Fic: Tastes Like Hope, Stiles/Derek
Author: wellhalesbells
Title: Tastes Like Hope
Rating: R
Pairing/s: Derek/Stiles
Character/s: Laura Hale, Lydia Martin, OCs
Summary: “You should’ve healed,” he accuses, says it like she didn’t just to spite him. “You should’ve survived."
Warnings: (Off-screen) Character Death
Content Notes: Alternate Universe - New York, Emissary!Stiles
Submission Type: Fic
Word Count: 10k+
Prompt: Baggage
Author's Notes: Since this won't fit all in one post due to LJ's posting limitations, I'll link to the rest when it's up on AO3. :) That title is subject to change as I just slapped this on in a jiffy, also I have no idea how I actually split this (just went with what fit) so characters/warnings may not appear in what's under the cut but they are in the complete fic!
“Where are you going?”
Derek stiffens, doesn’t turn. He hears the squeak of sweaty palms on vinyl behind him. Puts his hand on the knob, says, “Out.”
•
He tears at his thumbnail with blunt teeth, cuts it off past the quick and tastes metal. Matches the scent. The blood that still hides in the grooves of the pavement. The relentless drizzle of rain having done nothing to wash it away. It still smells like her here, the parts of her he doesn’t want to remember.
It’s only a few blocks from home. Seems impossible she’ll never make it there, not when she’d been this close.
He kicks at a few soggy newspapers, crumpled and illegible, rolls a glass bottle over bumpy terrain and slams his fist into the concrete wall behind him. His bones break in three places, heal in three places, and the mist of rain slicking his skin keeps the blood from crusting over his knuckles.
He shoves his hand into his jacket pocket, the dull ache already fading.
He stares down at the place where he found her body, sneers. “You should’ve healed,” he accuses, says it like she didn’t just to spite him. “You should’ve survived.” He turns on his heel and leaves.
•
Derek doesn’t think his… what? He has no idea how to begin to define what his relationship is to Stiles now. He doesn’t look as though he’s shifted a single muscle in the time Derek’s been gone. Still sitting on the lower bunk, hands fisted over the edge of the stripped mattress. His eye twitches when Derek looks at him. Maybe not so much as a blink then. He doesn’t know if that’s possible with him or not. Doesn’t exactly know what he’s capable of.
They’d never been that close.
Doe eyes stare at him, assessing, like he’s cataloguing every part of Derek to be sure he actually is in the one piece he seems to be and his eyes aren’t deceiving him. “Well?” His voice is strained, ueasy.
Derek brushes it off, shrugs. “‘Well’ what?”
He stands up, exasperated and with an anxiety clinging to him that Derek’s never associated with him before. He used to cocky, confident, impulsive. Just like Laura. They had been a perfect pair, those two, darting into trouble every chance they got and leaving Derek on the outside.
Always.
He doesn’t blame Stiles for her death. Mostly. Only that he encouraged her recklessness with his own and if it weren’t so much Laura’s fault in Derek’s mind, it would be Stiles’.
He swallows, cheeks pallid and eyes sunken, mutters, “Don’t be an idiot.” He turns off down the hallway to his own bedroom and Derek looks up at the top bunk to avoid looking at the lower one. He jumps up to it rather than using the ladder, doesn’t bother to take off his shoes or jacket.
It’s not like he’s going to fall asleep anyway.
•
He’s staring at the yellowing ceiling when it starts. The scatter-sound of a heart jigging into a ribcage, trying to dance away from its chest. It’s an irrepressible and thumping beat that stabs behind the cavities of Derek’s eyes, like the zagging bass at a rave Derek never agreed to attend.
Stiles stumbles into the dark room after another minute or so, lean and sinister in the diffuse slants of moonlight, palms digging hard against his eye sockets.
Derek sits up on his elbows and the hands lower and he knows he’s being stared at even though he can’t see eyes in the dark. The silhouette of Stiles’ chin dips to look at the lower bunk and he stops breathing mid-breath, a stutter of air that cuts off sharply.
Derek slips off the top bunk, lands on the floor with barely a sound. Would’ve been none if he’d taken off his boots.
Hands are already wrapped around his biceps like a vice grip before he can even straighten up, his space encroached upon faster than should’ve been possible. Fingers dig in harder and there would be bruises left behind if there could be. If they didn’t heal as fast as they formed, like the broken bones, the slices in his skin, the damage that never showed but he always took.
“You don’t get to die,” Stiles hisses.
“I’m not planning to,” Derek snarls back, angry for no other reason than that it’s right there. It always is, has been.
“She wasn’t either,” twists out of Stiles’ mouth, even though they don’t know that.
That could’ve been Laura’s plan for all Derek can guess. His big sister, always an enigma, smarter than him, faster than him, first to everything.
Even death.
The hands on Derek’s arms start to lighten, literally. Not glow so much as absorb the moonlight so he can see them clearly on his jacket. Note how long and the shine of his nails. He glances up and sees eyes clearly in the dark, brown going white. He fights off a cringe. “Stop. Now,” he bites out.
The white in Stiles’ eyes fades and his worried face is shadowed once again. He pulls in a shaky breath, loosens his grip on Derek but doesn’t let go. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to fuck off without telling me anything, wondering if-if-fuck you for ever thinking that was okay. Fuck you,” he reiterates harshly.
“Fine,” Derek says, less because he means it and more because he wants Stiles to shut up about it.
