Work Text:
i.
He loiters beside her hospital bed and knows, no, repeats to himself that he’s breaking about a dozen rules. Only family, no visitors after 7 PM or on Sundays, no unaccompanied minors permitted in the ICU. (And trust him, he knows all those regulations like the black spots on the insides of his eyelids against the sun; he's had experience with defying every one of them.) He’s never been somebody conducive to rules, anyway, so the way he sees it, it’s the universe’s fault for making both him and rules, because they’re mutually exclusive, and universes really should be smarter than that, like, really.
His hands tremble clumsily as they clench the haphazardly closed envelope, and he can feel the sweat and oil from his thumbs distorting the edges of the paper. He glances down at it and curses at himself, because it’s all wrinkled and bunched up at the corners, and the black ballpoint pen ink on “L” and “dia” is smudged.
The EKG sends pricks of stale noise into the dim quiet. Lydia is too limp and pale for her bed, and the stark whiteness of the sheets and the pillowcases and her hospital gown make her tangled hair look even more like it will ignite anything that touches it; her lips are dry and cracked and discolored from lack of stimulation, and her eyelids twitch just barely every now and then, but they don’t open. Her breathing is willowy, but steady, and for a second, just a second, Stiles watches the rise and fall of her, though fragile; she could still breathe fire, and she could still spit out kingdoms, and she could still buckle knees. (She’ll still not know him, not know that he’d kneeled beside her bleeding body on the lacrosse field and felt on the brink of vomiting when Peter had touched her, but it doesn’t matter anymore; nothing matters, except that thin sound of her breath, those tinny prods of her beating heart.)
He runs a hand back over his head and turns toward her bedside table. It’s funny. Lydia Martin is undoubtedly the gem of Beacon Hills High School, but there are only three cards in her hospital room: one from Allison, one from Scott, one from Danny. (The flowers are from Danny, too. And Scott, the nerd, had set aside some of his paycheck money to buy her an impressive teddy bear that Stiles is only a little embarrassed by, but that's just because he hadn't gotten her anything himself, because what kind of gift under $20 can properly articulate If you die the sky will lose all meaning?)
Stiles looks at the offering in his sweaty palms and it looks so drab, so afraid, clutched into an indistinguishable, broken mess. He’d written its contents out at four in the morning as though they’d been blood pumped from the largest vein in his arm, and they’d been inarticulate and desperate to be understood in the wake of some ever-looming Too Late, the manifestation of a scared boy’s Before It’s.
He almost sets it there for her to find (to never wake up to), which is what he’d come there for in the first place, but she lets out a quiet sigh in her sleep that sounds like summer starting and his arms falter. The space on the table seems all at once yawning and far too crowded, far too filled with the sleeplessness of people who actually matter to the girl sleeping in the bed, people who actually deserve to love her.
He slips the note into his pocket and when he turns to leave, his hand lingers on the door frame, covering any words that gather in the deepest parts of him (the parts he still can’t fathom and won’t try to – the parts that aren’t concerned with Lydia Martin’s green eyes, really, but rather the way Lydia Martin breathes the air around her [like it’s smoke that’s hers to swallow], or the way Lydia Martin watches birds when no one’s watching her [like they’re her only ticket home]).
“Night, Lydia,” he mumbles hastily, and goes.
ii.
“Hey, so, uh, I figure now’s as great a time as any to give you—”
“No,” Lydia chirps.
Stiles’s whole body deflates and a pout droops on his face with it. Lydia feels triumphant at the sight of such sudden defeat.
“What do you mean, ‘no?’” he demands.
Lydia cocks her head to try to give off the illusion of thinking at length, the falsely coy beginnings of a smile quirking her scarlet lips upwards. Her dimples are deep.
"I mean..." She tosses her head contemptuously back to him and it makes her curls bounce and sway at her chest. "A negatory statement expressing denial, refusal, or dissent, as in response to a statement or question."
Stiles gives her his usual flat look, the corners of his eyes narrowing. She bats her eyelashes innocently at him.
“Just out of curiosity,” she says, “Why do you feel this is the best time to give me that, exactly?”
“I—I don’t know; it…” Stiles scratches his head and looks at his feet, shuffling them. “I thought maybe it’d make you feel better.”
Lydia squints at him. “Better? You thought it would make me feel better?”
Stiles must notice the dangerous edge her voice has taken on, because he flounders silently, but she has already stood up from her chair at the library table and started to gather her things.
