there'll be no comfort in the shade

by Agent of the Apothecary

When you start a story with "once upon a time," you are usually precluding the possibility of someone collapsing in the middle of Beacon Hills Mall and waking up afterwards with thirty-five years' worth of memories of being a different person crowding their head.

Story: there'll be no comfort in the shade

Summary: When you start a story with "once upon a time," you are usually precluding the possibility of someone collapsing in the middle of Beacon Hills Mall and waking up afterwards with thirty-five years' worth of memories of being a different person crowding their head.

Notes: Firstly, there's just a broad baseline warning on this for Lydia Martin: Having Awful Opinions since 1996.

Secondly, this is mostly a Teen Wolf fic; if you watch TW but not OUAT, you should be fine in terms of comprehension. The reverse is probably not true, although I set this during their senior year of high school and do a lot of hand-waving about the stuff that happened in the interim between the end of season 2 and the events of this fic, so who knows?

Thirdly, this seriously could not have been written without Mumford & Sons; I listened to "Lover of the Light" so many times while writing this that I woke up singing it last week.

---

Lydia spends the night before her eighteenth birthday up to the tops of her Madden Girl boots in swamp. Last Thursday, there had only been two swamps in Siskiyou county, both of which are over thirty miles east of Beacon Hills, but nevertheless, there is a swamp in the preserve and Lydia is in the middle of it, holding a silver-tipped stake in one hand and a candle rolled in crushed rosemary and myrtle in the other. The herbs are meant to improve the elements of memory and luck in the protection spell that the candle is casting, and Lydia needs both of those in high quantity if she and Stiles are going to find the last of the red caps responsible for the sudden appearance of a swamp in the middle of the Beacon Hills Preserve.

"I hope these idiots realize that they completely destroyed the native ecosystem," Lydia says to Stiles, because she needs some way to tether their current hunt for red caps to something sane, and worrying about ecosystems is the only way she can think to do that. "There's no way the preserve is going to recover before the onset of winter."

"One," Stiles says, "winter is California is always a relative thing. Two, not sure that they care, being red caps and all."

"Being murderous fey creatures is no excuse for facilitating wanton destruction of an ecological niche, Stiles," Lydia reminds him. She focuses on ecological sustainability in a lot of her conversations with Stiles because she can guarantee that at least forty percent of everything she tells him will be regurgitated at some point and she wants to make sure that Derek gets this speech on more than one front; he's decimated the hare population since returning to Beacon Hills and he really should be focusing on deer. For one thing, deer over-population actually is a problem, and for another, deer hunting is a pack activity, and Derek needs as much help with pack bonding as he can get.

Stiles says, "Your concern is duly noted, Lydia," with twice as much sarcasm as he would've used two years ago. In many ways, Lydia appreciates Stiles no longer following her around like an over-enthused puppy, saying creepy things about her hair and bringing her gifts that make her uncomfortable, but sometimes she misses knowing that she could go up to him at any time of the day and know that he'd have a package of Reese's Cups for her in his backpack. Nothing kick-starts Lydia's mental processes like chocolate and peanut butter.

"We're all responsible for the earth, Stiles," Lydia says. "It's like you're not even paying attention to the itemized incident summaries I send you."

"I pay attention," Stiles mutters. He stomps his next few steps, like a little boy, and sends a wave of disgusting bog water towards Lydia. She grimaces and half-turns, sacrificing her BCBG Max Azria mini-skirt in favor of preserving her hair—supernatural muck very rarely washes out without serious intervention and Lydia's hair won't be able to handle another astringent wash for at least a month and a half—and in the process catches sight of three bobbing lantern-like glows on the horizon to the south.

"Clearly not," Lydia says, pointing at the lanterns, "as you didn't mention the red caps coming out to play despite the south being in your line of sight."

Stiles opens his mouth and makes a weird, contorted face in Lydia's direction. She usually sees it directed towards Derek, which means Stiles is mentally informing her that she's a stupid sourwolf. "Don't even go there, Stilinski," she growls, kicking swamp water in his general direction. "Everything single item of clothing I'm currently wearing is going to have to be thrown away, and I haven't even had a chance to wear these boots to school yet."

As he pulls out his cell phone, Stiles says, "Yes, what you're going to wear to school, definitely an important line item on our current agenda." He hits the second speed dial and turns his phone on speakerphone; approximately two seconds later, there's a click on the other end and silence. Without waiting for a greeting—it is Derek; a greeting seems unlikely—Stiles announces, "Red caps located, Chief."

"Don't engage without back-up," Derek barks. If he wants Lydia and Stiles to stop making dog jokes at his expense, he should probably stop acting like so much of a cliché. "I mean it."

"You always mean it," Stiles says blithely. "Looks like they're a quarter-mile south of our current location, probably two miles north of the house. We'll come from our end, you come from yours, and we should get to ground zero at about the same time."

"Stiles—" Derek roars, but Stiles has already hung up.

"Wolves, amirite," Stiles says to Lydia with an exaggerated eye roll. "It's like he thinks we can't do anything because we don't have claws and an overdeveloped sense of smell."

"I imagine his concern arises more from the fact that the red caps have hamstringed half of the pack and left us without our usual contingent of fanged companions," Lydia points out. Her hand is beginning to cramp around the candle and the melted wax is edging closer and closer to her nails; she sticks the stake through a belt loop and switches hands. The candle flame gutters twice in the process and she freezes, barely breathing, and lets the candle equilibrate.

According to the literature, they're protected as long as the flame doesn't die, but Lydia tends not to trust sources that don't come from a peer-reviewed journal. She recognizes that Allison's family does things old school, but the fact that the bestiary—which was, judging by what she can see of the binding on the scanned images, made between 1200 and 1350—is written in archaic Latin as opposed to classical or even Medieval tells Lydia that there was a whole lot of poor decision-making going on in that family in the early years. Medieval Latin was practically invented for natural science; there was no logical reason for the Argents to use archaic and its reduced vocabulary. If they wanted secrecy so badly, they should've used Medieval and coded it.

So while Lydia trusts her own nuanced translation of the bestiary's entry on red caps, she's not sure she trusts whoever wrote the entry in the first place. "Get closer to me," she tells Stiles, holding the candle slightly above her head to increase its glow radius and pulling the stake from her belt. Thank God for ambidexterity; at least 62% of Lydia's quantifiable usefulness in the field
can be traced back to that. "I don't know at what point the candle's light becomes less effective."

"I would recommend experimentation," Stiles says, "except I'm not sure I want to put the idea in your head."

"The sheer inconsistency of the shit that comes out of your mouth astonishes me, Stiles," Lydia tells him. "As always." The real reason Lydia is wearing $260 boots on a hunting trip through the preserve comes into play now, as Lydia and Stiles make a steady, even pace across the swamp. Even though Steve Madden's shoes are barely weatherproof and the size on the box very rarely computes to the actual size of human feet, the soles are thin and flexible and that enables Lydia to grip the mud with the curve of her toes, keeping her mobile and loose on the top layer of silt. She can hear Stiles squelching behind her in his Timberland hiking boots, swearing floridly, but the only sound coming from her is the soft shushing of the cotton of her skirt against the top cuff of her boots. Even that begins to fade the further they walk, as the fabric dampens and then finally sticks to the skin of her thighs.

They've gotten close enough to the fake lantern glow that Lydia can make out the square shape of the lanterns; the light is golden along the edges and melts into a reddish-orange center that looks like Thanksgiving and Halloween melted into one. It's the color of family and fall and warm fires and hot chocolate.

"Wow," Stiles whispers, his chest bumping against Lydia's back as she pauses. "That's actually really effective."

"They haven't survived for the past thousand years by being ineffective, Stiles," Lydia whispers back. "Why are we whispering? They can't understand English or hear us inside the circle."

"Too many years of conditioning by horror movies, I imagine," Stiles says, his voice still low. "Also, do you really trust the Argents? If the past two years of supernatural craziness has taught me anything, it's that hunters are really bad at research."

"Or just really bad at archaic Latin," Lydia allows. "Make the call, we're within strike distance." She winces at her choice of words almost immediately afterwards; like Stiles, she's apparently been watching too many movies with Bruce Willis and Navy SEALs.

What happens next occurs in slow motion, probably because the possibility hits Lydia too late for her to do anything but get a prescient flash of foreboding right before the shit hits the fan. Stiles reaches for his cell in the pocket of his coat and fumbles the slick metal with his wet hands. His phone arches out of his grasp and exits the circle of protective light cast by the candle, slipping into the water with a splash so loud it probably echoes for miles.

"SHIT," Stiles breathes, and that's when all of the lantern lights wink out in a sudden gust of wind. Lydia quickly reaches for the candle, trying to curve her hand over the wick and protect the flame from going out completely, and even though she manages to keep Stiles entirely inside the light, she exposes her front to the red cap that springs out of the darkness, its tiny white teeth glistening in the darkness.

Lydia has always wanted to know what a protective circle would do when it opens against an invading creature; she finds out when she uncovers the candle and the light slams into the red cap. Even though the circle appears immediately, Lydia slows down the phenomenon in her head to account for the fact that the light is moving. It hits the accelerating red cap and the creature dissipates, with a sick, burnt smell, into a splash of liquid that is dark like dried blood.

"Um, ew," Stiles shouts. Lydia considers the chum-like foam resting against the surface of the bog. Blood is fairly miscible in water, at least as far as anyone need be concerned about in practical situations, so whatever is currently floating along the top of the swamp's water isn't normal blood. Lydia has yet to see a supernatural creature with blood less dense than water, but admittedly she hasn't done any experimentation.

"It's probably not blood," she says to herself, leaning forward slightly. "Stiles, come around to my left. I want to get a closer look and you'll get taken out of the circle if I bend over."

It's a sign of how discomfited he is by the recently exploded red cap that Stiles completely ignores the opportunity to make an ill-advised joke about bending over; he acquiesces, with only a token, "What about the other red caps?"

"Listen for them," Lydia says dismissively. "This is why we have werewolves in our pack, isn't it? They'll take care of them." She flaps a hand towards the south, where the wolves should be coming from the direction of the Hale house. When she moves the candle closer to the blood, she can see that it's filled with tiny bubbles, and it smells of ethanol. Half-dried blood should be more viscous, not less, but maybe the lower density relates back to the red caps' need for constantly wet blood? A dried hat kills them, after all.

Lydia ignores the sounds of the pack rending the remaining red caps limb from limb or however else they exert their normally suppressed aggression and uses the wooden, inert end of the stake to nudge the foam. It moves sluggishly, akin to something with the viscosity of honey or maple syrup, and then the foam collapses it on itself and melts away into the water. "Hmm," Lydia murmurs, and—she's going to be angry at herself about this later—because she's so enthralled by the irregularities, neither she nor Stiles notices the red cap that launches itself into the candle's blind-spot, against the back of her head, and tugs her by her hair under the water.

---

There are seven text messages waiting for Lydia when she wakes up the next morning. She goes through them by rote, as part of her usual morning routine, and they're all some variety of please text me when you wake up so I know you don't have brain damage from pack members. There's a voicemail from Deaton, informing her that, in light of her recent water-related escapades, their discussion on wreath-building this afternoon is canceled. The second voicemail is from her father, postponing their weekend plans until later in the month; it means he's forgotten her birthday again, which is hardly surprising.

She sends a mass text to the entire pack, assuring them that she is brain damage-free, awake, and now eighteen and therefore expecting all presents to be delivered to her house before 7 pm. Before she's even going to consider checking her email or Facebook she needs coffee, so Lydia untangles herself from her bed sheets, wraps herself in an oversized sweater, and goes downstairs with her laptop under her arm and her cell in the pocket of her sweater.

Weirdly enough, as she's sitting on the granite countertop of the island, systematically deleting happy birthday wall posts on her Facebook page from people she doesn't like, she gets an odd, untethered feeling loose in her stomach. There's the distinct possibility that it's just hunger—she can't remember the last time she ate—so while she lets her mother's Colombian dark roast sit in the French press, she texts Allison to confirm that their lunch and shopping plans haven't been upset by Lydia's recent near-drowning.

Are you sure? Allison sends back. When I left last night you were nearly catatonic. I'm pretty sure you passed out in the shower.

You have yet to mention something an avocado melt from Stacey's and four hours in Nordstrom won't fix, Lydia replies. Pick me up at two, I need another shower before my hair is ready for public consumption.

The feeling persists through her shower, and the cup of coffee, and then the ride to Beacon Hills Mall, which Lydia and Allison spend singing along to One Direction, although Lydia insists on the windows being rolled up to prevent anyone from seeing.

"Do you not want to talk about last night?" Allison asks after lunch, when they're sprawled next to the Kate Spade table, trying on sequined pumps. "A red cap getting the jump on you because you were distracted—that's not like you, Lydia."

Lydia examines first her left foot—red sequins—and then her right—gold—and finally says, "Occasionally, we are all allowed to have our off days."

"The fourth thing you ever said to me was I don't get off days," Allison replies. "I remember because you were leaving for algebra at the time and I had never before been envious of a person's ability to do a hair flip."

"Even I am wrong, occasionally," Lydia says, removing her left shoe and replacing it with the second gold pump. Allison won't actually tell anyone about Lydia's weaknesses; the only real threat to this would be Scott, except Allison and Scott tend just to be creepily over-invested in how much in love they are with each other, and not talk about things like Lydia's occasional insecure flare-up. "I'm concerned that the gold makes my skin look sallow."

"I don't think it's possible for your skin to look sallow," Allison says. "I don't care what you read in Teen Vogue."

"I don't read Teen Vogue," Lydia says with a distasteful expression. "I read Vogue like someone who is an adult and don't look to Alexa Chung for every fashion cue."

"Buurn," Allison says under her breath. She picks up a pair of pumps with green sequins and tilts them enticingly in Lydia's direction. "I know you have an entire rant prepared concerning redheads in green, but I think these might better soothe the loss of the Madden Girl boots."

"Nothing can soothe the loss of the Madden Girl boots," Lydia says, yanking the pumps away from Allison. "Or so I'm going to tell my mother when comes back from San Francisco tomorrow with an apologetic expression and a check for $500."

"Are you also explaining to her that the boots met with an unfortunate swamp incident with some red caps?" Allison asks. "You're the last hold-out; everyone else's parents know."

"Everyone else appears to have parents who have some degree of concern about their well-being," Lydia points out. "Or dead parents, I suppose. And please don't pretend that the members of the pack made mature, rational decisions when informing their parents of their furry inclination; the Reyes only know thanks to that ridiculously overdramatic showdown with the Alpha pack."

The green sequined pumps look fantastic—of course; they're Kate Spade—and birthdays were invented so that men and women could make impractical sartorial purchases without feeling guilty; Lydia Martin very rarely does guilt, but she understands the dynamics of the guilt trip well enough to have raised it to an art from. She's the product of divorced, independently wealthy people, after all.

"Are you never going to tell them?" Allison asks after Lydia has forked over her credit card. "What if something happens to you? They'll just never get to know what really happened?"

