interstate highway
.interstate highway
lydia drives home.
notes: written as part of twreversebang for frogy's fanmix. thanks to gollumgollum for a last minute beta read (I thought our posting date was the 26th...obviously it wasn't).
pg13 . 5999 words . AO3
Lydia Martin can take care of herself. She reminds herself of that as she puts the car into gear, pushing the stick shift into first with the heel of her hand. It’s just for the summer. Cambridge will wait for her while she’s gone, the same way Beacon Hills did. Has been, since she left in August. Is. Beacon Hills is waiting.
She takes her foot off the brake.
I-90 cuts across Massachusetts like the world’s most boring artery, and Google and her Droid’s GPS say Lydia is supposed to get off of it, take I-80 down through Connecticut and then over into Pennsylvania, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know why; she decides to take 90 to 88 in New York, instead. It’s probably a waste of time, but it’s her waste of time, and it’s the little things, she thinks when she stays on I-90 at the interchange.
She calls her parents before she crosses the border into New York State’s laws about cell phones and driving, and she thinks about calling Jackson.
It’s alright to think about. Easier than calling. And it’s funny; in high school Lydia would’ve just done it, scrolled through the contacts on her phone to Jackson Whittemore, called him and said, “Hey, I’ll be in Beacon Hills by Friday, we need to talk.” Jackson’s difficult in a lot of ways, but he’s easy to predict, and Lydia knows he’d roll his eyes and go along with it.
But she’s not in high school anymore, and she ends up calling Danny instead.
“Lydia?” he says, sounding a little uncertain, when he picks up on the third ring.
“Yes,” Lydia says. There’s a Prius in front of her, driving like they’re paying more attention to what kind of mileage they’re getting than going any particular speed. She passes them.
“You realize it’s five in the morning here,” Danny says. Lydia hadn’t thought of that, but she realizes it now, so she repeats her “yes.”
“Okay,” Danny says. “Just checking.”
There’s a noise in the background--someone else talking, and then Danny says, “Go back to sleep, babe,” and Lydia can hear him--getting up, probably, going to another room.
“Who’s with you?” Lydia asks, idly curious. She has her suspicions, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. It helps, actually, to have something to ask.
“Isaac,” Danny says, like he knows Lydia knows. “Why are you calling?”
“You’re still living together?” Lydia says. It’s a stupid question. Danny will probably be offended that she asked.
“Lydia,” Danny says.
“I’m almost to New York,” she says. There’s a sign for the Berkshires, ‘America’s Premiere Cultural Resort’ next two exits. “I’ll have to hang up.”
“You’re coming home for the summer,” Danny says, which is really the crux of the matter. Nothing else panned out; she can live with her parents and do math and get a crappy job, like every other college student. She’d stayed in Cambridge for Christmas, studying for exams--there was only so long she could avoid Beacon Hills.
“Be there by Friday,” Lydia says. “If everything goes according to plan.”
“Does Jackson know?” Danny asks.
“Not yet,” Lydia says, looking out across the unfurling green of the trees.
“Tell him,” Danny says, like she expects him to.
She’s quiet on the phone for a bit, and then she says, “Thank you,” softly, and Danny says, “No problem” before the connection clicks out. She imagines he goes back to bed with Isaac. Lydia keeps driving, the highway in front of her and on all sides, and the trees around her keep going, growing.
The summer before junior year Jackson was a werewolf and Lydia loved him. It was that simple, then; in retrospect, it surprised her how cut-and-dried it all seemed. But then again, everyone knows what they say about hindsight.
It was a fact that Lydia had always had twenty-twenty vision and that made the things she missed all the more surprising, later. Lydia Martin didn’t usually miss things.
Junior year, though. Lydia remembers the way they tripped through that summer, all wrapped up in one another, in something they thought they had both lost, or didn’t have a shot at. They had to be in love, because Lydia had brought Jackson back to himself, because Jackson had let her. And it was easy, in a way, because the summer was easy; all sun and soft sand, caught between their toes on trips to the beach.
The trips to the beach were nothing anyone planned, but more often than not someone would send out a text, and anyone who wasn’t working would split between the available cars and drive out to the ocean, let the cold water lap their feet, stare up at clear skies. Jackson would loop an arm around Lydia’s waist and she’d press her head into his shoulder, close her eyes and breathe everything in. As a pair, they were safe. They would keep each other safe.
Around them, Lydia knew, other relationships ebbed and flowed. Boyd and Erica were whispers and dark eyes. Danny was pretending not look at Isaac, who was wearing swim trunks he had probably outgrown the year before, exposing long legs. Isaac was pretending not to look back, slanting his eyes down and away and then back. Derek even came, sometimes, and college girls would flirt with him and ask if he was taking his siblings to the beach, though they seemed uncertain as to which of their motley group might actually be Derek’s siblings. Derek would look at them flat and blank and they’d eventually fade into the background, as some people do. Most people faded into the background, that summer.
Lydia wasn’t sure how the ones that were foregrounded became her friends--wasn’t sure that they even were--but she was kind of grateful for the attempt at normalcy, even if it fit them like a skirt in need of tailoring, even if Peter cast a pall across everything when he appeared. When Peter was there Jackson let Lydia dig her fingers into his hand until her nails drew small crescents of blood, which was something.
It turned out Peter hadn’t drawn enough life from Derek and Lydia, that he needed more. If it was okay, it was only because Lydia had done her background reading.
Peter Hale was the first person she killed; killing Peter Hale was the first time Lydia looked at Jackson, saw the werewolf shape of him, and wondered if any of this was real.
They were in love. Lydia had saved him. But it wasn’t--it wasn’t like it was before, when Lydia had used Jackson and he had used her back, and Lydia wondered for the first time if Jackson had a choice, or if his wolf had latched onto the closest thing Jackson had to anything and held on tight. Lydia wondered if maybe it should’ve been Danny. Lydia wondered a lot of things, and there was nothing Lydia Martin liked less than not knowing the answer.
Lydia calls Jackson when she’s in Ohio, and Derek picks up.
“Jackson can’t talk now,” he says.
“Can’t, or won’t?” Lydia asks.
Derek doesn’t reply; Lydia imagines him furrowing his brow and staring at the floor, like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t. Lydia imagines, alternately, that he’s just sitting there, not looking at anything in particular, like a person on the phone.
“Can’t,” Derek says finally, without inflection.
“I’ll call back,” Lydia says, and hangs up.
She knows about the thing with Jackson and Derek. Jackson sent her a text message about it in the spring. Or--Jackson sent Lydia a text message that said ‘derek and i r fucking,’ and Lydia’s reaction was--complicated.
It made sense. Derek and Jackson were both needy. Derek and Jackson were both werewolves. Derek and Jackson were both in Beacon Hills. Lydia didn’t know how it started--didn’t really want to know, to be honest--and when she got that text from Jackson she’d considered throwing her phone at a nearby philosophy major, but she had to admit that it made as much sense as anything, if you started with the basic assumption that math was pretty much the only thing that made sense in any clean way.
Derek obviously thinks he’s protecting Jackson from her, and that’s ridiculous. Lydia should be the one protecting them from each other. They’re going to be codependent if they aren’t already. Jackson broke up with Lydia because she wasn’t codependent enough for him, and Derek had always been trying to cobble together a family out of gum and paperclips and poor decisions. They couldn’t be good for each other, and it isn’t that Lydia thinks she’s better so much as she knows she isn’t, knows her metes and bounds.
She floors the gas, passes a semi.
Danny used to sit next to her at lunch and stare across the room at Isaac.
