I Need More Of This Desperately

I need more of this desperately

to all the loves you might have known (ch. 1)

stiles stilinski x reader

read on ao3

words: 3k

summary: If your favorite romance novels taught you anything, it's that the only way to save yourself from love is to pretend you have never known its call. To avoid falling prey to the tragedy that is romance, each time you fell in love, you did what every great novel protagonist does. You wrote about it, but never acted on it. Love letters, penned to each owner of a piece of your heart, were hidden away and never to be read by anyone but yourself.

But what will happen when the letters are sent out without you knowing? Will anything ever be the same again?

notes: just a heads up - Kira moved to Beacon Hills in the 6th grade, reader moved in the 7th; no big bads will be coming for our pack in this fic; Allison is alive (she just moved), Argents adopted Isaac so he moved too (no Allison/Isaac relationship); I think that's it for now!! enjoy!! :)

You were never good at expressing your emotions, at least not to those who really needed to understand them. You tended to keep those feelings bottled up, locked away, and filed inside your own head never to be seen again. Usually, they were pretty easy to forget as you focused your time and attention on the people around you instead; but, there was one emotion that was harder to conceal than the rest.

Love.

You only believed yourself to have been in love five times (which, for a senior in high school, was actually a lot). Each time you fell, it felt as if the earth was crumbling around you and the only lifeline left was them. Their presence left you with an all-consuming passion that was sickening and overwhelming. You hated feeling that way, yet you silently craved it. More importantly, you had no idea how to deal with it.

When you first started to understand what it meant to love, you searched high and low for any clue on how to navigate this strange new land. In your frantic search for answers, you stumbled on what you believed to be the greatest source of wisdom you could find on the subject- Romance Novels .

If those books told you anything, it was that the only way to save yourself from love is to pretend you have never known its call. To avoid falling prey to the tragedy that is romance, each time you fell in love, you did what every great novel protagonist does. You wrote about it, but never acted on it.

You started out with a series of diary entries that took up page after page in your journal, but soon you realized that wasn't helping to rid yourself of your affection. So you began to write full, excruciatingly-detailed love letters to these people that, more than likely, did not remember who you were. The thought of said people finding out about this secret shame of yours was enough to make you want to flee the county, but the price of plane tickets being what they are, you decided it would be easier to simply hide the messages. So the love letters, penned to each owner of a piece of your heart, were hidden away and never to be read by anyone but yourself.

Your first letter was addressed to Derek, an older sleep-away camp counselor from when you went to Camp Triskelion in the 6th grade. You were into his brooding and so-called "mature" nature, oh how naive you were. The second was for your locker buddy Malia, your first ever crush on anyone who wasn't a boy. She protected you from idiotic bullies and treated you as if you were worthy of protecting. How could you not fall in love with your very own middle school knight-in-shining-armor?

The third belonged to Stiles, the recipient of your first almost kiss and your first actual kiss. His letter happened to be the longest, not that you were keeping track, and his was the crush that took the most time to recover from. For never having actually dated him, it was impressive how much he shattered your young heart.

The next letter was for the tortured yet beautiful Isaac, your lab partner in your sophomore year chemistry class. You had never been able to confide in someone as quickly or as deeply as you did with Isaac. He made the world seem lighter, more manageable, even when he felt the same world dragging him down into the dirt. Isaac was the only one you ever considered giving your letter to until he moved away in the middle of junior year. He did give you a letter before he left, but you never read it as you were afraid of what it could say. You tucked his letter in the bottom drawer of your desk with the rest of your own, out of sight but never out of mind.

Finally, there was Scott, the last subject of these letters. Scott McCall embodied the ideal man everyone spent their life looking for. He was kind, thoughtful, protective, observant, the captain of the lacrosse team, a volunteer at the animal shelter, and oh-so easy on the eyes. The entire school admired him from afar, or in any way they had the chance to. You were fortunate enough to admire him up close and personal. Scott was your next door neighbor, one of your closest friends...and the boyfriend of the best and most perfect person alive. Kira Yukimura.

You moved to Beacon Hills in the 7th grade, when friends had already been long established and becoming an outsider happened as quickly as the days turned to nights. Kira had been one of the only people to reach out to you, having been a new kid quite a few times herself. She absorbed you into her friend group and within five minutes of being around her, it was clear that the two of you were always meant to be in each other's lives. That's why you felt so awful about the fact that you had been in love with her boyfriend the entire time.

--

"Hey what's got you so far inside your own head?" Scott's voice brought you out of your daydream and back to the reality of picking at your half-eaten lunch while listening to him and Kira argue over who loves each other more.

"Oh! Nothing," Of course, he knew you were lying. If he couldn't tell from your heartbeat alone, he would know just from years of being your friend. All you could do was hope he wouldn't call you on it. "What were we talking about?"

Kira smiled at you with a warmth that rivaled the sun, burning away at the guilt in your stomach, "We were talking about how crazy it is that we're seniors, as cliche as that is! I mean, it feels like yesterday that I was pulling you out from under a mountain of papers in a middle school hallway."

