breathe in [part i]
Story: there’ll be no comfort in the shade
Summary: When you start a story with “once upon a time,” you are usually precluding the possibility of someone collapsing in the middle of Beacon Hills Mall and waking up afterwards with thirty-five years’ worth of memories of being a different person crowding their head.
Notes: Firstly, there’s just a broad baseline warning on this for Lydia Martin: Having Awful Opinions since 1996.
Secondly, this is mostly a Teen Wolf fic; if you watch TW but not OUAT, you should be fine in terms of comprehension. The reverse is probably not true, although I set this during their senior year of high school and do a lot of hand-waving about the stuff that happened in the interim between the end of season 2 and the events of this fic, so who knows?
Thirdly, this seriously could not have been written without Mumford & Sons; I listened to “Lover of the Light” so many times while writing this that I woke up singing it last week.
~
Lydia spends the night before her eighteenth birthday up to the tops of her Madden Girl boots in swamp. Last Thursday, there had only been two swamps in Siskiyou county, both of which are over thirty miles east of Beacon Hills, but nevertheless, there is a swamp in the preserve and Lydia is in the middle of it, holding a silver-tipped stake in one hand and a candle rolled in crushed rosemary and myrtle in the other. The herbs are meant to improve the elements of memory and luck in the protection spell that the candle is casting, and Lydia needs both of those in high quantity if she and Stiles are going to find the last of the red caps responsible for the sudden appearance of a swamp in the middle of the Beacon Hills Preserve.
“I hope these idiots realize that they completely destroyed the native ecosystem,” Lydia says to Stiles, because she needs some way to tether their current hunt for red caps to something sane, and worrying about ecosystems is the only way she can think to do that. “There’s no way the preserve is going to recover before the onset of winter.”
“One,” Stiles says, “winter is California is always a relative thing. Two, not sure that they care, being red caps and all.”
“Being murderous fey creatures is no excuse for facilitating wanton destruction of an ecological niche, Stiles,” Lydia reminds him. She focuses on ecological sustainability in a lot of her conversations with Stiles because she can guarantee that at least forty percent of everything she tells him will be regurgitated at some point and she wants to make sure that Derek gets this speech on more than one front; he’s decimated the hare population since returning to Beacon Hills and he really should be focusing on deer. For one thing, deer over-population actually is a problem, and for another, deer hunting is a pack activity, and Derek needs as much help with pack bonding as he can get.
Stiles says, “Your concern is duly noted, Lydia,” with twice as much sarcasm as he would’ve used two years ago. In many ways, Lydia appreciates Stiles no longer following her around like an over-enthused puppy, saying creepy things about her hair and bringing her gifts that make her uncomfortable, but sometimes she misses knowing that she could go up to him at any time of the day and know that he’d have a package of Reese’s Cups for her in his backpack. Nothing kick-starts Lydia’s mental processes like chocolate and peanut butter.
“We’re all responsible for the earth, Stiles,” Lydia says. “It’s like you’re not even paying attention to the itemized incident summaries I send you.”
“I pay attention,” Stiles mutters. He stomps his next few steps, like a little boy, and sends a wave of disgusting bog water towards Lydia. She grimaces and half-turns, sacrificing her BCBG Max Azria mini-skirt in favor of preserving her hair-supernatural muck very rarely washes out without serious intervention and Lydia’s hair won’t be able to handle another astringent wash for at least a month and a half-and in the process catches sight of three bobbing lantern-like glows on the horizon to the south.
“Clearly not,” Lydia says, pointing at the lanterns, “as you didn’t mention the red caps coming out to play despite the south being in your line of sight.”
Stiles opens his mouth and makes a weird, contorted face in Lydia’s direction. She usually sees it directed towards Derek, which means Stiles is mentally informing her that she’s a stupid sourwolf. “Don’t even go there, Stilinski,” she growls, kicking swamp water in his general direction. “Everything single item of clothing I’m currently wearing is going to have to be thrown away, and I haven’t even had a chance to wear these boots to school yet.”
