Work Text:
14 April 2013 1:45 PM
from: Stilinski
so. prom. thoughts?
14 April 2013 1:46 PM
from: Stilinski
and by thoughts i mean do you want to go with me, mayhaps?
Staring blankly at a text message is something that Lydia’s never done. She’s Beacon Hills’ indisputable champion at replying to electronic communications with lightning speed. (Jackson used to outrank her, but then he moved, and she’d been going easy on him anyway; she had to give him something in that joke of a relationship.)
Speaking of Jackson, this is exactly the kind of method he would employ to ask her to prom. Impersonal, facile, and quick – a few keystrokes and an easily discardable envoy. And Lydia, frankly, has had her fill of the Jacksons of the world, so now, instead of staring at it, she scowls instead.
“What?” Allison says. She's lying on her back on Lydia’s bed with one leg crossed over the other. She lifts one cucumber off of her eye.
“Stiles just asked me to prom,” Lydia explains, her voice taut.
Allison brightens. She doesn’t even try to hide it. Her dimples frame the grin and her nose wrinkles slightly.
“That’s great,” she says.
“Via text message,” Lydia continues.
Allison’s smile fades immediately. Lydia can’t be sure, but she thinks she hears her mutter the words, “Oh, nice, Stiles,” just before she sits up and both of the cucumbers come off entirely.
“I will not stand for this,” Lydia declares. “I’m sending him back a formal, grammatically correct, properly punctuated rejection.”
“Really?” Allison frowns at her. A couple of strands of her hair have fallen out of the towel wrapped around her head. (She and Lydia are having an at-home spa day, which they richly deserve, thank you very much, after regularly vanquishing the forces of evil.) “I thought you… I mean, I thought this was your plan. Go to prom with Stiles.”
She isn’t wrong. That had been Lydia’s plan. She won’t get into the details of why; it’s a long and involved story that consists of a whole lot of lingering glances and quiet talks and philosophies of carpe diem, and also the fact that Stiles is about an eight, face-wise, which isn’t her usual objective, but his smile makes it a ten.
“That’s because I expected him to actually consider me worth the effort of asking,” Lydia repliess in a sour voice. “It’s Stiles. He’s supposedly been deeply in love with me for the past ten years and the best thing he’s got is a text message? I’m insulted.” For emphasis, she adds, voice now shrill with offense, “I am insulted! This is insulting!”
“So what are you going to do?” Allison asks. She flops back down on the bed with a sigh that clearly indicates her utter surrender at having to deal with all Stiles-and-Lydia-related complications. “Not murder him to preserve your honor, I hope.”
“I had considered that,” Lydia says dryly, “But strychnine is too much of a pain to concoct in a home laboratory.”
Allison nods like that’s fair. “So, plan B?”
Lydia sighs, delicate and quick, and straightens, folding her hands in her lap for a second before picking up her phone again.
“Right,” she mutters to herself. “Plan B.”
14 April 2013 2:02 PM
from: Lydia
Dear Mr. Stilinski,
While the sentiment behind your request for joint attendance to senior prom is very flattering, the fact of the matter is that your requesting tactic was woefully sub-par, and you have done nothing to entice me to be your escort, as your chosen method of text messaging indicates low commitment and interest levels. Should you wish to attend senior prom with me, I expect you to invite me in an appropriately creative manner. You have until Saturday, the 21st of April, to attain my consent. Choose your approach wisely.
Yours sincerely,
Lydia Martin
14 April 2013 2:07 PM
from: Stilinski
why is this a text message?? there are things called e-mails, lydia, you should try them sometime
14 April 2013 2:08 PM
from: Stilinski
but oh. ohoho. challenge accepted.
Allison smirks at the phone screen when Stiles’s second message comes through.
“You have just gotten yourself,” she says, “into so much trouble.”
“Yes, I realize that now,” Lydia replies a little wearily. “Asking Stiles to be creative is basically guaranteed to end in property damage.”
