A/N: Just a few things this time:
1. I never proofread. I'm sorry. I just don't. And my beta's always leave me, so. :P
2. Why aren't you listening to Blind Pilot? Do it now!
3. I refuse to give up on this fic. I don't care if there's only a handful of people reading it. I love y'all too much. I love this story too much.
4. I chickened out on the Stiles/Chris. In Eastsiders the relationship turns rather explicit. If any of you are highly disappointed in this, lemme know and I'm sure we can work something out. ;)
That's all.
Stiles
You can't help that it feels like mourning.
Sure, you're already through three or four of the stages, but that doesn't change how empty the house feels, how there's memories of him left like soot stains in every room, on every wall. You rent a steam cleaner and wash each one. You paint them, make new pictures to cover them up, take a sledge hammer to one you guess isn't load-baring. It doesn't help. It still feels like a mausoleum, but in a sick twist of fate, you're the one left to haunt it.
After all, he's the one that got set free, to his new boy, his new future, his new life. You're the one drowning in the memories of what was, surrounded— swallowed by them. You're the one who's been passing out drunk in the halls, wrapped up in a comforter that stinks of sour sweat…. You're the one who didn't make it out alive.
Isaac comes by, every night at first, and then less and less. He's got shit of his own to deal with, shit you don't have the capacity to care for at the moment. He was forgiving for a while, but you both knew, from the beginning, that he wasn't going to get dragged in the mire, that although you had given in to the fate of it all, he wasn't going to go down like that, not even for you. So you let him go, and somehow you were happy. He's stronger than you, smarter too.
You only make it back to work because your dad threatens to fly out, to come and pity you, try and nurse you back to health like a wounded animal. Honestly, you're more of a horse with a shattered leg than a bird with a broken wing. Two barrels straight to the face.
But you don't want to pull him into it, can't stand to think of the way he'd look, the things he's say, what he'd think. He'd play the blame game, and he always wins. So you get out of your sweats, shower, stagger to the gallery, slump behind the desk. Chris comes in every so often, rubs a hand along your shoulder, down your back, looks you in the eye.
You don't have the energy to discourage it, and so you don't. Sometimes you think you could sink into it, lose yourself there, forget who and what you were, die a real death and live on as something else—a copied image of yourself. Sometimes, the way he takes care of you, the way he acts like he could make life so much simpler, it's all that you want. The only thing that stops it from happening is the catch of his wedding ring on your belt loops, the picture of his daughter that takes up the main wall.
And even then—
Jackson doesn't come back, doesn't even call…. Derek doesn't either. You don't know what it means that you've paid notice. You try not to think on it.
You can't focus on any one thing, not for long, and it makes each day seem endless and over in a second at the same time. You measure their passage in instances—the time you threw up in your own hands, desperate not to get any on the pillows that still smelled of him, the time you saw Isaac across the street and neither of you waved the other down, the time you came to images of the two of them together, in the shower, and cried about it for hours.
You feel set adrift.
You're lost in it.
You don't know how to get back.
You just want it to end—no matter how.
