disclaimer: i don't own anything you recognize.
dedication: to hope (allisonarrgent), because IT'S HER BIRTHDAY and i love her and i hope she has the most amazing birthday because she is the allison to my lydia and i hope she enjoys this!
notes: set six years after graduation, references events from senior year which have obviously not happened because they're only juniors right now and also i wouldn't read if you don't like allison/isaac as a background pairing.
prologue
Here's how the story goes: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy and girl are pulled apart due to tragic circumstances, boy and girl fight for their love, boy and girl live happily ever after. It's five steps to a fairytale, five steps to a snow-white wedding with a blushing bride and a seven-layer cake, five steps to true love's kiss and a lifetime of happiness.
Here's what the story doesn't say: five steps are always different for girls with magic in their blood.
-:-
i. step one
The phone call comes at 9pm on an unseasonably chilly summer evening which Lydia had planned to spend curled up by the fireplace of her tiny house outside Stanford reading some ancient philosophy texts for her early morning class the next day and eating Chinese take-out, like any normal grad student. When she answers, Allison's voice bubbles over the phone like a child on Christmas Eve.
"Isaac and I are getting married, Lydia!"
In hindsight, she probably should have seen it coming.
-:-
At 10pm, she decides to call Scott. She can kid herself into thinking its an impulse decision, but if she's telling the truth, which she almost never is anymore, her fingers had hovered over his name on her phone screen for a solid five minutes before she finally screwed up the courage to press down. Her homework lays abandoned on the table as she counts one, two, three rings before he answers.
"Hello?" he asks, sounding a little exhausted and a lot wistful, and Lydia tries not to think about the last time she had heard that tone of voice, the last time she had talked to him, six years ago on the night he'd sat on the porch swing outside her house for hours and held her as she cried because her mother had just died.
"Scott," she begins, finding her voice more breathless than she'd expected, "I – it's me, Lydia," although in hindsight, he must have had caller ID, he must have seen her name on the screen, and he must have – he must have recognized her voice. He'd told her once, a lifetime ago, that he liked the way she said his name more than anyone else.
"Hey, Lydia," Scott says, and his voice seems to fall effortlessly back into the easy, carefree tone it had carried back in high school, back when the pack was the most important thing in the world. "How are you?"
"I'm good, I'm – " Lydia cuts herself off and takes a breath. "Did Isaac call you yet?" There's a willful pause on the other end, a sharp intake of breath, a heartbeat pounding (hers, of course), and then –
"Yeah, I heard," and she can almost see the not-entirely-genuine, not-entirely-fake smile on his face. "I'm happy for them. It's been a long time coming."
"You think?" she asks, a bit incredulously, and then laughs. Because this is Scott, and he's nothing if not the most amazing friend in the world. For a minute, she almost regrets her decision to run to the other end of the country, as far away from supernatural terrors and werewolves and banshees as she could possibly get, almost regrets leaving him in the dust.
"I do," he says firmly, then hesitates before he asks, "is that the only reason why you're calling?"
Involuntarily, her teeth come down on her lip, like she's a teenager again. Except she's not, and neither is he, and both of them have lived through far too much to ever be considered children again.
"No, I – I missed you," she manages to get out after a silence that stretches so long she's afraid he might hang up. "I just – I figured I should… I mean, I'm coming back for the wedding, of course, and I – "
"Yeah," his voice is absurdly soft, and then, less gentle, "I'll see you in a few months, then, yeah?"
"I…yeah," she says, and then there is a click that sounds devastatingly final in the aftermath of their broken, stuttering conversation, six years too late.
-:-
ii. step two
Allison's hugs feel like home and high school and her mother's gingerbread cookies all rolled into one, and it's hard to express through words how much she has missed her best friend's hugs. After all the thank-God-you're-alive tackle-hugs over the years, Lydia thinks that this one is perhaps the sweetest of them all.
