Liquid Silver

Five

It had been a few weeks since Jem had last had a nightmare. 

But that night she found herself tossing and turning, and waking up sweating what seemed like every half hour. 

She and Stiles had dropped Liam off at the school just as Mason was leaving. Jem had felt a ridiculous amount of sympathy for the beta as he stepped out of the car, promising himself he was going to tell Mason everything there and then. 

They didn't hang around to wait for him. This was something between the two friends, not for her to try and help out with. They'd all be better off if she just stayed out of it, regardless of how close she was to either of them.

To put her in an even more miserable mood when they got home, their dad had to come up with a semi motivational speech, half giving out and half praising them. She and Stiles had been sitting at the end of her bed, silently wondering where to go next when he'd come in. The moral of his lecture was that Stiles should keep trusting his instinct.

"If this guys really guilty, then all you need to do is watch and wait" 

It had been then that Stiles decided to point out that Dad wasn't wearing his wedding ring anymore. 

Jem knew it was unfair to feel resentment about it. Their mom had been gone for years now. She didn't want her dad to be alone for the rest of his life, obviously not, but it still felt weird to think about him seeing other women. 

There was a weird tension when they all went to bed. It was uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and Jem didn't like it at all. Stiles would probably stay a little sulky until he figured out whatever the hell he still thought there was to figure out about Theo. Her dad was most likely going to continue acting weird around her, not completely sure how to address the whole dating new people topic. 

She really just wanted to go to sleep so she could stop thinking about the wreck of an evening she'd just had but of course it didn't seem like the universe was going to be giving her that liberty today. 

Her first dream wasn't so bad. By that she meant she'd gotten used to it by now. She'd been having the same recurring nightmare since Mexico. First she'd wake up, choking on dust and dirt with tomb stones crushing her chest so she couldn't breathe.

Just when she thought her lungs were going to burst the stones would be lifted, by figures that had emerged from the dark around her. She'd think she was saved until she realised they were berserkers lifting the stones,  picking her up and laying her down onto a flat tomb stone. She was always completely helpless, paralysed by the nightmare. 

The worst part was when she recognised the eyes behind the masks, and the berserkers would start speaking. She knew they weren't supposed to be able to talk, but when the voices came through the mask she started screaming every time. The eyes and the voices, they belonged to her friends. Scott and Stiles, Malia, Liam, even her dad and Brett. 

She always woke up just before they covered her face with a mask of her own. And it didn't matter how many times she tried to convince herself it wasn't real, that all of that was over, she still got freaked out most nights of the week.

The rest of her dreams that night were new. She'd never had them before and she didn't want to have them again. One was back when she was a kid, sitting in the hospital room with her mother. Something Jem had said had upset her, and she was wailing, throwing her arms around the bed unable to leave the room because of all the wires and tubes she was dependent on. Jem was stuck to the spot, desperately begging her mother to stop, until she let loose the most awful, guttural scream Jem had ever heard.

Just like the screams she'd heard from Lydia.

The rest were just randomly compiled memories she'd rather had stayed uncovered. The alpha pack holding her hostage, or Stiles' possessed body haunting her every where she went.