As he pulls out his cell phone, Stiles says, “Yes, what you’re going to wear to school, definitely an important line item on our current agenda.” He hits the second speed dial and turns his phone on speakerphone; approximately two seconds later, there’s a click on the other end and silence. Without waiting for a greeting-it is Derek; a greeting seems unlikely-Stiles announces, “Red caps located, Chief.”
“Don’t engage without back-up,” Derek barks. If he wants Lydia and Stiles to stop making dog jokes at his expense, he should probably stop acting like so much of a cliché. “I mean it.”
“You always mean it,” Stiles says blithely. “Looks like they’re a quarter-mile south of our current location, probably two miles north of the house. We’ll come from our end, you come from yours, and we should get to ground zero at about the same time.”
“Stiles-“ Derek roars, but Stiles has already hung up.
“Wolves, amirite,” Stiles says to Lydia with an exaggerated eye roll. “It’s like he thinks we can’t do anything because we don’t have claws and an overdeveloped sense of smell.”
“I imagine his concern arises more from the fact that the red caps have hamstringed half of the pack and left us without our usual contingent of fanged companions,” Lydia points out. Her hand is beginning to cramp around the candle and the melted wax is edging closer and closer to her nails; she sticks the stake through a belt loop and switches hands. The candle flame gutters twice in the process and she freezes, barely breathing, and lets the candle equilibrate.
According to the literature, they’re protected as long as the flame doesn’t die, but Lydia tends not to trust sources that don’t come from a peer-reviewed journal. She recognizes that Allison’s family does things old school, but the fact that the bestiary-which was, judging by what she can see of the binding on the scanned images, made between 1200 and 1350-is written in archaic Latin as opposed to classical or even Medieval tells Lydia that there was a whole lot of poor decision-making going on in that family in the early years. Medieval Latin was practically invented for natural science; there was no logical reason for the Argents to use archaic and its reduced vocabulary. If they wanted secrecy so badly, they should’ve used Medieval and coded it.
So while Lydia trusts her own nuanced translation of the bestiary’s entry on red caps, she’s not sure she trusts whoever wrote the entry in the first place. “Get closer to me,” she tells Stiles, holding the candle slightly above her head to increase its glow radius and pulling the stake from her belt. Thank God for ambidexterity; at least 62% of Lydia’s quantifiable usefulness in the field
can be traced back to that. “I don’t know at what point the candle’s light becomes less effective.”
“I would recommend experimentation,” Stiles says, “except I’m not sure I want to put the idea in your head.”
“The sheer inconsistency of the shit that comes out of your mouth astonishes me, Stiles,” Lydia tells him. “As always.” The real reason Lydia is wearing $260 boots on a hunting trip through the preserve comes into play now, as Lydia and Stiles make a steady, even pace across the swamp. Even though Steve Madden’s shoes are barely weatherproof and the size on the box very rarely computes to the actual size of human feet, the soles are thin and flexible and that enables Lydia to grip the mud with the curve of her toes, keeping her mobile and loose on the top layer of silt. She can hear Stiles squelching behind her in his Timberland hiking boots, swearing floridly, but the only sound coming from her is the soft shushing of the cotton of her skirt against the top cuff of her boots. Even that begins to fade the further they walk, as the fabric dampens and then finally sticks to the skin of her thighs.
They’ve gotten close enough to the fake lantern glow that Lydia can make out the square shape of the lanterns; the light is golden along the edges and melts into a reddish-orange center that looks like Thanksgiving and Halloween melted into one. It’s the color of family and fall and warm fires and hot chocolate.
“Wow,” Stiles whispers, his chest bumping against Lydia’s back as she pauses. “That’s actually really effective.”
“They haven’t survived for the past thousand years by being ineffective, Stiles,” Lydia whispers back. “Why are we whispering? They can’t understand English or hear us inside the circle.”
“Too many years of conditioning by horror movies, I imagine,” Stiles says, his voice still low. “Also, do you really trust the Argents? If the past two years of supernatural craziness has taught me anything, it’s that hunters are really bad at research.”
