Only He saw

So he had thought.

Two hours passed in a flurry of Peter contacting everyone he thought might be able to help Stiles, but nobody could. The boy had abruptly woken, then fainted, and had since been asleep, a restless, sick slumber that plagued Peter with worry and confusion...when repeated to The Sherriff, what Stiles had said still made little to no sense. The only plausible option was to wait for Stiles to wake up again, hopefully, this time for a while longer.

Another seven hours and thirty-six minutes passed: frantic calls and angry shouting, obsessive anxiety. Peter, joined now by the boy's father spent this time pouring over a million ways to analyse what he said, but neither could fathom what it meant.

But, finally, Stiles woke up.

As he woke from a groggy, dull slumber, he gazed at Peter sleeping fitfully by his side. It took him a few seconds to register the situation, and the events returned to him in a torrent of pain and fear. And with it, the return of new-found memories had come.

Stiles slowly brought a shaky hand to tentatively rest on the back of his head, his increasing heart only slowing slightly when he realised there was no injury. But fast, sharp, panicked breaths overtook his rational thought, and as the memories of only a few weeks ago came back, from behind a veil of deceit and torture. He didn't give up information to the Argents! When this registered in his desperate brain, breaths were harder to control and they rushed out of him, claiming his sanity and waking the stupified wolf next to him.

Peter shot up from his seat, standing next to the boy, desperately wondering what to do to help the gasping, broken child. It was apparent that he was having a panic attack, so Peter urgently placed calm and steady hands in Stiles' and commanded him to listen.

"Breathe in and out, with me...okay? In....and out.....In...and out..."

This continued for the next three minutes as the newly awakened Sheriff watched with dismayed, baited breath. Had he made his son feel like...this? He'd failed him. Absorbed in his own realm of emotions, he started to shake, steadying a heavy head with weak arms, deadly aware of his son's breakdown, yet following that with a comparable collapse of sanity.

Peter looked over, his decreasing sympathy for the man flaring in alarm as he saw John shaking, head in hands, the picture of insanity.

"John..." He murmured, still purposely squeezing Stiles' hands to banish the panic attack. "Stiles is awake...you need to speak to him..." All three people in the room suddenly felt the tension, between Stiles and Peter, Stiles and John, and the strained understanding of John and Peter.

"Peter, she was wrong." Stiles' voice rasped through the tangible agitated aura of the room, conjuring the attention of The Sheriff and Peter. The boy looked paler than ever, the healing cut on his arm a scar of remembrance, joined by a look of dawning horror and fear. His ashen features threatened another panic attack, so as the Sheriff looked on confusedly, Peter hurried to rectify their argument.

"Please...It was my fault and...you don't have to explain anything you don't want to for me! I should've trusted you, and...I do now! I trust you over all of that pack." Peter squeezed his hand anxiously, looking yearningly into quivering, wet eyes.

"No...she was so, so wrong..." Stiles' eyes filled with tears as he burrowed back into a fresh, painful memory: a hypothetical knife in his skin.

"...Stiles, what is it?"

"God, Stiles what the hell happened?"

Peter and John's voices chorused agitatedly in the hope of uncovering the source of Stiles worry. But they feared for what they'd find.

Reaching out with the strength of a startled animal of prey, Stiles gripped his fathers and Peters hands, before jolting and shuddering, his eyes rolling back in his head. The two other men sat rigidly, watching, seeing.

It's dark, cold. A figure leans over me and I choke, gasping and sobbing from a raw, pained throat. One figure comes into focus, an older man. He's followed by a younger, quieter man. Gerard Argent. His white hair framing a psychotic, twisted beaming, grin. He's grinning at me.

"Oh, Mr Stillinski, you don't have to do this..." The old man smiled sickeningly, tapping a scalpel threateningly on a metal tray as he watched me amusedly. My bloodied hands scrambled at the cuffs that tied them down, and I whimpered, terrified of the pain I was sure to face, the pain I'd been facing for hours now.

"Are you going to tell me what your little mutt friends are planning?"

The old man sneered as I shake my head vehemently, too exhausted to say a word. As much as my pack has changed lately, I refuse to tell The Argents a thing! I sob as I see him reach for the tray again and watch with wide eyes as he procures a set of tongues and some more scalpels. He leers over me, rife, plagued breath engulfing me in a disgusting cloud of vile smell.

"Luckily for me...I found a...friend...willing to make something up to...extract...the memories from you. The problem for you, my dear, is that you have to stay awake for the entire, rather gruesome procedure. I'd prefer not to dabble in witchcraft, but the situation calls for it. You'll be sorry if you let me down..." He chuckled maniacally as my breathing quickens and I manage to dredge up a single word, over and over again.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no....." I cry out as my tears roll down my face onto the exposed, tortured skin, stinging with unfathomable pain.

I clench my eyes shut, determined not to watch yet horribly aware of the noise emanating from inside me.

"And the beauty of it is...after it's done, there won't be a mark left, and you won't remember a thing!" He snorts, seemingly overwhelmed by the demonic hilarity of his distorted surgeon's scenario.

Agonizing pain rips through my head, starting with my ear then spreading excruciatingly to every corner of my being, like a web clinging to every crevice and crack...I feel my very soul being ripped apart. He takes my memories...staring into the very works of my brain before shoving it back, pretending he'd never touched them, then he took the memory of the intolerable pain he'd created, and all the thoughts that went along with it. They were gone for good...

Or so he had thought.

As the boy pulled the two men out of the flashback, all three gasped, a raw pain-filled chorus, a requiem for the sanity of the boy, and the pain he could now remember.

Millions of thoughts raced through their heads...For Stiles, the terrifying truth that had returned after a similar head injury...the realisation that he had been hurt. Tortured... And all of the agony that came crashing back into his world, a torrent of emotions and panic engulfing him in entirety.

For Peter, the horrifying guilt of not believing the boy, and the immense sympathy after seeing the torture he had endured...all for the pack that now despised him!

For The Sheriff, a profound view of a new, twisted world he never thought he'd find in Beacon Hills, in his very own son. He hurt doubly, infinitely, for his sons remembered pain, for not being there to talk to him...and the intense realisation that the black and white world he was living in was now a sickening technicolour showing.

They had all been lied to, and silently, they clung to each other, unwilling to breach the event that had been uncovered...but pulling at the others like driftwood after a sunken boat. So, so much was not what it seemed to be.