Chapter Text
Stiles hasn’t seen Scott since graduation, but somehow his ex-best friend is standing right in front of him with the same earnest look on his face that Stiles has seen a million times before. The eyes look the same even though Scott’s older now, his face more mature. If he closes his eyes, Stiles can see a million snapshots of this exact expression aimed at him over the years, a revolving merry-go-round of being talked into terrible ideas.
“Please, Stiles. We need your help.”
They need his help. They need his help. It’s totally hilarious. They certainly hadn’t needed his help when they’d pushed him out of the pack, when Scott had chosen to believe Theo over his lifelong best friend, when he’d made Stiles feel like a monster for defending himself against Donovan.
“No.”
“Stiles!” Scott catches his hand before he can storm off. They’re standing in front of the Nemeton, a place Stiles had promised himself he’d never return. That went for all of Beacon fucking Hills. He and Lydia had moved to the east coast and stayed there, far away from all the bad memories and the good memories now poisoned with all the bad that came later. “We can’t do it without you.”
There’s some kind of monster ravaging the town because there’s always some kind of monster ravaging the town. He is only here to spend the weekend with his dad, not to get tangled up in this mess again, though it had been Lydia's idea to travel this particular weekend and now Stiles is wondering if her Banshee intuition is the real reason he's standing there in front of Scott now.
“You did plenty without me,” Stiles says. “You can manage this too.”
“I didn't just abandon you. You killed someone, Stiles!”
Even after all this time, Stiles still flinches.
“You...you know what?” Stiles shoves his shoulder. He doesn’t need to relive any of this trauma, no fucking thank you. “Fuck you, Scott.” He shoves him harder this time.
Scott frowns, looking at him with the puppy eyes. “Stiles…”
Perfect true alpha Scott McCall wasn’t even going to give him the satisfaction of fighting back and beating the shit out of him— or at least stopping him from throwing useless punches. Stiles feels like his blood is boiling in his veins. Something inside him snaps and he throws himself forward, knocking Scott down.
The two hit the trunk of the tree hard and everything goes black.
-
Stiles opens his eyes.
This is a ceiling he knows, a sight he woke up to for years and years. This bed, too, is one that swallows his body in a familiar way, and the blankets and sheets smell like home. The room is dark, only the streetlight casting in through the window confirming his fear as he glances around the bedroom— the posters on the walls, the desk piled high with books and papers and homework, the empty spot where his crime wall should be.
He’s woken up in his childhood bedroom.
Stiles slowly rolls his head to the side to find a young, floppy-haired Scott fast asleep beside him, his breathing soft and steady.
With a shaking hand, Stiles reaches up and feels over the fuzzy hair of his old buzzcut. As he lowers his hands, he examines them— smaller than they should be with thin fingers and none of the scars rising over his knuckles that he’d gotten used to seeing there. No wedding ring either.
He drops his hands to his sides and stares up at the familiar ceiling. Stiles tries very, very hard to breathe, to quell the panic rising in his chest, but it doesn’t work. His breaths become steadily more shallow as the moments tick by. He struggles to take deep breaths and when that doesn’t help, he starts to talk to himself.
“This isn't real, Stiles. Get yourself together.”
That doesn’t help either because his voice is all wrong, young and frightened and cracking with puberty.
He’s having a full blown panic attack, the worst one in years, when Scott finally wakes up.
Stiles manages to push himself up on his elbows, chest tight and painful as his rapid breathing gets worse and worse.
“Stiles?” Scott whispers urgently. His eyes widen as he scrambles to sit up, sweeping incredulously over Stiles’s form. Stiles’s eyes widen right back at him, clutching a hand to his chest where he could feel the steady thumping of a too-fast heart beneath his oversized t-shirt. “Stiles. Breathe with me, okay?”
Scott’s voice is all wrong too and it makes the panic in Stiles’s chest spike. He can distantly hear Scott coaching his breathing beside him, but Stiles’s mind is far away, everything foggy and out of focus like a dream.
A dream. Of course!
“This is just a dream,” he whispers between gasps of breath.
His eyes fall down to his hands and he tries to count his fingers, but Scott’s pushing into his space now with his own palms.
“Count with me,” Scott orders. Scott at this age was not even a werewolf, let alone an alpha, but Stiles listens anyway.
“One,” he manages, watching as Scott holds up another finger. “Two…three…”
They count to ten together like they had once before, such a long time ago in the school bathroom when Scott had still been the person he loved and trusted most in the world. And just like that time, Stiles is breathing normal again by the time they’re finished.
In the dark, they sit up in Stiles’s old twin bed, small and narrow but fitting their younger bodies spaciously enough, and stare at each other in silence.
Stiles studies the face in front of him. Floppy hair, a kind and undeniably adorable puppy dog face, but something gave Scott away— the eyes. His eyes weren’t confused and innocent like a child’s, they were the hardened, terrified eyes of an adult who had seen too much trapped behind the sweet face of a kid.
“Scott?” Stiles finally says, keeping his voice down. He hesitates with the fear of being wrong, fully understanding the risk of potentially scarring this loyal and loving version of Scott who he’d never, ever want to hurt. “Are you…is that you?”
Scott nods jerkily. “Stiles?”
