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Water still dripped from the trees, even though the storm had passed and the sun was blazing. The air was all petrichor and hot metal and burned rubber, even though he’d left days ago, on a bus of all things. Summer had just begun, and Lydia was too busy being crazy to even remember how she’s passed her finals. Her boyfriend had taken off for parts unknown for reasons that sounded like family but looked like fangs. Her best friend was AWOL and for the first time in years, she didn’t want to call any of the people in her contacts, didn’t have any agenda or plan or ploy.
Her house was lonely, but she sort of liked that. They were a good pair. She woke up in the morning and went to the spin class her mother had signed up for but never attended. She ate lunch (tuna melt, potato chips and a glass of milk, and if you have anything to say about that, well, she could still cut you with her fingernails). She spent the afternoon sitting out in the back yard, reading Of Human Bondage and spent the whole day without saying a single word. She fell asleep in Jackson’s old lacrosse jersey at 10 p.m. and wondered if she was always this person splitting at the seams with nothing to say, or if, without the werewolves, she’d still be the same person everyone had always thought she was.
The first two weeks of summer passed like this. The book changed – sometimes she worked on multivariable calculus, sometimes she read Vogue or Michio Kaku. She reread A Brief History of Time twice. Sometimes she spoke to a lady in her spin class. Sometimes she spoke the barista at Starbucks, or the constantly high college kid at the sandwich shop in town. She never ran into anyone she knew, which suited her just fine. She looked fucking great, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to put a coherent sentence together.
Stiles stopped by on a Tuesday. Or maybe it was a Wednesday. She wasn’t sure anymore. He was holding two coffee cups from Starbucks and dressed in ridiculous cut off jeans, an old BHPD t-shirt, and a stupid backwards baseball cap. For some reason it worked for him.
“Wanna come help Derek tear down his house?” he said, holding out a cup to her. She blinked at him, and then took a sip. It wasn’t her favorite drink, just a regular latte she could drink but would never order, and that more than anything kept her from slamming the door in his face.
“He tried to kill me, remember?” she said evenly, leaning up against the door jam. Stiles grinned, bright and wide, with just a tiny sharp edge to one corner. There were still marks from whatever had happened to his face that night.
“Yeah,” Stiles sighed, fond and sarcastic in the way that only Stiles could be. “I’ve been trying to beat that out of him with 2x4s. So far it hasn’t worked, but I’m nothing if not persistent.”
Lydia rolled her eyes. She thought about saying something like “I know,” but Stiles had a determined look of confidence on his face and just the barest hint of a blush, and she found herself suddenly wanting to make this a little easier on him, if only because he was the first person she’d talked to this much in weeks.
“Alright,” she said, finally. “Let me change into something more suitable. You can come in.”
That finally forced a startled expression onto his face, and he hovered uncertainly in the front hall, shuffling from foot to foot as he looked around and sipped at his frappacino. And then he stopped, staring at the large painting hanging on the right side of the foyer.
“Dude. Is that a Correggio?” Stiles demanded, moving closer to the painting. Lydia resisted the urge to snap at him about getting his drink too close to priceless works of art, but he seemed to be managing his flailing alright. And then she realized what he said.
“You recognize Correggio?” she asked, skeptically, with one perfectly sculpted eyebrow raised. If she did say so herself, that is. Something in Stiles face shuttered off, and she wasn’t sure what it was, but it made her very nervous.
“I’ve had a lot of time to play six clicks to Jesus. Renaissance painters are the easiest way to go,” he answered. Everything about his stance and his tone seemed engineered to project nonchalance. She wanted to point out that you didn’t learn to recognize somewhat obscure Renaissance painters on sight by playing six clicks to Jesus, but instead she just turned around and headed up stairs to change into old shorts, one of Jackson’s t-shirts, and hiking boots. She waited until they were in the jeep to ask about Derek.
“Does he know I’m coming with you?” she asked, staring straight ahead as Stiles backed out of her driveway.
“Nope,” Stiles answered. She could hear the grin in his voice, that same sharp edge he’d had before. “He’s probably going to rip my throat out with his teeth. But we all deserve some closure, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than knocking down a building.”
