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Stiles is halfway down the hall to his apartment when he catches her scent. Again. A female beta has been lurking around for the last week, and it’s starting to piss him off, because he knows it’s only a matter of time before she drags her alpha over to see the pretty little omega.
The last beta to pull this kind of crap had actually used those exact words in front of Stiles when he called his alpha. The entitlement was astonishing, but it wasn’t half as interesting as the look on the guy’s face when Stiles kicked him in the nuts and broke both his arms for good measure. News like that gets around quickly, so the female beta must be new to the area, because it’s been a couple of years since anyone approached him.
When he reaches his door, he says, “I don’t care how awesome your pack and alpha are, I’m not interested. If you want to know just how uninterested I am, talk to the alpha of the Hayden Pack. I’ll push her number under the door for you after I get inside.”
He’s just stepping inside when he hears, “Stiles.”
The voice is familiar, but it isn’t until he turns around that he places it. “Cora?”
“Jesus, Stiles,” she says, stepping close enough so he can see her clearly but not so close that he feels threatened. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
The only thing that keeps him from going into his place and slamming the door behind him is the fact that she doesn’t assume he was turned voluntarily. He takes a deep breath, and then another one. He reminds himself several times over that neither Cora nor Derek was responsible for what happened. Although he thinks that if they’d been around at the time that Scott wouldn’t have bitten him, he’s been through enough therapy and to enough victim support groups to be able to keep the blame where it belongs: squarely on Scott’s shoulders.
“I’m not talking about it here,” he says finally. “We can go down to The Nickel.”
“Okay,” she says. Cora backs away slowly and adds, “I’ll stand outside so you can see where I am.”
She’s treating him like a victim, which both pisses him off and makes him relax, because she gets it. She isn’t insisting that he trust her or her intentions; instead, she’s going with the “actions speak louder than words” method of communication, and it works for him. Sort of. It’s been six years since he last saw her, and even then, he never really got a chance to get to know her before she and Derek took off, so it’s not like he’s ready to declare her a long-lost BFF. He is, however, willing to tell her what happened, and that means something, considering his many and varied trust issues.
Once they’re both outside and heading to the bar, he says, “If Derek is around, I’d just as soon tell the story only the one time.”
“I’ll call him,” she says. With any other werewolf, he would have expected to hear that they would text the other person. That Cora is allowing him to hear the conversation is another method of building trust, and it’s great, sure, but Stiles is suspicious in the way the son of a sheriff tends to be. She’s making an effort, and he wonders why she’s working so hard to be transparent.
“Hey,” she says when Derek answers.
“Are you going to be back soon?” he hears Derek ask.
“No. Stiles caught me watching him.”
“How did he react?” Derek sounds resigned.
“We’re on our way to The Nickel to talk. He said you should meet us there, because he doesn’t want to tell the same story twice.”
Stiles adds, “And I want to be sure you both hear my story. I don’t want Cora summarizing it.”
“Understood. I’ll be there in a half hour,” Derek says. “Cora, bring him up to speed while you’re waiting.”
“Got it,” she says.
“Stiles, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry to hear you were turned. I know it isn’t what you wanted,” Derek says.
“Yeah, well. We don’t always get to choose, do we?” Stiles hears the note of bitterness in his voice, and he really doesn’t want to go there tonight, so he adds quickly, “We’ll see you in a while.”
Cora hangs up, and the two of them finish the walk to the bar in silence. They sit at a table in the back, and Stiles orders a large pizza and a Coke. Cora doubles the order, no doubt in anticipation of Derek joining them. The waiter just looks at the two of them like they’re crazy until Stiles makes a shooing motion and says, “Go. Put the tickets in.”
The waiter blinks and says, “Yeah. Right. Um. Did you want breadsticks while you wait?”
Cora shrugs, and Stiles says, “Sure.”
Once the waiter leaves, Stiles says, “So what are you bringing me up to speed on?”
“Derek is an alpha.”
This surprises Stiles less than it should. “Did he take Peter down again?”
“No. Scott put him down for good about three years ago.”
Stiles’s heart speeds up at Scott’s name, and he has to give Cora credit for hesitating only a moment before finishing her sentence.
“How’d it happen, then?”
Cora smiles and shakes her head like she still can’t believe it. “Turns out it’s not that easy to stop being an alpha when you’re still alive.”
