"The ashes of your existence will fertilize the soil for the universe to follow."
― Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim
There's pressure and pain on Stiles' neck as he comes to, Lydia's familiar voice in his ear asking, "...gone? Everyone? "
"Yes, Lydia," Derek's voice replies to her and Stiles can feel Derek, even though his voice came from at least six feet away. Stiles' arms aren't nearly that long, are they? No, they're not. His whole body feels strange and loose, like his skin isn't holding him in anymore and he's floating on a sea of nightmares. "I couldn't... They... There was nothing I could do. And then they left me. Alive. As a punishment. They didn't realize they hadn't finished Stiles off."
"You should have taken him to the hospital," Lydia replies. "He's going to hemorrhage out before that bite you gave him takes effect and they'll have been right. God I'm glad I stopped hanging out with you losers after high school."
"Please, Lydia," Derek says in a voice that's softer than Stiles has ever heard from him, except maybe when he talks about his parents during their infrequent middle-of-the-night talks. Stiles tries to move, tries to tell his friends he's still here and he's listening. "Just figure out how to save him here. I can't exactly explain the bullet wounds and I just know if they find out he's still alive, they'll come after him and anyone in their way. Just, just do it."
Lydia sighs and the pressure on Stiles' neck lets up a little. A soft hand brushes over his forehead and then Lydia tells Derek in that no-nonsense medical voice that Stiles grew up hearing from Scott's mom, "I've got a few supplies here and enough vodka to drown a horse. But I'm going to need saline and blood."
"Take mine."
After a short pause, Lydia tells Derek, "Are you even a match? If I give him the wrong blood – and who knows what sort of immune factors a werewolf's blood even has – it could kill him. He's still human for a few hours, at least, Derek. I need O-negative. Five units, to be sure."
Stiles feels lips on his hand, fuck that hurts, what's wrong with my hand? and Derek's footsteps gallop away. Something warm and wet hits Stiles' head, just shy of his hairline and Lydia whispers in his ear, "Don't you dare die on us, Stilinski. I don't think Derek will survive this without you. I won't survive this without you. Maybe it's selfish, but I don't want to be the only one left alive who knew, who really knew Jackson, the wolfiness and everything. And I'm going to need that ruthless brain of yours."
Stiles manages to get his eyes to flutter open, meeting Lydia's and asking through her gasp of surprise, "Why?"
Lydia swallows and presses against what Stiles now realizes is the slit in his throat that must have just missed the major artery. Oh, god, and there's a bullet in him somewhere. Maybe near the searing pain in his hip. "Because," she says, dropping a kiss to his forehead, her voice low and harsh, "we're going to get revenge."
"Oh, good," Stiles replies as a wave of dark, sickening night crashes over him again and he loses his grip on Lydia's voice.
The blood bank in Lydia's neighborhood of LA is laughably easy to break into and everything is so well organized that even Scott could have figured out what to bring back to Lydia's apartment. The thought of Scott, the red light in his eyes going out as his head rolled at Derek's feet, makes Derek's breath hitch and his head swim. He doesn't have time for this. While he has to grab onto a cabinet – leaving his prints, god damn it – until he gets his balance back, Stiles is dying.
No. Derek won't let Stiles die. He'd sat by, chained from neck to knees and electrocuted half to death as he watched the rest of his pack executed one by one. He hadn't been able to save them. Stiles is the one he can save. He throws the blood and various needles and tubes and saline into the passenger seat of his car and brakes a dozen traffic laws on the way back to Lydia's place.
At least giving Stiles the bite had been an easy decision. It had been one of the things they'd talked about during their midnight discussions, which happened more and more frequently as life got weirder and more dangerous and someone had to keep watch. Derek has never thanked Stiles for keeping him company, keeping him awake and alert, but since Stiles kept coming back, Derek figures he knew.
Derek hasn't told Stiles how he felt about those late night talks and that he's been slowly falling in love for years, but it doesn't matter. What Derek wants doesn't matter. Stiles' life matters.
As soon as Derek gets close enough to the apartment, he narrows in on Stiles' heartbeat, gut clenching at the way it sounds so sluggish, so slow. So fucking slow. He tries to summon up some rage – at the hunters who had done this, at Lydia for making him go get blood, even at Stiles for trying to die – but he just can't. Derek has no more anger left to give, only grief and a crushing sense of panic and dread. Bursting into the apartment, he shoves the supplies at Lydia, who has a pair of tweezers two inches into Stiles' thigh.