Allison nods slowly, the smile never leaving her face. Lydia rolls her eyes and swats Allison in the shoulder, and when her mom brings them some strawberries and Allison is in the bathroom, Lydia specifically counts how many there are and takes more than half as an act of vengeance.
There’s a lacrosse game that evening, Beacon Hills vs. Orinda, which should be a piece of cake. Lydia sits with Allison in the stands the way she always does, right between Melissa McCall and Chris Argent, her practiced aloof expression an excellent accessory to her new spring jacket. Allison sends her a couple of obnoxiously knowing looks whenever Stiles scores and she pumps her fist, but Lydia fires back just as many every time Allison leaps up and yells encouragement at Isaac or Scott. Game, set, match—Martin.
Beacon Hills wins, 9 to 3, the lacrosse equivalent of a landslide. Lydia almost feels bad that she can’t cheer anymore for fear of unleashing her banshee powers and making everyone’s eardrums explode. When Scott scores that last goal, the entire field bursts into roaring waves of thrilled victory.
There’s a kind of unmistakable rush of triumph that pumps through your entire body when you’re standing in a crowd at a sports game and the team that you love wins. It makes your pores erupt with energy. Lydia expects that this is what it will feel like when Stiles’s method for asking her to prom is actually successful.
And speaking of—
He comes sprinting over as soon as they’re all done lifting Scott in the air (they’ve been Weasley-Is-Our-Kinging him ever since the season started) and comes to a stop at the foot of the bleachers, tugging his helmet off. Lydia’s heart jumps into her throat at the sight of his face, flushed and beaming, his untidy hair matted, his forehead glistening with sweat.
“Okay,” he pants, eyes practically glittering with exhilaration, “I am completely high on adrenaline right now, and honestly my wrist might be broken but I cannot feel it due to said adrenaline, so I’m just gonna come right out and ask it: Do you wanna go to prom with me?”
“Asking me under the influence,” Lydia chirps primly, polishing her manicure on her skirt. She can almost feel Allison roll her eyes next to her. “Not a good approach. Try again.”
“Damn it,” Stiles hisses, throwing his stick down and yelping in agony when he does. His wrist is not broken, but it is definitely sprained. If Lydia goes to prom with him, he might be wearing an arm brace.
Outrageous.
On Monday, during lunch, Lydia goes to sit at her usual spot beside Allison and stops in her tracks a few feet away. There is a plate on the table with baby carrots on it arranged in the shape of the word “PROM.”
Her eyes swivel, underwhelmed, to Stiles, who’s sitting beside Scott on the opposite side of the table and trying to look like he hadn’t even noticed she’d shown up. Scott, though, is staring at her with rapt attention. (And that, she thinks wryly, is what makes Scott McCall friend of the year – he’s so concerned about your feelings that he’s more invested in the outcome of your endeavors than you are.)
“I’m sorry, is this supposed to be a spelling exercise, or modern art?” Lydia sardonically demands of Stiles, setting her tray down.
He clearly did not expect this response, because he frowns dubiously up at her, then, glancing over at the plate, makes a small “oh” shape of realization with his lips.
“I didn’t have enough for a question mark,” he says. “Or your name, or my name, or any verbs or prepositions.”
“I can see that,” Lydia chirps, batting her eyelashes at him with acid coyness. “Unfortunately, I can’t give an answer if it’s not a question, so you can mark this down as another failure.”
Stiles tries to exasperatedly drop his face onto the table, but instead it winds up in Scott’s Sloppy Joe, which had been moved over at the last second to accommodate more space for Malia (who does not believe in senior proms, as coyotes are not allowed to have them and she would rather spend her Friday night hunting, and Lydia says good for her, even though eating raw meat can give you salmonella).
"Oh, Stiles, no," Scott exclaims.
“What are we talking about?” Isaac asks, settling with his tray next to Allison.
“Prom,” Allison says. “You’re going with me, right?”
Isaac blinks, looking somewhat shell-shocked. “I… guess I am.”
