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1.
Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.
By the time she’s eight years old, Lydia Martin knows every bone in the human body by heart. She sits on the top of the jungle gym with her legs crossed and her hair in pigtails and recites them to herself, feeling remarkably clever with every syllable pouring out of her. Poised, regal, she watches the other kids race around and skin their knees and send jealous looks at her pale pink cowboy boots.
Clavicle. Ulna. Maxilla. Mandible. Coccyx. Metacarpus, metatarsus. Femur. Ischium. Cervical vertebrae. Thoracic vertebrae. Cranium. Sternum.
It’s not until she’s older that she learns that the strongest bone in the body is the femur, and not the sternum as she had previously assumed. She wrinkles her nose at the Osteology book in her lap—the one she’d checked out of the library along with four Agatha Christie novels and To Bedlam and Part Way Back—and snaps it shut, because it doesn’t make sense, she thinks furiously; it doesn’t make sense that the only bone to protect the heart isn’t even the one that can withstand the most trauma. It’s dangerous. She hates it when things don’t make sense; she hates not understanding, but most of all she hates that her heart is not under maximum security.
So she decides to build a shield around it with her own two hands. Her heart will not be her Achilles heel; it will be her Trojan horse—it will sneak up on everyone who approaches it, even her.
“Fields Medal,” she whispers, ungainly with the genuine smile wobbling up her scarlet lips, and as Stiles Stilinski flummoxes out, “What?”, she stands from the chair and brushes off the sensation in the central cavity of her chest that even shields have to be lowered every once and a while, if you’re ever going to swing a sword.
2.
Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.
During Stiles’s first winter as a student at the esteemed institution of Beacon Hills High School, he starts noticing a tendency in his lips to get chapped. Like, abnormally so. He’s never done too great in cold weather anyway, but it’s about twice as bad when his lower lip will suddenly start bleeding and stinging if he bites into a Dorito the wrong way.
His dad buys him about ten different brands of chapstick in that sort of Overdoing-It Dad way that he has been for the past five-odd years, since the month that someone stole a vase of flowers the two of them left in front of a tombstone Stiles still can’t look at the epitaph of. Stiles tries all of them, every day a new stick, to see which one he likes best, and settles on the one with the lowest amount of discernible or appealing flavor, because when his mouth tastes like cake batter, it’s pretty hard to remind himself not to lick it constantly.
He forgets to put any on, the day Lydia leads him into a locker room and reminds him how to breathe again (by kissing him into not breathing at all). Everything inside of her, every scraped and battered and beautiful fraction, explodes out of her in a surge of light and noise and urgency, and the place where her mouth melds itself to his—the way all of the matter in space must have melded together to create the planets—is the only point of exit for it. She grips his head at either side and pulls him up, closer to her, still closer, until he’s almost afraid he’s going to return the gesture, cupping her jaw with his spasming hands and tilting her toward him.
“Shhh, Stiles,” she had hushed him a few seconds ago, her thumb drawing a map of a river down his cheek. They collide, the same way two atoms separate.
It’s funny, he thinks. He swears, when she pulls away from him, that even though he can breathe again, he feels like it’s no longer worth the effort.
3.
Pretend you don’t know English.
Lydia has always enjoyed showing off. It’s good exercise. She doesn’t get to do it as often when she needs to perpetuate a reputation for being a queen bee with an empty (and, by extension, harmless) head. She has to sort of wean herself off of it, only blurting out the answers in class when everyone is falling asleep anyway, or brushing off bewildered (judging) stares by saying that she was bored and read Wikipedia last night and just happened to remember the German word for heartbeat. (Herzschlag—heart blow, stroke, hit, dash, clap, slap, depending on how you want to translate “schlag.”) That doesn’t stop her, though, from resorting to it in case of dire emergency.
