Stiles is practically vibrating during the day, waiting eagerly for the countdown 'till the night. He jumps around the whole county, checking one last time that there's nothing 'interesting' waiting to blow his one night, and then uses the rest of the hours before nightfall looking out for the Sheriff and Scott. Part of him realizes that everything is going to blow up in his face shortly, but he's not really bothered by that as much as he is for the creepy glances Peter sends over Scott's shoulder, as if sensing him or something equally disturbing. He's tempted to stick out his nose or blow something in his face (he's creative, and Peter is starting to have a 'bad luck' reputation, which is just more of an incentive for Stiles to keep messing with the guy in the hopes of riding the world of the pest one day. A guy can only hope), but he wants to be top-notch for the night, and an undead creep is not really worth it (well, Peter is nearly worth it, but only because he tried to turn Scott into a murderer and that, no, just no). So he makes sure of hovering over other parts of the warehouse where the Pack is training, and fantasizes with burying Uncle Creep six feet under by himself. Preferably while alive.

However, he gets out of there before dusk starts to fall, makes a last moment visit to the Sheriff (still alive, still in one piece. Perfect.) and settles himself in a deserted alleyway, feeling his skin itch as the night creeps and his feet (his goddamned feet) touch the ground. Oh sweet mercy, corporeality is a blessing in disguise.

He trots out of the alleyway humming, torn clothes fluttering against his skin, and he walks to the woods where, behind a tree, his new clothes for the night await. He pulls on the layers of used clothes, smiling at how they feel over his skin, and pulls up the zipper of the hoodie before deigning himself acceptable. He knows he won't be able to wash away the smell of supernatural, but the clothes at least will give him a better cover than going into the battleground bare. Like this, he'll be able to hide himself for a while at least, which is better than nothing. And gods, let's hope Scott doesn't decide to get a good sniff from his best-pal-since-thirteen-who-only-visits-on-Halloween.

Which reminds him the reason he needs to take so many precautions now.

Fucking werewolves.

So he spends the next hours walking around the city, trick or treating and explaining to confused adults that his costume is "a normal looking teenager who's really a serial killer in disguise". He tells it so sweetly, that after that the house residents are left laughing uneasily, shifty eyes and subtle moves towards the safety of inside as they put more sweets than normal in his bag (hey, he's a teen, but he can damn well trick or treat if he wants!) and quickly shut their doors afterward.

It's kinda ironic to say it, but thanks to 'animal attacks' (and yeah, no one really believes they are such things, which makes terrifying people ten times funnier).

But of course, meeting with one of the resident werewolves in town is bound to happen sooner or later. What he isn't expecting is to be pushed against a wall. And pinned there.

By Derek Hale.

"Who are you?" the man growls, and Stiles can recognize the bite of anger, uneasiness and a little fear. And hey, death does that to you, so he doesn't blame him, even if it is unexpected (it's just, undead uncle anyone?).

"Hello! My name is Stiles Stilinski! Totally normal and harmless human being!" he says with a nervous smile, realizing he's just short of turning see through in front of the Alpha. And oh god that's just plain embarrassing.

"You're dead," deadpans mister gruff and broody, and Stiles doesn't try to deny his body in his urge to roll his eyes.

"No shit, Sherlock. Dead as a steak, and harmless as one," he says, and then backpedals "Though I'm not edible! At all! For your own health, I really do not recommend to eat me, this flesh has decades of putrefaction on it, as hot as I may look."

Derek lets him go, nose furrowing in something akin to disgust and eyebrows frowning even more. Stiles wonders how is that even possible, Jesus.

"You don't smell like years old rot," is Derek's answer.

Derek Hale, fucking everyone.

Derek. Fucking. Hale.

Stiles gapes, unsure if to take that as an insult or a compliment.

"Uh, thanks? I suppose? I've never had anyone commenting on my state of decomposition before," he blinks at the glare the receives in response. "So, now that you know I won't try to eat any children tonight, can I go on my merry way, oh big, bad Alpha, sir?"

And there he goes against the wall again, this time with a sneer as a bonus. Joy.

I wonder if you have a kink with walls and slamming, he nearly says. You really seem like the type for rough, dirty alleyway sex.

And then he backpedals in his thoughts because holy shit he's not going there.

"What's in your bag?" he asks, and Stiles gapes again.

"Sweets, can't you smell it with your wolfy senses? Also, you can stop your middle school thug play right now because I'm not giving you any." Derek frowns at him, and that's not even technically correct because the dude is always frowning, but this Stiles recognizes as the 'confused puppy' glare, and he relaxes a little. "You're pining me against the wall, with a 'give me your sandwich' attitude and trying to intimidate me into, what? Confessing all my ghostly sins? Look, I understand it's an Alpha thing to piss over your territory and growl at everyone else who touches it, but can you not?"

