#the amount of tragedy and grief this one character has survived is so crazy I want to sit in on just one therapy session | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jazzmckay · 6 years

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@teenwolfexchange gift for @clotpolesonly who asked for stiles and allison missing their moms during the holidays

words: ~2200 tags/warnings: past canonical character death, grief/mourning

It doesn’t occur to Allison to dread the upcoming holidays until December rolls around and stores start stocking shelves with Christmas decorations and radios play an increasing amount of festive music. At school, posters go up to advertise tickets for the Winter Formal and most students are talking about what they plan to do in the two weeks of free time they’ll be getting at the end of the term.

Last Christmas, Allison had an intact family with completely average family traditions, like threading a needle to make popcorn and cranberry garlands for the tree instead of stitching up lethal wounds.

It’s been a long year, but if there’s one thing she’s learned of late, it’s to put the past in the past and keep looking forward.

She holds it together until their English teacher gives them an assignment to write a reflection about how their families spend the holidays and then all she can think about is her mother teaching her how to handle a needle, as a child eager to help with the decorations, and then again as a teenager, being taught the same thing but harder, and colder, and with the pretense that this information could save her life someday.

Allison stares down at her blank notebook paper, pencil clenched in her hand, and tries to remember how to breathe.

A crumpled up note lands on her desk, startling her. Allison looks up, at Scott and Lydia sitting in front of her, and Stiles beside her, but none of them return her gaze.

She picks the note up and unfolds it carefully, flattening it out against the page of her notebook.

From the penmanship, she can tell that it isn’t from Lydia or Scott, but Stiles.

‘No one who doesn’t know you well enough will notice the difference if you just make shit up. It’s what I always do,’ the note says.

Allison considers the note, reads it a second time, and feels calmer. Make something up, she thinks. She can do that. She can map out something stereotypical, something that could be straight out of a generic holiday movie, something impersonal and without an ounce of loss attached. The most basic parts of her family tragedy are known to the public, but no one knows what the Argents were really like, what they did as a family before everything fell apart.

After sliding the note up to the top of her desk, still visible and the message on display, Allison gets to writing.

When class is nearly over, she stands up at the same time as Stiles to take her reflection up to the teacher’s desk, and lightly bumps her arm against his to get his attention.

“Thanks,” she says softly, for only him to hear.

Stiles shrugs nonchalantly. “Might as well put all this wisdom of mine to good use.”

“Seriously, Stiles,” Allison says, ignoring his joking tone. “It’s exactly what I needed.”

Stiles’ expression softens a fraction, and he gives a little nod. “No problem.”

The bell to signal the end of the period rings, and the classroom is filled with the flurry of students packing up their things and leaving. Allison nods to Stiles and he nods back, and then they go to rejoin their friends.

Stiles sits cross legged on the ground in front of his mother’s gravestone, picking idly at a couple strands of glass while he talks. He tells her what he’s been learning in school, about the last movie he watched, about a mysterious shipwreck he’d somehow ended up researching late into the previous night, and about how his dad is doing.

There’s a chill in the air that makes him wrap his arms around himself. He should have worn a jacket.

“I hope it snows this year,” Stiles says even as he shivers.

Beacon Hills never gets as much snow as the town where his mother grew up, if it gets snow at all, but he remembers a Christmas years ago when it had snowed enough for him and his mom to make a snowman and she had been just as excited as him. His dad has a picture of the two of them putting the final touches on the snowman by wrapping a scarf around it’s neck.

Footsteps bring him back out of his memories, and he looks up to see Allison approaching. She’s much more sensibly dressed in a fleece coat and warm-looking boots instead of sneakers, but her cheeks are still pink from the cold.

“Hey,” she says as she stops a few feet away from him, looking hesitant, like she thinks she’s intruding.

“Hey,” Stiles responds.

He pushes himself up from the ground, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets as he bridges the distance between them. Allison relaxes slightly.

“Visiting your mom, too?” Stiles asks.

“Um,” Allison says, eyes darting away. “I was thinking about it, yeah.”

Stiles furrows his eyebrows at her, trying to parse the expression on her face. The two of them just haven’t hung out enough for Stiles to understand her, yet. He can read Scott like a book, but that had taken years of friendship.

“What’s up?” he asks.

