Chapter Text
Stiles rinses some blueberries and dumps them in a bowl and covers them in chocolate syrup. It’s fruit, it’s healthy. He manages a spoonful, barely, before his stomach reminds him that, nope, he had his meds today, and a vision on top of that, and he’s not eating anything until at least an hour after the Adderall wears off.
He sighs, and rinses his spoon, and shoves the bowl in the fridge. He’ll probably end up staying at the loft for a while. He scribbles a quick note for his dad that there are Lean Cuisines in the freezer and texts Scott and grabs his keys. He’s probably good to drive. Almost guaranteed, really. He’s only gotten three visions so far, so the chances of getting one while he’s driving, so soon after the last one, are low. Still, he’s white knuckled most of the way to Derek’s. Who lives stupidly far away, anyway, barely on the edge of the zone for Beacon Hills High.
Halfway there, he realizes with an unpleasant jolt that he has no way to explain how he knows what’s going to happen. Telling the truth isn’t an option, because he can’t tell them what he’s done. The only thing he ever plausibly does is research, so, yeah, okay. He spends the rest of the drive rationalizing that it’s technically a kind of research, so that his heart won’t skip.
“Yo,” he says when Isaac opens the door. “So, had any weird dreams recently? Symptoms of sleep apnea? We’ve got a thing and we’re probably all going to die.”
Isaac raises his eyebrows, and Stiles can already tell that he’s not taking Stiles seriously when he says, “Again?”
Stiles gets in Isaac’s space until Isaac lets him in, throws his backpack down next to the chair he’s started to think of as his. Scott’s already there, standing with his arms folded and looking like he wants to be anywhere else. Stiles flops into the chair. “I’ve been doing research, okay?”
Derek shoves his ancient MacBook at him. It always feels weirdly intimate to use someone else’s laptop, but this particular computer is usually lying around the kitchen area, tabs full of recipes and whatever Isaac’s had to look up for homework. Stiles has never brought himself to ask, and doesn’t know the way he knows some other things, but he suspects that it’s the pack laptop, and that he’s pack. Derek lurks over his shoulder as Stiles opens it up and opens more tabs that he directs to relevant information. It’s all new to him, stuff he’s not read at all, but he’s certain these are right, guided by - he opens another tab, sends it to deliberately wrong information, moves the tab to the middle of the collection. “Do you know how few people die of sleep apnea? It’s like 6% of patients over five years. That’s low, that’s ridiculously low. But we’ve had three people apparently die of it in the last month, and only one of them was even diagnosed with sleep apnea.”
Derek puts a hand on the back of Stiles’ neck, and Stiles shuts up. “Calm down,” is all he says, though, and Stiles can feel some of his general awful feeling fading. Derek’s doing the pain-suck thing, and he doesn’t mind it at all, and he’s way more effective than ibuprofen, so Stiles just enjoys the way his headache fades. “How does that make it our problem?”
Stiles scrolls down through the pages of relevant information, stopping at the first picture he comes across. “Because mysterious sleeping deaths can be caused by this thing, called an Alp in Germany and a Bahktak in Iran, and normal people can’t even see them, let alone fight them.”
He keeps reading, and Derek moves off, pacing restlessly to the kitchen counter. “How do we kill it?”
“Looks like rending and tearing’ll work fine, it’s mostly a matter of locating it and making it visible. But I don’t know how it’s choosing it’s victims - Connie the dispatcher’s daughter doesn’t have a lot in common with this guy Jefferson in the retirement home, so I don’t know how to lure it out.” He looks up from the laptop and looks at Scott and Derek. “So what do we do?”
Dereks eyebrows draw down, and Scott tries to look appropriately serious. “Find the addresses,” Derek says. “We’ll go by and try to catch a scent.”
“But - fine, yeah, okay. I’ll do that now.” He can cobble them together, probably. He’s got a good memory, and he can look through the obits for pictures for the third woman and look up her address from there.
He gets the addresses for the retirement home, grabs Connie’s address from his dad’s contact list, and starts looking up the obits. It only takes a few minutes to find the address. “Okay, so there are three. I should probably go with whoever’s going to Connie’s house, because she knows me and will actually let us in. Here’s the retirement home, and Scott or Isaac, you should go, because you’re adorable. The other house, she has a boyfriend who lives there, so you might have to talk past him or break and enter.”
Cora pushes herself off the counter. “I should go to that one, then. Peter, come with me.”
Isaac looks at Scott, then at Derek. “I’ll go with Scott. Probably better to look more harmless.”
Which is how Stiles gets stuck with Derek in the passenger seat as his vision starts going grey. If Stiles had to have his first public vision in front of anyone, he’d far rather it be Scott, who was there, at least, when they died and set things in motion. There’s no helping it, though: he pulls over. “Get out,” he snaps. He doesn’t want Derek to see this. Derek’s got his own secrets to keep, but this - it’s private. He doesn’t have enough of a harness on it for it to be predictably useful, so right now it’s just another stupid thing that he’s done.