Truthfully, they barely know each other. Stiles has been with them-with him, just him now-for five years but he had always been closer to Laura. An employee to Derek, family to Laura. He’s younger than Derek, more bullheaded, more alive than Derek’s been in years and maybe that was why they never really mattered to each other. They have nothing in common and clash more than peacefully coexist. For Stiles to pretend that anything else is true now…
Derek knows it’s because he just lost everything he had. An orphan, with one friend who had up and disappeared on him years ago, when they found him. Then Laura became everything he’d been missing. And it’d seemed the same for Laura. Stiles didn’t have anything but Derek left now. That didn’t mean Derek mattered though, it just meant he was the last one standing.
Just like it didn’t mean that Stiles mattered to Derek either and Derek had thought, more than once, since Laura died: Good, now he can leave.
And then had to fight against the ensuing panic that thought inspired.
He understood it, even if he didn’t agree with his own reaction to it. They were each other’s people by default, by a shared love for the very dead, very gone Laura Hale, and when you had nothing else, that became a thing worth fighting for.
“Get into bed,” Derek snarls.
Stiles sighs and rubs a hand over his face. He drags the comforter-Derek’s comforter-off the top bunk through the wooden slats without care, dropping Derek’s flattened pillow to the floor. He tosses it over the stripped bed, says to preempt whatever argument Derek might have, “I don’t do top bunk.”
Derek heaves out his own sigh, stripping off his jacket and knocking off his boots. He sheds the socks too and then gets into bed with Stiles.
They haven’t done this since the night they found her body. It hadn’t been a decision then. They’d been too broken to think, too broken to do anything other than shake and blink, tears silently streaming down faces and Derek had sat on her bed for a half-second before tearing it to pieces, shredding it, the bedding mounted up and destroyed across the room in a fit of destruction and Stiles had flipped the clawed mattress, pulled him down onto it and wrapped his arms around him, holding him as less of a comfort and more of a restriction, to stop him from destroying anything else.
Stiles doesn’t touch him tonight, rolls towards the wall, back to Derek while Derek scratches at the ridge of his eyebrow with his ragged thumbnail, staring up at the dark bottom of the bunk above him, wide awake.
•
He opens his eyes to sharp sunlight, rays that’ve had time to hone themselves, coalesce and start stabbing at strategic places in the apartment. Like the backs of Derek’s eyelids. The comforter around him is rumpled up, bunched in places from a restless sleeper, which he isn’t. He frowns before it comes back to him.
Laura’s bed.
Stiles.
He’d woken up earlier in the pitch black with Stiles’ forehead pressed into the valley between his shoulder blades, breath a warm and reliable puff through his thin t-shirt, his hand clenched on the hill of Derek’s bicep, snagging him, pulling him back against him.
Derek hadn’t brushed him off. Though it had given him a moment’s pause, strange without the swell of breasts between them, an unmistakably masculine hand pulling him close. But only a moment’s; he’d been asleep again minutes later.
He scrubs at the rough brillo of hair on his jaw, the scent of coffee finally breaking through the haze of exhaustion. He swings his legs out, toes flexing on the warm floorboards and squints out the window at the brilliant day. “Rain finally stopped,” he says, voice scratchy and breath foul. He winces to himself, padding into the bathroom to grab his toothbrush.
Stiles doesn’t raise his voice, even when Derek turns the faucet on. “Should we go frolic in the park, you think? Grab your butterfly net.”
Derek snorts, nearly inhaling toothpaste and it’s almost normal. He could almost forget. Except Stiles would’ve said that to Laura, not to him. And she would’ve matched Stiles’ tone and amusement with her retort and they’d have laughed all the way out the door, him forever trailing behind, rather than let the lightheartedness peter away into nothing. He spits down the sink, rinses his mouth and pads back out in his ratty jeans and black t-shirt, scratching at the bristly hair beneath his navel before stretching, smelling like dried sweat and rubber.
“Sleep okay?” Stiles asks, standing at the stove, fried eggs getting crispy behind him. He looks like he should’ve stayed in bed for another year or so, yawning and worn.
Derek bunches up his shoulder in a shrug, sitting at a stool on the other side of the counter. Stiles’ coffee is on the far end and he reaches across to snag it. Takes a sip. Pulls a face at the acrid, soul-deadening flavor. “This tastes like fucking despair.”
Stiles turns around to see what he’s talking about and his shoulders hunch. He sighs. “Sorry.” He grabs a mug from inside the sink, rinses it, shakes it and pours Derek his own cup. “I tried to think about something else while I was making it but, well,” he frowns down at his own cup pointedly.
Derek waves it away. “Yeah, I got it.” He tentatively sips from the new cup. It’s not great, but only because Stiles doesn’t usually make their coffee and isn’t very good at it. Not because it tastes like liquid depression. “S’fine,” he says when he sees Stiles is still looking at him.
He nods approvingly, using the spatula to split his eggs apart. He grabs toast off the toaster and hands Derek half his breakfast.
Derek opens his mouth. “I don’t want-”
“I don’t care.”
Derek closes his mouth. The eggs are rubbery and sad. Literally sad. Stiles hadn’t been concentrating so hard with these. The toast is crunchy and miserable. Derek takes two bites and pushes the plate away. “You’re going to have to cheer up if you plan to take on cooking all our meals, or at least compartmentalize,” he says blandly.
Stiles lets out a heavy breath, munching his toast. “Sorry,” he says wanly, again. “I don’t even taste it anymore.”
