Work Text:
On a Monday morning in August, he kills himself.
A wolfsbane bullet to his head in the middle of the burnt out husk of his family home ends it all.
That is the truth.
What he tells people who ask: it was a Sunday, it was a Wednesday; it was spring, raining; it was winter, snowing; it was a cocktail of prescription pills left from a past operation, it was hemlock tea, sweetened with honey, it was a car crash: no scars, just endless internal bleeding, inevitable.
No one ever questions him further—they only nod, their grim curiosity sated as phantom smiles linger comfortably at the corners of their lips.
In this place, this... nameless, hellish place that sits on the edge of a life more miserable than the one he left, there are still some things he deserves to keep to himself.
When Gwendolyn walks in, it marks the end of his shift.
There’s no customers, so, he stands behind the bar and waits, listening to the off-tune music flitting around the bar from the jukebox with a resigned familiarity, just until Gwendolyn clocks in and gets settled behind the bar. He leaves with a nod, making his way to the employees room that’s nothing more than a glorified closet to grab his jacket and punch his time card.
Outside, he leans against his gray car that won’t ever suit him, not like the Camaro did, and lights a cigarette. Smoke drifts up, and he follows it to the sky.
There isn’t anything to see. There never is: void of any stars, absent of the Moon and all her phases, this place is a lapse of all reasoning. It’s, habitual for him, routine at this point, to smoke, to gaze at the sky: nothing more than petty vices, more methods of self-harm to punish himself despite none of it really mattering anymore.
It’s impossible to know how long he’s been here.
There’s a method he has to track the days, but, he only started when the days started to mix, started to mess with his head. What he does know is that time... it moves strange, here, and where here is, that’s another mystery all together.
No one knows, no one seems to care. If he had to say... it settles inside of him like New York; not like the sleeplessness of the city, the barely contained life that pulsed against every square inch of the city's boundaries all hours of the day⸻no, this place... it’s like the forgotten stretches of cracked and faded highways that lead into little towns, helpless to the passing years, helpless to their collapse: rural, dilapidated, molasses slow.
An exhale, another inhale; the bland burn of menthol settles in his throat and lungs: muted, but, present, alive.
There are times when it’s hard to discern which existence feels worse, but, nights like these, when his shift at the bar has done nothing but drag, and his skin ends up feeling too tight to be his while the phantom itch of fangs plagues him, the answer is clear.
Here, where the moon never shines, he’ll never be able to shift. The wolf died alongside him, so, there will forever be a piece of him lost, never to be held again—and it’s that fact alone that makes this life worse than ex-life.
They say suicides go to hell, the kind with brimstone and demons, but, perhaps, here, this... this watered-down bleakness, where the days and night mesh together in an endless timeline, and there’s nothing else to do but go through the motions of living...
He throws his cigarette on the ground, unlocks his car.
Fuck.
Maybe this is the real hell, after all.
There’s plenty of consistencies in this life, but, the main one is that nothing ever happens.
The only thing that brings variance are when new suicides land and come into the bar, and the intrigue of those never last past the night. Which is why, on his way home from work one night, it takes until his headlights are right on it to realize the purple lump laying in the middle of the road isn’t just a heap of discarded fabric—it’s a body.
The car rattles to a stop. His headlights flicker.
The lump remains still.
This place might be more subdued than ex-life, but, working at a bar has shown him that sometimes, death isn’t enough to water down people. Sometimes, this place makes them worse: crazier, angrier.
Common sense says to leave it alone.
He should leave, but, as he grips the steering wheel, listening to his engine idle, he knows that he won’t.
It’s silent as he gets out of his car. Everything in this world feels a stone’s throw away from isolated, and this stretch of road is as isolated as it can get. He looks around, slow, careful as he walks to the lump, but, he’s alone—mostly.
He nudges the lump in the side with his boot. The moan of pain he gets is feeble, masculine. Must’ve just landed, then. There’s still time to turn back, away, drive home, but, it feels like an inevitable course of action to squat down, to take the lump by the shoulder and roll it over.
He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but, what he does find is... surprising: it’s just a kid: shorn head, weird nose, long lashes, moles, and... pale—paler than anyone he’s seen in a very long time.
Rapid blood loss, probably, but the hoodie the kid is wearing covers his arms. He rubs his jaw and studies the sunken contours of the kid’s cheeks, the arch of his lips.
Could be a Juliet.
He’s pretty enough.
Thin eyes flutter open, enough to have him looking down into brown eyes that search for something past him. Here... dimmed eyes are the standard: everyone walks around full of ghosts, vacancies—but, this kid... his eyes are different: they’re... vivid, compelling, bright, brighter than any he’s seen here, and maybe in ex-life, too.
The kid mumbles something illegible, eyelids fluttering back shut as his consciousness slips away once more.
He shifts back on his heels.
