"This couldn't wait til morning?"

Stiles is crouched on Lydia's window sill. It's a wide one, plenty of foot-room, and the wooden lattice crawling with wolfsbane makes it easy to climb up to, though the dampness of half-melted snow makes things slippery.

Lydia is looking at him incredulously from the other side of the glass, sceptical eyebrow raised.

"You going to let me in?" he asks instead of answering - because she already knows the answer to that question. Time is of the essence, after all. And it's really cold outside.

She lets out a long-suffering sigh before heaving up the window. It squeaks in its ascent, sending a jarring shiver through Stiles' body.

He tumbles through thankfully, landing in a heap on the floor, and finally lets himself relax. The last hour can't have been good on his heart for all the numbe of minor heart attacks he's sure he's had. The paranoia is beginning to get to him too.

Lydia slams the window shut and taps the rune inscribed on the wall beside it, followed by the one above her bed; Stiles feels instantly better. A warmth permeates the room, leeching down into his frozen bones. He feels more like he's been sitting next to an open fire for the last hour than running through snow.

He can sense the wards - the most complex and intricate design he's ever attempted to create - smothering the house in their protection. He almost feels safe.

A thump sounds next to him, and he turns to see Lydia has sat down beside him. Her head rests on his shoulder. For a moment they just sit in silence, listening to the comforting sound of each other's breathing.

"How are you feeling?" he whispers.

She doesn't answer immediately, shifting her head to a more comfortable position. "It hurts." she answers eventually. Her voice is so quiet he barely hears it. She sounds so - so vulnerable. Stiles feels his heart shattering all over again. Lydia has been broken down time and time again, and none of the pack seem to realise that she isn't going to bounce back this time.

"Let me look?" She moves immediately, shifting closer to him and turning her head, pulling her hair back. Stiles flicks the bedside lamp on, squinting in the sudden glow.

The hole in Lydia's head is freshly bleeding. It's an ugly, dark red wound, glistening in the light. The blood has dripped down past her ear, but she doesn't seem to have even noticed. Against her deathly pale skin it's drastically noticeable.

He stands immediately, pulling her up as gently as he can. She follows him to the bathroom with a shuffling step, a dazed, mildly confused look settling on her features.

Stiles wants to cry as he carefully sponges the blood off her face, cleans up and dresses the wound as much as he can. This is a side she shows only to him. Things have been so different since they broke Lydia out of Eichen. As far as Scott and the others know, everything is just as it was before. Lydia is the same strong, intelligent, unbreakable banshee they all know and love. And Lydia let's them believe it.

She never tried to lie to Stiles, though. She knows she could never pull it off. So he's the only one who sees just how much they took from her, the only one she trusts enough to break down in front of.

He's done this more times than he can count in the past few weeks.

"I'm sorry," she whispers as he leads her back to her bed.

"There's nothing to be sorry for, Lyds."

"But there is. You shouldn't have to deal with this. With me."

"But I want to."

She gives him a look, like she wants to say something else, but stays quiet.

Their relationship is a strange one. It's not friendship - they evolved from that a long time ago - but it's not exactly romance either. It's deeper. Stiles trusts Lydia more than anyone else in the world, loves her with all his heart, and he knows the same is true of her. They've been through so much together, it couldn't really have ended up any other way. He can almost feel the tether that's tied them together since the nogitsune, linking their fates inextricably.

"So what was so urgent that you needed to try and break into my house at-" she checks the clock on her bedside table, "three in the morning?"

"It doesn't matter right now," he shrugs. "You need to sleep."

"But-"

"Lydia. Sleep. Nothing will change in the next three hours." He makes towards the window sill, but her fingers curl around his wrist, just enough force to tug him back.

"Stay?" Her lips flicker in something approaching a smile.

"Of course."

He's too wired to sleep. The adrenaline is still buzzing through his system, and he finds he can't sit still for long without feeling uneasy and out of place.

He waits until he's sure Lydia is asleep - she's out like a light in seconds - before carefully extricating his hand from her limp grasp and going over to the boards they have set up in the corners of her room.

There are three boards, all mostly filled with scraps of paper, strings and pins, photos. This is the culmination of three weeks of steady work and research.

He digs through his back pack until he finds what he's looking for - the thing he went to so much trouble for tonight.

For weeks he and Lydia have been looking for the schematics of the supernatural wing of Eichen House - they've had the plans for the rest of the building for weeks, courtesy of Stiles' extra key to his father's filing cabinet.

He didn't tell Lydia that he was going to break into the records room in the basement of Eichen, and he doesn't plan to. He knows she would have stopped him - and will yell st him. They shouldn't go anywhere near the building until everything's ready, she says.

He puts up the paper in the empty space waiting for it, shifting the strings and pins to incorporate it; there's still too much red string on the board for his liking.

He still can't sleep, even after checking over each board with meticulous precision, so he walks silently around the room, strengthening the wards and runes. The warmth rune above Lydia's headboard is wearing thin from overuse. There's a slight dent in the warding on the left side of the house.

Stiles is getting good with magic. He's only been studying it a year, yet his wards have easily surpassed those of Deaton, and even Morrell. Not that that's much of an achievement; now he can sense magic he realises how woefully inadequate their so-called emissary is.

No wonder the Hale pack burned.

No one aside from Lydia knows about his magic. His dad - well, the sheriff still seems to be struggling with the supernatural in general. There's no need to give him a heart attack.

And Scott. The guy can barely still accept that he's a werewolf, and Stiles has become his link back to humanity. He realises now that's why Scott reacted so badly to Donovan - because he needed Stiles to be perfect and pure. He couldn't deal with the idea that his humanity was tainted, whether by death or the supernatural.

Stiles wants to laugh at that - he hasn't been untainted since the nogitsune.

He thought about telling Malia for a while, but by the time he worked up the courage the Dread Doctors had messed everything up.

Lydia groans in her sleep, face scrunching up in a momentary flash of pain. She relaxes quickly enough, but Stiles still wants to hit himself. In all this time, the one thing he can't master is healing magic. He's useless to help her.

The warding and runes take him most of the rest of the night, and by the time he's finished he can barely walk in a straight line. He just about manages to stumble over to the armchair beside Lydia's bed before sleep finally claims him.

Come talk with/hang with/prompt me on tumblr: edelwoodsouls - I'm always free to chat :)