disclaimer: characters belong to mtv; song belongs to dashboard confessional.
notes: very au (based off the knowledge that colton is leaving and that the show filmed an alternate ending to the s2 finale where jackson died), set after s2 ends
life is always hard for the belle of the boulevard
;;
She can never remember her nights anymore. Far too many of them are spent sitting next to his grave beneath the shade of an old apple tree, memorizing every line etched into his marble headstone. The nights fade too quickly, and she gets too used to counting morning stars. They fade, too. Most everything does.
Ms. Morrell says it isn't healthy, that she shouldn't dedicate her life to her dead ex-boyfriend, that she's losing herself. Lydia wishes she could find a way to scream. She's been lost for a long time, lost since the wolves came, lost since she became the girl immune to the alpha bite, and Jackson's death is nothing, nothing in comparison to the nightmares.
Sometimes, she leans against the apple tree and remembers the blood, the water, the blinding lights. She remembers how he had looked her, the night of their last kiss, all crumbled memories and the remnants of something that could have been magnificent. She remembers her pounding heart, and his beneath hers, the night he died.
Lydia has always been told she has an excellent memory.
;;
Allison offers, multiple times, to accompany her. Lydia refuses every time, but Allison still shows up sometimes. She'll bring cookies or cupcakes from home, or maybe Lydia's favorite latte from Starbucks, and she won't say anything as she sits beneath the apple tree at her side. They'll eat and wait, and keep waiting, for days that will never come again.
"Do you think he'd be happy to be safe?" Lydia asks her one evening when the silence is too loud to bear and there's nothing left to memorize on his grave. "Far away from the monsters?"
Allison looks at her for a moment, looks at her like she's never seen her before, and she smiles, a little wistfully, a little brokenly.
"I think he'd want to be with you," she says, and Lydia has rarely heard lies quite that sweet. "He loved you, Lydia. He really did."
"He asked for his key back," says Lydia, a bit pointlessly, and her fingers instinctively rush to her neck, drawing out the necklace she has never stopped wearing. "He dumped me."
"He still kissed you," Allison reminds her, nudging her shoulder gently. "He still loved you. He just… had a funny way of showing it."
"He didn't have any problem showing you how much he cared," Lydia says, wants to say, doesn't say. She stays quiet and lets the thought build into a web of sticky lies and half-truths and the eyes of boys who've loved her so and lied.
Allison gets up to leave eventually, and the sun drifts aimlessly across the sky. Lydia keeps the key clutched between her hands.
;;
Stiles tries joining her five times before he gives up. His eyes are bright and his hugs are gentle, but she can't breathe when she's around him. He smells like normalcy, like a human, like another boy who's just hopelessly in love with Lydia Martin, queen of Beacon Hills High, and there's nothing normal, or human, or high-school-queen about her now.
"I know it's hurting," he tells her once, "I know it hurts. Believe me," and he gets that look in his eyes, "but we miss you, Lydia."
"I'm right here," she says, but her voice is quiet enough to get lost in the winds and her mind is trapped somewhere between the lacrosse field and the battlefield, and Stiles shakes his head and touches her arm and leaves, every time.
Distantly, she hears his words echo in the cemetery. Death doesn't happen to you, Lydia. It happens to everyone around you.
;;
It's almost autumn again, the first time she arrives at his grave to find somebody else there. Scott looks far more world-weary than she's ever seen him, looks almost as if his world has stopped spinning entirely. But he musters a smile for her, so she takes a breath and sits down beside him.
The silence stretches for a minute – two – three – four – and she breaks first.
"What are you doing here?" Because Scott may feel guilty about Jackson's death, but they weren't friends, and he's already paid his respects, months ago, back when others visited the grave and didn't leave her. Logistically, there's no reason for him to be here now, but then again, logic hasn't been a very faithful companion these days, so she settles in anyway.
"I – " Scott hesitates, glances sidelong at her, and there's something hauntingly bright in his gaze, "I needed some peace and quiet," he finally says, and she doesn't need super-hearing to know his heart jumps a bit. A half-truth is still a lie, and the she hasn't forgotten how full the moon will be tonight.
"Did Allison send you to check on me?" she asks, only half-accusingly, under the pretense that they are still Scott and Lydia of Beacon Hills High, and not two children trapped in a never-ending nightmare where monsters are real and the forest is haunted with blood.
A smile quirks one corner of his lips, and he shakes his head quickly. "No, I came on my own," he says, and then adds, so quietly she almost doesn't hear, "Allison's trying to stay away from me anyway."