This life is already shit. There’s no need for him to add the chore of taking care of the newly dead to it. The smartest thing for him to do would be to leave the kid here, walk back to his car, and drive off. Someone else can help if the kid can’t get his wits about him.
His fingers curl up into the meat of his palm. He should leave, but...
Pack, his mind whispers.
Fuck.
Both ways, the road is empty, black. There’s no telling if anyone will be by before morning, or if anyone will care enough to even stop. It’s been a while since he let himself think it: what would Laura do? What would mom do?
It’s stupid to think.
He knows what they’d do.
Fuck.
The kid feels weightless, fragile. Breakable. It’s nothing to scoop him up, to walk back to the car and settle the kid in the backseat. The kid doesn’t stir, even when his head hits against the hard metal of the car door. It’s... eerie, the stillness; like a dead body—but, they’re all dead bodies here, aren’t they?
For a moment, two, he stands there, warring with curiosity that wins out. When he pulls up the sleeve of the kid’s right arm, there it is: from the crook of the elbow, all the way down to the wrist: a long vertical scar. He stares at the scar tissue, at the way it finds the street lights and shines just so.
It’s impossible to come back from a cut that dramatic, and he’s sure, that if he checked the kid’s left arm, there’d be a matching scar.
So—not nearly a Juliet, but, still... pretty.
There’s nothing left to do on this empty road. He gets back in the car, puts the car in gear and drives off to a home that won’t ever be one, even after all this time.
Pack: it echoes in his head.
He turns the static-filled radio louder to drown it out.
Six days.
For six days, the kid lays unconscious on his couch.
He watches, sometimes: when he’s eating, when he’s getting ready for work, when he’s reading; mostly, he watches when he has nothing much to do at all.
The kid sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps; with each day that passes, he’s confronted with the fact that he doesn’t necessarily have a plan. There’s no telling what the kid’s temperament is, there’s no telling if they’ll... get along, whatever. But, his mind, it keeps whispering, pack, pack, and before he died, after the fire, the only pack he ever had was Laura—and after Laura... there was no one, there was nothing.
There is no wolf to satiate in this life; there is no power to chase. He doesn’t know if there’s anything he can do to help.
It’s the same sort of overwhelming not-knowing that plagued his every corner of ex-life after Laura died.
What he does know, at least, is that the six days the kid spends on his couch are the fullest his apartment has ever felt; and though the wolf is dead, there are some nights, when he’s staring at the water-stained plaster above his bed, lit up by street lights, he swears he can hear the steady thud-thump of the kid’s heart.
Wherever here is, there aren’t any traditional seasons or weather patterns, but sometimes, despite the lack of clouds, stars, and moon: it can rain. It’s never long enough, never hard, and never in any sort of predictable way, but it’s by far the most tangible thing that happens.
His kitchen isn’t very large, but, it has a big enough window that when he opens it during a storm, muted petrichor floats in, and for a few hours, he can pretend that he’s in ex-life, back home, before Kate and the fire: running with his pack, his family, letting the energy of the preserve flow through all of their wolves.
On the seventh day of the kid occupying his couch, it rains. He falls asleep at the kitchen table to the sounds of soft drops against the glass, dreams of elder trees covered in layers of lichen, of slow rivers and heavy moons, of his wolf running free, his mother’s smile.
What wakes him isn’t what usually wakes him: the melancholy of loss wetting the corners of his eyes, the ghosts of faces forever out of reach.
No, what wakes him up is the rusted fish knife he’s been meaning to replace held tight against his jugular. An odd sense of disappointment settles as its jagged edge presses deep. He would’ve never been caught so off guard in ex-life.
Still, he doesn’t move.
“Where,” the kid starts, voice crackling out from disuse. A lick of the lips, and the kid tries again, hand steady: “Where the fuck am I, and who the fuck are you? Where’s my... where’s my dad? What’d you do to him?”
He breathes in, out, slow. The knife doesn’t move.
“I don’t know your dad,” he starts. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t even know what this place is. What I do know is that you’re dead.”
“...dead?” the kid asks, incredulous, weak.
“Dead,” he says, flat. “Congratulations.”
“Stiles,” the kid rasps, an hour later when the panic attack finally ebbs away. “It’s, it’s not my real name, and sometimes, it’s, it’s Mischief, but, that’s only what my mom and dad—,” a pause, a breath: “...Stiles. Just Stiles.”
He nods from his place by the living room entrance as Stiles looks for answers in the glass of water held between his hands. The fear and anxiety etched across Stiles’ frame is so noticeable that he doesn’t need his wolf to know that Stiles is far from okay, and probably won’t ever be.
“Derek,” he offers up after a while.
Stiles looks at him, looks back down with pinched lips.
“So... dead, huh?”
“Dead.” He nods again. “Yeah. That’s all we are here.”
Stiles breathes in, lets it out; it’s wet, wrecked, glass penetrating lungs. One of Stiles’ hands comes up to cover his face.
