I.

There's a comforting routine after the school bell rings signaling the end of another day of classes. Stiles has this all down to the tittle on the 'i'. It's robotic, requiring minimum thought, even her thoughts become more Neanderthal Hulk-like; it's even worse with the cramps, causing her to grit her teeth because she read in WWII soldier diaries that grinding teeth can distract one from pain and torture but since in this sense, her first world problem shouldn't warrant technically a 'grinding'. Hulk in pain. Hulk want bath! She has a hot tub to soak in to look forward to before she can even look at her homework and all the problem sets that Finstock has gleefully dumped upon them ("I make it rain").

Open locker. Shove books in backpack. Wave at Scott. Look for Lydia. (Can't find Lydia.) Push past the lacrosse players. Accidentally kick Danny's new beau in the left shin. Walk out the double doors. Descend the steps. Pick out the car keys. Rap on her new paint job twice for good luck. Start the jeep. Back up. Pull out. Follow the line of cars. Oh look there's Derek-

- collapsing right in the middle of the parking lot…

If anybody is familiar with the time honored sound effects of a screeching car with failing brakes crashing into a tree yeah, that's her brain right now, ending with a Michael Bay explosion. "What the…" she manages to slam on the pedal and winced with her entire body jerked forward. "Oh come on!" she craned her head over the dashboard and still couldn't see him, fully aware of the jerk in the car behind her demanding that she 'get a fucking move on, Stilinski' with liberal applications of the horn. She blinks fully out of her automation, hitting the steering wheel in frustration, "You got to be kidding me. This guy is everywhere."

Just as she wretched her door open and climbed out, Scott darted over to inspect the commotion, already examining the downed man with the analysis technique of a veterinarian. Her eyes dart to Derek's side and the red bleeding hole on his left arm as Scott exclaims, "What happened? Why aren't you healing?"

"Dude." She side-steps to his side and mutters with all the observation of a teen, "He doesn't look too hot." Derek's face was a ghostly contrast to his hair, a good number of shades paler than his shirt.

"It's a special bullet," yeah, the guy wasn't sounding hot at all either; he couldn't even use his patented pissed-off, gruff voice.

Stiles shakes her head in consternation, "What? A silver bullet?"

So while Derek can't maintain the condescending tone in his voice, he can in his glare, "No, you idiot. Wolfsbane!" Then he turns to Scott as if he's the smarter one of the duo, "I need you to go to the Argents house and find the bullet that Kate Argent shot me with. It'll negate the poison."

"Argents? Allison?" Scott sputters in confusion, "They shot you?" He stutters to a stop when the glare intensified and swallowed loudly, turning his attention to his best friend, "Alright then. Stiles?"

"Yeah?" She warily answers.

Scott hauls Derek up to a position between his knees and his feet and guides him to… "He needs to stay with you."

"…What?" Stiles pitches her voice higher but doesn't hesitate to open the door to the shotgun seat. (Distantly, she's reminded of her "Try not to kill me" speech which revolved around, "Scott. My weight doesn't even make the cut-off for the Red Cross Blood Donation Drive. I am a skeleton dripped in wax. Sarcasm is my only defense.")

"Look, I know that you usually like to hole yourself up during that time of the month when you…" Scott makes the vaguest gesture towards her general direction. Stiles mouth drops open in shock.

"You can smell it," Stiles flatly states out after a couple seconds of the most awkward silence, "Holy hell, you can smell when-" Scott cringed. Even Stiles is not mature enough to say the words in the middle of public. Stiles rubbed her temples and willed her face to stop heating up, "You have got to be kidding… Shut up, Greenberg!" She snaps back at the horns behind her and then spins back around on her heals, opening her car door as Scott positions Derek on the seat next to her and closes the door, and levels her meanest look at the newly turned werewolf, "You owe me so much for this."

"Take care." Scott adds and pats on her door twice before heading back to his bike.

II.

