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Against all odds, both Stiles and Lydia wound up on the east coast with only a few states between them. Lydia was living in a two bedroom apartment in Cambridge with a fellow student from Harvard, where she was studying mathematics and working towards her goal of becoming the youngest Fields Medal winner (at 18, she had 8 years to achieve her goal. She was hoping to do so before she finished her degree). Stiles had a full ride to Princeton and was fulfilling the basic prerequisites for a Bachelor of Arts, pursuing different areas of academic interest and living in a single in Forbes.
It was during Lydias’ second year and Stiles first year (having deferred a year to take advantage of Princetons’ Bridge Year programme) that they started spending more time together, each going between states when they had a weekend free or opting out of thanksgiving to explore the east coast instead. Lydia visited Stiles more often than not – between her GPA and her extra-curricular, she’d ran the school in Beacon Hills and hadn’t signed up for everything she could squeeze into her schedule this time. Stiles, on the other hand, rarely had an hour that wasn’t taken up with a class, a club or his on campus job.
It worked, though. Lydia would spend her weekends on a beautiful campus, mingling with the other students while Stiles was running around and getting ahead on her reading in the Norman Thomas library. Stiles would join her between activities, would drag her outside and read out loud to her from whatever non-class related book he was reading at the time. They’d go off campus for dinner, eating at a different place each time and use the voice recorder on their phones to write a review on their way home, throwing in a bunch of fancy words that were useless to everyday life and posh accents. On their way back, they’d buy a few bottles of wine (they never drank at dinner, not when Stiles had to drive back) and go back to his room, curl up on the bed together with his laptop or a book and drink straight from the bottle, watching documentaries or reading out loud to one another till they couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer.
In Lydias’ third year, she picked up guitar. In Stiles’ second year, he picked up a girlfriend who eyed Lydia with envy. One memorable night, when both the girls were waiting in his room for him to return, she’d turned to Lydia.
“You do know he loves you, don’t you?”
Lydia regarded her carefully. “And I love him – platonically. As a friend.”
“I know what platonic means.”
“Good,” Lydia purses her lips. “Then there’s nothing to talk about, is there?”
The conversation ended there, not because neither girl had anything to say on the topic, but because Stiles came barrelling through the door, talking a mile per minute and falling on the bed between the two girls, putting his arms around them both and planting a loud kiss on their cheeks.
“How are my ladies doin’, huh?”
At 23, Stiles finishes his Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and takes off to travel around Europe for a year. He finally learns Spanish and relearns the Polish he’d lost after his mom had died. It takes him three months of living in France to remember how to speak it, despite studying it in high school, and in Italy he has no issues thanks to four years of languages he’d taken at Princeton. He starts a blog, a parody of Eat, Pray, Love – Eat, See, Lust – in which he details a dramatic breakup with his Princeton girlfriend (it was quite the opposite, in fact - hushed whispers in the library, friendly smiles as they parted ways, no broken hearts) and makes his adventures out to be a journey of self-discovery beyond his debilitating porn addiction and heart break.
(Everyone back home reads the blog, knows it all to be a lie – his porn addiction never interfered with his daily life).
At 24, Lydia won the Fields Medal. Stiles came home. He bought a tux for the occasion, celebrated it by her side with a huge grin. That night, when they returned to the hotel, Stiles ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the room service menu, put it on his credit card and washed down the taste of poverty with a fancy red wine he couldn’t pronounce the name of.
They moved in together at 25. By that point, Stiles was spending the majority of his time at Lydias’ anyway. They move to Washington, get a mortgage on a three bedroom family house. Lydia starts teaching Seattle University; Stiles gets a job in law enforcement, makes a promise with himself that he’ll never bring his work home with him.
Sheriff Stilinski has a heart attack when Stiles is 26, doesn’t make it through the night. Scott meets him at the airport with open arms and teary eyes, holds him when he starts sobbing on the spot. In all his running away from Beacon Hills, Stiles never once stop to consider that his dad wasn’t going to be alive long enough for him to return. In the 9 years since he left, Stiles has visited him a grand total of 5 times.
Lydia takes two weeks off work, stating a family emergency and drives the jeep to California despite not being insured on the vehicle held together mostly by duct tape and hope. Her and Scott stay by Stiles side, Melissa and Parrish organise the funeral and the entirety of Beacon Hills show up to the cemetery on the day to say a final goodbye to their beloved Sheriff.
Stiles tries to make a speech, but his vocal chords aren’t working and his hands are shaking too hard to keep hold of his note cards. Scott steps up beside his brother (not by blood, but by sheer will to be), steps up to the microphone and makes a speech mostly from his heart, but also from the few scribblings on the note cards that he could understand.
