When Levi Hale was born, her brother swore he would always protect her. This was a recurring theme in her childhood years, most importantly occurring during their Hale family games of hide and seek.
Levi had developed a habit of winning the game, but always because she hid so well that even she herself would not know where she actually was. The silence and isolation had built up her anticipation of the game, masking any fear that she did not realise she had.
The smell of the damp woods would always calm her and make her feel at home. A born werewolf with a large family, Levi had never had any reason to feel such fear of isolation.
She tried to help keep herself sane by trying to trick her mind into thinking that the past four months had just been an extended game of hide and seek with her pack members, that Scott and Lydia and Malia and Derek and Liam and Stiles would come running into the derelict building laughing as they realised that they had managed to find her and end the game.
But Levi knew this twisted form of a new reality was nothing more than that: reality. There was no extended game of hide and seek going on with her friends and family, there was no chance of them running into the dark train station - because they wouldn't be able to remember her. She missed them more than she had ever missed anything in her life. Sure, she had missed a family she had never truly remembered until only a year prior, but neither party had known the truth. This hurt more for she could remember every second with them, but they couldn't remember a single thing. She remembered how every morning Stiles' jeep would break down until she explained to him that the space he was parking in meant the engine got heated from the hot sun beating down on it. She remembered moving her locker after Allison's death - not wanting to have to stare at it all day so instead she was moved to the one next to Lydia's and a few along from Scott's. She remembered Scott promising her that he would never forget her only weeks before she was taken, as they said a quick goodbye before she left to visit Cora with Derek. She remembered Derek and Cora holding her hands as they helped her up from her trying to beat them in training but failed time and time again. But they wouldn't remember any of it.
So Levi paced the ground. The ground beneath her had changed its terrain, her restless pacing for the time she had been kept in this hell hole not only taking a toll on her.
121 days exactly. She had been stuck in this unidimensional prison for four months. Two-thousand, nine hundred and four hours - 174,240 minutes - of her life had now been spent in complete silence with no human interaction. She hadn't even ate - but for some reason she never found herself craving food, and despite not consuming any nutrients, she remained in the exact same physical condition throughout the four months of nothing but loneliness and emotional pain.
Sure, in a surprising twist her uncle Peter had appeared in this hellhole, but she made so attempt in the slightest to even try to wake him from the seemingly comatose state that he was in after his plan to have her and Scott killed months before in the church with Kate.
And sure, a part of her desperately just wanted to swipe her claws right across his neck and end him there and then - but she had made a promise to her pack that she had changed. She vowed that she would never become a killer like she had been before she had grown to become their family, and just because she was stuck in a seemingly eternal hell of torture didn't mean that she was going to go back on her word.
So she left the man be, knowing that his own thoughts would be driving him insane probably. He wasn't someone she would ever really worry that much about again - even if her brother found it hard to remove a family tie (despite having slicing Peter's throat once himself).
In her first month, Levi had planned many escapes. Obviously, none were successful or she would have been back with her pack by now. It was always the same - she'd go through a door and end up in the same room, or she'd chase after the ghost riders as they hurried out the tunnel but the same blue barrier would always send her flying backwards and make her go stone cold for what she presumed must have been hours.
She wasn't even sure if the clock and date that changed on the boards around the station correlated with the actual time in Beacon Hills so really when she was thinking four months, she honestly didn't have a single clue anymore.
By the second month, Levi had began to come to terms with what had actually happened to her. Her days had been spent sitting thinking of different loop holes in all the truth and stories she had known about the wild hunt, hoping that there was some loop hole she could use to reconnect with her friends. She never found anything.
The third month was her worst. Nothing but tortured screams at the silent train station, not having a single ounce of happiness left in her entire body. Her darkest thoughts were constantly clouding her mind - even pushing her to consider actually reverting to breaking her promise of no killing every time she looked at Peter - and she thought there was no end to this pain.
