A/N: Hey! Sorry for the late update, I was just real busy these past few weeks. Also, I would like to personally commend anyone who has made it through the last two chapters without gagging. They're horrible and full of typos. I think you've noticed by now that I don't proofread, I'm working on it, though!

Anyway, This chapter is slightly better than the last couple and really sets the mood for the rest of the story, if not in a really subtle way. It establishes a couple of relationships, and tells you what the latest Beacon Hills threat is, or at least what it resembles. It's also a good one because it's the rise of Detective!Stiles.

Also also, I do not ship Jackson and Lydia, no matter what it seems like. I just know how important Jackson is to Lydia as a person. Remember, this is, at its core, a Stydia fic.

Disclaimer: I do not hold the rights to MTV, Teen Wolf or any of its characters, European mythology, Greek mythology, or Harry Potter.

Enjoy!

Chapter 3

Lydia can't help but bounce her legs up and down as the pack (or part of it) is seated at a cafeteria table, munching at their sandwiches as if there hadn't been dead bodies found half an hour ago, and that she hadn't had a "banshee feeling" right before that. Her tray of food lay before her, untouched. Next to her, Liam, Corey and Mason are fully engaged in a conversation about God-knows-what while Hayden smiles down at her phone screen, probably texting someone. Lydia glances at her phone, hoping to find a text from either Scott or Stiles, but she receives no news.

She doesn't know how to feel about that.

Suddenly, Lydia is startled by an arm slipping around her waist as someone takes a seat next to her. She doesn't need to look up to know who it is.

"Get your arm off of me, Jackson."

Jackson looks confused, but listens nonetheless, slowly removing his arm while smiling as if he thinks that he's gotten to her.

He hasn't. Not yet at least.

"Still have to think about it, I see."

"The longer I look at your face, the more I'm leaning towards no."

Jackson chuckles, and then averts his attention to the people sitting around him. He seems to be studying them. Lydia hadn't had many friends when he was still around. She wonders if it surprises him, to see that she's surrounded herself by people who care about her. She wonders what they think about him. She is also curious to know what he thinks of them, but then tries not to think of that too much. She's convinced that she doesn't care.

She watches him stare blankly at Hayden, then amusedly looking at Malia, who was struggling to fit her double-burger in her mouth. When Malia notices him watching, she growls, threatening. Jackson raises his hands up in surrender and laughs, before looking back at Lydia.

"And they are –"

"–my friends," Lydia answers, almost defensively. Her voice is slightly high-pitched, and she sees the pack turning their attention towards her. Not in surprise, just in curiosity. Malia, who hadn't taken her eyes off the two of them, has her teeth bared and is still growling at Jackson.

Guess that answers whether she likes him or not.

"I don't want you here," the were-coyote then says to Jackson, narrowing her eyes and slightly flaring her nostrils. Then, as realization dawns on her a couple of seconds later, "Wait, you're the lizard boyfriend, aren't you?"

Jackson isn't fazed by her first comment. "So you've heard about me," he muses, almost proud.

"Yeah, you tend to hear about things like a homicidal lizard under the control of a psychopathic killer," Malia spits back.

"At least you acknowledge the fact that I was under influence."

Malia lets out a sneer and puts her burger down. She slams both of her hands on the table, and leans over towards Jackson, holding his gaze. "I acknowledge a lot of things about you, like the fact that you gave my friend shit while she was dating you. Now, we don't want you here. Leave."

"Well, I don't think it matters to me whether you want me here or not." he looks over to Lydia. "I'm here for her."

Lydia can feel all seven pairs of eyes upon her after Jackson is done speaking. They're expecting her to answer.

Once again, Lydia isn't sure how she feels.

On one hand, she agrees with Malia. She wants Jackson gone. From this table, from Beacon Hills, from her life. She doesn't want to have to revisit the painful feeling of him breaking up with her after she's given him her all once again.

But a small, tiny, almost irrelevant part of her yells out to Jackson. It reminds her that he says he's here for her. And even if she denies it now, she knows that that part of her will eventually lead to her taking that leap of faith and liking Jackson again, if she doesn't find a concrete reason not to.

