because a vision softly creeping

left its seeds while I was sleeping

He's driving around one night when he should be in bed. He dry swallows three extra Adderall and feels them stick in his throat, wondering if he'll choke on them. The idea kind of makes his stomach fill with laughter.

And with a sense of tiredness, he parks outside the 24-hour convenience to get some water because the pills are starting to dissolve while they stick and they taste like how Stiles imagines meth would taste.

On the ground of the parking lot, he almost steps on something; a full pack of cigarettes that someone dropped. He picks them up (and the Adderall finally slips down the rest of his esophagus).

The first time he tried smoking he coughed so hard that Scott lent him his inhaler and he sat for ten minutes in the woods behind their middle school with his head between his knees, watching the cigarette slow-burn a hole in a leaf on the ground, and thinking about cancer, thinking about his mom in heaven or wherever. It was the only time he could truly empathize with Scott's lungs. He said he'd never do it again.

But Scott's asthma is cured now. And it's been a while since Stiles has even said the word "cancer".

In the store he buys a bottle of water. He buys a lighter.

Sitting in his car with the windows up, under the flickering light of the store sign, he tries smoking for the second time in his life. It tickles and burns. It tastes like tar and ichor. He likes how the smoke makes a haze in front of him; he focuses on the plumes and the ribbons of white twirling out of his two fingers. It looks like magic. He doesn't really give a shit about werewolves, and giant lizards, and durachs, and mountain ash force fields, and coming back from the dead, kicking and screaming

He silently says sorry to his mother. He likes the little thrum of energy behind his eyes. He likes how his body rejects the bitterness. He likes the smell and how it's thick and encompassing, how it covers everything.

He drives around when he should be in bed because it's always keeping him up at night.

He doesn't want to think about what "it" is, but Deaton's words stir in his head all the time, even though Deaton was wrong- it's not a darkness at all. It's more like a fog, like a smoke. There, in his peripheral. There, hiding on his back. A hole that swallows; a hole that's more grey than black (and he knows that he's letting it in, that it's pouring into him like dry sand into his mouth, filling his organs, crying from his eyes, leaking out of his ears).

This is how it feels: it feels like a phantom wound, or like something that itches no matter how long you scratch it. It's an empty cup in his hand, but his fingers are cramping around it. It's so heavy that he can't tell if it's making him stronger, bearing its weight, or if it's just wearing him down. A strange and illogical weight of nothingness.

The Adderall is a distraction, something that lets him obsess over the curvature of the road ahead of him, the voices of the characters on TV. But alone in his bed, it pokes and nudges at his brain like the annoying little sister he never had.

So he puts his hand on his dick before he can slip too deep into it, he tenses his thighs, and gets hard quickly and efficiently. He wants to come, suddenly (lately he's been wanting for nothing and feeling nothing, but this different, it's almost substance). He works his hand, bites his lip, suppressed a groan into his lungs until it comes out as a sweet, tingling breath, and his thumb circles around the head of his cock like he's a robot and this is his only function. He imagines someone else's hand on him. He goes faster until he's coming. Wet and white.

(When he does this, he sometimes thinks about what Lydia would look like with her legs wide open. And sometimes he thinks about that night with Derek's slack body in the pool when Jackson was circling them. Derek positioned in his arms, bracing his weight, kicking his legs, feeling the malleable warm muscles completely loose in Stiles hands, and knowing that he was the only thing keeping Derek Hale alive.)

Stiles used to have excellent grades, but now he's failing two classes this semester. Ms. Morrell calls him into her office to warn him that they're calling his Dad in for a meeting soon.

"You'll have to give up your position on the team," she tells him. "And you'll have to repeat your year if this doesn't change- you know that."

He likes her. Maybe even more than Deaton. He remembers when it felt easy enough to be in this office, in this chair, talking to her in details about his feelings. Except that had been about real life, about real problems, about life-or-death.

So this is fucking condescending, really.

"Can't you just change my marks in the system? Tell them I did some extra credit or whatever?"

"And you'll be behind for the rest of your high school career."

He feels anger flaring and churning in his stomach. It's irrational, makes his teeth grind against each other, and his jaw lock like she's insulted him (even though she probably cares about him, even though he knows she's not trying to make things harder for him than they already are).

"You think it matters what number is beside my name on a transcript? Are you crazy?"

She takes a big breath and settles into her chair more. Her voice drops in volume and tone.

"It's been months since the Alphas were dismantled. Jennifer is gone. It's quiet."

"It's always quiet until it's not." The resentment crawls up through his teeth. Somewhere inside, he hears himself being a brooding dick, but he can't stop it.

"If you don't try to have a normal life then what's the point of fighting what's out there?"

"There's no such thing as normal."

That's not exactly true; Stiles remembers what it felt like to be himself before Scott was turned, when he used to wish that something amazing would happen, when he used to drag Scott into all sorts of crap so they could have a chance at breaking the boredom (like searching for bodies...choosing to dig them up). He should have been more careful what he wished for. Everything is different. Everything is extraordinary. Now he sees the little old lady next door who likes to garden at night by the glow of small lights, hunched over with her tiger lilies and he thinks, she's a fairy. She's a little garden nymph. He'll see the blood donation truck drive by and picture a horde of vampires breaking into it, stealing the bags of O-Neg and selling them into some kind of underground blood ring. One night, his dad was watching a show on the Discovery Channel. "Searching for Bigfoot". And it occurred to Stiles (in an almost horrific kind of eureka moment) that Bigfoot is plausibly just some harrier version of the alpha twins. The things he's seen- wolves, lizards, and the dead-the dead, always the dead- they've ruined the normal. They've ruined the joy of getting an A on a paper.

When he gets up, he looks at her, incredulous and annoyed, and he adds, "You're supposed to be a goddamn emissary, right?"

"Stiles-"

"Do what you want. Fail me. Expel me."