“Fuck,” Stiles says, whines, full of animal hurt that cuts small and ugly. “Fuck.”
Going from the final moments of death to here... that first moment of realization is never easy. Even if he could somehow find his heart, any comfort offered to Stiles would be useless.
So, he leaves.
There’s laundry to fold, carpet to vacuum.
Stiles’ choked sobs follow him all the way into his bedroom.
He waits until after Stiles has grieved all he’s left behind to poke around in the kitchen. He has eggs, cottage cheese, bread, but, there’s... nothing substantial.
For him, here, hunger is never pervasive, but—pack—he should do something nice for Stiles, maybe.
Pizza is nice. Easy. Pizza is... normal.
He rings Kamikaze; when the driver shows up, he doesn’t stare at the rope marks around the guy’s neck, or the way it bends at an unnatural angle—only has the idle thought of how annoying it must be to drive like that while handing over the money, and that’s it.
When he shuts the door, turns, Stiles lingers in the entryway, frowning.
“Good to know pizza delivery still exists, at least,” Stiles says, voice brittle as he tugs at the sleeves of his hoodie.
He shrugs, walking into the living room. There might be the same conveniences, but, food doesn’t taste quite the same here.
Stiles’ll figure that out eventually.
It’s expected that Stiles doesn’t have much of an appetite, and he’s never been fond of the pizza from Kamikaze, but, it’s something to do as they watch television shows that always feel a little too forced.
It’s a non-verbal understanding between them when sleep comes for Stiles in the middle of a talk show segment about the most convoluted ways to commit suicide.
He gets up and grabs a ratty but soft blanket from the hallway closet that never fails to remind him of Laura’s brief attempts at learning to knit back when they were kids. There’s an awkward pause where he’s stuck holding it out while Stiles hesitates—but, he waits, waits until Stiles reaches up and takes it with a small “thanks” and nothing else.
Dried pizza sauce sits at the corner of Stiles’ lips. He says nothing, only nods.
There are no goodnights. There is only the soft click of the living room lamp turning off, the murmur of voices from the television as Stiles settles himself deep into the most worn corner of the couch.
After, when he’s brushed his teeth, and settled into bed, he stares at his ceiling like he’s done so many nights before; but, unlike all those other nights, the tightness in his chest untwists, just a little, at the knowledge that for the first time in a very long while, there will be someone there when he wakes up.
In the morning, before dark shifts into light, he stares down at the lump on his couch as he brushes his teeth.
In true sleep, Stiles is miles away from the serenity of unconsciousness. Twisted up in the blanket like a pretzel, sucking his thumb—it’s his first real reminder of just how young Stiles probably is. It’s a nonsensical observation, one he buries by distracting himself with the worn laces of his running shoes.
Young, old, it doesn’t matter: the first thing this place teaches is that there’s no hard set rules when it comes to suicide.
He leaves the apartment, and has his run. There’s no destination in mind. He just... runs, eyes fixed on the horizon as he pushes, pushes, pushes until it feels as if his chest is going to explode and his bones have been replaced by jelly. He’ll never be as fast as he was when he had his wolf, he’ll never be as agile or as strong ever again, but... for an hour a day, he can pretend.
It’s only when he gets a cramp in his thigh does he turn and start the long walk home.
The first thing he sees when he gets back in, moving towards the kitchen for water, is Stiles, who’s yawning his way awake. When Stiles sees him, squints, it’s easy to categorize the emotions that flit across Stiles’ face: shock, confusion, the reminder; and then, acceptance: the grim reality.
He stands there. Says nothing.
For Stiles, every morning here will bring the sobering realization of ex-life, the absence of. That absence won’t ever get better, and it won’t ever leave. It just gets easier to compartmentalize the void.
Instead of comfort, he says, asks: “Do you want breakfast?” because that feels... safe, to ask, to talk about.
Behind him, the refrigerator hums. The barely audible thuds of his neighbor getting ready for their day goes back and forth above them. On the wall, the clock tick-tock-ticks.
It’s the sound of normalcy, of a new life.
It’s all Stiles has now.
He stands there until Stiles gives a tight nod, says: “...yeah, sure, man, thanks,”—and then, he goes to make them fried eggs.
After breakfast—
(and lunch,
and dinner,
and after he comes back home from work:)
Stiles never asks to stay.
He doesn’t tell Stiles to leave.
Stiles is a comfort he didn’t realize he wanted.
Waking up in the morning gets easier. Going through the motions of the day gets easier. Breathing gets easier. When it becomes clear that Stiles is staying, he finds himself acting on long forgotten instincts. Regardless of status, his mom used to say, pack takes care of their own—and he may not be an alpha, but he will always hold the teachings of the wolf inside of his heart.
