Archive of Our Own ^beta

And he knows it’s love, he really does, because when she briefly meets his eye across the playground one innocuous Tuesday the world around him blossoms into color.

He sees the shade of her hair for the first time, not quite red in the way that he’d imagined from his parent’s descriptions, but definitely red-ish. Maybe it’s closer to orange, or maybe even blonde, he thinks, but he won’t know for sure until he gets to see yellow, too, and it’s super rare to get more than one color at once. Red is enough for now, though.

The new color layers over his previously grayscale world and Stiles can see Lydia’s red hair, the light pink blush of her cheeks and the deeper pink of her lips. Stiles looks at Lydia and sees color, and it is beautiful.

His best friend Scott frowns when he tells him, like he doesn’t understand. “What do you mean you see color? Aren’t we too young for that?”

Stiles waves off his concerns and goes back to rifling through the classroom crayon supply, which suddenly holds a whole new world of possibilities. Some of them are still in black and white, and most are just sort of shades of gray, but some are vibrant colors and Stiles knows that’s more than most of the other kids can see so he’s happy.

He picks out the ones that look closest to Lydia’s colors, labelled red and pink and orange (that one’s a bit of a guess, but he has a good feeling about it) and sketches a rough drawing of her. He’s not the best artist, but just seeing the colors on the page makes his heart race.

He catches her just before the end of the day. “Lydia!” he calls as she neatly tucks her pencils into their case. He can see that she’s got a red one and a pink one, and another color he can’t think of the name of, and he wonders if she sees them too.

She blinks up at him as he skids to a stop in front of her desk. “Yes?”

“I drew this for you.”

She takes the drawing and he waits with baited breath for her response. She glances over it before rolling her eyes back to Stiles’s face. “What is it?”

“It’s… uh…” Now that he’s here in front of her, admitting that he’s drawn her seems like a creepy thing to do. He can see Scott wincing sympathetically across the room. Stiles finally settles on, “It’s in color. Don’t you see?”

Lydia scowls, pink lips pressing together. “No, I don’t see.”

His heart drops, because this is not how the stories go.

In the stories, when you meet your soulmate your whole world suddenly changes, and you start to see color. Because they’re your soulmate, they see color too. You look at each other, and you see color, and it’s beautiful. That’s what happened with Stiles’s parents, that’s what happens in all the stories of true love Stiles has ever heard.

But Stiles sees color, and Lydia doesn’t.

This doesn’t make sense.

Stiles is very lost when he asks, “You don’t?”

“No, I don’t.” Lydia eyes him warily, glancing from the drawing to his face and back again. “Why, do you?”

“Uh… I… um…”

When he doesn’t give her a straight answer, she pins him under a very scrutinising stare. For a second Stiles swears that she’s seeing it too, that she knows exactly what he’s talking about, but then she silently pushes the paper back towards him.

Stiles feels like he might cry. “Keep it,” he says quietly.

He turns to head back to Scott before she can reply, and his friend offers him a consolatory pat on the back.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Stiles shrugs and tries to play it off. “Eh. At least I can see color now.”

Scott nods. “And at least she kept the drawing.”

Stiles spins so fast he almost falls over. He turns just in time to see Lydia tucking the paper into her bag behind her pencil case. Both are pink.

Stiles grins. It might take a little bit longer, but he knows that one day Lydia is going to look at him and see something more than gray.

Lydia Martin doesn’t know if she believes in the concept of color bonding.

Even though she’s only ten, she’s read all about it; about how it’s really just a hormonal reaction, when you break it down, and about how people generally only get one primary color at a time, as their bodies and minds adjust to the change. Scientists still aren’t sure why people get different colors at different times, or even exactly what it is that bonds people together in the first place, but they’ve documented it well and they’re always doing more research on it.

Lydia’s grandmother doesn’t describe it in a scientific way at all. She makes it sound like a fairytale, like another one of the storybooks she and Lydia read together. She tells Lydia about her soulmate Maddy in a soft voice that she saves just for this particular story, and when she gets to the part where they meet for the first time and she describes how it looks, her eyes sparkle.

“I saw red, first,” Lorraine explains, looking far away.

Lydia is enthralled, because even if this is just a make believe fairy tale, it’s a good one. And she’s curious, too, always hungering for new knowledge. The idea that her grandmother can see things that Lydia can’t is both fascinating and frustrating.

She whispers, “What did it look like?”

Lorraine’s eyes stay focused on something Lydia can’t see, and her words come slowly, as if she’s thinking very hard about them before saying them out loud. “Like... passion. Loud and bright and demanding. Very attention grabbing. Very exciting, but also a little dangerous. A warning as well as an invitation.”

Lydia frowns, trying to picture it, but it’s hard to imagine something that you have no context for. Her mind keeps giving her blacks and whites, gray, gray, gray. She thinks she might understand the feeling, a little bit, though, abstract as it is.

Lorraine must mistake her thoughtfulness for confusion, because she pats Lydia’s head affectionately and offers a more concrete example. “Like your hair.”

“Like Ariel’s hair,” Lydia counters, and Lorraine smiles indulgently.

Lydia likes the fairytale of The Little Mermaid the best because Ariel went after what she wanted. After spending her whole life dreaming of being on land, she color bonds with the Prince, and Ariel doesn’t wait around for someone else to make things happen for her - she chases her own dreams, she fights for what she wants, and she isn’t afraid to sacrifice things along the way. Ariel is definitely red, and Lydia would like to be red, too.

Lydia’s dad doesn’t approve of Lorraine’s stories. He scoffs and rolls his eyes and tells his mother to stop putting stupid ideas of soulmates in Lydia’s head.

Ariel and Prince Eric color bonded. Lorraine and Maddy color bonded. Lydia’s parents did not.

She thinks about this as she listens to them scream at each other downstairs later that night. She wonders if they would fight like this if they had color bonded, if they were soulmates. She wonders if they have soulmates out there somewhere, fighting with someone else because they never found each other.

That’s another thing that bothers Lydia about the whole concept. Does everyone even have a soulmate? She’s read about people finding colors on their own, about people getting one color from one person and another color from a different person, and about people who found their soulmate and then broke up anyway. There are too many variables for her liking.

She could sort of understand why her parents gave up on the concept of soulmates and married each other, instead, if they liked each other. Maybe they used to like each other, but they don’t anymore.

“I can’t believe you’re not going to come!” Lydia’s mother yells, voice ragged enough at the edges to catch Lydia’s full attention.

“I can’t just take time off work whenever I feel like it -” her dad starts to argue, but Natalie cuts him off.

Lydia imagines her mother’s expression; all shock and indignation, lips parted and perfectly sculpted eyebrows furrowed. “Whenever you feel like it? I’m not asking you to come out for lunch, Ken, I’m asking you to come to Claudia’s funeral, for Christ’s sake!”

Lydia sits up straight at the top of the stairs, rifling through memories in search of a face to put to the name Claudia as her dad offers weak excuses and her mother gets increasingly hysterical.

Natalie is clearly crying as she says, “I’ve just lost a friend, Noah’s just lost his soulmate, Stiles has just lost his mother, and you can’t even take an afternoon off work to -”

Lydia inhales. Stiles. Stiles Stilinski. The small, dorky boy who wears oversized t-shirts and bags under his eyes, always with Scott McCall. He wasn’t at school today, although Lydia didn’t notice his absence until now.

Her stomach twists uncomfortably and she chews on her thumbnail. She knew that his mom was sick, had overheard the teachers talking about it in hushed voices in the hall, had seen the worried way all the parents looked at him as he walked out of school, hunched over with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

She never thought she’d die, though.  People don’t just disappear like that, moms don’t just die like that.

Downstairs, Natalie screams, “You are an asshole!”

Lydia jumps to her feet and runs down the hall to her room. She feels unsettled, for some reason, and she wants to slam the door behind her, but she closes it quietly so that her parents don’t know she was eavesdropping.

She crawls into the middle of her bed and stares at the copy of The Little Mermaid on her bookshelf until her vision goes blurry. She wonders what happens to you when your soulmate dies - she wonders if they take the colors with them.

When Stiles returns to school a week later he looks like there’s no light left in the world, let alone any color.

Lydia wants to say something to him, but sorry sounds contrite and anything else sounds fake, because it’s not like Lydia and Stiles are friends. So instead she watches Scott pat him on the shoulder as he wipes away his tears on the sleeve of his hoodie, and she feels bad in silence.

Stiles doesn’t get another color. The red doesn’t fade, and it doesn’t get any stronger. It just stays, patches of bright red and muted pink visible amongst the rest of the world’s shades of ruddy-gray-brown.

“Red’s a good one to have,” his dad says, nodding knowingly. “Red’s a warning colour. Stay away. Might keep you safe.”

Stiles looks at the red label on the old bottle of whiskey on the shelf, the tired, red rim around his dad’s eyes. Stay away.

Noah follows his gaze and sighs, rubbing a tired hand over his face before brightening up and saying, “And, hey - Lydia, her hair is red, isn’t it?”

Stiles barks out a laugh. “So you’re saying the forces of nature have conspired to tell me to stay away from Lydia Martin?”

“Hey, no, that’s not what I -”

“Don’t worry, Dad, I get it,” he says gently.

Stiles knows that talking about colors has been tough for his dad ever since his mom died.

He asked what had happened, once, terrified that his dad had lost the colors when he lost his soulmate. He’d smiled sadly and assured him the colors were still there, just different, now. A little bit darker, a little bit duller.

It makes a sad amount of sense. Without your soulmate there to provoke or sustain the chemical reaction, of course the colors would fade a little. Stiles’s looked it up, and apparently they won’t ever go away completely, but they’ll never be the same again, either. They’ll never be quite as bright as before.

His research also reveals that sometimes people don’t get all the colours, presumably for the same reason, which is a bit disconcerting. Because Stiles still goes to school with Lydia, still sees her almost every day (how could he miss her, with her curled hair and painted lips and beautiful blush, a walking personification of red hot desire) but they never interact. And it’s probably, almost certainly, definitely, the interaction that makes all the difference. The extended time together, that’s what gives you the other colors.

As far as Stiles knows - which, to be fair, is not very far, considering that he and Lydia have barely spoken in the last seven years and he’s pretty sure she might have even forgotten his name - Lydia still hasn’t seen any colors. She’s started dating Jackson Whittemore, Captain of the lacrosse team and the worst person Stiles has ever met, but she still sees nothing but shades of gray, and Stiles counts that as a win.

All he has to do is get himself back on Lydia’s radar, give her the chance to get to know him, and it’ll happen. He knows it will.

“Hey,” his dad says, drawing him back to the present. His eyes are soft, like he knows exactly what Stiles was thinking about. “I’ve got something for you. To say congratulations for making it to Freshman year.”

“Gee, no need to sound so surprised, Dad.”

The Sheriff laughs and stands up, draping an arm over Stiles’s shoulders and guiding him into the lounge. There’s a black bag sitting on top of the coffee table, and when Stiles gives him a questioning look he nods and gestures to it with a smile. “Go on.”