Lydia daintily bites off the end of her celery stick.
“Frrmgnhfnr,” Stiles growls into the bun.
On Tuesday, she opens her AP History textbook in class to find that several pages have been embellished with various arrows and numbers written in orange Sharpie. She plays along with a short huff, flipping from page to page, watching various revolutions and Renaissance paintings blur into one another until she lands on the spread of the world map just past the glossary.
Tu veut aller au prom avec moi?
She reads the words hovering above France a few times, mouth thinning, before she silently tears a piece of binder paper out of her notebook and folds it in half. Inside, she writes:
Work on your conjugation and avoid vandalism. And it’s bal de promo. Nice effort.
A few seconds after she passes the note over her shoulder and hears it make its way down the row of desks, Stiles lets out a harshly whispered, “What?” that immediately catches the attention of Mr. Yukimura.
“Something to share with the class, Mr. Stilinski?” he asks, and even though he's smiling, Lydia does not doubt in that moment that he could murder Stiles and no one would ever find the body.
“Oh, no, no sir, nope,” Stiles answers with several shakes of his head.
When Lydia simpers at him over her shoulder, she sees him stick his tongue out at her, and there’s really something to be admired about that (and she’s not just talking about the shape of it, the red tint, the way he wets his lips with it after he’s done), such an absolute regression to the third grade all in the span of about twenty seconds.
She remembers Stiles in the third grade. His hair had been long and in his face and the only reason anyone had noticed him had been because he’d been gone for ten days after his mother had died.
Wednesday comes and goes with no noticeable efforts, and Lydia can’t have that—the unspoken conditions of this challenge had been that Stiles would be required to keep her entertained until the deadline even if he isn’t successful at acquiring her agreement to go to prom with him—so she accosts him during the passing period between AP Calculus and AP Literature.
“What, no skywriting?” she says without preamble. She’s got him backed up against a locker. He gulps visibly; his Adam’s apple bobs up and down and she follows its movement with her eyes. “No a capella group singing your proposition to the tune of Mozart’s 40th?”
“God, no,” Stiles replies, wrinkling his nose and making Lydia want to smack herself for thinking that it’s cute. “Jeez, Lydia, I’m being creative; I’m not out of my mind.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Lydia snips. She folds her arms at her chest, quirking an eyebrow up at him but standing firmly in place, giving him no space in which to loosen away from the locker against which he is now flattened. “So what’s the deal? Don’t tell me you’ve run out of ideas already.” She squints at him. “Honestly, if the bad French was supposed to be your ace in the hole, I don’t even know if I want to be seen with you, let alone go to prom with you.”
To her slight surprise, Stiles doesn’t immediately shoot back further banter, but rather reddens slightly and reaches up to tug at his earlobe. His eyes dart away from hers, focusing instead on what must be a very interesting spot on the opposite wall.
“I dunno,” he mumbles back. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m… y’know, pressuring you, or anything.” He clears his throat. “Like, honestly, Lydia, in any other situation this would be considered straight-up harassment; I’m just saying. And I don’t like feeling like a harasser.” He pulls a skeptical face. “That’s a word, right?”
“Barely,” Lydia says instantly, just before she loosens and gives him a supremely unimpressed look, her eyebrows lowering. “Trust me, if you were harassing me, I would just have Allison make arrow shish-kebabs with your eyeballs.”
“That was nice and graphic; thank you,” Stiles mutters flatly. He slumps against the lockers, starting to twiddle his right fingers against the surface. He still hasn’t looked at her. “Look, if you didn’t like the way I asked you, you could’ve just said no.”
Lydia narrows her eyes, but doesn’t say anything.
“You look amazing today, by the way?” he tries, his voice nudging up with hopefulness at the end.
“Stating facts is a waste of time,” she says. He gets the message, because he returns to the topic at hand.
“I mean,” he plows on, gesturing vaguely with the hand not tapping out a frantic rhythm on the metal doors, “Sorry for doing it via text, but I figured it’d be easier.”
