Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was mid-morning on a sunny day in early August and Stiles was on his knees in the burnt hull of the Hale house.  It sounded sexier than it was in actuality, because he was in a particularly charred room, one he wasn’t sure was structurally sound enough to hold his weight, looking for the charm off his mother’s lucky pendant.  It was just a penny, a penny shiny and worn from her fingers worrying at it. A penny she had picked up as a joke the day she met his father and had kept, made into a necklace and worn next to her heart until the day she died.

The delicate chain had snapped when it got caught in the strap of his bookbag. He had heard the chain let go and hadn't reacted quickly enough to grab the penny as it tumbled to the floor, skittering beneath the closed-off doorway to one of the rooms Derek had cordoned off as unsafe. 

He could hear it continue to roll out of his reach, oscillating to a stop behind the closed door.   Stiles hesitated for a moment - barely - before pushing opened the door, expecting the wood to crack beneath his touch or for the hinges to creek ominously.  Neither happened, but the room beyond had obviously taken a lot of damage from the fire, blackened with visible scorch marks where the fire had burned hotter than in other spots.  It was obvious why Derek had shut this room off from the rest and Stiles could tell from that first glance that traversing into it would be foolhardy at best (deadly at worst).

There were some things Stiles cared about more than his safety.

Besides, how much trouble could he get into?  It was a lucky penny.

He dropped to a crawl, the floorboards creaking ominously beneath his knees and residual soot from the charred wood coating his fingers.  He remembered, vaguely, some advice about distributing weight from a movie he watched once with thin ice, and he thought that might be something he should do.  He could see the penny in front of him, gleaming copper against the black, and he spread out on his stomach, inching towards it. 

The fingers of his right hand closed over it and relief was coursing through him when he spotted something else shining between two floorboards a few inches to his left, directly in the path of the bright morning sun. Whatever it was, it was spherical in shape and glinting in his eyes, attracting his attention in a way that niggled at his curiosity. Stiles knew that if he left without exploring what the mystery object was, he would think about it until he was forced to return to check it out.  And really, it was safer to only navigate the floor of this room once.

He rolled over, his clothing already streaked with ash, so what was a little more damage?  His hand closed around the object, and he tugged it carefully forward, pulling it out of a splintered hole in the floor.

Stiles cradled it in his hand, baffled.  It looked like a partially-charred talisman of some kind, design half melted away but the metal bits still gleaming, almost vibrating in his hand with a spark that felt hot to the touch, probably from the sun caressing the metal.

It fit so perfectly in the palm of his hand that he had a moment to wonder if it was meant to be held.  He just finished closing his left hand completely around it when the floor let go beneath him.

And he fell.

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles woke up in Beacon Hills.

That wasn’t right. 

Stiles woke up on a park bench in the middle of the downtown Memorial Park beneath the pigeon-crap covered statue of James Beacon, Beacon Hill’s founder and an 'upstanding citizen' rumoured to have murdered an entire camp of his fellow gold prospectors in order to keep the major vein he found to himself.  Stiles always thought it was karma that he then spent the next hundred and fifty some years being shit on by birds.

He wasn’t sure what that said about him and karma that James Beacon was the first thing he saw after he took a header through the floor of the Hale house.

He knew the park.  He knew the area he was sitting in, just like he knew if he turned his head to the left…

Stiles awoke sitting directly across from his father.

Stiles’ heart leapt in his throat, a heavy blanket of panic settling in his lungs as he watched his dad eat lunch on the same bench he had eaten lunch on every summer since Stiles was four.  Sometimes his mother would bring him downtown with a picnic basket and they would sit in the sun beneath the shade of James Beacon’s huge head in his prospector’s hat and eat lunch with his dad like one small happy family.  Those were good memories for Stiles.  Fond memories. 

He was dead.  It had to be that, it could only be that.  One moment he was falling through the floor of the Hale house and the next he was sitting across from his dad in the park, the day almost idyllic with the sun high in the sky, the birds chirping from the trees above James Beacon, and the scent of freshly cut grass on the air.

He was dead and someone would call his father to tell him any minute now.

Fear clawed at Stiles’ throat, powerful enough that he ended up choking down air as he tried to breathe.  He stumbled to his feet.

“Hey! Watch it!” a lady said, swerving as she was forced to jog around him.

Suddenly he could breathe, air rushing into his lungs in deep gulps as he panted, hands braced on his knees.  He wasn’t dead.  He had felt her brush his arm, and she had glowered at him with the contact.  He was flesh and blood, then, at least.  Probably not dead.

And then his dad was frowning up at him.  “Are you ok, kid?” he asked, concerned, like he did every time Stiles had a panic attack.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered, confused, looking around himself again.  Had the Hale house been a dream?  It couldn't have been, because Stiles was still holding the penny in one hand and the mystery metal object in the other, fists clenched around both as though the flesh and bone of his hands could protect and hide both objects through sheer willpower.

What the actual fuck was happening?

“My son gets panic attacks,” his dad offered, frowning at him.  “I recognise the signs.”

“I...” His father didn’t know him.  What?  Why didn’t his own father, his own flesh and blood, recognise him?  If Stiles hadn't been about to panic before, he certainly was now.

He was interrupted by the familiar sound of Motorola’s Hello Moto ring tone, and Stiles looked around in confusion because he hadn’t heard that for years.  It hadn’t even reached the point of making a come-back for nostalgia’s sake.

It was coming from his dad.  “Sorry, I have to take this.  A deputy’s duties are never done. Excuse me,” and then he was getting up off the bench and answering his RAZR, a phone Stiles had last seen when it fell into the lake on a fishing trip the summer of 2007.  Good riddance too, as far as Stiles was concerned, because his dad hung on to technology far beyond its best-before date.

Then he realized.  “What the hell,” he whispered to the empty park, turning around and taking in his surroundings. 

But that wasn’t actually the question, was it?

When the hell? was more like it.

He shoved his mother’s lucky penny in his pocket, the ridges of it leaving small crescent indents on his palm from where he had held it in his fist.

Some lucky penny.

Around town he saw more evidence that it wasn’t 2012 anymore.  The theatre on the corner was still open, advertising a matinee for Roman Holiday, and the windows were not only intact, but they weren’t boarded up against vandals either.  Bettie’s Diner was still painted the white of his childhood rather than the eye-catching mint green and raspberry it was painted in his teen years, and the town hadn’t yet voted to rename Pleasure Lane into Missionary Lane (Stiles wanted to shake the hand of whoever had that sense of humour).

He walked around for a while, cataloguing the differences and trying to remember what point they changed.  He thought it might be summer of 2005, because the Applebees across from the community college was still being built, and he remembered that it opened right at the start of the 2005/2006 school year.

By the time he finished exploring he was hot and sticky, his throat parched from the afternoon heat.  He knew the outdoor pool and park had a water fountain he could stop to take a drink from, but his stomach was growling and he was starting to get cranky from a combination of fatigue and hunger.  Breakfast seemed like forever ago, though technically he wouldn’t eat it for another seven years, and he was still reeling from the possibility – the seeming reality – of the fact he had fallen through the floor in the Hale house and woke up in the past.

And he really, really wanted a chocolate milkshake.

Stiles pulled out his wallet and thumbed through the limited funds he had.  He still had the grocery money his father had left out that morning, plus a few ones and a twenty that were all his, and in his mind it didn’t seem to be nearly enough.  Who knew how long he would be here for?  He’d have to make it stretch.

The idea was horrifying and frightening, and brought way more problems to mind than he could really deal with.

Where would he sleep?  What would he wear?  How would he eat smart and spread out his money if he didn’t have anywhere to store his stuff?  How could he get a job without a social security number if this ended up being long term?  What if this was long term?  Like, forever long term. What if he couldn’t get back?

Stiles had two ways of coping with questions he didn’t know how to answer.  One was to research the hell out of it until he was sure he could account for most of the surprise variables, and the second was to ignore it.

Ignoring it sounded pretty good at the moment.  Like, potentially, he would go into Bettie’s, have a milkshake, and once he was finished enough time would have passed that it would turn out he was in a coma after partially bleeding out over the floor of Derek’s basement, probably knocking himself unconscious during the fall.  It would probably kill Derek to find him like that, which was a bonus because that meant Derek would be extra surly around him for about a week.

Stiles found it kind of hilarious that Derek’s response to ‘you almost died in the same basement most of my family died’ would be to take it out on him with glowers and animosity.

Hilarious and sad, which was why he would never call Derek on it.

