Blue

"Why do you do this?"

Derek's voice is rough and desperate. Stiles should be sorry for making it that way, but he isn't. He only feels the warmth of Derek's hands pressing against his wound and the slightly pulsing pain that follows. He wants to reply, but his lips don't listen and he is very tired. Maybe just a quick nap, and then he'll tell him why.

"Stiles!"

Just a short nap.

When he was six, Stiles got lost at a carnival. It was the same one that came every summer, drifting through town only long enough for the locals to spend their worth, and then moving on. His parents used to take him every year, but they don't anymore, not since he got lost. They stay home instead.

Stiles doesn't remember much of what happened that night. When he tries to, he sees flashes of colored lights and hears bells shrieking, feels his chest get smaller, his throat close up. He remembers thinking I am going to die.

Stiles can't for the life of him remember why it started, why the panic gripped his heart so hard he felt it falter. He wakes up with gasping breaths at night, fists curled so tightly that his nails break skin, and the only image printed in his mind is of the bright blue eyes that pulled him from the edge.

He remembers back hair tangled with leaves, ripped and mud-caked pants that maybe once were green, bare feet and no shirt. He remembers the boy who saved him. He remembers shaking, shaking and knowing he would never be still again. One moment Stiles was drowning without water and the next there were two hands pressed against his cheeks, blue eyes capturing his.

They stayed like that for years it seemed, centuries, Stiles and the boy, together, staring, until he could feel his heart return to its normal rhythm. The boy must've be able to feel it too, because once the erratic sound turned to steady thumps, he was gone. Stiles's parents found him moments later. Frantic and relieved at once, they asked him what'd happened, had someone tried to lead him away, had he been hurt or touched? But Stiles, even then, could no longer remember anything but the blinding brightness of the other boy's eyes. So he said nothing, and his parents, convinced that he was wholly traumatized, hugged him tightly and took him home.

The next summer when the carnival comes to town, they stay in together, order Chinese, and watch The Lion King. Stiles never asks his parents to bring him back, in the hopes of seeing the boy again. Because he knows—and Stiles doesn't know how, it frightens him if he thinks too much about it—that the boy wasn't there for the carnival. He was there because he knew Stiles was in danger. He was there because Stiles needed to be saved.

This is how it starts.

At age eight, Stiles almost drowns jumping into a river with a too-strong current. When he's nine, he breaks his leg trying to climb the highest tree in his backyard. A year later, he, this time with Scott, the new kid who moved in a few streets over, twists his ankle and wrist riding his bike through a construction site. On his eleventh birthday he and Scott get caught trying to sneak into the tiger's cage at the zoo. His parents sit him down after, and ask him if he has a death wish, if maybe he'd like to talk to someone, if there's something they can do. Stiles shakes his head, and tells them it's okay, that he doesn't want to die.

He doesn't tell them why he does it, knows they won't understand. He doesn't completely understand himself. All he knows is that, since the carnival, he has been empty. There is a gap inside of him, where something important used to be, and the only possible explanation is that the blue-eyed boy took it with him when he left. So Stiles needs to find him, and since they met when Stiles was in danger, he tries to recreate that feeling of panic, hoping the boy will know somehow, and come to save him again. Then maybe he can replace the thing he took away. Then maybe Stiles will feel like he can breathe again.

Stiles's mother dies when he is twelve. It isn't sudden like a car crash or a heart attack, but for a sickness, it happens quickly. In April she goes for her yearly check up and they find the lump, do some tests, tell her that it's serious. By July she can't keep down a single meal, and she goes to stay in the hospital so they can feed her through a tube. Stiles visits her every day. The nurses sometimes look at him like they want very much to hug him. He doesn't let them, when they try.

She goes in her sleep on a blustery November day. He bikes to the hospital before they can call the school, and so he finds out all on his own. When he gets to her room, a nurse is changing the sheets. She sees him in doorway and she gets teary-eyed, because they all know who he is, the Stilinski boy, whose mother is dying, whose mother is dead. She tells him that they've called his father, that he should be here any minute. She doesn't tell him where his mother is but he already knows. Something breaks inside him then, and he thinks that maybe it's his heart, that maybe he will die. He starts to run. He runs through the halls and down the stairs, out the door, and to his bike. He rides until his tears blind him and he can't see, and then he throws his bike down and runs again. Through the woods, he trips over invisible roots and scrapes his elbows, his knees. He doesn't stop running, though, because he knows if he does, he'll die.

