breathe in [part iii]
[part ii]
~
The next morning, Lydia wakes up to her mother, wearing an expression that wanted to be disapproving but lacked the proper flexibility, standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, in the middle of yelling at her PA. She points at Lydia and then at the kitchen table, framed in a patch of sunlight exactly like their interior designer had promised it would be, and whispers, “Sit down. No, Michael, I didn’t mean you. Why the hell would I be telling you to sit down if you’re in a car?”
Lydia pours herself a cup of coffee and takes a croissant out of the chrome breadbox on the island. She curls her legs under her at the table and nibbles on the edge of the croissant, interspersed with life-giving sips of coffee, as her mother finishes verbally abusing her PA and finally yanks the earbud out of her left ear. “What happened in the morning parlor?” she asks Lydia, slamming her cup down onto the countertop and almost chipping it in the process.
“Nothing Gordon won’t be able to fix,” Lydia replies, focusing on tearing the top layer of her croissant into perfectly even one-inch strips. Flakes of pastry tumble onto the tabletop, leaving golden shreds all over the linen placemats.
“It’s like a flood in there,” her mother says sharply. “Water will warp the wooden baseboard, Lydia, you know that.”
“I do indeed,” Lydia agrees. “However, there’s less water in that room than there would be in a flood, Mom, which is when you have to worry about warping.”
“And the candlewax,” her mother continues, voice increasing in shrillness with each piece of croissant that Lydia rips off and lays on her tongue. “If Gordon gets all of that wax out of the carving in my Rococo end table, it will be a miracle.”
Lydia finishes chewing before she says, “Gordon’s gotten wax out of worst places in the past.”
“The point is not Gordon, Lydia,” her mother says. “The point is you. I don’t care if you have friends over, but you shouldn’t leave your messes around for other people to clean up. It’s not their responsibility.” This is clearly venturing into a thinly-veiled criticism of Lydia’s father. While Lydia doesn’t mind her mother ranting about her father’s inadequacies-her mother is never wrong about them, even if she is unimaginative; besides, Lydia tunes her out once her invectives get particularly pointed-she has plans to utilize this morning for studying and she doesn’t want to deal with what will follow her mother’s rant: tears.
“I put away the candles and candlesticks and I cleared what I could,” she tells her mother. “I don’t know what else you expected me to do, since we don’t actually own a mop.”
“Of course we own a mop,” her mother deflects.
Lydia swallows a delicate mouthful of coffee and says, pointedly, “ No, we don’t.”
Her mother is saved from having to continue this painful conversation by the ringing of her phone. “Oh, for the love of,” she bites out. “What does he need now?” She stuffs the earbuds back in and barks, “Michael, what? No, Jesus, of course we don’t want McLaughlin to ask for Joanna’s input, if he does that we’ll be stuck in rewrite limbo for another month.” She half-turns from Lydia, tapping the heel of a Ferragamo stiletto against the tiled floor, and Lydia takes advantage of that to slip out of her seat and across the room to the glass door to the patio.
Prada is half-heartedly nuzzling along the edge of the pool, his face frozen in a parody of canine despair. “Mom forgot to let you back in, didn’t she?” Lydia says. At the sound of her voice, he bursts into enthusiastic barking and propels himself along the side of the pool towards her, his claws scrambling against the stone tiles. “Hello,” she tells him, settling down into a squat so he can nudge her knee with his head and tremble. “How has your morning been? Other than freezing, I presume.”
Her dog whines and scrambles into her lap, almost upsetting her coffee. “Oh, come on,” she says, scooping him up in a fireman’s carry with her free hand. She has an appalling amount of upper body strength for someone who deplores sweat, thanks to the pack’s extracurricular crime-fighting activities, and lifting Prada is easy. She straightens up, Prada’s breath warm and moist against the side of her neck as he buries his face in her hair, and that’s when she sees what’s happened to the garden.
Lydia’s forgotten about how much of a clusterfuck Beltane can be, but in her defense, Beltane in Camelot had never been this bad. It’d been about the symbolism, of course, which was why Guinevere had let her maids drape her in flowers and she and Arthur had led the dance in the lower town, mouths shiny from dark wine and the fire breaking over the golden flame of Arthur’s hair. If the king didn’t plow his wife, the farmers couldn’t plow their fields. The gardens had always looked fabulous the morning after Beltane, for the first few years of their marriage.
And then, when Guinevere hadn’t been able to conceive and she and Arthur had stopped talking about Camelot’s future and their ideas and dreams, the land had suffered. There hadn’t been any flowers for the Beltane wreaths, for two or three springs, until Arthur had stopped pretending that their marriage was salvageable and he’d finally gone to Merlin.
Even on that first morning after Arthur and Merlin had begun their affair, when the orchards had been filled with strange fruits and the grasses had been turned gem-like colors and the air had sounded the trembling chime of bells-even then, nothing had happened quite like what has happened to Lydia’s mother’s garden. The carefully-maintained rows of landscaped trees and shrubs have been drowned by vines of ivy and wisteria, the latter heavily laden with blooms. There is wisteria growing everywhere that Lydia had wanted it, framing the back gate and all of the doors and windows of the house, and ivy along the back fence. Spanish moss is dripping from the gabled arbor and lilies on fat pads have sprouted in the corners of the pool.
Now that she’s noticed the smell, Lydia can’t believe that it wasn’t the first thing she picked up on when she came onto the patio. It’s like the worst of her mother’s perfume in the height of summer. Everything is gardenia and heavy and sweet, like honeysuckle and roses, and all of the flowers are swollen and blazing with color. As Lydia watches, a thickset bumblebee meanders its way across a clump of sunflowers each the size of Lydia’s head, buzzing lazily.
“Fuck,” Lydia says to Prada conversationally.
She’s fairly certain that her mother’s landscape architect hadn’t planted half of these plants-for one thing, sunflowers attract bees, and her mother is allergic to them. Additionally, Southern moss shouldn’t even be growing in this part of California, let alone on a crepe myrtle, and as an epiphyte it definitely shouldn’t be able to grow alone, like it is on some sections of the arbor.
Guinevere had loved Spanish moss. They’d called it feathertears, in Camelot, and used it for weaving in such large volumes that the gardening staff had cultivated it essentially everywhere. That had been one of the first things Merlin had done to win Guinevere’s favor, when Guinevere was a young queen and still in love with her husband-Merlin had shown her how to make feathertears grow on its own.
You’ve the light of the sun inside of you, Merlin had whispered to Guinevere. Her hands had been wide-palmed and thin-fingered, her knuckles knotted under thin, brown skin; she’d worn rings at the base of every finger and the metal had been cold as she pressed her palms to Guinevere’s wrists and guided them over the wooden frame of an arbor. If you let it, the land would do much to please its queen.
Guinevere had loved Merlin in the way that Lydia loves Allison and Stiles. She’d taken care of Merlin when she was pregnant, naively hoping that Beltane had been a fluke, a single instance of infidelity never repeated; but then baby had been born thirteen months later and the Pendragon birthmark had stood out against Mordred’s hip. She had never wanted to feel that bare, gnawing stab ever again, but the faintest impression of it presses against Lydia’s stomach now as she watches clumps of Spanish moss wave in the morning breeze, wagging hello like Prada’s tail.
“I will never be you again,” Lydia says. The words come out of her mouth without any conscious effort, but she can’t seem to stop them. “I will never be you, ever again. I will not be weak.”
“Lydia?” her mother says from the door to the patio. “Jesus Christ, what the hell did Javí do to my garden last weekend? Never mind, that’s not important. I’m going in to the office for a few hours.”
“All right, Mom.” Lydia rests her hand against Prada’s trembling back and tries to ground herself with the wriggling of his small body. The fury inside of her feels as unexpected and vibrant as whatever the hell Beltane sex has done to her mother’s garden; she wonders if she smells the same way, sickly overripe. Prada doesn’t seem to have an issue with her, but Prada is worse at being a dog than Scott.
After the glass door shuts with a low snick and Lydia has let her breathing level out, she says, more decisively and less broken, “This maudlin Memento storyline is officially over,” and she takes Prada back into the house so she can work through the problems at the end of chapter 11 in her AP Physics textbook to Regina Spektor. There’s part of her that hopes that sheer willpower will manage to get rid of at least some of the crazed growth in the back yard, but when she goes down to the kitchen at four to make herself a pot of tea and a grilled cheese sandwich, she can still see the lily pads in the pool. They’ve picked up a family of frogs, small and green and speckled, and the littlest ones are hoping from leaf to leaf like gnats.
