Thank you all for your short but amazing reviews! :D I wasn't expecting that feedback. I think I'll add one chapter per day, or maybe one every two days...

Guest: They might appear, but I'm not saying yes or no otherwise it would spoil everything ;)

Fourth chapter

They brutally opened the door and just behind it stood a petite young woman with strawberry blonde hair and an anxious look on her face. She was barefoot, in her nightgown, and her feet were scratched, bruised. She was violently shivering, blue lips and rosy cheeks.

"Lydia?" Scott spoke up as he retracted his claws.

Thomas noticed how everyone was still tensed even though they seemed to know this girl. She was pretty, he thought. Not Teresa pretty, because Teresa had a different kind of beauty, but this girl reminded him of a blooming and bloody flower.

"I was just going out b-because I felt like I needed some fresh air and I don't know how I got here..." the girl stammered, her eyes wide with fear.

"But the last time that happened-"

"I found a dead body, thank you for reminding me, Scott."

Lydia's barbs were well-known and it was an enourmous part of her personnality, along with her resolute cleverness that never failed her. A few years ago, she would have been completely panicked in a situation like this one; walking forever without ever acknowledging it until stumbling upon Derek's loft. She would have called someone. Done something. But never gone inside the apartment.

Lydia's spirit resembled Stiles' these days. She didn't care much. She was tired. Old. Broken. But not fragile.

Not fragile but scared.

"Come inside." Derek gently said.

She slowly entered the loft, glancing at everyone in the room – at who was going to die, and Stiles suddenly knew that if she saw Thomas, something bad would happen.

Of course something bad would happen. Something bad always happened. They never had a break. They never could take a breath and cross their fingers for the situation to get better simply because they only had the time to think "oh crap, this is so not gonna end well" and everytime it didn't end well. Especially when Lydia was sleep-walking or whatever she was doing during a banshee moment, and when she was finding herself at their doorstep as Thomas was hanging around.

Stiles tried to quickly hide the teenager behind his back because if she saw him, if she saw him and she scr...

She saw Thomas.

Stiles started couting.

1

Her mouth hung open.

2

She clenched her fists and her whole body tensed in a way he knew too damn well.

3

She shut her eyes. Tightly.

4

She took a deep breath, incapable of controlling her own body, but she tried, she tried so hard.

5

(Five fingers. He had fice fricking fingers. On both hands. Five fingers.)

She held back her scream.

Her hand had flown to her mouth and she winced with pain as if something was trying to tear her vocal cords from the inside but she held back her scream.

Stiles let go a sigh of relief and Thomas tried to see what the hell was happening, totally counfounded.

"It's him-" Lydia whispered, her voice oddly hoarse. She tried to step away but her back hit the door behind her and Scott, being the True Alpha he was, took her hand to comfort her. "It's him-"

"It's not him!" Stiles cried out as Thomas managed to get away from him. "It's not him I swear, it's not!"

And she looked at him, she looked at Thomas with its face in her mind, its pale and sick visage with void in its eyes. Thomas felt all the eyes on him, and for once, it wasn't his fault. Right?

Why was everyone looking at him when this nightie-dressed girl had just magically appeared at Derek's loft, her feet bruised as if she didn't know shoes existed, her green eyes wild and terrified, her mouth opened in a silent but deathly wail.

"Lydia please sit down." Deaton said.

"I am n-not getting near him." Lydia murmured. She couldn't tear her tearful gaze off the teenager. Yes, it was maybe stupid of her, because this boy didn't really look like the Nogitsune, but she still could sense that monster's breath on her neck, his rough bites on her ear, his cold skin pressed to her face wet with tears, she could still feel his presence and his voice and her mental rape.

Deaton looked at Thomas pleadingly. "Thomas, please."

"I'm not going anywhere." Thomas dryly snapped.

Stiles abruptly grabbed him by the arm, aware of the fact that it felt like holding his own arm.

"Look, we have to explain it all to Lydia but first she needs to... avoid you, you get it?"

"I'm not going anywhere." he repeated.

