Goodbye
bloodwritesPart 6 of the Ruined series.
It's dark and cold, and Stiles shivers in his short sleeves. Cinder blocks tower above his head, and the air is filled with the smell of exhaust and blood.
Something wet and warm twitches in his hand, jolts him from the daze of misunderstanding.
When he looks down, the dim light from the street lets him see the shape of the thing he's holding, and it's not twitching at all.
It's beating.
Stiles grunts and jerks, opens his hand in horror and it drops to the ground. It hits the pavement with a dull sound, rolls to rest beside a long, dark shape. Stiles stares as his mind registers the outline of a body in the darkness, and the shine from the streetlights on a silver badge.
"Dad?" Stiles whimpers, crouching without thinking, reaching out to grasp the shoulder and pull so the face falls into the light. It's the familiar uniform, but it's an unfamiliar face, the badge of a deputy pinned to the front.
Stiles sobs in relief, but his eyes track to the dark, slick fluid that covers his fingers, that stains the uniform where he touches it, the same dark shine that spreads over the chest, fabric torn, fibers soaked and dripping.
He looks at his hand again.
Long seconds pass in which the only sound is the ragged draw of his own breath, then he gropes in his pockets for his phone. He smears blood across the screen as he dials, feels it sticky on his cheek as he holds it to his ear.
"Stiles?"
The voice is tinny, very far away, tight with concern.
"I did something," Stiles says. "Come. Come get me, please."
"Where are you?"
Stiles turns, looks out of the mouth of the alley. He recognizes the sign above the coffee shop across the street. "On 4th. I think. Derek, hurry. There's a lot of blood."
"On my way."
The line goes dead.
Derek approaches slowly. No sudden movements, his eyes flicking from Stiles' face, to his chest, then back up again. He touches Stiles, one hand sliding down over his arm to grip his wrist, the fingers of the other tugging at the front of Stiles' shirt where it's torn. The fabric is wet, cold. It sticks to his skin.
"I have to tell my dad," Stiles says.
Derek shakes his head and presses car keys into Stiles' fist. "No. Go home. Wait for me and don't talk to anyone."
Stiles bunches his hand in Derek's shirt, but the fabric is torn from his grasp as Derek moves past him. He reaches out with his mind and Derek freezes. "You can't leave me alone. You were wrong. I'm not okay. I'm not in control. Look at it. Look what I did when you left me alone."
"I'm gonna take care of it," Derek says. "Let me take care of it."
Stiles tries to calm his shuddering breaths. "Just hurry," he whispers.
He backs out of the alley, Derek's keys clutched tight in his hand. He lingers as Derek crouches beside the body, head bent as he stares at the human heart beside his boot.
Derek looks up at Stiles, shock and horror and fear on his face before he wipes his expression blank. "Go," he says.
Derek seems to take forever. Stiles sits at the end of the bed, trying to control his fear. His hands clench into fists on his thighs, one covered in sticky red to the wrist. He remembers the feeling of it pounding in his hand, remembers the blood that pumped out between his fingers before it went still.
He doesn't remember what came before.
Downstairs, the door rumbles open. Derek's feet shake the staircase and then he drags Stiles up, pulls him toward the bathroom.
"We have to burn them," he says, as he piles blood-stained clothes on the tile floor. He drags Stiles in under too-hot water and Stiles lets him, lets him scrape the blood out from under his fingernails and lets him wash the stinging cuts over his heart.
"The last thing you remember," Derek says.
"Nothing." Stiles shakes his head. Derek is perfectly composed, calm, but Stiles can't shake the expression he wore in the alley. "I was here. I was..." He grips the edge of the couch tight in his hands. "I was right here, and you'd been goneā" He closes his eyes. "You'd only been gone a few minutes, and I was thinking I was fine. I was okay." He blinks them open again, turns his hand over and stares at his open palm. "Then I was there and it was in my hand and I don't remember doing it." He stares into Derek's eyes. "I don't remember wanting to do it, I don't even know who he is, just that he's one of my dad's deputies and if they find himā"
"They won't find him," Derek says. "I promise." He glances up at the ceiling, at the far corner where it used to sit, watching, waiting.
