Fic: "Boards Creaking Underfoot, My Memories" [Lydia, PG]
Author: espressopotluck
Title: Boards Creaking Underfoot, My Memories
Rating: PG
Pairing/s: implied, vague bits of Lydia/Jackson, Allison/Scott, Scott/Kira, Stiles/Derek, and Allison/Isaac
Character/s: Lydia; Allison, Deaton
Summary: If she’s going to be walking through the others’ minds, Lydia figures she might as well be wearing her new Jimmy Choos.
Warnings: spoilers up through all aired episodes of 3B
Submission Type: fic
Word Count: 4,630
Prompt: #61 ひらひら
Author's Notes: This got away from me, as usual.
She doesn’t knock on her way in the clinic - if he’s as good as he pretends to be, he should have known she was coming several blocks down the street.
“Lydia,” Deaton says, and straightens. He’s holding a syringe and there’s a cat lying on the table, clearly sedated. “How can I help you?”
“At Scott’s house,” Lydia tells him. She doesn’t continue into the room further. “When we were in Stiles’ head, Peter called to me. I could hear his voice.”
Deaton sets the syringe down with care, and when he meets her eyes again, something has changed, though she can’t quite identify what. “Yes,” he says, slowly.
“How could he do that?” she asks.
“There is a bond between you,” Deaton tells her, spreading his hands to either side. He doesn’t look happy, or angry, or anything, really, and it’s as infuriating as the information he’s giving her. “Good or bad, it’s powerful enough that he can use it still.”
“Fine,” Lydia says, though clenched teeth. “Then how do I get rid of it?”
Across the table, Deaton puts hand on the cat, almost as if to check that it’s still breathing. His fingers disappear into the somewhat matted fluff.
“To sever something like that will take patience,” he says. “Focus. That bond exists inside your own head, and in his. It was created when he bit you. It functions very much like a pack bond would.”
“So how can I cut a pack bond?” she asks.
But Deaton shakes his head. “Pack bonds aren’t the only kinds. Everyone has bonds to other people - people who can hurt them, people to whom they make themselves vulnerable, people who are invited in. It’s what connects us to those around us, makes us human.”
“Peter isn’t human,” Lydia says, and almost believes it.
“No, he isn’t,” Deaton agrees. His face is, again, oddly neutral. “You have the gift to be able to do something about it. But it will take time, and you will need to find your way through your innermost thoughts. And it is... invasive.”
“I’m not afraid of what’s in my own head,” she tells him.
Deaton reaches into a drawer and pulls out a clear vial - one of the many, perhaps hundreds, that he has lying around. She can’t identify what’s inside it, but it’s a murky sort of gray color and thick, like honey, and it clings to the side of the glass as he moves the container, crossing the room to stand a few hand spans in front of her.
“Not in your head,” he says, and hands her the vial. “But in others. I told you that everyone is connected. To sever the bond with Peter, you may have to find your way to the connection with him, and by doing so, you will cross through those around you in perhaps the most intimate way.”
It doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, and Lydia’s fingers are cold when she curls them around the bottle he’s supplied her. She looks up, asking, “Is it wrong? To do this and see inside my friends’ heads?”
“You’ve already been inside Stiles’,” Deaton points out.
“But that was a matter of life and death,” Lydia says.
“Yes,” Deaton says. There is a long pause when Lydia can’t tear her eyes away from whatever is in the vial, resting against her palm. “I suppose you have to ask yourself, then: is this, too?”
--
She tries that night, when her parents are gone and the house is empty. She gets out all her candles and picks out the scents she finds the most relaxing - eucalyptus and grapefruit and sage - and lights them, because if she is going to be entering people’s minds, she might as well do it feeling as in-control as possible. As an afterthought, she grabs her new pair of strappy sandals and puts them on, too. Just in case.
“Okay,” she says, to the room around her, as she sits in the middle of the candles and pulls out the vial of gray liquid, which smells even worse than she anticipated once she opens the lid.
“There will be doors,” Deaton told her, “and those doors will be the portals to other people. To lock Peter out, you need to find your door to him and close it. But you won’t know what’s in the door until you walk through it, and once you walk through, you cannot turn back.”
Lydia knows what that means - she’ll have to keep going through doorways until she finds her way back to herself. In the back of her mind, she knows that there is the possibility that she’ll never find her way back, if she chooses the wrong doors, and can’t find a connection back home. Outside, she hears a coyote howl, and it solidifies her resolve. She straightens, squares her shoulders, and smears a bit of the jelly-like substance against her temples, near her hairline.
“There’s no place like home,” she breathes, and closes her eyes.
--
When she opens them again, she is still in her bedroom. Confused, and a bit disappointed, she stands up. The candles are still there, and still flickering, and she frowns at them. It was supposed to work. She checks that Deaton’s concoction is still on her forehead, wiping a bit off with her thumb, and stares down at it. Then, irritated, she kicks at the nearest candle to extinguish the flame.
Nothing happens.
Curious, she bends down. Waving her hand over the flame does nothing - she can’t feel it at all, like it isn’t even there. Like it isn’t real, and then she understands; her room is her mind. She had been anticipating something larger and grander, perhaps a dimly-lit mansion or a church filled with stained glass. It’s almost a let-down to find that it’s just her room, her life, that makes up the deepest part of herself.
