I haven't forgotten about Don't Fall, I've simply been waylaid by silly university and life happenings. Update to that story to come this week and I apologise for the wait. Stay tuned.

Disclaimer: Teen Wolf, the concept, and its characters are not my property nor will they ever be. As much as that may sadden me, I've learned to live with it.

As The Drummer Begins to Drum

"You are such an idiot."

"I know, okay? I know. Repeating those same words over and over isn't exactly going to change the situation."

"Trust me, there are many other words I can think of to call you right now and 'idiot' is just about the tamest of the bunch."

"Fantastic. And while you're over there practicing your anger management techniques, I'll just continue to be over here trying to get us out of this mess."

"As you should be considering you're the one who got us into it in the first place!"

"And you don't think that just maybe you should be putting your genius level IQ into something more productive than thinking up new and imaginative ways to insult me?"

"I could certainly use it to think up new and imaginative ways to kill you."

"She's a genius and a comedian! But give it a few minutes and I'm pretty sure that particular mental exercise will be pointless. Of course by then you'll be dead too and wishing you'd spent the last few minutes of your life very differently."

"You're right. I'll be wishing I hadn't spent them with you."

"Helpful, Lydia, is not something anyone will be suggesting should be written on your tombstone."

"There's only one word anyone will be suggesting should be written on yours, Stiles."

"Enlighten me."

"Idiot!"

"Did you think that one up with your genius level IQ?"

"It doesn't take a genius to figure you out, Stiles."

"Guys?" At the sound of Allison's voice both warring factions turned their heads to glare at the interruption. Allison held up both hands in a gesture of peace.

"I was just going to say that you can always restart the level and try it again." The suggestion was met with stony silence and two glares strong enough to melt the polar ice caps.

"You know what?" Allison rolled her eyes and threw up her hands in exasperation as she spoke, "I don't care." Pushing herself up off the couch, she tugged Scott up with her. "We'll just leave you two to maim and destroy to your hearts' content."

Their attention already back on the virtual battle playing itself out on the TV in front of them, Stiles and Lydia barely acknowledged their departure. Groaning as his character finally succumbed to the hordes of attacking demons, Stiles glanced over at Lydia sitting cross-legged beside him on the floor. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, her green eyes intent on the screen as they flickered rapidly between the bar showing her rapidly diminishing health and the bars showing the not-so-rapidly diminishing health of her attackers. Stiles winced when a particularly brutal attack left her character on the brink of death and Lydia threw her hands up in defeat.

"That went better than expected," Stiles offered.

Lydia sighed loudly as she watched the last of her health bar drain away and then aimed a pointed look at Stiles as the 'Game Over' title bled onto the screen. "Next time, try not to waste everything on the nothing players that get sent out in the first wave." Lydia's tone was matter-of-fact on the subject and only slightly condescending.

Stiles rolled his eyes and bit his tongue. He'd let her have this one. She was right anyway which should have been more infuriating than it was considering that they were playing a game she'd claimed never to have heard of, let alone played, in her life. But if showing him up on his own X-Box is what it took to get Lydia back to her usual fighting form, it was a sacrifice of pride he was gladly willing to make.

He stole another sideways glance and caught her idly picking invisible lint off of her pants as they waited for the level to reload. Her expertly applied make up concealed the dark circles under her eyes put there by weeks of sleepless nights and countless nightmares, but nothing – not even her sharp wit and clever evasive tactics – could hide the weariness that was diminishing the customary sparkle in her green eyes. Sometimes – like now when she was distracted by the prospect of handing him his ass on a virtual platter – he would catch glimpses of it, small flickering glimpses of it like a dying candle fighting to stay lit, and he'd be almost overcome with a desperate urge to tell her everything about Scott, about werewolves, about Peter, about the Argents. He'd catch her shying away from crowds at school, taking alternate routes in the hallways to avoid the looks thrown her way, whispering to herself when she thought no one was watching, and he'd have to physically stop himself from walking to her, pulling her into an empty classroom and telling her everything.

