Wow, thanks for the support everyone! Sorry this chapter took a bit to crank out, had to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with the middle of it.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Teen Wolf, its characters, or any affiliated entities. I maintain artistic license of my original character(s).

After that day in English, Emmalyn continued to use the seat in front of Stiles. They still didn't talk, but it was progress. She felt safer there. Even Scott had begun to melt the ice between them, joining Stiles in passing gesture throughout the day. Things were stiffer with Scott though, more controlled. It worried her. She could always tell he was staring when she felt pricks dance down her spine. Did he know something, is that why he'd been more distant than Stiles? It grated at the back of her mind, but she had more important things to worry about.

She kept thinking back to the beginning of the month when Stiles had mentioned writing to her, even then it had thrown her. Not once in her time away had she received a letter from him or Scott. She hadn't left an address for them, they didn't give her the time and the boys would have known something was up. Through reason and deduction, she assumed they would have gone to her father with them, asking him to pass them on to her. If that were true, that would mean he had kept nearly two years worth of communication from her, and with her father's habit of jumping focus, maybe they were still somewhere in the house.

oOo

"Out of place, ridiculous, absurd."

Stiles gave him a thumbs up before moving on to the next word, "Perfect, OK next word, um...Darack. Darach...it's a noun?" Scott looked to his scrupulous friend with an exasperated sigh. "We have to talk about it sometime, OK? We're gunna be on this thing for like five hours, why not?"

Scott's forehead hit the bus window and he reveled in the temporary relief the cool glass brought to his raging temperature.

"Next word – intransigent."

"Stubborn...obstinent," he struggled to find the answer through the searing pain in his side, only to be thrown forward by the sudden jerk of the school bus.

"Woah buddy, you OK? We shouldn't have come, I knew it! We shouldn't have come."

"We had to, there's safety in numbers."

"Yeah well there's also death in numbers, OK? It's called a massacre, bloodbath, carnage...slaughter, butchering..."

When Stiles realized he wasn't paying attention, he knew Scott was hiding how much pain he was in. but after a quick struggle he reluctantly lifted his shirt to reveal the dark, black gashes underneath. He insisted that he wasn't healing because the wound was from an Alpha, but Stiles knew it was something more. Boyd and Issac had healed fine, why hadn't Scott? It seemed like everyone but Scott knew there was something else amiss, but he too focused on reigning in Boyd to care for his own physical state. Even with Derek's death and the possibility of it having been for nothing now that they knew Ennis had survived the fall, he couldn't help but let his mind wander back to Beacon Hills. Maybe they both just needed a distraction.

"You been getting much of a read off Emma lately?"

Scott crinkled his brow at Stiles, "No more than I have been."

"Did Derek will you his uncanny knack for obscurity?"

"I just mean she hasn't felt any different from that first day. It's kind of weird, at first I thought it was just first day jitters, but she's been on constant edge for a month now."

"Well what exactly are you getting off her then?"

"Didn't she ask you to give her time, dude?"

"Technically, but that was like almost three weeks ago."

Rubbing his forehead, Scott thought back to their friend, "It's...confusing, sometimes I'm not really sure what it is. She's anxious, like really anxious, and not just when Coach gets in everyone's face, like all the time. It's like she's always holding her breath, but then other times it's like she's about to snap. It's like I can feel it on her from across the room, sense how uncomfortable she is. It feels like my skin is crawling."

"Well that's cheery."

"Hey, you wanted to know," Scott held his hands in front of himself defensively.

"I guess I'm just getting impatient, you know? I know she's wants time or whatever, but she's our friend and it's hard to pretend like we aren't."

The two fell in to silence again until a groan slipped through Scott's lips when he shifted in his seat.

"Did you call Deaton?"

"Keep getting his voicemail."

"That's it, I'm calling Lydia and Allison."

oOo

After managing to stop the bus, by less desirable means, Stiles and Allison helped Scott into the rest stop bathroom. He had gotten worse from earlier, black veins splintering off from the large wounds in his side.

"It could be psychological."

"Wh-What do you mean, like psychosomatic?"

"Somatoformic, a physical illness from a psychogenic cause." Stiles waved his arm spasmodically, obviously not understanding where Lydia was going with this. "Ugh, yes. It's all in his head.

"It's Derek...he's not letting himself heal because Derek died."

The answer made sense to him in more than just their current situation. He felt selfish for not being focused on the friend in front of him, but what if Emmalyn was the same? Scott's wound would heal, but what about hers? He knew it wouldn't be as easy to heal the kind of wounds she had, the emotional ones teeming with desertion and alienation. He and Scott had gotten their fill of berating over the years, but they were awkward teenage boys and it had never been any worse than name calling and they had always had each other through it. Emmalyn though, she'd been alone, and even now with Stiles reaching out to her she still was. She was keeping herself away from them, fearful of repeating the past but only prolonging her suffering. She needed them and he'd given her enough time to come to them on her own. When they got back to Beacon Hills, he had to make things right.

oOo

Her father had been busy the past week setting the final wheels in motion for his next business trip, so Emmalyn knew he wouldn't be home later in the evening. Having already spent the better half of the weekend scheming and checking miscellaneous hiding spots while her father wasn't looking, her window of opportunity was closing fast. If they were going to be anywhere at this point, they were hulled up in his office. She'd checked most of the spots already, claiming she was looking for supplies she needed for a project when he found her in there the day before, so it left only one. The safe in the closet, it was where he locked all of his client's confidential information up. She'd known the combination since she was young, having found it was his favorite hiding spot for her confiscated toys. He was usually too busy to remember he hadn't returned them to her, so the password never changed.

