Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kira stops her in the parking lot, and in the rain, they wait under the iron shed of the school junkyard for Lydia to come pick them up for their daily study-group together after her after-school session with the school counsellor is over.

It used to be just her and Stiles, in that study group. But lately, he’s been distant. Distant, absent, hard to get hold of.

Her exercise solved, she drops her pen and closes the book with it in the middle, and confides so in Lydia.

Lydia tells her it’s not unusual, to not worry, but Malia doesn’t miss the way her throat works. She tucks her red hair behind her ear, her fingers tremulous, her mouth a thin line as she mashes her lips together after her words stumble around the shapes of allison and demonic possession.

Malia holds her gaze, takes in her misty eyes, and slides the brownies Lydia kept between them before they started practicing the tests together.

Kira’s still immersed in her history book, not once letting up her gaze, sitting sideways in the chair, her legs hanging from the side rest. The Yukimuras have started allowing her to stay longer, and with each passing week their hours together stretch from evenings to late into the nights. They’ve had plenty sleepovers this past week, and none that were spent buried in the books, but now the mid-sems are nearing and their fun has turned into this. Malia has a lot of remedial tests and assessments to catch up on if she wants to take her placement exams and wants a shot at being seniors together with these people.

Kira gives no sign that she heard their conversation, but her heart still beats louder once Malia’s words are out.

. . .

She’s known about the nogitsune, of course. It’s like a badly kept secret. I remember everything I did, and the worst part is I remember liking it. Its ghost lingers everywhere. In the school, which she’s started to not hate so much. In Scott’s house, where she goes to practice her shifts on the weekends with Stiles in tow, and of course—in Stiles’ own room.

Its presence is the strongest there.

Stiles moves around the house like he’s the ghost haunting it—he still cooks and washes the dishes and waves the sheriff off in the evening with a thumb between his teeth, all mechanical—but Malia could pick apart like peeling paint the difference between him and whatever leaves a person terrified.

Malia enters through his front door quite often to find him studying at the kitchen table, the books strewn about. Or playing a video game slumped on the couch until he spots her in the doorway and startles and pulls her in his house and they watch whatever is on until one of them sleeps. It’s supposed to be some sort of how-to-human exercise, but Stiles is probably taking this opportunity to familiarise her with everything Star Wars.

But that’s what—until Malia stands at the maw of the oppressing loneliness of his house, of his room, of himself, until she makes herself known by the loud thud of the front door closing behind her, or barges into his life and fractures the silence until he can’t ignore the noise anymore, it’s him alone in here, suspended in some sort of gaping hole that she desperately wants to fill.

. . .

She makes a point to study with him, that week. She’s armoured with Lydia’s notes, and Kira’s giggles telling her to call her if he starts to look a little too distracting. Malia rolls her eyes, but can’t refute the principle, and takes her up on the offer and hits call even before she’s reached his house.

All Stiles really does these days is braid her hair while she tries not to hit her head with inorganic chemistry and its fucking exceptions. It’s not so much a distraction than a meditation of sorts. His deft fingers on her scalp are soothing as she works, and once he’s done he seems content with the work and returns to his equations after snapping a few pictures of her from her side. Sometimes she’ll smile at his phone. But at those times, his phone’s forgotten. It’s like he’s capturing her with his eyes alone.

Then he’ll blink, his face faltering, and he’ll flip a few pages Malia’s certain he wasn’t reading before he got caught up with her hair.

She’s almost done reciting the list of exceptions from Lydia’s notes—verbatim—when she ambles up to the front door. She knocks a few times, no one opens. But that’s not an anomaly, these days.

It’s just that the door’s locked, too. She can’t let herself in. When she listens for it, it’s faint, but there; Stiles’s heart.

“I’ll call back.” She tells Kira, and tries twisting the bolt a few more times.

