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They start sleeping together after she turns nineteen, and if the first time is all wandering hands and hard kisses and her hands fisted in the sheets, the times after that are different, like they’re more aware of who the other person is instead of just another body. It scares her a little, the way all the history they have looms over her like a dark cloud or her mother’s memory, and Derek always leaves out the doors to the balcony with a guilty look like he’s regretting it already.
She doesn’t push him, never instigates it. She might not like Derek over much, but she still doesn’t want to add to the heap of emotional trauma that hums beneath his skin like a living being. She’s never the one to touch first, and sometimes she thinks that this is the last time, he isn’t coming back, but he always does.
She gets used to it after a while, and though it never quite stops being strange, her smile doesn’t dim when she rolls over in the morning and he’s still there, or when they spend more time kissing like they’re teenagers in their first relationship than any actual fucking.
(She’s not in love with him, understand. She knows how love feels, how love with Scott felt, and this isn’t it. It’s just... nice.)
She knows the wolves can smell it on them, and grins the first time Scott sniffs deeply and looks vaguely disturbed. Other than that, she pretty much ignores the fact that everyone knows because there are more pressing problems in their lives than the two of them sleeping together.
Until someone does care.
“Stiles, what are you talking about?”
“Look, Allison, most of us determinedly don’t think about you and Derek, y’know, together, except for a few marginally confusing dreams because Derek’s hot but he also has a serious case of brood-face - how do you get past tha-“ She cuts him off with a pointed sigh, because most of the time she indulges his rambling, but he’s just told her that her aunt had sex with Derek. She needs a moment.
She stares at the wall in front of her like she could set it on fire, until her eyes blur and her hand shakes. She doesn’t notice Stiles slipping out the door, or the look he gives her. She hears him though, like the words are burned into her skin.
“Talk to Derek about it - there’s more.” More? she thinks, and wonders if Derek is so twisted as to replace Kate with her niece, to slide an Allison into the niches of his heart where the woman who killed his family once was.
Derek’s on her balcony that night like nothing happened - because, she realises dimly, for him, nothing has changed. It’s only her that needs to know whether she’s being used.
He kisses her the same as always, a little too much teeth and one hand on the base of her neck, and she tries to fit into the spaces he leaves the way she always has, but she can feel that it isn’t working.
“I can’t tonight,” she says, unwraps her arms from his waist and steps back.
“Okay,” he says, and she wonders if this is it.
He’s almost out the doors before she speaks.
“You slept with Kate.”
He just looks at her with those eyes she can never quite figure out the colour of, and disappears into the trees below her apartment.
She really doesn’t expect him to come back, after that, because it seemed final, but he makes his way up the trees and onto her balcony, and she’s afraid of what her face is telling him when she goes outside to meet him instead of letting him inside.
“We have to talk about this,” she tells him, fully expecting him to climb right back down the balcony She feels tense, almost posed, like a wooden doll held up with strings.
“I know,” he says, and all the fight goes out of her.
“You had sex with Kate.” He nods, silent.
“My aunt Kate?” Another nod.
“Why? Did she love you? Did you-“ she stumbles over the words. “Did she know about werewolves when she slept with you?”
“She used me in order to learn the layout of my house so she could trap my entire family in the basement and kill all the filthy werewolves. Is that what you were looking for?” he asks, all sarcasm and bitterness and hurt. It’s her turn to remain silent, all words dying in her throat before she can breathe them out, because she doesn’t know how to deal with this. The last two times she didn’t know how to handle something, she hallucinated her mother, and tried to kill Derek in revenge for her death.
“She was a hunter, Allison, what did you expect?”
“I’m a hunter.”
“You also tried to kill me.”
“Maybe it’s a family trait.” She doesn’t know what makes her say it, in the heat of this conversation where shadows are being brought up from the dark, but.
“I always thought it was,” he says, and his mouth is no longer fixed in a grim line.
“Thought?”
“Then you saved my pack, in that factory two years ago.” And I thought you might be different, she finishes, because if there’s anything important that stands out in the handful of things she knows about Derek, it’s that he puts family and pack above all else, and it means something that she helped them, even if it wasn’t for him.
They’re entirely silent after that; she doesn’t know what he’s thinking about, but her own thoughts don’t leave her enough room to wonder, not really. She must fall asleep sitting on the wooden floor, because the next time her eyes open, she’s bathed in yellow sunlight, and Derek is gone.
He appears on the balcony outside her bedroom the next night, when she’s just given up on him coming at all, even if she didn’t really know if she wanted him to or not.
“Are you going to let me in?” he asks, and she’s still learning the patterns of his face, but she thinks he sounds more cautious than the usual Derek, who runs into the fight without a plan and bit three teenagers because he wanted to give them something better but didn’t know how.
She slides the doors open silently, stands back to let him in. He smiles, tiny and fragile.
They don’t do anything that night, just sit in the near dark and watch the moon out the window, and she never used to like silence but now it’s a comfort, the fact that she can be surrounded by her demons and they won’t overcome her. The darkness around her heart is still there, but silence doesn’t overwhelm her like it did at first.
She falls asleep again to the sound of his breathing, and when she wakes up again, she’s alone in her room.
It works like that for the next few weeks, them not speaking or touching at all, and if the distance between them hums like a live wire, neither of them mentions it. She gets used to his presence again, but differently; his hands aren’t hot on her hips or his lips on hers, and she might have slept with him more times than she had digits but she’s never felt this comfortable before.
It doesn’t take long before the silence becomes strained, stagnant, like they both want to do something more but
And they’re still silent, but sometimes he shifts so their thighs are touching or her hair brushes his shoulder, and something settles within her. It must change something in him, too, because he’s the first one to break the silence, even if he does it seconds before he climbs back out the window, as if he didn’t want to face her once he’d said it.
“I loved Kate and then she killed my family, but I didn’t stop loving her completely until I came back to Beacon Hills,” he says, not like an apology but like he’s waiting for her judgement. She gets it, though - she has to divide Kate into hunter and sister-aunt so she can reconcile the part of her that still waits for a phone call or the visits she had looked forward to so much.
“You’re not a bad person, Derek,” she says in lieu of a million other phrases that she now hates. She doesn’t say I’m sorry or I understand or it’s not your fault, because she’s been told them so many times, with Mom and Boyd and Erica, that the thought of saying those same words makes her tongue taste acrid. She knows he can hear her heartbeat, that she’s telling the truth as she knows it, and he must believe her, because the distance they had carefully maintained is shattered the next time he enters her room, like the cracking of a window.
Crack.
“She tasted like smoke,” Derek whispers into her hair, and their bodies aren’t touching but she can feel the heat of his.
Crack.
“She told me we were meant to find each other,” he says, his breath tickling the tiny hairs above her lips, and she holds his face in her hands until he slumps against her.
Crack.
“She was my TA and I never brought her home, but Cora used to tell me I smelled like gunpowder after I saw her,” he tells her collarbones, never looking at her face, and she hear I should have seen the signs with every breath.
Crack.
“She told me she loved me, and her heart never stuttered,” he tells her, sounding more broken than the first time he told her his secrets, and she closes the gap between them and kisses him until his heartbeat smooths out under her palm.
She still isn’t in love with him, but she understands him now, and that’s more than she thought she would ever have with the man she referred to for months as her mother’s killer.
(She’s still not in love with him, but the scary part is that she could be, someday, because he trusts her and she trusts him, and sometimes she looks at him and her heart catches in her throat, because he’s not quite whole and neither is she. She tangles her fingers with the werewolf in her arms, and listens to his breathing until she falls asleep, and it’s enough.)