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The fire blazes in front of them, a white-hot tower roaring towards the sky—almost painful to look at.
A second later and Scott and Stiles would have gone up with it. Stiles’ shoulder smarts where it hit the ground after Lydia threw them out of the way. The stench of smoke and gasoline fills his nostrils, much of the latter floating up from the body of his best friend, currently braced against Stiles’ chest. Scott is drenched—drenched himself, shit; he probably turned the whole canister over on his freaking head—and it soaks through Stiles’ shirt to his skin.
Stiles can’t let go of him, though. All he can do is hold Scott close and focus on the fact that he’s breathing. The fact that he’s not dead.
He was almost dead. He was going to die, Stiles watched him almost—
The four left in the parking lot watch the flames climb for a while, but as they die down, the trance subsides. Lydia is the first to collect herself, standing and smoothing down her skirts with a shaky breath.
“Well,” she says, slightly-strangled tone and wet cheeks betraying her fragile composure. “That does it.”
“What? Does what?” Allison asks. Her voice is shaking, too.
Lydia scoffs and levels her with a look. “What do you mean, what? I’m getting my stuff. You really think I wanna sleep in there after that?”
“Where else are we gonna sleep?”
Lydia’s smile curls into a shaky imitation of her usual condescending simper. “The bus. Where else?”
Allison seems surprised at Lydia being the one to suggest it, but Stiles isn’t. Of all of them, Scott excluded, Lydia seems the most shaken-up, and Stiles thinks, banshee, Allison. C’mon now. The werewolves all got tormented with some kind of personalised waking nightmare or another, but Lydia was the one hearing the motel’s past tenants commit joint suicide in the air vents.
She starts off towards the stairs, but stops when Allison doesn’t follow.
“You coming?”
Allison looks hesitantly between Lydia near the stairs and Scott and Stiles on the ground. Her eyes lock with Stiles’, and he nods.
“We’re okay,” he says around a voice crack. “We’ll be okay. I got him. Go- go ahead. We’ll be right behind you.”
Allison hesitates only a second longer.
“Okay,” she whispers, then follows Lydia up to their room.
As the girls retreat, Stiles realises Scott still hasn’t said a word. He's silent against Stiles' chest, frozen except for his breathing. Stiles had hoped just seeing the fire and being near its heat would have been enough to break him from whatever weird fugue state the motel trapped him in, but maybe not.
He jostles Scott gently.
“Scott,” he says. “Hey, buddy. You with me?”
Scott shifts, then blinks a few times, his eyes clearing slowly. He sits up off of Stiles’ chest and rubs his brow with his thumb and forefinger like it hurts. Maybe it does.
“Yeah,” he says hoarsely, and Stiles slumps in relief. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
Stiles starts pulling them both to their feet, and Scott lets him, but he looks confused.
“Come on,” Stiles says, half-talking just to drown out the overwhelming drone of panic in his head. “Come on, let’s go.”
Scott frowns. “Where are we going?”
Stiles scoffs and waves his hands around Scott’s gasoline-drenched body. “Inside, to get you—cleaned up, or a change of clothes, at least. You’re all—gasoline-y. You need to shower or something, dude. I mean—don’t wanna get it all over the bus." He grimaces. "Can’t smell good, either. Smells like shit to me so it’s probably, like, twenty times worse for your super-powered werewolf sniffer.” He stops to take a breath, his conviction dwindling until his voice feels barely-there. “You wanna… you wanna do that, or…?”
Scott is looking at Stiles with concern, which is stupid, since Stiles is definitely not the one out of the two of them that just proclaimed there was no hope before trying to burn himself alive. Sure, maybe not all of that was entirely Scott—but Stiles knows his best friend well enough by now to know some of it was.
He'd been holding the last few flares—the same flares they used to wake up all the other weres—right in his hands. Ready to drop.
“Yeah,” Scott says eventually, reaching up to wrap an arm around Stiles’ shoulders as they walk. “Yeah, let’s go. I could use a shower.”
—
In their motel room, Stiles washes the gasoline off his hands and pulls fresh clothes out of their travel bags, while Scott strips down to his skin.
Stiles is shaking. It’s especially strong in his fingers; he keeps fumbling the jeans and T-shirts he grabs onto the floor. The outlines of his hands smear like paint when he bends down to pick them up.
“Fuck,” he whispers. He gives up on keeping the clothes folded and just throws them onto the bed in a wad. It’s not like it matters if it wrinkles—and besides, it won’t be long before they use them, anyway.
Scott notices. Of course he notices. He’s only half-undressed, his soaked shirt in an open trash bag in the corner of the room and the top button of his jeans undone, but he stops and walks over to Stiles anyway.
“Stiles,” he says gently, reaching up to plant a hand on Stiles’ shoulder. “Hey—you okay?”
The question is so absurd Stiles has to laugh. It’s an ugly, sharp sound, and Scott flinches.
“Am I okay?” Stiles asks. “Seriously? You’re gonna ask me that, when you just—you almost died, Scott. You tried to set yourself on fire. I watched you almost—”
He swallows down a shuddering breath, the tears he’s been holding back for Scott’s sake threatening to fall. His throat hurts.
