Archive of Our Own ^beta

Back when Lydia had always got what she wanted, asking permission had felt like a waste of time. She had learned over the years that nobody would say no to her— and if they did, all it took was pouting lips and doleful eyes and she could change her fate faster than she could flip her hair. She’d sunk into it, that comfortable feeling of getting everything she wanted, to dictating exactly how she was seen, to deciding who was worthy of being smiled at and who she would let slide their way into her life.

She had learned that willingly loving someone inevitably lead to them disappointing her, or disappearing, or both. She had liked being a force of nature instead. She’d always liked being the one who left.

Then Stiles had left her time and time again and Lydia had felt herself get a little smaller each time, a little more humble, fall a little more in love. It’s odd to her that the most active moments of falling in love with Stiles occurred either when she hadn’t realized that they were happening or when the two of them weren’t even that close. But as soon as he was gone (locked in Eichen, kissing Malia, taken by ghost riders) she felt the hole crack open wider. Each time she saw him kiss someone who wasn’t her, she shattered into smaller pieces. And each time she tried to remind herself that she was Lydia Martin and she did not ask permission, he violently reminded her that she wasn’t that person anymore.

Stiles hadn’t asked for permission either. He had just invaded her senses until suddenly everything was a comparison of how she felt when he was subconsciously drawing her name on her palm, when she had her face buried in his neck, when she was watching him laugh in the driver’s seat of his car, when she was hearing him absently hum under his breath as they studied together, when she was tasting him that first and only time, letting her tongue graze his without considering any alternate way to kiss him.

Maybe that’s why they’re perfect for each other. Neither of them asks permission. Neither of them knows when it’s their turn to apologize. Neither of them has ever quite been able to help it, the way they feel about each other. She knows that now. She knows it with a certainty that would be more terrifying if she weren’t so scared already.

Bothering to ask permission to stay over the Stilinski house that night feels futile, especially considering the fight that she would put up if she was rejected. She’d told him she wasn’t leaving him, and then she had. He’d vanished and he wasn’t there and she didn’t get to say it back. So now she’s staying, and neither of them says anything about it as they silently, exhaustedly walk back to the sheriff’s police cruiser.

The sheriff doesn’t comment as Stiles and Lydia clamber into the backseat. He doesn’t question them as they sit on opposite sides, buckling their seat belts because it’s a reflex. When Stiles sets his hand on the middle seat and Lydia wraps all her fingers around three of his, the sheriff doesn’t say anything then either.

It’s pitch black inside the house, and Stiles’ dad goes around turning on each and every light while Stiles stands in the doorway, staring around his own home as though he’s never seen it before. His face is empty, and that’s what makes Lydia slide her hand into his, wanting to see something warm coming from the press of their skin together. Stiles looks down at her, seeming like he wants to say something, seeming like he doesn’t even know what that is. Lydia feels a strong instinct to kiss the top of his hand, but he’s still the boy who she’d spent ages pining after. She’s still only ever kissed him twice— both under extreme duress. She is still so incredibly used to not touching him, not telling him, not taking what she needs from him.

So she shuts her mouth as he shuts the door and she refuses to let go of his hand. Hand holding they can do. Hand holding is something they did before they were even a they, really. It’s innocent in a way that she hasn’t been since she was fifteen, and soft in a way that only Stiles has ever really brought to her. It’s a clenching, solid reminder of the world of things she has been missing since he vanished into a relationship with someone else.

“You kids gonna be okay?”

The sheriff comes to stand in front of the two of them, scrutinizing them carefully. The lines on his face are deep-set in his exhaustion. Lydia remembers helping him kill his wife just a few hours ago and she can see every wave of that agony under the harsh lights in the front hall. Without really thinking about it, she lets go of Stiles’ hand and steps forward to wrap her arms around the sheriff, her cheek pressed against the deep green material of his sweater.

The Stilinskis, Lydia knows, are good people. The Stilinskis are the best of people. Stiles’ dad had been there for her when her own father hadn’t. And tonight she had helped him kill something that was a perfect reminder of the life he could have had if his world hadn’t fallen apart— just like his son’s had. The unrelenting kindness and goodness of the two of them, the way they always want to help, has always awed Lydia, but now she’s overwhelmed by just how empty this home must have always seemed to them.

The Stilinskis are good people, in their small, lived-in house and their old, crappy cars and their fridge that is always full because they try to eat together like a real family, even if they are a broken one.

“I’m sorry,” whispers Lydia, and when Stiles’ dad pats her shoulder comfortingly, she knows he hears. “I’m so sorry.”

He squeezes her shoulder just then, and says, “I’m not,” before gently pushing Lydia back so that he can look at her exhausted face. “It’s okay, Lydia. You did good.”

Somehow, she thinks he’s not just talking about killing the ghost riders’ Claudia, and relief breaks out all over her. Instinctively, she steps backwards towards Stiles’ warmth, helpless to her facial expression when she looks up at him. She sees him catch it, the rawness, the openness, and can see the way awe flickers across his features.

“Yeah,” Stiles says roughly, answering his dad’s question from before. “We’re gonna be okay.”

His dark bedroom, the one that Lydia brought back into existence, is cast in shadows which are too similar to how they’d looked when he was gone. Lydia shivers, incapable of keeping her body in control today, and maybe that’s because the person standing next to her brought back her soul. He’d taken it with him, somehow, stretching it across planes, across time and space, and though she had felt it breaking, it had never, ever snapped.

Lydia doesn’t know if that means that she’s strong or that what they have is strong. But she knows she believes in it. She knows that he’s got something of hers inside of him that she hadn’t meant to give away but that she doesn’t want returned.

They’re standing in the doorway, side by side, not speaking, not asking questions, not breathing for fear that it will all vanish again. Stiles’ breaths are heavy, like he might start to cry, like he’s in complete shock at being back here, and Lydia can’t help herself— she places her hand inside of his flannel, fisting the material of his t-shirt in her hand, and leans her forehead against his arm. Tentatively, shaking fingers reach up to glide through her hair. His other hand comes around her back, so Lydia breathes evenly for him, letting him steady himself.

“I’m not leaving you,” she says again. It’s the first thing they’ve said to each other in a long while. “Not ever, Stiles.”

“I can’t leave you either,” he admits softly, and she knows it’s more than that, knows it means can’t let go, can’t give up, can’t stop. He’s never abandoned how he feels about her, so he’s never abandoned her. And now she gets to learn how to do the same thing for him.

Now she gets to love him as best she can. Better than she can.

She loves him so much, this boy who holds her soul inside of his smile.

“You should eat,” Lydia tells Stiles, her eyes still closed as she leans on him. “You should eat something.”

She remembers him next to her bed the night after they got her out of Eichen, his hands shaking as he brought a bowl of broth to her, lifted a spoon to her mouth, careful not to let any of it spill onto her blanket. They were so nervous around each other back then, not wanting to give too much away. The intimacy of the way he brushed her hair back from her forehead was a secret, lasting only as long as the breaths shared between the two of them.

All of the adrenaline between the two of them had faded after that incident, replacing hope with fear. She refuses to let that happen this time. After the adrenaline fades today, she’s going to bring it alive again tomorrow by putting her hands on his body and painting her tongue across his lips.

“I should shower first,” he mumbles. “I wanna… wanna be clean.”

She understands that too well. Can understand the desperate need to wash the trauma off of her body— whether it’s a werewolf bite, or a chord against her throat, or a fugue state, or a body that wasn’t meant to be inside of hers leaving her bedroom no more full than it had been when she had let him into it.

“Okay,” Lydia says. She opens the door for him, pulling him gently across the hallway to the small bathroom where his shower is. Stiles blinks in shock when she turns the lights on, but that moment is nothing compared to the look on his face when she shuts the door while she’s still in the bathroom. “I told you I’m not leaving you.”

Her voice is quivering when she says it, and she’s daring him to kick her out, but he doesn’t protest. He kicks off his shoes instead, not bothering to untie the laces, and takes off his plaid shirt. Lydia catches it before it falls to the floor, folding it just for something to do with her hands, so that she doesn’t have to make eye contact with him and explain herself. Stiles stands at the sink and brushes his teeth for a long time; she can feel his eyes on her and knows that he’s watching her instead of looking at himself in the mirror.

When he steps away, there’s a nervous air between them as he makes a split-second decision to reach behind himself and tug his shirt over his head. He drops it to the floor and looks at her for a moment, waiting for her reaction almost like he’s waiting to prove to himself that she’s repulsed. But Lydia steps forward instead of away, letting her fingers carefully drift over the gash across his upper chest, healing, but still red and angry. The beginning of senior year seems like it was a lifetime ago, back when she’d thought he belonged to someone else.

Stiles’ eyes are closed as she touches his chest with her left hand, the right one following a careful path up his stomach, not sure where she’s going until she reaches his neck and gently strokes the sensitive skin there in a silent attempt to comfort him.

“You’re staying.”

It seems like it’s actually occuring to him now, and Lydia wants to cry, wants to ask what she can do to prove to him that nothing could make her go anywhere because she doesn’t know who she would be if it weren’t for him. She has spent her life being spun from heartache to heartache, waiting to topple, resisting it as hard as she could. But when she’d landed, it had been right in front of Stiles, and she hates thinking about the bitter girl she might have become without his hope bleeding into her sorrow.

His hand finds her cheek, cupping it, and this time when Lydia breathes in deeply, it’s for herself. Stiles smiles, a small one, mostly with his eyes, looking down at her the same way he had a few hours ago when he had kissed her for the second time in their lives. A few moments later, he places his hands on her waist and lifts her onto the bathroom counter, setting her there carefully. After a few blinks in surprise at his own boldness, Stiles scans Lydia’s face for her reaction.

Then he settles, for the first time seeming a little more relaxed around her.

“I’ll close my eyes,” she says fondly, because as much as she wants to see Stiles naked, she wants to do it right, when they’re both vulnerable instead of Stiles being in it alone. He nods, swallowing.

“Count to ten?” suggests Stiles, and Lydia nods before letting her eyes drift closed and waiting.

A moment later, the sound of Stiles’ pants hitting the ground causes her heart to skip a beat. She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and squeezes her hands into fists, trying to resist the urge to look at him.

“You know, I think this is a little unfair,” she says as the water turns on. She wants to make the air between them less thick; wants to remind him that he can talk to her, that it’s more than just the way it feels when they touch each other. She wants him to remember that she loves him.

“Uh, how?”

“You saw me naked once. An eye for an eye, a—”

“Tit for a tat?” he says wryly.

“Exactly.” Lydia’s voice is decisive.

He hesitates a long time before replying.

“Will you take a rain check?”

It’s tentative. It’s tentative because he’s implying that she might be seeing him naked in a context other than this one, during a different interaction, maybe even on a different day. It’s a promise, when he says it like that, so she keeps her eyes shut, taking his words to heart.

“A rain check,” she promises, because why not? They have time.

It’s insane to think that they finally have time to be together.

A moment later, she hears another crumple of clothes to the ground, what she assumes to be his boxers, and the shower curtain being pulled back once, then tugged back into place.

“Ten,” says Stiles, his voice echoing across the bathroom. Lydia opens her eyes, startled to see a lanky silhouette behind the curtain. She isn’t sure if he knows that she can see him, but she can, can see the shadowy movement of his body, lithe and slow. His head tilts back towards the water and he lets out a little sigh of relief that she isn’t sure she’s meant to have heard. She watches as he just stands there for a moment, under the stream, and resists the urge to join him just so she can be near him again.

He’s only fluid because he’s moving with such painstaking slowness, reaching out for a bar of soap and rubbing it across his flat stomach, the curves of his arms, the skin on his neck that he has to move his head around to get to. Lydia knows that she technically isn’t seeing anything she hasn’t seen before— honestly, a bathing suit would expose more of him than this silhouette does— but there’s something about seeing him rubbing soap across his shoulders that makes her toes curl on their own volition.

