He leaves the cave and he's even kind of more impressed with Derek and the others because it's a man-made protrusion into a cave that probably wasn't even accessible before, and is now hidden by a copse of pine trees.

Scott supports most of his weight on one side, which is good, because the pills haven't really kicked in, yet, and the forest at night is doing some weird shit. He breathes a sigh of relief once they come across Melissa's car parked just off the road at the edge of the Preserve, tires all crunched down on pine needles and fresh earth.

It's a good one, he'll give them that, he thinks as Melissa turns the ignition key and pulls out onto the dark, empty road. Paranoid-Schizophrenic Genius Terrorizes Small Town. It'd make a great headliner for the Beacon Hills Gazette.

So Stiles Stilinski is him, and he is Stiles, but Stiles has had first a demonic possession, followed closely by an (understandable?) psychotic break. Or at the very least, that's the McCalls' current premise, whether they believe it or not.

Is that what Derek believes? If so, why didn't he ever say anything?

And why did he stop showing up?

He doesn't realize he's said this aloud until Scott replies from the passenger seat. "There are some issues in the territory," he says, and the nogitsune snorts, because oh, really? There's trouble in Beacon Hills? But then Scott's words catch up with him.

"Sourwolf is hurt?"

"Derek's fine," Melissa says. "Which is more than I can say for how he'll be after I'm through with him. Leaving you alone in that place."

The nogitsune is silent. He considers I'd have tried killing you all again. Tries, he was with me every day until yesterday. Can't make it work either way. So he swerves, changes tack. "So, according to you, the oni were real, and they knew I was losing my mind. What summoned them, then, if the nogitsune was already gone, or suppressed? Stiles's scintillating personality?"

Scott turns to face him from the front passenger side. "Kind of. We knew someone was giving Barrow orders, so we did a spell to summon the oni to find out who it was. It was your own idea."

"Come on," the nogitsune says. "What about the lichen, the green lichen that Deaton gave him? That brought Stiles back," he presses when Scott continues to look confused.

"I think you're talking about the Clozaril," Melissa says, gently, keeping her eyes on the road. "It's green, and Deaton forced you to swallow it, that first time. You thought it would poison you. You seemed a little better after that, definitely a lot less violent and a little less confused. That was when you committed yourself, but Eichen House wasn't the best place for you."

"You got a lot worse," Scott supplies. "But now… Mom, look at him. He knows us. He's so much better. Derek knew what he was doing."

"Stiles still thinks he's a mythical fox-creature, so no," Melissa says, and pulls over.

The nogitsune is confused until he realizes they're at the McCall house already. He blinks a few times. Counts his fingers, because it feels totally unreal after a month of isolation.

"Until Derek Hale gets a PhD in psychology, he doesn't know what's best for a schizophrenic patient," Melissa is still chiding Scott. "I know he was your Alpha, but I'm your mother with an actual background in medicine, and Stiles is a human being. Derek won't always know what's best for him."

"I'm not a human being," the nogitsune says. He shrugs. "Sorry, but it's true." He slides out of the backseat only to find that his legs won't hold him, and he goes down in a messy heap of limbs.

"Okay, okay, easy there," Melissa says, and she and Scott hold him up like bookends. "Even supposing you're right, you're in a human body now. So you've got to listen to its demands."

"Its shrill, shrill demands," the nogitsune snarks, and is rewarded with a smile and a squeeze around the shoulders.

"Insistent, isn't it?" she says, and the two support him all the way into the house.

It's all nuts, everything they're spouting, but the shower pretty much makes listening to all their babble worth it.

Hot water. Oh, god.

It beats down on the back of Stiles's body, turning his skin an angry, coral pink, and the nogitsune doesn't care. It's so good, this simple human comfort, that he stays in until he's all pruny, accepts Scott's help into sweatpants and a tee shirt and collapses into the bed, asleep nearly before he hits the pillow.


The nogitsune dreams.

He's in the basement. His leg is trapped and bleeding against the cold floor. It's icy down here in Eichen House. (Except that's not really where he is, is it? It's cold outdoors. It's freezing. Do you want to die, Stiles?)

He just wishes he could give Scott more, but he has no idea where he is.

Something bad is going to happen if he knows, so – he doesn't.

But something bad will also happen if he doesn't. The creature, with the evil, iron rasp of a voice is stalking him. It's going to catch him, he knows. It's going to catch him no matter what, (so he's placed himself here in this dream like prey, far away from anyone he knows. He's run the Jeep's battery out so the monster has to travel on foot. His body is out in the woods; it'll take him hours to get back to town, hours before he could stumble across another living soul. Lydia will know, she'll hear him coming. She'll take care of it. He trusts her. He has to trust her.)

