Duh duh duuuuh!
John Stilinski’s sobs cut into them like a dagger. Every broken cry slicing into each one of them a little deeper as most of them shed their own tears for the son he clings to. Parents aren’t supposed to have to make that noise over their children, but children aren’t supposed to hurt like this. Peter Hale knows John’s pain, he himself felt it for his own children after the fire, twins that even never got the chance to live before Kate and Gerard Argent decided their so called code mattered less than the innocent lives of his unborn daughters. Chris Argent sits beside him in a similar sorrow, he too knows the pain of losing a daughter – and even too the same monster that now seems to be claiming Stiles.
“It should have worked.” His nephew says, his voice is scratchy and rough and kind of constipated in the way that it is when he’s feeling emotions. “It worked last time. Why didn’t it work this time?” He looks up to Peter for answers and that hurts him more than the sounds of anguish coming out of John, seeing his nephew looking up at him with wide eyes, so broken and confused like he had after Paige, it knocks the breath out of him a little bit.
“I don’t know, nephew.” He admits, wishing that he had never come here, that he had stayed in France w. hen Chris got the call instead of following him back here, wishing that Chris had never gotten the call and they could have stayed in their not-quite-happy not-quite-sad bubble of bliss they had been in before. He knows that even if Stiles survives this, they will probably never make it back to that. “It…I’ve never even heard of a Nogitsune behaving like this.”
He had shown up knowing exactly how this was going to go. They’d get here, Stiles would make a joke about how he knew that Peter and Chris had been together all along and then they’d give him the lichen like last time and figure out what to do from there. At least two people would die, his nephew would give at least three melodramatic speeches, and then Stiles would survive, but probably actually kill himself this time. Except of course it didn’t work like that.
It was going to plan, he walked in, Stiles looked him over from neck to toe said something about knowing his ass anywhere and congratulated them of finally getting over themselves and screwing. Halfway through reading the explanation that Derek had written down for him the room suddenly filled with the sharp and overwhelmingly acrid scent of fear. Even those without the enhanced senses could clearly hear how his normally humming bird like heart beat went out of control through the heart monitor he was connected to.
Stiles had been shock still when he looked up, frozen staring at the invisible figure none of them could see. Their eyes met for only a moment, but that moment was long enough for them to jump into action. In the end it was Chris that had managed to save the lichen from Stiles’ attempts to destroy it, but just barely, while the rest of them tried to restrain and calm him. He had begged and pleaded from them not to use it, that he would just possess someone else to torture him until he let him back in.
It made Peter think of Cora, how she had looked even smaller with so much fear and pain in her wide little eyes and tear-streaks breaking up the soot that clung to her cheeks. When he told her to run she had screamed and cried and begged him to come with her, and god, he would have if he had been able to, not even to save himself, but if only so that he wouldn’t have to see her looking at him like that – with such grief – but he couldn’t move. It was the same look on Stiles’ face as he begged them not to do it, the same desperation in his voice.
Now, sitting here in the aftermath, all he can think about is that this is nothing like Cora. In the end, Peter had saved her, convinced her to run, and she got to live, is still living. In those last few moments of consciousness he had gotten through to her and she had run, spent her whole life running until she couldn’t run any further but South America had been safe, so it hadn’t really mattered in the end – as far as the Argents had been concerned, she was dead. But she made it, he saved her.
He looks back at Stiles now, he’s so heavily sedated that there’s no way he’s dreaming, but somehow he still looks tortured, even while unconscious. Injecting him with the lichen was probably the hardest thing Noah Stilinski has ever done, it took a lot of strength to be able to do it while his son sobbed and screamed and thrashed. At first they thought that it worked, he passed out and then woke up in shock, looking at them for the first time in – from what Derek told him – a long time. Then all at once he froze, and the heart monitor went crazy again and he just collapsed back onto the bed and sobbed and begged it to get out of his head, please, he’d do anything, and gasped for breath that he couldn’t find when that didn’t work.
They had to sedate him when it the room started shaking and the heart monitor exploded.
Suddenly the dark, heavy atmosphere is all but suffocating him, pressing down firmly until he feels like he can’t move. That familiar feeling of paralysis is enough to get him on his feet in a hurry. “I can’t-I…” He takes a breath when his voice comes out cracked and strangled. “I’ll reach out to some friends, see if I can find anyone that might be able to help figure this out.”
