Son Of A Lost Country

He woke up with a start. His heart was racing and an urgent thought kept pressing into the centre of his attention. Looking for something but not knowing what, he sat up.

A sharp stab of pain at his side caused him to flinch and fall back again.

"Don't tear the stitches."

His tense muscles eased up at hearing the voice. Relief crashed down on him like a wave so powerful, he was swapped away by it. Stiles closed his eyes, trying to keep his emotions from spilling over.

When he opened his eyes again, he took in the sight of the alpha sitting cross-legged next to him on the bed, his feet bare, making him somehow appear more vulnerable.

His hair was dishevelled. He looked like he hadn't slept a wink.

Stiles vaguely remembered that this was not the first time he had woken up in a frenzy, feeling guilt gnaw at his conscious. He must have been the reason why Derek was looking so tired.

The realisation that Derek must have spent the night awake just to calm him down whenever he awoke from his nightmares made a painful spike of affection rise up in his chest.

The thought of "I thought I had lost you." was quickly followed by "God, I love you." which was almost more painful than any of his wounds combined.

He scrunched up his eyes in pain as if that would undo the revelation that was threatening to tear down everything he had built. He had worked so hard to hold these feelings at bay but they always came back like a tidal wave.

His eyes opened again as a hand brushed his hair back.

"The sun is rising," Derek said, looking out of the window. Slowly, the room was basked in various shades of red and orange. Stiles sat up again with Derek's help and together they watched the sunrise in silence. The world was quiet for now.

His heart heavy, he allowed himself to rest his head on the other's shoulder and pretended that he couldn't feel it beating faster.

"Where's the sword?" he asked, breaking the silence. He knew he was already interpreting too much into this, so he thought it better to fill the silence with communication.

"It's still in the office." Derek frowned. "I made sure it's kept in a special compartment."

"Did you touch it?"

"Yes, of course. How else would I have moved it?"

Derek sounded puzzled which in turn puzzled Stiles, so he sat upright and moved away slightly to look at the other man.

"Does that mean you healed? Oh, I should've warned you, I'm sorry. Why the hell couldn't you just let it be? But then, it's my fault for bringing it here."

Stiles looked down to Derek's hands which looked fine to him now. But how had they looked after touching the sword? His own arm was steadily pulsing with pain as if instead of blood agony was being pumped through his veins. With his good hand, he grasped the alpha's hands and turned them so that he could examine the palms.

Not even a blister.

"I'm fine. There was nothing to heal," Derek said, confused.

"So, it didn't hurt when you touched it?"

Stiles tried to think back to the Alpha's reaction after taking the sword from the Oni. He hadn't flinched from the pain, but Derek was probably able to conceal his emotions even in a situation like that. What had his hand looked like? Stiles didn't think that there were any injuries but everything had happened so quickly. He hadn't had a single thought when he had taken the sword out of his still hand.

He shuddered at the memory.

Derek's hand covered his injured one, black veins appearing on his skin. Stiles immediately felt the pain dull down, he sighed involuntarily and became slightly drowsy.

"It was the sword that burned you." Derek's eyebrows furrowed in response to his realization. "Why the hell did you hold on to it?"

Stiles opened his mouth to answer but the words were chained to a part of his heart that he was not ready to get ripped out quite yet, so he closed it again.

Because I saw you die and I lost it.

Derek looked at Stiles, ready to argue but then he just shook his head.

"Nevermind that. We can just use the ointment and be done with it."

"No, we can't. I don't have it anymore."

At Derek's sharp look, Stiles couldn't help but wince.

"You don't have it anymore," Derek repeated.

"Wow, you do have excellent hearing." The thick eyebrows were drawn together in an intimidating way. They made his eyes look darker, deeper like the sea before a storm. "Okay, okay. Not funny. It’s just - I gave the ointment to someone who needs it far more than I do. It was my decision and I'm not apologizing."

Derek scoffed. "Oh really, So there is someone who gets hurt more often than you do? I didn't think that was possible."

The sudden break in the atmosphere was palpable to Stiles, the toxin released to destroy the peaceful little world they had built themselves up here was as obvious to see as if it was green smoke caging them in. At first, it had seemed that reality had no grip here but now, it slowly contaminated the air surrounding them.

Stiles extracted his hand from Derek's and shifted away from him. Immediately, he wished he could go back to the quiet. If only he had never started talking. But that was the problem with them. The illusion always broke when reality came crashing in.

"You can't expect me to be happy about this."

Stiles stood up on shaky legs, reaching for the cane. With the wound at his side and his burnt arm, he definitely needed it. He wondered briefly where all his strength had gone. Still avoiding to look at the other man, he realized that he probably needed the normal amount of sleep for that.

