[fic] copper and axinite (4/4)
fic: copper and axinite: autumn (4/4)
fandom: btvs/teenwolf/tmi
characters: allison/lydia; dawn summers, clary fray, stiles/lydia-friendship, clary/simon-friendship
word count: 4500/19,000
setting: set a few years before the events of destiny came a calling; witches-au allison thinks she'll never find her familiar... Lydia always knew that she was different from her family and friends, she just didn't know how much...
[ one: summer]
[ two: spring]
[ three (1): autumn]
[ three (2): autumn]
Lydia watched autumn slip by behind a counter filling coffee orders and writing papers on the Rise and Fall of Christendom for the class Dawn forced her to enroll in. Between steaming milk, avoiding flirtatious regulars, and memorizing innocuous dates, Lydia spent most of her spare time pouring over the ‘Rebecca Letters’ and unsuccessfully attempting to turn herself back into a cougar.
She hadn’t been able to shift back into her wild form since the night she arrived on the Rosse’s doorstep, which was both frustrating and terrifying. Try as she might, she seemed determinedly stuck as an ordinary human girl.
Stiles had made this his main priority, collecting articles that read more like bad fanfiction, which were stacked in haphazard piles all over Clary’s room. He seemed to be the only one capable of getting a response from her these days, her obvious hostility towards her sisters’ pursuits of the missing family grimoire.
Despite being surrounded by people to the point where she felt as though she was practically tripping over them every day, though truth be told between the lurking cats and Dawn’s predilection for curling up with a book in the strangest floor-spaces she’d earned a few bruised shins she’d taken as a result of the falls she’d suffered, she couldn’t help feeling a bit lonely. Sitting at her desk in the cramped spare room alone, pouring over letters from a dead woman.
They all had their projects, had chosen a team to play on.
And once again, she was a team of one.
Autumn passed and in that time the five of them fell into a rhythm. Sunday pancakes at Stiles’ diner, game night on Thursdays, Dawn’s softball league on Tuesdays, PTA bake sales and Homecoming and a student art show for Clary. Autumn passed by with a whisper - holding nothing and no one accountable, least of all itself.
Autumn passed and every day Lydia looked out at the wind and expected change, but instead saw only red, orange, and yellow leaves tossed about. It was more of a mocking reminder of her life up to that point than a signal of things to come.
Through some sort of unspoken agreement, Lydia and Stiles went home for Thanksgiving, and after only three days Lydia was back in the spare room at the Rosse home, her eyes a little red, but otherwise the same studious Lydia, pouring over slips of paper as if they carried the weight of her whole world. No one asked why Stiles didn’t return with her.
And Clary signed up for the women’s field hockey team at school after several strongly worded emails passed between Dawn and the school’s guidance counselor about her anger issues.
A week after Thanksgiving, Allison came home to find Dawn and Clary glaring daggers at her from the living room. The two of them were never very good at being sneaky or even subtle - especially when they were working together. Regardless of Clary’s general boycott on all things Rosse-sisters, Allison had already figured out that the two of them had pulled their funds to buy her an antique crossbow for Christmas. She also knew that they were completely stumped on what to get Lydia but were also too terrified of her reaction to ask Allison for advice.
And yet, here they were, with their we need to talk faces on - that were so terribly similar and everyone was still dancing around the reasons why - and she felt like she’d been slammed into a tidal wave.
“This - whatever this is - has to wait until tomorrow,” she said wearily as she leaned against the door and pulled her purse over her head to hang on the rack by the door. “Unless it’s that you’ve both relented on the no meat thing and there’s going to be cheeseburgers for dinner tonight, because I’m starved.”
Her sister gave each other you first glances and the movement - which had her whole delighted her in the way that only sisters who understood each other’s very movements could understand - suddenly made her feel nauseous and her skin crawl.
No one had said it - hell, Clary’s stubbornness had nearly masked it - but she felt it in every glance they gave her, every benign conversation about carpooling and homework - she wasn’t their sister.
All their scrying and spellwork and digging through attic boxes was a pursuit for the answer to the question no one was willing to ask: Why?
Why had their mother - barely twenty years old and with a newborn baby still in her crib - why did she take off with some stranger?
Why had she had a child with him?
And why did she leave with him a second time?
All these years, mom leaving had been the cause of a foreign interloper - someone or something had dragged her away from them. Now it was clear that she had run away from the daughter she shouldn’t have ever born and right into the arms of the man who caused it all.
The interloper was Allison. She was somehow both the result and the cause of their mother’s streak of running away. Like a viper in the nest, just waiting to strike and tear them apart.
Allison swallowed her nausea and pushed away from the door, grabbing her bag, “On second thought, I’ll eat out. I want to catch Faith’s class tonight anyway.”
Dawn closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the front door clicking closed and Allison’s car engine turn over in the driveway. Clary’s feet on the stairs back into the kitchen and her mountain of paperwork. Lydia’s soft music drifting down from the attic room. Bo purring and rubbing against her legs.
Truth was, Stiles and Lydia moving into the guest room made the house feel like a home again. More like it was before grams passed. Even with Clary’s sulky silences, it still felt better than not. Their mother’s letter raised more questions than answers, Lydia and Allison were still keeping each other at arm’s length, and hell… she was basically running a halfway home for teenage runaways. Stiles’ absence was a blow in the sense that now they didn’t have someone in the middle giving them an excuse to not speak to each other.
