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They stay that way for a while, lying on the ground, feeling the heat of where fire met gasoline. Lydia turns her head to watch the flames, a single tear slipping down her face as she sees a shadowy figure amongst the fire. She knows without a doubt that it’s the darach; that the darach is responsible for her almost losing her friends.
Allison is the first to get up from where she’d leapt onto the ground, just as Lydia had thrown herself onto Stiles, who’d grabbed Scott, and the four of them all went down together.
Allison dusts off her clothes and offers a hand up to Scott, who takes it. Lydia watches it all in her periphery—eyes still glued to where the darach had been. It's gone now. She can only see the flames, burning orange and bright.
She hears a throat clearing below her.
“Hey, uh, Lydia? Can you, you know—get off me?” Stiles says awkwardly, and Lydia realizes she’s still sprawled on top of him.
“Oh,” she says, still stunned by everything, but then she feels herself flush. Her hands are curled into his red hoodie, fingers brushing his neck. She looks down at him, her strawberry blonde hair like a veil around them both, and she’s so close that he can probably feel her breath.
“Yeah, of course.”
She scrambles to get up, lacking all of her usual grace. Only when she’s finally disentangled herself from him does she relax, but her heart is still pounding. She catches Allison giving her a knowing smirk, and while that should annoy her, it just makes her blush more furiously.
When Lydia’s no longer on top of him Stiles gets up, too. They all turn to watch the would-be pyre. They listen to the crackling. They breathe in the acrid smell of the gasoline.
It’s Stiles who finally breaks the silence, because of course he is.
“Well, that was fun,” he says dryly. “Let’s never do it again. And we’re not going back to that horror show of a motel.”
“Where are we supposed to sleep?” Lydia says.
“We can sleep in the bus,” Allison says. Lydia makes a face at the very thought, but she doesn’t argue. She’d rather sleep in a ditch than go back to that motel.
She catches frenetic hand movements in the corner of her eye, but when she looks, Stiles is not looking at her.
“Hey, Scotty, you feeling okay?”
He almost killed himself trying to save Scott.
Scott almost killed himself.
“Yeah,” Scott says. He looks dazed. “Yeah, I’m alright now. I’m sorry. ”
“Don’t,” Allison says, not letting go of his hand. Normally Lydia would have a comment about that, about break-ups and feelings and denial, but she keeps her mouth shut. “Don’t, Scott, it was the darach. Somehow, the darach got into all of your heads. It’s not your fault.”
Scott looks at their entwined hands, and then at her. They hold each other’s gaze, and Scott seems to calm with it.
Anchor, Lydia thinks, remembering. Remembering what she was told, after. Everything was told to her after the fact. Not anymore. She’s right in the middle of it, this time. She saved them.
“She’s right,” Stiles says, and Scott nods at him, eyes no longer dim and unfocused.
Isaac and Boyd join them, then, and they wonder at what happened. They get the nutshell.
After that, they all go get their stuff from the motel, a harrowing five minutes that leaves them feeling spooked when they come back out, and then they enter the yellow schoolbus.
The two werewolves who once tried to kill her when they thought she was a murderous lizard settle all the way in the back of the bus. Several seats in front of them, Lydia ends up sharing a worn leather seat with her best friend. In the seat across from them is the boy who once told her he had a crush on her since the third grade, and in the seat in front of him is the boy she once made out with in Coach’s office, her best friend’s ex-boyfriend.
Weirdest sleepover ever.
It doesn’t stop her from thinking about what she saw in the fire, what she heard before the first attempted suicide, everything that followed. Nothing can. All the same, she’s surrounded. Breathing in the smell of everyone else.
At least she isn’t alone.
They sit in silence, and despite the uncomfortable seats and the ordeal they’ve just been through, they do fall asleep, one by one. She hears their breathing even out. She gazes listlessly past Allison and through the window, watches the blue neon letters of the motel, and doesn’t sleep.
“Anyone awake?” Lydia finally whispers when she can’t take it anymore, the silence as loud as one of her screams.
It isn’t just all the almost-suicides of her friends, it’s the actual-suicides of previous visitors that she just happened to overhear. The couple that shot each other. The woman that drowned her baby and then herself. What kind of mother would do that?
“Yeah,” Stiles whispers, and she doesn’t know why she’s surprised that it’s him.
She turns her head, away from the window, and towards him, sitting in the seat across. In the dim light, she can see that he took off his hoodie to use it as a make-shift pillow, leaving him wearing his grey shirt only; hair that had been gelled to perfection now mussed and sticking up in different directions. It’s not a good look, but she finds herself appreciating it anyway.
He looks good, sitting there on the leather seat. Good in a way she doesn’t think he looked in sophomore year. But she's changed a lot since then, or so she'd like to think. She doesn't judge people as harshly as she used to, by arbitrary and vain criteria. Maybe she just never allowed herself to truly notice him before.
