Surviving Spirit

Chapter 1

Y/N POV

Today had been a really rough day for me. I had been missing my baby brother Stiles and my dad more than usual. Spencer had been gone in Vegas taking care of his mom for the past 3 days because she had an episode and Bennington Sanitarium asked him to come and see her.

Diana having episodes reminded me of when my mother was in Beacon Hills Memorial as her dementia got worse and worse, to the point where she no longer remembered my brother and I. I had never told Spencer about what happened to my mother, or that I felt like moving to Virginia from California sometimes made me feel like I abandoned my dad and Stiles. He only knew that I was from California and that I had a brother and my dad was a sheriff for our small town. He knew I talked to my father and brother on a frequent basis, whenever I wasn't working as a family lawyer working with cases regarding child custody.

I went into this kind of law because when my mother died, the state tried to take my brother away from my father because they believed with his long hours and dangerous profession as a cop, he wasn't able to take care of Stiles on his own, but with my amazing people skills, I managed to not only vouch for my father's caregiving skills, but convince the state to leave him in his care, as he had no other family to go to. After the case was settled, I took over care of my brother, since he was only 11 when she died and I was 21, and I had just finished my undergrad at Georgetown, which my mother was so proud of.

Today was 6 years since she had been gone. As I sat there in my own world on the balcony of mine and Spencer's shared apartment, I didn't even hear the front door open and Spencer come in with his suitcase in tow.

SPENCER POV

It was about 4pm when I finally arrived home from Vegas, and I could not wait to just relax with my beautiful girl Y/N. I opened the front door, and saw all the lights were off and the apartment dark, which was odd because she didn't work today. Then I saw the sliding door to our balcony open and as the wind blew the curtains around, I saw her standing against the railing with tissues in her hand. I walked towards her, careful not to scare her.

"Y/N? Baby? What's wrong?" I asked as I wrapped my arms around her little waist.

"Oh! I didn't even know you were home! How's your mom doing?"

"She's fine now. She kept asking about you. But more about that later... What's got you so upset?"

"Its nothing, really Spence. I'll be fine." She said. I knew she was lying. She never wanted to 'stress me out with her problems', as she put it.

"I know you're lying to me, Y/N. Please baby, I want to help you. I'll do whatever I can..."

She sighed heavily, wiped her eyes, then turned to me.

"She's been gone 10 years today, Spence. My mom Claudia had been gone for 10 years..." Y/N said as she started to cry, almost sobbing.

"I'm sorry baby, I didn't know. I know how much you miss her. If it wont make you too upset, can you tell me a bit more about what happened to her? You've never really told me..."

After that, she went quiet for a minute. Then she went on to tell me how her mom had developed frontotemporal dementia, how she suffered for a while, eating things she normally wouldn't and eating them in mass quantities, and eating objects, like dolls and paper. Towards the end of her illness, Claudia forgot Y/N, Stiles, and their father, but they still visited every day. The night Claudia died, Y/N and Stiles were at the hospital while their dad had been working. By the time he got to the hospital that night, Claudia had passed, Stiles was sitting in a chair outside the room crying, and Y/N was talking with the doctors about what needed to be done next. When her mom died, she had just left the room for a minute to get Stiles some juice from the cafeteria, when the alarms had gone off and the doctors sat Stiles outside and tried to revive Claudia, and it worked, but only for a few minutes. Y/N went in and her mom told her to take care of her brother and dad, then the alarms went off again and she was pushed into the hallway with Stiles. After all the commotion stopped, the doctors broke the news to Y/N and her brother and she held it together for her brother and her father, and she always put them before herself, but no one ever really checked to see how she was doing.