Chapter Text
Stiles woke up around 10am feeling unfinished, which honestly wasn't remarkable enough to deserve attention on its own. Most mornings involved a certain amount of waiting for his body to come online correctly after spending the night fighting itself. He shifted and knew immediately that his joints had spent the night trying to escape each other and gravity had won several arguments while he slept. His eyes felt packed with sand, his spine ached in long familiar lines, and there was always that first minute upright where his body acted personally offended by the concept of circulation.
Usually he could tell what kind of day it was going to be by the time he made it to the bathroom.
Today felt... off.
He couldn’t categorize why exactly. It wasn’t a bad day—yet. It wasn’t a good one either. That just meant the entire list of possibilities was longer.
His elbow clicked into place when he reached for his toothbrush—again not unusual. The skin along the back of his neck felt oversensitive, every thread in his shirt registering individually instead of blending into background static where it belonged. There was a faint restless hum under everything, like his nervous system was running a little too wild.
He checked the patch automatically while changing shirts, more routine than concern. The square of adhesive sat on the outside of his upper arm, mostly hidden unless you looked for it. He preferred that spot. Easier to forget about. Easier to ignore. Easier to access if he needed to.
The date was written in black Sharpie across the tegaderm covering the real patch, because sweat was apparently a thing fentanyl adhesives weren’t designed around. He paused for half a second.
Tomorrow morning.
Right. So whatever this was, it wasn't that.
By noon, the weirdness still hadn't resolved itself into anything useful. It just kept accumulating in small irritating ways. His knee bounced without permission while he sat at the kitchen table scrolling mindlessly through his phone. His stomach felt vaguely uninterested in food. He ate some cereal anyways but only managed to finish half of it. The house was somehow both too warm and too cold. Every sound seemed to land a little too sharply against his skull.
Fibro flare maybe.
Or just one of those days where his autonomic nervous system woke up and chose violence for enrichment purposes.
He’d spent the last hour pulling the blanket over himself and kicking it back off again. He wasn’t really watching the television, he’d muted it anyways. He was dozing when Scott texted, asking if he was coming to Derek’s.
He texted back: I’d love to, but body said no.
Thirty minutes later there’s a knock at his door and Derek is letting himself in with the key Stiles had given him six months ago and neither of them had discussed further, and Scott brought food, and Stiles was glad they were there in the specific way he was always glad when the day felt slippery and he had people in it.
"You look tired," Scott said.
"I am tired," Stiles said. "I also think the weather is doing something."
"It rained this morning."
"There you go."
Scott handed him the takeout container before settling onto the opposite end of the couch with the kind of easy familiarity that came from years of doing exactly this. Derek disappeared into the kitchen without asking permission, opening the refrigerator and immediately making a face.
“Why do you have five jars of pickles?”
“They’re different kinds of pickles,” Stiles called back.
“Four are the exact same: Vlassic Kosher dill.”
Stiles sighed, “One is for eating, the other three are for drinking.”
“One of them says ghost pepper.”
“That one’s medicinal.”
Derek stared at him and slowly raised a brow.
“Hangover cure.” Stiles supplied at last.
Derek made a low noise of disapproval but Stiles ignored him. He brought the takeout container into his lap mostly because Scott was watching him in that careful, unobtrusive way he’d gotten lately.
Stiles flipped open the lid because he was also keenly aware that Scott was keeping track.
The smell hit him wrong almost immediately.
It wasn’t bad.
It wasn’t good.
It wasn’t unpleasant.
It wasn't pleasant.
Just weirdly too much in a way he couldn’t name. The grease and salt was heavy in the air instead of registering as food, and his stomach turned with vague uncertainty.
“You eat anything besides cereal today?” Scott asked.
Stiles picked up a fry. “Are you conducting a nutritional survey?”
“You literally texted me ‘body said no.’ Historically that means you forgot food existed for six hours.”
“Rude. Sometimes it means my body is throwing a tantrum like a Warlmart toddler.”
Scott’s mouth twitched faintly, but his attention stayed fixed a little too closely on him.
Stiles managed a few bites before noticing the slight tremor in his hand when he reached back into the container. It wasn’t dramatic. Barely enough to matter. The kind of thing he normally would’ve ignored completely if today didn’t mean he was extremely aware of everything.
Still, he grabbed another fry mostly because Scott was watching him now and because eating at least a little would stop further commentary.
He flexed his fingers and they steadied.
Low blood sugar—maybe.
Too much adrenaline from feeling weird all day.
POTS did stranger things than this regularly.