Dawn had secretly taken up an affair with her boss. Which was either a result of stress or the end result of three years arguing and bantering with a hottie who hated her husband. Dawn didn’t really care which and rationalized that she was far too young for either reason to say much about her character, so she was determined not to let it bother her too much.
“Come on, baby. Want to help me with dinner?”
“By help do you mean sit at the kitchen table and mock you while I do homework?”
“I’ll even let you pick the music.”
Clary closed her eyes and held her hands together in prayer, “Anything but Fall Out Boy.”
Faith’s small gym catered to moms who wanted something more exciting than pilates to drop pregnancy pounds, girls who were kicked out of Miss Trina’s Pink Tutus for being too-aggressive and sent here by concerned parents, a handful of girls from the high school and tiny community college with haunted eyes, and Allison.
Faith was a petite brunette in her late 20’s with military awards in her office and a framed ‘AA’ in physical education. Allison still wasn’t sure how she ended up in their small town - the one time she asked Faith had laughed tonelessly and said, “It was either here or hell.” A statement Allison tried not to take too literally.
She’d stumbled into Faith’s studio two weeks after grams had died. She did three classes in a row without Faith saying anything and then beat into one of the heaviest punching bags for an extra thirty minutes - turning around to find the gym empty and Faith sitting cross-legged near the wall of mirrors (still with their old barre from that one upstart who tried to compete against Miss Trina) with a cigarette in her mouth.
“Jesus, kid. Did somebody die?”
“My grandmother.”
Faith nodded and sucked on her cigarette, “Cancer?” Allison just stared, pacing back and forth, drenched in sweat. “In my experience, that kind of anger is fueled by two things: violent death, or disease. Things that can’t be stopped.”
“It was maybe both.”
“A murderer with cancert bullets instead of the regular thing. Gotcha.”
Allison cracked a smile.
“So what are you going to do about it? Kill yourself?
“I just…” Allison squared her shoulders and said the thing she couldn’t say aloud to her sisters. “I don’t want to ever feel helpless again.”
Faith studied her for a minute, “Well I think you’re better off getting a medical degree, but as long as you promise never to pull a stunt like tonight’s again, I might be able to help you get where you are headed.”
Which basically meant Allison had free reign of the place as long as she came for a private session once a week and helped out with the 6-10 range whenever she could, which was a bit like herding cats only afterwards Faith offered her a beer and the moms sometimes brought them dinner.
In the madness of her familiar actually being a girl and her mother’s letters being found, Allison’s training had petered off. She still came to the kid’s class to help out - dragging Stiles and Clary along to play punching bag - only to leave in the whirl of mothers and fathers coming to pick up their offspring. She wasn’t avoiding Faith so much as she was avoiding the whole concept of being in the place where she found solace.
If there was one thing Allison had been avoiding the past three months, it was comfort. She didn’t want to feel powerful or courageous or strong or healthy… she was perfectly happy feeling miserable. She didn’t want to adjust or play fair or hell, be self-aware at all.
Except looking across the room at her sister’s faces and feeling that pit of anger rising up, threatening to shoot bitterness out, well that was as much of a wake-up call as Allison was ever going to need.
She nodded to Faith and stepped into the back of the Beginner’s class and went through the simple movements she had long ago mastered, allowing the breath and action take over, letting her spinning mind finally flow.
After class, Faith handed her a plastic cup of water and sat next to her on the floor, their backs against the long mirror and their legs spread out in front of them, and no one else in sight to see her cry.
“Wait. What do you mean she’s at faith’s gym? Is that some kind of code for found Jesus while jogging?”
Dawn shook her head and grinned at her - it was her day to cook which meant a casserole was currently defrosting in case her new experiment went awry. From what Lydia could tell, Dawn’s food adventures had about a ten-percent likelihood of success. “Not faith’s gym - Faith’s gym. Faith is a person. She teaches kickboxing or something.”
“Didn’t you notice she’s gone all the time now?” Clary didn’t bother to look up from her Geometry homework at the kitchen table.
“Also,” Dawn sprinkled some pepperjack cheese on what looked like a fruit salad, “Stiles went there a few times, I’m surprised he’s never mentioned it.”
“Stiles went to a kickboxing gym?”
“Stiles went to an all-female gym. Aside from Simon, he’s the only male over the age of ten Faith’s ever allowed on the premises. She makes dads wait outside when they come at pick-up time.”
Lydia felt slightly ambushed and blushed, “I guess I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
Dawn began stuffing what looked like raw pita pockets with her strange concoction, “We understand.”
Clary hugged at the table behind them, but didn’t say anything.
“Will she be there long?”
“Kickboxing is like Allison’s form of yoga, so usually there’s really no telling. But it’s Thursday and she never forgets about game night.”
Lydia winced. The last few weeks, she’d avoided game night, not entirely willing to see if Stiles was right and she was depending on him rather than attempting to form her own relationships with the Rosse sisters.
"Well I guess I’ll just tell you then and she can find out when she gets home.”
“Find out what?” Clary’s voice held an unrestrained threat in it.
“Stiles is on his way, he says he has something to tell us, and it had to be in person.”
Stiles was waiting in the parking lot when Allison finally stepped out into the crisp winter air. A light snow was falling - the first of the season - and she hoped it stuck so that Clary would have a white Christmas. The Rosse family had never been the tree-decorating, lights on the house, stockings on the fireplace type - until Clary. When Clary turned three, their mother brought home a tree for the first time and though grams had put up quite a bit of a fuss the first couple of years, they all thought of it as Clary’s special holiday.
“You’re back! Why didn’t you come in? Faith would have loved to say hello!”
