Archive of Our Own

Lydia doesn't breathe a sigh of relief when she crosses state lines and the screaming stops, when Beacon Hills is no longer even a faint shadow in her rearview mirror. It’s a short reprieve and she knows it. This is only a break from the whispers of ghosts and the shrieks of the dying that she’s been forced to filter through for the past three years; only a fool would think it’s over forever. Lydia pops the cap of her lipstick and applies a fresh smear of bright red precisely, smacks her lips together. She maneuvers the cap back with one-hand, the other clasped firmly on the wheel, driving her way steady on the highway out of here. She clears her throat, following the sound with a soft hum—not of contentment or consideration, just a simple swan song for the town that will never fully leave her.

Lydia learns. That is her strength and was once her secret. Lydia learns, and that was once her weakness, too. She observes and she covets and at some point she began to learn through osmosis all the supernatural ripples that converged around her, twisting and pulling at her clothes. At some point, she became a conduit. But Lydia learns, and she began to twist and pull them right back.

The phantom screams plague her in every hotel and dorm room. The memory of handsaws, gunshots, pacts, and gasoline, You’re my brother-- Some of those sounds are more real than others, she knows this but can’t tell the difference even with miles to separate them.

Her mom calls every other Saturday at precisely 11AM. Lydia answers the phone on precisely the third ring every time, voice as crisp as her freshly pressed A-line skirt. These calls last for precisely as long as it takes to exchange pleasantries and minor life updates, which is to say a perfectly acceptable 20 minutes, and then Lydia is free to answer phone calls at whatever ring she should choose to-- or even not at all-- for another 13 days.

Her father chooses to email, a form of communication that allows him the highest degree of flexibility and professionalism while remaining firmly impersonal, as he prefers. He offers to meet up for lunch, should she be free. She rarely is. College is such a busy time, as Lydia informs his secretary smoothly. She’s sure her father can understand.

Some things don’t fade as well as the city skyline at night, as the image in her rearview as she took that one last turn, as her second boyfriend when she reminded him sharply that no amount of social posturing is worth even the slightest impact on her GPA and that he could escort himself, if it mattered that much to him. Lydia has seven glass vials underneath her bed, all of them carefully stoppered with a cork. She doesn’t mention them. Her roommate never asks. There is one similar, larger glass vial on their windowsill, however, that hosts a purple flower with vines curling ever upward. Some nights, Lydia will brush the fingers of her right hand against its petals gently and smile, a sharp glint of teeth in the moonlight.

Stiles calls her. There is no clear pattern to it. He’ll go days or weeks, one time over two months in between calls. He calls from payphones, his own cell phones- old and then new, after the run in with the tree sprites, and new again, after he put his jacket through the wash with his phone still in the pocket. Lydia never needs to check her caller ID to know it’s him. Doesn’t need his number programmed to appear on the screen, doesn’t need him to be calling her from a known number anyway. She can taste it, like the dregs in the red wine she pretended to favor at one of her father’s dinner parties, a bitter taste wrapped around her tongue and sticking. Sour, familiar, earthy, but an aftertaste nevertheless.

(She always answers. She never thinks about why.)

Stiles calls her. Sometimes, it matters. Sometimes, he’s at the bottom of too many glasses of whiskey, and he’ll tell her how his father still wears his wedding ring. They’ll both wonder what makes a person like that, and neither of them will mean the same thing. She won’t tell him that she couldn’t remember when her parents stopped wearing theirs, but it was long before the divorce, but not too much before they realized it didn’t matter anymore.

Stiles calls her, and she hates it. Hates how she slips back into answering, hates the sharp twist to the smile she can’t quite hold back. Hates the echo of his voice she can hear over the phone, younger, steadfast, and fucking terrified.

She’ll never love him, and he knows it now. She’ll never love him like he wanted when he was 8 and 12 and 15, more eyes and moles and freckles than teeth. Now, he’s more teeth and eyes in a different way, though he’s still heavy with freckles and moles. When he says her name now, it’s weighted down with knowing, and a twinge of regret he never quite holds back.

(When she says his, there’s no way to cover over that faint bit of relief to come to the end of it. She says it like one last shot in the dark toward home.)

Lydia was born in Beacon Hills. She took her first steps in the dance class her mother signed her up too young for. She lost her first tooth on the jungle gym at pre-school, swinging carelessly and rewarding herself with a mouthful of blood for it. She unwittingly helped kill a werewolf in the woods on the edge of town and later –just as unwittingly— brought the same werewolf back a few feet and floorboards over. Beacon Hills was a town of firsts and losses for her. Beacon Hills was a town that built her and tried to break her. But Lydia learned how to bend.

