Author's note: I'm having a lot of fun writing this and I'm so pleased with the response I've gotten to this fic, so thank you very much to everyone who reviewed/favourited/followed. Enjoy!

"Stiles!" Scott has to use both of his arms to hold his best friend back. It is wise that he does intervene because if he hadn't, werewolf or not, Aidan would have been lying dead, possibly just by the sheer force of fury in Stiles' glare.

"What did you do to her?"

"Who are you talking about?" To his credit, Aidan does look completely baffled. He rips the hand that Stiles has managed to get pass Scott off of his shirt.

It is a fair question if Stiles' were to stop and think about it. After all, the twins have not exactly had the best reputation when it comes to their treatment of the citizens of Beacon Hills. However, Stiles is in no mood to figure out who else his question could possibly apply to.

"Who the hell do you think?" Stiles' voice is filled with a certain kind of rage he knows only presents itself whenever Lydia is in trouble. "Lydia. She just about tried to tear herself open and Deaton thinks it's wolfsbane and you were the last person to be with her-so let's try that again. What did you do to her?"

"Lydia?" Scott repeats, confused. "What happened?"

Stiles runs a frustrated hand through his hair and begins to recount what happened at the clinic. As he talks, his mind fills with the sounds of her cries and get it out of me and shrill screams. His life is a constant nightmare and he has grown accustomed to taking the thoughts of werewolves and kanimas and homicidal druids and shelving them somewhere deep in his brain where they can't bother him when he sleeps. The sounds of Lydia's terror, however, are something that he can never push aside and he knows will haunt him just as sure as he is that they will her.

"She was hallucinating?" Scott asks after Stiles has finished speaking.

Stiles shrugs. "Deaton's guess."

He watches as Scott turns to both the twins but addresses Ethan when he speaks. "You told me you guys went after Danny and Lydia because you knew one of them would be important to me. And you said that you know it's Lydia."

"We didn't do this-whatever this is," Ethan holds up his hands, placating, catching sight of Scott's strained fists and probably realizing that between him and Stiles' vehemence, they would not benefit from being on the receiving end of their wrath. Alpha or not.

Stiles shakes his head, a humourless smile on his face. "Yeah? And why should we believe you? All you've," he jerks his head at Aidan, "been doing since you got here is trying to persuade her to join you in every freaking empty classroom in this place. And to what, keep an eye on her? So you can go back to your little barbaric group of alphas and decide on just exactly what to do to her to get to Scott?"

He realizes abruptly that half the anger that is radiating from him is aimed at no one but himself. They had all discussed Lydia's new found romance with Aidan-well everyone but Lydia- and came to the decision that it would be useful to keep Lydia in a position where she would be close to one of the Alphas. Not that they had much of another choice. Trying to force Lydia to break up with someone would not go over well. They'd all agreed to keep close watch of her and to put stock into what she always says about being capable of taking care of herself.

As reluctant as he'd been, he had eventually given in. He remembered wondering if they would come to regret it later. He wasn't sure about the others, but he knows that if he could, he would go back and keep her as far away from Aidan as possible. Her ire would have been much easier to handle than whatever his actions-or more so, lack of- have caused her now.

"Like you don't use her as a distraction for me whenever the need arises," Aidan sneers and Stiles pushes himself off of the wall he'd been leaning against only to, once again, be stopped by Scott. "Look, I didn't do anything to her. We were kind of caught up in something to do much of anything else-"

"Oh my God, shut up," Stiles groans and collapses back against the wall again.

"We don't have any reason to poison her with wolfsbane. We have no need to make her hallucinate," Ethan points out quietly and as much as Stiles wants to blame this on them, on Aidan, he can only deny the fact that he's convinced of their innocence –regarding this incident- for so long.

So he straightens and digs into his pocket for his keys. Once he's pulled them out, he stares at them for a moment, before looking up. "If we find out that you had something to do with this," he points at Ethan who raises a brow at him and the glint in Stiles' eye tells him you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to break off an extra large branch of mountain ash, wrap it in wolfbane, roll it in mistletoe and shove it up your freakin'-

"My threat still stands. Stay away from her."