Skin Deep (Are the Secrets I Keep)

CHAPTER 1

When Stiles was eight years old, his mother set his skin on fire.

"She didn't mean to," his dad desperately assured him in the aftermath, but then, Stiles already knew that. She never means to hurt him, never means to slap him around or hold his pelt and order him into the cellar and lock him in until Dad managed to either coax her into revoking the command or wrangle the pelt from her and give it back to Stiles so that he could come out again. She'd never do any of those things if she were in her right mind.

Still, this time, the damage was done, and somehow, the mutilation of his once-pristine pelt, now blackened and ugly and missing tufts of fur, was worse than all the blows and insults and screams she ever hurled at him combined. And the worst part wasn't even so much the pain that had him writhing in agony for what seemed like days until someone finally called the cops and his father managed to dump a bucket of water on his skin when he came home to investigate, although even then, it felt like the flames were still eating at him, and nothing anybody did could stop it. But no, that wasn't the worst. Far more so, it was that a selkie's skin is sacred, something to be respected, and a priceless gift when someone else is allowed to even just touch one because they would literally be holding a life in their hands, mind and body and soul, and his mother – who taught him all that – was the one who broke the cardinal rule.

Up until then, only she and Stiles' father were allowed to handle Stiles' skin anytime. After her latest episode though, there was just no denying how bad her condition had gotten, and the Sheriff was forced to ship her off to the long-term care ward.

That was the day Stiles was more or less orphaned in one swoop. Dad disappeared into his work and drink, and Mom became Claudia, and whenever Stiles braced himself and visited her, she either threw things at him or screamed at him until he fled. He always went back, though he could never figure out if it was out of love or pity or duty or fear or some complicated mix of the four – right up until the end when – in a rare lucid moment – she pulled him close and asked the impossible of him.

(But he did it, and in the end, he didn't know if it was love or pity or rage or grief that guided his hand, drawing that knife across the throat of his mother's beautiful pelt.)

After, afterwards, well.

Dad – in-between drinking his heartache away – wanted to give her a proper burial. Stiles didn't try and insist he quit reaching for the alcohol or staying buried in his work or avoiding the house, but he did insist on returning his mother to the sea.

That's what she would've wanted. And when Stiles doesn't flinch even when the Sheriff says no and yells and throws a couple glasses and smells like grief and hate and why did it have to be Claudia, when Stiles shoots back what would you know, you're only human, a burial at sea is what she gets.

It doesn't make anything better. His mom's still gone. His dad's arguably almost as gone, unable to handle a house full of ghosts, and unwilling to raise a son with eyes and hair like Claudia's and just as human as she was, which is to say not at all, because for all that Stiles looks human most of the time, he isn't. The sea is in his bones, and as he grows up, he needs the water almost as much as humans need air. But he also refuses to go swimming with his dad the few times the Sheriff remembers and offers to take him, because his pelt is still charred and twisted along one side, and the only one who even gets to see it anymore is himself.

He takes to keeping his skin wrapped around one arm, underneath his plaid shirts and sweaters. People sneer at his lack of fashion sense but he doesn't care because they're human and none of them would understand, but also because he knows from experience that if he's separated from it, it's a sure-fire way to send him into a panic attack.

When Scott McCall transfers in at the beginning of middle school, asthmatic and floppy-haired and as friendless as Stiles, he doesn't seem to care either, just grateful that Stiles doesn't laugh when he has to puff away on his inhaler.

They become friends, but Stiles' biggest secret remains a secret. He has long since learned his lesson about trust.

(Or so he thought, but he trusted Scott enough to be his friend, and he'll know to regret that only six years later.)

-0-0-0-

Then, werewolves happen. Well, no, first the Hales burn, and something in his stomach squiggles with a weird sense of sympathy, but he doesn't know them, and they're not even his people because his mom told him long ago that the Hales were land-shifters, although what kind she couldn't tell.

But they burn one summer evening, and rumour has it that Laura Hale was away at university when it happened which was why it missed her, Derek Hale was mysteriously not at home even though it was a school night which was why it missed him, and both of them took the next flight out of the state before the end of the week, leaving their uncle behind in the hospital, burned and broken and near-death because he was at home and the fire certainly didn't miss him.

It's the most exciting thing that happens, and even though Stiles sympathizes, he doesn't dare visit Peter Hale because the one and only time he does, he catches a single glimpse of the man's face and almost doesn't make it to the nearest restroom before he heaves up his breakfast.

He never goes back again, and as he soon discovers, even tiny candles make him twitch away. He starts staying away from open flames.

Six years pass, mostly at its usual small-town pace. Stiles learns to cook and clean and nag his father into eating better. He meets Scott and finally gains something of a friend, and he wonders if Lydia's sunset hair would look as beautiful as he imagines floating on the ocean's tide, right up until she starts going out with Jackson and just sits there looking bored even when he shoves other kids into lockers or humiliates them by knocking their lunch trays to the floor and tossing their belongings onto the roof. Then she becomes as ugly as almost every other human Stiles has had the displeasure of meeting.

Still, he grows up, year after year.

Then, werewolves.