Like when Stiles leaves daisies and little pill bugs and stones and cocoons on her desk. She knows it’s him, even though he doesn’t leave a note or anything, because only Stiles is the kind of person who’d spend a day noticing beautiful, natural things and wanting to share them with her. She knows that it’s going to escalate into him being bold enough to say hello to her, which is something that comes to pass about once a month, and she never really knows what to do with that. It’s not that she doesn’t like Stiles; he’s fine. Sweet, even. But she has to teach herself not to like him. Because, the fact of the matter is, pretty girls with nothing interesting or important to say (pretty girls without a soft spot on their soft bodies) have a much better chance of being liked, and those pretty girls are not supposed to intersect with people from Stiles’s neck of the social woods—excitable, precocious, jabbering kids with grass stains on their knees and a hundred fun facts about outer space jumbled up on their tongues.
“Hi, Lydia,” he greets her brightly, during the rehearsal for their eighth grade graduation. And Lydia is going to go to high school, and she is going to date Jackson Whittemore, and she is going to secretly and stealthily get straight A’s and a perfect score on her SAT and then go to Harvard and laugh at all the idiots who underestimated her, but in the meantime, she’s got people to manipulate and goals to accomplish and there is no room anywhere in any of those for a guy like Stiles.
So, looking at the ceiling as though she finds it exponentially more interesting than she finds him, crossing one leg over the other in her white plastic chair that’s directly in front of his in the rows on the stage, she primly replies, “Tu m’aimes trop.”
Stiles blinks at her. “Um, Lydia, that was—that was not English. That was French. I don’t speak…”
“Je trouve que c’est très reconfortant que tu m’aimes tant, mais je dois être honnête maintenant,” Lydia continues, pretending she hadn’t heard him.
Stiles is frowning, now, looking increasingly concerned. He should be used to not understanding her by now, Lydia thinks. He’s going to be keeping it up for a long, long time, just like everyone else.
“Okay, look, whatever, Lydia; the point is, there’s something I really need to tell you, and since it’s our graduation, I figure—”
“C’est impossible pour moi de faire attention à quelqu’un qui n’est pas populaire,” Lydia interrupts. “Tu comprends?”
She turns her head over her shoulder. Her hair is braided and done up and, earlier, she’d heard Stiles breathlessly telling Scott that she looks like a Grecian goddess.
“I…” He glances down at his pants for a second. “Are you, like… trying to tell me my fly is open? Do I have something on my face? I don’t—”
“J’ai l’ambition,” she murmurs, twisting back away again and folding her hands in her lap and making sure to keep her chin tilted high. “Je suis désolée.” She pauses, reconsidering that part. “Mais… juste un petit peu. On ne peut pas être désolée tout le temps. Ce n’est pas logique.”
In a couple years’ time, she will be able to speak French to someone who will actually understand it. One night, in a panic, with tears sputtering out of her eyes and her lower lip trembling, she sends a text to Allison and tries to forget she ever learned the name “Peter.”
to: ALLISON
4:18 AM
j’ai peur
4.
Pretend you never met her.
“I wish,” Stiles chokes out, palms slipping on the steering wheel of the Jeep, “I wish I’d never met her.”
Scott is gripping the coat hanger above the window with brutal strength. He whips his head to Stiles, and his tense demeanor unravels completely at what Stiles can only assume is the sight of him starting to break down while driving twenty miles over the speed limit, which is probably not a safe combination.
“Don’t say that,” Scott murmurs, in a steady and imploring voice, like he understands the sentiment.
Stiles grinds his teeth. He’s done trying to figure out what’s a dream and what isn’t, done trying to distinguish the nightmares from the stale rhythm of the daylight. What’s happening right now, where they’re driving, why they’re driving there, who they’re driving there for—it’s all the stuff of nightmares. So why does he feel so awake?
“If I’d never met her, none of this would’ve started happening to her,” he rasps, even he knows that it’s circular logic. “She’d—she’d be okay.”
“She will be,” Scott assures him. “We’re gonna find her.”
“Alive?” Stiles asks, his voice breaking.
Scott doesn’t hesitate before confirming, “Alive.”
If Lydia dies, who’s going to scream for her? You are.
They come bursting into the nemeton grove—the one that’s grown, lush and green and blue, to be thick and enveloping in only a few months—with Allison and Isaac, who’d driven separately. The first thing, the only thing, that Stiles’s eyes rivet onto is a pair of glistening green ones that are half-lidded and dull with something that sours his stomach when he identifies it as resolve.