Whatever the case, she made it in, so she crosses the room and opens her bedroom door. Now, she sees the hallway. Instead of the tiled wallpaper and small table that sits in the hall, there is only a long corridor and many doors. Some of them are closed, and some of them are open.
A shiver runs down her spine, like the flutter of butterfly wings against the back of her neck, and she struggles to push it aside.
She begins to make her way down the hall. She can’t see inside the doors, but she knows that she needs to find one that is open - the fact that it’s ajar is allowing Peter access to her. The closed ones are done and sealed, and while she knows that some of them are painful, they need to stay closed. There is no use reopening things she has locked away.
Lydia stops in front of one that is three-quarters of the way open. She doesn’t know how far down the hallway she needs to go, and she’s concerned that she won’t find the right one, and will end up without a way to get back. She takes in a deep breathe, and pushes inside.
The door itself is two-sided, and she realizes with a jolt that the connection must go both ways. She steps through both open doors, and wonders why it never dawned on her before - of course, one can be open, and the other side closed, if a person so chooses. As she turns around to let it sink in, she is overcome by a feeling of security and comfort: familiarity. She sees a bed with a dark comforter, and posters on the wall, and she knows where she is.
“Scott,” she says. Her door is nearly open for Scott; he’s pack. She might be human - or somewhat, anyway - but she’s still pack, and the bond is strong. Standing in Scott’s mind fills her with the feeling of courage. She wonders if she can take on the world. There are things strewn about the room that she doesn’t recognize: an old baseball she thinks must be from his childhood, several books she knows used to be in the middle school library. There is a lacrosse stick against the wall. The room is thrumming with energy that seems to have the same rhythm as her own heart, and she finds that comforting as well. They are connected, all of them, in the pack, and standing amidst Scott’s memories feels like home.
But she’s an intruder, and Scott wasn’t what she was looking for. There are doors in Scott’s room, too, and she knows she has to pick the right one in order to weave her way through the cords. The widest one is undoubtedly his mother, and Melissa will not lead her where she wants to go. That means Lydia must find the one that will take her to Allison to continue.
There are two doors that are near her, and both are fairly open; Lydia is afraid to pick one. She doesn’t know which will lead her to Kira, without a clear way back. She is already trembling and her muscles are screaming - she is tired. It’s wearing her out to be walking her way through minds like this. She has to find Allison or risk losing all her strength.
“I hope you still love her most,” Lydia whispers, even though she knows that Scott can’t actually hear her, and reaches for the door that is more ajar than the other.
It takes a moment for her to move through the second door, because it’s closed much more than Scott’s was, and that’s how Lydia knows her choice was right before she’s even in the next room. Allison’s bedroom looks like she remembers, before her mother’s death - soft, with touches of Allison herself all over it. There are paintings above the bed that mean nothing, and pictures on the dresser that mean everything; hanging near the window are several antique daggers and a crossbow, gleaming in the non-existent light. Allison’s mind carries the tang of grapefruit and fresh cut grass, and Lydia feels at peace.
Still, her arms are shaking. She needs to find the door back to her own room - she can feel the magic beginning to drain away from her. If she is stranded, she doesn’t know what will happen, but she would bet money that it isn’t good.
She stands in the middle of Allison’s room and looks at the doors. Two are close by each other - one is quite open, the other shut. Lydia guesses those are Chris and Gerard. Then there is the door she came from, which leads to Scott, and another that Lydia hopes is the one that leads to her.
She walks through before she can second-guess herself, and finds herself back in her own hallway. The relief she feels is palpable, as is the exhaustion already coursing through her veins. Deaton hadn’t told her quite how much of a battle it was going to be.
Lydia goes back to her room, and lets the feeling of letting go overtake everything.
--
Back in the real world, she pulls out a notebook from her bedside table. If she is going to need to find her way through the tangled maze of connections around her, then she’s going to need a map.
The first page of the notebook is one of her drawings of the nemeton. Lydia stares at it for a long moment, and moves to tear it out, then freezes at the last second. The drawing itself holds no power. Her fingers twitch over it, but she lowers her hand. Sometimes, forgetting the past is the most dangerous thing of all.
She flips it instead, to a new page, and begins to write.
“Honestly,” she huffs, and blows a bit of her hair out of her face. “You could all care a little less about people and make this easier for me.”
--
She doesn’t get a chance to try again for awhile; two days later, she wakes from a nightmare clutching her throat, still feeling Peter’s hands around her neck. She gets them, sometimes, even still, but usually they aren’t bad enough to cover her in a cold sweat. Her hands are clammy and her sheets are tangled around her legs. She kicks them off and then tries to calm her racing heart, to no avail. She can feel him in her room.
Lydia goes to the window and double checks the locks, which are still in place. Then, still feeling the shiver of disgust and fear, she grabs for the small jar of mountain ash that she’s kept beneath her vanity since Stiles told her everything about what had been going on. She sprinkles it across the windowsill, and then stares at it for several minutes before she feels the paranoia slowly going back down.
It isn’t until she crosses the room again that she looks in the mirror. There are fingerprints on her neck: wide and angry and red, and as she drags her fingertips across the sensitive skin, she knows they will bruise.
--
“This time,” she tells her own reflection in the mirror, “you will get further.”