Well, not call him on it too much.  If he didn’t give Derek shit about something Derek would become suspicious, and Stiles really did feel bad about the likelihood it would be Derek who found him, alive.

So, Stiles was fully hoping that he would be awake from this incredibly trippy dream by at least nightfall and could go back to his regularly scheduled program. 

He wasn’t sure what it said about his life that he wanted to get out of Doctor Who and back to Big Wolf on Campus, but all he had to do was wait it out and he’d probably wake up eventually.  Food would take his mind off all of that.

Probably.

Or maybe he’d choke himself awake.

It was a win/win.

(Or, more likely, all the walking around town, worrying and freaking out over seeing his dad in 2005, was throwing off his ability to face the truth and inevitability of his situation and he needed to take a moment to reboot).

The milkshake was smooth and refreshing going down, sweet with just a hint of bitterness, just the way he liked Bettie’s milkshakes before the face-lift to the diner which left half the menu with more nutritious ingredients.  There was nothing more fulfilling than full cream, real sugar and the very real possibility everything in Bettie’s was laced with some kind of saturated fat.

Because he was responsible and knew he should eat real food at some point today, he paired it with an order of curly fries.  Salty goodness definitely overcame all mental obstacles.  He was sitting in the back of the diner where he could watch everyone who came and went, giving himself a bit of privacy so he could worry about what he would do next in peace, because he couldn’t just assume he would wake up.  He could hope and wish all he wanted, but that didn’t make it true and having a distraction helped with the process.  It was fascinating watching Beacon Hills and remembering that Mr. Hershey, his ninth grade math teacher, used to have hair, or that Mrs. Thompson wasn’t always a widow.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the cute guy three booths away.

He had five fries in his mouth at once, eyes subtly tracking the back cute guy's head, when he spotted someone familiar, dark blond hair giving an attractive and innocent allure to a face that was as pretty as it was predatory.

Stiles almost choked on his curly fries, the spices turning into the taste of ash on his tongue as he tried to swallow them down, stricken with horror as his stomach churned and rebelled and his eyes immediately cut back to the third booth in front of him.

The guy’s companion was getting to her feet and gliding out of the booth and Stiles could see everything with the certainty of foreknowledge: the teenage boy laughed at something his sister said and flicked the crumpled paper straw wrapper after her as she stuck out her tongue, continuing into the restrooms;  Kate Argent watched the scene with calculating eyes, stepping away from the counter stool the moment the girl was out of sight with deliberate precision.

Stiles scrambled to his feet before he even understood his intent, because of course he recognised Derek.  He recognised Derek the moment Derek entered the diner with Laura and all air had drained from the room as he focused on Derek’s douchey spiked hair and clean-shaven face.  There was no mistaking the eyebrows or the cheekbones.

Derek.

Derek.

The grin was new (the grin Derek seemed to level at him when Stiles looked up from his milkshake, straw clamped between his teeth with a growl and a mock shake of his head to represent his dominance over his prey – the elusive straw – and Derek just finished saying something to his sister as he slipped into the booth).

(Derek grinned.  At Stiles.  That was so new that Stiles didn't know what to do about anything.  New, and cute.)

Or old?  Stiles hadn’t quite gotten a hang of what tense he was supposed to be thinking in.

Stiles would always recognise Derek, and because he recognised Derek, he understood that Kate was waiting for an opportunity to approach him.  Derek hadn’t even looked at her when she walked in, and there was a part of Stiles, the part that jumped to his feet the moment Kate shifted in Derek’s direction, that hoped Kate hadn’t made contact with Derek yet.

The idea of that moment being what he was about to witness made his curly fries sour in his stomach, spices sitting heavily when mixed with the milkshake he had completely forgotten about when he left his booth.  Milkshakes and curly fries didn’t belong in the kind of world Stiles wished he could prevent, the type of world where a woman in her early twenties targeted a sixteen year old boy with the intent of murdering his entire family, creating herself into one of the most deadly and reprehensible honeypots Stiles had ever had the displeasure of learning about (and he’d read through the Wiki page on the subject and was comparing Kate to actual Nazis).

Stiles had always been able to think on his feet, but unfortunately sometimes his feet had a different plan.  What he wanted to do was stop Kate, maybe drag her out of the diner and threaten her.  He wanted to get her far away from Derek and keep her far away from Derek.

Apparently overly gelled spiked hair and cheeks that hadn’t entirely lost their baby fat brought out Stiles’ protective instincts.

Instead what happened was he tripped over the waitress taking an order at one of the booths between them and landed heavily elbow-first against the table Derek was sitting at.  The move was so clumsy and uncoordinated that he could never have done it on purpose, even if it did present him with the perfect opening:

Pain.

Pain and embarrassment and all the diner turning to look as Stiles fell over the side of the table and land on the bench, swearing at how distinctly unfunny it was to hit his funnybone against formica.

Advantage: Stiles.  Now that he made a scene, Kate wouldn’t even consider approaching Derek today, in case someone noticed and recognised her.  It was difficult to murder an entire family if half the town could remember you speaking with the youngest son.

Stiles leveled her with a look from where he was sprawled, wedged between the bench back and the table.  It was a look of protectiveness, but also one of challenge, one that said he knew exactly what that bitch was up to.  Kate had already shifted her movements away from Derek, heading towards the door, and Stiles wasn’t entirely sure she had received the message he sent.

It didn’t entirely matter, because at least Derek was free of her for the time being.

“You’re not what I ordered.”

Stiles lifted his head over the edge of the table to look at Derek.

Derek, still as snarky and bad-tempered as ever, despite the grinning he had been doing earlier.  He wasn’t grinning now, and part of Stiles felt badly, like he was the one who had taken away Derek’s good mood.

If Derek knew what Stiles had just tried to save him from, he wouldn’t be so volatile.  “If I had control over my limbs at any point during that, believe me I would have fallen in front of some other asshole,” Stiles grunted, his entire arm radiating a sharp numbness that made it difficult to stumble to his feet.  He had to flail a bit to unwedge his shoulders from the space between the table and the bench, his long legs kicking out for a moment and almost taking out a couple who had just entered the diner. 

By the time he gained his footing, Derek was frowning at him, but not in that ‘I want to murder you with my teeth’ way Stiles was familiar with.  It was more in his ‘you’re doing something, I don’t know what, but I know it is something.’  Stiles saw that look a lot.

Trying to regain his dignity, Stiles straightened his shirt so it was lying flat over his stomach and glared at Derek.

“Next time you pass out down on the beach, try not to roll around in the remains of the campfire before getting breakfast,” Derek said breakfast like he was seriously judging Stiles’ life choices, considering it was around 1 PM.  “The scent of ash might put people off their food.”

Stiles made an exaggerated face of unhappiness at Derek, all puffed cheeks and mouth turned into a wide, lopsided grimace.  The terribleness of it struck Stiles as kind of funny, considering Derek was complaining of the scent of ash from the burned remains of his house in the year 2012.  He wondered how Derek wasn’t in a state of constant starvation if that was the case. 

Derek’s stomach chose that moment to rumble loudly.

Stiles gave him a pointed look.  “You don’t look like the kind of person who gets put off their food, Derek.”

Derek glared up at him, but this time it was tempered by suspicion.  “How do you know my name?”

Stiles raised his eyebrow and gave a pointed look at the breast of Derek’s shirt, where his name was embroidered in a fancy cursive meant to replicate a wave.  The blue shirt.  It was shockingly cheerful for something associated with Derek, but that wasn’t the thing that really gave Stiles pause.  Derek was a lifeguard.  Stiles would recognise the standard town-wide lifeguard uniform anywhere.

Holy shit.  Derek had been a lifeguard once upon a time.

The whole Stiles keeping Derek’s head above water in the pool for two hours thing just got a bit more ironic. He’d laugh, really, because drowning probably just would have added to the tragedy of Derek’s life.

“Oh,” Derek responded, picking at the chest of his shirt.

Derek was a lifeguard now.  He really needed to straighten out his tenses.

Stiles’ expression turned into triumph and he harrumphed at Derek before withdrawing back to his booth to finish his milkshake and curly fries.

Breakfast of champions.

x.x.x.x.x.

The smug superiority of both foiling Kate’s evil plans and winning a face-off against Derek by default of Derek’s stomach rumbling at the worst time, lasted about as long as it took for Stiles to finish his fries.  Kate hovered outside of the diner’s entrance after Stiles retook his seat, and he glowered at her until she got into a nearby car and drove off.  Shortly afterwards Derek and Laura took their food in a takeaway container, chatting in excited tones about driving up to Mount Shasta for a camping trip over the weekend.

