Stiles meets Lydia Martin for the first time in the mall's parking lot one month before school starts. His mother is fussing with the car trunk behind him when he spots her across the place, watching her father unload his purchases into a black Mercedes-Benz. It's the biggest car he's ever seen.
Transfixed, he cranes his neck to get a better view of it, and halts abruptly. The girl has turned around and is frowning at him. Stiles feels caught and uncomfortable but he can't look away because he's never seen red hair that pretty before. It's this weird shade just in between ginger and apricot and it's curly without being puffy and it shines.
He debates whether he should go and talk to her, considering and cross-referencing the statistic likelihood of not getting rejected, just as she gives him the stink eye and flips her hair, and he wonders if she's psychic and if that's why her hair looks like that.
Against all odds he decides to raise a hand for a small wave, but she's already lost all interest in him and follows her father into the car.
In June, shortly after Stiles' twelfth birthday, his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer.
He sits on a bench next to the examination room, alone, and tries not to hyperventilate, although he knows he will because his mother is in that room and she's dying. Her lungs are riddled with tumors, probably have been for a long time now, and it's too late, too late to say or do anything. She's dying.
He remembers how there'd been blood all over the kitchen floor and the way he'd spazzed out over it, and he thinks, this is unfair, she doesn't deserve this.
The thing is, most people who end up with tumors destroying their body don't deserve it. So Stiles really has no right to feel this way, his hurt is nothing special and it's not even him who's going to die. Even so, there is no way for him to bottle up all of the pain and anxiety licking at his throat; he's just a boy — not even a teenager yet, just a boy — and cancer is killing his mother. He realizes that this makes him weak and pathetic and even a greater burden for his parents to carry than before, but that's a pattern he's already used to. And he's going to stay that way. He will never get better at being strong, or calm, or good.
He will stay the same, and the same, and the same, until he dies of it.
On a lonely afternoon in September the heart of Stiles' mother stops.
His father calls him from the hospital, tells him to stay home, claims she wouldn't have wanted her son to see her like that, which is sort of stupid, because she can't look much more dead now than she did the last couple of days, but maybe she hadn't known this would be the case when she had uttered that wish. Stiles agrees though (because how can you refuse something like that?), and doesn't really listen to what his father says after that. His mind focuses on the world beyond the kitchen window, where the sky is cruelly, ironically clear and blue (unbroken), and then it hits him like a tidal wave crashing against the shore.
He lost her. She's gone.
The hurt and finality of it rip through him in brutal torrents, wreck his body until all he can do is say her name, like a prayer, to hold on.
He never talks to Scott about any of it. It's not because he doesn't trust him or because he doesn't want to burden him, it's just that he doesn't think he would understand. Scott likes to talk, preferably without thinking, just voicing whatever crosses his mind. He doesn't filter, it's not in his design, but words don't resurrect. They bury. And Stiles isn't ready to do that just yet.
In a way, he enjoys being at war.
It's a thing he's good at, it turns out, and that's something of a feat these days. He knows it's dangerous and reckless, but he's able to protect people this time, he's doing now instead of thinking. Thinking consumes, breaks and drowns you all at once. So he learns how to make explosives, to screen heaps upon heaps of information, and to park the getaway car on the right corner of the street. The sky might look a little like it's falling, but he's fine.
He's fine.