i stood alone [part i]
Story: you’re the message i was heeding
Summary: Stiles Hale: Schrödinger’s widow.
Notes: I actually feel a little bad about having written this because it’s hopelessly self-indulgent and not really that good, but, well, I’m posting it anyway. Warning for character death-off-screen-and a lot of emotional repression and also heavily overutilization of the word “what.”
~
Stiles wakes up hating everything. She feels swollen and achy, like a balloon filled with bruises, and she has to pee and her throat feels like it was doused in rancid oil and lit on fire. It’s like the worst possible case of the Mondays with an extra bit of fuck you, courtesy of the universe at large thrown in. She ends up staying in bed for a while, arms crossed over her breasts even though the pressure just adds to her general malcontent, and she tries to count all of the speckles on the popcorn ceiling as she waits for her life to stop sucking quite so hard.
It doesn’t, unsurprisingly. It hasn’t in the past six months, even though Stiles has basically woken up to this exact same scene every day since May.
Stiles is a restless sleeper even when she’s emotionally stable, so it’s business as usual that she’d apparently kicked off the comforter and flat sheet at some point and now they’re crumpled up at her feet like used tissues. Used tissue is a good metaphor, Stiles thinks lazily. She has moments where she feels a lot like a used tissue, usually when a bodily fluid is leaking out of one of her many orifices.
The cotton sheets are freezing anywhere not covered by Stiles’ immediate body, and her skin has pebbled from the cold.
“It’s Tuesday,” she says to the ceiling. She gives up on the sternly crossed arms in favor of gingerly lacing her fingers together and resting them on her stomach, and then she thanks the little baby Jesus when she doesn’t immediately begin to projectile vomit. “December 20th. I’m supposed to go over to the house this afternoon to help put the tree up, but let’s be frank here, it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster. Natalie is going to get dictatorial and Erin is going to get pissy and then tinsel is going to be everywhere.”
Casually, like there’s someone she needs to fool, Stiles affects a shrug. “S’cool, though, it’s not like I’m new to this rodeo.”
Stiles doesn’t say, I miss you, or Every day when I wake up I forget that you won’t be here, or I can’t do this without you, fuck you for doing this to me; she’s not quite that unhinged.
Besides, the first two are so obvious that they don’t really need to be said. Stiles wakes up and the first thing she does is nestle to the left, feet scrambling for a warm thigh so she can bury her icicle toes against it. Stiles still talks to her dead husband every morning, as if he’s just in the bathroom adjoining their bedroom, dunking his head under the tap after a morning run. Stiles drives to Beacon Hills Cemetery on the first and third Wednesday of every month and spends two hours there, weeding around first her mother’s chrysanthemums and then Derek’s tulips.
Derek is dead and Stiles has to do this without him, because otherwise no one will.
“I won’t clean it up,” she continues. “Your parents are just going to have to be satisfied with picking tinsel out of their drinks for the next twelve months.” This gives her the satisfying mental image of Erin, grinning widely, bits of tinsel woven around her teeth like braces. She can almost hear the first three Flo Rida jokes Laura is going to make.
That’s it as far as morning updates go on Tuesday, November 20th; three seconds later, Stiles is groaning and catapulting herself out of bed so she doesn’t end up with puke all over the carpet. How is it actually possible for a human being to feel this gross for such a prolonged period of time? Biology sucks, Stiles doesn’t care how much time Beatrice spends waxing rhapsodic about the crazy genetic mutation stuff she does in her lab.
“Thank god you’re the only spawn I’m going to have,” she tells her stomach when she’s resting between heaves, her forehead propped against the side of the cabinet under the bathroom sink. “There’s no way I could handle this disaster a second time. If a divine power decides to grace you with a brother or sister, they’re growing in a test tube.”
The baby’s foot presses firmly against the bottom of Stiles’ stomach and whoops, there she goes again. Forget about Linda Blair, Stiles has got Exorcist-level projectile vomiting locked down. She would win all the puke-based awards, even the ones from Nickelodeon that involve dunking someone in a vat of slime and ugh, gross.