And she doesn't try to stop him when he leaves her office. He doesn't go back to English class. He goes outside to the sidewalk and lights his last cigarette, huddling away from the wind, cursing until the flame stays lit for long enough. He faces the window of the classroom he's meant to be sitting in. It's mildly liberating not being there.

He catches Lydia's attention, catches her eye, sees her look up from her notes to stare at him questioningly through the window.

He breathes out a long smoke-covered sigh.

In his head, he can see the image of Lydia's face like it's burned into his retna. It's what he saw before he woke in the half-melted ice that night- the thing that dragged him from the mud and the tree stump in the woods and back to the cold metal; her red glow, gold halo of light, the pink, sharp cheek with the curl curving around it, and the blinking doe eyes staring right at him. It had been so bright.

But the image is ebbing away now. It's cracking at the edges like old paint.

And that also feels mildly liberating, though he doesn't know why.

Scott tries to come around a few times. He blows him off, says that he's got a midterm prep thing to do, that he's sick, that he's sleeping. More often than not, he just doesn't answer his phone, ignores the texts.

And the ones from Lydia. And the ones from Isaac.

He's the Alpha now and it's changed things.

Like when he comes to Stiles' house and opens the door without knocking. It's the middle of a Wednesday and Stiles is lying dormant in his boxers, mourning the empty bottle of Adderall that was supposed to last him two more weeks.

"Come on in," he says when Scott slams the door behind him.

"Dude," Scott says, wrinkling his grabs a pair of jeans from the pile of laundry beside his bed and tugs them on. "You didn't come to school today."

Stiles rubs his face with his hands. He's tired. So, so tired. He can't sleep well anymore. He likes to drive at night when his Dad is snoring. He likes to smoke and speed down long, empty roads, waiting for deer or unicorns or Peter Hale to jump out in front of his car.

"And you weren't there yesterday. Or the day before."

"Suspension," Stiles says. "They want me to finish these extra credit books by next week."

Scott looks toward the pile of (unopened) textbooks on the floor and back at Stiles. He's confused. His nostrils flare.

"You stink like smoke."

Stiles shrugs in response; it's all he's got the energy for.

"What's going on with you lately?"

And there is this anger that aches inside of him, like sharp particles of glass shifting in the greyness, because how can Scott not know? But also, of course Scott doesn't know what's happening, of course he can't feel it. So there's anger in his chest that scares him. He wears it down to a fine, sharp point in his mind. The anger turns into a needle. He tells Scott in a soft, unconcerned voice,

"Nothing, it's nothing. They've been switching my dosage around for the past few weeks. I'm a little foggy."

Only he's thinking,

I wish you would go. I wish you would go. I wish you would go.

But he's still his best friend. So he asks Scott if he wants to play GTA5 and he makes a pot of very strong coffee because he doesn't have any cigarettes left. He plays the game with focused concentration and precision curse words. Ms. Morell would call this "normal" behaviour.

Scott sniffs the air and looks uncomfortable, tries to ask him about the whole smoking thing, tries to ask why, but Stiles doesn't have an answer.

He just doesn't care anymore.

For today, he lets it go and finishes the video game while Stiles scrolls through random, disconnected pages of the internet on his bed, pretending to study. They don't talk much. He can feel Scott's alpha sense of entitlement waiting to burst out and interrogate him, but bless him, Scott keeps his mouth shut.

One night, he is a girl in her boyfriend's car.

They are driving down a back road, speeding through the country intersections. The music is loud. Her hand is on the boyfriend's leg, rubbing circles into his thigh as he wiggles his hips to get his cock closer to her. She raises a bottle of maple-flavored whiskey to her lips and swallows. It burns sweetly on her tongue.

"I love you," she says for the hundredth time. Her head spins. She's drunk and in love. He laughs at her, saying,

"You're drunk!"

And Stiles says (only her name isn't Stiles, it's Amanda and she knows this),

"I'm not drunk, you're drunk."

And she stops touching his thigh to touch his hand instead where it rests on the gear shift that he keeps moving. She bounces with the jumps that the car makes.

Then she checks her make-up in the mirror. She has grey eyes covered with kohl. She looks good under the dim light.

She's using her pinky finger to wipe a stray eyelash away from her lid when the car jerks her to the left. The painted nail of her finger falls forward and stabs her until it's lodged abnormally into the cavity of her eye, a bizarre and alarming pain, and she can't see as her body is thrown to the left and then the right, her hair tossing with everything else. She feels his arm pressed against her and they're moving forward in this erratic speed, and she's about to scream from the pain when they hit something final- crashing, she realizes. Then she feels the movement of her neck throwing itself back farther than it could possibly go until-

Stiles wakes up before the pain of it starts.

Shaking, he touches his face to feel his features, to make sure it's still him, to make sure he's not blind in his left eye, and cracks his neck to feel that it's still attached to his spine.

He's had this dream three times already.

And he's pissed the bed.

His dad comes homes some nights and goes straight for the bottle.

He hears the sound of the cruiser's keys dropping on the counter and the gun being set on the side table, and then the sound of a glass clinking; a lid spinning open.

In the kitchen, his dad sips the drink slowly at first, but then takes bigger and bigger gulps.

"Something bad?" Stiles asks. He envisions dog-sized spiders, faceless serial killer victims, little kids oozing black ichor from their mouths.

"Nothing weird." His dad takes the time to look at him- to make it pointed.

(It's not like he never took being sheriff seriously before, but Stiles has noticed that he comes home later more than earlier. He's noticed old case files dating back to the 70's piling up in his office, as if he's been going through every single crime committed in Beacon Hills and trying to categorize which ones were the wolves or which ones were something darker.)

"Pretty bad wreck off the main route," he tells him. "Couple of college kids."

Stiles can taste maple whiskey at the back of his throat, and he can feel the empty stinging of his left eye, hear the memory of the loud snap that woke him up. But he pushes that dream out. He refuses to make the connection.

"They're dead?" he asks.

His dad doesn't say anything, just takes another drink, finishing the whole glass.