So, that’s a no on normalcy, then.
~
As the days pass, the garden gets worse. Nothing dies, not even the monkeyflower blossoms that should live, according to the botanical literature Lydia references in the middle of the night, for a maximum of three days. The scent is stronger each morning when she wakes and her mother calls Javí and threatens to sue unless he gets rid of the sunflowers. It’s not Javí’s fault that they stay; each afternoon he uproots them, and each morning Lydia wakes up and makes herself a cup of coffee and the sunflowers beam at her through the window over the stove, unfurling yellow petals to the bees.
There is an element of instability to everything Lydia is doing. Since she’s had a mental breakdown before, she can recognize the signs of one building around her. She drifts in class, her hand writing notes for lessons she doesn’t remembering hearing, until her eyes are hazy and unfocused and she can almost visualize the auras pushing out of her classmates. There’s always a blaze of gold from somewhere to her left, where Boyd sits with Isaac and Erica in their little cluster of leather.
It’s not as if Lydia is going to be so crass as to get a B in anything and she’d officially accepted MIT’s offer back in the fall, so her inattention won’t harm her future in any way. It just makes her a liability in class and in the field. She breaks a fork when Boyd smiles at Olive Witherspoon at lunch one day, splattering Isaac’s shirt in salad dressing. She has to scramble for some kind of control in the aftermath, and she narrows in on Caleb Michaels the period after lunch for lack of any other options.
After AP Lit is finished, Allison slips to her side and says, voice tentatively censorious, “Lydia, was that, um, totally necessary?”
She means Caleb Michaels, who is staring, bloodless and shell-shocked, at the corner of the classroom and not moving.
“He’s an imbecile,” Lydia says scathingly, plucking her copy of The Sun Also Rises off of her desk and standing. “Maybe he should learn how to read before he ventures an opinion.”
“Lydia,” Allison says. “That was really kind of uncalled for. He’s comatose.”
“He’ll be grateful for the assistance eventually,” Lydia says. “I have a responsibility as a member of the human race to prevent him from unleashing such sophomoric idiocy on the rest of the world.” The look on Caleb’s face, pinched and drawn, doesn’t actually make her feel any better. It’s the act of speaking-the moment that he realizes that Lydia is better, smarter, faster, that her mind and tongue move twice as fast as his-that drives her.
“I don’t think I have ever heard you express concern for the rest of the human race,” Allison says blankly, falling into place at Lydia’s side as she stalks from the room. “Lydia, wait, please.”
Lydia staunchly ignores her and because they don’t share the next period, Allison reluctantly peels away to join Scott and Stiles in AP US as Lydia goes to AP Econ. It’s a class she technically shares with Caleb Michaels, but she can’t imagine he’ll be up for attending.
She’s right; Boyd is the only other person from their tiny AP Lit class who makes it before the bell rings at the start of the period. This is supposed to be a free period for them to use to work on their projects, but since Lydia has finished it, there isn’t anything for them to do. Boyd sits next to her anyway. Even if she doesn’t watch him directly she can’t avoid him; he’s too big and occupies too much of the space around her.
“How are you?” Boyd asks.
Lydia jerks and then freezes, forcing her hands to stop trembling against the surface of her notebook. They haven’t spoken since Beltane; it’s not suspicious behavior because Boyd and Lydia rarely talk to one another. Even though the pack is technically a complete unit, Scott and Isaac’s friendship and Derek and Stiles’ relationship in truth bond together two groups that exist in an uneasy harmony. “I’m fine,” she says, voice clipped.
“I only ask,” Boyd continues, casually leaning back and scratching the tip of his nose, “because you seemed a little bloodthirsty last period.”
“It’s called irritation,” Lydia bites out. “I feel it frequently in the presence of troglodytes like Caleb Michaels.”
Boyd laughs, open-mouthed, his head tilted backwards. He’s got the kind of booming laugh that Guinevere had been accustomed to hearing from barrel-chested men, but it sounds too loud for a classroom at Beacon Hills High. People turn to look, probably because Vernon Boyd hasn’t laughed in public ever.
As Jacob Schneider and Raj Patel turn in unison, Lydia gives them a placid bitch-face and they both decide to find their notebooks far more interesting than Boyd’s recently discovered sense of humor. “You’re very good at flying under the radar,” Lydia snips. “It’s a no wonder no one’s figured out your monthly problem yet, considering your skill with the unobtrusive.”
“I’m not exactly interested in hiding my past,” Boyd says. His eyes are still tilted up at the outside corners. Humor gives his face a familiar, vital cast. “You’re the one who’s put the breaks on.”
Lydia’s mouth twists helplessly; she sneers before she can even think about why. “Oh, yes,” she agrees. “I am, in fact, the one who took a firm hold of common sense and said that letting our pasts run away with us might not be the best idea.”
“Lancelot wasn’t flawless,” Boyd comments quietly, the humor draining slowly. “But he’s part of me. He was even before I could remember. Learning from your past mistakes is an important part of growing up.”
Jesus Christ. “Did you get that off of a pamphlet in Morell’s office?” Lydia demands.
“No,” he says, grinning briefly at her. “For a person who hates being stereotyped, you’ve got a fiery kind of temper, don’t you?”
“Thank you for that incredibly original observation,” Lydia drawls. “I don’t think anyone’s ever pointed that out to me before.”
“Just in case you were unaware,” Boyd says, lifting his hands and pointing his palms towards her in a don’t blame me kind of way. “Gwen didn’t get angry very often.”
Just the name makes the muscles in Lydia’s shoulders clench up. “She couldn’t exactly afford to,” she says, voice as tight as her deltoids. “Someone had to stay clearheaded, and it certainly wasn’t going to be Arthur.” I was angry, she wants to tell him. When Morgana gave me that damn potion, I wanted to burn her castle down around her and choke her on the ash.
Maybe he can read something of that in her face; Boyd has always been good at the subtle things, better than Lancelot. She wonders if it’s a byproduct of his upbringing, of his senile aunt and absent mother and years of isolation, but she’s only going to break that kind of question out if he fires first. “That’s fair,” Boyd says.
“Is it?” Lydia asks. “Arthur had his moments.”
“He was a great king,” Boyd agrees. “I am not sure he was a particularly good man.”
“Remind you of anyone else?” Lydia asks, tilting her head to the parking lot outside of the classroom window. It’s not like Derek is actually other there right now-he tends not to lurk now that the pack is mostly self-sufficient and unlikely to assault one another or innocent members of the student body-but Boyd still knows what she means.
“Derek’s a good man and a shitty king,” Boyd says. “It’s why Stiles is his anchor.” It’s an astute observation, all things considered; Stiles is not particularly good or kind to those he dislikes, which is why he and Lydia had begun to get along so well once he stopped in his obsessive and ill-fated quest to make her fall in love with him.
“I’m sure there’s a gold star somewhere in Morell’s office for you,” Lydia assures him, and Boyd laughs again, more quietly this time, perhaps in deference to the way that the classroom has hushed down to a low-level roar of activity.
“Gwen wasn’t perfect,” Boyd tells her an indeterminate amount of time later, when Lydia is working on her homework for the Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics class she’s taking online at UCBH and Boyd is doing whatever he does to occupy himself. “But Lancelot loved her.”
The past tense shouldn’t make Lydia’s skin clench in on itself, but it does. She knows perfectly well that she’s hard to love, if her string of past relationships is anything to judge by, and the passing judgment of a man who used to be her champion in another life shouldn’t have any effect on her emotions. “Bully for him,” she says, unwilling to look up from her homework and acknowledge that his statement might have any importance to her.
“Do you know what it’s like to love another man’s wife?” Boyd continues, his tone thoughtful, the way it is when he can occasionally be cornered into venturing an opinion in one of Lydia and Derek’s or Lydia and Stiles’ myriad squabbles.
“No,” Lydia says, stabbing her pencil through her paper with the force of her push. She continues to write her function anyway, focusing on the perfect downward lines of her letters and numbers.
“If you’re good enough, it begins to eat you alive.” Lydia concentrates on making every letter e on this line the exact same size. “It turns your thoughts sour and poisonous. It makes you willing to forget all of the good things that have happened to you, in favor of only the lack that exists in you. You turn into the worst of your self, and then you begin to lose even that.”
“What is the point of this?” Lydia asks, fighting for some kind of equilibrium. She isn’t going to cry because that would be stupid and pointless, but her knuckles are so white that they blur, indistinguishable against her notebook paper. “Your life was very hard, I feel for you.”
