RUNNER ━━━━ stiles stilinski. ¹

26

 {2.6}

"false sense of security"

***

"YOU KNOW, ON AVERAGE, if someone was suffering from a gunshot wound they could bleed out in five minutes."

 The clock was ticking too loudly. It was all he could focus on. His brain should be moving at one thousand miles a minute, but all he could focus on was the clock. 

 Tick tick tick - but how was that fair? How could time drag on even now, when it doesn't matter? How could time march at the same pace now as it did then, yet hold less impact? How could seconds mean less from different perspectives?

 After all - they were just seconds. Sixty in a minute, three thousand six hundred in an hour, eighty-six thousand four hundred in a day; they dictated movement and purpose and capability; but how did they matter? How did they matter now - how did they continue to tick even after the damage had already been done? There were three hundred seconds in five minutes. Sixty, five times in a row. 

 How could a life be measured in three hundred seconds?

 He tapped his foot against the ground, bouncing it faster than the ticks from the corner of the room. "And like-" he swallowed, wishing that he couldn't feel how red his face was, or how he felt like he was about to cry. "That's not a lot of time, you know? But when blood loss starts, it can be really hard to stop it... or at least stop it for good. Because like, a paper cut could clot in three seconds, right? But if it doesn't get the chance - the blood could just keep coming and coming-"

 He closed his eyes and saw it. Blood soaking through his leg, onto his stomach, pooling underneath him like a shadow that can exist without the sun. His ashen face, the mark on his shoulder -

 "Stiles."

 He opened his eyes. The counselor was staring at him from across the desk; and he couldn't tell if the concern on her face was fabricated or not. Her smile certainly was - who smiled at a student spouting bullshit about bleeding out? Ms. Morrell folded her hands and leaned forward ever so slightly, and Stiles wondered if that was a tactic to get him to open up. Like a false sense of security. "You've been through significant trauma." She said, and the boy resisted the urge to scoff. "It's normal for you to feel these intense emotions-"

 "Intense emotions?" His eyebrows flew up on his head, and his mouth began to do the thing where it moved faster than his brain. "What am I, the main character in a romantic comedy?"

 She didn't seem deterred. "What about Matt?"

 Stiles leaned back further in his seat and crossed his arms, feeling the way the sharp beat of his heart coensided with the pulse of his wrist. Still faster than the clock, it seemed. The name sent a sharp flash of anger through his chest. "What about him? Drowning's not even that bad. They say it's peaceful -" he waved his hand in an effort to appear offhanded. "More peaceful than bleeding out, that is."

 "Are you saying you hope Matt found some peace in his last moments?"

 "I don't feel sorry for him."

 "Can you feel sorry for the nine-year-old Matt who drowned?"

 Stiles remained silent for a long moment. Long enough Ms. Morrell might've thought that he was deep in thought or deliberation. In actuality, he was counting the ticks on the clock. The hour was almost over, and he had someplace to be. Finally, he spoke up. "Some dumbasses pushed him into a pool and he couldn't swim. And instead of being normal and going to therapy or taking up violin; he decided to take out his anger by murdering a bunch of people. That doesn't really seem like a forgivable connection."