Guess what time it is? That's right, it's time for a depressing #DarkAsShadows one-shot. I've had this idea for a while, originally I intended to turn it into a multi-chapter story but then I figured it might work best here. If you're familiar with my writing this warning should be a given, but for those of you who aren't: this story is dark, there's character death, and a very not-happy ending. It's set toward the end of S3, which should become clear as you read it.
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/
It starts with a scream.
The kind of scream that burns her tongue and rips her throat raw. The kind of scream that leaves her sobbing on the floor and gasping for breath. The kind of scream that means someone's going to die.
Voices wash over her, panicked but strangely soothing; blurred faces hover above her, concerned but oddly comforting.
"Lydia? Lyds, can you hear me?"
The banshee focuses on the voice, letting the words guide her back. She blinks a few times, still struggling for breath, and as the room comes into focus she sees the pack gathered around her.
"Lydia," Allison says again, but this time her voice is soft with relief. "Are you okay?"
Isaac and Kira help her to her feet, manage to get her into one of the chairs. Lydia leans forward, rubbing her temples to rid herself of that awful after-premonition headache. The pack gathers around her again, bombarding her with questions and almost overwhelming her with their concern.
"I'm fine," she says wearily, "I'm fine."
When they're sure she's okay, they turn their attention to what just happened.
Allison, arms folded and expression grim, looks at her best friend with more than a hint of fear in her eyes. "Who is it?"
Lydia lowers her gaze; she's used to being the bearer of bad news, but this is too much even for her. But she has to tell them. "It's Scott."
Unfortunately being a banshee doesn't come with an instruction book, and Lydia can't tell them any more information than that Scott isn't dead yet, but he will be soon.
No time. No location. Nothing that could actually help them.
It takes a few minutes of tossing ideas around, but finally Lydia gets it. The scream left more than a name – it left traces of something, swirling around in her mind, and while the others are discussing how to track down Scott, she'd been stitching the pieces together. She's got it now.
"It's Stiles," she says, and everyone stops talking at once and looks at her.
Isaac frowns. "I thought you said it was Scott?"
"It is," Lydia says quickly, causing the rest of the pack to look more confused. "Scott's the one who's going to die, but Stiles is the one who's going to kill him."
Utter silence follows her declaration. No one asks if she's sure, because they all know to trust her by now. She's never been wrong about something like this before. But god, she hopes she is this time.
"Because of the nogitsune?" Kira asks finally. There's a glint of foxfire around her, an aura she can't quite hide yet. Lydia never really noticed it before, but now everything seems clearer, in sharper contrast, right in front of her eyes.
Everything except a way to save Scott and Stiles.
"Yeah," she says, her voice still raw from the scream. Isaac disappears and comes back with a glass of water for her, which she takes gratefully. Suddenly the glass slips from her hand and smashes on the floor. She stares at the shards, at her reflection blinking up at her, and then she shoots to her feet. "We need to find Stiles."
"But Scott's the one in danger, and you know I haven't had any luck tracking his scent -" Isaac begins hesitantly.
Lydia shakes her head, silently cutting him off. "But you don't need to track Scott," she explains. "You can track Stiles instead. His scent's still the same, right?"
Slowly, Isaac nods. Then he closes his eyes, concentrates, and everyone else holds their breath. His eyes fly open, glowing yellow. "Follow me."
/
They're too late.
Lydia knows this, she can feel it, but she can't let it stop her. They follow Isaac at a distance, trying not to crowd him with their scents, and he tracks Stiles halfway across town. Finally he ends up at the public library; it's such an unlikely place for a murder that they would never have thought of it otherwise. It's kind of perfect. Tricky, like the nogitsune.
Isaac and Allison manage to barge their way into the library, using a combination of lock-picking and brute strength, and Lydia and Kira follow them in. The library's dark, and cold, and silent. The only thing Lydia can hear is her own heartbeat, and a high-pitched whistling, bouncing around inside her skull. She knows the others can't hear it, so she doesn't mention it.
They make their way down the halls, Isaac darting forward and then doubling back, trying to keep on Scott's trail, and Lydia just does her best to stay out of his way. Scott's not dead, not yet, but this whole place has a solemn feel – like a graveyard. Kira turns to say something to her but the look in her face must deter her; the kitsune turns away without a word.
