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wilt3d-r0zes · 6 months

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Fic Name (and link): A Fox is a Wolf who sends Flowers Series: Teen Wolf Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Scott McCall, Melissa McCall, The Nogitsune Pairings: N/A Trigger Warnings: Standard Season 3b TWs Important Tags: Spark/Magic Stiles Stilinski, Slow Updates, Season Rewrite Summary:

"Do not meddle more, Mieczysław. We will wait." The world tilts, the white fading into grey to black. His bed seems to reach up and yank him downwards until suddenly he’s screaming himself awake in the early hours of the morning. Or, The Nogitsune is not what it seems, and also sassy

Official Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/wilt3d_r0zes/a-fox-is-a-wolf-who-brings-flowers/

Official Acronym: FWSF

Official Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mqurPYscPgQacj4VpKfeH

The key he found on his keyring fits into the chemistry door. It isn’t that he didn’t expect it, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hopeful. Hopeful that maybe it’s just a coincidence, that maybe he got paint on his fingers and they got on the key sometime at the rave, or maybe someone tried to steal it with paint or chemicals on their fingers, and only managed to grab it but not take it.

But no, the chemistry closet door responds well to the mystery key on his keyring. He stares at the now cracked-open closet door. Surely not. There’s no way, maybe someone put it on his keyring somehow, somewhere, somewhen without him realizing, to frame him for it.

Right?

(He’s losing his mind again.)

He turns back to the blackboard, to the riddle still written in chalk for their teacher to wipe away the next morning. Stares at it in hopeful, frail denial and listens to his sneakers squeak on the tiled floors.

(He thought it was over.)

Picking up the chalk reveals just how shaky his hands really are, when it almost falls and shatters on the floor upon being picked up. His fingers don’t want to hold it like he’s telling them to, but he manages to write on the board anyways.

(He thought he was free.)

It’s the same handwriting.

…

Transition

He’s waking up in his bed.

He’s waking up in his bed?

Why is he in his bed?

He’s not in his bed.

Well, technically he’s in his bed, but when he looks up and explores the room with his eyes it’s that same weird all-white parking garage-esk room he remembers from the sacrifice they did to find their parents. His bed isn’t the only furniture in the 'room,' however. His desk is in the same spot it would be if he were in his room, except there’s someone sitting in the chair, reading through a book he doesn’t recognize.

The first thing he notices is that their head is wrapped in old, browning bandages with dried blood and dirt soaking through some of the less wrapped areas or the crevices. It fills him with an uncanny feeling of discomfort and fear that grips his heart and shakes it. Still, he looks around again before saying, "Hi?"

His voice cracks enough for him to wince and clear his throat. Logically, he knows this is a dream-- what else could it be? So it doesn't matter if he angers this weird creation of his subconscious. Yet, he's filled with a level of fear that feels disproportionate to Some Dude sitting on the other side of a non-existent room.

"Hello?" he calls again when he gets no response, the being at his desk slowly turning the page of an old book made up from tarnished leather and browning parchment, "Where am I?"

"Where dreams are made and come to die, clear or full will it be," he(? The voice is masculine, so is the build he can make out from around the chair and under the brown bomber jacket) rasps. Man. Stiles hates riddles.

“Uh, okay, that… makes no sense. Who are you?”

“Watagushi, na ke de wa nai.” He responds, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that that wasn't English. Considering the only other language Stiles knows is Polish, and it certainly isn't that either, he decides it's something made up by his brain-- or, maybe it was a language Stiles knows and was just muddled by the bandages, surely those go all around his face?

"Sorry, didn't quite catch that, man," the human responds, sitting up full in his bed from where he'd barely propped himself on one arm.

“Kore wa wa re ran ogu tu na no cha.”

"Still not a language I know."

The man(?) turns another page in the book, and this time it creates a horrible, gut-wrenching ripping sound, that screams into Stiles's ears and drowns out the rest of the world regardless of the lacking sounds of life. When the page is carefully released, Stiles is left with ringing ears, “Not ‘Who are you?’, Mieczysław, ‘Who are we?’”

