Work Text:
When is a door not a door?
The question whispers across the back of his neck, making Stiles’ pen stutter across the page.
Mr. Harris is still talking. Scott is sitting beside him, elbow on the desk, mouth moving. Stiles watches him say something, a question maybe, a joke, something ordinary. Nothing reaches him. The sound is there, technically, but flattened, distant, like he’s submerged under water.
Stiles blinks. Swallows. Forces air into his lungs.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
He nods at Scott on instinct, the automatic version of himself taking over. Smile. Shrug. Scott looks satisfied enough and turns back to the board. Of course he does. Stiles is fine. Stiles is always fine.
His fingers curl tight around the pen. Too tight. His hand aches before he realizes it.
When it’s ajar.
The classroom doesn’t disappear so much as… lose relevance. The scrape of chalk dulls. The overhead lights dim into something flatter, whiter. Stiles exhales and realizes he doesn’t feel his feet on the floor anymore.
He’s somewhere else.
White stretches in every direction, clean and endless, broken only by the high chemistry table he was still seated at.
There’s a Go board on it.
Perfectly square. White marble.
Two shallow pristine and polished bowls of dark wood sit on top. One held nothing but white stones, the other black.
He closes his eyes tight, shaking his head like he can erase the disembodied voice and the room he often found himself in. “Go away. You’re not real,” Stiles says. His voice sounds wrong here, thin and swallowed.
You always say that, the words sounded... amused? But here I am. Again. I'll be here next time as well.
Stiles swallows, a chill crawling up his spine. He wants to move, to run, to speak—but the words die in his throat and his feet stay stuck where they are.
Stiles starts counting his fingers. Pressing each one to his thumb. One, two, three, four, five—
There are six.
Stiles frowns at his hand.
He blinks. Flexes his fingers. Counts again, slower this time, pressing each one carefully to his thumb like the method matters.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Five.
His shoulders loosen despite himself. A shaky breath slips out.
But the room and Go board don’t change and Stiles gets the distinct feeling that it’s waiting.
“You’re just tired,” he tells himself quietly, because he hasn’t been sleeping well. Not since the ritual they did to save their parents. Stiles nodded to himself “Yeah. That’s all this is.”
Is it?
The thought slides in so smoothly it almost feels like his own, like something he was about to think anyway. But the voice attached is wrong. It slithers across his skin like a snake wrapping itself tightly before it tries to swallow it’s prey whole.
His chest tightens, a familiar pressure he’s learned to ignore. Anxiety does that. Stress does that. People talk about it all the time. There are pamphlets. Stiles has read a bunch of them when his panic attacks started shortly after his mother’s death. There are breathing exercises. He knows this, he’s learned several different ones.
Breathe in.
Hold for four seconds.
Breath out.
Hold for four seconds.
Repeat.
Only he doesn’t get that far. The voice is back counting with him, off just a hair.
Stiles swallows again, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes for a moment, trying to force Mr. Harris’ chemistry room back again. God, he never thought he’d wish for the day when he could sit in that man’s class and listen to his insults.
His fingers clasp tightly onto the pencil still held tight in his hand. His breath is trembling. He slowly shakes his head, like it’ll finally work this time.
Everyone has it, but no one can lose it. What is it?
"Shadow," Stiles whispers.
Good.
The thought isn’t his and that realization snaps his eyes open. His chest tightens until it’s hard to breathe. His fingers flex against the cool surface of the table. He wants to speak, wants to tell the voice to fuck off, even opens his mouth several times, only nothing comes out, like this voice has stolen his.
He tries to count his breaths again.
In.
Hold.
Out.
Hold.
Only the voice is counting with him, slower, faster, shifting ever so slightly until he can’t tell which number is his and which belongs to it.
He wants Scott to notice. Wants someone to break through the fog. A flicker crosses his mind, unbidden. Scott’s face, tired but smiling. The way he says Stiles’ name when he’s being patient. The way he looks when he thinks Stiles isn’t watching.
He worries, the thought offers. But not the way you think.
Something breaks through, but not the way he’d hoped. The white expanse peels back a layer, letting Scott in, but not really, Scott can’t see what Stiles can. It’s just the room opening around Scott so Stiles can see.