With each step Lydia's hope grows fainter and her heart grows colder. She can't shake the feeling that they're too late, that they're never going to be able to save him, but they have to try. He would never give up on them.
Partway down the hall Allison draws her bow and Kira pulls out her sword. Lydia just clenches her fists, knowing that if it comes down to a fight she's not going to be much help – and for more reasons than one. The nogitsune is marching around in Stiles' skin, and she knows she can't do a thing to hurt him, not when there's a chance it could hurt Stiles too. Call it selfish, call it cowardly, but it's still true.
Up the end of the hall, Isaac comes to a stop. He signals for them to do the same, and then presses a finger to his lips. There's a set of double doors in front of him, closed and padlocked. Lydia can see him gathering his courage, and then he wrenches the padlock off and tosses it to the ground. It makes a hollow thud against the hardwood floors. Then Isaac throws open the doors and sprints inside; Allison and Kira are right on his tail, Lydia a step behind.
She falters at the door, a rush of dizziness making her feel faint. Clutching the doorframe, she watches Allison and Isaac disappear down an aisle. Kira starts to come back to her, but Lydia waves at her to go on. The kitsune obliges, leaving Lydia alone.
Death is here; it's coming for Scott. She can feel it, she can taste it, and she knows she can't stop it. When she finally manages to move again, she stumbles through the room, almost tripping over fallen books and abandoned carts. The sounds of battle grow louder, until suddenly she's right on top of them.
Allison is sprawled on the ground, her hands clasped around her ankle. Isaac is out cold a couple feet away. Kira is trapped under a tipped-over bookshelf. And Stiles. He has his hands around Scott's throat, choking the life out of him. Scott's eyes are alpha red, but he's not fighting back; he can't. Lydia runs toward him, but the nogitsune takes its hands away from Scott for a second to send her flying across the room.
As she hits the bookshelf she sees Scott slump to the ground, and then she slips away.
They were too late.
/
Time doesn't heal all wounds.
It's been a month since the night at the library. They've been through it all – the police investigation, the funeral, the fallout as the town latched onto the latest tragedy and demanded answers from the people who were there for Scott McCall's final moments. Lydia visits his grave every day, hoping that one day she'll hear his voice.
But she doesn't hear it. She doesn't hear his voice, but she hears others. And the things they tell her would terrify her if she weren't already past the point of feeling. Past the point of caring. Past the point of being able to function at all.
"Lyds, come on. Melissa's waiting."
It's become a tradition, a kind of unspoken solidarity amongst the pack. Melissa McCall hosts dinner for the rest of the pack once a week, every Friday, seven o'clock on the dot. Lydia always gets there exactly eleven minutes late, but she doesn't tell anyone why. She can't tell them that that's the exact moment Scott's heart stopped beating; the moment the nogitsune took his life. The precise second Lydia lost a friend and Allison lost her first love and the pack lost its leader.
And she also can't tell them that it's the exact moment they lost Stiles too, because somehow she knows he's not coming back. She doesn't know if it's a banshee feeling or just intuition, but she knows it's true.
Tonight is especially quiet. Everyone shows up, just like every week, but the absence of a certain alpha is particularly pronounced tonight. They talk around him, try not to feel it, try not to mention it, but that empty place in the table is a gaping hole in their lives.
Since that night Lydia's been hearing sirens; she's been waking up in a cold sweat; she's been having panic attacks on an almost-daily basis. Scott is gone. He's dead. The others may be able to mourn him, may be able to remember his final moments and hate themselves for not being able to save him, but none of them will ever feel what she feels.
The pressure of Stiles' hands against his neck.
The lack of oxygen causing his body to shut down.
The absolute, mind-numbing terror.
But he wasn't scared for himself; even in his final moments, Scott was thinking of them. He knew his pack was there, knew they'd come to save him, but he also knew that it was too late. He'd been terrified for them, worried Stiles would go after them next.
He hadn't. Lydia had been unconscious for this part, but the others had filled her in later. As soon as Scott was down – as soon as he was dead – Stiles had simply left. They haven't seen him since, and they haven't had any luck in tracking him. There have been more murders around town than usual, continuing on with the trend that had started before Scott died, but no concrete proof that it was Stiles – the nogitsune. One of their friends is dead, and one's even worse off.
