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Lydia Martin is a study in contradictions.
For someone with such a love of knowledge, of complex mathematics and advanced sciences, languages and logic and learning, she thinks she should know better. She should think in patterns, linear tracks and clear swings of thought, observable intuition, but she doesn’t. Lydia Martin has always, always thought in feelings, and maybe that’s a part of having the banshee in her blood. Maybe it’s the way she was raised, or maybe it’s just her nature, but she likes the banshee answer best. Thinking that maybe she has to feel, that she was born to fucking scream, is more entertaining than nature versus nurture could ever hope to be.
That’s not to say she can’t think in train tracks, paths laid by formulas and theorems and proofs, because she can. She could, at least, before sleepwalking became routine trips to graveyards, before note taking became a way of giving prophecies, before she became the human personification of a Geiger counter. Before, before, before. As a banshee, Lydia Martin cannot compartmentalize. She cannot spend fifth period Calculus thinking in chain rule and quotient rule and sixth period Art thinking in broad swoops of color, texture and lines laid out with forethought. If she looked closely enough, her art would always subtly follow the Golden spiral or ratio in the intricacies of shape. Now, she wakes; screams; sometimes sketches.
Smudged graphite drawings of trees and shadows do not follow any dead man’s rule.
Junior year of high school saw the neat little boxes Lydia Martin had drawn around the fields of her life fading into each other, melting like something out of a Dalí. Her favorite matte red lipstick became bloody knuckles, her desperate weekend gasps for air between soaked sheets began to feel like the last breaths of someone else, police stations were now a place of refuge instead of sentencing for dance music played too loud and red solo cups full of whatever was colorful and sufficiently vile.
She can no longer think in A becomes B, B becomes C, C becomes A. Instead, she thinks like this.
The conspicuous space of nothing and no one she had always surrounded herself with, the parties and boyfriends that made her feel like Jay Gatsby because they were what they were but they were never enough, became suddenly full. The space was warm, it had dimples and tumbling dark hair and leather jackets. It had a silver necklace, a quiver of arrows, and one hell of a family. And then it was gone. It was gone and it hurt and Allison’s last breath became Lydia’s scream and it scraped her throat raw.
And then she began to heal.
People became friends and then friends became pack, and pack was good. Malia and Kira couldn’t fill the space in Lydia’s ribcage that Allison had left bereft, but they made it feel warmer and a little less dark. Home started to feel like a concrete loft with grimy windows and a veterinarian’s office and a piece of shit blue Jeep. She gained a handful of semi-parental figures along the way, from “grumpy uncle sourwolf” Derek Hale to “incredibly knowledgeable cousin” Deaton to “weird dad” Sheriff Stilinski to Melissa McCall, who was everything Lydia had ever secretly desired in a mother and never got to have. Scott became an Alpha, and then he became her Alpha. Malia and Kira and Liam became pack, Stiles became an emissary, and then he became Scott’s emissary. And then, perhaps the biggest contradiction of all, Stiles Stilinski became her best friend.
In the hazy breath of summer between Junior and Senior year, Lydia finds out that "best friend" can feel a lot like anchor in the right light.
Weekends spent between Jackson’s sheets become weekends in the back seat of Stiles’ Jeep, and Lydia relearns love just as easily as she’d learned the quadratic formula or the squeeze theorem. Love is frustration and eye rolls and sighs. Love smells like old spice, sounds like All Time Low, and tastes like clean skin under her tongue. Love tastes like lazy morning kisses and black coffee, and love looks like bedhead and henleys and motion.
Love, unfortunately, is not enough to fix her. But it helps, God does he help. Stiles absolutely fucking ruins her. Her standards hit an all time low, pun intended, but not about him, never about him. She just gets used to her clothes being rumpled when she pulls them back on, her buns being genuinely messy instead of a study in deceptively elaborate and intentional chaos. She gets used to black coffee and unmade cotton sheets, she gets used to family dinners, she gets used to doing homework next to him in his bed or hers depending on the day. He tries to braid her hair, and it’s complete shit at first, of course, but she loves it all the same.
(She still teaches him the right way. She has a reputation to uphold, after all.)
Borrowing Jackson’s varsity jacket becomes borrowing warm plaid shirts to sleep in that smell like boy in the best way. Her boy is awkward fumbling and cheek kisses when he walks her to class, and he’s always the little spoon despite having a full eight inches on her, but she likes tucking the points of her knees into the backs of his and kissing between his shoulder blades through thin cotton when she spends the night.
