His Reluctant Anchor

The first thing that hit him was how small everything looked.

Beacon Hills had always been a map he could fold and unfold in his head—streets he knew by the sound of tires over cracked asphalt, the way the light fell on the preserve at dawn. But now, getting off the highway felt like stepping into a picture he’d outgrown. The welcome sign was new and ugly. The gas station was a chain. The smell of pine and damp dirt was the same, but it slid off him like water. He didn’t know what that said about him, and he decided not to examine it.

His dad’s house had been painted a warmer color. There were flowers in the yard he didn’t recognize. He knocked anyway because it felt weird not to, and his dad laughed and pulled him into a hug that made something tight in his chest loosen. The couch was in the same place. The coffee was stronger. They talked about the FBI internship in that careful way that pretends pride isn’t threaded with worry. Stiles said the right things—yeah, it went well, yeah, Quantico was intense, no, he didn’t shoot anyone—while his eyes caught on details, the framed photo of Scott and Melissa at a graduation he’d missed, a postcard from Lydia in San Francisco pinned to the corkboard with a smiley face sticker.

“Everyone’s just… busy,” his dad said, like he could read the flicker in Stiles’s eyes. “That’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said. It tasted like dust.

The town moved around him with a rhythm he couldn’t catch. He took his jeep down to the preserve after dinner, engine ticking, windows down. The night air should have hummed, the subtle, prickling awareness that had shadowed him since the Nemeton, since Nogitsunes and nightmares and learning he was a Spark because some part of him kept lighting fires in the dark. He parked beneath the old trailhead sign and sat, listening.

Silence.

Not the innocent kind. This was the kind that hinted at absence, a missing instrument in a song he didn’t know he was still listening to. He swallowed, forced a smile at himself in the rearview mirror like he could charm his nerves into behaving. Things feel different because you’re different. You did the normal thing. You got out. Your weirdness isn’t a weight you have to hold up right now.

Back home, the house creaked the way it always had. He flipped his pillow to the cool side three times before giving up and getting out the notebooks he’d shoved into his duffel. He told himself he didn’t need them. He told himself there was no reason, no pull, no need to stick his fingers back into the parts of Beacon Hills that had burned him. But his hand moved anyway, familiar grooves of a pen sliding against paper he’d outlined months ago—ley lines that braided under the town like veins. Notes on anomalies, on points of pressure. A list of names in the margins, some crossed out. He stared at them until the ink blurred.

Text messages ghosted in. Lydia: Can I call you later? Time zones suck. Scott: Dude, when you get settled, come up for a weekend. I want to show you the clinic. Malia sent a selfie with a fox emoji. He thumbed out answers that sounded like him. He paused before sending anything too honest. He didn’t want to be the one that didn’t move, the one that stayed stuck.

The clock on his wall rubbed in the late hour. He put the notebooks away. He lay awake and listened to the quiet and told himself it was fine. It was good. Beacon Hills wasn’t screaming for him. He didn’t need to be useful, he could just be Stiles. He tried to make that feel like relief.

In the morning, he made his dad breakfast and pretended it wasn’t to delay going anywhere. He drove aimlessly after, past the high school, past the rebuilt Hale property road he didn’t turn up, past the strip mall that now had a smoothie place. He rolled his shoulders like he could shake off the static under his skin. He could go to the station, he could file paperwork for fun, he could do anything but sit with the sense that he had missed the part where everyone else learned how to breathe in a world without a constant threat.

At a red light, a group of kids on bikes laughed so hard they almost fell over. He watched them and felt old in a way that wasn’t about years. He hated it. He turned the volume up on the radio. A pop song he didn’t know filled the jeep. He pretended it was enough to drown out the not-quite-silence. It had to be. He wasn’t going to be the guy who imagined monsters because he didn’t know what to do if there weren’t any.

That night, when he put his hand against the window glass and let the cool seep into his palm, the quiet pressed back like a held breath. He closed the curtains, turned off the light, and called it peace. He had to.

His dad was already at the kitchen table when Stiles came downstairs, flipping through a battered manila folder and nursing coffee that could strip paint. The smell dragged him back to high school mornings and late-night debriefs, the kind where he’d show up shaking and pretend to be fine. He was fine now. He was.

“Morning,” the Sheriff said, eyes lifting with that small, relieved smile Stiles pretended not to need.

Stiles poured himself coffee and sank into the chair across from him. “You look like someone who had to wrestle a raccoon out of evidence.”

