Gut Instinct (Teen Wolf)

3:34 I Am A Force Of Nature

Warning: ANGST, vagueness I think, me improvising half the chapter I'm sorry if it's bad

Lydia laid on her back, staring at the ceiling. She was just thinking. About the plan the pack had to catch a Ghost Rider. About Stiles and Vic.

About Caleb, the boy she met in Canaan.

She didn't turn as her mom laid on the bed beside her. "Still thinking about how to prove the Riemann hypothesis?" Natalie asked.

"I'm thinking about a dead kid I met in Canaan," Lydia corrected.

"Dead?" Her mom repeated.

"He drowned in 1985," Lydia clarified.

"Okay," Natalie said. "Go on."

"His mom conjured him," the banshee continued. "To fill the void she felt after the Wild Hunt passed through Canaan." She was silent for a moment, an idea flickering at the back of her Mina's. "Mom, what if Sheriff Stilinski is filling a void? What if he's filling it with Claudia?"

Lydia looked at her mom, her eyes bright with a new theory.

"You think Claudia's dead?" Natalie asked. "No, I... I just saw her."

"So many things don't make sense," Lydia said, turning to the ceiling. "She had a fatal disease but then she's fine. She says her Jeep was stolen twenty years ago but it's Stiles's. Oh, you should've seen the look on her face when I peeled back the wallpaper. She wasn't just angry. She was scared. Like she was protecting a secret."

"Okay," Natalie said. "If this is true, then... maybe Sheriff Stilinski needs this. Maybe it's his way of coping."

"What if Claudia being here is preventing him from remembering his kids?" Lydia argued.

Her mom looked at her with a cautious look. "Lydia, if Claudia isn't real, you don't wanna be the one to tell him that."

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Lydia turned down the hall. She looked at the hole that hadn't been there before. Inside was a carpeted room. The windows were boarded, the closet was empty. But on the one wall was the mural of a sunset.

Vic. This was Vic's room. She painted that mural.

Lydia continued down the hall to the second hole. The sheriff held the door open as she walked in. The walls were blue, windows boarded and shelves filled with dust.

But it was Stiles's room. She just knew. The same way she knew that Vic preferred to go by the nickname her brother gave her.

Lydia turned to look at the sheriff. "You knew about these, didn't you?" He asked.

She nodded.

"God it was on the blueprints," he said. "It was here when we moved in. That was eighteen years ago."

Lydia looked around the room once more. This time, his bed was in the corner. The blue sheets that he never made unless he had to. Her gaze went to another corner. His cork boards and murder boards were there. The ones he would stare at so obsessively. His desk appeared by the one window. The one that was always covered with books and random papers.

"Lydia? What is it?" He asked.

She turned to the room, the bare fragments she had seen of him. It was gone again. "Nothing," she told him.

"I don't understand how you knew this was here," he continued. "If you want to discuss the possibility...that I had a son and a daughter... I'm listening."