"It's not there." Stiles repeats the words he's been saying for weeks now. "It's not talking, it's not... Nothing." He lifts his hand, traces the line of broken skin on his chest through his shirt. "It was just me. Derek, I think it was just me."
Stiles knows Derek's waiting for the headline. They don't talk about it, but they're both waiting for the shit to hit the fan, for the search for the missing deputy, for a witness that swears Stiles was the last to see the man alive.
There's nothing.
When the sheriff comes, he's normal. He asks Stiles when he's coming home, as he has been since Stiles stopped hearing the voice, since he stopped seeing it. Derek cringes when Stiles pushes, asking questions that are too specific, looking to Derek for confirmation that his father is telling the truth.
"Do you need to tell me something?" Stiles' dad says, but the look on his face is more curious than suspicious. "Do you boys know something? Is there somethingā" He pauses. "Something supernatural I should know about?"
"No," Derek says. "If there was anything you needed to know, we'd tell you."
They widen the net, but they find nothing about a missing person fitting the man's description, cop or not.
"What if he wasn't even human?" Derek says. "It could have been someā" He shrugs. "Some kind of creature, some kind of monster. We don't know what else you might be able to do. Maybe somehow you knew. You might have been protecting yourself, or someone else."
Stiles doesn't remember. If he can read the minds of monsters, if he knows when bad things are going to happen, he doesn't know.
He refuses to be left alone, so when Derek admits he wants to dig it up, see if he can figure out whoāor whatāthe man was, Stiles goes with him.
They go deep into the forest. There's no moon above, the sky is dark and the woods are darker. They walk for hours, and by the time Derek stops, driving his shovel into the ground, all Stiles can do is slide down the rough bark of a tree while he catches his breath.
Every few minutes, Stiles turns on the screen of his phone and waves it over the place Derek is digging. He's working fast, seeming to sink into the ground as he pulls more dirt out and piles it up beside the hole. Rested, Stiles crawls forward on hands and knees, peers over the edge.
The earth beneath his palms is damp, greasy between his fingers. He wipes it off on his jeans, but the slickness won't budge. "What is that?" he whispers, slides the light over his hands.
The whorls and creases of his fingers are caked with black gunk. He pulls his hand to his face and sniffs, and bile rises up in his throat when the scent of death and decay fills his nostrils. "Oh my god," he chokes. "Is that normal? For it to come up out of the ground like that?"
"Stiles," Derek says, his voice tight with barely suppressed alarm.
Stiles looks up. Derek's in the hole, staring down into it. His shovel is on the edge. "What?" Stiles asks. "Is it gross? I know it stinks, but is it... Is it like, falling apart and shit?"
Derek lifts his head. "There's nothing here."
"What?" Stiles leans over the edge, but it's black down there and he can't see a thing. "It's gotta be. I can smell it, like, decomposing." He holds his hands away from the dirt, because there's something coming out of the ground and he doesn't want any more death on him.
Derek shakes his head. "I can't smell anything."
Stiles stares for a beat, then shines his phone into the hole. There's nothing, but he can feel it, slimy between his fingers, oil in the dirt where Derek buried it.
"No," he says. He shakes his head back and forth. "No, no, see? It's gone. It left me alone and I don't see it anymore." He rocks back on his heels, falls back onto his ass in the dead leaves. He looks at his hands again. "There was blood on my hands. His heart was in my hand." He looks up. "It was beating in my hand, Derek. You saw the blood, right? You saw his blood? I killed a man, a cop. Did you see it? Was it even real?" His heart wants to pound out of his chest, it wants to explode, and he can feel it, watching, waiting.
Derek's speaking as he climbs out of the hole, but Stiles can't hear him over the pounding of his own heart. When he presses his fingers to his chest he can feel it, and it's tight, swollen, like something's got inside and infected it.