She sits down in her candles once more and crosses her legs in front of her. She is jittery and anxious, full of anger that Peter is still in the back of her mind and that she hasn’t succeeded in blocking him out yet. She closes her eyes and tries to focus on the nothing, the blackness - the smell of the candles and the tingle from Deaton’s goo. It takes awhile, and she doesn’t know how much time passes before she opens her eyes again, and finds her in her mind’s room once more.
This time, Lydia heads directly to the door she knows is Allison’s. Being back in Allison’s mind is just as peaceful as it was the first time, but Lydia has the goal to move faster. Allison can connect her across the connections perhaps faster than if Lydia tried random doors of her own and found herself in, say, her great aunt, rather than anyone connected with Peter and happenings in Beacon Hills. She thinks it best to stay within the group she knows is included in what she needs to accomplish.
Lydia goes to the doors she hadn’t been able to identify and pushes one open to walk in.
She finds herself in a room she doesn’t recognize. There is a stark lack of objects hanging around the room, and the few she can recognize aren’t familiar to her.
“Who...” she starts, and steps to the center, where she sees, on the ceiling above the bed, a giant painting of the night sky. There are hundreds of stars dotted against the sweeping curves of dark blue, indigo, and black - and in the middle, a moon, a perfect sphere and brighter than anything else. She sucks in a breath because the image looks so real she can nearly taste it; she can almost feel the night breeze against her neck.
“Isaac,” she says, to herself, and knows she’s right. Isaac’s room was bare and harsh before the addition of the night sky scene. She doesn’t want to think too much on it. Isaac is a puzzle that she hasn’t the time to properly figure out, and standing in his mind amidst the broken pieces of his childhood is too intrusive.
But she also knows that to keep going, she needs to find one of the lesser-open doors, in hopes that it will lead her to Peter. Peter was pack with Isaac, and she is banking on the wolf’s pack bonds to be stronger than the dislike of the man in general. She finds one that seems to fit what she is looking for, and squeezes through the smaller opening.
What she finds ends up taking her breath away, because she knows this room, too. She can remember waking up in that bed, tangled limbs and muffled sighs; she knows the way the carpet digs in between her toes when she walks across it in the middle of the night. Even the smell of his cologne is in the air, lingering, and the flutterings in her chest that it elicits are nearly embarrassing.
Lydia had tried for pack bond, and she had succeeded - it just isn’t the right one.
She knows she should leave Jackson’s mind, but it’s so tempting to stay just a few seconds more. She lets her hands run over the dresser that she had once spilled a bottle of nail polish remover on; even the part where the varnish came up with the towel she used to clean up the liquid is there, raised and bumpy, uneven with the rest of the top. Something catches in her chest, and it nearly takes over. She has to push it down, away, and blindly head towards the other doors.
The unexpected pseudo-reunion has rattled her. She wants to find her way back, so she can return to the real world and gather her thoughts again, empty out the emotional river banks that have suddenly refilled. There is a door open more than the others, and she lunges for it without really thinking. It’s only halfway through that she realizes she is still banking on Jackson holding her candle higher than all the others.
She’s right, but it’s a hollow victory when she stumbles back into her own hallway and crumbles to the floor. She’s gone so long without thinking about him that doing so now is painful, every breath like a knife searing her lungs. She makes her way to her bedroom and curls on the floor, against the rug her father brought back from the UAE when she was ten.
Her tears are soaking it when the magic fully wears off and deposits her back home.
--
She calls Allison once she can move her appendages again.
“Do you ever think about it?” she asks, without greeting, and hopes that Allison isn’t busy.
“Think about what?” Allison asks back.
Lydia tries to swallow and finds that her throat has swelled. “The way it use to be. You, me - everything. Before life became this horrible, complicated... thing.”
“Sometimes,” Allison admits, and then pauses before adding, “but I think maybe... my life was always a complicated thing. And it was worse when I didn’t know. I didn’t have any control over it then. At least now, I feel like I can fight back.”
“Or make your own path,” Lydia whispers against the LCD screen.
“Yeah,” Allison says. “Exactly that.”
Lydia stares at her hands and the dripping wax from her candles for a long time before she pulls out her notebook again, and updates the mind map.
--
Three days later, she goes back.
This time, she pauses in her own hallway. She still is wary trying the other doors, now that she can identify Scott’s and Allison’s, but Allison’s led her in the wrong direction and she knows she needs to open more of the options. She finds one of her own that is half open, and slips through, her new pumps with the leather heels clicking a bit as she goes.
She is in Aidan’s room. There isn’t much to it that would identify him, but Lydia knows, can feel it through her bones. She doesn’t altogether like the feeling that Aidan’s mind leaves her with. She’s been struggling with her own emotions towards him, and perhaps now isn’t the best time to come to terms with those. Still, walking across and heading for the most-open door gives her something to think about when she returns to the real world (when this is very, very over).
Aidan’s mind-room opens into Ethan’s. Lydia has little purpose in Ethan’s room, but it’s interesting to note the differences between the twins. Where Aidan’s room was dark shadows and corners that didn’t quite connect, Ethan’s is more open, geometric. He thinks in more dimensions and sees more of the angles in life: gray, instead of stark shades of black and white.