He gets cigarettes from a convenient store that's a few miles out of town and they don't ID him because the store is barely keeping afloat by the looks of the dusty shelves and empty parking lot. The guy at the counter just asks him what brand and Stiles doesn't know what kind of brands there are to buy so he just says,

"Surprise me."

It's the middle of the night again and he feels the sweet kiss of the smoke in his lungs, the breeze through the open window, and it's the closest thing to happiness he's felt in a month. He even turns on the radio and taps along to some 90's alt rock station as he drives.

He's going past the cemetery on the outskirts of Beacon Hills when he sees her up ahead- a black shadow until his headlights shine on her. He slows down a bit. A girl is walking along the side of the road and she has no shoes even though it's almost winter and he can see her breath steaming in the air above her head. He stops all together because this falls under the category of weird, and a little, vindictive part of him springs forth as if its been waiting for something like this, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dread springs forth as well.

"Hey," he shouts from his unrolled window.

When he gets close enough, he sees that it's fucking Allison.

"Jesus." He slips out of his car and tosses the cigarette away as he comes around to grab her, leaving the car running. The upbeat sound of "Semi-Charmed Life" coming from his radio dissonantes everything.

Her shoulders are cold in his hands, her hair is wet like she just got out of the shower, and she's only wearing a long t-shirt that he thought was a dress at first. Her eyes are downcast. She won't look at him so he shakes her.

When he yells, "Allison!" she snaps her head up and blinks, jerks away from Stiles's hands and takes a wobbly step backward, then looks around with her eyes wide and scared.

Touching her hair, she shakes her head. Tears are shining in her eyes.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asks her.

"I don't-" and she cuts herself off to hold her hand over her mouth.

"Are you okay?"

She shakes her head and then she drops to her knees. Allison starts to vomit with deep, retching noises on the ground and Stiles is scared for a moment before he leans down with her, holds her hair back as she gets sick and sick and sick for minutes, making terrible noises. She sounds like she's sobbing, like she's trying to say something. She murmurs, "leave me alone, leave me alone," again and again, but Stiles doesn't think she's talking about him because when he tries to pull away, her hand tightens on his arm like he's her only safety bar on a rollercoaster.

After, she falls back and leans into him. She presses her face into his shoulder and she breathes long, deep breaths. There's a bit of vomit on his sweater.

"You're alright, you're alright," he keeps saying, not knowing if it's true. He's shaking, but not as much as her.

They stay like that for a while. Until Stiles's legs are trembling from crouching for so long, until she starts to really shiver from the cold, as if it's all hitting her at once. He considers calling Scott, but it feels like the wrong thing to do.

"Can you take me home?" she finally says

"Yeah...yeah, come on."

He takes off his hoodie and tries to put it over her shoulders, but she just grabs it from his hands and stands up on her own, slips the jacket on and zips it up with quick, mechanical movements, as if she hadn't been puking her internal organs out just now.

He's not even going to try opening the door for her.

When they're driving, she rests her head on the window. He's itching for nicotine. If there was any time for nicotine it's now.

"Are you gonna tell me what that was?" he decides to say as a U2 song starts to play on the radio. He slams his fist on the off button.

"Why are you driving out here in the middle of the night?" she says instead of answering him.

"At least I'm awake...and wearing shoes."

"I wasn't sleepwalking."

He grabs the new pack from the dashboard with one hand and decides that he's given up on feeling ashamed of it. He just lights one to fill the space with something other than what Allison isn't saying. As they stop at a red light, he feels her hand come and take the cigarette from his. She takes a long, deep pull on it like she's practiced and holds it in longer than you ought to before blowing out a thin stream. She looks up, looks like she wants to cry, rubs her thigh harshly with one hand.

"I went to the cemetery," she says before taking a big breath in. "It's foggy- I... It's the second time this week."

"Do you remember why you were at the cemetery in the middle of the night?"

"It was my Mom." She stares for a long moment out of the window. "She told...she...she was there. " She bites her fist, throws the cigarette out the window- really about to lose it. "I'm so- I'm so f-fucking scared."

"Hey, hey, hey-" he takes Allison's skinny shoulder and guides it toward him, and she's crying. It makes his own eyes prickle because he feels...he feels like he knows that stirring that she's feeling, the strange and massive entity that has been there all along is over their shoulders right now, watching them.

He's reminded again of the car wreck on the main route, on the road he's scared to drive past (because it will look familiar; because it will mean that he was there, in the dream). He takes the back roads to avoid it.

"It's all fucked up," she whispers.

Stiles wants to tell her that it's not.

He wants to.

Snooping around in his father's office, he finds the car accident photos from the scene.

The yellow markers are in place around the body of a tall boy who Stiles remembers touching on the the thigh. There's a picture of a bottle of maple whiskey, somehow still in tact. sitting on the dashboard of the crumpled car.

The car is embedded in a tree.

The picture of the girl is grotesque. Her legs are crushed. Her neck is broken and blue. Her pinky finger is lodged into a bleeding eye.

Those eyes were grey and covered in kohl. She had looked good in the dim light of the car. She had been drunk and in love.

Stiles remembers being her for three nights in a row.

Allison comes over one night, and because she's an Argent, she climbs up the goddamn drainpipe and onto his roof. Her tap at the window is sharp enough to stir him out of the Adderall tunnel.

She looks a bit better now. Her hair is dry and clean. She's wearing a bit of makeup- not the usual full glamor face, but enough to cover the shadows under her eyes. Stiles can tell she hasn't been sleeping either.

After she climbs inside, she brushes her fingers through her hair and looks around the room like she's never been here before, and Stiles can't remember if she has been here before, but she inspects his walls with long glances before she sits down on his bed.

"So," he says, sitting next to her. "Dead people?"

"I'm not…I'm not crazy." She says it like she's practiced it in the mirror.

"I'm open to it. The whole ghost thing, I mean, why not, right?"

He wants her to tell him everything.

