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Lydia has been changing, minutely, under a realization. It's in the dull ache of power growing under her fingertips. In the sudden and overwhelming urge to take anything, everything she deems necessary. It's in the dreams she's been having, of ripping through flesh and bone and holding a heart in the palm of her hand. In the joy that it brings.

She has been changing, and she can't catalogue its beginning, but it feels good. It feels like she has been torn form her body and placed in this new shining one, one that has armor. One that has no room for mercy. If she's honest, if she's really honest, she hasn't felt anything but this for a long time. Longer than she can remember. She can pick out the faults in each of her friends, can picture their pressure points in her head. She knows how to push them. She is hungry with the wild knowledge that she can break them, if she so chooses.

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It's Stiles that breaks first.

That dark fox that clawed into him, that burrowed into the dark parts of his heart, that brought to light the dark things already in his head, it made his fingers dance on anything sharp. They tapped-tapped-tapped and then clenched shut, as if the act was involuntary and he had only just registered the motion.

He notices her noticing it. His eyes are wide and bright, but there are bruised rings underneath them. He is silent and still as prey. Waiting. She smiles slow at him and breath slips from his open, pink mouth at the sight of it. He doesn't smile, then.

It's too sharp and quick to be a smile.

He asks her, later, tries to find a space clear of people to speak with her– it isn't hard. Chris is gone, and with him Isaac. Scott is trapped in his house with his parents and his grief. Stiles' father remains in his office at the station, building a fortress. Derek and Peter are distant and cryptic.

They are the only ones left.

Stiles is outside her house, and she can feel him there. When he waits long enough, she comes down from her room, pulls herself into his jeep. They are quiet as they drive, and the sound of road under the tires is soothing. Stiles' shoulders are tense. His hands grip the steering wheel. His knuckles are ice-capped mountains.

"I remember," he says, and his voice is low– so low she almost mistakes him for a stretch of asphalt rushing past them. She waits for him to continue.

"I remember everything," he says, and that's the start of it.

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He asks her: Do you feel it too?

She smiles.

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Stiles, well, Stiles looks fine, looks healthy and bright. At the beginning.

But then something starts to hollow him out, something different crawls into his warm, damaged body and she is the one who notices first. A different kind of dark rings his eyes, a different kind of light frames his face.

Lydia takes him by the hand, pulls him away from the noise and the din and the utter uselessness of the crowded school halls. She pushes him into an empty room, an office with the blinds drawn and the lights off. Dim sunlight from the obscured windows makes the room glow at the edges. She is still holding his hand. She is silent.

Then, as if taking up a cue, he moves closer. His head lowers, his mouth tightens then relaxes. His lips are at her ear, and he says, "I'm starving, Lydia."

Lydia doesn't feel often, but when she does it runs deep. What she has for people is an alchemy of loyalty and jealousy and power and want that burrows deep into her like the roots of an ancient tree. It rips up the soil in her soul and plants itself there. No wind will shake it, no storm uproot it. It will not be swayed.

There is a sapling in her heart for Stiles, but its roots are weak, they don't run as deep. With this moment, this dark-edged admission in the relative quiet of their shared boon, it grows. A tree stands in its stead, curled and twisted. The roots drink deep.

"It's okay," she says, because it's something he needs to hear, and it's also the moment she realizes she can take him apart.

She can take him apart and remake him.

"I'll help you," she says.

He envelops her in his long, strong arms. She's crushed to his chest, and can hear his heart drum its sweet dirge. Her eyes don't shine with the light, but they shine with something else.

Something like purpose.

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They are sitting somewhere in the Beacon Hills Preserve at the cusp of evening, and shadows grow long and gnarled around their bodies. Stiles' hands pull apart a blade of grass. Then another, and another. His fingers rip each blade apart carelessly, effortlessly. It smells like crushed earth.

She has asked him how he felt, during his occupation. He stares into the distance, fingers moving.

Lydia watches the light change through the trees, waiting.

"It felt right," he says after a long moment, and his face is torn, his hands are still. He looks heartsick, looks as if he is chewing glass, tasting blood, or maybe only turning to stone.

He looks as if he wanted to be the one to be ground to dust, not his dark passenger.

"That's why you were going to do it," Lydia says, letting the kill yourself hang heavy as overripe fruit in the silence between them. Her voice is even, not a question. Just an understanding, and Stiles' shoulders shake.

"Lydia," he says, strangled. "What if it's still there? What if it's still inside me?"

His hands are warm inside hers. She twines their fingers together and he stares at the action. His eyes lift to hers, and she says, quietly, with gold tangling in her hair, "What if it never had to be?"

