auribus teneo lupum: old latin proverb "I hold a wolf by the ears" in regards to a situation where both holding on and letting go are deadly.
Lydia lives in theory. The simpler minds of her academic colleagues don't seem to understand that. They all think science is fact. Science is law. Science is proven. Who can blame them, though, what with all these laws floating around. Newton's laws, Euler's Laws. Kepler. The happy quad of Boyle, Charles, Avogadro, and the sophomore chemistry class snicker inducing Gay-Lussac. The ever narcissistic Joule, and Schrödinger who probably dropped acid and stared at a flashlight.
She draws her lips into a thin line and chuckles to herself. Science, to those who practice, is never fact or law. It's operates in the realm of the 99.9%, the probable, predictable. Every scientist knows that their work will never be done, each experiment must attempt to disprove those that have come before. There is not fact, only theory. Theories that are well backed and theories that are ripped to pieces but forever theories.
Einstein is the only one to ever get it colloquially correct. Relativity was right. Everything is relative, relative, relative. Scientists of sound mind and level headed purpose chase the exceptions in their theories, not the creation of fact. There is always an exception. That is the only fact there is. Werewolves, demons, and one thousand watt Japanese spirits, to name a few. Not the sort Lydia is used to dealing with, as far as exceptions in the realm of physical sciences go, but still. So they stand, real as her own flesh and bone and of an annoyingly inexhaustible supply.
Yes, Lydia moves in a world of theory, things are only things until they aren't. And so here is another puzzle presented to Lydia, the reason she makes herself as comfortable as possible in a cramped airplane seat, attempting to sleep away the next 15 airborne hours. The cabin lights dim, and she prays this one works.
Death is a pretty well backed theory and Lydia has never been more grateful for the persistence of exceptions.
It's hardly dawn by the time the plane screeches to a halt on the tarmac. Still, Lydia shakes her copper waves and gets her passport stamped.
"Business or leisure?"
"Leisure, hardly."
She wasn't about to tell the immigration officer that she was here to perform a resurrection ritual on her dead best friend's spirit. There should be some sort of subcategory though.
She doesn't bring much. She doesn't have much left. They breeze her through and she snags a loaner phone and a latte just as the sun peeks over the parking garage. She texts Stiles and only Stiles. He'll alert the rest. They all had pitifully given up on the cause over the past six months. Another day, another demon to tend to. The menagerie of demonic creatures plaguing Beacon Hills were nothing compared to the ones who gnawed at her dreams, twisted her heart, and clawed at her eyes since that night. They are what drove her here, to the ends of the earth.
The dense Australian air fills her lungs. She feels a slight twinge of guilt, leaving them, what with the whole pack thing and all, fragmented as it was.
Fuck that. Allison was part of the pack. Is part of the pack. They weren't on the plane, were they? They act like nothing happened. If she is so much as abstractly referred to, they fall mute with mourning.
Fuck that. Lydia didn't need their help. She never really did. She alone had helped, albeit unknowingly, bring a twice murdered serial killer werewolf back to life. Maybe he was murdered once and 99% dead before that, but she purposefully avoids the logistics. She'd never had cause to care, well not until now. Anyway, if they're so quick to abandon her, she couldn't give two shits about keeping them in the loop.
And like she said, Stiles would inform the rest.
Lydia sits at the very cafe she was told. It's a stone's throw from the airport. She's barely finished plugging the few contacts she has into her new phone before someone silently fills the seat across from her. They are quite a sight, the two of them. Her alabaster luminescence and his coffee black serenity. She stares at him, eyes green and blank.
"You pack light for such a long journey," he states, twanged with an accent Lydia has never heard before.
"I don't expect to be here long."
He shrugs, as if they spoke of the weather conditions for the coming week.
"I will be the judge of that."
Another pause overtakes them. He leans forward, purposefully.
"Tell me about it."
"...about it?"
"How long ago was it?"
"6 months, 8 days."
"It was a supernatural cause of death?"
"Yes."
"Was she buried?"
"Quietly."
"Do you have her remains?"
"No."
A look of disappointment overtakes his features.
"But I have this," she says, barely above a whisper. A silver arrowhead tumbles out of her palm and onto the wood of the table. It seems to glisten without much need for light.
He looks down at it, then up at her, clearly not grasping the meaning behind such an object.
"It's her... totem." She tests the word, unsure of it's weight in this conversation.
He smiles, and repeats, "Totem? That was not part of the agreement. Deaton said nothing of totems."
"But it can work. I read up on it. A little."
He narrows his eyes at her, perhaps initially misjudging her.
"You are... the banshee of California, are you not?"
"I should get business cards," she deadpans. He laughs succinctly and then falls into stoicism once more. She never cracked a smile. Her gaze is worn and desperate.
He pulls a pad of paper from his breast pocket, and scribbles with an unsteady hand. He slides it across the table. Lydia minds the scrawled address and raises a brow at her table mate.
"They pronounce it Cahhhhns."
The humidity hits her first, rendering her sticky and suffocating almost instantly. They said it would be mild, as it is going into winter. She strolls across the lot to her rental car, keys jingling in the emptiness that greets her in tropical Cairns.
The conversions are but simple mathematical adjustments for her, and she prefers the metric system anyway. Cleaner divisions, increments that make sense. Her little two door sedan zips up Captain Cook highway without a hitch. She mistakes the windshield wipers for the blinker only once, her focus mainly on the rolling mountains that creep along her left. They run right alongside the coast, sleepy and swathed in green bushels of gum and pine and god knows what else.
The sun dips behind a particularly proud peak. She floors it.
She's given boots and gloves and a scarf for her head. Protection, they claim, but not for her. They trudge for what seems like hours on a path that seems to circle around the same tree stumps, abreast the same streams. Yellow eyes watch her from the dense ferns. They blink, but they don't move.
