A Kiss Across Time

The night had already gone sideways before the druid raised his hands. Stiles saw the flash of something wrong—his fingers missing the cadence of a chant Lydia would have called clean. The pack’s shouting blurred around him, shapes moving, claws and teeth and the snap of branches and bone. Someone yelled his name. Scott? Maybe. It didn’t matter because the air buckled, pressure folding in on itself like a fist closing.

“Stiles, get back—” The rest was swallowed by sound. White noise filled his ears, a hard roar, and the ground tilted. He felt the spell before he saw it, the way static crawled across his skin, lifting the hair on his arms as if a storm were locked inside his body and searching for an exit.

The druid’s eyes cut to him. There was a flicker there—surprise, or maybe aim. Stiles couldn’t breathe. The sigils carved in the dirt glowed, the wrong color, too bright. He stumbled backward, boots grinding over pine needles, trying to break the line of sight. The world contracted to a tight bright point and burst.

He didn’t fall so much as get unstitched.

Colors smeared into a churn of black and light. His stomach flipped, a sick, cold lurch that hollowed him out. There was no ground, no up, only momentum. His fingers clawed at air, at nothing, searching for something to anchor to. He thought of the Jeep, of his dad’s voice telling him to slow down, of Scott’s grin when plans worked and didn’t end in disaster. He thought of Derek, which felt ridiculous, and also like the most honest thing in the world.

Then he hit. Hard. His shoulder slammed into earth and he rolled, pain flaring clean and mean along his side. He came to a stop against a root that jabbed into the tender spot under his ribs and lay there, eyes squeezed shut, breathing like he’d just outrun a nightmare.

The silence rang.

He didn’t open his eyes at first. He catalogued instead—dull ache in his hip, scrape at his knee, stickiness on his forehead. He wiggled his fingers. They responded, shaky but fine. Toes, same. Chest, tight but unbroken. When he finally cracked his eyes open, the sky above him was a deep, heavy blue with low clouds dragging in from the west. He tasted copper. Pine needles were stuck to the sweat at his temple. He turned his head and inhaled. The preserve. He’d know its scent anywhere: damp bark, earth, that clean wood smell that seeped into his clothes after long nights hunting things with more teeth than sense.

Relief slid through him in a weak wave. He pushed up onto his elbows. The trees looked the same. Paths cut through the undergrowth in familiar lines. Somewhere above him, a hawk screeched. A breeze moved the leaves, brushing cool air over his overheated skin. It should have calmed him. It didn’t. There was something off, and the wrongness pressed at him, soft at first and then insistent. The background hum he’d grown used to—power clinging to the Nemeton like a dog to the scent of meat—felt thinner. Lighter. As if a weight had been lifted, or hadn’t settled yet.

“Okay,” he said, his voice rough. Saying it out loud made it real. “Okay, okay.”

He pulled his phone out with shaking hands. It was scratched along the edge from the fall, and his lock screen—a photo of him and Scott, grinning under the fluorescent glow of the station—looked like a promise he didn’t deserve. He thumbed it open. No bars. Not even a ghost of a network name. He moved it in the air like proximity alone could coax a signal out of the trees. Nothing. He toggled airplane mode off and on, bit the inside of his cheek, tried the emergency call screen. Even that laughed at him.

Panic opened up under his ribs like a trapdoor. He pushed to his feet too fast and swayed, catching himself on the nearest trunk. Bark dug into his palm. The druid’s chant echoed in his head, wrong syllables colliding as if they were slamming into walls. Backlash, Deaton had once warned him. Magic didn’t like being interrupted. It recoiled. It struck without aiming. Sometimes it sent a message. Sometimes it took.

“Scott,” he tried again, like the name would conjure his best friend out of the quiet. Only the wind answered, slipping through branches. Somewhere, water moved, distant. He swallowed against a dry throat and wiped at his eyebrow. His fingers came away with a smear of red. Great.

