Work Text:
The first thing Lydia does is wake up on the forest floor with a pounding head, stinging skin along her forearm, and an aching, buzzing feeling in her bones. Which is funny, because she’s pretty sure they’d been standing in an abandoned parking lot when she was knocked out.
“Lydia! Lydia, wake up,” Allison keeps saying urgently, kneeling at her shoulder, and Lydia groans and rolled over.
“What’s going on?” she asks. It’s light out. Hadn’t it just been night? Isn’t light supposed to be a problem?
“Stiles was right,” Allison says. “There was a portal.”
“Who knew faeries celebrated April Fools Day?” Lydia asks, and pushes herself sitting. “Where are we?”
“We don’t know.” Allison bites her lip. “Scott says it doesn’t smell like there are any cars or roads or even towns anywhere nearby.”
“Scott’s here, too?” And the light...dawn. “The portal closes at dawn.”
Allison nods. “Wherever we are, we’re stuck.”
*
She’s wearing a dress four sizes too big borrowed from the deeply concerned woman from the local general store, over the top of a shift that they literally stole off of somebody’s clothesline, which was the fourth thing they did. Scott and Allison are just as ragged, though at least Scott’s borrowed pants more or less fit him. She’s still barefoot.
“Hi,” Lydia says to the slightly stunned proprietor with a smile. “You wouldn’t believe what just happened to us.”
Lydia still doesn’t entirely believe what happened to them. If she refuses to think too much about it, then she doesn’t have to deal with the implications yet. There’s been too much time for thinking already. The fifth and sixth things they’ve done since waking up involved several hours of trying to plan some kind of cover story while limping twelve straight miles down a dirt road, hoping for a town, on no sleep and almost no food. Too much time for contemplation. Too much time to worry.
It’s better if she thinks of today as just a list of one thing after another. First they woke up. Second, after Scott came back from reconnaissance, they collected all the abandoned faerie gold they could carry, because if faeries are going to strand them god-knows-where in space and time, they could at least fund some of the trip. Third they followed Scott’s hearing to the enormous old farmhouse, straight out of the old West, the one that started Lydia worrying more than ever about just exactly when they are.
The seventh thing they did was finally limping into Red Bluff in the first place, with their twenty-first century gym shoes and jeans and plastic laminated wallets hidden safely out in the forest, looking as haggard and shell-shocked as they possibly could. After twelve straight miles, it hadn’t been hard.
Red Bluff is tiny, and everybody here knows each other. They don’t have a sheriff, but after the woman from the general store, and the one and only town doctor, and a couple of random ranch hands in town to pick up dry goods, and literally every other man and woman on the street all got done fussing over the newcomers, the whole town was just about ready to arm up to the teeth and send out their own posse. Lydia, Allison, and Scott really need to be out of here before that happens.
The newspapers in the general store all say March of 1865. Lydia did way too much of the fairy portal research with Stiles to want to think about what that means for them next.
So now here. The goldsmith’s shop, because if this is really 1865, and if Lydia’s suspicions are accurate, they’re going to need money. Lydia’s doing her most pathetic, endearing, needy look up through her eyelashes, and hopefully Allison and Scott look more like sad victims than feral, blood-drenched bandits behind her. Scott’s a little more naturally threatening and a little bit better at playing the harmless puppy, but it’s not exactly either of their fortes.
The lady at the general store seemed to buy it, but this is not their best story ever. Lydia widens her eyes just a little bit more and crosses her fingers that looking sad and pretty is good for more than getting out of speeding tickets.
“They took everything,” Lydia says. “They smashed up everything they couldn’t carry. We’re just lucky they didn’t find the false bottom in my sister-in-law’s trunk.”
“Well now, let’s see what we have here,” the goldsmith says. Lydia lets the pouch of fairy gold spill open on the counter. His eyes grow satisfyingly wide.
“Can you help us?” she asks.
“Let me get you a chair, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll have a talk.”
Mr. Sanderson--”please, call me Bill”--sends them off with half the cash in his shop and a promise to set them up with a buyer for the rest of their gold if they can only be patient for a few days. Allison and Scott stay mostly quiet behind her, which Lydia appreciates; Sanderson’s eyes flick towards Scott a handful of times, but Scott must glower, or gesture, or just look shell-shocked, because he always turns back to Lydia. She’s a better liar and a better haggler than either Scott or Allison are. They’d agreed on this five miles back.
They’re on their way out when one of the counter displays catches Lydia’s eye. She glances back at Scott, who’s still standing unobtrusively with Allison near the door. He’s not going to like this.
“They took everything, you know,” she says. “The clothes off our backs. We saved Grandma’s gold, but everything else, everything we’d brought from home…” She glances back at Scott. He can hear everything, but he’s not quite suspicious yet. “They took the wedding ring right off my finger.”
“Now, Mrs. Martin,” Sanderson says kindly. He really is a nice old man, for all Lydia’s pretty sure he’s cheating her exorbitantly on the gold. “I know it won’t be the same, but I think we can replace those for you.”
“I just feel so naked without it,” Lydia says. She knew switching her senior year art elective to acting would come in handy, and not just because she didn’t want to get sent back to Morrell for drawing endless xerox copies of trees again.
“We can fix that,” Sanderson promises, which is when Scott appears at Lydia’s shoulder, drawn by her obvious feigned distress.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. Lydia blinks not-quite-tearfully up at him.
“He said he could show us some wedding rings,” she says. “So we don’t have to walk around without them.”
“Wedding rings,” Scott repeats. “Um, yeah. Yeah, we should have those.”
Jewelry shopping with a reluctant boyfriend is, at least, the one thing so far that Lydia knows exactly how to do. She reaches up to take Scott’s hand firmly. At least he won’t run. “What can you size to us today?”
*
“The fewer questions people think they need to ask, the better,” she says. “Right?”
“I think the hotel’s right down there,” Allison reports, pointing. “Can we get off the street before we start trying to make plans for what’s next?”
“Good idea,” Scott agrees. This isn’t Beacon Hills High School. If they start talking about faeries and werewolves in public around here, somebody might actually believe them.
They have cash now, which has to be a good thing, and Mrs. Cavit at the general store said that Captain Reed at the boarding house would be sure to take them in for a couple of nights, so at least they’ve got a place to stay while they’re coming up with a plan for getting back home. Right?
They check in under the name ‘Martin’. Scott only stumbles once, across the word ‘wife’; he gets through calling Allison his sister okay, and that’s better than he was doing earlier.
They had the name discussion sometime this afternoon, when they were still making plans for every possible contingency including alternate universes. Scott’s still pretty relieved that since hitting town, at least Lydia doesn’t seem to think they’ve ended up in one of those.
“Why not McCall?” Allison asked. “I mean, if it’s all about making sure we’re Scott’s family, why not use his name?”
“It doesn’t have to be my name,” Scott promised hastily.
“Too Irish,” said Lydia. “We’re in stagecoach and cattle drive land. That’s not the kind of attention we’re looking for, trust me.”
“His first name is literally ‘Scott’,” Allison pointed out. “Does it really make that much difference?”
“Yeah, I’m not actually Irish,” said Scott. Lydia stopped walking between them.
“Look,” she said, when Scott and Allison turned around to face her. “It’s not like I want to be married to Scott, but what else are we going to do? We don’t even know when we are . If we’re far enough back, maybe we’d be better off going with Scott’s mom’s name and coming up with some excuse for why Allison doesn’t speak Spanish.”
“We can be the Martins.” They both looked at him. “It’s okay,” Scott said. “You’re right. We don’t want to draw attention. It’s a way more common name, and it’s familiar enough that we’ll all remember to answer to it. Right?”
Lydia had just seemed so on-edge. She’s been so on-edge, even though she’s been the only one with any idea what to say to anybody they’ve run into all day. Mr. Yukimura’s history class didn’t really cover fitting in in California in the 1860’s. Scott might have to take that up with him when they get home.
They all convene in what’s supposed to be Scott and Lydia’s room, and Scott’s already trying to figure out if he should climb out the window to switch places with Allison or just sleep on the floor tonight. Allison paces back and forth in front of the door.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, so we have a roof over our heads, we have some money, we have something to eat tonight, and my bow and arrows are still in the woods but we can get them if we need them. We’re doing okay. Right?”
“Right,” Scott agreed. “Now we just need to figure out how to get home.”
“We should find someplace to stay,” Lydia says quietly.
She’s sitting on one corner of the bed, looking down at her hands. Scott and Allison exchange glances; she darts her eyes pointedly in Lydia’s direction, which means she agrees, something’s up.
“You mean closer to the portal while we figure out how to get home?” Scott asks.
“Lydia, what do you know?” Allison asks. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”
“Well,” Lydia says tightly. “On the bright side, I’ve been thinking it over all day and I’m pretty sure I know exactly how we get home.”
“Okay,” Scott says slowly. “So what’s the bad news?”
“The faerie ring has been there at least since the eighteen-sixties,” Lydia says. “According to Stiles’ research, it opens every year on the night before April first, and from everything we can figure out, if you know where you’re going or you have something in particular tethering you there, you can come out anywhere the portal leads that you want.”
“Lydia,” Allison says, “today’s April first. I checked with the old lady at the general store.”
“Well luckily, April first rolls around every year," Lydia says. She waits quietly while it sinks in.
“A year?” Scott stares. “Lydia, we can’t be here a year!”
“Well then, find us another way home!” She throws her hands up in the air. “That’s what Stiles’ research said! Have you ever known Stiles’ research to be wrong about something like this?”
“Not when you’ve been checking it for him,” Allison says heavily. Scott glances over. She’s leaning against the door jamb like she needs it to hold herself up.
“What about the rest of the pack?” Scott asks. “Allison’s dad, my mom...”
“We should be able to get back on the same night we left,” says Lydia. “Only a few hours gone.”
“So,” says Allison. Scott’s brain is buzzing, too much information, too much to take in. An entire year without Stiles or his mom. “How do we survive a year in 1865?”
*
“It’s 1865,” Lydia says. “That’s good. That means we missed the drought and the smallpox epidemic, but the bottom hasn’t completely dropped out on the ranching industry yet.” Allison raises her eyebrows; at this point, being surprised or impressed when Lydia knows things is mostly just habit. “What? It’s state history.”
“Why do we care about the ranching industry?” Scott asks.
“Economics,” Lydia says, but Allison has a better answer.
“We don’t want to live in town,” she says. “Right? The more time we spend around other people, the more chance they have to figure out we don’t belong.” She’s pacing again. The hotel room is too small, but they’ve got real clothes now, the best they could do from the general store, and Lydia even paid some woman the owner of the boarding house recommended to tailor them to fit. That means every time they leave the room, they’d better be wearing their new clothes, and the less time Allison spends in a corset, the less chance there is of her snapping and punching somebody just because.
She doesn’t know how she’s going to handle a year of this. In the middle of a small town like this, where everybody knows everybody else by name? She’d go crazy.
“You want to move to a ranch?” Scott asks.
“Or buy one,” suggests Lydia. “Allison’s right. The more privacy we can get, the better.”
“We have the money to do it, right?” Allison asks, and Lydia nods, and that’s how they end up owning a hundred and twenty acres sliced out of the remains of Rancho Monte de Faro, complete with a dozen cattle dogs, a half-empty horse stable, and eighty dairy cows with their calves, just begging to be milked.
Twenty years ago, this whole area was part of Monte de Faro, one rancho covering ten thousand acres of land. Lydia says it’s happening all over the state since the Mexican-American war that Allison never paid attention to in school, all the enormous old ranchos breaking up into pieces. Monte de Faro got sold off and split up during the drought everybody’s still talking about, into smaller cattle ranches, dairy farms like this one, and even crop farms. Now all that’s left are places like this surrounding the tiny, dust-spattered town of--
“Beacon Hills,” Scott says. “That’s what it means, in Spanish. It’s Beacon Hills.” That’s the first real smile Allison’s seen on his face in a week.
“Beacon Mountain, really. But basically,” Lydia agrees.
The ranch house in front of them is barely two stories, with no indoor plumbing and grime streaked across the floor, but it has two bedrooms and comes with all the furniture already inside. It’s pretty to look at from out here, whitewashed wood planks and a porch with a roof over it, with actual glass in the windows and everything. Summer’s coming up--Allison is really hoping those windows open.
“Well,” she says. Lydia’s got her arm tucked in with Scott’s, and when Scott offers Allison his hand on the other side, she takes it. They’re all they’ve got now. “Welcome home.”
********
Katherine the foreman’s wife has been coming up from the bunkhouse every afternoon to “help poor Mrs. Martin and Miss Allison settle in, it all must be so overwhelming.” Every hand on the farm has apparently already pegged all three of them as completely hopeless, which would be offensive if it weren’t so true. On one hand, Lydia decided a year and a half ago that she was over pretending to be vapid and useless. On the other hand, Katherine leaves the house every single night with something roasting in the oven and saucepans simmering away on the stovetop, while Lydia, Allison, and Scott are all still in agreement over being too afraid to try lighting the wood-burning stove. They’ve had day-old bread and dinner leftovers for breakfast for six days straight.
This is going to be their life for a year. If they run the entire dairy farm into the ground, it’s fine, so long as they take all year to do it, but Lydia is not going to spend a year living in squalor or looked down on by everybody she comes into contact with, and she’s not going to spend it eating day-old, unrefrigerated chicken for breakfast.
“Alright,” Lydia says, shoving her sleeves up past her elbows. “Teach me how to make bread.”
Katherine gives Lydia a sideways look that Lydia knows all too well. Let’s all humor the pretty, stupid rich girl and hopefully contain her before she does too much damage. “Mrs. Martin, you don’t have to--”
”I am going to make bread for my husband, and you’re going to teach me,” Lydia says tartly.
Every single time, it’s worked: Lydia invokes the ‘my husband’ card, and everything just gets a little bit smoother. It’s starting to feel natural now, slipping off the tongue. ‘Mrs. Martin’ doesn’t instantly make her expect her mother. She’s still double-checking the wedding ring every morning, still glancing at Scott’s hand when they sit down for breakfast to make sure he remembered his too, but neither of them’s forgotten yet.
“If you want to, Mrs. Martin,” Katherine says.
Lydia isn’t used to working with her hands. She holds pencils, not weapons. Allison’s tried to teach her to shoot a bow three different times, and Lydia always calls it quits within the first hour because the string hurts her fingers and she’s never going to be good enough to be useful in a fight with it anyway. She has other talents. She’s never cooked anything more complicated than boxed macaroni and cheese or Christmas cookies out of a tube in her life.
