Kings of the Moonlight

Face Down Alibi

We made it through, black and blue and face down.

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It's said that time slows down as you die - that as life slowly pumps out of you in a slow decadence of fat red droplets, it ravishes you and pulses in your veins, viciously slow and viscous; spearing tongues of fire dividing and devouring you from the inside out.

The grassy knoll of the baseball field meets Derek's knees in a lurch and he feels this, he feels this as his own heart dies in its cavity and yet he still shouts for Isaac, with a confused kind of panic. His son's caramel coloured sweater and his favourite soft brown leather suspenders are clutched tightly in his hand as if his heart hasn't quite understood that Isaac is not there, that Isaac is gone.

Guilt couples with scorching misery and they procreate: creating shards upon shards of pain that splinter and burn the surface of his skin like a thousand regenerations.

Derek kneels like a perfect facsimile of a defeated hero and the feeble illumination of the sun bears down on him in blistering beams like a message from the heavens. Derek would give anything; he would give his life, for the mere confirmation that his son is alive and well.

There is a burning beneath his skin, a relentless pain that destroys him from the inside as his panicked eyes dart around the park. His mind overloads and crashes in an inevitable end with half-abandoned questions and an abundance of what ifs?

In a bitter kind of cruelty Derek's memory reminds him exactly how he had meant to spend a lazy afternoon with his son, watching movies and eating frosted brownies witg tapioca ice cream. And then his mind depicts, with a terrifying clarity, every bitter syllable uttered from Kate's lips.

I will kill your son.

It feels as though the world closes around Derek and he can feel the damp desperation in his eyes and the hot spread of breathlessness grip his throat in an iron clench, even as he tries to choke out his son's name, in the faintest hopes that he he'll materialise in front of him. He closes his eyes and crumples in on himself, hands gripping at the cool blades of the emerald grass.

Gentle fingertips scrabble at his face and he can hear a garbled sort of noise and in another time, another lifetime, that noise would be his name whispered in a desperate appeal. Now though, now, it's merely a distant rumble, a flimsy attempt at a distraction from the pounding of his heart.

An iced slither of terror wraps around him like the tendrils of a hundred-armed monster and his heart palpitates in time with his callous breaths. It hurts as he feels the air spear into his lungs and he can feel pain lashing in his mind and he only wants his son.

Derek opens his eyes and half focuses on Stiles, unconsciously following the command in the other man's voice, his kind bronze-eyed gaze latches on to his with a ridiculous kind of hope. Derek feels like he's broken into a million little pieces and some part of him, somewhere beneath the panic and the guilt and the misery, tries to latch on to Stiles.

His mind scrapes at the edge of his sanity with the need to do this; the absolute need to resurface for Isaac.

And suddenly Stiles isn't there anymore. Half an instant later Boyd's infinite eyes are boring into Derek's, creating craters of compliance into a stirring awareness deep in the recesses of his mind. Boyd's hands firmly grasp the sides of Derek's face before he steadily lifts him so that Derek is mirroring Boyd's own stance.

They kneel there, friend to friend, and Boyd doesn't say anything but he doesn't need to. He just stares at Derek with determination marking his face, the skin around his eyes in an ebony tightness that belies the sheer terror that is also wracking through his mind. Boyd expands and contracts his diaphragm carefully and obviously, chest heavin in a controlled way - urging Derek's own stuttering, staccato breaths to still and to calm.