breathe in [part iv]
[part iii]
~
It isn’t the cold that wakes Lydia, even though when she catches sight of herself in the mirror hung across the room from her bed, she can see that her lips are purple and her skin is pebbled with goosebumps. It isn’t the screaming, either, although her throat aches from it. She’s suffered more than a few nights of Camelot-related nightmares since the resurgence of her memories, and they’ve all ended in the same way: Mordred broken open and bloody, like the inside of an uncooked fish, and Merlin screaming over the body of her son and Guinevere, pale and stalwart and bleeding from her femoral artery, slowly turning cold as the ogres sweep through the keep.
Lydia isn’t exactly upset about being awoken, until she realizes why-her wards have activated.
The sensation reminds her of being in third grade and feeling the sharp snap of a rubber band against her wrist: Jackson, sitting to her left, trying to get her attention for help on his multiplication tables. Her skin vibrates now with the force of the recoil. Someone is in the garden; not a wolf, but still supernatural and potentially malevolent.
Lydia is not an idiot; she texts Stiles first (Intruder) since she knows he starts the phone tree for both Derek and Scott regardless of the pack’s current power dynamic, and then, in a reflexive way that she will later find disturbing, she texts Boyd (Someone’s in my backyard). Seconds after she presses SEND, she rationalizes that at least if something’s coming after her because of her past, at least she’s covered her bases, and then she rolls out of bed.
Her mother is home, so Lydia doesn’t have the luxury of locking her bedroom door and waiting out the arrival of the cavalry. The night is balmy; she leaves on her silk nightgown and layers a lightweight cardigan on top of it for the pockets, into which she puts the pepper spray labeled ambiguously human, which is homemade and laced with salt and mugwort, as well as a protective charm of beaten iron. After a second’s consideration, she pulls out a silver-tipped stake from where she has a dozen of them stored in a box under her bed.
When Lydia peeks through the door to the master bedroom, her mother is asleep and all of her windows are shut and locked. Lydia pulls the door closed and completes the line of salt that she’d had varnished into the baseboard and door of every room in the house. Salt is a good all-purpose supernatural repellant and it doesn’t keep the wolves out. Lydia doesn’t want to venture out into danger to keep her mother safe only to find out that her mother’s throat has been slit anyway.
The patio door slides open noiselessly. Moonlight is playing across the dark spread of the pool; night gladiolus and ipomoea blossoms, normally closed and indistinguishable from the riotous mess of the rest of the garden, are still in the absence of a breeze. The air is heavy and still, like the garden is holding its breath. Lydia would normally deplore that kind of hyperbole, but the garden has as of late displayed remarkable respiratory abilities; she suspects that some of the plants have developed C4 capabilities, but she hasn’t been able to test her hypothesis to her satisfaction.
There is a woman under the arbor; as Lydia closes the patio door against Prada’s curious whining, the woman raises a finger to the Spanish moss and says, conversationally, “This is quite a garden, little witch.” She has the kind of voice that Lydia is used to hearing from women like this one, tall and well-formed; dark and rich and complex like a glass of Château Pétrus. It’s the kind of voice that would fool a lesser woman, but Lydia knows that depth of tone like that only comes from practice.
“Thank you,” Lydia says. Politeness has yet to have gotten her killed in a supernatural confrontation, and has in fact saved her life. Polite or not, she tightens her grip on the stake and shifts as if she’s nervous, letting her left hand drift, hidden, behind her hip and the fall of the pale green silk of her nightgown. “Can I help you?”
The woman says, “What a dear,” and she finally looks at Lydia instead of the fronds of the feathertears. Her irises are green and almost fluorescent, as if they’ve been tagged with GFP. Her eyebrows are dark and thick and they lie flatly, seriously, over her peculiar eyes. Her expression is familiar to Lydia, as it’s one that Lydia herself as adopted on multiple occasions when she’s been surprised by someone achieving even less than the bare standard of human accomplishment that Lydia expects from the idiots around her.
Peter Hale had been good at that look, before Derek had exiled him. So is this woman.
Lydia drops the nervous expression she’d adopted-probably poorly; Lydia’s acting has never been fantastic-and says, “Why the hell are you in my garden?”
“What a specimen it is,” the woman murmurs. “Impressive from one so young. I could feel it growing all the way down in Sacramento.” She rubs a leaf of ivy between her thumb and forefinger. “I’d heard of Beacon Hills, of course, but never about something on this scale.” She smiles at Lydia; her teeth are slightly crooked and yellowed. If Lydia had been uncertain-which she hadn’t, because she’s a person of reasonable intelligence-about whether or not this woman was a witch, she wouldn’t be anymore. Witches always have stained teeth; it’s from all the tea they drink.
Lydia’s teeth are white, but she has health insurance and self-respect.
