Multi-Fandom One-Shots Part 2

The Art of Wandering - Stydia (Teen Wolf)

The girl appears from out of nowhere.

It's raining outside, it's almost two in the morning and Stiles is halfway home from Scott's when he has to slam on his breaks because there's a girl just standing there in the middle of the street. He swears loudly, heart lurching in his chest as the brakes squeak, pounding on the wheel with one fist because Jesus Christ sidewalks exist for a reason.

The headlights of his Jeep illuminate her, a girl with long wet hair stuck to her back. She's not dressed properly; she's only wearing a tank top and little boxer shorts and her feet are bare, like she ran out of her house in the middle of the night like this.

And then the girl whirls around and Stiles' jaw drops because Lydia Martin is staring at him, hands held up in front of her face to shield her eyes from the lights.

Lydia Martin, unrequited love of Stiles' life, is the former most popular girl in their class. Last year, when they were sophomores, Lydia ruled supreme in five inch heels and hung off Jackson Whittemore's arm while Stiles pined for her from afar.

No one knows what happened exactly, not even Allison. Some say it was Jackson dumping her before moving to London right before summer break that pushed her over the edge, others swore they saw Lydia out and around with Peter Hale, the town creep, that he did something to her.

All Stiles knows is that something happened to her that summer, something got inside of her and started festering, the timer of a bomb countdown clicking on.

Junior year began and Allison and Scott got back together, which meant Lydia and Stiles started getting pushed together more, the way it happens when your best friends are dating. It was something simple and elemental, like gravity, they just got pulled into each other's orbit and to Stiles' delight Lydia didn't seem to even mind. They got stuck on group dates with everyone else, making faces at each other when Scott and Allison made out in plain view, took twenty minute concession stand breaks during the movies to talk about string theory, or dark matter, topology, whatever Lydia just discovered and wanted to share with Stiles, feeding him bits of information in the quiet moments when it was just the two of them, like her vast wealth of knowledge is a secret.

They started to develop a tenuous but genuine friendship. He started to see the incredible brain under that fabulous head of hair, the vulnerability in her eyes that thick eyeliner and coats of mascara couldn't totally hide.

Something between them was starting. Maybe.

And then Lydia went crazy.

It started with her wandering out of class and sometimes school altogether. For awhile their teachers let it slide because she was so smart it wasn't affecting her grades. But soon enough she started missing whole days, and then there was the incident in calculus, when she was called up to the front of the class to solve an equation and wrote help me in looping circles all over the board instead.

So Allison spent her winter break in France, Scott and Stiles stayed home and played lots of video games, and Lydia took a little trip to the psych ward.

When she came back for second semester she was different. Quiet, more likely to walk away when other girls in the halls whisper about her instead of walking up to them and giving them a verbal tongue lashing. She wears jeans sometimes now, doesn't braid her hair so tightly anymore. She's still friends with Allison; Stiles hangs out with them on occasion but it's different. There's this veil around Lydia now, like a force field between her and everyone else. She's still beautiful but she's changed. She looks a little delicate now, a little haunted.

But right now she's staring at him, his car, like a girl possessed, utterly frozen in place.

Stiles carefully signals and pulls the Jeep over to the side of the street and shifts into park. He turns his headlights off and gets out of the car, looking both ways before stepping out into the street because Lydia's still standing motionless in the middle of the goddamn road.