A month after Malia had enrolled in the school, and in short order, Scott’s pack, she’d found out about Derek Hale. And Hale, the name had rung in her ears and settled like anvil upon her chest, like she knew it from before. A memory at the tip of her consciousness that she just couldn’t reach.

Soon, it wasn’t the name she had to look for—but a whole goddamn person.

This Derek going missing meant Stiles was in a frenzy. It didn’t matter what the nature of their relationship was, just that it was the cause of Stiles’ worry. Petulant and angry and irked, speaking with a dryness he’d never bestowed on her, it was unlike anything she’d seen him be, so much that she didn’t understand why he was looking for this person in the first place, but she also got the sense that it was the reason Stiles was not losing his mind. Though anyone missing from your pack should warrant the losing of mind a little bit, the effect was opposite on him.

There was work to be done, hands to be used. The ordeal with the demon forgotten—like a skin being shed, an overcoat dropped—Stiles threw himself headfirst into his search.

Lydia opposed going to Mexico, but to Malia, anything was a welcome distraction from these inundated days, even crossing state borders in Stiles’ death trap of a jeep.

As long as he was with her, she’d thought, sitting between him and Scott, she could get through this off-kilter rescue mission.

Later, she’d confessed that she saw Stiles as her pack. Her only pack—when Scott’s unusual group of high school students, and now also a kidnapped/taken/missing/almost adult wolf they were on the quest for—had seemed somewhat shady, despite Stiles’ many appeases and assurances.

Matter of fact, she’d confessed to him being much more than just pack.

She hadn’t paid heed to that part of herself, since then. But it hits her now, the pang of paranoia and panic, the same she felt in Eichen House as she watched the nurses drag Stiles into the isolation room and drug him to sleep. The same pang she felt pressed on its door with Stiles’ shuddery breaths in her ears, desperately pulling at the lock and willing it to open when those shudders turned to screams.

In her desperation, she’d managed to break it. She’d no idea how she’d collected the strength at the time, but with Stiles in her arms, his wide eyes looking like a deer’s about to be preyed on, she didn’t care how it had come to be. She’d just hushed him, more so to calm her own nerves, and they’d made their way to the basement.

Now, there are no screams, but she debates breaking the door still. It’ll be much easier. She’s more in control now, more in tune with her strength. But this isn’t Eichen. Haunted though it has become, this is merely Stiles’ house. The house where, lately, no one’s allowed entry except Malia—someone who doesn’t seek permission, but simply barges in.

Stiles isn’t returning her calls. And so when she sees the window to his room, it’s a quick and easy decision.

Malia doesn’t know what she thought she’d find when she slips in, but seeing Stiles asleep – rather fitfully – but still asleep, loosens the ice in her chest.

His phone’s on the floor with other many papers scrawled in his handwriting.

She pulls the window shut, quietly, peering into the twilight, looking for any prying onlookers, and doing something she hasn’t ever done before, tiptoes to his bed and sits on her haunches beside it. She gathers the papers and his phone, puts them on the side table by the lamp with his phone as paperweight, and turns to him again, expectant.

He’s lying on his stomach, almost at the edge, his brow lined with sweat, his hair sticking to his forehead and the arm he’s sleeping on.

“Stiles.”

He doesn’t stir. But his face that was twisted earlier relaxes a little. His grip on the sheets also lets up.

Her knuckles come to graze his cheek. It’s the same soft texture she’s felt numerous times when they’ve slept together on his couch downstairs, his cheek resting upon her crown, but tonight, it’s burning.

She checks his forehead, his arms. It’s all but a furnace. Leaning in, she thumbs his cheekbone, feeling his shallow breaths fan her face. Up close, the warmth is almost welcome, but with a hand on his head, her fingers brushing his hair, she calls him a few more times.

He remains asleep.

She doesn’t know if this is a standard sickness symptom, lying callous on the bed, but she doesn’t let the worry bound her to the place beside him.

Getting to her feet, she shucks off the bag on her shoulder and deposits it in his back chair.

