Lydia shifts in the plush velvet seat, fiddling with her fifteen-carat emerald bracelet and crossing and uncrossing her ankles. She knows she shouldn't; all the fidgeting will wrinkle her dress and she has already snagged the hem on the heel of one of her vintage stilettos. Her stylist is probably watching the live telecast and making some gruesomely twisted approximation of a pout (the best the over-application of Botox will allow) and she imagines Christian Dior himself is spinning in his grave over someone as twitchy as Lydia wearing his gorgeous haute couture, even if she is nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress tonight.
But right now Lydia doesn't care about any of that. She's hungry and tired, cranky from the hours she had to spend on the red carpet answering the same half-dozen insipid questions over and over, and now she's stuck sitting next to some random seat-filler who has spent the last five minutes staring at her tits because Jackson canceled on her at the last minute.
Even twelve years after they'd broken up, he was finding new and creative ways of disappointing her.
And the ceremony is boring. It's been underway for 92 minutes but Lydia's certain it's somewhere much closer to the 17 hour mark. She sighs and pokes at the artfully plated meal before her without taking a bite - she doesn't want spinach stuck in her teeth if she has to give an acceptance speech - as Angelina Jolie's skeletal frame steps up to the microphone at center stage.
"This past year has brought us great highs and terrible lows, laughter and tears, new friends and heartbreaking farewells-"
And this trite, platitudinous little speech,Lydia thinks as she rolls her eyes, putting down her fork and reaching for another glass of champagne instead.
There's a dramatic pause as the orchestra begins playing something morose, signaling the start of Lydia's least-favorite portion of an already insufferable ceremony - the interminably long in memoriam montage.
Angelina continues, solemnly, "Please join me in saying goodbye to those who were lost, and honoring their contributions to world of film." She steps back and clasps her hands in front of her as the stage darkens and the large screen fills with old film footage, superimposed with familiar names and faces, with nothing to link them except two simple facts - they were entertainers of some sort, and they recently stopped breathing.
Lydia drains her glass, the fizz still burning at the back of her throat as she reaches to refill it. She hates these montages, hates them more than the endless red carpet or the camera that they'll shove in her face when they read the nominees for her category. She knows they most likely won't call her name as the winner; all the so-called Hollywood experts are calling her a "dark horse" and she has made her peace with it.
But this, the roster of recently-deceased entertainers? This is a list that she is all too aware she will someday be on. They'll put her name up there, probably with the famous climactic scene from Formative Years, the film she's nominated for tonight. There will be a polite smattering of applause, maybe a few half-hearted murmurs of "she'll be so missed," and that will be it.
She can see it all so clearly. After all, Lydia is from Beacon Hills; at only 28 she's already far more familiar with the rituals of death than any of the glittering stars surrounding her.
She's got the half-empty bottle of Moët in one hand and is pouring carefully, trying to hold her champagne flute at the exact right angle to keep it from foaming too much, so when the entire ballroom gasps - suddenly, collectively - she has no idea why. Time seems to thicken and slow; Lydia has one long, blissful second where the whole world shrinks down to the golden bubbles in her glass and the shining red lacquer of her fingernails.
And then the mouth-breathing seat-filler puts his hand on her knee and jerks his chin toward the stage.
Lydia flicks her eyes up, a furrow creasing between her brows, a frown beginning to tug at the corners of her flawlessly-lipsticked mouth.
It takes too long to process what she sees - she wonders, wildly, how many extra milliseconds she would have remained clueless if she didn't have such an ungodly high IQ - and then the synapses between her eyes and her brain begin to sort out the difference between her nightmares and the reality confronting her.
Because there she is on the screen, in the pivotal scene from Formative Years: striding out of a burning building with her arms around her costar, her red hair artfully mussed and soot streaked across her face in a way that highlights the caramel colors in her eyes. And then there's her name, in a serious black font - and even in her growing shock she thinks she can identify it as Palatino - stamped across the bottom of the footage with two very familiar dates.
Her birthday...and today.
Someone has added her to the in memoriam montage, and they've chosen this as the day she'll die.
The murmurs have grown to a louder chatter; dozens of people have pulled out their phones, the cameras aimed at Lydia's face to record her reaction.
She'd call them vultures if she could find her voice; she'd carefully arrange her face into a neutral mask but that, too, seems out of reach. Her head is filled with static and it's so hard, impossible, really, to calculate what she should do - what she can do - but the room is suddenly so small and she wants out.
She's still holding the champagne flute (now so tightly that her knuckles have bleached as white as her suddenly bloodless face) and pushes her free hand flat against the tabletop to help herself stand.
A spotlight sweeps the crowd before stopping on her; for one long moment she's just illuminated there, pale, waxy, and still, like a Madame Tussaud's statue of Marilyn Monroe or Mae West - one of those other beautiful, dead actresses. And then the digital version of herself on the screen changes, morphing into the maniacal laughter scene from one of her earlier roles, Banshees, and it all becomes even more surreal and terrifying.
Lydia is frozen, barely even breathing - her mouth a perfect, silent "o" as she stares at her own frightening, deranged visage onscreen - and then the world explodes.
There's the sharp, deafening crack of a shot and the seemingly simultaneous - and inconceivably small - tinkle of shattering glass when the flute in her hand bursts into a hundred thousand slivers. And then there's a hole in the otherwise pristine tablecloth and a cascade of champagne that soaks her hand and pools on the table beneath her.
She can't hear anything but the ringing in her ears but she can see everyone's horrified faces, imagine the screams pouring out of their throats as they run, tripping over chairs and one another, pulling and pushing and clawing their way toward the exits in a singularly surging mass. The aisles are littered with dozens of discarded Louboutin heels, allowing their owners to run freely and the upturned red soles leaving the carpets looking like they're hemorrhaging.