Stiles can taste decay on the back of his tongue. He chokes, spits, trying to expel it but it gets worse, every time his heart beats it pumps more of that filthy grease up into his mouth. He falls forward, holds himself on one hand, and with the other, tears at the front of his shirt, at the skin beneath it, because he's got to get it out, he's got to release the pressure or it's going to kill him.
"Stiles." Derek jerks Stiles over onto his back, pinning his arms to the ground either side of his head. "There's nothing there."
Stiles cries out, chokes on the thing inside him. "It's in me," he says. "It's been in me the whole time. Making me see thingsāit didn't happen. Did you see the blood? What did you bury, Derek?"
Derek's eyes track down over Stiles' chest. His eyebrows draw down, his lips press tightly together. "I buried a man. But he's gone. Someoneāsomethingāmust have taken the body. I don't know, Stiles."
"Had the dirt been disturbed? Had anyone been here since you did it?"
Derek drops his eyes and shakes his head. "No. I don't know howā"
"It wasn't a man," Stiles spits. "It was the thing I brought back with me." He tries to twist out of Derek's grip, needs to scratch at the skin over his heart to get it out but Derek won't let him go. "It's in me. It's always been in me. It's making me see things, and now it's making you see them too. Help me get it out."
His skin breaks open, splits over his heart, but it's not deep enough. "Help me," he cries, arching against the pain that makes even his fingertips scream in agony.
"Stiles, stop," Derek says, tightening his grip, stretching Stiles' arms out on the ground as if he can stop it with physical force.
Stiles digs deeper, closing his eyes and shaking with the pain as another layer of muscle tears inside his chest.
"No," Derek cries, actual panic in his voice. "Stiles, no. Too many people I love are dead already, please."
His skin, his flesh, every part of him buzzes with searing pain. He can't think, not enough to sustain the action of cutting into his own body. The pounding eases, the decay that bubbles out of his throat slows to a trickle, and the spasms of agony slowly subside. "I need you," he rasps, throat burned with bile and sore from screaming. "I need you to help me get it out."
"I will," Derek promises. "But I'm not going to kill you to do it."
Derek took to keeping rubbing alcohol and bandages in the apartment when Stiles was still cutting. He pulls them out again, cleans the wound in Stiles' chest, tapes a white rectangle over it. "If it helps," he says, "I don't think you killed anyone."
"Yet." Stiles closes his eyes, lets his head fall to the side. It was barely deep enough to bleed. It's unfair that the pain from something so minor was the thing that stopped him. "It's inside me, Derek. It stopped talking because I stopped listening. It got sick of waiting, and that cop, I dunno. Practice? Figuring out how to do it on it's own because I wasn't cooperating. One day it's just gonna take control again and..." He opens his eyes, turns his head back to look up at Derek. "If I were you I'd be getting as far away from me as I could."
"I'm not leaving you," Derek says. His fingers trace the edge of the tape on Stiles' chest. "You tried that before. That night, in the alley. You did it then, too. Why?"
"I don't remember."
"Why tonight, then?"
Stiles lets his eyes close again. He's tired, so tired. He wants to sleep for a week. Maybe never wake up again. "I could feel it. Taste it. It's like, this dead thing. It's like an infection, and I know if I could get to it, my heart would be black. I just want it gone, and I don't careā"
"I care," Derek says.
Stiles lifts heavy lids. Derek's blurry around the edges, but the look on his face is clear. Fear, concern. Helplessness. "Okay," Stiles whispers. "Then find a way to get it out. I can't do this, Derek."
"There's got to be something," Derek says.
Deaton looks grave. He drops his eyes to the floor, shakes his head from side to side. "Short of going back in, of ferrying it back the same way it came out, I can't think of anything." He lifts his head. "There's simply no other way, Stiles."
Stiles swallows around the lump in his throat. "If that's what it takes."
