Title: Knowing

Rating: K

Summary: So, how did Stiles guess that lycanthropy was the cause of Scott's bite from the get-go?

Warnings: I don't have personal experience with ADHD or the effects of Adderall - it's all the product of research (forgive me for any misrepresentations you may encounter)

BGE

All of his life (so far), Genim "Stiles" Stilinski was different.

He thought faster than even he could keep up with; he made connections that no one else either understood, or it took a lot of effort to see; his concentration was either shot, or super-focused; he had trouble keeping his mouth shut; his impulse to 'do now, think later' was much higher than most; he was… constantly in motion.

He took Adderall for it. It ensured that his growth was stunted: he was almost too skinny to be real, for all that he ate more than most growing teenage boys. It ensured that three-quarters of his day was spent with a mild headache pulsing just behind his eyes. It ensured that he managed, at best, four hours of sleep a night. It ensured that his motor mouth was never out of things to say. It ensured that when he had a change in mood, it was vivid, it was quick, and it was obvious.

So… it was more of a give-and-take relationship with his medication. But that was what ADHD demanded if he was going to function at even a fraction of normality. But it didn't stop his ADHD symptoms – merely suppressed them.

So when Scott was bitten, Stiles mind went into overdrive.

He was a comic book lover. Batman would forever be his hero. But that didn't mean that he ignored all the other characters, all the rest of popular culture.

Scott was bitten. Scott had better senses, suddenly. Scott rocked at lacrosse, when he'd been a bench-warming asthmatic since forever.

A bloodline trait? Like Naruto? A mutation? Like Wolverine? An experiment? Like… uh, the PowerPuff Girls…?!

Something nudged him, thinking like popular culture. Was it, hell, magic? And that was when Stiles' mind clicked, and the point about wolves made itself prominent: Remus Lupin! You know, from Harry Potter? The bite of a werewolf (Greyback to Lupin). The senses of a werewolf (those times when Lupin's eyes would flash amber, or he'd smell something). The physical superiority of a werewolf (he was a poor, waif of a man, but strong beyond what Rowling painted him). And it was the full moon last night…

When Scott brought it up, Stiles' mouth got away with him, and he blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

(Stiles wanted to facepalm so bad; since Harry Potter came out, who didn't know what lycanthropy was? Or, well, okay, be fair Stiles: who had at the very least, if not know the meaning of the word, who had never heard the Potter-heads say the word? There had been a flood of Potter-heads in Beacon Hills a few years ago – how had Scott avoided them all? And bless him, his confusion was so eager-to-please, too.)

So it was a stupid idea, and he played it up as a joke to Scott. And that was all well and good, but they still didn't know what was wrong with Scott. Then the bite disappeared – just poof, gone.

For a little while, he contemplated letting it all go. Creepy mysteries weren't his thing; his thing was comic books, superheroes, action, adventure, police murders. But that was one of the problems of ADHD. Some part of his mind had found a hook in the mystery, and refused to let him let it be. So he contented himself with considering options – infection, like Scott said; fluke; Scott's been hiding his skills in lacrosse for Stiles' self-esteem, and is using the excitement of the body and being bitten by a strange thing to stop lying; Stiles was the one who had been bitten, and was in a hospital room hallucinating; there had been something in the woods, and they were having a shared hallucination; Scott was breaking character and being such a massive hypochondriac that the worry and adrenaline were giving him a temporary physical boost. But he kept bouncing back to the werewolf theory.

And, he should really stop listening to his father's private phone calls, because then he wouldn't hear things like: the chemical analysis and wolf hairs on the body, that would make him panic (maybe) needlessly… He really couldn't let it go after that, so he went on a hyper-focused research binge instead. He found himself looking up everything there was to know about werewolves. Most of it was myth – some lore that Stiles hoped, desperately, if this thing was really happening, wasn't true – and barely any of it was plausible. And he would have nightmares for a couple of nights.

But Scott showing up confirmed it. Anger. Snarls. Being thrown against a wall in pure rage. But the big deal-clincher was the claw marks scored into the back of his computer chair. All that remained was convincing Scott of all the proof that Stiles could see.

(He had a bad feeling that he would be seeing more – much more – of claw marks in the future. As long as they stayed away from his baby, Stiles supposed he would have to be okay. It was Scott… he was never going to abandon his best friend.)