hit you in the back of the head with a gun

by sarsaparillia

Or, that time Lydia Martin decided that if Stiles Stilinski was going to be her new friend, she was going to have to teach him a thing or eight. — Lydia, Stiles, Jackson.

disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to Torie and Nat and Jo. you little cuties.
notes: JUST REMEMBER that you asked for this.
notes2: I love Lydia/Jackson so much it hurts but Lydia/Stiles is the best broship of all time and eclipses all other broships bye

title: hit you in the back of the head with a gun
summary: Or, that time Lydia Martin decided that if Stiles Stilinski was going to be her new friend, she was going to have to teach him a thing or eight. — Lydia, Stiles, Jackson.

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(june)

She slams her books down next to his head three weeks before their final exam of junior year. It's sunny outside, and the sunlight leaks in wet and vibrantly alive, and even though it's not even lunch, they're all drowsy with heat and the promise of summer vacation.

Lydia Martin, however, does not have time for this bullshit.

So she slams her books down next to his head as loud as she can. Stiles jumps about a mile into the air. Lydia is so unimpressed with everything.

"Stiles," she says. She smiles with her lips pressed closed.

(It's not time to bring out the arsenal just yet.)

"What—what are you doing, why are you looking like that, Lydia, have you seen Peter recently—?!" Stiles flails. He talks with his whole body. Pleb.

Her smile stretches wider across her face. It's not kind. Stiles looks like he'd scramble backwards if he had the ability which, honestly, pleases Lydia more than perhaps it should. It's always nice to remind people about whom, exactly, she is.

"No, I haven't," she says, and keeps the smile on, "and please refrain from mentioning that. No, Stiles, we need to talk."

"About what?" he squeaks.

Lydia would sympathize, except that really she doesn't. She tosses her hair over her shoulder in a wave of strawberry-blonde curls. Stiles watches her warily, like a trapped animal might. "Oh, wonderful, you didn't follow that. Better and better, we won't have to do any rehabilitation."

"What," he whines, actually whines. It is pathetic.

"I have no idea why I'm doing this. Stiles, we're going to be friends from now on."

"What?"

"Don't make me repeat myself," she says, schools her face into blankness. "Lesson one."

"I have no idea what's going on?"

"And stop phrasing things as questions. It's beneath you," Lydia sighs from deep in her chest. Well, one step forwards, two steps back: she should have expected this, it took her months to train Jackson properly. Stilinski will probably take less, but then, she doesn't want to kiss Stiles. It's a very different type of training.

"What's going on is very simple," she says, because he doesn't say anything at all. He just stares at her with his mouth open a little bit. Lydia forces herself not to sneer. "I have two months to turn you into an acceptable associate."

He is quiet for what seems like forever.

Finally: "Can't you just say friend?"

Lydia's perfect lips part over her perfect teeth, and she smiles with every sharp pearly white tooth on display.

"Friends," she says, "are for the masses. Or idiots. I am neither of those, nor do I waste my time on anyone who is. You, stunningly, have managed to avoid falling into either of said categories. And I need someone to talk to who doesn't make me want gouge my own eyes out from their sheer stupidity."

Stiles gapes. It is deeply unattractive.

"Two months, Stiles," Lydia says. She holds up two fingers to demonstrate her point. "Two."

She can practically see the cogs working in his brain: the year has been terrible, but Lydia Martin rallies with the best of them. Nothing can stop her, not even Stiles Stilinski. He can be reluctant and whiny and can possibly pine, which, ugh, whatever, dealt with worse in the form of high school teachers, but…

"I get to keep my plaid," he says.

"You can try, dear," Lydia retorts, and doesn't even try to be anything but patronizing.

He should know better, really. Plaid, really.

"Come on," she says. "We have AP History in seven minutes. Lesson two? I do not tolerate tardiness."

And with that, she gathers her books, and leaves him in the proverbial dust.

—

(july)

Stiles room is small and dusty. There are dirty socks in the corner; the covers of the bed are never set straight. The desk is a mess of old chemistry tests (for the record, she's still doing better than he is, and she will not be surprised by this), odds and ends that wouldn't be out of place in a library, and the walls are plastered with bad movie posters. It's quiet, too still, but lived in in a way that her own bedroom is not.

Lydia likes it despite herself.

And Stiles is… different, here. He's less fidgety when he's sprawled out across his bed, nose buried in one of the leather-bound books that Lydia had forced Derek into filching from Deaton's office. He can do without them for a few weeks.

(She is not above petty theft when there are things trying to kill her, banshee or not.)

Lydia tips her head, examines the crystal phials tucked into the crook of his wall. It's turned away from the door, and she supposes that one would have to look for them to find them, but that doesn't mean that she's not going to needle him about it.