His apartment is a one bedroom, and it isn’t large enough for another bed, so, he does his best to make Stiles’ life here feel less like an intrusion. It’s just... little things, like finding clothes of his that don’t drape on Stiles, going uptown for shoes that aren’t falling apart, laundry detergent that might smell like home, a better pillow.
Insignificant, to outsiders maybe, but, he knows the importance of feeling wanted, of needing to belong, and from the smiles Stiles gives him, Stiles feels the same.
Pack, his mind urges; but, the wolf in him is dead: he is nothing more than a man occupied by the ghosts of his family. He keeps it all locked tight.
There’s no need to load his burdens onto Stiles.
Stiles has his own to carry.
Glimpses of who Stiles could’ve been, might’ve been start to show.
Once the shock simmers down into acceptance, there’s an energy inside of Stiles that becomes hard to ignore: dulled, watered down, greyed, but, he sees it in every tangent Stiles works himself up to that deviates from the original topic, the sleeplessness that overtakes Stiles for the sake of whichever book calls to him from the shoddy shelf in the corner of the living room.
Stiles drags him into plenty of conversations, tangents, and rants, but, they never talk about why they did it.
He has no interest in making Stiles disclose the things that wake Stiles up at night, the things that make Stiles cry at night when the bedroom to his door closes and Stiles assumes he’s long drifted off into sleep.
But, there are times he’ll look up, or turn around, to find Stiles staring at him, only for Stiles to avert his eyes and find distraction in something else in the small apartment. He doesn’t ask what Stiles is looking at; he knows—on the back of his head, there’s a small gnarled scar, the diameter of a small rock: half-healed, and still fatal.
Stiles is curious, he knows, but Stiles never asks, and that alone is enough for him to excuse the stares, the looks, to ignore the late night tears and give Stiles the space he needs to grieve.
In ex-life, he was an omega: lost, damaged, broken by the choices made with his heart instead of the teachings of his family. In ex-life, after Laura, there was never the need to be with other people—he could never trust them, could never tolerate the way they grated against his skin.
But, Stiles feels so... alive, so human, that it’s easy to pretend here isn’t really here—at least, it’s enough until his eyes find the long silvered scars that bisect Stiles’ arms.
So. No. They never talk about why they did it, but, they don’t really need to, do they?
There are no calendars, no sense of months—just, day and night cycles, hours, over and over. Next to the refrigerator, he keeps a notepad nailed to the wall. After every 31 ticks, he rips the page off and starts new.
It takes the night of 27 ticks for Stiles to show his first real signs of frustration.
“Listen,” Stiles says, scowling. “I know we’re like, fucking, dead, but, this is straight up miserable, dude.”
He chews, blinks, as Stiles stabs at the cold slice of pizza on his plate with a fork.
“Like you said, we’re dead. I think the only thing it’s ever going to be is miserable.”
“Don’t you wanna, like, I dunno, fuck.” The frown on Stiles’ face gets even more severe as Stiles tosses the fork down. “Eat a vegetable? Something green? Something that’s actually warm for a change?”
Health isn’t a concern here, but, even if it was, in ex-life, he wasn’t much of a cook either. Anything involving the kitchen was Laura’s part of their household chores, because every time he tried to make anything more complicated than eggs, steak, and potatoes, it always turned into a fucking disaster.
He tells Stiles none of that. He only shrugs, takes another bite of miserable tasting pizza, and meets Stiles’ pinched expression with:
“If you think you can do better, be my guest.”
The next morning, he wakes to a pillow to the face.
“Get up,” Stiles says, snapping his fingers, looking angry... or maybe embarrassed. “I don’t... I don’t actually know where anything is, so, you have to take me, alright?”
There’s a restless energy in Stiles as Stiles looks over the small list in his hands and waits around for him to finish getting ready. It’s amusing, even if it makes his hands itch with the need to calm Stiles down like his mom would do for him and Laura when they were still growing into their wolves.
Pack, his mind whispers—it’s getting harder and harder to ignore.
The only grocery store worth shopping at that has fresh vegetables and quality meat is a few miles outside of town near the farmlands. It’s strange to see Stiles in his passenger seat, buckled up and squinting off into the distance as if the ambient light is too bright instead of pale and motionless in the backseat.
The roads are clear as they leave the apartment, and it’s only a twenty minute drive if they stick to the highway, but, it only takes five minutes of driving in silence before Stiles starts to fiddle around: with the console, with the glovebox, the overhead visor.
It’s fine, mostly ignorable until Stiles starts to fiddle with the radio.
“Stop it,” he says, smacking Stiles’ hand away before punching the buttons to get back to his preferred station.
“Sorry for finding it weird every song in this place is about fucking death,” Stiles grumbles, but, that’s easily ignorable, too.
It's early; hardly anyone is in the store to worry about, so he contents himself with following behind Stiles while Stiles commandeers the squeaky shopping cart, list in hand.
