Archive of Our Own

There’s something off about the boy with the purple hair and the lime green translucent plastic plugs stuck in his earlobes — but Scott has no idea what it is.

There’s something about him that makes Scott’s lungs clamp up like his asthma’s coming back to him again, as soon as Purple Hair wanders halfway into the Services for Students With Disabilities office waiting room and pauses in the doorway — but Scott can’t think of what it could be. There’s some undefined and seriously disconcerting something about him that even smells familiar in a way where it’s registering as important and significant — but Scott hasn’t smelled it in a while so he can’t place where he would’ve smelled it before, let alone why it would make his.

There’s something going on here, something about the purple haired boy — but Scott just cannot for the life of him put his finger on what.

Well, no. What’s going on here is pretty unmistakable, in a general sense. Orientation Week festivities on campus are in full swing but quiet for the moment. It’s Thursday and there aren’t any parties planned for tonight, at least not as far as Scott knows, mostly because most everyone wants to be hangover free tomorrow when The Kinsey Sicks show up for their annual end show to close up Orientation Week.

And because it’s the start of a new term, Scott has to be here and get up to his annual meeting with one of the advisors to clear up that, yes, he’s still autistic and no, he hasn’t stopped having his issues with anxiety either, so can they please make sure that he gets the same academic accommodations he’s always gotten. Sensitivity to sounds means that Scott needs a designated quiet space to take his exams. Sensory and information processing issues mean that he needs early access to assignments and extended time on tests. Laura’s pack so she’s usually available to help Scott with revising papers or making sure that all the heady academic Newspeak makes sense enough for him, but just in case, Scott wants to make sure the lines of communication are opening with the campus writing center and the different tutoring options available through the college’s channels.

September’s chilly this year — not really cold, but cool enough that Scott’s still in one of his red hoodies, and Kira and Erica still have their leather jackets on (never mind how they’re sitting so close to each other that they might as well be huddling together). Even while they’re all just sitting in the disabilities services office, the weather’s uncharacteristically crisp and it’s getting in through the open window by the receptionist’s desk. Scott could ask Wendy behind the desk to close the window, he guesses, but then the office would get really stuffy, really fast, which wouldn’t be good for Kira.

Plus, if it got too loud or if Wendy slammed it too hard and Isaac heard the sound? If it hit the triggers that his father left him with hard enough and in just the wrong way and he totally let his control over the wolf side slip? Then the whole group of them would have a lot of seriously impossible explaining to do and probably a visit from some enterprising hunters in the very near future. So Scott snuggles up tighter in his hoodie and looks over at the doorway and at Purple Hair still halted in it, swallowing thickly and rubbing his lips together and running his thumb along the door’s handle but not making any other moves, for better or for worse.

Everything about every aspect of this situation makes perfect sense. Except for the part where some long-necked, full-mouthed, purple-haired boy has let himself partly into the waiting room but won’t come in the rest of the way and sit down like everybody else. Except for the part where something about Purple Hair won’t stop scraping along the back of Scott’s neck and hissing in his ear that somehow and for some nagging, prickling reason that won’t hurry up and spell itself out already, Purple Hair is special. Significant. Important.

Well. Important in more ways than the usual, “everyone means something to someone; maybe you’re not Superman, Scott, and maybe you screw up sometimes but that doesn’t mean that you’ve ever been no one; nine hundred years of time and space and I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important before” sense of the term, anyway. The sense of the term. Purple Hair probably means a lot to his family and his friends and the people who love him — there’s just no reason why he’d be important to Scott. There’s no reason why he’d be important enough to completely unsettle Scott’s stomach and create this nonsensical sense of dread and recognition that refuses to leave Scott alone.

At least, there’s no reason that’s making itself obvious as Scott tries to scratch out the boxes on his annual paperwork, ticking off his symptoms so his advisor knows what they’re going to be working with from his perspective. They should already have the paperwork from Ms. Morrell, one of the Emissaries and Deaton’s sister and Scott’s counselor down at campus’s Counseling and Psychological Services office. They should have the paperwork from Dr. Strauss, the private practice therapist Mom made Scott start seeing back in high school, in junior year, about a year after the fire, when Derek found the suicide note draft hidden in Scott’s desk. Scott just has to do his legwork here and fill out the forms like a good, cooperative student who wants to keep his accommodations lined up.

It’s just more than a little difficult to pull that off when someone insists on drawing attention to himself and agitating other students instead of just sitting down.

Purple Hair shifts on his feet, rocking back and forth, and something reeks off of him. It’s a mix of smells. A weird mix of smells. On the clearest surface level, Purple Hair stinks of sweat and curly fries and some cheap, pungent spray-on deodorant. The sort of cheap, pungent spray-on deodorant that screams, look at what a big tough man I am with and look at how I can stink up the place. When Purple Hair sighs from the bottom of his chest, whipping his head around and frowning and looking like a rabbit when he wrinkles his nose, Scott catches a whiff of mint mojito gum on his breath.

Scott didn’t even know they still made mint mojito gum. Didn’t they discontinue it back in January?

All of that would be more than enough for Scott to handle on its own, but there’s something else, too. Of course. There’s always something else, isn’t there? In this case, there’s something warm-scented and sort of musky lurking under the mess of other smells. And it’s familiar, but there’s really no good reason why it should be. Regardless, Scott takes a few deep breaths, specifically tries to pick that one smell out from everything else in the waiting room — but even when he finds it, he has no idea what the Hell it is in the first place, never mind what it means or why he just knows that it’s important.

Scott could kick himself for it — he should kick himself. That could get his brain working right again (as much as it ever works right by anybody’s standards). But he seriously can’t place that smell, but he should be able to, he knows that he should know this scent. Maybe he doesn’t know why he should know this scent, but… something about it wants Scott to remember something else, and he’s certain that the something else in question, whatever it actually ends up being, is life or death important.

Wrinkling his nose down at his forms, rubbing his lips together perhaps a bit too hard, Scott digs his pen into his thumb and just tries to focus. He has forms to finish, responsibilities that matter. It’s going to bother him all day, though, the fact that he can’t place this scent. Something about it sets off this pink feeling in Scott’s chest. No other words really work for it — desprovisto de, maybe. Which, much like pink, isn’t even remotely a feeling. Neither is te extraño, but that doesn’t stop this uncertain smell hanging around Purple Hair from making Scott feel that rattling around in his chest. Same with vuelto — returning. Why would Scott feel some sense of returning? Where is he returning to? Where is he returning from? Or who’s returning to him? Who could return to him when no one’s left him recently?

Scott has no idea, because that’s really something new and different for him, but it’s all he has to work with at the moment. Lacking. Without. Devoid, deprived, destitute. Then also, pink, and inexplicably the desire to keen, “I miss you.”

And for some reason, on top of everything else racketing around his head and chest and stomach at the moment, Scott can’t shake himself from thinking of the one line from Finding Nemo that never fails to get him sobbing into someone’s shoulder: cuando te veo, estoy in mi hogar.

“When I look at you, I’m home.”

Which makes even less sense than everything else, really. Even taking into account how infrequently Scott’s feelings make any kind of sense, Scott has no idea why Finding Nemo would be coming to mind for him right now. Especially not that line, and further especially not when so many hundreds upon hundreds of viewings haven’t made Scott stop crying over that line. Emotional problems aside, he can’t have any sense of home with someone he’s never met before.

More importantly, though, there’s the part of what that line means to Scott, what happened when he was ten years old and first saw the movie with Derek and Laura and Stiles. There’s the part where he said that exact line to Stiles once, and meant it, and it still didn’t change a thing because Stiles disappeared anyway and left a hole gaping in the middle of Scott’s entire life, just a hole where Stiles should’ve been, and only their old Halloween costumes and a cuddle-pillow shaped like Vaporeon to remember him by…

But there’s even less of a reason for any of that to be coming back to Scott now. It was years ago. Why the Hell would Scott’s brain decide to fuck with him like this? Where does it even get off, making him remember Stiles in the middle of an otherwise nice day and for no good reason?

If only being on the spectrum played out like it does all the time on Hannibal and Criminal Minds. What, with the random magical autistic insights into the inner workings of the universe or whatever Will Graham and Spencer Reid have working for them. Maybe then Scott would have some kind of idea what’s going on here, what’s so important about Purple Hair and why his brain is bringing up fucking Stiles.

To Scott’s brain’s credit, though, Purple Hair has some of Stiles’s old habits down perfectly. But back on the sensible hand, that’s really where the similarities between them end. Rocking back and forth at the waist like Stiles used to do, he jostles the door handle and drags his teeth across his lower lip. Really, he seems loath to stop jostling the door handle. He’s fidgeting with it — he’s fidgeting in the first place, just in general — he’s fidgeting, the way Stiles would never stop doing unless something was really wrong with him. And as he looks around the room, Purple Hair drags his tongue across his lips, the same way Scott always told Stiles not to do, if he did’t want his lips to chap.

But lots of people lick their lips instead of using chapstick and Purple Hair’s body is all wrong for Stiles. His t-shirt strains around his toned chest and when he grunts and stretches out, it tugs up far enough to reveal a long stretch of brown happy trail. Not to mention a flash of pale abs that look like they might be more than a little impressive — that’s the rub, right there. Stiles was always skinny. A mess of bony elbows and hard, spare angles and sarcasm to compensate for that even by the time they were six years old. While Dad used to harass Scott about losing weight he didn’t need to lose in the name of making his asthma better, Stiles’s parents always worried about him being too skinny, especially once he started his first course of ADHD meds.

So, that settles the matter, really. Scott has no good reason to be thinking about Stiles, and Purple Hair has nothing to do with him. There’s probably more tone and definition on Purple Hair’s stomach than Scott’s ever managed to have on his, even with lycanthropy on his side.

Which is another road that Scott can’t handle letting his thoughts go down right now, for so, so many reasons. It never leads anywhere good to start comparing his own body to other people’s like this. Never has led anywhere good, never will lead anywhere good, and anyway, maybe Purple Hair doesn’t even work for his abs. Scott wouldn’t know. But maybe he had a plastic surgeon give him silicone abdominal implants. Though it’s much more likely that he works out and has good genes, and Scott’s just being an idiot at him because his brain’s decided to quit playing any kind of fair and drag all that long-buried crap about Stiles up to the foreground. Like Scott really needed that right now. Or ever.

“Hey,” Purple Hair says, cutting through Scott’s musings, ostensibly to no one in particular, even though he’s looking right at Scott when Scott perks up and looks at him. He takes a deep breath and drops one hand back to the door handle, drums the other one’s fingers along his thigh and his weather-beaten denim. “Hey. Uh. Hi, I don’t mean to, like… This is the, uh. Is this the office for all of us special kids who need the special arrangements and shit for all of our…”

He huffs. Jerks his one hand off his thigh and waves it in frenetic circles around his face. “This is the place we go too get stuff lined up for our special needs crap so our profs and lecturers can’t just totally screw us over, right? Like, the guy at the desk downstairs said it was here but, like… I mean, could they number the rooms in this building any more unhelpfully? I mean, I thought David Bowie was gonna jump out of the wall in his Goblin King getup and start asking me how I like his labyrinth or something.”

Kira, Scott, and Erica all look up from their forms and clipboards simultaneously. They trade glances back and forth, arching eyebrows and wrinkling their noses at each other, periodically looking back over at Purple Hair, and silently drawing straws or playing Rock Paper Scissors over who’s going to take care of Purple Hair and his apparently mistaken notions about everything. Wendy could do it, in theory, but she’s on a phone call to the Dean of Student Life and stuck on hold — and anyway, it’s not fair to just drop Purple Hair in her lap when she already has to put up with crap like that all day, everyday.

Finally, it’s Erica who sighs, and rolls her eyes and takes over handling things: “This is the campus Disability Resource Center’s main office, yeah,” she tells him with an icepick-pointed pout of her lips. “Y’know, the office where we go to meet with advisors and get it set up so that we have access to the different accommodations that we need in order to function as students on the same academic playing field as our non-disabled peers.  The accommodations that the school is legally required to provide us as part of making higher education accessible to everyone. Those accommodations— ”

“No, I know all that 101 crap, Princess,” Purple Hair interjects, spluttering all over the words and balling one hand up in his jeans. His brown eyes go deer in the headlights wide and he licks his lips again, and Scott’s not sure if he’s nodding or shaking his head or somehow trying to do both at once. Mostly, he looks like he trying not to flail around and gnash his teeth and thrash his limbs until he falls apart. “I mean, like. Hi? I’m here, aren’t I? As a student? A student who has his fair share of disabilities that need accommodating and who already knows that those accommodations are just different—”

“So you also already know that we’re not getting special accommodations here, then, right?” Erica drawls and smirks at him like the edge of a knife. “Calling them that’s wrong because they’re necessary accommodations. And you’re really not going to get anywhere with the people in this office if you tell yourself that you’re making unreasonable demands instead of just telling them what you need outright. Plus, most of us have to put up with enough of that from other people outside of this office already, so. How about you cool it with that ableist shit if you’re going to be hanging around in here, yeah?”

Purple Hair lets his mouth hang open like a dead fish in a supermarket display case. He shifts his eyes around the room without seeming to see anything, drags them up to the ceiling. Shaking his head, he huffs and says, “Yeah, no, I mean… I know that, I already know all of that, actually, it’s not like I was…” He trails off into a hard sigh and scrubs at his face and mouth with both hands a moment before dropping the one back down to the door handle. “You know, it’s really not like what you’re making it out to be right now. Like, what, are we not allowed to use sarcasm as a defense mechanism anymore? I wasn’t trying to say anything like what you’re trying to shove up in my mouth right now, okay.”