Lydia pushes past all of it to go through yet another set of connecting doors. She finds herself back in Scott’s room. It’s just as welcoming as it was the first time, with the pack feeling of belonging hitting her from all sides. She should have known, maybe, that Scott was the center of all things - that every path she took would eventually lead her back here. Scott is the anchor for all of them, and the glue that holds the entire web together. Lydia is suddenly fiercely grateful for him and his stability, and breathes deeply in the feeling of security and protection that his mind-room affords her before knowing that she has to keep going.
She knows now some of the doors in Scott’s room, so she tries one of the ones she hasn’t gone through yet. The door is open nearly as much as Allison’s is, and as she goes through, she is hit with the realization that she should have seen this one coming - she’d know Stiles’ room anywhere.
She has to stop here. She was once in this room as well. She was crying that night, the night she came to him seeking something she couldn’t even put a name to. Stiles is a rock she knows she could count on, that she can break against and always come back to, but that is the worst of it. Her waves may crest and swell around him, but he’ll never be able to keep her in one spot. Stiles is a bright, wonderful light that will never really be hers.
Lydia wonders if things would be easier if he could be. There’s a burst of bitter regret on the back of her tongue, and she thinks maybe she’s finished again - she needs to go back home. She’s getting tired, and her hands are starting to shake. She finds the most open door and knows that is the sheriff, and so turns to the second widest door and pushes through, prepared to find her hallway.
She’s somewhere dark, instead.
“What,” she sort of gasps, before she can stop herself, and even though she assumes no one can hear her, she is still a little afraid of alerting the owners of the minds to her uninvited presence within. She stumbles over something on the ground, something charred past any hope of identifying it. That’s when she knows where she is.
“Derek?” she asks. There’s no hope for a response, but she doesn’t think she was really expecting one. She turns back to the door that leads to Stiles’ room, and finds that Derek’s is flung wide as well. Lydia spends a long second staring at it, chewing her lower lip between her teeth.
She’s rarely so surprised at something she failed to recognize around her, but the feeling of shock is quickly replaced with the realization that Derek is going to lead her to Peter - provided she can find the right door. She makes her way to the center of the room, picking her way around the broken wreckage and debris that can only be memories from a childhood long since burned to ash. Still, there are pieces that aren’t covered in black: a chessboard, a water glass, an apple, and small pile of other mementos that she hopes are connected to the pack he tried to make, and the people who are still around him.
Standing at the center, Lydia turns one away from Stiles’ door and finds another one open most of the way - Cora, she guesses. After that is a similar door, and she assumes that one is Scott. And past that there are two, both more closed than open, and she moves towards them. One of them has to be Peter; the other, Isaac, and the problem is that she doesn’t know which is which.
Her fingers are trembling. Her muscles are screaming with exhaustion, but she’s close. She’s so close to finding the door she needs.
One door is open slightly wider than the other. This, she hopes, fiercely, is Isaac. Peter’s probably only exists due to family and pack, and the bond that, perhaps despite all the reasons Derek wants to rid himself of it, won’t go away.
Lydia slips through.
She knows the house she finds herself in. She has known this house since she walked towards it in the fog, what feels like ages ago, confused and disoriented and being led by something more powerful than she ever could have guessed. Lydia has never hated being right more than this moment. All the hair on her arms stands on end, and she tries to keep her eyes down - she doesn’t want to see Peter’s mind-room. She has no desire to see his memories, feel his desires. She just wants to sever whatever vampiric cord connects them, and do it as quickly as possible.
On the opposite wall, there are doors. One leads to Cora as well, she hopes, and another to Scott because of the alpha bite. But there is one half open, and she is drawn to it. She doesn’t hope that it is her door; she knows.
Lydia walks through and feels no relief when she is in her own hallway, only resolution. She turns back around to face the portal she just came from and grabs the door handle on her side, slamming it shut. It clicks, but she needs more. When she shoves her hand down in her pocket, she finds a key. It’s brass and large and old, the kind that scary movies always use to indicate something of importance, something ancient and most likely anachronistic. But Lydia feels powerful with the weight of the key in her palm, and it feels even better when she inserts it into the lock and twists it.
“No more,” she says, to the door and to Peter, to all the things that happened to her in the past without her own consent.
When she returns to the real world, she is still shaking, but she thinks there is a difference in the spasms that she can’t seem to stop this time.
--
She calls Deaton that night, before she gets ready for bed.
“I think it’s done,” she tells him. “The door is locked.”
“Good,” he says, and she thinks he sounds pleased - or maybe she just hopes that he does, for whatever reason inside her mind that she hasn’t the strength to really worry about. “I hoped you would be successful, and not just for your own sake. Sometimes, those bonds can be very dangerous when given to people who don’t deserve them.”
Lydia looks at her window, and the mountain ash that is sitting in the jar, half-gone and used. “Is there a way he can make a new connection? Like building a new door?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Deaton says. “What you did is actually quite powerful - there aren’t many ways around that. Did you learn things about the others?”
“No,” Lydia tells him. Some things are best left unsaid. “Nothing at all.”
“I see,” he says, and this time, he definitely sounds amused. “Then I think the only thing left to do is tell you to sleep well, Ms. Martin. I do believe you’ve earned it.”
