I AM THE LITERAL WORST, I APOLOGIZE. You guys are the best and super kind and I love you all so please forgive me. I love this fic dearly, but it can sometimes take me down paths I try my best to avoid so I can fall out of touch with it from time to time. Here's the newest chapter of Hero Complex, we're officially in to 3B, y'all!

And a very special thanks to everyone who has taken the time to review, subscribe, and favorite. You make my heart sing.

While everything in Beacon Hills seemed to have leveled out in the following week, it was the worst Emma had experienced since returning. Despite not knowing the details of what her friends had gone through, it was obvious to her that something was still wrong. Their behaviors were different. Lydia's eyes were constantly darting around, Scott was fidgeting – almost trembling. Sometimes she would see Allison bolting down the hallway just to slide to an abrupt stop like she'd heard something she didn't want to, Stiles looked like he hadn't slept in days. None of them seemed to want to talk to her, and in her mind it felt like they were purposefully avoiding her. Emma wondered what it was she did wrong. She had told Stiles to keep his secrets, but what if she'd seen too much, what if they didn't want her around anymore? Emma knew they'd started eating outside, but considering no one had bothered to tell her she stayed away. Despite how little she had disclosed in the last two months, regardless of everything they had kept from her, just having them around had been instrumental in her healing. Even a few short sentences and a passing smile in the hall had been enough to temporarily distract her. This was the closest thing she'd had to honest support, even if they didn't know it, since before she was institutionalized. To finally have something more only to have it taken away in the blink of an eye was sending her into a tailspin.

Instead of focusing on a group of friends she knew were too wrapped up in their own issues to notice too much about her, she sat in the lunch room alone, buried under the weight of every passing glance. Each echo of laughter felt like broken glass, she was so sure they were all talking about her. Emma's ears twisted each surrounding conversation into a mockery of her outfit, her hair, how fat she looked in those jeans. Had the lunch room always been this loud? Why was it getting louder? An accelerated heartbeat hammered through her chest. Were they always looking at her like this? Were these the conversations she couldn't hear over Stiles' rambling? Emma abandoned her things at the lunch table and ran for the bathroom. Her lungs felt like they were seizing.

The porcelain of the sink felt like ice under her sweaty palms. Her mind was reeling, wondering why she'd allowed herself to get so caught up in what was going on around her that she'd abandoned managing herself. Her breath was shaky, maybe it was her whole body. Mentally she tallied four – five – six hundred calories, two liters of water. The group of secretive teens provided such great distraction she'd nearly forgotten what it felt like to be falling apart. How did she do this again, what were the steps? Panic snapped her senses back in place as the bathroom door opened behind her. Don't ever let them see, she would tell herself.

"Hey um, lunch is almost over and I didn't want you to forget your bag." Emma looked at the reflection of the girl talking to her. "My dad just keeps bothering me about trying to make friends since I'm new here. You're...Emma, right? We have history together." She only nodded in recognition. "Anyway, I'll get going then..."

Emma squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed the stone in her throat. "Kira – Mr. Yukimura's daughter?"

Kira's face flushed, "Yeah, guess you remember that spectacle he made of me earlier."

"I'll see you around then," she responded, her expression softening into the ghost of a smile. "Thanks."

Emma nodded to Kira the following morning as she sat in the empty desk next to her. Even a relative stranger was better than people she'd thought were her friends ignoring her.

"All right everyone, let's get started. We were just talking about internment camps and prisoners of war, there's a passage in our reading that I'd like to go over in more detail. Who would like to come up and read for us?"

Kira smiled weakly at Scott who had nodded to her, holding a stack of printed pages in his hands about an inch thick. Emma wondered if that meant Kira would stop talking to her as well. Mr. Yukimura called Stiles to the podium. She hadn't seen him in a few days, the tired glaze in his eyes now extended to dark bruises under them. His complexion was sallow, tired feet dragging behind him after protests against reading got him nowhere. Stiles took a deep breath before starting, only for it to hitch in his throat as he watched the letters fall off the page. Emma had no idea what was going on in his mind at that moment, how could she when they'd all kept her at a ten foot distance? What she did know is that the situation was souring – fast. His knuckles were a ghostly white as they clung to the edge of the podium for dear life, eyes darting around frantically like he'd forgotten what he was looking at. He looked like he was going to pass out, and Emma jerked from her seat.

"I should take him to the nurses office," Scott said when he met her at the podium.

"It's a panic attack, Scott. The nurse can't do anything for him. Let me handle it."

Stiles smashed into the door frame of the locker room, spinning around disoriented as if he didn't know where he was. All he would say was that it was just a dream.

"Stiles listen to me, this isn't a dream. I'm right here with you." Emma led him to the sink where he held on like it was the only think tethering him to the Earth, praying for his vision to stop spinning.

"No, no – none of this is real. You aren't real, this room isn't real."

She paused, analyzing his behavior. It was something she'd seen before. "Stiles listen to me. Before this gets any worse – have you ever dissociated before?"

"No I'm not – it's all just a dream."

Emma thought back to an altercation at the institution. One of the patients was dissociating, but the under trained staff wasn't familiar with what to do. Every time they'd pushed her to see the truth she'd fallen further from it. Emma need to help Stiles find it himself.

"Ok, Stiles, ok. How do you know you're dreaming?"

"The words I – none of the words made sense."

"What else is there? How else can you tell?"

"F-fingers. You count your fingers, you have extra fingers in your dreams."

"All right, Stiles, look at me. We're going to count, count my fingers with me. One..."

"Two...three...four..."

"Five."

"Six...seven..."

"Eight."

"Nine...ten."

"Ten fingers. Ten."

Stiles' breathing began to level a he slid to the tile floor. "What the hell is happening to me?"