Derek skirts his eyes away. He doesn’t know what to say to that, that this is the only emotion Stiles has left, so familiar that he’s blind to it. “We should go.”
Stiles lifts an eyebrow in Derek’s periphery, finishing his toast. “Butterfly catching after all?”
“Leave. Move. Get out,” Derek clarifies his meaning.
“What.”
Derek turns to look at him, at his thin-lipped scowl, eyes wide and clear. “There’s no reason to stay here.”
Stiles’ hand slowly clenches into a fist on the countertop. “Fuck. You,” he says, voice strung tight and forebodingly calm. “This is the only place we have that still has a reason. Laura died here. You really don’t want to find out why?”
Derek swallows, brows coming together in a simmering anger. He stares down at his crossed arms on the table. “I don’t think we get to know why.”
“Not if we don’t even try to! You just-you want to forget her. You came back here that night and tore up everything she owned and for what? So you could pretend like she didn’t exist, like you didn’t lose anything? News flash, Derek: It didn’t fucking work.”
Derek’s lip raises and he stares at where he’d piled up her decimated possessions, left them to crumble further before, days later, tossing them into the dumpster in the same alley she’d died in, feeling betrayed by her going off on her own and getting murdered. And all the more furious because he wasn’t mourning her so much as hating her.
“I know you feel it the same way I do, like it’s a slice just under your skin every time you walk into a room.” Only Stiles is wrong of course, not a ‘wolf himself, he has no idea how fleeting physical pain is to him. How little he understands that sentiment. This-the agony of Laura’s death-this he’s only felt once before, when he’d been responsible for burning his whole family down. He doesn’t think he’ll survive this second time around. This is just another example of how ill-suited they are. “The absence of her is like a physical thing, and it’ll follow us everywhere we go. We don’t get away from it no matter how far we run, so we stay. Get answers instead.”
Maybe we stop saying ‘we.’ Maybe you stay, maybe we give up on banding together for no other reason than we’re alone and in the same pain. Derek doesn’t say it.
He’s terrified Stiles will agree.
He lifts an eyebrow, says condescendingly, “What did you have in mind?”
•
Derek doesn’t stare at the ground where he’d cradled Laura’s body to his chest, trying to will life back into her, to give her all that he had left in him. It feels wrong being here, bathed in sunlight, at what amounts to Laura’s grave with a non-mourner.
He watches her instead, the four-foot-something scrap of a girl sitting on top of the dumpster lid he’d thrown all of Laura’s meager possessions into barely a week ago. She’s banging her thick booted heels against the metal sides, eyes glowing a violent magenta, tongue sliding across the paper of her hand-rolled cigarette. Her dreads are loose, messily piled atop her head and unkempt.
She picks up one lock of dark, navy fraying hair and chews on it, sticking the newly rolled cigarette behind her ear.
She slips down off the lid like a spider from its web, all exaggerated angles to her limbs, almost hidden by black, belted pants that are two sizes too big for her. She sniffs. A long sniff. Blinks her eyes back to a dull brown. “There’s nothing here.” Her voice is that of a bored teenager with a thousand better places to be. Cheap headphones hang around her neck, connected to a walkman on her waist, and she adds, “Except angst. Like teen drama angst.” She raises her upper lip dismissively. “It’s like 10 Things I Hate About You threw up on She’s All That out here.”
Derek snarls, “My sister died here.” His eyes threaten to filter the world in red through neon blue and he tears his gaze away from her.
She blinks at him unapologetically, chews her hair again. “Yeah,” she says, shrugs. “Angstily.”
Stiles’ jaw clicks as he worries it back and forth. “Rio,” it’s barely civil, “maybe concentrate?”
Her eyes cut over to him, a slice across the atmosphere between them. Her eyebrow perks, the way it’s drawn up making the piercing in it look like it’s connected to a fisherman’s hook. “I am concentrating,” she says back snarkily, folding her arms over her bright red Wonder Woman tank, made a bit difficult by the incredibly puffy army-olive overcoat she’s wearing. “I told you the vibe.” She untangles one arm to hold her hand out between them, palm up. “Twenty bucks, slim.”
Stiles flexes his fingers at his side, as though forcibly keeping them from forming into a fist. “You can do better,” it’s half a challenge. Then a whole one: “I can do better.”
She smirks, as though calling his bluff, and uses the same hand to gesture across the alley. “Well?”
Stiles lets out a low growl, takes a step back towards the rough brick and slams his fist against it. Hard. Derek takes an instinctive step towards him when he scents the blood, and that’s something in and of itself, something he would do for pack, something he’s not sure Stiles was to him before Laura died. He stops himself as soon as he realizes what Stiles has done.
The scent of darker, richer, slightly fetid blood joins it, blood that was there two nights ago, a week ago, that’s still there now, blood that’s tumbling out of cracks and crags, rolling and scrambling down the walls, congealing, joining, puddling together in the center between them. Beads of red build upon themselves, like molecules combining, rising up to become something solid, something three-dimensional, filling in legs and arms, a cloaked torso, an outline of a face in Laura’s blood, hidden by a hood but with a clear swoop of hair across the brow. A soft chin, round cheeks.
But it’s nothing more than a suggestion of features rather than a picture perfect image.
Derek stares at it, this figure made of blood until Stiles lets out a wounded catch of breath behind him.
Derek rounds on him, the name out of his mouth before he’s even caught sight of him. “Stiles?”
