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1.
It felt like drowning.
It wasn’t quiet. The sound of his heartbeat in his ears was loud, loud, loud. It was dark though. The kind of dark where it’s impossible to really tell if your eyes are open or closed. If those darker shapes are figments of your imagination or things you should be afraid of. Assuming there was nothing to fear from the figments of your imagination, that is. Maybe it was all in his head. Or maybe, just maybe, the only truly frightening thing was him.
It felt like drowning. And he inhaled, and let the darkness in. And it wasn’t peaceful, but the chaos felt like home.
2.
People were dead. His English teacher was a psychotic serial killer. Beacon Hills was living up to its name and attracting all manner of supernatural beasties. The past year had been great. Swell, even. Sarcasm was a problem he had no desire to work on, especially in his own head. The nights when he could come home, covered in the goop and fleshy bits shifters apparently dropped when changing shape, and not have to lie to his dad about where he had been and what he’d been doing? Well, that almost made everything worth it.
It took a while to track the shifter down. And even then it was less tracking a motive and more the shifter taking his Dad and a deputy hostage and holding them in an abandoned warehouse. And really, there were far too many abandoned warehouses conveniently located in Beacon Hills. His dad had been missing for seventeen hours and fifty seven minutes, give or take, before Chris Argent pulled some hunter tracking hoodoo and found a building that seemed a likely candidate for a super-secret shifter hideout. They still had no idea what it was the thing was after. It had just shown up, broken into a few places disguised as the owners - save for that tell-tale thing it did with the eyes - and quickly progressed to killing law enforcement personnel. Maybe that was what separated out real evil from bad people. True darkness didn’t need a reason to exist, it just did.
They found the building, werewolves and Argents surrounding it and moving in, armed with silver bullets and weapons to match courtesy of Chris and his extensive collection. Turns out some things could actually be killed by real silver. His Dad and the deputy were in the middle of the room, blindfolded and bound to a pillar. And when Allison came to join him, pulling a knife from her boot and moving towards his Dad, arm and knife raised and a smile on her lips, he raised his gun and fired three times into her heart. Later, when Scott and Chris and Allison found them and couldn’t quite force themselves to look at the corpse that looked like Allison, they asked him how he knew. The eyes, he said. And they nodded and moved to help his Dad and the deputy out of the room as quickly as possible.
Looking down at the corpse dressed as the love of his best friend’s life, he wondered how he really knew. And then he wondered if he really had known. He wondered if it even mattered.
3.
Scott asked him once, a few months after Derek and Cora left. Asked him how he was dealing with that constant crushing, suffocating feeling. The darkness around your heart. Scott had looked at him with that open, earnest expression he’d had since preschool, and he’d hugged him just so he didn’t have to see that perfectly honest face. His best friend was a True Alpha now, capitalization required. Scott seemed to think that meant it was his job to protect everyone and everything around him, and he was willing to admit that yeah, Scott was definitely the Batman in this relationship.
He never answered the question though. Couldn’t find a way to tell his brother, in everything but blood, that for the first time in a long, long time, it felt like he could breathe. The darkness wasn’t around his heart, it was inside it. He’d inhaled, and now there was no more time to fight his way to the surface. Superhero Scott couldn’t rescue him now.
4.
Peter tried to kill them all on a Wednesday. It was seven months after he’d drowned in a tub full of ice and mistletoe, and been pulled back to life by a woman whose scream death followed. He’d be lying if he said he was surprised.
It was sloppy and obviously unplanned. He was actually slightly disappointed in Peter, who he knew was clever enough and patient enough to have killed them all without them ever seeing it coming. Derek and Cora had called a few days ago, done with their bonding trip and ready to call Beacon Hills home again. As much as Peter was a power hungry psychopath he clearly didn’t want his niece and nephew around for his hostile takeover. Whether that was because he didn’t want them to get hurt or because he didn’t want them to interfere was impossible to say. He supposed he could have asked Peter, but the answer probably wouldn’t have changed anything.
Attacking while they were all together was probably Peter’s biggest mistake. Scott, Isaac, and Allison were a force to be reckoned with when they were threatened. He had been short on time though, what with Derek and Cora arriving the next morning. Still, Peter should have known better.
The fight was long and Scott’s apartment desperately in need of some major renovations after. The neighbours were either deaf or smart enough to hide inside with the lights on and try to ignore the things that go bump in the night. Beacon Hills was a dangerous place now, and people were starting to notice. When it was over and everyone was bleeding, Scott used his Alpha voice to banish Peter from the pack and they watched as he snarled and limped away with cold, blue eyes. Then he was gone, and Scott turned and put his fist through a mostly undamaged wall, shoulders bowing a little more under the weight of everything he couldn’t fix in the world.
He found Peter stalking around the burned out living room of the old Hale house. He sort of wished he’d at least been outside, since Derek and that house had been through enough already. Peter had laughed when he walked in, and said something about having a vicious streak that would have made him a truly powerful werewolf. He raised his hand and tossed a circle of mountain ash around the man. Then he lit a match, and helped it burn with that tiny flicker of a spark Deaton had made him aware of.
He didn’t need to be a werewolf to be every bit as powerful as them. Scott would do what he could to protect them, and he would do everything he could to let Scott be a good man.
He watched the fire for a long time. He could feel the heat on his face, in his lungs, but its light was nothing more than a flickering candle in the darkness.
5.
It felt like home. It was dark and comfortable and welcoming. Maybe to some people, like Scott, fighting the darkness was the only way to stay sane. To them, letting it in would feel like giving up. They never really talked about it, the different ways they coped. It didn’t feel like giving up, though.
It was about survival. When it’s about survival, a little agony is worth it.