She’s not been in his room often, and she knows why, but with Stiles in it now, his face sweaty and blotchy with fever, it doesn’t feel as scary as he makes it seem. It’s a nice place to exist in, she can see herself here, among Stiles’ things, being something else of his.

Yet, quietly as she can, with her newfound skill at tiptoeing, she pads downstairs.

They spend most of their time here, around the kitchen table, and she feels more at home here for now. The clutter around the kitchen draws her brows together, and when she goes to open the fridge she understands why.

On the door of the freezer, a yellow note sticks.

Don’t worry too much, he’ll sleep it off.

Botched the soup. Order yourself something.

Won’t be back for the night.

Below it, a number’s also scribbled. The pizza place Stiles often calls and swears by and keeps a secret from his dad.

Standing alone in the kitchen, she considers the mess. She makes a decision.

The Sheriff and Malia haven’t crossed paths that much. On the rare occasions they have had the chance to, it’s when he’s leaving for the station. He’s always in the doorway, never lingering long enough, only warning Stiles to not stay up late, his eyes flitting to Malia, the warning still punctuated in his gaze and pinning her where she is.

She remembers his hand wrapped around her arm when her father finally opened the door, its touch burning her cold skin. His uniform on her body was foreign, but warm. In the beginning, since John had been the one after her case, she’d resented him too, like she’d resented Stiles.

In these weeks, when she saw him leave for the station, saw Stiles’ eyes follow him like a hawk, a bitterness exuding from both his face and skin, she absorbed that bitterness too. She also absorbed the fear, and in a few consequent days, understood where both these tangents led and what these emotions buried within themselves.

On the couch, she’d put a tentative hand on his arm and would throw a casual, “You okay?” and expect an honest answer. Stiles already knew she knew it, nothing was hidden, so what loss could be in the truth? She saw no point in lying anyway, regardless of her sensitive nose.

But Stiles, his eyes trained to the flashing TV, would lie. His heart would be steady. Maybe being around werewolves he had learned many lessons, or maybe his heart was always just running running running, even as he sat idle, and he would mumble that he’s fine and his heart would drum the same steady rhythm it was always drumming.

And so she’d resent the Sheriff for ever leaving.

The note, thus, leaves her a little breathless. Nothing ever manages to shake her quite like this, but this simple admission of Stiles’ dad, his simple acknowledgement of her presence in his son’s life unhinges her heart in its cage.

This is the man who investigated the carnage Malia left behind on a full moon years ago, he’s the only one who garners any real wariness from her, because he knows the full weight of her actions, knows up close and personal the sheer scale of violence she’s capable of unearthing.

Behind her dainty fingers and her supple skin is a feral animal taped together by—well, what do you know—his own son.

Stiles is why she’s tethered to this humanity. He’s the centre of her gravity. Everything else comes after. Her pack, her relationships, even this humanness.

He’s the one who stands in front of a raging coyote and holds his ground like an idiot, so in turn, she holds onto him. She holds onto this precarious human condition, despite the vulnerability it leaves her in.

And the sheriff sees all that, he sees the carnage and the animal who turned on its own family at short notice, he loses sleep over tracking it, writing detailed reports, and then he finds it and let’s it be.

No, he doesn’t just let it be—he lets it come into his home while his son sleeps, unawares. He locks the door for every other danger lurking, every contrived calamity a policeman can conjure up in his crime riddled mind, and then leaves an assuring note for her regardless, like he knows she will climb up the window and pad through the kitchen looking for food and answers.

Stiles swears he could “literally die” for that pizza place, but Malia doesn’t call them, or at least, as she conscientiously starts on the one pot pasta dish she’s seen Stiles make a few times, she hopes she won’t have to resort to it.

She prides herself on her observation skills, has come to rely on them through this entire ordeal (“It’s a process, Malia.”) of ‘becoming' human. Imitation has led her places, places that eventually lead to a twitch in Stiles’ mouth, a laugh he suppresses as he looks away, that low “progress” he mutters and finds utterly amusing when no one else is around.