Hearing them be so open about their lives, so careless about the possibility of being overheard, actually threatened to put Stiles off his own food.  They weren’t even worried about someone listening to their chatter and Stiles was very glad Kate wasn’t there to hear them.  It was just…

That innocence. 

That openness. 

That innate trust in Beacon Hills coupled by the arrogance of their youth. 

…it made Stiles ache with the knowledge of what would happen to them within the next month.

No, he decided, resolve strengthening as Derek and Laura left, nothing would happen to the Hales so long as he was there to stop it.  He didn’t care about the Butterfly Effect, because it was a shitty and predictable movie, but he was aware of how alternate universe theory worked.  He watched Stargate when he was home sick as a kid, he understood this stuff.

It didn’t seem like he would be waking up in a hospital bed, so it was time to accept that he might have actually have travelled back to 2005.

He didn’t entirely know what would happen to him if he did this, but he suspected his world would either change drastically once he returned to 2012 or he would return to the same world, the same universe.  That was the thing about alternate universes – either he was stuck in this one, and the changes he already made had impacted everything already, or his was still stuck the way it was, had been, and always would be.  He just had to find a way back to it.

He left the diner long after his meal was finished and started wandering around Beacon Hills again, until he was sure he had remembered and accounted for most of the changes that had happened since he was ten. 

It was funny to know that somewhere in 2005 was a mini version of himself.  It was also exhausting, and by the time the sun went down it felt like he had spent the entire day walking around, avoiding the one place his feet automatically took him when he began to drag, the events of the day finally catching up to him. 

Stiles just wanted to go home.

The terrible thing about it was his home was right in front of him.  It was right there, and yet he couldn’t walk through the doors.  He couldn’t greet his father and stumble up the stairs, fall into bed and sleep the rest of the day away, hoping he would wake up back in 2012.

He worried he would, and would miss his chance of saving the Hale family through saving Derek from Kate Argent.

His home was right there, but he was never so far away from it as he was right now.

He was so tired, and everything was collapsing around him like the floor of the Hale house.  He didn’t know where he was going to spend the night.  He literally had nowhere to go.

Stiles wandered away from his house only to find himself in front of it again almost two hours later, so exhausted he could barely stand anymore.  There were so many things he didn’t know.  Why was he here?  Was it to change things?  Had he travelled or was this some kind of strange coma dream?  Had the talisman he found performed some kind of magic, and was there a way back?

He had nothing but theories and questions.

His fingers automatically sought out his mother’s lucky penny, warm from his pocket, and he rubbed his thumb over the familiar surface. 

He didn’t know.

What he did know was that he needed somewhere safe to spend the night.  Beacon Hills was probably the safest the town had ever been with the Hales still living up on the hill, but there was more to safety than being wary of werewolves and things that went bump in the night.  There was family, love, acceptance and most importantly, trust.

He knew, for instance, that since his mother died the year before his father had shut the blue jeep in the one-car garage behind the house and wouldn't look at it again until Stiles was fifteen.  It had been shut away from his father’s eyes in a garage he never used, choosing to park his cruiser in the driveway.  All Stiles’ mother’s things were in there, and Stiles used to sneak into the garage sometimes and imagine he could smell her in the bins of old clothes, but in truth his mother hadn’t carried a scent other than the scent of home.

He might not be able to return to the house where his recently widowed father and a younger version of himself lived, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have somewhere he felt safe, somewhere he felt loved, and somewhere that still carried a familiar scent that had long since dissipated into thin air and memory.

He might not have anything, but he still had this.

So Stiles went home to his mother.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t that Stiles had never spent the night in the jeep before, it was just that he had never spent the night in the jeep in the middle of summer, closed in a garage.  Beacon Hills summers had never been high in humidity and the nights typically fell a few degrees in temperature so that they were pleasantly warm rather than overwhelmingly hot, but that didn’t account for what his body did to the interior of the small, airless room, his own sweat and breath creating a sweltering interior that had him worrying about whether the windows were steaming up in a noticeable way.  It seemed like a foolish thing to worry about, considering all the other sleepless nights he’d had throughout his life and everything else that was currently happening to him, but he’d learned somewhere along the way to only focus on what he could immediately control.

Right now that was whether or not he was helping to give away his position a la the Titanic sex scene.

It seemed foolish to leave the windows and doors to the jeep open while he was sleeping in it, but he needed the extra air, and even then his sleep was tumultuous at best, jumping at every sound with the anxiety that his father was just outside checking out a mysterious noise in his back yard.  Getting into the garage had been an interesting adventure by the light of the streetlight outside.  He hadn’t been sure how the piles of boxes were arranged and each step carried the potential disaster of Stiles tripping over something he couldn’t see and bringing everything down on top of him.

Having a dad who was also the Sheriff? Not so cool when you were trying to break into his property.

Oh, and as a sidenote: said dad would not recognize him.  It wasn’t like he could say ‘oh hey dad’ if he got caught.  It kind of complicated matters

Seriously, it would be smarter breaking into any of the other houses in the town.

Any other house.

Possibly even the Hale house. 

Stiles awoke with a start and a quick gasp of disorientation to the sound of his dad starting his cruiser and pulling out of the driveway.  He groaned quietly, trying to force his legs back on the ground with his entire body locked into a tight ball.  His back was pressed against the bench seat in the rear of the jeep, knees pushed against the back of the driver’s seat and legs tucked into the space remaining.  His knee joints popped as he tried to straighten, being as quiet as possible.  Now that the sun was out, dawn shining through the grimy garage windows, he could really see the familiarity of his surroundings.

In the summer of 2005 Stiles could remember going to camp with Scott.  As ten year old, it had been this huge concept – just the two of them, spending the summer on their own without their parents.  That had lasted about as long as it took to drive to the camp before Scott was miserable and Stiles spent the summer attempting to recreate the enthusiasm neither of them felt.  He could remember it being a terrible summer, but he would trade it in a second for what it felt like to lost out of his own time and still surrounded by the things he loved, only removed from everything like a stranger looking in.

It was… he felt kind of sympathetic to Derek in the early days returning to Beacon Hills with nothing but memories and ghosts of a happy past.

In the summer of 2005, Stiles was ten years old and fighting with his best friend over whether they should stay at camp or beg to go home. 

The summer of 2005, a seventeen year old Stiles broke into his own house using the key he kept in his wallet so he could take a shower. He didn’t feel safe in the house, worrying his father would come home and find a stranger using his bathroom.  He knew where to find the supplies no one would notice missing because it was his own house, and things hadn’t changed that much.  He knew where the extra towels were kept and where in the garage his dad stored his old clothes he’d never miss.

Ironically, his father’s vintage band shirts were some of Stiles’ favourite pieces of clothing from 2012 and he wore them sparingly after werewolf shenanigans ruined the best one…

But there it was, The Who’s target logo in all its glory, without a bloodstain smeared across the side and claw marks in the back.

Best time travel moment yet!

“Don’t you worry,” he said to his box of band t-shirts.  “I’ll make sure you never get destroyed for something that isn’t your fault.”

Nailed it.

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles ended up walking to each of Beacon Hill’s town-supported swimming holes searching out a very specific lifeguard.  For a town the size of Beacon Hills, the residents sure did like swimming.  There was the indoor pool, the outdoor pool, and the lake about two miles outside of town.

Derek wasn’t at any of them.

He walked two miles outside of town to figure that out, too.

Dammit, Derek.

Stiles didn’t bother asking any of the other life guards on duty where Derek was, not wanting to draw attention to himself, but that was where his inside knowledge of the town came in handy.  He knew, for instance, that the highly trained lifeguards got the shifts out at the lake, so the chances of Derek being out there were low.  He also knew that the lifeguards in town worked on eight hour shifts and the outdoor pool was open from 8 AM when the first swimming lessons started to about 8 PM, and that in addition to the full-time, year-round employees, the town hired about 6 students over the summer.

He knew all this because his parents had put him through swimming lessons with the hopes he’d be qualified for a summer job someday, but competition was fierce against the college students who had worked there during high school and…

Derek was totally part of the generation who had been job-blocking Stiles!  If Stiles went through with saving the Hales from Kate, 2012 might become a world where Derek worked as a lifeguard during the summer, shirtless up on his chair.  Maybe he’d wear his amazingly attractive douchetastic sunglasses and look at Stiles over the top of them with such disinterest that Stiles would probably have to do a cannonball just as Derek stood on the side of the pool.

He’d be a far better sight dripping with water than Greenberg’s older brother, that was sure.

For the benefit of his future job prospects maybe Stiles shouldn’t save the Hales.

