this is so messy, i'm so sorry, i just felt i needed to get this out after that last ep.

lydia should absolutely have been the person to push allison under.

as always, i own nothing.

Tell me everything that happened
Tell me everything you saw
They had light inside their eyes

Stiles' body is the first to go still.

'Pull him out, quick.' Deaton, hands still firmly holding a struggling Scott under the water, motions to Lydia urgently.

Lydia deliberates for a second, worried that she might not actually be able to do this, to pull Stiles' dead body out of the water. But Deaton is shouting at her again, and she snaps into action, doing all she can to lift the dead weight of the boy she'd kissed not even a few hours earlier out of the water.

Her dress is soaked in seconds.

'What do I do? Am I supposed to do CPR?' She's becoming frantic, trembling hands pulling at the collar of his shirt, as if moving the wet fabric from his cold (too cold) skin is going to do anything to help.

'No, they have to be triggered together. Only when they are all together.'

His words are followed by a cry from Isaac, and a great deal of splashing as he heaves Allison's body out of the tub.

Lydia doesn't look over at them. She can't.

A whole minute passes until Scott's limbs eventually stop struggling against Deaton's grip. Lydia assumes it was the wolf within him refusing to die.

Lydia tries not to think too much. She tries not to focus that the extra time Scott took up meant that Stiles had been dead for almost two minutes, and Allison; Allison had been gone for a little under that.

'Quickly, we need to line them up next to one another. Make sure each of their tokens are resting upon their chest. Hurry, there's not much time.' Deaton rushes over to his array of cabinets as Isaac and Lydia do as they're told.

Lydia gently rests Sheriff Stilinski's badge above the expanse of chest covering Stiles' heart. It feels like the right thing to do. She chances a glance to her left, wanting to make sure that Allison was still there. She sees Issac positioning the silver bullet and she fights the urge to vomit.

Deaton has returned and is handing the both of them what appear to be two small crystals. Lydia holds it in the palm of the hand, the small amount of light in the room is bouncing off of it.

It's a deep clue colour, and reminds Lydia of Allison's favourite dress.

(She closes her fingers over the stone and swallows thickly.)

'Now listen carefully, I cannot stress how important it is that we do this correctly. Each of these crystals possess a certain kind of energy; think of it as a charge. We're going to use them in a similar way to a defibrillator. On the count of three, place the crystal over the heart and press down as hard as you can. Ready?'

This isn't going to work.

'One.'

They're not breathing.

'Two.'

They're dead.

'Three.'

Just bodies.

Trembling hands exert pressure onto crystal, and if it weren't for the extremity of the situation, the fact that Lydia is trying to bring her friends back from the dead, she might marvel in the beauty of it.

She thinks back to her piano lessons as a child; to the way her fingers would dance across ivory.

Back then if she pressed her hands down she would hear music in return.

Now she's met with cold, non-beating hearts.

Dead hearts.

Until something changes.

A tingling begins in her fingertips and she feels it travel through the rest of her hand, past her wrist, up the length of her forearm.

She watches as the crystal begins to shake in her grip, before filling the room with shards of blue light.

And then it is gone as quickly as it came.

A beat of silence.

Stiles opens his eyes.

And Lydia laughs. She lifts her free hand to her mouth, eyes wide, and laughs with relief, with gratitude, with every other emotion shes feeling that she can't separate from one another.

Stiles is breathing in great lungfuls of air; Lydia pushes out the memory of him struggling for breath in the locker room earlier that day, and pulls him up into an embrace. Her hands grip the back of his shirt and whispers words of comfort into his ear: 'you were so brave.'

She pulls back and he gives her a weak smile. Deaton is patting Scott on the back; no words are needed between the two of them as Scott nods in response.

It actually worked.

'Deaton. Deaton, I-.' That's Isaac speaking. Isaac.

Allison.

Lydia has seen a lot of horrifying things in the last year. She's seen monsters, she's touched death, she's dated a boy who was being controlled and used as a killing machine. She's been living in the stuff of nightmares.

But nothing will haunt her as much as the sight of Allison's cold, wet body; the sight of her still chest will.

In a second Lydia is by her side, pushing Isaac out of the way as his tear-filled eyes dart about in terror.

'Why hasn't it worked? I don't understand why it hasn't worked!' The crystal is no longer in his hand, though Lydia notices his knuckles are white from having been gripping it so tightly.

Lydia vaguely registers Deaton talking about success rates and potential obstacles while she calls Allison's name and clutches her limp hand.

'Lydia...'

Somebody's calling her name, she doesn't know who. She doesn't care. There's a stray strand of hair falling across Allison's face. She would have hated that, she always complained about how her hair would get in the way during archery practice.

'Lydia, come away.'

'No.'

She takes a deep breath. Her fingers search for abandoned crystal.

'Lydia, there's nothing we can do.' Deaton's hand is on her shoulder.

Her eyes never leave Allison's face.

'It should have been me.'

'What?'

Her fingers enclose themselves around cool rock.

'Holding her down. I should have been the one to do it. I should have brought her back. It should have been me.'

As her voice breaks on the last word, the crystal is in her hand and she's pushing it into Allison's chest. She presses down so hard that she's sure it could push right through the rib cage and straight to the heart. To Allison's heart.

She doesn't try to stop the tears as she cries out Allison's name again and again, the crystal digging harder and harder into her palm with every passing second.

Her blood shows up against Allison's dress.

Suddenly her arm is searing with pain. Not the gentle burn that she had experienced with Stiles moments ago. She feels as if her entire arm is being consumed by fire. The crystal is humming with power, and Lydia is physically incapable of loosening her grip on it.

Another wave of pain hits her and she throws her head back and screams.

Maybe this is what she was born for, she thinks. Always alerting others, but always unable to change anything.

(She tries not to connect Allison with the deadly connotations usually attached to her screams.)

And then the pain is gone.

'Lydia?'

Lydia has looked into Allison's eye countless time before; subconsciously memorising the colour, the shape, the way they lit up when they would spend time together just the two of them. But now, as Lydia's tired eyes meet Allison's own scared, widened ones, she knows she'll never tire of them.

'Allison.'

She's not sure if the sound that leaves her mouth next is a sob, or a laugh, or even just a breathe. Maybe it's all three.

'Oh, Allison.'

The next thing Lydia knows she is lying on Allison's chest and sobbing into her shoulder. Allison is too weak to do anything but lie there and tangle her hand in Lydia's red curls, putting all of her strength in soothing the younger girl.

'What was that? Was it the scream that did it? Was it the banshee?' Stiles is rubbing his head, looking over at the two girls in confusion.

When he turns to Deaton for answers, he sees that the older man has bent to pick up the discarded crystal. Rolling it between his fingers he holds it up for Stiles to see.

The crystal is no longer blue.

Instead it has been replaced with a fiery red, making it appear almost ablaze.

Together Stiles and Deaton take in the sight of Allison now attempting to sit up and guide Lydia against her. Her hand continues to toy with the red, red locks around her fingers.

'No,' Deaton finally says. 'It was Lydia. Just Lydia.'

.

I could say it but you wont believe me
You say you do but you don't deceive me
Dead hearts are everywhere