“Or just really bad at archaic Latin,” Lydia allows. “Make the call, we’re within strike distance.” She winces at her choice of words almost immediately afterwards; like Stiles, she’s apparently been watching too many movies with Bruce Willis and Navy SEALs.
What happens next occurs in slow motion, probably because the possibility hits Lydia too late for her to do anything but get a prescient flash of foreboding right before the shit hits the fan. Stiles reaches for his cell in the pocket of his coat and fumbles the slick metal with his wet hands. His phone arches out of his grasp and exits the circle of protective light cast by the candle, slipping into the water with a splash so loud it probably echoes for miles.
“SHIT,” Stiles breathes, and that’s when all of the lantern lights wink out in a sudden gust of wind. Lydia quickly reaches for the candle, trying to curve her hand over the wick and protect the flame from going out completely, and even though she manages to keep Stiles entirely inside the light, she exposes her front to the red cap that springs out of the darkness, its tiny white teeth glistening in the darkness.
Lydia has always wanted to know what a protective circle would do when it opens against an invading creature; she finds out when she uncovers the candle and the light slams into the red cap. Even though the circle appears immediately, Lydia slows down the phenomenon in her head to account for the fact that the light is moving. It hits the accelerating red cap and the creature dissipates, with a sick, burnt smell, into a splash of liquid that is dark like dried blood.
“Um, ew,” Stiles shouts. Lydia considers the chum-like foam resting against the surface of the bog. Blood is fairly miscible in water, at least as far as anyone need be concerned about in practical situations, so whatever is currently floating along the top of the swamp’s water isn’t normal blood. Lydia has yet to see a supernatural creature with blood less dense than water, but admittedly she hasn’t done any experimentation.
“It’s probably not blood,” she says to herself, leaning forward slightly. “Stiles, come around to my left. I want to get a closer look and you’ll get taken out of the circle if I bend over.”
It’s a sign of how discomfited he is by the recently exploded red cap that Stiles completely ignores the opportunity to make an ill-advised joke about bending over; he acquiesces, with only a token, “What about the other red caps?”
“Listen for them,” Lydia says dismissively. “This is why we have werewolves in our pack, isn’t it? They’ll take care of them.” She flaps a hand towards the south, where the wolves should be coming from the direction of the Hale house. When she moves the candle closer to the blood, she can see that it’s filled with tiny bubbles, and it smells of ethanol. Half-dried blood should be more viscous, not less, but maybe the lower density relates back to the red caps’ need for constantly wet blood? A dried hat kills them, after all.
Lydia ignores the sounds of the pack rending the remaining red caps limb from limb or however else they exert their normally suppressed aggression and uses the wooden, inert end of the stake to nudge the foam. It moves sluggishly, akin to something with the viscosity of honey or maple syrup, and then the foam collapses it on itself and melts away into the water. “Hmm,” Lydia murmurs, and-she’s going to be angry at herself about this later-because she’s so enthralled by the irregularities, neither she nor Stiles notices the red cap that launches itself into the candle’s blind-spot, against the back of her head, and tugs her by her hair under the water.
~
There are seven text messages waiting for Lydia when she wakes up the next morning. She goes through them by rote, as part of her usual morning routine, and they’re all some variety of please text me when you wake up so I know you don’t have brain damage from pack members. There’s a voicemail from Deaton, informing her that, in light of her recent water-related escapades, their discussion on wreath-building this afternoon is canceled. The second voicemail is from her father, postponing their weekend plans until later in the month; it means he’s forgotten her birthday again, which is hardly surprising.
She sends a mass text to the entire pack, assuring them that she is brain damage-free, awake, and now eighteen and therefore expecting all presents to be delivered to her house before 7 pm. Before she’s even going to consider checking her email or Facebook she needs coffee, so Lydia untangles herself from her bed sheets, wraps herself in an oversized sweater, and goes downstairs with her laptop under her arm and her cell in the pocket of her sweater.
