hic abundant leones (quo fata ferunt)

by imperfectandchaotic

Stiles glances up from his spot half-knelt in the dirt, his fingers and wrists dark with ash and the tail end of a spell lingering in the air. Lydia thinks, you're the one who always figures it out, and wills it to be true again. "We deserve normal, now. And I promise you can have it, after this." [a daemon!college au in which stiles and lydia solve a mystery and avoid feelings.]

Notes: This was supposed to be a Stydia Big Bang entry for 2016, but it definitely ended up taking me almost a year to write. It's very awkward. Plays fast and loose with canon, but essentially everything is the same except for the finer emotions of the Wild Hunt – and everyone is alive because fuck you Jeff Davis. Please excuse my awful use of Latin, and mind the rating for language and sex.

---

When Lydia is seven, she and Alec play a game of hide and seek with the neighbourhood children. Her daemon becomes a tiny otter and curls silently over the back of Lydia's neck as she ducks beneath Felicia Drear's rain pipe and hugs the slatted side of her neighbour's home, searching for a good hiding place. The boundaries of the game extend from Felicia's house all the way to the tree line at the end of the street, and fifteen paces beyond that.

'You know we can't,' Alec reminds her. 'Your mother would never let us out of the house again.' Lydia makes a displeased face, but does not argue. She eyes the expanse of three backyards and darts across two, her hands slapping against the bark of the birch tree behind Mark Tillman's fence. Mark is It; he'd left the relative safety of his own yard just moments after counting to thirty, so she should be safe for now.

Lydia watches a skinny, dark-haired boy stumble and nearly trip on his way into the forest, his small, fluttering sparrow daemon circling, and has to smother an unkind laugh. Maybe, she thinks, maybe–

'Lydia.' Alec's tiny otter claws dig into her hair at the base of her braid, a warning. 'Don't.'

"But–"

"Caught you!"

Lydia's silent reproach is so fierce that Alec becomes a tiny mouse, balling up into the collar of her jacket and trembling. Mark's smug smile leaves them there; Lydia throws herself down at the tree's roots, determined not to speak to her daemon for the rest of the game. The sparrow and her human are also caught a few minutes later, the latter stumbling out of the trees just as he'd come in, his mouth seeming to move a mile a minute. The boy's daemon transforms into an exuberant beagle puppy, nipping at his heels in perfect reflection of his human counterpart.

"What's his name?" Lydia asks absently, forgetting her earlier resolve. Alec doesn't reply. Frowning, she reaches into her coat to pull him out, and nearly drops him as he transforms in her hand, into a startling yellow canary. As she watches, his feathers ruffle and turn completely black, and then Alec shakes his head and becomes yellow again. Back and forth his feathers turn; he stares up at her, alarm in the bright black of his eyes.

'Lydia–'

And then she notices it: a creeping feeling up the back of her neck

(dread– but she doesn't know the word yet.)

Someone screams; Alec convulses violently; Lydia is aware of her throat burning.

Dust, beautifully and horrifically iridescent in the pale evening light, rises from the treetops.

Mark Tillman does not return.

—

"...All-girls floors are not allowed male guests in their dorms overnight."

The orientation leader's daemon, a soft brown rabbit, yawns at her human's feet. 'Agreed,' says Alec and Lydia has to stifle a laugh. The girl to her left frowns at them. Lydia pretends not to notice, but Alec's tail swishes at the male parakeet on the girl's shoulder, who hops indignantly. His human's frown deepens. Lydia leans her ankle into Alec in warning. Be nice, she scolds silently. If we have to live with that girl for the rest of the year, don't come crying to me when her daemon pecks you to death.

Even though she isn't look at him, Lydia knows Alec is laughing. 'Let him try.'

Their Stanford orientation tour continues with little fanfare. Lydia eyes the clustered trees, planted strategically for winged daemons dotted across the green and wonders how Allison and Artemis are faring at BH College. Stanford, for its international reputation, must also accommodate for daemons not necessarily native or common to the United States; Alec had taken one look at the komodo dragon trailing a boy across the Maths Quad and scrambled up to balance on Lydia's shoulders like he'd done when they were both very small.

While the weight of a full grown bengal cat could be tiring, she supposes she can only be glad that her daemon is not, say, Kaius – Melissa McCall's black panther soul partner. He is the anomaly at Beacon Hills Hospital; while most daemons there are resilient, yet softer and smaller animals reflecting the nurturing, caring nature of their staff, many people still do a double take when they catch sight of Kaius' tail, curling lazily in the air behind the nurses' station.

"Your student card can be used to pay for meals in all dining halls–"

"What the hell–"

Parakeet girl's eyes are wide, her mouth twisted in surprise and horror. Lydia does not have to look, because Alec's claws are already running a light trickle of blood down her shoulder. Gone is his golden fur and cheetah-like markings, and in their place is nothing but black.

She sees a little boy, suddenly, in the rushing swirl of colour and shadow that follows, a startling clarity in a haze of confusion. She knows his name but she can't remember - the urge to scream chokes her, but she can't, not here. Lydia brushes past other gaping freshmen, nearly tripping over more than one skittering animal. "Excuse me," she gasps, and doesn't flinch when Alec clings more desperately to her as they round the corner of the dining hall into the shadow of the building. Lydia lays her hands against the brick, pressing the sound of the scream into her palms until the mortar ripples. Dust plumes at her feet as her daemon leaps down, normal again and curling anxiously around her ankles.

'Lydia I'm sorry–'

"It's okay." Sweat clings to the back of her neck. Lydia pulls out her phone with shaking hands. "It's okay."

He picks up on the third ring.

"Is it just me or did a komodo dragon just–"

"Stiles," she says, and whatever he'd been about to say stops abruptly.

"Just stay there." Lydia can hear Claudia rustling, picking up on her human's distress. "Drop a pin okay? Don't move, I'm coming."

She nearly drops her phone altogether, but Alec stretches up, his paws on her leg and his head pressed upwards, to steady her hand.

—

Lydia knows to look for Claudia first.

Alec's head turns toward the sun – she has to shield her eyes – but the whistling sound of the peregrine falcon dive is so familiar that it doesn't matter that Lydia can barely see. Claudia's wings beat her hair from her shoulders as the daemon pulls up with a cawed greeting.

"Lydia!"

And like clockwork, Stiles is only a few paces behind, skidding on the grass. She watches emotion play over his face: worry, relief, confusion. Lydia knows from the way a darkness flits across his mouth that he knows about the blood still sliding down her back, thanks his daemon's keen senses. But it isn't Claudia who heard the vague shake in her breath on the phone, or the way his name left her mouth, a way that was off, that said something's wrong – that said things that Lydia didn't even want to voice aloud.

But, she supposes, maybe bringing someone back from non-existence means you get to skip a few steps.

She says, "I'm fine," anyway. Stiles presses his lips together, but doesn't dispute her.

"What happened?" he asks instead.

Lydia wants to shrug; that seems too casual a gesture. "Someone's gone. I– I saw a little boy. I think…" Stiles is reaching for her elbow, her waist, avoiding her shoulders. His hands land and she is settled, somehow. "I think I knew him."

"C'mon," he says. "I'm sick of this tour anyway."

And so this is how Lydia finds herself fifteen minutes later, sitting on Stiles' twin bed in his dorm room and allowing him to undo the zip on her dress.

"Why am I not surprised that a first aid kit is the first thing you pull out of your suitcase?"

Stiles' fingers are cool with clean water and bandages on her skin; the intensity of his expression in the mirror on the opposing wall makes her stomach flip. "You know sarcasm is my only defence."

Lydia rolls her eyes. "Says Scott McCall's emissary." She nods her head at the protective spells burned into the baseboards of the doorway, carved with mountain ash and invisible to anyone besides the pack.

Stiles' hands go still; she cranes her neck to catch the frown around his mouth. "I can't ward for everything."

"Stiles," Lydia says, exasperated. Alec stretches from his spot beside her, a little more tense than she wants. She doesn't want to fight about this. "I told you I'm fine—"

Safe in the privacy of the room, Claudia betrays her human's anxiety as she transforms: falcon, hedgehog, a curling shepard puppy. Lydia tries to twist to look at him, but Stiles' hands are suddenly firm on her waist and her arm, keeping her still.

She doesn't shiver, but Alec shakes himself.

"I'm not done," he says softly. Part of Lydia wants to wrench herself from his grip and force a confrontation – Claudia doesn't change unless Stiles allows her to, unless he lets go of his control – but the rest of her is weaker and wins out.

"I told you I'm fine," she repeats, a little more petulantly than necessary. Stiles brushes stray hair from the back of her neck, his expression intent again and searing.

"You know how vulnerable you are when you See."

"And you know you can't ward against the Sight, Stiles. It defeats the purpose of me." It's a circular argument; they've done this at least once a month since first semester of senior year. Stiles moves this time, and Lydia swallows a gasp when he twists her to face him.

"You," he says fiercely, "are more than this." His fingers close around visus on the inside of her wrist, tattooed in black and sealed with Stiles' own magic. "You are always more."

A feeling that Lydia refuses to name crests over the indignation as she grips him back, just as certain. "So are you, Stiles. You know we can't–" Alec jumps from her lap; Claudia does the same to Stiles. They refuse to interfere when their humans fight. Lydia reaches for for his cheek. "You know we can't protect each other from everything."

He leans into her hand and they pretend he doesn't.

"Can we just go back to this morning, please?" There is a childish almost pleading to the question that Stiles graciously lets her have without comment. "Can we just be two college freshmen enduring a mind-numbing orientation and first week of classes?"

Stiles' phone rings; Scott flashes across the screen.

His mouth is grim as he shows it to her, and Lydia's stomach sinks as she gets her answer.

"Good thing I left a charger in Roscoe last night."

—

Of everyone in the pack, no one's really surprised when the wolves' daemons settle first, with Malia and Kira's both not far behind (Artemis, Allison's golden eagle, settles the day she says the new Argent pact for the first time). By the time they take Liam, Hayden, Corey, and Mason into the fold, well.

It's all getting a little out of hand.

To have a literal wolf pack, and a coyote and red fox to boot, by the time they've all entered senior year draws a few raised eyebrows, but Deaton and Stiles manage a blanket unseeing spell on their messed up town that allows everyone to find it perfectly normal.

And as far as Lydia knows from Scott's trips to Gatherings, it is normal. For the supernatural, at the very least. She isn't sure how semi-regular meetings of packs and knowing organizations across the country (and sometimes beyond) equate to a stronger level of secrecy within the supernatural world, but it works and she isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Alec had twisted into a vicious Bengal cat when Valak had tried to drive a hole into her skull, leaping into his startled crow and buying Stiles enough time to burst through the door, and had remained ever since.

It's only Claudia who can still change at will.

This is unheard of even among the supernatural, but Deaton attributes it to the combination of Stiles' ADHD and his potent emissary abilities. He is magical in a way that, according to the vet, rivals the dormant nemeton. So Claudia has never settled, though she and Stiles are careful to keep her in one form in public – a grown German Shepard – if only to keep up appearances of normal.