Erica rolls her eyes and sneers, “I really don’t have to try that hard. You basically shoved the ableism in your own mouth for me. Seriously. It’s like I’m arguing with my seven-year-old cousins. Just admit what you said and apologize and move on because personally? I would really, really like to be done with you now.”

As they trade wide-eyed glances, Scott and Kira try to stifle a gasp on her part and a wolf-whistle on his. They don’t have to tell each other that they’re gonna owe Erica so, so much for handling this little prick for them. Kira can probably win her over with a back-rub and maybe some long, slow eating her out for the entirety of any given movie, Erica’s choice. But Scott’s not sure what he could do to thank Erica for this. Write a miniature epic about her grace under fire and her righteous indignation, maybe. Possibly a little chapbook of sonnets, as long as she agreed that that idea wasn’t weird. Maybe he could just make her favorite dinner for her one night and save everyone the trouble.

Crossing that bridge when he gets to it is probably the best choice for everyone, though. Right now, Scott has other things to do than focusing on Purple Hair. So, he sighs. He looks back down at his paperwork and pushes his black plastic-framed glasses back up his nose. As always, he quietly curses the fact that lycanthropy didn’t magically make his eyes better for reading, or fix any of his weird neurology and how it manifests outside of his brain, or make his asthma go away so much as the bite made it a lot easier to manage.

Scott can’t even complain about that point, though. Not really. Maybe he still has to take his meds and carry his inhaler around, just in case something triggers an attack — but the attacks seize up Scott’s lungs less frequently. When they do happen, they’re less severe. Scott has an easier time keeping them in check. Preventing them’s easier, recovering from them’s easier, everything about them’s easier, and that’s more than Scott can say for his anxiety, for the panic attacks he’s had since seventh grade.

At the moment, Purple Hair isn’t helping Scott’s anxiety at all. The business where he won’t come sit down already is helping even less. Once Erica’s done chewing him out, the office goes back to nigh on silence and Scott wishes he could enjoy having the space to take a few deep breaths and settle himself down. But he doesn’t get it. One second, maybe two — Scott doesn’t bother counting them. He just flinches, jerks himself up into a ball. He digs a fingernail into his palm as Purple Hair jiggles the handle up and down with too much force behind his motions.

It’s a silly thing for Purple Hair to do, but Scott’s in no position to judge him, really. At least, not as long as he hurries up and stops. Which he should. Not even out of common courtesy so much as boredom. One time of Purple Hair playing with the handle like that should really be enough for him, Scott thinks?

But Purple Hair doesn’t stop. He just keeps right on twitching the stupid thing, curling his one hand tighter around it and flicking his tongue out over his lips again.

Everything’s still and even and calm, except for Purple Hair fussing with the door handle, jostling it up and down, looking all over the office as if he’s trying to pick out where the hidden sniper is. Who knows? Maybe he is. Maybe that’s the reason why he’s here in the first place, or one of them. Anxiety’s a pain in the ass, and that’s if Scott’s being really freaking generous with it, and it could make Purple Hair hesitate in doorways while playing with their handles. It makes Scott bury his face in pillows and muss up his hair so harshly that Derek sometimes has to hold Scott by the wrists and make him take deep breaths instead — by comparison, playing with door handles is probably way more normal than Scott’s anxiety things.

So yeah, Purple Hair’s probably having some kind of anxiety thing going on right now. Which is fair enough, really? Orientation Week is busy and stressful and loud. Coming down to the disability services office is one of the most nerve-wracking things Scott’s ever done. It’s not like Purple Hair’s suffering from a shortage of reasons why his anxiety might be aggravated. But the longer he stands there, the longer he looks around and every so often lets his eyes linger on Scott, the more Scott can’t shake this feeling in the pit of his chest that says Purple Hair might be up to something. As he’s lingering, it’s all quiet enough that Scott can hear the hushed conversations in the offices between the other pack members and their respective Disability Services Advisors about making sure that everyone gets what they need.

Boyd’s talking to his advisor about making sure he gets the same accommodations in attendance policies that he’s had for his depression and anxiety since freshman year. Isaac’s getting a miniature lecture from one of the least helpful Advisors about how he’s quite sure Isaac’s claustrophobia is very real, as is his anxiety, but there’s only so much that the Disabilities Services Office can do, and with how Isaac’s heart is steadily pounding harder and faster, he’s probably grinding his nails into his palm to keep from losing his control and shifting. Cora’s not faring much better than Isaac: she got a better advisor for her meeting but every year, she ends up dealing with someone who has to be reminded that yes, girls can be autistic too and her breath’s coming out in growls a bit too frequently for Scott’s liking.

Lydia’s the only one of them who didn’t have to come down on today’s group trip to the office and that’s because she got it done on Monday. The rest of them… Well, Mom makes them set up these pack trips to the office because she trusts some of them to handle getting their accommodations squared away. It’s a 50/50 split, really. Kira and Erica would go get things done without needing their arms twisted. Kira wouldn’t like it much but she and Erica have been in these kinds of meetings since they were kids, so they’re better at handling them and at accepting them as necessities. Boyd might need some nudging and reassurance that everything will work out fine, but he’d eventually do the responsible thing.

But Cora and Isaac, though? The two of them have outright said that if they got to pick between going to the disabilities services office and following Mom up to Mendocino for one of the periodic inter-pack conventions, then they’d much rather go on the road trip. Even if they wound up stuck there and listening to another round of Deucalion playing, “how many times can I reference Medea and The Oresteia in ten minutes,” they’d rather be there than talking to their advisors about what accommodations they need in order to function as students on a really basic level, never mind doing their best or anywhere even close to that, and never mind fully realizing their potential.

And as for Scott? He’s basically the reason why Mom started insisting on the pack trips to the office in the first place. Understandably so, given all the times he tried to skip his therapy appointments back in high school. And all the times he tried to blow off his weekend support group meetings and kill time at the mall or at the coffee-shop or at Barnes and Noble instead. And all the times that Derek caught him doing this and had to bodily drag Scott to his meetings by the arm or the scruff of his neck, then told Mom all about it over dinner because he knew that Scott wouldn’t.

Throw in the part where Scott’s tried to handle his ASD, his anxiety, and his depression by pretending that they don’t exist? And yeah, no. Mom was completely freaking right to think that Scott wouldn’t be an adult about getting his accommodations lined up unless she made someone come with him.

Which doesn’t help with the issue of Purple Hair, or the issue of how he’s still fidgeting with the stupid door handle. Glancing up from the paperwork, Scott sees Kira flinching from the sounds, scrunching up her face and letting slip a whine that’s too soft for Purple Hair and Wendy, but perfectly audible to Scott. Erica’s keeping it together better than they are, but she wasn’t particularly sensitive to sounds before she got the bite. Even so, when he glances at her, she has her lips pursed and her nose wrinkled. She digs her thumb so hard into her pen that she could easily break it in the next few seconds if someone doesn’t do something about the fuck off obnoxious noises that Purple Hair is sticking them with right now.

So, it’s Scott’s turn to be on Purple Hair Duty, he guesses. Sighing, he looks up at Purple Hair and says, “Hey, uh. Like, I totally get that maybe you just need to stim right now, or maybe you’ve got OCD and it’s kicking in to make you do that, but…” Scott trails off and scrubs a hand over the scratchy, few days‘ old collection of scruff around his mouth and jawline. He combs his fingers back through his floppy hair. Words are so much easier when he can write them down instead of getting put on the spot like this — but sudden, unwelcome noises turn Kira’s anxiety up so far past eleven that asking her to handle Purple Hair wouldn’t be right.

So Scott tries to push through it: “Look, it’s just… I don’t know what you’re in here for or if it’s anxiety kinds of anything? But could you knock it off with the door already? Please? It’s starting to get into really not good territory for me, like, uh. And for Kira?” Scott gestures at her. He should be trying harder to make eye contact with Purple Hair — and it should be easier, when his eyes are so unexpectedly soft.

But, on the other hand, his eyes make Scott’s throat close in around itself tighter than it did anyway and there’s something that seems off about them but Scott can’t peg what or why. Maybe it’s just the way Purple Hair’s started squinting them in some half-baked maybe recognition, like he’s trying to pick out why he knows Scott’s face. Except that he can’t know Scott’s face because they’ve never seen each other before now — Scott’s pretty sure that he’d remember someone as distinctive as Purple Hair.

No matter, though. Scott huff and shakes his head. “Just… Please cool it with the door handle? The noise is getting really stressful? Like, nerve-wracking, y’know? And, I mean… It’s not The Monster Book of Monsters or anything over here? The door isn’t going to jump up and bite you if you stop jerking off its handle or whatever you think you’re doing right now.”

Without even waiting for Purple Hair’s response (and hopefully, his agreement to stop), Scott chuckles under his breath, quirks his lips at his own joke, and ducks his head. Tries to go back to his clipboard and look like he’s really fixated on filling out his paperwork for the start of the new school-year, just in case Purple Hair catches him smiling like he’s up to something and wonders why Scott’s doing that. He really shouldn’t laugh at all, since Scott needs to get this form filled out and anyway, the joke is really, really not that funny in the first place. Never mind how it’s about as mature as snickering over a tab at the Sunny Side Up Diner that accidentally comes to $25.69.

But in fairness? Scott did that just last night when he, Derek, and Kira went to get dinner. Anyway, given that there are six other students, not counting Purple Hair, in the office right now, five of them are werewolves, the one who isn’t is a kitsune, and there was a banshee in here the other day? Quips about anything biting anything else are kind of funny. Not like, “bust a gut, knock out everyone at the comedy club’s amateur night, on par with listening to Isaac run down everyone else in the dining hall and get increasingly implausible and ridiculous as he details everything that he’d do with them sexually if he had half an hour, some handcuffs, a condom, and a paperclip” hilarious, but still kind of funny.

Scott could make a poem out of that. Well, those, more accurately. The biting joke as well as Isaac’s consistently frank attitudes about sex. They’d both work out pretty well as pieces.

Scott wouldn’t even have to dress the biting joke up that much in the pretension of separating the speaker’s voice from the poet’s. Any given audience at a slam or at open mic night down at Java Hut would hear him talking about werewolves and assume that Scott meant them as a metaphor. Every workshop group he’s ever been in has had at least one round of debating each other in circles over what the metaphor of lycanthropy means in one of Scott’s pieces when he was being perfectly literal about everything. Scott could get away with a poem inspired by the biting joke.

Anyway, Derek gets to flash his gold eyes and his fangs at kids on Halloween every year and Mom even thinks it’s funny that he does it. If their Alpha condones Derek doing that, then Scott can get away with writing werewolf poems. He can get away with trying out the drafts of them on his workshop groups or at Java Hut’s twice-monthly open mic nights. He’s pretty sure that’s just how fairness works, and as an Alpha, Mom’s never been anything less than completely fair in all things. Especially when those things involve settling any bickering about who all in the pack is allowed to do what.

Not that this helps Scott peg why his skin’s tingling and why the fine hairs on his nape are pricking up just from this guy existing in Scott’s general vicinity and doing little else of any note to anyone, aside from lingering in the door like this and playing with the handle after being asked to stop.

Dragging his eyes up and down Purple Hair’s body again doesn’t help Scott out here, either. Not that it’s not a nice view, because it is — but Scott’s still grasping at straws for anything that he could call a clue, anything that could help him put this stupid situation to rest with an explanation. All he comes up with is the thought that, as long as Purple Hair didn’t get a chance to loiter in doorways or play with their fucking handles, Scott could stand to spend tomorrow night taking him to the Commons for dinner, maybe off campus to Sun-Xing or The Argonaut or Sala Thai, and then taking him to the Sicks’ show.

He could even stand to take Purple Hair back to his and Derek’s place, as long as Purple Hair was okay with it and Derek could spend the night at Cam’s instead. He probably wouldn’t listen in on purpose, but it’s not like werewolf hearing can just get turned off and subtlety isn’t exactly Derek’s strong suit. Neither is keeping his trap shut when something’s really on his mind. So, if Purple Hair stayed the night and maybe hung around for breakfast, Derek would probably run his mouth off somehow and there’s no good way to explain why Scott’s surrogate older brother has any opinions about his little brother’s sex life that doesn’t involve making Derek look like a bigger creep than he makes himself look already.

Or, well. There are the explanations that involve telling the truth. The explanations that involve Purple Hair deciding that Scott and Derek are freaks, or crazy in ways that need more help than student counseling services can offer, or something to that effect. Those are definitely off the table. And not just because Scott would hypothetically like a second date, unless Purple Hair turns out to be a dud.

Practicalities aside, though: looking Purple Hair over more intensely is a really, really nice view. Punk guys like this aren’t even Scott’s usual type and as he turns his lower lip over between his teeth, Scott’s still caught between drafting some poetic riff on the Fair Youth sonnets and going all in, throwing aside his reservations, and penning an epic-length sexually explicit slam piece that would make Isaac blush.

Purple Hair slouches at the hips, hunches his shoulders in, and he still can’t hide his height. Tension runs all up and down his wiry arms; it’s visible in his toned thighs, too, even through his jeans (which might be a size too small, they’re clinging so tightly to his skin). He’s pale, freckled, lean but not skinny. Slumping like that could be the physicality of a former beanpole who started hitting the gym and still doesn’t really know how to work his musculature or create any particular effect with it. Just like how he’s not using his height for anything beyond being tall.

Seriously — maybe Purple Hair needs to be kept away from door handles for the foreseeable ever but his body, from what Scott can see of it, is beautiful. Enviably so. Lycian Apollo comparisons aren’t even fair right now. The Lycian Apollo only wishes that he held a candle to Purple Hair.