He’s barely upright, knees unsteady and using the wall as more of a crutch now than an element of his spell. He shakes his head, partly to stay him and partly as an answer to his unspoken question. “I can’t make it any clearer.”
Derek frowns, asks gruffly, glancing between Stiles and the body of blood, “Do you feel anything?” He should be telling him to stop, telling him this is dangerous, but he wants an answer more than he cares what getting it might do to Stiles.
Stiles’ body is trembling, breaths coming short and uneven. “Yeah,” he says hoarsely. He meets Derek’s eyes and says uncertainly, like he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying, “Remorse.”
Derek’s eyebrows knit together in confusion, expression darkening. Remorse? Like it’d been nothing more than a fucking accident, like they’d tripped and cut her carotid, whoopsie-daisy. Claws dig into his own thighs and tears of pain and rage spring up. He swallows them down, yanking his nails out of his skin. Blood and skin under them.
“There’s magic, too,” Rio says, bundling her coat around her as she circles the shape of Laura’s blood.
Derek had all but forgotten she was there.
Her combat boots make damp clunking sounds on the pavement. They look almost like they should be too heavy for her small feet to lift. She reaches up with tentative fingers towards the liquid face, fingernails painted in chipped teal polish, and as they near the features get more defined. The cheek sloping, the nose becoming smaller, straighter, the lips forming into a small bow and she sucks in a breath, saying what they’d all just seen: “It’s a woman.”
She pulls her hand away and the image collapses, blood splashing back down and seeping into the concrete, hiding in the same nooks and crannies it had before. She turns to Stiles, dangling earrings jingling softly, and the smirk’s back. “How ‘bout that Jackson?”
Derek grabs a twenty out of the wad of bills in his back pocket and slaps it into her hand from over her shoulder. “Here,” he says curtly, keeping his eyes on Stiles, “Go.”
She eyes him for a half second, lifts the bill up above her head (still below Derek’s eye line) and squints at it in the light from the windows above. “Pleasure doin’ business with you, boys,” she says, smacking her lips, turning on her heel and vanishing on the spot.
Derek spares a minute to be baffled by that. He doesn’t know Stiles’ contacts, barely knows Stiles’ capabilities, and anything beyond what werewolves can do still feels like a revelation. He steps gingerly over to Stiles, who’s still slumped back against the brick. “All right?” he asks gruffly.
Stiles nods but he’s unsettlingly pale. “Yeah,” he licks a cracked lip. “I’m good.” He shifts and Derek knows he just tried to stand and couldn’t.
He takes him at his word anyway. It’s not his job to worry about Stiles. Stiles is his own keeper, if he wants to kill himself trying to pretend he didn’t just run himself ragged then that’s his business. “Where should we look?”
Stiles leans his head back, enough that Derek can see him work a swallow down the column of his throat. “The registry,” he decides, chest rising and falling exaggeratedly. He dips his chin so he can look Derek in the eye. He may be wearied but his gaze is sharp. “There should be magical signatures on record for every coven in the city.”
“Maybe she’s an outlier,” Derek says roughly, because he’s not sure how well Stiles has thought this through. If at all, “some rogue witch.”
Stiles shrugs, pushing off the wall to stand. He doesn’t fall but he does wobble. “Might be,” he agrees grudgingly. He digs at the valley between his shoulders with probing fingers, working at a knot most likely. “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. We’re resourceful, Derek. We’ve got this.” It sounds more like wishful thinking than a certainty. Something said so Derek will stop asking questions and get on board. Stiles pulls in a deep breath and his eyelashes flutter unevenly. He lets it out through his nose and says wearily, “We’ll make a trip of it in the morning?”
Derek steps away from him before he does something he shouldn’t, like offer Stiles his shoulder to lean on, and nods.
When they get back to the apartment, they both, separately, spend a minute staring at the bottom bunk.
Derek wishes he could say it had to do with Laura but-his eyes cut over to Stiles’s knees-last night was the best sleep he’d gotten since Laura died. Actually, since the last time they’d shared a bed.
Stiles clears his throat, hangs his coat up by the door and says awkwardly, not meeting his eye either, “Well. Goodnight.”
Derek grunts, knowing it won’t be.
•
Stiles’ door opens with an understated click a little after seven the next morning and Derek hears him drag his feet down the hallway before he gets to the main room. He stops at the threshold, blinks at Derek’s slumped shoulders and owlish eyes at the kitchen counter.
His skin isn’t as pallid as in the alley yesterday but he looks even more exhausted if possible.
“Did you sleep at all?” he asks, prow berked high in judgment. Like he’s got any room for that.
Derek lifts a shoulder rather than answer. Because he didn’t and Stiles already knows it.
He frowns, looks back the way he came and starts genuinely, “You know you can always-” whatever he sees on Derek’s face shuts the offer down and he spits out sourly, “Right.”
Good.
Derek’s not going to cozy up to Stiles. Stiles with his loud, probably exaggerated and almost exclusionary grief, which matches his interaction with everything else, intense and attention-seeking and not made for Derek, always everything Derek isn’t. They’re allies, not friends, and Derek doesn’t want Stiles ever forgetting that.
“You know where this registry is?”
Stiles blinks at him. Almost like he’s shocked Derek doesn’t. He can almost see the memory play out in Stiles’ wide, blank-eyed expression. He’d gone with Laura. Probably hadn’t even realized until this second that Derek hadn’t been there with them; he was so much a spare part when it came to their dynamic. “Yeah,” he says but it sounds like, ‘sorry,’ and Derek hates him a little for it.
link to come
Title: Tastes Like Hope
Rating: R
Pairing/s: Derek/Stiles
Character/s: Laura Hale, Lydia Martin, OCs
Summary: “You should’ve healed,” he accuses, says it like she didn’t just to spite him. “You should’ve survived."