Stiles has a split second to watch Scott’s face crumble before he’s being pulled into a crushing hug, his nose buried in the damp skin of Scott’s neck. It smells awful, doubly-nauseating on top of Stiles' already-rolling anxiety stomach, but he wraps his arms around Scott’s ribcage and hugs back as hard as he can.
“I’m okay,” Scott mumbles into Stiles’ shoulder. “I’m—I’m okay.”
Stiles scoffs. “What, are you saying you don’t remember? ‘Cuz that doesn’t really make it any better, Scott.”
Scott’s arms spasm tighter, and Stiles knows he does.
They stand there like that for a while. Stiles thinks he could hold Scott forever if the smell of gasoline wasn’t giving him a headache. He pats Scott’s back, then braces his hands on his shoulders and pushes him away.
“Okay, no, sorry,” he says. “Emotionally rejuvenating hug later, shower now. You smell like an exhaust leak. This is nice and all, but I feel like me throwing up and/or passing out on you would kind of ruin the moment.”
Scott snorts. Then he looks down at Stiles’ shirt and grimaces. “Heh, sorry. You’re all gasoline-y now, too.”
Stiles shrugs. “Already was, Scotty.”
There’s a moment of silence between them—not what would normally be called tense, but definitely some kind of heavy. They’re both thinking about what happened. Stiles breaks it with a grin and a gentle pat to Scott’s shoulders. “Guess I’ll have to shower now, too.”
They shower at the same time, like they always used to when they were kids. Melissa would herd them towards the tub after a day of frolicking outside so they didn’t track dirt through the house. Those were the good days—moments of respite between the intermittent dreariness of Stiles’ mom’s hospitalisation and Scott’s parents’ divorce—and often devolved into bubble-fights drenching an impressive area of the bathroom for two seven-year-old boys. The fights usually ended when one or both of them got soap in their eyes, or when Melissa came in and put an end to things with a fond roll of hers.
It’s different now, but still familiar. For one thing, they’re almost ten years older. It’s gasoline instead of mud being washed off their skin, but it's still them. Still Scott and Stiles. Stiles helps Scott wash the smell out of his hair with the cheap shampoo provided by the motel, and Scott wipes apologetically at Stiles’ shoulder, taking some of the pain leftover from when it hit the ground.
The motel towels are thin and rough and smell kind of stale, but they’re good enough for drying. Stiles and Scott dress and pack up quickly, both eager to flee the oppressive feeling of haunting that seems to line the motel room walls like some fucked-up insulation.
Half-way through shoving the tied-up trash bag of old clothes into his travel bag, Scott stops.
“Did you mean it?” He asks suddenly.
Stiles looks up from where he’d been tying his shoes. “Mean what?”
“What you said before,” Scott says, and his brow furrows. “About—about going down with me.”
Stiles looks at him steadily for a while.
“Yeah,” he says eventually. Then he shrugs. “Yeah, yeah, I mean—duh, right? I kinda thought you already knew.”
“I didn’t,” Scott says quietly. He looks up at Stiles, and his eyes are wide. Sad. A little too much for Stiles to read. “I mean, a little, maybe, but not—“ and he looks back down again. “I don’t want you to die for me.”
Stiles scoffs. “Yeah, well, feeling’s mutual, buddy.” He finishes tying his shoe. “Maybe if we don’t want each other to die enough, it’ll be enough to keep our dumbasses alive long enough to survive this.”
Stiles leaves it unclear what this means, because the overall scope sort of seems too big to specify. Is it the current demon-alpha shitshow they’re fighting? Whatever doomsday is probably bound to come for their asses next? The rest of high school? General life in Beacon Hills?
Scott huffs a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, maybe.”
Everyone is asleep when they reach the bus. Allison and Lydia are passed out on each other’s shoulders in a seat on the right, and Stiles can just see the tops of Isaac and Boyd’s heads poking up from two seats near the back. Lydia and Allison must have grabbed them on their way down.
Scott and Stiles slide into the seat opposite to the girls. It’s not even a question of whether or not they’ll be sharing, even though they’re way too gangly in combination to make it comfortably work.
They’re silent for all of a second before Scott is turning and crushing Stiles into his arms again.
“Emotionally rejuvenating hug,” he whispers, and Stiles doesn’t even care how wet his voice sounds when he laughs.
“You got it, Scotty,” he says, curling his fingers in the back of Scott’s shirt.
Scott holds him tight enough to bruise and then, breath shaking against Stiles’ neck, says,
“You’re my brother, too.”
Stiles’ heart hurts, but it’s a good hurt.
“Love you, Scotty,” he murmurs.
“Love you too.”
They fall asleep like that, tangled together in a school bus seat that definitely was not built for horizontality. They’ll probably wake up with wicked muscle cramps in the morning—except Scott, the lucky bastard. Do werewolves even get cramps from stuff as simple as sleeping weird?
Stiles decides it’s worth it either way.