When he reaches up to vigorously scrub at his hair with shampoo, she watches the muscles of his back flex with each movement, and for a moment everything and nothing seems to exist in this bathroom. They’re eighteen, scared and uncertain, or they’re twenty-three, chatting lazily as he showers before bed, or they’re forty and she’s asking him what he wants her to get at the grocery store, or they’re sixteen, in another life, best friends who got here much earlier than the two of them did, and all Lydia knows is that she belongs to and with him in each and every scenario.

She’s supposed to be with him. And she doesn’t believe that anybody is supposed to be with anybody, not really, she never has, but she believes that she’s supposed to be with Stiles Stilinski.

The water turns off very suddenly, making Lydia wonder if Stiles had been racing to get back out to her. She wonders if the same instincts that had made her want to sneak under the warm spray with him were causing him to rush through his shower. She wonders if, with everything that she feels, so big and aching and painful, it is possible that Stiles feels those things for her too.

In the back of her mind, she’s realizing that the part of her that had held back right before he got taken was the part that had been worried that it’s not equal. Her motivation for not telling him has shifted and changed so many times over the course of their relationship, but she can remember how it felt a few months ago on those days where he would wake her up at two in the morning by pushing her hair off of her forehead and rubbing a soothing hand across her skin. She can remember how it felt to wake up like that, already knowing, before her eyes are open, before her brain had adjusted to being awake, that Stiles was in her bedroom, that Stiles was touching her, that the scent that made her sink deeper into her sheets, feel safer in her bed, was the boy who had the most dangerous hold on her heart.

What if she had told him and he said no? Or, worse, he left her alone on the sidewalk because she was too invested, too in, too much. The most frightening thing before he had been taken had been thinking about what might happen if she held on too tight and he asked her to loosen her grip. She doesn’t know how to loosen her grip with Stiles. Hasn’t since she’d woken up to his fumbling thumbs stroking her eyelids, delicate and demanding all at the same time.

She had given herself away many times, but it was the first time that it was like this, and the gravity of it is something that Lydia has never underestimated the heaviness of. It’s been terrifying, to think that maybe he’s finally realized that she’s too damaged to be salvaged. It’s been terrifying to think that her small, broken body loves him too much. It’s been terrifying just thinking about what might happen if he finally realized that he didn’t really want the girl she had turned out to be.

The thing about urgency is that it tends to feed demons. They had grown in her head, had multiplied, had taken over like weeds, and still nothing had been enough to stamp down the urgency that she’d felt for him.

When she thinks about it very carefully, she knows that she only remembered he loved her because she loved him too. Without that, without the tug of wrong, wrong, wrong at her navel, she never would have realized it. There was a version of their life in which Lydia Martin had experienced something that she could not recall experiencing. So she remembered.

She missed him, and she remembered, and now he’s right in front of her, hurrying to get out of the shower just so he can stand next to her again.

“Can you, uh, hand me that towel?”

“Oh!”

She looks to the side of the sink where Stiles had placed a towel for himself, probably when she was staring at him and not comprehending most of what was happening around her. Lydia leans forward, reaching out as far as she can go, and Stiles does the same, one soaking wet arm coming around the curtain before it vanishes again. A moment later, he’s in front of her with a ratty blue towel wrapped low on his hips, right underneath the bones that jut underneath his skin.

Lydia freezes, staring at him, tracing her eyes up the hair at his navel to his collarbone to his red cheeks and, finally, to his wet hair. The pieces are sticking up haphazardly, dripping onto his shoulders as he shifts his feet awkwardly, subconsciously reaching up behind himself to rub the back of his head. Lydia notices the hair on his arms and has a sudden flash of a five-year-old boy crying on a playground because he had accidentally gotten pushed over.

He gives a disbelieving sort of laugh before stepping out of the shower, already reaching for her. Lydia entwines their fingers carefully, taking both his hands in hers.

“What are you laughing at?”

“How short you are,” he informs her, eyes flicking down to where her feet are dangling several inches away from the floor. His voice gets quieter, following the look in his eyes. “How insane this is.”

She recognizes the face he’s making even though she’s not sure she’s ever seen it before— he wants to kiss her. She can feel it in her stomach, the build-up, the anticipation, the need to show him that he belongs to her because they both want him to. She tilts her chin up towards him, and it seems to wake him up. Stiles’ eyes search her face, every inch of it, until he sighs heavily and falls forward against her shoulder, wordless. His wet hair drips onto her romper, but Lydia doesn’t care at all, just fists her hands in the dark strands and holds on tight, letting him quiver against her. She feels him turn his head into her neck and kiss her, and then he stays there with his nose pressed to her skin. Lydia closes her eyes and breathes. The way he’s bending over her, his hands braced on the counter by her hips, it looks like he’s bowing to her. And that makes her feel invincible.

“Stiles…” she starts, and he hums against her neck, letting her know he’s listening. “The whole time you were gone... I... I thought you knew.” In another life, she used to get everything she wanted. Why wouldn’t she have had the man she was in love with? It just made sense. Waking up to their reality had been jarring, to say the least. “I thought you knew, I thought that we were together, I would… make up these scenarios in my head of you meeting me in front of my locker and walking me to class. I was so sure.” She unwinds his hair from her fingers carefully, letting her hand drift down to curve around his neck. “So I need you to know now. I need you to know that I’m in love with you.”

She feels his eyelashes flutter against her neck; she can feel the long exhale against her skin. It’s like he’s been holding his breath since he was eight years old and only now has someone given him permission to gulp in air again. It is pure relief.

“You’re in love with me,” Stiles mumbles against her skin. “I mean, I know, I knew, but… you’re in love with me.”

Emboldened by his words, Lydia keeps talking, feeling loud and bright and vibrant despite the fact that they are the only two people who can hear her.

“And I want to be with you. I… I want…” She doesn’t know how to express it in different words, how to express how big it is. She doesn’t know how to tell him that she wants him around when she’s sick, wants to be next to him when he’s angry, wants to be the person who he calls at the end of the day when he’s going to bed. She doesn’t know how to tell him that she wants him to know where all of her freckles and scars are, wants him to trace them with his fingers and mouth. She doesn’t know how to say that the idea of lying to him, or avoiding him, or wasting another second pretending that she remembers how to not care makes Lydia feel sick to her stomach. “I want to be with you.”

They go back to his room, where Stiles wordlessly kneels in front of his dresser and digs deep into the back of the bottom drawer, finally coming up with a tiny pair of shorts, which he hands to her with an edge of nervousness. It takes a moment, and the embarrassed redness that is splashed across his chest and cheeks, for Lydia to realize that the shorts are hers, ones that she had most likely left here years ago and simply forgotten about. The fact that he had saved them, had kept them for her just in case she might need them, had held onto them like they were a picture of their past, emboldens her. Lydia takes the shorts, turns them over carefully in her palms, before she walks towards that same dresser and opens the second drawer down.

The participation trophies on top of the dresser rattle as she sorts through his rumpled shirts, none of them folded. Each one comes with a different memory of a time he was wearing it, a look he gave her, a look he didn’t give her, and Lydia finds herself rifling through simply for the pleasure of revisiting old moments, ones that feel as soft against her skin as his t-shirts. Eventually, she finds one from their sixth grade field day, with all the signatures of the students printed on the back. Lydia pulls it out of the dresser, finding her own name with practiced ease, and fights back a smile at the neat cursive that she’d worked so hard on.

“Meet me in the kitchen?” she says to Stiles, then leaves his bedroom so that he can change in privacy.

It would have felt wrong to jump the gun. At the same time, it feels strange to ignore the intimacy they have too. Still, Lydia goes to the bathroom, the air of which is still thick with warm fog after Stiles’ shower, and shuts the door behind herself.

With the light on, harsh and bright, she can see how exhausted she looks. Being without him for such a long time had taken its toll on her— the confusion, the loss, the anger, the missing. Lydia pushes the shoulders of her romper down, staring at her papery skin in the mirror. She can see her bones sticking out, can see the effect of how little she’s been eating lately. Tilting her head to the side, Lydia lets her romper pool to Stiles’ bathroom floor, leaving her to stare at her pallid reflection in the mirror. She looks at the person in the mirror, the one who appears so damaged to her, and tries to understand what Stiles sees.

She can’t. Maybe that’s why she needs him.

Maybe that’s why he needs her— so that he can understand the bow of at the top of his lips, the soft skin on his forearms, the warmth of his eyes in sunlight. She suddenly understands all of it, that yearning to fix it for him, to make him see the way he explodes into a million fragments in front of her and each and every shattered part is her favorite one. She wants him to understand that she sees the pieces, sees the whole, and is so in love with him that she still doesn’t know what to do with her feelings.

With new resolve, Lydia peels her tights off, kicking them to the ground, and pulls her shorts on. When she tugs Stiles’ shirt over her head, it’s tight on her, showing a pale strip of her stomach over the shorts. Lydia doesn’t care. She likes the way it smells, likes the fact that she’s got the same shirt at home, similarly shoved into the back of a drawer. There’s never been a reason to wear a shirt that’s such an ugly mustard yellow color, but none of that really matters now.

She used to think that so many things matter that don’t. A few years ago, she would have desperately tried to figure out how to shake body into her hair. She would have pinched her cheeks, despaired at the dark circles under her eyes, wondered what Jackson would think of how small she looked— if he would make her feel smaller. Now, she slips a black elastic off of her wrist and ties her hair neatly up into a bun.

It’s enough. She knows it’s enough.

The kitchen is dark when Lydia gets there; she flicks on the lights. Immediately, she wanders over to the pantry, trying to find the chicken stock that Stiles would keep stored once it became evident that one of them was always in the hospital, always getting some sort of surgery. He’d had a whole shelf of it after she’d gotten out of Eichen, even though she didn’t come over that much at first. He’d just broken up with Malia, she was still afraid that she was going to watch them snap back together like rubber bands that stung her skin. But they were at the Stilinski house this one day, catching her up on the homework she had missed, and when she’d gone to the pantry to nab some popcorn, she’d found rows and rows of broth.

Without needing to ask, she had known it was meant for her. Lydia had whirled around, slamming the door to the pantry a little too vigorously, as though the sight had burned her eyes. Stiles’ expression had been one of determined calmness, only undermined by the redness on his cheeks.

It was sweet. It’s still sweet. She knows that there are things he’s done for her that she’d never think of, that she’d never known or realized. She’s probably never going to know all of them, but she can try. So she stands on her tip-toes until she reaches some of the chicken broth at the top of the pantry, and she bends down to the cabinet next to the sink to get a pot, and she pours the broth into the pot and she makes Stiles soup.

It’s not unthinking, like he is. It’s not elegant like he is, either. But it’s a start.

By the time Stiles ambles into the kitchen, rubbing wearily at his tired eyes, the room smells like chicken and salt and the bread that Lydia has in the toaster oven. His eyes widen, almost imperceptible, but she sees it because she’s watching for his reaction.

Lydia is standing in the center of the kitchen, holding a butter knife.

“I made you soup,” she says dumbly, raising the butter knife as if to provide evidence of her progress.

“Thanks,” he replies, just as dumbly, and that makes Lydia smile.

The flabbergasted look on Stiles’ face is enough to spur her into action, to pull out a bowl and a spoon and check the heat of the broth before she ladles soup out for him. Determinedly, she walks the bowl over to the table, refusing to look Stiles in the eyes. His gaze is heavy as she sets the broth in front of him, and he’s so still that it startles her when the chair adjacent to his abruptly moves backwards. Lydia looks at the chair, at Stiles, at the way he just blinks a few times at her, calm. Then she perches delicately on the edge of the chair, as if waiting for him to tell her to get up and walk away from him.