Warnings: (Off-screen) Character Death
Content Notes: Alternate Universe - New York, Emissary!Stiles
Submission Type: Fic
Word Count: 10k+
Prompt: Baggage
Author's Notes: Since this won't fit all in one post due to LJ's posting limitations, I'll link to the rest when it's up on AO3. :) That title is subject to change as I just slapped this on in a jiffy, also I have no idea how I actually split this (just went with what fit) so characters/warnings may not appear in what's under the cut but they are in the complete fic!
“Where are you going?”
Derek stiffens, doesn’t turn. He hears the squeak of sweaty palms on vinyl behind him. Puts his hand on the knob, says, “Out.”
•
He tears at his thumbnail with blunt teeth, cuts it off past the quick and tastes metal. Matches the scent. The blood that still hides in the grooves of the pavement. The relentless drizzle of rain having done nothing to wash it away. It still smells like her here, the parts of her he doesn’t want to remember.
It’s only a few blocks from home. Seems impossible she’ll never make it there, not when she’d been this close.
He kicks at a few soggy newspapers, crumpled and illegible, rolls a glass bottle over bumpy terrain and slams his fist into the concrete wall behind him. His bones break in three places, heal in three places, and the mist of rain slicking his skin keeps the blood from crusting over his knuckles.
He shoves his hand into his jacket pocket, the dull ache already fading.
He stares down at the place where he found her body, sneers. “You should’ve healed,” he accuses, says it like she didn’t just to spite him. “You should’ve survived.” He turns on his heel and leaves.
•
Derek doesn’t think his… what? He has no idea how to begin to define what his relationship is to Stiles now. He doesn’t look as though he’s shifted a single muscle in the time Derek’s been gone. Still sitting on the lower bunk, hands fisted over the edge of the stripped mattress. His eye twitches when Derek looks at him. Maybe not so much as a blink then. He doesn’t know if that’s possible with him or not. Doesn’t exactly know what he’s capable of.
They’d never been that close.
Doe eyes stare at him, assessing, like he’s cataloguing every part of Derek to be sure he actually is in the one piece he seems to be and his eyes aren’t deceiving him. “Well?” His voice is strained, ueasy.
Derek brushes it off, shrugs. “‘Well’ what?”
He stands up, exasperated and with an anxiety clinging to him that Derek’s never associated with him before. He used to cocky, confident, impulsive. Just like Laura. They had been a perfect pair, those two, darting into trouble every chance they got and leaving Derek on the outside.
Always.
He doesn’t blame Stiles for her death. Mostly. Only that he encouraged her recklessness with his own and if it weren’t so much Laura’s fault in Derek’s mind, it would be Stiles’.
He swallows, cheeks pallid and eyes sunken, mutters, “Don’t be an idiot.” He turns off down the hallway to his own bedroom and Derek looks up at the top bunk to avoid looking at the lower one. He jumps up to it rather than using the ladder, doesn’t bother to take off his shoes or jacket.
It’s not like he’s going to fall asleep anyway.
•
He’s staring at the yellowing ceiling when it starts. The scatter-sound of a heart jigging into a ribcage, trying to dance away from its chest. It’s an irrepressible and thumping beat that stabs behind the cavities of Derek’s eyes, like the zagging bass at a rave Derek never agreed to attend.
Stiles stumbles into the dark room after another minute or so, lean and sinister in the diffuse slants of moonlight, palms digging hard against his eye sockets.
Derek sits up on his elbows and the hands lower and he knows he’s being stared at even though he can’t see eyes in the dark. The silhouette of Stiles’ chin dips to look at the lower bunk and he stops breathing mid-breath, a stutter of air that cuts off sharply.
Derek slips off the top bunk, lands on the floor with barely a sound. Would’ve been none if he’d taken off his boots.
Hands are already wrapped around his biceps like a vice grip before he can even straighten up, his space encroached upon faster than should’ve been possible. Fingers dig in harder and there would be bruises left behind if there could be. If they didn’t heal as fast as they formed, like the broken bones, the slices in his skin, the damage that never showed but he always took.
“You don’t get to die,” Stiles hisses.
“I’m not planning to,” Derek snarls back, angry for no other reason than that it’s right there. It always is, has been.
“She wasn’t either,” twists out of Stiles’ mouth, even though they don’t know that.
That could’ve been Laura’s plan for all Derek can guess. His big sister, always an enigma, smarter than him, faster than him, first to everything.
Even death.
The hands on Derek’s arms start to lighten, literally. Not glow so much as absorb the moonlight so he can see them clearly on his jacket. Note how long and the shine of his nails. He glances up and sees eyes clearly in the dark, brown going white. He fights off a cringe. “Stop. Now,” he bites out.
The white in Stiles’ eyes fades and his worried face is shadowed once again. He pulls in a shaky breath, loosens his grip on Derek but doesn’t let go. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to fuck off without telling me anything, wondering if-if-fuck you for ever thinking that was okay. Fuck you,” he reiterates harshly.
“Fine,” Derek says, less because he means it and more because he wants Stiles to shut up about it.
