the bite | stiles stilinski¹

CHAPTER I - CRUEL SUMMER

~~~

~~~

'maybe it should have been me.'

~~~

Scientists say that everybody is born with two fears, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises and from the moment of our birth, those fears are engraved into our minds. And as we grow those fears do too and things that once didn't scare us become our worst nightmares, the monsters under our beds or in the closet and the dark, all fears that nobody thought to give a second look to. Maybe it was because they knew they were simply figments of our imaginations, chemical imbalances in the brain or simply tricks of our childhood minds. But for some people, when they aged, they grew away from the monsters and being scared of the dark, the nightlights that once sat in the corner of their rooms being forgotten and their parents no longer had to check under their bed before they slept, but for some their fears would consume and everything about them became more scary. Although fear was something that made them human, they cried when they were sad and they bled when they were hurt. As far as anybody in the town of Beacon Hills knew, they were all simply human.

For Lilac Collins, she was rather well aquatinted with the emotion, she was all too familiar with it, she was used to the constant clammy palms and the feeling of a glass bottle against her salty lips, she was used to being scared all the time. The cards that life had dealt her were not the luck of the draw and everyday she lived with the pain that had become her normal, pain that she hid rather well. Most days she wore a mask, more commonly known as a smile, one that to anybody who gave her a second glance would believe she was okay. It was a smile so sickening it made her face hurt but it was better than dealing with the constant looks of pity or whispers as she passed her classmates in the hall.

She was so used to living the chore that now came along every time she awoke that she could predict everything that would happen in her day before it even happened, every morning she pulled her tried eyes awake, she stumbled to her bathroom and hit her toe on the same spot of the doorframe, she knocked every item from the cupboard above her sink looking for the bottle of aspirin she found herself constantly restocking. Every sunrise before she awoke from her sleep, she knew that the moment her eyes opened the world would be a blur and that the day would be filled with numbness, the same way it was the day before and the day before that. But she knew that when she woke things would change and all eyes would be back on her, she knew that from the moment she stepped in that dreaded building, her whole demeanour would falter.

And as her heavy eyelids slowly pulled themselves apart, that same pain began to seep in, the weight that disappeared when she slept falling back onto her shoulders, she felt that same familiar ache run through her body the same way it did the morn before and she knew that the moment the sunlight began to hit her gaze that everything in her room, even the table beside her bed would simply become a vague shape. Her body began to toss around from the spot she laying looking for an inch of comfort from her bed but as her hand began to wander looking for her phone, she did not feel her blankets or a bed for that matter, instead under her fingertips she felt dampened leaves that now scattered the ground and the softened mud that now coated them and as she began to piece together where she was, the fear that had already pitted inside of her only began to grow.