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Lydia helps him come to a realization. The pain, the fear, the chaos, the grief. It was nothing, nothing, compared to the blooming well of certainty that a part of him, a bruised and aching night-creature part of him–

Well. A part of him liked it.

A part of him wanted to do it again.

(And that was nothing compared to the knowledge that he was not alone).

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In the end, it doesn't take much.

The only person she'd told, about what Peter did, how Peter crept inside her head and twisted and touched things not meant to be twisted or touched, how his bite still sent shocks of phantom pain up to her ribs, how he took from her and took from her until there were only pieces left– the only person she'd told was Allison, and Allison wasn't there anymore.

She often wonders if some sharp edge of Peter's rage broke off inside of her. If the thrill of it, the control of it, would be as heady if he had not clawed into her head and made himself at home.

She wonders what it will do now, to Stiles.

"I saw it, what he did," she says. She's laying on his bed, twisting a red curl of hair around her finger. The night is young, and she can hear the sounds of the Sheriff downstairs, opening cupboards in their kitchen, putting pans on the stove. Stiles is sprawled on the chair at his desk, head tilted. His face is pensive.

"Stiles," she whispers, and his head head snaps in her direction. She pulls herself– slowly, lazily –into a sitting position. Her legs are bare and her skin looks ghostly against his dark sheets. Her knees are pink. Stiles' eyes are fixed steadily on hers, and it makes her mouth tilt up.

Her hands twist themselves there, in his sheets, and it makes the light change in his eyes. She drags her legs into an easy, feminine cross.

"It felt good," she says. Her voice is so hushed that he's forced to break the rigid line of his spine, bend closer and into the space between them to hear her better. She feels like the blooming aftermath of a dying star– drawing everything closer to her, to a space where no light can escape. "It felt good to watch them suffer," she continues. "The ones who deserved it."

I liked it, she doesn't say, but it still floats between them, hazy and indistinct.

She gives him more than she ever told Allison, and it's freeing. Every word is a thread in the rope she will loop around Peter's neck. Every word is another string tying her and Stiles closer together. She can see it burning inside of him, behind his eyes. Each word from her lips like a brush of breath stoking the fire.

His fingers curl into his palms. His breathing is strained. She wonders if he can still feel the pain of things, the rippling wave of grief or strife, even as it rises from her memory. She thinks he might be feeling it now, his pupils going large and dark despite the light in his room.

"Hey, Stiles!" his father calls from downstairs. "Time for dinner!"

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Inside of Stiles there is still a gem of compassion, a diamond of guilt, and the edges of them are sharp. They rip into the softest parts of him, and Lydia can see the dark of it shutter behind his eyes. She runs her fingers along his knuckles in a caress. She whispers, lips at his ear, that he's right, that he's doing the right thing. That if he thinks about it, really thinks about it, it's justice.

She helps him dull the edges of those precious stones, helps him build a callous for his soft heart, turns his ribs into a cage. His body is an instrument and she has learned to play him. She can coax a melody from his bones, turn his hands into stone or bronze or satin. Make them bruise or have them run down her arms, stay clutched at her wrist like she will turn into smoke when he isn't looking.

He is hers. He is hers, and she will use him.

But the thing of it is: she wants to let him use her, too.

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It happens like this:

Peter tries to corner Lydia when they drop by Derek's loft with a question. They are there as an afterthought, on Stiles' part– a strange curiosity that he needs fulfilled, assurance that what left him is truly gone. That what is growing inside him now is of his own making.

(Something inside his chest doesn't trust the Yukimuras).

Stiles has a small dagger in one of his pockets. It was a silent gift from his father, pressed into his hands with a hard look. They both knew what it meant.

Peter does not think they are a threat. He remembers the easy control he had of Lydia. He thinks that what was dangerous in Stiles has left his head, has flown into a rowan box.

He is wrong.

When she screams, Stiles doesn't shake, but his smile turns downward on one side. His smirk is a slash across his mouth. Stiles' eyes are shining and sharp, the gaze of some lonely, ruthless bird in the angles of his face.

Peter, in agony, has his hands pressed against his ears. He falls to his knees.

Stiles is quick. Hefting his small knife in his hand, he leans over Peter's curled body. He guts him with a sharp, easy movement. Then he pulls the blade across Peter's throat. A bright line of blood beads to the surface, and then red floods from the cut. Stiles holds him down, calm as she's ever seen him, as Lydia wraps her hand around Peter's throat and squeezes. Just to be safe.