Allison looks back at him, eyes slightly wide. “It’s nothing,” she says quietly.

“No, it’s totally something. Come on.”

Allison huffs a humourless laugh. “I’m just not sure what I’m doing here.”

Stiles knows the cemetery well, just as well as he knows the school, or the police station, or the public library. He and his dad walk its aisles several times a year, on birthdays and anniversaries and his mother’s favourite holidays, but he still remembers how it felt being young and surrounded by a sea of graves on all sides, clinging to his dad’s hand for fear that they would somehow get separated and he wouldn’t know how to get home.

“Want company?” he asks. “I’ll go with you.”

For a moment, Allison doesn’t respond, deep in thought.

“Just like that?” she finally says. “After everything that happened?”

“Sure,” Stiles says easily.

Allison still looks uncertain, but she nods just a bit.

Stiles steps back towards his mother’s grave. “We’ll be here on Christmas Eve, like always,” he promises. “See you soon, mom.”

Returning to Allison, he nods back at her and then falls into step beside her as she leads him through the cemetery. They’re silent as they walk between the stones together, making their way to a section that Stiles recognizes as the one where Kate Argent is buried. Victoria Argent’s grave is right next to her sister-in-law’s.

Allison stops when they’re still back a ways, though her eyes are honed in on the marker over her mother’s grave.

“I didn’t like coming to the cemetery when I was still young,” Stiles tells her. “It was like going to the funeral all over again, or seeing her in her hospital bed during the last days. It took me awhile to feel comfortable being here.”

“It isn’t that, not really. My dad and I came before we left for France in the summer,” Allison says.

“What is it, then?”

Allison exhales a long breath. “I didn’t know, back then. What she’d done, what she was capable of. Who she was.”

“Oh,” Stiles says.

He knows what it’s like to know and love someone and have them change dramatically, to the point where it can feel like that person no longer exists. For a time, he’d desperately wished for his mother to come back and be who she had been when he was younger, until he finally understood that it wasn’t possible. He learned to cherish the good days and weather the bad ones.

“She was still your mother,” Stiles says.

“But even before we moved here, she already had that in her. I just didn’t know about it.”

“Sure, maybe there were some things about her that you didn’t know, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t know her. Things just got kind of crazy, you know? We were all pushed to new limits last spring.”

Allison considers his words, eyes still trained forward on the gravesite. “I guess you’re right,” she says.

“Usually am.”

That startles a laugh out of Allison, but she sobers quickly. She sniffs, and Stiles can’t tell if it’s because she’s emotional or because it’s cold.

“I miss her so much,” she admits. “I spent all this time bouncing between sad and angry, and then I just tried to put it all out of my mind entirely, but mostly I just… miss her.”

“Tell me about her. Something from before,” Stiles says.

A small smile creeps up on Allison’s face. “She was smart. I swear she knew how to do everything. She taught me a lot and I didn’t appreciate it nearly enough at the time. The other day I remembered this one time she helped me make a homemade wind chime. I think it came to mind because… it wasn’t a secret hunting lesson. It wasn’t a sport, or a skill that could be applied to survival, it was just tying bits of metal and glass together. I’ve realised that a lot of what my parents taught me was preparing me for a future as a hunter but the wind chime… I think that was just us.”

It doesn’t sound too different from the kind of crafty things Stiles’ own mom would have done with him as a child. Stiles never knew Victoria Argent before he knew about werewolves and werewolf hunters, but for a second he can imagine her just being Allison’s mom, a person Allison loved, and a person who is already gone.

“Did it sound any good?”

“No,” Allison says, smile widening. “I’m sure it scared all the wildlife away from our backyard.”

“Well, hey, I bet it still looked cool. Avant-garde. Very artistic.”

Allison playfully jabs her elbow into Stiles’ side. “Shut up, you’ve never even seen it. Maybe ten year old me was a master craftsman.”

“Guess you’ll have to show me, then,” Stiles says, grinning at her. “Do you still have it?”

“Yeah. It’s in a box somewhere, but I have it.”

“You should put it up. Your apartment’s got a balcony, right?”

Allison nods, looking thoughtful. “I could do that.”

For a moment, they’re quiet, and then Allison starts to step closer to her mother’s grave. Stiles hangs back, watching from a distance and giving her space.

