January seventh. Seven days since the start of 2015, and seven days since his father's death.
The bastard, he thinks bitterly. The past year Derek Hale had made it very obvious that he hated his scrawny guts, taking every given opportunity to shove...
Note: The entire Hale family died in the fire. Peter and Derek are the only survivors. Peter never went catatonic. Derek (an alpha) still lives in the mansion. Time-wise this fic replaces 3b.
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Stiles stares down at the ivory bistro mug he holds loosely in his hands, the untouched coffee inside long since gone cold.
It's January seventh. Seven days since the start of 2015, and seven days since his father's death. His eyes and throat are raw from crying, his insides numb. He blinks, unfazed as he watches another tear fall to the dark liquid below and break the surface in a plethora of tiny ripples.
Happy fucking new year.
He'd been living at home the past week, although it had been too much of a blur to really reaccount how he spent it. There were tiny snippets of crying softly in his dad's bed, pressing his face into the sheets as if the fabric could smother the reality of the outside world. Wretched panic attacks that reduced him to a quivering, hyperventilating mess on his bedroom floor until he passed out and woke up a few hours later on the carpet with gooseflesh and a headache, wondering if he would be able to endure another one the next day. Sometimes he would sit down in front of the TV and stare at it for lengthy periods of time before realizing that he never even switched it on.
Also, he's pretty sure he hasn't brushed his teeth since last year.
Ms. McCall had stopped by a lot, knocking softly at the porch and reaching out to wrap him in a warm hug when he opened the door. She would cautiously step into the house and glance around the living room, eyes going misty before she quickly reeled in her gaze and offered her best smile for him, as if his dad's absence didn't make the air thick and heavy and wrong. Then she usually murmured a stream of hushed, comforting words before leaving tupperwares of home-cooked casseroles and meals on the table. They had stacked up in his fridge, untouched. He felt bad for wasting her food.
Scott texted him every day. Lydia and the others too, just not as excessively. It was all they could do, since he refused to answer their calls. His phone buzzed from dawn until dusk, the cracked screen lighting up with short phrases of 'how are you?' and 'I'm here if you need me' and 'come over for dinner, we'll pick you up' again and again until he couldn't take it anymore and finally turned the device off, because he knew that seeing any of their faces would only make it worse. They would look at him differently now, with pity etched in their features and eyes filled with uncertainty. They would speak to him as if he were made of glass, ready to shatter at the slightest touch.
The description wasn't too far from the truth.
The plastic clock on the wall behind him ticks softly, but each secondhand stroke cuts through the silence like a booming countdown. He slowly turns his head to glance at it, heart sinking a little when he sees the hands: 2:01pm. He blows out a shaky breath, clumsily wiping a sleeve across his damp eyelashes as he reluctantly turns back to his cold coffee.
