Somehow, in the mess of everything (and really it is everything), they get Stiles to a bed. If you were to ask Scott, he probably couldn't tell you how, when his limbs hadn't stopped shaking since and when Lydia had been clinging to his shoulder as if she was on the edge of a cliff. But he had done it, and Stiles was as safe as he could be when an evil spirit was trying to win a battle for his body. Once Scott's sure there is nothing else he can do, he finds a small corner of the house and stays there.

Melissa doesn't go after him. She knows he needs that space, needs to find a special place to howl his grief. A ship without its anchor will never be able to rest, isn't that what someone had once said? In a book maybe. She stays with Stiles. She tucks the covers round him, places a glass of water by his bed and monitors his pulse, two fingers resting against his wrist until the steady thudding of his heartbeat becomes just another sound. Stiles is still and Melissa can't stop staring. She has known Stiles since he was four years old and can't remember the last time he wasn't jiggling or fidgeting or just moving somehow.

She remembers, though, that the first time Stiles came over to her house he climbed up the tree in the garden and got stuck. Four years old, scruffy-haired, bright eyes and a broad grin that bounces off every branch as he looks down from his spot. He can't get down for almost half an hour but he is jubilant the whole time, one hand tangling around and around a group of leaves as the McCall family try to help him down. In the end, Melissa manages to get halfway up and give him a hand. But even then Stiles' feet were not to be trusted and he falls the last six feet. Melissa remembers how mortified she felt when Claudia arrived to pick him, only to find a whopper of a bruise already forming on both knees. But Claudia laughed.

"Don't worry, Melissa!" Her voice was always breathless, rushed. Like she knew her time was limited. She scoops up her son, wrestles with his tangle of limbs until she manages to tug up his t-shirt. There's a fat graze across his ribs. "He got that from the playground last week. Thought he was ready to play tag with the big kids on the tarmac." She tumbles her son over, causing him to squeak with glee (a sound echoed by a staring Scott who lurks around Melissa's legs, still enthralled by his new best friend). This time she pulls up one of his sleeves, revealing a still angry patch of bruises on his elbow. "When he tried to walk backwards down the porch steps." Claudia tweaks her son's nose, then briefly touches Melissa's arm. "Please, don't worry about it. If he comes back from anywhere without some form of injury, I panic that he's ill!"

She leaves soon after that and Melissa drops into a chair with an exhausted sigh. Scott clambers up into her lap, his eyes still shining. In her mind, she is already set on never having that mad, stressful child in her house again. But one look at her son's grin and she knows that's not going to be the case.

Of course, Melissa remembers the hard times too. She remembers when Stiles was coming into the hospital every other week for endless tests for every behavioural-related disorder under the sun. He came out of each appointment grinning, having sassed another psychologist to the point of tears, but his parents trailed behind with that drawn look on their faces that Melissa is far too used to in her line of work. She reassures them over long dinners while their boys race each other across the garden that it will be fine, that Stiles is a good kid (and he is a good kid, she knows that from the way he gets a bloody nose from protecting Scott from the older boys).

But then the visits to the hospital change. Stiles stays at school, medication in system, while his parents go to tests on their own. And then Claudia stops picking Stiles up, even when she's meant to. Melissa stands in the playground, Scott pinned to one side and Stiles pinned to the other while she waits, prays that this time she'll remember, that she'll turn up with that broad grin of hers and wrestle her son away from the swings. But she doesn't, and Melissa remembers how she would take him to the police station, take one look at the rings under the Sheriff's eyes and just take Stiles home with her instead.

She remembers laughing despite everything at her boys' conversations (and yes, by this point, he is another son to her. Stiles wrote two cards on Mother's day, and hands one to Melissa with that unabashed, proud grin of his). There was the time when they were eight, goofy and still trying to work out how to use their limbs properly, and sat in the back of her car. Stiles is telling Scott about his night at the police station, tapping a pencil against his leg as he does so (she can't remember where the pencils come from but he always had them, somehow).

"And then this guy, with blood everywhere-"

"What, everywhere? Even on his feet?"

"What's so special about his feet?"

In the rear view mirror, Melissa sees her son stiffen in determination to answer his friend's question. "Well, if he was stabbed in the stomach like you said, it would be pretty hard for the blood to get to his feet."

A pause; Stiles is considering this, and Melissa can almost feel the Sheriff's son chewing through the problem. "I don't think I saw his feet. But it's possible, you didn't see how much blood there was…" Another moment of silence and then the squeaking of car seat as Stiles leans over to his best friend. "I even saw…" Dramatic pause. "his guts!"

Scott's gasp echoes around the car, followed by Stiles' gleeful chuckle. "Did he…die?" Scott asks a moment later, and one glance at the mirror shows that Stiles was dying for this question to be asked. His eyes are glinting with the thrill of the reveal. He drags it out until Scott gets impatient and uses Stiles' seatbelt as a makeshift weapon, pulling it back and then letting it go so it slaps across Stiles' chest. It's a classic Stiles-and-Scott move, and Melissa hasn't bothered to police it for years. "Tell me Stiles!"

Rubbing his chest, Stiles shakes his head, laughs. "He lived. Dad had to take him to the hospital in cuffs because he was too bloody to be interviewed. I got to ride in the front seat and-get this- I asked him why he had done it and he said…she started it!" Stiles shakes his head again, flopping it back onto the headrest with a chuckle. "Murderers are the best, they could say anything…"

Scott laughs in that nervous way he does when Stiles says something so bizarre that he can't work out how to respond. But a moment later he nudges his friend. "Maybe you're a murderer then."