"I'll need some time," Deaton says. "Give me a few days."
Derek's shirt is torn down the front. The ragged edges hang open, and the front of his chest is an open wound.
There's blood everywhere.
Stiles wants to not understand why Derek's pinned to the wall, arms outstretched like he's been crucified, head lolling forward like he's dead already, but he does.
Stiles' hand is wet and warm. Blood drips from his fingertips, hits the floor, explodes out in tiny red stars. His eyes flick from the barely perceptible movement of Derek's chest, to the river of blood flowing out of him, soaking into his jeans.
He understands completely. "It tried to stop you," he breathes. "It knows." He rolls his eyes to the ceiling and lets out a rough, broken laugh. "Of course it knows."
Derek coughs. Stiles drops his eyes to see blood on Derek's lips. It jolts him out of the shock, and he springs forward, ready to catch Derek as with a thought, Stiles releases him. "You're not gonna die, right?" Stiles says, as he gently lowers Derek to the floor. "You're still breathing. I didn't rip your still beating heart from your chest. You're gonna be okay."
Derek rolls onto his back, throws his arm over his eyes and coughs up more blood. "We have to do it now," he chokes. "It talked to me. With your voice." He pulls his arm down and looks up at Stiles with bloodshot eyes. "Wearing your face." He coughs again, rough and raspy, but no blood comes up this time. "It really doesn't want to go back."
"It tried to kill you," Stiles says. "It knows I wouldn't bother if you weren't here." His eyes track down Derek's torso. The edges of the wound are knitting slowly. "Why didn't it finish the job?"
"I thought I was dead," Derek says. "I said goodbye." He reaches out, grabs Stiles' hand, links their fingers. "And you came back."
Derek's not bleeding any more, but he still moves gingerly as Deaton ushers them into the back. Stiles hears the soft plink of water settling in stainless steel. He toes off his shoes, steps into the frigid tub, sinks down and gasps as all the breath rushes out of him. Derek's hands on his shoulders as the water covers his face are a comfort, and he doesn't fight, just closes his eyes and exhales.
When he opens them, he's not in the clinic any more.
Through the surface of the water, he sees white. As his face breaks the surface, he draws in air that's thicker than it should be, and as it fills his lungs and he pushes himself up out of the water, he registers the familiar slow unreality of the place.
It's like the dream he's had for months, coming back over and over again, and he sees blood on white, flesh ripped apart, and his heart pounds in anticipation.
There's no blood here now. There's only water as it sluices from his body and pools on the floor under his bare feet.
He looks up, and Derek is waiting for him, an almost smile curled on his lips.
"The Nemeton was here, before," Stiles says.
Derek cocks his head to the side. "It's not what you're looking for, this time."
"No." Stiles takes a step forward. Another. "This time I'm looking for you." He closes the space between them, expecting almost to never get close enough, but this isn't a dream, even though nothing is as it seems.
His hand, pressed over Derek's heart, twitches with the need to act. "This is what I've been waiting for," he says. "All along, this is what you taught me."
"Forget about that," Derek says, and his fingers on the back of Stiles' neck bring his head up. They burn where they touch him, and Stiles' skin goes slick beneath.
Stiles shudders into a kiss that tastes of dead leaves and earth. The fingers closing around his throat cut off his air, but he doesn't fight. "If I die, you'll never get back," he rasps. "You need me."
"I need you," Derek agrees, and his fingers loosen. "You need me, too. We belong together. You can do anything when I'm with you, Stiles. Anything you want."
It's true. Stiles knows it's true. He sees how it could be, how strong he could be, and he's almost tempted. "No," he says, though. "No."
The thing that he'll remember, more than the feeling of Derek's skin under his nails, more than the warm flow of blood over his fingers, is the sound Derek makes as Stiles tears into his chest. The gasp of surprise, followed by a grunt of pain, like it was unexpected, like it was the last thing Derek ever would have thought possible.