Everything in the bathroom is tiled green and white and it’s achingly cold, soothing against the hot press of her sweaty skin. Even as Stiles rolls her head and rests her temple against a particularly icy patch of birch wood paneling, she would give anything to have a large, familiar hand card through her hair and dig knuckles into the tense muscles of her shoulders. Stiles hasn’t cried in three months, even though she’s pregnant and should theoretically be a faucet with limbs, and she doesn’t want to break her record just because of a little puking.
It’s okay, she thinks, too tired to bother verbalizing the lie. She doesn’t really have much of a choice; it’s basically become Stiles’ mantra over the past few months. It has to be okay.
~
In fifty years Stiles is probably going to be an old woman in her house on the edge of town and people are going to call her the Widow Hale, because that’s how towns like Beacon Hills work, but for now she’s mostly “poor Stiles’ and “dear girl” and “that sad Mrs. Hale.” People tiptoe around her, even while they’re simultaneously tripping over themselves to open doors for her and help her up the stairs and get her things off of tall shelves.
Maybe Stiles will be able to appreciate, at some point, that all it took for the town to stop tagging her as the weird half of the Derek Hale-Stiles Stiliniski dynamic was for her to get knocked up and her husband to be hit by a car, but that point is not today or likely to occur in the next decade. It’s possible that she’ll be recovered enough by the time her kid is ten, but considering how fucked up her dad still gets on the anniversary of her mom’s death, eight years later, Stiles will probably never be at the point where she can joke about Derek’s death.
“Mrs. Hale!” Paul Oppenheimer pauses in the act of opening the door to Stella’s and waves. “How are you doing today?”
“Just fine, Paul,” Stiles says, valiantly attempting not to waddle her way down the street from where she’s parked her Jeep outside of the hardware store. “How are you doing?”
“I’m great!” Paul beams at Stiles, but there’s a forced levity and a vague hint of panic lingering around the edge of his smile. “We miss you. Mr. Harris isn’t really, um, the same.” Paul is still holding the door to Stella’s open, clearly waiting for Stiles to get closer. She grumpily begins to walk faster and, yep, there is now a distinct waddle to her step. Fantastic.
At least her sophomores like her better than Adrian Harris. That’s a small comfort; it’s sort of like them preferring her to Lucifer, or Rush Limbaugh. “I’m sure you’ll all do fine,” Stiles lies. “Are you planning on taking AP with me next year?”
Paul smiles toothily, his panic smoothed over by Stiles’ blatant falsehood. “Yep!” A lot of the sophomores choose not to take chemistry again, even for the AP credit, which is why Stiles has been aggressively campaigning that the school change it’s policy of requiring that students take standard chemistry before AP. Or at least, she had been, before she’d found herself with more life insurance than she’d really wanted, Derek’s trust fund, and a half-painted nursery.
“That’s nice,” Stiles says, slightly winded by her half-hearted dash. She finally makes it to the door and lets Paul wave her through as though he hasn’t been waiting to do it. Stella’s is packed for a Tuesday morning, but school is out for winter break and nothing says ‘Please, God, carry me through this last-minute Christmas shopping’ like a bracing cup of Stella’s cocoa and a stack of pancakes.
“Morning, Stiles!” says Stella cheerfully. She’s pouring coffee into a thick white diner mug for Stiles’ dad, who’s perched on one of the stools at the counter and poking at a bowl of oatmeal like it’s going to morph into a monster and bite his hand off. “Let me get you a cup. Move over, Jeff.”
Jeff Oppenheimer obligingly slides over a seat. Seeing him dressed in deputy’s khaki makes Stiles feel old; he was in her first AP class, back when she and Derek had just returned from Berkeley, and now he’s a couple of years out of BHCC and working for her dad at the station. “Thanks, Jeff,” she says to him, and then to her dad, “Glad to see you’re choosing to obey my instructions.”
“I was told the only thing on the menu I could eat was dry toast or oatmeal,” her dad replies. “With the choice of a festive holiday fruit salad on the side, that is.”
“I love Stella’s festive holiday fruit salad,” Stiles says, because she does. Who doesn't like strawberries cut into stars and arranged on top of slices of melon cut to look like a Christmas tree? Derek had loved it; he’d always hum the first few bars of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree as he speared blueberries with his fork. Derek hadn’t really done singing; his aim had been to make Stiles laugh.
