"Now really isn't a good time, Lydia."
"Oh, stop being so stubborn, Allison. I'm your best friend. Let me in."
After a pause of about twenty seconds, the door to Allison's bedroom door swung inward two inches, and Lydia pushed it gingerly open to see her friend retreating back to her bed. She plopped down on the corner and twirled something in her fingers, not caring to look up as Lydia entered the room. Maybe keeping her promise to Derek wasn't going to be as easy as she imagined. She could tell Allison was deeply upset by the loss of her mother, so much so that she hadn't even told any of her friends. She knew Scott especially didn't know - which was extremely weird considering they were obviously still in love with one another - or he would have been hanging out of her window begging her to tell him what was wrong. Instead, Allison sat alone in her bedroom, her bedroom window closed for the first time in weeks, spinning a metal arrowhead around in her fingers.
Lydia swallowed and walked to the bed, sitting gingerly next to her friend and allowing the silence to settle between them before she tried to speak. If Allison hadn't wanted any of them to know her mother was dead, there had to be a reason. She knew the reason had something to do with Derek and blaming him for her mother's death, but other than that she had no details. She hated being out of the loop - a side effect of being the most popular girl in the school and knowing every tidbit of gossip that flitted around on the tongues of the teenagers in Beacon Hills - and knowing Allison had her own mysterious reasons for keeping something so major from her only made the suspense worse. Lacing her fingers together in her lap, Lydia flattened her lips together and tried desperately not to tap her foot on the floor to ease the building tension she felt in Allison's presence.
"I'm sorry..." she said finally, glancing out of the corner of her eyes at Allison's brown, almost-black curls that shifted slightly as the girl tilted her head away from Lydia, resting her ear on her shoulder and watching the spinning arrowhead the entire time. "I heard about your mom."
Allison nodded slightly and there was a brief silence before she finally answered, "She committed suicide. She left a note... saying she couldn't go... on." Allison got choked up, and Lydia reached for her, wrapping her arms around her friend's shoulders as she began to weep silently against her strawberry blond hair.
"Shhhh. It's okay. It's alright," Lydia soothed, saying the customary words she'd heard people say in situations like these. She'd never lost a parent, or even a relative she was close to, so she couldn't empathize with her friend. But she knew sorrow and sadness, and that she could relate to. "Your mom was a strong woman. She never would have done something that wasn't her choice."
Lydia gently pushed on Allison's shoulders, looking into her brown eyes with a small, comforting smile. "No one can take that away from her. I know that whatever happened was entirely her decision. That means something. She wasn't weak, Allison."
Her black curls bounced as Allison nodded her head, choking back her tears and wiping desperately at her wet face, trying to dry tears that were coming too fast to soak into her shirt as she scrubbed at them. Then, her face hardened and her fingers visibly tightened around the arrowhead she still held in her fingers. She still cried, but the glare of rage in her eyes threw Lydia off guard, and her green eyes widened in response.
"This was all Derek's fault," Allison hissed, sniffing and rubbing her nose on her shirt as she looked down at the arrowhead.
"What... what do you mean?" Lydia asked, although she already knew exactly what Allison meant. She wanted to hear what the girl thought. "How could your mother's suicide have anything to do with Derek Hale?"
Allison shook her head, clamping her lips together and staring up at the ceiling as she did whenever there were too many words for her to speak at one time. Finally, she looked back over at Lydia desperately, and Lydia knew she wanted to tell someone. She'd been keeping the truth from everyone, and Allison wasn't the type of girl to keep her secrets bottled up for too long. She was about to explode.
"Derek... he..." she shook her head again, huffing in frustration as she tried to form the words. "He did something to her and forced her to do this." Her brown eyes bored into Lydia now, and she suddenly felt as if too many people had been violating her with their eyeballs in the past few days.
"You mean because he's a werewolf," Lydia concluded simply. Allison's eyes widened in surprise and she opened her mouth, gaping like a fish out of water. Lydia shrugged her shoulders slightly and chuckled uncomfortably.
"You all couldn't keep me out of the loop forever, you know," she played it off with another shrug. "That Latin you made me read, about the kanima? You didn't expect me to do a little research on my own? While I'm still not sure what that part was all about, I would imagine that thing I saw at the movie shop was, unfortunately, not only a nightmare." She looked down at the burgundy comforter on Allison's bed, noting it appeared untouched and she wondered if her friend had had any sleep since her mother's death. No wonder she looked so haggard and frustrated.
