It's not anything like he imagined it would be. It's cruel and it's dark and it's knives glinting in the dark, humanoid-shaped shadows twitching in the moonlight. Stiles thinks it might make sense, in a twisted sort of way. Madness is never what you believe it will be. Madness distorts the lines between reality and imagination, as thin as they can be.
Deaton had told them that a door would be opened and Stiles had pictured flames, searing flesh, and blood-spattered walls. He imagined shackled wrists and ankles, electrocution, and wailing moans.
Instead what he got was darkness. It's the best way he can describe it, really. It's darkness at the edges of his vision, sweeping inwards with each inhalation of breath, like he's sucking in more and more until every inch of his body is full of it. Until it's seeping from his pores, a shadow-sword of anger and rage and chaos.
Deaton never warned him about the murder flowing through his veins, never warned him about the creature wearing his face or the betrayal that has somehow been hardwired into his nerves. He feels stilted with manic energy, like there's a constant static current underneath his skin. He wants to claw himself to bits, wants to tear away nerve and muscle until there's nothing but bone and the marrow burrowed deep. He wants to destroy himself.
He's living, breathing, walking, but he's retreated inside the shell of who he used to be. Now, he's something that has control, something that smiles with sick confidence and who's fingers twitch with excitement instead of nervousness at the sight of blood and pain and death.
He has a sickness swimming beneath his skin, curling around his muscles like ravenous infection. There's a constant vertigo inside his skull, distorted shapes and blurred edges around what's right and what's wrong. He's drowning in his own blood- choking on the veins that tangle through his body and nobody fucking told him to not open the door.
He knows the thing inside of him was made for evil, was made for the sole purpose of destruction and death. Stiles wonders if he was born for it too, was born to be the skin of sin and inevitable annihilation.
It's hard not to believe it, to not get lost in the riddles and taunts and the deception that's persistently slithering up his spine into the nerves of his brain stem. Stiles is trying to hold himself together—stiches up the shambled remains of his mind with makeshift needles created from his splintered bones. It's painful but he's used to it by now. Agony has built itself into him, made a shelter of his ribs and sits heavy against his lungs.
The panic is second nature and he doesn't count his fingers anymore because there is no reality when you live inside of yourself, when your body is a meaty cage full of sharp teeth and bandaged faces.
Time is meaningless and Stiles had given up long ago on trying to keep track of the days that tick by endlessly while he rips apart his friends and family and his entire life. His head is a bloodbath, his hands even dirtier, and Stiles hopes to fucking god that he doesn't live through this.
His resolve is a death wish and it's fucking hilarious because he'd warned Lydia about dying, about the way it would tear at his insides until he was broken and bloodied, rotting from the inside out.
But he has to complete the cycle, has to wait until the pack puts him down like a horse with a broken leg, except he's just a human with a broken mind and chaos itself infested inside his body.
He was born to die and it's this thought that gives him sanity. He was born to be destruction, to be destroyed—circle of life and death—and this time Stiles doesn't choke around his own blood when Derek, or maybe Scott, sticks heavy-bladed knives into his skin to kill the thing hiding beneath his bones.
A/N: This was supposed to be longer and have some sick, twisted Sterek in it, but I finished it up when I was tipsy and my brain was just like, nope you are going to post it as a ficlet and concentrate on other, more important fics you shit. So this ended up being really short and to the point but yeaaaaah. Hope you guys enjoyed it!