"You know, I never did get revenge on Stiles for all those paper cuts," a laugh escaped you as you recalled the various band-aids that littered your arms and how Stiles had outwardly cringed whenever he saw them.

"Trust me, the guilt itself was revenge enough to last a lifetime," a familiar voice called out from behind you and even after all these years, it still brought chills up your spine.

A frantic blob of gray appeared beside you as Stiles plopped down in the extra seat at your lunch table, immediately and furiously scribbling in his notebook.

"Hey, Y/L/N," he said as he briefly looked up at you with a smile, which you weren't sure if you wanted to kiss or smack off of his face.

"Stilinski! Where's your owner? There must be a ginger queen running around somewhere searching high and low for her lap dog." You heard Scott choke on his water and Kira poorly attempting to hold in her laughter, but your attention was on the boy next to you.

"Ha ha," he muttered under his breath, trying not to catch your gaze with his own. Once he realized you were waiting for a reply, a sigh that could be felt through space and time left his lips. "She's...um interviewing new applicants for that position. Has been for a while , apparently, and I was the only one who hadn't gotten the memo! Lucky me!

"I got the official notice on Friday. And I really needed that reminder so thank you! I had not been kicked in the groin enough this weekend, so thanks for giving me another opportunity!" His head dropped onto his notebook, his arms shielding his face to try and hide his wounded expression from you.

As soon as he finished speaking and you saw that pained look in his eyes, you wondered how much it would cost to surgically remove your foot from your mouth.  "Mischief, I'm so sorry." And you were. Lydia was his everything for as long as anyone could remember. This was going to be a bitch and a half for him to deal with.

His bitter laugh seeped into his next words, "Stop acting like you aren't ecstatic about this, you hated her. You never liked us being together." His words were muffled by the notebook paper, but his tone rang loud and clear.

"Hey, hate is a strong word." You felt questioning eyes on you from the opposite end of the table, "Okay, maybe I hated her, but how I feel doesn't matter. Stiles, you were in love with her, this is gonna suck no matter what anyone thinks. Even if what I think is that you should want more than the one-sided relationship you had with her. You deserve better than that, Mischief."

He lifted up his head but avoided your gaze by turning his attention back to the ink covered page in front of him. "Yeah, well you can't always get what you want, right? Life never seems to work out that way. We should know more than most."

You tried your hardest not to let the disappointment cloud your face when you turned your body to face forward. Scott's eyes were still firmly planted on the side of Kira's face, oblivious to anything and anyone but her.

"Yeah, life's a bitch."

--

Hours later, you found yourself still thinking about the conversation from lunch.

"You can't always get what you want. We should know better than most."

Stiles's words echoed through your mind and left you thinking of only one thing, the letters. Those letters were the epitome of everything you wanted that you knew you could never have. They represented a fantasy. A fantasy that one day, when you sent those letters out, your love would finally become known and that love would be returned. They let you live in a fantasy world where you would be loved by the beautiful people that you always kept in your head but could never hold in your arms.

Maybe, that's why you kept the letters in the first place. Maybe, in the back of your mind, you knew that if you ever sent them out into the world, you would be faced with the reality that these people didn't love you, that they never would. If they ever knew of your affection, you could be faced with rejection, or worse, humiliation.

However, if they stayed with you, tucked away in a drawer, hidden under some old school papers and long-forgotten trinkets, the fantasy could stay alive. You could pretend that there was a possibility that they did love you. You could live in your head rather than having to come to terms with your reality.

Wanting to stay in your head a little longer, you decided to reread your letters. As you entered your room after school, you narrowed your focus onto the lower right drawer of your desk. You opened it, lifted the old school papers, and picked up the love letters from their hiding place. After shedding your backpack, you settled onto your desk chair and starting shuffling through the pile in your hands. Before you could decide on which one to read first, you heard your doorbell ring out through your front hall.

"Y/N! I think Liam's here for your study session! Do you want me to get the door or are you gonna come down?" your mother called out from the bottom of the stairs.

"I'm in the middle of something, mom! Can you send him up, please?" Quickly, you jumped up from your chair, shoved the letters back into their rightful place in the bottom of that lower right desk drawer, sat down on your bed, and did your best to look as inconspicuous as possible.

Seconds later, Liam pushed through your door and dropped his bag onto your desk chair, as he had done almost every Monday since you'd met him. "You ready to teach me how chemistry works?" His bright smile mirrored your own before he face-planted onto the bed beside you.

"I thought I was helping you understand history? What happened there? Why are we on chemistry instead?"

Liam flipped over onto his back to face you as he explained, "That was last year! World History was excruciating but I have a good enough grasp on US History that I'm like 92% sure I'll be okay. Plus, Mr. Yukimura knows what we go through, so he'll probably be more understanding if I miss an assignment because yet another person is threatening to kill us." You laughed along with him, the two of you trying to ignore the sting of knowing that danger was a given in your friend group.

"It's been one week of Mr. Harris and I'm ready to chew my own foot off just to have an excuse not to go to class," Liam spoke between gasps of silent laughter.