Stiles doesn’t touch his soup. He stares at his hands, two tight fists on the table, and then he stares at Lydia’s hands, which are folded neatly in her lap, as if she’s trying to take up as little space as possible. Then his chair roughly shoves backwards as he stands up and leans across the table to roughly smash his lips against hers, one hand coming up to cover her cheek. It’s awkward, a clash of teeth, at first, and then she unfreezes, tilting her head to him. He kisses her harder, mechanically so, as if forcing himself to scrounge up the energy to do it.

So she pulls away, presses one last, closed mouth kiss on his mouth, and then looks at him questioningly.

“The more we do that, the less weird it’ll be.” He answers her unasked question with a brief shrug of his shoulders, only seeming a bit unsteady.

“Okay,” she agrees softly.

“I want you to…” He takes a breath. “I want you to feel at home here. Like you used to.”

Lydia strokes his cheek.

“That was a long time ago,” she reminds him, because it was. A nogitsune ago, a relationship ago, a few shades of innocence back when everything still hurt but in a different way. “It might take awhile.”

She kisses him, curling her fingers around the material of the flannel he’s got on over his sweatpants and t-shirt. It’s like she’s reminded him of just how long it’s been since they were able to be alone together without being a loaded gun. Suddenly, his mouth is alive against hers, soft and insistent and desperate in a way she only understands because of him. She can feel him lean forward more, feel him want closer, and for a moment she imagines crawling into his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck, and learning what it feels like when his dick presses against her through their clothes.

But instead, she settles back into her chair and pushes the soup towards him insistently.

“I’m not hungry,” Stiles replies instantly, still looking at her mouth. Subconsciously, Lydia drags her tongue across her top lip.

“Your body has been in starvation mode for three months.”

“It doesn’t count. I was on another plane of existence, remember?”

The dark humor in his voice almost makes her give up any pretense of maturity and climb him like a tree in its place.

“There’s no scientific proof that you can exist on a different plane of existence and not be malnourished.”

Stiles rolls his eyes but lifts a spoon to his lips, sipping carefully at the broth. Lydia watches him, her chin propped on her hand, feeling very much like a watchdog. He notices her looking but doesn’t say anything, instead just blowing on the broth with carefully pursed lips. She can feel the quiet of the house shivering all the way through her bones; can feel the way it shivers through him too.

“Thanks. For… this,” he says awkwardly, gesturing at the broth and the toast that he hasn’t touched yet.

“Of course,” replies Lydia, as though this is something she’d do for anyone. As though this is a defining characteristic— Lydia Martin, watchdog, caretaker, chef. His lips quirk up at the way she brushes him off, but he doesn’t call her out on it.

She watches him eat for a few more moments, then blurts it out finally.

“What was it like when you were down there?”

Ever since he’d gotten back, she’d been dying to ask. And she’s not sure if it’s too soon, but she somehow needs to know. She needs to know desperately because she has to figure out how much to hurt for him, how hard to ache. Stiles sets down his spoon, wincing at its loud clatter against the bowl. He meets her eyes with a quiet in his, like he’s the one who has to protect her, not the other way around.

“It was… lonely,” he says eventually. “Like, there were all these people, but none of them were really… awake, you know? They were just shells of themselves… and I was really fucking scared of becoming like that, of getting to that point where I didn’t seem to hurt anymore. Cause they were just like… content. And I’m an insomniac with ADHD and chronic anxiety. I’ve never been content a day in my life, so like the idea of succumbing to that like they did...”

“It would be like totally losing with yourself.”

“Yeah.” He meets her eyes, serious. “It would mean that final piece of me was missing.”

The idea of that makes her feel shivers crawl up her spine. Carefully, Lydia arranges her limbs so that her knees are pulled tight against her chest, her arms pulling them close. She hugs them to herself, rests her chin on them, and watches him.

“How did you stay?”

Now he’s smiling; now there’s a wry twist to his lips that is more familiar than anything she’s felt tonight. It’s the smile that goes down to her toes, the one that used to make butterflies drift through her stomach, the one that told her that Stiles Stilinski, above all, was her equal.

“Thought about you, I guess,” he says, so sincerely that she wants to cry. “Thought about the way you told me that you weren’t leaving me— how it made me so fuckin’ sure that I could tell you I love you before I got taken and it wouldn’t turn out bad. Like, fifteen minutes before it happened I would’ve been sitting in that car terrified at the concept of telling you, or terrified at the concept of not getting to tell you at all before I got taken. But you… you said you weren’t leaving me, Lydia, and I just...” “You figured it out,” she says fondly, and it’s not hard, just then, to reach across the table and grab his fingers.

He snatches her hand up, kissing the palm, the heel, and goosebumps erupt across her skin.

“‘s that…?”

“Okay,” she whispers, so he does it again, slower this time, eyes latched onto hers. It’s not lecherous like it could be, or commanding. It’s a slow, reverent surrender that makes her want to relocate her missing white flag and tuck it into his pocket.

“I kept replaying it in my head like a loser, that look on your face when I was talking. Just, like, hoping it meant what I thought it did.”

Lydia can remember, now, the way it had burned through her. The way his words had lit her on fire and burned her at the stake simultaneously because he was getting taken and there was just nothing she could do about it.

He finally told her he loved her and a few seconds later he was ripped out of her grasp, possibly forever. And maybe a few years ago she would have let herself waste away, or maybe she wouldn’t have let herself love anyone this hard in the first place. But she’d let herself feel everything and his absence had stopped the air from entering her lungs properly until she finally got him back.

It’s a type of bravery, Lydia thinks, to love someone like Stiles loves people.

She can’t believe the person that he chose to love is her.

She can’t believe he hadn’t figured out that she wasn’t worth it yet.

She can’t believe that she’s sitting at his kitchen table with him with absolutely no urge to run away from what is real.

“I hated that I didn’t get to say it back,” she admits, avoiding his gaze.

“Well,” he begins after a breath, his voice taking on a mischievous note. “You could say it now.”

Lydia looks up at him to find an impish sparkle in his eyes— one that has been notably absent for the past year. It hits her, just then, that he hasn’t been this happy in a long time. She can just see it, the way he’s looking at her makes it obvious, and it squeezes painfully at her heart. He’s happy. She’s making him happy.

So she mashes her lips together, meets his gaze, and says it as firmly as she can.

“I love you, Stiles.”

At the sound of her saying his name, he closes his eyes briefly, that content smile drifting across his lips again. She says it softly, like it’s sacred, and that’s probably because it has been for the past few months. He’d been a mythical creature, a concrete fact with no evidence to back it up, a character in a story who she felt she knew despite the fact that he was unreachable.

“I don’t think that could ever get old.”

“Well then,” Lydia starts, then says it a second time for good measure. “I love you.” She pauses, giving herself a moment to watch the light fluttering in his eyes. “Now no more talking until you finish your soup.”

“Okay, so we’re lying on this rock in the middle of the woods, which is fucking dumb, in hindsight, because that’s where Scott had just got turned into a fucking werewolf? Like, what the hell were we thinking? Anyways. I’ve got this huge bottle of Jack that I stole from my dad, and as Scott likes to tell it… I’m wasted.”

“Of course you are,” Lydia says, resting her hand on her chin. “And which breakup was this?”

“Uh, the one right after we all got trapped in the school together?”

“Oh, when you punched Jackson,” she replies lightly, and Stiles groans.

“I was really hoping you forgot about that.”

“I could never.” He grabs a pillow off of the side of the couch and smashes it over his face. Lydia tugs it out of his grasp, throwing it to the side. “It was hot.”

Stiles grins.

“Oh yeah?”

“Mhm,” nods Lydia, solemn. “Plus, Jackson had it coming.”

Across the couch, Stiles’ face darkens a little.

“He did.”

“So.” Lydia slides one foot towards him and taps it against his sock-covered toes. “What happened next?”

“Right, so, we’re drunk, we’re in the woods, and I’m just talking about how there’s plenty of fish in the sea for Scott to date, and I started talking about how much I like girls.”

“You did, did you?”

She’s amused, watching the curve of his tongue as he licks his lips a little nervously, building up to the crux of the story. Lydia has a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to be embarrassing for him. She also suspects that she is going to love it.

“So, apparently, I started describing how much I like girls who have strawberry blonde hair, green eyes, five-foot-three—”

“Ignore you on the daily?”

“Oh man, you guessed who it was too?” he jokes. Lydia rolls her eyes, smiling. “Yeah, Scott called me out in roughly ten seconds.”

“You hadn’t learned subtlety yet.”

He shrugs, unaffected by her teasing.

“I liked you a lot.”

Instantly, guilt invades her thoughts, causing her stomach to clench uncomfortably. Stiles is looking at her contently, like he’s happy that he gets to tell her this story. But for Lydia, it feels wrong. To Lydia, it never should have happened in the first place.

She wants them to be good. She doesn’t want anything in the way.

“I need to apologize to you.”

The cautiousness on his face is almost enough to make her squirm out of his grasp, but she doesn’t. She raises her chin higher. She meets his eyes.

“For… what?”

“For… for when I didn’t know you, and I wasn’t nice to you. For all the things I did that hurt you. For everything that—”

“Lydia—”

“I know, I know you’re going to say that it doesn’t matter, but it does matter. Because a year ago I would lie awake at night trying to pull those moments up in my memory. You know, the ones that hadn’t seemed to matter at the time. I kept trying to find them and remember what I had done to you, how I had hurt you, so that I could convince myself that you’d never feel what I was feeling now. Because it was too late. I had spoiled it.”

He’s not happy about what she’s saying. Lydia can tell. Nevertheless, she fumbles forward with her speech.

“And that brings me to my next apology.”

“And what’s that?” Stiles’ voice is low now, a little more dangerous, like he’s pissed off and trying not to show her.

Which is absolutely ridiculous. She pays far too much attention to him to not be able to tell.

“For not telling you how I felt sooner.”

He closes his eyes. Squeezes them tight. When he opens them again, there’s a sheen of brightness separating the two of them. Leaning forward, he brushes his lips against hers, barely a kiss, and then pulls back to nudge his nose against hers.

“We can’t keep score.”

“I know. I just—”

“I should’ve said something sooner too. Not, like, way back when we were sophomores, when I didn’t really know you. Not then. But when it was… when it was almost too late too many times. I should’ve told you every single time I got scared I’d never get another chance to. But I didn’t because I know what I used to be like, and I was so fucking afraid you’d think it was still that. And it wasn’t. It’s not. God, Lydia, it’s…”

“No, I know,” she bursts out, a little breathless, tightening her hand on his neck, gripping him. “I know it’s not the same anymore.”

He nods, swallowing.

“I didn’t know you enough then.” A grim smile sweeps across his lips. “I don’t even think I know you enough now. I’m never, ever gonna know you enough, or be close enough, it’s like...” He’s blushing. Lydia can tell through the moonlight that he’s embarrassed, and she likes it so much, the way he’s uncertain around her. She likes the fact that she isn’t the only one who is afraid of one, single misstep making their whole house of cards fall down.

Maybe it’s that fear that will keep them from collapsing in on themselves. Maybe that fear can keep them steady. Here, towards the beginning, the only thing that she can see making her walk away is being afraid that he will walk first. And as long as that’s in the back of her mind, she’s going to be terrified.

But she’s also going to try harder than she ever has in her life.

“Well.” She focuses hard on one eye, just one, and the way the colors bleed together until they’re something new, something golden. “What do you want to know?”

The way he lights up from the inside warms her all the way down to her toes.

Around one in the morning, they turn on the television so that the house doesn’t feel as empty. When they’re hunched together on the couch, heads tilted towards each other, they don’t have to speak above a whisper.

Lydia wonders idly if she’s ever had anyone who latched onto her every word like he does. As it is, she’s forcing herself to do the same for him. It’s late, and she’s exhausted, and she wouldn’t go to sleep right now for anything. But for Stiles, it has always been effortless. He likes listening to her. It’s something that she can see without even having to search for it.

