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Ever since the whole substitute sacrifices thing, Beacon Hills has been living up to its name more than even Deaton had expected. Personally, Lydia thinks that it could stand to be a little less of a beacon; there can't be that many supernatural creatures who are unable resist the pull of it, right?
Apparently, there can be.
That's why when the call from Derek comes in, explaining that some kind of wind spirit had decided to take up residence at the old Hale house, Lydia has had enough.
"Lydia, if you can distract them, then Allison and I ca-" Stiles stops at the look on her face. Good for him, she thinks a little viciously. He's finally learned how to pick up on signals. "What?"
"I'm not interested in dealing with another wind spirit," she says blandly, knowing that she's projecting her utter apathy perfectly. Honestly, she’s not exactly uninterested; she would kind of like to compare this wind spirit to the others, see if there are any patterns she can spot that the books or the bestiary haven't mentioned. She's sure she would find some. But it has been a long week, a long two years, and the thrill of the supernatural is wearing a little thin.
It’s exhausting, and it's not like she's letting her grades drop just because yet another supernatural being has a vendetta or no idea how things work around here. She's going to have more than one Ivy League college on their knees for her, and no Peter Hale wannabe is going to stop her, particularly since not even Peter himself could mess up her perfect GPA.
"Lydia?" Scott asks, looking at her with slight suspicion. He trusts her, as he should after more than two years of her no longer being trapped in the dark, but she knows he's heard the lie.
"I refuse to be involved in this. Call me in a week," she says, pronouncing every word carefully so they don't misunderstand. She doesn't know what she's going to do yet, but it isn't wailing till her throat hurts or Scott manages to deal with whoever it is just couldn't resist the lure of Beacon Hills.
Lydi-"
"No."
She walks out the door, and doesn't look back.
She calls Allison within the hour, suitcase unzipped on her bed and a stack of clothes to consider next to it.
"Lydia?"
"Allison. Have you heard from Scott yet?"
"He said you just walked out." It should be a statement, but Allison makes it sound like a question. She should know better, really.
"Yeah. I'm going for a drive. A long one. Are you coming?”
"Getting out of here sounds good. I-" Her voice muffles suddenly, and Lydia uses the time to reconsider her wardrobe. She doesn't think she'll need evening wear, but what if she wants to go dancing? Allison's quite a good dancer, and she wouldn't mind having her girlfriend close enough to whisper into her ear and kiss her cheek.
"Lydia?"
"Mmm?"
"Cora says she’s coming too.” Well, obviously. She might get on Lydia’s nerves sometimes, but they are dating. “And also that you should pick us up ASAP because Derek’s pouting.” Again. It probably has something to do with his anniversary of meeting Jennifer coming up, and he tends to brood about these things long before they’ve actually happened. Then again, it could just as easily be Peter calling from wherever he’s living now. She pointedly doesn't care about where that is, as long as it isn't anywhere near her.
"She's paying for gas," Lydia says, and in the privacy of her room, smiles wide. She hadn't been this comfortable with anyone she had dated before, couldn't risk them figuring out that she didn't actually have the IQ of a brick wall. Letting Allison in had been easier than expected. Cora had been harder, because talking to her was often like talking to a sarcastic brick wall, but they managed. Quite well, actually, she thinks, considering what they had gotten up to last week. Her mouth still feels a little sore.
"I'll grab Derek's credit card before we leave," Cora promises, and she imagines Cora leaning in close to shout into the phone, exchanging smiles with Allison because she can. Her mouth twists fondly; sometimes it just hits her how much she wants to keep them.
Allison giggles, sounding tinny on the other end of the line, and Lydia can almost see her smile when she starts talking again.
"Where are we going?" she asks, and oh. She hadn't thought about that.
"Somewhere warm. Somewhere with good shopping. Somewhere with a low instance of usually murderous, supernaturally inclined beings," she muses.
"So, somewhere not here?"
"Pretty much."
"Sounds good to me. Even if I'm stuck with you two," Cora adds, and Lydia may not be a werewolf, but she can hear the lie.
Allison and Cora are waiting on the curb when she pulls up outside Allison's house, opening up the boot and piling in their bags before they even say hello.