“Thank you,” Lydia says again, but more harshly this time. “I would appreciate it if you would please get to the point behind your visit.” How the woman got through her wards isn’t mysterious, since Lydia’s wards aren’t designed to be impenetrable, but it would take a large amount of blunt force to get in, and that’s not exactly available to a casual practitioner of Wicca or a member of one of the many clans of hedgewitches dotting the Pacific coast.
“Who is your teacher?” the witch asks casually, as if she’s one of Lydia’s mother’s business partners, catching up on the Cliff Notes of Lydia’s teenage existence over cocktails and canapés. “She’s done exceptionally well by you.”
“He’s very proud,” Lydia assures her. “It’s late; can we please get to the point?”
“For the creator of such a marvelous construct, you lack any sort of appreciation of lyric or subtlety, don’t you?” the woman asks. She sounds vaguely amused by this fundamental aspect of Lydia’s character. Her magnificent green eyes are glowing more forcefully; a cloud has gone across the moon and Lydia can’t guarantee that it’s a natural phenomenon.
Lydia looks pointedly to the woman’s left, where a gladioli blossom the size of a small pizza is tethered to a petiole as thick around as Lydia’s thumb. She lets her eyebrow say, Clearly not. Subtlety is rarely appreciated in Beacon Hills.
“That’s remedied easily enough under the right mentor,” the woman continues. Her eyes make the skin across the Lydia’s shoulders clench and shiver. She can’t tell if the eyes are indicative of some kind of compulsion spell or the woman is more than just a witch. Lydia has, sadly, some experience with both of those options.
“I’m not in the market for another teacher,” Lydia says, evenly as she can. “Thank you for the offer.” The joints of her fingers ache where they are pressed against the stake, but she refused to loosen her grip on principle.
The woman smiles, showing off her yellow teeth, and the cloud drifts away. If she has that much control over the winds, Lydia should probably be doubly worried. “’Twas only an offer, kindly meant,” the witch says. “Power such as this should not go untethered into the future.”
“I am plenty tethered,” Lydia tells her. She tries not to sound offended and probably succeeds; more intimidating people have said worse about her in the past two years, and only some of them about the state of her magic. “It’s a pity you came all the way up from Sacramento for nothing.” She smiles the way that Derek smiles at Omegas, the better to display how white and straight her teeth are.
The witch laughs and it releases a burst of air into the garden, sending the vines around her dancing. “I wouldn’t call it a fruitless endeavor,” she says, the amusement drawing deep tones in her words. “Check on your pack and your love, little witch. Learn to keep your power in check, or it will create more trouble than it will solve.”
She leaves like the Cheshire cat, melting into the shadows until only her eyes are left. They are trained on Lydia and they feel appraising and familiar and the second that Lydia feels the woman disappear completely from the property protected by her wards, Lydia tucks the stake under her arm and pulls her phone out of her pocket.
There are three texts from Stiles explaining the lack of back-up, and the last one reads, Get to Boyd’s now, something’s wrong.
In a perfect world, Stiles’ text wouldn’t make Lydia’s fingers stall and she wouldn’t lose her grip on the stake and send it in an over-loud clatter into the pool and in a perfect world Lydia wouldn’t be in love with Boyd anymore by sheer force of will; but the world is symmetric and mathematical but it certainly isn’t perfect by any means. Lydia leaves the stake in the pool and the patio door unlocked; she gets into her car without any shoes and she drives to Boyd’s Aunt Heni’s house in a fugue state so severe she doesn’t even notice parking, or getting out of the car, or crossing the yard.
“Where is he?” Lydia asks the first person she sees. It’s Erica, her claws buried in the flesh of her upper arms. She looks like she’s having trouble keeping control over her wolf, but Lydia can’t be terribly fucked about Erica’s issues right now.
“Oh, fuck you,” Erica says. “Seriously, princess, go the fuck home.”
Despite her words, she doesn’t keep Lydia from opening the front door and stepping into the living room. The house is small and mostly decorated in floral patterns. It smells like houses occupied by old people always do: musty and medicated and faintly of lemon-scented cleaner. Isaac and Scott are on a couch covered in plastic, hands clenched into fists. Stiles, pacing in a far corner of the room, is on the phone and nervously picking up and putting down china figurines of the Virgin Mary.
“No, yeah, we can’t exactly bring him to the hospital and have this be the third person this month from our friend group to drop into a mysterious coma, it doesn't even matter that I woke up after a day and a half and Allison only got diagnosed with a concussion-this is the kind of shit that even my dad can’t put a lid on.” He waits and then says, testily, “Of course I’m worried about him, Mrs. McCall, but what’s a hospital going to do? His blood work would be a freaking mess.”
