#it backfired terribly for the poor witch she just wanted out but stiles is one tough cookie

[theyjusthowl]

Tidbit Tuesday for my sterek fic of doom

Have I been absent for three weeks? Why yes thanks for asking I'm loving working on my master's thesis on why representation on TV matters and being mean on Twitter is bad.

Incidentally, I cannot stress how badly I need a beta reader to bounce ideas around please message me I'm nice and totally normal about Derek Hale and Stiles Stilinski.

There is a witch in the woods and, much like many other creatures drawn to Beacon Hills, she’s parched with a thirst can only be quenched through pain. She comes from a distant life she barely remembers, other than the rotten florals that follow her, so she hides in the evergreen.

Nobody knows this, but there is a witch in the woods. There has been, for quite some time now, trapped and desperate to find a vessel. It has to be perfect. It has to be someone, but it can't be anyone. She must be patient and find the perfect person, one that would go to the greatest lengths, who would trade a life for a life for a life.

It has to be perfect. She won't have it any other way.

At first, because this liminal space she inhabits is familiar in ways she cannot recall, almost out of a vision, known to someone else in some other time, she waits, she gets acquainted with everything that makes up the forest and the town and the bleeding sky in the heat of summer.

Eventually, she dips her feet in this strange place called Beacon Hills, roaming but never free, and she hides, carried in the crackling of dried leaves on a clear day. She glimmers in the cold waters of the lake, rippling and reveling in the soft waves that break the stillness of the surface. She simmers in the tarmac, under the roaring traffic, and hums inside the pipelines of the buildings downtown, and creaks along the wooden staircases of old Victorian homes and rustles through the gardens of the neat little rows of suburban white picket fence houses.

She waits. She listens and she sees, and she bides her time. She lurks around the graveyard, and she runs with the winds around the ruins of the Hale house after the fire dies down, howling mischievously to lure the wolves that used to run in the woods. She wails with the sirens on patrol cars, and she slithers under the hospital doors, hovering over the skin and bones of a battered, sleeping dog.

It must have been years, spent rotting away in the depths of her isolation, when the forest starts convulsing around her. There is a rogue wolf circling her territory. There is another, and then another, and another one. It doesn't stop. The hospital room is empty now and there's a corpse, but no other ghosts to keep her company among the trees. There is new blood and old blood, blood that awakens something primal in the woods, something hot white at the doors that separate this realm from others, something that pushes her and whispers in her ear that her time has come.

So she wakes. She wakes and she lies underwater, in the creek, carried away by the first rains of the season, biding her time, until the crisp autumn leaves start crunching under the trodden sneakers of the young and unaware. The wind is picking up and the sky is slowly bruising away into a clear sunset, and there are wolves but it's not quite right.

No, it's not right. It's not the wolves that have her squirming in the confines of her shapeless lifeform. It's not the wolves. So then it must be the boy. The boy. The boy, who steps on a pile of browning foliage and mud and falls flat on the loose soil around him, near the edge of the cold stream, hands scrabbling around clumsily.

A rock slides and drops into the water. The lazily swirling currents set in motion a tiny ripple that reaches beyond the blurry confines of the riverbed, lapping at the muddy bank and splashing away mischievously. The water takes hold, soaking through the thin, well worn material of his jacket. The wolves have dismissed him, but she hasn't.

She knows, it is him. A life, for a life, for a life. The boy, the wolf, the witch.

There is a creature, for lack of a better word, a presence that might be a fae, a ghoul, a spirit, a shadow that creeps and preys on the tiniest wisp of hope and sanity she can find.

There is a witch in the woods.

She learns, she plots, she waits. She finds the perfect vessel.

And then, she shows her hand.