Archive of Our Own ^beta

poltergeist: a ghost or other invisible supernatural being supposedly responsible for physical disturbances, such as unexplained noises and objects being moved or destroyed

Hell tastes like the day your PE teacher had you choose single partners for the game, and Scott only looked at you for a second before his eyes found Stiles’ and together they rushed to the other end of the field: inevitable, and cold down to the bones of your toes.

When you were seven and your parents made the rare joint appearance to pick you up from your checkup in pediatrics, your sister ended up piling into the back of the car with her friend Wendy because they also needed picked up from reading camp at the library. Their carefree laughs scratched your eardrums. Your father laughed along, too, which was rich considering he said he’d never find peace again after you had the audacity to come out defective.

You were so sick of it that when your mom reached back to place her half-empty takeaway cup of coffee in the holder between the seats and missed, then tried several more times to fit it into the plastic ring, you jerked your knee up and knocked the whole thing clean from her hand. Hot muddy splatter drenched the cream mats.

Your mother raised Cain in the car that afternoon. She tongue-lashed Tara in front of her friend for fifteen minutes straight and, when the awkward wide-eyed girl had been dropped off at her stop, mom went on going for another fifteen minutes after that. Hair was pulled and tears were shed at home and your sister came crawling into bed at half past eight without dinner with her braids fucked up, her fingers all pruned and red-raw with bleach.

Nobody had even considered the possibility that it could have been you. Not because of pity for your heart: because you were unremarkable.

When you’re fourteen on a streak of bloodlust in Flagstaff, Maine, you get cocky enough that you let one of the older victims escape. He’s the brother of one of the squirming little things you had to lure back to the labs for your guardians. You follow the young man to the police station and hover outside at a distance, watching his trembling mouth move and his nails get bitten to the quick as he reports his missing sister to the inexperienced detective in front of him. You can hear well enough, and you perk your ears up as the freshly minted officer stops clacking at the keyboard to ask for a physical description of the teenage boy he last saw Minnie with by the lake.

You wait, leaning forward through the trees, licking your chops and grinning at the corners.

The young man fails. He doesn’t recall a single detail, save the fact that you have brown hair.

You stood face to face with him on the dock and chatted with him for half an hour about the fishing grounds and your fake story about your fake grandpa who saved you from drowning in a lake just like this one. And yet, after all that, the fucker can’t even remember your eye color or the way you smelled like grave shit because you’d just dug three fresh burial sites in the woods earlier that morning.

When you get back to the labs that night and find another neatly deconstructed and resutured body for your disposal, a craze possesses you. You plunge your clawed hand into the boy’s stomach and knead the lukewarm guts in your fingers. You’re too caked in fury to count how many organs are missing in the mess of entrails that unspools over your hands and spaghettis across the concrete between your knees.

It only thickens the haze of red you see when it dawns on you that not even the dead you bury will flinch to acknowledge that you were the one who murdered them.

—

After hell, after—the beastly reincarnation of sorts that was inflicted on your body, you’re no longer capable of anything beyond a fistfight with your crush behind a dilapidated Goodwill.

You go through the motions, expecting the tip of your claw across his chest or the glance of your knuckles under his chin will only leave a mild smart that he’ll be able to wash away with lemonade and ball games and summer movies with the real friends he has back home. But you lunge and you hurt him and you hurt anyway, begging, feel me. Hate me. See me. Remember me.

Five razor points find themselves tenting around your neck and squeezing at your throat without warning. You gasp.

Eyes snap toward yours, gold on gold, master on monster, seeing on seen.

“Gotcha,” he whispers with a bloody grin.