Stiles isn't even able to catch his breath before he's being slammed against a locker. He didn't even have time to process why he was in school, during summer, in the middle of the day, before a blurred shape ran down the hall like a banshee and attacked him.

Stiles instantly recognizes her as Laura Hale, from a picture that he found Derek crying over three months ago, and instead of wondering how the fuck she's even alive, let alone in a high school, he can't help but get mad at Derek because, really, he could have at least attempted to tell him a story or two about his sister other than mentioning she was the old Alpha.

Did every Alpha come back to life after they died or is it just a Hale thing?

She presses him up against the lockers as soon as she reaches him and while it's not nearly as emasculating as when Erica beat him with his starter, it still makes him wave his hands in the space between them and groan obnoxiously. Stiles whines about the feeling of his naked upper torso against the cold lockers, the fresh stinging of his wounds.

He's reminded so much of Derek when he sees her crystal blue eyes drilling holes into his, and the slight tips of elongated fangs poking out from her lips, that he decides it's better to try to assess the situation instead of begging for his life.

But, really? Why is Laura Hale so intent on murdering him in a school hallway? He looks down at himself, and wonders if he's not beat up enough for her to consider leaving alone.

The main difference is that Derek is always just trying to intimidate him, but Laura looks well prepared to actually rip his throat out. The thought makes Stiles gulp and go slack in her grip, trying to appear as least threatening as possible.

Eye contact. He remembers the rule about eye contact well and quickly steels his gaze to the wall behind her, where he gapes at a sign. His gut twist like a washing machine as his eyes roam over it again and again because no.

There was no way that sign was congratulating the class of 2007 on graduating soon.

No.

Fucking.

Way.

Laura snarls at him, as quiet as she can to still be threatening, and presses him harder into the unforgiving metal. Stiles' shoulder is digging into a locker, and he winces at the thought of another future bruise that is sure to form.

"Who. Are. You?" She growls at him. He can feel the small pricks of her very werewolfy claws against his neck and he's eerily reminded of the Kanima slicing people into paralysis. He would really love to answer her, but he's a bit busy having an existential crisis over the possibility trying to take home in his head.

There's no way that demon transported him back in time six years. If Stiles was Scott, he would have denied denied denied, but the logic is almost too flawless. He has freaking Laura Hale in front of him, pressing him into a locker, for fucks sake. There really isn't any room for denial right now, so he tries to roll with it as best as he can.

As best as he can apparently isn't good enough for Laura, because she presses a single claw into his exposed shoulder. He manages to flinch away from her and it sends his heart slamming against his rib cage as it makes her dig harder into his muscle. What's one more open wound compared to realizing he's six years in the past though, right? He looks down, letting out a huff of relief when he sees that she didn't scratch at his scars.

Flinching away exposes his neck more, though, and by her pleased expression he can't tell if it was the right move or not. Isaac would always bare his throat to Derek if he was being reprimanded, but that was towards his Alpha. Stiles internally listed the pro's and con's of submitting to Laura Hale, of all people, and decides that he really isn't in any position to question her dominance over him right now anyway.

Especially when she tightens her grip on his neck and looks positively delighted as he hisses against the feeling.

Laura Hale is a girl who enjoys her power trips. Noted.

Her eyes narrow as more seconds tick by and her features are rapidly shifting into something way less human and Stiles yelps as she crowds closer to him, "Stiles. Ugh, fuck! Please don't kill me, please, I really have no idea what's going on and-" Stiles sputters and flails as she presses her face closer to his throat and her nostrils flair like Derek's anytime Scott came to a pack meeting after being with Allison, "-can you not smell me right now, Jesus! I know you werewolves get off on that kind of thing but seriously?! Show some decorum. We are in a public-"

Laura relaxes her grip on him but manages to look pissed as opposed to her angry curiosity before. Stiles wonders if it's bad form to pee himself when being interrogated by a scary werewolf.

"You smell like my brother," She hisses, and it's almost a snarl by the way she flashes her fangs at him, "Why?"

Stiles can answer this question, technically, but he would really rather not explain to Laura that he's from six years in the future and he and her brother and kinda sorta friends who work together a lot and spend Sunday mornings eating cereal and discussing new training strategies and save each others lives if it's convenient. Stiles challenges Hallmark to make a card for that awkward situation, but that's an email that'll have to be written later since Laura's, now thankfully human, nails are digging into his neck and dragging him out the front door of the school, one hand typing rapidly on a flip phone.

He wonders briefly if the man-handling is also werewolf thing or a Hale thing, but doesn't have a lot of time to think about it with Laura forcing him into the front seat of a suspiciously familiar Camaro. She manages to do this all one handed while still typing away on her phone; a feat that Stiles is truly impressed by because he remembers 2007 and texting on a Razor sucked ass no matter what freaky werewolf superpowers you had.

She snaps her phone shut loudly as she settles into the drivers side and doesn't even bother with the seat belt. Stiles does, because he remembers Derek's driving and is still finding little to no differences between the brash Hales.

She growls lowly at him when he opens his mouth to ask where she's taking him, because it's only common courtesy to warn someone before you drop their mutilated body in a river bank, so he takes the drive to pinch the soft skin of his underarm and hopes to wake up from whatever nightmare he prays he's in, and then, when the skin turns an angry red and it's apparent he won't be waking up any time soon, he picks at the dried blood covering the skin of his torso. He remembers ripping his shirt off of him, remembers pressing it into Scott's side and shouting at Boyd to watch out.