“It never stops,” Boyd says over her. The thoughtfulness is gone now, channeled into a severe kind of deliberation. “Even if you leave and join a mercenary army and pledge your sword to a new king and queen, love like that doesn't die.”
Lydia can’t keep herself from looking at him, now, and his eyes are scalding in the dark skin and square bones of his face. “Are you trying to tell me,” she says, her lips dry under her Chanel lipstick, “that it was true love? This isn’t The Princess Bride, Boyd.”
“Don’t play it like that,” Boyd says. There’s more savagery in his voice, underlining whatever he’s trying to nonverbally convey to her through the power of his stare. “You remember how powerful it was. The strongest power there was, in all of the lands.”
Something in the air is making her magic sing, long and trill, like a mistle thrush. She wonders absently if Boyd’s extrasensory perception can pick up what she feels inside of her head; the tinkling of chimes and the spiced kick of ginger and soil and musk. “This isn’t Camelot,” she says. “Magic is different here.” Just about anyone could do anything with enough magic powder and a good spell book, in Camelot, which had always driven Arthur insane with frustration. The magic here is of stronger, more vibrant stuff; it breeds itself and creates creatures tied to the land and its pulse, but it’s not a fairy tale.
The words sound weak, probably because they are, in the face of Boyd’s forcefulness. “True enough,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not just as strong here.” He can’t seriously be saying-“Strong enough to bring back dead memories.” She notices his hand begin to rise, the way that it hovers to her left, curved in the shape of her cheek, still inches away. “You have to feel it, still. There’s no other explanation for what happened the other night.”
“Beltane happened the other night,” Lydia says. Her voice is stupidly breathless.
“Beltane can’t invent something that isn’t already there,” he tells her, with a curl of a smile deep in his right cheek. He has a dimple there; did Lancelot? Lydia can’t remember for a dazed moment, as static electricity snaps across the space between her skin and his.
The bell rings. Chairs scrape, voices rise, someone jostles the back of Lydia’s chair as they push for the door. They all feel as if they are miles away, happening in another room in another country to other people. Lydia can still feel the pull against her, a startlingly strong urge to sink into Boyd until the world feels like it had when she was splayed across her mother’s end table, the light of the candles flaring up to the ceiling.
Lydia is suddenly done with dancing around. “I was madly in love with you,” she says. “It completely destroyed me when you left. I was barren and lonely and my husband was openly fucking the mother of his only son. I thought that being valiant and silent would give me the strength to bear it, but all it did was make me weak and tired. That love that poisoned your heart? It broke mine. I will never be that helpless again.” Her voice is trembling and shrill, like her mother’s had been when she’d thrown her father out and asked, finally, for a divorce. “Never.”
“I can’t take away your fear,” he says quietly. “That’s not something I can do.”
“I don’t need you to fix me,” she hisses. “We’re not like your queen and her trophy husband.”
“No,” Boyd agrees. “Snow and Charming drew their strength from their love. I would say we’re nothing like them.” She can still feel his hand as he pulls back, curling his fingers into a fist. “I wasn’t saying that you need to be fixed, Lydia. Your fear is your own.”
If Lancelot had been there, he’s fading rapidly, crawling behind Vernon Boyd’s blank visage. She can almost smell the way that the passion is leached out of him, until all that’s left is Boyd like he’d been when they were sixteen, silently hovering along the edge of the cafeteria and ice rink, huge and quiet and ignorable.
Lydia Martin doesn’t do guilt. Vernon Boyd isn’t her responsibility. He’s a member of her pack and her partner for AP Economics and sometimes he stands guard when she does magic, and they’re friends in an inoffensive and colorless kind of way. She doesn’t need him, neither for their project nor to serve as any kind of emotional crutch.
“I know how to learn from my mistakes,” she says, pushing out of her desk and taking special care to slip her notebook into its usual place, to return her pencil to its case, and to arrange her jacket around her shoulders.
“That’s assuming it was a mistake,” Boyd points out, but there’s nothing behind his words at all; they’re recited like lines from an infomercial.
“Everything in Camelot was a mistake,” Lydia says. “We lived miserable lives and then we died. I saw all of my people die in their homes, destroyed by the ogre resurgence. I watched the ogres tear down the keep and crush Mordred’s skull between their teeth.” All of her is shaking now, probably a result of the adrenaline that is trickling coolly down her spine and making her face numb. “Merlin tried to stop them, of course, but she couldn’t take out an entire raiding party, especially not after Arthur and Gawaine fell.” She adjusts her collar and arranges her bag at her shoulder, smoothing her skirt down the back of her thighs. “It makes things in Beacon Hills rather pale in comparison, doesn’t it?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer; she doesn’t even look at him as she turns on her boot heel and leaves. The halls are pressed with students eagerly rushing to escape; Lydia has to elbow her way to her locker, where Allison is waiting.
“Are you okay?” she asks, locking her hand around Lydia’s elbow. “I didn’t mean it before, Caleb Michaels’ is kind of a dick.” Lydia can recognize that Allison has her Argent stare engaged, but the last of the adrenaline has yet to leave Lydia’s system and she can barely feel anything.
“I’m fine,” Lydia says. “Shall we? Stiles is going to cry again if we show up late.”
~
Even if Lydia makes a point to emphasize to all of the Betas how ignorant they are, mostly so that they don’t let the power trip of their werewolf powers get to their head, Scott, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd aren’t actually morons. To be fair, Scott and Isaac are debatable, but Lydia can recognize that Scott is better than her at emotional awareness even if she demeans its worth as an actual type of intelligence.
Erica notices first, maybe because she’s always been tuned in to Boyd. She makes a few aborted attempts at being threatening, but Lydia shuts her down almost immediately. She doesn’t want to deal with Erica’s sublevel Basic Instinct posturing and Stiles still has a scar from when Erica hit him with a piece of car engine. Lydia isn’t going to suffer an unsightly blemish just so that Erica can work out her feelings; she’s not Erica’s psychologist and she’s certainly not Erica’s friend.
Isaac and Scott are next, tag teaming and cornering her after a pack meeting that she’d spent almost entirely silent. Allison trails them after, with a sympathetic but determined look on her face. Lydia rolls her eyes and informs them that she’s neither depressed nor likely to develop any symptoms of it before she leaves for MIT in the next six months. She’s not lying, so that removes their immediate suspicions and they can’t really do much after that.
Derek just looks at Lydia a week after that and she says, “Don’t even fucking think about it,” and he retreats.
Lydia is sitting in the back garden two weeks after that, finishing her take-home final exam for Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics under the shade of the bougainvillea that has recently battled against the wisteria and won the fight for the walls framing the pool, when Stiles knocks on the back fence and strolls in, pushing aside a burst of wisteria blossoms the size of his head.
“What the hell happened here?” he asks. “I mean, I expressed a little bit of concern when whatever the hell I was rooting for you went Little Shop of Horrors on my kitchen sink, but this is gratuitous. Is there even enough space in the ground for the roots of that many plants?”
“Probably not,” Lydia says. Prada, who is lolling over her bare feet with a look of bliss on his face from his recent dinner-a steak originally partitioned for Lydia’s mother, who’d had to hop a plane to Chicago at the last moment-perks up a little bit at the sound of Stiles’ voice and barks hopefully.
“Hey little dude,” Stiles says, bending down and scratching the base of Prada’s stomach. “How’s it going?”
Prada wriggles over Lydia’s toes and rumbles like a cat deep in his chest.
“So,” Stiles says a few minutes later, straightening out of his crouch and stuffing his hands into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ve been sent by Allison.”
“Of course you have,” Lydia mutters. Her Intro to Theoretical exam is kind of a joke, but she’s going through it slowly because she’s feeling oddly sentimental about her first college final. “Well, get on with it.”
“Are you even going to pretend to pay attention?” Stiles asks her. He hooks the other chair with his ankle and pulls it out, dropping into it with his limbs splaying everywhere. Stiles has taken to his recent growth spurt with a vengeance; Scott keeps making Slenderman jokes.
“No,” Lydia says, checking back in her notes for the name of a particular theorem. “I’m capable of multitasking.”
“Look, she’s worried about you,” Stiles says, leaning back in his chair and prodding a clump of Spanish moss where it’s dangling over his head. “You’ve kind of been even more emotionally unavailable lately. Even Derek’s worried, and you know it takes some seriously bad mojo for him to admit to feeling anything about anyone.”
“That’s very sweet,” Lydia says absently.
