suddenly I can see what I didn't before
Uh, so here’s 3k words of fluff and soul mate marks, hope you enjoy, love. Merry Chistmas xx
To Tay (@lydiamqrtin) From Kath (@regardselena)
Derek is laughing at her and Stiles’ keyboard-smash Polish Name Stain is scrawled across her ribs. This is not how Lydia planned to spend her penultimate summer vacation.
Derek laughs at her when she tells him. If Derek’s life wasn’t already such a fucking tragedy, she’d probably stab him somewhere particularly painful, but, as it is, it’s taken a lot of years to get him to the point where he even felt comfortable displaying normal human emotions beyond anger and that sort of fake salaciousness that had made her decide to steamroll his life and force him to become her friend. Derek laughs at her and she can’t even do anything about it, because he has a perfectly good reason for doing so.
Because there, on her left side, stretched over the delicate skin of her ribcage and fairly close to her breast, is what she assumes Stiles’ real name is. Honestly, it looks like a keyboard smash, and she almost wishes she’d taken Polish instead of French.
Jackson’s name on her forearm, near the crease of her elbow has turned into the pale white scar tissue that means she’s fallen out of love. Aiden’s name, tiny and behind her knee, can barely even be seen anymore.
There is conflicting data that says that the bigger and bolder the lettering the higher chance of forever.
It takes a while, but eventually Lydia pulls her blouse back on and considers prodding Derek on his wrist or his shoulder blade or his hip, but even she’s notthat mean lately.
And, well, it’s not like the damn thing won’t be easy to hide.
“Of course you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist,” Derek scoffs at her, with actual inflection and everything. “Why on earth would you bother to tell him? It’s not like he’s got your name on his chest from collarbone to collarbone.”
“I will disembowel you,” Lydia says pleasantly.
-
The rest of the pack shows up across the span of the next seventy-two hours. She’d been due to be the last one back to their Hellsmouth of a hometown, but she’d changed to an earlier flight when she’d woken up in her tiny apartment, her entire left side feeling like it was being split open as something etched each letter of Stiles’ birth name into her skin like a brand. Scott and Allison show up bright and early the next morning, her best friend’s name poking out of Scott’s ridiculously slouchy muscle tank top.
Allison’s got Scott’s name in prime tramp stamp area, something that Chris Argent had nearly burst a vein in his forehead at when he’d found out. Allison takes one look at her while Scott pulls Liam into a hug. The brunette fixes her with a scrutinizing look, says “I thought you weren’t going to be back until Thursday” just for propriety’s sake, and then jab’s a viciously sharp thumb into the still-sore area that Lydia had been trying not to favor too obviously.
“You told Derek before me?” Allison asks, instead of bothering to give Lydia the dignity of asking whose name has taken up residence on her body. Like she already knows, and, shit, Lydia has never felt this flustered in her life, and she’s double-majoring in mathematics and biochemical engineering in an accelerated program that’s allowing her to get her master’s degree in just five short years.
But she’s Lydia Martin, so she licks her lip and tilts her head in a very and just what are you gonna do about it? kind of challenge that has Allison rolling her eyes.
Malia and Kira show up next, followed by Isaac and Cora. Lydia leaves to go have dinner with her mother and not because Stiles is meant to arrive within the hour, no matter what Derek’s judgmental eyebrows have to say.
She takes precisely eighteen calming breaths in the front seat of her car before she gets out and spends the entire meal wondering if Stiles was disappointed she wasn’t there to welcome him home.
She’s disgusted with herself.
-
Through a series of carefully orchestrated events, Lydia doesn’t see Stiles until Sunday afternoon, when Scott and Allison stop by to pick her up and drive her to the refinished Hale house for what has become a tradition of roughhousing, barbequing, ice cream, and movie nights that had been the first thing Derek and Scott had agreed on when deciding to be a pack together.
When they get to the clearing, Scott bounds ahead, whooping as he tears off his t-shirt and tackles Isaac not fifteen seconds after getting out of the Range Rover. Allison and Lydia follow at a more sedate pace, carrying six pies between them that they’d picked up at the supermarket. Allison is telling her that she and Scott are thinking about trying for a baby and her dad is pushing for a wedding but “—I mean, come on, dad, it’s not like this is the fifties—shared Name Stains are practically wedding rings in their own right—” to which Lydia pointedly does not mention that she’s already helped Scott pick out a ring months ago.
So she’s distracted, alright? Allison’s in a crop top and low-rise denim shorts and is gesturing viciously at Scott’s name smudged across the small of her back and Isaac is shrieking now that Liam’s joined in on some sort of mutant wrestling match slash tickle fest and Derek’s already grilling steaks and burger patties, because a pack of werewolves could probably eat an entire herd of cattle and still perk up for desert. She doesn’t notice that Stiles is even there until he comes bustling out of the Hale house with a massive bowl of pasta salad and a casserole dish filled with corns balanced in his hands.