She was beaming, her breath coming out in little bursts of steam, her long hair curling out from where she had shoved it in her knitted cap, her boots lightly tapping on the pavement.
His nose was red from waiting in the cold and his eyes gleamed with … mischief, maybe.
She stopped in front of him and opened her mouth to say something about the snow when he narrowed his eyes and said, “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
Allison shook her head and turned towards her car, pulling her keys out of her low-hung purse. “If you came all the way back here to interrogate me, then you can walk back.” She threw her small duffel bag into the trunk and slammed the lid down.
“I wasn’t asking, I was telling. You are - I know you are, I see the way you look at her.”
Allison’s shoulders tightened. For a minute, she stood silently at her car door, her back to him. And then she said so softly he nearly didn’t hear, “So what?”
“So what?!” he went around to the passenger’s side so he could glare at her over the roof of the car. “That’s the best you got?!”
“Yeah, that’s it. So what? So it doesn’t change anything, so she was still forced into this by magic or the Universe or whatever, so she still lied to me-“
“So you’re lying to her now as payback, is that it?”
“No!” she shouted and then looked down at her hands. “No,” she said - more softly this time, “it’s not payback. I understand why she lied. But she should still have the chance to leave.”
“Isn’t not telling her how you feel, or at least giving it a shot, taking her choice away from her again?”
“We tried that, remember? We tried being normal, getting to know each other slowly, and we were handed a bomb. Every time we get close, it gets more… complicated.”
Understanding dawned in Stiles’ eyes, “You don’t want her to think you’re using her for information, for more clues about your mom.”
Allison shrugged.
He laughed, “I’m pretty sure the Universe would be able to see through any fake-dating scheme.”
“But would she?” Allison’s voice sounded broken. “Would she ever be able to trust that it was real between us?”
“But…” Stiles shook his head, “ But it’s like…”
“The deeper in we are, the more we come to learn.”
“Your logic is flawed.”
“The situation is flawed. But she deserves an out either way.”
“Don’t you both deserve to be with the person you love?”
Allison’s eyes darkened as she opened her door, “I’m not sure what I deserve, but happily ever after isn’t in my cards.”
The drive back to the Rosse house was silent, Allison brooding - her good mood from class now gone - and Stiles plotting.
Which probably had nothing to do with the circumstances, Stiles was always plotting something.
The house went into a bit of a whirlwind when they arrived. To say that the Rosse girls - who had never had a brother - spoiled Stiles, was a bit of an understatement. No other male had been privy to their secret history, aside from fuzzy memories of an oft-absent father, so when he waltzed in, knowing enough not to be seen as a threat, they took to him like cats to cream.
The excitement wore of in only a few moments as they all remembered that he was back with important news.
“Wait!” Clary raised her hands over her head as Lydia and Allison shifted her homework off the kitchen table. “First we need to try these monstrosities Dawn calls food and decide if their edible or if we need to keep the oven hat for something else.”
They clustered around the counter as Dawn sliced the extra pocket into five. She always made one extra for taste-testing purposes.
“Holy balls, Dawnie! This is great!” Stiles reached out to grab the piece out of Lydia’s hand but she slapped him away. “What is it?”
“Avocado, mango, sweet and red potato, garbanzo beans, bell-peppers, jalapenos, and cheese,” Dawn sighed with relief. “Yours and Alli’s have chicken in them, too.”
“You might have to make more,” Clary said through a mouthful, fanning her mouth as she had obviously taken too large of a bite and the pockets were still hot from the oven.
“Depends on whether we still have an appetite after Stiles tells us why he’s back,” Lydia said, carrying plates and a pitcher of sweet ice tea to the table.
Stiles winked at Dawn, “More would be great if you can.”
“There’s another batch already in the oven,” she stage-whispered.
After devouring three pockets, Stiles looked at them appraisingly and said, “First off, I have to admit that I lied.” He looked at Lydia and then Clary, “Especially to you. I said that I was working on why Lydia couldn’t turn back into a cougar, but I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t?” Lydia’s forehead creased. “You put on quite a show.”
“Oh, I mean I was looking. I am. I still can - but I think we all know that was only a temporary thing. I kinda think it was a kick in the ass to get you to come here and since you did -” he snapped his fingers.
“I agree,” Dawn cut in. “Or at least the garden does…”
Clary shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but Stiles grabbed her hand, “Alright kiddo, no more magic at the dinner table, right?” He nodded at her and she went back to nibbling at her pocket.
“It occurred to me that the magic route wasn’t giving us any solid answers, so I dug around the human way.”
“You dug up bodies?!” Clary looked down at the hand he was holding like she might have to cut it off.
“In a manner of speaking,” he turned his attention to Dawn. “I googled the hell out of your family tree. Interesting stuff. Couldn’t find your roots across the pond, but your family has been here since the early colonists. Even inter-married with Cherokee in the area awhile back. Probably French originally, but the Petersons... they were British for sure.”
“Petersons?” Allison’s stomach dropped.
“Yeah. You know how the old European royals all intermarried for years? The Rosse and the Petersons are kinda like that, every generation or so a Rosse and a Peterson get married, have babies.” He took a drink of tea and then leaned in, elbows on the table. “If you look at a family tree like a straight arrow, you could almost miss it, but build it from the roots up follow every thread - and yeah, the pattern is there. Nothing anyone would notice if you weren’t looking for it.”
“What made you look for it?” Lydia croaked out.
Stiles shook his head, “There was something about those letters, about Peter.”
Allison sought Dawn’s gaze across the table, yearning to apologize even if she didn’t know what for.