He thinks / not thinks. It's a trick, keeping something from oneself, but Stiles manages.

The mummified creature pulls into view. Kanji for identity, a backwards five. Telling him it's trying to save Stiles's life. Telling him it's too cold for Stiles to survive, that he's stopped shivering. The creature seems helpful for a minute, but Stiles knows better.

This thing will destroy everyone he loves. Because it's fun.

(But he's done the best he can. They'll be safe. They'll be safe from him.)

Please, Stiles thinks, wrapping his wrists around his throbbing ankle. Please find me.

(Please, Stiles thinks: never find me again.)


The nogitsune wakes to sunshine on its face and Lydia Martin's green eyes at close range.

"You're alive," she says.

"No," he says, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

"No?" She's wearing one of her sweet little dresses, lemon yellow-and-gold, with gold lamé high heels and a gold necklace. Her hair is done up with wisps falling down.

The nogitsune still remembers when Lydia Martin was the most beautiful thing Stiles had ever seen.

"No," he says. "I'm not alive."

"Oh," Lydia says, and seats herself in a chair by the bed in – yes – he's in the McCall's spare bedroom. He barely remembers collapsing here. "I didn't know I saw ghosts, too."

The nogitsune snorts.

"You seem better," she says. "I'm really glad."

Against its will, the nogitsune feels a little touched. "Thanks."

She tilts her head to the side. "Anytime." She frowns at him. Then, she leans down over Stiles's body and presses her lips to his.

The memory hits him right between the eyes: (I read somewhere that holding your breath can stop a panic attack.) Lydia is kissing with intent this time, her right hand cupping his cheek, and when she withdraws, he feels just as baffled and thrown as he did, before.

"That just happened. You actually kissed me. Right?"

Lydia opens her eyes. "Mmm hmm. Maybe I was hoping it'd snap you out of it, like last time. Like maybe my kiss could… wake you up. Like a sleeping prince."

He uses Stiles's hand to snake out and snag her at the wrist. For an instant, he sees her features flash into a fearful expression, but when her eyes light on his, it eases.

She must see something safe within him. She must see something she can trust.

"The thing is," he says, haltingly. "The thing is, if it wasn't – if I was just sick. Then Stiles did a lot of those terrible things on his own. Could he even live with that?"

Lydia smiles sadly and ruffles his hair. "I think that's what we're waiting to find out." She lifts a small volume off the nightstand with one hand – the nogitsune catches a glimpse of a swarm of numbers and symbols – but the other settles in Stiles's hair, gently tugging the strands straight. Between one stroke and the next, the nogitsune is asleep again.


Hale is back, looking far worse for wear. Despite werewolf healing, the side of his face seems beaten in, so the nogitsune can only imagine what it must've looked like a day or two ago. But then Hale's eyes light on him and he offers up a dazzling smile, the one that gives his face a unique, three-dimensional reality that it otherwise lacks. "You're awake," he says.

"Hi, Sourwolf," the nogitsune says. "They kidnapped me."

"I see that. I got an earful from Melissa McCall."

"Why didn't you tell me you thought I wasn't the nogitsune anymore?"

Hale eyes him. "Because to confront someone who's in a delusional state is asking for trouble. The more you argue, the less they believe you. I thought you had to come to it on your own."

He almost did. He thinks, given another week or two, he would have begun to wonder not just why he hadn't tried harder to escape Derek and the others, but whether a deity like a nogitsune even had the capacity to care for other people the way he cared for these humans around him. The way he had a vested interest in their survival.

"In all the shows Stiles watched as a kid," he says, "there was an insane asylum episode. Like, the character awakens in the mental health ward of wherever, and they're told there's no such thing as werewolves. Demons. Vampires. Fill in the blank. And there's no magic in this new world they're in. And if the writer's worth their salt, they leave a little doubt at the end whether the world with the insane asylum is real or whether the magical world is, because it's a common human fear that there is something not quite right with us."

"Them."

"What?"

"You said, 'secret human fear'. I'm not human, and neither are you – right?"

The nogitsune rolls its eyes. "Yeah, whatever. But you also notice, right, that all these people go through these crazy disasters in their magical worlds, but there's, like, no counseling, no therapy. They just move forward regardless. So I began to think insanity or supernatural activity. Not insanity and supernatural activity. And now it turns out they're not mutually exclusive."

Derek ducks his head. "No."

"Like, how'd you do it?"

Derek looks up. The light is somehow finding his eyes. Like always. It's unfair.

"Your family. They're dead. And your uncle killed your older sister, and now he's better – at least a little – but he's just around. Didn't you ever blame yourself? Why haven't you gone insane?"