She nearly passes out before the one behind her announces that they've reached Wandjina. The sacred ground.
A camp of sorts has already been erected. No tents or chairs but there is a fire, and a knife and it's placed a little too ceremoniously on a rock for her taste. They are also not alone.
Joining her party of three are two others. The older of the two, his salty beard a stark contrast to his charred skin, beckons her closer.
"You are Lydia, the banshee."
His voice creaks like the floorboards in her parents attic. She nods at first, not quite sure what happened to her nerve. When he seems unmoved, she clears her throat.
"Yes, I am."
"You have come to the sacred site of the gods to bring your comrade Allison Argent back from the dead."
She feels something prick the back of her eyes. She doesn't think she's heard anyone other than herself utter that name, not since, not to her.
"I have."
His gnarled hand sweeps across the sky, visible through a break in the canopy above. It's inky black, peppered with stars.
"The moon is dark tonight, you can see. We must give her the proper burial, so her spirit can prepare for rebirth."
Lydia is painted in streaks of white. They all are. But the shaman is nearly covered in it. The silent companion to the shaman drags the paint down her arm on an s curve. Almost like a snake.
A chant follows that she cannot decipher. It fills the clearing with a deep hum, the yellow eyes multiplying around the foliage that encompass it.
She's called forth, and the arrowhead is placed on the rock beside the fire. The shaman looks down at what is presented to him. He halts the chant, furrows his brow, and questions her.
"This is the totem?"
"Yes."
He purses his lips, but is interrupted before he can object.
"An imprint of what once lived is left in what is left behind. As the plant leaves it's likeness in the seed after it is long gone, so do those who die, in the totems they leave behind."
Lydia's words are engulfed by the forest. She's almost not sure if anyone heard her.
"Well that's the gist of it, isn't it?" she asks.
The shaman smiles a crooked grin at her. His teeth are as yellow as the flames.
"You are certain that this totem is what she has left behind?"
Lydia glances at the silver metal dancing in the firelight. The fleur de lis is carved clearly, discernible even from the few feet away at which she stood, fresh as the day she forged them.
"I'm certain."
A knife is placed in her hand by another member of the tribe. His expressionless face says nothing in the way of instruction. The shaman gestures to the arrowhead.
"You must bleed, you must show remorse for your departed."
This was most certainly not part of the deal Deaton had relayed to her, but there seemed nothing sinister about it.
"How much?" she inquires shakily.
"The depth of your remorse for your departed."
If she did that, she would bleed out a thousand times over this damn rock. She swallows thickly, and settles for a shallow gash above her wrist, letting the crimson drip down onto the glinting silver.
It hurts, but it is the least of her pain, and she smacks herself mentally for being so melodramatic. She blames it on the jet lag.
She steps back, holding out her bleeding arm and the knife. Her eyes dart from the shaman to the tribesmen, neither paying her much attention. They all have their eyes closed while her blood dribbles down the rock. The crackle of the flames and the quiver of her breath are the only sounds to be heard.
Suddenly, the shaman plucks the arrowhead between his two fingers, and moves to stand. For a while, Lydia wasn't sure if he was able to walk, but he scampers over to a large gum tree where a hole has been carved. Down the arrowhead goes, without a second thought. It shimmers down into the dark depth of the trunk and is out of sight.
The knife is taken from her and delivered to his hand, where he stabs and makes to whittle new holes into various places in the tree. He steps back and presents his work to her.
"The stars of the southern cross," he proclaims. His finger tracing the kite shape that the four gouges make. He looks back at Lydia, eyes alight, cheeks full with a satisfied grin. "It is the eyes of the first man to die, and the eyes of death itself."
She was well aware of the astronomical sights in the Southern Hemisphere, but this was the first time she'd heard that story. Rather morbid. But what in her life these day's wasn't.
From behind her approaches the assistant to the shaman, with a bowl filled with a reddish goo. Hands smear it across the center of the southern cross. She feels like the whole thing is some scene out of Lion King, despite being on the wrong continent. Maybe she's pushing her objective evidential approach to theory a little too far.
"At the death of the first man, the gum trees bled their red tears, as you bled for your beloved."
Beloved.
Let's not go there.
Another chant. Another swipe of the gum tree sap. And then it's finished. The fire is extinguished. The shaman looks at Lydia's bewildered expression in the moonlight and places a bony hand on her shoulder.
"You sleep. You dream. Return when the moon is round."
She dreams, vivid, rattling, screaming dreams. In the dreaming she's there, fuller faced, ringlets bouncing wildly as she giggles. She's never seen her like this, this young. She crawls into Lydia's lap and shoots a foam arrow up into her chin.
Her eyes open before she wakes. It takes her several staggered breaths before she strokes her throat absentmindedly.
She'd been screaming.
Hungry for knowledge to anchor her, she buys every last book on aboriginal lore in a shabby bookshop down the road. She drinks in the stories. The way spirits live on, children of the departed, waiting to be reborn.
Each dream follows the course of the first. Allison buried in sand on a beach, teeth white and snaggled with a few missing. Allison gangly and wobbling on skates, pinwheeling her arms and reaching out for someone. Allison tucked away in a caravan corner, doing homework, scribbling with a pencil ridden with bite marks.
Then the Allison she remembers, standing in the woods. Allison vigilant. Allison crouched and poised and deadly. Allison rewiring a bow underneath someone's hands, someone whose angular face and cinnamon hair are obscured by a silted mist. Lydia squints, and she wakes. Mid scream.
Allison doesn't smile in her dreams anymore.