"God, we missed you, Lydia," Allison sighs, pulling back so that Isaac can embrace her next. "How have you been? How's grad school? What have you been up to?"
Isaac laughs and picks her up and spins her around before she can even begin to think about answering. "Allison, let her breathe for two seconds, would you?" he says fondly as he sets Lydia back on the ground, a little ruffled but no worse for the wear. "We've got your room all ready, it's down the hall and to the right. Dinner's in an hour, and the whole gang is joining us!"
"I – " Lydia feels the beginnings of a smile stop in its tracks on her face. "The whole gang? Who's the whole gang?"
Allison smiles brightly. "The pack, of course," she says meaningfully, as if the whole world is contained in the word pack, and maybe it is. Lydia thinks that maybe it always has been.
-:-
Dinner is as lively and boisterous as she would expect from her reunited friends, though this is maybe due in part to the fact that Derek has grown a semi-decent sense of humor over the past six years and, of course, Stiles and Cora still won't make anything easy on him. Not that little sisters ever should, and Stiles is – well, Stiles is still Stiles.
Lydia smiles a little as she sips her wine and thinks about how nothing's really changed, even though everything has changed. Life is funny that way, because Stiles is even taller and wears suits now and Cora has cut her hair and added more streaks and Danny's grown his hair out and Scott –
She falters when she meets Scott's eyes across the table. He's the same, all warm brown eyes and a hopelessly sweet smile and the entire sky weighing on his shoulders, the way it always had been in high school. The only difference is, he doesn't look at Allison like she's his whole world, and he doesn't look at Lydia like maybe she could be. It hurts more than she expected it to.
"Hey," he says, his voice lowered enough to be masked under the sounds of everyone else's laughter at Derek's latest road-trip story, loud enough only to get her attention. "Is everything okay? You look like you're seeing ghosts."
Lydia smiles wryly at him. "I think I am," she says, and he laughs a little like he gets exactly what she means. He'd always had a way of doing that, a way of making people at ease no matter what they were saying.
"It's funny how some things never change," he observes, looking over at the rest of the table, the rest of their pack, all gathered together under the same roof like those long, rainy nights in senior year.
"Yeah," she agrees, and then she decides to take a chance. "Hey, after dinner, are you – I mean… could we talk? Alone?"
She might not have werewolf super-hearing but she can still hear the way his breath catches for just a second. "Um," he coughs, clears his throat, "yeah, of course. I'll be around."
Her first truly genuine smile plays on her lips. "Good."
-:-
iii. step three
Here's how it happened: two weeks and a day after the mother died, she showed up on his doorstep and kissed him and the next morning he awoke to an empty bed.
It's not that simple because it never is but it's also not that complicated, because the simple fact of the matter is that she loves him more than she's ever been able to say and more than he has ever known and more than she's ever loved another boy and it had taken a solid year before she admitted to herself that she had fallen in love with him and only one night before she ran away from everything that she wanted.
She left for Harvard only a few weeks later, leaving him behind as if it hadn't mattered even though it had, so much so that it hurts, and he'd called and she hadn't picked up and suddenly, six years were gone forever. She moved back to California at some point in the middle of a blur of books and boys and bars, but she still hadn't called, and it turns out, she's better at one-night stands than she'd thought.
Except Scott was never a one-night stand, never could be even if he tried.
-:-
"I'm sorry," she says immediately when he finds her by the Argents' backyard pool, lonely in the middle of the fruit trees and fairy lights. "I'm sorry for everything."
Scott takes a deep breath, hands in his pockets, like they're teenagers struggling to save the world all over again. "You have nothing to be sorry for," he says, the words like a script on his lips, as if he'd rehearsed this conversation a million times over in his head. She knew him well enough to know that he had.
"I do," she sighs, sinking down into a pool chair, her hands twining through her hair like a lifeline. "I have everything to be sorry for. I never should have left you that night, and I should have answered your calls, and I – "
"Hey," he says soothingly, sitting down next to her and pressing his hand to her knee, the warmth of his body spreading through hers. "It's okay, Lydia, it's okay. It was six years ago, it's fine, I get it. I know I – I read too much into it, and it was stupid."