First, produce, then the aisles, then the deli and meats. The cart starts to fill as Stiles navigates the store with an ease that tells of regularity, familiarity, in ex-life, (—my dad, he’s a sheriff, Stiles says, eyes red from being all cried out. After... after my mom... he just works a lot, y’know? drinks, too, so, I... I just hope he’s okay.)
He thinks of his own ex-life as Stiles murmurs to himself: he thinks of Laura, of early mornings, being coaxed, bleary-eyed from their small apartment in New York City to go shopping, with promises of black coffee, bagel sandwiches and fresh lox at the end of it all.
He pays for everything as Stiles bags up the groceries. There’s only one cashier in the front; she’s wearing an eyepatch, and it’s clear there’s a story there, but, despite all the subtle looks Stiles sends her way: if Stiles wants to ask, he keeps it to himself.
As they load the trunk of the car, Stiles looks up at him from underneath his eyelashes: shy, says: “thanks, for this, really,” before busying himself with tying the bags so the food and boxes don’t go rolling.
On the ride back into town, Stiles fiddles with the radio again.
This time, he lets him.
It’s all strangely domestic.
When Stiles cooks, it’s obvious they’re meals that mean something beyond the criteria of simply being warm and healthy.
There’s some foods he recognizes from ex-life in New York City: potato pancakes; pan-seared pierogi, topped with fried onion; borscht that stains Stiles’ fingers and the counter tops blood red for a full week and a half, gołąbki made with a tomato sauce Stiles spends a whole day cooking in between watching game shows.
Some of the dishes remain nameless, and sometimes they’re plain things, like spaghetti, or burgers, tacos; and while everything is muted here, as if there’s no other choice than to interact with the world through a thin plastic wrap, feeling only half of what is expected—but, Stiles’ cooking somehow does the impossible: it warms him from the inside, explodes on his tongue as if daring the nature of this place to suppress all the humanity Stiles keeps inside of him.
It’s heartfelt, filled with memories, loss, love.
It’s soul food, plain and simple.
He eats it all with enthusiasm.
At the end of every meal, they wash dishes side by side. Sometimes, Stiles is silent during, but, sometimes, Stiles will tell him pieces of his ex-life, of who he was and the things he did—it’s enough of a vivid picture to envision a fragmented interpretation of who Stiles could’ve been. It feels easier, next to Stiles, to let his thoughts drift to his own family, to their traditions, and to his dead wolf.
When night falls, he replays Stiles’ words, and compares it to all of the pockets of absence and isolation in his own ex-life, an unnamed emotion twists deep in his chest.
Jealousy, maybe, if he really had to search for a name, if he felt like being honest.
Not aimed towards Stiles, just.
Sometimes—and he can admit at least this much to himself—he wishes he could’ve known Stiles before their grief took them.
Grocery trips become a part of their routine. It’s a welcome change to his mundane life.
The only thing that he doesn’t wholly appreciate is their newfound dependence on the car. He doesn’t drive it much if he can help it. None of the cars here are worth much: they’re all lemons in their own way—but, his car is its own special sort of horror.
It’s more of an evil necessity rather than something he enjoys because everything it is reminds him of how different it is from the Camaro.
It drags once he hits 40 MPH. If he presses the breaks too hard, they squeak, high pitched and aggravating, even to his human ears. The seatbelts never latch for long. The windows rattle like they’re about to break when down. He hates the fucking thing, but... for Stiles’ sake, he deals with it, even when there’s days like today, when Stiles gets into a bratty sort of mood and is dead set on driving him up the wall with his loud off-key singing of lyrics that don’t match any of the songs on the radio and dirty shoes up on the dashboard.
It’s bright today, and the glare of the sky is doing nothing to help the headache that’s forming.
“Shades,” he grunts, hand out. “In the glove box.”
“We’re gonna teach you how to say please and thank you one day,” Stiles grumbles; still, the glovebox pops open, and there’s the sound of rummaging as Stiles searches for his sunglasses.
Stiles gives a triumphant little ah-ha! when he finally finds the shades through the mess of receipts and other stray things that seem to accumulate in cars, but, instead of handing them to him, Stiles fucking tosses them.
He curses as he tries to grab them, but, they bounce off the tips of his fingers, clatter down on the foot well and slide right underneath Stiles’ seat.
“God damn it.” He smacks the steering wheel. Fuck. He liked those sunglasses.
“Don’t throw a fit, dude. Don’t even know why you need them,” Stiles says, sighs, shifting to feel around on the floor. “The sun isn’t even that bright today.”
He squints down the road, frowns. Fuck this shitty car. “Don’t bother. You’re not going to find them.”
“What do you mean, ‘don’t bother’? Why the fuck not?”
“There’s a hole underneath the seat,” he says, flat. “Anything that gets dropped down there always fucking disappears.”
“...what? Like, there’s a hole in your car?” He looks over as Stiles twists in his seat to look behind them at the road.