Logic dictates that if A=B and B=C then A=C. So if Scott can smell it and Scott is a werewolf and Derek is a werewolf, then Derek can smell it too. Contrary to popular opinion, she does have dignity and a glass ceiling for her daily quota of humiliation and she is not letting this stand and fester in the hands of a twenty-something, near-stranger (hot too, but that's not the point). So after more than an hour of incessant illegal texting while driving, she manages to get the world's most unhelpful text back: Need more time.

Need more time? She will bet her right arm and her first born that all he has accomplished so far is making out with Allison seeing how Allison has a thing with those little puppy smiles that Scott gives her which is all congrats for him: Achievement Unlocked and all, maybe they'll reach second base, but there's the fact that there are bigger problems at sea namely… She side glances to said problem, "Yo. Try not to bleed on my seats alright? We're almost there."

Derek glances back and then takes time to scan the road, "Where are we going?"

Stiles shrugs, "I don't know. Maybe, your house?"

"We can't go there." Stiles' stoic face turns darker as she glares off to the stop light before her.

"We can't go there," she parrots.

Derek lets out a sardonic laugh, "Not when I can't protect myself." Stiles breaths out through her nose like a raging bull from Spain and yanks on the steering wheel, bringing the jeep to an abrupt halt by the curb. She squints at him, taking note that his hands were clenched together to hold down tremors. He's looking worse for the wear as the seconds tick by.

"What will happen if Scott doesn't find the bullet? Huh?" She shakes a hand towards him and demanded answers, "Are you dying?"

"Not yet," the man replies, fingers moving towards his sleeve, "I have a last resort."

"Throw me a bone here, man. What are you talking about?" Stiles angrily gestures towards the air, "What last resort? What could you possibly be-" Derek pulls up his sleeve. A wave of nausea rolls unforgivingly over her but she can't stop staring at the wound with its little lines trailing up the arm and the blood trailing down, "Oh… my god. What is that? Why does it stink so bad?" Her own hand comes up to her mouth and then over her eyes but her fingers parted so that she could still see and grimace as with every flex of the muscle, more blood drips into her car. "Is that contagious, like, the precursor of the zombie apocalypse?" Thank god the windows are rolled down: she coughs, ignoring the judging look from the other man as she indulges in her histrionics, "You know what? I don't see the problem of going to your place and dropping you off before I puke."

"We're not going to my house." Stiles manages to bite down her groan of agony. Jesus Christ. This man would rather pull out his own teeth than give information. She tries to a different tactic.

Her eyes dart from his face back to his wound, again and again as if engrossed in a table tennis match. "I don't think you're in a position to be barking orders at me. The way I see it, the wolfsbane is spreading isn't it?" She bluntly asks, cranking up the fan and inhaling through her mouth. She chews on a hangnail for a bit before noting, "I'm not going to lie: you smell like death, like serious zombie necrosis here. If I, with my measly human nose, smell rotting flesh, you probably smell an epically realistic version of World War Z." Derek rested his head against his window, eyes glazed and almost closed, drawing shallow breaths, face sheened in a light layer of sweat. Is he even listening? She resisted the urge to poke him. Her face twists in horror as she recalls the many contamination-esque movies that she forced Scott to watch as a kid, "Derek? You can't possibly be thinking about amputation, are you?"

The silence says enough… shit. Shit. SHIT.

You cannot put this type of responsibility on the slim shoulders of a teenage girl. Normal teenage girls would faint on the spot. Stiles, though not really a typical teenage girl, is close to doing that. Derek has no qualms to speak of.

For the record, this has got to rank amongst the top five shittiest days ever.

The radio plays The Whos in soft crackling tones from a faraway tower. After pulling back the emergency brake and drawing her knees to her chest, she picks at a stitch in her jeans, deep in jarring, whirling, in-motion thoughts, the only constant being the resolve that there is no way in hell that she's going to be staying in a jeep all afternoon and what looks to be evening with a non-verbal werewolf that smells of rotting flesh who can also inconveniently smell menstrual blood. She has a moment of clarity accompanied by a numb third-person party perspective of this: her life – to an audience, in Technicolor. Her moment of clarity also includes the following: Silver on the periodic table is labeled Ag for Argyros in Greek and Argentum in Latin and Argent in French. Lore speaks of werewolves, always hunted with silver.