They snap his neck, too. Lydia wants to sever his clawed fingers from his bloodied, terrible hands, but Stiles looks almost like he's been drugged. His cheeks are flushed and pink, his eyes glassy and bright. His mouth is open, tongue swiping against his lips, like he is chasing the taste of some heady liquor. The knife is in his hands. He's covered in wolf's blood.

He looks like he drank the wine of death and it sated him.

Lydia presses her mouth against his in a quick, soft kiss. "Thank you," she says. Her lipstick is red, and it smudges pink on his lips.

She takes his hand.

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They leave Beacon Hills with blood still sticky between Lydia's fingers, Stiles clutching the knife, followed by the swollen, hungry howls of wolves. Lydia turns on the radio. Blood flakes from her fingers on the volume control.

There is only the road ahead of them, the heart-shaking pulse of the music, and the sight of Stiles' head thrown back, throat working as if he is laughing wildly, hysterically, but Lydia can hear none of it. The sun is setting and floods through the car with angry orange light. It gutters into bright, sweeping reds. And then it's dark, and they are free.

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When they go missing, it's clear why. No one tries very hard to look for them. They just assume they'll find their way back, eventually.

Stiles has found his way back– into that empty carved cave of his chest, where a fire has been built. It's a fire that boils in his blood, and there is nothing that will make it die out. There is no one that can douse it. Except Lydia.

But it's alright. She only douses it with gasoline.

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The next one isn't planned. They're in a bar somewhere far and southeast of Beacon Hills, because Lydia may not look legal but the men certainly don't mind. Stiles grew into his height over the past year, grew into his broad shoulders. They slide onto barstools.

Stiles has something seasonal on draught. Lydia gets something clear and red. It smells like cranberries. Their legs press together under the bar. Stiles' fingers dance on his cold glass. It's been two days of driving, emptying their mutual accounts, and taking turns sleeping in the backseat of her car. Lydia's dress feels stale and too-worn. Stiles' hair is a bird's nest, his hands pulling through it almost compulsively every few hours. A ring of blue is starting to etch itself under his eyes.

She watches Stiles' hands, moving again, restless. They've been still and calm up to this point. They move like there is an ocean inside of him, the currents pulling and pushing for motion. They look empty, and then Lydia understands.

She takes a long pull of her drink. She uses Stiles' shoulder as a handhold to jump from the barstool. "Be right back," she says against his neck. "Gotta use the ladies' room."

Stiles can still feel the warmth of her breath on his neck after she sways through the early evening crowd.

She doesn't get back quickly enough. It's been five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes, and Stiles feels a discordant note in his chest. A pull of some invisible thread. His heart goes flush with adrenaline, and he pushes his way to the back of the bar. The music is loud and the light is dim but Stiles can see Lydia crowded against a pool table, two men looming over her like evening shadows. It's empty save for them. Lydia's mouth is smiling but her eyes are dangerous. Her hand is stretched out behind her, carefully closing around an eight ball. She catches Stiles' gaze across the room and nods almost imperceptibly.

Stiles clenches his jaw and closes the distance between them with quiet fury. He pushes between the men to get to Lydia with a hard, lacrosse-trained shove. They stumble away from one another, unsteady. They're both of equal height, just a hair shorter than Stiles. They're larger than him though, more heavily muscled. One of them has dark hair and heavy brows, his face bland and unmemorable. The other has lighter hair, and an ugly misshapen nose.

The dark-haired guy shoves back at Stiles, but he steps out of the way, closer to Lydia.

"Get lost, you little fuck," the ugly one says. Stiles laughs and insults them so masterfully that Lydia can't help the smile spreading across her face. They notice. They ask him if he wants to take this outside.

"Yeah," Stiles says. Lydia has pressed a billiard ball into one of his hands, hidden from their view. It's heavy. "Let's take this outside like gentlemen, shall we?"

There's a back door. It's almost too easy.

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They wash their hands in the small, unisex bathroom. The billiard ball is bloody, and Stiles washes and dries it with paper towels, careful not to let his bare hands touch it afterwards. Fingerprints.

There's a rip in Lydia's dress, where the dark-haired man's hands tried to pull her off of him. But her hands were too strong for his weak throat. Stiles' man had dropped like a sack with a single blow to the head. It was fairly anticlimactic. He sliced the man's throat easily, and stepped away from the growing pool of blood. He watched as Lydia forced the life from her own pick, the dark-haired man who took the bait too easily, and she could feel a well of power bubble in her chest and throat.

Stiles' pupils were blown out and dark when the man died in her hands.

Here, in the bathroom, his eyes are still dark, but his hands are steady as he presses the eight ball into his pocket.