And wow, that was a really horrible thing to think.  He was the worst.  He wasn’t just trying to save Derek, he was saving Laura, and Cora, Peter, and all the Hales he had never met (but had heard mentioned now and then, not by the surviving Hales but from other people who whispered names as they walked past.  ‘That’s Talia’s son,’ old Mrs. Beaudoin had said to her daughter in law.  ‘He doesn’t look much like his father,’ younger Mrs. Beaudoin had responded, and Stiles had stared after Derek, knowing he heard but not seeing him react).

(It was one of those times Stiles realized Derek was just always on edge, always expecting pain, always in pain).

He was a terrible person sometimes, but thinking of did help him remember that Derek and Laura had been talking about a camping trip on the weekend.  The way they spoke, Stiles had assumed the trip was in the distant future, but possibly they already left.  It could be an explanation for why he couldn’t find Derek.

One of many.

There was only one place Stiles could think of that could help him answer all of his questions…

“What day is it?” he asked the librarian, leaning against the front counter casually.  The computer system was old as balls, and it startled Stiles for a moment to see the library without security gates at the door or a whole room dedicated to a computer lab.  In 2005 there was just a desk of four computers, and they weren’t even heavily in use.  The monitors were cathode boxes and Stiles was seriously weirded out by how there, more than anywhere, he could tell that he had gone back into time.  He hadn’t really considered the library as even being a possibility as the location that would trip him up and have him gaping like a tourist – books were eternal, right?

“The twenty-first,” the librarian informed him from where she was cutting out construction paper behind her desk.

“... of the week?”

She stared at him and sighed.  “I miss having holidays.  Thursday.”

“Is there a full moon this weekend?”

She glanced over at the calendar.  “Tonight.”

Yeah, he thought so.

Thursday.  So it could be considered the weekend already, which meant that Derek and the rest of his family would be away camping and probably doing werewolf-y things in the solitude of the mountains.  It was probably the best part of their summer, and he considered that this might be the last time Derek and his family got together and had fun before they died late in the summer months.  He couldn’t remember the exact date, but high school clubs had started up again and Stiles had been anticipating his own first day of school the week after, so he knew that he had until late August or early September to… make things right?

Was it making things right to stop history from happening?  Whose definition of ‘right’?

Figuring that out was… future Stiles’ problem.

He was fiercely glad that he had prevented Derek and Kate from meeting before Derek’s trip to the mountains, because even sparing Derek that one small detail, making it so Derek didn’t spend his last few positive memories with his family tainted by Kate’s presence in his life, felt like a huge thing.  Stiles didn’t know anything about teenage Derek, but he knew what it was to be 16 and pining over a beautiful woman.  The idea of at least prolonging Derek’s impending fascination with Kate made everything he had experienced so far worth it.  He felt fiercely protective of this version of Derek already.

He wanted Derek to stay away from Kate forever, and would make it possible if he could.

For the next three days he wouldn’t have Derek to watch from a distance.  It would just be him.

And Kate.

x.x.x.x.

He found Kate in the hardware store looking at chains, and he stood at the end of the aisle with his arms crossed over his chest, eyed narrowed dangerously in her direction.  She noticed him, of course she did, because she was trained to be aware of her surroundings.

Good.

“I hear the full moon brings all the crazies out,” he said to her, with a friendly smile and his head tilted defiantly before he turned on his heel and left.  That would get her attention for sure.

He slipped out the door of the store as she was dropping everything in her arms back into a half-empty bin, and by the time she made it through the doors after him, Stiles was watching her from the window of the store across the street.

He watched as she looked around for him and then returned to make her purchases, probably convincing herself he wasn’t worth the effort.  He didn’t mean what she thought he meant.  He was just some punk teenager making a joke about chains.

He watched as she got into her car, the same incongruous blue vehicle he’d watched her drive away in from the diner.  From this angle he was able to get the license plate number as he watched.  Stiles’ eyes were on her as she loaded her purchases into the trunk and got in the front seat, driving away down main street.  He noted that she turned left at the light, but considered it with a grain of salt because Kate knew she was being watched and he doubted she was dumb enough to drive back to her hotel, or rental house, or apartment – wherever she was holed up for the month and a half it took her to get her talons into Derek.

Just because the Hales were away didn’t mean Stiles had nothing to do.  Kate had the same knowledge that he did, and she was using the time wisely, gathering supplies he wasn’t sure she had even used to burn down the Hale house, but it looked probable.

Seriously, she’d just bought some heavy duty chains and a container to hold gasoline.  How did that not send up red flags?  At least post-fire, when the evidence of an accelerant was present, and it had to be present because Stiles could still remember watching the fire from a distance, the flames reaching levels that weren’t natural for a forest fire, or even a house made of dried wood. How had Kate gotten away with it?  Why hadn’t someone checked sales receipts?  Beacon Hills always had a few tourists in the summer, but not so many that a beautiful woman like Kate wouldn’t be remembered if someone went asking for her, which told Stiles that no one had, not after it had been ruled an accident.

That was fucked up.

And probably why it had never sat right with his dad.

x.x.x.x.x.

Kate seemingly disappeared from sight over the next few days, though Stiles looked.  He did nothing but look, biding his time until Derek and his family returned from their (wolfy) retreat.  The house the Argents lived in in 2012 housed a family of five in 2005 and was in no way related to Kate.  He walked by the few low-cost rentals in town, loitering in public areas close by as long as he could without appearing conspicuous.  It was a bit more difficult to do the same to the cheap motels on the edge of town, but part of him thought that Derek was smart enough to question Kate if she brought him back to a motel.  Being blinded by sex was one thing, but Kate had made Derek trust her, and Stiles never would have trusted an older woman who lived in a cheap motel.

Stiles thought back to Derek and Laura in Bettie’s and their complete guileless lack of self-preservation, and wondered if Derek and his innocent face would even consider something like that as suspicious, or if he’d believe honeyed lies.  He’d loudly talked about his plans in a public place!  Stiles would never do that…

ok, Stiles did that all the time, but it felt different on this side with the omniscience of knowing what was to come.  It gave perspective, anyway.

Mostly, he had a lot of spare time on his hands.  Spare time to think.  Spare time to plan.  Spare time to figure out this whole time travel thing, which surprisingly was becoming a very low priority on the list of things Stiles felt a need to do.  He worried that if he figured everything out too soon that he’d be helpless to stop being transported back.

But what if the opposite was true?  What if the only way he could put off returning to 2012 was if he understood how he had gotten to 2005 in the first place?

He ended up reading Briane Green’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality in the library until he ended up sneaking it out in his old backpack.  It was the first instant that he knew for sure that things could be changed, because that book was definitely part of the collection in his time, right down to the smeared Beacon Hills Public Library stamp across the top of the pages that read more like B*acon Hllls Publlc L~~ary. 

Stiles remembered it because.  Well.  Bacon.

But now he was sitting on a park bench eating from the loaf of bread and the jar of peanut butter he bought at the grocery store with the stolen book in his hands, exerting his free will by underlining passages that made sense to him.

Yeah! He was changing things! One underlined sentence in a stolen book at a time.

The book was a little more approachable to him now than it had been at fourteen when he read it in an attempt to get Lydia’s attention.  That hadn’t worked.  At all.  He was just left with a headache for his troubles and about two years of high school physics that seemed to come easier, as though his brain learned things even though he had barely comprehended the text.

Maybe he understood it better now because he was living it.  He was living the Time Travel.

And time travel was kind of boring.

“Excuse me.”

A shadow fell over him, blocking a direct ray of sunshine from hitting the pages of his book.

“Yes?” Stiles asked, attempting to look up casually, despite the fact his heart was pounding really quickly in recognition.  He wanted to jerk his head towards his father’s voice.  He wanted to jump to his feet and pull his father into a hug and tell him everything that was wrong.  Tell him how much he needed him, and that living among his mother’s things hurt so badly.  On the second night he’d gone looking for something to use as a pillow and had found a half-knit Finding Nemo Dory hat to match the father/son ones they’d worn in the Holiday parade that year without her. 

Stiles had cried, sobbing into the soft yarn because that was one thing his father hadn’t allowed him to find when they sorted through her things.

He wanted to hold onto his dad, harder than he usually did.

Instead, he managed to look up without allowing too much of that to show on his face.

“We spoke the other day.  I’m Deputy Stilinski.  I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

No, he wasn’t.

Stiles nodded vehemently and then stopped as his dad’s brow wrinkled in confusion, probably because it was such a trademark Stiles-reaction, that his father could see the resemblance.  “I’m fine, sir,” Stiles informed him, lying.  His heart began to pound anxiously as his father remained unconvinced.

