Work Text:
"Do you ever hear from Derek?"
Only many years of wolfing - ha - down food while planning around certain death kept Stiles from spitting out or choking on his mouthful of mashed potatoes. His father didn't look guilty for his timing or particularly concerned for Stiles's health. What he looked was patient and mildly curious.
Family dinners were rare enough in their whirlwind of supernatural mentoring and law enforcement, and Stiles had absolutely become more vocal about missing them since graduation. But what he had forgotten in his desire to stock up on valuable Stilinski time before he left for college was that dinners with his father were usually an exercise in torture and mortification. Too late, Stiles. Too late.
He could have accused his dad of waiting until he was swallowing to ask, but if he was being honest, Stiles had forgotten to eat lunch and most of breakfast in favor of Assassin's Creed, and had been sort of hoovering down everything within reach since he'd come downstairs. So it wasn't like he'd offered his dad a leisurely stretch of time to work up to a question gently. And they could still both do with a little benefit of the doubt on the family bonding front.
"Derek Hale?" he asked. It was only half stalling for time. Three quarters at most. The Sheriff Face looking back at Stiles gently suggested that he was welcome to keep playing dumb, but it probably wasn't going to help.
"Yes," his dad answered, his smile starting to curl around the word. "Derek Hale."
It was the first time that he'd heard his father say the name without the accused murderer implied. It wasn't quite "Derek Hale, Werewolf Ally," but at least it didn't sound like he'd hate it if Stiles answered yes.
He hadn't though, heard from Derek. Or Cora. Or Peter, for that matter. The werewolf quotient in his life had been steadily reduced until it was just Scott and Isaac's weird little pack of two, with increasingly rare yet distracting appearances from Ethan and Aiden.
Since Stiles couldn't picture Scott offering anyone the bite, ever, and Isaac was unlikely to let a new werewolf within ten miles of Scott for the rest of his entire life, it seemed like a safe bet to stay that way.
"Uh, nope," Stiles said. "Should I have?" And then, when his father just looked politely inquisitive, "Wait, have you heard something?" He gulped down some milk to clear the last of the traitorous starch from his throat, and then paused to wipe his mouth and lean forward into a proper gripe. "I thought we agreed that you'd keep me in the loop on any possible werewolf-related business! No animal mutilations, no decapitated or otherwise severed bodies, no sudden crops of creepy flowers- "
His dad held his hands up, infuriatingly calm. "I haven't heard anything, son. I just thought you might have. I know he was important to you, and you've seemed distracted lately." He leaned back and let that thought sit for a moment, and as it stretched out, it was clear that they were both well aware of what 'distracted' could be code for.
Stiles sighed, a little disappointed for all that, and forced himself to relax as well.
He had thought that Derek would come back, had even specifically been keeping a list of things to ask him for a while. Scott had been more doubtful, even if he'd kept up a fairly positive attitude for Isaac's sake, but it'd been over a year since anyone they could find had heard from one of the Hales, and it wasn't for lack of trying on Stiles's part.
"I meant it, Dad. I promised I'd tell you if I'd heard anything, or if it looked like there might be trouble. It's not Derek, or even trouble really. There hasn't been anything since. Well. There's hasn't been anything new, anything we don't already know how to handle. Total radio silence on the creepy, growly front."
There was so much understatement to that, Stiles wouldn't have been surprised if saying it had generated some sort of spontaneous understatement award ceremony, but it was still true at its core. There was so much that they didn't know, that he hadn't been able to figure out, that the potential quite literally terrified him sometimes, and the waiting could be the worst of it all. They could all do with a little less quiet.
In his more frustrated moments, Stiles had even toyed with the idea of pressing charges against Derek - surely there was something in their shared history that was an actual prosecutable offense - just to be able to bring law enforcement boots on the ground into it, because they'd run into a wall pursuing every other option.
But again, probably not the best plan if he - if they wanted to find Derek and not immediately lose him again.
"He's just all," Stiles made a frustrated gesture that tried to imply melodrama but probably fell short. "True love, yadda-yadda-yadda, Romeo and Juliet. Er, without the suicide part. Allison's going away to school, and Scott's got all these conflicted Allison feelings and pack feelings." Still hesitant territory, then, the werewolf talk, if his dad's expression was any clue. The less said about that, then. "It was a rough year. They'll probably be fine." And if not, it wasn't like there was anything Stiles could do for him on either front. Just one more facet of life for which Stiles was woefully underprepared. "He's a good kid," his dad said. "And he's got a great parent in Melissa. I'm sure he'll come through." Stiles made a dubious noise. "I'll keep an eye on him too, son."
That summer, Stiles's time was destined to be equally split between awkward conversations with his father and cryptic ones with Deaton. Stiles flattered himself that he was contributing his share of mystery to the Deaton conversations, but considering how Deaton had avoided being killed about a million times, it was pretty likely that he was observant enough to be on to Stiles and was just being polite.
"I just don't understand why there isn't something, like, useful I can learn to do? Like locate my keys or lost pets. Something that isn't based on an assumption of impending death of the Grr, Argh variety."
Deaton looked at him steadily, and Stiles let his hands drop to his side from where they'd been curled into his best impression of werewolf claws.
"Fair enough," Deaton said. "Learning to focus your magic towards a specific goal. Why don't we start with fire."
It turned out that trying to learn everything about magic from basic principles took sort of a long time. And while in some ways, Deaton remained the least helpful mentor ever, he had also impressed on Stiles that poor planning was pretty likely to result in him exploding or summoning something from beyond the grave that wanted to eat his face off.