“And then I got it into my head that while no one would call their kid Peter Peterson, maybe a woman would change the name of her lover from Mr. Peters to just Peter as a joke or a clue.”
“So is he a Peterson?”
Stiles shook his head, “Damned if I know, around the twenties, Petersons fall out of the Rosse tree and off the face of the planet. It looks like they all died out.”
“Or someone wants it to look like they all died out,” Lydia looked up, surprised to hear Clary give voice to the thing they didn’t want to admit. That there was something sinister lurking under this story.
“Well that brings me to Lydia’s paternity test-”
“My WHAT?!”
“Her… why???”
Stiles held up his hands in surrender, “It makes sense, okay? Just hear me out to the end.”
Behind him, the oven chirped and Dawn stood up, “Keep going, I’ll be able to hear you.”
“So Peter has dreams about your mom and Lydia has dreams about Allison. I had to rule out that he was… your dad.” Allison’s face when white and Lydia’s turned the color of a ripe tomato. “It was one of my crazier theories. Which was totally fueled by your mom lying you birth certificate,” he pointed at Allison. “We all know Peter is your dad, but your birth certificate was signed by Kris. Same as your sisters’. Which pretty much left me with a profound sense of distrust.”
Lydia cut in, “Skip ahead to you doing a paternity test. I assume my birth certificate has my parents on it?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t trust it. I had to go home to figure it all out.”
“I wasn’t adopted, then.” Lydia didn’t really know how to feel about that exactly. It wasn’t relief and after everything that happened, it wasn’t a surprise either.
“Both of your parents check out. You are 100% Martin. Which isn’t all that bad, actually. You guys got up to some hinky stuff in Iceland a while back but otherwise-”
“Otherwise no witches,” Clary said slowly.
Stiles shrugged, “I couldn’t find the same kind of pattern like with the Rosse history. But I don’t know who I’m looking for, just what. And that makes it hard.” He took a deep breath, “You are the very last of the Rosse line. Some far-flung relations here and there but…”
“So where does that leave us?” Dawn rested her hand on the back of Stiles’ chair.
“Ah, this is my favorite part,” when he smiled, Allison felt a strong desire to run out of the room as fast as she could. “Allison and Lydia aren’t sisters - I even ruled out Mr. Martin being Peter, never ask me to explain that - but they are connected. Every time they get closer, we get another glimpse at the truth.”
Dawn smirked, “Too bad they’re both too stubborn to admit they totally fell for each other.”
Clary groaned, “If this being solved hangs on them having to make declarations to each other, we’re doomed.”
Stiles laughed and stood up, yanking Clary out of her chair, “Come on. I’ll teach you how to play poker.”
“Puh-lease amateur. I’ll teach you how to lose at poker.”
Dawn rolled her eyes at them and then pointed at the two girls sitting at the table, “Don’t even think about joining game night until the kitchen is spotless.”
By the time Allison had recovered from the emotional whiplash of the dinner conversation, Lydia had already cleared the table and was up to her elbows in warm suds. Allison worked on cleaning off the counter and table - putting Dawn’s scattered ingredients and utensils away as Lydia washed and dried the dishes.
She was putting away the broom in the pantry when Lydia said in a choked voice, “I already told you that I love you so if you’re waiting for me to-”
But Allison never heard what she was supposed to be waiting for because she had already gathered up Lydia in her arms and had nipped her nose playfully, stopping Lydia’s words in their tracks.
She pressed her forehead to Lydia’s, “You should still get out, run away while you still can.”
Lydia laughed brokenly, “Come with me.”
“Leave, Lydia. This is crazy. Dreams and lions and witches? This isn’t a life.”
Lydia kissed Allison softly, her lips warm and soft, “Wild cougars couldn’t chase me away.”
“I’d like to see them try.”
Clary’s voice interrupted them, “I’m seriously going to implement a no kissing in the kitchen rule because gross, goddess save my appetite. Also get your asses in here, it’s time for Huggermugger and I can’t beat Dawn without your help.” As an afterthought she threw over her shoulder, “Allison, you’ve got Stiles. I’d pity you more if I wasn’t worried that you making out with my teammate might make her lose her edge.”
Clary needn’t have worried, even with their legs tangled up in each other’s, Lydia still chased Dawn around the board - and nearly won. Clary smashed them all in Disney Trivial Pursuit, Settlers of Catan came down to a battle between Stiles and Dawn, and Allison won Clue in three moves like always.
There was a lot to discuss and learn, they were nowhere near the edge of the woods yet - with their budding relationship or with the current magic dilemma that was their lives - but sitting in front of the fire with Lydia pressed against her side, their makeshift family laughing around them and snow falling gently outside - it almost felt like maybe they didn’t need to wait for the other shoe to drop. Maybe it wasn’t coming.
Allison briefly imagined magical Easter eggs popping up all over the house - after their first fight, after second base, after their first real date (which she really should plan) - roadmaps sending up little flares to the others over the status of their relationship. Like the flowers spilling everyone’s secrets to Dawn only on a more epically embarrassing scale. She laughed and teased with the others and squeezed Lydia’s hand when she looked over at her worriedly.
Okay, so they had a lot more to deal with than any normal relationship should … but they’d get through it.
They had to.
Let the shoes fall where they may.