Still, after another couple bites the food started feeling increasingly impossible to care about. Not nauseating exactly. Just heavy in a way he couldn’t explain. Grease and salt sitting wrong in his mouth instead of registering as something edible.
Scott noticed when he set the container aside.
“You done already?”
“Temporarily,” Stiles said, dragging the blanket back over his legs. “My stomach currently thinks food is an act of aggression.”
Scott’s expression tightened slightly. “You barely ate.”
“I ate enough to technically count as participating.”
“That’s not a unit of measurement.”
“It is in this house.”
Scott still looked unconvinced. Stiles ignored him and dragged the blanket higher over his legs, settling deeper into the couch cushions. The warmth helped for maybe a minute before heat started creeping unpleasantly across the back of his neck again. With a frustrated sound, he shoved the blanket back off.
Almost immediately cold prickled up both arms so he pulled the blanket half way up.
Derek looked over from the kitchen doorway. “You keep doing that.”
“Doing what.”
“The blanket thing.”
“I’m temperature buffering.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It absolutely is a thing.”
The problem was he couldn’t actually seem to get comfortable. Every position felt wrong after a few minutes. Too warm. Too cold. His knee wouldn’t stop bouncing. His skin felt too aware of everything touching it. Even the tag at the back of his shirt had started irritating him enough that he reached back to tug at it for the third time in ten minutes.
The blanket had become its own problem. Heat gathered unpleasantly underneath it, sweat damp against the back of his neck while he somehow still felt cold at the same time. Cold and hot simultaneously in a way that made everything feel like his body had turned all the volume knobs to 11. Every instinct said to kick it off until his skin started feeling like cold needles and every instinct said to keep it on instead. Stiles sighed. Great. Loved that for himself. Apparently his nervous system had decided to declare war with itself.
The afternoon moved slowly. Stiles dozed in and out, which he felt mildly guilty about and then didn't, because Scott and Derek were talking quietly about something that didn't require him and his body was asking nicely, for once, instead of demanding. He let himself drift.
He woke up with his skin feeling wrong. Like every nerve ending had gotten a memo to report in simultaneously. He shifted and the blanket fabric registered too much, and he pushed it off without really deciding to.
Scott noticed. Of course Scott noticed.
"You good?"
"Mm." Stiles sat up a little. Ran a hand over his face. "Just warm."
He wasn't warm. The house was the same temperature it had been.
He felt vaguely the way he did whenever he forgot to change his fentanyl patch, back before he started writing on it, because that kept those events from happening. He reached up without thinking, tugging his sleeve back far enough to check the patch on his arm.
Still there.
Yesterday morning.
Not due until tomorrow.
So not that.
Scott didn’t say anything when Stiles let the sleeve fall back into place, but his eyes tracked the movement anyway before flicking back up to his face.
Scott had gotten better about that over the years, disguising concern as casual attention. At letting Stiles come to things in his own time instead of pushing immediately just because his werewolf hearing picked up something weird.
Unfortunately, subtlety only worked on people who weren’t hypervigilant by necessity.
Derek's attention sharpened when Stiles’ sleeve fell back down and he caught the particular expression Stiles wore whenever he'd checked something off a mental list and hated the answer.
Stiles's heart rate had been sitting slightly elevated for the last hour. Derek had been attributing it to the bad day. Pain did that. Dysautonomia did that. Adderall did that. A lot of things did that.
“You sure you’re okay?” Scott asked quietly.
Stiles leaned his head back against the couch cushion and closed his eyes for a second. “Define okay.”
Scott gave him a look and Stiles shrugged, the movement pulling his attention back to each individual thread of his shirt. “Mm. Functional-ish.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s not supposed to be reassuring. It’s supposed to lower expectations.”
"When did you put it on?" Derek asked.
Stiles opened his eyes. "What?"
"The patch."
"Yesterday morning.”
Stiles noticed the look Scott and Derek gave each other but couldn’t read its meaning. “It's not due until tomorrow. It's fine."
They both nodded.
Which was probably supposed to make him feel better.
It did not.
Stiles let his head fall back against the couch again, but the inside of his skin still felt busy in a way rest wasn’t touching. That was the part he hated most. Pain made sense, even when it was unbearable. Fatigue made sense. Joints being stupid made sense. This was harder to argue with because it wasn’t any one thing. It was his body quietly increasing the volume on every channel and then refusing to tell him where the remote was.
Scott shifted beside him, not closer exactly, just enough that Stiles could feel the attention move with him.
“I’m not dying,” Stiles said, eyes still closed.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You were thinking it very loudly.”
Scott made a small sound that might have been a laugh if it had more air in it. “I was thinking you look uncomfortable.”
“I live there.”
“In discomfort?”
