I'm Not Afraid || A Teen Wolf Fanfic

Chapter 16

The drive hadn't been long, and it had been just what Skyler needed. After feeling like she was suffocating in the hospital, telling her uncle and cousin how sorry she was for their loss and if they needed anything just to ask her, she told her father she'd meet him back at the house and all but sprinted out of the building. The fluorescent lights had birthed a pounding headache into her head, the cries only working to see it further into her brain. She needed to get out before her lungs were soon to follow in the malfunction.

She killed the engine and the light of her motorcycle when she saw him waiting for her outside of the building, his arms already outstretched for the hug she desperately needed. "You okay?" he asked as she crashed into his body. "You don't look so good."

"I fucked up, Isaac," she sighed into his chest. "And you don't look good either."

"Yeah, well, I just went through a gruesome transformation under the full moon," he chuckled softly. "What's your excuse?"

"My aunt just killed herself, and it was, in part, because of me."

"Well, okay. You win." He released her from his hold to find sorry strewn across the girl's face. Dry tears cling to her skin in lines of grey and fresh ones threatened to spill from her reddened eyes. "Tell me what happened. Why do you think it's your fault, Sky?"

"The night of the rave, when Derek and I left to get Scott, we found my aunt Victoria slowly killing him with a vaporized version of wolfsbane," she started. "I thought about fighting her for a second. I've been trained well enough that I could have possibly come out alive from that fight, but Derek told me to get Scott —make sure he was okay and, most importantly, not dead. They fought for a bit as I got Scott off the floor, and then, all of a sudden, she was gone. After that, when we were in the vet's office, he told me he bit her deep enough that she would turn on the next full moon."

"Tonight," Isaac affirmed. "I haven't heard either of you do anything wrong yet, Skyler."

"A hunter being bitten or scratched deep enough to trigger the transformation is essentially receiving a death sentence," Skyler explained, her voice trembling under the force of her worries. "Argent hunters don't turn into werewolves, Isaac. They kill themselves before it can happen—that's part of our code. And that's what my aunt did tonight. My cousin lost her mother because I wasn't strong enough to fight her."

"Hey, that's not your fault, Sky."

"Why does everyone keep saying that?" she exclaimed. "I had the chance to make things different, and I didn't. How is that not my fault?"

"Let me ask you this, did you bite here?"

"Isaac..."

"Did you?"

"No," she grumbled.

"Did you force her to go and kill Scott?"

"Of course not."

"And did you kill her tonight?"

"No, but..."

"There are no buts," Isaac affirmed, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her out of her head. "You didn't do anything wrong, Sky. You were in the middle of a difficult situation and made a decision. That's it. Just like Victoria decided to kill Scott, you decided to save him. And have you ever thought what would have happened if you had been the one to fight her? What if your training isn't as good as you thought, and hers was better? Maybe there would have been two bodies in the morgue rather than one."

"It's just... seeing Allison and my uncle break down in front of me broke me, Isaac." The breath she took stammered as the weight of the night fell on her shoulders. Guilt and sadness gripped her body, sinking their claws into her skin and digging themselves a home in her body. "And for some reason, Victoria protected me. She didn't tell anyone that I had been in the room that night."