Allison crouches down in front of the stone, reaching out to brush her fingers over the carvings that spell out her mother’s name.

“I wish things had happened differently. I miss you.”

She speaks so quietly that Stiles can barely hear it. The wind picks up, swirling around them, making Stiles rub his hands along his arms to warm them up. He waits there, until Allison is finished and comes back over to him.

Looping an arm around his, Allison leads him away from the Argent cemetery plot. “Thanks,” she says. “Again.”

Stiles makes a split decision. Allison’s family is a lot like his own, now. Two people and an empty space that can’t properly be filled again.

“You and your dad should come over on Christmas.”

“What?” Allison says, sounding surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah. Trust me, it’ll be good. The McCalls spent Christmas with us the year after Agent McCall skipped town, and it was one of the best holidays we ever had. When it’s just the two of us… we end up getting emotional, and then it’s awkward and tense and no one has fun. Really, you’d be doing us a favour.”

Allison looks like she’s torn between smiling and giving him a sympathetic look. “Okay. I’ll talk to my dad.”

“Cool,” Stiles says.

When they reach the road where both of their vehicles are parked, Allison turns to face him and wraps her arms around him, pulling him into a tight, warm hug. For a moment, before they separate and part ways, some of the chill in Stiles’ body is staved off.

Allison is nearly done screwing together a hook for her wind chime, when her dad appears in the doorway that leads back into the apartment. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him watching her, hesitating before speaking.

“Is that the wind chime you made with your mom when you were little?” he asks.

“It is,” Allison says.

With the hook done, she picks up the wind chime from the balcony table, and carefully hangs it up. The pieces of metal and coloured glass clink together from the movement and although the resulting sound isn’t melodious at all, Allison smiles.

“Stiles invited us over for Christmas,” she tells her dad. “I want to go. I think it would be good for us.”

Her dad looks as surprised as Allison had felt when Stiles first suggested it. “Are you sure?” he asks.

Allison nods. “It’ll be good for the Stilinskis, too. I want to be there for Stiles.”

“Alright, good enough for me,” her dad says, nodding to her. His face is completely passive, but Allison knows that doesn’t mean he’s unaffected. He looks back to the wind chime for a moment before disappearing back into their home.

Allison takes out her phone and snaps a picture of the chime, sending it to Stiles along with a quick message.

‘We’ll be there.’

#teenwolfexchange #jazz writes

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

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unpopular opinion but I hope this babysitting jack comes to an end asap, it's boring to me and I wouldn't like the show turned into a weird family sitcom lol sorry ,just not my thing, also regarding the other ask, people seem too obsessed with the nephilim and well cas was supposed to be in a very few episodes but fans were crazy about him so he (fortunately) stayed I just hope the nephilim doesn't replace him (nothing against him but i would be heartbroken if cas was relegated in favor of nephi

Fortunately they’re not and never have been writing a weird family sitcom and it all has a plot purpose :D

I was responding to asks just like this fearing this situation that’s not happening before the season and I kept on saying, the tension is on Jack in the Bunker because he’s scary and they’re “babysitting” him because he’s potentially dangerous and everything about him is a great big uncertain knife edge for if the Winchesters can raise him well enough to save the world, while being their more than usually fucked up selves… The only reason they’re keeping Jack in the Bunker is because he’s dangerous and vulnerable in equal measures and Sam and Dean have never had possession of something like that before, to break Jack down to raw plot McGuffin. Usually if they ever get hold of something game-breakingly powerful (the Colt, Cas) it slips between their fingers. And if they capture something dangerous it manipulates or breaks its way free as soon as the plot requires it, which is usually within the episode. And if they have friendly allies staying with them (Cas, Kevin, Mary) then there is no tension or drama in the story if they stay, and stagnation for their own characters (Kevin’s off-screen nonsense staying in the bunker in season 9 was really painful >.>). Jack is a whole mixed up bundle of them, like a Colt, Crowley in the dungeon/Kevin in the library at the same time, amalgamation of a character-plot McGuffin thing in the story. And all this is being made all the worse because Sam and Dean’s grief plots come first and foremost, including in how they treat and see Jack, while balancing their own responsibility to him and the world.