Upstairs, beneath a pile of Clary’s sketchpads, a small notebook with teenage scrawl covering it’s pages and the name Rebecca embossed on the cover appeared. While one sister waited for the world to come crashing down and another held back her suspicions to watch silently, the third started down a very dangerous path of keeping secrets.
fandom: btvs/teenwolf/tmi
characters: allison/lydia; dawn summers, clary fray, stiles/lydia-friendship, clary/simon-friendship
word count: 4500/19,000
setting: set a few years before the events of destiny came a calling; witches-au allison thinks she'll never find her familiar... Lydia always knew that she was different from her family and friends, she just didn't know how much...
[ one: summer]
[ two: spring]
[ three (1): autumn]
[ three (2): autumn]
Lydia watched autumn slip by behind a counter filling coffee orders and writing papers on the Rise and Fall of Christendom for the class Dawn forced her to enroll in. Between steaming milk, avoiding flirtatious regulars, and memorizing innocuous dates, Lydia spent most of her spare time pouring over the ‘Rebecca Letters’ and unsuccessfully attempting to turn herself back into a cougar.
She hadn’t been able to shift back into her wild form since the night she arrived on the Rosse’s doorstep, which was both frustrating and terrifying. Try as she might, she seemed determinedly stuck as an ordinary human girl.
Stiles had made this his main priority, collecting articles that read more like bad fanfiction, which were stacked in haphazard piles all over Clary’s room. He seemed to be the only one capable of getting a response from her these days, her obvious hostility towards her sisters’ pursuits of the missing family grimoire.
Despite being surrounded by people to the point where she felt as though she was practically tripping over them every day, though truth be told between the lurking cats and Dawn’s predilection for curling up with a book in the strangest floor-spaces she’d earned a few bruised shins she’d taken as a result of the falls she’d suffered, she couldn’t help feeling a bit lonely. Sitting at her desk in the cramped spare room alone, pouring over letters from a dead woman.
They all had their projects, had chosen a team to play on.
And once again, she was a team of one.
Autumn passed and in that time the five of them fell into a rhythm. Sunday pancakes at Stiles’ diner, game night on Thursdays, Dawn’s softball league on Tuesdays, PTA bake sales and Homecoming and a student art show for Clary. Autumn passed by with a whisper - holding nothing and no one accountable, least of all itself.
Autumn passed and every day Lydia looked out at the wind and expected change, but instead saw only red, orange, and yellow leaves tossed about. It was more of a mocking reminder of her life up to that point than a signal of things to come.
Through some sort of unspoken agreement, Lydia and Stiles went home for Thanksgiving, and after only three days Lydia was back in the spare room at the Rosse home, her eyes a little red, but otherwise the same studious Lydia, pouring over slips of paper as if they carried the weight of her whole world. No one asked why Stiles didn’t return with her.
And Clary signed up for the women’s field hockey team at school after several strongly worded emails passed between Dawn and the school’s guidance counselor about her anger issues.
A week after Thanksgiving, Allison came home to find Dawn and Clary glaring daggers at her from the living room. The two of them were never very good at being sneaky or even subtle - especially when they were working together. Regardless of Clary’s general boycott on all things Rosse-sisters, Allison had already figured out that the two of them had pulled their funds to buy her an antique crossbow for Christmas. She also knew that they were completely stumped on what to get Lydia but were also too terrified of her reaction to ask Allison for advice.
And yet, here they were, with their we need to talk faces on - that were so terribly similar and everyone was still dancing around the reasons why - and she felt like she’d been slammed into a tidal wave.
“This - whatever this is - has to wait until tomorrow,” she said wearily as she leaned against the door and pulled her purse over her head to hang on the rack by the door. “Unless it’s that you’ve both relented on the no meat thing and there’s going to be cheeseburgers for dinner tonight, because I’m starved.”
Her sister gave each other you first glances and the movement - which had her whole delighted her in the way that only sisters who understood each other’s very movements could understand - suddenly made her feel nauseous and her skin crawl.
No one had said it - hell, Clary’s stubbornness had nearly masked it - but she felt it in every glance they gave her, every benign conversation about carpooling and homework - she wasn’t their sister.
All their scrying and spellwork and digging through attic boxes was a pursuit for the answer to the question no one was willing to ask: Why?
Why had their mother - barely twenty years old and with a newborn baby still in her crib - why did she take off with some stranger?
Why had she had a child with him?
And why did she leave with him a second time?
All these years, mom leaving had been the cause of a foreign interloper - someone or something had dragged her away from them. Now it was clear that she had run away from the daughter she shouldn’t have ever born and right into the arms of the man who caused it all.
The interloper was Allison. She was somehow both the result and the cause of their mother’s streak of running away. Like a viper in the nest, just waiting to strike and tear them apart.
Allison swallowed her nausea and pushed away from the door, grabbing her bag, “On second thought, I’ll eat out. I want to catch Faith’s class tonight anyway.”
Dawn closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the front door clicking closed and Allison’s car engine turn over in the driveway. Clary’s feet on the stairs back into the kitchen and her mountain of paperwork. Lydia’s soft music drifting down from the attic room. Bo purring and rubbing against her legs.
Truth was, Stiles and Lydia moving into the guest room made the house feel like a home again. More like it was before grams passed. Even with Clary’s sulky silences, it still felt better than not. Their mother’s letter raised more questions than answers, Lydia and Allison were still keeping each other at arm’s length, and hell… she was basically running a halfway home for teenage runaways. Stiles’ absence was a blow in the sense that now they didn’t have someone in the middle giving them an excuse to not speak to each other.
Dawn had secretly taken up an affair with her boss. Which was either a result of stress or the end result of three years arguing and bantering with a hottie who hated her husband. Dawn didn’t really care which and rationalized that she was far too young for either reason to say much about her character, so she was determined not to let it bother her too much.