“He likes you,” she said, sometime in November. She was inspecting her nails. Danny had just started to eat.
“You don’t even know if he’s gay,” Danny said. “And the last guy I liked turned out to be--whatever the hell Stiles said Matt was.”
“Controlling Jackson’s lizard form for his misguided revenge?” Lydia asked, raising an eyebrow. “Well, you already know he’s a werewolf, and he’s definitely bi. Seriously, Danny, I don’t remember you being like this.”
“The Jungle’s different from high school,” Danny replied, pushing the food on his lunch tray around with his fork. He looked thoughtful.
“Like high school isn’t a jungle,” Lydia said. “Especially this one.”
Danny gave Lydia a wry smile, one that recognized her joke as more correct than clever and flashed dimples. Across the room, Isaac probably swooned.
“Besides,” Danny said. “He’s a werewolf, and we aren’t, you know--” he gestured expansively with a hand. “Whatever you and Jackson are.”
Jackson was skipping lunch to do something with lacrosse, so they could talk about him like this.
Lydia shrugged, averted her eyes.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not sure how much difference that makes. Werewolves can date like normal human beings. Scott and Allison did.”
“At first,” Danny said.
“He’s just another guy you want to date who wants to date you,” Lydia said. “Don’t overthink it.”
“How many guys like that have there been?” Danny asked, raising his eyebrows wryly. Lydia bumped her shoulder into his, nodded at Isaac.
“At least one, now,” she said. “But I know it’s been more than that.”
“You think he can hear us?” Danny asked suddenly.
“We haven’t said his name,” Lydia said. “So if he’s listening, it’s because he wants to be. Because he’s listening to you.”
“Or you,” Danny said, raising his eyebrows significantly.
“I’m pretty sure I’m effectively off the werewolf market,” Lydia said, though she fell a little short of making the joke she intended to make.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “When even Stiles gives up, you know it’s serious.”
Lydia rolled her eyes and turned the conversation towards the readings for English literature. It made her a little sad, in her way. Not that--Stiles was Stiles--but it made her feel like everything had already been decided, and she wasn’t sure if it was a decision made by her or for her.
She found Jackson after lunch, and he caught her around the waist and kissed her once, twice, three times. Lydia smiled at him, and then for a moment Lydia allowed herself to close her eyes. She almost believed in it, then, still.
She stops at a Subway near the border between Indiana and Ohio for a late lunch. There’s too much vinegar on the sub, bite without any other layers of flavor, but it is, for all intents and purposes, a meal. She considers trying Jackson’s cell again but she doesn’t want to talk to Derek or Jackson, not really, and her face feels greasy. Lydia scrubs at it under the flourescent lights in the bathroom before going back to the car. She’s feeling tired and unreasonable in equal measure, but the sun’s still--well, it’s not high in the sky, but it’s in the sky, and it doesn’t seem worth stopping yet, not when she could get further.
Danny calls her, because that’s something that he does. He takes care of people, or some people--Lydia thinks he used to be more subtle about it, but maybe he wasn’t, and maybe she’s just more sensitive to it.
“Did you tell him?” Danny asks.
“Derek picked up,” Lydia says. Danny makes a noise Lydia can’t immediately identify, contorted by the phone and stifled by the sound of wind whipping past her window.
“You know I’m not a delicate flower, right?” Lydia says. She doesn’t know why she’s annoyed now, but she is. “You can tell me what you’re actually thinking.”
Danny doesn’t say anything.
Lydia hangs up.
A few hours after sunset she checks into a motel, peels back the outer bedspread and falls face-first into the pillow. When she doesn’t immediately fall asleep she turns on the TV and flips through the channels listlessly, then turns it off. She ends up calling her roommate, one Jess Lakhani, just for someone to talk to. Jess and Lydia got on well enough as roommates--if they aren’t living together next year that’s just because Jess was ultimately closer with Vanessa from down the hall. Lydia can’t really blame her; Lydia kept a lot of people at arm’s length after she left Beacon Hills. Maybe when she was still in Beacon Hills, too.
Everyone, actually. She found it was easier to hole herself up with some graph paper and an algorithm than it was to deal with the social landscape. Besides--Lydia won high school by being the most popular. She figured it was about time she found another way to win. So she let people say what they wanted about her. The students mostly said she was a stuck-up bitch, which was ironic, considering they all went to Harvard. The professors mostly said she was a genius, and since about half of them are old men who spent most of the first semester calling Lydia “dear” whenever she tracked them down in their offices she figures it comes out in her favor.
Still, Jess and Lydia are close enough to being friends that Jess is willing to chatter at Lydia on the phone, and that’s all Lydia really wants. Jess won’t ask about Jackson, because Jess doesn’t know; she will tell Lydia to turn to Bravo and watch Project Runway reruns with her, and that’s something Lydia didn’t know she wanted, but--yeah, she did. Watching Heidi Klum say, “Auf Wiedersehen” eventually puts Lydia to sleep, at least until the alarm on her phone wakes her up in the morning.
Danny got kidnapped by a djinn just before Christmas. It wasn’t entirely Jackson’s mother’s fault, but it was mostly Jackson’s mother’s fault, inasmuch as she was the one who bought the lamp. It might’ve been a pretty lamp if you were someone’s grandmother, but you still needed to miss a few obvious alarm bells to buy anything at the antique shop that had popped up in a strip mall outside of town that Black Friday. Which Jackson’s mother--well, obviously she missed them.
So Danny got kidnapped. He and Jackson had been playing video games or something, he bumped the lamp with his elbow, and the rest, as they say--
Well, that’s the short version of how Lydia ends up a witch.
The longer version involved Jackson set to charge into the lamp, nonexistent guns blazing. So Lydia went to talk to Stiles because--whatever else Stiles was, he had more experience with the werewolf stuff than she and Jackson did, so she went to talk to him.
“Genie, you think?” he said. “Did it sound like Robin Williams?” And then he laughed kind of nervously, rubbed his head and spun around in his computer chair, typed a few searches into his computer before sending her to Dr. Deaton, the town vet. The irony of going to the vet to talk about werewolf problems didn’t escape her. She wondered if there was special werewolf birth control she should be asking for.
“So,” Deaton said. “You’re the one who’s immune.”
Lydia stared at him, didn’t drop her gaze. She was good at doing that, then, at being subjected to scrutiny and standing up to it. It was still a skill she wishes she hadn’t earned.
“That’s what they tell me,” Lydia said, false brightness intact.
Deaton hadn’t told her what to do, exactly, but he had given her enough information that she could figure it out, and then he had piqued her interest so she kept coming back. The thing was, magic--or the particular school of it that he taught her, which had its roots in the Abbasid Empire--looked a lot like math.
Lydia took to it like a fish to water. It was more challenging and useful than what they were covering in pre-calc at the time; it was, she found, one of the most useful ways to apply algebra to real life, though it was also the one no one mentioned in school. Not that Lydia had needed a reason to learn algebra, but the fact that you could use it to perform magic seemed like a significant selling point that most textbooks skipped.