They learn to take care of each other, and if there’s anything Lydia is good at, it’s learning. Stiles, she soon discovers, is just as good at learning as she is. He just goes about it in a different way. Lydia likes to block her time, likes to lay stretched out on her stomach in bed, an open textbook on the bedspread under her with her reading glasses slipping down her nose. She likes to do her math homework before she eats dinner, but she usually saves literature for right before bed, because she gets more poetic at night.
Stiles, she discovers, works in fits and bursts. It bothers the hell out of her at first, when she sees him trying to finish his last three math problems at breakfast on a crumpled sheet of paper, mechanical pencil in one hand and half a bagel in the other, textbook nowhere to be seen, the problems instead stored in his phone’s photo gallery. She learns that he wakes up a lot at night and likes to finish homework then. The first time that she wakes up to a cold bed, the room bathed in soft blue light from his laptop, with him clicking away at his desk writing an essay at four in the goddamn morning, she groans and begs him to come back to bed a couple times. He tells her no dice, Kira’s dad needs his paper on the Victorian era at eight am tomorrow, and her sneaky tactics to pull valedictorian out from under him will not be tolerated, no matter how good she is in bed.
She rolls her eyes, feeling her irritation slipping away despite herself because damn him, it’s actually really endearing. She eventually gives up on trying to get back to sleep, because he’s awake and his room is way too cold. He gives her the plaid flannel off his back and she wraps herself up in it because it’s warm and it smells like him, and she ties one of his blankets around her shoulders like a cape and slogs her way over to his desk, sprawling out on his lap with her head on his shoulder. She chucks adjectives at him and proofreads over his shoulder, banters with him about the best concluding sentence and reminds him to indent the paragraphs. He’s a good writer, which surprises her a bit, but it mostly just makes her feel ridiculous for not guessing sooner. They end up making out, but not before the essay is waiting on the printer, and she decides that it can be nice to rise with the sun, in more ways than one.
(He nearly forgets the paper at home, and she almost forgets to remind him.)
She learns about his panic attacks first, of course, on that day when she first kissed him in a shadowy locker room. She learns with time that kissing is a far cry from the best way to help him. The shock factor of the first time ends there, and the second time she tries it, he almost hits her, reflexively, panic seizing the reins and making him fear anything that comes too close. She learns better ways to help, cues to watch for. She learns his tells, and sometimes she picks up on his anxiety before he can quite put a finger on what’s wrong. She learns to devote a tiny corner of her brain to watching for wild eyes, inhales that are longer than exhales, clenched fists. The best way to help him is to quietly tell him that he looks really anxious and offer him help leaving the problem situation. Half the time, he doesn’t even realize that the tension is building until the wave crests, and all he knows is that he’s drowning. If it’s bad, he’ll nod and ask her to come with him, but if it’s softer, he can usually manage alone, and he prefers to keep some personal space and dignity. She can understand that, she hates falling apart around other people just as much as he does. Sometimes he likes to be held, sometimes he likes her to talk him through it, but sometimes he just needs to cry and shake it out on his own to feel settled again. She understands, and she gives him the space he needs.
He learns about her nightmares first. She has one the very first time they spend the night in the same bed, at the start of a long, lazy summer of Beacon Hills and pack and calm and Stiles. Her mother is spending the summer in Paris with her latest lover, and the two women had invited Lydia to come along. In the past she would have agreed in a heartbeat, but now the thought of leaving behind Beacon Hills, abandoning Scott and Kira and Malia and Derek and Liam and Stiles, parting from her pack for three months straight...she makes her decision before her mother is even through with the question. Even though Paris might mean a chance to see Isaac again or a chance to somehow reconnect with Allison’s dad, she doesn’t feel like crying. Isaac will be back soon enough, he’d promised to come home as soon as he felt like he could handle it. He had promised not to pull a Jackson, wrench himself away from them all like ripping off a band-aid. He knows how much they miss him, knows there’s a space in the pack for a six foot two beta just waiting to be whole again.
The decision to stay in California was the easy part, Lydia knew. The hard part, she thought, would be convincing her mother to let her stay with Stiles. The sheriff might be a bit of a pushover, and Malia had already spent her fair share of time in the Stilinski household while she was adjusting to her new human obligations, but Lydia hadn’t expected her mother to be so lax.
That prediction had turned out to be surprisingly wrong. Lydia’s mother nods almost immediately, asks a few questions, says she’ll talk to the Sheriff. Lydia supposes that the benefits of having people to watch over her and a law enforcement officer only a few rooms away outweighs the impropriety factor of temporarily moving in with a boyfriend after everything that’s happened. They’re both almost legal adults, anyways.