His dad’s eyes swept over the things spread around Stiles, that concerned expression on his face that Stiles knew well.  It wasn’t just concern that the teen in front of him was lying, but that there was something innately wrong with the situation.  “I’ve seen you around town over the weekend,” his dad said, eyes resting on the loaf of bread and peanut butter on the picnic bench.  “Do you have somewhere to go, son?”

“Yes,” Stiles answered quickly, getting the word out before his throat closed with emotions.  It was almost too much to hear his dad express concern for a boy who was showing signs of being in trouble, but it was quite another thing for his dad to be expressing those concerns to Stiles, who actually did need his help but couldn’t go to his father he wanted to.  That was almost normal in 2012, but Stiles wasn’t in 2012.  “I’m fine, sir,” Stiles repeated, trying to keep the emotion out of his tone.  He didn’t realize until it was too late that he’d used the same phrase he had earlier in the conversation.  The way his dad’s eyes narrowed, Stiles knew that he’d noticed.

“Here’s my number.  If you need help, call me.”

“Thanks,” Stiles mumbled, shoving the card into his pocket without looking at it. His dad gave him a long, considering look before placing his hand over Stiles shoulder.

“Take care of yourself,” he said before walking back to his squad car.

Holy shit, Stiles breathed as though he had been holding his breath the entire time.  How was it that in a town full of people and werewolves, that his father was the first to notice the possibility that Stiles was homeless, and offer him help?  What kind of irony was that?  He was living in the man’s garage.

But also, it deserved looking into.  Was his dad still so in tuned with Stiles, even seven years in the past, that he could tell something was wrong?  Or was that just the kind of man his father was?

Once his father was out of sight, Stiles dug for the business card, intent on throwing it out.  He knew his father’s work number by heart, and as he turned it over in his hands and noticed the home phone and cell phone jotted on the back, appearing like an afterthought but being anything but. His father had deliberately handed Stiles his private numbers, writing them on the card before seeking him out.  Of course, he had no way of knowing that Stiles knew those numbers better than he knew his own cell phone number: because who saw a kid wandering town and jumped to the conclusion that they were your time travelling son?

Stiles slipped the card into his wallet, feeling infused with warmth and the knowledge that his father was a good man, one he could turn to even now, if he really needed him.  He might not be able to tell him the truth, but there was more than one way to ask someone for help and sometimes the truth was irrelevant.

x.x.x.

Stiles didn’t want to know what terrible, terrible things Kate had been up to over the weekend.  His brain went wild with the possibilities of her following the Hales on their camping trip up to Mount Shasta and running into Derek there.  The problem with changing a timeline he was familiar with was that now he had no idea what could happen.

Kate probably wouldn’t follow Derek’s family to remote camping areas because 1. That reeked of desperation even for her, and 2. She’d risk exposing her entire plan to adults who actually knew better than to trust a stranger with a nice smile but hardened eyes.

But that was the problem.  Stiles didn’t know for sure.

It was a long weekend of uncertainty until he found Derek on Tuesday afternoon working out at the lake.  Of course Derek worked at the lake, he was probably their best lifeguard, because who better than a werewolf to be able to tell someone was drowning in murky water the length of two lacrosse fields away and then reach said drowning person on time to get them back to shore and perform CPR?  Honestly, Stiles wasn’t sure why werewolves were hunted, because as far as he was concerned, he wanted them in positions like lifeguards, paramedics, fire fighters or anything that was rescue-related, because werewolves would give a fighting edge to life or death situations that humans couldn’t provide.

Not that he wanted to force Derek to choose a life as an uncelebrated hero or anything.  Derek could be whatever he wanted to be.

Stiles just wasn’t sure why it wasn’t a thing.  Maybe it was a thing, but the one time he asked 2011 Derek, Derek had just given him a long-suffering look and ignored him.  That told Stiles that either someone had thought of that a very long time ago and werewolves were, indeed, strategically placed in positions where they could help, or werewolves weren’t around to spend all their time saving humans and risk their own necks at being caught if hunters figured out their secret identities.

Whatever.  Stiles just thought it would be cool to have werewolf super cops, ok?  It would make a good movie.  Maybe he’d write a script about it.

He may or may not have a lot of time on his hands right now.

Derek didn’t even look in his direction when Stiles stepped onto the beach, which was really good, because the last thing he needed was for Derek to pay too much attention to the fact that Stiles would be around a lot.  The day wasn’t very bright, a thick, dark covering of clouds over the sun, but there were still a few people sitting on the beach, watching their children playing in the water.

Stiles climbed onto a picnic table on the edge of the scene, situated beneath the shade of a tree and in front of a deep coppice of evergreen trees.  He was hot from the 2 mile hike out and wanted nothing more than to slip into the water himself, but the walk back to town was going to be miserable enough, knowing the only thing he had to look forward to was a jar of peanut butter and the heel of a loaf of bread, and another night of being utterly quiet in the stifling air of his dad’s garage.  He didn’t need to attempt it with wet pants, because the only way he could enter the water and not scandalize the family of five sitting down the beach was to keep his jeans on.

Stiles’ To Do List:

1. Stop Kate

2. Save the Hales

3. Avoid his dad

4. Find swim shorts

He took a drink of the bottle of water he swiped from the fridge at home.  His dad never kept track of certain things, like how many bottles of water they went through.  Not because they went through a lot, but because his dad wasn’t one of those people who counted things, though he was more likely to notice when pudding cups mysteriously went missing than he was to notice single bottle of water that Stiles was reusing as often as possible.

Stiles respected those kinds of priorities, and knew how to use them to his advantage.

Stiles was just starting to get comfortable, the hard wooden table and hot summer air were equally if not more comfortable than the jeep.  The picnic table was in the shade, but Stiles could already feel the strip of skin stretching across the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones were burnt and red from the weekend, despite wearing the trucker cap he’d stolen from himself.

He was doing pre-teen Stiles a favour, really.  He could remember wearing the cap backwards once to illustrate to Lydia how cool he was, and that was in his top five regrettable moments, dragging Scott into the woods included.

“Don’t go beyond the white marker,” Derek called out to a kid in the water who had already slipped passed the designated safety area once.  Derek had been scowling at the kid for a good ten minutes, which was frankly kind of adorable on this Derek’s face.  Like being berated by a puppy.

Derek was slouched in the raised lifeguard chair, but despite his relaxed position, Stiles could tell that he was aware of what was going on in front of him.  Stiles wouldn’t be surprised if Derek knew what was going on behind him too.

If the Hales had survived and Stiles had spent his summers at the pool or the lake with that, it might be a very different world.  It might be a world where Stiles had realized his bisexuality earlier because of the hot, hot, hot lifeguard with the bitchface who watched everyone with a keen eye and a bored, impervious expression.  Derek might have been the one to teach Stiles CPR, and Stiles totally would have been the guy who made the dirty jokes to impress his instructor.

That was so weird to think of.

Stiles needed something to happen soon.  Really soon.

And that’s when he spotted her: Kate Argent in a bikini, sauntering down the beach towards the lifeguarding stand, wincing as her feet stumbled over the line of rocks between the grassy slope of the parking area and the water.  Stiles laughed as he saw her composure break, and it was obvious she was not a local because the locals knew that the lake was more mud and rock than it was fine sand.  Shoes were optional, but definitely recommended outside of the water, if only for the fact teens habitually drank on the shore and broke bottles in the public areas.

By the time Kate schooled her expression back into what Stiles assumed was flirtation and moved to set up her blanket in Derek’s range of sight, Stiles was up off the bench he was perched on.  The moment Kate sat down, Stiles walked by, kicking sand all over her blanket because it didn’t matter whether he was ten or seventeen, small, petty revenge was awesome. 

Then, he sat right between Derek and Kate, smiling up at Derek as his eyes spanned over, not caring if the ground beneath him was damp and that he was probably getting mud all over his butt.

Kate was far better at knowing how to draw attention to herself.  She rubbed down her skin with sunblock, despite the fact it was overcast (ok, point for her attention to the harmfulness of UV rays or whatever.  Stiles would give her that).  She laughed into the book she was reading, loud and ringing false to Stiles’ ears.

Stiles had no idea how to do the same in a way that wasn’t obvious.  He best he knew how to get Derek’s attention on him was through calling out his name and being obnoxious.  Stiles learned from his mistakes, sometimes.  That didn’t really work very well as a strategy. 