If anyone else noticed the way Claudia's falcon form always reaches Lydia first in emergencies, then they haven't commented.

Stiles' daemon is a falcon now, gliding and keeping pace easily with the Jeep along the highway. They'd passed the first sign for Beacon Hills half an hour ago; she had taken flight soon after.

'Maybe everything's fine,' Alec suggests from the backseat. Lydia eyes him dubiously in the rearview. 'Maybe he just wants one more pack meeting before the semester starts and this has absolutely nothing to do with it.'

She glances across the jeep to Stiles, who is tapping just a little offbeat to the song on the radio. "Somehow I doubt that."

"A little optimism would be appreciated!" Stiles shouts out the half-open window. Claudia's answering call could have been a laugh, if ever Lydia had heard such a thing. At the town line some time later, he checks and rechecks the protective magic, while Claudia does checks of her own, circling with her Shepard nose to the ground.

"I know I dragged you out of bed all that time looking for– something, anything, but…" Stiles glances up from his spot half-knelt in the dirt, his fingers and wrists dark with ash and the tail end of a spell lingering in the air. Lydia thinks, you're the one who always figures it out, and wills it to be true again. "We deserve normal, now. And I promise you can have it, after this."

Alec snorts, if cats could snort. 'He knows better than to make promises he can't keep.' His tail swishes back and forth over the Jeep's windshield like a wiper. Normally Lydia would call him out on such a callous remark, but Alec hates being overtaken by the Sight and it's always worse in their hometown.

So Lydia just says, "Let's just get through this, huh?" and reaches out a hand to help Stiles to his feet; he draws a druid symbol on the inside of her arm, so quickly and absently that she isn't sure he's even aware he's done it.

(She forgets about it until it glows faintly in the evening light on the journey back to Stanford; back in her room, Lydia has to scour the bestiary for it.

heart.)

—

Two wolves and a fox meet them at the entrance to the clinic. Callo, Sam, and Tomo circle playfully around Claudia and Alec as Stiles holds the door for Erica, Isaac, and Kira's daemons as well as their own. He smiles a little at Lydia, a small, crooked thing and she feels her own thought echoed: it's like wrangling a bunch of kids.

'I heard that.' Alec gives her a pointed look, before leaping up onto a counter in the main operating room, where Artemis perches. He prowls along the edge as the wolves and Tomo meet the rest of the pack's daemons, all curled up together in a corner of the room. It's been a long time since they've all convened in one place; Boyd and Erica live two hours away now, while Stanford is even further. Isaac, Kira, and Malia are all taking a year off before college; Scott and Allison can be back within forty-five minutes.

"Lydia!" It is a welcome relief to feel Allison's arms around her again, to smile back at Kira's bright grin. "How's Stanford?"

"Are the dorms shit?" Malia and Erica wear equally conspiratorial smirks, and Boyd and Isaac clap Stiles on the back in silent, easy welcome.

"We'll have to reunion later," comes a familiar voice before Lydia can reply. The pack turns to find their alpha and Deaton, their expressions grim. "We've got trouble."

Scott catches her eye and that feeling from earlier rises up: part anger, part fear, part sadness, part dread.

"I need to know if you can tell me. Are we looking for a body?"

Everyone gathers around Deaton's steel observation table. Lydia takes her usual place with Stiles on Scott's right side, shoulder to shoulder. She can feel him looking at her and doesn't want to look back, doesn't want to betray her sudden nerves in the room where she should feel most safe. His hand slides across the table to touch hers, pinky against pinky. Lydia takes a breath. She doesn't pull away.

"A little girl's gone missing," Scott says. Onto the table he slaps a manila folder, which bursts open. Lydia catches blonde pigtails and has to close her eyes. "Sara Lewis disappeared this morning from her yard and the Sheriff's already had search parties out two counties over."

"Lewis," says Isaac thoughtfully, picking up a photo of Sara and her parents. "Isn't that–?"

"Aren't they wolves?" Malia blurts, and Lydia's chest seizes. Alec appears on the table as if she'd just willed him there, pressing against her, grounding her. "Didn't they just–"

"Yes," Scott says, and he looks so weary that's it's a wonder that every supernatural person in this room is really less than 20 years old. "They're werewolves. They just moved here. Mr. Lewis and I met a few times, to talk about if they wanted to officially join the pack, or they just…"

Allison slides a hand up his shoulder as their alpha looks down, away from all of them. "If they just wanted a peaceful life," she finishes. "And that they would know that no matter what, even if they weren't officially pack, that we would be here for them."

"We think…" Scott looks at Lydia again, and she feels ashamed suddenly, at how hard it is to meet his gaze and say the words aloud.

"I'm pretty sure she's already gone."

Kira's eyes are overbright; Boyd is staring at the photo of the Lewis family, his expression unreadable. Stiles leans until they're pressed together from wrist to shoulder.

"But we don't know that for sure?" Malia looks from Scott, to Lydia, and back again. "You– you had a feeling right? A banshee feeling?" Lydia can only nod mutely. "So we're–" And for the first time it seems, even Malia hesitates. "So we're looking for her body?"

"I saw a boy," Lydia says softly, though thankfully no one has to strain to hear. "He was really familiar, and definitely not Sara. But I can't shake the feeling that she's…" She can't finish her sentence; no one forces her to.

"Regardless," Scott says, firm and resolute. "Her parents deserve the truth, and no one knows Beacon Hills like we do."

She isn't sure how he arrived with this without anyone noticing, but suddenly there's a stuffed turtle on the table and Stiles' fingers are wrapped around her trembling wrist, around her sight, and only Alec leaping back up onto her shoulders keeps Lydia from collapsing right then and there.

"Dog teams are being deployed," says Deaton. "But you're better. What's more," He glances at both Stiles and Lydia in turn. "The police don't have an emissary able to magnify a banshee's powers."

No one argues that. Scott divides the town and the preserve amongst the pack; Lydia wishes abruptly that they were in Stiles' room, and that she could unspool some red thread and have something to do besides watch each member of the pack in turn pick up the turtle with sombre eyes.

No one says it out loud, but it hangs in the air: she's only five years old.

'I'm with you,' Alec says as Deaton gestures for Lydia to sit up on the observation table. 'And you know how much I hate this.' He curls his head and front paws onto her leg, surprisingly willing to anchor her as a conduit for Stiles' magic. She puts her hand on his head and breathes slowly. Stiles finishes going over the points of the spell with Deaton, gesturing as he mutters and Lydia bites back a fond smile at the sight. The moment of quiet reprieve is broken though, when he turns to look at her, a serious near-frown shaping his mouth.

"Ready?"

She nods (but she isn't – can he see her hesitation? should she read into the fact that Claudia has pried herself from the pack to make the mountain ash symbols with her human, watching her as Stiles draws on the floor around the room?). He steps over the last marking, just beyond the shadow of her feet dangling over the table, and takes Lydia's hands. It's oddly hard to look at him; magic always does something peculiar to his eyes.

"We'll let you know when we find something," Scott says from the doorway. Lydia nods again mutely, because Stiles has that intent silence in his stare, and then, with surprising speed, the pack is gone.

'He's optimistic.'

"He's the alpha," is the only reply she has. Stiles' lips twitch – a suggestion of a laugh – and the curl of anxiety in her stomach loosens.

Lydia draws in a breath; Stiles' thumbs draw warm over her knuckles; the spell rises in silent, vaguely violet light around the room. She can see his lips moving, forming the Latin that calls the magic forth, but Lydia cannot hear his voice anymore. Soon everything falls away, and she and Alec are alone in the woods. Pale light dapples through the trees, not quite sun or cloud but an eerie middle ground. Her daemon, completely black again – product of the Sight – does a few circles around her ankles. She waits until he's finished before she speaks.

"Have we been here before?"

Alec's whiskers twitch, this way, that way. 'Almost.'

The ground is soft beneath her feet as Lydia moves carefully between the trees. '"Any idea–"

'This way.' There is a slightly annoying confidence in his step. 'Home is this way.'

And because he has never led her astray before, Lydia follows.

They wander through the forest for an agonizing several minutes, though maybe that's Lydia's nerves talking. But never at any point does Alec seem unsure, so that has to count for something. It feels old, but she cannot for the life of her explain that feeling. Suddenly, he stops, so quickly in fact that Lydia almost trips over him.

"What?"

Alec cocks his head. 'Someone's coming.'

To Lydia's great surprise, the figure that bursts through the trees just then is not Sara Lewis, but a boy – a pale boy with flailing limbs and dark hair and a fluttering daemon that, despite its tiny form, she would somehow recognize anywhere.

'That's Claudia,' Alec says, sounding unnervingly stunned. He looks back at Lydia, who cannot tear her eyes away from a young Stiles: his flopping hair, his incredible energy.

"Caught you!"

Young Stiles' disappointment is stark. She can't see the owner of the voice, but it's another boy; there is a familiarity here, a prickling of memory, if only Lydia could reach–

But everything starts to swirl away – a little girl screams, and somewhere deep down, she knows.

—

"Lydia!"

She returns with a gasp, colour and sound spinning to a halt to reveal Stiles' wide eyes. His hands clasp her shoulders, and beneath them she finds that she is shaking. Stiles has one leg stuck out to bar Claudia, a puppy now, who is trying to scramble up towards Alec.

"I'm alright," Lydia manages, gulping in air. She is so aware of his fingers, sliding over her shoulders, catching on her collarbones, tangling in her hair behind her ears. Some part of her is afraid to meet his eyes, so she looks at Claudia instead, frantic and earnest in a way that makes her inexplicably warm all over.

"It's okay," Stiles says, releasing his grip and throwing Lydia an unreadable glance before looking down soothingly at his daemon. "They're fine, it's okay."

'Speak for yourself.' Alec, for his part, presses into Lydia's lap, and she is too busy reassuring her own life's partner to think too hard on the relief in Claudia's eyes.

"So?" Stiles asks, after Alec has disentangled himself and Claudia is full grown once again. "Anything?"

Lydia opens her mouth to reply; Alec ends up having to headbutt her to unlock her throat. "You."

Claudia shakes herself, but doesn't shift.

"Me?" Stiles stops sweeping at the ash on the floor and really looks at Lydia, much to her vague alarm. "You guys saw me?"

"Not–" She makes a fluttering gesture in his general direction. "You you. You were a kid...seven or eight maybe? In the woods." She can practically see the gears in his' brain whirring. "Someone said–" Again, a memory prickles. "Caught you."

Stiles frowns, and Lydia struggles to get the last truth out. "I think I screamed then." She knows without looking directly at him that he's already reaching for her, pulling her into the invisible safe space of him with just the pads of his fingers curling around her arm. "I think I was there."

"Wasn't there some kind of accident?" he asks. "When we were kids? I feel like there was a funeral. My mom made me wear a tie."

It is a sharp relief not to have to wander in this confusion alone. Recollection dangles like smoke in the periphery of Lydia's mind, frustratingly intangible. "I can't remember."

Stiles' thumb traces absent patterns in the bare crook of her elbow; the motion is comforting and distracting both at once. "We can ask my dad," he offers. "After."

