fic: even robots need blankets (seahorses); teen wolf gen sheriff&derek
Title: even robots need blankets (seahorses)
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: teen wolf
Pairing: gen | the sheriff who is thusly named John because yes & derek & stiles
Word count: 1,974
Rating: g or r for language
Prompt: wish
Summary: we are supposed to write about something we wish would happen in a 2014 fandom and well, I have a thing for woobie!Derek because let’s face it, his life is shit, and I have a thing for bamf!sheriff because he’s awesome and well this is the one with seahorses.
Author’s Notes:
- for universe_ the
*****
It starts out innocuously--or as innocuously as a meeting between John Stilinski and Derek Hale can be.
Derek arrives back in town approximately two weeks after he left, the sheriff is a little hazy on the exact dates and times regarding most thing supernatural. He shows up sans Cora at the station, waits twenty minutes to see John, and then asks him to coffee. Using the least amount of words possible. Basically he grunts the word ’coffee’, and John grabs his jacket and follows him out.
They end up at a coffee place in the middle of town with coffee so awful that no one actually goes there for coffee. Derek orders a water and two ham sandwiches and John takes a chance on a Sunshine Citrus smoothie.
Derek, he’s pretty sure, is the opposite of Stiles in enough ways to be counted on both hands. John isn’t in a particularly helpful-feeling mood, so he sips his smoothie slowly and waits for Derek to start talking.
It takes a sandwich and a half.
Derek sighs. “I’m back, for now.”
“Okay,” John says with a nod.
“I plan on staying out of the way, I just thought someone should know,” Derek offers.
John raises an eyebrow. “And you chose me?”
Derek does this awful half-shrug, half- grimace thing with his body as he answers, “You know now.”
Which, that doesn’t answer John’s implied question, not really, but he’s letting it slide because Derek looks… He looks awful. Dark rings are under his eyes and he somehow looks smaller than ever, shrunken into his trademark leather jacket. He looks like a kid, even though John knows he’s well over the age of eighteen.
John thinks Derek might have come back because he has nowhere else to go. He thinks about Stiles, if Stiles had been through what Derek has, if he’d hope that Derek’s parents could somehow reach out a helping hand or just a steady presence.
“I won’t tell the boys,” John says finally. “One one condition.”
Derek looks more scared than he should as he tentatively nods. “Which is?”
“Lunch, once a week, one a week day,” John tells him. He has no idea what the hell he’s doing, but Derek is--was-- someone’s kid too and fuck if John knows how to turn off the parenting mode he’s been in since Stiles was born.
Derek eats the rest of his food in one bite and mumbles, “Okay,” before he takes off for the door. John watches him go and vaguely wonders where he’s even going.
They never set a day for lunch, but consistency doesn’t seem to matter to Derek. One week he shows up on a Tuesday, and the next it’s Friday, and John can’t help but wondering if this is what Derek was like as an Alpha, too.
After a month of meetings, mostly filled with silence, John realizes that Derek almost never eats. He orders free water and eats twelve of the free cracker packets by the condiments.
Derek has grown even smaller in the month they’ve seen each other and John can’t help but feel as though he should have noticed earlier.
When he gets back to the station he quietly does a search on Derek’s financial records and finds that anything that might have been Derek’s is now in his uncle’s name. His dead uncle’s name.
John sighs.
John has only just stepped into his house when Stiles rushes by holding a huge duffel bag and his backpack. “Staying at Scott’s!” he yells over his shoulder, barreling towards the Jeep.
Stiles can barely sleep as it is and if he’s okay sharing his insomnia with Scott, well, John is at least grateful he has a friend willing to try and help.
However it leaves John with two pizzas on their way and three orders of breadsticks and only one person to eat them. He immediately thinks of Derek.
The pizza shows up five minutes later and John pays for it and leaves it on the kitchen table. He slides his jacket back on, fishes his keys out of his pocket and heads out.