Lydia looks to the mountain ash, but doesn’t bother putting it across the sill. She sleeps soundly that night.
Title: Boards Creaking Underfoot, My Memories
Rating: PG
Pairing/s: implied, vague bits of Lydia/Jackson, Allison/Scott, Scott/Kira, Stiles/Derek, and Allison/Isaac
Character/s: Lydia; Allison, Deaton
Summary: If she’s going to be walking through the others’ minds, Lydia figures she might as well be wearing her new Jimmy Choos.
Warnings: spoilers up through all aired episodes of 3B
Submission Type: fic
Word Count: 4,630
Prompt: #61 ひらひら
Author's Notes: This got away from me, as usual.
She doesn’t knock on her way in the clinic - if he’s as good as he pretends to be, he should have known she was coming several blocks down the street.
“Lydia,” Deaton says, and straightens. He’s holding a syringe and there’s a cat lying on the table, clearly sedated. “How can I help you?”
“At Scott’s house,” Lydia tells him. She doesn’t continue into the room further. “When we were in Stiles’ head, Peter called to me. I could hear his voice.”
Deaton sets the syringe down with care, and when he meets her eyes again, something has changed, though she can’t quite identify what. “Yes,” he says, slowly.
“How could he do that?” she asks.
“There is a bond between you,” Deaton tells her, spreading his hands to either side. He doesn’t look happy, or angry, or anything, really, and it’s as infuriating as the information he’s giving her. “Good or bad, it’s powerful enough that he can use it still.”
“Fine,” Lydia says, though clenched teeth. “Then how do I get rid of it?”
Across the table, Deaton puts hand on the cat, almost as if to check that it’s still breathing. His fingers disappear into the somewhat matted fluff.
“To sever something like that will take patience,” he says. “Focus. That bond exists inside your own head, and in his. It was created when he bit you. It functions very much like a pack bond would.”
“So how can I cut a pack bond?” she asks.
But Deaton shakes his head. “Pack bonds aren’t the only kinds. Everyone has bonds to other people - people who can hurt them, people to whom they make themselves vulnerable, people who are invited in. It’s what connects us to those around us, makes us human.”
“Peter isn’t human,” Lydia says, and almost believes it.
“No, he isn’t,” Deaton agrees. His face is, again, oddly neutral. “You have the gift to be able to do something about it. But it will take time, and you will need to find your way through your innermost thoughts. And it is... invasive.”
“I’m not afraid of what’s in my own head,” she tells him.
Deaton reaches into a drawer and pulls out a clear vial - one of the many, perhaps hundreds, that he has lying around. She can’t identify what’s inside it, but it’s a murky sort of gray color and thick, like honey, and it clings to the side of the glass as he moves the container, crossing the room to stand a few hand spans in front of her.
“Not in your head,” he says, and hands her the vial. “But in others. I told you that everyone is connected. To sever the bond with Peter, you may have to find your way to the connection with him, and by doing so, you will cross through those around you in perhaps the most intimate way.”
It doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, and Lydia’s fingers are cold when she curls them around the bottle he’s supplied her. She looks up, asking, “Is it wrong? To do this and see inside my friends’ heads?”
“You’ve already been inside Stiles’,” Deaton points out.
“But that was a matter of life and death,” Lydia says.
“Yes,” Deaton says. There is a long pause when Lydia can’t tear her eyes away from whatever is in the vial, resting against her palm. “I suppose you have to ask yourself, then: is this, too?”
--
She tries that night, when her parents are gone and the house is empty. She gets out all her candles and picks out the scents she finds the most relaxing - eucalyptus and grapefruit and sage - and lights them, because if she is going to be entering people’s minds, she might as well do it feeling as in-control as possible. As an afterthought, she grabs her new pair of strappy sandals and puts them on, too. Just in case.
“Okay,” she says, to the room around her, as she sits in the middle of the candles and pulls out the vial of gray liquid, which smells even worse than she anticipated once she opens the lid.
“There will be doors,” Deaton told her, “and those doors will be the portals to other people. To lock Peter out, you need to find your door to him and close it. But you won’t know what’s in the door until you walk through it, and once you walk through, you cannot turn back.”
Lydia knows what that means - she’ll have to keep going through doorways until she finds her way back to herself. In the back of her mind, she knows that there is the possibility that she’ll never find her way back, if she chooses the wrong doors, and can’t find a connection back home. Outside, she hears a coyote howl, and it solidifies her resolve. She straightens, squares her shoulders, and smears a bit of the jelly-like substance against her temples, near her hairline.
“There’s no place like home,” she breathes, and closes her eyes.
--
When she opens them again, she is still in her bedroom. Confused, and a bit disappointed, she stands up. The candles are still there, and still flickering, and she frowns at them. It was supposed to work. She checks that Deaton’s concoction is still on her forehead, wiping a bit off with her thumb, and stares down at it. Then, irritated, she kicks at the nearest candle to extinguish the flame.
Nothing happens.
Curious, she bends down. Waving her hand over the flame does nothing - she can’t feel it at all, like it isn’t even there. Like it isn’t real, and then she understands; her room is her mind. She had been anticipating something larger and grander, perhaps a dimly-lit mansion or a church filled with stained glass. It’s almost a let-down to find that it’s just her room, her life, that makes up the deepest part of herself.
