Part of the Wonderful Mess We Made

by kellsmarie

Or "How Malia Got from Her Den to Stiles's Bed" He reeks of hope and nerves. Eau de Mating Season, even though mating season is still months away. His foot bounces violently against the cracked linoleum, and he keeps watching her out of the corner of his eye like he's afraid she might bolt. She wants to bolt.

He reeks of hope and nerves. Eau de Mating Season, even though mating season is still months away. His foot bounces violently against the cracked linoleum, and he keeps looking at her out of the corner of his eye like he's afraid she might bolt. She wants to bolt. If she could just stop shivering so hard, she would be out that door and halfway back to her den before his heel could hit the floor again.

It just hit the floor again.

Her hand flies out before she can stop herself, clamping down around his knee cap. He yelps, jumps two feet into the air. And then he chuckles, his leg finally growing still. "Sorry," he says, rubbing the back of his neck with the same intensity he bounced his foot. "I have this thing about sitting still."

"This thing?"

It's the first time she's spoken in... well, years. Her voice is raspy and quiet, higher than she thought it would be. And as soon as she's spoken, her throat is raw. It feels like she's been screaming for hours. But her shock is nothing compared to his delight as his face breaks open in the widest grin she's ever seen.

"Yeah." His hand rubs the back of his neck again. "I can't do it."

She rolls her eyes, another motion that somehow feels as familiar as Ella's doll and as foreign as

Arabic at the same time. She wants to emmake/em him stop, but her claws are gone, and she's still shaking too hard to have much control over any part of her new body. So instead, she makes a list of the things she wishes she could do.

Like tear him limb for limb. Claw off his jittery right leg. Drag him by his restless foot back to her den.

Just go back to her den.

She stopped paying attention to him in an effort to keep from committing a murder in the middle of the Beacon Hills Police Station, but he stayed fixated on her. And he must notice when her shoulders plummet down in a flurry of shaking and shivering, her fight gone. All she wants to do is go back. Is that so much to ask?

"Hey, Malia?" he says, his voice softer and more sincere. His hand slips around hers, and now it's her turn to jump. His hand is hot against her skin, bigger than it had looked vibrating against his knee. "Scott's right. It'll just take time. Look at him, he's well-adjusted... Well, he's adjusted enough. And you'll get there. He'll help."

Help isn't the word Malia would use. It didn't feel like help when he forced her out of her own body and into this one. It didn't feel like help when he led her out of the woods wrapped in a striped hoodie, too startled to be standing on two legs to resist. And it didn't feel like help when they ended up back here, with... Scott, she guesses that was his name. With Scott sitting across from her in an interrogation room, explaining to her that from now on, her story is that she fended for herself in the woods all of these years. From now on, she never had a fur coat or killer hunting skills or paws. He'll help her figure out the rest later. For now, she's just a girl.

"We'll help." He gives her hand a squeeze, snapping her out of her thoughts. And it's too much. Doesn't he see that she doesn't care? Doesn't he sense that she doesn't want this, the same way she senses his hope and his nerves and an overpowering desire to make this one thing right?

"Why are you even still here?" She asks in another low whisper, almost a growl.

He looks startled, then hurt, but she doesn't understand. All she wants is to know why he's still here. She wants to be anywhere other than here. He has to have somewhere better to be too. "That?" he answers as he points between the slits in the blinds in front of them. She recognizes the officer who picked them up on the edge of the woods. "That's my dad. And my ride home. I'm as stuck as you are right now."

There's nothing else she wants to say, so she falls quiet. She feels his nervous anxiety continue to build until his knee starts bouncing again. The motion of his jeans against the tips of her fingers makes her realize he still has her hand, and she yanks it away. "You're so cold," he says then, hopping out of his own chair. "Let me try to find you a blanket. Or something."

If he can sit still when he comes back, she might agree to tolerate him until she can make a break for it.

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She's been with her father for 24 hours when the social worker, Shelly, shows up. Malia dislikes Shelly from the moment she smiles at her and tells her what a miracle it is to see her back home. Home. Even the word makes her bones ache for another form. Her father insists on taking Shelly to see her room, to point out the way she stripped her bed and piled the sheets in the corner. A Malia-sized indent still exists in the middle where she curled around herself for warmth the night before. "The bed was too soft," she explains with a shrug of her shoulders, and Shelly's smile never falters.

Despite Malia's strong feelings towards her, Shelly becomes a fixture there. She takes her shopping for clothes because the dresses Malia took from her mother's closet are too big around her torso and too short for her long legs. Everything itches and feels too tight, but Shelly refuses to give up, coaxing her into more scratchy denim, another frustrating blouse with buttons her fingers fumble with. Behind the dressing room door, Malia fantasizes about howling an invite to a Shelly feast.

Shelly also sends a homebound instructor who shows up for an hour each day. Her father doesn't understand why she can't just go to school. "We'll get her there," Shelly promises. "For now, we'll bring school to her." In the first week, Malia learns that she still remembers multiplication and division, but she doesn't remember the difference between a fraction and a decimal. And she can read anything they put in front of her, but she doesn't get what a fragment is or why she can't use one in the middle of a paragraph.

She also doesn't understand why she'll need to know how to balance an equation in the middle of the woods.

Every time she mentions her life before this, she has to sit down with Shelly. "What is it that you miss, Malia?" She always asks the same questions, like she thinks Malia is too stupid to remember. Or maybe Shelly's stupid enough to think that this time when she asks, Malia will say she doesn't miss anything.

"Everything," she says one afternoon, knees to her chest in the middle of the blanketnest on her bedroom floor. Her father said it wouldn't be a problem to bring her to Shelly, but Shelly insists on seeing her in her natural habitat. The first time Shelly showed up and said that, Malia headed straight for the door, ready to lead her off into the woods. This room isn't her natural anything. "The freedom. The wilderness. The fur."

She knows the Sherrif's son - she can never remember his name - and his friend told her to pretend like it never happened. But Shelly tells her to always tell the truth, so she talks about fur and dens and preying on injured deer. Shelly never responds to those comments, but she's always constantly taping away on her iPad.

"You still have freedom, Malia. We could go outside right now if you want."

But Shelly doesn't understand. Sometimes, Malia feels like the social worker thinks she's still nine years old. Maybe in some ways, her mental and emotional abilities aren't quite there, but she feels 17. Sometimes, she feels much older than 17, having survived on her own for so long. It's not that she doesn't understand. It's that this body moves too slow; sometimes, she still feels shaky on only two legs. And even though she can catch the scent of Shelly's confusion when she talks about missing the thrill of chasing a rabbit, her instincts are dulled now. And she can't get warm.

That's the one thing Shelly does right. On that first shopping trip, they find a coat, a heavy down jacket no one in California would ever have need for inside the state. She doesn't plan to take it off until she has her fur coat back again.

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Her father is a different story. That night in the station, the boy beside her had watched her with the skills of a hunter, tracking her every move until he could predict the next one faster than she could. Her father is more like a trap, waiting in the corner for that moment when she'll take the first wrong step. For weeks, he barely talks to her, only watches from afar. Sometimes, it makes her skin crawl; she can't help but wonder if he knows what she did. Or what she became.

The worst part is his scent. Not even years spent in a cigarette smoke cloud or the constant booze on his breath can mask the strong, acrid smell of resentment. Because she's still here and they're both gone.

Malia doesn't fault him. For how long has she blamed herself for that afternoon? It's even harder not to think about the guilt she carries with her being back in that house. He kept all of their things just the same. A shrine to her, a shrine to Ella, a shrine to her mother. It was one thing to have Ella's doll as a constant reminder, but now Ella's little pajamas are still laid out on the foot of her bed, and there are strands of golden silk wound through the bristles on her mother's brush.

Her father rarely leaves (she has the impression his life halted the same way her own did after the accident), but when he does, she slips into his room or that of her baby sister. She straightens tiny skirts on tiny dolls, she fingers clothes her mother must have worn but that she no longer remembers ever seeing on her. She pulls sweaters down from the top shelf and tries to breathe them in, but the scent there is a foreign one.

He finds her like that once, startling her and making her feel like she's fallen prey to him, a much bigger predator in this unfamiliar territory. He's silent for a long time, watching her as she keeps the soft cashmere pressed against her face. "You remind me so much of her," he finally says, leaning against the doorway in a way that makes her think the sadness emanating from his skin is making it hard for him to stay standing.

She doesn't say anything - what is there to say? This is one of those moments she still struggles with. Shelly tells her that it's normal, that she missed out on this normal adolescent development when she would've learned things like forgiveness and filters and finding the right thing to say in these awkward moments. But right now, there's a wall in her brain that keeps her from processing what to say or do. All she knows is that she sees herself as a coyote and her mother as her mother, and she doesn't see where the two could intersect.

"Do you remember them?"

Them. Of course, she remembers them. What she remembers best is the terrified expression on her mother's face when she started to change. She remembers the way Ella started to cry, loud and high-pitched and filled with terror. She doesn't remember the impact, but she remembers afterwards. The frustration as she tried to hold them, to put them back together, but only tore them apart with her frantic clawing. If she thinks about it too much, she can still taste the metallic tang of her blood as she bit down on her tongue in her panic, realizing the monster she had become.