Stiles lets out a shaky breath and flops backwards onto the pillows. He lays there, looking up into Scott’s young face and feels like he’s delirious. It’s like someone opened up his memories and dropped him inside one without warning.
“What the hell is happening?” Scott asks.
Stiles thinks about the time his dad had asked them, very seriously, if they’d been time traveling and lets out a sudden and slightly crazed laugh at the irony. The alarm on Scott’s face at his sudden sense of humor makes Stiles laugh even harder.
They both freeze as a light comes on in the hallway and the door opens a crack to reveal the Sheriff looking so much younger than the last time Stiles had seen him.
“Boys,” he says sternly. Stiles and Scott flinch together, like their nervous systems are in sync. “It’s three in the morning. I know you’re nervous about high school—“
“High school?” Scott squeaks.
Stiles lets out another wild laugh at the sound of his cracking voice because this is all so bizarre and his brain, which has accepted so much insanity in his lifetime, is incapable of processing this.
Time travel? Nope, he is checking out of this one.
Stiles’s dad looks unimpressed. “Your first day of high school is tomorrow,” he says in that lecturing voice Stiles knows so well. “You need to get some sleep.”
“Sorry, Dad,” Stiles says quickly. “We’ll sleep.”
His dad eyes them warily. Stiles remembers this night, the night before their first day of high school. Scott slept over because his mom had a night shift at the hospital and the Sheriff had volunteered to take him. They stayed up all night talking about their hopes for the school year, too nervous and jittery to sleep, and in the morning, his dad made them chocolate chip pancakes that they had inhaled with orange juice.
“Yeah,” Scott chimes in. “We’ll sleep.”
Stiles watches his dad nod, wish them both goodnight with a warning look, and head back down the hall, closing the door behind him. They sit in silence and listen for the door to his room to close before swiveling around to face each other in unison.
“Stiles, you’re…you’re a kid,” Scott says.
“Am not,” Stiles shoots back instinctively, but the petulance in his voice works against his argument. “I’m twenty-seven.”
“You don’t look twenty-seven.” Scott’s eyes are searching him, running up and down his body in a way that makes Stiles feel even smaller, like he’s under a microscope. “You’ve got braces, dude.”
Stiles slides a tongue over the front of his teeth and cringes at the feeling of the raised metal there.
“Neither do you!” Stiles reaches over and ruffles Scott’s floppy hair to make a point. Scott flinches backwards. “You’re not even a werewolf yet!”
Those words hit Scott hard. It’s like an essential piece of him has been surgically removed. Scott looks like his brain is short-circuiting, trying to process that bit of information. Stiles waits for smoke to come out of his ears, but instead, Scott’s breathing goes uneven and breaks into short gasps.
He’s wheezing by the time Stiles realizes he’s having an asthma attack and just like that, all those years of distrust and betrayal fall away and they’re just kids again, kids who always, no matter what, take care of one another.
“Scott,” Stiles says urgently. His eyes scan the room while he firmly grips Scott’s shoulder. “Scotty, I’m right here, okay? I’m going to find your inhaler.” It’s not on the bedside table, not on the desk, not on any of the dressers. Scott’s breathing is getting more ragged by the second as he sinks back against the pillows, squinting his eyes in the effort it's taking to breathe.
“Where the hell is it…?”
In a panic, Stiles throws himself out of the bed and stumbles over to Scott’s backpack, tripping over his own two feet as he does so and landing on the ground with a thud. When he reaches it, he shuffles through fresh papers and binders and sharpened pencils until he finds it in a front zipper.
“I’m coming, Scott!” He clumsily throws himself back onto the bed and presses the inhaler firmly into Scott’s palm. With shaky hands, Scott accepts it, shakes it and brings it to his lips to breathe in the puff of medicine.
Stiles sits there for a moment with bated breath, unable to exhale until he hears Scott’s breathing return to normal. They exhale together.
Stiles flops back beside Scott, shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s been a really long time, but it still feels familiar, like the most natural thing in the world. Something this body was made for.
They don’t speak for a while. Stiles is too afraid to get up and look in the mirror to find the inevitable reflection of a scrawny fourteen-year-old, so he stays put and watches the asthmatic fourteen-year-old beside him have a silent battle with himself instead, his facial expression dark and worried.
“Stiles, how are we here?” Scott finally asks.
“I don’t know.” Stiles runs a hand over his short hair. It’s not as therapeutic as it is when he does the same gesture and it’s grown out. “We’ve got to see Deaton.”
“How are we going to do that with school in the morning?” Scott asks flatly.
“We’ll just go really early before my dad gets up.”
“Deaton won't be there that early. And you’re not old enough to drive.”
Stiles nearly falls into another panic attack at that, but Scott reaches over and squeezes his forearm and it grounds him. For now.
They both settle back in against the pillows and try to control their breathing, their mounting panic.
“Okay. New plan,” Stiles says. “We go to school, then bike to the clinic in the afternoon. Our parents will probably be working. Sound okay?”
Scott is quiet for a minute, considering, then he says in a soft voice, “Yeah…okay.”
Stiles forces his eyes closed, though he’s relatively sure he isn’t going to be able to sleep. “Go to sleep, Scotty,” he murmurs.
“Go to sleep, Stiles,” Scott murmurs back.
They both try, but neither of them do.