The djinn, though, and Danny. He’d taken Danny into the lamp, and Lydia recruited Isaac to help her with the release ceremony because--well, she wouldn’t say she was meddling, exactly, but it would be good to have a werewolf around who wasn’t Jackson, and Isaac was more agreeable than any of the others, with the possible exception of Scott, who was--busy. And not someone who had a crush on Danny that everyone but Danny could see. But Isaac was shy and Danny was being uncharacteristically shy about this, himself, so they needed a nudge. And if that nudge was pulling Danny out of the lamp starkers, well. It wasn’t Lydia’s fault. That was just how the ceremony worked, because of the space-time continuum and lamps. It was complicated, but at the end of the day: Danny’s little harem girl outfit disappeared with the shackles when they got him out of the lamp, leaving him wearing approximately nothing.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was the look an Isaac’s face when Danny fell out of the lamp, which had nothing to do with the clothes Danny was or wasn’t (wasn’t) wearing. Isaac let out his breath in a relieved rush, and then he was there, beside Danny, cradling him. Lydia caught Jackson’s eye and they both left the room. Danny and Isaac had been working on a project together, assigned partners in government, but they hadn’t been like this until now, and it wasn’t the time. It reminded Lydia of when Jackson first transformed, and she wondered if Danny and Isaac were experiencing the same heady mix of adrenalin and hormones she remembered from that night. She glanced over at Jackson, who was very obviously listening to what was happening in the other room, leaning against the wall with one leg hitched up.
“Remember?” she said.
“What?” Jackson asked, obviously distracted. Lydia rolled her eyes.
“Stop spying on them, Danny will be fine,” Lydia said. “This is Isaac, you know Isaac.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. He sounded slightly skeptical, but Jackson was skeptical whenever Danny did anything that might make Jackson less central to his life, because Jackson was Jackson.
“Remember when you became a werewolf?” Lydia pressed, lacing her fingers through Jackson’s. Jackson tilted his head towards her and smiled, the corner of his lips turning up into a small, honest smile. He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Lydia’s lips, and she slid her hands up his back.
“You were good in there,” he said, pulling away. “Sexy.”
Lydia swatted at him a little, but then she pressed her face in his shoulder. Before he became a werewolf Jackson had worn cologne, too strong, but then he got sensitive about strong scents. Lydia liked the way he smelled, warm and subtly human; liked the way he looked down at her from under his lashes and wrapped his arms around her, still smiling.
He wasn’t a werewolf then. Or he was--he was always a werewolf--but it didn’t seem like he was. He was just Jackson, and he was kissing her there in the dark hallway of his house, and Lydia was kissing him back. Kissing Jackson had always been the easy part.
And now Jackson’s--in California, fucking Derek Hale. Or something. And Lydia’s in Iowa. It’s flat, and the fields around her are patchworked brown and green. She stops at a gas station, buys a bottle of iced tea from a gas station attendant who doesn’t even look at her. She calls Jackson.
Derek picks up.
“Jackson’s--” Derek starts.
“Just give him the phone,” Lydia says. “I don’t care what he’s doing.”
“He’s in the shower,” Derek says. “He has an iPhone. It isn’t--”
“Why do you keep answering it?” Lydia asks, because she gets it, the iPhone isn’t waterproof, her Droid isn’t waterproof, either, and she broke another phone when she dropped it in a bowl of pho and tried to flirt with the guy to get him to replace it, but he was a dick about it instead. “Why do you keep answering Jackson’s phone?”
“Lydia,” Derek says, and his voice has gone weird and gentle.
“Why aren’t you in the shower with him, then?” Lydia asks. She doesn’t know why she’s angry about this, but she is. She can hear Derek sigh.
“Lydia--” he starts, and Lydia hangs up before she says something else, something stupider. Derek was the one who told them, Jackson and Lydia, that it was important they remain partners. Like Derek Hale was some sort of relationship counselor. She knew about what happened with Kate Argent, Allison told her, and thinking about it now just makes her shake her head because--there’s some fucked up explanation behind this. There has to be. It’s Derek and Jackson, and it probably has something to do with the pack. Lydia’s not sure she wants to know.
She calls Derek back and asks, anyway.
“I almost didn’t pick up,” he says, dry.
“Well, I’m sure we’re both glad you did,” Lydia says. “Does Jackson still take long showers?”
There’s a pause, and Lydia wonders for a second if her call’s been dropped before Derek says “Yes.”
“Okay,” Lydia says. “Explain to me what’s going on.”
Derek sighs again.
“That’s what you wanted to do, isn’t?” Lydia says. “That’s why you keep saying my name like it physically pains you?”
“Yes,” Derek says. “It’s just complicated.”
“It is,” Lydia repeats.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Derek says sharply, and Lydia shuts up and waits. It takes a moment of silence and another long suffering sigh before Derek begins again.
“Jackson only became a werewolf because of you,” Derek says. “You’re the only reason he survived the transformation.”
“Well, good for him,” Lydia says, and hopes she doesn’t sound bitter.
“Yeah, sure,” Derek huffs lightly. “Until you left. He needs more than the rest of the pack.”
“Sex?” Lydia asks. It hurts, because she’s not sure what Derek’s trying to say, but if he’s saying what she thinks he’s saying all her suspicions are confirmed--she knew Jackson needed her more than she needed him. But now she knows Jackson only needed her because Jackson’s wolf needed her like a panda needs bamboo, a koala needs eucalyptus--she was his weirdly specific diet, only Derek turned out to be an acceptable alternative.
“An anchor,” Derek says. “Something to keep him human.”
“Sex,” Lydia says flatly. “So now you’re keeping him human, wolf man. As a favor to the universe.”
Derek doesn’t say anything.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Derek says, when he does say something. “I do what I need to do.”
“And so this is purely mercenary?” Lydia asks. “Do you--” She doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. Does Derek love him? Does Derek--
Lydia tries to shake the thought out of her head. She glances over at her side mirror, then looks back towards the road. On the phone, Derek’s quiet. She wonders if maybe the connection dropped.
“I don’t know,” Derek says as Lydia watches the dotted yellow lines whip past.
Lydia applied to Harvard Early Action and found out she was accepted December 15th, which was precisely the way she planned it. She didn’t plan the strange fissure that ran across Jackson’s face when she told him, though. But she lived in California--she knew about rifts and faults, things that ran beneath the surface and eventually caused quakes.
“You didn’t think I’d get in?” Lydia asked, trying to mask the sharpness in her tone.
“I didn’t think you’d apply,” Jackson hissed. “We talked about this. The pack--”
“Doesn’t dictate my life,” Lydia interjected. “It’s Harvard, Jackson. I’ve wanted to go there since I knew what college was.”
“Things change,” Jackson said. His eyes flashed blue, just for a moment, like maybe Lydia didn’t know what he was talking about.
Lydia looked away.
“Some things don’t,” she said.
They fought that night, that week, that month. It was a bitterly cold winter without any snow at all--Lydia held either climate change or trolls responsible--and Lydia found herself railing against Jackson like he was a cage.
Jackson, for his part, called her ‘babe’ a lot. Probably too much.
“I don’t want to go to Cambridge,” is what Jackson said, eventually. It was spring then. They had tired themselves out, fighting. They were sitting in the bleachers. Lydia’s wrists were crossed on her knees. She wasn’t looking at Jackson--she knew what he looked like. “I don’t--Lydia.”
“You’re choosing between us,” Lydia said.
“So are you,” Jackson said.
Lydia wanted to tell him that she made him this, she gave him this, and if Jackson was loyal to Derek, Derek didn’t deserve it. But they both knew that. And the pack was more than Derek, anyway--it was Erica, Isaac, Boyd. Danny, too. Lydia was one person. She couldn’t compete against five. And she knew she was supposed to be loyal to the pack, too, but at the bottom of it the pack wasn’t her own.
Harvard was, or could be. Lydia needed to figure that out. She needed the time and the space to figure that out, because she knew she was more than what she was in relation to Jackson, to the pack, she just wasn’t sure what, or how much. It seemed important. It was important, she thought.
