#or needed

Stiles can see a second person in his periphery, dressed so darkly that she almost disappears into the murk. “Jake.”

Strong hands yank Stiles around and slam his back into the post so he’s facing the dark scowl of some guy in a green hoodie that’s stained and halfway to ‘tattered.’ Something creaks above him, catching Stiles’ attention and making him look up. A heavy, rusted hook swings gently over his head. “Oh, great! We’ve got meat hooks too!”

The man presses his hand back over Stiles’ mouth. “Shut up! Some of us actually want a break from the hooks this time around!”

“Jake!” The girl beside presumably-Jake grabs his arm and shakes it. Jake whips around to her and opens his mouth, probably to say something rude, but goes absolutely still. The girl with the dreadlocks is also standing frozen, eyes locked over Jake’s shoulder.

Grrrrrrrrr

Jake turns slowly toward the source of the low warning rumble. Derek bares his fangs and leans in closer, red eyes in their full glowing state. “Don’t. Touch. Him.”

“New killer! New killer!” The girl turns on a flashlight in her hand and shoves it into Derek’s face. Jake yanks Stiles away from the post and shoves him into the girl, herding them both toward the sparse trees and scrub that were allowed to grow among the stacks of tires.

“Run! Run, now!”

Stiles opens his mouth to point out that his boyfriend only looks like a serial killer (and only acts like one when he has to but he probably won’t say that part), but two hands grab onto him and drag him into the maze of scrapped cars. Stiles is surprised by the strength in the pair of them, and stumbles over his own feet, trying to keep up with them to avoid just being dragged through the dirt. Turning a sharp corner, Stiles is shoved against a stack of heavy tires that don’t even budge under his weight.

“You’re just gonna piss him off, dude,” Stiles says, rubbing his chest. “Also, you’re a lot stronger than you look.”

“Everything pisses them off.” Jake grabs the sleeve of Stiles’ hoodie. “Red? Seriously? What were you thinking?”

Stiles bristles and slaps his hand away. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t get dressed expecting the forest to eat me!”

The girl elbows Jake, glaring at him. “He’s really new. Be nice.”

“I am being nice, Claudette,” Jake says, and Stiles makes a mental note that Jake is clearly a liar. He yanks the shoulder of Stiles’ hoodie. “Take this off. It’s going to get you on a hook.”

Stiles shrugs out of the hoodie mostly because he wants answers more than he wants to argue about it. “Okay, hoodie is off. Now… explain literally everything you’ve said since we met.”

Jake stares at Stiles’ chest. “Are you seriously wearing an actual target on your shirt?”

“Again where I didn’t expect to be here,” Stiles repeats. “And also, why does it matter? What are we hiding from in this creepy junkyard?”

“From whatever almost cornered us at the hook,” Claudette says. “He’s new, though. We don’t know what he does. But you can bet it’s something bad.”

“Oh, that was just Derek,” Stiles says, making a face as Jake pulls off his own hoodie and shoves it over Stiles’ head to hide his shirt. “He’s with me. He does…” Stiles wants to finish that sentence with ‘me, also’ but this is probably not the time for that. “Good stuff.”

“The guy with the glowing eyes and fangs was… a survivor?” Jake shakes his head and grabs Stiles by the back of the collar and hauls him away from the tires. “You’ve got a lot to learn here, but we need to keep moving and find the generators. Lesson 1 is that anything not human is going to try to kill you.”

“I think I know Derek, and he’s totally harmless and o-” Stiles gets cut off by a beefy arm grabbing Jake by the back of the neck and yanking him away. Stiles really does have the worst timing ever.

“Run!” Claudette tries to pull Stiles back with her, shining her flashlight in Derek’s eyes again. Derek snatches the flashlight away and snaps it off.

“Stop doing that.” He hauls Jake around to face him. “And you. Stop touching Stiles.” He shoves Jake away and turns to Stiles, wrinkling his nose. “What are you wearing?”

“I’m blending into the forest,” Stiles says, flapping his arms in the loose, worn sleeves of the hoodie. “My shirt was apparently too much like an invitation.”

“You smell.”

“Shut up. I’m camouflaged.”

Derek looks around the forest. “From what?”

“We don’t know. From you, we thought,” Claudette says, holding her hand out for her flashlight. “If we’re the four survivors in the trial, then it’s some other killer.”