“You think that some piece-of-crap little love poem you probably wrote me after a wet dream is going to make me feel better? You think anything you can give me, Stiles, is going to make me feel better, unless it’s a very heavy dose of nitrous?” She whirls on him, her hair cascading around her, seeming more like a mane now. Regret sparks in his eyes, but she plows on past it. “Maybe you could have thought about making me feel better when you left me crying in the parking lot. Because I fail to see how it is even remotely possible to pull something like that when you’re supposed to have the kind of feelings for someone that a grown-up, and not some dopey third-grader, would. So here’s my advice to you, Stiles—”
She leans down onto the table, making sure that her cleavage is right in his face, and braces her hands on the wooden surface. She locks eyes with his, which are staying on hers with surprisingly little effort, but she sees the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallows, and she can feel his face heating up.
“Grow up,” she whispers, not without a tinge of venom, and that’s when she leaves him, turning on her heel and striding out, amidst plenty of skeptical mutterings from the other students in the library.
She wishes she could be like Allison and use her middle finger like a weapon, but she isn’t – she pushes the doors open and walks out into the hallway and doesn’t regret any of the things she’s just said.
Back in the library, Stiles’s fumbling fingers open the fold-smoothed paper, still soft at the edges from his sweaty thumbs in the hospital room. He should have told her that he’s never been much of a poet, and that the words scrawled into the white are more frank and honest than anything he can conjure when his running mouth clutters it, and maybe that’s what makes them so dangerous.
iii.
It’s almost four in the morning when somebody knocks softly on his bedroom door.
Stiles sighs quietly, one arm slung across his eyes, the other splayed out over the bed. They’d all only gotten back from the warehouse where Gerard had gone all evil and Jackson had died and come back to life several times half an hour ago, so it’s probably his dad, wanting to know why he’s been acting so bizarre on the night of the greatest victory of his high school career.
“Dad, I’m fine,” he calls for what feels like the fortieth time, but he takes his arm off of his face and turns on his bedside lamp anyway.
“Stiles,” Lydia says quietly from the other side of the door, “It’s me. Again.”
Stiles stiffens, but doesn’t sit up. Pain jumps in his stomach, constricting it, making him swallow roughly.
“Oh,” he replies. Nothing else.
After a second, the door is nudged slowly open, and Lydia slips in, closing it silently behind her. Stiles keeps his eyes trained on the ceiling, but it’s hard to keep them there when her face leans into view, strands of red hair glowing gold from the lamp. He can’t read her expression for the life of him, but all of her makeup is off, and it looks like she’s wearing Jackson’s lacrosse hoodie.
He forces his face to stay neutral.
“You’re not staying at Jackson’s?” he finally asks when she doesn’t say anything for a while. He’d tried to keep the question casual, but Lydia’s eyebrows twitch together slightly, so he must have failed.
“No,” she answers. There’s a chill in her tone. “Why?”
Stiles closes his eyes and huffs all of the malice in him out through his nose. When he’s sure that it’s all gone, he pushes himself up with his hands. Lydia tilts out of view.
He feels a weight settle on the bed beside him and looks over to find her sitting next to him, one leg hitched up on the mattress, her hands in the pockets of the sweatshirt. There’s a zit on her chin, red and bright.
“Sorry,” he mumbles after a few seconds, hands fidgeting idly against each other in his lap. He glances down at them, setting his jaw.
Lydia sighs, long and light, more of a breath out than anything else.
“I mean, for that,” Stiles expounds, gesticulating vaguely, “But also for… for the yelling at you thing. And the—God, everything tonight, I guess. I was a dick.”
“Yeah,” Lydia agrees without pause. “Yeah, you were.”
Stiles winces.
“Out of your freaking mind, huh?” Lydia whispers, her voice cracking, and when Stiles raises his eyes to hers over his shoulder, he sees that they’re glistening. She’s staring at some indistinct point on the opposite wall, her mouth agog, one eyebrow lifted slightly.
Stiles hears a rushing sound in his ears, originating from somewhere in his chest. His gaze has darted to the closed drawer of his bedside table with the note in it (sixth revision, composed last week) before he can seriously think on giving it to her.
“No pressure,” he says, cracking a hesitant smile to try to diffuse the roar of his heart.
Lydia coughs out a laugh, or what sounds like one; it’s edged with emotion Stiles doesn’t want to dwell on.
“Right,” she replies, nodding. “No pressure.”
They sit in silence like that for a long time. Stiles rubs at his tired eyes, stifling several yawns, but he’s determined not to fall asleep before she leaves, before he’s given her everything she could conceivably need in this world. He doesn’t bother wondering why she’s at his house instead of Jackson’s. He doubts he’ll see her over the summer. His scraped-up cheek hurts, and so do the muscles in his legs.
He wakes up alone the next day at one in the afternoon, mouth dry, nursing a Charley horse with gritted teeth and hissed curse words.
