Chapter Text
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
Before her mother’s death, Drea would have picked fire. Every single time.
She never liked the cold; never really had to get used to it growing up in central California—but the crux of her argument, the twisted logic behind it all, was that most burn victims died from suffocation before they felt the flames. A small mercy, really, in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
In the end, however, statistics were just numbers, her mother didn't die from smoke inhalation, and there was no mercy in burying a parent before you were old enough to have children of your own. Nothing ever ended poetically off the page. Death was just death, and it was always ugly. Someone should really tell that to Robert Frost, Drea mused, biting at a raw hangnail.
The medical examiner said the actual cause of death was pulmonary edema; at least, that was his best guess based on the state of the body. He didn’t say that she felt everything, her skin peeling back into her flesh, her flesh liquefying into fuel, her joints flexing into contorted pleas until the fire incinerated her last nerve ending. He didn’t have to; Drea connected those dots all on her own. She’d been twelve at the time, not an imbecile.
“I’m sorry to drag you through this all again.”
Drea flitted her eyes away from the flickering lightbulb above Sheriff Stilinski’s head and met his gaze; it was nauseatingly sympathetic. Her responding shrug was a small, little thing—more like a twitch in practice, “Not your fault.”
Her yearly visits to Sheriff Stilinski’s office were solely her father’s doing, even if no one wanted to admit it to her face. Most mayors would use their political power to get their child out of a police station, not into it, but perhaps Mayor Dickinson stopped being her dad somewhere between the funeral and now.
“If you could start—”
“From the beginning,” Drea smoothed her thumb in small circles over the armrest of her chair, attentively tracing patterns into the polished wood, “I know.” This was, after all, the fourth anniversary of her first interrogation. She’d become somewhat of an expert at being a useless witness. Drea picked at her uneven cuticles before continuing, “Mom put me to bed around 10:00—which was kind of late for a school night, honestly, but she let me stay up to finish another chapter anyway.” The right corner of her mouth twitched for a brief moment, “Nancy Drew: Password to Larkspur Lane. I told her that forcing someone to go to sleep in the middle of a mystery was specifically forbidden in Geneva Protocol II.” Her mom had been far too indulgent of her lip on most occasions, but that night she didn’t smile at her snarky aside. She let her finish the chapter because she was too tired to argue; Drea could tell. At the time, she saw it as a victory. Now, it kept her up at night, the drooping lines of her mother’s mouth spilling over the pages of whatever book she was trying to read.
Drea bit down on her tongue when a stray splinter snagged against the soft pad of her thumb, “Dad was out of town, so it was just the two of us. Mom always put me to bed when Dad was gone; said it was the only way she could get to sleep. Had to make sure my window was locked.” She paused for a long moment: everything went dark after this. Her mother kissed the top of her head, murmured, ‘Love you,’ turned out the light, and then that was it. Drea woke up in the hospital, and her mom was dead.
A bead of sweat dripped onto her top lip. The air in the Beacon Hills police station was, without fail, sticky with heat and body odor—and it wasn’t just the oppressive Californian sun. Even in the winter, a person could choke on the stifling warmth. Idly, she wondered if it was a matter of interrogatory tactics or budgetary constraints.
“And then,” Sheriff Stilinski prompted gently, though they both knew how the story went from here. She had told it to him and a dozen other officials at least a hundred times in the last four years.
Drea bit down on her thumbnail and winced when her teeth snagged on the tender nail bed, “And then nothing. I opened my eyes, and a nurse said that you found me on the front lawn.”
“You don’t remember how you got outside?”
Drea shook her head, staring past the Sheriff's shoulder. Large pieces of dust floated through the air, highlighted by the slivers of light trickling through the blinds. Suddenly, she had a newfound appreciation for the lack of fans in the room.
Sheriff Stilinski cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his jaw, “You don’t remember saying it was an angel?”
Blinking slowly, Drea looked at the grim line of the Sheriff’s mouth and gripped her knees tightly, digging her fingers into tawny skin until her wrist cracked, “I should, right? I was twelve. I should remember something—that’s what everyone thinks. That’s what my dad thinks.” Her eyelids fluttered to a tight close, and her voice went so quiet she could barely be heard over the hum of the copier outside the door, “He thinks it was me. That’s why he makes you question me every year.” She pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her fists and gnawed on the soft lining of her cheek, “He thinks you’ll finally figure out how I did it.”
