Chapter Text
Losing one’s family hurt.
Stiles had suffered through the pain when his mom had died, and the wound, though healing, had left a scar across his heart. Sometimes he thought it had left him more broken than he wanted to admit. Sometimes he thought that might be why he couldn’t seem to keep any friends.
He could admit to himself that he’d kept them at arm’s length—the pack—never quite letting them in all the way. Until he had. Until his complaints when Derek snuck in through his window for some reason or another became merely habit. Until he’d smiled at Lydia as they translated ancient Latin texts together on his bedroom floor, and she’d smiled back. Until Jackson, the absolute idiot that he was, shoved the last piece of pizza at him, saying that he was full, even though Stiles knew full well that the wolves were never full.
But, well.
He’d let them in, and they’d pushed him away.
It had started slowly.
Erica mentioned a pack meeting they’d had without him and nobody blinked an eye, and Stiles was left to wonder how long that had been going on. He stayed home sick from school for two days, and none of his pack mates noticed, let alone asked where he’d been, or if he was okay, despite the scent of sickness he knew must have lingered around him.
When he stopped showing up to the few pack meetings he was invited to, nobody commented on it, and when he started slipping his printed research on whatever magical mishap of the week happened to pass through Beacon Hills underneath Derek’s spanking new apartment door, the werewolf stopped coming by at night. The first few nights that he lay alone in his bed, watching the window in the hopes that a pair of red eyes would gleam back at him, Stiles had never been so upset to have a decent night of sleep.
It prompted the question—what was wrong with him? On those sleepless nights, he would stare at the ceiling and wonder what was so wrong with him that once they saw the true him, the real him, the Stiles that laughed so hard he choked, the boy that cried at Disney films, they shoved him aside? He’d tried so hard to be useful, but as in everything, he’d failed.
And it hurt.
They all drew away, one by one, slowly, surely, they left an aching hole in the place he’d carved for them in his heart. It wasn’t emotional hurt—or, rather, not just emotional hurt. Stiles’ dad commented with a frown forming between his brows that he was looking pale and sickly, even though the doctor said there was nothing wrong with him. There was a pain knifing between his ribs with every breath he took, an ache deep in his bones, a stake to the heart each time he waved at Scott in the halls, and Scott didn’t wave back.
When Stiles went to him, desperate, Deaton had a second explanation. As his pack bonds waned, he could no longer funnel energy into his pack mates, as if his magic were a coursing stream and the bonds thinning aqueducts. He’d talked about it with a sort of intrigue, like he’d never seen such a thing before.
“You must be very powerful,” he’d said, voice eager, eyes gleaming, and for the first time around the vet, Stiles felt scared. Deaton hadn’t shown any interest in his Spark before, when all he could do was manipulate mountain ash, but now that Stiles wasn’t unknowingly giving away his magic, now that he had the propensity for more, he was far too keen for comfort.
The excess magic was building up inside him the longer he was without an outlet, blocking his body from doing stuff like working properly, but when he asked how to get it out, Deaton just shrugged and said it was out of his area of expertise. Maybe before, before his forced isolation, before everything, Stiles would have argued, but he was too weak. He was tired. So instead, he just went home.
Stiles watched his dad watch him, and the mirror provided him a startling resemblance to his mother in her final months. He wondered if that’s what his dad was seeing too—he always said Stiles was so much like his mother, in every way. The magic books he found hidden beneath the floorboards in the corner of his dad’s room attested to that fact. They told him nothing, except that he would die like she had—alone, and with too much magic burning him up from the inside.
His dad took him out of school, the doctors shook their heads apologetically, Stiles threw up and shivered and cried and nobody came. He sometimes wondered if his friends had noticed his leaving school—if they realised the bonds which connected him to the pack were growing thinner than thread.
If they realised he was dying.
It had been a hard pill to swallow, at first, but it got easier. After days, weeks, of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, it got easier. He didn’t want to die, but he thought, maybe it would be okay. He spent hours writing up meal plans, when he felt up to it, so that his dad wouldn’t follow him any time soon after, and when he gifted them to his dad, the sheriff didn’t look away fast enough for Stiles not to see the tears glistening in his eyes.
“You’ll be okay,” his dad had said, and they both knew it was a lie.
Still, nobody came.
In the rare moments that Stiles was both awake and lucid, he would ask if anyone had come by to check on him, and his dad would smile that trembling, apologetic smile, and shake his head. He would hold his hand until Stiles slipped back into the calm depths of sleep, and he would only cry when he thought Stiles was out.
Nobody came, until one day, as he wasted away in his bed, somebody did.
She covered his burning hot hand with her own comfortably cool one. Her palm was calloused, her face blurry, and then, all of a sudden, she was chanting something, throwing back her head and crying out as Stiles felt, in a sudden rush, the magic which had consumed him disappearing.
Disappearing somewhat—not entirely, not enough, but enough to alleviate his symptoms, enough to sit up in bed and enough to hear his dad agree to her taking him somewhere far away. Enough that when he was bundled into an unfamiliar truck, he could reach up towards his dad’s cheek and say, “Look after your heart, I’ll see you later,” and hear him laugh in a choked off sort of way, like he knew Stiles wasn’t going to come home. Enough that he could feel his world burst into burning, blinding pain as they rumbled past the Welcome to Beacon Hills sign and he felt the last of his pack bonds snap.
For him, it was agony, it was losing his lifelines, but they were so thin that he wondered if the others had even felt it at all.
He screamed his throat hoarse as one by one, they broke, until he slipped into the blissful relief of unconsciousness.