Chapter Text
Stiles knew he was in trouble halfway through the statistics final when the words on the page stopped meaning anything.
He could see them perfectly fine. His brain just suddenly refused to turn them into usable information.
He stared at the same probability question long enough for the numbers to start feeling fake and sat back slowly in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes as pressure throbbed behind them. The migraine had been building for hours now, slow and quiet and inevitable as a haint from Appalachia.
He needed to stop listening to “Old Gods of Appalachia” podcast before bed.
Someone near the front sniffed hard every couple minutes. Another student coughed into their sleeve.
Finals week.
Everyone sounded sick.
Stiles felt sick.
He knew he wasn’t.
That was the problem.
He’d been hearing the sounds of other’s being sick around him and his MCAS sent out the alert to the rest of his body to release the histamines like some action flick hero who saves the day.
That is not this. His body is not saving the day. None of those people are probably even sick, they just sound like it. Allergy season is in the air and it’s hit Beacon Hills hard this year. Stiles would argue what he was feeling was allergies too but his doctor had him on a regimen that was four times the allergy meds most people took. And now he’s sitting here with the miserable, inflamed, vaguely poisoned feeling when his body decided something completely normal had become unacceptable. His sinuses burned. His throat felt irritated. His skin felt too hot while his hands somehow stayed cold. Even his joints ached worse than usual, deep and dull like the weather had settled directly into his connective tissue.
The fluorescent lights overhead scraped against the inside of his skull.
His water bottle sat beside his foot on the floor, filled with electrolytes instead of coffee because he’d already learned that caffeine plus POTS plus stress plus sleep deprivation turned his heart into a live percussion solo and made Scott look at him with that look of concern that’s trying not the be concern.
It still wasn’t helping much.
Probably.
Maybe.
Okay.
It probably was helping.
Or at least keeping this from getting worse.
Which currently felt like the world’s most insulting definition of success.
His pulse felt weirdly heavy in his throat, every heartbeat slightly too noticeable while exhaustion dragged at him hard enough that keeping his eyes focused took active effort. Standing up too quickly earlier had kicked the migraine into something meaner. Now it sat behind one eye pulsing in steady warning waves while his brain moved through wet cement.
Question twenty-three remained unanswered.
Stiles read it again.
Then once more.
Nothing.
He had studied this. He knew it. He remembered sitting at his desk at two in the morning memorizing formulas while wrapped in a heating pad.
The information existed somewhere but retrieving it currently felt like trying to watch Netflix off an old modem connection.
His pencil hovered uselessly over the page.
The clock at the front of the room ticked forward another minute.
Thirty-seven minutes remaining.
Which would have felt like enough time if his brain wasn’t currently running on whatever emergency backup generator his body kept hidden somewhere for special occasions. The kind that powered exactly three systems at once and made the rest flicker ominously in the background.
Someone crinkled a tissue nearby.
Stiles couldn’t breathe through his left nostril anymore and the right one was closing fast.
“Oh, come on,” he muttered under his breath.
The girl next to him glanced over briefly before returning to her test.
Right. Talking to himself during finals. Totally normal behavior.
His throat felt worse now because swallowing was uncomfortable. The kind of feeling most people would shrug off as allergies and move on from. Stiles would have loved to move on from it. Unfortunately he’d learned to read it more like a tactical warning.
He reached down blindly for the water bottle near his foot and took another long drink.
Room temperature electrolyte water.
Truly the champagne of chronic illness.
His knee bounced under the desk as he stared at the problem in front of him. Standard deviation. Confidence intervals. Something about distribution curves.
Normally statistics made sense to him.
Not in a fun way. Nobody actually had fun with statistics except serial killers and sociopaths who voluntarily used Excel for recreational purposes, but it usually felt predictable at least.
Numbers had rules.
Numbers behaved.
His body did not.
Currently it felt like it was making decisions through a dart board.
Stiles finally wrote something down for question twenty-three mostly because leaving it blank was beginning to stress him out more than potentially getting it wrong. The answer looked statistical enough at a glance. There were numbers involved. A symbol or two. At least one thing had a line over it. That was about the extent of his confidence currently.
He turned the page.
Immediately regretted it.
Of course there was an essay section.
Normally this would have been the easier part. Stiles had spent most of his academic career surviving through a combination of panic, pattern recognition, and talking confidently enough that teachers usually assumed he understood more than he actually did. He could normally work backward from context clues and half-memory well enough to build something coherent. He’d written an essay about the history of male circumcision for economics once and Coach was so impressed he connected to the original question he gave him an A.
Right now even organizing thoughts into the correct order felt weirdly difficult.
“Discuss the relationship between sample size and margin of error.”
He stared at the sentence for a long moment.
He pondered if he could connect the history of male circumcision to that.
Probably not.
Which honestly felt discriminatory against his learning style.
Stiles squinted harder at the page as the migraine pressed harder behind his left eye. It felt like someone had started slowly inflating a balloon behind his skull while simultaneously stuffing his sinuses with wet cement.
God, he wanted to go home.
He just suddenly wanted his bed with an intensity usually reserved for religious experiences and sex.
Blackout curtains.
Heating pad.
Absolute silence.
Maybe an ice pack if he could find one that didn’t smell faintly like freezer burn and despair.
Instead he was here trying to explain statistical relationships while his body acted like it was fighting off the Black Plague.
A chair scraped loudly against the floor nearby.
Stiles flinched before he could stop himself and immediately closed his eyes in irritation.
He pinched the bridge of his nose carefully between two fingers and looked back down at the essay question.
Sample size.
Margin of error.
Right.
He tapped his hand against the desk and closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them hoping the test would look less hostile.
He was wrong.
He sighed and folded the pages back to front, made sure his name was on the front and grabbed his bag. He walked the test to the teacher at the front and handed it to her and headed for the door.
“Mr. Stilinski?” the older man called after him.
Stiles paused at the door and turned back raising his brows.
“You didn’t answer the essay.”
Stiles shrugged tiredly. “Body said no.”
“Class isn’t over yet.”
Stiles pushed the door open. “Yeah, well. It said no.”