"Bastards couldn't just shoot him through the heart," she practically growls and Derek clenched his teeth around the thought that Lydia's immunity kept her from becoming a wolf. She would have made a damn fine one. "They had to wound him first and then slit his throat like a pig. The indignity of it all just makes me so fucking pissed!"
Derek thinks maybe Lydia cares more about Stiles than she's ever let on. Huh. He and she actually have something in common for once. Looking down at Stiles' pale face, at the way his chest barely rises and falls around his breaths, Derek asks, "What can I do? Tell me how I can help."
Without missing a beat, her mind faster than lightning, Lydia replies, "Rinse your hands with some alcohol and then hold this. I'll get a line for the blood going."
Derek does as she asks and watches Lydia as she starts a line, tapping out all the bubbles and then slips the needle into Stiles' arm like it's nothing. He tells her, "You're going to make a good doctor."
"Yeah, maybe," she agrees, taking the tweezers from him and wrestling the bullet out of Stiles' muscle, throwing it so it clatters spent on the kitchen floor. "In case you haven't noticed, Beacon Hills left me a wreck. I didn't even get into Stanford, Derek. Stanford! I am meant for so much more than being a doctor, but after all the mayhem and death – could you hand me that pack of sutures? – after Peter and the way he literally drove me crazy, med school was all I could handle. So yeah, maybe I'll be a great doctor. Maybe I'll be the best doctor in the country. But I could have been better."
Derek knows she doesn't want an apology, so he says nothing. He hands Lydia things as she asks for them and keeps pressure on the wound in Stiles' neck. He agrees with Lydia – this is no way for Stiles to be killed. He isn't prey, he is pack and pack doesn't die like this.
When Lydia moves to work on the neck wound, Derek takes Stiles' hand and holds it against his mouth, not quite kissing it. He counts the pulses in the artery of his wrist, stronger and stronger with every pint of blood Lydia pours into him. He pulls away some of Stiles' pain, even though the guy is unconscious and can't feel Lydia's needle sewing up his wounds.
"I read about how to do all the different sutures," she says as she works, her voice quiet like they're at a funeral (a comparison Derek hates his brain for). "I only practiced three of them before I ran out of pig shoulder. I guess it doesn't matter if he scars, since you gave him the bite. He'll heal." She pauses with her needle in the air for a brief second, saying, "He could die instead, I suppose."
Derek doesn't agree with her. Stiles won't die. He can't. Derek won't be the sole survivor. Not again. He says, "Some scars stay with you and even the bite can't cure them."
"I know the bite only ever means trouble," Lydia replied, hanging a bag of saline and then sitting down on the opposite side of the dining room table where Stiles was laid out. She laughs a little and says, "Remember that one kid? Ran afoul of the alpha pack junior year?"
"Charlie," Derek nods. "He bit half a dozen people before I could run him out of town. Never even realized he was a beta and it didn't work that way."
They work in near silence until Lydia sits back and pulls Stiles' wrist into her lap, taking his pulse. "This is all I can do," she says, meeting Derek's eyes, hers shining with tears she blinks back. Derek notices that none of them fall and wonders when Lydia learned not to cry.
Derek learned the night he realized he was responsible for his family's death, when Laura insisted there wasn't time for it and they didn't know if the hunters would come for them, too. Derek learned to hide his tears the way Laura hid hers.
He moves around the table to sit next to Lydia and puts an arm around her. "Thank you."
Lydia must have been tired, because she settled into Derek's embrace without a fight, leaning her head on his shoulder. He didn't look, but he knew she was keeping her eyes open, keeping a watch on Stiles. He knew because he was doing it, too.
Lydia feels it when Derek falls asleep. His weight shifts and instead of supporting her, she's supporting all two hundred pounds of him. Going to med school was supposed to mean leaving this shit behind. It wasn't supposed to mean sitting in her kitchen in the middle of the night, breathing shallowly because she's slowly being crushed to death by a werewolf and waiting for the one boy who ever realized she was smart to wake up. Except he won't be a boy anymore, will he? Stiles will either be a werewolf, or he'll be dead. Lydia knows the chances of him being immune are next to nothing.
God damned werewolves. When Lydia left Jackson, she thought she'd be done with all of this. She'd missed him so much, but at least she'd been alive. Now, what? Hunters might be after Stiles. Which means they will probably come after her. When Derek showed up at her door, Stiles half-dead in his arms, she should have called the cops. She should have done anything except let these god damned werewolves back into her life.
She's been ignoring Jackson's calls for two years, but she can't not save Stiles. She's not that cold-hearted.