"It wasn't stupid," she insists, pulling her fingers free from her hair and dropping them onto her lap, "I was stupid. I was eighteen and I thought I could conquer the world if I just left Beacon Hills behind. If I left you behind. And I was – I was scared."
"Of course you were," Scott sighs and wraps an arm around her, drawing her into a sideways hug. "I was scared, too, Lydia. I was terrified. I didn't know how to – how to deal with everything going on, let alone my feelings for you."
She stares numbly down at her interlocked hands before murmuring, "You had feelings for me? Real feelings?"
"No, fake feelings," he snorts, then presses his lips to her hair as she giggles, "yes, real feelings. Do you think I would have slept with you if I didn't – if I didn't… I loved you, Lydia. I don't know when it happened, but senior year, I just – I fell in love with you."
Lydia finally tilts her head up to look at him. "You said 'loved'," she points out quietly, and Scott's entire body goes still against hers.
"I – " He closes his eyes, shakes his head, detaches his arm. She feels suddenly and abruptly cold without him. "Lydia, it's been six years, and I – I haven't heard from you since, I mean… how do you think I felt when you just disappeared to Massachusetts like that?"
"I'm sorry," she tries quietly, because she's not eighteen anymore and the only thing of any importance she's learned in her college years is that life is just too fucking short to run away. She counts five heartbeats before he replies.
"Save me a dance at the wedding, okay?" His lips find her cheek, and then he's gone as if he was never there. She wonders if this is how he felt, that fateful summer night six years ago.
-:-
iv. step four
She's slept with four guys in her entire college experience, all of them tall and dark-haired and handsome and absolutely none of them worth anything more than a good time and good memories. She'd liked them all, dated three of them, and kept the jewelry they had given her, but she couldn't remember their names if you asked her.
The truth of the matter is, as messy and complicated and not entirely fairytale perfect as that night with Scott had been, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about him for six years.
A handsome boy with dark curls and pretty eyes comes up and asks her to dance – twice – at Allison and Isaac's wedding party, and she accepts the second time, if only because Scott is already on the dance floor with Cora and smiling like she belongs in his arms.
It's not that she's jealous, but maybe she likes the looks he sends to the two of them when he notices her dancing with somebody else because maybe it's confirmation that he's been thinking about her as much as she's been thinking about him.
-:-
She ends up in Stiles's arms at some point in the night, after about three or four drinks and several other handsome boys. He is warm and familiar, and he smiles at her like they're in high school all over again, like they're packmates again, and she almost smiles back.
"What's going on tonight, Lydia?" he asks, his voice a low murmur against her cheek as they waltz. "You and Scott have been avoiding each other – don't give me excuses, I know how you two are."
She huffs, stepping back, suddenly defensive. "There is nothing going on and it's none of your business anyway," she informs him primly, but Scott whirls by with Cora at that moment and she nearly trips over Stiles' feet.
"Is there nothing going on, or is it none of my business?" Stiles smirks at her. "Because those two happen to be somewhat different things, Lydia."
"Shut up," she tells him in no uncertain terms. "There's nothing – "
"I know that you slept with him," he interrupts, mercifully keeping his voice to a whisper. "He's my best friend," he adds at her disbelieving look. "Of course I knew. He was going crazy over you for ages and when it finally happened, he just – "
"Stop," she interrupts, because there's nothing in the world she wants to hear less than about Scott's previous feelings for her. "It doesn't matter. It was six years ago, and it's over."
"I wouldn't be so sure," he tells her, twirling her under his arm. Before she can ask what he means by it, his hand is suddenly gone from hers, and she finds herself caught in the arms of his best friend without even a chance to catch her breath.
"Hey," says Scott, his smile wistful when he looks at her, and Lydia doesn't remember how to dance anymore.