“Easier?” Lydia repeats, scathing. “Oh, I can only imagine how much easier it must have been for you; you didn’t have to audibly form any multisyllabic words.”
“I meant for you,” Stiles interjects, eyes fixated on a point over her shoulder. Lydia stills, blinking up at him, rendered effectively speechless. “Among the probably millions of other invites, I thought it’d be easier for you to deal with something deletable. Plus, it’s—I don’t know. I didn’t want to make it a big thing because big things usually equal pressure and I… I didn’t want you to say yes just because it’d be awkward to say no after I had Jared read it over morning announcements.”
By this point, Lydia is fully fuming. She’s never been very good at doing that without looking like a particularly put-out preteen, because her lips fold in tightly and her cheeks sort of puff out and her fists clench at her sides and her face flushes pink, but her whole body exudes imminent rage, which is something, at least.
Frankly, she thinks, how dare he; how dare Stiles Stilinski have the gall to believe that she could ever be pressured into anything, much less into dressing up and dancing around a large, dimly lit room with him, especially after she’d smashed a kiss onto him until the breath had stopped inside his chest and he’d saved her most valued limbs from a coyote trap and they’d pulled him up out of death, out of the void, and she’d stayed over at his house six nights in a row until the purpling bags under his eyes had started to fade with new sleep and sunlight. They’ve faced down monsters together and vanquished chaos itself and he’s still scared of her, scared to look at her, convinced that any and all time she’s spent with him is concealing some long-running ulterior motive, like that she’s been using his Netflix account for months so she won’t have to pay for her own (which is true, but not ulterior).
The truth of it, though, is that she’s unaccustomed to boys being considerate, to boys treating her feelings cautiously and with invested care. It’s new territory for her, hearing that her decisions and convictions are the only ones that matter, being told that she’s the arbiter of her own heart (purportedly cold and unbeating and never once jumping at the sight of lanky dark-haired boys in Jeeps parked in front of her house at two in the morning, waving her down to go to Denny’s in her pajamas, because people whose best friends almost die at the hands of oni deserve some Denny’s every once in a while). It’s not that her own self-confidence rests on Stiles’s weak shoulders, or anything; it’s just that she’s better acquainted with being sure of her cleavage presentation and hair styling than the admirability of her ever-sparking brain and her unguarded smile (but he’s been nudging her in the right direction for those).
“Stiles,” she tells him coldly, “You are one of the smartest people I know—“ Here he rises up with pride. “But sometimes you’re so earth-shatteringly stupid that I almost feel sorry for you.”
He deflates again pitifully.
“Work on your sincerity,” she says, “instead of your tact.”
“Huh?” he sputters, but she’s already gone, heels stabbing sharp ticks onto the linoleum of the now-empty hallway.
And she doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the day, or on Thursday; she doesn’t even talk about him until she picks Allison up on Friday morning, and it isn’t voluntary, for the record.
“So did you say yes to Stiles yet?” Allison asks before she’s even buckled her seatbelt.
Lydia purses her scarlet lips and cocks her head, squinting at the road.
“What an interesting way of phrasing it,” she says in an airy voice. “Not, did you make up your mind about whether or not you’ll go with Stiles yet? Not, what did you have for breakfast this morning, Lydia; I’m so interested?”
“Probably strawberries and a slice of toast with Nutella like you always do,” Allison retorts. She is the only person on earth who knows about Lydia’s shame Nutella problem. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Lydia says too quickly. She huffs, flexing her fingers over the steering wheel when the car coasts to a halt at an intersection. “He’s just making this worse for himself; that’s all.”
“Wow, Stiles going overboard on something; that’s a shocker,” Allison deadpans.
Lydia frowns over at her, lower lip sticking out. “I never said he was going overboard.”
Allison shrugs, casual and smug. Lydia squints dangerously at her.
