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wellhalesbells · 4 months

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i desperately need to know what "troll the respawn jeremy" is and also hi i love you and everything you've written 🤍 (i regularly go reread the classics because they make me Feel Things)

Okay, so, "Troll the Respawn, Jeremy," is 1) a quote from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and b) the fic I've been trying to finish in time for Halloween for like.... years now. I cleverly only remember it exists in September, add a few thousand words, subtract about a thousand even, and then inevitably fail to finish in time. It's a great system, like, absolutely no notes on that, obviously. You're killing it, brain!

I'm honestly not sure how the thought originated in my head now but I do know the prompt for it was nothing more than 'zombie!Stiles' essentially. Stiles dies and the gang brings him back and he's... not quite right. The memories are there but his emotions aren't so he's rebuilding relationships, morality, and the everyday in this new framework where the only thing to stop him being awful is essentially if it's more work or not.

When it's not dark humor, it's actively silly. There's a lot of Stiles building bonds with Erica, Boyd, and Isaac, since he wasn't very close to them before he died meaning they have the least expectations for how he should be behaving. It's a lot of Pack, figuring out how his relationship with Scott is going to evolve and Jackson coming back and Peter's curiosity naturally being piqued by this less self-righteous version of Stiles and he and Stiles and Boyd watching soap operas together because of course they would.

It's a fun one and a humorous one, even with Derek pining in the background and Stiles having to decide what his emotional responsibility for this person is and if he should be the one to police his choices or not. Because, well, there has to be twisted psychology in there, right? It's a resurrection fic, dammit!

It's also a lot of making Derek do the work too, which I like - especially when I have a good reason for it, because Stiles is all path of least resistance, so these people want him, care for him, would like him around and so he would like to be around and preferably in a way where no one's commenting on his behavior so everyone's trying to help him build boundaries, want the right things, do the appropriate action, etc. So Derek's figuring out in real time what Stiles' motivations are and learning to work within them and having exchanges like:

D: "We can’t keep fucking if I die.”

S: “Unless I bring you back. You might be more fun that way. Less with the frowny face probably.”

D: “Sounds like a lot of work for you.”

Same kind of thing with making monogamy something Stiles might want by framing it in a way that's appealing specifically to him. It's interrogating in a lot of ways what's necessary to make a relationship work. My little ace brain has questions and this is the only way I know to get answers, okay, LOL

Snippet(s):

“You gonna get all deep and philosophical on me?” The church is a tiny one and Stiles had only ducked inside to avoid, well, everyone. He hadn’t expected Boyd would follow. Truthfully, he doesn’t expect a lot of what Boyd does. He hadn’t thought about him much before he died and even less after. Follow he does though, settles into the pew ahead of and at a diagonal angle to him. Feet up on the wood next to him, arm stretched out over the back so he’s facing Stiles rather than the front. Like he’s expecting Stiles to offer the sermon tonight. Stiles blinks at him. “No, I don’t think so,” he says, when it dawns on him: “Should I?” He doesn’t know a lot about being dead, having only done it for a short time, but if he’s meant to start spewing revelations, or even Revelations, he’s willing to give it a try. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” Boyd says in his lazy tone of voice that seems indifferent to most everything around him. Stiles likes that; it sounds like he feels. “What are you doing here then?” “Isaac was around here.” It’s close to where he works, this little abandoned site of holy ground. And Stiles had kind of wanted to see if he’d taken on any vampiric dead-guy traits and couldn’t cross the threshold. He doesn’t know what the new rules are, and is starting to suspect there aren’t any. Which is about the most horrible thing he can think of. “Then his boss called, and he wasn’t, and I was bored. What are you doing here?” “Keeping an eye out.” The way Boyd says it, it sounds like, ‘figuring out how many things are wrong with you.’ “Think I’ll start eating brains?” Stiles is genuinely curious as to what the theories are. Wants to see if any match up to his own. Boyd shrugs. “Do you want to?” He sounds genuinely curious too. Stiles shrugs back. “I don’t have any moral qualms about it. But it seems like a lot of work and there’s just pretty much no way they’re as good as Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, right? It’s a bone-saw and blood and innards versus opening a plastic bag.” He weighs them in his hands. “That’s not even a hard decision to make. If I am a zombie, which I’m not conceding by the way, then I’m a zombie with some serious dietary deficiencies. I require processed foods, stat.” Boyd seems to consider this, then decides, “Cheetos would be good.” After a second, he adds, “I have Runts in my pocket.” Stiles jumps over the back of Boyd’s pew and lands hard near him, says, “Then break ‘em the fuck out, man.” Stiles steals all the banana pieces spread out on the bench between them, and relinquishes the cherry ones as penance. They don’t talk. It’s not half-bad.