He started walking because standing still felt like asking to be prey. The path led him toward the service road. Each step jarred his shoulder. He catalogued the wrongness as he went. Encroaching plants in places the maintenance crews usually kept cleaner. Younger trees where he’d expect bigger trunks. A sign he didn’t remember, with a different font, a different county emblem. It scraped at his nerves, tiny details sharpening into a possibility he refused to unwrap.

When he broke through the treeline, the sky seemed to open wider. The road looked the same. Cracked asphalt. The long, lazy curve toward town. In the distance, he could see the ridge with the cell tower on it. He checked his phone again. Still nothing. He breathed hard once, twice, and made himself move.

The rush of adrenaline that had carried him sputtered to an ugly exhaustion, and anger crept in around the edges. Stupid, he thought. Stupid to stand that close. Stupid to think he could play with magic without it snapping back. He wanted to blame the druid, blame the universe, blame his own need to be in the middle of everything. None of it would get him out of this.

A bird lifted from the brush ahead, startled by his stumbling approach. He flinched anyway. The late afternoon light slanted through leaves, thick and golden. When he reached the first overlook where Beacon Hills unfurled below him, he stopped. The town lay quiet in the distance, roofs and streets and the water tower painted with the familiar blue. His chest loosened, just enough to breathe without tasting iron.

It would be fine, he told himself, lying because he needed it. He’d get down there, he’d find Deaton, he’d find Scott, he’d find anyone. He’d drink a gallon of water and then he’d figure it out. He glanced at his phone one more time. No signal, no time, the icon for his messages stubbornly still. He tucked it away and pressed his palm to the ache in his ribs. His heart beat a fast, unsteady rhythm against his hand, like it was trying to catch up with a body already in motion.

He started toward town. Behind him, the woods breathed. Ahead, Beacon Hills waited, familiar as a dream and suddenly, terrifyingly new. He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare.

By the time he hit Main Street, sweat had dried into a sticky film on his back, and his legs felt like he’d walked out of a nightmare and straight into another one. The storefronts were familiar in shape and placement, but the colors were off. The bakery had a hand-painted sign instead of the sleek vinyl he remembered. The coffee shop was called Bean There, Done That, which felt like a crime against language someone should have stopped.

The smell of caramel corn drifted across the street. The marquee at the Rialto yawned over a small line of people. A couple stood by the ticket window, fingers laced together, their sneakers scuffed and white. Stiles’s eyes tracked over the letters lit in red: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Beneath it, Coming Soon: The Prestige, The Departed.

He went cold. For a second, he thought he’d misread. He blinked. The letters stayed the same.

Cars rolled past with a low hum, not the throaty roar of the muscle cars that still survived, and none of the boxy SUVs he’d grown used to. Small sedans with rounded edges. A blue hatchback with a CD dangling from the rearview mirror, catching sunlight. An old Jeep soft-top, older than his. Stickers on bumpers that hadn’t existed in his time yet. A gas price posted on the corner station shocked him with how low it was.

His phone would have loved a picture of this, if it could do anything besides play dead.

He moved to the curb, letting a group of teenagers brush by. Their clothes were wrong. Layered tanks and low-slung belts. One kid had frosted tips. He felt like he was watching a memory he had no claim to. He focused on breathing and keeping his face blank. Panic would get him noticed. Being noticed would get him questions he couldn’t answer.

Okay. Mid-2000s. He could work with that. He had to.

He scanned for everything he needed and didn’t have. Money. ID. A plan. He had lint, a half-melted granola bar, and a wallet with a driver’s license that wouldn’t scan anywhere and college logos that hadn’t been printed yet. His reflection in a shop window looked pale and rattled, hair a mess, blood dried at his temple. He scrubbed at it with the corner of his sleeve until it was just a shadow.

Survival first. Find water, a place to hide. Don’t talk to cops. Don’t say his last name anywhere near that station. Don’t step into timelines that don’t belong to him. He repeated it in his head, like he could tuck himself behind the rules and be safe.

A newspaper box sat outside the drugstore. He dug in his pocket and came up empty of quarters. He pulled the handle anyway. It didn’t budge. The date on the paper behind the scratched plastic winked at him: August, six months. His stomach dipped.

