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She wakes in darkness, jolted from sleep by the sensation of a sudden fall. Whatever forgotten nightmare she's escaped, the comfort of the familiar is slow to settle, and the darkness where she's woken lies oppressively complete. The very air around her is unfamiliar, wrong – and as the seconds pass, that wrongness grows instead of fading. There's a weight on her chest, like being swaddled beneath a mountain of bedclothes, holding her so tightly she can neither move nor speak, so surely that she doesn't dare try. Something – something with a name she dreads to remember – hovers waiting on the edges of her mind, hovers intangibly just out of sight in the gloom, one shadow among many, looming over her body with the inevitability of sin. The darkness here could swallow her and leave nothing left behind, those two glowing pinpoints of red the last she'll ever see.
Then a voice says, "Lydia?" and there's the sound of someone scrabbling for a match. Another voice says, "What? What happened?" – both of them familiar, they sound so scared, but before she can identify either there's light in the room and Scott-the-stable-boy is leaning over her bed. He has a burning match in one hand; with the other he grips her on the shoulder – to reassure her or to reassure himself she doesn't know, but like a spell is broken, suddenly she can move. Lydia gasps like a drowning man finding air at his lips at long last, and sits up as though the bed has burnt her.
Jackson appears from somewhere, calling her name in the voice of a broken man. He shoves Scott and all remnants of propriety aside and wraps his arms around her in a hug, so tight she almost can't breathe. She hears Scott swear as the match goes out, hears him scramble for another, but Jackson doesn't seem to notice, and Lydia is suddenly, horribly occupied with a wave of dread – all the fear and horror you don't dare let yourself feel until the moment you're safe – that hits her like a plunge into ice-cold water. Jackson's arms around her, the faint heat of his body might be the only things left that are real anymore. The three of them in this room might be the last people left of all the world, floating in an empty, endless void.
She can't quite bring herself to hug him back.
In the background, she's dimly aware that Scott's lighting another match and then a candle, but nothing there is terribly relevant until she hears him exclaim, "Stiles!" and rush for the door all at once.
Jackson is gone from beside her as abruptly as he appeared. "No, wait!" He stops Scott at the doorway... or rather, at the improvised barricade of furniture blocking the doorway, casting sinister shadows in the candlelight. "Don't! What if... what if it's still out there?"
"If she's awake, that means it's dead!" Scott insists.
"How do we know?" argues Jackson. "What if it isn't? What if it's right out there, right now, playing tricks to get us to open up and let it in? What if that scream was all part of the gambit, and you're about to walk right into a trap!"
"What if it's dead and Stiles is hurt?" Scott yells back.
"And what are we supposed to do about that? Do either of us have any idea how we'd help him even if we went right up? Either the plan worked, or it's out there right now and that," Jackson points to the door, "is the only thing between it and Lydia!"
"It?" echoes Lydia. All three of them startle at the sound of her voice, high and fragile.
"The..." Scott breaks off before producing a noun. He looks at her, evidently second guessing whatever he was about to say. "How much do you remember?"
"About what?" asks Lydia.
"About the incubus demon that broke in and attacked you last night!" says Jackson.
"Oh," says Lydia, quietly. "That."
The boys fill her in.
Lydia has woken up in a strange alternate universe where demons crawl in through her window at night, and Stiles-the-uncommitted-apprentice takes it upon himself to orchestrate traps for such beings by lying down in her bed and offering himself up as bait for the monster. The monster with the red eyes, which had sat on her chest in the dream-that-wasn't-a-dream.
The one she'd looked upon in her moment of waking, and known in no way she could put into words that this was what she'd waited her whole life for.
In the dreamlike haze that accompanied the demon, none of that had seemed unlikely. Now that she's properly awake and knows – rationality be damned – that it was no dream, there's a tiny, traitorous part of her that despises them for their gall in chasing it away – when it was her it came for, and no business of anyone else to interfere. If the incubus is dead as Scott insists, that much had not died with it.
Far more than whatever mortal danger may have come and gone, that's the part that scares her.
By the reckoning of her caretakers, there isn't long now until dawn. Jackson convinces Scott to wait that long at least before going to see what might have become of his friend. Jackson plants himself by the bed, smelling of sweat and fear. Lydia stares down at the bedclothes and attempts to decide how sure she is that her body will be there beneath if she pushes them aside. Some poor serving boy she hardly knows from furniture may have given his life this night to save her own after she, Lydia Martin, proved helpless to the thrall of the beast. She watches Scott pace and Jackson snap at him from his chair at her bedside, shifting now and then with a restless energy all his own, though he seems reluctant to leave her side.