“Yeah. No.” He reconsiders, settles on: “kind of.”
“What do you mean ‘kind of’?” Stiles asks, eyebrows raised. “If there’s a hole, it’s gotta have fallen through and landed on the road. We could just stop, right? Your tires probably didn’t even hit ‘em.”
“I mean,” he says, sighs. “It’s not a plain hole. More like a black hole.”
“A black hole.” The skepticism rolls off Stiles in waves.
“Yeah,” he says, shifting gears to pass a station wagon. “Like the Bermuda Triangle.”
“You’re shitting me,” Stiles says.
“I’m really fucking not.” Stringing Stiles along when he could have his fucking sunglasses would be idiotic.
Stiles takes it in, decides: “You’re really not, are you? What the fuck.”
The only thing between them for a while is the hum-static of the radio, the grinding of the engine. But, before long, Stiles shifts, clears his throat.
“...is there, like, a limit to how big something can be?” Stiles asks, too neutral to be an innocuous question.
Any answer he gives opens up the door for Stiles to cause trouble, so, he only sighs again, reaches out to turn the radio up, and submits himself to the knowledge that things are about to go missing around the apartment.
It takes 43 ticks on the notepad for Stiles to stop him one night at the front door.
“I don't like silence,” Stiles says, hovering next to him in the small foyer, scratching at his neck. “The TV is, like, fine, but, it’s, it’s not human, y’know? And, silence... it’s, it's never been good for me, honestly, so—if it’s, if it’s okay, can… can I come? With you?”
He puts on his jacket, thinks. Dealing with vulnerability has never been one of his strongest traits. Laura was the emphatic one, in that tough, cock-sure way of hers. Vulnerability wasn’t something he could afford to have, not after what he did, so, he’s at a loss—but, when he looks up, Stiles is listless, vacant: so reminiscent of the night he found Stiles in the road that it makes him a little sick to remember.
It would be cruel to say no. So, he doesn’t. Just holds the front door open for Stiles and locks it tight behind them.
He doesn't know how Stiles old is, was, when he died, but when Stiles walks into Stiff Drinks, there's familiarity inside of Stiles: the way he settles at the bar, the way he eyes the pool table, the way he doesn't hesitate to flag down Gwendolyn and ask for a beer. Smiles are hard here… but, there's mischief in Stiles’ eyes when Stiles points over to him, and tells Gwendolyn to put all the night’s drinks on his tab.
Stiles following him to work becomes another part of their routine.
During his shifts, Stiles talks: talks to him, talks to anyone who sits at the bar, talks to himself, and talks to the jukebox in the corner that only ever seems to play three songs reliably.
Stiles is a distraction.
In ex-life, he couldn’t afford those.
Here, he doesn't mind.
“Can you even kill yourself here?” Stiles muses one night, sleepy.
They’re sitting on opposite sides of the couch. On television, a dating show is in progress. A few of the men are shirtless, flaunting their scars, trying to impress the women sitting in pool loungers with their violent deaths. Why they sit here just to watch this shit, he doesn't know.
He shrugs. “Don’t know. Haven't really thought about it.”
That's a lie. He thinks about it all the time, from the moment he wakes up until the moment sleep claims him.
Stiles looks at him, all bleary-eyed and knowing, and continues.
“I have. Like, a lot, which is weird, but, like, dying doesn’t really fix shit, I think. Kinda just makes it worse.”
“I’m guessing that’s the point of this place.”
Stiles nods, slow, considering. “...probably, yeah. Though, I think the second thing I learned was that while, like, bleeding out that fast wasn't exactly fun, kinda hurt, actually, but, I think I’d do it again, ‘cause, at the end… there was… it was almost euphoric, you know?”
He doesn't. At his end, there was the taste of cold metal in between his teeth, then pain, endless, as his body tried to heal itself, but couldn't, and then—there was just... here. Still, he nods. It’s been 54 ticks, and he’s gotten better at understanding the layered nuances behind Stiles’ words.
They finish the rest of the show in silence. As the credits roll, Stiles shifts, squirms, and settles into the couch for the night. He tries to ignore the press of Stiles’ toes against his thigh.
“If this is the afterlife…” Stiles murmurs, already drifting off. “I wonder what's after this.”
He stares at the television as a music video program comes on, and convinces himself he doesn't want to know.
“Do you miss anything?” Stiles asks one night at bar, poking at his congealed cheese fries.
He pauses his cleaning of the whiskey glasses for a second before he continues. “What?”
“Y’know, like, before you bit it. Was there anything good in your life still?”
He takes a deep breath, stares at the glob of cheese stuck to Stiles’ chin, and chooses his words carefully as he picks up another glass. “I have nothing to miss that wasn’t already gone.”