"I can see where my role is here," Lydia calls out, and Allison pauses on her way round to the passenger door to kiss her on the cheek.
"Do you like my new chauffeur? My daddy got her for me," she teases, her voice as affected as the rich girls in the movie they'd watched last week, taking over the loft to have a movie night.
(Derek had complained about watching Wild Child for the third month in a row, but Lydia had caught him watching from the doorway more than once. She'll just invite him in next time.)
"Very pretty. If she doesn't drive us into a ditch, I say we keep her," Cora responds, hopping into the back seat and slamming the door a little too hard.
"Watch the door, werewolf, or I'll make you drive," she threatens, but she's too pleased about leaving behind all the blood and stress to really get into it. On a good day, she and Cora can snap at each other until Allison shuts them up, but right now she just wants to get out of here.
"As if you'd let me even touch the wheel, banshee," Cora tosses back, and Lydia hates to admit that anyone else could be right, particularly Cora, who continuously brings up the instance of her being right whenever she's wrong, as if that past time makes up for now, but. She's right. Lydia just got her car out of the shop, again, and she isn't eager to have it back there any time soon.
“I thought we were going a road trip, says the hunter,” snarks Allison, fiddling with the radio and filling the car with the sound of static and the low noises of auto-tuned voices that would probably sound better without it.
“Yes, sure, you can kill us with your bow and one hand tied behind your back,” mocks Lydia. Allison smiles.
“She’s right, though, I feel creepy loitering in the driveway,” Cora points out, settling back into her chair.
“Afraid you might get arrested again? Being creepy is a criminal offense, you know,” Allison teases, clicking her seat belt in. Cora’s grumble of “It was one time,” is ignored. She thinks Stiles will tease Cora and Derek for being arrested for standing outside a paranoid man’s house until he forgets about it. Which will be never, since Stiles has a memory rivalling an elephant. In their defence, they had been waiting for an omega to show up to make a treaty with them, but still.
“If you’re quite done?” she says, raising an eyebrow at Allison before shifting to eyeball Cora in the mirror.
“Can your chauffeur talk to you that way?” Cora asks as they pull out of the driveway, and Lydia stops the car just to see her lurch a little. She doesn’t expect Cora to nearly fly through the window, her claws sinking into the front seats the only thing stopping her from landing Lydia’s car in the shop for the second time this week, before they’ve even left Allison’s street.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a seat belt?” she hisses, her pounding heartbeat and the shock of fear still clawing through her veins making her sharper than usual.
“Haven’t you ever heard of instant healing?” Cora throws back.
“You wouldn’t need instant healing if you had a seat belt!”
“How would a seat belt stop a kanima from tearing my arm off?”
“In this instance, a seat belt-“
“Cora, put on your seat belt so we can go,” Allison interrupts, turning up the radio to a station they’ve listened to a thousand times before. It’s soothing, knowing that they have a routine, and she smiles an apology at Cora in the mirror. She’s not sorry, not really, because she has a handful of people she cares about who put themselves in danger all the time, and she would rather they not die, or ruin her car, because of something as mundane as a seat belt.
They’ve driven past the ‘Welcome to Beacon Hills’ sign before any of them realizes they haven’t picked a destination yet, and Lydia pulls up two feet from said sign to go over their options. She’s never done something as unplanned as this, except for the Peter debacle which wasn’t her choice, and basically everything with Jackson after he got the bite without her knowledge, which wasn’t her choice either.
Even her relationship with Allison and Cora was planned, at least a little, reading books on polyamory on the internet and having discussions that wound into the night about how it would all work. Then Cora and Allison started kissing on her bed instead of paying attention to the virtues of spending time in pairs, and that had been that.
“Where are we going?”
“This was your idea,” Cora says.
“So it’s your turn now.”
Cora shrugs, as if she’s made a good point, and trails her finger down the map. Lydia holds back a shudder at Cora’s terrible, uncared for nails, which Cora won’t even let her paint because as soon as the claws come out all the paint peels off like she dipped them in a vat of paint stripper. Since she spends more time with the claws out than in, these days, Lydia had been forced to reluctantly accept it, for now. She stills makes her file them, though.