Stiles settles her bulk on the open stool and accepts the mug of herbal tea that Stella slides in her direction. As she strips off her hat and gloves, she pretends not to notice the small dish of turkey sausage her dad is casually elbowing into Missy Quentin’s plate of waffles to his left. It’s the holidays, after all, and besides, and her dad has disgustingly good luck charming any woman between the ages of 35 and 65 in Beacon Hills into giving him the occasional pass on Stiles’ strict diet.
“Well, this is for you, then,” Stella says, and she plunks down a plate of fruit salad. This one is cantaloupe slices arranged into a menorah, with melon as the candlesticks and pineapple as the flames. Since it’s the fourth day of Chanukkah, there are only five chunks of pineapple; Stiles rations them accordingly between bites of cantaloupe.
“Are we still on for tonight?” she asks her dad. “I know you don’t get off shift until six, but there should still be plenty of the healthier cookies left.”
Her dad groans theatrically and chokes down his mouthful of oatmeal. “Your in-laws are crazy,” he tells Stiles gravely. “Worse than your mother’s family, and that’s really saying something considering your aunt Ewa.”
“Dad, when I married into the Hales, you knew what you’d be in for,” she replies just as seriously. “You don’t say no to Beatrice Hale about Christmas.”
Her dad looks like he’s seriously considering taking his life into his own hands anyway, and then he sighs and takes a swig of his coffee. Stiles tries not to be jealous and mostly succeeds; she’s had a long few months to get used to the lack of caffeine in her life. “I could try,” he says mutinously, and then he smiles and, putting down his mug, leans over to kiss the top of Stiles’ head. “Yeah, I’ll come by.”
Stiles lets him rest his hand against the back of her head, his thumb pressed against the base of her ponytail. She knows that she looks like her mom and the older she gets, the worse the similarities become; she knows that her being pregnant is bringing back the kinds of memories that used to wreck her dad, back in the early days when Stiles was away at school and her dad worked instead of coming home.
When he sighs inaudibly and pulls back his hand, Stiles sticks her fork into a slice of melon and thinks, at the Christmas party hop, and then stuffs the fruit into her mouth and chews it faster than she should, so the muscles in her face will keep her from doing something idiotic like crying in the middle of Stella’s and landing her a starring role in the Beacon Hills gossip mill for the rest of the week.
~
The first person to come across Stiles is actually Scott McCall. He’d been in Stiles’ AP class last year and he’d sent her an email over the summer to tell her that he’d gotten a perfectly respectable 4 on the AP exam, which apparently had surprised him but hadn’t shocked Stiles at all.
“Scott,” says Stiles, struggling to her feet and trying not to look pathetic-although to judge by the slightly constipated look on Scott’s face, she’s not really succeeding-with a hand on her belly. “I would ask what you’re doing in the preserve, but since it’s going to save my butt, I won’t split hairs.” Stiles knows that Scott is allergic to everything around them, namely trees and grass, but she’d been a bit of a dumb teenager, so she gets the urge to surround yourself with dangerous objects.
“I’m…sorry?” says Scott hesitantly. The constipated expression gets worse.
“I’m not going to tell on you to your mom, Scott,” Stiles assures him. She makes it upright and mostly vertical and then groans because all of the muscles in her lower back have simultaneously decided to go on strike. She hisses through her teeth and presses a fist against the knotted muscle. “I don’t know what happened, but my car sort of stopped in the middle of the road and now it won’t start.”
Scott nods, twice, his eyes stuck on Stiles’ face. “Won’t start,” he says wheezily.
“Are you okay?” Stiles asks. “You aren’t having an attack, are you?” Scott is wearing tight jeans and a tighter t-shirt and there’s no way he’s smuggling an inhaler anywhere in that outfit; he looks kind of like the cover of Out, down to the fact that he’s not wearing shoes. “Scott,” says Stiles slowly, aware that he’s yet to do much more than breathe heavily in her direction, “is everything all right?”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Scott demands, which is when Isaac Lahey-same grade, but Stiles had him for first period honors chem-bursts out of the tree line behind him. He’s also shoeless, because apparently that’s now the happening thing for Beacon Hills’ teenage population, but Isaac isn’t wearing a shirt either.
“Ookay,” Stiles says slowly, watching as Isaac skids into place next to Scott. “I would really have thought you’d remember me, Scott, since I just finished writing you an exceptional letter of recommendation and it’s not like there are a lot of pregnant chemistry teachers wandering around Beacon Hills. There’s basically just me.”
