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Lydia swirls the glass beaker gently in her hand, tilting her head as she watches Peter watch her. He’s helpless, trapped as he is by the wolfsbane ropes he taught her to make.
“Let’s try an experiment,” she suggests with the smirk he ingrained in her nightmares.
---
There’s a man, in her brain. He’s digging through her like he’s looking for something, like he’s trying to pry himself up from the ground through the vehicle of her body, and that’s what he does — claws through her with claws, cutting her open with his voice in her ear, in her head, in her bones.
There’s a boy, in her brain, and he smirks like a villain and lies like an innocent, and Lydia can see the shadow of who he really is in the twist of his lips and the press of his body. Her hands shake around the flower cradled in her palm. Wolfsbane, her memory tells her. It’s not there, her senses tell her, none of this is real. It’s all in her head, but her mind is the only thing that matters.
---
“What do you think you’re going to do to me, Lydia dear?” Peter asks, and his words slide over her like honey, coiling and sweet, but if she let them they would entangle her. Not honey but resin, and if she stands still along enough, she’ll be trapped forever in the amber glow of his lies. “What do you possibly think you could do that hasn’t been done already?”
Lydia smiles down at the wolfsbane flower in her palm. She crushes it, turns it to a powder between her hands, and then she tips it into the beaker. Swirls the beaker carefully. There’s an extra length of wolfsbane rope on the rotting table behind her, and she’s tempted to gag him with it.
She wants to see him helpless. She wants to see him scream. She wants to lean in and whisper his damnation in his foolish werewolf ear — this isn’t your game anymore, burned man; the game has always been mine.
“You’re not as slick as you think you are,” Lydia says. She sets the beaker down. “You left quite a mess behind.” She taps her temple with one perfectly manicured fingernail. “Up in here.”
He looks at her like that doesn’t bother him a bit, the traces he’s embedded inside her. But Lydia sees the lie, and it makes her smile turn into a grin. She turns back to her supplies and hums.
Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? The big bad wolf, the big bad wolf?
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
---
There’s a monster, in her brain, and he’s burrowed himself a den. Lydia looks around the dilapidated house and sees echos of grandeur. She sees what a man he used to be.
Not a good man, not a brave man, not a kind man. But a strong man. A man strong enough to lay in ruin for years and then rise again. A man strong enough to sink his fangs into a teenage girl and split her open until he can touch sunlight again.
---
“My nephew will kill you for this,” he says as she binds him tighter and tighter. She’s reconsidering the gag: how his skin would blister and burn underneath the wolfsbane, how she might even get a whimper out of him. A little cry of pain, like a gift. “He’ll destroy you for murdering his last family member.” Peter smirks. “I’m all he has left.”
“You destroyed me once,” Lydia says with no inflection. She drifts back to her table of supplies, picks up the beaker again. Stares at the mixture inside. “You murdered me on the lacrosse field.”
“You survived, Lydia,” he tells her with false earnestness. “You’re stronger now than ever. I made you better.”
Lydia laughs and laughs and laughs.
---
“I’m going to bury you back beneath the floorboards,” she whispers to him like a secret. “Bind you and trap you and entomb you.” She leans closer, even closer.
“And you’re going to be awake for it.”
---
She dreams of a house in the woods, built tall and wide and strong. A family lives there, a happy family. But there’s a shadow stalking them, with glimmering blonde hair and a smile that tastes metallic.
He is there, the thing inside her. He pulses like a bruise underneath her skin, a tether she just can’t cut. She wants to wrap it around his neck and choke him, watch the fear bleed into his eyes, his bloody red eyes that haunt her nightmares. Every flash of red has her scattering, torn apart on the lacrosse field like it was nothing.
(She was nothing, just another stepping stone to his plan, and this knowledge burns into her like a brand and fuels her rage, her anger, her own thirst for blood. She wants to taste his fear like he tasted hers.)
She keeps to the edges of the dream, watching the family within. There’s a boy that stands apart, and the shadow catches him, nets him in her hair and her smile and her smell, and then she stabs him in the back and the dream dissolves into flames.
And through that, he watches, waiting, with sly eyes and patience clouding his ashy lungs.
---
He tries to clench his jaws when she grabs his face, but she jabs him with her fingers until he opens up, unable to stop her. He’s weakened by the wolfsbane, his eyes a ruddy orange and inhuman. She’s in control.
She takes the beaker and pours it down his throat, and though he sputters — the most undignified thing she’s seen him do since he took up space in her brain, and she’s proud that she’s reduced him to this, this gasping thing tied to her mercy. (She has none.) She pours and pours, until he’s swallowed most of it, and what he hasn’t swallowed is slowly dripping down the front of his shirt.
She drags him to the edge of his grave. She says, “This isn’t your game anymore, burned man. The game has always been mine.”
---
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? she hums as she lays down the last floorboard and nails it back into place. She knocks on the wood like it’s a door.
“Sweet dreams, Peter dear,” she says, and then she leaves him. Alive.
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? The big bad wolf, the big bad wolf?
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?