He’s wearing the slouchy tank top that Scott had been wearing that first day, and some properly-fitted jeans and Lydia can see her own damn name scrawled across the top of his chest and after he manages to set both dishes down without disaster, he notices her and Allison lounging on some deck chairs and his stupid face just lights right up at the sight of her—them, she corrects herself furiously—and he makes his way over, hands tucked casually in his pockets and a crooked grin pulling at his mouth.
Lydia is not hearing even a single word that is coming out of Allison’s mouth, transfixed by the broad shoulders and the biceps and her fucking name displayed proudly on his chest because Stiles is far past the point where he’d hidden it in an unusual fit of self-preservation as she cycled through werewolves that generally disliked his mouthy attitude as it was.
“Hey, Lyds,” he says when he reaches them, collected but pleased in a way that speaks to the four years that have passed since high school, and Lydia can’t make herself stop—cannot get her traitorous muscles to listen to her when she tells them to stop standing and don’t you dare hug him, Martin. She throws her arms around him in greeting, pushing out a uncharacteristically redundant “hi, Stiles,” even as her heart seizes up when he makes a pleasantly surprised noise and wraps his arms around her, one hand braced on her back.
And she can feel the way his palm spreads practically from shoulder to shoulder, and he smells familiar in a way she’d never really allowed herself to notice before this very instant, and she forces herself to not look like she’s wrenching herself away from him when she pulls back after allowing herself ten whole seconds to linger and just pretend.
“Sorry we haven’t run into each other before this,” she says, setting Allison on fire in her mind when the girl has the nerve to laugh.
“Figured it’d happen sooner or later,” Stiles replies, mouth quirking up and eyes so wide and the color of actual whiskey and Lydia swallows tightly against the unreasonable momentary panic that he’s talking about something else—something besides running into each other in a town as small as Beacon Hills.
“It’s good to see you,” She allows herself to say, sounding prim and perfunctory, and his eyes crinkle at the corners like he’s beaming, even though he doesn’t allow his smile to become anything too obviously cheerful like he would’ve in high school.
“You taken over the mathematics department at MIT yet?” he asks instead, and Lydia has one second of lingering teenage-worthy angst where she wonders why he hadn’t said it was good to see her, too.
And then she flips her hair and fixes him with an unimpressed look that isn’t even acting. “That happened years ago, Stilinski,” she levels out flatly and he laughs, apologizing for even assuming otherwise.
“Stiles—help me!” Isaac yelps when Scott and Liam manage to get him on his stomach and perch themselves on his back like pleased little toddlers and Stiles glances away towards them for a moment before offering her a rueful head tilt and hastening away, ripping off his shirt and leaping onto Scott.
Allison stares at her pointedly when she settles back down into the deckchair beside her best friend, but Lydia pretends like Kira and Malia and Cora showing up distracts her from the huntress’ Look.
-
Lydia spends most of dinner trailing off her sentences when she gets distracted by Stiles and that damn oral fixation that he’d never grown out of. Every time she realizes she’s staring, she gulps down her wine. The alcohol makes her less embarrassed, but it also makes her less subtle. By the time people are starting in on desert, Allison and Derek are not the only ones smirking at her and she decides to put a mild form of wolfsbane in Derek’s water filter that will leave them all itchy for days.
It’s not her fault, alright? Back in her sophomore year when Allison had entered the world’s most perfect relationship, she’d kind of acknowledged that that sort of gushiness was something that Jackson wouldn’t ever manage to give her, but she’d been more or less okay with that back then—not even Jackson, with whom she’d shared a Name Stain since they were twelve years old was going to distract her from conquering the world of mathematics and proving to people just why they should stop discouraging young girls from math and science degrees.
She’d known even then that that sort of puppy-dog devotion would be found in one Stiles Stilinski, but she hadn’t wanted it then. Barely wanted it now, though she was sure that he’d grown up and settled into something less frenetic than he’d been in his youth. She sort of wanted to see just how much of that wholehearted attention thing had stuck around after he’d grown out of romanticizing her.
He’s talking amongst Kira and Liam, both of them piping up with the word he can’t reach in his mind the way that’s instinctual to all of them by now. Stiles had worked hard to recover, healthily, from the nogustine, had been to group therapy with Allison for a while about the rift that had been there after he’d almost killed her, and she knew that when he went with Scott and Derek to meet with other packs, they wouldn’t be able to tell that he’d ever been possessed by a thousand year old demon fox. But sometimes it shows up in his speech and the way he taps his fingers methodically, counting, she thinks, the fact that a lot of the little magic he’s able to do is eerie because of the darkness that still surrounds his heart.
Lydia thinks it’s fitting that she’s in love with him. Banshees are tied to death in a way no other supernatural creature is—she thinks his lingering darkness would fit right in with her inherent one.
