"I- What do you mean me?" His voice cracked on the last syllable.

"What do you think I mean? I mean you're going to die, dumbass." The familiar sniping tone of her voice went a long way to pull Stiles back to reality. He stared at Lydia, her eyes wide, her skin pale. It was that face, the same face, the first one he'd seen when that weight lifted and the darkness of the nogitsune was finally gone. Like she had fallen twenty stories and was lying broken and dazed on the ground. It was the face of losing Alison. He didn't know what it meant that she was wearing it now.

"Okay, can you give me anything else? Like any helpful information at all?" The frightened look on Lydia's face flickered into one of haughty annoyance, but there was something dark in her eyes that didn't go away.

"It doesn't work like that. I can't control it. It's not like a magic 8 ball." Stiles looked at her incredulously.

"Are you saying you can control magic 8 balls?"

"That's not what I meant-" Their bickering was cut off by the sound of the door to the front office swinging shut. They both spun around to see a tall, dark haired woman walking toward them. She was beautiful, somewhere between twenty and thirty, and if it wasn't for the pair of long, curved fangs hanging on a chain around her neck, she would have seemed friendly. Instinctively, Stiles took a step in front of Lydia.

"Where's my jeep?" Well, thought Stiles, at least he didn't sound like the scared seventeen year old boy that he very much was in that moment. The woman smiled.

"What makes you think I would be able to answer that question?" Her voice was slow and lilting, a vaguely European accent lending a hint of music to her words.

"Well, for starters those fangs you're wearing around your neck were in a box in my backseat last time I checked." Her almost distractingly full lips twitched, as though she was suppressing a laugh. "And it's not like you're the only other person here or anything. So there's that." The woman shook her head, raising an eyebrow at Lydia.

"Your boyfriend, he is very sarcastic. I don't like that in a man so much. But he is very cute." She stepped closer, trailing a finger along Stiles chest. He didn't realize he was holding his breath, but Lydia did. An expression of distaste crossed her features before she rolled her eyes.

"He's not my boyfriend. And as much as I would enjoy hearing the entirety of your profile, how about you tell us what you want. If it was just the fangs, why don't you give us back that piece of junk Stiles calls a jeep, and let us get out of your hair." Stiles stared at Lydia. She wasn't Alison, she didn't love to fight, didn't relish the idea of a battle the way her friend had. But she was stubborn, maybe more so than anyone he had ever met, and she didn't like to lose. Why was she giving up so easily? They had spent nearly four days in the desert in Nevada trying to find those fangs, and she had complained without end the entire time. It wasn't like her to let someone take something from her so easily. He jumped in, not so willing to give up what they had come for.

"Why do you want them? Because we actually would only need to borrow those, for like two days, just so we could restore a brooding pubescent werewolf to his adult-sized, facial-haired glory. And then, you know, you could take them." The woman waved her hand in the air dismissively.

"I know all about Derek Hale and the change that was put on him. His problems are of little interest to me." Her eyes narrowed as she stared at Stiles, and something about her gaze made his skin crawl. "You however, are very interesting. How is it that you got into my grandfather's house to steal these from his crypt?" Lydia frowned.

"Crypt? You mean the hole in the ground that his body was dumped in like a hamster?" Stiles noticed the rage in the woman's face before Lydia did, and he stepped in front of her.

"You," She hissed, her face twisted in anger, "were not able to see the crypt of the man whose body you defiled because you were unworthy. Do not presume to speak on things you do not understand."

"You're talking about all the iron?" The words slipped out before he could stop them. Her eyes widened in surprise.

"You could see it. The spirit gate."

"If that's what all that iron work was, then yeah." He thought back to how odd it had looked against the dust of the basement floor. The house itself had been easy to break into, small and old and abandoned, why anyone would have chosen to bury a family member inside had been a question on his mind. When they had descended the stairs into the basement he had noticed the spiraling black gates rising out of the floor, hinged together against one of the walls. He had assumed they were meant to stand outside, where they could be opened, but he was beginning to suspect they were exactly where they were intended to be. The other pieces of metal winding around the walls and the ceiling had looked just as out of place. Stiles glanced over at Lydia. He hadn't mentioned the strange decorations because they had gotten in and out quickly, both spooked by the idea of grave robbing. He hadn't realized she hadn't seen them.

"But that's…" The woman seemed at a loss. "You are a human." Her gaze flickered over to Lydia. "She is supernatural, but she does not have the sight because she lives in the world of shadows, she stands with death. But you, you should not have the sight, you are not…" She stepped closer suddenly hooking a hand around the back of his neck.