Whatever the case, she made it in, so she crosses the room and opens her bedroom door. Now, she sees the hallway. Instead of the tiled wallpaper and small table that sits in the hall, there is only a long corridor and many doors. Some of them are closed, and some of them are open.
A shiver runs down her spine, like the flutter of butterfly wings against the back of her neck, and she struggles to push it aside.
She begins to make her way down the hall. She can’t see inside the doors, but she knows that she needs to find one that is open - the fact that it’s ajar is allowing Peter access to her. The closed ones are done and sealed, and while she knows that some of them are painful, they need to stay closed. There is no use reopening things she has locked away.
Lydia stops in front of one that is three-quarters of the way open. She doesn’t know how far down the hallway she needs to go, and she’s concerned that she won’t find the right one, and will end up without a way to get back. She takes in a deep breathe, and pushes inside.
The door itself is two-sided, and she realizes with a jolt that the connection must go both ways. She steps through both open doors, and wonders why it never dawned on her before - of course, one can be open, and the other side closed, if a person so chooses. As she turns around to let it sink in, she is overcome by a feeling of security and comfort: familiarity. She sees a bed with a dark comforter, and posters on the wall, and she knows where she is.
“Scott,” she says. Her door is nearly open for Scott; he’s pack. She might be human - or somewhat, anyway - but she’s still pack, and the bond is strong. Standing in Scott’s mind fills her with the feeling of courage. She wonders if she can take on the world. There are things strewn about the room that she doesn’t recognize: an old baseball she thinks must be from his childhood, several books she knows used to be in the middle school library. There is a lacrosse stick against the wall. The room is thrumming with energy that seems to have the same rhythm as her own heart, and she finds that comforting as well. They are connected, all of them, in the pack, and standing amidst Scott’s memories feels like home.
But she’s an intruder, and Scott wasn’t what she was looking for. There are doors in Scott’s room, too, and she knows she has to pick the right one in order to weave her way through the cords. The widest one is undoubtedly his mother, and Melissa will not lead her where she wants to go. That means Lydia must find the one that will take her to Allison to continue.
There are two doors that are near her, and both are fairly open; Lydia is afraid to pick one. She doesn’t know which will lead her to Kira, without a clear way back. She is already trembling and her muscles are screaming - she is tired. It’s wearing her out to be walking her way through minds like this. She has to find Allison or risk losing all her strength.
“I hope you still love her most,” Lydia whispers, even though she knows that Scott can’t actually hear her, and reaches for the door that is more ajar than the other.
It takes a moment for her to move through the second door, because it’s closed much more than Scott’s was, and that’s how Lydia knows her choice was right before she’s even in the next room. Allison’s bedroom looks like she remembers, before her mother’s death - soft, with touches of Allison herself all over it. There are paintings above the bed that mean nothing, and pictures on the dresser that mean everything; hanging near the window are several antique daggers and a crossbow, gleaming in the non-existent light. Allison’s mind carries the tang of grapefruit and fresh cut grass, and Lydia feels at peace.
Still, her arms are shaking. She needs to find the door back to her own room - she can feel the magic beginning to drain away from her. If she is stranded, she doesn’t know what will happen, but she would bet money that it isn’t good.
She stands in the middle of Allison’s room and looks at the doors. Two are close by each other - one is quite open, the other shut. Lydia guesses those are Chris and Gerard. Then there is the door she came from, which leads to Scott, and another that Lydia hopes is the one that leads to her.
She walks through before she can second-guess herself, and finds herself back in her own hallway. The relief she feels is palpable, as is the exhaustion already coursing through her veins. Deaton hadn’t told her quite how much of a battle it was going to be.
Lydia goes back to her room, and lets the feeling of letting go overtake everything.
--
Back in the real world, she pulls out a notebook from her bedside table. If she is going to need to find her way through the tangled maze of connections around her, then she’s going to need a map.
The first page of the notebook is one of her drawings of the nemeton. Lydia stares at it for a long moment, and moves to tear it out, then freezes at the last second. The drawing itself holds no power. Her fingers twitch over it, but she lowers her hand. Sometimes, forgetting the past is the most dangerous thing of all.
She flips it instead, to a new page, and begins to write.
“Honestly,” she huffs, and blows a bit of her hair out of her face. “You could all care a little less about people and make this easier for me.”
--
She doesn’t get a chance to try again for awhile; two days later, she wakes from a nightmare clutching her throat, still feeling Peter’s hands around her neck. She gets them, sometimes, even still, but usually they aren’t bad enough to cover her in a cold sweat. Her hands are clammy and her sheets are tangled around her legs. She kicks them off and then tries to calm her racing heart, to no avail. She can feel him in her room.
Lydia goes to the window and double checks the locks, which are still in place. Then, still feeling the shiver of disgust and fear, she grabs for the small jar of mountain ash that she’s kept beneath her vanity since Stiles told her everything about what had been going on. She sprinkles it across the windowsill, and then stares at it for several minutes before she feels the paranoia slowly going back down.
It isn’t until she crosses the room again that she looks in the mirror. There are fingerprints on her neck: wide and angry and red, and as she drags her fingertips across the sensitive skin, she knows they will bruise.
--
“This time,” she tells her own reflection in the mirror, “you will get further.”