"Stiles!" Lydia's sharp tone startled him and he quickly realised that what had started as a quick sideways glance had turned into a full blown stare and that he was now gaping at her like an asphyxiated fish.

Instead of verbally tearing him a new one, Lydia merely frowned at him and gestured with her controller at the screen.

"Right," Stiles mumbled and turned his attention back towards the game.

"So," Lydia raised her voice over the game's soundtrack and the occasional sounds of clashing swords and magical spells being cast. "How'd the quest go?"

Stiles cast a questioning glance at her after taking care of a particularly pesky goblin and replied, "Quest? What quest?"

"The quest you, Scott and Allison were completing for that online role-playing game that battles mythical creatures and apparently expects its players to be knowledgeable in archaic Latin," Lydia tossed back nonchalantly, her gaze never leaving the screen.

"Oh, yeah. That one," Stiles answered dumbly. He fought the urge to slap himself.

"Yes. That one." Lydia took a second to toss him a winning smile before going back to casting spells.

"It went good." Stiles closed his eyes in exasperation at himself. "I mean, it was well." He caught Lydia's raised eyebrow and swore under his breath. "It was fine. We quested and we won and you were a huge help, Lydia." He grinned at her and hoped she'd simply chalk it up to this being his usual mumbling behaviour around her.

She rolled her eyes and he took it as a good sign.

"Whatever," Lydia replied, her attention already back on the growing number of magical evil-doers swarming onto the screen. Stiles let out a long slow sigh of relief he hoped she wouldn't notice.

They played through the next few swarms in a comfortable silence only broken by the occasional grunts he'd use to communicate his need for a healing spell or the muted squeaks she'd let escape when their opponents would start to overwhelm her weaker defenses.

"What's the game called?" Lydia inquired as a cut scene took over.

"Game?" Stiles answered a split second before he realised she was still talking about the kanima quest they'd lied to her about.

Shit, he thought to himself. She really wasn't going to let this one go. And she wouldn't, of course. She was too smart to buy their pitiful excuse for a lie.

"It's not really even that good. You probably don't know it," he mumbled in the inane hope that she'd just drop it.

She didn't. Instead she tossed her hair over her shoulder and scoffed, "Undoubtedly. That would be why I'm asking."

Stiles let out a chuckle that he hoped sounded less panicked to Lydia than it did to himself.

"Lydia," he started. The look in her eyes as he turned to meet her gaze stopped him. There it was again, that resolute flicker of something in the depths of her eyes. He could read the almost panicked desperation on her face that she was trying hard to hide behind a facade of benign curiousity and he mentally cursed Peter Hale for the thousandth time.

He tried to start again, but she softly interrupted him, "Don't lie to me, Stiles." Her expression didn't change, but her eyes darted quickly to the side and back to meet his as she leaned forward the barest of fractions.

Stiles' breath caught in his throat, a now familiar feeling of panic gathered in the pit of his stomach and he couldn't stop himself from glancing sideways as well. There was nothing remarkable about his father's worn out old armchair, but Stiles couldn't quite shake the rapidly growing sickening feeling that there was something going on he wasn't completely aware of.

"World of Warcraft," Stiles blurted out. "Yeah, it's some new expansion that's still in beta. You know how it is with gamers," Stiles continued to nervously ramble as Lydia continued to stare at him. "Always looking for a new challenge and you of all people would know how challenging deciphering archaic Latin is, am I right?" He tried for a laugh, but it sounded stilted and fake even to his own ears.

Lydia stared at him intently for a few more seconds before letting her eyes drop. When she raised them again that flicker was gone. It was as if a light had been turned off and the flatness he'd grown scarily accustomed to seeing over the past few weeks was back.

"Right," she whispered and smiled sadly at him.

Guilt was now eating away at him and he tried to come up with something sincere to say, anything sincere to say, that would wipe the disappointment from her face. He couldn't. It seemed that while his ability to lie to everyone and anyone around him had grown exponentially over the past few months, his ability to speak with even an iota of honesty was diminishing at an equally rapid pace.

Now Stiles really wanted to slap himself.

