Chapter Text
It starts with the tree. Not just any tree, of course. The blasted Nemeton.
In all honesty, Lydia would be perfectly, blissfully happy if she never heard that particular word ever again. It’s been weeks and she can still feel the downy hairs on the back of her neck standing up when she remembers bursting into Morell’s office with Stiles hot on her heels, seeing the startling realization dawn on his face and watching as he’d rifled frantically through the pages of her notebook. Terror had risen in her throat like bile, choking her; her breaths had been ragged with panic.
How could she not remember drawing the same exact image every time?
Sure, freakier things have happened to her (um, Peter Hale much?), but for some reason, nothing had made quite the same impression as seeing those identical, twisting roots replicated across ten, twenty, thirty pages, all in her own hand. After everything was said and done – after Stiles had held his breath and looked at her with eyes flaming like the setting sun, after she’d watched three of her closest friends drown icy deaths right in front of her, after her throat had been ripped raw from screaming in the face of a demon – after all that, she’d sat alone in her bedroom unable to sleep, staring so hard at her trembling fingers they became blurry.
That’s how it starts.
That very night, Lydia forces herself to put pen to paper; she forces herself to draw. She sketches harmless little doodles and countless cartoon-like caricatures, scrawls loopy hearts and lopsided stars, draws anything to get those gnarled branches out of her mind.
After all those hellish months in the past when she thought she was seriously losing the plot, which didn’t turn out to be far from the truth, Lydia needs to do something to show herself that she’s still relatively sane – that she’s not becoming another puppet being poked and prodded into subservience, that her autonomy is her own. Even if it’s something as utterly mundane as drawing a bunch of symmetrical shapes and wonky patterns. She stays resolutely away from depicting anything even remotely plant-like.
And to her surprise, it works. Drawing becomes a respite from the otherworldly antics constantly taking place around her, from the creeping darkness that seems to loom around each and every corner, from the absolutely crazy turn her life has taken. Sitting quietly in her room at random intervals between studying, her trusty 2B pencil scratching the surface of her cartridge pad, makes her feel strangely safe. The normality of it all, of the swift sweeping motions of her hand and the deliberate marks she chooses to make, is somehow comforting.
That is, until it stops simply being a security blanket, and starts becoming a skill she actually wants to master.
She’s sketching furiously in her A4 sketchbook one lunchtime, her tray of food abandoned to the side, when Allison happens upon her.
“Still going hard on the drawings, huh?”
Without even looking up, Lydia can practically feel the waves of amusement emanating from her best friend. She growls softly under her breath and then sighs, finally lifting her head to greet the playful look on Allison’s face with a rather grumpy expression of her own.
“Yes, and it’s not going very well,” she says, well aware of the annoyance colouring her tone as she tosses her pencil dramatically onto the table.
Allison, now sliding onto the bench across from her, seems to be making an effort to hide her grin. Lydia narrows her gaze at the good humour sparkling in her best friend’s eyes.
“It’s not funny! I’ve been practicing for weeks!”
“Come on, Lydia,” Allison cajoles, unwrapping her sandwich. “There had to be at least one thing that you don’t excel in, right?”
Lydia knows that Allison means this in jest. The only problem is that this time, she’s hit the nail right on the head. Calculations, equations, deductions, problem solving, memory recall – these are Lydia’s specialties, the shining hallmarks of her unparalleled genius. A realist at heart, Lydia has always been remarkably clear-eyed about her capabilities, and she knows without a doubt that the razor-sharp mental tools she wields daily to further her academic prowess are highly impressive.
Knowledge comes quickly and easily to her; it always has. And while she never fully takes this for granted by slacking off in any of her subjects, it’s true that she’s grown accustomed to acing each and every one of her classes with minimum effort. In fact, if she was really honest with herself, Lydia would have to admit that the Beacon Hills High School curriculum hasn’t presented much of a challenge to her in, well, ever.
Drawing, however, is an entirely different ball game.
For once in her life, Lydia can’t reason or brainstorm or calculate her way out of this one. She can’t use the many skills in her arsenal to learn how to become an amazing artist, she can’t achieve pro status with her natural talents, she just has to–
“Fumble your way through it, like most people do with everything,” Allison finishes for her, still smiling. “Lydia, it’s not like an exam you have to pass. You can take your time with it, you know.”
Lydia hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. Coming back to herself with a faint tinge of embarrassment, she admits, “Yeah, well, it’s just frustrating. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about three-dimensional form and perspective and proportion, but even when you’re as well-versed on the intricacies of the human anatomy as I am, it’s still difficult translating that pictorially.”
