The Beginning

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Her illness came with the first humid showers of spring, curtains of rain gliding down their windows as they drove to and from Beacon Hills Memorial. Stiles was nine when his mom had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. After months of forgotten appointments, bouts of strange behavior and slipping judgment, his mom had finally decided to go in for a thorough check-up. After her diagnosis, their lives had changed completely.

Suddenly, Stiles wasn't allowed to stay with his mom unsupervised. The woman who practically breathed sunlight and worshiped the outdoors, stopped leaving their house. She stopped making breakfast with Stiles every Sunday morning, she neglected her beloved flowerbeds out front, and began to lose her appetite with time.

Right before his eyes, Stiles' mother was deteriorating.

She eventually stopped leaving her bed or showering regularly. She would suddenly become angry and scream at Stiles and his dad, or breakdown crying out of nowhere. The worst, however, was whenever she would disappear. She got confused sometimes, and would just wander out of the house—usually still in her pajamas—and sympathetic neighbors or pitying townsfolk would call up the station to let his dad know they had found her and where to pick her up.

Almost just as bad, were the times when his poor mother would come out of an episode, realize the chaos and pain she had caused—sometimes even in the middle of screaming at her family—and he could see her breaking on the inside. She cried the hardest in those moments.

An outspoken part of Stiles hated himself for it, but he was almost relieved when it came time for his mom to move into the hospital, only because he felt so incredibly dumb and helpless every time his mother lost herself to her illness. At least the doctors knew how to comfort her and make her better. Right?

Wrong.

That cold beige hospital room made his mom miserable, and Stiles' time with his mom was cut in half once she went there. As usual, his dad would drop him off at his best friend Scott's house when he went to work, and many days Stiles would secretly borrow Scott's bike and go straight to the hospital to see his mom. Melissa always tattled on him to his dad, but other than a weary sigh when he came to pick Stiles up from the hospital, and a ruffling of his buzzed hair, his dad didn't scold him at all.

It was the sixth of June, the morning had been a mess of warm summer showers, green-tinted skies, and distant thunder storms. It was also Stiles' tenth birthday. He had begged his dad to allow him to take the day off school and let him spend the day with his mom. She had been sleeping more and more those past few weeks, looking weaker and more tired every time she woke up, but he didn't mind. He would spend hours at her bedside if only it meant he could have a few spare minutes with his mom. His dad was reluctant to leave him on his own for so long, since he had an important meeting that morning to attend to and couldn't join him until around noon, but Stiles persisted.

He should have stayed home. He should have listened to his dad and waited for him to come visit later.

It was not even an hour into sitting vigil at his mother's bedside, that his world came crashing down. The limp hand in his grasp twitched, he saw her eyelids flutter as her eyes rolled behind them, the breath in her throat stuttered and seized, all the while the wall of machines around her lit up like a Christmas tree and alarms sounded around the room. Stiles was ripped from his mother's tightening grasp by a swarm of frantic doctors and nurses, shoved to the back wall of the room and forgotten as they began shoving needles inside his mom and flashing pen lights in her unresponsive eyes.

He stood frozen, ears ringing and chest feeling like it was slowly filling with water, as a man in blue scrubs pressed both hands over his mom's chest and began pushing down hard , again and again. Again and again and again andagainagainagainagain --

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