Liquid Silver

Twenty Three

Brett left a little while later.

Jem probably should have gone with him since she had missed more than enough days of school this semester but Stiles and her dad both agreed she needed to stay home.

After he'd left, and Stiles had gone downstairs, she started trying to clean her sheets. She knew they wouldn't wash properly in the machine, and it would be an odd thing to have to explain to a cleaner, so she ran the sink and poured detergent into the bowl.  She only rubbed two corners of the sheets together before the water had stained a grey colour, losing its transparency and staining her hands all over again.

After she looked at the water, she threw up a few times in the toilet. She might have felt better in terms of her arm and her head, but that wasn't helping the fact that she'd never felt so sick about herself in her life.

When she looked in the mirror she wanted to smash it. She wanted to scrape her eyes out if it meant she could get rid of the godforsaken silver in them. When she stared at them she was filled with hate. She despised them. She didn't care if Brett thought they were beautiful, or her friends thought they were cool and unique.

They were awful. They were evil, and they were ruining everything.

Stiles found her an hour later on the bathroom floor, shaking with her knees tucked under her chin, tears streaming steadily down her cheeks. Her sheets were on the floor around her, making pools of water from where they were still soaked. He held her while she cried for a while longer, neither of them spoke, but her mind was racing.

You're all going to die

That's what she had seen. She had started to imagine Valkyrie as something separate inside of her. It wasn't Jem, it wasn't Jem's powers or enhanced abilities. It was like a virus and it was using her. That's how she saw the so called gift Derek had labelled it before. She wanted desperately for it to go away. She never asked for it, and she didn't want it.

She didn't understand how anyone could tell her that it wasn't a curse. That she wasn't being plagued to have to choose who was worthy of death and who could survive. She was literally a beacon for conflict, battles and deaths. Lydia was able to warn people of it, whereas she was the one who was going to make it happen in the first place.

She hated the power, but she hated herself more for not being able to stop it from controlling her.

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Stiles finally got her snapped out of her despair in the afternoon.

He quit the pity card and came into her room unannounced, where she was sitting, staring blankly at the wall trying to remember. She might have calmed down but her mind was still spinning. She had been with Liam and Hayden just a few hours ago and now they were both gone.

She couldn't grasp the severity of it completely, to a degree further than the sickly feeling she'd been stuck with for days now in the pit of her stomach. She needed to know where Liam was. She needed to know if he was okay, or if he needed her as much as she thought he did.

They had their ups and downs in the past, but out of the whole pack, sometimes it felt like he was the only one who understood what she was thinking. It helped of course that he was the only one her age, so they could bond over high school assignments and sophomore gossip. But he was also the most recent member of the pack.

He was new to all of this, and having someone there who was just as nervous and unfamiliar with all of this as she was helped so much. Especially when the older guys got all mature, or high and mighty about things. She needed him back safe.