Title: lupinus
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Rating: PG
Length: ~1400 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Teen Wolf, 3.23.
Author notes: Thanks to amberlynne for reading over this for me!
Summary:

lupinus, adj. I. of or belonging to a wolf. II. made of wolf skin. n. I. a lupine, especially as fake coin used on the stage.


Lydia woke up irritable, her skin crawling and the bedsheets tangled around her feet. The light streaming in through the bedroom window hurt her eyes and she shuffled to the bathroom feeling like she’d just come off one of the three-day sugar-and-caffeine benders that had sustained her towards the end of her master’s programme. When she flicked on the light, she took one look at herself in the mirror—shadows under her eyes and hair all tangled—and made an executive decision.

“Meredith,” she called, sticking her head around the bathroom door, “we’re skipping this morning’s session.”

There was a moment’s silence, then a thump, and then Meredith’s head appeared around the door of her bedroom. She was wrapped up in a quilt head to toe, only one baleful eye and the mass of her curls visible. “We’ll get yelled at if we miss another class.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “What are they going to do, refuse to give us a certificate in being a banshee?”

“Maybe,” Meredith said. She lowered the quilt and peered at Lydia. “You didn’t sleep well.”

“Oh, I see!” Lydia said, lacing her words with mock surprise. “You’ve already earned the certificate in stating the obvious?”

“We’ll skip class,” Meredith said, shuffling back into her room, “but coffee first.”

“Coffee definitely,” Lydia murmured, turning to look at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She prodded delicately at the dark circles under her eyes and winced. “Coffee and concealer.”

The walk to the nearest café was short and sunlit, but did nothing to take away Lydia’s sense of unease. She and Meredith had both been working on their control for years, and even living in a city as big as Paris shouldn’t have been an issue anymore; the voices of the dead and the soon-to-die were little more than a background whisper now unless Lydia chose to listen. It wasn’t as if she’d met more than a handful of people in her month in France, and certainly no-one whose loss would compel her to scream in spite of her training.

“Do you feel it?” she asked Meredith once they were seated outside the café, their orders taken with the curt Parisian incivility which Lydia normally respected.

Meredith cocked her head to one side and listened intently for a moment, as if straining to hear a faint piece of music. “There’s a woman two streets away who’s going to die from pneumonia soon. Is that what you mean?”

If Lydia concentrated, she could hear that too—and beyond that, the echoes of a man who’d been knocked down when jaywalking and the faint cries of a child who’d died long before Lydia had been born. “No, it’s...” She paused when the waiter brought their coffees and croissants, gave him a tight smile until he went away. “No. Not that. I don’t feel like I want to scream. I feel... angry.” Confused and clueless in a way she hadn’t since she was wandering the woods in Peter’s wake.

Meredith tore off a piece of her croissant and chewed it with a contemplative air. “Are you sure this is a banshee thing and not, you know...”

“No,” Lydia snapped, “Enlighten me.”

“Your mom’s getting remarried in two weeks,” Meredith said, with her usual blithe indifference to Lydia’s moods. “That’d be enough to have anyone on edge, even if you liked Bob. And you hate Bob.”

“It’s not—” Lydia broke off and stared across the street, feeling like she’d spotted something familiar out of the corner of her eye. At first she didn’t see anything, and she would have dismissed it as a random fancy, returned her attention to her cooling coffee, but her chest felt tight, so tight, like it was difficult to catch her breath and there was adrenaline in her blood telling her to look, look, look—

She stood up so abruptly that her chair toppled backwards and fell to the floor with a clatter.

“Madame!” the waiter yelled at her, “c’est quoi votre problème?” Lydia ignored him, running out and across the street, through the morning traffic and along the pavement.

“Wait!” she said, “wait!”, following a once-familiar head of dark curls down the street and around the corner. For once, Lydia had put on flats instead of heels and so she was able to gain despite the head start, grab her by the elbow and pull her around to face her. “Oh my god, Allison, wait.”

And it was her, there was no mistake—Lydia had stood by her graveside ten years ago, but this was Allison, her companion on a hundred movie nights and shopping trips and desperate last stands. A little older, a little more formally dressed, but this was Allison. The pain in Lydia’s chest had reached a crescendo and her breath came raggedly; she was dimly aware that tears were rolling down her cheeks, that her hand on Allison’s elbow was shaking.

“Allison,” she said, “what the hell is going on? Where have you been, what is—”

Allison was smiling at her—not the sunny, dimpling grin that Lydia remembered but something tight and distant and embarrassed—and gently removing her arm from Lydia’s grasp. “Je suis désolée, madame. Vous m’avez pris pour quelqu’un d’autre.”

Meredith came clattering around the corner to join them, her handbag slung over one shoulder and Lydia’s over the other. “Lydia, what—holy crap.”

“Je suis désolée,” Allison said again, taking a step back.

A man put his arm around her—tall and frowning, no one Lydia recognised. “Amélie?”

“Ce n’est rien,” Allison said, turning away, and she wasn’t pretending, Lydia realised with growing horror—there was nothing more than uncomprehending dismissal in her eyes, nothing to indicate that Lydia meant anything more to her than an anecdote about a crazy American she could tell over dinner. Allison and her companion walked away down the street and vanished into the early morning crowd heading into a Métro station and then it was just Lydia and Meredith, standing there.

“How was that possible?” Meredith said. “That was Allison Argent, right?”

“Oh god,” Lydia said, staring down the street and thinking her way through the possibilities, the probabilities—it had always said it fed on chaos and pain, tragedy and strife, and nogitsune could live for centuries. Why wouldn’t it want to play a long game—why couldn’t it have played tricks with their memories? “Oh god,” she said, thinking of Chris Argent’s face the day they’d buried Allison, the frown lines that had etched themselves onto Scott’s forehead.

They must have given it a feast.

“Give me my bag,” she said, “now,” snapping her fingers at Meredith until she tossed the purse over to her. Lydia rummaged through it, cosmetics and credit cards showering down onto the sidewalk until she found her phone and hit a number on speed dial with a shaking finger.

It took a moment for the call to go through, and then she heard a sleepy Stiles mumble, “Lyds, I love you, but it is two in the morning and we have to go to work in four hours and if you’re calling to gloat because you bumped into some new celebrity—”

“Stiles, shut up,” Lydia said, because patience had never been her strong suit and she wasn’t about to change right now. “Tell Derek and Scott to get their passports and get dressed, I’m going to book you seats on the next flight out of LAX.”

“See, not that I ever really stopped getting off on imperious and dictatorial behaviour, because hi, look at my relationship choices, but—”

“It’s Allison,” Lydia said, raising her voice to cut across him. “It’s Allison, she’s here, I saw her, Meredith saw her. She’s alive, Stiles.”

There were thousands of miles between them, but Stiles’ breathing was suddenly very loud in her ear. “Lydia, don’t, don’t do this to me—”

“It tricked us, it lied to us,” Lydia said, “she was always alive, always.”

Stiles inhaled sharply and then said something truly filthy under his breath. She could hear rustling and thumping, and then him hissing, “Get up, get up, we’ve got to go, call Scott, where’s my passport, where did we put them after Tijuana—Lyds, I’ve gotta go, e-mail me the tickets and I’ll see you at the airport.”

Then there was nothing but dead air in her ear and the sun on her face and Lydia was smiling and crying and feeling like maybe soon she’d be able to breathe.