Chapter Text
“I had ‘em on the ropes.” Lydia would joke whenever Allison came to her rescue, her glossed lips spread wide in a grin that was somewhere between teasing and smug. Strictly speaking, Lydia could take care of herself, she had been for sixteen years before she’d even known that Allison Argent existed. But it was always more fun when Allison showed up, exasperated and beautiful as she slammed her fist into the face of whoever had been stupid enough to wrong her best friend.
When Allison went to war, it was only fitting that Lydia followed. After all, where was the fun in picking fights if Allison wasn’t around to roll her eyes at her.
Lydia was too small, they said. Too fragile. Too human. She’d had no prior training and had no supernatural abilities to support her in a fight. The first time she’d been rejected she’d cried; Allison had been gone for three days and Lydia had sat on her bed and sobbed until her chest hurt. The second time, she’d grit her teeth. The third, she’d started to lie.
And then she’d lied, and lied, and lied some more. Seven forms in all she’d fibbed on. She was pretty sure that was illegal. But she didn’t care. She had to get to Allison.
Allison could have been cold and alone, she could have been dying, and Lydia was just sitting at home trying to perfect the wings on her eyeliner. She couldn’t take that. So she kept lying, and she kept getting rejected.
Until the one time she wasn’t.
Two months and eighteen tries (a new record, she’d been assured) later and Alan Deaton finally found her. She was sitting in yet another exam room, frowning down at her hilariously impractical shoes and waiting for another nameless, faceless G.I to come and tell her that she wasn’t good enough to fight for her country. That they needed faster, stronger soldiers and she just didn’t fit the bill.
Instead, she met Deaton. Deaton who asked her one simple question.
“Why eighteen?”
“Because I got seventeen ‘no’s.”
~
They drilled holes in her head.
She was barely nineteen but she let the army drill holes in her head. For her country, she said, because she loved her country. But that was a lie that tasted like chalk on her tongue. She was there for Allison. She lied on eighteen federal forms for Allison. She let scientists who specialized in the supernatural drill holes in her head until her screaming burst the windows f o r A l l i s o n.
For the girl with the dark hair and the darker eyes who sat on the counter in their tiny apartment and dried the dishes that Lydia washed. For the only other person that Lydia knew who liked black olive and pineapple pizza. For the hunter with the heart of gold.
For her best friend.
~
They made her a spectacle. Lydia grit her teeth, figuring that it would all end eventually. That sooner or later they were going to let her go, let her do the things that she’d come there to do. But they made her a poster child. They slapped makeup on her face, made her a red, white, and blue star-spangled outfit, and taught her to smile pretty for the cameras.
She was a walking piece of propaganda and she hated it - almost as much as everyone else did. She stopped paying attention to where they paraded her. Her smile was as painted on as the glitter on her eyelids. Until they hit the 323rd.
Lydia knew the number - she practically had it tattooed on the inside of her eyes. 323 was known for its fighters, its archers, its hunters. 323 is where Allison was.
Supposed to be.
“Taken?” Lydia asked dumbly, staring at the tube of bright red lipstick held in her trembling fingers. She was in her costume, the sequins biting into the soft skin under her arms and the heels of her shoes catching in the soft dirt under her feet. “What do you mean that Allison was taken?”
Scott McCall, Allison’s commanding officer - alpha - set a gentle, comforting hand on Lydia’s shoulder. “She was patrolling with a few guys from another unit down south. They were ambushed. Half were killed the other half-”
Lydia stopped listening. Half of the patrol was killed but Allison was taken? Why? Why? Why? Why take Allison?
“Who else was taken?” She asked, voice wavering. “Was there a pattern? Was there-”
“Kira Yukimura, Malia Tate, Erica Reyes, Laura Hale.” Scott interrupted her, “All women who showed exceptional promise. We’re convinced it was premeditated. Like they wanted them for something in particular.”
Lydia sunk down into the uncomfortable chair positioned behind her, her head falling into her hands. Her makeup was probably smudging but she didn’t care. She wasn’t going on stage. How could she when Allison was… exactly where Lydia was terrified she was going to be.
Cold. Alone. Possibly dying.
She’d joined the army, let them experiment on her, turn her into something decidedly not human - a banshee - so she could find Allison, protect her like Allison had already protected her. Now it was over before she ever got the chance to start trying.