"How did it feel?" she asks, and Stiles looks down at her with his wide, dark eyes. He doesn't say anything.

Lydia presses against him, a blazing line of heat against his body, and his hands wrap around her waist.

"How did it feel, Stiles? Are you still hungry?" she says, and she watches his Adam's apple bob, swallowing. Whatever dormant part of him he has ignored– it's been woken. It is frightfully, startlingly awake. And it is hungry.

He tells Lydia, in a storm of hot open-mouthed kisses, how hungry he is. How hungry he is for everything.

She hums in approval, or pleasure. He licks into her mouth, pulls her closer. Her hands tighten in his hair, her hips press hard against his.

Pleasure, then.

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They move on. They go further south, and east, and they stay in cramped motel rooms with greasy sheets until Lydia sees Stiles' fingers start to tap against his knee, on the car's dashboard, on her skin. They fall into a rhythm, easy and warm and hungry. Always hungry.

Mostly, Lydia is the lure. They go to small restaurants, to dive bars, to little establishments in Middle America that don't have a high enough crime rate to merit security cameras. That leave all their doors unlocked. Lydia looks harmless, innocent. She puts on an accent, does up her hair, and then the Banshee inside of her will thrill at the coming death. Stiles will thrill at the sight of her.

They go from town to town, and Lydia barely has an idea of what state they're in. It doesn't matter. They leave a trail of bodies in their wake.

She doesn't tell him, but she can see that Stiles has developed a type. On occasion, when it's his turn to pick, he has her go up to tall, lean boys with broad shoulders and a happy mouth. Boys that wear rumpled plaid, that have large hands and mussed hair. They have bright eyes.

Stiles watches Lydia sidle up to them, watches them fall into her orbit easy as breathing. She lets her hand fall on their leg, lets her hair sweep across her face, lets them smooth it back behind her ear. She has a drink with them, and their drink is always too strong.

Then she brings them to Stiles. Something inside of him breaks, each time. Over and over again, she watches as he grits his teeth and grins while his hands crush the life from these boys, destroying the light that inhabits their bodies.

Over and over again, she watches as Stiles kills himself.

She doesn't judge him. She lets him revel in it. After all, she has a type, too.

Predators.

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The bodies make the news.

There are no new leads. More details to follow, but now over to the weather.

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Lydia is no stranger to death. It suffuses her very limbs, climbs from her throat, filters into her ears, aches in the joints of her fingers. Death pulses and twists in her hips, in her wrists, at the corners of her lips. It sits perched in a cave inside her chest, and it is wild and primal. It's made from the vast empty desert, from the sharp drop of sea cliffs, from the rip-pull of ocean, from the cold and the dark of the night, from the heat and the light of the day.

It sits there in her chest, a universe of death, dying, and rebirth. Entire circling solar systems are pulled apart by her entropy. She is full from boot to lip with it, near-bursting from the pain of it, and the ecstasy.

She is filled to the brim with death, and she feeds it to him.

He is always hungry.

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Sometimes, Stiles smiles too bright at bodies in the bar, and hands that are not hers will touch him, lips that are not hers will press against his mouth, and possession spirals up through her body. He is hers, hers, hers, and so she grits her teeth and smiles too wide at every male in the room. Sometimes she will take one of them to bed, use them up and then watch the light dim in their eyes, and it takes days for Stiles to shake it off. It takes days of her hand on his thigh in too-hot too-bright diners in the middle of nowhere, her leg wrapped around his, letting his eyes pick the next one. Letting him watch. Days of him bending under her will, bending under her fingers, bending under her.

She thinks he might love her in the way only wronged things can love, with anger and need. She thinks he might love her in a way she will never understand, something that burns through flesh and makes ashes of ribs. Something all-consuming or endless. He loves her with something she just can't. Quite. Put her finger on.

All she knows is that he is hers, he is only hers, he is the only one who feels the open hunger, feels the hollow endless thirst. He feels it. The want. To make silence from all that noise.

(To make silence of them all).

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It has been weeks. Months, maybe, since that first time. Since Peter. Stiles is pulling away from her. She can see that he misses California in his hands, in the way his eyes scan for trees in the desert and finds nothing for his gaze to land on. Everything is so open that he feels vulnerable, and she can't have him drift from her. She can't. She drives, and drives.

Eventually, they hit trees.

There is a garden party in the latest middle-of-nowhere town, and Lydia finds Stiles the perfect substitute. He is perfect: dark hair, dark eyes, and laughing with a dark-haired girl. His skin is bronze, sun-kissed.

His jaw isn't crooked, but it's the thought that counts.