"Oh," says Lydia, the word absurdly normal on her lips. She's not sure what else to say, so she lets them fall into a silence that verges on comfortable as they sit and watch the grave and the sunset and the visitors who occasionally come for other people, and his hand finds hers and he doesn't leave.
;;
"Full moon tonight," she remarks as the sun finally dips over the horizon and she can see the glimmer of the evening's first stars.
"I know," he says, and his grip on her hand maybe tightens a bit when the moon rises, but otherwise, everything stays quiet. Lydia intertwines their fingers and listens to him breathe.
;;
Not even two days later, her dog gets sick and the natural place to go is the vet clinic. She finds Scott there, working alone as he tends to a sick kitten, and she knows he can hear her enter, but she doesn't say anything for a moment, just watching him work. His hands are far more gentle than she thought possible, and his eyes are far kinder than she probably deserves when he looks up to smile at her.
"Hey, Lydia," he greets easily, lifting the kitten up off the counter to place it in its basket. "Something wrong with Prada?"
She moves forward slowly, cradling her dog in her hands, and she can't quite find the strength to smile at him, but his presence leaves her warmer than she has been in months. "Food poisoning, I think," she says softly, more focused on how strong and steady his hands are as she passes Prada over to him.
"Doesn't look too serious," he says, setting Prada on the bed to observe her properly. "Do you know what food it was?"
Lydia opens her mouth, prepared to tell him all the details of Prada's meals for the last few weeks, but what comes out instead is, "Why did you go to his grave on the full moon?"
Scott freezes, his fingers hovering over Prada's fur, and his gaze is lowered so he can't look her in the eye. Lydia counts five breaths before he answers.
"I need to – " He hesitates, licks his lips. "I need to focus on something, something specific, during the full moon, or I go out of control," he says, his eyes darting up towards her once and then back down to Prada. "Last month, I tried thinking about Allison, like I always do, but it didn't work. I could hear the Alpha pack moving in the forest and I had to go find them and fight."
Lydia frowns, mulling his words over and pretending not to notice the way he's still avoiding her gaze. "How'd that turn out?" she asks instead of the obvious question of why Allison didn't work as his anchor anymore.
Scott finally looks up to shoot her a wry grin. "Not so great," he says, and lifts up his shirt to show her a gaping wound filled with dry blood, healing far, far too slowly, in the center of his chest. Lydia sucks in a breath sharply and steps closer almost involuntarily.
"Dr. Deaton's out of town to get me some special ingredient that's supposed to help wounds from Alphas," he adds as explanation. "These guys are a lot worse than Derek."
Lydia doesn't reply, finding herself staring at her outstretched hand as it moves towards the wound on his chest. Scott keeps his shirt up, waiting almost patiently, but when her hands touch his skin, he jumps about a foot in the air.
"Sorry," she says, hastily withdrawing her hand. "I didn't – "
"No, no, it's fine," he says quickly, staring at her with wide eyes as he lets his shirt drop back down. "It's just – your hands are really cold."
"Oh," she says, looking down at her hand, and the word is still as useless as it had been on the night of the full moon, "I don't know why."
Scott looks at her a little oddly and moves over, catching her hand in his and holding it close. "They were pretty cold the other night, too, but I guess I was so hot from the wolf thing, it kind of evened out," he says thoughtfully. "Do you think they're cold because you're immune?"
Lydia snatches her hand away. "I'm not immune," she whispers, and he stares at her like she's crazy, but, "it's true, I'm not," she insists. "I'm a freak, that's all."
"Lydia," he sighs, "I'm the one who turns into a wolf once a month, and you think you're the freak? You're the normal one – you always have been."
She laughs bitterly. "I can't even turn into a wolf like normal people would, Scott. I spend all my time in a cemetery. I never even bother to curl my hair in the mornings these days. I haven't been normal in a very long time."
Scott holds her gaze steadily for a moment long enough to feel like it stretches into the universe. Lydia wants desperately to say something else, but he's still holding her hand, and he's still looking at her like she's worth it, so she stays still and waits.
Finally, he says, "I like your hair straight," and then he lets go of her hand and turns back to Prada, leaving her standing next to him, feeling rather like her world had stopped whirling so wildly and slowed, if only for an instant.
;;
The next evening, he joins her again beneath the apple tree, but this time he just sits beside her and doesn't say a word, doesn't even try to touch her. Lydia thinks that maybe this is okay, the two of them silent by Jackson's grave, watching stars fall from the sky. Maybe this is normal.
When he's still there in the morning, she reaches out and touches his hand first.
