So, all that talk of alpha/emissary bonds the other day produced this weird little thing:
Emissary Stiles Stilinski returns to Beacon Hills to find that the Hale pack has been destroyed, except for Derek Hale.
Stiles Stilinski arrives back in Beacon
Hills the week before his sixteenth birthday.
He is late.
His father picks him up from the bus
station, and Stiles hugs him tiredly and tries not to notice how much older he
looks. It’s been five years since Stiles saw him last. Five years since the
family convinced John Stilinski that a trip to Poland was just what Stiles
needed to get over his mother’s death, and just what John needed to sort
himself out. Stiles remembers packing for a few weeks, but it’s been five
years.
His dad no longer smells like whiskey.
He no longer smells like home either.
Stiles stares out the window of his dad’s
cruiser at the familiar streets of Beacon Hills. Familiar, but somehow brand
new. Things aren’t exactly how he remembers them. Sometime in the last five
years his memories have faded, have cracked around the edges. They’re flawed. They’re
false in entirely unimportant ways that make Stiles worry that maybe none of
his memories can be trusted, and that everything he’s ever thought he knows is
build on a shifting foundation of sand.
The fire hydrant is on the other side of
the intersection than he remembers. The book store has a red awning, not a blue
one. The house at the end of the street has two stories, not one. Tiny things,
but a ball of anxiety sits heavily in his stomach. How can this be home when it
didn’t even stick in his memory right?
How can this be home when Stiles knows he
speaks with a slight accent now? When sometimes the first word he thinks is
Polish, not English. How can this be home when his dad steals glances at him
like he’s a stranger?
Stiles is a stranger, and he is set on a
stranger path than his dad could possibly know.
The house is the same as Stiles remembers,
but the dimensions have shrunk. Stiles was ten when he packed a bag and went
with his babcia.
It was only supposed to be for a few weeks.
“You remember the way to your room, right?”
his dad asks him. His voice sounds like it’s close to cracking.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Stiles lifts his suitcase
and carries up the stairs.
He passes through the ghost of a little boy
dragging his the other way, thump thump
thump all the way down.
shealwaysreads 