The only stationary object through all of it is Lydia herself, her hand sliced open by the shards of glass and dripping blood into the champagne spilled on the table, swirling and merging until it turns a shade of pink startlingly similar to Lydia's lipstick.
She doesn't see it. Her eyes are locked on the now-frozen image of herself on the giant screen and that death date - so formal, so imperious, so permanently etched into her brain that she's certain she will see it every time she closes her eyes, like the ghost image that appears after staring too long at the sun.
And then there's another crack, accompanied by the sharp sting of a pinch or a bee at her bare shoulder, and it brings the world rushing back into her frozen senses at top speed: Men in suits and earpieces swarming her now-empty table and shouting over the ringing in her ears for her to get down. A hand shoving at her shoulder, more pushing at her back. She scans the room, frantic now, and sees the glowing exit sign at what seems like an insurmountable distance.
She clambers over an overturned chair, rucking her long skirt up into her hands to give her room to run, but another crack splits the air - and suddenly one of the supportive hands at her back falls away. She tries to turn back but the other security guards won't allow it, and her recorded laughter still loops on top volume through the speakers and they're running, half-tripping and surging, and then the side door finally bangs open before them-
-it's dark and cool, the early January California air suddenly surrounding her while the building muffles the madness raging inside.
Lydia feels like she can almost breathe again, like none of it really happened.
For a second, anyway. Then the security guards hustle her into a waiting SUV, the door slammed shut before she can even pull her entire skirt inside, and speed off into the quiet black night.
Stiles sits sprawled in his cruiser on the far edge of town, theoretically monitoring motorist highway speed.
In reality, he's watching Lydia at the Golden Globes on his laptop while slurping greasy Chinese food out of a cardboard takeout container. Or he was - at the first flash of her perfect, painfully familiar face in the montage of dead actors, he stops chewing.
And then there's the pop of a gunshot, tinny and too quiet through the shitty computer speakers, and the chopsticks fall utterly forgotten from his fingers when he jerks forward in the cracked leather driver's seat.
"C'mon c'mon-" he's swearing at the camera operator running away from the action instead of trying to help; he's sliming the keyboard with lo mein noodles while hauling the laptop closer so he can see better; he's staring for snatches of strawberry blonde hair or her slinky green dress, anything...
There's pressure behind his eyeballs and his temples are throbbing - he's pretty sure his head is going to explode if he doesn't know what the hell is happening right the hell now, if he doesn't have her warm and breathing and intact before him in the next six seconds.
The video feed goes to black and he mutters something unintelligible; the police radio crackles but Stiles doesn't care. Because, shit, the only good thing about Lydia leaving Beacon Hills (and his life) was that he wasn't supposed to have to worry about her dying anymore. She was supposed to be safe in her big LA mansion and movie star career; the part of her life that had been so tainted with death and danger should have been long over.
The video comes back up, now switched to a news anchor who isn't actually saying anything useful yet but Stiles watches anyway, eyes huge and barely breathing, as they replay the footage over and over.
He tries to keep his eyes on Lydia every time, but she always disappears at the same moment - right before the second shot, hidden in the surging mass of terrified people and overturned chairs.
But he thinks he can see the viscous red spray of blood somewhere near the place where she should be.
His hands are shaking; hell, all of him is. He's pretty sure he can feel quivering in his liver.
She's fine. She's Lydia, so of course she's fine.
...you'd know if she wasn't fine.
But he doesn't really believe it; not anymore, anyway. There's just been so much time, so many miles between them...he's so wound up and focused on the screen that when his phone buzzes at his hip he jumps, showering himself in cold noodles and sticky sauce. He doesn't even bother swearing, because he's too busy scrambling for his phone. He's suddenly certain that - despite the decade of silence between them - it'll be heron the other end, that she knows he watches and roots for her every chance he gets so he saw...whatever it is that he just saw, and is therefore suffering the world's most massive coronary until he knows for certain that she's okay.
He swipes to answer, leaving a sticky streak across the screen. "Lydia?!"
He's answered with a soft sigh, followed by Scott's murmured, "So you were watching."
"Yeah, of course I was fucking watching," Stiles says, feeling fully unleashed to vent every bit of how unsteady and panicked he feels, "It's Lydia and there was blood and screaming and no wonder she left us because our lives are always involving blood and screaming but not hers, not anymore, and I don't know how to reach her and now they won't say jack shit on the news except that there was a shooting, like, no shit, you useless douchebag, and - hey, Scott? Can you tell anything about her? Have you got some sort of weird wolf smell thing to tell if she's still alive or-"
"Stiles, stop. Breathe. I'm sure everything is fine, but Allison has Lydia's personal number and the contact info for her agent, and we're going to blow them both up until we hear something."
Scott sounds calm; that seems to only work Stiles up more. He grabs at his chest and wishes, strangely, that he had Scott's old pre-wolf inhaler; he's suddenly certain that without it he's going to pass out from oxygen deprivation at any moment.
"...uh, Stiles? You still with me, man?"
Stiles scrubs his free hand through his hair and then drags it down his face; he exhales so hard that it makes him feel smaller, somehow, like he has deflated.
"Yeah," he finally chokes out. "Yeah, I'm here."
"Good, because, look - the Golden Globes are swarming with private security and cops, and I'm sure they're all being kept up-to-date on Lydia's condition. So Allison thought, since you're a cop, too, maybe you could contact them somehow and-"
Stiles will never know what Scott says next. He doesn't even bother to hang up, just flings the phone across the car and snatches at his still-crackling radio.
"Dispatch, it's Officer Stilinski...no, the other Stilinski. I need you to get me the name and contact number for the LAPD's lead investigator on the attempted homicide of-" his voice catches a bit and he has to blink a few times, "-Lydia Martin."