When Stiles is eighteen she steals her dad's razor and shaves off her hair. She packs up her bag and laces up her boots and leaves a note on her bed, written in Polish, so only the Sheriff can read it.
When Stiles is eighteen she leaves Beacon Hills and joins the army and doesn't look back once.
(She never said it was a good idea.)
The thing is, after werewolves and druids and a whole bunch of other supernatural shit, the world just feels too small for her to stay in school. She could be valedictorian, she knows, or at least runner-up for it after Lydia. She could get a perfect GPA, land a scholarship to Berkeley and ace all her classes there, too.
But she can't. There's a tightness in her chest that feels like the beginnings of a panic attack, only this time is doesn't go away, just lurks there inside of her, loosening only after she's driven her jeep over the Beacon Hills town line.
It's surprisingly easy to forget about the pack. She's not Stiles here, not anymore, instead Private Stilinski, and the name fits her like a second skin. She loses herself in drills and suicide runs and camouflage uniforms and tries not to dwell on memories of her best friend's dopey smile or Lydia's curling hair or even Isaac's fucking stupid scarf. (Or him, most of all, him and his stubble and his eyebrows and his eyes.) It works, too. She finds that her training, along with the Adderall, is calming her ADHD down in ways that never happened back home.
She hasn't had a panic attack since she was drafted. Stiles counts that as a win.
They're at the shooting range today, and the men standing on either side of Stiles – boys, she corrects herself, they're only kids – look wary, uncomfortable, like they've never used a gun before. In fact, they probably haven't.
Stiles has.
The drill sergeant stops in front of her and asks if she can shoot. Sir, yes sir, she replies, and he hands her a rifle.
The target is ten metres away, big and easy to hit. She lifts the rifle and breathes in, out like her dad taught her when she was ten. In, out like Allison showed her when she needed reminding.
In, out.
The bullet hits dead centre and Stiles allows a smile to grace her lips.
She never really thought about being deployed until it's actually happening. They're leaving the day after tomorrow, following months of training, and Stiles' friends are going into town tonight one last time. To celebrate, she thinks, though the word sits wrongly on her tongue.
"Coming?"they yell at her as she's finishing re-shaving her head.
They wind up at a tattoo parlour.
Stiles draws out the design on a spare piece of paper on the front counter. Though she hasn't seen it in person in months, she knows it like she knows her own face in the mirror. She only wants the tattoo small, the size of a coin on the inside of her wrist.
(Not like his, never like his, this small reminder is enough.)
It hurts, but she's been through worse.
The next day, as she peels off the bandage, McFadden and Dwyer and Bennett crowd around her. "What's it mean?" they ask, and Stiles swallows.
"It's a triskele,"she hears herself say. "Three-fold star that can symbolise anything…birth, life and death; past, present and future. You know."
"What's it mean to you?"
Stiles swallows and looks down at her wrist. Little Zdziesława, Stiles, Private Stilinski, she could say. I'm three people all at once. I've tattooed my heart onto my wrist in the form of Derek's triskele.
"I'm not sure yet," is all she says out loud, and, for once, they drop the subject.
She supposes it shouldn't come as a surprise to her that when the first opportunity to mail letters home rolls around, she writes one to her dad and the other to Derek.
The triskele is staring up at her whenever she aims her gun and shoots, so she supposes it's only natural he springs to mind.
Truth be told, she doesn't know what she puts in his letter. If she could carve out sorrys and I miss yous from her freckled skin and slip them into the envelope she would. She would tug out her own heart and send it to him for safekeeping, too. But she doesn't. She can't.
(She thinks she writes something meaningless about a memory from home, but she isn't sure.)
It is a surprise that when it's their turn to receive letters, not only does she get one from Dad and Scott and Lydia and Allison and even Isaac, there's a small brown envelope with her name written on the front in a spindly hand she knows instinctively is Derek's.
She reads his last. Reads his when she's meant to be sleeping, reads by the glow of her lighter that she's careful not to hold too close to the page.
He hasn't written that he misses her, has noted down nonsense about what's happening with the pack and how her dad is going instead, but she understands the subtext and it makes her smile.
She never thought she'd miss Derek Hale most of all, but there's that cliché about not knowing what you have until it's gone. Though she doesn't regret joining the army, for the first time since leaving home she feels a sharp stab of something in her gut that takes her a moment to place as longing.
It becomes a thing between the two of them. During the day, Stiles dodges landmines and washes blood from her hands and closes the glassy eyes of her dead friends. She's Private Stilinski out here in the field, stitching up skin around organs that spill out into her palms, slipping cheap cigarettes whenever she can, field-stripping her gun when she has the time to do so. It's messy, it's sickening, and it's what she signed up for.