“That was only once.” His dad’s mouth twitched. He slid a photograph across the table. “Tell me what you see.”

Stiles took it. It was a wide shot of the preserve, a trailhead marker in the corner, a Boy Scout troop blurry at the edge. “A bunch of kids about to learn knots they’ll never use again?”

“Look closer.”

He frowned. Near the bottom of the frame, four compasses lay on a picnic table, their needles bent sideways, pointing at the trees. Not north. Not anywhere that made sense. He felt the prickle in his palms like his skin remembered something he didn’t want to name. “Okay. Weird.”

“There’s been more,” the Sheriff said, tapping the folder. “Phones glitching out around mile marker twelve like they’re stuck in a Faraday cage. The metal detector at the courthouse went haywire for an hour yesterday and then fixed itself like nothing happened. I’ve got a fisherman who swears his watch stopped every time he cast toward the preserve.”

Stiles took another sip he didn’t need, watched his own hand shake minutely and set the cup down so his dad wouldn’t see. “Electrical interference? Solar flare? Maybe Beacon Hills finally realized it’s allergic to itself.”

His dad gave him a look that had cut through teenage bravado and late-night lies. “I was thinking you might know who to ask.”

“Dad,” he said, soft protest threaded with warning. “I’m not—”

“I know.” The Sheriff’s voice gentled. “You’re not the kid who ran toward the fire anymore. You don’t have to be. But you… you understand that world. More than I do. And the person who understands it better than anyone is the one who never left.”

The name arrived before he said it, dragging a tight pull behind Stiles’s ribs.

“Derek Hale,” his dad finished, like saying it out loud would make Stiles less likely to bolt. “He’s… different now. Steady. People go to him.”

“They go to him? For what, scowls and wolfly wisdom?” It came out sharp, a reflexive joke that tasted like something old. He looked at the photograph again because it was easier than looking at his dad. “We’re not— I mean, we don’t—”

“You don’t have to be anything,” the Sheriff said. He slid the folder closer. “I’m not asking you to get involved. I’m asking you to ask him if this is nothing or something. If it’s nothing, I get to tell a Scout troop that their compasses were defective. If it’s something…” He paused, the weight of the word hanging between them. “I’d rather know sooner than later.”

Stiles picked at the rough edge of the folder. Derek in his mind was a collage: hands on his throat, eyes burning, the smell of smoke, a porch light cutting two silhouettes apart. Also a quiet, almost-smile that had been rare and confusing. He remembered the feeling of being nineteen and too loud, bouncing off Derek’s walls because they were safer than empty space.

“I can check a few things,” he said finally. “Before I— I mean, it could be something benign.”

His dad nodded like he’d expected that. “I knew you’d say that.”

It should have annoyed Stiles. Instead it pressed against the sore spot under his sternum and made him want to do something he could succeed at. He took the folder up to his old room and spread the contents over his desk: incident reports, notes in his dad’s neat hand, a printed map of the preserve with faint circles drawn at mile markers, a compass that had been bagged and labeled.

He got his own notebooks out because he couldn’t not. The one with ley lines was thick, corners turned down, margins annotated with dates and side thoughts he would recognize anywhere. He flipped to the map he’d sketched months ago. The lines were there, faint pencil trails threading Beacon Hills. He blinked and leaned closer. The darker notations—pressure points, nodes—looked… lighter. Like someone had rubbed a finger across them and the graphite had smeared. He ran a thumb over one, expecting to come away gray. His skin stayed clean. The line looked thinner when he lifted his hand.

He sat back hard enough that his chair squeaked. He flipped to another page, a messy diagram of the Nemeton’s radius of influence. The circles were pale, like an old photograph left in the sun. He could swear they had been bold. He remembered pressing the pencil down too hard and snapping the lead. He rubbed at another line. Nothing lifted. But when he glanced away and back, his stomach dipped. The circle’s edge looked softer. Fading.

He shut the notebook and opened it again. The lines were there. Dimmer. He thought of last night’s quiet pressing, the way the air had felt like it didn’t know him. He reached for his phone, thumbed a text to Lydia and deleted it before sending. He took a breath that didn’t do anything. He texted Scott: You ever seen compasses freak near the preserve? But the typing dots didn’t appear.

He looked at the evidence bag with the compass, the needle listing toward the door like it wanted to leave. “Okay,” he said to the empty room. “Okay.”

