Lydia and Stiles lived on a quiet tree-lined street towards the outer edge of Beacon Hills that abutted the Preserve. It was nice two story house, but quite a come-down from a girl who once resided in one of the gated McMansions actually on the hill that gave the town its name. Reid and Prentiss saw a dark mini SUV parked in the driveway and the living room window glowed behind gauzy curtains, alerting anyone watching that someone was home. The front porch light flickered on once they reached the front door and a moment later a petite redhead looked at them through a screen door.
"Yes?"
Her voice was a little rough as if she'd just awakened from a nap.
"Good evening, I'm Special Agent Emily Prentiss and this is my colleague Dr. Spencer Reid -"
"The author of Unitary Triangularization of a Nonsymmetric Matrix and Variational Methods For the Solution of Problems of Equilibrium and Vibrations? (1)"
Reid looked at the pretty female with a dumbfounded expression on his face. "You've read my work. How? Why?"
Lydia shrugged. "I like to read."
"Ph.D level Mathematical scholarly articles?"
His skepticism was echoed by Prentiss as she didn't even know Reid had written those papers and she worked with him for years.
"What, because I'm a stay at home mom I'm supposed to eat bon-bons and watch soap operas?"
"I...don't know what that even means."
Prentiss knew it was time for her to step in. "Mrs. Stilinski -"
"Stop right there. I'm not Mrs. Stilinski. I'm Lydia Martin." There was a frown gathering on her brow and Prentiss silently cursed her faux pas. "Why are you even here?"
"Well, there was a body found just outside of town..." Prentiss was interrupted by a visibly exasperated Lydia.
"Oh, I know why you're in Beacon Hills. I want to know why you're standing on my front porch."
"May we come in so we can explain?"
Blue eyes flicked over them rapidly while Lydia decided if she would let them in or not before heaving a loud sigh and unlocking the screen door. Reid opened it and started forward before stopping in surprise. "You're pregnant."
"I can see why they let you in the FBI with that level of observation."
Lydia was obviously in the late stages of pregnancy as her small frame was almost completely swallowed up by the hard roundness beneath her stretchy blue top. Both agents followed her to a large comfortable living room - an odd mixture of feminine touches such as framed pictures on the wall, brightly colored pillows, and pillar candles scattered across end tables and a large sturdy coffee table with masculine looking leather sectional, scattered large sized shoes, and a huge flat screen tv nearly taking up one wall. The Xbox and Playstation could've been Lydia's, of course, but Prentiss suspected it belonged to her husband.
After the usual hostess duties - showing them where to be seated, asking about refreshments - Lydia curled up in a small stack of pillows and eyed them.
"So, I'm assuming since you're here, you want to know about Eichen House."
Reid startled. For a man who could wipe up at the poker table, he was terrible at hiding his reactions. "Why would you think that?"
She sighed again with an added eyeroll this time as if she were still a teenaged girl. "Because I'm pregnant, not stupid. You hauled my husband in for questioning and these deaths are connected, which you're starting to piece together and realize the girls from Eichen House are being targeted." Lydia dropped her eyes for the first time and was inordinately interested in the fringe ends of one pillow. "You probably even think Stiles had a hand in it since two bodies turned up in Beacon Hills."
Everything she said was true. There was a working theory Reid, Prentiss, and Hotch mulled over after Morgan called about finding Stilinski with Malia Tate. Garcia was tasked digging deeper into the Stilinski family background and what she came up with was similar to many sociopaths' histories: Dead mother, overworked alcoholic father, latch-key kid, severe attention deficit disorder, and several unexplained trips to the hospital during his teenaged years for everything from a broken arm to a tree branch through his sternum. It harkened to an abusive childhood, which could've in turn led him to "experimenting" especially since there were missing pets, children, and other mysterious phenomena in between his ER visits.
Hotch, however, had shaken his head at the implications and said "There's something more here, and I don't think Stilinski is the cause. I think he's tangled up in it, but not the perpetrator." No one had said anything to gainsay him for two reasons: one, he was rarely wrong about these sort of things as he had a seemingly savant like ability to understand criminal behavior and two, the conclusion was too easy. Too simple. They'd learned over the years with their varied cases that the easiest answer wasn't always correct, regardless of Occam's Razor.
Lydia raised her head proudly, eyes red though no tears fell. "Stiles saved my life and Erica's and Malia's. He would never ever hurt us or our children."
The fervor was unmistakable in her voice and Prentiss didn't look at Reid or shift to avoid disrupting the slight connection they'd made with her.
"Can you tell us how he saved you?"
Blue eyes became clouded as her mind obviously went to a distant past no one could see but her. "My parents were never very interested in raising me until I got to middle school age and suddenly could be showed off like some goddamn show pony to their friends." The venom was as unmistakable as the fervor. "By the time I reached high school, I had decided I wouldn't play their games because it never garnered more than a head pat or a distracted "That's nice dear," unless their friends were around. It was Stiles who pulled me from going too far in retaliation." She smirked. "It was in math class when he leaned over while we were both at the board and said he knew I was better than I was pretending and could he please copy off my homework because he hadn't had time to do it the night before."
The smirk stretched into a fond smile, Lydia's hand absently caressing her burgeoning belly. "Stiles was always...there. We'd been going to school together since kindergarten and, despite his ADD, we always fought for the best grades, or we did until high school when I decided being a popular airhead was more important. After all, my daddy would buy my way into any college I wanted so why should I have to work for it?"
