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Lydia Martin’s nails are always painted.
It’s a fact—the same amount of truth is in that statement as there is in pointing out that the sky is blue, grass is green, and the Earth is round.
It’s not exactly healthy, no, but it’s better than the alternative.
It’s better than people pointing out the way her fingers taper the smallest amount at the tips from years of Lydia picking at her skin to sate some compulsion that appeared out of nowhere sometime in her youth and never fully went away.
When Lydia Martin’s nails are painted—usually deep reds with tinges of pink or sometimes black, but only when the occasion calls for it—people just smile and compliment the color. They ask her if she did them herself or which nail salon she’d gone to because they would like to get theirs done too, and they won’t think any longer or deeper about it.
Allison Argent used to be one of these people—though she isn’t anymore.
Allison doesn’t feel guilty about it now after having gone to therapy and finally accepting that she doesn’t have to carry the weight of everything that had taken place in her childhood or before she was even born—her parents’ divorce or her entire family’s dark legacy—but she still feels pangs of something whenever she thinks about the way her wife had suffered in silence as a young girl in an empty house with estranged parents.
Even if she had only met Lydia during their senior years of high school.
Even if she had only been a teenaged girl herself.
She thinks about the big birthday parties that her wife had thrown back when they were still in high school and the millions of dresses that Lydia Martin had had for every occasion, and she thinks about her wife’s entire wardrobe that now fits in the same closet as Allison’s own sizeable amount of clothing and how most of their social hangouts are with the other members of the original Pack—Stiles, Scott, Isaac, Derek, Erica, Boyd, Jackson, and Danny—when everyone can find the time to get together, and she mourns the fact that Lydia Martin couldn’t have grown up as a quiet bookworm, who spent her nights reading about complex physics instead of trying to fill the space with people and partying and superficial relationships, and then Allison lets all of the unhelpful thoughts go with the breath she took before stepping into her wife’s study.
“Lydia,” she murmurs, coming up behind where her wife sat in her office chair and smiling at the sight of red hair in a messy bun secured with a pencil—“for the aesthetic, Allison.”
On the desk is a laptop that had fallen asleep and organized stacks of papers with small-print text and jargon Allison couldn’t hope to understand. A pad of pale yellow sticky notes sits off to the side where Lydia had doodled a cat playing with a ball of yarn.
Instead of responding with words, Lydia just leans into the way Allison has subconsciously taken to massaging her shoulders.
There are pale flakes of skin littering the beige carpet below, but Allison doesn’t say anything about them—only makes a mental note to sweep them up after she gets her wife into bed.
“Lydia, love,” she gently persists, “it’s time to go to bed.”
Over the years, she’s learned that the best way to get a banshee’s attention isn’t to try to be louder than all of the dead’s whispers but to use soft, grounding touches until her love comes back to her. Sometimes, she’ll light a candle that smells like pumpkin spice—even outside the autumn months—and bring their weighted blanket from the basket in the living room to drape over her wife’s shoulders, but she doesn’t think she needs all of that tonight.
“Ally,” Lydia hums eventually, blinking her eyes to help her escape the trance she’d been in, “what time is it?”
Lydia’s banshee trances weren’t as bad as they used to be since she’d learned better how to harness her supernatural abilities, but they still caught her off guard from time to time.
When Allison tells her that it’s two o’clock in the morning and the last thing Lydia remembered before zoning in on the itchiness in the back of her throat was typing up an email to Stiles about digitizing their bestiary three hours ago, Lydia feels herself stiffen before she forces herself to relax.
She lets Allison pull her chair out from underneath her desk, spin her around, and then pull her into her arms with a delighted laugh, and together, they both walk to their master bedroom and then their connected bathroom to go through their respective bedtime routines.
Allison gets done long before Lydia does, so when Lydia finally joins her wife under the covers, her spot is already half-warm.
Later, in the morning, Lydia will remember what she’d spent the last two hours of her night doing—from the red and raw skin of her right thumb and left index finger—she’ll take a deep breath that feels too shallow, pick her head up, and pretend it never happened, but Allison won’t let her.
She won’t bring any attention to her hands—not by holding her hands or kissing the backs of them as is her instinct to do—but she’ll ask her to slip a black hair tie around her wrist for Allison to use later after she gets sweaty from going on her run.
Allison will deposit her wife at a picnic table in the park, and she’ll smile when she gets back from the loop and sees her wife fidgeting with the scrunchie instead of ripping off her hangnails.
Lydia Martin’s nails are always painted.
It’s a fact—the same amount of truth is in that statement as there is in pointing out that the sky is blue, grass is green, and the Earth is round.
But another fact of life is how much her wife loves her.
She saw past the bubbly, know-it-all, bitchy persona she used to wear and flaunt as a shield all throughout high school, and she’d told Lydia that she “could be the girl next door with sweater paws and a messy bun secured with a pencil” and Allison would keep her secret—just between them.