“Scott, what the hell,” Isaac breathes. “She-is that-do you?”
“Yeah,” Scott says, putting a hand out and gently shoving Issac behind him. He does it automatically, kindly, and firmly. “I smell it.”
Stiles is fairly certain that neither Scott nor Isaac have joined a cult or become substance abusers since last she saw them, and last she saw them was Thursday, when they were elbowing each other in the snack food aisle at Raley’s in a furious argument over kettle corn versus movie theater-style popcorn, so she’s not really sure what to make of whatever the hell is going on right now.
One of Stiles’ least favorite things about being pregnant-and it’s impressive, really, that it beat out the way her body just sort of leaks fluids now whenever the hell it wants-is the vulnerability. Stiles has never really been a Lara Croft, or even much of a Hermione Granger, but she’s always been a fast runner and she’s fairly competent with mace and a handgun, even if she’d turned down her dad’s offer to get her a concealed carry permit for that latter.
But now, of course, Stiles can barely walk without feeling like an impending earthquake, let alone run, and even though Derek’s death has fucked her up in a million of little tiny incalculable ways, it’s also left Stiles achingly, obviously alone, and she’s not going to do anything to put her baby at risk.
“Maybe I’m all right,” Stiles says, trying to inch back towards to where her handbag is draped over the hood of her car. “You know, I think, um, I’ll just try for dispatch again and hopefully the line won’t be busy.” The line will probably still be unreachable, since Stiles doesn’t appear to have service out here, but she doesn’t want to advertise that to Scott and Isaac. They could’ve theoretically been replaced with pod people between now and Thursday; it’s not like Stiles knows how they spend their weekends.
“Who are you?” Scott says again, and it’s not him being a shit. For one thing, Scott’s fairly bad at being a shit; Stiles knows, because she teaches teenagers for a living. For another, he looks genuinely concerned.
“I’m your chemistry teacher, Scott,” Stiles says, enunciating slowly.
“Mr. Harris is our chemistry teacher,” Isaac says from behind Scott, and he has the same confused tilt to his head, like he’s trying to place someone he’s only met once or twice. Bringing up Harris is kind of a low blow, though.
“Just because he’s subbing while I’m out on leave doesn’t mean I’m not your teacher, Isaac,” Stiles chides. She’s not the greatest at projecting authority, probably because she’s miniscule and pale and covered in moles, as well as really fucking pregnant, but she’s a professional-grade chider. “I mean, the fact that you’re both seniors now and taking physics is what really makes me no longer your teacher, but I’d like to think that our bond has extended past such petty concerns.”
If Scott keeps this up, Stiles is seriously just not going to mail the last of his recommendation letters. She’ll do it; she keeps a mean grudge.
“What are you talking about?” Isaac asks, in a low sort of growl, and Scott says, “I think I should probably call Derek, dude, I think this counts as weird enough for that,” which leaves Stiles still confused and still by the side of the road with a broken car and two former students who’ve apparently forgotten her in the past four days.
“I think you’d better leave,” she says to them firmly.
“We’re not going anywhere, lady,” Isaac drawls.
Okay, seriously, no. Stiles may be young and pregnant and female, but she does not fucking deal with disrespect from her students. “It’s Mrs. Hale, Mr. Lahey,” she says coldly. “I may no longer have you in my classroom but you’re still a student at my school.”
Isaac’s face turns a weird, splotchy kind of pink and he stops posturing like an extra on True Blood. “Dude,” he garbles at Scott.
“Holy shit,” Scott says, and drops his phone. From the other end of the line, Stiles can hear furiously low-toned shouting, but all Scott says is, “Did you just say Hale?” as if it’s some kind of shock that a member of the Hale family is on the road that leads to the Hale residence.
Stiles is going to burn Scott’s remaining recommendation letters when she gets home and take particular enjoyment in watching Scott is very talented at isolating important information and prioritizing it disintegrate into ash.
“Yes, Scott,” she says, rolling her eyes heavenward. “I know everyone likes to pretend that teachers don’t have personal lives, but I do, in fact, occasionally visit my in-laws. What, did you think I was out here with a broken-down car for a Tuesday afternoon drive?”