Which sparks a thought. It flares up like a cartoon lightbulb and Scott tries to stifle a gasp as the word relapse dances around his head. Maybe this is what’s been nagging at Scott since Purple Hair walked in — maybe it’s his body and, more accurately, maybe it’s all the things clawing their way up to the front of Scott’s mind because of Purple Hair’s enviably beautiful body. The more Scott looks him over, the likelier the possibility looks. Purple Hair has the right body type to fuel those thoughts. The ones that Scott’s not supposed to be entertaining. He’s just like some of the guys Scott used to keep scrapbooks of and look at when he had to convince himself not to eat. And if that’s the case, then things are seriously going to suck for Scott until he somehow magically gets himself more centered.

Never mind that he has no idea why he’d be any kind of uncentered in the first place. Never mind that Scott has no idea why he’d be feeling like that now and never mind that he hasn’t had any notably relapse-flavored thoughts these days. Hints of them here and there, yes, but nothing like the way things used to be with Scott.

Scott’s been fine. For five months now, Scott’s been fine. Aside from right this instant, wrinkling his nose at Purple Hair’s physique and thinking that he’d make a pretty good scrapbook model and knowing that he can’t let himself keep thinking that, Scott’s been fine. Sure, he has some harder days here and there. There have been an assortment of moments like this one, where Scott catches himself thinking that he wants someone else’s body more than his own or feeling like he could stand to skip lunch. Feeling like maybe it's less of an it's better if I skip lunch thing and more of an I want to skip it because more than anything, I miss the rush. Those are just the usual stumbling blocks, though — Ms. Morrell and Dr. Strauss have both said that they're completely normal parts of recovery. Feeling them is fine and even expected, as long as nothing crystallizes into old familiar patterns. Or worse, into new ones.

Scott’s been fine and he can prove it — but really, never mind that. One hint that Scott might not actually be as fine as he wants people to believe, and the end result would still be the same.

They’ve done this song and dance twice since Scott first got caught in high school. First, after Derek found his scrapbooks and ratted Scott out to Mom and Deaton. Then just last spring. He knows the tune better than he knows, “Surprisingly Good For You” and, “That’s What Makes You Beautiful”: recovery meal plans coming out of the folders in Mom’s desk again and getting enforced, probably with a food diary and everything. Derek inviting himself to share every single meal with Scott, especially the ones outside their off-campus apartment, not just out of concern but also on Mom’s orders as Derek’s Alpha, even when Scott really needs some space and quiet time to just recharge.

Especially when Scott really needs some space and quiet time to just recharge — but he can’t complain about that point or even blame Derek for it. He can’t blame Mom and the rest of the pack for taking Derek’s side over it, either. I need some space right now is one of those things that, while accurate and usually respected, loses its validity when it comes to Scott and food. No one really trusts him when food’s involved and he tries to say, I need some space. Not without reason: he’s played that card to get out of eating before, and done so more times than he’d care to count. They have every right to doubt him.

And then there’s more: Kira having to report to Mom about whether or not Scott’s been making their support group meetings and actually participating in them because Kira’s always at them too. Extra meetings with his Ms. Morrell and with his therapist on top of her. Derek having to report back to Mom a few times a week about how Scott’s doing and how he’s eating and whether or not he’s cooperating with getting his recovery back on track (if it’s even off track in the first place and Scott has no earthly idea why it would be). Lydia turning any constructive criticism of Scott’s poetry into an excuse to armchair psychoanalyze him and pick out any issues she thinks he can’t see just fine on his own.

On the other hand, though, and more hopefully? There are other possibilities here. It might not be some looming relapse that he’ll have to bring up in group or one of his one-on-one sessions with Ms. Morrell. Scott glances up at the clock on the wall, then sneaks back to dragging his eyes over Purple Hair, combing them over all the details in search of who even knows what. Maybe whatever’s nagging at him about this kid isn’t on Scott himself and is really just a reflection of being something that’s off about Purple Hair himself.

Maybe it’s something about his shredded jeans or the manufactured easiness of how his purple hair flops over the shaved sides of his head. Maybe it’s something about his studded plastic cuff bracelets rattling around his huge, bony wrists, or how his Converse sneakers hang together by a few threads. Maybe it’s something about the art screen-printed on his worn and faded black t-shirt: a black and grey cityscape with a distorted, orange pop-art picture of a red-lipsticked woman at the foreground and some red-lettered words that make no sense, so they must be in a language Scott doesn’t know.

Maybe it’s something about the words tattooed in a soft flowing script around the veins on his right arm: Do you know what your soul said to me, without saying a word? “Let her go.” (Scott recognizes that quote immediately: Interview with the Vampire, or at least a close paraphrase of one of Claudia’s lines from the movie. It’s been too long since Scott reread the books for him to remember whether or not she said it there as well. He could check his and Derek’s weathered paperback copies when he gets home but there isn’t much of a point to it, probably. It won’t change Purple Hair’s tattoo — and if that’s really what’s putting Scott off, then picking up his old Anne Rice won’t suddenly make him more reasonable.)

Maybe it’s just that Scott’s ill at ease from the reading he has to get done before his Sociology of Gender class meets for the first time on Monday morning and he’s being ridiculously unfair to this guy who hasn’t done anything wrong and who totally doesn’t deserve any of what Scott’s doing right now.

Which letting Purple Hair just hang around the doorway isn’t really helping Scott with, either. Scott looks up from pretending to fill out the form about his different symptoms and their presentation patterns and why they require certain academic accommodations, and Purple Hair’s still just waiting around. He’s still standing there, stuck in the doorway, taking deep breaths, fingers half-curled around the handle. He fidgets with it again, twisting it around and running eyes darting from Scott to Erica to Wendy behind the receptionist’s desk to the flier on the wall about the campus eating disorders support group over to Kira and finally back to Scott. He lets his eyes stay on Scott, at that. He squints at Scott, furrows his brow — which isn’t fair because if either of them has any right to make a face like that at the other, it’s Scott, not Purple Hair — and he turns the handle down again as he tilts his head like an incredibly perplexed bird.

Scott can’t take any freaking more of this — he can already feel his own pulse in his throat. Then Purple Hair jiggles the handle again. The latch bolt flips in and out of the hole and kicks Scott’s nerves like it wants to take their lunch money and shove them in a locker. Scott gets a quiet moment. For that moment, he breathes easier. And then Purple Hair does it with the door handle again — the latch bolt clicks and bangs like gunshots again. Even without lycanthropic super-senses, the room’s so quiet that the noise would’ve smacked Scott’s eardrums. And another click and bang sequence. And then another — Scott drags his nails up his knee but doesn’t let his claws come out. If they weren’t in public now, he’d consider doing that, self-harm or not, but since they are and since he can’t because there are humans here and they could see…

Another jiggle. Another click of the latch bolt. Scott gasps. Inhales sharply, at any rate. Loudly enough that Kira and Erica look up from filling out their own forms and furrow their brows at him by way of asking if he’s okay. And he nods. Because he’s fine. He is fine. For the most part, anyway. Scott’s fine in the sense that there’s nothing longterm wrong with him, at least nothing that hasn’t already been diagnosed and nothing that Scott doesn’t know how to manage pretty well already.

Scott doesn’t mean to snap, it just comes out that way as he clenches his fingers around his pen: “You know you can just come in, right?” Scott whips his head up so quickly that his glasses slip down his nose again and for a moment, Purple Hair’s figure gets all blurred around the edges. Pushing them back up, he huffs, “Sorry, just… If you can’t be by the door without… doing that with the handle? Then will you please just come in and sit down already? Seriously.”

Purple Hair arches an eyebrow and smirks. “Is that an invitation?” he purrs. Full on purrs. “Maybe one to come and sit next to you, eh, Pretty Boy?  For the… nearish foreseeable future, maybe? ”

Okay, nice body or not, that look Purple Hair’s giving Scott right now? The way he’s smirking like the cat who got in the canary cage and the way his eyebrow’s trying to climb off his freaking forehead? It’s sorta mild to moderately unnerving. And really not helping with the hinky feelings that Purple Hair’s already giving Scott in general. It’s more making Scott want to ask if leering at people like they’re pieces of meat usually goes over well in the bottom of the ashtray dive bars that Purple Hair most likely frequents. Which is judgmental, yes, and also supremely unfair because Purple Hair doesn’t even smell like secondhand smoke.

Maybe he covers it well enough to dupe a werewolf. But it’s more likely that he doesn’t smoke at all — which means Scott’s being ridiculously unfair, which makes his stomach twist around in heart-pounding guilt… So Scott sighs, and nods, and says that okay, yeah, Purple Hair can sit with him.

The worst part, though? Well, the worst part aside from the weird feelings themselves and the fact that Scott’s just condemned himself to sitting next to this kid for who even knows how long until one of the advisors can meet with Scott? The worst part is that there is still no good reason for him to feel like he’s sitting on a razor’s edge just from being around Purple Hair.

Like, sure, fine, Scott’s gotten weird feelings off of people before. But that doesn’t mean that Scott is any kind of right about the boy with the purple hair. It doesn’t mean that Scott isn’t being ridiculously hypersensitive and inventing problems where there aren’t any. Not that it does Purple Hair much good for Scott to acknowledge that he’s probably being just totally full on ridiculous right now, coming up with all these thin air extracted reasons why he feels so weird about Purple Hair or about Purple Hair sitting next to him or about any of this.

At least, once he gets his paperwork from Wendy and takes the seat down at Scott’s right, Purple Hair isn’t standing in the door or fussing with the handle, which is some decided freaking progress at this point and Scott’s just going to freaking take it.

Maybe he needed someone to invite him in, Scott thinks with a huff. I mean, Derek and Laura have never heard of it happening before but vampires have to go to college too, I guess. Anyway, just because they’ve never heard of it happening doesn’t really mean anything. Derek hadn’t heard about One Direction either until Cam had to explain who Zayn is and why anyone cares about Harry outside of him dating Taylor Swift.

It should tickle a bit, the way that Derek lives under a musical rock, but having Purple Hair sitting right next to him like this… It just rubs Scott’s face in the fact that he has no idea what to make of Purple Hair or why he’s so bone-deep convinced that Purple Hair is somehow important. Scott hmms, idly running his thumb over the raised lettering on his ballpoint pen. It’s probably kind of silly but it calms his nerves, feeling the texture of the letters rubbing up against his skin. It gets Scott breathing a little easier and keeps him from getting on edge.

Which he’d definitely need if Purple Hair were really a vampire — but invitation coincidence or not, he’s giving off body heat and he doesn’t smell like death or graveyards. So, mostly, Scott doesn’t want to be on edge because it’ll make him likelier to forget something when he gets called in for his meeting. But Purple Hair’s sitting down, now, so they can get on with their paperwork like adults and everything will work out fine—

“So what’re you in for?” Purple Hair huffs and leans back in his seat, and when Scott looks back up at him, he’s turned on a playful smirk.

Scott wrinkles his nose. “We’re at the disability resources center,” he points out, “not prison. Maybe you’ll want to work on your opening lines a bit? Or your general technique, maybe? Like… do you always go from calling someone pretty to telling them they look like they belong in prison?”

“Hey, hey, hey, I…” Purple Hair twitches his fingers and stretches out his mouth, and if Erica’s watching, Scott can only imagine what kinds of thoughts she’s having about all the dick his mouth could take. “I never said you looked like you belonged in prison, Pretty Boy. I just thought… I thought it was kinda funny, and you know, just for the record and all? If we were doing time together, I’d so be a heroic protector for you. And I would never trade you for smokes.” He pauses. Slips back into smirking. Tacks on another, “Pretty Boy.”

“My name is Scott.” He shouldn’t roll his eyes so obviously, but on the other hand, subtlety seems lost on this guy. “And that’s really romantic of you. I mean, I prefer art museums and coffee houses with open mic nights, but uh. I guess if you really think that prison makes for great first date material, it’s definitely better to go in with someone who’ll look out for you.”

“Oh, I’d look out for you anywhere.” Purple Hair chuckles at his own joke, and Scott wants to find it distasteful? But on the other hand, it’s probably karmic comeuppance for doing the same thing earlier. “I mean, you’re cute, you’re smart, you’re snarky, you are… free tomorrow night? Maybe?”

“You’ve only just met me and you’ve already decided that I’m smart?” Scott slumps back into the wall and rolls his eyes again. Leans his head back into the wall and gives this little punk a long, quiet look. “You must really like setting yourself up for crushing disappointment. At least, you are according to most of the teachers I’ve ever had.”

Purple Hair flashes a toothy grin. “Well, I don’t trust the academic agents of the corrupt bourgeoisie to judge anything. Not least who is or isn’t smart, or what does or doesn’t constitute smart in the first place.” He laughs again and Scott wrinkles his nose because he has no idea what the joke here is? But Purple Hair continues, undaunted, “Anyway, you’re keeping up with me okay, so there’s no way you can be stupid. Unless you’re dumb enough to have plans tomorrow night, I mean. I hear the drag queens they’ve got coming are pretty great. And you could be going to see them with me, maybe?”

“Oh, the Sicks are pretty great. They come every year, they’re totally brilliant.” Scott wrinkles his nose. “You don’t look young enough to be a freshman?”

