A/N: I don't own Stiles, or Teen Wolf - the MTV version or the version that captured peoples hearts from the eighties onwards.
I don't honestly know why this was in my head- I think 'cause of how he looked in 2x04, but there are no spoilers for anything really. Warning though: this is a slightly dark drabble, and Stiles is probably a bit OOC.
He wears a large part of his heart on his sleeve- his inherent fear of the threats of getting his throat torn out by temperamental werewolves, his bone-chilling fear that his father would find out about everything and get seriously hurt (he would NOT say the word die, or any word alluding to it, because that would be like saying 'nothing else can possibly go wrong' - it just invites the worst possible situation to arise, and he was not going to lose the one last piece of blood relation that he had left in the world; he would make sure of that), the happiness of being able to help out (well, as much as he could) and save innocent lives, the love he had for his makeshift family and his willingness to do anything for them, no matter what.
There are the parts of his heart that he keeps off of his sleeve though, hidden under so many layers of dry wit and sarcasm that no one could see, not, admittedly, that anyone would try to look deep enough to possibly do so:
The lack of fear he felt that he actually would get his throat torn out one of these days, the unfeeling acceptance that he had when his friends turned his back on him, choosing to ignore his help because he was human, and not even the type of human like Allison, because she at least could use bows and arrows to take down opponents and he could barely pick up a bat to protect himself, the complete inability he had to care about the danger and extremely real possibility that he might not walk away when he was staring down the barrel of a proverbial gun or into a set of snarling, very, very sharp and literal teeth in order to protect the ones he cared about. There was the numbness that had become his friend over the years, and the feeling of being so absolutely drained emotionally at the end of the day that all he wants to do is collapse onto his bed, go to sleep and never wake up again.
But all the feelings lying underneath the surface are the ones that he pushes down daily. The ones that he knows that if he gives into, he won't make be able to wake up the next morning and face another day. So he puts his smile back on every day, and fixes it so surely into place that nothing can shift it unless he makes the conscious decision to do so, he adopts the attitude he'd formed over the time since the day his mother died, and he fakes it. Because if he didn't, well... they'd never see him again, and even in death, he didn't think he could handle hurting them, even in the slightest way imaginable.