“Look, I feel like you guys are continuing a conversation we weren’t here for,” Stiles says as Jake turns and heads through the maze of stacked tires and low scrub.

“You’re gonna need to learn to fix generators.”

Claudette sighs. “I wish Dwight were here. He’s better at them.”

Stiles opens his mouth to ask, yet again, what the hell is going on and why the hell they’re apparently fixing shit in the middle of a junkyard. He doesn’t get that chance because something happens, and Stiles’ brain can only quantify it as A Thing.

The green dust kicks up and there’s a throaty, inhuman wail. The thing that appears from the dust is human in shape, but bent and gnarled, standing at a strange angle. There’s a wide black space in her head that might be a mouth. It’s female. Or used to be. There’s a split second where the thing just stands there, solid on the ground and yet somehow feeling like it’s dangling from strings.

Stiles doesn’t notice the massive claw on her right side until she’s swinging it.

“Hag!” Claudette snaps on her flashlight as she’s screaming. “It’s the Hag, run!”

Jake grunts sharply as the claws hit him across the shoulder, spattering red on the white of the birch trees behind them. When Claudette swings the beam of her flashlight into the thing’s eyes, it stumbles and hisses. Claudette grabs Jake’s wrist and sprints into the piles of wrecked cars.

“Come on!” she yells. Derek grabs onto Stiles, pulls him up under one arm, and takes off after them.

“What was that?” Stiles asks as Derek catches up, running alongside Claudette. “Was that thing human?”

“Did she fucking look human?” Jake snaps. “She’s the killer this time!”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘this time’?” Stiles flails a frustrated hand at Jake. “You keep saying shit like this! How often do you end up getting chased through this place by monsters??”

“A lot!”

“Shut up!” Derek and Claudette say at the same time.

“She’s going to hear you!” Claudette hisses.

“And you’re both annoying.” Derek pauses just long enough to grab Jake and heft him up over his shoulder. Jake hisses and bites back the grunt of pain as they take off running again.

Claudette looks behind her and gasps. Stiles tries to see over his shoulder, but can’t see around Derek’s arm as well. There’s more footsteps, though, with an odd gait to them. It has to be the monster… thing. The Hag, she’d called it.

“Derek, faster. Faster, man!”

“We can’t leave her,” Derek hisses. Right. Derek can’t carry all three of them. Not a slight against his werewolf strength, more a lack of arms thing.

“We-”

“Take him into the jungle gym! Try to find a med, check the chests!” Claudette orders, then breaks away from the group before Stiles can ask what the hell any of that is and where they’re supposed to find a chest.

“Claudette!” he yells, just as she vaults through the open window of the shell of a bus and disappears. The strange footsteps taper off. “Shit. Where are we going?”

“In there,” Jake groans from up on Derek’s shoulder. The thing they run into isn’t a jungle gym. It isn’t playground equipment at all. It’s a long wall of crushed cars and junk, stacked unevenly so there are gaps in the middle of the piles, and more stacks of tires. And a rusted pickup truck still mostly intact. It appears to be mostly just a lot of places to hide, or a lot of shit to duck around while being chased.

“I don’t see a chest,” Stiles says, looking around as Derek finally sets him back on his feet.

“It’s a junkyard. Why would there be chests?”

Stiles pauses and considers that. It’s really easy to get sucked into these weird habits these people have. “Fine, whatever. I’m just gonna rip strips off my hoodie.” Which sucks, because he likes that hoodie. But he can’t use Jake’s filthy sweatshirt to wrap around an open wound. He’ll just kill the guy from an infection.

“I’m gonna go after that thing that was chasing us.”

Jake eyes the long strips Stiles produces from his hoodie. “Those are gonna be really easy to see.”

“No more so than your blood. Hey, find me a weapon while you’re out,” Stiles tells Derek, crouching beside Jake and dumping his homemade bandages on their new friend’s lap.

“Doubt there’s a bat around here. What do you want?”

Stiles shrugs. “Anything long and heavy. See if there’s a bigger flashlight or just a non-jagged piece of junk.”

“Just wait until you hear the screaming,” Jake growls, hissing as Stiles begins wrapping the bandages around the claw marks. “The Hag will leave her on one of the hooks. You should be able to get her down and bring her back.

“…Yeah, why don’t you go now,” Stiles says, because it sounds entirely nicer for Claudette if they just avoid that altogether. “Like now.”