“Did he wake up one morning and lo and behold he was an alpha again?”
“No, nothing like that. We think it started when Janey joined us. She was an omega who was going a little nuts on her own. Derek and I were tracking her at the request of another pack. They were worried she would bring hunters, and they wanted her gone.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t try to recruit her,” Stiles says.
“Some of the more traditional packs don’t accept strangers. They’ll only accept someone new as a spouse, and that person has to be a born wolf,” Cora says.
“Huh. Bigotry?”
“Security,” she answers. “Bitten wolves take longer to adjust and stabilize, and the bite itself is a red flag for hunters who know how to read between the lines.”
Stiles nods. “Makes sense. What happened with Janey?”
“She’d been bitten about fifteen years earlier and was doing okay until her alpha died and the new alpha kicked her out.”
“What? You told me once that losing a pack member was like losing a limb.”
Cora nods. “It is. But Janey was the old alpha’s mistress, and the new alpha was his widow.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Bad situation all the way around, and Janey isn’t necessarily proud of it, but she isn’t exactly ashamed, either. Anyway, she’d already run a couple of hundred miles by that time and was going feral without a pack to support her.”
Stiles wants to object, to say that the lack of a pack doesn’t mean a werewolf will go feral, but he stops himself, because that isn’t what Cora is saying. A werewolf who’d lost her alpha and her pack probably could go nuts under those circumstances.
“How’d you bring her back?”
“Derek did. When he caught up with her, she attacked him, and he just roared at her. It was enough to startle her back to lucidity for a moment, so he did it a few more times. Eventually, she stabilized enough to ask if she could travel with us.”
Stiles sees Derek enter, but Derek doesn’t start toward them until Stiles acknowledges him. Even then, he approaches slowly.
“Is that when he figured out he was an alpha again?”
“No,” she says. “That happened a few months later when Bob asked if he could join our pack. While he and Janey sorted themselves out, Derek and I kind of freaked out a little.”
“How could you not notice something like that?” Stiles asks.
“It’s easy when you never really wolf out,” Derek says. He sits next to Cora. “I knew I was stronger than I’d been, but I thought it was being part of a slightly larger beta pack.”
“His power came back so gradually that it took Bob addressing him as ‘Alpha Hale’ before I recognized it myself.”
“What about Janey?” Stiles asks. “Did she know?”
“She thought I was a strong beta.”
Cora snorts. “You should have heard the bitching when we figured out what happened. She wasn’t happy about it.”
“Why not? I’d’ve thought she’d be happy to have an alpha again.”
“She was still grieving for her former alpha,” Derek says. “It wasn’t easy, but eventually, she made her peace with the situation.”
“Yeah, about half an hour after knocking Bob on his ass for good,” Cora adds.
They fall silent when three of the wait staff show up with pizzas and pitchers of pop. It takes a few minutes to figure out how best to get all three pizzas on a single table, but eventually, they’re left to themselves again.
While they eat, Stiles braces himself to talk about what happened. Even now, after five years, it isn’t easy to discuss.
“After you left,” he begins, “the Nemeton started living up to Deaton’s predictions and became a beacon to a whole bunch of supernatural shit. I won’t lie — it was bad, and whenever we thought it couldn’t, it got worse.”
Cora and Derek stop eating as soon as Stiles starts talking, and neither of them says anything when he pauses. They sit and wait, and it’s one of the nicest things anyone has done for him. Ever. He’s pretty sure he could stretch this pause into next week, and they would still wait on him.
“Scott started — he started losing it. Right after he became an alpha, he was pretty easy-going and would listen to whatever anyone had to say. But with everything going down, he started clamping down on discussions.” Stiles looks at Derek and says, “He started to sound like you right after you became an alpha. I told him that one night and he didn’t speak to me for a week.”
Derek nods, unsurprised. “For me, it was panic over how alone I was. I would guess that for Scott, it was the strain of defending his territory.”
“Yeah. That’s what Deaton said.” Stiles takes a deep breath, because it’s one thing to hear it from Deaton, and it’s something else to hear it from Derek, someone with personal experience of the stress that can turn an alpha into a dick. “Scott — he convinced Danny to take the bite, but he didn’t exactly give him full disclosure about what we were facing. Worse than that, Scott didn’t talk to Ethan first, and it nearly tore the pack apart. Eventually, I sat Ethan down and explained that Scott’s ideas are the legendary stuff of fail but that he always means well.”
