"How can you even remember me?" Stiles asked, sitting on one of the large sofas in the library, Veva tucked up on his knee and glaring at Lydia with a fierce expression on her little face.

"I don't know!" Lydia snapped. She was pacing back and forth on the rug in front of the roaring fire – just like she'd been doing for the past hour and Stiles explained about the spell, and the bite. "But this morning Jackson and Scott don't remember a thing about last night and I think I'm going crazy." She pointed a finger at Stiles. "This is your fault."

Veva snarled, snapping her little pointed teeth at Lydia's extended finger. Stiles flicked her ear playfully. "Stop it." He chided. "She's aloud to be angry."

"Damn right I am!" Lydia said, resuming her pacing. "My boyfriend's brother is a werewolf. Seventeen and Shacked up! With red eyes and teeth and a kid! A baby!" She looked at Veva. "A cute kid, but still… Stiles, you're seventeen!"

"I know-"

"No, you don't." She cut him off. "You don't know. You've never been outside of Beacon Hills. You've never been to college, or gone to Paris, or had a life – and now you want to stay here? Be a dad? At seventeen?"

"I don't have any other option, Lydia." Stiles said, feeling spookily calm in the face of her very relevant points. "If I leave… what? I go mad? I really, really, wasn't kidding when I said I wanted to kill Scott – and all he was doing was getting in my way!" He glanced over at Jo and Sam, who were standing over at the window and hadn't moved since Lydia arrived. For some reason Stiles felt that they were distancing themselves from him, and he didn't like it. "What about the fact that no one remembers me? I can't go back to school – do you what it would feel like if your mom and dad didn't even remember you? Seeing them all the time and not being able to do anything about it? So you want me to leave town? And do what? And what about Veva? And Jo? And Sam? I'd have to take them with me. How the hell am I supposed to explain that their mine?" He looked at Lydia. "It sound great when you say 'come home' but you aren't thinking this through. I don't have a home to go back to!"

Lydia stopped in her tracks and glared. "I see you've made up your mind. You obviously don't care about the people you are leaving behind."

Stiles wasn't sure how it happened, but one moment he was sitting the couch with Veva on his lap, and the next he was holding the ginger princess up by her neck, snarling.

"Don't you ever, ever think I don't care!" He snapped, words slightly slurred by his elongated teeth. "Don't you fucking dare! You think I didn't sit there every day and watch my family go about like I never existed? Watch them eat dinner and watch TV and go on like nothing was wrong?" He growled, tossing her easily across the room, where she landed in an undignified heap. "Get the fuck out of my house."

Six hours later, Stiles was still throbbing with anger, so much so that even Veva had decided to leave him alone – stalking the gardens and growling under his breath. Who the hell did she think she was, saying Stiles didn't care? Didn't care about his mom and his dad – or his brothers?

She had no fucking clue what it felt like to see them, through the mirror, getting on with their lives like he'd never existed. It wasn't even like they thought he'd died, they weren't mourning him. They didn't even know his name. As far as his parents knew, they had two boys, and Stiles was… well… he just wasn't. Ever. How could he go back and see them?

Would he walk past his dad and have him say 'Have a nice day' like he did to the people in the town who he couldn't quite place. Faces without names. He didn't think he could cope with that blank look – not from his dad.

He growled at nothing and swiped at an innocent rosebush, watching as the soft yellow petals floated through the air, landing on the path on front of his feet. A lazy bee buzzed around his head, annoyed at being disturbed but too drunk on nectar to fly straight. For some reason, watching the bee, fat and uncoordinated try to land on the still swaying buds of the rosebush made him smile.

He couldn't go home.

But it wasn't bad here. Not with Derek.

"At least you're smiling now." Sam's voice drifted from in front of him. Stiles looked up from his study of the honeybee and saw Sam walking down the path. The fallen petals crushed under his feet. "Decided what you're going to do then?"