She startles out of these thoughts, horrified and blushing even though no one can possibly know what she’s been thinking about—that she and Stiles would probably actually be quite perfectly matched—and considers drinking the rest of the wine straight from the bottle.
-
They watch The Notebook first, as always, and Lydia swallows tightly when Stiles takes up his usual spot on the floor in front of her perch on the couch. Halfway through the movie, during the montage when Noah is renovating the house so that it looks like Allie’s dream house, his fingers capture one of her ankles and knead into the arch of her foot, even as he watches the movie.
Liam and Malia, still not quite used to the common decency of pretending not to hear things like startled whooshes of breath, both stare at her as she tries very hard not to flush in some sort of guilty shame at how good it feels to have Stiles’ hands on her. He’s not even paying attention, either, subconsciously working his fingers into the painful spots of first one foot and the next until she’s trembling a little at how good it feels and Derek taps the side of his nose to tell her to stop leaking her pheromones all over the place.
-
Lydia spends most of the next week staring at Stiles and pretending she’s not. Being away in Cambridge had been near impossible—the thrum of pack beneath her skin calling her back home at all hours of the day. It had been pretty awful to be back in town and be avoiding what Stiles refers to as the Lair, no matter how many times Derek turns judgmental eyebrows his way.
Besides, it’s not like Stiles is even noticing her noticing him—the slope of his nose, the strong lines of his back, the nape of his neck, the grown out hair that she wants to get her fingers in and tug—so she mostly just alternates between watching his arms as he and Cora replace the shutters on the west side of the house and glaring at everyone else for laughing at her. She enacts her original revenge plan quickly and mercilessly, forces everyone to watch nothing but Nicholas Sparks movies, serves tofurkey three times, stabs Derek in the hand with a fork.
It’s days later when Stiles asks her if she wants to go along with him to his dad and Melissa McCall’s family dinner—gleefully announcing that he thinks they’re going to finally admit they’re dating. She blushes when he asks and he sort of furrows his brows at her, but she hastens to agree before he can take a proper look and realize that she’s suddenly and completely utterly gone for him.
He picks her up from her house because Lydia’s car is still in Cambridge and the town might be small, but she and he live on clear opposite sides of it. Lydia’s wearing a dress that’s just a smidgeon nicer than her every day style, a dark lipstick that she knows makes her look intense. Stiles has a fitted pale green button up on and one hand on the gearshift, long, dexterous fingers dancing around it to the beat of the music he’s got playing and Lydia loves him—can’t believe she needed a name stain to tell her what she’s apparently been hurtling towards for years and years.
The Sheriff looks surprised but not unwelcoming when she follows his son inside the now familiar house.
“Miss Martin, always a pleasure,” he says formally before his expression cracks and he grins at the pained groan that Stiles makes.
“Sheriff Stilinski,” Lydia replies primly, “the pleasure is all mine.”
And then he hugs her, because that’s what he does. So she and Stiles and Scott and Allison sit around the small table with Stiles’ dad and Scott’s mom and she pictures this in the future when everyone is older and married and is delighted when the Sheriff and Melissa break out embarrassing baby stories—some of which they helpfully provide photographs with—and after everyone has a generous helping of triple-decker chocolate cake that Stiles shoots his dad a Look for, they announce that they’re planning on getting married.
Stiles cries a little when he hugs Melissa in congratulations, but no one else is far behind.
-
He takes her home late, apologizing that all of their limited spare room is apparently being occupied by Scott and Allison for the night, and she watches as he unbuttons the top button of his shirt and drags a hand through his hair. He looks tired, but in a good way, and she watches his fingers tap at the steering wheel and watches his eyes flicker over to her when she tells him some asinine story about one of her professors, paying her the utmost attention even as he drives with a level of care that is habit now, long after the chaos of their teenaged years.
She thinks about her name, blazed across his chest—thinks about how it’s been there, for close to two decades now, and how loving her is just another part of his integral personality.
Thinks about how she wants loving him to become part of her own character.
When he pulls up into her house’s driveway, all of the windows are dark. Her mom is staying the night at her boyfriend’s house.
“Come in with me for a second?” She asks him, even though she knows he’s tired and that it’s late and she’s being very inconsiderate in asking him to stay out longer than necessary. But he agrees without hesitation, like he always has, and she unlocks the door and tugs him up to her bedroom and, in the dark, says what she’s been waiting for a month—a year, a lifetime, maybe, in the making—to say.
“Your Name Stain is on my ribs,” she tells him, point-blank. She can see his eyes in the faint light coming in from the half moon and the streetlamp outside, watches as they widen when her words register with him. She doesn’t let him talk though. “I’d really like for you to kiss me now,” she says, and it feels like some illusive tightening in her whole body has finally set her free.
He kisses her.