This is unusually forceful for Allison; she'd been the first to accept that Lydia's parents were never going to learn about Lydia's magic lessons, and even after Stiles and Scott had banded together to gift Lydia with a well-meaning PowerPoint presentation entitled 'Life After The Talk: So Much Easier' that frankly Lydia wishes she could permanently erase all memory of from the face of the Earth, Allison had supported Lydia's decision.

"I didn't die last night," Lydia says quietly, so that the cashier doesn't get any ideas about calling the police. "I haven't died during any of the myriad other wacky adventures we've had over the past few years, and although at some point I will, in fact, die of supernatural causes, there is no reason for my parents to know the truth, as if the truth somehow will change our relationship. In order for that to happen, Allison, you need to have a relationship with your parents. Based on how they reacted to my cousin Marta coming out, they prefer the lie." She smiles as the cashier hands her a receipt. "Have a nice afternoon!"

Allison must be able to infer from this that Lydia doesn't want to discuss her parents anymore; when she catches up with Lydia outside of Orange Julius, all she says is, "Smoothie?" Never let it be said that Allison is as slow as her boyfriend.

A smoothie actually sounds like a really good idea, the longer Lydia thinks about it; her head is throbbing directly above her left eyeball like Athena is seriously considering making a bid for freedom. Lethargy and chest pain are normal near-drowning systems, but Lydia's never read anything that would indicate that the peculiar, aching feeling low in her stomach is at all normal.

"You okay?" Allison asks; Lydia realizes that she's been staring into space directly above Allison's shoulder, the heel of her palm pressed against her abdomen. "You're venturing into freaky territory, and, you know, better safe than sorry in Beacon Hills."

"No, I'm fine," Lydia says automatically, a lifetime's worth of idiomatic nonsense prompting the words. "I probably swallowed too much bog water last night. I would love a smoothie." She links her arm through Allison's and tugs her into the shop, determined not to let a putative bacterial infection keep her from an enjoyable birthday.

"If I didn't love you," Allison tells her, "I would probably be very frightened of you right now."

"There's no need to let the fact that you know me keep you from being afraid," Lydia reminds her. "Your treat, as I'm the birthday girl."

Caleb Michaels, who shares seventh period AP Lit with Lydia, is manning a fake smile and an ice cream scoop behind the counter. His face freezes into a parody of horror when he catches sight of Lydia, as she's been particularly vocal as of late concerning his inability to focus on any element of The Sun Also Rises beyond Jake's lack of a penis. "H-hey," he stutters, towards Allison, as apparently he's too much of a toddler to look Lydia directly in the eye. According to Stiles, this is an especially common occurrence amongst Beacon Hills' current crop of freshmen; it now appears to be spreading to upperclassmen.

"Hey, Caleb," Allison says, leaning against the glass counter and peering down into containers of syrupy, ostensibly freshly-cut produce. "How's it going?"

"F-fine," Caleb says, staring unblinking directly into the middle of Allison's forehead. "How are you, Allison? L-lydia?" He whispers Lydia's name. There's a pack in New Mexico that now believes that speaking Lydia's name will cause her to physically manifest and exact vengeance on the speaker; the birth of that myth had ended up being the one upshot to an otherwise lackluster vacation in Albuquerque. It's highly unlikely that Caleb is a member of that pack—he's too stupid to have survived this long as a werewolf, for one, although Scott McCall lives to thwart that hypothesis—but he speaks her name like he's one of them.

"I'm great," Lydia purrs. "Have you finished your paper for AP Lit yet, Caleb?"

Caleb blanches. "What can I get you?" he half-shouts at Allison's forehead, his skin turned blotchy by fear. If Lydia were a better person, this would probably be less hilarious, but she has to get her kicks somehow.

"Oh, I'll have a medium 3-Berry Blast, please," Allison says. "Can you put extra ginseng in that?"

"Of course," Caleb breathes, aiming his ice cream scoop at the tank labeled VANILLA.

With Caleb sufficiently occupied, Allison turns back to Lydia, propping her elbow on the glass case. "Is this how we're going to end up?" she asks, giving Lydia that particular grin—toothy, half-cute, half-smirk, open-mouthed—that never fails to make Lydia want to pinch her cheeks like an eighty-year-old Italian grandmother. "Me keeping you in the lap of luxury, while you spend my money and wait for me to die so you can trade me for a younger man?"

"Ally," Lydia says, "if I was using you for anything, it would be sex. And while I've never seen Scott hit a woman—bless his little chivalrous heart—if I tried to steal you away from him in order to have my wicked way with you, he might actually rip my throat out." Caleb's hand trembles above the container of strawberries as Lydia reconsiders. "Well, Scott would try to rip my throat out."

Caleb drops the spoon and strawberries onto the counter and makes a small, terrified squeak when Lydia stares in his direction. "Let me get another spoon," he says. He vanishes into the back room so fast Lydia is fairly certain that, had Finstock been around, Caleb Michael would've been first line material faster than he could say 3-Berry Blast.

"I think we've scared the poor boy," Lydia says. She can hear her disdain for his sheer existence dripping from every word; even Allison's quelling look can't dispel it. "I'm not sorry," she tells Allison. "He's possibly the most timid human being I've ever seen."

"Normal people are allowed to have nervous conditions," Allison says. "It's not something that's generally punishable by death in Beacon County."

Lydia has a lot of opinions about what should receive capital punishment in Beacon County, and very few of them are fit for public consumption. She's opening her mouth to express one or more of them anyway when a sudden lash of dizziness hits her and she's tilting into Allison before she even knows what's happening. "Lydia!" Allison shouts; a wave of purple explodes in the corners of Lydia's vision and she's hit with a monster of a headache so strong that the most sensible thing to do is fade into unconsciousness.

Never let it be said that Lydia Martin isn't sensible; out she goes, face-first, into the glass counter of Orange Julius at Beacon Hills Mall. There's no way she's going to be able to make any social trade out of this at all; thank Jesus she's already given up on prom queen to that nasty piece of work Olive Witherspoon, or else waking up after this might actually be a little bit embarrassing.

---

"I am beginning to feel like Eragon," Lydia announces to the back of her eyelids when she finally regains consciousness. "Seriously, if unconsciousness becomes a thing that happens at the end of every chapter, I am not playing the deadweight damsel in distress."

Of all the things that could be filed under 'weird' about Lydia Martin's eighteenth birthday, number one officially becomes what happens next, which is the sudden memory spike that damsel in distress causes to happen in her brain. "Oh my god," she breathes, curling to her left and rolling an arm over her head. "Jesus fucking Christ." There might actually be a small creature burrowing through Lydia's brain right now, to judge by the level of pain she's currently suffering.

"It's okay," he says, and a big, warm hand presses against the back of Lydia's head. "Just breathe. It'll go down in a few seconds."

"I'll thank you for your medical opinion when you finish your MD," Lydia snipes. "Oh wait."

He laughs; like always, it drips down the back of Lydia's throat and tingles against the top of her stomach, erupting into sparkles and butterflies and other sickening, wrenching things. It's like a Taylor Swift song, without the blatant slut-shaming and poor knowledge of classic literature; Lydia has turned into a parody of her worst outer self. "Well," he says, "if you're sassing so prodigiously, it must not be a serious problem."

"I can't believe you just used sass and prodigious in the same sentence," Lydia murmurs into the curve of her arm. "Who do you think you are, me?"

"I know exactly who I am," he says. His fingers card through her hair, gently, tugging at the curls at the end and drifting back to rest against her scalp. Without any other stimulus, her heart begins to slow. "Do you?"

Such a question raises a whole bunch of red flags—supernatural amnesia is never going to be funny to Lydia after the month she spent being tailed by Stiles when he thought he was eleven and in love with her again, especially not in light of how much time Derek had spent trailing after his stupid adolescent boyfriend like a creepy pedophile—but Lydia's head hurts too much to delve into the myriad possibilities.

"Lydia Martin," she says. "Aged eighteen. Obama is president." Her tongue feels funny against her lips; twitching and fierce. "Wait, that's—that's not right." She can remember watching MSNBC the night that the election results had come in, though; she, Danny, and Stiles had talked about how much they were in love with Rachel Maddow and occasionally turned on Fox News so they could throw popcorn at the sour-faced commentators. "I'm—"

She can remember her eighteenth birthday. Today is her eighteenth birthday.

"I'm—"

Shit.

"I am Guinevere," she says. "Queen of the Summer Country."

As if saying the words are a cure against the ache, her head stops throbbing. She can feel his hand more securely, now, more of a tether and less of a guiding presence. "Oh, by the will of the elder gods. Lance—"

It is him, when she opens her eyes. She hadn't seen him in seven years, when she had died, but she'd met Lancelot when they were both eighteen, young and stupid and filled with Arthur's silly, extravagant ideas about kingship and joy and the future. She'd seen him age after that; she'd seen ten years pass against the crags of his face and never once had they turned bitter or angry towards her. But those years are gone when she looks at him now. It's like being returned to her childhood, to the best of herself.

"Boyd," she says, and she's more unsure than Lydia Martin has ever been unsure about anything in her life. "Oh my god, Boyd."

"I know, Gwen," he says, and his smile looks cracked and odd along the very edge, curving into the darkness that hides his eyes. "I remember, too." His hand begins to burn where it is pressed against her head. Now that she isn't occupied by searing agony, Lydia realizes that she's curled up in the backseat of Stiles' Jeep, which appears—to judge by the few details that Lydia can make out from behind Boyd's massive shoulders—to be in the Beacon Hills Mall parking lot.

"Where's Allison?" she asks. "And why the hell am I in Stiles' car?"

"I didn't know anyone else who could drive me on short notice," he says, with a quick-muscled shrug that makes his jacket shiver across his shoulder. "I sent him and Allison to buy ice from the gas station over by Ruby Tuesday's. I thought maybe—I was confused, when I woke up. I would've appreciated a familiar face, even," here his face twitches slightly, twisted with maybe self-loathing and that awful, hardened look that Lancelot had worn for his last few months in Camelot before he'd left, "one I hadn't seen except in anger."

"I wasn't angry at you," Lydia says, before she can even really evaluate this as possibly the worst place for her and Lancelot to ever have this conversation. "It was a shitty situation for everyone."

Boyd's face melts into impassivity. "Yes," he says, and what she hears is Lancelot shouting, Why would you stay with him?! Why would you stay and suffer through this? It's the most eloquent single syllable she's ever heard, and that's including the way that Derek seems to communicate his affection for Stiles.

"If there is ever a time wherein we can talk about our past with anything approaching emotional maturity, we can do so then," Lydia says, staring at the ceiling of Stiles' Jeep. "However, that time is not now." What she means is, We are never talking about Camelot.

"As you wish," Boyd says drily, and his claws prick against her scalp as he gently removes his hand. Her hair must be tangled around his claws—that's one thing that Lydia can remember about the sex with Jackson after he shifted from lizard to wolf, beyond it being full of his self-hatred: his claws always caught on her hair and it was a bitch to get them loose—but she wouldn't be able to tell from how slowly and carefully Boyd frees himself.

Even though she doesn't want to talk about Camelot—even though Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and, god, Mordred are the last things she ever wants to pass her lips as Lydia Martin—she still can't help looking at Boyd's face and seeing, mirrored in the kind gentleness there, the way that Lancelot had looked when he had first seen her. Summertime in her father's lands and the new king come to ask for her hand and his bravest knights on either side: Gawaine of Orkney, dark-haired and green-eyed and with a silver grin, and Lancelot du Lac, dark and tall and serious, his hand caught over his heart.

My knight, she thinks; or, she'd thought, at the time, when Arthur had offered Lancelot as her champion as part of her bride price.

"We were stupid," she says quietly, as she carefully raises herself onto her elbows.

It's unsurprising that Boyd doesn't respond; there are so many situations to which that statement could be applied, after all, and she means every one of them.

---

They'd called this land—Beacon Hills, America, whatever you want to term it—the Land Without Magic, or so the lore had said. Lydia already knows that to be untrue, if simply because she took a handful of mountain ash when she was sixteen and raised a werewolf from the dead, but magic is different here.

Deaton isn't so crass as to come out directly and ask about it, but Lydia arrives at the veterinary clinic at 5:30 on Monday afternoon while he and Ms. Morell are sitting in the waiting room, drinking tea, and when Lydia walks through the front door Morell drops her mug. Lydia stops it without even really considering the consequences; it's been a long day, between Caleb Michaels' stupidity and the way that Olive Witherspoon had been flicking increasingly interested looks at Boyd over her school copy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf during lunch and Lydia is tired.

"That's a neat trick," Deaton says, plucking the mug out of the air wherein it is suspended, a foot above the ground.

"It is," Lydia agrees. On the one hand, the slip was ill-advised, but on the other, she's fairly certain Deaton and Morell are talented enough to pick up the changes that have gone on in the way that magic is distributed around Lydia's body. Just because things are different doesn't meant Guinevere's skills are any less profound, especially not with Lydia's training to back up her own natural capacity. When neither Deaton nor Ms. Morell show any sign of getting up, she asks, "Are we going to begin, or just sit around and stare at each other? There are other places I can be if that's the case."

Morell's hands are trembling slightly, but she retrieves her tea from Deaton and says, "Don't be petulant, Lydia. Take a seat."

Lydia wants to relax in one of Deaton's shitty waiting room chairs like she wants to have back problems in her thirties, but she slips her bag off of her shoulder and places it on the floor as she sits. There's no harm in cultivating an aura of reason, if not helpfulness. She probably doesn't need Deaton and Morell's lessons anymore, but since experimenting with her magic today has been low on her to-do list, which has prominently featured Don't collapse in the middle of the hallway at school and Don't stab Olive Witherspoon as its main line items, she can't be sure.

Lydia's magic, before she remembered Camelot, had been small and useful and green, like a field of corn. Everything underneath her fingertips had glinted with potential and she'd slowly coaxed the stalks to ripeness under Deaton and Morell's (blackmailed, but Lydia has never pretended to be above fighting dirty) guidance and occasional disdain. Guinevere had been an accomplished sorceress by the time of her death, the unfortunate result of spending the last ten years of her life as basically useless, and now Lydia's magic has exploded like hothouse flowers. Because magic in Beacon Hills is so strongly tied to the land, Lydia feels it in the air as she breathes and the earth as she walks.

"Why don't we just have a talk today?" Deaton says. "You mentioned last week that you were translating a new text for Stiles' library. Would you like tea, Lydia?"

The air in the veterinary is cold and slightly recycled, in deference to all of the animal dander. Lydia strips off her jacket with studied casualness and says, "Yes, thank you," as she adjusts the cuffs on her silk blouse. When she briefly presses her lips together, she can feel the slightly gummy tack of her lipstick. The physical reminders tether her to Lydia Martin, who dresses to kill and doesn't give any fucks, and remove her from Guinevere's uncertainty.

And, always, her magic hums under her skin: a buoy and a guide and a heart, beating with the pulse of the land. Lydia makes a mental note to have another talk with Derek about the rabbit population; it's more problematic than she had originally presumed, back when she'd been basing it on insufficient sampling.

