The first time Stiles wakes up, after, he opens his eyes on the sight of the words GET WELL SOON! in bright green and yellow and pink. He reaches out without thinking, and he smiles a little as he takes in the card. There's a cartoon dinosaur with a bandage wrapped around his tail, and inside, a crowd of other dinosaurs are looking hopeful under the words WE MISS YOU! and various scribbled names. Scott's is scrawled possessively across the stomach of the triceratops, because Scott always insisted to Stiles that the triceratops could totally take the T-Rex in a fight. The others are grouped around Scott's without much regard for which dinosaur they're claiming.

Stiles blinks and flips back to the front of the card, where he reads the words again, automatically, effortlessly. GET WELL SOON! WE MISS YOU! Scott, Isaac, Allison, Lydia, Kira, and, down below the other names like it's trying to be unobtrusive, a capital D with an illegible scribbled line that's got to mean Derek. Stiles has seen how Danny signs cards: DANNY in tidy small-caps. Stiles tucks the card half-under his pillow and falls asleep again still trying to think of anyone else he knows whose name starts with D who would have signed a get well soon card for him.

After the first muzzy days of recovery, when he's too busy sleeping 22 hours a day to think about much of anything, Stiles makes a point of keeping something with writing on it next to his bed, so that he can always be sure he's really awake as soon as he wakes up. He keeps random business cards in his pockets--his dad's, at first, because it's easy to get hold of, but then he starts collecting them. He has Deaton's, his dentist's, one from every doctor he has to visit in the process of getting his clean bill of health back, one from his therapist who he feels kind of bad about lying to, but not as bad as he would feel about telling the truth. Any time things get weird, any time he dozes off, he can pull a little card out of his pocket and read the neatly printed name and information there.

It's just a habit, after a while, the way he'd catch his mom crossing herself sometimes when she heard bad news, even though she'd never taken him to church. He always has a card in his pocket, a piece of writing near his bed. He doesn't even think about why he's checking, he just does it and goes on.

He doesn't drink. Hanging out with werewolves, Lydia, and Allison, he hardly notices it through the rest of high school; all of his friends either can't get drunk or have reasons just as good as his for wanting to avoid mind-altering substances. He has a bad few weeks when he starts college where he ricochets between accepting drinks when he's offered them (he really doesn't have to be very far out of control of his body before it starts feeling like he's not in control of his body, which leads in its turn to nightmares and one panic attack in the middle of a symbolic logic class when he looks at a white board full of stuff that he can't read at a glance) or thinking way too much about why he doesn't want to drink or feel out of control of his body, which leads to some panicked middle of the night phone calls. Scott is patient and soothing. Lydia is reassuringly brisk and never lets him ramble for more than ten minutes before she orders him to go and do something else which usually turns out to be helpful. Weirdly, Derek just listens.

By October of his freshman year he's gotten really good at saying smoothly, "No man, I can't. It's a medical thing."

He also doesn't like waking up next to people he doesn't expect. Sleeping with people makes him nervous anyway--he never knows when he's going to have another screaming nightmare--so going to bed with anybody is a good recipe for insomnia and then, if he's really lucky, the self-fulfilling prophecy of a screaming nightmare with bonus disorientation when he finds someone else in bed with him. He can never remember, in the first few seconds, why the hell they would be in his bed, and that's usually enough time for him to say a fair number of awful things and get himself wound up enough that he's going to be dealing with the consequences for days.

Stiles keeps trying, though. Up to halfway through sophomore year he's sure that this is the relationship where it's going to be safe to fall asleep in someone else's bed, or let them fall asleep in his. He likes all the other parts of dating, and sex is one of the few times when he can forget everything else; it's not totally surprising that he makes a lot of incorrect decisions about closing his eyes just for a minute, the first two years of college.

Stiles wakes up disoriented, reaches for the nightstand and his fingers don't touch anything made of paper, anything he can read.

There's a hand on his arm, and Derek's sleepy voice says, "Stiles?" in a cadence too familiar from too many dreams.

Stiles doesn't have time to do more than flinch before Derek's hand is gone, and there's a low golden light coming from the far side of the bed. His heart is starting to race, the sickness is starting to come on, but Derek's voice is perfectly steady as he says, "There's a book, your hand is almost on it. Check that."

There is a book; Stiles grabs at it but the cover is blank--it's old, cloth-bound--and he can't bear the thought of flipping it open and being confronted with gibberish, of looking back at Derek and seeing--

"Pull out the bookmark," Derek offers. "There's writing on that."

Stiles's hand is shaking but he manages to tug out the faded yellow card. The words on it are words, familiar words, in his own handwriting.

"Do you remember how you got here?" Derek says quietly, and that's what makes Stiles turn his head and look.

Derek is fully clothed, wearing nothing sexy at all--or at least, nothing that's sexy on purpose. Stiles has had enough stupid fantasies about Derek in the last five years that the faded t-shirt and pajama pants are sexy enough. But it's not what a nightmare would have dressed him in; it's not even what he would have fallen asleep in if they'd fucked last night.

They'd kissed, Stiles remembers. On the couch, after the last of the trick-or-treaters. Stiles came home for Halloween, because it fell on a Saturday and he didn't want to deal with campus for a continuous seventy-two hours of costumed drunkenness. He also hadn't wanted to tell Scott or anyone else why he was taking off, but Derek had said, "You can help me give out candy," so Stiles came here. He spent a few hours handing out M&Ms and Snickers to all the kids who've figured out by now that Derek is an easy mark on Halloween. Afterward they'd sat talking on the couch for hours, drifting closer and closer until there was no distance between them at all.

Stiles hadn't wanted to let go of Derek even when he was falling asleep, but he'd said I have nightmares and Derek said, Nothing I haven't heard before.

Stiles hadn't remembered to set something by the bed to read, but Derek's book was there, and Derek's bookmark, a note Stiles wrote years ago on a yellow index card leftover from note-taking for some research paper. The corners are rounded off, the edges soft with handling.

"This." Stiles's voice is almost steady, and he waves the note a little more pointedly than the residual shaking of his hand is already doing for him. "This is how I got here. I can't believe you kept this."

"It makes a good bookmark," Derek says mildly. "Just the right size."

Stiles doesn't remember writing it, but he remembers tucking it under the Camaro's windshield wiper, the first week of summer vacation after sophomore year. Boyd and Erica had been missing for more than a month, and Scott was busy, and Stiles had needed something, anything to do. He was willing to brave Derek just to feel like he mattered.

Stiles has never felt less disoriented in his life. He feels like he can see the entire line of events from that moment to this one, when Derek is giving those words back to him.

Please let me help, the note says. I don't know what I can do, but I'll do whatever I can.