Shaking his head, Purple Hair chuckles again. “Oh, no, uh. Transfer, actually? Transfer student who took a couple gap years after high school, uh… I thought I was going to be a rockstar for a while and maybe get to go on tour with The Analogs. Uh, they’re this anti-fascist punk band from Poland, I found them in middle school and fell in love. They’re kind of an acquired taste, I guess? And their lyrics are in Polish, so. Not everybody’s cup of coffee. But if wasn’t them, it was gonna be Blink 182, except it turned out that I’m basically tone-deaf and I don't have any rhythm and there’s just… There’s not a single musical bone in my entire freaking body. So it goes, y’know? Anyway…”

He sighs. Stretches out his mouth again (he probably has to, with the way he runs it off so much). And Scott could interject, but he’s curious to see where Purple Hair’s story’s going to lead them next: “So, when the rockstar thing didn’t pan out, I thought I was going to write basically Das Kapital for DIY queer liberationist anarcho-punks? And hand-in-hand with that, I thought I was going to incite the next great revolution. Uh, there were a couple months when I got stoned a lot and mostly I just thought I was going to be Kermit the Frog…”

“Are you sure you never thought you were going to be Nicholas Angel, Sanford Police Service, when you grew up?” Scott snickers — but Purple Hair just grins at him even bigger. If not for the enthusiasm underneath it, he’d be getting into, all the better to eat you with, my dear sorts of territories.

“Oh my god, you… you are going with me to the drag show tomorrow night, okay, Scott? Like, you have to go out with me to the drag show tomorrow night.” He pauses long enough for Scott to ask him why on Earth this is suddenly so necessary, and the laugh he rewards Scott with is breathless, halfway floored. “It’s so necessary because you are literally the first person on this freaking campus who’s gotten my Hot Fuzz references. Even if you don’t want to date me, we at least have to try the friends thing out, okay?”

Scott can’t help laughing at that — not maliciously, but because, for all they had a sufficiently rocky start, Purple Hair is turning out to be… pretty nice. “We’ll call tomorrow night a date,” he says, pulling his phone out of his jeans’ pocket. “Maybe you should give me your number, though? And then we can—”

“Scott Delgado!”

Scott perks up. Boyd and his advisor are standing by the desk, which means it must be Scott’s turn now — perfect freaking timing, too. Of course they couldn’t have taken a few extra minutes to clear things up so Scott could trade numbers with this guy he’s apparently going to date tomorrow night. When he looks back to Purple Hair, Scott can see the gears spinning in his head, visible underneath his narrowed eyes and knotted brow, and he tries to give Purple Hair an apologetic smile. It wavers a bit too much for Scott’s liking, but at least he’s trying.

“Hey, sorry, man, but… that’s my appointment call, so, uh… I’ll just wait for you to get out of yours and we can swap numbers then, okay? And it’s still a date for tomorrow, uh. If you still want it to be. I’m not doing anything else today, so I’m good to wait for you, if you want?”

He waits for Purple Hair to nod, then shoves himself up to standing. He makes it a few steps toward the desk, lets Boyd nudge past him to go sit with Erica, and stops dead in his tracks when Purple Hair half-whimpers, “Wait! You’re… Scotty?”

That nickname washes over Scott like a bucket of fucking ice water and makes his entire body seize up.

Nobody calls him Scotty. Not anymore. Not for eleven years, give or take a little. Anyone who tries to call him Scotty gets summarily shut down because freaking no one gets to call him Scotty. Not anymore.

The only person who ever did pulled the world’s worst ever disappearing act and ripped the rug out from under Scott’s entire fucking life. And he’s been gone eleven years and a little over. And to hear Purple Hair throwing that nickname out there with some notes of recognition underneath it…

To turn back to face him again and see him bug-eyed and fish-mouthed and balling one hand up in the fabric of his jeans, staring up at Scott like the entire world hangs on what he does next…

“ Scotty… Oh my god, Scotty… ” Purple Hair breathes it out, intones it like a prayer while his whole face lights up in childish delight. “Scotty? It’s you, right? I mean. …It is you, isn’t it?”

There’s no other words for what Purple Hair’s face is doing right now, either. Only childish delight really captures it. He just got the Golden Ticket and a hippopotamus for Christmas besides, while Scott’s over here, gaping down at this punk kid who looks so familiar and yet so alien, whose face has changed but is every bit still the loud, awkward, mole-covered kid Scott used to know. Except that he can’t be Stiles. He just can’t be. There is no way in all the minds of humans, werewolves, vampires, kitsunes, or angels that this wide-eyed, duck-lipped, purple-haired punk kid can be Stiles. No way. None whatsoever. Scott refuses to accept that proposition because it makes no sense.

Purple Hair just can’t be Stiles. He can’t Stiles. He can. not. be. Stiles — and he can’t because eleven years, three weeks, and six days ago, Stiles moved to Seattle with his Dad and disappeared from Scott’s life forever. Which is a word that means something real, such as a broken promise that they’d never be without each other and a subsequent unspoken oath that Stiles was never coming back. There were phone calls for a while, but they ceased. There were promises of emails, but these never once came through. There were plans batted around for someone making a trip out to the other’s place, but all these passed away.

Once, Scott knew the truth in part and still believed that there was hope for him and Stiles, that somehow they’d find each other again someday. But then he saw completely and he knew there wasn’t any hope at all, that he couldn’t waste his life on an open wound, just waiting around for Stiles to get back to him — and here they are, anyway. Here they are with Purple Hair’s eyes starting to water, looking absolutely freaking starstruck. Looking up at Scott like he’s some kind of angel.

Bully for Purple Hair, he gets to beam up at Scott like the world isn’t falling apart around them, while Scott’s stuck with his own ribs clawing up the insides of his chest and his stomach trying to straight up plummet out of him. Ice shoots through his veins and his heart starts skipping beats and oh, god, this cannot be happening to Scott. This can’t be happening to Scott. Not right here. Not right now. Not ever. Not when he’s long since buried the possibility of it — this cannot be happening to Scott.

Purple Hair’s face isn’t helping matters. Meanwhile, the broader he lets his grin get, the more he lets it contort his face, the surer Scott gets that this is it. This is the day he’s going to die. Because there’s no way that he’s prepared enough to deal with the thought of Purple Hair actually being Stiles, never mind the threat of that coming true for real.

Scott’s deep breath shudders into him and stumbles out. Behind him, Erica whistles low in recognition — she’s probably right to do so, too, because there’s no way that she hasn’t figured out what’s going on. Kira has no idea, though — she didn’t move to Beacon Hills until junior year when Stiles left town before fifth grade — so she whispers, wait, what’s going on? at Erica and Erica promises to tell her later. When Scott can’t hear us hashing out the details, Pretty Girl, she says. It’s old business. Dirty business. All kinds of things. They’re sort of his perpetual raw nerve.

Perpetual raw nerve… Scott doesn’t care how loud Erica was actually being, whether or not Purple Hair Who Might Be Someone Else could hear her. He turns, scowls at her so deeply that he probably looks more like Derek than himself, and narrows his eyes because no really, Erica has no idea what she’s talking about right now. All she does is shrug as if to say, well, it’s not my fault that I’m right about you.

It isn’t even an issue of being right or not. It’s more that perpetual raw nerve doesn’t go nearly far enough in properly naming what’s racketing around Scott’s head and chest and stomach, what’s tingling up and down his limbs.

“Scotty…?” Purple Hair prompts again — less certainly this time, uneasier and infinitely more cautious, more wavering, like he’s finally considering the possibility that he could be wrong. Considering it even though he’s very likely right.

Scott turns back to him and Purple Hair turns on the pleading puppy dog eyes, the ones that scream, it’s you — it’s really you — I’ve been looking for you for freaking ever. And all at once, a million questions throw their Hermione Granger hands up in the air, waving them around and trying to vie for Scott’s attention.

Questions like, for instance, what the Hell? and, why is this happening to me? and, what the fuck did I do to deserve this? and, what are you doing here, you’re supposed to be in Washington? and, no, but really: where the H-E-double hockey-sticks did you even fucking come from, and if it’s really you at all, then why did you have to show up here now, right as I’m finally getting the complete mess of my fucking life together without you in it  and without waiting for you to decide to come be in it ever a-fucking-gain ?

They’re all good options, really. They’re all pretty fair and reasonable demands. And they only manage to come out in Scott swallowing thickly and croaking, “…Stiles?”

Purple Hair’s face explodes into a grin — no, Stiles’s face explodes into a grin — and it’s somehow even bigger and more face-straining than its predecessor. A victorious, barking laugh bursts out of him. He yawps and launches out of his seat. His clipboard clatters to the floor and he flings his arms around Scott’s shoulders. Scott hasn’t been hugged this tightly in a couple weeks, since Derek had to talk him through a particularly awful, vaguely potential relapse-flavored sort of night. And he hasn’t been rocked and shaken the way that Stiles is shaking him right now… uh. In longer than Scott can even think to put a number on. The last person who did it was probably Kira and it’s been a while since she got quite as enthusiastic as all this.

And Scott can’t even dwell on that for long, because Stiles claps him between the shoulder-blades and yanks him in tighter still and breathes out, “Yeah, it’s me, buddy. It’s your Stiles. It’s your Stiles. Oh my god, dude, you have no idea… This is the best freaking thing, Scotty. The best.”

Only having one hand free means Scott can’t hug back properly. But he can’t just leave a hug like this unreciprocated. So he sighs, and wraps his free arm around Stiles in return, and he says, “Yeah, I… It’s good to see you, too, Stiles. It’s so… It’s just really great…”

What Scott’s thinking, though, is more in line with, Fuck my life.

***

It was August when Stiles and his Dad left Beacon Hills, and it was a colder, wetter August than usual. Which was really sort of fitting.

Even more than that, the weather was one of the only things about that summer that made any sense at all, and considering what horrible things loomed over every moment, the sense it made was literally perfect. Considering the part where Stiles was leaving Beacon Hills and moving to Seattle. More so considering the fact that he was leaving not just because of his Mom’s death back in February but also because another family member was sick now.

It was Stiles’s grandfather who was sick this time. His Dad’s dad. Most of their family lived up in Seattle already, all of Stiles’s aunts and uncles and cousins, his grandmother who rode a motorcycle and called Stiles’s Dad a goody two-shoes for going into law enforcement — and his grandpa who was slowly dying from some advanced stage of stomach cancer, who needed more family support right now because Stiles’s aunts and uncles and grandmother were already stretched too thin, and who specifically wanted to have his youngest son around. His youngest son being Stiles’s Dad.

None of which was good — it was all terrible, actually, and Scott cried over it more than Stiles did, if only because Stiles never let himself cry after his Mom’s funeral and Scott’s always felt everything too much and too strongly for anybody’s good. But terrible or not, all of that got eclipsed by the part where Stiles was leaving Beacon Hills.

Stiles was leaving Beacon Hills and moving to Seattle and most likely never coming back and that meant that nothing would ever make anything feel better again, ever. Nothing in the entire world could fix any part of this, short of Stiles not leaving Beacon Hills. Nothing could fix something so terrible as Stiles leaving, short of his grandpa magically getting all better, the way Scott prayed for every single night and every Sunday morning, no matter whether they went to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the church Mom liked on the other side of town, or to St. James the Greater’s, the Catholic church three towns over that Dad liked better because the priest was white and they didn’t conduct any of the services in Spanish.

The extent of Dad’s Spanish was limited to asking where the bathroom was and whether or not someone spoke English, and knowing a smattering enough of insults to know when Tío Javier, Mom’s older brother, Tío Diego and Tía Gabriela, the two youngest of Mom’s four siblings, were saying when they called him pendejo and pinche cabrón and el diablo blanco. He knew enough Spanish to know that Tía Teresa, Mom’s middle sister, usually told the three of them to stop for peace-keeping reasons but didn’t actually disagree with what they said. So, sitting through services in Spanish, even only partly in Spanish, made Dad feel lost. Confused. Like he wasn’t really getting the full spiritual experience that you’re supposed to get out of going to church or really getting in touch with God. It just didn’t feel right to Dad.

That made sense enough to Scott, even if he liked going to Nuestra Señora better. He liked it better because Beacon Hills was closer to San Francisco than San Diego, where all of Mom’s family lived, and between paying off the credit card debt, putting away money so Scott could go to college, putting away other money in case of some unforeseen emergency, and paying off the remainder of the classes Mom took so she could become a Nurse Practitioner? The family didn’t have enough spare cash to just go down to San Diego that often, so Scott only got to see his abuelos every so often, and his tías and tíos, and Marisol and Santiago, his favorite cousins. He mostly only got to see them for Christmas and Easter, sometimes for his birthday (but not that often).

Maybe they would get more regular time together if Mom’s siblings could come make it to Beacon Hills, but that usually didn’t happen. Not without some unexpected good fortune that probably had strings attached. Dad’s family only lived a two-hour drive away, but sometimes, church was all Scott really had of Mom’s. Going to Nuestra Señora made him feel like he was getting a halfway decent substitute for time with the Delgados. Still, if Dad didn’t feel spiritually right about it, then Scott guessed that that made sense. Scott guessed it was a good reason to go to St. James’s more often.

It wasn’t until after Dad walked out at Halloween, until after the divorce got finalized two days before Scott turned eleven, that he learned the truth. Dad just didn’t like going to Nuestra Señora because he wanted Scott to be less Mexican.

But at the time, Scott believed Dad’s lie about the language barrier and the spiritual experience of going to church, and anyway, it didn’t matter. God and Jesus were the same at both churches, and regardless of which church Scott wound up at on Sunday mornings, whenever the time came to pray in silence for whatever anybody needed to ask of God, Scott always clasped his hands together so tightly that it hurt. Dug his fingers into the backs of his hands and refused to let up. Scott held on so hard that he went white-knuckled, and he prayed as hard as he could for Stiles’s grandfather to just get better. For Stiles and his Dad to not have to deal with this anymore. For Stiles to stay.