Danny, for his part, somehow managed to remain friends with Lydia and Jackson both. He was the only one Lydia cried to after she pressed a kiss to Jackson’s forehead and told him they were through. He was the only one Lydia cried to at all.
Lydia doesn’t smoke, has never smoked, but she buys a pack of cigarettes on the edge of Wyoming before she stops for the night at a motel with stains on the carpet. It’s one of the first tricks she learned, and kind of a silly one; she used to do it with pencils, before she was eighteen, but cigarettes work better. She traces a golden rectangle on the carpet, then lays out the cigarettes in a spiral. From there, the math is easy, and the illusion is simpler still: all she wants are candles, but she makes as many as she can, until they fill the room, floating. When she falls asleep, they’re still there.
They’re gone when she wakes up, of course. Illusions vanish with no one there to see them. She picks the cigarettes up off the floor and puts them back in the box, shaking it until everything falls into space. There’s a layer of pale dust in the shape of a spiral on the stained carpet, but she figures housekeeping will take care of it, assuming this hotel has housekeeping. It was cheap.
She calls Jackson. When Derek answers, she tells him she’s calling again and to let it go through to voicemail. He doesn’t say anything at all, but when she hangs up and calls back she does get Jackson’s voicemail message. It doesn’t sound like he’s changed it since high school.
“Jackson,” she says. “I’ll be in Beacon Hills tonight. Late. I figured I’d tell you before you smelled me.”
She doesn’t call Danny, or Jess, or anyone else. The highway keeps going, and it will keep going, even after she gets to the exit for Beacon Hills and turns off. It could keep going across the Pacific, for all she knows it doesn’t. But there are planes, and ships--there are ways to keep moving.
Lydia stops in the mountains, before any of the exits she might need to take, sits on a picnic table and looks out across miles of clear air. She closes her eyes and breathes in.
She hums a little, thinks about getting the cigarettes from the glovebox and making another spiral, but then another car pulls into the picnic area and the opportunity to landscape the universe is gone.
The car’s a Range Rover, and Lydia gives it a look she knows is withering. Two guys get out, and they look a lot like Jackson in high school--not in their faces, exactly, but in how they’re dressed, the way they move. She could flirt with them. It would be easy, easier than taking candy from a child, more like shooting fish in a barrel. They smile at her, too many teeth.
She doesn’t smile back. She gets in the car, burns a little rubber as she pulls out of the lot, just to make a point.
And the point is this: she’s leaving.
Except now she’s coming back. Going back. She still has Utah and Nevada ahead of her, before California, but that’s not much compared to most of the rest of America, so she’s comfortable saying that she’s almost home.
She’s in Nevada, actually, when Jackson calls her back. It’s less surprising than it should be: she looks at her phone, thinks, ‘Oh, it’s Jackson,’ and picks up. It’s only after she hears his voice that she realizes she hasn’t spoken to him since September.
“Lydia,” he says. He sounds careful, which is not how Jackson usually sounds.
“Hi,” she says. She’s gripping the steering wheel too tightly, staring straight ahead.
“You’re coming back.”
“For the summer,” she says.
They’re both quiet, and Lydia wonders if this is it. She’s more than okay with that. She expects Jackson to react or overreact, but she’d rather he didn’t, because that might mean he’s okay. That also might mean he’s gotten to be a better liar, but she’s willing to take those odds.
“Okay,” he says. “We should get dinner. We could--that taco place you like is still open.”
“It’s been nine months, Jackson, not a lifetime,” Lydia says, but she’d like that. When Jackson hangs up she closes her eyes for just a second, presses the heel of her hand to her forehead like she’s getting a tension headache. She isn’t, she just--she might be. Could be.
It wasn’t that she broke up with Jackson that worried her. It’s that she broke up with her true love or her mate or whatever Derek said they were.
She felt like she should regret it more, like choosing to go to Harvard--to be ordinary--was wasting her potential for love and magic and other pretty, romantic things. She was studying math. Other than the candle illusion, she hadn’t done magic in months, and people who did magic were supposed to revel in it, were supposed to be Harry Potter--magic was supposed to be the escape from life. It wasn’t supposed to be the other way around.
She counts by threes, in her head, until she gets to one hundred and two, and then she calls Jess and they start a pretentious discussion about Walt Whitman that quickly devolves into gossiping outrageously until Lydia’s phone is almost out of battery and her exit is almost there. It looks the same, the exit that’s not for Beacon Hills but for a town a bit north of it, as it did the last time she was there, and something in Lydia rises up to greet it, pleased that it’s so familiar, that things haven’t changed as much as it seems.
When she gets back to Beacon Hills it’s dark, and Erica Reyes is sitting outside Lydia’s parents’ house. Erica hadn’t taken Boyd’s last name when they got married because she said it was patriarchal and, furthermore, confusing, given that Boyd went by his last name. The way she said it made Lydia wish they’d been better friends, but the fact of the matter was: they hadn’t been. Lydia thought Erica wore too much make-up. Erica probably did. Erica thought Lydia was a bitch. Lydia probably was.
“Reyes,” Lydia says, nodding.
“Martin,” Erica says, and her smile is a bit sardonic, but maybe it had always been that way.
“I’m surprised my parents didn’t call the Sheriff on you,” Lydia says, looking up at the house. Lydia’s holding her bag in her two hands, and she thinks if she were dressed differently she’d look like something out of a wistful, old fashioned photograph. But she’s wearing cut-off shorts and a Harvard t-shirt a size too small that smells a little human from a day spent in the car, so that’s out.
“They did,” Erica says easily. “And I explained that I was just waiting for you so I could say hello.”
“And?” Lydia asks.
Erica shrugs, then gestures expansively.
“Can’t I welcome an old friend back to town?”
“We weren’t friends,” Lydia says.
“You wound me,” Erica says, then pauses, glances up and down the street, wrinkles her nose and sniffs. “But of course you’re right. I just wanted to tell you not to fuck this up.”
“What?” Lydia asks, even though they both know she knows. Erica raises an eyebrow.
“Anything,” she says.
“I don’t intend to,” Lydia says, and smiles. She knows that Erica’s a werewolf, that Lydia’s tight smile probably shouldn’t intimidate her. “I’m still a witch,” Lydia continues conversationally. “You know I’m here. I’m leaving again in the fall.”
Erica’s still watching Lydia, and Lydia can feel the smile on her face tighten and sharpen.
“I was always more for math than magic, anyway,” Lydia finishes. It’s a declaration, it’s important, and Lydia’s not sure if Erica gets it or if Lydia cares.
“Jackson?” Erica asks, because they both knew that was always the point.
“Please,” Lydia says. “Everyone knows I broke up with him.”
It’s true. Lydia’s surprised at how true it is, when she says it. And there’s something in Erica’s face that might be respect, but before Lydia can catalogue it she’s turning on her high, sharp heel and loping off.
It doesn’t matter, really. Lydia stops and sets her bag down on the pavement. The street lights are flickering through a layer of fog, and she’s back, and there are so many things she should say--to Jackson, to Derek, to Danny. Erica’s probably not the person to tell, but she was there when Lydia was ready to tell it. So maybe over tacos with Jackson, or at Derek’s house, or at the beach in the summertime, when the days are long and warm and the ocean is frigid. Maybe then she can explain it. For now, she knows: Lydia Martin can take care of herself.
