Chapter Text
Derek Hale used to think pain came in sharp bursts claws, fire, gunshots, loss compressed into a single unbearable moment.
He never knew pain could be an echo.
Repeating.
Endless.
Soft enough that no one else could hear it, loud enough to drown him.
And the worst part was that it hadn’t always been like this.
It used to be good.
Better than good.
It used to be Stiles.
Their first date had been a disaster in theory Stiles spilling his drink twice, Derek glowering at the waiter for flirting, both of them pretending they weren’t shaking under the table but it was perfect because it ended with Stiles leaning over the gear shift, saying, “If you don’t kiss me right now, Hale, I’m reporting you for emotional negligence.”
Derek had kissed him.
He kept kissing him, through late night stakeouts, through bickering over pack politics, through stolen moments where Stiles would sit on his lap and say, “Relax, Sourwolf, I’m not made of glass.”
Maybe he wasn’t.
Maybe Derek was the one who was breakable.
The fights started small arguments about Stiles throwing himself into danger, Derek being too overprotective, warnings about something hunting in the preserve. Stiles saying he could handle it. Derek saying he didn’t believe him. Doors slamming. Eyes glowing. Stiles muttering, “You’re not my alpha,” and Derek muttering, “Then stop asking me to save you.”
But the supernatural made everything worse.
The night they fought about the siren pack by the lake Stiles insisting on going alone because “You don’t trust me anyway” Derek felt something inside him crack. They yelled loud enough for Scott to show up and take sides. Loud enough for the forest to go quiet. Loud enough for Derek to shift halfway and punch a tree until bark splintered.
After that, the fights got uglier.
Sharper.
More personal.
And then came the fight the one they pretended wasn’t the last.
Derek had said something cruel.
Stiles had said something truer.
And they both walked away bleeding in places no claws could reach.
The breakup wasn’t clean. It wasn’t even real half the time — they’d still circle each other, still stare too long, still ache. But Stiles pulled away, piece by piece, until Derek realized the only time he heard from him was when he was yelling.
Or laughing with someone else.
Derek saw him once outside The Jungle, leaning against a wall, smiling too wide at some guy who smelled like cologne and vodka and hands that didn’t deserve him. Derek’s jealousy hit like a freight train. He dragged Stiles around the corner.
“What the hell are you doing?” Derek snapped.
“Breathing,” Stiles said, icy. “Is that against the Hale code?”
“That guy was all over you.”
“So? We’re not together.”
The words gutted him.
Derek grabbed his wrist without meaning to, fingers trembling.
“Stiles… please don’t—”
Stiles pulled back like he’d been burned.
“You don’t get to want me only when someone else does.”
Derek didn’t remember going home that night.
But he remembered the smell of someone else on Stiles.
It haunted him more than any ghost ever could.
And then he cheated.
He didn’t even know why.
Weakness?
Cowardice?
Self-sabotage wrapped in guilt and anger and longing?
Whatever the reason, it was the one thing Stiles could never forgive.
Stiles found out.
He didn’t yell.
He didn’t cry.
He just looked at Derek with a kind of quiet devastation that felt like dying.
“I loved you,” Stiles said. “More than I should have. More than you knew how to hold.”
And he walked away.
That should have been rock bottom.
It wasn’t.
Derek found him two weeks later.
The rain had been falling for hours, soaking the Hale house roof, dripping down Derek’s neck as he followed Stiles’s scent inside Stiles’s place faint, fading, wrong. The bathroom door was half open. Water spilled over the edge of the tub.
Stiles lay there, skin pale, lips blue, wrists open like pages in a book Derek didn’t know how to read.
The world ended quietly.
With a drip.
With a gasp.
With Derek’s knees hitting tile and a sound leaving his chest that didn’t belong to any living creature.
After that… the haunting began.
Derek saw Stiles everywhere.
At pack meetings in the corner, arms crossed, silently judging Scott.
At the store leaning on the cereal aisle, glaring at the granola Derek picked.
In the loft pacing like he used to when he was alive, muttering insults Derek could almost hear.
The pack thought Derek was grieving.
They didn’t know he was seeing him.
But they did know Derek had been seeing someone before Stiles died they just assumed it was the girl who kept texting him about “the necklace incident.” None of them knew that “the girl” was actually the girl Derek cheated with, and that the person he’d been dating… was the boy whose funeral they now stood at.
Derek sat in the front row, clutching the letter the sheriff had handed him something Stiles wrote before he died. A letter meant for Derek. A letter written in loops and shaky scrawl, like his hands were trembling the whole time.
Derek read it aloud at the funeral because the sheriff asked him to.
It was a love story and a goodbye rolled into one equal parts punishment and mercy.
The words sounded like Stiles.
Like hope and chaos and too much heart.
"I wish I could have told you what it meant to me to sit next to you, to hold your hand in the dark, to hear you say my name and mean it. I wish I could have told you I was proud of you not for your strength, or for being a leader, or for being a Hale, but for being you. For being soft enough to care, hard enough to survive, and stubborn enough to love the people who needed you, even when they didn’t deserve it."
"I know now that the mistakes we made were ours, not just yours. I know that my anger, my fear, my jealousy all of it didn’t help. I know I wasn’t perfect. But Derek… I loved you. And I still do. I always will. Not in a haunted, bitter way. Not in a way that wants revenge or punishment. But in the way that a person keeps a song in their head long after it’s ended. In the way a shadow follows the sun. In the way the universe doesn’t forget what it made."
“You were my anchor,” the letter said. “Even when you didn’t want to be. Even when you pretended you weren’t. I’ll love you in ways you’ll never understand even when I shouldn’t. If another life exists after this one, I hope it brings me back to you. And if it doesn’t, then I hope you find someone who looks at you the way I did. Someone who sees the good you keep locked away. Someone who knows how to hold it without breaking.”
People cried.
Derek didn’t.
He stared at the back row.
Because Stiles was sitting there.
Swinging one foot.
Looking right at him.
After the funeral, Derek didn’t go home.
He drove to the burned Hale house, sat on the crumbling porch, and waited.
The air shifted.
Pine. Aftershave. Electricity.
Stiles sat beside him like he used to.
“You look like crap,” Stiles said.
“You’re not real,” Derek muttered.
“Then stop staring at me like I am.”
Derek’s jaw tightened. “Why are you here?”
“Why do you think?” Stiles snapped. “You don’t get to break me and then be surprised I’m in pieces.” “You left,” Derek said, voice cracking. “You gave up.” “Yeah? And you pushed me there.”
The silence hurt more than the words.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were dying?” Derek whispered.
Stiles laughed — hollow, sharp.
“You didn’t ask.”
“Don’t do that,” Derek growled. “Don’t put this on me.”
“Oh, Derek.” Stiles tilted his head. “Everything is on you. The fights. The cheating. The way you made me feel like I was too much and not enough at the same time.”
Derek’s vision blurred.
“You still loved me.”
“I did,” Stiles said. “Enough to die with your name still in my head.”
“Stop,” Derek choked.
“No. You need to hear it.” Stiles leaned closer. “I loved you so hard it destroyed me. And what hurts the most is that part of you loved me back.”
Derek shook.
Physically.
Violently.
Stiles softened, just a little.
“You’re haunted, Derek. Not because I’m dead. But because you finally understand what you lost.”
“Can I fix it?” Derek whispered.
Stiles looked at him with eyes that weren’t living but felt painfully human.
“No,” he said. “But you can try to forgive yourself.”
And then he was gone.
Just an echo.
Just Stiles.
Just the one person Derek would never stop seeing.