To the background of canned laugh tracks and unfamiliar voices, she presses her knees against Stiles’ legs and sews together the words that have been floating in her head for years with nothing to attach them. She calls up the things that she doesn’t want to, the pieces that hurt too badly, the ones that she’s never revealed even to her mother, much less a boyfriend.

Stiles isn’t a boyfriend, though. He’s a best friend. He’s the person she’s in love with. He’s the string that pulls her lips into a bright red smile even when everything around her seems gray.

“A few days later, he came back to grab some things. And I guess I thought… maybe I thought that he would explain it to me. Take me out for ice cream, or for a walk, and tell me he wasn’t leaving me, he was leaving her. And he just… didn’t.” She breathes her heart out through her lungs, letting it linger in the air for a moment. “I think I waited for him to say that for a long time. Maybe… maybe too long.”

Lydia cringes at the way her voice dips, just for a moment, and for some reason she isn’t surprised when Stiles cups her cheek.

“You didn’t ask for anything he didn’t owe you, Lydia.” She squirms uncomfortably at how quickly he had pinpointed what she’d been thinking, but doesn’t say anything. “The truth is, you know exactly what you deserve. And he made you feel like you didn’t, but that’s not your fault. That’s on him.” When she meets his eyes, he’s watching her earnestly. “You never, ever ask for too much.”

She laughs. It’s hollow.

“I think you’re the only one that thinks that.”

“No.” Stiles shakes his head. “No way. This past year… look, watching you has been incredible because you’ve done all this shit that never would have occurred to you when you were younger. You aren’t the person you think of yourself as— and, trust me, I know. You’re so fucking selfless, you never ask for anything from anyone, you look out for other people in a way that neither of your parents ever did for you. It’s amazing.”

“Well,” she begins, tasting the bitterness of her tone on her tongue, “I think I owe it to the world, don’t you? After the way I behaved for such a long time?”

His hand slides down from her cheek to her arm, fingers trailing across the exposed skin under the sleeve of his old t-shirt.

“It hasn’t been about you in a really long time, Lydia.” She gazes at him, enamored by the sincerity with which he stares at her. “You never make it about you, never, so I’ve decided that I’m going to always make it about you so that we balance that shit out.” She laughs a little, and he breaks out into a smile. “Seriously. Just keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll be over here making sure you…” He pauses, searching for words. Instead of letting him, Lydia interjects.

“Take care of me. And I’ll take care of you.”

His eyes flicker from her eyes to her lips, then back again.

“So, basically what we’ve been doing since we were juniors?”

“Exactly.”

Lydia doesn’t know why she feels pride course through her in that moment, but it is heady and powerful and she thinks it tastes like his tongue tilting against hers. Just to make sure, she leans forward and kisses him, knotting his hair around her fingers to pull him closer.

When they pull away, Stiles’ eyes are glassy and Lydia’s heart feels just as delicate.

“Don’t let me sabotage this,” she whispers, leaning her forehead against his shoulder. He smells like detergent and deodorant, the same scent that she had picked up on his lacrosse jersey. It had been muscle memory, really, that made her stomach drop when she smelled it— that made tears come into her eyes. She had his voice. Now she had his scent. Searching for him like this, without knowing his face, without knowing their stories, was like blindly stumbling around in the dark and not knowing where the lightswitch could possibly be. “I know myself. I’m going to try.”

“Think I’ll be able to tell?”

She breathes out a laugh.

“Oh, you’ll know.”

“‘kay,” he whispers. “I’ll push back, then.”

“I mean it, though,” she tells him, raising her voice a little louder. “I could… I would… I’ll wait for you to leave and then push you away when you don’t. I know mys—”

He cuts her off by reaching out to offer her his hand. She takes it, a little confused, and then he shakes her hand as though they’re entering a business interaction.

“I, Stiles Stilinski, do vow to never let you chase me out of your life when I know you still want me there.”

“And don’t let me be mean to you because I’m scared,” Lydia warns. “And… and…”

“I will never let you be mean to me, I will never stop loving you even if you are.” He trips over the word ‘love’ like a little kid, nervous. Lydia smiles. “And I will never stop wanting to be the person that makes you happy. Because you fucking deserve happiness, Lydia.”

It feels like she’s caught a firefly in her hands, something so fragile and unique that she could’ve missed it altogether. If it weren’t so strong, burning through her, it could have gone unnoticed. But she cups it to her, presses it against her chest, acknowledges how much power that one, tiny thing has. She finds it in Stiles’ eyes, in his hands, in the way his tongue darts out to nervously wet his lip, waiting for her reaction.

“We’re not going to ruin this.”

She says it like a statement, even though it’s a question. Even though it is the shakiest ground she has to stand on, loving him. She says it because she wants to believe it, even though everything in her past has shown her that loving people does nothing but make them vanish.

Her memories of her father are all black and white, pages in a storybook that she’d been forced to close a long time ago.

Her memories of Stiles are so flushed in color, so warm, that everything has a tint of pink to it. His cheeks, his cupid’s bow, the skin on his wrists that should appear paperwhite. It’s not. She sees color in him everywhere, giving her the distinct impression of pages still to come.

Stiles doesn’t move, just stares at her with eyes that are brown and yellow and orange and filled to the brim with hope.

For the first time, Lydia exhales.

By three in the morning, they’ve grown bored of sitting on the couch, vollying words back and forth like they’re playing a game that they’re the only ones who know the rules to. She notes, midway through a story Stiles tells about the first concert he ever went to, that sometimes he doesn’t have to finish his sentences. Sometimes he’s speaking and it’s like the cliff-notes version of the story and Lydia fills in every line, every blank. Sometimes he’ll trail off and she’ll catch the words in the lines on his face or the set of his mouth.

Lydia stretches, yawning, and Stiles stands up on legs that are shaky from hours of disuse and offers a hand to her. She takes it, following him outside to his back porch. They sit on the unfinished wood slats, letting their feet dangle into the cold grass. Stiles’ legs stretch so much further than Lydia’s. She stretches on her tiptoes until she can almost knock her foot against his ankle.

He doesn’t look at her. Just squeezes her hand tighter in his grasp.

“If you’re going to apologize, I need to too.”

“Thought you said we weren’t going to keep score?” she responds wryly.

“Easier said than done,” he says, laughing through his nose. He sounds guilty. Lydia can’t help it. She rests her head on his arm tentatively. “I think I… I kinda knew. I didn’t know, but I knew in some ways. And I wasn’t there for you because I was scared to be wrong.”

“When?”

“After we got you outta Eichen, I dunno, I just—”

She groans.

“That’s when I was sure you knew.”

“It was more like I was spinning my wheels. Like, I’d tell myself that I was right, then I’d tell myself to shut up. Then I’d—”

“I was so angry with myself.” Her voice is loud, but there’s some humor in it. It seems ridiculous now to question whether Stiles had feelings for her, but at the time it had felt impossible. “I thought I gave it away and every moment you didn’t say it back, you were telling me you didn’t want me. And then I felt—”

“Lonely,” he fills in for her. “When we were little kids I used to tell Scott I thought you were lonely and he never believed me.”

She feels her heart clench, a natural reaction to feeling raw and exposed. But it’s Stiles. She has to learn to not be scared of Stiles.

“You paid attention.”

“Couldn’t help it, I guess.”

Lydia kisses his shoulder. Murmurs “I didn’t deserve you” into his flannel shirt and hopes he doesn’t hear her. Because she didn’t. And she doesn’t. But he just presses his lips against the crown of her head, holding them there for a long time.

“False. You were, like, the coolest girl I’d ever seen.”

She snorts.

“I was a snob.”

“Yeah, a hot snob in the snobby sandbox.”

Lydia hides her face in her hands, laughing.

“Oh my god.”

“Seriously, I think my sexual awakening was playing dodgeball against you in gym class.”

“Stiles.”

He tucks his chin back against his throat, shaking his head back and forth.

“Ugh, and then I felt massively guilty about it when we actually became friends.”

“Me too,” says Lydia without thinking.

He’s silent for several moments. Then he clears his throat.

“Um, what?”

Lydia blinks up at him.

“What?”

“You… thought about that?”

She sighs dramatically, rolling her eyes at the moon as though the two of them are in on a secret together. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re the only two who know what it was like when she would wake up in the middle of the night with her hand already tucked into her waistband, her hips rutting against a pillow. On those nights, she would pretend that Stiles was on her bed with her, his lips on her neck, his hand on the back of her head, his fingers gliding through her slick. She’d thrust her chest out as she arched back and imagine her nipples sliding against his chest. And she’d ignore, just for a moment, the bitter knowledge that he was two miles away in his own bed, another girl wrapped around him the way Lydia wanted to be. She’d lie in the moonlight that peaked through her curtains and breathe in particles of dust and light and try to brush away the loneliness of it all, just for a moment, just until the thought of him made her come.

“Of course I did.” When he doesn’t say anything else, she continues. “I started thinking of you that way after you saved me from the bear trap. I think that’s when I knew it wasn’t a fluke, that I wasn’t going to stop feeling what I felt after I kissed you.” She elbows him a little. “You got under my skin, Stilinski.”

She feels the way he smirks all the way down to his toes; curls them as he preens a little, his nose scrunching up in satisfaction.

“All that false confidence was good for something.”

“No,” Lydia disagrees. “I don’t believe that. I think a part of you just… knew we could be friends. I don’t think it was bravado. I think you’re just smart.”

“Are you being optimistic right now?”

He’s pretending to be shocked, one hand over his heart and the other one coming up to feel her forehead, pretending to check if she’s well.

“No. I’m being logical.”

It’s late, they’re giggly, they’re comfortable. Everything that hurts seems to have vanished with the sunset, existing in a different section of the universe. In this one, they’re two normal teenagers who finally made it to some semblance of a finish line. In this section, the biggest roadblock to getting here was Stiles dating another girl and the thing that hurts the most is missing someone who’s right next to her, not someone who Lydia will never see again.

In this version of their lives, she’s got some form of practice at being content. She’s not going to have to learn how to trust the boy she loves despite the fact that she already trusts him. She’s never going to have practice not feeling guilty for breathing.

The night sky winks down at them, tumbling away from darkness and towards light as they turn their faces up to it. It’s too cold to be outside, but Lydia doesn’t care. Her hair tickles her elbows as she looks all the way up, eyes skidding around the horizon until she spots all of her favorite constellations.

“I wish people died like stars,” Lydia says without thinking. She’s taken aback, a moment later, to have said something that would appear so odd. Stiles, however, doesn’t seem to notice.

“Millions of years,” he says quietly. “Just trying to cling onto life any way they can.”

“Millions of years,” she agrees, “and right before they’re gone they’re at their brightest.”

“I don’t want to live millions of years,” Stiles admits, sighing a little.

“I think I just like the idea of fighting that hard to live until you become bigger than yourself.”

“S’not hard when you’re five-foot-three,” he teases, nudging her. “I get it, though. I get wanting to be bigger.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a moment. The grass sways to the side, and Lydia runs her toes over individual blades, trying not to disturb them. When she gets up later tonight, she wants it to be like she was never there. “I want to make a difference. I want to help people.”

“You will.”

She’s so confident about it that she isn’t expecting the insecure skepticism of his voice when he says,

“How do you know?”

“Because you helped me.” Lydia shrugs, not looking at him. “Because you stayed up night after night researching banshee information even though we both knew it was useless. And you were always there when I couldn’t control my abilities, always making sure I wasn’t hurting myself or… or getting too overwhelmed. I don’t know, Stiles, you just... you risked your life for me and never asked for anything back. And then you risked your life for other people too, even when they didn’t ask for it, even when they didn’t realize it. You dragged me out of bed at two in the morning to make sure other people were safe because you wanted a reason to help them. So I just know. I know because I know you.”

“Oh.” She notices him wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand and tries not to feel shy. “Shit. I shoulda had you write one of my recommendation letters for college.”