The creatures of the Dark have their hands all over her, their nails at her throat, their fingers in her gnarled hair. There are scrapes on her cheeks and elbows and her right arm is caked in a trail of dried blood.
“Stiles,” she murmurs, gulping down breaths. “Stiles, don’t even think about it.”
He thinks about it for a microscopic portion of a second. Then, gaze unstraying, he leaps toward her, just as Scott’s fangs rumble into place, just as Isaac’s claws unsheath, just as Allison lets an arrow fly at the shadows. When it hits, a burst of blinding white light is unleashed upon the dark.
A thousand things compress into that second between kicking off from the earth and reaching her. A thousand auburn hairs, a thousand concealed smiles, a thousand lingering looks, a thousand accidental brushes of the wrist bones. A thunderclapping instant of the English translation of the words he’d heard years ago: You love me too much.
His arms cuff her around the middle and they both go sailing through the air from the force of his tackle, crashing to the dirt and rolling about two feet. A horrendous scream rips its way out of her, without prompt or preamble, and Stiles can’t cover his ears because his hands are too busy holding her. He loses his breath somewhere in the middle of his throat as all of the hairs along his spine stand up, and Lydia keeps screaming, like a wolf with only one last chance to howl, and Scott’s battle-roar mingles with it.
Time draws itself taut along the axis of the skin-searing sound. After a moment, or maybe two, or maybe two thousand, everything falls back into absolute, perfect silence.
Stiles’s ears are ringing. Tinnitus. The perception of sound in the human ear when no actual sound is present. Can be evaluated using the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory. First classification: mild. Final classification: catastrophic.
Every noise is muffled, and it leaves a fuzzy imprint on his eardrums. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut and doesn’t let go of Lydia, not for a second. He’s made the mistake of doing that a hundred times too many.
[Exhibit A: Stiles Stilinski’s 7th Grade Yearbook. Stiles, You’re weird but I’m glad I met you. Have a good summer. — Lydia Martin]
Stiles hasn’t prayed since his mom died, but that night, he goes home and grips his fingers against each other and, even though he’s sure there’s nobody up there to hear him, he thinks, Please, God, let Lydia Martin live forever.
5.
Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.
“He has been infected,” Deucalion growls. “He is no longer a body, but a vessel, and he now carries the power to destroy everything you and I and everyone else on this planet hold dear. Is that what you want, Miss Martin? You would rather let your friend live than save the entire world from whatever insidious thing has taken hold of him?”
Lydia roughly swallows down the irrational rebuttals already stirring in her chest, about how Stiles couldn’t, Stiles wouldn’t, Stiles is not a vessel but a human with a mole on the right side of his pale neck and a long white scar from falling out of a tree on his spine.
“You can’t prove that he’s being used when you don’t even know what’s supposed to be using him,” she snaps. Scott is gazing at her, slack-jawed, with awe in his eyes; she’s been dominating nearly all of the interpack discussion since all of the wolves congregated around the nemeton at Derek’s behest.
“He’s too vulnerable,” Deucalion retorts. “Scott has said so himself; the boy has been plagued by vivid nightmares and is questioning his own sanity. The ajar door your Deaton spoke of is now being used as a point of entrance for these Shadow People. Why they are doing it does not matter; the only thing that matters is that he’s been responsible for four deaths and almost responsible for two others, one of which, need I remind you, was yours.”
Lydia’s heart gives a jolt, but she doesn’t stray her gaze. She doesn’t think about the vacancy in Stiles’s eyes only a few hours ago; she doesn’t think about seeing Jackson move as though all of his limbs were on strings. She clenches a fist and her rose quartz ring catches the moonlight.
“Listen to me,” she whispers. The whole grove goes quiet. Scott and Isaac watch her unfalteringly; Ethan and Aiden glance at each other before swivelling their eyes back to her; Derek’s nostrils flare, but he doesn’t stray his attention. “I’ve been used as a vessel before, too, so trust me, this is not a concept I’m having any difficulty grasping. But I’d just like to point out that your ideal course of action here was not exacted on me, and if I do say so myself, I think I turned out spick-and-span and evil-free, if only slightly more aware of my supernatural ability to make an enormous racket.”
