absolution ☾teen wolf [slow updates]

four [friend or foe]

You know when you drop a coin on a flat surface, and just before it stills, it shakes and shudders and shimmies against the ground or table or whatever it's collided with, the sides blurring from one hard line to a mixture of frayed edges? Well, that's exactly how Aubrey's brain felt, four days on from her Derek Hale research extravaganza.

Her first week of school had passed in a flurry of hastily scribbled notes, greetings from faces to which she couldn't quite put names yet, and the sound of textbook pages slowly scraping against each other as they were turned. Yes, it had seemed pretty normal, and yes, she felt like she was finally settling in at Beacon Hills, but her brain couldn't stop reminding her of Stiles and Scott's strange behaviour. It was a niggling feeling that was strongest in the late hours of the evening, when she couldn't sleep, or during class, when she was supposed to be - emphasis on supposed to - concentrating. She was pretty sure that if she didn't find out what the two boys were up to soon, her grades would start dropping, due to lack of concentration and sleep.

Her brain was that coin, hitting the ground again and again as it tried to even itself out; her mind refused to cease scattering until the balance was restored - only, the balance couldn't be restored. Not until someone let her in on what was going on, and that was proving to be fairly difficult. For a girl with pretty strong powers of persuasion when it had come to her parents - wanting to stay out a little later, or pleading for those beautiful Doc Martens that she had so desperately desired - Aubrey was finding it near impossible to uncover a way to pry any information about Derek Hale out of Scott and Stiles.

Like when Scott had pottered into the café whilst Aubrey was on her Tuesday evening shift - in a daydream-like state, probably thinking of Allison - and she had fired questions at him while she was making his coffee until he just left without the beverage, not even accepting his money back. He had been rather stony-faced during the interrogation, and had managed to pretty much avoid her for the rest of the week (somehow, she got the feeling that Scott McCall just didn't like her). But hey, she had gained a free coffee from that experience; a small bonus in her desperate situation.

Looking back on her multiple encounters with Stiles, though, they had been a completely different story. When she cornered him in the library during Wednesday's free period, starting out with innocent questions about comic books and then becoming more direct and serious with her line of questioning, he'd hissed at her to keep her voice down and begged her to stop interrogating him. And the previous day, when she had sat next to him in biology class, he'd insisted that it wasn't 'his story to tell', and that she, in his words, 'shut the hell up about Derek Hale and stop copying his answers'. Okay, so Aubrey wasn't great at biology, but she knew that she was great at interrogating people, and working stuff out. Fitting information together was her thing. It was what she did. But at the moment, she was completely and utterly stumped.

She had discussed the matter many times with Will and Ezra, sending them multiple links to different articles about Derek Hale and repeating every detail to them over and over again. Anyways, it was more interesting than hearing Ezra gush about Jane, or whatever her name was, and Will seemed to agree that something was weird, but he couldn't put his finger on what exactly was so out of the ordinary. Ezra had suggested that Derek was a vampire, before returning to texting the girl who had apparently not replaced Aubrey, although for the first time in all their years of being a trio, she actually felt closer to Will than to Ezra. It was peculiar; Ezra was the glue that held the three of them together.

"It's probably better off like this," Will had told her on Thursday night, in a private Skype call. "You know, with you guys in different states."

"Him in a state of joy, and me in a state of depression?" Aubrey had replied glumly, scrolling through Tumblr as she talked to her friend.