Deaton continued to slowly dole out elementary spells for Stiles to learn and then experiment with. Light a candle, blow it out, move an empty soda can without crushing it, cushion a water balloon before it hit the floor, separate a pair of magnets. There was a lot of meditation, which Stiles was awful at, to the surprise of no one in the room. There were a lot of books, each one dustier and heavier than the last, and seriously, had no one heard of a flatbed scanner? But then there was a moment, every time something worked, that was amazing. Awesome, even, in the truest sense of the word. Stiles felt connected to things in a way that he could never have imagined, which was, again, awesome, even if he hadn't found a way to talk about it that didn't make him sound like he was high. He imagined it was what Scott had felt like, learning to manage his new senses. Scott mostly listened to whatever new story Stiles had bubbling out of him, and then said, "that's cool, man. Good for you. Madden?" which Stiles totally appreciated. Sometimes, if it wasn't too hot out, they went for a run instead.
It also didn't take long until the wonder of being a first-year at Hogwarts slid into the frustration and tedium of being a first-year at Hogwarts. Also unsurprising, since Stiles hadn't demonstrated much capacity for linear lesson plans.
"Everything hinges on developing a feel for the elemental forces," Deaton said. "I honestly can't be more helpful than that. It's possible to combine them in more advanced ways, but first you need to master the components, and that's something you have to find within yourself."
"Be one with the force," Stiles muttered. "Well, we've already got the 'fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering' part down."
He just wanted to learn to do one thing that couldn't be replicated by completely conventional means. Like the mountain ash, that'd been cool.
"So, astral projection, is that a real thing? Like, outside the death-seeking magic tree and all."
Deaton studied Stiles for a moment before responding. "If what you're you're searching for has nothing shielding it, yes, it's possible. It takes training, and focus, like everything else, but it's possible to glimpse."
"Cool," Stiles said. It was cool, and certainly in no way suspicious that Stiles was asking about it.
"You seem awfully preoccupied with locating things, and with distance, Stiles. Is there something you'd like to talk about?"
Stiles shook his head. "I'm going to pass on the therapeutic talking it out for a while, if you don't mind."
"Preoccupations can take form in one's magic, Stiles. It's hard to keep them from doing it, actually. You either need to face it or let it go, or it is going to keep holding you back."
Which was the whole problem, wasn't it? Stiles would have very much liked to face his preoccupation. If his preoccupation was doing a less excellent job of hiding, he'd get right on that.
Stiles spent a lot of time over the summer meditating, trying to listen to the universe or whatever, in between the spell research and trying to not make his father nervous. If nothing else, his resting heart rate was lower than he could remember, and that was supposed to be a good thing.
That, and he was waiting for a stretch of a few sunny days in a row before sitting his ass down in the woods for who knew how long, to try and "glimpse" who knew what. It was one thing to commit to a campaign of possibly mystically stalking an absent werewolf, but it was something else entirely to sit on his ass in the forest on a day when the only thing he was guaranteed to get from it was cold, damp boxers.
For all the time he felt like he'd put into planning, when the day arrived, it all felt a bit second-rate if he was being honest. But then, that was why he was hiding in the woods like a loser instead of showing off his ingenuity to Deaton. Looking at the lengths that he, Scott and Allison had gone to to find their parents, a bit of mystical smoke and a bloody t-shirt that he'd found behind Derek's abandoned mattress didn't seem likely to do the trick.
But if he failed, at least this time he wasn't being held under ice water.
And he did. Fail. He sat there, and he breathed, and he cleared his mind. He set fire to the sachet of herbs he'd prepared, and cleared his mind some more. And when he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in a clearing in the woods. And his legs had gone numb. Which was. Well, which was not good.
So maybe he wouldn't mention this bit to his father right away, in this new and improved trusting of each others' judgment that they were still working on. Baby steps.
The next time, because of course there was a next time, he didn't try to shake Scott off the trail of his plan, and brought him along, "just in case."
In case what, Stiles had no idea, but it was nice that Scott offered to go with him, and Stiles triple-checked that both their phones were on silent before starting a new recording in case there was a clue there. Bless him, because he had all the good intentions in the world, but unless their lives were under active threat, Scott's attention to detail and recall for conversations with anyone other than Allison just weren't ever going to be sharp.
Stiles blinked, or tried to, but his vision wouldn't clear, like he was looking under water or behind smudged glass. It was full dark, though, even though the sun had barely started dropping behind the trees when Stiles lit the fire. The pit in front of him contained nothing but charcoal, no sign of the drifting green smoke that should have been there. He'd done, something at least, even if he couldn't say what. He supposed he was willing to give up the frightening clarity and immediacy of the sacrificial visions for the greatly decreased risk of death.
He closed his eyes again, and when he drew in his first deep breath, he could still smell the smoldering herbs. But when he opened them again, Scott was gripping his shoulder, and whatever progress he had made was gone. He could move again, and the fire was completely out in front of him. Clouds had rolled in over the moon, and Scott had his cell phone out and the flash on so that Stiles could see.
"What'd you see?"
Stiles couldn't quite manage to hold in his disappointed sigh and shook his head no, and Scott's expression drooped at the corners. "Nothing. Again. Didn't work."
Unlike Stiles, Lydia was perfectly content to leave her supernatural talents unexamined. Until someone could demonstrate a connection between foretelling a stranger's death and either predicting next season's on-trend skirt length or winning the Morgan Prize, she had better things to do with her time, like pointing out Stiles's inadequacies in the sassiest way possible.
"So, it doesn't work," she said. "That's all you've got, really? 'It doesn't work' ?"
"Right. It doesn't work. No se funciona. You now know exactly as much as I do, unless you'd like to read a bunch of awful books about something you can't learn."
Lydia makes a face. Inefficiency is really not her thing. "Have you tried casting it with someone else as the target? Like Scott?"
"But I know where Scott... A control. Yes, Lydia, I am a complete idiot."
"Honestly, Stiles, it's a wonder that you ever focused long enough pass a class. There's a reason for systems besides "do everything that occurs to you, all at once."
"I'm sorry that my brain doesn't automatically apply the scientific method to my magical werewolf finding expedition," he snapped back.
