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The thing that people don't know, above all else, about Stiles is that the ice bath ritual is not the first time he died. It's not even the second time, or the longest time.
The first time he had died was the longest he'd spent unalive, and it had been at the hands of his mother.
In fact, most of his deaths to date were are the hands of his mother.
The thing that people don't know about Claudia is that she had magic, and she specialized in necromancy. Necromancy eats away at the mind, especially when used frequently without long enough intervals to recover. What the humans diagnosed as Frontotemporal Dementia had actually been the decay of a necromancer unmoored. She lost sight of her anchor, and she dabbled in things she shouldn't have, and the price had been her mind and ultimately her family.
Her decline started when she miscarried her first three children. She tried to use her magic to revive them, but the fetuses weren't viable or far along enough for the magic to latch. Every failure dug deeper into her brain, twisting her emotions, unraveling her sanity a little more every time. She became obsessed. She believed herself to be cured when she successfully carried Stiles to full term, natural birth, and although he was on the small side, he was perfect and beautiful, and she believed he was to be her redemption.
The post-partum made her overprotective and possessive of the infant. She didn't allow anyone other than Noah to hold him for three months after the birth, for the simple fact that she couldn't bare to part with him. She slept in the nursery with him more often than not, or sometimes simply brought him to bed with her.
An unhealthy attachment, many would say. Those same people also would justify it due to her trauma from the previous losses. Mieczyslaw Stilinski was her rainbow baby, a clear miracle.
The first time he has a health scare at the age of three with pneumonia, the irrational fear of her baby's mortality struck her and hooked black, oozing claws inside her.
Claudia delved deep into the dark magic and strove for a way to prevent her son, her only child whom she had fought so hard to have in the first place, from ever dying. Instead, as a result of her numerous experiments, she caused some of his many deaths and prevented him from dying permanently.
Noah never knew of the first death. The tumble down the stairs at the slightest, almost playful push at three-year-old Stiles' back that resulted in a nasty gash on the head, a broken arm, and a twisted neck.
It had taken so long for Claudia to realign his limbs and his spine correctly, sobbing the whole time as everything maternal in her screamed that she'd just killed her baby. She cast so many healing spells to fix what she'd broken that her throat went raspy and ragged, hands shaking and clumsy, by the end of her desperate frenzy to bring her child back from the shadows of the afterlife.
Stiles was dead for thirty-four minutes and 12 seconds. She healed his spine and the damage to his brain before sparking it the activity back to life. The gash to his forehead remained, sluggishly bleeding, as did the broken arm, and Claudia called Noah for help with the story of an accidental fall, magic depleted and unable to further heal him. He somehow managed not to be irreparably brain-damaged despite the length of time his brain went without oxygen and blood flow. He also didn't remember being push or the fall itself, only knew that he hit his head hard enough to need staples and got a bright pink cast on his arm for four weeks.
She went unpunished for her crime, and although the guilt ate at her, she continued her experiments.
He died a second time for half the time when she poisoned his lunch with antifreeze a few months before he turned five. It was a more painful death than she had anticipated, and her baby suffered horrendously. He woke up alive and only a little sick, like he had the flu or food poisoning, ten minutes after his heart stopped beating.
Noah never knew of the extent of the harm or the truth of illness, had only been asked to bring supplies home for a child with the flu. Ever the attentive and affectionate father, he also brought Stiles a new stuffed wolf half nearly as large as he was to cuddle while he recovered.
Claudia's condition worsened. She delved deeper into her research and her magic, made connections with people she never would have before. The determination to achieve this outlandish goal became her sole focus, and she lost sleep, time, and friendships over it.
Wolfsbane poisoning, twice—the deaths quicker and less painful, administered while he slept. Both deaths were less than fifteen minutes long. She attempted a third time, wanting to layer the magic over him, and found that he had become immune to wolfsbane, even with different strains, as a result of her meddling.
The decay in her brain became noticeable, affecting her everyday tasks, and she was diagnosed with FTD. Her moods fluctuated, and Noah gradually became more and more reluctant to leave Stiles alone in her care.