Stiles holds onto his arm as a steadying presence, as a ground force, as a thank you. Looks at him with bloodshot eyes and knows that his best friend didn’t need him to find words to convey his gratitude on this day, be it at the stand making a speech or later at casa Stilinski when he pries a bottle of Jack out of his hands and helps Lydia guide him up to bed.
Stiles wanted to sell the house immediately, but Lydia talks him out of it. They drive home, radio at full volume and Lydia behind the wheel again, because Stiles hasn’t stopped shaking since he heard the news. Back in Beacon Hills, Melissa is sorting through everything. Scott shows up when she’s in hour 5 of looking through both of her best friends belongings. She’s crying into a box of dusty books, all in Polish and unreadable to any Stilinski but Claudia.
Scott crowds her, rocking her in his arms and trying to take her pain. He’d learnt over the years that he couldn’t heal emotional wounds, only physical ones, but he was a True Alpha. If he tried hard enough, maybe he’d defy the rules (again).
Taking the pain of loss hurt much more than breaking through a mountain ash barrier ever did.
Five weeks later, they realise that Lydia is pregnant. Neither of them mention the pregnancy scare in her third year, when they’d first started sleeping together, as they sit in tense silence on the edge of the bathtub waiting for the results.
“I can’t believe I’m placing my future in a stick right now,” Stiles comments, staring at it where it was resting on the sink.
“Stop watching it. A watched test never… concludes,” she finishes lamely.
“That’s not what I was taught in science class.”
He shuts up when she punches his leg, unimpressed with the sarcasm. He lets out a (manly) high pitched squeal when she hits him again, higher up his leg and too close for comfort, when the stick shows a smiley face.
“I’m not happy about this,” she tells him, but she’s beaming when she phones her mom later that evening to give her the news. Stiles watches her from the dining table, smiling fondly at her excitement and cradling an empty shot glass.
I’ve got the best news, dad, he thinks, watching his strawberry blonde Goddess, Lydia Martin and I are having a baby. You’re gonna be a granddad.
He proposes to her shortly after that. She hits his shoulder, ranting at him that she refuses to get married while she’s a whale, while wriggling her fingers in front of him, impatient for the ring.
“You haven’t said yes,” he smirks up at her.
“Yes, you dork, yes,” she hits him again, excitedly this time.
She finishes work earlier than she needed to for two reasons – the first being that she was 100% dedicated to being a mom now and she wanted stay-at-home to be in that title; the second being that Stiles was an overprotective asshole who didn’t even like her running her own bath anymore, let alone spending her days in busy hallways full of immature college students.
“You were one, once,” she reminds him gently as he rubs her belly fondly.
“I was never immature,” he sniffs, pouting at her before going back to gazing lovingly at her stomach. “Was I, little bean? Daddy was never, ever immature.”
Her heart melted at the sight every time.
“I can’t wait to meet little bean,” Stiles is saying excitedly to Scott. Lydia is ignoring them both, pissed off and uncomfortable at this late stage in her pregnancy. In a show of support, some of the pack had come down to be with them for the birth. Scott and Stiles were using the excuse to re-enact their childhood and were camping out in the living room. Her mom and Melissa were sharing the spare room.
“I’m so happy for you, dude,” Scott tells Stiles one night. “And proud. I’m proud too. They both would be so proud of you.”
Stiles grins in the darkness, ignoring the shooting pain that goes through him at their mention. “I’m proud of me too, man. The only thing that would be better is if you were about to become a dad with me. Or if you’d done the trial run already. It would be so much easier going into this with your advice.”
He stops there, thinking about how all he wanted right now was the advice of his mom and dad, and thinking about how, out of the two of them, Scott was supposed to be the one settling down with a ring on his fiancées finger and a baby on the way.
“Allison was it for me,” he says suddenly, as if knowing where Stiles mind was going. “Even after, with Kira, with Louise… I couldn’t imagine building a future like the one you’re about to have with anyone but Allison. I don’t know if I ever will. And that’s okay. Instead I get to be godfather and uncle to the most beautiful, genius kid in the world.”
“You haven’t even met little bean yet,” Stiles chokes out a laugh.
Scott grins. “She’s a by-product of you and Lydia. There’s no way she’ll be anything but the most beautiful, genius kid in the world.”
“She?”
“Yeah, little bean feels like a she, don’t you think?”
“…We have only picked out girls names.”
“I would pay to get a front row seat to you threatening her first boyfriend.”
