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“I’m not thrilled about you already going back to school,” Natalie Martin said for the hundredth time while she did the dishes and Lydia ate cereal at the table behind her.
Lydia had been home all weekend. Friday night, Stiles drove her, her mom, and Scott back to the Martin house from the animal clinic. They helped her mom get her inside and laid her on the couch. Scott stayed for a while and then left to check in with the rest of the pack. Stiles stayed so long that he fell asleep in the chair next to her. The next day, Kira and Malia came over and hung out with her for hours, catching her up on what had happened since she’d been gone, watching movies and eating junk food. Yesterday even Liam, Mason and Hayden had stopped by. They made her laugh with their recount of how they’d been apart of the Plan B to get her out of Eichen.
She’d missed her friends and her mom, who had stayed home with her all weekend, but the next step was rejoining the outside world.
“Mom, I told you: I’m fine. I got caught up on all my schoolwork yesterday, I’m taking the medicine Deaton got for me, and it’s my senior year and I really don’t want to let Eichen House take any more of that away from me.”
Her mom turned off the sink and looked at her, sighing. “At least let me drive you. You had holes drilled into your head last week, Lydia. There’s no way I’m letting you operate a vehicle.”
As if on cue, they heard a loud engine approach outside followed by some rickety noises as it was put into park and its door was slammed shut.
“I already have that covered!” Lydia smiled. “I called Stiles.”
The doorbell rang as Lydia put her bowl in the sink and gathered up her books. Her mom went to the door.
“Hello, Stiles. Long time no see,” her mom said happily. She had been trying to be extra nice to Stiles since it turned out he had been right about Eichen House all along. Her mom even apologized to Lydia after she told her that she’d kicked Stiles out when he’d been visiting her last week.
“Good morning, Mrs. Martin!” Lydia walked up to them then and smiled at them both. “You ready?” he asked her.
“I still don’t like this,” Natalie said as he hugged her daughter.
“I’m with you,” Stiles said. “You know, the two of us could take her. I mean, she could easily outsmart us, but if we caught her by surprise we might be able to lock her in her room and force her to rest.” He spoke with his arms flailing about wildly the way they always did when he was explaining a less-than-perfect plan.
“I have rested,” Lydia groaned. “I was catatonic for a week, remember? All I did was lay in a bed!” Before either of them could respond she slid past her mom, grabbed Stiles’ hand, and pulled him out the door towards his car.
It wasn’t until she plopped down in the passenger seat that she allowed herself a moment to feel her injuries. She closed her eyes and tried to quiet the throb in her head and ignored the cuts from Theo that were still fresh on her throat.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m…” She was about to say she was fine, but she’d said it so many times the past three days that the thought of saying it again made her head want to explode. Besides, she couldn’t lie to him. “My mom feels guilty, so I don’t want her to see that I’m hurting. She’d be even harder on herself. Now that I’m away from her… I just need a minute.”
“What do you want me to do? Do you want to stay at my house? I could bring you home at three so your mom would think you were at school all day. Or Mrs. McCall could give you a spare hospital bed for a few hours. She did that for me when I was having trouble sleeping. I could even-“
“Stiles. Just school. I want to go back to my old routine.” She put her head in her hands.
“Okay. I’ll just be quiet. I don’t want to make your headache worse.” He put the car in drive and pulled away.
“No, keep talking. It helps distract me. How did it go at the school last night?”
“Oh, it went perfectly,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Lots of bodies turned up, I still have no idea what the hell Parrish even is besides a walking candle, and the Beast is freaking huge.”
Lydia sat up and looked over at him. “Did Parrish, er- the Hellhound, fight the Beast?”
“He took off after him, and we haven’t heard from him since. I’m sure he’s fine. You just worry about yourself, alright?”
She wasn’t worried about Jordan, truth be told. From what she read about the Hellhound, it could handle things quite well on its own. But if her friends were going to be tracking the Beast late at night and finding its victims, she’d rather the Hellhound defeat it sooner rather than later.
But still, it was nice that Stiles didn’t want her to worry. She wanted to jump right back into helping her friends, but as she sat in the passenger seat of his jeep, memories of seeing blood dripping from his ear as she fought off a deadly scream, she decided it was probably best to let the pack handle things for a little bit longer.
Stiles looked over at her then and caught her staring at the backseat. She wondered if he could tell she was thinking about how he held her, how he calmed her down and made her actually feel kind of safe. She wondered if he was thinking about it, too. Then she quickly turned back around and cleared her throat, breaking the moment.
“I’m sure you didn’t feel like coming back to school after just being here last night,” she said casually. “I hope you weren’t planning on skipping until I called-“
Stiles waved his hand before replacing it on the gearshift. “Had to come to school. Lacrosse game tonight. No school, no playing. Which reminds me, we’re meeting up today to go over some new information Liam got from Mason. We’re doing it fourth period. Scott’s idea. He figured you could use a nice little break halfway through the day so now you have an excuse to skip.”
She could just picture the two boys talking it through. Scott was probably worried about her the way he worried about everyone in his pack. It was probably Stiles’ idea to meet up to get her out of class; he knew she had enough credits that her attending classes was mostly just for experience than necessity. Scott probably planned it strategically so that they could meet somewhere quiet where she didn’t have to put on a show of normalcy for her teachers and classmates.
Stiles looked over at her and smiled. “Okay, yes, it was my idea for you to skip class but in my defense, helping your friends defeat a weird werewolf-chimera-hybrid that could kill us all falls a little higher on the list than you being bored in AP Latin. By the way, those lessons you’ve been giving me totally came in handy the other day: damnatio memoriae….”
She let him continuing prattling for the rest of the car ride to school. Stiles was always the talker. He loved updating her on advances in their plights against whatever villain Beacon Hills threw at them. He gave her pep talks and told her interesting things he’d read on the internet. Her mom even told her that she’d overheard him telling her what she was missing at school when he came to visit her.
Lydia, on the other hand, was used to just going to Stiles. He’d quiet her down, let her sit on his bed, or stick by her when they were doing something dangerous. Sometimes he’d put his hand on her back to guide her or squint his eyes at her when she said something so intelligent and ridiculous that it couldn’t be true.
So while he talked constantly until they got to school, Lydia realized something. He missed talking to her as much as she missed just being around him.