Truthfully, they barely know each other. Stiles has been with them-with him, just him now-for five years but he had always been closer to Laura. An employee to Derek, family to Laura. He’s younger than Derek, more bullheaded, more alive than Derek’s been in years and maybe that was why they never really mattered to each other. They have nothing in common and clash more than peacefully coexist. For Stiles to pretend that anything else is true now…
Derek knows it’s because he just lost everything he had. An orphan, with one friend who had up and disappeared on him years ago, when they found him. Then Laura became everything he’d been missing. And it’d seemed the same for Laura. Stiles didn’t have anything but Derek left now. That didn’t mean Derek mattered though, it just meant he was the last one standing.
Just like it didn’t mean that Stiles mattered to Derek either and Derek had thought, more than once, since Laura died: Good, now he can leave.
And then had to fight against the ensuing panic that thought inspired.
He understood it, even if he didn’t agree with his own reaction to it. They were each other’s people by default, by a shared love for the very dead, very gone Laura Hale, and when you had nothing else, that became a thing worth fighting for.
“Get into bed,” Derek snarls.
Stiles sighs and rubs a hand over his face. He drags the comforter-Derek’s comforter-off the top bunk through the wooden slats without care, dropping Derek’s flattened pillow to the floor. He tosses it over the stripped bed, says to preempt whatever argument Derek might have, “I don’t do top bunk.”
Derek heaves out his own sigh, stripping off his jacket and knocking off his boots. He sheds the socks too and then gets into bed with Stiles.
They haven’t done this since the night they found her body. It hadn’t been a decision then. They’d been too broken to think, too broken to do anything other than shake and blink, tears silently streaming down faces and Derek had sat on her bed for a half-second before tearing it to pieces, shredding it, the bedding mounted up and destroyed across the room in a fit of destruction and Stiles had flipped the clawed mattress, pulled him down onto it and wrapped his arms around him, holding him as less of a comfort and more of a restriction, to stop him from destroying anything else.
Stiles doesn’t touch him tonight, rolls towards the wall, back to Derek while Derek scratches at the ridge of his eyebrow with his ragged thumbnail, staring up at the dark bottom of the bunk above him, wide awake.
•
He opens his eyes to sharp sunlight, rays that’ve had time to hone themselves, coalesce and start stabbing at strategic places in the apartment. Like the backs of Derek’s eyelids. The comforter around him is rumpled up, bunched in places from a restless sleeper, which he isn’t. He frowns before it comes back to him.
Laura’s bed.
Stiles.
He’d woken up earlier in the pitch black with Stiles’ forehead pressed into the valley between his shoulder blades, breath a warm and reliable puff through his thin t-shirt, his hand clenched on the hill of Derek’s bicep, snagging him, pulling him back against him.
Derek hadn’t brushed him off. Though it had given him a moment’s pause, strange without the swell of breasts between them, an unmistakably masculine hand pulling him close. But only a moment’s; he’d been asleep again minutes later.
He scrubs at the rough brillo of hair on his jaw, the scent of coffee finally breaking through the haze of exhaustion. He swings his legs out, toes flexing on the warm floorboards and squints out the window at the brilliant day. “Rain finally stopped,” he says, voice scratchy and breath foul. He winces to himself, padding into the bathroom to grab his toothbrush.
Stiles doesn’t raise his voice, even when Derek turns the faucet on. “Should we go frolic in the park, you think? Grab your butterfly net.”
Derek snorts, nearly inhaling toothpaste and it’s almost normal. He could almost forget. Except Stiles would’ve said that to Laura, not to him. And she would’ve matched Stiles’ tone and amusement with her retort and they’d have laughed all the way out the door, him forever trailing behind, rather than let the lightheartedness peter away into nothing. He spits down the sink, rinses his mouth and pads back out in his ratty jeans and black t-shirt, scratching at the bristly hair beneath his navel before stretching, smelling like dried sweat and rubber.
“Sleep okay?” Stiles asks, standing at the stove, fried eggs getting crispy behind him. He looks like he should’ve stayed in bed for another year or so, yawning and worn.
Derek bunches up his shoulder in a shrug, sitting at a stool on the other side of the counter. Stiles’ coffee is on the far end and he reaches across to snag it. Takes a sip. Pulls a face at the acrid, soul-deadening flavor. “This tastes like fucking despair.”
Stiles turns around to see what he’s talking about and his shoulders hunch. He sighs. “Sorry.” He grabs a mug from inside the sink, rinses it, shakes it and pours Derek his own cup. “I tried to think about something else while I was making it but, well,” he frowns down at his own cup pointedly.
Derek waves it away. “Yeah, I got it.” He tentatively sips from the new cup. It’s not great, but only because Stiles doesn’t usually make their coffee and isn’t very good at it. Not because it tastes like liquid depression. “S’fine,” he says when he sees Stiles is still looking at him.
He nods approvingly, using the spatula to split his eggs apart. He grabs toast off the toaster and hands Derek half his breakfast.
Derek opens his mouth. “I don’t want-”
“I don’t care.”
Derek closes his mouth. The eggs are rubbery and sad. Literally sad. Stiles hadn’t been concentrating so hard with these. The toast is crunchy and miserable. Derek takes two bites and pushes the plate away. “You’re going to have to cheer up if you plan to take on cooking all our meals, or at least compartmentalize,” he says blandly.
Stiles lets out a heavy breath, munching his toast. “Sorry,” he says wanly, again. “I don’t even taste it anymore.”