“That very well may be,” Deucalion murmurs, tapping his fingers on the tip of his cane. She doesn’t know why he still uses it—habit, maybe. “But it all comes down to apples and oranges, in the end. The fact of the matter is that you proved to be no danger to the fate of humanity, while Mr. Stilinski, I’m afraid…”
“You aren’t touching him.”
The words come out as sharp as claws or fangs might. Lydia clenches her jaw, breathing in shakily.
“You,” she repeats, “are not touching him. We’ll find another way.” She turns to Scott, hating how frantic her face must look, hating the fact that she can feel moisture welling up in her eyes, because strong and pretty girls don’t cry, and the heart is never as well-protected as it should be. “Scott. Tell him we can find another way.”
Scott opens and closes his mouth. Lydia remembers the ceremonial dagger in Stiles’s hand burying itself to the hilt in between Scott’s ribs. She bites her lower lip. Stiles hadn’t blinked, hadn’t flinched.
Animals can’t read, she thinks, inexplicably.
“We…” Scott’s voice breaks, so he clears his throat and tries again. “We’ll try.”
Later, in the car, as Lydia’s hands slip over the steering wheel from sweat, Isaac asks what Shadow People are. Lydia knows that if Stiles were here, if he were occupying the passenger seat with all of his gangly joints and excitable tics, she wouldn’t have to say a word, wouldn’t have to play liaison from the pack to the human world.
“They come out of the dark to scare you,” she answers. “According to legend, anyway. Most scientific studies have postulated that the sightings are due to things like insomnia, night terrors, and sleep paralysis.” Pavor nocturnus.
“Due to?” Scott poses from the back seat. “Or directly causing?”
Lydia swallows.
“We’re going to bring him back,” she says, more to herself than anyone else. She does not know how she knew about the scar under his shirt. She has a feeling that he showed her, once, in a dream, before he went through a door she begged him not to touch.
6.
Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.
Lydia read a book about excision, once, in Physiology class. She knows that sometimes the most treacherous diseases and wounds leave marks on the inside of the body, and the only way to get them out is to saw their edges with a scalpel, with a knife.
When the whole Peter Thing comes to a disturbingly unresolved close, framed by apathy and disregard, Lydia lies awake at night for hours feeling certain that Peter left a tumor somewhere inside of her, some ticking time bomb in the form of a sore or a cyst that will reactivate her, reinvade her, if he ever needs it.
She has a dream about cutting Peter out of her with the sharpest knife at her disposal; the only problem is that the blade is encroached in rust. Her skin grows gangrene and bleeds too much and that’s when she realizes that the scars Peter left between her ribs are a part of her now, and something she can only overcome by confronting, shield and sword and all.
“Do I seem different to you?” she asks in a raspy, distant voice, the night Jackson comes back from the dead. She’s sitting on the floor outside his hospital room and Stiles is next to her, bare feet and a battered face and a swollen lip and a bag of peanut M&M’s that he keeps extending to her.
“No,” he says immediately, then reconsiders. “Well, I mean, a little. But not like you’re… something you weren’t before; just that you’re letting it show more.”
“What does that even mean? And what do you know?” Lydia snaps. “You’d think I was still the same if I was wearing a curtain for a dress and singing Sukiyaki.”
Stiles snorts, passing her a green M&M—her favorite.
“That sounds like a good gig for you,” he tells her. “Pursue that.”
Two weeks later, Lydia goes on a vacation with her mother to Athens, and, while she’s there, spread-eagled under the sun, closing her eyes behind the shade of her sunglasses, floating with endless indolence in the blue and green waves, she has no intentions of ever going back.
7.
Don't inhale.
“When I kissed you, um…” Lydia whispers, feeling positive in that moment that no voice has ever been more made of clouds and air than hers is, “You held your breath.”
She’s expecting him to say something like, “I’m always holding my breath around you,” the way the gangly, pale sheriff’s kid with the buzzcut and the earnest amber eyes and the too-doting attitude toward her ought to say, or is known to say. Instead, she watches as his eyes well up with fresh tears and he nods at her, revering her, proud of her.