As far as John knows, Derek is still driving the silver Toyota he had when he left Beacon Hills. And there’s only one place someone can safely park overnight, so John checks there first. He holds out hope that Derek is somehow in an apartment or even god forbid back at the train station, but when John pulls into the Wal-Mart parking lot, Derek’s SUV shines bright in his headlights.
Derek hurts in different ways than Stiles and John has no idea how to help him or help him deal with everything. But it’s cold when he steps out of his car and heads for Derek’s, so cold John can see his breath, and he doesn’t want Derek sleeping out here, hungry, when John has a warm house, a fold out couch, and too much food at home.
He knocks softly on the glass and Derek doesn’t startle like someone else would. Instead he sits up slowly, glances at John, and looks like a man without dignity as he opens his door.
“Sheriff,” Derek greets.
John runs a hand over his hair and says, “Look, Stiles ran out to Scott’s place for the night, but I’d already ordered some pizza, so there’s a whole pie with your name on it and one and a half bags of breadsticks if that’s your thing and don’t tell Stiles but I was thinking ice cream for dessert.”
“Pizza,” Derek repeats, as though the word is foreign to him.
John nods. “So why don’t you follow me back to my place, and you can stay the night, and have leftover pizza for breakfast the way everyone else does, okay?”
Derek looks slow and uncomprehending but he nods anyway and says, “Okay.”
As they drive back to the Stilinski household, John can’t help but look in the rearview mirror more often than normal to make sure Derek is still behind him.
After parking, John gestures for Derek to park in Stiles’s spot if he wants to, but the werewolf pulls up to the curb.
“You have laundry?” John calls out. “Feel free to bring it in and do it while you’re here.”
Derek seems to hesitate but then reaches in the back for a small duffel bag, smaller than the one Stiles had lugged to Scott’s for a one night stay.
And John wanted to hate Derek. He wanted someone to blame for the shitshow that became Stiles’s life (and Scott’s life and everyone else’s) and Derek was an easy target. Sure there’s Peter, but John hasn’t met him to put a face to the bastard. Derek is the frequent target of Stiles’s rants and Scott’s complaints and Isaac’s hurt looks.
He couldn’t hate Derek, though. Not now. Not anymore. Not when it is so easy to picture Stiles alone and lost and living on one duffel bag while sleeping in his car, apart from his two remaining relatives. John doesn’t know why it is so easy to picture Stiles in Derek’s place, but it is. Derek could be any kid, any kid with bad luck and nowhere to go.
It helps that this Derek isn’t anything like the Derek John remembers. He isn’t angry and vengeful and circumventing the law. This Derek is quiet and resigned and wasting away while no one watches, while no one cares.
John holds the door open for the younger man and Derek steps through. He doesn’t smell at all, which John is both grateful for and curious about, but it could just be the overwhelming smell of pizza that now permeates the house.
“The washing machine is out in the garage,” John says. “Soap is on top with stain-removers and stuff. Feel free to use whatever you want.”
Derek shuffles out to put a load in and John heads for the food. It’s still warm enough that John doesn’t think it needs to be reheated. He debates internally about plates and then thinks about dishes and just carries the food as is over to the coffee tables and sets it down.
“Soda, water, beer, milk, or juice?” John calls out towards Derek.
He’s pretty sure Derek says water, but John grabs him a glass of juice, too; Derek looks as though he needs more vitamins than not.
John turns the tv on and flips through the channels, finally landing on Top Gear as Derek sits down. “Ever seen this?” he asks.
Derek shakes his head and reaches for the pizza box that John nudges towards him.
That’s the last of their conversation as Derek slowly but steadily makes his way through his food, John doing his best to keep up.
John cleans up while Derek moves his clothes over to the dryer. He almost has the couch pulled out when Derek comes back in.
“We also have an air mattress,” John tells him. “Stiles says the couch bed is awful, but he’s never slept in it, so what does he know? If it is, though, the air mattress can be set up in a few minutes.”
“This is fine,” Derek says.