Stiles scoops it up and pulls the contents out immediately, taking no time for ceremony. It’s a heavy, hardcover book, and the first thing he notices is the gradient at the top of the cover. He can see pure, bright red, and maroon like his lacrosse gear, and shades of pink and even a bit that looks like it’s verging into orange territory. After that the image is gray, the only differences he can see distinguished by shades of light and dark rather than hue.

Stiles gapes at his father, fingers moving reverentially over the cover. “Dad, is this -?”

“The Complete Guide to Spectral Color,” his dad says, like he’s announcing it for a crowd. And then, much more bashfully, “My, uh, mine and your mother’s is sort of… out of date, so I thought you might like your own. Updated.”

Stiles’s throat feels tight and he can’t stop drumming his fingers against the cover. “Dad, this is. Wow. I can’t believe you got me the Spec Guide, that’s… thank you.”

And then, still holding the book, he throws his arms around his dad in a hug.

He returns the embrace just as fiercely. “You’re welcome, kid. I’m proud of you, I hope you know that.”

Stiles pulls back and stares down at the book, feeling a little overwhelmed. Because he is holding, in his hands, a swatch of every single named color there is. Not just red and blue and yellow, or even purple and green and orange, but things like vermillion, sapphire, chartreuse, plum and mint and tangerine. Inside this book is an entirely new world, just waiting for Stiles’s brain to catch up with it.

“Do you think I’ll be able to see them all, one day?” he asks without thinking.

It takes a moment for his dad to answer, but when he does he’s smiling, small but sincere. “Your mother used to write down notes about the colors, when she was - when she was in the hospital. She got a bit confused about which shade was which, towards the...”

He cuts off, but Stiles knows exactly what he was going to say. His mom had gotten confused about a lot of things, towards the end.

“Anyway,” the Sheriff says, obviously making an effort to refocus on Stiles. “Our copy has some notes about the colors, what they reminded your mom of, what they felt like. Do you wanna get a head start by copying them into your book?”

“Hell yeah I do!” Stiles exclaims, grinning wide, pushing aside everything that this conversation has brought up except for the prospect of learning more about colors. He can deal with the rest later, when his dad’s on night shift and Stiles has the house to himself and can feel guilty without worrying about making him feel bad.

For now, he lets himself be distracted by two words written in his mom’s loopy script beneath a swatch of color that is all too familiar.

Strawberry blonde, Claudia’s written.

Stiles picks up a pen and writes beside it, Lydia.

Sometimes Lydia thinks she might love Jackson, and sometimes she thinks she can’t, because she still hasn’t gotten any colors, and sometimes she thinks soulmates are the stupidest thing in the world and what does it matter if Jackson can’t make her see colors when he can make her see stars, anyway?

Colors or no colors, as Captain of a winning lacrosse team, Jackson is the perfect boyfriend for Lydia’s plan.

Her plan involves ruling the social circles of Beacon Hills High School with a perfectly manicured fist, getting top grades in each and every one of her classes, and then getting into MIT and asserting her dominance in the Mathematics faculty until her research wins her a Fields Medal. That is Lydia’s plan.

Having a soulmate does not factor in, so when she outgrows fairytales Lydia takes no more than a passing interest in the science of it, following the rare new developments with a detached sort of intrigue.

Until she becomes friends with Allison Argent.

The day Allison arrives at Beacon Hills High School, Lydia claims her as her own and invites her to watch lacrosse practice. Allison knows nothing about lacrosse, and she’s quite obviously a little overwhelmed, but she comes along anyway, which Lydia finds genuinely endearing.

“Who’s he?” Allison asks, nodding towards a player that Lydia doesn’t recognise.

“Him? I’m not sure who he is.” She throws her new friend a curious glance. “Why?”

“He’s in my English class,” Allison says, and that should be the end of it, but something about her tone has Lydia intrigued.

“And?” she prompts.

Allison looks surprised, all doe eyed innocence. She winces when a ball hits the guy right in the helmet, bouncing into the goal and making the rest of the team laugh. Lydia resists the urge to roll her eyes.

“And what?” Allison asks.

“And what did he do in English to catch your attention?”

The goalie catches the next shot, and Lydia’s interest is piqued.

“It’s probably nothing,” Allison says modestly.

“Probably nothing means definitely something,” Lydia replies.

Allison sighs and twists her fingers together in her lap. She’s saved from answering by the goalie catching the next shot, and the next, and the next, and Lydia momentarily lets it drop because how does she not know this boy?

“He seems like he’s pretty good,” Allison says beside her, leaning just as far forward in her seat as Lydia is, clearly impressed.

Lydia arches her eyebrows and nods. “Yeah, very good.”

Good enough to stop Jackson’s throw, which earns him an impressed cheer from a boy on the bench and Lydia herself, who gets to her feet and claps enthusiastically. On the field Jackson shoots her an unimpressed glare and she sends a sly smile back, a warning to lift his game.

“I thought maybe I saw a color when I met him,” Allison says quickly from down on the bench seat, the words all coming out so fast they sort of blur together.

Lydia blinks down at her before dropping gracefully back to the seat, eyes wide. “Excuse me?”

Allison looks extremely embarrassed, ducking her head and trying to hide behind her dark hair. “I told you it was stupid, I don’t even know his name -”

“But you thought you saw color when you met him,” Lydia repeats, trying to keep all the skepticism she’s feeling out of her tone.

She must do at least a passable job, because Allison lifts her head and meets Lydia’s eye hopefully. “Maybe, yeah.”

“Which one?” Lydia asks, glancing out to the field where the mystery boy is talking animatedly to the boy off the bench.

“Blue,” Allison mumbles. And then, a little louder. “When he let me borrow a pen.”

“How romantic,” Lydia says before she can stop herself. She immediately regrets it as Allison folds her arms and turns away, frowning. “Okay, I’m sorry, that was rude. He let you borrow a pen, that’s… sweet.”

“Yeah,” Allison says, clearly still hesitant. She looks towards the boy rather than Lydia, now, and her expression softens. “He passed it to me and it was like… like a firework went off, and there was a shower of blue, so much richer than the gray everywhere. I could see it on my scarf, on his shirt, the sky outside…”

Despite herself, Lydia feels a pang of jealousy, sharp and straight through her heart. “And then what?”

“And then he turned back around and I blinked and everything was normal again,” Allison says. How anticlimactic. “Can it happen like that? Can you get a little bit of a color but not all of it?”

It’s uncommon, but Lydia’s definitely heard of it happening - A flicker of color followed by a gradual reveal. It’s something about the way the different cones in your eyes react to the light spectrum, and something else that so far they haven’t been able to explain, one of the inexplicable, magical things about the way you connect with your soulmate.

Lydia doesn’t say any of this to Allison, though. She just shrugs and says, “I don’t know.”

Allison bites her bottom lip before declaring, “I think I should talk to him and see if it happens again.”

“Good idea,” Lydia says, because in order to call it a success every experiment must have repeatable results, and any boy who saves every single shot is worth experimenting with.

She watches the goalie and the boy from the bench head for the locker room, walking behind an extremely pissed off Jackson. For just a second, she lets herself wish that she could see the colour of their uniforms, could make out the contrast of the deep maroon against the yellow-green grass.

And then she remembers the plan, and she flips her hair over her shoulder and offers Allison a dazzling smile. “Let’s go.”

A lot of weird shit happens in very quick succession after Scott gets the bite, but one of the weirdest is when he declares that he’s met his soulmate.

Stiles doesn’t want to kill his post-makeout glow, but he doesn’t want him to get his hopes up, either. “Whoa, buddy, hang on - what if it’s an effect of the bite? You said you can see some color when you start to shift, right, what if it’s -”

“No, man, it’s definitely Allison!” Scott is beaming, his smile stretched wide and his eyes crinkled in the corners as he stands opposite Stiles in the locker room, practically buzzing with excitement. He just won the game, he just kissed his crush, and he might have just started to see color, so Stiles isn’t all that surprised by his dazed expression. “It’s Allison, it literally just happened, I can see color, I can - I kissed her, and now I can see color!”

Stiles runs a hand over his hair, mouth hanging open in shock. “Which one?”

“Yellow,” Scott says in a way that makes it sound like the happiest word in the world.

That’s one of the things written under the Yellow section in Stiles’s Spec Guide - happiness, alongside sunshine and hope and light. All of those concepts are embodied in Scott’s smile.

Stiles smiles back, because, “Holy shit, dude. You’ve found your soulmate.”

“I can’t believe you’ve had this since third grade,” Scott breathes, holding his hands out in front of himself and turning them over, blinking at the new perception.

“Well, not this, exactly, you know, because I’ve got red and you’ve got yellow, but -”

“This is amazing!” Scott crows, curling his hands into fists and punching the air.

Stiles laughs and claps him on the shoulder in congratulations, letting his best friend’s enthusiasm catch. Because Allison is Scott’s soulmate, and she’s Lydia’s friend, and things should be easy for Stiles from here on out, right?

Well, they’re not exactly easy, but it sort of works out okay, because despite all of the messed up shit that’s happening, Stiles gets to take Lydia to Prom, which is honestly something that, up until a few days ago, seemed more impossible than werewolves existing.

He wonders if it’s fate, that she wears a dress in one of the few colors he can actually see. She looks beautiful in pink and black, with her hair curling around her shoulders, her lips perfectly painted and her eyes bright, and he wants this to be a good night, he really, truly wants her to have a good time. 

It’s just a shame that she seems determined not to.

“Lydia, get off your cute little ass and dance with me, now,” he snaps.

She purses her lips and tilts her head, saying lightly, “Interesting tactic. I’m gonna stick with no.”

“Lydia, get up! Okay, you're gonna dance with me,” Stiles insists, as she slumps back in her seat and rolls her eyes. God, she’s the most infuriating person he’s ever met but he is determined to get through to her. “I don't care that you made out with my best friend for some weird power thing. I don't -”

He flails, and she stares at him, eyebrows furrowing slightly as he powers on.

“Lydia, I've had a crush on you since the third grade. And I know that somewhere inside that cold, lifeless exterior, there's an actual human soul,” he says, pointing to her for emphasis. “And I'm also pretty sure I'm the only one who knows just how smart you really are, uh-huh, and that once you're done pretending to be a nitwit, you'll eventually go off and write some insane mathematical theorem that wins you the Nobel Prize.”

She turns her head and closes her eyes, as if she’s gathering her thoughts and picking which insult to fling back at him for his impudence. There’s no going back now, though.

Her response is not what he’s expecting. “Field's Medal.”

“What?” Stiles asks, unable to hide his shock, which only grows as Lydia gets to her feet and comes to stand in front of him.

“Nobel doesn't have a prize for mathematics,” she explains. “The Field's Medal is the one I'll be winning.”

And then she takes his hand and leads him onto the dance floor, and Stiles is honestly surprised that he doesn’t get another color right then and there.

But of course things couldn’t be that easy; Of course Jackson fucking Whittemore has to screw everything up.