Wordlessly, she squares her shoulders and pulls out, makes a turn and gets back onto the pain road. "Scott's not going to make it on time, not if Allison and all that jazz is going on," she casually says with all the air of a long-suffering tone of 'teenagers, I know, right?' when the werewolf offers her a tired, suspicious look. "Ergo, I have made a plan and I hope that it's a damn good one." She visibly brightens up, "We'll first need to head back to my place to regroup and collect supplies. Are you strong enough to give me a boost?"

"Why?" Derek grunts out with minimal effort, eyes once again closed.

"To reach the Argent's second floor window," she says with a grim smile and then sends out a text to Scott ordering him to keep the Argents busy.

III.

There was a time in her life when she convinced herself that the only reason why the Queen of England hasn't accepted her as the new James Bond was because her name was too Polish with a first name that was unreadable to everybody but her mom. Long story short, binoculars are always damn useful but the glare on the window closest to the Argents' dining room wasn't giving her much visibility. The light from the setting sun caught on the hair of one of the inhabitants, causing her give an involuntary whistle. And if she wasn't feeling like a complete stalker now, this cinches everything. But damn, that is one sexy lady, man eater now, MILF for sure if she ever decides to have kids. On the other hand, Stiles wasn't even on the cusp of womanhood and definitely not glowing in it like Lydia and Allison.

She had handed the binoculars to Derek and then reached into her pack to pull out a pen and her graded statistics exam and flipped to a blank page and starts drawing a conglomeration of ugly rectangles. Thank god that Allison had invited her over to study Chemistry together two days ago; it meant that she didn't have to beg Danny to hack into the city hall records for blueprints. "Listen up, Agent Wolf," she had ignored the growl and took it at face value to mean that he's conscious, "We have the first floor and the second floor. The important parts of the first floor are the dining hall, living room, and kitchen. Here," she tapped at a spazzing line, "is the stairs going into the second floor. That's the guest room where Allison's aunt is staying in, Kate Argent? Ringing any bells?" She then scooted far away when the dark aura from the werewolf nearly suffocated her, instincts telling her to bolt.

Instead, she got the privilege of watching Derek clench onto the side door armrest so hard that it collapsed in on itself.

The climbing part of the plan was easy as dicks. To the question of "Do you even lift?" the answer is that Derek bench-presses people like Stiles when he's sleeping for shits and giggles to show off to people like Man-eater, Kate Argent.

So now she's crouching on the nearby rooftop, leaning over to swipe a finger at the outside of the window ledge and rubbing the powder together thoughtfully, watching it disappears with the breeze. If she was Sherlock Holmes, this would be the part where she would sniff it, taste it, claim that the substance is grounded wolfs bane, and puff up with Watson gushing out praises behind him. Instead, she strokes her imaginary goatee and says with all the knowledge that she contained, "Huh." With that one word full of meaning, she flips her hood up and pulls it over. The red hoodie isn't going to be the end all of all disguises but it's her biggest one and should throw people off her trail seeing how little she wears it.

Seriously, all she wants is a hot bath.

It's a pity that Derek doesn't have a cell phone (still convinced that he lives in a world pre-Nokia let alone the rebirth of Apple) because of course things can't be convenient where she can just take out her phone and ask, "So which is it? Nordic Blue Monkshood" as she's staring at the box labeled Aconit Napel Bleu Nordique "or Aconitum ferox or any of the other species?" Instead, there are headsets with really bad signal that aren't even good enough to speak across. Instead, Derek agreed to turn on the headset only when he sees Kate walking up the stairs from the opposite window. Still, white noise is better than no noise.

Kate Argent's room is a room for a psychopath that is really talented at hiding all of her psychopathic traits. The color theme is subtle feminism. Everything thing looks neat and orderly. She has papers and papers documenting animal attacks with little writings in the margins with first names, last names – or sometimes, just the last names. Her weapon collection in her trunk is also very impressive, to say the least – that looks like a missile launcher – as was the impressive bullet collection of which Stiles now has to get a sample of every single bullet, memorizing which bullet goes with which species of plant.