“Come on, baby. Want to help me with dinner?”
“By help do you mean sit at the kitchen table and mock you while I do homework?”
“I’ll even let you pick the music.”
Clary closed her eyes and held her hands together in prayer, “Anything but Fall Out Boy.”
Faith’s small gym catered to moms who wanted something more exciting than pilates to drop pregnancy pounds, girls who were kicked out of Miss Trina’s Pink Tutus for being too-aggressive and sent here by concerned parents, a handful of girls from the high school and tiny community college with haunted eyes, and Allison.
Faith was a petite brunette in her late 20’s with military awards in her office and a framed ‘AA’ in physical education. Allison still wasn’t sure how she ended up in their small town - the one time she asked Faith had laughed tonelessly and said, “It was either here or hell.” A statement Allison tried not to take too literally.
She’d stumbled into Faith’s studio two weeks after grams had died. She did three classes in a row without Faith saying anything and then beat into one of the heaviest punching bags for an extra thirty minutes - turning around to find the gym empty and Faith sitting cross-legged near the wall of mirrors (still with their old barre from that one upstart who tried to compete against Miss Trina) with a cigarette in her mouth.
“Jesus, kid. Did somebody die?”
“My grandmother.”
Faith nodded and sucked on her cigarette, “Cancer?” Allison just stared, pacing back and forth, drenched in sweat. “In my experience, that kind of anger is fueled by two things: violent death, or disease. Things that can’t be stopped.”
“It was maybe both.”
“A murderer with cancert bullets instead of the regular thing. Gotcha.”
Allison cracked a smile.
“So what are you going to do about it? Kill yourself?
“I just…” Allison squared her shoulders and said the thing she couldn’t say aloud to her sisters. “I don’t want to ever feel helpless again.”
Faith studied her for a minute, “Well I think you’re better off getting a medical degree, but as long as you promise never to pull a stunt like tonight’s again, I might be able to help you get where you are headed.”
Which basically meant Allison had free reign of the place as long as she came for a private session once a week and helped out with the 6-10 range whenever she could, which was a bit like herding cats only afterwards Faith offered her a beer and the moms sometimes brought them dinner.
In the madness of her familiar actually being a girl and her mother’s letters being found, Allison’s training had petered off. She still came to the kid’s class to help out - dragging Stiles and Clary along to play punching bag - only to leave in the whirl of mothers and fathers coming to pick up their offspring. She wasn’t avoiding Faith so much as she was avoiding the whole concept of being in the place where she found solace.
If there was one thing Allison had been avoiding the past three months, it was comfort. She didn’t want to feel powerful or courageous or strong or healthy… she was perfectly happy feeling miserable. She didn’t want to adjust or play fair or hell, be self-aware at all.
Except looking across the room at her sister’s faces and feeling that pit of anger rising up, threatening to shoot bitterness out, well that was as much of a wake-up call as Allison was ever going to need.
She nodded to Faith and stepped into the back of the Beginner’s class and went through the simple movements she had long ago mastered, allowing the breath and action take over, letting her spinning mind finally flow.
After class, Faith handed her a plastic cup of water and sat next to her on the floor, their backs against the long mirror and their legs spread out in front of them, and no one else in sight to see her cry.
“Wait. What do you mean she’s at faith’s gym? Is that some kind of code for found Jesus while jogging?”
Dawn shook her head and grinned at her - it was her day to cook which meant a casserole was currently defrosting in case her new experiment went awry. From what Lydia could tell, Dawn’s food adventures had about a ten-percent likelihood of success. “Not faith’s gym - Faith’s gym. Faith is a person. She teaches kickboxing or something.”
“Didn’t you notice she’s gone all the time now?” Clary didn’t bother to look up from her Geometry homework at the kitchen table.
“Also,” Dawn sprinkled some pepperjack cheese on what looked like a fruit salad, “Stiles went there a few times, I’m surprised he’s never mentioned it.”
“Stiles went to a kickboxing gym?”
“Stiles went to an all-female gym. Aside from Simon, he’s the only male over the age of ten Faith’s ever allowed on the premises. She makes dads wait outside when they come at pick-up time.”
Lydia felt slightly ambushed and blushed, “I guess I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
Dawn began stuffing what looked like raw pita pockets with her strange concoction, “We understand.”
Clary hugged at the table behind them, but didn’t say anything.
“Will she be there long?”
“Kickboxing is like Allison’s form of yoga, so usually there’s really no telling. But it’s Thursday and she never forgets about game night.”
Lydia winced. The last few weeks, she’d avoided game night, not entirely willing to see if Stiles was right and she was depending on him rather than attempting to form her own relationships with the Rosse sisters.
"Well I guess I’ll just tell you then and she can find out when she gets home.”
“Find out what?” Clary’s voice held an unrestrained threat in it.
“Stiles is on his way, he says he has something to tell us, and it had to be in person.”
Stiles was waiting in the parking lot when Allison finally stepped out into the crisp winter air. A light snow was falling - the first of the season - and she hoped it stuck so that Clary would have a white Christmas. The Rosse family had never been the tree-decorating, lights on the house, stockings on the fireplace type - until Clary. When Clary turned three, their mother brought home a tree for the first time and though grams had put up quite a bit of a fuss the first couple of years, they all thought of it as Clary’s special holiday.
“You’re back! Why didn’t you come in? Faith would have loved to say hello!”