Drastic times called for drastic measures.  Stiles was a step away from pretending to drown so Derek would be forced to stop looking in Kate’s direction (and pay attention to him, because he was obviously the better option).

Oh fuck it.

“Hey, diner-boy!” Stiles said, jumping back up to his feet and drawing Derek’s line of sight to him just as Kate stripped off the sarong around her hips.  “Did you ever get what you ordered?”

Derek glared at him from over the top of his sunglasses before pushing them back up his nose and returning his attention to the lake.  “You saw me leave the diner, didn’t you?”

Aw, Derek remembered.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that you left happily,” Stiles pointed out, thinking about how weird it sounded to be saying that to Derek.  The Derek he was familiar with never looked happy, with a kind of gut-churning, exhausting grief that went so deep it was just a part of him now.  This Derek didn’t have any traces of that.

“The food from the diner is always satisfying.  It’s the other people that can ruin a meal,” Derek responded dismissively in what Stiles was sure he thought to be a good burn but that just made Stiles want to laugh at him.

"Is that so?" Stiles asked.  "Maybe that’s why I noticed when you left."

TAKE THAT DEREK. Was it an insult or a compliment?  He'd never know.  And from the look on his face, Derek had no idea which way to respond to it.  Point: Stilinski.

“I’m not surprised,” Derek answered, eyeing Stiles back.  “You practically threw yourself at me.”

“I fell.  You have an elevated sense of your self-worth,” Stiles snapped back, jabbing his finger towards Derek.  “Do you actually think you’re that attractive with your…?” Stiles gestured vaguely to his face.  Damn, Derek was that attractive.  Was it too much to hope for awkward teen years? Really?

Derek’s mouth quirked, a cocky smirk that Stiles was certainly aware Derek was capable of, but that he’d never quite seen in that context before, as though pre-everything, Derek’s biggest challenge was a battle of wits and right now he thought he was winning.  “If you’re so great, why does that woman look like she wants to kill you?”

He knew what he would find when he turned around, and Kate didn’t disappoint.  She was glaring daggers into Stiles’ back for interfering with her plan again.

“Brrr,” Stiles mock shivered.  “I don’t know, I heard her say something on her cell phone about being a hunter. It’s a good thing neither of us are prey, isn’t it? Because if looks could kill…”

Derek’s eyes widened as his head swung back around to look at Kate.

Come back from that, Kate Argent, Stiles thought smugly.

“Later, Derek," he said casually, trying to resist the urge to gloat.  Of course, that was when he tripped over a branch and his foot slipped in the mud and he came periliously close to falling on his face in a puddle. 

It was ok, Stiles decided.  Derek was still facing forward, and obviously if no one sees you almost fall and then regain balance in a ridiculous and yet miraculous fashion then it never happened.

Right?

Stiles would take his successes as they came.

Chapter Text

Stiles went to see Deaton on a Thursday. It had been a week since he arrived in the past and he'd put it off long enough.

"Oh shucks," he muttered with a defeated snap of his fingers, seeing the Closed sign on the door. "Gosh Darn."  Both were said with a complete lack of sincerity.

The thing of it was, Stiles had forgotten that in the summer Deaton typically loaned his vet services out to local farms and wildlife preserves two days a week. He'd forgotten because it wasn't like Scott had ever spent those days freely texting him or anything. It had just slipped his mind. "I'll try again next week." He said out loud.

Probably next Thursday. Thursday was a good day. It wasn't that he was avoiding Deaton but he kind of knew what would happen if he walked into that office and told Deaton who he was and when he was from.

Deaton was an enigmatic asshole at the best of times. He was a negligent murderer at the worst of times.  Stiles didn’t have the best regard for Deaton and the information he chose to give out.

Stiles resigned himself to the fact that this was something he had to do.  There were just some things – like eating your vegetables – that were probably good for you in the long run, but weren’t very fun to do at the time.

Then there were some things that just weren’t good for you at all, in the long run or in the moment, but that needed to be done.  Talking to Deaton was one of those things in Stiles’ opinion, and he’d put it off for as long as he could.

Stiles knew what Deaton would say.  He suspected anyway.  There was no way that Deaton would have a stance on time travel that wasn’t entirely cautionary, and the thing was – Stiles didn’t want to know.  He didn’t want to be told about fixed points in time or worst case scenarios of messing with time travel because he was there now.  He was there, the damage was done the moment Stiles was sent back in time, because unlike Deaton, Stiles couldn’t just sit back and allow nature and time take its course.  He was there now and he’d make sure that no one got in his way on his mission to make sure the Hales survived to see the future.

Not to act would be tantamount to murder.  That kind of passive negligence might be Deaton’s M.O. but it wasn’t Stiles’.

Stiles had made a promise, and he was going to do everything in his power to keep that promise, even if he tore the universe apart.  He was a big believer in knowledge as power, and in this case it was the enemy, because Stiles could and would change the course of history, and he’d rather not know if there would be repercussions.

He turned away from the vet’s office.

Maybe time travel had rules, but Stiles had a spark of belief. All he had to do was be certain that what he was doing was right.

And it was.

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles hit face-first, his nose going straight through the gaps in the wire, but his mouth hitting against one of the links in the chain-link fence he’d been walking past. He could feel the sharp knot cut his lip against his teeth, the taste of copper blood flooding his mouth.  It was a shock, one he shook off quickly from years of being attacked by an unknown source. Stiles had brought his hands up defensively to stop his forward momentum at the last moment and now he coiled his fingers through the fence, about to use it to jerk himself back into his attacker.

“Look, you little punk,” Kate said, tone a hateful sneer as she pulled at his shoulder, forcing him around to face her.  Stiles went without fight, allowing her power play to unfold.  Stiles had definitely fucked up if he hadn’t heard her approach while walking by one of the garages downtown, but he thought that might be by design.  The noise of mechanics at work covered a lot of lesser sounds, like the fall of footsteps made by someone who knew how to mask them.  Kate was trained to be a hunter, to get the jump on people with better senses than he possessed.  It would be wise of him to remember that about her.  Stiles hadn’t had much exposure to Kate the first time around, but he did know Allison.  They weren’t the same person, but they were both of the matriarchy of the Argent family, born to lead the foot soldiers and protect the innocents.  The problem with Kate was that the line had blurred to the point where innocence meant a complete lack of exposure to a supernatural world she reviled.  “I don’t know where you heard that conversation about hunters, but I suggest you stay away from Derek Hale.  He and his family are dangerous and your little crush could get you hurt.”

Hurt?  Yeah, Kate, the only one who looked like a threat to him right now was her.  Her strategy was seriously lacking, which made him think that warning him off wasn’t her purpose.

Stiles could feel the knife poking into his side.  He widened his eyes in surprise.  The expression never would have fooled Allison, but then Allison was one of his best friends and so it was an unfair comparison, because she knew when he was lying almost as well as Scott did.   He allowed himself to stare, letting his open-eyed expression to do the work for him.  He could see that Kate’s mouth had a cruel slant to it, that she seemed pleased with herself for intimidating a teenager, shoving him back against a fence and pulling a knife on him.  Well done, Kate. “I don’t…” he said, swallowing, his eyes flicking down like he was nervous about the knife, when really he was just trying to see how dangerous it was so he could plan his next move.  “What?  What’s?”  his voice creaked, high and thready. “I don’t… please.”

He played scared just long enough to sweep his elbow down, jabbing it into her hand with a complete disregard to whether he got injured in the process.  Sometimes self-defense came down to accepting you might get hurt, and Kate’s folding knife wasn’t even the most frightening thing he’d faced all week.

Stiles was homeless.  He had time travelled.  A three-inch blade?  Whatever, Kate.

Kate was surprised just long enough for the knife to clamor out of her hand, skittering across the sidewalk.  Stiles took the moment she was disarmed as his chance to step away from the fence and into the street, where he was in full view of the entire neighbourhood.

“Nice fear tactic,” he said, waving his fingers at her, the most taunting of jazz hands.  “I see where this is going.  You put the fear of the Argent family name into me, and I buckle like a scaredy little boy and keep out of your way while you’re free to carry on your nefarious plan.   Do you even know what it’s going to be yet?” Stiles mused, circling around her and keeping a good buffer zone between them.  He could hear traffic stop behind him, cars unable to pass on the street because he was standing in their way.  He wasn’t sure what the smile on his face looked like, but he bet it was just as cruel and jeering as hers could be. 

“You’re making a mistake,” she told him, flicking the blade back into her pocket.

