I could probably have specified on the original note that: Void=CANON Stiles and Dark=AU Stiles. In my defense, I posted it at 2am and was sleepy?
2 Dark
Stiles focused his stolen eye on the shadows surrounding the pack. Hunters might not have the glowing auras of the supernatural, but Lydia would. She could train with them and adopt their code, but she would always be a banshee. Hers was an eerie light, rising in grey and white wisps. Stiles found the tendrils of her aura wrapping around the trunk of a tree.
"Gotcha," Stiles muttered.
Scott set his hand against Stiles' back to calm him. Malia only snorted. She had no respect for any monster who sided with hunters. Her disdain never made the bullets hurt less. Neither did it bridge the chasm at their backs. Stiles eyed Lydia, but she didn't move.
"You're trapped," Jackson called from a position near Lydia's. He liked to gloat. Stiles thought it made Jackson feel better about Peter's refusal to give him the bite.
"Surrender and we'll spare you, Scott," Allison said. She stood some distance from the others and stepped into view with her bow drawn, aimed at Malia.
"And the rest of us?" Stiles asked.
Stiles and Malia were monsters according to the hunters' code. Malia's blue eyes signaled her guilt, no matter that it hadn't been her fault when they changed. Part of Stiles' problem was in his eye too, but he wouldn't survive its removal, assuming he survived Lydia.
"You know we didn't do this," Scott said. "Peter only kills the responsible. We would never kill innocents."
"Maybe you wouldn't, but what about your packmates?"
Malia growled, eyes lighting with the blue that drew Allison's wrath.
"It wounded me," Scott insisted, pulling up his shirt to reveal the gash through his stomach. "I think it was an alpha. We should be working together."
Allison laughed at that. "You expect hunters to work with Hales?" Her laughter became a sneer. "If you lead me to Peter, I'll leave his daughter alive. How's that for working together?"
Stiles said, "You weren't very good at cooperative games as a kid, were you?"
"I guess that's the cost of moving around to hunt monsters," Allison conceded. "So what childhood damage does it take to put part of a demon in your face?"
Stiles shrugged. "Same as you, Allison. I never want to feel helpless again."
Lydia's aura moved. They always thought speaking distracted Stiles.
Nothing could ever be distracting enough to pull his attention from Lydia Martin.
Lydia preferred to fight at close range. She carried daggers laced with wolfsbane, and her handgun almost always remained strapped to her thigh. Once she had tried to shoot Stiles. He struck her with lightning. Instead of stopping her heart, it had left a scar over the left side of her body.
She stopped when she saw he had turned toward her. He had never told her about her aura, and he liked to imagine she thought he was connected to her and could feel her presence. He liked it because he knew it would terrify and disgust her. She deserved that and worse.
Hatred widened Lydia's eyes almost to the point of madness. "We don't have to talk to them, Allison. We already know they're guilty."
Stiles rolled his eyes.
"The only thing we're guilty of is taking justice," Malia said.
"What you took was my aunt's life," Allison snarled.
Malia hadn't even been with the pack when they killed Kate.
Allison composed herself, breathing steadily in and out. "Last chance. Give up the alpha, or die protecting him."
"Please choose die," Lydia added.
Stiles asked, "Shouldn't you be able to hear if we're about to die?"
Lydia shrieked with rage, but not power. She hurled one of her daggers at Malia, so Stiles guessed she'd learned something from last time. When Malia knocked it out of the air with an almost lazy kick, Lydia looked disappointed, so Stiles guessed she hadn't learned that much.
Allison shot at Scott. He caught the arrow, but Allison had knocked and loosed another before the first reached him. Eventually, something would hit. Jackson stepped out of cover already firing. Stiles had a moment to be thankful it cost too much to put wolfsbane in every bullet before he realized Jackson wasn't aiming for the werewolf on Stiles' left or the werecoyote on his right.
Stiles' leg collapsed under him. That would hurt to heal later. It hurt now. Stiles bared his teeth, though he couldn't growl like his packmates. He set a hand against the dirt. When he lifted his hand, the ground rose with it, forming a barricade between him and the hunters. Blood falling from the hole in his leg to the ground paid tribute, a sacrifice to grant Stiles power. Someday, the hunters would learn not to make him bleed.
"Don't shoot the witch, dumbass," Lydia shouted.
"Quiet," Allison hissed. "Something's coming."
It wasn't Peter. Stiles would have felt his alpha approaching.
"I think it's the bad guy," Stiles said. He pulled his hand from the barrier he built and checked his leg for an exit wound but found nothing. Stiles couldn't pull a pullet from his leg here, and he couldn't heal until he'd removed the bullet.
"It's him," Malia confirmed, ducking behind Stiles' cover. "Can you heal?"
Stiles shook his head.
"Can you walk?"
Stiles shrugged.
"How are you his favorite?"
Stiles smirked. "I can do this." He turned his demon eye to the woods and found the alpha's dark aura approaching from the south. He let blood from the hole in his leg pour out over his hand before setting it to the lightning bolt tattooed on his arm. Power lanced through Stiles and lightning struck the alpha.
"It wasn't enough," Malia noted.
The alpha would need hours at most, probably closer to minutes, to heal from the same wound that left Lydia in recovery for weeks and scarred for life.
"No," Stiles admitted, "but it looked cool.
"If you two are done flirting, I think it's time to run for our lives," Scott said, pulling Stiles to his feet.
"We're not flirting," Stiles said as Malia mimed puking at the thought.
Standing, Stiles could see Allison had turned toward the alpha. Its aura faded into the shadows, so Stiles couldn't see where it ended and the forest began. Stiles had never seen anything like it.
"Look out!" Scott shouted. He and Malia had pulled ahead when Stiles paused to study the alpha.
A tendril of white snaked into Stiles' view. Something had pulled his attention from Lydia Martin after all. She shrieked with glee.
Stiles pulled all the ink he could into his forearms. He raised them as a shield before him.
The blade cut him anyway. Lydia ducked down to pierce his unprotected hip and wrenched the blade up across his stomach and under his shield. Stiles faltered and fell to the sound of laughter.
He redirected his ink to the wound. It was poisoned. He had never cast with poisoned blood before. He tried to heal. It should have hurt more in healing, but the pain never changed. He pushed outward instead, trying to strike at Lydia. He saw a flash of light. A crash like thunder right around his head fallowed it. Lydia didn't die.
Stiles struggled to sit up, to see. He didn't know what his magic had done.
Scott hovered over him. His aura was too bright, too fierce, tinged with red. His tattoo was gone, replaced by two bands wrapped around his arm. Lydia stood behind them, aura glowing white with power beyond anything Stiles had ever seen from a banshee. He had never realized how thin the wisps of her aura were until he saw the thick ropes that surrounded her now.
People couldn't just change their auras. This was impossible.
"Scott," Stiles grunted. He couldn't say more. Where was Malia?
Lydia stepped forward, set a hand against Scott's shoulder. Scott didn't fight her off. He let her past him to set her hand against Stiles' cheek. Stiles snarled weakly.
"It's okay, Stiles. It's me." Her voice sounded softer and gentler than Stiles had ever heard it, in contrast to the intensity of her banshee's aura. "What happened? There was a flash of lightning, and then you were... different, and injured."
Stiles tried to laugh, but he was too weak.
"Who did this to you?" Lydia asked with such sincerity that Stiles had to close his human eye in case it had deceived him.
"You did," he whispered.