He interferes with Scott and Allison, just like he’s been interfering with Stiles and Lydia for years, and he stupidly tries to get involved with the werewolf stuff, and he’s the one Lydia’s looking for when she gets attacked by Peter Hale, and he’s the one who doesn’t seem to really care all that much when Lydia goes missing, while Stiles spends hours panicking and trying to help with the search and freaking out because she’s his soulmate, damn it, and he needs her to be okay.

And then, after all that, Jackson’s still the one she goes back to.

And Stiles wants to just come out and say it, thinks about it every time they’re together, just casually dropping into the conversation, “Oh, Lydia, by the way, do you remember that day I gave you a drawing in third grade and said it was in color? That’s because, surprise, we’re actually soulmates and I’ve color bonded with you! Isn’t that awesome?”

But then he thinks about the horror stories of people who color bond with someone who doesn’t color bond back with them, and he honestly doesn’t think he could take it if that was what was happening here. He’d rather live in ignorant hope.

So Stiles doesn’t bring it up, and he watches as Scott falls for Allison and gains another color (red, for passion, danger, lust and love), and he becomes tentative friends with Lydia, and he tries to convince himself that it’s enough, for now.

They’re sitting side by side on the bleachers at the ice rink, lacing up their skates, and Stiles is trying very hard to think about anything other than the fact that their legs are almost touching when Lydia shivers and complains, “Could it be any colder in here?”

And lucky day, he just so happens to have a spare shirt in his bag. He grabs it and holds it out to her. “Here.”

Lydia frowns at the shirt and then at him. “What color is it?”

“Uh…” Stiles recognises the distinctive lightness of the soft material, but he flips the tag over to double check it anyway. “Orange.”

“I’m wearing blue,” she informs him, and it sounds an awful lot like a no, but Stiles has no idea why. She reads his silence correctly and explains, complete with pointed finger for emphasis, “Orange and blue, not a good combination.”

“But it’s the colors of the Mets!” he counters, offended. “And the Spec Guide called them complementary colors -”

“That’s an outdated and misleading term. ‘Opposite colors’ is more accurate, because the whole point of it is that they don’t complement each other, they clash.” Lydia gives him an extremely unimpressed look, pink lips pressed together.

He holds his hands up in surrender, because she’s clearly not going to hear his arguments, and she turns back to her boots.

“I thought you couldn’t see colors, anyway,” Stiles says as he shoves the shirt back into his bag.

Her fingers still for just a second before she goes back to lacing up. “I can’t.”

“Then what does it matter what color the shirt is?”

“Because other people can see color, and I don’t want to look like an idiot in front of them,” Lydia snaps, as though this is the most obvious thing in the world.

Stiles gapes at her. She’s frowning, but not at him; her attention is focused on Allison and Scott, who are making disgusting heart eyes at each other and whispering together. And he gets it immediately, because it’s pretty much the only thing he and Lydia have in common - they both know how awful it feels when your best friend is with their soulmate and you’re not with yours.

He says softly, “Lydia, you could never look like an idiot, no matter what colors you were wearing.”

She tilts her head, looking at him the same way she did when he told her she was going to win a Nobel Prize for mathematics. He wants to shy away from that scrutinising look, but he forces himself to hold her gaze.

“Do you see any colors?” she asks carefully.

Shit.

“Oh, uh, I…” Stiles fumbles for something to say, anything that can distract her long enough for him to remember how to form an actual sentence.

His eyes land on something inside his bag, a shade ever so slightly closer to red than his spare shirt, and he snatches it up. A Reese’s chocolate. Without another word, he offers it to Lydia.

She eyes it warily for a second, and he panics that she’s going to call him out on the blatant change of topic. But then she shrugs and takes it from him, methodically and ruthlessly ripping the wrapper off, and Stiles allows himself a small smile.

This is going okay. Lydia’s obviously open to the idea of discussing soulmates, at least in terms of color theory, and they’ve been sitting together, alone, for multiple minutes without Stiles doing anything (majorly) embarrassing. Maybe he’s better at this than he thought.

He takes a deep breath, gathering his courage, and says, “Okay, um, maybe orange and blue’s not the best. But, you know, sometimes there’s other things you wouldn’t think would be a good combination that end up turning out to be, like, a perfect combination. You know, like… two people, together.”

This is ridiculous. Even by Stiles’s standards, this is verging into saying way too much. Beside him, Lydia’s paused her destruction of the Reese’s wrapper, and he can feel her watching him.

It takes every ounce of what little self control he has to shrug casually and keep his voice relatively level as he adds, “Who nobody ever thought would be together. Ever.”

“No, I can see that.” Lydia’s voice is surprisingly soft, and she’s nodding like she completely understands.

Stiles feels like he may spontaneously combust, right here in this ice rink. “You can?”

“Yeah.” Lydia nods seriously. “They’re cute together.”

And he takes it all back, this is a disaster.

Stiles turns his head to see Scott helping Allison to her feet, both of them grinning like they’re having the time of their lives.

“Oh,” he says flatly. “Yeah, them.”

“Cute,” Lydia repeats, popping the rest of the chocolate into her mouth and smiling coquettishly.

“Cute,” Stiles mimics, scowling and lacing his boots up with far more force than is necessary. “Adorable.”

As soon as Lydia admits that she loves Jackson, colors or no colors, kanima be damned, he leaves for London.

And Lydia is thrust into a parallel universe where werewolves and monsters are real and she is friends with Scott McCall and Stiles Stilinski, and things are simultaneously the worst and best they’ve ever been.

For the first time in her life, Lydia feels like she is on par with someone, and to her unending shock (and mild horror) that someone is Stiles.

She’s so wrapped up in all the rest of it - the screaming, the sacrifices, the school work - that she doesn’t have time to consider anything new about color bonding, and she’s so distracted trying to figure out what the hell she is that she doesn’t really notice Stiles has wormed his way into every facet of her life until he’s sitting across from her at her kitchen table one innocuous Thursday.

He’s eating a handful of curly fries he picked up from a burger place on the way here, and there are a few grains of salt sticking to his top lip. He’s frowning, drumming his absurdly long fingers against the tabletop, staring at the list they’ve made of potential clues regarding who could be behind the sacrifices, and Lydia realises with a jolt that this feels natural.

Their homework may have been pushed to the side in favour of facts about murder victims and ancient myths, and Stiles’s oversized flannel and jeans may clash with the upscale furniture, but Lydia wouldn’t change it even if she could. Having him here, like this, feels right.

Her eyes are just drifting from the freckles and moles on the side of his face to the small constellation of them peeking out from under his shirt collar when it happens. Something flares in the centre of Lydia’s vision, and suddenly everything is warmer and brighter, sharper and crisper and yellow.

And then Prada barks, and Lydia reflexively looks towards the sound, and the color fades as suddenly as it had appeared. It lasted maybe a few seconds, maximum, but Lydia feels as though her entire world has been tilted on its axis.

Stiles has started talking, mouth moving at a million miles per hour as he tries to piece things together, but Lydia can’t hear what he’s saying.

It must have been a hallucination, brought on by stress. A trick of the light. Something, anything other than what Lydia thinks it was.

She’s so lost in her own head she doesn’t even notice he’s stopped babbling until he says her name for probably the third time. “Lydia. Hey, you okay?

She blinks, but Stiles doesn’t change. He’s still just sitting there, with spiked up hair and salt on his lips and shades of gray everywhere, but Lydia’s heart still won’t settle in her chest. She can’t get rid of the memory of him all lit up like that. She can’t stop thinking about the way the hue completely changed her perception of him, adding a whole new dimension that she’d never even imagined before.

His expression shifts, eyebrows knitting together and lips parting, and she knows before he even moves that he’s going to get up and come around the table. (How does she know that? Just how much time has she been spending with him, to be able to read him like that?)

“I’m -” She’s fine, so why can’t she say it?

Stiles stops in front of her chair and drops to his knees, so that he’s looking up at her, and Lydia can’t tear her gaze away from him. His lips quirk up into a crooked smile as he says, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

She laughs a little breathlessly. “I’m fine. I just… thought I saw something.”

All brevity disappears from his expression. “Something supernatural?”

“No.” Lydia licks her lips, and Stiles watches the motion as though mesmerised. 

He’s so close to her now, and she can’t stop thinking about how he’d looked in that flare of color, with the rays of late afternoon light shining in through the window behind him. Her eyes flicker down to his lips and then back to his eyes, and the way he’s looking at her makes her feel warm all over.

“Stiles, I -”

Prada barks, and both of them almost jump out of their skin.

Lydia loses her courage. When Prada continues barking, she tears her eyes away from Stiles and snaps, “What, Prada?”

The dog keeps barking, and Lydia is so on edge that she just about falls out of her seat when Aiden appears at her back door. Her expression is horrified enough to compel Stiles to whip his head around to see what she’s looking at, and his shoulders sag.

“Oh,” he says quietly, slowly standing.

Aiden slides open the back door and Lydia shoots to her feet, pushing her chair back with an awful scraping sound. Prada finally stops barking.

Aiden is good looking. He treats Lydia well enough. He’s amazing in bed. But he’s not her boyfriend, and so Lydia doesn’t understand why she feels like she’s been caught doing something forbidden and intimate.

He looks between her and Stiles and says, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“We’re just going over clues. About the sacrifices,” she says, far too quickly.

Both boys look at her like they know she’s lying, but where Aiden is smug, Stiles is definitely hurt. Her heart sinks.

“Mind if I take a look?” Aiden asks, stepping inside.

Stiles replies before Lydia can even open her mouth. “Actually I have to head out,” he says, eyes darting over Lydia’s shoes, the papers spread out over the table, the empty fry packet threatening to fall off the edge - everywhere but at her.

He walks around the table and gathers his stuff, and Aiden comes to stand beside Lydia. She doesn’t move.

Stiles is halfway out the door before she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

His smile is small and he still doesn’t quite meet her eye, but he does glance at her over his shoulder and say, “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

And then he leaves, and Lydia lets out a shaky breath.

Aiden gives her a look. “Enjoy your little study date?”

She rolls her eyes and scoffs, but her heart’s still racing. She only had it for a few seconds, maximum, but Lydia already misses the yellow she saw when she looked at Stiles.

She thinks back to that day with Allison at lacrosse practice, so long ago now, and she wants to ask her best friend about it. She wants Allison’s opinion on what it’s like to see a splash of color and then have it taken away, wants to know how to bear it. Because it seems cruel, to give you a taste of what the world can be, and then to take it away just as quickly.

And she can’t stop picturing it. For days and days later, it’s all she sees every time she closes her eyes. Lydia is going to go mad with images of a sun kissed Stiles burned onto the backs of her eyelids.

But she can’t put it into words, because she’s terrified, absolutely terrified, of what this might mean. And besides, she doesn’t have any proof, yet. Despite all of her instincts screaming at her that this is it, he’s the one, she’s finally figured it out - Lydia is still mistrustful.

Every experiment must have repeatable results in order to be deemed a success. So she takes Allison’s advice from all those months ago and waits for it to happen again.

