St. Clair || Stilinski [2]

Thirty-Nine || Rising Conflict

| | Rising Conflict

When Stiles awoke alone next to his sleeping father with an unnerving feeling as he looked to the empty chair next to him, Olivia Dane was holding her daughter close on the living room sofa across town as the sun began to rise over the doomed town.

Olivia brushed a hand through Jacy's hair, cradling her tight like she had since birth.

Around four a.m. earlier that morning, Jacy had caught herself asleep in Stilinski's hospital room, something she hadn't planned on in the slightest, and shifted Stiles back to his slumped position over his dad's bed without waking him up. And when she returned to her own home to get a few more hours of sleep, she had found her mother sitting on her bed, forlorn and confused.

Since then, they had kept quite silent in the living room just holding on to one another.

"I don't understand why you have to stay away from your friends," Olivia said, still running a hand along Jacy's hair. "They love you. They want to help you."

"They can't help me, Mom," Jacy told her. "No one can help me."

"Even if you think they can't, they're still your friends."

"It will be easier in the long run if they start to detach from me now," she said, voice low. "Stiles, too."

"That sounds awfully lonely."

Jacy kept her head pressed against Olivia's chest, staring out the window. "I have you."

"You always have me, baby." Olivia kissed the top of her daughter's head. "But you need more than your mom in life. You need your Stiles and your loving friends. Your brother. Not your father because he's an ass, but you have Chris and Noah in his place. And they love you just like their own. It doesn't do you any good to hide away forever."

"It will, in the long run," Jacy said softly. "I know it doesn't make sense."

"So make it make sense to me." Olivia pulled back, forcing her daughter to look up. "Talk to me. We have already gone through so much since we got here. You can tell me. I can only take so much of you disappearing for days and returning without explanation. Random calls from you about solving mysterious illnesses when a man's life is on the line. It's concerning, J."

"I don't have an explanation, Mom," she said with a shake of her head. "I don't know what to say."

"There's obviously something you're not telling me," said Olivia. "Maybe you don't know the whole plot, but you have to know some of the rising conflict. Everyone in the city can sense we're headed toward something big. Can't you feel it?"

Jacy pulled her legs from across Olivia's lap, sitting up straight. "There's so much to it. It's obscene how this came to be."

"Show me your eyes."

Jacy's brows furrowed. "What?"

"Jacy Parrish," she sternly said, "show me your eyes."

Although she paused, Jacy let her eyes shift.

Olivia nodded lightly, gently tilting her daughter's face to view to striking sapphire. "The purple is gone."

"It's not gone." Jacy blinked away the shift, eyes returning to brown. "The blue just...swallowed it."

"Well, that's comforting," Olivia said with a sigh. "Her eyes were blue, too, if I remember correctly."

Jacy suddenly stood from the sofa, looking down at her mother with wide eyes. "What do you mean? Why would you say that?"