stiles went home to an angry tirade and grounding from his father. Because “who knew what trouble you were getting into that earned you nerve damage." There had been angry sighing and then "You won't talk to me and clearly you can't be trusted out of the house. Perhaps Melinda was right. You shouldn't see Scott either.” Derek's angry threats later that night were just icing on the metaphoric cake.
Stiles had already felt hysterical when he'd talked with the doctors. By the time Derek arrived and certainly by the time he left, all Stiles could do was laugh. It might have been edged with hysteria. The cascades of giggles might have been part of why Derek looked so concerned as check over Stiles' wounds, turned his face and examined the scaring on his arms. Derek bitched and criticized. Blamed him for getting involved and Stiles just laughed. Because Stiles now understood what Nietzsche had been talking about. Hunters were clearly monsters for all they claimed to battle them and Stiles had looked into the abyss and the abyss had fucking seen him.
In Stiles' estimation that gave him two choices: either become a monster or be swallowed by the abyss.
Stiles decided to tip the scales. He began to plan, used his father's interminable grounding as a reason to stay indoors, to work through the all the old stories and odd books he could get his hands on. He spread maps out across his floor and plotted his points. Memorized the exact lay of his path and only then began to go out again. Started to make his move and plant his marks. To take a step forward each night from the start of the witching hour to the end. He hoped he was right about this whole thing.
Stiles started on side of town away from the preserve but circled back into the woods as far back as he could in a year and a day. It was still a long path to walk with blood dripping from his arms and a constant stream of the necessary words pouring from his mouth, combining the fire of his blood and the air of his words to the earth and water of the ground. He hoped they were the right rituals,
It might have been more difficult if Derek hadn't been so studiously ignoring him, if Scott hadn’t been continuing his quest for normality.
Stiles used their averted attention to his advantage. But he did waste a cold moment, backpack slung across his shoulder filled with medical tape and weighed down with an iron knife, to wonder what they would have said. What anyone would have said. He thought Scott wouldn't have understood why Stiles should put himself at risk. He had several scenarios regarding Derek's possible reactions. He almost thought Lydia might actually help him. It would certainly be in Jackson's interest. He couldn't bear to think of what his dad might have said. It didn't matter though, not any of his chilled musings when his shows were filled with water, because no one knew, not a one.
Stiles turned eighteen and withdrew the money his maternal grandfather had left him for college. With the bulk of it, he bought the house that stood at the center of his spiral. The house he had marked out for himself at the beginning of all of this. A small, hacienda style building wrapped around an interior courtyard that was – importantly – under foreclosure by the bank. The realtor assured Stiles it was a steal, his expression slightly terrified. The man had avoided looking directly at him as he signed the papers with a trembling arm.
He didn’t tell anyone about that either. Another secret buried under secrets.
Stiles didn’t talk to anyone about what he was up to until the night he lost his eye. That long evening in which the woods sunk its fingers into him and kept him there well past his normal schedule, pulling him into morning while a hag sat with him. She never stood, never moved, but somehow stayed by him and listened all the while he laid his claims and wove his spells. The hag who had finally asked as the sun rose, her own voice rising in a cadence that scraped his bones, for an eye. Her hand was already out, waiting, and there was nothing for Stiles to do but comply. She'd given him one in return, a round white eye with a flat, grey iris and no pupil. She'd patted his head after examining his original eye and mentioned that it had been a long time since any human had cared enough to do this. She told him just before she vanished (gone one breath to the next) that she and her sisters would rip him apart if he stopped now.
It was the first if many unexpected exchanges that would take place as he wound his way inward, always spiraling inward. Each reminded him that he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to.
It was a week after the hag's visit before his father finally saw him and noticed his eye. He looked at him in horror and didn’t ask a single question. Stiles didn’t tell, even as whispers began to follow him around town.