"Unless werewolves have developed a new ability to regenerate entire limbs that I am unaware of, let's keep your foot where it is, okay? If I remember correctly, there should still be some old flashcards and study guides from chemistry somewhere in my desk. Why don't you try to find those, and I'll get us some snacks. I have a feeling we're gonna be here for a while." You pulled yourself up from your spot and started toward the door.

"Do you know where in your desk they might be?"

Instead of turning around, you called over your shoulder, "No clue! Just start with the top drawers and work your way down!" Once you heard the sound of the drawers opening and papers shuffling, you made your way down the stairs.

After you had your arms full of snacks that would sufficiently feed a growing teenage werewolf, you made your way back toward your room.

"Okay, so I have doritos, popcorn, cheese-itz, pretzels, and crackers. I also have carrots and hummus if you're feeling more of a healthy vibe but I doubt that, so I'll take those. Oh and my mom made brownies but I didn't bring those with me so you'll have to go downstairs and get them if you wa-" You finally looked up from the pile of goods in your hands to see Liam holding five very familiar-looking envelopes.

Once he saw you in the doorway, he dropped the letters as if they burned him. "I am so sorry, Y/N. I was just looking for the study guides, and I found them! Yay! But when I lifted them up, I saw these, and you know me, I'm a naturally curious person so I picked them up when I saw some names that I recognized. I had no idea what they were a-and I was, yeah, I was  going to leave them alone but you were taking so long downstairs that I decide to read one. I mean, they weren't sealed and I didn't stop to think that, you know, maybe I shouldn't totally invade your privacy but I just kept reading and then you came into the room and now here we are...yeah."

You heard his voice, heard him speaking, but your brain couldn't seem to process his words as everything seemed to move in slow motion. You dumped the food on your bed and slowly crouched down to the floor, collecting the scattered papers. One by one, you stacked them in your hands. Malia, Isaac, Stiles, and Derek, all still hidden in their envelopes but...that's only four. You looked around and saw the last letter was outside its casing, the envelope cast to the side. When the realization hit you of what exactly Liam had read, your head snapped up to look at him.

"Liam, how far into this letter did you get?" You were sure he could sense the panic in your voice, your rapidly accelerating heart rate, the tears starting to well up in your eyes, but you were electing to ignore that. You could cry about this later. First, you needed to know how much damage had been done.

His face screamed of pity and remorse causing tears to cloud your vision. Met with silence, you asked again, "Liam. How much did you read?"

"Enough." He paused, not sure of how to handle this. To be fair, you didn't know either. "Y/N, why do you have these letters? Do they all say something like this? Why haven't you told him how you feel?" He sat down on the floor in front of you, carefully, so you wouldn't feel trapped by his presence. "Do you still feel this way? What about Kira?"

At the mere mention of Kira's name, the guilt in your stomach burned with a fiery rage and a lump in your throat made it harder to speak. "Liam, you can't tell anyone what you read. No one can know about this, okay? Not Stiles, not Scott, and especially not Kira. Please. Don't say anything about this."

You had evaded his questions, somehow telling him everything he needed to know. In your lack of response, he saw how alone you had been with these feelings and it scared him. He had never seen you this vulnerable before, he didn't think anyone had. For as long as he'd known you, you'd always had such a hard exterior, constantly trying to prove to the pack that you were strong and capable despite being one of the few humans among them. He thought you to be unshakeable, nearly invincible, but now, hearing your voice cracking and seeing the tears stream down your cheeks, he remembered that you were human. You were just a teenager, a heartbroken teenager who set their feelings to the side for the sake of others, and to protect yourself.

He slowly wrapped his arms around you, letting you collapse into his embrace, "It's okay, let it out. We don't have to talk about this right now. I'll wait till you're ready. Chemistry can wait for another day or another week. You're more important right now." He took the papers from your hands and laid them on the ground beside the two of you, curling you closer into him. He hoped you could feel his heartbeat and find comfort in the steady pulse.

Several minutes later, he was still holding you as tight as he could without hurting you. How long had you kept those letters? How long had you felt the things you wrote about yourself, about Scott? He brought himself out of his thoughts when he felt your breathing slow and your shaking stop. Liam pulled away to look down at your sleeping figure as a bittersweet smile that found its way onto his face. Trying not to wake you, he picked you up into his arms and laid you down on the bed. Once he saw that you were comfortable under the blankets, he went ahead and cleaned up any trace of what just occurred. The papers were put back on the desk, the food was brought back into the kitchen, and flashcards were shoved into his backpack. Liam was all but ready to leave when he saw the envelopes on your floor. Taking one last look between your sleeping figure and the letters, he scooped them up and snuck out of your house.

He knew it was wrong to take them, but seeing you that fragile flipped a switch in him. Burying these pent-up feelings had only caused you sadness and frustration. Maybe, if you didn't have to hide behind the secrecy of it all, a weight would be lifted off of your shoulders. Maybe, you could finally start to let people in, start tearing down your mile-high walls, and express your feelings without worrying about what people might say.

Only good things could come from people knowing the truth, right?