She didn’t ask what he meant by that, and it turned out that she didn’t need to. When they arrived at the house, nearly everyone was there. Allison and Scott, sullen and not talking, to each other or anyone else. Isaac, looking uncomfortable and defiant and uncertainly between Derek and Scott and the humming Jeep. Boyd, stoic and shut down. Erica wasn’t anywhere to be found and Lydia suddenly felt like maybe she shouldn’t be here. But she was nothing if not able to convince everyone that she was exactly where she should be. So she hopped out of the car before Stiles had even turned it off. Derek looked mutinous.
Scott’s mom and the Sherriff stood a little ways away from the group, talking quietly. Lydia guessed they both must know about werewolves, and judging from the grey lines in the Sherriff’s face, the dark circles under his eyes, he’d only found out recently.
“What the hell is this?” Derek growled, eyes flashing red. Scott looked just about ready to lunge forward, but Stiles put a hand on his arm, without even glancing at him.
“Remember yesterday, when I said we were knocking down your house today?” Stiles asked, patiently, like he was talking to a five year old. “Well you agreed. It’s not my fault you forgot to ask specific questions like who the we entailed.”
Lydia could see the tension in Derek’s arms, the clenching of his fists that led her to suspect claws. Nobody spoke for a while, and the air hummed with some kind of electricity she wasn’t sure she should be able to feel. The house stood stark and scorched against the backdrop of the forest, like some giant tombstone, a grave marker that no one visited. She had little compassion for purposeful self-inflicted wounds, but this, this was something else. Something bigger. This was a monument to war, and the private burnt heart in Derek’s chest. This was the root of her nightmares and Allison’s hate and Scott’s defiance. This house was a scar on all of them, a rune she could read most clearly in the remnants of cuts and bruises on Stiles’ face.
“We’re going to start from the top,” she said. She could hear the authoritative condescension in her own voice. She’d thought her voice might shake, surrounded by all this brute strength, at the ground zero for her insanity. “Otherwise we’re going to bring the whole house down on top of us.”
Scott and Allison followed her in resentful silence. Isaac and Boyd were close behind them, because obeying an imperious Lydia was Pavlovian at this point for the whole sophomore class of Beacon Hills High. She’d trained them well. It took Derek and Stiles a little while longer. Stiles was standing just out of Derek’s reach, but leaning forward on his toes a little bit as if he wanted to reach out to Derek but was still a little afraid of where that might lead him, injury-wise.
She’s gotten her third splinter by the time they join the party, and she’d give them a piece of her mind about it, but she was afraid if she broke the silence she’d break the peace too. They worked in silence but for the splintering of wood, the occasional shouts for someone to get out of the way. Scott’s mom and the Sheriff left after, she assumed, assuring themselves that no one was actually going to get their throat ripped out.
Stiles disappeared around noon and came back an hour later with a sort of ridiculous spread of cold roast chicken and potato salad and a dark green salad and iced tea and lemonade and brownies. Everyone seemed to be able to muster up the energy to thank him, and he appeared to consider that progress because he smiled. Lydia was honestly surprised he’d been able to keep quiet all day, but the quiet continued all through lunch and he didn’t seem like he was any more inclined to break it than anyone else.
They were tossing their plates into a garbage bag in the back of Stiles’ Jeep when Lydia realized that they’d never be able to tear the house down, no matter how many rotted, burned planks they tossed out the windows, if someone didn’t say something. So she waited until the rest of the group was heading back towards the house before she cornered Derek.
“You wanted to kill me,” she said, evenly, when she’d trapped him next to Stiles’ jeep.
“You raised my uncle from the dead,” he replied. There was a blankness to his tone, an dark, easy willingness to take on the responsibility of everything.
“Not my fault. Who taught you that the best response to something you don’t understand is death?” she demanded.
“Allison’s family.”