She rises due to the squawking of the cockatoos. They bellow their guttural call in unison outside her window. The mooyi, the tribes call them. Their sulfur crests dart two and fro while they screech. Maybe it's a good omen. It doesn't feel like it. It's all reminiscent of before she knew what all this mess was about, when she was doped up in her room after the video store attack, rolling in and out of states of shock and white, just blinding white nothing. She sometimes wishes she could go back to the nothing.
Lydia makes herself a plunger coffee, they call it. She walks around the apartment at a loss of what yet to do. It's a two bedroom. Wishful thinking, she supposes, the same sort that brought her to Stiles's door a week ago with Deaton's instructions fresh in her head. Then to Issac's. Then to Scott's. The sort that put her on that plane, alone.
It is nearly nightfall, and she has woken just as the sky trades the sun for a yellowing full bellied moon. It's so bright, it illuminates the crashing waves on the modest shore, lined with palm trees, like rising daylight.
Lydia gathers her clothes from her unpacked suitcase in the corner, wraps her head in the scarf, and locks the door.
They take her through the same bowing branches and umbrellaed leaves. The light of the moon pushes through the weaves of the basket ferns and the splayed fingers of the palms. It dots the path before her with speckles of silvery light.
Everything is the same. The fire, the shaman, the voiceless companion, the knife. She lays the towel she was urged to bring on the rock, also same as before. The scab on her left wrist pricks in memory.
"The moon is full," the shaman rumbles, "If she made the journey, she will be ready."
Lydia looks around the clearing, counting the heads. No one but them. No coffin or body bag or anything resembling the corpse of a human. Nothing has changed. Did anything really happen at all?
The blade of the knife is urged into her hand once again. She feels her heart rate double, the panic set in. She searches for the rational, for the methodical calm of her logical mind, but she's at her wit's end. She's not in her element anymore. She's in a nameless jungle with nameless faces with not a soul on this earth knowing where to search for her severed body parts.
Lydia raises the blade to her other arm and sucks in a breath but she's stopped. The tight-lipped companion lays his smooth hands on hers, separating them, moving the blade from her skin. Her heart stalls. Her breath stops. She looks up at him, and he shakes his head at her.
"The tree."
Lydia had to see his lips move to verify that he had indeed uttered the words. She looks from him to the gumtree, not understanding. This whole thing has been some big crock of shit and she let her stupid grief drag her into it.
The knife is slipped from her fingers and the companion seeks wordless approval from his then nodding shaman.
She's hardly lucid, lightheaded from sleepless dreams, sustaining on the last dregs of her hope when they open the trunk and pull a milky white Allison from the clutches of the sap.
They wrap her in the towel, clear the sap from her face, and place her in Lydia's arms. She looks up at Lydia, brown eyes the same, the exact same, and sucks in a breath.
Lydia screams, the air pulled from her lungs by some force beyond her control, and that's all she remembers.
Allison never leaves her sight.
She wakes up next to her, cocooned in blankets, hair wet from a shower, and she's here. She's asleep, has been for days. Her skin is white and dry as chalk and chilled to the bone. She breathes too little, and won't open her eyes, but she's here. Alive. Somehow.
Lydia tries to outline the events and steps of what occurred into her reference lab book of sorts. It's nearly full, and this is the second volume. Tabs and thumb creased pages mark the divisions of her attempts thus far. Someone should be keeping track of the rituals and otherworldly beings they experience. She wouldn't exactly call Stiles and his web of strings comprehensive. Not that she has any interest in the Mystery Inc. follies of her friends, no. Just death. She figured, with the depth of cultures and religions in this world and all their individual takes on the subject, one of them had to work. Her involvement in this tornado of supernatural idiocy had amount to something.
And so, theory #26 has so far proven successful.
But Lydia won't touch her, not without a towel or a blanket or something so she won't undo whatever is holding her together. Her hair looks brittle, so she won't risk that. God she wants to. She wants to feel her pulse. For scientific purposes, of course.
She covers her in snakes blood, once a day, as per the shaman's orders. It's absolutely disgusting, but the blood of the snake is the blood of the rainbow snake which is some ancient spirit that brings life. It's also supposed to draw the color back into her skin, dying it, almost. Lydia's not sure if that's going to work, but she's in no place the question their methods.
Afterwards, they both take a warm shower. Together. Lydia holds her up against her under the pounding water. Her ribs poke Lydia in the most unpleasant of ways, and she could play the vertebrae of her spine like a xylophone. She just tries not to look, instead zeroes in on the swirl of the crimson circling the drain.
It's about a week before she opens her eyes. They flutter, effortlessly, like they would on lazy Sunday mornings after a breakup and wine and sleeping a little too close to just be friendly comfort. Lydia holds her breath.
Allison's lips crack open and a sound filters through.
"Cold."
Lydia leaps into action, pulling a charcoal blanket from the closet and flinging it over the layers that already encompass her friend. The fleece drapes softly, and Allison breathes a sigh of what could be relief.
Lydia climbs back up onto her bed. Allison looks at her, and Lydia can see the confusion. The jostled memory. The life flooding back into her body in gulps and gags.
"Do you know who you are?" Lydia asks tentatively. Her voice sounds like someone else. Soft, soothing, like her mother's used to. A long time ago.
Allison nods. Her sandpaper tongue darts out to do what against her lips, Lydia didn't know. Muscle memory, maybe. There wasn't a drop of saliva to spare.
"Do you know who I am?"
The fractured words terrified of the response. Allison blinks up at Lydia. She isn't wearing any makeup. Her hair is tousled, unkempt, but as flaming red as ever. She hardly recognizes herself these days.
Allison grins, teeth pushing past chapped lips. Its the smile of deep, fond memories coming to the surface.
Lydia exhales, and she may or may not be crying.
