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All of Stiles’ trips down memory lane start the same way. At least the part of memory lane that’s littered with mud, slick from recent rains. Covered in fog and cold. A chill that bites down to your bone and makes you tug and pull the corners of your coat until your arms meet and you wish that you didn’t leave your thicker jacket inside.
It starts with the same mantra. You can still go back. You can still turn around. A manner of self preservation. And, eventually, that cadence turns into something else. Something more soul crushing and darker. You can’t go back now – it’s too late.
See, Stiles has fond memories of his mother – for the most part. The memories of when his mother was sick were locked away somewhere safe. In a box under his bed, hidden amongst the monsters and fears that he kept there – but, sometimes, he pulled that box out and sorted through the files in it. Sometimes – when he was alone and afraid.
When you’re young, things are simple. Black and white. As the numbers of age begin to grow, they begin to complicate. First you remember being five. This kid is bad, this kid isn’t. Then, you’re eight. And the primary colors mix into the spectrum. And, then you get older and you start meshing colors. You get purples. Teals. Golds. Gray.
Stiles began to see things in full color when his mother became sick – when his mother began to forget things. When her view on the world around them began to get skewed. Things that Stiles would soon rather forget. But he can’t – he can’t. He can just pretend that they don’t exist for a little while. And live in his world of bliss.
As he picks through the photos in his box of memories, the pictures are discolored. Torn around the edges.
Stiles, it’s cold outside, sweetie. Don’t forget your coat. When it was eighty degrees outside.
The screams and cries of a broken woman – tears running down her cheeks when her duct tape and safety pins that held her together have been tossed to the wind months ago. Her voice is straining and pulling at her tender throat; making his own throat tight as an eight year old swallows down emotions and tears and learns far too young to be a stone.It’s all gonna end, it might as well be my fault.
She thought that happiness, at this point, considered of bright paintings on her walls, maps of places that she would never live to see, and Stiles. Beautiful Stiles would could do nothing wrong in her mind.
Until he did everything wrong. Until even her own son became an enemy in her mind. Beating weakly for dear life at his arms, as if a ten year old could easily tear apart a grown woman with tears in his own eyes and his hands trembling -- his father trying to hold her back.
The moon doesn’t hang as high as it used to, I swear. Only sleeping properly when the rain was pounding hard against the window outside of the hospital – while a young Stiles curled up in a plastic, uncomfortable chair – amber eyes cast out to the storm and listening to the symphony of a hospital at three in the morning. The only time he could sit in her room without her screaming and crying. The only time he could see his mother.
Things got worse from there – and it was a mesh of messy paintbrush strokes in his mind. Nasty blacks and dark blues and reds. But nothing was as bad as the time she looked at him – finally – and asked in a meek voice. Sounding younger than Stiles was – “Who are you?”
One would think it’d be easier -- be better -- for her not to remember him rather than think her own son was out to kill her. You really, really would. Except... it wasn’t. It was empty and hollow. At least the fear and hurt had been something real.
And this is when Stiles packs up all of the photographs and letters in his box of memories to shove them back under his bed with the beasts and darker parts of him. Sealing the lid and wrapping it back with it’s pretty little ribbon as he whispers, “I can’t help but be scared of it all sometimes.”