Playing mystical hide and seek with Scott was sort of fun, but all it did was teach Stiles that he could find Scott, and not why he couldn't find Derek. If he changed the herbs in the fire, he got nothing. If he didn't have an item to focus on, nothing. If something distracted him, he snapped right back to consciousness: nothing. He got Lydia to agree to a trial when she flew to visit family in Massachusetts. He'd even had a painfully awkward conversation with Isaac about whether Isaac had, maybe, possibly, kept something else with a tie to Derek that Stiles could use.
All of which begged the question: what if he couldn't find Derek because Derek was really gone, the permanent kind of gone that mortals weren't supposed to come back from?
And then, one day when Stiles opened his eyes, on one of the stones surrounding the fire pit, there was a little percolator coffee pot just like his parents-
"Oh my God," Stiles said. "He's camping. Derek Hale, you asshole!"
He jerked, catching even himself off guard. It had been stupid to pull himself out of it, this he realized almost as soon as he did it, because one success - or even one reasonable assumption of success - didn't mean he'd actually seen anything. But he'd found something, someone who was definitely not himself. It wasn't progress, precisely, but it was hope.
Lydia found Stiles in the library a week later, surrounded by pages of over-hasty notes and worse sketches.
"Are you sure he's worth the time to find? Not that I wouldn't try to find him if he was my werewolf and I'd lost him, because he is hot. But Stiles, honey, there has to be an easier way. Or a less defective werewolf to ask for help."
"1) He's not mine, and 2) he's not. Okay, yeah, he's pretty damaged. That's not what this is about. That's not why I'm- That's not why we're trying to find him."
Lydia hummed her doubt, but didn't say anything else.
"And it's working, I guess, but I don't seem to be able to view anything sentient. Just a bunch of trees and rocks, no birds or mammals that I could tell, can't really hear anything either. Not sure about insects."
"So what type of trees were they?" Lydia asked. "Have you started mapping yet?"
"I'm sorry," Stiles said. "The what?"
Lydia rolled her eyes. "Yes, Stiles. The trees. You said it was nothing but trees and rocks, and surface geology is notoriously imprecise. So what. Did the trees. Look like."
"Oh my God, you're a genius!" The girl at the next table over shushed him, and when Lydia rolled her eyes Stiles chose to believe it was at her and not himself.
A quick search in the library's catalog revealed that they had a copy of the Audubon tree identification book that Stiles had loved as a kid.
There was probably something to be said for an image-based search, but until they learned how to take snapshots directly from his brain, that would have depended on Stiles being able to draw. Anything. Which he couldn't, not for the sake of science nor art, which his elective grades would attest to.
Although to be fair to his teachers, they'd been grading him on effort, not execution, and there hadn't been a lot of that either once Stiles had realized there were things he was innately better at.
Anyway, the book. It'd been a lot more fun when he was ten and bored on a weekend looking at flowers, as opposed to cold and stiff and sitting in his car trying to recall as much as he could before it slipped away entirely. But again, it was something. Progress.
Even with Lydia's help, by the end of the summer, Stiles was still cobbling together the world's slowest geography project, but he was also trying to spend time with his dad, trying to convince his dad that he'd be okay on his own, trying to distract Scott from Allison's imminent departure, trying to distract Scott from his own imminent departure, trying to figure out if Isaac viewed him as a threat for disturbing his alpha... It was a lot. And while he wasn't yearning to throw himself into college life, as the end of September approached, he was guiltily glad for a break and a change of venue.
A couple times a week, Stiles drove out to the nearest campground and set himself down in front of a fire pit, and tried to find Derek. He'd imagined college with more parties and less sitting by himself in the woods.
Sometimes it looked different, maybe, but it was hard to tell one ring of rocks from another, and despite his best efforts, trees were trees were trees about as far as Stiles could retain them. The changing season helped, turning leaves another set of data points to correlate with sunsets and... it was still a whole freaking lot of land. Maybe in the spring, it'd be easier.
That was an awful thought, that they'd still be looking for Derek into the spring.
Stiles kept up with the test runs as well, just in case. That's how he found out that his roommate's girlfriend was cheating on him, actually, which was information that he could have done without, and a fun exercise in the ethics of magic use that he figured was unlikely to be covered in any of his core classes.
Any sort of sign that it's really you would be nice, Derek. Anything. Y'know, a leather jacket, or something you've turned to stone with the force of your scowl. Rabbits dead of boredom, I don't know. Something.
It wasn't until Thanksgiving that Stiles felt confident enough to even think about talking to his dad about what they'd been trying to do. He was fairly certain that he'd lost the right to play the, "I'm 18, I can do what I want," card for at least a good two years into his supposed adulthood, so if he got shot down, he'd. Well. He'd probably do something ill-advised that'd make his dad trust him even less than he already did. So he focused his attention on planning everything else, or at least coming up with a really convincing lie to cover the bald spots where they just couldn't figure some things out without information they were never going to have without other sources. Or Derek emerging from the woods to interact with civilization and maybe some street signs.
He let the talk with his father slip until the weekend and their turkey comas had cleared. "I know you don't really like to talk about the werewolf thing," Stiles said into a commercial break. "But I need to talk to you about the werewolf thing."
His dad looked away from the television, and away from Stiles, for a few seconds before turning off the football game that Stiles hadn't been able to follow. "Okay."
"You asked if I'd heard from Derek Hale, and that's the thing. I haven't heard anything, none of us have, but I think we've figured out where he is," he said. "Roughly. Give or take fifteen miles of wilderness." He held up his hands. "And I know that sounds like a lot of distance, because it is, but I'm worried about Scott. I know you said that you don't want me making decisions because of Scott wants, but this was sort of a big deal since I was going away to school, and I think it's become a bigger deal since I left. He doesn't seem okay, and it might just be and Allison, but Derek and his sister were on their own for years, and they were. Well, they were maybe not okay, but they seemed to be doing better than Scott is. And since Derek was born a wolf, he knows a lot more than we've been able to figure out on our own."