Melissa couldn't help but laugh then.

She wishes she could say that she remembers the best moments more, but it's not true. She has wisps of good times, of laughter and smiles but they are blown away by the gusts of pain that she has helped that boy through. Is it strange that she remembers the pain of Stiles losing his mother more than that of losing her own husband? Maybe. But that's the truth. And now she can remember the last time Stiles was still.

Sitting in a hospital chair too big so that his legs dangle a few inches from the floor. Usually that would be a recipe for swinging legs and passers-by getting kicked, but not then. She wants to stay with him but there's a pile-up and the injured are coming in bit by bit, demanding her attention. She sees him in blurs as she rushes past to help the next person, and each time her limbs seem to stiffen, slow. He is staring straight ahead with his jaw set, but one small tremble in his bottom lip, as he waits for the doctor to let him see his mother. Every time she passes, Stiles catches her eye. "My dad-?" he begins, but each time she has to shake his head. Every time a cop comes through the doors, his shoulders rise up in anticipation. When they do finally let him into see his mother, Melissa doesn't see him for two hours. One of her colleagues whispers across to her at some point that Claudia Stilinski has died and she has to fight every instinct to stop herself from running to find the two Stilinski boys, to help them through this.

But she has to keep working and so two hours later, she finds them in the corridor. Side by side. She has to walk past the open door to Claudia's room, has to see in the corner of her eye the empty bed, the smoothed over sheets. The Stilinski boys (men? She's not so sure) are silent but Stiles has one hand gripping tight to the shirt sleeve of his father and his arms are shaking. They look up when Melissa stops in front of them. Stiles looks to the left almost immediately, as if hoping he'll see the dark-haired son of this woman who insists on caring so much about him. The Sheriff shakes his head at Melissa, needing to tell her the news even though it's obvious she already knows.

She drives them to her own home when her shift finishes two hours later because neither have quite worked out how to leave yet and neither seemed to know what to do next. Even though it's the middle of the night, Scott is waiting. He must have been listening out for the car, because he barrels out of the house and has the car door open before Melissa has even turned the engine off. They are kids, still young enough to want a story before bed. But they are old enough to work out what each one needs. Scott stands by the door and lets Stiles get out, then pulls him into a fierce, tight hug. A hug that doesn't need to be that tight again until years later, when Stiles sits on the edge of an MRI machine.

Melissa lets them feel their way through this pain together. She takes the Sheriff inside, fixes him up a coffee and ignores his request for a shot of whiskey in it. But she hears Scott and Stiles, sitting on the top step of the front porch. They have forgotten that the adults can hear them, or they just don't care.

"Did she say anything? Before…?"

"She didn't really recognise me, Scott….She asked me if I'd seen her son."

"The hospital lighting sucks, plus you had your hair cut last week. I didn't even recognise you at school."

"You thought I was somebody else, stealing my own seat…"

The boys laugh, hollow. Scott speaks again after a second: "You can come live with us. I'll sleep on the couch, you can have my bed."

"What about my Dad?"

"He can stay too. He can have the other couch."

"….You don't have another couch."

"Well we'll buy one."

"My dad is very particular, don't make it too firm."

It's these sort of pointless conversations that get Scott and Stiles through. When Scott's father left, Stiles offered up his own as a replacement. Scott asked what qualifications he had and Stiles wrote up a mock resume for his father. The Sheriff was furious when he found out (though Melissa remembered the shouting was done with a certain twinkle in his eye). When Allison broke up with Scott, Melissa hears Stiles proposing to Scott followed by the unmistakable sound of Stiles getting smacked by a lacrosse stick.

Now though, Scott is on his own and Stiles is unreachable. Melissa squeezes his wrist, no longer noticing the pulse even though it has just quickened significantly. She closes her eyes, feeling the tears hot and heavy in the corners. But then Stiles coughs and they are open again immediately, searching for some sign of recovery.

A second later, Stiles opens his eyes. He frowns at the fact that he is once again in Scott's bedroom, then at the fact that Melissa is holding his wrist and that Scott is nowhere to be seen. Despite the pain obvious in the tightening of his jaw, he has one concern: "Where's Scott?"

"He's safe." That's all Melissa can say. She's not going to be the one to tell him what's happened, because she doesn't know how. There will be guilt, far too heavy for this kid to carry. She can't find a way to hand that over to him without breaking him. So she leaves it. Takes his pulse again, places a hand on his forehead to take his temperature. "You're still freezing, you need to stay in bed."

A ghost of a smile touches the corners of his mouth, just for a moment. "Wasn't going to move."

Melissa has to laugh. She stands up, squeezing his wrist one more time. "Stiles that is the biggest lie you have ever told."

Those words were meant to be joking, but all they do is trigger a memory that she's been trying to ignore. The words of a nogitsune that remind her that Stiles has been lying to his best friend for years to protect his best friend and his best friend's mother.

Do you want to know why he never told Scott? Because he knew that Scott would never forgive you, he knew how much he would hate you.

Melissa pauses, turns back to face the bed where Stiles is slowly pulling himself into an upright position. "Stiles-" she begins, and one look at his face and she knows he can tell what's coming.

He shakes his head. "Don't worry. It's okay," he says, and smiles weakly. Smiles like every inch of it is hurting him. "We both just want the best for Scott, right? I won't tell him. Promise. " As she's leaving (because she can't stay and answer that, can't respond to this boy who constantly alarms her with his dedication to decency), he says one more thing: "For what it's worth- I don't hate you. And he wouldn't either."

It means a lot to hear that. But that doesn't mean she believes it.