Bread, apparently, is more physical than she’d realized. If she does this every day for a year, her shoulders aren’t going to fit in her favorite blouse when she gets home.
It’s better than wandering around the house looking for something to do all day, when the last owner only had three books and two of them were Bibles, and Katherine keeps looking at her like that. Allison keeps finding excuses to be out of the house, which is fine for her, but Lydia doesn’t have any more experience with cows than she does with bread and her skin burns. She’s not getting skin cancer when she’s fifty because of a year she spent in 1865.
Last week, Allison set up a target and out-shot every single one of the ranch hands with a crappy nineteenth-century rifle. She knows how to ride a horse. She’s fine here. And Scott could fit in anywhere, even though he doesn’t have any more idea of what he’s doing than Lydia does, because everybody on Earth loves Scott McCall once they spend five minutes getting to know him. Even Jackson liked Scott, a little. It’s the only reason he hated him so much.
They straggle in, one after the other, a little before Katherine leaves in the afternoon, clothes duty and hands and faces wet from the pump outside. Scott waits until Katherine bids everybody good evening and heads down to the bunkhouse to get dinner for the men before he gently shoulders Lydia out of the kitchen to finish it himself.
“Don’t let that bread burn,” Lydia warns him, but she takes off her apron and yields the stove willingly. “I made that.”
“You made bread?” asks Allison.
“What, like it’s hard?” She’s still got dough under her nails. Hygiene in this time period is a problem and a half. “What did you do today?”
“I milked a cow!” offers Scott.
“Only one?” Lydia asks.
“Well, that’s just seventy-nine more to go,” yawns Allison. “I learned so much more about making butter than I ever wanted to know.”
“It’s kind of hard. They don’t exactly like wolves getting that close to them.” There’s a clatter of cast iron in the kitchen, and the rich, oniony, increasingly familiar smell of pork and beans. “I think dinner’s ready.”
The dinner table is too big for them, built for some couple and six of their children all to fit in at once. They cluster around one end and let Scott dish out dinner.
Lydia's bread is tough and a little lumpy. She'll be better at it tomorrow.
*
"It's been such a disaster," Allison says, and settles down on the floor between Lydia's knees readily. "I feel filthy all the time."
"And not a deep conditioner to be found for miles," Lydia agrees. Allison's hair hasn't been washed in days, any more than Lydia's has, and it's a little coarse under her fingers. Lydia smooths the horsehair brush over it, slowly, one stroke at a time. "I've been watching what Katherine does. Apparently this helps."
It’s too warm to lay a fire, but Scott’s got the oil lamps out. He sets one on the trunk that serves as an end table, next to Lydia and Allison, and carries the other over to the old leather armchair in the corner.
“Which one are you reading tonight?” Allison asks. Scott holds up a fat, leatherbound volume.
“What, no more Familiar Quotations?” asks Lydia. “That was almost amusing.” There were only three books in the house when they bought it, and they need to find a place to buy more before they go crazy. Lydia can already feel the edges of it creeping in. She learned to bake bread today. She passed stabbing-her-eyes-out-with-a-fork bored weeks ago.
“I’ve never actually read the whole thing,” he admits. “Or even most of it. I figure since we have the time, I might as well. It’s a classic, right?”
“I’ve lived places where people could quote chapter and verse,” Allison says.
“Honey, we live in that place now.” Lydia works her fingers gently through a particular tangle, loosening the fine strands of hair until they run through her fingers. “And God help us.”
“Do you want me to read out loud?” Scott offers.
“Sure,” Lydia says. “Let’s sit around and read the Bible out loud like it’s Little House on the Prairie.”
It’s not fair of her. She misses the internet so badly it makes her want to scream, which would at least make things interesting around here for just as long as it took for every cow on the ranch to spook and every last pail of milk to curdle. Judeo-Christian doctrine is interesting, and culturally relevant, and possibly not even entirely wrong. Aside from the fact that she’s fairly sure parts of it are excruciatingly boring, Lydia would’ve seriously considered reading the Bible all on her own at home.
Context and the absence of options makes all the difference. “It can’t be that bad,” Allison says. “Right?”
Scott’s hesitating, cover flipped open to page one. “Go for it,” Lydia says, and he clears his throat.
“Okay,” Scott says. “Just like Little House On The Prairie. Book One is called Genesis.”
It’s not so bad, really, the rhythmic strokes of the brush and the silk of Allison’s hair running through her fingers keeping time with Scott’s steady voice trying not to stumble over archaic prose. He hands the book off to Allison somewhere around chapter four, when his voice gets tired.
Allison’s hair is tangle-free long before they finally give up and go to bed, but Lydia keeps running the brush through it anyway, over and over, and Allison doesn’t complain. It’s one of the best nights they’ve had so far.
********
He’s gotten on a few of the ranch horses just long enough to figure out that riding a horse is nothing at all like riding a motorcycle. He hasn’t even gotten thrown--well, not badly, anyway. Allison’s horse will tolerate Scott near his head without shying away so long as Scott doesn’t make any sudden movements, but that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable.
God, he wishes Stiles were here. Stiles hasn’t been on a horse they were seven, either, after that unfortunately memorable pony ride at the zoo, but at least Scott wouldn’t be the only one.
It’s easy for Allison, who’s lived in Alabama and Wyoming and New Mexico and rides bareback with perfect balance. She’s got an enormous gray gelding who makes her look tiny, bought from the Velasquez horse ranch next door. Lydia named him Silver, with a wicked smile that just dared Scott or Allison to burst out laughing in front of Ramon Velasquez and all three of his sons. Lydia didn’t bother with a horse of her own, just taught herself to ride sidesaddle while nobody but Allison was looking so she could pretend she’d been doing it for years, because Lydia is great at the 1860s. Lydia’s handled every major financial transaction or dealing with the other people in town since they’ve gotten here. And nobody expects Lydia to ride out from one end of the ranch to the other checking on fences or collecting cows.
It’s hard to adjust when Lydia and Allison seem to be doing so well. Scott loves them, but he misses Stiles. Stiles would complain constantly about the food, and he’d laugh his ass off at Scott's new clothes, not to mention the new crop of facial hair. Then he’d declare a beard-growing contest even though Scott’s seen Stiles try to go without shaving before, and the patchy look is not attractive. He’d probably have fallen off a horse ten times in the past two months. And he’d have figured out how to keep them from freaking out when Scott got too close a month ago.
Without him, Scott’s been trying to figure everything out on his own. Which brings him to the pony.
Domingo the foreman calls the horse a pony, anyway, even though she seems pretty big to Scott. She’s a cart horse, and she doesn’t seem to hate Scott any more than she hates anybody else around the ranch. It’s sort of a good start, considering how much she doesn’t like most people. It’s why she’s a cart horse.
“What’s her name?” Scott asked Domingo, and Domingo just snorted.
“Who, the pinto?” he asked. “No name on that one. Tanner wanted her as breeding stock. Used to be a decent cow horse, when she was younger.” The farm is full of projects that Tanner the last owner had wanted to do or try, and the horse isn’t the only odd resident bought for breeding stock, not with those huge Ayershire bulls in the herd. Domingo was willing to leave it right at that.
She likes dogs, though. Scott’s seen the pony bending down to bump noses with some of the cattle dogs on the ranch, even letting them run under her feet. The ranch dogs, at least, all love Scott. They pretty much all think Scott’s one of them. Scott’s been trying to convince the pony of the same thing for the past month. It sort of seems to be working.
She takes sugar from his hand, delicately, and lets him pat her neck without any sudden movements. Scott’s been petting her, mostly, lately, running his hands over her back and down her whip-scarred flanks, not talking too much. She doesn’t seem to mind the wolf, even when he relaxes his grip on control and lets a little bit of the alpha out. It’s the human she doesn’t like.
“Okay, horsie,” Scott murmurs. “You ready for this?” He glances over his shoulder to make sure nobody’s watching the back paddock. He already knows that Domingo and the other hands don’t really respect him, and since Scott knows about as much about running a dairy farm as Derek did about being an alpha, he can’t really blame them for it. Scott just doesn’t need them to see him end up flat on his ass.
She doesn’t flinch when he touches him any more, which might be as good as it gets. Scott leads her over to the fence and hoists himself up onto her back, fully prepared to end up explaining mud stains all over his pants to Lydia this afternoon.
The first thing Scott realizes is that whatever Allison does, he really should’ve used a saddle. The second thing is that he’s still sitting on the pony's back, and she’s not even trying to buck him off. That’s better than the last half-dozen or so times he’s been on horseback already.
“Okay,” says Scott. “Okay, this is...high.” She’s taller than he’d thought from the ground, and Scott really doesn’t think she qualifies as a pony. “Let’s try this out.” He barely has to squeeze his legs before she’s walking on ahead.
The third thing that Scott realizes is that the horse isn’t so much listening to anything he tells her to do, as trying to anticipate and making all her own decisions. On one hand, that’s how they end up trotting from one end of the pasture to the other before Scott’s even really thought about going faster than a walk, while he tries to hang on with his knees and remember everything Allison’s tried to tell him about not falling off a moving horse. On the other hand, if there’s one of them here who knows anything at all about cow ranching, it’s not Scott, so he should probably bow to the authority here.
“So here’s the deal,” Scott says, and her ears twitch back so he knows she’s listening. “I promise not to hit you or try to boss you around too much as long as you don’t throw me and you keep figuring out how to do what I want before I do. Okay?”
*
“And the children of Reuben, Israel's eldest son, by their generations, after their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of the names,” Allison drones.
“Please god tell me you’re not actually about to read their names,” Lydia says.
“They don’t have the names,” says Allison. ”But apparently there were forty-six thousand of them.”
“And that’s why nobody reads the Bible,” Lydia says. “Stone the gays and forty-six thousand descendants.” She takes the dice from Scott’s hand and eyes him suspiciously. “And what are you grinning at?”
“Me? No, nothing,” Scott says. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to beat me.”
“Well, obviously,” agrees Lydia. “What is it?”
“Still excited about the horse?” Allison asks.
“No,” says Scott. “I mean, yeah, but…”
It’s a really nice night. There’s a breeze coming across the porch, and he can hear the distant clatter of laughter in the bunkhouse, Katherine letting the children play in the yard in the fading light. Lydia’s been offering scathing commentary on Bible verses all night, sharp and sarcastic enough that Scott should be missing Stiles like nothing else, enough to feel familiar.
It feels like home. Lydia keeps making Allison laugh, and getting so gleefully triumphant every time she wipes the board with Scott at backgammon, and he hasn’t stabbed himself in the finger with a knitting needle once so far tonight.
“That horse needs a name,” Lydia declares. “You’ve been working with her for two months. Pick one or I’m going to start calling her Spot.”
“Spot’s good,” Scott says easily, which makes Lydia roll her eyes and Allison laugh and scold--”You can’t be Scott and Spot, that’s terrible!”--and he doesn’t even think they realize how bright they’re shining right now.
Two and a half months since they’ve been home. Two and a half months since they’ve seen a dead body, or Lydia’s screamed in the night. Scott doesn’t know, exactly, about Allison’s nightmares. His have been better.
*********
Jasper is the town blacksmith’s oldest son. She met him two months ago when Silver threw a shoe, and she’s seen him maybe once a week since then. He’s friends with the Velasquez boys, and the dairy farm is on the way back to town, so Jasper stops by for a glass of Katherine’s lemonade and some town gossip whenever he’s out that way. He’s not the only one who does it. People are strange here, over-friendly, and when living seven miles out of the town center is a two-hour walk instead of a twenty-minute drive it mostly just means that people make a point of being social. Allison hadn’t thought it meant anything.
“I know this isn’t the life you’re used to, Miss Allison,” Jasper says, “and whatever fancy courting you may’ve done back in Baltimore this ain’t it, but those are my intentions and I wanted to make them clear.”
“Oh my god,” Allison chokes out. “Are you actually serious right now?”
“As a heart attack,” he says. “With your brother’s permission--”
“You didn’t,” she says. “Tell me you didn’t ask Scott’s permission.” Oh god. She might die. She might have a stroke and die.
“Not yet, no,” Jasper says. “I know I should, but before I made things official I wanted to get a sense of your mind here. You’re an unusual woman, Miss Allison, which is all to the good to my mind when it means you can handle a rifle like that, but you can be mighty hard to read.”
“Absolutely not,” says Allison. “My mind is no.” Three months, they’ve been here, and Allison’s spent almost all three months of it at the farm without even going into town, and this is happening already? “I’m not marrying you, I’m not marrying anybody,” she says. “Not any time soon.”
It’s fine for Scott and Lydia. They have each other like a shield, an added veneer of respectability, like they’re not already each more respectable than two of Allison put together. In her whole life, Allison thinks she’s maybe only ever met one person who managed to dislike Scott. Gerard respected Scott, in his own way, and so did Deucalion, and Ms. Blake, and even her father. Peter actually seemed proud of him, creepy as that was. Derek would die for him. Everybody likes Scott at home, and everybody likes him here, no matter whether or not he can even tell one end of a horse from the other.
And Lydia doesn’t have to like corsets, because at least she can wear them without feeling like she’s being strangled even when they’re loose enough to breathe in fine, just because she can’t twist to the side or run or fight. Allison would never call Lydia traditional, but Lydia’s so good at being what other people want to see. Allison’s not like that. Allison doesn’t even want to be like that.
Allison’s just Allison. A warrior. A hunter. She’s better on a horse than Lydia or Scott, better with a rifle than any man on the dairy farm, and she doesn’t fit.
Jasper gets very stiff and proper and disappears a few moments later, and Allison walks back to Scott and Lydia in something like shock, pail of water long forgotten. Their blanket, at least, is in the shade. Allison sits down slowly, hating the corset the whole way.
“What’s wrong?” Lydia asks immediately. “Allison?”
“I want to go home,” she says, sounding pathetic even to her own ears.
“I’ll get the cart,” Scott says instantly. “Is it the sun?”
“I told you to wear a bigger hat,” Lydia agrees. Her own ribbon-decked poke bonnet has a brim wide enough to shade her entire face, and Allison isn’t completely sure, but she suspects it’s the absolute height of 1865 fashion.
“No,” says Allison. “No, it’s fine. I’m fine.” It’s not fine, not really. If nothing else, they need Jasper and Emmanuel Harrington just for the farm to get by from month to month. “We might need a new blacksmith.”
*
“You’re sulking,” Lydia declares. She drops a large paper-wrapped package on the table with a clatter, and loosens her bonnet strings like she’s been doing it forever.