Seeing no other alternative, Lydia nods. "I just wish," she starts, and doesn't want to finish, because there is a soft knowing in his eyes. "I just wish I could have done more." She can sense his objection even before any words leave his lips, so Lydia is oddly grateful that Stiles' phone goes off at that precise moment.

"It's not her," comes Scott's voice through the loudspeaker. Her relief is echoed in Stiles' hand squeezing her arm. "But we found a body."

—

"Mark Tillman."

No matter how many times she hears his name aloud, Lydia can't quite reconcile her childhood neighbour of four houses down with the pile of bones on the steel gurney in the morgue.

"How did we forget?" She looks at Stiles, whose expression is equally stricken, and back down again. "How did we forget an entire person?"

"You were young," Melissa says gently. "We didn't want to scare you– after the funeral, the Tillmans moved away and we all figured it would just be best to not bring it up. We're trying to find them to– to notify them, but so far..."

'No.' Alec presses a paw to her leg, and then his claws pinch when Lydia fails to look at him. 'We are not taking shame on with everything else.'

She still can't look at him.

"There has to be a reason," Scott says, giving voice to the thought that's been hanging in the air since Isaac and Malia struck one of Mark's ribs with their shovel an hour ago. "There's a reason we found him and not Sarah."

She knows they all want an answer, but everyone knows too, by now, that Lydia cannot yet give one.

"There's still a chance, then." Stiles' glances at her, his gaze somehow as soft as a kiss that she cannot rebuke, forcing her to take the hope she wants to hate him for offering. "She could still be alive."

"We still don't know," Lydia points out. "We still don't know if she's just lost, or if she was–" She swallows. "Taken."

Scott reaches for her hand, warm and sure and certain in a way she will always envy. "We're going back out," he says. "After dark, all of us. As a pack."

Lydia catches the meaning in his eye, whirling around to face their emissary. "You know town unseeing wears you out."

Stiles has the decency to at least look rueful, but before Lydia can properly admonish him he presses the Jeep's keys into her hand.

"Good thing you're driving, then."

—

Stiles sleeps on the way back to Stanford; Lydia leaves the window down until she can't hear the howling anymore.

Classes officially begin two days later and Lydia has never been grateful for her own genius in this way before, in a way that wipes nearly all first year requirements from her timetable and leaves her space to try and answer the question:

Why Sara?

She thinks about Mark Tillman a lot over the next week, but as far as she can gather, there is no connection between them, besides their similar age. It's not exactly enough data to go on–

Until.

A nine year-old banshee went missing in Boston.

Lydia nearly drops her psych textbook, which sends Alec skittering backwards in alarm.

'When?' he demands, leaping up onto the half empty shelf to stare down at her phone, as if he could read the message, as if he needed to read it instead of Lydia's own mind.

Three days ago.

It starts like that: a text, Alec's dark dread, and Stiles, opening the door when she shows up unannounced to his dorm room and taking the ball of red thread she offers him without a single question or comment.

(Of course, Lydia steps inside then and sees the beginnings of a board already half up on his wall.

She can't decide if this sudden ache in her chest is more fear or–)

It starts; it doesn't stop.

| Sarah Lewis: 5 – Beacon Hills, California; missing 14 days | Finn Stiller: 9 – Mystic Falls, Virginia; missing 11 days | Daisy Kol: 7 – NYC, NY; missing 10 days | Owen Vern: 11 – Portland, Oregon; missing 8 days

Werewolf; Druid; Banshee; Werewolf

It's not just here anymore.

| Kristen Fell: 7 – Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; missing 6 days | Benjamin Dubois: 8 – Montpellier, France; missing 4 days | Simon Kay: 6 – London, United Kingdom; missing 2 days.

Kitsune; Werecoyote; Werewolf

Twice in one week, Lydia wakes up in Stiles' bed with red thread twisted around her, one hand dangling off the edge (reaching) towards him on the floor. She manages to drag him onto the mattress with her in the hazy blue light, while his roommate snores on. He hands her a t shirt and they don't look at each other as she pulls off her own clothes and slides it on; his hand ends up beneath it, slotted against her ribs, her back curved into the shape of him and they don't speak.

Alec and Claudia are an indistinguishable shape in the dark and no one speaks.

—

They're calling a Gathering.

No one in the pack utters even a suggestion of a deadline, but Lydia catches Stiles' eye over the message and knows that he feels this, too. Scott must have something to say to the alphas of the world if there's any hope of finding these kids.

The pack has been out for miles beyond the county line; there is no sign of Sarah.

"Do you think Stanford's history section even goes back that far?" Stiles asks, library quiet.

She shrugs. They can only hope. It had come to Alec, smacking her awake in the middle of the night with this sudden, striking, certainty in his bright, black eyes: 'This has happened before.'

But her daemon can tell them nothing else after the Sight leaves him, so that certainty is all they have to go on. Lydia pulls a book entitled: The Dark History of Dust and Daemon Culture from the shelf, jumping when Alec and Claudia recoil sharply.

"Sorry," she says automatically, even as Stiles takes the book from her hands, frowning. He glances down at their daemons, and then around the mostly deserted section of the library before dropping his voice even lower.

"There's magic here."

She's lost the ability to feel surprise.

"Let's go."

He won't let her sit with him while he pries the invisible barriers apart – "Killed by a magic book, as much as we both love Harry Potter, is not the way you're going." – so Lydia returns to her own dorm and spends several hours between her physics assignment and literature reading reconsidering everything they thought they knew.

'It's not about you,' Alec says suddenly, jumping from the bed to land on her desk. He presses a paw to her condensed version of Stiles' investigation board, to a photo of Sara and her daemon, Jake, in the form of a grizzly bear cub. 'It's about us.'

Stiles calls then, like he knows, and at a certain point Lydia can only hear a few words amidst her own horror.

Kids…

Daemons…

Separation…

Dust.

—

Lori Talbot goes missing three days before Scott is due to leave for Washington.

You guys have to go for me.

He picks up immediately.

"Lydia–"

"You're the Alpha, Scott." To be perfectly honest, Lydia doesn't even understand her own sudden hysteria. "We can't go to a Gathering without you."

"Alphas send envoys all the time. Besides, you guys understand all of this a lot better than I do. You know that I'd be of more help to Satomi helping her look for Lori."

"But–"

"You'll be together," Scott says, sounding oddly patient. "You two are always better together. You'll be alright, I promise."

She can't argue it; Lydia cannot deny what she knows to be true.

"How're the kids?"

Her alpha doesn't need her to clarify. "Liam's taking it pretty hard. You know how he and Brett were. It took Mason all day to convince him not to skip class to try to meet us out here."

Scott has made up his mind. Lydia can only sigh noiselessly.

"Be safe," she says.

"You too."

—

"Are you sure you don't just want to take my car?"

Stiles' scandalized expression would have made her laugh, if she could laugh right now. "You made us late," he points out, but there is no real bite to it. Lydia rolls her eyes.

"Yes Stiles, remind me next year to schedule classes around the next possible international supernatural crisis, alright?"

They'd had to wait until Lydia had done a presentation for her psych class before they could leave, and poor timetabling means they'll have to drive through the night to make it to the Gathering on time. Through Stiles logic, that means they take Roscoe.

She honestly couldn't care less; Lydia thinks about a dusty Mexican roadway and feels a similar swell of fond annoyance. It's easier to bicker about insignificant semantics than it is to think about why they have to make this journey at all.

"Do we want snacks?" Stiles asks, as if he can read her thoughts. Lydia tosses her overnight bag into the backseat, wincing only a little when her cosmetics bag clinks in protest. The pack has claws; she has her own armour.

"Let's just pick up some curly fries on the way."

Claudia's tail thumps wildly against the door and she does laugh, this time.

—

They end up in Portland for the night.

"I figured you'd be okay with letting my dad spring for an actual hotel," Stiles says as they pull up to the Best Western. "I told him we'd be fine without it, but he can be annoyingly Sheriff-y when he wants to be."

Lydia considers the bright lobby lights and the smiling receptionist. You wouldn't know, stepping through the doors, that midnight had passed them by on a dark road some time ago. She'll never sleep in a motel again. "You figured right."

He grins, a quick, fleeting thing, and for a moment she can remember what he looks like without such shadows in the planes of his face. "Hi there," he says to the woman at the counter. "We have a reservation under Stilinski."

"Let's see here…" She taps some keys and stares intently at the screen and all Lydia can think is how strange this all is; this is their second genuine roadtrip together, and not because they're regular kids nearly in their twenties, with cars and a little money and wanderlust, but because they're part of a supernatural family and they can sense death and summon magic and people's lives are hanging in the balance.

Alec winds his tail around her ankle.

'Maybe we can just pretend a while.'

"There we are," says the receptionist then, breaking Lydia out of her spiral. "A queen and a cot, is that right?"

Lydia looks at Stiles. He does not look back. Claudia shifts at their feet. "Perfect," he says. The woman smiles at them in an absent kind of way and hands over their keys. Lydia manages to wait until they're all rising in the elevator to the 4th floor before she asks.

"A cot?"

He shrugs, and somehow the motion seems odd across his shoulders. "I didn't want to assume," he says, and a strange emotion rises in her. "Besides, my dad reserved the room and it's not as if we–"

Stiles catches her gaze then, almost as if he didn't even mean to, and Lydia is surprised at the vulnerability she finds there. "It's not as if we're–"

"We're sharing that bed, Stiles," Lydia cuts in. She's annoyed, suddenly ('afraid, maybe') at his willingness to put words and truth to things between them that have been unsaid and unmoored from anything like daylight or speech for so long; she can't possibly deal with this now. "Hotel cots are the worst. Besides, we've done it nearly every night for two weeks and clearly it's fine, so–"

And now she can't speak either. Lydia glances up at him through her eyelashes and she can see that strange emotion reflected back in his eyes. "Okay?" It frustrates her how unsure she feels, even as the elevator doors ding open and Stiles' hand lands on the small of her back to guide her forward, as familiar and easy as Alec's weight across her shoulders.

"Okay."

It takes him three tries to get the key to work, swearing under his breath as he does. Alec laughs silently. At last the lock flashes green and he holds the door open for her. Lydia smiles her thanks and makes a beeline for the bathroom.

'Watch the tail,' Alec says as she closes the door, hopping up from the toilet to the sink. He always prefers to be at eye level with her; he can attack faster this way, but they don't talk about it.

"Sorry." Lydia takes a steadying breath and begins the soothing process of removing her makeup and the day's grime from her skin. It's blissfully easy to lose herself in the routine, and by the time she's finished and changed for sleep, she feels like herself again.

'Stop freaking out.'

"I'm not," Lydia says lamely. Alec can't literally raise eyebrows at her, but she gets the feeling he would. "Besides, we've got more important things to worry about."

'So open the door, then.'

She thinks about slamming it shut and leaving her daemon in there for the night; he shoots out before Lydia can act on the impulse. Stiles is sitting on the right side of the bed, frowning at Claudia, curled up in the armchair. She can't shake the feeling that their conversation's been echoed somehow. She can't decide how that makes her feel.