(Angstier) Snippet #2:

“You’re not you,” Derek says gruffly, not meeting Stiles’ eyes when Stiles lowers his head and looks at him straight on. Derek and Stiles’ dad, they just can’t ever seem to get there. Derek says it like he thinks this is why Stiles is here and wants it out of the way. So Stiles won’t be here any longer.

“Not entirely,” Stiles agrees, tapping his fingers along the counter, the island a buffer between them. “But the basics are all there, I’m just having a hard time accessing my,” he does a half-assed robot dance, “bleep-blorp-beep morality center. I kind of think maybe because it just doesn’t exist anymore?” He grins widely. “Fucking cool, right?”

Derek stares at Stiles’ adam’s apple, glassy-eyed and blank, says without inflection, “What.”

Stiles slides into the stool at the counter enthusiastically and talks as much with his hands as with his mouth. “I mean, okay, there’s action and consequence, right? And arguably the biggest action and consequence: life and death, I defied it and now it’s like, I don’t know, I can’t appreciate that there are consequences.” He rubs a hand over his buzzed hair, back and forth, back and forth, jolting himself back into the present moment with the spiky side, losing himself in his head when he’s not fighting its natural direction and his hand hydroplanes smoothly over it. “I just don’t feel things the way I used to and that’s my best guess for why.”

It’s better than his second-best guess: that there’s still a part of him that’s dead, that the only part that ever gave a shit about any of these death-prone people/supernatural whoosie-whatsits didn’t come back with him.

Derek stares down into the depths of his cup, asks it, “Why are you hanging around Isaac?”

Stiles shrugs, staring more intently at Derek the longer Derek avoids his gaze. He can see Derek’s pulse thudding in his throat, fluttering like it’s trying to escape confinement entirely. There’s a heaviness to him that Stiles doesn’t think has anything to do with the sleep that’s still clinging to him. He looks like the weight between his hands, cradling his mug, is as draining as holding up a bowling ball with just his pinky fingers. “I’m fixing him,” Stiles answers succinctly.

Derek raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

Stiles shrugs some more. His gaze drifts down to the folds of the tank top over Derek’s stomach, he wants to flatten his palm there, smooth it out. Derek looks so warm and defenseless, leaning against his counter, barefoot and weary, defeated and just waiting for someone to finish him off. “Something to do. Plus,” Stiles adds, sly and low, “I fix him, I know how to break him.”

“You want to… break him.” It’s not a question, more like a naked declaration that wishes it were uncertain in the least. Derek’s eyes are downcast and sad.

Stiles sighs, places his elbow on the counter, drops his chin into his hand and stares at the stubble on Derek’s cheeks, can practically feel the rasp of it against his mouth. “I don’t know. Something to do.” He’s really not malicious, he doesn’t think, just easily bored and inherently curious about how other people work. Since he doesn’t seem to.

Derek drops his chin against his neck and Stiles watches a slow breath move the weight of him. He doesn’t ask for anything else, has no more comments to make, almost seems to be rejecting Stiles’ presence simply by virtue of ignoring it.

Stiles stares down at the island, lifts up his other hand. It hasn’t left behind an outline of perspiration. He rubs his dry fingers against a dry palm. Stiles’ hands sweat; they’ve always sweat.

They don’t now. Now. Now everything is scorching, burning up sweat and tears before they can even make an appearance on his skin.

He lets out a gusty breath and says quietly, but without judgment, “You shouldn’t have done this.”

Derek’s eyes close, rim of the cup against his lip, expression pained. “It was my turn,” he says softly into the steam. Stiles watches him and Derek’s head drifts to the side before he wrenches it back, jaw tight, looking in Stiles’ direction but down at his chest now, where the scar tissue is resting under the cotton of his t-shirt. “To save you.”

“But you didn’t,” Stiles tells him blankly, but not meanly.

Anyone watching would’ve thought it was an upper-cut though, the way Derek’s whole body rocks with the impact. His eyes are closed again and he doesn’t look inclined to open them, not while Stiles is still there. His hand slowly curls around the lip of the counter behind him, holds on tightly. He still answers though, through some weird sense of debt or something else Stiles doesn’t understand, but he answers, says, “I know.”

Wip list is here!

#omgosh thank you so much for the KIND THINGS #they made me giddy #i cannot explain to you how much this fic should be done and would be if it didn't only exist for me #in this one section of the calendar year lol #that is not helping it. there's also.... i don't want to fix stiles at the end #i'm much less of a 'let's make it so this never happened' person and more of a 'let's live with it' person #and i just don't know how appealing that would be to anyone but me #i already have the last scene dialogue skeletoned - like they're endgame for sure - but they're also not... perfect y'know?#because love isn't the framework for stiles anymore and i KNOW that's not gonna be easy for anyone to deal with lol #i love it but i am also a weirdo so #sterek #teen wolf #!ask #wips #my writing

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