❛ And I'll spend my whole life-time with your life-line wrapped around my throat. ❜

SEASON 1, EPISODE 9
lunatic

"WHERE ARE WE going?" Scott called after Stiles as they walked into the woods.

⠀⠀⠀It had been a couple of days since the two teenagers had been stuck in the high school. Along with their classmates being chased around by the Alpha that wanted to kill them. Or rather, wanted Scott to kill his friends.

⠀⠀⠀Then, after all was said and done, Stiles and Willow's relationship became strangely in the middle of exes and friends. They bickered the average amount for themselves, which was always part of their relationship, but they weren't malicious in them. They talked like ordinary people, didn't get under each other's skin, and spent a little bit more time with each other than necessary (with Scott and her sisters, of course).

⠀⠀⠀Scott and Allison, on the other hand, became nonexistent.

⠀⠀⠀"You'll see," Stiles called back to him, leading him further into the woods.

⠀⠀⠀"'Cause we really shouldn't be out here," Scott continued to fret, looking around the woods as if he weren't the danger parents warned their kids about lurking in the woods. "My mom is in a constant state of freak-out from what happened at school."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles turned to look at Scott with an unimpressed frown.

⠀⠀⠀"Well, your mom isn't the Sheriff, okay?" Stiles shot back with a shrug. "There's no comparison, trust me."

⠀⠀⠀"Can you at least just tell me what we're going out here for?" Scott continued to whine.

⠀⠀⠀"Yes," Stiles relented. "When your best friend gets dumped—"

⠀⠀⠀"I didn't get dumped," Scott quickly interrupted him. "We're taking a break."

⠀⠀⠀"Alright," Stiles said, rolling his eyes at his friend's denial. "When your best friend gets told by his girlfriend that they're taking a break," he continued, pulling the bottle of Jack he had hidden in his jacket and holding it into the air with a smug smile. "You get your best friend drunk!"

⠀⠀⠀It felt like half a second passed, then everything was hazy and dizzy, and there was only half a batch of Jack left.

⠀⠀⠀Whenever Stiles turned to look at Scott, he could see two of him. Two sad versions of himself, sulking on the rock he sat on while Stiles laid out on the ground by himself.

⠀⠀⠀Stiles worried now that Scott was a sad drunk, which he had never been before, and that coming into the woods to drink was a bad idea. So, he tried cheering him up between sloshy words and inspirational mumbo-jumbo.

⠀⠀⠀"Dude, you know, she's just one-one girl," Stiles told him. His hands felt detached from his body. They set the bottle of Jack down, but Stiles barely registered them doing it. Did he do that, or did Scott? It didn't matter. He was trying to cheer Scott up. "You know, there are so many-there are so many other girls in the sea."

⠀⠀⠀"Fish in the sea."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles looked up at Scott. He could feel his whole bottom jaw drop into confusion as he stared up at his best friend. What the hell was he talking about? Did werewolves fall in love with fish now? If anything, he'd suspect that maybe Scott could fall in love with a wolf but never would have thought about him falling in love with a fish!

⠀⠀⠀"Fish? Why are you talking about fish?" Stiles asked, taking in a sharp breath as he tried to calculate what Scott had said to him. "I'm talking about girls. I love girls! I love 'em!"

⠀⠀⠀His mind flipped from fish to Lydia, and it was all he could think about. Her pretty pink hair, her soft, plump lips, her cleavage in the nice blue nightgown when she was hopped up on pain meds. He could practically feel himself drooling before he fell back to relay what he was thinking in hyper-fast speed to Scott.

⠀⠀⠀"I especially love ones with strawberry blonde hair, green eyes, five foot there—"

⠀⠀⠀"Like Lydia?" Scott interrupted him again.

⠀⠀⠀Stiles looked back up at Scott, astounded he knew exactly who he was talking about. Had he been taking mind reading lessons from one of the sisters? He should take one of those to try and read Lydia's mind. Maybe he'd see her thinking about him like he thought about her.

⠀⠀⠀WAIT! NO! He didn't want to see himself like that.

