Scott had felt himself slipping away, the hum of the nebulizer and Stiles' panicked voice the only thing able to filter through the fog. There had been a moment of guilt, a slight pulling in his heart as Allison's shaking hand raked back and forth across his t-shirt before Stiles even arrived, but that had passed quickly as he fought the darkness pooling behind his eyes.
Thank God you're here, Scott thought to himself as he felt mist against his nose and tasted the albuterol on his lips, throat calming enough for him to attempt to say Stiles' name. He was afraid to look his best friend in the eye, wondered if he thought any less of him because of their fight earlier, so he just let Stiles hold his hand as the medicine filled his lungs more and more with each inhale.
Scott suddenly remembered being thirteen and waking up fighting for air, back painfully arching upwards each time he tried to inhale. His lips were moving, but there no words were coming out, his hand grazing his nightstand for any signs of his inhaler. He remembers how his eyes burned from being open so wide and the rough wallpaper against his fingertips and side of his face as he slid against the hallway wall to his parent's room.
Scott's fingers had gathered a mix of comforter and sheets when he went to put his hand down to shake his mother awake, his air-deprived brain unable to figure out why she wasn't there. His knees hinged, body ready to collapse, when his father hoisted him against him and started calling, screaming really, for the boy's mother. The last thing Scott remembers is hearing her feet bounding up the wooden stairs, and that's when he knew that they didn't sleep in the same room anymore.
And if it wasn't for Derek's booming voice and the way Scott could feel his feet pounding the stairs through the floor, he would have let himself blackout completely. But he fought it, harder this time not for Allison or even Derek, but for Stiles. Because Scott knew who Derek was going to blame, and for the first time in a long time Scott wished Stiles was the only one in the room, wished that it was just his best friend holding his hand and whispering corny words of encouragement that, coming from anyone else, Scott would just roll his eyes at.
But his asthma wasn't just about him anymore, had never really been, actually, at least since the day Stiles stayed after watching one of Scott's more dramatic attacks and sat with him as he did a breathing treatment. Which got Scott to thinking that maybe there were other things in his life that weren't just about him anymore as well, that maybe he'd forgotten that that was possible, and that maybe, just maybe, the hand holding that was going on at that specific moment was more vital to Stiles' well-being than Scott's. And so he finally tried to look his friend in the eye as a means of apologizing, but when he caught his friend biting his lip in nervousness, eyes unfocused and thoughts seemingly scattered seconds before Derek appeared, Stiles' "You really think I'm jealous of you?" sounded in Scott's head, heart tugging once again so fiercely that it made him lose any breath he'd regained, the darkness he'd been fighting finally able to take over.