Derek sends him a constipated look that's suspiciously murderous looking, and Stiles has to remind himself that he's already dead anyway. There's little worse the man can do, really.

"You're the poltergeist who's been stalking my betas," the Alpha accuses, and Stiles gapes for a third time in a five minute interval.

There's so much wrong with that whole sentence, Jesus.

"One, I'm not a poltergeist. Two,you are in no place to accuse me of stalking, holy shit, which, by the way, I am not doing." he explains angrily, well hidden fury peeking an eye to the outside, "Three, if you were so bothered by my presence (which I had no idea you could sense, not cool dude), you could have said something! I'm a friendly Casper, man, you only would have needed to call, instead of waiting until Samhain to slam me into things, oh my god."

"Friendly?" Derek sneers, pressuring Stiles' body more against the wall (and oh god he's a dead teenager who never got laid can't some god have mercy on him?) "If I remember correctly, you set Peter's hair on fire last time."

"Yes, and I deeply regret it wasn't his head as a whole. No offense, but your uncle is a crazy psycho that should have stayed dead. But, nooo, you leave him to freely prance with kids, unsupervised."

"So you supervise him? Is trying to kill him part of it?"

"No, supervision isn't my job. And I just make mostly harmless, potentially mortal pranks on him, and only on him."

"You have a grudge against him."

"He turned Scott, duh," Stiles deadpans back, leaving unsaid every other reason he holds a grudge against the psycho, and he's got a lot of those.

"The bite is a gift," Derek growls, and shiny red eyes look back at him. Ohhh, scary.

Stiles is so not in the mood for this shit.

"Yeah, no. Look here, Chris Crocker, no one likes to receive gifts they don't want. And you can't go around justifying being an asshole and forcibly taking something from someone by saying that it is a gift. That's not a justification, that's a fucking excuse and a shitty one at that."

Derek growls again, but doesn't answer. Instead, Stiles and him begin an Epic Narrowed Gaze Contest. He pretty much loses not ten seconds after.

But sweet mercy, that face shouldn't be legal.

(And he totally didn't look at those lips. Nope. How come he's being haunted by his hormones even though he's been death for decades? Holy fuck.)

"Why are you here?" said hormones do a backward somersault at the gruff, deep tone the voice takes, and Stiles has to gulp before his brain catches on the meaning of the question.

"Why? Well, I'm here pinned to a wall because you actually don't know what a normal conversation is and your best score in social skills is in negatives." Derek just glares, but continues his interrogation.

"Why are you in this town?"

"Because it's kinda my home? I mean, you know what they say about the place in which you're born and die."

"Then why do you stalk us?" the man growls, increasingly more annoyed.

"I'm not stalking you, I thought that point was already clear, buddy." Derek sends him an unimpressed look, and he rolls his eyes. "I'm just looking after Scott, okay? People may do weird things all around the city, but Scott's my bro, so I look after him."

"Why?"

"No offense, but case number one would be your uncle; case number two would be hunters; and finally, case number three would be Everything Else, including supernatural creatures. Anything else, oh Alphaness?"

Said Alpha growls, and Stiles can hear the claws tearing ten holes on his beautiful 'I Support Single Moms' shirt.

"The Pack can protect him. That's what Pack is for."

Stiles wants to punch him. Or maybe kiss him for being cute.

Wait, no.

No, no, no, no. Mental images, out. Now.

"Maybe," he's going to give it to him; Stiles can't do crap to save Scott's life, except the little things like setting something on fire or moving mostly smallish objects. "But a spirit never hurts, no? As I said, I bear no ill intent."

And hey, maybe they're leaving out those times Stiles has turned off the lights when the Pack needed to sneak inside a place or made sure that someone 'forgot' to close the door. Maybe they're purposely ignoring all the times that something after one of the Pack members heels suddenly stopped their chase, falling in a trance for a moment and giving said Pack members the time to escape.

Anyway, Stiles has showed he's in the best intentions.

Derek just stares. And yeah, Stiles recognizes that look too.

(And holy shit, how much did he learn about Derek Hale's body language without realizing it? He swears he didn't stare that much, and never too long.)

"I don't trust you." And yep, there are the words.

Stiles isn't going to acknowledge the imaginary burn they cause on his stomach. He's dead, for fucks sake, he shouldn't be able to feel.

"It's fine," he says instead. "I trust you. Who I don't trust is your uncle."

