application for ataraxion

[instincts]

C H A R A C T E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Malia Tate
Canon: Teen Wolf
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: 4.01
Number: 077

Setting:

Teen Wolf takes place in the modern-day, fictional town of Beacon Hills, California. In the world of Teen Wolf, supernatural creatures are a well-kept secret to most of the world, and thus far they include: werewolves, druids, darachs, kanimas, naguals, oni, kitsune, nogitsune, and banshees. After the events of season 3A, the town became a hub for the mystical and supernatural courtesy of the nemeton acting as a beacon (hence the town name) that created a kind of psychic pull for them.

History:

Malia Tate was born to Peter Hale via an unknown mother in roughly 1995. In order to protect the child from her father's ambitious lust for power, her aunt, Talia Hale, removed Peter's memories of her and sent her away (somehow). As a result, the Tate family raised Malia as their own child (it's unclear if they know she was adopted). Things went pretty well through her childhood until she was 8 years old, and went for a drive with her mother and younger sister on the night of the full moon. Malia shifted for the first time into a werecoyote, killing her family either with her own claws or in the ensuing car accident that came from a child turning into a coyote in the car.

Traumatized, Malia lost all desire to shift back from full-coyote form because she knew that turning back would mean facing what she'd done and a life without her family. She cloistered herself away in a desert cave, and eventually lost the presence of mind to even remember that she had once been a girl, let alone how to turn back if she did want to. Over the course of the next 8 years, it's assumed that Malia also died the day of the wreck, dragged off and eaten by wild animals. As a coyote, Malia references a lot of time spent alone, and some time spent in a pack situation. As she spent 8 years living as a coyote, it's possibly she shifted back and forth between favoring isolation and running with other animals.

At age 16, Scott and Stiles figured out that she wasn't really a coyote. Sheriff Stilinski begins digging back through old files, reviewing the cases with his new knowledge of the supernatural. He deems Malia's case worthy of a second look. Scott tries to follow a scent to Malia, but comes up empty. When they visit the crash site, they take Malia's younger sister's doll, which even coyote Malia still felt emotional attachment to.

Scott and Stiles track down Malia's den and enter it, insuring she won't return. They convince the sheriff that Malia is actually a girl, not a coyote. She follows them back to the school to try and reclaim it, nearly attacking Kira, and as a result they're forced to stop her father from trying to hunt down his own daughter using bear traps in the woods. They track Malia into the woods, and Scott uses his alpha roar to shake her into transforming back into a girl.

A tearful reunion with her father doesn't last long because Malia is placed into Eichen House, a mental health clinic, to help her readjust to being human. She remains there until Stiles commits himself while possessed by the nogitsune. After she attacks Stiles in the courtyard, the staff indicates that she has considerable aggression in her, and difficulty engaging with other patients. They enter group therapy together, wherein Malia tells Dr. Morrell that guilt makes her feel sick to her stomach.

She uses the men's bathroom to shower because the water is hotter, and tells Stiles when he finds her there that she hasn't been able to get warm since she lost her fur coat. In the same conversation, she points out that she doesn't owe him any gratitude for turning her back: she misses being a coyote. She makes a deal with Stiles that she'll help him gets Brunski (an orderly)'s keys if he helps her find a way to change back.

Malia presumably baits Oliver into starting a fight by talking about trepanation. When he wrestles her to the ground, Brunski intervenes, and Malia steals his keys for Stiles. Stiles' attempts to use the keys get him sent to solitary, and Malia busts him out, citing her super strength. She leads him down to the basement another way, and the two go through Eichen House's records. The two bond over mutual guilt and responsibility over doing terrible things, as Stiles tells her that he's currently possessed by the nogitsune, and Malia reminds him that she killed her whole family. Stiles asks Malia to check the lines in his back that indicate when the nogitsune will have control again, and the two share an intimate moment made less romantic by said moment taking place in the shady basement of a mental hospital.

In the aftermath of whatever fooling around they did, Malia gets an idea about the kanji Stiles noticed drawn on the wall. She notices it's hollow, and breaks it open. The discover the nogitsune's corpse, and pull a photograph off of the body. Oliver, controlled by the nogitsune, shows up and tazes the two of them, threatening Malia in order to get Stiles to let him in. Stiles relents, and Malia is freed. Morell checks Malia out of the institution and sends her to Scott for help with control.