She remembers the lights, too, and the voices. She thinks one of them might have been the Sheriff, there was something about him that was just too familiar. And she remembers running. Running and running until it felt permanent. Until it felt like she would never have to go back to being this person, this girl who had to live with heavy weight of what she had done.

Malia doesn't say any of this either. And she can't remember how to cry, not like Ella did that afternoon. Instead, it's a low, sorrowful keening noise that leaves her throat as she holds onto the sweater, knuckles turning white. She remembers too much. She doesn't remember enough. She can't bring them back, and that's all he seems to want. And she has to live with this. She can't escape it again.

For a long while, he watches her, never moving from the doorway even as her whimpering continues. It's the most animalistic thing she's done in weeks, but if he has any kind of reaction, he doesn't wear it on his face, nor does it overpower the bitter scent of resentment. Eventually, he turns around and walks away, leaving her to cries.

Maybe it's not an issue with processing. Maybe it's genetic.

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They make it eight weeks before they reach the breaking point.

Her bed.

He wants her to sleep in it, but she can't. Of course, there were issues before this. She refuses to use silverware, and she doesn't understand the necessity of a shower. She disappeared for a night to sleep in her den and came back to find the Sherrif sitting in her living room. She never knows what to say when he asks her a question, so she mostly doesn't answer. She growled at her instructor when equations still didn't make sense. And she still sleeps with her blankets piled on the floor, coccooning herself in their warmth as best she can.

After one particularly frustrating math lesson, she finds the sheets back on her bed, made up as neatly as the one in the Ella museum down the hall. She acts on instinct when she pulls them back off and recreates her nest in the corner. And she acts on instinct again when he returns them to her mattress the next morning.

Her father walks in as she's finishing, and there's yelling. There's screaming and a fist against the wall, and she doesn't know how to put how she's feeling into words. She flounders with her emotions until he demands to know what it is that she wants from him, his breath hot against her face.

"I just want to go back."

"Back to what?"

And when she tells him, when she uses the word coyote, he laughs. He laughs, and he laughs as he sinks to the floor, burying his face in his hands. She doesn't understand why it's so funny.

Later, she can hear him on the phone with Shelly. The house is so quiet and her hearing is still so intune, she can hear every word as he argues that she's delusional and he just can't take it anymore. After all, he never signed up for this. He wanted his daughter back, not a girl who thinks she's a goddamned animal.

It's Shelly who suggests Eichen House. And that's that.

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She gets angry at Eichen House. With Scott and Stiles (She knows his name after every news station devoted an entire day to the BHHS Lockdown, and every TV in Eichen House devoted itself to the news.), she was too shocked to feel much of anything. With Shelly, she was too hurt that she would be denied the only request she had ever made. With her father, she was too guilty to process any other emotions. Now, she has plenty of time on her hands, and she's angry. No, she's furious. She's furious that her father would give up and ship her off. She's furious that Scott turned her into this thing she can't stand and left her alone. She's furious that Shelly sent her here, even though she never liked Shelly to begin with.

The only thing more powerful than her fury is her determination to turn back.

There has to be a way. Maybe she still can't find a square root, but she's smart enough to know there was a time before she was in the woods, and now there's a time after. It's just a matter of figuring out the before. What she needs is a Scott, someone who can tell her what to do, but there's no Scott here. So the experimenting begins.

She thinks she remembers rain that day she caused the accident, but changes in the weather only make her feel colder, not any closer to being a coyote.

She remembers a fight, too. She had yelled at her mother, upset about something she can't remember anymore. So she tries that, too. She starts fights with every other patient at Eichen House until she gets tired of being locked alone in her room as punishment for the rest of the afternoon. It's not hard, though. She still has no idea what the hell a filter is or how she should use it, and everyone else here thinks they're Jesus or Superman or the Queen of England. Some days, it makes her feel like the most normal person. Other days, it makes her feel homicidal.

But fights get her nowhere and give her nothing, except more visits to the new social worker she never wanted. With Shelly, she mostly said nothing, not knowing what to say to the brunette. But what card can outplay the crazy house card? She already landed herself here, so she might as well play the role. She folds herself across the chair, legs swinging over the arm as she is the most honest she's been with herself since she found herself back in human form.

"I miss the hunting the most. Catching something in my teeth, tearing it apart."

"Why don't I go outside with everyone else? Because I'm a coyote. They're no competition."

"In the woods, I would leave them for dead. That's why I have no patience in group."

"Of course, I'm still cold. I'm going to be cold until I get my fur coat back."

Marin, her new social worker, doesn't freeze like Shelly did on the rare ocassion Malia got too comfortable and let something slip. There's not even the smallest resemblance of anxiety in the room as she nods, never writing a single note. And no one tells her to put the sheets back on her bed when she leaves them in the corner of her room.

Anger and the weather aren't the switch she's looking for. If it's some kind of companionship, she should give up now because she's not making friends. Everyone else is crazy. Really crazy. Even she's sane enough to realize that she's the one that's not like the others. But some of the other patients are better than others. Meredith doesn't really make sense when she talks, but she gives Malia the blanket she never uses to add to her corner. And when she complains about how cold the water in the showers is (She had finally learned to appreciate them if only for their warmth at home), Oliver tells her that the water is always warm in the boys' bathroom, and that the last suicide happened in the bathroom in his wing, so it's mostly empty, and she starts showering in there.

Her father never visits, but it never bothers her. She went eight years without him, and she never knows what to say to him. With her mother and Ella gone, they have nothing in common anymore.

Before she knows it, she's been there a whole week. And she's still just as human as she was when she got there.

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That's when he shows up. She catches his scent in the halls before she sees him. Hope and nerves so tangled together, it's impossible to separate one from the other, and there's that same overpowering need to do something good. Something right. But there's the slightest sense of something rancid there now, something that wasn't there before. Something that makes her feel like she should stay away.

She sees him only once in the hall before this afternoon in the courtyard that passes as a recreation area. Even though she's so in tune to his scent, she doesn't realize he's gotten so close until he says her name.

"Malia?"

Slowly, she turns around, her mind flooding with the feeling of her nonexistant fur standing up straight, ears pricked at the scent of danger. When she meets his impossibly sincere eyes, she's met first with shock because only imposter saviors are supposed to be in an asylum. And then there's the tiniest bit of hope because he's familiar. Because he sat with her that night in the police station, and he brought her a blanket when she couldn't find a way to stop shaking. Because he rode home with her, talking too fast for her to keep up as he told her about Scott and about how the two of them would be over there in just a couple days. Give her time to get settled, then start helping her to adjust.

But they never came.

"Hey... It's Stiles. Do you remember me? I'm friends with Scott?" They never came. He never came. He made her that promise, and he never came. "Remember we- we were the ones that helped you with-"

It's that word helped. Because he didn't help. He turned her into this, and then he left her like this, clutching his broken promise like a security blanket. She can't stand him right then. She loathes him, and once again without a filter, she finds herself rearing back and nailing him with her fist. He groans as he falls to the ground, and they're on her in seconds, yanking her arms back as she struggles to hit him one more time.

She wants to claw his face off, to tear him apart with her teeth. He's not the good guy she thought he'd turn out to be, and she doesn't want to fall for his act a second time. Plus, there's something there. Being this close to him, she feels something stir in the pit of her stomach. Maybe if she lets herself attack him, she'll finally be able to change back.

Unfortunately, the orderly is much bigger and tougher than her. She already has a reputation for fighting, and she's started enough of these to know what comes next before he threatens her with a closed unit. But she doesn't heed his warning. Instead, she continues to struggle against him, fighting to get back to Stiles. Back at Stiles. He deserves to know that she only remembers his name because she saw it on the news, and he deserves to know that her father had her committed here because she doesn't know how to be a person. He deserves to know that she trusted him, and he only disappointed her.

"Okay, that's it," the orderly says as he pulls his arms tighter around her own. She's going to solitary, at least for a few hours. Until she can calm herself down.

"But he promised!" she insists with one last forceful kick of her legs.

"Yeah, yeah. They all promise. All those little voices."

"There's no voices," she tells him forcefully as he finally lets her go, leaving her alone with her thoughts and her stewing anger.

Stiles is the only person who made her a promise. And now, she's promising herself that she'll find him again. To finish this.4

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He's there in the required group meeting, too. Most of the time, she keeps to herself, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands and twisting and untwisting her fists around the soft material. But Marin somehow keeps track even though she never takes notes, prompting them and forcing them to share. Last time, Malia was the victim, so she should be off the hook for a while now.

When Marin brings up her visceral reaction to grief for a second time, though, she doesn't mind sharing. Her eyes are glued to him, wondering if guilt makes him sick to his stomach, too. Wondering if he can live with the physical manifestation that still keeps her up at night.

There's no denying the way he squirms in his chair, the way his eyes are on her as he talks about his own experience with guilt. But his eyes also dart to the corner of the room, watching the door the same way Ella would watch her closet door with wide-eyed fear.

She only learns two things about him: One, he has enough guilt to fill an ocean, but she has no idea if any of it is because of her. And two, he has enough fear to fill a second ocean. She feels like she can't breathe sitting across from him, suffocated by the stench of his terror. And why hasn't that hair-standing-straight-up sensation gone away yet?