“Thanks,” he rasps. He tilts his head slightly, gazing at her, amazed by her. “It was really smart.”
Lydia has never felt as important as she does right then. And that, of course, is trouble. She’s learned to hone a very good eye for trouble.
8.
Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.
Lydia pretends not to know what love is. Sometimes she doubts even her own silent certainty, because she sees her parents realize that they don’t feel anything for each other but bitterness, bitterness that’s sprouted up from gnarled wounds neither of them ever had the courage to examine. She sits in her four-poster bed and buries herself under her quilt and her pink sheets and covers her ears and hums the happiest pop song she can think of, to try to tune out the roaring echoes of the shouting downstairs. She cries until she has to flip her pillow over to a drier side. And then, when they finalize the divorce papers, she decides once and for all that love is a lie.
She doesn’t realize that she loves Jackson until he’s lying dead on the lacrosse field. She doesn’t realize that she loves him until she flings herself into his arms when he rises again; she doesn’t realize that she loves him until she goes to the airport with him two months later and accepts the fact that she’s probably never going to see him again. It’s a completed love, though; it’s a closed book; it’s an epilogue. It’s resigned. It’s tired. It’s exhausted by its own flaws and its own lack of logic and if there’s one thing Lydia’s never been comfortable with, it’s a lack of logic. So really, love is pretty terrifying. This is something she figures out when, standing on that shoe-battered lacrosse field, watching her breath spurt in white clouds in front of her, she feels the bottom lurch out from under her heels. This is something she figures out when she’s lying in bed one night and itemizing all of the times Jackson insulted her, scared her, hurt her; she matches them up with all of the times she forgave him and excused him and turned the other cheek, in literary parlance.
That’s when she figures out how terrifying love really is. Because love isn’t a lie. Love lies.
She’s sure that watching Jackson die will be the end of her. She’s sure, for a second, that she’ll never feel anything again, and maybe that’s better, in the long run, because feeling things is a dangerous pastime, filled with potholes and pitfalls. But that’s just another one of the elaborate falsehoods that love, with all its dirty tricks and sucker punches, whispers in her ear, and, unchanged in her naïveté, she believes it. She believes in the idea that nothing will ever ruin her, will ever paralyze her, as much as watching Jackson’s body be carried away in a bag nearly had.
The flare, scarlet, rolls toward the pool of glistening gasoline in slow motion. The end result flashes against the back of Lydia’s skull: Stiles, his body engulfed in sanguine flames, and Scott with him. And Lydia Martin, famed for her frigid nature, feared for her disregard, feels her heart jolt up and hit the roof of her mouth and the impact manifests itself in a single word, hauled up from the very depths of her being, ragged with fears both fresh and forgotten: “No!”
Lydia Martin faces death. She slams into Stiles and he, gripping Scott, is carried by her, and when they hit the concrete, when his palms skid along the pavement and his head cracks into Scott’s and all of the breath scatters from him, Lydia holds onto him, watches a scarred face appear in the fire, and counts the hammering heartbeats that she can feel coming through the fabric of Stiles’s hoodie and the bony curve of his spine.
And she thinks to herself, later, folded into an uncomfortable sleeping position on the seat of the dark bus that still smells like Greenberg’s puke, that it’s a good thing she supposedly doesn’t have a heart. If she did, she knows it would have stopped.
She flattens a palm against her chest and glances over at Stiles. He’s snoring quietly, eyebrows twitching together, his hand just slightly grazing Scott’s on the leather seat. Or maybe this is the part where it starts.
9.
Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.
The way that Allison loves is fierce and unprotected, at first, but Lydia watches firsthand as the willingness to open from the chest fades from her best friend. Suddenly the bow and arrow seem so much more appropriate—Allison is afraid to touch, afraid to leave fingerprints, afraid to hold things, because now she knows better than anyone how easy it is to lose them. The way Allison loves is suicide.
“You love him, don’t you?” Lydia asks softly, on the bus, after Allison comes out of the highway restroom with Scott’s blood on her unceasingly shaking hands.
Allison whips away from staring out the window to stare at Lydia with wide and thunderstruck eyes. Lydia shrugs, pursing her lips.
