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What is love and is it really worth it? John Stilinski ponders that question sometimes, late at night, when he can’t sleep because his other half is no longer with him.
His life was supposed to be one filled with laughter and happiness, but instead, he’s stuck with dreary pain. It’s not fair, so he numbs himself with booze to forget everything that he was supposed to have, and cope with the shit that he’s left with.
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She was a swirling whirlwind of smiles and laughter, floating into a room and immediately changing the atmosphere for the better. She could thaw the heart of even the coldest bastard. That was Claudia Greer, the woman that would become Claudia Stilinski. She was the sweetest woman in the world, but she had a little bite to her too, and that only made her all the more perfect. John was in love before she even opened her mouth.
It was the smile that did it for him. It was the aura that she possessed. Almost like a siren in its call, it pulled you in whether you wanted to go or not. He was hooked, line and sinker, before he’d even known it. Then she talked. She opened her mouth and it was like the angels singing and the birds chirping and every lovely sound he’s ever heard. She talked, and she didn’t stop talking but he didn’t care as long as he got to hear her voice for as long as possible.
She was interesting in a way that most people weren’t. In a way that made you want to stick around for as long as possible in case she said something else interesting, and most of the time, she did.
John Stilinski, captain of the football team, class clown, playboy, and all-around typical jock, was head-over-heels in love with the school weirdo. Claudia, for all her ability to make people happy, was still an outcast because she talked a lot and was friendly with everybody, and had many people who liked her. The girls were jealous of her beauty and the way that all the guys looked at her. The guys were intimidated by a girl who was afraid of them, and who could hold her own against them. It put her in some awkward middle ground to where she was untouchable and weird but liked enough to be left alone.
John didn’t care at all about her role, or what people would say, he just knew that she had to be his. Surprisingly enough, she felt the same about him. He expected to have to work harder to get her. Expected a fight, a chase, to win her affections because he was far from perfect. It was like she could see through him though, like she could see that he wasn’t actually what everyone thought of him. That there was more to him. And there probably wasn’t, he can admit, but the way that she looked at him made him find more. Made him want to be more.
16 years he tried, and he gave her the best that he could possibly offer. 16 years he spent pouring all of himself into everything that he did in order to be worth her smile, and her trust. 16 years and then life took her away from him in the cruelest of ways. It was cruel because he can fight bad guys, he can shoot a target dead center multiple times in a row, he can kill people for hurting those he loves, but he can’t fight disease. He has no one to blame if she’s taken away by an invisible illness that he can’t fix.
He tried though. He tried to fix it. He threw all the money that he had, and even some that he didn’t, into all the pills, and injections, and treatments, but nothing worked. Nothing he did fixed her. Nothing worked and she was still taken away from him too early. 16 years wasn’t enough, he still had so much more that he wanted to do, so much more that he wanted to say, and give to her, and experience with her and now he’d never get the chance. Now all he was left with were painful memories and a child that reminded him too much of her.
Stiles is the spitting image of his mother. His eyes, the color of his hair, the upturn of his nose, the way that he laughs, the way that he doesn’t stop talking, and most painfully, his smile. He embodies his mother so much that it hurts to even look at him. John can’t say that he’s truly let himself look at his child since she died. He worked long hours to avoid being home as much as possible. Home where everything still smelled like her and where Stiles would be waiting for him at the door with that smile on his face. He drank on his way home on the times when his deputies would force him to go home to shower and rest. He drank to forget what he wouldn’t have when he went home and to block out the sadness that Stiles’s smile would inevitably turn to when he was ignored.
He buried himself in the bottle of a bottle because it brought him comfort and solace against all the reminders of what he lost. And he didn’t see anything wrong with that. But he knew that when he drank it loosened up his tongue. He knew that alcohol caused him to slip back into that asshole 18-year-old before Claudia that didn’t care about anybody. He knew that it wouldn’t spell out anything good for his son, but he did it anyway.
He did it, and then he couldn’t stop. The first time that he’d struck his son was an accident, he swears it was, but then Stiles had stopped talking, stopped sounding so much like his mother, that John could finally breathe again. It became easier after that, to strick his son in order to get him to obey. And easier and easier until he didn’t need a reason anymore. Until he could just strike his son, his reminder, until he felt better. The more time that passed the easier it got to justify that he was just disciplining the boy. Stiles was often getting into trouble anyway, so it wasn’t a stretch. He and only he had to know that it wasn’t discipline. He and only he had to know that Claudia was probably turning over in her grave every time he did it.
Claudia wasn’t here anymore though, she wasn’t here to temper his fist, or control his tongue.
She wasn’t here anymore and he has no one to blame, and his son is so much like her, and he only feels okay after six whiskeys when it used to be two, and life just isn’t fair!
But life doesn’t have to be fair, life just has to keep on doing what it’s doing and there’s nothing that he can do or say that will make it change, and therefore, he won’t change. No matter how his rotten little child (that looked at him with Claudia’s eyes) threatens him. No matter who his rotten little child (that has Claudia’s laugh) hangs around with. No matter what his rotten little child (that is the spitting image of his mother so much that John’s heart hurts when he looks at him) says about Claudia. Yeah, she’d be rolling in her grave, but she’s still in a grave, so who gives a damn. Life has no purpose, no meaning, without her.
Is he an asshole? Yes. Will his wife condone what he’s doing? No. Will he stop though? Probably not. Not because he doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong. He knows the law, and he used to know morals. He simply just doesn’t care anymore. He can’t find the man that Claudia loved inside him anymore. He can’t give all his love to anybody anymore to be the best for them. He simply doesn’t have it in him. Is losing his child easy? Honestly? Yes, it is. Because he can’t remember what it felt like to care about him. He can’t remember anything past the thick haze of booze that he always clouded by, or the sleep-deprived haze from working the back-to-back shifts with only a nap on the couch in his office. He can’t remember the times back before the booze, before the work, before her death. He just remembers the pain, and loss and little eyes that looked up at him just like his mother’s and he couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t stand to remember so he stopped looking. He’d stopped looking at his child as his child so that he could stop seeing everything that he’d lost.
And on that day, the day that he’d stopped looking at his child, everything became so much easier.
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But now that rotten little shit is stirring up trouble. Those videos are probably all over the internet and thousands of people have probably seen them, including some of his deputies. What’s he to do? He can’t lose his job, it’s the only thing he has left. And prisons don’t let inmates get drunk off their rockers in order to forget their dead wives. He’s not going to jail, and he’s not about to lose his job. Especially not behind a big-mouthed kid who doesn’t know when to shut up. So he plots, and he schemes, and he gathers every ounce of intel that he’s ever gotten because he’s not going down.
But if he does go down, he’s not going down alone.