-:-
v. step five
Scott has always watched her like she held the world in her smile, but when she's pressed up against his body, fingers entwined, breaths mingling, she thinks he can't possibly look at her the same way ever again. Now his gaze is dark, guarded, as if the last six years have torn away his optimism, and maybe they have. Or maybe she did.
He still smiles though, and holds her as gently as he always has, and if she closes her eyes, it feels like senior prom all over again, like she has a corsage and too many drinks and a last scream of the supernatural variety hovering on her lips, one more time for the road.
(And then her mother had died and everything had fallen to pieces, but she still has that night embedded in her memory, free from the horror of what came after from inside the forest later that night.)
-:-
"Lydia," he says half-way through the song, "I think we should talk," which is so stupid because they have talked and unless he was too drunk to remember (he wasn't) or he has accelerated memory loss (he doesn't), he should definitely remember telling her he didn't love her anymore. Because she certainly does.
"I thought we already had," she says stubbornly, and he sighs, and then drops his arm from around her waist, tightens his grip on her hand, and pulls her off the dance floor and out to the little balcony outside of the reception hall overlooking the gardens of whatever fancy building they were in.
"We didn't finish," he tells her, too close for her heartbeat to remain a normal rate. "Lydia, I'm sorry if I – "
"You don't have any apologizing to do," she cuts across him easily, tugging her hand free so she can cross her arms and stare him down. "I'm the one who ran away. It's my fault. You know, there are a lot of things that happened in high school that weren't my fault, but this one was. What happened with us – it was my fault."
"It's not like I wasn't a willing participant," Scott says, almost laughing, almost humorous. "Lydia, I didn't – I didn't say I didn't still love you. And I don't want you to blame yourself for ruining anything."
Lydia frowns at him in confusion, her pulse racing at his confession. "Why not?" she demands, because for the past six years she had blamed herself for ruining everything. She hadn't thought she was wrong to, either.
Scott's eyes dart around in a nervous gesture from when he was fucking eighteen, she notes absently. "Because – because you didn't, Lydia," he says, a little breathlessly, and then his lips are on hers and she understands why he feels eighteen again, because she feels the same. Because she is eighteen once more, kissing the one boy who had never let her down, who looked at her like she was everything, everything, but didn't make her carry everything on her all the time.
Because this is Scott, and if he's still in love with her, there's no way she's giving that up for anything in the world.
-:-
epilogue
"I hope you had a fun wedding night," she says to Allison over the phone with a giggle that she blames partly on the hangover and partly on Allison's giddiness exuding through her cell. "Let me know if I need to hit Isaac for anything."
Allison laughs, "Oh, no, Lydia, he was wonderful – "
"I didn't actually ask!" Lydia interrupts, causing another wave of laughter from the other end of the call.
"Okay, okay, why don't you tell me about your night?" There's a note of mischief in Allison's voice now. "I heard you were spotted leaving with the alpha of the hour, Lydia, the scandal!"
"Shut up," Lydia laughs, dropping dramatically down on the couch in the living room. "We didn't – we didn't actually do anything because we were drunk, and you know Scott."
Allison's smile can practically be seen through the call. "Always a sweetheart," she agrees. "You're a lucky girl, Lydia. Don't run away this time."
Lydia tilts her head over the back of the couch in time to see Scott wandering downstairs, still sleepy and shirtless from the night, but awake enough to smile at her as if the sun was shining through him. "I won't," she promises Allison with a smile before hanging up.
"You stayed," Scott says wonderingly, coming up to lean against the back of the couch and run his hands through her tangled curls. "I'm glad you stayed."
"I'm glad I stayed, too," Lydia agrees, and then she pulls him over the couch so she can kiss him the way she did last night. After six years, she has no shortage of kisses left inside her.
a/n: if you read this far, please drop me a review to let me know what you thought!
and please DON'T favorite without reviewing, thank you.