"What the hell was that?" he squawks, fumbling to get out of the bed. He can't move his legs, though, in what he assumes is dream logic. Somewhere in his brain he thinks it's because he's tangled in the blanket.

"We were getting too close." Mummy Man responds, voice growing no less raspy despite how much he's talking. Stiles almost wishes this is the kinda lucid dream he can control, just so he could summon a glass of water.

"Who's we?"

“We are us. I am we, you are we,” he sounds like he’s thinking, tilting his head to the side and looking up from the book, “We are meddling, we need to stop.”

Stiles stares. What? That makes no sense. Actually, that makes less than no sense, even his not-english-polish gibberish had made more sense than that. Yet, he's filled with fear at the statement. He thinks back to what he was doing just before this dream, the chalkboard, the chemistry closet--

This must be what's causing that. The part of his subconsious or brain or whatever that's doing that, killing people. Even if indirectly. He saying that he is Stiles, and that Stiles is meddling in his plans of murder.

"No!" Stiles yells, struck with a startling amount of indignant anger, "I'm not just gonna sit- sit idly by while you kill people!"

The Mummy Man turns slowly, an unnatural creak, not unlike the sound of a rusty door hinge, following the movement. He reveals his 'face', something obscured by bandages save for what can only pass as being described as a mouth. It's a gaping hole in the bandages, with teeth and tongue and black goop. Blood and black stain the bandages surrounding it, like he'd eaten something alive and not tried to clean himself up after. He doesn't even have any lips.

More fear surges through him, warring with the anger for a place in his actions.

"In due time, Mieczysław."

"You using my name is fucking weird, Mummy Man," Stiles snarls, drawn back into himself and pushed to the far side of the bed like the mere foot of extra distance will save him.

"Do not meddle more, Mieczysław. We will wait."

The world tilts, the white fading into grey to black. His bed seems to reach up and yank him downwards until suddenly he’s screaming himself awake in the early hours of the morning.

…

Silver finger

“Scott, hey!” Stiles skids to a stop, only to grab his best friend by the elbow and drag him down the hallway, free hand waving about as he starts talking, “Remember the key I was telling you about yesterday? Well, when we were at that rave I was talking to Caitlin– the girl who's girlfriend died recently– and when I pulled out the bottle opener I’ve got she saw the key and, apparently, it had phosphors on it- which means it glows in blacklight, right?- and then I asked why I would have phosphors on my key and she asked if I’d been handling chemicals and so that got me thinking about the chemistry closet,” he rambles, pushing open the chemistry classroom door and taking in a gasp of air, shaking out that same free hand, “And the fact that someone had to let Barrow in, and once I got here the key worked on the door and–.”

He wilts. The blackboard had been erased.

“It’s gone,” he knows he sounds unreasonably defeated, bumping his palms together anxiously before spinning on his heel from where he’d gotten halfway across the room, “Well, that’s fine, I still have the key and– what the hell?” The key’s gone from his keyring now. It makes him think back to that weird, stupid dream he had last night. Was that real? Did the other in his head really take action in getting him to stop meddling? “I had it. I had it, right here,” he holds his keyring up and shakes it for effect, the sound rattling almost painfully around his skull, “I swear to god, I had it here this morning.”

“The key you were talking about last night?” Scott has that very confused, lost puppy dog look on his face and in normal circumstances Stiles would laugh at how easy it is to compare his werewolf best friend to a puppy, but instead he’s starting to verge on a panic attack so he just keeps talking.

“Yes! Yeah, that, I showed it to you, didn’t I? Please tell me I showed it to you.”

Scott’s head shake makes his chest squeeze painfully, “No, you told me about it but… I never actually saw it.”