"I woke up one night really late. It's always 3 AM when it happens." She glances at the clock, which now says 2:48 AM. "And there was someone in my room and it scared me at first, but then I realized it was Mom. And I was…I was tired so I didn't really think about it, about how she's dead." She starts to chew on her nails that are practically non-existent. "It's like that in the mornings sometimes when someone dies...you wake up and for a second before you actually get up, before you start to remember where you are, it's like- like there's no grief, like they're still alive just for a second."

"I know," he says quietly, thinking of his mom.

"It was like that. And then she sat on my bed… and she started to- started to talk, but I could barely hear her, you know? It was like she was behind a glass or...or a door. And I felt her-" she reaches out and grabs Stiles's hand, starts to draw little circular patterns in his palm. "I felt her on my hand. She always put me to sleep like this. I know it was her."

"And she took you to the graveyard?"

"At her grave...she was...it was like she was just there. Like you or me. She talked to me, Stiles. I talked to my mom." Allison's voice cracks here and Stiles feels a pang of jealousy that makes tears prickle in his eyes. He tells her,

"I think I dreamed that someone died. And then it happened. In real life."

He shows her the accident photos that he scanned on his computer. And he shows her the facebook profile of Amanda Greene and her boyfriend. And he tries to find the words to explain what it felt like to be her that night, in that dream, what it was like to feel her neck breaking like it was his own. In the dream that happened three days before the accident.

"Deaton was right, wasn't he?" She looks off out the window even though you can't see anything in the dark. "Something's wrong with us."

She's still holding his hand so he squeezes it a little.

"It used to be one of the only things I had going for me, being human." he says. "Stiles: Prophet of Death. Guess it has a ring to it." When she ignores him, he adds, "So does Allison Argent: Medium."

"Don't tell Scott," she whispers.

"Okay," he promises.

"He's not the same as us...maybe because of the Wolf or maybe...because he's just Scott. I don't want him to know." She's so sure and so clear about it, looking him hard in the eyes.

He wonders how the world could exist without Scott in his periphery all the time. Right now he just wants to talk to Allison. Because they're the humans and because death is reaching out and touching them very inappropriately. Stiles doesn't think Scott would even notice that kind of touch. He could get a handjob from the grim reaper himself and still find it just dandy

When the clock strikes 3, Stiles tucks her into his bed and draws up the covers. He lies beside her for a while in the dark. He's afraid to sleep and she's afraid to open her eyes.

He never thought the first girl he'd have in his bed would be Allison Argent. Scott would kill him. Scott would be hurt. Even if all they do is sleep.

It makes him inexplicably hard and she has to feel it pressing into her back like this. He doesn't move his hips an inch. He imagines what her body looks like under the covers, under the clothes. He craves to touch himself like he craves cigarettes, but buries it down into the fire of his belly.

He dreams about nothing and she sees no dead mothers that night. When he wakes up in the morning, she's gone, and he's glad for it.

The next night, he is an old man named John Triggle in a hospital room. It smells like a hospital, at least- he can't see well anymore.

The machine is beeping slowly beside his bed. He's gotten so used to that sound that it's almost like it's been there his whole life; the beep-beep-beep was there in the war actually; when the jungle hummed and sang, it beeped as well. And it was there beside him when he slept next to his wife for forty years, beeping between her snores.

And this only changes when the beeping stops very suddenly The beeping ceases. And it's quiet. It's so quiet and so dark in the room all of the sudden. He feels more awake.

The pain meds make it so that he only feels pressure on his chest, but he can feel his heart jumping and stopping inside him.

The darkness opens up and he thinks he sees a light- there in the corner of his room. It's glowing so dull, like a candle that he wants to warm his hands on-

Stiles rolls immediately out of bed this time clutching at his chest, sleepily pacing the floor beside his bed. He's freezing. He wraps the blankets around him.

When he closes his eyes, he imagines that the light in the corner of the hospital room is there, in his room. It's so much like the place he went when he sank in the ice bath. He starts to cry about it, aching for it, scaring himself.

A few days later, Stiles and Allison sit in his jeep that is parked in the gravel pathway through the cemetery. Its 4 in the morning. She had her phone with her this time. She called him to pick her up.

Stiles has today's newspaper sitting on the dashboard. Together, they go through the obituaries under the light of the full moon (somewhere, Scott and Isaac are holed up with themselves. Somewhere even further away, Derek is changing, too).

"Here-" Stiles says, pointing. "John Triggle. War vet who died on tuesday, right?"

"You dreamed about him?"

"It wasn't like Amanda this time. I wasn't a horror show or anything. It was...it was kind of nice, actually. Quiet." He lights a cigarette. "I think it was just a heart attack. There was a heart monitor sound and then it stopped."

Allison closes the newspaper and settles back in the seat.

"I saw someone tonight. Someone dead."

"Yeah, I figured that's why you're out here."

"It was the same thing my mom did. She was in my room and then she took me to her grave," she points out the window to a plot nearby the car. Then softly, she adds, "she looked like you, Stiles."

Stiles doesn't say anything. He feels his stomach move through the bottom of the car and then through the rest of the earth until it's burning at the core somewhere. His mother's grave is in that plot- he just realized it. Clearing his throat, he asks,

"My mom?"

She nods.

"You talked to my mom." It's not a question. He states it and feels the gravity of it while they sit there. He imagines the sound of her voice, vague in the back of his head. "What did...ah….did she say anything else?" He waits for her to answer, but it feels like a year has passed. Stiles let his head fall back against the seat when she doesn't say anything. "What did she look like?" he asks instead. He remembers his mother's gaunt face, almost swallowed completely by the hospital pillow.

"She looked like she was just...just stepping out to buy groceries or something."

Stiles smiles at the thought. He wishes he could remember the very last time he saw his mother out buying groceries; the last time he saw her putting lipstick on at the kitchen table with all her make up spread out, making a huge mess; the last time she drove him anywhere in her car that Dad sold when she died; the last time she made him something really good for dinner.