"I don't know what to expect from you." The admission was quiet but true.

He looked out of the windows into the deep woods surrounding the Hale House. The narrow driveway leading up to the house consisted of just tire tracks that had only started to become more prominent once the pack had started to hold their meetings here.

Back then, everyone had come separately, worried about their own survival enough to work together but when it was over, they all went home to lick their wounds where no one else would disturb them. It was every man for himself.

Stiles understood that caring about someone meant that every bad occurrence left their impact on them all, no matter whom it initially concerned. Your problems were no longer yours alone.

"I didn't choose this. Believe me, I also wish things were easier. Less messy," he said. "But this is my life now. I have to deal with it."

He wanted to run his free hand through his hair but since it was the injured one he halted in the movement until he just let his arm drop back to his side again.

"I'm sorry. This sounds horribly melodramatic." Stiles shook his head at the words that had tumbled out his mouth. "We'd better get ready. They'll probably be here soon."

As Derek assisted Stiles walking down the stairs, he couldn't help himself but ask. All his attempts at figuring it out himself led nowhere.

"Who'll be here soon?"

"The Order, naturally."

"Yes, naturally."

As soon as Stiles entered the living room, all eyes were on him and there were a lot of them. Questions were being thrown his way in a crescendo of noise that reached its climax when they all realized that by all of them speaking at once Siles couldn't understand a thing.

While they were attempting to sort out who reserved the right to speak first, Stiles went to get his jacket. After throwing on the jacket, he took a seat close to the front door and looked down at his shoes to make sure that his laces were tied. They were. There was a knot on one shoe that he would probably never get untied ever again.

He was somewhat surprised to find Burly lying down by his shoes. By this point, he should have come to expect that the fox would always find his way to him.

The commotion around him died down when the werewolves heard the first signs of someone arriving on Hale property. They all simultaneously lifted their heads, alerting those with hearing not as impeccable as theirs.

"Well, I think the question-answer-round will have to wait," Stiles announced, getting up from his chair with more effort than he anticipated.

Peter opened the door for them and strolling in came Noshiko, Jordan and two of her goons. One of the newcomers was looking determined, one was looking down to the floor as if fearing that there were holes in their way, and the rest was looking bland.

"Oh, guys, what a surprise visit! If only I'd known. I would have prepared some snacks."

Derek rolled his eyes. He was aware that Stiles had indeed known that they were coming, even though he couldn't explain how.

"You have to come with us," Noshiko unceremoniously announced. She was looking only at Stiles, not even acting as if she recognized that other people were in the room.

Stiles made a gesture with his hands encompassing his whole appearance.

"I'm ready."

There was a chorus of outrageous outcries behind him which he promptly ignored.

"Fine, let's go," said Derek.

This was the variable he could not have predicted. Noshiko for one second looked as incredulous as he felt.

"If you want the sword than you'll have to accept that I will have to come with you. Stiles certainly won’t touch it,” the Alpha explained with a warning glance towards Stiles.

Noshiko smirked. “That, as you will find out, puts us at an impasse, since only the one who won the sword in battle is able to carry it without harm. Touching it, you will find that not even your healing abilities can maintain its normal speed.”

Without acknowledging her remark with a response, Derek walked into the office from which he soon reentered the living room with the sword in his hand.

There was no sign of even the slightest discomfort in his posture or his expression.

The implication of what he was seeing was almost impossible for Stiles to process.

“It’s a good thing then that I’m the one who won the sword in battle,” Derek announced.

Noshiko heaved out a sigh and agreed to take both of them. Derek was sure he heard Scott murmur to Isaac “I think it’s Derek’s turn for an adventure with Stiles.” Smirking slightly as he closed the door behind them, he thought that as far as he was concerned, this certainly wouldn’t be his last turn.

Stiles wanted to ask so many questions in the car but at the same time, he wished that he could just turn around and walk away from all of this.

He felt the anger inside of him brewing like a stew. The mass was a thick and slimy substance of an unhealthy colour, popping bubbles every now and then with a low “blub”. There was a vein in his forehead pulsing with the rhythm of the exploding bubbles.

“Since you kept me up for so long the night before, I was getting exceedingly more tired as the afternoon progressed. So I found myself taking a nap on the couch. And then I was there. I thought it was a dream,” Derek said, his eyes focused on the road as if he needed all his attention to follow the black car before them.

Stiles scoffed. “Oh please. How often could you possibly dream of me being in the hospital?”

Derek’s eyes turned darker. “More often than you think.”