Por favor, Nuestro Padre. Por favor, Jesús, nuestro salvador. Please, one of you. Both of you. Por favor, just save Stiles’s grandpa. Can’t you let him live? You already took his Mom — wasn’t that bad enough for you? We know that in all things You work for good, ¿pero adónde lleva está enfermedad? ¿Dónde está en matándolo el bien? ¿Cómo es esto bueno para Stiles? What are you proving with this? What happened to, “blessed are the poor in spirit”? ¿Cómo esto es una bendición? Isn’t God supposed to be faithful? You’re not supposed to let us be tested beyond our strength. What if you’re doing that to Stiles right now? What if he can’t handle this? Nuestro Padre, ¿y si Stiles no esté bastante fuerte sin mí?

It didn’t matter how hard Scott prayed, though, and it didn’t matter how he phrased things. Nothing mattered. It was just like Stiles’s Mom all over again: God wasn’t listening, as far as Scott could tell, and if He was? Then He thought that Scott was being unreasonable. Stiles’s grandfather stayed sick. Stiles and his Dad still had to leave. And that was why the weather made the most sense out of everything.

Like, really, considering everything? Considering the Stilinskis’ family troubles and the way that world was probably ending? Considering the way that Scott and Stiles couldn’t talk about it, or about anything to do with grandparents period, because Stiles didn’t want to and the way Stiles’s eyes darkened and his jaw clamped in on itself if Scott so much as mentioned his abuela and abuelo down in San Diego?

Considering the way that Deputy Stilinski always gave Scott these unreadable and sad expressions when he came over, and always squeezed Scott’s shoulder gently as he asked how things were going or how Scott’s Dad was liking his job at the FBI, and told him, thanks, Scott… just, thanks a lot, kiddo for no real reason that Scott could see because the words came out of nowhere and he hadn’t done anything to deserve them?

Considering the way that Scott’s own Mom and Dad kept fighting, raising their voices until Scott had to hide in his closet with a pillow around his ears because they were so loud and so angry and their voices got so shrill that it made Scott’s heart race and his chest burn like he’d been set on fire and his chest clench up like he was going to have an attack and his head spin like he was going to just pass out? Considering that the pillow-shield sometimes didn’t help drown them out or muffle the rusty nails on chalkboard, explosive sound of yelling and the fear laced up in his heartbeat: maybe this fight would be the last fight? Considering how often Scott got left burying his head between his knees and struggling to keep breathing while his head spun and he didn’t know where his inhaler was because he remembered where he’d left it but there wasn’t any guarantee that it would still be there if he groped for it?

Considering the one night, about two weeks before Stiles left, when Scott climbed out his bedroom window and got his bike out of the garage and thought about running away to the Stilinskis’, because Stiles and his Dad would take Scott in for the night like they had so many times before when Mom and Dad got fighting, but Scott felt some guilty, leaden weight plummet into the pit of his stomach, so he took a wrong turn on purpose and wound up at Derek and Laura’s house instead? Considering the way he waited outside in the drizzle for almost fifteen minutes because he didn’t know if their Mom and Dad would let him stay over, or if Cora wouldn’t be upset and snappish about Scott showing up at all because she never really seemed to like him much, or if Peter would be there and giving Scott goosebumps just from smiling at him, or if Derek and Laura would want him there at all? Considering how Scott honestly didn’t know if all of that was worse or better than listening to Mom fight or feeling guilty for bothering Stiles and his Dad at a time like this, and how he couldn’t put two and two together, no matter how hard he thought about it?

Considering that Scott picked his bike up off the tree he’d leaned it on and almost went to Danny’s instead (because Danny was best friends with Jackson but he still thought Scott was okay too so maybe he’d be okay with Scott showing up like this)?

Considering that Scott only stopped walking away when the door into the Hales’ house creaked open and someone thumped out onto the porch and Derek called out after him, Scott? …Scott, what’s wrong? …Scott, turn around, I know it’s you. Look, my mom just got off the phone with your mom, and she’s freaking hysterical. Your mom, I mean. You weren’t in your bed or at Stiles’ place, he and the Deputy hadn’t heard from you… She is freaking out right now, Scott. Like, completely freaking out, okay? My mom and Laura and our cousin Jake were just gonna go out to look for you… just. Come here and come inside and tell me what’s wrong?

Considering that Scott dropped his bike back against the tree quicker than he’d ever done anything and ran up onto the porch, flinging his arms around Derek’s waist and clinging to him? Considering that he didn’t go back home that night, not after Talia called Mom to let her know that Scott was safe at their place and she’d have Derek and Laura bring him over in the morning, but instead stayed in one of the excessive guest rooms? Considering that, when Derek came to check on him, Scott clung at him again, face buried in Derek’s neck, taking deep breaths of his dirty, musky scent, letting Derek rub his back until something snapped and Scott broke down and cried hard into Derek’s shoulder? Considering that, once he’d cried enough, Scott could only apologize for getting Derek’s shirt wet and beg him not to tell Stiles?

Considering that Scott couldn’t tell Stiles about that night or any of what was happening at home, about all of the fighting and about how Dad hiding Scott’s inhaler again, about how Mom was crying almost every night, over Dad and all the things he said, and about how Scott had no idea what to do? Considering that Scott had to keep secrets from his best friend in the entire world, something he and Stiles once swore they’d never, ever do? Considering that Scott had to do it because things were bad enough for Stiles already without putting Scott’s problems on his plate as well, without making him deal with more things that Mom and Deputy Stilinski kept saying they were too young to be handling in the first place, and how could Scott even think about doing that to his best friend in the entire world?

Considering every single thing about that summer, barring the sole exception of the Order of the Phoenix midnight release party back at the end of June? Cold and rainy and dark was probably the most fitting weather that ever could’ve happened to them.  At least, it was if anyone asked Scott.

No one had, but that wasn’t the point. Day in, day out, the skies stayed cold and gray. Rain wasn’t heavy, most of the time, but it never stopped and there was always just enough to make riding bikes some kind of dangerous. Sometimes, the clouds hung so thick across the sun that they had to turn the lights on in the house even though it was only one or two in the afternoon if they wanted to be able to see anything, much less function any kind of decently. Sometimes, when he was alone in his own room, Scott didn’t bother — what did it matter if he couldn’t see anything? Stiles was leaving Beacon Hills and that meant the entire world was ending. It meant that Scott’s life was over so who cared if he could see anything.

They needed the lights even more on the days when Laura babysat Scott and Stiles both, since they inevitably spent those days at the Stilinskis’ house, trying to pack things up. Deputy Stilinski had put in his notice and secured a transfer to the Sheriff’s station in King County, Washington — “It’s where Seattle is,” Stiles explained when he told Scott about the looming move, “it’s where my babcia and dziadzia live, they’re not really in the actual city or anything, they say it’s too loud for them” — but until he and Stiles got closer to their leaving, his Dad still had to go into the office most days. His notice hadn’t kicked in yet and anyway, he wanted to feel like he was still useful to someone. Like he wasn’t just some deadweight hanging around the force and dragging it down until he and Stiles left. He’d been getting a campaign together, planning to run for Sheriff, even after losing Stiles’s Mom in February, but that didn’t really matter anymore.

Around the middle of July, Stiles’s Aunt Veronica came down from Seattle to help with the packing up. It was never going to be a good idea, leaving the task to two ten-year-old boys and their nineteen-year-old babysitter and sometimes her sixteen-year-old brother. Even with Aunt Veronica there with them, they still ran stretches where they couldn’t do much, not without Stiles’s Dad there to help them make a call on certain objects. On whether or not they wound up in the trash, in the boxes to go down to Goodwill, or packed up to go to Seattle.

It was in the middle of packing up Stiles’s room, one of the last tasks before he and his Dad would be ready to go, when the full reality of things finally smacked into Scott: this really was forever. It wasn’t just a temporary relocation thing, some short-term move to handle a family emergency, after which Stiles and his Dad would come back to Beacon Hills where they belonged. This leaving was forever and Scott wasn’t ever going to see Stiles again.

On some level, Scott had always known that. He’d danced around that truth ever since Stiles had told him about the looming move, about how he and his Dad missed their family and how there wasn’t anybody left of his Mom’s. Everyone had tried to tell Scott how dramatic he was being, how silly and how totally ridiculous, how he was running away with his emotions and dragging his overactive imagination along with him for the ride — but he was right. He’d known that from the start. And as he and Stiles sorted through his Pokémon cards, his comic books, his action figures, it just became that much more apparent that Scott’s original assumptions were completely accurate.

As Scott had to sit there quietly and listen to Stiles going on and on about what his cousins said about his new school and the aquarium, the Space Needle, and some weird local whale-watching boat trips that Stiles could go on up there, Scott only saw more evidence agreeing with him about all of this. He swallowed that down, though. He kept quiet because he had to, because otherwise, he’d most likely say something he’d regret. Something that he’d never be able to take back and that Stiles would take with him up to Seattle even though he didn’t deserve that kind of baggage.

For only rarely managing to have a mental filter, Scott did okay at keeping quiet. His stomach kept bubbling like he might throw up and his head felt a bit too fuzzy sometimes, but at least he didn’t run his mouth off — until Stiles threw some back-breaking straw of a question out there. Until Stiles asked something that Scott didn’t even really hear, except for the dangerous last five words: “Hey, Scotty, what d’you think?”

“You don’t want to know what I think,” Scott snapped before he could stop himself. It didn’t come out too harshly, just a heavy sigh with a little bite behind it. More like verbally nipping at someone’s ankles than biting them, really. Stiles started trying to explain the question, wondering whether or not Scott had even heard him, but Scott just clambered to his feet, looked Stiles in the eye, and went on: “The only thing I think right now? Is that you can’t leave like this, Stiles. Okay? You can’t. That’s what I think about all the packing, and it’s what I think about everything, and… Don’t go. Please? Please don’t go to Seattle.”

Stiles’s mouth fell open and his hands went slack. The Batman comics he was holding flopped to the carpet and Scott picked out a stray Wonder Woman issue mixed in among them. Any other day, he might’ve smiled about that. Wonder Woman had always been Scott’s favorite and Stiles had always tried to insist that Batman was better and that he’d never buy a Wonder Woman comic of his own.

But Scott couldn’t appreciate that right now. He couldn’t wait for later, either. He just charged in and leaned up and yanked Stiles into a fierce hug, arms snaked all up around Stiles’s shoulders and their bodies pressed too close together for a breath to get between them. Stiles let slip a few staccato, breathy laughs and hugged Scott back, and for a long moment, they just stayed quietly entwined. Scott took in deep breaths of Stiles’s scent and tried to find the right words for what he meant to say, and Stiles rubbed his hand in warm, tender circles between Scott’s shoulder-blades and let him ponder.

But apparently, it took Scott way too long to manage this, because Stiles half-chuckled, “Dude, when did you get so skinny?”

“I didn’t, but that’s not the point, okay?” Scott huffed and somehow found a way to squeeze Stiles closer, tighter, harder. “You can’t leave, Stiles — you know that, right? Just. You’re my best friend, I don’t even know what I’d do without you, and you can’t… You can’t leave, it’s just…”

Scott tried not to whimper. He tried to keep it together because Stiles hated it when people cried. He tried to find something else to say — and he failed on all three counts, just nuzzled deeper into Stiles’s neck and said, “Stiles, you can’t go. You’re my best friend, and you’re like… When I look at you? I’m home.”

“Scotty, dude, like…” Stiles trailed off. Hugged Scott tighter back, almost as tightly as Scott was hugging him. He went quiet, stayed that way a moment. And finally, he said, “Scotty… I don’t wanna go. Dad doesn’t want to, either, but we have to. And I don’t care how long I’m gone. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be back. We’ll be back together and giving our Dads a headache before you know it, okay?”

Scott nodded against Stiles’s shoulder. “Get back here soon, though. And don’t forget about me in Seattle if you can’t do that.”

Balling his hand up in Scott’s t-shirt, Stiles nosed at Scott’s temple. “No one could forget about you, Scotty. And, buddy, please. I’ll be back before you know it — swear to God.”

That promise sounded nice in theory but it didn’t play out right. It wasn’t ever going to play out right, either. Probably nothing could’ve ever changed that.

Two days later, Stiles and his Dad left early in the morning, after his and Scott’s last hug felt empty and perfunctory. For all Scott clung at Stiles, for all he leaned up to bury his face more in Stiles’s neck than in his pointy collarbone (he’d hit a growth spurt back in June or May, and he had an almost-three inch height advantage on Scott now), for all Scott held Stiles to his chest, closer than his own skin, Stiles only squeezed him (and far too softly, like he felt afraid of breaking Scott) and rubbed Scott’s back (with a touch that moved too lightly, that moved like it was searching for something that it didn’t even knw, that didn’t seem to recognize someone Stiles had held so much closer than this before).

Stiles probably didn’t mean to call them up, but Scott couldn’t shake his words from the other night: dude, when did you get so skinny?  Scott couldn’t shake the thought that Stiles was being so gentle with him in the name of finding evidence of… something. Who even really knew what with Stiles. Scott knew Stiles better than anybody else and there were still parts of his mind that Scott couldn’t read for crap.

Separating came too quickly. Scott didn’t want it to, and he held on to this last hug for dear freaking life. But Stiles started wriggling in Scott’s arms and saying that they had to get on the road, now, Scotty — I don’t want to, dude. You know I don’t wanna. But my Dad says we’re gonna be on the road for like thirteen hours to get there, and that’s if we don’t stop, and we might need to stop for the night in Corvallis if it gets too late, and there could be traffic, and… just… Scott, come on. Scotty, please? My Dad’s gonna get mad, and… I’m not going away forever, dude? I’m just not. And we can write? We can call? There’s emails, yeah? Once your Mom gets you an email, anyway… It’s not forever, Scotty, I promise. Swear to God.

