Vortex Theory

[Atomyk]

Victoria Chase was pissed.

How could she not be? How was she expected to continue her life like nothing totally fucked up had happened? Her parents breathed down her neck constantly, expecting her to maintain the near-perfect GPA she had practically killed herself up to this point to maintain. Now the stress was suffocating, and Victoria couldn't deal with the fact that everything had changed. Everything.

Max was gone. Victoria hadn't even liked her much, but knowing what had happened to her in that strange dream world was enough to keep her up at night. That girl was the last person Victoria expected to be this upset about. She sometimes broke down, finding tears on her cheeks and images of that rope around Max's neck flashing through her head.

Even worse was Nathan, who had also mysteriously disappeared. What the hell, Victoria kept thinking to herself. What was up with that? He hadn't been a part of that nightmare at all, and yet he had disappeared just as seamlessly as Max had, leaving a void in Victoria's life that she didn't think she could ever replace.

No one even seemed to care. Barely anyone knew Max, and Nathan was hardly very well liked. Like Rachel Amber before them, their disappearance seemed a minor blip in Arcadia Bay life. Was this karma? Victoria had been happy in a way that Rachel had disappeared, but all this...? This was just too much.

Perhaps strangest of all was the changes Victoria wasn't minding. She had somehow made friends during that awful incident, and they had so wonderfully decided to crash the party that was her life. Diana had needed a place to live and Victoria wasn't able to turn to her parents or the bitches at Blackwell for help, so she found help in the unlikeliest of places-- Kate Marsh, the girl who Victoria helped ruin the life of.

She'd visited Kate in the hospital and somehow the girl said she forgave her. At the time, it had made Victoria so flustered that she could barely deal with it, but when she needed support, she knew just who could give it to her without judgment. Kate's family was pretty cool, and they probably felt bad themselves, so when Kate pretended Diana was a friend of hers who needed a bed... well, Diana was right at home.

Then came Stiles, which had been so much harder to explain.

How Kate didn't hate Victoria's guts was beyond her, but Kate pulled through and now Victoria's friends from other dimensions were living with the girl she once bullied.

... So freaking weird.

"Stiles," Victoria said to herself one early morning, "please pick up the phone." Thanks to some kind of multiversal group, Stiles managed to get his cell phone working in Victoria's world, which allowed Victoria to thankfully not think about it much. She was phoning him at the crack of dawn before she had even started her morning rituals because she needed someone to talk to. As a boy who seemed to like her, Victoria figured he would have minded less than Diana.

@LuckycoolHawk9​

 

[LuckycoolHawk9]

Mieczyslaw 'Stiles' Stilinski was wide awake.

How could he not be? It was hard enough sleeping with his ADHD, but even harder after all the things that he had gone through. He had lived through a world where he met his new friends, but had also watched countless people be murdered. He had come back to a base where the same thing happen and things got even worse. After living through two events like that, sleep was hard, next to impossible for the young man.

To add on top of that fact, Beacon Hills had become a ghost town. Nobody who he ever knew was left there. No Lydia, no Malia, No Melissa, no dad, none of them. They were all scattered across the multiverse, either still missing or helping the organization that Scott and him had left behind due to conflicting differences on everything that had gone down there.

To add on topic of that fact, he knew that out there in the world was the void version of himself. The nogitsune who had appeared in his nightmares back in the Coalition base. There was only one problem, unlike everyone else's, his and Scott were real and they had disappeared. He worried what they were doing out there.

The thing that worried him about this was that Scott was the least worried of all of this. He had been the one who had gotten Stiles to calm down about the situation. Of course, it may have been Scott's True Alpha that had gotten him to calm down, but he didn't want to dwell on that fact for too long, least he feel bad.

Of course, with most things, some changes weren't so bad. Arcadia Bay was a nice place, even if it wasn't his first home. It had grown on him and he did like being able to still be able to be close to the people who he had become friends with over the course of his nightmarish adventures. He felt good that Scott, Diana and Victoria were all there and that he could talk to them about the things they had experienced.

It was good to have reminders of these things and he did still have the journal that Wanda had carried and he had turned into his own. He knew he should have given it to the Coalition, but he wasn't about to trust when he had first arrived and he was right about not trusting them after that whole internal fight they had had. He tapped his pencil, debating what to write in the journal. There was so much to write about.

Where should he even start about his feelings now that he was safe?

It may have been cleared if he had actually slept the night before or had a board to organize his thought. Or taken his Adderall. All of those may have helped him to focus.

.... It was too late for that now though.

Stiles put his pencil down when he heard his phone ring. He answered it quickly, so that he wouldn't wake up Scott, Diana or anyone else in the house. He knew only one person who would call this early in the morning. Victoria Chase. He answered the phone, as he debated how to start a conversation with her. He decided to go with the best way to start any conversation. " Hey, how are you?" He asked. He already knew her answer, but it would be rude to not at least ask.

@Atomyk

 

[Atomyk]

"Fine," she said, deliberately gruff. She sighed loudly through the phone, falling back onto her bed to stare up at the ceiling. "I didn't sleep much. Again. And you'd think it would be easy considering how fucking quiet it's been around here lately--" Victoria paused to make a frustrated noise. "I don't want to go to class today."

Victoria paused then, mind swimming with drowsiness and defeat. She needed to go to class, or else her parents would kill her, but she didn't want to go to class because she had a class with Mr. Jefferson, who she did not want to see. It was so stupid. Victoria liked photography. Hell, she probably could say she loved it, considering all the work she put into it. Why did it have to be like this?

"Listen, today's going to suck, so can you maybe stop by Blackwell today and keep my company? You know, moral support? Maybe bring Diana too, if she's up for it." Diana had been to the school a few times, but there wasn't much for a non-student to do around here. Victoria just... needed people around her whose names weren't Taylor or Courtney. "I don't know if Kate plans to come back to school anytime soon, so don't bug her about this, okay?"

@LuckycoolHawk9​

 

[LuckycoolHawk9]

Stiles knew that when she sighed loudly that she was not okay. It was something he had learned a long time ago. "Join the club, I can't remember the last time I slept either- I spend many nights awake either remembering how things used to be or thinking about those ... those...I don't even know what to call them, calling them events seems wrong."

He wished he could be a greater comforter or even go to class with her. He had wanted to transfer to Blackwell, but it's kind of hard to prove you passed classes and have a good GPA when your school doesn't exist in the universe that you happen to be in. He wondered what he could say to make her want to go to class or for that matter, make her feel better. It would probably be the same thing that made him feel better.



Stiles looked on the floor as she listened to what she had to say. " Sure, I can do that. I really don't have anything planned to do today and Scott's been looking into getting a job with the vet since he is so good with animals," he replied, looking at the journal and tossing it to the side. "I didn't really plan on tell her about it. I might mention it to her parents if they ask where I am going, but I might not," he replied back to her, feeling kind of good about being honest with her.