“I can’t really think of him screwing something up any other way,” Allison says. “He’s a smart guy. Too smart for his own good, probably, just like somebody else in this car.”
“Okay, one: there’s no such thing,” Lydia says, “as too smart; two: I resent the implication.”
Allison makes a face. “The one that you’re ridiculously intelligent?”
“The one that Stiles is anywhere near on my level,” Lydia corrects her, even though she’s not really being serious; Stiles is somewhere near on her level, but that’s the best she’ll give him.
“You know,” Allison tells her after a few minutes of comfortable silence, “Maybe before you start playing mind games with him, you should figure out what you actually want.”
Lydia likes to think that she knows what she wants. To go to Harvard, to marry a rich doctorate student who will let her have as many horses and books as she wants, to win the Fields Medal before she’s thirty, and to leave the darkness-encrusted town of Beacon Hills behind in a flurry of dust and ragged memories without looking back. They had been normal dreams to have, before she’d found out that her screams can herald death and that graveyards make her sick and that she feels more satisfied saving lives and knowing things loudly, now, than knowing them privately and waiting out all of the people who are afraid of what her mind and her cutting beauty can do. And Harvard is nice, but it doesn’t have Allison, or Scott, or Stiles, or nemetons.
“I want to just have one nice night,” Lydia replies quietly before she can consider the words. “I want to dress up and dance to poorly selected top 40 hits and forget that this freaking town is like a general store for amoral supernatural forces. That’s it.”
“I don’t know if going to prom with him as a coping mechanism is exactly a smart thing to do,” Allison tells her, in that frank and frustratingly right voice of hers, and Lydia is so grateful, right then, that Kira had knocked the oni’s katana out of its hands before it had been about to pierce Allison through the chest. “How do you feel about Stiles, honestly?”
They hit another red light. The universe seems intent on prolonging this conversation, but, strangely, Lydia’s usual compulsion to avoid it is in some unattainable corner, neutral and silent.
“I feel something,” she whispers.
“Something?” Allison prods.
It’s not a good enough answer; Lydia knows that, but she also knows that the thought of confronting whatever boundless sensation opens up inside of her chest when Stiles looks her in the eye is scary, just the way werewolves are, because werewolves, and Stiles’s eyes, are things she doesn’t know or understand and might never, fully, and understanding things is about the only thing she can always count on herself to be able to do.
“Something,” she reiterates.
There’s a weight on the word now that hadn’t been there before. Something, she thinks again to herself; something that feels like words disrupting her heart, something that feels like faith and admiration with which she’s woefully inexperienced. Something that makes her want to kiss that running mouth of his a hundred more times, until she knows every facet of him, until she’ll always be able to keep up (but maybe she always has been).
“The light’s been green for thirty seconds,” Allison comments just in time to be punctuated by a horn from behind them, and Lydia jumps and snaps her foot down on the gas pedal, vaulting the car across the intersection with a lurch that dislodges the scattered hesitations in her head; cooties, she thinks, aren’t real, scientifically, but maybe they’re just a fancier word for wanting to follow someone until you both run out of road to walk on.
When she gets to her locker, she stops a couple of feet in front of it, blinking. There’s really no better response. The thing has a single string of bright red yarn trailing out of it and down the hall.
She looks to her left, then to her right, then back to the yarn again, making a big show of folding her lips in pensively and tilting her head.
“What’s that?” Kira asks at her shoulder, startling her into jumping.
“I see Derek’s been teaching you the art of silent approach,” Lydia says dryly, reaching for the lock and twisting in the combination on the knob. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees that Kira’s holding about six textbooks, and her hair is in two braids. “Cute hairdo.”
“Oh!” Kira sounds astonished, the way she usually does whenever Lydia says something positive in her direction. “Thanks.”
“As for what this is,” Lydia continues when the lock clicks open, “I have no clue, but I strongly suspect—”
She swings the door open to find that a piece of paper has been taped in front of her line of books. The yarn has been knotted once through a single hole punch at the base of it. Written in black marker are the words, “Follow Me,” and then, in smaller letters, “Or Don’t; It’s All You; No Pressure.”