A payphone huddled against the wall like a metal relic. He stepped toward it on instinct, then stopped. Who would he call? His dad would be asleep somewhere in another decade. Scott would be eleven and still wearing shirts with wolves on them without irony. Deaton—he didn’t know where Deaton was now. Maybe nowhere near Beacon Hills yet.

A kid on a BMX bike shot past him, whooping. Stiles jerked back onto the sidewalk. He felt like an exposed nerve. He needed cover and information and time to think that wasn’t eaten by fear.

The library. Public access computers, periodicals. He could blend there. And it was quiet. He’d deal with the fact that every keystroke would feel like walking through minefields later.

He ducked down a side street and cut across the lot behind the diner, keeping his head down when the cook propped open the back door to let steam and the smell of frying onions spill out. His stomach cramped with hunger. He ignored it and kept moving, grateful for the muscle memory of town’s shortcuts. They were different, but the bones were the same.

When the library came into view, the relief was absurd. The building was smaller. The banners out front were faded. Inside, the air conditioning hit him hard, cold and smelling like dust and old paper. He stood for a second, letting the chill sink in, then made for the stacks, weaving until he found the bank of computers tucked behind a rack of biographies.

The monitors were fat and humming, and the keyboards had that faint stick of communal use. He slid into a chair and woke one up. The homepage took forever to load, a browser he hadn’t seen in years limping across the screen. He navigated district websites, news archives, anything that could give him a date he could anchor to and not just feel.

It matched the paper. It sat on the screen like a sentence.

He swallowed and shifted to practical searches. Bus schedules. Nearby shelters. The hospital’s directory. He stopped himself from searching for Hale because the name alone felt like inviting something to look back. He scrolled instead through lists of after-hours clinics and stared at the words until they became meaningless shapes.

He could sleep at the distillery. No one went there. He could find food in dumpsters slower than he wanted to admit he knew how. He could make a fake name and keep his head down. He could get a library card if he found cash for a printing fee. He could learn the rhythms of this place before he touched anything else.

A shadow moved across his screen as someone passed behind him. He hunched instinctively, tucking into himself. He wanted to laugh, except his chest hurt too much. This was fine. It had to be. He would survive this, and he wouldn’t touch anything he couldn’t afford to break.

He logged off and stood, stretching his tight shoulder. On the way out, he paused at the bulletin board, scanning lost cat notices and babysitting flyers written in bubble letters. None of it had his name on it. He took that as a blessing and a warning.

Outside, the day had softened toward evening. He shoved his hands in his pockets and started back toward the edge of town, keeping to the quieter streets, counting breaths and telephone poles like he could stitch himself to this version of Beacon Hills without getting trapped in it.

He almost made it to the next block before the noise found him—voices bouncing off brick and glass, easy and careless. The kind of laughter that comes from bodies that believe the night will hold. Stiles didn’t want to look. He did anyway, because he always did.

A cluster of kids spilled out of the convenience store, a plastic bag swinging from someone’s wrist. The tallest tossed a bottle of orange soda to another without looking. Hands caught it, sure and quick. The jersey hit him first—forest green with white numbers, shoulder blades sharp beneath it. Then the face turning in profile, the mouth tilted up into a grin that had no shadow tucked behind it.

Derek Hale.

Alive in a way Stiles had never actually seen. Not guarded. Not hard around the edges like something burnt and cooled. This Derek’s hair was shorter, a little messy like he didn’t care because everything else was easy. His cheeks were sun-warmed. He wore tape on one finger, a narrow strip of white that flashed when he shoved a friend lightly in the ribs and laughed again.

Stiles’s body made the decision before his brain could scratch out a plan. He turned on his heel and stepped off the sidewalk, slipping between the laundromat and the pawn shop into the narrow cut of an alley. It smelled like damp cardboard and laundry detergent, metal trash lids and the faint sweetness of spilled beer. He flattened himself against the rough wall, chest tight.

