fic: hyper heart alone, derek/stiles, nc17, 3/4
masterpost
“Take Larkspur,” Stiles says, and Derek slows.
“It’s longer.”
“I know,” Stiles says, and Derek takes the turn.
“Do you want to go somewhere else first?” he asks.
“No,” Stiles says. “Just wanted to enjoy the view.”
“There’s nothing down here,” Derek says, frowning.
“Pull over,” Stiles says, though they aren’t far enough down the street yet.
When Derek rolls to a stop, he turns to ask, “What are-“ and Stiles kisses him.
“Come on,” he says, amused, and Derek’s head slams back against the headrest when Stiles’ hand tightens on his cock. “You know what this place is, right?”
Derek looks around like he’s just noticing where they’re parked. “Fuck,” he says, though that may have more to do with the way Stiles’ hand is moving, and Stiles thinks he’d like to see Derek soak through his uniform pants, but they do actually have to go into the office after this, so he reaches for the fastenings.
Derek slaps his hand away. “What are you doing!”
“Giving you a blowjob,” Stiles says. “I’ll swallow, don’t worry.”
“I’m not-“ Derek says, though his eyes darken. “That isn’t-“
“I won’t let anything happen to your uniform,” Stiles reassures him.
“That isn’t what I’m worried about,” Derek says, fighting Stiles’ fingers as they work at his zipper.
“Come on,” Stiles says, impatient with Derek’s recalcitrance. “I always wanted to do this here.”
“I can’t do this here!” Derek says, voice rising, and then Stiles gets his hands on skin and Derek breaks off with a grunt, but he recovers enough to pull Stiles’ hands off again almost immediately. “Stiles, I can’t! I’ve patrolled here, I’ve chased off a dozen kids-“
“You don’t patrol here now,” Stiles says. “You’re not even on duty yet.”
“Other people are,” Derek insists. “Other officers will be-“
“Nobody’s driving by until tonight,” Stiles says, sliding back so he has room to lean down over his trapped hands and put his mouth on Derek’s dick, and then Derek releases his hold on Stiles, puts his hands on Stiles’ head instead, and yanks him back up.
“No,” he says curtly, and starts the car before Stiles has time to argue, and Stiles isn’t going to attempt to suck somebody off in a moving vehicle, because he values his life, thank you very much.
“Are you seriously turning down a blowjob?” he asks, and that doesn’t sound anything like a whine.
“No,” Derek says, but he keeps driving, so Stiles settles back in his seat sulkily.
Derek pulls into the lot of an apartment complex on Montrose.
Stiles follows him out of the car and trails after him when he moves at a brisk clip towards the building.
“I thought we were going into the office,” he says.
“We are.”
“Where are we going?”
“I live here,” Derek says, shoving through the doors, and Stiles stops dead for a second before rushing to catch up.
“You don’t have the house anymore?”
“I do,” Derek says, hitting the button to call the elevator. “I don’t live out there.”
“Huh,” Stiles says, and Derek keeps his eyes on the neon numbers.
“It wasn’t practical,” he says, breaking under Stiles’ gaze. “This is near the office, so.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Stiles says, and he thinks he might, but he doesn’t think that’s the reason Derek left.
When the elevator’s a floor away, Stiles says, “So you think I’m going to suck you off in your apartment?”
“Yes,” Derek says.
“I wanted to do it in the car. Maybe I don’t want to do it in your apartment, maybe I’m not in the mood.”
“You are,” Derek says. “And I am a responsible officer of the law, and I resent any attempt to persuade me into an infraction of-“
He stops speaking when the elevator arrives, and when they get in Stiles asks, “Does this thing have cameras?”
“Yes,” Derek says, heated, but looks like he’s about to pounce on Stiles anyway, and then someone starts yelling for Derek to hold the doors, and a woman with a toddler on her hip gets in with them.
Derek makes halting smalltalk all the way up, and the woman looks puzzled, maybe a little suspicious. She can probably tell they’re itching for her to be gone, and she keeps looking at Stiles curiously, although he doesn’t recognise her, so the chances this will be all over the station by the time they get in are slim.
He barely manages a goodbye as he bolts off the elevator, and Derek doesn’t do much better.
He pushes up against Derek’s back while Derek fumbles with the key, and when they spill inside, Stiles shuts the door by shoving Derek back against it as he drops to his knees.
Derek pulls him to his feet.
“What is wrong with you?” Stiles asks, frustrated with Derek beyond belief.
“The bed is literally ten feet away,” Derek says, and manhandles Stiles through his bedroom door and onto it.
Derek comes down on top of him, lining them up and rocking, like he can’t wait long enough to do anything else, and Stiles had meant to make this a lot simpler, a lot cleaner, but Derek’s face is twisted in pleasure above him, and Stiles is urging him on before he knows what’s happening.
“Take off your clothes,” he says distantly, removed from the thought but remembering that it was important, and then he opens his eyes and sees the brown material under his hands, shifting with Derek’s rough movements against him, and the sound Stiles makes is honestly embarrassing.
Derek seems content to keep going like this, shifting together deep and hard until they both come, but this isn’t what Stiles asked for, isn’t what he’d wanted, and it’s his turn, so he fumbles his hands under Derek’s shirt until it parts for him. He thinks a button breaks loose, but he doesn’t really care. Derek props himself up on his hands above Stiles, giving him free reign to do what he will, but he grinds harder against him at the same time, so Stiles removes his hands from Derek’s chest so he can flip Derek onto his back and unbutton his pants. Once he gets his hands on the fly he realises it’s wet, so he drops his mouth down to suck at the fabric, taste of cotton and Derek’s arousal filling his mouth, and then once he gets the buttons open he still doesn’t get to see Derek properly, because his mouth is on Derek’s cock immediately, and Derek is just a blur of colour before Stiles closes his eyes.
Stiles knows he’s good at this, but it feels like a remarkably short time before Derek is shoving up against Stiles’ face, a broken stream of noise spilling from him, and Stiles is looking up at him, trying to see his face past his pale chest framed by the familiar clothing, when Derek’s hands land on his head and pull him off. And then Derek is arching off the bed and Stiles doesn’t know where to look, Derek’s agonised face distracting him, but then Derek’s cock is spilling all over his belly, all over his pants, and Stiles can’t look away until Derek stops shaking enough to wrestle Stiles down and return the favour.
When Stiles’ dick hits the back of Derek’s throat Derek doesn’t swallow, so Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s head and holds him there so he can rock steadily in, and then Derek looks right at him while he swallows and swallows and swallows around him, throat gripping tight every time, and it’s a relief for more than one reason when Stiles can break the gaze, throw his head back and come with a groan.
Stiles bites back a whimper when Derek pulls his mouth away, entire body feeling bludgeoned by that sudden rush of sensation. Derek’s ruined pants slip down when he gets onto his knees, and he steps out of them as he stands and lets them drop to the floor.
He shucks his shirt as well, falling to join the pants, and goes to the open wardrobe to pull out a pristine replacement uniform.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says.
“Okay,” Stiles says, still a little vague.
Derek waits, then says, “You need one too.” His voice is a little hesitant, but it’s a good effort.
“Nah, I think I’m fine,” Stiles says, and throws an arm over his eyes. “You go ahead.”
When he hears Derek leave the room, he lets his arm slide to the mattress and blinks up at the ceiling.
“Fuck,” he says softly, hoping the running water will cover it.
*
Stiles did need a shower.
He wasn’t filthy like Derek, now shower-fresh and squeaky-clean, but he sweated through his shirt, and it’s sticking to his skin in random, irritating patches.
It’s making him snappish. There’s nothing else bothering him.
He should have taken a shower.
“So,” he says, when he’s sitting sullenly in Derek’s office, and he does realise his tone is not the most encouraging. It might be downright forbidding. “What’s going on with you?”
“With-me?” Derek asks, looking at Stiles warily.
“No, not with you,” Stiles says, annoyed. “With you and the marshals and this prisoner thing. Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
“That’s sensitive information relating to-“ Derek starts.
“Spare me,” Stiles says dismissively. “If the universe didn’t want me knowing confidential information regarding ongoing criminal investigations and events, it would not have made my dad the Sheriff, and it would not have allowed the internet to provide me tutorials on how to hack a police scanner.”
Derek opens his mouth, and Stiles says, sternly, “No. And if you say anything shitty about my dad I’ll tell him exactly what I just did to you.”
Derek shuts his mouth, then opens it to say, “Ate all my emergency Doritos?”
“No,” Stiles says with dignity. “And you’re not distracting me.”
Derek is distracting himself, though, and he looks conflicted when he says, “Hey, uh, this morning.”
“Yes?” Stiles prompts, when nothing more is forthcoming.
“How did Fred know about us?”
“He doesn’t,” Stiles says, and that’s kind of a lie but it’s mostly the truth, because, “there’s nothing to know, really.”
Derek’s face changes, softens with hurt and then tenses, hardens, and Stiles can’t deal with any of it.
“He knew,” Derek says flatly.
“He maybe figured out we’d had sex,” Stiles obfuscates. “But there’s nothing else to figure out, because there’s nothing else going on.”
He feels like he should check in with Derek on that, add a right? There’s nothing going on between us, right? like he’s a pathetic kid again, but he isn’t, and there isn’t, and he isn’t going to.
“But like I said, my dad is an awesome lawman and disciplinarian, and you can’t hide a thing from him, even if there’s barely anything to be discovered.”
Derek doesn’t respond.
“I’ll set him straight,” Stiles offers, barely biting back the bitchy if you want me to, and Derek’s eyes flash and his mouth opens and then Mary pokes her head into the room.
“So,” she says. “You two!”
“Yes?” Derek asks.
“No,” she says, “I mean, you two! Emma Anders called me.”
Stiles doesn’t recognise the name, but Derek looks horrified.
“She says you two were looking like a pair of rabbits in spring in that elevator, and I’m sure this is wonderful news, but I don’t know why it has to make you late.”
“I’m sorry,” Derek says.
“Hmm,” Mary says, withholding forgiveness until Derek looks suitably chastened. “You do make a lovely couple, though!”