“I’m not sulking,” Allison says.
“It’s at least a hundred degrees in here,” says Lydia. “Sulking.”
“The raspberries would’ve gone bad,” says Allison, stirring very deliberately at her pot of half-stewed berries because she’s not sulking over some boy thinking of her as a marriage prospect. She’s not.
“Well, then, it shouldn’t make a difference when I tell you I ran into Matthew Sullivan in town today, and he wanted to know if you might be a little more receptive to him than you were to Jasper.” Allison’s head snaps up, and she gapes at Lydia’s cheerfully needling tone. “Since the gooseberries won’t be ready for another week.”
“Lydia,” Allison says, “tell me you’re kidding me.”
“And I have it on good authority that the Velasquez boys were holding off to give Jasper the first shot,” Lydia continues. “Face it, Allison, you’re quite the hot commodity around here. An attractive unmarried woman between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, who can field-dress a deer without a moment’s hesitation? If I were one of the local boys, I’d marry you.”
Allison doesn’t want to be a commodity. She doesn’t want to be a prize, whether anybody’s going to try to insist on winning her or not. She had enough of that with Matt. She doesn’t want to be courted. Not like that.
“Well, fine,” Lydia says. “If you want to let Sam and Jamie and the Velasquez boys go out after the mountain lion without you because you’re too busy making raspberry jam, I’m not going to stop you.”
Nobody can bait her like Lydia. “What mountain lion?” Allison asks anyway.
“Sam found tracks out by the watering hole yesterday, and again this morning,” Lydia says. “Really big ones. Everybody’s been talking about it. They’re afraid that if it’s coming in this close for water, sooner or later it’ll come after the stock, so they’re mounting up tomorrow just before dawn.”
“Nobody said anything,” says Allison. Not even Scott, last night at dinner.
“Well, we all knew you were sulking.” Lydia picks her bonnet back up and heads for the stairs. “I’m going to change and go down to the dairy cellar where the temperature is actually fit for human habitation,” she says. “Feel free to join us if you’re done.”
*
Their backstory is crap and they all know it, but they’ve been putting it together piece by piece on nights like this. “I wonder if you were engaged before,” Lydia muses. “That would fit.”
“She doesn’t have to be,” says Scott. There’s half of what Allison thinks is meant to be a sock on his knitting needles, and he didn’t even blink when three of the hands walked right past the front porch earlier and saw it. They do need socks, even lumpy and distorted ones. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to get married.”
“Hmmm, plausible,” Lydia says. “Or she had a beloved fiance who died in the same smallpox epidemic that took your parents, throwing her into years of mourning.”
“Is this before or after your dad got Scott thrown out of med school?” Allison asks. When Lydia says it like this, it feels almost like a game, making up wild and crazy rumors about themselves to pass the time. They dropped little hints about Scott’s time in med school and his torrid romance with Lydia with just one or two of the ranch hands, and everybody in town’s been gossiping about it for months.
“I thought it was after,” Scott says. “First I married Lydia, then her dad got me thrown out for running away with her, then everybody died?”
“Sure, something like that,” Lydia agrees. “It’s not really that complicated.”
“Well,” says Allison. “Not if you compare it to our actual backstory.” One nice, tidy little smallpox epidemic to kill off everybody they cared about in Baltimore, compared to trying to explain the long, drawn-out saga of Hales, and nematons, and kitsunes, and everything else? There’s no competition.
“So what are we reading tonight?” Scott asks, and Lydia reaches down for the same paper-covered package from earlier.
“I got a new book in town,” she says. “Some terribly salacious detective novel that Mrs. Gillespie thought I’d like.”
“Well great,” says Allison. “I haven’t caught a single episode of Law and Order in months.”
“Shall we, then?” Lydia asks. “‘The Woman In White’.”
“That sounds sort of Sherlock Holmes,” says Scott. “Hey, can we get Sherlock Holmes?”
“I’d be up for that,” Allison agrees, but Lydia shakes her head.
“Still a few decades off,” she says. “Now. ‘This is the story of what a woman’s patience can endure, and what a man’s resolution can achieve,’” Lydia reads aloud, and the snorts. “Oh, this is going to go well.”
“There’s always the Bible,” Allison points out. “The last book wasn’t so bad.” She’s not sure she’d ever read it for fun, ever again, but at least she’s sort of getting used to the rhythm of it now. The last book had battles, sort of. At least they seem to be past the endless string of laws.
“I need a break from the litany of ‘worship god or be torn into tiny pieces’ for a while,” says Lydia. “So. ‘If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion...’”
*********
It takes him a second to match where he is with the hazy fragments of whatever dream he was having--running around the school lacrosse field, maybe, trying to catch Stiles who kept getting farther and farther away with Scott’s knitting needles and laughing--and remember where he is. The second after that, his feet are hitting the floor and his whole body is moving.
“Señor Martin! Señora, Señor Martin, come quick!” That’s Jamie, and Jamie doesn’t panic for no reason. There’s movement upstairs, Allison and Lydia rustling around in the master bedroom, coming out into the hall in nightgowns. Scott pulls the door open. He smells smoke.
Jamie almost hits him in the face with a fist when he goes to pound the door again, and recoils just in time. The horizon behind him is glowing gold.
“Fire?” Scott asks. Everybody says the drought is over, and there was rain all last winter, but it’s August in California. He’s lived in this state his whole life, he knows what that means, and there’s no fire department out here tonight.
“Near the south pasture,” Jamie confirms. “Lightning hit a tree. The herd is too close, Domingo says they’ll run straight into the gorge.” There’s eighty head of dairy cattle out there, and if Jamie is here, only four ranch hands, plus the gorge isn’t even the real problem. The south pasture is nothing but wide open grass and only a couple of acres off from the stable and the barn, and out past the ridge in the opposite direction is Velasquez’s land, with their entire stock of quarter horses. If the wind picks up or the fire grows…
“We need help,” Scott says. “In town--”
“Domingo sent the boy,” says Jamie, and good, that’s good, Tom’s small and rides fast and Scott doesn’t want the kids anywhere near a forest fire anyway.
“Go,” Scott says. “I’ll be right there.” He needs pants, shoes, Stiles, and he’s only getting two of those things tonight so he’d better go for them quick. “Tell Domingo I’ll be right there.” Domingo’s a good foreman. He’ll know how to handle this.
“Scott!” Lydia calls from the top of the stairs. Scott glances out the door, but Jamie is already running for the stables. Hopefully he’s too preoccupied to wonder why Senor Martin is downstairs in the middle of the night, and his wife and sister are both up by his supposed bedroom. It’s not important tonight, but it could get pretty awkward once the smoke clears.
“I’m going,” Scott tells her.
“Scott, you need to think,” Lydia says. “It’s 1865. This isn’t our time, these aren’t our people, and those are not our cattle.” Technically, she’s wrong about the last one, which Lydia knows since she’s the one who signed the deal and paid for them. He knows what she means, though.
“It doesn’t matter,” Scott says. “I’m going to help.”
“I’m coming with you.” Allison reappears at the top of the stairs. She’s swimming in his shirt, but she managed to find a set of suspenders for the pants somewhere way quicker than Scott ever manages to do, so they’ll at least stay up.
“Are you sure?” Scott asks, because he has to, and Allison doesn’t roll her eyes at him because she knows that.
“Come on.” She throws another pair of pants at him from the top of the stairs, but Lydia stops her with one hand on Allison’s arm before Allison can follow.
“Be careful, both of you,” Lydia says. She hates dangerous situations like this, Scott knows it. They haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of them lately, but this has to be giving Lydia unpleasant flashbacks just like him. “I want you back here in one piece.”
“It’ll be okay,” Allison promises, softly, not really for Scott at all. “You’d know if it wouldn’t, right?”
Lydia closes her eyes and is quiet a long moment. “Nobody is dying tonight,” she says. “But that doesn’t preclude horribly maimed, so you’d still better be careful.”
“We will,” Scott promises. “Get Katherine and see what you can do to protect the stable.”
“Fine, fine, go,” Lydia says. “Psychic banshee powers don’t work for animals, go save your cows from being barbecued.”
Scott stumbles out the door, trying to pull breeches on and run at the same time, and Allison catches up to him halfway across the lawn to the stable, just as he realizes he’s still barefoot. He’s also still in his flapping, billowing nightshirt, which has been three sizes too big since he got it, and can’t be good to wear into an actual fire. Screw it. He yanks the nightshirt off his head. Pants are enough, he’s fought in less.
“You’re going to get burned,” Allison warns him, although she doesn’t stop moving either.
“I’ll heal,” Scott points out. Werewolves do that, even from fire.
The horses in the stable aren’t panicking yet, but they’ve smelled the smoke just like Scott did, and they’re restless, stomping and snorting, and Scott hangs back at the door. “Maybe I shouldn’t go in there,” he says. They’re still not quite used to him, and no need to make a bad situation even worse.
“Spot’s in pasture, I’ll bring you tack,” Allison promises. “Go!”
There’s something weirdly, almost comfortingly familiar about this, working seamlessly with Allison in the middle of the night, in the face of danger and needing to move faster than humanly possible to save things. It’s been really, really quiet here for the past few months. It’s weird that rushing headlong into possible death or dismemberment is what it takes to make the farm feel like home, but there it is.
Scott has Spot by the door by the time Allison comes out, and he’s gotten good enough with all the straps and things that saddle and bridle only take a couple of minutes. Allison’s already up on Silver, no saddle, extra rope slung over her shoulder and waiting to go by the time Scott heaves himself up. Spot lets him. Spot is a good horse.
“Ready to go?” Allison asks, and there’s something achingly familiar in her grin, a gleam of excitement and a little bit of danger, something Scott hasn’t seen since 2015. He grins back, and there’s enough distant glow of fire that she might be able to see it even without werewolf night vision of her own.
“Let’s go,” he says, and then has to kick Spot hurriedly into gear when Allison takes off ahead of him, no warning, her laughter drifting back on the slight breeze.
After that the night all goes to blur. Scott’s not much good as a cowhand, but he can circle endlessly back and forth, cut between the herd and the fire, the herd and the lip of the gorge, back and forth with the heat crackling along one side and the smoke getting into eyes and nose and lungs. Little Mike shoves a bandana into his hand at one point and Scott ties it over his nose and mouth, and ignores any little jumping embers that hit his bare skin.
The cows have settled down with Scott, so in the face of fire he’s more familiar than wolf-terrifying, and they go where he herds them willingly enough. At some point there are shouts and more riders, men from town, enough hands to pile up dirt and cut a heavy firebreak between a scrubby woodland full mostly of live, still-green trees, and the August-dry grass of the pasture. He loses all track of Allison, but she can take care of herself.
They’ll never put the fire out on their own. The best they can do is contain it, hope and pray that it doesn’t get past their firebreaks, that there’s enough moisture left in the trees that it’ll die out on its own. Once or twice, Scott passes close enough to one of the hands to actually hear them mumbling prayers under their breath. Everybody’s been saying that the drought of the past few years was the worst California’s seen in anyone’s lifetime, anyone’s grandfather’s lifetime. Scott and Allison and Lydia didn’t get here until after the rains did but he knows fear on somebody else’s face.
The ranch dogs are circling under Spot’s feet again and it took the better part of an hour just to get most of the cows safely away into the north pasture, but there’s at least a handful that got themselves separated from the herd and stranded, terrified, behind billowing plumes of smoke. There’s work to do.
*
The fire, though, remarkably, actually seems to be going out. There are hands from the Velasquez place mixed in with their own, but they look relieved, not shattered. She doesn’t think it got through.
“Miss Allison!” Domingo calls, and Allison sighs inwardly, because this is the other reason she’d really like a bra. Scott’s shirt is thin linen, and when Domingo rides up, he keeps his eyes on her face so pointedly and politely he might as well be staring. “Miss Allison, we’ve got it under control now. You and your brother should head back to the house and check on Mrs. Martin. She must be worried.”
At least it’s Scott, too--not so much ‘get the woman out of plain sight’ as ‘get rid of the rich Easterners before they do more harm than good,’ and by now Allison and Scott are both plenty used to that. She’s too tired to argue anyway, not when it looks like they really don’t need her any more.
“Of course,” Allison says. “Make sure the men get breaks when they need them.”
She finds Scott at the other end of the field, standing up in his stirrups in a way that suggests he forgot a few lessons and bounced just a little too much last night to sit down right now, streaked in soot all the way down to his toes. Spot looks like a whole new breed of pinto, brown and white and splotched in black. Allison can only imagine she’s not much better.
“Hey,” she says, startling Scott out of a half-doze. “Ready for coffee?”
“Please tell me Beacon Hills got their first Starbucks,” Scott moans, and Allison laughs.
“Go catch a cow and we can make lattes,” she suggests.
They plod slowly up the hill back towards the barns. There’s a ladder propped up against the stable, and what looks like every quilt they own strewn over the roof--Allison blinks and rubs at her eyes, but it doesn’t change. Okay. Well, it’s too hot to need them anyway.
“Oh god, I don’t think I can stand,” groans Scott, slipping heavily down from Spot’s saddle. He’s bow-legged, and Allison would have so much more sympathy if she didn’t know werewolf healing will have him back to normal by the time they finished breakfast. If there’s breakfast.
“You!” And there’s Lydia.
She actually took the time to put on a corset and a dress and sweep her hair back into a braid, because that’s Lydia for you. Of course, it’s been--four hours? Five? There had probably been plenty of time back here. Had anybody actually bothered to keep Lydia updated on how the fire was going? Probably, judging by the expression on Lydia’s face, not.
She storms up to them in full righteous fury, finger pointing from Scott to Allison and back again. “You,” she says, “and you, have a lot to answer for for making me worry like that.” Her hand’s shaking a little, a fine tremor.
“We’re sorry,” Allison says honestly, and Scott steps forward, reaching for her hand.
“We’re okay,” Scott says. “Lydia, we’re fine.”
“Don’t,” Lydia shakes her head, and she lets Scott take her hand but her shoulders pull back away from him, “don’t say that like it’s that easy, do you know what I’d do if you left me here--”
“We’re not going to leave you,” Scott says. “I promise.”
“You…” And then, like she doesn’t even have the words so she’ll damn well get her point across some other way, Lydia is grabbing for Scott’s hair with her free hand, pulling him down into a kiss.
Allison freezes. She hadn’t...of course it’s fine, of course it is, and Scott and Lydia have been wearing matching wedding rings for almost four months now so it’s not like they can’t...
It’s fine. It’s totally fine. Lydia pulls back and Scott blurts out, “You’re shaking.”
