When I got home, I brought my bag and shoes into the kitchen and grabbed a walked over to the fridge. I poured myself a glass of iced tea and stood there, leaning against the counter with my free arm folded over my chest. I took my time drinking it, knowing what I had to do as soon as I was finished. I took the last sip and placed the cup down in the sink, picking my bag back up and slinging it over my shoulder. It felt heavier than usual. Solemnly and quietly, I made my way down the hall where I knew Deucalion would be waiting.

Not to any surprise, the door was open. I was right, he had been expecting me.

"Can I come in?" I asked, shifting on my feet. All he did was nod, which made it that much more difficult for me to get a good feel on whether or not I thought he was pissed.

"Do you know why," he started, taking a dramatic pause, "I chose you to send to watch over the others instead of just having one of the twins do it?"

I bit my lip and shook my head, not wanting to talk in case I said something wrong.

"It's because I know your worth." Deucalion answered for me, walking around to the back of the chair I was sitting in. "I know how powerful your gift can be, and I know that you know things that no one else could possibly know."

"If the dream lets me." I blurted out, unsure if I regretted doing so. "A lot of it's open to interpretation." I wrung my own hands out in my lap.

"Ah, but still capable of predicting the future of certain individuals." Deucalion made his way back around to stand in front of me.

"And that makes it all the easier for you to get close with them. You trust them with your little secret and they trust you and your words."

I knew what he was getting at. He was probably slightly unwilling to believe that I had somehow managed to betray him by telling the others about my abilities and his reasoning for me doing so was that I had chosen a different method of "watching" everyone: the method of emotional attachment. I guess it didn't surprise me; Deucalion hardly seemed like someone to think of using emotion and relationships as a means of getting to know them. Which I was and wasn't doing all at once. Getting to know them? Yeah sure. Doing it with my first thought being that I was supposed to be looking for suspicious conversations of any talk of a war between packs? Not really first on my list.

"So you're not angry that I told them?"

Deucalion thought a moment longer. "No. After all your instructions were to watch them and evidently you've chosen to do so by becoming close to them all."

Alright so I was right about what he assumed. I felt a stab of guilt in my gut that I had in some way betrayed my alpha. I knew in my heart that I had only gotten close to them because well, I wanted to. Actual companionship- that was something I had admittedly longed for since I had lost my old life. Since my parents.

"Think of this as a, friendly reminder that that is all you are doing." Deucalion added as if he had somehow gotten a glimpse into my mind. "It's better for everyone if you don't find yourself too well-integrated with the others."

"Did you lie to me." I blurted sternly. The words had sprung from my lips before my brain processed that it was happening.

"What?" he asked, in an appalling voice clouded with threat.

"You said there were no sides. If there aren't any sides, why do you seem so concerned about my loyalty to this one?"

Deucalion smiled, and that scared me. "Because it would be a pity if the girl who possesses one of the most intricate and impressive minds were to get herself in harm's way because she made the crucial mistake of following her heart over following a path of loyalty to her pack."

"I just don't want you to hurt anyone."

He laughed lightly. "I'm not going to hurt anyone if I have no doubts you are doing as you are told. May I remind you that I was the one who took you in? I gave you power when you had nothing, when you had nobody else."

My eyes were staring out straight in front of me. "I don't need anybody else." I said under my breath.

"After your parents died in the car accident what did you do? Ah, that's right. You didn't know what you were supposed to do; you sat in that house alone by yourself for weeks."

"I don't need anybody else." I repeated, feeling a tear spill over and curve down towards my chin. Deucalion stopped in front of the chair facing me. Slowly, he leaned forward, closer to me. And just as I allowed my eyes to rest on him, he said, "You need me."

I sniffed and held my breath. I wasn't this pathetic; I had to keep it together.

"I'm going out tonight." I said and I wasn't entirely sure why I had. Was I giving in and this was simply just me reporting into Deucalion on the big events in my life, or was I making a statement to him that I didn't need him for because for some reason I had convinced myself that maybe, just maybe, I was going to find someone who I did need, and that person wasn't him.

"I'm going out with Isaac Lahey."

"Are you." He stated rather than asked. "Isaac Lahey. The boy turned werewolf whose father was killed by the famous kanima."

My eyes flickered back up to him. "The what?"

The look on his face was sadistic. "A bite experiment gone wrong."

I watched as he kept moving around his desk, trying to think of what he could have meant by that.

"I suppose I would have prepped you further by giving you a more extensive background check on the boy if I had known you were going to keep an eye on him by wrapping him around your pretty little finger."

I didn't dare speak, surges of anger rapidly flashing through my body.

"You told him you saw his father in your dreams."

"Yeah. I did."

"And just how upset had he really seemed about the whole thing?"

I thought back to the previous night. Besides the fact that Deucalion had known I snuck out and where to, which I wasn't all that surprised by, I thought about the look on Isaac's face.

"I… I don't know." I said, which was true. Maybe I expected more of a reaction or maybe I hadn't, it didn't much matter. All I knew was that I had since then wondered why and how his dad had actually died.

"Isaac's father," Deucalion began, "Was not a model parent by any standards. To be quite frank and blunt with you, he took most of his anger and frustration out on the boy. Beat him actually. And locked him up in a freezer when he saw it fit, quite a few times."

Something lodged itself in my throat. Deucalion paused, like he was letting me soak in it. My brain was a frenzy of memories of my own past as well as vivid assumptions of the horrors of what must have been Isaac's.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I am trying to get the fact across to you that you may think you see the whole picture, but you don't. You're inexperienced on how these things work and you haven't fully mastered the ability of what your dreaming is capable of doing."