Derek skirts his eyes away. He doesn’t know what to say to that, that this is the only emotion Stiles has left, so familiar that he’s blind to it. “We should go.”
Stiles lifts an eyebrow in Derek’s periphery, finishing his toast. “Butterfly catching after all?”
“Leave. Move. Get out,” Derek clarifies his meaning.
“What.”
Derek turns to look at him, at his thin-lipped scowl, eyes wide and clear. “There’s no reason to stay here.”
Stiles’ hand slowly clenches into a fist on the countertop. “Fuck. You,” he says, voice strung tight and forebodingly calm. “This is the only place we have that still has a reason. Laura died here. You really don’t want to find out why?”
Derek swallows, brows coming together in a simmering anger. He stares down at his crossed arms on the table. “I don’t think we get to know why.”
“Not if we don’t even try to! You just-you want to forget her. You came back here that night and tore up everything she owned and for what? So you could pretend like she didn’t exist, like you didn’t lose anything? News flash, Derek: It didn’t fucking work.”
Derek’s lip raises and he stares at where he’d piled up her decimated possessions, left them to crumble further before, days later, tossing them into the dumpster in the same alley she’d died in, feeling betrayed by her going off on her own and getting murdered. And all the more furious because he wasn’t mourning her so much as hating her.
“I know you feel it the same way I do, like it’s a slice just under your skin every time you walk into a room.” Only Stiles is wrong of course, not a ‘wolf himself, he has no idea how fleeting physical pain is to him. How little he understands that sentiment. This-the agony of Laura’s death-this he’s only felt once before, when he’d been responsible for burning his whole family down. He doesn’t think he’ll survive this second time around. This is just another example of how ill-suited they are. “The absence of her is like a physical thing, and it’ll follow us everywhere we go. We don’t get away from it no matter how far we run, so we stay. Get answers instead.”
Maybe we stop saying ‘we.’ Maybe you stay, maybe we give up on banding together for no other reason than we’re alone and in the same pain. Derek doesn’t say it.
He’s terrified Stiles will agree.
He lifts an eyebrow, says condescendingly, “What did you have in mind?”
•
Derek doesn’t stare at the ground where he’d cradled Laura’s body to his chest, trying to will life back into her, to give her all that he had left in him. It feels wrong being here, bathed in sunlight, at what amounts to Laura’s grave with a non-mourner.
He watches her instead, the four-foot-something scrap of a girl sitting on top of the dumpster lid he’d thrown all of Laura’s meager possessions into barely a week ago. She’s banging her thick booted heels against the metal sides, eyes glowing a violent magenta, tongue sliding across the paper of her hand-rolled cigarette. Her dreads are loose, messily piled atop her head and unkempt.
She picks up one lock of dark, navy fraying hair and chews on it, sticking the newly rolled cigarette behind her ear.
She slips down off the lid like a spider from its web, all exaggerated angles to her limbs, almost hidden by black, belted pants that are two sizes too big for her. She sniffs. A long sniff. Blinks her eyes back to a dull brown. “There’s nothing here.” Her voice is that of a bored teenager with a thousand better places to be. Cheap headphones hang around her neck, connected to a walkman on her waist, and she adds, “Except angst. Like teen drama angst.” She raises her upper lip dismissively. “It’s like 10 Things I Hate About You threw up on She’s All That out here.”
Derek snarls, “My sister died here.” His eyes threaten to filter the world in red through neon blue and he tears his gaze away from her.
She blinks at him unapologetically, chews her hair again. “Yeah,” she says, shrugs. “Angstily.”
Stiles’ jaw clicks as he worries it back and forth. “Rio,” it’s barely civil, “maybe concentrate?”
Her eyes cut over to him, a slice across the atmosphere between them. Her eyebrow perks, the way it’s drawn up making the piercing in it look like it’s connected to a fisherman’s hook. “I am concentrating,” she says back snarkily, folding her arms over her bright red Wonder Woman tank, made a bit difficult by the incredibly puffy army-olive overcoat she’s wearing. “I told you the vibe.” She untangles one arm to hold her hand out between them, palm up. “Twenty bucks, slim.”
Stiles flexes his fingers at his side, as though forcibly keeping them from forming into a fist. “You can do better,” it’s half a challenge. Then a whole one: “I can do better.”
She smirks, as though calling his bluff, and uses the same hand to gesture across the alley. “Well?”
Stiles lets out a low growl, takes a step back towards the rough brick and slams his fist against it. Hard. Derek takes an instinctive step towards him when he scents the blood, and that’s something in and of itself, something he would do for pack, something he’s not sure Stiles was to him before Laura died. He stops himself as soon as he realizes what Stiles has done.
The scent of darker, richer, slightly fetid blood joins it, blood that was there two nights ago, a week ago, that’s still there now, blood that’s tumbling out of cracks and crags, rolling and scrambling down the walls, congealing, joining, puddling together in the center between them. Beads of red build upon themselves, like molecules combining, rising up to become something solid, something three-dimensional, filling in legs and arms, a cloaked torso, an outline of a face in Laura’s blood, hidden by a hood but with a clear swoop of hair across the brow. A soft chin, round cheeks.
But it’s nothing more than a suggestion of features rather than a picture perfect image.
Derek stares at it, this figure made of blood until Stiles lets out a wounded catch of breath behind him.
Derek rounds on him, the name out of his mouth before he’s even caught sight of him. “Stiles?”
He’s barely upright, knees unsteady and using the wall as more of a crutch now than an element of his spell. He shakes his head, partly to stay him and partly as an answer to his unspoken question. “I can’t make it any clearer.”
