AN: Okay so there was a tumblr post made by orwecouldnot that totally sparked this idea. You can find it at orwecouldnot dot tumblr dot com slash post slash 79944386007 slash okay-but-if-you-think-that-lydia-martin-just-sat

AN2: This didn't quite turn out the way I wanted it, but it's choppish nature and wording sort of reflects on how I imagine Lydia's thought to be. So there's that. Enjoy.

Dedication: To orwecouldnot on tumblr, who I have never talked to before, but whose idea made me itch to write.

Disclaimer: If I owned Teen Wolf people would die for a reason and the death would be dealt with properly. Also the twins would have died with Deucalian. Just sayin'.

Allison Argent has been dead only five hours when Lydia Martin storms into Deaton's clinic demanding answers. Despite the fact that it's past midnight the man is still there, crouched over one of the metal tables in the back. Aiden's on the table, apparently unconscious, while Ethan lay across the second table. Both are pale and exhausted looking. Both are beneath Lydia's worries at the moment.

"How do I resurrect someone?"

Lydia's words hang in the air. Deaton sighs and does not face her.

"You can't, Miss Martin," the man says. "It's not possible. Let her go."

Across the room from them Derek stands still as a statue, face pointed at the ground. He does not move as she snarls, as she storms closer to the druid turned vet. In turn Lydia pays him very little mind.

"I can," Lydia snaps, propriety be damned. "Tell me how to bring her back."

Deaton does not answer. Lydia whirls out of the vet's clinic, hands curling into fists, jaw clenched, and heart pounding. She gets ten steps out into the parking lot, eyes fixed on her car, when she hears the sound. There's someone behind her in the parking lot, hiding in the shadows of the building. She whirls, ready to scream, ready to claw someone's eyes out if they get too close. It's Morrell, her expression unreadable.

"You wish to bring Miss Argent back," the woman says. Lydia has never liked her, even before she knew she was involved in this supernatural shitshow, but if she knows something about resurrection then her previous feelings can go fuck themselves. Lydia marches up to her, stands front to front with only a few inches between them. Ms. Morrell is taller, but Lydia refuses to be intimidated.

I was kidnapped today, she thinks, hands shaking. I was kidnapped in a plot to kill my friends. I couldn't get a warning out that they would heed and now my best friend is dead. This is all my fault. Her hands still. That thought whirls in her head. This is all my fault.

"Tell me what you know about resurrection," she demands. Ms. Morrell does.

Allison Argent has been dead sixteen hours. Lydia has not slept, has not eaten, and has not returned home. Ms. Morrell had directed her to a bookshop in L.A. and Lydia had gone, with only a short trip to her house as a detour. Now she wore jeans and a t-shirt, her legs crossed underneath her as she read. It was a school day, but school didn't matter. Nothing mattered but the book in her lap.

"Lydia," Derek says. She does not jump, but most that is because she does not have the energy to. She glances up at him, lips pressing into a tight thin line. He does not look much better than she feels. When he doesn't continue she turns back to the book, ready to ignore him, but then the book is out of her lap and instead in his hands. She leaps before she can process what is happening, her bare feet scrambling across the loft's floor. She had come here for peace. Derek holds the book out of her reach easily and one of his broad, warm hands on her shoulder keeps her from clawing him.

"Lydia," he repeats. "You need to sleep."

"Sleep," she hisses. Fury builds in her like leaves across an unkempt yard and she boils with it, festers with the anger she has. She thinks about biting him, briefly. "You expect me to sleep when my best friend is-"

She can't say the word. It clogs her throat, choking her. It's the same feeling she had gotten when Ms. Blake had meant to kill her, wire wrapped around her throat. She can still feel the phantom blade that had pierced her stomach when Allison had fallen. She can still hear her scream echoing in her own ears.

Derek's eyes do not soften. "Sleep," he repeats. He gestures to the couch she had been sitting on, to the blanket piled on one end that had not been there when Lydia arrived. When she does not move he uses the hand on her shoulder, pressing her down toward the couch until she sits. She thinks about screaming, about taking the pen she had been using for notes and stabbing it into his leg. She considers biting him again. Then without another word Derek takes her book and goes upstairs, winding up the spiraling staircase with quiet, careful, sure steps. Lydia falls asleep half hoping Peter will be there when she wakes, so that she can wrap her fingers are his throat and choke the answers she seeks out of his lying, filthy mouth.