⠀⠀⠀He shuddered.

⠀⠀⠀"Hey," Stiles exclaimed, remembering he hadn't told Scott that he was talking about Lydia. "How did you know I was talking about-about—"

⠀⠀⠀Stiles' brain went blank.

⠀⠀⠀"What was I talking about?" he asked, grinning ear to ear.

⠀⠀⠀"What about you and Willow?" Scott asked, ignoring Stiles' question, and turned to look at him. "You guys seem to be doing better."

⠀⠀⠀"Y-Yeah," Stiles laughed, sitting up on his side and taking another swig of alcohol. "I guess."

⠀⠀⠀"What's wrong?" Scott asked in concern, and it was like he had unplugged all the issues that had been kept locked in Stiles' chest.

⠀⠀⠀"UGH!" Stiles exclaimed, falling onto his back again. "I just, you know, I miss being her friend, and she doesn't want to-she doesn't want to be my friend anymore."

⠀⠀⠀"But you guys broke up," Scott pointed out.

⠀⠀⠀"I didn't even want to break up," Stiles muttered, thinking about it now. He didn't want to think about it now. He wanted to think about anything else. Lydia, Allison, Scott. Something that wasn't always Willow. "I wanted to stay together," he continued anyway.

⠀⠀⠀"You never told me what happened," Scott commented, leaning forward with furrowed brows as he looked at Stiles.

⠀⠀⠀Stiles looked up and frowned, "She never told me."

⠀⠀⠀"What do you mean?"

⠀⠀⠀"We were happy. We were going out. We had been dating for two years. Two years," Stiles explained, holding the 's' on the end of years for a little too long as he tried to think. How did he get stuck talking about her again? "Then one day, she comes up to me and tells me we're over. We're done. She never wants to see me again. She takes my heart, rips it out, and steps on it right in front of me. Then! She acts like I'm to blame without even telling me why."

⠀⠀⠀Scott was silent, and the ringing in Stiles' ears hurt, so he kept going.

⠀⠀⠀"Why did she do that?" Stiles asked Scott, slapping his hand to press against Scott's pant leg and then falling back to the ground. "Why did she not? Why did she do that?

⠀⠀⠀"Sometimes, I think about it too much. Sometimes, I lay in bed and wonder what I did wrong. I wonder if I ever got another girlfriend will it end the same. I wonder, what happened? I go over every second of our relationship, think about everything, and come up with nothing. Now, with more things coming up that I didn't know before, I wonder if that's why. If it was her powers, that I didn't believe in what she did, and I asked her. I did, and she said no, and I believed her because she doesn't sound heartbroken over those things. There's something I'm missing—Something I-I don't see. What am I not seeing, Scott?"

⠀⠀⠀"Did you ever think it was Lydia?"

⠀⠀⠀Stiles furrowed his brows. Did you ever think it was Lydia? What the hell does that mean?

⠀⠀⠀"Lydia? What about Lydia?" Stiles asked, confused, his head spinning.

⠀⠀⠀"What do you mean 'what about Lydia?'" Scott scoffed. "You've been in love with her since the third grade. You don't think Willow ever saw that."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles scoffed, looking ahead of himself.

⠀⠀⠀"It's not Lydia," he muttered. He turned to Scott and frowned. "Shit, I'm sorry, man. I made you said. Take a drink."

⠀⠀⠀"I don't want anymore," Scott told him.

⠀⠀⠀"You're not drunk?" Stiles surmised. That would be why Scott was so sad. Stiles knew he wasn't a sad drunk.

⠀⠀⠀"I'm not anything."

⠀⠀⠀"Hey, maybe it's like—" Stiles said, putting the pieces together. "Maybe it's like not needing your inhaler anymore, you know. Maybe you can't get drunk as a wolf. Am I drunk?"

⠀⠀⠀"You're wasted," Scott said simply.

⠀⠀⠀Stiles didn't feel wasted. Or did he?

⠀⠀⠀He did feel like he was spinning without even moving from the ground. His head was pounding, and two Scotts were sitting next to him...

