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Sometimes in the middle of the night, she watches the steady rise and fall of his chest, listens to the rhythm of his breathing, if only to remind herself that she is not alone. She thinks about the days when their greatest worries were passing History or getting onto the lacrosse team. The days when Stiles Stilinksi was nothing more than a name without a face and Lydia Martin was nothing more than the girl who threw the best parties in Beacon Hills.
Every morning she wakes up next to Stiles before the sun. They both ignore the other’s sleepless dark circles and don’t say a word, chasing away panic attacks with gentle touches and chaste kisses. They wait for the darkness to recede, pressed close to one another, before finally climbing out of bed. She layers on concealer while he stands behind her, running the brush through her hair.
She hasn’t cut it since that night, since the night everything was taken from them. It’s almost obscenely long now, reaching her hips, but he understands, handling it with an unspoken reverence. He pulls it back, away from her face just as she finishes her swipe of dark red lipstick, and she closes her eyes, feeling his fingers work it into an acceptable braid. Nothing fancy, nothing presumptuous. That Lydia Martin is gone, taken with the lives of her best friends.
She never wears anything other than pants now, having done away with the short skirts shortly after her legs became too scarred to explain away as dog scratches or having tripped on the stairs. She keeps the high heels though, in a vain attempt to maintain the illusion of confidence or, god forbid, control.
Every morning, they stand together and swallow their pills, pinkies locked together for silent support. Then he pretends to read the paper and she pretends to drink coffee, both of their gazes trained on the clock. At exactly 8:15, she stands from her seat and stretches with a smile on her face that feels as plastic as it looks.
Sometimes she throws in a little comment, like ‘I’m off, dear,’ or, ‘I’ll be back at six, sweetheart.’ He’ll smile too, but he’s not nearly as good as she is at hiding pain. He opens his arms and she goes to him without hesitation, closing her eyes as he buries his nose in her hair. They stay like that for as long as they need for their hearts to slow and their unshed tears to withdraw. Sometimes it’s seconds, sometimes it’s minutes, and on special days it’s hours and they stay locked in each other’s arms the entire day, letting their grief pour out without reservations.
On those days, she’ll allow him to carefully unpin her curls and run his fingers through them ever so softly. She’ll kiss the tear tracks on his face and brush her fingers over the scars that cover his chest. She’ll allow herself to drop her façade of strength and he’ll tell her stories of Scott and him as children in a broken voice, pausing every few sentences to choke back a sob. She holds him close and they’ll weep.
They weep for Allison, for Boyd. They weep for Kira and Erica. They weep for Malia and Isaac and Jackson. They weep for Derek. They weep for Scott.
There are some things she doesn’t tell Stiles. She doesn’t tell him how earlier on the day of the attack, she’d clutched her heart and fallen to her knees in the middle of the school hallway, seized by an irrepressible sense of fear. Allison had knelt down next to her, worried yet kind, asking her if she was alright, and Lydia had been unable to do anything but stare at her with wide eyes, frozen in place.
She doesn’t tell him how the wolfsbane bullet that took down Scott was aimed for Stiles’ back. How just before it reached his heart, the young werewolf had made eye contact with Lydia and made her promise to take care of his best friend in his stead, and she had been so frightened she couldn’t choke out the words before Scott’s head fell to the side and his red alpha eyes faded back to brown.
She doesn’t tell him how the day after, she had driven to the cliff in the woods, note clutched tightly in hand, and stood there for almost two hours trying to work up the courage to throw herself off. He had called her, a mess, and it was that call that reminded her that there were people that needed her and she couldn’t afford to be selfish. They needed to lend each other strength.
Lydia throws herself into her work. She spends hours at her office, surrounded by complicated mathematical equations that can be solved logically, without emotion, until it’s past acceptable and she can’t put off the inevitability of going home any longer. Stiles doesn’t know how to deal with it himself. He’d quit his job as deputy sheriff shortly after a case with supernatural implications had come in. She remembers that night, him coming home face pale and hands shaking. Sometimes these days she finds him passed out on the carpet, bottle in hand. But she never says anything, simply cleans him up and takes him to bed, holding him tightly like a child until the sun comes up.
She hates sleeping. She knows he hates it too. Because sometimes the medicine doesn’t help enough. They wake in the night screaming with the names of the dead still on their lips. The panic hits them and they can’t breathe, faces of friends long past spinning through their heads. They see ghosts.
Once a year they make the visit to the cemetery, the neat rows of identical tombstones both terrifying and calming simultaneously. Stiles insists on buying forget-me-nots every single time despite Lydia’s gentle reminder that the flowers are always stolen anyways. Nevertheless, he resolutely lays down one bunch at the headstone of each friend, and Lydia bites her lip the entire time, thinking about how Allison would be thrilled to be receiving flowers and how Derek would probably roll his eyes, fighting a smile. Scott would just laugh and pull his best friend into a tight hug.
When it comes to being faced by the reality and immediacy of the graves, Stiles proves to be the stronger one. He lets her sob into his dress shirt- the idiot always dresses up, laughing wryly about how they were all buried in nice clothes and he didn’t want to be out of place- and rubs her back, but she can feel his body trembling, and she presses him closer.
After they’ve spent all the time they can handle with their friends, Stiles drops a kiss onto her head and extracts himself from her, carrying one last bouquet of flowers.
Claudia Stilinksi’s grave is further in, and while she trails behind him, she swears she can hear the singing of the dead as they pass. It’s been years since her banshee senses were actually present. Now they’re just whispers here and there, washing over her with familiarity. But she already has enough voices in her head these days.
Stiles moves with practised ease around his mother’s grave, and it breaks Lydia’s heart to think of just how many times he’s been here, and how he’d had to deal with all that pain alone. If she didn’t have him, she’s almost positive that she would be in the ground by now as well.
Stiles doesn’t know that it was him who saved her, so many times in so many ways.