The forth month - where she currently was - was her acceptance stage. As sad as it was, Levi had accepted she would die here. How? She didn't know - for she had tried many things and not once had she even been harmed critically.
The one thing she did know was darker than anything she'd ever imagined. She was going to die here; alone, in silence, with not a single one of her friends even having a clue that she existed.
//.//
"Scott? SCOTT!" Scott jumped as he was snapped out of his thoughts of failing AP Biology by Stiles slamming his locker shut inches away from his face.
"Stiles?" He asked, confused as to why his best friend was being all scattered and hyper. "Did you take your adderall this morning?"
"Yes! Well, no but anyway," he continued, passing on the thought quicker than it had taken Scott to even process the boy's excited heartbeat. Stiles waved his hands excitedly through the air, grinning as he jumped on the spot slightly.
"The jeep is working!" He cheered, causing Scott to groan and laugh with a playful roll of his eyes. Something had been stopping Stiles' jeep from working every day for the past four months at the exact same spot in the parking lot.
Scott's eyebrows creased for a second as he replied without thought. "Didn't we say that it was because of the space you parked in that it didn't run?"
Stiles paused, cocking his head as he stared at his best friend - the words rang in his head with such familiarity but he couldn't remember them ever being spoken to him or Scott by anyone. Not even Lydia had suggest it, for the strawberry blonde really didn't care about the jeep's problems as much as Stiles' had hoped.
"Who said that?"
Scott paused, "maybe I'm imagining it."
.
He found himself alone in the corridor later, everyone having left school as the bell had hung almost an hour prior. He had been talking to Coach Finstock about hopefully getting Liam as the new captain of the lacrosse team after he left in a few weeks time, but for some reason he had felt drawn to a particular locker.
There was nothing special about it. It was dented, something that made it unusable but after spending so much money to repair the majority of the school since the attack of the Beast previously, they couldn't afford to replace all the lockers. It was weird, he thought, that all the other lockers were perfectly intact except from that one.
Placing a delicate hand against the metal frame, his eyes furrowed as the door pushed itself open from the gentle touch. He could smell Lydia, but he realised it was from the locker beside the one he was inspecting - making a note to ask Lydia about why he had never noticed the dented metal before now.
Having expected to find nothing inside of the locker, Scott was surprised at the small crumpled sheet of paper he found inside the compartment. Unsrunching it, he realised it was a photo - but that wasn't what set the hairs on the back of his neck up. Instead it was the content of the mysterious photograph.
It was a selfie. More so, a selfie of him. But it was weird; he had never seen this photo, and he definitely did not remember it even being taken in the first place. And even if he had taken it, which he surely must have, why was there a massive gap beside him? Why was his arm out as if it was wrapped in thin air?
Hearing the loud yells of the lacrosse team filing out of the locker room, he pocketed the photo before meeting up with Stiles and Liam as they walked back outside to Stiles' trusty jeep.
As they drove, Scott's eyes couldn't help but drift to the leather jacket with the L.H stitched into the linen that was rammed in the footwell of the front seat - where it had remained discarded since they had first discovered it in the back seat of the car at the start of senior year. Now, as they started to prepare to finish, the jacket still lay there - a reminder of a life that had once been.
Ignoring Stiles and Liam bickering as they pulled up at his house, he said his goodbyes before snatching the leather jacket before either of them could notice. He brushed past the note on the dining table about Melissa being on a night shift and headed straight to his room, sitting the leather jacket down on a seat next to his window.
There was something strange going on, but he couldn't figure any of it out.
He tried to ignore the feeling, heading for his bag and pulling out the photo of him, Lydia, Malia and Stiles that had been taken that morning, pinning it on to his noticeboard so he didn't lose it.
As Scott left the room, his eyes missed the crumpled sheet of paper that was stuck to the board, a black marker scribbling unevenly across the page. A note from someone who would never hear the answer wrote to another who didn't understand the question.
A note from L.H to S.M.