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Eli was 15 when his Dad died.
There one minute, looking worried and scared and so, so alone as he told Eli that he was sorry, that he’d be home soon and not to worry—gone the next, in a plume of smokey ash with an echoing shout of pained alarm.
His dad was scared and alone and then he was gone, and now Eli is stuck in an empty house full of memories feeling like Dad will just walk right in like nothing ever happened, a peace offering in the form of a bag of greasy takeout hanging from oil-stained hands.
[...]
When the front-bell rang, Stiles scrubbed a hand over his tired face and brushed the too-long-hair out of his eyes with a sigh, pulling himself up to answer the door as he scratched idly at the nearly-decade-old scarring that trailed down his arm from the still-painful bite mark marring his bicep. It was pulsing alongside his heart, falling just short of in time like an echo, and had been since he woke with a start before the sun had even risen early that morning.
As he flung the door open, he blinked blearily at a dirty, ash-smudged face before his brain recognized the features and the thrumming in his arm kicked up to a violent vibration, making the muscles tremor and shake.
“Stiles?” Derek murmured, swaying on his feet and clutching at a swath of burns stretching from his left hand all the way up to his shoulder. “Stiles—”
Stiles just stared, taking in those painfully familiar eyes—blue-hazel-green, with a tiny smattering of red-brown just left of his right iris—
[…]
“You know,” Scott starts hesitantly, breaking the silence between them and interrupting Eli from his rampaging thoughts, turning slightly to face him as he resolutely stares holes into the living room walls with a tired frown. “When I was your age, my entire life, as I knew it then, was turned upside down. I almost died, like every other day, and then had to get up in the morning covered in dirt and dried blood, and go to school like nothing was wrong. Like I wasn’t being actively hunted down by bloodthirsty creatures trying to destroy the town, to destroy me—my friends.”
Eli says nothing, jaw clenching so fast it could’ve been a twitch.
“I can’t say I know what it feels like,” he wisely skirts around what that ‘it’ is, “but I do know being a teenager is hard, and being a… supernaturally-inclined teenager is even harder, especially surrounded by a bunch of humans whose worst problem is forgetting to clean their room before Mom gets home.”
[...]
to be continued...