Hi! I was in Grand Central Terminal recently and when I saw a stall in the dining concourse called Hale and Hearty (it looks like they sell mostly soups and salads) my first thought was of your wonderful au's. Dont know if this is exactly your jam but I thought it might be interesting!
Derek’s phone buzzes two months after he’s left Beacon Hills. Well, let’s be honest, it’s buzzed before then because Cora has his number and also there’s those damn telemarketers these days and also Deaton has checked in and Lydia once and Derek never meant to do a dramatic “disappear into the wilderness and never talk to anyone again” so there have been buzzes. The ones from Deaton and Lydia and even the Beacon Hills library bring pressure and anxiety and a sort of nameless terror so he doesn’t enjoy them but he always answers the buzzes. He has to. He knows that.
And this particular buzz makes him look down and read Stiles’ name.
His heart sort of lurches but he doesn’t hesitate to open it.
It’s a text. A picture of what looks like a stall in an underground mall--Grand Central if he’s not mistaken (and he’s not, he did live in New York for years)-- with bold, proud lettering declaring it “Hale and Hearty”.
A moment later, another text: Is this you?
And then another: lol. soups. knew you were a big softy.
And then cause its Stiles: your tomato is not very good. do better.
Derek rolls his eyes. That’s obviously not my business, Stiles.
Not for long. You’re gonna go under if you can’t even get tomato soup right.
Derek changes the subject. Sometimes with Stiles, that’s the only way. What are you doing in New York?
Visiting colleges. Big fun. TTYL. Fix your soup.
Derek doesn’t bother responding, but he doesn’t feel bad about it. Stiles had all but said it was okay and the knot in his stomach eases and... okay, that wasn’t that bad. He can do that.
*^*^*^
The texts continue.
A few days later and it’s some kind of taxi service called Hale When You Need Us that frankly doesn’t make any sense. Stiles complains to him that the cabdriver hadn’t even wanted to chat at all and he thought that was part of the experience. Derek texts back that he was pretty sure Stiles had gotten into a fake cab that was supposed to kidnap him until he annoyed them so much.
Then there’s a few weeks later from a place in Vermont called Snow, Ice, and Hale Sporting Goods. Stiles claims that his prices are ridiculous. Derek texts back that you gotta pay for quality. Stiles says that’s easy to say when you are a secret millionaire. For some reason Derek laughs at his phone instead of getting offended.
There’s silence as, presumably, school starts up again and Derek doesn’t have any real urge to break the silence, to text first, but he smiles when mid-October he gets a picture of Scott in front of a sign of a store called Hale Mary that apparently sells religious statues? He asks if the misspelling was on purpose or had a deeper meaning and Stiles replies that they hadn’t really had time to stop since they were tracking a hag of some sort but--
Don’t worry, Stiles texts a moment later. Everyone safe, no stress, we’re fine.
Stop worrying.
Go have a drink
You can buy it from Hales&Ales.com. They deliver.
Derek frowns even as his shoulders relax. Werewolves can’t get drunk, Stiles.
Like you aren’t brewing that will some strong stuff. Probably why you started it in the first place.
“Idiot,” Derek mutters. He doesn’t feel pressure to text back but he does anyway.
They keep it up. Old as Hale (an antique store). Fighting Tooth and Hale (a boxing gym). Hale No Longer (a tanning salon?).
Is there a point to this? Derek finally texts after Stiles sends a picture of a sweatshirt declaring itself to be Hale University in a deep Yale blue that Derek is honestly concerned he had custom made.
Just trying to figure out what you’ve been up to.
For the first time since Stiles started texting, Derek feels a wave of pressure behind his eyes. He doesn’t... he doesn’t know what he’s been up to either. He’s...
He’s been travelling and spending time with Cora and reading and hiking and wandering and fishing, oddly enough, and he doesn’t really know how to say any of that.
So he doesn’t say anything.
Doesn’t respond. Even when the pressure gets to him and he stops and types and retypes a dozen different responses a dozen different times. It’s stressful and embarrassing and--
Wait, wait. I got it, Stiles texts six days later.
