This is a ridiculously quick drabble thing, and I am not proud of it. I am sure many, many people could take this basic premise and do it a lot better - really, it needs to be novel-length - but the idea wouldn't leave me alone, so I figured I may as well post it. Hope you guys enjoy!
1.
Lydia is on Peter's doorstep the next morning. There's a Gucchi bag hanging from her shoulder that smells like wolfsbane and old parchment, and despite the events of the last few days she looks like a runway model. When Peter opens the door, she unsheathes a smile like a knife.
"Teach me how to bring her back."
They know each other too well to need the unspoken or else.
2.
It was the most obvious thing imaginable. The moment she had a second to breathe, Lydia saw the answer at once, as perfect as a balanced equation: she had already helped to bring one person back from the dead.
Now she just needed to do it again.
3.
Peter warns her: "It won't be easy. She wasn't a werewolf."
Lydia asks: "Is that a requisite?"
He is forced to admit that it is not.
4.
It just makes things much more complicated.
5.
She tries to tell the others what she's doing – their assistance would be helpful, if they could follow orders for once – but they react badly. Scott breaks down in tears and Stiles shouts at her for trusting Peter even for a second, and Lydia loses all control. She screams back at him, and the windows of her mother's sitting room explode into glittering, razor-edged dust. The boys hold their hands over their ears and Lydia keeps screaming; shrieks not her loss or grief or anguish (her best friend, her first and best best friend is gone gone gone and she still wakes up from nightmares of Allison's still face) but her complete and utter refusal of this reality. She screams until jagged ribbons snake across the mirror above the mantlepiece and the fine china in their display crack and splinter like badly-fired clay and the expensive white vase on its stand bursts apart, scattering water and tulips all over the carpet.
Her mother comes running in, pale and frightened. "Lydia! What happened?"
Lydia tells the boys to get out.
6.
She doesn't go to Allison's funeral, but she visits the grave two days after they put her best friend in the ground, and she cries.
She also takes some of the grave dirt; two greedy handfuls. It gets under her nails.
She keeps it in an urn.
7.
"You're a banshee."
"Does this have relevance?"
"You're going to need cash. Banshee hair is worth its weight in gold to the right people."
"And I suppose you just happen to know the right people."
"Well."
8.
She makes very sure that it is impossible for anyone to curse or otherwise enchant her using her hair before she starts selling it, but it turns out that there are some perks to being a walking talking omen of death: anyone who tries to hex her is going to meet a very bad end very quickly. She tells her parents that it's for charity and cuts off almost all of her hair.
She sells it strand by strand at fourteen different locations, to a variety of very strange customers, and has to open a new bank account for the proceeds.
Peter looks slightly strangled when she shows him the invoice. "I think that ought to be enough, yes."
9.
Deaton won't let her use his books – "the dead need to stay dead, Lydia,", she's getting very tired of hearing that – so she turns to the internet. Turns out that Amazon doesn't stock eight-thousand-year-old Babylonian tablets but Stiles isn't the only one who knows how to research. Lydia tracks down the private owners of a dozen rare and precious books and scrolls and takes a road-trip.
She brings Allison's urn with her, because she doesn't trust Peter to look after it.
10.
She buys a strand of blue goldstone beads that allows her to astral project from a charming young kappa, and instead of trying to steal all the books she needs she takes pictures of the pages with her smartphone.
Peter doesn't understand how the phone can work while she projects. She doesn't try to explain the adjustments she made to its workings. He's cunning, but she doesn't think he could hold up under quantum physics.
11.
She doesn't speak for three months in order to raise power for one of the charms they need. It's easier than she thought it would be.
The psychiatrist her parents send her to is happy to converse through notes.
12.
She cuts her tongue with a golden sickle and bleeds into a bowl of green jade, and then she can talk again.
She speaks to Peter when necessary, but mostly she talks to the grave dirt and tells herself Allison can hear her.