The bedside table’s drawer is open. The note, however, is undisturbed.
(He keeps one of her drawings, entranced by the steady linework on all of the tangled roots. The picture frame had been empty for years – an unused leftover from his mom’s memorial service – but he can’t imagine it holding anything else once he tucks the binder paper corners into the wood. He tapes the note to the back of it – eighth revision – after she kisses him, because that’s when he knows he’ll never revise it again.)
iv.
“Lydia…” His voice stutters out of him, blood-slurred, delirious. “Listen, there’s… there’s something I n-need t’...”
“Quiet,” she tells him, and it’s too loud, at too high of a pitch, the opposite of collected – it spills, chaotic and desperate, edged with unwelcome tears. “Be quiet; you’ll make it worse.”
“I need… you…” His eyes are rolling back behind his shuddering eyelashes, and Lydia’s throat constricts at the words, but he finishes with, “To…”
“Apply a proper amount of pressure to your wound to prevent you from bleeding to death?” Her voice quavers, but she forces a smile. “Perfect; already on it.”
He lets out a whimper that feels like it breaks her in half right down the middle, right in the center of her spine. Tears coagulate in the corners of his eyes, but don’t fall, or maybe they do and she just can’t see them through the dirt.
Anger flares in her chest, out of nowhere – the nogitsune had used his body with such little regard for its smallest capabilities and flaws; here it had cut him open but she has a feeling it had never known about the mole under his jawline, or his crooked left second toe (the product of a skateboarding accident at twelve), or the places where he’s too ticklish. All of those are going cold, now, as he bleeds out beside the Nemeton, where it had left him; she remembers kneeling over its body (his body, misused, void-veined) in the pipes and thinking it was his, before she had recognized that the stung and prickling sensation in her chest was not new grief but seeking.
She’s all alone with him – she'd followed the aching tug and twinge in her skeleton (the tug of a red spool of yarn) – trying to scoop and cram the life back into him with her trembling hands, already feeling a wail start to crawl up from the bottom of her.
“There’s… a note…” he rasps, amber eyes sliding blearily to hers. “In my room… f’r you.”
Lydia shakes her head, wetness springing up in her eyes, pushing down harder (but not too hard, to avoid causing further internal trauma), gritting her teeth. She can feel her mascara clumping up from the moisture.
“No,” she insists, grinds it out, really, unable to stop her fingertips from curling against the fabric of his shirt. “I’m not reading that stupid thing unless you hand it to me yourself; do you hear me? So you’d better stay conscious, Stiles, or I swear to God—”
“You ’member in the third grade?” he whispers like she isn’t talking at all. “When you… you gave me back my… P-Pokémon cards. And you said…”
“Of course I don’t remember!” she shouts, crying now, more out of fury than anything else. “You can remind me some other time!”
“Do me a favor,” Stiles mumbles. His eyelids are lowering with finality that makes panic start to burst between Lydia’s bones. “M-Make sure Dad… eats good. Hug Scott. Okay?”
“I don’t need to do you any favors because you’re going to be fine,” Lydia chokes out. “Stiles, I’m not letting you—”
The scream rips out of her before she’s ready. It scrapes her whole throat raw and rattles the trees and seems to pry the stars apart, and Stiles is so still on the leaf-strewn earth, and his fidgeting fingers are so cold.
--
They get him back.
Lydia would be lying if she said she’d planned for it all along, if she said she hadn’t been that fazed, really, by the sight of a headstone with his actual first name on it (the only time any of them besides Scott had known it). But she’d also be lying if she said it hadn’t been her idea.
She hopes he outlives her. She would rather die than ever have to scream that way again.
v.
“Here,” Stiles says.
Lydia doesn’t look at the object in his hand, at first; she’s too busy being enraptured by the diploma in her hands and the glimmering gold script printed onto it, swirling out words that make her heart start to bob up like a balloon, which is more than a little ridiculous, since they won’t count for anything once she closes her last suitcase and sets out for a college far away from monsters: Conferred upon—Lydia Martin—Honors.
“This thing again?” she asks after he foists it upon her, holding it up for him to see and pursing her lips into an especially underwhelmed shape. He looks nervous. His mortarboard is crooked and his robes are open, revealing the dress shirt and slacks his dad had forced him into. “Stiles, when are you going to learn that I am not meant to read this?”
His brow furrows, dark eyebrows knitting together, fingers darting up to scratch at the back of his head.
“Well, I mean, that’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” he splutters. “I’d say you’ve more… passed up every single opportunity you’ve had to read it, even when I was kind of very extremely dead, but…”
“I’m not going to read it,” she tells him with conviction.