Stiles is probably going to be talking in circles with Mrs. McCall for the better part of an hour, so Lydia leaves them and follows a well-worn path in the carpeting to the back of the first floor. Allison is sitting with her back against the back door, her head resting on her knees. She looks up when she sees Lydia and whatever is on Lydia’s face must freak her out, because she rockets to her feet and says, “Oh my god. Oh my god, Lydia, I had no idea,” and Lydia lets Allison put her arm around Lydia’s neck as she walks into the only lit room. It has to be Boyd’s, of course, and it is.
It’s neat and mostly empty, except for a cross hanging over the bed and a basket full of laundry sitting next to a dresser. It’s the room of someone who lives with his senile aunt and has to keep things clean because no one else is around to do it; it’s exactly what Lydia would have predicted, down to the pile of Hanes v-necks, like the kind that can be bought in a six-pack from CVS, draped on top of the laundry basket. She tries to spare a moment to despair that she’s apparently in love with someone who buys his clothes from a drugstore, but it’s-harder than she would have anticipated.
Boyd is awkwardly sprawled across his bed, like he was caught by the witch halfway between sleep and wakefulness and he just flopped unattractively back into a horizontal position. Deaton, arms folded across his chest, is dourly informing Derek for what is probably the thousandth time that he is a veterinarian, not a trauma surgeon, and there’s nothing he can do.
“There’s always something,” Derek says in response to this, which is a fair point. “Even if it’s far-fetched, there’s always some bullshit secret magic ritual.”
Lydia has an IQ of 170, but she doesn’t need it to know the answer to what Derek isn’t directly asking. “Get out,” she says to Deaton. She tries to speak normally, but she probably doesn’t because Allison rears back and Derek’s face sticks in a weird position, like it does when he’s been confronted with a situation outside the range of his emotional intelligence. “All of you. Get out.”
Deaton must know, or at least suspect, but he doesn’t say anything; instead, he locks his hand around Derek’s upper arm and tugs him out of the room. Allison lingers for a second, her fingertips pressed against the skin of Lydia’s cheek. “What are you doing?” she murmurs. “Please don’t do something stupid.”
“Of course not,” Lydia says by rote. “I’m Lydia Martin.”
“You don’t do stupid, yeah,” Allison says, “I’ve heard it.” She pauses, and Lydia hears the question before she asks it-the low, wounded, best friend cry of why didn’t you tell me?-but she rethinks it and leaves without another word, shutting the door behind her.
Without anyone else in the room, Lydia can take a series of deep breaths and on the third inhale she finally catches a faint hint of lavender. It isn’t totally unexpected, considering all of the laundry and the prevalence of lavender as a scent in household cleaners, but it’s too organic for that. The piercing greenness of the witch’s eyes come back to Lydia, and with the two pieces of evidence the rest of the story slides into place. Lydia can’t let herself laugh because if she does she’s going to descend into hysteria, but she lets herself choke on it.
Merlin. Of course.
“Always the lessons,” Lydia says. Her voice is unhappy and shaky; it sounds like the voice of a wounded creature. It sounds like Guinevere’s labored breathing, when she’d tried to pull herself on legs that didn’t work away from a rampaging ogre, when she’d put her hand in a puddle of the intestines of one of the serving girls who had braided her hair that morning.
Boyd doesn’t say anything; he’s asleep.
Lydia sits on the edge of his bed and rests her palms against the tops of her thighs, letting her spine straighten vertebrae by vertebrae. His body to her left is incredibly hot; Lydia can feel it through the thin silk of her nightgown like the fabric has been set on fire. The pepper spray in her pocket is an awkward weight, so she strips off her cardigan and drapes it across the foot of his bed.
Guinevere had met Snow and Charming only once. Snow had been six months pregnant, glowing and beautiful and vivacious and feisty and everything Guinevere had been once, before Morgana, and Charming had floated in the background, willing to put his handle on the pommel of his sword occasionally to accentuate his wife’s political points. After the feast the first night, when everyone had been varying shades of inebriated, one of the ladies of the court had asked about the curse.
“We have heard of the power of true love, of course,” the idiot woman had said, coyly fluttering her fan and looking to where Merlin sat to Arthur’s left, the vibrancy of her dark hair and beautiful nut-brown skin a direct contrast to Guinevere’s pale, lackluster figure. “But your story is so well-known, your majesties.”
“Is it,” Snow had asked, archly amused. “Charming, how fabulous.”
“Shh,” Charming had murmured into her ear. It had been hard to Guinevere not to notice, seated as she was across from them. “Don’t bait them.”
“Well,” Snow had continued a moment later. “Please ask your question, Lady Brangwain.”
Brangwain, who was too curious for her own good and too vicious for Guinevere’s, had put down her fan and, leaning across the table, asked breathlessly, “But how did you know?”
“Know what?” Snow’s mouth had ruched into a delicate frown.
“That it was true love,” Brangwain had said, rushing over the words as though they held actual power. “And not a simpler, less-powerful kind.”