“Stiles,” Lydia finishes, gesturing illustratively to the paper.
Kira blinks at her. “I’m not going to argue with you that this is definitely something Stiles would do, but how can you tell?”
“He’s the only other person besides Allison who knows my combination,” Lydia answers simply. “And I know his handwriting.”
“Wow,” Kira says, eyebrows raising. “Well… I’m glad somebody does, because I have no clue what any of that says.” She shifts some of the books in her arms. “What’s this for, anyway?” A look of panic suddenly overtakes her face. “Oh, my God; are you sure this isn’t a trap set by some of the pack’s enemies? Should I tell Scott? Maybe I should; I mean, unless you’re sure…”
Lydia has to suppress a roll of her eyes. Scott’s frantic motherly paranoia is rubbing off on innocent transfer students.
“I’m sure.” She puts as much reassuring conviction into her voice as possible. “Maybe you should try worrying about something a little more pressing. Like how you’re going to get Scott to ask you to prom.”
Kira’s cheeks blossom into searing red and Lydia doesn’t even try to conceal her smirk. Checkmate.
(Payback for inquiring, a few weeks ago, about romantic involvement between her and Stiles, because they’d make such a cute couple, unless she didn’t like him that way!)
She waits until school is out for the day to go back to her locker and evaluate whether or not she’ll take the bait and see where the yarn leads. The halls are empty, and she feels like she’s about to be swallowed whole for a second, standing in the middle of one of them, her arms free of textbooks and notes, her hands automatically moving toward each other to fidget and wring.
She follows the scarlet length slowly, one foot in front of the other, eyes never straying from the (now slightly trampled) line of it, breath caught somewhere under her tongue. Her heart swells intermittently without her permission.
Along the way, her mind ambles – it lingers over a weeknight spent crying in her car, a snapping sensation in her chest twenty minutes after leaving Stiles at the hospital, a pair of arms – musky smelling, like the attic of an old house – crushing her against a frail chest after Aiden had stopped breathing, a shivering boy’s shoulder under pink and purple lights three years ago as he’d swayed in time with her and she’d been looking for the wrong person.
She rounds a corner. Stiles has grown since then, not just in height and limb but in voice, in the depth of his eyes, in the sagging of his shoulders when he doesn’t think anyone’s looking. His eyelashes might be longer; she can’t be sure. He no longer flails or stammers. His driving has improved. He still sings power ballads out of key in the Jeep; he still smells the same, like too much laundry detergent, because neither he nor his father are comfortable yet with working a washing machine.
She likes Stiles, she realizes when she passes the cafeteria. She hunkers down on her wedge ankle booties and picks the yarn up off the ground, now striding alongside it while holding it between her fingers. She likes the way his voice fills the silence, so that she doesn’t have to listen to the Voices; she likes the way the world is when he’s breathing in it; she likes his raw pink elbows and his quick gait and the way his brow furrows when he’s thinking. She likes the way the air around him jolts with an invisible electricity when he figures something out; she, despite her enjoyment of burly boys who hike her skirts up in unoccupied teacher’s offices, likes the delicacy with which he handles her, the care and meaning poured into the way he pats her shoulder or grips her forearm or reaches for her out of instinct whenever the pack stares down a monster. She likes the way his fingers instinctively curl around hers when she grabs his wrist to lead him somewhere.
(Oh, shit. Oh, shit. She really likes Stiles.)
She comes to a stop at the double doors under which the yarn continues. It’s the entrance to the band room. She raises an eyebrow, but pulls one of the doors toward her anyway, slipping in through the opening.
The light inside is dim; the late afternoon sun is on the other side of the building, but some of its leftover daylight sifts through the dust in the air and illuminates the polished surfaces of the tubas and cymbals.
