Work Text:
Something had woken Stiles, was pulling him from slumber, and the safe embrace of Derek's arms to sit up.
The door. It was ajar.
Uneasy, Stiles looked behind him to Derek rolling over to show his bare muscular back and triskelion tattoo, then flicked his gaze to the door again.
It shouldn't be open. What if his dad, the Sheriff, saw Derek in his seventeen-year-old son's bed?
"Er... Derek?" Stiles whispered warily.
Derek didn't really answer him, so much as he hummed to let Stiles know he was listening.
"The door, it's... open?" he said as he stared through the tiny crack into the void beyond.
"It's fine. Go back to sleep," Derek grunted, not turning around.
"Are you sure? I think someone's out there."
Surely Derek's wolf ears would wake him if there was any danger, right?
"Stiles. Go to sleep," were Derek's final words on the subject.
Stiles squinted in the dim moonlight toward the door mistrustfully. The shadow of the hallway seemed to shift and thicken the longer Stiles watched it. Although Derek didn't seem concerned by it...
He shrugged and rolled over with his arm swinging around Derek's huge biceps. He squished his cheek on those firm muscular shoulders, allowing sleep to take him away again.
Only falling asleep felt an awful lot like falling from a great height, and Stiles jerked awake just as his cheek touched his pillow... which he was hugging.
Stiles blinked around his bedroom as his heart pounded in his chest, and he tried to catch his breath.
Of course, he was alone. He huffed, remembering his anger and resentment towards the ex-alpha. Derek was not even in Beacon Hills right now, having disappeared somewhere with Cora after Scott became an alpha because Cora believed Beacon Hills was cursed, and Stiles could not even blame her after everything she (and Derek) had lost.
Derek, however, he could blame. The werewolf had the nerve to climb through his window like old times after the Sheriff had coldly turned him away at the door and before Stiles could even say goodbye. Then Stiles had felt too betrayed by everything that had happened between them: the kiss they shared during the Summer while they were searching for Erica and Boyd, the mockery Derek made of his supposed attraction to Stiles by dating the new English teacher, who ended up kidnapping with the intent to kill his dad, only to tell him that he had to get his traumatized sister away from Beacon Hills for a while, leaving Stiles in the dust.
Derek had apologized for everything, but Stiles was jilted and bitter that he thought Derek's confession of attraction and the subsequent kiss that Stiles goaded him into meant he would wait for Stiles's eighteenth birthday to ask Stiles on a date.
Stiles should have known he would not get the kind of love story his best friend and his childhood crush got with their love interests. He was just not the type to inspire such feats of heartfelt romance. It made him wonder if Derek even liked him in the first place.
He was so sick of feeling jealous.
Derek had seemed pained to leave things so sour between them, but Stiles was too hurt to patch the too-fresh wound, choosing to let it fester instead by denying he even cared that Derek might not come back.
The worst of it was they both knew he was lying.
He rubbed his eyes, ignoring how they burned with unshed tears, and then he heard something that turned his blood into ice.
His name. His true name. The one he had not heard since...
"Hieronim," a feminine voice called from the other side of his bedroom door.
"Mom?" Stiles whispered, desperately hopeful but not daring to believe.
"Hieronim," the voice beckoned again.
His heart was heavy... He really shouldn't... Why shouldn't he?
"Mamuśka?" he asked, his voice pitched higher as if he was eight years old again.
"Hieronim."
He swung his legs over the left side of his bed and stood up, shuffling toward the door. And with his heart beating in his throat, like a sailer enthralled by a siren's song, he followed the call into the beyond.
The hallway was longer and wider than he remembered. As he walked to the staircase, the floorboards creaked ominously under his bare feet. Out the front door, there were tall trees, and when Stiles looked back, he saw the burnt shell of the Hale house.
"Hieronim," a sharp whisper tickled his left ear, making him flinch away.
Stiles spun around, and there was a dead tree stump where there hadn't been before. The Nemeton? Tall and skinny trees surrounded Stiles, the Hale house no longer behind him.
Stiles shuffled closer, and the whisper suddenly multiplied into many voices, female voices. No... wait. Three distinct female voices all spoke his name over and over again. And they grew louder as he neared the splintered bark of the dead tree.
"Hieronim," "Hieronim," "Hieronim," they breathed, sighed, and hissed.
Slowly, enthralled, Stiles reached out toward the tree stump. Where were they? Who were they? What did they want?
Then a thick root coiled out of the tree, and quick as a whip, it wrapped around his wrist, squeezing tight enough to bruise.
Stiles gasped, the spell broken, and reflexively yanked his hand back, but the root tightened even more, grinding the bones in his wrist together.
"Argh! MOM! HELP ME!" Stiles yelled as the root pulled him sharply forward.
He closed his eyes and braced to collide with the tree's rough bark.
But he landed further down onto soft soil and grass instead.
Stiles gasped, his wrist throbbing but unmarked, and he looked frantically around him. He was in the middle of the lacrosse field at Beacon High.