“We’re not a couple!” Stiles protests.
Now he’s the one being cowed by Mary’s glare.
She turns back to Derek to say, “Emma asked me to recall to you the thinness of the walls,” and sweeps back out, letting the door bang behind her.
Derek is still scowling when Stiles reluctantly turns back to him, and Stiles takes the opportunity to return to the topic.
“So what’s with you and the escaped prisoners?” he asks breezily. “You biffys?”
“No,” Derek says, and it sounds like a lie.
“What?” Stiles demands. “You are?”
“No,” Derek says defensively, then makes an impatient face and forces calmness. “They were just some people I used to know.”
“People you used to know.”
“We weren’t friends at all,” Derek says.
“So what were you?”
Derek shrugs, a telling twitch, and he looks deeply uncomfortable when he says, “I used to run with them. They weren’t very pleased with me when I stopped, but they hadn’t changed much from when I knew them, and I was never going to form a pack with them.”
“They were omegas who wanted to join the pack.”
“No,” Derek says. “I didn’t have a pack when I knew them.”
“But when they found out you had one now they wanted to join it.”
“No,” Derek says steadily. “They wanted to destroy it.”
“They what?”
“They came into town looking for me, but they’d planned to hunt Allison down first-they had maps printed off.”
“But you knew they were coming,” Stiles says. “You stopped them.”
“No,” Derek says. “They ran into Lydia in the supermarket while they were buying rope and they recognised my scent, so they went after her first. It was a mistake.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says faintly. “I would imagine.”
“So I arrested them and put them in holding,” Derek continues, though Stiles hadn’t asked. “And I went to take care of my pack. The marshals were due to get in any minute and they would take care of the transfer. There were warrants out in several other states that would have taken priority.”
“Warrants for what?”
“Grand theft, kidnapping, rape and murder,” Derek says flatly.
Stiles tries to laugh. “Some friends,” he says.
“But they escaped before the marshals arrived. They went to your father’s house, probably looking for me. I’d said I had to report in to him within their hearing.”
“You-“
“I was at Lydia’s, so when your father called in to report intruders I was close enough to get there quickly. They were fleeing the scene when I arrived, but when they saw me they attempted to retreat into the house. I shot them.”
“They were werewolves. You could’ve shot them all day and they would’ve shaken it off and got back up.”
“Argent let me have some ammo,” Derek says. “We needed to explain the state of the bodies, so it is believed they had a genetic allergy to lead.”
“So,” Stiles starts. The faint ringing in his ears is lending itself to a certain detachment. “Old friends came into town looking for payback and when they couldn’t fix their issues with you by raping and killing my best friend’s pregnant wife they shot my father instead.”
Derek twitches again. “Yes,” he says.
Stiles draws in a breath, and then he has to let it go, because he can’t start shouting at the undersheriff in his office.
After a second he says, “I have to go,” mechanically, and he knocks his leg against the corner of the desk as he rises, but the pain doesn’t really register.
“Wait,” Derek says, and that might be alarm in his voice, but Stiles doesn’t care. “What-“
“Are you serious?” Stiles asks incredulously, voice rising dangerously. “Do you actually expect me to be okay with that?”
“No,” Derek says, but then adds, “Your father knows, he-“
“I don’t care what my dad is okay with,” Stiles says, pinching the bridge of his nose until it hurts, but it does nothing to distract him. “I’m not.”
“You don’t get to make that decision for him.”
“Neither do you,” Stiles bites out. “And I’m making it for me. Is Scott all right with this, is Allison?”
“I didn’t tell them he was going to go after Allison,” Derek says. “They had enough-“
“You didn’t tell them?”
“It would’ve come up with the trial,” Derek says. “I just didn’t want to tell Allison while she was pregnant, and-“
“She’s going to kill you,” Stiles says.
“And now she never has to know, so obviously it was the right decision.”
“Uh, no,” Stiles says.
“I realise my choices aren’t perfect, Stiles,” Derek says, anger edging out defensiveness. “But you have no idea why I’m making them, and your judgement means very little.”
Stiles doesn’t know why he’s surprised. “Got it,” he says, and the hardness of his voice is a relief.
“Stiles,” Derek says, apologetic.
“No,” Stiles says, “you endanger the lives of my friends and you get my father shot, but I don’t get to have an opinion.”
Derek looks guilty, and then Derek looks angry again, and he says, “They’re barely even your friends anymore.”
“Wow,” Stiles says. “Okay, fuck you too.”
“Stiles,” Derek says again, but Stiles waves him off, already out the door.
*
So maybe getting into this thing with Derek was a mistake, but he can’t regret it. He went for it because he couldn’t stand the thought of not knowing; he wants to be certain that there’s no potential here so he can say he tried and never have to second-guess himself, never have to give a second’s thought to Derek Hale again.
He needs to be able to stop thinking about Derek. He needs to be able to file him away in a box in his head, a childish attraction that never had any place in his life, never had a hope in hell of working out, of mattering in the grand scheme of things.
He needs to know that’s true.
As it is, he stews in his anger all day, can’t let it go, and he’s startled by its vehemence. Stiles doesn’t really get angry very often anymore; there never seems to be much reason for it. It’s infuriating that Derek is dredging up all these things he’d thought he was done with, but when he thinks back on this he’ll remember how this felt, how much of what Derek made him feel was so unwelcome.
When he realises the bubbling fury isn’t going away, he heads out to Derek’s apartment to wait for him to come home from work.
Derek looks tired when he gets out of the elevator, and he’s surprised to see Stiles sitting in front of his door.
Stiles gets to his feet. “You’re a fucker and I hate you,” he says, and Derek nods warily.
“Open the door,” Stiles says impatiently, and when Derek does Stiles trips him to the floor and slams the door shut in the same ungainly movement.
“Fuck,” Derek says, taking an elbow in the stomach on the way down, but he knows how to land, and all Stiles gets out of the fall is a banged knee.
It’s difficult to get his jeans off while he’s kneeling on Derek, but Stiles manages it.
“What-“ Derek starts.
“Shut up,” Stiles snarls. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“What do you want?” Derek asks, hands tightening on Stiles’ hips, and Stiles slaps them away and scrambles for the packet of lube he’d brought for this, manages to tear it open on the second try.
“Do what I want,” Stiles says, coating Derek’s fingers and pushing them directly to where he wants them, and Derek nudges right in, slow and firm. “I just want you to fucking-“
“What do you want?” Derek asks again, and when his finger gets deep enough Stiles can just slide right down, head going back at the rough drag.
“That,” Stiles says, and he didn’t realise it was going to come out so spiteful.
“This?” Derek presses another finger in beside the first, and Stiles resents the rush of pleasure that flows through him, so he bends forward to tear at Derek’s shirt and bite at his chest, ignoring what the change in angle does to him though Derek will know anyway. He bites and scratches at Derek because he can, because Derek can’t, and it’s a release to be able to dig his teeth in as hard as he wants, to claw at Derek until his nails start to ache, and know it’s okay, feel Derek’s cock hard against the inside of his thigh through his pants.
Stiles doesn’t think about that though, just rides the spikes of feeling as Derek’s fingers brush into him, exactly where he wants them, and this wasn’t how he’d planned for this to go, but suddenly he’s coming all over another clean uniform, Derek working him through it.
When he can register stimulus again, Derek is pulling his hand away, and there’s blood in Stiles’ mouth though Derek’s chest is unmarked.
“How many uniforms do you have?” Stiles asks, noting absently that there are buttons on the floor beside Derek’s head.
“Two,” Derek says forbiddingly, but he’s rocking against Stiles’ leg, hard and wanting, and Stiles is considering what to do about it when his phone goes off.
“Don’t-“ Derek says, but Stiles is already saying, “Scott, hey!”
“My mom says dinner tonight,” Scott says happily.
“Cool!” Stiles says, sliding off Derek and reaching for his discarded clothes on his way into the bathroom. “Now?”
Derek groans.
“You’re invited too,” Scott says, and Derek glares at the phone before stalking into the kitchen.
“He says thanks,” Stiles relays to Scott. “He’s thrilled.”
Scott huffs a laugh. “Come over whenever,” he says. “We’re headed out now.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “be there soon,” and hangs up.
When he gets out of the bathroom, Derek is starting a load of laundry, standing naked in the middle of his kitchen.
Stiles can’t suppress the shiver that passes through him, and he stares longer than he means to; it takes too long to meet Derek’s eyes when he turns around.
Stiles flushes, but Derek doesn’t say anything. “Are you coming for dinner?” Stiles asks.
“Yes,” Derek says, like it’s obvious, like his natural place is at Ms. McCall’s dinner-table, like there’s a chance in hell he would’ve volunteered for that back when Stiles knew him.
“I have to get dressed,” Stiles says, massively irritated, and grits his teeth when he realises he already is. “I’m not waiting for you,” he continues, not willing to acknowledge any correction is necessary, and somehow by the time he checks his pocket for his car-keys and locates his shoes and makes his way to the front door, Derek is standing beside him, fully dressed in his old uniform: tshirt, jeans and leather jacket, all regulation black.
“You still think you’re twenty-two,” Stiles says, tone consoling. “That’s embarrassing. You barely got away with this then.”
Derek follows Stiles’ gaze down to his clothes, but his face is so inquisitively uncomprehending when he looks back up that Stiles curses him for a killjoy and leads the way out.
When they get to the lot they argue about whose car to take.
“There’s no need to bring-“ Derek starts, for the nth time, considerably more frustrated than the first, which is fair, because Stiles is too.
“This is not a date!” Stiles says, hoping to settle the matter, but Derek just looks considering. “You are not driving me-you know what, never mind.” He turns his back on Derek and pulls out his keys. “I don’t need to win here, because I don’t have to do what you say anyway.”
“Do you even know wh-“
He gets into his car and regards Derek with a superior air, and when Derek glances at the passenger side door, Stiles activates central locking and tries to look unruffled.
