Drag Me Down Quick (So they don't notice)

Deal

     The Nogitsune was gone. At least that's what everyone kept saying. Stiles, they said, you're okay, you're safe. He's gone, and he's not coming back. 

     Stiles didn't feel okay. He didn't feel safe. He didn't get how anyone else could either. Not around him at least. How Scott could even look him in the eye after... Stiles couldn't even say her name. He saw, sometimes, the way Scott looked at him, especially when Stiles lost his temper, but sometimes just when he thought Stiles wasn't looking. That barely disguised fear, the heart-rending loss. Stiles had never wanted his friend, his brother, to feel that kind of loss, and he'd never even dreamed that he would be the one responsible for it. 

     He had tried to live with it at first. It was no less than he deserved, but he would never hurt them again so he could deal with the guilt. But then he had started feeling something, something deep within his bones, a darkness, coiling and thrashing just beneath his skin. He knew what it was. And he would be damned if he let it out.

     So Stiles pulled away. First it was just excuses, the no I can't come to the pack meeting, I've got homework kind of thing. He signed himself up for summer school just so he wouldn't be lying. The good part was that once he ducked out of enough of them, they just stopped inviting him. Lydia always let him know where they were meeting but after enough brush offs she mostly gave up. 

     Stiles knew that normally his pack wouldn't have let him push them away, but things weren't normal now. Stiles wasn't normal. So why should they treat him like he was? They had fought him, and he had killed their own. 

     Stiles pushed himself into summer school. He took online classes as well and spent the time that he wasn't buried in school work on fixing his jeep obsessively. The plus side, she now ran better than she ever had before. Stiles loved duct tape. 

     Scott had stopped coming over. Stiles wasn't entirely sure if it was because he couldn't stand to be around Stiles or if it was because of all the nasty things Stiles had said to him. Either way it didn't matter. The only person who wouldn't leave him alone was his dad, and Stiles felt both gratitude and annoyance at that fact. He knew that if he ever hurt his dad he would never forgive himself, even more so then he already couldn't. But Stiles couldn't bring himself to push his dad away too. It was childish he knew, but his dad was his dad, and it would hurt too much. Stiles knew he was a coward but at that point he didn't care. 

     So Stiles sat in his room, forcing school work down his own throat trying to contain the anxiety that constantly writhed just under the surface of the facade he had created for his father. He found himself taking more and more Adderall, forcing himself to eat over the nausea, and taking way more sleeping pills than was healthy because he couldn't deal with the nightmares and if he took three ambien every night there weren't any. He knew he was building a tolerance and that taking pills for more than a week could lead to depressed breathing and death. He took more pills. Dying in his sleep sounded peaceful. Much better than slitting his wrists, taking pain meds, or hanging himself, any of the other ways he had considered it. 

     But then he found something.

     A way to fix it. A way to undo everything he had done. 

     It was an accident that he stumbled onto it in the first place. He was just researching for his mythology class online, but the website he unknowingly found himself on seemed to have less to do with mythology and more to do with witchcraft and demons. Stiles was browsing out of curiosity when he found it. 

     He had never really believed in demons, at least not the black-eyed sulfur kind (the Nogitsune was a whole other deal) but the site was way too detailed to just be for kicks. He hoped, anyways. It didn't take long to make up his mind. He wanted to die already, might as well do it to undo everything he hated about himself, or most of it anyways.