Monsters | Stiles Stilinski

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟖𝟎

   GRIEF... ITS A FUNNY THING.

It's a natural response to loss yet there is nothing natural about the way it makes you feel. It's suffocating, soul destroying, gut-wrenching...it's painful. It hurts. Jennifer Blake once said in our English class that tears are the silent language of grief but personally, I think she was far off. In the four days since...that had happened I had no tears left to shed. I had no words to speak, no thoughts, no feelings. Everything was just numb and empty. I felt hollow inside, nothing but a shell of skin and bones.

The days blurred and they moulded into one whole mess, minutes passed by in hours and days passed by in seconds. It didn't make sense yet I was at no liberty to question it. Perhaps this was what grief was... maybe it was what it did. How was I to know? I was too young to understand what grief even was when I was nine. All I knew was that my mom had gone and she was never coming back. I grew up with that notion and accepted it every day.

This time? No. It was different. It wasn't just one person. It was Allison and Aiden. Everyone I knew who had been affected by this was either grieving one or the other. Scott didn't know Aiden enough to cry over his loss—he had every right to be sad over it but he didn't bond enough with him. He did, however, have the justification to grieve Allison. They had been each others first love. What they held for one another had been special. Ethan was the same. He could be sad over the loss of Allison but he grieved for his brother solely.

I grieved for them both.

Everything they were experiencing, I was experiencing double. I'd lost two of my closest friends, confidants, people... They had only lost one and because of that they had been able to progress through the stages of grief slowly but surely.

Denial quickly morphed into anger which led to a total and complete blackout. Derek told me that when he'd tried to take me home so Deaton could take care of Aiden I'd lashed out—refused to leave his side. The extent of emotion swirling around in my brain had somehow triggered the shifting process.

I was completely unaware of what I'd done but apparently it wasn't pretty. Derek had been the one to face my wrath. He'd willingly put himself on the receiving end of my claws which I'd made great use of. He had failed at trying to contain me, however, and eventually both Scott and Isaac had to intervene. Even then, them both and an injured Derek had struggled to restrain me enough for Deaton to sedate me.

I woke up two days later—two days ago—and I hadn't moved an inch. I laid in Derek's bed and I stared out of the window for forty-eight hours while clutching a pillow in an embrace.

I'd skipped out on the bargaining stage for the most part. I'd thought every second of every day about how I wished it could've been me instead but I never vocalised those thoughts. Stiles had once said to me death doesn't happen to you, it happens to those around you and at first I had no idea what he meant by it though now I wished I was still that naive.

I was stuck in the fourth stage...the depression stage. I couldn't eat, I couldn't drink. I couldn't bring myself to shower. All I could do was lie in bed and stare out of the window.

I'd lost count of the amount of people who had been to see me, how they had tried to coax me out of my pit but none of them succeeded. Melissa and the Sheriff had even been by but there was one person who hadn't... one person who I thought would and that twisted an abundance of feelings inside of me. It was like I was trapped inside a box and the glass walls were bulletproof. I couldn't break out.

Voices were hazy, people passed in a blur. They were so insignificant, I couldn't even remember what they said to me.

Derek never left. I saw him in the corner of my eye constantly. He would either be sitting on a chair, reading a book with one eye secretly on me or sitting on the edge of the bed. He tried to feed me, tried to get water into me. At one point he had even carried me into the bathroom and tried to get me to take a shower but I could just not bring myself to even move.