Chapter Text
Stiles first notices how the water mutes his surroundings, and the sound of his father’s badge scraping against the rim of the basin startles him enough to remember to pull his hands in the water. The corners of the badge dig into his skin as he grips it tighter, trying to think of anything but his father’s face if he doesn’t survive this. The water is freezing, filled with herbs that irritate his exposed skin just enough to notice, but not enough to pull his focus from the cold and the dread of waiting. Even feeling his heartbeat pound in his ears is wrong somehow, knowing that soon that sound will stop, that his lungs will burn and his head will pound until he opens his mouth and lets the water drown him.
He is aware of every second; his body dulls and gets heavy with the weight of his clothes. Though he feels the seconds pass he cannot measure them in anything but the tightness in his chest and the desperate urge he has to struggle against the hands holding him down. He pities Lydia and Isaac. He doesn’t know if he could do the same if Scott asked this of him. He imagined more pain, more desperation. He thinks of Matt and how he must have thrashed under the water. Instead he feels the world narrowing and the water feels like its embracing him, slithering around his limbs trying to hold him under. He isn’t sure of much more after that. All he remembers is a burning and the thin tendons of Lydia’s wrists when he gripped them struggling for air as water passed through his lips and down his throat.
****
When asked what death feels like, Stiles gives a pretty perfunctory answer. It feels like nothing, because you’re dead. But Deaton’s words catch on his thoughts sometimes, like a loose thread catching on splintered wood; at times the darkness feels real and it stays with him, pulling at his memory. He remembers blurs of shapes and swirls contorting like ink in water. He remembers stillness and silence. It’s not that he expected a bright light or choirs of angels singing, but damnit he imagined something, not just emptiness. It felt wrong, like hell with no fire, just endless muted darkness.
When his Baba Agnieszka died his mother was too beside herself to explain to him what had happened. He remembered his confusion as he and his father sat on the hard and yellowing plastic cover of her paisley couch while his mother cried over her body in the other room. When he went in to visit, before the funeral home collected the body, his mother was keeping vigil in the corner. Her whispered prayers as she clutched her rosary sounded so foreign to Stiles that he could barely focus on the dead body that had once been his grandmother.
That was the first death he had ever experienced, until his mom two years later. Just the soft and hazy memories remain of them both; the warm candies his grandmother kept in her coat pocket for him when they would walk to mass on Sundays, the soft surprised laugh after he shaved his head for the first time so his mom wouldn’t be embarrassed about losing her hair, and the feeling of her hand in his as she whispered to him from the hospital bed, calling him Pucek as his grandmother used to. When he imagined his mother and grandmother after they died he pictured warmth and soft clouds. He pictured his coloring books from Sunday school, before he stopped going all together, with angels and light. He didn’t picture nothing, and he didn’t picture being alone.
***
When the stillness ends, the pain flushes out like fire over dry grass. Everything feels like agony and he can't distinguish sound from touch or smell. His eyes stay firmly shut and he feels as if a tide is pulling him under, curling in pounding crescents that rip any sense or thought from his mind. The waves are relentless, some force feels like its lifting him up to the surface but at the last moment the wave pulls around him and drags him back under. He sinks deeper and becomes aware of movement in the blackness. What was still is now writhing and what was silent is screaming so loud he doesn’t know how to block it out. He feels a grasping, pulling, choking force on his body bringing him back to the stillness, but the dark remains unsettled.
A flash of heat sears his skin, his awareness of his body so sudden it feels like pulling on wet clothes ten sizes too big. Something is wrong, something doesn’t fit but the pulling suddenly stops and his eyes slam open to light so bright it feels blinding. He can feel breath in his lungs as they struggle to expand and water dripping down his skin as he starts to shiver. The goose pimples that break out over his arms and legs are painful, every nerve feeling chaffed from lack of blood flow to his brain. He spends countless seconds feeling his body again, feeling sensation and trying to force his mind to start processing the loud hum in his ears and the herbal smell cloying at his nostrils.
His eyelid is pulled open to more light swaying back and forth but he can’t focus his vision enough to process it. He would fight the intrusion but his limbs feel leaden and cold. As the humming starts to get softer, he brain begins to distinguish voices and words but he can’t understand them yet. His focus is overtaken by sudden warmth, too hot but better than the freezing cold of before. His fingers register the softness of a blanket and the shaking begins to stop as he feels his body relax and suddenly the darkness seems much more preferable than blinding light and sharp pain.
***
When he opens his eyes again he feels instantly awake and aware. His back aches from whatever his body is laid out on, so curiously he pulls his fingers out of their death clutch on the blanket around him to push down on the soft give of the vinyl cot. The only light in the room is the surgical light over one of the steel examination tables in the center of the room, but he can make out Deaton leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and his face devoid of expression save for a slight worried wrinkle in the middle of his forehead. There is a sharp squeak as a chair is pulled over to the cot and Lydia leans over him, petting his head while her eyes scan his face looking for signs of recognition.
“What happened?” he croaks out, barely recognizing his own voice as he struggles past the tightness in his throat. He feels like he’s been used as a werewolf chew toy, his muscles screaming in protest as tries to sit up, Lydia takes his hand in hers. Her eyes water as she bites down on her lip and he takes a second to appreciate how beautiful she is.
“Stiles, you didn’t….you didn’t come back….after” she stops and chokes a little on the words she is clearly determined to get out. “When you went under the water everything was fine and then Deaton brought Scott and Allison out of it. You just…you wouldn’t come back.”