Weirdly enough, as she’s sitting on the granite countertop of the island, systematically deleting happy birthday wall posts on her Facebook page from people she doesn’t like, she gets an odd, untethered feeling loose in her stomach. There’s the distinct possibility that it’s just hunger-she can’t remember the last time she ate-so while she lets her mother’s Colombian dark roast sit in the French press, she texts Allison to confirm that their lunch and shopping plans haven’t been upset by Lydia’s recent near-drowning.
Are you sure? Allison sends back. When I left last night you were nearly catatonic. I’m pretty sure you passed out in the shower.
You have yet to mention something an avocado melt from Stacey’s and four hours in Nordstrom won’t fix, Lydia replies. Pick me up at two, I need another shower before my hair is ready for public consumption.
The feeling persists through her shower, and the cup of coffee, and then the ride to Beacon Hills Mall, which Lydia and Allison spend singing along to One Direction, although Lydia insists on the windows being rolled up to prevent anyone from seeing.
“Do you not want to talk about last night?” Allison asks after lunch, when they’re sprawled next to the Kate Spade table, trying on sequined pumps. “A red cap getting the jump on you because you were distracted-that’s not like you, Lydia.”
Lydia examines first her left foot-red sequins-and then her right-gold-and finally says, “Occasionally, we are all allowed to have our off days.”
“The fourth thing you ever said to me was I don’t get off days,” Allison replies. “I remember because you were leaving for algebra at the time and I had never before been envious of a person’s ability to do a hair flip.”
“Even I am wrong, occasionally,” Lydia says, removing her left shoe and replacing it with the second gold pump. Allison won’t actually tell anyone about Lydia’s weaknesses; the only real threat to this would be Scott, except Allison and Scott tend just to be creepily over-invested in how much in love they are with each other, and not talk about things like Lydia’s occasional insecure flare-up. “I’m concerned that the gold makes my skin look sallow.”
“I don’t think it’s possible for your skin to look sallow,” Allison says. “I don’t care what you read in Teen Vogue.”
“I don’t read Teen Vogue,” Lydia says with a distasteful expression. “I read Vogue like someone who is an adult and don’t look to Alexa Chung for every fashion cue.”
“Buurn,” Allison says under her breath. She picks up a pair of pumps with green sequins and tilts them enticingly in Lydia’s direction. “I know you have an entire rant prepared concerning redheads in green, but I think these might better soothe the loss of the Madden Girl boots.”
“Nothing can soothe the loss of the Madden Girl boots,” Lydia says, yanking the pumps away from Allison. “Or so I’m going to tell my mother when comes back from San Francisco tomorrow with an apologetic expression and a check for $500.”
“Are you also explaining to her that the boots met with an unfortunate swamp incident with some red caps?” Allison asks. “You’re the last hold-out; everyone else’s parents know.”
“Everyone else appears to have parents who have some degree of concern about their well-being,” Lydia points out. “Or dead parents, I suppose. And please don’t pretend that the members of the pack made mature, rational decisions when informing their parents of their furry inclination; the Reyes only know thanks to that ridiculously overdramatic showdown with the Alpha pack.”
The green sequined pumps look fantastic-of course; they’re Kate Spade-and birthdays were invented so that men and women could make impractical sartorial purchases without feeling guilty; Lydia Martin very rarely does guilt, but she understands the dynamics of the guilt trip well enough to have raised it to an art from. She’s the product of divorced, independently wealthy people, after all.
“Are you never going to tell them?” Allison asks after Lydia has forked over her credit card. “What if something happens to you? They’ll just never get to know what really happened?”
This is unusually forceful for Allison; she’d been the first to accept that Lydia’s parents were never going to learn about Lydia’s magic lessons, and even after Stiles and Scott had banded together to gift Lydia with a well-meaning PowerPoint presentation entitled ‘Life After The Talk: So Much Easier’ that frankly Lydia wishes she could permanently erase all memory of from the face of the Earth, Allison had supported Lydia’s decision.
