Chapter Text
As the moonlight shone through a gap in the curtains, a raven passed by the groaning old trees that swayed in the breeze and landed on the windowsill outside a sprawling country house on the edge of Beacon Hills.
The raven cocked its head to the side, although thinking about where to fly next. Maybe Britain, as the summers were getting warmer and the waves bluer, or maybe France, the city of love.
Love is a fickle and fragile thing. Many times love causes more destruction in its absence than in its presence. Love takes its toll every time it doesn't work, yet most are content to pay the price for a little happiness in their lives; after all, what would life be like without a little happiness?
Animals prowled through the dense brush surrounding the house, and more often than not sunbathed on the grass outside the entrance to Mort D’argent, one of the many homes of Lydia Martin and Allison Argent, two people who were undoubtedly in love.
After being turned into a vampire and before finding her tutor, Allison was wallowing in self-pity and the doubts she had about her relationship with Scott. Don't get her wrong, she liked Scott, but she didn't think she ever loved him, and she realised that she loved Lydia only a week after she had come back from MIT.
Allison loved the girls' mind, the way her eyes glinted when she had a new idea and the way she seemed to know everything. She found the intensity at which Lydia loved enthralling and she wanted to be a part of it. She knew that Lydia knew what she was planning when she asked Lydia out for dinner, but that didn't make her any less excited. After a week, she told Lydia that she loved her to her face, and not to her sleeping frame before she kissed her goodnight.
That was the day that they decided to be lifelong partners. They knew each other well enough to know that neither would break the promise, and neither were blind to their future together that would almost certainly be filled with happiness and domesticity. She believed their love to be true and as much as she hated to admit it, true love was hard to find.
The only other people she knew who were well and truly in love were Celestia and Mitch. Even a blind man could tell that Mitch worshipped the ground Celestia walked on, and she looked at him so adoringly when she thought nobody noticed. Their love was sweet and all encompassing and despite their professions, in private with their friends, they were warm and bright in their presence. However, when at work they were downright terrifying. They move as one with no communication necessary and kill without mercy; this increases tenfold when their nogitsunes surface, partially because of their age - being a thousand years old did tend to give an advantage, but also because their vessels were so in tune it became almost impossible to miss a shot when both were fighting together.
And in terms of platonic soulmates, Narcissa and Augustus - although they were an unlikely pair - simply savoured each other's presence in a way even Lydia couldn't comprehend. They were inseparable, and were often found in the library, Narcissa curled on Augustus’s lap while he read to her. Their devotion to the other person was palpable, but they would never be romantically interested in one another.
The whole group, if she was being honest, was very tight knit. There wasn't much they didn't know about each other. Each person or pair had a house (Thanks to the hefty salary that came with being a government employed agent), and in every house there was a room reserved for each of their friends. For god's sake, each of them could say they have a room reserved in hell for them and it would not be a lie.
Most of them had met each other's friends and parents, like Adalene and Shane for example, and were so directly involved in one another's lives that Allison wouldn't be surprised if the outside world thought their group was constantly having orgies or something equally as ridiculous, (although a part of her was aware that Adalene probably had an orgie with Celestia and Mitch, she preferred not to think about it to deeply.)
Her relationship with Scott was nothing like she has with Lydia. Dating Lydia is like relaxing in a hot bath and being pampered day in and day out, with no requirements and constant safety in Lydia's arms. Even when at work, Allison never had to worry about saying the wrong thing and setting her off, or gaining new scars because of Lydia being blinded by pleasure, and that was how Allison liked it. However, dating Scott was thrilling, it consisted of him sneaking in her bedroom window for sex and being chased out the door by her dad - who was decidedly not amused. Their whole relationship was sex, sex and more sex, and it may have been because they were teenagers and it had been both of their first serious relationships, but it finally hit her that the ‘love’ she felt for Scott was bleeding into fear, and there was nothing she could do about it.
It started a few weeks before Stiles distanced himself from the pack - Scott became agitated easily and more violent in their meetup sessions, so much so that she often left the encounters with claw marks on her shoulders and scratches down her back; not deep enough to turn her but deep enough that she bled freely on her mattress and had to stitch her wounds closed. After Stiles was kicked out, it got so bad that when Scott had tried to kiss her, she had flinched away reflexively after weeks of being grabbed and violently thrown around. Scott was so pissed off, he shouted and screamed and threw sticks at trees before leaving her trembling from the cold and the nerves in the middle of the preserve with no car, no phone and no way home.
That was the night that she was bitten.
She was picking her way through the preserve slowly but surely, when she was ambushed by a lone vampire, who bit her in the neck before she managed to stake it with the sharpened stick she had been carrying for protection.
Its death did not influence her transformation, which happened painfully the next night when she had locked herself in the basement with Lydia's help and ended with her leaving the basement covered in chicken guts and blood.
She worked with Lydia for a week, trying to find a way to hide her new nature from her friends and Scott, as he was so vehemently against turning her that she was afraid of his reaction. Luckily, they found a ritual that could be used to conceal supernatural scents and any sign of change, however she knew she couldn't hide forever.
She contacted the only good branch of Argents that she knew, and requested they take her in and allow her to teach in an archery school - and before the week was out she was in France and Lydia moved away to stay on campus in MIT.
Allison managed alright on her own for many years, she drank from animals and learned to control her impulses, but she always missed Lydia. They had started dating a year after Allison left, but Lydia couldn't stay in France and Allison wouldn't stay in America, so they resorted to flying Lydia out for a week every month to see her. It wasn't until a year after Stiles’ ‘death’ that Lydia proclaimed she had found Stiles and Katerina alive and well through her hacking and sleuthing, but they were working for the government after being arrested. Lydia contacted them, and after only a week they had flown out to Virginia to meet them.
It was there that Allison was introduced to Adalene, and soon after they both joined the CIA.
The CIA was the perfect place for them, hunting killers with their expertise and recruiting those extraordinary enough to warrant a place.
Every once in a while they were forced to return to Beacon Hills, but with Adalene as her tutor, none of the wolves were any the wiser to her vampire status. They watched as slowly the pack began to forgive each other and even as love was won and lost. They watched over them, a subtle reminder of Stiles and Katerina on the tips of their tongues that they never unleashed Overtime, new people were added to their sector of the CIA, and they grew closer still.
Over time the sting from what she now recognised as abuse from Scott lessened, but she still had the scars and no matter how much Lydia kissed them, they permanently marred her skin along with the other scars she had earned from her years with the pack. Burns, claw marks, bite marks, stab wounds and gunshot wounds stretched across her skin and told the story of her pain more emotionally than she ever could. The map of her skin was beautiful to Lydia, who had her own fair share of scars and together they traced each other’s before sleep - simply to remind themselves of their magnificence and beauty.