seek not to alter, part 2 (gift for chase_acow)
Header, warnings, and notes here
By the time Stiles had finished telling his tale, Laura had warmed to them sufficiently to provide them somewhat awful instant coffee and entirely amazing lemon cookies from a little bakery downtown, where she was the assistant manager. Derek had also emerged from his Sulking Spot and sat on the edge of the cubby, bare feet dangling down as he watched Stiles talk. It was a little unnerving, having his eyes on them while telling his sister about a life that had integrally included him; unnerving and sad, painful behind Stiles’ ribs. He wanted to reach out and touch Derek, make sure he was real, warm and alive and real.
He was just a silent shadow for most of the conversation, and Stiles noted, much to his dismay, that he and Scott seemed to be doing an awful lot of glaring at each other from across the camper, a mutual wariness that Stiles hoped would not blossom into dislike. Laura seemed chill about Scott, oddly enough, and when she started questioning him about his life and his future plans, leaving the subject of Stiles’ reincarnation with no comment for the time being, she didn’t appear bothered by his insistence that he’d done pretty well so far on his own, only nodded and said that he wasn’t under any pressure to join the club.
“Werewolves are a lot like wolf-wolves in a lot of senses,” she said after a while, snagging a cookie out of the box and shoving most of it in her mouth at once, flipping another cookie to Derek as she did. He caught it deftly and bit into it with bad grace. “But we’re not so territorial that you can’t go your way and we go ours and we agree to stay out of each others’ hair.” She stopped, rolling her eyes upward for a moment and then amended herself, “Well. I’m not that territorial. Don’t have the manpower or the energy for it, for one thing. No reason, for another. My pack is small, just me and my brother, and though eventually I’d like to see it expand, I’m firmly of the ‘attracting flies with honey’ school of recruitment techniques.”
Derek made a low, injured sound, and Laura gave him a sharp look. Stiles then watched one of the most bizarre things he’d ever witnessed, and he once watched a woman turn herself inside out just to make a point: Derek held her eyes for just a moment, then huffed a hard breath through his nose and looked aside, fixing his eyes on the floor. In a human, that’d just have been sulking, but Stiles knew what he was doing. Derek Hale was baring his throat. It was subtle, but Stiles knew he wasn’t wrong. He nearly spilled coffee all down his front in surprise. More than the physical differences, more than the lack of recognition when he looked at Stiles, Derek so obviously and demonstrably being a beta was the weirdest shit Stiles could have ever imagined.
The fucked up part was that it didn’t look weird on him. It was a second’s small gesture, and then it was done, gone, and he was wolfing down the rest of his lemon cookie and slurping coffee from a styrofoam cup and back to glaring at Scott, though now he mixed it up with glaring at Stiles a little, too. There was no show to it, no theater. It looked so natural on him that it was like seeing him relax after a long, long period of tension, taut along his limbs. Stiles gaped, unknowingly, and Derek frowned at him til Stiles flushed and turned away.
“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions right away,” Laura reasoned, dropping down off the counter and brushing cookie crumbs off her jeans. “Nothing needs to be set in stone til you’re twenty-five, and you may not even be in Beacon Hills by then.”
“Mm. Maybe,” Scott said, but he sounded doubtful. “I just finished a vet tech program and I’ve moved back to work with Dr. Deaton again. My mom’s here. The, um. Argents are here.”
Derek’s stiffening spine could be felt around the room, supernatural senses not required. After a tense moment, he dropped down from the raised bed and swept out of the camper, slamming the door behind him. Laura pressed her lips together and scuffed the linoleum floor with the toe of her sneaker.
“I don’t have to tell you,” she said quietly, “that that relationship’s pretty acrimonious. The accord was the first thing I did when I got back after killing Peter, and the very first thing I did here that I’m actually proud of. It needed to be done, sooner than later, because…because the person actually responsible for the fire is still out there, and she wants the last of the Hales mounted on her wall.” There was a low vibration of sound emanating from her that she seemed unaware of, a near-subsonic growl, and suddenly, terribly, Stiles could see the family resemblance with Derek so starkly in the way pain and rage transformed her. Stiles’ stomach turned violently when he registered that Kate was still alive here. Maybe he should go have a look in the police files and a talk with Allison and Adrian Harris, if he could possibly dig him up from wherever he’d scuttled off to after being dismissed from the high school…
That meant that…Derek had told her, then. About Kate, about what had happened. Stiles hurt for him, hurt for them both, hated himself, just a little bit, for having not gone farther with his little dying wish, and restored Derek’s whole family to him. If he’d thought, if he’d been actually planning it out at the time, then he would have. But this would have to be enough, he thought: Derek, not alone with this anymore, and Laura, born to be an alpha, meant for it. It had to be enough. Right?
“Anyway,” Laura said, and the low growling tapered off. “With the accord in place, everyone’s guaranteed safety - even omegas who have my leave to stay. So if you decide that’s what you want to do, Scott, that’s your prerogative.” Her lips turned up in a spare smile, then, and the corners of her eyes crinkled in a familiar way. “You’re always welcome out here, though, if you have any questions or want to stop by for a visit. And I’m at the bakery all the time. I can get you a ten percent discount on better coffee than this and donuts all day long.”
Stiles perked up at that. He was only human.
“Donuts, huh? Taking that honey and flies analogy a little literal, don’t you think.”
She grinned, and her teeth looked a little sharp and very white in the sunlight streaming through the blinds. “Hey,” she said with a shrug. “Whatever works.”
***
“I’m just saying, it won’t hurt anything to get to know them,” Stiles said, herding Scott and Allison down the sidewalk toward the bakery, picked out from the plainer shopfronts around it with a handpainted sign and wrought-iron tables and chairs out front. “Nor will it hurt anything or anybody to have a donut! You two are looking too skinny, anyway, I have one way-too-near-to-death experience and get back to find you’ve let yourselves starve to death.”
Allison was laughing incredulously and looking over her shoulder at Stiles, dimpling at him. She’d been really extremely phenomenally lovely about the Stiles-back-from-the-dead thing, despite how bizarre it was. She’d hugged him and let him ramble for a while about the shittier portions of his last few years and produced tissues when he started to cry a little despite his best efforts to the contrary. Since then she mostly failed to make note of the times when Stiles acted, to her view, strange, including the time he’d had a panic attack when she asked him to help her bring up some stuff from her basement. She seemed to know intuitively when to make Scott take a break from asking Stiles questions or when Stiles was starting to get overwhelmed by everything and needed to go for a run. It was nice, good, to have her grounding him to the present, to this reality, just an uncomplicated warmth that was, Stiles couldn’t help but think, motherly. He appreciated her more in the week following his death than he maybe ever had before, which probably said something a bit terrible about him as a person.
“Hey, I like donuts as much as the next guy,” Scott said, seeming to give up on trying not to be pushed down the sidewalk and into the bakery. “I just don’t think it’s going to do any good. I don’t really want a pack, Stiles. I mean, I kinda already have one, right? You and Allison and her dad and my mom and your dad?” He smiled big, and Stiles wanted to pat his cheek and shake him, just a little, at the same time.
“Well, leaving aside that literally no one in your pack is a werewolf except you,” Stiles said sarcastically, holding the bakery door open for Allison, “What I’m saying is maybe there’s strength in numbers, and you should give it some thought.”
“I’ll give it thought,” Scott said equably. “But you’re buying the donuts.”