She runs into him a second time in the bathroom. Or rather, he runs into her. He doesn't know the suicide story, and he must be fighting bigger demons than she originally thought; it takes a pretty big inner struggle to not care about the consequences that follow a broken rule at Eichen House. And whatever pills he's popping definitely break a rule.

Malia means it when she says she doesn't care that he's there. He already saw her naked and vulnerable back in the woods, and beyond that, she spent almost a decade without clothes. She's never felt a sense of security from hiding her form behind layers; in fact, the necessity of clothing was another lesson she had weathered under Shelly's care. But he's rattled by her appearance and her state of undress. So rattled, she's suprised he can even form a question.

"Did you expect me to thank you?" she asks when he wants to know why she reacted with anger the day before. And that's how she knows Stiles just doesn't get it. He thought he was her hero when he only complicated things for her. She was happy as a coyote. She was happy with her den and her solitude and her inability to think abstractly enough to realize she had played a role in her mother and sister's demise. When he pushes her, she tells him all of this, watching as his face falls hard and fast. She tries to grasp to the elation she had thought she would feel when she finally let him have it, but it's missing. Replaced by that visceral feeling.

Guilt.

He smells like guilt now, too. Fear and guilt and hope and nerves. And that need to make something right. To make this right.

When she finally comes up for air, he has his own question for her: "Do you really want to be a coyote again?" And there's something in his voice that tells her she isn't crazy. That tells her that this doesn't have to stay a daydream she uses to while away her time here. This is his chance to make things right for her, and she's not about to let him pass it up. He makes no move to leave the room, but it still feels necessary to step closer, taking a fistful of his t-shirt for good measure.

"What do you know?" she asks, noticing the note of hope in her own voice, making it sound almost as foreign as it did the first time she spoke in the station.

"I might know someone who can help you change."

In this new form, nothing has ever sounded so good.

He knows how to help her change. She knows her way around Eichen House. He'll find a way to give her back her fur coat if she can get him into the basement. And for whatever reason, she feels like she can trust him this time.

Now, at least, they're both prey to something else. Instantaneously, they become a team.

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She does her part. She starts another fight with Oliver - her third since she came here - and she slips Brunski's keys out of his pocket while he's too busy wrestling her to the ground. She slips them to Stiles while he pretends to comfort her, and then she sits and waits.

This is a new kind of waiting. Maybe that second her hand brushed against Stiles' was enough to transfer some of his hopeful energy because that's how she feels now. For the first time since she took on this human form, she feels hopeful. It'll be hours before she sees him again. First, he'll have to wait until after lights out to go to the basement, and then there's the time it'll take him to do whatever it is he has to do in the basement. In this free time, she makes a list of the things she'll do once she's back to being herself.

She'll run - this body is still too clumsy to move that fast. God, has she missed being able to run.

She'll find a new den that doesn't reek of hope and nerves.

She'll hunt an injured deer for dinner. God, has she missed that too.

She'll leave Ella's doll on her father's back porch. Maybe he'll know she's okay then. Better than okay.

Brunski's voice cuts through her fantasy to call for lights out, and an excited knot pulls itself tight in the pit of her stomach. She's the high-strung mess of nerves now.

Within the hour, Oliver is at her door, shouting her name in what he thinks is a whisper. "Brunski found Stiles trying to get in the basement, so he got moved. Can I sleep in here with you?"

Panic bubbles up inside of her. At first because if he can't get into the basement, he has no reason to help her. And then she realizes he feels like a member of her... pack. Brunski's only weapon is a tall glass of sedative, and Stiles was determined to stay awake when she saw him last night in the bathroom. Some forgotten sense buried deep inside the animalistic part of her mind knows that his need to stay awake is connected to the monster lurking in the hall. Which means she has to find him.

Survival in the animal kingdom means using weaker animals, sometimes even sacrificing them, so she doesn't feel sorry about letting Oliver lead her to where they're keeping Stiles and then closing the door in his face after she breaks the lock. For a few minutes, he knocks on the door, shout-whispering her name and asking to come back inside. Eventually, he bores himself or maybe he finds someone else wandering the halls because he gives up and she's left alone with Stiles. She doesn't understand why, but she can't leave him. It's like the way she can smell emotions or she can hear the neighbors' TV when she's in her room at night. It's not something she can control, and she doesn't want to ignore it. The first time she tries to wake him, she has to put her hand below his nose to even be sure he's still breathing. It's the soundest sleeping she's ever witnessed.

An hour later, he's still just as fast asleep. Twenty minutes later, nothing's changed. Twenty minutes after that, he stirs, but only long enough to flip onto his other side. She sinks back against the wall in defeat.

She must drift off herself because the next thing she knows, she's being woken up by screams. His screams. Her eyes fly open, prepared to be met with the monster that followed him to Eichen House, but there's only Stiles. Tossing and turning on the bare mattress, screaming in terror.

She whispers his name at first, but when she's drowned out by his own voice, she shouts it over and over again until it's enough to snap him out of it. The fear in his eyes is enough to make terror gnaw at the pit of her own stomach, and he's way too wide awake to have just been sedated. Something's not right here. They need to find whatever it is in the basement.

The fights she got herself into might not have triggered any change, but they gave her enough time in the closed unit to get bored enough to wander. And wandering gave her enough knowledge to know there's a second entry to the basement Brunski probably doesn't even know about.

When he's lagging behind her, she takes his hand. It's just as warm as it was the last time he touched her, but this time, it feels nice. Neither of them pulls away.

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She blames Shelly for what happens next.

Once in the basement, Stiles' imaginary monster seems to be everywhere all at once, and she can't see it. And even though she doesn't understand this new emotion, she feels bad for him. Not sorry for him, the way she would feel about a baby rabbit right before she grabbed it by the back of its neck and made it her next meal. But like she wants to give him that rabbit because he could use it more than she could. Except there are no rabbits here, and Malia has a feeling a fresh kill won't fix this problem.

When she finally convinces him to spill, she knows that a rabbit definitely isn't the solution. He tells her about black outs that could last 15 minutes or a whole night and will leave him with no memory of what he said or did. He tells her about sleepless nights because the nightmares are too real and too constant to close his eyes. He tells her about a dark voice in the back of his mind, one that he constantly has to fight against and sometimes loses to. He tells her about the terrifying feeling of still being there in his own mind when that darker voice takes over, doing things that he never would. He tells her about his reason for insisting on being here, about Marin's warning that he stay awake, and about the last time he was here in this basement even though he had never walked through the doors of Eichen House before he arrived three days ago. She doesn't understand all of it - she doesn't understand most of it - but she understands enough to know going back upstairs and trying to sleep isn't going to help.

She goes around the basement, opening doors and rusty filing cabinets, searching for a clue. Stiles is there in the background, trying to convince her to stop, but she's on the hunt now. She can't stop until she has her prey. Once there's nowhere else to look and she's pulled out every file she can find, they sit on the forgotten loveseat in one less poorly lit corner. It smells like mildew and regret, but whatever that stagnant scent is on Stiles is stronger now, so it's hard to know what's bothering her more. Together, they leave no file overturned, but there's nothing there.

His disappointment is so strong, it seems like she can feel it in her own chest. And when he takes her hands in his, it's like she can sense his vulnerability through his skin. But the most upsetting thing of all is that she doesn't smell hope anymore. Only nerves and fear and something decaying, something that won't be around much longer if things stay the same. And that's where Shelly comes in. Because she wanted Malia to understand math and writing and how to behave in public, but she wanted her to understand more than that. She wanted her to understand human relationships, too. Some afternoons, they sat outside and talked, but other days, they sat together in front of the TV while Shelly pointed out the way friends talked to each other, the way parents showed their children affection, the way love looked different from the mating rituals she had learned through observation in the woods.

It's these clips she's thinking about when he looks up at her and there's no words she can think of to give him what she wants to give him. So she leans in and kisses him instead.

It's quick, and it's different than what she expected. His lips are softer than they looked, and warmer than even his hands. But it feels... nice. It feels like the right thing to do when there are no words that fit right. He looks startled when he pulls away, and when he asks her if that was her first kiss, she nods.

"Want to try that again?" he asks. And she does.

The second time feels nice too. It feels even better as he brings his hand up to her cheek, spreading heat through other parts of her constantly cold human form. But as nice as it feels, she doesn't really understand this whole idea of a kiss. She had never found a mate while she was still a coyote, but if she had, she and her mate would have done something more. Something more to show how much they depended on one another.

When he pulls back again, she looks him right in the eye again. "I want to try something else."

"Something else?"

She gives in to instinct as she pulls off her sweatshirt, watching the way he stares at her nearly naked torso the same way he had stared two nights ago. She can sense his excitement just as strongly as she did his fear, and there's something more there, an emotion she hasn't encountered before, at least not in human form. It's something she recognizes from the wild, something that makes him seem more animal than human. It's something huskier, more natural, more potent than his normal mixture of hope and nerves. She thinks this is what desire smells like. What desire feels like. And she likes it.

She lets her body take over after that, and somehow, she knows he does the same. It's the most normal she's felt in a month as she depends on her body to know what to do. Her lips to respond to his, her hips to meet his, her heartbeat to match his. For the first time since becoming human, it's okay to use her teeth and what remains of her claws. It's okay to communicate with sounds that aren't words and know they'll be understood. And when he makes a sound that she thinks is a growl, she's never felt closer to anyone. Not even her father or Shelly who have worked so hard to develop a relationship with her.