He was alone, but the voices had followed him. They were even louder than before and gaining in volume.
Suddenly, the floodlights came on, and the voices, three women, continued to scream at him.
"Hieronim!"
"HIERONIM!"
"HIERONIM!"
"Stop it!" Stiles shouted back, his hands flying up to cover his ears. But it didn't help.
It was like the voices were inside his head.
"STOP!" he screamed.
In a hotel room in Mexico, Derek opened his eyes and sat up in bed with a gasp, his heart thundering in his chest and a disjointed sense of grief heavy in his gut.
At the same time, in Beacon Hills County, Lydia rolled over in her sleep with a scream on her lips.
Jackson startled awake beside her, his hands flying to his ears.
"Lydia! Wake up!" he shouted.
She did, and her scream faded into a dry whimper.
Jackson slowly lowered his hands.
"What was that?" he said warily, mentally preparing himself for another death.
But Lydia just stared up at him with a haunted look in her eyes.
"I... I don't know."
In the Stilinski house, the Sheriff was also woken up by screaming. As soon as his white-socked feet hit the floor, he was running to his son's bedroom.
Stiles was in his bed, fighting against the sheets tangled around him as if he were fighting off an unseen demon, and he was screaming as if he were seeing one.
The Sheriff acted quickly, tearing the sheets from Stiles's wild flailing limbs, then sat down on the mattress and pulled his son into his arms.
"Sshhh. Shhhh, Stiles. It's all right, son. It's just a dream," he soothed as he kept Stiles from punching out at him. "Sshhh, that's it. Wake up."
"Dad?" Stiles asked, his voice hoarse from screaming and with tears streaming down his pale face.
"Yeah, son. It's all right."
"No," Stiles sobbed, shaking his head frantically. "No. Dad, please. We have to save her. She's trapped."
The Sheriff took note of the glassy-amber eyes focused, not on him, but somewhere inside his son's head, and concluded Stiles wasn't awake yet.
"Who's trapped, son?" The Sheriff humored him.
"Mom," Stiles said, and the Sheriff tensed from shock. "We have to save her, dad! It's got her, and it won't let her leave! Dad, what do we do? We have to get her out!"
"Sshhhh, ssshhhhh," the Sheriff said reflexively, his mind spinning from the unexpected déjà vu of comforting Stiles from nightmares after his wife's death. "Stiles. It was a nightmare. Your mom's safe. She's not hurting anymore."
"No, no, no," Stiles moaned between breathtaking sobs, his pale face now blotched red. "No, she's not. She needs to rest. Why won't it let her rest?" he devolved into trembling gasps and choking cries as he clung to the stunned Sheriff.
The Sheriff could do nothing but hold his adolescent son and gently stroke his wild hair as Stiles eventually cried himself back to sleep. The Sheriff didn't move for hours, just watching over the boy in his arms, who looked so much like Claudia that it still sometimes hurt to look at him. And he wondered...
He had ignored the signs before, but now, with recent events...
He could only hope this had been a bad dream, a nightmare, and nothing more.
He didn't want to think about the possibility that his beloved Claudia, the love of his life, was not at rest.
When morning finally arrived, the Sheriff had dressed for work and made himself a coffee by the time Stiles came downstairs dressed for School.
He seemed fine now, and the Sheriff hoped this was a good sign.
"Morning," he said cautiously.
"Morning," Stiles replied easily, if a little more solemn than normal.
"There's bread in the toaster ready for you."
"Oh, good. Thanks," Stiles said with a lopsided smile.
The Sheriff sighed, relieved.
Stiles frowned at him with apparent confusion as he pushed down the bread to make his toast.
"You okay, dad?" Stiles asked.
The Sheriff laughed.
"Me? I'm fine. What about you? You're the one who had a nightmare last night."
Stiles froze where he had been reaching for the coffee mugs.
"Nightmare?" he repeated.
The Sheriff squinted toward him.
"You don't remember," he said, not asking. The answer was evident from Stiles's reaction.
Stiles frowned deeply as he considered his dad, then shrugged.
"Nope. It can't have been that bad if I don't remember it," he reasoned as he tried not to burn his fingers while pulling the half-charred bread out of the toaster.
"You almost woke the whole neighborhood with your screaming," the Sheriff said, a hard edge of tension in his voice.
Stiles froze again, dropping butter all over the countertop.
Slowly, he lifted the hand not holding a knife to press butter-covered fingertips to his neck.
"Huh," he said roughly, and he cleared his throat. "I guess I am a bit sore."
The Sheriff hesitated.
"You sure you're all right, kiddo?" Stiles half-turned towards him, blinking away the distance in his eyes, and smiled.
"I'm fine," he said with confidence the Sheriff didn't feel, but he let it go.
Besides, one strange nightmare was no cause for alarm.
He carefully watched Stiles as his son returned to pulverizing burnt toast with a butterknife.