God knows she’s spending enough time with Stiles lately anyway. Figuring out that Jennifer’s behind the sacrifices is just one part of the puzzle, and things get infinitely more dire when she kidnaps Melissa McCall and the Sheriff.

Lydia’s with Stiles, standing in the middle of the Beacon Hills High School hallway, when the news they’ve been dreading comes through in a text message.

“It’s from Isaac,” Stiles says, eyes flicking to hers before he looks away again. “Jennifer, she took - She has Allison’s father, she took him. She’s got all three now.”

Lydia can see the hope draining out of Stiles’s eyes as his hands begin to shake, and her chest constricts. She forces herself to remain calm, to keep her voice even as she says, “There’s still time. We still have time, right?”

That wasn’t meant to be a question, but Stiles’s breathing has gotten way too shallow and he’s turning away from her and she’s not sure what to do to fix this.

“Stiles? You okay?” When he doesn’t answer, panic pitches her voice higher. “What is it? What’s wrong? Stiles -”

Finally, he meets her eye. “I think I’m having a panic attack.”

Lydia’s gotten used to monster attacks, fugue states, and finding dead bodies. She’s not frightened of much anymore. But the look on Stiles’s face as he says that - the sheer helplessness - that frightens her.

“Come with me,” she says, grabbing his arm and steering him towards the locker room.

He follows with no complaints, no wise cracks, no smart ass comments at all, and Lydia pushes the door open with far more force than usual. He sounds like he’s about to cry, like he genuinely can’t breathe, and as she leads him to the middle of the room all Lydia can say is, “Okay, come on, come on.”

He falls to the floor and she follows him down, kneeling across from him as he struggles to catch his breath.

“Just try and think about something else, anything else,” she says, desperately trying to recall anything she’s ever read about panic attacks.

“Like what?” Stiles asks, staring straight down and sounding very unappreciative of her efforts.

She doesn’t remember ever feeling this tongue tied before in her life. “Um, happy things! Good things! Friends, family -”

Stiles lifts his head, disbelieving, and she winces.

“Urgh, I mean, not family, oh god.” Shit, she was not prepared for this.

Lydia is good at a lot of things. She is smart and brilliant, but she isn’t exactly known for being caring. Looking after others is not one of her strong suits, but here, kneeling in front of Stiles, she’d give anything to make him feel better.

Something flashes to the front of her mind, a passage she read once about panic attack symptoms, but she can’t recall any of the details when Stiles is doubled over in front of her like it’s life or death.

“Okay, just… try and slow your breathing,” she says, deciding to go on what she can see. If she can get him to slow his breathing he’ll get more oxygen and everything will calm down.

Except.

“I can’t,” Stiles says, hand coming up to his chest like he’s choking. “I can’t.”

She moves forward and cups his face in her hands, trying to sound both commanding and comforting as she says, “Shh, Stiles, look at me.”

He’s still trapped in panic, and even as she strokes his cheek and says his name he can’t break free from it. His eyes dart from hers to her lips and back again, and something settles inside Lydia. She remembers this boy sitting opposite her the other day, when just the sight of him gave her a glimpse into a whole new world, and she lets her instincts take over.

“Stiles…” she breathes.

Lydia leans forward and kisses him.

She pours everything she has into that kiss; all of the unsaid longing, all of the comfort Stiles gives her, all of the security she feels when he’s around, she tries to give it all back to him. She keeps her hands on his face, and she feels him tense and then soften at her touch. His lips are soft and pliant beneath hers, and when he kisses her back her heart soars.

She knows that it’s happened again before she even opens her eyes.

She keeps them closed as she pulls back, lips still parted and hands curling in front of her trembling heart. There’s no going back from this, she knows.

Lydia opens her eyes slowly, and she’s greeted by a Stiles she’s only glimpsed once before. She can’t take it all in; the new pallor of his skin, the multitude of new shades visible in his hair, the way that the hue seems to add so much more depth than light and shadows alone ever could. And then he looks straight at her, and Lydia’s breath catches in her throat because, oh, his eyes.

Yellow might be the only color Lydia has right now, but she thinks it might be the most beautiful of them all.

Lydia’s wearing blue. A few seconds ago, her dress looked gray, but now Stiles can see that it’s actually light blue.

It takes a moment for his brain to process what’s just happened. Quite a few moments, actually.

When he got red, all those years ago, Stiles had blinked to check that it was real. This time, he’s scared to blink at all. He keeps his eyes open and locked on Lydia, frightened that if he looks away for even a second she’s going to disappear and take the new color with her.

But Lydia is right in front of him, striking in shades of red and blue - strawberry blonde hair, pink lips, powder blue dress. She’s staring right back at him, eyes wide and intense and a slightly different shade to how he’s always seen them before.

He wonders if this changed it for her, too - if she finally got a color.

His voice shakes as he asks, “How’d you do that?”

Lydia takes longer to answer him than she ever has before, like she’s contemplating what exactly he’s asking her. She sounds slightly hoarse when she says, “I, uh… I read once that holding your breath could stop a panic attack. So, when I kissed you… you held your breath.”

Stiles still feels dizzy, overwhelmed by the lingering effects of the panic attack and his brain trying to adjust to the sudden onslaught of new color. Hearing Lydia say the words ‘I kissed you’ isn’t helping things.

“I did?” he asks, slightly dazed.

She nods, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Yeah, you did.”

And something about the way she says it - the crack in her voice, the way she won’t stop looking at him with those wide eyes which are an entirely new shade, the fact that she’s still close enough for him to kiss - sets Stiles off.

He blinks back tears and strains to say, “Thanks. That was really smart.”

Lydia makes a small noise of disbelief, and then the moment vanishes. She shifts, and Stiles follows her lead and lets himself sit back in a slightly more comfortable position. He still feels unsteady, his heart pounding wildly in his chest, but it’s for an entirely different reason now.

Lydia’s hair is still strawberry blonde, but now she’s wearing blue, and Stiles knows now more than ever that he is a lost cause.

When he gets home that night, after making sure that his dad is safe asleep and checking in with Scott and Allison, too, Stiles pulls out his Spec Guide. The words calm, peaceful and intelligent are fittingly already written in the Blue section, transferred over from the notes that his mom made in her copy.

Stiles runs his fingertips over the words and tries to recall exactly how Lydia’s lips felt against his, how she was smart enough to break through the panic attack and calm him down when he felt like his whole world was imploding.

He picks up a blue pen and writes next to the powder blue swatch, Holding your breath.

Lydia stares at her reflection in the mirror and twirls individual strands of hair around her finger, marvelling at the blonde color. Her skin looks warmer and her eyes look brighter, like she’s shining from the inside out. 

She goes through all of her old photos and takes approximately four dozen new selfies, smiling wider in each consecutive one.

Everything is yellow and gold, champagne and lemon, cream and canary and light itself given a hue.

Theoretically, she knows what this means. Stiles Stilinski is her soulmate. They have a connection, as Deaton put it.

(She replays the veterinarian's words from earlier that day over in her head; “It’s not just someone to hold you under. It needs to be someone who can pull you back. Someone who has a strong connection to you.” And then; “Lydia, you go with Stiles.”)

She wonders if it’s really that obvious; if everyone else’s perception of her has changed, too.

Lydia frowns at her reflection.

Having a soulmate was not part of her plan. It seems improbable, really, that there is someone out there so intrinsically perfect for you that they literally trigger a chemical reaction in your brain, sparking new connections to the optic nerve and changing your entire perception of reality.

It seems even more improbable that the person so intrinsically perfect for Lydia would be Stiles Stilinski.

She’s starting to understand that there is a big difference between improbable and impossible, however.

And she likes Stiles, obviously. Maybe she more than likes him. But Lydia Martin will not have the course of her life dictated by such an abstract concept as fate. And this tentative thing, this connection between them, whatever it is, she isn’t going to put the weight of ideas like soulmates and destiny on it when it’s still so fragile.

So she decides that she’s not going to tell Stiles. She’s going to approach this scientifically, rather than emotionally. She’s going to see whether they come together without any influence of color bonding.

Maybe it’s this reluctance to give in to her own feelings that causes Lydia to get blue gradually. It’s not like yellow, where it sparked only once in a furious flare and then vanished before appearing for good. Instead, blue just sort of seeps into the grays.

Sometimes she looks at Stiles and the black and white lines of his shirt will brighten, very, very slightly, to a color that’s close to gray but has more feeling to it. She’ll stare, waiting for the color to solidify, but it always remains just out of her grasp.

She thinks that it gets stronger when she holds his hand, or when he looks at her with those wide, amber eyes, but the change in her perception of him is so gradual that when blue finally solidifies itself in Lydia’s vision it takes her a few moments to notice.

Her foot is pressed to a steel trap and Stiles is the only thing standing between her and losing a limb.

“You don’t need the instructions. When is the last time you have ever used instructions, am I right?” she says, and her voice barely shakes. “You don’t need them, because you are too smart. Don’t waste your time with them, okay? You can figure it out.”

And she’d started talking to boost his confidence, to convince him that he could do this, but Lydia’s surprised to find that the more she talks the more sure she becomes. He can do this. It’s Stiles, and if she had to put her life in anyone’s hands, she’d choose him.

He glances up at her and he looks different, somehow, and everything seems to slow down.

Lydia takes a deep breath. “Stiles, you’re the one who always figures it out. So you can do it. Figure. It. Out.”

And he does. He gives her enough time to get her foot away, jumping up and catching her in his arms just as she makes the leap. Her heart’s racing at a million miles an hour, and his is too, she can feel it where his chest is pressed up against hers. They’re both breathing heavily, her arms tight around his neck and his hand rubbing her back, when she glances down at his shirt and realises that it is very distinctly no longer gray.

It’s two shades of blue, light and dark, both of them so much more vibrant than the grey-ish, livid tone she’d been able to see before she’d stepped on the trap. 

Stiles has saved her, and given her another color, and all Lydia can do is press her forehead to his cheek and thank him for pulling her back.

“What do the different colored strings mean?”

Stiles turns around to see Lydia lying on her stomach on his bed, bare feet crossed at the ankles and chin propped in her hands. She’s wearing possibly the brightest shade of red lipstick he’s ever seen and watching him intently as he pins more evidence to his board.

“Uh, they’re just different stages of the investigation,” he explains. He has a whole code system, outlined in the notes section at the back of his Spec Guide for posterity's sake. “So, like, green is solved. Yellow is to be determined. Blue’s just… pretty.”

He swallows, thinking about the first time he saw blue. Pretty, indeed.

Lydia tilts her head at him like she always does when he mentions colors. He’s long given up on hiding the fact that he can see them, and he knows that she’s figured it out, too. Neither of them explicitly mention it, though. Like the kiss in the locker room, they hedge around it with lingering glances and loaded words in their near-endless stream of back and forth banter, but never manage to just flat out say what’s on their minds.

Stiles is pretty sure that Lydia can see colors now, too; or at least a color. He doesn’t know which one. He wants to ask, but that’s sort of socially taboo.