Derek doesn’t move, just raises a sardonic eyebrow that’s only visible because of the contrast against his pale skin. Stiles’ sight is already nearly gone. He feels himself twitch involuntarily as a new scene rushes in, too much for his head, like trying to cram an IMAX screen into his eyeballs.
Scott’s asleep in his own bed and a misshapen thing sits on his chest, sucking the life out of him. The thing looks up, straight at Stiles, and grins, with far too many teeth.
It’s not supposed to see him, nothing’s supposed to see him, he’s not here.
“Seer,” it says. “I’ll eat your eyes before I steal your breath.”
Then it’s over, before Stiles even has time to formulate some kind of retort.
Derek’s hand is on his arm, and his veins are raised and black.
Stiles jerks away, and his voice comes out high and panicked. “What are you doing?”
“You were in pain. You have visions now.” It’s not a question, but Stiles wants to deny it anyway, and looks angrily out at the road.
He starts the Jeep up again and drives. “They’re useful.”
“They’re new,” Derek counters.
Stiles opens his mouth, then remembers that he doesn’t lie to Derek, and closes his mouth.
**
When they come back from the dead, Stiles can feel the darkness Deaton talked about. It’s not evil, it’s not pulling him into some dark void, it’s just - it’s a shadow. It’s a liminal thing, a mark of him as a liminal person, now that he’s been dead for magic.
He gets his dad back, stands mostly as witness to other people beating the crap out of each other, explains things again, is grounded forever, and waits another couple days for the feeling to fade.
It doesn’t, so he goes to Deaton again. He waits in the waiting room until he’s alone and Deaton is standing behind the counter, arms crossed as he meaningfully eyes the clock. “Stiles.”
Stiles stays where he is, elbows propped on his knees. “So we’ve got an active nemeton now, which I’m gathering is basically a Hellmouth. Being a druid and all, you taking trainees?”
Deaton’s face softens infinitesimally towards sympathy. “Training can take up to twenty years, Stiles, and takes a great deal of discipline.”
“I’ve been doing my research,” Stiles says, and watches Deaton’s face. He wants to have a way to fight back, a way to help, a way to do what his dad does and protect and serve his town.
“No,” he says, and there’s a sort of echoing finality to it.
It makes Stiles flush hot with rage and frustration, and his movements are jerky with it. “Fine,” he says, shoving his way to his feet. “Sorry to bother you.”
**
He researches for a couple weeks before he packs up to go to the nemeton, because the internet is full of bullshit. He’s pretty sure he knows what he’s doing, though, at least in a general sense. Lydia can tell them that someone’s about to die, can lead them to the bodies, but they don’t have anything more preventative than that, and they have no way to tell what’s coming.
And, aside from Deaton’s warnings, Stiles can feel that things are coming. He thinks Scott and Allison can, too. Scott’s dealing with alpha mojo, but he’s been antsier about training than Stiles had expected, going so far as to apologize to Derek and try to work together.
Stiles texts Scott where he’s going, because Scott understands, and won’t interfere unless he doesn’t hear from Stiles for several hours, and then he takes the various herbs and the shitty bread he’d baked himself and the beer from the fridge because it should substitute for mead as an offering.
He takes an athame from the New Age store and the lighter he demanded from Derek and Derek inexplicably handed over without arguing and some herbs he mostly got dried from Trader Joe’s and plain white candles from the Hallmark store in the mall and he puts them all in his backpack and drives out to the Preserve. He doesn’t have solid directions - no one does, not to the nemeton, because there are no marked trails. But he has a link, and a vicious belief that he will be lead straight to it. Will carries through, which is reassuring given what he’s going to do, and he’s drawn to it like a lodestone to north.
There’s new green growth from the stump of the old tree, and Stiles huffs out a breath at the sight. Cutting down the tree brings disaster, and powering it up again draws chaos, and the whole of Beacon Hills would be better off if it had never been here.
Nothing he can do about it, though, so he ignores it as he sets up his ritual circle, going to the compass points and lighting candles and chanting. He feels centred when he’s done, like after the meditation exercises one therapist suggested to help with his ADHD. He feels kind of silly, when he’s done, because he’s sitting in a circle in the middle of the woods talking to himself.
He sets out the herbs and starts the incantation and crushes them in his fist when it’s called for, and is amazed that his voice stays steady.
When it’s done, a shivery sort of weight settles on him, and Stiles can’t help but grin like a madman as he dispels the circle. This, he can do. He can choose magic, choose the supernatural: it doesn’t have to all be by birth or horrific trauma. Deaton can suck a dick, because visions are going to be way more useful than years of rote memorization.
He packs up and goes home and puts most of the magical ingredients back in the spice cabinet and the rest in his room with the books his weirder research had made him track down. He jerks off in the shower and goes to sleep and wakes, hours later, covered in cold sweat in the aftermath of his first vision.