Chapter Text
Stiles awakens to drool dried across his cheek, a monster cowlick, and probably the most grating ringtone to ever grace his ears. Only managing to shut the offending sound off after a good deal of scrabbling about in the moonlit dark, he checks his notifications.
Lyds: Stiles
Lyds: Stiles this is not a drill
Lyds: STILES
Sti: lydia we have school in like
He checks the time.
Sti: three hours
Lyds: Check my location
Lyds: Please
Lyds: I don’t know where I am
Lyds: And my Snap is fucking updating or something
Lyds: Theres this house and shit
The Snap Map wisely tells that she’s in the middle of the preserve. At three in the goddamn morning.
Sti: what the ufck
Lyds: STILES
Sti: you’re in the preserve
Sti: face south, and keep walking
Lyds: How do I face south
Sti: use your constellation app
He clammers for his keys on the nightstand, flopping out of bed and pulling on a stray pair of jeans splayed over the floor.
Sti: I’ll come pick you fup
Lyds: Thank you
Lyds: Thank you
Lyds: Thank you
Sti: don’t get eaten by a coyote
Lyds: Do NOT say that you raging dickhole
It’s not as easy to climb out the window anymore, as he’s bony, tall, and a bit awkward at the elbows, but Stiles manages to make it into the bushes without breaking his neck. Roscoe’s door opens with a long squeak, and she growls as she starts, but all he can do is loudly hush her and try not to wake up the old coot nextdoor.
Crickets sing through the forest. His phone buzzes twice, and then no more.
Lydia probably just told him that she made it to the roadside. She totally didn’t get eaten, right? Right?
Fuck. He’s too tired for this shit.
The preserve is beyond terrifying at night--even in broad daylight you’d feel like you’re being watched by something in the brambles. There are steep, short ravines and trees with thick, winding roots, and the soil hums with something supernatural. Beneath the canopy, the sky is dimmed, the grass cold, only shedding warmth in pinpricks of light through the cracks.
When he sees a figure shrouded in black, he declines to the curb and flicks out his phone.
Sti: hey I’m the car in front of you
Sti: get in I’ve got the butt warmer on
Lyds: Where??
Lyds: I can’t see you
Sti: turn around nimrod
The figure shifts, slightly, and makes no move to approach. An uneasy shiver drips down Stiles’ spine.
Sti: do you see anything on the road around you
Lyds: NO??
Lyds: I don’t hear anything either???
He checks her location. She’s further down the road.
Sti: if I’m here
Sti: and you’re not here
Sti: then who the fuck is standing on the roadside at three in the morning
Lyds: What do you mean
Lyds: Stiles who is there with you
The figure isn’t--it’s like a slate of void against the low light. Still, Stiles has this nagging feeling, like--
Lyds: That’s not me
Lyds: Get out of there
Like he’s being watched.
.+` ( `+.
Lydia is caked in dried mud and soot, like she clawed her way out of crater. She conks out in the passenger seat as soon as they’re back on track to home, bathed in the safety of moonlight.
When they get home, he clears most of the mess with the outside hose, but then she’s shivering her way up the stairs to Stiles’ room. She rifles through his drawers for a fresh shirt and sweatpants, fishes a brush from the bathroom, and swiftly kicks him out with a soft click of the door. Not a word is spoken between them.
He slides down the wood and flips his phone open.
Misfit: hey you have spider senses right
Misfit: oh wait you’re probably asleep
Misfit: anyway there was a weird Dark Figure in the preserve, you might wanna tell your mom about it
Misfit: or maybe your dad. Your mom is kinda scary
The door opens, and he collapses against the floor.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” parrots Lydia, smacking a hand over his and hauling him upward.
“Are you going to tell me why you were in the preserve at three AM?”
“No. Because I don’t know either. Can I use your shower in the morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
.+` ( `+.
Furry: Stiles, I think you might have been hallucinating.
Furry: Especially since you sent that to me at three in the morning, and nobody in the house was tipped off by a disturbance in the preserve.
Furry: Why were you even there?
Misfit: lydia apparently woke up there, even though she remembers physically going to bed
Misfit: I went to go pick her up, and I thought I found her, but instead there was just. This dude
Furry: “This dude.”
Misfit: shut up
Misfit: it was freaky
Furry: I can try to pick up a trail after school, but if it didn’t set off our sigils, I doubt it’s anyone malicious.
Furry: Are you staying at home today?
Misfit: only slept in
Misfit: no offense to my feminist homies but FUCK womens literature
Misfit: we’ll see you at lunch
Furry: Copy that.
When he glances up, Scott is correcting Stiles’ multiple choice sheet along with his own. Bless that man.
“What’s the verdict?” he murmurs, unwilling to catch the attention of their fickle French teacher.
“That she’s probably sleepwalking.” She’s not.
“I don’t want to miscredit you, but why would she text? Why not Allison?”
The question of the hour. Lydia isn’t even involved in the supernatural community, much like Scott and Boyd and Allison. Why she texted Stiles—whose phone number she has because of a group project they did freshman year biology—could be anyone’s guess.
In a bout of honesty, “We still grew up together. Maybe Allison wasn’t answering her texts. It was three AM, after all.”
He only hums.
.+` ( `+.
Signora keeps playing ABBA. Derek thinks he may kill her.