“Where is she?” She asked, “Has anyone even looked? Why aren’t there search parties? Why haven’t you gotten her back?”
Scott looked gutted. Pale. There were bags under his eyes that suggested that he’d stayed awake night after night wondering the same thing. It made Lydia wonder who he had that was captured. Which one of the women he’d mentioned was his person?
Maybe Allison was?
“We’re trying.”
~
Trying, Lydia decided, wasn’t good enough.
She stole a plane.
Okay, stole was probably a strong word. She temporarily misappropriated a plane, with the help of Scott’s friend Stiles. Stiles was… nice. Chatty. Stiles, Lydia could definitely see herself becoming friends with after it was all over. If she survived.
Stiles was like Lydia - firmly a member of Team Human before he’d followed Scott to war. Except Stiles’ supernatural ability manifested itself as something he called a ‘spark’ and something Lydia rolled her eyes and grumbled about being ‘Harry Potter bullshit’.
Neither of them were superhuman, neither of them could heal on a dime, and when Lydia slipped off her heels and pulled her hair back into a ponytail, reaching for the emergency button on the plane, Stiles nearly had an aneurysm.
“What are you doing?” He yelled. They were thousands of feet above the ocean and being shot at and Lydia was opening the door?
Wind whipping her hair and numbing her face and the sound of bullets the motion picture soundtrack of her life, Lydia smiled at him. It was all teeth, no charm, just an almost vicious need to make whoever took Allison pay. She never had liked bullies. “I’m getting my best friend back.” She called back.
And then she jumped.
~
The first wave of… of death physically knocked Lydia off her feet. Fortuitous, since had it not the spotlight would have hit her directly in the face. It was so sudden, so intense, that it nearly choked her. No, it was choking her.
No, no that was the vomit. Definitely the vomit.
They’d told her she would be able to do that, to feel the death around her. She’d heard things before. Screaming, mostly. But never so bad. Never so strong. Never over and over and over again until she couldn’t gasp in a breath.
She managed to push herself up onto her hands and knees, wiping her mouth on the arm of her borrowed fatigues, and then she got up and kept moving. She had shit to do and she was Lydia goddamn Martin. She nagged the army into letting her in, okay, she could do anything she put her mind to. And right then her mind was pretty damn set on rescuing the one person on the planet she gave a shit about.
For the first time in her life she was so, so glad that she was small. Without her heels she was barely five foot three, and she could slip between and under and over things nearly silently and quick as a whip. She ducked around a corner and pressed her back to the wall behind her, holding her breath as a sentry passed her hiding spot.
The camp was huge - too huge to be called a camp, really, it was more like a base. She had no idea how she was supposed to find Allison before they… before they…. God, even Lydia’s internal monologue couldn’t even put her fears into words.
Allison had already been missing for a week. A full week. Seven days. They could have done anything to her. They could have killed her by then.
Panic seized up Lydia’s chest for a moment before the logical part of her brain finally caught up to her reckless body and reminded her that she would know if Allison was dead. She could feel death as surely as she could feel hot or cold and she would definitely feel if it was Allison.
Banshee perk.
Kind of.
Lydia found the others first - Kira, Malia, Laura, and Erica. They were all dirty and covered in dry blood. Lydia would bet all of her Too Faced pallets that there had been far too many broken bones in that tiny cage that had been taken care of by the enhanced healing that were’s were known for.
Allison wasn’t with them. She’d been taken. Again. But she was still in the base, according to Malia. She could still smell Allison, faintly. Lydia shouldn’t give up hope.
More running, sneaking, hiding, climbing. She ran into some trouble and shot a man with his own gun without a second thought. It wasn’t until she was hacking a thumbprint scanner with a bit of blush and a gum wrapper that she realized she’d left him alive and he’d probably set off an alarm by then.
Fuck.
But then she was through the door and in a lab and Allison was there. Barely conscious, but there. She blinked blearily at Lydia as she undid the restraints that held her friend down.
“Lyds?” She rasped, awed, like she was sure she was dreaming. “I thought you were taller.” She said.
All Lydia could do was laugh and look down at her bare, red painted toes. “That’s what they all say.” She said.