Allison comes up to visit one weekend and crashes Lydia’s bed, the two of them curled together like earbuds pulled from someone’s pocket, an entangled mess. Allison’s heavy leather boots get stuffed under the bedframe, next to the glass vials that neither of them will mention. Allison draws a line of dark powder across the door, but leaves the windowsill alone, doesn’t touch the purple flower still blooming in the glass. Lydia just combs her hair perfunctorily, staring into the mirror for a long minute before following Allison under the sheets. Neither of them says much that night. Neither of them sleeps much, either.

Lydia goes long stretches of time without thinking about Jackson. Thinking about Jackson makes her tired, most days, and sad on others. His name carries so many things she tries to forget, but it seeps into everything, like poison, and paralyzes her in a way that his did not. Her sociology class brings up the prevalent myths and fairytales of One True Love, one day, and she forces herself not flinch. It’s never that simple, she thinks, and she knows it now. It’s not a matter of whether or not the concept is real; it’s never that fucking simple.

One Saturday phonecall, her mother mentions that Jackson has sent her a card and offers to forward it to Lydia’s dorm. Lydia burns it as soon as it arrives, the heat curling up the edges of the stamp, Queen Elizabeth II’s face disappearing into blackness.

She graduates Magna Cum Lade a year early with two degrees, Theoretical Mathematics and Biochemistry. She does not walk at her graduation. She does not send out invitations. She does not tell her parents until she is driving out east to set up for graduate school.

When she gets to her new apartment, there is a card waiting for her in the assigned mailbox, postmarked three days before she arrived. The return address reads Beacon Hills, CA and the stamp features a cartoon wolf wrapped around the moon. The card reads ‘HAPPY HALLOWEEN’ on the front, but has ‘Congratulations’ scrawled on the inside. Stiles signed it right along the curve of the mad scientist’s elbow, but there was never any doubt. She sends him back a framed and pressed purple flower from her windowsill next week. She thinks he’ll get it just fine.

Lydia left Beacon Hills at 18, and she wasn’t terrified. Leaving wasn’t the cessation of the terror that plagued her that someone might have suspected. She still hears echoes of the screams, the whispers, the pleas, the whoosh of flames from a Molotov cocktail, the howls of wolves. She still feels the thrumming in her veins that calls for her return. Lydia left Beacon Hills at 18, but she knows it has yet to leave her.

Stiles is sitting on her doorstep three months and two days after the postmark on the flower, only a week after she’d expected. He doesn’t have it with him, doesn’t have anything more than the keys to his Jeep and his phone in his hands. He stands, and his eyes are just as amber as they’ve always been. He smiles, and he’s still more teeth than he was at 15, but the curve of his lips soften it. She says, “I can’t,” and doesn’t add anything further. He says, “I know,” and she almost believes him.

He stays for the weekend, unearths a bottle of Jack Daniels from the pile of lacrosse gear and discarded jackets in the back of his jeep. He offers it to her with a splash of water, a couple of ice cubes, and she raises her eyebrow. He pulls back the cup and offers her another, neat. Half the bottle and an hour later, he says his dad finally took off the wedding ring, tells her that Mrs. McCall and the Sheriff are coming up on three months now, and finishes off with a joke that now he and Scott can get those bunkbeds they’ve always dreamed about. His voice echoes with loss, hope, and finally an empty laugh. She thinks about needling him on the inconvenience of bunkbeds now, but chooses silence instead.

Stiles falls asleep on the floor, his head leaning against her knee. She cards her fingers through his hair, feeling the scarring along his scalp, tracing it down the curve of his neck. She doesn’t ask about Scott that night, or the next, or in the morning, and Stiles doesn’t offer, but the bottle says enough. Lydia doesn’t offer anything about that night before Allison skipped out on all of them. She left it all behind, but not before tracing a hot line of kisses down Lydia’s sternum, sucking a bruise into the junction of hip and thighs. Lydia thinks of hopelessly tangled wires whenever she thinks of that night, but Allison never did promise her anything, true enough.

Lydia dreams of strings of pale blonde hair on a corseted corpse. She dreams of digging in the dirt, running with bare feet making sticky slapping sounds in pools of blood. She wakes up screaming, and one time, Stiles is there for it. He hands her a small glass of cold orange juice, pulpless. He talks about how the Mets are doing this year. She lets him pretend for her, everything is fine.