Lydia had pushed herself up off the floor and had walked over to the front door before Stiles stopped his self-recrimination, realised she'd left, and quickly followed her. He clumsily stumbled over the hoodie he'd earlier cast off onto the floor before reaching her as she was tugging on her boots.

"I should go," Lydia explained. "My mom tends to freak out if I'm gone for too long now, you know, on account of me being crazy."

Stiles surprised himself and stopped her with his hand on her arm as she was pulling on the second boot.

"I don't think you're crazy," he told her with earnest.

She only looked at him, her eyes wide and questioning, so he repeated himself more softly, "I don't. I don't think you're crazy."

Lydia's eyes never left his and he swore he saw them flicker slowly back to life.

"Everyone else does," she replied softly.

Stiles' lips quirked into a lopsided smile as he lowered his head to whisper conspiratorially, "Well, not everyone's as smart as you and I."

He watched her fight a smile of her own and gave himself a mental high five. When the half-smile quickly faded and her eyes hardened, Stiles quickly withdrew the high five and felt himself shrivel about three feet.

"I don't remember much about that night, Stiles." At his questioning stare, Lydia quickly clarified, "The night of the winter formal. The night I was attacked. You remember that night, right, Stiles?"

Stiles slowly nodded, confused as to where she was going with this.

"That must be nice for you because I don't," Lydia snapped. "I remember looking for Jackson. I remember not finding him. And I remember you. I remember you asking me to dance and getting mad when I said no. I remember something about my 'cute little ass'-" Stiles blushed at that, but Lydia went on as if she hadn't noticed, "- and you telling me that you know how smart I really am. Do you still think you know how smart I really am, Stiles?"

"Of course," he replied immediately, his confusion blatantly evident on his face.

"Then were you lying?"

"What?"

"When you told me you thought I was smart enough to win a Nobel Prize, were you lying to get me to dance with you?"

"Of course I wasn't lying, Lydia. Why would you think that?"

Lydia cast him a pointed glance. "I wonder," she replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

When he could only gape at her instead of respond, Lydia threw up her hands in exasperation, yanked the door open, and stalked out. She was already down the porch stairs and pulling open her car door before Stiles managed to shove his feet into a pair of shoes and chase after her.

"Lydia, wait," he called after her. Tripping on a shoelace, he caught himself on her driver's side door and knocked on the glass, his eyes pleading with her to roll down the window.

"What?" she snapped impatiently, refusing to look at him as the glass separating them disappeared.

"Lydia," Stiles stopped and took a moment to collect himself. He'd never been very good at expressing himself seriously. Jokes, sarcasm, humour of any kind, were always easier to dole out than a serious thought. Add in the fact that talking to Lydia Martin usually caused his tongue to tie itself into knots and his thoughts to get lost somewhere between his brain and the tongue he could no longer control, and the prospect of explaining himself to her held the definite possibility of imminent disaster.

"Lydia," Stiles tried again, this time his voice stronger. "I wasn't lying to you that night."

"No," Lydia spat. Her head snapped up and her green eyes blazed with quiet fury. "You're just lying to me now."

"Would you just let me finish?" Stiles snapped back.

"Finish what? Lying to me some more?"

As reasonable as her anger at him was, he was starting to lose his patience. He was trying to explain and the fact that she was responding with infuriatingly valid retorts was only making him feel increasingly guilty.

"No. Not lying. Just-" Stiles gripped the car's window frame tightly and let his head fall forward as he let out a frustrated groan. He pushed himself away from her and ran his hands over his hair in frustration. Casting his eyes upwards, he focused on the nearly full moon barely over the horizon in the night sky and willed himself to calm down. Shoving his hands forcefully into his pockets, he took a couple breaths before trying to speak again.

"Do you remember who found you?" This time, his voice was so quiet Lydia had to strain to hear him. She frowned when she realised what he was asking her.

"Jackson did, but I don't see what-"

"Do you remember that," Stiles interrupted her this time. His eyes were still on the brightly lit moon. He couldn't look at her yet. Or wouldn't. He didn't think it mattered which was the truth. "Or is that what the police report says?"

Lydia's frown deepened. "I don't remember anything after leaving the dance to go look for Jackson."