Lydia takes Allison to the sea, also as instructed. She has to support her still. Her legs are twigs and her arms limp rope, but they make it to the soft sand nonetheless. Lydia strips down to her bathing suit. Allison wears a baggy black v-neck, the hem gliding over her hip bones.
She brings her out into the surf. It's a calm day for the cove. The rolling waves break sweetly around them until they're far out enough that it's just the bobbing hills of green salt water.
Allison coils her arms around Lydia's neck. They're translucent in the sun. Lydia has her arms circling the bones of her middle. She holds her in the chest high water, revels in the breath puffing against her ear. Allison hums in appreciation of the remarkably warm water, and her head drops onto Lydia's shoulder.
Beneath the sun, encompassed by the sea, Lydia tries not to dig her fingertips into Allison's thin coating of flesh. Eventually Allison's legs find their strength and they too wrap around Lydia, finding purchase atop her hips. Lydia tightens her grip just a tad and Allison follows suit, tethering herself to her relentless best friend completely.
Hours in the sea, blood baths until Lydia can't look at the thick fluid anymore, and the addition of fruits. Passion fruit, coconut, apples, pears, mangos, pineapples. All fruit of the earth, fruit of the sea, the shaman says. Allison first merely sucks the juice out of them, making Lydia entertain the possibility that she can add vampire to her list of growing supernatural encounters.
Allison's hunger grows exponentially, however, and it's not long before she bites off hunks of passion fruit, chunks of pineapple, oblivious to the juice dribbling down her chin. They sit on the deck of the apartment, Allison still wrapped in a blanket while Lydia thumbs away the nectar of the diminishing fruit from her chin. Allison blushes and her cheeks dimple in that irresistible way.
She laughs in spite of herself and Lydia inhales the sound, mingled with the nearby caw of the stupid cockatoos.
She tries not to get choked up when Allison's hands forget how to hold a fork, and when she does get a hold of her dexterity, how she doesn't have enough strength to apply pressure to to the knife to cut a piece. Her pale hands shake, her jaw quivers, and Lydia just sidles up beside her and guides her, weaving their fingers together around the silverware.
Like this, remember?
Allison doesn't speak often, but Lydia spoon feeds her information when she thinks she can take it.
"We're in Palm Cove, in Australia."
"Dear old dad's credit card, of course. He doesn't notice much of anything anymore."
"I never stopped looking. Not for a second."
Lydia touches her now, softly and often. She runs her hand through her hair, testing it's growing strength. She runs her hand down her back in the shower, smoothing the suds away. Every nerve ending cries out for her, for confirmation that she's really there and it isn't one of Lydia's nightmares, the most cruel one yet.
Allison slowly grows into herself, like leaves filling out the branches of an wintery oak tree. She laps up the sun with her lips pink and rosy.
Lydia bets they taste like a sweet syrupy cocktail of the fruit that dribbles down them.
It's best not to think about those things.
It comes one night, the nightmare. Lydia couldn't recall what plagued her to save her life, but she wakes up with a bottomed out stomach, screaming, writhing.
She flips over to her left and her failing hands meet solid matter. Allison is there, breathing her name, flattening her palm over Lydia's matted hair. But she wasn't here, it had all been a dream. No, no, no, not again.
She holds Allison's jaw and covers her lips with her own. She kisses her and kisses her, still slightly chalky, but wet and warm and god that was certainly an improvement from stiff and dead. She kisses her so blindly she doesn't feel her kissing back. Lydia cradles her head in her hands, tasting the salt of her own tears, until she's drawn her whole body up against her. She doesn't care which consciousness she inhabits. Just let her kiss her, let her hold her, for fucks sake. The tropical storm rages on outside, splattering rain on the tin roofs next door in a spectacular cacophony.
Somehow, they must have dozed off, because when Lydia wakes, Allison's brown eyes are flickering gold in the sunlight. Their legs tangled and their bodies flush, Lydia can't bare to move. They stay there till noon at least, Lydia mumbling her name over and over into her skin. She would say it a thousand times, each echo grateful to be absorbed by listening ears and not the dead plaster of 3 a.m. walls.
Allison, Allison, Allison.
They go for walks now. The place they're staying is flush up against the shore, with a narrow cobblestone road the only distance to cross. It's a sleepy little resort town, all on one straight shot down the beach and back, and no one pays much mind to anyone else. Lydia takes her on walks, coaxing her muscles back into the rhythm of life. They must look hysterical with Allison towering over yet clinging to Lydia's petite form.
First they barely make it to the next hotel. Allison's grip tightens on her hand and she nearly goes down before Lydia circles her arm around her waist and hoists her upright.
She overexerts herself a lot, frustrated by her own physical shortcomings, and Lydia snaps at a local surf hunk to carry Allison back to the apartment. He blinks at the door shutting in his face like they always do. Silly, malleable, but occasionally useful boys.
A few more attempts and Allison makes it to the coffee shop, leaning on the bends of palm trees only twice. She's rewarded with a juice, but she eyes Lydia's latte wantonly. A single sip of the foam and it seems to open a compartment of memories, her eyes drifting shut. When she opens them, she looks at Lydia with a fresh glaze over her eyes.
Another sip, then, and she doesn't white knuckle Lydia's hand on the walk back.
It's a steady ebb and flow they've established in their apartment. They wake up together, move wordlessly in and out of each other's space in the kitchen in the mornings. Lydia brought her a few clothes of her own, one's she's kept unbeknownst to Chris. Allison will remark something new about her chosen shirt every day and sometimes its an old memory of time they spent together, sometimes it's a family anecdote and Lydia learns something new. Some days, she opts for something of Lydia's.
She hasn't asked about anyone yet. After hearing her father is alive and functioning, she stops inquiring. Nothing about Scott or Isaac or Derek or any of them. Lydia's slightly concerned but mostly grateful that she doesn't have to fire up her Skype and share her with people who, in her opinion, don't deserve to know. It's petty, sure, but being so far from everything helps her evade her conscience.
