It obviously wasn't the issue of the reservation being the worst place ever that made him want to go somewhere else, anywhere else. Stiles didn't mind the intermittent availability of water and electricity, the HUD houses everyone lived in, the scarcity of jobs and the government deliveries of basic necessities. That was normal, or had been normal almost every day of his entire sixteen years of life. There were times when food was plentiful and times when he and his dad were stuck depending on the nature fey to share, and there was nothing worse than being indebted to a fey, everyone knew that. Of course, it was simple for Stiles and his dad to avoid that for obvious reasons; the government didn't like it when either one of them owed anybody anything, unless it was them.

It wasn't even the name of the reservation. Most of his peers complained loudly that it was demoralizing to be from Toad Suck Reservation in Arkansas but Stiles didn't care because it wasn't like he was one of those who could even get a Visa to visit Outside, so anyone he was ever introduced to was already a Rez member.

It wasn't even that Stiles had very few friends. Being a metalzauber on a fey reservation meant that most of the things Stiles wanted to play with made his nature loving friends sick to their stomachs. Some of them even broke out into hives when they were at his house. So it was without saying that Stiles didn't have a plethora of companions, but Stiles could talk to himself and keep himself company plenty fine.

No, Stiles wanted to leave for the simple fact that there was Somewhere Else. There were other places in the world, and Stiles wanted to see them, not just stare at pictures and vids of them from his tablet screen. There were a million places he wanted to go, a million things he wanted to see and hear and taste and touch, and all of them were separated by a six foot brick and stone wall to keep the fey in and more importantly, the humans out.

Humans really didn't understand fey, as proved by the fact that they wanted them locked up and away from them once they had figured out the walls between their reality and Fairie had broken a couple thousand years ago (and it had only taken them that long to figure it out; really, Stiles thought that humans had to be stupid for that one alone). Stiles's dad tried explaining the strange value system of the humans, where paper was valued above all other things, especially if that paper had printed words or numbers on them. Then his dad launched into a lecture about Capitalism, but Stiles wasn't paying attention at all at that point. He was still trying to wrap his head around thinking paper was important.

Everyone knew that the fey dealt in favors. Paper couldn't get you anything that you wanted or needed, it wouldn't get you love or trust or power or teach you how to take care of the things around you, the people in your life or the elements that surrounded you. And it didn't matter if Stiles didn't understand this value system because it wasn't like he was ever going to leave the reservation.

Stiles sat half-listening in his history class, trying to figure out a way to make a deal with the government to let him go see things. It wasn't like history was boring, it was awesome to listen to the history teacher talking about what had happened in the past, especially since for most of it he was there. It was great having a history teacher a couple of thousand years old, especially since that history teacher had been a teacher to Merlin and a couple of European kings and some witches that had burned at the stake when the humans got scared of other humans with magic.

That was another thing Stiles didn't understand. Humans killed each other, but then it was so easy for them to have children that they must not value each other. Stiles was the only son of his parents who had been married for almost three hundred years, and he was the last one born of his kind. Metalzaubers were very rare, and his dad said that besides him and Stiles, there were probably three others left on the planet who could control and manipulate metal like them. Most of them were killed in the great dragon wars over a thousand years ago, since dragons were really the only things that could kill metalzaubers, anyway. And everyone knew there was only one dragon left on the entire planet. Well, maybe not the humans, but all of the fey.

"Mr. Stilinski," the teacher called his name.

"Yeah?" Stiles asked.

"Mr. Stilinski, you aren't paying attention, are you?" the teacher tapped his foot a few times, giving him a look that was filled with disdain.

"No sir, sorry sir," Stiles said, feeling ashamed. He really liked this teacher.

"Perhaps you should go outside and center yourself?" the teacher asked. It wasn't like they had a time limit to complete school, so attendance was spotty at best. Stiles was the only one he knew who wanted to get it over with, because he wanted to Go Outside. Everyone knew it, although he was laughed at a lot for it. There were those who were too powerful to ever leave the reservation, and Stiles was one of them.

"Yes sir," Stiles said, pulling on his red hoodie. "I'll see you tomorrow," he called over his shoulder, leaving the rest of the class who had wandered in giggling at him. They were all in their thirties and forties, just now getting around to taking high school.

"Relax, Stiles," one of them called after him. "You'll grow up in a hundred years or so. Don't rush it."

Stiles gave them a sheepish grin, waving at them as he walked outside of the building. It was hot, but it was almost always hot in Arkansas. Stiles had seen snow once, and the ice giants and cold spirits had gloried in the half inch of white while it had lasted for four hours. They sat around afterwards and told stories, about when they were free, and they could go to the northerly places and play in feet of the stuff. Stiles found it fascinating, but that didn't mean anything because Stiles found everything fascinating.