One of the teenagers says, “In-laws?!” in a torturous, confused undertone, and the other one groans. Stiles doesn’t know which, because she’s judging the distance between her and her purse. She’s not going to be the jackass who hits a seventeen-year-old asthmatic with a face full of mace, but it’s not like Isaac has asthma.
Before Stiles gets an opportunity, though, there’s crashing through the undergrowth as if a hereto-unknown boar infestation in the Beacon Hills Preserve is choosing now to reveal itself. Stiles is kind of willing to leave Isaac and Scott to its tender mercies, except-it’s not a boar.
For a long second, Stiles think she’s hallucinating. He looks like Derek, but more tired, wearing pants that are the kind of tight Derek had stopped wearing after they’d graduated college and become real adults with real responsibilities. His hair is heavily gelled and he isn’t wearing the big hipster glasses Derek had needed when he was too lazy to put in his contacts, which was pretty much all the time, but Stiles had fallen asleep and woken up next to the same face for seven years, and she knows it like she knows the mirrored reflection of her own; better, even, because Stiles would always rather look at Derek than herself.
Of course, it can’t be Derek, even if it looks like him and Stiles’ chest is aching from the sudden reminder. The Hales have so many cousins that Stiles still has yet to meet all of them, even though she was practically raised at the house in Beacon Hills. It makes sense that one of them looks so much like Derek that Stiles is having a hard time breathing properly. Her lungs appear to be doing something they shouldn’t; the air in front of her face looks like it’s swimming.
“What the hell is going on, Scott,” the man snaps, and oh god he even has Derek’s voice. Sometimes, when Stiles is generally overwhelmed by the overindulgent stares of the people in town, she’ll duck into a nearby bathroom and dial Derek’s voicemail at the shop just to listen to the recording. You’ve reached Derek Hale at Hale Carpentry. Our normal business hours are from 10 to 4 Monday through Saturday. If you need to check up on the status of your order, please leave a message.
Standing suddenly seems an overly ambitious goal, so Stiles sort of half-collapses back onto the ground, her butt landing on the patch of dry dirt that’s already been worn into a perfect seat after the last thirty minutes she spent in it, waiting for someone at the house to realize she’s late and send out Erin in the truck.
“She smells like Stiles,” Scott says, somewhere to Stiles’ left, and Stiles can’t help snorting because yes, thank you, Scott.
“Brilliant deduction, Mr. McCall,” she says; her voice is definitely revealing twinges of hysteria. “Twelve points to Gryffindor. I smell like myself. Good job.” The baby must decide that it wants to be part of this discussion, too, because it promptly lodges its foot into Stiles’ kidney. “Oomph. I think someone’s a little keen to join Beacon Hills pee wee soccer.”
When Stiles looks up, carefully avoiding looking directly at the guy who’s basically her dead husband’s doppelganger, Scott has an adorable confused puppy look on his face. His eyebrows fall down over his eyes as he says, “What?”
“The baby kicked me, Scott,” Stiles says, slowly. “That’s generally what pregnant women mean when they make comments about soccer leagues.”
“No,” Isaac interrupts, “no, the other thing.”
“What, like you’ve never heard me make a Harry Potter reference before. Isaac, I named your class’ lab groups after Hogwarts Headmasters; that I’m a Potter nerd was really not that hard an inference for you to make.”
“You smell like Stiles,” the man says. His voice falls weirdly over her name, probably because Stiles is used to hearing it said in Derek’s voice in a different way: exasperated and fond and often annoyed, but never so-blankly.
Stiles presses the heel of her right palm into her chest, trying to dislodge some of the discomfort that the fluttering edges of panic are trying to evoke. “What the hell are you even saying,” she says. “I smell like Stiles because I am Stiles, Jesus fucking Christ, how many fucking people named Stiles live in this goddamn town.” The panic doesn’t go away, so Stiles rubs harder. “And what the fuck does that even mean, you smell like Stiles. I’ve never even met you before.”
Scott says, “What?!” and Isaac says, “The fuck,” and the man who looks uncomfortably like Derek says, “She’s not lying.”
“No shit I’m not lying,” Stiles mutters aggressively. “Yes, let’s verbally abuse the pregnant woman sitting by the side of the road, brilliant idea.”