Stiles sighed. “Scott, you know what is uncomfortable? Being comfortable. Not having my joints ache, my skin buzzing, hearing the lights, and feeling every fiber of my shirt when it shifts. When I don’t feel all that, then I’m definitely dying.”
That got quiet in a way Stiles hadn’t meant for it to.
He opened his eyes again because closing them was starting to make the room tilt faintly behind his eyelids. Derek was still in the chair, elbows resting on his knees now, watching him with the kind of focus he usually saved for threats he was trying to figure out.
He wished he could say it helped.
It absolutely didn’t.
The television continued flickering silently across the walls. Outside, a car passed somewhere down the street, tires hissing softly against damp pavement left over from the rain earlier.
Stiles shifted again.
His body still wouldn’t settle correctly. Every position worked for about thirty seconds before some new discomfort crawled out of the woodwork to replace the previous one. The couch pressed too hard against his spine. The air felt cold against his arms. His shirt collar suddenly felt too close to his throat.
He tugged at it absently.
Derek’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“You’re sweating.”
Stiles blinked. “No I’m not.”
“You are.”
He was. He knew he was but it wasn’t a lot. His skin wasn’t damp exactly, but there was a faint sheen across the back of his neck and along his hairline that definitely hadn’t been there earlier.
“Everyone sweats,” he said quietly.
His heart gave another one of those hard, unpleasant thuds against his ribs, sudden enough to pull his attention toward it.
Scott was still watching him carefully.
“Stiles.”
“I know!” Stiles snapped.
He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face again, slower this time. The room still had that faintly tilted feeling to it, not enough to qualify as dizziness but enough that his body kept subtly overcorrecting against it.
“I just...” He frowned, trying to pin the sensation down into something explainable. “I feel wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
Stiles laughed once under his breath, sharp and humorless. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation and it would be way less annoying.”
Another hard thud in his chest.
His nervous system had lost the ability to separate important information from background noise. The television light flashing against the walls. The pressure of the couch seam against his thigh. Derek’s chair creaking softly when he shifted his weight.
Everything kept demanding attention at the same volume.
“I’m too warm,” he admitted after a moment, tugging absently at the collar of his shirt again. “But I’m not.”
Scott frowned slightly. “You don’t have a fever.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
“That’s somehow worse.”
Derek leaned back slightly in the chair, still watching him with that same narrowed focus. “You didn’t eat. Are you nauseous?”
“Not really?” Stiles considered it. “Food just… seems unappetizing.”
Scott frowned. “I got it from Mary’s. You love that place.”
“No, I don’t mean that… just food in general.”
“All food?” Derek asked.
Stiles nodded and regretted it immediately. He absently began to rotate his hands and feet, which meant his body was doing that thing it did automatically when he needed to help his circulation system and standing wasn’t optimal. He shivered and suddenly thing entire conversation bothered him to an irritatingly high degree.
Because he tracked things better than this.
Symptoms had timelines.
Causes.
Patterns.
He was good at patterns.
This felt fuzzier.
Like trying to hold onto air bubbles underwater.
His knee started bouncing again without permission. He pressed both hands against it until it stopped, only for the restless energy to relocate into a yawn that pulled his entire body into the stretch with it, which meant his muscles were restless and his brain needed oxygen.
Scott noticed that too.
“You’re shaky.”
“I’m always shaky.”
“Not like this.”
Stiles shrugged. “Maybe it’s POTS acting up then.”
He stood but Derek was already in the kitchen. “What do you need?”
Stiles rolled his eyes. “To move. And pickle juice.”
Derek nodded taking the jar from the fridge, one of the kosher dill ones and met him half way.
Stiles twisted the top off and started to drink from the jar. The cold brine hit his tongue sharp and familiar, salty enough to almost hurt.
Almost immediately, some of the static under his skin eased.
Scott straightened slightly. “Better?”
“Eh, a little?” Which honestly should’ve been reassuring. POTS acting up made sense. Electrolytes helping made sense. That was a pattern he recognized.
Except the relief felt incomplete somehow.
His heart still kept landing too hard against his ribs. His skin still felt oversensitized in a way he couldn’t quite explain. The restless energy under everything hadn’t disappeared so much as shifted slightly further into the background.
Enough to make him think maybe he’d overreacted. He returned to his place on the couch and grimaced as his stomach did a weird twist.
“Still feels… wrong.”
"Wrong how," Derek said. Not a question exactly. More like permission to keep going.
Stiles stared at the muted television. A nature documentary. Something with birds.
"Like." He stopped. Started again. "Like my skin is on too tight. And I can't — I keep trying to get comfortable and I can't. I’m too hot with the blanket on and too cold with it off.”
