Chapter Text
Twenty minutes later, Stiles was still pretending.
Technically, it was working.
Nobody had asked if he was okay again. Scott had stopped doing the thing where his concern filled the room like fog. Lydia had gone back to making occasional devastating comments from the armchair. Isaac was still talking about the movie, possibly the same movie, possibly a different movie. Stiles had lost his place somewhere around the third mention of a boat.
The itch had not stopped.
It sat under his shirt in a steady, crawling thrum across his chest and under his arms. Moving made it sharper. Holding still made it easier to notice. The cotton was soft, which almost made it worse, because there was nothing to blame. No scratchy tag. No rough seam doing anything unusual. Just fabric resting against skin that had already decided contact was a problem.
The shirt was only exacerbating it.
That was the word his brain kept reaching for, because apparently even miserable, he was still annoying. Exacerbating. Making an existing thing louder. Giving the itch something to push against. Every breath shifted the fabric just enough to remind his skin it was there, and every reminder made the urge to scratch flare up under his ribs.
Stiles kept his hands on his knees.
Miserable but not scratching.
Derek appeared in front of him with a folded throw blanket over one arm. It was thick and fuzzy and the one everyone fought over because it was the softest.
Stiles looked at the blanket, then at Derek, then back at the blanket.
“No,” he said.
Derek raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know what this is, but no.”
“Up,” Derek said.
“Wow. Fantastic explanation. Very collaborative.”
Derek only waited, which was somehow worse than answering. Derek had a deeply irritating talent for making silence feel like a complete sentence with punctuation, and Stiles hated that it worked on him.
He pushed himself up from the couch with as much dignity as he could manage while every nerve ending from his collarbones to his ribs filed a complaint. The movement shifted his shirt across his chest, and the itch sharpened immediately, not new, not sudden, just louder. His hand twitched toward it before he caught himself.
Derek saw it and, mercifully, did not say anything.
He stepped past Stiles and shook the throw open over the couch, covering the fabric in one efficient motion before smoothing it down with his palm. There was no announcement, no explanation, no careful little speech about why it might help. Just the blanket appearing between Stiles and one more surface, soft and thin and worn smooth without being fuzzy.
Stiles crossed his arms, then uncrossed them when the movement pulled the shirt wrong under one arm.
“So we’re redecorating,” he said.
Derek looked at him.
Stiles looked at the covered couch.
Then back at Derek.
The blanket sat there, absurdly soft and completely unhelpful while Stiles was still wearing the thing currently touching every place his skin had decided to hate.
Derek’s gaze dropped once to Stiles’s hand, which had curled uselessly near his side again.
Then he said, “Take it off.”
The room went quiet so fast it felt physical.
Stiles stared at him. “Wow. I’m not a stripper, and I don’t do that for free. Buy me dinner fir—”
Derek didn't blink. “Take off the shirt.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s bothering you.”
“Yeah but I’m fine.”
“You aren’t.”
“Realistically I am.”
Derek closed his eyes as he breathed in slowly. “Take. It. Off.”
Stiles gaped at him like a fish. Derek sighed back, “The cold air will help.”
Stiles looked down at himself. The cotton rested against his chest, innocent and unbearable. Soft fabric. Normal fabric. Fabric he had worn before without wanting to crawl through the nearest wall. Every breath shifted it. Every tiny shift fed the steady thrum under his skin.
He wanted it off.
He wanted everyone to stop existing before he took it off.
Both things were true, which seemed rude. There should have been a scheduling conflict.
“No,” Stiles said, because it was the first word he could reach.
Derek nodded once.
Not offended. Not impatient.
Just accepting it.
That was worse.
He turned slightly, like he was going to leave the blanket there and go back to the kitchen, and Stiles hated him so much in that second he almost itched less from pure spite.
“Wait,” Stiles said.
Derek stopped.
Stiles swallowed.
Scott had gone very still. Lydia was looking at Isaac with the concentrated force of someone silently threatening him into becoming furniture. Isaac, for once in his life, seemed to understand the assignment and stared at the blank television like it contained secrets.
Stiles looked at Derek’s shoulder instead of his face.
“If I do, nobody makes it weird.”