He didn’t breathe for a count of three, then made himself drag air in deep enough to hurt. The sound of them was still there at the mouth of the alley—teasing, something about practice, about Coach riding them hard, about meeting up at the courts later. Derek’s voice threaded through it, warm and low, easy in his throat. Stiles had to press his tongue to the back of his teeth to keep anything from slipping out in reaction.

He had always imagined Derek younger, had pieced him together from offhand comments and a few pictures Laura kept in an album that nobody touched. He’d built a version in his head: self-serious, already aching with responsibility, already looking at the world like it was something he would have to hold up himself. He had not imagined this—this boy who smiled without checking first if it was safe.

His mind scrambled for rules. Don’t change anything. Don’t be seen. Don’t let the universe tangle you more than you already were. He could feel the tug—the urge to step out and catalogue this, to get closer, memorize the angle of Derek’s shoulders when he laughed, the smooth, unmarked line of his throat when he tipped his head back.

He forced himself to stay in the shadow, to count the facts he could hold instead of the ache that rose up without permission. Derek’s jersey said HHS. The number was 14. His sneakers were worn at the toe, laces gray where they’d dragged. His friends moved around him like planets, comfortable in their orbits. One of them—the guy with the orange soda—leaned into Derek’s side, bumped him with his shoulder, and Derek bumped him back, playful. Stiles’s hands curled against the brick until grit ground into his palms.

He didn’t belong near this. He didn’t belong near any of it. The timeline had teeth. He could feel them.

“Dude, you coming?” someone called.

Derek answered, closer now. “Yeah. Hold up.” Footsteps scuffed, a backpack strap squeaked. For a terrible second, Stiles thought Derek was turning toward the alley, felt every nerve flare with the possibility of being seen, known. He pressed harder into the wall, ridiculous, like he could turn flat.

The footsteps moved past. The group’s noise slid along the curb and away, their shapes slicing the light at the edge of his hiding place before they were gone. Stiles stood there until the echo of them was only a memory and his heartbeat settled somewhere below alarm.

Emotion gathered under his sternum, heavy and unfair. He swallowed it down and it didn’t go anywhere. He braced his forearm against the cool brick and let his forehead touch his wrist for a second. The skin there smelled like old soap and sweat. He focused on that instead of the image branded into him—Derek laughing, uncomplicated.

He lifted his head finally and glanced back toward the street. The convenience store door sighed shut. A car idled at the corner and then rolled through the stop. The world returned to its regular shape, but it felt bent to him, tilted.

He could not touch this. He could not touch him. He repeated it until the words lost edges and dulled into something he could carry. He pushed off the wall and moved deeper into the alley, letting the narrowness and the dim bleed the edges off his panic, following the line of back doors and dumpsters until the noise of Main Street thinned.

At the end of the block, he paused and exhaled, long and shaky. The sun had dropped lower. The shadows stretched. He angled toward the outskirts, toward the broken skeleton of the distillery waiting like a secret he’d kept from himself. He kept his head down. He kept going.

The distillery rose out of the scrub like a shipwreck, its brick bones sunburnt and the windows gaping. Stiles slid through a gap in the chain-link fence where the metal had rusted thin and bowed. Weeds brushed his jeans. A grasshopper skittered away from his foot and disappeared into a crack in the concrete.

Inside, the air was cooler. It smelled like old yeast, dust, and rain that had blown in sideways. Shafts of light fell through the broken panes and hit the floor in pale rectangles, catching motes that turned slow in the air. His footsteps echoed. He moved cautious, listening for the sound of other trespassers—kids, squatters, animals. Nothing answered except the faint ticking of the building settling.

He climbed a short flight of metal stairs that complained under his weight and found a platform that was half enclosed, old office space with a wall of glass that had spider-webbed and fallen away in some places. A few cracked filing cabinets leaned against each other like drunks. There was a desk with one leg missing, held up by a stack of phone books. It would do.

He set his backpack down and stood still, arms crossed tight over his chest while his gaze dragged over the place he was making a claim on. It wasn’t home. It was a pause button. He needed one.