“I didn’t die last night,” Lydia says quietly, so that the cashier doesn’t get any ideas about calling the police. “I haven’t died during any of the myriad other wacky adventures we’ve had over the past few years, and although at some point I will, in fact, die of supernatural causes, there is no reason for my parents to know the truth, as if the truth somehow will change our relationship. In order for that to happen, Allison, you need to have a relationship with your parents. Based on how they reacted to my cousin Marta coming out, they prefer the lie.” She smiles as the cashier hands her a receipt. “Have a nice afternoon!”
Allison must be able to infer from this that Lydia doesn’t want to discuss her parents anymore; when she catches up with Lydia outside of Orange Julius, all she says is, “Smoothie?” Never let it be said that Allison is as slow as her boyfriend.
A smoothie actually sounds like a really good idea, the longer Lydia thinks about it; her head is throbbing directly above her left eyeball like Athena is seriously considering making a bid for freedom. Lethargy and chest pain are normal near-drowning systems, but Lydia’s never read anything that would indicate that the peculiar, aching feeling low in her stomach is at all normal.
“You okay?” Allison asks; Lydia realizes that she’s been staring into space directly above Allison’s shoulder, the heel of her palm pressed against her abdomen. “You’re venturing into freaky territory, and, you know, better safe than sorry in Beacon Hills.”
“No, I’m fine,” Lydia says automatically, a lifetime’s worth of idiomatic nonsense prompting the words. “I probably swallowed too much bog water last night. I would love a smoothie.” She links her arm through Allison’s and tugs her into the shop, determined not to let a putative bacterial infection keep her from an enjoyable birthday.
“If I didn’t love you,” Allison tells her, “I would probably be very frightened of you right now.”
“There’s no need to let the fact that you know me keep you from being afraid,” Lydia reminds her. “Your treat, as I’m the birthday girl.”
Caleb Michaels, who shares seventh period AP Lit with Lydia, is manning a fake smile and an ice cream scoop behind the counter. His face freezes into a parody of horror when he catches sight of Lydia, as she’s been particularly vocal as of late concerning his inability to focus on any element of The Sun Also Rises beyond Jake’s lack of a penis. “H-hey,” he stutters, towards Allison, as apparently he’s too much of a toddler to look Lydia directly in the eye. According to Stiles, this is an especially common occurrence amongst Beacon Hills’ current crop of freshmen; it now appears to be spreading to upperclassmen.
“Hey, Caleb,” Allison says, leaning against the glass counter and peering down into containers of syrupy, ostensibly freshly-cut produce. “How’s it going?”
“F-fine,” Caleb says, staring unblinking directly into the middle of Allison’s forehead. “How are you, Allison? L-lydia?” He whispers Lydia’s name. There’s a pack in New Mexico that now believes that speaking Lydia’s name will cause her to physically manifest and exact vengeance on the speaker; the birth of that myth had ended up being the one upshot to an otherwise lackluster vacation in Albuquerque. It’s highly unlikely that Caleb is a member of that pack-he’s too stupid to have survived this long as a werewolf, for one, although Scott McCall lives to thwart that hypothesis-but he speaks her name like he’s one of them.
“I’m great,” Lydia purrs. “Have you finished your paper for AP Lit yet, Caleb?”
Caleb blanches. “What can I get you?” he half-shouts at Allison’s forehead, his skin turned blotchy by fear. If Lydia were a better person, this would probably be less hilarious, but she has to get her kicks somehow.
“Oh, I’ll have a medium 3-Berry Blast, please,” Allison says. “Can you put extra ginseng in that?”
“Of course,” Caleb breathes, aiming his ice cream scoop at the tank labeled VANILLA.
With Caleb sufficiently occupied, Allison turns back to Lydia, propping her elbow on the glass case. “Is this how we’re going to end up?” she asks, giving Lydia that particular grin-toothy, half-cute, half-smirk, open-mouthed-that never fails to make Lydia want to pinch her cheeks like an eighty-year-old Italian grandmother. “Me keeping you in the lap of luxury, while you spend my money and wait for me to die so you can trade me for a younger man?”