"Need the light still?" Stiles asks politely. Lydia shakes her head. A sharp stab of panic and regret pinches beneath her ribs – maybe this was a bad idea after all – but as he clicks off the bedside lamp and leaves them in near darkness, turning to face her as she crawls into bed beside him, Lydia is settled again, somehow. It's silly, she knows, to be so nervous of him in the light, but judging from what she can see of his face, Stiles is thinking the same. By some unspoken agreement they shuffle closer together; Lydia has never before been so aware of her bare knees brushing someone else's.

Her hair's fallen awkwardly in her face, and Stiles reaches out to brush it back before she can do it herself. She finds herself breathless in the face of such casual intimacy, more somehow than his hands on her bare skin, more somehow than, when Lydia rolls over and he reaches for her instead of she for him, Stiles' breath on the back of her neck.

She can't explain it; it makes no sense, and yet somehow she knows the truth.

Perhaps her makeup is not her only shield.

"Should we talk about this?" he murmurs. His thumb is tracing her hipbone and she can't think.

"Not tonight."

He might have kissed her, his mouth just barely touching the top of her spine, but Lydia is too afraid to know. Stiles' hand moves beneath her t shirt, over the flat of her stomach. She shivers and he pulls her closer, like an instinct.

"What if…" she starts, and falters.

"We're not wrong," he says, before Lydia can even finish her sentence. That unnamed emotion from the first night in his dorm room rises in her throat. "We're not. We're going to find those kids."

"We don't even know who's doing this," she points out. "Or why."

"You'll figure it out." His voice is doing that slow, deep thing it does just before he falls asleep. "You always figure it out."

"Isn't that you?"

Stiles is smiling against her skin. "Not always."

Lydia cannot exactly argue that, even though part of her instinctively wants to. Stiles' breath goes deep and even and she lets the warmth of him pull her down.

—

(Later, she'll think about that conversation and hate him a little for not just fucking saying it.)

—

The Gathering takes place in Olympic National Forest, in a clearing marked by magic and warded by the Washington pack emissary. Twenty-three minutes into their forty-five minute hike, Lydia can only be grateful for Scott's early warning: "Pack sturdy shoes." The forest itself is absolutely stunning in the misty morning light, and a childish part of Lydia wants to stop and take a few pictures.

'We can play tourist another time.'

Lydia glares at her daemon, who just gives her a look and takes too much pleasure in watching her struggle over a particularly steep part of the "definitely not on the path" path. Claudia, further ahead than either of them, barks to get Stiles' attention. Part of Lydia wants to spurn his proffered hand out of principle, but the rest of her knows that they're only about halfway there, so she lets him haul her up next to him.

She lets him keep her hand, too.

They don't say anything, but it's nice, in a way. At the empty clearing, Stiles mutters an incantation to give them sight.

"Deaton?" she asks, nearly a whisper. He nods. As the Gathering takes shape before their eyes, Alec leaps up onto Lydia's shoulders. Before them on the furthest end of the clearing, at a massive wooden table carved into the roots of a tree, sit The Eight: the four most senior alphas of both the US and Canada, to whom all smaller packs in places like the Northwest or Southeast defer leadership. There are also the four alphas from the UK, and three representatives of the "Supernatural EU," as Scott always refers to it, in perpendicular seats on either side.

As the only True Alpha on the continent, Scott has had his own chair for the last two years.

The circular tables closest to them on the clearing's near side are a mix of betas, banshees, emissaries, and allied hunters from all over the world. There are also, it pains Lydia to see, so many children here. They sit cross-legged on the forest floor, within easy reach of their parents. She's gotten a lot better, over the last few years, at understanding a room of supernatural beings. Wolves outnumber the rest two to one, while there are roughly more banshees than emissaries.

Lydia has also never seen so many wolf daemons in one place.

She counts nine werecoyotes and two kitsune. 'Kira and Malia will be happy.'

"Remind me," Stiles mutters out of the corner of his mouth, "Why Scott brought Isaac two years in a row instead of me?"

"Two years ago you were possessed by the Nogitsune, and last year you literally did not exist."

He laughs, softly, and Lydia's chest aches a little. She can't remember the last time she heard him laugh. "Touché." Stiles gives her a look that says, shall we? and together with Claudia and Alec they step through the ward and enter the Gathering. The buzz of conversation finally reaches their ears, but as she and Stiles move towards the open centre of the space, Lydia is keenly aware of how quickly a hush falls over the woods.

He lets go of her hand to steady her back and she wants him to take it back, suddenly.

"Stiles Stilinski and Lydia Martin." Richard Link, alpha of the East, rises to acknowledge them. "Envoys of Alpha Scott McCall. Welcome to the Gathering."

'Does he expect us to bow?'

Please stop talking.

"It's an honour to be here," Lydia says, her voice miraculously steady and clear. "We wish it was under better circumstances."

"What news?" asks Christopher LaFontaine, alpha and aboriginal chief of the Canadian True North. "Is it safe to assume you have some, since young Scott has so abruptly sent you in his place?"

She falters and hates herself for it.

"Our neighbouring pack has lost a child," Stiles says. "Scott and the rest of the pack are aiding in the search efforts." A murmur rises through the crowd. "He sent us because–" Lydia watches Stiles' throat bob as he swallows. "Because we think we know why these kids are being taken."

The buzz in the clearing gets louder. The alphas look at each other, before Richard raises his hand for silence, which falls instantly. "Please continue."

Stiles glances at Lydia and she nods encouragingly. "It's about dust. We found a text that talks about this same problem occuring only one other time. Scientists believed that Dust contained an energy that could be harnessed, and that it was most powerful in children whose daemons hadn't yet settled."

"But Dust only appears when–" LaFontaine stops, the horror in his expression reflected in the faces around the Gathering. He doesn't finish his sentence, and a knot rises in Lydia's throat when she hears soft, lilting voices asking questions from behind.

"The story of Lyra Belacqua is a myth." The British alpha sitting on their left rises to his feet, contempt in his voice. "All of it is hearsay. There is no proof that she, or anyone else, even existed."

"That may be," Lydia concedes. "But the science is sound. Researchers have been studying the properties of dust for years. It stands to reason that we, as–" She nearly trips over the words. "–as supernatural beings, would expel a more unique kind of dust upon our death. Or that maybe we could withstand a kind of...separation from our daemons, whereas ordinary humans could not."

"Are you saying my daughter is dead?"

Everyone turns towards the voice, a dark-haired woman with tears in her eyes and clutching the hand of a tiny boy. Their fox daemons prowl at their feet. Lydia's throat locks.

"Mrs. Fell," Stiles starts, contrite. "We don't know anything for sure–"

"Exactly!" The little boy, Amos, if Lydia remembers right, whimpers then. His mother lifts him into her arms, smoothing his hair, but her face has lost none of its anger, its accusation. "Why are we trusting the word of two kids?" She turns her glare on her alpha. "Christopher, why do you entertain this?"

"Amelia…"

"Please," Lydia interjects. "None of my visions had any of the kids–" People are getting to their feet; Claudia's hackles rise.

'Uh oh.'

Alec please.

"You shouldn't be here." Amelia Fell is advancing on them, wolves at her shoulder, her son tucked away in the arms of another woman. "It all started in Beacon Hills; who's to say you're not the ones behind all this?" She points a trembling finger at Lydia and it takes everything in her not to flinch back. "It could be you– you could have been making up visions all along!"

Alec hisses. His claws dig into her coat.

'This bitch better not.'

"Stand down." Christopher's up too, but it's no use. Stiles steps in front of Lydia and she wants to shout at him.

"Stiles–"

"Back up," he says to the advancing crowd, the line of his shoulders sharp and unyielding. "Everyone needs to calm down."

Lydia can see sneers and the suggestion of fangs and Alec is smug beneath his own animosity. 'They're in for it now.'

"Step aside, boy." A werewolf bares his teeth. "You couldn't take a single person here."

"Enough!" Stiles shouts, and several things happen at once:

A fox and wolf daemon leap at them; at least one alpha howls; Stiles' arm sweeps out; animals yelp as they hit an invisible barrier; Lydia and Stiles are both dwarfed in Claudia's shadow as she becomes a hulking grizzly bear and roars the entire clearing into a stunned silence.

"Attack us if you want." Stiles straightens, his voice clear. The only indication of the strain of this barrier spell is the tiny flexing of his fingers. "But there are children here, and none of us are going down without a fight."

Amelia Fell presses her fingers against the magic and recoils. "You–" She breaks off, looking down at her feet where no mountain ash lies, and up at Claudia, who huffs a growl through her nose. "She–"

"That's enough, Amelia." Christopher's daemon, a snow white wolf, leaps over the tree roots to draw up beside Lydia. "You all disobeyed a direct order. Anyone who does not stand down immediately will lose their place in the pack."

Sufficiently cowed by their alpha, people disperse. Claudia shrinks back to her shepard form, circling both Lydia and Alec first before taking her place next to Stiles. Children tug at their parents' hands, pointing, and the whispers flit easily now through the crowd, the ones that will surely carry across borders and seas and territory lines.

Emissary. Unsettled. Changing.

"We have a plan," Stiles says once everyone is settled again. Lydia has to make a concentrated effort not to jerk her head and stare at him.

'What is he talking about?' Alec demands.

"If we can track the next person taken, it will lead us straight to whoever is doing this. We don't know if any of the kids are still alive, but we'll have to move quickly if there's any chance of bringing them back."

"You're not suggesting that a parent willingly risk their child?" Richard asks, though it's not really a question.

"Not at all," Stiles replies. He looks at Lydia then, an apology in his eyes, and she knows what he's going to say before the words leave his mouth.

"We're going to get them to take me."

—

"Are you insane?"

Stiles just looks at her. Lydia flaps a hand at him, so furious that she can barely undo the laces of her boots. They're back in the Best Western that the Sheriff insisted they use for one more night; it's all for the best really, because having this argument on the road would certainly get them both killed.

"Of course you're insane. Because no sane person would voluntarily get themselves kidnapped–"

"You know I have to." He's not yelling yet, but they've argued enough times that she's sure he'll get there. "You know there's no other way."

"There's always another way," Lydia shoots back. "And besides, if you think Scott would ever let you…" She trails off. "You already told him."

Stiles sighs and shrugs out of his own shoes and coat. "Yesterday."

Lydia wants to throw something at him. She settles for her hotel key, but it's unsatisfying even as Stiles grimaces a little when it strikes his shoulder. "I cannot believe you."

Their daemons both slink into the bathroom; Alec is actively not listening for perhaps the first time ever. The rational part of Lydia's brain knows that Stiles' plan is sound. He can keep himself safe in a way that young children cannot, and he'd certainly spell himself so that he could be found before anything terrible happened. But the rest of Lydia cannot move past this feeling of betrayal.

"We tell each other everything, Stiles." There is shame in his eyes now and she wishes she could feel satisfaction in that. "I don't understand why you thought you couldn't trust me with this!"

"I knew you'd try to stop me."