"Why don't you tell us about this text?" Deaton suggests. Morell purses her lips and still hasn't moved her eyes away from Lydia, her uncomfortable counselor stare pinned to Lydia's forehead. It would almost make Lydia uncomfortable, except Lydia knows she's impeccably put together and she refuses to find Morell's psychology degree intimidating. Psychology is an imprecise social science with delusions of practicality.

As a spoon clinks against a ceramic cup in the canteen behind the welcome desk, Lydia crosses her left leg over her right and flicks her hair over her left shoulder. "At the moment there's not much to report," she says, raising and lowering one shoulder in a more elegant version of her father's favorite insouciant shrug. "Stiles originally asked me to examine it in order to determine the likelihood of us suffering another situation with an incubus, but it isn't about sex magic at all. Much to Stiles' disappointment, I'm sure." She accepts the cup as Deaton offers it, careful to actually touch the side of the mug and not float it into her hands.

The leaves swirling in the bottom of the mug tell her a particular story: valerian root to soothe her troubles and leave her more open to conversation, passiflora vine for emotional balance, and meadowsweet as the base, for flavor and as a stress-reliever. "I don't have a headache," she tells Deaton, since as far as she knows this tea is meant to reduce the symptoms of one.

"Consider it a preventative measure," Deaton replies.

When she inhales the sweet steam rising off of the surface of the tea, it drifts inwards and tickles her nose. Meadowsweet reminds her of home and the spring—she can remember brewing mead for the summer solstice with the other ladies of the keep. She always collected the honey; the bees would never bother her much.

"Thank you," she remembers to add, after her first sip.

Deaton gives her as much of a smile as he ever does and Morell's mouth tightens in the corners. "If it's not sex magic," she says, drumming her purple fingernails against the ceramic of her mug with a series of small tinkling noises, "then what is it?"

"It looks most like an analysis of a compulsion spell of some kind." Lydia drinks more of the tea, rolling it over her tongue, and then she launches into a technical explanation of what she's read so far. Deaton and Morell are a satisfying audience. They're smart enough to follow along but, unlike Stiles, don't feel the compulsion to interrupt every other sentence. Maybe eventually Stiles will reach the point where he no longer needs to prove his worth to the pack via his intelligence, but that day is unlikely to occur within the next eighteen months, by Lydia's estimation.

Morell flicks her eyes into a roll. "Alan, this town will never cease to be ridiculous," she murmurs. "Please note that I'm not disputing the likelihood of a compulsion spell of that caliber coming into play, but Beacon Hills' ability to attract the supernatural will never fail to astonish me."

She drawls this last bit; Lydia gets the heavy-handed irony, that Morell is never astonished by anything. Since Lydia still doesn't like Morell overmuch, she ignores the interjection. "The reason why Stiles must've found it in his research on incubi is probably that it's been found before in towns where witches have used it to simulate an incubi infestation."

Because the conversation is rooted mostly in the hypothetical, it drifts eventually from incubi and compulsion spells to hemlock dosing, and from there to a heated—as heated as Deaton ever gets, really, which is not much—debate concerning consent in ritual exorcisms. It's the way that they treat her in this discussion, as less of a student and more of a teaching assistant, that tells Lydia that they have tactfully acknowledged that there isn't much else for them to teach her in a practicum environment and as such the tenor of the lessons will be shifting in the future.

"Why don't you come back on Monday," Deaton offers as he holds the door for her to leave. Lydia finishes securing the last button on her jacket and briefly tugs at the fringe along the edge of her scarf—a tasteful amount; Allison should take note—and nods.

"Once a week from now on is fine for me," she says. "Have a nice evening, Dr. Deaton, Ms. Morell."

She can feel Morell's eyes against her as she walks to her car and Morell's suspicion in the way that the lights in the veterinary clinic flicker off when the engine turns over and she reverses out of her parking space. Her curiosity about the sudden surge in reincarnation in Beacon Hills is manageable, so she feels no need to outsource to Deaton or Morell. Why she remembers, why Boyd remembers, why her magic has changed: Lydia wants to know, of course, because she wants to know everything, but she isn't burning inside out with curiosity. The external factor of her magical ability proves that this isn't a case of someone messing around in their heads, at least, so she doesn't need to worry about that.

Her mother is on a conference call when Lydia comes home and to judge by the sharp, furious note that cuts out from under the door to her study, she won't be interested in dinner for another few hours. Lydia accordingly tosses together a salad and retires for her desk with it and a glass of lemonade, intent on hammering out the last details of the translation for Stiles.

She finds herself, two hours later, dipping the tip of her mechanical pencil into the half-empty glass of lemonade, eyes slightly glazed over, using the pale liquid to trace runes into the air. The translation hasn't even been touched; she's eaten maybe three leaves of spinach.

The runes burn out in the air in front of her. They shine like trapped, trembling sunlight, and they beg for something that Lydia isn't prepared to give: resolution for that peculiar precipice on which Guinevere had teetered for so many years. She'd been a good, strong queen and a strong woman who'd maybe not been quite so good. She had loved her husband for many years and then, when he'd left her barren bed and gone to find his son elsewhere, she'd stayed faithful to him regardless of the desire in her heart.

Lydia despises Guinevere for that. What's the point of being selfless, if you end up in the situation where Guinevere had found herself—childless at thirty-five, essentially isolated from her husband and the rest of her court, deserted by her champion and her friends? Lydia had done a book report on Katherine of Aragon in the fourth grade and she'd been filled with revulsion for her steady, plodding nature, for the way that she'd clung to her ideals instead of moving on with the times and using her position to win something more meaningful for her and her daughter.

Guinevere had been a powerful sorceress, the kind of sorceress rivaled only perhaps by Merlin and Morgana in all of Camelot, and although she'd fallen to Morgana's infertility potion and Merlin had seduced her husband away, she'd still been better than everyone else. But she'd never used any of it.

"What's the point?" Lydia asks, aloud, to her empty bedroom and the runes written in front of her. "Having it and not using it is stupid."

Guinevere hadn't even been particularly wise. Guinevere had been a victim, primarily. She'd met other queens of other lands—Snow, from the Enchanted Forest, and Regina from the Dark Lands, and even Ariel from her little island and Penelope, whose daughter had been dropped into a deep sleep on the eve of her engagement—and always Guinevere had sunk back into the shade thrown by their vibrancy and purpose.

Pathetic, Lydia thinks, the word burning deep into her skin and further, into the wrinkled, membranous flesh of her stomach and intestines and heart and lungs. She opens her hand, letting the pencil fall, and splays her fingers so that the lemonade runes can sink into the meat of her palm. They're meaningless jumbles, for strength and protection and mental acuity—things Lydia has in spades—but they still buzz under her skin and set off synapses in her head.

Lydia will allow nothing to jeopardize the years' worth of effort she has put into building Lydia Martin, mathematical wunderkind and couture connoisseur. There is purity of purpose in Lydia that she refuses to sacrifice, even to Guinevere's sensitive, high-strung demands of emotional comfort and the gentleness of Lancelot's hands as he'd helped her from her horse and carried her basket of cuttings to the storeroom and swung her through a jig during the Yule feast. Lydia Martin is no longer Guinevere, Queen of the Summer Country; there's no reason for her to assume that Vernon Boyd is still Lancelot.

---

Unlike everyone else Lydia knows, Derek parks outside of her house and leans on the horn rather than coming up to the front door. Lydia recognizes that his family all burned to death and it was very heartbreaking and difficult for him and many a violin played Mendelsohn tragically in the background while he cried bloody tears, but he wasn't raised in a barn. Lydia remembers Mrs. Hale, who'd been the children's librarian at Beacon Hills Public Library, like she remembers everything else—perfectly—and Mrs. Hale had not been the kind of woman who tolerated poor manners in her children.

As such, Lydia finishes applying a second layer of top coat as Derek sounds the Camaro's horn again, and then she changes her Facebook status, checks her eyeliner for irregularity, and gives the irises that her mom has in a crystal vase over the fireplace a little extra va-va-voom; Lydia has never liked dying flowers. Peter Hale had been especially fond of metaphors during his tenure in Lydia's head, and if she never has to hear someone waxing lyrically about a waning orchid it will be too soon.

Eventually, her phone rings; it's Derek, of course. He's the only one other than Deaton who likes to pretend that text messaging doesn't exist.

"Hello?" Lydia answers, checking her nail polish for chips or stray hairs.

"Get your ass in the car, Martin," Derek growls.

Lydia blows on her left pinkie and gently nudges a piece of lint out of the danger zone with her thumb. "What do we say?" she asks in a sweet, singsong tone.

"Get out here before I rip your throat out with my teeth," Derek says, parroting her sweet voice. He sounds like a chain-smoking Southern belle; Lydia can imagine that there's a story there, but, unlike Stiles, she isn't obsessed with discerning every nuance of Derek Hale's tragic backstory.

"Nice try," Lydia says, "but I'm not Stilinski." She hangs up.

Two minutes later, her doorbell rings. Lydia's been sitting on the living room couch for the past minute and thirty seconds, composing the email she always sends her grandmother on the first of the month; she saves her careful examination of MIT and Caltech's respective math departments and goes to answer the door.

The look on Derek's face could melt iron, but Lydia's made of sterner stuff. "Hello, Derek," she says breezily, elbowing him out of the way so she can step out onto her porch. "Thanks for giving me a ride."

"Is that really how this is going?" Derek demands, flashing her a bit of side-fang in the afternoon sunlight. "Thanks for the ride?"

"I was showing you how people with manners respond in normal situations," Lydia replies, yanking the door shut and slamming her key into the front lock. "I realize 'please' and 'thank you' are generally foreign concepts to people who live in subway cars, but that's why I've taken it upon myself to educate you. Without manners you might as well go back to living in the woods with fur."

Derek reaches out and mimes strangling her. "Believe it or not, this disaster will not postpone itself because you're playing Miss Manners, Lydia."

"I thought you and the other wolves killed all of the red caps, Derek," Lydia says. "If this does qualify as a disaster, whose fault would that be, exactly?"

"Probably the girl who almost drowned," Derek says tightly. He puts his hand against the back of her head and shoves her towards his car; he really must be concerned, because Derek rarely shows physical imposition against anyone except Stiles nowadays. "Get in the goddamn car, Lydia."

"Pushy," Lydia remarks. "There must be another cluster of them in the preserve, then."

All Derek does is twitch as he crosses in front of his car; it means she's right but he doesn't want to lose whatever tenuous hold he currently has over the situation. Derek's leadership issues are adorable, and by adorable Lydia means excessively annoying. She's toyed with signing him up for some kind of leadership camp experience for this summer—something for him to do while the rest of the pack deals with orientation and buying desk lamps and other pre-college things—but she imagines that he'd just spend it unproductively, lurking in dark corners and texting Stiles.

Stiles is the only person Derek will text. It's another thing that Lydia finds irritating.

"We won't be able to hunt them until sundown," she reminds Derek once he's joined her inside his car and turned it on with an overwhelming roar. Even though Lydia has read plenty of classic Freud and knows enough to make fun of the Psychology Today links that show up on her newsfeed, it would take a team of crack psychologists with a lot of NSF funding to delve into the full depths of what the Camaro represents in the domain of Derek's shattered psyche.

"We're doing this new thing," Derek says, grinding into a gear that somehow enables him to go even faster, "where we plan before we venture out into dangerous situations."

"Oh, are we?" Lydia replies with a raised eyebrow. She's trying a new thing where she's pretending that Derek driving his car like a NASCAR reject doesn't make the skin want to peel off of her fingers. "That's exciting."

"Hopefully not too exciting," Derek says drily. "The goal is to cut back on excitement."

"Please, stop with the euphemisms," Lydia says, waving a hand at him. "Your uncle had a fondness for them and I still have lingering trauma related to that."

Derek mutters something about how they all have lingering trauma thanks to Peter, and now that Lydia has officially ventured deep enough into emotional vulnerability to fill her daily quota for Ms. Morell, she decides to take them back out. "As touching as this bonding moment has been, I'd much rather talk about the red caps. Presumably a plan is in development that doesn't involve essentially cornering them in the middle of their territory and hoping no one drowns?"

Now that he's been given the okay to be a shithead, Derek blazes forth with all engines roaring. He and Lydia bicker for the entire drive back to pack headquarters, which is the Stilinski residence this week while the sheriff is out of town at a state-mandated conference. Just to be an asshole, Derek starts in on Sun Tzu halfway through their conversation, and Lydia obviously can't let that stand. It's like waving an evolutionary psychology study with a sample size of N=10 in front of her face and expecting her not to rip it to shreds.

They haven't progressed to full-out yelling—Lydia Martin is never anything but flawlessly classy—but Derek is definitely growling more than he is enunciating his vowels by the time he brakes in the sheriff's cruiser's usual parking space and he and Lydia pour out onto the Stilinski's front lawn, Lydia openly baiting Derek about his stereotypical preferences in military science literature.

"It's nice that you think a few quotes from the Art of War are going to cure our difficulties, but the red caps are not human," Lydia points out, jabbing an index finger towards Derek's chest. "Ascribing human motives to them would be foolhardy and short-sighted and I thought the whole point of reevaluating our plan of attack was to reduce the amount of incurred risk."

"Okay, time out," Stiles says, stepping onto the porch and throwing a hand out in either direction.

"Shut up, Stiles," Derek and Lydia both growl.

"No, seriously, my house and my rules. Table the debate on ancient Chinese military tactics and put on your big boy pants."

"Over my dead body are we using Sun Tzu to mandate our plan of attack against the red caps. In the first place, it's intellectually immature." Lydia makes sure to smack Derek in the chest with her purse as she steps past him. He's basically incapable of disobeying Stiles, which is a trait Lydia doesn't share and of which she is perfectly willing to take advantage. "Secondly, red caps aren't human and therefore human war strategy won't work on them. It's cute that you think it will, but it won't." She smiles at Stiles, and it isn't a pleasant expression. "No need to play Mom, I'm done."

When she breezes past Stiles into his living room, most of the pack is arrayed on various pieces of furniture, draped like Annie Leibovitz is going to show up to shoot the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair at any second. All that's missing is the couture, really, and while Lydia had made a pact with herself very early on not to have any feelings about Jackson moving away, whether they be positive or negative, she misses knowing at least one other person at pack meetings could be guaranteed to have touched something by Chanel in their lifetime.

Boyd is in the far corner, looming above the only open armchair, his face inscrutable and distant. Now is not the time for Guinevere to be having inconvenient feelings all over Lydia's carefully-maintained aura of perfect composure; to prove it, Lydia walks through the sea of Beta limbs thrown across the Stilinskis' living room floor and settles delicately into the open armchair. Her skin feels scattered pricks of heat from where Boyd's hand is resting against the left shoulder of the armchair.

"Hello, Lydia," he says, deliberate and low.

"Hello, Boyd," she says. Very few things ever choose to disobey Lydia Martin, but her voice cracks over the last consonant of his name. It would be imperceptible to human ears, but naturally Lydia is surrounded by supernatural creatures with excessively good hearing; Scott and Isaac's heads swivel towards her in unison.