06-18-95

The red light on the key pad turned green, a resounding thud signifying the door had unlatched. While the code was her birthday, she was sure the reason he used it was because it was also the day that her mother died. She was never entirely sure if he had blamed her for her death, but it was hard to hide how much happier he looked in old photos when they were standing together. His chestnut eyes shone with happiness he'd never shown in her lifetime, he'd thrown himself into his work when they lost her.

Sifting through the stacks of manila envelopes, Emmalyn's finger caught on the finger pull to the false bottom. Her toys had always been on the top shelf, so she wasn't surprised her five year old self had failed to notice its existence. She slid the files from the top of it and carefully lifted the soft, black facade, but found something other than what she was looking for. Her fingers felt cold plaster, it was a third grade craft project. She traced her own mangled handwriting. #1 Dad. She remembered that day, she'd made it for him because he was coming back from an extended business trip that day. He'd smiled and hugged her, thanked her for it, but quickly placed it on the kitchen counter when his phone rang. When she saw it there the next morning she'd put it on his desk, but it had disappeared after that. Underneath that, she found what she was looking for.

It was a shoe box, but it was packed to the brim. She sat there, carefully reading every letter, every moment that she'd missed with her friends. She read about how they'd made the lacrosse team like they'd always wanted, about how Coach was crazy and how Harris had it out for Stiles, how Lydia still ignored him no matter how hard he tried, and how Scott had finally gotten his girlfriend and his first heartbreak. Her eyes welled at their words, how they wrote how much they missed her all the time. Stiles wrote more than Scott later on, but he did his best to include what was going on in his life among his own details. Her body shook as tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was careful not to damage the letters.

I miss you, more than I ever thought I would. I'm not just missing my best friend, I
miss your smile and the way you would snort when I made stupid SciFi references.
Everything is so complicated right now and I'm doing my best to keep it together
for
Scott, but you were always better at it. You always knew how to make me laugh
when
my face was covered in mud. I miss having you here, it's like a piece of me is
missing, the one piece that held me together when mom died and I don't know how to
be that
piece on my own. I miss you, Em.

Emmalyn heard the front door creak open, her father's weary footsteps following. She grabbed the box and ran out to the hallway to meet him.

"Emma? What are you –"

"Why would you keep these from me?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose, laying his jacket down on the counter, "It wasn't my choice. They told me it would cause a relapse, ruin all of the progress they made."

"No, it was your choice," she said through her tears, "but instead you hid them, took away my only connection to the two people who have cared the most about me. You know," she scoffed, "I tried so hard to make those doctors happy when they told me it could mean me finally coming home, but maybe that breakthrough wouldn't have taken two years if I had known there was more than an empty house to come back to!"

She threw the plaster medal to him, but as he fumbled to catch it she grabbed her keys and disappeared.

oOo

The small Toyota's engine hummed to a stop before Emmalyn made a mad dash for cover. It had started raining on her way, but she could have gotten here blind folded. Brushing her wet hair from her face, she gently pushed the doorbell.

"Emmalyn?" She looked up to the weary eyes of Sheriff Stilinski. "Oh god, you're soaked. Come in."

Emmalyn stood uncomfortably in the living room, clutching the shoe box to her before he returned with a towel. She smiled weakly to him. The Sheriff had known her back when he was only a deputy, he had been the officer on call two years ago.

"So...how are you –"

"Is Stiles home?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, he just got back from the cross country trip, he's up in his room."

Finding her way up the staircase they had used as a sleeping bag toboggan run and kids and down the hall, Emmalyn knocked lightly on Stiles' door.

"Dad, it's been a long weekend I just want to go...Em? What are you...?"

She merely held the box higher and opened it. He knew what it was.

"You kept those?"

"I just opened them."

"All of them?"

Nodding, she pushed past him into the room. It hadn't changed much, even picture of Scott, Stiles, and herself from the Halloween they decided to be superheroes. Scott had been the Hulk, Stiles was Spiderman, and she chose Wonderwoman. Some older kids in the neighborhood stole her bad of candy, so the boys had pooled together theirs and split it evenly among the three of them.

"Hey listen, I don't know if maybe I sounded weird in any of those...I wasn't really thinking much when I wrote them, so you should probably just forget –"

"Stiles?" She interrupted, earning a concerned look.

"Yeah?"

Before he could give her a 'what's up?', her arms were around his waist, head buried in his chest. "I'm sorry, sorry that I've been ignoring and avoiding you since I got back. It was stupid," she mumbled into her shirt, letting loose tears fly.

"Em hold on, you're not the one that needs to be sorry here. Me and Scott, we're the ones that are sorry, we were stupid and weren't paying attention. None of this is your fault."

Not once in the last two years had she been told that it wasn't her fault. Emmalyn gripped his shirt, reluctant to let go. No, she wouldn't let go again.

"Hey Em...do you maybe want to hang out with us at lunch tomorrow?"

Alrighty, you know the drill, praise, critique, tell me what you liked and what you're excited to see! Thanks for reading!