"And Scott didn't?!"

"It's different with you!"

Lydia flinches without even really meaning to; Stiles' eyes are vaguely alarmed now, but the words – the truth – are out now, in the open, and there's no going back. There isn't even a hint of regret in Stiles' expression, only a kind of brazen defiance, a challenge that somehow makes Lydia's anger easier to hang onto.

"I swear to God Stiles if this is some kind of sexist 'girls have too many feelings' bullshit–"

"Oh of course it isn't," Stiles scowls. "You know I'm too much of a feminist for that." Her heart swells with a sudden annoying wave of fondness, but Lydia isn't prepared as Stiles steps closer, an almost accusation in his voice. "You can't honestly tell me that things haven't changed, Lydia." She turns away. "We can't just go on pretending like they haven't!"

"Why not?" It's a silly, childish thing to hurl at him as the curtain of her hair swings around. There is something resolute in Stiles' expression, something sure that Lydia wants to strike at because of everything she isn't. "Why did you have to bring this up now, Stiles–"

"Because I don't want to leave you, okay?" It's a strangely tender thing to have shouted at you; Lydia blinks, for once at a loss in the face of Stiles' glare, at the depth of the emotion behind his eyes. "I don't ever want to leave you again. I don't want to leave without saying–"

But he doesn't get to say it, because Lydia has crossed the room in three strides and yanked his mouth down to hers, swallowing his surprised huff. It's a stretch, both for her toes and surely for Stiles' neck, so despite the firm grip she has on the collar of his plaid, Stiles bends swiftly to haul her up into his arms somehow without losing contact with Lydia's mouth. He ducks his head a little to properly kiss her back and the softest part of her heart is whole.

"You're not saying it," Lydia says, pressing her cheek against his, firm when all the rest of her is splintering apart. "Not now. You don't get to say it when you're about to go be an idiot." Stiles sets her down standing on the end of the bed, looking faintly dazed and part of her is smug, looking down at him. "I'm still mad at you."

Annoyance flickers over his face, and beneath that, something else, something searing and open and empowering. "Of course you are." Stiles tugs her forward, his hands sliding firm beneath her shirt, his mouth hot over hers. "Because you're Lydia Martin and you are probably one of the most stubborn–" Lydia shoves at his plaid while nimble fingers find the clasp of her bra. Stiles helps her slide out of the straps and drops the bra on the floor before yanking on the back of Lydia's knees; she yelps as her legs collapse and she's left to lie there, half-breathless still when he leans over her. The hair over the back of his neck is soft; Lydia tugs; Stiles kisses her harder, making a noise that sounds like a snarl into her mouth.

Heat pools low in her belly, and even lower still.

"You're one to talk." She nips at his lip. It's honestly unsurprising that they're still essentially in the midst of an argument, even now. It is easier than admitting what they will soon have to carry alone.

"You have no idea," Stiles mutters fiercely, into her neck, over her collarbone. She can't figure out if he's still angry or not, his voice belied by the gentleness of his fingers ridding Lydia of her shirt, but compounded by the rough squeeze of her hip. Stiles traces and tweaks a little at her nipple, one, and the other; he does the same with his mouth and it should be embarrassing maybe, how wet she is. He makes quick work of the button of her jeans, and the sound of her fly is jarring in the otherwise silent room. "You have no idea how much I want you."

Lydia's stomach jumps even as she helps him wriggle her out of her pants. She pushes with both hands at the hem of Stiles' t-shirt until he's pulled it off, sitting up and leaning forward until she can touch the firm skin of his stomach, a tiny constellation of moles over his ribs, the two small black circles over his heart that mark him at Scott McCall's emissary. The naked desire in his expression is thrilling and terrifying both at once.

"So what are you waiting for?"

Lydia snakes a hand into Stiles' underwear when his own jeans disappear, faster than he can react. She closes her fingers around the hard, hot length of him and he closes his eyes. For a breathless moment, everything is still. There is something otherworldly about Stiles then, something inexplicably both magical emissary and fragile human in colliding contrast, that makes a deep part of Lydia yearn in a way she never has before.

His pupils are blown dark and wide when he grabs her wrist, a stark reminder of how strong he is, how much harder he's become. And because she's never been one to back down, Lydia strokes, a firm, deliberate motion, and refuses to look away. Stiles' fingers press the fine bones around her pulse and her blood roars.

"Please tell me that you fall into the typical college boy stereotype and you have a condom in your wallet."

"Would you judge me if I did?"

She has never rolled her eyes harder in her damn life. "Are you seriously asking me that right now?"

Stiles barks a laugh; he's never sounded so wolf-like before. Lydia figures she should not try to contemplate that, nor should she look too hard at their reflections in the enormous mirror on the far side of the room as she listens to the foil packet crinkle. Sex should not be a fight (at least, not always), but part of Lydia is afraid that if she does not push back, she will be swallowed in the tide of him and everything she will not allow him to say.

Then in a movement too quick for her to process, Lydia is flat on her back, one of his hands pinning both of hers above her head and Stiles is leaning over her; the reality of them, naked and aching for each other, slams into her like a freight train.

"Lydia," Stiles says roughly, his gaze claiming hers. He might want to say something else but suddenly she just cannot wait, anymore.

Who knows how long she's been waiting for this and never realized.

"Yes." She lifts her hips to meet his, strains a little against his grip because she's a little out of breath already and she wants to make it clear, how much she wants him. "Yes."

It's not quite gentle. It's Lydia deflecting his attempts at testing her readiness and the ache as he finally just gives in and slides inside her. It's Stiles groaning in her ear and the hot skin of his shoulder against her mouth, her teeth, her tongue. It's the sound of their hips snapping together and the stretch in her leg as Lydia hooks her ankles around him, pulling him deeper. It's this coil of pleasure, twisting tighter and tighter until her thoughts just blur into yes god Stiles, more, yes, more–

She might be saying these things aloud but she doesn't care.

"Lydia," he bites out. "Holy–"

Stiles shifts; she isn't sure how or why but it doesn't matter, because he manages to strike that sweet spot inside her and all other thoughts vanish. "Oh, fuck–!"

He's rambling now, his pace almost brutal. "Come on Lydia, come on you're amazing, you're perfect, come on you can do it for me, you can–" Stiles reaches one hand down between them; all it takes is one, two, three circles against her clit and she is gone.

He comes with a groan, hips stuttering into hers, catching her mouth for one last kiss, and when Lydia feels like she can breathe again, when Stiles has gently pulled away and disposed of the condom and rolled back over, she looks at him.

They're naked of course, but there's something else bare about him now, something open and vulnerable in the evening light, something that is beautiful and scary and sacred and that Lydia would burn cities to the ground to keep safe.

She hates him a little for taking that choice away from her.

"I know," he says, before Lydia can speak. His eyes are soft. "I won't say it."

She wants him to, now.

But she doesn't say that.

—

Once, mid afternoon cram, Stiles and Claudia saunter into her reserved study space in the arts library and he scrawls in bright green board pen beneath her recently solved physics problem.

"Hic abundant leones," Lydia reads aloud. She lifts an eyebrow at him. "Lions abound?"

"They used to write it on old maps," he says, grinning. It's boyish and earnest and a welcome reprieve from the files of five missing kids strewn out on the table in front of her. "In undiscovered territory."

"Someone's enjoying introductory Latin."

"Not all of us can be geniuses of classic and archaic," Stiles points out, and Alec curls his tail smugly.

"Quo fata ferunt," Lydia replies loftily. He frowns at her and she gives him her best raised eyebrow. "What? You take Latin now, figure it out."

Lydia doesn't see Stiles immediately when she wakes up, which scares her a lot more than she would be willing to admit. When she catches sight of him tugging up boxer briefs at the end of the bed, Lydia pretends that her heart wasn't racing just moments before.

"Hey," she says softly, pulling the sheets up around her. The look Stiles gives her then makes her want to hide, suddenly.

"Hey." He scrubs at the back of his neck, over his hair. "We've got about three hours before checkout. Did you want to go down for breakfast?"

Lydia shuffles forward and ducks down towards the floor to pick up her bra. "You haven't seen my shirt, have you?"

The tiny frown on his face is adorable and she almost wants to laugh, before Stiles extends his plaid instead, with a shrug that doesn't feel as casual as either of them might hope it to be. "Least I can do."

She sneaks a glance through her eyelashes as she sits down comfortably to button; his stare is so intent that she doesn't even manage the fourth set without her fingers trembling. Before Lydia can reach for him, he peels back, ducking down beyond the edge of the bed. Stiles' callouses trace the heel of her foot; he kisses her dangling knuckles and her heart is so tight it feels like it might burst.

"Stiles…"

"Do you want me to stop?" Stiles looks up at her, from the floor, from between her legs, and Lydia's breath catches a little at the serious crease between his eyebrows. There should be sparks, she thinks. There should be sparks and lightning flashes and starbursts everywhere he touches her, but instead there is just a steady kind of sunlight, a kind of safety, a kind of certainty.

"No," she says, smiling softly. "No I don't want you to stop."

His smile is a little stupid and she loves him for it.

"Good." He tugs her gently a little closer. "Because I plan on being amazing and I'd hate for you to miss it."

Lydia laughs, but soon enough the laugh becomes something else entirely.

"Stiles," she gasps, sitting up as he does things with his tongue that should be illegal. She isn't even sure what she wants to say. Lydia drags one hand up the back of his neck, scraping his scalp with her nails. Stiles' entire body shudders and he groans against her, pressing closer. Lydia can feel her legs trembling. "Stiles, I–"

The sound his mouth makes as he pulls back borders on obscene. "Wait," he says, and for a moment Lydia can only stare at him, until he surges up to kiss her. Lydia can taste herself inside his mouth and the unsatisfied ache between her legs only deepens. Stiles brushes her hair back, his next kiss gentle. "I want to see."

A protest leaps up from her throat as Stiles presses her back into the mattress, but then his hand slides up the inside of her thigh and–

Oh.

Lydia has never before realized just how long Stiles' fingers are.

"Okay?" he asks, and she can only nod, unable to speak as he somehow manages to press his palm against her clit with every push of his first two fingers inside her. A sound escapes her – a gasp, a keen, a moan – and Stiles' wonderment washes away her embarrassment. "Fuck, you're beautiful."

"Stiles, please." She's essentially begging but right now Lydia doesn't care, teetering as she is on the precipice of something so wonderful and good, something that takes her breath away even before she's there, even before she's sent tumbling over the edge because it's Stiles, his eyes and his mouth and his fingers–

Lydia was wrong; there are stars, in the end.

Her legs are trembling again when they stop their vice grip on Stiles' elbow (she should apologize, she thinks faintly, but her mind is too hazy and warm to manage); he pulls his hand away gently and drops a kiss against the inside of her knee, so tenderly that tears well up in Lydia's throat. She can't speak still but she decides it doesn't matter. Lydia just pulls at Stiles instead and he goes to her; she thinks about magnets and tides and the poles of the earth.

They don't end up getting breakfast.

