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Stiles is four when he fully understands pain. He is walking down the sidewalk when Mrs. Dodgers bull dog latches it's jaws around his arm. His mother, who was walking behind him, yells and beats it off with her purse. She holds a screaming stiles to her chest and whispers soothing words in polish even as she drives to the hospital. She holds his hand and strokes his hair as he gets stitches, sings him lullabies until his tears all dry up and he drifts off to sleep in her arms, submerged in the feelings of safety and love.
Stiles is seven when he fully understands fear. He is hiding behind the stair railing when he should be in bed, listening to his parents argue in hushed tones. He doesn't understand what's going on, but his dad thinks something is wrong with his mother, his mommy, and he wants her to go get examined. Stiles doesn't like the sound of that. It's sounds ominous, sinister. He doesn't understand, but he is so very afraid.
Stiles is eight when he fully understands hurt. He is confused and scared and his mother is screaming and throwing things at him. He takes refuge in the pantry, curling up in a ball and trying not to cry as she beats on the door. And then she just stops. And in the deafening silence, the turning of the lock sounds like a gunshot. The silence is worse than the noise, a resounding emptiness taunting stiles with his utter solitude. And when his father gets home six hours later and finds him locked in the pantry, curled up in the darkness, crying silently, he just looks at Stiles, eyes inscrutable, but heavy with terrible knowledge. He doesn't ask questions, just rubs Stiles' back and tucks him into bed, kisses him on the forehead. The next morning, Stiles finds him passed out in a puddle of his own vomit. It's two weeks before stiles talks again.
Stiles is nine when he fully understands grief. He is sitting on a hospital bench, fingering the stitches on his stomach where his mom had slashed him. She had been chopping vegetables and he had gotten in her way, always underfoot. Apparently, stiles thinks bitterly, life threatening knife wounds are enough for his father to crawl his way out of denial. Six months of ignoring bruises and averting eyes and his dad has, reluctantly, decided that Claudia needed to be hospitalized. Frontotemporal dementia the doctors say. It's only a matter of time they say. And stiles watches from his bench as his father dissolves, like the tide sweeping a clumsy sandcastle out to sea. They go home together, and together they sit on the couch, the flowered one Claudia had picked out because it reminded her of spring. They cling tightly to each other, because both of their worlds have been shattered, but at least they have each other. They'll always have each other. But at the end of the night it's Sheriff Stilinski that drowns himself in Jack Daniels and its stiles that cries himself to sleep alone in his bedroom.
Stiles has just turned ten when he fully understands hate. The nurses and the doctors and his father all tell him that she doesn't know what she's saying, that she's not in her right mind, that she doesn't mean it, kiddo. but Stiles isn't stupid. He can read it in her eyes, clear as day. She hates him, loathes him even. He can barely stand to be in the same room as her, he's afraid, illogically, hilariously, that if she looks at him for too long that those hateful eyes will burn a hole straight through his soul. Other days she's just scared. Terrified. She'll scream if he comes near her, throw things at him, call him a monster. Some days it isn't so bad. Some days he looks at her and catches glimpses of his mother, a fleeting smile, the way she hums under her breath. He hates those days the most, because it means that his mother is still in there somewhere. That she's not gone completely. It means that on the bad days, he can't pretend that it isn't his mother screaming at him, can't act as though she's already gone,because he knows better, and disease or not, this is still his mother.
Stiles is eleven when he first understands shame. It is all consuming, threatening to swallow him whole. His mother lies in her hospital bed, for once not angry or frightened, but instead just weak and pathetic, a worn out husk of a woman. He feels bad the instant he thinks it, but it's true. She looks up at him with her empty eyes and begs and, really, how can he refuse? It's his mother's last request, and who is he not to honor it? She tells him which drug to use and how to find it and how to inject it and Stiles resolutely ignores the fact that she's been planning this. She's been through a lot, it's only fair that she finally gets a little peace.
It's only after, hours later when his mothers corpse has gone cold and his father finally stumbles through the hospital doors, looking shell shocked and breathing far too shallowly that he considers that maybe he was wrong, that he shouldn't have done it.
It's when his father breaks down and cries like a baby in the waiting room that Stiles feels the first tendrils of guilt caress his mind.
It's when they stop at the liquor store on the way home that stiles feels those tendrils wrap around his heart, whispering misgivings in his ears. He had done the right thing, he tells himself. She had wanted it. Needed it. He would've only been drawing out the suffering for all of them. And.. And she had asked him. It was the right thing to do, he thinks desperately.
It's that night when his dad is sobbing over wedding photos and drinking himself into a stupor and stiles is standing in the bathroom trying not to throw up that he thinks I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. He stares at himself in the mirror, looks at his mother's face and his mother's hair and his mother's eyes and abruptly loses control of his stomach.
It's when he is heaving his guts up over the toilet that he thinks she was right, I am a monster.