Drea was scared to open her eyes as the silence stretched between them. They’d danced around the subject before, hinted and twisted around the heart of it, but they’d never truly discussed how it looked from the outside. Sheriff Stilinski had been kind enough to give her a few different excuses over the years: trauma, head injury, oxygen deprivation, plain old grief—but whatever caused her temporary amnesia wasn’t so conveniently explained. In fact, currently, she still had no explanation at all. When she finally peeked through her lashes, clumped together with frustrated tears, Drea couldn’t quite figure out what expression the Sheriff was making. He leaned back in his desk chair and frowned, “I’m sure he doesn’t—”
“He does,” Drea cut him off. Her eyes went flinty, deep brown darkening to something far more ashen with the resolve of her anger. She never had any trouble reading her father’s face; the disgust was thinly-veiled between the flickers of fear.
Sheriff Stilinksi leaned forward so that she had no choice but to look him in the eyes. They were kind—more tired than usual, but still kind. They always were. That was one thing Drea remembered from that day, waking up in the hospital to Sheriff Stilinski’s kind, watery blue eyes, just before the entire world fell apart. His voice was gentle, but firm, when he finally spoke, “I don’t.”
Drea nodded numbly and pulled at a fraying string on the hem of her denim skirt until the thread snapped.
“I mean it, kid. They couldn’t identify the source of the fire. They couldn’t even find an origin point; no twelve-year-old could pull that off.”
Drea chewed on her bottom lip, “Could anyone?”
Sheriff Stilinski’s brow furrowed, and his mouth screwed up into a crooked line, like he was chewing on his words and deciding if he should swallow them or spit them out. “I wish I had all the answers for you. I really do. Not knowing, it’s worse than any truth.”
Drea blinked up at him for a moment, once again taken aback by his raw sincerity, and swallowed hard. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to have the answers; he was the one who was supposed to ask the questions. There was one failure in his muggy office, and it wasn’t the Sheriff. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Not your fault.”
He looked like he wanted to argue the point, but whatever he wanted to say was interrupted by the sharp ringing of the phone on his desk. “I have to take this, but if you remember something, or if you just need to talk—”
“My dad spends a small fortune on a psychiatrist and a behavioral therapist for that,” Drea stood up quickly, shouldering her bag. She forced the corners of her mouth into a small smile, tight at the edges like a sheet that had been stretched too thin, “But thank you. For everything.”
The Sheriff’s gaze darted to a framed photo on his desk. Drea had seen it before, on one of her many visits to his office. It was of a boy—his son, she assumed—he looked like he was around five or six at the time. He was grinning, wide enough to show off his missing incisors, and his fingers and wrist were stained cotton-candy blue from a melting popsicle. She must’ve been that happy once, right? In the beginning, everyone was unencumbered by the weight of imminent mortality. Maybe that’s what Sheriff Stilinski was thinking, too. He looked away from the photo and gave Drea a small smile, “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”
Drea gave a half-hearted wave before wrapping her fingers around the strap of her backpack and walking to the parking lot.
Outside, the sky was grim, a mocking reflection of the dour expression on her face. The spite in her eyes hardened when big, fat raindrops splattered against the apples of her cheeks. For a moment, she just stood there, glaring at the rain and cursing the cosmos for their utterly unamusing sense of humor.
A jeep pulled into the parking lot, and the squealing engine startled her back into reality. The search for her car keys was, of course, a considerable endeavor. Nothing could be easy, not here, not today. Not ever, she thought darkly. A bit melodramatic maybe, but the weather was certainly ripe for a bit of self-pity.
Drea stacked her textbooks and binders onto the hood of her sedan, haphazardly throwing her jacket on top of the pile to protect her painstakingly penned Kafka essay from the rain. By the time her fingertips brushed against the cool metal of her keys, her hair was damp and curling at the ends.