"Are you—" Isaac tries, and then he thinks better of it when Lydia gives him the chilly look that she had whetted against Stephanie Lin, who had cried every day of freshman year and is now probably a stronger person because of it.

"Yes?" Lydia asks sweetly. She nails Scott with her stare next, but he's made of slightly more impervious stuff now that he's buoyed by the force of Allison's love or whatever other teenage drama nonsense floats through his brain instead of the material for their AP Physics class.

"Are you okay?" Scott asks, all well-meaning interest and sympathy, his big puppy eyes earnestly blinking in Lydia's direction. She wants to take a firm grip on his Justin Bieber mess of a haircut and slam him face-first into the Stilinskis' coffee table; even though she suppresses that particular urge, Scott still yelps a second later when his glass of soda burbles over the rim and splashes Coke all over his shirt and jeans. He carefully put the glass onto the coffee table and goes into the kitchen to clean himself off.

As she nestles back into the armchair, checking her cuticles with an air purposely meant to discourage conversation, she feels the heat of Boyd's body and the strength of his presence as he leans over the back of the armchair and breathes into her ear, "That was unsubtle."

"Well, thank God Scott's thicker than Julia Russell's thighs, then," Lydia says, not bothering to whisper. Whispers perpetuate intimacy, and the last thing Lydia needs is to trick herself into a return to intimacy with Lancelot. She wonders sometimes, when she's being very weak-willed and there's no one around to witness it, if Lance found his true love after he left Camelot. He'd told her on his last night in the castle, with an involuntary grimace, that he was trapped by his love for her—one that she obviously couldn't return, considering her husband and the kingdom and everything it represented—and he needed to leave Camelot to free himself before it killed him.

She respects his decision. It had nearly broken Guinevere into pieces at the time—Lancelot had been the last of her allies to stay in Camelot after Mordred had been born and it had become obvious that Guinevere wielded a fading power—but Lydia understands self-preservation in light of the state of affairs in Beacon Hills. Guinevere had been a parasite; Lancelot had made the best of a bad hand of cards by leaving.

Boyd laughs as he draws back, and his breath drifts in a gust of warmth across the exposed skin of her neck, ruffling the neckline of her sweater. Lydia can control her breathing and she can wrest her heartbeat into normalcy through sheer force of will, but she can't do a thing to stop her magic from reacting. The new power from the return of her memories still sits uneasily under her skin as Lydia Martin; at the sudden reminder of a familiar presence, combined with the sheer unpredictability that always goes hand-in-hand with the first of May, the power simmers and snaps until her fingers tingle and the air around her crackles with the smell of ozone and ginger.

A fire snaps to life in the Stilinskis' fireplace. Isaac makes a high-pitched squeak and flattens himself against the back of the couch. Erica makes the same noise but doesn't move, which Lydia respects. From the doorway, Stiles, his hand resting against Derek's back, says, "Way to be a show-off, Lydia," and, like always, Lydia has no earthly idea what Boyd is thinking.

"Are we going to begin any time soon?" she asks, zeroing in on a stray fleck of nail polish on her left ring finger. "Some of us have things to do this weekend."

She means studying for her AP Physics test on Monday—she gets in the habit of studying even if it's unnecessary, like it is for physics, because it keeps her sharp and focused—but Erica rolls her eyes and says, "We're all very sad that you're missing Josh Grabowski's party, but actually no fucks are given about your social life."

"That's so cute," Lydia tells her. "The way that you pretend you have no interest in Josh's party this weekend. Good for you." Something about Erica rubs Lydia the wrong way; it's definitely intentional on Erica's part, and probably relates to her tragic backstory pre-bite, like most of the behavior deficiencies in the pack do, but Lydia only has so much room in her teeny tiny soul to wedge in caring for a few individuals. Stiles and Allison take up the majority of the real estate currently available.

"Meow," Stiles says. "Um, if the cats could sheathe their claws? There is, in fact, something we need to talk about."

"Try comparing me to a kitten one more time, Stiles," Erica growls, "and we'll see what happens." She bares her teeth to Stiles, who rolls his eyes in an exaggerated imitation of Erica herself, and it's enough to make Boyd and Isaac laugh and take down the tension in the room by a few degrees. The fire in the grate, which is sustaining itself without any fuel, flickers and calms into something a little less than a total blaze.

"Oh, cool," Scott says coming back from the kitchen, his attention drawn by the change in light. "Thanks for whoever started that, it was getting pretty chilly in here and the Sheriff threatens to cut someone whenever the thermostat inches above 60." As far as conversation shifts go, it's not the most obvious one they've ever had to suffer through, so. Things move on.

The new plan is only slightly less stupid than the previous one, but at least it requires Lydia to stay home and scry rather than traipse through swamp muck in a new pair of shoes. Lydia realizes that Stiles has a burning desire to be recognized as an equally important member of their pack, despite his being human and lacking the ability to do impressive things with a crossbow, but Lydia's self-esteem problems don't extend far enough that she feels the need to put herself in constant physical danger. As Stiles aggressively campaigns to be included on the field trip, Lydia begins to write a shopping list on her phone for what she's going to need from Deaton's office and her own personal collection.

"Boyd, stay with Lydia," Derek orders as Stiles grips the front of his shirt and begins to forcibly push him towards the stairs. He's not going anywhere unless he wants to be, which makes his whole pretend-struggle just look ridiculous and juvenile; Stiles appears slightly less pissed off in the face of it, though, so maybe Derek isn't a complete failure at his stupidly co-dependent, unhealthy relationship. "The rest of you, regroup at the house at sundown."

As she leaves, Erica nails Lydia with an unhappy, threatening stare and Lydia returns a blank bitch-face that is, according to Stiles, nationally competitive. If Erica wants to make a scene and finally reveal why, exactly, she despises every word out of Lydia's mouth, Lydia can block out time in her schedule for it. Lydia has very little patience for people who threaten without following through, though, which is why she stopped being scared of Derek very early in their relationship.

Eventually, Lydia and Boyd are left alone in the Stilinskis' living room, with only the sound of Stiles shouting at Derek upstairs tinkling through the background. "What do you need?" Boyd asks finally. He has yet to come around from behind the armchair, but Lydia doesn't have it in her to be uncomfortable with Boyd at her back. She has too many years of memories as Guinevere where having Lancelot at her back was just about the only protection she had against the forces that would've ripped her throne away.

"Ginseed oil and a new leather thong from Deaton—mine snapped during the thing with the ghouls—and my crystals and tapers from home." Lydia scrolls down her list to the end, where she's written rosemary again? "Maybe a stop at Raley's."

"Deaton's first," Boyd suggests. "Then Raley's."

Lydia's a smart girl; she hears the hesitation in his voice, the way that he pauses and asks without words to be invited into her home. She's hosted the occasional rotating pack meeting when her mother is out of town, but she hasn't since her birthday and the sudden reemergence of her memories. The way that he asks is all Boyd. Lancelot had never been particularly great with the subtle sort of boundary.

She wonders, like she has at least seven times in the last two days, what happened in the childhood of Vernon Boyd to create a man so much more taciturn than Lancelot. He lives with his Aunt Heni in a neat clapboard house on the edge of town; his two jobs are to pay for the live-in nurse that takes care of Heni. She knows that his mother cleared out when he was thirteen; she knows that he puts black pepper on his macaroni and cheese.

Lydia has never heard him say any of this; she's good with context clues, inferences, and extracting information from Stiles. In another world, she might be capable of opening her mouth and asking, without sounding like she has an ulterior motive, what it was like, to have parents who completely gave up on the pretense of caring about you, parents who stopped pretending that they were going to come back and just left altogether. This other Lydia might be able to ask him why he so obviously loves his Aunt Heni, even though the presence of the live-in nurse and some basic research into genealogy would reveal that she's 95 and probably senile. How do you love someone who isn't even really there?

Hypothetical questions are only fun when there's the possibility of them actually being answered.

Lydia stands and pockets her phone. "Stiles might have rosemary. There's no reason to go to Raley's if that's the case." When Boyd doesn't move, she waves her hand at him. "I'll meet you in the car. Deaton's, then home. If my mother asks—which she won't—you're my partner for that feudal infrastructure project in AP Econ."

Boyd says, "I am your partner for the AP Econ feudal infrastructure project."

"I finished that paper a month ago," Lydia says dismissively, leaving him behind as she makes her way into the kitchen, where pots of herbs are lining the sill above the sink. There's a small, struggling rosemary plant, fighting against an onslaught of lemonbalm, in the glazed blue pot furthest to the left. Lydia says a small prayer of thanks to the plant for its gift and then twists three stems off in quick succession, before wrapping them in a paper towel and tucking them into the pocket of her jacket.

The other two pots on the sill are green and yellow; the yellow one, on the right and closest to the fridge, is filled with wisteria that Lydia is having Stiles root for her. Before remembering Guinevere, setting down roots had always been the most difficult part of nature magic for Lydia. The original idea had been to plant vines around all of the entryways of her house; a guard in the future against shitheads like Peter Hale getting any stupid ideas.

Wisteria protects because it represents steadfastness. When Lydia reaches for one of the newly emerging petals, it unfurls, hot and velvet, across her finger. The whole kitchen scents of it, thick and heavy, and the plant grows—harder, faster, until the base of its pot cracks and the roots spill out over the sink, greedily sucking water from the lip of the washbasin. Lydia can't see out the window anymore for the profusion of blooms, but still it grows. It's so hungry. Steadiness needs some kind of foundation; devotion can't actually be built on thin air, no matter what Scott thinks.

Sorry about the pot, Lydia writes on the notepad stuck to the fridge. She leaves it pinned to the mess of dirt and plant that's erupted out of the windowsill and then she leaves the house, Stiles and Derek yelling at each other upstairs and the wisteria blossoms pressing against the glass of the kitchen window, for Boyd and his silent car.

---

As twilight falls into night, Lydia lights the candles around her scrying circle and rubs her palms together briskly, trying to stave off the inevitable symptoms of low circulation. Boyd is somewhere behind her, hovering in the shadows like Derek has started giving lurking lessons, but Lydia's focus is entirely devoted to what is in front of her. She'd added the last of the water with an eyedropper, to ensure flawlessly level surface tension; the steel grey of the water reflects Lydia's face back to her, her eyes huge in her pale face.

Lydia dislikes scrying for the same reason she dislikes psychology and string theory: it's imprecise and inclined to fail when tested on a large enough sample size. But if Derek needs her to scry for the last surviving red caps and it's the best plan out of the others offered by his Greek chorus of Betas, Lydia will scry for him.

At first, everything goes well—she chants directives under her breath as she swings the crystal in a clockwise motion above the surface of the bowl, letting the power of the crystal shiver across the water. After a while, the ripples begin to shape images, and these images distend themselves away from the bowl, taking on the shape of the bog, of Derek and Stiles and Scott, of Allison with a fierce, concentrated expression and her bow drawn.

Lydia narrates steadily to Boyd, who should be relaying the information on to Derek, and everything goes peachy until they finally reach the red caps and Lydia changes the direction of the crystal, intending to send the images back down to the water and break the connection, because her crystal stops moving.

"Shit," Lydia breathes, and the crystal starts to melt against the water.

"What do you need?" Boyd asks. Lydia's already begun her disaster response compartmentalization; the part of her brain that can deal with inanities respects that Boyd doesn't flail or ask stupid questions about what's happening. If Lydia knew what was going on, there wouldn't be a problem.

"Break the circle," Lydia tells him, unwinding the thong from around her hand and trying to keep her fingers from trembling. As long as the water doesn't spill out of the bowl, things are still at a manageable level. "At the western point," she adds a second later when she can't see him moving. "Blow out the candle. Push the smoke out of the circle."

"I have done this once or twice, Gwen," he reminds her as he circles around to the western point. His brows are drawn low over his eyes with deep concentration.

Lydia hears his slip, but now is not the time for that conversation. There will likely never be a time for that conversation, although she has three contingencies in place for reasons why he might call her Gwen in public in front of other members of the pack; the third one isn't Stiles-proof, but it'll do well enough with the rest of the pack. "Magic was different in Camelot," she bites out. She locks her biceps to prevent shaking; the liquid at the tip of the melting crystal is beginning to form a drop.

Boyd licks the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and positions his left behind the flame, inside of the circle. Lydia can feel the intrusion like a small pinch; it's sort of how an needle feels going into skin treated with a local anesthetic, except that Lydia's never been interested in needle-play and Boyd's hand in her circle changes the flavor of things.

"Now, if you would," Lydia snaps, and Boyd closes his thumb and forefinger over the flame, following immediately after with his left hand cupped to encourage the smoke out of the circle. Lydia feels the spell magic snap across the back of her hand and she lets go of the crystal, her arm hot from relieved tension. The crystal stays suspended for one second, and another, and then it falls into the water with a small splash, sending a wave of water over the rim of the bowl onto the floor.

"What was that?" Boyd asks.

"I don't know," Lydia says tightly, before she can even think of something clever or pointed or distracting. When she splays her hands over the water and tries to feel for what might have caused the disturbance, she gets nothing. Even her scrying crystal, misshapen and solid again at the base of the bowl, has lost its aura.

"I'll call Derek," Boyd says. "Check up on everyone. You should sit down."

Lydia nods, eyes closed, still shaping the outline of the scrying field above the water. "You do that," she tells him, trying to tease out the edges of the field. There should be some kind of aftereffect, even if it's just the hemispherical haze of the field itself, but Lydia's magic pushes against nothing.

Lydia has always enjoyed practicing magic because, like math, it presents her with the opportunity to map a set of circumstances that might otherwise be left unexplainable. She likes how magic makes her feel, too; Lydia enjoys fields where she has to work at becoming the best but it's still attainable. Too many things come to her easily for her to trust them with her full attention.

Still, Lydia hasn't been unable to explain a magical phenomenon in a year and a half. With Guinevere's thirty-plus years of experience hovering in the back of her head, there should be very little that is inexplicable to Lydia. No matter what Stiles says—and Stiles says a lot, most of it nonsense; smoke and mirrors meant to dissuade the listener from paying attention to him beyond superficial concerns—magic follows rules. Magic, unlike string theory, does not dissolve into a set of contradictory terms.

"Everything has a reason," Lydia murmurs to herself, curling her fingers into claws and trying to draw up some kind of reading through sheer willpower.

She feels when Boyd returns; his physical presence always pushes at the edges of her consciousness. It shatters what little concentration she could pull together, and all it leaves behind is Lydia's most hated feeling—gnawing, grasping emptiness and a need for knowledge. She's not as bad as Stiles when it comes to some research, mainly because she doesn't have self-control problems, but Lydia is very, very bad with puzzles she cannot solve.

"Are they all right?" she asks. She leaves her hands out and her eyes closed so that she has an excuse for ignoring him handy if she needs one.

"Nothing connected to what happened here. Some bumps, all healable. Derek said they finished off the last of the red caps and the swamp disappeared."