She sits down in her candles once more and crosses her legs in front of her. She is jittery and anxious, full of anger that Peter is still in the back of her mind and that she hasn’t succeeded in blocking him out yet. She closes her eyes and tries to focus on the nothing, the blackness - the smell of the candles and the tingle from Deaton’s goo. It takes awhile, and she doesn’t know how much time passes before she opens her eyes again, and finds her in her mind’s room once more.
This time, Lydia heads directly to the door she knows is Allison’s. Being back in Allison’s mind is just as peaceful as it was the first time, but Lydia has the goal to move faster. Allison can connect her across the connections perhaps faster than if Lydia tried random doors of her own and found herself in, say, her great aunt, rather than anyone connected with Peter and happenings in Beacon Hills. She thinks it best to stay within the group she knows is included in what she needs to accomplish.
Lydia goes to the doors she hadn’t been able to identify and pushes one open to walk in.
She finds herself in a room she doesn’t recognize. There is a stark lack of objects hanging around the room, and the few she can recognize aren’t familiar to her.
“Who...” she starts, and steps to the center, where she sees, on the ceiling above the bed, a giant painting of the night sky. There are hundreds of stars dotted against the sweeping curves of dark blue, indigo, and black - and in the middle, a moon, a perfect sphere and brighter than anything else. She sucks in a breath because the image looks so real she can nearly taste it; she can almost feel the night breeze against her neck.
“Isaac,” she says, to herself, and knows she’s right. Isaac’s room was bare and harsh before the addition of the night sky scene. She doesn’t want to think too much on it. Isaac is a puzzle that she hasn’t the time to properly figure out, and standing in his mind amidst the broken pieces of his childhood is too intrusive.
But she also knows that to keep going, she needs to find one of the lesser-open doors, in hopes that it will lead her to Peter. Peter was pack with Isaac, and she is banking on the wolf’s pack bonds to be stronger than the dislike of the man in general. She finds one that seems to fit what she is looking for, and squeezes through the smaller opening.
What she finds ends up taking her breath away, because she knows this room, too. She can remember waking up in that bed, tangled limbs and muffled sighs; she knows the way the carpet digs in between her toes when she walks across it in the middle of the night. Even the smell of his cologne is in the air, lingering, and the flutterings in her chest that it elicits are nearly embarrassing.
Lydia had tried for pack bond, and she had succeeded - it just isn’t the right one.
She knows she should leave Jackson’s mind, but it’s so tempting to stay just a few seconds more. She lets her hands run over the dresser that she had once spilled a bottle of nail polish remover on; even the part where the varnish came up with the towel she used to clean up the liquid is there, raised and bumpy, uneven with the rest of the top. Something catches in her chest, and it nearly takes over. She has to push it down, away, and blindly head towards the other doors.
The unexpected pseudo-reunion has rattled her. She wants to find her way back, so she can return to the real world and gather her thoughts again, empty out the emotional river banks that have suddenly refilled. There is a door open more than the others, and she lunges for it without really thinking. It’s only halfway through that she realizes she is still banking on Jackson holding her candle higher than all the others.
She’s right, but it’s a hollow victory when she stumbles back into her own hallway and crumbles to the floor. She’s gone so long without thinking about him that doing so now is painful, every breath like a knife searing her lungs. She makes her way to her bedroom and curls on the floor, against the rug her father brought back from the UAE when she was ten.
Her tears are soaking it when the magic fully wears off and deposits her back home.
--
She calls Allison once she can move her appendages again.
“Do you ever think about it?” she asks, without greeting, and hopes that Allison isn’t busy.
“Think about what?” Allison asks back.
Lydia tries to swallow and finds that her throat has swelled. “The way it use to be. You, me - everything. Before life became this horrible, complicated... thing.”
“Sometimes,” Allison admits, and then pauses before adding, “but I think maybe... my life was always a complicated thing. And it was worse when I didn’t know. I didn’t have any control over it then. At least now, I feel like I can fight back.”
“Or make your own path,” Lydia whispers against the LCD screen.
“Yeah,” Allison says. “Exactly that.”
Lydia stares at her hands and the dripping wax from her candles for a long time before she pulls out her notebook again, and updates the mind map.
--
Three days later, she goes back.
This time, she pauses in her own hallway. She still is wary trying the other doors, now that she can identify Scott’s and Allison’s, but Allison’s led her in the wrong direction and she knows she needs to open more of the options. She finds one of her own that is half open, and slips through, her new pumps with the leather heels clicking a bit as she goes.
She is in Aidan’s room. There isn’t much to it that would identify him, but Lydia knows, can feel it through her bones. She doesn’t altogether like the feeling that Aidan’s mind leaves her with. She’s been struggling with her own emotions towards him, and perhaps now isn’t the best time to come to terms with those. Still, walking across and heading for the most-open door gives her something to think about when she returns to the real world (when this is very, very over).
Aidan’s mind-room opens into Ethan’s. Lydia has little purpose in Ethan’s room, but it’s interesting to note the differences between the twins. Where Aidan’s room was dark shadows and corners that didn’t quite connect, Ethan’s is more open, geometric. He thinks in more dimensions and sees more of the angles in life: gray, instead of stark shades of black and white.