Cora started a low growl when Stiles mentioned Ethan, and she’s still doing it. Derek elbows her, and she blinks in surprise.
“Sorry. I guess I’m not as over it as I thought,” she says.
“Trust me. I totally understand,” Stiles says. “Anyway, I managed to get things smoothed over with Ethan and convinced Chris Argent that Scott had actually reasoned things out before he turned Danny.”
“Scott was lucky that Argent didn’t know you were lying,” Derek murmurs.
“Yeah. But maybe if Argent had figured it out, Scott wouldn’t have kept going.”
Derek asks, “How did Allison take it?”
“Kind of the way I did — she thought Scott was an idiot but figured that an extra werewolf would be a good idea.” Stiles takes a long drink of his pop. He’s hungry and nauseated and isn’t willing to risk solid food at the moment. “Danny was just the first one, though. He turned a friend of Lydia’s next, and Lydia nearly shot him with wolfsbane. The only thing that stopped her was that Hayley seemed excited about being a werewolf.”
“Two new betas in how long?” Derek asks.
“Two months. He was still thinking clearly enough to realize he didn’t want to have to drag more than one beta at a time through its first full moon.”
Stiles takes a deep breath to calm himself down, and Derek and Cora start eating again, because apparently, this is a good time for a break. Stiles would rather get it all out at once, but his own reactions aren’t good at the moment, and the last thing anyone needs is for him to lose control in a crowded university bar.
To give himself a chance to think about something else, he asks, “Why are you here?”
“Because of you,” Cora says.
Her answer is easy and sure, like she knew all along she was going to be honest about it. Stiles wonders what the lie will be then immediately shies away from the thought. Suspicious and cynical, yes, always, but Derek and Cora aren’t trying to hide anything, as far as he can tell, and that’s actually pretty far, because Stiles was always good at detecting bullshit, and his skills have only improved with the addition of werewolf senses.
“What, you heard about me living here and decided to pay a visit?”
“More like we heard about a pain-in-the-ass omega who was protecting other omegas who didn’t necessarily want to be part of a pack,” Derek says. His voice and heart rate are still calm, and there’s not a hint of tension in him, but the same can’t be said of Stiles, who feels the urge to run. Derek gives Stiles a sharp look and adds, “Once I heard the whole story, including your name, I told the alphas in the area to back off. They won’t try to recruit you or anyone you’re working with. Not anymore.”
“You’re what — like the Lone Ranger for werewolves now?”
Cora elbows Derek hard and starts laughing. Derek ends up looking like a complete mope, and Stiles adds, “Wait, I’m right?
Derek doesn’t say anything. He just slumps a little lower on his chair. Cora says, “Nothing as noble as that. We’ve been traveling around to look for a suitable territory, and word’s gotten out that Derek is good at dealing with omegas and is willing to take them on.”
“Just on the strength of Janey and Bob?”
“And Martin, and Susan, and Jack, and Sandy, and Candy,” Cora says.
“Candy? You have a werewolf named Candy in your pack?”
Derek sighs. “And her twin, Sandy. They don’t know what their parents were thinking either.”
“The Werewolf Candy,” Stiles says, delighted beyond reason.
Cora kicks him lightly under the table and says, “Candy and Sandy were body builders before they got turned, and they’ve only gotten bigger.”
“Jesus. Wait — they aren’t like Ethan and Aiden, are they?”
“No,” Derek says. “From what we could tell, Deucalion had a witch do something to them. They killed their alpha while merged, so they both became alphas, but they’re weaker than regular alphas when separated.”
“And stronger when they’re together,” Stiles says.
Cora is growling again, and Derek puts his arm around her. She says, “I need to get over this.”
“Or you don’t,” Stiles says. “Everyone deals with trauma in their own way. As long as you aren’t letting it run your life completely, you’re doing okay.”
Cora and Derek both give him an assessing look at that, but he’s not ready yet to dive back into his own issues and hopes they don’t call him on it.
“The point is,” Cora continues, “That people who snicker at Candy because of her name usually end up with their face planted into a wall.”
“Or pavement,” Derek says. “Whatever is convenient.”
“And they travel with you? Along with — what is it? Five other werewolves?”
Derek says, “They did up until recently, but Candy has the potential to become a true alpha.”