Stiles grimaced, knowing that he had lost that argument.
“Still, couldn’t you have said something sooner?”

“It wasn’t easy to wrap my head around this. So sorry that I wasn’t immediately sure about what had happened.”

“Don’t be snarky. That’s my job,” Stiles said. Then he looked down at his hand which was in a cuff linked to the one around Derek’s right wrist. “Still don’t see why the cuffs were necessary but since it was their condition to let us drive ourselves, well. You’ve got the chip, right?”

“They’re finally taking you to their headquarters. What a day this must be for you.” Derek followed the car ahead of them off the road. “And now you even get to plant a chip. You must be so happy.”

Stiles fought hard to suppress a grin. “Only if it turns out I’m right. Being wrong would be a bummer.”

Finally, they reached an old and rather worn down cabin in the woods, which must be on the other end of the forest since it definitely was not on Hale territory anymore.

A similar image of a cabin flashed in front of his eyes, so briefly it felt like he had just blinked. It had been night then. Had he been wrong back then… Or was he wrong now?

He shook his head, trying to focus. he memory was so blurry he couldn’t even tell where it started and where it ended.

They got out of the car with a great amount of difficulty since their hands were bound together. Derek climbed out at the passenger side after Stiles, the inconvenience of which caused them both to stumble. Stiles would have fallen if it hadn’t been for Derek holding him up. The only one getting out of the car with grace was Burly.

Derek reached back with his free hand to grab the sword which he then held in his hand ready to attack if necessary.

“You have never held a katana, I see,” Noshiko said, taking in his stance. “Grip it like you would a tennis racket, not an axe. Then we may see how the training goes.”

***

Chaos had erupted after Stiles and Derek had left with the Order. The unanswered questions hung in the air like cobwebs and the pack ran into them again and again and then spent an ungodly amount of time feeling horror while trying to untangle themselves.

Lydia and Jackson soon got tired of the same dance repeating, leaving the Hale House to find a more sensible activity to pursue.

“Dude, what is going on?! Why is no one telling us anything?” Scott complained, throwing his hands in the air.

Erica huffed in annoyance. “You think you’re the one being left out? Try being one of us who is not part of the golden circle!”

At Scott’s look of confusion, Boyd elaborated, “Stiles tells you stuff because he trusts you.”

“Trust,” Scott repeated the word as if it had lost its meaning. “He joined the Order without even asking my opinion on it. He goes off to who knows where getting hurt and doesn’t tell me about it. That’s not the way it was before.”

Erica, still sitting with her legs casually hanging over the armrest in the big armchair, snorted. “Nothing is the way it was before. Open your eyes.”

“Erica!” Isaac scolded her in a sharp voice. “This is not the time.”

He rested one of his hands on Scott’s shoulder because he felt that the other beta needed it. Not even a second did his hand rest on that spot before something collided with him and wrestled him to the ground. Too stunned by the sudden turn of events, he realized too late that an arm had snuck around his neck, crushing his air pipe with frightening strength.

Boyd was the first one to react. He grasped the attacker around the waist and lifted her off of Isaac who was left on the floor, gasping for breath. At first, they thought it was over but not even Boyd seemed to be strong enough to keep all the fury at bay. Her anger had become a monstrous being, stronger than any of them.

Erica and Laura saw that Boyd was not able to subdue her and immediately went to help.

“What is going on?!” Scott could only watch as three werewolves fought with all their strength to keep one human down. “This is not Allison. It can’t be.”

She looked at him with big dark eyes and he felt a shiver run down his spine. Her eyes had never been so soulless before. Then, her gaze turned to Isaac and turned so hateful that every person in the room could feel the chill.

“He’s not yours,” she hissed, her voice full of venom. “He’s mine, do you understand? I’ll tear you apart if you touch him again!”

Isaac stood up with a hand around his hurting throat, his eyes slightly wet.

Laura narrowed her eyes in thought before crouching down and ripping the girl’s jeans open at the ankle. What was revealed, left them all speechless. Dark lines were spreading from the wound, an infestation that was reaching further and further.

***
“Are you sure it’s here?”

Annoyed, Jackson rolled his eyes but continued digging the shovel into the earth. The ground was hard and dry, with no grass on it. It was not fertile enough anymore to grow anything. Every time he dug the shovel into the earth, he felt resistance but he kept going. He had expected that it wouldn’t be easy.

“You looked at the entries. We both know that it was a hint,” he said through clenched teeth. He barely glanced at her standing bored at the sideline while he had to do the real work.