“As always, I’m impressed by how vicious a normally polite sentiment sounds coming out of your mouth,” Stiles promptly replies. “The great part about having friends is that you can tell them shit that you’re struggling with, Lydia.”
Lydia raises an eyebrow that she knows Stiles will see even if she doesn’t look at him. “Do I appear to be struggling with anything, Stiles?”
“It’s a bit hard for me to tell,” Stiles says drily, “what with the fact that you just haven’t been around for the last four weeks. I get missing one or two meetings of the Human Club-it’s a Friday afternoon, you have shit to do-but you’ve missed four in a row.”
“Stop calling it the Human Club,” Lydia says automatically. She realizes that she’s miswritten a line of her proof and she reaches for her eraser, only to discover that Stiles has misappropriated it and is tossing it up into the air, his pose one of studied nonchalance. “Stiles, give me the eraser.”
Stiles shrugs and throws it slightly higher; the white of the synthetic rubber flashes against the sun before falling back into his hand. “Lyyyydia,” he drawls. “Tell Uncle Stiles all of your issues and concerns.”
“If you keep calling yourself Uncle Stiles I’m going to do something irreparable to your Jeep,” she informs him, and he frowns and throws the eraser at her head.
“Fine, whatever. I get that sharing is tough and Care Bears are hard to come by in this economy, so I’m just going to kick back here and relax until you decide you want to clue me, Stiles, one of your best friends, in on where the hell your head has been for the past couple months.” He then does as he’s threatened and closes his eyes, folding his arm against his chest.
Just looking at him gives Lydia pangs in her lower back; she returns her attention to her proof, which she finishes in twenty minutes. There’s nothing else for her to do, then; her exam is done and she just has to scan it into her computer as a PDF and email it to her professor. There’s something calming about sitting with Stiles in the garden, though, and Lydia doesn’t quite want to disturb it. She wriggles her toes further under Prada and props her chin on her hand, watching the play of light across the surface of the pool.
Dragonflies are flitting across the lily pads and there’s a nest of reeds popping up in the far corner where a set of stairs should lead down to the bottom of the pool, rooted in God knows what. Thanks to all of the vegetative growth, the water in the pool has gotten successively murkier as the weeks have passed and Lydia almost can’t see the bottom anymore. She sort of likes the atmosphere of it, even though her mother has taken up complaining about Javí like she doesn’t have a real job.
That’s likely the point, though; the backyard is responding to her desires. Lydia isn’t barren anymore, and while spurting out a child currently ranks lower on her to-do list than praising Scott for his insight and having a sleepover with Erica, the kind of land magic that she practices has always responded well to fertility.
Lydia stands up, Prada whining at the sudden upset, and announces, “I’m going for a swim.”
“’k,” Stiles says, low and sleepy.
Lydia changes into her suit in the pool house and emerges, white terrycloth robe wrapped around her, to Stiles openly asleep, now on one of the lounge chairs. His head is tossed back at an awkward angle and his mouth is open in a quiet snore. She’d rather cut off her own foot than have sex with him, but the sight still fills her with a little pang of affection. Instead of dealing with it, she drapes her robe over the chair next to Stiles and slips into the water.
Underneath the surface of the pool, a family of minnows is lazily darting in and out of the root system of the lilies. Javí might still be having one of his minions chlorinate the pool-Lydia’s usually in school when they’re working and not in a position to notice-but it’s not appearing to be having any effect on the growth of the pool’s new ecosystem.
The minnows are inordinately friendly; as Lydia swims towards them, kicking down to get a better look at the base of the pool, they swarm towards her in groups of two and three, their little silver bodies catching the sunlight as it filters past the lilies. When Lydia touches the root of a nearby water lily, it curls over her finger as a kind of hello, the spindly white flesh pressing against her skin. There’s algae growing over the tiled side of the pool, reducing the glare from above the water and turning everything brown and green and secluded.
When Lydia kicks even deeper, to run her fingers over the cement base of the pool, she can feel bumpy irregularities like swollen pores. Even if she can’t see them, she can feel the potential pushing its way up; sweet flag and pickerelweed and water stargrass. In another week or two they’ll have broken through the cement. Lydia has always, as a rule, preferred orderly, landscaped gardens, but she gives the buds an encouraging nudge of magic. Every time her mother looks out of the glass to the patio she gets a tighter and tighter expression around her mouth; Lydia has to derive some kind of enjoyment out of this ridiculous spurt of spring felicity, so she might as well get it from her mother’s frustration.
She propels herself to the surface and inhales, the heady presence of the garden sinking into her head. Lydia and magical plants rooting where they shouldn’t have a tangled history, but the sprouting wolfsbane from Peter Hale’s psychological masterstroke had been nothing but malicious. Lydia had tasted the bitterness of aconite leaves in the back of her throat for weeks after his tongue had been in her mouth. The new pond plants aren’t malevolent by any stretch; very little about them is supernatural at all, beyond their ability to break through a foot of concrete.
They’re comforting. Like the wisteria, they remind Lydia that this is her house and her land and the visitors in it are there under her grace.
Lydia folds at the waist and sinks back down to the bottom of the pool, watching the speckled, cloudy sky melt like the Pissarro her father has in the foyer of his apartment in LA. She hates Impressionism as a school-Lydia’s tastes extend mostly along the lines of John Singer Sargent and Gustav Klimt-but she can appreciate expensive artistic endeavors in any direction. She’s hardly Stiles, for example, who takes the joy out of calling him a Philistine by virtue of actually being a completely unapologetic Philistine.
Lydia’s hair has pulled itself free of a braid and now the red is tangling with the blues and greens and muddy browns of the dappled underwater world that Lydia’s magic has helped build in her mother’s once-tidy pool. She kicks her feet lazily and watches the bubbles rise like glass balls to the surface. She only has a passing interest in physics, but she kicks again, with a smaller, more controlled motion, to see how it changes the diameter of the bubbles.
Lydia can remember with crystal clarity, even allowing for the fallibility of her memory, Boyd’s fingers locked around the delicate bones of her ankle. The callouses that she had grown used to seeing on Lancelot’s hands from sword and staff and handling the reins of the big warhorses that had occupied Arthur’s stables have been replaced by different ones. If she lets her eyes become unfocused she can feel the one from holding a pencil against the middle finger of his right hand, like the twin to the one on Lydia’s left.
She wants so badly, like she hasn’t since the morning that Jackson had texted her-We’re moving to Boston; Mom & Dad packed last night-about leaving and she’d stared at the screen of her iPhone like the pixels would reorient themselves to her will like everything else in her carefully maintained life was often willing to do; Lydia wants to feel Boyd’s hands on the thin skin of her hipbones and she wants to laugh with him like she hasn’t since the sun caught the metal planes of his armor.
One of the smaller minnows gets courageous and darts inside her reach, flitting between her fingers and brushing over her forearm in a streak of pale scales. Lydia turns her palm up and lets the minnow circle it. Its delicacy, in the murky, underwater world of her pool, is strangely affecting. Looking at it and its translucent eyes creates a bubble of feeling in Lydia’s chest that she normally associates with an elegant experimental design or the last twenty minutes of Waitress: the promise and reward of perfect internal structure.
Nothing is perfect, not even the proofs Lydia will submit later in the afternoon to her professor; not even Lydia herself. It’s lucky, then, that only humans demand perfection; the universe couldn’t really give less of a fuck. The universe orients itself in patterns and deviations from the norm result in either swift eradication or adaptation on the part of the universe to accommodate this change. It’s a peculiar kind of excellence, but one that Lydia has grown used to achieving.
She lifts her palm; the minnow curls over her hand and with a final flick of its tail, falls away and returns to its school of fellows. Air will soon become a pressing issue, but Lydia has above average lung capacity, like she has above average everything else, and she can afford an extra few seconds. Besides, here, in the nest she’s made for herself, she has enough control not to let herself drown.
That’s at least one aspect of her life that Lydia can label with satisfied; as she lazily kicks her feet twice and then, more forcefully, propels herself up to the surface, she tries to ignore the ache that is pressing along the edges of her head. She is familiar with the hungry push for success, mostly because her ambition has always been the part of her with which Lydia has been most comfortable.
This is more than ambition, Lydia thinks for a single second, and then she breaks the surface and takes a deep breath and she pushes the thought away and smothers the hunger with more-more magic, more life, and she watches through the prismatic shift of the water around her as the pickerelweed breaks through the bottom of the pool in a wave front of green. Lydia is hovering above the source of emission, and then the cement is gone and all that’s left is the dark, absorbing shadow of the plants.