Stiles follows Derek to the floor, coming down straddling his waist as he uses two hands to open Derek up. His fingers are slick with blood, he can't see, but he feels his way, peeling back skin and tearing muscle, then focusing his mind, breaking Derek's ribs beneath his hands.
Derek chokes. He coughs, spits up blood that marks the smooth white floor with streaks of red.
Derek's heart beats beneath Stiles' fingers.
It shouldn't be this easy.
The sound is slick and wet when he pulls it free, separates it from the flesh that surrounds it. Derek's eyes go wide as he stares at the twitching mass in Stiles' hands, then they go dim, and cold, and dead.
The heart keeps beating.
Stiles stares at it, blood still dripping red over his fingers, adding to the mess that coats him to the elbows. "Stop," he whispers, but it doesn't. He squeezes, with his hands and his mind, tries to force all the blood from the muscle as his own pounds in his chest.
The blood turns black, pours out in a quantity that Stiles knows, logically, couldn't be contained in such a small thing. It's greasy, smells like decay, coats Stiles' fingers in filth that he knows he's never going to be able to wash away. It beats, one last time, and finally goes still.
Stiles is left with a handful of smoke and ash. The body beneath him is gone, and Stiles is sitting on the floor surrounded by thick, black, oily dust. He takes a breath, sucking in the heavy air, choking back a sob.
When he slides back into the tub the water turns black. He wonders, briefly, if he'll simply drown, wonders, briefly, if that wouldn't be the best thing for everyone, because if he opens his eyes and Derek's not there, all of it will have been for nothing.
Stiles' face breaks the surface, and he clings to the sides of the tub with fingers that look clean but he can still feel the dirt caked into every crease. He coughs, and water pours from his lungs. His heart is racing, and he can't breathe for the fear that's formed a knot in his throat.
Then warm fingers touch his chin, tip his head up, and when Stiles sees Derek's face he sucks in lungfuls of cool, fresh air. His tears are hot, a contrast to the chill of wet skin. "It's gone," he chokes.
Derek pulls him out of the water, wraps a towel around his shoulders, pulls him close. Stiles soaks up his heat, breathes in his scent, clean and warm and alive.
Stiles strokes his fingers down the center of Derek's chest. The scar is gone, like Derek had never been opened up, like Stiles had never had his hand in there, inside him. Stiles doesn't remember it, but he knows what it feels like to have a heart beating in his hand, and he'll never be able to wipe away the memory of it.
"Does it feel different?" Derek asks, his own palm covering Stiles' heart.
Stiles lifts his eyes. "Lighter. I can breathe." He's afraid, though, knows his heart is beating just a little too fast. "I killed you like it was nothing."
"You knew it wasn't me," Derek says.
"I didn't. I was only, like, ninety-five percent. I had doubts, and I still did it. I killed you without a second thought."
"Good," Derek says. "Some things are worth the risk." He kisses Stiles, slow and sweet.
Stiles presses himself close. When Derek touches him it feels different, cleaner, more real, like he's woken up from a dream. He twists his fingers into Derek's hair, arches into Derek's body.
Derek pushes him away. "You don't need me anymore." He's quiet, and there's a hint of regret in his words. "You don't need to be here anymore."
"Yeah, I do." It's even easier now that Stiles' mind isn't clouded. It takes just a glimmer of a thought, and Derek jerks onto his back, arms pinned to the mattress beside his head. Stiles pushes himself up, looks down at Derek, held immobile with just the power of Stiles' mind.
Derek blinks up at him. "You can stillā"
"I can still." Stiles laughs, soft and easy, and he feels like he hasn't smiled in forever. He's still smiling when he leans over, presses a kiss to Derek's lips and lets go.
Derek's arms around him are warm, and Stiles feels safe, finally. Derek rolls him onto his back, and Stiles closes his eyes.
fin
End Note: And that's the series done and dusted :D After the hiatus from hell (seriously, I'd pretty much written it off as abandoned), it's an immense relief. Thank you for reading!