Stiles didn’t explain to Scott at school or Derek in the woods either. He didn’t want to justify what he was doing. He didn't want to explain why he looked pale and made sure to have liver and onions for breakfast with a shot of wheatgrass. Why dinner now featured red meet and raw vegetables.
He thought Lydia might have become suspicious when he fainted in English class. But she only hissed at him, told him that he was killing himself when he opened his eyes in the nurse’s office to her furious expression. He'd shrugged, tired, and told her that she wouldn't have to worry about Jackson anymore. She didn’t mention it again. But that might have been because it was only days before graduation and he barely saw her again.
Stiles forestalled Scott’s questions about his eyes by asking him excitedly to check out his new look. Scott had been intrigued, curious if it was a contact lens. Isaac, ever at his side, had looked suspicious. The next night Derek had started following him into the woods and Stiles took to wearing red just to piss him off. He wondered if that was why Derek stayed back and didn’t say a word for months.
No matter if Derek kept quiet, Stiles’ path exploded with new sounds and colors as he started the second ring of his spiral. It got louder and brighter as his world shrunk down, as the interior of the spiral became his universe. The wind in the trees became the voices of spirits that chattered him up while he worked. Beams of light displayed the spirits’ colors as they flicked through shape after shape. As he spiraled inward, they became solid and bolder, giving suggestions and asking for tokens. They shot the breeze through with comments on the forest soil and the likelihood of rain.
Which, Stiles mused, meant either that he was crazy or this was working. It reminded him of the Hitchhiker’s Guide and Wonko the Sane. The backwards in was out of it.
When Stiles cut through Hale property Derek finally approached and actually spoke. He was sitting in Stiles' jeep when he opened the door. Looked at Stiles like perhaps he was loosing his grip on something. But he didn’t comment on that, told Stiles instead that whatever he was doing meant that the Alphas were gone. That they had suddenly up and left as if they couldn’t be here another moment. Their scent had only spoken of dread. Stiles wasn’t surprised. He had moved through their camp and found the white tulips and aqua-blue hyacinth the Alphas had left behind.
“I don’t know what you’re doing” Derek said quietly, his voice booming in Stiles’ ears. Stiles didn’t answer, didn’t say a word, just rocked slightly in his seat, unable to stay still as exhaustion flooded his blood. He always felt so tired after a night out.
Derek started again. “I could feel you coming toward the house, you know. You’re doing something that is changing the air, charging the forest with some form of power.” Stiles rested his forehead against the steering wheel and let his arms hang limply at his sides, hands on the seat.
“Will you let us stay?” Derek asked seriously, a finger touching Stiles’ cheek just below his new eye.
Stiles looked at him, turning his head on the wheel. Surprise colored his voice and he wondered if the various spirits could see his words, “You belong here, just like the others. All of the others. Those trees that were so loud yesterday and the water that keeps looking like little birds. You aren’t the only one who calls this bit Hale property, you know. They think this is yours too.”
As he finished, Derek was climbing out of the car. Stiles felt a flicker of wonder if that was the end of their interactions. But it was so hard to care. Perhaps Derek would stop following him now. But then his door was opening and Derek was moving him to the back seat, taking his keys, driving him home. Stiles didn’t remember being carried up stairs, but he woke up the next morning tucked into bed.
The next night Derek was in his car again, sitting in the driver’s seat this time. Looking pointedly at Stiles' trembling frame until he climbed into the passenger’s side. “I want to know what you need” Derek had half-asked Stiles as he turned on the car. Stiles demanded three hairs from each of the current members of Derek’s pack and still didn’t tell Derek what he was doing. Derek kept showing up to drive him home regardless.
A full year, a full revolution, and he reached the center of his spiral. A year and a day after he began, Stiles Stilinski walked through the gate of the house that was now his world. The point just on the edge of town, just next to the preserve and the Hale property. All of it his as long as he never entered any of them again.
Stiles shut the gate behind him. In became out and the world narrowed. His vision reversed and his hearing inverted.