—

No one speaks on the drive home. Alec and Claudia curl up together in the backseat; Stiles takes Lydia's fingers on the highway and she stares out the window as the cities and trees and nothing pass them by.

—

("If you say it to me I won't be able to let you go."

He kisses her goodbye instead.)

—

Stiles is gone for three days before the tethering spell compels her awake. Panic steals the breath from her lungs but Alec presses beneath her arm, against Lydia's racing heart.

'They're alright,' he says as she grasps for calm. 'They're okay.'

"How do you know?" It's not as though she doesn't want, more than anything, to believe him, but for the very first time in their life together, Lydia does not understand the look in Alec's eyes.

'She told me.' He lays down carefully on her chest, the weight of him grounding. 'She can tell me now.' Lydia has so many questions, but Alec doesn't offer anything else. 'Go back to sleep.'

"Then why–"

'He's dreaming.' The glow of his eyes is almost ethereal in the dark. 'He's dreaming about you.'

Lydia doesn't realize she's crying until tears splash down on her hands.

They lay awake for a long time.

—

"Sometimes our motives don't make sense to anyone but ourselves. But they don't have to – not really. We all live in pursuit of something, but whether that pursuit is less valid in the eyes of others is another question."

All of her things hit the floor with a clatter. Three birds take startled flight in the hall and Alec is halfway to the door before he realizes that Lydia is still struggling to pick up eight colours of Staedler pens.

"Miss Martin?" The professor peers at her, his projector remote still held aloft. Several hundred eyes are staring and it's a miracle that her face is not the same shade as her hair. Professor Jones shouldn't even know her name – she should be a faceless number in a crowd of freshmen – Lydia cannot decide whether the fact that she isn't is a good thing or not. "Is everything alright?"

"I'm sorry," she manages, scrambling to her feet. She swings her bag over her shoulder, clutching at her phone in vague pretense. "I just– there's been a family emergency and–"

It's only so many years of traipsing through the woods in heels that allows Lydia to make it down the auditorium steps, over bags and backpacks, dogs and cats and rabbits and lion's tails without breaking an ankle.

"Do let me know," says Professor Jones as she flies past him to the door. Lydia feels suddenly like she might burst into tears, as though that simple kindness is the one that will ruin her forever.

"Thank you."

'Come on.' Alec urges, and then they're gone.

—

"Lydia what–"

"The bones," she bursts out, before Scott can even get in another part of his question. "Mark Tillman. Are his bones still in the morgue?"

"His– of course they are. Lydia–"

"Can you check?" Alec jerks between wanting to leap ahead of her and keep close to her ankles and she nearly trips over him on the way back to their dorm. "I'll explain later just–"

Ever the alpha, Scott stops asking questions. "I'll call you back."

It's the longest twenty four minutes of her life.

The text arrives just as she's left the last sign for Stanford in the rear view.

You better get home.

—

"Hey this is Stiles. You know what to do."

"Hey this is Stiles. You know–"

"Hey this is Stiles–"

"Hey–"

—

"The Tillmans?"

It's the first senior pack meeting in weeks and if Lydia wasn't so panicked, she'd be glad to see everyone.

'Can everyone just catch on faster please?' Alec huffs. Lydia shoots him a look, but there's a reason he said it. She takes a deep breath and tries to find the fewest amount of words that would explain everything.

"They're trying to bring their son back."

"But–" Malia starts, but Lydia rushes on before anyone can point out the obvious.

"The dust. It's what our daemons expel when we die, what tethers us to our outward souls, what keeps them alive. People have believed for a long time that it could be harnessed – used like–like energy, or a power source–"

"Powerful enough to bring a dead kid back to life?"

Lydia just looks helplessly at Boyd. She wants to shrug but you can't shrug your way around a conversation like this – nor does one of the pack's oldest members speak often. "I don't know."

"Seven of us transform into horror story creatures once a month," Erica points out. "The rest of us are straight out of fairytales and myths. It's not exactly beyond impossible, is it?"

"We have to find him," Allison interjects, before Lydia can start drowning in all the ways that killing children to bring back children is wrong, more wrong than any of them and all the things that they can do, as a pack, that they should not. "We have to find them before it's too late."

"He's not answering." It's only years of knowing Scott that lets Lydia hear the faint panic in their alpha's voice. "So I guess we'll have to do this old school."

"They have to be close, right?" Kira looks from Lydia to Scott, and back again. "Mark Tillman died here in Beacon Hills. This has to be the place they try to bring him back."

"Let's hope they're running on the same logic." Scott's eyes track Lydia across the room as she picks up a scalpel from Deaton's operating tray. "It wouldn't be that hard to pay a lone druid to cloak all those kids. I can't believe we didn't think of that before."

"We don't have time to waste wondering." Alec hisses as Lydia cuts into her palm, letting blood drip onto the mountain ash of the tethering spell that Stiles left on Deaton's floor. The ash goes red; her daemon goes black. "Let's go."

—

The preserve is cold this time of year.

Lydia doesn't have time to shiver before something soft and heavy is being draped over her shoulders. A lacrosse hoodie.

24.

"He left it here," Isaac says, his eyes soft. Lydia blinks at him, and then blinks again, harder. "He said it would help you find him."

The fabric is wet at the collar as she pulls it over her head. Keep it together, Lydia. There isn't time for crying.

Isaac's daemon, Sam, glows faintly in the misty moonlight as she sniffs the air. Alec slinks ahead, darker somehow than the shadows all around them. 'This way.'

"He'll be alright." Isaac's hand is warm in hers, enveloping her fingers. "You'll be alright."

They walk in silence, Lydia trying to concentrate on the pull of the spell in her chest, Isaac turning his head to every rustle among the trees. Every so often, she hears a faint howl. Lydia curls her fingers around Isaac's arm, grateful for the natural pack split of so many years together that leaves him here with her, her eyes in the dark when her vision is elsewhere.

The tattoo of her Sight is hot on her wrist; Lydia lets the voices rise and clamour for attention and prays that none of them are his.

Help me please.

"Help me, please."

Lydia jumps, a scream stuck in her throat. Just before them on the path is a pale little girl with blonde pigtails, a bear cub at her feet.

"Sara?"

Isaac stops short. "Where?"

Lydia gestures, but she knows without having to ask that he can't see her. Her heart sinks as she crouches down to see a tiny stuffed turtle clutched in Sara's hand. "Sara, my name's Lydia. We're here to help you, okay?"

The little girl nods. She is, as with anyone who visits Lydia like this, there and not there both at once. All Lydia wants to do is reach out and hug her, but part of her is strangely afraid to do it. "Do you know where you are?"

Sara blinks owlishly at her. "We're here," she says, her voice soft. It takes everything in Lydia not to shudder. "It's green."

'We?' Alec circles the young werewolf, his tail curling.

"Is it just you? You and–" Lydia reaches back in her mind. "You and Jake?"

Trees rustle; Isaac jerks his head; Sam growls. "Lydia."

"Is there–" she starts, but Sara just turns, her eyes staring blankly at something beyond, and disappears. "Wait!"

"Lydia!" Isaac's weight shoves her to the ground, knocking her breath from her lungs, just as a tiny figure bursts through the trees, followed by the sleek shape of a coyote. And then another.

"Hey wait!" Kira's sharp whisper carries through the darkness. Isaac jumps to his feet, leaping forward in a burst of speed to catch a boy. His daemon, a wolf pup, yowls and nips while the child struggles wildly.

"Hey–Hey it's okay. It's okay–" Isaac throws Lydia a vaguely desperate look, locking his arms around the boy. "We're here to help– just calm down, okay?"

He's real. He's real. He's alive.

"Let me go!" His accent is unmistakably English. Lydia scrambles upright.

"It's Simon, right?"

At the sound of his name, Simon freezes. He stares up at her, his face pale and wet in the light despite how fast he must have run. "How do you know my name?"

"I know your Alpha," Lydia says quickly, glancing up at Isaac, Kira, and Malia, shrugging into a pair of shorts and a top at the same time. "My name's Lydia, and these are my friends."

"Are you a pack?"

Simon looks up at her three packmates; three gazes – one yellow, one amber, one blue – glow back at him. Lydia forces her face into an expression of non-panic, of reassurance. She tries to smile; she's not sure if it works.

"We've been looking for you guys. Do you know which direction you came from?"

The boy scrubs at his face. "I'm not sure," he says, and she hopes her eyes do not betray her disappointment. "He just said to run. He said to run and not to stop until I was out of the woods and that someone would come to find me once I was out."

Her heart leaps. She can't look at anyone. "Who–?"

'Lydia.'

She doesn't quite scream but Alec convulses.

Everything spins.

When the almost full moon and the dark and the trees have all stopped, Lydia and Alec are alone. There's a light in the distance. Lydia wants to step forward but her body refuses. He's there. You know he's there, come on. A scream – a girl; come on you idiot there are kids here – propels her forward, as quick as the Sight allows.

"You don't have to do this."

Maybe it's all the years between them; maybe it's Eichen House and Ghost Hunts that have dissolved the jump in her stomach; Lydia hears his voice and instead of a lurching in her chest, that frantic, most profound fear in her heart goes still and silent.

"You don't have to do this."

Alec breaks the line of trees. The green firelight of druid magic casts eerie shadows across the clearing, but she would recognize the shape of him anywhere. Stiles is tied to a wooden post in the centre of an eight point mountain ash star, his hands bound behind his back.

He has a gash above his left eye. Even from here she can see the blood trickling from his wrists, where he's struggled and failed to undo the spell on the rope.

He is magicless without his hands.

Just listen to my voice, alright?

She feels vaguely nauseated, like before.

Claudia is on the other side of the post. The clang of cage bars rattling is jarring, but no matter how many forms it seems she takes, they won't give, nor let her pass through.

'Are they all here?' Alec has to strike her with a paw to get Lydia to tear her eyes from the shepherd, panting and whimpering.

Stiles is so pale with effort.

She counts: seven kids, seven daemons that recoil in cages. The children are quiet and trembling, but otherwise seem unharmed. Two points sit empty to the left of Ben Dubois and across next to his coyote pup and Lydia can only take another breath in relief.

Maybe they made it in time.

"Mrs. Tillman, please," Stiles implores, staring just beyond the reach of the magic's light. "You have to know that this isn't going to bring Mark back."

Lydia is suddenly afraid to look, to put a face and a name and a soul to this horror that's been plaguing them for so long. But she has to look. She has to know.

Aurelia Tillman steps into the white circle around the spell's edge, her daemon, a dark rattlesnake, slithering at her feet. Lydia can imagine she was striking years ago, when she and Stiles were both too young to notice or care about such things. There's a kind of regality to her posture and the perfect symmetry of her cheekbones; however behind Mrs. Tillman's red stained lips and eyes rimmed with black kohl is a hollow frailty that heats the anxious coil in Lydia's stomach.

The woman opens her mouth to speak, but another voice, gruff and worn, interrupts.

"Tell me why we haven't knocked this kid out yet?"

"Because he's the anchor." Aurelia throws her husband an irritated frown. "None of the others are strong enough."