Lydia once again eyed their surroundings critically. They were at a clearing in the woods, the one near the creek. She had been here before, they all had. It was the very spot where their training sessions were usually held at. It was a bleak spot and unbelievably infertile for being so close to a water source. The trees surrounding it were thin and leafless, gnarly branches reaching toward the clearing like old and wrinkly hands. She had always thought that it was that way because they used it for training, kicking down everything that tried to grow here. Maybe she had been wrong.

“The entries only spoke of the relevance of this place but it could’ve just been for training purposes. Maybe there’s more to it but that is a big maybe,” she admitted.

***

Stiles watched as Derek tried his best to stand his ground against Jordan who was more experienced in katana fighting techniques than Derek could become in only half an hour of listening to instructions. What he lacked in experience he made up for in determination and aggression. Jordan was talking to him and gathering from Derek’s attacks becoming more ruthless and cunning, Stiles guessed that they didn’t particularly get along.

“The katana should not be here,” Noshiko said, watching the Alpha and the Phoenix fight. “It is demonic and that, as Jordan has just pointed out to your friend, is the reason why a child of Veles is able to wield it. Had you - a child of Perun - been able to hold it, it would have meant that you’ve become corrupted by the darkness.”

Stiles frowned. “Derek is not corrupted. Don’t let his grumpy eyebrows fool you.”

“You misunderstand. Werewolves are not demonic, but they were a creation of Veles. You see, both gods were allowed to send some of their creations to earth. While Veles created creatures with terrifying abilities and strength such as werewolves, warlocks and witches, Perun created woodland elves, tree nymphs and kitsunes. Those creatures were supposed to balance each other out. Nature and force. Demons, on the other hand, were never supposed to walk the earth but sometimes, they managed to gain entrance for a short while. But now demons walk among us freely, and the living enter a realm meant for the dead. Do you see what concerns us?”

Stiles watched as Jordan managed to land a hit on Derek’s shoulder, causing the Alpha to fall to his knees. Immediately, he was reminded of the Oni besting Derek and then subsequently dishing out the final blow.

“I understand now why he so adamantly fought against you joining us.” She continued watching Derek and Jordan fight for a moment longer before she turned her sharp eyes to Stiles. “For him to be able to follow you into another realm, your bond most be quiet strong. It’s certainly something I’ve never heard of before. Don’t you find it curious, Stiles?”

It was the way she put emphasis on the word “bond” and her knowing smile that caused Stiles’ stomach to twist. All he could see was the red string, frayed and fragile until he gave it a spark to mend it.

Had he caused this? Was Derek forced to follow him to this realm because of the spark? If so, what else had he forced on Derek?

Thinking of the way their behaviour towards each other had changed, how Derek had become affectionate, considerate, gentle and concerned for him, Stiles felt like puking.

***

“I’ve found something!”

Jackson threw away the shovel and started brushing the dirt away with his fingers. He had felt that he could dig no further so this must mean that he had found it, whatever it was.

Lydia came closer, bending over the slight hole in which Jackson was standing to see what he was so excited about.

His shoulders sagged down in disappointment when a thick, dark root came into sight. He already began his climb out of the hole when a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Wait, something about this root is different. Wrong, almost,” Lydia said and after a rueful look at her clothes, she also jumped into the hole and bent down to take a closer look. Hesitantly, she reached out a hand, which hovered over the tree root for a few seconds before she had finally found the courage to touch it.

She winced at the contact. “It’s dead,” she whispered.

Her hand was splayed out over the root as if she was searching for a heartbeat. She did feel something but couldn’t tell what it was.

“Or maybe, not completely dead,” she corrected herself. “There’s still something here.”

She turned quiet as a thought occurred to her. Pursing her lips, she turned to Jackson, who looked at her quizzically. She then grabbed his hand and put it on the root next to hers.

“Try taking its pain. That usually involves an exchange of power, doesn’t it? It might work as a jumper cable.”

Jackson tried to focus on something. Usually, he focused on the pain of the person but this was not a person and so he couldn’t feel pain per se. What he felt was absence.

He hadn’t realized that he had closed his eyes in concentration until Lydia’s gasp caused him to look at her. His eyes widened in surprise.

The root was slightly glowing, continuing to be seen even at the parts which Jackson hadn’t dug free. Like veins through the skin, the path of the root was visible through the earth and its reach was far beyond their sight.

Jackson and Lydia got out of the hole as fast as possible and followed the path. They discovered that it even reached the town centre and spread out so that it could encompass the entirety of their town.

The light soon dimmed and dwindled down completely in just a few minutes.

Their town was as it was before, just without its protector pulsing with energy underneath it.