The episode starts with a flashback, to a teenager (who we know to be a younger version of Derek) running through the preserve while being pursued by hunters.

Another werewolf runs up to him and asks if he's a Hale, but before Derek can respond, a hunter shoots the werewolf through the throat with an arrow. The same hunter shoots an arrow at Derek, but Peter runs in and catches it before it can do any damage, and after a few shots of running, we see Peter holding onto Derek in a dark root cellar and hiding as Cora's voice says "They were there for two days. Waiting, and hiding. That's what we're taught to do when hunters find us. Hide, and heal."

"Okay, so is two days standard then, or are we thinking Derek's on, like, some extended getaway?" Stiles asks, standing beside Noel as the two listen to Cora. Cora turns to face them, asking "Why do you care?"

Noel opens his mouth to reply, but she says "I know why you care. I meant Stiles."

Stiles replies "Because over the last few weeks, my best friends tried to kill themselves, Scott's boss nearly got ritually sacrificed, a girl I've known since I was three was ritually sacrificed, Boyd was killed by alphas, do you want me to keep going? Cause I can. For like an hour."

"You think Derek can do anything about that?" Cora asks, Stiles shooting back "Well, since he's the one everyone seems to be after, it's more like he should do something about it."

"I don't know if he can. It feels like there's something... Different about him now," Noel says, stepping closer to the table Cora has herself leaned against. The two make eye contact, Noel quickly looking away as soon as they do. Cora does the same.

"Noel's right, more right than he knows, actually. Derek wasn't like this when I knew him," she says, Stiles asking her what Derek was like. She looks to Noel, saying to Stiles without putting her eyes on him "Werewolf exclusive intel. Sorry."

Stiles makes an expression of disbelief, doubting that that's a true statement. Cora doesn't let up, however, now looking at him and repeating "Hale pack business only, Stiles. You have to leave."

"I'm just as much a part of the Hale pack as Noel is!" Stiles argues, Noel turning to face him and casually letting his eyes glow gold. He then pulls the back of his shirt up, finally showing the Hale triskele tattooed on his back in the show as opposed to just being in the credits.

Stiles stares at the tattoo with his mouth slightly open, asking "Since when have you had that?"

Noel puts his shirt back down and smiles, saying "Sometime during the whole kanima thing. I'd give you a specific date, but it's kinda Hale pack business only."

Stiles stands there for a beat longer before groaning out his annoyance and turning on his heel to leave the loft. As he stands in the doorway, he yells over his shoulder "Noel's gonna tell me everything you're about to tell him anyway, Cora! Hope you know that!"

"I'll keep that in mind," Cora says back, not even bothering to make her voice loud enough to be heard. When Stiles is gone, Noel turns to her and asks "Is there any real reason that he can't hear about who Derek used to be?"

"A few," Cora says with a shrug, elaborating "Derek's a private guy, you're probably the only one that he'd let know any of this on his own. Plus, I just generally don't enjoy Stiles' extended company at the best of times."

"Not that I disagree, but that's also one of my best friends you're talking about," he warns her, but there's no bite to the statement. She ignores the warning, and Noel walks away from the table as he asks "So... What was Derek like? When you knew him?"

Before Cora can answer, Peter descends the stairs of the loft, informing Noel "A lot like Scott, actually. A lot like most teenagers. Unbearably romantic, profoundly narcissistic, tolerable only to other teenagers. Though, I suppose you got the chance to see that side of him, didn't you, Noel?"

"Parts like that," Noel supplies, "but I mostly know the same Derek that Scott and Stiles know. Brooding, distant, even kind of cold at times when he wants to be. What changed him from a normal teenager to the Derek I know?"

"Well, the same thing that changes a lot of young men. A girl," Peter says, and Noel asks with a laugh "A girl? A girl broke his heart and turned him into the guy he is now? He broke my heart and I'm still..." he trails off at that, not wanting to go into detail, especially not in front of the very same man's uncle and sister.

"Do you remember Derek before he was your alpha? When he had blue eyes?" Peter asks Noel, gaze also shifting to Cora. Noel and Cora both nod, and Peter asks him if he knows why some wolves have blue eyes.

Noel shakes his head. "I always assumed it had something to do with a wolf's status; Alphas are red, betas are yellow, omegas are blue. Derek was a lone wolf before you bit Scott, I figured that's why his eyes were blue."

Peter shakes his head with a smile, saying "Good guess, but not exactly. If you want to know what changed Derek, you need to know what changed the color of his eyes."

—

In the next scene, Allison takes Scott to speak to Gerard, who forces Scott to take away his pain in exchange for information. Scott agrees, and his eyes turn yellow just before the credits roll.

