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Lydia has blue half-moons under her eyes and hollowed out cheekbones. Her fingers seem too thin to hold the spoon she eats her porridge with every morning. Stiles watches her from across the room and has to remind himself to take a breath when she flicks her hair over her shoulder. She has impossibly long eyelashes and doesn’t suit the light yellow gown they have her wear, but still holds her chin up higher than anyone at Echo House.
Stiles only gets to see her a few times a day. She stays in the ward over, where they put the dead-end cases. He only even knows her name because he’d overheard the wardens talking about her, about how she screams at night so loud it sets off their car alarms. She doesn’t talk much, they say – when she does, her voice is croaky from her shrieks.
Stiles sits awake at night and listens to Oliver cough, thinking about Lydia’s spindly fingers and her strawberry blonde hair.
Lydia makes eye contact with Stiles one morning. She even holds it for a few seconds, before sighing as though she’d rather watch paint dry. Stiles thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, until she crosses her legs at the ankles and props her chin up on her hand. Flicks her hair over her shoulder.
Stiles has to spend twice as long in therapy that day. Doctor Morrell gets frustrated because he won’t answer her questions. Says he’s ‘regressing,’ or ‘repressing,’ or some other word that ends with –essing.
In reality, Stiles stays silent because his mind keeps wandering off. He sifts through memories of the curve of Lydia’s neck and the dimples in her cheeks when she purses her lips.
In reality, Stiles isn’t sure what’s real.
That’s a lie, actually. He knows some things are real.
Stiles knows Lydia is real. After the first week of watching her, Stiles decided he would have to make sure she wasn’t another hallucination – a projection of his fractured mind, like a mirage hovering above the horizon and giving false hope to parched prodigal sons.
After close examination, it turns out Lydia is real, not a mirage – she’s a rainstorm. Sudden and overwhelming and engulfing, and Stiles still can’t take his eyes off her.
One day, she throws her bowl of porridge at the wall.
Stiles knew it was coming. Anyone with a pair of eyes would know it was coming.
Stiles could hear her from the other side of the room. Well – he could see her lips moving. She still doesn’t really talk.
‘No, thank you,’ she mouths as they put the bowl in front of her. Her teeth are white against the peach of her lips. Stiles mirrors the actions with his own mouth, to taste the words on his tongue. It feels like they are closer.
In his watching of Lydia, Stiles has realised a few things;
1; No one seems to pay much attention to Lydia. For a person he overhears talks about on a regular basis, no one really seems to listen.
2; She’s not as crazy as they make her seem. Stiles knows a thing or two about crazy – he’s fairly sure the word is written into his genes, engraved in his bones and signed onto his birth certificate like a legal promise. He knows about crazy, and Lydia isn’t it.
Lydia gently touches the orderly’s arm. She points at her bowl with short fingernails. ‘I don’t want it,’ she mouths, clear as day. No one pays any attention. It makes Stiles angry – he looks around with frustration and wants to go over, to help her, but the thought of leaving his chair feels like ice-water in his veins.
He looks down at the table and counts his fingers quickly. 1, 2, 3 – A smash of ceramic draws Stiles out of his compulsion.
He finishes counting one hand hastily, because as much as he fantasizes about dying, he doesn’t actually want the ceiling to fall and crush him. He balls his hands into fists and draws in a shuddery breath before looking up and seeing the chaos play out in front of him.
His eyes are wide as Lydia is rushed out of the room by two female orderlies.
As Lydia passes where Stiles is sitting, she smiles. There’s porridge on her arm and bruises on her shins and she’s being half-dragged across the linoleum floor, but she curls her lip up in a smile, and Stiles’ heart flips.
It feels like something he’s seen before. A flash of deja vu from a past life, maybe. The smash of the bowl echoes in his mind, getting louder and louder until it’s more like a hammer on pipes.
Stiles’ eyes follow her until she’s out of the room, and then he counts to ten on the quivering fingers of his spidery-hands again.
The sound doesn’t go away.
If anything, it gets louder.
That night, Stiles dreams of purple flowers and yellow sundresses and light, fleeting touches up his spine. He imagines delicate hands with short nails and mermaids with orange hair and mint-green eyes.
He wakes up with a shout and Oliver crouching beside him.
“What clanging? There isn’t any clanging. You were shouting about hammers.” Oliver stammers from Stiles' side. Oliver thrives off Stiles’ crazy; feeds off it. Says he gets bored of his own, sometimes. He smiles encouragingly at Stiles with wide eyes, and Stiles ignores him. He pulls himself out of bed to stare out of the window.
The man with the hammer is still in his head, and he still bangs at his brain as though trying to break through to the other side.
Stiles stares into the mirror after his morning shower and imagines his head is a gold mine and the metallic clanging comes from the tiny workers behind his eyes, mining for his collection of thoughts about Lydia. ‘Well, you can't have them,’ he tells his reflection stubbornly, and double locks the filing-cabinet they’re hidden in.
Stiles goes into the canteen to have breakfast. His feet are heavy and his head is heavier.