Stiles approaches another side desk and curiously reads what looks to be a collection of newspapers dating all the way back to the early 21st century. She frowns as her eyes fixate upon the word Hale (; her speed reading skills and the ability to accumulate and utilize logic in a way that if A=B, B=C, then A=C should both be acknowledged as super legendary). Within moments, she blanches and stumbles back as though the clipping had personally dealt the killing blow and she wants to puke in a way that "the epiphany of the existence of werewolves" has never managed to impact on her.

She had snuck into her dad's files about the Hale fire. Autopsy reports of the entire family, around ten strong, all ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Inquiries were made about why everybody was in their own rooms, as though they couldn't escape. The Sheriff had also made a note of a ring of ash perfectly surrounding the house but its identity and effects unidentifiable. Stiles glances down to her fingertips and the remnants of white powder still rubbed in. A photograph of a boy (fifteen? sixteen?) and Kate Argent, cougar style, slips out of the paperclip attached to the back of the article. Stiles squints at the black and white photograph and tries to determine what sporting event the couple are. Another photograph slips out when she flips the clipping over. It's of a boy looked drugged up and happy, his back on a mattress, face flushed red – he looks kind of sick.

And then Stiles hears flashes of radio static and curses because it'll take too long to stuff everything back where she found them, because she knows that she's not in any crime scene murder movie and she might as well kiss the miracle of escaping without notice goodbye. The sound of feet padding against the wood floors made her double her speed. The door opens just as she slips out the window. The angry shriek forces her to gracelessly scramble the hell out of this place. She sprawls herself over the shingles, thankful that the setting sun gives her a great deal of shadow to creep across, crawls to the other side of the house and jumps down to the garage roof and then tries to parkour off the roof into a bush and…

Well, she was never good at landings – but at least the pain on her foot wasn't crippling.

She limps down three blocks off the main road like a fine trooper she is until she sees a familiar blue jeep parked in the sketchiest alleyway she could find. After shrugging off her hoodie and tossing it through Derek's passenger window, she empties her pockets of bullets onto the dashboard, rattling off the genus and species of each special bullet from handguns to snipers. Apparently she did something right because Derek reaches for the sniper bullet, rips off the cap, empties its contents and pulls out a lighter. He completely ignores her indignant protests of burning down her car as he collects the ashes of the burnt wolfs bane and shoves it into the bullet hole. He even digs his claws into the wound to ensure that the ashes don't escape as he howls and arches his back from the pain, but it seems to do the trick and the black veins are receding like the best Sci-Fi movie that she could ever see and the skin is repairing itself like nano-machines in a cyborg.

Derek leans back and his entire body slacks.

Stiles froze.

Because now she knows who the boy was in Kate's collection of photos by that single familiar face and it's wrong on so many different levels that she can't even compute the utter… It wasn't really even the age difference, it was the manipulation, the whole idea of using someone through sex to… Hell, that is gross. So, so gross. Stiles bends over and dry heaves with her forehead resting against the steering wheel. If A=B, B=C, then A=C. The Hale fire occurred when Derek was around her age. Kate is at least five years older than Derek. The age of consent in California is eighteen. How many people were killed in the fire? There were parents, grandparents, and children… reportedly a victim of the 'accident' was expecting within two months.

(Allison has a plaque of her family motto hung proudly by her bedroom door, "Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent.")

Derek, still sweaty and pale, has his own suspicious gaze trained upon her, eyebrows furrowed as if asking why she isn't driving yet. So after taking a few more shaky breaths, she starts the car after many fails at sticking her key into the ignition and pulls forward the gear shift and says, "Did you know that serial murders tend to take a bit of their victims, hair, clothing, blood, something to use as a memento to showcase as a trophy?" She turns out of the alleyway, "There's an old superstition that taking a photo of somebody would take a bit of that person's soul."

