Author's Note: This is a Scott and Malia story and will document the evolution of their feelings for one another. Stiles will eventually be taken by the ghost riders. I'm not sure if I will put Stydia in this considering I'm not a huge fan of them, but if I do, it won't be an overwhelming amount. Who knows, maybe I'll decided to go with Sterek. So many options. Enjoy!

Chapter One: How Far We've Come

Scott POV: Maybe it was just a moment, a slip of time... Or maybe it had been building for a while now. All I know is that when I think about Malia, all I can remember is how sad she was. It didn't fit her, you know?

Malia had a pretty smile. That was probably the first thing I had noticed about her.

It's been about four months since Kira left. We tried to make it work... God did we try. But she felt like it was selfish holding onto me, keeping me accountable to an unfathomable number of days until we could be together again. So when I went back to see her for the last time for who knows how long, she kissed me: soft and sweet, just like her. She made me promise to not wait for her and make my own happiness.

"Take care of them" She had said. "And... Take care of Malia, Scott. She's going to need you." With those parting words, she let go of my hands and kept her eyes locked on mine until she disappeared into a cloud of sand.

Gone.

Bye Kira

I catch my mind going back to Malia often before I remember that she's in love with my best friend. It's hard because I think about "us" a lot. Even when "us" doesn't even really exist. I don't even know when I started seeing her differently, but I remember feeling this sense of opia fill me when I saw her standing there in Deaton's clinic. She stood tall and looming like an avenging angel under the lights covered in her own blood with a lone bullet hole in her stomach. I learned that Theo had betrayed her and practically led her to her death like a cat that caught the canary. But he'll pay for it... Man will he pay for it.

And as soon as she turned her head I felt this great weight on my chest, like that lead feeling in your bones after you come to a startling realization. Her eyes struck me so hard, you'd think they were made of lightening. She'd always been that that way: hard and cold or soft and warm. There was no in between or half-assing it with her. Malia is an all or nothing type of girl, and maybe that is why her and Stiles didn't work out.

And something about her in that moment bewitched me. And now every time that I shut my eyes at night, her brown eyes wash over me like a rainstorm. I swear she can see right through me, always so calculated and crafty. Her pupils glitter when she's concentrated, honing in on the sights and sounds around her. Maybe that's how she's gotten so much out of me, all my secrets and hopes and dreams of life after the last ruins of Beacon Hills.

Within those months after the Beast, we had gotten to know each other better. Her ability to just sit there and listen goes deeper than I thought possible. One night she came over late to just hang out and do some homework together. Eventually ditching the school work, we just began to talk. And talk. And talk.

And about what you may ask?

Just about everything the human language could possibly muster up in the form of questions and answers. And she'd just sit there as I spoke, her eyes invasive and bottomless, drinking in every word that left my lips.

I told her about Kira and how every second that I thought about her broke my heart a little more each time. And I talked about the pack, how I'm afraid to let them down. We'd come so close to losing so many more of our friends and I just can't stand the crippling fear of losing another. I vented to her about college, and how I had missed the deadline on this scholarship application that I had been stressing over. I want to be a vet so bad, and she encourages me to try again.

"You're the strongest person I've ever known, Scott." She had said, rolling over to face me before turning over to lay on her back. She stared absently at the ceiling and I waited for her to speak. I could tell she wanted to talk about it. She needed to talk about Stiles and how much the break up hurt her, but she stayed quiet. That's the thing about learning to be human, we try to hide our feelings, but we forget that our eyes speak too. But she did talk about other things.

Malia is actually very smart for only being human for so long. She had always been perceptive of other people's anxiety and harnessed this innate ability to always know what you were thinking. One thing about Stiles that had always bothered her was facing the reality that while he was fine with calling her his girlfriend, letting her take on dangerous obstacles, make her own decisions and heck... Even have sex with her, he still thought of her as a child in some ways. He sometimes made her feel like she was helpless and inadequate... Not able to function with the mature balance of normal human thought. "It's progress" could sometimes come out condescending, even if he hadn't meant it that way. Or "she likes pizza" as a way of drawing attention away from that fact that it was actually deer. But I guess he felt like he needed to do that so she seemed more human, normal. She had been fine with simply brushing that stuff off, until she wasn't.

But what no one else knew about Malia is that she loves to read. Even 'till this day I have never mentioned it to her, but I had caught glimpses of her in the library after lunch on her off period, a new book in her hand with the passing days. But it was almost as if she were inhaling the words. She would run her fingers across the text, caressing them with her eyes, and mouthing the words to herself just to have a taste of what they felt like on her tongue. Sometimes I would just watch her for a little while, seeing her so unbothered by the other people around her.

So when Malia does open up to me about things, she will talk about the world as if she's lived a thousand lives, a strange and unique theory for how the world should work as opposed to how it actually does. And it's weird to experience her this way, considering she's barely even lived much of her life as it is now. Human.

She talks about life in a way that I've never really thought about, in ways that I could never understand. I wouldn't say that she romanticizes the act of living, but she speaks in such a way that begs for you to listen.

I don't know what to say for myself. After a while, those homework hang outs turned to movie nights or morning jogs and sometimes late night drives or 3 am phone calls.

And in that time I felt this overwhelming curiosity to know everything about her. Who she was before Stiles? Who would she become after him? How does she cope with knowing that Stiles and Lydia may or may not have feelings for each other? Does she still think about Kira, too?

All of these questions and so many unknown answers.

But what I've been wondering most of all...

What will she do with that year's worth of wasted love she had stored in her heart? Will she let it consume her, bleed her out, and leave her crying every night for his best friend who didn't love her enough to stay?

Would she push me away if I told her the truth?

That I've started to like her, that I like her a lot. Would she shy away from the news that I've come to rely on her presence, whether that be her sitting next to me at the lunch table, being my helping hand when I need some advice for the younger group, or just coming over with pizza and bad comedy movies when I'm feeling lonely?

And will Stiles ever forgive me for it if she doesn't?

Author's Note: Worth continuing? Leave some reviews, pretty please. I'm not sure if this will be a full story or just a two-shot, possibly three-shot? It just depends on the response I get from you guys. Thanks for the love!