Lydia is already sitting there, as usual. Her fingertips are massaging at her temples, and her strawberry blonde hair is matted. Stiles had heard talk from the orderlies again – she’d been screaming even louder than usual. They’d had to sedate her.
Stiles watches her and this time, Lydia watches back. Her eyes are curious, if slightly squinted, as though narrowed in pain.
Stiles counts his fingers under the table without breaking the eye-contact. He picks his nails anxiously under her gaze, the sounds of the room bubbling like he's underwater.
During therapy, he doesn’t really hear Doctor Morrell talk. He thinks about the pipes in his head and wonders what could possibly be so wrong that they need someone hammering at them 24-hours a day.
Stiles sits up all night in the hope that the morning will come faster. Imagining seafoam-coloured irises soothes the nauseating copper he sees behind his eyelids when he tries to sleep.
He pounds at his forehead with his fists, as though his skull is the wall between himself and some noisy neighbours, and banging right back is the only way to shut them up.
When Stiles wakes up, he isn’t sure whether he slept at all.
Lydia isn’t in the canteen when he has breakfast.
Stiles refuses to touch his food and stares at the empty space opposite him. The air around Lydia’s seat seems to shimmer.
The clanging gets louder and louder. His mind a construction site, and Stiles hopes they’re building something nice. He props his chin on his hand and when he closes his eyes for a moment of peace and quiet, they don't open again.
When Stiles wakes up, the first thing he notices is that his head lying on a plastic-covered pillow. It crinkles in his ear and sticks to his cheek when he moves.
The second thing he notices is that the clanging in his head has gone. Completely gone. There’s no thrum, no metallic crunch. He flounders for a moment, gasping for air and something to hold onto, because the noise in his head is all he’s ever known and now it’s gone and his hands are strapped to his bed so he can’t count his fingers and –
“Hey.”
Stiles’ heavy breathing shudders to a stop. He turns his face to the sound and sees an occupied bed next to his.
There’s a flash of strawberry blonde and a tightness easing in his chest. Stiles forces himself to focus.
Lydia’s voice is croaky, like talking is agony for her. Like knives scraping up the inside of her neck. It makes Stiles’ throat sting just listening to it.
Stiles taps his fingers against his thighs and counts to ten. He exhales and gives Lydia a shaky smile. She’s laying on her bed, too – her hair fans out in a halo around her face on the plastic pillow as though she's underwater.
“Hello,” Stiles replies quietly. His voice is soft. He doesn't remember the last time he heard his own voice so clearly.
Lydia’s cheeks dimple into a smile. Her bird-like wrists aren’t strapped, and she props her face up with her hand and lounges on the plastic sheets of the bed as though in her own bedroom.
“Has it stopped for you, too?” She asks, and it sounds like shards of smashed glass fighting their way out of her mouth. She winces and swallows.
Stiles nods in his horizontal position. “You could hear it?” He can’t drag his eyes away from Lydia’s face, can't break the habit of inspecting every facet of it in case he never sees it again. "You can just mouth the words," he tell her.
The room is empty apart from the two of them, and Stiles can't hear any movement behind the closed door. He doesn't want anything to interrupt them.
Lydia clenches her jaw and nods.
She points at her temple and then at Stiles' face. Her finger is steady and her nails are neat and short. 'We're connected,' she mouths slowly, and if Stiles concentrates hard, he swears he can feel her warm breath on his skin, smell her mint toothpaste.
It doesn't surprise him, what Lydia says. It makes sense to his fucked-up head.
When Stiles replies, he does so silently, not wanting to break the calmness of the quiet between them. He forms the words with jerky, hesitant lips. 'I can feel it,' he says. His hands jerk uselessly at his side, trying to reach out to Lydia.
Lydia nods enthusiastically as though Stiles' words just injected the meaning of the universe into her veins. 'Yes, yes,' she mouths repeatedly. Her yellow gown and the plastic sheets crinkle as she puts her feet on the ground and crosses the floor between their beds.
"I thought I was alone," Stiles mumbles in a voice thick with sleep and restrained emotion. He doesn't try to jerk away from Lydia's touch to his hand - his spine seems to melt into it, dissolving at the sensation of warm skin on his.
Lydia stands beside his bed and her feather-light touch dances over his fingers one by one. She mouths the words as she counts to ten, her skin soft and eyes never once leaving Stiles'.
When she finishes counting, she raises a delicate hand up to where Stiles can see it. Her fingers are crossed over each other, like kids do when they're keeping a promise or praying for good luck.
'Connected,' she mouths again. Her face is open and happier than Stiles has ever seen it from across the dining hall.
Stiles clutches at Lydia's other hand desperately; their weak, skinny fingers intertwined and bridging the gap between their fractured minds and splintered souls.
The contact feels like... Well, to Stiles, it feels like home. His expression is mirrored on Lydia's face, and a happy sigh escapes her lips even if no words do.
In his head, the padlock Stiles fitted over his thoughts of Lydia smashes with a light tingling chime, and it's nothing like a man connecting a hammer with pipes.
"Lydia," Stiles says in a stunned voice. Lydia smiles back and squeezes his hand comfortingly, and just like that, the floodgates open in his head and he can see clearly.