Prompt: Subtle release
It was the little things, in the end. Scott becoming closer with Isaac, the look the Lydia had in her eyes when she saw Jackson. The fact that no one had warned him about Peter (he was still the scariest thing he had faced) and what happened in the basement were also part of it, of course. But Stiles had no room to care.
He understood that it was his fault for starting all this. Without him, Scott would have never been in the woods that night. If Allison and him got together, well, there would be no need for her parents to come after them. (He didn't think about the flip side. How his dad and the other cops would have been in the woods all night with Peter, who would have definitely turned them. How Derek would be dead, poisoned by the wolfsbane bullet Kate shot him with.)
Stiles took to visiting his mother's grave. Even with nothing happened on the supernatural end (Stiles deleted the texts without looking now. There were only a couple anyways.) He could no longer connect to his father. They were standing on opposite sides of an abyss, in which fell everything that happened over the past few months. Even shouting had no effect. The banter (which had once been easy) was strained, and the house felt like it had just after the funeral, when the Sheriff was the one coming home late at night and sleeping on the couch. Not his father – the Sheriff.
He would sit next to the headstone, fingering the pill bottles in his jacket. It would be so easy, he thought. Every time he went to raise that first handful, he could hear her voice. But it was muted, and got more and more fragmented the more he thought about it.
In the end, it was simple. There was no one home and no one on his phone. He sat next to the grave with a bottle of Jack stolen from the liquor cabinet and downed the pills. With each hand full came a subtle release.