He wishes that cigarettes didn't give you cancer, so he wouldn't feel so bad for reaching for one when he thinks of her, lying in that bed when the chemo became useless.

They don't talk for a while. He doesn't know what to say, so he just finishes the cigarette and tries to not feel jealous of Allison.

"Does anything make it stop?" Allison says suddenly, raising her voice. "Does anything make it go away?"

"No...but jerking off helps."

He doesn't know why he said that.

He feels embarrassed, looks out the window, looks anywhere but at her.

Then he feels her shift.

She's small enough to crawl over to him, to wedge herself between him and the steering wheel. His insides turn to fire, to nervous ash, and they fall away when she reaches down and pushes his seat back so that she can sit upon his lap. He feels her breath. He feels his heart start to pound.

"Can we?" she whispers into his neck.

Funny enough, he doesn't even consider Scott or Lydia or his own virginity or any of that. He just feels how warm it is on his lap. And he wants to stop thinking of his mother.

"Yeah," he says back.

Her hands take his hands and put them on her ass. She hovers for a moment, making space between them for her to pull her underwear down and push it aside a bit lifting up her long t-shirt. He starts to breathe fast, afraid to look in her eyes, afraid to do anything. She undoes his jeans and he shifts his hips so she can pull them down enough that he's showing her his dick- someone is looking at him like they've never looked at him before. When she wraps her fist around him, he's already hard.

"Don't kiss me," she says, and he doesn't.

Then she takes the head of his cock and presses it to the warm wet space between her thighs that he can't see in the dark. Her breath hitches and she pulls him down until it feels like he's sinking into a warm pot of honey. She bears down onto him until she's sitting on his lap again- this time twitching, this time whispers of moans at the back of her throat. Stiles just lost his virginity and he's reeling over this fact until she distracts him by moving.

She fucks him. He doesn't have that much to do with it. She rocks fast and it's so warm and so wet and so good that he feels it down to his bones. And he's seen porn, so he knows where to rub her while she rolls forward on him. They're writhing together like one entity and he's close when she squeezes out, "fuck, fuck, fuck," and he thrusts his own hips up so that they meet halfway, and she comes, he thinks, and he can feel it happening inside her as everything becomes tight and wound to its limit. Then he has the best orgasm he can remember having, yells out something into her hair, stays with her pressed and still fucking while they both try to breathe, while they both feel the aftershock.

After a while, she pulls her head away from his shoulder.

"Was that your first time?"

He nods.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Don't be."

Then she says,

"Don't try to save them."

"What?"

"That's what your mom said, that's all she said- 'don't try to save them'."

He predicts the death of two people in one month. One of them is a sick baby girl in the hospital (and it's the most jarring and strange dream he's ever had. It's a mixture of horrible senselessness, of images and sounds that feel alien, and underneath an aching need for the warmth that is mother). He goes to the hospital the night after it happens, bypassing the main nurse's station to avoid Scott's mom. Up in the maternity ward he wanders the dark halls, peeking in on some of the open doors. He knows that the blonde haired woman when he sees her because of that aching that the baby felt- it's for this woman. When he sees her, he wants to cry out like a baby. He wants to wake her up, go to her bedside and tell her to go hold her baby- hold her for the next three days and don't put her down because soon she won't be there to hold.

Don't try to save them.

Stiles feels a weight on his chest, holding him in place until a nurse walks by and pulls on his collar.

"Excuse me?"

"I was just- just looking for my mom." It sounds pathetic and he knows it.

"Visiting hours are long over, son-"

"Ok. Yeah. Sorry, I'll come back tomorrow," he says while turning away, his heart beating fast, his brain burning with the death of the baby- over and over, and over again.

After that, he doesn't even try to find the middle aged woman who does from a brain aneurism on her kitchen floor the next week. He just lets the visions come and go like chronic nightmares, like they live in his subconscious only, like they aren't real.

Allison comes over every once and awhile and they always fuck in absolute silence in his room while his dad is downstairs, or they drive out to roads shrouded in trees to writhe in the back seat of his car. She tells him about her ghosts that always come, and he tells her about the people he feels dying, but they never mention his mother again, and he can't find the courage to ask her.

It's not sweet, it's not a forbidden romance, and he knows that she's fucking other boys. Isaac. Maybe even Scott.

He doesn't talk to Scott. He talks to him, but it's all algebra homework and lacrosse scores and excuses.

Usually, when you mourn someone, the feeling is in your chest. That's why they call it "heartache". Somewhere inside, he feels an aching, hollow heartache like Scott has died. But we both died, he reminds himself. We all did. And maybe he uses it as an excuse to keep fucking Allison. Maybe everytime he fucks her he thinks about the look on Scott's face when he left with Deucalion that night on the roof. People don't fuck their best friend's exes. Maybe he doesn't have a best friend anymore and maybe he can't even begin to touch that thought. All he knows is that Scott's silence is comforting. He watches him from afar.

And his dad tries to talk to him about it a few times, but two years of undercover werewolf support has made it easy to spin webs. He pulls his grades slightly out of the toilet, enough that he doesn't bring up college or tutors anymore. He tries to sound nonchalant about everything. He tries to smooth it all over, and most of the time it works, but he'll catch his dad looking at his face rather than the television when they're sitting in the living room some nights, looking at him like he's so confused. So he spends most of his time in his room.

And he has a lot of sex.

He likes sex. He wonders why he never tried harder to have sex before this. It's great, the way his dick takes over and everything just checks out. It's better when someone else is doing it. He turns feral. He's not even a human. When he pounds into Allison some days, he thinks there's an ounce of werewolf in him.