—

After the credits, we see a girl playing the cello. Someone dribbles a basketball outside the room where she practices, throwing her off her rhythm. She steps out to see a hallway full of boys, and asks them if they mind keeping it down. One of the boys turns around to face her, and we see that it's a younger version of Derek. The girl tells Derek that she's trying to practice, all the boys with him listening as he tells her that they're trying to practice too. The girl tells them that if they're practicing basketball, they should be in the gym, but Derek argues that basketball practice happens anywhere there's a basketball.

She turns to leave when Derek approaches her, but he asks her to hold on and tells her that if she can get the ball out of his hands, he might stop. She turns back around and tries to get the ball, but he evades her multiple times in a row and shows off some of his skills at the same time. She shakes her head and walks away back into the music room, and after a second, he follows her to apologize. She ignores him when he asks for her name, and he relents that he'll leave her alone when he gets her name. She challenges him that if he can play one of the instruments in the room she'll tell him her name, and when he comes back to her with a triangle and plays a single note, she tells him that her name is Paige. He tries to tell her his name, but she informs him that she already knows who he is.

The scene fades as they smile at each other, and we cut to Gerard planting the idea that Deaton is the Darach in Scott's head and telling him that Deucalion isn't "always blind."

—

"If Derek was a sophomore when he knew Paige, how old would he have been? Fifteen or Sixteen? Fourteen maybe?" Noel asks as the commercial ends, and he has a sudden realization. "Wait, how old were you? How old are you now?"

"Not as young as we could have been but not as old as you might think," Peter says, Noel rolling his eyes and saying "I prefer actual answers, Peter, please. Like if I ask Cora, 'how old are you?' I just wanna hear-"

They both finish the sentence at the same time with Cora's age, "Seventeen."

Cora looks at him and asks "You know how old I am?"

"Well, we're the same age, so of course I do. Plus I kinda asked Derek when your birthday was as soon as I knew you existed. I love birthdays, my calendar's full of them."

Cora bites her lip to hide a smile, Noel turning back to Peter and saying "Okay, Mr. September 24th, 19-Something-Something, what happened to Derek and Paige?"

"What do you think happened?" Peter asks him in return, saying with almost a smile "You dated him, you know how he tends to pile on the charm. They went very quickly from 'I hate you, don't talk to me' to the stage where they'd frantically grope in any dark corner they could manage to find themselves alone in for five minutes."

—

Just like that we're back to a Paige and Derek flashback, as Peter informs Noel that Paige and Derek's favorite place to be alone was an abandoned distillery just outside Beacon Hills.

Paige and Derek enter the room and start kissing, Noel cutting in to ask "How do you even know all this? The distillery, the way they met, that's all pretty personal stuff."

"Back then, I wasn't just Derek's uncle. I was his best friend, his closest confidant. That's how I know," Peter reveals, and we see teen Peter looking into the distillery, spying on Derek and Paige as they kiss.

Paige breaks her kiss with Derek to step back and ask him "Why do you like me?" Derek asks what she means, so she repeats the question. He asks it back to her, wondering why she thinks he likes her, and she says that at first she thought he only liked her because she didn't like him. He assures her that he'll never stop liking her, and she seems satisfied with that answer as they once again move in to kiss. Derek turns however and says that something happened at the distillery, and that he caught a scent of blood. He takes her away to hide, Peter doing the same outside, as a few pack of wolves (including all the alphas, besides Ethan and Aiden, and the packs they would go on to murder) come in to discuss the werewolf that was killed in the opening.

Before all hell can break loose, it's revealed that Peter's story and Gerard's have blended together. Gerard says that there was once an exceptionally powerful alpha in Beacon Hills, with the ability to shapeshift into a full wolf (which is uncommon for werewolves). We see the wolf in question padding toward the distillery, eyes shining red, and the wolf is revealed to be Talia Hale, Derek's mother.

—

Talia tries to diffuse the situation, but Ennis is out for the blood of the hunters that killed his beta. He draws the spiral that calls for revenge/war on the wall of the distillery, which transitions into Peter drawing a similar spiral on the foggy window of the loft as rain pours outside.

"It's our mark for vendetta," he elaborates, Noel asking "What's with werewolves and revenge? Is that an instinct I'll acquire after I graduate Werewolf 101? The affinity for revenge?"

"It isn't just about revenge," Cora explains, fists clenched and jaw set. "Losing a member of your pack isn't like losing family. What did you feel when you saw Boyd, lying there dead on the floor in front of you?"

Noel's eyebrows scrunch together, and he says softly "It felt like I had lost a piece of myself. Like part of me was down there with him, and he took it along when he was buried. That... That's a pack thing, isn't it?"

Cora nods sadly, looking at Peter as the man says coldly "And they wouldn't even let Ennis see his beta's body."