“I thought that was rare,” Stiles says. He can’t help the bitter tone in his voice and doesn’t particularly want to.
“It has been,” Cora says.
“But I have a theory that it’s because no one takes the time to work with werewolves who have the potential,” Derek says. “Candy is close. Martin, Susan, Jack and Sandy all respond well to her, and they should be a tight knit pack once she fully transitions.”
“Where are they now, if not with you?”
Cora says, “They’re about forty miles north, working with an alpha who’s interested in helping Candy make the red-eye leap.”
Despite himself, Stiles is fascinated. “Why? Why would another alpha help like that?”
“He has a large pack but no one with the right potential to be able to split it safely,” Derek says. “Candy would allow him to bring his own pack to a safer size and give him a built-in ally nearby.”
“So a win-win, right?” Stiles doesn’t let himself wonder how things might have turned out if another alpha had been close enough to help mentor Derek. He went down that particular road once, and once was all it took to make him realize that “might have beens” were dangerous, dangerous things to someone like him.
“A win-win,” Cora says.
The waiter brings their checks, and Derek takes both before Stiles can object. Not that he would, because yeah. Starving student and all that, but even so, it doesn’t sit right. It’s another moment before he realizes it’s because their meal is done, but he hasn’t finished telling them the complete story of Scott did to him, and he needs to get that out tonight, or he’s afraid it won’t get out all.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he says suddenly.
He’s never told anyone the whole story before, not even the omegas who have come through town. Only one of them was bitten by a rogue alpha, but like Scott, she found the transition to a new species to be more traumatizing than the attack itself. He’s talked around his attack in survivor groups, though, substituting “raped” for “bitten” without hesitation, because as far as he can tell, the emotional fallout has been essentially the same. But he’s never taken anyone through the attack step-by-step, not even his dad, and Stiles isn’t sure he has enough control to keep from wolfing out while he talks.
“On second thought, let’s walk through the woods behind my place.”
Derek nods and says, “I’ll take care of this and meet you outside.”
Cora and Stiles don’t talk while they wait, and when Derek joins them, they walk back to Stiles’s apartment complex and head toward the woods. They’re probably a hundred yards under the canopy of spring leaves before Stiles starts talking again.
“Scott turned three more people after he turned Hayley, and as far as we could tell, he got their consent every time, but he didn’t tell them what they’d be facing. He seemed to settle down for a couple of months after the last one, but then Scott asked me if I’d take the bite. I told him no, that he needed at least one human in his pack. I thought that was the end of it, but then his betas started trying to talk me into it. When I didn’t budge, Scott told Dad one day that I’d be safer if I was turned.”
He can feel a slow thrum of anger coming from Derek and Cora, and he assumes it’s because Scott broke a few more rules than simply biting Stiles without his consent.
“Dad wanted me to leave that day, but I couldn’t believe Scott was capable of doing that to me, not after what he went through with Peter. I told Dad that Scott knew what being turned against his will was like and that he wouldn’t do that to anyone else.” He takes a deep breath to calm himself. “Two weeks later, I found out how wrong I was.”
Derek puts his arm around Stiles’s shoulders and brings him close, and Cora crowds in on Stiles’s other side. Between the two of them, they settle Stiles down, and for the moment, he can keep his claws in where they belong.
“We were on the lacrosse field, arguing about me taking the bite. I told him I never wanted to be a werewolf, that I was happy the way I was. Scott told me that unless I took the bite, I would continue to be a danger to the pack, because they would have to keep protecting me. That pissed me off, because at last count, I’d saved the pack more times than they saved me.”
His claws come out before he can stop them, and he can feel his eyes shift, but Stiles keeps talking, because it’s time to get this poison out of his system. Five years is too long to keep a secret, and he trusts the people he’s with to keep him from hurting anyone in his distress.
“Scott shifted and pinned me to the ground. I used every trick Allison had taught me to try to throw him off, but he was too strong. I kept telling him no, don’t do it, but he —”
After his fangs come out, he completes his shift and howls. Derek pulls him around so they’re chest to chest, and Cora is behind him. The two of them keep him from flying apart completely while he relives the memory of being absolutely helpless to prevent Scott from biting him. He’d been terrified — truly terrified — of what Scott had become. The Scott Stiles grew up with had disappeared into fur, fangs, and instinct, and Stiles was forced not only to try to stop Scott from biting him, but also to face up to the fact that their friendship was ending in violence. Stiles had never seen Scott as a monster until that point, and now he can’t see him as anything but a monster.
