Send me “black bird” for a darker memory of my muse’s past
"A memory, huh?" the boy asks, grin too wide and eyes too sharp as he glances over his shoulder to meet the she-wolf’s gaze. There is a darker edge within his own amber eyes, something that is mean or bitter or full of regret. Or perhaps all of these things (and perhaps none of them at all).
He holds Jess’ gaze for a moment longer, all wolfish behavior despite the fact that he is still very much apparently human: dominant and aggressive enough to stand toe-to-toe with Alphas, baring teeth at them and betas and omegas alike. Foolhardy or brave, it doesn’t really matter. Stiles refuses to back down from a fight nowadays, stands his ground with chin high and challenge in his gaze—and no one can quite understand why or how or even when.
Turning forward to once more face the river whose bank they’re sitting at, the teenage boy picks up a decent-sized pebble from next to his hip and inspects it for just a moment before his arm moves back and the rock gets launched into the air. It spins ‘round several times, over and over again, eventually landing in the middle of the stream with a loud, satisfying ‘plop!’
"So there’s this guy. Pretty much his entire family dies all in one go and, at the time, all he thinks that’s left of it is a basically braindead uncle, himself, and an older sister. A couple years pass, a crapton of shit ends up happening, supernatural things start coming back out of the woodwork in Beacon Hills—and the sister comes back. She gets killed in a set-up ambush, the brother doesn’t hear from her in a couple of days, he comes back to see what happened to her. Enter two really, really dumb teenagers who hear about a dead body on a police scanner one of them shouldn’t have had in the first place and—being the really, really dumb teenagers that they are, they go looking for it.”
Stiles pauses in the story at that, chewing absently at his thumb as he thinks. The silence doesn’t last long because the teen does know where the story needs to lead towards, but—this is something that he’s never actually said aloud and, yeah, he can only imagine just how strong the scent of shame must be for the she-wolf.
"One of the dumb teenagers gets bit, turns into a werewolf, more shitty things happen—there’s a ton of screaming and terror and fire and blood and flailing and Jeeps getting damaged by a certain feral ex-Alpha dickhead and more screaming and… you pretty much get the picture. Lots of stuff ends up happening, most of it not good, huge chunk of it a weird mix of a Scooby Doo episode where the monsters are real and Murder She Wrote. With more blood. And screaming. I mentioned the screaming, right? But—the part that pretty much everything else was supposed to lead into was layered in under everything else. Because some of the crapton of events that happened, the two really dumb teenagers actually managed to set the brother up as a murder suspect. …a couple of times, actually, but let’s not sweat the details. What’s important was…"
He can feel his heart race, the way that its beating came too quick, too fast—a hummingbird’s wings pounding against the cage that his ribs had become, demanding to get out and have its own sort of freedom; the tension-sweat that gathers at his temples and slowly trickles over his cheeks to drip off of the edge of Stiles’ jaw feels clammy, sickly and wrong and the teen brushes it away with the sleeve of his tee.
"The family that died? They died on this land. Generations of that family lived and died on this land. It’s their land, owned and claimed by them—theirs, no matter what any sort of government might say otherwise. Blood and bone and ash and fang and claw, it’s theirs. The woods are theirs. The sister came back home when she didn’t have to, not necessarily. She died trying to find out what was going on here and to prepare to defend Beacon Hills against it. She sacrificed her life, no matter that she was ambushed in an unfair fight, because she came here to defend and to protect. As her family always did. And the brother? Might not have originally come back to fight and defend, but that’s what he ended up doing. More than that, though—he buried his sister in his family’s land, gave her the honors that he could remember, protected her spirit against all who would try to disturb her… and the two really, really dumb teenagers not only stumbled upon her grave but were cruel enough in the way that all kids usually are—because all they really care about is me, me, me, right?—to family, sister, and brother to desecrate the grave by digging her up. The kicker, though…? The teenagers set the brother up as a murder suspect for the sister’s death, yeah. But."
Stiles shakes his head then, slouching forward to rest his chin atop his knees while hugging his legs closer still to the lanky form of his body.
"But never once did they apologize for the desecration to the sister’s grave. Still haven’t, not even to this day. I mean, sure, the stupid teenagers could say that there are lots of reasons for it—too much time’s passed by now, they better understand the pain the brother must have felt during the time, blah blah blah. But those would just be bullshit excuses. Because how do you apologize for something that’s inexcusable?"
He falls silent after that, eyes going heavy-lidded as he stares out over the water. The amber-eyed teen’s expression is pensive and obviously lost in memory, no matter the fact that he’s not spoken a single word after that last bit. Eventually, however, Stiles begins to stir as he hides away the darker thoughts and the quieter, more serious expressions: when he moves, it comes in a sudden burst of movement as he abruptly jumps up to his feet, clapping his hands gaily.
"All right, Jess! Storytime’s over. Time to head back into town; c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, let’s get a move on it~"
And it’s as if the energetic, high-spirited, chatterbox, and pushy Stiles never left at all.