Allison seemed to buy her excuse, and Lydia was thankful she didn't have to confess about Peter Hale and any of her other recent experiences which she had been keeping from her friends. She had her own secrets that she didn't feel like sharing. No one trusted anyone, she supposed.
"You are smarter than you let everyone believe."
Lydia smirked and shrugged her shoulders. "Just don't tell Stiles. He'll get a big head and make some smart comment about 'discovering' me first or something gauche like that." Allison snorted and Lydia smiled, knowing she'd cracked another person's shell for the day. She was just a regular Dr. Phil today. She should be paid for all of the good she was doing for the depression rate in Beacon Hills.
"Back to what you were telling me..." she commented, steering the conversation back to her reason for arriving here in the first place. "What did Derek do to your mom?" Since Derek had neglected on the details, she had to get them from somewhere or she had no way to living up to her end of the bargain and keeping her throat intact.
"He bit her. She didn't want to turn, and it was a full moon, so..."
"So she had to kill herself," Lydia finished for her as Allison nodded in affirmation. Her brown eyes were still so glassy and hard, Lydia shied away from looking at her and glanced around the room, finally noticing how the room looked as if parts of it had been torn apart.
"What in the world happened in here?" she asked.
"I got a little.. angry last night," Allison admitted, tilting her head and shrugging nonchalantly. Lydia's eyes widened and she nodded in fervent agreement but didn't comment further. Now wasn't the time to lecture Allison on the disrepair of her room.
"Do you know why Derek bit her?" she asked quietly, trying not to upset her friend but feeling it was an appropriate question to ask.
"Because he wanted to kill her? Because killing Kate wasn't enough?! I don't know, Lydia! He just did it! That's all that matters: Derek Hale killed my mother, and he deserves to die," Allison cried, throwing the arrowhead across the room. Lydia heard a 'thunk' as it hit something, but she didn't have time to look as Allison stood suddenly from the bed and pulled at her black curls, screaming in agony. "Wasn't Kate enough? How could he be so cruel? How could he be such a bastard?" Allison babbled, falling to her knees on the carpet among a pile of her diaries and make-up accessories she'd thrown onto the floor in the previous tirade that had torn her room apart.
Lydia leapt up from the bed and ran to her side, pulling her into a hug and allowing her to sob into her shoulder once more. "Who will be next? My dad? My grandfather? ME?!" Allison continued to ask, rocking in Lydia's arms, her tears pouring down her face and smearing what little make-up she still wore. Lydia brushed down her hair and rocked with her, shushing her and trying to soothe her with words. The girl ranted about losing her family one piece at a time, about Derek wanting to even the score because he'd lost his entire family, and how she would get retribution for her mother's death.
"You know the difference between retribution and revenge, don't you, Lydia?" she asked finally, after ten minutes of sobbing and rocking and ranting. When she didn't answer, Allison answered her own question, "It's strategy over emotion. Derek has to die to even the score, or more people will keep dying."
Lydia knew about evening the score. She knew only too well. She was caught in the middle of this entire ordeal, and while she knew Allison didn't know the entire story, she didn't know all of the details herself and didn't know how she could make it right.
"Are you sure you know the whole story?" she asked weakly.
"I know Derek Hale is the reason my mother had to kill herself, and that's all there is I need to know," Allison snapped firmly. Lydia smiled blankly and nodded slowly, taking one deep breath and releasing it.
"Any one who comes in the way of that becomes an unfortunate casualty," the dark-haired girl added, the thinly veiled warning sparking Lydia's attention although she didn't show it.
"Just make sure you know all of the facts before you jump to conclusions," Lydia agreed, hoping she could get something into Allison's head past the raging hatred she felt for Derek. Rising from the floor, following Allison's lead as the other girl stood and headed for the door, obviously done with her company for the night, Lydia walked toward the bedroom door and paused as she turned the knob to let herself out. She looked back at Allison with sad eyes and offered her one last, parting smile. "Promise me you'll get all of the details first."
Allison nodded slightly, the only action she was able to give, and Lydia had to accept. She breathed in deeply and turned to exit the room, noticing the arrowhead that had disappeared when Allison threw it across the room. It had sunken sweetly into the panel around the light-switch, splitting the plastic in half as it drove halfway down into the plaster behind the panel. Lydia gulped and left the room with her heart pounding in her chest and her head feeling somehow heavier than it had the morning before.