The question was obviously rhetorical, but Prentiss pinched Reid's side when he opened his mouth, and he slumped back into his chair with a pout. Knowledge and learning for its own sake was reward enough in his estimation, but he didn't know how tough being a teenage girl could be, especially with uninvolved parents. Prentiss understood, god did she, so she protected the space that opened up inside Lydia as she waded through the muck of her past life.
"Then...things...started to happen and my boyfriend, Jackson, went off the deep end, so I started cutting to relieve the pressure."
Lie.
The first one she'd told so far. Reid straightened, alerting Prentis that he'd caught it too. Her posture and voice hadn't changed, but something about Lydia was off and it made the agents wonder why she'd lie about this. Why lie about cutting?
Lydia fiddled with the ends of the pillows again. "My parents were having their own issues and with my episodes, it pushed them into divorce. But not before my dad had me committed to Eichen House on his good friend Dr. Creager's advice."
The mixture of emotions that passed across her already expressive face was astounding in its breadth: hatred, betrayal, hurt, loneliness, and fear.
"I was drugged for a good portion of the time so I don't remember much" - another lie - "thank god, but one day I woke up in my room with Stiles standing over me, his face stricken and horrified." Lydia cradled her stomach and hunched her shoulders as if to ward off a blow. "I didn't understand what was going on until I realized I was in labor and blood pulsed between my legs."
Lydia fell silent now, her face empty, though her eyes were haunted as memories of a terrible labor obviously danced across her mind. Reid spoke for the first time with a gentle nudge, "What happened then?"
"Stiles had tried to for months, without success, to gain access to Eichen House because he was worried about Erica and I. He finally got in and found us locked up and pregnant, though Erica still had a few months left before she went into labor, and called everyone who could help. All the staff and Dr. Creager mysteriously vanished between the time Stiles got there and the sheriff."
Lydia's trembling mouth firmed and she squared her shoulders with pride. "Stiles has absolutely nothing to do with the deaths you're investigating and in fact is trying to find out who's responsible. Malia isn't one of his, but she's still born of Beacon Hills so he would go to the ends of his limits to avenge her murder."
Reid and Prentiss wondered at the almost archaic ideology she used, as if her husband were some knight errant tasked with defending the realm instead of a wildlife officer employed by the government to watch over a small swatch of land.
Any follow-up questions were forever silenced by the slap of the screen door opening and small feet running across the wood floor.
"Mama, Mama, guess what Papa and I did!"
A sturdy little boy with his mother's influence in the blue of his eyes and reddish glints in his blond hair skidded to a stop when he noticed the agents seated in the living room. He ducked his head shyly when he saw Prentiss, but a moment later his eyes wandered to Reid and they widened with recognition.
"You're the fucking FBI I met with Daddy!"
Prentiss had heard about the first meeting with Stilinski and couldn't quite stifle her chuckle, even as Lydia groaned and muttered imprecations against her husband and his vulgar mouth.
"Oksar, what are the rules in the house?"
"No running or shouting or...oh." His shoulders slumped and blue eyes peeked through long brown lashes. "Am I in trouble?"
Lydia held out her hand imperiously and Oksar sedately walked across to his mother and clambered up onto the sofa with her. He bussed her proffered cheek before bending down and kissing her belly. "How's Sissy today? Is she ready to come out and play yet?"
Reid watched the little boy with bemused fascination and Prentiss thought it might have to do with his own childhood, at least until he asked, "Why do you call your father both Daddy and Papa?"
Lydia breathed in sharply and started to respond, but Oksar promptly said, "Cause I have two, duh. Daddy and Papa. They sleep with Mama in a huuuugggeee bed and I can come in when they're just puppy-piling, but when Papa is growly and tumbling either Daddy or Mama, I'm not allowed to go into their bedroom until after they call a god down and it gets real quiet."
"Oh God." Lydia hid her face in her hands.
Oksar turned with a beaming smile on Lydia. "Just like that!" He turned back to the stunned agents, "I want to call a god, but Daddy says I have to be waaayyy older to learn how to do that."
A strangled cough behind them alerts the agents to another presence, and both turn to see a large dark-haired man standing there, ears red with embarrassment.
"Papa, that man is the I met at Deaton's office."
"Uh, hi," the man said with a much higher voice than expected. "I'm, uh, Derek Hale."
Prentiss felt her eyebrows raise at the unexpected introduction. This was Derek Hale? And he was in a…relationship…with the Stilinskis?
"Hi, I'm -"
"Could we please skip the introductions when everyone in the room knows who the other is. If you seriously think Derek doesn't know who you are, then you've not been paying attention to how the gossip vine in Beacon Hills works."
Derek walked in and primly sat on the end of the longest end of the sectional with his hands in his lap. Oskar crawled away from his mother's nest and curled up in his lap, adoring eyes on his face. Derek and Lydia didn't look at one another, and the silence that fell was awkward.
Before either Reid or Prentiss could power through the unforeseen news and pull it back to their interview, someone else slapped open the screen and pounded across the wooden floor. Both agents resigned themselves to another outburst, so neither were surprised by Stiles Stilinski's abrupt entrance, because of course he would show up. Why not?