[part iv]
~
The next morning, Lydia wakes up to her mother, wearing an expression that wanted to be disapproving but lacked the proper flexibility, standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, in the middle of yelling at her PA. She points at Lydia and then at the kitchen table, framed in a patch of sunlight exactly like their interior designer had promised it would be, and whispers, “Sit down. No, Michael, I didn’t mean you. Why the hell would I be telling you to sit down if you’re in a car?”
Lydia pours herself a cup of coffee and takes a croissant out of the chrome breadbox on the island. She curls her legs under her at the table and nibbles on the edge of the croissant, interspersed with life-giving sips of coffee, as her mother finishes verbally abusing her PA and finally yanks the earbud out of her left ear. “What happened in the morning parlor?” she asks Lydia, slamming her cup down onto the countertop and almost chipping it in the process.
“Nothing Gordon won’t be able to fix,” Lydia replies, focusing on tearing the top layer of her croissant into perfectly even one-inch strips. Flakes of pastry tumble onto the tabletop, leaving golden shreds all over the linen placemats.
“It’s like a flood in there,” her mother says sharply. “Water will warp the wooden baseboard, Lydia, you know that.”
“I do indeed,” Lydia agrees. “However, there’s less water in that room than there would be in a flood, Mom, which is when you have to worry about warping.”
“And the candlewax,” her mother continues, voice increasing in shrillness with each piece of croissant that Lydia rips off and lays on her tongue. “If Gordon gets all of that wax out of the carving in my Rococo end table, it will be a miracle.”
Lydia finishes chewing before she says, “Gordon’s gotten wax out of worst places in the past.”
“The point is not Gordon, Lydia,” her mother says. “The point is you. I don’t care if you have friends over, but you shouldn’t leave your messes around for other people to clean up. It’s not their responsibility.” This is clearly venturing into a thinly-veiled criticism of Lydia’s father. While Lydia doesn’t mind her mother ranting about her father’s inadequacies-her mother is never wrong about them, even if she is unimaginative; besides, Lydia tunes her out once her invectives get particularly pointed-she has plans to utilize this morning for studying and she doesn’t want to deal with what will follow her mother’s rant: tears.
“I put away the candles and candlesticks and I cleared what I could,” she tells her mother. “I don’t know what else you expected me to do, since we don’t actually own a mop.”
“Of course we own a mop,” her mother deflects.
Lydia swallows a delicate mouthful of coffee and says, pointedly, “ No, we don’t.”
Her mother is saved from having to continue this painful conversation by the ringing of her phone. “Oh, for the love of,” she bites out. “What does he need now?” She stuffs the earbuds back in and barks, “Michael, what? No, Jesus, of course we don’t want McLaughlin to ask for Joanna’s input, if he does that we’ll be stuck in rewrite limbo for another month.” She half-turns from Lydia, tapping the heel of a Ferragamo stiletto against the tiled floor, and Lydia takes advantage of that to slip out of her seat and across the room to the glass door to the patio.
Prada is half-heartedly nuzzling along the edge of the pool, his face frozen in a parody of canine despair. “Mom forgot to let you back in, didn’t she?” Lydia says. At the sound of her voice, he bursts into enthusiastic barking and propels himself along the side of the pool towards her, his claws scrambling against the stone tiles. “Hello,” she tells him, settling down into a squat so he can nudge her knee with his head and tremble. “How has your morning been? Other than freezing, I presume.”
Her dog whines and scrambles into her lap, almost upsetting her coffee. “Oh, come on,” she says, scooping him up in a fireman’s carry with her free hand. She has an appalling amount of upper body strength for someone who deplores sweat, thanks to the pack’s extracurricular crime-fighting activities, and lifting Prada is easy. She straightens up, Prada’s breath warm and moist against the side of her neck as he buries his face in her hair, and that’s when she sees what’s happened to the garden.
Lydia’s forgotten about how much of a clusterfuck Beltane can be, but in her defense, Beltane in Camelot had never been this bad. It’d been about the symbolism, of course, which was why Guinevere had let her maids drape her in flowers and she and Arthur had led the dance in the lower town, mouths shiny from dark wine and the fire breaking over the golden flame of Arthur’s hair. If the king didn’t plow his wife, the farmers couldn’t plow their fields. The gardens had always looked fabulous the morning after Beltane, for the first few years of their marriage.
And then, when Guinevere hadn’t been able to conceive and she and Arthur had stopped talking about Camelot’s future and their ideas and dreams, the land had suffered. There hadn’t been any flowers for the Beltane wreaths, for two or three springs, until Arthur had stopped pretending that their marriage was salvageable and he’d finally gone to Merlin.
Even on that first morning after Arthur and Merlin had begun their affair, when the orchards had been filled with strange fruits and the grasses had been turned gem-like colors and the air had sounded the trembling chime of bells-even then, nothing had happened quite like what has happened to Lydia’s mother’s garden. The carefully-maintained rows of landscaped trees and shrubs have been drowned by vines of ivy and wisteria, the latter heavily laden with blooms. There is wisteria growing everywhere that Lydia had wanted it, framing the back gate and all of the doors and windows of the house, and ivy along the back fence. Spanish moss is dripping from the gabled arbor and lilies on fat pads have sprouted in the corners of the pool.
Now that she’s noticed the smell, Lydia can’t believe that it wasn’t the first thing she picked up on when she came onto the patio. It’s like the worst of her mother’s perfume in the height of summer. Everything is gardenia and heavy and sweet, like honeysuckle and roses, and all of the flowers are swollen and blazing with color. As Lydia watches, a thickset bumblebee meanders its way across a clump of sunflowers each the size of Lydia’s head, buzzing lazily.
“Fuck,” Lydia says to Prada conversationally.
She’s fairly certain that her mother’s landscape architect hadn’t planted half of these plants-for one thing, sunflowers attract bees, and her mother is allergic to them. Additionally, Southern moss shouldn’t even be growing in this part of California, let alone on a crepe myrtle, and as an epiphyte it definitely shouldn’t be able to grow alone, like it is on some sections of the arbor.
Guinevere had loved Spanish moss. They’d called it feathertears, in Camelot, and used it for weaving in such large volumes that the gardening staff had cultivated it essentially everywhere. That had been one of the first things Merlin had done to win Guinevere’s favor, when Guinevere was a young queen and still in love with her husband-Merlin had shown her how to make feathertears grow on its own.
You’ve the light of the sun inside of you, Merlin had whispered to Guinevere. Her hands had been wide-palmed and thin-fingered, her knuckles knotted under thin, brown skin; she’d worn rings at the base of every finger and the metal had been cold as she pressed her palms to Guinevere’s wrists and guided them over the wooden frame of an arbor. If you let it, the land would do much to please its queen.
Guinevere had loved Merlin in the way that Lydia loves Allison and Stiles. She’d taken care of Merlin when she was pregnant, naively hoping that Beltane had been a fluke, a single instance of infidelity never repeated; but then baby had been born thirteen months later and the Pendragon birthmark had stood out against Mordred’s hip. She had never wanted to feel that bare, gnawing stab ever again, but the faintest impression of it presses against Lydia’s stomach now as she watches clumps of Spanish moss wave in the morning breeze, wagging hello like Prada’s tail.
“I will never be you again,” Lydia says. The words come out of her mouth without any conscious effort, but she can’t seem to stop them. “I will never be you, ever again. I will not be weak.”
“Lydia?” her mother says from the door to the patio. “Jesus Christ, what the hell did Javí do to my garden last weekend? Never mind, that’s not important. I’m going in to the office for a few hours.”
“All right, Mom.” Lydia rests her hand against Prada’s trembling back and tries to ground herself with the wriggling of his small body. The fury inside of her feels as unexpected and vibrant as whatever the hell Beltane sex has done to her mother’s garden; she wonders if she smells the same way, sickly overripe. Prada doesn’t seem to have an issue with her, but Prada is worse at being a dog than Scott.
After the glass door shuts with a low snick and Lydia has let her breathing level out, she says, more decisively and less broken, “This maudlin Memento storyline is officially over,” and she takes Prada back into the house so she can work through the problems at the end of chapter 11 in her AP Physics textbook to Regina Spektor. There’s part of her that hopes that sheer willpower will manage to get rid of at least some of the crazed growth in the back yard, but when she goes down to the kitchen at four to make herself a pot of tea and a grilled cheese sandwich, she can still see the lily pads in the pool. They’ve picked up a family of frogs, small and green and speckled, and the littlest ones are hoping from leaf to leaf like gnats.