Eventually, his legs stop listening to him, because they're tired and they want to rest. He crashes to the ground and lies there in the leaves. He watches the sky darken and thinks somewhere deep in the back of his mind that maybe this time he'll finally get to see the boy. For some reason this thought makes him laugh uncontrollably, hysterically, and then he is sobbing great, huge sobs that rack his body and he can't breathe. He tastes salt and sadness and agony but not air. He is going to die here in the forest. He lets this knowledge fall over him like a blanket. He is ready.

Just when he's sure the darkness will finally take him, he feels a warmth rest on his face. He knows that it's his mother, coming to take him with her to wherever it is they're going, and so he opens his eyes, gladly. All he sees is blue. It doesn't surprise him; if Heaven were going to be color, it would be this one.

Stiles waits for something, a light, a sign, but slowly he realizes that he can feel the rocks digging into his back, where he's still lying on the dirt-covered ground. There is warmth, he hadn't imagined it, but it's centered on his forehead and on his chest and it's not as otherworldly as he had thought. And the blue that fills his vision, that blessed color that has haunted him for years, it is really there, ringed around pupils blown wide in the darkness.

He gasps for breath, hadn't realized he'd been holding it, and the smell that fills his lungs is one that he has always known. When he was made, when his soul was crafted by whatever higher being, this smell and the color blue were woven into him, with springtime and marshmallows and every other thing that he was always meant to love.

Against his will, a whimpering noise breaks free from his lips and the boy—the boy, who else could have eyes so sinfully bright—smooths his hair away from his face, uses the pads of his thumbs to smudge the tear tracks from Stiles's cheeks. He's gotten older, Stiles thinks, of course he has.

The horrible, awful thing is that Stiles doesn't know if he is alive or dead. He can feel pain, but maybe death isn't like a dream. That must be it, because the boy has been missing for so, so long. And then a hateful voice whispers in his mind's ear, tells him that the price for blue was the death of the person he loves most. He shatters at the thought.

Stiles starts to cry again, this time silently, his heart cracking with every tear a little more. The boy tries desperately to help him, tries to wipe away each tear the second it falls, and small sounds of his distress seep into the ever-chilling night air. Stiles never wanted this.

Blackness surrounds them, the boy gives up his futile efforts and curls around Stiles, maybe to keep him warm. With a suddenness that frightens him, Stiles needs to ask, needs to know.

"Where have you been?"

His voice cracks and is swallowed up by the darkness, and he feels very silly for saying it. The boy lifts his head from where it was resting under Stiles's chin. He doesn't reply, only burrows closer, pressing his cold nose against Stiles's neck. But Stiles wants an answer.

"I waited for you. I did all this stupid stuff and my parents were mad at me, I made them worry, and you never came. Why didn't you come?"

The boy growls something into his neck. Stiles can't hear him, and he tells him that. The boy growls again—growls, Stiles thinks, like an animal—and then speaks, barely audibly even in the quiet air,

"I couldn't." Stiles wants to scream, wants to pound his fists into the ground, into the boy. Everything he ever did was for this boy, and his only excuse, he couldn't show up, couldn't be bothered.

Like he can hear what Stiles is thinking, and maybe he can, the boy grips Stiles freezing fingers in his hand, and says,

"I wanted to, I just—I couldn't." He squeezes Stiles's hand, hard enough to hurt. "You have to be safe," he says, "but you never are. If I came, you would stop, but then you would start again when I left. I thought..." Stiles presses his chin down into the boy's hair, because if he stops talking there will be nothing but silence and Stiles doesn't want that, he will drown.

"I thought if I left you alone you would stop." And his tone changes then, the boy sounds like he is begging Stiles when he says, "What do you want from me?"

Stiles listens to the emptiness inside of him, to the pounding of his dying, bleeding heart.