—

Returning to a flashback, Stilinski enters the hospital where Ennis holds a man in a near choke hold. He tells Stilinski that the man who died belongs to him, and Stilinski tells him to back off, and that he's only a deputy so he does what he's told. He goes on to explain that they're dealing with a homicide, and no matter how close Ennis was to him, the two weren't related. Ennis argues that he was like family.

—

"What does any of this have to do with Derek?" Cora asks, having moved inexplicably closer to Noel since the discussion of Boyd's death. They both look tense.

"It has everything to do with Derek. It's never just a single moment, it's a confluence of events. Personally, when I looked at Ennis's circumstances, I saw profound loss. Derek... Saw something different. He saw opportunity."

"To do what?" Noel asks, and Peter replies "To always be with her."

—

Back in the past, Derek has his ears trained on Paige as she plays her cello even while he's in a class halfway across the school. Without looking up from her sheet music, Paige asks Derek what he's staring at, and he looks at her from where he stands in the doorway with admiration in his eyes. He argues that he isn't staring, he's listening. He asks if he's distracting her, but she tells him she has incredible "laser-like" focus. He smirks, asking her if she's sure.

In an attempt to distract her from her playing, Derek runs his lip along her ear, and she tells him she hates him. There's no malice behind it, however, so Derek corrects her and says that she loves him. She reiterates, but so does he, and this time she doesn't disagree. They kiss when she nods, and we go back to Peter in the present.

"The thing was, he had this constant fear. He was obsessing over it, thinking about it all day and night, always, it was always on his mind."

—

Young Peter helps himself to a seat beside Derek at his table at lunch, asking him why Paige always eats alone. Derek asks what Peter's doing there, and Peter says that he's looking after his favorite nephew and making sure no one is aiming a crossbow at his throat.

"I can get you banned from school grounds, you know that right?" Derek asks his uncle, but Peter argues that no one will ban him from anywhere since he's too good looking. Peter asks if Paige has any friends, Derek saying she has a few but she prefers to study at lunch as opposed to hanging out with them, and he doesn't think that she would like his friends.

"No one should like your friends, they're a bunch of hormonal halfwits," Peter sides with Paige, taking Derek's candy from his lunch and helping himself to a piece. "But that one's perfect for you, and perfect combinations are rare in an imperfect world."

Derek takes Peter's word for it and stands to leave, but Peter continues and says that if he was Derek, he'd be worried too, and that he'd think about "it" all the time as well. Derek asks what he means, and Peter explains that he means Paige finding out that he's a werewolf.

Peter scares Derek with a scenario where Paige learns about his condition and leaves him because of it, and explains that there's only one way to assure that she'll be with him forever. Derek realizes what he means just as Peter says it out loud- "Turn her."

—

As soon as the commercials end, Peter leans in and lies through his teeth "I kept telling him not to do it. Every day, the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became. You know teenagers, I bet he even blames me. He's probably convinced himself the whole thing was my idea."

With perfect timing, we fade to teen Peter telling Derek he has the "perfect idea." Derek tells him to go away, but Peter tells him that there are more alphas than he's ever seen before in one place now gathered in Beacon Hills. He says that Derek's mother would never do it, and the packs wouldn't be there for much longer, and that the time to do it is now.

He continues to egg Derek on with all the advantages of having Paige bitten, ending his speech with the now infamous line "The bite is a gift."

Derek appears convinced, as we change to a scene of Chris and Gerard finding the nemeton (a sacred meeting place, and the same place Derek and Peter were hiding out in the opening scene).

—

After Gerard explains the myth of Lycan and the birth of the emissary to Scott and Allison, Cora is explaining to Noel what an emissary is in easier to understand terms.

"They keep us connected to humanity. But they're a secret even in the pack, sometimes only the alpha knows who the emissary is. Derek and I had no idea about Deaton."

"Or his sister, Morrell," Peter says, and at Noel's shocked expression, he says "She's the emissary to the alpha pack."

"Our school guidance counselor? God, I can't take one step in this town without finding out someone I'm close to is well-versed in all this werewolf stuff," Noel says like he's been betrayed, Cora saying bemusedly "You're well-versed in this werewolf stuff. You're a werewolf."

"That's different, I asked to be one. I didn't ask to be told all this nonsense about all-seeing and all-knowing emissaries and my ex-boyfriend's love life."

"Emissaries aren't all-seeing or knowing, Noel," Peter chides. "They give advice, which is why Morrell makes such a good guidance counselor. That's what Deaton used to do, for Talia."

—

In the next flashback scene, Deaton tells Deucalion and Talia the story of the scorpion and the frog (which teaches that people can't control their nature) and warns them against underestimating Gerard Argent's nature.

—

Next we see Paige at the school at night, meeting up with Derek. She hears someone at the end of the hall and assumes it's Derek, walking toward the sound, and seeing Ennis there waiting for her with his claws out and eyes red. She runs and he gives chase, and we cut to commercial.