Lydia pushes past all of it to go through yet another set of connecting doors. She finds herself back in Scott’s room. It’s just as welcoming as it was the first time, with the pack feeling of belonging hitting her from all sides. She should have known, maybe, that Scott was the center of all things - that every path she took would eventually lead her back here. Scott is the anchor for all of them, and the glue that holds the entire web together. Lydia is suddenly fiercely grateful for him and his stability, and breathes deeply in the feeling of security and protection that his mind-room affords her before knowing that she has to keep going.
She knows now some of the doors in Scott’s room, so she tries one of the ones she hasn’t gone through yet. The door is open nearly as much as Allison’s is, and as she goes through, she is hit with the realization that she should have seen this one coming - she’d know Stiles’ room anywhere.
She has to stop here. She was once in this room as well. She was crying that night, the night she came to him seeking something she couldn’t even put a name to. Stiles is a rock she knows she could count on, that she can break against and always come back to, but that is the worst of it. Her waves may crest and swell around him, but he’ll never be able to keep her in one spot. Stiles is a bright, wonderful light that will never really be hers.
Lydia wonders if things would be easier if he could be. There’s a burst of bitter regret on the back of her tongue, and she thinks maybe she’s finished again - she needs to go back home. She’s getting tired, and her hands are starting to shake. She finds the most open door and knows that is the sheriff, and so turns to the second widest door and pushes through, prepared to find her hallway.
She’s somewhere dark, instead.
“What,” she sort of gasps, before she can stop herself, and even though she assumes no one can hear her, she is still a little afraid of alerting the owners of the minds to her uninvited presence within. She stumbles over something on the ground, something charred past any hope of identifying it. That’s when she knows where she is.
“Derek?” she asks. There’s no hope for a response, but she doesn’t think she was really expecting one. She turns back to the door that leads to Stiles’ room, and finds that Derek’s is flung wide as well. Lydia spends a long second staring at it, chewing her lower lip between her teeth.
She’s rarely so surprised at something she failed to recognize around her, but the feeling of shock is quickly replaced with the realization that Derek is going to lead her to Peter - provided she can find the right door. She makes her way to the center of the room, picking her way around the broken wreckage and debris that can only be memories from a childhood long since burned to ash. Still, there are pieces that aren’t covered in black: a chessboard, a water glass, an apple, and small pile of other mementos that she hopes are connected to the pack he tried to make, and the people who are still around him.
Standing at the center, Lydia turns one away from Stiles’ door and finds another one open most of the way - Cora, she guesses. After that is a similar door, and she assumes that one is Scott. And past that there are two, both more closed than open, and she moves towards them. One of them has to be Peter; the other, Isaac, and the problem is that she doesn’t know which is which.
Her fingers are trembling. Her muscles are screaming with exhaustion, but she’s close. She’s so close to finding the door she needs.
One door is open slightly wider than the other. This, she hopes, fiercely, is Isaac. Peter’s probably only exists due to family and pack, and the bond that, perhaps despite all the reasons Derek wants to rid himself of it, won’t go away.
Lydia slips through.
She knows the house she finds herself in. She has known this house since she walked towards it in the fog, what feels like ages ago, confused and disoriented and being led by something more powerful than she ever could have guessed. Lydia has never hated being right more than this moment. All the hair on her arms stands on end, and she tries to keep her eyes down - she doesn’t want to see Peter’s mind-room. She has no desire to see his memories, feel his desires. She just wants to sever whatever vampiric cord connects them, and do it as quickly as possible.
On the opposite wall, there are doors. One leads to Cora as well, she hopes, and another to Scott because of the alpha bite. But there is one half open, and she is drawn to it. She doesn’t hope that it is her door; she knows.
Lydia walks through and feels no relief when she is in her own hallway, only resolution. She turns back around to face the portal she just came from and grabs the door handle on her side, slamming it shut. It clicks, but she needs more. When she shoves her hand down in her pocket, she finds a key. It’s brass and large and old, the kind that scary movies always use to indicate something of importance, something ancient and most likely anachronistic. But Lydia feels powerful with the weight of the key in her palm, and it feels even better when she inserts it into the lock and twists it.
“No more,” she says, to the door and to Peter, to all the things that happened to her in the past without her own consent.
When she returns to the real world, she is still shaking, but she thinks there is a difference in the spasms that she can’t seem to stop this time.
--
She calls Deaton that night, before she gets ready for bed.
“I think it’s done,” she tells him. “The door is locked.”
“Good,” he says, and she thinks he sounds pleased - or maybe she just hopes that he does, for whatever reason inside her mind that she hasn’t the strength to really worry about. “I hoped you would be successful, and not just for your own sake. Sometimes, those bonds can be very dangerous when given to people who don’t deserve them.”
Lydia looks at her window, and the mountain ash that is sitting in the jar, half-gone and used. “Is there a way he can make a new connection? Like building a new door?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Deaton says. “What you did is actually quite powerful - there aren’t many ways around that. Did you learn things about the others?”
“No,” Lydia tells him. Some things are best left unsaid. “Nothing at all.”
“I see,” he says, and this time, he definitely sounds amused. “Then I think the only thing left to do is tell you to sleep well, Ms. Martin. I do believe you’ve earned it.”
Lydia looks to the mountain ash, but doesn’t bother putting it across the sill. She sleeps soundly that night.