~
The sick feeling in Lydia’s feeling when she realized who was behind it all, who had kidnapped Allison and her friends, was nothing at all like a reaction to death. More like a need to cause it.
“She’s your granddaughter!” She shouted; glass shattering, equipment shifting, while every bit of her urged her forward, told her to wrap her hands around Gerard Argent’s throat until she felt his death wash over her like a tide. Allison stood off to the side, her eyes glassy and her muscles lax as she leant against the wall to keep herself upright, “What did you do?”
Gerard sneered. “Nothing that can’t be finished.”
Lydia screamed.
The base went up in flames.
They got out.
So did Gerard.
~
They promoted her to captain, when they got back, the stealing of a plane and the insubordination aside.
Laura Hale was the C.O’s sister.
Lydia eyed the medal attached to her new uniform and curled her lip in distaste. Allison asked her what the hell she had expected.
She said she didn’t know.
Not this.
Still reeling from the knowledge that her grandfather was a monster, Allison leant over and settled her head on Lydia’s shoulder. Her hair smelled like cheap, military issue soap and slightly synthetic purified water, the same as Lydia’s. It smelled better on Allison and Lydia turned slightly to wrap her arms around her best friend and hide her face in that dark, dark hair while Stiles and Scott and the group that Lydia had saved along with Allison poured over schematics and planned their next move.
They were going to cut the head off the snake.
~
The day they met, Allison had tripped over a crack in the school sidewalk, too busy pouring over her map and schedule, looking for her next class with single-minded self-reliance, to watch where she was going.
Lydia had caught her. Complimented her jacket. Realized they were heading the same place. Silently vowed to never leave her side again.
When Allison fell again, this time from a moving train hundreds of feet in the air, Lydia wasn’t quick enough to catch her.
~
They had a crappy apartment back in Brooklyn. It had one bedroom and one bathroom and a kitchen exactly large enough for a fridge and an oven. But it had a balcony, and sometimes when it was nice out (and other times when it wasn’t so nice out), they would sit out there with large bottle of cheap tequila and pass it back and forth between them and just talk. About everything.
Lydia’s crappy, official job bartending in the dance club, and her unofficial one beating up any and every man who thought it was okay to harass the waitresses like she wasn’t five-foot-three on a tall day and maybe a buck ten soaking wet. Sometimes her not so crappy night classes that they could barely afford for her to take.
How Allison should quit her equally crappy job in the Frozen Yogurt bar and start teaching self-defense classes. Lydia’s waitresses would be her first students. And then maybe Lyd’s could come home from work without a black eye or a bloody nose once or twice a week.
Allison was always so livid whenever that happened - it was 2012, what kind of man would hit a woman. Lydia always laughed it off because when the subject of feminism was brought up, nine times out of ten, the first thing the men in the room would ask was if that meant they could hit women now?
So, yeah, their apartment was crappy and their jobs were crappy but they made it work. They ate a lot of noodles and pasted glow in the dark stars to the wall to try and hide the cracks in the drywall. They hung up old blankets and scraps of fabric in place of the paint that they couldn’t afford. It was a crappy apartment but it was their crappy apartment. Their crappy space where they could sprawl out, basically on top of each other, on their crappy sofa and watch crappy television and drink crappy, bottom shelf tequila.
When Lydia shipped back stateside, after Gerard was taken care of and Lydia had had the distinct pleasure of being the one to pull the trigger; after they’d won; after she’d half stumbled, half been carried by Malia, back to camp and had stood there blankly while her friends, her pack, washed the blood off of her hands, off of her face, out of her hair; after she’d sat on a plane for seventeen hours and stared out the window, barely blinking, remembering how much Allison loved to fly, how often they’d fantasize about winning the lottery and being so rich that Allison could take a private jet to go grocery shopping if she’d wanted to; after all of that, she unlocked the door to their apartment and nearly broken down again.
It wasn’t their crappy apartment anymore. It was hers. All hers. Because she was alone, now. Because she hadn’t been fast enough. Hadn’t been good enough. And Allison had fallen. Allison was dead. Gone. Never coming back.
And now Lydia was all alone in her crappy apartment with its crappy sofa and crappy glow in the dark stars that Lydia always thought were a little dumb but that Allison had loved so much.
And she was never going to be whole again.