“Ally,” Lydia says, “if I was using you for anything, it would be sex. And while I’ve never seen Scott hit a woman-bless his little chivalrous heart-if I tried to steal you away from him in order to have my wicked way with you, he might actually rip my throat out.” Caleb’s hand trembles above the container of strawberries as Lydia reconsiders. “Well, Scott would try to rip my throat out.”
Caleb drops the spoon and strawberries onto the counter and makes a small, terrified squeak when Lydia stares in his direction. “Let me get another spoon,” he says. He vanishes into the back room so fast Lydia is fairly certain that, had Finstock been around, Caleb Michael would’ve been first line material faster than he could say 3-Berry Blast.
“I think we’ve scared the poor boy,” Lydia says. She can hear her disdain for his sheer existence dripping from every word; even Allison’s quelling look can’t dispel it. “I’m not sorry,” she tells Allison. “He’s possibly the most timid human being I’ve ever seen.”
“Normal people are allowed to have nervous conditions,” Allison says. “It’s not something that’s generally punishable by death in Beacon County.”
Lydia has a lot of opinions about what should receive capital punishment in Beacon County, and very few of them are fit for public consumption. She’s opening her mouth to express one or more of them anyway when a sudden lash of dizziness hits her and she’s tilting into Allison before she even knows what’s happening. “Lydia!” Allison shouts; a wave of purple explodes in the corners of Lydia’s vision and she’s hit with a monster of a headache so strong that the most sensible thing to do is fade into unconsciousness.
Never let it be said that Lydia Martin isn’t sensible; out she goes, face-first, into the glass counter of Orange Julius at Beacon Hills Mall. There’s no way she’s going to be able to make any social trade out of this at all; thank Jesus she’s already given up on prom queen to that nasty piece of work Olive Witherspoon, or else waking up after this might actually be a little bit embarrassing.
~
“I am beginning to feel like Eragon,” Lydia announces to the back of her eyelids when she finally regains consciousness. “Seriously, if unconsciousness becomes a thing that happens at the end of every chapter, I am not playing the deadweight damsel in distress.”
Of all the things that could be filed under ‘weird’ about Lydia Martin’s eighteenth birthday, number one officially becomes what happens next, which is the sudden memory spike that damsel in distress causes to happen in her brain. “Oh my god,” she breathes, curling to her left and rolling an arm over her head. “Jesus fucking Christ.” There might actually be a small creature burrowing through Lydia’s brain right now, to judge by the level of pain she’s currently suffering.
“It’s okay,” he says, and a big, warm hand presses against the back of Lydia’s head. “Just breathe. It’ll go down in a few seconds.”
“I’ll thank you for your medical opinion when you finish your MD,” Lydia snipes. “Oh wait.”
He laughs; like always, it drips down the back of Lydia’s throat and tingles against the top of her stomach, erupting into sparkles and butterflies and other sickening, wrenching things. It’s like a Taylor Swift song, without the blatant slut-shaming and poor knowledge of classic literature; Lydia has turned into a parody of her worst outer self. “Well,” he says, “if you’re sassing so prodigiously, it must not be a serious problem.”
“I can’t believe you just used sass and prodigious in the same sentence,” Lydia murmurs into the curve of her arm. “Who do you think you are, me?”
“I know exactly who I am,” he says. His fingers card through her hair, gently, tugging at the curls at the end and drifting back to rest against her scalp. Without any other stimulus, her heart begins to slow. “Do you?”
Such a question raises a whole bunch of red flags-supernatural amnesia is never going to be funny to Lydia after the month she spent being tailed by Stiles when he thought he was eleven and in love with her again, especially not in light of how much time Derek had spent trailing after his stupid adolescent boyfriend like a creepy pedophile-but Lydia’s head hurts too much to delve into the myriad possibilities.
“Lydia Martin,” she says. “Aged eighteen. Obama is president.” Her tongue feels funny against her lips; twitching and fierce. “Wait, that’s-that’s not right.” She can remember watching MSNBC the night that the election results had come in, though; she, Danny, and Stiles had talked about how much they were in love with Rachel Maddow and occasionally turned on Fox News so they could throw popcorn at the sour-faced commentators. “I’m-”
She can remember her eighteenth birthday. Today is her eighteenth birthday.