Derek's grey eyes have turned into chips of ice. "I do blame myself. But I don't let it all rest on my shoulders. It's not like Argent caught me wandering down Main Street one day and saw an opportunity, she was looking for a way in. She'd have found it. Her father instilled that kind of thinking into her, so I could blame him. My family was even to blame, like you said, for being too stupid to get out in time, for rushing to their panic room and not realizing that a room made of reinforced steel would heat up enough to kill them all."

"I didn't mean that," he begins, then realizes that he kind of had, at the time. He suspects – as he had when he was Stiles – that there's more to the story of how Derek's family died than anyone has ever told him, because the pieces don't fit together as well as they should. That may be because Derek doesn't know the whole truth, or just that he considers it his private business. Given Sourwolf's nature, denial and obfuscation seem equal contenders.

"You're to blame for your actions," Derek says, not noticing or sweeping over the nogitsune's silence, "but we're also to blame for not noticing your illness. Your father for thinking it was just the normal level of freaking out at the supernatural. Me, for thinking you were human and that made your way of thinking more fragile, that you'd adjust on your own without my help. Scott should have come to me or his mother about your panic attacks right away, but instead he kept them to himself, as though your health concerns were a shameful secret between friends. For that matter, Lydia could be to blame because she couldn't hold you tight enough, didn't have a strong enough connection to you to hold you fast when you were sacrificed. Because you lost yourself after the Nemeton, Stiles: your ability to reason and make connections went downhill fast, and you didn't recover like the others. So you can blame your English teacher, too, if you want, and the werewolves who destroyed her, and on and on."

"But Stiles is mostly to blame," he says.

"Yes, Stiles is," Derek says. "You should've had better control. You should've come to one of us faster, not just when you thought it was your own handwriting on the board, but at the first signs of serious illness, and you didn't."

"What would you have done?" he demands. "Sent me off to Eichen House right away?"

Derek leans forward and growls: his eyes flash bright blue and his canines elongate. "What do you think? I would've trained you!"

"Trained me?" Suddenly, he sees everything in a new, weird light. Scott almost killed Stiles on the first full moon, and Scott has the least darkness in his soul of any human being the nogitsune has ever known. When the nogitsune first took hold of Stiles, he was like a new-turned werewolf, with a dark, dangerous side that could make him do terrible things. Scott could've easily hurt someone, if he hadn't had Stiles to help him. Could've killed them.

And then he realizes that this is exactly what Derek has been doing. Keeping him isolated so he can't hurt anyone, not even himself. Slowly introducing members of the Pack into his life again, starting with who he trusts most and working outwards. Surely Isaac is somewhere around here, but Stiles hasn't seen his face, yet, and that's probably because Derek feels he isn't ready to. Like, in fact, when he asked to speak to Deaton and Derek demurred?

Derek smiles, and it's the third expression he's ever seen on Derek Hale's face that makes any sense. One side of his lip is curled up, the other down: his brows are lowered, and his eyes are intent on Stiles's face.

Derek looks proud, and sad, and a little like he might cry.

Stiles can't deal with that, so he leans forward to cup his hand around the injury along Derek's cheekbone. "So what happened? Did you have a run-in with a brick wall?"

Derek's face falls back into familiar, impassive lines, and he tells Stiles the story of the latest threat to Beacon Hills.


The nogitsune waits until everybody goes to sleep, then creeps out the front door and closes it quietly behind him.

Gosh, they didn't even lock the bedroom door. When are they gonna learn? It's a good thing he is on his meds and feels more settled and logical than he has in – than Stiles – huh. It's a good thing he feels like Stiles Stilinski right now, all a-thrum with the positive energy of solving a puzzle, playing a game.

He heads for the veterinary clinic on foot. God knows where the Jeep is, and the nogitsune doesn't mind the walk. After being confined for so long, he walks loose and bares his throat to the wind. He doesn't even mind how cold it is, how the air cuts through his hoodie and down to skin and bone. When he arrives, he feels refreshed, alive, vibrating with positive energy.

He picks the lock and slips inside, strides for the swinging mountain ash door and stands there, for a moment, gathering his nerve. He takes in a breath. Another. Lifts his hand up and presses

Against a crackling blue barrier.

Something inside his chest squeezes. A trick. All a trick, the way they said they felt, the way they looked at him, the press of Derek's hands, of Lydia's lips, the ferocious squeeze of Scott McCall's arms, pressing him close. How'd they make up a story like that? It fits the facts so well…

Almost as well as his own version.

They had to have known. Was his mother right? Did he have to love them all so that they could be revenged?

Oh god. What if it's worse? What if they really believe?

"Turn around. Slowly," says a very familiar voice, and it's Sheriff Stilinski standing by the door, gun out.

Of course it is.


A/N: Read? Review!