It had been here when it had occurred to Brangwain that her dimwitted question was moderately insulting; she’d flushed, but before she’d been able to think of some way to retract it, Charming had said, in his level, deliberate way, “There was no way it was anything else.”
Snow’s smile then had been private and glorious. “Aye,” she’d said. “You always know when it’s the true sort of love. It changes how you see the world, but it doesn’t sweep you away like a grand passion does; you stay yourself, even as you discover what that means. A true love acts like a reflecting glass.”
Brangwain and three of the other court ladies within earshot had melted into their soup like sticks of butter; Guinevere had thankfully been spared the trial of looking at Merlin and Arthur, because of the seating, but Gawaine and Tristan had given each other a set of positively sickening looks across the table.
“There’s no hiding from it,” Snow had added a moment later. She’d turned serious, perhaps too serious for a feast celebrating a visiting monarch, but it had seemed important to her to say it. She’d spoken directly to Guinevere, as if she could see into her heart and find the parts of it devoted to Lancelot, who had been gone six long years by then. “You can be caught up in fear and run from it, but a true love will find you again.”
“It will always find you,” Charming had agreed, and he’d kissed his wife’s temple and half of the court had dissolved into tears.
Lydia rests her hand in the air above Boyd’s left ankle, curling her fingers across the curve of his foot. It’s bare under the hem of his pajama pants, and the bone points into the arch of Lydia’s palm. The truest love will always find you, she thinks, and it’s slightly hysterical even within the bounds of her head.
“There’s no escaping this, is there?” she asks Boyd’s sleeping figure. “You tried and I tried and we’re still here thanks to Merlin’s meddling.”
The sheer inevitability of it is slightly galling.
“This isn’t a declaration,” she lies, most likely to the universe at large since Boyd is still unconscious, and then she leans over his huge chest and rests her lips, still chapped from the screaming earlier in the night, against his. It’s like kissing a waxwork model, at first, and then Lydia senses the magic lying over Boyd begin to dissipate, taking with it the scent of lavender, and Boyd is kissing her back. He steals her breath with an inhale and then he cups her face with both hands and twists and kisses her harder, with an obvious tinge of the desperation he’s been hiding for the past two months.
“Lydia,” he says between breaths, “please, Lydia,” and she climbs on top of him so she can get a better angle, tucking her knees into the dip of his torso above his hips, and he says, resting his forehead against hers, “You have to decide, I can’t do this forever,” his eyes squeezed shut.
He looks so young that Lydia closes her eyes, too, so she doesn’t feel like a forty five-year old woman molesting a teenager. The bits of her that have been overextended for the last few months, that have been seeking solace in the warmth of her mother’s garden and the cool shadows of the pool, press against the inside of her chest and they want so badly that Lydia Martin actually stops thinking for the first time in her life-possession by undead werewolves aside-and she says, “Yes,” so tightly that the word almost doesn’t come out at all; Boyd has to feel it in the way her lips brush against his mouth in forming them.
It doesn’t feel like she’s handing over control she’s never going to get back, but Lydia isn’t sure she’d be able to feel that, anyway; it just feels like she’s resting muscles that have been stretched too far for too long, and the warmth of Boyd’s body feels so good against them. “I love you,” he says, which is basically beside the point by now. His love hasn’t been in doubt for a while now.
Lydia thinks, I will never love anyone as much as I love you, and she kisses him, hard enough to break the skin, and she bites her own lip and mixes their blood together in her mouth because that’s how you spell permanence, when you’re a witch and a werewolf: nothing less than blood will do.
“Always,” she says. His mouth is painted red and the rosebush outside of his window is blooming so violently that petals are stuck to the panes of glass. “It looks like we don’t really have a choice.”
Boyd’s hand firms against the back of her neck and he uses his grip to pull her away, enough that he can gain and maintain eye contact. “Lydia, you have a choice.” His hand is shaking and his thumb is resting over her pulse and Lydia’s thighs are pressed against the bare skin of his chest, creating a complete circuit. “You will never lack a choice.”
“I know,” she tells him. She’s already decided; it doesn’t make sense how nervous she is to speak the words. She feels depressingly like the reluctant male protagonist of a shitty Lifetime original movie, and that’s what eventually motivates her to move her hands so they’re both resting on his chest, over his heart. Lydia’s favorite movie is The Notebook, after all, not fucking Love Story. “I’ve loved you since you first rode with my colors, and I will die loving you.” She doesn't even bother trying to smile. “I already have, after all.”
“I won’t leave again,” he promises. His smile is brilliant and wide, like Lancelot in his best days. Even in the dark of his bedroom, at four in the morning, Lydia can see the shine spilling out from him. Under her palms, his heart is fast and steady and she kisses him again, to lick his mouth clean of blood. “By the gods, Lydia, we’ll be happier this time.”
Lydia’s mouth hurts, from a combination of the bruising kisses and her deranged smile. “I think we’ve made a good start of it,” she agrees.