Connor Tillman sneers; Lydia swallows a lump of horror. "What good–" the man spits, waving an arm at the empty points of their star, "–is an anchor with an incomplete spell?"

"You're a druid," Aurelia shoots back. "You should have fortified the earth before we got here. Have you found that British brat?"

"The trace will kick in any second."

"You better hurry up." Mark's mother stares down at Stiles, whose gaze is unflinching. "We've stolen Scott McCall's emissary. You better believe that's his pack prowling around these godforsaken woods."

Connor's expression darkens as he and his chimpanzee daemon disappear into the treeline without another word.

'We have to get back, now.' Alec makes panicked circles around her ankles, and when Lydia isn't fast enough, bounding ahead of her on the dark path. She loses sight of him for a moment in the shadows; anxiety slams up into her throat. 'Lydia let's go.'

"But–" she starts, and stops. But we don't have Stiles to pull us back.

Lydia knows what Stiles would say. You've never needed me for anything.

—

"It's like – Apparition, is it?"

Stiles' sudden enormous grin makes Lydia want to laugh and hit him at the same time. "That is what it's called Doc, yes."

Deaton rolls his eyes behind Stiles' head and her nerves loosen just a little. "It's about focus. You have to concentrate only on where you want to go back to. If you don't have Stiles to tether you to this world, you'll have to do it yourself. And if you lose focus…"

"Please don't say splinched," Lydia begs.

"Well, no." The vet looks from banshee to emissary in turn. "But we could lose you, Lydia. Like–"

He breaks off, but neither teen needs him to finish.

Like before.

"Okay," Lydia says after a long pause. She lifts her chin to meet Deaton's eyes. "Talk me through this."

—

'Come on, Lydia.' Alec leaps up onto her shoulders, the weight of him grounding even on this other plane of being. 'Take us home.'

She closes her eyes and pictures it – the high school, her mom's house, the preserve.

Stiles.

Stiles.

Stiles.

—

It's too bright.

They land back in real space and time with a jolt. Lydia doesn't have time to gasp before Isaac's hands are on her waist, her shoulder, hauling her up, pushing her forward, away from electromagnetic lightning rods that make her shrink back instinctively. "Come on, come on–"

"What–" Lydia tries, nearly tripping over a root. Someone roars – Scott, she thinks desperately, trying to crane her neck back, but Isaac presses relentlessly.

"How did we not know Connor Tillman is a fucking druid?"

'We're going the wrong way.' Alec tries to turn around; Sam nips at his heels. 'Hey–'

"Isaac, stop!" Finally he yanks her beneath a cluster of trees, so tall and so closely grown together that all four of them nearly disappear from the path. "Where are we going? Stiles is–"

"Going to kill me if I let you back there."

"You don't understand," Lydia nearly shouts, trying to wrench her arm from his grip. "He's going to–"

"Lydia–Lydia!" With his stupid werewolf strength Isaac forces her still. All of Alec's hair rises on end. "He made me promise."

She can't breathe.

Isaac sighs. He reaches for her, but Lydia jerks back and finally, he lets her go. "Weeks ago, before the gathering. He called me– he guessed. I guess he was hoping he'd be wrong."

Her eyes blur with tears.

"Scott–"

"He doesn't know." Isaac sighs again. "I'm sorry."

"He–" she starts, but she doesn't know what to say. Everything is starting to spin again, but they're not going anywhere. Alec's fur starts to shift, tan, black, back again. Dread takes root in her gut.

A howl (Sam's head jerks, her spine stiff) pulls Lydia out of her hysteria.

The tethering spell is so hot inside her chest it hurts.

"I'm not just going to leave him," she says finally, swallowing. She scrubs the sleeve of Stiles' hoodie over her face. "So we can either go back together and help the pack, or I'm going to put you down here and Scott can pick you up later."

Isaac is listening to something her ears cannot hear, but he knows she'll make good on her threat. He sighs again, running a hand up the back of his neck.

"Come on, then."

—

Malia is bleeding.

"Guys I'm fine," she insists, but the coyote's face goes even paler in the moonlight when Kira and Allison pull her to her feet. Their daemons prowl, tense and nervous.

"You're not healing," Kira points out. Lydia's blood goes cold. "Why aren't you healing?"

Allison tosses an arrow in the dirt, her face twisted in disgust. "Poison. In the trap. We have to get you back to Deaton."

"But Stiles–"

"We'll go." Isaac nods firmly and the girls half-carry, half-drag the still protesting Malia towards the path that leads out of the preserve. "We'll find the rest of the pack, don't worry. Just get her there and get back as soon as you can."

Another howl lifts the hair from the back of Lydia's neck. Sudden, striking urgency makes her heart pound.

'It's time.'

"We have to go." Lydia yanks on Isaac's arm. "We have to go now."

"Lydia–" Allison drags her back, and Lydia is surprised (and not) to blink at a glittering blade of a knife in the dark. "Just in case, okay?" She squeezes Lydia's arm. "You're going to find him."

Fear locks her vocal cords together.

Alec takes off, Lydia not too far behind; she doesn't look to see if Isaac follows.

—

When her mind is too overcome, her soul knows. Lydia treads in Alec's wake with unshakeable faith in her daemon; she may have brought them back, but he is going to lead them home.

'Almost there.'

Lydia wonders if she ever be able to breathe normally again. It takes another few yards before she can see what Alec sees: firelight. They're here, at the spot from beyond.

'Watch these branches,' he warns as they inch closer. Lydia pushes a handful of damp leaves away from her face, crouching down beneath the brush, and the clearing takes shape again before her eyes. Connor wrestles Simon into his point in the star, one hand in the scruff of his daemon; her heart sinks. Aurelia's snake partner creeps at the edge of the spell, but more than one animal growls and snaps and it's hopeful, somehow.

"Don't let go, okay?"

Stiles is turning his head to look at each young supernatural being in turn. "No matter what happens, no matter how scared you feel, no matter how much–" Claudia whimpers. "No matter how much it hurts. Do not let go of your daemon. Understand?"

He glances between Owen and Lori, through the trees, and Lydia is so sure that he can see her. "It's going to be okay."

Mrs. Tillman steps into the circle, holding a bundle that makes both Stiles and Lydia lurch with recognition. "Save your breath. Words are not going to save them, emissary."

There is a familiar determination in Stiles' gaze as he stares at her, refusing to look at the bones being placed at his feet. There's something else, too. Pity. Daisy Kol squeezes her eyes shut when Aurelia pulls out a knife, slicing into her own hand and using the blood to draw a symbol on the dirt-marked skull of her dead son.

'Whatever we're going to do,' Alec hisses, 'we need to do it now.'

She can't scream – these kids are too young to withstand a force that could kill an adult. The blade of Allison's knife is cold against her forearm. Let's go.

A hand lands on her shoulder and Lydia almost stabs herself.

Scott.

He lifts a finger to his lips, pointing at himself, at Connor, at Lydia, then at Aurelia.

She lifts the knife in reply.

Her alpha's eyes go wide, and for a moment the thought of his judgement is crushing, but then Lydia can see beneath Scott's surprise the eyes of the man who killed Gerard Argent.

She would sacrifice almost anyone for Stiles. Even herself.

Scott nods, and together he and Emaline disappear into the shadows. Alec looks back at Lydia just as they stop behind Aurelia in the brush.

'I'm with you.' He crouches low, his tail curling, waiting for Emaline's signal that she cannot hear. 'Three. Two.'

Connor's voice rises. "Cor ad cor."

Heart for heart.

'Now.'

Scott bursts out with a roar, and everyone's surprise is just long enough that Lydia can kick in the back of Aurelia's knees and bear the other woman into the ground, while Alec pounces on the snake. She gives herself exactly two seconds to glance up; Stiles' eyes have too much in them to process at once. Lydia grabs a fistful of Aurelia's glossy blonde hair and takes a dark pleasure in how the woman cries out when her head is yanked up.

"Stop the spell."

"Stupid girl," Aurelia spits, twisting to glare with manic eyes at Lydia. "There's no stopping the spell."

She presses the blade in until blood trickles into the grass. "There is if we kill the caster."

Aurelia's husband is unconscious at Scott's feet. The woman's face betrays no emotion at the sight, but when Alec digs his claws into her daemon, Aurelia screams.

Alec.

'Not sorry.'

Aurelia's head drops in Lydia's grasp, but when she lifts it, the other woman is laughing. Dread chokes the breath from Lydia's lungs as Aurelia twists again, digging her own neck further into the blade. Her eyes are wild, her crazed smile victorious.

"Sed animam pro anima," she spits, and the screams are so awful that Lydia drops the knife.

Life for life.

The magic races around the mountain ash star, lighting the earth with blinding white light. One by one the kids drop and their daemons go still. Lydia wrenches away from Aurelia; she doesn't see but she feels Alec strike the snake daemon– twisting, clawing, biting.

He (they) might have killed Mark Tillman's mother, but if she lets that fact come all the way in, it will weigh her down until she will cease to move again.

"Lydia!"

She throws herself into the star just as the light encloses Stiles and Claudia at its centre and lands in a heap at his feet. Her wrist throbs. Stiles stares, wonderment in his eyes and something softer too – for just a moment they're not here, in the grass, trapped in a spell, but on a cold locker room floor, held safe by the sun.

"Lydia–" he says, his voice hoarse and uneven, his chest heaving with effort. The spell is working – even she can see it; they don't have time.

The first particles of Dust rise in the night.

"Come on," she gasps, working the knot around his wrists with shaking hands until it gives. "I'm immune; we're tethered together. We can still–"

"I have to stay."

She looks at him, well and truly stunned into stillness. "No," Lydia says, "No you're not. You're not–"

"If you pull me out," he gasps, seizing her arms and forcing her to look at him, "All these kids are going to die. The spell will be incomplete, their dust will go nowhere– they'll all be gone. You can't seriously make me live with that, can you?"

He's too gentle – his eyes, his hands; how can he be so soft when everything around them is harsh and cruel and terrible?

"You have to let me go."

She can't cry. If she cries, she can't see his face. "I won't," she insists, shaking her head frantically. "I won't, I won't."

Stiles yanks up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal black, inky markings traveling up his arm.

A spell.

"You need to bring me back." He presses his fingers in the gash on his forehead, hissing, before drawing the first symbol in the grass next to her knee. Stiles picks up Mark Tillman's skull and closes his eyes before smearing away the blood on a boy long dead.

Light recedes.

"Where the fates bear us to, right? That's what you told me. Well you were right. I was– I was an idiot for thinking college would let us escape what we were meant for."

Quo fata ferunt.

"But I–" He cradles her face; Lydia forgets all of her next words; he gets blood on her cheek but she doesn't care.

"Say the words for me. Soul and soul, heart and heart. Willing death for life."

She can't speak.

Stiles' thumb strokes over her lips. "C'mon Lydia. Say it. Soul and soul."

Alec paces outside the circle, giving her the faith in Stiles that she cannot carry by herself. 'Et animam meam.'

Stiles nods encouragingly. "Heart and heart."

She wraps her fingers around his wrist, the warmth of him already fading. "Cor tuum...et cor tuum."