"Woah what are you-" She yanked him forward pressing her lips to his in an almost violently passionate kiss. Lydia watched in shock, then irritation. She cleared her throat. The woman broke off with a noise of alarm. She let go of Stiles, backing away. The look on her face, for the first time, was not one of superiority. She looked afraid. Stiles, looking a little shell-shocked just stared at her. Without another word, she spun on her heel and ran for the woods, disappearing into the trees. Stiles thought he saw a flash of fur before the shadows eclipsed it, but he couldn't be sure.

There was silence for a moment, both of them too confused to know what to say. Finally, Lydia broke the silence.

"What the hell was that?" Her cheeks had a slight flush, her eyebrow creased in something other than confusion. They had moved closer, unconsciously, and Stiles found himself looking down at her.

"I... have no idea. I literally have no idea what's going on." He found himself pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, pushing until he saw stars. The fangs that they had spent four days hiking through the Arizona desert for and stolen off a corpse were gone. His jeep was gone. Their phones were dead, and it appeared that the guy who had been working at the front desk of the motel the night before was also gone. Stiles had a strong suspicion he wouldn't be back. "I- don't even know where we are." The words came out roughly. He hadn't realized how angry he was. It was as though suddenly his frustration with the past few months, with Scott turning and Lydia screaming and the never ending parade of supernatural events and monsters was finally tallying up in his mind.

When his best friend had been bitten, and turned into a werewolf, Stiles had accepted it. It had been there and it had been real, and Scott was his brother so he took it in stride as best he could and helped him through the transformation. When it had become apparent that not only Scott but Beacon Hills in general were attracting every kind of supernatural werebeast and demon within a 100 mile radius, he had rolled with it. There hadn't been time to reflect on the absurdity of their situation, there was always someone to save, something to kill. When he had gotten sick he remembered thinking maybe it wasn't such a surprise that he was losing his mind after all. He had been afraid in a way monster wolves and Japanese demons couldn't ever touch. He was the token human of the group, he was just Stiles and he was weak and he was clumsy and he was not, in his own opinion, particularly striking. But he was smart. He was clever and logical and he put things together, and because of that he still had something. He saved people. If he was sick, if he was losing his mind, he had nothing.

That blanket terror was like an eclipse, he felt nothing other than his own madness, and then when the nogitsune took over he was trapped in his own head. Now it was suddenly apparent to him that his life was the material of a bad comic series, and he couldn't contain his laughter. It burbled out of him, angry and incredulous, and Lydia stared at him like he'd lost his mind. Again.

"What?" He just shook his head, the last of the laughter trailing away, leaving a slightly less tense silence than before.

"Nothing. We need to check this place out. See if there's a phone or something. At the very least a map so I know where we are." He gestured toward the office building, waiting until Lydia started walking toward it to follow her.

"She was weird." Lydia's voice came from somewhere under the desk, and Stiles just rolled his eyes as he sifted through the contents of the filing cabinet. They had entered the front office building to find it, unsurprisingly, abandoned. Deciding they had no way of getting home, and no way to call for a rescue, they had taken to tearing the office apart, looking for any supplies that could be useful. So far they had amassed a couple flashlights and a map, telling them they were about thirty minutes over the state line. The closest town was Susanville, but that would have been two hours driving. Walking, it would be at least 15, and they didn't know who that woman was, or if she'd brought friends. Deciding it was safer to stay at the motel for the moment, they'd hoped to find a working phone, but had no luck. They didn't even have computers, instead a hard copy of all guest records had been written out in a log book. From the looks of things, there hadn't been many.

"Do we honestly meet any other kind of people?" He didn't mean to be sarcastic, but it was his default, and he was too busy sifting through office supplies to worry about it. He could hear Lydia sigh even over the noise of the jurassic air conditioner.

"I wouldn't have thought you'd even notice that, considering." Stiles rolled his eyes.

"Are you calling me weird? You are aware that you're a banshee, right? Supernatural being?" She didn't reply, and he glanced up. He could just make out the tips of her boots sticking out from under the desk. "Lydia?" Nothing. Worried, he squatted down, and caught sight of her lying on her stomach, a knife in her hand. She glanced over her shoulder to look at him.

"I found something."

"Yeah," he said slowly, eyes on the blade "that's a knife." She gave him a scathing look.

"Thank you for that. No, it was on the floor, there's blood on it. It has an inscription on the blade." She wiggled out from under the desk and handed it to him. "See? It says quem amiserat. It means the lost. When I touched it…" She looked up at him with those big, sad eyes that he had never quite adjusted to, and blew out a breath. "It felt like death."