“I’m surprised,” she says, voice husky as she doesn’t quite whisper. “I thought you could sleep in any uncomfortable position imaginable. I remember when you camped out on the hospital’s waiting chairs outside my room for an entire weekend.”
“Yeah, but it takes me a long while to actually fall asleep,” he says quietly. “There’s so much noise, you know?”
The only sound she can hear is the chirping of the crickets outside. Once, she would have pointed that out, but now she gets it. Maybe not really the way that he means it, but—too much noise is a problem she can sympathize with.
“I understand,” she says softly.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have accused you of being responsible for this stuff.”
“Look, you weren’t exactly wrong. I did poison you all with wolfsbane once.”
“Yeah, but still.” He sighs. “I guess we should be glad it didn’t affect the humans this time, or we wouldn’t have been able to…”
“Yeah,” she says, but then the words hit her. “Wait, you were affected at my party?”
“Yeah, and Allison too. I mean, she never said what she actually saw, but I know she saw something.”
Guilt burns within her. The heat should bring her out of any dark thoughts, the way it did to the affected wolves tonight, but it doesn’t.
“What did you see?” she asks, with bated breath.
“Oh,” he says, like he didn’t expect her to ask him, and that makes her heart lurch painfully. “Yeah, I saw—I mean. It was just some stuff about my parents. It doesn’t matter.”
Parents, plural. His mother.
“It matters,” she disagrees gently, and she thinks again about the blue neon lights and the puddle of gasoline, black sneakers confidently stepping forward into the line of fire. Literally.
He hasn’t been in her life for that long, but she hadn’t known how unbearable it would be to lose him until that moment.
If you die I will literally go out of my freaking mind, she thinks, with no small dose of irony.
“You hungry? I stole some stuff from the vending machine earlier.”
She doesn’t know why that makes her laugh, but it does. It’s just so him.
He told her about the vending machine he totalled in the hospital while she was freaking out in the shower. She’d laughed, when hearing that, remembering the loud noise that startled her right before everything started going scary. She doesn’t want to dwell on the scary parts. And that’s why she lets him change the subject now, though some part of her is filled with a burning desire to know, to know everything about him.
She knows a lot of useless things about him: his favorite movie being Star Wars; his favorite thing to do in a diner is dip curly fries into a strawberry milkshake; he doesn’t have a favorite song because being asked to pick a favorite anything is torture, Lydia, like the aforementioned things aren’t choices at all. These kind of things never used to matter to her before.
Sometimes, she thinks she wants him to know everything about her, too.
“What have you got?”
He rummages around in his bag as quietly as possible—for him, anyway. Allison stirs next to Lydia but her eyes stay closed.
“Peanut butter crackers?”
For a moment, she’s transported to a time where things were—not easier, exactly, but simpler. She was still unaware of the supernatural, knowing only the strange things that she saw, not knowing what they meant. Though, she still doesn’t, not really. Can’t begin to fathom what exactly makes her different. Immune. Something.
They’d been lacing up their ice skates on the bleachers. She’d been wearing blue. He’d rambled about combinations after she declined his shirt to keep her warm, and she’d pretended not to know who he was talking about. He’d offered her a peanut butter cup, packaged in orange, which she accepted.
When they skated on the ice, she held his hand. Strange thing to focus on now.
“Yeah,” she says, voice huskier than normal, and she takes what she’s offered. She opens the packaging as quietly as she can—which is quite a bit more silent than him—and enjoys the smooth taste. More than that, enjoys the feeling of being offered food from a vending machine, of someone wanting her to eat regardless of calories or what they’ll do to her figure.
“It’s good. Thank you.” She flinches at the way the package crinkles when she stuffs it away. All is still quiet. When she looks at him, he’s not looking at her, eyes focused on the back of Scott’s head.
There’s no hope. The words echo in her head.
“He’s okay,” she says, gently.
“If anything happened to Scott, I’d—I mean. I…” He can’t even finish the sentence.
“I know.”
Black sneakers, blue lights reflected in a puddle of gasoline, burning red flare. Nearly dead. Both of them.
He clears his throat.
“I guess we should try and get some sleep.”
Disappointment is the first thing she feels, but she squashes it down. He’s right. Sleep helps maintain cognitive skills. Poor sleep can make it much more difficult to cope with even relatively minor stressors, and what happened is anything but minor. She knows this.
But she wants to talk more. She wants to find out what exactly he saw at her party, she wants to know about his mother, she wants him to know that she still gets nightmares about a monster with red eyes on the lacrosse field. She wants him to know that the taste of peanut butter is still in her mouth and she’s beginning to associate it with him. She wants him to know that she—that she’s—
He’s right. They should sleep.
“Goodnight,” she murmurs.
“Goodnight, Lydia,” he says with his voice very warm despite the horrors they’ve just been through. She lets it soothe her, closes her eyes, trying not to think about anything except that they’re still alive, they’re still here.
They’re still here.