Cora sighs, placing her phone face-down on his desk, pinching the bridge of her nose. The gesture is affectionately reminiscent of their older sister, Laura.
“Uncle’s safe and sound in the hospital. Stiles must finally be going insane.” She slumps back against her seat, arms crossing.
Derek would be lying if he didn’t inwardly heave a sigh of relief given their uncle hadn’t magically un-comafied himself and strolled around the Preserve at three in the morning. It’s the little things.
“Don’t say that.” Derek slides her grammar sheet back to her. “And your conjugations are wrong again.”
“I hate this class.”
“Our entire family speaks Spanish. It’s not my fault you were too stubborn to learn the writing portion.”
“I don’t understand how a teenage girl could just--” She waves her hands about in a poof! motion, completely ignoring the sheet in front of her. “Y’know? And with no previous history of sleepwalking?”
“Maybe she’s being possessed.”
“One more angry ghost in this town and I’m moving to Georgia with Laura.”
“Georgia with Laura,” Derek parrots in a snuff.
“Did the Nogitsune get out?”
He levels her with a blank stare. “If the Nogitsune got out she’d have--quite noticeably--killed several people at this point.”
“Lovely, so we can scratch that one off.”
“Still, it’s an evil kitsune. Tricksters can take their time, too.”
Her head falls to the desk. “Christ.”
“Don’t worry. Our best clue is, that if Stiles’ judgment is right, whatever was out there didn’t trip our bonds and isn’t malicious.”
“Maybe it was just some random dude.”
His eyebrow cocks high. “‘Some random dude’ probably would’ve called for help if he were stuck in the preserve at three AM.”
“Dehydration,” she states.
“More likely that he’d be a zombie.”
She shoots him a quizzical look. “Zombies exist?”
The smile he gives cuts weird through his cheek, sharp and unintended. “No, idiot.”
The bell rings, and Cora shovels stray sheets into her mess of a bookbag. Her Twilight keychain jingles against the zipper. “Don’t scare me like that. I genuinely believed you for a minute there.”
When she rises, Derek pushes their chairs in, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “I thought you got the ‘zombies aren’t real, they can’t hurt you’ talk from dad?”
“I wasn’t a pissbaby about walking corpses--” She heaves the class door open, and they set off down the bright hall-- “like you and Laura were.”
“The Walking Dead was a completely justifiable source of fear.”
“Maybe, if you watch it at ten years old, which you did, and then fled crying!”
“At least I didn’t binge South Park at five years old thinking it was a normal cartoon.”
“I plead the fifth! Where’s your evidence?!”
“Mom.”
She rolls her eyes. “Right.”
Still, it irks him that Lydia could’ve easily gotten killed out there. If they don’t figure this out, then they’ll have to leave it to their parents. And nobody wants to stress out their parents.
Sunlight flashes over Cora as they whisk through the hall. Their peers are loud and overbearing around them: High voices and easy pushes and tired sighs.
At least it’s not a Friday. The school plays shitty pop over the intercoms on Fridays, and he prays that they’ll forget every time.
The breezeway doors screech loudly behind them as they make their way to the bleachers beside the football field. The breeze bites, though the sun mulls it over with its heady rays. Stiles, Lydia, Allison, and Boyd are spread out over two levels of seats, sandwiches and drinks resting on rustling wrappers.
“Stiles,” Cora greets, dragging Derek to sit beside her a row above the others. “Scott’s usually with you?”
“Something-something lacrosse,” Stiles says around a large bite of ham and cheese. “I wouldn’t bring him to this anyway.”
“Now that everyone’s here,” Lydia sighs, “could we please figure out a plan of action? If I wake up with dirt caked irreversibly in my hair again, I’ll go crazy and die.”
“I think we should go to the scene of the crime after school.”
“Stiles, don’t make it sound like a murder.”
“Sorry.”
Softly, Boyd interjects, “Erica and I won’t be able to go. I have a history test tomorrow that I have to cram for, and she’s going to read me flash cards.”
“Cramming is not studying the day before. Cramming is studying five minutes before,” Stiles says.
“I think you’re just a bad student.”
“You may or may not be correct.”
Their group must look peculiar, from the outside. Two Hale children, the son of the late Hale Emissary (there’s a joke in the juxtaposition of that, somewhere), the son’s two awkward friends (only one today), and Lydia Martin. Derek has very little relation to Lydia Martin--she’s like her mom: pretty, straight-A smart, a little mean.
He swerves the conversation back to Lydia, “Where exactly did you wake up?”
“In a really shoddy grave. Horrible craftsmanship.” Despite her humoring tone, she shivers. “I think it was… in front of the Hale house. The old one.”
Derek’s brows climb his forehead.
“Before Stiles gets too ahead of himself: I did go to sleep in my own bed.”
Stiles squacks, affronted, “I wasn’t going to ask that!”
“I could see it in your eyes, you plank.”
Derek shakes off the shivers behind his ribs, the hair raising over his arms. “The Old House... if we’re going to investigate, I can’t go.”
While leeway is nonexistent whenever Derek speaks, the air is thick with an unnanounced, mutual agreement. He doesn’t like going into the specifics of The Fire—least of all the fact he caused it—but he’s also not going to push himself directly into six more months of perscribed therapy. Self-care? Self-care.