She picks up her bag and goes up the steps. There’s a candle in the window, real and not an illusion, and everyone’s waiting for her to arrive.
lydia drives home.
notes: written as part of twreversebang for frogy's fanmix. thanks to gollumgollum for a last minute beta read (I thought our posting date was the 26th...obviously it wasn't).
pg13 . 5999 words . AO3
Lydia Martin can take care of herself. She reminds herself of that as she puts the car into gear, pushing the stick shift into first with the heel of her hand. It’s just for the summer. Cambridge will wait for her while she’s gone, the same way Beacon Hills did. Has been, since she left in August. Is. Beacon Hills is waiting.
She takes her foot off the brake.
I-90 cuts across Massachusetts like the world’s most boring artery, and Google and her Droid’s GPS say Lydia is supposed to get off of it, take I-80 down through Connecticut and then over into Pennsylvania, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know why; she decides to take 90 to 88 in New York, instead. It’s probably a waste of time, but it’s her waste of time, and it’s the little things, she thinks when she stays on I-90 at the interchange.
She calls her parents before she crosses the border into New York State’s laws about cell phones and driving, and she thinks about calling Jackson.
It’s alright to think about. Easier than calling. And it’s funny; in high school Lydia would’ve just done it, scrolled through the contacts on her phone to Jackson Whittemore, called him and said, “Hey, I’ll be in Beacon Hills by Friday, we need to talk.” Jackson’s difficult in a lot of ways, but he’s easy to predict, and Lydia knows he’d roll his eyes and go along with it.
But she’s not in high school anymore, and she ends up calling Danny instead.
“Lydia?” he says, sounding a little uncertain, when he picks up on the third ring.
“Yes,” Lydia says. There’s a Prius in front of her, driving like they’re paying more attention to what kind of mileage they’re getting than going any particular speed. She passes them.
“You realize it’s five in the morning here,” Danny says. Lydia hadn’t thought of that, but she realizes it now, so she repeats her “yes.”
“Okay,” Danny says. “Just checking.”
There’s a noise in the background--someone else talking, and then Danny says, “Go back to sleep, babe,” and Lydia can hear him--getting up, probably, going to another room.
“Who’s with you?” Lydia asks, idly curious. She has her suspicions, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. It helps, actually, to have something to ask.
“Isaac,” Danny says, like he knows Lydia knows. “Why are you calling?”
“You’re still living together?” Lydia says. It’s a stupid question. Danny will probably be offended that she asked.
“Lydia,” Danny says.
“I’m almost to New York,” she says. There’s a sign for the Berkshires, ‘America’s Premiere Cultural Resort’ next two exits. “I’ll have to hang up.”
“You’re coming home for the summer,” Danny says, which is really the crux of the matter. Nothing else panned out; she can live with her parents and do math and get a crappy job, like every other college student. She’d stayed in Cambridge for Christmas, studying for exams--there was only so long she could avoid Beacon Hills.
“Be there by Friday,” Lydia says. “If everything goes according to plan.”
“Does Jackson know?” Danny asks.
“Not yet,” Lydia says, looking out across the unfurling green of the trees.
“Tell him,” Danny says, like she expects him to.
She’s quiet on the phone for a bit, and then she says, “Thank you,” softly, and Danny says, “No problem” before the connection clicks out. She imagines he goes back to bed with Isaac. Lydia keeps driving, the highway in front of her and on all sides, and the trees around her keep going, growing.
The summer before junior year Jackson was a werewolf and Lydia loved him. It was that simple, then; in retrospect, it surprised her how cut-and-dried it all seemed. But then again, everyone knows what they say about hindsight.
It was a fact that Lydia had always had twenty-twenty vision and that made the things she missed all the more surprising, later. Lydia Martin didn’t usually miss things.
Junior year, though. Lydia remembers the way they tripped through that summer, all wrapped up in one another, in something they thought they had both lost, or didn’t have a shot at. They had to be in love, because Lydia had brought Jackson back to himself, because Jackson had let her. And it was easy, in a way, because the summer was easy; all sun and soft sand, caught between their toes on trips to the beach.
The trips to the beach were nothing anyone planned, but more often than not someone would send out a text, and anyone who wasn’t working would split between the available cars and drive out to the ocean, let the cold water lap their feet, stare up at clear skies. Jackson would loop an arm around Lydia’s waist and she’d press her head into his shoulder, close her eyes and breathe everything in. As a pair, they were safe. They would keep each other safe.
Around them, Lydia knew, other relationships ebbed and flowed. Boyd and Erica were whispers and dark eyes. Danny was pretending not look at Isaac, who was wearing swim trunks he had probably outgrown the year before, exposing long legs. Isaac was pretending not to look back, slanting his eyes down and away and then back. Derek even came, sometimes, and college girls would flirt with him and ask if he was taking his siblings to the beach, though they seemed uncertain as to which of their motley group might actually be Derek’s siblings. Derek would look at them flat and blank and they’d eventually fade into the background, as some people do. Most people faded into the background, that summer.
Lydia wasn’t sure how the ones that were foregrounded became her friends--wasn’t sure that they even were--but she was kind of grateful for the attempt at normalcy, even if it fit them like a skirt in need of tailoring, even if Peter cast a pall across everything when he appeared. When Peter was there Jackson let Lydia dig her fingers into his hand until her nails drew small crescents of blood, which was something.
It turned out Peter hadn’t drawn enough life from Derek and Lydia, that he needed more. If it was okay, it was only because Lydia had done her background reading.
Peter Hale was the first person she killed; killing Peter Hale was the first time Lydia looked at Jackson, saw the werewolf shape of him, and wondered if any of this was real.
They were in love. Lydia had saved him. But it wasn’t--it wasn’t like it was before, when Lydia had used Jackson and he had used her back, and Lydia wondered for the first time if Jackson had a choice, or if his wolf had latched onto the closest thing Jackson had to anything and held on tight. Lydia wondered if maybe it should’ve been Danny. Lydia wondered a lot of things, and there was nothing Lydia Martin liked less than not knowing the answer.
Lydia calls Jackson when she’s in Ohio, and Derek picks up.
“Jackson can’t talk now,” he says.
“Can’t, or won’t?” Lydia asks.
Derek doesn’t reply; Lydia imagines him furrowing his brow and staring at the floor, like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t. Lydia imagines, alternately, that he’s just sitting there, not looking at anything in particular, like a person on the phone.
“Can’t,” Derek says finally, without inflection.
“I’ll call back,” Lydia says, and hangs up.
She knows about the thing with Jackson and Derek. Jackson sent her a text message about it in the spring. Or--Jackson sent Lydia a text message that said ‘derek and i r fucking,’ and Lydia’s reaction was--complicated.
It made sense. Derek and Jackson were both needy. Derek and Jackson were both werewolves. Derek and Jackson were both in Beacon Hills. Lydia didn’t know how it started--didn’t really want to know, to be honest--and when she got that text from Jackson she’d considered throwing her phone at a nearby philosophy major, but she had to admit that it made as much sense as anything, if you started with the basic assumption that math was pretty much the only thing that made sense in any clean way.
Derek obviously thinks he’s protecting Jackson from her, and that’s ridiculous. Lydia should be the one protecting them from each other. They’re going to be codependent if they aren’t already. Jackson broke up with Lydia because she wasn’t codependent enough for him, and Derek had always been trying to cobble together a family out of gum and paperclips and poor decisions. They couldn’t be good for each other, and it isn’t that Lydia thinks she’s better so much as she knows she isn’t, knows her metes and bounds.
She floors the gas, passes a semi.
Danny used to sit next to her at lunch and stare across the room at Isaac.