"Stiles," he says in that 'shut up, Stiles' kind of way.

"I was spotted," she says, checking her rear view mirror and absentmindedly noting a large, black SUV behind her.

"And you led them here?" Derek incredulously asked.

"No, I went out the back way. But I don't think she can…"

She stops in front of a traffic light, the SUV stops on her left side. She glances over and sees four people all watching her, one of them looks to be a proud man-eater with a grin made to kick puppies. While it was smart to hide the hoodie, she didn't really think about hiding Derek or the bullet casings still rolling on her dashboard and her jeep had no tint on the windows. Luck doesn't even exist for her anymore. It waves on by, not even deigning to give her the after effects. Stiles, in her deep panic, offers weak smile accompanied by a two finger salute towards Kate Argent and her newly formed group of followers and… oh my god, those are guns.

"Fuck," she says, reaches down to shift her jeep into reverse and slams on the gas.

IV.

The only experience she can attest to that would assist her in this sort of situation is a lifetime of playing Grand Theft Auto and Mario Cart, the latter which taught her that running over prostitutes and grandmas with strollers was a good thing. And here she thought that she would never have to do a 'K' turn ever after Drivers' Ed, with the belief that the skill would turn out to be useless like memorizing SAT vocabulary. "He's not answering," Derek growls out after attempting to call Scott listed under 'BFF' with her phone.

"Don't shift, alright? Calm your tits. No claws, no teeth, seriously." Stiles checks her blind spot and moves over two lanes and over the yellow line onto oncoming traffic and takes a sharp left turn into a parking lot, her stomach dropping when her jeep did a wheelie. She also adds, "No growling either, it messes with my mojo." Yeah, she totally did a wheelie, another thing to check off the bucket-list. How in the world is she not losing her shit right now? "Try 'AAGF'. Put it on speaker phone." It only took two rings before someone answered.

"Stiles?"

"They're keeping the same distance," Derek turned around, "They're toying with us." He places the phone in the cup holder, "Who is that?"

"Can't imagine why. I have nearly a full tank of gas here. At least they're not shooting," Stiles muttered before yelling into the phone, not bothering with the proper greeting ettiquette, "Allison? Do you know where Scott is?"

"He left. My parents were going kind of nuts after we heard Aunt Kate went upstairs after dinner and, well, not pleasant. I think he was heading back to your place. He mentioned a sniper shotting someone?" Cars were angrily honking at her as she weaved through heavy traffic, "Stiles? Aunt Kate ran off ranting about a robber and getting her guys out there to hunt. Uh, that wasn't you was it? You're not saying anything. That was you? What are you doing? You know there's a curfew out." The phone slips between the crevice of her seat and the emergency brake when the jeep banked on sharp turn.

"That is a really, really long story," Stiles yells over traffic, trusting Allison to hear her, "it'll be a misunderstanding if you assume anything but I want to tell you that it's all your aunt's fault, I swear to god. Right now she is a psycho bitch and I need you to somehow get her to stop following us."

"Get into an alleyway and block the area so they won't go around us, we'll get out on the other door," Derek hissed, craning his neck again to check on the status of their pursuers. "She's calling for backup and discussing strategies on how to corner you into an area without cameras or people. The sooner you do this, the better."

Stiles makes a dying-cat sound.

"Us?"

"Derek and I- Shit!" Stiles curses as the SUV shoved itself against her back right corner, trying to crash her onto the sidewalk. Derek grabbed the wheel, causing the jeep to narrowly balance on the curb and the road. "Come on, baby," she mutters to her jeep, drifting into a right turn, "don't fail me now."

"Derek? Derek who? As in Derek Hale?" Allison's incredulous voice resonates in its dark hiding spot, "Stiles, my parents talk about him a lot and they don't say that he's the guy you would bring home to the parents. You know that you can't keep wanted fugiti-"

"Not the point right now. That is so not the point." Stiles snaps back, "Here's what's happening. Your aunt and her band of merry men are trying to kill us. I'm talking bonafide murder with guns. Huge guns. Not like those swanky pistols, closer to like, uzis, got it? The only reason I'm alive right now is because she likes the chase. I'll explain later. Do not tell anybody about this, not your parents… well, if you can find Scott, that'll be great, but- swear to secrecy, man, and somehow get your aunt off our backs."