“Cheapskate,” Stiles hissed, and then smiled charmingly at the front counter clerk, though he had a momentary mini freakout in his head when he realized he knew her, because he’d seen her body mangled by the side of the road last year.
Fuck. This was all going to be so much harder than he’d ever imagined.
He got through ordering a coffee and a maple donut and then retreated somewhat to the end of the counter, blowing on his coffee and waiting on Scott to make up his mind about bear claws or eclairs. That was when Stiles noticed that Derek was sitting at the corner table, head bent over a thick book and pen scrabbling over a notebook. Taking notes.
Stiles left his credit card with Scott, waving off his questions for the moment and then all but tiptoeing over toward Derek’s table. Predictably, Derek looked up after he’d taken about two steps that way, and Stiles felt both foolish and rooted to the spot. Derek looked upset, but it was hard to pin it to an exact reason, with this Derek, whereas Stiles could mostly divine his Derek’s moods. He swallowed a little, heart fluttering in his chest, and forced himself sternly not to think of them as two different people. This…this was Derek. And if Stiles still wanted him, still wanted to be with him, this was the man he would have to speak to and convince that Stiles was worth his time. Only this time they didn’t have the excuse of being pseudo-partners in crime to bring them into proximity to each other. Which meant that Stiles had no real idea about how to approach him. He’d never had to think about it before.
Licking his lips and ignoring the fact that he knew Derek could hear his heart, Stiles plucked up his courage and crossed the rest of the way to his table.
“Hey,” he said quietly, with the little smile he reserved for Derek. Derek was still looking at him a little bit like he thought Stiles was out of line for coming over. Stiles decided to press on with the assumption that he was not actually out of line, until Derek told him otherwise. “I just…wanted to introduce myself properly, since…you’ve never met me, and all.” He put his hand out. “Stiles Stilinski.”
Derek just looked at him, then at his hand, clearly trying to discomfit Stiles. But Stiles could easily outlast him, and after an awkward second or two, he did reach out and clasp Stiles’ hand, tight and brief. Stiles tried so hard not to revel in it too much; it wasn’t meant as an intimate gesture, but just the warmth and sureness of Derek’s skin, the solidity of him, really there safe in front of Stiles, made his pulse hammer against his skin. It must sound like a bass drum to him. Stiles couldn’t do anything about it.
Derek withdrew his hand after a short moment. “Derek Hale,” he said, a little roughly, like he hadn’t been talking in a while. Stiles glanced at his work; looked like statistics, maybe…or finance? There were a lot of graphs in the book, and there were a lot of handwritten notes spread out around the book, too. Derek didn’t seem inclined to offer any more information, so Stiles tried to throw him a bone.
“You taking classes?”
“No, ‘m reading about economics for my health,” Derek replied flatly. His eyes flitted, just for a brief instant, to one side of Stiles, and then back again. Derek looked even more tense, then, and Stiles looked over his shoulder, to where Scott and Allison were standing, Allison looking over at them in concern.
“Oh,” he said softly, which drew Derek’s eyes boring into his. Stiles put up a hand, said softly, too soft for Scott to hear without trying, “Look, I’m not trying to start trouble. I just…wanna get to know you and your sister. I think you could be good for Scott.”
Derek’s scowl shifted to more of a stony, sulky look. “We can’t help you. And you can’t help us. There’s nothing for you here.”
Stiles felt hollowed out by that, and tried not to get too defeated or defensive about it. Derek had no reason to trust him, and if Derek did not already have a middle name (Stiles was sworn to secrecy), then his middle name would most definitely be “Trust Issues.” Stiles got that, probably better than Derek had ever given him credit for, so he nodded, understanding. “Okay. Well, if you ever do need anything, I’m happy to help,” he offered, smiling again. “Nice to meet you, Derek.”
He turned and went to join Scott and Allison, loudly making a fuss of his donut, which, in all actuality, really was pretty damn delicious. He didn’t steal any more looks at Derek, with a huge show of willpower, but he could feel Derek looking at him, sometimes.
True to her word, Laura, who appeared from the back a few minutes after they’d sat down, made sure they got their snacks at the discount she’d promised, and she gave Stiles a big, slightly secretive smile as they left, which made him feel both terrified and warmed, all the way to his toes.
***
“Derek!!” Stiles screamed, launching himself upright in bed and clawing the blankets off his clammy skin.
He found himself sobbing on air, trying to breathe, and he wrestled himself from the blankets with undue violence. He seemed only to be tangling himself further, and he finally just sort of threw himself out of bed and onto the floor. His knees ached from the impact and his right leg burned, that same twingeing karmic ache from feeling bones and cartilage crushed, liquefied inside his skin as he was half-buried under a reinforced concrete column. Isaac had wept as he and Derek dug Stiles out from under it, the sound a wretched combination of human crying and wolf whimpering that had made Stiles want to cover his ears and gather Isaac into a hug, at the same time. When Isaac saw Stiles’ leg he’d retched.
Stiles staggered to his feet, limping into the bathroom across the hall and closing the door, locking it with shaking fingers. The light was harsh and the tiles cold, but it sharpened Stiles, woke him up from his stupor and helped leech the oppressive heat from his skin. He crawled in the shower and turned it on tepid, curled in the floor of the tub with his forehead pressed to his knees and breathed out the tremors, waited for the pain and the memories to pass.
He’d been with the pack, all of them huddled together for warmth around a fire - everyone there, whole and okay again, like they’d been last summer when they all took a camping trip in Oregon. But then the fire had blazed up too hot, and they’d all been forced to move back, away from it, to avoid being singed; as they moved farther from each other and the circle of heat and light, they were being snatched away, screaming, into the impenetrable dark around them. First Allison, then Scott; then Lydia and his dad. All of them, one by one, and Stiles was running around the ring of light the fire cast, looking for them, calling for them, til finally he saw Derek, coming toward him out of the darkness. He was bloodied and tripping over his feet, chest riddled with bullet holes and his hands wet with blood. He was half-wolf and clearly terrified, reaching for Stiles with his slick hands, and Stiles reached for him, grabbed on, but couldn’t hold him when the screeching darkness came and pulled him away.
Stiles realized he was crying again, and he hugged himself fiercely, shivering but not turning the water warmer. He needed to know this was real, needed the discomfort to ground him to himself, to his tangibility. He was so cold, and all he could see was Derek’s face, his eyes, his slippery fingers, so red. Stiles had let him go to his death for him. What kind of a mate was he? What kind of a friend, what kind of pack, that he would let his alpha die for him?
And now Stiles had none of it. No pack, no alpha, no mate. No Derek. It was just, he supposed, in a way, that he should have lost all those things he allowed to be taken away from him, things he should’ve fought for harder.
No, that was no way to think. As his shivers subsided and the tendrils of the dream cleared reluctantly away, Stiles took deep, even breaths, like he’d done for panic attacks, and told himself that he had not made Derek’s decision for him. He couldn’t have. In all the time Stiles had known him, Derek had never once acquiesced from a position he believed to be morally correct. He was bull-headed in the worst way, but more than that, he had a rigid set of morals that would have put most monks to shame, and he’d tried to follow them to the letter whenever he possibly could. He could never have stood to stand still and watch his mate die, if there was any chance at all of saving him. Stiles knew that, and knew there was no way he could have talked either him or Isaac from doing what they did.
