Summary: Stiles and Lydia find comfort in each other after too many loved ones are lost over the years between friends and family, particularly after Lydia loses her mother and Stiles his father.
A/N: So this small drabble is inspired by the prompt "Lydia comforting a sad Stiles" but it came out slightly different. It's bittersweet and it broke my heart a little, but I couldn't let it rest and I had to write it down. I still like how it turned out, I really love the ending. Always leaves me teary. The summary already has all you need to be warned about so delve in it if you're up for a little hurt.
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Stiles was eight when he lost his mother. He's twenty-three when his dad dies.
He doesn't understand. He doesn't know how someone so young can have the misfortune of losing his mother to a nefarious disease as a child and his father to an unfortunate accident when all of his life is ahead of him, barely starting, and he already lost so much between friends and family. He can't also cope with the fact that, for a pack that runs into another supernatural creature every other week, another paranormal menace, something as ordinary as a car crash would take the life of one of their own. But it did. And it took his dad's.
It came at a time when Stiles was finally figuring things out again. His dad had a heart attack during Stiles' senior year and the boy stayed in Beacon Hills for him. He found a job at a small coffee shop, enrolled in some classes at community college, helped his dad on the side with some of his cases. He met with Scott often, who had also stayed in California along with Kira, even if now they didn't live as close to each other as before. And things were still working out for him and Lydia; they were still close even if she was miles and miles away from him after she had left.
Stiles couldn't blame her for leaving because Lydia had lost her mother a week before turning eighteen, killed along with a few members of the pack by an Alpha that almost took Lydia's life too hadn't Stiles and Scott been there. And Stiles was her rock. He stood beside Lydia for weeks. The first night after her mother's death he didn't sleep just to make sure that Lydia was breathing properly. And the morning after that, when it dawned on her that she'd never see her mother again, Lydia had turned hollow, empty, quiet. Until she wasn't. Until rage and grief and pain filled her heart so effusively that Lydia had screamed her lungs out until she lost her voice. And then she'd cried. Lydia cried for so long that Stiles started to worry about her health for how unnatural it was that someone could cry so much.
But he never faltered. Stiles was with her through every second of it: when she had to identify her mother's remains because of how disfigured the woman had been left, a grip so tight on Stiles' hand that he was sure Lydia was gonna crush it; through the wake, when Scott and the Sheriff and Melissa, even hurting and in pain as they were for all the members that the pack had lost, had been the ones taking charge of things at the Martin's residence - a house that Lydia would sell within a month - to greet loved ones and friends while Lydia slept upstairs in her room in Stiles' arms because Lydia had been the one who lost the most; at the funeral, when all Lydia could do was cry against his chest as Stiles held her close because not only had she just lost her mom, but also because her dad didn't want anything to do with her for he had another family to take care of.
The following days had been challenging, but Stiles still didn't leave her side. He helped her with the most basic tasks like eating and showering, getting up and dressed in the morning, actually engaging her in some activity that would distract her from the fact that she was now alone, that she had no family but her friends, all while staying in her house with her, day and night. When her eighteenth birthday came, Lydia asked Stiles to stay with her, just the two of them, as she tried to bring herself to make trivial conversation, to try and normalize her life a little bit. It took her two hours of them sitting on her front porch side by side in silence to ask him something as simple as "How are you today?"