Derek gives him a scowl that Stiles might have been afraid of once upon a time, and follows him out onto the street, but Derek has overtaken him by the time they’re on Beechview, and takes a sharp right onto Williams Avenue while Stiles is sitting in the left lane waiting for the light to change.
Stiles gapes after his disappearing tail lights for a second, then swerves sharply to follow, though he isn’t sure why, because it isn’t like he’s been gone so long he’s forgotten the way to his best friend’s childhood home.
He catches up with Derek quickly, and follows him until he pulls to a stop on the street outside the Argent house.
“What are we doing here?” Stiles asks him, not really expecting an answer. Scott’s car is in the driveway.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew, but Argent and Melissa are living in sin,” Derek says, starting towards the house. “Don’t be weird in front of Allison.”
“I would never be weird,” Stiles says defensively, as Derek raps on the door, “I am a prime example of savoir faire and ability to cope with all kinds of crap,” but when Ms. McCall swings open the door to greet them with a smile, all Stiles can do is gape at her as if the muscles in his face have all stopped functioning.
“Stiles,” she says, wry amusement warm and familiar. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you Ms. McCall,” he garbles out, “here.” Derek shoves him through the door, and Stiles recovers enough to slap him away. “Hey, can I call you Mel?” he asks Ms. McCall, and opens his mouth to offer justification for the change, but she says, “No,” firmly, and sweeps away, and Stiles is overcome with an unexpected wave of untrammelled nostalgia.
“I missed you!” he calls after her, shyly pleased when she responds in kind from wherever she’s vanished to, and then he slips away himself, so he can avoid Derek’s amused eyebrows.
*
Allison is in the dining room.
“Hey, Stiles,” she says, sounding totally stressed.
“Hi, Allison,” Stiles says, cheerful but wary, mindful of Derek’s warning. “How are you?”
“Fine,” says, obviously not. “Totally fine! So, let’s talk about you and Derek!”
“Let’s not,” Stiles says, holding his hands up in surrender. “Nothing to talk about.”
“Well that’s worth talking about,” she says, “since apparently you’re screwing like-“
“Does everyone know about that?”
“No,” Allison says, but her eyes shift away.
“Great.”
“Yeah,” she says, bitterness in her tone. “I know.”
“Do we need to talk about this?” Stiles asks, throwing caution to the wind when confronted with her strained face. “I feel like we should talk about this.”
“I really don’t want to,” she says, heart in her eyes.
“Fair enough,” he says equably, pulling out a seat for her at the table and taking one himself. “Neither do I. About me, I mean.”
“But if I talk about you I don’t have to think about me,” she says miserably.
“Okay,” he says, daunted. “I don’t know what to say, though, because, like, there’s nothing. I’m not going to-“
The realisation that the reason there’s nothing is because he won’t allow it is sharp.
“There’s nothing.”
“That’s sad,” she says.
“It isn’t,” he says defensively. “Nothing about my life is sad, okay?”
And that’s true: Stiles’ life is absolutely fine, even if what he has is a job he’s worked hard to get good at, and friends he does nothing but drink with, and guys he doesn’t want to remember the next morning, and nothing that comes close to anything he had here, even when he thought that was nothing, even when he thought it counted for shit.
“If you say so,” Allison says dubiously, and if Stiles didn’t know better he’d think she’d been drinking, but he can recognise a stray pregnancy hormone from twenty klicks away by now.
“You’re upset,” Stiles says, foolishly.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I just wish I didn’t have to talk about this, I wish nobody knew, I wish I didn’t-didn’t-I can’t even blame him, but I don’t care what she did. She was my mother.” Her face trembles, and Stiles starts to think he’s in over his head here, because he knows that feeling, and he can’t deal with it in himself, let alone in her. “I don’t blame my father, either, because she’s dead, but-She was my mother, and I love you, I love you all, but I don’t care-“
“Hey,” Scott says, appearing in the doorway and by Allison’s side before Stiles can blink. “Hey, babe, come on.”
She buries her face in his chest for a second, and when she lifts it she’s composed again.
“Yeah,” she says, and smiles at Stiles. “I didn’t mean to say that to you.”
Scott pulls her out of the room, casting an anxious look back at Stiles, and then Stiles is alone, left to wonder what the hell that was about.
*
Everyone is in the kitchen when he follows Scott and Allison there, watching Ms. McCall pull something out of the oven.
“I didn’t make this,” she tells Stiles. “I don’t cook anymore.” Stiles’ face spins to Chris Argent, watching proceedings placidly, and she laughs. “We order in and heat it up. We’re so busy. It’s good, and if you tell anyone about this you will not be welcomed back.”
She’s smiling at him, but Stiles isn’t sure she’s joking.
“I know better than to cross you,” he says. “I remember-“
“Nothing,” she says, dropping the tray on the table. “You remember nothing.”
“Gotcha,” he says, and Chris, grinning, takes his hands out of his pockets to slice up the casserole, and Stiles can’t believe this is his life, so he dismisses Allison’s pregnancy hormones; she doesn’t need the excuse.
Everyone moves to the dining room, a minor fight over who gets to carry the best dish settled when Melissa takes it herself, and they take their seats quickly, used to the routine.
“Ah, ah,” Ms. McCall says to her son, “move up,” and half the table shifts down so Stiles is sitting next to Derek.
“Thanks,” he says sarcastically.
“No backtalk,” Ms. McCall says, and Chris says, “Are we encouraging this?”
She makes the so-so gesture with her hand, and Stiles gives serious consideration to burying his whole head in the bowl of casserole, just so everybody else’s dinner will suck as much as his does.
Instead, he says, “Well, if you told me I could I wouldn’t want to,” and Ms. McCall pauses with her mouth full of food.
“I never actually wanted to dissuade Scott from anything,” she says, then, “well, anyone,” and waves vaguely in the direction of Allison’s belly while Allison’s dad pretends to be deaf. “Thanks for the tip, though.”
She looks thoughtful, and Stiles waits for her to try the suggested reverse psychology, but she scoops up another forkful of pasta and changes the subject instead.
“Yeah,” Jackson tells her. “We’re totally keeping up the membership.”
“I like the clubhouse,” Lydia chimes in, though if they’re talking about the links, then Stiles has been to the clubhouse, and knows the only thing Lydia could possibly like about it is that other people aren’t allowed in.
“I don’t get out as much as I’d like,” Jackson says.
“Jackson really likes how good other people think he is at golf,” Lydia says sweetly.
“I’m good at golf.”
“Since any werewolf could hit a ball from the eighteenth to the other side of the parking lot without even trying and-“
“I was good at golf before I was a werewolf!” Jackson insists hotly, and the conversation devolves into an argument Stiles was sick of listening to by junior year, so Melissa changes the subject again.
“Stiles,” she says. “You should have brought your father. I haven’t seen him since the accident.”
Stiles has to bite back the first rush of responses: that this wasn’t an accident; that everybody asks but nobody finds out, his dad’s place in this town as tied to his function as ever; that Derek has been over so much Stiles had really been thinking about wondering why, but now he knows it was guilt, just guilt, and rational at that.
He avoids Derek’s eyes so he can say, “He’s doing better. I’ll invite him next time.”
It’s true, and the relief starts to unwind the hard knot lodged under his ribs, but then he meets Allison’s eyes and it jumps up tight into his throat. He swallows with difficulty.
“-great,” Melissa is saying. “I was so worried.”
“We all were,” Chris tells him, eyes distant and warm, his familiar regard a weirdly comfortable memory.
“Thanks,” Stiles says quietly, as Melissa speaks over him: “And Mary told me all about this nurse.”
“How does Mary know about Helen?” Stiles asks. “I barely know about Helen and I’m living there.”
“He deserves it,” Melissa says firmly, and Stiles doesn’t disagree, so he smiles like nothing about any of this is uncomfortable at all.
“-would be disgusting even if cardiovascular health and cancer weren’t a concern, and that’s what I told her,” Lydia is saying, apparently enjoying the ugly flush she’s raising in Jackson’s cheeks.
“He’s been alone for a long time,” Melissa says, and her voice is quiet, like Allison won’t hear her, sitting two places down, but Allison flinches, and Stiles does too, though for a different reason.
“He hasn’t been alone,” Stiles says, cutting into Jackson’s raised voice, silencing him as Allison says, “It wasn’t that-“ and cuts herself off as the sudden lack of concealing noise registers.
“Can I have some more water?” she asks, and Scott stands to get her some though her glass is still half full.
“You’re going to need your medicine if you’re eating the cheese later,” Melissa says, and that distracts Allison enough that she forgets to look resentful as she goes rummaging in her handbag, and when she emerges with a blister of tablets and pops three in quick succession, her eyes are only reserved. It’s a relief.
Everything about this is unexpected tension and sudden release, and when Stiles counts the years since Allison’s mother’s death, he doesn’t think things should still be this strange.
“What shift are you working tomorrow?” Allison asks Melissa politely, and Stiles doesn’t think anyone should have to be trying this hard by now.
Lydia and Jackson jump in as Melissa carefully turns the conversation to Allison’s pregnancy, but Derek is uncharacteristically silent. Stiles eyes him warily as he lingers over his casserole, face downturned, fork tracing hatches in the sauce.
“You don’t even like that,” Stiles mutters, sliding insignificantly closer. Derek looks at him through his lashes, though his head doesn’t move. “You hate broccoli.” Stiles doesn’t know why he remembers that.
Derek’s lips curve, and he looks away from Stiles, a shy cast to the action though Derek is anything but, and Stiles has to try hard to resist the pull of the implied intimacy when Derek murmurs, “That’s why I’m not eating it,” low enough that Stiles has to lean in to catch the words.
“Yeah,” he says, refocussing on Derek’s cheek, suddenly closer, and he takes a breath before settling back into his chair. He’s fairly sure the lurch is only in his mind. “Good plan.”
Half the table is looking at him, but they look away when he catches them.
“-take you through it again,” Melissa is telling Allison. “I’m not in obstetrics, but-“
“You don’t have an opinion?” Stiles asks Derek, right back where he was before, helplessly disobeying his better judgment. His shoulder is nudging Derek’s arm, and Derek is relaxing into him, though Stiles can see the tension around his eyes.
