Unspoken ▹ Teen Wolf [01]

043.

Jackson is dead.

Jackson is dead.

No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn't even begin to comprehend the outrageously blunt statement. It was as though, everytime she so much as attempted, a switch in her brain flicked & all thought processing was suddenly blocked by a solid wall of complete & utter darkness. Emptiness. Which, ironically, was all she was capable of feeling since she'd seen the lacrosse player lying dead on the field with the self-inflicted claw wounds that'd ended his life. Emptiness & a small voice playing on repeat "it's all your fault."

Logically, she knew it wasn't. Rachel could have never predicted that one action could have such a domino effect causing so much death & disaster. Not even her wildest nightmares could have foretold it; but that didn't stop her from believing that she was the cause, and if her actions could be undone, the present day would drastically change. Jackson would (probably) be alive. Matt would be alive (and likely still dealing with many, many psychotic thoughts & mental disorders, but alive was better than dead). Everyone he made Jackson kill would still be alive. Gerard wouldn't be winning. Rachel would still be the shameless, overconfident metaphorical queen she intended on being at the start of it all.

She had no way of knowing if any of those would've still happened had she not turned Jackson— but she couldn't help assuming. Forget being the Alison DiLaurentis of Beacon Hills, Rachel was starting to feel more like post-mental-breakdown Spencer Hastings. Everything was spiralling out of control, her world was crashing down around her & there was nothing she could do to stop it. Absolutely nothing. The brunette had spent hours searching her guilt wracked brain for even the slightest way to repair something— anything, but she hadn't a single clue. All she had left to do was sort through the wreckage around her to see what remained, and then protect it as best as she could through the fallout.

That was the worst part; everything that had happened so far wasn't even close to the ending. This was the build up, the action packed final thirty minutes of every thriller flick ever produced, the steep uphill road leading straight to the cliff everyone was metaphorically going to plummet off of in the end. The movie - or in this case, the miniature war - still had at least twenty minutes left in it (hours, days even). The end was surely nearing, but if they even wanted to see what it had to offer, they had to survive until then.

If Jackson was dead, it wasn't because he killed himself. Jackson Whittemore, even aware of how much of a danger he is to every living thing in Beacon Hills, would not kill himself. He wouldn't even lock himself in a basement. If Jackson was really as dead as he looked, it was because Gerard forced him to kill himself. If Rachel, a girl who'd spent virtually her entire life learning how to avoid being killed by hunters, knew anything about a man like Gerard Argent, it was that he wouldn't surrender a weapon as powerful as Jackson right before the fallout. In a time like this, one where a climatic event had just gone down & everyone was in the midst of registering it within their minds, someone like Gerard would be reloading his guns. Recharging the stun guns, sharpening the knives— he'd be doing everything possible to ensure no matter how many people the other side had, he'd win without taking so much as a scratch.

Rachel had a base idea of what he could be doing; but she wasn't sure. She could vaguely recall the sketched image of a Kanima next to various paragraphs within one of her family's old books, but the words were too blurry for her to recall exactly what they'd said. Rachel wasn't entirely sure she'd ever been exactly sure of what they said— she couldn't have been older than seven when she'd been flipping through the books her mother normally kept out of reach. She had been gone visiting a friend & left Peter & Derek to babysit; both of whom cared little to none about what Rachel managed to dig out of the bookshelf whilst they watched a basketball game on television in preparation for one of Derek's upcoming games.