Stiles tried not to let it hurt him when he looked at her and he saw scars. He'd loved her since the third grade, back when she had been untouched and unharmed and the world hadn't yet started leaving marks like tattoos on her innocence. He loved her still, after tragedy had scorched it's footsteps permanently in her eyes, and every time she shook, or she cried, and he was reminded that fearlessness had its cost, it hurt him. He looked down at the knife in his hand, still stained a rusty brown with blood that had long dried, and his eyes fell across the lettering on the blade. The lost.

Wasn't everyone? He thought of Beacon Hills, and the civilians who lived and breathed there every day with no knowledge of the horror show that was the reality of their home. The people, like Scott, who knew and were fighting and would probably die fighting but would never give up the idea that it was their responsibility. He thought of his father, who was trying to police a town that didn't need police, it needed shamans, and yet he strapped on his gun every day and did what he could because he couldn't do nothing. He thought of Melissa McCall, who was a nurse and saw horrifying things every day and one of those things was her son but she had accepted it and she loved him with an honesty that Stiles couldn't even remember in his own home. They were all lost. They fought, and they loved, and they tried their best to live, but none of them really knew where they were going. Most of Beacon Hills was living a lie. The rest were just trying to survive. Sometimes having a clear view down the road of your future is too bleak to stomach. So they didn't look that far down the road, they just went blindly on. So they were lost.

He folded the knife in on itself and pocketed it. They could probably use it once he'd washed off the blood, but at the moment he was more concerned with getting them home than figuring out who was after them. Every moment without their pack, without Scott, left him feeling vulnerable to the point where he was raw. He doubted he could protect Lydia, he doubted he could protect himself. He was just a human, used to having a pack of werewolf body guards to boss around and involve in his plans.

"I'm guessing there's no chance you found some food." His stomach growled as he voiced his thoughts, and Lydia shook her head.

"Not even a box of crackers. Do you think there's anywhere to eat close enough that we could walk?" Stiles sighed.

"I don't know. We would probably just get lost, and who knows if that weird predatory chick is still out there."

"Please. Predatory? You didn't look like you were complaining when she had her predatory face all over you." Lydia sniffed, prompting Stiles to roll his eyes so hard he gave himself a headache.

"Hey. I was the one who was assaulted by a stranger who stole my jeep and stranded us in the middle of nowhere. I'm not exactly planning on asking her to prom." His stomach growled again, louder. "And I'm starving. We're going to starve to death." He moaned and flopped onto the ground, closing his eyes. The exhaustion that he had barely staved off the night before was back, with a vengeance. He felt someone lie down beside him.

"We're not going to die. At least not yet. I would know." Her voice was close to his ear, and it soothed the raw edge of his anxiety. She might not be of particular defensive use to him, but he was glad to have her there.

"Yeah but I will. Sometime soon, right? Before I starve to death?" He couldn't even muster up the energy to be afraid anymore. It was starting to feel like he had spent the past year being afraid. Now he was just tired. And hungry. He felt something touch his hand, and then he felt Lydia lace her fingers through his, squeezing hard.

"I don't know, Stiles. I feel it, but it's different than the other times." She sounded far away. Stiles didn't like it.

"Banshees are just a wealth of information, aren't they." Once again, the sarcasm dripped out accidentally. He was beginning to suspect Lydia just tuned it out.

"Shut up, Stiles." She squeezed his hand again, and Stiles began to suspect that she was more afraid than she let on. It would be typical of her, so he squeezed back, and they lay in silence for a while. There were, he thought, as they lay there, different kinds of lost. They were literally lost at the moment, stranded geographically from where they needed to be. They were lost from the people they needed, they had lost the things that they needed, and they were beginning to lose faith that things would ever really turn out okay for them. Death was just another type of loss. You were lost from your body, lost from your life, lost from the world. Stiles wasn't sure if he believed in the afterlife. He had thought, after his mother died, that there had to be something, because his mother's life was short and it hadn't been conceivable to his underdeveloped brain that the world could just be that cruel as to cut a person out of existence. So she had only been lost to Stiles, and he had been lost in his own life for a while. If he died, he would be lost to everyone he loved that was living. And they would be lost to him. But maybe he would get something back, something from his old life, something like his mother. It sparked a question, one that would lodge itself in his mind playing over and over and over just to drown out the ambiguity of his oncoming death.

Did lost things ever find each other?