It was just that, for all he had Scott back - and make no mistake, he was so grateful for Scott he still wanted to cry a little, every time he heard his voice - Stiles felt so alone. There were holes in his heart, or his spirit, or his psyche, or something, where pack had been, and were torn away from him, little slices of his life permanently closed off from him now, and the largest and most gaping of these was the place where Derek had nestled, burrowed in close to his heart when he wasn’t paying attention. If what Deaton said was true, and pack enhanced your psychic energy, then Stiles’ psychic energy must be weak as a fading firefly. Probably he’d recover that energy over time, as those holes where his missing siblings had been scarred over, but that still didn’t change the fact that he felt cold and isolated now, without them.
It was everything Stiles could do not to get in his Jeep and drive to Derek’s house and take whatever Derek gave him, be it a punch in the face for trespassing or a quick claw to the juggular for interfering in his pack. So Stiles didn’t touch his car keys; when he emerged shivering from the shower, he dried perfunctorily, pulled on whatever clothes he managed in the dark, and went for a walk.
Wandering alone after dark through the outskirts of Beacon Hills was the metaphysical equivalent of waving a red flag in front of an enraged bull, but the night was quiet and, dare say it, peaceful; Stiles didn’t hear or see anything more gruesome on his walk than a disgruntled owl hooting from the trees and a rabbit go bolting from a bush as Stiles walked by, the sudden noise and motion giving him a heart attack. The town sure did seem a lot quieter than Stiles had known it to be, but still he didn’t quite trust it, and he paid more attention to his immediate surroundings than to where he was actually headed. He was surprised for a moment when he ended up near the cemetary, though he shouldn’t have been, since it was only a quarter mile from his house. There were floodlights on somewhere deeper into the property, and the distant whirr of machinery. Frowning, curious with the kind of paranoia that six years as a werewolf’s best friend will instill, Stiles easily scaled the fence surrounding the property and dropped down onto the mossy grave mound of some accommodating soul on the other side. Stiles gave them a quick, arcane salute, to let them know he was sorry for the intrusion, then picked his way through the graveyard toward the sun-bright white beacon of the floodlight.
He didn’t have to go far before he realized what the machine sound was, and relaxed. A backhoe jerked its way through the soft earth, digging a new resting place for someone by the light of the halogens. Suddenly his memory tweaked, and he crept closer to the hulking old machine to see who was inside it. He made sure to stay as much in the shadows of the bigger monuments as he could, and braced to make a run for it if it was old man Lahey. Stiles had known even before he properly knew Isaac that he did not ever want to fuck with that man. Very minimal deduction made it clear that if Derek had never been the alpha, he’d never bitten Jackson, and voila, there was never a kanima to do the one truly altruistic thing Jackson had maybe ever done, and put Lahey out of Isaac’s misery.
As soon as he was close enough to properly see, however, Stiles’ heart leapt at the bright white light reflecting off a full head of curls. He grinned despite himself, and then his grin faltered as he realized, in quick succession, that Isaac didn’t really know him, right now, the way Stiles was used to; Stiles was trespassing on private property; and Stiles had no earthly clue what in the world he’d say to him, given facts A and B. He was just thinking that discretion might be the better part of valor, in this instance, when Isaac turned to look over his shoulder and - damnit - caught Stiles lurking behind a stone angel with a broken wingtip.
“Hey!” Isaac said, lowering the bucket of the backhoe and idling the machine. “What’re you doing here? This is private property!”
Stiles put his hands up and edged out from behind the angel, smiling in what he hoped was an innocent manner. “Yeah, sorry, I, uh. I was taking a walk and I saw the light and thought maybe a UFO had landed in here.”
Isaac blinked at him, clearly unsure what to even do with that, so Stiles rushed on. “You’re Isaac, right? Isaac Lahey?”
Isaac looked suspicious. “Who’s asking?”
“You don’t…you don’t really know me, we went to school together.”
“Yeah, not really making the best case for yourself, there.”
“No, we were, I mean, we were cool, we didn’t really talk much. I’m Stiles. Stilinski, the sheriff’s son?”
That seemed to make Isaac relax some. “Okay, I remember. You’re friends with Scott McCall, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right!” Stiles replied, smiling and trying not to feel a bit as though Scott had somehow stolen his thunder while currently drooling into his pillow.
“So…what’re you doing here? You really shouldn’t be.”
“I told you, man! UFOs! Your lights totally make the place feel like Roswell.”
Isaac’s lip quirked in his crooked, smirky little smile. “No, not really. The only mysteries covered up around here are which of the women around town had fake tits.”
Stiles choked on a laugh. Isaac cut the engine, climbed down out of the machine; Stiles had to viciously quash the urge to leap at him for a hug and a headrub. His hair was way longer than Stiles had ever seen it, nearly down to his shoulders, and up close, Stiles could see he was too thin, pale, and with a fading yellowed bruise down one side of his neck. It was strange though not suprising; Stiles had never seen a bruise on Isaac’s skin before.
“So d’you still work for your old man?” Stiles asked, hoping that wasn’t too insensitive as an opening gambit. It wasn’t like it had ever been a secret.
Isaac shrugged in an affirmative kind of way. “Yeah, just doing this. Probably be doing this forever. Why?”
“No reason, really. I always thought this job must be creepy as fuck.”
“It’s not too bad,” Isaac offered, smiling that smirky thing again. It was his shy, discomfited smile, and Stiles hadn’t seen it in a while. “I like late hours, pay’s decent. No one bothers me.” He smiled again, a little more genuinely, with more teeth. “Well, usually.”
Stiles grinned back encouragingly, shameless. “Am I bothering you?”
Isaac paused, then shook his head, stretching his arms behind his back to pop his shoulders. “No, not really. I was just about to wrap up anyway.”
“Oh yeah?” Stiles said, brightening. “Are you done with your shift?”
Isaac checked his watch. “‘Bout fifteen minutes.” He cocked his head. “I thought you went away to school.”
“I did. Just graduated, home for the summer to look for work.”
“God, why?” Isaac said, then flushed a little, seemingly surprised by having said it. “I mean…why come back to Beacon Hills, if you’d got out?”
“Mmm…it’s home. My friends are here. My…my family’s here.” The word family hurt him a little. You were part of it, Isaac. You could be again. Do you want to be?
Isaac looked unconvinced. “Man, if I ever got out of here…” He shook his head. “Nothin’ for me here but digging graves for my dad.” A shadow passed over his face and he swallowed, and Stiles wanted to kidnap the guy right then and there and take him home and feed him pancakes and never let his father touch him again.
“Yeah,” Stiles said, a little sad. He smiled at Isaac. “I used to be kinda like that too, when I was a little younger, but. I don’t think so anymore, so much.”
“How come?”
“Just…realized I had things to do here. People who needed me. And it started feeling more like home.”
Isaac nodded simply, pulling a crinkled pack of cigarettes from his hip pocket. He offered one to Stiles, who declined, and lit up, taking a long drag off of it and holding onto it for a second or two before he exhaled and replied. “I’m not sure if it’s ever really felt like home, to me.”
Stiles chewed his lip, then made a flaily little half-pointing gesture. “D’you wanna…go grab something to eat at Rita’s? After your shift’s up, I mean. I couldn’t sleep, but I’m tired of wandering around.”
Isaac toed at a clump of mud and grass overturned by the backhoe, kicked it off into the pit he’d just dug as his cigarette burned lazily between his fingers. Finally he looked up at Stiles, blinking a little, and nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He laughed a little. “Guess we’ll get to talk now.”