After the nogitsune is defeated, Malia takes Scott up on this, seeking him out to help her begin to shift back into coyote form and control her powers. She enrolls in Beacon Hills High School and joins his pack.

While it's implied that between S3 and S4 Scott has helped her better control her powers, and Stiles has helped her assimilate more to normal human life, both still leave a lot to be desired. She fights well when they take a trip to Mexico to rescue Derek from being kidnapped, but when she and Stiles wind up locked in a room apart from the others, she struggles to focus and tap into her super-hearing until Stiles prompts her to center herself (which she does by kissing him). Similarly, when they are locked in a room with Kira and Scott, Stiles has to coach Malia on why they can't simply leave Lydia behind and reminds her that the rules of the animal kingdom don't apply to friends.

When they break out of the Calavera compound and head for the desert to find Derek and Kate, it's Malia who prompts Scott to update Kira and herself on who Kate is, despite the emotional discomfort evident in the car at drudging up the relative of their recently-dead friend, Allison. When they break down, she against experiences some trouble with control when she tries to look out into the desert for enemies. Spotting one, she runs off to fight it with Kira behind her. They fight it off, but when they return, Stiles expresses fear that Malia was running off—away from them, leaving them behind. She asserts that she would never leave him. The others, yes, but not Stiles. They retrieve Derek at the church with Scott and Braeden, but he's not as he should be: he's been de-aged.

Personality:

Malia’s personality is a direct result of the fact that she has spent half her life as a coyote. Rather than adapting to the social/cultural norms of the human world, she’s been conditioned to survive in the wild kingdom. For this reason, she misses out on a lot of social cues and conventions that leave her behaving like a foreigner in the human world.

While she doesn’t lack empathy, she doesn’t express it well. Malia is more likely to punch someone in the arm and tell them to get over it than to assuage their feelings. When she senses Kira’s Scott-related anxiety, she frames it in terms of how it inhibits her ability to focus rather than actual worry for Kira. While humans have the sense to at least behave like they care about others, Malia has no need for such pretext. Everything is face value with her because it doesn’t occur to her to obscure her feelings and opinions, or to be delicate in how she handles the feelings and opinions of others. She doesn’t feel the need to speak excessively, but what she does say is pointed, blunt, and often tactless. She makes no effort to pad or qualify her words.

Coyotes by nature are hugely isolated animals despite pack behavior, and Malia reflects this. While living as a coyote, she had to look out for herself first and foremost because she was in a constant state of scrambling for her basic survival needs — the same as the rest of her pack. This experience has conditioned her to prioritize her own well-being and to cut and run when others become a heavier burden than they are an asset. In that way, Malia is a pragmatist, thinking rationally rather than emotionally and prioritizing people based on what purpose they serve rather than emotional connection. If it came down to her or someone else, she would run and save herself — with the exception of two people.

Scott and Stiles have managed to earn her unerring loyalty, not by turning her back, but by supporting her and helping her adjust. Scott, as her alpha, earns some considerable deference. She respects and looks up to him because he has helped her learn how to control her powers so that she can stay in contact with her primal side. When they forced her to turn back, she was furious that she’d lost the ease of being a coyote and been forced to face her guilt. Scott teaching her how to be a were-coyote instead of a regular one helps smooth that transition.

Similarly, Stiles followed through on his promise to her in Eichen House, where they bonded over mutual guilt for hurting people in ways out of their control. Stiles was hurting his friends because the Nogitsune had possessed him, and Malia had killed her mother and baby sister when she lost control of her shift. While Scott helps her with the shifter stuff, Stiles helps her with the human stuff. He prompts her for emotional cues in social situations, explains with considerable patience, and encourages her — all of these things are things that Malia appreciates because of her own insecurity about her adjustment. Malia is immensely protective and possessive of Stiles, and he’s one of the only people whose needs she will put above or equal to her own. Despite her cut-and-run mentality, he’s one person she would never leave behind.

