title: shadows bleed and the locks will break
summary: just when lydia thinks she's figured out the whole banshee thing, the world decides to drop a new surprise in her lap—namely, the ghost of her best friend. or most of her, at least. —allydia, malydia, multi, canon divergent.
word count: ~2100
cw: canon character death, internalised homophobia (in later chapters)
Chapter I
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Time means nothing here. Here means nothing here, where nothing is solid, where voices and faces scatter when she reaches for them, where she is nothing but a flickering consciousness—a boat without sail or rudder at the mercy of a roiling sea of memory, but she no longer knows which are hers and which are someone else's. Maybe they're both.
There's a girl in the woods. Twice. One lopes across the forest floor, easy as breathing; the other stutters and trips, her hair matted with leaves and dirt. One howls at the moon, the other cries. Their eyes are almost human.
A man lays awake in—France?—staring at a family photograph. His daughter looks little like him, but she has the same smile. It hurts to look at, the sort of hurt which dredges up a thousand old hurts. For a moment, she pretends she can hold his hand, but it's only a moment before the storm rips her away again.
She can find purchase, if she looks hard enough.
She's over Scott's dead body. His blood stains the library floor and a part of her reaches towards him because if this is his end—if this is his end they can be together now, but a stronger part of her feels sick because it's too soon it's too soon and he can't die like this, just a kid, not after everything, not like her. She pulls together all her strength and pins his writhing soul down to his body as best she can until his eyes flash open and he ROARS—
And she's spiralling away again, send tumbling by the force of it. Spinning through time and space without purchase, hands clawing at empty air. A fox creates dead bodies, grinning like a boy. A girl crushes wolfsbane in a charred room. Hunters pin their prey with arrows. A wolf howls in the woods, smearing his dress suit with dirt, his pain cracking the air in two.
It's panic and chaos and hurt and she's breaking apart in the hurricane and she just needs everything to—
"STOP!"
—and everything does.
She's dizzy. Unsteady. Like an abrupt halt after a sprint. But for one calm moment she's found something to hold onto, and reality is stilled around her.
A hand, she realises. It's a hand, attached to an arm, attached to a half-dead girl with red hair who pales and shakes and stares at her like a woman condemned, and she knows her.
God. Allison knows her.
"Lydia?"
The banshee's eyes shimmer.
She opens her mouth and—
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The alarm woke Lydia before her own scream could.
She found her lips stretched back in preparation for the throat-tearing cry, white-knuckled hands fisted into the bedsheets, but the premature waking trapped it in her throat. She choked, curling around the unsteady, quickening palpitations of her heart with her trembling hands pressed to her sternum and her eyes wide in the early light.
She hadn't dreamt about Allison in weeks.
She closed her eyes and took careful, even breaths until her heart slowed down and she could sit up. But the movement made her wince, massaging her temples; the unsung scream seemed to have been caged in her skull and roared against its walls with a vengeance, because that's exactly what she needed the morning before a French quiz, clearly. Some freaky supernatural migraine from dreaming about her dead best friend.
This felt—different, though. Not like her usual nightmares.
For one thing, those rarely made her scream like that.
Maybe she wasn't quite the expert on banshee abilities she'd like to be, but she'd lived as one long enough to take notes. Her screams, they weren't triggered by just anything—it had to be death, real death, either present or imminent. Allison died a year ago. Her scream had come and gone, lost to the unmarked graveyard of Oak Creek.
The memory of the dream was sickeningly fresh: Allison clutching Lydia's hand as if it were the only solid point in a storm, dark hair framing gaunt cheeks, eyes too large and brown in her black-and-white face. She'd spoken one word, just one, and that was when Lydia woke up. Fairly tame as far as her dreams went, but something about it unsettled her; her stomach rolled and her mouth was drier than a bad hangover, and she'd had more than enough to know. Groaning, she groped blindly for the painkillers on her bedside table and downed enough to (hopefully) dull the headache to a mild throb.
"Lydia!" Her mom, calling up the stairs. "Hurry up if you want to use the shower. We'll both be late for school."
Right. School.
That thing normal people worry about.
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Malia blinked at her. "So she just...said your name, and left? That doesn't sound so bad."
"It wasn't really what happened in the dream," Lydia said. "It was the way it felt. Like she was real. "
"But she can't be. Unless there's another Kate Argent situation, and from what you guys told me that's not likely." Only Malia, with her distance and harsh manner, could be so blunt about the subject. In an odd way, Lydia appreciated it—not having to dance around someone else's grief—even if Malia's suggestion stirred Lydia's own, heart squeezing in her ribs. She clutched her books tighter to her chest as if to hide its painful juddering.
"It's not like Kate. I don't know what it is. Or what it means."
"You could talk to Scott," Malia supplied, rooting around in her locker. Lydia stared at her.
"I can't tell him I'm dreaming about his dead ex. I mean, he just lost Kira." They all had. Or that's how it felt, at least, and God knew his girlfriend's absence must have been worse for Scott than anybody else. Knowing Kira's time in the desert was limited helped little when they couldn't know how long she'd be gone. Months, years—decades—it'd stretch the most dedicated long-distance relationship.
"Okay, fair enough," Malia said. "But why tell me?"
She hesitated. Because you're the first person I wanted to tell, she thought. Because I trust your judgement. Because...I don't know. "You didn't know her like the rest of us did," was what she actually said. "You can be pragmatic, I guess."
"Liam and Mason didn't know her either." Before Lydia could rebuke that, Malia frowned. "Do ghosts exist? They don't, right?"
"No," Lydia said automatically, but she paused. "The bestiary never mentioned them. Neither did Meredith."
