A/N: YOU GUYS I POSTED 2 THINGS YESTERDAY, THE INTRO AND THE PROLOGUE WHY DOES THIS ALREADY HAVE 500+ VIEWS YALL ARW CRAZY
real talk, tho, I love and appreciate all of you 💞💞💞

"Stiles; what the fuck do you mean Liam found a child last night?"

Katherine's body had fully healed just in time for the start of second semester, and she was thrilled. Now that everything involving the Dread Doctors, the Beast, and Theo was over she could finally focus on getting homework handed in rather than who was going to die next.

Melissa had confirmed she no longer needed to wear a brace on her ankle because it was now fine, so her crutches were now stuffed in the back of her closet for when — not if, it was definitely when — she would need them next, the bruises on her face were practically non-existent aside from the last splotches of a yellowing one at the outer corner of her left eye, and her ear had healed up perfectly.

All in time for the first day of the second semester of her grade 10 year.

Stiles was staring at her in the middle of the school parking lot as if the answer should've been super obvious. "I mean last night, Liam and Hayden found an abandoned moving car last night on their date—"

"—How can it be abandoned and—"

"—Shut up, literally just listen, oh my god. So it was just rolling down the road and there was a kid in the back seat, no parents, the windshield shot out completely. He's panicking, so they called Dad and he was brought back to the station where Scott did the little werewolf memory-hijack thing and found out there was some guy on a horse with a gun that took them. Apparently they're not dead, but they aren't alive either. No one knows where they are, or who they are. The kid doesn't remember."

Katherine blinked at him and slowly started walking up to the school again, staring at him in astonishment. "And no one thought to wake me up so I could help?"

"You've just started sleeping without needing your pills, KitKat," Stiles sighed softly, turning his upper body to face her as they wandered around, looking for the rest of the pack. "We're trying to let you live a semi-normal life."

Katherine tucked her now-short hair behind her ears — getting bored with a pair of scissors led to having her hair cut from below her chest to the ends just brushing the tops of her shoulders when it was loose — and she scoffed at him. "Yeah, because I can totally live a normal life when I live in Beacon Hills."

The sarcastic expression on his face softened as he sighed, and pulled her in for a hug. "I'm trying to do you a favour here, dude," he mumbled, kissing the top of her head awkwardly. "Stop whining about it. Now go find the others, I need to talk to Malia."

Katherine wandered around for a little bit until she found Scott and Lydia sitting at one of the outdoor tables near the lacrosse field working on homework for the day while Stiles tried to talk to Malia ten feet away and interrupted her yearbook photo. She sat down beside Lydia, a deep frown on her face that didn't go away, even as Stiles and Malia came over and bickered.

They talked for a while, pointedly ignoring her expression which she didn't like much either, and they teased Stiles for not signing up for his photos, and Scott made a comment about how he might be purposefully missing out on key milestones because of stress and then explained he was writing a psych paper before looking at her and sighing. "You know we did it because we care about you, Kat," Scott promised her, his eyes gentle.

She stared at him. "One text," she pointed out, arms folding over her chest. "Literally just one, it's not that difficult. You open your phone, move your fingers across a keyboard and say something like Hey Katherine, sorry for waking you up, Liam and Hayden found an abandoned child in an even more abandoned car last night, no big deal, get some sleep and we'll keep you updated." Her arms fell to her sides and se frowned at him again. "I'm in this world just as much as you guys are, okay? You can't start leaving me out now, I won't let you."

"We know that," Lydia promised her with a small smile as she set her pen down on the table to look her properly in the eye. "But when you help us you don't take care of yourself and we need you to do that, okay?"

Katherine squinted at them with pursed lips, then huffed. "Fine, thank you for caring about the fact that I'm a mentally ill train wreck, but next time you go somewhere without me I'll have to run you over with a lawnmower."

"Sounds fair," Malia shrugged.

Stiles was grimacing. "That is...disgustingly graphic...oh!" He clapped his hands and stuffed the photo form paper back in his pocket. "Deputies searched the car; No slugs, no exit hole. And the address Alex gave my dad, it's an abandoned house." They all stared at him uncertainly, though Katherine couldn't help but admit that it all did sound kind of weird. "Come on! Missing parents, suspicious guy on horseback, magic bullet. Who's comin' with?"

"I've got to retake my photos," Malia huffed.

Lydia smiled politely. "Yeah, not interested."

"I cannot miss any more classes," Scott cut him off before he could even turn to look at him.

"Scott—"

"I missed 38 last semester," he continued on making Katherine grimace. She'd missed 21 herself and her dad hadn't even been remotely impressed. "And Lydia's mom is the only reason I'm still in school." Lydia smiled pointedly at that. "I can go after school?"

"I've got to actually take the homework home with me, dude," Katherine grimaced, even though she'd rather skip school to go solve supernatural crimes.

As much as they always terrified her, and as much as she wished she could have a normal life as a normal high school student who's biggest problem was writing a two thousand word paper on the history of something really stupid, she wasn't. The moment she'd heard Scott and Stiles talking about dog bites in her brothers bedroom three years earlier was the moment she knew she couldn't turn back, because where they went, she went.