~
It isn’t the cold that wakes Lydia, even though when she catches sight of herself in the mirror hung across the room from her bed, she can see that her lips are purple and her skin is pebbled with goosebumps. It isn’t the screaming, either, although her throat aches from it. She’s suffered more than a few nights of Camelot-related nightmares since the resurgence of her memories, and they’ve all ended in the same way: Mordred broken open and bloody, like the inside of an uncooked fish, and Merlin screaming over the body of her son and Guinevere, pale and stalwart and bleeding from her femoral artery, slowly turning cold as the ogres sweep through the keep.
Lydia isn’t exactly upset about being awoken, until she realizes why-her wards have activated.
The sensation reminds her of being in third grade and feeling the sharp snap of a rubber band against her wrist: Jackson, sitting to her left, trying to get her attention for help on his multiplication tables. Her skin vibrates now with the force of the recoil. Someone is in the garden; not a wolf, but still supernatural and potentially malevolent.
Lydia is not an idiot; she texts Stiles first (Intruder) since she knows he starts the phone tree for both Derek and Scott regardless of the pack’s current power dynamic, and then, in a reflexive way that she will later find disturbing, she texts Boyd (Someone’s in my backyard). Seconds after she presses SEND, she rationalizes that at least if something’s coming after her because of her past, at least she’s covered her bases, and then she rolls out of bed.
Her mother is home, so Lydia doesn’t have the luxury of locking her bedroom door and waiting out the arrival of the cavalry. The night is balmy; she leaves on her silk nightgown and layers a lightweight cardigan on top of it for the pockets, into which she puts the pepper spray labeled ambiguously human, which is homemade and laced with salt and mugwort, as well as a protective charm of beaten iron. After a second’s consideration, she pulls out a silver-tipped stake from where she has a dozen of them stored in a box under her bed.
When Lydia peeks through the door to the master bedroom, her mother is asleep and all of her windows are shut and locked. Lydia pulls the door closed and completes the line of salt that she’d had varnished into the baseboard and door of every room in the house. Salt is a good all-purpose supernatural repellant and it doesn’t keep the wolves out. Lydia doesn’t want to venture out into danger to keep her mother safe only to find out that her mother’s throat has been slit anyway.
The patio door slides open noiselessly. Moonlight is playing across the dark spread of the pool; night gladiolus and ipomoea blossoms, normally closed and indistinguishable from the riotous mess of the rest of the garden, are still in the absence of a breeze. The air is heavy and still, like the garden is holding its breath. Lydia would normally deplore that kind of hyperbole, but the garden has as of late displayed remarkable respiratory abilities; she suspects that some of the plants have developed C4 capabilities, but she hasn’t been able to test her hypothesis to her satisfaction.
There is a woman under the arbor; as Lydia closes the patio door against Prada’s curious whining, the woman raises a finger to the Spanish moss and says, conversationally, “This is quite a garden, little witch.” She has the kind of voice that Lydia is used to hearing from women like this one, tall and well-formed; dark and rich and complex like a glass of Château Pétrus. It’s the kind of voice that would fool a lesser woman, but Lydia knows that depth of tone like that only comes from practice.
“Thank you,” Lydia says. Politeness has yet to have gotten her killed in a supernatural confrontation, and has in fact saved her life. Polite or not, she tightens her grip on the stake and shifts as if she’s nervous, letting her left hand drift, hidden, behind her hip and the fall of the pale green silk of her nightgown. “Can I help you?”
The woman says, “What a dear,” and she finally looks at Lydia instead of the fronds of the feathertears. Her irises are green and almost fluorescent, as if they’ve been tagged with GFP. Her eyebrows are dark and thick and they lie flatly, seriously, over her peculiar eyes. Her expression is familiar to Lydia, as it’s one that Lydia herself as adopted on multiple occasions when she’s been surprised by someone achieving even less than the bare standard of human accomplishment that Lydia expects from the idiots around her.
Peter Hale had been good at that look, before Derek had exiled him. So is this woman.
Lydia drops the nervous expression she’d adopted-probably poorly; Lydia’s acting has never been fantastic-and says, “Why the hell are you in my garden?”
“What a specimen it is,” the woman murmurs. “Impressive from one so young. I could feel it growing all the way down in Sacramento.” She rubs a leaf of ivy between her thumb and forefinger. “I’d heard of Beacon Hills, of course, but never about something on this scale.” She smiles at Lydia; her teeth are slightly crooked and yellowed. If Lydia had been uncertain-which she hadn’t, because she’s a person of reasonable intelligence-about whether or not this woman was a witch, she wouldn’t be anymore. Witches always have stained teeth; it’s from all the tea they drink.
Lydia’s teeth are white, but she has health insurance and self-respect.