“She’s not having a boyfriend till she’s 30,” he says seriously.
They both laugh loud enough that Lydia comes storming down the stairs as quickly as she can in her very pregnant state to hit them over the head with their pillows.
“If it’s not the kid inside me keeping me awake, it’s you two! She just stopped kicking and you wanna wake her up?!”
“You think little bean is a she too?!”
Their gut feelings turn out to be right. Unconsciously, they’d managed to buy typically female clothes and toys and furnishings for the babies room. Stiles mutters angrily under his breath about stereotypes and the patriarchal society; Lydia just shrugs, confident that her little girl will grow up to be a confident, fearless woman with or without the colour pink in her life.
“A little pink never did me any harm,” she comments sweetly when Stiles starts talking about redecorating the room. That stops him in his tracks easily enough.
They have a long engagement. Between Stiles bringing his work home in an attempt to get a promotion (“I’m doing this for you and little bean!” “Ariel doesn’t need more money, she needs the love and presence of her father!”) and the cost of a new baby on top of a mortgage, it’s two years before they finally tie the knot. Scott is best man, makes a moving speech (“-and I can’t believe that I’ve known this guy, my brother, for over twenty years now, and that I get to stand here and make a speech at this beautiful wedding, that I get the chance to be a part of this beautiful family – mom and dad would be so proud of you, of what you’ve made-“) and Lydia chooses not to have a maid of honour, instead saves that position in memory of Allison, because like Scott, she’d imagined marking certain milestones with her best friend and this was one of those mile stones.
Melissa babysits Ariel for two weeks while they go on their honeymoon. They go to Hawaii, visit all the islands and learn to surf. They also spent a lot of time locked in the hotel room with the cheapest bottle of wine and read out loud to each other till they fall asleep.
Before they know it, they’re in their 30’s – Ariel is going to school, Stiles is the Sheriff and Lydia has taken a teaching position at the local nursery. Lydia pushes tutors and after school activities on Ariel and they argue at every corner, with Stiles insisting that Ariel needed free time to cultivate academic and creative growth.
Lydia lets Ariel drop a few clubs when she walks in on them during a particularly bad argument. Instantly, she enrols in piano, debate and writing club. Lydia is smug. Stiles is happy that Ariel got to have her say in things.
They split up when she’s 12 years old. Stiles moves out, rents a two bedroom apartment a fifteen minute walk from the house. He decorates Ariels’ room, leaves his as he finds it. When Lydia moves back to Beacon Hills, taking Ariel with her, Stiles moves back too. He spends two weeks on Scotts couch, searching for a place, before Scott sheepishly admits that when Lydia convinced him not to sell his dads place, they’d put it up for rent instead, but it had been empty since last month. Stiles moves back into his childhood home, ends up at Scotts several nights a week despite that, because he’s lonely and that house was always too large without his mom, is even worse without his dad.
On the nights he doesn’t go to Scotts, he stays at home and drinks until he can’t stay awake any longer. He wakes up, more often than not, slumped over paperwork on the dining room table and a shot glass still held firmly in his hand.
Ariel stays over on weekends. He suggests they redecorate his old room for her, the first weekend she stays, but she curls her lips up in disgust.
“I like my room as it is.”
Instead, he buys her a piano, puts it in the living room, listens to her practice every evening. Starts learning himself, eventually, wanting something more than blue walls and ADHD in common with his kid.
Lydia spoils her rotten, showers her with designer clothes and expensive presents for no reason. She shows her daughter love the way her parents did, buying her affections despite having promised herself she would never be like her parents.
Stiles drinks too much. He drinks too much when he’s alone and he drinks too much in front of his kid. He has to slow down, and he loves his dad, always wanted to be like him, but not in this way. This was the one trait he’d hoped he’d never pick up.
When Ariel is 15, Lydia gets cancer and ends up hospitalised. She moves into her dads full time, spends her afternoons by her mothers bedside and her nights prying a bottle of cheap wine from her dads hands. He gives it up without a fight, just a slight whimper, and struggles up the stairs alone. She thinks he has the weight of the world on his shoulders, thinks about how much love he has for the people he’s kept close and realises that he never stopped loving her mom, no matter what came between them.
She’s 16 when her mom dies, spends her nights listening in on a police scanner, paranoid that her dad isn’t going to make it home. She reads the police files he brings home, lies about doing so when he confronts her. When she’s 17, she stops hiding the ways in which she tries to help him solve cases and puts up an evidence board in her room.
She doesn’t understand why he looks at her with such sad eyes when he first sees it, covered in pictures and pin tacks and coloured string.
“Red is for unsolved.”