They realize it at the same time, turning to look at each other with wide eyes. Without another word, Stiles scrambles up and rushes into the house, Lydia close behind him. She goes to the kitchen table, shuffling through the piles of mail that are strewn there, while Stiles checks the box on top of the fridge.

“Anything?” asks Lydia as she finishes the pile, finding no letter addressed to Stiles.

“No,” he says, voice thick with anxiety. “Oh, god, what if—?”

“Stop,” says Lydia, holding her hand up. “The early decision program that you applied to. Did they give you a username and password to check your account?”

“The one at George Washington?”

“Mhm.”

“Uh, yeah. Yes.”

“Do you remember it?” she asks coaxingly.

“Yeah,” replies Stiles. “Um, it’s the same password I always—”

Lydia holds out her phone and hands it to him. As Stiles feverishly types the web address into her phone, she moves behind him, standing on her tiptoes, peering over his shoulder. With shaking fingers, he finishes his password and clicks the “admissions” tab on the tiny corner of his screen.

She’s glad she’s already connected to the wifi, because Stiles seems too panicked to remember the password and Lydia’s fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to handle the slow cell service in Beacon Hills.

Dear Mieczyslaw,

Congratulations! George Washington University is excited to welcome you to the class of 2017. Our comprehensive criminal justice program, beginning this summer in—

“I got in,” Stiles whispers before Lydia can read anything else. “I got in.”

He turns to her, staring in shock, and she tugs the phone out of his hand, a little worried that he’ll drop it. Then she hugs him, wrapping her arms all the way around his body, standing on her toes so that she can get a better grasp. He pulls her into him and laughs in her ear, relieved.

“Congratulations, Stiles,” murmurs Lydia.

“God, I can’t believe Scott’s dad actually—” He pauses. “Wait. Where are you going?”

“MIT,” she tells him. “I got in as a junior, actually, because—”

“It’s only an eight hour drive.” She pulls back to look at him, frown deepening. “I… looked it up when you applied.”

She presses her smiling lips against his, feeling the way he chuckles deep in his stomach as he kisses her back.

“I guess that means we’re going to try long distance,” Lydia teases as his lips drift from her mouth to her cheek, then her other cheek, and finally her forehead, his large hand cupping the back of her head, the other stretched all the way across her back. She closes her eyes. Lets herself sort out her frazzled emotions until she finally, finally finds the happy ones, pulling them to the forefront.

“You think I’m gonna let you go after I just got you?” he replies, scandalized. “I mean, we can do whatever you want, but I’m probably gonna be pining after you regardless, so—”

“So long distance it is.” She says it softly, eyes glued to his so that she can watch the way he reacts. It’s odd so far, something that fits but isn’t yet broken in, and Lydia expects that she’ll get used to it within the next few weeks— meeting Stiles’ eyes instead of looking away. Exposing herself to him instead of hiding. Having a boyfriend and a future and a bright, fervent hope that she hasn’t felt in years.

“I get to tell people that I have a girlfriend who goes to MIT,” he says happily, and then he pulls a face. “Oh god, they’re gonna think I made you up.”

Lydia smirks.

“Not unless you bring up the banshee part.”

“Sure, I’ll just tell them that I’m dating a gorgeous math genius who’s attending MIT and who I’ve had a thing for since I was eight years old. That’s totally believable.”

“Well, it should be,” says Lydia, mashing her lips together. “It’s the truth.”

All it takes is one yawn before Stiles has Lydia up off the couch and is steering her towards his bedroom, despite fervent protests on her part.

“I’m not tired,” she argues, which just makes Stiles push her a little harder.

“Sure, and I’m not eternally bitter,” he says, flicking on the light in his bedroom. “Back to you.”

She stands in the center of the room, crosses her arms over her chest, and glares at him as he selects a pillow off his bed and throws it on the floor. Then he opens the door to his wardrobe and reaches all the way to the top, grabbing at a thick, woolly blanket from the shelf.

“What are you doing?” Lydia asks, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

“I’m just trying to reach,” he explains, oblivious to the annoyance on her face as she crosses the room and smacks her hand against the lightswitch, letting the lamps flicker off. Stiles is turning around in confusion when she grips his hand in the dark and tugs him impatiently towards the bed, picking up his pillow and putting it in place before she crawls in between the covers and turns to stare at him expectantly.

“Well?” she says when he doesn’t move. Her voice startles him into action, and Stiles scurries into the bed next to her without hesitation, as though she’s about to change her mind at any second.

For all her confidence, her pulse has still sped up as he settles into place, watching as she slides a bit lower, getting comfortable on one of his pillows. His voice is nervous too, when he speaks, trying to laugh off the awkwardness of sharing a bed for the first time.

“I mean, if you wanted to get me into bed, all you had to do was ask.”

“For the love of God, Stiles,” replies Lydia, rolling her eyes.

He’s silent for a moment.

“You know,” he begins, adopting a casual tone that she immediately decides is fake, “if you’re going to be my girlfriend, you have to actually laugh at my jokes.”

It’s her turn to be surprised.

“What? I laugh at your jokes.”

“No,” he corrects. “You smile and look away, or you cross your arms and roll your eyes, depending on the joke.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“Specifically not laughter, yes.”

“It is for me,” she says mildly.

He groans, hiding half of his face in his pillow.

“Look, I just… I wanna make you laugh. You don’t laugh a lot, and you should, ‘cause it’s beautiful and I think there’s some scientific study that says it helps make you happier, or something, and maybe you don’t think I’m funny, but—”

“Stiles.” She reaches out and touches his cheek. “You’re the funniest person I know.”

He blinks.

“I am?”

“If you tell anyone this, I will deny it, but… I love your sense of humor. I do, I promise. I just… don’t laugh a lot.”

“Oh.”

He sounds disappointed, and she feels guilty.

“So how about this,” says Lydia, expression becoming austere. “I, Lydia Martin, do vow to always find your jokes funny even when they’re not, and to let myself laugh at them when I want to.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm,” she murmurs, leaning forward. “I vow to laugh at your jokes, and watch the movies you love, and to never, ever take you for granted. And I vow to always reiterate these things when you need to be reminded of them. I will always tell you I love you when you need it repeated. Because when I say it, Stiles, I mean it.”

She feels it so strongly in that moment, offering her hand to him the same way he’d done for her earlier, and shaking it. In early morning light, she can barely see his face, but she can hear his stuttering breaths, the way it affects him. For the first time, it occurs to Lydia that maybe she doesn’t give herself away enough. She’s all internal, all quiet affection and silent ardor. And she knows that he could take the time to read into it now that he’s looking for it— she knows that, were he to look back through their past moments together, he would find the hints and clues that he had been missing. But, God. she loves him too much to make him look that hard. He shouldn’t have to search to find her.

When she wakes up tomorrow, fully rested and with renewed inhibitions, Lydia doesn’t want to forget how it feels to give herself away to him.

“It’s a deal,” he says hoarsely, kissing the top of her hand.

Earlier in the evening they had barely been able to look at each other. Now it’s five in the morning and they’re lying on his bed nose to nose, Lydia purposefully nudging her knee against Stiles’ thigh, Stiles’ thumb drawing soothing lines across her shoulder. He’s got his other arm resting on the pillow on top of her head, and Lydia feels surrounded by him, by the smell of his sheets and the warmth of his body and the closeness of their minds.

She wants him to know how much it means to her.

“We should make breakfast for your dad in the morning,” says Lydia, because it’s true, and also because she can anticipate the way Stiles’ brows dip as he looks down at her like she’s the most precious thing in the world. “After everything that happened— he deserves it.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees, briefly kissing her on the mouth. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“And you.” Lydia pushes her knee against him a little bit, as though she’s trying to get his attention. “Are you okay after seeing your mom again?”

She’s wanted to ask all night. As they shared stories of childhood traumas and favorite animated movies and moments that changed everything between them even though they hadn’t realized it at the time, Lydia had been going back and forth, debating whether she should bring it up.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I… it wasn’t her. It looked like her, but it wasn’t her, y’know?”

“I know,” Lydia whispers.

“I keep thinking about how my dad had to lose her a second time.”

“I can’t imagine,” admits Lydia.

“The first time was so bad, so slow, I kinda wish I had stayed gone so that he didn’t have to lose her all over again.”

“There’s no way your dad would prefer that,” scolds Lydia gently.

“Yeah, well.”

He sounds so helpless, and it reminds her of what she already knows, of the fact that he’s always felt like a burden, that his positive relationship with his father is a new development, not something that existed at the beginning of time. That the reason Stiles knows how to cook and do laundry isn’t because he likes it, but because he had to take care of himself and his dad after his mom first died.

“Your dad loves you more than anything,” Lydia tells him, the severity in her voice unwavering. She wants him to know it. She wants him to know how loved he is.

But he just laughs, a little frustrated, and breaks Lydia’s heart all over again.

“His hyperactive little weirdo, yeah.”

“Stiles.” Her voice has a furious edge to it, one that she thinks must be startling from the way he jerks back slightly. “You weren’t there when you weren’t there. He was… when he remembered you, when he realized he was missing someone? Nothing else mattered.”

Stiles blinks back the tears in his eyes, and Lydia wipes away the one that manages to fall. She leaves her hand on his chin, stroking his jaw soothingly.

“Your dad loves you for all those things… and, god, the things that I love about you the most are the things that you’d never guess or assume or think about. I’d imagine it’s the same way for him. You’re his son. He loves you because of you.”

For a moment, Stiles is silent. When he does speak, he’s very quiet, as though he’s afraid someone else in the room might hear even though they are the only two people there.

“I just… I want to make him proud.”

She leans her forehead against his.

“You will. You already do.”

“Wanna impress you too,” Stiles adds.

He closes his eyes, not wanting to see her reaction, but not wanting to move away from her touch.

“You do impress me.” Honestly, it’s ludicrous to think that she could ever be with someone who doesn’t impress her the way Stiles does. She had been with guys like that once. But she’s so different now, and the way he thinks blows her away.

“Even after…” He trails off.

“What?”

“Donovan,” says Stiles quietly. “Even after I killed Donovan.”

She takes a few moment to compose her mind— to think about what to say, how to approach him. She wants to be careful, because if she isn’t, he could get more in his head than he already is. So when Lydia speaks, it’s in a slow, even tone, trying to keep her voice level.

“You’ve been thinking about this a lot, haven’t you?”

Wordlessly, he nods. She waits.

“Everything that’s happened… the nogitsune having my face, torturing you, killing your best friend… and then Donovan. That wasn’t someone wearing my face. That was… that was me.”

Thinking about him killing someone makes her want to cover him with a blanket and hide him from the world. But worse is thinking about him beating himself up for something that means he’s here. Stiles could have vanished so easily that night. And, instead, she got to keep him.

“Earlier tonight, that ghost rider was pointing a gun at your head. I screamed and I killed him so that he wouldn’t kill you.” She frowns. “Do you think I’m a murderer?”

He shakes his head emphatically.

“God, no.”

“Then why, Stiles, do you think you are a murderer?”

“Because it wasn’t the s—“

“Oh, don’t say it wasn’t the same. Come on, Stiles. You only think it’s different because it’s me.” She's furious, and he can tell by the tremor in her voice, she knows he can tell. “The truth is, if you’d let him hurt you, I never would have forgiven you. Never. You did what you had to do to get back to me. And that’s what was supposed to happen.”

The way Stiles’ body collapses in on itself reminds Lydia of a blanket flowing into place until it lands with one final puff of air. He pulls her to him, squeezing her tight, and leans his head low onto her shoulder, shuddering a little.

“I almost told you once,” he whispers hoarsely. “I wish I’d known you’d think of it like that before because I swear to god, you were the person I needed to tell. We were standing in the forest and I just thought to myself… Lydia would get it. Lydia would know.” He hesitates. “But, yeah. I couldn’t. I mean, obviously I couldn’t.”