The last text is like the first. A picture of a big sign of a store called Hale to the King: Toilets and Bathrooms accompanied by no less than eleven crying-laughing emojis.
I hate you. Derek texts and he somehow knows Stiles is still just laughing his ass off at him and he suddenly very much wants to hear that sound and so before he can think about it, he hits the call button.
Hi I've been following you for 30 seconds and just wanted to ask why? Are these completely impossible to relate to memes so relatable?
It’s because all humankind is imperfect, and the fact that I’m a nerdy weirdo who hates parachutes and loves gelatin lets you know that it’s okay for you to be an imperfect nerdy weirdo too.
‘Cause if Captain America’s got problems WHO POSSIBLY hasn’t got problems?
Also because I’m lovable and have a really nice smile. Everyone relates to a fella with a nice smile.
I’m a Theology major at a religious university, and while I imagine Elsewhere doesn’t have any such affiliation, I’d like to think the theology department remains. It is a uniquely Human thing; They can’t touch it. The varied traditions of religion have a legacy of purification, of truth seeing that makes Them wary. However, at the edges of even the holiest establishment are the prickleings of politics. Beings versed in the letter of truth, but not subject to the spirit of it find this difficult to look away from.
There are things you learn from studying religion. These things that can be useful for living on the edges of something that has rules, but but rules that are subject to belief and truth, where they Matter. Theo majors know the way ritual can soothe and how words mean something beyond what you might comprehend. They understand the way belief can keep you mindful and respectful and safe, in a way that continues to prove useful to the faithful and the studious, the curious and the humble.
Worship is not something you direct at the Fair Folk, but it is something They understand. The process of offering, of hoping for intercession. They do not seem to understand why there is never a stench of bargain around the campus prayer-spaces. Sometimes, if you’re particularly unlucky, They get jealous.
It’s almost surprising how, for students of such a seemingly provocative discipline, how normal Theo majors experiences at Elsewhere University tend to be. Not mundane, by any means, no. At least, not more than the typical ⅓. Theology students get bothered just as much as other majors. Their stuff gets stolen, their rooms get shifted, and they as much as anyone feel long shadowing fingers trailing against their cheeks as they unwisely pass under certain trees at night. All except for one thing, of course.
Theology majors never get Taken. Not even if they ask.
tadhdfw you're talking too fast so you flip some syllables or mispronounce something so you try again twice and when you finally slow down you fuck it up again because all you can think about is the way it sounded when you said it the first three times
fallingupdownsideways replied to your post “If I wrote more true dreaming/collective unconscious soulmate AU, what...”
Paradex? Idk if you ship it but i like the idea of them sort of coming into synch with each other over the distance
Hey, I can give it a go! I did like @cptnkentparson‘s fic about them. Contains references to childhood abuse, gore, and vomit.
He has so many dreams about being angry.
There are a lot of people in the Southwest who will meet up to get high and work magic together so they can dream about their soulmates, and Kent’s one of them. It’s honestly a bad habit; it takes time away from his hockey and leaves him almost always in a bad mood for days afterwards, as he dreams about raised voices and slamming doors and the thought, I can’t wait to get out of here. He wakes up aching, imagining a kid just like himself, wishing he had a way to cut a more direct channel and say, Here’s my number. I have money. You don’t have to stay.
Those dreams are... confusing. He goes out into the desert these days with a cat carrier in the backseat no longer seeking for a glimpse into the life Jack has locked him out of. Jack still owns pride of place on the fishhook in Kent’s heart, but whatever the link is between them it can’t be invoked in a soulmate’s name. Which drives Kent nuts because he used to be so sure and he’d give everything he has just to hear it straight from Jack’s mouth, No, it isn’t you. just so he can know and put the entire fucking thing to rest.
Sometimes when he casts his spells and falls asleep he’s reaching for a younger version of himself, a nightmare he can never stop, trying to reach into it as an adult, someone who could help, someone who can stop it and make it make sense. He’s never managed it as himself, but Kit walked into that childhood dreaming once, touched where he couldn’t. Now although he knows she wasn’t really there, every time he touches her he remembers that once when he was young and away from home, she jumped up to where he was sitting with his head pressed into his hands and butted her head and sides against his shins until he unfolded his legs, held her in his arms and cried against her fur. And that time, that odd lacuna in history, the worst didn’t happen and he was safe.