They still shower together. Neither one offers a reason.
Lydia finds her after dinner that night, knees drawn up on the beach. There's a slight breeze ruffling her hair, and the black water breaks mere feet from her position. She doesn't start when Lydia plops down next to her, but she does dig her feet further in the sand. It feels terribly normal, like none of this happened at all and they're just on a vacation somewhere far from the mess of everything.
Allison's pallor is white, but this time from the moon that has caught her attention. She's transfixed and her lips are slightly parted. The cascades of her ribbon-soft hair, the roundness in her cheeks, the thicket of lashes around her eyes, it's all here, just as it was, hardly aged a day since 16. She's beautiful, and it renders Lydia utterly speechless.
The moon is full again, marking the approximate month passing. She's had quite enough of moons, if Lydia is being honest.
She must have said it out loud, because Allison chuckles, like she understands, like she remembers. Her hair whips around her head as she turns to Lydia. Something's changed. Or more that something is now like it used to be? Her eyes sparkle, Allison's. She's smirking.
Lydia cocks her head to the side, feeling a smile poke through herself.
"Did you remember something?"
"Yeah."
Lydia holds her gaze, waiting, patient. She's been nothing but patient, more so than she ever thought she was capable of. Some things, she's learned, are well worth the wait.
But every force reaches it's limit, and Lydia is Lydia, so she clicks her tongue, and presses, "And what would that be?"
Allison's smirk fades into a small, quirk of a smile and she says, "I think I remember everything, now."
Her voice is steady and smooth, the hunter's voice of calm collection that Lydia remembers coaxing her through the sleepless nights when Peter occupied her mind.
"Everything?"
Lydia tries not to add subtext to her words, it's not an even playing field yet, with Allison half there.
Allison gulps, all of a sudden nervous and blushing.
"Everything," she reiterates, but this time, it's an entirely different word. For the thousandth time in their friendship, Lydia has underestimated her.
Lydia smiles coyly and quips, "Well, took you long enough."
Allison also seems to recall how Lydia is Lydia as she rolls her eyes, and tugs the red head's chambray lapel forward. Allison's lips are soft again, finally soft. She runs her tongue over them, purely in admiration of this fact. Allison takes it for more, and she hesitates just a beat before opening her mouth, nearly swallowing Lydia's gasp.
Come to think of it, the fact that Allison is some variation of half-dead aside, making out under the moonlight might be the most romantic damn thing to ever happen to her.
They take to strolling down the moonlit beach, past the short stretch of Palm Cove to where the trees grow right up to the sand. Without the domestic lights, Lydia can point out the dazzling web of interstellar landmarks, unique to those eyes below the equator. Carina, Centaurus...
"Southern Cross?"
"It means death, more or less."
Stiles calls her phone. No one has tried to contact her on her new phone yet, so the sound startles her.
He begins with sarcastic niceties before he rails on her for being MIA so long.
"It worked, Stiles."
"... wait what?"
"You heard me."
He's speechless like she knew he would be. Everyone is always surprised when she's right. Lydia revels in it.
He asks her how she is, and Lydia isn't quite sure how to answer that. That would require her to understand the projected medical progression of a deceased corpse resurrected by aboriginal gods.
She is living, breathing, and had her memory intact, and Lydia relays as much. He asks her if she has exhibited any noticeable zombie side effects. Lydia tells him she's going to hang up.
His indiscernible expletives keep her on the line long enough for him to ask her when she's coming back. She's at a loss for words because she actually hasn't considered that yet.
"When we're ready."
"We?"
"Bye, Stiles."
His concern is slightly heartwarming. He's the only one keeping everyone together, really. He is the one who has to round up the troops, pursue leads, and her falling off the map for an extended period of time is probably not welcomed anxiety. At least now he knows it was not for nothing.
Allison whimpers in the middle of the night and Lydia sleeps light enough these days to hear it.
"C-cold."
Lydia opens the closet and runs her hand along the top shelf, inches above her view.
"There's no more blankets, they're all on you, Al."
Still Allison shivers, clutching the hems of four blankets in her fist. Lydia is at a loss again so she remembers the laws of hypothermia and sheds her t-shirt and shorts to climb under the covers. She slides into place against her, a key clicking into it's lock. She places a kiss in the crook of Allison's neck, along with a few words of assurance that are usually needed at this hour of the night.
She lays still until she feel's Allison's hands moving up the small of her back. They were cautious, creeping like she wasn't sure of her own actions.
She then is reminded of the principles of friction, and how they're better suited for this predicament. But she's unsure, and Allison is so fragile that she couldn't. Could she?
Allison nuzzles her cheek and pecks at the flesh where her jaw meets her ear. It's sensitive, and sends a shiver down Lydia's already jello spine. So, Lydia lays feather kisses along her pristine skin, coasting down the slope of her chest until she surfaces again on the other side of her neck. Allison pushes the column of her throat out and the lids of her eyes fall. Lydia pays special attention to it, leaving light lip shaped bruises behind in the daintiest shade of peach.
Lydia draws herself up to look at her bedfellow. She gulps as Allison's eyes darken and her breath quickens and she realizes now that her thigh is wedged between two legs and this is Allison. She's here, so very warm, so very much in her bed again and confused?
Allison's brow is creased and she's tracing Lydia's gratuitous lips with the pad of her thumb. Something is forming beneath the surface of her mind and Lydia is answered before she can ask.
"I loved you," she half-mumbles. She says it like it's news to both of them. But there's more, "I loved you and I-I never said it. I never got to say it, I never..."