The thing was?  Yeah, he probably was.  He was probably jumping into this feet first.  There were probably ways to handle this that didn’t have to do with angering an Argent.  And hey! Who knew! Maybe Stiles (and this conversation he was having right now) was the reason Kate burned the Hale house and everyone in it.

Stiles didn’t think so, though.

“Oh, probably,” he told her.  “But it’s the right one to make,” he finished, turning his back on her.  He took a moment to thumb away the blood from the split lip she gave him when he hit the fence with his face.  It gave him some satisfaction to know that he hadn’t allowed himself to do anything about it while she was looking straight at him. 

He looked up from the blood smeared across his thumb and came face to face with his father standing behind the door of his police cruiser and staring at the tableau in front of him with wary, ready eyes.  He could tell from his father’s stance that he was prepared to arm himself.   They observed each other for a moment until his dad’s eyes softened with concern. “Are you alright?”

 And Stiles just… he ached to not be strong for a moment.  He nodded once, to reassure his dad, and then adopted a cocky grin.  It pulled at the cut on his lip, forcing his mouth crooked.  “Sure thing, Deputy Stilinski.”

His dad looked over Stiles’ shoulder at Kate, his eyes narrowing at her retreating back.  Stiles hadn’t planned it.  Stiles hadn’t thought to plan it, and if he had thought it, he would have assumed it wouldn’t work, but this couldn’t have gone better.  Beacon Hill’s best Deputy was now suspicious of Kate.

His dad was suspicious of Kate.  Stiles didn’t know what Kate would do with the police watching her.  Where did that fall under the code?  More importantly, where did that fall under the fucked up morality Kate seemed to work under?  If a police officer, one who didn’t know anything about the supernatural creatures he was protecting, got in her way… how would she react to that?

This outcome couldn’t be worse, either, because now Stiles had indirectly put his father in danger.

He should have spent more time considering Kate in the present and less time considering what her next move was where Derek was involved.  Derek wasn’t the one on Kate’s radar right now because Stiles had put himself as the obstacle in her path.

It was a rookie mistake not to notice that.  Stiles had played the decoy enough to know about transferred rage.

There was a good chance that using this opportunity he had to save the Hales, Stiles was making the sacrifice play.  He’d jump on an armed grenade before he allowed anything to happen to his father, and he was starting to feel the same way about the Hales.  He hadn’t considered that what he was doing might be a tougher decision than whether or not to change history, but then Stiles’ own safety wasn’t always as much of a concern to him as it should be.

Stiles was known for making the sacrifice play.

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles might not have a lot of money to his name, but it was money well-spent when he convinced a kid, probably someone he was a year or two ahead of in school, to walk into the bar Kate was wooing the insurance inspector guy in.  Wooing and plying with alcohol.  It had given Stiles a severe chill to be witnessing it.  He knew, he remembered, what happened to the man, and watching as he kept his eyes affixed to Kate’s cleavage, laughing along with whatever overly flirtatious crap she was feeding him, made that vindictive part of Stiles act up.  He wanted to find a way to bring this man down, so he couldn’t do what he did to the Hales to another family.

Stiles had no idea how to do that, and he was fighting just one battle, aiming for just one win, not preparing for a crusade.  Maybe once he succeeded, he’d consider revisiting Garrison Myers.

“Mom, you’ve gotta come home,” the kid said to Kate, putting himself bodily between her and Garrison.  “The baby won’t stop crying and I don’t know what to do with her.”

Stiles turned away, leaving while Kate’s attention was distracted so she wouldn’t spot him.  There was a smug smile on his lips as he crossed the street.  He walked a few blocks with his head down, looking up to spot Derek across the street, staring at him with a contemplative expression on his face.

Stiles waved at Derek with two fingers, a salute of sorts.  Derek didn’t nod so much as his head straightened and he observed Stiles more carefully.  Maybe he thought he was hidden standing in that doorway? If so, Derek severely underestimated human eyesight, or maybe Stiles’ attention to his surroundings.  His motto had been constant vigilance for what felt like years, but it had gotten worse since Kate got the jump on him.

Geez, try to save a guy’s family and have him start his creepy staring routine.

It was kind of comforting to know there were some things about Derek Hale that weren’t caused by overwhelming loss.

That wouldn’t have been one of the things Stiles expected.

x.x.x.x.x.

If Stiles thought it was jarring to walk into his bedroom to find Derek staring at him from behind his door like a serial killer, it was even more disconcerting to look across the street and see Derek’s gorgeous and curious eyes looking back at him.  He was looking at Stiles with a thoughtful expression, ignoring what his mother was saying to him. Derek’s mouth curled into a smile that was part smirk when he noticed Stiles observing him back, and Stiles wasn’t really entirely sure what to think of it.  There were a few things he could label a smile like that, and none of them were things Stiles wanted to consider at the moment.  He looked back at Derek, startled by the thought, before he ducked his head and turned into the pharmacy.  There wasn’t really a reason he was in there except to avoid Derek, because Derek was starting to notice Stiles and that?

That was not a good thing.

It happened again a few days later, and this time Stiles didn’t even notice Derek until he turned his head at the park where he sat watching his dad eating lunch, being as unobtrusive as possible.  Stiles considered this hour to be the one point of his day where he was completely selfish, and it figured, it figured so much that Derek would interrupt it with his presence.   He never had gotten that some things were just sacred to a guy.

No, that was wrong.  Derek had always understood that some things meant more than they appeared to on the outset.  The cloud of misfortune that followed Derek around malevolently never seemed to get that some things were sacred.  Stiles had spent half a year researching whether Derek was under some sort of curse because there was irony and then there was Derek Hale’s life.

But in 2005 that hardly mattered.  In 2005 Derek was a normal teenager.

Derek was standing at the start of the pathway leading into the park holding Cora’s hand.  Cora was so tiny, Stiles was momentarily startled more by the realization that this was the age she was when the fire occurred than he was by the fact that Derek was watching him, but when Cora pulled impatiently at Derek’s hand and Derek didn’t budge, Stiles could see the problem for what it was.

It was pretty difficult to keep an eye on someone when they were watching you back.

Derek, it turned out, was universally a creeper.

The third time, well the third time was more Stiles’ fault than anything else.  Kate was in the grocery store at the same time as Derek and his mom, and Stiles was watching a little too close for comfort considering there was an alpha werewolf about half an aisle away from him.  He took a corner a little too fast when it looked like Kate was going to meet the Hales at the checkout and brought half a display of Starbursts down with him.

He had a moment, a single moment to make a decision of what he should do next.  Should he bail?  Should he continue after Derek and Talia?  Should he make a ditch effort to reach Kate? Or should he clean up the mess he made like a courteous human being? 

The decision was made for him when Derek knelt next to him.  “Let me help,” he said, smiling slightly at Stiles as he grabbed a few of the bags.

“Thanks,” Stiles muttered, sure his face was red, but unsure what the embarrassment was actually caused by.

“No problem,” Derek answered, patting his shoulder once all the bags were off the floor and Stiles was left holding the last one.

“Who’s that?” Talia asked once Derek returned to her side.  She was giving Stiles a penetrative look.

“It’s…” Derek started, turning to glance back at Stiles.  Stiles winced, positive he knew what Derek was going to say.  It’s no one was such a typical answer for someone their age, but one of the most hurtful ones.  And why did Stiles care? “Someone I’ve talked to a few times at the lake.”

“So a friend of yours then?”

Derek gave her a flat look.  “Maybe.”

“Maybe? What else would you call… oh,” she said in surprise, turning to stare at Stiles with what was possibly the most penetrating alpha look he’d ever been the recipient of.  “I see.  Are you sure?”

“Yes mom,” Derek said with his typical exasperated eye roll.  “I’ll see you later, Stiles.  Sorry about her. Moms, right?”  It was ballsy for Derek to say that within earshot of his mother, but then if he wanted to have any kind of conversation with Stiles in the store, it would be within earshot of the alpha werewolf.

“I…” it was on the tip of his tongue to say that he wouldn’t know what moms were like, especially not how moms seemed to a teenage boy.  He and Derek had a relationship based in snark and uncomfortable truths, but that was something they shared that always remained unacknowledged.  Maybe there was a certain comfort there that loss was something neither of them had to mention to each other, so it felt weird to realize that he could say ‘I wouldn’t know’ and make Derek feel acutely uncomfortable rather than making him roll his eyes in a ‘don’t give me that pity party, because if we’re going to play the compare-game, this is one I’ll always win’ way.  “See you,” he trailed off lamely, watching as Derek walked away.

It was a nice view, but he didn’t look for more than a fraction of a second.  He might not have a mother anymore, but he knew enough about them and their sixth sense for when people were checking out their sons that he didn’t want to go there.