He was annoyed having to list it all and started yanking his shirt off. “I can feel every fucking fiber of this shirt,” he winced when he felt the fabric of the couch against his back and arm and wrenched the shirt back on again. “But without it everything feels worse. I can’t stop stretching, like I need to move but moving just sucks. My stomach keeps twisting, my nerves are so fucking loud, my heart does this weird thump…”
Scott's hand found his knee and stilled it. Stiles hadn't realized it was bouncing again.
"How long?" Scott asked.
"I don't know. Since I woke up, kind of. But it's getting—" He exhaled. "It's getting louder."
Derek was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "When did you say you put it on."
Stiles heard the shift in how he said it. Not asking about the timeline. Asking if the timeline added up.
"Yesterday morning," Stiles said pushing up his sleeve. "Derek, I wrote it down, see? I checked it, it's not—"
"I know you checked it."
"Then why—"
“Because this sounds like withdrawal.”
“Yeah I know. But it’s not due until tomorrow. It’s not—” Stiles cut himself off in frustration.
Derek nodded slowly. “Could it have gone out early?”
“I—” Stiles started to argue back but stopped instantly.
The birds on the television opened their wings and lifted off a branch in complete silence.
Stiles pushed his sleeve up.
His fingers pressed automatically against the edge of the tegaderm, like touching it might somehow produce a different answer.
Still attached.
Still exactly where it was supposed to be.
Yesterday morning written in black sharpie across it.
His stomach twisted harder.
“Oh,” Stiles said quietly.
The word barely sounded like anything at all. Just the abrupt, sinking recognition of a pattern he hadn’t wanted to see, but the reality of it was sitting there deep in the back of his brain. He just kept turning away from it.
Scott sat forward slightly. “Stiles?”
“I thought I was just having a weird day. Slept wrong, POTS acting up, maybe MCAS helping the coup, the barometer having a personal grudge,” He laughed once under his breath, short and frustrated. “Which, okay, technically is everyday.”
Neither of them smiled.
That did not help.
Stiles rubbed hard at the center of his chest, trying to settle the unpleasant thudding there. “This is what it used to feel like before I started writing the dates down. Before I kept accidentally leaving them on too long because I couldn’t remember when I changed them.”
Derek’s expression tightened slightly.
“But I did write it down,” Stiles said immediately, the words coming faster now, irritated and defensive in equal measure. “That’s the thing. I checked it. I know when I changed it. So it shouldn’t be this. It’s not due until tomorrow.”
The room felt too small all of a sudden.
Everything around him kept arriving with uncomfortable clarity. The flicker of silent wings across the television screen. The pressure of the couch seam against the back of his leg. Scott’s breathing. His own pulse hitting too hard every few seconds like his body was trying to get his attention using a hammer.
“Okay,” Derek started carefully. “Do you have an extra we can change it now? If it doesn’t help it at least rules it out.”
Stiles lips twitched as his mouth grew tight. His doctor prescribed him fifteen patches, for thirty days. Then scheduled his next appointment in 26 days to create an overlap because sometimes there were delays and shortages getting his patches. He nodded slowly doing the math in his head, albeit messily.
He started to push himself off the couch and his body objected loudly to the speed of that, his vision doing something unpleasant at the edges. Scott's hand was on his arm before he'd fully processed standing up.
"I got it," Scott said. "Where."
“Top drawer of my nightstand.”
Scott was already gone.
Stiles sat back down because standing suddenly felt both necessary and unbearable at the same time.
Derek watched him carefully for another moment. “You should’ve said something earlier.”
Stiles let out a short laugh. “I did. Body said no.”
“You knew something was wrong.”
“I know something is wrong leaves me with a very long fucking list of possibilities, Derek.”
The words came out sharper than he intended.
Derek didn’t react to it, which made Stiles feel worse.
His stomach twisted again.
The room tilted faintly when he looked too quickly toward the hallway.
“This is stupid,” he muttered.
Derek’s gaze flicked toward him. “The patch?”
“The timing.” Stiles scrubbed a hand hard over the back of his neck. “I literally solved this problem already.”
His skin still felt unbearably aware of everything touching it. The fabric of his shirt. The seam of the couch cushion under his arm. Even the air moving through the vent overhead felt too cold when it hit the sweat at the back of his neck.
Another yawn hit him hard enough to water his eyes.
That distinction suddenly felt important in a way he couldn’t explain.
Scott came back a minute later holding the unopened patch packet in one hand and the tegaderm in the other.
Stiles stared at it for half a second longer than necessary. “Okay.”