So, that’s a no on normalcy, then.
~
As the days pass, the garden gets worse. Nothing dies, not even the monkeyflower blossoms that should live, according to the botanical literature Lydia references in the middle of the night, for a maximum of three days. The scent is stronger each morning when she wakes and her mother calls Javí and threatens to sue unless he gets rid of the sunflowers. It’s not Javí’s fault that they stay; each afternoon he uproots them, and each morning Lydia wakes up and makes herself a cup of coffee and the sunflowers beam at her through the window over the stove, unfurling yellow petals to the bees.
There is an element of instability to everything Lydia is doing. Since she’s had a mental breakdown before, she can recognize the signs of one building around her. She drifts in class, her hand writing notes for lessons she doesn’t remembering hearing, until her eyes are hazy and unfocused and she can almost visualize the auras pushing out of her classmates. There’s always a blaze of gold from somewhere to her left, where Boyd sits with Isaac and Erica in their little cluster of leather.
It’s not as if Lydia is going to be so crass as to get a B in anything and she’d officially accepted MIT’s offer back in the fall, so her inattention won’t harm her future in any way. It just makes her a liability in class and in the field. She breaks a fork when Boyd smiles at Olive Witherspoon at lunch one day, splattering Isaac’s shirt in salad dressing. She has to scramble for some kind of control in the aftermath, and she narrows in on Caleb Michaels the period after lunch for lack of any other options.
After AP Lit is finished, Allison slips to her side and says, voice tentatively censorious, “Lydia, was that, um, totally necessary?”
She means Caleb Michaels, who is staring, bloodless and shell-shocked, at the corner of the classroom and not moving.
“He’s an imbecile,” Lydia says scathingly, plucking her copy of The Sun Also Rises off of her desk and standing. “Maybe he should learn how to read before he ventures an opinion.”
“Lydia,” Allison says. “That was really kind of uncalled for. He’s comatose.”
“He’ll be grateful for the assistance eventually,” Lydia says. “I have a responsibility as a member of the human race to prevent him from unleashing such sophomoric idiocy on the rest of the world.” The look on Caleb’s face, pinched and drawn, doesn’t actually make her feel any better. It’s the act of speaking-the moment that he realizes that Lydia is better, smarter, faster, that her mind and tongue move twice as fast as his-that drives her.
“I don’t think I have ever heard you express concern for the rest of the human race,” Allison says blankly, falling into place at Lydia’s side as she stalks from the room. “Lydia, wait, please.”
Lydia staunchly ignores her and because they don’t share the next period, Allison reluctantly peels away to join Scott and Stiles in AP US as Lydia goes to AP Econ. It’s a class she technically shares with Caleb Michaels, but she can’t imagine he’ll be up for attending.
She’s right; Boyd is the only other person from their tiny AP Lit class who makes it before the bell rings at the start of the period. This is supposed to be a free period for them to use to work on their projects, but since Lydia has finished it, there isn’t anything for them to do. Boyd sits next to her anyway. Even if she doesn’t watch him directly she can’t avoid him; he’s too big and occupies too much of the space around her.
“How are you?” Boyd asks.
Lydia jerks and then freezes, forcing her hands to stop trembling against the surface of her notebook. They haven’t spoken since Beltane; it’s not suspicious behavior because Boyd and Lydia rarely talk to one another. Even though the pack is technically a complete unit, Scott and Isaac’s friendship and Derek and Stiles’ relationship in truth bond together two groups that exist in an uneasy harmony. “I’m fine,” she says, voice clipped.
“I only ask,” Boyd continues, casually leaning back and scratching the tip of his nose, “because you seemed a little bloodthirsty last period.”
“It’s called irritation,” Lydia bites out. “I feel it frequently in the presence of troglodytes like Caleb Michaels.”
Boyd laughs, open-mouthed, his head tilted backwards. He’s got the kind of booming laugh that Guinevere had been accustomed to hearing from barrel-chested men, but it sounds too loud for a classroom at Beacon Hills High. People turn to look, probably because Vernon Boyd hasn’t laughed in public ever.
As Jacob Schneider and Raj Patel turn in unison, Lydia gives them a placid bitch-face and they both decide to find their notebooks far more interesting than Boyd’s recently discovered sense of humor. “You’re very good at flying under the radar,” Lydia snips. “It’s a no wonder no one’s figured out your monthly problem yet, considering your skill with the unobtrusive.”
“I’m not exactly interested in hiding my past,” Boyd says. His eyes are still tilted up at the outside corners. Humor gives his face a familiar, vital cast. “You’re the one who’s put the breaks on.”
Lydia’s mouth twists helplessly; she sneers before she can even think about why. “Oh, yes,” she agrees. “I am, in fact, the one who took a firm hold of common sense and said that letting our pasts run away with us might not be the best idea.”
“Lancelot wasn’t flawless,” Boyd comments quietly, the humor draining slowly. “But he’s part of me. He was even before I could remember. Learning from your past mistakes is an important part of growing up.”
Jesus Christ. “Did you get that off of a pamphlet in Morell’s office?” Lydia demands.
“No,” he says, grinning briefly at her. “For a person who hates being stereotyped, you’ve got a fiery kind of temper, don’t you?”
“Thank you for that incredibly original observation,” Lydia drawls. “I don’t think anyone’s ever pointed that out to me before.”
“Just in case you were unaware,” Boyd says, lifting his hands and pointing his palms towards her in a don’t blame me kind of way. “Gwen didn’t get angry very often.”
Just the name makes the muscles in Lydia’s shoulders clench up. “She couldn’t exactly afford to,” she says, voice as tight as her deltoids. “Someone had to stay clearheaded, and it certainly wasn’t going to be Arthur.” I was angry, she wants to tell him. When Morgana gave me that damn potion, I wanted to burn her castle down around her and choke her on the ash.
Maybe he can read something of that in her face; Boyd has always been good at the subtle things, better than Lancelot. She wonders if it’s a byproduct of his upbringing, of his senile aunt and absent mother and years of isolation, but she’s only going to break that kind of question out if he fires first. “That’s fair,” Boyd says.
“Is it?” Lydia asks. “Arthur had his moments.”
“He was a great king,” Boyd agrees. “I am not sure he was a particularly good man.”
“Remind you of anyone else?” Lydia asks, tilting her head to the parking lot outside of the classroom window. It’s not like Derek is actually other there right now-he tends not to lurk now that the pack is mostly self-sufficient and unlikely to assault one another or innocent members of the student body-but Boyd still knows what she means.
“Derek’s a good man and a shitty king,” Boyd says. “It’s why Stiles is his anchor.” It’s an astute observation, all things considered; Stiles is not particularly good or kind to those he dislikes, which is why he and Lydia had begun to get along so well once he stopped in his obsessive and ill-fated quest to make her fall in love with him.
“I’m sure there’s a gold star somewhere in Morell’s office for you,” Lydia assures him, and Boyd laughs again, more quietly this time, perhaps in deference to the way that the classroom has hushed down to a low-level roar of activity.
“Gwen wasn’t perfect,” Boyd tells her an indeterminate amount of time later, when Lydia is working on her homework for the Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics class she’s taking online at UCBH and Boyd is doing whatever he does to occupy himself. “But Lancelot loved her.”
The past tense shouldn’t make Lydia’s skin clench in on itself, but it does. She knows perfectly well that she’s hard to love, if her string of past relationships is anything to judge by, and the passing judgment of a man who used to be her champion in another life shouldn’t have any effect on her emotions. “Bully for him,” she says, unwilling to look up from her homework and acknowledge that his statement might have any importance to her.
“Do you know what it’s like to love another man’s wife?” Boyd continues, his tone thoughtful, the way it is when he can occasionally be cornered into venturing an opinion in one of Lydia and Derek’s or Lydia and Stiles’ myriad squabbles.
“No,” Lydia says, stabbing her pencil through her paper with the force of her push. She continues to write her function anyway, focusing on the perfect downward lines of her letters and numbers.
“If you’re good enough, it begins to eat you alive.” Lydia concentrates on making every letter e on this line the exact same size. “It turns your thoughts sour and poisonous. It makes you willing to forget all of the good things that have happened to you, in favor of only the lack that exists in you. You turn into the worst of your self, and then you begin to lose even that.”
“What is the point of this?” Lydia asks, fighting for some kind of equilibrium. She isn’t going to cry because that would be stupid and pointless, but her knuckles are so white that they blur, indistinguishable against her notebook paper. “Your life was very hard, I feel for you.”
