This...didn't turn out like I intended. It was originally supposed to be from Stiles' pov but Lydia busted in and jumped my brain. So now it's from her pov.

Maybe I'll write Stiles' half as well.

The title of this could be talking about a number of people, to be honest.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, dude.

There's a surface pressing ice cold against her spine and legs, her wrists ache, there's a tender spot on her neck where she struggled against the ropes and hit the side of it on the pillar she's tied to.

Something(she doesn't want to call it what she knows it is, 'something' is fine for a descriptor for now) is fizzing in her veins, boiling and writhing and knowing. She knows it is coming, fuelling the pressure in her skull, the itch beneath her skin, in her bones, and she has no way to relieve the sensations.

(She just has to wait for someone to die, that's her cure).

And it can't be him. It can't be Stiles, not in any reality there might be, there is no version of this where he gets to leave her, where she will go on without him now, there is no version of events in which Brunski wins. She will not let death win. Especially not if it's Brunski, an angel of death, claiming he's saving people while stealing the life from their veins, taking breath from their lungs and stilling the beat of their hearts.

She listens to her grandmother being tortured. She listens to her cries, to her pain, with no way to stop it. Her grandmother is already dead, but she is still forced to listen. While she listens, she works. She sets to pulling at the ropes holding her, wriggling to free herself, even though she knows it's very unlikely she will escape before Brunski kills her and Stiles.

She does it anyway.

She can hear Stiles talking, telling her not to listen, but it's in her nature to take in information, and all banshees really do is listen, for facts, for creatures. For death. And on tape, her grandmother says her old nickname, a name she hasn't heard since she died.

"Don't hurt Ariel." She says, voice crackly old, scratchy recording sounds overlaying the voice that read to her countless times. "Don't hurt her."

Brunski crowds her against the pillar further, hissing, enquiring about it.

"Who is Ariel?" He spits. And she laughs. Not out loud, she isn't that stupid, but really? All he wants to know is who a name needs to be assigned to in reality, who the woman he was murdering begs safety for as she dies?

And then there is a needle sliding icey hot into her neck, and she feels the trembling, the anticipation of her murderer as he goes to depress the plunger.

Gunshots.

He cries out with pain, falls backwards as she wrenches away from him, opening her eyes as she goes. She didn't know she had closed them, but it doesn't matter now. What matters is that Parrish is standing beside her, recently fired gun resting by her knee, untangling the knots of the ropes at her wrists, and Meredith is stepping out from the shadows as she and Stiles(wrongly) piece together the information they have and label their attacker as the benefactor.

She takes Parrish's offered hand to lift herself from the cold ground, pulling Stiles up as well as she goes. They huddle together, the two of them, slightly behind Parrish as he stares at Meredith, and then all three of them get really confused as Meredith holds out her hands and lets Parrish cuff her and haul her off to the station.

"Not dead." She mumbles, almost to herself. Stiles' hand slides warmly around her wrist and she relaxes just a little. They're alive, the fizz in her blood was Brunski's death at the hands of a supernatural creature(and speaking of that, they really need to find out what Parrish is), and Meredith is the benefactor, which means they've finally found the person who has been making all their lives hell. They can go back to living, maybe.

For now...

"Take me home, Stiles?"