Archive of Our Own

Lydia sat quietly near the back of her 300-level physics lecture theater. They were covering one of the most difficult sections of the course, much to Lydia’s dismay. It wasn’t that the information was difficult for Lydia. In fact, she had already blown through this class’s course materials for the next month and a half and was actually disappointed to be so heinously delayed over a concept she considered elementary. She had skipped sixth grade, which might have been the least socially advantageous move she could have made, but still, here she was, plowing ahead through the information assigned to her in the second year of her tenure at MIT.

This class was one of the unfortunate courses that she was not allowed to simply test out of because it was required by both the math and physics departments, and if she planned to be a double major, she was required to sit through the tedium and do all of the interim coursework. They were only a month into winter semester classes, and Lydia was on the verge of walking up to the front and yelling at the professor for his roundabout teaching method that complicated the concept in a completely unnecessary fashion.

However, seeing as she wanted to pass the course and get into a graduate school as soon as possible, she settled for opening her laptop and browsing through online clothing stores, twitter, tumblr, and Facebook. The professor began the lecture, establishing that he would be spending yet another class on the same content, and Lydia sighed deeply, only delving deeper into her browsing.

After approximately thirty minutes of “window shopping,” scrolling through her social media, and replying to a few personal emails, Lydia was desperate for some other stimulation. With an internal smirk, she decided that she’d get a look at the screens and notebooks of the students in front of her to see if they were actually grasping the content yet.

She was satisfied and even distantly proud to see that of the three kids sitting in front of her to her left, only the female engineering student seemed to have a solid understanding of the concept. The two boys to her right were entirely in the dark. There was a weird sense of camaraderie between female students at MIT, and they always worked to boost each other up and support each other. In this particular scenario, she was especially excited because she had worked with the girl, Sidney, a couple of times in the previous weeks, and it would appear that her tutelage had helped.

She then turned to peer at the desk of the boy sitting almost directly in front of her to her right. With a start, she realized that he didn’t even have a writing utensil out, but he had the complete problem set for the current section completely filled out in his notebook. And all of the answers were correct. Impressed, she craned her neck to see what he was looking at on the screen of his PC, wondering if he was working ahead too.

As she made out the first few lines of text on his screen, she realized that he was most definitely not working ahead.

He was reading Star Wars fanfiction. The plot seemed to revolve around the sensual and passionate love affair that was tearing at Han Solo’s heart as he was sexually involved with both Luke and Leia while hiding the existence of the affair from the twins.

Well, that’s what Lydia thought it was about. She was following along with a Han Solo and Luke Skywalker love scene and couldn’t really tell. She tore her eyes away from the screen with vigor when she encountered the phrase, “the finger, and a second slid in easily, as if already lubricated, with no pain, only spreading fullness that made Han even harder, if such a thing was possible.”

Initially, her expression contorted into disgust, but as she looked at the kid’s profile from her limited angle, she realized that he wasn’t even cracking a grin. There was no perverse lust in his eyes. She assumed that, to the professor, the kid could’ve been following along with the lecture for all he knew. This kid was impassive about reading graphic, gay smut in class. For the first time that semester, Lydia found something interesting to think about in her physics lecture.

Two days later, they had another lecture. This time, Lydia came prepared. She brought her large, square framed glasses instead of wearing contacts to ensure that she could really see what he was reading, and to make sure that she wasn’t mistaken in what she was reading. Uncomfortable but determined, Lydia hovered outside of her lecture hall doors until she saw the same kid walking in. Trying to stay as casual as possible, she filed into the theatre behind him and ensured that she was sitting at the same vantage point as the previous class.

When the professor began to lecture, she realized that they were moving onto a new topic. While she had completed and understood the entirety of the upcoming material, she wasn’t concerned for herself. She was concerned that the smut kid would be too busy taking notes to make a repeat performance. However, once again, he set out his notebook, the next section’s completed problem set visible, and then proceeded to enter the Archive of Our Own domain.