“No,” Derek says. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Never stopped you before.”
“Yeah.” Derek smiles, strained.
“And this is pack, right, the next generation, so-“
“I don’t have an opinion,” Derek says, drops his fork, and sits up, leaving Stiles twisting in the wind, leaning off his chair towards the empty place Derek had been.
Stiles doesn’t feel a lurch this time, just disgruntlement. He glares at Derek.
Lydia is saying, “-know how to breathe, and all werewolves know how to deal with pain, so-“
Allison is glaring at Derek too.
“I really don’t think having a high pain threshold qualifies you to instruct on how to cope with a sustained assault on-“ Melissa is saying when Derek interrupts, looking at Allison for the first time since sitting down, saying, “If you want it, the offer’s there. You know-“
“I don’t want it,” Allison says coldly. “Scott, can I have some more water?”
Nothing gets better from there.
*
When they eventually manage to escape, Lydia and Jackson head for the hills immediately, and Scott makes halfhearted noises about Stiles coming over for a beer, not looking Derek in the eye or extending the invitation his way, before Allison yells, “So I’m driving myself home?” and he bolts.
“What the fuck was that?” Stiles asks, when they’re alone in front of the Argent house, standing by their cars. He supposes he can’t call it the Argent house anymore, since Ms. McCall is living there.
Derek shrugs. “Allison gets weird about family sometimes.”
“Why does she hate you more than her stepmom?”
Derek shrugs.
“That isn’t an answer,” Stiles says, annoyed.
“They aren’t married,” Derek says, then, at Stiles’ glare, “She hates Melissa too.”
“Derek.”
Stiles watches as Derek tries to rid himself of the hunch his shoulders snap into; he doesn’t quite manage it.
“She blames me for her mother’s death,” he says.
Stiles’ attention is on the tension in Derek’s shoulders, so it takes a second for that to register.
“She blames you for-“
“Killing Victoria,” Derek says, easier now. “Sometimes.”
“She sometimes blames you for killing her mother,” Stiles says raggedly.
“She always blames me,” Derek says, “but sometimes it gets to her more, when she remembers her mom’s never going to see her kid, or see her get married, God, do you remember the wedding?”
“Yes,” Stiles says numbly.
Now that he thinks about it, the day that Scott and Allison married, Derek was on the fringes more than would have been natural, given how close Scott and Derek had gotten even by the time Stiles left. Derek had been an uncomfortable, intrusive presence lurking on the periphery of his own pack, and nobody had made a move to draw him in, which would have made sense once, but Stiles should have noticed it was a change, should have questioned it.
He’d had other things to concentrate on that day, the first time he’d seen Derek since Derek had kind of, maybe broken his heart. He had barely let himself look at Derek, unwilling and unable to let Derek ruin all the work he’d put into being okay somewhere else, being okay somewhere else with somebody else’s life, the way Derek is now, the way Derek has now.
Stiles steps back, and Derek looks startled.
“Hey-“ Derek says uncertainly.
“Does everyone know?”
“No, they-“ Derek’s eyes are tracking over Stiles, and Stiles doesn’t know what Derek is reading off him, but his eyes are wide and dark and intense and Stiles wants them to go away. “They don’t blame me.”
It’s so unfair that every breath is a painful rasp, and he’d known Derek would do this to him, he’d known but somehow he’d forgotten to expect it. His hands curl in helpless anger, something he’s felt a lot since his return, but never for this reason, never because he’s felt like this, and never because he’s felt this pathetic.
“Should they?”
“No,” Derek says sharply, and bites back whatever else he’d been going to say.
Stiles believes him, probably, the same way Allison probably does, and right now he thinks he might care about as much as she does too.
He doesn’t care that the rest of the pack doesn’t blame Derek for killing Victoria, and he wouldn’t care if they did, and he doesn’t care what Derek did to Victoria Argent, and okay, he cares about whatever Derek did that lead to his friends threatening Allison and almost killing Stiles’ dad, but it doesn’t matter, he can’t-
“Do you want to-“ Derek starts, but Stiles says, “I’m going to go,” and jerks a thumb over his shoulder at his car. “And since you murdered Allison’s mother and almost got my father killed, I don’t actually want to, no.”
It’s a lie, which is why he doesn’t look at Derek as he gets into the car, doesn’t look at his face in the mirror as he drives away, and he doesn’t draw a steady breath until he’s three streets away.
It’s a lie. He wants to; he doesn’t know how to stop wanting to, and he hates Derek for that.
That’s a lie too: mostly he hates himself.
*
Stiles phones Scott as soon as he gets home.
“What the hell happened to Victoria?” he asks abruptly, interrupting Scott’s greeting, and Scott is suddenly silent on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, just a sec,” he says, and then Stiles can hear him murmuring to Allison, making excuses as he leaves the room. There’s an echo when he says, starkly, “She was killed. It had to happen.”
“But-“ Stiles is feeling a little shaky, he can admit it. It’s one thing for the guy you’re into to kill his serial-killer-alpha of an uncle, or the alpha of a rival pack who’s coming after his own, but it’s something entirely different when it’s the mother of your friend.
“It had-It wasn’t Derek’s fault if that’s what you’re worried about,” Scott reassures him. “Allison just-“
“There’s a reason she thinks it is,” Stiles says. “I want to know.”
He has to wait for the answer, and when it comes, Scott only says, “No you don’t.”
“Tell me what happened,” Stiles says, and when this answer comes it’s, “No.”
“Scott, I want to-“
“No!” Scott says, voice anxious. “Stiles, you weren’t-I’m sorry, but you weren’t here and I can’t tell you because you don’t-You don’t understand what it was like.”
Stiles can feel panic rising, and it’s almost a relief to have another focus for it. “So tell me,” he says again.
“No,” Scott says quietly, and hangs up.
*
Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that. It certainly isn’t the first time Scott has left him hanging, ended a conversation before Stiles was ready, but it’s the first time he remembers that Scott has left him on the outside, a deliberate exclusion he didn’t even try to hide.
Stiles makes his own way to the Sheriff’s office the next day, although he doesn’t want to see Derek, but in the event, all he sees is Derek’s back vanishing through a doorway Stiles is pretty sure leads to the janitor’s closet, ducking out of any kind of confrontation before Stiles has the chance to do the same.
Scott isn’t answering his phone.
So Stiles doesn’t have much choice but to go over to Jackson and Lydia’s that evening; they’re the only ones he’s still on easy terms with.
“Don’t you have better things to do?” Lydia asks as soon as he sits down on her couch. “Why aren’t you out fucking Derek or something? We do have a life that doesn’t include you, you know.”
“Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Lydia says.
“We were just going over to Spiral later,” Jackson says, and Stiles’ eyebrows shoot up at the name of the club. It hadn’t been around when he’d left, but he’s heard enough about it since he’s been back.
Lydia glares, but at Jackson, so Stiles doesn’t care.
“What?” Jackson says. “I’m just saying, we can do that any time. He isn’t interrupting anything.”
“Or we can not do it,” Lydia says, tone all how d’you likethemapples? Jackson is ready to argue, but Lydia turns to Stiles before he has the chance, waspish when she asks, “But seriously, don’t you have anything else you can do?”
“No,” Stiles says, because he isn’t a teenager anymore, and he can admit when he hasn’t got anything going on. He isn’t ashamed, and he doesn’t want to go out the way he would have when he was younger, try and work his way up to something somewhere with someone, not when things with his people are in this kind of mess. He wants to fix it. He doesn’t know how things are going to be, or even how he wants them to be, but he knows he needs to fix things somehow, because he doesn’t know if he’s capable of seeking out new people at this point; he’s tried that once already, and it didn’t really work out for him, and he’d been a lot younger then and everything had felt easier.
He isn’t even thirty yet, but he feels old, unhappy with the world that stretches beyond his gaze, and dissatisfied with the shape of the universe under his fingers, and if he can affect anything at all here he can only influence one of those things, he thinks, and he’s just glad it’s the one he cares about.
“That’s so sad,” Lydia says. “Your life is so sad.”
Stiles bites back the instinctive denial, and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about how true that is.
“What’s going on with Allison and Derek?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Lydia says evenly. She might even have convinced herself that’s true.
“Scott wouldn’t tell me whatever it was but I know you know.”
“I do,” Lydia says.
“So tell me!”
“No.”
“I already know about Derek’s friends,” Stiles says. “Maybe I should trade secrets with Allison.”
“You wouldn’t,” Lydia says, but she doesn’t look certain, and when Stiles stands firm she says, “This is why nobody wanted to tell you,” and Stiles has to pretend to be unaffected by that.
“Derek killed his friends-“
“They were threatening his pack,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes and checking her hair in the reflection of the dark TV screen. “Of course he killed them. This isn’t going to be some weird thing for you, is it? Killing people?”
“It isn’t a weird thing,” Stiles protests.
“Because they almost killed your father,” Lydia says, almost kindly. “I would think you would be thankful.”
“I just want to know what’s going on,” Stiles says, at the end of his tether. “With Derek killing his friends and Victoria and-“
“These things are unconnected!” Lydia says, waving her arms in an irritable negatory gesture. “Stop conflating your issues.”
“So tell me,” Stiles grits out, “and I will.”
“Screw you,” Lydia decides. “You don’t know what happened because you didn’t want anything to do with us, so whatever happened while you were off fucking around is none of your business, and if Scott wants you to know he’ll tell you himself. Jackson, we’re going to Spiral.”
And she throws him out.
*
Stiles thinks about following them to the club, but tells himself he isn’t that obsessed, even if that’s a lie; the real reason he goes home is because he knows absolutely nowhere would let him inside dressed as he is.
His dad is out with Helen, and when he comes home Stiles is slumped over the kitchen table, head pillowed on the back of his hands.
“How come Allison gets away with everything?” he asks his dad. “She’s meaner to Derek than I am.”
His dad’s pause sounds doubtful. He says, “Well, they’re used to her,” and Stiles groans miserably.
“Thanks, dad!” he yells, but his dad is already shuffling up to bed and waves him off.