Stiles is sitting at the piano, playing what sounds like Dots on his phone. The end of the yarn dangles over the edge of the piano bench next to him. She has no idea how he’d set this up so that no band kids would tamper with it; those weirdos are wired to cause ruckuses.
“Are you winning?” she calls, approaching him.
Stiles yelps and jumps. His phone flies out of his hands and lands on some of the keys, causing a jarring high note to clink into the quiet.
“Holy mother of everything,” he wheezes, clutching his chest with one veined hand. “You scared the crap out of me.”
Lydia gives him a flat look. “Not literally, I hope. And you’re the one who led me in here; you have no right to complain.”
“I so do!” he argues, pointing accusatorially at her. “If I have a heart attack and die, you can bet your ass you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”
Lydia’s hands go to her hips. She lets her glare do the talking for her, and Stiles’s resistance only lasts a few seconds before he cracks, sighing loudly and dropping his head back with a pained expression and a silently mouthed “Why.”
“Okay, restart,” he announces, and then positions himself on the piano bench invitingly, waggling his eyebrows at her. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Lydia. What an incredible coincidence that you should happen to show up h—“
He moves to lean against the piano, but his elbow lands on the keys, resulting in another sharp noise that may as well split the air in half. He grimaces like someone’s just shot him in the kidney and Lydia doubts she looks like she’s enjoying herself much more.
“Second restart,” he declares when the reverberations have ebbed. “Lydia.” He clasps his hands in his lap, sitting forward slightly, patting the spot on the bench beside him. “There’s something I want to ask you.”
Lydia considers firing back a biting retort, but thinks the better of it when she catches the rampant hopefulness in his earnest eyes. She bites her lip, approaching him carefully, sitting down next to him, keeping her knees together.
He smiles at her, eyes half-lidded and blatantly adoring, one corner of his mouth tugged up into a crooked smile. His red hoodie is faded on him from years of sun-wear. There are new freckles scattered over his nose from the onset of spring.
“You look great,” he tells her.
She rolls her eyes fondly. “Smooth.”
“Thank you, thank you.” He straightens, closing the fall over the piano keys. Lydia turns a loose thread from the hem of her dress between her fingers, out of sight. (And she doesn’t know that he’s thinking that maybe his whole high school life has led up to this, or he’d thought it would, but that maybe it’s silly to hinge all of that on a yes or a no, because maybe seeing Lydia smile every now and then is what really matters.)
“So,” Lydia murmurs.
Stiles sighs, and it pulls his shoulders up, and they don’t slacken again until the exhale.
“Yeah,” he says. “So.”
Unexpectedly, he reaches over tentatively and clasps her hand, lifting it out of her lap and resting it on the surface of the fall with his. Lydia doesn’t draw away, staring at the veins on his arm, acutely aware of the life pumping through him.
“Okay,” he croaks, and then clears his throat. “Here goes.”
“Take your time,” Lydia starts to jibe him, but then he’s drawn her hand toward his chest so that she has to turn slightly to accommodate him. He pulls the yarn up from the edge of the piano and keeps his eyes fixated on her knuckles, blowing out a breath. The surface of his wrist brace brushes against her palm.
“Lydia,” he says, carefully wrapping the yarn around her fingers, looking bashful. A smile is slightly tugging at the corners of his lips, but his hands are shaking. “I’m sorry. I messed this up. You’re right—I was more focused on looking cool and not wanting to put pressure on you than I was in conveying my, y’know, utmost sincerity. Like, that I’m practically oozing sincerity from my pores.” Lydia wrinkles her nose. Gross. “So here’s me, being sincere.”
He lifts his eyes up to meet hers, and her breath hitches at the earnest focus in them, at the way he doesn’t blink or eschew.
“I’d really, really love it if I could go to prom with you. You are so brilliant, and so great, and it would be an honor for me to…” He waves a hand as if trying to pluck the words out of thin air, and Lydia’s glad he doesn’t have Scott’s super-hearing, because her heartbeat feels deafening right now, and it’s absurd. “I don’t know, desperately scramble to find a tie and a corsage that match whatever ridiculously expensive dress you’ll be wearing, like, let’s be real; I could probably buy a new car with the amount of money it’ll cost you.”