Stiles looks around the room expecting to see Isaac, Scott, and Allison somewhere but they are the only three people in the room. He starts a little as Deaton comes toward him and crouches down next to the cot. “It took some time to pull you back Stiles. You were meant to be dead, clinically dead, for just a few seconds. It took me more than an hour to bring you back” Deaton explains like that is supposed to mean anything to Stiles right now. He feels ass backwards, like he doesn’t fit, uncomfortable in his own skin.
“What do you mean an hour? How am I-?” he stutters as he tries to communicate his confusion.
“I did everything I could. I could feel awareness but you weren’t responding to Lydia, Scott, anyone as a tether. Lydia and I kept trying but-"
“But I made it back right? So it worked? Is my dad ok? Scott, where’s Scott? Why isn’t he here?” Stiles fires the questions the second they swim into focus, trying to make sense of the whole picture when he feels like he only has jagged pieces. Deaton hushes him as he and Lydia share a glance too loaded with information not to get him more worked up. Lydia answers him first.
“When the others came out of it Scott tried to help you get back but you weren’t responding and they needed to find the nemeton. They left a few hours ago, while you’ve been asleep. I’ve been calling but no one is answering. Stiles…I don’t know-"
Stiles cuts her off as he pushes his legs to the side of the bed and nudges Deaton aside as he stands on wobbly footing. He reaches down to his clothes and palms through his pockets only to remember he put his phone on the counter before he went in the basin. Deaton tries to get him to sit back down but however uncoordinated he manages to make it over to the counter and grab his phone. He scrolls through looking for messages or calls but finds nothing. A frustrated growl erupts in his throat as he turns back to his audience only to catch his eye on the light glinting from his father’s badge at the bottom of the tub of ice water. Stumbling, he crashes to his knees and fishes it out of the water, trying to ignore the cloying tightness erupting in his chest and throat. Everyone he loves, everyone is out there right now and he knows nothing.
“Stiles we don’t even know where they are and stumbling into a fight between the Darach and a pack of alphas is suicide. If you both stay here you remain under my protection but once you leave I cannot help you” Deaton reasons as Stiles gathers his shoes and clumsily ties the strings. When his fingers slip for the third time a flash of strawberry blond hair encompasses his vision and his hands are swatted away as Lydia takes over for him, tying the strings in neat bows in seconds. She looks up as she finishes and they share the same determined look before turning to Deaton as one.
***
Looking over at her from the passenger side of his Jeep, Stiles can see bruises forming around Lydia’s wrists that could only be from his hands. The sight hypnotizes him a little as he struggles to formulate contingency plans A,B, and C should things have already gone wrong by the time they reach the preserve. As long as he is planning he isn’t thinking about his father, or Scott, or any of the people he has become so close to lying prone on the ground, life stolen from their bodies while he was helpless to stop it. He may not have claws or teeth or superhuman strength, but his human hands can do damage of their own.
The jeep rumbles into his own driveway first as Lydia struggles with the manual transmission. He can feel the damage she is doing to his baby as she ‘grinds it till she finds it’ as his dad would say. When she finally puts it in park he hops out on his marginally more stable legs and jams the passcode into the code box for the garage, impatiently waiting for it to open as Lydia trails behind him.
“I don’t understand what the hell I’m supposed to do with a gun Stiles, I’ve never even touched one” Lydia complains as she follows him up the stairs to his dad’s bedroom. He swings open the closet door and crouches down in front of the sizable gun safe his dad has buried under clothes barely clinging to their hangers and storage boxes. He sighs a little at the state of the closet but crouches down and swings the dial to 1-23-64 and the safe opens. His dad really needs to change the number; pretty much every password he uses is his wife’s birthday.
“Wouldn’t you rather go into a fight with something? We may not be storing an arsenal for the zombie apocalypse like the argents but a 45 is something ok” Stiles responds, rolling his eyes heavily as she takes the gun he passes to her by the handle and holds it between her thumb and her forefinger like he just handed her a dirty tissue. He grabs it back from her and readjusts her hands around it so she is holding it properly and shows her how to take the safety off. When she looks surer of it he takes it back and loads it for her, hoping his dad won’t ground him for this later. Much, much later if he can help it.
“Aren’t you going to use one?” she asks, as he closes the door of the safe and spins the dial. They cross the hall into Stiles’ room as he tugs the bottom panel off of his cheap IKEA dresser and pulls out a Tupperware container of black ash. He opens it up and inspects it, just in case, before turning and digging beneath his bed to produce a standard wooden bat. Lydia raises her eyebrow at him as he sits on his bed to open the container.
“Ok so I may have pilfered some mountain ash from Deaton’s office. I figured it would be useful someday, alright?” he responds defensively. “The one I temporarily sort of borrowed from the McCall's house kind of split in two at the hospital so I figure if I can’t get a bat made of whatever tree mountain ash is made from, we can just coat this one in it? What do you think?”
“ Rowan” she corrects as she sits down to help him. Stiles remains confused and she huffs in exasperation before explaining, “Sorbus scopulina, native to California, commonly known as a rowan tree. That’s where mountain ash comes from.”
“ Right” Stiles responds, once again feeling a like a twelve year old idiot trying to get the attention of the prettiest girl in school. She dips her fingers into the powder and suggests they coat the bat in oil first so the mountain ash will stay. The closest thing Stiles has in his kitchen is olive oil, and though he feels a little bit like he is trying to make a sloppy last minute science project this is really his only idea so it’s just going to have to work.