And alright, that was fair. She appraised him, assigning value to the circles under his eyes, the haunted hunch to his shoulders, the tight line of his mouth. She remembered his expression from that morning, when Stiles had shown up. Defeated, humiliated, but not angry. Not violent. She completed her calculation, and then nodded.
“Don’t do it again,” she said finally. Out of all the things that had happened lately, his willingness to kill her seemed almost insignificant. And what did that say about the shit that Beacon Hills put them through.
Around three in the afternoon, Stiles and Scott started shouting at each other. It began over something small, Scott pulling Stiles away from some beam or some hole or some nail he thought might have it out for his best friend. But it ended like this:
“I can’t tell if the reason you think you have to do everything by yourself is because you think everything is your responsibility or because you don’t think the rest of us are good enough to keep up with you,” Stiles said coldly. Lydia admired the tone of his voice, the control there. She hadn’t thought Stiles capable of it. “But it’s going to get us all killed. Derek saved you. Whatever else you two fought about, he saved you when your girlfriend’s mother tried to suffocate you, and in turn you used him like a tool, like his will meant nothing. You’ve been blind this whole time to me and everything else around you because you can’t cowboy up and accept your life now. Well bully for you. Shit happens. The rest of us deal with it, it’s time you learned to do that too.”
And then Stiles turned around and walked to the other side of the house and started swinging a sledge hammer with such force that no one dared say anything. Not Scott who was looking angry and defiant and guilty all at once, or Allison who looked like she was about to crumple under the weight of too many contradictory truths. Isaac and Boyd hadn’t even stopped ripping boards to listen.
By the time the sun was setting, they’d gotten the whole top level of the house ripped to pieces and piled on the edge of the property. Scott marched toward Stiles’ car without looking at anyone, slamming the passenger side door while Stiles looked on surprised and amused and still furious. Isaac and Boyd changed to their wolf form and took off running, but they said a quiet goodbye to Derek and waved to everyone else.
Allison was standing by the pile they’d made, looking for all the world like she might start screaming right there. Lydia asked Stiles to wait a moment and went up to her.
“From what I hear, you’ve got a lot to own up to, too,” she said, placing a light hand on Allison’s arm. It was hard to muster up compassion for someone who’d kept you in the dark for so long, but she was doing her best. “Maybe it’s time to stop thinking like you’re the only one who got hurt here.”
Allison whipped around to face her, her expression hard and violent, her lips pressed tightly together in a thin line, as though all the things she had to say were fighting their hardest to get out, and it was all Allison could do to keep from flinging words around like grenades. Lydia didn’t bother considering what those things might be. She just tugged on one of Allison’s curls and offered her a smile before she turned around and headed back to Stiles’ jeep.
Stiles didn’t make Scott move for her, but from his expression she figured that had more to do with not wanting to speak to him than any sort of preference. The car ride was silent in that way things often are right before they blow up, as if the potential fight is sucking up all the surrounding energy so that it can be all the more concussive. Lydia had said almost all of the things she needed to today, though, so she leaned back against the seat and let the sunset sooth her. As they pulled away from the Hale property, she saw Derek walk up to Allison, saw the two of them staring quietly at the pile of burnt wood, together.
When they reached her house, Stiles helped her clamber out of the back seat and walked her up to her door.
“Go easy on him,” she said, not knowing where it came from. Only that Stiles without Scott was like her without Jackson and the world wasn’t big enough for all that hurt. “It’s been hard on him.”
“My mother died,” Stiles answered through gritted teeth. “And he got super powers. It seems so fucking small.”
Lydia didn’t have an answer for that. It felt unbalanced and unfair, like Stiles wasn’t considering all the angles, had neglected to find the numbers that went with certain variables. But she figured he’d been doing this whole werewolf thing for longer, and the angrier he seemed, the more likely he was to give way. She knew that much from his cold, cold tones from earlier.
“Pick me up tomorrow,” she said in lieu of a response. And then she pulled open her door and stepped inside. Her parents were out again, but the easy, familiar silence felt nice after the harsh thrum of tension that had tore down the house with them all day long. The jeep pulled away outside and she turned on some music while she made dinner.
Today was hard. Tomorrow would be better.