⠀⠀⠀Yeah, he was wasted.

⠀⠀⠀"Come on, dude," Stiles sighed, seeing the pout on his friend's face. "I know it feels bad. I know-I know it hurts, but you know what, as much as being broken up with hurts, being alone is way worse. I had you, now you have me."

WILLOW HAD, YET again, not studied. Chemistry was her worst subject, and she didn't even study. She hoped that maybe she could just pull it off. She paid attention in class, she knew what she was doing (kind of), but there was a bigger chance that she would fail. She never actually paid attention either. Who was she kidding? Mr. Harris was more boring than the desk right in front of her. So, she was usually doodling in the margins of her notebook. At least the test was multiple choice.

⠀⠀⠀The class had also been moved into another room to take the test since Mr. Harris believed it would reduce the chance of cheating, seeing as they sat so close to each other. Willow was thankful he had at least put the equations up on the board for them to use so she could at least try to fake her way through.

⠀⠀⠀"You have forty-five minutes to complete the test," Mr. Harris called out, raising one of the blue books above his hand for the class to look at. "Twenty-five percent of your grade can be earned right now simply by writing your names on the cover of the blue book. However, as it happens every year, one of you will inexplicably fail to put your name on the cover, and I'll be left, yet again, questioning my decision to ever become a teacher. So, let's get the disappointment over with. Begin."

⠀⠀⠀Willow let out a deep breath, readjusting herself in her chair, and stared down at the test. She read through the first page; she didn't know the answers to any. She flipped to the second, none. Third, nothing.

⠀⠀⠀Willow ran her hand through her hair, gripping the strands as if to pull the answers out of her head.

⠀⠀⠀32. Sodium hydroxide is a strong base. What is the pH of a 0.02 M sodium hydroxide solution?

⠀⠀⠀Did they even learn about pH levels?

⠀⠀⠀Suddenly, a chair scraped across the laminate tiles, and Willow looked up to see Scott running out of the room. She glanced at Stiles on the other side of the classroom. He looked back, matching the wide-eyed expression she had on her face. Neither of them knew what had happened.

⠀⠀⠀They both stood and followed Scott out of the classroom. She was going to fail the test anyway.

⠀⠀⠀"Mr. Stilinski! Ms. Gallagher!" Mr. Harris shouted behind them, but neither responded, running into the hall.

⠀⠀⠀"Scott?" Stiles shouted.

⠀⠀⠀They noticed the backpack sitting in the middle of the hall and walked over to it. Stiles picked it up for a second to look it over before he stood back up with it in hand. He pulled his phone from his pocket and called Scott.

⠀⠀⠀Scott's phone rang down the hall, and the two trailed it into the boy's locker room.

⠀⠀⠀Inside, they didn't know what to expect. The way Scott ran out of class indicated that he was possibly changing in the middle of class. Neither would find that surprising with the full moon that night.

⠀⠀⠀Water was running in the showers, and the two-edged on the sides of their feet towards the sound. Willow stood in front of Stiles, holding her hand at Stiles' chest to keep him back if Scott attacked them again. She peered around the corner and saw Scott standing underneath the head of the shower, thankfully still wearing pants while his shirt soaked up the wet floor beside him.

⠀⠀⠀"Scott?" Willow called out to him, making sure he knew they were there and didn't scare him.

⠀⠀⠀Scott slowly turned to them, his eyes slitting from the water passing over his eyes as he tried to look at them.

⠀⠀⠀"Willow, Stiles," he called hoarsely. "I can't—"

⠀⠀⠀"What's happening?" Stiles asked, stepping away from the corner and approaching him. "Are you changing?"

⠀⠀⠀"No," Scott shook his head, leaning back against the tiles. "No, I can't breathe," he explained, clinging to his chest as his voice hitched in a desperate attempt to get air.

⠀⠀⠀"Stiles," Willow whispered, hitting his arm.

⠀⠀⠀"Yeah, I know," he muttered, pulling Scott's bag around him and digging inside it until he pulled out Scott's inhaler and held it out for him. "Here, take this. Come on, do it."