"I thought you said he wasn't in Scott's pack."
"He's not, at least we don't think he is. We're not even really sure how that works," Stiles said.
"And you trust him."
"As much as I can trust anyone who I haven't seen in two years and who doesn't talk when I do see him, yes. I'm just being honest, dad, but I think he's Scott's best chance."
"And what does Scott think?"
"Scott thinks that having Derek here will help me not worry so much. Which is true. But mostly I want him back here all for Scott, and I'm not sure Scott's ready to hear that yet. But there was a big gap between "more mature" and "ready to welcome back the biggest source of emotional baggage in your life, and yes that includes your father, who was really sort of an asshole."
"But I think we've found him now. It's a long story, there's some magic, and a sunset table and a lot of foliage mapping, and Lydia is a genius. And I thought, it it seems like he's still where we think he is, that we could go try to find him over Winter Break. Maybe."
Stiles's dad called the first week in December. "I saw Scott the other day. He didn't look well, and I've been thinking about what you said, that you thought Derek could help. I made some calls, based on what you said, and ran the VIN on the Camaro, and it seems like you might be right. There's a record of sale near Bozeman, Montana. So if you want to go try, it's fine with me."
"It's a good combination, the supernatural and the practical, don't you think? It'd be good for you to remember that next year."
It took some delicate negotiation with Isaac and Deaton to get Scott away for the week, but then they were clear for takeoff on the type of road trip that Stiles never could have imagined when they were twelve years old and wanted to be grown up and anywhere but Beacon Hills.
"You call home," his dad said. "Every day. And if he's in some sort of trouble, you ask for help. You don't go charging in alone."
"You don't lie to me," Stiles heard.
For as much time as Stiles had spent doing it, hollering into the woods never felt any less embarrassing.
"I know you're out here," he called. "And I know you must be curious, so I promise that I will tell you the fascinating story of how I figured out where you are, in excruciating detail. Especially if I have to keep myself busy walking a grid for hours out here until I find your camp."
Talking and keeping track of his paces was a lot more complicated than Stiles had anticipated, which was sort of messing with his system of dropping pins for the grid he was supposedly walking, but the GPS map on his phone indicated that he was doing a pretty good job of correcting himself into a straight line. He thought. He could definitely find his way back to the car at least, and if Derek actually didn't want to be found, there was no way that they'd be able to catch him, even if Stiles stuck to the plan long enough to find where he'd been the night before.
So, boisterous conversation with himself and a fair amount of thrashing through the underbrush and crunching thin sheets of ice.
"Or I can have Scott come search. He's in the car. I'm not sure if you can tell that from wherever you are, but he is. I figured you might not want to see him, so I asked him to stay there for now, but my dad wasn't about to let me drive practically to Canada all by myself, and then Scott wouldn't wait in town in case you've gone feral and you try to rip my face off."
Scott was great, and Stiles tried not to think of it as being devaluing when Stiles tried to do something innocuous without back-up and Scott wouldn't let him. As opposed to Scott, who consistently decided that the best option was for him to go off on his own against a clearly identified danger. But Stiles had worked really hard at being able to at least defend himself, and he'd been prepared to trick Scott if he'd had to, to get first crack at talking to Derek alone. It was gratifying that Scott had just looked at him for a minute, and then said "okay."
On the other hand, walking around the woods alone was pretty boring. "So it would be really awesome if you'd just show up. You can do one of your fancy leaping roll things, and I promise to be really impressed."
Upon reflection, Stiles thought, maybe what he had actually wanted to do was walk in arcs out from the car. Oh well. If Derek was going to be a jerk about it, then he'd just tell Scott to go run him down and maul it out or whatever they needed to do to start being werewolf bros.
"Or I can keep thrashing around and scaring off the wildlife. I figure you've got to be hunting for at least some of your food, and I can make woodland creatures really scarce if I want to."
The forest floor didn't leave a whole lot of opportunity for thrashing around, to be honest. The snowy bits were just an invitation to frostbite, and the bare patches were a bit too damp for a good rustle, but maybe if he stamped his feet or something, the vibrations would travel enough that Derek would think he was making good on his threat.
On his fifth chorus of Henry the 8th, Stiles came up to the creek that had been marked on the map, the one he had been hoping was seasonal-but-not-this-one, and he had to decide how committed he was to that penetrating the forest plan, versus how he felt about the possibility of walking around with wet feet until he got frostbite and/or hypothermia.
When he looked up again, Derek was standing on the opposite bank. Stiles almost slipped down the hill into the water in surprise, before catching himself and managing to reverse course and get back onto the bank behind him.
"Stiles," Derek said. Not that Stiles had imagined a tear-filled reunion, but he'd thought he'd get more than one word. Still, Stiles acknowledged his name with a little bow.
"Tell me again how Scott was supposed to keep you safe if I decided to rip your face off?"
"He's not, actually. Or not immediately." Stiles didn't bother to hold back his grin, and now that it seemed like Derek hadn't gone feral or evil, Stiles hoped he would try rushing him, just for fun. "I finally learned to do that cool thing with the mountain ash circle, even when the ground is all uneven. And a few other handy bits. It's been quite a year. So as the youth say, come at me, bro." Stiles made the universal gesture for "bring it," and one of Derek's eyebrows quirked up. People could say what they wanted about Stiles, but he'd never pretended to be shy about a bit of showing off once he found something he was good at.
"Pass, thanks." Derek said, the spoilsport. "But feel free to explain why you're here."
"How about a counter-offer," Stiles called back. "Can I buy you lunch?"
Stiles tried to keep an eye on Derek on the way back to the Jeep, less because he thought Derek was going to bolt than from curiosity. He really didn't want to start making his case while they were out in the cold literally as well as figuratively, but it was as hard to keep his mouth shut as usual. And he had promised to tell Derek how they'd tracked him down, which seemed as good for a monologue as any other topic.