Allison Argent has been dead nineteen hours by the time Lydia wakes up. Isaac is sitting on the floor next to the couch, his eyes trained on a notepad in his lap when she opens her eyes. She sits up, smooths a hand through her hair, and spots Derek behind the couch, pacing in his kitchen. He has the book in his hands, open.

"You need blood of her line," Isaac answers. Her eyes snap to him and tentatively she hopes. He doesn't look up at her. There are bags beneath his eyes, deep and purple. His hair is beginning to shine with grease and his lower lip is torn. He has no shoes on, only socks. They match, but they're old, white, and threadbare, with a hole at the heel of his left sock. Lydia isn't surprised at the state of his socks, but it makes her sad unexpectedly. She turns away, squares her shoulders as her eyes find the man in the kitchen, pacing.

"What else do I need," Lydia asks. Derek answers this time, rattling off a list at her in his low, even voice. He does not tell her that she is taking the wrong route. He does not say let her go. He tells her she needs candles, Allison's body, and blood of her line.

"That's all I could translate right now," Derek says. She doesn't ask where he learned Greek. It doesn't matter as long as he is right. He holds out a travel cup of coffee to her as she approaches and she takes it, doesn't say thank you, and leaves.

"Should we tell Scott," Isaac asks. He is following her, hands shoved in his pockets. She doesn't know when he put on his shoes, but a glance says he has them on. She wants to tell him he's in gross need of a shower, but doesn't want to have the same thing thrown back in her face. There is no time for a shower, no time for a real meal.

"No," she says. She does not elaborate. Isaac doesn't ask any more questions.

Allison had told her that Gerard was still alive shortly after Ms. Blake had been dealt with. She hadn't told her where he was, but there were only so many places you could keep an old man who continually hacked up black goo and was too weak to take care of himself. They find him at the second care center they visit, one almost an hour out of Beacon Hill's city limits. Lydia finds him on the second floor, tucked away in a wheelchair.

"Well, well, well," he says when she opens the door. "You're one of my granddaughter's friends, aren't you?"

"I'm her best friend," Lydia tells her primly. "She wants to see you."

"Going on a little trip, are we?"

"Yes," Lydia answers. She wraps her hands around the handlebars of his wheelchair and pushes him out the door. They slip out the back door unnoticed, Isaac positioned as a distraction at the front desk. He hands her a slouching hipster beanie, grey with scratchy wool, and she pulls it on quietly. Gerard makes a smart comment about the hat being beneath her usual flare and she smiles thinly, sweetly, and says nothing.

Lydia dumps the old man on the ground a few hundred yards into the woods, ignores his sputtering, his shouting, and pulls out a knife. It was Allison's knife, the one she left tucked in the glove compartment of Lydia's car in case Lydia ever needed it. It feels strange in Lydia's hand, cold and impossibly small.

Allison Argent has been dead twenty-one hours when Lydia and Isaac return to the loft, Gerard's heart in a plastic bag inside of a plastic container in her purse. She pulls out the container, sets it on the counter next to the coffee maker, and looks to Derek. He glanced at the hat, at the way Isaac's lacrosse sweatshirt is wrapped around her frame, and then at the heart in the bag without a word.

"What's next," she asks pointedly.

"Eat the sandwich and I'll tell you," Derek says. He pushes a sandwich on a plate toward her, roast beef on white bread, lettuce peaking out just a bit. She doesn't take it. "Lydia," he says flatly. Isaac has already laid into his like a starving man, which he probably is. She ignores him, ignores Derek, ignores the damn sandwich he pushes toward her. She has had coffee and nothing more in the last twelve hours. She feels like she's dying.

This is all my fault, she thinks. But then she thinks of Allison, of the face she'd make if she was there. She can hear her tsk, the pitch of her voice as she berates her. Lydia takes the sandwich and eats it mechanically. After her first bite Derek nods to himself and opens up the book again, eyes skimming the page.

