Multi-Fandom One-Shots Part 2

The Laws of the World (Tell Us What Goes Sky) - Stydia (Teen Wolf)

Here's the thing: Lydia never expected to spend her sophomore year of college working as a Juice Junkie in some decrepit mall in downtown LA.

(Seriously, someone ought to tell the owners of the stores in this mall that there are literary tropes other than alliteration from which to draw inspiration. She'd happily lend them her copy of TS Eliot's greatest works, even if he is occasionally a little too esoteric for her tastes.)

But, the thing is, there are only so many textbooks and pairs of killer high heels that she can buy with a scholarship, and a girl's gotta pay rent. And eat, despite what her co-worker Allison's magazines seem to suggest; Lydia knows science, can calculate metabolic rates as well as count calories, and she knows that those so-called health ideas are really just pseudo-diets with a side serving of bullshit. Hence, the job.

And the lunchtime visits to Book Nook (seriously, enough with the rhyming too) a few stores away from the food court.

*

The first time Lydia visits the bookstore on her lunch break, it's because her iPad battery is dead and she cannot spend the next forty-odd minutes listening to the inane chattering of customers in the food court. There's a special kind of hell reserved for the people who think that eating sushi makes them cultured.

She makes her way past the only two other customers in the store, a pair of teenage boys who she knows will never actually read the Game of Thrones books in their hands when the TV series has twice the nudity and a lot fewer words. She glares at them when they stare at her just a little too long. Lydia finds the science section, which is really just a small shelf in the back corner of the store, and she runs her thumb along the spines of the books before pulling out a biography of Albert Einstein. It's cheap enough and maybe she can entertain herself by working out exactly what the authors got wrong, she decides. Just as she flips to the contents page, the books on the shelf she'd just pulled this particular find from topple, one of them landing on her foot.

Lydia automatically bends over to pick them up, the bottom of her apron swishing along the carpet, when a hand reaches out in front of her, scooping up the two books furthest from her foot. She glances up, taking in the guy's monogrammed polo and the pen smudges on the side of his hand where he'd written himself a note, order Twilight deluxe edition, and right, obviously an employee.

Lydia stands up straight, smooths out the wrinkles in her apron, and says, "What kind of a bookshop doesn't have the deluxe edition of Twilight?"

"Boss is considering revising her no supernatural creatures policy," he replies. "Tends to cause a few occupational hazards - screaming girls being the least of them."

"I think you're getting your source material mixed up; music store's five stores down if you want a copy of One Direction," she says, raising an eyebrow. "But I might be able to forgive you -- what's your view on Harry Potter?"

"I spent all of third grade wishing I was Hermione," he says, as he fits the last of the books she'd knocked over into the shelf, patting the spines with a self-congratulatory smile. "Although, you have to agree that she's a perfect example of the occupational hazards of associating with supernatural creatures."

"When Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them includes a section on the Backstreet Boys, then I'll concede the point."

"Hermione would have been a bigger fan of NSYNC, I think." He grins at her. "Besides, I wasn't joking about the occupational hazard - ever had an Anne Rice novel fall on your head?"

Lydia smiles despite herself, because that's something she never expected to have in common with a guy - then again, all she had in common with her high school boyfriend, Jackson, was a mutual appreciation for his abs. This guy is kind of cute, in a way she didn't expect to find attractive - he moves his hands a lot when he speaks and his eyes kind of sparkle in a way that she'd find ridiculous if she didn't know her own eyes lit up exactly like that whenever someone asked her a question about Asian mythology. (For the record, it's happened exactly once, and she's never been asked for homework help since then.)