—

We see Derek in the locker room nervously bouncing a basketball when we come back, and Cora asks "Ennis? Why would you ask him?"

"Why not?" Peter replies, explaining "Ennis needed a new member for his pack, Paige was young and strong. Doing a favor for Derek meant Ennis would be in good with Talia, back then everybody wanted to be in good with her."

As we see Derek continue to dribble the ball, Noel says "Derek doesn't remember that it was Ennis." It isn't a question.

"If he does he keeps it to himself," Peter says, Noel looking skeptical. We hear Paige crying in fear, as Noel asks if Ennis did end up turning Paige. He sees Peter's grim expression, hanging his head down when Peter says Ennis almost turned Paige.

We see Derek rush to attack Ennis as Paige struggles to get away from him (Peter calling the scene a "fifteen-year old boy against a giant"), but Ennis just takes hold of Derek's head and pins him down so he can see that Paige had already been bitten. Derek shakes Ennis off as the man retreats down the hall, Peter looking on at the scene.

—

After we see a flashback of Gerard ambushing and killing members of Deucalion's pack with a spiked bat, Cora asks Peter if Paige turned. Peter reasons that she should have, and that most often the bite takes. Noel knits his eyebrows together and says "When you offered it to me, you said I'd become a werewolf 'if it doesn't kill [me]'."

"If," Peter agrees solemnly, as we see Derek holding Paige at the base of the nemeton as her body rejects the bite. He asks Peter what's happening, but Peter explains in a voiceover that despite being young and strong, Paige wasn't made for being a werewolf despite her struggle and will to live.

At the same time, we learn that Gerard was the one that blinded Deucalion with arrows when the man was begging for peace between the wolves and the hunters.

—

In the next scene, Derek tries to take Paige's pain away as she dies, but it proves to be too much for him to stand and he apologizes. She tells him that she knew about him being a werewolf from the beginning, because of how he spoke and the things he could hear. He confirms that she still liked him despite this, and she corrects that she loved him.

She then starts crying out in pain, gripping onto Derek's hand and asking him if she's going to die.

He doesn't say anything, and she starts to sob as she tells him she can't stand the pain anymore. She begs for him to kill her, and he brings her into a tight hug and apologizes as his eyes shine yellow and he stabs his claws into her back. They both sob, Derek apologizing again as he realizes she's finally died in his arms.

Peter relays in the present that he remembers taking Paige's dead body out of Derek's arms, and carrying her to a place in the woods where she would be found. He explains that is was eventually brushed aside as another Beacon Hills animal attack, and we see Noel sitting with his hands in front of his mouth with tears in his eyes as he asks softly "What about Derek?" His voice hitches as he says it, almost like it pains him to even think about it.

"Taking an innocent life takes something from you, as well," he explains. "A bit of your soul darkens in you, dimming the once brilliant golden yellow to a cold, steel blue. Like mine." Peter's eyes flash blue, and almost as a fear response, Noel's shine the aforementioned golden yellow of a beta whose hands are clean from the act of taking an innocent life.

—

We then see Deaton unwrapping Deucalion's bandages, to reveal that his eyes are burned and his sight won't return. In a fit of rage, Deucalion murders his beta where he stands, and it's revealed that Deucalion does have some sight- the sight of a wolf.

—

For his final scene of the episode, we go back to Noel and Cora. Noel is staring straight ahead in the loft, and Cora asks him what the look on his face is. He asks what look she's talking about, and she elaborates that it's a look that makes her want to punch him.

Noel looks over her face with a bit of a smile, noting "Yeah, you're definitely Derek's sister."

She seems surprised that he isn't afraid of her, and she licks her lips before asking once again what he's thinking about.

"I don't... I don't believe Peter," Noel admits, turning to look at Cora again with a slight frown. She looks at him questioningly, and he explains that in Jennifer's class, they're reading a book with an unreliable narrator, and that details of stories can change based on that character's perspective. Cora offers that maybe he isn't lying, and that they just heard Peter's perspective on the story.

"And I don't think that's the whole story, the things Peter knows," Noel continues, and Cora seems to understand what he's hinting at. But she seems skeptical that he has a viable solution, asking with raised eyebrows "So you're just going to ask Derek about the girl he fell in love with and then killed?"

"If asking means that I'll be helping him figure out what's been happening... I'd ask him a million times over," he confirms, and then says "He's... He's my alpha. I'd do anything to help him."

In the last scene of the episode, we watch as Talia finds Derek at the nemeton, hands covered in blood. She says his name and he tells her he did something terrible, and she picks up his chin to look at his eyes. She tells him they're different, but still beautiful, like the rest of him. A shot of Derek's new blue eyes fades to a shot of Derek, back in the distillery, staring at the vendetta spiral Ennis had drawn in those previous years.

—

With that, the episode ends.