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Sometimes, when Allison looks down at her newly resurrected body, she sees dirt. It cakes around her ankles, weighs down on her chest. The worms crawl through her fingers. She thinks she can feel the cells in her body collapsing in on themselves, like little supernovas. Like hundreds of explosions, just not quite as bright.
~
Sometimes, Lydia thinks she can still feel the dirt under her fingernails. For days after she dug Allison up, she would look at her hands and smile. Those hands brought her best friend back. Those hands were capable, and those hands held power over life and death.
Those hands shook, then.
Those hands haven't really stopped shaking.
A blood oath, Deaton called it. You can bring someone back, but they'll forever be bound to you. He had said it like he didn't know exactly who she was working to bring back.
You see, Scott had mourned. Stiles had been too broken up about it to go to the funeral. But Lydia? Lydia got to work. To her, Allison never died. She was just asleep, like a princess in a fairy tale, and she needed someone to wake her.
Lydia never doubted it would be her.
She wasn't sure what exactly a blood oath would entail, but she knew the soft earth around Allison's grave like the back of her hand.
By the end of that night, she knew it even better than that.
~
Allison wakes up and sees Lydia above her.
"You're my new best friend." Lydia.
"Allison, I love you." Lydia.
The same person who screamed her name as the world went dark around her.
Allison doesn't remember where she had been, but she isn't sure it matters anymore.
Maybe it was that night, looking up at Lydia's scared eyes and wild hair and shaky hands, maybe it was then that she realized she was in love with Lydia.
Or maybe it was the next morning, leaning against the cold of Lydia's counter, watching Lydia brush through her wet hair and asking her, in a quiet, unused voice, what all had happened since she left.
That's what they've been calling her death, "when she left."
Scott doesn't even know for another week. They aren't sure how to go about it- who can they tell? Should they keep Allison out of sight?
Her dad knows, of course. And Allison supposed that Isaac does too, but he was too shaken up about the whole thing to ever come back to Beacon Hills.
It's been nine days before Allison and Lydia decide to tell Scott.
He cries, and he hugs her, and she doesn't want to kiss him and he doesn't want to kiss her. Kira is sweet, and Allison thinks that maybe in a different life, she loved Scott and Kira and they loved her back.
Allison tells him that, yes, he was her first love, but maybe she'll never love a boy like that again. He gets it, and he's kind enough not to call her out on these newly discovered feelings being for Lydia. Another week passes, and Scott comes home to her crying on his porch step.
"I think I've loved her since the moment I heard her voice."
Sometimes, Lydia jerks away before their lips can touch, and Allison thinks maybe she'd have been better off still in the ground.
~
Blood oaths are confusing. Well, the whole business of raising someone from the dead is confusing.
Lydia can't remember Allison looking at her like that before she brought her back. She tells Allison that she needs some time to think, and it was heart breaking for both of them. She goes to Deaton, and wonders where Allison is going. (Would she go to her father who can barely look her in the eyes? She'd made her home in Lydia's bed for weeks. Lydia tried to sleep on the couch, but the nightmares haunted them both. "Dreams aren't like they were then, before I came back.")
Deaton tells her that love is a troublesome thing. Lydia flinches at the word.
He tells her, as she's leaving, that what they have is a powerful bond.
"It always has been."
~
Allison's hair doesn't grow nearly as fast as it used to. It's a weird thing to miss, but she does. She dyes it instead, a light shade of pink, desperate for change. It works for a disguise as well. She can go to the grocery store without worrying that someone will say, "Isn't that the Argent girl? But it couldn't be, she's dead."
Lydia dyes it for her when it starts to fade.
Allison looks up at her, and thinks that she remembers Lydia looking at her that way before she left.
Why hadn't she realized what that meant?
"You know you don't owe me anything, right?" Lydia asks softly.
"I know." Allison promises.
"Good." Lydia says, and there's that self assured nod, that look of determination that means things Allison has always admired about her.
Lydia is the one leaning in close this time, and it's the first time she's touched Allison on her own accord since she raised her from the dead. Allison doesn't flinch, and neither does Lydia.
Neither of them have ever been more happy that Allison is here, with a mostly working body and a usually beating heart, and not in the ground.