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Lydia Martin does not know who she is.
Her English teacher, a woman who is herself far from what she claimed to be, called Lydia a banshee. Maybe she’s right. Lydia doesn’t know, and she finds she doesn’t mind. Learning she may be less than human is nothing compared to knowing she’s always been less than herself.
After last year, Lydia thought she could change that. At her nadir, her glamour stripped away like her clothes in that forgotten forest run, she thought she had nothing left to lose. She stopped disguising her intelligence, stopped pretending that she didn’t need her friends, stopped ignoring the obvious signs of the supernatural all around her. She thought she could stop hiding.
She says as much to her mother, as they sit side-by-side in her fluffy purple room: she doesn’t want to hide. Who she is and what she’s experienced has marked her, and for the first time, the truth is visible on her skin. For one shining moment her mother seems to understand, to agree, and then she follows up with “But we’re still gonna do your hair, right?” and Lydia knows her mother will never really see her. She only sees the pretty reflection in the vanity mirror.
“Of course we’re doing my hair,” Lydia says to the woman who has never heard her scream, and she goes to school in a messy fishtail braid and a dress that bares the bruises on her neck.
At school she talks to Stiles, and the situation progresses from bad to worse, and his breathing starts coming in startled gasps, so she kisses him, because it’s the only thing she can think to do. She uses her sexuality like a weapon and a tool, because she knows that if she doesn’t, someone else will. When she pulls back she’s shaking, and so is Stiles, and he’s looking at her like she’s made of fairy dust, and for all he’s always claimed to know who she really is, Lydia knows she has him fooled even worse than all the others.
She misses Jackson, sometimes. Jackson was always pretending as much as she was, and sometimes their facades cancelled each other out. They never talked about it. But she saw Jackson cry when he lost his first lacrosse game. She saw him tear up an album’s worth of family pictures the day he found out he was adopted. She saw the way his eyes would flit towards Danny, then guiltily away. Jackson never mentioned what he saw in her eyes, but she’s sure they were a mirror of his own. Neither of them was ever as dumb as they claimed to be.
She and Aiden are lying to each other the same way, and that’s the only reason she keeps fucking him. At first it was a challenge: ensnare the hot new guy, reassume her place at the top of the social ladder. Then she found out he was a werewolf, and it only seemed logical to keep him close, to learn his secrets, to maybe find out what it was that Jackson had wanted so badly. Now she does it as an idle challenge to herself, to see how long she can keep it up, how long she can pretend his body doesn’t repulse her, in all its forms. Her friends disapprove, but they didn’t hesitate to send her off to distract him, to be their femme fatale, to put her pretty face between the lion’s jaws and bite down on its tongue.
Allison is the only one who understands. Allison who was used by her own family, Allison who learned some truths far too late. And still Lydia can’t be honest with her. She tries to talk Allison into pink paint for her new bedroom, because the thought of masculine blue makes her stomach twist in fear. Lydia can’t look away from the fall of Allison’s dark curls, the light that catches in her eyes, the way her whole face transforms into a dimpled heart when she smiles. Lydia looks, and wants, and knows that wanting is pointless when Allison has scores of lupine boys falling at her feet. Lydia could never be what Allison needs, even if she somehow worked up the courage to offer.
Lydia knows what she’s good for, knows it when she opens a door and finds herself staring at Peter Hale. She’s an encyclopedia, a compass, a Lazarus pit – dip yourself deep enough inside and come out alive and shining, dripping her entrails along the ground. She doesn’t know who she is, but she knows what she can do, what others can and will use her for, if she gives them half a chance. It’s not conscious, any more than the tree roots she draws over and over, but it’s something. Maybe she can pretend that’s enough.
She knows it isn’t enough.
Lydia wants to stop fighting. Girl or banshee, ice queen or mathematician, straight seductress or longing lesbian, she wants to surrender to the truth of who she is. But the world isn’t ready to let her.
Lydia stands before three tin vats of ice and poison and the veterinarian says something about emotional anchors. Lydia doesn’t even question the way her body moves toward Allison, the way her hand starts to reach out to touch those bowstring-calloused fingers. But the vet stops her, tells her to go to Stiles, to resume her duty as the girl who brings broken boys back to life. It doesn’t matter to them that she’d rather bring a girl back to life. It doesn’t matter to them that she’d rather choose where and how to use the magic coursing through her veins.
Lydia does as she’s told, and waits patiently for the day of her own resurrection.