Ecstatic with this development, Lydia’s eyes followed the page critically. He was reading Star Trek this time instead of Star Wars. He started with a couple of tame stories revolving around Captain Kirk and Bones before he appeared to dive headfirst into the proverbial deep end.

Ninety fucking minutes of fictional fucking.

As Lydia walked out of lecture that day, she felt dazed by the amount of graphic gay space porn she had just ingested. To be frank, it was slightly nauseating, and she had struggled to keep her reactions under control. She very nearly walked out of the lecture when anal beads were mentioned. But before she could gather her things, she saw him page over to a new fic. This one was more of a slow build-up to sex, not quite the graphic porn without plot. Before she knew it, she was emotionally attached to two characters on a show that she had never watched.

This enraged her. How dare this kid sit there with unwavering stoicism that could put statues to shame? She hadn’t asked for this. She was indignant, infuriated and above all, intrigued.

Despite her best intentions to skip some of these lectures to avoid such a repeat occurrence, she continued to attend. For four more weeks, she read this kid’s smutty fanfiction with the sort of bemused inability to look away from that train wreck of a human being sitting in front of her.

She learned from his problem sets that his name was M. Stilinski, but the emails he’d sent (she didn’t mean to snoop, she swore it) were all signed “Stiles.”

He was also really, really fucking cute.

She started seeing him everywhere. He was walking around in a stupid beanie and flannel and puffer vest, being a typical dude with other guys. He was at the same house party as her one Saturday, and she could have sworn that they made solid eye contact for a moment before they were each jostled away by the crowd. He was even at the gym at the same time as she was.

When she decided to study on a Friday night instead of party, she headed to her favorite off-campus coffee house, but stopped in her tracks on the doormat when she saw him sitting in her favorite comfy chair with his fucking computer open. That look of practiced stoicism was stony on his face. In the reflection of the darkened window behind him, she could see the glare of the telltale red and white banners of the fanfiction archive.

How fucking dare he?

In a huff, she stomped up to him in her coat, boots and beanie, dropping all pretenses of courtesy or unfamiliarity.

“You have spent four fucking weeks of class reading that shit, how do you do it?” The kid jumped, startling at her accusation. When he looked at her, her stomach plunged straight for her shoes. The dark brown ruffle of his hair was un-gelled and looked invitingly soft. Single, dark freckles were scattered sparingly across his neck and face. She hadn’t noticed how big his hands were when he’d been sitting in front of her, but now they were noticeably large with tenuous, long fingers and gently raised veins accentuating the muscle of his hand and exposed forearm. Based on the way he was sprawling out of the chair, he was also significantly taller than she’d believed him to be in lecture. Then again, in lecture she would sit in a row raised eight inches above where he sat. His eyes were a dark, syrupy brown, and they stared at her with analytical intensity. He was cataloguing her the same way she was cataloguing him.

“I’m sorry but…” the kid was properly baffled by her outburst, shutting his laptop self-consciously. “Like who are you? And what are you talking about?” His cheeks were pink and he rose to stand in front of her, dwarfing her since she had forgone her heels for a casual night of studying. Lydia didn’t let this intimidate her in the slightest. She jabbed a finger into his chest and looked up at him.

“You are reading smutty fanfiction in your Quantum Field Theory lecture, and you never change your expression. It’s extraordinary. How do you do it?” Her voice was more admiring and less accusative than she had intended it to be, and it sounded small in comparison to the deeper tenor of this kid’s voice.

Luckily for her, the tone and pitch of her voice didn’t seem to matter to him. He seemed to be purely, deeply embarrassed, but in self-preservation, he tried to pass it off.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pippi Longstocking. You’re cute as hell, but you’re out of your mind if you think that- hey! Hey that’s mine don’t touch that!” Lydia had rolled her eyes at his attempt to intimidate her, and had instead slipped by him, into the chair he had been occupying, and she opened up his laptop.

“You have been reading it and I’ll prove it,” she sneered. “I just… I need to know how… and why!”