13.
Stiles tries to ask her how she is. She's too self-composed to stick out her tongue at him, especially since he would most likely notice the still-healing cut. She smiles and pretends everything's fine, and dismisses him as quickly as she can.
14.
She goes to Scott and demands a vial of his tears. "Cry for Allison," she orders.
Kira looks worried in the background, but Lydia ignores her and Scott doesn't ask.
He gives her back the vial two days later in Algebra II, and it's full.
15.
She uses her gold sickle to harvest nettles in the rain, and spends six weeks beating and spinning them into cord.
Her hands hurt so much she cries, but never where Peter can hear.
She keeps on spinning.
16.
She tracks down a knife made from sky-iron (metal from a comet; why all these old texts need to be so poetic she will never know) in Oregon, and that she steals.
She uses it to hack a knot of wood from the oak that started all the trouble, then breaks into the school after hours and uses the tools from Shop Class to carve and sand it into an old, old sigil, from a language only eight people in the world can read anymore, and none can speak.
She threads it on the nettle-cord and wears it around her neck.
17.
The cord still burns. It raises rashes around her throat and on her collarbone.
18.
There's a dragon sleeping underneath the Midwest.
She takes cameras and notebooks and pens to document the experience, then goes to talk to it. She brings the urn.
The dragon is enormous, a river of molten gold and crimson. She is excited for what its existence means for the study of biology (a reptile that can fly, or is it an avian that only resembles a lizard? How does it breathe fire?) but she is untouched by its beauty.
She knows the most beautiful things are dangerous.
She has come prepared to bargain with her mother's jewellery box, but for the phoenix feather in its hoard, it wants a finger.
She holds out her left hand without hesitation.
19.
She tells her parents that she sliced it off by mistake while cutting fruit, and they are too distressed to wonder where the finger itself has gone.
20.
It makes her hand feel lighter.
21.
She lines her shoes with shards of broken glass.
Peter scrutinises her closely as she takes her first stumbling steps across the floor of his open-plan apartment. She forces her spine straight and tries to pretend that they can't both hear the crunch of the glass with each step.
The pain is beyond description.
"You're going to have to do better than that," Peter says, and he's right, of course. She must show no sign of how much it hurts, not on her face or in her pulse or scent, for an entire month. New moon to new moon.
She snarls at him anyway. It helps to distract her.
A very, very little bit.
22.
Two weeks in, she breaks. Pain flickers across her face for just a moment, but it's enough to dissipate the power she's been building.
Peter finds her crying in the stall of a school bathroom. She has no time to wonder how he knew where to find her before he hauls her up and slaps her across the face. "Is this all she means to you?" he roars. "Is this it? Do you give up? Do you give up, Lydia?"
"No!"
She runs out into the woods on her shredded feet and screams until the boughs around her crack and break and fall to the ground as splinters.
Then she waits until the next new moon and starts again.
23.
She doesn't thank Peter, and he doesn't mention it.
24.
Derek is waiting for her on a Thursday afternoon. His ridiculous vehicle is in the school parking lot, and he is lounging against it like a model in a car magazine.
Lydia ignores him, but he steps in front of her. "You smell like blood."
She cannot even think of the agony screaming in the soles of her feet, or she will break again and the spell will be ruined. So she gives him her best sarcastic smile. "I realise you spend most of your time hanging out with children, but as a hetrosexual male menstruation is really something you ought to look up. It plays an important role in any romantic and/or sexual relationship with a woman."
She raises her eyebrows at him when he still doesn't move. "If you'll excuse me."
She steps around him and heads for her car. He doesn't try to stop her.
25.
This time she gets through the whole month.
It's a relief to be able to reveal her injuries at last and request medical attention.
The doctors don't quite believe that she stepped on broken glass just once, but it's a hard thing for them to disprove.
26.
Her psychiatrist is becoming very familiar, but at least they can talk out loud now.
27.