He goes to a party with one of the girls he met at the gay club- Sophia, who has kept in text-contact with him all year about her boyfriends and girlfriends. She wears a lot of makeup but no wig this time, and her hair is as short as his. He drinks enough to feel loose and careless about it, then they go to a closet where she kisses his throat and licks his adam's apple; he licks hers before she goes down on him. He didn't think that his first blowjob would be from a drag queen in a closet, but it doesn't matter because everything still smooths over the same when he comes in her mouth. He tries to think about what it means, afterward, when Sophia is kissing his cheek and leaving her heavily applied lipstick on him. The thought of her dick makes him excited in the pit of his stomach, and maybe that should worry him, but right now all he can think about is whether Allison will stop by his house tonight or whether Sophia will suck his dick again.

He got Danny to get him a fake ID. He used to think that Scott and him would do this kind of thing together, but he goes to bars alone and takes shots with girls, pretends to be a part of their groups and fakes his way through conversations where he mostly compliments them. Most of the really pretty ones think he's young and awkward because he doesn't want to dance and they end up grinding with jock-type guys on the dancefloor while he has another drink. That first night at a rowdy pub, he goes home with a twenty-something girl who has dark red hair, tattoos on her arms, and has big hips and a stomach that she's shy about. When he gets her shirt off, he kisses down her chest and licks the soft, fat parts of her to show her that he doesn't care (because he doesn't and he just wants to be inside her). It's different than being with Allison, who is all angles and flexibility. He feels like he's melting inside the tattooed girl, rolling around inside a cloud when he comes. He was nervous at first, being with someone he doesn't know- but when he sneaks out of her bed in the middle of the night, it all falls away.

A week later, a girl makes out with him while they dance, grinds her ass against his groin and he's so drunk that he forgets to care about dancing in public. He doesn't even make it to the girl's home- ends up fucking her behind the bar in the alley. It's hot and fast, and scary because they might get caught. He can't actually remember what her face looked like the next day.

A few nights, he goes home alone to fuck his hand violently and miserably. And Allison becomes less frequent, he guesses, because she's doing the exact same thing he's doing. He knows it's a kind of sickness. It thrums in his chest all day. When he can't get off, it feels like the dreams that he keeps fucking having are going to burst out of him and kill everything in sight. And when he doesn't dream of death, he dreams of his mother. When he can't come inside a girl's warm, soft thighs, he thinks of where else he can bury his cock; where else he can bury it all.

He has the grand idea to go back to that gay bar that Danny frequents, thinking of Sophia and the way the girls had crowded around him that night they were chasing Jackson, how they showered him with praise and tried to pinch his ass. Self consciously, he ditches his hoodie and wears a tight shirt (something reminiscent of Derek's style). He feels like he's burning, like he's a sparkler as he watches the men making out and dancing around him. The guys come to him. Stiles will say it- some of them are hot. Some of them are the type of Abercrombie & Fitch model guys that Stiles used to stare at and feel confused about.

When a guy named Ian asks him if he wants to go grab something to drink somewhere else, Stiles say okay because he told his dad once that he could be gay and he thinks that it's not entirely untrue anymore. He aches for something new.

The guy's apartment is really nice and clean.

They make a pot of coffee in the pristine kitchen. Then, after taking one sip and feeling the tension static in the air, the guy sets his cup down and leans into Stiles's mouth. It tastes good. He drags his lip against the slight stubble of Ian's chin and it makes him latch on, and he likes this, he likes this in a different way than kissing a girl. Ian peels off Stiles's shirt and lets it fall. He might come in his pants from the excitement and these strange, dangerous feeling in the pit of his stomach.

When they are in his bedroom and mostly naked, and Stiles is looking at the shape of Ian's cock through his boxer-briefs, he tells him,

"I've never done this."

"Sex?" Ian asks, lips twitching in a smile.

"I've had sex, just never with...not with-"

"You'll like it. If you want to. I promise."

And Stiles's heart is racing when Ian turns him over onto his knees, when he pulls down Stiles's underwear, when he kisses his ass and reaches around to rub his cock. Nervously, he listens as the condom is opened and the lube snaps shut. It's not like Stiles has never tried to finger himself before (sometimes Allison even reaches down there when she works him with her hands), but when Ian's fingers start to tease him and spread the slick lube around, he finds that it makes him crazy. He leans into Ian's hand, rubbing his cock along the mattress and desperate for something to happen.

It does happen. His fingers open him up slowly at first, before he learns how to just relax, make it as though his body is an empty vessel. He loosens his grip on the bed sheets. His hips are pulled into the air. He feels the head of Ian's dick pressing against him and he lets out a long breath, full if anticipation, full of anger, full of death, and he pushes himself down and keeps going even though it hurts. Ian gasps behind him.

"You're so fucking tight," he says into his shoulder, biting him.

His eyes water from the feeling. But then he feels a hand snaking down his belly. Ian rubs him fast enough that it feels fucking good, and then the feeling of the dick in his ass is so blunt and heavy, and it makes him feel wet and closed and full- so full, more full than he's been in months. He lets out a low moan.

"I'm gonna move," Ian says.

There's a sharp pain when he moves out of Stiles, but he bites his lip hard and waits for that feeling to come back. When Ian finally moves back into him, he hits what has to be the place you're supposed to hit because Stiles's dick jumps and leaks and it's torture not to touch himself.

"Do that again," he tells him.

Ian does, harder. It's still sharp, but he lets himself be pulled into the rhythm. It makes little embarrassing squeaks and grunts come from his throat. Ian keeps touching his cock which makes it all better, makes it sing from his pores. It builds the tallest tower in him, building him up and up and orgasm comes from inside; when he feels it burst through him it's like a symphony has hit a crescendo and he wants to scream- almost does- but Ian puts his fingers in his mouth and he bites down and pulses and races toward the end.

He feels like a part of him has died when Ian finally pulls out, when he abandons the condom and flips Stiles over. Ian beats off viciously. He comes all over Stiles's chest. Stiles just closes his eyes and breathes.

He is Derek Hale. He's looking in the mirror at himself. He just shaved the beard that he hadn't bothered to trim in weeks and his face is more recognisable now. He hasn't bothered with hair products or appearances in weeks and now his hair is longer and lying flat on his head. He feels the perpetual stubble on his neck.