Derek had acquired a stillness to go with his silence that frankly freaked Stiles right the fuck out. Maybe he'd always had it, around people who weren't Stiles, who had filled him less with rage and exasperation than Stiles did, but sitting in a Perkins, watching Derek watching him back, Stiles felt like nothing so much as prey.
Maybe it was a werewolf thing, not a Derek thing, but if that was true, it was a werewolf thing that Scott hadn't even come close to mastering.
"Where's Cora?" Scott asked.
"Safe," Derek said.
"And Peter?"
Stiles cut in before Derek had a chance to reply, as much as he wanted the answers to the same questions that Scott did. "Scott, you wanted to call and check in with Allison, right? Why don't you go do that now?"
Scott grumbled, but Stiles used every iota of best-friend telepathy, and maybe some actual magic, who knew, to plead just go outside with his expression, and Scott slid out of the booth, reluctantly.
No amount of waiting was going to spare him from werewolf eavesdropping if Scott wanted to listen, but Stiles still waited til he was out the door and had his phone held up to his ear. "I know Scott's not helping, but are you angry that we came to find you? Because you didn't seem angry earlier, and I don't think I've done anything other than show up here, and yet." He waved his arms, tah-dah!. "Here we are, with all the you, with all the... the intensity, and me over here trying not to piss myself."
Derek didn't move, but at least he looked away from Stiles and out the window into the parking lot. Not that Stiles had any doubt that his peripheral vision was still about a hundred times as sharp as anything Stiles could see right in front of himself.
Stiles poured himself another cup of coffee, and debated whether adding three sugars would make it palatable or just rot his teeth faster.
"Did you wonder if I'd be angry?" Derek asked.
"If I wanted to have everything I say repeated back to me as a question," Stiles said, "I'd go back and hang out with my guidance counselors."
Derek didn't laugh. Or smile.
"I wonder lots of things, Derek. That's sort of how I roll. Wonder and caffeine and Cool Ranch Doritos." He tapped a poppy rhythm on the table along with the music until Derek looked down at his hands. Stiles splayed his fingers out across the surface and pressed into it, keeping up the motion without the noise. "I thought it was more important to find you than to try to figure out how you'd feel about it. I've never been right, trying to guess how you feel about something."
Scott's pacing took him past the window again. He looked less stressed. At least someone was smiling.
"I'm not angry," Derek said. "I was surprised."
Stiles laughed. "That was sort of the point, dude."
"No, Stiles. Not just surprised to see you. I mean, when I stopped to think about it, I was surprised that you came to find me."
"Digging around the loft to find the bloody rag of a shirt you'd left behind and having Scott smell it to confirm it was yours, that was not my proudest moment, okay? But I did it, because it was important. Look, Scott's never going to bite anyone. You know he's not. I don't even think he'd bite me if I asked him to, and I know about as much about what I'd be getting into as anyone else on the face of the planet.
"So unless he and Allison are going to start getting it on without protection... which is, actually, a thought I could have done without having. Anyway, unless they've got a lot of plans for procreating in the very near future... I'm worried about them, Derek. I'm scared something's going to come after Scott, and he's not going to be strong enough to take it out when there's some way I could have helped. Or some werewolf thing is going to bite us in the ass when we least expect it. I thought it was bad when Peter was pulling the strings, or you two were at each other's throats, but it's been rough, since you left. And I think it'd be better if you were there. If it's pack before everything, don't you think you owe it to Scott to help him figure this all out?"
"We'd like you to come home, is what I'm saying. It's not like I think you're any more likely to listen to me know than you used to be, but I'd like it if you came back. I don't know, you probably hate it there, it's all Grr, Argh, Angst, Death, but it's sort of like that for me too, and it's still home. "
It was probably a sad commentary on Stiles's life that his dad had spent many more hours on safe driving trips than safe sex talks or relationship advice, but the damage was done, and absent a more pending threat to his life, Stiles didn't have a good reason not to pull over every few hours and take a break to clear his head.
And if those breaks also meant that Stiles got to put ten or more feet of distance between him and Derek for whole minutes at a time, then that was just a bonus.
Scott made a half-hearted attempt at offering to drive, before giving up. It was one thing to trust Scott behind the wheel when... Actually, no. It was never a thing to trust Scott driving, but it was nice of him to offer. Derek hadn't done the same.
Scott also volunteered to sit in back, and managed to fall asleep with a spare hoodie bundled up to cushion his head from the worst of the rattling. It simultaneously didn't grant Stiles any measure of privacy, and kept him from trying to start up a more trivial conversation with Derek to pass the time.
So mostly, Derek sat in the passenger seat and watched the scenery and Stiles with varying levels of bored disinterest and resentment.
When Stiles pulled in to their first gas station on the trip home, Scott moved when Derek prodded him, but declined to get out of the car. He'd probably regret it in about 30 seconds after all the heat blew out of the open doors, but that was a lesson he'd have to learn for himself.
Stiles stamped his feet, and bounced on his toes a bit before almost losing it on a patch of ice near the island.
Derek was close enough to grab Stiles's arm as he started to slip. He stood there for a minute after he let go, silent while Stiles unscrewed the gas cap and squinted at the pump to figure out what else he needed to do. Derek's body blocked some of the wind that was trying to chew off Stiles's fingers and burrow through his layers of clothes to freeze his very soul.
"I'll pump the gas," Derek offered. "You can stay inside after you pay."
Stiles opened his mouth without preparing any words to come out of it, shut it again, and then just said thanks, and hustled into the store.
Stiles had the attendant put $40 on the pump, and walked over to the window to shoot Derek a thumbs-up, before turning back to the shelves to mine them for dubious nutritional value.
He was setting part one of his haul down on the counter as Derek came inside, and they both walked over to inspect their options for caffeine infusion.