"You should hide those," she says.

Stiles blinks at her. "Wait, what?"

"The wolfsbane," Lydia says delicately.

"Easier to grab where they are," he mutters.

Lydia scrutinizes her cuticles. They're getting a little frayed. "For when Derek shows up bleeding?"

"How do you even know that?!" Stiles shouts, pinwheeling and nearly keeling over. Lydia doesn't ask how he manages that lounging on his bed the way he is. He's Stiles, of course he manages it.

(She has no idea why she likes him, really. Her lips don't twitch at all.)

"Lucky guess," she says. "Lesson four: I always know what I'm talking about."

Stiles is incredibly proficient at muttering under his breath, and Lydia pretends she doesn't hear stupid Sourwolf and supernatural idiots and the Winchester brothers never have to deal with this shit so HOW IS THIS MY LIFE.

Lydia actually asks that herself, every so often. Somehow the fact that they have this quietly-mumbled question in common catches her off guard. She's reaching across the gulf between them, and touching him gently on the arm before she realizes quite what she's doing. She knows Stiles fixates on things, but he looks so tired—he looks more tired and older than any eighteen-year-old should.

And that is how they begin.

She shoves him over. His bed isn't big enough for two people. Lydia makes it work anyway, at least until she can drag him outside and into the sun.

(She'll take him to her own home, one day, she promises herself. When her mother isn't there, incidentally, and the house goes silent and numb like a war wound. They'll sit on the never-used white suede couches and throw popcorn at each other. The thought makes something—a little like happiness, a little like misery—twist in her stomach.)

So the summer goes like this:

They watch movies together. Usually horror (usually werewolf horror, in fact, and no, Stiles, you are not as funny as you think you are), but regardless they are always, always terrible. There is legitimately nothing good about any of the movies Stiles picks. The acting is always sub-par, the accents are a hundredfold worse.

She and Stiles laugh themselves sick every time.

"What is that supposed to be?" she demands, pointing at the screen. Lydia is righteous fury. "Is that supposed to be a banshee? How is that—how?!"

He flops around on the bed, clutching his sides. His cheeks look like they hurt.

What. An. Idiot.

Lydia thinks about punching him.

A minute later, she concedes that the movie might have a point when the banshee screams and screams and screams so loud that glass shatters on-screen. There's a dead girl, and her eyes are wide and staring and no one, no one can replicate that, not unless they've seen it. Stiles goes quiet, and they gulp in tandem when the blood on the concrete shines wetly in the gaslight.

(It's all fake, but that doesn't mean it doesn't send Stiles into a panic attack [panic attack, no anxiety attack; after that first one, Lydia did her fucking research], nor does it mean she's going to get any sleep tonight.)

They turn the TV off for a while, after that.

But it's too hot to go outside; July is a solid brick of heat to the face. All of Beacon Hills staggers under it, because not even air conditioning keeps the burning away for long. They're too far off from the ocean, here, to get the salt on the breeze the way Lydia remembers from her childhood beach house.

"We should go somewhere," Lydia says. It's not a suggestion.

Stiles blinks fast, too fast. The algorithm for his blinking could be tangentially related to pi, 3.14 blinks per second; Lydia knows these things.

"Where?" he asks, and then launches into surprisingly coherent word-bile. "Because there's like nowhere we can go where we're not, y'know, supernatural-bait—wait, is there? Are we supernatural bait? Maybe just Scott, I dunno, man, we should check that out one of these days—and I mean, you know I love you, Lyds, but we gotta—"

"One," Lydia slaps a hand over his mouth. It is by far the most efficient method of shutting him up. "You do not love me. You did not love me. You worshipped me, there's a difference. Two, how did you even breathe through that?"

"Breathing is overrated," Stiles laughs the words, and Lydia wants to punch him again.

This is a frightfully common urge she has in regards to Stiles. She would examine the violent tendencies closer, but then she remembers that as it is, he spends a decent amount of his time shoved up against a wall. By Derek Hale.

She stops worrying about it. The banality of that relationship has nothing to do with her.

Besides, she has a sneaking suspicion that Stiles is into it, anyway.

"Stop that," she orders. "Either we go somewhere, or I'm calling Allison and we're taking you to the mall. For shopping. There will be no plaid, Stilinski."

The colour drains from his face. "You wouldn't."

"I would," Lydia says. She is delighted with this development, takes it and runs. Really, she should have known that threatening him with fitted clothing would be exactly what it took to get him out of the house. "You know I would."

"You have no scruples!" Stiles wails, jabs a finger in her general direction. He looks like the sketchy hobos that hang around Derek's apartment. "What—what is all of—who are you?!"