He walks out of the motel bathroom, zips up his jacket and takes the bag of clothes from the bed. He leaves a tip for housekeeping on the dresser. Outside, it's warm because it's Nevada and it's always warm unless you're out in the middle of the desert at night. He's not very accustomed to the desert so he avoids it. He misses trees and the smell of the forest and the pine needles under his claws. He misses Beacon Hills. For a second, he steps out into the sharp sunlight of the day and he thinks of getting into his car and driving his way back to California, back to Beacon Hills, even though he knows that he'll end up taking an exit that leads him to some new place, any new place.

When he sniffs the air, he smells something familiar.

It's an Alpha.

Close.

He thinks...no, he's sure, that Peter is behind him.

He steps back into the room, drops the bag, shuts the door.

"I always thought the "nomadic, lone wolf" suited you best, you know? But then- it made tracking you down a bitch. Nice job throwing off your scent."

"You found me anyway.." Derek turns around. Shouldn't have left this loose end...should have known better.

It's been awhile since he was a beta. The imposition of an alpha presses on him- it's presence stinging in the air like a song that makes him move in some kind of ridiculous servitude toward the ground. Derek sits down on the bed.

"Who did you kill this time?" He hopes that it wasn't Scott. He hopes it was an alpha who deserved it.

"It's not really that important." He sounds frustrated and bored, like he's always sounded, even when they were younger- his voice never changes, never stops grating Derek's ears. "I didn't kill you. I let you bleed it out instead of taking it."

(Except when he stopped being the Alpha, it wasn't really like bleeding out. It felt more like the Alpha was ripped from him- like a limb.)

"It would have been easy. You were...a truly shitty alpha, Derek." Peter comes and sits beside him. "You don't know how difficult it was to watch you...doing nothing with that power. Leading puppies and humans around like you were an actual pack?" He laughs in a melodramatic way that makes Derek want to claw out his own eardrums.

"We did alright," he says. "We were fine in the end."

Peter sucks in a hard breath.

"In the end..." He touches the side of Derek's face with his claw. He tenses his muscles. "It's funny you would say that."

He knows what's going to happen.

He thought it would be different. He didn't think he'd be in the shittiest Super 8 in Las Vegas.

He thought he would go down fighting and he tries to access something- some kind of rage, some kind of beast, but it's the same as it has been for months and there's nothing; a half-empty room inside him. He tries to even feel betrayed, but there's no point. He always knew Peter had agendas. He always knew that every word was bullshit.

He bares his neck.

"It's really just for poetics," Peter says while placing a claw under Derek's chin. "You killed me once, remember? Besides- I want the Hale's to have a fresh start. You're an exhausted resource."

"I know," he says.

"Cora has potential. I'm not sure what I'll do with her yet."

He forgot about Cora. He starts to struggle, but Peter takes his whole hand and closes it around his neck and it feels tight and strong.

"Come, now. This was going so well. You're so...beautifully docile."

He thinks about what would happen if he ripped out his beta claws and tried to get at Peter's eyes. He plays out the whole fight in his head, messy and futile. He apologizes to Cora. He's tired.

For the final thirty seconds of his life, he thinks about the last time he was this close to death. It had been underwater in a swimming pool and paralyzed and he couldn't breathe. And it was getting dark inside his head until it wasn't, all of the sudden, and he could breathe again, and he saw the pale neck dotted with moles beside his face, and he smelled chlorine and boy scent, and heard Stiles's voice moving all over pitch and he had thought,

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Don't let me go.

And then Peter rips out his throat.

He wakes up in sweat and tears and confusion, like always.

His heart is going to fall out of his mouth.

"You okay?"

Ian is groggy and naked, waking up beside Stiles and reaching out to him in the dark. Stiles puts his face in his hands and rubs until he feels like he's alive again. He hadn't meant to fall asleep here tonight and the cold, unfamiliar bed is jarring. He feels the panic under his fingernails.

"Yeah...I gotta go."

Ian tries to tell him to stay, but he shuts him up with a sloppy kiss and says he'll text him. He doesn't give a shit if it's tactless.

He starts to lose it when he's on the road home. It's the same as it was last time this happened, except there's just open road between him and the mess in his head, and no great big distraction like Lydia Martin's kisses, and he starts to feel the jeep veering away from his control, so he pulls to the side of the road and leans as far back into the seat as he can. Everything swims. He can't breathe. He can't fucking breathe.

This death...this death cuts his iron insides in half like a hot, glowing sword- it severs something inside of him and he can't breathe, God, he can't breathe. He'll never touch a cigarette again.

Of course that's not true. Once he calms down a bit, he lights a smoke with shaky hands and closes his eyes to appreciate the burn.

He pictures Las Vegas and the skyline and the motel sign and the road behind it and the billboards advertising the nearest slots (his nose fills with the abnormal memory of a scent- Derek's senses inside his brain- assaulting and harsh. He wonders how werewolves can stand it).

Vegas is a good ten hour drive from here, and he has sixty bucks, and that's enough gas for one way, probably.

He wants to go to Allison's house and he wants to raid her father's well-stocked supplies of werewolf-killing arsenal, but she can't know what he's doing. Stiles feels it in his bones; no one should know what he's doing. This shit is between him, Derek Hale, and the Grim Reeper.

Instead he sleeps for a few hours in his car, parked outside of the Vet Clinic. He jumps awake when he hears the slightest noises. Until it's morning, until he hears the sound Deaton's car.

"Hey," he calls, wiping the sleep from his eyes, slamming his jeep shut.

Deaton plays with his keys and stares at him for a moment.

"You don't look so good, Stiles."

"I'm fine. I just…I need your help with something."

Deaton invites him inside and offers him a cup of coffee that he could probably use, but he refuses. Stiles feels antsy and afraid to say anything.

