#stydia | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vivitalks · 13 days

Text

[read on ao3]

"You okay?"

Lydia has her elbows on her knees. Sitting in the waiting room of Deaton's clinic, her blue dress paradoxically bright against the bland color palette of the room, she's a contradiction unto herself. She looks tired and shaken. She looks glad to be alive. She looks unprepared to believe that being alive is going to last.

"I've been worse," is how she answers him. Then, "I've also been better."

Stiles takes the empty seat beside her.

"Feels like we're always hovering in the middle there," he offers.

Lydia nods. "Ethan and Aiden are going to be okay."

"Thank God," Stiles deadpans. "I would have been heartbroken to lose them.”

Lydia gently shoves him. "They did the right thing in the end. They're not that bad."

Stiles only hums, drumming on his knee with restless fingers. A deafening silence crowds them in. Stiles reflects on the events of the last twenty-four hours and finds them alarming when compressed into such a small time frame.

"What's on your mind?" he dares to ask, after the quiet is almost insurmountably heavy. If Deaton is still in the exam room with the twins, they're being very quiet. Suspiciously so. Something for Stiles to check on, once he's done checking on Lydia.

Lydia who is smoothing out her dress with a persistence that could be called obsessive. Every motion creates a new wrinkle, and every time, Lydia flattens it under her thumb.

"Oh, you know." Her tone is light, but her twisting fingers betray just how uneasy she is. "Thinking about how the last time I was sitting in this waiting room, you were dead for sixteen hours."

Stiles takes that one to the solar plexus, though he's not sure how else it could be taken.

"I wasn't…really dead. It was more like a long sleep. A long, icy sleep."

"You stopped breathing." Lydia stares lasers into her knees. "You didn't have a heartbeat. Deaton kept saying it was okay, that this was normal, that if something was really wrong we would know, but he was lying, I could tell. He wouldn't let us near you guys — he said he didn't want us interfering with the process." A fist forms in her lap, creasing the folds of her dress. "Sixteen hours. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep. I just sat here. Waiting. Hoping Deaton wasn't full of shit."

"And he wasn't," Stiles says, morbidly upbeat. "We came back!"

"You don't get it," Lydia says, sounding angry and scared and deeply wounded all at the same time.

Stiles frowns. If she would just look at him, maybe he could read her expression, but he can't tell what she's thinking from the set of her shoulders. "So help me get it."

Lydia breathes out, out, out, expelling air like it's a toxic gas.

"Humans have a reflex," she says in a small voice, staring through her palms. "It prevents them from drowning until the last possible second. The survival instinct is so powerful that it overpowers the breathing instinct, even when holding your breath becomes excruciatingly painful. It's called—”

"Voluntary apnea," Stiles says dumbly.

Lydia looks up at him and nods once. Her green eyes latch onto his.

"You told me once that death happens to the people around you," she says, biting her lip. "I can't imagine how it must have felt to be in that ice bath…but can you imagine how it felt to be the one holding you down?"

Stiles is too dumbstruck to answer.

"I killed you. I did that. It doesn't matter that it was temporary. I didn't know that, we didn't know that for sure. I held you in that water until you died, Stiles." Her hands tremble. "You were dead for sixteen hours because of me. I was a murderer. For sixteen hours."

"Whoa whoa whoa, hey," Stiles says. His 'Protect Lydia Martin' instinct is back online and the alarm is blaring. He grabs her hands in both of his, keeping them still and warm.

"Okay, first of all, you didn't murder me. It was consensual drowning! If anything it was more like assisted suicide." Lydia glares. "Not helping. Right. Sorry. Um, but secondly, and— and way more importantly, Lydia, yeah, maybe you temporarily killed me, but you also— you brought me back to life."

She’s unmoved, he can tell, so he shakes her gently. "Yeah. You did that. Look, anyone can kill me. I'm not even six feet of fragile bones and zero muscle mass, and my best friend's a freakin' werewolf, okay, killing me is not impressive. Bringing me back? That takes something else. Something special, and only someone who—" He tries not to stammer but his tongue sabotages him, "who cares about me enough to bring me back to life could do that, and honestly, those are in short supply, so yeah. Maybe you were a temporary murderer, but you were also a savior. My savior." He smiles weakly. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."

Lydia holds his gaze. She holds his hands, too — not passively but decisively, clutching them like a lifeline, like she's the one who's drowning. Reflecting once again on the past twenty-four hours, it occurs to Stiles that he is not the only person for whom that stretch of time has been alarming.

"That's certainly a nicer way of looking at it," she yields softly. Then she shakes her head. "But it doesn't change the fact that in order to save you, I had to kill you." Now she weaponizes that arresting stare, seaglass green pinning him to his seat. "I'm never doing that again, you understand? I can't."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

"You don't know what it was like," she murmurs — seemingly talking to herself now, more than him, anyway. "Watching you. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't do anything but sit there."

Something niggles Stiles's brain, that feeling he gets when a few different threads braid themselves into a discernible pattern. The emotional tether. Lydia's remorse. Sixteen hours of sitting and waiting.

"Sitting there was exactly what you were supposed to do," he realizes, also half to himself. It gets her attention anyway; she frowns at his conclusion. Stiles goes on: "An emotional tether, Deaton said, someone to bring us back, I didn't really get it, how that could work, but you just said it. You all just sat there. For sixteen hours. You waited. You stayed, so I had someone to come back to. The way only a tether could do. Think about it, right? If a fisherman casts a line and then walks away from the fishing pole, it doesn't matter whether he hooks a fish because no one is there to reel it in."

"Are you comparing yourself to a fish?"

"We were underwater, I was thinking about water, it was the first metaphor that came to mind, give me a break,” Stiles says defensively. "My point is, sixteen hours is a long time. Long enough to get bored, to lose faith, to give up and walk away and pronounce us dead. But you guys didn't. You didn't."

"Deaton said—”

"You just told me you thought Deaton was full of shit. But you stayed anyway, right?" Stiles presses, looking Lydia in the eye. "You had a feeling. Or maybe you just believed. Whatever it was, you stayed. That's how you brought me back. You thought you weren't doing anything, but you were doing the most important thing." He squeezes her hands. "You were waiting for me."

#lydia martin #stiles stilinski #stydia #stydia fic #teen wolf #teen wolf fic #fic #my fic #tw #tw fic #this fic contains spoilers for season 3a of teen wolf in case any newcomers happen upon it #boy i am a one trick pony and the trick is writing season 3 stydia fic huh #look. you fuck around with me and you sure as hell find out #and what you find out is that mentally i am still in season 3 with the specific stydia dynamic created therein #and i have not left and i will never leave #maybe i cant change the past but i sure as hell can live in it forever #so anyway i really gotta go the fuck to sleep cuz it is a whole entire 1am #and i have like. stuff tomorrow i think. like i gotta pack and stuff. which won't take long god willing #but does still need to happen #stuff

7 notes · View notes