He knew he was being too stubborn but hell, he began to feel pissed off. One of his best friends had died in his arms, then he and the gladers were abducted by soldiers in a chopper, and now he was in a (bloody, would say Newt) parallel world with fucking werewolves. He needed some answers along with the results. He didn't give a damn if he scared a girl.

"Do we have to force you?" Derek prompted impatiently as he approached him, maybe a bit too quickly and determined because-

Thomas got brutally rid of Stiles' grip and stepped forward the wolf.

"I'm not going to do any step back because I told you my story, I told you the truth and you still look at me like I'm a freak." he yelled and Derek narrowed his eyes on him, startled. "I am not the freak here. I just happen to look like this guy, and you should really question yourself as to who is the freak here – you're not even human, okay?! And I bet this girl isn't either!"

Lydia flinched. "I am still not getting near him."

"That'll make two of us." Isaac scoffed.

That was too much for Thomas. It seemed like he was going to explode. Having experienced all kind of rejections the last days, now was the moment he couldn't bear it anymore.

He wanted to punch Isaac and make him see what he had seen the last few days and he didn't give a single crap about what happened to this brat to turn him this way – maybe it was the fact that he was a werewolf that galvanized him – and Thomas was too angry right now to think that the answer to Isaac's attitude was maybe someone's death. So he simply calmed down. Actually he seemed calm on the outside but he literally boiled. He needed answers, right here, right now, and he was going to have them.

"Look, I just need to know. Who and what are you? What happened to Stiles? What the hell is going on?"

As Deaton didn't do anything, Scott decided to play his Alpha role. He let go of Lydia's hand after making sure she was okay, and took a step forward.

"Stiles, I think you're the most qualified to explain it all to Thomas." he proposed calmly.

Stiles' head dipped. Scott was right.

"Come on, Thomas." he said.

He knew using force on Thomas didn't work so he never tried to grab him, he just waited for him to follow. Thomas stayed frozen for a moment but eventually he gave up and followed Stiles. His arm brushed against Lydia's and she took a step to the side. He didn't know what to think of the look she gave him in return.

"Okay." Scott said once they were gone. "Lydia, I guess you need some answers too."

She stared at him, nearly offended. "I just nearly screamed at a person I thought was the Nogitsune. Yes, I really do need some answers, Scott."

~Ξ~

Thomas sat down sighing. Stiles behind him did the same.

They were both under the white light of a street lamp and its insect-like humming. They stared into the cold and dark night in front of them. Stiles rubbed his hands together, trying to get some heat. It was unusually cold for California, no wonder Lydia was freezing in her nightie. And she had to walk to arrive here, as he didn't see her car. That too explained her muddy feet.

"I can answer whenever you want, Tommy." Stiles said.

Thomas smiled faintly at the nickname. Newt used to call him that.

He was worried for his friends. He had no idea where they could be, if they were just as lost as him in this world, or still in the desert outside of the maze. He remembered the soldiers dragging them out of the lab filled with corpses, but he didn't know if they had been put inside the chopper. Maybe they were flying away right now, far away from Thomas, but he knew his friends would look for him. That's what he would've done if he was with them and it was Minho who got missing.

"The first question was 'what is Lydia', right?" Stiles asked.

The tanned teen nodded.

"She's a banshee. Banshees are like Joan of Arc, they hear voices inside their heads that tell them morbid stuff, it's kind of like a supernatural radio always on. And they have this... super powerful scream whenever they're scared or feel threatened."

Thomas kept nodding. What Stiles said made perfect sense.

"That's all?" he said.

"About Lydia, outside from the fact that she has an IQ of 170, a little dog named Prada and that she's super awesome at math, yeah."

Stiles felt like he was betraying Thomas by not telling him the real truth but he also knew that he was right not to tell him. It only would make Thomas more on his nerves. How could you tell someone that if Lydia suddenly started to scream like she was possessed it would mean someone was going to die probably horribly?

"Why is everyone suspicious of me?" Thomas then drawled as he turned his head to look directly at Stiles. "What happened to that other duplicate of you? Isaac said he had... he had made you lost someone."

Stiles wanted to chuckle humorlessly, but if he did that he would have seemed crazy. Like he used to be.

"It's... kind of a long story. Actually it all began when Scott, All-Allison and I sacrificed ourselves to save our parents who were being trapped by an evil druid, our, well, our english teacher."