*
next
“Take Larkspur,” Stiles says, and Derek slows.
“It’s longer.”
“I know,” Stiles says, and Derek takes the turn.
“Do you want to go somewhere else first?” he asks.
“No,” Stiles says. “Just wanted to enjoy the view.”
“There’s nothing down here,” Derek says, frowning.
“Pull over,” Stiles says, though they aren’t far enough down the street yet.
When Derek rolls to a stop, he turns to ask, “What are-“ and Stiles kisses him.
“Come on,” he says, amused, and Derek’s head slams back against the headrest when Stiles’ hand tightens on his cock. “You know what this place is, right?”
Derek looks around like he’s just noticing where they’re parked. “Fuck,” he says, though that may have more to do with the way Stiles’ hand is moving, and Stiles thinks he’d like to see Derek soak through his uniform pants, but they do actually have to go into the office after this, so he reaches for the fastenings.
Derek slaps his hand away. “What are you doing!”
“Giving you a blowjob,” Stiles says. “I’ll swallow, don’t worry.”
“I’m not-“ Derek says, though his eyes darken. “That isn’t-“
“I won’t let anything happen to your uniform,” Stiles reassures him.
“That isn’t what I’m worried about,” Derek says, fighting Stiles’ fingers as they work at his zipper.
“Come on,” Stiles says, impatient with Derek’s recalcitrance. “I always wanted to do this here.”
“I can’t do this here!” Derek says, voice rising, and then Stiles gets his hands on skin and Derek breaks off with a grunt, but he recovers enough to pull Stiles’ hands off again almost immediately. “Stiles, I can’t! I’ve patrolled here, I’ve chased off a dozen kids-“
“You don’t patrol here now,” Stiles says. “You’re not even on duty yet.”
“Other people are,” Derek insists. “Other officers will be-“
“Nobody’s driving by until tonight,” Stiles says, sliding back so he has room to lean down over his trapped hands and put his mouth on Derek’s dick, and then Derek releases his hold on Stiles, puts his hands on Stiles’ head instead, and yanks him back up.
“No,” he says curtly, and starts the car before Stiles has time to argue, and Stiles isn’t going to attempt to suck somebody off in a moving vehicle, because he values his life, thank you very much.
“Are you seriously turning down a blowjob?” he asks, and that doesn’t sound anything like a whine.
“No,” Derek says, but he keeps driving, so Stiles settles back in his seat sulkily.
Derek pulls into the lot of an apartment complex on Montrose.
Stiles follows him out of the car and trails after him when he moves at a brisk clip towards the building.
“I thought we were going into the office,” he says.
“We are.”
“Where are we going?”
“I live here,” Derek says, shoving through the doors, and Stiles stops dead for a second before rushing to catch up.
“You don’t have the house anymore?”
“I do,” Derek says, hitting the button to call the elevator. “I don’t live out there.”
“Huh,” Stiles says, and Derek keeps his eyes on the neon numbers.
“It wasn’t practical,” he says, breaking under Stiles’ gaze. “This is near the office, so.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Stiles says, and he thinks he might, but he doesn’t think that’s the reason Derek left.
When the elevator’s a floor away, Stiles says, “So you think I’m going to suck you off in your apartment?”
“Yes,” Derek says.
“I wanted to do it in the car. Maybe I don’t want to do it in your apartment, maybe I’m not in the mood.”
“You are,” Derek says. “And I am a responsible officer of the law, and I resent any attempt to persuade me into an infraction of-“
He stops speaking when the elevator arrives, and when they get in Stiles asks, “Does this thing have cameras?”
“Yes,” Derek says, heated, but looks like he’s about to pounce on Stiles anyway, and then someone starts yelling for Derek to hold the doors, and a woman with a toddler on her hip gets in with them.
Derek makes halting smalltalk all the way up, and the woman looks puzzled, maybe a little suspicious. She can probably tell they’re itching for her to be gone, and she keeps looking at Stiles curiously, although he doesn’t recognise her, so the chances this will be all over the station by the time they get in are slim.
He barely manages a goodbye as he bolts off the elevator, and Derek doesn’t do much better.
He pushes up against Derek’s back while Derek fumbles with the key, and when they spill inside, Stiles shuts the door by shoving Derek back against it as he drops to his knees.
Derek pulls him to his feet.
“What is wrong with you?” Stiles asks, frustrated with Derek beyond belief.
“The bed is literally ten feet away,” Derek says, and manhandles Stiles through his bedroom door and onto it.
Derek comes down on top of him, lining them up and rocking, like he can’t wait long enough to do anything else, and Stiles had meant to make this a lot simpler, a lot cleaner, but Derek’s face is twisted in pleasure above him, and Stiles is urging him on before he knows what’s happening.
“Take off your clothes,” he says distantly, removed from the thought but remembering that it was important, and then he opens his eyes and sees the brown material under his hands, shifting with Derek’s rough movements against him, and the sound Stiles makes is honestly embarrassing.
Derek seems content to keep going like this, shifting together deep and hard until they both come, but this isn’t what Stiles asked for, isn’t what he’d wanted, and it’s his turn, so he fumbles his hands under Derek’s shirt until it parts for him. He thinks a button breaks loose, but he doesn’t really care. Derek props himself up on his hands above Stiles, giving him free reign to do what he will, but he grinds harder against him at the same time, so Stiles removes his hands from Derek’s chest so he can flip Derek onto his back and unbutton his pants. Once he gets his hands on the fly he realises it’s wet, so he drops his mouth down to suck at the fabric, taste of cotton and Derek’s arousal filling his mouth, and then once he gets the buttons open he still doesn’t get to see Derek properly, because his mouth is on Derek’s cock immediately, and Derek is just a blur of colour before Stiles closes his eyes.
Stiles knows he’s good at this, but it feels like a remarkably short time before Derek is shoving up against Stiles’ face, a broken stream of noise spilling from him, and Stiles is looking up at him, trying to see his face past his pale chest framed by the familiar clothing, when Derek’s hands land on his head and pull him off. And then Derek is arching off the bed and Stiles doesn’t know where to look, Derek’s agonised face distracting him, but then Derek’s cock is spilling all over his belly, all over his pants, and Stiles can’t look away until Derek stops shaking enough to wrestle Stiles down and return the favour.
When Stiles’ dick hits the back of Derek’s throat Derek doesn’t swallow, so Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s head and holds him there so he can rock steadily in, and then Derek looks right at him while he swallows and swallows and swallows around him, throat gripping tight every time, and it’s a relief for more than one reason when Stiles can break the gaze, throw his head back and come with a groan.
Stiles bites back a whimper when Derek pulls his mouth away, entire body feeling bludgeoned by that sudden rush of sensation. Derek’s ruined pants slip down when he gets onto his knees, and he steps out of them as he stands and lets them drop to the floor.
He shucks his shirt as well, falling to join the pants, and goes to the open wardrobe to pull out a pristine replacement uniform.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says.
“Okay,” Stiles says, still a little vague.
Derek waits, then says, “You need one too.” His voice is a little hesitant, but it’s a good effort.
“Nah, I think I’m fine,” Stiles says, and throws an arm over his eyes. “You go ahead.”
When he hears Derek leave the room, he lets his arm slide to the mattress and blinks up at the ceiling.
“Fuck,” he says softly, hoping the running water will cover it.
*
Stiles did need a shower.
He wasn’t filthy like Derek, now shower-fresh and squeaky-clean, but he sweated through his shirt, and it’s sticking to his skin in random, irritating patches.
It’s making him snappish. There’s nothing else bothering him.
He should have taken a shower.
“So,” he says, when he’s sitting sullenly in Derek’s office, and he does realise his tone is not the most encouraging. It might be downright forbidding. “What’s going on with you?”
“With-me?” Derek asks, looking at Stiles warily.
“No, not with you,” Stiles says, annoyed. “With you and the marshals and this prisoner thing. Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
“That’s sensitive information relating to-“ Derek starts.
“Spare me,” Stiles says dismissively. “If the universe didn’t want me knowing confidential information regarding ongoing criminal investigations and events, it would not have made my dad the Sheriff, and it would not have allowed the internet to provide me tutorials on how to hack a police scanner.”
Derek opens his mouth, and Stiles says, sternly, “No. And if you say anything shitty about my dad I’ll tell him exactly what I just did to you.”
Derek shuts his mouth, then opens it to say, “Ate all my emergency Doritos?”
“No,” Stiles says with dignity. “And you’re not distracting me.”
Derek is distracting himself, though, and he looks conflicted when he says, “Hey, uh, this morning.”
“Yes?” Stiles prompts, when nothing more is forthcoming.
“How did Fred know about us?”
“He doesn’t,” Stiles says, and that’s kind of a lie but it’s mostly the truth, because, “there’s nothing to know, really.”
Derek’s face changes, softens with hurt and then tenses, hardens, and Stiles can’t deal with any of it.
“He knew,” Derek says flatly.
“He maybe figured out we’d had sex,” Stiles obfuscates. “But there’s nothing else to figure out, because there’s nothing else going on.”
He feels like he should check in with Derek on that, add a right? There’s nothing going on between us, right? like he’s a pathetic kid again, but he isn’t, and there isn’t, and he isn’t going to.
“But like I said, my dad is an awesome lawman and disciplinarian, and you can’t hide a thing from him, even if there’s barely anything to be discovered.”
Derek doesn’t respond.
“I’ll set him straight,” Stiles offers, barely biting back the bitchy if you want me to, and Derek’s eyes flash and his mouth opens and then Mary pokes her head into the room.
“So,” she says. “You two!”
“Yes?” Derek asks.
“No,” she says, “I mean, you two! Emma Anders called me.”
Stiles doesn’t recognise the name, but Derek looks horrified.
“She says you two were looking like a pair of rabbits in spring in that elevator, and I’m sure this is wonderful news, but I don’t know why it has to make you late.”
“I’m sorry,” Derek says.
“Hmm,” Mary says, withholding forgiveness until Derek looks suitably chastened. “You do make a lovely couple, though!”