"What do you expect me to do? What can I do?"

The school looms into view beyond the next corner. "I don't know, work a miracle like you always do?"

"Since when have I ever…" Allison pauses as Stiles stops in the middle of the alley way, swerving until both the nose and the tail end of her jeep are bumping into the walls, "Stiles. Did Scott ever tell you? You know that my parents tape my phone conversations, right?"

Out of all the kids in Beacon Hills High, she would think that it would be her dad, the Sheriff, that would most likely tap into a phone, not the parents of a near perfect angel. Then again, with Scott… "What? What sort of parents tape phone conversations of their kids?!" Stiles yells in horror as Derek kicks open the door and drags her out by the collar over the seats and to the other side before she can even turn the engine off. After realizing the problem with her not-so-twisted-but-still-in-pain ankle, Derek manhandles her into a piggy-back ride and sprints away from Allison's voice still yelling over the phone.

Just then, the familiar black SUV slams mercilessly against the side of the jeep, causing Stiles to whine in empathetic pain. Her baby: all the times that she had lovingly cared for it, all the times that it had faithfully served her – years of bonding – all gone. Still, she can't deny the fact that Derek's plan is working; the SUV can't move another inch – or at least the effort isn't going to be worth it. Tires dig into the ground, catching on the edges of potholes, as the SUV struggles against the dead weight of broken rubble. She smells rubber. That jeep is totaled; there is clearly no hope of fixing it. Slowly, the hunters files out with their weapons cocked and ready. Kate Argent saunters out and confidently breaths in the air of anticipation for blood.

Derek snarls with over grown fangs; running away in a prey-like fashion wasn't part of werewolf instinct, but Stiles has enough common sense to know when to flee but not enough to stop her self from smacking her handler over the back of his head, thankfully he doesn't seem too bothered, "Get a move on. There's a side door up ahead that will get us into the school hallways. Over there… no, that one. The alarms doesn't work for that one since that coach from the swim team went up against it with a baseball bat six years ago. Let me down, I just need a couple seconds to pick the lock and-" The padlock shatters under Derek's grip. "…that works too."

Once inside with the door locked behind him, Derek shifts her weight more comfortably over his back and props her up, giving no notion of wanting to let her back down, and jogs down the hall. He flicks on a switch and the area lights up block by block like they do in prison camps. "They haven't changed much here except for the Hall of Fame trophies," he notes absentmindedly.

"What?" Stiles starts, "Oh right." She laughs, "You probably did go to high school here. This is the only high school in the area."

"I had a normal childhood," Derek points out sounding mildly offended, "What did you think? Or do you still believe that teachers live in the school closets and come out every morning fresh and ready to start the lesson?"

She holds up both hands in surrender, "I'm just saying that it's a bit weird knowing that I could probably find your handsome mug on four of the yearbooks in the archives. I'll have you know that it's a reasonable conclusion seeing that you live in this dilapidated-"

His head tilts to the side as if aiming his ears at a nearly unnoticeable source of sound. Stiles cuts herself off and looks nervously over her shoulder and saw only the continuous rows of lights and lockers. The handle on the door on the far side is starting to shake. She pushes against his shoulder blades, trying to convey the message of needing to hide. They quickly duck into a classroom for home economics as bullets knock enough holes into the emergency exit door to force it open. Derek allows her to slide down and sink to the floor while he took a chair. This is just like the Code Red procedure back in elementary school except the stranger with the gun is an experienced SWAT team of crazies. They sit in the shadows in a corner of the room at an angle from the door. Stiles could hear her pulse race.