She was beaming, her breath coming out in little bursts of steam, her long hair curling out from where she had shoved it in her knitted cap, her boots lightly tapping on the pavement.
His nose was red from waiting in the cold and his eyes gleamed with … mischief, maybe.
She stopped in front of him and opened her mouth to say something about the snow when he narrowed his eyes and said, “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
Allison shook her head and turned towards her car, pulling her keys out of her low-hung purse. “If you came all the way back here to interrogate me, then you can walk back.” She threw her small duffel bag into the trunk and slammed the lid down.
“I wasn’t asking, I was telling. You are - I know you are, I see the way you look at her.”
Allison’s shoulders tightened. For a minute, she stood silently at her car door, her back to him. And then she said so softly he nearly didn’t hear, “So what?”
“So what?!” he went around to the passenger’s side so he could glare at her over the roof of the car. “That’s the best you got?!”
“Yeah, that’s it. So what? So it doesn’t change anything, so she was still forced into this by magic or the Universe or whatever, so she still lied to me-“
“So you’re lying to her now as payback, is that it?”
“No!” she shouted and then looked down at her hands. “No,” she said - more softly this time, “it’s not payback. I understand why she lied. But she should still have the chance to leave.”
“Isn’t not telling her how you feel, or at least giving it a shot, taking her choice away from her again?”
“We tried that, remember? We tried being normal, getting to know each other slowly, and we were handed a bomb. Every time we get close, it gets more… complicated.”
Understanding dawned in Stiles’ eyes, “You don’t want her to think you’re using her for information, for more clues about your mom.”
Allison shrugged.
He laughed, “I’m pretty sure the Universe would be able to see through any fake-dating scheme.”
“But would she?” Allison’s voice sounded broken. “Would she ever be able to trust that it was real between us?”
“But…” Stiles shook his head, “ But it’s like…”
“The deeper in we are, the more we come to learn.”
“Your logic is flawed.”
“The situation is flawed. But she deserves an out either way.”
“Don’t you both deserve to be with the person you love?”
Allison’s eyes darkened as she opened her door, “I’m not sure what I deserve, but happily ever after isn’t in my cards.”
The drive back to the Rosse house was silent, Allison brooding - her good mood from class now gone - and Stiles plotting.
Which probably had nothing to do with the circumstances, Stiles was always plotting something.
The house went into a bit of a whirlwind when they arrived. To say that the Rosse girls - who had never had a brother - spoiled Stiles, was a bit of an understatement. No other male had been privy to their secret history, aside from fuzzy memories of an oft-absent father, so when he waltzed in, knowing enough not to be seen as a threat, they took to him like cats to cream.
The excitement wore of in only a few moments as they all remembered that he was back with important news.
“Wait!” Clary raised her hands over her head as Lydia and Allison shifted her homework off the kitchen table. “First we need to try these monstrosities Dawn calls food and decide if their edible or if we need to keep the oven hat for something else.”
They clustered around the counter as Dawn sliced the extra pocket into five. She always made one extra for taste-testing purposes.
“Holy balls, Dawnie! This is great!” Stiles reached out to grab the piece out of Lydia’s hand but she slapped him away. “What is it?”
“Avocado, mango, sweet and red potato, garbanzo beans, bell-peppers, jalapenos, and cheese,” Dawn sighed with relief. “Yours and Alli’s have chicken in them, too.”
“You might have to make more,” Clary said through a mouthful, fanning her mouth as she had obviously taken too large of a bite and the pockets were still hot from the oven.
“Depends on whether we still have an appetite after Stiles tells us why he’s back,” Lydia said, carrying plates and a pitcher of sweet ice tea to the table.
Stiles winked at Dawn, “More would be great if you can.”
“There’s another batch already in the oven,” she stage-whispered.
After devouring three pockets, Stiles looked at them appraisingly and said, “First off, I have to admit that I lied.” He looked at Lydia and then Clary, “Especially to you. I said that I was working on why Lydia couldn’t turn back into a cougar, but I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t?” Lydia’s forehead creased. “You put on quite a show.”
“Oh, I mean I was looking. I am. I still can - but I think we all know that was only a temporary thing. I kinda think it was a kick in the ass to get you to come here and since you did -” he snapped his fingers.
“I agree,” Dawn cut in. “Or at least the garden does…”
Clary shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but Stiles grabbed her hand, “Alright kiddo, no more magic at the dinner table, right?” He nodded at her and she went back to nibbling at her pocket.
“It occurred to me that the magic route wasn’t giving us any solid answers, so I dug around the human way.”
“You dug up bodies?!” Clary looked down at the hand he was holding like she might have to cut it off.
“In a manner of speaking,” he turned his attention to Dawn. “I googled the hell out of your family tree. Interesting stuff. Couldn’t find your roots across the pond, but your family has been here since the early colonists. Even inter-married with Cherokee in the area awhile back. Probably French originally, but the Petersons... they were British for sure.”
“Petersons?” Allison’s stomach dropped.
“Yeah. You know how the old European royals all intermarried for years? The Rosse and the Petersons are kinda like that, every generation or so a Rosse and a Peterson get married, have babies.” He took a drink of tea and then leaned in, elbows on the table. “If you look at a family tree like a straight arrow, you could almost miss it, but build it from the roots up follow every thread - and yeah, the pattern is there. Nothing anyone would notice if you weren’t looking for it.”
“What made you look for it?” Lydia croaked out.
Stiles shook his head, “There was something about those letters, about Peter.”
Allison sought Dawn’s gaze across the table, yearning to apologize even if she didn’t know what for.
