Home is a Fire | Part 6 & 7 - The End
They left Stiles out because they knew the nogitsune would tear him apart, but now the nogitsune is gone and Stiles can feel the nemeton telling him it isn’t over — not for him. And maybe not for Derek either.
Read the entire, completely fic now on AO3!
Part 6
Everything that happens next is fast and confusing. Stiles can’t help but be drawn back into the adrenaline rush of preparing for this ancient ritual that they don’t really understand. It’s just like old times. Lydia is sitting alone in his room, trying to come up with more information or more directions. Scott is on the phone with Deaton talking about the nemeton and sacrifices and if Deaton thinks it’s really possible that the nemeton is sending Stiles this message. From the hopeful tone of Scott’s voice, Stiles decides that Deaton thinks it is possible.
Allison is on the porch with her father and Stiles’s. Stiles can’t hear what they’re talking about but even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to focus on another conversation while he’s trying to talk to Cora and the quiet voice of Peter coming through Cora’s phone.
Cora has decided she’s going to be the Hale member. Peter did not fight this decision because he’s not convinced that this isn’t a trap. Still, he agrees to go and wait by the cars with Chris and Noah. He also agrees to keep all of this from Eli which hasn’t been difficult given that Eli’s been in the woods with Malia. Stiles can only assume that has to do with some kind of transforming into a wolf business. He’s never really understood the traits of the Hale wolves.
“Do you think we need to have ice baths? Wolfsbane? Robes?” Peter, though he’s been on his best behavior, is, of course, making fun of them.
“Right now all that we know is that the 5 of us need to be at the nemeton,” Stiles says.
“On the next full moon,” Cora adds.
“That’s two weeks away. For once, we’re not running out of time.”
Xxx
That night passed quickly. Lydia commanded the attention of the room as the sun set. She was talking about the similarities between this nemeton ritual and the one that brought Allison back. Apparently, they brought with them items relating to her death. A sword, some dirt – you know, Stiles thought, normal things.
“I could have Jordan light up and then scrape off any ashes on his skin afterwards?” Scott suggested. He was met with nods as well as a barely choked off laugh from Cora.
“Besides Jordan, the nemeton is the only other connection to Derek’s death so I get this feeling,” Lydia said, gesturing her hands towards her heart, “that we need to bring things that will connect Derek to his life.”
Stiles tuned out of the conversation at that point, thinking about his own connections to Derek. What did he have to offer? He thought about how Derek had kept and worked on his Jeep for so many years. How he’d let, though “let” was not the word Derek would’ve used according to Stiles’s father, Eli drive it. It was the best connection Stiles still had to Derek.
After a few hours, everyone had settled on what they were going to bring and when they were going to meet. Scott would bring Allison back home with him for the time before the full moon. Lydia would leave, too. Cora and Stiles decided to stay and catch up.
They decided to meet back at Stiles’s Dad’s for breakfast so make sure no one was missing anything. Scott, Allison, and Chris left for Melissa’s. Cora went to Derek’s. Noah offered the very comfortable couch to Lydia who was too exhausted to decline. Stiles was alone again in his room with the kind of quiet that he’d grown unaccustomed to in Portland.
Xxx
Stiles awoke to a scream. It was the blood curdling kind of scream from Lydia that he hadn’t heard since the first few weeks after they’d moved. He struggled into a pair of sweatpants that he’d left on the floor by his bed before he went to sleep, then rushed down the stairs.
Lydia had stopped screaming but she was curled into a ball on the middle of the floor in the Sheriff’s living room. Stiles’s father was already beside her, trying to wake her up. Weirder still, she was surrounded by black ink. At some point in the night, or early this morning, she drew black over full pages and spread them on the floor around herself in a full circle.
Stiles walked around the circle of her drawings while he heard his father calling Melissa McCall who promised her and Scott would be there in a few minutes. The drawings were too neat. The more Stiles looked at them, the more he knew that they weren’t just blacked out pages. On the corner, there were white pages and pages only half blackened in lengthy curved shapes. He closed his eyes for a moment to get the pages out of his mind before going into the kitchen, grabbing a step ladder, and returning to view the pages from a higher angle.
At this angle, he could see that they formed a giant black circle around Lydia, still curled up in the fetal position but now with her head in Noah’s hands and he tried to get her to wake up.
“Stiles, would you get down here and help me wake her up?”
As soon as Stiles got off of the step ladder, crossed the pages to Lydia, and took hold of her hand, her eyes shot open.
“It’s the new moon, Stiles. It’s not the full moon. It’s the new moon,” Lydia said. Stiles heard the door open. Lydia continued to repeat “the new moon” while she sat up and got a sense of her surroundings.
“Stiles.” It was Scott, Stiles thought, he must’ve come through the door first. “Stiles,” Scott repeated, “the new moon is tonight.”
Part 7
Stiles, Lydia, Scott, Allison, and Cora Hale stood in a large, loose circle around the nemeton. In the darkness of the new moon, Stiles’s eyes gave nothing away. This was mainly because they were wide open, struggling to adjust at all to the pitch black darkness of the woods with no moon.
In his hands, Stiles held his original copy of the keys to his Jeep – Eli’s set of keys, his fathers’, and the Jeep itself were safely out of the woods. Cora held her necklace which one of Talia Hale’s claws dangling from a golden setting. Scott had an old tupperware container which contained the ashes he scraped off Jordan after a transformation. Allison’s fingers were wrapped around a few fresh blooms of the Nordic Blue Monkshood buried above Laura Hale that had incidentally brought all of them together, though these petals weren’t from that specific plant and rather from the plant about the now Hale Library. If Derek were to later tell him that the plant above the library was indeed from the same plant which had once marked Laura’s grave, Stiles wouldn’t have been surprised.
