Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It starts in the morning, when her skirt is swishing by her thighs and her notebooks are dead weight in her arms.

She’s certain that everything up until now has been pretty normal: she woke up this morning, got ready for school, drove her car to the same parking spot at Beacon Hills High, entered the same building.

And that’s when the routine ends. But isn’t there something else?

It’s fleeting, this feeling of something she can only describe as emptiness. Lydia barely captures a wisp of it as it floats away from her brain, but she grasps it like it’s her last breath and holds on. It feels almost uncomfortable; an odd air seems to permeate around her. She’s supposed to do something, supposed to… What is she supposed to do? She can’t remember.

Lydia stands there in the middle of the hallway, concentrating on nothing of substance as she scans her surroundings. What am I missing?

Liam and Hayden turn and, seeing her, throw a smile in her direction, but she doesn’t notice it, too lost in her thoughts. Mason and Corey watch the scene unfold, and the group of teenagers give each other confused looks before walking up to her.

As soon as they come into her field of vision, Lydia startles and looks up, shaking herself out of her reverie. “Hey, Lydia. You okay?” Mason asks, the first to voice his concern.

The girl looks down so that she’s staring at their clothes, refusing eye contact as she focuses. Maybe if she focuses hard enough…

And then it hits her. “I came to school this morning and I was sure I was supposed to meet someone,” Lydia asserts softly, still staring into space.

“Maybe Scott?” Liam guesses.

“Or Malia?” Hayden shoots.

Lydia shakes her head twice. Those names each gave off a little bell in her head, like they were getting warmer, somehow, but they weren’t right. She has plans to do something every morning, she knows it. Except she doesn’t. “No,” she murmurs, trailing off. The bell rings over their heads, saving her from having to explain herself to them.

She finally looks at them all properly. She’ll have to deal with this startling feeling later. “I probably just didn’t have enough coffee this morning,” she adds, smiling and laughing it off like this situation was a joke.

They all laugh. Then they’re all out of her sight, saying their goodbyes to a smiling Lydia, not suspecting a thing, leaving her in a nearly empty hallway with her empty thoughts. 

She goes about her day as usual after that… incident. By noon, she decides to call it the Forgetful Incident. Her logic is that by giving it a name, maybe it’ll tell her brain that this is important and that she needs an idea to pop out of nowhere like it normally would so that she can figure this out. It sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not like she’s got any bright ideas (which is, weird. why doesn’t there seem to be any logic in this? why is she thinking like she needs someone else to bounce ideas off of?).

Then three things happen in quick succession as Lydia gets closer to her car.

Suddenly, 1) a girl with a plaid skirt walks by, 2) someone shouts, “You going to the lacrosse game later tonight?” and 3) her heart starts beating wildly out of its own volition.

She gasps, dropping her bag and her notebook onto the floor. Plaid, lacrosse... Where's the correlation to cause such a response in her? In her heartbeat?

Lydia's jaw drops. Only one person makes her feel like that. One single person, and his face is forming in her brain now, his brown hair, his moles, his stupidly long arms and sly smirk and一

Her breath catches in her throat.

He’s not even here, and he’s making me feel this way!

“Remember,” Lydia murmurs. “Remember…”

And then, a memory:

Remember I love you.

A whisper. A confession. A promise. A goodbye. All wrapped up into one.

It all slams down on her at once. She almost passes out with the sheer force of her realization. “How have I forgotten,” she whispers frantically, her lips trembling, her face as pale as a ghost. The magic is already working on her. He’s already fading away.

Stiles.

Chapter Text

She drives all the way home with her newfound information, nearly running two red lights in her dreamlike state. Lydia can’t stop thinking about the memory, about Stiles ; she’s too afraid that if she did, he would be lost to her forever, never to come back. To me, her brain tacks to the end of the thought.

All she wants is for him to come back to her.

Running up her staircase, she ascends to the second floor of her house, going into her room to toe off her shoes. She lays face down on her bed.

What is she going to do? Obviously, Stiles is gone, and no one even realizes anything’s wrong.

“Wait a second,” Lydia mutters in her silent bedroom. “Does Scott not even一”

Her phone rings in her bag, a shrill sound cutting through the air. Lydia doesn’t smile, but she’s pretty close to it; when did she stop being surprised at her unconscious ability to sense what was happening? (But she’s not a psychic. Just good at sensing things.)

She picks her phone up without reading caller ID. “Scott?”

“Lydia,” a desperate voice replies quickly. “Is it just me, or was there something seriously missing today?”