“Thank you,” Lydia says again, but more harshly this time. “I would appreciate it if you would please get to the point behind your visit.” How the woman got through her wards isn’t mysterious, since Lydia’s wards aren’t designed to be impenetrable, but it would take a large amount of blunt force to get in, and that’s not exactly available to a casual practitioner of Wicca or a member of one of the many clans of hedgewitches dotting the Pacific coast.
“Who is your teacher?” the witch asks casually, as if she’s one of Lydia’s mother’s business partners, catching up on the Cliff Notes of Lydia’s teenage existence over cocktails and canapés. “She’s done exceptionally well by you.”
“He’s very proud,” Lydia assures her. “It’s late; can we please get to the point?”
“For the creator of such a marvelous construct, you lack any sort of appreciation of lyric or subtlety, don’t you?” the woman asks. She sounds vaguely amused by this fundamental aspect of Lydia’s character. Her magnificent green eyes are glowing more forcefully; a cloud has gone across the moon and Lydia can’t guarantee that it’s a natural phenomenon.
Lydia looks pointedly to the woman’s left, where a gladioli blossom the size of a small pizza is tethered to a petiole as thick around as Lydia’s thumb. She lets her eyebrow say, Clearly not. Subtlety is rarely appreciated in Beacon Hills.
“That’s remedied easily enough under the right mentor,” the woman continues. Her eyes make the skin across the Lydia’s shoulders clench and shiver. She can’t tell if the eyes are indicative of some kind of compulsion spell or the woman is more than just a witch. Lydia has, sadly, some experience with both of those options.
“I’m not in the market for another teacher,” Lydia says, evenly as she can. “Thank you for the offer.” The joints of her fingers ache where they are pressed against the stake, but she refused to loosen her grip on principle.
The woman smiles, showing off her yellow teeth, and the cloud drifts away. If she has that much control over the winds, Lydia should probably be doubly worried. “’Twas only an offer, kindly meant,” the witch says. “Power such as this should not go untethered into the future.”
“I am plenty tethered,” Lydia tells her. She tries not to sound offended and probably succeeds; more intimidating people have said worse about her in the past two years, and only some of them about the state of her magic. “It’s a pity you came all the way up from Sacramento for nothing.” She smiles the way that Derek smiles at Omegas, the better to display how white and straight her teeth are.
The witch laughs and it releases a burst of air into the garden, sending the vines around her dancing. “I wouldn’t call it a fruitless endeavor,” she says, the amusement drawing deep tones in her words. “Check on your pack and your love, little witch. Learn to keep your power in check, or it will create more trouble than it will solve.”
She leaves like the Cheshire cat, melting into the shadows until only her eyes are left. They are trained on Lydia and they feel appraising and familiar and the second that Lydia feels the woman disappear completely from the property protected by her wards, Lydia tucks the stake under her arm and pulls her phone out of her pocket.
There are three texts from Stiles explaining the lack of back-up, and the last one reads, Get to Boyd’s now, something’s wrong.
In a perfect world, Stiles’ text wouldn’t make Lydia’s fingers stall and she wouldn’t lose her grip on the stake and send it in an over-loud clatter into the pool and in a perfect world Lydia wouldn’t be in love with Boyd anymore by sheer force of will; but the world is symmetric and mathematical but it certainly isn’t perfect by any means. Lydia leaves the stake in the pool and the patio door unlocked; she gets into her car without any shoes and she drives to Boyd’s Aunt Heni’s house in a fugue state so severe she doesn’t even notice parking, or getting out of the car, or crossing the yard.
“Where is he?” Lydia asks the first person she sees. It’s Erica, her claws buried in the flesh of her upper arms. She looks like she’s having trouble keeping control over her wolf, but Lydia can’t be terribly fucked about Erica’s issues right now.
“Oh, fuck you,” Erica says. “Seriously, princess, go the fuck home.”
Despite her words, she doesn’t keep Lydia from opening the front door and stepping into the living room. The house is small and mostly decorated in floral patterns. It smells like houses occupied by old people always do: musty and medicated and faintly of lemon-scented cleaner. Isaac and Scott are on a couch covered in plastic, hands clenched into fists. Stiles, pacing in a far corner of the room, is on the phone and nervously picking up and putting down china figurines of the Virgin Mary.
“No, yeah, we can’t exactly bring him to the hospital and have this be the third person this month from our friend group to drop into a mysterious coma, it doesn't even matter that I woke up after a day and a half and Allison only got diagnosed with a concussion-this is the kind of shit that even my dad can’t put a lid on.” He waits and then says, testily, “Of course I’m worried about him, Mrs. McCall, but what’s a hospital going to do? His blood work would be a freaking mess.”