"Since when has Meredith ever been clear about anything?" Malia said dryly. Her locker shut with unnecessary force. "I'm just saying, maybe there's more to the whole banshee thing that you don't know about yet. Maybe that no one knows. It's possible, isn't it?"
Lydia's pulse picked up. Her temples throbbed. "Maybe," she whispered.
The bell rung. Lydia flinched sharply, the shrill sound cutting right through her, and Malia's brow furrowed in concern. Any other time, Lydia might have liked it. "You okay?"
"I'm fine. Let's just get to class."
In her head, the noise only grew louder.
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Do ghosts exist?
Lydia wasn't particularly prone to nervous habits. But this was her third abused pen lid in the hour; she worried it mercilessly with her teeth, intent on the notes in her margins. The headache made it hard to concentrate.
This was stupid. The dream was probably nothing. Not a ghost. Not a sign of impending doom upon Beacon Hills (again). Just some freaky post-traumatic response to—to the Beast, to Theo, to all of the bullshit at Eichen House. Allison was only on her mind because of what Stiles had said, that's all.
But since when had anything been nothing in Beacon Hills?
Do ghosts exist?
"We always seem to find each other anyway," Lydia murmured, lips barely moving. "Even Allison." What if Stiles were right about that?
"Something you want to share with the class, Lydia?"
Ms Flemming interrupted her thoughts, hands on her hips with a stern mouth. Lydia glanced up, then frowned at the equations on the board for a moment.
"One hundred and six," she said. "Twenty seven point three. Seventeen."
Ms Flemming blinked. She checked her notes. Her praise was begrudging. "Ah. Well. Good work, Lydia."
Lydia smiled thinly. She ducked her head back into her notebook.
Do ghosts exist? Or was she only clinging to a throwaway suggestion, the false hope that it were possible to see Allison again? She had to be practical about this, no matter how much it might hurt. Perhaps someone had died last night. Perhaps that's who she'd almost screamed for, and Allison's face was a warning—another oni attack? God forbid, another kitsune attack? They'd barely recovered from the Dread Doctors. She could ask the Sheriff later if any bodies had been found, but...
Lydia tapped the pen rapidly against paper, scanning her bullet points. Dreams (visions?) of Allison. Banshee scream. Ghosts? Voices at Oak Creek? Oni? Eichen House?
Gingerly, Lydia felt the side of her head. There. The indent, where Valack had carved a hole into her skull to amplify her abilities. Her stomach shifted unpleasantly at the mere thought of it, as it always did, but she swallowed her nausea and tacked onto the last point: aftereffects?
She was the only banshee she knew to survive Valack's procedure. That might mean something.
But the noise hadn't gone away. Lydia squeezed her eyes shut, breathing through her teeth, while a few seats away Malia and Stiles fired less-than-subtle looks in her direction.
This always happened. Every damn time. Just when Lydia thought she had a handle on her abilities, the supernatural flung her a curveball. She was a scientist. A mathematician. A social climber. She noticed patterns, tested them, and observed the effects: hydrogen plus oxygen plus heat made water, ten was the square root of a hundred, dating the lacrosse captain made you the queen bee. Strategy. Logic. Simple.
There was no scientific procedure for the whispers she heard, no formula for her attraction to death, no biological explanation for her glass-shattering voice. She was fumbling in the dark, treading the tightrope of her own sanity, and anyone who could possibly help her understand had long since lost their balance.
Her nails dug into her hair. Her mouth became a grimace. There was pressure in her throat.
God, the frustration. It made her want to—to—
"I need the bathroom!" she blurted out, bursting to her feet, and Ms Flemming was startled enough to nod instantly. Lydia was out of the door in a second, too quick to notice Malia's outstretched hand.
The hallway was empty. Thank God. Lydia bit her lip and worried her wrist as she darted into the girls' room, the picture of distress but no one to bear witness; the whispers about her which began after her two-day fugue in the woods had never entirely died down, and she had no wish to give them fresh kindling. The bathroom was empty too. She'd think someone up there was smiling down on her, but she knew her own luck better than that.
She picked the third mirror along, because it seemed right, and braced her hands against the sink with her eyes closed to focus her breathing. It had been hours and the painkillers had worn off, or the roar was getting stronger, or both. She felt it wriggling up her throat and locked her lips—not at school, not again—but the longer she fought it, the less certain she was that it belonged to her.
All the scream does, she thought, is help drown out the noise. Maybe if she listened carefully, she wouldn't need the scream, and it would wither away, and she'd understand what the hell was happening. Wasn't it worth a shot?
She tightened her grip on the sink, exhaling slowly through her nose. Her neck strained. I'm here, she braved. I'm listening.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the distant ambience of school began, gradually, to fade. The temperature of the bathroom dropped. Goosebumps rippled across Lydia's bare arms, something like static raising the downy hair on the nape of her neck, and she sensed her breath frosting in the air before her. The scream buzzed impatiently in her skull as it grew louder and louder and—no, not louder. Closer.
Her breathing picked up and she leaned forward, into the noise, nose almost bumping the mirror's surface. She was close. So close.
And it wasn't her voice.
The realisation trickled like ice down her spine. She recognised it. She knew that voice.
Her words were less than a whisper. "Allison?"
A weight settled around her neck. Her eyes flashed open and met those only centimetres away in the fogged mirror: warm brown, ringed with hazel and framed with thick black lashes. A sharp jaw. A smattering of freckles. Dimples when she smiled.
An impossible reflection.
"Lydia," Allison said, voice thick with relief. "I found you."
Lydia's heart stopped.
She opened her mouth and screamed.
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