All it takes is the flip of her hair. "Take you pick, Stiles. Beach, or shopping with Allison?"

"Beach?" he perks up. "Did you say beach?"

"Lesson two. Don't make me repeat myself."

"You repeated that," he points out.

This time, she does punch him.

(It is good for everyone involved, except Stiles, who just ends up wincing and poking at what looks to be a magnificently blooming bruise-in-the-making. Lydia laughs so hard she almost vomits all over her favourite Manolos. She never would have forgiven herself. Or Stiles, for that matter, because it would have been his fault.)

They take her mother's fuck-me-with-my-heels-on red Mustang convertible, because Lydia likes the wind in her hair and the way the stick-shift feels right under her grip. It's solid and real in a way a lot of things just don't anymore. The engine purrs to life beneath her hands.

Stiles salivates at it even as he stuffs a duffle bag into the trunk.

Lydia doesn't let him touch the keys.

"No," she says. "Don't even think about it!"

"But Lydia!"

"You are the worst associate-in-training ever, Stiles. I think I'm going to have to return you."

Stiles clings to her arm, eyes gone wide and round and watery. He looks like a constipated squirrel, it is very unattractive, and she tells him this exactly like it is.

"It could be worse," he says. "I could be Scott."

Lydia purses her lips and shoots him the most unimpressed sneer she has in her inventory. "Please. As if I would ever."

"Hey! Scott's my best bro! There will be no best-bro-beating around here!"

Lydia slaps a hand over his mouth (for the twelfth time that week). "Tangent, but lesson six, Stiles. Never use alliteration in front of me again."

He grins at her through her fingers, all sharp teeth. She thinks if he was a werewolf, he would have tried to eat her heart right then and there.

Lydia is reluctantly impressed.

She has a horrible feeling that this will not be the last time.

—

(august)

August is different than July, for a lot of reasons. It's hotter, wetter; more claustrophobic in every way. School hovers on the horizon, tangible as a heat mirage. Lydia can taste it already, ashy thick between her teeth. She can't even wait.

Also, Jackson comes home.

It's different just for that.

But Lydia hasn't seen him, hasn't made the effort, and Stiles rolls around on her bed at four in the morning sloppy-drunk and happy because apparently this is a thing they do, now! Allison's gone home, went an hour ago with her back straight and hair her shorter than anyone had ever seen it. She hadn't said Scott once, though Lydia knew that he was all that Allison had wanted to talk about.

They all need something.

It's just not always healthy, not for everyone.

Lydia sloops down next to Stiles on the bed, pours herself into the Egyptian-cotton sheets. Her skirt rucks up high around her thighs, ruffles skimming along her sides. He crawls up so they're head to head, staring at the ceiling.

"I should paint the ceiling," Lydia muses. She thinks of thistles, purple blooms bright spots of colour against a gloomy moor. She's never been to Scotland, but she'll have to go, now. Maybe after high school, so she can spend long days immersed in old castles and green hills. Maybe she'll find the Loch Ness monster.

They say that banshees originated in Scotland.

Her heart clenches.

Stiles doesn't say anything, but his hand finds hers in the dim light of pre-dawn. Everything's greyed out the way it does at four in the morning, just before the sun comes up, and she turns her head just enough to catch slight of the curve of his nose backlit by the waning light of the moon.

Lydia's not sure what prompts it, but she rolls until she's tucked up against him.

"Are you mad that he's back?" Stiles asks. He is very quiet.

"Mad isn't the right word," Lydia says, and it's true. The wary melancholy that sings through her veins at the knowledge that Jackson—Jackson—has come home, that he's back in town; that? It's not sadness. It's something… else. Something a little too close to the soft squishy inner lining of her soul to name just yet, and Lydia… Lydia can't.

"Sad?"

"Eloquent, but no," Lydia replies.

He's not this quiet normally. He's normally opens his mouth and—

"You don't have to, you know? Like, you don't have to talk to him, I can talk to Derek, he can just, I dunno, go away forever, we can make that happen, I am good at making things happen—"

Lydia laughs into his shoulder. It's choked and sharp, maybe the ugliest sound that's ever escaped her throat except for when she screams and people die. It's a broken-glass sound, more jagged sob than laugh, but Stiles takes it.

They hold hands until the sun comes up, and they don't sleep.

Six hours later, when the sun's high in the sky and the world is burning with slick heat, the doorbell rings. The dishes Lydia was washing clatter in the sink. They don't have to look to know who it is—the only person who would ring the doorbell is someone who is scared, who doesn't know if his welcome still hasn't worn out.

Stiles is already up and moving. He doesn't look at her, doesn't have to. "I'll get it!"

