13. Aftermath

Stiles awoke slowly this time, consciousness creeping in bit by bit.  The first thing he perceived was blessed silence — Kate’s screeching voice finally absent, nothing but the distant sounds of birds echoing in his ears.  Next came the pain, still throbbing but not as overwhelming as before — localized now to his shoulder and his face.  

Stiles pried his eyes open, blinking into the sudden sunlight.  At first he could only see a blaze of white, but then slowly his vision cleared, the familiar contours of his own bedroom emerging, and then the even more welcome sight of Scott, slumped in a chair at his side.

“Hey, Brother,” Stiles rasped, wincing at the way the words scraped out of his dry throat.

Scott jolted awake, a sunny smile slowly spreading across his face as he looked at Stiles.

“You’re finally awake!  I’ll get Mother!” he said, but Stiles grasped his wrist, urging him to stay.

“What happened?”

“Here.”  Scott poured water into a glass from a pitcher on the bedside table.  Stiles gulped it thankfully even as he gestured to Scott to continue, chafing at the delay.

“Everyone’s fine, first of all,” Scott said.  “Except Kate.  She’s kind of...dead.  Which I suppose I should be sorry about, but Brother, after seeing what she did to you, I can hardly even —”  Scott appeared to become choked with emotion, and Stiles patted his arm.

“Finally, we find the limits to your willingness to think well of others,” Stiles snarked, wincing as his smile pulled at a cut on his lip.  “But, truly, everyone else is well?  I thought I saw Dad there, and Derek —”

“No,” Scott said, a little too quickly.  “Derek wasn’t there.  Just Dad and me, and some werewolf authorities, who took care of Kate when she refused to yield.”  

“Scott.”  Stiles may have had his wits scrambled by the barrel of Kate’s gun, but even so he could tell when his brother was trying to hide something.  “Why won’t you look at me?”

“No reason!”  Scott jumped to his feet.  “I’ll get Mother — she said you’d mend quickly, the gunshot is healing cleanly without infection, and your nose is set, so —”

“Scott.”  Stiles made his tone of voice severe, tightening his grip on Scott’s wrist.  “Tell me the truth.”

Scott blew out a frustrated breath, casting his eyes upward as if seeking strength from above.  “I told him!  I told him I was the worst liar ever, but he kept insisting…”

“Who?”  

Scott sat down again, scooting his chair even closer to Stiles’ side.  “Derek Hale,” he confided.  “He made me swear not to tell you he was there, but I told him I can never lie, least of all to you.”

“He was — he was really there?” Stiles repeated.  He had the vague memory of seeing Derek’s eyes, but he had thought it was yet another hallucination.

“He was the one who found you!”  Scott ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up on end.  “Stiles, when you didn’t return home from the village, and then we found your knapsack in the ditch, we were so afraid!  Dad was looking all over, and I tried to track your scent but I was getting so turned around — you know I’m no good at that kind of thing.  And then all of a sudden Allison and Derek and even that weird Uncle Peter were there, saying something about Kate’s scent on Derek’s valet.  And then Derek was all red-eyed saying he smelled your blood, and he followed your scent like it was calling to him, and Allison had her bow and arrows, and then Derek knocked down the door of that cottage, and Kate tried to shoot us but Allison put an arrow in her hand, and then Peter ripped Kate’s throat out — and, Derek had eyes for no one but you!  He ripped the cuffs off of you even though it burned his hands terribly, but then once you were home he said to pretend that he was never there but I knew it would never work, and Stiles, why didn’t you tell me he was in love with you?”

Stiles had gone from lacking information to now having received too much of it at once.  His head spun as he tried to make sense of all that Scott had told him, but his heart kept catching on that last question.

“There’s so much I have to tell you,” Stiles groaned.  “And so much I have yet to understand myself.”

“There will be plenty of time for explanations later,” Scott said pragmatically.  “For now, you need to rest, and focus on healing.  Oh!  Look what Derek showed me how to do!”  Scott’s hand covered Stiles’ bare wrist.  Slowly, lines of black crawled up Scott’s fingers and up his forearm, just as a rush of pleasant warmth washed over Stiles, the pain seeming to drain away from him.

“What is that?” he tried to say, but found himself slurring the words as he slid once again into a pool of unconsciousness.