Of course Scott would choose to die by light.

Gasoline gleams in pools, as tranquil and unthreatening as puddles after a spring rain. In the dim lamplight of the motel from hell, the burning flare flickers warmly. Everything is soundless. Everything is still.

Nothing is more still than Scott.

He stands, head solemnly bowed, shoulders braced and square. A soldier's stance. The set of his mouth is sad, but set with dark purpose. He looks, in this moment, every inch the alpha, every inch a man. Immovable. Bound, by iron conviction, to this needless disaster of a sacrifice.

Stiles' whole world fractures in the space of a breath.

For a moment that captures eternity, he thinks that they have already lost. Scott is ruled by nothing so strongly as his code of honor…and if honor dictates agony, Scott will light himself on fire without a second glance.

But sweet, familiar brown eyes lift as they approach. The seemingly firm mouth begins to tremble. Understanding hits Stiles with the force of a slug to the gut as the façade of adulthood fractures, and crumbles into dust.

In the ruin of illusion is left a frightened teenage boy, frantic under the weight of guilt.

Muscled arms shake, exhausted beyond endurance. Pure pain shines out of the kindest eyes Stiles has ever known, and his heart cracks a little more. His best friend carries too much. They all do. Stiles lives in a world colored hectic, all jangling shades of green and yellow and red, because it is his nature to anticipate disaster even when nothing is trying to kill them, and basically everything is. Lydia is tormented by images of ravaged bodies, souls she had no chance to save but cannot help but grieve. Allison holds the darkness of fear and grief and anger wrapped tight within her, tight as a live wire—so tight she might snap, as neatly as a bowstring drawn too fast. They are all of them battered child soldiers, dragged into adulthood in one fateful flash of savage jaws. But Scott…

Scott carries not only his own pain, but the combined weight of the rest of theirs. Stiles has known this for a while, because it is his business to know everything Scott. But he has never seen it so vividly as now. Scott is their protector, the sole reason that Stiles sometimes views claws and snarling teeth as comforting things rather than nightmare visions. Scott is their glue, gumming them all together—friends, ex-girlfriends, neurotic abused werewolves, ex-werewolf hunters, psycho-killers returned from the dead—with the stubborn adhesive of forgiveness. Scott is the cheerful, strikingly child-like smile that reminds that maybe not all innocence can be taken away. Scott is his best friend, his inspiration. His brother.

Scott is the quietly radiant being, a torch of heart and purity somehow giving them hope even as tragedy and evil rip his own from his fingers.

Of course he would choose to die by light.

But Scott has forgotten one thing, as he stands lost among sparks that burn too bright, and pungent gasoline, and pitch black night. He carries a terrible burden, and maybe no one can take it from him. But if Scott is too worn by carrying all of Beacon Hill to save himself, well, then Stiles is damned well going to carry Scott—even if that means dragging him by the ankles onto that lousy school bus and all the way back home (because, hell, Stiles isn't a super-powered werewolf, and he's pretty tired too.)

After all, they're brothers. And that means you and me against the world, always and forever, and Scott knows that too.

So Stiles steps in lighter fluid, and saves his beacon from the shadows.