“Nobody’s making it weird,” Scott said immediately.
Stiles pointed at him without looking. “That made it weird.”
Scott closed his mouth.
“Fine,” he said. “But if anyone says anything about my nipples, I’m defecting to another pack.”
Lydia turned fully toward Isaac. “Tell me about the boat again.”
Isaac blinked. “The boat?”
“The boat,” Lydia said, with murder in her diction.
“Right. The boat. So the boat is, uh, structurally important.”
“Great,” Stiles said. “Love a structurally important boat.”
Isaac looked relieved to have been given permission to keep talking, which was impressive considering no one had actually given it to him.
Derek was still standing there.
That was the problem.
Not the blanket. Not the couch. Not even the shirt, technically. The shirt was just making everything worse by continuing to exist against skin that had already declared a state of emergency.
The problem was Derek standing there with the same expression he used when Stiles was being difficult in a way that was not fooling him.
“Take off the shirt,” Derek said again.
Stiles looked at him. “You know, repeating it doesn’t magically make it less weird.”
“It’s bothering you.”
“A lot of things bother me.”
Derek’s eyes dropped briefly to Stiles’s hand.
Stiles realized he had curled his fingers into the hem of the shirt again, pulling it away from his chest without meaning to. He let go immediately.
The fabric settled back against his skin.
The itch brightened.
His jaw tightened.
Derek saw that too.
Of course he did.
“I hate you,” Stiles said.
“No, you don’t.”
“I could start.”
Derek’s mouth did the almost-smile thing, which was rude because this was not a smiling situation. This was an itchy, exposed, socially catastrophic situation in which Stiles was being asked to admit that a completely normal shirt was currently too much for him.
Stiles looked at the blanket Derek had spread over the couch. It was the soft one, thick and fuzzy, the one Scott always grabbed first and Lydia pretended not to want even though she absolutely did. On the couch it looked ridiculous. Too cozy for Derek’s furniture. Too gentle for the room.
It also looked like it might help.
Which was the worst part, obviously.
Stiles swallowed.
“This doesn’t fix it,” he said, because that felt important.
“I know.”
“It’s still going to itch.”
“I know.”
“It’s not the shirt causing it.”
“I know.”
Derek said it every time without impatience. Not like Stiles was arguing. Not like Stiles was making excuses. Just like he understood the distinction and was not asking Stiles to prove it.
Stiles hated that more than if Derek had been wrong.
He grabbed the hem of his shirt.
For a second, he didn’t move.
Taking his shirt off was not actually a big deal. Objectively. He knew that. He had changed in locker rooms. He had been shirtless around Scott plenty of times. The issue was not skin exposure in a normal way.
The issue was that everyone knew why.
Everyone knew he was taking it off because his body had made ordinary contact unbearable, and there was no way to joke that into being less true.
The itch crawled under his left arm again.
That decided it.
Stiles pulled the shirt up and over his head.
It was awful for exactly as long as it took to do it. The cotton dragged across his chest, brushed under both arms, scraped over the places that were already lit up, and then it was gone.
The itch stayed.
Of course it stayed.
But the constant pressure of the shirt was gone with it. The sleeves were gone. The soft, maddening drag across his chest with every breath was gone. The air hit his skin and did not fix anything, but it gave the flare less to argue with.
Stiles stood there for a second with the shirt clenched in one hand.
Derek held out his hand.
Still not making a thing of it.
Stiles looked at the blanket-covered couch, then at Derek, then at the couch again.
“Sit,” Derek said.
“Bossy.”
“You’re still standing.”
Stiles sat.
Carefully at first, because his body had earned suspicion honestly. The blanket shifted under him, soft and loose in a way his shirt was not. The blanket was warm against his back where it touched, but not tight. Not clinging or tucked under his arms the way the shirt had. It was something he could lean into or away from without it following him.
His chest stayed bare to the air.
The itch still moved under the surface, but without the cotton brushing over it every time he breathed, it lost some of its teeth.
Derek went back to the kitchen without looking at him, which somehow made the whole thing easier to survive. No speech. No check-in. No tiny victorious acknowledgment that he had been right.
Just the blanket under Stiles’s back.
The air against his chest.
The itch still there, but quieter around the edges.