“We’re not a couple!” Stiles protests.
Now he’s the one being cowed by Mary’s glare.
She turns back to Derek to say, “Emma asked me to recall to you the thinness of the walls,” and sweeps back out, letting the door bang behind her.
Derek is still scowling when Stiles reluctantly turns back to him, and Stiles takes the opportunity to return to the topic.
“So what’s with you and the escaped prisoners?” he asks breezily. “You biffys?”
“No,” Derek says, and it sounds like a lie.
“What?” Stiles demands. “You are?”
“No,” Derek says defensively, then makes an impatient face and forces calmness. “They were just some people I used to know.”
“People you used to know.”
“We weren’t friends at all,” Derek says.
“So what were you?”
Derek shrugs, a telling twitch, and he looks deeply uncomfortable when he says, “I used to run with them. They weren’t very pleased with me when I stopped, but they hadn’t changed much from when I knew them, and I was never going to form a pack with them.”
“They were omegas who wanted to join the pack.”
“No,” Derek says. “I didn’t have a pack when I knew them.”
“But when they found out you had one now they wanted to join it.”
“No,” Derek says steadily. “They wanted to destroy it.”
“They what?”
“They came into town looking for me, but they’d planned to hunt Allison down first-they had maps printed off.”
“But you knew they were coming,” Stiles says. “You stopped them.”
“No,” Derek says. “They ran into Lydia in the supermarket while they were buying rope and they recognised my scent, so they went after her first. It was a mistake.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says faintly. “I would imagine.”
“So I arrested them and put them in holding,” Derek continues, though Stiles hadn’t asked. “And I went to take care of my pack. The marshals were due to get in any minute and they would take care of the transfer. There were warrants out in several other states that would have taken priority.”
“Warrants for what?”
“Grand theft, kidnapping, rape and murder,” Derek says flatly.
Stiles tries to laugh. “Some friends,” he says.
“But they escaped before the marshals arrived. They went to your father’s house, probably looking for me. I’d said I had to report in to him within their hearing.”
“You-“
“I was at Lydia’s, so when your father called in to report intruders I was close enough to get there quickly. They were fleeing the scene when I arrived, but when they saw me they attempted to retreat into the house. I shot them.”
“They were werewolves. You could’ve shot them all day and they would’ve shaken it off and got back up.”
“Argent let me have some ammo,” Derek says. “We needed to explain the state of the bodies, so it is believed they had a genetic allergy to lead.”
“So,” Stiles starts. The faint ringing in his ears is lending itself to a certain detachment. “Old friends came into town looking for payback and when they couldn’t fix their issues with you by raping and killing my best friend’s pregnant wife they shot my father instead.”
Derek twitches again. “Yes,” he says.
Stiles draws in a breath, and then he has to let it go, because he can’t start shouting at the undersheriff in his office.
After a second he says, “I have to go,” mechanically, and he knocks his leg against the corner of the desk as he rises, but the pain doesn’t really register.
“Wait,” Derek says, and that might be alarm in his voice, but Stiles doesn’t care. “What-“
“Are you serious?” Stiles asks incredulously, voice rising dangerously. “Do you actually expect me to be okay with that?”
“No,” Derek says, but then adds, “Your father knows, he-“
“I don’t care what my dad is okay with,” Stiles says, pinching the bridge of his nose until it hurts, but it does nothing to distract him. “I’m not.”
“You don’t get to make that decision for him.”
“Neither do you,” Stiles bites out. “And I’m making it for me. Is Scott all right with this, is Allison?”
“I didn’t tell them he was going to go after Allison,” Derek says. “They had enough-“
“You didn’t tell them?”
“It would’ve come up with the trial,” Derek says. “I just didn’t want to tell Allison while she was pregnant, and-“
“She’s going to kill you,” Stiles says.
“And now she never has to know, so obviously it was the right decision.”
“Uh, no,” Stiles says.
“I realise my choices aren’t perfect, Stiles,” Derek says, anger edging out defensiveness. “But you have no idea why I’m making them, and your judgement means very little.”
Stiles doesn’t know why he’s surprised. “Got it,” he says, and the hardness of his voice is a relief.
“Stiles,” Derek says, apologetic.
“No,” Stiles says, “you endanger the lives of my friends and you get my father shot, but I don’t get to have an opinion.”
Derek looks guilty, and then Derek looks angry again, and he says, “They’re barely even your friends anymore.”
“Wow,” Stiles says. “Okay, fuck you too.”
“Stiles,” Derek says again, but Stiles waves him off, already out the door.
*
So maybe getting into this thing with Derek was a mistake, but he can’t regret it. He went for it because he couldn’t stand the thought of not knowing; he wants to be certain that there’s no potential here so he can say he tried and never have to second-guess himself, never have to give a second’s thought to Derek Hale again.
He needs to be able to stop thinking about Derek. He needs to be able to file him away in a box in his head, a childish attraction that never had any place in his life, never had a hope in hell of working out, of mattering in the grand scheme of things.
He needs to know that’s true.
As it is, he stews in his anger all day, can’t let it go, and he’s startled by its vehemence. Stiles doesn’t really get angry very often anymore; there never seems to be much reason for it. It’s infuriating that Derek is dredging up all these things he’d thought he was done with, but when he thinks back on this he’ll remember how this felt, how much of what Derek made him feel was so unwelcome.
When he realises the bubbling fury isn’t going away, he heads out to Derek’s apartment to wait for him to come home from work.
Derek looks tired when he gets out of the elevator, and he’s surprised to see Stiles sitting in front of his door.
Stiles gets to his feet. “You’re a fucker and I hate you,” he says, and Derek nods warily.
“Open the door,” Stiles says impatiently, and when Derek does Stiles trips him to the floor and slams the door shut in the same ungainly movement.
“Fuck,” Derek says, taking an elbow in the stomach on the way down, but he knows how to land, and all Stiles gets out of the fall is a banged knee.
It’s difficult to get his jeans off while he’s kneeling on Derek, but Stiles manages it.
“What-“ Derek starts.
“Shut up,” Stiles snarls. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“What do you want?” Derek asks, hands tightening on Stiles’ hips, and Stiles slaps them away and scrambles for the packet of lube he’d brought for this, manages to tear it open on the second try.
“Do what I want,” Stiles says, coating Derek’s fingers and pushing them directly to where he wants them, and Derek nudges right in, slow and firm. “I just want you to fucking-“
“What do you want?” Derek asks again, and when his finger gets deep enough Stiles can just slide right down, head going back at the rough drag.
“That,” Stiles says, and he didn’t realise it was going to come out so spiteful.
“This?” Derek presses another finger in beside the first, and Stiles resents the rush of pleasure that flows through him, so he bends forward to tear at Derek’s shirt and bite at his chest, ignoring what the change in angle does to him though Derek will know anyway. He bites and scratches at Derek because he can, because Derek can’t, and it’s a release to be able to dig his teeth in as hard as he wants, to claw at Derek until his nails start to ache, and know it’s okay, feel Derek’s cock hard against the inside of his thigh through his pants.
Stiles doesn’t think about that though, just rides the spikes of feeling as Derek’s fingers brush into him, exactly where he wants them, and this wasn’t how he’d planned for this to go, but suddenly he’s coming all over another clean uniform, Derek working him through it.
When he can register stimulus again, Derek is pulling his hand away, and there’s blood in Stiles’ mouth though Derek’s chest is unmarked.
“How many uniforms do you have?” Stiles asks, noting absently that there are buttons on the floor beside Derek’s head.
“Two,” Derek says forbiddingly, but he’s rocking against Stiles’ leg, hard and wanting, and Stiles is considering what to do about it when his phone goes off.
“Don’t-“ Derek says, but Stiles is already saying, “Scott, hey!”
“My mom says dinner tonight,” Scott says happily.
“Cool!” Stiles says, sliding off Derek and reaching for his discarded clothes on his way into the bathroom. “Now?”
Derek groans.
“You’re invited too,” Scott says, and Derek glares at the phone before stalking into the kitchen.
“He says thanks,” Stiles relays to Scott. “He’s thrilled.”
Scott huffs a laugh. “Come over whenever,” he says. “We’re headed out now.”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “be there soon,” and hangs up.
When he gets out of the bathroom, Derek is starting a load of laundry, standing naked in the middle of his kitchen.
Stiles can’t suppress the shiver that passes through him, and he stares longer than he means to; it takes too long to meet Derek’s eyes when he turns around.
Stiles flushes, but Derek doesn’t say anything. “Are you coming for dinner?” Stiles asks.
“Yes,” Derek says, like it’s obvious, like his natural place is at Ms. McCall’s dinner-table, like there’s a chance in hell he would’ve volunteered for that back when Stiles knew him.
“I have to get dressed,” Stiles says, massively irritated, and grits his teeth when he realises he already is. “I’m not waiting for you,” he continues, not willing to acknowledge any correction is necessary, and somehow by the time he checks his pocket for his car-keys and locates his shoes and makes his way to the front door, Derek is standing beside him, fully dressed in his old uniform: tshirt, jeans and leather jacket, all regulation black.
“You still think you’re twenty-two,” Stiles says, tone consoling. “That’s embarrassing. You barely got away with this then.”
Derek follows Stiles’ gaze down to his clothes, but his face is so inquisitively uncomprehending when he looks back up that Stiles curses him for a killjoy and leads the way out.
When they get to the lot they argue about whose car to take.
“There’s no need to bring-“ Derek starts, for the nth time, considerably more frustrated than the first, which is fair, because Stiles is too.
“This is not a date!” Stiles says, hoping to settle the matter, but Derek just looks considering. “You are not driving me-you know what, never mind.” He turns his back on Derek and pulls out his keys. “I don’t need to win here, because I don’t have to do what you say anyway.”
“Do you even know wh-“
He gets into his car and regards Derek with a superior air, and when Derek glances at the passenger side door, Stiles activates central locking and tries to look unruffled.
Derek gives him a scowl that Stiles might have been afraid of once upon a time, and follows him out onto the street, but Derek has overtaken him by the time they’re on Beechview, and takes a sharp right onto Williams Avenue while Stiles is sitting in the left lane waiting for the light to change.