He’d thought that getting closer to her would make talking about this type of stuff easier, but it’s actually made it more difficult, because she’s no longer Lydia Martin, untouchable and incomparable goddess who is his soulmate - she’s Lydia, a real, multifaceted person, one of his best friends, and the fact that she might be his soulmate is no longer the most important thing about her in Stiles’s eyes.

“What does red mean?” she asks, drawing him out of his thoughts.

He turns back to the board, surveying the lines of string. “Uh, unsolved.”

“You only have red on the board.”

“Yes, I’m aware, thank you,” he says drily, shaking his head at her.

He goes to turn back to the board but pauses halfway as her words register. He blinks at her and she blinks back, red lips pressed firmly together. She looks panicked, like she’s slipped up and revealed something she wasn’t ready to, which is all the confirmation Stiles needs.

He can see the red string on the board, slashes of bright color across the cool monochrome and blue background. He can also see balls of red and blue string beside Lydia on the bed, and two bundles in different shades of gray that he only knows are yellow and green because that’s how they were labelled when he bought them. He’d wanted purple, because he can actually see that color, but it was sold out.

He wonders which ones Lydia can see in color.

He wants to press it, wants to ask if it’s just the red string she can see, or if she can see all the other colors and so deduced that all the string on the board must be red. That’d mean she can see both yellow and blue, and hence green, and it’d mean that… well, it’d mean that she must know that he’s her soulmate.

Lydia looks away first, tilting her chin down and twisting the red thread around her finger. “Did you get detention for pulling the alarm?”

Stiles swallows. He debates calling her out on the blatant subject change, but she looks so sad that he can’t quite do it. Not now, not when there’s a murderer on the loose and they have so many other things to deal with. 

So he turns back to the board and says, “Yep, every day this week. It’s okay though, we were on to something.”

“Even though we couldn’t find any proof of Barrow being there?” she says flatly.

He turns, marker still in hand, to look at her. Her eyes are still downcast, her expression one of disappointment. He knows how much she hates losing composure in front of people, and his heart squeezes as he realises how much she must trust him, and how awful she must be feeling, to let her guard down like this.

“Hey, Lydia.” He kneels in front of her so they’re at eye level. “You’ve been right every time something like this has happened, okay? So don’t start doubting yourself now.”

“No scent. No bomb.” She looks down at the thread tied around her finger and lowers her voice. “And I got you in trouble.”

Stiles recognises the olive branch she’s offering, the apology just underneath those words, and he accepts it implicitly. He carefully unwinds the string from her finger, his hand brushing hers with every movement.

“Okay, look. Barrow was there, all right? You knew it. You felt it. Okay?” His gaze is steady as he looks up at her, each of them holding one end of the red string. “And look, if you wanted to, I’d go back to that school right now and search all night just to prove it.”

She smiles, but it’s not the usual blinding smile she shares with the world. It’s close lipped, small and sincere, strikingly similar to the way she’d smiled at him when he’d won the lacrosse game for Beacon Hills. It’s a smile that’s gentle and perfect, and reserved only for Stiles.

He holds her gaze and smiles back, and he thinks that this is enough, for now.

She tries to keep things scientific and logical, tries to stop herself from getting caught up in her emotions, but whatever the Nemeton is doing to Stiles breaks Lydia almost as badly as it breaks him.

Her frustration bubbles over as the Nogitsune runs rings around them, as she struggles to understand her own Banshee abilities, as her connection with Stiles leads her to make mistake after mistake. (An empty basement at Eichen House, his crumpled body in a parking lot, getting herself kidnapped.)

Lydia feels gravely out of her depth. She hasn’t felt this inadequate since Peter Hale used her to get himself resurrected, and she hates every second of it.

She cowers against a cold, stone wall as a monster wearing Stiles’s face looms over her, and she tries not to cry. The hard brick digs into her back and she can smell the disgusting scent of the Nogitsune’s breath as he brings his arms up on either side of her head and boxes her in.

“Are the voices getting louder, Lydia? Are they still telling you that Stiles is dying?” he taunts. “I think we can both feel it.”

She fights back the urge to shudder. He doesn’t look like Stiles, not really, not when he’s this close to her and she can see the darkness in his eyes. He’s all shadow, this monster crowding against her, all sharp edges and smooth movements, speaking in a low, rough voice that sounds like a permanent growl. He doesn’t have any of the real Stiles’s warmth.

His lips move in an eerie imitation of a smile. “And you, Lydia, you can see it, too, can’t you?”

Lydia forces herself to meet his gaze. His eyes are sunken, rimmed with dark gray bags. His skin is pale, making him look sickly. But his expression is victorious.

She shakes with rage. “I can see that you’re exhausted and weak. You’re the one who’s dying.”

He laughs, a horrible, sinister sound that makes her skin crawl. “You haven’t noticed yet, have you?”

She wants to ask what the hell he’s talking about, but her pride stops her. She won’t give him the satisfaction, she won’t play his mind games.

But he surprises her, then, by stepping back. She instinctively breathes in, relishing the small amount of space between them. He smirks at her and holds his arms out wide, taking up most of the small stairwell they’re crammed into.

“I can’t blame you, really. It must be so loud at the moment, all those different voices yelling at you, all that pain and suffering echoing in your head. I understand if you’ve been a little preoccupied,” the Nogitsune says, feigning reason. “But, Lydia, come on now. You’re a clever girl. That’s one of the things he likes most about you. Surely you’ve noticed.”

Her hands are shaking. She clenches them into fists at her side and tries to block out her throbbing pain, the voices in her head, the smug satisfaction on this face that isn’t Stiles’s. “Noticed what?”

“Aren’t things looking a little gray down here?”

Lydia stops breathing for a second. The voices dull, just for a moment, as she’s overwhelmed with panic. She sways on her feet. “We’re in tunnels. Of course everything looks gray.”

“Ah, but you know that’s not completely true,” he says, sounding positively joyful. “This isn’t the type of gray that comes from a lack of sunlight. This is the type of gray that seeps back in when your soulmate dies.”

She inhales sharply. Her traitorous eyes flicker around the tunnel, taking in the muted blues and grays, the black shadows looming in every corner. She tries to remember what true blue really looks like, tries to find a single speck of yellow in this scene. There is none.

“You’re wrong,” she bites out.

“Oh, you see it now, don’t you?” the monster taunts, in a voice Stiles would never use. “Look at you, you’re terrified.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. Tears roll down her cheeks. “You’re wrong. He’s not dying.”

“You can feel it, Lydia. You can hear it, you can see it. Stiles is dying, and you’re going to be left without a soulmate.”

A fresh wave of fear forces Lydia to open her eyes, to see the threat. The Nogitsune has retreated back to the top of the stairs, however, and is just sitting and watching her, lips drawn into a smug smirk.

“You’re wrong,” she says again.

He doesn’t react at all.

And as night falls, the colors continue to dim. Even when Stiles is back in her arms - the real Stiles, her Stiles - the world is full of grays and blacks and the voices are still so loud.

They’re not saying Stiles’s name now though.

They lose Allison.

They lose Aiden.

They almost lose Stiles.

And Lydia almost loses herself in her grief. The pain clamps around her heart, fills her chest until it feels like her ribcage is too small, like she is too small to contain all of it. 

Every time Stiles looks at her it’s with guilt and sorrow, and she remembers him lying still and unresponsive on the hallway floor, and she thinks that she can’t do this.

Sheriff Stilinski looks mildly surprised to see her there when she knocks on his door early on a Friday morning.

“Lydia,” he says, swinging the door all the way open. “Stiles isn’t here, he’s with Scott.”

“I know,” she says, because she does. That’s specifically why she chose this time to come to the Stilinski house. I’m actually here to see you, is what she’s meant to say next. It’s what she rehearsed  in her head, over and over and over, the entire drive here. But now that she’s here, standing on the porch and actually looking at the Sheriff, she finds herself tongue tied.

He looks her up and down and sighs, but not like he’s annoyed. More like he’s sorry. “Do you wanna come in?”

Lydia nods, and he steps aside as she enters the house. She follows him to the lounge, settling on an armchair he gestures to as he takes a seat on the couch.

She wonders if he knows that she’s Stiles’s soulmate. The appraising look he gives her suggests he does.

“What can I help you with, Lydia?” he asks gently.

She holds her hands very still in her lap. “I -” Her throat constricts and she’s forced to pause.

I have to ask you something. It’s uncomfortable, and rude, and I’m extremely sorry for bringing it up, but I have to know. Did the colors change when your wife died? How did you cope with it? How did you keep on living after losing your soulmate? Because I don’t think I can do it. I’m not as strong as you, or Scott. I don’t think I can risk it.

The Sheriff leans forward, elbows on his knees and eyebrows creased with worry. “Are you okay?”

There’s a photo of Stiles and his mom on the wall behind the Sheriff. Stiles is grinning cheekily, probably around seven or eight, and Claudia is smiling brightly as she hugs him tight.

The grief in Lydia’s chest climbs higher up her throat. She swallows thickly and licks her lips. “Fine,” she says quietly, and then with more conviction. “I’m fine. I just -”

The Sheriff nods encouragingly.

She can’t do it.

She exhales. “I think that I left my biology book in Stiles’s room and I need it for a test on Monday.”

“Oh.” He nods slowly. “Well. You’re more than welcome to go and get it, I’m sure he won’t mind.”

Lydia nods and stands on autopilot. She follows the familiar path to Stiles’s room, but she isn’t greeted by a familiar sight. The walls are bare; no pictures, no news articles, no evidence connected by different colored strings.

The framed picture she drew of the Nemeton is still sitting on his desk, though. She steps towards it, hand outstretched, longing to see the note he’s attached to the back; ‘For Lydia’ written in his familiar script. But she stops short when she sees what else is on his desk.

There’s a stack of paperwork sitting right in the centre, all with the Beacon Hills High School logo and the name Malia Tate stamped on it.

Lydia turns and flees. If the Sheriff notices that she leaves empty handed, he doesn’t say anything.

Lydia pulls away. Stiles doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t completely understand, but he doesn’t blame her. He pulls back, too. After what happened with the Nogitsune, with Allison, they’re both fragile.

And they’re both busy, too. With school, with figuring out where Derek’s gone, with working out how to end the Dead Pool. Lydia’s trying to get a better grasp on her abilities, and Stiles is trying to settle back into his own skin.

Malia helps him with that. She’s not his soulmate, but he really likes her, and she really likes him, and it’s nice to be absolutely certain of the reciprocity, for once. So he helps her remember how to live like a human, and she helps him figure out how to start to forgive himself for the things his hands did without his control, and Lydia makes herself emotionally distant, and it’s fine.

Stiles still has red and blue, and all the shades in between, and he knows that Lydia still has at least one color, too. That hasn’t changed.

He’s surprised to discover that Malia already has all the colors.

“I don’t get it,” she says, staring at Stiles blankly as he debates which highlighter is yellow and which is green. They’re lying on his bed, her hands are curled over their labels, and he’s pretty sure the one on the right is green but he can’t be certain. “Can you really not see what color these are?”