“Beach,” Cora says abruptly, and Allison tilts her head so she can see better.
“Not that I’m against it, but why the beach? Can you even swim?”
“Mom used to take us there in the summer. There’s a bit away from the main beach so if we, you know, turned, people wouldn’t start screaming or shooting. People tend to shoot first, ask questions and figure out they’ve shot a kid later.”
“I get that,” Allison says, and she and Cora smile softly at each other. Lydia will never understand what it means to be brought up as pack or feel so strongly like a hunter, and she doesn’t want to, but it’s nice that they do.
“So, beach?” she says, breaking the silence.
“Beach,” Allison agrees, and Lydia waits until she hears Cora’s seat belt click into place before she turns the keys and presses down on the accelerator, rolling back onto the road and fixing her eyes on the horizon like that will make them reach it sooner.
They spend two days driving, including one night where they tried to sleep in the car, at Allison’s insistence - apparently it’s easier to defend the car than a strange hotel room - before Cora kicks Lydia in the head and she demands that they drive through the night. She volunteers Cora for the job, because she’s a werewolf and doesn’t get as tired and Lydia has a headache, alright?
(She does threaten to scream right in Cora’s ear if she wrecks the car, and sits in the passenger seat with her hand on Cora’s thigh, sunshine yellow nails digging in whenever Cora make a move she thinks will endanger her car. It’s an effective method.)
They reach the beach at 10 minutes to midnight, which doesn’t stop Allison from flinging the door opening and running down to where the sand hits the water, standing outlined by the moon. Cora isn’t far behind, her caustic veneer shed for a moment in this place of childhood memories. Lydia wonders if she can still smell her family here, untinged by smoke and burnt leaves, or if time and the salty smell of the sea have buried the scents so far down that it’s as if they were never here.
She follows more sedately, locking the car behind her before slipping down to join her girlfriends at the edge of the water. She doesn’t know how long they stand there, just looking at each other and cracking jokes and smiling like a weight has been lifted. It has, really. It’s been two days since she’s had to look at a book older than the entire pack combined to figure out what’s trying to kill them now, and one and a half since they’ve mentioned anything more supernatural than Cora’s ability to sleep with her eyes open.
“It’s late,” she says, because she’s supposed to be the sensible one, even if Allison is the one they trust most with weapons, and is actually more responsible. She supposes that trying to kill people makes her seem a little less sensible, but if that were true, most of their social circle would be deemed the least responsible people ever.
“We should go back to the car,” Allison agrees, and see, Lydia knew Allison was sensible.
None of them move.
Lydia wakes up with sand in her hair and salt in her nostrils, Allison’s hand tangled in the knots of her hair and Cora drooling on her thigh. It’s the best sleep she’s had in more than a year.
By the time she wakes up completely, Cora’s up and pretending that she wasn’t the girl drooling on her girlfriend an hour ago, like that’ll get rid of the sticky patch on Lydia’s thigh that’s getting more and more disgusting. She pulls away from Allison, accidentally kicking sand over her, and walks the metre back to the water.
Submerging herself in the waves solves two problems: she’s no longer tired, and there aren’t any unwanted substances on her body, which is always the best way to start a morning, in her opinion. Allison joins her in the surf and scrubs out the last of the sand, laughing at the way Lydia’s shirt sticks unflatteringly to the gap between her breasts and her ribs.
(She asks if she should take it off altogether, then, and smiles to herself when Allison’s eyes darken.)
“Starting without me?” Cora asks, dropping down so that her shoulders are completely covered. It’s still early, just eager surfers and people who don’t groan at the thought of mornings populating the beach, and Lydia feels. She just feels everything, in this place where people have died but more often lived, smiling parents and ice-cream mushed into the sand and couples racing each other in the surf. She had forgotten what it felt like, not to be standing in a graveyard, the way the loft and the school and Allison’s place and her own home had felt.
“Serves you right, for drooling on me.”
“I don’t drool!” Cora insists, and gets hit by a wave.
“That’s karma!” Allison teases, pausing to dive under the water, reappearing a metre away, hair entirely drenched and tangled.