“Mm… I get that, I think,” Stiles says, murmurs, really, squinting at his plate. “I miss my mom, but, she died when I was still a kid, so, it doesn't… doesn’t hurt, maybe, like it should, but, I miss her Jeep. It was mine, after, Roscoe.”
He listens as Stiles takes a steady breath, continues.
“I miss my dad, too, obviously, and eating the crunchy-soft curly fries from the diner with him in his cruiser, nagging him. He’s probably eating like shit now, but, after, fuck, everything me and my mom put him through, I guess he probably deserves some kind of happiness. There’s... the beach? Yeah… yeah, I miss that. Where I lived, the beach was miles and miles out, but, it was always a blast to make a trip of it, with... my best friend Scotty, and his mom, Melissa, we always used to go, and, fuck, it’s stupid, but, sometimes I even miss Ly—.”
Stiles cuts himself off. He waits, puts all his attention on cleaning the whiskey glass in his hand instead of focusing on the unreadable stone that sits on Stiles’ face.
After a moment, Stiles continues: “...I guess I just miss myself, y’know?”
It’s been 71 ticks since he found Stiles. Neither of them acknowledge the crack in Stiles’ voice.
“...I miss my older sister,” a beat: “Her Camaro, too,” he offers, because while they may have not known each other very long, one thing he knows is that silence and Stiles shouldn't coexist. It's the most he’s ever offered of his ex-life—an olive branch of understanding, commiseration: awkward, but, a gesture nonetheless.
Stiles huffs, eyes watery: were they in ex-life, he might’ve called it a laugh.
“Of course you’d have a hard on for Camaros. I bet you had a leather jacket, too, huh, big guy?”
He smiles, turns away to put the glasses back on the shelf.
That, he doesn't bother denying.
Dreams of fire, of death, of gun powder, jolt him from his sleep. Stiles stands over him, hands outstretched and hovering.
“You, uh. You were talking in your sleep,” Stiles murmurs, eyes wide. “Growling, even, kinda.”
It's been a while since he's had a nightmare that bad, that vivid. He drags a hand down his face, keeps himself in darkness for a moment, two, before he throws his legs off the couch and stands, walks. Stiles backs up, quick, curious, obviously not scared if the way he lingers at the kitchen doorway is any indication.
He opens the cabinet above the sink and pulls out two bottles.
The one good thing in this life is that he can get drunk. It's not a habit, just, something he needs, when ex-life starts to visit again and turns the little good in his dreams to nightmares.
He keeps two bottles stocked at all times: one whiskey, the other gin.
He turns to Stiles, bottles out, and says: “pick one.”
Stiles licks his lips, eyes darting between the two. “The whiskey.”
“Good choice.” He gives Stiles the whiskey, twists the cap on the gin, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, until the ache in his chest is replaced with the astringent burn of juniper berries and citrus and static starts to creep up his arms.
“Woah,” Stiles breathes.
He raises his eyebrows, lowers the bottle. “Are you going to get drunk with me, or are you just going to stand there?”
And that's how they spend the night, getting drunk together while watching a comedy show about two brothers who can't seem to manage to kill themselves properly despite all their best efforts.
It isn't very funny, not at first, but the less liquor that sits in their bottles, the more they laugh. The more they laugh, the more Stiles slumps over him, body warm against his side in a world that feels so devoid of.
During a commercial, Stiles starts up on a rant about production value. He listens half-heartedly, not a stranger to these spiels. Movies, television shows—it must’ve been something Stiles had a big interest in back in ex-life. It’s, it’s charming to think about: Stiles, on weekends, holing up with movies he’s watched plenty times before; Stiles, with friends outside of a movie theater in the dead of night waiting for a midnight release. There’s so much of Stiles he’ll never get to know, so much that he’ll never get to show Stiles.
Stiles would’ve loved to know about werewolves, about all the supernatural that lurked in the world of humans.
He smiles, looks down at Stiles at the exact moment Stiles turns looks up at him.
He doesn't know what Stiles sees, looking at him, but, for him: he’s thought it, has thought it since that night: Stiles is beautiful—awkward and boyish, yes, but, devastatingly haunting with how sadness shapes his features; and, while there is no telling who Stiles could’ve became in ex-life, what he knows for certain Stiles would've been someone magnificent, someone bright, someone deserving of all the love and more.
Unspoken, magnetic, they drift close, closer, until Stiles’ nose is brushing against his and he can smell the corn and rye of the whiskey on Stiles’ breath. The first press of their lips is tentative, cautious, the acknowledgement of the potential destruction of this careful thing they’ve crafted together. But, like a dam breaking, it shifts to frantic, desperate, both of them eager for connection, to feel, to mean.
It’s juvenile, making out on a couch, but it's a lifeline, it’s a necessity, for both of them. He won't regret this, refuses to, as Stiles shifts to climbs into his lap. Regret is for ex-life, problems too far away to matter outside of phantasmal echoes. It's easy to let his hands rest on the thin cut of Stiles’ hips, destructive in its own right as heat zips through him as Stiles climbs over, climbs on him, and settles right against his cock.