At some point she looks down and sees her hand clutched in his, though it's unlikely either of them could have said quite when or how that came to be. It helps though; more than she'd easily admit. Jackson looks over at her every little while, as though still seeking some reassurance she's unable to provide. It soon becomes uncomfortable, to be repeatedly forced to wonder what he could've seen in her face to keep him less than sure; to wonder what it would take to make him believe.
After a while the glances get shorter, as though there's something there he's not sure he wants to see.
As hard as it is to remember what befell her before waking here, trapped in the dark with two scared boys for company, it's harder still for Lydia to think back to a time when he wasn't there in the periphery of her life, carving out his place among the trainees with furious determination. She'd noticed him, of course – his pretty face and easy arrogance would be no easy feat to miss, his need to be noticed hardly less so. In anyone less than uniquely skilled it would have been absurd; in Jackson's case, the best that could realistically be said was that his opinion of himself outstripped that reflected back by his peers and teachers by less than one might expect. He is, above all else, transparent – and sometimes too much so for the comfort of open scorn to come so easily as it might.
Her wandering thoughts arrive upon the memory of the autumn jousting tournament this last year gone – consigned to a sedate affair, with the best and bravest among their knights already gone to the aid the king, and the ranks filled out by mere trainees riding in their elders' places. The spectacle, however, began early that year: even as the herald called each young knight by name to parade before the crowd, one among their number had broken away and ridden boldly up to her feet.
"My Lady," Jackson had greeted her, with the barest nod of his head.
"Sir Jackson," she'd responded, her voice cool. "Perhaps my good knight has gotten lost in the excitement? I do believe the starting line is to be found over there."
"But if I went directly," said Jackson, "I'd miss my chance to beg a token of good luck from my fair lady."
Lydia had arched a brow, and waved a hand to her maid. "Rebecca dear, tell me: did we bring with us today a selection of gaudy scarves and ribbons suitable for a young knight wishing my favour?"
Rebecca's place was behind her and out of sight, but the laugh in her voice rang in Lydia's ears as her maid played along. "No milady, I'm sorry to say we brought not a bob. Not save those you're wearing."
Lydia had raised a delicate hand to her hair, twined and woven with a dozen strands of bright blue ribbon. "Do you know how long it took my dear maid to braid these in this morning? I wouldn't dream of ruining her good work now. Alas, my good knight, I must disappoint you."
Jackson had taken it all in his stride. "Well, then perhaps my lady might accept a token of my own. For luck." So saying, he'd retrieved a trinket from his belt and held it to her in offering.
Lydia still remembers the heat of her father's disapproving glare boring into the side of her head. Jackson was out of line, and for the lord's daughter to publicly favour one of their knights over the others would be unseemly in the extreme – tokens and favours were to be awarded in private, if at all. Without her father's disapproval perhaps she might not have acted at all, but Lydia herself was never content to sit quietly within the lines of expectation, and if a knight is not to be rewarded for his brass, what then was left of the affair?
When she stretched her hand for his, Jackson caught it by the fingers and pressed a kiss beneath her knuckles before releasing her.
Lydia is a lady of the very best composure, and she'd recovered quickly. "Very well. Don't imagine you'll have this back if your show on the field doesn't please me."
"Then it's a good thing, Lady Lydia, that I would not dream of disappointing you," Jackson had answered her, and ridden away.
In her hand, Lydia had found herself grasping a solid brass key. A message, surely, to be puzzled out some other time, when the official entertainment of the day was done.
Jackson rode that day like a man possessed, his spear flying true again and again. In the final round, his opponent – half stunned by a previous near-blow – had faltered and fallen clean from his stirrups mid-gallop, before Jackson came near enough to touch him. A clean victory, but hardly the finale anyone would have hoped for.
Unperturbed, Jackson returned where she sat as the herald declared his victory. "Well, is my lady pleased?"
"By that?" she'd sneered. "Your lady is very little pleased. As little consolation as it offers me, you won't have your token back this day." Lydia remembers watching him falter a moment before smiling up at her, barely disappointed, her meaning not the least misunderstood.
After, she'd strung his key on a fine blue ribbon and, when the modesty of her dress allowed, worn it around her neck like a talisman, heavy against her breast. A little work soon proved it to be a copy of that which kept the tower armoury locked against intruders, though the Martins had never retained so many men-at-arms as to need even half that space for mail and steel, and it was little used for storage nowadays. Sir Finstock and his retinue had long since overtaken that space to install two training pells – wooden posts driven deep into the floor and outfitted in crude mockery of a man – where trainees might receive instruction on occasions when the weather out of doors became too foul to endure.
With summer barely ended it would have been hardly used in months. Lydia, however, found the dust had settled lightly on the left pell, its leather wrappings worn thin with use. She also found a single lantern lying by the wall, the candle within melted almost to a stub, deep within a nest of its own wax.