Lydia’s aware that she sounds overdramatic, but here’s the thing: she’s never failed anything in her entire life. And she’s not about to start now.
“What are you drawing at the moment?” Allison asks, straightening up and arching a puzzled brow. “I thought you were working on landscapes?”
Lydia wrinkles her nose. “I wanted to start figure drawing,” she says, pushing her sketchbook across the table towards Allison. “And then I started working on faces, but…” She shrugs, conveying her dissatisfaction without words.
Allison begins flipping through the pages, pausing every now and then to study a sketch. Lydia feels suddenly and unaccountably nervous, even though she knows it’s only Allison. Still, she imagines that there’s more than a few similarities between writing in a journal and drawing in a personal sketchbook. She feels like Allison’s almost perusing a piece of her soul, pressed down on the thick white paper and rendered through smudged lead and ink.
“Hey, I’m in here!” Allison exclaims, interrupting Lydia’s musings. “And… Scott? And even Stiles!” She pauses, flicking through a few more pages. “Huh. Stiles makes a few appearances, actually.”
Allison looks up, her face just a little bit mischievous.
Lydia resists the urge to snatch the sketchbook back. She’d forgotten about those hastily scrawled portraits. “I needed some inspiration,” she says, getting a little defensive without really wanting to examine why. “It was getting boring drawing random models from the internet.”
She rolls her eyes when Allison seems to perk up, a wicked grin lighting up her face. “Not those kinds of models,” she says in a half-amused, half-irritated tone. “And anyway, I see you three the most these days thanks to the constant supernatural hijinks, so I figured I might as well make good use of it for drawing practice.”
“Well,” Allison says slowly, “Maybe that’s what you need more of, then. Drawing from live subjects is supposed to be the best way to get better, right?”
Lydia eyes her friend suspiciously.
“And since Stiles is clearly your favourite subject…” Allison trails off, her expression one of supreme innocence with just a touch of innuendo thrown in for good measure. She directs her stare rather meaningfully to a table several meters to the left of their own, and Lydia, somewhat reluctantly, follows her gaze.
Scott, Stiles and Isaac are arrayed around the table, deep in conversation. Two dark heads and one light one are bent over to form an unmistakable barrier against the rest of the world. Lydia has no idea what they could be talking so intently about. Since the death of the Darach, everything’s been fairly quiet on the supernatural front. Though of course, things never stay that way for long around here, she reflects darkly.
It looks like Stiles and Isaac are arguing; the former is gesticulating wildly with an almost comically forceful expression on his face, while the latter simply looks mutinous. Scott, the would-be mediator, looks unsurprisingly exasperated as he watches his two best friends duking it out. He has the air of a person who has seen this self-same scenario play itself out many times in the past, with consistently uninspiring results.
As Isaac turns to direct his next comment to Scott, however, Stiles seems to sense their (admittedly unsubtle) stares. She watches him tilt his head to catch first Allison’s eye, mouthing a friendly hello, before turning to meet her own gaze.
A couple years ago, Stiles probably would’ve spluttered embarrassingly with excitement if he ever caught Lydia noticing him. A year back, his reaction would’ve been a goofy grin accompanied by an over-the-top wave. In the here and now, however, Stiles doesn’t do any of those things. He simply gives her a slow and crooked smile, his eyes so warm she feels like they’re sharing a personal and unspoken inside joke.
Lydia offers him a quick answering smile in return before whipping her head back, thinking that she probably shouldn’t dwell on that smile or those eyes for too long. It’s for her own good, honestly.
“You seriously think I should ask Stiles if I can draw him?” Lydia asks Allison now, her voice full of doubt. “Wouldn’t that be kind of…”
Weird? Awkward? Intense?
Lydia doesn’t finish her sentence, but her expression must speak volumes.
Allison shrugs nonchalantly, her dark curls bobbing with the movement. “It’d definitely help you to improve, right? And let’s be honest. It’s Stiles. He’s not going to say no to you.”
With this she returns to her yoghurt, the smallest of smiles quirking her lips. ‘I rest my case’ goes unsaid, but it’s understood either way. Lydia bites her lip, running her fingers along the thick edge of her sketchbook.
This could be very good. Or very, very bad.
Her next class immediately after the lunch break is English. Lydia’s heeled boots click briskly on the tiled floor as she enters the classroom, only to falter slightly when she sees Stiles already slouching casually in his assigned seat, directly to the right of hers.