But at night, she's simply Stiles, and writes down whatever comes to mind in a letter to Derek that, by the time she ends up sending it, reaches twelve pages in length.
(She slips her longing in-between the inked words, and trusts that he'll find it and keep it safe.)
Her nineteenth birthday was forgotten amidst busy schedules and target practice, but Stiles celebrates her twentieth with McFadden and Bennett, the empty chair where Dwyer would have sat as blindingly obvious as her mum's old seat at the dining table back home.
They get drunk, even though none of them are twenty-one yet, but Stiles consoles herself with the fact that it's legal somewhere.
She vaguely remembers writing a drunken confession that evening, and when she wakes in the morning she finds it stuffed beneath her pillow, a letter of smudged ink entitled Dear Derek with at least thirteen I love yous inside.
She burns it.
(She wishes she was brave enough to send it.)
Her dad sends her an announcement of his engagement with Melissa McCall. Stiles stares at it for a long time, stares at it until the sun bleeds up and over the horizon. She wonders if this is the only thing she's missed while away from home; if anyone else has fallen in love while she's been gone.
(She looks at her triskele and wonders if she's too late.)
Stiles is twenty-one and a half when her time in the army's up. She only signed on for three years, three years to learn how to live her own life, three years to learn how to breathe again.
The jeep is right where she left it, lurking in an impound lot where she pulled out her dad's status for a favour. The guy manning the desk grumbles as he gives her the keys, but she catches his small wave as she turns onto the road.
The trip home is shorter than she remembers, and soon enough she's crossing the town line. She waits for the tightness to return, the construction of Beacon Hills to come back full force and engulf her, but it never does.
She's breathing freely and loudly and she thinks she might be laughing a little hysterically, too.
She breezes into the police station first. Her dad is in the foyer talking quietly on the phone, but the handset slides from his grip as he sees her, as he takes her in, and then they're hugging and both their faces are a little wet and Stiles can't quite see straight.
When they pull apart, it's for her to tease him about Mrs McCall, and he looks so genuinely worried that she pulls him back in for a kiss to the cheek.
"I'd better be the one who walks you up the aisle," she growls, and there's an it's okay threaded in there somewhere, interwoven with an I'm sorry, and she knows her dad has heard the words behind the words when he smiles, big and wide and real.
Scott waylays her at the traffic light outside the clinic, banging on the passenger seat window until Stiles pulls over and hops out. He hugs her like she's a rag doll, all flesh and sinew and no bone, but she's hugging him back the same way, so it's a moot point. He smells like antiseptic and springtime and even though she's no werewolf, it's a scent that's familiar and screams of home. Isaac and Allison and Lydia are right behind him, and all take turns to see who'll be the one to squeeze the life out of her first.
Isaac is still wearing his dumb as fuck scarf, but all Stiles can do is tug fondly at it and grin.
Allison's hair is short, and Stiles makes some dumb comment about them matching now, even though hers is a buzz cut and Allison's is kind of designer, but they laugh about it anyway.
Lydia just slaps her upside the head before pulling her in for a kiss on both cheeks.
It's another ten minutes before Stiles convinces them to let her go, and only after she swears on her jeep to meet them for coffee tomorrow.
(She has one more person to check off her list.)
The drive is familiar and so are the stairs and so is the door knocker that stares her down.
(Breathe.)
When he opens the door, when he finally opens the door, Stiles can do nothing but stand there and drink him in. She shuffles her feet, suddenly awkward, because she's forgotten the lines she'd practiced in the car, because maybe – definitely – she has this all wrong and he never found her I miss yous buried amidst pages of nonsense sent from miles and miles away, because who would?
But then he smiles.
Derek Hale. Smiles.
He reels her in by the lapels of her coat and she's been kissed before, but not like this, never like this. It's an ending, or maybe a beginning, or maybe a middle to this story they've been writing together for years.
(Whoever said Stiles wasn't a sucker for clichés?)
Later, when he spots her triskele, he pushes her down into the sheets and kisses the explanation he doesn't need from her lips, kisses her breathless, kisses her heart open and wide enough for him to fit perfectly inside.
When Stiles is eighteen, she joins the army to find herself. She does.
Along the way, however, she discovers that a little piece of her will always remain in Beacon Hills, and that's the reason why, when Stiles is twenty-one and a half, she comes home.
(And stays.)
Author's Note: I know nothing of the American military, and wasn't bothered to look anything up, so this is all wildly inaccurate. Also, girl!Stiles because reasons.