“Better late than never, right?” Stiles asked with a hopeful grin, and felt like whooping a victory cry when Isaac smiled back, real and easy.
***
It was about the fourth time Stiles came to the bakery by himself and, disappointed not to see Derek there, installed himself in the far corner with his laptop and a maple donut, that Laura came over and deposited herself in the seat opposite.
“You didn’t tell me everything,” she said, like that was a reasonable conversation starter. Stiles gaped, suddenly imagining her just popping out her claws and going to town on him for some slight or other.
“I, wha?”
“You didn’t tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Stilinski. Did you?”
“I…don’t recall ever swearing in under oath, sooo…”
“When you told me. All about…where you’ve come from. What happened to you, and my brother, and…wishing me back into existence. There was more to it, that you left out.”
Stiles worked his jaw, stuffed some donut into the gaping hold of it to buy himself a few seconds. “Well sure I didn’t tell you every single solitary detail.”
“About my brother,” she said, and looked less teasing and more serious, now. Stiles’ bite of donut stuck in his throat and he quickly washed it down with coffee. “See, it didn’t make sense, exactly, your story - some of the things you said Derek did, and capitulating in the end that way…I mean, some of it can be explained by his relative inexperience, but not all of it.” She raised an eyebrow that looked like it knew how to kill a man. “It bothered me until I saw you start coming in here looking for him.”
Stiles just looked at her for a long moment. Then he blurted out, “How do you even see these things? You’re in the back office working every time I come in here!”
Laura pointed directly over Stiles’ head, and he glanced up at…oh. Security camera.
“We’ve a CCTV monitor in the office,” she said, and now she looked pretty amused again, which Stiles did not think quite fair. “Mostly we use it to laugh at customers and know when to bust skulls if we see people harrassing the clerks. But every time you’ve come in here, you look all around the room once before you even buy anything.”
“I could be meeting my secret service correspondent for a clandestine meeting,” he said, to which her face remained absolutely, unexpressively still. Stiles sighed, feeling heat creep up his neck. “Fine. Alright. Yes, I was…hoping I might catch him again.”
“Why?”
“Because…” he said, and then couldn’t continue for a moment, swallowing convulsively around the aching knot that formed in his throat. He saw fire and blood-slick hands, and shuddered a little, fixed his eyes on the tabletop. Finally he murmured, “Because…he was mine.”
Laura didn’t say anything, so eventually Stiles was forced to look up to get a bead on her. She was looking back at him, mouth drawn tight and eyes…sad? Afraid? He wasn’t even sure. Her eyes were dark brown, not at all like Derek’s, but Stiles still felt like he saw Derek there, the way Derek was when he was at his quietest, happiest.
After a moment, Stiles stumbled on, “We were…we hadn’t actually been…together-together that long…a year and change. But it was…a long time in the making and. It was, it was really important to me. He was really important to me.”
“Was?” Laura zeroed in. Stiles flushed.
“Is,” he corrected himself. “Only…he doesn’t even.” He gestured helplessly. “I thought nothing in the world could be more awkward than the way we were when we first got together, covered in mud and chimaera slime, but Jesus. Being in love with a guy who doesn’t even know you, I just.” He shook his head, snorted. “I shouldn’t complain. I was trained for this, pretty much. Loved a girl for eight years before she even knew my name, and then after she learned it, it did exactly bupkis for me. I practically majored in unrequited love in high school, you’d think this would be--“
Laura put her hand on the table between Stiles’ clenched fists, her fingers splayed, and he stopped talking, looking up at her.
“You two were…mates?” she asked softly.
Stiles nodded.
She paled a little, rubbed at her mouth with her fingers as she thought. Her eyes flicked back to Stiles’ again after a moment. “He doesn’t like you, you know. You or Scott. Doesn’t trust you.”
Stiles sighed. “Believe it or not, that part I’m pretty used to.”
“I believe it,” she muttered softly, shook her head. “He thinks…he doesn’t want Scott in the pack. Or anyone, really. He doesn’t think there should be a pack, because it wouldn’t be our pack.” She looked at him steadily, searchingly. “But we can’t keep doing this by ourselves. We aren’t a pack, we’re a…a severed limb that needs a body to reattach to.” She wrinkled her nose. “Metaphor’s not my strong suit.”
Stiles shrugged with his face. “I dunno, I thought that was pretty good. Right blend of poetic and disgusting. Suits you.”
Laura blinked again, then laughed, seeming surprised by the fact that she was laughing. Stiles smirked, and when she’d caught her breath again, she shook her head and said, “D’you know? I’m pretty sure you have been hanging out with my brother.”
Stiles shrugged, smiling. “He’s hard to ignore.”
She sobered a little. “Yeah. Hard to live with, too. But…you probably already know that.”
“Well, yeah and no. I mean…I don’t know this Derek, exactly. The Derek I know is…was…” Stiles shook his head and cleared his throat and continued, “Angrier. More impulsive. Dangerous.”
Laura hummed. “I think those terms apply to Derek no matter the time and place, at this point. My brother hides it well, but he’s…so furious, even now.”
“Can’t blame him, really.”
“Well, no, and I don’t. But I can and do worry for him. And I can’t…I can’t be productive as an alpha when Derek is terrified I’m going to try to replace our family.” Her voice cracked a little, but only just a little. “When he treats every prospective member of a pack with distrust and anger. It isn’t territorial bullshit so much as it is fear.”
“That you’ll leave him,” Stiles finished. “That he won’t have you, when you’re all he’s got left.”
She nodded, sighed a little. “We’re never going to survive, short or long term, without a pack. I’ve debated whether we should even stay, but…being at the house feels right to both of us, and it’s the place I’d want to raise a family of my own, even given…everything that’s happened there. I just need him to trust me with this.”
“I. I mean, I don’t know, I can’t say for sure, but. You’re his sister. I don’t think he mistrusts you. It’s everyone else in the world. Outsiders. People who could come in and hurt his family again. And I know he doesn’t like me or trust me, but I think I could show him. That I won’t hurt him or you, that I just. I just want to know him, again. Whatever…happens after that, happens, even if it’s nothing.”
Laura tapped the table, thinking for another moment. “You and Scott,” she said eventually. “You should come by the house again sometime. Help me clear some of the junk from inside so we can start the rest of the renovation.” She cocked her head. “You’re on summer break, right?”
“Yeah. We could come by anytime.”
“There’d be cookies and coffee in it for you,” Laura added. “Just in case you need to convince Scott.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t…know if it will help, for sure, but it might. Derek needs to know that not everyone is…like her. Especially not all humans. Do you think you’re willing to spend the time on my brother that he needs? Again?”
Stiles looked at her, the concerned fold in her brow, the way she held herself, like she was in control of the situation, even as she asked for help. She really was made for this, he thought. She wasn’t half as crazy and she seemed to make significantly better leadership decisions, but Stiles found himself thinking of Derek’s exposed throat, and how his shoulders had leaned into the motion of baring it, a reflex, ingrained in his bones. As messed up as they still were, these two that were all that was left, they were - together - a little more right and whole than Derek had been on his own. And Stiles knew there was no question whatsoever what he’d spend time doing, as much time as it took, the rest of his goddamn life if necessary.
“Lady, I just got a new lease on life,” he said, with a soft, crooked smile. “So let’s not waste any more of it talking and do this thing. Got any suggestions?”