“They’re slightly different shades of gray,” he repeats, frowning. “If you had, say, a red highlighter, or a blue highlighter -”

“I have a blue highlighter. And a red one.”

“I know you do, I’ve seen them.”

“How do you know you’ve seen them if you can’t see color?”

“No, I -” He sighs and rubs his hand down his face. “I can see some colors, just not all of them.”

Malia narrows her eyes. “Just not yellow and green.”

“Or orange, really… technically,” he adds.

Her eyes widen again and she thrusts the highlighters towards him. “So you’re guessing.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” He points to the left one. “That one’s yellow.”

She nods and passes it to him. “Good guess.”

“Have you always been able to see colors?” he asks as he puts the highlighter back on the bed.

She shrugs and rolls onto her back, stretching her arms out above her head and kicking one of his pillows with her feet. “Not as many, when I was a coyote. Everything’s a bit closer to gray and blue, when I shift. But yeah, as long as I’ve been human, I’ve had all the colors.”

He hesitates just a second before asking, “Even when you were little?”

He knows that this is dangerous territory. Malia tenses, bringing her arms down by her sides. She keeps her eyes locked on his ceiling as she answers, “Yeah, even when I was little.”

“Huh.” He waits for her to roll back over before saying, “So what’s with all the highlighters, anyway?”

Malia picks up each respective color as she explains, “Green is for the things I understand. Yellow is for ‘I’m working on it’. Red means I have no clue.” She shrugs. “I’m mostly using red.”

Stiles feels content in a way he hasn’t for a long time. He leans over and kisses her, smiling against her lips, because Malia may not be his soulmate, but, in some ways, she’s perfect for him.

And it’s not like dating Malia means that he loses Lydia. They’re still friends, they still work together to solve all the puzzles the rest of the pack can’t, and she’s still one of the most important people in Stiles’s life.

Scott asks him about it, once. Stiles has arrived at the McCall house just as Kira’s leaving, and she awkwardly shuffles around him on the porch.

“Oh, hi, Stiles! I was just - I came over to study, with Scott. But we’re finished, now. So you can go right on in!” she says chirpily. And then her face falls. “Not that you couldn’t have gone right on in if we weren’t finished, because we were just studying, it’s not like you couldn’t have… oh, god. Sorry, I’ll stop rambling.”

“Hi, Kira,” Stiles says with a smile.

“Right,” she says, swinging her arm across her torso and turning to the curb. “I will just be leaving now, then. Oh, do you want me to, like… knock, or something, to let Scott know -?”

“I’ve got a key,” Stiles says, holding it up.

Kira blinks. “Oh. Right. Of course you do. That’s cool. Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Bye!”

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow!” he calls after her as she dashes down the front path, blushing furiously.

Stiles lets himself in, calling out to Scott as he goes.

“Hey, man,” Scott greets from the kitchen, where he’s making himself a sandwich wearing nothing but a pair of grey sweatpants, which is definitely not his usual studying attire.

Stiles smirks. “I heard you and Kira got some studying done tonight.”

“Oh.” Scott blushes a little, ducking his head and smiling. “Ha. Yeah.”

Stiles leans against the counter and steals a piece of bread from the loaf, tearing off the crust and eating it separately. “So…” he leads.

Scott gives him a completely innocent, clueless look. “What?”

“It’s going good then, I guess? You two?”

“Oh! Oh, yeah, it’s… nice. She’s nice.” His soft smile returns. “I like her a lot.”

“Well I can see that,” Stiles says. Scott looks down at his pants, panicked, and Stiles flinches and throws a piece of crust at him. It hits his chest and bounces off onto the counter. “Oh, gross, dude! I meant because you’re walking around shirtless, not - Jesus, I don’t wanna think about that.”

It’s Scott’s turn to smirk, now. He picks up the piece Stiles threw and eats it, talking through the mouthful. “Like you can talk.”

Stiles feigns offence. “Excuse you? I have no idea what you mean, I am totally innocent -”

“I’ve seen those scratches on your back, dude.”

Stiles clamps his mouth shut and tries to think of a comeback. “I can’t help it if Malia’s got long nails,” is all he eventually says.

Scott smirks and picks up his sandwich, heading up the stairs for his room. Stiles follows, taking the time to seal up the bread bag beforehand. Scott settles himself on his bed and Stiles takes his desk chair, absentmindedly drumming his fingers against the arms.

“So things are going good with you two then, I guess?” Scott asks.

“Yeah, things are - things are good,” Stiles answers, but he’s frowning.

Scott catches it immediately. “But…?”

“I dunno, man.” Stiles swipes a hand up the back of his head, flinging his other arm out to the side. “I feel sorta bad, sometimes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Malia’s great, I really, really like her, I do. But, like…”

He trails off, and Scott fills in, “But she’s not Lydia.”

“She’s not my soulmate,” Stiles corrects, because it’s an important distinction. “And I just feel… I feel like I’m not being fair to her, you know?”

Scott chews thoughtfully. “Have you talked to her about it?”

“Yeah, I mean, kind of.” Stiles shrugs. “She’s always been able to see colors, so it took a bit for her to get her head around the concept. I’ve told her that I have a soulmate, but I haven’t told her that it’s Lydia.”

Scott winces. “Dude. That’s rough.”

“How am I meant to say that to her, Scott? Can you imagine how awkward that’d make things? Lydia hasn’t warmed up to her at all -”

“I wonder why,” Scott mutters.

“- I don’t wanna make things even more awkward than they already are.”

There’s a long pause, where Scott finishes his sandwich and brushes the crumbs off his hands. He sounds like he’s trying very hard to sound unaffected when he says, “Kira and I haven’t really spoken about Allison.”

Stiles looks up sharply, reading his face to see whether or not they’re going to continue this conversation. He waits for Scott to talk again, not wanting to butt in.

“I mean, she knew her, obviously. And she heard what she said when she…” Scott swallows thickly.

Stiles looks down. 

He wasn’t there, he was passed out and useless in the tunnels when it actually happened, but Scott had told him, afterwards, what Allison had said with her dying breaths. (“I’m in the arms of my first love. The first person I ever loved. The person I’ll always love… My soulmate. I love you, Scott McCall.”)

Stiles blinks away tears at the thought of it. “It’s okay, man, you really don’t have to -”

“No, I’m good,” Scott insists, sniffling slightly. He wipes his face with the back of his arm. “Anyway, so Kira knows. She knows that Allison is my - was my soulmate. And she’s okay with it, I think.”

Stiles nods, because what do you say to that?

Scott takes a deep breath and says, “My mom told me that sometimes people have more than one soulmate. And that sometimes you can get in a relationship with someone and think that they’re not your soulmate, but then later on you start to get the colors. Kira doesn’t have any colors, now, and mine have… changed... but maybe…”

Stiles nods slowly. “I get it.”

When Scott looks at Stiles he smiles, and Stiles thinks that he doesn’t deserve a friend like this. 

“Things’ll work out eventually,” Scott says.

“Yeah.” Stiles nods and licks his lips. “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

“No problem.” Scott smiles wider, and Stiles is reminded of the one color he’s missing: Yellow (happiness, joy).

He forces himself to smile back, despite the guilt sitting heavy on his chest; guilt for Allison, for Scott, for Malia.

He adds guilt for Lydia when he sees her bleeding out on the floor of the Sheriff’s Station.

She’s so pale, and she looks so small, drowning in an oversized pink shirt and lying in a pool of dark red blood. Her blood.

Stiles shuts down.

He watches on, horrified, as Kira applies pressure to the wound, as Theo tries to tourniquet it with his belt, as Mrs Martin rushes in and collapses by her daughter’s side. His stomach churns. His limbs feel like they’re made of lead. He can’t look away, no matter how much he can’t stand the sight of her like this.

“Stiles,” Scott repeats his name, over and over, trying to drag him away, but he can’t, he can’t leave her like this. “Stiles, come on.”

Red and pink were the first colors he saw on Lydia, and now they might be the last, and he can’t do a thing to stop it. Stiles’s hands shake at his sides, pressure pounding in his head as he looks from Scott back to Lydia.

Hold your breath.

He wonders if she’d look any less like she was dying if he could see her in full color.

What if this is it? What if Lydia dies here, taken out by a fucking chimera-kanima and left to bleed on the floor of the Sheriff’s department, wearing the first color Stiles ever saw her in, like some sort of sick irony. What if he never gets the third color, what if he never gets to tell her that she’s his soulmate, what if -

Lydia smiles at him, but it looks more like a grimace. “Tracy,” she grits out. “Stiles, I’m fine.”

She’s not fine, she’s so far from fine that her saying so would be ridiculous if he didn’t know that she was doing it purely to get him to move. Smart as always, she’s telling him the one thing that might kick his nervous system out of freeze and into fight.

“Help Tracy. Find Tracy.” Lydia gasps. “Go.”

And because he could never say no to Lydia, he does. Stiles leaves her there and runs after Scott, and he never forgives himself for it.

He makes the same mistake when she gets locked in Eichen.

He finds her lying in a hospital bed, pale, clammy and weak but conscious, breathing and fighting. Stiles is hit by a wave of relief so strong that it nearly knocks him off his feet, that he has to close his eyes for a second just to get his bearings, because he’s found her and she’s alive.

And when he opens his eyes again, the world shimmers for a second, the sheets on the bed flashing to yellow, Lydia’s eyes brightening and her skin warming. Because of course it would be now, of course it would be when he's thinking he might lose her for real, of course he would finally be able to see the full spectrum of her skin and her eyes and her hair (god, so this is strawberry blonde) right when she’s about to be taken from him again.

“Stiles, you can’t be here,” she says desperately. “You’re going to die if you stay. All of you.”

Stiles ignores her pleas, clenching his jaw and trying to stop his hands from shaking so he can undo her restraints.

“Stiles, he’s coming,” she says, and the terror in her voice makes him want to scream.

“Lydia, I’m not leaving you here,” he insists.

“You have to,” she pleads, staring up at him with glassy eyes.

The yellow has faded back into gray, and Stiles prays that it’s just because of his own stress and anxiety and has nothing to do with Lydia’s health.

She gasps as alarms blare. “Stiles, go!”

Her restraints are still on and he hesitates, feeling like he’s back in the Sheriff Station watching her bleed out on the floor, frozen and running out of time. Logically, he knows that he should go. If he stays he’s definitely going to be attacked, and if he gets hurt - or killed - he can’t save Lydia. If he hides now, he’ll have another chance to free her later, either by taking Valack by surprise or by sneaking her out when he’s not around. But emotionally, he can’t leave her. Not again.

Lydia sounds like her life depends on it when she says, “Please.”

Stiles listens to her.

His rescue plan has gone horrifically wrong; The whole of Eichen is in lockdown, Theo and his pack of chimeras are here, and the thought of what Valack’s going to do to Lydia has Stiles so on edge he feels like he’s going out of his freaking mind.