“Brilliant and great,” Lydia repeats, purposefully nitpicky, even though she already knows her answer. “I think you forgot the most basic one.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Beautiful, I mean.”
“Stating facts is a waste of time,” Stiles says slyly. She whacks him lightly on the shoulder and he sways away, snickering.
“You’re a waste of time,” she retorts like a fourth-grader, but then she pulls him into a hug, dropping her chin onto his shoulder and wrapping her arms around his torso, closing her eyes over her smile. “I accept.”
Stiles tries to damper his wide grin, but doesn’t do a very good job of it; Lydia sees it ignite both of his eyes. It’s one of those stupidly Stiles smiles, too, one that fills his whole face and shows all his teeth and looks just a little bit bewildered and a little bit overjoyed. It’s like a disease; within seconds, she’s mirroring him, unable to help herself.
He falters, suddenly, eyes dimming.
“This… this isn’t going to be one of those ‘just as friends’ things, right?” he asks, and then shakes his head as if to ward something off. “Wow, sorry, that sounded really douchey. I just mean it’s, uh, I want to be clear that… I want to go to this thing with you as more than just friends. Like, I don’t know how many more ‘just friends’ I’ve got in me; and that’s no pressure on you, I swear, it’s just that I know sometimes these things can get lost in translation —or, not translation, more like communication? Because I’m not translating anything, but what I mean is, I’m not great at articulation when I’m nervous, and I am so nervous right now; I’m talking terrible stress B.O. and sweaty palms and weak knees and I think I’m seeing spots—”
“Stiles,” Lydia interrupts him, bracing both of her hands on his shoulders. He sputters into quiet, staring owlishly at her. She raises her eyebrows. “If you pull any of this nonsensical rambling at the actual prom, then you can be assured it will be just as friends.”
“Okay, the implication there is that right now, it’s not just friends, but that it could be, which I don’t really know what to do with—“
“Stiles,” Lydia repeats, talking over him now, “I don’t go to senior prom with anyone just as friends. It defies any and all dignity I’ve built up over the past seven years. And Allison may have blackmailed me into going to winter formal with you, but not even threatening to send my nudes to the board of education would dissuade me from going to prom with you romantically, so you have nothing to worry about, I promise.”
Stiles gives her a blank (somewhat blanched) look. Her hands haven’t left his shoulders.
“You have nudes?” he whispers at length, leaning forward incredulously.
Lydia rolls her eyes and hits him upside the head. Typical. She releases his shoulders as though they’re moldy and turns to stand and leave.
“Nononowaitwait!” he yelps, flinging out an arm to halt her. She pauses mid-step, but doesn’t turn around. “You… I just want to be clear. You said romantically? As in, you’re going to prom with me… in a romantic… context, a romantical context?”
“You’re a smart guy, Stiles,” Lydia answers, tilting her head back to smirk at him over her shoulder. “Figure it out.”
She considers that a pretty decent cover for the incessant fluttering in her stomach that’s threatening to burst out of her in breathless laughter, even though there’s nothing especially funny going on.
“Oh, my God, I like you so much,” Stiles blurts out. “I really like you. I really, seriously am in love with you. I like you a lot.”
“I actually have to get back home before my mom calls the police, but if you figure out more ways to say that, text me so I can hear them,” Lydia says. She twiddles her fingers at him, striding for the door. “By the way, I'll be wearing blue, so plan accordingly.”
It’s only when the door is closed safely behind her and she’s at least six paces down the hall from the band room that she pauses. She bows her head, beaming privately to herself, biting her lip, letting out the smallest of ebullient laughs. She tucks some of her hair behind her ear, waits for the heat in her cheeks to subside, and then takes a deep breath, drawing herself up to her full height again.
The public cannot be seeing her blush.