“You don’t have to keep anything from me.” Lydia lifts Stiles’ head away from her shoulder, forcing him to make eye contact with her. “You don’t have to hide anything. I’m not… I’m not this perfect person that sometimes I think you tell yourself I am. You’ve seen all the hurtful things I’ve done, I think you’ve seen the worst of me. You can show me the worst of you. I’m never going to hate you for it.” She quirks a smile. “In fact, I might love you more for it.”

He laughs.

“Like I love you more every time you act like a bitch?”

“Oh, do you now?”

“Absolutely,” he replies with sincerity. “The ruder you are the happier I am.”

“From now on, we’re rude together,” she teases, then grows quiet. “Seriously, though, Stiles. If you fuck up, we figure it out together. Your messes are my messes.” She nudges him. “Okay?”

He seals it, leaning forward like he’s going to kiss her. Lydia’s eyes flutter shut, and that’s when Stiles kisses one lid, then the other.

“Okay,” he agrees, so quiet and so sweet that it makes any tension left inside of Lydia’s body simply melt away. “Together.”

In the cold light of five in the morning, Lydia learns that she has an obsession with Stiles’ heartbeat.

It’s odd to think that it is the same heartbeat he’s had since they were kids. His heartbeat is the irrefutable evidence that something so precious to her had existed all along. Stiles hadn’t simply sprung up and swept her off her feet one day. He had been waiting for her to hear it for years, his heart pumping and shattering and leaping as he went through life without her.

Lydia likes to think, even though there is no proof, that Stiles’ heartbeat is louder than hers. Certainly she believes that his is stronger than hers— it has to be. His heart had made her better, had solidified the beats in hers.

She lies on his chest, her ear pressed against his t-shirt, listening to the beat as it pounds against her ear. She suspects that it’s faster than normal, but she doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind the extra confirmation that they are alive together.

One day, she’s going to have this heartbeat memorized.

Stiles is stroking her hair, calm and sleepy, content underneath her. Moments ago, she’d been telling him the story of the time she thought she had a crush on Allison’s dad, and they’d both been laughing. Now, focusing on his heartbeat, Lydia is suddenly gripped with the unnerving fear that it could get taken away from her all over again. She presses her ear harder to his chest and counts the beats per minute, desperate for each and every one of them.

“What’s wrong?” asks Stiles, hand stilling in her hair for just a moment. Lydia shakes her head against his t-shirt, not wanting to answer him. “What?”

“We still live in Beacon Hills.”

She can’t see anything but the muddy gray color on his walls, but she doesn’t want to look elsewhere anyways. Doesn’t want to see his face when he realizes that she is a paranoid, frightened little girl who has gotten lost in the woods a few too many times.

“So?”

“So you could still get hurt.”

At first, Stiles doesn’t say anything. His pink lips tighten, thin and curved and slick with spit from him licking them a few moments ago.

“You could too,” he finally says, quiet.

“No.” Lydia shakes her head. “It’s different. It’s different if it’s you.”

“How?” His voice rises in annoyance, but Lydia doesn’t want to hear it because he doesn’t understand what it was like to be here without him, what it was like for the memory of him to always be on the tip of her tongue, like a celebrity whose name she couldn’t remember.

“Because,” she says guiltily, “I know what it’s like for you to be gone.”

“And you think I don’t? You think I don’t know how that feels? I had to watch you stuck in a coma, Lydia. I had to hear Deaton describing what could happen if we didn’t get you in time, if your scream literally killed you. Living without you isn’t some abstract concept, okay? It was almost my actual life.”

He’s defensive, but so is she. Lydia isn’t backing down— she’s not. She is almost certainly wrong, but she also doesn’t care.

“You’re going to help people,” she reminds him. “And I know you think you can do that here, but you can’t. You can’t.”

“I can protect you here.”

Lydia hides her face in his chest, not wanting to look at him.

“And I can protect you if you’re gone.”

Her words are muffled, but he hears them anyways. She knows from the way his entire body tenses against her.

“I’m not gonna be gone if you need me,” he says, some sense of stubborn resilience sneaking into his tone. “It’s not that far by plane; as soon as something happens, I’m gonna be back.”

“Right,” she agrees, but she’s lying, and she’s not even doing it well.

“I mean it, Lydia,” Stiles says, sitting up so that she has to look at him. “As soon as you need me, I’m right back here. I’m not just leaving you guys behind.”

“Okay.”

“And you better be the one to tell me, not Scott or Malia or my dad, because I swear to God, Lydia, I am going to be so mad if I find out that—”

“I will,” she fibs, laying a hand on his chest gently, letting his heart pound up against her palm.

It’s easy to decide when she puts her selfishness aside. Does she want him to love her? Yes. Would she rather he be alive and angry with her than dead for a girl who kept her word to him against her better judgment? Yes. She’s vain and she’s closed off and she’s angry, but she’s not a coward.

She’ll do what she has to do if it means he’ll be okay.

Stiles settles back, oblivious to the lie that had effortlessly passed her lips.

“Okay. Good,” he says, calmer now.

Smiling genially, Lydia leans upwards to kiss him, her hand gentle on his cheek. He kisses her back, hesitant, like he wants to ask her if she means it, if he can trust her. And Lydia doesn’t know what to say that isn’t a lie, because he can’t. She could deal with him hating her. She couldn’t deal with losing him.

It’s a strange vow to make along with all the other ones she’d offered to him tonight. She had promised to vocalize her affection, to love the things he loves, to laugh at his jokes. And intrinsic in that had been a more implicit vow: you can trust me. You can trust me to love you. You can trust me not to hurt you.

For the most part, that’s true

He won’t come back if there’s nothing to come back for. She almost lost him before. She isn’t going to do that again.

Stiles’ heartbeat is Lydia’s favorite sound in the world and she will do anything to keep it going.

“Nick.”

“Nick?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“Nick.”

“Nick,” she replies with frustration, grabbing a pillow from behind his head and banging it against his shoulder. “What part of ‘Nick’ do you not understand?”

“The part where Nick was your favorite Jonas Brother in middle school.”

“He had curly hair,” she says, shrugging. “I happen to like guys with curly hair.”

“Says the girl with a track record of dating exactly zero guys with curly hair.”

“At least I didn’t say Kevin,” replies Lydia, drawing a ‘K’ across Stiles’ palm.

“Nobody ever says Kevin.” He looks down, watching the path of her finger as it dances across his marriage line. “He is the least desirable Jonas Brother.”

“I’m glad we’re learning the really important things about each other before we get too deep into this,” Lydia replies, deadpan.

“Speaking of which,” says Stiles, “your turn.”

She thinks for a minute, trying to figure out what to ask him, leafing through questions in her mind. She’s been asking him things she already knows the answer to, just to hear them. She’s been asking him stories from before she knew him so that she can paint a better picture of him in her head. She’s been asking about their history to see if anything between the two of them lines up— if any of the same things hurt.

It is very likely that she already knew him too well before tonight, but now she knows how he got the scar on his nose and what the first book he ever read was and the name of the girl he had his first kiss with (Abby Meyers, seventh grade, he kissed her at a party because she asked him to and they never spoke again).

She wants to prove to him that she’s been paying attention. That she’s listened. That she’s remembered.

“How do you like your coffee?” asks Lydia, blinking innocently up at him.

“Black with roughly eighteen packets of sugar,” recites Stiles.

“Incorrect.” He frowns at her. “Coffee makes you jittery and nervous and I have told you a million times to stop drinking it.”

She can tell that he’s taken aback, and then that same look from earlier crosses his face: he wants to kiss her. Lydia knows it because she knows him, because she knows how it feels, because it makes her want to lean in equally as much. Butterflies erupt in her stomach, a fevered tizzy as he gets closer, and suddenly this is all too real— lying in a bed with Stiles as the sun turns the sky into the color of softly worn denim, the two of them looming closer to something that they can’t run away from.

Once upon a time, the Lydia who never asked for permission had felt like an adult trapped in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl. Now, very suddenly, she feels like a teenager who is petrified in all the best ways, the ways that feel like graduations and proms and crickets on midnight drives with the radio turned all the way up and falling hard for the first time.

“It’s your turn,” she blurts out, unable to be smooth, unable to play the part. The truth is, she has never wanted something so badly while simultaneously being so terrified of getting it.

“Okay,” Stiles says, low and smooth. He doesn’t break eye contact with her. “Let me think.”

He rolls over her a little, using his hand to brace himself above her, and Lydia instinctively rolls onto her back to look up at him. His hand is pressing into the mattress next to her body, and even though he isn’t touching her skin, Lydia can feel him, somehow. He’s hovering over her body, staring down at her, chewing on his bottom lip, and somehow Lydia feels the least trapped she’s ever been. Carefully, Stiles brushes her hair out of her eyes, so gentle, so loving, that Lydia can’t help but reach up to wrap her fingers around his wrist.

Stiles leans closer still, tilting his head to the side, ready.

“Any day now,” prods Lydia, all false confidence. He’s making her melt right into his mattress, the way he’s looking at her. Making her feel like no one has ever seen her quite this naked before despite the layer of clothes and blankets between them.

Nervously, she taps her index finger against his wrist to the beat of some song that she thinks hasn’t been written yet. But she recognizes it. It sounds like them; whatever their song is, something that is the steadiest frenzy in the world.

“How do you like to be kissed?” asks Stiles quietly, and even though everything about this moment is making her clit pulse unapologetically, there’s still something incredibly innocent about the way he says it. He’s asking because he wants to know— not to be slick, not to ask permission, but because he wants to kiss her and he wants to do it right.

“Oh.” It’s a quiet puff of air, releasing the nerves in her body. The tension inside of Lydia snaps, at least momentarily, and she runs her hand up and down his arm gently, back and forth, back and forth. She watches his eyes, the same lovely brown that have always believed in her, always trusted her even when she didn’t deserve it. And without any hesitation, she knows what the answer is. “Honestly?”

“Yeah, honestly.”

“Well. I don’t think I know yet.”

From the way his tongue runs up hers a few moments later, Lydia has a feeling she’s about to find out.

Neither of them can fall asleep, but around seven, they both get quiet.

Being with him like this feels like limbo, like they’re the only two corporal people in the world. For all intents and purposes, nothing else matters to Lydia aside from the warm body that leans into hers.

It’s not quite bright outside yet, but there are still chirping birds who sing into the pale, straw-like sunlight. In the isolated box of Stiles’ bedroom, they feel intrusive, so Lydia does her best to shut all of it out.

She would prefer to exist forever at three in the morning, just light enough to trace Stiles’ features in the dark with her fingers and pretend that he’s the only one who has ever known what her vulnerability looks like. The steady inhale and exhale of his body is far more musical to Lydia than the notes of birdsong, and it’s just better that way, with Stiles being the one who reminds her how to breathe.

But she supposes, as he runs his fingers across the clothed expanse of her back, that this is okay too.

For most of the last hour, Stiles had been cupping her body with his, nose pressed into her hair. He had been very still, as though worried she would kick his body away from hers, but Lydia had found herself pressing her nose against the arm that was resting above her head and letting herself soak in his scent. Being enveloped in Stiles is better than she could have ever imagined, from the warmth of his body to the soft way he strokes her hair to the sound of his breaths in her ear. There are a million things that Lydia never would have thought about until she had it, and now that it’s hers, she would never consider asking him to move.

He’d done so anyways, on his own, only a few minutes ago. When he had shifted away from her to study the back of her shirt, Lydia had bit the inside of her cheek to stop the whimper of protest that had threatened to rip up from her stomach. Even with his fingers on her back, she feels cold without him, as though her body’s homeostasis had adjusted to him so efficiently that going back was now impossible.