By the time Stiles had finished telling his tale, Laura had warmed to them sufficiently to provide them somewhat awful instant coffee and entirely amazing lemon cookies from a little bakery downtown, where she was the assistant manager. Derek had also emerged from his Sulking Spot and sat on the edge of the cubby, bare feet dangling down as he watched Stiles talk. It was a little unnerving, having his eyes on them while telling his sister about a life that had integrally included him; unnerving and sad, painful behind Stiles’ ribs. He wanted to reach out and touch Derek, make sure he was real, warm and alive and real.
He was just a silent shadow for most of the conversation, and Stiles noted, much to his dismay, that he and Scott seemed to be doing an awful lot of glaring at each other from across the camper, a mutual wariness that Stiles hoped would not blossom into dislike. Laura seemed chill about Scott, oddly enough, and when she started questioning him about his life and his future plans, leaving the subject of Stiles’ reincarnation with no comment for the time being, she didn’t appear bothered by his insistence that he’d done pretty well so far on his own, only nodded and said that he wasn’t under any pressure to join the club.
“Werewolves are a lot like wolf-wolves in a lot of senses,” she said after a while, snagging a cookie out of the box and shoving most of it in her mouth at once, flipping another cookie to Derek as she did. He caught it deftly and bit into it with bad grace. “But we’re not so territorial that you can’t go your way and we go ours and we agree to stay out of each others’ hair.” She stopped, rolling her eyes upward for a moment and then amended herself, “Well. I’m not that territorial. Don’t have the manpower or the energy for it, for one thing. No reason, for another. My pack is small, just me and my brother, and though eventually I’d like to see it expand, I’m firmly of the ‘attracting flies with honey’ school of recruitment techniques.”
Derek made a low, injured sound, and Laura gave him a sharp look. Stiles then watched one of the most bizarre things he’d ever witnessed, and he once watched a woman turn herself inside out just to make a point: Derek held her eyes for just a moment, then huffed a hard breath through his nose and looked aside, fixing his eyes on the floor. In a human, that’d just have been sulking, but Stiles knew what he was doing. Derek Hale was baring his throat. It was subtle, but Stiles knew he wasn’t wrong. He nearly spilled coffee all down his front in surprise. More than the physical differences, more than the lack of recognition when he looked at Stiles, Derek so obviously and demonstrably being a beta was the weirdest shit Stiles could have ever imagined.
The fucked up part was that it didn’t look weird on him. It was a second’s small gesture, and then it was done, gone, and he was wolfing down the rest of his lemon cookie and slurping coffee from a styrofoam cup and back to glaring at Scott, though now he mixed it up with glaring at Stiles a little, too. There was no show to it, no theater. It looked so natural on him that it was like seeing him relax after a long, long period of tension, taut along his limbs. Stiles gaped, unknowingly, and Derek frowned at him til Stiles flushed and turned away.
“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions right away,” Laura reasoned, dropping down off the counter and brushing cookie crumbs off her jeans. “Nothing needs to be set in stone til you’re twenty-five, and you may not even be in Beacon Hills by then.”
“Mm. Maybe,” Scott said, but he sounded doubtful. “I just finished a vet tech program and I’ve moved back to work with Dr. Deaton again. My mom’s here. The, um. Argents are here.”
Derek’s stiffening spine could be felt around the room, supernatural senses not required. After a tense moment, he dropped down from the raised bed and swept out of the camper, slamming the door behind him. Laura pressed her lips together and scuffed the linoleum floor with the toe of her sneaker.
“I don’t have to tell you,” she said quietly, “that that relationship’s pretty acrimonious. The accord was the first thing I did when I got back after killing Peter, and the very first thing I did here that I’m actually proud of. It needed to be done, sooner than later, because…because the person actually responsible for the fire is still out there, and she wants the last of the Hales mounted on her wall.” There was a low vibration of sound emanating from her that she seemed unaware of, a near-subsonic growl, and suddenly, terribly, Stiles could see the family resemblance with Derek so starkly in the way pain and rage transformed her. Stiles’ stomach turned violently when he registered that Kate was still alive here. Maybe he should go have a look in the police files and a talk with Allison and Adrian Harris, if he could possibly dig him up from wherever he’d scuttled off to after being dismissed from the high school…
That meant that…Derek had told her, then. About Kate, about what had happened. Stiles hurt for him, hurt for them both, hated himself, just a little bit, for having not gone farther with his little dying wish, and restored Derek’s whole family to him. If he’d thought, if he’d been actually planning it out at the time, then he would have. But this would have to be enough, he thought: Derek, not alone with this anymore, and Laura, born to be an alpha, meant for it. It had to be enough. Right?
“Anyway,” Laura said, and the low growling tapered off. “With the accord in place, everyone’s guaranteed safety - even omegas who have my leave to stay. So if you decide that’s what you want to do, Scott, that’s your prerogative.” Her lips turned up in a spare smile, then, and the corners of her eyes crinkled in a familiar way. “You’re always welcome out here, though, if you have any questions or want to stop by for a visit. And I’m at the bakery all the time. I can get you a ten percent discount on better coffee than this and donuts all day long.”
Stiles perked up at that. He was only human.
“Donuts, huh? Taking that honey and flies analogy a little literal, don’t you think.”
She grinned, and her teeth looked a little sharp and very white in the sunlight streaming through the blinds. “Hey,” she said with a shrug. “Whatever works.”
***
“I’m just saying, it won’t hurt anything to get to know them,” Stiles said, herding Scott and Allison down the sidewalk toward the bakery, picked out from the plainer shopfronts around it with a handpainted sign and wrought-iron tables and chairs out front. “Nor will it hurt anything or anybody to have a donut! You two are looking too skinny, anyway, I have one way-too-near-to-death experience and get back to find you’ve let yourselves starve to death.”
Allison was laughing incredulously and looking over her shoulder at Stiles, dimpling at him. She’d been really extremely phenomenally lovely about the Stiles-back-from-the-dead thing, despite how bizarre it was. She’d hugged him and let him ramble for a while about the shittier portions of his last few years and produced tissues when he started to cry a little despite his best efforts to the contrary. Since then she mostly failed to make note of the times when Stiles acted, to her view, strange, including the time he’d had a panic attack when she asked him to help her bring up some stuff from her basement. She seemed to know intuitively when to make Scott take a break from asking Stiles questions or when Stiles was starting to get overwhelmed by everything and needed to go for a run. It was nice, good, to have her grounding him to the present, to this reality, just an uncomplicated warmth that was, Stiles couldn’t help but think, motherly. He appreciated her more in the week following his death than he maybe ever had before, which probably said something a bit terrible about him as a person.
“Hey, I like donuts as much as the next guy,” Scott said, seeming to give up on trying not to be pushed down the sidewalk and into the bakery. “I just don’t think it’s going to do any good. I don’t really want a pack, Stiles. I mean, I kinda already have one, right? You and Allison and her dad and my mom and your dad?” He smiled big, and Stiles wanted to pat his cheek and shake him, just a little, at the same time.
“Well, leaving aside that literally no one in your pack is a werewolf except you,” Stiles said sarcastically, holding the bakery door open for Allison, “What I’m saying is maybe there’s strength in numbers, and you should give it some thought.”
“I’ll give it thought,” Scott said equably. “But you’re buying the donuts.”