“Whoever you want to be.” He tells her the time she asks who she’s supposed to be. He’s stood before his crime wall and she’s looking over his shoulder, studying its remains, the flannel well-worn and unexpectedly soft where she’s perched her chin. It smells of detergent and a general scent of something she’s started associating as simply stiles.

What she’d really meant to ask was who she was on his crime board—what name did he have for her when he had no name at all? Where did he put her, what did he see? A suspect, or victim? A monster or mere refugee?

A small part of her had also meant to ask how. How was she supposed to be who he wanted her to be? But he’d answered it like it was just that simple. He’d answered it almost absently, like it didn’t matter to him if she remained on this half animal half whatever threshold they’d reached for her.

So Malia draws her memory to the most recent time she’s seen Stiles worry about the stove and huff and fling his hands around while he repeats to her the instructions to the easy recipe he found on the internet, and starts on the sauce.

She uses her claws to open the tomato puree, but manages to mince the garlic with the knife. To her surprise, her knife work is pretty nimble and not as hefty as she’d believed it would be.

Her dad calls her when she’s in the middle of draining the sputtering water down the sink, and it doesn’t take much to handle the pot with one hand and hold the phone with the other.

“No, Dad, no curfew talks, I’m staying. I said I’m staying. Ten o’clock or so. You got some tips for me to help with the fever or not? Just hang up then, I’m in the middle of something here. What do you mean—if you really must know, I’m doing great in this kitchen department. For now. If I start a fire you’ll be my first call. Right, sure, the fire department then—” something catches her elbow and she startles, spinning around with the knife in her hand.

Stiles barely reacts. The knife’s about a hair’s breadth away from his abdomen.

Shakily, she puts it away and hangs up the call with a whispered “later, dad.” and takes stock of him. Her eyes run down his torso in a fear that keeps mounting. Her hands, too, first squeeze his shoulders and run down his arms, checking his chest for any injury and come to a stuttered stop around his middle. They ghost over his stomach, where she wants to touch him, relieve him of any hurt the knife might have inflicted no matter how quickly she acted, but she’s seized with a fear that it may actually have. “What the hell, Stiles, I didn’t even hear you come in.” She mutters, angry, roughly pulling him into her arms and holding him close, worried that she’s done something she just can’t see yet.

The words are already echoing in her head, circling like a crow around carrion, gripped in the fear of how she can’t have heard him wake up, come all the way down the stairs, and just stand behind her without her knowing. How human has she become after all?

Or, oh. Another fear grips her mind. As she feels his throat working, a solid but quiet presence in her hold, she wonders if there’s some truth to Stiles walking around the house like he’s haunting it. For it really is a quiet presence—not a single beat of his heart falls in her ears.

He pulls away, and her own heart aches, but his hands come around her jaw, loose in their grip but determined, pulling her hair away from her face. She lets him inspect whatever he wants to. In her periphery, she can see his glassy eyes, can feel his slow movements despite this sudden exigency. His fingers press against her temple and prod the area around it. “You’re okay.” He mutters, a question still marking the conclusion he’s reached.

“I’m okay.” She repeats, though she doesn’t know what she’s agreeing to.

“It hurt you.” He whispers, his deep brown eyes watching her closely. He looks a bit dazed. His fingers are a burning presence wherever they graze her skin.

She goes still at his words. “No one hurt me.”

“No, it did. Oliver—he tied you up. He was—he had a drill.”

The basement floods back to her, and with the dawning, the fear she felt in there rushes back too. “He didn’t. I mean he didn’t do anything; he couldn’t hurt me. I punched him, in fact. I didn’t—” she didn’t see him, after that. She was afraid he’d hurt Stiles, but he was nowhere to be found. After days of fruitless search, she’d just held onto his brittle promise and got out of that place altogether.