The momentary relief was short-lived when she pressed the unlock button five times and the accompanying beep didn’t sound, not even once. For an absurdly long minute, all she could do was rest her forehead against the driver’s side window, breathing heavily until condensation gathered next to her mouth and the drizzle speckled dots onto the sleeves of her thin cotton shirt.
“If you’re trying to charge the battery through osmosis, it’d probably be more effective to smash your head against the hood.”
Drea jumped, and then flinched again when her keys clattered against the ground. She caught a glimpse of the phantom speaker in the side-view mirror; bizarrely, he looked just as surprised as she felt. She turned around, apprehensively—objects may be closer than they appear n’all—and tried to swallow her rapidly rising heart.
“Sorry,” the boy pulled the hood of his sweatshirt down and had the decency to look contrite, “big mouth.” He rubbed a hand over his chapped lips. “It’s a real problem. It’s so big, actually, that my foot just slides right in there like…all the time,” he gestured animatedly with a flat hand, a quick sliding motion, like a fish through water.
Drea blinked at him, slowly, and bent down to reach for her keys, “Might wanna see someone about that. Sounds unsanitary.”
“Eh, it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve put in my mouth,” he said, eyes widening into horrified round circles the second he stopped talking. A faint flush creeped up his neck to his ears, and Drea’s heart dropped back into her chest. Slashers and ax murderers didn’t blush. Probably. She hadn’t ever met one, but it seemed like sound logic.
“Choking hazard,” Drea hummed, leaning back against her car. Her fingers traced a small dent in the door, the cause long forgotten, “It’s definitely still a choking hazard.”
The boy grinned before fixing his expression into something on the cusp of severity, “I’m about 95.7% sure that anything bigger than a fist is completely mouth-safe.” He held up his fist and nodded sharply, “Make that 98.3% sure.”
“98.3?” Drea’s brow arched.
“Maybe even 98.9.”
The buzz of a lamp post hummed above their heads as they stared at each other with little smirks until the quiet made Drea sink her teeth into her bottom lip and big-mouth drum his fingers against his forearm.
“So,” his sneakers squeaked against the slick asphalt as he shifted his weight, “you need a jump?”
Drea pursed her lips and ran her eyes over the front of her car, “I might give osmosis another shot. 30 seconds is hardly a fair trial.”
“Of course,” he hummed, “you gotta be fair.”
“We are in front of a police station.”
“Well,” he scratched his cheek, “it’s not a courthouse.”
“Technicality.” Drea was slightly horrified when she finally noticed that she was smiling. The sensation felt like it had escaped straight out of the uncanny valley and latched onto her face like a parasite in need of a host. It only took two weeks for muscles to atrophy; years must have completely decimated the fibers in her cheeks. “I guess I could use a jump. If your offer was an offer and not a hypothetical.”
“Smart choice.” The boy rapped his knuckles against the hood of her car and said, “Steel’s probably pretty low on the permeability scale.”
“As opposed to a skull.”
He snorted and then nodded towards the large lump of books and papers covered by her freshly dampened jean jacket, “You should probably move your stuff. Y’know, ‘cause of the very un-permeable battery.”
“There’s that,” Drea sighed and started stuffing her things back into her backpack, shaking it violently until her notebook finally slid past her chemistry textbook, “and flunking English isn’t high on my list of things to do this weekend.”
His gaze flickered back and forth, rapidly cataloging every corner and crevice of her face. Drea tilted her head, brows pinched, and stared back at him with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. His eyes, she noticed, became a peculiar shade of brown in the yellow glow of the setting sun and the fluorescent light of the lamppost. More like honey, she realized, more like honey than irises. Something finally clicked behind them. "You,” he pointed aggressively, “you go to Beacon Hills.”
Drea pushed his finger away from her face with her own, “Safe bet, considering there’s exactly one option for the next 2,000 square miles.”
“You’re kind of a smartass, you know that,” he muttered as he struggled with the trunk of the jeep parked one space to her right until he finally wrenched it open with an almost guttural grunt.
Her lips parted briefly, and then she grinned drolly. It was refreshing, not being treated like some fragile little creature who would buckle in the knees—or possibly set something on fire—at the slightest confrontation. “Kind of?”