So, he let Stiles go. Pulling back, Scott swallowed thickly and looked down at his shoes. He trembled as he looked back up and made himself hold onto eye contact with Stiles — it made his skin crawl slightly, the way it always did with everybody, and he hated that feeling. He hated that it could even happen with Stiles. He hated having to endure it. But this was probably going to be the last time he got to take Stiles’s eyes in properly and he needed to remember how they looked. All wide and brown and bright and soft and looking at Scott like he was somebody important.

Stiles arched his eyebrows and half-drawled, Scotty? so, Scott nodded. Agreed that yeah, it wasn’t going to be forever. This was just temporary, the moving away thing. Soon enough, he and Stiles would be back together like they always were. He asked if Stiles’s Dad remembered to pack his Ritalin. (“Oh, you bet I remembered to pack his Ritalin, Scott,” Deputy Stilinski piped up from loading a cooler of drinks in the backseat of. “Already called up a few doctors in Seattle, too, so he won’t run out of it.”) And when Stiles moved in Scott’s direction again, he thought they’d get in another hug…

But Stiles only clapped him on the shoulder. His hand hit Scott like a cartoon anvil and he squeezed in the same too-gentle way from earlier and furrowing his brow, he told Scott to take care of himself. Scott promised to do that, too, but as he stood on the Stilinskis’ lawn with Mom and Derek and Laura, as he watched Stiles get in the backseat while his Dad and his Aunt Veronica climbed into the front, Scott didn’t know why he’d ever bother. As he watched the van pull out of the driveway, Scott didn’t entirely see the point of taking care of himself anymore. Was there ever even a point to it, in a universe where Stiles could just leave so easily, after everything   that they’d been through together, after telling Scott that they were brothers and that Scott was the only brother he would ever want in his life.

There probably wasn’t a point to Scott taking care of himself. Or to anything else, really. Not in that kind of world. God wasn’t listening. He probably never had been in the first place, not when Scott had prayed for Stiles’s Mom, not when he’d prayed for Stiles’s dziadzia, not when he’d prayed for everything to be okay again so Stiles could stay in Beacon Hills. Not ever. God had simply never been listening.

As he listened to the van’s engine spluttering and the scratch of its tires on the pavement, Scott realized for the first time that God was even less reliable than Dad. Maybe God couldn’t come home drunk and yell at Mom, and maybe He couldn’t hide Scott’s inhaler or refuse to hand it over while he was having an attack — but that didn’t mean Scott could rely on Him. He’d have to learn some different way of handling things. One that didn’t involve trusting that God ever really had his or anyone’s best interests at heart. Prayer didn’t even make Scott feel any better anyway. He’d have to get things done himself.

None of which made any difference in the meantime: it was too little, too late, at this point. Scott hadn’t figured this out soon enough and now Stiles had to go away. Scott couldn’t fix this anymore. He couldn’t do anything to stop it or keep them together.

All he could do was watch on as the van kept leaving. Stiles waved at him out of the backseat window and it made Scott’s arm and shoulder ache, just lifting his hand so he could wave back. The van crawled off down the block, past the stop sign that Scott and Stiles had never paid attention to when they went out on their bikes, trailing the u-haul full of stuff behind it, and Scott watched it intently. Kept his eyes locked on it and zeroed in until it passed the middle school and turned a corner out of sight and left Scott with a gaping hole in his chest and the same thing he’d known this whole time: his entire life was over and the world was absolutely ending.

Not that the rest of the world recognized this. Clock hands kept ticking. Mom hugged Scott and kissed his forehead and went off to work, leaving him with Derek and Laura as though it was any other day. They had to watch Cora, too, so they took Scott back to their house, and after a few hours of what Derek called, “completely atypical solitude and a freaking monastic silence,” Scott had to accept the notion that the Apocalypse wasn’t happening today after all. Which didn’t help. Not by much, anyway. As Scott huffed through starting and restarting different games of Tetris on Laura’s old GameBoy Color, he hoped that maybe the end of the world was running a few hours late. What was the point of even having a would if Scott and Stiles couldn’t be together in it?

Only seven weeks before, Stiles spray-on dyed his hair bright red so he could be the Ron to Scott’s Harry for the new book's midnight release party. He’d drawn Scott’s lightning scar on with purple marker and helped him make fake glasses out of pipe cleaners because Scott’s real glasses didn’t look like Harry’s were supposed to look. He'd put up with Derek being their Sirius and Laura being their Hermione and Cora getting dragged along and refusing to wear a costume in protest. Stiles had put up with that, even though he hated Derek and thought Cora probably wanted to kill him, even though he’d hated Derek ever since he’d overheard Derek saying, you and me, Scott? We're brothers now — because, according to Stiles, who the H-E-double hockey-sticks was Derek to act like he was allowed to be Scott’s brother when Stiles had been there first.

Stiles had put up with an arrangement that he’d hated and he’d done that all because he knew how much the Harry Potter midnight release party meant to Scott, and how much it meant to Scott to go with Stiles now that that they were old enough for that — but his Dad got called into the office late, and Scott’s Dad was out of town on some big important case or other, and Mom was working an overnight shift at the hospital, so going to Barnes and Noble with the Hales was the only choice they had. Except for the one where they stayed home with Laura there in her capacity as babysitter, but that one wasn’t even on the table.

That had only been seven weeks ago, and now Stiles was gone. They were supposed to go to the next two books’ midnight releases together too, and no matter what anybody said about how Scott and Stiles could still do that, Scott knew better. That was never going to happen. They weren’t going to have any more midnight releases and it wasn’t fair. The world had no right to do things like this to people. Why couldn’t they pass a law against letting things like this happen to people, especially when they didn’t deserve it, the way that Scott and Stiles definitely didn’t?

But it helped to slump into Derek’s side in his bed and make him read Prisoner of Azkaban for their umpteen-millionth time together. It helped that Derek did all the different voices without Scott needing to ask him to do them, from his drawling, languid Snape and his growling, breathy Sirius Black, to his chirping, domineering Hermione and his voice for Professor Lupin that always came off like he was trying to sound like Scott. Even if Derek wasn’t trying to do that with his Lupin voice, it helped that he came off that way because Professor Lupin was Scott’s favorite, even if he’d dressed up as Harry because Stiles’s favorite was Ron, and it helped for Scott to think that maybe he could be like Remus when he grew up. Remus or maybe Cedric Diggory. Except for the part where Cedric died — that wasn’t on Scott’s list of things he wanted. Not yet, anyway. And when it did make the list eventually, Scott would come to be grateful that he hadn’t succeeded in acting on those feelings.

In the meantime, though, it helped that Scott had Derek with him, that he could drape his legs over Derek’s lap and lean into his chest and drop his head onto Derek’s shoulder. It helped that Derek curled his free arm around Scott like he’d never let anything hurt Scott ever again. It helped that Derek knew exactly the right way to card his fingers through Scott’s hair and the right way to muss it up so that Scott could breathe a little easier, instead of getting higher strung. But that didn’t last. Not for lack of trying on Derek’s part or anything; it was just a fact of life, or that’s what Dad said about it. The world kept spinning like nothing bad had even happened here because that was just the way things worked.

Fifth grade started two-and-a-half weeks later, and for all he tried to find other people to call friends — or other people to eat lunch with, at least — Scott mostly wound up sitting by himself. Danny took him in sometimes, let Scott sit with him and Lydia and Caitlin, but only when Jackson wasn’t in a bad mood because when Jackson was in a bad mood about anything, then Danny could only sit with him. And Jackson would only sit with Danny when he got like that, too. And Scott tried three times to sit with Lydia and Caitlin when they didn’t have Danny there as well, but almost everything they said made him feel dumber than he always felt. It didn’t matter what they were talking about. All that mattered was that Caitlin and Lydia were just crazy smarter than Scott and they probably didn’t want to deal with him. He’d just drag them down, or be deadweight on their conversations by making them stop to explain everything. True, they didn’t say that, but they didn’t need to say it. Scott could see it clearer than his memories of the Stilinskis’ van pulling away down the block.

They weren’t even trying to do it, and he knew they weren’t, and if anything, that made it worse because they were trying to be friendly with him and Scott was just too stupid to appreciate it. So, mostly, he ate his lunch alone.

Or didn’t, as the case was more than once. And more than twice. And more than twice a week, even, at the worst of it. Scott didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t like the patterns he’d develop later on, starting in the middle of seventh grade, or at least that’s when Scott really became aware of them. This time, he didn’t even think there was a problem. Not with how he was eating (or wasn’t), not with the fog that clouded over everything and made it hard to focus, not with anything. There simply wasn’t a problem.

Aside from Stiles being gone, obviously. Aside from how his calls were few and far between, and when he did call, he didn’t sound exactly happy, but he had all kinds of cousins to spend time with up in Seattle. He was making new friends. Even if he hadn’t been, what was the point of telling him how much Scott wanted him back? Where was the point in making Stiles feel guilty about something that hadn’t even been his choice in the first place? What kind of person would do something like that to their best friend, their brother, even a brother who didn’t call as often as he’d promised?

Anyway, Scott only wasn’t eating much because he wasn’t really hungry. That’s just how it worked, they always told him. Eat when you’re hungry. He wasn’t hungry, so he didn’t eat, and for once, Dad stopped bugging him about how losing a few pounds would be better for his asthma. For once, when Dad asked Scott if he was sure about something over the dinner table, the question was, Are you sure you’re done, Scott? and not, Are you sure you really want that? Everything was fine and Scott was fine. His head was spinning half the time and Scott didn’t know what the point was, but it didn’t matter. He was fine.

Scott was fine right up until he wasn’t. Right up until Derek picked him and Cora up from school two days before Halloween and instead of going home, they wound up in the ER because Scott passed out on the walk over to Derek’s car and Derek wouldn’t take, “I’m okay, I’m just kind of tired” for an answer. Mom met them there — she was already on shift anyway — and Derek hung around with them. Insisted on it, even. One of his and Cora’s aunts took her home because she had homework to do and couldn’t afford to be stuck at the hospital over her big brother’s bullheaded refusal to leave while Scott was still getting looked over and before they had any idea what was wrong with him.

But Derek stayed, and Mom let him, and Scott didn’t want to talk about anything, so he said, “thank you” by twining up his hands with one of Derek’s and curling up into Derek’s chest. All Scott said, outside of answering any questions he got asked, was that Derek didn’t have to stay if he had other things to do tonight. His other stuff was probably important and taking over babysitting Scott while Laura was off in college didn’t mean Derek had to stop the rest of his life for Scott’s sake or whatever.

“It’s Wednesday, too, you know,” Scott muttered through a sigh. “Don’t you and Paige always study together on Wednesdays? Isn’t she going to be upset?”

Derek huffed and mussed up Scott’s hair with his free hand. “Yeah, we do, I guess,” he said. “But I called her at the pay-phone while they were getting you all checked in. Told her what was up. And I said it was important. Really important, even. She understood. She said she hopes you feel better soon, too.”

“Yeah, but she really likes you,” Scott pointed out. “She’s nice, and she’s smart, and she really likes you. And you really like her, too. And it’s just… It’s okay? I mean. You really, really like each other and it’d be okay if you wanted to go study with her, or kiss her, or whatever you like to do with her on Wednesdays instead of staying here? It’s just… I’d get that? That’s just what you do with people when you really, really like them, right?”

For a moment, all Derek did was nudge Scott’s head down onto his shoulder and card his fingers through Scott’s hair. “Yeah, I really like her. We really like each other. But…” Derek trailed off, ducked his chin and nuzzled at Scott’s forehead. “We’re brothers, Scott. I’ve said it before. And I meant it before. I mean it now. And I’ll keep saying it until you believe it. You’re sick, and we’re brothers, and that means I’m staying right here unless you want me to leave.”

Scott blinked up at Derek for a moment, then let his hand go and wrapped his arms around Derek’s shoulders instead, dropped his legs into their familiar position in Derek’s lap, nestled his head under Derek’s chin. “I want you to stay,” he tacked on, just in case Derek didn’t get it. Because sometimes, Derek didn’t always get things, so Scott just had to be sure with him.

Dad showed up a while later with a haphazard duffle bag on his shoulder. He was muted when they let him into Scott’s patient room, all mild and quiet and sad, wearing a deep, quivering frown, apologizing in a hushed voice, explaining that his boss wouldn’t let him go and then he hit rush hour traffic on the way back to the house. Mom started asking why he’d wasted time like that, going back to the house while Scott was sick and in the hospital with who even knows what, and why hadn’t he come straight here instead, and they might have needed him here, Rafael, and he’d gone back to the house—

But before she raised her voice too much, Dad pulled his explanation out of the duffle: Scott’s stuffed stegosaurus with the fraying threads along its tail. Mom went quiet. Swallowed thickly. Pursed her lips and nodded, bent over and folded her hands up in her lap and watched quietly as Dad set the dinosaur down in Scott’s lap. He ruffled Scott’s hair so gently that Scott almost didn’t feel his hand. All of which was weird enough that Scott wrinkled his nose at Dad and asked if he was sick or something before Dad could ask Scott how he was doing or ask Mom what the status of everything was at the moment.

Dad frowned deeper down at him for that, but it made sense enough to Scott. If Dad was coming in without any of his usual stomping around and swaggering and posture, then something was probably really wrong with him. The only things Dad managed to give Scott in response to that were a heavy sigh and a squeeze of his shoulder and the promise that he was fine, he only cared about making sure Scott got all better, the way he deserved to be.