“I’m sorry,” Scott says a second later, and Stiles realizes that he’s hovering at her elbow. He’s moved across about twenty feet of open space really quickly, but Stiles doesn’t want to be scared of her favorite student, so she lets him help her to her feet. “We’re just, um, confused.”
Stiles says, “Oh really, I couldn’t tell,” and jerks her arm free so she can brush some of the dirt off of the seat of her jeans. “I swear to God, Scott, if you’re doing hallucinogens regularly, I’m just flat out not sending your letters. Forget about UCLA or vet school, that shit fucks you up for good.” Stiles doesn’t believe in lying to her students. “A little recreational pot, whatever, but you don’t really want to start on LSD at your age unless you’re willing to sacrifice a couple necessary brain cells.”
Scott nods twice, jerkily, still uncomprehending, and Stiles sighs and rakes the fingers of her left hand through her hair, snagging the tie holding her hair into its usual limp ponytail and pulling it free. There are bits of leaves and dirt in her hair, because Stiles has never met a messy situation where she didn’t pick up some kind of debris in her hair, but she’s used to efficiently picking it out.
She’s doing a fairly good job of not looking at the unidentified Hale cousin when he says, suddenly, “What is that?”
It’s so blatantly threatening that Stiles almost drops her hair tie into a ditch when she jerks backwards. “What?” she says, reflecting with feeling that she never wants to hear that goddamn word out of anyone’s mouth for the next twelve months, at least, and she’s tricked into looking at him. He’s staring at her hand.
“That-that’s my grandmother’s ring,” he says, and he sounds pissed.
Stiles takes another step back and takes Scott with her, her arm thrown out in front of his chest. “Okay, one of Derek’s cousins, then. Look, I know the ring was a point of contention, but your grandmother wanted him to have it and Beatrice put her foot down about it.” The cousin actually fucking growls at Stiles, like he’s a toddler, and she snaps, “Oh my god, grow the fuck up. I know everybody loved Meredith and there was like a month where I thought Natalie was going to shank Derek for it, but she wanted him to have it. She wanted me to have it. And you don’t get to be angry about my fucking wedding ring.”
Stiles hadn’t realized that she was still angry about that, considering that the biggest part of that debacle, which had been when Natalie had stopped talking to either Derek or their mom for three weeks, had occurred five years ago. Bianca would probably have some kind of psychological bullshit reason for the sudden surge of resentment-related, no doubt, to Stiles’ massive abandonment complex and the symbolism behind Stiles wearing the ring that has belonged to Hale matriarchs ever since Beacon Hills was a one-horse town with a bandit problem-but Bianca is presumably at home, right now, and therefore can’t force Stiles to deal with her issues.
“Derek,” Scott says urgently from behind Stiles’ outstretched, protective arm, “you can hear that, she’s telling the truth.”
Stiles hates herself for it basically immediately, but she breathes, “What.”
“She thinks she is,” the man says, and he can’t be Derek both because Derek is dead, has been dead for six months and Stiles weeds his grave the first and third Wednesday of every month, and because Derek had loved Stiles for her entire life and there isn’t anything that Stiles can read in the man standing twelve feet away from her except exasperation and a low simmering fury.
“You’re not-” Stiles tells him. Her voice is steady but high-pitched. “You-”
Does Derek have a cousin with the same name? That’s kind of stupid, even for the Hales. “I’m Derek Hale,” he says, “so who the hell are you?”
“I’m Stiles Hale,” Stiles says, automatically, because that shit falls off of your tongue, like your social security number and your favorite player on the Giants. “Well, Mieczyslawa Stilinski-Hale, but.” She shrugs, and the hysteria begins to burble in her throat. “You know. Pronunciation.” She has the urge to giggle, and also maybe to claw at her face.
“That’s Stiles’ name,” Scott says to Derek. “Mieczyslaw.” He pronounces it like someone’s stuck his face in a food processor. Somewhere, Stiles’ grandfather is rolling in his grave and shouting to her mother about travesties.
“Seriously?” Isaac asks. “Jesus, no wonder he doesn't tell anyone.”
“If he finds out that I told you he’s gonna kill me, so, um, don’t say anything.” The fact that Scott manages to find the time to be concerned about this kid’s embarrassment over his name is just so Scott that the giggle breaks free. It’s the bad, broken kind, like the soundtrack of Harley Quinn on Arkham Asylum, and Stiles has to slap both hands over her mouth because she’s seconds away from flat-out bawling.