Stiles, Lydia realizes through the fog of sleep, is looking at the names signed onto the t-shirt. On the last day of sixth grade, they had all crowded into the classroom and shoved each other with scraped elbows and knobbly fingers to get to each and every t-shirt the fastest. Lydia remembers that she had used her shiny silver pen to sign her name in her best cursive, elegantly moving past each and every one of her classmates to sign the shirts.

At the time, she hadn’t payed attention to Stiles’ signature. She can imagine it now, though. Too big, because his handwriting is usually too big. Crammed in right next to Scott’s, most likely, tilted just a little bit sideways so that he can fit his name next to his best friend’s.

His index finger touches something on her back, and Lydia imagines that it is tracing over the childlike signature of Scott— pictures that sweet, goofy boy signing with his tongue poking out between his teeth like it used to. Lydia noticed him in elementary school because one time he came into school with bruises on his arms, legs, and face, with a split lip to boot. A few weeks later, she heard her mom saying that his dad left his family.

It was like that with Stiles, too. Back then, she only noticed him when he was all emptied out. The first time he came back to school after his mother died, she watched him feel nothing and wondered what could be floating around in his head that made his eyes so hollow. In the eleven years from kindergarten to tenth grade, the only time she ever looked at him— really looked at him— was when his pain was so tangible, so bare, that it made her curious.

It’s not like that now. Now, Stiles makes the slightest movement and she can feel the hair on her arms standing up. Now, his eyes flash in her direction for just a moment and Lydia realizes that she is already looking. Now, as Stiles’ fingers trace the lines on her back, she feels every touch as sharply as if it were with a knife.

Being touched like this is like a lullaby. Lydia drifts in and out of it and thinks about which signature Stiles is looking at. As he taps his finger across her back in a fairly staccato rhythm, she imagines that it is Isaac’s name he’s touching. When he seems to trace a particularly lengthy name, she imagines that name reads Vernon Boyd in crooked lettering. Not far from that, Stiles charts a name that Lydia decides must be Erica, given that the surname seems far longer than the first name. When Stiles’ index finger draws a short, straight line on Lydia’s back, she thinks it must be Cora Hale, whose long, thick brown hair always made Lydia feel envious back then.

Then Stiles draws a pattern over and over again, tracing the same name on repeat, and Lydia knows, without a doubt, that it is hers.

When she reaches back for him, it’s because she’s worried that he’s been stuck with the idea of Lydia Martin for so long, he might forget that she is actually there.

Feeling her hand touch his seems to kick Stiles into motion. Slowly, tantalizingly, his hand crawls along her body. It glides over her waist, her hip, until it rubs backwards and rests just above her ass. She can feel the tenseness in his body the moment he realizes it; tries not to smile when he overcompensates by slinging his arm all the way across her body, tugging her closer in the process. When Lydia slowly opens her eyes, she sees Stiles’ hand on the comforter right in front of her, the long fingers curved slightly as if inviting her to tangle them within hers.

Lydia closes her eyes again and reaches for Stiles’ hand, sliding her fingers over the mattress until she finally feels them hit skin. She feels her hand gliding over his bones and knuckles until she’s covering them. Her fingers, so much shorter and smaller than his, are too tiny to cover as much ground as she wants to, and she thinks he knows from the way his lips curve into a smile against the back of her neck. When Lydia lifts her hand up, inviting, Stiles’ hand follows hers a moment later, firmly entangling their fingers and squeezing tight.

Without a doubt, she knows that he’s not going to let her go.

For a moment, they lie there, Stiles spooning Lydia’s body, their hands locked together and resting across her hip. Lydia tries not to smile, tries to go to sleep for real, tries to drown, a little, in the body that is dwarfing her. She does none of those things. There is a small, comforting squeeze of her hand that Stiles gives her as he feels her shift a little, and that’s when she knows.

It’s like blowing out a candle, watching all the smoke rise to the ceiling, and realizing that maybe this diminutive pocket of time is what you were waiting for all along.

Stiles is nuzzling his head into Lydia’s neck to try to fall asleep when she twists around in the bed and crushes her lips against his. She knows she takes him by surprise because of the small grunt he lets out, but his hand still comes up to cup the back of her head, thumbs rubbing absent circles as his tongue drags along the inside of her lip.

She wants to tell him a million things: That this isn’t a game, that he’s got the ability to smash the strongest pieces she has, that she feels so small underneath him but, for the first time, it’s not a weight that could make her crumble. But then he nuzzles her nose with his while he kisses her, unwilling to pull away from her mouth, and Lydia realizes that he already knows all of that about her. He knows her better than anyone does.

So she reaches down and pulls the t-shirt over her head and drops it to the floor without much ceremony, because the time for ceremony with Stiles has passed. She can’t pretend around him. Instead, she’s going to have to figure out how to be exactly herself when her instinct, when keeping someone around, had always been to create a disguise.

“Lydia,” he says hoarsely, because she’s bare and suddenly there’s nothing to hide at all.

“You can look,” she whispers to him.

His eyes flicker from her face to her chest and then back again, checking to see if she really means it. When he finds her smiling at him, a side effect of her endearing amusement at him, Stiles lets himself stare for longer, his mouth a little slack as he looks down at her breasts. Lydia focuses on her breathing, keeping it even as he stares, trying to ignore the way her heart is pounding against her skin.

When Stiles’ eyes finally return to her face, they hold the kind of awe in them that makes Lydia think that maybe it doesn’t matter that she wasn’t his first. She’d been harboring some sort of jealous resentment about it for such a long time, but now her nipples tighten just at the look on his face and it all slides away, replaced with more of the tenderness that has been building up inside of her all night. She reaches out, touching his heart with her left hand, feeling it beat under his shirt, and Stiles takes his cue, whipping the shirt over his head and tossing it to the floor.

He licks his lips as she looks at him, a nervous tick that does nothing to deter the frantic pulse between her legs. Sighing, Lydia rolls on top of Stiles and kisses him until it almost seems familiar, like the well-treaded path it could potentially become. With her chest against his, bare and soft, she finds herself feeling almost as though they have slid the puzzle pieces into place.

Almost.

“Do you have anything?” she asks, and when it takes him a moment to figure out what she’s asking, Lydia kisses his shoulder, this innocent boy who thinks so poorly of himself but who made Lydia fall in love with him when he wasn’t even trying to.

“Uh, I, yeah?”

He cringes at the squeak in his voice. Lydia smiles.

“Then get it,” she murmurs, and then she’s getting out of her shorts, kicking them off of the bed while Stiles rummages through his top drawer for a condom, and when he’s out of his sweatpants she can’t help but watch him as he rolls it on with dexterity despite the fact that his hands are shaking a little and the light isn’t very good.

He looks up at her after that, the expression on his face suggesting that he doesn’t know what to do. Lydia places her hand on his neck and draws him into her slowly.

“Just kiss me,” she whispers, settling onto her back and pulling him on top of her.

“I can do that,” replies Stiles, husky.

She spreads her legs and he notches himself between them, one of his hands finding her breast and covering it fully. It’s warm; Lydia arches into him with a small sigh, wondering if she’s feeling too much, if it’s possible that being touched by him is so good that it’s bad for her. When his dick slides against her clit accidentally, she decides that she doesn’t care. She’d rather not think at all.

Lydia finds his hipbone and grips it tight, hoping he gets it. But Stiles rolls off of her, settling back on his side of the bed, and stares down at her with worried eyes.

“Do you need… well, something else? I mean, are you…?”

She meets his eyes with petulance, a little irritated that he would question her.

“Why don’t you feel for yourself?” suggests Lydia, annoyed.

He doesn’t notice her tone of voice at all, eyes going darker at the idea of touching her so intimately. Lydia closes her eyes and tenses in anticipation, ready, waiting, but then she feels a thumb tug her bottom lip down and realizes that he’s going to take his time.

Stiles’ thumb slips from her lip to her chin, trailing a little wetness down the path of her neck. Lydia holds her breath, not quite sure why she’s doing it as she opens her eyes and watches him move down her body. When his fingers find the valley of her breasts, his nose follows soon after, dropping a small kiss there, and then to the flat plane of her stomach. His left hand is still spread over her as his right hand dips lower.

Her body knows what to do even though her brain is quiet, and Lydia’s legs spread for him just in time for Stiles’ knuckle to brush against her folds. He sucks in a breath as she tenses up, and then he does it again and again, knuckles skimming her folds. Lydia sucks her top lip into her mouth as she tries not to whimper, the sensory overload of her face pressed to his pillow making her ache that much more.

“You’re so warm,” he marvels, voice rumbling against her. Lydia finally gives in, moaning when his knuckle finds her clit.

“Please, Stiles.”

She hates that she’s begging, hates it, but her body feels so empty just now, like it’s waiting for some essential thing that she never got. It’s like she’s missing a limb or or a mind or a heart, but the necessary component is right next to her on the bed, completely within reach.

He ignores her, settling in behind her so that he can kiss her spine, her hair, her shoulders, her neck, and Lydia would be angry at him for being so delicate with her if it weren’t gentle to the point of generosity. The way he treats her, with all of the ardor and affection that she has never had, fills her with a vehement, choking certainty.

By the time Stiles decides to slide a finger into her, Lydia would beg again and again and again if it meant he would finally fit himself inside of her and fill her up.

“I’m here,” he tells her, pressing against her back. A moment later, his finger slides out of her opening and he’s guiding his cock into place, causing Lydia to gasp out. “Okay, Lydia? I’m right here.”

She nods, not trusting herself to speak. His entire body is pressed against her back; she can feel the taut way he’s pulling at his muscles, straining to not come yet. His breath causes her hair to flutter across her cheek as he experimentally rolls his hips forward, adjusting to the feeling of being inside of her for the first time. From this angle, he feels so big; she lifts her right leg closer to her chest so that he can sink in deeper and finds herself gasping as he rubs against her g-spot.

“Oh,” she gasps, reaching up for his hand. He’s got his arm splayed out across the pillow, and when she entwines their fingers, the muscles jump as though he’s startled. Stiles buries his face in her hair, murmuring words that she can’t quite make out.

“Fuck, you’re tight, Lydia.”

That she can hear, and she gives a little disbelieving laugh at the whinge in his voice. She hasn’t had sex in a year and this, this is worth the wait. The way he rolls in and out of her feels like a continuous roll of stimulation; she feels him everywhere, her walls fluttering around him to pull him deeper. He never pulls out of her in this position, leaving her constantly on the precipice of something perfect. Lydia tilts her ass into him, changing the angle a little, and moans so loud that she surprises even herself. She expects Stiles to shush her, but instead he squeezes her hand, dropping his face into her neck.

He fucks into her faster, driving against the spot that is making her tilt her head to the side and bite down on his arm to keep from making too much noise. He’s moving so fast that he slips out of her, and when he pushes back in, hitting an even deeper spot than before, his body is melded to her more tightly than ever.

Lydia lifts her leg, looking down at where they’re joined, her eyes rolling back in her head at the sight of him rolling his hips into her, his hand splayed across her stomach, warm and heavy on her skin. Without planning it, she finds herself reaching for the hand on her stomach and placing her palm over it, leading it downwards to her clit. They rub her together, Lydia’s hand guiding Stiles’, showing him how she likes it.

She’s out of her mind with the feeling by the time she tilts her head back to meet his eyes. He’s got blown pupils and ruddy cheeks and his eyes are fixed on her lips so Lydia kisses him, sloppy and feverish as stars explode behind her eyes.

He fucks her through her orgasm, closing his eyes and letting himself let go a few moments later, thrusting into her one final time that makes her shiver as she tries to catch her breath.

Stiles is nearly fully hard as he pulls out of her, creating a delicious wince inside of Lydia as her walls cling to him, not willing to let him go quite yet.