“The option is there,” John says. “There are some sheets and blankets in the upstairs closet. Why don’t you go grab some while I finish pulling this out?”
For a second he thinks Derek might do a runner, but instead he heads for the stairs, stepping lightly as he ascends.
Derek comes back down with an armful of cloth and John presses his lips together and nods. “Well, if you need anything, I’m just upstairs. Feel free to help yourself to anything in the kitchen or bathrooms.”
John is almost to the top of the stairs when he hears Derek say, “Thanks.”
Normally John falls asleep quickly, but not tonight. Instead he glances at his clock and sees it’s just past eleven. He wonders if Stiles is still up. Probably.
[You awake?]
{Yep. Why are you? Case??}
John thinks of how to word this. [No. How would you feel about a house guest for a while?] At least until John can straighten out Derek’s finances a little, and what’s left of the werewolf’s life.
{…Please not Aunt Trudy}
Even John has to grimace at the thought. Claudia’s sister she may be, but she never liked John and somehow she’d never taken to Stiles. [Derek Hale.]
{Um… WHAT??? He’s back? Since when? How long have you known? Why are you even talking to him? Doesn’t he have a place to stay? What happened to Cora?}
John has no idea how Stiles can type so fast. [Yes or no, Stiles.]
{Fine. But if he sheds in the bathtub, he’s cleaning it up.}
His kid, ladies and gentlemen. John gets out of bed quietly, walking around the places he know that creak. There are two spare rooms in their house, one is full of Claudia’s stuff and the other is empty but for an oversized chair Stiles refused to part with when he was younger.
They don’t have a lot of money, so Derek will have to live with the air mattress for a while, but John thinks they can start grabbing pieces of furniture from the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Melissa might have some things she wants to get rid of as well.
He thinks about asking Derek to get a job. Small steps, he reminds himself. Derek has a GED and that’s it. He has almost no social skills, no work skills, and from what John can tell he’s barely even there at all. For now he thinks it’s okay if all Derek does is adjust to a roof over his head again and a well-balanced meal courtesy of Stiles.
John closes the door to the empty spare room and heads back to bed.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: teen wolf
Pairing: gen | the sheriff who is thusly named John because yes & derek & stiles
Word count: 1,974
Rating: g or r for language
Prompt: wish
Summary: we are supposed to write about something we wish would happen in a 2014 fandom and well, I have a thing for woobie!Derek because let’s face it, his life is shit, and I have a thing for bamf!sheriff because he’s awesome and well this is the one with seahorses.
Author’s Notes:
- for universe_ the
*****
It starts out innocuously--or as innocuously as a meeting between John Stilinski and Derek Hale can be.
Derek arrives back in town approximately two weeks after he left, the sheriff is a little hazy on the exact dates and times regarding most thing supernatural. He shows up sans Cora at the station, waits twenty minutes to see John, and then asks him to coffee. Using the least amount of words possible. Basically he grunts the word ’coffee’, and John grabs his jacket and follows him out.
They end up at a coffee place in the middle of town with coffee so awful that no one actually goes there for coffee. Derek orders a water and two ham sandwiches and John takes a chance on a Sunshine Citrus smoothie.
Derek, he’s pretty sure, is the opposite of Stiles in enough ways to be counted on both hands. John isn’t in a particularly helpful-feeling mood, so he sips his smoothie slowly and waits for Derek to start talking.
It takes a sandwich and a half.
Derek sighs. “I’m back, for now.”
“Okay,” John says with a nod.
“I plan on staying out of the way, I just thought someone should know,” Derek offers.
John raises an eyebrow. “And you chose me?”
Derek does this awful half-shrug, half- grimace thing with his body as he answers, “You know now.”
Which, that doesn’t answer John’s implied question, not really, but he’s letting it slide because Derek looks… He looks awful. Dark rings are under his eyes and he somehow looks smaller than ever, shrunken into his trademark leather jacket. He looks like a kid, even though John knows he’s well over the age of eighteen.