It’s been 99 ticks since Stiles has come into his life—99 days to become familiar with each other, to navigate this wasteland, 99 chances to try to find something to live for, so, he won't regret this, no, but that doesn't mean he can't realize it’s a bad idea: because he won't be content with just this, this one moment in their shared endless eternity.
There is no guarantee that Stiles will stay here, there’s no guarantee Stiles won’t move on to find something better, someone better, no guarantee that Stiles won’t try to kill himself again.
But, as he feels the tentative press of Stiles’ hand against his belt buckle, he decides that whatever happens, he’ll have an eternity to figure it out, to deal with.
His ex-life was nothing but bad—and, so, this, it can't all be bad, not when with every stroke of tongue, every soft moan, every slide of fingers, Stiles reminds him of what feeling alive, truly feeling alive, used to feel like.
After: when they’re relaxed, and Stiles’ body against his feels as natural as anything as the television glows in the dark of the room, there’s the weight of anticipation between them.
They won’t talk about it, but they probably should.
102 ticks, and Stiles starts sleeping in bed with him.
They don’t talk about it, and maybe, it’s for the best.
One night, there's two girls at the end of the bar—he tries not to eavesdrop, because however many shifts he’s had at this place is enough to know these conversations don't really matter.
Except, one of them, the one with half her face scarred, mangled: kindred spirits, likely a gun, except, she never got to get her angle right—she says:
“What did you say?” he asks, a little too forcefully as he sets the beers they ordered down.
“The beach…” she says, slow, cautious. “There’s one a few miles south. It isn't much, and like, full of rocks, junkie needles, that kinda stuff, but,” a shrug: “it’s something to do, right?”
She goes back to her conversation, and he makes himself scarce on the other end of the bar to take stock of what needs to be reordered, but... he thinks. Thinks. Tries not to keep glancing over to where Stiles is, by the pool table, talking with two blonde girls, a guy with a Russian accent, and someone who looks like ex-life still plagues them.
A beach. His mother’s voice echoes: pack provides for their own.
It’s probably just a small, isolated stretch of the edge of wherever this is. Still.
A beach.
He doesn't tell Stiles where they're going, a fact that Stiles complains about for the first fifteen minutes of the car ride.
“You have a terrible habit of kidnapping people, you know,” Stiles grumbles, looking through a found CD book filled with music neither of them know. Stiles’ socked feet are on the dash, and it's hard not to let his eyes get drawn towards the slip of pale ankle he sees. “No manners at all. It’s like you were raised by wolves.”
He smirks. “Maybe I was.”
“Ha, ha, fucking ha.” Stiles sneers. “Very funny.”
All of Stiles’ complaining aside, it’s somewhat of a peaceful drive. In between the mournful music coming from the radio, Stiles talks: about college, about the trips he used to take downstate with his friends, about all the lies he told his dad to get away with taking those trips, about all the things and places Stiles wishes he could’ve seen and done before deciding enough was enough.
“Sometimes... I dunno. I don't think I really meant to do it,” Stiles says, looking out of the window at the stretches of nothing that disappear along the horizon. “Kill myself, y’know?”
He doesn't, but, Stiles knows that much already.
“...it just, it all got so tiring. Pretending. Functioning. I think I just wanted it all to stop. Life isn’t all that kind for people who function a little different, who, like, lack a little, or need a little help.”
An 18 wheeler passes by, too fast, shaking the tired frame of the car. He grips the steering wheel tight, and thinks about the taste of gunpowder, about Laura’s laugh, about Cora, Peter, his mom, his pack.
He swallows past the lump in his throat. “It never really stops, though, does it? That feeling. It just gets... a little less shitty to deal with.”
When he looks over, there’s a considering look on Stiles’ face, a small smile.
“No,” Stiles agrees, fingers tapping against the worn fabric against his jeans in time to the song playing. “I guess not.”
It’s… it’s not very impressive, for something that calls itself a beach.
There’s no sand, for one thing, just rocks that make themselves known against the sole of his boots. Littered across them are used condoms, syringes, plastic food wrappers and containers. He’s seen better looking ravines, honestly—part of him wants to apologize; it was better in his head, this plan, and:
“Holy shit.” There's breathless wonder in Stiles’ voice as Stiles rushes forward, right up to the edge where land meets water.
Nothing ever really seems to matter here. Catatonic, stasis—a state of unbeing: the motions of a life that isn't real, isn't the life that they’ve all decided to behind, so it shouldn't matter, but, still—Stiles deserves more, better,
Except, when Stiles turns to look at him… the sun dances off the side of his face: his brown eyes burn, dance, and there, on Stiles’ face—toothy and bright: the first smile he’s seen since leaving his ex-life.
His own twitch in response.