“He likes you,” she said, sometime in November. She was inspecting her nails. Danny had just started to eat.
“You don’t even know if he’s gay,” Danny said. “And the last guy I liked turned out to be--whatever the hell Stiles said Matt was.”
“Controlling Jackson’s lizard form for his misguided revenge?” Lydia asked, raising an eyebrow. “Well, you already know he’s a werewolf, and he’s definitely bi. Seriously, Danny, I don’t remember you being like this.”
“The Jungle’s different from high school,” Danny replied, pushing the food on his lunch tray around with his fork. He looked thoughtful.
“Like high school isn’t a jungle,” Lydia said. “Especially this one.”
Danny gave Lydia a wry smile, one that recognized her joke as more correct than clever and flashed dimples. Across the room, Isaac probably swooned.
“Besides,” Danny said. “He’s a werewolf, and we aren’t, you know--” he gestured expansively with a hand. “Whatever you and Jackson are.”
Jackson was skipping lunch to do something with lacrosse, so they could talk about him like this.
Lydia shrugged, averted her eyes.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not sure how much difference that makes. Werewolves can date like normal human beings. Scott and Allison did.”
“At first,” Danny said.
“He’s just another guy you want to date who wants to date you,” Lydia said. “Don’t overthink it.”
“How many guys like that have there been?” Danny asked, raising his eyebrows wryly. Lydia bumped her shoulder into his, nodded at Isaac.
“At least one, now,” she said. “But I know it’s been more than that.”
“You think he can hear us?” Danny asked suddenly.
“We haven’t said his name,” Lydia said. “So if he’s listening, it’s because he wants to be. Because he’s listening to you.”
“Or you,” Danny said, raising his eyebrows significantly.
“I’m pretty sure I’m effectively off the werewolf market,” Lydia said, though she fell a little short of making the joke she intended to make.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “When even Stiles gives up, you know it’s serious.”
Lydia rolled her eyes and turned the conversation towards the readings for English literature. It made her a little sad, in her way. Not that--Stiles was Stiles--but it made her feel like everything had already been decided, and she wasn’t sure if it was a decision made by her or for her.
She found Jackson after lunch, and he caught her around the waist and kissed her once, twice, three times. Lydia smiled at him, and then for a moment Lydia allowed herself to close her eyes. She almost believed in it, then, still.
She stops at a Subway near the border between Indiana and Ohio for a late lunch. There’s too much vinegar on the sub, bite without any other layers of flavor, but it is, for all intents and purposes, a meal. She considers trying Jackson’s cell again but she doesn’t want to talk to Derek or Jackson, not really, and her face feels greasy. Lydia scrubs at it under the flourescent lights in the bathroom before going back to the car. She’s feeling tired and unreasonable in equal measure, but the sun’s still--well, it’s not high in the sky, but it’s in the sky, and it doesn’t seem worth stopping yet, not when she could get further.
Danny calls her, because that’s something that he does. He takes care of people, or some people--Lydia thinks he used to be more subtle about it, but maybe he wasn’t, and maybe she’s just more sensitive to it.
“Did you tell him?” Danny asks.
“Derek picked up,” Lydia says. Danny makes a noise Lydia can’t immediately identify, contorted by the phone and stifled by the sound of wind whipping past her window.
“You know I’m not a delicate flower, right?” Lydia says. She doesn’t know why she’s annoyed now, but she is. “You can tell me what you’re actually thinking.”
Danny doesn’t say anything.
Lydia hangs up.
A few hours after sunset she checks into a motel, peels back the outer bedspread and falls face-first into the pillow. When she doesn’t immediately fall asleep she turns on the TV and flips through the channels listlessly, then turns it off. She ends up calling her roommate, one Jess Lakhani, just for someone to talk to. Jess and Lydia got on well enough as roommates--if they aren’t living together next year that’s just because Jess was ultimately closer with Vanessa from down the hall. Lydia can’t really blame her; Lydia kept a lot of people at arm’s length after she left Beacon Hills. Maybe when she was still in Beacon Hills, too.
Everyone, actually. She found it was easier to hole herself up with some graph paper and an algorithm than it was to deal with the social landscape. Besides--Lydia won high school by being the most popular. She figured it was about time she found another way to win. So she let people say what they wanted about her. The students mostly said she was a stuck-up bitch, which was ironic, considering they all went to Harvard. The professors mostly said she was a genius, and since about half of them are old men who spent most of the first semester calling Lydia “dear” whenever she tracked them down in their offices she figures it comes out in her favor.
Still, Jess and Lydia are close enough to being friends that Jess is willing to chatter at Lydia on the phone, and that’s all Lydia really wants. Jess won’t ask about Jackson, because Jess doesn’t know; she will tell Lydia to turn to Bravo and watch Project Runway reruns with her, and that’s something Lydia didn’t know she wanted, but--yeah, she did. Watching Heidi Klum say, “Auf Wiedersehen” eventually puts Lydia to sleep, at least until the alarm on her phone wakes her up in the morning.
Danny got kidnapped by a djinn just before Christmas. It wasn’t entirely Jackson’s mother’s fault, but it was mostly Jackson’s mother’s fault, inasmuch as she was the one who bought the lamp. It might’ve been a pretty lamp if you were someone’s grandmother, but you still needed to miss a few obvious alarm bells to buy anything at the antique shop that had popped up in a strip mall outside of town that Black Friday. Which Jackson’s mother--well, obviously she missed them.
So Danny got kidnapped. He and Jackson had been playing video games or something, he bumped the lamp with his elbow, and the rest, as they say--
Well, that’s the short version of how Lydia ends up a witch.
The longer version involved Jackson set to charge into the lamp, nonexistent guns blazing. So Lydia went to talk to Stiles because--whatever else Stiles was, he had more experience with the werewolf stuff than she and Jackson did, so she went to talk to him.
“Genie, you think?” he said. “Did it sound like Robin Williams?” And then he laughed kind of nervously, rubbed his head and spun around in his computer chair, typed a few searches into his computer before sending her to Dr. Deaton, the town vet. The irony of going to the vet to talk about werewolf problems didn’t escape her. She wondered if there was special werewolf birth control she should be asking for.
“So,” Deaton said. “You’re the one who’s immune.”
Lydia stared at him, didn’t drop her gaze. She was good at doing that, then, at being subjected to scrutiny and standing up to it. It was still a skill she wishes she hadn’t earned.
“That’s what they tell me,” Lydia said, false brightness intact.
Deaton hadn’t told her what to do, exactly, but he had given her enough information that she could figure it out, and then he had piqued her interest so she kept coming back. The thing was, magic--or the particular school of it that he taught her, which had its roots in the Abbasid Empire--looked a lot like math.
Lydia took to it like a fish to water. It was more challenging and useful than what they were covering in pre-calc at the time; it was, she found, one of the most useful ways to apply algebra to real life, though it was also the one no one mentioned in school. Not that Lydia had needed a reason to learn algebra, but the fact that you could use it to perform magic seemed like a significant selling point that most textbooks skipped.
