She stops sleeping in her own bed. She stops sleeping alone. She physically cannot sleep by herself now. Every time she tries, she wakes screaming. The doctor gives her sleeping pills again, tries to send her to a therapist. Her mother makes her tea and kisses her like she did when Lydia was small. Not much helps, so she stops trying other people's methods.
Instead, she sleeps with Isaac.
She stops talking to Stiles. She doesn't answer his texts or call or emails or DMs on twitter. She moves seats in every class they share. She can't look at him, can't listen to him, can't see him without thinking on the Stiles that was not Stiles. The Stiles that was not that haunts her nightmares and her time by herself, his hands slipping through her hair and over her body every time she stops running, thinking, doing. His voice is the same, enough the same, and she cannot. She will not. It hurts him. It doesn't hurt her. It should, but it never will because Stiles will always be Nogitsune in her mind. She can't compartmentalize, can't differentiate between the two because they shared a face and a voice and a hunger for her that nearly manifested in the decrepit remains of an internment camp where the whispers were loud enough to wake the dead. And did.
Instead, she talks to Isaac.
They get thrown together like sheets in a dryer, separate and then impossibly tangled together until it's hard to tell where one ends and the other actually begins. She touches him once, twice, three times in the space between Allison's death and Chris's arrival, and then she can't let go. He doesn't seem to mind, not when she's mopping the blood off him after everything in the police station bathroom, not when she falls into his bed and clutches his pillow and sobs. They're still tangled and she thinks the knots will never be undone.
She becomes a regular at the McCall house. She practically lives there, and her bobby pins take up space on the countertop Isaac shares with Scott. Allison showed her a picture once that said that bobby pins were the way girls marked their territory. Melissa cooks for four instead of three and adds Lydia to her speed dial. She sleeps in Isaac's clothes and in his bed and steals Scott's socks sometimes. The boys teach her how to play Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty and eat her popcorn when they watch Paranormal Activity. Her mother calls Melissa when Lydia doesn't come home for three days one time and the next thing she knows, Melissa joins the list of emergency contacts the school has for her.
The entire lacrosse team is convinced she and Isaac are screwing. They aren't. There isn't a need. They exchange lazy kisses and occasionally there's a tiny hickey behind her ear, but they aren't screwing. She feels like she has to be weirdly celibate, her best friend is dead and will never have sex again, so who is Lydia to enjoy it? Isaac is different, anyways. She'd want sex with Isaac to mean something, love, commitment, forever. They're too young to decide on forever.
And Allison doesn't get a forever. Why should they? What do they have going for them that she didn't?
She spends Christmas at the McCall's. Her mother comes over that morning and they open presents and Melissa makes cinnamon rolls. It's good until she forgets and dials Allison to wish her Merry Christmas and gets an automated voice reminding her the number is disconnected. She cries until she passes out and spends the rest of the day curled in Isaac's lap as he reads Carrie aloud to her in his soft, low voice that cracks on the word prom. They don't go downstairs for dinner. Stiles tries to come up and talk to her and she shouts at him to go away and when he doesn't Isaac storms through the doorway and pins him to the wall by his throat, eyes yellow. Scott has to rip Isaac's back open, eight bloody claw marks and a puncture from his thumbnail between his shoulder blades before Isaac lets go. Isaac manages to get out an apology to Scott not Stiles, she's positive he won't ever apologize to Stiles, before he blacks out and falls down 12 stairs. He comes around long enough to make it back to his bedroom, where Melissa bandages him up and holds him to her longer than normal before leaving again.
The cuts scar. Lydia reads her psychology textbook to find a reason, but cover to cover and there is no explanation. The supernatural doesn't follow science. It's frustrating to her.
Lydia looks up the word grief in 5 English dictionaries and one thesaurus and then types it into google translate and keeps changing the language for translations. She decides that she likes the Italian version the best. Isaac tells her the the Germans have a word called kummerspeck that translates into overeating due to grief. She laughs until she cries and writes the word "grief bacon" twenty times in her planner and once over her right hipbone. She doesn't eat bacon again because now it makes her think of Allison.
She hates Malia Tate more than anything else. Lydia tells the other girl so very vocally during Spanish one day after she asks Isaac to be her dialogue partner. Malia looked at Isaac like something she wanted to steal, and she wasn't going to get him. Not when he was All Lydia Had. She doesn't really remember the entire exchange of words, only calling her a "tremendously large, false harlot." Lydia isn't even sure what that phrase could possibly mean. Malia gets her revenge during track practice and Isaac comes staggering out of the woods towards the parking lot thirty minutes late, dried blood crusted around his healing nose.
