Chapter Text
It said something about Stiles’ life that he was so incredibly used to running for survival that his mind actually began to wander even as his body kept fleeing through the trees at high speed. He’d gotten much better at the whole running thing, actually, since this whole thing began. He’d started running cross country, which meant he voluntarily went for long runs on the weekend. Not to mention he spent a dedicated portion of every month madly escaping various monsters that wanted to eat him.
As his feet now expertly navigated the familiar preserve, he thought back over the craziness that was his life since Scott had been bitten at the start of sophomore year. They were seniors now, so close to graduating. The three years seemed to have passed so slowly, time dragged and stretched by horror and grief and pain. Except that he had hardly even noticed it passing so quickly. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that they were going to graduate soon. Just over a month away now. Not all of them had made it to this point of course. As usual when he thought of them, he sent up a quick feeling of apology and affection for Erica, Boyd, Allison, Aiden. It seemed so cosmically unfair that the good ones died while their enemies seemed to have more lives than a cat. Peter had ripped Kate’s throat out, and yet she came back to torture Derek and spill her crazy everywhere. Peter himself had returned from the dead. Now, because they’d never properly killed Gerard, he was back too and trying to kill them all. Stiles shook his head and lept over a fallen log. He couldn’t say that he’d started liking the violence and bloodshed that came with this life, but a few key cornerstones of his morals had realigned. Specifically, he had taken a hard, critical look at Scott’s ‘no killing’ policy and felt that it was a bit too Batman never killing the Joker and less suitable for real life situations.
He could still hear footsteps behind him but they seemed to be getting farther away. Encouraged, he picked up speed and kept running. At least the bullets had stopped flying about a mile ago, likely having run out of ammunition. The rest of the pack were currently otherwise occupied, meaning that Stiles was on his own for this fight. Or flight, rather. He was running straight for a cliff, he knew, but he was also hoping to maybe pull off a trick move where he pulled himself out of the way at the last second while the guys chasing him went careening off the edge. He should probably know better than to attempt things he’d seen in cartoons, but he’d never behaved the most logically when his life was threatened. He thought that perhaps the extensive practice in that area should have changed that fact, but no.
Almost there. He could see the edge where it dropped off, the optical illusion making it seem like a short drop to the ground below when really it was more like falling off a three story building. Not that he knew what that was like from experience.
A shape stepped out from behind a tree about ten feet in front of him, startling him so badly he felt his heart somersault in his chest and he did his best to skid to a stop. How had they gotten ahead of him? He panted and started to dart to the right when a voice called out to him and made him freeze in his tracks. His body felt almost beyond his control as he turned back slowly and saw that the shape was actually a woman, tall and lean, with intense, violet eyes. She held herself with the bearing of a queen.
“Mieczysław,” she said again, softly this time. He didn’t see her mouth move. “You have been chosen.”
That didn’t sound good. It was never a good thing when a beautiful stranger suddenly appeared in front of you and told you you’d been chosen. “No, thank you,” he said as politely as he could. Fear, adrenaline, and his aborted sprint caused him to breathe so heavily he worried for his lungs.
She smiled at him, revealing sharp, white teeth like a shark. She didn’t say anything else, just raised her hand until her palm faced him. He should run. He should move. Pain ignited along his spine, sizzling like lightning was setting fire to his bones. The agony spread, pouring out into his limbs and sinking down, down. He didn’t know when he’d fallen to the ground, didn’t know how long the pain lasted. It simply was . All encompassing, paralyzing. He didn’t even scream, his throat too constricted with the electric magic coursing through him. A voice that didn’t quite sound like the woman from the woods spoke to him in gentle, soothing tones, telling him how important he was, how very pleased she was that he would be the one to do this for her. Do what? he tried to ask, but the voice faded at the same time as his consciousness and all he knew for a long time was blackness.
Stiles groaned as he woke up, a lingering ache in his head reminding him of what had happened. He pushed himself up as gently as possible and was shocked to feel sheets beneath his hands, not leaves and dirt. He opened his eyes and looked around. He had no idea how he’d gotten to his room. Maybe one of the pack had found him and carried him home? It sounded like something Scott would do. Or even Derek, although he would deny it if directly accused of that level of kindness. Blearily, he checked the time on his phone. Time for school. Another cosmic injustice to this whole life was having to wake up every morning, pretend nothing life threatening or supernatural had occurred the night before, and drag himself to classes to fake paying attention to physics formulas and lessons on American history.
He let himself half fall out of bed, turning the motion into a smooth roll to his feet. His body felt sore and kind of weak, like he hadn’t eaten in days and had also been run into the ground by Coach. He pulled out some clean clothes without really looking at them and pulled them on. When he went to pull on his shirt, however, he paused. He ran his hand over the front of it and frowned. He remembered when this shirt was ripped to shreds in a fight. He couldn’t imagine anyone in his life thoughtful enough to replace it, even if it had been one of his favorites, and he certainly hadn’t done so. He didn’t know what to make of it, so he just put the matter in a box in the back of his mind labelled ‘Examine Later’ and grabbed his backpack.
Scott was waiting for him outside of the school, as he’d done every day of their entire friendship. It was the singular constant in the sea of chaos that Stiles tried to never take for granted.
“Hey, man,” he greeted as he approached him. Was it just him or did something seem off about Scott? “What happened last night?” If Scott had been the one to retrieve him from the woods, then Scott would have no trouble telling him all about it. If not, he would go and bug Derek until he confessed.