Awkward City. Population: Stiles Stilinski.

He looked up to find Kate observing him from the check-out line.  “Do you have some kind of inappropriate interest in teenage boys?” he asked her in a frosty tone, fully aware that Talia Hale might not be looking directly at him, but that didn’t mean that her attention wasn’t focused in his direction.  He hoped she’d take note of his words, even subconsciously.

Stiles didn’t know if he had to worry about overdoing it or not, but at this point every small hint he could plant that Kate Argent was someone not to be trusted, he was going to take as an opportunity. 

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles thought lifeguard Derek would be one of the most amusing things he’d ever seen, mostly because it was something he would never be able to picture Derek doing.  Every time Derek scowled at a kid or berated teens older than he was for bringing beer to the lake, Stiles thought he would break into laughter, but it wasn’t actually as amusing as he thought he would be.  This Derek didn’t really fit into the expectations he had for the Derek in 2012, and everything he did just seemed natural, like it was a Derek thing to do.  Derek from the future was the one who was starting to seem like the unnatural version of this guy who could make Stiles smirk just by reminding a guy to pull up his shorts because there were children present.  No, not unnatural.  It was painfully obvious to Stiles just how much of an impact Derek’s past had on him.

Stiles had been out at the lake twice before it happened.  He was about half an hour early for Derek’s shift and he settled in like the guard dog he was starting to feel like.  Stiles was just starting to snooze in his spot across the picnic bench, arms spread across the width of the wooden plank top.  He heard footsteps crunching on the beach, and even though there were a number of people walking around, it was this sound that made him lazily lift his head and look towards the lifeguard stand.

Derek approached with a casual saunter, all arms and slouched shoulders, exchanging a few words with the lifeguard on duty.  Stiles wasn’t sure what was being said, but he could see Derek gesture towards the water. He then pulled off his shirt, dropping it in the space beneath the elevated chair.

Stiles raised his head a little more with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  Derek wasn’t exactly close enough for detail, but Stiles got the distinct impression that while he wasn’t as musculature in stature as he was when Stiles knew him, teenage Derek wasn’t exactly skin and bones.  Stiles could see the curve of bicep, the sharp line of hipbones, and the very real possibility that Derek was stupidly gorgeous at sixteen.

Aww damn.  That guy was going to kill him, Stiles considered, dropping his head back on the table.  Stiles already knew that Derek didn’t seem to be having an awkward teenage phase, but he was willing to put money down on the fact that Derek already had started developing defined abs, and that just wasn’t fair.  At least he only had to worry about keeping Kate away from Derek… if he was trying to deflect all the people in town, it would be a hopeless quest. 

Werewolf physiology was unfair.

Derek’s face was unfair.

Derek looking over at Stiles, quirking both eyebrows up at him in what was either a challenge or a cocky acknowledgement that he’d seen Stiles checking him out, was severely unfair.  It was all the unfair.

Derek then running into the lake for a swim before his lifeguarding shift was just the absolute worst.  “Wow,” Stiles whined, watching as Derek’s strong breaststroke allowed him to cut quickly through the water.  It was like Olympic-medalist levels of competent.  “Asshole,” he decided, smirking a bit as he thought of Derek sinking to the bottom of the pool during the kanima saga.

Karma, you sexy bitch.  KARMA.

Derek wasn’t in the water long, but Stiles got the distinct impression he was showing off for someone as he crossed to the safety markers, turned, and came back a total of three times, lapping a few other people who were doing the same swim.  Stiles was now sitting on the table, looking around for Kate.  Derek peacocking couldn’t be a good thing.  Had she somehow managed to ingrate herself into his life without Stiles noticing?  God, had he failed already?

When he didn’t spot Kate, he looked for a cute girl (or guy).  There were two possibilities.  One, Derek was showing off for the current lifeguard, which Stiles couldn’t completely dismiss, or Derek was showing off for Stiles.

He was tempted to shrug it off, dismissing the idea entirely, but Derek got out of the lake and quirked a smirk in Stiles’ direction, completely self-assured as he put on his sunglasses.

It was devastatingly effective.

Well shit.

x.x.x.x.x.

Somewhere out there a version of himself was at camp crying himself to sleep.  He hadn’t known how bad it would be to be away from his dad.  It had never really been Scott who’d been miserable, it had always been him.

Stiles could completely relate.  At least mini-Stiles had a mattress, even if it had been inflated.

x.x.x.x.x.

“This is private property,” Derek said, his eyes landing on the logo in the middle of Stiles’ chest with a smirk.  Something playful seemed to be moving behind his eyes, a softening in the stern stance he’d taken when he found Stiles poking around on Hale land in Stiles’ normal timeline, arms crossed and eyebrows unyielding.  It was an achingly Derek pose.  The playfulness was… well, not new, but not something Stiles was familiar with Derek telegraphing so obviously. “I wouldn’t suggest wearing a bullseye in the woods.  You never know, some arrow might take that as an invitation.”

“Cupid’s, maybe,” Stiles muttered, enjoying the fact that he could whisper things like that around Derek with the full knowledge that Derek could hear him, but without Derek knowing that Stiles knew that he could be heard.  It might make for some interesting situations in the future.

It made for an interesting situation now, because Derek looked a little bashful, tilting his face away from Stiles so he couldn’t see his expression.  It ruined his ‘this is private property’ stance that was oh so familiar.  It was kind of nice to know that some things didn’t change. 

He couldn’t help but take some of Derek’s meaning as a possible warning, because there was one obvious group of people who would be armed with arrows in these woods and it wasn’t the ones who owned the land.

Stiles raised his eyebrows at him, pretending to be curious about Derek’s reaction.  “I’m not still on the preserve?” Stiles questioned.  “I saw a parked car over there, so…” he trailed off, allowing Derek to fill in the blanks.  There was a skill in lying to werewolves, and Stiles had developed it with a finely tuned acuity.  “But if it belongs to someone you know… sorry.”

“A car?” Derek asked, curiously, looking over to where Stiles had indicated.  He grabbed Stiles’ elbow, bringing him along as he walked forward.  Stiles wasn’t sure what to think about the manhandling, but it seemed like Derek was, and always would be, a little unclear about personal boundaries when he went into protective aggressor mode.

It didn’t take Derek long to find Kate’s car, and he tilted his head to the side, considering.  His nostrils flared as he scented the area. 

“Guess I’m not the only trespasser,” Stiles said with a forced cheer, attempting for levity.

“No,” Derek decided.  He was frowning, eyebrows drawn together, and it was one of the best signs of self-preservation Stiles had seen from him yet.  “Come on,” Derek urged, pulling Stiles back towards the main road.  “The lake is thataway.”

“Of course it is,” Stiles answered, dripping with disdain.  “I can follow a road.”

“Can you?  Apparently you can’t read no-trespassing signs, so I didn’t want to assume.”

“This one only really goes two ways,” Stiles pointed out, and though it sounded like some kind of obscure allegory, it really wasn’t.

“Yeah, but you gotta pick the right one, or else you’ll find yourself lost and alone.”

Thanks Derek.  Actually make the conversation profound, why don’t you.  “I have.  Have you?” Stiles questioned, giving Derek a smug little salute before he walked away.  He knew the exact moment Derek stopped watching him go and ran back towards his house, and Stiles smiled to himself, because that was exactly what he wanted.  The Hales needed to be concerned about Kate, and now not only would the police be on the lookout for her, but they would be too.

Stiles might not know what he was doing, but he’d always excelled at improvisation.

x.x.x.x.x.

Stiles…

needed to see his dad.  He had no idea what he was doing, and it was hard to believe in himself when everything was gone.  He didn’t have his family or his friends to back him up on this one, and as much as the Hales were counting on him, none of them knew that they were.

He needed a tangible connection.  Something to believe in.

He needed his father.

Stiles might be living in the man’s garage, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t miss his father with a painful kind of desperation.  He worried that what he was doing might be putting his dad in danger.  There were too many unknowns involved in changing the past.  He worried about the man in front of him, but he worried more about the version of his father he left behind, a man struggling in a town full of werewolves and other dangers.  Where would he be without Stiles if Stiles never made it back?

Stiles thought about this as he ate lunch in the park, hidden from direct view behind the statue of James Beacon.  He could see the back of his father’s head, and smiled when his dad fed the pigeons the crust from his sandwich and greeted people by name as they walked past him.  Beacon Hills loved his father, and his father loved his town.  Once, it had been as easy as that.

Deputy Stilinski was the type of man you believed in.

It helped.