Scott’s tests came back inconclusive. All of them did. No results that pointed toward anything that would help them find a diagnosis. The problem was obvious enough to the handful of doctors looking after Scott: he wasn’t eating, at least he wasn’t eating enough. He’d grown an inch and still lost seventeen pounds since his physical in mid-July. This combination of factors left his body out of balance in all kinds of ways Scott didn’t understand and couldn’t pronounce either. But all the tests came back negative or normal, which messed up the process figuring out what had made Scott get like this in the first place.

Because as far as the tests said, there wasn’t anything wrong with Scott beyond the side-effects of his current state. As far as the tests said, he wasn’t sick with anything medical, but something was still visibly wrong with Scott, so they had to look elsewhere and for other potential causes. So Scott had to stay the night in a hospital bed, waiting for a morning full of still more tests that didn’t really seem to help. He and Mom spent Thursday in the hospital too, talking to two therapists and three counselors and a dietitian, coming up with the conclusion that Scott’s loss of appetite was psychosomatic and drawing up meal plans that Scott had to stick to, in addition to seeing one of the hospital’s therapists, if he wanted to get well again.

They let him go home on Friday morning, and after trick or treating with Derek, Danny, Paige, and Cora on Friday night, Scott came home again to find all of Dad’s things missing. Aunt Adelaide, his younger sister, came by the house a few days later with the divorce papers. But Scott kept up with his therapy. Mom and Derek and Laura all made sure he kept up with his meal plans, so did his homeroom teacher when Mom told her about them. Things got better. Nominally, anyway. They all stopped feeling so empty and half-awake and pointless. Scott gained the weight back and got healthy, as much as he could short of a miracle cure for asthma coming out of nowhere. He worked hard, did well in school, life went on.

Next June, he and Derek and Laura and Danny all went to the midnight release of the movie version of Prisoner of Azkaban. Scott and Derek matched as Sirius and Remus, respectively. The morning after, they split some of Derek’s chocolate chip pancakes and ran down all the ways that Kloves and Cuarón changed the book and whether or not they worked. Derek snickered indulgently and ruffled Scott’s hair over his righteous indignation about how werewolves did not work like that CGI nightmare, not according to JK Rowling and not according to anybody ever. At least, not anybody who knew the first thing at all about any kind of werewolves, like Kloves and Cuarón obviously didn’t. Life went on. Things got better.

Except for the part where Stiles never came back home. Except for how their phone calls got shorter and more infrequent until they stopped happening at all, and the promised emails never came. Except for how Scott didn’t heal so much as he just scabbed over and didn’t get over missing Stiles as much as he adjusted to not having Stiles around anymore. Except for the part that, even when Scott took the bite and gained a pack, even when he could smile without it being some kind of facade, he was doing this without his Stiles there so no matter how right any given thing could feel, something about it always came out feeling wrong.

Scott would pick another word to describe that, but there really, really isn’t one. Except there isn’t another word for Stiles turning up after eleven years. The only word for this fucked up situation bangs itself out in time with Scott’s heartbeat: wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong.

***

If anyone were to ask him, Scott couldn’t honestly say why he stays in the waiting room alone after his meeting.

Waiting for Kira and Erica to get out of theirs made sense enough, sure. Stiles was in his own appointment by then, so there wasn’t any reason to panic and run out on everybody. More immediately, though, Isaac, Boyd, and Cora hung around and waited for Scott, too. They came in as a pack and leaving as a pack was just a safe, solid plan.

But it doesn’t stop there for Scott. He doesn’t do anything about getting out of his seat or getting ready to go while everyone else starts adjusting scarves, throwing on jackets and sweatshirts, and talking about where to go for dinner. It’s a little on the early side, still, but still getting on the late side, and there are Orientation Week activities to get to yet tonight… Getting dinner earlier than usual might work.

(“The dining hall’s gonna be awful tonight, I mean, between the lasagna and how many people are gonna be avoiding the Commons right now,” Kira points out, but Boyd shrugs and argues back, “So’s the diner, and the Thai place, and everywhere else — we’re getting into dinner rush time and it’s really gonna suck no matter where we go.”)

There are so many good reasons to just go with the pack instead of hanging around the office. After the scene that happened before he went in for his meeting — after fucking Stiles fell out of the fucking sky and right into Scott’s lap — no one could blame Scott for wanting to clear the Hell out of here as soon as lycanthropically possible. Which he does want to do. If Scott could have his way, he’d be so far out of here that you’d think they covered the whole office in wolfsbane.

But he promised Stiles that he’d stay and promises mean something to Scott. Promises don’t get broken unless someone’s going to get hurt or there are some other extenuating circumstances. Which means that Scott just has to tough this out.

While his pack all start moving out, Isaac stops to ask Scott if he’s coming or not. Scott shakes his head. Tells them that there’s something else he needed to do — something that he has to do alone, and that he doesn’t really want to talk about, though Erica can explain it for them if they’re really all that interested in the inane details of Scott’s life outside the pack. So, he’d really like to go to dinner with them, but he’s staying put. Kira makes him swear to let her know that he did get some dinner in him eventually, and he can’t hold that against her, really.

So Scott agrees, and the pack heads out for dinner, and as soon as the door slams behind them, Scott heaves a sigh so hard, his lungs ache. He toes out of his sneakers and curls his legs up, thighs pressed to his chest and heels resting on the cushion of his seat. He leans his head into the wall, which doesn’t really stop it from spinning like a tilt-a-whirl and making him certain that he’s going to freaking hurl, but… at least this situation, while probably pretty awful, is still not that bad.

Or anyway, it could still be a whole lot worse, Scott guesses. It could’ve been Dad instead of Stiles. It could’ve been his perpetually disappointed white grandparents, or Tío Eduardo, Tía Gabriela’s husband, who never thinks Scott is Mexican enough. And at least Stiles was happy to see him, which could go all kinds of ways that Scott can’t even begin predicting, much less trying to plan responses to for safety’s sake.

When Stiles finally wanders out of his appointment, his entire face lights up again. “Dude,” he says, all breathless and floored again. “I… You stayed?”

Scott shrugs and nods. “I promised to, didn’t I? And to give you my number, right?” I mean, I wish that the earth would swallow me whole over here but that’s not really your fault. It’s not like you made me this way or anything. Who even knows why I have fucking anxiety? Because I sure don’t. I don’t understand it at all and it’s my fucking life, Stiles.

Grinning, Stiles hands over his phone, and Scott hands over his, and as he’s keying his number in, he hears Stiles start chattering, “I just didn’t expect it, y’know? Like. You got pretty freaked out when you realized it was me?”

“Yeah, but… That wasn’t really about you, though?” Scott combs his hands back through his hair, brushing the soft, floppy strands back off his face just because he needs to play with it right now. It’s not a lie, what he’s telling Stiles now. It’s not a lie. At least, not entirely.

It’s not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God, either. But it’s not a lie.

Still, Stiles probably deserves more explanation, so once they’ve swapped phones again, Scott tells him, “It wasn’t about you, Stiles. Not really. Like, you were part of it, yeah? Because it’s been a while and this was like, one of the last possible things I expected—”

“Yeah, well, if I had to bet on finding you in the freaking special kids’ office and finding a talking cat who’s gonna tell me that I’m secretly the Moon Princess and a chosen warrior for love and justice?” He pauses long enough to preemptively laugh at his own joke, and that devilish glint in his eyes hasn’t changed at all since they were ten. “I would’ve definitely picked the bet where I get to be Sailor Moon. Not just because I could totally rock heels and a miniskirt like she does.”

“I have rocked a heels and miniskirt like she does,” Scott says without thinking about it. “It was… It was for a burlesque troupe number last year? Uh, I managed to convince them to let me choreograph a Sailor Moon number, and uh. I played Sailor Moon? Kira was my Tuxedo Mask. There are pictures up on Facebook somewhere, if you really want to see them, but… If you don’t, then it’s okay? Like, I totally understand, it’s probably kinda weird and… Not what you ever thought I’d end up doing?”

Stiles blinks at Scott for a moment. Purses his lips and tongues at them and Scott seriously wants to throw his tube of cinnamon sugar Lip Smackers at Stiles and tell him to just use it on his fucking lips if they’re so chapped. Because licking them like that will only make them worse and Scott only told Stiles that how many times when they were kids? But ultimately, he doesn’t bother because Stiles furrows his brow and that’s much more distracting.

Did Scott grow a second head or something? Because that’s honestly all he can think of to explain Stiles’s expression right now. And he ends up being pretty fuck off wrong:

“Dude,” Stiles half-chuckles, “I would love to see pictures of you looking hot in a Sailor Moon costume. Like, seriously. And I mean… come on. Did you seriously think I’d end up with purple hair and four-gauge plugs and a freaking Anne Rice tattoo to commemorate my Mom?”

…Well, that’s certainly not the explanation Scott was expecting. He shakes his head, says he didn’t expect that, no. “I mean, the would-be shit-stirring rebel leader thing isn’t that unexpected? I just always thought you’d be way more Han Solo than… DIY queer liberationist anarcho-punk Kermit the Frog? Who’s also Karl Marx on the weekends or something?”

Stiles shrugs. “Yeah, you and everybody else — I think my Dad’s just grateful I’ve only been arrested twice by now. And I never got charged with shit because the arrests were completely bogus, so.” He smiles down at Scott — not a smirk, but a smile. It’s genuine, and fond, and his brown eyes shine as he asks, “So… are we still on for tomorrow night? You, me, dinner and a… what do they call themselves?”

“A dragapella beauty-shop quartet.” Scott has no idea how he manages to say it — his heart’s trying to beat out of his chest again and he still has to get himself home after this and he has no idea how the Hell that’s ever going to happen.

But Stiles just nods and keeps on smiling. “Yeah, that. Yeah, that, exactly,” he says and apparently can’t decide if he wants to smile or leer. “You, me, dinner, and a drag show. It still a date, hermosito? Or are you gonna make me beg?”

***

“So, Derek? As it turns out, I am indisputably, hands down, the world’s single biggest fucking idiot ever and if I asked you to kill me as a favor and for, like, everybody freaking ever’s benefit, would you do it.”

Scott doesn’t slam the apartment door behind him, but once he’s in and once he’s out of his sneakers, once he’s dropped his backpack down by Derek’s boots, he slumps back into the wood, probably harder than is really necessary. He curls his hand tight around the doorknob, full on digs it hard into his palm — but he doesn’t twist the stupid thing. Scott’s had enough fucking twisting doorknob sounds and enough clicking latch bolts today. He’s probably had enough of those noises for the rest of his fucking life.

But Scott can’t let this get to him too badly — he’s agitated. He’s anxious. But he knows what can help with that, and hopefully, it won’t involve Scott reaching for his Xanax. Counting backwards from two-hundred, Scott takes one deep breath after another. The world seriously needs to chill out and stop fucking spinning already, but it’s more than taking its sweet time with that, so Scott keeps counting. He keeps breathing. He only lets up on the knob or either of these activities when Miss Snuggle Bear, their little part-Yorkie shelter rescue mutt, comes bounding out of the hallway to their bedrooms, starts dancing and yipping around Scott’s ankles.

Really, he only pulls back because doesn’t stop until he bends over and picks her up. Sighing from the pit of his stomach, he rests her against his shoulder, whispers some baby-talk that he isn’t even listening to because as long as he says it softly and sweetly, she really isn’t bothered. He trudges into the kitchen, following the sounds of Derek puttering around with something, and slumps against a free space on the counter, over by the knife-block where Derek keeps his Wüsthofs. Derek heaves a sigh at Scott, but doesn’t look up from his work — the double-chin he’s developed in the last few years pooches out as he furrows his brow and stays so intently focused on the counter and the food that it’s almost scary.

Which doesn’t really answer Scott’s question, so maybe he’s not going to have to talk about it. That could be a blessing in disguise, really. He watches quietly as Derek beats a bowl full of eggs (and from the smell of it, cream and salt as well). He eyes the diced vegetables, the different diced meats (ham, Scott identifies on sight, but he’s not going to sniff the others right now, just to figure out what they are), and the four different pans full of golden brown crusts. Pursing his lips, Scott scratches Miss Snuggle Bear along the scruff of her neck.

“So… it’s quiche for dinner tonight, then?” Scott huffs and noses at their baby. She noses back and he grins as she showers him with little licking kisses. And when Derek still hasn’t answered, Scott prods him again: “Derek? Hey, Derek? I kinda asked you if we’re having quiche tonight?”

“And I thought that it was obvious, so I let you draw your own conclusions.” Derek finally dignifies Scott by looking up at him, and his face is… basically illegible. He’s smirking, that much is certain. But it’s some weird mix of quizzical, playful, affectionate, and stern. Never mind the way his eyebrows are trying to escape his freaking forehead.

Scott doesn’t even know how Derek’s managing to have a stern smirk in the first place, but… leave it to Derek to somehow make that concept work, Scott guesses.

“And before you ask,” Derek goes on, swishing the whisk around his eggs some more, resting the bowl against his belly. “I let you draw your own conclusions about dinner because like I said last night? I’m done humoring you about letting you call yourself stupid. I’m serious about that, too.”

Scott rolls his eyes and doesn’t try to hide it. After knowing each other for fifteen years and calling each other brothers for twelve of them, he and Derek don’t have to hide that. “You’re serious about everything, though,” he points out, and bounces Miss Snuggle Bear extra-gently, nosing at the top of her head again. “Isn’t that right, Baby? Isn’t your Papa so serious about abso-freaking-lutely everything? Isn’t he always such a great big grumpy wumpy wolf? Isn’t he? I think he’s a grumpy wumpy wolf, don’t you, Baby? Yes, your Daddy thinks your Papa is just so grumpy and serious and grumpy.”