“Yeah well good luck with that, sweetheart, I’ve got it password protect…” he trailed off into near silence as she correctly entered his thirteen-character password. “Okay, what, are you following me around or something ? This is getting really fucking creepy.”

“No!” Lydia snapped back, rising to stand, laptop still in hand. “What’s really fucking creepy is the amount of anal fisting you are able to gloss through in each ninety minute lecture without even fucking blinking!”

Their altercation had rendered the rest of the coffee house completely silent, the barista staring at the two of them with wide-eyed wonder and amusement. Lydia supposed that was better than getting kicked out. The other kid seemed to be looking around now too, his skin going scarlet enough to match hers.

“Umm… right. Sorry. I was just… I’ll see you... never again… sorry. Sorry.” Lydia put his laptop back down on the table and stepping gingerly around his unmoving form. Only his head swiveled to follow her, shame and confusion and some other potent emotion congealing together into something unrecognizable. She felt eyes on her the whole way to the door, and when she got out onto the sidewalk, she burst into a full tilt run in the cold, night air, hoping to get back to her apartment without seeing anyone else. She didn’t think she would be ready for an encounter with another human being for a while.

If she had turned to look back at any point, she would have seen the kid chasing out the front door after her, beanie in hand, papers and laptop stuffed into his backpack haphazardly. He slowed to a stop only a couple of doors down from the coffeehouse, watching the desperate ferocity of her pace with a slight frown.

Noticing the flutter of paper against his leg, he looked down to see a mostly dry packet of paper sitting on the wet, slushy ground. It must have only been dropped… seconds earlier. He picked it up trying to shake the clinging water from the back pages as he looked at the front page. Despite the water distortion seeping through the pages, he recognized the packet as their problem sets for the last week of the semester, still more than a month away. It was totally complete in small, neat handwriting, and in the blank left for a name, there sat the important information: “L. Martin.”

Lydia did not go to another lecture for her physics class. She turned in her problem sets directly at the TA’s office dropbox instead of handing it in during class. With tremendous effort, she did her best to avoid every place she’d seen him before. On the unfortunate circumstance that they were set to cross paths, Lydia tucked her hair up over her shoulder, pulled her hat down more firmly over her head, and veered away in the opposite direction.

Over five weeks had passed since the confrontation in the coffeehouse, and Lydia was proud to say that she had avoided the kid entirely. When she bragged about this to her roommate, Allison, she laughed.

“Lydia, are you kidding me? You can’t live your life walking around, avoiding one kid!” She said incredulously. She was a student at Boston College, a business major, and took absolutely none of Lydia’s shit. Ever.

“You’re right, my hair’s too conspicuous, isn’t it? Do you think I could pull off a brown or auburn?”

“Oh my god. Lydia. Stop for just a second, alright?” Allison implored. Lydia turned around from where she’d stood pouting in the mirror. “You need to be okay with the fact that you may, at some point in your life, see this guy again.”

“Umm… or…” Lydia dragged out the conjuction with deliberate slowness. Allison rolled her eyes and pushed herself off their couch.

“Or you can become a hermit or move to Florida, I don’t know.” Allison snickered. “But in the meantime, I’ve been meaning to ask you a favor.” Lydia turned around, eyebrows pulled up and together in premature sadness and reluctance.

“Please, no…”

“I need you to double with me and Scott tonight.”

“No…” The syllable dragged out over several seconds as Lydia flopped facedown onto the couch that Allison had just vacated. Allison had been dating Scott, a Vet Tech student at BC, for six months now, and while Lydia adored Scott on his own, the couple had decided to make it their mission to find her a boyfriend so that she could tag along with them. Each of their five previous attempts had been nothing short of disastrous.

“Oh come on, I’m not even the one picking your date this time!” Allison whined. Intrigued, Lydia turned her head and surveyed her roommate through narrowed eyes.

“Did Scott pick my date?” Lydia drawled.

“He did, as a matter of fact. His best friend is single, and we’ve been trying to set him up with a girlfriend for as long as we’ve been trying to set you up with a boyfriend.” Allison said enthusiastically.