“It never stops,” Boyd says over her. The thoughtfulness is gone now, channeled into a severe kind of deliberation. “Even if you leave and join a mercenary army and pledge your sword to a new king and queen, love like that doesn't die.”
Lydia can’t keep herself from looking at him, now, and his eyes are scalding in the dark skin and square bones of his face. “Are you trying to tell me,” she says, her lips dry under her Chanel lipstick, “that it was true love? This isn’t The Princess Bride, Boyd.”
“Don’t play it like that,” Boyd says. There’s more savagery in his voice, underlining whatever he’s trying to nonverbally convey to her through the power of his stare. “You remember how powerful it was. The strongest power there was, in all of the lands.”
Something in the air is making her magic sing, long and trill, like a mistle thrush. She wonders absently if Boyd’s extrasensory perception can pick up what she feels inside of her head; the tinkling of chimes and the spiced kick of ginger and soil and musk. “This isn’t Camelot,” she says. “Magic is different here.” Just about anyone could do anything with enough magic powder and a good spell book, in Camelot, which had always driven Arthur insane with frustration. The magic here is of stronger, more vibrant stuff; it breeds itself and creates creatures tied to the land and its pulse, but it’s not a fairy tale.
The words sound weak, probably because they are, in the face of Boyd’s forcefulness. “True enough,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not just as strong here.” He can’t seriously be saying-“Strong enough to bring back dead memories.” She notices his hand begin to rise, the way that it hovers to her left, curved in the shape of her cheek, still inches away. “You have to feel it, still. There’s no other explanation for what happened the other night.”
“Beltane happened the other night,” Lydia says. Her voice is stupidly breathless.
“Beltane can’t invent something that isn’t already there,” he tells her, with a curl of a smile deep in his right cheek. He has a dimple there; did Lancelot? Lydia can’t remember for a dazed moment, as static electricity snaps across the space between her skin and his.
The bell rings. Chairs scrape, voices rise, someone jostles the back of Lydia’s chair as they push for the door. They all feel as if they are miles away, happening in another room in another country to other people. Lydia can still feel the pull against her, a startlingly strong urge to sink into Boyd until the world feels like it had when she was splayed across her mother’s end table, the light of the candles flaring up to the ceiling.
Lydia is suddenly done with dancing around. “I was madly in love with you,” she says. “It completely destroyed me when you left. I was barren and lonely and my husband was openly fucking the mother of his only son. I thought that being valiant and silent would give me the strength to bear it, but all it did was make me weak and tired. That love that poisoned your heart? It broke mine. I will never be that helpless again.” Her voice is trembling and shrill, like her mother’s had been when she’d thrown her father out and asked, finally, for a divorce. “Never.”
“I can’t take away your fear,” he says quietly. “That’s not something I can do.”
“I don’t need you to fix me,” she hisses. “We’re not like your queen and her trophy husband.”
“No,” Boyd agrees. “Snow and Charming drew their strength from their love. I would say we’re nothing like them.” She can still feel his hand as he pulls back, curling his fingers into a fist. “I wasn’t saying that you need to be fixed, Lydia. Your fear is your own.”
If Lancelot had been there, he’s fading rapidly, crawling behind Vernon Boyd’s blank visage. She can almost smell the way that the passion is leached out of him, until all that’s left is Boyd like he’d been when they were sixteen, silently hovering along the edge of the cafeteria and ice rink, huge and quiet and ignorable.
Lydia Martin doesn’t do guilt. Vernon Boyd isn’t her responsibility. He’s a member of her pack and her partner for AP Economics and sometimes he stands guard when she does magic, and they’re friends in an inoffensive and colorless kind of way. She doesn’t need him, neither for their project nor to serve as any kind of emotional crutch.
“I know how to learn from my mistakes,” she says, pushing out of her desk and taking special care to slip her notebook into its usual place, to return her pencil to its case, and to arrange her jacket around her shoulders.
“That’s assuming it was a mistake,” Boyd points out, but there’s nothing behind his words at all; they’re recited like lines from an infomercial.
“Everything in Camelot was a mistake,” Lydia says. “We lived miserable lives and then we died. I saw all of my people die in their homes, destroyed by the ogre resurgence. I watched the ogres tear down the keep and crush Mordred’s skull between their teeth.” All of her is shaking now, probably a result of the adrenaline that is trickling coolly down her spine and making her face numb. “Merlin tried to stop them, of course, but she couldn’t take out an entire raiding party, especially not after Arthur and Gawaine fell.” She adjusts her collar and arranges her bag at her shoulder, smoothing her skirt down the back of her thighs. “It makes things in Beacon Hills rather pale in comparison, doesn’t it?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer; she doesn’t even look at him as she turns on her boot heel and leaves. The halls are pressed with students eagerly rushing to escape; Lydia has to elbow her way to her locker, where Allison is waiting.
“Are you okay?” she asks, locking her hand around Lydia’s elbow. “I didn’t mean it before, Caleb Michaels’ is kind of a dick.” Lydia can recognize that Allison has her Argent stare engaged, but the last of the adrenaline has yet to leave Lydia’s system and she can barely feel anything.
“I’m fine,” Lydia says. “Shall we? Stiles is going to cry again if we show up late.”
~
Even if Lydia makes a point to emphasize to all of the Betas how ignorant they are, mostly so that they don’t let the power trip of their werewolf powers get to their head, Scott, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd aren’t actually morons. To be fair, Scott and Isaac are debatable, but Lydia can recognize that Scott is better than her at emotional awareness even if she demeans its worth as an actual type of intelligence.
Erica notices first, maybe because she’s always been tuned in to Boyd. She makes a few aborted attempts at being threatening, but Lydia shuts her down almost immediately. She doesn’t want to deal with Erica’s sublevel Basic Instinct posturing and Stiles still has a scar from when Erica hit him with a piece of car engine. Lydia isn’t going to suffer an unsightly blemish just so that Erica can work out her feelings; she’s not Erica’s psychologist and she’s certainly not Erica’s friend.
Isaac and Scott are next, tag teaming and cornering her after a pack meeting that she’d spent almost entirely silent. Allison trails them after, with a sympathetic but determined look on her face. Lydia rolls her eyes and informs them that she’s neither depressed nor likely to develop any symptoms of it before she leaves for MIT in the next six months. She’s not lying, so that removes their immediate suspicions and they can’t really do much after that.
Derek just looks at Lydia a week after that and she says, “Don’t even fucking think about it,” and he retreats.
Lydia is sitting in the back garden two weeks after that, finishing her take-home final exam for Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics under the shade of the bougainvillea that has recently battled against the wisteria and won the fight for the walls framing the pool, when Stiles knocks on the back fence and strolls in, pushing aside a burst of wisteria blossoms the size of his head.
“What the hell happened here?” he asks. “I mean, I expressed a little bit of concern when whatever the hell I was rooting for you went Little Shop of Horrors on my kitchen sink, but this is gratuitous. Is there even enough space in the ground for the roots of that many plants?”
“Probably not,” Lydia says. Prada, who is lolling over her bare feet with a look of bliss on his face from his recent dinner-a steak originally partitioned for Lydia’s mother, who’d had to hop a plane to Chicago at the last moment-perks up a little bit at the sound of Stiles’ voice and barks hopefully.
“Hey little dude,” Stiles says, bending down and scratching the base of Prada’s stomach. “How’s it going?”
Prada wriggles over Lydia’s toes and rumbles like a cat deep in his chest.
“So,” Stiles says a few minutes later, straightening out of his crouch and stuffing his hands into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ve been sent by Allison.”
“Of course you have,” Lydia mutters. Her Intro to Theoretical exam is kind of a joke, but she’s going through it slowly because she’s feeling oddly sentimental about her first college final. “Well, get on with it.”
“Are you even going to pretend to pay attention?” Stiles asks her. He hooks the other chair with his ankle and pulls it out, dropping into it with his limbs splaying everywhere. Stiles has taken to his recent growth spurt with a vengeance; Scott keeps making Slenderman jokes.
“No,” Lydia says, checking back in her notes for the name of a particular theorem. “I’m capable of multitasking.”
“Look, she’s worried about you,” Stiles says, leaning back in his chair and prodding a clump of Spanish moss where it’s dangling over his head. “You’ve kind of been even more emotionally unavailable lately. Even Derek’s worried, and you know it takes some seriously bad mojo for him to admit to feeling anything about anyone.”
“That’s very sweet,” Lydia says absently.