“Cheapskate,” Stiles hissed, and then smiled charmingly at the front counter clerk, though he had a momentary mini freakout in his head when he realized he knew her, because he’d seen her body mangled by the side of the road last year.
Fuck. This was all going to be so much harder than he’d ever imagined.
He got through ordering a coffee and a maple donut and then retreated somewhat to the end of the counter, blowing on his coffee and waiting on Scott to make up his mind about bear claws or eclairs. That was when Stiles noticed that Derek was sitting at the corner table, head bent over a thick book and pen scrabbling over a notebook. Taking notes.
Stiles left his credit card with Scott, waving off his questions for the moment and then all but tiptoeing over toward Derek’s table. Predictably, Derek looked up after he’d taken about two steps that way, and Stiles felt both foolish and rooted to the spot. Derek looked upset, but it was hard to pin it to an exact reason, with this Derek, whereas Stiles could mostly divine his Derek’s moods. He swallowed a little, heart fluttering in his chest, and forced himself sternly not to think of them as two different people. This…this was Derek. And if Stiles still wanted him, still wanted to be with him, this was the man he would have to speak to and convince that Stiles was worth his time. Only this time they didn’t have the excuse of being pseudo-partners in crime to bring them into proximity to each other. Which meant that Stiles had no real idea about how to approach him. He’d never had to think about it before.
Licking his lips and ignoring the fact that he knew Derek could hear his heart, Stiles plucked up his courage and crossed the rest of the way to his table.
“Hey,” he said quietly, with the little smile he reserved for Derek. Derek was still looking at him a little bit like he thought Stiles was out of line for coming over. Stiles decided to press on with the assumption that he was not actually out of line, until Derek told him otherwise. “I just…wanted to introduce myself properly, since…you’ve never met me, and all.” He put his hand out. “Stiles Stilinski.”
Derek just looked at him, then at his hand, clearly trying to discomfit Stiles. But Stiles could easily outlast him, and after an awkward second or two, he did reach out and clasp Stiles’ hand, tight and brief. Stiles tried so hard not to revel in it too much; it wasn’t meant as an intimate gesture, but just the warmth and sureness of Derek’s skin, the solidity of him, really there safe in front of Stiles, made his pulse hammer against his skin. It must sound like a bass drum to him. Stiles couldn’t do anything about it.
Derek withdrew his hand after a short moment. “Derek Hale,” he said, a little roughly, like he hadn’t been talking in a while. Stiles glanced at his work; looked like statistics, maybe…or finance? There were a lot of graphs in the book, and there were a lot of handwritten notes spread out around the book, too. Derek didn’t seem inclined to offer any more information, so Stiles tried to throw him a bone.
“You taking classes?”
“No, ‘m reading about economics for my health,” Derek replied flatly. His eyes flitted, just for a brief instant, to one side of Stiles, and then back again. Derek looked even more tense, then, and Stiles looked over his shoulder, to where Scott and Allison were standing, Allison looking over at them in concern.
“Oh,” he said softly, which drew Derek’s eyes boring into his. Stiles put up a hand, said softly, too soft for Scott to hear without trying, “Look, I’m not trying to start trouble. I just…wanna get to know you and your sister. I think you could be good for Scott.”
Derek’s scowl shifted to more of a stony, sulky look. “We can’t help you. And you can’t help us. There’s nothing for you here.”
Stiles felt hollowed out by that, and tried not to get too defeated or defensive about it. Derek had no reason to trust him, and if Derek did not already have a middle name (Stiles was sworn to secrecy), then his middle name would most definitely be “Trust Issues.” Stiles got that, probably better than Derek had ever given him credit for, so he nodded, understanding. “Okay. Well, if you ever do need anything, I’m happy to help,” he offered, smiling again. “Nice to meet you, Derek.”
He turned and went to join Scott and Allison, loudly making a fuss of his donut, which, in all actuality, really was pretty damn delicious. He didn’t steal any more looks at Derek, with a huge show of willpower, but he could feel Derek looking at him, sometimes.
True to her word, Laura, who appeared from the back a few minutes after they’d sat down, made sure they got their snacks at the discount she’d promised, and she gave Stiles a big, slightly secretive smile as they left, which made him feel both terrified and warmed, all the way to his toes.
***
“Derek!!” Stiles screamed, launching himself upright in bed and clawing the blankets off his clammy skin.
He found himself sobbing on air, trying to breathe, and he wrestled himself from the blankets with undue violence. He seemed only to be tangling himself further, and he finally just sort of threw himself out of bed and onto the floor. His knees ached from the impact and his right leg burned, that same twingeing karmic ache from feeling bones and cartilage crushed, liquefied inside his skin as he was half-buried under a reinforced concrete column. Isaac had wept as he and Derek dug Stiles out from under it, the sound a wretched combination of human crying and wolf whimpering that had made Stiles want to cover his ears and gather Isaac into a hug, at the same time. When Isaac saw Stiles’ leg he’d retched.
Stiles staggered to his feet, limping into the bathroom across the hall and closing the door, locking it with shaking fingers. The light was harsh and the tiles cold, but it sharpened Stiles, woke him up from his stupor and helped leech the oppressive heat from his skin. He crawled in the shower and turned it on tepid, curled in the floor of the tub with his forehead pressed to his knees and breathed out the tremors, waited for the pain and the memories to pass.
He’d been with the pack, all of them huddled together for warmth around a fire - everyone there, whole and okay again, like they’d been last summer when they all took a camping trip in Oregon. But then the fire had blazed up too hot, and they’d all been forced to move back, away from it, to avoid being singed; as they moved farther from each other and the circle of heat and light, they were being snatched away, screaming, into the impenetrable dark around them. First Allison, then Scott; then Lydia and his dad. All of them, one by one, and Stiles was running around the ring of light the fire cast, looking for them, calling for them, til finally he saw Derek, coming toward him out of the darkness. He was bloodied and tripping over his feet, chest riddled with bullet holes and his hands wet with blood. He was half-wolf and clearly terrified, reaching for Stiles with his slick hands, and Stiles reached for him, grabbed on, but couldn’t hold him when the screeching darkness came and pulled him away.
Stiles realized he was crying again, and he hugged himself fiercely, shivering but not turning the water warmer. He needed to know this was real, needed the discomfort to ground him to himself, to his tangibility. He was so cold, and all he could see was Derek’s face, his eyes, his slippery fingers, so red. Stiles had let him go to his death for him. What kind of a mate was he? What kind of a friend, what kind of pack, that he would let his alpha die for him?
And now Stiles had none of it. No pack, no alpha, no mate. No Derek. It was just, he supposed, in a way, that he should have lost all those things he allowed to be taken away from him, things he should’ve fought for harder.
No, that was no way to think. As his shivers subsided and the tendrils of the dream cleared reluctantly away, Stiles took deep, even breaths, like he’d done for panic attacks, and told himself that he had not made Derek’s decision for him. He couldn’t have. In all the time Stiles had known him, Derek had never once acquiesced from a position he believed to be morally correct. He was bull-headed in the worst way, but more than that, he had a rigid set of morals that would have put most monks to shame, and he’d tried to follow them to the letter whenever he possibly could. He could never have stood to stand still and watch his mate die, if there was any chance at all of saving him. Stiles knew that, and knew there was no way he could have talked either him or Isaac from doing what they did.