“I mean, I wouldn’t know,” she continues in a chirping tone. “About love, I mean. But call it an educated guess, based on months upon months of watching you and Scott gaze at each other at all hours of the day.”
“Lydia, don’t pull that,” Allison chides her. Her voice is gentle.
Lydia doesn’t blink.
“Pull what?” she asks.
Allison laughs that incredulous laugh of hers, shaking her head. She slackens against the seat of the bus, her arms folding at her chest. When she rolls her gaze back to Lydia again, it’s got a knowing glint to it.
“I know love is scary, okay?” she whispers, leaning in. “Trust me. I know. It’s… unpredictable and it’s complicated and it’s…” She laughs again, more to herself. “Terrifying. But it’s there. It’s not something you can just… ward off if you think about enough other things.”
“Not true,” Lydia retorts, still keeping her eyes focused straight ahead. “Haven’t you ever heard of asexuality? Aromanticism?”
Allison sighs.
“Besides,” Lydia continues, “I’ve got a good insurance policy in case I ever run into something like that. I’ve been slowly conditioning a response in myself to spray on some nice perfume and walk the other way if things get too emotionally deep. It's worked out pretty well for me since—” She trails off.
“Lydia—” Allison starts to say in that exasperated but fond tone of hers, but Lydia refuses to let this conversation progress further.
“Why are we discussing love when we could be discussing the fact that you just stitched up an openly bleeding werewolf with your bare hands and a sewing kit?” she interrupts.
Allison snorts. “Of course that’s what you care about.”
Lydia likes the clinical. She likes the scientifically miraculous. She likes the things that draw blood.
She dozes off hearing Allison steadily talk about sutures. She dreams about stitches going up her right arm and straight to the spot where her chest cavity is, and they’re all in bright red yarn.
10.
Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdeme.
Stiles knows useful things in various languages, among them such pragmatic phrases as, “Où sont les toilettes?” and “Semper ubi sub ubi.” He never bothered learning how to ask for help in any language, and knowing how to ask for it in English has always been enough of an insult. Stiles doesn’t need help. Stiles helps. That’s what he’s there for. He’s there to figure things out and have breakthroughs and know what he’s doing.
Lydia slams four textbooks down on his desk, causing him to jump about two feet out of his chair. He’d been wearing his headphones, functionally the same as being deaf.
“Jesus!” he sputters out, lowering the headphones until they hug his neck. “What—I mean, not that I’m complaining, but what the hell are you doing here? In my house? In my bedroom?” He pales. “Oh, God, I have, like, underwear on the floor—”
“So you’re having trouble reading English,” Lydia talks over him. Her bright blue dress mingles with the auburn of her hair instead of clashing with it. She puts her hands on her hips, shooting him a bright magenta simper. “Don't argue with me. You might be able to fool Scott, but I'm another story entirely. So out of the goodness of my heart, I brought along some Latin, French, German, and Tedaga Tubu.”
Stiles blinks. “Oh. Uh.”
Lydia flops down in a sitting position at the foot of his bed and kicks off her flats.
“Get started,” she orders him. “I’m on a tight schedule.”
Anchor: a heavy object attached to a rope or chain and used to moor a vessel to the sea bottom. A person or thing that provides stability or confidence in an otherwise uncertain situation. Lydia, eternally, since she’d given him back his Pokémon cards in the third grade.
She stays for dinner. Stiles forgets about monsters in the dark, and about werewolves, and about demons, just watching her laugh at his dad’s terrible jokes and leave bare footprints on the hardwood floor.
11.
Don't kiss trainwrecks. Don't kiss knives. Don't kiss.
(You almost kiss him. You almost kiss him again.
“Lydia?” His voice, hushed, sends out a breath that warms your teeth. His hands are hovering at either side of your shoulders, and you’re practically lying down on top of him, utterly still. You’d tripped on a snare left out to catch the kitsune and Stiles, ever on-guard, had grabbed you around the waist and hauled you out of the way just as it had snapped up, at the cost of his own balance. The two of you had tumbled, landing with an enormous thud on the leaf-strewn forest path.