They spend an entire weekend in the abandoned train station and get really really stoned one night and throw bullet casings at the trees and whoop when they fall to earth like stars. The next night, they drink vodka straight from the bottle and eat a family sized bag of Doritos and then do shots of Jack and see who pukes first. She loses. Isaac takes her fifty dollars with a sage grin and then kisses her messily. They pass out tangled together. She wears her sunglasses in class that Monday, and he still smells like booze even though he took a shower. She knows he took a shower. She sat outside the curtain for twenty minutes and listened to him sing "Glory and Gore" seven times very poorly and joined in on the chorus.
They go to winter formal and she wears a dress with long sleeves because the nightmares, Isaac's nightmares, got really bad a few nights ago and she made the mistake of trying to hold him down. He broke the skin, not deep enough to need stitches, but they were still messy and it looked like she had tried to kill herself and failed. The last thing the two of them needed was a suicide rumor right now. He had locked himself in the bathroom for the rest of the night and she had fallen asleep against the door listening to his sobs like they were Mozart. The dance is a good distraction. They kiss and dance and sway, pressed to each other, until a song comes on that has Isaac bolting. She knows that song and nearly chokes when she realizes why. It was Allison's favorite. Of course Isaac would know that. She had always laughed at Allison's penchant for the song, thinking it was funny that her Kesha loving was also so very enamored by the Arctic Monkeys. The endings of "Flourescent Adolescent" fill her ears with whispers and she runs, looking for Isaac. She finds him the corner of Coach's office mid panic attack and sits down next to him and rubs his back until he calms himself down. Kira finds them curled together on the floor sometime around 11:30, and that's when Lydia remembers they came with Scott.
She visits Aiden's grave. Isaac goes with her and stands to the side, holding his phone so tight it cracks the screen. She talks to a tombstone that isn't really Aiden because he's dead too. They were over and now he was dead. She calls him an asshole, breaks down, cries and screams. Then they leave. Isaac collapses to his knees and sobs for a good five minutes when they walk past a grave with a flag resting on it. She realizes it's Camden's. They don't look at the west corner. They look anywhere but the west corner. Allison's under the dirt in the west corner.
She starts wearing Isaac's sweaters to school on Fridays. Even invests in a pair of cute little Mary Jane wedges to wear with skinny jeans. He loves seeing her in them and buries his face in her neck and breathes in every time she comes downstairs in one. Every other day of the week, she is Lydia Martin, the Boss Ass Bitch She Wants To See In The World. On Fridays, she is Isaac Lahey's Girlfriend. Even the teachers think they're fucking now. She cries during lunch the first day of second semester when a teensy little freshman girl asks her shyly if she knows where the french room is. The girl runs away so fast Lydia is almost positive she imagined it. She feels bad for scaring her.
Isaac gets the flu, doesn't tell anyone, goes to school with a fever of 104, and falls the hell out of it in the middle of a presentation. She's out of her seat and next to him in seconds, begging him to wake up. It's only after Scott grabs her and pulls her to his chest that she realizes she's shaking and crying. Isaac spends three days in bed and she skips three days of school. He's delirious for two of them and keeps calling her mom, Cam, Allison. She cries. He gets better. Then she gets the flu and he doesn't leave her side for a week.
They start watching LOST. It takes up too much time, sucks up her life and spits it out, but it's a welcome distraction. Isaac likes Charlie the best and condemns Jack every chance he gets. She thinks Jack reminds him of Derek. She likes Claire. She wants to create life too. She's so sick of death. Then people on the show start dying and she changes her mind. Life ends, but death is forever. You don't feel pain in death like you do in life.
Peter calls them all to the loft sometime in late January. She lets Isaac hold her hand so tightly she feels bone shift. The loft smells like Allison and Boyd a little bit still, and Isaac's trying not to cry. Lydia shifts closer to him and farther from Stiles (nogitsunenogitsunenogitsune) and Malia (theiftheiftheif). Peter avoids looking at her. Isaac growls at him and holds her tighter. She doesn't want to know what he can smell coming off Peter, she decides, if it has him so upset.
"Derek's missing."
And she finds purpose again. She can breathe again. It's funny how impending danger and death feels more freeing than just living. It's a testament to how damaged her mental state really is.
They go home and go to bed and Isaac lets her be the big spoon. She presses her face into his hair and breathes in.
"Isn't it funny," He starts, shifting to face her slowly, "How the only way for us to find purpose is to save our sorry asses?"
She laughs.
And if the nightmares still stay, and the panic, and the random crying, then so be it. Because Allison's death brought out something good.
It gave her Isaac