⠀⠀⠀Scott took in a deep breath with the help of the inhaler. Willow walked into the shower, turned the water off, and stood in front of Scott, keeping her distance, so he didn't feel restrained and unable to escape.

⠀⠀⠀"Scott, are you there?" Willow asked, and he nodded, still looking foggy-eyed. "Hey, hey," she called, smiling softly. "All I want you to do for me is look around the room and tell me five things that are in here. Anything you can see. Can you do that?"

⠀⠀⠀Scott nodded again, his eyes moving wildly around the room.

⠀⠀⠀"I see, um, I see you, and Stiles and the lockers, and um, the lights hanging from the ceiling and the-the... the benches," Scott told her, his breathing beginning to steady.

⠀⠀⠀Scott looked between his two friends that were staring right back at him in concern. He narrowed his eyes, confused, rubbing the back of his head.

⠀⠀⠀"I was having an asthma attack?" he asked, lifting the inhaler to look at it.

⠀⠀⠀"No. You were having a panic attack," Stiles told him, his tone-light hearted but edged closer to worry. "But thinking you were having an asthma attack actually helped stopped the panic attack. Irony! Then, Willow," he stated, motioning towards her. "Helped by grounding you, um, finding five things in the room."

⠀⠀⠀Willow stepped out of the shower, her shoes soaked and squeaked as she walked back towards Stiles to stand beside him.

⠀⠀⠀"How did you guys know how to do that?" Scott asked them.

⠀⠀⠀"I used to get them after my mom died..." Stiles explained, glancing at Willow and sighing. "And then some. Not fun, huh?"

⠀⠀⠀"I looked at her, and it was like someone hit me in the ribs with a hammer," Scott explained, his hand going over his chest again.

⠀⠀⠀"Yeah, it's called heartbreak," Stiles explained. "Been there before."

⠀⠀⠀Willow glanced at Stiles, frowning. This thing in her chest had been lingering there for days. It made her wonder if he was talking about her or Lydia.

⠀⠀⠀Most likely Lydia.

⠀⠀⠀"I can't stop thinking about her," Scott said.

⠀⠀⠀"Well, you could think about this," Stiles said. "Her dad's a werewolf hunter, and you're a werewolf. So, it was bound to become an issue!"

⠀⠀⠀Willow and Scott both turned to glare at Stiles. Although they all knew the issues, now wasn't the time to get into it.

⠀⠀⠀"That wasn't helpful," Stiles realized, nodding his head. "Dude, I mean, yeah, you got dumped, and it's supposed to suck. Trust me."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles glanced at Willow, and she looked back to Scott as their eyes locked.

⠀⠀⠀"No, that's not it," Scott stated, shaking his head. "It was like, I could feel everything in the room, everyone else's emotions."

⠀⠀⠀"Your senses were heightened," Willow concluded. "It must be the full moon tonight."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles nodded, looking at her and then back to Scott.

⠀⠀⠀"We'll just lock you up in your room later like we planned. That way, the Alpha, who is your boss, can't get you either."

⠀⠀⠀"I think we need to do a lot more than lock me in my room," Scott told him.

⠀⠀⠀"What, you mean because if you get out, you'd be caught by hunters?" Stiles asked, raising a brow.

⠀⠀⠀"No," Scott told him, taking a few steps forward. His expression changed from the timid, anxious boy standing in the shower to anger, chest pumping as he glared at the two. "Because if I get out, I think I might kill someone."

 "WILLOW! WILLOW! WILL! WILL! WILLOW!"

⠀⠀⠀Willow turned, her eyes wide at the number of times Stiles had shouted her name. She waved at him down the hall, and he waved back with both his hands frantically for her to walk over to him.

⠀⠀⠀Willow did and passed Scott talking to Lydia. She rose an eyebrow at the pair talking but continued to Stiles by the locker room.

⠀⠀⠀"Did you see Scott just go into a classroom with Lydia?" Willow asked Stiles, pursing her lips into confusion.