Miss Snuggle Bear yips and licks at Scott’s face again, which probably means that she agrees with him. Which means that Scott wins. He doesn’t know what he wins, but after the nightmarish Hell-scape that he had to deal with today, even before he ran into Stiles? Scott could really stand to win something.

He could really stand to win something before he slips up and starts trying to count all the calories in the different types of quiche that Derek’s whipping up, or deciding that he ate too much at lunch when really Scott did anything but, or emotionally berating himself about his weird relationship with Derek’s body. Or, more specifically, his weird relationship with his feelings about Derek’s body and the weight he’s gained in the past three years or so since he’s been dating Isaac’s older brother.

Gone is the Hulk-sized, immaculate musculature that Derek painstakingly kept up while Scott was in middle and high school. In its place, Derek’s gone soft all over, with a full round stomach, a rounder face and fleshy thighs, and a round, seam-straining ass that Camden can’t go ten minutes without groping whenever he comes over. And the rub is that Derek’s comfortable like this. Derek’s happy like this. While Scott’s still fucking stuck with days where he has to talk himself out of skipping lunch because he feels like he’s put on weight when he hasn’t. Scott’s still stuck with bad days where he feels like, if they didn’t already know each other, he could probably hate Derek for being literally fat and happy.

And because Scott’s pretty sure that being so pointlessly jealous of his big brother’s happiness makes him an objectively terrible person, and that makes him feel gross? He’d really like to win something now. Like… right now, preferably. But he can handle waiting. As long as they acknowledge that he wins.

Apparently, just judging from the arch of his eyebrows and the freshly sucked lemon face he pulls, Derek disagrees with the assessment of things where Scott gets to win at this. He huffs and it could easily be dismissive. Or it could be amused. It’s one or the other. Possibly both. Possibly some mix of other affects on top of that. It’s hard enough to tell with Derek anyway because he’s constantly expressing at least three different things and everybody has to pick apart his layers to really talk to him like a person. On any normal day, Scott doesn’t mind doing that for Derek really. Derek’s his brother, Scott would die for him — but tonight, Scott’s really used up all of his daily points allotted to understanding social nuances.

It doesn’t get any better when Derek chimes in as easily as most people give a weather report: “Well, Daddy, I think that you’re doing your thing of pseudo-heteronormatively baby-talking the dog and acting like she’s our child. I also think you’re doing this because you think it’s going to get you out of talking about things. I think you know that you’re doing this, and I think you’re doing it on purpose, and I think you’re doing this because you think you can distract me by sneaking little insults that you don’t even believe in into said baby-talk. And I’m not going to engage you in this. Well. I’m not going to engage you in the way you want me to engage you. Because you’re acting like a passive-aggressive seven-year-old instead of dealing with your problems like the adult that we both know you are.”

“Yeah, well, I think that Cam’s seriously worried about you giving yourself a freaking stroke when you two are fucking.” This isn’t even a lie. Or it’s not much of one. Cam’s said basically exactly that before. “And I think he’s worried about that because you’re so serious. And because you work too hard, and you focus too much, and you’re even an obnoxious perfectionist at fucking sex.”

“I don’t know why you expect me to be ashamed of working hard to sexually please my boyfriend. Also?” Derek huffs and quirks his lips at Scott. “It’s pretty funny that you should mention that? Because that’s pretty much exactly what Danny and Kira both said about having sex with you. You know, when they came to ask me if you were okay because you seemed like you weren’t having fun during sex. Because you got so serious about it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I learned it from you. Like, maybe you just rubbed off on me like that. Maybe I should’ve gotten the non-Mom sex ed talk from Laura instead.”

“Except that she offered and you still wanted me to do the parts you were really interested in because Laura’s never done anal outside of pegging her one ex-boyfriend.” The quirk of Derek’s lips turns into another fully fledged smirk. “And I distinctly remember a skinny, clean-shaven, floppy-haired, seventeen-year-old Scott Delgado coming and begging me for a primer on getting fucked so he could go all the way with Danny after the winter formal.”

Nestling Miss Snuggle Bear closer to his neck, Scott groans. Rolls his eyes again. Smooths his fingertips down Miss Snuggle Bear’s spine and ruffling them through her fur. “You know, you’re being a real douche right now. I mean, you do know that, right? You have to know that.”

Derek shrugs. “And you’re being childish and trying to get out of talking about what’s bothering you enough that you’re in a mood to ask me to murder you.” He pauses and inspects the mixture, gently moving the whisk through it, delicately sniffing at it, then taking a deep breath. Ostensibly satisfied with it, Derek sets the bowl down on the counter, leans down and props himself up on his elbows. “For the record? The answer’s a pretty resounding, ‘no.’ Call it enlightened self-interest or whatever make you happy, but I kinda like my little brother better when he’s alive.”

“Right now, I’m gonna call it you being a freaking dick,” Scott says, whining more than he really likes. Definitely more than he’ll ever admit in public. “Y’know, if you were a real humanitarian, you’d kill me.” There’s a split second where Scott almost thinks better of what comes out of his mouth next, but then Miss Snuggle Bear licks his cheek and he adds on, “Don’t be upset. It’d be a mercy killing. I have a certain naïve charm, but no—”

“Finish that quote and we’re watching Twilight after dinner.” There’s a pause after Derek says this, one that Scott spends glowering at him, silently daring him to confirm or deny how serious he is about that threat. He waits for Derek to snicker or give one of his breathy, legitimate laughs or do something that might prove this is just a terrible, ill-conceived, jackass excuse for a joke. But all Derek does is give Scott a cabbage-complacent, unfazed stare.

“Finish that quote,” he says again, enunciating each syllable perfectly perfectly, “and we’re watching Twilight after dinner. The entire movie, all the way through, from start to finish, no exceptions. And the blooper reel. And if you keep dragging out the whole, ‘Scott tells Derek what’s bothering him today’ part of this talk? We’re watching the commentary track too. I know how much you just love to listen to Robert Pattinson talk about his pretentious dishevelment.”

Derek grins in the way that he’d never admit makes him look like a certifiable Big Bad Wolf ^TM , and Scott frowns, cuddling Miss Snuggle Bear closer still. “Why do you hate me,” he deadpans. “If you were a real humanitarian, you’d find a nicer way to kill me than with fucking Twilight.”

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers, Scott. And anyway, I guess it’s a good thing I never claimed to be a humanitarian then, isn’t it. Real or otherwise. Because you can beg me, bribe me, badger me, do whatever you want to me? And I’m still not going to kill you. Ever. So you can just get used to that.” For a moment, Scott thinks Derek’s going to smirk and keep this in the realm of mostly easy banter but his face stays even. Set. Serious. And he says, in complete earnestness, “So. What happened and who do I need to beat the shit out of?”

“That’s probably just going to make more problems really. Also, nobody. It’s just…” Scott trails off and lets Miss Snuggle Bear nose and lick at his jawline for a moment. He hates words. Hates them. They’re only good for anything when they’re written down — or at least, that’s true right now. He sighs and knocks his head back against one of the cupboards. “Just. There was this guy, okay? Over at the disability resource center, while me and Kira and Erica were waiting to get in for our appointments. Boyd and Cora and Isaac were all in, and he showed up, and started lurking in the freaking doorway and just… I don’t even know, it's such a mess.”

Scott does mean to go on without getting prompted. He has every intention of doing that, in fact. But he must go quiet for too long or something, just ruffling his fingers through Miss Snuggle Bear’s fur and trying to make sure he gets all the words right. Scott guesses he must go too quiet because Derek takes it upon himself to clear his throat and arch his eyebrows like, and is there more to this or do I get to tell you that you’re being completely ludicrous right now? Unless this is an anxiety thing for you, in which case I’ll be more sensitive and understanding with you. But if it’s not, then you’re being ludicrous and I will tell you so.

“I’m getting to the rest of it, okay?” Scott snaps and knocks his head into the cupboard again. Harder, this time. Hard enough that Derek tells him to quit doing them. “So, like… He was kinda hot? In a dirty, grimy, punky sort of way? Tall. Purple hair. Funny, kind of a dick, but funny. Tight t-shirt from some… Polish anti-fascist punk band that I’ve never heard of. And… then he might’ve kind of, sort of asked me out? For tomorrow night? And I maybe probably said yes?”

“You maybe, probably said yes?” Derek’s incredulity could probably kill a man. “That’s not exactly a maybe, probably sort of question that he asked you, Scott. Either you said yes or you said no or you—”

“Fine, I said yes, okay? I said yes, and we’re getting dinner and going to the Sicks’ show after that, and it’s… It’s a date? Like? We’re going on a date?”

“So, are you such a mess right now because you want me to be out of the apartment tomorrow night? Because all you have to do is ask me and I can spend the night at Cam’s or Laura’s. I’ll even take the Baby with me, and you and your dirty little punk guy can have the whole place to yourselves. You can fuck to The Ramones and piss off the neighbors, it’ll be a really nice evening with nobody dropping any eaves—”

“Derek!” Scott snaps again. Whines in some twisting, bone-deep desperation. He doesn’t mean to do either of those things, and he doesn’t mean to cling so much to Miss Snuggle Bear — Scott definitely doesn’t mean to hold her so close to his chest that she starts wriggling in his hands and whines until he puts her down, with her little nails clicking on the kitchen’s linoleum tiles. He doesn’t mean to do a lot of things, but just thinking about this whole fucked up situation’s making Scott’s head start spinning all over again. Taking simple, basic level breaths gets harder, and they come in shorter bursts, no matter how much Scott tries to control his heart-rate or breathe in deeper…

“Derek,” Scott almost whimpers and he seriously hates himself for sounding so weak like that right now. “The guy is Stiles.”

There’s a moment where the kitchen goes mortuary silent. All Derek does is blink at Scott, then scrunch up his entire face and squint like this is a joke and he’s waiting for the freaking punchline. So Scott says it again — he drags the words up, kicking and screaming, Derek, the guy is Stiles — and when Derek asks where the hidden camera is, Scott just swallows thickly and shakes his head.

“No hidden camera. There’s not… Why would I fucking Punk you about something like this, Derek?” Scott scrubs at his face with both hands, dragging his fingers up and down his cheeks, digging them into the bridge of his nose. And then everything comes up, the word vomit: “He just… We didn’t recognize me, okay? And I didn’t recognize him. Like I told him, it’s kinda been a while, so we didn’t recognize each other. And it’s not like telling him, ‘my name’s Scott’ makes me any kind of special, I mean…”

Scott sighs and whine and swallows thickly. “I mean, why would that make me special? There are tons of other guys at this school named Scott. And it’s not like I regret it? Not completely, anyway? And once he figured it out — they called me Delgado when they called me in for the appointment, that’s how he put it together, probably. He didn’t tell me his name until he called me Scotty and I guessed it. Anyway, he asked if I still wanted to, knowing it was him, and I still said yes and I just…”

Scott gasps — he has to gasp, at this point — too much talking, not enough breathing. And having a werewolf’s improved lung capacity still doesn’t mean that Scott’s lungs are perfect. He didn’t even realize how little he was breathing. It didn’t hit him until he felt his chest start burning. Mussing up his own hair, frenetically combing his fingers through it and letting it flop everywhere, Scott whines. Doesn’t try to fight it. His heart’s racing and his chest’s on fire; he can’t bother fighting it right now. Too much energy. Too much work. Too much. Too much. Too much — every single everything about today is just too much.

But before Scott knows what’s going on, Derek’s scooping him up in his warm, strong arms. Scott falls into the hug immediately: he gets on his toes a bit, just to lean up into it some kind of better; he presses himself into Derek’s soft chest and nuzzles into his plush neck. Scott coughs — he’s not sure if it’s an asthma cough or a feelings that will lead to crying cough or something else — but he coughs and then he whimpers into Derek’s neck. Derek doesn’t say anything. He only holds Scott closer, rubs his back with one hand and straightens out Scott’s hair with the other. He noses at Scott’s temple, and still, he doesn’t say anything. There probably isn’t much he can say. It’s not like they make For Dummies how to guides about handling this kind of situation.

Scott doesn’t keep track of how long he stays nestled up in Derek’s chest, saying nothing, just breathing in deep his brother’s scent of vanilla and brown sugar and the lingering undercurrent of dirt. They only remember that time’s an issue in the first place when Derek’s phone buzzes in his hip pocket and starts blasting, “Truly Madly Deeply.” Scott tries to pull back, but Derek won’t let up. So, Scott points out that Derek’s phone is kind of ringing?

“Yeah, it’s Cam,” Derek mutters into Scott’s hair and squeezes him around the shoulders. “I’ll call him back once your heartbeat’s steady and you’re breathing right.”

“You sure? I mean…” Scott should pull back, but he leans further into Derek anyway. “It could kind of take a while, like… What the Hell am I going to do, Derek? I have a date. With Stiles. Like, eleven years, I should seriously be over this already, but… I have a date with Stiles and no idea what I’m going to do for it.”

Derek sighs and kisses Scott’s temple, and his beard scratches on Scott’s skin, and it’s itchy but it’s reassuring. It settles Scott’s nerves, if just a little bit. It’s one of the positive side-effects that Derek has.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do for it, either, Scott,” he whispers. “But I know what you’re gonna do now. You’re gonna drink some water. Take your meds. Go have a shower. I’ll get the quiches in the oven — Kira already told me you were picky at lunch, so I tried to pick out your favorites. And…” He sighs. Scrapes his scruff against Scott’s temple again, but doesn’t kiss him this time. “Over dinner, we’ll try to work something out, okay? ‘s what brothers are here for, right?”