"Willing death for life."

Lydia chokes on a sob.

"Pr-promptus est ad– ad vitam mortem."

She didn't know pride was an emotion one could express moments from death. "That's my girl. You can do it, okay? I know you can." His eyes go soft, tender, full of that unnamed thing. "Just remember…"

"Stiles," Lydia almost reels back. "Don't."

He smiles very faintly. "Remember I love you."

—

I can't feel the spell anymore.

'Lydia–'

He's gone.

'Lydia–'

I can't breathe.

'Ly–'

I can't breathe.

—

"Lydia!"

Her eyes jerk up from their vigil of Stiles' pale, motionless body to Scott, whose face is streaked with dirt and blood and tears. He tosses Allison's knife. Lydia has to lurch sideways lest she be nicked by the blade. Oxygen comes rushing back so fast it's hard to see straight.

Alec shakes.

"Lydia," Scott's voice breaks. "Please."

She plucks the knife from the grass with a trembling hand. Scott had wiped it clean before throwing it; bile rises in her throat. When Lydia can finally wrench her eyes away, she half staggers, half crawls over to Stiles, turning his wrist. She looks at Scott again, who nods.

Lydia asks for forgiveness from anyone and anything above before cutting into Stiles' palm and letting blood well there. She draws in the grass around her until she runs out of room and has to move closer to Claudia, lying still and silent. The druid symbol for heart appears eight times at her feet. When it's finally done her knees and her back ache, but Lydia kneels next to Stiles, taking his hand in both of hers and pressing her mouth and new tears against his knuckles.

"Et animam meam. Cor tuum, et cor tuum." She closes her eyes. "Promptus est ad vitam mortem."

Please come back to me.

The light is white, then violet–

and then there is no light at all.

—

Aurelia Tillman laughs madly as she sinks a knife into Stiles' chest. No matter how hard Lydia throws herself against it, the magic seal around the spell repels her.

She can't stop screaming.

Mark Tillman's bones rise up.

His green eyes stare from inside his dirt-scuffed skull.

—

"Lydia!"

Strangely, she can't scream anymore.

Hands land on her arms, her shoulders, but Lydia lashes out against them – Alec is hissing – why can't she see anything but his eyes?

"Stiles!" It comes out on a sob. "Stiles!"

"Lydia– Lydia it's me, I'm here–"

She forgets sometimes, how the years made him stronger. Firm arms pull her in, hold her tight, and now matter how hard this panic inside her chest pushes against her ribs, there is nowhere to go. She comes back in pieces – to his hands smoothing her hair, the warmth of his throat against her forehead, the sound of his voice.

The softness of his comforter.

They're in his bed. They're in his house. They're in Beacon Hills.

They're alive.

"You're alright. You're alright, I'm here. You're okay. I'm okay, I promise."

At last, Lydia can really see again. Stiles is still pale like always, but there is an undeniable flush to his cheek, a brightness to his eyes even above the dark sleepless circles.

He's alive.

"Stiles–" she starts, and then loses track when a knot overtakes her words in her throat.

"Hey, hey shh." He brushes her hair back with such tenderness that part of Lydia is afraid she's still dreaming, still clinging to a memory. "I'm here." Stiles takes one of her hands and presses it to his chest, where she can feel his heart beating beneath her fingers. "You did it."

Alec presses his head and his face against her back, her side, curling around her. 'We're alive.'

"The kids–"

"They all made it. Thanks to you."

Lydia stares at her hand, wrapped in Stiles', watching it rise and fall in time with his breathing. She notices it then: the blood on her fingertips. "Oh god."

Stiles follows her line of sight, releasing her. Lydia takes stock of herself; they're both still wearing their clothes from the clearing; Stiles is wearing the shirt he died in, and Lydia the jeans stained with his blood that brought him back to life.

"Lydia, talk to me. What is it?"

'Breathe.' Alec shoves himself against her chest, grounding her.

"I just–" The panic from before stabs again. "I need to get out of these clothes."

Stiles blinks, and then looks down at himself. "Right, yeah. I should probably–" He nearly stumbles out of his bed and it would be adorable, if Lydia could process it properly. "You know where the bathroom is. Do–" Stiles' slide from her clothes back up to her face. "Do you want to shower? I'm pretty sure the girls left some things…"

"Um–" Lydia manages to stand, somehow. "I…" She isn't even sure whether the rest of her sentence would have been a yes or a no.

Stiles eyes go soft. She feels young suddenly, more vulnerable than she's felt in a long time. His hands land on her shoulders, guiding her gently out of his room and down the hall, to the open bathroom door. The warmth of his hands is all she can concentrate on. "I'll be back in a minute, okay?"

Alec jumps onto the countertop, staring at Lydia who stares at her reflection. There is something unrecognizable and frightening in the eyes that look back. She doesn't really have to ask her daemon; she could find the truth in the intrinsic magic between them, but she does it anyway.

"Is she–" And then she finds that she can't.

Alec keeps her gaze. "Alive."

Relief makes her knees shake.

Lydia turns the tap, listening to the water spray and slosh – something real – before finding the finding the soap. Alec leans away from the bubbles as she washes her hands; they both watch pink run down into the drain. Lydia scrubs until her fingers are red and raw, but without Stiles' blood this time, closing her eyes when the water is finally clear again.

She should feel settled, but she isn't. It simmers beneath her skin like something living, this panic; Lydia wonders how long she'd have to stand here, her hands scalding though she can't really feel it anymore, to be rid ot it.

'Breathe,' Alec reminds her.

Remember I love you.

Lydia's gaze is wide-eyed when she finds herself again in the mirror. She's blushing. She's alive. They're all alive. Lydia whirls around toward the door, barely remembering to turn off the tap before she's down the hall. She hurtles herself into Stiles' doorway just as he appears before it. She catches him off guard, changed now into sleep clothes, carrying a bundle clearly meant for her.

"I never said it back."

His surprise is beautiful.

There is still a pounding in her chest, but it's not panic this time, only a strangely wonderful searing of nerves that makes her knees wobble again. Stiles drops the clothes to the floor between them, reaching. Lydia leans into his hand.

His fingers tremble against her skin.

She looks up; the love there takes her breath away and makes tears burn in her eyes.

"I didn't say it back."

Stiles' fingers brush at her tears, pushing back her hair. "You don't have to."

Lydia doesn't know who moves first – not that it even matters, really – but the kiss fills her heart and her lungs and it's like she can finally breathe again. Stiles crowds her against his door, his hands pressing her hips into the wood and they're alive alive alive. She grabs a fistful of his shirt, craning her neck, until he hauls her up against him and she doesn't have to stretch anymore.

The memory of the hotel room lurches her stomach.

"Lydia?" Stiles pulls back. Lydia wraps her hand around his neck and threads her fingers through the soft hair there. "You okay? You're shaking."

So she is.

Stiles tightens his grip. She leans her forehead against his, trying to look at him but knows she goes a little cross-eyed in the attempt. "I love you," she says. She wants to sink the words into him so that he has to carry this truth forever. "I love you."

Lydia isn't sure how he manages it, but Stiles is somehow able to hold her up and wrap her in a hug at the same time. He presss his open mouth against her collarbone and she shivers. "God I love you."

She can't stop trembling, especially when he kisses her there, and again on the junction of her neck, and again on the sensitive skin behind her ear. Lydia leans her forehead into the warm hollow of his throat. She feels a little dizzy.

"Let's just…" He carries her with that frustrating ease across the room. "Let's get you out of these clothes huh?"

She snorts a vaguely hysterical laugh into his shoulder and Stiles freezes. Lydia finds herself just suspended, momentarily weightless, above his bed. "I didn't mean–"

"Stiles," she says, and he stops. Lydia kisses the crease between his eyebrows. "I know."

He places her very gently on the mattress, turning away in a very sweet attempt to give her some privacy. "I'm afraid all I have is my own clothes," he says. "The girls were gonna run to your mom's, but…" Claudia can read her distress (which is almost a thought too big to contemplate). She whimpers; Stiles turns around.

It should be embarrassing perhaps, that Lydia's still shaking hands somehow cannot manage her shirt or her jeans, but all she feels is suddenly very tired. "Could you–?" she starts, and lets the question dangle there. Help me, please. New tears want to flood and it takes considerable effort to push them back.

Stiles smiles faintly. Remember I love you. Her heart aches. "Sure."

Lydia can't remember the last time anyone undressed her, either with such tender care or without any intentions of sex. But Stiles does both, pulling her to stand. His nimble fingers coax the hem of her shirt above her head and pop the button of her jeans. He stares for a moment at the soft cotton lace pattern of her bra, but Stiles doesn't say anything. He just reaches for the clasp and slides the straps away with such a studious effort that Lydia would laugh, if she could.

The air is cool on her exposed skin.

Alive.

Stiles offers her the top opening of a white t shirt, the rest balled up to help ease her head through. She looks at it, then at him. He just shrugs, as if to say, we're here now. Lydia can only smile weakly as he slides it over her head, catching his elbow with her fingers as her arms find the sleeves. He kisses her forehead and moves for the belt rings of her jeans. There is a certain thrill in the sight of Stiles ducked down past her knees, pulling on her jeans as he goes. A thrill for another time.

When he's done and she's left surrounded by worn and soft and Stiles, Lydia kisses him, takes his hand and tugs him into bed with her. He crowds her close, pulling her thigh between both of his, pressing his face into her skin where the collar of his shirt slips down at her shoulder. She can feel his eyelashes fluttering there as he closes his eyes. Stiles reaches over her body for her open palm, and as Lydia stares his fingers slide up her hand to find the space between hers.

She doesn't speak, but closes her fingers over his, so aware suddenly of how small she is.

He squeezes. Within moments his breath is deep and even, but Stiles' grip remains tight.

Alive.

It's a profound relief to be able to sleep again.

—

She wakes up hours later, suddenly lost.

"Stiles?"

The night is faintly blue in the edges of the windows; their daemons are still a dark shape at the foot of the bed; she and Stiles are half-tangled together beneath the blanket. Beacon Hills, she thinks. Stiles' room. Alive. Lydia remembers all those nights in his dorm and it's hard to breathe for a moment, crushed by the magnitude of how much has happened since.

"Okay?" he murmurs, the words heavy with sleep. Lydia inhales slowly, turning towards his voice.

"Yeah," she breathes, and finds that it's the truth.

Stiles reaches out and pulls her towards him and Lydia goes willingly. His hand moves from her thigh to slide up her back, underneath his t-shirt, rising up along her spine to cradle her neck. His fingers tangle in her hair. She can feel his heart beating. Lydia can't remember the last time she was held so tightly.

She's so in love with him that it would have scared her, in any moment besides this.

'We're going to be okay.'

She can't see Alec, but she feels his certainty.

You sound pretty sure about that.

Her daemon resettles in the dark.

'Call it a feeling.'

---

More Notes: It's been years since I worked this long on one piece of writing; I hope you enjoyed what may be my Teen Wolf swan song. I will miss you show. Thank you for one of the best and worst otps ever.

Annie