I Will Run You Like A Thread (Fem!Stiles x Derek)

At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more

It's the thunder that wakes her up. It's not the most soothing way to come up for air, so all Stiles can do for a minute is panic, crushed under the weight of her own heart rabbiting in her chest. Where is she? Whose ceiling is she staring at right now? Where's Derek? And god, why god, does her head currently feel like it's splitting itself in two? All valid questions, she thinks.

When she's finally able to move, even though she can admit that part is not her best showing of gracefulness, and blink herself back to reality, it all starts filtering into her brain, a slow drip like liquid molasses. Jackson. Training exercise gone wrong. Mild concussion. Even though the size of her headache does not currently lend itself to that word -- mild. Mild, her ass. She's dying here. It doesn't help the way her stomach flip flops, either, in that ocean of guilt that's currently her insides. She could, should, would have just gotten out of the way. Instead, she'd miscalculated, ended up on the wrong end of Jackson's attempt at a body slam. And being the breakable, little human that she was, she kind of broke...just a little. She hadn't even been unconscious for that long, maybe thirty seconds at most, but when she came to, fuck, she'd have thought her head was on backward or something, the way everyone was fussing over her.

Derek especially (obviously), with his shockingly and uncharacteristically pale face, those damn eyebrows all screwed up with worry as he white-knuckled the steering wheel the whole way to the hospital. The hospital he and the rest of the pack'd had to drag her kicking and screaming through the front doors. Of course, then she'd ended up vomiting on Jackson's shoes (whatever, payback), and things after that had gotten a little bit blurry. Stiles had sort of lost that battle.

She'd won the war though, flat-out refusing to stay overnight and begging Derek repeatedly to take her home. And he gave in, because of course he did, because he knew better than anyone exactly why she couldn't stay there. Wouldn't stay there. So he'd taken her back to the loft, put her to bed, and tasked himself with babysitting her -- curling around her back for what she thinks has been about twelve hours, glancing at the clock, of him licking her bruises and cuts and drawing out pain at various random intervals.

Well, if it's been that long, she can't really begrudge him a break. She'll forgive Derek for making her wake up alone. This time. She's put him through enough the last couple of days. Still, she can't help feeling the loss of him anyway, the same way they both do when they aren't touching. Which would be annoying, and is, if it weren't so damn good when they finally do get their hands on each other. It isn't hard to find him though. When it's storming like this, he likes to watch, listen, so that's where she finds him: book in hand and sitting in one of the chairs on the patio as the rain falls in sheets onto the pavement.

He's heard her, obviously, so there's no surprise in his voice when he speaks. "You're awake."

"No thanks to you," she quips. The concrete is cold under her bare feet as she pads across it, but it's so warm outside that even the storm isn't enough to chill her. It's still hot, the air stiflingly thick from the humidity, sticky against her bared skin. "I thought you were supposed to keep waking me up because of the whole concussion thing?"

Derek smiles weakly through a sigh. "That's outdated medical advice, which you would know, Steve McQueen, if you'd actually listened to the doctor instead of planning your great escape the whole time he was trying to talk to us."

He motions for her to come sit in his lap, but Stiles knows what she wants ( needs, that familiar voice in her head prods at her). When she's close enough to touch, she falls to her knees in front of him, hiding her wince as she does. "I've been sleeping forever. I don't wanna sleep anymore."

"Stiles..." This time there's no smile when he breathes out. "You're supposed to be resting. We can go inside, I'll get back in bed with you, just --"