He could drive around and pretend to be doing his dad a favor. He could tell himself he would only go as far as the library. He could also admit that the only person in town who would feel this the way he did was the one with a territory in his bones.

Derek’s name sat in his mouth like heat. He stood up too fast and almost knocked the chair over. He left the notebook open on the desk and paused once at the door to look back. The ley lines lay across the map like veins under skin just before you pass out, visible and too fragile.

He went downstairs. “I’m going to take the jeep,” he said. “I’ll… I’ll call you.”

His dad didn’t say Derek’s name again. He just squeezed Stiles’s shoulder when he passed and said, “Be careful.”

“I’m always careful,” Stiles lied, aware of the way his pulse kicked at the thought of a certain house at the end of a certain road, and the way his notes had looked thinner in his hands, as if something in Beacon Hills was erasing itself while he watched.

The preserve swallowed sound the way it always had, but the quiet felt wrong now. Stiles parked at the trailhead and sat for a full minute with his hands on the wheel, listening to the faint tick of the engine cooling, the insect-buzz he’d once called summer. It skated over his skin without catching. He shoved the door open, let the air hit his face, and tried to tell himself the damp under his shirt was just humidity.

The path to the Nemeton was muscle memory. He stepped around the same roots he’d tripped over when he was seventeen, ducked under branches in the places he knew would grab at hair and sleeves. He kept waiting for the low hum to start under his feet, that familiar awareness like standing near a power station. It didn’t. The earth felt like it was holding its breath too long.

When he reached the clearing, he stopped. The stump sat in the center like an altar that no one visited anymore. The bark had grayed further since he’d last been here, sun-bleached and dry, almost brittle in places. He could smell damp leaves, loam, a trace of something sharp and metallic that made the back of his tongue prickle. He took a step forward. Then another.

“Hey,” he said, because he always talked to it, because that had once felt less insane than not. His voice fell flat. No echo, no answering vibration. He pressed his palm to the scarred wood and waited for the familiar pushback, the throb inside bones. For years the Nemeton had been a heartbeat he couldn’t not hear.

Now there was only the faintest whisper, so thin he had to close his eyes and hold his breath to catch it. It brushed his palm like a moth wing and drifted away. He swallowed and pushed harder, fingers spread on the rough surface. His own pulse thudded dully against it. He tried to reach the part of himself that had always lit when he stood here, the spark he had learned to smother and coax in equal measure. He pictured a taper, a match, a wick waiting.

Heat flickered in his fingers. It was small and skittish. He felt it like a thread running from his sternum to his shoulder, down his arm to his palm. He nudged it along the way Deaton had taught him, careful and deliberate. The Nemeton should have met him halfway, drawn the energy in, steadied it, fed it back as a hum of welcome.

Instead, the thread stretched thin, fragile as spider silk. When the stump took it, it was a drag, not a pull. The energy left him and didn’t return. Stiles clenched his jaw on a sound that wasn’t a word. He forced his hand flat, counting in his head to keep from jerking away. One, two, three, you’re fine, four, five—

A soft, sickly pulse tapped against his palm. Not healthy. Not itself. He tried again, lighter, testing, and felt it the way you can feel a bruise under your skin before you touch it—the center hollowed out, the edges trying to hold. The Nemeton wasn’t asleep. It was hungry.

“Okay,” he said, breath shaking out. “Okay.”

He pulled his hand back and flexed it, watching the tremor in his fingers. Pinpricks throbbed along his palm, his skin oversensitized where the wood had pressed. He rubbed his thumb along the heel of his hand and felt the lack like a negative space. The spark, always a steady ember when he was this close, guttered and went thin.

Panic surged sharp and stupid. He crouched, braced his hands on his knees, and waited for it to pass. The earth should have steadied him; it didn’t. He reached out again, this time just the tips of his fingers brushing the bark. The whisper skimmed over him, weaker. A moment later it dipped, as if something else had opened its mouth and taken a breath.

“Holy—” He cut himself off, looked around the empty clearing like he expected to see someone there with a straw jammed into the ground. Leaves stirred in a breeze that felt manufactured, a shift in air pressure without wind. The fine hair on his arms lifted. When the pressure eased, it left him oddly lightheaded.

He sat on the edge of the stump because his legs didn’t feel entirely reliable. He stared at the center rings, the story of years carved in circles, and thought about his notebook lines fading without a smear on his thumb. He’d told himself it was a trick of the light. This wasn’t. You couldn’t fake the way his body had always answered this place. You couldn’t fake the chill of having it not answer back.