“Total.” He nodded decisively before sticking his head and torso into the depths of his trunk. “Completely, entirely, and wholly a smartass.” There were various clanging sounds until he re-emerged with a pair of jumper cables, “Never noticed that in class. You don’t really…say anything.”
Drea bit back the snark poised on the tip of her tongue. When people looked at her, the only thing they saw was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was the daughter of the woman who burned to death on Cedar Street; Drea Dickinson’s mom died, and she was there. It seemed like that was all she would ever be in Beacon Hills.
In the grand scheme of things, it was better to be no one.
High school had been her chance to slip into social obscurity—more kids, more drama, less discussion of homicide by arson—so she took it, wholeheartedly. She kept to the corners of classrooms, away from extracurriculars, and her mouth resolutely shut.
“I try to exclusively bring the smart and leave the ass at home,” Drea finally replied.
The boy’s eyes drifted downwards for a moment, and his voice did a funny, squeaky thing when he said, “I should give that a go sometime.”
“10/10 would recommend. No one bugs you—and teachers never throw erasers at your face.”
“So you do remember me,” he grinned a little and rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before unlatching the jeep’s hood and propping it open.
Slanting her head, Drea watched his profile. There were moles scattered across his cheek and neck, and his angular jaw clenched as he struggled with the knotted cords in his willowy fingers. “Vaguely,” she said faintly. It was coming back to her in pieces. That was life after twelve for Drea Dickinson: bits and pieces. Everything was made up of the disquieting moments when she surfaced from the haze and into the present. It should’ve felt like a lungful of air, but it didn’t. It always felt like choking.
He wiped his grease-smudged hand on his jeans and then extended it towards her, “Stiles.”
She took his hand, despite the strange formality, and shook it—mainly because of the black streaks staining his pants. “Drea.”
Stiles’s brow wrinkled, “I thought it was Andy.”
Drea hadn’t been Andy for what felt like a very long time. Four years, in fact. There were several reasons: her mom called her Andy, and she wanted to become someone else, anybody else—but ultimately the deciding factor was ‘Andy Arson.’ The nickname stuck around far longer than she thought it would. With a last name like Dickinson, Drea really thought the tweenager taunting would go in a different direction, but thirteen-year-olds had a knack for latching onto a person’s deepest-seated insecurities. Middle school, she mused, was a tragedy all on its own.
“Nope. Just Drea.”
Stiles examined her face, and she saw that flicker in his eyes again: the light of recognition. “Well, Drea’s cool, y’know, in comparison.” His fingers twitched a few times when he connected the clamp to the coordinating battery terminal, and Drea’s eyes widened. She held her breath in her sternum until she registered that he hadn’t been electrocuted. He was just naturally tweaky, she concluded. It was either that, or he had jumped one-too-many engines in the last 24 hours…unless it was hidden option C, and he was actually tweaking. Unlikely, given he was on his way into a building teeming with cops, but far stranger things had happened in Beacon Hills.
The longer she remained silent the more parts of his body started to move. Stile squeezed and unsqueezed the black clamp in his hand and drummed on the side of her car with his unoccupied fingers, “Like, Andy—no offense—doesn’t exactly strike fear or confidence in the heart. I mean, I wouldn’t trust Officer Andy to save my ass in a shoot-out, and I definitely wouldn’t trust Dr. Andy to cure my unknown, incredibly rare, incurable disease.”
“No one could cure your incurable disease. That’s quite literally the entire definition of the word.”
“Sure,” Stiles connected the last clamp and glanced at her over his shoulder, almost checking himself in the chin with a large shrug, “but I’d buy that Dr. Drea could.”
Her mouth parted for a second, and then she closed it before she could say something impulsive. “That’s not even how it works; I’d be Dr. Dickinson.”
Stiles winced, “Brutal.”
“Yeah,” Drea sighed and rubbed her palms over her arms until the goosebumps prickling her biceps receded into her skin.
Stiles looked back at her again, and his mouth wormed its way into a little frown. His head disappeared into his trunk, and after a moment a lumpy maroon mass hurtled towards her face. She caught it before it could smack into her nose, and she clutched at the soft material until she realized that the projectile missile was actually just a sweatshirt.