Stiles gapes after his disappearing tail lights for a second, then swerves sharply to follow, though he isn’t sure why, because it isn’t like he’s been gone so long he’s forgotten the way to his best friend’s childhood home.
He catches up with Derek quickly, and follows him until he pulls to a stop on the street outside the Argent house.
“What are we doing here?” Stiles asks him, not really expecting an answer. Scott’s car is in the driveway.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew, but Argent and Melissa are living in sin,” Derek says, starting towards the house. “Don’t be weird in front of Allison.”
“I would never be weird,” Stiles says defensively, as Derek raps on the door, “I am a prime example of savoir faire and ability to cope with all kinds of crap,” but when Ms. McCall swings open the door to greet them with a smile, all Stiles can do is gape at her as if the muscles in his face have all stopped functioning.
“Stiles,” she says, wry amusement warm and familiar. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you Ms. McCall,” he garbles out, “here.” Derek shoves him through the door, and Stiles recovers enough to slap him away. “Hey, can I call you Mel?” he asks Ms. McCall, and opens his mouth to offer justification for the change, but she says, “No,” firmly, and sweeps away, and Stiles is overcome with an unexpected wave of untrammelled nostalgia.
“I missed you!” he calls after her, shyly pleased when she responds in kind from wherever she’s vanished to, and then he slips away himself, so he can avoid Derek’s amused eyebrows.
*
Allison is in the dining room.
“Hey, Stiles,” she says, sounding totally stressed.
“Hi, Allison,” Stiles says, cheerful but wary, mindful of Derek’s warning. “How are you?”
“Fine,” says, obviously not. “Totally fine! So, let’s talk about you and Derek!”
“Let’s not,” Stiles says, holding his hands up in surrender. “Nothing to talk about.”
“Well that’s worth talking about,” she says, “since apparently you’re screwing like-“
“Does everyone know about that?”
“No,” Allison says, but her eyes shift away.
“Great.”
“Yeah,” she says, bitterness in her tone. “I know.”
“Do we need to talk about this?” Stiles asks, throwing caution to the wind when confronted with her strained face. “I feel like we should talk about this.”
“I really don’t want to,” she says, heart in her eyes.
“Fair enough,” he says equably, pulling out a seat for her at the table and taking one himself. “Neither do I. About me, I mean.”
“But if I talk about you I don’t have to think about me,” she says miserably.
“Okay,” he says, daunted. “I don’t know what to say, though, because, like, there’s nothing. I’m not going to-“
The realisation that the reason there’s nothing is because he won’t allow it is sharp.
“There’s nothing.”
“That’s sad,” she says.
“It isn’t,” he says defensively. “Nothing about my life is sad, okay?”
And that’s true: Stiles’ life is absolutely fine, even if what he has is a job he’s worked hard to get good at, and friends he does nothing but drink with, and guys he doesn’t want to remember the next morning, and nothing that comes close to anything he had here, even when he thought that was nothing, even when he thought it counted for shit.
“If you say so,” Allison says dubiously, and if Stiles didn’t know better he’d think she’d been drinking, but he can recognise a stray pregnancy hormone from twenty klicks away by now.
“You’re upset,” Stiles says, foolishly.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I just wish I didn’t have to talk about this, I wish nobody knew, I wish I didn’t-didn’t-I can’t even blame him, but I don’t care what she did. She was my mother.” Her face trembles, and Stiles starts to think he’s in over his head here, because he knows that feeling, and he can’t deal with it in himself, let alone in her. “I don’t blame my father, either, because she’s dead, but-She was my mother, and I love you, I love you all, but I don’t care-“
“Hey,” Scott says, appearing in the doorway and by Allison’s side before Stiles can blink. “Hey, babe, come on.”
She buries her face in his chest for a second, and when she lifts it she’s composed again.
“Yeah,” she says, and smiles at Stiles. “I didn’t mean to say that to you.”
Scott pulls her out of the room, casting an anxious look back at Stiles, and then Stiles is alone, left to wonder what the hell that was about.
*
Everyone is in the kitchen when he follows Scott and Allison there, watching Ms. McCall pull something out of the oven.
“I didn’t make this,” she tells Stiles. “I don’t cook anymore.” Stiles’ face spins to Chris Argent, watching proceedings placidly, and she laughs. “We order in and heat it up. We’re so busy. It’s good, and if you tell anyone about this you will not be welcomed back.”
She’s smiling at him, but Stiles isn’t sure she’s joking.
“I know better than to cross you,” he says. “I remember-“
“Nothing,” she says, dropping the tray on the table. “You remember nothing.”
“Gotcha,” he says, and Chris, grinning, takes his hands out of his pockets to slice up the casserole, and Stiles can’t believe this is his life, so he dismisses Allison’s pregnancy hormones; she doesn’t need the excuse.
Everyone moves to the dining room, a minor fight over who gets to carry the best dish settled when Melissa takes it herself, and they take their seats quickly, used to the routine.
“Ah, ah,” Ms. McCall says to her son, “move up,” and half the table shifts down so Stiles is sitting next to Derek.
“Thanks,” he says sarcastically.
“No backtalk,” Ms. McCall says, and Chris says, “Are we encouraging this?”
She makes the so-so gesture with her hand, and Stiles gives serious consideration to burying his whole head in the bowl of casserole, just so everybody else’s dinner will suck as much as his does.
Instead, he says, “Well, if you told me I could I wouldn’t want to,” and Ms. McCall pauses with her mouth full of food.
“I never actually wanted to dissuade Scott from anything,” she says, then, “well, anyone,” and waves vaguely in the direction of Allison’s belly while Allison’s dad pretends to be deaf. “Thanks for the tip, though.”
She looks thoughtful, and Stiles waits for her to try the suggested reverse psychology, but she scoops up another forkful of pasta and changes the subject instead.
“Yeah,” Jackson tells her. “We’re totally keeping up the membership.”
“I like the clubhouse,” Lydia chimes in, though if they’re talking about the links, then Stiles has been to the clubhouse, and knows the only thing Lydia could possibly like about it is that other people aren’t allowed in.
“I don’t get out as much as I’d like,” Jackson says.
“Jackson really likes how good other people think he is at golf,” Lydia says sweetly.
“I’m good at golf.”
“Since any werewolf could hit a ball from the eighteenth to the other side of the parking lot without even trying and-“
“I was good at golf before I was a werewolf!” Jackson insists hotly, and the conversation devolves into an argument Stiles was sick of listening to by junior year, so Melissa changes the subject again.
“Stiles,” she says. “You should have brought your father. I haven’t seen him since the accident.”
Stiles has to bite back the first rush of responses: that this wasn’t an accident; that everybody asks but nobody finds out, his dad’s place in this town as tied to his function as ever; that Derek has been over so much Stiles had really been thinking about wondering why, but now he knows it was guilt, just guilt, and rational at that.
He avoids Derek’s eyes so he can say, “He’s doing better. I’ll invite him next time.”
It’s true, and the relief starts to unwind the hard knot lodged under his ribs, but then he meets Allison’s eyes and it jumps up tight into his throat. He swallows with difficulty.
“-great,” Melissa is saying. “I was so worried.”
“We all were,” Chris tells him, eyes distant and warm, his familiar regard a weirdly comfortable memory.
“Thanks,” Stiles says quietly, as Melissa speaks over him: “And Mary told me all about this nurse.”
“How does Mary know about Helen?” Stiles asks. “I barely know about Helen and I’m living there.”
“He deserves it,” Melissa says firmly, and Stiles doesn’t disagree, so he smiles like nothing about any of this is uncomfortable at all.
“-would be disgusting even if cardiovascular health and cancer weren’t a concern, and that’s what I told her,” Lydia is saying, apparently enjoying the ugly flush she’s raising in Jackson’s cheeks.
“He’s been alone for a long time,” Melissa says, and her voice is quiet, like Allison won’t hear her, sitting two places down, but Allison flinches, and Stiles does too, though for a different reason.
“He hasn’t been alone,” Stiles says, cutting into Jackson’s raised voice, silencing him as Allison says, “It wasn’t that-“ and cuts herself off as the sudden lack of concealing noise registers.
“Can I have some more water?” she asks, and Scott stands to get her some though her glass is still half full.
“You’re going to need your medicine if you’re eating the cheese later,” Melissa says, and that distracts Allison enough that she forgets to look resentful as she goes rummaging in her handbag, and when she emerges with a blister of tablets and pops three in quick succession, her eyes are only reserved. It’s a relief.
Everything about this is unexpected tension and sudden release, and when Stiles counts the years since Allison’s mother’s death, he doesn’t think things should still be this strange.
“What shift are you working tomorrow?” Allison asks Melissa politely, and Stiles doesn’t think anyone should have to be trying this hard by now.
Lydia and Jackson jump in as Melissa carefully turns the conversation to Allison’s pregnancy, but Derek is uncharacteristically silent. Stiles eyes him warily as he lingers over his casserole, face downturned, fork tracing hatches in the sauce.
“You don’t even like that,” Stiles mutters, sliding insignificantly closer. Derek looks at him through his lashes, though his head doesn’t move. “You hate broccoli.” Stiles doesn’t know why he remembers that.
Derek’s lips curve, and he looks away from Stiles, a shy cast to the action though Derek is anything but, and Stiles has to try hard to resist the pull of the implied intimacy when Derek murmurs, “That’s why I’m not eating it,” low enough that Stiles has to lean in to catch the words.
“Yeah,” he says, refocussing on Derek’s cheek, suddenly closer, and he takes a breath before settling back into his chair. He’s fairly sure the lurch is only in his mind. “Good plan.”
Half the table is looking at him, but they look away when he catches them.
“-take you through it again,” Melissa is telling Allison. “I’m not in obstetrics, but-“
“You don’t have an opinion?” Stiles asks Derek, right back where he was before, helplessly disobeying his better judgment. His shoulder is nudging Derek’s arm, and Derek is relaxing into him, though Stiles can see the tension around his eyes.