“I’ve had three cups of Katherine’s coffee,” Lydia says briskly. She pulls her hand away. Scott and Allison both wince.
Katherine’s coffee is strong enough to’ve raised Peter Hale from the dead without needing a blood sacrifice, so of course Lydia’s a little riled up. It doesn’t mean anything.
“Okay,” says Scott. “That’s fine.”
“Can we get some coffee?” Allison asks. “Maybe some breakfast?”
“Katherine’s in the kitchen making enough of both for the whole fire-fighting team,” says Lydia. “Wash your hands first.”
*
They’re too exhausted to even sit up tonight like usual, no matter how much they could use a little quiet time with just each other. Allison took a bath that afternoon in the big copper tub, and Scott went down to the swimming hole with the ranch hands because he’s still trying to fit in with them no matter how hopeless it is, so everyone’s clean. The quilts are all still damp but they’ve at least got sheets. They fall into bed by an hour after dusk.
Lydia doesn’t much trust or like the lanterns they use in place of electric lamps, especially after today, so she and Allison get ready for bed in the dark. It’s always more awkward for Allison, who keeps her clothes in the downstairs bedroom, but Katherine does too much tidying and laundry to make it obvious who sleeps where. Then again, it’s also easier this way for Allison to raid Scott’s wardrobe again and again. She never wore pants half as much as she does now, back in the twenty-first century.
Allison’s quiet enough as they climb into bed that Lydia can feel it coming. She’s too tired to wait tonight. “Allison--”
“You and Scott,” Allison says. “If you want to, it’s okay.”
“There isn’t a me and Scott,” says Lydia. “He’s my friend. I only have two of those right now, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“You kissed him,” Allison points out.
“Well, next time I’ll kiss you and we’ll just see what Katherine has to say about that,” Lydia returns. She would. She’d been just as scared for Allison last night at she had for Scott. She’d go just as crazy without her.
“Okay,” says Allison. “Okay, fine, there’s nothing going on there, but if there was--”
“I’d tell you,” Lydia promises. “You know he still has feelings for you, too.”
“You’re married to him,” says Allison. “I could see if it got--”
“Please, like the only feelings you have left for him are sisterly?” Lydia demands. “He’s Scott. Yes, fine, I care about him. He’s less of an asshole than the men I usually date. If you want to get back together with him, you can, and then I’ll start sleeping downstairs.”
“I want to go home,” Allison says.
It takes Lydia a few seconds to find Allison’s hand under the sheets, to turn her own hand so their palms fit together and their fingers entwine. Laying there on her back, staring up at the shadowy whitewashed ceiling, Lydia squeezes Allison’s hand and Allison squeezes back.
“Me, too,” Lydia says. “How many months left?”
“Eight,” says Allison. “Eight months until April. We’re a third of the way there.”
“I really did almost kiss you,” Lydia says. “I would.”
“What, now?” There’s the hint of a laugh in Allison’s voice, like she’s joking, but Lydia’s not, really.
“Sure,” she says.
The mattress shifts, that’s how Lydia knows Allison’s rolling over on her side. Lydia’s the one who invited this, so she rolls over to meet her, the two of them facing each other across a narrow strip of bed, clasped hands between.
“Seriously?” Allison asks. Lydia leans forward.
It’s not quite as forceful as the kiss with Scott earlier, and she’s not shaking this time, buzzing wired from too much caffeine and epinephrine. It’s soft. She keeps her hand out of Allison’s hair.
Allison’s the best friend Lydia’s ever had. The kiss is light, gentle, the press of lips and just a slight brush of tongues before Lydia pulls back. They’re sharing a bed for the next eight months unless one of them would rather crawl in with Scott. Better not to make this more awkward.
“Should we talk about this?” Allison asks.
“Do we have to?” asks Lydia.
“No,” says Allison. “Go to sleep, Lydia.”
*********
In September, a heifer breaks a leg in a gopher hole, and Domingo goes for the shotgun but he actually pauses when Scott says, “Wait.”
He’s splinted a lot of legs, and even if most of them were on dogs or cats, it’s not that different, right? Scott knows Dr. Deaton’s taught him way more about veterinary medicine than a high school vet assistant’s probably supposed to know. Scott soothes the heifer, with his sleeves rolled all the way down hiding the blackening veins, and splints the leg with a straight stick of wood and cotton batting, and sets her up in a big boxy spare stall in the barn himself. They’ll have to keep her off it, but Scott thinks they can manage. He’ll sit with her if he has to.
It gives him a kind of puffed-up, proud feeling to see the respect on all the farm hands’ faces when he’s done, but Scott thinks the really important thing might have been that they let him do it.
*
It’s a tiny house compared to what they’re used to, without a lot of room in the kitchen, but Scott doesn’t even really notice when they bump into each other any more. Or not...doesn’t notice. It’s more like they’ve all figured out where they’re going to be, and expect it. Allison reaches past him at the stove to grab the salt cellar for the table, and the brief, momentary press of her body--it’s not that it doesn’t affect him, it’s just that it feels so familiar by now that it doesn’t stun him like it once did.
Scott doesn’t even think about it beyond that until Allison spots the hole in the seam of his shirt over dinner. “Just take it off,” she says. “I’ll take your turn reading while you fix it.” Scott can’t embroider very well, but his stitches are tighter and more practiced than either of theirs, even though he’s a little more used to sewing skin.
Lydia’s eyes linger on him kind of long, but Scott doesn’t think anything of it until she stands up abruptly, stretching so hard he can hear her back crack. “Fix that later,” Lydia says.
“Lydia?” Allison asks.
“You realize, we’ve been here for five months?” Lydia asks. “Which means that not only have I not gotten laid in five months, I’ve been sharing a bed with my best friend and a house with a werewolf, for five months.”
“Uhh,” says Scott. He holds his shirt a little closer to his chest.
“Really, Lydia, it’s no big deal,” Allison says awkwardly.
“No, no, it’s not,” says Lydia. “I like you both very much, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go upstairs, and I’m going to take this dress off, and whoever is in that bedroom by the time I’m naked, I’ll be having sex with them. If that’s only me, I suggest you both take a walk, because I have no intention of being quiet.”
“Lydia!” Allison says while Scott gapes. Lydia just pauses at the bottom of the stairs, perfectly poised, eyebrows raised in deliberate challenge.
“Well?” she asks. “I know I’m not the only person in this house dealing with a little sexual frustration. Do you want to come or not?” Scott doesn’t even realize that was a double entendre until Lydia catches his eyes and smirks.
And then she’s upstairs, and Scott is still gaping. “Did she just…?” he asks.
“Yep,” says Allison. “Yep, that’s Lydia.”
“That...wow.” He finally tears himself away from staring up after Lydia to look awkwardly at Allison. “So. Do you--”
“Do you want to go up after her?” Allison asks abruptly.
“What?” Scott asks. “Really?”
“Sure,” Allison says. “I mean, you can.”
“Do you want me to go up there?” Now isn’t really the time to focus on the fact that, as frustrated as Lydia might be, Scott’s barely gotten the chance to even jerk off over the past five months either. They don’t exactly have a private shower here, the outhouse really isn’t all that conducive to a good time, and Katherine washes their sheets. Scott sleeps on what Katherine thinks are Allison’s sheets. He’s not a good enough knitter yet that they have socks to spare for anything other than their feet. He’d give a lot for a good supply of kleenex or toilet paper.
“I want you to be happy,” Allison says. “She’s right, we’re all frustrated, and if I know Lydia that’s a one time offer with no strings attached, so if you want to, you should go.”
“Wait, do you want to go up there?” Scott asks. We’re all, she said. He doesn’t mean to, but his nostrils flare, and he catches the scent of her--the edge of sexual tension.
“Scott!” Allison hits him on the arm. “Don’t sniff me.”
“I’m sorry! But hey, if you want to go be with Lydia…” That’s a mental image Scott can’t look at too long, or at all, not with the way this conversation’s already going. “You should go.”
“This isn’t about me,” says Allison. “She only kissed me because she’d already kissed you--”
“Wait, she kissed you?” Scott asks.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Allison. “You should go up there.”
“I’m not going up there without you.” Not with the way Allison’s pulse is beating, the way she keeps glancing towards the stairs out of the corner of her eye, let alone the fact that they still have to live together for the next seven months.
“Well, I’m not going up there without you,” Allison counters.
“So are we both going or are we both not going?” asks Scott.
“I’m almost done with my corset!” Lydia’s shout makes Scott jump.
Scott looks at Allison. She licks her lips, unconsciously. Scott can’t stop watching them.
“Is this going to make things weird?” Allison asks.
“Probably,” Scott admits. “But we’re doing it anyway, aren’t we?”
“I haven’t gotten off since July,” says Allison. “So yeah, I think we are.”
*
Scott’s smelled arousal on Lydia before, but never like this, never so thick and hot he can actually taste her in the air even without getting his tongue on her. He’s seen Allison kiss other people, mostly Isaac, but he’s never been this close to her naked body while she does it.
No nineteenth-century condoms means Scott’s cock isn’t allowed anywhere near anybody’s hole, which he is definitely not complaining about. Scott’s not allowed to go down on Lydia until he shaves his beard but Allison can do what she wants.
Allison wants Scott to tell her what to do, as she lowers her head between Lydia’s thighs for the first time. She’s never done this before. Scott’s never tried to teach anybody cunnilingus before, and he’s never kissed Lydia like this, with his hands in her hair and her hands on his arms, with Allison guiding his fingers down between Lydia’s legs to feel out all the right spots and then licking up in between them until Lydia’s whimpering into Scott’s mouth and he and Allison both have to pull away before Lydia breaks her own rule.
Allison’s mouth is slick and wet with Lydia’s juices, and Scott has to touch it, has to run his thumb across her lips until Allison parts them, takes his thumb between her teeth and sucks lightly. She’s looking right at him in a way she hasn’t in a long time. She’s happy. Wicked, grinning, confident and unafraid, happy.
He looks at Lydia to see if she’s seeing it too, but Lydia’s not just watching Allison. She’s looking at both of them. “Not bad for a first try,” she says. “We might just have to do this again.”
The idle patterns Lydia traces across his chest send a jolt through him, and when she flicks the edge of her nail over a nipple Scott has to bite down on his lip to keep from thrusting hard against nothing. Allison lets go of his thumb to pull herself up towards the head of the bed again, straddling and pressing herself hard against Scott’s hip. She reaches for Lydia and Scott watches them kiss from two inches away, and if this keeps up he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to hold off on coming until Allison does.
“So,” Lydia asks, just breathing the question out into the tiny space between them. “Who am I returning the favor to first?”
*
He slides out of bed and Lydia sits up, careful not to jostle Allison awake. “Where are you going?” she asks.
Scott’s known he loved Lydia for a long time, same as he loves Isaac, or probably Kira, or maybe even Derek. She’s family, the pack kind, and he belongs to her a little bit just from that. He never realized until now that he could love her the way that makes him want to crawl back into that bed and bury his nose in the crook of her neck even if it’s not the best thing for either of them.
He’s always known, if Allison ever asked him into her arms again, he couldn’t say no. He never expected Lydia’s arms to feel so much like home, too.
“Glass of water,” Scott says. “And I thought I’d grab the book from downstairs.”
“Bring me one too?” she requests. “And make sure it’s the Shakespeare, Allison doesn’t get to sleep through the next round of God smiting nonbelievers from the mountaintop if we don’t.” They’re going to run out of Shakespeare soon, especially since Mrs. Gillespie in town can only get them one volume at a time.
Lydia fits under his left arm, tucked up warm against his side without any shame or hesitation. Scott’s hand just dangles at the level of Allison’s head, pillowed on Lydia’s hip.
“Act Three, scene seven,” Scott reads. “The widow’s house in Florence.”
“You have to do the voices,” Lydia reminds him. “How else am I supposed to keep track of who’s speaking?”
She’s propped up right against him, her hair spilling over his bare chest, and Scott looks down at the top of her head with a wry smile. “You can see the page,” he points out.
“Maybe I want to close my eyes,” Lydia says. “I just had some very tiring sex.”
“Okay,” says Scott. He has to clear his throat to raise his pitch for Helena right. “If you misdoubt me that I am not she, I know not how I shall assure you further, but I shall lose the grounds I work upon.”
*********
“Is it weird?” she asks at the breakfast table, while Lydia passes her the pot of honey and Scott hands Lydia the newspaper, just like every day. “We’re supposed to be in college right now, and instead we’re...here.”
“Don’t get started thinking like that,” Lydia advises. “We’ve still got finals in six months.”
“And how are we planning not to fail those again?” Scott steals the honey pot to spread over the butter on his bread, and replaces it with the raspberry jam Allison still likes better. “I still want to go to college.”
“We may need to add calculus study sessions to our evening rotation sometime before March,” Lydia says. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to find a Cold War history textbook anywhere around here.”
“Will MIT still take you if you fail your finals?” Allison asks. It’s the first time she’s asked about college in six months, but maybe it’s time.
Last night, Lydia kissed her until Allison couldn’t breathe any more, while Scott held her wrists down to make sure Lydia could ravish her as long as she liked. MIT is on the other side of the country. It’s time to ask.
“I have no idea,” says Lydia. “Luckily I’ll be going to Stanford, so I don’t really think it matters, does it?”
The inside of Allison’s stomach twists. “Stanford?” she asks. “Since when?”
“Since I decided to,” Lydia says. “If you’re done with the jam, you can pass it, you know.”
“Lydia, that’s great,” Scott says, smile broad, not even trying to hide how happy he is. Stanford’s not even a three hour drive away.
Allison thinks this twisting, stomach-dropping feeling, the one that never wants to let Lydia out of her sight, is probably happiness. She’s not sure she knows.
*
Allison spent two and a half years thinking that someday she and Scott might fall back into each other again, because something that huge had to be inevitable. She’d never really thought about what that would mean.
She’d never thought about it like this: a chair out on the porch where they can take advantage of the fading sunlight, a towel draped over his shoulders, and a thin, sharp blade in her hand. The blade almost feels familiar. The rest of it?
“His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year,” Lydia reads. “And here, there’s a sketch of him here. Not as attractive as Colin Firth.”
“A little busy for that,” Scott points out.
“Stop moving your face or I’ll cut you,” Allison warns. “You don’t want to explain to the hands why there’s blood all over and no nick, right?”
“Well, he’s already had to explain to the hands why a grown man needs his sister to shave him,” Lydia points out.
“Straight razors are really hard,” says Scott. “You don’t use them either.”