The djinn, though, and Danny. He’d taken Danny into the lamp, and Lydia recruited Isaac to help her with the release ceremony because--well, she wouldn’t say she was meddling, exactly, but it would be good to have a werewolf around who wasn’t Jackson, and Isaac was more agreeable than any of the others, with the possible exception of Scott, who was--busy. And not someone who had a crush on Danny that everyone but Danny could see. But Isaac was shy and Danny was being uncharacteristically shy about this, himself, so they needed a nudge. And if that nudge was pulling Danny out of the lamp starkers, well. It wasn’t Lydia’s fault. That was just how the ceremony worked, because of the space-time continuum and lamps. It was complicated, but at the end of the day: Danny’s little harem girl outfit disappeared with the shackles when they got him out of the lamp, leaving him wearing approximately nothing.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was the look an Isaac’s face when Danny fell out of the lamp, which had nothing to do with the clothes Danny was or wasn’t (wasn’t) wearing. Isaac let out his breath in a relieved rush, and then he was there, beside Danny, cradling him. Lydia caught Jackson’s eye and they both left the room. Danny and Isaac had been working on a project together, assigned partners in government, but they hadn’t been like this until now, and it wasn’t the time. It reminded Lydia of when Jackson first transformed, and she wondered if Danny and Isaac were experiencing the same heady mix of adrenalin and hormones she remembered from that night. She glanced over at Jackson, who was very obviously listening to what was happening in the other room, leaning against the wall with one leg hitched up.
“Remember?” she said.
“What?” Jackson asked, obviously distracted. Lydia rolled her eyes.
“Stop spying on them, Danny will be fine,” Lydia said. “This is Isaac, you know Isaac.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. He sounded slightly skeptical, but Jackson was skeptical whenever Danny did anything that might make Jackson less central to his life, because Jackson was Jackson.
“Remember when you became a werewolf?” Lydia pressed, lacing her fingers through Jackson’s. Jackson tilted his head towards her and smiled, the corner of his lips turning up into a small, honest smile. He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Lydia’s lips, and she slid her hands up his back.
“You were good in there,” he said, pulling away. “Sexy.”
Lydia swatted at him a little, but then she pressed her face in his shoulder. Before he became a werewolf Jackson had worn cologne, too strong, but then he got sensitive about strong scents. Lydia liked the way he smelled, warm and subtly human; liked the way he looked down at her from under his lashes and wrapped his arms around her, still smiling.
He wasn’t a werewolf then. Or he was--he was always a werewolf--but it didn’t seem like he was. He was just Jackson, and he was kissing her there in the dark hallway of his house, and Lydia was kissing him back. Kissing Jackson had always been the easy part.
And now Jackson’s--in California, fucking Derek Hale. Or something. And Lydia’s in Iowa. It’s flat, and the fields around her are patchworked brown and green. She stops at a gas station, buys a bottle of iced tea from a gas station attendant who doesn’t even look at her. She calls Jackson.
Derek picks up.
“Jackson’s--” Derek starts.
“Just give him the phone,” Lydia says. “I don’t care what he’s doing.”
“He’s in the shower,” Derek says. “He has an iPhone. It isn’t--”
“Why do you keep answering it?” Lydia asks, because she gets it, the iPhone isn’t waterproof, her Droid isn’t waterproof, either, and she broke another phone when she dropped it in a bowl of pho and tried to flirt with the guy to get him to replace it, but he was a dick about it instead. “Why do you keep answering Jackson’s phone?”
“Lydia,” Derek says, and his voice has gone weird and gentle.
“Why aren’t you in the shower with him, then?” Lydia asks. She doesn’t know why she’s angry about this, but she is. She can hear Derek sigh.
“Lydia--” he starts, and Lydia hangs up before she says something else, something stupider. Derek was the one who told them, Jackson and Lydia, that it was important they remain partners. Like Derek Hale was some sort of relationship counselor. She knew about what happened with Kate Argent, Allison told her, and thinking about it now just makes her shake her head because--there’s some fucked up explanation behind this. There has to be. It’s Derek and Jackson, and it probably has something to do with the pack. Lydia’s not sure she wants to know.
She calls Derek back and asks, anyway.
“I almost didn’t pick up,” he says, dry.
“Well, I’m sure we’re both glad you did,” Lydia says. “Does Jackson still take long showers?”
There’s a pause, and Lydia wonders for a second if her call’s been dropped before Derek says “Yes.”
“Okay,” Lydia says. “Explain to me what’s going on.”
Derek sighs again.
“That’s what you wanted to do, isn’t?” Lydia says. “That’s why you keep saying my name like it physically pains you?”
“Yes,” Derek says. “It’s just complicated.”
“It is,” Lydia repeats.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Derek says sharply, and Lydia shuts up and waits. It takes a moment of silence and another long suffering sigh before Derek begins again.
“Jackson only became a werewolf because of you,” Derek says. “You’re the only reason he survived the transformation.”
“Well, good for him,” Lydia says, and hopes she doesn’t sound bitter.
“Yeah, sure,” Derek huffs lightly. “Until you left. He needs more than the rest of the pack.”
“Sex?” Lydia asks. It hurts, because she’s not sure what Derek’s trying to say, but if he’s saying what she thinks he’s saying all her suspicions are confirmed--she knew Jackson needed her more than she needed him. But now she knows Jackson only needed her because Jackson’s wolf needed her like a panda needs bamboo, a koala needs eucalyptus--she was his weirdly specific diet, only Derek turned out to be an acceptable alternative.
“An anchor,” Derek says. “Something to keep him human.”
“Sex,” Lydia says flatly. “So now you’re keeping him human, wolf man. As a favor to the universe.”
Derek doesn’t say anything.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Derek says, when he does say something. “I do what I need to do.”
“And so this is purely mercenary?” Lydia asks. “Do you--” She doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. Does Derek love him? Does Derek--
Lydia tries to shake the thought out of her head. She glances over at her side mirror, then looks back towards the road. On the phone, Derek’s quiet. She wonders if maybe the connection dropped.
“I don’t know,” Derek says as Lydia watches the dotted yellow lines whip past.
Lydia applied to Harvard Early Action and found out she was accepted December 15th, which was precisely the way she planned it. She didn’t plan the strange fissure that ran across Jackson’s face when she told him, though. But she lived in California--she knew about rifts and faults, things that ran beneath the surface and eventually caused quakes.
“You didn’t think I’d get in?” Lydia asked, trying to mask the sharpness in her tone.
“I didn’t think you’d apply,” Jackson hissed. “We talked about this. The pack--”
“Doesn’t dictate my life,” Lydia interjected. “It’s Harvard, Jackson. I’ve wanted to go there since I knew what college was.”
“Things change,” Jackson said. His eyes flashed blue, just for a moment, like maybe Lydia didn’t know what he was talking about.
Lydia looked away.
“Some things don’t,” she said.
They fought that night, that week, that month. It was a bitterly cold winter without any snow at all--Lydia held either climate change or trolls responsible--and Lydia found herself railing against Jackson like he was a cage.
Jackson, for his part, called her ‘babe’ a lot. Probably too much.
“I don’t want to go to Cambridge,” is what Jackson said, eventually. It was spring then. They had tired themselves out, fighting. They were sitting in the bleachers. Lydia’s wrists were crossed on her knees. She wasn’t looking at Jackson--she knew what he looked like. “I don’t--Lydia.”
“You’re choosing between us,” Lydia said.
“So are you,” Jackson said.
Lydia wanted to tell him that she made him this, she gave him this, and if Jackson was loyal to Derek, Derek didn’t deserve it. But they both knew that. And the pack was more than Derek, anyway--it was Erica, Isaac, Boyd. Danny, too. Lydia was one person. She couldn’t compete against five. And she knew she was supposed to be loyal to the pack, too, but at the bottom of it the pack wasn’t her own.
Harvard was, or could be. Lydia needed to figure that out. She needed the time and the space to figure that out, because she knew she was more than what she was in relation to Jackson, to the pack, she just wasn’t sure what, or how much. It seemed important. It was important, she thought.