“Gone.” Derek climbs through a window in the junk and Stiles hears his footsteps run off.

“You have to be quiet,” Jake says, gingerly sitting up and lifting his arm to give Stiles more room to work on it. “You have to run from her and avoid her.”

“What, you guys just let her impale you on hooks?” Stiles ties off a strip and grabs another one. “How are you still alive.”

“You have to fix the generators until the door out of here works.”

Stiles knows weird rules when he hears them. Beacon Hills has her own weird rules. You stay out of the woods. No one ever does a license check on Eichen House. New kids enrolled in the high school with no paperwork, no transcripts, nothing. The front office staff changed all the time. No one ever thought any of it was weird. Stiles thinks his is a little easier to brush off than monsters jamming people onto meat hooks, but his is not to judge. “Yeah, well… we’ll go fix them as soon as Derek gets back.” When in Rome and all.

“Just listen for the scream.”

The scream doesn’t come at first. There’s a lot of faint noises that aren’t human. Hisses. Growls. First they’re the click-y sort that the Hag made. Then they’re more of Derek’s sort.

Then there’s a scream. Long and dry.

Stiles presses his back against the heavy wall of junk behind him, perched under Jake’s arm, ready to haul him up and run if he has to. His legs ache from the tension coiled in his muscles but he holds the position. And his breath.

Claws jut in through the open hole in the middle of the junk. Stiles bites back a scream in the hopes that the Hag’s ears are in as bad of shape as the rest of her.

“Son of a… push on the back for me,” Derek growls.

Claudette makes a miffed sound. “Ew, no. Just carry it around.”

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

The claws wiggle a little, and then the whole goddamn arm comes flying through the window and flops onto the ground beside Stiles and Jake. Jake stumbles back across their hiding space until he falls back against the pick-up truck.

“Seriously, Derek?” Stiles unfolds himself and nudges the arm with the toe of his sneaker, taking care not to focus on the ragged bits at the end.

“It’s long and heavy,” Derek says as he climbs through the window after his prize. “Just like you wanted.”

“You think you’re funny, but you’re not.” Stiles sighs and grabs the arm below the shoulder. The flesh and muscle that was left on it is as leathery as it looks, but the bone is surprisingly sturdy. And heavy, thus the flesh-ripping claws.

“I’m hilarious.”

“Not.” Stiles hefts his new weapon over his shoulder. “Alright. Guess we’re going on a hag hunt.”

“Stiles!” Scott yells, hands cupped around his mouth to amplify the sound.

“Derek!” Isaac calls, then strains to listen in the dark forest. “Where the hell did they go?”

“I don’t know.” Scott scratches the back of his head in frustration. “They can’t just disappear, you know? But I can’t smell them!”

“They’re somewhere,” Isaac huffs. “Let’s just regroup with Erica and Boyd and-” Isaac’s mouth stops working promptly as the forest around them just… wobbles and bends and then some dark void pries itself open. Giant, spindly legs hook out of the void and strain on it, pulling the blackness open further. More legs throw four people out of the maw, sending them sprawling onto the forest floor.

“Aw, you don’t want to play now?” Stiles rolls to his feet, brandishing something long and jagged at the legs. “Not so tough, are you?”

“Is that… an arm?” Isaac asks, watching Stiles proceed to beat at one of the legs with it.

“I… think so? Who are they?” Scott gestures at the two people who run up to join Stiles. The girl begins trying to pummel the legs with a flashlight while the guy just proceeds to stomp on the ones holding the gap open. One of the legs grabs onto the misshapen arm Stiles is using and pulls at it. Derek grabs onto Stiles as he tries to play tug-of-war for the arm.

“Stiles. Drop it.” Stiles growls and loses his grip as Derek yanks him back. The legs immediately retreat into the blackness, taking the arm with them. The gap swirls closed, leaving the forest quiet and… whole again, with no tear through the middle of it.

“Scott! Isaac!” Stiles wriggles free of Derek’s arms and rushes over, pulling Scott into a one-armed hug. “Dudes, we have got a hell of a story for you.”

“Yeah, like where were you?”

Isaac nods at the two new people being herded over by Derek. “And who the hell are they?”

“We’ll talk about that on the way to my house. I gotta get my bat before we go back.”

Scott blinks and scratches his head, watching Stiles and Derek leave the clearing with the other two following them like ducklings. “…Back where??”