"Yes, well, that took long enough," Lydia says. Her hands, which have been steady through this entire process, begin to shiver. She tells herself that it's exhaustion, and then an overuse of her power resources, and then she stops kidding herself and tags it as what it really is, which is the first time that she and Boyd have been alone and distraction-free in a room together since they remembered that Arthur is dead and her husband is therefore no longer any kind of impediment.

The pressure that's been sitting on Lydia's pelvic bone all day begins to simmer and rise. Does the room smell of wisteria or is that just her projecting? She normally has much better control over her physical senses. She normally has better control over everything, including herself, but the absence of extraneous magic in the room is making hers pulse stronger, and to judge by the way that Boyd takes a breath—overloud in the silence of the room, the beginning of a gasp at the end—he can smell it.

As if to give herself permission, Lydia tells herself very firmly, This will only be a bad idea if it happens more than once, and then she puts down her hands and opens her eyes. Boyd is stationed across from her, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his massive chest, his face inscrutable in the shadows left by the four remaining candles. She used to be able to read Lancelot so easily.

She wants to ask, Why don't you laugh anymore? She wants to know about the years in between his acquaintance with her. She wants to know about what he did after he left Camelot, how he buried the ache that he used to carry in his eyes for her, whether he found something as strong and destructive as Merlin and Arthur had had between them, if he misses the queen that he served after he left her, the one with her beautiful husband and their shining, glossy castle.

It's Beltane; if there's ever a time where the earth demands a stupid kind of decision-making process, it's now.

They meet less than halfway, four of Boyd's steps to Lydia's two, and he's licked his way inside of her mouth before she has time to think about closing her eyes. She feels his eyelashes—they're long, dark, and thin—against the bridge of her nose as he tilts her head to the left, his tongue curling over the ridge of her bottom teeth. He's hot like Jackson had been, after the change, running at an average temperature ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter than Lydia's normal human mean, and it means that Lydia knows exactly where his body is at all times in relation to hers.

Boyd is a biter, but it's more symbolic than forceful—he nips at the heavy curve of her upper lip and then the corner of her mouth and out towards where she would have a dimple, if she was the kind of girl who had dimples, genetically speaking. He rubs his cheek against hers and the motion is faintly abrasive from end-of-the-day stubble but nothing that manages to convince Lydia that this is a bad idea.

Then, his mouth is on the lobe of her ear and then behind her ear, where she dabs perfume as part of her morning routine, and then down the line of her sternocleidomastoid muscle to the meat of her shoulder, the place where her collarbone melts into her neck, and his bite there is more aggressive before he follows immediately after with a hot, soothing kiss, his tongue pressing against the developing bruise.

There's a high-pitched noise coming from the back of Lydia's throat, dragged from her by the way that he tilts her head back with a single hand and stretches the muscle of her neck for his perusal. She wants to see more of him, and the candles flare in recognition of that, responding eagerly to Lydia's wordless, stupid keening noise, the way that she scrambles to fix the height separation between them, hiking her skirt higher up her thighs so she can press against him.

Boyd's skin reflects copper and burgundy against the flat shadows of the rest of the room; he visually blazes like he feels against her bare skin. She palms his shirt and tries to lift it over his head but she can't, not while he's worrying a line of skin down her shoulder with his teeth. "Clothing removal is not optional," she tells him in a low rumble and he laughs, Lancelot's laugh but different, less confident and more shell-shocked; it forces him to release her and she takes advantage of that to rip his shirt over his head.

One or both of them must knock the scrying bowl to the floor because Boyd lifts her with a hand under her ass, the other pressing in a hard, long stroke down her back, and he sets her down on the table where it had sat and there's nothing to prevent Lydia from leaning back and whipping her sweater over her head. She doesn't even think about her hair, or her eyeliner, or the various other things that she's used to keep herself occupied during sex before—Lydia's attention span is better than Stiles' but not by much and especially not when its only distraction is a sixteen-year-old boy more interested in humping against her thigh than doing anything even remotely pleasurable—before she plasters herself against his front and sinks her fingernails into his scalp.

Lydia doesn't even recognize all of the things she's chanting under her breath; little cries and moans and the heat of the candles and Boyd's skin and the warmth of the wooden table under her ass and it bleeds together with the sickening smell of wisteria blossoms, undercut by the bite of the rosemary. Boyd's fingers finally stop fucking around and slip under the waistband of her tights, peeling the chiffon off of her sweaty skin and then slowly down her legs, because Boyd is patient and his eyes have turned golden and his fangs are pressing against his lower lip as all of his concentration focuses on the curl of her tights against the inside of her knee.

"Lydia," he says, in a weird voice, lisping from his fangs, and then he thumbs the base of her throat and slants his mouth across hers and everything tastes metallic and drugging like velvet for a second before he releases his mouth to realign their lower bodies. His hand encircles her entire knee and he presses his fore- and middle finger against the back of her knee, tickling her until she can't decide whether to laugh or to shiver helplessly. Lydia Martin never does helpless, even now, so instead she bites into the thick muscle of his left pectoral, hard enough to raise blood, hard enough to leave a fleeting mark in his impervious werewolf skin.

And then finally, finally, like Lydia hasn't been waiting for him to touch her for the past twenty years, like they don't have any history of staring at each other across crowded corridors or that stupid, reckless, first and final kiss, like their history is as clean as if they were and always had been nothing more than a pair of teenagers, he presses his thumb against her clit and completes some kind of circuit.

"Foreplay is nice," Lydia tells him once she can see straight, "if you haven't been doing it for years and I don't know what the fuck you think you're doing, but you're not," and she's scrambling for the button closure to his jeans and he's digging through his pockets for a condom and for a handful of seconds it's just awkward teenage sex again, even if it's awkward teenage sex in the middle of a scrying circle etched into Lydia's mother's morning parlor, and Lancelot and Guinevere and their aching romantic drama feels the furthest that they've ever been.

But then they're not, because when they are finally together, Boyd sunk so deeply inside of Lydia that she's sort of bonelessly draped over the table, every nerve in her body tingling with a resting potential that could short out the entirety of Beacon County's electrical grid, the sharp edge of his pelvic bone resting, like a friendly hello, against the jut of Lydia's own, all she can see behind her closed eyelids is Lancelot riding in the first tournament that he'd won with her favor, as queen's champion, and the way that she'd wrapped her magic through the links in his chain mail and kept him close.

So, in a way, this is all Guinevere's fault. From the first moment that she let herself be caught by her husband's best boy-knight, she'd made all of this happen.

"Lydia," Boyd murmurs against the still skin of her stomach, "I don't make love to dead women."

"Oh, you're so romantic," she flutters, pressing a palm to her sticky chest. "Do you say that to all the girls?"

He says, "There weren't other girls, Gwen," and somehow—God knows how he finds the space—he sinks in an inch deeper, slowly, as if he has all of the time in the world to finish tearing her into pieces.

"I'm not an idiot," she says to the ceiling, trying to focus on the patterns left by the candles instead of the too many feelings sparking across her clit from the pressure he's exerting against it. She doesn't need placating lies; they're boring.

"None meant this," he says, and unlike the four or five times Lydia has heard this in the past, from boyfriends tired of trying to keep up with her insane demands and Arthur explaining why the hell his court sorceress has given birth to a child that is his splitting image, Boyd sounds solid and sure instead of desperate; he isn't pleading with her. "It has been and will always be you."

It's the endorphins, Lydia thinks. She can draw the molecular structure of every chemical currently coursing through Boyd's brain, convincing him that he's in love; she can name them, both in alphabetical order and the order in which they occur in the signaling pathway. Instead of doing that, she traces the outline of a benzene ring against his forearm and says, "I'm not the same."

"No," he agrees, and this is apparently the only signal that he needs to decide that, in fact, moving would be a good idea; he slides out and then thrusts back in, and every inch of lubricated flesh feels the slide of warmth and friction and God damn it this is probably the worst time for them to be talking about this, so Lydia does what she does best and takes control of an otherwise disastrous situation. She sits up, sucks his tongue into her mouth, and bites down until his hips begin to stutter and his breathing stops altogether.

After Lydia's come and he's come and they're both now half-naked, sprawled across a miraculously unbroken table, Lydia spits out her mouthful of blood and lazily unloops her legs around his hips. "My mother will probably be home soon," she says. "I lost track of time but she's usually back by eight."

"It's after ten," Boyd mumbles into her shoulder. His breathing is still erratic and his skin is moving in little jerking shivers under her touch. "I can feel the moon."

That's a neat treat. "Great," Lydia says. "You need to leave, then. My curfew is at eleven."

Lydia doesn't even feel bad about how much of a total lie that is—not only does Lydia not have a curfew, it wouldn't be at eleven if she did—because it accomplishes what she needs it to, which is Boyd puts his shirt back on and leaves Lydia in the wreck of her scrying circle to have a very brief panic attack that in no way resembles one of Stiles' infamous shitfests. Then, after she's forced her heartbeat back into a normal range and cleaned up the wreck of the morning parlor, she puts on a pair of fleece pajamas and watches The Notebook in the living room with a bowl of microwaved kettle corn.

---

The next morning, Lydia wakes up to her mother, wearing an expression that wanted to be disapproving but lacked the proper flexibility, standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, in the middle of yelling at her PA. She points at Lydia and then at the kitchen table, framed in a patch of sunlight exactly like their interior designer had promised it would be, and whispers, "Sit down. No, Michael, I didn't mean you. Why the hell would I be telling you to sit down if you're in a car?"

Lydia pours herself a cup of coffee and takes a croissant out of the chrome breadbox on the island. She curls her legs under her at the table and nibbles on the edge of the croissant, interspersed with life-giving sips of coffee, as her mother finishes verbally abusing her PA and finally yanks the earbud out of her left ear. "What happened in the morning parlor?" she asks Lydia, slamming her cup down onto the countertop and almost chipping it in the process.

"Nothing Gordon won't be able to fix," Lydia replies, focusing on tearing the top layer of her croissant into perfectly even one-inch strips. Flakes of pastry tumble onto the tabletop, leaving golden shreds all over the linen placemats.

"It's like a flood in there," her mother says sharply. "Water will warp the wooden baseboard, Lydia, you know that."

"I do indeed," Lydia agrees. "However, there's less water in that room than there would be in a flood, Mom, which is when you have to worry about warping."

"And the candlewax," her mother continues, voice increasing in shrillness with each piece of croissant that Lydia rips off and lays on her tongue. "If Gordon gets all of that wax out of the carving in my Rococo end table, it will be a miracle."

Lydia finishes chewing before she says, "Gordon's gotten wax out of worst places in the past."

"The point is not Gordon, Lydia," her mother says. "The point is you. I don't care if you have friends over, but you shouldn't leave your messes around for other people to clean up. It's not their responsibility." This is clearly venturing into a thinly-veiled criticism of Lydia's father. While Lydia doesn't mind her mother ranting about her father's inadequacies—her mother is never wrong about them, even if she is unimaginative; besides, Lydia tunes her out once her invectives get particularly pointed—she has plans to utilize this morning for studying and she doesn't want to deal with what will follow her mother's rant: tears.

"I put away the candles and candlesticks and I cleared what I could," she tells her mother. "I don't know what else you expected me to do, since we don't actually own a mop."

"Of course we own a mop," her mother deflects.

Lydia swallows a delicate mouthful of coffee and says, pointedly, "No, we don't."

Her mother is saved from having to continue this painful conversation by the ringing of her phone. "Oh, for the love of," she bites out. "What does he need now?" She stuffs the earbuds back in and barks, "Michael, what? No, Jesus, of course we don't want McLaughlin to ask for Joanna's input, if he does that we'll be stuck in rewrite limbo for another month." She half-turns from Lydia, tapping the heel of a Ferragamo stiletto against the tiled floor, and Lydia takes advantage of that to slip out of her seat and across the room to the glass door to the patio.

Prada is half-heartedly nuzzling along the edge of the pool, his face frozen in a parody of canine despair. "Mom forgot to let you back in, didn't she?" Lydia says. At the sound of her voice, he bursts into enthusiastic barking and propels himself along the side of the pool towards her, his claws scrambling against the stone tiles. "Hello," she tells him, settling down into a squat so he can nudge her knee with his head and tremble. "How has your morning been? Other than freezing, I presume."

Her dog whines and scrambles into her lap, almost upsetting her coffee. "Oh, come on," she says, scooping him up in a fireman's carry with her free hand. She has an appalling amount of upper body strength for someone who deplores sweat, thanks to the pack's extracurricular crime-fighting activities, and lifting Prada is easy. She straightens up, Prada's breath warm and moist against the side of her neck as he buries his face in her hair, and that's when she sees what's happened to the garden.

Lydia's forgotten about how much of a clusterfuck Beltane can be, but in her defense, Beltane in Camelot had never been this bad. It'd been about the symbolism, of course, which was why Guinevere had let her maids drape her in flowers and she and Arthur had led the dance in the lower town, mouths shiny from dark wine and the fire breaking over the golden flame of Arthur's hair. If the king didn't plow his wife, the farmers couldn't plow their fields. The gardens had always looked fabulous the morning after Beltane, for the first few years of their marriage.

And then, when Guinevere hadn't been able to conceive and she and Arthur had stopped talking about Camelot's future and their ideas and dreams, the land had suffered. There hadn't been any flowers for the Beltane wreaths, for two or three springs, until Arthur had stopped pretending that their marriage was salvageable and he'd finally gone to Merlin.

Even on that first morning after Arthur and Merlin had begun their affair, when the orchards had been filled with strange fruits and the grasses had been turned gem-like colors and the air had sounded the trembling chime of bells—even then, nothing had happened quite like what has happened to Lydia's mother's garden. The carefully-maintained rows of landscaped trees and shrubs have been drowned by vines of ivy and wisteria, the latter heavily laden with blooms. There is wisteria growing everywhere that Lydia had wanted it, framing the back gate and all of the doors and windows of the house, and ivy along the back fence. Spanish moss is dripping from the gabled arbor and lilies on fat pads have sprouted in the corners of the pool.

Now that she's noticed the smell, Lydia can't believe that it wasn't the first thing she picked up on when she came onto the patio. It's like the worst of her mother's perfume in the height of summer. Everything is gardenia and heavy and sweet, like honeysuckle and roses, and all of the flowers are swollen and blazing with color. As Lydia watches, a thickset bumblebee meanders its way across a clump of sunflowers each the size of Lydia's head, buzzing lazily.

"Fuck," Lydia says to Prada conversationally.

She's fairly certain that her mother's landscape architect hadn't planted half of these plants—for one thing, sunflowers attract bees, and her mother is allergic to them. Additionally, Southern moss shouldn't even be growing in this part of California, let alone on a crepe myrtle, and as an epiphyte it definitely shouldn't be able to grow alone, like it is on some sections of the arbor.

Guinevere had loved Spanish moss. They'd called it feathertears, in Camelot, and used it for weaving in such large volumes that the gardening staff had cultivated it essentially everywhere. That had been one of the first things Merlin had done to win Guinevere's favor, when Guinevere was a young queen and still in love with her husband—Merlin had shown her how to make feathertears grow on its own.