“Did he hurt you?” She bites her lip, a rage igniting at the thought of it.

He pulls out of her grasp completely, but doesn’t let go of her hand, peering at the pot sputtering on the stove. He tugs her towards it, and amused, gives it a sniff that startles a laugh out of her. “Smells nice.” He says, twisting his long fingers into hers, pressing at her knuckles like it’s grounding him. He turns the stove off after letting it simmer for a minute. “Can’t let it burn.”

“I’ve heard many people say they prefer the smokiness.”

“That’s different.” He mumbles, stirring the pasta.

She squeezes his hand when he starts to sway on his feet. After those first few weeks of focus Derek’s disappearance impelled him in, there was a reckoning. Once Derek had come back from his regressed state—however that had happened—and things had returned to whatever shred of normalcy the supernatural world offered, Stiles, too jittery to accept that normality at first, had subdued in its wake.

But now she thinks maybe it isn’t some acceptance. Maybe whatever he’d avoided when he threw himself in Derek’s search and its subsequent dangers, was catching up to him, and now even she was falling into the abyss cast around by his unnatural quietude. “Stiles.”

Sensing the import in her voice, he shakes his head, “I let it in, so he didn’t do anything.” Then he huffs a short harsh laugh, “I also punched Oliver, actually. Or the other me did, I guess.”

She nods, watching him curiously, listening for his heart. “What do you mean, let it in?”

Stiles heaves a sigh, like talking about it is simply annoying him and not bringing back all sorts of bad memories and trauma. But she can’t let this go. It’s like a fingernail she can’t help tear, expecting it to reveal something more than just blood this time.

“If I let it in, Oliver would let you go. That was the deal.” He turns to her again, and turns her face at the side. Suddenly Malia can hear the sound of that machine, can feel the air it displaced hit the side of her head, can feel Oliver’s stuffy fingers shoving her cheek further into that rickety chair. “It’s got principles, who knew.” Stiles’ fingers, unlike Oliver’s, are unsteady. He knows nothing’s there, no hurt, no hole he keeps imagining, and yet they tremble when they touch her temple this time.

She takes his hand in hers and opens her mouth to argue. What does it mean? What does it fucking mean they had a deal? You don’t strike deals with demons. You definitely don’t strike deals with demons for a girl you met in a mental institution.

But one look at him, and her words turn to ash. “Hey.” Her heart aches again, so rare the feeling. He looks sad, cut open and turned inside out. He looks sad and Malia wants to cast away that wounded look from his face. “What’s wrong?”

His mouth works soundlessly, his eyes dart around her face, absent, quick and never staying, never braving the stillness that might key her in onto what he’s feeling. Then, at last, his eyes flit down to her lips and his throat bobs.

She watches it, watches him lean in—slow and nervous like he’s never been around her—and press a feather light kiss on the side of her lips. When he lingers there, his hot breath fanning her face, his chapped lips just as burning, she captures them in her own and hears him whine around the kiss.

His hands slip and grip her waist, and she grabs him by his face, her palms around his jaw, fingers digging the flesh of his neck, grazing his dark, sleep mussed hair.

They’ve never really kissed like this before, no matter what Kira or the rest of the pack might assume. Not since the time in Mexico when they were stuck in the restroom and all she could focus on was his voice and nothing else. To shut him up, to anchor herself, she’d kissed him, and that was the first time she’d realised, in their months spent together coaching and learning, that she could, that he didn’t mind it, that he wanted it, even.

In Lydia’s Lake house, she waited for him to bail on her. She wouldn’t have resented him for it. She understood the urge. She’d fled so many times before. So when he didn’t, when he stayed right there, she wanted to kiss him again, put all that she felt into that one catharsis. But she didn’t trust herself enough yet.

They’d both crossed that bridge together just moments ago, and yet it felt precarious. She’d remained human, and in his arms had started to unravel into something more, but she’d stopped herself from crossing that line with him.