Stiles walked out of the school doors and stopped. Seated underneath the tree, reading a comic book, was a boy who looked like he was nine or ten years old. He had bright red hair and slanting green eyes, and when Stiles left the building he grinned up at Stiles with a look that belied his supposed youth.

Fey didn't age like humans, and Stiles knew that this particular fey was very young for his race, only a couple of thousand years old. Stiles smiled back at the last of the dragons, his principal and the only one who could teach him anything about metal that Stiles didn't already know.

"Rupert," Stiles greeted him by the name that he had chosen for this decade. Dragons loved names, although they never told anyone their true name. No fey ever shared their real names with anyone, unless that person was their mate.

"Hello, Stiles," the dragon said to him, putting his comic book aside and sitting up straighter. "How are you today?"

"Distracted," Stiles said. "Dumbledore sent me outside."

Rupert laughed at the nickname that Stiles had given his history professor. He loved Harry Potter as much as Stiles did, and his nickname for his professor had caught on with the student body, and the professor didn't care because Harry Potter had gone over very well with the fey population. It was also where Rupert had gotten his name for the decade.

"Stiles, you and I have been friends your entire life, haven't we?" Rupert asked, drawing his fingers over the comic book in the grass next to him.

"Yes," Stiles said, sitting down next to him and drawing a little in the red dirt underneath the grass. He liked the feel of the iron in the soil; it calmed him and made his mind quit wandering.

"You're always wanting stories about the outside world," Rupert said. Stiles didn't respond because it wasn't a question, and he figured that dragons liked to draw things out. They lived for such a long time that Stiles figured they just wanted to fill up that time with stories and poems, which never really bothered him either way. "What do you know about shape-shifters?"

"They're humans that can change shapes into animals?" Stiles asked.

"Do you know how they're different than fey?" the old dragon asked him with a boy's face alight with curiosity.

"Yeah," Stiles said. "The European killed all of their shape shifters, except for the werewolves because human wizards and the undead kept them as bodyguards, and the humans weren't powerful enough to fight them when they were organized like that. Most other cultures revered their magical humans, and so they were left free. There are some shape shifters who can change others into beings like themselves, especially European werewolves because they were so close to wizards for so long that their blood has magic in it."

"Most of that magic was put into their blood by wizards," Rupert amended Stiles's recitation of history.

Stiles nodded his head, he hadn't known that but it made sense.

"Do you know how werewolves feel about the fey?" Rupert asked him.

Stiles shook his head. He didn't know how anyone really felt about the fey, other than they needed to be kept locked up for some reason. His access to the Internet was given on the grounds that he didn't hack around the firewalls imposed on the reservation by the government. So many walls, it made Stiles's heart sink. He wished he could just peek, just a little, around them.

"Werewolves don't really know a whole lot about us. Most people don't know a whole lot about us," Rupert said kind of quickly, and Stiles was startled by the rush of words. No one spoke quickly on the reservation, there was never a reason for any of them to do anything with any kind of speed. "Most people think we are all the same, that we hate metal and we don't like them and that we're out to steal their souls. Most people think we are like the Christian devil and we want to steal their children. Werewolves, who are clannish on the best of days, will never let a fey near them or their cubs because they are scared that we will steal their pups. There is a deep distrust of the fey outside the walls of Toad Suck."

Stiles was shocked. Why would anyone distrust him? He was a good boy: he always ate his vegetables and he helped the other fey any time one of their machines went down, he never lied and he never cheated at games. He even went to school, just like the humans did, and he worked really hard to make good grades on the human standardized tests. And why in the world would he steal children or puppies?

"Humans too, they distrust us. They are scared of anything with power, and Stiles, you have a lot of power. You must never let anyone know the full extent of your power, because humans will kill you for it. They might think that they can steal it from you, but it is your blood that makes you this way. You have to know this."

"Why?" Stiles asked. "Why are you telling me these horrible things?"

The dragon stood on his very short legs, looking down at Stiles. Stiles had seen the dragon's true form at night, when he flew amongst the stars and the humans had cleared the sky for him to stretch his wings, and once the dragon had even taken him flying with him. "You must never tell any human what goes on at the reservation, Stiles. If they knew about your peers, if they knew about me… they would burn our homes to the ground. They do it every time they find out about how much power we have, so never tell anyone your secrets. You know your history, you know what happened the last time someone told a secret."