There was no point in pretending that Stiles didn't know what Sam was talking about. "Yes." He nodded. "I'm staying here. I've got nowhere else to go – and I wouldn't be able to stay sane out there. It's hard enough to keep my temper here."

All the tension seemed to leave the larger man's body, like he had been bracing himself for bad news. "I've gotta say, I'm glad." He admitted. "Jo an I didn't know how to tell ya, but we wanted to stay here. Keep safe." He leaned forward a little, "You might wanna talk to her."

Two days after Stiles let his pack know that they weren't leaving, Isaac was sitting in the hidden staircase that no one else used anymore. With the house fuller – who knew that 3 people and a 5 year old could take up so much damn room? – he'd resorted to that same hiding place where he'd kissed Sarah Hale, the same place he'd planned to elope with her.

He'd changed a few things, the first couple of years he'd treated the place more like a shrine than an abandoned staircase, but as the years went on he added a few things. There was electric lighting now, and a plush carpet on the wooden stairs. He sat there now, a book held loosely in his long fingers, thinking about the changes that had happened.

Stiles had started it all, and Isaac couldn't even start to think how much Veva would disrupt the house – he remembered that children were loud and messy, despite Erica's assurances that he'd hardly notice her. Sam – well… Sam looked like he was going to be spending a lot of time with Boyd, which was great news because last night he was pretty sure he heard Erica and Boyd alone. Together. Stiles and Derek weren't the only people in the house getting some action, then.

But then… then there was Jo. Angry and sullen, with about as much sense of decency in her clothing as Erica – he didn't care about what Erica said about times changing, he was always going to think women belonged in dresses and bonnets – and a nasty habit of showing up in the library just when he'd gotten himself settled down to read.

Which was why he'd retreated here, away from them all. Away from Erica spoiling that kid rotten, and Derek and Stiles trying to break the world record for 'most sex in a 24 hour period', Boyd and Sam in the kitchen – and Jo. Mostly, he just wanted to stay away from Jo.

"He's got a fucking problem with me." Jo snapped at him, and Stiles wasn't sure how to go about soothing her temper. He'd not been out of the bedroom much since Lydia left and had no idea if Isaac had an issue with her at all. "He won't even be in the same room as me." She said, glaring at Stiles like this was his problem.

"He likes his own space." Stiles said. They were sitting in the long, clear stretch of grass between the house and the tree line. Erica was sitting with Veva – they were both drawing a bowl of fruit… well, Erica was drawing a bowl of fruit, and Veva was making a mess. Stiles wasn't sure how that was teaching, but Erica told him that all young ladies should draw, dance and understand the delicacies of polite conversation (what Veva was going to do with that Stiles wasn't sure) but he was leaving her to it. It made her happy, and if it made Erica happy, it made Derek happy – and if it made Derek happy, he made Stiles very happy.

Jo glared. "He hates me, he won't even look at me. I don't even know why."

Derek, who'd been watching Erica with what was almost a soft expression, gave a small huff. "He probably doesn't know why either." He said, glancing at the redhead. "Took me a few days to figure it out."

Both Stiles and Jo turned to glare at the Alpha. "You knew something was going on?" Stiles said, around the same time Jo burst out with: "Then what's his problem?"

Derek leaned back and let out a sigh. "Your scent is… similar… to someone who lived here a long time ago." Derek shrugged. "My cousin. It's not the same, of course, but I suppose to a human it would smell almost the same."

"He's not human."

"He was when she was here." Derek said. "They were having an affair – a pretty serious one, if I remember. I was only a kid at the time, but I think they had planned to leave together." At their expressions, he shrugged. "They were both human – and completely unaware of how scenting worked beck then. You can't hide that kind of thing from a house full of werewolves." He looked over at Veva and Erica. "It was a long time ago, and his human memory of her scent might be confusing his wolf."

"He thinks I'm his dead girlfriend?"