She grinds the phoenix feather in a marble mortar, along with chips of jade and obsidian and nuggets of pine sap. She boils the result with hemlock and orchids and Scott's tears and the dark flakes that are the blood of her silence. She sprinkles in the broken glass she spent a month walking on.
She leaves the oak pendant soaking in the mixture over the full moon.
28.
Lydia takes out the pendant. The paste that is left is almost like dough.
She fetches the urn of grave dirt, and sprinkles the old, crumbly earth over the paste.
29.
It's so hard to breathe.
30.
Peter peers over her shoulder at the necklace and the concoction in its bowl. "That's it?"
"Almost."
He eyes her warily. "What else is there?"
She doesn't answer.
31.
It took ten months to create everything she needed. But they have to wait for the anniversary of Allison's death, and that's two whole months of waiting.
Whenever another scream starts building in her throat, she glances down at her missing finger and reminds herself that it's worth it.
32.
Waiting turns out to be the hardest part.
She decides she would give up the rest of her fingers to make the day she needs come faster.
33.
Her thumbs too.
34.
Jackson calls. It is completely unexpected, in this new world where she charts the stars and the movements of the planets until everything, absolutely everything, feels premeditated and predictable.
She picks up, after a minute of staring blankly at her phone.
When he asks what she's been up to, she thinks of the Romantic ideal of souls as ribbons of white light, imagines herself weaving a tide of them on some gleaming loom. "I'm interested in quantum energy now," she tells him blithely.
It's funny to think that once upon a time he was very nearly her everything. But she lives in a different kind of fairytale now, one distinctly more Grimm.
The conversation doesn't last long, and he doesn't call back.
35.
The night comes at last. She gathers the strength she used to walk on glass and keeps herself calm and poised all day, but by the time she and Peter make their way to the grave she feels as though she's breathing lightning.
36.
Peter helps her dig up the grave. It's hard, brutal work, but Lydia has grown used to hard, brutal work. Her hair brushes her shoulders as she hoists the shovel, driving it into the dirt again and again, and her hands are almost shaking.
It takes both of them, and the ropes they brought, to lift the coffin out. Lydia pulls out the nails with her hammer and swings back the lid, and it's -
It's horrible.
Somehow, she forgot that Allison would not, of course would not, look as she had.
Tears roll down Lydia's cheeks, smearing her make-up, as she pries open Allison's mouth. She tries to be gentle. She does not shudder, does not use the gloves she brought. She can't do that to Allison. Not now. Not after all they've been through, all Lydia has gone through to reach this moment.
Carefully, she packs the clay-like potion over Allison's tongue, and presses her chin until her mouth closes over it. She takes the necklace from around her own neck and places it around Allison's; it's tricky, and Peter comes closer to lift Allison's shoulders to help, but they do it.
And wait.
"Is that it?" Peter asks, sceptical. He peers down at Allison's mouldering face. "I do hope this hasn't been a great waste of time – "
Lydia sweeps her gold sickle across his throat in one smooth motion, and his blood splashes over Allison.
37.
Persephone's Mercy can only be granted to one mortal at a time. For Allison to leave Hades, Peter has to go back in.
38.
Lydia does not say she's sorry. She barely notices Peter's look of betrayal as he crumples to the ground.
She holds her breath as his blood slides over Allison like crimson silk, leaving whole, healthy skin in its wake. It spins her hair anew, long dark silky locks.
It trickles into her mouth and onto the potion there.
39.
And Allison jerks awake, gasping and panicked and disorientated, jack-knifing upright.
"Lydia?"
40.
For a moment, Lydia stares back at her, saying nothing. Doing nothing.
Until suddenly she throws her head back and screams, and Allison starts, her heart – oh God, her heart, she was dead, Stiles and the nogitsune and the oni, it's all coming back – pounding as her best friend screams and screams and screams.
But it's not a sound of anguish.
It's a banshee's wild song of triumph.