Lydia shakes away the thoughts from her head, clearing her mind before letting the awkward silence that has settled within the group get to her once again. She avoids making eye-contact with any of them, but their gazes are burning holes into her skull, expectant. And, knowing full well that they can hear the rapid thumping of her heart better than she can, Lydia feels more vulnerable now than she ever has.

The light on her phone goes off. It's a text from Stiles.

Lydia thanks the universe and proceeds to tap on the little icon, revealing a short message from the boy (whom she totally considers her life-saver right now).

Scott and I have info. Come to my place as soon as possible. Alone if you can.

The young girl answers his text immediately and only speaks to Jackson as she gets up.

"I have to leave, so please go away right now and don't talk to my friends unless I'm with them, understood?"

"Where do you have to go?" Mason then inquires.

Lydia hesitates, not knowing how the werewolf sitting right next to her would react to the answer, but then lifts her chin up, proud, all signs of doubt gone, and answers boastfully, mostly for Jackson's benefit.

"Stiles's house."

She doesn't wait to see his reaction.

"The unusually quickly delivered forensic reports say that they've been poisoned with a venom that is currently unidentified in any lab, but they're keeping samples longer to see if they can find anything," Stiles explains to Lydia, pinning a ripped page out of a notepad onto his crime board.

"There is no trace of any possible injection on any of the three bodies," Scott adds, "so they couldn't have been injected in the past couple of hours, if that's the case."

"Needle marks are tiny. They could be hard to find," Lydia suggests.

"But the venom is so strong it killed one of the forensic scientists when he accidentally made contact with an amount estimated to be of almost a drop. Rotted his organs to the core in less than a second."

Scott shakes his head as he gets off the bed and goes to stand near a pacing Stiles.

"It's impossible," the alpha started, "that the venom stayed in their systems long enough for an injection mark to disappear without killing them."

"And there were no needles found at the scene."

Lydia stops to think for a while.

"They could've –"

Stiles interrupts her.

"No, they did not ingest or digest the venom."

Lydia closes her mouth, with nothing else to say. Scott and Stiles share a glance, before Scott turns his head towards the ceiling and inhales slowly, blinking.

Finally, he looks straight at her and tells her the part that confuses them all.

"When – When they found the dead bodies, all of them had rocks instead of eyes."

At first, Lydia is taken aback. That was weird. Millions of scenarios pass through her brain, starting with organ traffickers and ending on biochemical engineers. Her human side decides to look for a logical explanation to the situation, some sort of mathematical formula resulting in an entirely non-supernatural related solution. She tries to convince herself, putting her banshee intuition aside, that Stiles was wrong. That this wasn't a supernatural event that had come rising from the ground to disturb their senior year. She tries to make sense of it, playing a hundred scenarios in her head, but comes up empty. Nothing makes sense.

Then, her eyes lock with Stiles's, and she remembers the story of a mythical creature everyone knows all too well. Oh yeah, mythology. Mythology always has the answer.

Lydia rises from her spot on Stiles's bed and walks up to him and Scott, her eyes glistening the way they always do when she thinks she's discovered something.

"Who turns people to stone when people look at her?" she asks Scott.

"Medusa?" Scott tries, confused.

Lydia nods and pulls out her laptop from her bag. She turns it on and frantically begins typing.

"That might be our lead."

The banshee narrows her eyes, reading something off the screen, and does so for several minutes, as if having forgotten about the other two people in the room. Meanwhile, Scott and Stiles look at each other, uncertain. Sure, the supernatural surprised them every once in a while, but it was common knowledge that Medusa the gorgon, if she did exist, was dead, right?

But what if there's another? Stiles thinks. What if Greek divinities were real and some other gorgon fell in love with Poseidon and pissed off Athena, the almighty goddess of wisdom and war, who in return had cursed this gorgon with the same curse she had bestowed upon Medusa? What if the supernatural extends to Greek mythology, as well? With everything that the pack has had to face in the last couple of years, is it really still possible to put boundaries on the supernatural?