;;
They settle into a routine, a simple one of watching marble stones and stars, and July bleeds into August agonizingly slowly. Around them, life continues in a whirl of getting ready for school and picking up the pieces of a summer spent pretending that the whole world hasn't been falling down all around them.
Allison gets a new crossbow. Stiles grows his hair out. Lydia buys herself a wardrobe that she's never going to wear. And late at night, when she's lying half asleep with her head on Scott's shoulder, she can hear wolves howling in the forest. Beacon Hills smells of terror these days.
"Peter worked out some kind of deal," Scott tells her one night when she breaks the silence and asks. His hand presses gently on hers when she shivers at Peter's name. "They're staying away for now, but they still like to scare us sometimes."
"They'll be back," she says, and it's meant to be a question, but it's not. Scott doesn't say anything, but she can hear his heart pounding the drumbeats of war beneath her palm.
;;
Her parents get concerned around mid-August and tell her that she's spent far too much time mourning before forbidding her from going near the cemetery for the rest of summer. Lydia wants to throw a tantrum, but she's too tired and it's not worth it, so she curls up in her bed and tries not to fall sleep, too afraid of the nightmares that will come when she doesn't have Scott's warmth beside her.
In her mind's eye, she can see the wolves, darker than the night she was bitten, eyes glowing red with bloodlust, bites scattered across her body. She can smell the forest, smell the moon, smell the blood on everybody's hands, and she's running, but there's nobody to run to.
Bodies lie sprawled on the forest floor, deep in her darkest daydreams, and one by one, they all fall down – Derek and his pack, even Peter, the Argents, Allison, her family, Stiles, and Scott. Marble headstones gleam in the moonlight, and Lydia buries her face in her pillow to muffle a scream.
;;
One night, the window near her bed creaks open, and Lydia awakens from a nightmare too sweet to be reality and fumbles for the lights to discover Scott sitting on her windowsill, one eyebrow raised in question and a half-apologetic smile on his face.
Lydia almost asks what he's doing here, but that would be almost as pointless as going back to sleep. Instead, she clambers out of bed, throwing on a robe to cover herself up, and approaches him.
"Hey," he says casually, as if she hasn't just broken into her house. Lydia wants to laugh. "I figured you might be getting stir-crazy."
"My hero," she says, only semi-sarcastically, and allows him to help her climb out. "We're not going to do anything stupid, are we?"
Scott grins at her. "Me? Stupid? Never."
The next thing she knows, he's got her scooped up securely in his arms and they're racing at top speed right through Beacon Hills, far away from the town and its forests and its nightmares full of blood.
;;
They end up spending the night on the beach, splashing each other in the water like little kids and breathing in the fresh ocean breezes freely, pretending for just one night that the world left behind them isn't still suffocating them. If she's being totally honest with herself, Lydia hasn't smiled this much all summer long.
"Do you ever just want to run away?" he asks her at some point when they are both knee-deep in the ocean and soaked to the bones. "From everything?"
Lydia catches his eye across the water, her hands stilling in the tangles of her hair. "All the time," she admits softly. "Don't you?"
Scott smiles wryly at her. "All the time," he repeats, and then he doesn't say anything for a moment, his gaze locked on hers, just waiting. Lydia can feel her universe shift with every heartbeat, every breath, every single secret filling the space between them that has entwined the two of them in this horrible war of bloodlust and heroism and offered them no way out. Scott's eyes are filled with the same world-weariness she saw the first day he came to the grave, the look of a boy who'd become a man far too quickly, the look of a hero who never should have fought.
Lydia wants to scream from the injustice. Instead, she moves forward and kisses him like they won't live to see tomorrow, and though the sun is already rising, she can still see marble headstones glitter in her mind's eye. She kisses Scott harder and counts the beats of a different fairytale from the one waiting in the forest.
;;
During the next full moon, she sneaks out by herself and finds him by the beach again, completely human and sitting on the shore, watching the tides push and pull. Lydia takes a breath and sits down beside him, just like she did at the last full moon, and she feels her world finally settle into place around her.
Scott tilts his head to smile at her. "Thanks," he says quietly, and there's no need to say what for. Lydia laces their fingers together and squeezes.
"We'll get through this," she tells him, and maybe she doesn't believe herself, but with the forest at her back, it's easier to pretend that their lives are sweeter than they seems.
"I know," he says simply, as if it could ever be that easy, and then he closes his eyes and lets her anchor him to the world, the moon above casting light on a love story that was only ever doomed for tragedy.
a/n: i know i know this sucks and it took me ages to churn even this out, but if you've read this far, i hope you like it, and please drop me a review to let me know what you thought!
and DON'T favorite without reviewing, please and thank you.