"Soil where she died and something that she made with her own two hands," he tells her. She wonders why he is doing this, why is he helping her, but finds she doesn't particularly care. She looks to Isaac, hunching over the plate his sandwich had sat on like it had been the only thing in life he had to live for and now it was gone. She understands the feeling.

"Lydia," Stiles says, in the parking lot under the loft. He's climbing out of his Jeep, passenger side door. Scott's climbing out of the driver's side door. Scott's face holds concern, but Stiles' is almost knowing. She feels the urge to flinch while looking at him, seeing for a second the nogitsune instead. She smothers that urge ruthlessly and tells herself that next time she sees it the nogitsune is going to die. If she can carve a man's heart out of his chest without getting blood on her clothes she can do anything, she tells herself.

"I need something Allison made herself," she tells them. She does not tell them why, but Stiles nods, as if he already knows. If Derek is helping her then it would not be too much of a stretch. Derek and Stiles used to talk, before he left to take his sister away, used to share information all the time. At any other point Lydia might wonder about that, but it isn't important now. Scott protests, as she knew he would.

"Lydia, what's going on? You look like you've been up all night. And why do you need something Allison made?"

She squares her shoulders and meets his eyes. He's taller than her, broader, stronger, faster, but when she steps forward he steps back, dips his head, submits. "I'm going to bring her back," she says. "Get me something she made herself." She whirls to climb in her car, but there's a hand on her shoulder, Scott's. She turns, lips curling into a snarl. She's been around monsters so long she's turned into one herself, she thinks a little hysterically.

"You are either helping me or against me, Scott McCall," she snaps. Then she climbs in her car, sticks the key in the engine, and turns it. The passenger side door opens and Stiles climbs in, Isaac talking to Scott in the parking lot as he gapes after her.

"If you try and talk me out of this, I will slap you," she says. She doesn't recognize her own voice, flat and distant. Stiles doesn't smile.

"If Scott's getting whatever Allison made with her own hands," he says, "what are we after?"

Allison Argent has been dead twenty-three hours and forty minutes. Her window to resurrect her best friend is only twenty minutes wide. But Scott isn't budging, is staring at her like she has grown three heads, like she is on the wrong side of moral line and slipping fast. She presses her lips together and fights for control.

"Scott," she says for the second time. "You are in my way."

"You can't do this," he argues. "You can't do this, Lydia, it could kill you. You haven't eaten, you haven't slept; you don't even know the extent of your powers!" He paces a little bit to the side and she darts forward, but before she can disappear into the morgue he grabs her, hauls her back to him.

"You could die," he says, grief in every inch of his expression. "Please, Lydia, you could die."

"No," Lydia says. There is a heart in her purse, one she carved out herself. She has a piece of paper crumbled in one hand, the phonetic pronunciation of the Greek spell written out in Derek's careful, blocky handwriting. There's a Ziploc bag with dirt beside the heart, dirt that is still stuck under her fingernails from scooping it up herself. There's an arrowhead of silver in a bag beside the dirt, which knocks against the five candles Derek had given her as she walks. She looks at Scott, eyes narrowing, and repeats, "move."

Scott moves.

Allison Argent has been dead twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes by the time everything is set up. Melissa McCall had been persuaded to distract the morgue attendant, as she believes that Lydia wishes to see her best friend one more time before the autopsy is preformed. Lydia chants the spell as she lights the candles, sprinkling the dirt over the heart as the words slide off her tongue. Something builds inside her, a feeling she cannot name. It starts as a tingling in her fingers and grows, until she is shaking, eyes prickling with tears as she stares at the pale, cold form of her best friend. After the dirt is sprinkled she takes the arrowhead out of her purse, Ziploc bag dropped on the floor and forgotten. She puts the container with the heart in it on Allison's stomach, holds the arrowhead in numb fingers above it, and as the clock strikes the hour of her death Lydia pierces the heart above the place where the sword entered her friend's body. And then Lydia Martin brings her best friend back with a scream.