"I just want to breathe again."

The boy presses himself impossibly closer to Stiles. They lie there like that until the moon dips low in the sky and Stiles forgets that he is dead. He wonders if they will live together now, if this is his prize for everything that he has given.

His father's men find him hours later. They bring him to the hospital—and he hates it, hates it, hates it—the doctors tell his father he should be dead, that temperatures reached far below freezing. It is a miracle he is alive. They don't say anything about a boy, and when Stiles asks where he is, they say delusions, hallucinations, not uncommon in these situations.

Stiles doesn't say a word again for six months and eighteen days. Trauma, they say, grief. But it's only that he knows, now, that no one is listening. His mother is dead, and the boy is gone. For good, he knows, for ever.

Stiles decides to stop thrill seeking as he blows out the thirteen candles littering his birthday cake. His father's smile is shaky, and even though Ms. McCall has tried her best to help, they haven't been doing so well.

The house is dark at night, and his father likes to drink the pain away, so when he wakes up sometimes crying out, no one is there to hear him. He finds the silence almost comforting in a masochistic kind of way. It is his only companion after all, on those nights.

He doesn't need to find the boy anymore, knows that he won't come. And even if he gave Stiles back whatever it was he took that makes it hard to breathe, Stiles wouldn't stop suffocating. What the boy took, his mother did too, and the emptiness grows a little every day.

Stiles sometimes forgets he is alive, when he's at school and no one sees him, when he is home and all alone. But in the quiet he can hear the way his heart thumps, painstakingly clear, steadily keeping him from falling. He needs to listen to know that this is not his everlasting punishment. The silence helps him cope. So he doesn't need the danger anymore. He is fine.

When Stiles is fourteen, the Hale mansion burns down. The night of the fire, Stiles wakes up as he usually does, gasping and grasping for things that are no longer there. But something is different, something is wrong. His feet act on their own, bring him to the window. He sees the dark black smoke almost invisible against the sky. It rises up and up. He watches it for hours, maybe days. He thinks he hears a wolf howl, but shakes his head, and goes back to bed. Everyone knows there are no wolves in California.

When he and Scott enter high school, Stiles vows that things will be different. He is almost able to sleep through the night, now, and he and his father are surviving a little more like living. He feels maybe okay. So he decides he's going to be better. He's going to speak up, he's going to talk, so much, and so often, that no one will ever call him shy again. People won't look at him and whisper amongst themselves, they won't say, there goes that Stilinski boy, whose mother is dying, whose mother is dead.

He is going to reinvent himself. He will be known as Stiles, that awesome kid that gets everyone laughing and talks all the time.

And if by sophomore year, they call him Stiles, that clumsy kid that doesn't know when to shut up, then that's okay. That's great. And if no one but Scott remembers who he was before, remembers those silent years, that's even better.

Things are so great, actually, it's no wonder he doesn't see it coming. After all, nothing gold can stay.

Scott won't stop talking about Derek Hale, the crazy other werewolf—yes, werewolves, this is Stiles's life now—who killed his own family and is currently on a spree. He rants and rants, and his eyes go golden, and Stiles tries to breathe through the sudden wave of something he feels whenever Scott mentions the older man.

Derek, Stiles's mind reminds him of the name, like he could forget. When Scott appears in his room through the open window, the first words out of his mouth are,

"Derek's up to something."

Stiles wants to reply with a sarcastic comment, his now usual way, but his brain won't work, won't stop spinning, and his heart pounds always harder, as the name echoes on and on, Derek Derek Derek.

If he wasn't so used to his messed up mind and the strange fixations it likes to settle on, he might be frightened by the way that one word has become his obsession. As it is, this is just another fascination in a long ling of similar ones: dangerous stunts, the color blue, silence, and the ashy skeleton of the old Hale house. As it is, he is not worried in the slightest. He has much more important matters to deal with, like getting his best friend through the next full moon.

The lady at the Walmart checkout line eyes him cautiously as she rings up yards of chain and three pairs of handcuffs. This is his life now, he thinks, and gives her a winning smile.