Sometimes he stands in the circles that are calling for love and he dreams of anger so intense that he’s alive with flame even as he walks into the sea, burning fiercely underwater. He dreams a fight behind a school where he takes a hit to the jaw and he yearns, Kent yearns, to teach that dream-self boxing, to keep his hands up and deliver a right cross. To win cleanly and clearly, not to be left behind that building with a crawling sense of shame and uncertainty about whether they’ll come back, whether it’s over.
The best dreams that they share are always about hockey and Kent is almost an independent person here, almost a figure on his own, though he can’t ever see the other dreamer’s face; they play against each other, again and again, duelling up and down the ice, trying to slide the puck by or steal it away; the teams around them are ephemeral, irrelevant. When one of them scores it’s not a defeat. It’s inevitable, and intimate, like kissing in the dark, like bracing against a gust of wind you knew was coming. They play as hard as they can, every time, but losing is still the best part.
“I think, like,” one of Kent’s fellow dreamers says one morning-after, as she drags on a joint and Kent eats a breakfast burrito, “you’re scared of anyone getting close, but when you find that somebody has, it’s a relief.”
“It’s a sexual metaphor for penetration,” another guy further down the circle says, but he says that for almost anything.
He went to those meetups too often last year and he’s trying to cut back now. The only time he’s gone yet this season it’s a softer dream, full of new places and moments of unexpected sanctuary. The only lit terminal in a computer lab in a darkened building at night, and the golden room he reaches beyond when he walks through the screen; the river he and his hockey team glide down as though the water were ice, the ducks they make friends with and the feast at the bottom of the lake they find.
It’s the first wholeheartedly erotic dream he can remember, in all these sessions of trying to reach his consciousness out across the lonely miles; sharp, unexpectedly vivid, sharing a bed with the person whose face he can’t see and it’s warm, comfortable, like pools of skin pouring into each other, waking up from sleeping together and moving from pleasant langour to a spark of sexual pleasure.
“Hey,” he says to Sexual Metaphor guy at breakfast, drinking burned coffee and not really expecting an answer, “what does it mean if I dream about being penetrated?”
It’s just, he’d also dreamed about Jack Zimmermann, too.
Jack, leading the hockey team down the river; Jack, making him do drills on the ice as he darted in between piles of red and golden leaves. Jack, whom he’d wanted to scream at, who didn’t fucking belong here.
So fuck it, he visits Zimmermann the next time he’s in the area, drives out to Samwell after a game in Boston. Jack can come back with him or not but he at least owes it to Kent to give him a fucking answer.
It goes badly, and Kent doesn’t even get the yes or no he’s looking for.
He stops on his way out of the house, even though he knows he’s under the streetlights, even though he knows the party guests can still see him, because he has to lean against a tree and lean over, dry-heaving, before he even gets to his car.
Frosty grass crunches underfoot behind him and one of the Samwell students says, “Hey, are you--”
"I’m fine,” Kent says roughly, straightens up and pushes away from the tree. He gets to his car without even looking back.
He goes back to that tree later that night, asleep in his bed in Boston; he’s on his hands and knees and the cold is gone and someone puts their arms around him, rubbing his back while he vomits out bile until his stomach is empty. He’s crying, snot running out his nose, and this person is smoothing his hair away, wiping his face with a cloth, awkwardly rocking him back and forth.
He feels hollow and empty, worse in his chest than a fishhook, and this person just goes on holding him.
When he wakes up he finds himself staring at his palm, where he could have sworn there was something written. He stumbles around until his morning coffee wondering why he washed a number off his hand without writing it down first, and it’s only after coffee that he realizes he didn’t actually swap numbers with someone at Samwell. He only dreamed he did.
Well, dammit, he thinks then resigns himself to a workout and breakfast.
Except after breakfast a number of haunting familiarity texts his phone, skeleton-bare without contact information, and the message says: Hey hockey guy, is this u?