"No." Derek said, with a frown. "but he might not be happy with someone new arriving reminding him of her, subconsciously." He shot Jo a quick look. "It took him a long time to let her go, try to understand."

Stiles was sitting in the library, still getting tutored by Isaac – who had refused to listen to his arguments that he'd never need to learn this crap any more – when he heard the car pull up outside.

This time, rather than immediately marching into the house, he could her the tiny redhead walk around her parked car, feet crunching on the gravel.

"Are you going to stand there or are you going to help?" She snapped at someone – going on the growl that Stiles heard – Derek.

Stiles got to his feet and walked towards the door, thrown open to let the warm summer air come through the large house. By the time he got to the door, everyone was there – looking at him expectantly.

"Hello Lydia." He said, watching as she pulled bag upon bag out of the small car.

"Hello Stiles." She said, pointing at the bags. "Jackson had a clear out of all his 'old' things. I managed to take everything in the house that belonged to you. I'm not sure if you want them or not." She pointed at one of the boxes. "Just crap from your room, pictures, comics… that kind of thing. I also got your medical records and school files." Lydia paused, then looked around at the house. "I'm the only one who can remember you, and I'm not going to let the fact that we had a fight get in the way of our friendship."

"Is this an apology?"

"I'd rather rip my own arm off." Lydia said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. Stiles couldn't help his laugh.

Two weeks after Lydia arrived with the contents of Stiles old room, Stiles, Sam and Derek took on the task of building Veva a tree house, while she sat imperiously and watched them. Their first attempts were clumsy and dangerously fragile, until Isaac appeared with a roll of paper and a ruler. Three hours later, Erica, Boyd and Jo appeared, and started putting forward their own suggestions.

Jo and Isaac got into a fight almost immediately and needed to be separated when she leapt through the air and tried to rip his throat out.

Lydia came once a week, normally on a Tuesday when Stiles knew Jackson had lacrosse practice. She mostly came for the library, and to talk to Stiles. Veva didn't like her.

A month after the tree house was complete, Isaac and Jo got into an actual fight that resulted in two suits of armour being smashed across the wide hallway, a priceless vase thrown at a head and hitting the wall , and more broken bones than Stiles had ever seen in his life.

Three months after Jo stopped limping and Isaac was able to talk without his jaw popping unpleasantly, Erica and Boyd moved their things into a twin room.

Two days after that, while Veva was refusing to learn her letters and numbers with Erica by locking herself in a toy chest and swallowing the key – resulting in Derek, Stiles, Erica and Boyd trying to work out how to smash open a solid oak chest without hurting the screaming werechild inside – Isaac and Jo got into another fight.

This time, without their Alpha's pulling them apart, they kept throwing punches until they couldn't.

Derek looked over at where Veva was playing with Sam and Boyd, being swung high into the air and screaming for more. Somewhere in the house, Erica was humming to herself happily, although they hadn't exactly told anyone, her scent was already starting to shift – pregnancy hormones kicking in. Stiles was clothes shopping – Derek really needed to stop ripping apart the ones he had left – with Lydia, who'd become an almost daily visitor.

He heard the raised voices, distantly, probably from some part of the house facing away from the green gardens. At first he thought that Jo and Isaac were fighting again, but then the pitch changed and… Ah.

He smiled in the sunshine, listening to the sound of his pack around him, aware that his mate would be back soon. Although the curse wasn't broken, he couldn't help but feel like he'd beaten it.

Who says you can't live happily ever after?

The End.

It's take me far too long to write this, the first time I've EVER struggled like this with writing.

I'm going to take a break – a few weeks at least – and just let my brain recharge.

Training for the Moonwalk has kicked up a gear and I'm mostly just exhausted now – we're walking in 8 mile stretches with 10 miles this weekend. Combined with work being really busy, I feel like I've got no time AT ALL to write anymore, and it's become a chore. Which is not fun!

I'll see you all when I get back to writing!

Love ya, and thanks for all your support with this story and my others!

- Robyn