“It was crazy!” Scott exclaimed, his voice higher and younger than Stiles was expecting. Obviously something beyond incredible had happened if Scott was reverting to his Innocent Voice. “After you left, this thing came out of nowhere and bit me!”
“After I left?” Stiles hadn’t been anywhere near Scott last night. They both had gone in separate directions after school to accomplish their tasks for ‘Mission Defeat Argent: Again’. “What sort of ‘thing’? And dude, unless it was poisonous you should be fine.”
“Does this look fine?” Scott demanded, lifting his shirt. There, on his side, right where Peter had bitten him was a large piece of gauze taped where something had, apparently, bitten him again.
“That’s just freaky,” Stiles commented. Surely Scott of all people recognized the odd coincidence of the bite’s location. He imagined being bitten by a werewolf wasn’t something one easily forgot the details of.
“Tell me about it,” Scott agreed. “It was too dark to see much, but I'm pretty sure it was a wolf.”
Stiles froze where he’d been reaching out a hand to lift the bandage and take a look at the wound. “A wolf bit you?” he asked faintly. He had the strangest sense of deja vu.
“Uh huh. Came out of nowhere, growling and snarling. Knocked me over and just took a chunk out of my side.”
“Scott,” Stiles said carefully, “is this the first time you’ve ever been bitten by a wolf?”
“What kind of question is that?” Scott asked, tipping his head to the side, eyes wide. When Stiles just kept watching him intently, Scott huffed. “Yeah, of course it is. I would have told you if I’d ever been attacked by a wolf, Stiles.”
Right. The best friend code of sharing everything with each other. The one they’d solidified in fifth grade with spit and a made up handshake. Stiles looked back down at the covered bite, the one that had changed their lives irrevocably, and felt the world tilt sideways under his unmoving feet.
“Stiles? Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Stiles muttered. “We gotta get to class. The bell’s about to ring.” He didn’t say anything else, just turned and walked toward the front door. They’d been standing off to the side, partially hidden, mostly ignored, and no one paid them any attention as they joined the throng headed for their various classrooms. Scott tried to speak to him several more times in the hallway, but Stiles just shook his head each time. He needed time to think, to process. Yes, their lives were beyond insane, but he hadn’t been mentally prepared for time travel.
If that’s what this even is , he thought to himself, sliding into his seat. It could be a vivid hallucination or a dream created by that woman, whatever she was. It could be that I’m actually in a coma right now, imagining all this in my head.
Another terrible thought slithered into his brain. It could be the Nogitsune.
Stiles mostly tuned out the teacher as she handed out the syllabi and went over the plans for this semester. He stared down at the paper without seeing it. He didn’t want to believe that it could be the fox demon. They’d defeated it, it was gone. He also despised the idea of all of this being a product of his own imagination. It reminded him too much of his mother’s delusions before she died. He’d done a lot of research both during her illness and when he was first struggling with the Nogitsune’s possession into how to tell the difference between dreams or hallucinations and reality. It was how he started noticing the details, little discrepancies that allowed him to know when he was awake, like the number of fingers on a person's hands. A quick look around the room showed that everyone, including himself, had the requisite ten fingers. He focused his eyes and looked at the paper he was staring at blankly and was relieved to find that he could easily read the words printed there. Which left the last possibility he’d come up with: time travel.
Even if it really was time travel, that didn’t make things any better. For one, it felt like a trap. A terrible, deadly, no good trap. What was the point? Did the woman get off on his confusion and angst? Did she just want to see him live through all those horrors again? He paled at that thought. He’d gone back to the beginning. Not far enough to actually stop the catalysts for everything to come, but just far enough to suffer through it all a second time. That must be it. She was a sadist and was sitting somewhere, watching, munching on some popcorn. He imagined her laugh to be an evil cackle, one that she didn’t even have to open her mouth to produce. He shuddered.
He glanced out the window, mostly out of paranoid habit than anything else, and saw a dark haired girl sitting on the bench outside. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and turned slightly to face the building, allowing Stiles to see her face. Allison . He stared for a long moment, his lungs seizing in his chest. It took everything in him to not leap out of his desk and sprint to her. He wanted to kneel down in front of her and weep into her knees and beg for absolution for her death. He knew, objectively, that it hadn’t been his fault. It hadn’t been him who killed her. But it had been a thing wearing his face, one that he’d been too weak to bar from his mind, and he carried that guilt with him like an albatross around his neck.
When he managed to escape from his thoughts, Allison was already gone from the bench and he looked up at the sound of a knock on the door. Allison walked in, alive and whole and unburdened by the truth of life. She sat behind Scott after being introduced. Just as the first time, Scott turned around and handed her a pen with one of his puppy dog smiles and she melted. Stiles swallowed past a lump in his throat. He wasn’t sure if he could do this. He wished it were a dream so that he could wake up, but the more time passed the more he became convinced that it was real. His jaw tightened and he forced himself through a series of breathing exercises until the bell rang.
In the hallway, he passed by Erica Reyes, human and small and so, so fragile. She looked up and caught his eye and he felt gutted. Time seemed to freeze as they both paused, staring at each other across the stream of students flowing between them. He saw her in a thousand different states: embarrassed on the floor of the gym after a seizure, proud and confident as she sank her teeth into a blood red apple, scared and in pain in the Argents’ basement, bloody on the floor of an abandoned bank with glossy, lifeless eyes. He blinked and she was just a girl again, wearing soft, comfortable clothes and no makeup, confused by his strange attention. He left her and hurried to catch up to Scott for their next class.