#coralydia

When there’s no longer a hint of moon in the sky, she returns stateside and stays a few days in the echoing loft, works out until it feels like her heart might explode from her chest, runs through the woods until her feet are a mess of dirt and crushed leaves and dried blood.

Mainly, she tries to figure out where to go next.

She’s trying to narrow it down between New York and Philadelphia, where Derek says he’ll be for at least another week, when she gets a call from Lydia. It’s not entirely a surprise; they’ve been in fairly consistent contact since Lydia left for Massachusetts, text each other at least once a day.

The subject of the call is what throws Cora off-guard.

“My roommate is moving out at the end of the week,” Lydia says as soon as Cora picks up. “Do you still want to get out of Beacon Hills?”

If Cora were to take some time to think it over, she’s fairly certain that she could come up with a dozen reasons why saying yes is a horrible idea. But, when it comes down to it, it’s probably a better idea than crashing on Kira and Malia’s couch or tagging along as Derek and Braeden’s third wheel for a few weeks.

So she doesn’t give herself any time to talk herself out of it. She simply says yes and starts to pack as soon as the call ends.

It takes just a little under an hour. All her most valuable possessions, the things she holds most dear in all the world, fit into a single worn duffle bag.

Frankly, she’s surprised that she manages to fill it.

It’s raining when her flight lands.

Lydia is waiting for her just inside the entrance to the arrivals area, raincoat belted tightly around her waist, hair hanging in a tight braid over one shoulder, looking so effortlessly put together and beautiful, so at ease in her surroundings, that Cora has to swallow around a sour lump of jealousy.

“It’s nice to see you,” she says as Cora walks up. There’s a moment of hesitation, a moment where her shoulders go stiff, before she shakes her head minutely and pulls Cora into a tight hug. It’s been so long since Cora’s touched someone else that her first instinct is to shrink away, but then the smell of Lydia’s shampoo reaches her nostrils, and the unique rhythm of her heartbeat, so utterly familiar, fully settles in Cora’s ears. For the first time in months, she feels like she’s standing on solid ground again, and she melts into Lydia’s touch.

“Yeah,” she mutters, closing her eyes for just a moment, focusing on the steady thump of Lydia’s heart in order to block out the cacophony filling the rest of the vast space. “You too.”

Lydia’s apartment is smaller than she expected, but she’s actually relieved; after spending so much time alone in the cold, echoing loft, she’s had enough of expansive spaces. The windows let in copious amounts of sunlight, and there’s a balcony large enough for her to work out on when the weather is nice. Her own room is already mostly furnished; Lydia’s old roommate left behind their bed and desk, so all Cora has to order is a new dresser (which remains half-empty, even after she buys some new clothes). At night, it’s surprisingly quiet; the street isn’t heavily trafficked, and they’re far away from the bars, so she’s able to sleep with the window open, enjoy the breeze, without having to use earplugs.

Even though the official beginning of the semester is still some weeks off, Lydia has already managed to score a job as a research assistant for a professor in the mathematics department and, once Cora has unpacked her meager belongings and taken some time to get used to the neighborhood, she uses a connection that she’s somehow managed to cultivate in only a few months to land Cora a job as a barista at a coffee shop on campus.

Despite it being the summer, the shop is still busy enough that most of her day flies by in the blink of an eye, and she falls into the routine quickly, uses her enhanced senses to her advantage. It’s not glamorous, the uniform is absolutely hideous, and it’s definitely not something that she wants to make a career out of, but seeing as she isn’t sure what she does want to make a career out of, she’s fine with it being a stopover. At the very least, it gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, gives her something to focus on that isn’t the pull of the moon.

Any reservations she may have had about being Lydia’s roommate dissolve fairly quickly. Lydia spends a good portion of any given day on campus and when she is home, she’s quiet, is usually curled up on the couch with a book or watching something on her laptop. She doesn’t push Cora to talk, but she listens when Cora does want to talk. She’s freer with her physical affections than Cora remembers; she doesn’t hesitate to slide closer when Cora sits down beside her on the couch, doesn’t shy away from occasionally brushing Cora’s hair away from her face, but she’s never pushy about it, never lingers for too long.

One night, as Cora lays in bed, staring out the window at where the glow from the streetlights has turned the sky a deep shade of orange and listening to Lydia quietly hum to herself in her bedroom down the hall, she thinks to herself that maybe this is where she’s meant to be.

Maybe this is what she’s been searching for since senior year came to an end.

But then the moon starts to edge towards its peak again and her skin grows too tight and her chest aches for something she can’t put a name to but is too damnably familiar with.