“As always, I’m impressed by how vicious a normally polite sentiment sounds coming out of your mouth,” Stiles promptly replies. “The great part about having friends is that you can tell them shit that you’re struggling with, Lydia.”
Lydia raises an eyebrow that she knows Stiles will see even if she doesn’t look at him. “Do I appear to be struggling with anything, Stiles?”
“It’s a bit hard for me to tell,” Stiles says drily, “what with the fact that you just haven’t been around for the last four weeks. I get missing one or two meetings of the Human Club-it’s a Friday afternoon, you have shit to do-but you’ve missed four in a row.”
“Stop calling it the Human Club,” Lydia says automatically. She realizes that she’s miswritten a line of her proof and she reaches for her eraser, only to discover that Stiles has misappropriated it and is tossing it up into the air, his pose one of studied nonchalance. “Stiles, give me the eraser.”
Stiles shrugs and throws it slightly higher; the white of the synthetic rubber flashes against the sun before falling back into his hand. “Lyyyydia,” he drawls. “Tell Uncle Stiles all of your issues and concerns.”
“If you keep calling yourself Uncle Stiles I’m going to do something irreparable to your Jeep,” she informs him, and he frowns and throws the eraser at her head.
“Fine, whatever. I get that sharing is tough and Care Bears are hard to come by in this economy, so I’m just going to kick back here and relax until you decide you want to clue me, Stiles, one of your best friends, in on where the hell your head has been for the past couple months.” He then does as he’s threatened and closes his eyes, folding his arm against his chest.
Just looking at him gives Lydia pangs in her lower back; she returns her attention to her proof, which she finishes in twenty minutes. There’s nothing else for her to do, then; her exam is done and she just has to scan it into her computer as a PDF and email it to her professor. There’s something calming about sitting with Stiles in the garden, though, and Lydia doesn’t quite want to disturb it. She wriggles her toes further under Prada and props her chin on her hand, watching the play of light across the surface of the pool.
Dragonflies are flitting across the lily pads and there’s a nest of reeds popping up in the far corner where a set of stairs should lead down to the bottom of the pool, rooted in God knows what. Thanks to all of the vegetative growth, the water in the pool has gotten successively murkier as the weeks have passed and Lydia almost can’t see the bottom anymore. She sort of likes the atmosphere of it, even though her mother has taken up complaining about Javí like she doesn’t have a real job.
That’s likely the point, though; the backyard is responding to her desires. Lydia isn’t barren anymore, and while spurting out a child currently ranks lower on her to-do list than praising Scott for his insight and having a sleepover with Erica, the kind of land magic that she practices has always responded well to fertility.
Lydia stands up, Prada whining at the sudden upset, and announces, “I’m going for a swim.”
“’k,” Stiles says, low and sleepy.
Lydia changes into her suit in the pool house and emerges, white terrycloth robe wrapped around her, to Stiles openly asleep, now on one of the lounge chairs. His head is tossed back at an awkward angle and his mouth is open in a quiet snore. She’d rather cut off her own foot than have sex with him, but the sight still fills her with a little pang of affection. Instead of dealing with it, she drapes her robe over the chair next to Stiles and slips into the water.
Underneath the surface of the pool, a family of minnows is lazily darting in and out of the root system of the lilies. Javí might still be having one of his minions chlorinate the pool-Lydia’s usually in school when they’re working and not in a position to notice-but it’s not appearing to be having any effect on the growth of the pool’s new ecosystem.
The minnows are inordinately friendly; as Lydia swims towards them, kicking down to get a better look at the base of the pool, they swarm towards her in groups of two and three, their little silver bodies catching the sunlight as it filters past the lilies. When Lydia touches the root of a nearby water lily, it curls over her finger as a kind of hello, the spindly white flesh pressing against her skin. There’s algae growing over the tiled side of the pool, reducing the glare from above the water and turning everything brown and green and secluded.
When Lydia kicks even deeper, to run her fingers over the cement base of the pool, she can feel bumpy irregularities like swollen pores. Even if she can’t see them, she can feel the potential pushing its way up; sweet flag and pickerelweed and water stargrass. In another week or two they’ll have broken through the cement. Lydia has always, as a rule, preferred orderly, landscaped gardens, but she gives the buds an encouraging nudge of magic. Every time her mother looks out of the glass to the patio she gets a tighter and tighter expression around her mouth; Lydia has to derive some kind of enjoyment out of this ridiculous spurt of spring felicity, so she might as well get it from her mother’s frustration.
She propels herself to the surface and inhales, the heady presence of the garden sinking into her head. Lydia and magical plants rooting where they shouldn’t have a tangled history, but the sprouting wolfsbane from Peter Hale’s psychological masterstroke had been nothing but malicious. Lydia had tasted the bitterness of aconite leaves in the back of her throat for weeks after his tongue had been in her mouth. The new pond plants aren’t malevolent by any stretch; very little about them is supernatural at all, beyond their ability to break through a foot of concrete.
They’re comforting. Like the wisteria, they remind Lydia that this is her house and her land and the visitors in it are there under her grace.
Lydia folds at the waist and sinks back down to the bottom of the pool, watching the speckled, cloudy sky melt like the Pissarro her father has in the foyer of his apartment in LA. She hates Impressionism as a school-Lydia’s tastes extend mostly along the lines of John Singer Sargent and Gustav Klimt-but she can appreciate expensive artistic endeavors in any direction. She’s hardly Stiles, for example, who takes the joy out of calling him a Philistine by virtue of actually being a completely unapologetic Philistine.
Lydia’s hair has pulled itself free of a braid and now the red is tangling with the blues and greens and muddy browns of the dappled underwater world that Lydia’s magic has helped build in her mother’s once-tidy pool. She kicks her feet lazily and watches the bubbles rise like glass balls to the surface. She only has a passing interest in physics, but she kicks again, with a smaller, more controlled motion, to see how it changes the diameter of the bubbles.
Lydia can remember with crystal clarity, even allowing for the fallibility of her memory, Boyd’s fingers locked around the delicate bones of her ankle. The callouses that she had grown used to seeing on Lancelot’s hands from sword and staff and handling the reins of the big warhorses that had occupied Arthur’s stables have been replaced by different ones. If she lets her eyes become unfocused she can feel the one from holding a pencil against the middle finger of his right hand, like the twin to the one on Lydia’s left.
She wants so badly, like she hasn’t since the morning that Jackson had texted her-We’re moving to Boston; Mom & Dad packed last night-about leaving and she’d stared at the screen of her iPhone like the pixels would reorient themselves to her will like everything else in her carefully maintained life was often willing to do; Lydia wants to feel Boyd’s hands on the thin skin of her hipbones and she wants to laugh with him like she hasn’t since the sun caught the metal planes of his armor.
One of the smaller minnows gets courageous and darts inside her reach, flitting between her fingers and brushing over her forearm in a streak of pale scales. Lydia turns her palm up and lets the minnow circle it. Its delicacy, in the murky, underwater world of her pool, is strangely affecting. Looking at it and its translucent eyes creates a bubble of feeling in Lydia’s chest that she normally associates with an elegant experimental design or the last twenty minutes of Waitress: the promise and reward of perfect internal structure.
Nothing is perfect, not even the proofs Lydia will submit later in the afternoon to her professor; not even Lydia herself. It’s lucky, then, that only humans demand perfection; the universe couldn’t really give less of a fuck. The universe orients itself in patterns and deviations from the norm result in either swift eradication or adaptation on the part of the universe to accommodate this change. It’s a peculiar kind of excellence, but one that Lydia has grown used to achieving.
She lifts her palm; the minnow curls over her hand and with a final flick of its tail, falls away and returns to its school of fellows. Air will soon become a pressing issue, but Lydia has above average lung capacity, like she has above average everything else, and she can afford an extra few seconds. Besides, here, in the nest she’s made for herself, she has enough control not to let herself drown.
That’s at least one aspect of her life that Lydia can label with satisfied; as she lazily kicks her feet twice and then, more forcefully, propels herself up to the surface, she tries to ignore the ache that is pressing along the edges of her head. She is familiar with the hungry push for success, mostly because her ambition has always been the part of her with which Lydia has been most comfortable.
This is more than ambition, Lydia thinks for a single second, and then she breaks the surface and takes a deep breath and she pushes the thought away and smothers the hunger with more-more magic, more life, and she watches through the prismatic shift of the water around her as the pickerelweed breaks through the bottom of the pool in a wave front of green. Lydia is hovering above the source of emission, and then the cement is gone and all that’s left is the dark, absorbing shadow of the plants.
[part iv]