“Why didn’t you try to bring us both together until now?” Lydia asked suspiciously. Allison shrugged with an innocent, honest smile.

“Networking, I guess. Three couples are more fun than two.” Lydia groaned wordlessly and put her face back down into the couch. “Oh come on, Lydie. He’s cute and he’s smart. You’ll like him.”

“This sales pitch was more convincing the first five times.”

“Come on, please?” Allison begged. “If you don’t like this one, I’ll never ask you to double with me again.” This proposition got Lydia’s attention, and she sat up on the couch, looking tiredly at Allison.

“You swear?”

“I swear. You’re going to like him, Lydia. This one’s different.”

“You better hope so.”

“Nah, man, you’re really going to like this girl, I promise.” Stiles pulled on his coat with a sigh, looking at his roommate Scott with tired disbelief.

“Yeah, okay, whatever you say.” He slipped on his shoes and prepared himself for the deceptively biting April winds.

“She’s really pretty, if that helps. Like, if I wasn’t with Allison, I’d totally go for her.”

“If you weren’t with Allison, you would be going for Allison.” Stiles teased. Scott seemed to accept this without question, blushing a little, but smiling.

“Okay, maybe you’re right, but this girl is just… wow, I mean, she’s probably the smartest person I know.” Stiles looked at Scott in mock outrage.

“Are you kidding?”

“I am not,” Scott deadpanned, bracing himself against the wind as they made the short, one-block walk towards the cute little neighborhood bar that they frequented. Allison had texted him that they were on their way too.

“Just try to be nice this time.”

“I’ve been nice to every girl you introduce me to! It’s the girls who aren’t cool! That last chick, Malia? She had a biting and scratching fetish. Not cool,” Stiles asserted, stripping off his coat and hat the second they made it into the bar.

“Okay, maybe Malia was a little out there, but Lydia’s not like that.”

“Ah, so her name is Lydia?” Stiles asked, his tone brightening at the clue. Scott looked disappointed in himself momentarily, but seemed to give up the facade of secrecy almost immediately after that.

“Yeah, Lydia Martin. She’s a physics and math double major at MIT, you might-”

“Martin?” Stiles spluttered. L. Martin. “Oh shit.”

“What’s wrong?” Scott asked, his voice wounded and expression contorted with worry.

“I’ve met her before and I most definitely-”

“-need to get out of here, oh my God, Allison, no, this is the guy. The guy I’ve been avoiding.”

“No better time to face up to past mistakes like the present!” Allison was deaf to her friend’s complaints, dragging her cheerily towards the booth. Lydia stared at her best friend, aghast.

“You knew? You knew it was him and you-”

“-never told me? I can’t believe you, Scott!”

“And I can’t believe you were looking at porn during a lecture. We all have to face the great unknown some time, so do it now!”

“I don’t-”

“-want to talk to him again!”

“Well too bad, buttercup, you’re sticking it out.”

“I have been-”

“-avoiding me for a fucking month!”

“You’re staying.”

“I don’t want to go on a date with her!”

“I don’t want to go on a date with him!”

Their voices chimed in perfect time, and Stiles and Lydia were forced to look at each other with mirrored horror in their eyes. Scott and Allison looked perfectly pleased with themselves.

“Stiles Stilinski, this is Lydia Martin. Lydia, this is Stiles.” Scott announced, no shortage of glee evident in his voice.

“I hate this.” Once again, Stiles and Lydia’s words came out in perfect harmony. Scott and Allison laughed aloud this time.

“They’re perfect,” Allison said, shoving Lydia into the booth first, ensuring that she was sitting against  the wall across from Stiles, while also preventing her from trying to escape.

“So tell us how you two met,” Scott insisted, his grin so smug that the two prisoners on this double date both rolled their eyes and looked away.

“My only worry is about what’ll happen to their egos when they realize they now have the opportunity to literally date themselves,” Allison countered. Lydia glared at her, then turned her accusative look to Stiles when she realized he’d been doing the same thing to Scott. They made solid eye contact for the first time that night, and each was surprised to find defensiveness, not malice, in the other’s eyes.