Stiles makes her feel like no human - or animal - ever has before. It starts as a warmth in the pit of her stomach, but it spreads quickly, moving through every inch of a body she's beginning to feel comfortable in. He makes her heart beat between her legs as he moves with her and then in her. He makes her breathless, more breathless than she'd get running the length of the woods. And when there's no place else for that feeling to reach, something breaks free, moving through her in waves as she howls.

Afterwards, she knows from the way he looks at her that he's never felt like this before either, and there's a tidal wave of comfort in that knowledge. It's an experience they can share, one that is purely animalistic. One that she can process without the help of any social worker. She realizes, too, that even though she's shaking, she's not shivering. For the first time since she lost her fur, someone's found a way to make her warm.

There's something more. In that most intense moment, when she felt like she was going to burst with that feeling, she felt like there was a solid memory there. One that she could grasp and use to go back to what she used to be. Who she used to be.

In a few moments, her peace will be stolen. But before that happens - With Stiles' arm draped over her waist and his heart beating against her back, surrounded by hope and nerves, she discovers another new emotion: contentment. She's okay to stay this way if Stiles is here.

/-/

Her head is still pounding, but she forces herself to focus on the beating of her heart, the evenness of her breathing. It's Marin's suggestion, to focus on the parts of her that are still the same, and Malia's willing to try anything at this point. The pounding gets worse when she closes her eyes, but she does it anyways in her attempt to concentrate. Heartbeat, even breath... Still human.

Really, she's never felt more human than she did this morning when she woke up to her pounding head and dry mouth, memories from the night before fuzzy around the edges. What she knows is that she was found in restraints this morning, Oliver's being treated for some kind of serious injury, and Stiles has disappeared. In response, Marin has fabricated a file full of progress that will clear her to be released, there are clothes waiting for her on her bed, and her father will be here in an hour to pick her up. But before she'll let her go, Marin wants something else.

She wants to see Malia find her inner coyote.

"You healed," the social worker explains from where she sits on the bed behind Malia. "You should have bruises on your wrists, a cut on the side of your face, and a nasty burn on the back of your neck. But you're fine."

"That doesn't mean I know how to control this," she says with a huff, opening her eyes to look back at the mirror. Still the same girl she's been for over a month.

"You need to concentrate."

"I am."

"Harder."

Anger. She focuses on anger as she closes her eyes this time. She imagines sinking to the floor on all fours, baring her teeth before she pounces on Marin and rips out her throat. Anger's never worked before, but Malia doesn't know if she's fantasized about a kill the way she is about preying on the social worker right now. She bares her teeth and the mirror and growls for extra measure. Still, she's as human as they come.

"You need to find a way to do this, Malia. Stiles needs you to do this."

A rush of emotions accompanies the sound of his name. She whimpers as the pounding in her head grows worse again, but it's nothing compared to the ache in her chest. Marin's right. When she was interrogated this morning, Malia didn't talk about most of what she had done with Stiles the night before (Marin didn't ask for specifics, otherwise her filterless mouth would have offered them up without a second thought), but she told Marin about that sickly sweet odor that had surrounded her when her skin was pressed against his. She told her that it was the smell of something dying, like the remains of her latest kill baking in the California heat. Something inside of him was losing a battle, and last night might have been the decisive blow.

Last night. At the memory of the way he made her feel not quite so human the night before, something comes loose inside of her. She closes her eyes as she concentrates on that feeling, tries to grasp that familiar feeling of being in control while somehow losing it at the same time. When she opens her eyes again, they flash a brilliant blue, sending her world into technicolor, and she know she's done it. She's figured it out.

"It's good enough," Marin says as she stands up from the bed, handing that new jacket to Malia on her way out. "Now you have to find Scott McCall."

It's easier than it sounds. She waits until her father is asleep - she's learned her lesson about disappearing while he's awake - and then she slips out her window into the waiting night. She pulls that memory back to the forefront of her mind, waiting for that moment when the world comes into a sharper focus, heightening her senses until she can catch Scott's scent from across town. And then she runs. This body that felt so awkward only a week ago feels more natural to her after the night before. Now that she knows parts of her will forever respond like the animal she still wants to be, she feels more comfortable in this skin.

Stiles gave her that. Now, she owes him.

She thinks about breaking the lock on Scott's door the same way she broke the lock on Stiles' last night, but the ghost of Shelly's voice in the back of her head stops her. Instead, she compromises on pounding on the door until a bleary-eyed Scott appears, looking more stunned to see her than Stiles was to find her in the boys' room.

"Malia?"

She doesn't wait for an invitation before she steps inside. "Stiles needs our help."

She tells him everything. About the smell, about the basement, about the fuzzy memories that are starting to fix themselves. She tells him as much as she can before he howls and becomes the animal she aches to be. The animal she's starting to feel farther and farther away from.

And as badly as she wants to help him save Stiles, she might want that power he has even more.

/-/

More waiting. Scott thanked her for the little information she could provide, but he didn't invite her to help. And Marin fictionalized her time at Eichen House so well, she's no longer seen as needing a social worker. Her instructor still comes for an hour each afternoon, but her days are otherwise empty. So she has a lot of time to think about Stiles. Which becomes a lot of time to spend semi-hidden in the greenery surrounding his house.

She only does it at night. Her father watches her too closely during the day. If she started disappearing for hours at a time in the middle of the day, he'd haul her back to Eichen House. Plus, two nights ago, they released a breaking news bulletin about a girl from BHHS who was killed in a carjacking gone wrong (Scott's appearance in the background is a big tip off that it wasn't really a carjacking, but Scott also warned her about telling any of this to her father, so she can't tell him it was probably a wolf. Or Stiles.) Her father warned her about it again just that afternoon when she had gone to hide out in the swingset he never took down in their backyard.

She feels the most herself when she's close to Stiles, though, so she's been coming here since she came home. At first, he wasn't there at all. She could still pick up on that faint scent that was entirely his, but it wasn't strong enough for him to be inside. And when he came back, she knew immediately. That rancid odor was overpowering, causing her to heave as it overwhelmed her senses. Still, she stayed there, not understanding why it felt right to be there, but somehow knowing she couldn't leave. Last night was different again. That smell of decay was there, but it wasn't nearly as strong, and it had somehow separated itself from him. Tonight, it's nowhere to be found.

That's why she decides to let herself in.

Some part of her primal instinct knows that breaking the lock on the Sherrif's home wouldn't be the best idea, so she tries his window instead. It's unlocked. She eases it open, and then drops gracefully to the floor. She finds the boy she can't stop thinking about sprawled across the middle of the bed, one pillow behind his head and the other being suffocated by his arm. In the moonlight cutting across the bed, he looks deathly pale, especially in comparison to the dark shadows rimming his eyes. But he smells like hope and nerves and an intense need to do something good and... peace. She wants that.

She wants him.

And impulse is something she hasn't learned to say no to yet. It felt so natural to lay with him in Eichen House, and this need to be closer to him, to hold him and know that he's Stiles again, feels just as natural. She sits on the edge of the bed, presses her hand to his chest where she can feel his heartbeat, making him as much of an animal as he is a human.

But she wants more. She wants to know what it feels like to kiss him without that darkness there. And curiosity may have killed the cat, but not the coyote. She leans down, pressing her lips against his, aware of the lazy way he moves his lips against her own and the incoherent way that he moans. It feels better than last time. It didn't make sense to her last time, but maybe she could get used to this after all. She lets her teeth graze his bottom lip, and the next thing she knows, she's hit the floor.

He awakens with a scream, and he's against the wall in the same instant he pushes her off the bed. She's confused; she thought he liked this too. She could sense his desire again already, overpowering his normal scent. Now, though, all she can smell is his fear. His panic. And she can hear the frantic beating of his heart in her ears, even from across the room. "Malia?" he finally says between gasps for breath. "How... How'd you get in here?"

"The window," she says matter-of-factly, as if he should have known this already.

"Well, most people would use the door."

"I didn't want to break the lock."

"No, you knock!"

"But the window was unlocked."

"Because people use doors!" There's so much she still has to learn. Sometimes, she feels like she'll forever be 100 steps behind everyone else.

"I just wanted to see you," she finally admits, still on the floor. His face softens.

"Well, I wanted to see you too."

It's her turn to be surprised now. This is new. Her father resents her. It's Shelly's job to meet with her. Oliver was excited to see her, but he's crazy. For the first time, she has someone who wants to see her with no further motive. "You did?"

"Yeah," he says as he finally moves back to his bed, sitting back down in the middle. "Next time, just knock, or call, or text, or send a smoke signal. Just... give me a little warning, okay?" He told her to give him a warning before he shows up, not before she kisses him. So she pounces before he has the chance to change his mind. A physical agreement to his terms.

He responds this time, and they're right back where they were the night before. She falls in love with this new body again as it answers his, knowing what to do even before she does. Her hands know where to go, her mouth knows what to do, her hips know when to rise and fall. He gets winded easily, and he slows her down more than once. Whatever happened while she was waiting, it wasn't good. He's a little worse for wear, but she can feel the resilience he holds. "I can do this," he tells her when he slows her down a third time. "I can do this. Just... give me a minute."

