Oh, Ophelia, you've been on my mind girl since the flood. Oh, Ophelia, heaven help a fool who falls in love. -Ophelia, The Lumineers
When Stiles is a little girl, her mother takes her out to the woods, to a quiet little pond all tucked away, filled with fallen leaves and salamanders.
Stiles sits at the bottom for hours, just watching the silt and mud shift with every movement she makes, stirring up clouds that swirl through the leaves and plants that have long been drowned by the spring rains.
Her mothers sits beside her, watchng her daughter play, smiling.
Once, when she is five, she finds a salamander hidden in her pocket as she is undressing for bed. It sits in her hand, blinking placidly up at her, perfectly still.
By the time she is seven, she stops checking her pockets after she goes anywhere near water. Its no use, she'll still find several sets of dark eyes peering up at her the next time she wants to sneak a cookie into her pocket before dinner.
When she is nine, she doesn't visit the ponds and lakes in the woods for the two months it took her mother to come back from the hospital.
The day her mother arrives home, she looks at her daughter for a long moment, and tells her she must never forsake herself again.
She doesn't.
Not when her mother stops returning from her visits to the hospital, not when her mother smells only of antiseptic, and nothing of lakewater and her favorite cookies. Not even the day she touches her mother's hand, and its cool to the touch, like the mud that oozes between Stiles' toes after a long rain.
Stiles lets her hair grow out long, and stops picking out the lake weeds she constantly finds curling in and around the strands. When she caches her reflection out of the corner of her eye, it gives her a slow smile, and the air smells like a coming storm.
Derek sometimes mocks her, saying she must value her looks over her life, on the chance someone would use her hair as a handhold in a fight. In response, Stiles begins braiding her hair back into a complicated style she asks Lydia to help her create. She thinks she sees something like admiration in Derek's eyes, before he looks away, making a comment on her idiocy and stubborn nature.
Stiles spends whole days in the forest, sitting on the bottom of a lake that used to be a pond, watching currents of mud and silt drift through once-drowned plants that had been growing happily underwater for years. She gives a slow smile to the salamanders who watch her, their dark eyes quiet and curious.
Peter is careful around her, constantly baiting her but never letting her escape the place he makes for her in the corner of his eye, where he watches and waits for the day he will push her too far.
Stiles watches him back, waiting for the day he realizes he isn't going to.
Scott was never wary around her, he never questioned why she smelled like the deepest depths of the lake and the air before a storm.
To him she has always been so, and she will always be so. She is Stiles, and he has know her as long as he has known himself.
Isaac is hesitant around her at first, afraid and never knowing why. Why do his instincts tell him to step carful around Stiles, the weakest link in the chain, the human in a pack of wolves?
Stiles gives him the same smiles she gives the salamanders and toads who always eat any cookie she tries to sneak into her pocket, and he slowly stops tracking her movements when they're in the same room, and gradually starts trusting her with his back instead.
Stiles walks into the lake as the moon shines down on the water, and the lake and its inhabitants come to greet her, the water shifting in the quiet night.
Lydia looks at her sometimes, like there's something about Stiles she can't put her finger on, so Stiles starts to make some comment about Lydia not being able to keep her eyes off her, but she trips halfway through. She's never quite mastered walking on land. Lydia stops watching her, and rolls her eyes. Making a sarcastic comment even as she offers her hand to help stiles off the ground.