Stiles nodded, still confused. He knew that telling the wrong person a secret had ended in disaster for his people last time. It had been a brownie, who had begged not to be fired as a maid from a Senator's house, who had let everyone know that they fey still existed. It didn't take the humans long, in their overwhelming numbers, to round every last one of them up and set them behind the walls of the three fey reservations, just as they had done to the werewolves only ten years beforehand.

Stiles hadn't been born yet, but his dad told him of the nightmarish things that humans were capable of. Toad Suck was one of them, and it was where the most powerful fey were kept under armed guard, six foot walls, and spells that the human wizards had come up with. Scientists, Stiles reminded himself, the humans didn't call them wizards anymore; they were called scientists.

"You should go home," Rupert said, his green eyes no longer twinkling.

"Rupert," Stiles started to say, but the dragon looked sad.

"You have been a fun playmate," Rupert said, reaching out and stroking Stiles's cheek.

"What's going on?" Stiles asked.

Rupert walked away without answering, and Stiles knew better than to chase a dragon, even if his human exterior was only nine or ten years old.

Stiles gathered up his backpack and started walking home. He hated that he couldn't drive the old Jeep that one of the soldiers right outside the wall had given him to fix up, but the metal in proximity to so many fey made them sick to their stomachs, so Stiles was stuck with driving it on the outskirts of the reservation. He walked faster than normal though, because he really wanted to know what was going on with Rupert, and as his dad was the reservation Sherriff, he was the best person to go to for information.

When Stiles finally came up to his house, a hodgepodge of a HUD house and various metal parts his father and he had modified it with, (including a huge metal chimney for when they were working with metals and an antennae for receiving digital information and a few other parts most humans wouldn't recognize,) it was surrounded by military vehicles. It seemed as if they were taking everything out of it and putting it into a semi-truck, the likes of which Stiles recognized from the occasional times when the government brought something big to Toad Suck, like a fey that had been in hiding on the Outside or when one of them disappeared and their house had to be cleaned.

"What's going on?" Stiles asked the nearest warrior… soldier, Stiles reminded himself. Sometimes it sucked to have a history professor who couldn't keep up with human changes in language.

The soldier knew Stiles, he was the one who had given Stiles the Jeep in exchange for one of his golden rings that Stiles had called up from the ground. The soldiers liked it when Stiles called metal from the earth, so Stiles never saw a problem with giving them the metal in exchange for whatever spare mechanical parts they had on them at the time. Their metal had been smote and combined with other metals, and Stiles loved finding out the differences in them by taking them apart and forging them into something new. Gold was sometimes boring, but it was shiny and the soldiers liked it.

"Your dad is getting reassigned," the soldier said sadly. Stiles liked to think that if he wasn't fey, he would be friends with Special Forces Officer Anderson.

"Reassigned?" Stiles asked.

"You should probably go talk to your dad about this, kid," the soldier said. He looked like he was going to cry that Stiles didn't understand what was going on.

Stiles nodded his head. He knew he was young, but he thought he might be old enough to be told things. He walked into the house he and his dad shared, dodging military men carrying boxes and furniture out of the house. "Dad?" he called, his voice echoing in the emptier house, more than normal. The metal sang back to him, hearing his voice and soothing him.

"Stiles?" his dad called. "I'm in the bedroom."

Stiles found his dad looking sadly at some pictures of his family before his mother died. They were standing outside of this house, and his mom had a funny smile on her face as she tried to hold on to Stiles, who was trying to run out of range of the camera. Stiles remembered wanting to touch the camera and see what it was made out of, he remembered the song that the gears made when the photographer took their picture.

"What's going on?"

"We're going away," Sherriff Stilinski said, looking up at Stiles. "There's a problem on another reservation, and they have requested that a neutral party come lead the investigation, and to take over as Sherriff if the investigation goes well. It was suggested that I take this job by the BOA."

The Bureau of Otherkind Affairs had ultimate jurisdiction over the reservations. That was the only thing that Stiles really knew about them. Well, that and some of the elders were upset with them having jurisdiction over them because they were all so young, some of them only fifty or sixty years old, and they thought this made them wise.

"We're moving reservations?" Stiles asked, shocked.

"Yes, son," Sherriff Stilinski said. "We're going to a place called the Beacon Hills Reservation. It's in California."

Beacon Hills, Stiles thought. No wonder Rupert was giving Stiles pointers on werewolves and shapeshifters and humans. That reservation had all of them, and it was the most open reservation in the entire country. Stiles was going somewhere else, and for the first time, the thought terrified him.