Stiles nodded. He'd figured that was the case.

"I'm sorry." Only now could he look at her again. He caught her eyes with his own as he spoke and hoped she realised that he was being sincere this time. That this was the most honest he could be with her right now. "I'm sorry about what happened to you and I'm sorry I can't explain it." Stiles sighed and shook his head sadly as he continued, "But I'm mostly sorry I didn't apologise sooner."

The fury was draining from her and the blaze in her eyes had quieted down to a simmer. There was uncertainty building in them instead, but Stiles couldn't quite figure out if it was aimed towards him or towards her own feelings. Selfishly, he hoped for the latter.

He stepped towards her car again and her eyes darted quickly towards the backseat as if something there had grabbed her attention, but a split second later her gaze was back on his and Stiles forced himself to focus.

"This isn't about lying to you. This is about protecting you," he pleaded, trying to make her understand.

"I can protect myself," Lydia responded adamantly, but her voice lacked any venom.

Stiles allowed himself a small smile at that and a little bit of weight lifted itself off his shoulders as he realised she was actually listening to him. "Of course you can. You're a genius. One day, you'll probably rule the world and we'll all be better off for it. But right now?" Stiles moved closer, back to where he'd been before, right up against her door and close enough to make out the dark green flecks in her eyes even with only his porch light to weakly illuminate them. "Right now, I need you to trust that I'm only doing this to protect you."

"And I need you to give me a reason to," Lydia pleaded quietly.

For several seconds, neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke. They just maintained eye contact. The cold was starting to make the hairs on Stiles' arms prickle and the back of his neck was already ice cold, but his gaze never wavered from Lydia's. He knew he couldn't tell her what she thought she wanted to know, what she by all rights probably deserved to know. Largely because most of it just wasn't his secret to tell, but also because if she knew, she'd be in the same position he found himself in most days – in danger, terrified for his life and the lives of his friends and dad, and impossibly overwhelmed by something he'd never had a conscious choice in. He knew it wasn't his place to make that choice for her, but maybe, just maybe, if he was smart enough or clever enough or lucky enough, they could resolve this whole mess without anyone else getting involved or hurt by it.

"Can you just trust me on this one?" Stiles inquired softly.

Lydia broke their gaze, her eyes travelling over to the passenger seat of her car. She shook her head slowly, hair falling over the sides of her face and obscuring it from his view. She was muttering something just under her breath and as close as Stiles was to her, he still couldn't make out what she was saying.

That sickening, knotted feeling in his stomach was back and he couldn't shake the disturbing notion that there was someone just in the corner of his eye. If he turned his head quickly enough maybe he'd catch whoever it was, but the rational part of his mind kept telling him there was no one else there. It was just him and Lydia alone in his driveway. His hand was barely a hair's breadth away from her shoulder when her head snapped back up and her eyes, now slightly wild and overly bright, met his startled ones.

"I said, I don't know." Her tone was measured but there was something below the surface that made his heart sink and set his teeth on edge. It was something so eerily familiar that it was grating on the very edge of his memory. The knot in his stomach tightened and he swallowed back a yelp of surprise when her chilled fingers grasped tightly onto his forearm.

"I don't know what's real anymore," she told him calmly as if she were telling him the weather or the day's homework assignments.

"Lydia," he tried to speak through the panic rising in his throat. He stumbled back when she let go of his arm.

"I really have to go, Stiles. You'll make sure Allison gets home, right?"

"Yeah, of course, Lydia, wait."

Her car's engine roared to life and Stiles blinked at the sudden brightness from her headlights as she neatly reversed back out of his driveway. Blinded, he rubbed his hands over his eyes and caught her staring at him through her passenger side window before she accelerated away from him and down the street.

He heard the front door open and two sets of footsteps join him on the driveway.

"Lydia left?" Scott asked.

Stiles could only nod in acknowledgement.

"Is she okay?" Allison inquired softly, already knowing the answer.

"No," Stiles replied. His shoulders slumped and he let his head fall forwards, closing his eyes wearily. "Not even remotely."

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