So this takes place post-Season 4. Diverges from canon obviously. Hope you all enjoy. Title from Aurora's 'Running with the Wolves.'
Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf.
She screams for Scott in her nightmares. When she wakes she tries to convince herself that an asthmatic boy who she has never really cared for cannot save her. Will not save her because he doesn't care for her, won't save her because the type of saving she needs, needs to come from doctors and drugs, needs to come from herself.
She turns on the cot to face the white walls and tries to go back to sleep, tries not to cry. There will be no miraculous rescue from her alpha. Because she doesn't have an alpha. She doesn't have a pack; she isn't a banshee. It's just all in her head. A humongous delusion to make up for the fact that she is sick. Her mind, so brilliant, was sick. She has to fight not to cry, has to fight not to want to hear the door break down and Scott and Stiles' ridiculous voices as thy hurry over to her and tell her that they're getting her out.
The therapist told her not to indulge in the fantasy as much as she could. She manages most of the day. But the nights, the nights are hardest. She's lonely and she feels trapped. She tries not to hear the whispers as they rattle down the halls, tries not to listen when they become trapped in her room and rattle around her four walls.
She tries not to scream.
In the morning, she gets up and goes through her morning routine, has breakfast and then goes to visit her therapist Lisa.
"Good morning Lydia," she says when Lydia walks in.
"Good morning," Lydia says.
"And how are we today?"
"Just like every other day," Lydia says. She is non-caring, bored. Her tone of voice says that this is quite possibly a waste of time.
"Did you have any nightmares?" Lisa asked.
"No," says Lydia shortly.
"Lydia," says Lisa warningly. She has an uncanny ability to tell if Lydia is lying.
"I don't want to talk about my nightmares," Lydia says tightly.
"That's fine," says Lisa, "but if you like…"
"No!" Lydia says firmly, "No more drugs than I need."
"Alright," says Lisa. "Have you had any more hallucinations?"
For a moment the world around Lydia blurs. The cream gives way to brown that clears a little to blurred surroundings before snapping back to white. Lydia shakes her head a little and then looks at Lisa to see her purse her lips.
"It just happened again, didn't it?" she said. Lydia said nothing. Lisa sighed. She opened the folder on her desk. "You drew on the wall yesterday with your fork. We're going to have to talk about that."
Lydia rolled her lips inwards and then blew out a breath. "It's just like the last times," she said, "I don't remember doing it. I don't remember what triggered it okay? It just happened."
The fugue states were the worst as far as she was concerned. Lydia hated them the most…because every time she wrote on the wall, she wrote 'help me, save me'. It was the only thing she ever wrote. That and a circle within a circle. The bands around Scott's arm, the symbol their pack leader wore, the symbol of their pack. An open wound worn on a protector.
When she had asked him, when she had heard the reason why, she realized that she had never heard something that fit together so well.
"Scott," she'd said, "That's a promise to protect."
"Why'd you say that?" he'd asked.
She'd laid her hand over his tattoo, "Because you're a protector, and this shows that you know how much it hurts." For the banshee, the girl surrounded by death, this made sense. A protector with an open wound. A person with a heart.
For the banshee, the girl who didn't want to find the bodies when it was too late, this was hope.
The symbol of the nematon. The symbol of a beacon. The symbol of her pack, the beacon of light that stood against the darkness.
Every time she saw the circles she wanted to scream (normally) because there was no pack, Scott didn't have the tattoo, he'd never gotten them. He wasn't an alpha, wasn't a werewolf, there wasn't a nematon, he and Allison were still talking because they had never broken up. Allison had never gone to France. Her mother had never died. Allison had never died.
In one night her life had changed and she didn't remember any of it. She'd gone to the formal, they'd told her, with some jock (not stiles) and had gone out into the field following one of her hallucinations and soon after had had one of her worst episodes ever. She was screaming and yelling, twitching and attacking anyone, everyone who'd come out to help her, she'd even attacked herself.
Shed finally collapsed and had been taken to the hospital. It was two weeks later when she gained cognizance of anything. Her parents had to tearfully break the news to her. Two days later they'd flown her to the hospital here. She'd refused to go Eichen.
At first she'd been in shock. Some part of Lydia thought she might still be in shock. After all she couldn't seem to grasp the truth. She wasn't a banshee. There were no werewolves. Or anything else for that matter. It was all a figment of her imagination.
She'd fought the truth for a long time because of course she still 'remembered' what had happened with Peter. But the truth wins. The truth wins and the cold hard facts was that she was sick and pretending it wasn't true wasn't going to make it wall go away.
"Lydia?" asked Lisa, "Ae you with me?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Lydia says.
"Lydia…"
"I'm not talking about it," Lydia cut her off.
"Oaky," she said, "What about letting your friends visit, even skype? They've asked."
"No," said Lydia. She didn't want pity. But most of all she didn't want them to be here now and then watch them slowly stop skyping and talking to her. She would cut them off now. At least that way he wouldn't feel the pain of abandonment and they wouldn't feel too much guilt when they eventually, sensibly, left her behind.
