Sybil McCall didn't remember what had started the argument between her mom and dad; she had been in her bedroom, trying to go to sleep, when the shouting started. She didn't remember crawling out of bed and creeping out of her room to investigate. She certainly didn't remember her dad pushing her out of the way in his drunken stupor, or how her mother had screamed when she had tumbled down the stairs and slammed her head against the hardwood floor with a solid thunk.
What Sybil did remember, with that uncertain clarity someone recounts dreams, was a girl much older than herself, practically a woman grown to her own five year old perspective. She didn't look much like her, despite the dark hair they shared, but some primal part of Sybil's mind recognized the girl. It was her. It was her, but not her. Her before she was Sybil. And this Not Sybil came to her in flashes, sometimes alone, other times with other people whose faces sent pangs of heartache through her. She loved these people, the Not Sybil, and Sybil herself missed them terribly. She saw a woman she knew was her mother, but not her mom now, and a man that was her father. He didn't drink near as much as her dad now. She loved her parents now, but she loved these others just as much.
She saw the girl grow up, and she saw, in terrifying flashes, the girl's life being cut brutally short.
Sybil didn't remember how her dad had pushed her down the stairs, but when she woke after her brief blackout, she broke into tears anyway. Cried, because the memories of the Girl Before Sybil meshed so seamlessly with her own that she no longer knew where she was, didn't recognize the mother holding her in her arms and wanted the mother from Before, wanted to know why she was so little when she had just been so big, wanted to know why she was being called Sybil when she wasn't, she hadn't been Sybil, not before, right?
Her heavy, keening sobs had sent her into an asthma attack so bad that her mom - and only her mom - had taken her to the emergency room after she had stopped breathing.
The doctors initially blamed her confusion on the knock to her head. She stayed at the hospital overnight, and her mom had stayed with her, and the next day, when they went home, her father was gone.
It was because of her mother - the current mother, who she loved so very much - that she learned to understand the dreams and nightmares and confusion that followed. Her mother who took her to doctors. Her mother who held her close at night and brought her back to Sybil - and later, Emsy.
Still, her mother was not enough to stop the dreams.
The Girl from Before had had a best friend, like Emsy had Stiles. And that best friend had watched shows. And in one show, there had been a boy who had her last name and had her best friend and had too many people around him get hurt and die. The boy had been called Scott. The boy had been turned into a monster.
Emsy knew, in that primal part of her brain that couldn't be denied, that there was truth in her dreams. That they were memories. That it should have been Scott here, and not her, not Emsy. But it was Emsy there, not the boy Scott. She had befriended Stiles Stilinski in pre-k and asked him to rename her so that she could have a nickname that sounded matched her last name like his had. She was her momma's little girl and who never got to see her dad any more and nevermind what life she had had before. That had passed, and she didn't see the point in trying to get it back. She didn't want it back, because there were still nights she woke crying for her mom when she saw just what had ended the Girl from Before.
This life did not belong to the Boy She was Meant to be, not anymore. It was her's. And she knew, in the uncanny way that children knew things, that the Universe would try and force upon her all that pain and death and general unpleasantness that the boy had lived through, and while someone who didn't have a clue what was to come might have let it all happen, she was not one such person.
Emsy McCall had a lot of work to do.