The light over their heads swung back and forth, the shadows still lurked. She couldn’t risk another thing. And anyway, nothing could have offered more stability than being wrapped in his lithe arms. To be the reason for his unbidden joy, to watch his doe eyes glisten with the relief he hadn’t let himself feel or even hope—it tugged at her heart, and that was all she could handle with the full moon already tugging at one part of her soul.

Tonight, he kisses her with his whole body, shamelessly pressing into her, curling inwards, another whine escaping him when she kisses back with fervour. The fact that he’s sick is not lost on her. But even if she could contract whatever that’s got him so tired and loose and dazed, she knows she still wouldn’t stop herself from kissing him. Not now, when the worry for him has her cooking, of all things, not now when she knows what he did for her. He might have done it for anyone, she wants to believe that—she has to, or else the weight of such an admission might eat at her heart that seems to be beating for both of them today, filling in for the void it’s finding against itself.

It’s not until she feels the wetness on his cheeks that she finally pulls away. “Stiles?”

Eyes shut, he still chases her mouth, another tear slipping and breaking her heart. She squeezes the nape of his neck, making him open his eyes. “Hey, why are you crying?” Her own throat is tightening at the sight.

To ground him, or herself, she thumbs the bone of his wrist when he doesn’t speak. He simply gnaws at his lip, sniffing and wiping roughly at his cheeks.

“He’ll take you.” He mutters in the silence after a long time, like a confession to a crime she isn’t yet a witness to. She doesn’t miss the change in the pronoun, but Stiles sounds worried now, borderline panicked, eyes pools of sorrow and stubborn tears. Once again, it’s a sight so scarce that it leaves her just as panicked. “He’ll take you and twist his ways into you. I know him—he does that. He tried with me, with Scott, he’ll try with you, and you—you won’t know better.”

The dig hurts her, despite how out of depth she feels. “Have some faith in me, Stiles.” Hell, after all these months of humanity 101 he’s coached her through, out of whatever misplaced—or well, actually, well placed—guilt, he should have some faith in his own teachings. “I’m not naive.”

“No.” He agrees. “But he’s fucked up. He fucked with my head for days. I can’t let you go through that. I can’t let that happen—he’ll take you away.”

She gathers all her courage that’s been draining ever since she saw his ashen face and his sunken eyes, and finally mutters the name that’s been gnawing at her psyche. “Void?”

The mere mention buckles his knees. He falls into her with a gasp, like some invisible weight has crushed him. With her strength, it’s easy to hold him up, and when his arms come around her neck, tighter than an embrace, she hugs him back. He shudders; his face buried in her hair. “He’ll take you,” comes another gasp. “don’t go with him.”

Malia’s too stunned to say anything else. She wants to defend herself, feel some righteous anger and throw it back in his face—but she also feels the urgent need to reassure him. She doesn’t need protection, but even if she did, the nogitsune is gone, he defeated it, no one will come and take her away like he’s so worried.

Only then, the irrationality seizes her, too. She strokes the back of his head, absent.

It won’t take her—whatever it is, whatever he is—but she can’t let it take him either.

“Don’t go with him, ‘lia.”

“Okay. Okay, not going anywhere.” She says, her voice shot with a fear she rarely feels, and keeps holding on.

. . .

They finish dinner together, and by that time a listlessness succumbs him. He insists that he loves the pasta, but doesn’t eat more than half the plate, and in the end she has to finish most of it and store the rest in the fridge for tomorrow.

He’s always instructing her through all these little things, that to Malia, sometimes, don’t even matter, so tonight, with a quirk of her lips, she takes the baton and comments how the tables have turned and delights in his pained laugh.

She ushers him upstairs, instructing him through it all mostly as a joke. He laughs at all the jabs, at every “one step forward, another—yes, use your feet, work those glutes, that’s progress.” but it isn’t lost on her that he really does need help getting to his room, and he doesn’t shy away from leaning into her, letting her carry much of his weight.