The light above them suddenly flickered and they both looked up. The white bulb went on and off at an erratic interval until it brutally died, leaving them in the darkness. They could only see thanks to the light of Derek's loft by the large windows and the bright moon.

The two boys stood up, their similar eyes scrutinizing the night.

"Power cut?" Thomas suggested, his breath forming a small cloud of steam.

"It's weird, Kira's sleeping as far as I know." Stiles replied and Thomas frowned.

"Who's Kira?"

Stiles got his phone out of his jeans pocket and the powerful light of the screen illuminated both of their faces. "A kitsune. Basically she controls electricity and Scott told me she has a weird fire aura around her, but I can't see that because, well, I'm painfully and ordinarily human."

Thomas's frown deepened. He was utterly lost. "A kitsune?" he repeated. In what kind of world did he fall into...

"Yeah. Or a fox. Not really a fox, because she can't transform into a real fox, y'know, with fur and all, but a trickster." Memories flew to him at his last word and he mentally slapped himself for even thinking about it. Trickster. Fox. God, he just wished he could forget it all. Maybe if he tried to act like nothing ever happened, everything would go back to how it used to be.

Thomas noticed his wince and decided to drop the subject. "So that other you was evil, right?" he asked instead. He didn't know that, by saying this, Stiles's nerves threatened to burst and that he wasn't doing him a favor.

Stiles ran a hand through his messy hair and sighed. "Long story short, I got possessed by a dark kitsune, a demon fox, who then tried to maul everyone. Scott and Kira killed him after he succeeded killing Allison... and Aiden, and now everything's gone back to normal."

He knew too well he was lying to himself, but that's how he dealt with things and that wasn't going to change. Stiles quickly tried to avoid that subject by all means and stared blankly at the road in front of them, the light of his phone frozen on the ground.

"When I saw you on my doorstep – after I had a minor heart attack, I mean – you looked like you were crying." It was possible that he was being a total shit by asking this because Thomas probably had a broken soul just like him, but as he had told his depressive story in two short sentences, he thought it was only fair for Thomas to explain himself too.

Thomas pursed his lips together and stared, expressionless, at the phone in Stiles's hand. Maybe he thought that if he looked at the object long enough he didn't have to tell the truth. Well the truth sucked.

Despite himself, Chuck's chubby face appeared before his eyes and more than ever, he wished he was the one that took the bullet.

All of a sudden they were both blinded by light. It was like getting hit by the headlight of a car at midnight: as surprising as it hurt the eyes.

It was just like that impression when Thomas was running. Confusion, panic, fear, all of that in a haze, a muddled fog. He didn't know what was happening but he had already felt it before.

Warm colors danced before his eyes; red, yellow, white, all of those dazzled him and he yelped, raising his arms to protect his eyes. He fell down and scorching sand ran between his fingers, burned his palms and got caught under his nails. He let out a muffled shout.

Everything was so fast. The world was turning upside down. He didn't know why but all he could think of was Chuck.

Chuck.

The red spreading on his shirt. The little boy's blood on his shaky hands. His eyes as empty as a dead fish as he stopped moving. Thomas' cries. His screams. His punches to get rid of the countless arms around his torso. The sun burning his pupils and the tears digging on his cheeks.

All those memories rushed to him and it seemed like something was trying to attract him against his will. It was like - no, it was exactly what had happened before he found himself at Stiles' doorstep.

So he jerked himself upright and ran. That's what he could do best, running. Escaping from all danger and his problems. Running from the memories and the fear and the pain. Running from the sun.

Then, as violently as it began, the blinding star disappeared and he tumbled frantically. He blinked, his mind trying to comprehend what just happened, but he couldn't see a damn thing, it was all so dark and colors still swung in front of his eyes. The sand was gone, replaced by the cold asphalt of the road, and the only thing that told him he hadn't imagined all that was the vivid pain on his skin.

Something violently threw his head on the side. He heard a single crack, blood splatter on his cheeks and something breaking, maybe his nose. Then his vision started to shrink and his brain said 'enough for today'.

Like the weak flame of a candle, his consciousness evaporated.