Fantastic, that’s just what I need, she thinks, feeling far more rattled than the situation really calls for. An hour sitting next to Stiles after that stupid conversation with Allison. Damn her for putting ideas in my head!
She makes her way to her desk, trying to ignore the way Stiles’s eyes follow her. Once seated, Lydia makes rather a fuss of preparing herself for the lesson; arranging her pens just so, aligning her notebook neatly with the edge of the desk, taking her time printing the date and class in her neat, block writing. She refuses to admit the real reason for her overly zealous attentions towards her stationery, even though that reason is sitting so close she could easily reach out a hand and touch him.
“Hey, Lydia.”
She considers ignoring him for a second, but decides against it. That would be a bit of an overreaction. After all, it’s not like Stiles himself has done anything in particular to offend her.
It’s just his, you know, general presence that’s causing a slight problem.
“What?”
Stiles raises a bemused eyebrow at her prickly tone. “Nothing, it’s just…” He pauses. “Is everything okay? I saw you and Allison at lunch and you looked like, I dunno. Really stressed out about something.”
He looks genuinely concerned for her and it makes Lydia feel like an idiot. She flushes very slightly and snaps, “It’s nothing, I’m totally fine,” in a slightly higher pitch than usual.
Stiles looks more puzzled than affronted by her harsh voice, but at that precise moment the new English teacher arrives, and he consents to simply shoot her a quizzical look as the class begins.
They’re currently studying To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s a book Lydia’s read (and analysed herself, out of pure interest) so many times before that its effectiveness as a distraction is zero to none. In fact, she’s so aware of Stiles’s every insignificant movement beside her that she’s practically vibrating out of her skin, and it’s making her furious with herself.
She’s Lydia Martin, for god’s sakes. No-one has ever had this kind of effect on her, except maybe Jackson in the early days, and that was a long time ago when she was a naïve and lovesick freshman. Lydia scoffs to think that she’s comes face to face with power-hungry werewolves and all manner of crazed supernatural demons, and yet it’s Stiles Stilinski who’s making her squirm with anxiety.
She supposes that the kiss is to blame. Not just any kiss, of course – that kiss. The panic attack kiss. The you-held-your-breath kiss. The it-wasn’t-supposed-to-feel-this-way-holy-fuck-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into kiss. Yeah, that one.
They’d been under duress at the time, with a million other more important things demanding their attention than one measly little lip lock. But even when it was all over, they still hadn’t talked about it. Lydia had done what she always did best when it came to matters of the heart and simply avoided the issue. She hadn’t wanted to think about what the kiss might have meant, if anything, and Stiles, unusually for him, hadn’t pushed it either, so the topic had just never come up. They’d moved on and were quite as close as they’d been before, although there was perhaps a new tautness underlying their gazes these days – but what’s a little sexual tension between friends?
Lydia watches Stiles subtly out of the corner of her eye as the class continues, and tries to be objective about the matter. She needs to improve her figure drawing skills. To do so, she needs a friend to be her live subject. Stiles is her friend and he has the kind of bone structure that’s, uh, not entirely displeasing to the eye – from a purely artistic point of view, that is. Ergo, she should just ask Stiles point blank and not make a big deal out of it. Right?
Lydia can feel something strange fluttering in her stomach, but she refuses to acknowledge that it might be butterflies.
She finds him after school in the parking lot, standing next to the Jeep and having what sounds like a fierce argument with Scott.
“No way, buddy,” Stiles is saying passionately as Lydia approaches. “Spiderman would own Captain America every single time, I swear–”
But Scott’s already shaking his head, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Peter Parker would be completely screwed without his powers,” he points out.* “Hey, Lydia.”
Stiles swivels around so quickly it’s almost comical. “Hey, Lydia!” he echoes, sounding slightly out-of-breath.
Lydia rolls her eyes as she comes to a stop in front of them. “You two are living a real-life supernatural drama, and yet you still have the time and enthusiasm to debate the merits of Marvel comic book characters,” she says dryly. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Scott just shrugs, still grinning, as he tucks his motorcycle helmet under his arm.
“What can I say? We’re good at multitasking. I’m heading off now, but Stiles – it’s going to be okay. Just accept how completely wrong you are and I promise, all will be forgiven.”
Stiles is mouthing wordlessly with indignation in response to this blatant jibe. Scott just laughs as he claps Stiles hard on the back before offering Lydia a parting smile, which she returns. They both watch Scott take off in the direction of his motorbike.
Stiles is shaking his head now and muttering something under his breath about “Captain America… he’s delusional,” before remembering that Lydia’s still standing there in front of him. He turns to face her with a small, slightly hesitant smile on his face.