Derek frowns, asks gruffly, glancing between Stiles and the body of blood, “Do you feel anything?” He should be telling him to stop, telling him this is dangerous, but he wants an answer more than he cares what getting it might do to Stiles.
Stiles’ body is trembling, breaths coming short and uneven. “Yeah,” he says hoarsely. He meets Derek’s eyes and says uncertainly, like he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying, “Remorse.”
Derek’s eyebrows knit together in confusion, expression darkening. Remorse? Like it’d been nothing more than a fucking accident, like they’d tripped and cut her carotid, whoopsie-daisy. Claws dig into his own thighs and tears of pain and rage spring up. He swallows them down, yanking his nails out of his skin. Blood and skin under them.
“There’s magic, too,” Rio says, bundling her coat around her as she circles the shape of Laura’s blood.
Derek had all but forgotten she was there.
Her combat boots make damp clunking sounds on the pavement. They look almost like they should be too heavy for her small feet to lift. She reaches up with tentative fingers towards the liquid face, fingernails painted in chipped teal polish, and as they near the features get more defined. The cheek sloping, the nose becoming smaller, straighter, the lips forming into a small bow and she sucks in a breath, saying what they’d all just seen: “It’s a woman.”
She pulls her hand away and the image collapses, blood splashing back down and seeping into the concrete, hiding in the same nooks and crannies it had before. She turns to Stiles, dangling earrings jingling softly, and the smirk’s back. “How ‘bout that Jackson?”
Derek grabs a twenty out of the wad of bills in his back pocket and slaps it into her hand from over her shoulder. “Here,” he says curtly, keeping his eyes on Stiles, “Go.”
She eyes him for a half second, lifts the bill up above her head (still below Derek’s eye line) and squints at it in the light from the windows above. “Pleasure doin’ business with you, boys,” she says, smacking her lips, turning on her heel and vanishing on the spot.
Derek spares a minute to be baffled by that. He doesn’t know Stiles’ contacts, barely knows Stiles’ capabilities, and anything beyond what werewolves can do still feels like a revelation. He steps gingerly over to Stiles, who’s still slumped back against the brick. “All right?” he asks gruffly.
Stiles nods but he’s unsettlingly pale. “Yeah,” he licks a cracked lip. “I’m good.” He shifts and Derek knows he just tried to stand and couldn’t.
He takes him at his word anyway. It’s not his job to worry about Stiles. Stiles is his own keeper, if he wants to kill himself trying to pretend he didn’t just run himself ragged then that’s his business. “Where should we look?”
Stiles leans his head back, enough that Derek can see him work a swallow down the column of his throat. “The registry,” he decides, chest rising and falling exaggeratedly. He dips his chin so he can look Derek in the eye. He may be wearied but his gaze is sharp. “There should be magical signatures on record for every coven in the city.”
“Maybe she’s an outlier,” Derek says roughly, because he’s not sure how well Stiles has thought this through. If at all, “some rogue witch.”
Stiles shrugs, pushing off the wall to stand. He doesn’t fall but he does wobble. “Might be,” he agrees grudgingly. He digs at the valley between his shoulders with probing fingers, working at a knot most likely. “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. We’re resourceful, Derek. We’ve got this.” It sounds more like wishful thinking than a certainty. Something said so Derek will stop asking questions and get on board. Stiles pulls in a deep breath and his eyelashes flutter unevenly. He lets it out through his nose and says wearily, “We’ll make a trip of it in the morning?”
Derek steps away from him before he does something he shouldn’t, like offer Stiles his shoulder to lean on, and nods.
When they get back to the apartment, they both, separately, spend a minute staring at the bottom bunk.
Derek wishes he could say it had to do with Laura but-his eyes cut over to Stiles’s knees-last night was the best sleep he’d gotten since Laura died. Actually, since the last time they’d shared a bed.
Stiles clears his throat, hangs his coat up by the door and says awkwardly, not meeting his eye either, “Well. Goodnight.”
Derek grunts, knowing it won’t be.
•
Stiles’ door opens with an understated click a little after seven the next morning and Derek hears him drag his feet down the hallway before he gets to the main room. He stops at the threshold, blinks at Derek’s slumped shoulders and owlish eyes at the kitchen counter.
His skin isn’t as pallid as in the alley yesterday but he looks even more exhausted if possible.
“Did you sleep at all?” he asks, prow berked high in judgment. Like he’s got any room for that.
Derek lifts a shoulder rather than answer. Because he didn’t and Stiles already knows it.
He frowns, looks back the way he came and starts genuinely, “You know you can always-” whatever he sees on Derek’s face shuts the offer down and he spits out sourly, “Right.”
Good.
Derek’s not going to cozy up to Stiles. Stiles with his loud, probably exaggerated and almost exclusionary grief, which matches his interaction with everything else, intense and attention-seeking and not made for Derek, always everything Derek isn’t. They’re allies, not friends, and Derek doesn’t want Stiles ever forgetting that.
“You know where this registry is?”
Stiles blinks at him. Almost like he’s shocked Derek doesn’t. He can almost see the memory play out in Stiles’ wide, blank-eyed expression. He’d gone with Laura. Probably hadn’t even realized until this second that Derek hadn’t been there with them; he was so much a spare part when it came to their dynamic. “Yeah,” he says but it sounds like, ‘sorry,’ and Derek hates him a little for it.
link to come