Stiles went with a coffee about the size of his head, and grabbed a few Red Bulls out of the refrigerated case for good measure. Derek made a face at the options for a long time before pouring his own cup. He picked up a few bags of beef jerky on the way back to the counter.
"You are such a cliche."
"Says the college student with his hands full of Red Bull." He shook one of the bags. "This tastes like plastic, but not as much as that crap you picked out does," he said.
"Do not underestimate the restorative power of the honey bun," Stiles said. "I'm not even sure they sell these in real grocery stores. I should look."
Stiles turned around to scan the shelves one last time as the lady behind the counter started to ring up his purchases, and by the time he turned back around, Derek was already handing over a credit card to pay for everything.
"How do you have a credit card?" Stiles asked. "You were literally living in the woods. Is that even legal?"
Derek's expression closed off as the lady behind the counter stopped processing the sale, and Stiles belatedly remembered that they were in public around people who weren't obligated to be sympathetic, and probably didn't take accusations of fraud lightly.
"Yes, Stiles. It's legal. They have this magical feature called automatic bill pay now, so even people who live in the woods can maintain financial accounts." He turned to face the woman, and smiled that smile that never failed to bewilder Stiles at its appearance. "If it would make you feel better to call the credit card company and confirm anything, I absolutely don't mind." He pulled his drivers license out of his wallet as well and slid it across the counter. "He gets a little carried away, sorry."
The charge cleared without so much as a blip, and Derek signed the receipt and exchanged it for his own copy along with his card and license and slid all three into his wallet.
"You're welcome," Derek said to Stiles, and then, "Have a good night," to the lady. Stiles watched him pick up his coffee and one of the packs of jerky in silence.
After the bell over the door chimed Derek's departure, Stiles gathered everything else and hurried over to the car. Derek watched him impassively as he circled the car and struggled to open then door, then dropped the bags of food into the footwell under Scott. He set his coffee on the dashboard long enough to fasten his seatbelt, and then lamented for the umpteenth time his lack of cupholders.
"Do you want to get back on the road? I can hold your coffee for you."
'I wonder if that is literally the nicest thing you've ever done for me,' Stiles thought. They had a long way to go.
When they got back to Beacon Hills, Stiles dropped Scott off at his house first. They'd rotated seats at the last rest stop so that Scott was shotgun and Derek was in the back, where his silence was less oppressive. When Scott hopped out of the car, Stiles turned to face Derek, who looked about as uncomfortable as every full-sized person in the back of his Jeep ever did. What was one more ambush that was the endless series of ambushes that made up his relationship with Derek?
"Look," he said. "I know we didn't talk about this, but you should come stay at my house."
"No," Derek said. Which was mostly why Stiles hadn't brought it up earlier, because he hadn't been able to come up with an argument beyond 'Please' or 'Because my father said so,' neither of which had seemed to work on Derek in the past. He'd been counting on catching Derek in a weak moment, not that he'd ever seen Derek have a weak moment.
I don't know what my dad's doing right now, but I can tell you that both he and Mrs. McCall would kick our asses if Scott and I brought you back to town in the middle of winter and left you standing on the street like-" some kind of orphaned waif, Stiles almost said. Too soon, probably, even for a decidedly non-waifish guy like Derek.
"It's not the middle of the night." Derek said. "It's 10pm."
"Fine, in the middle of the dark, then," Stiles said, rolling his eyes. "Please just come over, Derek. I'm not going to drop you off at the loft. It's freezing outside, and it's already dark, and there's no telling what's moved in there since you left."
Derek raised an eyebrow, challenging.
"The last time it was empty, a pack of werewolves moved in, if you'll remember," Stiles said. "I'm not talking about a band of rowdy squirrels, here. Just give the creepy warehouse district a pass for one night, and tomorrow I'll drop you off anywhere in town that you want."
Derek closed his eyes for a few seconds, probably praying for patience, drew in a deep breath through his nose and let it out more slowly. He studied Stiles for a moment longer, for once more like he was considering and less like he was trying to decide the most efficient way to end him. "Fine," he said. "Let's go."
It was no 'thank you,' but it'd do. Stiles shifted into reverse and rolled back out to the street.
"There's no guest room, sorry, but we do have a baffling amount of extra bedding, so whatever you'd like to pile up on the couch, I can probably hook you up with. Or the floor," Stiles said. "You look like you could be a floor sort of guy. The couch is a pretty solid choice for sleeping, though. Comes highly recommended, and it's long enough to stretch out on. That was my main thing when we. Uh, redecorated. My dad used to crash there a lot." Just one of the fine selection of avoidance strategies on the menu at Chez Stilinski.
Derek had followed Stiles out of the car and into the house easily enough, but he paused in the entryway when Stiles had carried on down the hallway.
"Oh, welcome to the first floor of our house," Stiles said. " I think you'll find that it's just as Stilinski-filled and protected from weather as my room is, sometimes moreso. Shoes on or shoes off, your choice. Bathroom's upstairs. Kitchen, living room, dining room," he said, pointing in their respective directions, even though Derek could probably figure that all out himself from the light of the lamp they left on at night.
"I have no idea what's edible in the kitchen. It's probably all leftover takeout, but you're welcome to whatever's there. We're not territorial about food. Your typical excessive number of cable television channels, if you watch TV. Maybe you had those hippie parents that didn't believe in electronic entertainment. You seem like the frolicking in the woods sort."
"Right," Derek said. "Like we wanted something that would make us stand out even more."
"Oh," Stiles said. "Right. Well, I'll go grab the stuff. You can sit. Or not. Whichever. I think I might be done with sitting for a few days, myself."
When Stiles came back down with his arms full of blankets and pillows, Derek had moved his bag and himself from the hall into the living room and was on the rug in front of the coffee table, doing pushups. Maybe that was settling in, for Derek.
"Werewolves probably aren't big on road trips, huh? That's a lot of doing nothing, all bunched together."