Stiles can still hear his screams and Allison's gasping breaths as she sobbed over him. Hunters could lace almost anything with wolfs bane, apparently, and the pure silver of the knife had glinted dangerously in the moonlight once the demon stole it off of Chris' body. He shivers uncomfortably as he remembers the black shape, It's mouth just a gaping maw as it taunted and teetered dangerously around his pack.

Laura smirks as she scents the air, "I'm not going to kill you, if that's what your afraid of."

Stiles doesn't correct her, doesn't tell her that his fear is mostly from the nauseousness that swirls in his gut, from still feeling the black abyss press into his back, the thousand knives jamming into his sides, the fire that burned in his very soul as his own spark was used against him. He lets her think she's a big, bad, scary werewolf and doesn't tell her that he can still feel the weight of his vial of mountain ash in his pocket, that he can shield himself from her in a few seconds if he needs to.

She can go on thinking he's just a suspicious human who smells a bit too much like her brother, five other wolves, and blood. Stiles somehow keeps his mouth snapped shut, too busy recounting the events that had just occurred five minutes ago.

Fuck, how had it all gone so wrong?

They had him, they fucking had him! It was trapped in the circle that Stiles meticulously slaved over for two days, It was doused with holy water, and It had sat there and shivered and burned against the words that Stiles and Lydia hurled at him, the words they stayed up night after night practicing over skype.

But Stiles can still remember Its smirk as they finished, the sharp fangs as It laughed harshly before brutally attacking them all. And when It saw the marks on Stiles; the shapes Deaton had carefully carved into the skin of his shoulders, his rib cage, and his hips? It practically giggled with glee.

Stiles presses his face into the cool window, letting his breath create puffy clouds on the surface. He can almost hear Derek growling at him to stop, that he could scratch them, but he ignores the voice in his head.

Laura isn't as protective of her car, or she's just too busy replying the to the flood of text messages she received as soon as they left the parking lot. Her phone is a barge of ting!s and Stiles is two seconds away from grabbing her phone and throwing it out the window.

He side eyes her and decides that would just make him an even bigger target of her anger and decides the phone will remain intact for another day.

It takes him two minutes longer than he would have liked for it to to realize that Laura is taking him back to the Hale house. Stiles isn't comforted by this, not like he would be if he was driving his jeep with Erica, Boyd, and Isaac squished in the back, Erica snarking him every which way about any asinine topic that pops into her head, with Scott to his side, rolling his eyes at their banter.

He's not being taken to his Alpha, isn't going to be able to pop into the renovated kitchen and mutter about movie options while pulling out supplies for waffles or lasagna or whatever he was making that night, isn't going to laugh while Derek completely dominates the wolves in training matches, isn't going to have the comfort and safety of his pack. He's literally being dragged into a wolf den, reeking of another pack and their son.

Stiles uses the rest of the drive to reconsider any and all life choices he made that lead him to this point in time. He absently runs his right hand over his left side, using his fingers to trace the swirls and circles and diamonds of the scar, feeling the smooth, fake looking, pink flesh under his palm. It calms him, grounds him to the situation, reminds him that this is real.

The last thing he remembers is the demon tracing the pattern with Its featherlight touch while it held him in an unbreakable hold. It ran Its hand from his right shoulder, across to his left, and down to where it ended just above his hip. It had said something in Its deep voice, the one that just made him feel queasy and so so so wrong. What had It said though? Stiles was too busy struggling, too busy listening to the cries of Allison and the roar of anger from Erica, too busy trying to remember the last thing he said to his father because if he was dying he wanted to make sure it wasn't something stupid like promising to take the trash out.

Laura pulls up to the Hale house and Stiles really wonders why Derek didn't correct how many of the details they got wrong in the rebuild. They didn't even paint it the right color. Like, come on. He blinks and there's suddenly four other people on the porch.

Werewolves, he reminds himself, and these ones will kill him if they think he's a threat to their pack. Stiles remembers Derek's eyes flashing as a feral omega cornered Lydia, remembers his ferocious growl when Danny showed up to the house when Stiles and Allison were locking everyone up for a full moon, remembers the swift and unrelenting tug that called to him anytime someone got too close to them, remembers the need and desire to protect his family and his pack.

He doesn't have a pack though, not here, not in 2007. His pack is down the street at school, blissfully unaware of werewolves and hunters, or at the police station, pouring themselves too hard into their work, or in San Diego, wishing they could just settle down. He's alone, and it hurts worse than the pain in the deep cut on his thigh.

Stiles decides he's way too emotionally drained for pack politics and ignores Laura's warning snarl as he gets out of the car.

"Look," he starts, eyes sliding over Derek's family and settling directly on the woman he suspects to be his mother. She's tall, and holds herself exactly as Peter did when he was an Alpha, except she doesn't exude an air of murderous psychopath. Her eyes flash red as she scents the air, and Stiles lightly lifts his chin, in submission- not defiance, but keeps his eyes trained on hers. His knees want to buckle under the weight of her gaze, and he's suddenly reminded how many bruises are on his skin and how many open wounds he's currently letting get infected and sighs, "twenty minutes ago, my best friend was bleeding out on me and I had to watch half of my pack die because I obviously fucked up somehow. If you're going to kill me, can you at least let me sit down on a fucking couch first."