"I saw his father die." I said. "I didn't know it happened however it did and I didn't know about those… other things."

"That's precisely the story. And why do you suppose you had that dream in the first place; a dream involving the life of somebody who at the time was a complete stranger? Did you assume that was a coincidence?"

"I don't know." I said.

"The dreams you have about other people are just as much of an insight into their lives as they are into your own. That dream being about Isaac was your mind predicting your own future; the one where your path crosses into his."

I had just assumed up to this point that who and what I dreamt about were simply larger incidents of things that were to come and that's why they were the ones that were deemed important enough to be translated into my thoughts. I don't know why the idea that they somehow would end up involving me personally never crossed my mind. I hadn't exactly walked into Deucalion's office with the intention to be mind-blown, yet here I was.

"This just proves you have no idea how to control the gift you possess." He waved a hand up lightly in the air. "But I can show you how. And I can be your teacher. But I need you to do this for me, and not only for my sake but for the sake of all the little friends you seem to be making at Beacon Hills High. So when you say you are going out with Isaac tonight, I know you have it in your best interest to further study his actions. A better understanding of someone can only give you a greater insight into the events involving them to come."

"I'm confused." I admitted, still distracted by the idea that I had known I was going to cross paths with Isaac before I even had. "So my brain knew that I was supposed to meet Isaac?"

"Which is just all the more reason to further investigate what your subconscious is trying to tell you. You're no longer only doing this for my insight and the well-being of everyone, but for yourself."

I was staring down at my shoes. I took in a breath and held it and then I looked back up.

"So if I tell you that Derek Hale has been showing up in my dreams, what does that mean?"

Deucalion smiled and leaned back on the front of his desk.

"Tell me more." He entailed.

I wanted to rip the flesh off my bones and burn it. I wanted to gut myself like a fish and then throw everything overboard. I didn't deserve to be going out at all. I didn't deserve Deucalion's leadership or the protection of the twins or the trust of everyone that I had met at Beacon Hills. I was a liar and a sneak and a crazy dreamer in the most literal sense.

I'm not doing anything wrong, I kept repeating. All I'm doing is watching them. Who cares if I do it by being their friend? Who cares if I I'm not telling them the whole story? Who cares if I don't even know the full story, if I don't even know exactly why Deucalion is making me watch over them all? Who cares if my parents would be disappointed in me, or that the basis of all of these relationships is nothing but a big fat lie? Who cares? The answer to that question was nobody. Because I had nobody who would know enough to care.

I turned my face away from the vanity mirror over to the bedside table. My dream journal, unkempt and not recently updated, stared back at me.

My hair was half pulled up, the strands twisting and winding around themselves in clusters. I was wearing a baggy white, off-the-shoulder shirt with a skirt covered in purple, navy, light blue, and pink roses and little short grey boots. Everything about my outfit sounded and looked pretty, so then why was I so utterly disgusted with myself?

I took the car to Derek's loft, figuring that nobody would know whose it was as opposed to taking one of the twin's bikes and risking that entire awkward slash disastrous potential situation again.

When I knocked on the door, Isaac answered, which I was glad about since the last time Derek had seen me we hadn't exactly left each other on great terms.

"Ready to go?" he asked me.

I shrugged a little and smiled, glancing to the side. "And where would it be that we're going?" I asked.

"I have a place picked out." He said, stepping out of the doorway in his grey shirt and jeans.

We ended up going to this snazzy little restaurant in the middle of town with an outside patio and tiny lanterns strung around the railings. I made some reference to it reminding me of the movie 'Tangled' but he didn't get the reference. He ordered off the grill menu and I asked the hostess if it were possible to order something off of the breakfast menu, to which she replied with a 'yes' but not without a long questioning stare. After she left, Isaac smirked at me and raised a brow, asking, "Pancakes?"

I smiled and shrugged. "I like pancakes." I said like I was admitting some deep secret. "My mom used to make them for me every weekend."

After we ate he paid and I argued about it but he said something along the lines of, "the guy's supposed to pay and our waitress already thinks you're strange enough ordering pancakes at 7:30," to which I didn't really have much to argue with.

After dinner it went without saying that the both of us weren't really set to go home just quite yet. We walked around downtown for a bit and then after a while of me chasing pigeons around the sidewalks and him trying to convince me that Derek didn't hate me while doing a bitter impression of his alpha, we stopped and had been sitting on this bench for a while.

I was telling some story about this goldfish I had as a kid and how he died before I even got the chance to name him and since every fish after that had met the same cruel, short-lived fate. When I was finished, I laughed and was watching a couple make their way into some coffee shop across the way when Isaac said, "Do you like stars?"

My head pivoted back to him and only then did I realize that he had been staring at me for more than a moment.

"Sure," I smirked. "I mean who doesn't love spherical celestial bodies consisting of a mass of gas that is hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion and thus produce radiant energy?"

Isaac blinked in response. "She's no good at math but she's got science in a headlock." I laughed.

"Yeah, I like stars." I said. "Why?"

"I know a place where we can get a great view of the town," he raised and moved his hand steadily across the sky like he was waving to the moon. "On a good night the lights from the buildings don't block out the stars and you can see them for miles."

I tiled my head towards him and looked up where he had outlined the sky. "Think this is a good night?" I asked.

I could feel him looking at me again and I let my eyes meet his. "Well I think it is." He said, leading on that he meant it in a way besides the one involving stars. "Do you?"

A smile spread its way across my face. "I think so too."