"I'd rather be doing something than... not," Derek said.
"Right," Stiles said. Personally, he treasured the not-doing-anything times that he got, but to each their own. Derek popped up to his feet, and Stiles held out his bedding offering. "So, here you go, there's a little bit of everything. Downstairs gets a little cool at night, but. You're probably fine with that, what with the all-season outdoorseyness."
By the time Stiles got to the top of the stairs, he couldn't hear anything but his own footsteps, but the house felt less empty for the knowledge that Derek was there. It was satisfying, knowing that he was nearby again, even in unfamiliar circumstances, and Stiles was looking forward to figuring out what came next.
He texted his dad, back, Derek staying on couch, and then waited for sleep to come.
Stiles woke up early the next morning. His dad had the morning shift on the 30th, and then late on New Years, and Stiles wanted to be up to mediate breakfast between him and Derek.
When he got downstairs, the couch was empty, blankets folded up and sitting on top of the spare pillow just as they had been when Stiles had handed them to Derek the night before. Stiles turned around and went back to bed, if not to sleep.
When his dad knocked on the door to check on him before leaving for work, the only reason he wasn't staring at the ceiling was that he'd pulled his comforter up over his head. If he folded it back down with a bit of a flounce, well. It had been a rough week, and he wasn't opposed to acting like a child when it felt like the universe treated him like one.
"I can't tell you what I don't know," Stiles said. "He was here when I went to sleep. He was gone when I woke up."
"I'll put the word out, quietly if you'd like. It should be a slow day. We can do some checks."
After his dad left, Stiles pulled out his phone to text Scott. derek's gone. thanks anyway.
After spending the whole day before moping, Stiles slept away far too much of New Year's eve.
He roused enough to say good-bye when his dad left at 5pm, but only just, and then it was back to the land of blankets and not giving a fuck.
Around 9pm, he peeled himself out of bed, called in a delivery order for probably more pizza than he'd be able to finish before he went back to school, and went to take a shower and put on real clothes so that he could at least not embarrass himself in front of the delivery person. Just because it'd be obvious that he was home alone, didn't mean that he couldn't have friends descending on him any minute to party the night away, right?
In theory. He didn't, of course, but he could, was the point.
Pizzaria Villa was notoriously slow, free from the corporate shackles of 30 minutes or less, and probably due to be even slower on a night that Stiles was sure no one wanted to work, but it had the best pizza of the places that delivered, and he tipped well.
Stiles was just getting out of the shower when the doorbell rang, which meant nearly killing himself on the stairs and answered a door while wearing a towel and holding his jeans with his wallet still in the pocket from two days earlier.
Only it wasn't a disgruntled teenager holding three large pizzas. It was Derek Hale and his stupid everything, holding a folded piece of paper.
"Oh," he said. The paper fluttered as the wind gusted into the doorway, and Derek dropped his hand, flattening it against his leg.
"Right," Stiles said back. "Hi."
Derek looked almost disconcerted, but after a brief flick down, he met and held Stiles's gaze. "I didn't," he started. "I didn't actually think you'd be home."
"And yet, you drove?" Stiles rocked up onto his toes to look over Derek's shoulder, and yup, there was an unfamiliar boring sedan in the driveway. "You drove over here, walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell, and waited long enough for me to get to the door. That explains so much about your life if that's how you plan what you're going to do."
Derek opened his mouth, presumably to reply, but Stiles wasn't in the mood to let him talk yet. "Look, I'm pretty sure my nuts are going to freeze off if we stand here much longer. Can you come in, and we can finish this argument somewhere warmer?"
"I'm not arguing," Derek said. "I can go."
Stiles let out a noise of immense frustration, and only resisted trying to physically hurt Derek because he knew from long experience that he'd just do more damage to himself. "Fuck's sake, Derek. I don't-. Look. Fine, we're not arguing. I wouldn't have invited you in if I didn't want you in. God, like it's not painfully obvious to the most casual observer after this week that I want you here, fuck. Just. In. And quickly, please."
"Okay." Derek said.
"Okay. Great," Stiles shot back. "Well then, you can come not-argue with yourself in the living room for a minute while I put on some clothes." He stepped back from the door to gesture Derek in, which exposed some fun new parts of his body to the wind. He beckoned a little more maniacally than necessary. "In, in, please. Fuck, that's cold."
Derek slid in through the door, his back to the wall and skirting Stiles by about as wide a margin as permitted by the hallway. Stiles kicked the door shut behind him and folded his arms across his chest.
"Awesome," Stiles said. "Make yourself at home. And by at home, I mean sit on the couch, not leave like you have free use of the doorways, because you don't."
He hustled up the stairs, toes burning from the chill and almost losing it when one leg of his neglected jeans snuck under his foot
By the time he was standing in front of his closet, dressing like he had somewhere to be sounded like a much stupider idea than it had before he'd spent a damp and frigid 90 seconds trying to figure out Derek Hale.
Sweatpants, wool socks, six or seven shirts and a hat, that sounded like a good idea, but after staring blankly at his pile of mostly-clean clothes for a good minute, Stiles turned and put on the jeans and the henley he'd set on the bed before going for his shower. At least one pair of wool socks and a hoodie were definitely getting added to that, though.
Derek was still on the couch when Stiles made it back downstairs, hair dry enough and fully clothed this time. He was leaning forward, possibly looking at something, with his elbows on his knees, but he hadn't turned a lamp on, like the total creeper he was. 'Someday' Stiles thought, 'I'll walk into a room and Derek will be acting like a normal person.'
"Make yourself at home like a human, I should have said. I suppose I should be grateful that you're not perched on a shelf like a gargoyle."
Derek turned to look at Stiles from head to toe and back, and let Stiles's jab go without comment. He looked tired.
Stiles shivered, and crossed his arms across his chest again, tucking his chilly fingers into his armpits. "I hope this isn't becoming a thing for us, that we can only talk when I'm stalking you or in danger of freezing to death."