John thinks Derek might have come back because he has nowhere else to go. He thinks about Stiles, if Stiles had been through what Derek has, if he’d hope that Derek’s parents could somehow reach out a helping hand or just a steady presence.
“I won’t tell the boys,” John says finally. “One one condition.”
Derek looks more scared than he should as he tentatively nods. “Which is?”
“Lunch, once a week, one a week day,” John tells him. He has no idea what the hell he’s doing, but Derek is--was-- someone’s kid too and fuck if John knows how to turn off the parenting mode he’s been in since Stiles was born.
Derek eats the rest of his food in one bite and mumbles, “Okay,” before he takes off for the door. John watches him go and vaguely wonders where he’s even going.
They never set a day for lunch, but consistency doesn’t seem to matter to Derek. One week he shows up on a Tuesday, and the next it’s Friday, and John can’t help but wondering if this is what Derek was like as an Alpha, too.
After a month of meetings, mostly filled with silence, John realizes that Derek almost never eats. He orders free water and eats twelve of the free cracker packets by the condiments.
Derek has grown even smaller in the month they’ve seen each other and John can’t help but feel as though he should have noticed earlier.
When he gets back to the station he quietly does a search on Derek’s financial records and finds that anything that might have been Derek’s is now in his uncle’s name. His dead uncle’s name.
John sighs.
John has only just stepped into his house when Stiles rushes by holding a huge duffel bag and his backpack. “Staying at Scott’s!” he yells over his shoulder, barreling towards the Jeep.
Stiles can barely sleep as it is and if he’s okay sharing his insomnia with Scott, well, John is at least grateful he has a friend willing to try and help.
However it leaves John with two pizzas on their way and three orders of breadsticks and only one person to eat them. He immediately thinks of Derek.
The pizza shows up five minutes later and John pays for it and leaves it on the kitchen table. He slides his jacket back on, fishes his keys out of his pocket and heads out.
As far as John knows, Derek is still driving the silver Toyota he had when he left Beacon Hills. And there’s only one place someone can safely park overnight, so John checks there first. He holds out hope that Derek is somehow in an apartment or even god forbid back at the train station, but when John pulls into the Wal-Mart parking lot, Derek’s SUV shines bright in his headlights.
Derek hurts in different ways than Stiles and John has no idea how to help him or help him deal with everything. But it’s cold when he steps out of his car and heads for Derek’s, so cold John can see his breath, and he doesn’t want Derek sleeping out here, hungry, when John has a warm house, a fold out couch, and too much food at home.
He knocks softly on the glass and Derek doesn’t startle like someone else would. Instead he sits up slowly, glances at John, and looks like a man without dignity as he opens his door.
“Sheriff,” Derek greets.
John runs a hand over his hair and says, “Look, Stiles ran out to Scott’s place for the night, but I’d already ordered some pizza, so there’s a whole pie with your name on it and one and a half bags of breadsticks if that’s your thing and don’t tell Stiles but I was thinking ice cream for dessert.”
“Pizza,” Derek repeats, as though the word is foreign to him.
John nods. “So why don’t you follow me back to my place, and you can stay the night, and have leftover pizza for breakfast the way everyone else does, okay?”
Derek looks slow and uncomprehending but he nods anyway and says, “Okay.”
As they drive back to the Stilinski household, John can’t help but look in the rearview mirror more often than normal to make sure Derek is still behind him.
After parking, John gestures for Derek to park in Stiles’s spot if he wants to, but the werewolf pulls up to the curb.
“You have laundry?” John calls out. “Feel free to bring it in and do it while you’re here.”
Derek seems to hesitate but then reaches in the back for a small duffel bag, smaller than the one Stiles had lugged to Scott’s for a one night stay.
And John wanted to hate Derek. He wanted someone to blame for the shitshow that became Stiles’s life (and Scott’s life and everyone else’s) and Derek was an easy target. Sure there’s Peter, but John hasn’t met him to put a face to the bastard. Derek is the frequent target of Stiles’s rants and Scott’s complaints and Isaac’s hurt looks.