It's been six weeks since you had tasted his mouth in the locker room. It's been four weeks since he had wrapped a red string around your fingers and you had reminded yourself not to believe in forces like fate and destiny. It's been four weeks since the black mark had appeared behind your ear. It's been three weeks since you had told him about Peter, since he had told you about the numbers he had written on the chalkboard.
His cheeks are flushed and his pupils are blown. His hands are so close to the skin of your upper arms that the distance is filled by only your suddenly electrified hairs. Your palms are braced on the ground at either side of his head, and you can feel his chest rising and falling against yours.
You tilt your head down. Your eyelids start to flicker. His lower and close altogether. If you curled your tongue out, it would touch his lower lip.
And then you remember. You remember the sight of the scarlet signal flare; you remember the way the entire world around you had begun to plunge into nothing; you remember holding him down on the pavement and burying your face in his red hoodie and wondering if you’d left your weak and throbbing heart in the middle of what was now senselessly ablaze.
Your eyes open again and you draw sharply away.
“I,” you rasp, and then clear your throat, clambering off. “Work on a better landing next time.”
Stiles only hesitates for a second, but it’s the longest and most disheartening second of your life.
“Will do,” he says, and nineteen days later, he’s drawing Scott’s blood out of his body with a knife, and twenty-two days later, Deucalion announces to the wolves of Beacon Hills that Stiles Stilinski, a vessel, a demon, a heart of immense darkness, must die.)
12.
Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist.
“Please,” Stiles begs. “Please, I don’t care anymore; just take me.”
That’s what heroes do. But Superman never left Lois Lane bleeding on the early autumn grass in the dark. Peter picks him up by the neck and shoves him ahead so that he stumbles, and Stiles looks back over his shoulder until the trees close around the vision of the prone body clad in starry white.
He’s never been a hero; he never will be. Heroes raise their fists and fight; heroes let their hearts become chariots in defense of love. Heroes don’t leave anyone behind.
Regardless of what he is, he knows one thing: he’d lie on that cold field with her and hold onto her until all of the blood went back into her; he’d carry her across forests and mountain passes until his feet were nothing more than parts of the earth itself, and it wouldn’t matter if she came to in time to see that it had been him, all along, who had clung to her, who had traced every abrasion back into untouched skin, because for the first time in his life, it doesn’t matter whether Lydia looks at him or whether Lydia recognizes him or whether Lydia reaches a hand out toward him, just so long as she opens her eyes to look or recognize or reach toward anyone ever again.
“Pathetic,” Peter comments. “But… the oldest trick in the book.”
“What is?” Stiles croaks.
“Why, Stiles, I’m surprised at you,” Peter drawls. He gives Stiles a pointed look. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one who knows better than anybody?”
Stiles has no idea what he’s talking about. He sleeps in the chairs outside Lydia’s hospital room and, both in consciousness and in disjointed dreams, apologizes. I’m sorry for leaving you. I’m sorry for watching you leave. I’m sorry for not being him. I’m sorry for not knowing how to tell you you’re a universe. I’m sorry.
He trips over himself when he sees her naked body, the way boys do. It’s covered in tiny scratches and bits of dirt, and her hair is gnarled with twigs and leaves, and her hands are quivering, and when he calls out her name, she lifts green eyes to his, and he remembers dancing with her, swaying under the purple lights and closing his eyes when her palm found his shoulder blades, not caring that her eyes had been wandering, not caring that everything was about to unravel.
“He is not riding in the ambulance with me,” Lydia snaps.
“I didn’t even suggest it!” Stiles retorts. “Nobody is suggesting it!” He sobers. “But seriously, are you okay?”
Lydia blinks and pulls Stiles’s dad’s coat more tightly around herself.
“Do you know you’re the first person to ask me that?” she whispers. “Just a plain, simple, ‘Are you okay?’ Not, ‘Have you recently imbued an excessive amount of alcohol or used methamphetamine?’”
“Oh,” Stiles mumbles, not knowing what else to say. He scratches his head. The buzzcut rubs softly against his bitten-down fingernails. “Well, uh… cool, I guess.”
“Thanks, Stiles,” she tells him, locking in on his eyes.