You've the light of the sun inside of you, Merlin had whispered to Guinevere. Her hands had been wide-palmed and thin-fingered, her knuckles knotted under thin, brown skin; she'd worn rings at the base of every finger and the metal had been cold as she pressed her palms to Guinevere's wrists and guided them over the wooden frame of an arbor. If you let it, the land would do much to please its queen.

Guinevere had loved Merlin in the way that Lydia loves Allison and Stiles. She'd taken care of Merlin when she was pregnant, naively hoping that Beltane had been a fluke, a single instance of infidelity never repeated; but then baby had been born thirteen months later and the Pendragon birthmark had stood out against Mordred's hip. She had never wanted to feel that bare, gnawing stab ever again, but the faintest impression of it presses against Lydia's stomach now as she watches clumps of Spanish moss wave in the morning breeze, wagging hello like Prada's tail.

"I will never be you again," Lydia says. The words come out of her mouth without any conscious effort, but she can't seem to stop them. "I will never be you, ever again. I will not be weak."

"Lydia?" her mother says from the door to the patio. "Jesus Christ, what the hell did Javí do to my garden last weekend? Never mind, that's not important. I'm going in to the office for a few hours."

"All right, Mom." Lydia rests her hand against Prada's trembling back and tries to ground herself with the wriggling of his small body. The fury inside of her feels as unexpected and vibrant as whatever the hell Beltane sex has done to her mother's garden; she wonders if she smells the same way, sickly overripe. Prada doesn't seem to have an issue with her, but Prada is worse at being a dog than Scott.

After the glass door shuts with a low snick and Lydia has let her breathing level out, she says, more decisively and less broken, "This maudlin Memento storyline is officially over," and she takes Prada back into the house so she can work through the problems at the end of chapter 11 in her AP Physics textbook to Regina Spektor. There's part of her that hopes that sheer willpower will manage to get rid of at least some of the crazed growth in the back yard, but when she goes down to the kitchen at four to make herself a pot of tea and a grilled cheese sandwich, she can still see the lily pads in the pool. They've picked up a family of frogs, small and green and speckled, and the littlest ones are hoping from leaf to leaf like gnats.

So, that's a no on normalcy, then.

---

As the days pass, the garden gets worse. Nothing dies, not even the monkeyflower blossoms that should live, according to the botanical literature Lydia references in the middle of the night, for a maximum of three days. The scent is stronger each morning when she wakes and her mother calls Javí and threatens to sue unless he gets rid of the sunflowers. It's not Javí's fault that they stay; each afternoon he uproots them, and each morning Lydia wakes up and makes herself a cup of coffee and the sunflowers beam at her through the window over the stove, unfurling yellow petals to the bees.

There is an element of instability to everything Lydia is doing. Since she's had a mental breakdown before, she can recognize the signs of one building around her. She drifts in class, her hand writing notes for lessons she doesn't remembering hearing, until her eyes are hazy and unfocused and she can almost visualize the auras pushing out of her classmates. There's always a blaze of gold from somewhere to her left, where Boyd sits with Isaac and Erica in their little cluster of leather.

It's not as if Lydia is going to be so crass as to get a B in anything and she'd officially accepted MIT's offer back in the fall, so her inattention won't harm her future in any way. It just makes her a liability in class and in the field. She breaks a fork when Boyd smiles at Olive Witherspoon at lunch one day, splattering Isaac's shirt in salad dressing. She has to scramble for some kind of control in the aftermath, and she narrows in on Caleb Michaels the period after lunch for lack of any other options.

After AP Lit is finished, Allison slips to her side and says, voice tentatively censorious, "Lydia, was that, um, totally necessary?"

She means Caleb Michaels, who is staring, bloodless and shell-shocked, at the corner of the classroom and not moving.

"He's an imbecile," Lydia says scathingly, plucking her copy of The Sun Also Rises off of her desk and standing. "Maybe he should learn how to read before he ventures an opinion."

"Lydia," Allison says. "That was really kind of uncalled for. He's comatose."

"He'll be grateful for the assistance eventually," Lydia says. "I have a responsibility as a member of the human race to prevent him from unleashing such sophomoric idiocy on the rest of the world." The look on Caleb's face, pinched and drawn, doesn't actually make her feel any better. It's the act of speaking—the moment that he realizes that Lydia is better, smarter, faster, that her mind and tongue move twice as fast as his—that drives her.

"I don't think I have ever heard you express concern for the rest of the human race," Allison says blankly, falling into place at Lydia's side as she stalks from the room. "Lydia, wait, please."

Lydia staunchly ignores her and because they don't share the next period, Allison reluctantly peels away to join Scott and Stiles in AP US as Lydia goes to AP Econ. It's a class she technically shares with Caleb Michaels, but she can't imagine he'll be up for attending.

She's right; Boyd is the only other person from their tiny AP Lit class who makes it before the bell rings at the start of the period. This is supposed to be a free period for them to use to work on their projects, but since Lydia has finished it, there isn't anything for them to do. Boyd sits next to her anyway. Even if she doesn't watch him directly she can't avoid him; he's too big and occupies too much of the space around her.

"How are you?" Boyd asks.

Lydia jerks and then freezes, forcing her hands to stop trembling against the surface of her notebook. They haven't spoken since Beltane; it's not suspicious behavior because Boyd and Lydia rarely talk to one another. Even though the pack is technically a complete unit, Scott and Isaac's friendship and Derek and Stiles' relationship in truth bond together two groups that exist in an uneasy harmony. "I'm fine," she says, voice clipped.

"I only ask," Boyd continues, casually leaning back and scratching the tip of his nose, "because you seemed a little bloodthirsty last period."

"It's called irritation," Lydia bites out. "I feel it frequently in the presence of troglodytes like Caleb Michaels."

Boyd laughs, open-mouthed, his head tilted backwards. He's got the kind of booming laugh that Guinevere had been accustomed to hearing from barrel-chested men, but it sounds too loud for a classroom at Beacon Hills High. People turn to look, probably because Vernon Boyd hasn't laughed in public ever.

As Jacob Schneider and Raj Patel turn in unison, Lydia gives them a placid bitch-face and they both decide to find their notebooks far more interesting than Boyd's recently discovered sense of humor. "You're very good at flying under the radar," Lydia snips. "It's a no wonder no one's figured out your monthly problem yet, considering your skill with the unobtrusive."

"I'm not exactly interested in hiding my past," Boyd says. His eyes are still tilted up at the outside corners. Humor gives his face a familiar, vital cast. "You're the one who's put the breaks on."

Lydia's mouth twists helplessly; she sneers before she can even think about why. "Oh, yes," she agrees. "I am, in fact, the one who took a firm hold of common sense and said that letting our pasts run away with us might not be the best idea."

"Lancelot wasn't flawless," Boyd comments quietly, the humor draining slowly. "But he's part of me. He was even before I could remember. Learning from your past mistakes is an important part of growing up."

Jesus Christ. "Did you get that off of a pamphlet in Morell's office?" Lydia demands.

"No," he says, grinning briefly at her. "For a person who hates being stereotyped, you've got a fiery kind of temper, don't you?"

"Thank you for that incredibly original observation," Lydia drawls. "I don't think anyone's ever pointed that out to me before."

"Just in case you were unaware," Boyd says, lifting his hands and pointing his palms towards her in a don't blame me kind of way. "Gwen didn't get angry very often."

Just the name makes the muscles in Lydia's shoulders clench up. "She couldn't exactly afford to," she says, voice as tight as her deltoids. "Someone had to stay clearheaded, and it certainly wasn't going to be Arthur." I was angry, she wants to tell him. When Morgana gave me that damn potion, I wanted to burn her castle down around her and choke her on the ash.

Maybe he can read something of that in her face; Boyd has always been good at the subtle things, better than Lancelot. She wonders if it's a byproduct of his upbringing, of his senile aunt and absent mother and years of isolation, but she's only going to break that kind of question out if he fires first. "That's fair," Boyd says.

"Is it?" Lydia asks. "Arthur had his moments."

"He was a great king," Boyd agrees. "I am not sure he was a particularly good man."

"Remind you of anyone else?" Lydia asks, tilting her head to the parking lot outside of the classroom window. It's not like Derek is actually other there right now—he tends not to lurk now that the pack is mostly self-sufficient and unlikely to assault one another or innocent members of the student body—but Boyd still knows what she means.

"Derek's a good man and a shitty king," Boyd says. "It's why Stiles is his anchor." It's an astute observation, all things considered; Stiles is not particularly good or kind to those he dislikes, which is why he and Lydia had begun to get along so well once he stopped in his obsessive and ill-fated quest to make her fall in love with him.

"I'm sure there's a gold star somewhere in Morell's office for you," Lydia assures him, and Boyd laughs again, more quietly this time, perhaps in deference to the way that the classroom has hushed down to a low-level roar of activity.

"Gwen wasn't perfect," Boyd tells her an indeterminate amount of time later, when Lydia is working on her homework for the Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics class she's taking online at UCBH and Boyd is doing whatever he does to occupy himself. "But Lancelot loved her."

The past tense shouldn't make Lydia's skin clench in on itself, but it does. She knows perfectly well that she's hard to love, if her string of past relationships is anything to judge by, and the passing judgment of a man who used to be her champion in another life shouldn't have any effect on her emotions. "Bully for him," she says, unwilling to look up from her homework and acknowledge that his statement might have any importance to her.

"Do you know what it's like to love another man's wife?" Boyd continues, his tone thoughtful, the way it is when he can occasionally be cornered into venturing an opinion in one of Lydia and Derek's or Lydia and Stiles' myriad squabbles.

"No," Lydia says, stabbing her pencil through her paper with the force of her push. She continues to write her function anyway, focusing on the perfect downward lines of her letters and numbers.

"If you're good enough, it begins to eat you alive." Lydia concentrates on making every letter e on this line the exact same size. "It turns your thoughts sour and poisonous. It makes you willing to forget all of the good things that have happened to you, in favor of only the lack that exists in you. You turn into the worst of your self, and then you begin to lose even that."

"What is the point of this?" Lydia asks, fighting for some kind of equilibrium. She isn't going to cry because that would be stupid and pointless, but her knuckles are so white that they blur, indistinguishable against her notebook paper. "Your life was very hard, I feel for you."

"It never stops," Boyd says over her. The thoughtfulness is gone now, channeled into a severe kind of deliberation. "Even if you leave and join a mercenary army and pledge your sword to a new king and queen, love like that doesn't die."

Lydia can't keep herself from looking at him, now, and his eyes are scalding in the dark skin and square bones of his face. "Are you trying to tell me," she says, her lips dry under her Chanel lipstick, "that it was true love? This isn't The Princess Bride, Boyd."

"Don't play it like that," Boyd says. There's more savagery in his voice, underlining whatever he's trying to nonverbally convey to her through the power of his stare. "You remember how powerful it was. The strongest power there was, in all of the lands."

Something in the air is making her magic sing, long and trill, like a mistle thrush. She wonders absently if Boyd's extrasensory perception can pick up what she feels inside of her head; the tinkling of chimes and the spiced kick of ginger and soil and musk. "This isn't Camelot," she says. "Magic is different here." Just about anyone could do anything with enough magic powder and a good spell book, in Camelot, which had always driven Arthur insane with frustration. The magic here is of stronger, more vibrant stuff; it breeds itself and creates creatures tied to the land and its pulse, but it's not a fairy tale.

The words sound weak, probably because they are, in the face of Boyd's forcefulness. "True enough," he says. "That doesn't mean that it's not just as strong here." He can't seriously be saying—"Strong enough to bring back dead memories." She notices his hand begin to rise, the way that it hovers to her left, curved in the shape of her cheek, still inches away. "You have to feel it, still. There's no other explanation for what happened the other night."

"Beltane happened the other night," Lydia says. Her voice is stupidly breathless.

"Beltane can't invent something that isn't already there," he tells her, with a curl of a smile deep in his right cheek. He has a dimple there; did Lancelot? Lydia can't remember for a dazed moment, as static electricity snaps across the space between her skin and his.

The bell rings. Chairs scrape, voices rise, someone jostles the back of Lydia's chair as they push for the door. They all feel as if they are miles away, happening in another room in another country to other people. Lydia can still feel the pull against her, a startlingly strong urge to sink into Boyd until the world feels like it had when she was splayed across her mother's end table, the light of the candles flaring up to the ceiling.

Lydia is suddenly done with dancing around. "I was madly in love with you," she says. "It completely destroyed me when you left. I was barren and lonely and my husband was openly fucking the mother of his only son. I thought that being valiant and silent would give me the strength to bear it, but all it did was make me weak and tired. That love that poisoned your heart? It broke mine. I will never be that helpless again." Her voice is trembling and shrill, like her mother's had been when she'd thrown her father out and asked, finally, for a divorce. "Never."

"I can't take away your fear," he says quietly. "That's not something I can do."

"I don't need you to fix me," she hisses. "We're not like your queen and her trophy husband."

"No," Boyd agrees. "Snow and Charming drew their strength from their love. I would say we're nothing like them." She can still feel his hand as he pulls back, curling his fingers into a fist. "I wasn't saying that you need to be fixed, Lydia. Your fear is your own."

If Lancelot had been there, he's fading rapidly, crawling behind Vernon Boyd's blank visage. She can almost smell the way that the passion is leached out of him, until all that's left is Boyd like he'd been when they were sixteen, silently hovering along the edge of the cafeteria and ice rink, huge and quiet and ignorable.

Lydia Martin doesn't do guilt. Vernon Boyd isn't her responsibility. He's a member of her pack and her partner for AP Economics and sometimes he stands guard when she does magic, and they're friends in an inoffensive and colorless kind of way. She doesn't need him, neither for their project nor to serve as any kind of emotional crutch.

"I know how to learn from my mistakes," she says, pushing out of her desk and taking special care to slip her notebook into its usual place, to return her pencil to its case, and to arrange her jacket around her shoulders.

"That's assuming it was a mistake," Boyd points out, but there's nothing behind his words at all; they're recited like lines from an infomercial.

"Everything in Camelot was a mistake," Lydia says. "We lived miserable lives and then we died. I saw all of my people die in their homes, destroyed by the ogre resurgence. I watched the ogres tear down the keep and crush Mordred's skull between their teeth." All of her is shaking now, probably a result of the adrenaline that is trickling coolly down her spine and making her face numb. "Merlin tried to stop them, of course, but she couldn't take out an entire raiding party, especially not after Arthur and Gawaine fell." She adjusts her collar and arranges her bag at her shoulder, smoothing her skirt down the back of her thighs. "It makes things in Beacon Hills rather pale in comparison, doesn't it?"

She doesn't wait for an answer; she doesn't even look at him as she turns on her boot heel and leaves. The halls are pressed with students eagerly rushing to escape; Lydia has to elbow her way to her locker, where Allison is waiting.

"Are you okay?" she asks, locking her hand around Lydia's elbow. "I didn't mean it before, Caleb Michaels' is kind of a dick." Lydia can recognize that Allison has her Argent stare engaged, but the last of the adrenaline has yet to leave Lydia's system and she can barely feel anything.