"I don't know, Stiles, but we can figure it out. I'll help you."

He shifted away from her, "You can't help me."

"I can try, ok? I know a lot about this stuff – more than you'd expect me –"

"You have no idea what I'm going through."

"I'm just trying to help, Stiles. Let me help."

"You just don't get it, you can't help with this."

Emma's mood soured. "No? I don't know how it feels to pull away from my friends and hide how much I'm struggling? I don't know how it feels to be crumbling to pieces inside with no on there to hold me together? Except you did have someone – me, because I know what it feels like to need help and never get it. I might not know why you're like this, but I sure as hell know what it feels like." She stood and began to leave, pausing at the door. "You though, you don't know a damn thing about me."

Stiles hadn't meant to upset her, but there was just no way she could understand the severity of what was going on. Still, he couldn't take his mind off of what she had said to him earlier, and what Scott had mentioned weeks before about her behavior. Maybe he'd just been so willing to have Emma back in his life that he hadn't stopped to think about how she'd be different, how she'd changed. It couldn't have just been juvenile bullying, there was more to the situation. There had to be more.

"C'mon, Stiles, thought you were worried about my heart. Better eat those curly fries before I do."

A half hearted smile spread across Stiles' lips at his father's jab. Between everything going on with the Pack and Emma, how could he focus on dinner?

"Dad, do – do you know anything about what happened to Emma before she left? Did something happen?"

He frowned, "Stiles, you know I can't talk about that stuff."

"Yeah but see now I know there was something, and that something's got a record somewhere. That means I can either go looking for it and see god knows what else along the way or you can tell me."

The Sheriff pinched his nose and sighed. "The police didn't handle anything other than the 911 call so I don't know much. All I know is they took her to Beacon Hills Memorial."

"Is everything ok, Stiles?" Melissa questioned, looking up from the files in her hands. His eyes were wild, deep breaths filling empty lungs as he finally stopped running.

"You've got to tell me what happened to Emma, why she was checked in here two years ago."

"I can't just go handing files out to anyone who wants them, especially not to a teenager," she noted his disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes, "but I can see what I can find. Stiles – are you all right?"

"I don't know. I guess...I guess not really?"

The more he spoke the faster his facade crumbled.

"All right kiddo, all right. Come with me, it's ok."

Blue police lights flooded through Emma's curtains. They would have woken her, had she been able to fall asleep. Her confrontation with Stiles played on an infinite loop in her mind. She'd replayed it so many times, analyzed and rationalized so much of it that it seemed out of reach, almost as if it hadn't ever happened. The weight in her chest was her reminder that it did. She wasn't surprised to see the Sheriff with him being the head of the department, it was why he was there that caught her off guard. Stiles was missing/

"We're just checking with everyone that knows him, hoping someone has seen him recently."

The police were gone as soon as they had arrived, there wasn't time to waste. It wasn't just that he was a minor and the Sheriff's son. That night was the coldest it had been all season, and with his car dead in the hospital parking lot they knew he was on foot.

A new wave of guilt crashed over her. Had he run off because of what she'd said to him, was what she said on top of everything he had been dealing with too much? Emma curled back up in bed and cried, cried until she was sure there wasn't an ounce of water left in her body.

Stiles

Please.

Please come home.

DELIVERED

Emma

Bring him home, Scott.

Please bring Stiles home.

Working on it

I promise

"Notice how strong the scent is up here?" Derek asked as Scott slid his phone back in his pocket. "You ever hear of chemosignals? Chemical signals that communicate emotion. Sweat can give off anger, fear, disgust. Take a deep breath, tell me what you feel."

"Stress..."

"Anxiety."

Scott thought back to the beginning of the school year when Emma had first come back. With the stress he'd been under it was hard to focus, so to clear his mind he'd been doing what he'd always been told to do. Breathe deep. Except he had been, unknowingly, picking chemosignals off of Emma. It wasn't that he was uncomfortable being around her, she was uncomfortable being around them.

Emma

Please.

Please come home.

His phone died before her could respond. Stiles had no idea where he was, no idea what was happening to him. He couldn't sleep, he was hallucinating, panic attacks wracked his body daily, he got night terrors. By some grace of God Stiles hoped Emma had never experienced these things, but after what she'd said, after learning about her hospitalization before her abrupt disappearance – focusing on her was the only thing keeping him distracted from the steel trap on his left leg.

Or was it his right?

Two hours, nearly three now. Emma tossed over in her bed for what felt like the hundredth time that night. Laying there doing nothing was agonizing, but she knew there wasn't anything else she could do. Stiles hadn't made any contact and she had no idea where he could have gone, so she just continued obsessing over when she'd snapped at him. She had just pulled him from a borderline mental break and then pushed him right back over the edge. Years of people mishandling her and she turns around and does the same to her best friend. This was all her fault, everything was –

Scott

We've got him

He's safe

Just when she thought she'd run out of tears to cry a new wave rushed over Emma, exhausting her into a dreamless sleep.

A/N: Aw yes, another chapter in the bucket. This go around we've seen a lot of development that I know you guys have been waiting for. We see Stiles finally realizing that something just isn't quite right with our dear Emma, but the poor guy has been really distracted by a mass murderer so cut him some slack, yeah? We also get Scott's lesson on chemosignals, which is a pretty important puzzle piece when it comes to where his relationship with Emma stands. People have been questioning why he was so distant from her when it was the three of them that were best friends. Having not learned to interpret chemosignals until now Scott had been misinterpreting their dynamic, so now that he's all the wiser we'll see him taking the steps to change that.

If you feel so obliged, drop me a line and let me know what you thought! I promise I don't bite, and more often than not I respond directly to your questions.