Jackson's talent is unmistakable, but the truth of what lengths it must have taken for someone so young to earn that victory on the field – a boy whose knighthood never was assured – cast matters in a different sort of light. The picture she'd uncovered was of fortitude and mettle – qualities most commendable – but above all else, one ever plagued with doubt. She never could decide whether he'd meant for her to see that much, or if he'd meant the message sent at all.
Her father had been much less pleased.
For his disobedience, Jackson's knighthood was withheld. When all his peers were called to ride out to the king's aid at Lord Martin's side, he alone remained behind, dishonoured and disgraced. The message in his punishment was wholly unambiguous, and Jackson – for all his talent and all his guile – took the blow to his pride with ill temper and little grace. He blamed first her father, then her, then finally himself. In the months that followed, Lydia watched him grow bitter and distant. Even as her staff dwindled, she saw less of him than ever before, and liked what she saw less still.
When did that change? He'd never begged her pardon and she'd never given it, nor doubted for a moment it was more than he deserved. But in all the years she's chafed beneath the expectations of her father – always waiting for the day she'll fail him as her mother before her – the attraction of that avenue of rebellion never wholly went away. In the seasons that passed before and since she'd seen too much – and he, too much of her – to hate him as easily as she'd have liked, and his worst attempts to make her play the enemy fell through one by one. She'd not been wrong, as such things may be judged in the comfort of hindsight, but days alone can hardly count all they've both lived through since then, before her father rode away.
(Before Kate.)
It could be centuries and more separating both of them from who they were that day – and yet, the memory of his lips against her fingers may have been only yesterday, for how easily it comes back, for the shiver that runs her whole body through at the memory. For the first time that night, the spectre of the incubus seems very far away.
Jackson doesn't let Scott leave – doesn't even let him begin to shift the barricade blocking the door until the first rays of dawn have begun to creep in through cracks in the shutters. The moment Jackson gives the okay Scott is all but tossing furniture aside (it scares her to watch, she'd never had any idea he was so strong). There's one last furiously whispered conference between them at the door, and then Scott's gone and Jackson is locking the door behind him; locking himself and her in together. Lydia finds herself suddenly, achingly sure.
She watches Jackson pace three laps back and forth across the floor before giving up hope of his coming back to the bed of his own accord. Some encouragement is evidently called for. "Jackson! You're driving me insane with that. Please," she entreats him, the space beside her open and inviting. "I need you here."
Jackson will not be the first man she's endeavoured to seduce (no matter what her father may choose to believe of her, or the ends she's reached before in the name of attracting those few select young men of noble birth who managed to please her). In his case she'd not imagined any great subtlety would be required – yet the sharpness of the look he returns her, the flash of horror in his face, suggest he's understood her meaning all too well.
"No!" The response is too quick, his fear too obvious to be anything but heartfelt. "This isn't..." he starts, stops, gets himself under control with a growl in his voice, "this isn't you, Lydia, this is what that thing did to you!"
"Jackson. There's something I need to return to you." The shape of Jackson's key is familiar against her breast, yet even as she raises a hand for it, the doubt overtakes her: had she really worn so cumbersome a trinket to bed last night, or is that weight no more than a phantom that will vanish into memory if she moves?
It's just a symbol, she tells herself; she doesn't need it, not really. But maybe Jackson does.
"Lydia, you don't want this," Jackson growls. "Do you even know who you're talking to right now?" His voice is tinged with desperation, hysterical almost – but he believes what he's saying and that will not do. "I have spent all night hearing about-"
"Jackson," Lydia draws herself as high as she's able. This insinuation he knows her mind better than she will not be borne. "Let me explain this to you so you understand. I want to know we survived this. I want a memory of this night that doesn't start and end with a monster at my window. I want this need spent – in the manner of my choosing, and if I choose to spend it with a man who approached me once, before he lost all nerve, that's as much as is his business to question. Do I make myself clear?"
Jackson looks at her like he doesn't believe his own eyes and ears. The possibility that she's entirely serious seems to have made it through at last. "You want to do this now? Here? This is what it takes to impress you?"
Lydia answers that challenge by leaning back against the pillows. "Come on, Jackson. You saved the lady from the beast. You could at least be man enough to claim your prize."
"That's not what this is about." Raw as his voice has worn, the words are firm and sure.
Lydia gives a very deliberate, put-upon sigh. "Well if you won't, I'm going to have to ask Stiles or Scott, and neither of us want that, do we?"
It would be a childish threat if she didn't almost mean it; she watches him reel with it, ready for the blank-eyed look of betrayal that flashes across his face. She's less ready for what comes simmering up underneath, rising with a fury that takes moments to boil over. "And did you ever think about what I want? Did you?! Do any of you?"