Now he looks annoyed. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t need to,” she explains with a toss of her hair, still holding the folded envelope between two fingers. Neither her mortarboard nor the gold valedictorian tassel on it are loosed by the motion. “If you have something to say to me, I’d certainly hope you could say it to my face, instead of scribbling it out on some piece of binder paper you tore out of your math notebook.”
“Hey, now, that is quality stationery from Staples, okay, I’m not an animal,” Stiles defends, pointing at it. “Lydia, come on…”
“I repeat: if you are going to impart any sentiments of groundbreaking seriousness to me, I expect you to do it verbally,” Lydia cuts in as haughtily as she can. “Out loud.”
“I know what ‘verbally’ means,” Stiles grunts, scowling.
“It was for emphasis,” Lydia says. “The point is, I am not settling for some cheap, roundabout method here. It would be like breaking up with me via text.”
“Okay, I know for a fact that Jackson did that at least three times,” Stiles argues, “And you did it at least four. And I’m not knocking that, but Lydia, look, you know what happens when I talk; my brain goes faster than I can make noises and then I just sound like all I know is word salad. With ranch.”
Lydia physically wrestles back a chuckle.
“Humor will get you nowhere,” she insists. She hands the paper back to him, slamming it against his chest, and he has to grab it to keep it from falling. At his wilted look, she sighs, raising her eyebrows at him. “Stiles, really? You really still need notes to get this across?”
“Well—” Even though he probably knows it’s not the right answer, he says it anyway: “Yeah?”
“I’ll see you at Allison’s tonight,” she tells him, putting a seal on the conversation. “Your fly is open, by the way.”
She’s halfway through walking away, heels clicking down the empty halls of Beacon Hills High School for the last time, past the Chemistry classroom where she’d tried to make a Molotov cocktail, past the English classroom where Jennifer had tightened the garrote wire around her throat, past the locker room where she had quieted Stiles’s breathing with her own desperate mouth, when he calls after her.
“Hey, Lydia.”
She turns. The sunshine catches the red in her hair. Her satin robes rustle with the motion. The hand holding onto her diploma is shaking, and she doesn’t know why.
She feels an unstoppable happiness swelling up from her chest, seeing Stiles, older, brighter, alive, some of his freckles now gone, smiling at her across the daylight. The sensation had started out on the lacrosse field when, after they’d all thrown their hats into the air and dispersed from their chairs, Scott had found her across the field and scooped her up and spun her; it had gone on, unfettered, when Allison had flung her arms around her, laughing, crying a little, aching with the joyful normalcy of it all, the small triumph of making it this far. It has reached a crescendo now, feeling Stiles’s heart beating at her, remembering how gangly he’d once looked in his lacrosse uniform, remembering the unsure shuffling of his feet when he’d danced with her, a long time ago.
Stiles’s smile grows softer, and his eyelids lower over it, and it becomes all at once proud and content and a little rueful, the sort of smile people get when they realize they’ve gotten somewhere they’ve always wanted to be.
“I love you,” he tells her, without weight or obligation, a simple fact of the universe, just like that the sky is blue and deciduous trees change colors in the fall.
Lydia beams at him, standing up taller, ready for whatever the wide world might conjure up for her, be it dragon or day job.
“I know,” she replies, and when she turns away again, vanishing around the corner, Stiles looks down at the note in his hands, blows out a breath, and tears it down the middle.
+.
She never tells him that she’d gone up to his room alone, back when the nogitsune had taken him away. The Sheriff had been at the station, working a late shift to distract himself from the cold air left by the unexplained absence of his son, but she’d known where the spare key had been hidden (under the stone turtle next to the long-dead rosebush in the front yard), so she’d let herself in.
She’d wrenched the scissors out of his mattress, cut every red string tied to it. The smell of him had gone stale, and she’d admitted to herself that maybe she’d known it well enough to tell.
She’d wrestled with herself over it for a while, in her defense. She’d stood in front of the bedside table, staring at the framed sketch, one hand absentmindedly massaging the side of her neck. Maybe he likes the drawing a lot, she’d deflected expertly, then not wanting to confront the possibility of reading something like that just because Stiles might never come home; now, gazing at it, bare feet and raw throat, she’s more afraid that it won’t be there, that she’ll never know, that he’ll never have gotten the chance to tell her.
She peels the tape off carefully, holding her breath.
For Lydia.
She sits on the floor and reads all of it four times, until it’s engraved somewhere inside of her, until she knows he’ll figure out that she’s seen it if he ever comes back, because there are two splattered tear stains in the middle of it, making the ink bleed on the word you. She puts it back just the way it had been, and wishes he was there, and hates the descending uncertainty accompanying this new conviction that she would be all right, fine really, if she could just find him and hold him.