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Just breathe deep and start from the beginning.
But which beginning? You could've gotten here from anywhere, too far from home to trace your steps. Was it the blustery playground where you fell off the monkey bars (fourth time’s the charm) and found friendly brown eyes staring back into your own from inside the warm, asthmatic-safe classroom? Or the kitchen table where you sat, still and cold as a river stone, knowing it wouldn’t help to tell your parents they were off the hook for this conversation, you’d looked up what her medicine bottles meant in the big, solemn books of Beacon Hills Library a week ago. There was a beginning, surely, in the imperious toss of copper hair, in the leaf-green eyes that sparked with annoyance and their own brand of mischief, in the crazy wish for some piece of that heavenly summer to reach in and drag you out of your lonely winter. There would be a whole new start, someday, when you realized the two of you had traded places, and it wasn’t you she wished for.
(This one you don’t remember, but someone else does, and maybe it begins when you run through the police station where chaos has left a silent boy and his terrified, fierce sister in chairs by the Deputy Sheriff’s desk. They startle like wild things when you shove Styrofoam cups of clumpy hot chocolate into their hands, then abruptly snatch his back and give him yours, the one with the mini-marshmallows, because you wish he could smile. You won’t remember, because Dad accidentally doubled your Adderall after school and you’re practically high, but the silent boy holds the taste of chocolate powder and marshmallow secret, close, for long years.)
Or do you begin at a bedside, late, the world faded to the color and texture of Dad’s favorite t-shirts, like the pale grey one she’s wearing when she sobs through the pain that she can’t fight any more and you, stranded somewhere between twelve and a hundred, promise to make it stop. More likely, it begins where the memories pick back up– the dark kitchen, in your last-year’s church suit that fits even worse than the big spoons and heavy pots in your small hands. Follow it from there, watch Dad come in to overcooked pasta and Ragu without turning on the lights, without saying a word, repeat; a hundred more scenes like that and it’s almost like the table was always set for two. Almost. The silent places, you have to fill on your own, and pray he doesn’t crack under the pressure of taking up the rest.
After that there are few beginnings, just your life tripping along towards high school, a driver’s license, your beautiful blue Jeep, a spot on the lacrosse bench with your name on it. There was a jock who hadn’t so much as looked your way in elementary school, who suddenly turned vicious and casually cruel, made you realize you had things to be ashamed of. There was the first time you hacked the police computers (a boring afternoon stuck in the station), a website (curled, fascinated, around your new Mac in the early-morning darkness), a database (in Scott’s bedroom, assuring him you could definitely wipe out all the gym class absents), and realized you were a different kind of smart than they measured on report cards. Those feel like small things, now.
(Somewhere in there, there’s one ending, the day you go to pick up salt at the store and then can’t throw out the old can; instead, you re-fill it, and refuse to cry because it’s the last thing left in the kitchen that your mom bought, because it’s the last thing she had cooked with. Dad doesn’t say anything about the dusty, slightly battered container, either.)
You can’t recall the first time you and Scott snuck out; it was something innocuous, a break-in or vandalism, but once it becomes a habit, you get caught by Dad a few times, get better at it. You listen to the message about half a body in the woods and don’t even contemplate skipping the most gruesome thing to happen in this sleepy town for years. And suddenly the beginnings come thick and fast; a howl in the night, a slick black car purring like a predator, chains, arrows, handcuffs, a pale party dress splashed with blood, a bottle of Jack, and everyone else sprinting towards finish lines of their own, Lydia, Scott, Jackson, Derek, Alison, Isaac, Erica, Boyd, Dad, Dad, Dad, and you think now that there were never any beginnings, just bells tolling, tolling in the deep dark woods, always ready to fall silent and leave you alone.
Breathe, and start from the beginning, he says, holding you by the shoulders because you’re hyperventilating and your knees are shaking. When they go out beneath you he’s there, catching you before you know you’re falling.
Where? You choke out, a sick little laugh, all you can manage with the panic attack curling its grip around your lungs, sweat coating your back and making the metal lockers feel even colder, head swimming like you’re going to throw up and pass out at the same time.
He’s kneeling between your legs, one big warm hand on the back of your neck, keeping your head up and your gaze on his. Start with the breathing part, he says, in and out with me, Stiles, flattening your hand on his bare chest so you can feel the rise and the fall. A part of you is amazed when it just keeps going, even and steady, guiding you back to something like a rhythm, even ragged and gasping with watering eyes.
You'd forgotten you could do that, without it being for show.
It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me, he promises after a long time, just keep breathing.
I’m sorry, you half-sob, and you couldn’t quite list off the reasons why, but you know you owe him more than you can repay at this point. That even unspoken, the list of your debts and your sins and your lies is long enough to cover every inch of pale skin in black ink, burned all the way down to the bone.
You don’t have to tell me what’s going on. I know it’s bad, he says, and I know it keeps getting worse and weirder. But if it’ll help, I can keep a secret. And if you can’t tell me, we can just sit here until you feel better, okay?
You’re tangled together on the locker room floor, half-naked in his case, and you’ve been crying and choking on air for maybe the last twenty minutes, and you might've elbowed him when you flailed on the way down, but still he’s looking at you like he’s got all the time in the world for Stiles Stilinski. With brown eyes that are scared, sure, ‘cause he’s not stupid, but still gentle. Like you’re something wounded and wild, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be saved.
Your whole world tilts, and you’re looking at fall, now, heady and rich and bound for winter, sure, but not alone. There’s spring on the other side, beginnings blossoming again in his reassuring smile. And a deep-down part of you, a place gone tense and cold for so long you’d forgotten what it felt like to inhale all the way, kindles warm again.
It might just be enough.
Danny, I don’t even know where to begin, you manage, so I’m just gonna start talking.
Okay, he says, settling against your side and slinging an arm across your shoulders, warm and not alone at all, I’ll remind you to breathe once in a while.