“Thank you, Uncle.” Derek says quietly, the look in his is giving clear permission to flee. Peter takes the gift for what it is and turns tail and runs – metaphorically of course – desperate for to escape to somewhere he can breathe. He wants nothing more than to truly run away, somewhere far enough to drown out the face of his favorite niece reflected back in the face of one of the only people he’s truly cared about outside of his family, but he won’t. He can’t do that to Stiles, not after everything he’s done for Peter.
So instead he finds a bench outside, where even the polluted city air is better than the smell of stress and fear and grief that has by now soaked into the walls of the hospital. He breathes deeply, ignoring how that makes the nausea worse, and tries to calm himself down. After an unknown amount of time Chris joins him, looking about how Peter feels, and sits next to him in silence.
“We’ll figure it out.” Peter says after a long silence. He’s not usually one for comforting words, but Chris already lost a daughter to this monster, Stiles is one of the few names on the list of things he has left to protect.
“Yes. We will.” Chris agrees firmly.
***
It had been two weeks. The only thing any of the Hales contacts had been able to tell them so far is that this is very odd behavior for a Nogitsune. They had to move him into a specialized floor of Stark Tower after a while, when the small earthquakes began effecting the whole building, he slept through almost the whole thing, only waking once to tell Chris that if it comes down to it, to send Peter and Derek and his father away and burn him to death, so that Void wouldn’t possess him once he died. Peter spent three hours outside with Chris, and later Derek and John, offering assurances that they didn’t believe – not that he could blame them, when he himself didn’t either.
After that it got a whole lot worse. It seemed that the sedatives that held them magic at bay stopped blocking the nightmares, and none they tried after that helped either, forcing them to sit there and watch Stiles suffer through hell knowing there was nothing they could do about it. The nutrients they were pumping him full of intravenously and through a feeding tube stopped working too, and the young man before them grew even thinner than before, wasting away before their eyes. They searched for answers and waited for Thor to return.
Stiles birthday passed.
Noah cried himself to dehydration and had to be admitted overnight with a strong sedative and fluids.
The next day they pulled Stiles off the sedatives, praying that he would be able to control the magic, as they couldn’t let him lay there stuck in nightmares any longer.
The next few days were a different kind of hell. He woke up, cried, screaming at things they couldn’t see, tried to eat, threw it up, had to be restrained through his nightmares. Rinse repeat.
Now they sit there in silence as Stiles stares blankly at the blanket he’s holding less than two inches rom his face. He’s taken to doing that since he woke up, Peter thinks it’s because there’s not enough space there for him to hallucinate Void into. John is in the hall with Derek, Tony, Steve, and Chris, arguing loudly about calling the Pack. Derek and Chris are trying to reason with him, pointing out that, from what he’s told them about the circumstance under which they left Beacon Hills, Scott’s Pack is more likely to kill Stiles than try to save him.
Pepper starts crying silently at that.
So does Stiles.
Finally, salvation. A booming voice joins the conversation, and suddenly Tony is yelling for an entirely different reason, protesting wildly. “Thor, are you out of your mind? Why in the hell would you bring him here?”
“He is an expert of trickster spirits, he can help.”
“You are not bringing him anywhere near Stiles!”
“Let him in.” John says tiredly. “We need all the help we can get.”
The door opens and in they come, followed by who Peter can only assume are Thor and Loki. Half of the room is suddenly on their feet arguing, but all fall silent when Stiles heart monitor lets out a long continuous beep for a full second before ratcheting back up to a worryingly accelerated pace. Stiles stares in shock at what is presumably Void, a brand new kind of horror painted vividly across his face before snapping his head up to stare directly at Loki.
Loki who is staring at the same empty spot Stiles was but a moment before looking mildly troubled and very confused.
“That, is not what I was expecting.” The man in questions says before turning to meet Stiles gaze, and he doesn’t even look away.
“You can see him?” Stiles asks, nearly hyperventilating. “You can see him, oh my god. No. Nonononono.”
“Brother, why didn’t you mention he was a spark?”