Stiles Stilinski is just like Lydia in all the wrong ways.
His thoughts move as fast as hers, sometimes faster, and it’s the first time someone else’s brain has measured up to hers. It makes her hate him. It makes her despise him. His existence upsets Lydia’s painstakingly constructed social hierarchy where she’s always meant to be the smartest person in the room.
She is the smartest person in the room. Most of the time. There are just rare occasions, few and far between, where Stiles will do better on a test than her. Or he’ll give a presentation and clearly understand the material better than she does, even if he does do a shit job at presenting it.
Sometimes she’ll look around the room and wonder how everyone can be so stupid. How she can be surrounded by people who think so slowly that they’re actually having trouble comprehending things that are so obvious.
Whenever she does that she always finds Stiles looking straight at her, like he’s thinking the exact same thing.
It only makes her hate him more.
~
Jackson Whittemore is just like Lydia in all the right ways.
He wants to be better than everyone. He wants it like it’s everything. Like to be lesser is death. Like to be lesser is hell.
Lydia has always felt the exact same way.
It’s refreshing, at first. For someone to ache for power like she does. The fact that the two of them are the only people who need control like they need air is probably the reason they actually achieve it in the first place.
She supposes that the fact they’re both beautiful and smart and mean doesn’t hurt.
It takes a long time for Lydia to love Jackson. It’s something that happens in an instant. Even when they started dating it was more an arrangement of mutual convenience, something they did because they both wanted to be the best and becoming a team was simply the next step in achieving that. But after they’ve been dating for a while Jackson looks at Lydia and she feels utterly understood in a way she had always thought might be impossible from the perspective of a mind that doesn’t move as fast as hers.
It puts fire in her bones and Lydia decides that she never wants to stop burning.
~
Far later, Lydia supposes that it isn’t so surprising that she ends up having loved them both.
She always has adored her reflection.