“Nineteenth-century women don’t shave their legs, Scott,” Lydia says. “Let alone anything else. Of course, if you object…”
“Nobody’s objecting.” Allison cuts the argument--or flirting, really--off before it can start and provoke Scott into talking more. “Keep your face still.”
She doesn’t mind Scott and Lydia’s flirting, most of the time. Sometimes it feels like Allison’s the only one here with a calendar in her head, counting down the days until they finally get home. They’re halfway there already. It’s not that far away.
Then she realizes that she doesn’t even complain about her corset most days any more, that all of her bow callouses have started to fade and she can’t remember the last time she went a whole day without getting on a horse. There’s a pork stew Katherine makes with sage and apples that Scott always serves with potato dumplings, and she’s been craving it all week. Until just now, she hadn’t even thought about pizza.
Six months is a long time. Allison scrapes the blade of the razor carefully across Scott’s cheek, clearing away lather and hair stroke by stroke.
“As I was saying,” Lydia continues. “The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.”
There are chickens clucking away, just like every evening, and Domingo and Katherine’s children are chasing each other around the farmyard, and Jaime and Little Mike are way down on the other side of the stable, leaning against the fence for an evening smoke she can just smell from here. Allison knows Lydia’s reading voice, the ups and downs of her emphasis, the smoothness of it and the dry irony when she thinks she’s reading something particularly dumb or dull, as well as her own.
This isn’t how it was supposed to happen, but she can’t regret that it did.
*
Allison doesn’t mind watching. The room’s all bathed in moon- and lamplight, turning Scott’s skin a darker gold than the sun already has and painting Lydia silver against him, her hair spread out over the bleached white pillows like fire, Scott’s hair just brushing her milk-white thighs like the ink on all their book pages. Scott’s impossibly tender when he touches her, soft and worshipful. Lydia’s a goddess. Scott’s always treated his lovers with reverence.
Allison doesn’t know the noises Lydia makes when she comes quite as well as her reading voice, but she’s learning. Lydia asleep has been familiar for a long, long time.
They end up curled up with Lydia in the middle tonight, passed out cold. Allison runs fingers through hair she’s brushed a hundred different nights by now, stroke after stroke while Scott took his turn reading anything they could get their hands on. Scott’s more dynamic with the feel of a story than Lydia, puts fewer of his own opinions into his tone. He always does the different voices.
It’s strange looking at him now on the other side of Lydia’s head, skin newly-shaved smooth and his hair almost as shaggy as when she first met him. He’s not the boy Allison once knew. He just looks like him.
“Thanks,” Allison says, and smiles sideways when he looks confused. “For letting me that close to your throat with a blade that sharp.”
“Of course I did,” says Scott. “You’d never hurt me.”
Of course she would, of course she has, and she will again sooner or later, but Scott just furrows his brow and reaches across Lydia to rest his hand on Allison’s arm. “You won’t,” he says. “And you let me that close to yours all the time.” He’s so careful not to leave bruises when he kisses the soft part of her throat.
She’s trusting him with Lydia. He deserves it, he’d never do anything to hurt Lydia if he could help it, but Allison’s trusting Scott with her best friend. It’s a quicker route to Allison’s jugular than even lunging at her neck.
“Fine,” Allison admits. “I guess I do.”
*********
The vegetable garden starts looking sad and limp and muddy. Dairy farms don’t produce much meat, not unless they want to start culling the calves, and those would bring a better price at the spring market even if Lydia didn’t think Scott would cry. Allison used to complain about the crappy aim inherent in nineteenth century riflery, but she’s the one getting up before dawn to go shoot turkeys from bushes to pluck and clean for Thanksgiving dinner.
It’s cold and miserable and Scott spends all day out with the stock, checking them for signs of getting sick and making sure they have plenty of feed even in the bad weather. If he stomps into her kitchen soaking wet and covered in mud one more time, he’s going to end up sleeping with them.
“Out,” Lydia declares, pointing at the front door. “You take that off on the porch, and then you come inside. I just washed this floor yesterday.”
“But.” Ugh, when did she start to find Scott’s sad puppy look so endearing? “It’s not even fifty degrees outside,” he says.
“And you can have a nice hot bath inside once you take those clothes off. The tub is already half full.” Lydia raises her eyebrows and waits.
It takes almost two full seconds for Scott to cave. He hadn’t been fighting very hard, but he still manages to look like a wet, filthy dog with his tail between his legs retreating to the porch.
“Woops!” Allison catches him at the door, a do-si-do of in and out, and Lydia just puts her hands right on her hips.
“Oh no,” she says. “No, no, no.” There’s mud on Allison’s boots and caked along the hem of her skirt, blood on her sleeves and a spatter of it across her cheek, smudges of ash on her apron.
“What?” Allison asks. “Those deer are all broken down and hung up in the smokehouse. I think the hides might be worth taking in to the tanner if we do it first thing tomorrow.”
“And if we didn’t have six male farmhands who might be walking by right now, you would also be stripping on the porch,” Lydia informs her. “You’re not taking one more step until you’re naked.”
Allison raises her eyebrows. “Well that’s not a proposition you’ve tried before.”
“I’m not mopping in here again!”
*
“It’ll come in time,” Katherine promises with a sidelong look at Lydia’s flat abdomen. “Mr. Martin seems patient.”
Scott hasn’t whined even once about not getting to fuck her or Allison, not even knowing that nineteenth century condoms exist and might not even fail horribly on them. Nineteenth century abortion exists, and for all Dr. Farnshaw might give her the same sad, reproachful look Katherine’s giving her now, Lydia doesn’t think he’d even complain before he handed her the equivalent of a morning-after pill. Scott still hasn’t asked, not even once.
“Oh yes,” Lydia says. “He’s been very, very patient.”
Scott probably wants kids someday. Lydia’s going to continue to operate under the assumption that he wants to go to college first, and if he really wants them before she’s finished at least a master’s program, he can ask Allison. Lydia probably wouldn’t mind kids, if she didn’t have to be the one to carry them.
Lydia tries to look sad and pious enough to stop Katherine prying, because she promised Scott and Allison not to insert a period-appropriate history of miscarriage or firstborn babies succumbing tragically to smallpox into their backstory. Katherine pats her hand sympathetically.
“The good Lord has His plan,” she says.
*
“Wouldn’t that be great?” Allison asks lowly. Her two fingers are pumping steady in Lydia’s cunt, but she’s been absolutely refusing to touch Lydia’s clit, and Lydia arches backwards against her body, wanting more. “We could tie him up like this and you could ride him without even having to worry. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Her mouth’s level with Lydia’s ear, but the last question is redirected, aimed at Scott instead. He blinks at them with glassy eyes that flicker red in the glow of the candle flame.
“Yeah,” Scott agrees. “Do something. Please.”
“Now now, Scott,” Lydia scolds, and then jerks into Allison’s hand when Allison pinches her nipple, sharp and unexpected. Her thigh brushes Scott’s poor, neglected cock, and he arches his back, almost throwing them off his legs but not even straining the leather straps wrapped around his wrists. “Scott, it’s the full moon. We can’t let you go. What if you hurt somebody?” Scott hasn’t needed to be chained up on the full moon in two and a half years, but god is he pretty this way, all his werewolf instincts and powers heightened and still succumbing to their every demand.
“You’ll just have to watch,” Allison agrees. “Maybe if you’re good, we’ll let you come before dawn.”
“Do I get to come?” Lydia demands. Allison’s got her trapped, her legs tucked over Lydia’s and her arms wrapped around, pulling Lydia back into her, holding her too close to do any more than wiggle. Scott’s not the only one being tortured here. Allison’s had her on edge for what seems like an hour. “Ideally well before dawn?”
“Maybe,” Allison agrees. “Make sure he can see you. Let’s put on a show.”
She twists Lydia’s nipple between her fingers and Lydia throws back her head and moans, and Scott’s eyes glow red, red, red in the dark, and the rain beats down on the tin roof while the wind howls, even louder than Scott.
*********
“I’m not getting up,” Lydia says, muffled into the pillow over her face after the third time the rooster crow sounds out, right from the roof above their head. “It’s a holiday and you can’t make me.”
“Scott can,” Allison points out. Scott’s the responsible one, already on his feet and fumbling for his trousers. Allison’s just a little more awake than Lydia. “Come on. Baths and Christmas baking.”
The room is cold when Allison pulls back the covers, near-freezing after a night spent curled up between two warm bodies, and she hisses when her feet hit the bare pine floor.
“Here,” says Scott, and tosses her a pair of balled-up wool stockings that Allison catches almost without looking.
They’re promised at the Sullivans by five for a grand Christmas gala of some kind, and the milking’s got to be done by then one way or another. Life on a farm doesn’t stop for the holidays.
Still, everything’s more festive today, a little brighter with anticipation. By the time Allison finishes setting extra feed out for the cows and horses and makes it back into the house, Lydia and Katherine and Katherine’s daughter Mary-Rose already have aprons on and flour spread out right across the tabletop, up to their elbows in dough.
“Wash your hands and grab the cinnamon,” Lydia instructs, “we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
There’s no music. That’s maybe the strangest part, that she can’t just step over and turn on the radio for Christmas carols, or turn the TV up in the other room so they can listen along to Rudolph or Miracle on 34th Street on cable. The baking’s normal; Allison’s mom did it every single year, and Allison helped her, usually, there was just always music.
“Can we make my mom’s spice cookies?” she asks. She doesn’t need a recipe. She knows this one.
“Do we have the ingredients?” Lydia asks. “We can’t just run to--”
“It’ll be fine,” Allison cuts her off, because Katherine’s looking just sympathetic enough that Allison doesn’t really want to talk about it. There’s one tiny bottle of vanilla extract on the counter, and she can make do with the rest. “I just need a bowl and a cookie sheet.”
Scott shows up an hour later, a light dusting of actual snow on his hat and the shoulders of his coat, grinning like a ten-year-old boy on, well, Christmas Eve. “How are my girls?” he asks, and puts his arms around Lydia’s waist from behind.
“Scott!” Lydia squirms in that way Allison knows intimately, like she’s trying to get away but really just pushing herself back into Scott’s arms. She’s done it with Allison a dozen times, and Allison’s seen Lydia and Scott like this more times than she can count, Scott dipping his head low over Lydia’s shoulder for a kiss, but never with Katherine watching. Usually it just gives her warm butterflies, not slightly unsteady ones. “I’m trying to bake here.”
“How can I help?” Scott asks.
“You’d best to stay out of the way and let the women work, Mr. Martin,” Katherine says, warm but firm. Scott’s a better cook than Lydia and Allison put together, and at least as decent a baker, but Katherine doesn’t know that. How would Katherine know that? “You don’t want to spoil Miss Allison’s surprise.”
“Surprise?” Scott picks his head up like a dog perking up its ears, still holding Lydia, grinning right at her across the table. Allison doesn’t even know what Katherine’s talking about.
And then she does. “Mom’s spice cookies,” she says, biting back the my and hoping Scott remembers everything they’re supposed to be pretending. Allison doesn’t know what Melissa does for Christmas. She’d make it for Scott if she knew. She just wanted this little piece of her childhood, one good little memory of her own mother to share with her lovers, but it’s going to have to wait until after Katherine leaves and Scott can hold her like he’s holding Lydia without anybody asking questions.
“Mom’s cookies,” Scott repeats, and when he meets her eyes Allison can tell he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “I can’t wait,” Scott says meaningfully, like a promise.
“Go chop some wood, Mr. Martin, and then you can fill up your bath,” Lydia says primly. “You’re not going to the Sullivans smelling like dairy cattle.”
“Anything you say, Mrs. Martin.” Scott kisses a spot high on her neck one last time as he pulls away, keeping eye contact with Allison the whole time. Allison tries not to smile too obviously. How did they ever convince anyone they were brother and sister?
“Well, let’s get this over with so we have time to get ready ourselves, right Miss Allison?” Lydia says. “If we run out of time we’ll have to share the bath, and there’s hardly room for that.”
*
“And merry Christmas to you and yours. Come in, come in.” Mrs. Sullivan steps back from the door and waves them inside, where the house is already bustling with warmth, life, and the sharp smells of pine and cinnamon. “It’s so wonderful that you could all make it.” Her eyes linger a little on Allison and Scott with that last.
All three of them know everybody here, or at least they should. The Sullivans own the bank; this party should have no more than thirty or so people, all well-to-do merchants and landowners, and in theory Scott, Allison, and Lydia should be at least good acquaintances with them all. In practice, it’s easier to stay the mysterious, insular Martin family up at the farm. At least the hands are used to their eccentricities.
Lydia can cope with putting on three layers of fashionable crinoline and a pleasant smile twice a week when she goes into town. She’s good at that, and one of them has to be. It’s what she can do to protect Scott and Allison, so she’ll do it well. And if there’s one thing Lydia excels at? It’s parties.
Tonight they’re turned out well enough to show up in Baltimore, let alone one little cow town in California. Lydia braided holly sprigs with berries that match the dark red silk of Allison’s new dress into a tight crown of her hair until Allison looked like a Christmas queen, and dressed herself in purple and blue with a skirt that’s wider than most doorways. Inside the trunk in their bedroom, underneath the spare blankets and as many odds and ends as they could find, Lydia’s purse still has mascara, eyeshadow, lipstick, blush, even eyeliner. Scott’s pants and vest are professionally tailored, not mangled on a sewing machine in their living room like everything else he wears, and his coat actually fits. They look good. It’s the least Lydia can do for them.
“Big smiles, everyone,” she murmurs. Scott’s hand fits around her waist, warm and steady.
“It’s just a party,” he says. “It’ll be fun.”
“So long as I don’t get proposed to again,” Allison agrees. Scott tucks his other arm through hers.
“Let’s go find the food,” Lydia says.
As far as parties go, some things are universal. There’s snacks, drinks, music, dancing, and alternate forms of entertainment, and the Sullivans have checked them off right down the list. Miss Rebecca March, all of fifteen years old, is rattling off a lively waltz on the pianoforte, and they aren’t in the room two minutes before Matthew Sullivan appears almost out of the woodwork with a charming smile.
“Mr. Martin,” he says to Scott. “A merry Christmas to you and your family. I was hoping I could ask Miss Allison for a dance?”
“I…” Allison starts. Shit, shit, shit. Of all her suitors, Matthew’s been the most persistent, and unlike the last Matt who wouldn’t take no for an answer, this one probably isn’t going to end up conveniently drowned before Allison gets provoked into actually breaking his arm.
“She can’t,” Lydia says. “She...promised the first dance to her brother.”