None of it is strictly about babysitting or raising him because if it was they’d put that first, and actually make it fluffy. So since it’s not fluffy and Jack’s extremely dangerous to them as a worst case scenario, anything where they treat it as a humour beat is just that. Of course Jack isn’t an intern. But it’s funny to compare him to one. He’s not even their brother or child, really. Sam keeps trying to drag him into the family too soon but it’s paralleling 4x17 and that went swimmingly with “Adam” who turned out to be a ghoul, or 5x18 where Sam tried bonding with the real Adam and he still sold them out to Zach and they never reconciled over that, lost him that same day, and just added him to their guilt pile.

At the moment though we’re on episode four and it’s incredibly hard to treat Jack as all the things he is and may be all at once, which is what makes him so interesting. Like sure the POTENTIAL for a fluffy family sit com is there but that’s not the story they’re telling, nor what the show will ever be, so we can immediately write that off as a tragic never going to happen scenario, which is what makes every bone they throw about it resonate to people, because there’s an inherent tragedy in watching this show and knowing the characters aren’t ever going to have happy lives while the show keeps on churning, unless they’re some of the few lucky characters released by the narrative to go be free of the story. (Who still live in threat that they may be brought back and killed - so far the surviving candidates for Wayward Sisters are the only ones to TRULY escape, though there’s a couple of side characters who survived, but only, like, Lisa & Ben or Amelia or other characters who were deliberately set aside like that and genuinely have no further role in the story but escaped the death sentence.)

I don’t think you should judge people for being “obsessed” with Jack though. He’s a new character, a vital plot arc, and they’re giving him a disproportionate amount of screen time while showing us 1000 character and plot mirrors in him and making him cute and sad and stirring up protective instincts for him deliberately.

Like I don’t think anyone’s oblivious to the tension that makes about him being sweet and naive and not wanting to be bad, but we KNOW the turn is coming (turn of the story, or turn of Jack) and we’re still in the “honeymoon” stage where they’re making sure we like and care about him. So of course it feels like it’s all going to be fluffy now, so you either enjoy it while it lasts, or decide early that because the turn is coming not to trust him or not to get attached because he doesn’t interest you or whatever and you see him as just another problem down the line, but it’s that very tension that makes him fascinating and has made him so compelling, because his supposed legacy and destiny has been describe for him in season 12 and is hanging over him and they’re characterising him very well…

But I don’t know how to keep saying that Jack is different from Cas, has this precarious weird place in the story where he’s pre-the bad stuff happening to him/him doing bad things, but we all know that he’s got to at least be TESTED on this sense of self and morality he’s developing. And it’s not going to be in a series of sit com level adventures hanging out with the Winchesters. It’s going to be cosmic.

And Cas is a major character with a major arc with a major place in the heart of the story, Dabb loves him to bits, goes out of his way to be good to Cas right back through the seasons. I can’t IMAGINE a world where Cas is replaced. If you’re worried the fandom will love Jack more than Cas, look at the explosion of love for Cas’s method of getting out of the Empty… it’s like my entire dash :P

Like, sure, Jack is being cute, but Cas is embedded and he’s never been replaced and he’s going nowhere. It’s okay. The show is NOT the stuff people say about it on the internet (including what we all say about it) - you just have to watch what’s on your screen and form you own opinion. I see Cas as being so absolutely integral to the show that I can’t even get down to the headspace where people think he’s mistreated or that the show doesn’t love him and would do anything to get rid of him, or doesn’t care about his personal arc, or anything else people say about it. I like to think I can take a general surface level read on the show as well as delving underneath the hood, and what I see is Cas is being absolutely worshipped by the narrative this year. He’s in no danger - in fact he only just got back :D

And I’ll repeat what I said in the last comment about this: characters aren’t given worth by their screen time, especially not in comparison to each other. They’re given worth by the story written about them. And Cas and Jack have two equally compelling, complementary, INTERTWINED stories. So what if Jack has had more screen time and Cas was dead? We’re getting to know Jack in a way we already know Cas and implicitly trust him - and Cas had some character development of his own to handle, and Sam and Dean also need to have some serious reflection on Cas and what he is to them, so that’s all great for this year which is absolutely ripping these characters open, and exploring these things.

#Asks #season 13 #season 13 speculation #Nougat Winchester

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