"I didn't say I didn't want to see you," Derek grumbled.
"Right, then. I don't know how I could have gotten that wrong," Stiles shot back. "Drink? I can offer you water or... I have no idea. Probably a coke, or coffee. Eggnog. Cider."
"Water's fine, thank you," Derek said. Then, "I don't know why you're mad at me."
Stiles sighed, and turned towards the kitchen. He pulled two glasses and a mug from the cabinet over the sink, and concentrated on not breaking any part of the coffeemaker as he muttered to himself. "You disappear without a word, and then when you come back, just as unexpectedly, you're disappointed that I'm here. Yeah, no idea why that would cause a problem."
He turned away from the sink with a carafe of water, and straight into Derek's chest. "Right," he said. "Excuse me, silly of me to think I could take half a step in my own kitchen without you looming over me.
"I wasn't- I had to start looking somewhere, didn't I?"
"In the kitchen? Pretty sure I'm visible from all portions of the room."
"Stiles. If I say I'm sorry for whatever I did, can we start this conversation over again?"
"Which, just to reiterate, brilliant strategy, start looking somewhere you don't expect what- Wait, you were trying to find me? Why were you trying to find me?"
Derek held up the piece of paper that he'd had with him at the door.
"I got a new cell phone. New number. I wanted to make sure you had it."
"And you couldn't just text me?"
"I didn't have your number."
"Could have given it to Scott."
"I don't have his either." Derek raised his hands, frustrated, and then lowered them with visible effort. "What, you remember everyone's number?"
"It's a thing for me, okay?" Stiles said. "My phone hasn't been all that reliable when I've needed it. No need to be rude about it." He shoved an empty glass into Derek's hands, and turned to the coffeemaker. He'd never actually stood and watched the coffee brew before. It took a lot longer when there was nothing else going on. He kept his back to Derek as he moved to the fridge to get the half and half.
"So," Derek said into Stiles's awkwardest silence. "You're not out with your friends?"
Your friends, he said like they were some sort of strange concept with no connection to Derek.
"I don't think I can overstate how boring my New Years Eves are," Stiles said. "And I am a master of hyperbole. I'd say that it got even worse when Scott couldn't get drunk anymore, but that's probably a lie. Before that, it was just two of us being pathetic together. Tonight, though, Allison wanted to party, and Scott still mostly wants to do whatever Allison wants, which is cool. It seems to be working better for them now that no one's trying to kill anyone else."
"As for me, my dad and I are still trying this not lying to each other thing. Well, mostly I'm trying not lying to him. He's trying not omitting, but he's actually got the law and solid law enforcement policy on his side."
"Anyway, there's no rule that says Lydia has to voluntarily report underage drinking to the Sheriff's department, so she's hosting the party, and I agreed to take one for the team. Surprisingly, the Sheriff's kid doesn't get invited to a lot of ragers, so that exhausted my options. It's just another night, anyway. The Roman Calendar is just a construct, so it's not even like there's a real significance-"
And then the doorbell rang. On the one hand, saved by the bell. On the other, with Stiles's luck, it could have been another infuriating werewolf for him to pick a petty argument with and then bore with his life.
As he was opening the door, Stiles realized that he'd left his wallet upstairs, but when he turned to go get it, Derek was standing behind him again, with cash in hand.
"Eighty bucks," Stiles said. "To cover the tip."
Derek counted off four twenties and handed them past Stiles to the delivery guy without comment. Stiles silently wished he'd said a hundred or maybe two, just to see if Derek would balk, and then took the pizzas from the delivery guy, whose face could have given Derek's a run for the money in looking unimpressed by life. Happy New Year, indeed.
"You do know that you can't keep paying for things as an apology, right?"
Derek shrugged and trailed behind Stiles to the table.
"You might as well stay," Stiles said.
Derek looked more uneasy at the prospect than someone who'd just paid for dinner should have. "I think this might have been a mistake," he said. "So if we can just. Here," he said, finally holding out the piece of paper to offer it to Stiles.
The paper was clearly the worse for wear, folded in quarters and back, and crumpled around the edges. As advertised, it had Derek's name written on it with a phone number underneath, but then Stiles unfolded it the rest of the way, and there were two more names and numbers on the other side. Stiles looked up in inquiry, and Derek squared his shoulders.
"Will you listen now if I I try tell you why I left yesterday? I went up to Fresno to visit the Petersen pack. And then this morning, down to Riverside to meet with the Medinas. I don't know if there's still time to submit transfer applications, but if Scott wants to, there's a clear path to any campus in that radius. And if there's somewhere else he wants to go, those were just the easiest. I can work on making other introductions. It might take a while to network. Scott can contact either of them, or not if he doesn't want to."
Of all the things that Stiles had imagined Derek might have disappeared for, this was- "That's. Wow," he said. "That was really decent of you Derek. Thanks. I mean, C- for execution, but I really appreciate it, and I know Scott will too."
Derek shrugged. "If that's what he wants to do, go away for school, then I should help. I think I could be a good beta again. If there's still a place for me here. I thought maybe we could work on having a normal life. Scott, and Isaac, and Allison. And you, and me."
And Stiles. Stiles still just wanted to sit next to him on the couch and start working on that list of questions. He wanted it to be one of the things that Derek had done, that he had done, that worked, instead of one of the things that failed.
"It's just, I spent way more of my senior year, shit, of my first semester in college having feelings about you than I wanted to." Derek looked up, suddenly enough that it could have made a noise. "I was so freaking angry, at you, man. And frustrated, and worried about Scott. And the whole time you were gone, I was forgetting how much time I used to spend being mad at you, but then that all came back, too."
"Feelings," Derek said, like it was a new word. "Okay."
"But I think we can get through it this time," Stiles said. "This time, you should stick around. If you're still here in the morning, then we can try to figure it out."