Stiles stared her down with only trivial accusation in his eyes, but more importantly, he was taking the opportunity to reevaluate the crazy girl who came into the coffee shop to interrogate him about his reading habits. He’d expected to see her in class the following Monday, where he had planned to address the whole thing as a joke, maybe actually get to talk to her. He had scanned the audience when she hadn’t been sitting behind him (because frankly, he’d known all along that he was sitting in front of a very pretty girl), but he couldn’t find her anywhere. She didn’t show up to class all week.

He didn’t see her in all the places he had been used to seeing her before. They always crossed paths on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between classes, and he’d always enjoyed throwing her a smile, though he never thought she noticed. He’d seen her at parties before, and once he’d sworn that she noticed him too, their eyes locking across the room. But then the packed mosh pit of a living room had hidden her among taller bodies.

Their gym schedules even matched up on some days. He’d run and lift weights while she would either run or attend one of the university classes held up in the fitness studios in one of the upper floors, but he saw her in passing all the time. She looked beautiful without her makeup on, sweating but happy.

After their encounter at the coffee house, she had just disappeared from all those familiar places. The one time she actually talked to him, it was to address his fanfiction reading habits. While it was horrifying to think that such a beautiful, intelligent girl had seen the depths of his weird internet habits, it had intrigued him that her focus wasn’t on the explicit content, but rather, his ability to read it with a straight face.

He began to worry that his inability to hold a fucking conversation had just ruined his chances with her. Then he began to worry that she was doing this because she was freaked out by him. But now it was clear that neither option was the case. She had been embarrassed about her own behavior.

It made perfect sense, but Stiles hadn’t been able to imagine a world in which her uncomfortable avoidance wasn’t his fault.

The silence between them was heavy and awkward, and Stiles realized that Allison and Scott had started their own, unrelated conversation while waiting for Stiles and Lydia to interact. Lydia was just staring at him with wide, guilty eyes, as if begging him not throttle her right then and there at the table. To Stiles, that look seemed to say an awful lot about the kind of retaliation she was used to receiving, so he took a chance.

“It’s not hard to read the smutty stuff with a straight face,” he admitted. Lydia visibly flinched at his words, as if she wasn’t expecting them at all. Then her face screwed up in curiosity.

“What?” She whispered.

“The sex stuff. It’s easy to read it with a straight face. Once you’ve read a few, you’ve read them all. There’s nothing new and it’s not really emotionally engaging,” Stiles started honestly. “It’s the other ones you have to look out for.”

“What other ones?” Lydia asked, her body starting to uncoil from its uncomfortably tight, stiff position. Allison and Scott stopped their conversation abruptly to listen in.

“The really cute ones,” Stiles admitted with a confident grin. “They’ll reel you in and sucker punch you so hard that you can’t hold back the stupid, happy look on your face. Those are the really dangerous ones to read in class.”

“Really?” She asked.

“Really,” he assured her. “If you get caught reading smut, you’re in bigger trouble. But if your poker face is good, you’ll never get caught.”

“Well, almost never,” Lydia said. Stiles matched her grin with a small laugh.

“Okay, almost never. But, while the repercussions of getting caught reading fluff aren’t as bad, it’s way more likely that you’re going to get caught.

Lydia considered this with a smile and Stiles felt like he could breathe again.

“That makes a lot of sense,” she said.

“Of course it does, I’m kind of a genius about everything,” Stiles said with fake bravado. “Try not to be impressed.”

“If I wanted to be impressed by my date’s intellect, I would have gone out with Stephen Hawking,” Lydia said smoothly.

“If you had any say in who you were dating, we wouldn’t be here right now,” Stiles said.

“What a travesty that would have been.”

“Oh come on, admit that you’re glad we met up again.”

“Only if you do.”

“Okay.” The profession was met by a moment of silence, then a smile.

“Good.”