And she does. She's waited for him before.

Afterwards, she lays with her chest against his back, one arm over his shoulder and the other around his waist, like he might disappear if she doesn't hold on tightly enough. He's so quiet, she wonders if he fell back asleep. And then he tells her about the nogitsune. He tells her about the oni and all of the innocent people. He tells her about the pain of separating himself from that evil. He tells her about Allison and his voice breaks.

"I did a lot of awful things. I hurt a lot of people. And I can still remember it. I still remember doing it."

"But it wasn't you," she argues stubbornly as he shifts to his other side, facing her.

"It's my fault she died. If it wasn't for me, Allison wouldn't have even been there."

"Stiles, it wasn't you," she repeats as she places her palm against his flushed cheek. "It was the nogitsune. I could smell it on you." He looks at her like he doesn't know what to say to that, so she tells him the one thing she hasn't yet admitted to herself, let alone said out loud. "It's my fault my mom and my sister died."

He sighs, brushes her hair back from her face. "I told you that we'd help you, too, and then I tossed you to the wolves... Or away from the wolves. That's my fault, too."

"It's okay. You had a nogitsune."

He laughs at that, weak and tired but still filled with hope. "Well, I'm tossing you back to the wolves now. Me and Scott, we're your guys. You helped me, I promised I'd help you."

And she trusts him. She doesn't know why, but she trusts him this time.

/-/

Her trust pays off. Her homebound instructor comes for an hour each afternoon, her father attempts a conversation with her once every two weeks, and on the weekends, she meets Scott at Stiles' house. If it were up to her, she'd give up her tutor for this. But school won't end for a few more weeks, and Coach has them running track this year as a last ditch effort to make a mediocre team out of this sorry bunch. So she settles for weekends for now.

Malia is determined to get this right, and she has high hopes for herself. The first time they meet, she's there two hours early, and she plans to turn before the hour is up. But Scott makes her start slow. "You've gotta find your trigger," he explains before demonstrating the way he can fuel his anger, transforming into his alpha form in the next breath. She becomes so jealous - and so frustrated that he's showing off his own powers instead of helping her to find her own - that she lunges for him, and Stiles has to remind her that Scott is a friend.

Just like Lydia and Kira, even though Kira's ability to already fit in makes Malia want to lunge for her throat too, and Lydia's perfume is stronger and almost less tolerable than the smell of the nogitsune on Stiles's skin. She doesn't understand why she needs friends now. But she's a part of a pack now. At least, that's what Scott says when he's not forcing her into taking baby steps.

But she's too determined to get this right. She found her trigger back at Eichen House, so all she has to do that first day is prove it to Scott. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, remembers the way his growl reverberated in her own chest last night. And judging from the boys' reaction when she opens her eyes, it worked.

"Did you get angry?" Scott asks, his face lighting up with excitement.

"No. I thought about sex with Stiles," she tells him matter-of-factly. And now it's Stiles's turn to get ridiculously excited.

"Who's the man, Scott?" he asks. "Who's the man?" This is one of those moments when she's lost. Scott's smile is gone and his cheeks are the same color as his lacrosse team t-shirt. And Stiles looks as excited as he did yesterday when the track meet was rained out. But she doesn't understand what she did to make this happen. Or why Stiles raises his hand, telling Scott to "put it up top."

Maybe Scott doesn't understand either, though, because he takes her by the wrist to lead her outside instead. "Or not," she hears Stiles call from behind them. "That's cool."

Scott isn't convinced that Stiles is that switch she needs at first, so they keep searching. Anger makes her want to change, but it's not enough to change her. Jealousy makes her feel like an animal, but not that kind of animal. And she likes the happy feeling she gets when she does something right, like solve the equation her tutor gives her or say the appropriate thing to the Sheriff when she uses the door to come in instead of the window, but it's not enough to make her a coyote again.

During her next lesson, though, she can't seem to get her claws to work until Stiles gives her hand a squeeze. Then, Scott becomes a believer.

Stiles is her switch.

Try as she might, though, she still can't change. And it's not for lack of trying. They've been... experimenting. A lot. She spends most nights in Stiles bed now because it's comfortable - unlike her own bed that was always too soft - and she feels better knowing that he's safe. Most nights, she greets him with a kiss that quickly becomes something more because she's better at communicating that way. She doesn't have to worry about using the wrong word or not having any words to describe what she's feeling. And she doesn't need words for that. But even though she feels close, like she could change if she knew how to control it, she just can't.

Of course, it doesn't stop them from still trying.

And it is Stiles who is eventually her trigger. It's Derek who has to restrain her afterwards when she wants to rip out Scott's jugular with her newfound claws because no one told her it was all part of the plan. It was Stiles's idea she learns later - much later when she's already naked and in his bed. She hasn't met Derek before now, so she doesn't know it's a friend when he appears in the woods in wolf form and goes straight for Stiles. Instinctively, she moves in front of him to protect Stiles, and it's not until she hears the fierceness of her own growl in her ears that she realizes she's done it.

"That's my girl," Stiles says as he wraps his arm around her shoulders once she's back to her human form, thanks to the boys. She's shaking and exhausted and just a little sore, but she feels as proud of herself as Stiles looks when he leans in to steal a kiss.

"But you better have this figured out now. 'Cause we're so not doing that again."

/-/

Scott isn't the only one to help her transition. Slowly but surely, she is starting to make sense of this life she's committed herself to. Along the way, she's also starting to trust the pack, Scott's pack. No, her pack.

First, there's Scott himself. There's a connection to him that she doesn't fully understand, but she knows it's because he's now her alpha. And because he's her alpha, he's teaching her now while she learns on the job. She learns how to trigger her ability to heal after a fall while helping to track Derek's scent once he's been missing for nearly three weeks. And she learns that the pack sticks together when Stiles is waking her before the sun is up, telling her that they're leaving for Mexico. Across the border, she starts to learn about the connection she shares with the pack, and back home, she's comforted by the fact that not even Scott has all of the answers. But he has a lot of them, and he's willing to share them with her.

Then there's Kira. Kira's best attribute is that she's clumsier in the human body she's always possessed than Malia feels in hers. But she's also a history expert, thanks to her dad, and because history happens to be Stiles's worst subject, she's helping Malia to catch up. World History is one of the classes Malia takes that summer in a last-ditch effort to catch up. She's finished her homebound coursework, and though it'll be challenging because she doesn't qualify for remedial classes, her tutor thinks she's ready for school. Kira is the reason she passes World History. Malia is still trying to figure out how this friend thing works, but she's never felt like making a meal out of Kira, so Stiles says that's progress.

And then there's Lydia. No one really understands her abilities, just like no one really understands how Malia managed to remain a coyote for eight years. It just happened. Lydia is the one who realizes Malia is forever wearing the same handful of things once she starts going to school with them, and she asks to see her mostly bare closet. The next day, she comes to the door - knocks on the door - with boxes filled with clothes. In Malia's bedroom, she pulls things out one at a time, quickly filling her closet. "Mr. Argent gave them to me," she explains as she pauses with a leather jacket in her hands. "But they've stayed in the boxes because... They're just not my thing. But they deserve to be loved again, don't they?"

Malia doesn't understand how anyone's clothes could be loved, but she also doesn't understand when Kira says she thinks she might love Scott. Even though she loves her family and she's finding she would do almost anything for Stiles, Malia is still trying to figure out that whole love thing. But she agrees to put on a floral print dress that Lydia hands her, picking up on the somber air that surrounds the banshee and the watery look to her eyes.

"Your legs are longer than Allison's," Lydia assesses when Malia has the dress on. "But it fits you perfectly." Lydia stares at her for a moment longer, and Malia wonders if she's in the middle of some banshee business. But then she speaks again, her tone thoughtful. "Stiles will like it."

Another thing she doesn't understand is the history between Lydia and Stiles. When she asked Stiles about it, he told her that Scott is his best friend and Lydia is... his other best friend. But she knows that he cares about her, even if he doesn't kiss her like he kisses Malia.

"Stiles is a good guy," Lydia tells her as she sets down the pair of shorts she was about to put on a hanger, giving Malia all of her attention. "He's the best guy. Take care of him, okay?"

"I do."

And she does. Stiles is the easy one. Stiles is the one who gave her a reason to love this body, and he gave her a pack to help her learn how to use it to her benefit, and he gave her a slew of other experiences that have brought her so much happiness. Most nights, she climbs through his window, waking him up with a kiss or a touch or sometimes, just settling into the bed beside him, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her palm against his beating heart. She doesn't understand the friend thing, but she understands that Stiles is more than her friend.

He's her mate.

Which is why he catches her off guard one afternoon when they're laying side-by-side on his bed, trying to fix the essay her English teacher's pen bled all over. She's fixing another fragment (she still doesn't understand what one is, but Stiles tells her how to fix them) when he presses a hand beneath her chin and forces her to look at him.