“Definitely not just you. Do,” Lydia stops, pausing to take a breath. Stay strong, Lydia, please, this is not the time to break down. Attempting to calm herself, she asks the first question that comes to mind. “Do you remember?”

“Kind of.” She can imagine Scott right now, scratching his neck or his head in frustrated confusion, ever the concerned alpha werewolf. “Stiles is gone, isn’t he? They took him.” Lydia doesn’t say anything, which he takes as a silent confirmation. “Lydia, what do we do?”

Her heart shatters at the tone of his voice. No matter how many times they go through this一this thing where they meet the next supernatural villain in this damned town and defeat it, there’s still this feeling of hopelessness. The fear never ends; why don’t they just go away? Why don’t they just leave Beacon Hills?

And Scott . If she’s feeling as horrible and devastated as she is, she can only imagine how Scott must feel, losing his best friend and brother. Hell, Scott stayed by his side through everything, including the years where Lydia was a royal bitch to the both of them. And now, years later, she can feel the places in her heart that are reserved for each of them.

“I don’t know,” Lydia whispers, closing her eyes in shame. She has no good words to tell him, no words of wisdom or hope. She has neither right now, not when there’s no clear answer on how to fight back.

“What if we don’t remember him tomorrow?” Scott asks, getting louder. “How the hell do we save someone we can’t even remember?”

A tear trails down Lydia’s cheek. “I don’t know,” she repeats, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

The next afternoon, she stops by Stiles’ house.

Lydia rushes out of her car. She’s not sure why she’s rushing to enter the house, when she’s ninety-nine percent sure of what she’ll see when she goes up to his bedroom, but the next thing she knows, she’s running to the doorstep, grabbing the spare key from under a rock, and unlocking the front door.

Predictably, no one’s home. Only two people live here, and one’s at the police station, oblivious to recent events, while the other is being held captive by the supernatural. Lydia scoffs. What a world they live in.

She trudges up to his bedroom, the fear that has been creeping up on her all day now almost in full force. Opening the door, she lets light into Stiles’ bedroom. Lydia slaps a hand over her mouth as she lets out a broken sob.

Everything’s gone. The desk they put shit on to figure things out, the bed they always study on (and there’s a memory resurfacing一something that has to do with a red piece of string), the flannels that invade his closet and occasionally, his bedroom floor. All gone. Just like him.

“They’re not just erasing him from our memories,” Lydia realizes, mentally scolding herself for not putting more thought into this sooner. She lets out a shaky breath, rubbing her lips together to keep herself from turning into a crying mess. Oh, Stiles. “They’re erasing everything that has to do with him from existence, too.”

How could every object he’s ever called his, every picture he’s ever been in, just disappear?

Lydia leaves the house after standing in his bedroom for what seems like hours. She goes home, setting her brain on autopilot because at this point in her life she can get home from Stiles’ in her sleep.

That night, several hours later, she’s getting ready to go to bed. Lydia’s just rummaging in her bottom drawer for an old T-shirt without any thoughts in her mind when she freezes.    

She might as well call her T-shirt drawer the Stiles drawer. The whole thing is full of Stiles’ stuff. Not just T-shirts, but an old pair of sweats he let her borrow after a cold day, his textbook for math class, a couple of his pencils he’s left at her house, and一in the very corner, hidden in plain sight一his red Beacon Hills lacrosse jersey with his last name and the number twenty-four on the back.

Gasping, she lunges for it, feeling the smooth fabric in her hand. How have none of these objects disappeared when everything he owned in his room did? Was it because of her mysterious inability to forget him permanently?

She doesn’t question it too much, too happy to find that she still gets to keep one significant thing of his.

Throwing it over her head, she walks calmly to her queen-sized bed, curling into herself under the covers. Lydia reaches over to turn her bedside lamp off, and glances at the clock. It’s ten o’clock一way too early to be going to bed on any night for her, but she closes her eyes anyway.

Then she lets herself cry. First with Void Stiles, and now, this? How many more times is Stiles going to be whisked away by the supernatural? He’s human; he shouldn’t be targeted by the supernatural this often.

But he’s the strongest person she’s ever met.

And, if anything, the tears make her stronger. Her resolve shines through.

She resolves to pore through every supernatural book she can get her hands on to get Stiles back. The ghost riders have another thing coming for them other than a pack of werewolves. They’ve got a powerful banshee, too.

Lydia Martin is not giving up, especially when she’s still got a word or three to tell Stiles.