She calls in sick on the day of the full moon and stays in her bedroom, buried under her blanket despite the heat, palms going through a continual cycle of tearing open and healing as her claws dig in.

She wants to call Derek. She wants to ask if he’s experiencing the same thing, if he feels like he’s going to implode every single time the moon reaches its peak, but the idea of moving to find her phone, of poking her head out into the sunlight, just makes her head ache, and she remains motionless.

By the time Lydia returns from campus, it’s nearly evening, and Cora still hasn’t moved. The sound of the front door closing behind her echoes through Cora’s head, as does each of her footsteps. When she pauses outside Cora’s door, Cora can hear the wood rasping when Lydia lays her palm on it.

Idly, she wonders how painful gouging out her own eardrums would be.

“Cora?” Thankfully, Lydia’s voice is softer than usual, barely louder than a whisper. “Are you okay?”

Cora could lie to her. Lydia wouldn’t be able to hear her heartbeat shift and tick, wouldn’t be able to smell her scent change ever so subtly. But frankly, Cora doesn’t know if she could keep her voice from shaking long enough to lie.

So, instead, voice raspy with thirst, she answers, “No.”

Lydia’s scent changes at that, sours a little with something that isn’t quite sadness but is in the pain spectrum nonetheless. After a moment where the only sounds from her are her heartbeat and breath, she slowly pushes the door open, and Cora shifts the blanket just enough so that she can look out with one eye.

“I have an idea,” Lydia says, glancing around the room, at the closed window and the blanket bunched over Cora’s body. “But we’d need to go for a short drive. Is that something you could manage?”

The honest answer is that Cora isn’t sure. But she wants to try, even if only to make the sour smell of Lydia’s pain dissipate.

“Can we come back?” she asks, sticking her whole head out from underneath the blanket and blinking at the overly bright room. “If it’s too much.” Lydia nods.

“Of course.”

That’s the assurance Cora needs to fully kick the blanket away from her body. Sitting up and tossing her legs over the edge of the mattress, she runs one hand through her hair and is only mildly alarmed when her fingers snag on a considerably large knot.

“Alright. Just let me brush my teeth first.”

The world seems to be painted in swathes of screaming florescent color, and the sound of everything is turned up too high, and the moon feels like it has its claws firmly hooked into her back, but Cora still manages to make it out of the apartment and into the passenger seat of Lydia’s car.

Once she’s seated, she sinks back into the leather and closes her eyes, grateful for the tinted windows. Even though it’s warm enough outside to have the windows down, Lydia leaves them up and turns the air conditioning on the lowest setting. After a moment of adjustment, the low whoosh of air actually becomes almost soothing. It gives Cora something else to focus on, along with the sound of Lydia’s heart, something to block out what feels like every sound in the universe. Lydia doesn’t tell her where they’re going, and Cora doesn’t ask.

She figures it out when they’re still nearly a block away.

The barking of at least a dozen dogs assaults her ears, and she digs her hands into her knees, claws tearing through her jeans and pressing into her skin. Lydia immediately slows down and glances over, fingers tight around the steering wheel.

“Is it too much? We can turn around.”

On some level, it is; there’s just so much noise, so many things clamoring for her attention that it makes Cora’s head throb. But she’s made it this far; she doesn’t want to give up yet, especially when they’re so close. She wants to know the full details of Lydia’s plan, at the very least.

“No,” she winces, forcing herself to take a deep breath. “Keep going.”

They pull into the parking lot of the animal shelter a minute later. They’re the only vehicle in the lot, and once Lydia slides out, she comes around to Cora’s side and holds out her hand.

Her slim fingers would never heal properly if Cora squeezed them too hard. They’d stay jagged and crooked for the rest of her life.

“What if I hurt you?” she asks, bumping the door closed with her hip. Lydia just stares at her.

“Homicidal lizard of an ex-boyfriend never hurt me,” she says, hand still extended. “And I don’t think you will either.” It’s such an absurd thing to say, so human, but she’s unwavering; there isn’t a single ounce of fear coming off of her.

“I like to think that I’m more trustworthy than Jackson ever was,” Cora replies, trying her best to crack a joke as she slots their fingers together and lets Lydia walk her towards the entrance.

“You are. And more honest,” Lydia says. Just for a moment, her scent spikes with pain again, and Cora feels the abrupt need to pull Lydia close and hug her until it goes away. But the scent disappears almost as soon as it arrives, and when they walk inside, Cora immediately returns to focusing on keeping herself under control. Barking and meowing reverberates off every wall, and the lights are too glaring, and the combined scents of animal waste and industrial strength cleaning supplies gets caught in her throat, forcing her to swallow around a retch.

