Sterek One Shots

No Need to Speak

No Need to Speak by Survivah

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Stiles is a white male, born and raised in a crime free, affluent suburb, who does pretty well in school and always has food in his stomach and a roof over his head. He know he doesn't have much to complain about. He knows that in the large scale of things, like, on a Maslow's hierarchy of needs scale, he's doing pretty well. Stiles has the world's best friend in Scott, and he and his dad are as close as you can get when one of them has work all the time and the other is a teenager.

So he doesn't complain. He figures it's normal to feel like a part of you is missing, like you're more alone than you want to be in your own skin. It's the human condition, isn't it? "Ultimately we're all alone" or some shit like that?

"Man," he sighs when he and Scott stumble out of Harris' classroom. "That sucked."

"Totally," grumbles Scott, taking a swig from his water bottle.

Stiles looks over his shoulder at the classroom. He can still see Harris berating that one girl with the purple braces. "You ever wonder what guys like him were like back in high school?"

Scott shrugs. "He sucks now, he probably sucked then."

"Yeah," Stiles agrees, "but like, was he a bully, or was he one of the really quiet kids that just sits in the back hating everybody silently? Like, where did it all go wrong for Mr. Harris?" Stiles thinks that maybe Mr. Harris was one of those guys that always thought they were smarter than everybody else, and is eager to finally be able to prove that he is. He probably has much more successful siblings, and a chip on his shoulder to match.

Scott stops at his locker. "Dunno, man." He opens his locker, changes out a few binders, grabs his jacket, slams the locker door shit again. They change the subject to simpler things, like lacrosse maneuvers and that English test, yeah man, that looks like it'll be tough.

It's normal. Scott doesn't live inside Stiles' head, even if everybody jokes they do. Stiles can't explain to Scott why exactly he likes walking through the woods so much in the fall (everything feels crisp and new, even as the leaves are sloughing off of the branches in droves, and there's a sense of promise in the crispness of the air, like maybe winter isn't a time for hibernation, but a chance for a new beginning,) or exactly why he dislikes Jackson so much, (he represents all of the muscle-flexing, masculinity-tossing, punch-throwing guys that have been shuffling around for millennia like glorified cro-magnons,) or why it is that he can't help but stay up until god-forsaken hours of the night following trails of wikipedia links like breadcrumbs (he feels part of a pulsing web of information, like he's entered a nether space of only knowledge, where facts and figures can run between his ears like air.) He can't explain it to Scott, and he can't explain it to anybody else.

Stiles figures that's what makes people separate–– everybody has parts of them they don't know how to share, bits of them so private and buried that trying to bring them out is like describing a dream; the right words can never encompass all of it.

It's the difference between waking up at 7AM every morning, then brushing his teeth then washing his face then putting on his clothes then driving to school then talking to Scott by his locker then going to first period when the bell rings, then second, then third, then fourth, then fifth, then sixth, then seventh, every day an identical blur of talking which metaphor can represent which theme, or which equation will solve this problem, or who's dating who or what sports player is doing what, and late afternoons spent with his feet hanging out of his bedroom window, sucking on ice cubes in the summer heat, balancing Of Mice and Men on his knee, but getting distracted by the play of orange light on the leaves outside and thoughts of what it means to no longer be a kid.