“I’m-”
Shit.
“I am Guinevere,” she says. “Queen of the Summer Country.”
As if saying the words are a cure against the ache, her head stops throbbing. She can feel his hand more securely, now, more of a tether and less of a guiding presence. “Oh, by the will of the elder gods. Lance-”
It is him, when she opens her eyes. She hadn’t seen him in seven years, when she had died, but she’d met Lancelot when they were both eighteen, young and stupid and filled with Arthur’s silly, extravagant ideas about kingship and joy and the future. She’d seen him age after that; she’d seen ten years pass against the crags of his face and never once had they turned bitter or angry towards her. But those years are gone when she looks at him now. It’s like being returned to her childhood, to the best of herself.
“Boyd,” she says, and she’s more unsure than Lydia Martin has ever been unsure about anything in her life. “Oh my god, Boyd.”
“I know, Gwen,” he says, and his smile looks cracked and odd along the very edge, curving into the darkness that hides his eyes. “I remember, too.” His hand begins to burn where it is pressed against her head. Now that she isn’t occupied by searing agony, Lydia realizes that she’s curled up in the backseat of Stiles’ Jeep, which appears-to judge by the few details that Lydia can make out from behind Boyd’s massive shoulders-to be in the Beacon Hills Mall parking lot.
“Where’s Allison?” she asks. “And why the hell am I in Stiles’ car?”
“I didn’t know anyone else who could drive me on short notice,” he says, with a quick-muscled shrug that makes his jacket shiver across his shoulder. “I sent him and Allison to buy ice from the gas station over by Ruby Tuesday’s. I thought maybe-I was confused, when I woke up. I would’ve appreciated a familiar face, even,” here his face twitches slightly, twisted with maybe self-loathing and that awful, hardened look that Lancelot had worn for his last few months in Camelot before he’d left, “one I hadn’t seen except in anger.”
“I wasn’t angry at you,” Lydia says, before she can even really evaluate this as possibly the worst place for her and Lancelot to ever have this conversation. “It was a shitty situation for everyone.”
Boyd’s face melts into impassivity. “Yes,” he says, and what she hears is Lancelot shouting, Why would you stay with him?! Why would you stay and suffer through this? It’s the most eloquent single syllable she’s ever heard, and that’s including the way that Derek seems to communicate his affection for Stiles.
“If there is ever a time wherein we can talk about our past with anything approaching emotional maturity, we can do so then,” Lydia says, staring at the ceiling of Stiles’ Jeep. “However, that time is not now.” What she means is, We are never talking about Camelot.
“As you wish,” Boyd says drily, and his claws prick against her scalp as he gently removes his hand. Her hair must be tangled around his claws-that’s one thing that Lydia can remember about the sex with Jackson after he shifted from lizard to wolf, beyond it being full of his self-hatred: his claws always caught on her hair and it was a bitch to get them loose-but she wouldn’t be able to tell from how slowly and carefully Boyd frees himself.
Even though she doesn’t want to talk about Camelot-even though Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and, god, Mordred are the last things she ever wants to pass her lips as Lydia Martin-she still can’t help looking at Boyd’s face and seeing, mirrored in the kind gentleness there, the way that Lancelot had looked when he had first seen her. Summertime in her father’s lands and the new king come to ask for her hand and his bravest knights on either side: Gawaine of Orkney, dark-haired and green-eyed and with a silver grin, and Lancelot du Lac, dark and tall and serious, his hand caught over his heart.
My knight, she thinks; or, she’d thought, at the time, when Arthur had offered Lancelot as her champion as part of her bride price.
“We were stupid,” she says quietly, as she carefully raises herself onto her elbows.
It’s unsurprising that Boyd doesn’t respond; there are so many situations to which that statement could be applied, after all, and she means every one of them.
[part ii]