“Hey, what’s up?”
Well, it’s now or never. Lydia lifts her chin defiantly and looks Stiles straight in the eye.
“I have a favour to ask you.”
She’s pleased to hear that her voice sounds sure and strong, no hint of a nervous quiver.
“Anything,” Stiles agrees, without preamble. His voice is suddenly soft and steady as he meets her gaze straight on, his eyes the colour of butterscotch in the afternoon sunlight.
For a split second, his ready acquiescence and that affectionate expression jolts Lydia right off track. She feels inexplicably warm and shivery, and more confused than ever. It still freaks her out how he can do this – go from jokey, clumsy idiocy in one moment to sweet, swoon-inducing earnestness in the next. And it’s always for her. She only ever sees that beautiful sincerity illuminating his face when he’s looking at her.
Lydia simply can’t wrap her brain around it, even after all this time. How can he be so… so… so in love with her? He’s seen her at her very worst this past year, screaming, crying, scheming, lashing out – and yet his regard for her seems as constant and unwavering as it ever was.
It’s amazing. It’s terrifying.
Lydia quickly regains her composure, shaking off these needless thoughts. Just do it now, she urges herself, annoyance at her own reticence reaching breaking point. It’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid, fast and painless.
“I want to draw you.”
She hears the words as if they’re spoken by someone else. There’s a slight pause, during which Lydia struggles to maintain direct eye contact with Stiles, whose face has undergone a strange series of rather amusing contortions. Lydia swears she’s never seen a person’s eyes actually bulge before, but right now Stiles is going all out proving that eye bulging is indeed a real phenomenon.
“You… want to–? Wait, what? You want to… draw me?”
He doesn’t sound adverse to the idea, Lydia notes with some relief. Nor is he laughing at her. He simply sounds confused. Very, very confused.
“Yes,” she says, her voice sharp with impatience. Realising how utterly out of the blue her proposition must have seemed to him makes her feel a little foolish, prompting her to sound more cutting than she really intends. “Ever since I drew the Nematon, I’ve been working on face and figure drawing, but in order to do it well I need a live model. Congratulations, you’re the lucky candidate. So, will you do it?”
Lydia’s right hand is subtly fiddling with the clasp of her bag at this point, but her face betrays none of her nervousness. To Stiles, she looks as cool and collected as she ever does, one dainty eyebrow perfectly arched as she waits for his response.
Stiles, for his part, is still clearly having a difficult time grasping the gist of the conversation. “But…” He trails off, sounding bewildered. “Why would you want to draw me? I mean, it’s really cool that you’re doing this,” he hurries to assure her. “And I’m not saying no, like seriously not at all in the slightest refusing you, but it’s just that surely there are other people you had in mind – like Allison or…?”
Aiden’s name hovers unspoken in the air between them, the proverbial elephant in the room. In truth, Lydia hasn’t replied to any of Aiden’s messages for well over a fortnight. Her interest in him has fizzled out in the last month, once she'd started really thinking about everything Deucalion’s pack had put her and her friends through, but she refuses to discuss this particular subject with Stiles, of all people.
“No,” she says now, her firm voice brooking no arguments. “I need the right model for this and I want to draw you. You have the perfect bone structure for it, really.”
She blurts out the latter part without thinking, her mind still buzzing angrily about Aiden. When she sees the amazed and incredulous expression on Stiles’s face, however, Lydia recalls her words and feels her own cheeks beginning to heat up. Shit shit shit shit.
His eyes are suddenly alight and there’s this warm, lovely grin growing on his face. It makes her want to hug him or hit him. Possibly both.
“So you’ve been admiring my bone structure, huh?” Stiles asks, in an impossibly cheeky voice. The grin is now fully-fledged.
Lydia sends him one of her worst glares but it only eggs him on; he looks more playful than ever. Her eyes linger on the slightly crooked lilt of his smile, the wavering edge of his top lip. She wants to commit the sight to paper.
And you will, she thinks to herself with a jolt. Unbidden, a shiver runs right through her body and she instinctively starts to turn, taking a step back from the boy who’s so rudely making her feel all these peculiar and unwanted sensations.
Stiles is still practically beaming at her, and Lydia sighs a little in resignation, unsure of what she’s really gotten herself into.
“Just don’t let it go to your head,” she says pointedly, tossing the comment over her shoulder as she turns from the Jeep and heads in the direction of her own car.
The sound of Stiles’s laughter follows her all the way home.