He looks so much like Derek.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Stiles admits, “but there’s a house full of people down the road who expected me twenty minutes ago, so why don’t we shelve this-whatever this is until some time around, um, never.” When all three of them look at her blankly, Stiles says, “That was a gentle reminder that Erin Hale is going to be driving down this road any minute now and you should probably all scram.” This is usually a fairly effective threat, since everyone knows that Erin is a fucking psychopath, but it doesn’t appear to penetrate.
Derek begins to look horrified. Maybe he’s finally remembered that Stiles’ husband died six months ago and he should be less of a judgmental asshole about the whole ring thing.
“Okay, something definitely weird is going on.” Scott, talented as always at stating the obvious, has his hand hovering by her elbow again. “Um, Mrs. Hale? Nobody lives up the road.”
“My family lives up the road,” Stiles snarls.
“No,” says Isaac, and he’s getting the same awful and surprised look on his face that Derek has. “They’re all”-he gives Derek a quick, unhappy look-“um. Dead.” Isaac isn’t as unfailingly sweet as Scott-no one is as unfailingly sweet as Scott-but Stiles had never really thought of him as an actual asshole until this moment.
“Oh my god, this is so many levels of not okay that I am going straight to my dad and the principal and you are going to have so many required therapy hours with Bianca Morell that you’re going to want to claw your eyes out.” Stiles sometimes surprises herself with the level of her fury; she’s not really an angry person, per se, she just sometimes gets so mad that she can’t breathe properly and her hands start to shake. “What the hell, Isaac Lahey? You know what, forget the principal or my dad, I’m going to your mother.”
Normally, threats to visit Penelope Lahey get Stiles immediate groveling, but Isaac blanches instead of apologizing.
It’s Derek who moves first, stepping towards Stiles carefully like she’s going to suddenly burst into flames from the force of her rage. It’s not the first time Stiles has been treated as delicate, since she’s been a pregnant widow in a small town for half of the last year, and she’s turning to rip him a new one, too, but he’s close enough for her to see that he has a tiny freckle two inches or so above the arch of his left eyebrow.
Everything just stops. Stiles stares at the freckle and she hears, like he’s actually there, Derek’s whiny, Stop touching my face, Stiles, and It’s just a freckle, you have like a million of them, and she can remember perfectly the way that it would disappear when he would do his sarcastic eyebrow raise in response to something dumb Stiles had suggested, like “borrowing” Laura’s car or blowing off a family dinner to have debauched married people sex on their kitchen table.
Stiles says, or at least tries to say, “What the ever-loving motherfucking hell,” but it’s just a series of endless wheezes instead of actual words. “Oh my god,” she realizes she’s chanting, and she holds out her hands and great, wonderful, she’s crying, which is really just icing on the cake of the second that Derek pauses and then deliberately walks into her outstretched hand and even though he’s wearing stupid pants and his hair looks like it might spontaneously combust if it gets near enough to open flame, it’s Derek. It’s her husband.
She wants to demand to know what’s going on, but she’s too busy crying so hard that she thinks one of her lungs might actually fall out of her mouth. Even though the tears are blurring her eyes she can tell that Derek is hugely uncomfortable and he’s holding himself tensely, just inside of her reach, his hands in fists at his side.
“You asshole,” Stiles tells him, “you were dead, I watched you die.” She must get this out clearly, since Derek’s shoulders become even more tense, clenching somewhere up near his ears. She hopes he’s uncomfortable; he’s not the one who was emotionally decimated in a hospital waiting room. She purposely tries to cry onto him, but it’s like crying onto a brick wall. All of the parts of Derek that Stiles had grown used to-the parts that she’d had to learn to miss without losing a vital part of herself, in the first few months after his death when she was mostly locked up in their house, systematically making and eating macaroons that were never as good as the ones Derek had baked for her-are still missing. “What’s going on,” Stiles wails, wetly.
“I have no idea,” Derek admits, and he sounds like he had when his mother had manipulated him into a corner, usually over who would make a birthday cake for one of Derek’s myriad nieces and nephews. It’s not exactly the least comforting thing Stiles has ever heard out of her dead husband’s mouth, but it’s close.
[part ii]