He couldn’t hate Derek, though. Not now. Not anymore. Not when it is so easy to picture Stiles alone and lost and living on one duffel bag while sleeping in his car, apart from his two remaining relatives. John doesn’t know why it is so easy to picture Stiles in Derek’s place, but it is. Derek could be any kid, any kid with bad luck and nowhere to go.
It helps that this Derek isn’t anything like the Derek John remembers. He isn’t angry and vengeful and circumventing the law. This Derek is quiet and resigned and wasting away while no one watches, while no one cares.
John holds the door open for the younger man and Derek steps through. He doesn’t smell at all, which John is both grateful for and curious about, but it could just be the overwhelming smell of pizza that now permeates the house.
“The washing machine is out in the garage,” John says. “Soap is on top with stain-removers and stuff. Feel free to use whatever you want.”
Derek shuffles out to put a load in and John heads for the food. It’s still warm enough that John doesn’t think it needs to be reheated. He debates internally about plates and then thinks about dishes and just carries the food as is over to the coffee tables and sets it down.
“Soda, water, beer, milk, or juice?” John calls out towards Derek.
He’s pretty sure Derek says water, but John grabs him a glass of juice, too; Derek looks as though he needs more vitamins than not.
John turns the tv on and flips through the channels, finally landing on Top Gear as Derek sits down. “Ever seen this?” he asks.
Derek shakes his head and reaches for the pizza box that John nudges towards him.
That’s the last of their conversation as Derek slowly but steadily makes his way through his food, John doing his best to keep up.
John cleans up while Derek moves his clothes over to the dryer. He almost has the couch pulled out when Derek comes back in.
“We also have an air mattress,” John tells him. “Stiles says the couch bed is awful, but he’s never slept in it, so what does he know? If it is, though, the air mattress can be set up in a few minutes.”
“This is fine,” Derek says.
“The option is there,” John says. “There are some sheets and blankets in the upstairs closet. Why don’t you go grab some while I finish pulling this out?”
For a second he thinks Derek might do a runner, but instead he heads for the stairs, stepping lightly as he ascends.
Derek comes back down with an armful of cloth and John presses his lips together and nods. “Well, if you need anything, I’m just upstairs. Feel free to help yourself to anything in the kitchen or bathrooms.”
John is almost to the top of the stairs when he hears Derek say, “Thanks.”
Normally John falls asleep quickly, but not tonight. Instead he glances at his clock and sees it’s just past eleven. He wonders if Stiles is still up. Probably.
[You awake?]
{Yep. Why are you? Case??}
John thinks of how to word this. [No. How would you feel about a house guest for a while?] At least until John can straighten out Derek’s finances a little, and what’s left of the werewolf’s life.
{…Please not Aunt Trudy}
Even John has to grimace at the thought. Claudia’s sister she may be, but she never liked John and somehow she’d never taken to Stiles. [Derek Hale.]
{Um… WHAT??? He’s back? Since when? How long have you known? Why are you even talking to him? Doesn’t he have a place to stay? What happened to Cora?}
John has no idea how Stiles can type so fast. [Yes or no, Stiles.]
{Fine. But if he sheds in the bathtub, he’s cleaning it up.}
His kid, ladies and gentlemen. John gets out of bed quietly, walking around the places he know that creak. There are two spare rooms in their house, one is full of Claudia’s stuff and the other is empty but for an oversized chair Stiles refused to part with when he was younger.
They don’t have a lot of money, so Derek will have to live with the air mattress for a while, but John thinks they can start grabbing pieces of furniture from the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Melissa might have some things she wants to get rid of as well.
He thinks about asking Derek to get a job. Small steps, he reminds himself. Derek has a GED and that’s it. He has almost no social skills, no work skills, and from what John can tell he’s barely even there at all. For now he thinks it’s okay if all Derek does is adjust to a roof over his head again and a well-balanced meal courtesy of Stiles.
John closes the door to the empty spare room and heads back to bed.