The rest of the pack is still shaken, but they're doing their best to move forward. None of them had been seriously injured in the fight, thank god. Allison's wrist was broken, but it's healing well; Isaac had taken a while to come round, but then werewolf super-healing had kicked in and he'd been okay; Kira had spent two days in the hospital, but there was no major damage. And aside from a concussion, Lydia was fine. Physically, at least. But they're all still scarred, still broken, still beyond repair.
Time can't heal these wounds.
/
This doesn't feel right.
As soon as Lydia steps foot in the library again – even weeks after they've cleaned up the blood and the books and all evidence that a murder had happened here, even weeks after they reopened the library and closed the investigation – she feels a shiver shoot down her spine. It's not quite as bad as being in a graveyard, but she's still accidentally tapping into the vibe of the place, hearing whispers and echoes of screams. This past month has been hard enough for the others, but it's so much worse for her.
Still, there's no choice. They need information, and Lydia knows she's going to find it in the stacks of dusty hardcovers in the half-forgotten mythology shelves. They haven't found any traces of Stiles, no spells that could track him down, no way to bring him back. She knows there's something here, something she's on the verge of stumbling onto, and she just needs to look a little deeper.
Of course this would be a lot less painful if the information she needed was anywhere other than the place where one of her best friends was murdered. It had taken a while to convince the others they needed to go down this route, and they don't even know she's here. Allison had said they would go together tomorrow, but Lydia couldn't wait. They're running out of time.
She works until late in the night – or early in the morning, she can't quite tell – even after the librarian's gone home. Her vision begins to blur and she starts to think that maybe she was wrong after all, but then she finds it. Just a tiny passage in the back of a book on lycanthropy, something she almost skimmed past. But once she reads it, she can't stop staring at it. Her blood runs cold, and then it just freezes. She can't move. She can't think. She was wrong; they were all so horribly, horribly wrong.
As soon as her limbs unfreeze enough for her to be able to move, she snatches up her phone and punches in a number.
"Allison," she gasps as soon as her friend picks up, "we were wrong. It's not the nogitsune, it's -"
A shadow falls over her; with shaking hands she hangs up the phone. Her breath catches in her throat, her gaze still caught by the single line in the text. The line that falsifies everything they'd ever believed, every feeling she's had, everything that's happened since they started on this crazy supernatural path.
"You know who I am?" says a voice from behind her, painfully familiar but too soft, too cold, like icicles on her skin that melt and leave her feeling cold.
"I know who you are." She swallows, still not turning to face him, although she can feel his breath on the back of her neck. "There never was a nogitsune, was there?"
"Clever girl," Stiles croons, stroking her hair. "It's a tricky old legend, and they didn't get it all right."
"It only works for true alphas," Lydia guesses, and Stiles' chuckle is enough of an answer.
"It's fascinating, really," Stiles muses, still playing with Lydia's hair with a kind of frightening intimacy. "A true alpha can only be killed by someone who loves them."
Lydia licks her dry lips, feeling her heart slamming against her chest. "If you loved Scott, why did you kill him?"
"Because he knew," Stiles says simply, as if that's a perfectly logical reason for murder. "He figured out that the nogitsune thing was a disguise, and I couldn't have him running around blabbing about it, could I?"
His hand drifts down, landing on her shoulder. She shudders; the sounds of death are stronger now, almost overwhelming, but Stiles' words still slip through the chaos.
"And now you're going to kill me," she says, her words nothing more than a whisper, "aren't you?"
She turns to face him now, meeting his eyes at last; they're dark, almost soulless. He smiles.
"You're the banshee," he says quietly, "why don't you tell me?"
It started with a scream, and that's the way it ends too.
/
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I know I've done something similar before, but I just find the idea fascinating. dark!Stiles is kind of an obsession of mine. Anyway. Hope you enjoyed this, and if you did, please review. I've got some other stories in the works, both short ones and some full-length ones, and I'm always up for taking Teen Wolf prompts (preferably Stydia, preferably angst/tragedy). See you guys around.