The shift back to humanity has proven difficult for her. While Malia may seem blunt and hard in how she speaks, her expression give light to a certain amount of struggle. When Stiles points out that they don’t leave their friends, Malia grimaces in a way that shows she really is trying, and it gets to her when she realizes she’s messing it up still. Adapting to humanity and remembering all of the rules of social convention associated with it feels like a constant uphill battle for her, and while she perseveres stubbornly, it does weigh her down to realize she keeps doing or saying the wrong thing. She’s years behind in school, and feels constantly targeted in classrooms where people expect her to know the answer, and then she feels extra stupid when she doesn’t because she knows that (to everyone else in the room) it’s simple. She knows that she should get all of these things and hates that she doesn’t. When it’s a matter of social interaction or empathy rather than fact, it makes her feel guilty on top of it.

Guilt is something Malia continues to battle with — primarily for killing her mother and sister. After it happened, 8-year-old Malia ran away and remained a coyote, shucking off her humanity in favor of hiding from the feeling because she couldn’t stand it. Now, she’s forced to confront it, and continue to war with those same wild instincts that and led to her murdering her family in the first place.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Malia has all of the standard powers and weaknesses of a beta werewolf in the Teen Wolf universe.

ABILITIES. augmented strength, speed, dexterity, durability, healing factor, and senses. ability to fully or partially transform into animal form—either just the claws/teeth/hair, or full animal form. pain absorption via physical contact. for malia in particular, she still struggles to control her physical shifts and her senses. it is not yet clear if she has control enough to turn back and forth from her full wolf form, so attempting as much might get her stuck (again). limitations: halving her strength and speed seems reasonable, and prevents her from doing any damage to the ship itself.

WEAKNESSES. in addition to her knowledge gaps about social convention and the function of the human world, malia is still struggling to control her abilities. she never had a were-pack to guide her; she knows all about being an animal, but not about being a shifter, or a human. she also shares the standard werewolf weaknesses, including: mistletoe and wolfsbane act as poison, inability to cross mountain ash, sensitivity to light and sound due to enhanced senses, general struggles with control (particularly aggression at the full moon).

Inventory:

1 pair of american flag shorts because they're hella
1 maroon half-sleeve shirt
1 set of underwear
1 other misc set of clothes
1 triskelion because that awkward moment when your friends won't tell you who your real dad is
1 potted wolfsbane plant for her to hate opening her locker to

Appearance:

malia has dark hair with considerable blonde highlighting. despite her thin build, she is tall (5'8"). her eyes are naturally brown, but her 'werewolf eyes' are blue because she has taken an innocent life. somehow one of her first priorities as a human seems to be learning the way of hairstyling.

Age: 16

S A M P L E S
Log Sample:

Only a week after her first jump, Security starts trying to condense the patrol-space by 'asking' passengers to move their rooms to lower floors. There are just two hundred passengers on the ship now, but they stretch out over thirty four floors—it's unreasonable. That much Malia can agree on. On the other hand, she doesn't especially feel like she needs anybody's security, and their 'asking' sounds a lot more like demanding.

"No," she says flatly, standing in the doorway of her room. When her confusion is met with equal parts from the others, she just presses her lips together, patiently waiting out the obligatory demand, and then promptly counters with the plainest of shrugs. "I'm not going."

She's done with being kicked out of her home. Humans had invaded her den—these humans—and made her unwilling to return. This ship had ripped her straight out of her home with her father. The new 'crew' wasn't going to force her to do it again. When part of their pack asks something of her, she does it because she owes them. She doesn't owe this security team anything.

"We don't need a security team." At least, she doesn't. She's been able to look out for herself for years, and while she doesn't love the idea of doing it again, she loves it a lot more than packing up and moving because someone said jump. Exasperated, she turns to look expectantly at Stiles for support.

Comms Sample:

The others told me that the fastest way to find out where to get something was just to broadcast over this thing. I need four feet of heavy chains and leather restraints.

[ A beat. She seems to recall a lecture, because she rolls her eyes a little bit. Right. Blah blah, human world, it's not polite to just demand things. Well it's going to be a lot less polite if the full moon comes when she's not expecting it and she eats everyone. ]

Please.

[ It sounds flat and painfully recited. ]