“I was here, Scott! And just a few hours ago I unlocked the chemistry closet door and there was Kira’s name in atomic numbers in my handwriting on the blackboard.”

“So… you unlocked the chemistry closet so Barrow could hide from the police, and then you wrote him a message telling him to kill Kira?” He sounds so beyond disbelieving and it’s not helping Stiles in feeling like any of this was real. He glances down at his hands, wanting to count his fingers in the way he’s started doing too many times for too many days. That’ll just make him look more nuts.

“I know how it sounds, Scott, but– but look at this!” he scrambles to pull the news report he brought with him for extra proof, hands beyond shaky and nearly ripping it on its violent trip out of the bag, “This is the news report that came out about Barrow when they caught him, okay? About the shrapnel bomb that he used. See this, see what he did? He put nuts, bolts, and screws, and then he hid the bomb and the detonator in a box that he wrapped as a birthday present. What does that sound like to you?”

“Coach… It sounds like the joke we played on Coach.”

“That was my idea, remember? That was my idea, that can’t be a coincidence, it can’t be.”

Scott winces, gesturing vaguely for Stiles to quiet down. The human blushes, not even realizing how loud he’d gotten in his growing panic, “I don’t want to tell you that you’re wrong, but I don’t think you’re trying to kill anybody either.”

“It was here,” he runs a hand through his hair and turned back towards the board, “It was all here.”

“Dude… are you feeling okay?”

(He’s losing his mind again, please, please, he thought he was better.)

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just… haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Why don’t you go home?” Stiles turns back around, confused, “Take a sick day?”

“...Yeah, yeah,” he sighs– again, “Yeah, maybe I will.”

(He thought it was over.)

…

“Well, Dr. Gardner’s not back until next week. Do you want to try and wait for one of the other Urgent Care doctors, or…?” Stiles shakes his head, pushing off from the desk and trying to keep from losing himself. He’d come here straight from the school, because he feels like he’s falling apart and some part of him urged to come here, “Stiles? Are you okay?”

His eyes sting with tears and he feels like there’s a dull knife sawing away at whatever is keeping him from going nuts and getting locked up in Eichan House. He brings a hand up to his chest and thumps it against his ribcage, like it’ll slow down his heart rate if he shows it how to work, “I guess, uhm,” thump, thump, thump, “I guess not really?

“Alright,” it’s the way that she says it that makes Stiles want to melt to the floor and cry, while simultaneously making him want to lash out at the way she sounds like she’s handling a feral cat, “Alright, kiddo, come with me.”

He feels like his limbs are going to fall out from under him while they walk through the halls until she stops outside a door, giving him the chance to shake out his hands and rock back on his heels.

She gestures for him to sit on the bed while she grabs a clipboard, “Can you tell me your symptoms?” she glances towards him, then back towards the papers on the clipboard. He’s rocking in place, arms crossed over his empty-feeling chest and flexing his hands to keep from freaking out.

“Blackouts,” he clears his throat and looks away, “But not for that long. Uhm, and sleepwalking, which I used to do a lot as a kid. Some really bad anxiety, too.”

“Panic attacks?”

“Yeah, a couple,” he breathes shakily and it feels like he’s electrocuted his heart in the way it races, “I also temporarily lost the ability to read but, uhm, that might’ve had more to do with the whole human sacrifice and- magic tree thing.”

Melissa is looking at him with an amused smile when he glances over at her and the paper she’s still writing on, “I seem to vaguely remember something like that, yes.” she looks back towards her paper when he doesn’t respond or react, “How many hours of sleep are you getting?”

“Eight.”

“A night?”

“In the last three days.”

He sees her turn to him with the kinda face he usually associates with him having done something wrong in his peripherals, but he’s looking down at his hands and counting on his fingers, cataloging all the times he woke up from nightmares and each night he stayed up until the sun rose only to pass out in class.

“Have you been feeling irritable?”

“Yeah, uhm, possibly to the point of homicide.”

“Inability to focus?”