The grief is still too big to face head-on, but Derek and Cora are there, and they keep holding him, because they understand what it’s like to lose everything to someone who was once so trusted. Stiles feels like he’s being fully supported for the first time since before his mom got sick, like he doesn’t have to make hard decisions, because someone else can take care of those for him. He feels like he has family around him, and he feels secure. He no longer feels the need to defend himself, and it’s enough to bring him back to his human face so he can finish telling them about that afternoon.
“He shoved my shirt up and bit me,” Stiles says, his eyes closed and face hidden against Derek’s shoulder. “Afterward, he stood up and said it was too late now, that I was going to be a werewolf and I should just get used to it, because there was too much to do with the Nemeton being so active. Then he walked off like it was nothing.”
“What did you do?” Derek asks quietly.
“I got up after a while, drove home, and told Dad what happened. He was ready to hunt Scott down and kill him right then, but I told him it would be dangerous if he left all those new betas without their alpha, especially with all the other things that kept showing up in town. He told me to pack whatever I needed. He said there was no way in hell he trusted Scott to be my alpha, not after turning me like that.”
“So he sent you out of town,” Derek says.
“Yeah. But he called Deaton first and told him what happened and asked how to keep Scott from controlling me. Deaton told him to get in touch with Morrell and said she’d be able to help and to direct me to a safe haven. He also told Dad to let Chris Argent know what was going on.”
“Did he? I thought Deaton was Scott’s biggest cheerleader.” Derek’s voice is a low rumble in the gloom of dusk, and Stiles kind of wants to crawl inside it and never leave.
“Yeah, ‘was’ is the operative word there,” Stiles says, laughing a little. It’s weird, because he hasn’t felt like laughing at all in the last five years.
“Anyway, while I was loading up the Jeep, Allison texted me. Chris had Dad on speakerphone, so she knew what went down, and she told me she would do what she could to keep Scott from trying to call me back. She said Chris told Dad that he would give Scott one warning, and after that, he’d bring hunters to town.”
“Scott didn’t try to reach you after that?” Cora asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If he did, it was too late, because I met up with Morrell a couple of days later, and she was able to do something to cut me off from Scott’s influence. After that, she sent me to Pine Ridge Reservation.”
“I know the pack,” Derek says. “The alpha has a good grasp of reality, and her betas love her.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, relaxing at the memory of Abigail and marveling that he managed to get the story out without falling to pieces. “She kept me there for a year, until I had enough control to be on my own. She helped me get my GED and told me I didn’t have to join a pack if I didn’t want to.”
Derek and Cora tighten their hold on him, and then Derek says, “You’re exhausted.”
“It’s the first time I’ve told anyone,” he says, too tired to dissemble and deflect.
He gets his temple nuzzled for that, and Derek says, “We’ll get you back to your place so you can sleep.”
The thought of being alone doesn’t feel right. He says, “Any chance you can stay with me?”
“Sure,” Derek says.
~*~*~
When Stiles wakes up the next morning, he feels calm and centered. Derek is in the kitchen, but Cora is gone. He wonders if she went to talk to the other two betas in their pack, but his curiosity isn’t enough to get him out of bed.
Derek comes in a few minutes later with a cup of coffee and says, “We need to talk.”
Stiles sits up and accepts the coffee. “Yeah, conversations that start that way never end well.”
Derek snorts and says, “That tends to be the case, but I hope this conversation will beat the odds.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I’d like you to consider joining my pack,” he says. “If you say no, I’ll accept your answer, but in return, I’d like you to accept my number should you change your mind down the road.”
“Why? Why me? You could barely stand to be around me in Beacon Hills,” Stiles says, sipping at his coffee. Derek’s offer doesn’t alarm or threaten him, which is new. Even Abigail, whom he’d adored, had scared the crap out of him when she’d offered a place in her pack.
“It wasn’t that I couldn’t stand to be around you,” he says. “It was that you frustrated me. As a human, you were a better beta than any of the others could hope to be, but you didn’t want the bite, so you were off limits.”
“I’m sorry,” Stiles says.
“About what?”
“I’m not saying you were a good alpha, but I think you had a better grasp of reality than we ever gave you credit for. I’m sorry we made it harder for you.”