"I know I promised I'd help you to find a way to get back to being a coyote if you helped me, and you've gotten so good at changing on your own." She feels a sense of pride as she listens, knowing he's right. Stiles risked his life a few more times before she finally learned how to channel that feeling without having to actually witness him in a dangerous situation. But mixed with the hope and nerves she loves so much is the scent of something else. Something that's a little like fear, but a little like his normal anxiety. Like nerves on steroids, and it's concerning to her. "But I hope you at least consider staying like this."

She blinks, confused by what he just said. "I'm not going back to being a coyote," she tells him when she's sure he's not going to say anything else.

"You're not?" he asks, a puzzled expression replacing his more nervous one. She shakes her head.

"I want to stay here with you. I don't want to go back to that anymore."

It's slow, the way she can almost watch as her words sink in and that hope envelops the two of them again. "Really?" he asks, his lips forming a crooked half-smile. She nods, and he doesn't say anything as he kisses her instead, slow and soft before he pulls her in deeper, the kind of kiss she knows now isn't just a kiss.

She pulls back quickly, her lips making a smacking sound as they part from his. "But what about this essay?"

"Later," he promises. She likes the sound of that.

/-/

There are still other challenges, too. For example, she doesn't realize there's a rule that says it's okay to tell Scott that Stiles couldn't answer his phone last night because they were having sex, but she can't talk about that in front of Stiles's dad. And there's this thing called PDA at school that lands her and Stiles in detention a few times before she finally starts to remember what he says about where she can put her hands and her mouth when they're in school. It's hard for her to sit for eight hours straight in school, and she has a hard time remembering to ask before she leaves class.

And then there are full moons.

At first, they thought maybe she wasn't affected by full moons. "I don't know if it's the same for coyotes, but for wolves..." has been Scott's catchphrase since they started working together, and full moons fell under that category because she didn't change. When Scott asked her where she went during full moons, she had looked to Stiles the way she did when someone at school asked her a question she didn't have an appropriate response to. And when they realized she had never changed, they thought maybe she was lucky. Maybe she had to choose to change, and then choose to change back. Maybe they didn't have to worry.

But learning how to change woke up something inside of her. And her first full moon is a disaster.

She's with Stiles when it happens. It makes her feel nauseous, it makes her ache, and she doesn't understand what's happening until it's too late. Stiles closes the door half a second before she lunges at him, hitting the hard oak separating them instead. He tries to reason with her through the door, and there are moments of clarity, but mostly she feels like she's possessed by some beast that won't be satisfied until she's ripped out his throat. She scratches at the door, throws her weight against it. She growls and howls and curses him out. And the panic is the worst of all. Locked in his room, she's overwhelmed by vivid memories of being trapped in that car. She relives those moments over and over again, unable to stop seeing Ella and her mother. It's the longest night of her life.

In the morning, she's exhausted and sore. Stiles's bedroom door is destroyed, and even though he tells her it's okay, he understands, he also says they're lucky his dad was working that night. She tells him she thinks she knows what it felt like when he had the nogitsune inside of him because she knew she wasn't in control, but she couldn't take that control back. He looks so sad, she feels like she disappointed him.

"Next time, we'll be ready," he promises. But they're not. Because Malia changes twice a month, not just during the full moon, and Stiles loses a second bedroom door.

After that, Stiles is ready at a moment's notice.

She can sense his excitement one afternoon before he's even walked into the room. She's in his doorless-for-the-moment bedroom with Scott, concentrating on trying to sense Kira or Lydia and not meeting much success. When she opens her eyes, he holds up a pair of leather handcuffs. "You just tell me when," he tells her, pulling on them to demonstrate their resilience.

"I don't even want to know," Scott says. She asks Stiles to tell her what there is to know, but he's too busy trying to explain to Scott what the cuffs are for to hear her.

Scott and Stiles are both there the third time. And Lydia and Kira too. When Stiles begs enough, Lydia offers up her lake house with one condition: she is to be nowhere near a door. Everyone else comes for moral support because the pack is supposed to stick together. When she starts to feel nauseous and shaky, Stiles insists on being the one to take her downstairs to the basement. He tells her stories about Scott's first full moons while he chains her to the wall, stories about duct tape and his father's handcuffs and one unfortunate locker that he and Scott had to pay the school back for.

He stays with her the whole time. Once again, she only has moments of clarity and spends most of the time threatening him and fighting against her restraints. By the time the sky is turning gray with the first hints of dawn, they're both exhausted and emotionally drained. She's shaky and clammy to the touch when he finally undoes the cuffs from her wrists, revealing deep red lines and chaffed skin that will heal soon enough, but she lets him hold her while she tries to explain the memories she has to fight against every time she turns. Memories she doesn't know if she wants to hold onto or forget forever. In return, he tells her about the way he dreams of Allison sometimes at night, seeing the light leave her deep brown eyes as he twists the knife buried in her abdomen. Eventually, they both fall asleep under the weight of their guilt.

"It'll get easier," he says just before she drifts off. She doesn't know if he's talking to her or himself, but she likes to think things will get easier for them both.

/-/

There's only one time that Stiles comes to her house. When he asks her why she hasn't invited him over, she tells him that she likes his house. She likes the way it smells like him, and she likes how there aren't any rooms that have been left as shrines. She likes the way he looks so comfortable there, like he's a permanent part of the scenery. She even likes his dad. But he wants to see where she is when she's not with him, so finally, she relents.

At his house, she sleeps in his room with him most nights, but she's watched plenty of movies sprawled across the couch with him, and she's sat down to dinner in the kitchen with him and his dad plenty of times. In her own house, the only place she feels even close to comfortable is her bedroom, so she takes him back there. He doesn't ask about Ella's room, but he stops outside the open door, and she has to call his name before he follows her back to her own. And then he doesn't cross the threshold. He leans against the doorframe instead, pushing his hands into his pockets as he nods towards her blanketnest in the corner. "You know the sheets go on the bed, right?"

She's already settled there on the mess of pink sheets and a butterfly comforter she's too old for. Looking up at him, she cocks her head to the side in confusion. "What?"

She smells the change in his demeanor before he moves inside, that half smile falling away from his face. "Do you need help making your bed?" he asks her as he moves to crouch down next to her blankets. "I'm not very good at it, but I could still show you."

"Stiles," she says with a laugh, "this is my bed." And when he looks to the mattress, she feels like she can almost read his thoughts. "It's too soft."

"But you sleep in my bed."

"That's because you're there." (He misunderstands this statement, and that night, he'll insist on sleeping on the floor even though she argues that his bed is different from her own. One very sore back later, he'll declare that they never do that again.)

After that, his questions don't stop. What does she do there? Well, not much of anything, besides sleep and meet with her tutor. Where's her father? She doesn't know. He kind of comes and goes, just like her. Seriously, what else does she do here? Nothing. That's why she's always with him.

He's still there when her father gets home, too, accompanied by a cloud of smoke and the slightest hint of booze on his breath. "Who's this?" he asks without a smile, never stopping to introduce himself.

"I'm Stiles," he says, moving forward to hold out his hand before she has the chance to introduce him herself. "I'm, uh, yeah. I'm with Malia."

Her father takes his hand hesitantly, and Malia only watches. Even though she's finally starting to understand square roots and compound sentences and sadness, she still never knows what to expect when it comes to her father.

He never introduces himself, eventually letting go of Stiles's hand to move farther into the house without saying a word. Malia is used to his quiet now. They haven't had anything to say to each other since before Eichen House, so they don't say anything at all. But now she can sense Stiles's sadness, and she doesn't understand that either.

He wears a smile that looks like a mask as he swings an arm around her shoulders, leading her towards the door. "Dinner at my house?" he asks her, already opening the door she she doesn't have much of a choice. "Nobody orders a pizza better than me."

That's the only time Stiles is ever in her house. Two weeks later, even she won't live there anymore.

/-/

It happens on a Friday night when Stiles is gone for the first away lacrosse meet of the season. Scott and Kira are there too, and Lydia is out of town for a wedding. So Malia spends the weekend in her room, curled up on her blankets that still smell a little like him with the homework she hasn't yet been able to figure out. She wishes it wasn't raining; when she gets frustrated with something she doesn't understand now, her defense is to run, and she's gotten pretty good. Stiles won't admit it, but she can beat him when they run together now. Her next goal is to beat Scott.

But she doesn't run in the rain. In the wild, it never mattered what the weather was doing, her schedule stayed the same, but Stiles told her that people will wonder about her if they see her running in the rain. Like wonder if she's as crazy as Oliver is. So tonight, she can't go run.

Instead, when she can't make sense of Edgar Allen Poe, she gets up to walk around. Her father has been trying to talk to her more ever since she brought Stiles here, but she still never knows what to say back. It's easy with Scott and Stiles, even Kira and Lydia, because when they ask her a question, they tell her when she gives the wrong answer. But when her father asks her what sounds good for dinner and she says rabbit, he only looks at her like she's done something wrong. Maybe she has. She really doesn't know. But tonight, he is working, so she finds her way to Ella's room.

It really is the same as Ella left it, right down to the half-dressed Barbie at the foot of her bed. Her toys have stayed in this room all of these years, and her clothes are still hanging in the closet; she's opened it enough to know that they're there. When she opens the door this time, for whatever reason, she hears Lydia's voice in her head.

But they deserve to be loved again, don't they?