“No,” Derek says. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Never stopped you before.”
“Yeah.” Derek smiles, strained.
“And this is pack, right, the next generation, so-“
“I don’t have an opinion,” Derek says, drops his fork, and sits up, leaving Stiles twisting in the wind, leaning off his chair towards the empty place Derek had been.
Stiles doesn’t feel a lurch this time, just disgruntlement. He glares at Derek.
Lydia is saying, “-know how to breathe, and all werewolves know how to deal with pain, so-“
Allison is glaring at Derek too.
“I really don’t think having a high pain threshold qualifies you to instruct on how to cope with a sustained assault on-“ Melissa is saying when Derek interrupts, looking at Allison for the first time since sitting down, saying, “If you want it, the offer’s there. You know-“
“I don’t want it,” Allison says coldly. “Scott, can I have some more water?”
Nothing gets better from there.
*
When they eventually manage to escape, Lydia and Jackson head for the hills immediately, and Scott makes halfhearted noises about Stiles coming over for a beer, not looking Derek in the eye or extending the invitation his way, before Allison yells, “So I’m driving myself home?” and he bolts.
“What the fuck was that?” Stiles asks, when they’re alone in front of the Argent house, standing by their cars. He supposes he can’t call it the Argent house anymore, since Ms. McCall is living there.
Derek shrugs. “Allison gets weird about family sometimes.”
“Why does she hate you more than her stepmom?”
Derek shrugs.
“That isn’t an answer,” Stiles says, annoyed.
“They aren’t married,” Derek says, then, at Stiles’ glare, “She hates Melissa too.”
“Derek.”
Stiles watches as Derek tries to rid himself of the hunch his shoulders snap into; he doesn’t quite manage it.
“She blames me for her mother’s death,” he says.
Stiles’ attention is on the tension in Derek’s shoulders, so it takes a second for that to register.
“She blames you for-“
“Killing Victoria,” Derek says, easier now. “Sometimes.”
“She sometimes blames you for killing her mother,” Stiles says raggedly.
“She always blames me,” Derek says, “but sometimes it gets to her more, when she remembers her mom’s never going to see her kid, or see her get married, God, do you remember the wedding?”
“Yes,” Stiles says numbly.
Now that he thinks about it, the day that Scott and Allison married, Derek was on the fringes more than would have been natural, given how close Scott and Derek had gotten even by the time Stiles left. Derek had been an uncomfortable, intrusive presence lurking on the periphery of his own pack, and nobody had made a move to draw him in, which would have made sense once, but Stiles should have noticed it was a change, should have questioned it.
He’d had other things to concentrate on that day, the first time he’d seen Derek since Derek had kind of, maybe broken his heart. He had barely let himself look at Derek, unwilling and unable to let Derek ruin all the work he’d put into being okay somewhere else, being okay somewhere else with somebody else’s life, the way Derek is now, the way Derek has now.
Stiles steps back, and Derek looks startled.
“Hey-“ Derek says uncertainly.
“Does everyone know?”
“No, they-“ Derek’s eyes are tracking over Stiles, and Stiles doesn’t know what Derek is reading off him, but his eyes are wide and dark and intense and Stiles wants them to go away. “They don’t blame me.”
It’s so unfair that every breath is a painful rasp, and he’d known Derek would do this to him, he’d known but somehow he’d forgotten to expect it. His hands curl in helpless anger, something he’s felt a lot since his return, but never for this reason, never because he’s felt like this, and never because he’s felt this pathetic.
“Should they?”
“No,” Derek says sharply, and bites back whatever else he’d been going to say.
Stiles believes him, probably, the same way Allison probably does, and right now he thinks he might care about as much as she does too.
He doesn’t care that the rest of the pack doesn’t blame Derek for killing Victoria, and he wouldn’t care if they did, and he doesn’t care what Derek did to Victoria Argent, and okay, he cares about whatever Derek did that lead to his friends threatening Allison and almost killing Stiles’ dad, but it doesn’t matter, he can’t-
“Do you want to-“ Derek starts, but Stiles says, “I’m going to go,” and jerks a thumb over his shoulder at his car. “And since you murdered Allison’s mother and almost got my father killed, I don’t actually want to, no.”
It’s a lie, which is why he doesn’t look at Derek as he gets into the car, doesn’t look at his face in the mirror as he drives away, and he doesn’t draw a steady breath until he’s three streets away.
It’s a lie. He wants to; he doesn’t know how to stop wanting to, and he hates Derek for that.
That’s a lie too: mostly he hates himself.
*
Stiles phones Scott as soon as he gets home.
“What the hell happened to Victoria?” he asks abruptly, interrupting Scott’s greeting, and Scott is suddenly silent on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, just a sec,” he says, and then Stiles can hear him murmuring to Allison, making excuses as he leaves the room. There’s an echo when he says, starkly, “She was killed. It had to happen.”
“But-“ Stiles is feeling a little shaky, he can admit it. It’s one thing for the guy you’re into to kill his serial-killer-alpha of an uncle, or the alpha of a rival pack who’s coming after his own, but it’s something entirely different when it’s the mother of your friend.
“It had-It wasn’t Derek’s fault if that’s what you’re worried about,” Scott reassures him. “Allison just-“
“There’s a reason she thinks it is,” Stiles says. “I want to know.”
He has to wait for the answer, and when it comes, Scott only says, “No you don’t.”
“Tell me what happened,” Stiles says, and when this answer comes it’s, “No.”
“Scott, I want to-“
“No!” Scott says, voice anxious. “Stiles, you weren’t-I’m sorry, but you weren’t here and I can’t tell you because you don’t-You don’t understand what it was like.”
Stiles can feel panic rising, and it’s almost a relief to have another focus for it. “So tell me,” he says again.
“No,” Scott says quietly, and hangs up.
*
Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that. It certainly isn’t the first time Scott has left him hanging, ended a conversation before Stiles was ready, but it’s the first time he remembers that Scott has left him on the outside, a deliberate exclusion he didn’t even try to hide.
Stiles makes his own way to the Sheriff’s office the next day, although he doesn’t want to see Derek, but in the event, all he sees is Derek’s back vanishing through a doorway Stiles is pretty sure leads to the janitor’s closet, ducking out of any kind of confrontation before Stiles has the chance to do the same.
Scott isn’t answering his phone.
So Stiles doesn’t have much choice but to go over to Jackson and Lydia’s that evening; they’re the only ones he’s still on easy terms with.
“Don’t you have better things to do?” Lydia asks as soon as he sits down on her couch. “Why aren’t you out fucking Derek or something? We do have a life that doesn’t include you, you know.”
“Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Lydia says.
“We were just going over to Spiral later,” Jackson says, and Stiles’ eyebrows shoot up at the name of the club. It hadn’t been around when he’d left, but he’s heard enough about it since he’s been back.
Lydia glares, but at Jackson, so Stiles doesn’t care.
“What?” Jackson says. “I’m just saying, we can do that any time. He isn’t interrupting anything.”
“Or we can not do it,” Lydia says, tone all how d’you likethemapples? Jackson is ready to argue, but Lydia turns to Stiles before he has the chance, waspish when she asks, “But seriously, don’t you have anything else you can do?”
“No,” Stiles says, because he isn’t a teenager anymore, and he can admit when he hasn’t got anything going on. He isn’t ashamed, and he doesn’t want to go out the way he would have when he was younger, try and work his way up to something somewhere with someone, not when things with his people are in this kind of mess. He wants to fix it. He doesn’t know how things are going to be, or even how he wants them to be, but he knows he needs to fix things somehow, because he doesn’t know if he’s capable of seeking out new people at this point; he’s tried that once already, and it didn’t really work out for him, and he’d been a lot younger then and everything had felt easier.
He isn’t even thirty yet, but he feels old, unhappy with the world that stretches beyond his gaze, and dissatisfied with the shape of the universe under his fingers, and if he can affect anything at all here he can only influence one of those things, he thinks, and he’s just glad it’s the one he cares about.
“That’s so sad,” Lydia says. “Your life is so sad.”
Stiles bites back the instinctive denial, and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about how true that is.
“What’s going on with Allison and Derek?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Lydia says evenly. She might even have convinced herself that’s true.
“Scott wouldn’t tell me whatever it was but I know you know.”
“I do,” Lydia says.
“So tell me!”
“No.”
“I already know about Derek’s friends,” Stiles says. “Maybe I should trade secrets with Allison.”
“You wouldn’t,” Lydia says, but she doesn’t look certain, and when Stiles stands firm she says, “This is why nobody wanted to tell you,” and Stiles has to pretend to be unaffected by that.
“Derek killed his friends-“
“They were threatening his pack,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes and checking her hair in the reflection of the dark TV screen. “Of course he killed them. This isn’t going to be some weird thing for you, is it? Killing people?”
“It isn’t a weird thing,” Stiles protests.
“Because they almost killed your father,” Lydia says, almost kindly. “I would think you would be thankful.”
“I just want to know what’s going on,” Stiles says, at the end of his tether. “With Derek killing his friends and Victoria and-“
“These things are unconnected!” Lydia says, waving her arms in an irritable negatory gesture. “Stop conflating your issues.”
“So tell me,” Stiles grits out, “and I will.”
“Screw you,” Lydia decides. “You don’t know what happened because you didn’t want anything to do with us, so whatever happened while you were off fucking around is none of your business, and if Scott wants you to know he’ll tell you himself. Jackson, we’re going to Spiral.”
And she throws him out.
*
Stiles thinks about following them to the club, but tells himself he isn’t that obsessed, even if that’s a lie; the real reason he goes home is because he knows absolutely nowhere would let him inside dressed as he is.
His dad is out with Helen, and when he comes home Stiles is slumped over the kitchen table, head pillowed on the back of his hands.
“How come Allison gets away with everything?” he asks his dad. “She’s meaner to Derek than I am.”
His dad’s pause sounds doubtful. He says, “Well, they’re used to her,” and Stiles groans miserably.
“Thanks, dad!” he yells, but his dad is already shuffling up to bed and waves him off.
*
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