“There were enough mistakes all around,” Derek says, making it clear that it’s all water under the bridge. He starts to say something else but stops.
“What?” Stiles asks.
Derek stares at him for a long moment before saying, “Scott was wrong, and if human law recognized werewolves, he would have gone to jail for biting you, and I would have been in the courtroom to request the maximum sentence.”
“But,” Stiles says. “I hear a ‘but’ lurking at the end of that.”
“But I understand what drove him to do it,” Derek says. “Just know that I don’t believe he should have. He’s a ‘true alpha’ and should have had at least as much self-control as I did when I was failing as an alpha left and right. In fact, he should have had more self-control than I did.”
It stings to hear that Derek understands what drove Scott to bite him, but Stiles pushes past that and thinks he gets why Derek told him so.
“Are you trying to warn me that if I join your pack, you might make crap decisions, too?”
“No, I’m telling you that regardless of whether you join my pack, there’s always the potential for me to make crap decisions. But if you’re with us, you’ll have a better than average chance of talking me down off the ceiling,” Derek says. His eyes are gentle, and Stiles can hear the truth both in his words and in the spaces between the words.
“Your pack keeps you grounded.”
“My pack keeps me grounded,” Derek says.
“Why didn’t it keep Scott grounded?”
“I can only guess, but I think at least part of it had to do with how many new betas he had. Aside from destabilizing him, it’s unlikely that none of them knew how to function as a pack.”
“Ethan and Aiden — never mind. They wouldn’t have had a clue either,” Stiles says.
“Here.” Derek hands him a card with his name and number on it. “For when you’re ready to decide.”
Stiles accepts the card and blinks. He’s already made his decision, and while it isn’t what he would have expected, it feels right.
“No need,” he says. “As long as you’re willing to let me graduate next month, I’ll join your pack now.”
Derek takes the coffee cup out of his hand to set it on the nightstand and takes Stiles’s hands into his.
He says, “If you ever want to go back to Beacon Hills, I’ll have to bite you to override Scott’s prior claim.”
It’s a good thing he’s already holding on, because Stiles starts shaking. Derek brings him in close and tucks Stiles’s face into his shoulder.
“I won’t bite you unless you ask me to. We will be in a clean, safe place, and if you tell me to stop, I will. We will keep trying until you can accept my bite or until you ask me not to try anymore. If you can’t accept my bite, you won’t be able to risk being near Scott, but you’ll still have the security of the pack.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Derek?” he asks. He doesn’t lift his head, because Derek’s shoulder is both comfortable and safe.
“I’m still me, but it’s amazing what mentorship can do to improve an alpha’s approach to life,” he says, his voice dry as dust.
“You went to alpha school?”
“Something like that.”
“Huh. Cool.”
Stiles doesn’t make any effort to sit up, so it falls to Derek to make the decision for them some time later.
“Come on, lazy bones. Time to get showered and dressed so you can meet the rest of the pack.”
“What happens then?” Stiles gets out of bed reluctantly and heads to the shower. It’s one thing to trust Derek and Cora, but Janey and Bob are a different story. “Will I have to fight for my place in the pecking order? Will the other wolves pick on me?”
His sarcasm and sass are rusty, but they’re still workable. He feels like he fits in his skin again, and that’s pretty amazing.
“Idiot,” Derek says. “You’ll meet the others and figure out how to fit in. And while you do that and finish your coursework, I’d like to meet with the omegas you’ve been protecting.”
“Why? Not that I object, or anything,” Stiles calls out from the bathroom. He turns on the shower and waits for the hot water to make its way to his unit.
“I want to let them know how to get in touch with me. If they ever decide to join a pack, I can help them find one that’s a good fit.”
“Kind of like a werewolf matchmaking service?”
“Something like that,” Derek says.
Stiles skims out of his boxers and climbs into the shower. His desire to hear about Derek and Cora’s adventures over the last six years is sudden and fierce, but more than that, he wants to call his dad. He wants to tell him that he’s — okay. Stiles may never fully get over Scott’s betrayal, but being okay is a hell of a leap forward from where he was yesterday at this time. He thinks hope might not be all that far behind, and with that thought comes the realization that he’s finally moving forward.
He starts humming to himself, and while he can’t remember which song it is, he does remember the line, “Man is a giddy thing,” and thinks he’s never heard a truer thing.