Stiles freezes in the moonlight.
“You—” he sputters, his arm dropping to his side. “You, ah… you… know my name.”
The corners of her mouth twitch upwards with uncharacteristic sentiment. It vanishes in an instant, though, in favor of her patented wintery indifference, and she turns her head away again, looking like she couldn’t possibly be more underwhelmed to be undergoing examination by an EMT.
“Don’t let it go to your head or anything,” she says airily.
“Huh?” Stiles hadn’t heard her. He’d been too busy letting it go to his head.
13.
Pretend there is no kryptonite.
“Tell me, banshee…” Deucalion’s voice is shiftless and black, like oil. “What is your kryptonite?”
Lydia can feel Scott’s eyes boring into the back of her skull. She swallows.
“I beg your pardon?” She sighs, short and sharp, to punctuate the frustration she’s trying to construct.
“Your weakness,” Deucalion elaborates. “That which is guaranteed to incapacitate you, no matter who uses it, no matter when. Your Achilles heel, in more sophisticated terms. We all have one. The trickster will certainly use it. Best air it now, my dear, for our sakes and yours.”
Lydia gulps. It hits her heart, the Trojan horse in her chest, harboring untold armies and defensive forces and not a single pacifist.
“Nobody,” she replies, too soon, and then, realizing what she’s done, fumbles to save herself. “I don’t have one.”
But Deucalion knows. She can tell by the way he laughs. Before she falls asleep that night in her bed, her phone buzzes, and she has to squint against the brightness of the screen in the four-o’clock dark.
from: SCOTT
you’re his, too
Lydia runs all the way to the Stilinski house, but the window is already open, and Stiles is already gone, and Lydia, panting, barefoot, sweating, crying, doubles over in the middle of the misty street with her hands braced on her knees and wonders what universal powers so impeccably govern her chronic inability to come to terms with things on time.
14.
Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck – you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.
“Look at me.” The words shake and shiver in her throat. “Stiles… please, please, it’s me; it’s us.”
“Daremoga shinanakereba naranai,” Stiles barks in a dozen different rustling voices made of bone and shadow. “Watashi wa anata o shiranai. Watashi wa darenimo wakarimasen.”
“Lydia.” Scott is shaking his head, and there are tears rolling down his face, but he’s in his werewolf form. Lydia has never seen a wolf cry. Pain wrenches onto Scott’s animal features; the searing crimson in his eyes glistens with agony.
Stiles, without warning, jerks slightly. His eyes roll back into his head. He grips the silver handle of the dagger in his hands and then, with a sudden snarl, leaps at Lydia with the blade raised.
“Kurayami,” he shouts, but his voice is collapsing in on itself with torment. “Kurayami!”
Lydia doesn’t duck or cower or flinch or run. Her hands stay at her sides, balled into white-knuckled fists. She closes her eyes and thinks of fingers tapping the window of her car, asking her what was wrong, turning her moment of what felt like weakness into a moment of unparalleled beauty.
There’s beauty in being scared, and loving is being scared, and that’s what Stiles Stilinski teaches girl genius Lydia Martin.
15.
Forget her name.
Stiles wakes up in a hospital bed and sees red. Not the red of blood, or of dianthus flowers. He blinks the world into racking focus and discerns red that’s rusty and rich and full of far-off treasure, full of promise. It falls in waves.
“Who—?” he croaks, all of the words stirring in his head trickling down the back of his throat and elsewhere. He tries again. “Sorry. Who’re you?”
He watches as the figure reaches a hand towards his. It freezes, starts to draw back, inches forward again, and finally drifts away. The air around his knuckles quivers with an aching emptiness.
“You don’t remember?” a voice whispers. The consonants come out hard and precise, but the vowels, the rhythm, is soft. And he suddenly feels like this is the worst thing he’s ever done, not remembering the face slowly edging back into the shadows away from the gold lamp on the empty table. The steady rhythm of the EKG falters.
“I know you’re important,” he rasps, curling fingers into the sheet and closing his eyes tightly. “The most important… person—”
“Go back to sleep, Stiles,” the voice murmurs, a plea.
So he does.