Title: you're the broken one (but i'm the only one who needed saving)
Disclaimer: not mine.
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Pairing: Jennifer Blake/Derek Hale
Word count: 609
Rating: G
Warnings: spoilers for season 3a
Summary: Every tiny smile is a gift she hasn’t deserved in a long time.
Author’s Notes:
- for beacon hills
- title from stay by rihanna
*****
Her favorite color is pink. She likes the way it looks on every color of skin and the way it reminds of grace and childhood and misty memories of years gone by. Every year until she turned twenty-one, she painted her bedroom a different shade of pink. One year, after her seventeenth birthday, it was a bright, hot pink that made her eyes angry and her posters stand out. She loved that year.
Derek never asks her what her favorite color is and she never tells him. She thinks he doesn’t know how to ask. People talk about him, in town, and it’s never anything good. His name comes up alongside recently deceased or missing persons. They whisper about fire and sisters and flight. Nothing that says Derek will glide into a relationship with poise. If that’s what they have.
She can appreciate Derek for his body and even more for all the questions he doesn’t ask. She has answers, things she would tell him. Such as she loves to ski and draw and her favorite color is purple. Nothing real. Because that’s what she is now: nothing real.
Jennifer thinks Derek understands that more than anyone else. The way to carry on after death--her own and everyone else’s.
Sometimes when she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her she thinks maybe. A feeling crawls up her gut and lodges in her throat and stops her from saying anything she shouldn’t. It’s so easy to curl her fingers into Derek’s. To rest her chin on his chest. He lets her because he knows that no matter what he could over power her. She does it because she likes the idea that he lets her.
Once in a while she thinks in another life her and Derek could have been something. They’re cut from the same cloth, made of the same stuff. And she could use someone in her life who is always trying even though they have no reason to. Jennifer thinks that if there’s anyone in the world entitled to just give up, it would be Derek Hale. But he keeps going and she doesn’t know why. That’s probably half of her interest in him. The other half is the way he looks in a t-shirt.
Jennifer has plans and schemes and things too dirty to be near Derek. He was an accident on her part, falling into her life to save her. She let him catch her and lets him distract her, but she isn’t going to use him. Derek hasn’t done anything to deserve that, not the way others have. The nights she can bring a smile to his face, no matter how small, are nights she smiles for real. There isn’t happiness in his life, not now, and not for years, and with the way the Alpha Pack is tearing through his family, maybe none to come. Every tiny smile is a gift she hasn’t deserved in a long time.
His hand is warm against her stomach as he presses up behind her, tugging blankets up over their rapidly cooling forms. He doesn’t ask if she’s staying the night anymore, just assumes. It’s nice.
As she falls asleep she hears him whisper, “You looked nice today.”
“More than usual?” she asks, curious, her voice raspy with sleep.
“Pink looks good on you,” he tells her, referring to the blouse she had on earlier.
Jennifer can’t regret Derek because he’s the closest she’s come to feeling human in longer than she can remember. “Thank you.”
He grunts a non-answer and lets her tangle their fingers together and Jennifer is left to regret everything else.
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