Lydia credits almost three years of lying about werewolves with the fact that Scott and Allison don’t instantly turn to her in confusion, but that means now it’s Lydia’s job to follow up on the lie. “Mr. Martin is so fond of dancing, and I don’t really enjoy it, so Miss Allison agreed to partner him,” Lydia explains, and hopes Scott doesn’t kill her later. Usually Lydia would resent the fact that now she’s more or less obligated to sit out the dancing for the rest of the night, but while she can box step as well as any girl born in the 1990s, the Spanish Waltz they’re doing over there looks just a little different.
Scott and Allison are probably both going to kill her for this. She’ll make it up to them later.
“Right,” Allison says, tight with fake cheer. “Can’t desert my brother.”
“Of course,” Matthew says, and tips his head in their direction. “Later tonight, perhaps.”
“So,” Scott says as he walks off. “Now we have to dance?”
“Come on.” Allison takes his hand and tugs him towards the floor. “We’ll figure it out.”
The good part about sending Allison and Scott off to dance is that they don’t have to socialize much. Lydia makes the rounds of the party herself, making small talk about the weather and the Whittakers’ plans to extend their cropland and the very latest word from Congress. If Scott’s a little too distracted on the dance floor to overhear anybody’s opinions on the new Amendment, well...Lydia just hopes he’s distracted. It’s one thing for all the neighbors to know or suspect that those Martins are all staunch abolitionists, but Lydia’s not spending her Christmas cleaning up after fistfights.
She works the room for an hour or so before she actually looks around for the others. As soon as she spots Scott and Allison, still moving across the dance floor, quite a bit more gracefully than they began, Lydia rolls her eyes.
“Take a break after this one,” she orders, half-covered by her hand, just loud enough that hopefully Scott will hear.
They seem to be having fun, at least. They’re also standing at least two inches closer than any of the other couples, Scott’s hand a little too low on Allison’s back, making far more eye contact than necessary. Nobody else seems to’ve noticed, but she’s not taking any chances.
Lydia meets them near the punch table, dawdling just long enough that Mae Gossner has time to accost Allison with a string of questions about her dress. Serves her right.
“There you two are!” Lydia sweeps in. “I thought we’d never get you off that floor. You’re a regular Jamie and Cersei out there.”
Allison’s coughing spasm as she sputters around her punch distracts Mae Gossner from Scott long enough for him to get his look of pure, unadulterated horror under control. She thought Stiles’ influence would be enough to make sure he’d get the reference.
“Who’s that?” Mae asks, and Lydia tosses her hair.
“What, you never studied Greek mythology? Circe was a queen, of course,” Lydia says, which is only barely accurate by technicality, if you’re actually talking about the Greeks. “And Jamie was her brother. Obviously.”
“Right,” Scott echoes. “Obviously.”
“Those crazy Greeks,” Allison adds faintly.
“Far be it from me to break you up, but can I borrow my sister for a minute?” Lydia adds before anybody can start talking too much about crazy, frequently sister-marrying mythological Greeks. “I promise to bring her back.”
Nobody even looks twice at two women linking arms and heading for a quiet corner. “I can’t believe you just said that,” Allison hisses under her breath. Somewhere behind them, poor Scott has to deal with Mae Gossner all on his own. Serves him right.
“I love you,” Lydia says. “I love you both. Stop flirting in public.”
“You owe us,” Allison says. “You owe us both so much.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Lydia promises. “I know.”
She’ll pay them back tomorrow night, when they’re not all too exhausted from the party to make it really fun.
*
They’ve been stringing popcorn and making paper chains all week. It doesn’t glitter like Scott’s mom’s glass ornaments, but it’s theirs.
There are only three presents under the tree. There’s no stocking with foil-wrapped chocolate oranges or clumsily-wrapped box of too-cheap jewelry for his mom. He’ll see her before next Christmas, and this one doesn’t really count, not really. It’s not a real Christmas if he and Stiles don’t watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special together while one of their parents gets sucked into working a double shift no matter how hard they try to get out of it.
This is something different, just like this whole year is something different. It’s for him and Allison and Lydia, and only for them. Three presents under the Christmas tree.
“Past midnight,” Allison reports, coming back into the room behind him while Scott tries to poke the embers in the grate back up into a fire. The house got cold while they were out. “It’s officially Christmas.”
She and Lydia settle down onto the couch together with a pile of blankets grabbed from the trunk in the abandoned second bedroom, already in nightgowns. “I vote presents now, and we sleep in tomorrow,” Lydia says. “Just once I want to stay in bed past dawn. That’s my Christmas present.”
“Oh, so we should send back what we got you, then,” Scott teases.
“After all the work it took to get it?” Allison asks. “Come on, Scott, forget the fire, just come sit under the throw.”
“And grab the presents on your way,” Lydia instructs.
There’s just room for all three of them on the couch if they don’t mind cuddling a little close. They spread out, usually, because it’s hard to knit with somebody right at your elbow, but Allison lifts up a corner of the blanket and Scott fits in perfectly on the right side of the couch, Allison tucked up next to him warm and solid.
“So,” Allison asks when they all have their presents on their laps. “One at time, or all together?”
“All together,” Scott answers instantly. It’s how he and Stiles have always done it, for the past decade or so of giving each other Christmas presents.
Whatever Allison and Lydia got him, it’s wrapped in plain brown paper, just like the other two gifts. It’s big and heavy and rectangular, like a book, and new books are always pretty exciting around here. They picked up a copy of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ last week brand new off the presses, and only Lydia’s magic at navigating the nineteenth century postal system knows how they got it in from New York so quickly.
“Oh,” Lydia says. “Oh, it’s beautiful.”
“You like it?” Allison asks. Scott leans forward so he can see her on the other side of the couch, tracing the pretty filigree vines on the cover of the pocket watch with her fingertips.
“We couldn’t find you a nineteenth-century pocket calculator,” Scott adds. He’s feeling light and warm, still buzzing a little from the party, through exhausted and out the other side in the way that comes from waking up predawn for eight months and then staying up past midnight, and the teasing rolls off his tongue, affectionate and gentle. Though they really would’ve gotten Lydia a nineteenth-century pocket calculator, if they could’ve. The pocket watch was the best compromise of a precision measuring tool they could find, something Lydia can wear as jewelery too. She likes pretty things. Scott and Allison both know that was never an act.
“Well I love it,” Lydia declares. She kisses Allison solidly on the cheek and reaches an arm across her to touch hands with Scott. “Now finish opening yours!”
“I did,” says Allison. “You got me a gun.”
“Excuse me, that’s not just any gun,” Lydia says. “That is an engraved pearl-handled Remington derringer pistol the likes of which won’t even be on the market until next year. That is the quintessential classic cowboy gun.”
“You have no idea how hard she worked tracking it down once we got the idea,” Scott says. Apparently it’s possible to buy pre-market guns right from the manufacturers if you have enough future knowledge to know exactly what you want even before they file the patent. Well, if you’re Lydia Martin, anyway.
“It’s pretty,” Allison says, a little admiring, a little hesitant, and Scott bumps her shoulder with his.
“Well yeah,” he says. “Sometimes dangerous things are.”
“Now you have a collector’s item to sell to a retired mobster someday in exchange for information that might save your future children’s friends’ lives,” Lydia says, cutting off the moment before it gets too deep or intense. “Scott, you haven’t said anything about yours.”
He’s almost surprised to realize the package is still in his lap. “I haven’t even gotten the paper all off,” Scott admits. Stiles likes to rip all the paper off at once, but Scott’s always a little bit more methodical. He likes to savor the moment, bit by bit. He slides his fingers under the last flap of paper and tugs it away.
The cover is cloth, bright red and new, and he has to turn the book on its side to read the title. “Gray’s Anatomy?”
“First edition,” says Lydia. “Which is out of print and almost impossible to find even in 1865, let alone in 2015.”
“For when Lydia’s father doesn’t get you kicked out of med school,” Allison adds. Scott blinks up at them.
“Who says I’m going to med school?”
“Vet school, then,” Lydia waves off. “UC Davis isn’t too far.”
“Who says I’m going to vet school?” Scott asks. Allison bumps his shoulder, just like he did to her.
“The way you sat with that horse who got bit by the rattlesnake,” she says. “And the look on your face while you did it.”
Copper had been too scared and in pain to shy away from Scott, who’s at least familiar by now even if the horses don’t love him. He hadn’t done much, really. Deaton treated a Newfoundland with a rattlesnake bite last year, and he said anything big enough could probably survive a rattlesnake bite so long as the airways didn’t swell closed. Scott just copied everything Deaton had done as much as possible, and sat with the horse until the swelling went down and Copper pulled through the other side. Anybody would’ve done the same thing.
Or maybe not. His mom would’ve, but yeah, okay. Not everybody would’ve sat on the ground with a horse for eight hours making sure her nose didn’t swell up too much for her to breathe. Scott’s not everybody, and that’s Lydia and Allison’s point.
“I was actually thinking maybe nursing?” Scott offers tentatively. There are no med schools within an hour of Beacon Hills, and only one vet school in the entire state of California. Even if he could be sure to get in it’s a lot of years of school he can’t necessarily afford to take, in money or in time. Nursing sort of makes sense, but he hasn’t mentioned it to anybody else yet, not even more than a passing comment to Stiles. It’s not really glamorous. He’s known that much for years.
“What, nurses don’t need anatomy textbooks?” Lydia asks, like it’s a completely reasonable career choice to make, and something indefinable in Scott’s gut relaxes at it.
“I love it,” he says, and means it. “Merry Christmas.”
*********
If she’d ever thought about it before, Allison would never have called how dull time travel could be. It’s not for the same reasons as history class, either. Civil War and reconstruction stuff actually matters right now, when they spent half of last year sitting on Scott every time they got a newspaper to keep him from trying to march off and single-handedly speed the end of slavery. They’ve started getting men in town looking for work, black men with southern accents and scars that didn’t come from fights, and the dairy farm can’t hire them all. It’s weird and a little scary not to know what to do, when Allison knows what the world looks like in a hundred and fifty years and wouldn’t dare change it even if she had the first idea how.
The history part, the big things they always made so incredibly dull in class, that actually matters. It’s all the everyday little things that used to make history feel a little bit more exotic and interesting and real, the horses and the food and the god damned butter churn, that are driving Allison crazy.
Allison has made more cheese in the past year than she thinks she’s eaten in her entire life. She’s skimmed enough pails of cream to drown the entire population of Beacon Hills circa 1865. There are only so many deer and rabbits she can hunt. On the bright side, they won’t have to eat pork and beans again for months. On the other hand, smoked venison. For months.
Lydia and Scott are feeling it just as much as she is. April 1 is closer than ever, but the more days go by, the more this winter feels like it's never going to end.
So they make their own fun.
*
“Of course I can,” says Allison. She hates it, and even when she does wear her skirts she usually leaves the crinolines off, but it won’t kill her for a day. She’s done it before.
“And still keep up with the boys just like you do now,” Lydia continues. “Riding, roping, keeping your unchallenged supremacy in shooting competitions. The whole thing.”
“Is it safe to try that?” Scott asks dubiously. “Isn’t it kind of hard to move in those?”
“They’re not that bad if you’re not used to running marathons and punching werewolves on an everyday basis,” Lydia says. “Anyway, that’s the point of the challenge.”
“Fine,” Allison says. It’ll be hard, but she can sit astride on Silver in four layers of crinoline if she hikes her skirts up high enough. And no amount of constricted breathing is going to make her lose at shooting to Little Mike or Sam. “But next time you go into town for the day, no cart. Saddle the whole way.”
“I’m really sorry you guys have to dress like that,” says Scott, who’s wearing a wool trousers and a vest with a shirt he could probably wear in 2015 without anybody even blinking. Lydia and Allison exchange looks.
“Dish duty for the next week,” says Allison, “says you couldn’t handle it for one night.”
*
“That’s because I didn’t pull it as tight as Lydia always does,” she says.
“And because skirts are infinitely preferable to pants in a pre-underwear society,” Lydia adds. She’s laying on her stomach on the bed, down to nothing but her shift just like Allison is, chin resting on one hand while she watches Scott contemplatively. “I really don’t know how Allison kept wearing your pants without it.”
“Because going commando in your ex-boyfriend’s drawers is still more comfortable than riding a horse in six layers of crinoline,” Allison says. “Which we haven’t even put you in yet.”
“The skirt is kind of weird,” Scott admits. The thin cotton shift is Lydia’s, because her hips are wider so her shift fits Scott’s much broader body a little better than Allison’s would, and it hits Scott right around the knees. “Actually, it’s all kind of weird.”
“What did I say?” Allison asks. “Corsets are evil.”
She has to take a step back to get a really good look at him. It should probably be comical, but Scott doesn’t actually look too bad in Allison’s corset. It gaps at the top even though Allison tugged the strings into place as best she could, but Scott is naturally broader in the chest and shoulders and slim through the waist to begin with. The corset, plain pale blue cotton, fits smooth and tight down his chest, pulls in a narrower waist and flares back out right over the round swell of Scott’s ass.
It’s sort of pretty, if Allison’s being totally objective here. Like Lydia’s pretty in her corsets and the little tiny-waisted dresses she wears over them. Objectively. It’s not doing anything for Allison at all.
“Well, you were right about it being restrictive,” Scott says, which was the whole point Allison had been trying to prove in the first place. He twists a quarter-turn to the left, then to the right, then back again. “It definitely restricts movement.”
There’s a funny little note in Scott’s voice that Allison puts down to being out of breath, until she tears her eyes away from the way the boning is pressing into his skin and looks at his face. That wide-eyed expression, bottom lip pulled into his mouth to bite down on, that’s Scott’s turned on face. Scott gets off on being tied up. Allison knew that. She just hadn’t thought about it here.
“You look like you just need a pair of lacy panties and a garter belt,” Lydia comments. “I have to say, Scott, the look is really working for me.”
Scott ducks his head down to the side. Allison’s not sure Lydia can see the embarrassed little half-smile from her angle, but Allison doesn’t miss it.
“Scott?” she asks. “Do you want to keep it on?”
“Um,” says Scott. He looks up wide-eyed, caught out, flushing around the ears.
“Well, that could be a fun game tonight,” Lydia says. “You could be our pretty girl for a change.”
“Is that…” Scott glances down at himself, smoothing his fingers self-consciously down the lines of the boning over his waist. “You’d be into that?”