These are the small things they do for each other. Stiles drives home and she never once mentions Scott’s ripped t-shirt in his backseat, his favorite cap from middle school that Stiles slipped on without thinking when they went for a walk. How Stiles flinched before she finished asking if he’d like some scotch. Stiles is full of tells, but she never calls them. She knows not to bother when he knows her hand just as well.

Stiles is a heart in a glass case, she thinks sometimes. Stiles tries to let a tree grow around it, to protect it further. He is a spark, Deaton once said. Lydia feels like she might be a forest fire, sometimes. Others, she thinks they both feel like ashes.

Stiles loved her at 8 and 12 and 15. He loves her still, but she’s not the one who can break him anymore. She’s glad for it. (Sometimes, she almost wishes she still was. She thinks she wouldn’t now. But she knows better.)

Scott calls her once and only once, after Allison. The call lasts two minutes. They exchange no pleasantries. She answers no the whole way through it. He doesn’t ask again.

Scott calls her again, the day that Stiles drives away. His first words are sorry and please. Even without improved senses, even with the distance, he reeks of fear. He asks nearly the same questions as that phone call years before. She lets him. This time, she answers yes without thinking about it. This time, she holds nothing back. She’s got miles and years on everything. She knows this time what counts. Scott sighs in relief and thanks her. She doesn’t let him hang up. She asks him if he remembers the motel, the red glow of the flare, spitting out flames. If he still hears it at night. Doesn’t need to hear him say yes, but pushes for it all the same. He doesn’t take much pushing, never has where Stiles is concerned. It’s not very subtle, but she doesn’t feel that reminders need to be.

Her research project for her final year of graduate work concerns immunity and she smells hospital beds and damp wood fungus the whole way through it.

She sees Allison one night when she’s out with some classmates at a bar. She swears she’s mistaken at first, but then Allison smiles. Lydia cuts out early that night, but not before taking a quick detour to the bar bathroom. She leaves with smudged lipstick, her wrecked panties stuffed in the trash bin, and Allison following behind her with a wide, wolfish grin.

Allison is knives and arrows and points all over. Lydia runs her lips gently over the curves of her neck and shoulders, her breasts, careful for that bite of steel. Allison licks inside her with no such caution, Lydia bites off the edge of a gasp, can’t contain the moan that follows. Allison doesn’t stay the night and Lydia doesn’t ask. She’s gotten good at that.

Lydia’s classmate and often-times reluctant friend Nadia gets engaged in their second year and she shows off the diamond to the lab for weeks on end. The talk of One True Love resumes, and Lydia barely holds back her snort at endless anecdotes about how people look at each other and just know. Lydia brought a boy back from death with the power of love, they said. They had no explanation for Peter, really. She has no reason to think they were different, in a way. One just features less often in her nightmares, one kiss tasted less like dirt and wolfsbane. She can admit she loved one of them, but she no longer thinks that sealed it. Of course, admittedly, she’s grown out of any fairytale that ends with happily ever after.

Allison doesn’t remind her of fairytales. Lydia tried to place her in one, once, on a particularly slow, rainy weekend when the only thing left that was dry was her reading on immunity in a certain species of frog. Nothing really fit. She could be a dead ringer for Snow White, but Allison would also be the huntsman. Lydia thinks, there’s not a fairy tale quite like us, and a small spark warms in her stomach at that.

She sees Allison sooner than expected, though she tries never to expect it at all. She did not expect the blood dripping down her arm, the clip of wolfsbane bullets in her back pocket. Lydia grabs the first aid kit and doesn’t flinch at the blood on her hands. Allison thanks her, later, with a hand sliding up her thigh, another underneath her shirt. Lydia bites off the questions building on her tongue, instead thrusting it against Allison’s and moaning. Everything smells of antiseptic, iron, and lust.

Allison is still there in the morning when Lydia wakes up, and she’s careful not to think of it as the novelty it is. Allison is dressed and seated at the kitchen table, grim-faced. The wolfsbane bullets have taken up residence again in her back pocket, though Lydia had moved them to a side table last night. Allison’s gun is still missing.

Allison says, “I won’t ask you to.”

Lydia sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, says, “I know.” Follows it up with, “your car or mine?”

Allison slips her hand into Lydia’s halfway to Beacon Hills, and they both rest them on the center console. Lydia feels the humming in her veins growing stronger with every mile. The screams and whispers increasing as the trees roll by her window. She smiles, a sharp-edged thing of white teeth shining against bright red lips. Home.