He let himself remember what it had felt like when the Nemeton was strong. The weight under his feet. The way his thoughts had gone quiet for once, not because there was nothing in his head, but because the hum under everything had matched the frequency of his bones. He remembered anger lighting inside him like flint and the stump taking it, smoothing it, returning it as something he could hold without burning.

Now when he reached for that place, he found only the ache of wanting. The whisper came again, a frail brush, and even that seemed to cost the stump something. Stiles curled his hand into a fist.

“Someone’s taking from you,” he said, low. Saying it out loud steadied him. “Or you’re bleeding on your own.”

If it was an attack, it was slow and patient. If it was decay, it was cruel in a way that felt impersonal and personal at once. He couldn’t tell which was worse. He stood up and circled the stump, scanning the ground for anything out of place—charms, sigils, a pattern in the leaves. He found scuffed dirt where deer hooves had torn the top layer, a beer can half-buried near the trees, a tangle of red thread snagged on a thornbush that made the back of his neck itch until he forced himself to touch it. It was cotton, ordinary, and his reaction was his own nerves.

He slipped the thread into his pocket anyway. He went down on one knee and pressed his ear to the wood like a kid listening for trains. The faint pulse was there, then not, the way a faulty light flickers. It wasn’t dying because of him. It wasn’t waking because of him either.

When he stood, the world tilted for a second and righted. The edges of the clearing sharpened and blurred, like the air was trying to decide on a filter. He took a step back and another, giving the stump a space that felt too ceremonial for a normal afternoon and not enough for a place that had once held a town together. He wanted to put his hand on it again, to give it more, to see if the whisper would strengthen. He also wanted to run.

He didn’t do either. He drew in a slow breath and let it out. His ribs felt tight like they always did right before a decision.

“It’s real,” he said to the empty trees, to his own stubborn head. “It’s happening.”

He turned toward the path. The urge to call Scott, Lydia, anyone, bubbled up and slid away. There was only one person whose name rose and wouldn’t sink. The thought of Derek’s quiet, steady gaze hooked behind his breastbone. Stiles swallowed around it and started back through the woods, the not-quite-silence following like a shadow. The jeep felt a thousand miles away. The static under his skin wasn’t static anymore. It was a direction. It pushed him down the trail with a certainty that made his hands steady again, even as the spark inside him flickered thin and stubborn, refusing to go out.

He drove without music, windows cracked, letting the preserve air bleed the inside of the jeep cooler by degrees. The road to the Hale property was muscle memory too, though it forked where it hadn’t before, a new gravel stretch that bit under the tires and rattled up through the steering wheel. He remembered weeds and ash, a foundation like a scar. He did not expect a driveway. He did not expect a wide, low house that looked like it had grown from the earth and then decided to stay.

The place wasn’t big, but it was solid. Timber beams dark with oil, stone set with a mason’s quiet pride. The porch wrapped the front like a watchful arm. A new metal gate stood open behind him with a keypad and a camera he’d nearly missed, the kind of security you install when you plan to keep people safe. Wind chimes made of bone and brass hung under the eaves, quiet now. Herbs grew in a long bed along one side—sage, rosemary, something with purple flowers he couldn’t name. A pair of boots sat neatly on the porch beside a mud-scraper. The yard was clean but not sterile. A soccer ball lurked under a pine. A clothesline at the far end of the house bowed under the weight of clean shirts.

For a beat, his brain supplied the old image anyway—blackened timber, broken glass, char and grief—and he had to blink it away to make room for what was here. The air smelled like cedar and sun-warmed wool. He cut the engine and sat, hands still on the wheel, aware that his heart had climbed somewhere high and tight between his ribs.

A dull thud came from around the side of the house. He got out, every nerve alert, and followed the sound until he rounded the corner and saw him.

Derek stood by a chopping block in a stretch of shade, sleeves shoved up, an axe lifted over one shoulder. Sweat had darkened the gray T-shirt between his shoulder blades. He’d always been big, but now he carried it differently, his weight settled, the lines of his body finished where they used to be all sharp starts and stops. His beard was fuller, the edges trimmed close. When he swung, the movement was clean and economical, like breath. The wood split with a crack and fell into neat halves at his feet.