She tries not to let the easy dismissal sting.
The sheriff agrees before sundown.
Stiles and Lydia spend that summer learning each other. She finds that she likes waking up in someone’s arms after a nightmare. It’s grounding and weighting in a way that screaming out her lungs can’t hope to match. The first night that it happens, it’s 4am cold sweat and a scream locked right behind her teeth. The room she’s in is not her own and then it’s Eichen, and the sheets twisted around her are wrong and binding, and her ears are buzzing the way they always do before the screaming starts.
And then it’s motion, because God, Stiles is anything but stagnant. It’s arms around her and she flails, turning to face him, expecting to see maybe Peter, or Meredith, something awful with no mouth- but it’s just him, green henleys and whiskey eyes and his hair’s a motherfucking mess and she feels the anchor-weight drag her down.
The scream pours down her throat like something sickening and heavy and she sobs, crumpling like a marionette puppet with no creator at the strings, and she falls forward against him, and it’s soothing palms and shaky breaths and her tears taste the saltiest then, she thinks.
She cries for an hour.
He learns about more, later. She still has nightmares, they both do, and she thinks they always will, the same way he’ll always have panic attacks. He learns about her self esteem issues, learns about the way she spent eighth grade and then tenth with “no thank you” on her lips and a vile taste in the back of her throat, the way she avoided full length mirrors. He learns that she still has to be careful about It, and he tiptoes around It with her as respectfully as he can. Then, he starts to remind her to eat, and it lights a fire somewhere in her when he does, because it’s never accusatory, though the reminders are sharp and exactly what she needs. He tells her she’s beautiful more than Jackson ever did, and he somehow manages to mostly avoid making it sound pitying, making it sound like he’s talking about That. It doesn’t sound like a form of prevention or some kind of safeguard, it just sounds like belief, because he’s an emissary, and belief is all he has. She hopes it’ll rub off on her eventually. For now, she still wears heels, because the click of them on concrete grounds her, and the day she’s shorter than Liam Dunbar will be the day she dies, but they’re a little shorter, because she’s grown tired of making herself bigger or smaller or dumber or taller.
The first time he really talks to her about his ADHD, they’re curled together in his bed on a Friday night, and Lydia’s hair still feels damp with sweat at the nape of her neck, and she’s wearing his shirt, and his thumb is running over her knuckles.
And he’s laughing so hard he almost can’t breathe, quiet wheezy gasps for air as he tries to keep the noise down, and she starts laughing too, despite herself. It takes her a couple minutes to ask what’s so funny, and his answer is that he’d started thinking about infomercials because one of her Faces with a capital F reminded him of “like, the typical infomercial housewife who opened a cupboard and like a billion tupperwares fell out, and she’s just looking at her kitchen like what the fuck, yo billy mays, help me out.” She tries to be mad but she just ends up hissing giggles right along with him, and when they’re done gasping for air and they still both have tears in their eyes, he sighs and pulls her closer and kisses the back of her neck lightly, fidgeting a little.
She can sense his nerves, and she sighs, turning in his arms to face him, blinking up at him. She tells him to just spit it out, whatever’s making him nervous, because it’s hard to cuddle with someone so wiggly, and he sighs, tries to put the thoughts together for a few moments, before just blurting it out.
“I have ADHD,” he says, and at first Lydia thinks it might just be a bad joke in response to her comment about him being jumpy, but his tone of voice tells her that he’s being genuine, so she just nods.
“I take meds for it and stuff, you’ve probably heard Dad yelling at me to take them in the morning or whatever. They help, but I’m still kinda jumpy like, all the time, and I don’t know how much of that is just my personality and now much of it is that stuff, but. Yeah. Trouble focusing, all that jazz.”