The aftermath is a warm blend of blue and yellow, his blankets and the sunlight, the wanting and the having. Lydia doesn’t know what direction to turn or where to look, just knows that everything feels better than it did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. In the morning light that blooms through the window, Stiles traces his fingers over the planes of her body, touching her freckles and her hip bones and kiss-swollen lips. When he runs his finger over the swell of her breast, her nipples pebble against the soft, well-worn material of the flannel she’s wearing over her bare body. Neither of them react. He’s been inside of her three times now, the vibrations of his moans pressed against her throat, his hands finding hers whenever they could.

Each time he has slid home to her fills her with relief, with the indelible knowledge that he’s right in front of her, on top of her, under her. Everything is a blur of white thumbprints on his arms and her nipples in his mouth and both of Stiles’ hands on her cheeks as she rode him, neither of them able to look away from each other. She learns that she likes kissing his cheek, nuzzling against it; likes his hands on her ass, holding her in place as he fucks upwards into her; likes when he holds her against his chest while she wraps her legs around his waist and rocks over him, still pulsing from the last time he made her come.

Her hair is mussed up, there’s bruises on her collarbone, and it should all be ugly but it isn’t. Not even her extreme exhaustion can make her want to go to sleep when he’s on his knees in front of her, trailing his fingers from her inner thigh to her ankle, pressing his mouth briefly against the bone that protrudes inelegantly from her skin.

She decides, a little mindlessly, that she’d like to do everything in the world with him.

But then Stiles is gently sliding the material of the flannel to the side with steady fingers and a steady gaze, pressing those same lips against her sternum and her stomach and the milky skin on her breasts. They’re soft together, in touch and tone, and in the way they look at each other. They’re soft in a way that feels like white-gold light leaking through the blinds, spotlighting their bodies on his bed.

“I’m keeping this flannel,” says Lydia sleepily, her voice rattling in her chest. “You’re not getting it back.”

“Okay,” he replies, lifting the flannel to the side so that he can kiss her shoulder.

She watches him, feeling so honest and so in love that it leaves her body aching, like he’s physically cracked her open with his affection for her. Lydia imagines sunlight spilling out of her chest where her heart was supposed to be before she handed it off to him.

A long time ago, she had an idea of what the first time was supposed to feel like. She watched girls in movies stare at their bodies as though something was different. She read books in which girls felt physically changed within their own bodies. When Lydia was fourteen, she had expected that to happen with Jackson. It didn’t.

Sex was sex, just that, nothing more, nothing less.

It didn’t happen with a single one night stand. It didn’t happen with Aiden. Sex was mechanical, it was to feel good, it was bodies without any motive other than getting off.

This, though. This feels like kicking through the water, lungs screaming for oxygen, until suddenly she breaks the surface. It feels like that first breath of sweet summer air, and like she can hear, suddenly, after being under so long. Everything used to be muddled.

And then, Stiles.

When his head dips to kiss her on the stomach, Lydia places her finger under his chin and effortlessly guides him up until his lips cover hers, pushing her under all over again, then helping her kick to the surface.

His eyes are still closed when he pulls away, lips frozen in motion, like he’s still kissing her.

“Stiles?” asks Lydia, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

“We’re gonna have to figure this out all over again tomorrow morning,” he says, finally opening his eyes. “Aren’t we?”

Lydia nods.

“Mhm,” she murmurs, thumb trailing down the side of his face. He turns to the side and presses his lips against it.

“I know we are, I know it doesn’t all get fixed over the course of one night, I know that. But.” Instead of interjecting, Lydia waits. She waits while Stiles hesitates. She waits while he finds the right words. She waits for him to be the brave one. “I just… I want you to know that I’m yours, okay? I always have been. This isn’t some whim or one night thing or leftovers from my crush on you. This is— Lydia, you said you wanted to be with me and I want to be with you too. I have always wanted to be with you. And I’m gonna be yours for such a long time.”

The words warm her more than the flannel, more than his lips on hers, more than a steadily rising sun. It’s the reassurance that she clings to as she finally falls asleep.

When Lydia wakes up, she immediately knows that something is wrong. Even as she reaches for Stiles, she has a sense that he isn’t there, and it makes her bolt up in bed as soon as she feels the cool, rumpled sheets next to her.

Heart hammering in her chest, Lydia tries to ignore the scenarios that scroll through her mind like a flipbook. Had she dreamed all of last night? Had she been in a fugue state the whole time and ended up in his bedroom? Had he panicked when he woke up and decided that he didn’t want her after all? Was something she said or did not good enough? Or, god forbid, had the ghost riders come back to take him?

She remembers him, after all. They couldn’t have snatched him again— they can’t have taken him away from her. For a few moments, she breathes in and out, trying to ignore the blood that is rushing up to her head. She sits in bed, feeling very small and very alone, and counts to ten, praying that she will look to the side and find Stiles’ body there, just outside of her peripheral vision.

He isn’t there.

Lydia scrambles out of bed feeling like her heart is about to fall out of her throat. She remembers at the last moment that she’s only wearing her underwear and reaches onto the floor to snatch up the first shirt she finds— the gray one that Stiles had worn all night. The one he had worn to bed before they had sex. Before he’d gotten taken all over again.

Quickly, Lydia pulls it on and rushes into the kitchen, her heart thundering as loud as loud as her bare feet against the hardwood floors. She calls out his name in a desperate attempt to hear his voice, hope he answers, hope that she hadn’t missed something, that he isn’t gone all over again, not after last night.

“Stiles!”

The panic in her tone follows her as she skids around the corner to the kitchen, her knees going weak with relief when she sees him standing at the stove.

“Lydia?” he says, bemused, and he darts forward to catch her with a surprising speed. “Whoa, okay, calm down.”

Her arms wrap around his neck and she buries her face in his chest, hiding the tears that had just been watering in her eyes. Feeling like an idiot hasn’t quite become a norm for her yet, and her panic mixes oddly with humiliation as she thinks of what an incredible overreaction she had just had.

It doesn’t matter, though, because Stiles is hugging her tight to his body, his hand in her hair, supporting the back of her head as she catches her breath. She’s never had a panic attack before, but she imagines that this is what he must have felt like that day in the locker room, like the world was tilting and collapsing and becoming upright again was impossible.

“I… I thought you were gone again,” she tells him. “God, I thought they took you again, Stiles, I thought—”

“I’m right here,” he whispers, rubbing her back. “‘S okay, Lydia, ‘m right here.”

He sounds like a little kid just then, just as timid as she feels, and she remembers his question last night— having to relearn all of it later. It’s only eleven in the morning and apparently they’ve already forgotten. She hates that. It makes her feel stuck, and anxious, and aggravated at both Stiles and herself.

“Her heart’s beating really fast,” says another voice.

Lydia startles, pulling out of Stiles’ embrace to see Scott standing by the stove, his forehead crinkled with concern.

“Scott?” she says, throat dry.

“G’morning,” he says, managing a half-hearted wave. He stares at her for a moment, then blinks twice, hard. “This is officially really weird.”

“What?”

It takes her a moment before she remembers that she is wearing Stiles’ discarded shirt, and even though it falls to the top of her thighs, her underwear is still visible. Stiles, meanwhile, is standing shirtless and in the same sweats from last night, the navy blue top of his boxers sticking out over the waistband. Currently, he is touching Lydia’s cheek with concern, and that’s when she remembers that the last twelve or so hours didn’t happen to anyone but them.

“Right,” Stiles says, removing his hand from her cheek like her skin had just scalded him. “Um, well, yeah.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Scott points out, and Stiles glares at him.

“Dude,” he complains. “You know what I mean.”

A small smile twists at Scott’s mouth.

“Yeah. I do.” He turns to Lydia, speaking to her gently, like he’s afraid she’ll bolt if he startles her. “I just came over to talk to Stiles. I wanted to catch up with him.” Here, he tilts his head to the side, looking a little guilty, “Mostly to apologize for forgetting he existed. And all that stuff.”

“I just.” She shrugs helplessly, looking up at Stiles, at the way the morning sunlight splashes across his bare shoulders. “I woke up and you weren’t there and I—” “I know,” he says hurriedly, cutting her off. “It’s okay, I understand. After we got you out of Eichen, I was the exact same way.”

Lydia allows herself to smile at him, and when Stiles sees that, the expression on his face shifts from concerned to hopeful in a matter of seconds.

“Wow,” Scott says after a few moments of silence. “This is… this is weird.”

It’s him saying that that makes Lydia decide, in that moment, that it is absolutely not going to be weird.

“Oh really?” she replies, taking Stiles’ hand. “How?”

“Lydia Martin is half naked in Stiles’ kitchen,” teases Scott. “I’d say that’s the weird part.”

“You have to have known,” Lydia points out.

“I mean, of course I did.”

Scott looks sheepish, and Lydia keeps a straight face even though she feels fondness creeping up her chest.

Stiles, on the other hand, does not have the same response.

“Wait, what?! You knew and you didn’t tell us?”

“I didn’t want to interfere with your lives!”

Stiles squints in annoyance.

“So, helping me realize that I could be with the girl I’m in love with is interference?”

“Supernatural interference,” Scott corrects.

“You couldn’t… humanly interfere?”

“I could have if either of you had just told me with words. I had to find out Lydia liked you through her chemosignals! And, Stiles, you couldn’t admit to yourself that you were still in love with her for like a year, how was I supposed to tell you that your heartbeat skipped like you were lying all the time when you talked about her?”

“Okay.” The grimace on Stiles’ face is so adorable, Lydia finds herself wishing she could sketch it. She’s wanted to sketch him for a while. She wonders if he would let her do that now. “Good point.”

“So,” Scott clasps his hands together, grin spreading across his face. “Are you two together now?”

“No,” Lydia says flatly. “This is just sex.”

The look of horrified agony on Scott’s face breaks Stiles first.

“She’s kidding,” he says, then glances sideways at Lydia. “She actually promised to laugh at all my jokes forever.”

“If they’re funny.”

“They’re always funny.” When Lydia doesn’t say anything, his eyes grow wide. “Excuse me, we have a d—”

“Hey, guys,” Scott pipes up. “Maybe we should continue this when Lydia is wearing pants?”

“Right,” says Stiles. “Um, is that something you’d be interested in?”

She rolls her eyes, standing on her tip-toes to kiss him quickly on the mouth.

“I’ll go change.”

Lydia begins walking back towards Stiles’ bedroom, enjoying the warmth of the morning, when suddenly she feels two hands around her waist, stopping her from moving. She twists around in time for Stiles to maneuver himself so that he can press his lips against hers again, kissing her deeply. When he pulls away, her eyes are still closed and she doesn’t remember when she had tucked her hands underneath the waistband of his sweatpants.

“Good morning,” murmurs Stiles, leaning his forehead against hers.

“Good morning,” she replies softly.

“Also—” “Mhm?”

“We’re making breakfast for my dad, like you said last night. And also I told Scott about George Washington and he thinks it’s a good idea. And also I’m sorry I worried you, I’m not gonna do it again, I swear. And also last night was kinda the best night of my life and I, like, really really love you. And also do you want to go to prom with me?” He stares down at her expectantly, and Lydia bursts out laughing. “Uh, that wasn’t one of the jokes.”

“No, I know,” she says, touching his cheek. “I just…”

Lydia hesitates. She doesn’t know how to explain that, suddenly, like magic, the hole inside of her chest feels gone. That loneliness that she had felt since she was a child, that feeling of never being anyone’s favorite person, like she was always the girl standing at the window watching someone walk away. She feels like the weight of isolation has been removed from her chest very suddenly, and it makes her giddy in a way she’s never quite felt before.

She’s still a banshee. His best friend is still a werewolf. His dad is still the sheriff of a small, dangerous town in California. It’s never going to not be complicated. Lydia knows that there is absolutely no chance that everything will go perfectly, or smoothly, and that sometimes she will be as lonely and scared and heartbroken as she has always been.

But the boy she likes asked her to prom, and in that moment, everything feels so simple.

“It sounds like a plan, Stiles,” she says, wrapping their fingers together. “It sounds like a really good plan.”