Danny, for his part, somehow managed to remain friends with Lydia and Jackson both. He was the only one Lydia cried to after she pressed a kiss to Jackson’s forehead and told him they were through. He was the only one Lydia cried to at all.
Lydia doesn’t smoke, has never smoked, but she buys a pack of cigarettes on the edge of Wyoming before she stops for the night at a motel with stains on the carpet. It’s one of the first tricks she learned, and kind of a silly one; she used to do it with pencils, before she was eighteen, but cigarettes work better. She traces a golden rectangle on the carpet, then lays out the cigarettes in a spiral. From there, the math is easy, and the illusion is simpler still: all she wants are candles, but she makes as many as she can, until they fill the room, floating. When she falls asleep, they’re still there.
They’re gone when she wakes up, of course. Illusions vanish with no one there to see them. She picks the cigarettes up off the floor and puts them back in the box, shaking it until everything falls into space. There’s a layer of pale dust in the shape of a spiral on the stained carpet, but she figures housekeeping will take care of it, assuming this hotel has housekeeping. It was cheap.
She calls Jackson. When Derek answers, she tells him she’s calling again and to let it go through to voicemail. He doesn’t say anything at all, but when she hangs up and calls back she does get Jackson’s voicemail message. It doesn’t sound like he’s changed it since high school.
“Jackson,” she says. “I’ll be in Beacon Hills tonight. Late. I figured I’d tell you before you smelled me.”
She doesn’t call Danny, or Jess, or anyone else. The highway keeps going, and it will keep going, even after she gets to the exit for Beacon Hills and turns off. It could keep going across the Pacific, for all she knows it doesn’t. But there are planes, and ships--there are ways to keep moving.
Lydia stops in the mountains, before any of the exits she might need to take, sits on a picnic table and looks out across miles of clear air. She closes her eyes and breathes in.
She hums a little, thinks about getting the cigarettes from the glovebox and making another spiral, but then another car pulls into the picnic area and the opportunity to landscape the universe is gone.
The car’s a Range Rover, and Lydia gives it a look she knows is withering. Two guys get out, and they look a lot like Jackson in high school--not in their faces, exactly, but in how they’re dressed, the way they move. She could flirt with them. It would be easy, easier than taking candy from a child, more like shooting fish in a barrel. They smile at her, too many teeth.
She doesn’t smile back. She gets in the car, burns a little rubber as she pulls out of the lot, just to make a point.
And the point is this: she’s leaving.
Except now she’s coming back. Going back. She still has Utah and Nevada ahead of her, before California, but that’s not much compared to most of the rest of America, so she’s comfortable saying that she’s almost home.
She’s in Nevada, actually, when Jackson calls her back. It’s less surprising than it should be: she looks at her phone, thinks, ‘Oh, it’s Jackson,’ and picks up. It’s only after she hears his voice that she realizes she hasn’t spoken to him since September.
“Lydia,” he says. He sounds careful, which is not how Jackson usually sounds.
“Hi,” she says. She’s gripping the steering wheel too tightly, staring straight ahead.
“You’re coming back.”
“For the summer,” she says.
They’re both quiet, and Lydia wonders if this is it. She’s more than okay with that. She expects Jackson to react or overreact, but she’d rather he didn’t, because that might mean he’s okay. That also might mean he’s gotten to be a better liar, but she’s willing to take those odds.
“Okay,” he says. “We should get dinner. We could--that taco place you like is still open.”
“It’s been nine months, Jackson, not a lifetime,” Lydia says, but she’d like that. When Jackson hangs up she closes her eyes for just a second, presses the heel of her hand to her forehead like she’s getting a tension headache. She isn’t, she just--she might be. Could be.
It wasn’t that she broke up with Jackson that worried her. It’s that she broke up with her true love or her mate or whatever Derek said they were.
She felt like she should regret it more, like choosing to go to Harvard--to be ordinary--was wasting her potential for love and magic and other pretty, romantic things. She was studying math. Other than the candle illusion, she hadn’t done magic in months, and people who did magic were supposed to revel in it, were supposed to be Harry Potter--magic was supposed to be the escape from life. It wasn’t supposed to be the other way around.
She counts by threes, in her head, until she gets to one hundred and two, and then she calls Jess and they start a pretentious discussion about Walt Whitman that quickly devolves into gossiping outrageously until Lydia’s phone is almost out of battery and her exit is almost there. It looks the same, the exit that’s not for Beacon Hills but for a town a bit north of it, as it did the last time she was there, and something in Lydia rises up to greet it, pleased that it’s so familiar, that things haven’t changed as much as it seems.
When she gets back to Beacon Hills it’s dark, and Erica Reyes is sitting outside Lydia’s parents’ house. Erica hadn’t taken Boyd’s last name when they got married because she said it was patriarchal and, furthermore, confusing, given that Boyd went by his last name. The way she said it made Lydia wish they’d been better friends, but the fact of the matter was: they hadn’t been. Lydia thought Erica wore too much make-up. Erica probably did. Erica thought Lydia was a bitch. Lydia probably was.
“Reyes,” Lydia says, nodding.
“Martin,” Erica says, and her smile is a bit sardonic, but maybe it had always been that way.
“I’m surprised my parents didn’t call the Sheriff on you,” Lydia says, looking up at the house. Lydia’s holding her bag in her two hands, and she thinks if she were dressed differently she’d look like something out of a wistful, old fashioned photograph. But she’s wearing cut-off shorts and a Harvard t-shirt a size too small that smells a little human from a day spent in the car, so that’s out.
“They did,” Erica says easily. “And I explained that I was just waiting for you so I could say hello.”
“And?” Lydia asks.
Erica shrugs, then gestures expansively.
“Can’t I welcome an old friend back to town?”
“We weren’t friends,” Lydia says.
“You wound me,” Erica says, then pauses, glances up and down the street, wrinkles her nose and sniffs. “But of course you’re right. I just wanted to tell you not to fuck this up.”
“What?” Lydia asks, even though they both know she knows. Erica raises an eyebrow.
“Anything,” she says.
“I don’t intend to,” Lydia says, and smiles. She knows that Erica’s a werewolf, that Lydia’s tight smile probably shouldn’t intimidate her. “I’m still a witch,” Lydia continues conversationally. “You know I’m here. I’m leaving again in the fall.”
Erica’s still watching Lydia, and Lydia can feel the smile on her face tighten and sharpen.
“I was always more for math than magic, anyway,” Lydia finishes. It’s a declaration, it’s important, and Lydia’s not sure if Erica gets it or if Lydia cares.
“Jackson?” Erica asks, because they both knew that was always the point.
“Please,” Lydia says. “Everyone knows I broke up with him.”
It’s true. Lydia’s surprised at how true it is, when she says it. And there’s something in Erica’s face that might be respect, but before Lydia can catalogue it she’s turning on her high, sharp heel and loping off.
It doesn’t matter, really. Lydia stops and sets her bag down on the pavement. The street lights are flickering through a layer of fog, and she’s back, and there are so many things she should say--to Jackson, to Derek, to Danny. Erica’s probably not the person to tell, but she was there when Lydia was ready to tell it. So maybe over tacos with Jackson, or at Derek’s house, or at the beach in the summertime, when the days are long and warm and the ocean is frigid. Maybe then she can explain it. For now, she knows: Lydia Martin can take care of herself.
She picks up her bag and goes up the steps. There’s a candle in the window, real and not an illusion, and everyone’s waiting for her to arrive.