Lydia lets him make the approach. Stiles tells him they are relatives from down the state, cousins far removed, and he accepts it easily, accepts the quicksilver of Stiles' tongue. They are so trusting, in these parts. They spend the day at the party, carefully maneuvering out of photos, deflecting all questions about themselves, never mentioning phone numbers, never letting it get that far.

Later, when they follow him to his apartment, Stiles asks her to do it with a voice so soft it seems reverent. She kisses him hard. "Of course," she says against his lips.

He lets them in when they knock.

Stiles has already drugged him, and by the time he realizes what's happening, he is starfished on his own bed, the sheets halfway on the floor. Lydia's hands wrap around his throat, and she feels the life struggle to stay inside of him, the desperate clawing want of survival. Stiles is in the doorway, his hands clenched into fists, and he makes a soft noise at the sight of them. That's when it begins, deep down in her belly and burning up through her throat, vibrating, waiting on her tongue.

It starts as a scream but it turns into a laugh.

Stiles gaze never falters, eyes gleaming in the low light.

Afterwards, in their motel room, Stiles wraps his own long fingers around her pale, delicate throat, pinning her to the bed as he pushes into her again, again, again. It is not the first time it's ended this way, with his head thrown back and her hands reaching for any part of him she can hold or mark as her own, but there is something different this time. Stiles is desperate, wild. Sweat beads on his neck and down his chest. Their bodies are warm and pliant. The motel's air conditioner is a loud droning hum, and it blows warm night air into the room. Release beckons inside Lydia, a pounding, white-hot need that grows brighter with each of his thrusts, and peaks when one of her hands slips down between their bodies and presses just there.

(It starts as a scream but it turns into a laugh.)

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They are two states over, and up, when he finds them. Tennessee, maybe. Or Montana. Stiles ordered cold sandwiches from a nearby diner, complaining of the heat and the sticky humidity, too lethargic to go out for anything himself. There is a knock on their door, and when Lydia opens it she is against the sun, but Stiles can still map every inch of her, can make out each delicate twist of her body. Her feet turn outward, her shoulders draw upward slightly. Danger.

Stiles already has a knife palmed and is lithe and silent as a wolf when he slides off the bed and makes his way to Lydia's side.

It's apt that he thinks himself a wolf, he suspects, since it's Scott at the door.

Tension snaps and bleeds through the room, fluctuates in strange ways as Scott enters. He looks taller, stronger, but something clings to his skin, something like grief, or acceptance. He pulls Stiles into a hug without preamble, holds him so tight and for so long that Stiles' eyes are wet with– something.

Lydia is standing behind Scott, still in Stiles' vision. Her shoulders are slim and freckled in her sleeveless dress. Her hair is some forgotten color between rust and dying fire, curling softly down her back. Her feet are bare. She glances pointedly at Scott. A question.

"Stiles," Scott says, barely a whisper. The words press themselves against Stiles' neck and shoulder. "I found you. Stiles, I found you. You can stop now."

And then Stiles realizes: he knows. That's why he's here. Scott knows. A dark bird surges inside Stiles' chest, grips his heart in mad talons. Scott knows, and no one is supposed to. They are careful, so careful, because Stiles has seen how it all works. Has seen how the smallest of things can turn a tide against you.

Panic sets his heart to something double-time. He loves Scott, he does. He does. His fingers drum themselves on Scott's back.

The knife is still up his sleeve. It would be easy. He would never expect it. Stiles can almost feel the way Scott's throat would fit in his hands, can imagine how bright the light in his eyes would be before they began to dim. He loves Scott, loves him in a way he can't love Lydia, and he wonders if that's what it would take. If only destroying the thing he loves can give him peace, if his friend's body would be able to rest, and not have to carry the heavy burden he always shoulders. The burden of being a champion of life, of hope.

Stiles has already watched a version of Scott die, a body that was his in from a different time, a different universe, one where he was never bitten. He let Lydia take him as a favor, because that Scott had already seen the best he would see. He was helping that Scott, the other Scott, by letting Lydia choke the lost potential from his body, letting the breath bleed from him until there was nothing left. Letting him go silent, in a world full of noise.

Before he can decide, Scott pulls back, wipes a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. He claps Stiles' shoulders and looks happy, proud.

Maybe he didn't know, then.

But maybe it didn't matter.

Stiles nods to Lydia over Scott's shoulder. Then he smiles wide at Scott, laughs with his head thrown back.

He has heard that if you love something, you should let it go.

But if he as learned anything, it's that the only things you can really love are the things you take.

When Lydia shuts the door, the room is darker.

They take him.