So this is my first Teen Wolf fic. I hope it is okay.

Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf.


She reflects, as she is lying down in her bed after the whole near-death experience at Eichen house, that perhaps Ariel really was a suitable name for her. Because right now she feels like she is drowning. Scratch that. She feels like she's been drowning for the longest time. Allison dead, Aiden dead. All the death that surrounds her, clamors around her and choking her. Trying to get her to cry out for them. Trying to get the screams that they never got the chance to utter, sound into the world. Tying to be hear one last time. Not to be saved, most of them, but just to be heard. We were here, we lived, we died.

She should be at home in the sea. These waters she prowls are the homelands of her kind, the preternatural. She should fit in. She should be a part of it, so immersed and adjusted, she shouldn't even dream of the shore far more think of them as promised land. The others walk the fine line that balances being normal and being preternatural. It wasn't easy at first but they do it now. But she, she feels as if she surfacing for a breath of fresh air and then diving back down to hold it for as long as she can.

Like Ariel she dreams of land, dreams of walking on legs instead of a tail. It isn't a prince she longs for; it isn't curiosity of the people there that drives her. She knows what they're like, those people, she knows what the land is like and she longs to go there. Longs for it because it's home. She knows it's silly, knows that the world she lives in is the real one, knows that denial will do nothing and that she can never live with a death on her hands if she could have stopped it. But still, sometimes, she wishes she could live in an illusion where all she had to worry about was her grades and usual high school drama. She longs for freedom from reality.

It is perhaps the first time that she'd ever thought of knowledge as anything but good. But some knowledge comes with a price and Lydia Martin doesn't think she can pay it. She wonders if one day or soon enough, she'll just be another scream clogging up a banshee's throat. She doesn't want to know if she would want to be heard or prefer to be silent; one more death to vanish into the eons of time.

She's supposed to be the beautiful, deadly, playful, mermaid who claims the seas and lures many a man to the water. Her voice is supposed to be sweet and clear, the songs of the preternatural sea, rolling of her tongue with ease. She's supposed to be the princess of the sea but she isn't even the mistress of herself. She has gills but they don't fill her lungs with air. Lydia Martin is supposed to be strong and dependable. But she is drowning, she is crumbling. She wouldn't leave, not when they need her. But if she could go without repercussions….

Like Ariel, she's supposed to be at home here. And like Ariel, she would give up her voice for the barest chance to leave it forever.


R&R Please! Reviews make me happy!