He’s dizzy by the time she sits him down on the edge of his bed. All the laughter leaves her and she plops herself beside him, rubbing circles on his back while he recovers from the spell, his head bent on his knees. She’s seen people do it in the school washroom sometimes.

“You’re not gonna throw up, are you?”

Another muffled laughter comes in response. “Don’t worry, your pasta is Stilinski approved. My dad’s gonna lick the plate tomorrow.”

“And you guys accuse me of being too wild?”

“Never accused.” He raises his head to meet her eyes, the honesty pinning her to her place by his side. Like it aches him to, his hand slowly comes and tucks her hair behind her ear, and stays there, stroking her cheek as he leaves a chaste peck on the other.

His motions are stunted; his movements fractured. On the stairs, too, it was like he’d learned to walk just today.

“It happens, sometimes.” He starts, like he read the question in her eyes. “Ever since it threw me up.” She gets the idea that he’s trying to explain, not just the stairs but the whole ordeal with his fever today, but the sentence only manages to stab another ice through her chest. “’s like—new born. New body.”

Whatever the fuck that means, she thinks, and takes both his hands and tries to rub feeling into his arms, for though they burn, they feel just as numb to her. Numb and useless. And in the short time she’s known him, he’s never been that.

The more she massages, pressing her hands into his clammy palms and their crevices, the more she feels like she’s looking into a mirror.

After she turned back human, she’d also forgotten how to use her body. She’d forgotten what it was like to carry it. It’s like what he said; it was a kind of birth.

Her movements were also nascent, like his seem right now.

After a while, he slumps back on the pillow, his eyes slipping shut. He mumbles all these incoherent things that are increasingly worrying—things she has no real assurance for when her own future seems to be tanking—how he thinks he’s not passing this semester, that his grades have continued to drop ever since the supernatural got ahead of him, that he was in her den, once.

“When you guys infiltrated it?” She arches her eyebrow, even though he can’t see.

“No. After that. It was the basement first, then it was your den.”

Once again, she doesn’t get what he means, but their conversation in Eichen’s basement is coming back to her, and she pieces some of it together. What was that he had said? He’d sleepwalked there? She’d found it odd that he seemed to know the basement like the back of his hand, and yet didn’t know the way to it. When she inquired him about it, he cryptically breathed that he’d been there in his dreams when he was sleepwalking. That was perhaps the only time she’d let herself believe that he maybe did belong in Eichen, that maybe trusting him was not her best decision among other worse decisions she’d made in her life—but the worries dissolved when she saw the kanji, and shaped into something unfamiliar, something that wasn’t for herself.

Swallowing around her parched throat, she pulls the covers over him when he starts shivering. She rubs a gentle hand down the side of his hip even through the covers, hoping that it’s calming.  

Just as she gets up, eyeing her bag and thinking of leaving, he stops her by a hand on her wrist.

She could easily remove it. He’s already half asleep, his heart slow and faint, like it’s finally come back on when he needs it least. His eyes are still shut.

She watches, and lingers. Stiles made his way into her den somehow. As she looks around, she feels his house has become something akin to it as well. The presence she so feels around his room—the weight that is like the sky pressing down on Malia’s chest, must truly be crushing for him to heave all alone

She was right here, sitting right where he sleeps when he removed the remaining newspaper cuttings and clips from his crime board, bundled the red yarn, and threw it in the dustbin on his way to the kitchen as she tagged along with him.

They were to report to Scott’s house again, not a practice but just a movie marathon. She was supposed to break the ice, but when they got there she had the slow epiphany that the ice was breaking between Stiles and Scott, and not her and rest of the pack.

She doesn’t know when all will be well between them, or if it has. She doesn’t know when Stiles will pluck the courage to rearrange his board again, trust his mind to not commit the crime but solve it, but for now, she knows she wants to be with him when he gets back up to do it all.

So, as she hovers, she makes another decision. She takes his hand and falls back into his arms.