"I'm fine," Lydia says. "Shall we? Stiles is going to cry again if we show up late."

---

Even if Lydia makes a point to emphasize to all of the Betas how ignorant they are, mostly so that they don't let the power trip of their werewolf powers get to their head, Scott, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd aren't actually morons. To be fair, Scott and Isaac are debatable, but Lydia can recognize that Scott is better than her at emotional awareness even if she demeans its worth as an actual type of intelligence.

Erica notices first, maybe because she's always been tuned in to Boyd. She makes a few aborted attempts at being threatening, but Lydia shuts her down almost immediately. She doesn't want to deal with Erica's sublevel Basic Instinct posturing and Stiles still has a scar from when Erica hit him with a piece of car engine. Lydia isn't going to suffer an unsightly blemish just so that Erica can work out her feelings; she's not Erica's psychologist and she's certainly not Erica's friend.

Isaac and Scott are next, tag teaming and cornering her after a pack meeting that she'd spent almost entirely silent. Allison trails them after, with a sympathetic but determined look on her face. Lydia rolls her eyes and informs them that she's neither depressed nor likely to develop any symptoms of it before she leaves for MIT in the next six months. She's not lying, so that removes their immediate suspicions and they can't really do much after that.

Derek just looks at Lydia a week after that and she says, "Don't even fucking think about it," and he retreats.

Lydia is sitting in the back garden two weeks after that, finishing her take-home final exam for Introduction to Theoretical Mathematics under the shade of the bougainvillea that has recently battled against the wisteria and won the fight for the walls framing the pool, when Stiles knocks on the back fence and strolls in, pushing aside a burst of wisteria blossoms the size of his head.

"What the hell happened here?" he asks. "I mean, I expressed a little bit of concern when whatever the hell I was rooting for you went Little Shop of Horrors on my kitchen sink, but this is gratuitous. Is there even enough space in the ground for the roots of that many plants?"

"Probably not," Lydia says. Prada, who is lolling over her bare feet with a look of bliss on his face from his recent dinner—a steak originally partitioned for Lydia's mother, who'd had to hop a plane to Chicago at the last moment—perks up a little bit at the sound of Stiles' voice and barks hopefully.

"Hey little dude," Stiles says, bending down and scratching the base of Prada's stomach. "How's it going?"

Prada wriggles over Lydia's toes and rumbles like a cat deep in his chest.

"So," Stiles says a few minutes later, straightening out of his crouch and stuffing his hands into the back pocket of his jeans. "I've been sent by Allison."

"Of course you have," Lydia mutters. Her Intro to Theoretical exam is kind of a joke, but she's going through it slowly because she's feeling oddly sentimental about her first college final. "Well, get on with it."

"Are you even going to pretend to pay attention?" Stiles asks her. He hooks the other chair with his ankle and pulls it out, dropping into it with his limbs splaying everywhere. Stiles has taken to his recent growth spurt with a vengeance; Scott keeps making Slenderman jokes.

"No," Lydia says, checking back in her notes for the name of a particular theorem. "I'm capable of multitasking."

"Look, she's worried about you," Stiles says, leaning back in his chair and prodding a clump of Spanish moss where it's dangling over his head. "You've kind of been even more emotionally unavailable lately. Even Derek's worried, and you know it takes some seriously bad mojo for him to admit to feeling anything about anyone."

"That's very sweet," Lydia says absently.

"As always, I'm impressed by how vicious a normally polite sentiment sounds coming out of your mouth," Stiles promptly replies. "The great part about having friends is that you can tell them shit that you're struggling with, Lydia."

Lydia raises an eyebrow that she knows Stiles will see even if she doesn't look at him. "Do I appear to be struggling with anything, Stiles?"

"It's a bit hard for me to tell," Stiles says drily, "what with the fact that you just haven't been around for the last four weeks. I get missing one or two meetings of the Human Club—it's a Friday afternoon, you have shit to do—but you've missed four in a row."

"Stop calling it the Human Club," Lydia says automatically. She realizes that she's miswritten a line of her proof and she reaches for her eraser, only to discover that Stiles has misappropriated it and is tossing it up into the air, his pose one of studied nonchalance. "Stiles, give me the eraser."

Stiles shrugs and throws it slightly higher; the white of the synthetic rubber flashes against the sun before falling back into his hand. "Lyyyydia," he drawls. "Tell Uncle Stiles all of your issues and concerns."

"If you keep calling yourself Uncle Stiles I'm going to do something irreparable to your Jeep," she informs him, and he frowns and throws the eraser at her head.

"Fine, whatever. I get that sharing is tough and Care Bears are hard to come by in this economy, so I'm just going to kick back here and relax until you decide you want to clue me, Stiles, one of your best friends, in on where the hell your head has been for the past couple months." He then does as he's threatened and closes his eyes, folding his arm against his chest.

Just looking at him gives Lydia pangs in her lower back; she returns her attention to her proof, which she finishes in twenty minutes. There's nothing else for her to do, then; her exam is done and she just has to scan it into her computer as a PDF and email it to her professor. There's something calming about sitting with Stiles in the garden, though, and Lydia doesn't quite want to disturb it. She wriggles her toes further under Prada and props her chin on her hand, watching the play of light across the surface of the pool.

Dragonflies are flitting across the lily pads and there's a nest of reeds popping up in the far corner where a set of stairs should lead down to the bottom of the pool, rooted in God knows what. Thanks to all of the vegetative growth, the water in the pool has gotten successively murkier as the weeks have passed and Lydia almost can't see the bottom anymore. She sort of likes the atmosphere of it, even though her mother has taken up complaining about Javí like she doesn't have a real job.

That's likely the point, though; the backyard is responding to her desires. Lydia isn't barren anymore, and while spurting out a child currently ranks lower on her to-do list than praising Scott for his insight and having a sleepover with Erica, the kind of land magic that she practices has always responded well to fertility.

Lydia stands up, Prada whining at the sudden upset, and announces, "I'm going for a swim."

"'k," Stiles says, low and sleepy.

Lydia changes into her suit in the pool house and emerges, white terrycloth robe wrapped around her, to Stiles openly asleep, now on one of the lounge chairs. His head is tossed back at an awkward angle and his mouth is open in a quiet snore. She'd rather cut off her own foot than have sex with him, but the sight still fills her with a little pang of affection. Instead of dealing with it, she drapes her robe over the chair next to Stiles and slips into the water.

Underneath the surface of the pool, a family of minnows is lazily darting in and out of the root system of the lilies. Javí might still be having one of his minions chlorinate the pool—Lydia's usually in school when they're working and not in a position to notice—but it's not appearing to be having any effect on the growth of the pool's new ecosystem.

The minnows are inordinately friendly; as Lydia swims towards them, kicking down to get a better look at the base of the pool, they swarm towards her in groups of two and three, their little silver bodies catching the sunlight as it filters past the lilies. When Lydia touches the root of a nearby water lily, it curls over her finger as a kind of hello, the spindly white flesh pressing against her skin. There's algae growing over the tiled side of the pool, reducing the glare from above the water and turning everything brown and green and secluded.

When Lydia kicks even deeper, to run her fingers over the cement base of the pool, she can feel bumpy irregularities like swollen pores. Even if she can't see them, she can feel the potential pushing its way up; sweet flag and pickerelweed and water stargrass. In another week or two they'll have broken through the cement. Lydia has always, as a rule, preferred orderly, landscaped gardens, but she gives the buds an encouraging nudge of magic. Every time her mother looks out of the glass to the patio she gets a tighter and tighter expression around her mouth; Lydia has to derive some kind of enjoyment out of this ridiculous spurt of spring felicity, so she might as well get it from her mother's frustration.

She propels herself to the surface and inhales, the heady presence of the garden sinking into her head. Lydia and magical plants rooting where they shouldn't have a tangled history, but the sprouting wolfsbane from Peter Hale's psychological masterstroke had been nothing but malicious. Lydia had tasted the bitterness of aconite leaves in the back of her throat for weeks after his tongue had been in her mouth. The new pond plants aren't malevolent by any stretch; very little about them is supernatural at all, beyond their ability to break through a foot of concrete.

They're comforting. Like the wisteria, they remind Lydia that this is her house and her land and the visitors in it are there under her grace.

Lydia folds at the waist and sinks back down to the bottom of the pool, watching the speckled, cloudy sky melt like the Pissarro her father has in the foyer of his apartment in LA. She hates Impressionism as a school—Lydia's tastes extend mostly along the lines of John Singer Sargent and Gustav Klimt—but she can appreciate expensive artistic endeavors in any direction. She's hardly Stiles, for example, who takes the joy out of calling him a Philistine by virtue of actually being a completely unapologetic Philistine.

Lydia's hair has pulled itself free of a braid and now the red is tangling with the blues and greens and muddy browns of the dappled underwater world that Lydia's magic has helped build in her mother's once-tidy pool. She kicks her feet lazily and watches the bubbles rise like glass balls to the surface. She only has a passing interest in physics, but she kicks again, with a smaller, more controlled motion, to see how it changes the diameter of the bubbles.

Lydia can remember with crystal clarity, even allowing for the fallibility of her memory, Boyd's fingers locked around the delicate bones of her ankle. The callouses that she had grown used to seeing on Lancelot's hands from sword and staff and handling the reins of the big warhorses that had occupied Arthur's stables have been replaced by different ones. If she lets her eyes become unfocused she can feel the one from holding a pencil against the middle finger of his right hand, like the twin to the one on Lydia's left.

She wants so badly, like she hasn't since the morning that Jackson had texted her—We're moving to Boston; Mom & Dad packed last night—about leaving and she'd stared at the screen of her iPhone like the pixels would reorient themselves to her will like everything else in her carefully maintained life was often willing to do; Lydia wants to feel Boyd's hands on the thin skin of her hipbones and she wants to laugh with him like she hasn't since the sun caught the metal planes of his armor.

One of the smaller minnows gets courageous and darts inside her reach, flitting between her fingers and brushing over her forearm in a streak of pale scales. Lydia turns her palm up and lets the minnow circle it. Its delicacy, in the murky, underwater world of her pool, is strangely affecting. Looking at it and its translucent eyes creates a bubble of feeling in Lydia's chest that she normally associates with an elegant experimental design or the last twenty minutes of Waitress: the promise and reward of perfect internal structure.

Nothing is perfect, not even the proofs Lydia will submit later in the afternoon to her professor; not even Lydia herself. It's lucky, then, that only humans demand perfection; the universe couldn't really give less of a fuck. The universe orients itself in patterns and deviations from the norm result in either swift eradication or adaptation on the part of the universe to accommodate this change. It's a peculiar kind of excellence, but one that Lydia has grown used to achieving.

She lifts her palm; the minnow curls over her hand and with a final flick of its tail, falls away and returns to its school of fellows. Air will soon become a pressing issue, but Lydia has above average lung capacity, like she has above average everything else, and she can afford an extra few seconds. Besides, here, in the nest she's made for herself, she has enough control not to let herself drown.

That's at least one aspect of her life that Lydia can label with satisfied; as she lazily kicks her feet twice and then, more forcefully, propels herself up to the surface, she tries to ignore the ache that is pressing along the edges of her head. She is familiar with the hungry push for success, mostly because her ambition has always been the part of her with which Lydia has been most comfortable.

This is more than ambition, Lydia thinks for a single second, and then she breaks the surface and takes a deep breath and she pushes the thought away and smothers the hunger with more—more magic, more life, and she watches through the prismatic shift of the water around her as the pickerelweed breaks through the bottom of the pool in a wave front of green. Lydia is hovering above the source of emission, and then the cement is gone and all that's left is the dark, absorbing shadow of the plants.

---

It isn't the cold that wakes Lydia, even though when she catches sight of herself in the mirror hung across the room from her bed, she can see that her lips are purple and her skin is pebbled with goosebumps. It isn't the screaming, either, although her throat aches from it. She's suffered more than a few nights of Camelot-related nightmares since the resurgence of her memories, and they've all ended in the same way: Mordred broken open and bloody, like the inside of an uncooked fish, and Merlin screaming over the body of her son and Guinevere, pale and stalwart and bleeding from her femoral artery, slowly turning cold as the ogres sweep through the keep.

Lydia isn't exactly upset about being awoken, until she realizes why—her wards have activated.

The sensation reminds her of being in third grade and feeling the sharp snap of a rubber band against her wrist: Jackson, sitting to her left, trying to get her attention for help on his multiplication tables. Her skin vibrates now with the force of the recoil. Someone is in the garden; not a wolf, but still supernatural and potentially malevolent.

Lydia is not an idiot; she texts Stiles first (Intruder) since she knows he starts the phone tree for both Derek and Scott regardless of the pack's current power dynamic, and then, in a reflexive way that she will later find disturbing, she texts Boyd (Someone's in my backyard). Seconds after she presses SEND, she rationalizes that at least if something's coming after her because of her past, at least she's covered her bases, and then she rolls out of bed.

Her mother is home, so Lydia doesn't have the luxury of locking her bedroom door and waiting out the arrival of the cavalry. The night is balmy; she leaves on her silk nightgown and layers a lightweight cardigan on top of it for the pockets, into which she puts the pepper spray labeled ambiguously human, which is homemade and laced with salt and mugwort, as well as a protective charm of beaten iron. After a second's consideration, she pulls out a silver-tipped stake from where she has a dozen of them stored in a box under her bed.

When Lydia peeks through the door to the master bedroom, her mother is asleep and all of her windows are shut and locked. Lydia pulls the door closed and completes the line of salt that she'd had varnished into the baseboard and door of every room in the house. Salt is a good all-purpose supernatural repellant and it doesn't keep the wolves out. Lydia doesn't want to venture out into danger to keep her mother safe only to find out that her mother's throat has been slit anyway.

The patio door slides open noiselessly. Moonlight is playing across the dark spread of the pool; night gladiolus and ipomoea blossoms, normally closed and indistinguishable from the riotous mess of the rest of the garden, are still in the absence of a breeze. The air is heavy and still, like the garden is holding its breath. Lydia would normally deplore that kind of hyperbole, but the garden has as of late displayed remarkable respiratory abilities; she suspects that some of the plants have developed C4 capabilities, but she hasn't been able to test her hypothesis to her satisfaction.

There is a woman under the arbor; as Lydia closes the patio door against Prada's curious whining, the woman raises a finger to the Spanish moss and says, conversationally, "This is quite a garden, little witch." She has the kind of voice that Lydia is used to hearing from women like this one, tall and well-formed; dark and rich and complex like a glass of Château Pétrus. It's the kind of voice that would fool a lesser woman, but Lydia knows that depth of tone like that only comes from practice.

"Thank you," Lydia says. Politeness has yet to have gotten her killed in a supernatural confrontation, and has in fact saved her life. Polite or not, she tightens her grip on the stake and shifts as if she's nervous, letting her left hand drift, hidden, behind her hip and the fall of the pale green silk of her nightgown. "Can I help you?"