The corset doesn’t give like skin when she tugs Scott closer, but Allison’s palm fits over the curve of it perfectly. It’s a little like manhandling Lydia when she’s still in her underwear, but not, not at all. “It’s pretty hot,” Allison admits. “Is that weird?”
“Who’s going to judge?” Lydia asks. “I like it. Besides, what else are we going to do tonight?”
The thin cotton of the skirt is starting to gather a little around Scott’s crotch, just barely rippling. Allison avoids the area for now, but she wonders how the loose hanging fabric must feel draping over an erection more used to pressing against riding breeches or jeans. She’ll have to play with that later tonight.
“You want to get over here for this?” Allison glances over at Lydia, who shakes her head.
“Oh, believe me, I’m enjoying the show,” she says. “Make it a good one.”
“Well, we’ll be wanting the bed soon,” Allison points out, but she tilts her head up and drags her fingers through Scott’s hair to bring him down for a kiss.
It’s one of Scott’s slow, thorough kisses, the kind of kiss Allison always just wants to sink into forever. His cheeks are getting shaggy again, a week or so’s growth that she’ll teach him to shave himself when she stops enjoying the excuse to run her hands over his face so much, his hands are big, holding her between the shoulders and at the small of the back. He smells male, undeniably musky and familiar, nothing at all like Lydia or any other woman Allison’s known well enough to hug. She hadn’t realized this was a kink she had, but it really all makes the fact that Scott is basically wearing her underwear that much hotter.
She pulls her mouth away, and Scott kisses up along her jaw line. “Hey Lydia,” Allison says. “Did we ever figure out how many times Scott can come in a night?”
“Oh god,” Scott groans, right next to her ear.
“Hmm,” says Lydia. “No, I think last time that experiment got derailed somewhere in the middle. You want to try it again?”
*
“O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.” It’s Allison’s turn to read tonight. Scott’s taken over her job with the hairbrush, sitting close behind Lydia on the couch and running the brush carefully through Lydia’s hair, stroke after gentle stroke. Supposedly Lydia’s needlepointing tonight, but every other time Allison glances over, she has her eyes closed, her head tilted back into Scott’s hands just a little. Allison can’t blame her. Scott’s got good hands.
“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.” After this many months of Shakespeare and Bible passages, Allison’s tongue doesn’t even trip over the words. She knows the rhythm by now. Her finger follows the by-now-familiar lines of text to make sure she doesn’t lose her place in the sea of tiny type, tracing down the delicate page, thin as onion skin. “Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.” Allison has no idea where, or possibly who, Bether is. She’s learned to just go with that, too.
“End chapter?” Lydia asks.
“End chapter,” Allison agrees. “This one is definitely...different.” They probably should have given it up months ago, but they go too fast through the pulp novels Mrs. Gillespie gets in sometimes, and at this point the thick old family Bible’s almost like a challenge. Or maybe it’s just an inside joke, three twenty-first century teenagers reading the Bible, pretending to be Little House On The Prairie. Half the time it’s almost-endless droning about obeying God or else, and the other half the time is pretty much full of war and strife and the occasional rape or marauding bear attack, mostly in the name of ‘or else’. The love poetry is a surprise.
“It’s not exactly Neruda, but it’s not bad,” says Lydia.
“Well, nothing’s like Neruda,” Scott says, like he’s pointing out an obvious fact. Allison frowns at both of them.
“Neruda?” she asks.
“Mid-twentieth century poet,” Lydia explains. “Mostly love poetry. Have you read the originals?” she adds. She can’t crane her head backwards with Scott’s hands in her hair, but she pats him on the calf, like there’s any chance they’d think she was still talking to Allison.
“My Spanish is not that good,” Scott says ruefully. “I wish it was.”
Lydia, Allison can understand, because it’s just a fact that Lydia knows everything there is to know, but Allison’s starting to feel oddly left out. Since when is Scott a fan of obscure poets? “Where’d you find it?” she asks casually.
He hesitates. “That summer before junior year when I kind of read everything?” Scott says. “He was on a list somewhere.”
“Oh,” says Allison. That summer. That summer that was more than two years ago, now, that they’ve never really talked about, just like they’ve never really talked about what the three of them are doing together here. “Did it help?”
“Stiles actually staged an intervention and took the book away,” Scott admits. “But it was good.”
“‘I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,’” Lydia says, meeting Allison’s eyes directly--half quote, half promise. It’s warm in here by the crackling fire and she’s been reading about love and fawns and vines growing deep into the earth all evening, and the heat in Lydia’s eyes brings an answering flush up in Allison’s cheeks. “We’ll go to the library when we get home. Allison can read it out loud for us.” That part is all promise.
“Should I read more of this?” Allison asks.
“Another chapter?” Scott suggests.
When they slide into bed that night, Allison tangles her fingers into Lydia’s silk-smooth hair and pulls until Lydia gasps. Scott opens her up with his fingers like cherry blossoms open to the sun, and Lydia bites the half-delirious I love you from Allison’s mouth.
*********
It’s not very many. It’s eight and a half weeks, which sounds like a long time, and it can be, sometimes. The length of time between Lydia meeting Peter Hale on the lacrosse field and her sixteenth birthday was much, much less than eight and a half weeks, and that was almost an eternity.
But it’s not very long. They’ll be gone before most of the calving this year. They’ll be long gone before Katherine has her baby.
It’s not quite warm enough to sit out on the porch at night but she’s tired of being cooped up in the house, so Lydia brings her writing set out into the bright afternoon sunlight to compose another sternly-worded letter to Mr. Corning, and make lists on a scrap piece of parchment of all the things they need to do in barely two months.
Katherine is out in the yard with her daughters, hanging laundry on the line, stepping easily over an old marmalade cat who refuses to budge from its spot of sunlight. Lydia looks up from time to time, eye caught by the gleam of light on blonde hair, then back down to her work. She doesn’t say anything when Scott comes up beside her, resting one hand on the porch railing while he watches the activity in the yard.
“What do they do for epilepsy in the 1860’s?” Scott asks, and Lydia looks up.
It’s the first time any of them have said anything about it in ten months. It hasn’t been too hard to ignore. Domingo and Katherine are staff, so around the ranch they go by first name, not last, and there’s a hundred and fifty years between here and home. There are too many variables. There are too many things they can’t fix, with time travel the way it is.
“It’s probably a different Reyes,” she says. “It’s not exactly an uncommon last name around here.”
“I know,” says Scott. “But you don’t know for sure.”
“It’s a hundred and fifty years, Scott,” Lydia says. “What could you do?”
They could’ve gone back to April 1, 2005 instead of 1865. They could have, and Lydia’s literally lost sleep over the possibility. She and Allison might have managed to keep Scott from ripping a hole in the fabric of causality trying to save everybody from the disasters they all knew were coming, but it would have broken him to do it. That’s the problem with time travel. There are so many what ifs.
“I don’t know,” says Scott. “Something.”
“You’re giving them the ranch.” Lydia dips her pen in the inkwell, and doesn’t bother to look up. They haven’t discussed it, but she knows Scott McCall.
“It ought to be theirs,” says Scott. “They do more work around here than we do.”
“I agree,” Lydia says. “Have you thought about how you’re going to keep it from looking like they murdered us for our land and hid the bodies?”
“I was hoping you’d help with that,” Scott says.
Lydia signs her name with a great flourish, the Mrs. at the start flowing out of her pen like it’s been part of her signature forever. When she goes into town to deal with the bank, she has to sign Scott’s name to everything. As elegant as the dip pen is, she misses ball-point.
“We’ll get Allison and talk about it over dinner,” Lydia says. She blows gently on the ink to dry it.
*
They’re basing everything on Lydia’s memories of Stiles’ serial killer wall from nearly a year ago, and what kind of certainty is that? It’s a maybe. Everything is a maybe.
It’s not like Lydia can’t picture it. She’s read enough history. She’s spend enough of this year smiling at her neighbors and learning to blend in, to not rock the boat. Mrs. Scott Martin, devoted wife and sister-in-law. Lydia knows what that life looks like.
Life lived as a duty to her husband, signing Scott’s name on paper for the rest of her life, growing this farm and their business to see him prosper. Going flat on her back in their bed and letting him move inside her, finally, hoping to give up her body to a parasite for nine months even though she’s not even nineteen yet because that’s the duty a wife owes her husband. Raising tiny, breakable babies into muddy, messy children all calling her ‘Mom’, needing her for their whole worlds. Marrying Allison off to one of the many, many men around town who’d be thrilled to have her, and just hoping Allison would be lucky enough to find a husband half as decent as Scott. After all, Scott would be good to Lydia. He’s been a good fake husband so far. He’d be as good a real one as anybody could, under the circumstances. He’d take care of her.
That’s the quiet life, the unremarkable one. That’s what the reality of this total farce of a life would look like, if they had to do it.
If it doesn’t work this year, Scott’s going to want to wait another year and try again. They’ll come back to this house that they already know every crack and cranny of, like it’s home, and spend another year milking cows and riding horses and smiling politely at Mrs. Sullivan in town, just like it fits. And maybe another year after that.
Sooner or later, one of them’s going to give up. Sooner or later somebody is going to get pregnant. Sooner or later other werewolves are going to show up in Beacon Hills, and Scott is going to have to decide between stepping forward as the alpha he’s supposed to be and taking on a responsibility he’ll never willingly let go, or giving up their last link to home along with the territory. Sooner or later, Allison is going to leave.
It’ll be Allison, and it’s not because she loves them any less. Lydia can’t shoot a gun or ride off into the sunset by herself, and Scott would never abandon her while she still needs his name to even make a bank withdrawal. Allison is too proud and too strong to beg them to come with. And the three of them can’t call Allison ‘sister’ in public and stay together in this bed of theirs forever.
Sooner or later, if they stay too long, Scott will take his heavy anatomy textbook and his insatiable need to help people and take over for Dr. Farnshaw, and Allison will take her pretty little cowboy gun and ride off to challenge Annie Oakley to a shooting match, and Lydia will be stuck. And Lydia refuses.
If she’s going to be stuck in the nineteenth century for the rest of her life, then she’s not going to be meek and quiet about it. If this is going to be Lydia’s life, she’s going to have to make some changes.
Stanford, for one thing, will have to wait, since it hasn’t been founded yet. Apparently Berkeley’s at least under construction right now, if Lydia really wants to wait here, planning her dairy empire for the next three or four years. She’d rather sell the farm, pack up their faerie gold, and head east. MIT doesn’t technically have any female students yet, but they’re only a few years off. Lydia’s willing to bend history that far. She can do math that hasn’t even been invented yet. They’ll take her.
Maybe Scott and Allison will be willing to come with her, if it’s 1866 and there’s no pack or family to keep them in California. She’d never ask, in 2015, when Beacon Hills is theirs and needs all of their protection. Stanford is more than far enough. If this portal doesn’t work, though, Lydia wants to put as much space between herself and Beacon Hills as possible.
Lydia just wants them with her. They can be scandalous and impossible and anachronistic together. They can sail over to Europe and live in France until the Franco-Prussian war tears it down again, or go be degenerate Americans in Victorian London. She doesn’t care. She’ll run off to the wild west with Allison and become a cattle rustler. She’ll do just about anything except stay here, pretending herself into a life she doesn’t want while she waits for some tiny maybe of a chance to get home.
One chance. One night. They’ll go out to the portal in fifty-three days, and if it doesn’t work, Lydia’s not trying again.
*
“Amen.” Allison lays the last fork down and looks up as the front door thunks shut. “There he is.”
“Hey! Sorry, I got sort of sidetracked.” Scott sweeps into the kitchen, both hands hidden behind his back. “I brought something for you.”
He pulls his hands out with a great flourish of purple-and-yellow blooms, one bouquet in each fist. Crocuses. The first ones of spring.
“Scott!” Allison’s closer, and takes her bouquet first, holding it up close to her face to sniff. “They’re beautiful.”
“Lydia?” Scott extends his arm across the table in a gentlemanly half-bow, the kind of thing that ought to be a joke except that Scott is always so completely sincere. The flowers are beautiful.
“Thank you,” she says. Scott doesn’t even want anything. Has Lydia ever had a boyfriend who’d bring her fresh flowers without wanting anything?
“Let’s get these in water,” says Allison. “Thanks, Scott.”
She leans up on her toes to kiss Scott on the cheek, on her way to the water pump under the window, just as easy as that. Of course, Allison’s been in love with Scott for years. She’s used to it by now.
Some things, Lydia’s used to. Some things are still new.
“Did you leave some in the ground?” she asks. “Of course, if these are up, we’ll have more soon.”
“There’s a whole patch of them,” Scott promises. “And I’m sorry I’m late for dinner.”
“It’s fine,” promises Allison. “Just don’t be late in forty-seven days.”
“What’s in forty-seven days?” Scott asks. Allison holds up the full pitcher, and Lydia passes her a glass from the table.
“You’re taking us out for pizza,” Lydia informs him, and Scott grins, uncomplicated and sincere.
“I can’t wait,” he says.
Neither can she.
*
“Hey.” Allison’s hand brushes gently across Lydia’s face, tucking stray hair back behind her ear. Lydia opens her eyes even though she can barely make out Allison’s shadow in the dark. “I know you’re not sleeping.”
“Neither are you,” Lydia points out.
“Yeah,” says Allison. “Soon.”
She sounds sleepy, barely awake, and her hand hasn’t left Lydia’s cheek. Scott’s chest is a warm pillow under Lydia’s head.
“Thank you,” Lydia says softly.
“Mmm?” Allison asks. “For what?”
“Sharing,” says Lydia. Scott brought her flowers today, but he loved Allison first. Lydia can’t blame him for that. Allison’s amazing. And of course Lydia’s no slouch herself, but everything they have in this bed here feels too precious to take for granted. Not fragile, necessarily. Just precious.
“He’s not mine to share, Lydia,” says Allison. “He’s his.”
“Maybe I meant thanks for sharing you,” Lydia retorts. “Not that I should have to thank somebody for sleeping with me.”
Allison huffs a quiet breath of laughter into the darkness. “Go to sleep, Lydia,” she says. “Love you.”
She’s half asleep and not thinking at all about what she’s saying, but Lydia would’ve believed her a year ago. It shouldn’t be any less true now than it was then. Anyway, it’s nothing to talk about tonight.
“Night, baby,” Lydia murmurs.
Allison makes a pleased little noise, muffled a little by Scott’s other shoulder. Scott-in-the-middle nights are always like this, both of them using him like a pillow and then waking up in the morning when he starts to move underneath them.
It’s a quiet, warm, perfect night. Only forty-seven more to go.