"Stiles," she says softly. He freezes. "It's fine. Leave it."

Her hands are soapy. She doesn't bother to wipe them on a towel before she trots to the door, steels her shoulders; her mask is right there, her strength in her make-up, but she never wears make-up when it's only her and Stiles. Stiles doesn't give a fuck because he thinks she's a goddess anyway (which, true, she is) and she learned a long time ago that she's just as dangerous as she ever was even without the layer of armour.

Jackson's shifts his weight from side to side, shuffling his feet and watching the ground instead of meeting her eyes.

"Hey," he says, voice low.

"Hi," Lydia says. She thinks she is going to be sick.

"I, uh," his throat works as he swallows. "I wanted to, uh. See how you were. Doing. I. Uh. Yeah."

The Jackson Lydia loves never stutters in front of her. He does not wear dark jeans, or loose white shirts that don't button up. He does not leave his hair undone, clean of gel. He does not look casual and loose and scared.

Lydia breathes in heavy through her nose, and forces herself not to screech at him.

(He does not know what she is. He does not know what her voice can do. He does not know what she can bring, if she should want.)

"I'm alright," Lydia says on the exhale. The words leave her as a whisper, but she feels hollowed with them, like just speaking has scooped out her innards and popped her lungs. She can't even breathe, couldn't scream even if it was the most important thing in the world.

"That's—good. Yeah. Good," he says. His shoulders slump lamely, and Lydia thinks you're hollow inside, too.

She doesn't fist her hands into the soft frills of her skirt, even though she wants to. Something swirls inside; it's ugly, but possessive. His eyes remind her of nights curled up in his Porsche, her legs thrown over his and being so warm despite the cold of the air around them.

Lydia realizes she is never not going to love him.

"What do you want, Jackson?" she asks, softly, kindly. She doesn't know why, because he is not worth her kindness.

The long silence shakes them both.

"Can I come in?" he asks, finally.

And Lydia wants to say yes. She wants, deep her in her soul, to let him pass the threshold.

But Stiles is in the kitchen, waiting for her. Stiles, who makes terrible jokes and never stops talking, and who Lydia thinks might be her best friend. Stiles, who never, never left. Who could never leave, not even if he wanted to.

Lydia's heart settles low in her stomach.

"Sorry," she says, shaking her head. "Not today."

"Wait, Lydia, I—!" Jackson looks panicked.

"No," Lydia says. "No, Jackson. Not today."

She doesn't wait for the rest of the sentence. She doesn't wait, and she slams the door in his face so hard the frame shakes. She locks it for good measure, spins, presses her back against it and takes great deep breaths of air into her lungs. She's shaky all over.

God, Lydia hates.

And then Stiles is kneeling next to her, big eyes and quiet mouth.

"Hey," he says. He's smiling, but it's not a happy thing.

"Hi," Lydia says. It's so much like the conversation she just had that a hysteric giggle escapes her mouth.

"You gonna be okay?" Stiles asks.

Lydia raises her head. Her eyes are dry. "Lesson seven. I'm always okay."

"You weren't okay after Peter," Stiles says.

It's enough to shock her out of the Jackson-induced melancholy. "I survived running around the woods for two days naked, Stiles. I have killed three men, found more bodies that I can count—and we both know that is saying something—and I faced down Derek Hale when he was in a mood without getting my throat ripped out. I am always okay."

Stiles laughs weakly. He wraps his arms around her anyway, and if Lydia cries at all, he's not going to tell anyone.

"Hey," he says. "Do you want to go for a drive?"

Lydia turns it over in her mind. She's not wearing make-up, still in yesterday's dress, and she has no doubt that Jackson is sitting on the steps of her porch waiting for her. She could blow Stiles off, leave with Jackson. Stiles probably wouldn't even be mad.

(He's too good for her, really. Stiles is too good for anyone. One day, Lydia knows, she is going to grill some girl or boy about him and perhaps threaten their lives should they dare hurt him. Stiles is too good for the entire world.)

"The gas tank is full," Lydia says, instead.

"Can I dri—?" he asks.

"No, Stiles," Lydia sighs. "Lesson eight: you are never going to drive my car! Stop asking!"

Stiles throws his head back and laughs.

Lydia thinks that it is the best sound she's ever heard. She reaches up for his hands, and he helps her up without even being asked.

It's nice. It's so nice.

They sneak out the back, through to the garage where Lydia's mother's cars sit still, always fueled, just waiting to be driven off into the sunset. Ten minutes later when they go roaring by, Stiles waves at Jackson, smiling shittily all the while.

It is probably the best moment of Lydia's entire life.

She laughs hard enough to hurt, and guns the engine.

—

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fin.