Malia's too old for her toys, too big for her clothes, but clothes are supposed to be loved, even though she still doesn't really understand what that means. And she really needs to stop thinking about that stupid raven who keeps saying the same thing over and over again.

So she starts packing.

Her dolls fill one box, along with their clothes and their blankets. She saves only one that reminds her of the doll she kept with her after the accident, the one Stiles stole from her before he knew any better. Then it's her Barbies, her coloring books and crayons, her puzzles. She's moved on to the closet by the time her father gets home.

He finds her in the midst of those boxes, moving as methodically through her baby sister's clothes as she used to plan a kill. First the dresses, then the little pants, then the smaller t-shirts. She's so focused on what she's doing, she doesn't know he's there until he talks. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he asks, his voice so cold that she feels a chill down her back. In her shock, she jumps back, her claws digging into the palms of her hands.

"Taking care of Ella's things."

Tonight, he smells different. Like sadness and regret. Like anger. Like enough resentment that she starts to feel like she can't breathe. "Why would you do that?" he asks, and she whimpers. His fist hits the wall so hard, it goes right through, and her claws draw blood from her "Why would you do that?" His voice is loud enough to rattle something inside of her. She feels lightheaded, in the same way she does when she's seconds away from changing. Now, Scott's been teaching her how to hold on, how to keep from changing when she needs to. But she's not very good at it.

"They deserve to be loved again," she says, trying to echo Lydia's confidence and sincerity.

But her father only laughs again, the same way he did right before he sent her away. She can feel herself begin to panic, her heart racing like Stiles does sometimes when he doesn't hear her before she's slid beneath his covers. "Your sister deserved to be loved, too," he tells her, and she whimpers. "I can't even look at you right now. You need to get out."

Malia stays rooted to that spot. She's never been told to leave like this before, but more than that, she's afraid to move. Right now, she has a hold on being human, but she feels unsteady. She feels like she'll slip into that other side if she's not careful. But his fist hits the wall again, and she bolts before he can tell her again.

She doesn't stop until she's at Stiles's, dripping wet and curled up on his bed. It's the spot in the house that smells the most like him. She doesn't know how long she waits before he's home, but she's become unaware of her own soft whimpers and the way she shakes. He smiles at first when he sees her there on his bed, but then he must notice that she's wet or that she's shaking or that she can't stop making that sound that she thinks might be what heartbreak is. He drops his things immediately, sitting down beside her.

"Hey," he says as he moves a hand under her chin. "Hey, what's wrong? What happened?"

She doesn't know how to explain it, so she holds out her trembling hands instead so he can see where the blood dried when she didn't wipe it away.

He holds her for a long time before she tells him about Lydia and Allison's clothes, about Ella's clothes and her father. And then he kisses her. He kisses her a lot. He doesn't have to tell her to slow down tonight because she lets him undress her. She lets him rock her hips toward his. She lets him fill her with enough of this new feeling to push away the sadness.

Just before he falls asleep, he promises her that she doesn't have to ever go back there. And she trusts him.

/-/

Once again, he's good on his promise. Every night, it's just expected that she'll sleep with him. She still comes in through the window after she's sure his dad is asleep, and she makes herself scarce in the morning, but there aren't any more nights when she sleeps on the mess of sheets in her room. She returns home only long enough to grab the things she needs, like the books her tutor has given her and the clothes Lydia gave her. After a week, Stiles tells her that his dad wants to talk to her. She doesn't understand why the sheriff would want to talk to her, but she still shows up like he asked.

"Hey, look at you! You knocked!"

She's confused already. "You told me to. Plus, your window was locked."

"I know." As he swings the door shut, he says something that she might've missed if her hearing wasn't so good. "Did that on purpose."

It's not her first time having dinner with Stiles and his dad, but this feels different tonight. Stiles is acting weird, like this is the first time she's ever been there. His knee bounces constantly under the table, and his normal scent of nerves is heightened. At one point, she grows so annoyed that her claws sink into his knee when she tries to get him to stop, and he yelps in response. It's been a long time since she's felt anything even close to resembling violence towards Stiles. In fact, nearly everything she does anymore is connected to protecting him. But if he doesn't stop soon, she's going to rip off that foot. She might even like it.

She's about to tell him this when he finally grows still for all of five seconds, looking to his dad. "So, Daddy-o... Isn't there something you want to tell Malia? Me and Malia?"

She looks at both Stiles and his dad then, watching as the sheriff takes his time, chewing slowly and then taking a drink. Stiles's knee begins to bounce beneath her hand again.

Finally, he starts to talk, explaining that he and Stiles had a long talk. Stiles told his dad about the fight she had with her own father, and he expressed his concerns about her continuing to live in that environment. She thinks she understands what he's saying. In fact, for once, she thinks she might know what he's going to say before he even says it.

"So, Malia: You are welcome to stay here. Permanently." Stiles looks at her with a huge smile, his eyes wide in a way that she now knows is a signal she needs to say something in response. She can't hide her own grin either.

"I can stay?"

"You can stay," the sheriff confirms before looking straight at Stiles, his expression stern. "As long as you stay in the guest bedroom. There are no cribs allowed in the Stilinski house."

She doesn't understand anymore. She looks to Stiles for his help. His mouth is a tight line, and she feels like she's choking on his nerves. He's making the same face he usually makes when she brings up what they did the night before in front of Scott or Lydia or his dad.

"Babies," he explains. "He means no babies."

"But mating season doesn't start until January." Stiles nearly jumps across the table in his effort to grab her wrist, another signal that she should stop trying to explain herself. The rules of the wild don't apply to this situation.

"No, no, no. Mating season doesn't start for twenty Januaries." With his hand still on her wrist, he forces her out of her chair, pulling her with him out of the kitchen. "Thank you so much, Dad. We really appreciate this."

She just catches the sheriff's voice as he yells after him. "There is no mating season in this house!"

/-/

Things are better. Things are good. She no longer misses her life from before, her den, her freedom. And she's constantly learning, thanks to Stiles and the rest of the pack.

She learns that it's good to no longer be the new girl. Between a slew of foreign exchange students at school and Liam in the pack, she is suddenly old news. She's beginning to blend in, and that feeling of belonging helps to cement her human state. She knows this body now. She feels steady on two feet, even more so now that she's joined the cross country team. And she likes the way Stiles makes this body feel even more, forming a bridge between who she once was and who she's becoming. He makes her somehow feel like a girl and an animal at the same time, and she loves it. She might even be starting to understand what it might mean to love him.

She learns that he's her anchor, too, during Liam's first full moon. He trusts her enough to stay put when she pulls free of her restraints, and when she concentrates on his voice, she's able to break free of that control. He makes her believe that she's not a monster, and she tries to help him understand that the nogitsune is gone now, but it really was there. They stay in the basement that night, away from the noise of the party because Stiles is never comfortable in a group of people and she never knows what to say. After that, she starts to trust herself, too.

Slowly but surely, Malia's also starting to understand friendship - to a certain extent. Right now, it's an exchange for her. They give her things she needs, and Stiles helps her to remember to do things for them in return. Lydia gives her notes in math and chemistry that make sense once she's no longer writing in code, and Malia finally gives in and lets her try to tame her eyebrows. And Kira teaches her everything she knows about coyote myths because there are still things that are different from Malia than they are for Scott, so Malia starts a fight in Kira's honor in the hallway after U.S. History, landing her back in detention. Most of the time, she remembers not to leave them behind, and Stiles says that's progress.

Fewer and fewer things in her life are red now, most of them moving to green and yellow. She may have resisted it at first, but she's starting to get the hang of this whole human thing.

Things are good. Things are really good. Until they're not anymore.

Until she's cold and shaking on the floor of the Hale vault, aware of the dark, lingering sickness that grips her like a fist and pulls tight. Until her vision blurs, and she can just barely make out the names written on the list she finds in Stiles's pocket. She only wants to see how many other people are above her on the list, to know how long she has before she should really start to worry. She doesn't expect to find her name right there, her full name.

Malia Hale.

When Scott calls her name, she knows. She knows from his tone that he knows from the list. But she doesn't want to talk to him about it. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. "I can't see," she says instead, and by then, it's more truth than lie. Not long after that, she's more drowsy than not, and it's hard to care about much when she's barely awake.

By the time she gains consciousness, Stiles is there, hope and nerves and lingering panic and ... blood? It's still there on his shirt and in his hair, staining his skin, and she doesn't know if it's his or not. She wants to ask, and then she wants to find whoever's responsible and take out her revenge in the form of a hunt. But it hurts too much. He's her person, still the only one she trusts. He's her mate. He watched her lose the remnants of her family, knowing that she still had more family elsewhere. He watched her learn from Derek without ever mentioning that he was a relative. And he witnessed her talking to Peter without letting her know that he could be family.

Maybe even her father.

As much as she wants to know that Stiles is okay, she can't stand to look at him. So she gets up and leaves him there empty handed before she can change her mind.

/-/

She doesn't make it very far. For one, the school is still swarming with reporters and emergency responders and CDC members who insist on examining them all before anyone can leave school grounds. And then there's the fact that if she can't talk to Stiles, she has nowhere to go. His home is her home now. She's not allowed to talk about it, but there are very few nights she actually does sleep in the guest room. Most of the time, she's sleeping in Stiles's bed still, and she just doesn't want to have to see him right now. She needs time. Time to figure out how she's supposed to process this.