“No, the adderall’s not working.”

“Impulsive behavior?”

“More than my usual? Hard to tell.”

“Vivid dreams during the day?”

He huffs nervously, “Okay, basically all of the above. Do you know what it is?”

(Please be something normal. Please.)

“I think so,” she turns away, setting the pen down with a deafeningly loud tap that reminds Stiles he’s been in sensory overload for the last twenty-four hours and it’s been slowly dragging him further into the pit of insanity.

He shakes his head, feels his brain rattle around, and then looks up towards Melissa and the needle in her hand, “What’s that?”

“Do you trust me?”

“When you’re not holding a needle.” and when his mind isn’t slipping through his fingers like old jell-o.

Still, he doesn’t stop her when she wipes his upper arm down with an alcohol wipe and sticks it into his skin, “It’s midazolam. A sedative.”

More panic tries to spark, his lungs quivering and his rocking resuming once she’s removed the needle and he can self-soothe again. What if this isn’t real? What if he’s hallucinating again and really he’s acting nuts and this is his hallucination telling him he’s being sedated? “Why are you giving me a sedative?”

“Because you, Stiles, are one profoundly sleep-deprived young man. You need rest, and you need it now.” she puts her arms on his shoulders, effectively stopping his rocking, “Lie down.”

He stares at her, because now it feels like reality is far away and nothing is quite real, like it’s taking years for everything to process while simultaneously not even taking a second, “How long’s it going to take to–,” she pushes him back and he falls with the light pressure, losing the ability to hold himself up with the sudden exhaustion that ripples over him, “Oh. Not long at all.”

“Get some rest, Stiles,” he hears, before reality slips between his fingers.

(Thanks, mom.)

…

It’s startlingly dark when he comes to, wide awake, in the hospital room however long later. The blinds are shut on all the windows but it’s still obvious the sun has set, leaving him in almost pitch black.

At least, it would’ve, but there seems to be a yellow-ish green light coming from somewhere in the room. There’re little specks of opaque something floating in the air, like how you'd see dust particles in a camera. His first thought is that maybe this is another dream, and it makes it that much harder to force himself to sit up.

Instead, he clenches his hands and counts them without looking at them.

(One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine- ten.)

He sits up.

On the folded heavy blanket at the foot of his bed, there’s a fox curled up. It’s not a real fox, no, it’s more like the shape of one made out of yellow-green neon lines. He furrows his brows at it, counting his fingers in the dark again.

(One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.)

It moves. One of its ears twitches. Once, twice, and then it slowly blinks its eyes open. There are two startlingly black dots where its iris and pupil should (probably) be, and they lock onto Stiles.

They stare at each other for a long moment in silence. The restless fidgeting and stimming that Stiles is almost always doing slows to a still while they stare at each other, completely unmoving.

Then it blinks, and its ear twitches again. It turns towards the door, pushing itself into a sitting position.

“They are coming.”

Stiles jolts, breaking out of his trance with a surge of panic, “Who?”

“We are in danger. We must not be caught.”

“Who’s we?”

“They are coming.”

Stiles looks towards the door, and counts his fingers again.

(One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.)

“What do you want me to do?”

It’s weird, the way he knows it's the fox speaking into his mind. The way he doesn’t feel confused or alarmed by this creature, like it’s something he’s gone through hundreds of times–

Something familiar.

“Do not let them touch us.”

“Who’s us?”

“We.”

The fox turns back to him and stares. The statement itself reminds Stiles of the dream - the one with the mummy man. The way he connected it to a potential part of him that aided the mass murderer– maybe it’s something more than that. Something supernatural.

Maybe that’s why there’s a fox here, in reality and not a dream, talking to him in his brain. That means the fox is talking about him, and not itself.

“How do I do that? Who are we talking about?”

“They will come out of the shadows.” the fox rasps into his brain, turning back towards the door, “Bide our time. He will help us.”

“Who’s he?”