He goes on to explain that that’s why his thought process is “kind of a fucking carousel,” and when Lydia thinks about it, it really does make sense. There’s the twitchiness, the sassing snarky comments without much thought for the repercussions, the pile up of detention slips for talking in class or mouthing off. The more she thinks about it, the more the pieces start to snap together. His seemingly bizarre homework habits are just him taking advantage of spurts of focus and productivity whenever they happen to strike, the long nights he spends hunched over his laptop down an inescapable rabbit hole of research are something called hyperfocus. He says his meds give him sleeping problems and exacerbate his anxiety, that he spent most of middle school trying various brand names and combinations and that his current prescription is the one that worked the best, even if there are side effects. In his mind, the good outweighs the bad, and she trusts him on that. It takes her a while to start reminding him to eat, but that’s because it took him a while to feel comfortable telling her she had to. His meds are apparently the reason for an appetite shockingly low for a teenager, because he says that they suppress his appetite a lot and his Dad or Scott or Melissa have to remind him to eat. Sometimes, he says, his body deals with stress by just shutting down any hunger at all besides whatever specific thing he’s craving at the moment. He’s hushed and vaguely trembly throughout most of the conversation, as if he thinks she’s going to up and leave over something like this. She wants to dig deep and find the source of that anxiety, but that’s none of her business. He’ll tell her when he’s ready. For now, she just kisses the corner of his lips and tells him that she understands, tells him she loves him and that she’s proud. She thanks him for telling her, lets him know that if he needs help with something, he can ask her. She makes a mental note to ask him more questions later, read up on this, but for now, this is enough.
They have more talks that summer, on the hood of his Jeep in the preserve at night, passing a bottle of Jack back and forth. They talk in the kitchen while Stiles is cooking, and Lydia sits on the counter by the stove and she swings her feet back and forth and he grabs quick kisses when he passes by her on his way to the fridge. They talk when they're helping the Sheriff at the station, making coffee runs and restocking printers. They talk at Kira's pool parties, sitting on the edge with their feet in the water. They talk in bed a lot, nestled together, all hushed whispers and forehead kisses. When she tells him that she's bi one night in one of his henleys, her head on his chest and his hands in her hair and her cold toes pressed against his calves, he laughs, and he kisses her nose, and he murmurs a soft "same, actually." They spend the rest of the night playing quiet games of truth or kisses, talking about attractive friends and celebrities and their favorite facial features, favorite songs, colors, lyrics, times of day. She knows him better, now.
That summer, they clean out his closet together. She makes sure to ask him if anything has sentimental value before getting rid of it. Everyone has their ugly summer camp t shirts, she lets him keep his. About half of his closet is made up of shirts stolen from Scott, which makes sense because she knows firsthand that at least that much of Scott’s closet is full of things borrowed from Stiles. They’re inseparable, sharing clothes and sleeping in the same bed and cuddling come with the territory. They’re working on an alpha-emissary bond laid on top of over a decade of trust and friendship. Boundaries practically don’t exist anymore. Whatever makes them happy, keeps them grounded, helps them both through their collective trauma is fine in her book. Besides, it’s not like she can complain that Scott and Stiles are a package deal. Having someone like Scott McCall in her life is one hell of a benefit, and when she sees the look on his face when she casually tells him that he’d better be the best man when she eventually marries Stiles, she decides he’s in her life for the long run.
She takes Stiles shopping, and if a tiny fraction of her trust fund is spent on skinny jeans, flannels, and henleys, well, that’s her business. He jokingly calls her his sugar mama and his kissing privileges are revoked for a week.
(The penalty doesn’t even last an hour.)
When they all walk in together on the first day of senior year, Lydia swears she could cry. Stiles’ weird, veiny hand is gripped in one of hers, and Scott and Kira are beside them, Scott’s strong arm around her shoulders. Malia and Liam are there too, until Liam spots Mason up ahead in the hallway and runs to greet him with kisses.
There is no teen movie moment. All eyes don’t turn to watch Lydia as she walks in, slow motion, her outfit perfectly coordinated. She’s in a black skirt and black tights with black wedge booties and a pale pink top, and if she happens to have one of Stiles’ baby blue plaid flannels tied around her waist, well, sue her. Precisely no eyes are on her and she honestly couldn’t be happier.
Derek meets them in the parking lot when the day is finally over, with Isaac in the passenger seat, fresh from the airport, tired purple international flight half-moons still stamped under his eyes. Lydia barely even chokes out a “Shave your beard, it’s fucking awful” before they’re all crying and hugging. There’s dinner at Scott’s, spaghetti in the living room on paper plates because the kitchen table can’t hold all of them, and Melissa calls them all her kids, and it’s as loud and chaotic as ever and Lydia loves every second of it.
She is not, after all, a study in contradictions.
Lydia Martin is a study in growth. She is art in fractals, light passed through a prism. She is chaos in all of its comfort and clarity in all of its terror, and she is herself and someone else’s all at once, and it tastes sweet.
be·com·ing
bəˈkəmiNG/
noun
PHILOSOPHY
the process of coming to be something or of passing into a state.
Lydia Martin is a study in becoming.