You feel it don’t you? The way he humors you because it’s easier than arguing.
Stiles’ throat tightens. He blinks at Scott, at the familiar curve of Scott’s smile. But now it doesn’t land right. Something in the edges feels wrong. Did Scott laugh at the joke because it was funny—or because he felt obligated? Obligated to Stiles.
And now he notices the small things he’s always ignored: how Scott hesitates, questions Stiles’, and the way his eyes flicker to someone else just a little too long, before agreeing, or was that him capitulating? Stiles can see now how Scott laughs at things that aren’t jokes. Does he even like him, or is it just habit?
You see it now, don’t you? You’re human. You’re a liability.
Stiles’ breath hitched, “No, it’s not true.”
Even he frowns at how weak and pathetic he sounds to his own ears.
Don’t lie to yourself Stiles, you’re smarter than that.
Stiles blinked rapidly, trying to keep tears from falling. Ever since Scott became a werewolf, sure it turned his life upside down, but he was stronger, faster, more popular than before. Stiles always worried he was just along for the ride and Scott would tired of him eventually and realize he didn’t have to drag himself down with Stiles’ weight.
He tolerates you Stiles. You know it. He knows it. Everyone knows it.
Stiles pressed his hands over his ears to block out the voice but it did nothing to stop it. It didn’t even dampen it. Like the voice was echoing inside his own skull, rooting around and pulling out all of Stiles’ insecurities.
Scott turns to Stiles now and smiles brightly. Then it morphs, into a sneer of annoyance. Stiles blinks and it’s gone. When he blinks again it’s back.
The voice slides through his mind like smoke, invasive and smooth. Pulling threads that Stiles had tried to hide, tried to tuck and weave around other’s so they didn’t come free. The voice has no such care, it pulls and let’s everything unravel.
Stiles remembers things—laughs that feel hollow in retrospect, remarks he brushed off. It all starts to shimmer, fragile and wrong. His friends… they melt, blur at the edges of his memory and what he knows. Maybe what he knows is just what he tells himself. Are they his friends? Derek makes it a point to remind him they aren’t.
You’ve felt it, how you slow them down. How unnecessary you are to them.
The words are so close to sounding soft, like a brush of air across his ear, but they carry a weight that makes Stiles’ chest tighter. He swallows, looking down at his hands. At the pen still clutched tightly in his hand. How useless it feels, a thin thing between him and the certainty that maybe it’s all true.
His fingers twitch toward the board without him realizing it. He pulls them back, heart skipping.
“I don’t—” He exhales, frustrated. “I don’t even know what you are.”
The thought doesn’t answer right away.
When it does, it feels closer. Not louder. Just nearer.
I’m the part of you that doesn’t lie.
That lands wrong. Heavy. Familiar.
Before he can respond, sound crashes back into the world.
“Stiles.”
The white fractures like glass.
“Stiles.”
His name again, sharper now, urgent.
Stiles jerks in his seat. The classroom snaps into focus, fluorescent lights buzzing, chairs scraping, the bell screaming like it has been for several seconds already. Scott is half-standing beside him, hand hovering like he wasn’t sure whether to touch him.
“Dude,” Scott says. “I was calling you.”
Stiles drags in a breath that burns. His heart is racing like he ran miles instead of sitting still.
“Sorry,” he says automatically. “I— zoned out.”
Scott watches him for a second longer, searching. Then he nods, because Stiles sounds normal, looks normal, is normal. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Stiles lies, easy as breathing.
Scott grabs his bag and heads for the door.
Stiles doesn’t move right away.
He looks down at his desk.
He’d been scribbling across his notes the same phrase. “Help me.”
Terrified he tears the page from the notebook and crumples it up tightly before tossing it in the trash on the way out.
Stiles stops cold, staring at his hand as it hovered above the waste bin. He counts his fingers quickly, three times to make sure.
Five.
Five.
Five.
He sighs relieved when a thought slips through the back of his mind, cold and unwelcome.
He doesn’t know if Scott pulled him back.
Or if something else decided, for now, to let him go.
He startles as a locker slams.
Let me in!