"Derek, sweetie?" Kate calls into the empty corridors, "Where are you?" Stiles attempts to curl deeper into the werewolf's back and closed her eyes as the sounds of footsteps neared. "Little Wolf? Remember how I used to call you that? Little Wolf, please come out, your little Red Riding Hood is here to see you. And your companion, who is that lovely little girl? I would like to meet her and tell her the consequences of stealing prized wolfs bane."

An imaginary bucket of cold water drenched her spine as she heard the clear 'shhk' sound of claws sliding out of skin. "Don't listen to her. Listen to me. Don't listen to her. You confront her and I guarantee it's going to be my ass on the line," she grits under her breath, trying to control her own heart rate and not to lapse into another panic attack, knowing that her voice is loud enough to be heard, "I will find a way to haunt your miserable existence for the rest of your life if I die here. Now calm the fuck down." Derek eases into a low growl that could be mistaken for the crappy AC and ventilation of the school.

A couple of minutes later when the voices and clicking of heels on the hard floor fade off, Derek picks himself out of his hiding place and steps back into the hallway. Stiles runs a shaking hand through her hair and bites her fingernails, hyper aware of the hand on the door knob, twisting, pulling. "All clear," he announced softly into the darkness.

Her head spins with the amount of pressure building at her temples, as though she was leagues below the sea with no air expect for that contained in her lungs. The pain in her ankle is a mere dull ache that is easily ignored. She racks her brains for ideas. Once upon a time, Lydia Martin told her how to make Molotov cocktails. It was after the death of the bus driver. There was no reason why Lydia Martin would know how to make one, let alone decide that Stiles was worthy of that knowledge. She will need a large flask, something to use for as the wick, a flammable liquid… err, what else was there? It wasn't really one of Stiles' best moments seeing that she was completely drowning in the other girl's beauty, still pinching her arm to convince herself that no, this wasn't a dream: Lydia Martin had deigned to lower herself to talk to the known ADHD class clown.

"Stiles? I can hear someone coming, it's not Kate but we need to move."

As if anticipating that sentence, the sound of glass shattering from one of the classroom windows followed by a long howl causes both of them to jump. Derek spins around and makes his way to the door. "Stop for a sec. Wait a moment," Stiles tries her best to follow, stumbling when she hears muffled pleadings. In the distance, she can hear a redoubling of footsteps from Kate's group from the other side of the school. She peers over the doorway under Derek's arm and cranes her neck out, "What's going on?" Derek growls at her which she only acknowledges by lowering her voice. "No, seriously, what is happening?"

A classroom door is yanked off its hinges and thrown across the hallway into the lacrosse trophy case. Then a body is thrown against the floor, skidding to a stop by the broken display. The body shifts as if trying to move and starts groaning. …Is that Harris? Holy shit: that is Harris. A creature stomps out into view, a humanoid monster with a large chest and tapered waist on back wolf haunches. Its massive bulk forced it to bend over to fit through the doorway, muscles pushing and pulling with constant tension. Its head tapers into a muzzle with enlarged teeth. Two triangular ears are drawn back into its fur that is thick at the neck. Its eyes are blood red.

"What is that?" Stiles tugs on Derek's shirt and stares at the scene before her.

"The Alpha."

The Alpha howls. Mr. Harris screams. Kate's voice grows closer.

"Balls." The sigh that Stiles lets out is equally long suffering as it is reluctant.

Of course it would be the Alpha. Of course the Alpha would be out on a murder spree of one of her teachers on the night that she is back in school hiding from an insane arsonist after saving a werewolf from a magic bullet by sneaking into the room of said arsonist illegally and dipping into her collection of armory and inconveniently learning that said arsonist has a taste for young boys in the worst possible way imaginable. Of course there would be a grand car chase like that to rival the movies and of course her jeep ends up as nothing more than scrap metal. Of course the Alpha would be drawing the attention of the arsonist and her band of devotees back to their position. Of course all of this bullshit is happening on the exact day that she forgot to take Tylenol because life can never be easy.

Ever.

Dude, her dad is going to flip.

And to think that just a couple weeks ago, her biggest goal was to somehow get Lydia or Danny to say "hi" back at her.

Ladies and gentlemen: her life.