Stiles is probably going to be talking in circles with Mrs. McCall for the better part of an hour, so Lydia leaves them and follows a well-worn path in the carpeting to the back of the first floor. Allison is sitting with her back against the back door, her head resting on her knees. She looks up when she sees Lydia and whatever is on Lydia’s face must freak her out, because she rockets to her feet and says, “Oh my god. Oh my god, Lydia, I had no idea,” and Lydia lets Allison put her arm around Lydia’s neck as she walks into the only lit room. It has to be Boyd’s, of course, and it is.
It’s neat and mostly empty, except for a cross hanging over the bed and a basket full of laundry sitting next to a dresser. It’s the room of someone who lives with his senile aunt and has to keep things clean because no one else is around to do it; it’s exactly what Lydia would have predicted, down to the pile of Hanes v-necks, like the kind that can be bought in a six-pack from CVS, draped on top of the laundry basket. She tries to spare a moment to despair that she’s apparently in love with someone who buys his clothes from a drugstore, but it’s-harder than she would have anticipated.
Boyd is awkwardly sprawled across his bed, like he was caught by the witch halfway between sleep and wakefulness and he just flopped unattractively back into a horizontal position. Deaton, arms folded across his chest, is dourly informing Derek for what is probably the thousandth time that he is a veterinarian, not a trauma surgeon, and there’s nothing he can do.
“There’s always something,” Derek says in response to this, which is a fair point. “Even if it’s far-fetched, there’s always some bullshit secret magic ritual.”
Lydia has an IQ of 170, but she doesn’t need it to know the answer to what Derek isn’t directly asking. “Get out,” she says to Deaton. She tries to speak normally, but she probably doesn’t because Allison rears back and Derek’s face sticks in a weird position, like it does when he’s been confronted with a situation outside the range of his emotional intelligence. “All of you. Get out.”
Deaton must know, or at least suspect, but he doesn’t say anything; instead, he locks his hand around Derek’s upper arm and tugs him out of the room. Allison lingers for a second, her fingertips pressed against the skin of Lydia’s cheek. “What are you doing?” she murmurs. “Please don’t do something stupid.”
“Of course not,” Lydia says by rote. “I’m Lydia Martin.”
“You don’t do stupid, yeah,” Allison says, “I’ve heard it.” She pauses, and Lydia hears the question before she asks it-the low, wounded, best friend cry of why didn’t you tell me?-but she rethinks it and leaves without another word, shutting the door behind her.
Without anyone else in the room, Lydia can take a series of deep breaths and on the third inhale she finally catches a faint hint of lavender. It isn’t totally unexpected, considering all of the laundry and the prevalence of lavender as a scent in household cleaners, but it’s too organic for that. The piercing greenness of the witch’s eyes come back to Lydia, and with the two pieces of evidence the rest of the story slides into place. Lydia can’t let herself laugh because if she does she’s going to descend into hysteria, but she lets herself choke on it.
Merlin. Of course.
“Always the lessons,” Lydia says. Her voice is unhappy and shaky; it sounds like the voice of a wounded creature. It sounds like Guinevere’s labored breathing, when she’d tried to pull herself on legs that didn’t work away from a rampaging ogre, when she’d put her hand in a puddle of the intestines of one of the serving girls who had braided her hair that morning.
Boyd doesn’t say anything; he’s asleep.
Lydia sits on the edge of his bed and rests her palms against the tops of her thighs, letting her spine straighten vertebrae by vertebrae. His body to her left is incredibly hot; Lydia can feel it through the thin silk of her nightgown like the fabric has been set on fire. The pepper spray in her pocket is an awkward weight, so she strips off her cardigan and drapes it across the foot of his bed.
Guinevere had met Snow and Charming only once. Snow had been six months pregnant, glowing and beautiful and vivacious and feisty and everything Guinevere had been once, before Morgana, and Charming had floated in the background, willing to put his handle on the pommel of his sword occasionally to accentuate his wife’s political points. After the feast the first night, when everyone had been varying shades of inebriated, one of the ladies of the court had asked about the curse.
“We have heard of the power of true love, of course,” the idiot woman had said, coyly fluttering her fan and looking to where Merlin sat to Arthur’s left, the vibrancy of her dark hair and beautiful nut-brown skin a direct contrast to Guinevere’s pale, lackluster figure. “But your story is so well-known, your majesties.”
“Is it,” Snow had asked, archly amused. “Charming, how fabulous.”
“Shh,” Charming had murmured into her ear. It had been hard to Guinevere not to notice, seated as she was across from them. “Don’t bait them.”
“Well,” Snow had continued a moment later. “Please ask your question, Lady Brangwain.”
Brangwain, who was too curious for her own good and too vicious for Guinevere’s, had put down her fan and, leaning across the table, asked breathlessly, “But how did you know?”
“Know what?” Snow’s mouth had ruched into a delicate frown.
“That it was true love,” Brangwain had said, rushing over the words as though they held actual power. “And not a simpler, less-powerful kind.”