The first time he lays eyes on Derek—Derek, Derek, Derek—Stiles is bleeding, he is slowly dying. The hunters had been chasing Scott, Stiles of course had followed, a ricochet bullet had pieced his flimsy human flesh, and Stiles had thought, as he'd fallen to the leafy forest floor, I am going to die.

Stiles is lying in the leaves and staring at the sky, wondering in a pain-induced haze, if he'll get to see the boy, when there he is. Suddenly, appearing from the brush like some sort of beast in a fairytale is the boy, who is no longer a boy, who is tall and dark and daunting. He collapses to his knees next to Stiles, his breathing so haggard Stiles worries he is hurt. He lets out a whining noise that does something strange to Stiles stomach. But his own breaths come easier, like the boy's presence alone is all he ever needed.

Oh, he thinks. Oh, wow.

The boy takes off his jacket and tries to stop the bleeding, and then Scott is there, panting and swearing, saying words too fast for Stiles to catch. But Stiles does hear something, one thing.

"Derek," Scott says, and Stiles's brain answers, Derek Derek Derek.

The boy—Derek, of course it's Derek, Derek Hale, Derek whose house Stiles watched burn to the ground, Derek who kept him warm enough to live and growled into his neck, who pleaded, what do you want from me—growls a command at Scott and for once he listens. He casts one last panicked glance at Stiles and runs off into the woods. Leaving Stiles alone, with Derek. Derek, Derek.

"Derek," Stiles says, and he means to yell it, because finally he has at least a name for his obsession—and almost all of them go back to him, why is that—but it comes out as a gasp, a breathless whisper, and Derek's glowing eyes find his. They are so, so blue and Stiles wants to cry.

"Why do you do this?" Derek begs him for an answer, and he must be thinking this is just another stunt Stiles pulled out of hope for him. What an ego, Stiles thinks, as his eyes slip shut. Maybe when he wakes he'll tell him how wrong he is, after he sleeps, though, he's so tired.

"Stiles!"

Stiles sinks into the darkness and he is not afraid.

Stiles wakes up to the smell of hospital, so familiar to him, first because of all the inevitable outcomes of his danger days, and then because of after, when things were hard. He doesn't wake up choking, which is new, but he puts it off to the drugs and doesn't think much of it. He opens his eyes, the white stings too bright, and he has to blink to clear his vision. When he does, he blinks again, and then once more.

The boy is sitting at his bedside, sleeping with his mouth hung open, one hand curled into his chest, the other resting on the bed, where Stiles's must have been. Stiles thinks for sure he's dead, when he remembers the woods, the leaves and rocks against his back, and the blue. He remembers blue, remembers Derek's voice yelling his name. Remembers Derek.

Stiles smiles then, so much it hurts his cheeks but he doesn't stop, he can't. His eyes tear up from lack of blinking but he can't stop staring, doesn't ever want to look away again.

"Derek," Stiles whispers, his throat soar and scratchy. Derek's eyes snap open and he sits up straight like a soldier, like he's been trained a certain way. Stiles wonders just how much he doesn't know about this boy, knows that mostly everything is secret still, they are strangers really. But not really because the boy, this boy, Derek, is his somehow. He knows it like he knows the grass is green, the clouds are white, Scott is an idiot. These are facts of the universe. Him and Derek. Just like that.

Derek scoots his chair closer, the sound of it disturbs the silence, but Stiles doesn't mind, he doesn't need that anymore.

Derek's eyes never leave his as he slowly takes his hand, like he's afraid that Stiles will pull away. Why he would ever think that, Stiles has no idea.

"You can't quit, can you? You're so goddamn stubborn," Derek says, in a growl, but somehow with more affection than Stiles has heard in years, directed at him at least.

"How would you know," he replies, and winces as he does. His throat is still soar. Derek passes him a cup of water from the bedside table and watches as he drinks it. When Stiles is done he takes it back, sets it down, and grips Stiles's hands in his again.

"I just do," he says, like it's a rule, a fact everyone should know. "I know you."

Yes, Stiles thinks. He squeezes Derek's hand and smiles when he squeezes back.

"You do."

-End-

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