"So, what you're saying," Stiles then says, hesitantly, hoping to prove himself wrong, because he goddamn well knows that he doesn't want to fights Gods. He looks over to Lydia's concentrated form, her fingers typing endlessly, her brows furrowed causing her forehead to slightly crease, her bottom lip being mercilessly chewed on by her incisors, "is that there's another Medusa?"

Lydia glances at him for a split second before returning her attention to the screen before her and slightly shaking her head. Seconds later, she stops typing and a small smile forms across her face. Keeping her focus on the laptop, she motions for the two boys to come forward and see what she's found.

"Medusa had snakes on her head instead of hair," Lydia explained, "which got me thinking. So I searched up a list of snake-related creatures in mythology and came up with one that kills a prey by simply gazing into its eyes. The creature is also rumoured to turn its victims to stone."

She turns the screen towards them and in big, bold letters, the boys could read: BASILISK

"So, like, the basilisk from Harry Potter?" Stiles exclaims, incredulously.

Lydia purses her lips and tilts her head to the side, as if looking for the right words to say. Stiles looks over to Scott, who bears an expression similar to his, and they both simultaneously shrug their shoulders and wait for Lydia to speak.

"In Harry Potter," Lydia starts, "the basilisk is described as a huge monster that scares spiders and can be killed by its own venom."

The boys nod, urging her to go on.

"In mythology, the creature is no longer than twelve inches and, like other snakes, is unaffected by its own venom."

"So Rowling lied to millions of people by promoting basilisks as gigantic snakes?"

"Basically."

Stiles nods, sucking on his bottom lip. He then furrows his brows and tilts his head a bit, thinking.

"So, kill a foot long lizard? Can't be too hard."

Lydia shakes her head.

"It's not easy either," she explains, typing something in, causing a new window to open up. "It says here that the creature can kill someone by staring at, drooling on, or biting them. Any living soul that tries to get near it is most likely to perish right there."

"Hey, at least we have an idea of what the creature might be," Scott says, trying to ease things. "We'll figure something out, we always do. Let's wait for the venom samples to be examined before we start chasing this lead." He walks to the door and picks up his school bag, checking the time on his phone as he does so. "I've got to get to work; I'll try to see if Deaton's got anything for us."

Stiles grabs his keys and follows.

"Your bike is still at school. I'll drop you off and pick you up; we'll get it on the way back."He looks back towards Lydia. "You leaving or waiting for me?"

"I'll stay, thanks."

Stiles smiles a little.

"There's pizza in the fridge if you get hungry."

"And as always, Lydia was the one to figure it out," Scott says as the blue jeep pulls into the parking lot of the animal clinic.

"Yeah," Stiles answers, absentmindedly tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

"You two going to talk it out?"

Stiles nods, inhaling.

"I hope," he says, his voice barely above a whisper. They both stay quiet for a while before speaking at the same time.

"I'll get going –"

"I hope she knows I'm not mad –"

Scott, whose right hand rests on the handle to the door, shakes his head and puts his free hand on his friend's shoulder.

"She knows. Trust me," the alpha says before stepping out of the jeep and turning around to wave back at Stiles.

Stiles stays rigid for a while, but then relaxes and waves back, pulling out of the lot, the face of a certain strawberry blonde distracting him from the roads.

The pizza's cold, but she likes it that way.

Lydia hasn't had lunch, and the whole, baked, frozen pizza in the fridge proves that Stiles knows. She doesn't know when he got the time to make pizza for her, or even if he made it purposely for her, but she's thankful either way. Once again, her friend is the reason she's smiling while doing something so completely mundane, causing her to actually thank her lucky stars for having given in to go to a school dance with a hyperactive spaz, a couple of years ago.

Lydia's down to her last slice when she hears a key turning at the front door. In comes Stiles, his face red from what she assumes is the cold, and, as he tucks his keys into the pocket of his pants, the boy comes over and sits down next to her. She can't help but notice the look of sheer amusement crossing his features as his glaze lands on her plate. She gulps and looks down, embarrassed.

