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Stiles pushed the heavy sterile door open using his shoulder as his hands were already occupied juggling a bouquet of brightly coloured wild flowers. He winced as it creaked, craning his neck around the door, silently praying he hadn’t woken her. But she was already awake. Lydia Martin was propped up on an array of dull hospital pillows, her strawberry blond locks falling softly over her shoulders. Her skin was still pale but Stiles quickly noted the improvement from the night before. She turned her head as he slid through the doorway, the dimples on her cheeks revealed as she afforded him a delicate smile.
“Lydia, hey,” Stiles breathed quietly, as if speaking any louder might break her.
“Hi Stiles,” she returned just as softly.
“You doing ok?” His face contorting and his voice smothered with sympathy as he imagined the pain she must have been in.
“Yeah I’m ok, I’m fine. They stitched me all up,” she answered, her voice ringing out with a subtle hint of humour. Stiles offered back a week smile in response, but honestly he didn’t find it funny at all.
He shuffled over to her bedside meekly “I bought you these,” he remembered, holding the flowers above his head and then awkwardly placing them on the table next to her bed.
“They’re really beautiful Stiles, thank you.” More smiling.
Stiles patted Lydia’s blanket covered knee before settling down in the arm chair by her side, “I’m so sorry this happened Lydia,” seriousness and remorse shadowing his features.
“Stiles, really, there’s nothing any of you could have done. I had to go, I had to warn my mother,” she reassured him, “and I’m going to be ok, alright?” She added. Stiles let out an elongated sigh folding his arms over each other and leaning against the side of her bed from his chair. Lydia patted his hand encouragingly as he continued to look disheartened.
*****
As they exchanged small talk about Scott’s next plan of action, Lydia allowed her mind to wander back to what little she remembered from the previous night. She’d been so cold, and the floor so hard against her bones. She was crippled with pain and coated in crimson blood. Her head was light and spinning. Voices. Banging. Hurried footsteps. Hands hovering over her. It had seemed as though the whole world was moving too fast.
There was only one thing which she had seen clearly. Stiles face. Lydia had not been able to focus her eyes on anything else. A face covered with pure shock and horror. A face that Lydia knew well. She’d seen it once before, the day she had pulled Stiles into the boy’s locker room trying desperately to pull him out of a panic attack. When she saw him looking at her on the floor, the pain in her side had faded and a new pain had begun to wrap itself slowly around her heart. He was panicking again. Another memory had echoed in her mind.
“And if you die? I will literally go out of my freaking mind!”
In all of her pain, it was the sadness Lydia felt in her heart for Stiles having to see her this way which hurt her the most. She felt overwhelmed with love for Stiles Stilinski in that moment. Lydia had noticed her love for stiles growing slowly inside her heart for a long time. She had begun to let it consume her slowly until they had started to drift apart, and then she locked that feeling deep inside of her and threw away the key. She had known deep down that she was too late when Malia entered the picture.
But looking at Stiles helpless face Lydia didn’t need to be able to smell his emotions, the way she knew Scott could. She could see the love in his eyes. She knew that he loved her still. He always had. Her own love for him came exploding back out inside of her as if it was going to flow out of her body and intertwine with his. She wanted nothing more than to jump up onto her feet and run to him. To make him breathe again like she had done before. But she couldn’t. This time she was helpless, and he was too. Lydia had mustered up every ounce of strength she had left in her body and forced a smile for him instead.
“I’m fine”, she said looking into his eyes, “go.”
*****
Stiles had been thinking about the previous night too. How he had seen the trail of blood on the floor and the room had started spinning. His vision impaired. He had rounded the corner to find Lydia, the girl he’d loved since third grade, sprawled bleeding across the floor. Her delicate 5’3” frame looking more vulnerable than ever. Dark memories of the night Peter had attacked Lydia filled his head like smoke. He had been just too late. Just like tonight.
He was paralysed. His feet stuck to the ground. His ears were ringing, blocking out all the sounds around him. He felt as if a heavy weight had been dropped down inside of him, pinning him to the wooden floor like an anchor. He had tried to move, nothing. He had tried to speak, nothing. Nothing else mattered to Stiles in that moment. If something happened to Lydia Martin, he didn’t know what he’d do.
Guilt. Guilt flooded through his veins poisoning his heart. He had seen Theo in his peripheral vision stepping into action. Theo moved quickly and with purpose as he wrapped his belt around Lydia’s ribcage like a tourniquet.
“Smart.” Stiles had thought. That was something he would have thought of himself had he not been frozen in place. He was the one who always figured it out.
It was in that moment, as the guilt pumped through his body, that Stiles realised it should have been him. This was Lydia. He should have been there with her. He should have been the one to save her life. Regret fell over him like rain as he baffled over how they got to this. How had they slowly drifted apart so much? To the point where he was no longer there for her, like he had always been before. Regardless of his feelings for Malia, Stiles felt like he had let Lydia down in more ways than one. The guilt and regret threatened to eat away at his soul, and Stiles felt as though he should let it take him.
Lydia had smiled up at him and Stiles looked into the depths of her eyes like he had done so many times before. One thought flashed clear in his mind at that moment. This was Lydia Martin. He was still in love with her. And if she died, he would be ruined.
*****
The pair continued talking until Lydia could see that Stiles had relaxed. It made her feel at ease to see him begin acting like himself again. It had unnerved her knowing that he was worried about her, and now that he was ok she felt like she too could breathe again. She briefly wondered if that feeling had something to do with them being emotional tethers, but she quickly brushed that thought away, reminding herself that she and Allison had agreed that there was no such thing as fate. All of that was nonsense.
She snapped back to reality when Stiles phone buzzed in his pocket. He flicked it out in one swift movement and scrunched his eyes up slightly as he read the message.
“It’s Scott”, he announced hesitantly. He enjoyed times like this when he and Lydia could just talk. “He needs me at the school, he thinks they’ve found something.”
“Ok, go on then, I’m starting to get tired anyway,” Lydia smiled again, encouraging him to get on with his day. “Thanks Stiles, for coming. And for the flowers.”
“Of course Lydia.” He finally cracked a smile back for her as he stood up awkwardly, not sure of how to say goodbye. He hated the idea of leaving her again so soon. He settled for patting her knee again as he began to walk away.“You look after yourself,” he teased lightly.
“Stiles?” He froze turning back around from the doorway at the sound of her calling after him.
A million things were running through Lydia’s mind. She wanted to say something else. Something more. Every inch of her body wanted to tell him that she loves him too, like she knows he loves her. But the words couldn’t quite find her lips. It just wasn’t right.
“You’ll figure it out,” she says instead. A small smile tugs at Stiles lips and he gives her a little nod as he disappears back through the door.
Oh well. Lydia thinks. There’s a hundred ways to say I love you. And they both knew that the look they’d shared the night before was one of them.