𝑅𝐸𝑄𝑈𝐼𝐸𝑀 - M.R.

[REFLECT]

Home.

The word felt foreign on his tongue. He hasn't had a home since the death of his former self.

He's had houses and apartments and motel rooms and nights with his jeep and a thin blanket but never a home.

Katrina felt like home, but they never had a place for themselves, never got the change to buy a house and settle down. Didn't even rent an apartment together before she was taken away from him.

He toys with the frayed green cord in-between his fingers as he settles on the creaky bed of the apartment - the one that's become the closest thing to a home he's had in the last five years.

Scoffing at himself as he lets the thread slip though calloused fingers, the ring hitting the carpeted floor with a muted thud. Five years, he shakes his head, rubbing his fingers to his palm before bringing his knuckles to his mouth and biting down hard.

A dry sob shudders through him, five years today and you still can't pull yourself together, look at you.

He bites down harder against the bitter ache in his throat, still crying like the day you lost her.

He yells out to no one, pulling a knife from his waistband and launching it at the dusty mirror on the vanity opposite him.

Weak. Vulnerable. The pack were right to pity you. His mind sneers as he watches the shards of his reflection clatter to the floor.

It'll destroy you, going back there. His scream is silent as he tugs on the length of his grown-out hair. If his vocal cords weren't torn apart from other early mornings just like this one then maybe his scream would've rivaled that of young Lydia Martin's.

Perhaps it would've been loud enough for even Katrina to hear, wherever she is now, on this earth or beyond it.

Would Irene send him back there, back home, if she knew what it would do to him? Would she send someone else if she knew the pain their faces would cause him?

Does he think she'll fix him, somehow, by making him remember? Remember all the things and creatures he spends his nights trying to forget.

An alarm tone plays out on his phone and just like that he straightens himself up, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes tight shut.

When he opens them a second later there's no sign of emotion there, two deep black pits in the dark of his room.

He stands slowly, grabbing his jacket and a single duffel back on his way out, tugging his knife out of the wooden backboard of his mirror.

He slips the phone with only two numbers into his back pocket as he slugs the duffel into the back of the big black jeep, the one with tinted windows and a beretta in the glovebox.

He slides on his sunglasses and listens to the lonely silence of the reality he's made for himself as he starts the three-day drive back to the small town he'd tried with everything inside of him to forget existed. Two days if he doesn't stop to sleep the night somewhere, and he doesn't think he'd be able to sleep if he tried.

()()()()()

Noah Stilinski spends each day pondering all the things he should've said, should've done, to keep his son at his side.

He spends every passing moment wondering if he even has a son to search for anymore, or if the world took him away like the world always seems to.

If his son suffered the same fate as Claudia, or one far more deadly. Not that he regards Claudia's death as a very peaceful one. Months of screaming and begging and simple misunderstandings turning into what felt like the end of the world. The end of his world, anyway.