“The wolf. He will hide us.”

Stiles looks back at the door, at the closed blinds that hide the light from the hallway. “Should I stay here?”

“There is only one exit.”

“That’s a no then, got it,” he pushes the blanket off himself, disturbing the fox into hopping onto the table by the foot of the bed. It leaps onto his shoulders as he passes by, startling him in the fact it seems to have a weight despite being nothing but a spirit-like creature.

The hallway is empty. Shockingly so, he remembers hospitals always being so overpopulated by nurses and doctors in every hallway. Yet, it’s silent. Not even the sounds of patients in the neighboring rooms reach his ears, and it draws unease into Stiles’s chest.

“Melissa?” he calls, as if she’ll suddenly appear from wherever it is she is. Possibly at home, maybe on the other side of the hospital. Of course, she doesn’t appear, leaving him alone in the hallway with a ghost fox on his shoulders.

He stays close to the wall, praying that the fox is watching his back because it’s going to drive him nuts to keep looking back and forth with the groggy remnants of sleep and a sedative still dragging him down.

Only the faint buzzing sound of fluorescent lights that he normally wouldn’t notice unless already in sensory overload is heard in the hallways. It’s almost funny, actually, how once you hit sensory overload your brain just collects more sensory input for you to notice. Why is that?

He pushes open a door and it brushes against the ground but doesn’t creak at the hinges like he expected it to. It feels like he’s in a horror movie when the double swinging door reveals a small, dark hallway.

“We should turn back.”

“Yeah, agreed,” Stiles backs up, letting the door swing shut, “If they come out of the shadows, does that mean we’re safe if we stay in the light?”

“Without shadow, there is no light.”

“Okay, then what’s the point of avoiding the creepy hallway?” he gestures behind himself toward the doors he’s actively walking away from. He’s moved away from the wall, now standing in the center and under the lights, hopefully giving him enough space to avoid whatever when it ‘comes from the shadows.’

(Why exactly is he following the instructions of a weird ghost fox that appeared after he woke up from a sedative?)

“More light means less shadows, it is harder to reach us in this light.”

“Got it,” he swings around a corner, pushing open another door and thankfully revealing a lit hallway. He makes it about four steps in before the fox on his shoulder pushes itself into a sitting position, ears perking up and mentally alerting Stiles to a threat.

“They found us.”

“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” he lowers his voice, turning in a slow circle and surveying the area. Nothing has appeared yet, but he can hear a quiet grumbling coming from the walls. When he squints at them, the shadows almost look like they’re shimmering. Something seems to tap, tap on the shadowed wall, and it ripples like when you throw a pebble into water.

A gloved – is that a glove? or is it bunched up skin? -- hand reaches out in a sharp, singular movement before halting just below the wrist. Stiles startles backwards, signaling him to turn around and see two more hands coming from the wall behind him.

“Shit. How likely am I to die if I run out the door?”

“The wolf is waiting.”

“Not very, then, awesome,” he stumbles over his shoeless feet, socks sliding on the tiled floors uselessly, but successfully makes it out of the creepy room and into the next hallway. He looks both ways, still seeing no nurses or doctors and being invited into an eerie silence punctuated by buzzing lights and growling walls. Internally, he feels a nudge, and turns on his heel toward the left.

He’s sprinted halfway down the hall when Scott turns the corner ahead of him, “Scott!” he shouts, sliding to a stop and looking back at the way he came to see a trio of black clad beings with swords and weird masks that he can’t make out the details of.

“Stiles! Mom said you were asleep!” Scott breaks into a jog, if his sped up footsteps have anything to say, before he appears in the side of Stiles’ vision.

“I woke up,” he flashes a grin.

“We do not have time for this.”

The creatures take a step forward, so he grabs Scott’s wrist to start dragging him away, “We should go!”

“No, wait,” Scott sounds startlingly calm for the actively approaching demons in front of him, “...Why are they after you?”

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