Stiles stopped, the word hey hanging in his chest and choking out as nothing. He took in the small domestic details because they were easier than the man in front of him: the stacked cordwood under a tarp, the galvanized bucket half full of kindling, the water bottle beading on a table nearby. The faint, low hum that he always felt at the edges of the preserve was thin here but steadier, as if something in the ground was trying.

Derek glanced up at the sound of gravel shifting under Stiles’s sneaker. For a second his eyes flashed wolf-bright, instinct and assessment in one sweep. Then something smoothed in his face. He set the axe down with care and wiped his forearm across his forehead, leaving a clean streak in the sweat. He didn’t smile, but the harshness Stiles remembered wasn’t there.

“Stiles,” he said.

His name in Derek’s mouth did a stupid thing to his pulse. “Hey,” Stiles managed. “Nice… house.”

Derek’s gaze flicked past him to the jeep and back, a quick scan that cataloged and dismissed threat. “It works,” he said. His voice was a little rough with disuse or with the day. “What are you doing here?”

Stiles swallowed. The impulse to deflect rose and fell. This wasn’t a drop-in. This wasn’t a joke. He was standing in sunlight at the edge of a life Derek had built and asking for an entry.

“I went to the Nemeton,” he said. The word settled between them, heavy. “It’s wrong. The hum—there’s barely anything. It took from me and didn’t give back.”

A muscle in Derek’s jaw moved. He looked past Stiles again, toward the line of trees, as if he could see the stump from here. When he brought his eyes back, they were darker. “I know,” he said. “It’s been off.” He nodded toward the porch. “Come in. You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“I’m not—” He was. The lightheaded float from the clearing had never entirely left. He followed anyway, keeping pace with Derek’s easy stride, trying not to stare at the way the shirt clung to his back or the way his hands were callused and nicked. The door clicked open under Derek’s hand and the smell of coffee—fresh, strong—rolled out.

Inside, the air was cool. The entry opened to a wide room with a couch, low shelves, books stacked in careful piles. A wool blanket lay thrown over one arm, a blue that made Stiles think of water under shade. Family photos were absent, but there were frames: a black-and-white shot of trees, a sepia image of a farmhouse that might have been this land long ago. The kitchen was all practical lines and light. A row of mugs hung under a shelf. Two extra plates sat to dry beside the sink.

“You live here,” Stiles said, and heard the obviousness of it and couldn’t help it. After years of ruins in his head, the fact of rooms was a surprise his mouth needed to process.

“Yeah.” Derek handed him a glass of water and watched him drink like he was waiting for confirmation of something. “You look the same.”

Stiles laughed once, short and not very steady. “Liar.” He set the glass down and made himself meet Derek’s eyes. “You look… good.”

Derek’s mouth tilted, almost there and gone. He jerked his head toward the table. “Sit. Tell me what you felt.”

Stiles sat because his legs were rubber and because Derek asking like that tugged at something old and wired into him. He ran a hand through his hair, felt sweat at his nape, the buzz under his skin thin and dogged. Derek took the chair across from him, forearms braced on the table, close enough that Stiles could see the pale crescent scars under dark hair.

He started to talk, and Derek listened, the kind of listening that didn’t interrupt, that didn’t rush. Outside, somewhere, a distant bark rose and fell. The house held around them, quiet and alive, and the awkward pause that should have swallowed them whole stretched and thinned and didn’t break. Stiles’s throat eased. He watched Derek’s eyes narrow when he got to the part where the stump dragged at him, watched his hands curl on the table like he wanted to reach and didn’t.

When Stiles ran out of words, the silence that followed wasn’t empty. Derek’s jaw flexed again. He nodded once, decisive. “Okay,” he said, and the word landed between them like a promise and a beginning. He stood, and Stiles’s gaze caught on the way the fabric pulled over his shoulders. Derek noticed—of course he noticed—and for a heartbeat they looked at each other too long, both of them acutely aware of the space between and the way it had shifted.

“Show me your notes,” Derek said finally, turning toward a cupboard where a first-aid kit sat beside a stack of journals. His tone was even, practical. It didn’t hide the way his shoulders had gone a little tight, or the way his breath came slow, controlled. Stiles dragged in air that tasted like cedar and coffee and sweat and found his voice.

“Yeah,” he said, standing. “Okay.” The word echoed Derek’s and settled in him, steadier than anything he’d felt since the clearing. He reached for his bag, and for the first time since he’d pressed his hand to dead wood, the spark inside him flared, small and stubborn, answering something in the room that felt like ground.