"I'm guessing the past few months haven't been too easy on you, have they?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Scott tells me things." He leans against the metal table, leans closer to Stiles. Stiles looks at the floor, at the exact spot where he died only a few months ago. It feels like it's been years. "I told you that what you did wasn't easy. It comes at a price. You and Allison have been paying it, haven't you?"

"I need a gun, Deaton," he says softly, changing the subject. This makes Deaton put his shoulders back. He realizes it sounds like he wants Deaton to assist in his suicide or something (which makes the image of putting a gun in his mouth pop into Stiles's head), so he adds, "It needs to be able to kill an alpha."

"What are you planning to do?"

"I can't tell you that."

"Then I can't give you a weapon."

He grits his teeth.

"Just- just trust me, alright? It's not what you think-"

"You shouldn't intervene when you're not trained, when you don't know what the threat is- I can see that you're acting on impulse. Whatever it is, you need to find another solution."

"Look, you were right, okay? You said we would pay a price for fucking with the other side and we are. I am. And it's shit...it's horrible, most of the time. It feels like- it feels like," he trails off, unsure of what to say, unsure of how to put it into words. "It feels like I'm half-dead, alright? But something good can come of it if you just help me. I need to do this...this one thing. I'm supposed to. I need a gun."

"Is this about Hale?" He doesn't ask if it's Peter or Derek or Cora. But Stiles just nods slowly.

"I've been looking out for everyone's asses since this whole thing started. Just trust me."

And then he does the unexpected; he goes into his back room to open a safe and comes back with a box. Deaton ends up giving him a 9mm and a small box of carefully separated mountain-ash-wolfsbane-fairy-fuckin-dust bullets that will only be effective if Stiles can aim for the head. He has to reassure Deaton that it has nothing to do with Scott or Isaac or anyone in Beacon Hills. He tells him not to worry, and somehow, Deaton seems satisfied enough with Stiles's shoddy explanations to let him go in his jeep. Before he leaves, he tells Stiles,

"Be quick and be silent. Mask your scent. And don't get yourself killed, Stiles. Dying once is enough."

He leaves a note at his Dad's house saying that he's going to Danny's step-dad's cottage for the weekend with some of the lacrosse guys and then he calls Danny and offers to pay him $100 that he doesn't have if he'll cover for him.

He doesn't even pack anything. He just gets a carton of cigarettes and keeps the gun in the glove compartment, and he hears the words in his mothers' distant voice,

Don't try to save them.

The words are stuck in his head like a song.

He won't pretend that Derek Hale will be alive somewhere, living the american-werewolf dream when he's bleeding out on the bed of shitty motel in Sin City. Not when he knows who Derek Hale is. Not when he knows what Derek Hale feels like in his hands, what he smells like, who he is, and what he does, and how he acts. He knows this guy. It might be a stretch to call him a friend, but Stiles has saved his life before and he's going to save it one more time because Derek isn't some anonymous old woman dropping dead in Stiles's dreams, some poor soul leaving some abnormal body that he enters for a night.

He'll try to put this thing, this darkness, whatever it is, to use.

Because what disturbed him the most about dying in this dream was how perfectly deserving, how perfectly comfortable it felt to let Peter Hale's claws rip into his neck and end him.

It's a long drive. He spends it focusing on the details and listening to the radio stations change with every town he speeds past. He pictures the motel sign again and again until he can't distort it. He's so anxious and tired and practically crazy by the time he crosses into Nevada that he almost misses the complicated exit on the highway.

It's the middle of the night and he only has a few hours until the sun comes up over the sand beyond the lights and casinos. He drives around the main block and goes to all the outskirt plazas filled with shitty motels and fireworks stands. He doesn't even stop for coffee though his eyelids are slipping, and he can't find the familiar place where Derek is.

And the sun rises. The gas tank is low.

The restless voice in his head tells him that he should have called his friends. He should have asked for help. He can't do this on his own. He should have saved all those people- the girl in the car and the war vet in bed and the little baby girl in the prenatal unit, but he couldn't do that and he can't do this for the same reason. Who is he? Human Stiles Stillinski? Fucked up beyond repair Stiles Stillinski? Who is he to be a prophet of death? Why does it always come down to him saving people, saving all the little and big people and monsters that walk all over his life?

Eventually, when it's almost 8 AM, he runs out of gas and has to pull into a run down diner parking lot before it dies on the road.

He wants to walk out into the desert until he collapses and rots in the sun. He wants a cancer to spring up in his lungs and take him down to his mother's grave with it. He beats his fist against the steering wheel, feeling like he's going to cry, feeling the phantom scrape of Peter Hale's nails on his neck, and then he looks up.

The motel sign- The Glade Motel. Across the street and down the road It clicks in his head perfectly, like when you've lost a cell phone or a wallet and you suddenly remember where you last had it.

The rest is like what Deaton said- impulse. He really should have a plan if he's going to try to do this, but he jumps from the car and rips open the glove compartment. He only knows that he might be out of time by now. He takes the gun and puts it in his pocket, starting in a jog across the highway and and past all the other shitty motels that people are fucking and dying in.

It's funny because he thought he would feel more fear, like every other time he approached danger like this. Peter Hale could smell him from a mile away, proabably, and then he could be ready to pounce on Stiles throat instead. The Kanima, for one thing, used to give him nightmares and make his breath feel like ice whenever he looked at it. And then the alphas- they were all so visceral and fucked up and sharp looking that he could hardly see the humanity in them, like he sees in Scott. Maybe now he's desensitized to that kind of fear now. Or maybe it's the effect of too many cigarettes and too many dreams where he's died as another.

The gun in his hand is heavy as he runs up the rows of motel rooms, regretting the sound his footsteps make.

Maybe he just has very little to fear because he lives inside that fear now, inside death itself. It's the reason he's here. He thinks that maybe he is death itself...just a little bit. What else could a prophet of death be?

He gets to room 10 and rips the door open so fast that the knob might break. The gun is raised. They're on the bed in front of him.

He pulls the trigger.

A/N- This is chapter one of two.