She forgot who Stiles was when he was seven. She stabbed him, and he screamed for help. He bled out, locked up in the pantry while she screamed at him for being a monster that dared to enter her home. Claudia came back to her senses minutes later and found him dead on the floor. She had to expend more magic than she probably should have to dispel the evidence and bring her boy back to life yet again, painting a rune into his back with his own blood until he awoke and gasped for breath. The last bit of her magic, before he became aware, was to erase the majority of his memory of the incident.
It didn't work fully. This time, Stiles told his father that she threatened him and brandished a knife at him before locking him in the pantry. He didn't remember the actual stabbing, or his death. She didn't remember the incident at all by the time Noah arrived home, so she accused him of lying.
Stiles went to stay with his friend for a week while Noah worked on figuring out their future from here out. He couldn't prove that she'd done anything, but he couldn't get the fear on his son's face out of his head. Stiles could be a fibber like any child, especially when trying to get out of being in trouble, but he would never speak ill of Claudia without reason. Since infancy, Claudia had been his everything, and Stiles was an incredibly sweet boy.
Now Stiles was afraid of her.
The last time she killed him, she drowned him in the bathtub. Again, she had forgotten who he was and thought he was an imposter of one of the children she had miscarried prior to his birth. Her mind supplied that the clear answer to this was not to call her husband for help, but to drown the imposter. She held him down in the tub, the rim pressed hard to his midsection while he flailed and cried and fought for his life, his skinny eight-year-old body no match for sick adult woman's feverish strength and delusions.
Three minutes after his struggles ceased, she came back to reality, but she was so far gone that she couldn't parse out how to save her baby. The knowledge and magic eluded her. She cradled him to her chest and wept, rocking him in her arms, water soaking the floor and her hair and clothes.
Noah arrived home by the time his little body had gone cold, and he found her there with the lifeless body of their son in her arms. He shoved her while wrenching Stiles out of her hold, and he screamed at her with accusations between going through the desperate motions of CPR.
He broke two of Stiles' ribs, but the boy coughed up water and heaved in ragged breaths.
Police and an ambulance were called. Stiles was pulled form the last month of school to recover from his injuries and attend therapy sessions with a pediatric counselor. Claudia was institutionalized with limited contact with her beloved child until her disease ended the remained of her miserable existence.
To the very end, Stiles loved her, even though she'd killed him.
He died again when he acquiesced to a ritual to save his father.
The magic of the ritual cleansed away some of the dark magic on Stiles, shedding the suppressants layered over his mind.
The memories of all his other deaths flood him, the truth of them loud and clamoring, and he comes out of the icebath screaming like he'd been electrocuted while he was under.
Lydia screams with him, and the devastation in her gaze tells him that she knows. As a banshee and his anchor for the ritual, she had seen his deaths. She felt them with him, pressure and agony in her throat, as he relived them in rapidfire order and excruciating detail.
They don't have time to explain to the others or dwell on it. They have to face off with their enemies and save their parents, save the town.
Once in the safety of his father's arms again, Stiles breaks down.
He'd reached his breaking point. He'd almost lost his only parent, and he'd seen his many deaths prior at the hands of his own mother, and he just can't take it anymore.
He demands that Scott, Derek, and Deaton help him tell his father about the Supernatural. He takes advantage of how many times he has saved each of them, and threatens to out Deaton for his shady dealings outside of the veterinary clinic to get his way. They can't refuse him, he has too much on them, and Lydia, his new pillar of strength, backs him up on all of it, icy and protective after witnessing everything Stiles had gone through.
And after his father has gotten the crash course on everything that has been happening in Beacon Hills, and what Stiles has been lying to him about and why, and Chris has to promise to teach him on what to look for, how to defend his son better against these new enemies, Stiles recruits Lydia to help explain what they have just learned about Stiles.
Noah is just as devastated as Stiles over the truth. There is a misplaced sense of guilt at not having been able to protect his child from a parent he never knew was abusing him.
Later, a week or so later, after the Stilinskis have some time to recover, Deaton remarks that Stiles' unique situation means that he is naturally a part of the Supernatural world and cannot technically be categorized as human.
Peter, who somehow overheard everything, gleefully declares that Stiles is clearly more of a zombie than he himself—a jab at Stiles' nickname for him, Zombiewolf.
Stiles isn't sure how to respond to that.
He isn't sure about a whole lot of things anymore.