It was just that, for all he had Scott back - and make no mistake, he was so grateful for Scott he still wanted to cry a little, every time he heard his voice - Stiles felt so alone. There were holes in his heart, or his spirit, or his psyche, or something, where pack had been, and were torn away from him, little slices of his life permanently closed off from him now, and the largest and most gaping of these was the place where Derek had nestled, burrowed in close to his heart when he wasn’t paying attention. If what Deaton said was true, and pack enhanced your psychic energy, then Stiles’ psychic energy must be weak as a fading firefly. Probably he’d recover that energy over time, as those holes where his missing siblings had been scarred over, but that still didn’t change the fact that he felt cold and isolated now, without them.
It was everything Stiles could do not to get in his Jeep and drive to Derek’s house and take whatever Derek gave him, be it a punch in the face for trespassing or a quick claw to the juggular for interfering in his pack. So Stiles didn’t touch his car keys; when he emerged shivering from the shower, he dried perfunctorily, pulled on whatever clothes he managed in the dark, and went for a walk.
Wandering alone after dark through the outskirts of Beacon Hills was the metaphysical equivalent of waving a red flag in front of an enraged bull, but the night was quiet and, dare say it, peaceful; Stiles didn’t hear or see anything more gruesome on his walk than a disgruntled owl hooting from the trees and a rabbit go bolting from a bush as Stiles walked by, the sudden noise and motion giving him a heart attack. The town sure did seem a lot quieter than Stiles had known it to be, but still he didn’t quite trust it, and he paid more attention to his immediate surroundings than to where he was actually headed. He was surprised for a moment when he ended up near the cemetary, though he shouldn’t have been, since it was only a quarter mile from his house. There were floodlights on somewhere deeper into the property, and the distant whirr of machinery. Frowning, curious with the kind of paranoia that six years as a werewolf’s best friend will instill, Stiles easily scaled the fence surrounding the property and dropped down onto the mossy grave mound of some accommodating soul on the other side. Stiles gave them a quick, arcane salute, to let them know he was sorry for the intrusion, then picked his way through the graveyard toward the sun-bright white beacon of the floodlight.
He didn’t have to go far before he realized what the machine sound was, and relaxed. A backhoe jerked its way through the soft earth, digging a new resting place for someone by the light of the halogens. Suddenly his memory tweaked, and he crept closer to the hulking old machine to see who was inside it. He made sure to stay as much in the shadows of the bigger monuments as he could, and braced to make a run for it if it was old man Lahey. Stiles had known even before he properly knew Isaac that he did not ever want to fuck with that man. Very minimal deduction made it clear that if Derek had never been the alpha, he’d never bitten Jackson, and voila, there was never a kanima to do the one truly altruistic thing Jackson had maybe ever done, and put Lahey out of Isaac’s misery.
As soon as he was close enough to properly see, however, Stiles’ heart leapt at the bright white light reflecting off a full head of curls. He grinned despite himself, and then his grin faltered as he realized, in quick succession, that Isaac didn’t really know him, right now, the way Stiles was used to; Stiles was trespassing on private property; and Stiles had no earthly clue what in the world he’d say to him, given facts A and B. He was just thinking that discretion might be the better part of valor, in this instance, when Isaac turned to look over his shoulder and - damnit - caught Stiles lurking behind a stone angel with a broken wingtip.
“Hey!” Isaac said, lowering the bucket of the backhoe and idling the machine. “What’re you doing here? This is private property!”
Stiles put his hands up and edged out from behind the angel, smiling in what he hoped was an innocent manner. “Yeah, sorry, I, uh. I was taking a walk and I saw the light and thought maybe a UFO had landed in here.”
Isaac blinked at him, clearly unsure what to even do with that, so Stiles rushed on. “You’re Isaac, right? Isaac Lahey?”
Isaac looked suspicious. “Who’s asking?”
“You don’t…you don’t really know me, we went to school together.”
“Yeah, not really making the best case for yourself, there.”
“No, we were, I mean, we were cool, we didn’t really talk much. I’m Stiles. Stilinski, the sheriff’s son?”
That seemed to make Isaac relax some. “Okay, I remember. You’re friends with Scott McCall, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right!” Stiles replied, smiling and trying not to feel a bit as though Scott had somehow stolen his thunder while currently drooling into his pillow.
“So…what’re you doing here? You really shouldn’t be.”
“I told you, man! UFOs! Your lights totally make the place feel like Roswell.”
Isaac’s lip quirked in his crooked, smirky little smile. “No, not really. The only mysteries covered up around here are which of the women around town had fake tits.”
Stiles choked on a laugh. Isaac cut the engine, climbed down out of the machine; Stiles had to viciously quash the urge to leap at him for a hug and a headrub. His hair was way longer than Stiles had ever seen it, nearly down to his shoulders, and up close, Stiles could see he was too thin, pale, and with a fading yellowed bruise down one side of his neck. It was strange though not suprising; Stiles had never seen a bruise on Isaac’s skin before.
“So d’you still work for your old man?” Stiles asked, hoping that wasn’t too insensitive as an opening gambit. It wasn’t like it had ever been a secret.
Isaac shrugged in an affirmative kind of way. “Yeah, just doing this. Probably be doing this forever. Why?”
“No reason, really. I always thought this job must be creepy as fuck.”
“It’s not too bad,” Isaac offered, smiling that smirky thing again. It was his shy, discomfited smile, and Stiles hadn’t seen it in a while. “I like late hours, pay’s decent. No one bothers me.” He smiled again, a little more genuinely, with more teeth. “Well, usually.”
Stiles grinned back encouragingly, shameless. “Am I bothering you?”
Isaac paused, then shook his head, stretching his arms behind his back to pop his shoulders. “No, not really. I was just about to wrap up anyway.”
“Oh yeah?” Stiles said, brightening. “Are you done with your shift?”
Isaac checked his watch. “‘Bout fifteen minutes.” He cocked his head. “I thought you went away to school.”
“I did. Just graduated, home for the summer to look for work.”
“God, why?” Isaac said, then flushed a little, seemingly surprised by having said it. “I mean…why come back to Beacon Hills, if you’d got out?”
“Mmm…it’s home. My friends are here. My…my family’s here.” The word family hurt him a little. You were part of it, Isaac. You could be again. Do you want to be?
Isaac looked unconvinced. “Man, if I ever got out of here…” He shook his head. “Nothin’ for me here but digging graves for my dad.” A shadow passed over his face and he swallowed, and Stiles wanted to kidnap the guy right then and there and take him home and feed him pancakes and never let his father touch him again.
“Yeah,” Stiles said, a little sad. He smiled at Isaac. “I used to be kinda like that too, when I was a little younger, but. I don’t think so anymore, so much.”
“How come?”
“Just…realized I had things to do here. People who needed me. And it started feeling more like home.”
Isaac nodded simply, pulling a crinkled pack of cigarettes from his hip pocket. He offered one to Stiles, who declined, and lit up, taking a long drag off of it and holding onto it for a second or two before he exhaled and replied. “I’m not sure if it’s ever really felt like home, to me.”
Stiles chewed his lip, then made a flaily little half-pointing gesture. “D’you wanna…go grab something to eat at Rita’s? After your shift’s up, I mean. I couldn’t sleep, but I’m tired of wandering around.”
Isaac toed at a clump of mud and grass overturned by the backhoe, kicked it off into the pit he’d just dug as his cigarette burned lazily between his fingers. Finally he looked up at Stiles, blinking a little, and nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He laughed a little. “Guess we’ll get to talk now.”