“Catch me if you can!” she calls, starting to swim away from the shore, and Cora finishes coughing up a lung to give chase, laughing and swallowing the water Allison kicks into her face.
Lydia feels light.
The next few days follow the same pattern: lying in the sand and laughing at the amount of sunscreen Allison has to put on to stop herself matching the lifeguard’s uniform, checking out said lifeguard because he’s cute, even if he hasn’t been drinking the Beacon Hills beautiful people Kool-Aid, and splashing each other with fragments of ocean whenever it gets too hot to lie there any longer.
On the fifth day, Lydia remembers the phones in her glove box. Well, it’s less ‘remembering’ and more ‘ceases forcing herself to forget’, and they spend the morning finding cords at the bottom of their bags and plugging them into the power points of the kiosk. The girl serving had been more than willing to lend them the electricity once Allison had stepped in with a smile and her cleavage in that bikini, which Lydia takes credit for choosing, thank you very much. She could have done it herself, but Allison’s smile could power a first world country, and it’s always nice to see people getting dazzled for the first time.
She’s not the slightest bit jealous, to be honest; sharing Allison has never been a problem for her. She can’t speak for Cora though, who growls under her breath even as she plugs her phone in, and if Cora’s hand around Allison’s waist is a little tighter than normal, none of them say anything.
Her phone chimes just after lunch to let her know that her real life has arrived once again, and she approaches reluctantly. She’s not unintelligent in the least - her IQ and ability to come up with last minute solutions can testify to that - and she knows she can’t avoid it forever, but she’s enjoyed the last days more than she had thought she would. Plus, she really doesn’t want to hear that someone’s died since they left, she doesn’t need that guilt on her conscience. Unless it’s Peter.
32 Missed Calls, the screen of her phone reads, and scrolling down she can see that they’re mostly from Stiles, with several from Scott and two from Isaac rounding it out.
The unread texts are more varied in who they’re from, but follow the same pattern, which is mostly just people asking for help and irritating her with things she doesn’t care about, like that the latest creature ruined Derek’s car so he bought a Sudan, or that Stiles finally got a date. Which sure, she cares about, but not until she gets back and has to deal with Stiles’ meltdown and latest sexual frustration.
The only midway interesting thing is that Peter’s back in town, and that’s more nauseating than interesting.
Looking at Stiles’ text message ( Peter’s at the loft. Scott almost punched him.) , her thoughts collect together properly for the first time since Peter got what he wanted, scattered ideas and wants that pull together because she hates him so freaking much. Hates what he did to her, to Allison, even the snippets of what he did to Derek; hates him for slipping in and out of their lives like the puppet master pulling strings they didn’t know were there. Concentrating on this one thing gives her clarity, lets her push past the messy tangle of strings and just- Focus.
She’s going to kill Peter Hale.
She rolls that thought around in her mind, over her tongue and between her fingers like it’s a tangible thing. She likes the feel of it, the sound of the words in her head like they’re definite and real. She never thought she would be someone finding peace at killing someone else, but Peter... there’s nothing she can compare to the way he made her feel: out of control, and weak, and small, and used, and she’ll thank every kind of deity that exists for that.
Allison appears at her elbow, looking more tired than she had before they checked their phones, but the steely core of her that she keeps like armour against the inhabitants of the darkest corners of Beacon Hills has returned. The Allison of the beach is slightly different to the one who sleeps with ring daggers underneath her pillow, the one Lydia talks strategy with in between choosing outfits, rather than the girl who rolls around in the sand giggling as Cora fashions a mermaid tail from sand. The Allison of the beach wouldn’t harm anyone unless she had to. Her Allison would help her kill Peter.
“Ice cream?” Allison offers, deftly taking Lydia’s phone before she crushes it.
“Will you buy me a smoothie?” she asks instead, hating herself for feeling weak, even though she knows that it isn’t weakness to feel messed up by someone who used you like a power tool to bring them back from the death they deserved in the first place.
Allison slips her arm around her waist, and Lydia leans into her, just a little, and smiles into her hair. She’s going to kill Peter Hale one day, and Allison and Cora will help her, but right now she’s going to drink a smoothie, lie on this beach for another two days, and kiss her girlfriends. Maybe Cora will let her paint her nails.