She’s vaguely aware that Lydia is talking to the woman at the front desk, but she doesn’t catch most of the conversation, doesn’t really even know what’s going on until the woman unlocks the waist-height gate beside the counter and ushers them back.

Once they leave the front area, the lights thankfully dim a little, and Cora’s able to open her eyes to more than a squint. They walk down a long hallway dotted with doors and stop in front of the one at the very end. There’s a small window inset in the door, and Cora peers through the glass into a room with a concrete floor and walls. A large dog bed fills one corner and curled up on it staring at the window is a dog only slightly smaller than a coyote with black and white fur. When Cora leans in closer to the window, the dog’s ears perk up, and its short tail starts to thump against the bed.

“This is Star,” the woman says, unlocking the door and pushing it open. “She was surrendered a few weeks ago. She’s very sweet.”

“What kind of dog is she?” Lydia asks, but Cora doesn’t pay attention to the answer that Lydia receives. Instead, she steps into the room and carefully sinks down onto her haunches and slowly extends one hand, ready to pull back if need be; dogs tend to be more wary around alphas, but some of them are just as frightened of betas, and healing factor or no, she doesn’t really relish the thought of having fangs sunk deep into her wrist.

But that doesn’t happen. Star wriggles forward, black nose cautiously sniffing at the air in front of Cora’s fingertips. After only a few moments, she gets to her feet, trots across the space between them and starts excitedly licking at Cora’s palm. When Cora fully sits down on the cold ground, Star clambers up into her lap and nudges at her chin with her snout, smacks her tail against Cora’s knee.

“I think she’s picked you,” the woman laughs quietly. Cora nods and glances up at Lydia, who is smiling but looks unsure of herself, is too stiff to be fully relaxed.

“Good,” Cora responds, scratching underneath Star’s chin, and Lydia’s smile comes fully alive. “Because I’m picking her.”

For an extra fee, the shelter is able to provide them with everything they need: a cage, food, a leash and some starter toys. While Lydia is occupied with filling out the required paperwork, Cora pays for everything and then ignores Lydia’s protests that they should have at least split the cost halfway.

It takes a few moments to fit everything into the back of Lydia’s car, and there isn’t enough room to fully unfold the cage, so Star rides back in Cora’s lap. Her head whips around as she looks at all the passing scenery, but she doesn’t claw at the dashboard or the window, and she seems perfectly content to allow Cora to press her face between her shoulder blades and breathe in deeply.

The different rhythms of the heartbeats in the car, of her own and Lydia’s and Star’s, should be too discordant, should only make her head throb more, but instead, she feels safe. Feels like she’s back in Beacon Hills with the rest of the pack, feels like she knows her place again.

It takes them two trips to bring everything upstairs. Once the door is closed behind them, Cora unclips Star’s leash. She expects Star to run around and explore, but instead, she simply follows Cora around, watches her set up her bed in the living room, follows her to the bathroom and waits outside until Cora comes back out. She only wanders away once they’ve set up her food and water in a corner of the kitchen.

After they’ve put everything away, Lydia sits down on one end of the couch and turns the television on, mutes it and puts something on Netflix with subtitles, and Cora doesn’t even think about retreating back to her bedroom. Instead, after a moment of hesitation, she sits beside Lydia on the couch, not close enough to touch but close enough to feel Lydia’s body heat.

After only a moment, Lydia reaches out and gently sets one hand on Cora’s shoulder.

“You can come here,” she says by way of explanation, glancing from Cora’s face to her own lap and back again. “If you want to.” There’s a hitch in her heartbeat that Cora isn’t familiar with, but it’s one that she knows as nervousness from hearing it in other people.

“Okay,” she says quietly and, before she can talk herself out of it, she pulls her legs up onto the couch and lies down with her head in Lydia’s lap, shifts around until she’s comfortable. When Lydia drops one hand to her hair and starts carefully untangling the knots, Cora lets her eyes fall shut.

“I wish I could take your pain away,” Lydia murmurs, fingertips smoothing along Cora’s hairline, like she’s trying to do it anyway, like she’s imagining black veins of pain climbing up her hand. Before Cora can answer, the sound of nails clicking against the floor reaches her ears, and Star hops up onto the couch, presses herself back against Cora’s chest and stretches out.

Cora sighs, lets herself sink further into Lydia’s lap, and drops one hand to Star’s side, anchors it in her sleek fur.