It had been here when it had occurred to Brangwain that her dimwitted question was moderately insulting; she’d flushed, but before she’d been able to think of some way to retract it, Charming had said, in his level, deliberate way, “There was no way it was anything else.”
Snow’s smile then had been private and glorious. “Aye,” she’d said. “You always know when it’s the true sort of love. It changes how you see the world, but it doesn’t sweep you away like a grand passion does; you stay yourself, even as you discover what that means. A true love acts like a reflecting glass.”
Brangwain and three of the other court ladies within earshot had melted into their soup like sticks of butter; Guinevere had thankfully been spared the trial of looking at Merlin and Arthur, because of the seating, but Gawaine and Tristan had given each other a set of positively sickening looks across the table.
“There’s no hiding from it,” Snow had added a moment later. She’d turned serious, perhaps too serious for a feast celebrating a visiting monarch, but it had seemed important to her to say it. She’d spoken directly to Guinevere, as if she could see into her heart and find the parts of it devoted to Lancelot, who had been gone six long years by then. “You can be caught up in fear and run from it, but a true love will find you again.”
“It will always find you,” Charming had agreed, and he’d kissed his wife’s temple and half of the court had dissolved into tears.
Lydia rests her hand in the air above Boyd’s left ankle, curling her fingers across the curve of his foot. It’s bare under the hem of his pajama pants, and the bone points into the arch of Lydia’s palm. The truest love will always find you, she thinks, and it’s slightly hysterical even within the bounds of her head.
“There’s no escaping this, is there?” she asks Boyd’s sleeping figure. “You tried and I tried and we’re still here thanks to Merlin’s meddling.”
The sheer inevitability of it is slightly galling.
“This isn’t a declaration,” she lies, most likely to the universe at large since Boyd is still unconscious, and then she leans over his huge chest and rests her lips, still chapped from the screaming earlier in the night, against his. It’s like kissing a waxwork model, at first, and then Lydia senses the magic lying over Boyd begin to dissipate, taking with it the scent of lavender, and Boyd is kissing her back. He steals her breath with an inhale and then he cups her face with both hands and twists and kisses her harder, with an obvious tinge of the desperation he’s been hiding for the past two months.
“Lydia,” he says between breaths, “please, Lydia,” and she climbs on top of him so she can get a better angle, tucking her knees into the dip of his torso above his hips, and he says, resting his forehead against hers, “You have to decide, I can’t do this forever,” his eyes squeezed shut.
He looks so young that Lydia closes her eyes, too, so she doesn’t feel like a forty five-year old woman molesting a teenager. The bits of her that have been overextended for the last few months, that have been seeking solace in the warmth of her mother’s garden and the cool shadows of the pool, press against the inside of her chest and they want so badly that Lydia Martin actually stops thinking for the first time in her life-possession by undead werewolves aside-and she says, “Yes,” so tightly that the word almost doesn’t come out at all; Boyd has to feel it in the way her lips brush against his mouth in forming them.
It doesn’t feel like she’s handing over control she’s never going to get back, but Lydia isn’t sure she’d be able to feel that, anyway; it just feels like she’s resting muscles that have been stretched too far for too long, and the warmth of Boyd’s body feels so good against them. “I love you,” he says, which is basically beside the point by now. His love hasn’t been in doubt for a while now.
Lydia thinks, I will never love anyone as much as I love you, and she kisses him, hard enough to break the skin, and she bites her own lip and mixes their blood together in her mouth because that’s how you spell permanence, when you’re a witch and a werewolf: nothing less than blood will do.
“Always,” she says. His mouth is painted red and the rosebush outside of his window is blooming so violently that petals are stuck to the panes of glass. “It looks like we don’t really have a choice.”
Boyd’s hand firms against the back of her neck and he uses his grip to pull her away, enough that he can gain and maintain eye contact. “Lydia, you have a choice.” His hand is shaking and his thumb is resting over her pulse and Lydia’s thighs are pressed against the bare skin of his chest, creating a complete circuit. “You will never lack a choice.”
“I know,” she tells him. She’s already decided; it doesn’t make sense how nervous she is to speak the words. She feels depressingly like the reluctant male protagonist of a shitty Lifetime original movie, and that’s what eventually motivates her to move her hands so they’re both resting on his chest, over his heart. Lydia’s favorite movie is The Notebook, after all, not fucking Love Story. “I’ve loved you since you first rode with my colors, and I will die loving you.” She doesn't even bother trying to smile. “I already have, after all.”
“I won’t leave again,” he promises. His smile is brilliant and wide, like Lancelot in his best days. Even in the dark of his bedroom, at four in the morning, Lydia can see the shine spilling out from him. Under her palms, his heart is fast and steady and she kisses him again, to lick his mouth clean of blood. “By the gods, Lydia, we’ll be happier this time.”
Lydia’s mouth hurts, from a combination of the bruising kisses and her deranged smile. “I think we’ve made a good start of it,” she agrees.