But he’s not giving up. He’s not leaving her, he’s not going to lose her. Valack drags her away, and Stiles goes after her.

Lydia gets red all in a rush.

Stiles comes back for her, and as he runs through the door the entire world changes. Suddenly his cheeks are flushed in a way Lydia’s never seen before, and he's pulling red wires from her head, bright, bright red wires, and his lips are pink, so pink and so close and she watches him say the words, “We’re getting you out of here, okay?”

Her head is still pounding with voices yelling in her ears, her throat is raw from her last scream and every muscle in her body is aching from disuse, but Stiles’s hands are so gentle that she feels herself melting into his touch.

She remembers what her grandmother told her about red: Red is a warning. Stiles is in danger.

“You can’t,” she murmurs, too tired for anything stronger. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Lydia.” He says, voice firm and familiar and enough to break through the noise in her mind. “Shut up and let me save your life.”

If she had the energy she'd tell him, right now, that she sees it. She sees all of the colours, and it’s all because of him. But she doesn’t think she can find the words. So Lydia just smiles at him, small and sincere and gentle, and lets Stiles help her off the bed and out of the room.

The screams are still clawing their way up her throat, and the red is still there, still caked through her hair and down her temple, warning her that they’re not safe, even as Parrish carries her out of Eichen, even as Stiles holds her in the back seat of his Jeep and Scott races them to the clinic.

She tries to hold it in, tries to clamp down the screams and the panic, but she can’t hold back the shriek that forces its way out. It’s enough to crack the mirrors of the car, and she doesn’t feel any better afterwards.

“Hey, Lydia, Lydia, hey. You’re going to get through this, okay?” Stiles says, cupping her face in his hands. “Lydia, look at me, you’re going to make it.”

Even in the dark, shadowy blues of the backseat of the Jeep, she sees the red blood leaking out of his ear.

She doesn’t understand how fate could be so cruel, giving her the final color just so she can see herself and Stiles stained with it, bloodied and beaten and about to expire.

She can’t stop looking at him. “But you’re not.”

His blood stained fingertips brushing the side of her face is the last thing she registers before the pain becomes too much, and every ounce of energy Lydia has left is spent on staying alive.

The next thing she’s aware of hearing isn’t a scream.

It’s Stiles.

Just Stiles, telling her to open her eyes.

She tries, but everything’s so heavy.

“Come on, listen to me, Lydia. Show me your eyes, okay?” He sounds so close. She wishes she could see him. “Lydia, come on, just… I got a new color, Lyds. When I found you, I got yellow, for a few seconds, and I think I’ll get it back if you open your eyes. And that’s all of them, then, that’s all the colors, because blue, I got that when we - when we kissed, and red, I got that when we were just kids, and I - I drew you a picture, but you couldn’t see any colors, back then. I know you see colors now, Lydia, I know you do. I need you to open your eyes so you can see them again.”

Lydia thinks about colors.

Yellow, all warmth and joy and seeing true sunlight for the very first time when she pressed her lips against Stiles’s.

Blue, security and calm and understanding, Stiles figuring out the trap and holding her until they could both breathe normally again.

And red, the type of danger where you risk your life for someone else’s, like Lydia throwing herself at Stiles to get him away from a lit flare rolling into gasoline, or Stiles breaking her out of Eichen and almost getting himself killed in the process. Red, for the things you do for the people you love.

“Lydia,” Stiles says, “You have to open your eyes.”

She listens to him.

He should have told her sooner.

He should have told her the second she opened her eyes at the clinic and Stiles saw, really saw, for the first time, Lydia Martin in full color, every tone and shade on the spectrum, more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.

He should have said it in the mornings, when they met up at school, or in the afternoons, when they studied with Scott and Malia, or at night, when he dragged her out of bed to go hunting supernatural occurrences, or whenever she looked at him and smiled, gentle and perfect and just for him.  

But Stiles always thought that they’d have more time.

It’s been all too easy, after everything, to fall back into their old pattern of bickering and flirting around their feelings, exchanging loaded glances and lingering touches but never taking that next step. Like the kiss in the locker room, like the red string, like the way Lydia looked at him when he saved her, they dance around it with clever little hints.

(Lydia preens in the mirror of a smashed up car, delicately admiring her eyeshadow. “This is the perfect shade for me. I forget the name…”

Stiles rolls his eyes in the backseat, exasperated. “Can we please stay on topic here?”)

But neither of them have the courage to just come out and say it.

And now they’re here, trapped in the Jeep and surrounded by Ghost Riders, and Lydia is staring at him like her heart is breaking and he knows, he knows that they’re out of time.

“Lydia, I’m going to be erased, okay?” He tries to keep his voice calm and level, tries to find the exact words he needs to say, because this could be his last chance. “Just like Alex. You’re gonna forget me.”

“I won’t.” Lydia shakes her head vehemently. “No, I won’t, I won’t.”

“Lydia, you will,” he insists, because this is important, she has to accept it and she has to understand - “Just try to find some way to remember me, okay?”

She nods, and Stiles keeps his eyes locked on hers, trying to memorize every single individual shade of green in them. He reaches out to take her hand, anchoring himself to her.

“Remember how you were the first girl I ever danced with? Or how I had a crush on you freshman year, sophomore year, junior year?”

Her smile is shaky, lips pressed together and eyes watering, but it’s still the same perfect smile she saves purely for Stiles, and the sight of it, one bright spot in the darkness of the car, gives him the courage to keep going.

His voice is steady as he says, “Remember how you saved my life?”

“You saved my life, too.” There’s something gentle about the way Lydia says it, something serious and sincere in her expression that Stiles can’t find the words to describe.

He squeezes her hand. “Remember the colors, Lydia. I don’t know if you’ll still see them when I’m gone, but try to remember how you got them.”

She blinks and a single tear rolls down her cheek.

“Just remember…” He steels himself. It’s time for the truth. “Remember I love you.”

The last thing Stiles sees as he’s taken is Lydia, sitting stunned in the passenger seat of the Jeep, looking more lost than he’s ever seen her before.

Lydia can see colors, and she doesn’t know how.

When she insists that this is important, Malia and Scott share a look that quite clearly says they think she’s crazy. Their faith in the existence of Stiles is wavering, whereas Lydia’s conviction is only growing stronger.

She curls her hands into fists on the top of Scott’s dining table. “He’s real. I know he’s real, and he has something to do with why I can see colors.”

“I’ve always been able to see colors,” Malia says, shrugging.

Scott nods encouragingly. “Maybe you’re the same?”

Lydia shakes her head. “No, I’m not the same. I used to see in grayscale. And…” She trails off, struggling to remember.

“And what?” Scott asks after a moment, looking at her earnestly.

“It’s right there,” she growls, frustrated. “I know that I’m missing something, and I just can’t - I just can’t remember… Pensée civage.”

Scott and Malia frown.

“Pensive what?” Malia asks.

“It’s French,” Lydia explains, feeling strangely reminiscent. “A lingering thought you can’t reach.”

There’s a pause, and then Scott says slowly, “Lydia, the only way Stiles could have anything to do with you seeing color is if he’s your soulmate.”

Lydia focuses on Scott, trying to convey how serious she’s being. “I think he is.”

Because she can see colors, but she thinks they’re different now, somehow. She can’t remember what they were like before, but she knows they weren’t exactly like this. They’re muted now, maybe. Not quite as crisp, not quite as bright, not quite as much.

In her nightmares Lydia dreams of a shadowy figure in a tattered flannel with a face she can’t see pinning her against a wall, growling into her ear, “He’s dying, and you’re going to be left with no colors and no soulmate.”

She wakes up screaming, cradled in her mother’s arms and feeling overwhelmed with grief.

“Lydia.” Her mom runs a hand soothingly through her hair. “Lydia, honey, you’re okay. It was just another nightmare. You’re safe.”

“Stiles is gone, mom,” she sobs, clutching at her covers. “He’s not safe, we need to find him, we need to -”

“Shhh, Lydia, shh, calm down,” Natalie coos. “It was just a nightmare.”

Lydia clutches at her mom’s arm. She’s hit by a sudden memory, of the two of them sitting exactly like this, and Lydia looking up at someone whom she can’t remember now with stars in her eyes.

“Mom,” she whispers, “Do you ever think about your soulmate?”

Natalie tenses, obviously thrown by the question. It’s a long time before she answers, “Sometimes… Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different, with them.”

Lydia pulls back to look at her mom, tears tracking down her cheeks. “Do you miss them?”

Natalie smiles sadly and brushes Lydia’s hair back from her face. “You can’t miss someone you’ve never met.”

“I miss Stiles,” Lydia says, voice cracking. “And it wasn’t a nightmare - I think it was a memory.”

One of the creepiest things about this limbo/prison/train station the Ghost Riders have trapped them in is the fact that it’s so grey. Colors are still there, sort of, but they’re all muted, and when Stiles tries to focus on them for too long he gets a headache.

He wonders if this is anything like how his dad and Scott see the world, without their soulmates.

He wonders if this is how Lydia sees the world, with him trapped here.

The thought of his friends and family back in Beacon Hills makes Stiles feel anxious. Do they remember him at all? Do they have any niggling feelings at the back of their minds that they’re missing something? He remembers Lydia saying that there was a French phrase for that sensation, but he can’t recall the wording, which is ironic.

Peter elbows the door to the radio control room open and looks back over his shoulder at Stiles. “Are we doing this?”

Stiles sets his jaw and follows him in. None of the other people even glance at them as they go. “Correction, I’m doing this,” he says to Peter, “and you’re keeping watch.”

“Fine by me,” Peter snaps back, folding his arms over his chest and glancing out the door. “Just be quick.”

After spending so much time around police scanners, the radio on the table isn’t completely foreign to Stiles. He thinks he can get it working, and he hopes he can get through to someone back in Beacon Hills.

“So what makes you think they’re going to hear this?” Peter asks while Stiles rearranges some wiring.

“Because they have super hearing,” Stiles replies shortly.

Peter laughs. “Great idea. Rely on their werewolf and werecoyote hearing to break through the Ghost Rider’s defences. Because the whole werewolf thing worked so well for me.”

Stiles lifts up on his knees to glare at Peter over the top of the table. “Lydia’s a banshee.”

“Ah, yes, Lydia. How could I forget her abilities?”

“Yeah, you were so instrumental in activating them.” Stiles wrenches a wire free and almost punches himself in the face in the process. He can’t tell if Peter’s smirk is because he saw that, or if he’s just enjoying the conversation.

“Nice to see you’re as protective of her as always.”

Stiles makes a noncommittal noise and gets to his feet to lean over the radio.

Peter hums thoughtfully, and then his expression becomes much more serious. “You said her name first, when you were talking about who’d remember you.”

Stiles bites his bottom lip and counts to three. “Did I?”

“Isn’t Scott your oldest and bestest friend?” Peter sounds far too interested in the answer for this to be leading anywhere good. “Why wasn’t he the first to come to mind?”

“Drop it,” Stiles warns.

“Ah, no, this could be important, Stiles. Why did you say Lydia’s name first?” Peter presses, gaze locked on Stiles.