“And then I got it into my head that while no one would call their kid Peter Peterson, maybe a woman would change the name of her lover from Mr. Peters to just Peter as a joke or a clue.”
“So is he a Peterson?”
Stiles shook his head, “Damned if I know, around the twenties, Petersons fall out of the Rosse tree and off the face of the planet. It looks like they all died out.”
“Or someone wants it to look like they all died out,” Lydia looked up, surprised to hear Clary give voice to the thing they didn’t want to admit. That there was something sinister lurking under this story.
“Well that brings me to Lydia’s paternity test-”
“My WHAT?!”
“Her… why???”
Stiles held up his hands in surrender, “It makes sense, okay? Just hear me out to the end.”
Behind him, the oven chirped and Dawn stood up, “Keep going, I’ll be able to hear you.”
“So Peter has dreams about your mom and Lydia has dreams about Allison. I had to rule out that he was… your dad.” Allison’s face when white and Lydia’s turned the color of a ripe tomato. “It was one of my crazier theories. Which was totally fueled by your mom lying you birth certificate,” he pointed at Allison. “We all know Peter is your dad, but your birth certificate was signed by Kris. Same as your sisters’. Which pretty much left me with a profound sense of distrust.”
Lydia cut in, “Skip ahead to you doing a paternity test. I assume my birth certificate has my parents on it?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t trust it. I had to go home to figure it all out.”
“I wasn’t adopted, then.” Lydia didn’t really know how to feel about that exactly. It wasn’t relief and after everything that happened, it wasn’t a surprise either.
“Both of your parents check out. You are 100% Martin. Which isn’t all that bad, actually. You guys got up to some hinky stuff in Iceland a while back but otherwise-”
“Otherwise no witches,” Clary said slowly.
Stiles shrugged, “I couldn’t find the same kind of pattern like with the Rosse history. But I don’t know who I’m looking for, just what. And that makes it hard.” He took a deep breath, “You are the very last of the Rosse line. Some far-flung relations here and there but…”
“So where does that leave us?” Dawn rested her hand on the back of Stiles’ chair.
“Ah, this is my favorite part,” when he smiled, Allison felt a strong desire to run out of the room as fast as she could. “Allison and Lydia aren’t sisters - I even ruled out Mr. Martin being Peter, never ask me to explain that - but they are connected. Every time they get closer, we get another glimpse at the truth.”
Dawn smirked, “Too bad they’re both too stubborn to admit they totally fell for each other.”
Clary groaned, “If this being solved hangs on them having to make declarations to each other, we’re doomed.”
Stiles laughed and stood up, yanking Clary out of her chair, “Come on. I’ll teach you how to play poker.”
“Puh-lease amateur. I’ll teach you how to lose at poker.”
Dawn rolled her eyes at them and then pointed at the two girls sitting at the table, “Don’t even think about joining game night until the kitchen is spotless.”
By the time Allison had recovered from the emotional whiplash of the dinner conversation, Lydia had already cleared the table and was up to her elbows in warm suds. Allison worked on cleaning off the counter and table - putting Dawn’s scattered ingredients and utensils away as Lydia washed and dried the dishes.
She was putting away the broom in the pantry when Lydia said in a choked voice, “I already told you that I love you so if you’re waiting for me to-”
But Allison never heard what she was supposed to be waiting for because she had already gathered up Lydia in her arms and had nipped her nose playfully, stopping Lydia’s words in their tracks.
She pressed her forehead to Lydia’s, “You should still get out, run away while you still can.”
Lydia laughed brokenly, “Come with me.”
“Leave, Lydia. This is crazy. Dreams and lions and witches? This isn’t a life.”
Lydia kissed Allison softly, her lips warm and soft, “Wild cougars couldn’t chase me away.”
“I’d like to see them try.”
Clary’s voice interrupted them, “I’m seriously going to implement a no kissing in the kitchen rule because gross, goddess save my appetite. Also get your asses in here, it’s time for Huggermugger and I can’t beat Dawn without your help.” As an afterthought she threw over her shoulder, “Allison, you’ve got Stiles. I’d pity you more if I wasn’t worried that you making out with my teammate might make her lose her edge.”
Clary needn’t have worried, even with their legs tangled up in each other’s, Lydia still chased Dawn around the board - and nearly won. Clary smashed them all in Disney Trivial Pursuit, Settlers of Catan came down to a battle between Stiles and Dawn, and Allison won Clue in three moves like always.
There was a lot to discuss and learn, they were nowhere near the edge of the woods yet - with their budding relationship or with the current magic dilemma that was their lives - but sitting in front of the fire with Lydia pressed against her side, their makeshift family laughing around them and snow falling gently outside - it almost felt like maybe they didn’t need to wait for the other shoe to drop. Maybe it wasn’t coming.
Allison briefly imagined magical Easter eggs popping up all over the house - after their first fight, after second base, after their first real date (which she really should plan) - roadmaps sending up little flares to the others over the status of their relationship. Like the flowers spilling everyone’s secrets to Dawn only on a more epically embarrassing scale. She laughed and teased with the others and squeezed Lydia’s hand when she looked over at her worriedly.
Okay, so they had a lot more to deal with than any normal relationship should … but they’d get through it.
They had to.
Let the shoes fall where they may.
Upstairs, beneath a pile of Clary’s sketchpads, a small notebook with teenage scrawl covering it’s pages and the name Rebecca embossed on the cover appeared. While one sister waited for the world to come crashing down and another held back her suspicions to watch silently, the third started down a very dangerous path of keeping secrets.