Stiles was staring at her when she looked up from her hands. A small, unsure…something squirmed over his face, and she felt a little stupid, just standing there, hoodie limp in her arms. It happened a lot—more than it should after so many years. The invisible quicksand materialized in the strangest, most insignificant moments. Drea blinked, completely brainless, at simple questions, stared aimlessly into her closet until her second alarm startled her into snatching the first shirt her fingers came in contact with—clasped at a stranger’s hoodie until the rainwater pooled on her lashes dripped into her eyes.
Robotically, Drea thrust her arms through the sleeves and tugged it over her head, “Thanks.” The sweet scent of grass clung to the fabric, and there was something earthier underneath it, something like evergreen. She smiled slightly, combing her baby hairs behind her ears, “I almost forgive you for being a dick about my name.”
Stiles’s shoulders unwound as he scoffed, “At least people can say it without seizing.”
Drea looked at him and tilted her head, eyebrows crawling towards the bridge of her nose.
Stiles waved his hand in the air and extrapolated, “My full name is—just trust me. Dick jokes aren’t the worst thing in the world.”
“No,” Drea chewed on her lip, “they aren’t.”
There was a moment in middle school where she was tempted to plant the seed of something incredibly stupid and irresistibly raunchy, something like, ‘Andrea wants ‘Dickinsideher,’ because even that was better than a name with matricide as the punchline. But it didn’t take when Jared Cartwright soft-launched it in PE, so Drea seriously doubted it would ever catch-on from the target herself.
She cleared her throat, “But they are almost as bad as stye jokes.”
“Uh, absolutely not. Eyesores are nowhere near as gross as dick’n nu—” Stiles coughed, throat bobbing as he swallowed, before finishing his sentence with an audible question mark, “…phallic imagery.”
Drea pursed her lips, “Pus beats penis on the ick meter by at least 23 points.”
Stiles’s eyes glimmered in the fading light, “23?”
“Maybe even 24.”
Another bout of silence fell between them, but it wasn’t so restless this time—even after Stiles torpedoed his body through his passenger seat. He fought with his keys for a while until the correct one slid into the ignition.
The jeep’s engine hummed pleasantly in the quiet as Drea let out a soft sigh, dropping her head back against her car window. The rain had stopped somewhere between trying to unlock her car and now, but she couldn’t quite recall when. The chill wasn’t so bad, she realized, without her foul mood casting a shadow over her head.
Stiles landed back on his feet and leaned against the jeep. Drea could feel his gaze on her again. A tickling sensation trailed down her spine as she fiddled with her keychain. It was old, a gift from her parents on some birthday she couldn’t remember. Paint had chipped off in most places after thoughtlessly throwing her keys every time she came home, but she could still make out the M and Y of the orange ‘Mystery Machine’ logo.
Stiles hummed for a moment and then said, “I’m Nobody. Who are you?”
Drea stared at him and waited for the punchline. It didn’t come. Instead, he shifted from one foot to the other and fumbled over each following syllable. “You know, like… Dickinson,” he waved his hands around, seemingly searching for some sort of cosmic relief. “I thought it would better than a dick joke, but upon some seriously belated reflection, I realize that you’re probably tired of corny assholes qu—”
“How dreary,” Drea interrupted, quietly but loud enough to be heard over the rumbling jeep, “to be Somebody.”
Stiles’s jaw snapped shut; it was his turn to blink at her stupidly. He smiled a little and ran his hand over his buzzed head, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t know what she was agreeing with, only that she wholeheartedly did.
“I forgot that part.”
Drea clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shook her head, “It’s the best line.”
“It might have something to do with my species landing somewhere between microscopic bacteria and radioactive cockroach on the high-school social food chain,” Stiles said dryly. His face remained impassive, like he was talking about something benign as the weather.
Drea tilted her head a little and a timid smile unfurled over her face in time with the swell of familiarity blooming beneath her ribcage, “Then there’s a pair of us.”
His cheeks dimpled when he smiled back at her, “I do remember that one.”
