Smile Like You Mean It

by GigiHudson

Stiles moves away to college, desperate to try and start fresh. No more being the awkward one who only gets second glances because He's The One Who's Mom Died. No more falling in love with stupid werewolves who don't care. No more being the outsider. But sometimes things can get broken, and the only way to fix them is to return. (Sterek.)

I'd been at college for almost a year when I decided to pay Dad a visit. He'd come up to see me a few times, but I'd never visited Beacon Hills. I told myself it was because I didn't want to try the long drive, which was probably fraught with terrible perils (running out of Cheetos for the drive snack, the radio signal going weird). I ignored the fact that I'd done longer drives, and had been fine.

It wasn't really the drive that bothered me.

Here I was though, and more than a little uncomfortable. I'd always been Awkward Stiles in Beacon Hills, a title that was sadly well earnt, but at college it had been different. I'd still been a nerd, (duh, college isn't a magic quick fix for geekdom), but I hadn't been uncomfortable in my own skin, awkward and out of place the whole time. I had been in Beacon Hills.

I'd had Scott, but that didn't really work. I was still the outsider, not really friends with anyone but Scott, and yet he was friends with everyone. From the lacrosse team that didn't even know I played for them, to Allison and all of her friends. Even Jackson and him had come to a kind of truce between them. Scott was just never on the outside, only the fringes. But he didn't see it like that, didn't realise.

But it didn't matter, because I was here now. I'd missed Dad too much to stay away for too long, and my apartment for college just didn't smell right, even after I'd lived in it for the last few months.

Which is why, as I dropped my bags down on the bed, I inhaled deeply through my nose. The scent of the forest came in through the open window, but that was nothing new. The woodsy smell of pines had permeated the whole house, for as long as I could remember, and it was more of a comfort than anything. And behind it all, buried underneath the fresh cotton smell of my bed covers, and the familiar, yet faint, smell of my old aftershave, was that smell.

His scent.

I didn't know how I could still smell it; I wasn't a werewolf like Scott, just some plain ass human, (with a wonderfully quirky side that had the ability to melt even the coldest of heart, no really), and it had been more than a year. Probably more like two. But it was still there.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to cry or laugh. Maybe both. In the end, I settled for laying back on my bed, my eyes wide open as they stared at the familiar ceiling, still covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that I'd stuck up there back when I was afraid of the dark, and Mom had decided to kick me out of her bed once and for all. 8 year old Stiles was pretty similar in weight to 18 year old Stiles, though not as tall yet, so Mom had lifted me up while I stuck them all over the ceiling and laughed about the monsters that couldn't get me now.

In the end, it wasn't even me that had needed protecting from the monsters; it had been Mom. She died 3 months after I stuck the stars up there, and for all my crying and preying and begging, the stars didn't help her find her way home at all.