Lydia was the only one of them who held nothing. In many ways, her connection to Derek was the weakest. Her connection to the nemeton was stronger and that’s what brought her with them, less than an hour before midnight, underneath the new moon.
Keeping their formation, each member of the circle stepped forwards. When they finally got close enough to touch the nemeton, they each placed their items on its top. Cora used Talia’s claw to slice across her hand enough to leave a small pool of blood on the nemeton’s surface. Lydia placed her palm down on the nemeton instead and looked up at the moon. “What’s taken is returned,” she whispered. The rest of the circle repeated after her. She lifted her hand and took a few steps back, looking now at the nemeton. Again, she repeated the words. Again, they chorused after her.
After the third repetition, tendrils of silver light began creeping outwards from the center of the tree. The tendrils curled around the ankles of the pack and flowed out past them, into the woods. Some tendrils began to climb up trees. Slowly, the clearing began to grow brighter and brighter. While his eyes readjusted, Stiles looked to Lydia and swallowed down a noise that threatened to come up from his throat.
A few of the tendrils had wrapped their way up Lydia’s body. One seemed to creep right into her mouth. Suddenly, her eyes shifted to the same glowing silver of the tendrils and she spoke. “Derek Hale,” said a voice through Lydia’s mouth that was not her own. “You sacrificed virgin blood to us in our time of death. This new life we took and we have prospered.” The light in the clearing was becoming too bright. Stiles tried to see the others but could only see the faintest shape of Scott’s hand covering his eyes. Stiles lifted his own hands up to shield his eyes. “Derek Hale,” Not Lydia said once more, “what’s taken is returned.”
Behind the pink glow of his eyelids, it became dark again all at once. Stiles lowered his hand.
Xxx
“If any one of you discusses, considers, or even thinks about following an eerie dream, performing a crazy banshee ancient druid ritual, or anything of the supernatural sort without consulting every single member of this pack first, I will personally drown you in a bathtub full of ice and you can live out your days in a perpetual blank space. Do you understand?!” The voice was loud, commanding, and most importantly, it was the voice of Derek Hale. He was facing Scott, his back completely turned to Stiles.
“If you would just stay safe and out of harm’s way, I wouldn’t have to,” Stiles said, his voice shaking and much as his knees were before he had grown unsteady on them and fallen forward. Now, kneeling on the other side of the nemeton, Stiles watched Derek Hale, completely nude with salt-and-pepper hair and bright red eyes, turn around to face him. In normal circumstances, Stiles would’ve fought to keep his eyes up and on Derek’s. Today, he couldn’t have looked away from Derek’s eyes if he’d tried.
“You came?” Gone was Derek’s booming voice from before and replaced with a much softer tone.
“I had an eerie dream of fire and hope,” Stiles whispered.
Derek was moving. He was so much faster than Stiles remembered. He had barely blinked before Derek was in front of him, grabbing him under his arms and lifting him to stand. Stiles' knees were still not ready to carry his weight but Derek knew. Derek always knew. He kept one arm wrapped underneath Stiles’ arm and around his back, holding him steady. As Stiles looked up, Derek’s red eyes faded back to normal. Normal, Stiles thought, what a stupid way to describe the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.
“You never came back,” Derek whispered, keeping his other hand awkwardly by his side.
“I like to think I came back when it mattered the most,” Stiles retorted, trying to lighten the heavy air between them.
“Are you going to stay?”
“Are you going to stop sacrificing yourself when you have so many people to live for?”
“Who else will do the self-sacrificing if I stop?” They were joking back and forth now, albeit in hushed tones. The awkwardness was turning into tension, like it used to when Derek would press him up against the nearest wall.
“I think it’s high time for that responsibility to fall on Peter,” Stiles said, sounding as serious as he possibly could.
Between them, there was a single beat of silence. Then Derek started laughing. Derek Hale’s laugh was so happy and contagious that soon their forgotten family and friends began to laugh behind them, though they didn’t notice. “Can I?” Derek asked, trailing off into an unspoken question.
“I just brought you back from the dead, I think I deserve one–” and Stiles was cut off by Derek’s lips on his own. His eyes dropped shut as Derek’s unoccupied hand settled on the side of his neck, his thumb resting underneath Stiles’ jaw. Stiles’ own awkward arms reached up and settled on Derek’s shoulder and collarbone. If time was passing while they kissed, neither of them noticed. They didn’t know if the rest of the pack had scattered or remained to comment on what Stiles thought must be surprising at least to Allison.
They kissed until, “Dad!” broke through the perceived silence. Stiles dropped his head to lay on Derek’s shoulder and give him an unobstructed field of vision over him as Eli ran from the woods, into the clearing, and straight up to the two of them. The arm that held Stiles up remained but the one holding his neck was stretched out just in time to accommodate the sudden teenager who joined their embrace. “How?” Stiles heard Eli whisper.
“Eli, I’d like to properly introduce you to Stiles Stilinski,” Derek said. “Impossible things happen around Stiles Stilinski.”
“I’ve had my share of impossible things. I’d be content to just have this forever,” Stiles whispered, not completely realizing he’d spoken out loud.
“Then let’s have this,” Derek said in return. “The three of us. Let’s have this forever.”
<3