“Well,” Drea slid her hands into her back pockets and shrugged, “it is the best part.”
Stiles squinted at her and then laughed.
Drea felt a bit like laughing too, so she swallowed thickly before she could choke on the impulse. She took a step backwards and curled her fingers around her keys in her back pocket, “I should probably try to start my car…y’know, before you start reciting, ‘I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain.’”
He nodded, taking a step towards his jeep, “Solid plan. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ would be next.”
Drea slid into her car and stared at the steering wheel, wrapping her fingers around 10 and 2 and silently calling upon every deity she’d ever heard of to end her suffering. Stiles seemed nice enough, but she seriously doubted her small-talk capabilities were up-to ‘ride home’ standards. Perhaps, she should revisit her resounding dedication to atheism, she thought, as the engine sputtered in protest a few times and then came back to life.
Stiles flashed two thumbs up through the window. The smile on his face was positively goofy, but his dismount from the jeep was somehow even goofier. He stumbled over his large feet a few times before regaining stability. Drea bit back a smile when he shot her another thumbs up, this time through the dash as he removed the jumper cables from her battery.
He wiped his hands off on his jeans again; at this point, she was convinced that they were beyond saving, but Stiles didn’t seem concerned. He tapped against her window before stepping around the open door, “You should probably let it run for a while. Take the scenic route home; enjoy all the Beacon Hills hotspots open past 8:00 pm on a weeknight. I personally recommend the Rite Aid or Walmart.”
Drea snorted, “Maybe I’ll swing by the Preserve. I hear the woods are especially beautiful in the foreboding darkness.”
“Don’t.” Serious was an odd look on Stiles’s face. Drea decided that she much preferred the goofy grin. “Don’t go anywhere near the Preserve. It’s officially cordoned off—totally locked down, quarantine-zone-central. Something about flesh-eating, parasitic plant life.”
“As completely real and unobtrusive as that sounds,” Drea drawled, “don’t worry about it. Literally every single person in town knows about the body they found in the woods.” It was bound to happen, small town and all—and ‘woman dies in deadly animal attack’ was the most interesting thing that had happened in Beacon Hills since the intersection got a Target two years ago. “I’ve seen every installment of Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project. If I’m going to be murdered, I refuse to also be humiliated by a cliché C.O.D.”
The manic expression on his face softened to a relieved smile and then again to a little smirk, “So what’s a certified fresh murder, then? Not that I doubt the depths of human depravity, but I think society killed off originality a few centuries ago.”
Drea thought back to a house fire with no origin, accelerant, or discernible cause. Apparently, not. “You know what they say,” she sighed, “life finds a way.”
Stiles tilted his head, “And death.”
“And death,” Drea agreed, staring at a small chip in her windshield. The cracks had just begun to spiderweb out from the pit.
Stiles looked like he wanted to say something, and he looked so much like the Sheriff with his face twisted around thoughtful contemplation that she couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to make the connection. The boy in the photo had grown up. How unfortunate for him. Stiles swallowed whatever it was that was lingering on his tongue and shut Drea’s door. He leaned his elbow against the window frame and cocked his hand in a stiff little wave, “See ya in English, Dickinson—both of you.”
“Awful,” Drea’s nose scrunched as she buckled her seatbelt, “terrible, dreadful. A solid 25 on the ick meter.”
Stiles grinned and held up his hands, “I’ll think of something better by Monday, promise.”
Drea put her car in drive once Stiles was safely a few feet from the wheels and flicked her damp hair over her shoulder, “I dwell in Possibility.”
What a scary place to be, she thought as she watched Stiles disappear in her rearview mirror. Possibility. Hope. Life. She was chronically good at surviving; cockroached her way out of every horrible thing life squashed her with. Lately, all she could do was cling to her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin, until she was barely more than roadkill. A walking carcass was a far cry from living, but Death would not stop for her, so she stopped looking for him. She kept treading water, took her pills, stopped existing—she was a lot like Schrödinger’s cat that way: too stubborn to live, too stubborn to die. She didn’t know what to do if someone unsealed the box and forced her to choose. That was the trouble with possibility; it required far too much uncertainty.