*********
“There are new people in town,” Lydia informs him as soon as she’s close enough that it won’t look weird to have her talking at a quiet, conversational volume. “The latest stagecoach brought in a widow, her brother, quote-unquote, and her son.”
“Okay?” says Scott. “What’s wrong?”
“The widow’s name is Hale,” says Lydia. “You might want to check them out.”
*
He can sense her as soon as they hit the center of town. It’s the kind of presence Scott hasn’t felt in over a year, but it’s strong, and it’s unmistakable. She’s an alpha.
He pulls Spot up at the edge of Main Street, and waits. Not a minute goes by before the woman hurries out of the Gillespies’ general store, glancing left and right like a wary animal. She notices them almost right away. Scott gives her a slow nod, and waits for her to respond.
He hasn’t seen a single other werewolf in the time since they’ve been here. There aren’t even very many humans out in California these days, let alone werewolves. They treat him like he’s in charge out on the farm, but Lydia’s been doing his talking for a year, and he hasn’t had to stand up and fight once the whole time. Scott straightens his back in his saddle and tries to remember how it works.
The woman is dark, maybe part Native, dressed in heavy, formal clothes with a lot of obviously fancy stitching on the bodice and dirt and travel stains all along the hem. Scott thinks he can see a little bit of Derek around her nose, but he can’t be sure. They have to be five or six generations removed. She stops a good eight or ten feet away from the horses, far enough that they don’t spook. “I’m not looking to bring trouble,” she says quietly. Allison might not be able to hear, but Scott picks up every word.
“Good,” he says. “We’re not planning to start any. What’s your name?”
“Felicity Hale,” says the other alpha, which means that Lydia was right.
“Scott McCall,” says Scott. He ought to get used to telling the truth again, and besides, she’ll hear his heart if he lies. “In town, you can call me Scott Martin.”
Felicity watches him thoughtfully. “I don’t know of a pack McCall,” she says. “Or a Martin.”
“You wouldn’t,” says Scott. “We should probably talk.”
*
They haven’t missed an evening of reading to each other since the forest fire last August. They were set to finish Frankenstein tonight.
If Lydia was awake to yell at him, Scott might wash up in the kitchen, because Lydia likes to have a reason to get in a righteous huff about things and it’s fun to watch her come sparking alive when she has something to get really sarcastic about. Instead he backs quietly out into the yard and takes his shirt off to sponge the worst of the mess off at the well. He’s as quiet as he can be, starting up the stove and putting on coffee, and Lydia and Allison don’t wake up until he’s putting the morning bread in the oven. Lydia learned first and she’s still better at it, but Scott can knead a pretty good loaf by now, too.
They’ve got two weeks to go, and Scott doesn’t know how it’s going by so fast. He’s going to miss most of calving season, and all the best parts of spring on a farm that they were way too new and confused to really appreciate last year. They’re going home in two weeks. Lydia’s got lists of things they need to do first, and Scott’s pretty sure he’s going to fail all of his finals.
Two weeks to say goodbye. Fourteen more days. Two weeks.
*
He doesn’t know much about her story. She hasn’t shared a lot. Her so-called brother is her pack emissary, but Scott doesn’t think she’s been alpha for very long. Her only beta is her son, and she doesn’t seem to have any other living children. He’s a little afraid to ask.
The place where the portal will be, the flat area that will someday be an abandoned parking lot behind the shell of a defunct 7-11, is calm and quiet in the moonlight. They rest side by side in the grass. Scott tries not to think about it as one fewer night to spend with Allison and Lydia before they have to go back.
“Tell me, Alpha McCall,” Felicity says. “Why should we stop here? Why should I trust my son’s life to this place?”
“Because you did,” says Scott.
He can’t say too much. He doesn’t know much, not really. He barely knows Derek’s mother’s name, let alone everything that happens to the Hale family over the next century and a half.
Maybe he should tell her to run far and fast. No Hales in Beacon Hills means no fire, no massacre, no Peter slaughtering his way through the town, no lots of things. It could change everything that Scott isn’t allowed to change.
“I can’t promise it’s all going to be good,” Scott says. “We’re werewolves, and I’m pretty sure that means it’s never going to be all good. There’s going to be blood.”
“There’s always blood,” says Felicity. She’s wearing a wedding ring and the kind of locket that always has pictures inside, even out here in the forest. Scott’s pretty sure she knows a lot about blood.
“But in a hundred and fifty years, there’s still Hales in Beacon Hills,” Scott says. “I know your great-great grandchildren. They’re mine.” He’d protect Derek and Cora right into death. Maybe part of that means making sure they get born at all.
It’s been really easy to just pretend to be human this year. He’s not. He’s got a whole life waiting back for him, his family, his responsibilities, his pack. This year is a dream. It’s been one long, drawn-out vacation, that’s all. It’s time to remember what’s real.
This time, when he slips quiet into the house just short of dawn, Lydia and Allison are curved together like perfectly matched spoons in bed, and nobody’s in the living room to wake up if he opens the oven a little too loudly.
*
The portal is ten miles away, and there’s no way they’re going to walk that on foot. They sneak away from the farm as early as they can on the morning of the 31st, leaving Lydia’s note pinned down by an earthenware cup of water and wildflowers on the kitchen table. Gone picnicking! it says. A little bit of blood smeared across the saddles of their returning, riderless horses and the will on file at the bank should do the rest.
The problem with leaving early enough to make sure they’re well in time is that they’re more than in time. Allison unloads the horses and Lydia spreads out a picnic blanket. It’s only midafternoon.
They have cold roasted pork in sandwiches with applesauce they cooked and jarred themselves last fall, a bottle of cider Scott grabbed on a whim from the pantry, a small wheel of cheese Allison filched from the dairy that isn’t quite cured yet. Scott can’t put a name on almost anything that he’s feeling right now. Spot bends down and noses at his shoulder, and Scott scratches her under the chin, right in the spot she likes. He’s going to miss his horse. He might miss all of it.
“Indoor plumbing,” Lydia says abruptly. “I’m not going to miss the outhouse, and I’m looking forward to indoor plumbing.”
“Air conditioning,” Scott agrees. That’s better. There are definitely some things he won’t miss, and thinking about electricity and plumbing is easier than thinking about how it’s been an entire year since he’s seen his mom and Stiles, and what if he’s forgotten more than he realizes? What if he’s changed too much for them instead?
“Pineapple,” says Allison. “I think I’ve been craving pineapple for five months.”
“Pineapple pizza?” Scott suggests. Lydia wrinkles her nose.
“Gross,” she says. “But don’t forget, we’ve got a pizza date as soon as we get back.”
“Is it a date?” Allison asks. “Like, a real date?”
Scott has no idea how to answer that question. He’s been trying not to think about it too much, in case the answer is no. They’re good together, but this is a dream. They’re about to go right back to real life. Maybe Lydia won’t want them when she’s got other options. Maybe she’ll leave and Allison won’t want Scott if it’s only the two of them again. Maybe Lydia and Allison would rather just date each other. It would be easier.
He doesn’t know. He has no idea how this works.
“Of course it’s a date,” Lydia says. “Scott’s paying, we’re putting out afterwards. What’s complicated about that?”
“So that’s it?” Allison asks. “We’re not even going to talk about it?”
“I think we should talk about it,” says Scott. Dating two of his best friends at the same time is definitely the kind of thing that’s supposed to be talked about first, and looking back, they haven’t, not in all this time. Scott’s mom would be disappointed in him. Scott is disappointed in him.
“What’s to talk about?” Lydia asks. “Do you want this to end?”
“Lydia, it can’t just stay the same,” Allison says. “I don’t want to be your secret forever.”
“No secrets,” says Scott. “If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be real.”
“Fine!” says Lydia. “Fine, I’m in love with both of you, is that what you want to hear? I’ve never felt like this about anyone, and I have no idea if it’s even possible to keep it going once we get home together, but I don’t think turning it into some complicated drama is going to help.”
None of them are touching right now, and it’s weird. The house is small. They’re always touching each other. Every evening, they’re sharing the couch, putting their feet or heads into each others’ laps, brushing or braiding the girls’ hair. They’re never this far apart. Scott hates it.
So he edges over towards Lydia and puts his hand over hers. “I love you too,” he says. “So let’s skip the drama.”
“Do you think we can?” Allison asks. Scott holds his other hand out towards her, and she doesn’t hesitate in taking it.
“Sure,” says Scott. “We’ll just go for pizza.”
“Pizza,” Lydia agrees. “And penetrative sex, once we have access to latex again, and Pablo Neruda, and no secrets. Simple.”
Put that way, it does seem pretty easy. It probably won’t be, but Scott just survived an entire year in the 1860’s. It can’t be that hard.
“Okay,” says Allison. “That works. I love you too.”
The sun dips closer and closer to the tree line, and Scott eyes it carefully. “Time to fake our own deaths and send the horses home?”
“Yep,” Allison agrees. “You want to take care of that part, then have sex on the picnic blanket one last time before we go home?”
“I’m not missing our portal home because I was too busy getting it on in the middle of a forest when I’ve got a perfectly comfortable bed right there in 2015,” says Lydia. “But Scott can use his night vision and read to us for a while.”
“I thought we left the books at home,” Scott points out. They never managed to finish the Bible, even after a year of trying, but he thinks it’s probably okay to leave that one undone.
“You brought Gray’s Anatomy, right?” Allison asks. “Read that.”
“It’ll be kind of boring,” Scott warns. The last thing they need is to fall asleep.
“You’ll keep us awake,” Lydia says. “Do the voices.”
“For an anatomy textbook?” Scott raises his eyebrows, and Lydia smirks back.
“You’ll figure it out,” she says. “I trust you.”
********
“Witching hour is over,” says Stiles. “If the faeries were going to come, they’d have shown up by now. That’s kind of the point of the alarm.”
“If they show up because they heard that, I’m going to let them rip you apart,” Isaac says conversationally. “You know that, right?”
“And then Scott will send your furry little ass packing,” says Stiles, only to be cut off by a bright, blue-green flash over around the back of the abandoned 7-11. “What the hell?”
Isaac takes off before the words are even out of his mouth, leaving Stiles to roll his eyes and grab his baseball bat. “Seriously, come on,” he complains, hustling behind. “What the hell is even--”
He registers the shape barreling towards him out of the darkness and recognizes it as Scott a moment later, just soon enough to drop the bat before he’s being bodily tackled into a hug by a hundred and eighty pounds of determined werewolf. “Um, hi, buddy,” he says.
“Stiles,” Scott says. “Oh my god I missed you.”
“...yeah, that last twenty minutes was pretty rough for me, too,” Stiles says carefully. He has to duck his head to keep from getting hit in the face by the brim of Scott’s hat. “What are you wearing?”
“And why do you all smell like horses?” Isaac adds.
“Yeah, Scott, I love you too but you’re kind of ripe.” It doesn’t stop Stiles from wrapping his arms around Scott and hugging back until the muscles in Scott’s back start to relax. Okay, and since when does Scott own a kind of brocade embroidered vest thing like the one he’s wearing right now? He doesn’t, that’s since when, and Stiles knows that because he would’ve mocked the crap out of Scott for it.
“Take a wild guess,” Lydia says.
Over Scott’s shoulder, in the sulfur-yellow light of one of the few unbroken street lights still standing over the abandoned parking lot, Lydia Martin is wearing a big high-necked dress that goes all the way down to her feet. Stiles once spent a whole lot of time cataloguing Lydia’s every move, and Lydia has never in her life worn a dress like that.
“Oh shit,” Stiles says, and pushes Scott off him so he can actually look his best friend in the eye. Scott’s got something like a five-day growth of beard on his face. “Oh no.”
“Oh, yes,” says Allison. “Hi.” At least she’s wearing pants, although he’s definitely never seen Allison in suspenders like that before. Or pants, now that he thinks of it.
“Um, yeah,” Scott says. “We found the portal.”
“You got caught?” Isaac straightens up, looking left and right like the faerie portal is going to jump out of the dark and attack them, which, shit, maybe it might.
“How long?” Stiles asks. They seriously split up twenty minutes ago, but they way they’ve gone native it has to have been at least a week.
“That,” says Lydia, “is a long story, and I was promised pizza.”
“Wait,” says Scott, “is the pizza place even still open? Does anybody remember? What time is it?”
Lydia pulls out an honest-to-god gold pocketwatch on a chain before Stiles can stop gaping enough to look at his wrist, and opens it with a flick of her thumb. “Well, if we went straight hour to hour it’s about 1 AM, but I don’t remember what time Sarpino’s closes.”
“Midnight,” Isaac says. He’s got a funny, stunned look on his face that Stiles is pretty sure is mirrored on his own. “We tried last week after that research session, remember? We ended up going for burgers?”
“Oh my god, burgers,” says Scott.
“Yes,” says Lydia. “Fine, put pizza off, burgers.”
“They have milkshakes, don’t they,” Allison says. “Chocolate milkshakes.”
“Seriously, guys, how long were you gone?” Stiles asks. Scott reaches into a pocket and tosses a set of keys that Isaac grabs out of the air mostly on reflex.
“Take the bike,” Scott says. “I’m not sure I actually remember how to ride something that doesn’t steer itself. Stiles can drive us, right?”
“Um, Allison drove too,” Stiles points out. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I am feeling great,” Lydia declares. She holds one hand out to Scott, who takes it like he’s been doing it for months. “Mr. Martin, would you be so kind as to buy me a cheeseburger?”
“Of course, Mrs. Martin,” Scott says. “Miss Allison?”
“Why thank you, Mr. Martin.” Allison links elbows with Scott. The burger place is not going to be happy about that gun on her hip. Stiles is pretty sure he’s staring. His mouth also might be hanging open.
“Why Mr. Stilinski, Mr. Lahey, you won’t ever catch yourselves a fine wife like Miss Allison if you just stand there gaping,” Lydia chides. “Of course, there’s no wife so fine as Miss Allison in all of California territory.”
“And now we’re home and I never have to field dress a deer in a full-length skirt again,” says Allison. “And you know, I’ve definitely never heard any complaints about Mrs. Martin, either.”
Stiles knows that look on Scott’s face there. That is Scott’s complete and total shit-eating grin. That is a Scott McCall who just got so royally laid that even he can’t help gloating about it. And he’s got a gorgeous woman on each arm, who are, if Stiles isn’t grossly mistaken, flirting with each other. Holy shit.
“Um,” says Isaac. “I’m gonna go find Derek and the others so somebody can drive Allison’s car home.”
“Yeah,” says Stiles. “Yeah, that’s great. And, hey, guys? We parked that way.”