“Better late than never, right?” Stiles asked with a hopeful grin, and felt like whooping a victory cry when Isaac smiled back, real and easy.
***
It was about the fourth time Stiles came to the bakery by himself and, disappointed not to see Derek there, installed himself in the far corner with his laptop and a maple donut, that Laura came over and deposited herself in the seat opposite.
“You didn’t tell me everything,” she said, like that was a reasonable conversation starter. Stiles gaped, suddenly imagining her just popping out her claws and going to town on him for some slight or other.
“I, wha?”
“You didn’t tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Stilinski. Did you?”
“I…don’t recall ever swearing in under oath, sooo…”
“When you told me. All about…where you’ve come from. What happened to you, and my brother, and…wishing me back into existence. There was more to it, that you left out.”
Stiles worked his jaw, stuffed some donut into the gaping hold of it to buy himself a few seconds. “Well sure I didn’t tell you every single solitary detail.”
“About my brother,” she said, and looked less teasing and more serious, now. Stiles’ bite of donut stuck in his throat and he quickly washed it down with coffee. “See, it didn’t make sense, exactly, your story - some of the things you said Derek did, and capitulating in the end that way…I mean, some of it can be explained by his relative inexperience, but not all of it.” She raised an eyebrow that looked like it knew how to kill a man. “It bothered me until I saw you start coming in here looking for him.”
Stiles just looked at her for a long moment. Then he blurted out, “How do you even see these things? You’re in the back office working every time I come in here!”
Laura pointed directly over Stiles’ head, and he glanced up at…oh. Security camera.
“We’ve a CCTV monitor in the office,” she said, and now she looked pretty amused again, which Stiles did not think quite fair. “Mostly we use it to laugh at customers and know when to bust skulls if we see people harrassing the clerks. But every time you’ve come in here, you look all around the room once before you even buy anything.”
“I could be meeting my secret service correspondent for a clandestine meeting,” he said, to which her face remained absolutely, unexpressively still. Stiles sighed, feeling heat creep up his neck. “Fine. Alright. Yes, I was…hoping I might catch him again.”
“Why?”
“Because…” he said, and then couldn’t continue for a moment, swallowing convulsively around the aching knot that formed in his throat. He saw fire and blood-slick hands, and shuddered a little, fixed his eyes on the tabletop. Finally he murmured, “Because…he was mine.”
Laura didn’t say anything, so eventually Stiles was forced to look up to get a bead on her. She was looking back at him, mouth drawn tight and eyes…sad? Afraid? He wasn’t even sure. Her eyes were dark brown, not at all like Derek’s, but Stiles still felt like he saw Derek there, the way Derek was when he was at his quietest, happiest.
After a moment, Stiles stumbled on, “We were…we hadn’t actually been…together-together that long…a year and change. But it was…a long time in the making and. It was, it was really important to me. He was really important to me.”
“Was?” Laura zeroed in. Stiles flushed.
“Is,” he corrected himself. “Only…he doesn’t even.” He gestured helplessly. “I thought nothing in the world could be more awkward than the way we were when we first got together, covered in mud and chimaera slime, but Jesus. Being in love with a guy who doesn’t even know you, I just.” He shook his head, snorted. “I shouldn’t complain. I was trained for this, pretty much. Loved a girl for eight years before she even knew my name, and then after she learned it, it did exactly bupkis for me. I practically majored in unrequited love in high school, you’d think this would be--“
Laura put her hand on the table between Stiles’ clenched fists, her fingers splayed, and he stopped talking, looking up at her.
“You two were…mates?” she asked softly.
Stiles nodded.
She paled a little, rubbed at her mouth with her fingers as she thought. Her eyes flicked back to Stiles’ again after a moment. “He doesn’t like you, you know. You or Scott. Doesn’t trust you.”
Stiles sighed. “Believe it or not, that part I’m pretty used to.”
“I believe it,” she muttered softly, shook her head. “He thinks…he doesn’t want Scott in the pack. Or anyone, really. He doesn’t think there should be a pack, because it wouldn’t be our pack.” She looked at him steadily, searchingly. “But we can’t keep doing this by ourselves. We aren’t a pack, we’re a…a severed limb that needs a body to reattach to.” She wrinkled her nose. “Metaphor’s not my strong suit.”
Stiles shrugged with his face. “I dunno, I thought that was pretty good. Right blend of poetic and disgusting. Suits you.”
Laura blinked again, then laughed, seeming surprised by the fact that she was laughing. Stiles smirked, and when she’d caught her breath again, she shook her head and said, “D’you know? I’m pretty sure you have been hanging out with my brother.”
Stiles shrugged, smiling. “He’s hard to ignore.”
She sobered a little. “Yeah. Hard to live with, too. But…you probably already know that.”
“Well, yeah and no. I mean…I don’t know this Derek, exactly. The Derek I know is…was…” Stiles shook his head and cleared his throat and continued, “Angrier. More impulsive. Dangerous.”
Laura hummed. “I think those terms apply to Derek no matter the time and place, at this point. My brother hides it well, but he’s…so furious, even now.”
“Can’t blame him, really.”
“Well, no, and I don’t. But I can and do worry for him. And I can’t…I can’t be productive as an alpha when Derek is terrified I’m going to try to replace our family.” Her voice cracked a little, but only just a little. “When he treats every prospective member of a pack with distrust and anger. It isn’t territorial bullshit so much as it is fear.”
“That you’ll leave him,” Stiles finished. “That he won’t have you, when you’re all he’s got left.”
She nodded, sighed a little. “We’re never going to survive, short or long term, without a pack. I’ve debated whether we should even stay, but…being at the house feels right to both of us, and it’s the place I’d want to raise a family of my own, even given…everything that’s happened there. I just need him to trust me with this.”
“I. I mean, I don’t know, I can’t say for sure, but. You’re his sister. I don’t think he mistrusts you. It’s everyone else in the world. Outsiders. People who could come in and hurt his family again. And I know he doesn’t like me or trust me, but I think I could show him. That I won’t hurt him or you, that I just. I just want to know him, again. Whatever…happens after that, happens, even if it’s nothing.”
Laura tapped the table, thinking for another moment. “You and Scott,” she said eventually. “You should come by the house again sometime. Help me clear some of the junk from inside so we can start the rest of the renovation.” She cocked her head. “You’re on summer break, right?”
“Yeah. We could come by anytime.”
“There’d be cookies and coffee in it for you,” Laura added. “Just in case you need to convince Scott.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t…know if it will help, for sure, but it might. Derek needs to know that not everyone is…like her. Especially not all humans. Do you think you’re willing to spend the time on my brother that he needs? Again?”
Stiles looked at her, the concerned fold in her brow, the way she held herself, like she was in control of the situation, even as she asked for help. She really was made for this, he thought. She wasn’t half as crazy and she seemed to make significantly better leadership decisions, but Stiles found himself thinking of Derek’s exposed throat, and how his shoulders had leaned into the motion of baring it, a reflex, ingrained in his bones. As messed up as they still were, these two that were all that was left, they were - together - a little more right and whole than Derek had been on his own. And Stiles knew there was no question whatsoever what he’d spend time doing, as much time as it took, the rest of his goddamn life if necessary.
“Lady, I just got a new lease on life,” he said, with a soft, crooked smile. “So let’s not waste any more of it talking and do this thing. Got any suggestions?”