Six Feet Under | Sterek

ten;

Stiles hadn't realised just how much he'd missed Scott. He'd missed the stark affection, the willingness in which Scott listened. He'd missed Scott, missed him so much that now that he has hm back, Stiles feels like he can breathe.

"I'm never going home," he says, draped over Scott's bed so that he's half hanging off it. "I don't even know if I've got a home anymore. Is this still home? It is not? I don't know."

Scott hums noncommittally, flopped over Stiles. His body is warm. Stiles is absurdly comfortable. "Everyone has a home," Scott says finally, and his voice is thoughtful not resentful. "This can be your home if you want. Personally, I think that home is someone not something, you know? Home is where your heart is happy."

Stiles twists his mouth into a grimace because that hadn't been what he'd been looking for. "Fair.'' He traces his hands along the floor, delights in the dizziness that sends his vision spinning away. He feels light and airy, and it's the best he's felt in a long time.

Scott taps his ankle gently. "Your heartrate is starting to stumble. Come back up now."

Stles scowls, but hauls himself back up so he's laying normally on the bed, curled around Scott who simply sighs and settles in against him. They say nothing for a while, because they're still closer than brothers and can read each other in an almost disturbing way, but eventually Stiles needs to make noise, needs to talk, needs to make his presence known again.

"I'm the reason my mother died." Well fuck, that's not what he meant to say at all.

Scott makes a truly sad sound, and Stiles hates himself just a little bit more. "Stiles," Scott says, like he can fix this, but he can't. Not this time.

"Forget it." He rolls away slightly, disentangles himself from his oldest friend and curls into himself, burying his face in the pillow and swallowing back his scream of frustration. (He feels heavy again)

He always has to ruin everything. He always has to hurt everyone that he cared about on this godforsaken bit of space rock, and he hates himself so fucking much because they all deserve better.

He lies to his father, to his last living parent, because he's too afraid of his own identity, his own past and actions and feelings and monstrous demons to open up. He blames his father, his dad, because his dad hadn't known what to do only known that Stiles was hurting and not telling him anything. Stiles yells at him, standing in the police station, because Stiles gets too fucking drunk, and Stiles ignores the haunted look in his father's eyes.

Stiles he abandons his brother, because he tricks himself into believing that Scott had abandoned him first. He says no, and he says he's tired, but really he's just scared that this is the breaking point, this is where Scott gives up. If Scott gives up on him, then Stiles is going to give up on himself too and he can't afford to do that.

He gets drunk and harasses a son who has nothing left, and then seeks solace and comfort in a man who isn't an uncle to anyone anymore because dammit if Stiles isn't fucking lonely. He invaded Derek's space, eats Derek's food, drinks Derek's fucking alcohol and uses Derek's fucking soap, and then he acts like the victim when Derek says no. He soaks in the strangely positive affection Peter willing gives him, doesn't let himself acknowledge that Peter had been an uncle once and is projecting.

Stiles refuses to call Melissa mother, and he doesn't even know why, but he knows that it hurts her because it hurts him too. He cuts short her shifts, he always takes, takes, takes and gives nothing back and he hates it.

Stiles shouldn't have been born. Better to have Claudia Stilinski than a fucking ADHD mess who's skin is always too tight and his blood too hot and his inner monster too prominent. Better to not have him at all.

Scott shuffles over, wraps an arm around his side. Stiles doesn't have the heart to shake him off. "I love you," Scott says quietly, in the darkness.

Stiles says, "I'm a mistake," and then cries the way he's seen Scott cry - heaving sobs, a screwed up face, and a feebly beating heart displayed rift on his fucking sleeve.

(He breaks in a way that he's only ever seen his dad break. It's brutal, loud, messy and all at once. Stiles has been living with fissure cracks, and stone chips, and now he's thrown something too heavy and he's collapsing down around himself.)

Blood roars in his ears and he cries and shouts and babbles his sins as though they mean something. Scott holds on through it all. He just holds him, and Stiles just cries harder because of it.

.

Once, when he had been little, his mother had told him a story.

"There was a bird, Stiles, that could fly further than any other bird.

It was a clever bird, but to be clever it had to be broken inside. And he other birds knew that, and so they told him not to be clever. They told him to be whole instead, because being whole was better than being clever. So the bird agreed, and it fixed itself so that it wasn't clever.

But the bird, because it was whole, couldn't fly as far anymore. It didn't see the point in flying so far because he wasn't fleeing anything anymore. He wasn't broken. So he stopped flying completely.

The other birds let him be, because he was whole and that meant he was happy. But the little clever bird was not happy. He wanted to fly, he wanted to soar further than the other birds, but he couldn't bring himself to take flight.

One day, the little bird broke again. He cracked himself in too many places to fix, and then he flew as fast as he could to escape the hurt that he'd been blocking. As he flew, he found his cleverness, his ambition. He flew faster and faster, soaring further and further, until he had become his old self again.

He let the hurt catch up, and he embraced it.

That bird, the clever little bird, was a broken bird. But it flew faster and further than the others."

Claudia had died before she's explained the meaning of the story, and Stiles had never known if he was the bird or not.