"Sorry, was I not supposed to eat the whole thing?"

Stiles chuckles and shakes his head a little, placing a hand on Lydia's back.

"No, it was yours. Scott and I ate before you got here. It's just," He forces himself to stop smiling, "I had a feeling you didn't have lunch. Guess I was right."

It's Lydia's turn to laugh. As she swallows the last of her food off her plate, she glances over at Stiles, her eyes twinkling with delight.

"Yeah, watching Malia trying to gobble up an entire double burger tends to take one's appetite away."

"Tell me about it," he jokes, before picking up her plate and making his way to wash it. When he's done, he looks at her and tilts his head towards his room, his expression calmer but still with the ghost of a smile present.

"I believe we need to talk."

He doesn't wait for her to follow.

Lydia can't bring herself to feel nervous as she steps into Stiles's room behind him, taking a seat on his bed, facing him. He's smiling at her, and she smiles back. To be honest, she doesn't even remember what they're supposed to be talking about.

"Jackson," he then says, as if reading her mind. He's sitting with his legs crossed, his hands playing with each other, as if he isn't quite sure what to do with them, and he's looking at her, his face soft but void of definitive expression.

"Yeah," she answers, taking in a deep breath, "Jackson."

"I'm not mad," he breathes out, meeting her gaze and refusing to look anywhere else, his eyes burning with honesty and desperation and just the pure hope that she understands.

She does.

"I know."

He brings up a hand and rakes it across his hair, letting it linger at the back of his neck for a moment, his gaze momentarily falling to his bed sheets. Then, shaking his head slightly, he meets her eyes once more and takes both of her hands into his, the same way Scott had done earlier that day yet feeling so entirely different.

"It's just, you know –It's just that you love so selflessly Lydia," he starts, his grip on her hands tightening slightly, "so goddamn selflessly and wholly that you forget to put yourself first when you need to. You love so intensely that even when you try to hide it, it's impossible not to know that you love someone. You – You make yourself vulnerable in love, Lydia."

Lydia is about to answer but is interrupted.

"You deserve love," he continues, "you really do. You deserve a love that completes you and makes you happy. A love that makes you feel powerful at your weakest. After all you've been through, you deserve some happiness. Jackson," his gaze flickers elsewhere for a split second, and Lydia would've missed the moment of hesitation, was she not staring right at him, "Jackson still hasn't earned our trust, Lydia. I'm not saying that you shouldn't love him, that's not what I mean at all, but, "He licks his bottom lip slowly, blinking real fast for a couple of seconds, "try not to love him more than you love yourself. At least not until you're sure he deserves it."

Lydia is at a loss for words. She looks down to where their hands meets, and then back into his eyes, still emitting the same intensity as they always have in moments like these. His face is just so sincere that Lydia almost forgets that this is the same boy who has trouble staying still for more than thirty seconds, but she's known him long enough to know that occasionally, Stiles Stilinski will manage to say something that you won't be able to forget for your entire life, and he'll say it with such honesty that you can't help yourself but take him seriously.

"I was going to yell at you for not believing in our friendship," Lydia explains to him, smiling, a little embarrassed, "but I think we can both agree on the fact that I was wrong."

And then, barely any louder than a whisper, she adds, "Thank you."

Stiles just smiles back and, letting go of her hands, pulls her in for a hug. Lydia obliges, wrapping her arms around his neck, squeezing him tight as a way of displaying gratitude. Gratitude for trusting her, gratitude for believing in her, gratitude for caring about her.

As they both pull away, Stiles is about to say something else when Lydia's phone begins to ring. It's a number she doesn't recognize. She gets up and walks away from the bed, facing the door as she answers.

"Hello?"

"Hey," Jackson's voice answers on the other side.

"How did you even remember my number?"

Before Jackson can answer, Stiles talks again.

"Hey, Lydia," he softly says, and, as she turns around to face him, adds, "If he asks you out, you answer honestly."

Lydia just nods, and, when Jackson asks her to accompany him to a party on Saturday, she tells him that she'll meet him there.

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