“Would you keep an eye out for them, please? I said her name first because she was with me when I was taken, okay.”

“She hadn’t forgotten you?” Peter asks, genuinely curious.

Stiles’s throat feels tight. He flicks a row of switches with more force than is strictly necessary. “No, she was the only person left who remembered me.”

There’s a long pause, where Peter goes back to keeping watch and Stiles continues to work on re-wiring the radio.

“That’s good, Stiles,” he says eventually, and all traces of teasing have vanished from his tone. “If she’s your soulmate, it’s good for us. She’s more likely to hear you. More likely to remember you.”

Stiles freezes with his hand on a dial. He wants to ask so many questions, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “How’d you know she was my soulmate?”

Peter’s lips twitch up in a smile, and he looks a bit more like the smug prick Stiles is used to. “I didn’t, but thanks for the confirmation.”

“Unbelievable.” Stiles rolls his eyes and goes back to work. He waits a few seconds before asking, “Is it true that could help her remember me, or help her hear me?”

Peter nods. “It actually is. Now hurry up and fix the radio, I don’t think we have much time.”

Buoyed by the thought of Lydia remembering him, Stiles gets back to work.

Lydia is sure, surer than she’s ever been of anything before, that they need to get Stiles back. To do that she needs concrete evidence, though, and when she visits the Stilinski house she finds no trace of his existence - nothing more than a small, unhelpful tear in the lime wallpaper.

But he’s her soulmate, right, so surely she must have something of his. He must have given her something, at some point, there has to be something of his left behind. Lydia collapses to her knees at the bottom of her closet and pulls out boxes of mementos, things she doesn’t remember looking at since Allison died.

Her heart squeezes painfully as she pulls out a top she borrowed from her and never got the chance to give back; a string of photobooth photos of the two of them, Allison squealing with delight as Lydia kisses her cheek; a ticket stub from some movie they went to see together, the title half smudged away.

She tells herself to focus when she comes across a stack of birthday cards, rifling through them and looking for one from Stiles. There’s one from Allison (+ Scott, signed hastily down the bottom, the only thing on the whole card in his handwriting), one from Danny, one that’s been ripped in half and then taped back together from Jackson, but there’s no card from Stiles.

Lydia keeps looking.

And, right down the very bottom of the box, tucked beneath an extremely old, extremely generic and unsentimental Christmas card from her father, she finds a drawing. It’s in crayon, featuring a stick figure person in a pink triangle dress with overlapping spirals of red and orange for hair. There’s no name, no date, nothing to give her any context.

“What is it?” Lydia asks aloud, hearing her own, much younger voice overlapping with the sound.

No one answers. Lydia glances up at the mirror on her dresser, where she can see herself reflected, and then back to the drawing. She doesn’t understand why, but this feels important.

Lydia carefully folds the drawing in half and tucks it into her bag.

And the next day, she sees the blue Jeep in the parking lot at school, and she knows that that’s important, too. (“Scott? Lydia? Is that you?” Stiles asks through the radio, and the colors flare, and Lydia feels like she’s been holding her breath for weeks.)

And after that she finds the maroon lacrosse jersey, and she convinces Sheriff Stilinski, and she’s so close to getting him back, she can feel it.

But it’s not until Scott looks at her and says, “I don’t think anyone had a connection like you guys” that Lydia realizes the full extent of it. If she wants to see Stiles again, she’s going to have to bring him back herself.

The memories don’t come back slowly. As soon as Scott hypnotizes her they flood in, so eager to be recalled that they overlap and bleed together, cutting each other off and jumping from scene to scene as Lydia skips through them, like fast-forwarding through a tv show.

(There’s a small boy handing her a piece of paper, the stick figure drawing she found in her closet. “I drew this for you... It’s in color, don’t you see?”

Lydia doesn’t see. The entire memory is in black and white, uninspired grayscale.)

And so is the next, and the next

(A boy with a buzzcut and a suit that’s too big, asking her to dance. “...pretty sure I'm the only one who knows just how smart you really are…”

“Fields Medal,” she says.)

and the next

(An ice rink, Allison and Scott smiling below her, a Reese’s wrapper crinkling between her fingers. “...turning out to be, like, a perfect combination…”)

The next one starts out the same, too.

(Lydia’s in the locker room, surrounded by gray steel and concrete, and she watches herself fall to the floor with Stiles, who’s struggling to breathe. She feels all of the panic she felt in that moment, reliving it all over again -

And then she feels the calm certainty that settles over her as she leans forward and kisses Stiles.

Light radiates out until the entire memory is washed in yellow, the first color Lydia ever got, the color of sunlight, of happiness, of Stiles’s eyes.)

“That’s when it happened,” she says out loud, feeling just as overwhelmed as the first time she lived through it.

“When what happened?” Scott asks.

(A wave of blue rolls over the next memory.

She jumps from a steel trap and presses herself against Stiles’s chest, pulled back from the brink and breathing heavily.)

(Stiles kneels in front of her in his colorful bedroom, and carefully, purposefully, unwinds a gray string from around her finger as Lydia stares, so obviously in love that she can’t believe she didn’t kiss him again right then and there.)

Scott speaks again, trying to bring her back to the present, but she’s still lost in memories. “Lydia, what do you mean? When what happened?”

(Stiles’s arm is curled protectively around her, his determination to keep her safe palpable in the air.)

“When I kissed him,” she explains to Scott and Malia.

(And finally, the memories get red.

Stiles pulls the bright red wires away from her head, and she can’t believe how pink his lips are or how dark her hair is. He’s saving her life.)

She tries to speak around the lump in her throat. “That’s when it all changed.”

(“Lydia, look at me,” he says in the backseat of his Jeep, cradling her head in his hands, and she doesn’t want to hurt him like this.

“Look at me,” he says, and the memory shifts and blends into a different one, the same Stiles and the same Jeep but a different night - )

“I saw him,” Lydia says through tears. “I was there, I was the last person to see him.”

“Where? When did you see him?” Scott asks urgently.

“The Ghost Riders, they - they took him.”

(She’s back in the Jeep, Stiles sitting across from her, and god she’s so scared, she’s missed him so much and she doesn’t want to see this again, she doesn’t -

“You’re gonna forget me.”

“I won’t. No, I won’t, I won’t.”

She doesn’t want to relive this, she doesn’t want to go through this again.

“Just remember…” Stiles is holding her hand and he looks so serious, so absolutely sure of himself. “Remember I love you.”)

“I never said it back.” Lydia’s voice doesn’t shake, even as tears fall from her eyes. “I never said it back.”

The air shifts, colors warping and changing right before her eyes. The whole room starts to shake, everything in it rattling dangerously.

There’s a bright white light outside the door.

Their plan’s working. They’re getting Stiles back.

Stiles Stilinski is in his senior year when Lydia Martin shows him that she’s in love with him.

And he knows it’s love, he really does, because when he sees her again the whole world gets brighter. The colors that had been muted in the Ghost Riders’ limbo come back full force, a technicolor storm that’s so bright he has to blink a few times every time he looks at her.

She’s standing there, breathless and beautiful and so bright, even in the shadows of the locker room, and she’s just saved his life and she’s staring at him like she’s never wanted anything quite this bad before.

“I didn’t say it back,” she says.

But Stiles already knows.

He’s known since he heard her voice calling to him through the rift, “When I kissed you!” He’s known since she came back from the brink and said, “Stiles saved me.” He’s known since she kissed him in this very locker room and looked at him like he’d handed her the sun. Maybe he’s known since before that, even, since he won the lacrosse game and she smiled just for him.

Or maybe a part of him has always known that it was going to end up like this. Since that day in third grade when he looked at her across the playground and the world blossomed into color, Stiles has known that, eventually, somehow, someway, Lydia Martin was going to look at him and see more than gray.

“You don’t have to,” he says, because he’s never been surer of anything than he is of the fact that he loves Lydia and she loves him, too.

One second he’s moving towards her and the next she’s in his arms, pressed up against him with her hands on his face, holding him to her, and he’s kissing her like his life depends on it, which at this point maybe it does.

And when they finally break apart Stiles swears that he’s never seen the colors quite so vivid before.

They’re curled up on his bed, Lydia’s strawberry blonde hair splayed out over his blue pillows and her pink lips set in the sweetest smile he’s ever seen, when she says, “I have something for you.”

He rests his hand on her hip, holding her steady as she leans back to grab something from her bag. His thumb moves in small circles over the smooth skin between her shorts and the jersey of his she’s wearing, and she kicks a foot out to keep her balance as she struggles to reach the floor.

“You got me a present? That’s sweet of you,” he says lightly.

When she swings herself back onto the bed, she’s waving a folded up piece of paper in the air triumphantly. “Actually, you got me a present.”

He raises an eyebrow at her and props himself up on one elbow. “Did I? Gee, I am just so thoughtful.”

“You are though.” Lydia’s sort of laughing, little breaths of laughter escaping with her words, like she can’t contain all of her happiness; but then she meets his gaze, and she grows suddenly serious. She sits up and holds the piece of paper out to him. “I found this, when you were gone.”

Stiles sits up and takes the paper from her, but he doesn’t unfold it. He runs his fingers over the crease reverentially and waits for her to say something, because this feels important.

“Stiles,” she says softly, ducking her head so that he’s looking at her.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Open it.”

With shaking hands, he unfolds the paper. A crudely drawn person stares up at him - a stick figure with a pink smile and a pink triangle dress, and a mess of red and orange hair.

Stiles’s throat feels tight all of a sudden. “Is this…?”

“The drawing you gave me in third grade,” Lydia says, smiling. “The day you color bonded with me.”

He’s definitely crying when he looks up at her, but it’s okay because she’s crying, too. He holds the paper to his chest, not wanting to risk having his tears make the crayon run. “You remembered that? You kept this?”

Lydia nods. “Yeah, I did.”

Stiles knows what this means. He knows exactly what she’s admitting, in handing over this old drawing, and he knows exactly what’s coming next, and he feels a fresh onslaught of tears threatening at the thought of it.

She must be able to tell, because she shuffles closer to him on the bed and splays one of her hands over his, where he’s pressing the drawing right above his heart. Her other hand comes up to cup his face, her thumb stroking his cheekbone, and when she takes a deep breath and then exhales he feels it hit his lips.

“Lydia,” he breathes, bringing his spare hand up to rest at the back of her neck. 

There are a thousand things he wants to say, a million thoughts racing through his mind. He’s dreamed about this before, spent years panicking over every possible way this conversation could go.

But he never planned for the heart wrenching way Lydia looks at him now, like she’s literally putting her life in his hands. He didn’t anticipate just how overwhelming it would be, to feel this cosmic sort of love for someone and then have it reflected right back at you.

He never imagined that her eyes would be quite so green, or her hair quite so vibrant, or her smile so gentle and perfect and reserved just for him; finally, honestly, for him. Her soulmate.

“Stiles,” Lydia whispers. “I see every color there is, all of them, because of you. I look at you, and I see color.”