But the person who is always there to answer her "What Would Human Do?" questions is the one she can't talk to now.

At least she ends up with a place to stay. Melissa insists on quarantining the three supernatural beings until she's convinced they won't regress into blind invalids, like the wolf she treated earlier that day. She still struggles to pick up on social cues, but she can smell the guilt on Kira and Scott, strong enough to tell her that they knew just as much as Stiles did. But that doesn't bother her like it bothers her that Stiles kept secrets from her. If it came down to her survival, she would probably still leave Kira to fend for herself. She'd never leave Stiles.

And yet, he betrayed her - she didn't even understand what that word meant before now.

Melissa gets her settled on the couch for the night, babying all three of them more than she needs to. Malia's mind is too distracted to be annoyed, though. And for the next few hours, she's focused entirely on her phone as it continues to vibrate at nearly consistent intervals. Each time, it's Stiles. Each time, he leaves another voicemail. Each time, she makes the mistake of listening to it.

"Hey... uh, you disappeared on me. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. You better not be running away with one of these CDC guys, though I get it. Not everyone can pull off a yellow suit like that."

"Okay, that wasn't funny I know. Look, I'm really sorry. Can we at least talk about it? Call me."

"Hey, Malia. I'm really starting to get worried. Can you just let me know you're okay? You don't have to call, a text or a smoke signal works too. Okay... I guess I'll wait to hear from you."

"Are you not coming home? I know I screwed up, but you can still sleep here. I can go somewhere else. I just - I know you like being here, so don't feel like you can't be here because of me. Still worried. Call me, okay?"

"Hey, I just talked to Scott. He told me that you're there. I'm glad you're safe. And I get it if you need time, but at least let me explain, okay? Please? Call me."

After that, she stops listening. She wants to know if he's okay; she overheard enough of Scott's conversation with his mom to know that Stiles was waging his own war while they were trapped in the vault. And she wants to be in his room with him. Since she left her den, she hasn't been as comfortable anywhere else as she is with him in his natural habitat. But she can't shake this hurt feeling that's burrowed down into her heart, leaving her aching for another form for the first time in a long time.

Stiles has taught her enough now about other peoples' emotions that she knows Scott is uncomfortable around her, so the next night, she stays at Kira's. There's only a spot on the floor for her there, but the familiarity of sleeping on the floor should be a comfort for her. Now, though, the floor feels too hard when she's gotten so used to sleeping in Stiles's bed. Eventually, she gives up on trying to sleep and runs instead. She ends up outside his room, hiding in the shadows of the trees at the edge of the property like she did while she waited for the nogitsune to leave. Part of her wants to pretend like she never saw her name on that list and slip through his window like it's any other night. But part of her knows that the minute she sees him, she'll only be able to think of the family he kept from her. Before she leaves, she checks the window to find that it's still unlocked, just waiting for her.

She can't stay at Kira's once she finds out even Kira and Lydia knew about her parentage. So she goes to Derek's loft that night. She doesn't know whether she should tell him that she knows now that he's her cousin - or if he even knows that he's her cousin. Mostly, she just keeps to herself, which isn't hard when he's always been a man of so few words.

Mostly, she just misses Stiles.

/-/

Melissa McCall is the one to set it right.

Even though she couldn't get drunk enough to forget Stiles (or drunk at all) last night, her head is still pounding when she wakes up alongside Scott and Liam. Whatever the assassin had tried on them the night before, it's left a lasting effect that none of them can shake. Or at least, her head is still pounding, and Liam is still unsteady on his feet. Scott, their faithful alpha, seems unaffected the morning after, which is why he insists on taking them to see Melissa. Just to make sure.

Malia is too tired to argue. She relents to every test Melissa wants to run, she only thinks about running without ever trying to when Melissa leaves the room to check on someone else. That's where her mind is - running far, far away from this room and this feeling and this small animal named Hurt burrowed in her heart - when she catches his scent.

Stiles. Hope and nerves and regret and the strongest desire to make something right.

When Melissa returns the next time, she nearly pounces. "Is Stiles here?"

"He came in a little while ago with Lydia," Melissa explains. "They had a run-in with an orderly at Eichen House." Malia's claws are out before she even realizes that was her first instinct; Melissa notices too.

"He's fine. It's just a concussion." But that's not good enough for Malia. She needs to see him. Now.

When she does see him, it hurts more than she thought it would. It makes her knees buckle and her heart ache. It's similar to the night when her father told her she wasn't welcome in his house, but it's different. This pain is sharper and stronger. And the fact that he looks so sad is only making it worse. She tells herself that she'll leave as soon as she knows that he's okay.

Which is exactly what she would have done - had the door not been locked.

Immediately, she feels angry. She feels trapped for the first time in a long time, and she hates it. She should have ran when she had the chance. "Why would she lock the door?"

Of course, Stiles has no real answer to that. He makes excuses for her, something Malia still doesn't know how to do, and it's not until he mentions the hundreds of texts and voicemails that she realizes he's not talking about Melissa at all. He's talking about himself. She knows because she listened to all 48 voicemails, and she read each of those 167 text messages, too.

"Is she going to keep begging?"

She thinks she catches the tiniest hint of a smile as Stiles realizes she's keeping up with him. "She might."

She tries to tell him that she doesn't understand forgiveness. Before the fight that led her to Eichen House, her father had tried to make her bed for her. He gathered up her sheets and blankets from the pile on the floor and he made her bed up as neatly as Ella's and she was furious. She refused to talk to him after that. Shelly had explained that at age nine, Malia had just been learning how to forgive, so it was something she still had to learn now. It's something she's still been trying to learn. But her father's refusal to let her sleep on the floor led to Eichen House, and Eichen House led to Stiles, so maybe she's starting to understand.

"Like math?" he asks her, letting her know that he understands her confusion with forgiveness.

"I hate math."

"Do you hate me?"

Hate is an emotion she understands. A lot. Hate is what she still feels towards herself sometimes when she thinks about her mother and Ella. Hate is what she feels towards the nogitsune whenever she thinks about the way it tortured Stiles. Hate is what she feels towards the berserkers and the Benefactor. Hate is what she feels towards math and chemistry and sometimes English, too.

But she could never hate him.

"I like you, Stiles. I like you a lot."

It's something to work with; it's progress. She doesn't know how to tell him that she thinks that tiny animal named Hurt has finally left her alone, so she does what she's always done. She kisses him instead (she's learned to really like kissing now), and she thinks this might just be what forgiveness feels like.

/-/

The Benefactor is gone. She is a Hale and a human. He is learning to accept the fact that he's done things that were outside of his control. It's all progress.

They end up in his room when it's all over - when the computers have been turned off, when Lydia has finally said her goodbyes to Meredith, when Scott and Liam and Derek have all made it home safe. There was never a conversation. She just knew she would come back here, and he never had to ask. Because since she left her den, this is the only place she has ever belonged.

She has learned a lot from him since that day he offered his sweatshirt up to Scott to help cover her in the woods. Some math and some science, social cues and acceptable behaviors, loyalty and happiness and hope. But there are still things she needs to learn, and there are still times when she doesn't know what to do. Tonight, she has no words to tell him how she feels, so she stops trying to find them.

Instead, she uses what remains of her claws and her teeth, feeling like the animal she is learning not to miss so much. She uses kisses that he taught her to appreciate and soft touches she's learned from mirroring him, feeling like the girl he's helping her to become. Sometimes, she lets him lead the way, and other times she takes over, pulling him along with her. They balance each other out, and somewhere, somehow, they achieve perfection along the way.

Afterwards, they never talk about whether or not she's back for good because there's no discussion to be had; all of her things are still in the guest room, and his sheets still smell like her. Instead, he tells her that her next lesson will be watching something called Star Wars because it's crucial to her understanding of humanity. She tells him about the afternoon she spent with Peter, and he's quiet, which she tells him is progress and he laughs. He asks her about whether or not she understands their history project and if she's started yet. She asks him to explain what Kira meant when she texted Malia to tell her to enjoy her make-up session with that little winky face.

Eventually, his voice trails off at the end of a sentence, and he lays there, watching her in a way that makes her feel like she should be doing or saying something. Like this is one of those moments when she missed a cue.

"What?" she asks.

"What what?"

"What are you staring at?"

"I have this thing about staring."

"This thing?"

"Yeah. I can't stop," he tells her with a cheeky half-grin. "At least, I can't stop when it's my girlfriend and she just sexed me like that."

Girlfriend is a word he taught her. He uses it for Kira in relation to Scott, for Braeden in relation to Derek. It's a word she understands, but it's not one he's ever used for her before.

"So I'm your girlfriend now?"

"Well, you're definitely not my boyfriend." He's silent for a minute then, just watching her. He sounds more hesitant when he speaks again. "What do you think about that?"

She smiles before kissing him. Hard. "I think I can work with that."

He wraps his arms around her, pulling her into his embrace. This won't last long. His arm will grow tired or his side will grow sore or he'll get too warm. But for now, she lets him spoon her, feeling like the animal she used to be and the girl she's becoming. He smells like hope and nerves and the desire to do this one thing right... and home.

She thinks she might stay for a while.