Lydia lets Derek sleep on her for about half an hour before poking him in the face until he wakes up. "You're too big," she says, but it doesn't come out the insult she expected it to be. Derek grunts and slides to the floor, pillowing his head on one of his big arms and falling back asleep. Lydia wonders how much trust it takes for a werewolf who's recently lost his pack to sleep in your presence. Maybe Derek is just exhausted from everything and would have passed out anywhere, but Lydia doesn't think so. She has a sneaking suspicion that Derek could stay awake for weeks if he needed to.
Sometimes Lydia wonders if surviving Peter's bite made her feel like pack to the werewolves. She's not one of them, but she's not a normal human being anymore. Derek could have gone to Deaton in Sacremento, he could have just gone to a fucking hospital, but he came to Lydia. Honorary pack member Lydia. Almost, but not quite Lydia.
Around dawn, she notices that the scrapes on Stiles' knuckles have healed. He probably won't even need that last bag of stolen saline, but she'll keep it anyway. You never know when someone in her life will go hypotensive. To celebrate Stiles' continued state of being alive, Lydia makes herself a mimosa and tries not to think about exactly how she's turning into her mother.
After her first mimosa is drained and a second is halfway gone, Lydia feels pleasantly buzzed on her empty stomach and decides to go check on Stiles' sutures. If he's healing anywhere as quickly as Jackson always did, he's going to need them removed soon. She's not prepared for the doorbell to ring.
Derek is out the back with Stiles in his arms before Lydia can even turn around to ask about his plan, so she pulls her hair back and slips into her favorite pair of flats. Lydia Martin does not entertain guests barefoot. "Who is it?" she calls sweetly as she goes up onto her toes to look through the peephole in the door.
"LAPD, ma'am," a man's voice calls through the door, matching the badge and ID held up to her peephole. And please. Lydia is twenty three years old. She's not a "ma'am," thank you very much. "We're looking for an old acquaintance of yours. Derek Hale?"
A slice of fear grabs Lydia's chest, but she's used to fighting it down and pasting on a smile. She takes one second to use the mirror next to the door to wipe away any stray make up that lasted through the night and then opens the door. There are two plainclothes police there, probably detectives if her long history of watching forensics shows taught her anything. She smiles at the woman and beams at the man as she replies, "Derek? I haven't seen him in years. Why?"
"He's a suspect in several crimes, Miss Martin." Ah, there is the Miss. "He left fingerprints at a break-in that happened last night in this neighborhood. You're sure you haven't seen him?"
"No," she insists, not liking the way the woman tries to look around her and into the house. "I'm sorry, my place is a wreck. Med school, you know. Otherwise I'd invite you in."
"I'm sure," the man nods, putting a hand on his partner's shoulder and frowning at her. The subtle sexism in the gesture doesn't escape Lydia, but it's working for her at the moment, so she doesn't protest. But then the woman hits her partner in the stomach and points to a red, tacky-looking puddle dripped across the edge of Lydia's welcome mat. Blood. Stiles' blood. Fantastic. "Miss, I'm going to have to ask you to step outside."
Lydia does what she does best, even after one and a half mimosas on an empty stomach, and thinks quickly. "Well, okay, but I don't see why a couple of cats fighting on my porch means you've got the right to invade my privacy! You'll be hearing from my lawyer!"
The cops both draw their guns and leave Lydia out on the porch, which is a stupid move because as soon as she's out of their line of sight, she stalks off into the morning air, wishing she'd thought to wear a coat. At least she's wearing flats, so she can start jogging a block later. "Where the fuck are you, Derek?" she says to herself, but it doesn't surprise her when a black Camero pulls up to the curb and Derek growls, "Get in."
Lydia does as asked, looking over to see Stiles still unconscious in the backseat. She buckles her seatbelt, turns up Derek's heater, and tells him, "I hope you know you've ruined my life. There is evidence all over my house and aiding and abetting a criminal is one of those things that gets you kicked out of med school, not to mention jail time!"
"They won't find us," Derek says, merging onto the freeway, which is just starting to fill up with rush-hour commuters.
"Yeah, thanks," Lydia grumbles. "That assurance doesn't make my ruined life any easier to swallow."
From the back, Lydia hears Stiles murmur, like he's still asleep, "'s okay, baby. You can spit if you want."
Lydia glances over at Derek and she's pretty sure they roll their eyes in unison. She frowns and says, "I know why you did it, but you're totally going to regret making that into a werewolf."
Derek sighs and says, "I know."