Nothing could change that.

"You know what?" Stiles huffed, gaping at the four of them. "Forget it. I'll take Liam."

Katherine followed Scott's gaze down to the players bench closer to the field where Liam was sitting with Hayden, the two of them holding each other tightly and kissing like the world was about to end. She rolled her lips in and automatically glanced over at Lydia, who was smiling at her sympathetically.

She had truly meant what she'd told Liam that day in Deaton's; she was happy for him and Hayden. But she was still hurting as much as she had been when she'd first seen them holding hands, because she knew she'd gotten her hopes up for no reason at all.

"Yeah, I'm not taking Liam," Stiles decided with a cringe, and they all just smiled at him.

Katherine just snickered at him.

"Hey, can I get a candid?"

She turned to look at Sydney, who had a hopeful expression on her face and her camera in hand, and shrugged while Scott dragged Stiles down onto the bench with them. "Okay, fine. If you can explain to me why this is blue, I'll let it go," her brother huffed.

He handed Scott a shard of blue glass that more than likely shouldn't have been blue, and Katherine couldn't help the confused smile that appeared on her face as she alternated between glancing at the glass and her brother, knowing he was more than likely right. He usually was.

She offered Sydney a small smile as the bell rang, and waited for Hayden and Liam to make their way over since they all had the same first class; physics. She walked to class with them, though she didn't say much and tried to look like she didn't feel slightly jealous still, and sat herself down in an empty seat between Mason, who had Corey on his other side, and Liam, who was sitting with Hayden at the end of the row.

"You okay today?" He asked her softly, sharing a wordless look at Liam so he wouldn't know they were talking about him. Corey seemed to know, though, because when Katherine glanced at him he was smiling sympathetically at her because he more than likely knew her current internal struggle.

So she smiled a tight-lipped smile at them both, and just shrugged. "I've been worse and I made it through that, so this is going to suck but I'll be okay," she promised them.

The name written up on the chalkboard wasn't familiar — Mr Douglas — but the guy standing at the front of the room looked young, maybe in his late twenties, and was relatively attractive though she didn't consider that overly important. His honey blonde hair was styled neatly away from his face, and his eyes were light. He was the type of guy she would consider handsome from an old movie, though she wasn't quite sure how anyone could give off 1940's vibes in this day and age.

"Schrodinger's Cat," he announced as he turned away from the board, and she heard practically every person who was attracted to guys in the room sigh, excluding herself. She already liked one guy and it had caused enough problems, she was starting to like another and it was just confusing her; she had no time for small crushes on a teacher. "Ah, I can see I impressed you all with my artistic abilities," he smiled charmingly, and 90% of the class giggled.

"What the fuck," Katherine muttered to herself while sharing a look with Liam and Mason, who seemed equally confused.

He continued on, still facing the class. "Schrodinger puts his cat in a box with poisonous food. Now, until he opens that box, the cat is, in theory, both alive and dead. But when he opens it, it's either Hello, Mittens or Goodbye, Socks. Putting aside the potential animal abuse here, what does it have to do with physics?" He glanced around the room for an answer and wound up looking at her, to which she rapidly shook her head. "Yes, Hayden," he then decided, and she sighed out in relief.

"It illustrates the concept of quantum superposition. Light is both a particle and wave until it's observed."

Mr Douglas beamed at her. "Yes. Excellent answer, very impressive. Does observing something change its behavior? Or alter its outcome? That's the question of today's lab on page 117. Break into groups of five."

The solution came easily to them, and the five of them automatically became a group without so much as a glance. Katherine watched as Mason and Corey brought heir chairs around to the front of the row of desks so they'd be in a circle, and noticed Mason had his phone out. "Have any of you guys noticed that phones can't geolocate today?" He asked curiously.

"Looks like it works," Liam commented with a small shrug.

Katherine glanced over at his phone and noticed it was pointed to towards her. "I'm directionally challenged so if something's wrong you're going to have to point it out to me, dude," she huffed.

"That's not North," Mason explained, and then pointed in almost the opposite direction. "‭That is."

"Mine's doing it too," Corey commented thoughtfully.

Katherine pulled her own phone out and did a quick check. "Yeah, I think mine is too." She showed it to Mason, who nodded.

"Mr. Douglas has a compass," he then commented vaguely, though they all picked up on what he was hinting at real quick. Corey grinned, slapped his palm down on the physics text book in front of them, and allowed himself to become invisible.

She watched as the door to the cabinet slowly creaked open, then closed, and moments later he reappeared right back at the table. Wordlessly, Katherine held her hand out for a hi-five, which she got.

"What are you gonna do with it?" Hayden asked curiously as Mason flipped the old-fashioned compass open.

"Follow it," he shrugged.

"Seriously?"

"Where do you think it goes?"

"I have no idea," he shrugged again. "But we won't find out till we open the box."

Corey looked unbelievably confused, and Katherine found herself mirroring his expression almost exactly.

"Schrodinger's cat?" Hayden prompted.

"I... I still don't get it."

"Me neither, dude." Katherine sighed softly. "I wanted criminology, not this bullshit."