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Saturdays are their weekly sleepover night, and it’s Lydia’s turn to host. It’s their routine.
Allison showing up at her doorstep half an hour late, dripping blood onto the front porch? That, however, was unexpected.
“Like hell…hear me…listen…” Listen? What? No, that isn’t right, but close. Maybe she should listen. She tries to tamper down the sound of blood pulsing in her ears and focus on the words again.
“Allison? Allison!”
The exasperated sigh and abrupt snap of freshly-manicured fingertips is enough to force Allison out of her state. She blinks a few times, and Lydia can see the process of her coming to terms with her current location play out on her face.
“…Lydia?” The name is drawn out, but it feels good on her tongue—familiar. Allison doesn’t want it to end, but it eventually does. She blinks again, relieved when the angles finally come into focus. She smells strawberries and lavender. “What am I…?” The question never finishes, and her brow creases in confusion.
It takes a grand total of two seconds for Lydia to register the signs of blood loss and give a compulsory eyeroll, followed up by a frown that barely touches the corners of her mouth and is gone in an instant. “Dear god, you’re completely out of it. Wait here.” She can’t do much of anything else, but Allison turns her head to watch Lydia’s retreating form and catches snippets of her quiet mutterings. She’s able to hear ‘hemorrhaging on my pillows’ and ‘doesn’t even care how hard it is to get blood out of satin’, before Lydia vanishes around the corner in a flourish of red hair. Absentmindedly, Allison pulls her arm off of one of the aforementioned pillows on the bay window seat, grimacing at the stain it leaves behind.
Lydia returns a minute—though it could have been twenty, for all Allison is concerned—later, nudging something into her hand. It’s cool to the touch, and Allison almost pulls away, but Lydia’s insistent. “Drink,” she commands, and Allison instinctively obeys, bringing the glass to her lips.
The cold water running down her throat is possibly the closest thing to salvation Allison’s ever felt.
Closing her eyes, Allison takes a moment to appreciate the sudden shock to her system, and devours half of the glass’s contents in one sitting. When she opens them again, Lydia’s gone.
The unspoken question is answered not even a second later, when the sound of Lydia’s heels clicking against the bathroom tile fade out as they’re muffled by the carpet. Leave it to Lydia Martin to wear heels in her own house. “Better now?”
Allison nods, still sipping on her water, and lifts her gaze to watch the approaching redhead, who has gauze bandages and peroxide in tow.
“I figured you wouldn’t be up to walking, so I brought the first aid to you.” Lydia sounds extremely self-satisfied with her foresight…but then again, Lydia’s always self-satisfied. She carefully kicks off her heels by the foot of her bed and kneels in front of Allison.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
Lydia quirks an eyebrow and flashes her patented patronizing smirk—the one that’s always a few degrees less intense whenever it’s directed at Allison. Or at least, that’s what she tells herself. “Sweetheart, I’m a full month ahead of our Biology curriculum, and I read medical textbooks for entertainment. I think I can handle this.”
Okay, that much is true. Allison doesn’t say anything else.
“Are you going to tell me what happened? It’s the least you can do after nearly giving me a heart attack,” she comments, with an open concern that momentarily distracts Allison from the sting of the peroxide against the long gash on her arm. Her skeptical look must not have gone unnoticed, because Lydia quickly counters with a nonchalant shrug and a simple, “…My mom just got the carpets cleaned.”
Setting the empty glass on a bare section of the window seat, Allison caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “That hiker that wound up dead about a mile off of the—ow, Lyd,” she hisses as Lydia presses an alcohol-soaked gauze pad against her right temple, and earns nothing but an answering hum in response. “Anyway, the preserve? Not an accident; an omega werewolf with some kind of Darwinian complex. No one we know. I tried to wrap things up neatly before it got out of hand.”
“And…?” Lydia doesn’t bat an eyelash at the morbid implications, and instead pulls back to give her an expectant look that Allison summarizes as, ‘I don’t get paid enough for this, but carry on’.
“I ran out of arrows and didn’t have enough time to recover. My backup took care of him before anything major happened.”
Lydia sucks in a slow breath, her lips pressing together in a firm line, and Allison feels the need to ask her what’s wrong. But she doesn’t, and the faint noise that escapes her when Lydia applies the bandage to the side of her head is the only thing that breaks the sudden silence in the room.
“I’m finished,” comes the curt declaration.
Allison finally stands and inspects her newly bandaged wounds in the full-length mirror, but in true Lydia fashion, it’s nothing short of professional work. She tosses a look over her shoulder and beams, but the answering glare makes her smile falter, then vanish completely.
She knows that look. The arched eyebrow, the index finger poised against the contour of her jaw…it’s the look Lydia gets when she’s about to tear some poor freshman to shreds. The look that says, ‘you’ve personally offended me and you brought this upon yourself’. Allison’s never been subjected to that look.
Until now.
“You know, Allison, I was never under the impression that you could be as mind-numbingly idiotic as the rest of the masses, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.” The words are slow, cold, and direct, and hit home right in the spaces between Allison’s ribcage. To her credit, she doesn’t flinch.
But Lydia does take a step forward, and all of Allison’s warrior-like composure can’t match the slow-building rage in the shorter girl’s every movement. “Nothing “major”? You could’ve died, you infuriating, self-sacrificing, careless asshole—” And suddenly Lydia’s across the room, her arm wrapping around Allison’s neck before she can even protest, and lips are crashing into hers. The whimper that slips out of Allison’s mouth once her back collides with the wall is only half-pained, not that Lydia cares in the slightest. No, she’s all teeth and roughness and urgency and Allison has to process that this is actually happening before she begins to respond in kind, strawberry-laced oxygen filling her lungs with all the desperation of a dying breath.
It catches Allison off-guard when she notices that she’s crying, and a double round of shock ensues when she realizes that the tears marring her cheeks aren’t hers.
“Lydia…”
“God, you’re an idiot,” Lydia whispers, a broken sound that Allison’s never witnessed before. But for all the tears that fall, her lips leave flames in their wake.
—
“…If you die, I hope you know that I’m bringing you back just to kill you again.”
Allison shifts under the blankets and rolls onto her uninjured side, and doesn’t bring up the fact that Lydia’s impromptu resurrection ritual probably only works on werewolves—once she’s gone, there’s no coming back. She knows that Lydia knows.
She stares at Lydia for longer than necessary, piecing together the enigma that’s etched into every crease in her brow, every strained muscle in the set of her jaw. You can’t die. Me without you just doesn’t work. Don’t let me go.
It would take a small army to coax that kind of confession out of Lydia Martin, and then some. But Allison Argent has long since learned how to slip through the cracks in her polished armor. There’s one more confession in the depths of those green eyes, and tonight, the moonlight shines just brightly enough for her to make it out.
I love you.
“I know.”
The corner of Allison's mouth lifts a fraction of an inch, but it’s enough to say: I do, too.