He checked the corners first. Animal droppings. A bird’s nest tucked up in the rafters. No recent signs of people. He tested the door that led back to the stairs and found the lock broken clean through. Good. He could wedge it and hear anyone coming.

He eased down onto the concrete and pressed his back to the wall. The fatigue he’d been outrunning tried to catch him all at once. He let it hover and didn’t let it land.

Inventory. Money: thirty-seven dollars and change. A few singles stuffed in a side pocket and a twenty folded into a sleeve of gum he’d meant to throw away three days ago and hadn’t. ID: useless, because it was a future that hadn’t printed yet. Phone: a dead glass rectangle that looked like something out of a sci-fi prop department in this timeline. He powered it on anyway, more habit than hope. The screen flashed and died. No signal. No service. A pocket mirror.

He patted his jacket and came up with a half-melted granola bar, two aspirin rattling loose without their bottle, and a pen that had leaked onto his fingers. He wiped his palm on his jeans and told himself he’d wash the stain out the next time he had access to a sink and soap and a version of himself that had room to care.

The sun slid lower. He pulled himself up and went back down the stairs to scout the perimeter. He found a hose spigot in a side lot and twisted it on. It coughed air and then released a thin ribbon of water, metallic and cold. He cupped his hands and drank greedily, then splashed his face until his skin stung. He watched the water circle a drain clogged with leaves, and for a second, the dizziness of standing in the wrong year threatened to tip him. He braced his hand on the brick and breathed through it.

Back upstairs, he rearranged the phone books and leg braces until the desk didn’t wobble. He scraped dust off its surface with the side of his hand and sat. The chair’s fabric was torn along the back and scratchy through his shirt. He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer and stared at the blank space until he could put lines into it.

He wrote: Rules. Don’t be seen unless absolutely necessary. Don’t say names. Don’t go near the Hale property. Don’t go near the Stilinski house. Don’t touch the Nemeton. Don’t touch anything that will echo. Find food. Find a way back.

He wrote: The date. Six months.

He circled it until the paper fuzzed. He thought about his dad and pressed the pen to the page hard enough that the tip stabbed through. He set it down.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and forced his thoughts to turn in a smaller loop. Tonight: shelter. Tomorrow: the library again. Use the computers only when the bank of them is empty. Cash-only diners for fries and coffee that could stretch into hours. Dumpsters behind the bakery right before close. The thrift store for a sweatshirt if the nights bit colder. Paperwork for a fake name—scratch up something workable with photocopies and laminate if he found access. He knew a dozen ways to make himself pass at a glance. He hated that he knew and loved that it might keep him breathing.

His heart still beat too fast. He let it. He opened his pack and spread what he had in a small ritual that looked like control. A coil of paracord. A pocket knife. A book of matches with a hardware store logo. He set them in a line, a small altar to survival.

He moved to the far corner and collected the least filthy of the abandoned blankets—a tarp, really, stiff with age. He shook it out and a wave of dust rose up. He stepped back, coughing, tears stinging his eyes. When it settled, he spread it and laid down, shoes still on, arms wrapped around himself to keep his body heat in. The concrete leached warmth from him anyway.

He stared at the ceiling. The rafters held shadows that shifted as the last light changed. Every groan from the building sounded like a footfall, then didn’t. He let his breath match the slow count he’d learned from sitting beside hospital beds and waiting for bad news to turn into worse news. In, four. Out, six. Repeat.

He told himself a story where he was just a kid who’d run away and needed a few days to figure out his life. He told himself a story where he was going to fix everything without touching anything. He told himself nothing, finally, and listened to the distillery’s hollow heart beat around him—steady, empty, holding him the way a broken shell holds the last of the tide.

When sleep came, it came in snatches. He woke to silence and checked his phone again, knowing the answer. He turned his face toward the wall and thought of laughter drifting across a sidewalk like a song from a radio in another room, and of a green jersey, and of a future that was already burning. He pulled the tarp tighter against his neck and made himself let the dark close over. Tomorrow he would think. Tonight he would endure.