Darkened

Allison stares into his eyes, those damn eyes that look like dried pisalis berries. She used to think they were impossible, but now she thinks there's nothing special about them except for the long-suffering loneliness and the endless fires of abandoned souls. Nothing natural about them. It's wrong. It evokes a paranoid urge to carve them out of someone else's skull, unbearably slow, stabbing them until her chest itches, grasping to the point of itching at the attempt to hear the tearing sound that opens up, cracking the branches that braid his consciousness with an impenetrable web. She wrinkles her nose, picks up the book that has fallen from her pale hands, holds it out in front of her with the most indifferently cold expression she can muster. The falseness flows across the cover of some overly abstruse math tome, touching her slender fingers. Allison feels like she's playing the part of a jester in front of a corpse suspended by the neck. -Are you okay? The huntress knows he's kidding. He laughs with crickets eating the flesh in his chest, his lips still open. Blood frozen on the ribs that have become a grate for death-hungry birds. -Normal. Allison has a bow behind her back, her arrows lined with disgust, the poison of pleasure piercing her rotting body. Nogitsune has no reason not to smile. He sidesteps her, nodding only slightly at the echo, his last words echoing in the room. The library shelves have become depressing rows of dust, the pressed screams of trees turned inside out. She had absolutely nothing to say to him. -Wait. Argent turns around, spinning on her heels, stamping the flesh of her black boots into the faded parquet. Her movements are sharp and deliberate, honed for instant impact. Stiles stops, turns around only halfway, raises one eyebrow in a questioning gesture. He is not at all afraid of her words, sharp and harsh, sliding a blunt bow across the tendons pulled from the muscles of his forearm. Nogitsune is grateful for his own irrationality. -Don't go near Scott. He knows: it's stupid to ask the obvious things, but those words are so few, so terrifyingly few, that they don't even scratch his tenacious hearing. Stiles stretches his lips in a smile, clutching the book to his chest in a pseudo-protective gesture. A pathetic game, a travesty still alive, the noose around his neck too tight not to laugh. -Otherwise? Allison looks as if he's finished off her father, mauled all her friends, left their mangled pieces out in the sun on a hot summer day under countless swarms of worms just to watch the colors of their fleshy undersides change under the bright rays. -I'll kill you. -You can't kill me as long as you exist on your own, Allison. The huntress clenches her fists. In her eyes, the eternal existence of evil makes no sense, because humans are not monsters, and monsters are nonhumans. Paradoxically original, so human. And so repulsive. Argent obviously takes everything personally because her family business is exterminating metamorphosed darkness. She finds the idea of humans causing material sin silly if, like werewolves, they can take on its guise. Not that it keeps her from sleeping with Scott. Her thinking starts with the buttons on her blouse and ends with the Messiah. The most Argent is capable of is someone else's sacrifice. But it will never be her own, so Stiles' words are empty and meaningless to her. The usual provocation of some creature. Allison figures monsters don't want to die alone. And Nogitsune can't help but recognize that this is true. The only truth she's gotten to the wrong way. -Then I'll make you hate your own existence. Stiles hums, more of a joke to him than a direct threat. A ridiculous irony hidden beneath a layer of anger. -To learn to love my life, I wouldn't need a hundred millennia. Allison staggered, staring into the pisal eyes that seemed to squeeze themselves shut behind the pupil. Sick to the pain in her chest, hysterical to the wiping on her lips. Stilinski grins, turns away, the book in his hands becoming an insupportable projection of his own physical sensations. The further away he gets, the closer he gets to the collapse of the beaten experience. He wants to be killed, his existence wants to be destroyed. But it's all one unbearably long sound of the bow sliding, which is what he was generated by. Stiles got what he wanted from Allison. -Try your best,- he waved goodbye, -a broken life can sometimes taste surprisingly good.