Lydia hushes her down turned lips with her own when she can't bear it anymore. She doesn't need to push any further to know what scene must have played in her head.
That was so long gone, as far as Lydia is concerned. Once more, her mouth drinks Allison in and her body follows suit. Allison's shirt finds the floor and their bodies crash like the waves on the shore, making themselves known with their relentless din. Allison knots her hands in Lydia's tresses while Lydia mouths against her body the words she never said and maps the constellations across her back and up the swells of her curves and in the caverns between.
She is slow and slight like a summer breeze and Allison falls apart underneath her, sounds pouring from her lips to rival the pacific shore below. Lydia buries herself in a living breathing Allison. In turn, Allison digs half-moon marks in Lydia's back, crying out and mewling and in the gasps between Lydia breathes:
I love you, I love you, I love you.
Lydia takes her second chance by the reins and runs with it.
At Allison's request, she paints her up like she used to. Runs pencils around her eyes and dashes pink powder on her cheeks. Her lips she coats in a rosy red pink, and Allison's tongue darts out to meet the thumb wiping the color on her lips.
Allison blushes where Lydia is bold, and Lydia smirks from her kneeled position on the bed and pushes her thumb to hook in Allison's mouth. She draws her closer and takes her top lip captive, running her tongue across it.
Lydia releases her. Allison is sporting a growing smile and Lydia tells her to put her shoes on before they're late.
She isn't as heavy handed on the makeup as she usually is, but she doesn't tell Allison that. Something about the natural color of Allison's skin and not treasuring things until they're gone and the like.
Lydia was never one for -isms. Putting words to things that shouldn't need to be said.
She glides up the cliffside roads to Port Douglas as the sunlight dwindles on the ocean's last breath for the day. Each curve cuts into the towering rock facades that loom over them. They have dinner in the marina and Allison admires the vessels bobbing while Lydia admires the girl across the table.
The waiter smiles at their moony-eyed demeanor as he broaches the table. His smile grows wider as he picked up their accents.
"America, yeah?"
"Just a couple of regular California girls here," Lydia beams.
He asks what brings them here, like they always do. It is such a long way, it's often the focal point of small talk. She smiles innocently up at him, remarking that she thought she'd take Allison out on a real, normal date, their first one actually.
Allison's lips pucker as she attempts to suppress her grin, and decides shielding it behind the menu is a better method.
"Quite a long way to come for a first date, yeah?"
"Between you and me, I'd follow her anywhere."
Allison chews on the inside of her cheek and quirks her brow after the waiter leaves. Lydia busies herself with the specials.
"I don't remember you asking me on a date," Allison teases. Lydia shrugs.
"I figured since I hauled you from a tree trunk where you had been dead for six months, that you might want to skip formalities these days, with all the catching up you've got to do," Lydia quips. She hardly looks up at her dinner guest from the leather bound menu.
Allison sits back in her chair and shakes her head at the snark Lydia is so famous for. So much for beating around the bush.
"So ask me."
Lydia mumbles the risotto components and looks up, unmoved.
"What's that?"
"Ask me. Ask me out."
Allison crosses her arms and decides to match Lydia, petulance for petulance. She stares her down. Lydia's heart almost flutters at the old Argent cockiness showing it's face again. She brings her hand up onto the table, and tucks her fingers under Allison's limp ones.
"Allison, can I take you out to dinner tonight?"
Her words flow through the air between them honey sweet and she looks like a lovestruck idiot, the way she gazes across the table. The thought makes Lydia sick, but maybe sick with relief at her highly improbable circumstances. This gaping, gut-wrenching, suffocating hole was gone and she felt like she was the one brought back from the dead because looking at her here, just, god, she can finally breathe.
Lydia jots down in her log that remarkably, sex is the most effective treatment thus far for Allison, food a close second. Theoretically, sex has been known to reduce stress, increase metabolism, lower cholesterol, minorly reduce the effects of bipolar disorder, and even prolong life by an estimated 10-15 years. She can now add 'may expedite the rehabilitation of the resurrected' to the list. It probably in contributory at best, but hey, if it ain't broke. And it's not exactly a chore.
She's not taking this as license to fuck like rabbits. Lydia loves sex just as much as the next hormonal teenage girl. She's just not sure how much Allison can take.
So, she lets her set the pace. She lets her initiate it.
Sometimes, Allison is curled into her side while she reads her iPad and she'll feel lips kissing a path to her neck. Or, she wakes up and Allison kisses her full on the mouth.
It's still Allison, bashful and exploratory and led by her aimless hands and nuzzling and Lydia has to suppress the urges that twitch her lips and her hips. In the sheltered oasis of this little beach town, they had all the time in the world. With every caress and eventual breathy scream, Allison's strength builds and her lungs expand.
Lydia finds time slows to a halt in the afterglow when the sweat adhesion of their skin makes it's hard to tell whose limbs are whose. She's sure her hair is a mess and her skin is probably blotchy with flush, but Allison takes the metaphor of the post-sex afterglow literally and beams. Adoration pours from her very being, splayed against Lydia, tracing endless circles on her alabaster skin. Lydia knows for a fact that her eyes return these non-verbal sentiments tenfold, but she whispers streams of affection just in case. Things never uttered so softly to Jackson or Aiden or any other boy that found their way into her bed.
Any little bit helps, she tells herself.
Lydia is outlining the patches of sun gracing Allison's bare back, where the leaves of the foreign flora cut the light into strange geometric shapes, when she catches a glimpse of a scar marring the expanse of milky skin. She sits up slowly, glancing back at her subject of inspection who is blissfully dormant.
Upon closer observation it is indeed a scar with a painstakingly accurate resemblance to Allison's arrowhead, the very one dropped into the gum tree. Lydia can't help but touch it and feel her mouth gape at how strange it is she never noticed it before.