⠀⠀⠀"Yes, he's trying to see if she likes me because his senses are heightened and can smell lust or whatever," Stiles replied, talking a mile a minute making Willow's head rattle. "That's not why I called you over, though."

⠀⠀⠀"Why'd you call me over then?" Willow asked, unable to contain a smile as he beamed at her, nearly jumping around her.

⠀⠀⠀"I made first line!" he exclaimed, pumping his fist and jumping afterward.

⠀⠀⠀"You did?!" Willow asked, grinning as well. "You're not messing with me?"

⠀⠀⠀"No! I mean it! I made first line!" Stiles exclaimed, taking her shoulders and shaking her. "I can't believe it. I've always wanted to be on the first line, but, you know, I try my best, but there are better werewolves on the team that pass me up. Oh, my God! Willow, I honestly can't believe it, I'm about to explode out of excitement, I just, I—"

⠀⠀⠀"I'm proud of you, Stiles," Willow said, placing her hand on his bicep, and that move seemed to stop him in his tracks.

⠀⠀⠀"Thank you, Will," he told her seriously, looking down at her as he smiled. "Are you watching practice today?"

⠀⠀⠀"Yeah," Willow said, removing her hand and looking away for a moment. "My mom is letting us stay after school for that."

⠀⠀⠀"Good! I'm glad you'll be there to see me on the first line," he admitted. Then started buzzing around her again. "Oh, man. This is so exciting! I really can't believe it! Can you believe it? I can't!"

⠀⠀⠀"Stiles," Willow interrupted him, and he turned to her, raising his eyebrows. "I have to run to my locker, but I'll see you out there."

⠀⠀⠀Stiles nodded rapidly, trying to compose his features into a neutral one. It immediately turned back into a smile, and he laughed at himself for it.

⠀⠀⠀"Okay, I'll see you out there," Stiles stated.

⠀⠀⠀He paused for a moment before pulling her into a bear hug, lifting her off her feet, then setting her back down. He smiled at her once again before running down the hall toward the lacrosse field.

⠀⠀⠀"Woo!" he screamed.

⠀⠀⠀Willow was left a little stunned standing in the hallway. She and Stiles were back on good terms. For the time being, they weren't worried about much, and her mom would have their protection charms finished after tonight. Although, they'd be grounded longer than that.

⠀⠀⠀Willow recollected herself and left the athletics hall to head back toward her locker. She shoved her bag in and glanced down the hall to see if anyone was passing. When she found no one since school was over, she turned back to the mirror inside the door.

⠀⠀⠀"Speculum, speculum, absens decoques et portale fieri ad unus tu es ad astrictum."

⠀⠀⠀Willow looked inside, seeing her room through the mirror rather than her reflection. She smiled to herself, thankful that the portal spell worked since it was a more complicated one.

⠀⠀⠀Willow reached her hand out, pressing her fingers against where the glass had been, and a ripple followed after. A moment passed, then she forced her arm inside, standing at an odd angle to find the small jar on her desk. Willow pulled back and opened the lid to a collection of wooden runes she had carved during the summer. She sifted through them, finding the one she wanted, Fehu, then put the jar back on her desk.

⠀⠀⠀"Speculum, speculum, in unus iterum conriges."

⠀⠀⠀The mirror showcased her reflection, and Willow looked back at the rune in her hand.

⠀⠀⠀"Fehu, fortuna rune, in suus contatos sustines Stiles et ferre suus felicitas et novus primordium."

⠀⠀⠀Willow smiled, then immediately felt stupid she had made the good luck charm. She slammed her locker closed and headed for the field before she thought twice about it.

AUTHOR'S NOTE —

I'm really tired and wanted to get this out tonight so ignore the fact I didn't read this over (I did edit though), and the fact I didn't translate the spells or add the recap. I'll add them in tomorrow okay.

SONG: Thanks To You by All Time Low

Thank you for reading! Leave comments telling me your thoughts on this chapter, but however you interact, know that I really appreciate you reading. I hope you enjoy, and until the next one.