"Lydia," said Lisa, "You have to make some effort to connect to the real world of you are to pull yourself out of this. You have to come out of the dream and form connections to the real world that will help you to hold on. All of this happened because you lost your connections to the real world. Your brain was trying to hold onto the dream but you knew deep down inside that that was all it was, a dream."
"I don't want it to be a dream," Lydia whispered, eyes wide, "I don't want it to be a dream."
"That's understandable honey," says Lisa, "But that can't happen."
"Fine," Lydia says. She takes a moment to gain her composure and says, "Okay fine. I want to talk to Scott but I want to actually meet him."
"Okay," says Lisa, "but you'll have to wait a few days for him to fly in, if he agrees to come."
"Okay," says Lydia, "Can I go now?" She arches an eyebrow.
"For now," says Lisa and Lydia escapes from her office.
A few days later she's in the visiting area waiting for Scott. He comes in five minutes later, his hair like it'd been in their sophomore year, a sort of awkward air hanging around him. He didn't know why she'd asked for him and not someone else. But still he came over to her and sat down on the chair opposite her.
"Uh, hey," he said.
"Hi," she said and tried not to cry.
Scott seeing her eyes fill up, started to look a little bit like a deer in the headlights. "So, um, how are you?" he asked.
"Some better days, some worse days, worst nights," she replied.
"Oh, sorry to hear that. I mean I'm glad to hear that some days are better, but I'm sorry about the bad days. And nights."
"Me too," she says. "How's Allison?"
"Good," he says perking up a little, "Missing you. She's worried about you, you know?"
"I miss her too," Lydia says, "I miss all of you. I miss you. You were my strength you know. It helped to know I had someone I could call if I needed too." And she knows she is going off. This Scott, the real Scott doesn't know what she is talking about. They'd certainly never had any interactions that speak of what she is saying and she sees him frown, browns furrowed in confusion.
The world chooses to blur around her at that same moment. The white walls disappear and there in the shadowy blurred world that appears she sees Scott. Her Scott, her alpha. 'Lydia,' his lips mouth and she can't hear what he is saying but it feels like it is possible to.
The word snaps back into focus, the white walls there and real Scott staring at her.
"Are you okay?' he asked.
She must have spaced out. "I'm fine," she says, "Tell me what's going in Beacon Hills," she adds quickly.
Scott looks suspicious but begins to tell her all the news that transpired. He relaxes as he continues his news telling but Lydia begins to tense because something is wrong. She doesn't quite know what. She can only describe it as watching paint begin to crack on a canvas.
The world blurs around her again and she sees her Scott. "Lydia!" he says. He's worried and frantic and staring at her intensely. "Lydia!" And she realizes that she has actually heard him call her name twice this time.
The white walls snap back and the real Scott is still talking but the paint is beginning to loosen off of the canvas now. Something is wrong and she knows it. The Scott in front of her is wrong. He is evil but she doesn't focus on him. She focuses on the Scott she knows is behind all the paint.
The blurs again, fast. The white walls snap back but this time she can see her Scott behind the fake Scott that is talking.
"Scott!" she says. The fake Scott stops talking. He is frowning confused.
"What?" he asks. She ignores him.
"Scott!" she yells.
The eyes of her Scott, behind his fake copy, light up. "Scott!" she yells again and then tilts back her head and screams a long high pitched wail that rises in pitch and volume and then dips back down. It was the banshee version of a wolf howl and her alpha heard her.
His eyes lit up and he howls. Scott's howl isn't pretty. It's scary. Frightening. But it doesn't scare her. It is protection, strength. She hears it reverberating around her.
She screams again and it's pure banshee this time. Scott 's howl cut of but only for a moment. He howls again and she screams again and together they cause the paint to flake off the canvas entirely. The white walls flake off and fly away and Lydia keeps screaming over and over again in discordant harmony with Scott's howl, until the world, the real world, her world, comes into focus and stays there.
Scott is kneeling in front of her, wolfed out, eyes glowing and Lydia has never been so happy to see anything in her life.
"Lydia?" he asks.
"What?" she says.
"Oh thank goodness," says Stile's voice and she is suddenly hugged from behind. She lets out a pitiful little laugh but it is a still a laugh.
The sound of something being whacked really hard caused her and Stiles to twist around and Scott to look up. Chris Argent stood over the body of….something.
"I'll take him to Eichen," he says.
"Thanks," says Scott.
"Was that?" she asked.
"Yeah," said Stiles. He begins to haul her up. "Let's go home."
"Wait," she says. They all pause. She reaches out for Chris and He walks over to her and she reaches for his right hand. She rubs her thumb over the wedding band there, looks at him sadly and then let's go. He walks away and she places a hand on Stiles face and looks into his eyes. Stiles eyes are all that she needs to know if this is really him.
She moves away from him and goes over to Scott, lifts his sleeve so that she can see the tattoo there clearly. She places her hand over it. And then Scott places his hand over hers.
"An open wound," he says, and she looks up at him. "A promise to protect," he tells her and she bursts into tears and clings to him. The real him. The real world. Her alpha.
Stiles hugs them both and she cries all the more.
Her pack was real.
They were real.
This was real.
She clings to them both. "Take me home," she says, "Let's go home."
Review please!