The woman says, "What a dear," and she finally looks at Lydia instead of the fronds of the feathertears. Her irises are green and almost fluorescent, as if they've been tagged with GFP. Her eyebrows are dark and thick and they lie flatly, seriously, over her peculiar eyes. Her expression is familiar to Lydia, as it's one that Lydia herself as adopted on multiple occasions when she's been surprised by someone achieving even less than the bare standard of human accomplishment that Lydia expects from the idiots around her.

Peter Hale had been good at that look, before Derek had exiled him. So is this woman.

Lydia drops the nervous expression she'd adopted—probably poorly; Lydia's acting has never been fantastic—and says, "Why the hell are you in my garden?"

"What a specimen it is," the woman murmurs. "Impressive from one so young. I could feel it growing all the way down in Sacramento." She rubs a leaf of ivy between her thumb and forefinger. "I'd heard of Beacon Hills, of course, but never about something on this scale." She smiles at Lydia; her teeth are slightly crooked and yellowed. If Lydia had been uncertain—which she hadn't, because she's a person of reasonable intelligence—about whether or not this woman was a witch, she wouldn't be anymore. Witches always have stained teeth; it's from all the tea they drink.

Lydia's teeth are white, but she has health insurance and self-respect.

"Thank you," Lydia says again, but more harshly this time. "I would appreciate it if you would please get to the point behind your visit." How the woman got through her wards isn't mysterious, since Lydia's wards aren't designed to be impenetrable, but it would take a large amount of blunt force to get in, and that's not exactly available to a casual practitioner of Wicca or a member of one of the many clans of hedgewitches dotting the Pacific coast.

"Who is your teacher?" the witch asks casually, as if she's one of Lydia's mother's business partners, catching up on the Cliff Notes of Lydia's teenage existence over cocktails and canapés. "She's done exceptionally well by you."

"He's very proud," Lydia assures her. "It's late; can we please get to the point?"

"For the creator of such a marvelous construct, you lack any sort of appreciation of lyric or subtlety, don't you?" the woman asks. She sounds vaguely amused by this fundamental aspect of Lydia's character. Her magnificent green eyes are glowing more forcefully; a cloud has gone across the moon and Lydia can't guarantee that it's a natural phenomenon.

Lydia looks pointedly to the woman's left, where a gladioli blossom the size of a small pizza is tethered to a petiole as thick around as Lydia's thumb. She lets her eyebrow say, Clearly not. Subtlety is rarely appreciated in Beacon Hills.

"That's remedied easily enough under the right mentor," the woman continues. Her eyes make the skin across the Lydia's shoulders clench and shiver. She can't tell if the eyes are indicative of some kind of compulsion spell or the woman is more than just a witch. Lydia has, sadly, some experience with both of those options.

"I'm not in the market for another teacher," Lydia says, evenly as she can. "Thank you for the offer." The joints of her fingers ache where they are pressed against the stake, but she refused to loosen her grip on principle.

The woman smiles, showing off her yellow teeth, and the cloud drifts away. If she has that much control over the winds, Lydia should probably be doubly worried. "'Twas only an offer, kindly meant," the witch says. "Power such as this should not go untethered into the future."

"I am plenty tethered," Lydia tells her. She tries not to sound offended and probably succeeds; more intimidating people have said worse about her in the past two years, and only some of them about the state of her magic. "It's a pity you came all the way up from Sacramento for nothing." She smiles the way that Derek smiles at Omegas, the better to display how white and straight her teeth are.

The witch laughs and it releases a burst of air into the garden, sending the vines around her dancing. "I wouldn't call it a fruitless endeavor," she says, the amusement drawing deep tones in her words. "Check on your pack and your love, little witch. Learn to keep your power in check, or it will create more trouble than it will solve."

She leaves like the Cheshire cat, melting into the shadows until only her eyes are left. They are trained on Lydia and they feel appraising and familiar and the second that Lydia feels the woman disappear completely from the property protected by her wards, Lydia tucks the stake under her arm and pulls her phone out of her pocket.

There are three texts from Stiles explaining the lack of back-up, and the last one reads, Get to Boyd's now, something's wrong.

In a perfect world, Stiles' text wouldn't make Lydia's fingers stall and she wouldn't lose her grip on the stake and send it in an over-loud clatter into the pool and in a perfect world Lydia wouldn't be in love with Boyd anymore by sheer force of will; but the world is symmetric and mathematical but it certainly isn't perfect by any means. Lydia leaves the stake in the pool and the patio door unlocked; she gets into her car without any shoes and she drives to Boyd's Aunt Heni's house in a fugue state so severe she doesn't even notice parking, or getting out of the car, or crossing the yard.

"Where is he?" Lydia asks the first person she sees. It's Erica, her claws buried in the flesh of her upper arms. She looks like she's having trouble keeping control over her wolf, but Lydia can't be terribly fucked about Erica's issues right now.

"Oh, fuck you," Erica says. "Seriously, princess, go the fuck home."

Despite her words, she doesn't keep Lydia from opening the front door and stepping into the living room. The house is small and mostly decorated in floral patterns. It smells like houses occupied by old people always do: musty and medicated and faintly of lemon-scented cleaner. Isaac and Scott are on a couch covered in plastic, hands clenched into fists. Stiles, pacing in a far corner of the room, is on the phone and nervously picking up and putting down china figurines of the Virgin Mary.

"No, yeah, we can't exactly bring him to the hospital and have this be the third person this month from our friend group to drop into a mysterious coma, it doesn't even matter that I woke up after a day and a half and Allison only got diagnosed with a concussion—this is the kind of shit that even my dad can't put a lid on." He waits and then says, testily, "Of course I'm worried about him, Mrs. McCall, but what's a hospital going to do? His blood work would be a freaking mess."

Stiles is probably going to be talking in circles with Mrs. McCall for the better part of an hour, so Lydia leaves them and follows a well-worn path in the carpeting to the back of the first floor. Allison is sitting with her back against the back door, her head resting on her knees. She looks up when she sees Lydia and whatever is on Lydia's face must freak her out, because she rockets to her feet and says, "Oh my god. Oh my god, Lydia, I had no idea," and Lydia lets Allison put her arm around Lydia's neck as she walks into the only lit room. It has to be Boyd's, of course, and it is.

It's neat and mostly empty, except for a cross hanging over the bed and a basket full of laundry sitting next to a dresser. It's the room of someone who lives with his senile aunt and has to keep things clean because no one else is around to do it; it's exactly what Lydia would have predicted, down to the pile of Hanes v-necks, like the kind that can be bought in a six-pack from CVS, draped on top of the laundry basket. She tries to spare a moment to despair that she's apparently in love with someone who buys his clothes from a drugstore, but it's—harder than she would have anticipated.

Boyd is awkwardly sprawled across his bed, like he was caught by the witch halfway between sleep and wakefulness and he just flopped unattractively back into a horizontal position. Deaton, arms folded across his chest, is dourly informing Derek for what is probably the thousandth time that he is a veterinarian, not a trauma surgeon, and there's nothing he can do.

"There's always something," Derek says in response to this, which is a fair point. "Even if it's far-fetched, there's always some bullshit secret magic ritual."

Lydia has an IQ of 170, but she doesn't need it to know the answer to what Derek isn't directly asking. "Get out," she says to Deaton. She tries to speak normally, but she probably doesn't because Allison rears back and Derek's face sticks in a weird position, like it does when he's been confronted with a situation outside the range of his emotional intelligence. "All of you. Get out."

Deaton must know, or at least suspect, but he doesn't say anything; instead, he locks his hand around Derek's upper arm and tugs him out of the room. Allison lingers for a second, her fingertips pressed against the skin of Lydia's cheek. "What are you doing?" she murmurs. "Please don't do something stupid."

"Of course not," Lydia says by rote. "I'm Lydia Martin."

"You don't do stupid, yeah," Allison says, "I've heard it." She pauses, and Lydia hears the question before she asks it—the low, wounded, best friend cry of why didn't you tell me?—but she rethinks it and leaves without another word, shutting the door behind her.

Without anyone else in the room, Lydia can take a series of deep breaths and on the third inhale she finally catches a faint hint of lavender. It isn't totally unexpected, considering all of the laundry and the prevalence of lavender as a scent in household cleaners, but it's too organic for that. The piercing greenness of the witch's eyes come back to Lydia, and with the two pieces of evidence the rest of the story slides into place. Lydia can't let herself laugh because if she does she's going to descend into hysteria, but she lets herself choke on it.

Merlin. Of course.

"Always the lessons," Lydia says. Her voice is unhappy and shaky; it sounds like the voice of a wounded creature. It sounds like Guinevere's labored breathing, when she'd tried to pull herself on legs that didn't work away from a rampaging ogre, when she'd put her hand in a puddle of the intestines of one of the serving girls who had braided her hair that morning.

Boyd doesn't say anything; he's asleep.

Lydia sits on the edge of his bed and rests her palms against the tops of her thighs, letting her spine straighten vertebrae by vertebrae. His body to her left is incredibly hot; Lydia can feel it through the thin silk of her nightgown like the fabric has been set on fire. The pepper spray in her pocket is an awkward weight, so she strips off her cardigan and drapes it across the foot of his bed.

Guinevere had met Snow and Charming only once. Snow had been six months pregnant, glowing and beautiful and vivacious and feisty and everything Guinevere had been once, before Morgana, and Charming had floated in the background, willing to put his handle on the pommel of his sword occasionally to accentuate his wife's political points. After the feast the first night, when everyone had been varying shades of inebriated, one of the ladies of the court had asked about the curse.

"We have heard of the power of true love, of course," the idiot woman had said, coyly fluttering her fan and looking to where Merlin sat to Arthur's left, the vibrancy of her dark hair and beautiful nut-brown skin a direct contrast to Guinevere's pale, lackluster figure. "But your story is so well-known, your majesties."

"Is it," Snow had asked, archly amused. "Charming, how fabulous."

"Shh," Charming had murmured into her ear. It had been hard to Guinevere not to notice, seated as she was across from them. "Don't bait them."

"Well," Snow had continued a moment later. "Please ask your question, Lady Brangwain."

Brangwain, who was too curious for her own good and too vicious for Guinevere's, had put down her fan and, leaning across the table, asked breathlessly, "But how did you know?"

"Know what?" Snow's mouth had ruched into a delicate frown.

"That it was true love," Brangwain had said, rushing over the words as though they held actual power. "And not a simpler, less-powerful kind."

It had been here when it had occurred to Brangwain that her dimwitted question was moderately insulting; she'd flushed, but before she'd been able to think of some way to retract it, Charming had said, in his level, deliberate way, "There was no way it was anything else."

Snow's smile then had been private and glorious. "Aye," she'd said. "You always know when it's the true sort of love. It changes how you see the world, but it doesn't sweep you away like a grand passion does; you stay yourself, even as you discover what that means. A true love acts like a reflecting glass."

Brangwain and three of the other court ladies within earshot had melted into their soup like sticks of butter; Guinevere had thankfully been spared the trial of looking at Merlin and Arthur, because of the seating, but Gawaine and Tristan had given each other a set of positively sickening looks across the table.

"There's no hiding from it," Snow had added a moment later. She'd turned serious, perhaps too serious for a feast celebrating a visiting monarch, but it had seemed important to her to say it. She'd spoken directly to Guinevere, as if she could see into her heart and find the parts of it devoted to Lancelot, who had been gone six long years by then. "You can be caught up in fear and run from it, but a true love will find you again."

"It will always find you," Charming had agreed, and he'd kissed his wife's temple and half of the court had dissolved into tears.

Lydia rests her hand in the air above Boyd's left ankle, curling her fingers across the curve of his foot. It's bare under the hem of his pajama pants, and the bone points into the arch of Lydia's palm. The truest love will always find you, she thinks, and it's slightly hysterical even within the bounds of her head.

"There's no escaping this, is there?" she asks Boyd's sleeping figure. "You tried and I tried and we're still here thanks to Merlin's meddling."

The sheer inevitability of it is slightly galling.

"This isn't a declaration," she lies, most likely to the universe at large since Boyd is still unconscious, and then she leans over his huge chest and rests her lips, still chapped from the screaming earlier in the night, against his. It's like kissing a waxwork model, at first, and then Lydia senses the magic lying over Boyd begin to dissipate, taking with it the scent of lavender, and Boyd is kissing her back. He steals her breath with an inhale and then he cups her face with both hands and twists and kisses her harder, with an obvious tinge of the desperation he's been hiding for the past two months.

"Lydia," he says between breaths, "please, Lydia," and she climbs on top of him so she can get a better angle, tucking her knees into the dip of his torso above his hips, and he says, resting his forehead against hers, "You have to decide, I can't do this forever," his eyes squeezed shut.

He looks so young that Lydia closes her eyes, too, so she doesn't feel like a forty five-year old woman molesting a teenager. The bits of her that have been overextended for the last few months, that have been seeking solace in the warmth of her mother's garden and the cool shadows of the pool, press against the inside of her chest and they want so badly that Lydia Martin actually stops thinking for the first time in her life—possession by undead werewolves aside—and she says, "Yes," so tightly that the word almost doesn't come out at all; Boyd has to feel it in the way her lips brush against his mouth in forming them.

It doesn't feel like she's handing over control she's never going to get back, but Lydia isn't sure she'd be able to feel that, anyway; it just feels like she's resting muscles that have been stretched too far for too long, and the warmth of Boyd's body feels so good against them. "I love you," he says, which is basically beside the point by now. His love hasn't been in doubt for a while now.

Lydia thinks, I will never love anyone as much as I love you, and she kisses him, hard enough to break the skin, and she bites her own lip and mixes their blood together in her mouth because that's how you spell permanence, when you're a witch and a werewolf: nothing less than blood will do.

"Always," she says. His mouth is painted red and the rosebush outside of his window is blooming so violently that petals are stuck to the panes of glass. "It looks like we don't really have a choice."

Boyd's hand firms against the back of her neck and he uses his grip to pull her away, enough that he can gain and maintain eye contact. "Lydia, you have a choice." His hand is shaking and his thumb is resting over her pulse and Lydia's thighs are pressed against the bare skin of his chest, creating a complete circuit. "You will never lack a choice."

"I know," she tells him. She's already decided; it doesn't make sense how nervous she is to speak the words. She feels depressingly like the reluctant male protagonist of a shitty Lifetime original movie, and that's what eventually motivates her to move her hands so they're both resting on his chest, over his heart. Lydia's favorite movie is The Notebook, after all, not fucking Love Story. "I've loved you since you first rode with my colors, and I will die loving you." She doesn't even bother trying to smile. "I already have, after all."

"I won't leave again," he promises. His smile is brilliant and wide, like Lancelot in his best days. Even in the dark of his bedroom, at four in the morning, Lydia can see the shine spilling out from him. Under her palms, his heart is fast and steady and she kisses him again, to lick his mouth clean of blood. "By the gods, Lydia, we'll be happier this time."

Lydia's mouth hurts, from a combination of the bruising kisses and her deranged smile. "I think we've made a good start of it," she agrees.