And it's true. Peter can go fuck himself sideways with a tree for all he cares.

Derek finally lets him go.

(A last threat of bodily harm before he disappears in the shadows is a must do for Derek, tho.)

He finds Scott in his house, unsurprisingly. So he knocks the door and says fuck it to everything.

Just, fuck it.

"Yeah...? Stiles!" is Scott's instant puppy-like reaction after opening the door, which shouldn't make Stiles want to coo as much as he does. Oh well, being given a bear hug the moment someone sees you tends to do that to a person. "You came!"

"Yeah buddy, always do," he laughs, messing with Scott's hair when they finally untangle from each other.

Scott is grinning, until he suddenly frowns and tries to quietly take a sniff.

Aaaaand yeah, here comes the start of his own personal ring of Hell.

"Stiles?" Scott asks, this time warily, unsure, and Stiles sighs.

He's pretty sure he caught up so quickly because fucking Derek Hale drowned him with his combination of leather jacket, tug life and Alpha scent. Like putting red light over a ditch, which, rude much.

Fucking Derek Hale.

"It's really me, Scott," he says, resigned to his fate. "Look, can we talk about it inside?"

Scott nods, and both migrate to the couch on the living room. And yeah.

This feels much worse.

"Okay, so you remember how I told you I was a friend of the Sheriff when he started to date your mother?" he asks, and Scott nods eagerly, his thirteen years old self memory apparently still strong. Good, now let's go slowly. "Well, he's not really my friend. Though he kinda was when he was eight and I was sixteen and was left to babysit him while he hanged from my pants every time mom had to go to work, but yeah, thing is that he isn't so much 'an old friend' as 'my little brother who I took care after and babysat when I was still alive'." smooth, Stilinski, he berates himself, at least you earned a 'you fucking tried' star. "Ta-da?"

Scott blinks, and Stiles swears he can see the little gears working full speed in his brain.

Scotty's 'thinking face' is something that will never stop being indecently cute.

(And he needs to eat greasy food and do something immature soon or he'll turn into a total cooing grandma, crap.)

"So...you're dead?"

"Yup."

"You've...been dead since the Sheriff was a kid?"

"Pretty much."

"Huh," and then, same as with the werewolf problem and the 'my girlfriend is a hunter and her parents tried to kill me at least once' problem, he just accepts it and goes on. Oh god how he loves his Scotty. "Okay. Um, how did you die, by the way?"

Give it to Scott to ask with child-like curiosity totally rude questions.

Who is he trying to kid? Between him and Scott there are no boundaries.

"Animal mauling" Stiles replies with a straight face, and Scott replies to that with a 'are you kidding me' face. "Yup. Decided to take a walk around the forest with some friends, got drunk and somehow managed to piss off an already very angry bear. It was a tragedy."

"Holy shit."

Understatement.

"Yup. Which reminds me that your genial idea of a nightly walk didn't end that well for you either, even though I told you to never go out the woods at night."

"Dude! I was, like, fourteen when you told me that!"

"And two years later you forgot, even though I managed to creep the fuck out of you that night? Dude, I didn't tell you so many monsters-in-the-forest horror stories for nothing!" he whines, remembering the several hours spent searching through the internet for the most terrifying, shitting-your-pants worthy campfire tales regarding forests.

"Dude, I wasn't expecting werewolves. And I thought you were just trying to scare the pants out of me."

"Totally was, too, and you even wet yourself. But not the point."

"I thought we had a mutual pact to never speak of that again."

"Whoops, my bad."

"Wait, but then how did you receive the letters I sent you? And how the hell did you send me letters?" Scott asks, looking more and more confused by the moment. Ahhh, Scott.

Stiles smirks and wriggles his fingers. "Ghost magic" and promptly gets a hit on the shoulder. "Ow! Dude, lay off that werewolf strength of yours, Jesus Christ that hurts."

"You know I'm a werewolf?" he asks, actually looking surprised.

Scott McCall: Moments of brilliance or moments of stupidity? The world will never know.

"No, I just got aggressively shoved against a wall by Derek Hale and threatened for fun" Stiles deadpans "If you weren't aware, the fact that I'm visible just one night of the year doesn't mean I'm not there every other time."

"Oh" and then, Scott starts to aggressively blush. What. "Um, you wouldn't have seen me and Allison...n-not that it would be bad! I mean, you're dead after all...wait, no no no! I didn't mean! I-I just meant! Oh my god"

And Stiles starts to laugh hysterically while Scott dies of embarrassment.

Ah yeah, he loves that kid.

After The Talk, they spend the rest of the night playing video games and talking.