"I was going to ask you, I didn't get a tattoo before I did, did I?"
Lydia twists her neck to look back at Allison and shakes her head.
"If you did, I didn't know about it, and nothing gets past me so I doubt it."
Allison rolls her eyes with a grin.
"Does it hurt?" Lydia asks softly.
"I didn't even know it was there until yesterday."
Lydia frowns at the peculiar marking as Allison suddenly cradles her forearm in her hand.
"Did this hurt?" she whispers, "it's taking a long time to heal."
Lydia gulped at the incessant ashen line down her vein that has stopped healing for two weeks now. She was beginning to think it would never go away. Lydia is familiar with the metaphysics of her world, mass cannot be created, actions meet equal reactions, etc. It's not an unreasonable concept that banshees don't get to pull from the pool of the dead unscathed.
She recalls Deaton offhandedly mentioning that all this abracadabra garbage doesn't come free, and that as the universe tends to go, everything comes at a cost in one way or another. She can't quite remember the context of the anecdote as it involved Allison drowning in an ice bath so she pretty much blocked it out.
Anyway, she hasn't told Allison what the lesion is exactly, although she's probably pieced together something close to the truth.
Lydia is shaken from her reverie with the scratching of a pen on her flesh. Allison has drawn a small triangle at the head of her scar and she's finishing the last of four lines sprouting out the other end, an arrow.
Allison smiles up at her shyly and Lydia presses her lips together.
"Well," Lydia huffs, surveying the artwork, "If it insists on tainting my flawless complexion, might as well make it worth looking at."
Allison is rather pleased with herself and runs her thumbs over the scar, adding, "That's the idea."
Lydia feels a smile tug at her lips at the gesture. Allison has always been in tune with her surroundings, the whole hunter thing and all, but perhaps her brunette companion picked up a little emotional intuition in her posthumous adventures. Stranger things have happened.
If Lydia publishes this experiment, the results will win her the Nobel Prize by a landslide.
Over the course of her treatment, Allison has regained nearly her entire self. She exhibits zero obvious symptoms that she was resurrected from a disintegrating corpse. Her motor and sensory skills are top notch. She eats like a horse. She favors her baggy sweaters again. Critical thinking, reading, memory, and most other cognitive skills are highly impressive.
She wrinkles her nose at the sight of the SAT test book. Lydia takes that as a good sign.
Allison takes up running, a sight that shocks Lydia as she recalls her difficulty stumbling from one block to another not long ago.
She also runs on her own.
Allison slips out of the bed at the faintest sign of daybreak, before Lydia can finish a decent REM cycle. She begins with a light jog on the cobblestone and advances to racing the sunrise on the beaten sandy paths between the palms.
Lydia times her, secretly. She's usually in a haze of heavy sleep, her hand flopping to find her pen, but she jots down the time from her glowing phone when Allison returns red faced and glistening with sweat, her chest heaving in protest. She takes note of those things too, her body after the run.
It's purely clinical, of course. She licks her lips, but Lydia has no such smelly, sticky, athlete fantasies.
She may or may not watch Allison strip from her spandex and hop into the shower, but she omits that from her notes, understandably.
In fact, she's shown incredible bouts of athletic ability at a startling pace. Like bionic pace.
They quickly discover that Queensland is the proverbial dirty south of Australia and an archery range was not difficult to find. It takes only a few harrowing exercises to reacquaint Allison with her trusty bow. Her accuracy has excelled to impeccable, and her speed, outstanding. Papa Argent might actually crack a smile if he could see it.
She also has taken to paddle boarding very well, and proceeds to drag Lydia out on the mornings she's too "tired" to run, where she is forced to employ the upper body strength she doesn't possess and be blinded as the sun sits lazily at eye level on the horizon. Lydia focuses on Allison paddling leagues or knots or whatever in front of her. Her back muscles flex beneath her skin and her arms propel her forward effortlessly. Besides the unnecessary level of physical exertion, floating out there with the vast aquiline Pacific ocean stretching out before her, Lydia wonders briefly if this is what it's like in the afterlife, wherever Allison was.
She's partial to the stumbles where Allison tumbles into the water and reemerges slick with water droplets that she knows will leave her skin deliciously salty, only accentuated by the amber glow of the sunrise.
Lydia allows herself a few teenage indulgences.
All in all, Lydia is happy to report that Allison's physical ability exceeds her projected results. And Allison is quick to run Lydia a hot bath as soon as they get home. If Lydia whines enough, she will even carry her up the stairs.
Allison possesses more vigor and life than any person actually living, but in the quiet moments, Lydia notices the cracks.
Words stick to the tip of her tongue, random ones she can't understand anymore. She'll squint at the wall, puzzled, and lost and Lydia shakes the pressure at the back of her eyes and uses a synonym. Allison can cross being a writer off her list of backup careers. It's for the best. Lydia read those old poems and yikes.
When she's still, curled up on the couch entwined with Lydia in one way or another, Allison will fade into a vacant stare at times, and it takes a gentle nudge to bring her back. Lydia doesn't know where she goes, and Allison never remembers.
Or she'll stop on her way to the kitchen, the store, unaware of where she was going and why, as if the thought was erased completely from her mind. When she finds her like this, Lydia has to bite back her urge to scream and yell and scold Allison, anger that she knows only stems from worry, and coax her home when she's inconsolably confused. She wants to be overprotective and hold her hand and accompany her everywhere she goes, but she knows it'll only hinder her progress. Lydia can show her the way, but Allison has got to learn to find her way back on her own.
These episodes are far and few, but they don't get better. It's the only sign of what happened to her, the decomposed gyri of her brain identifying themselves one slip up at a time.
Theoretically, the brain can not regenerate neurons.