The words hit her like a slap across the face – the lash of his tone not nearly so harsh as the terrible possibility that he means it.
"Don't you?" she whispers. On her mother's name she swears, whatever comes now, she will not cry.
Jackson's rage stutters and goes out. "I didn't..." he tries, breathes out long and slow. "That's not what I meant." At last, he comes to her, falling by the bedside as he takes her hand in his, and something deep within her breathes out in relief; breathes in and tightens. "This isn't how it's supposed to go." The rawness of his voice is almost more than she can bear.
If Lydia had the strength, she'd laugh at him: if they're to speak of what was meant to be, then she was supposed to marry for status and find love in the arms of her servants and courtiers, if ever she found it at all; that he was to be far from here, pledging his life to the field of battle; that the kingdom was to be prosperous and rich – who would dream of such ruin and decline that demon-spawn banished from these shores an age ago would come to accost the likes of Lydia Martin beneath her own roof?
She hasn't the time or words for any of it, but she cups his cheek and draws him close, tugs their joined hands between them and wills him to take this as her answer. With both his pulse and hers thrumming through her fingertips, she opens her lips against his fingers as he watches, and hears him gasp the shakiest breath of his short life.
Between that breath and the next he's kissing her – they're kissing – rough and unpractised in a way they've neither of them the excuse for, and from there it all becomes so much easier.
It isn't right – it isn't enough until she has him inside her, and even that takes longer almost than she can bear. His hands would not stop shaking, she was the one left to pull blindly at the laces of his breeches as he muttered quiet blasphemies in her ear – and with them, the whispered fear he wasn't sure he could, not like this, so soon. By one candle in a room with too many shadows, the light permits them both more modesty than they deserve, but there'd been nothing modest in Lydia when she'd licked a thumb, found him by touch and coaxed him into hardness with her fingertips (and if hers were sure where his faltered, it's not because the heartbeat pounding in her veins runs any tamer). It's her fingers clutching at his hips that bring him to her, her hands that guide him in.
It's not enough until that first long push inside, that leaves him so deep before he stills that she feels him in her fingertips and toes – oh yes, this is what she's needed since the moment she woke, alone and empty. With her dress pushed up beneath her arms, his breeches hanging open, like guilty youths expecting interruption any moment, they rock against each other, suspended there. She hears Jackson gasp, arms shaking beneath his weight, and she murmurs his name quite without shame as her eyes drift closed. She knows, with all the demon left behind in its wake, that he could ask nearly anything now and she'd beg him for it. He knows it too, or guesses as much, and even now she feels his fear they two of them aren't in this bed alone. This is more trust than he deserves or even wants from her, but she wraps herself around him and swears this won't be for her alone.
The incubus would have given her what this is like to dreamers, but Lydia wants something more and less – wants something human, that she understands. Wants sex as she knows it: an act, a gift, a little fun to prove yourself no-one's blushing maid; a risk you take with all your vulnerabilities – all your softest, most private shame – laid open and spread wide for every misaimed word or knee. With him, it never could have been entirely perfect, and she's glad.
He holds her as she clutches at his sides, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow as he moves inside her, slow. She's not one to lay quiet and demure, but now sound catches in her throat, leadened into empty gasps and whispers, building into a writhing mass that could burst her from within. She feels the world go thin and taught, strung between the spaces of each moment, shattered and reborn anew with every move they make. She feels it in the tension in his arms, his rhythm never constant, the pent futility of a thousand old frustrations, broken and rearranged anew. They rise together now, and she crests at last in wave on wave of overwhelming noise; every voice within her dumbed into glorious silence for moments without end.
"Lydia?" he whispers, eventually, still firm within her when she shifts, no longer comfortable. She finds herself pushing on his belly before she can think better of it, out, away, and he draws out with a gasp.
"It's all right," she whispers back, catching him by the hem of a shirt as it flutters past her hand, she pulls him back into her arms. "It's all right," she whispers again, watches his eyelids flutter closed as he understands. He lets forehead fall to lie against her own and they rest there, breathing one another's breath as she takes him in her hand again. It doesn't take long at all – as if permission might have been all he'd waited for.
Panting, he falls beside her. The quiet that falls between them doesn't shift into ease – the tension in his body says he doesn't trust what happens now. Truth be told, she doesn't either.
Later, wrapped in borrowed cloaks, she will stand beneath the Tower and look upon the body of her monster, lying in the snow. She'll see that it died screaming, look upon its twisted flesh and wonder how she could ever have been made to believe she wanted such a thing. She'll watch its body crumble in the flames. Not even for the space between two moments will she be grateful in the least.
But for now, she curls her hand in Jackson's hair and thinks, this much is mine as she kisses him, one long, last time before the world without can intrude to pull her away.