Chapter Text
“It was a dream.”
Sitting in that locker room, Derek can’t help taking a moment just to look at the boy in front of him. The last time he saw Stiles was when he was looking over Aiden’s lifeless body. They had stood there, staring at one another from afar. He remembers the boy’s paleness and how he was being propped up by Lydia. Despite that, they still haven’t talked since New York.
There’s an unexpected sense of relief, being able to see Stiles safe and unharmed and himself--well, mostly himself. Surely, no one could be expected to go through what Stiles went through and come out unchanged. Derek can attest to the changes a person can undergo after traumatizing events. But Stiles is safe and alive, and Derek likes to think that that counts for something—even though he can’t really be credited for any of it.
His name may have been on the king piece, but what did he really do in the grand scheme of things?
Not very much.
Not enough.
Derek can’t even begin to count how many hours of sleep he’s lost worrying about the boy, not that he would ever admit to it. To see Stiles standing there in the locker room with him, he can’t help feeling a rush of euphoria at being able to debrief and discuss things with the boy again.
For a moment in that locker room, it feels like that summer after Erica and Boyd went missing. The two of them poured over all the information they could get their hands on and bounced ideas off of each other before going out to test and investigate the plausible ones. It was futile in the end, and Erica and Boyd are gone now, but they tried, and it kept them busy and sane, helpless as they were.
Selfish as it may sound, he’ll always remember it as their summer.
“Actually, it was more like a nightmare,” he says.
“Okay, what happened?” Stiles asks in his information-collecting tone, his arms wrapped around himself.
“It started with these hunters that caught Peter and me after we left Cora…”
He recalls his dream of the hunters in his loft, looking for La Loba and finding out that they weren’t talking about Cora. Then came the smoke screen and the attack, and the gun went off. Stiles listens, silent and thoughtful. “Who was it?”
Derek glances up. Instead of answering, he says, “There’s a lot of myths about how people can be turned into a werewolf—usually a bite. There’s one about rain water.”
Stiles nods. “Drinking rain water out of a puddle of a werewolf’s print.”
“There’s another one…” he mutters, recalling Peter slashing Kate’s throat open, “about turning from a scratch—if the claws went deep enough.”
“Derek,” Stiles says, sitting down in front of him. Just their proximity to each other and hearing his name being said is enough to ease a little of the tension. “If this was all just a dream, why do you look so worried?” he asks.
He looks up at Stiles, eyes searching. “Because I don’t remember waking up,” Derek tells him, not bothering to hide the fear and uncertainty in his voice.
Just as Stiles had comforted him in his time of need, he had listened to Stiles question his sanity. He’d sat outside the hospital ward while the boy got tested for his mother’s disease. He had talked to the Nogitsune and witnessed the mere tip of the madness that dwelled in the boy. They’re past the point of putting up fronts and pretenses.
“So tell me: how do you know? How do you know if you’re still dreaming?” he asks, because if anyone knows the answer, it’d be Stiles.
“Your fingers,” Stiles tells him. “In dreams, you have extra fingers.”
Without thinking, Derek grabs the boy’s wrist and counts.
He counts again.
Still six.
His heart skips a beat in dread.
Derek falls onto his knees and looks at the bullet hole in his chest in disbelief. “It’s real.”
“This is a dream. This is the dream,” he says in realization, back in the locker room. Suddenly, he feels just as far away from the boy and helpless as he had, on the phone, in his room back in New York. Only this time, he’s the one in need of help.
Stiles doesn’t reply, watching him with a sad glint in his eyes, his arm still in Derek’s grasp.
“You’re real,” he gasps, looking up as that all too familiar woman approaches him.
Kate smirks and opens her mouth to speak.
As the dream fades, Derek turns to Stiles and, with disappointment and heartbreak colouring his voice, whispers, “You’re still not you...”