So far, Lydia can count on two hands the number of theories she's disproven, not to mention the laws of just about every earth science.
If she did publish it, she knows she would establish her own scientific law.
The Law of Exceptions.
Allison leans against the closet door as Lydia scribbles madly in her lab book.
"What are you always writing in there, Einstein?" she teases.
Lydia looks up and quirks an eyebrow.
"Emmy Noether is more of what I'm going for, actually."
Allison doesn't try to understand, and instead plops down on the bed next to her, jostling the few papers Lydia has laid out.
"Is it about me?" she presses.
Lydia leans in and attempts to kiss away the self-important smirk on Allison's lips.
"It's not prose, if that's what you think. I'm hardly the sentimental type."
Allison scoffs and her smirk morphs into a grin as she chortles, "Yeah, don't I know it." Lydia feigns being offput by the jibe. Allison recovers, "But you have other redeeming qualities!"
Lydia is not convinced, so she closes her lab book, stows it in the nightstand, and Allison spends the rest of the night using her hands and lips to highlight Lydia's redeeming qualities.
"When are we going home?"
Allison asks her offhandedly, one night while they're out to dinner. Lydia gussied her up in a white skirt that is short on herself, so it's scandalously high on Allison's thighs, who is rather off put by the idea of dressing up. She says she only equates it with funerals, really, and Lydia can sure as shit second that.
It's actually more of a request, than a question. Lydia can hear the hesitant hope in the slight quiver of her voice. She tries to cover it up by stuffing her mouth with roast chicken.
It's not that Lydia doesn't want to go home, it's that Beacon Hills hasn't felt like home in a very long time. A bleakness and suffocating emptiness haunt her in that town. It was the main reason why she was eager to galavant across the world digging up every legend and ancient custom involving the dead.
She likes to write off those six months as just emotional instability, a blurry cocktail of confusion with her own abilities and isolation and the fog of grief. Typical byproduct of a teenage girl who has seen too much and lost too much. Psychological theory has lots to say about a victim of trauma, especially multiple kidnappings, and how they will feel detachment from their families, daily life, and concepts of time and reality.
Except Lydia knows the exact date and time Beacon Hills stopped feeling like home. And she doesn't care to call herself a victim anymore.
She can't quell the stuttering in her chest and the twisting of her stomach bringing Allison back to the very town that killed her. Lydia won't be able to bear it. She suffered so much there, and still, despite her best efforts, all roads seem to lead back to that dreadful place.
But she knows Allison has a twisted sense of pride when it comes to Beacon Hills, a belonging Lydia never found, and how can she deny her anything with those brown eyes, obscured by a rogue curl.
Lydia would follow her to the ends of the earth and back. She pretty much did, actually.
"I was thinking Monday? I'll make Stiles pick us up."
They have sex that last night. They move together, filling every space with skin and generating friction in the most glorious places. The air around them thickens with heat and their gasping moans and sweet nothings.
Lydia may even call it making love, if she believed in that stuff, which she might, just a little.
She clings to Allison, but more than just her nails digging into her back and her legs cinching her at the waist. She hangs onto every breath and jerking muscle and vibrating living cell like Allison will burst and burn into a pile of gum tree ash any second.
She never lets go. Not after they both come, not after they're both sore and spent, and certainly not after Allison's head succumbs to sleep against her collarbone.
She won't let go, not ever. She tried desperately and she couldn't escape the pain of acceptance eating away at her day in and day out. Maybe if she couldn't hear the echo of her voice in every string, smell the acrid rotting flesh from under the earth, maybe if she was a normal girl grieving the loss of her best friend she could have drowned it all in booze and pills and come out a little worse for wear. But Lydia is not so fortunate.
So she holds on for dear life because she knows this will kill her one way or another, and this is the way she prefers.
Lydia is hardly ever prone to bouts of nostalgia, but before she can tuck her lab book in her suitcase, she finds herself transfixed by it, thumbing through the pages. Some of the pages are nearly blank, some littered with circles, x's and underlines, some wrinkled with the unmistakable characteristics of dried tear stains.
"Lyds, the car is packed you ready?"
Allison catches her attention at the foot of the bed. She stands tall, hands on her hips, hair thick and buoyant and skin sun kissed like Lydia has never seen. A landslide of everything that's happened, everything they've been through, washes over Lydia. For a moment, she can't believe Allison is standing there, and she wonders if she'll ever really get over it.
Probably not.
"...Lydia are you okay?"
Allison is making to kneel on the bed, but Lydia stands up suddenly. She clears her throat and wipes the tears she didn't realise were trickling down her cheek.
"Of course. Everything is, um, it fit in the back?" she says, stumbling over her words.
"Yeah, it all fit fine, but… are you sure you're…"
"You're just so strong, you know?" Lydia blurts out. Her voice is watery and she feels the heaving in her chest again, so she tries to get it all out before she crumbles. "If I think back to the girl I met all those years ago, I… she's long gone now, and you're just this amazing, brave, crazy person and-and…"
Allison wraps her arms around Lydia's neck and plants one on her if not for the sole purpose to shut her up. She kisses her until Lydia's breathing levels.
"I'm strong? Lydia, you're the strongest person I know. You brought me back and spent the past two months nursing me back to health. I was dead," Allison reasons. She rests her forehead on Lydia's and releases a heavy sigh.
"I figured I owed you one," Lydia squeaks. Allison breaks out into a giggly laugh and she nips a little more at Lydia's peach lips before stepping back, Lydia's hand in hers.
"Now we're even, then," Allison declared.
Lydia lets Allison drag her out of the bedroom. She almost forgets her lab book, strewn across the comforter. She darts across the room to snatch it and disappears out the door in a flurry of bouncing pale yellow flounces and strawberry blonde curls.