***

Derek thinks Stiles likes this place. He's sitting on a barrier fence set up just at one edge of the lifeless highway. The road drops down at this point, making a steep turn between a seemingly endless wasteland and an impassable patch of forest. He hasn't moved for nearly four hours, staring endlessly at the crooked tree trunks, bare limbs piercing the low gray-blue sky. Hale doesn't smell Peter, doesn't see the cigarette in the stranger's hands, but the Alpha inside him freezes, almost breathless, wheezing, realizing: the predator in front of him is hungry. The predator in front of him will never be fed. Derek's stalking is a futile act, essentially for nothing, reasoned by his own uncontrollable interest and even more uncontrollable fear alone. He knows Stiles feels him, hears every breath, every heartbeat, the fluttering of eyelashes and the gnashing of teeth, but does nothing. Hale knows that people lie. Most of what they say is a beautiful mantle of impossible events, a river flowing into dim meaninglessness. You can't watch the fire burn forever because eventually you'll go blind. You can't watch water flow forever because eventually you'll lose touch with reality and drown. You can't, you can't, you can't... But it seems to Derek that Nogitsune is able to stare at the forest forever, for ages, for fucking eons, until it's nothing but splinters. Hale sees something mystical in it and can't take his eyes off it. Forgetting all about his own “can't.” And that's because right now, Stiles looks like a lost child. Derek stares at the profile, obscured by the evening haze, and corrects himself. Nogitsune looks like a lost child. His figure, crookedly pointing upward, is almost the same as the broken branches. Branches cast off by the tree like something completely unnecessary, harming everything else like mold. Did he have anything other than his role as the sheriff's son? Other than constant hunger and a translucent smile on cracked lips? Derek is certain that Nogitsune has nothing, never has and never will. Hale is uneasy, he can't stop thinking, wanting, wishing someone so disgustingly warm. The alpha whimpers unhappily under his crust, expressing powerlessness. The wolf freaks out, as if the gravity of the decisions made around him is changing. A shiver runs through his body, dewdrops dropping onto the last holding leaves that have begun to blacken. A lone lantern lights up next to Stiles, a soft little orange color scorching the gloom-covered ground. He raises his head to the sky, which has no stars in it. Derek feels like howling for no reason. The screen glows annoyingly in the darkness, Isaac texts that Deaton has found something, that Allison has lost her mind, and Scott continues to be himself, letting things go. Hale Leahy doesn't answer, shoves his phone in his pocket, glances around at the idyll that has become a looped idyll. The Alpha disappears, leaving behind a faint odor of sweat, tar and doubt, making Stilinski smile faintly. -It was like a date. Four hours of serenity. Stiles stands up, pats his numb legs with his palms, and heads into the woods. There is always twilight between day and evening, but there is nothing between evening and night. The darkness thickens with every movement of his eyelids, turning into an absolute void, created only for anyone to get lost. The torn veins of the earth are torn by the peaks of the trunks of trunks merging with space. The wind grows stronger, creaking the trees bending under its weight. Nogitsune senses an impenetrable longing in the air. He takes a step forward, making the rest of the world disappear. The soil beneath his feet hums happily, the rusted moss-covered trees laughing. Skeletons of leaves mingle with the dying, a thick layer of colored gouache covering the damp and soft earth. It's strange to be greeted by something mute. Stiles sees before him a body with its head cut off. But Nemeton does not cry, as if this wound is too old to feel its pain. -Who did this to you, bro? Roots that descend into the underworld, part of the trunk touching the world of the living, and no branches that can reach to the heavens. Looking at the surrounding forest and its towering spires, Nogitsune smiles unhappily. Tree has developed an inferiority complex. Stilinski wants to move closer, but he hears a wrong, unnatural sound and feels a tearing pain. He lowers his gaze down, looking at the snare, iron teeth clawed into his leg. Nogitsune exhales through clenched teeth. Apparently he's not the only one hungry. His fingers touch the rusty sharp ends and allow it to gnaw at his palms, letting black kites fly along with the blood. The trap unhinges its jaws, allowing Stiles to come close and sit down on the stump with a venomous stare, triumphant. The muddy blood soaks into the bark like something holy, and Nogitsune feels a sense of satisfaction in the air. He rubs the bridge of his nose, smearing red across his face. The Nemeton cannot be found unless it wants to be found itself. The Nemeton cannot be found out unless the druid tells about him. Stiles's mind is spinning with a cocky vet, a smarmy huntress, and one nasty tree. Stilinski points a finger at him in frustration. -As bad a character as you've ever had, you still have it. The forest ripples, fireflies flickering in the moss, night birds opening their mouths silently. The druids are gone, betraying what is dearest to them, leaving them alone for an indestructible eternity. Nogitsune lies on her back, her eyes blurring as she studies the sky, which is only starry from here. With her fingers she studies the circles that have become visible, gently tracing them with her curled phalanges. -You know I always come back to you. Nemeton is his personal crypt, his personal tomb, filled time after time with his dying breath. Nemeton is his best but very vulnerable friend. -All right, I'm sorry for coming only now. The tree sneezes resentfully, creating an incongruous creak in the surrounding space. It's as hungry as he is, insatiable for other people's blood. -Don't be such a pest,- Stiles looks up at the moon, which seems almost perfect, -one way or another, in just one day, someone will be dead here. His friend remains silent, a barely perceptible warmth circling the healing scratches. Nogitsune laughs. -You never knew how to apologize.