Chapter Text
If there’s one thing Derek’s learned in life, it’s that crushing on someone who lives on an entire other fucking continent is probably a bad idea.
He’s got dozens of photos of Stiles saved to his phone, and a whole box of letters from Stiles, and years’ worth of emails from Stiles, and a whole wall of postcards from Stiles pinned up on the wall over his bed, and none of it is enough.
He wants to do things to Stiles, okay, things besides just watch movies together in two different time zones or talk on skype.
…which… is kind of a new feeling.
Derek didn’t even know he liked guys until three years ago, freshman year of high school, when Stiles came home from a party raving about this girl he’d kissed, Malia something-or-other, and how Malia’s hair was so soft, and how Malia had the prettiest brown eyes and the best laugh, and—and suddenly Derek wanted to throw his computer against the wall.
“I have to go,” he’d snapped, and slammed his laptop shut and thrown on some jogging clothes.
He was five miles deep into the Preserve before it really sank in, not just the jealousy but the absurdity of the jealousy. He and Stiles had never even met, technically. They were probably never going to live in the same country. There was no logical reason for them not to date other people. Especially given that Stiles might not even like guys, or like him.
Still, he was secretly, guiltily, viciously satisfied when Stiles and Malia broke up barely two weeks later.
And since then the crush has gotten, if anything, worse.
*
They weren’t always even that close. They didn’t write to each other every week, or even every few weeks, not at first.
At first it was just Derek in his second grade classroom, the teacher passing out their first letters from their new Polish pen pals, all shaky too-large handwriting on paper colorful with crayon doodles. Derek’s was from some kid named Mieczysław Stilinski. (Stiles didn’t go by Stiles yet.) Not even Derek’s teacher could pronounce it.
It was almost Thanksgiving—an American holiday but not a Polish one, apparently; Derek was aghast—and Stiles’ class was learning about American culture. Stiles had drawn a turkey, sloppily tracing his hand and adding feathers. The other kids’ pen pals had colored theirs in various shades of brown, red, and yellow; Stiles had given his green and purple stripes.
“What a weirdo,” one of the other kids had sneered, so at recess Derek pushed him off the monkey bars and gave him a bloody nose.
Derek still has the turkey card in a box in his closet. It’s where he keeps all his letters from Stiles. He’d been embarrassed about it for a long time, until one day a few years ago when Stiles admitted offhand that he had a similar box under his bed.
At this point he can’t really remember what it’s like not to be pen pals with Stiles.
He’s known Stiles through all his weird phases: that one year he was embarrassingly obsessed with Tobey Maguire, and that brief period when he took to sketching strangers’ shoes on public transit, and that month he wanted them to write to each other only in Elvish because they had both gotten hooked on Lord of the Rings at the same time. He knew Stiles back when he still pronounced “ship” like “sheep” and thought a daffodil was a species of bird. He was there when Stiles had an awkward Bieber haircut and an even awkwarder crush on this girl in his class named Lydia. He was there when Stiles’ mom died.
And Stiles was there in fourth grade for Derek’s intense obsession with wolves, when he took to memorizing wolf facts, referring to his mom as “the alpha,” and practicing his howling just in case he was ever stranded in the wilderness and adopted by a wolf pack. (He read Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves fourteen times in a row that summer, and probably would have kept on reading it if he hadn’t accidentally dropped it in his cousin’s pool.) To this day Stiles sends him snapchats of every wolf-themed thing he stumbles upon, mugs and T-shirts and ads on the tram, and whenever Derek is in a bad mood, Stiles calls him “Sourwolf.” He thinks it’s hilarious. (So do Derek’s sisters, and now they’ve started calling him that, too.)
Everyone at school thinks Derek is cool, but Stiles knows better. And Stiles likes him anyway.
These days they skype every chance they get, although that’s not as often as they’d like, thanks to the nine-hour time difference between Beacon Hills and Warsaw. Most days they text each other good morning and good night. They send each other copious amounts of postcards. They have a standing date every Friday afternoon (Derek) / Friday night (Stiles) to watch movies together on Netflix. And Derek has already planned every detail of their wedding in his head, down to the flowers (peonies, Stiles’ mom’s favorite), the color scheme (red and black), and the cake flavor (red velvet).
At this point he’s not sure which fantasies are more embarrassing, the wedding ones or the… other ones. The ones where Derek is there with Stiles, curling up with him in bed, undressing him, exploring, coaxing moans from Stiles’ mouth and kissing his moles.
Usually, whenever he sees Stiles on skype, he’s wearing at least two layers, more often three—some kind of hoodie over some kind of plaid over some kind of graphic tee. In winter he’s likely to be wearing a beanie and scarf as well. Derek hates when Stiles wears scarves, even though Stiles looks good in them, because then he can’t sneak glances at Stiles’ neck during their skype calls.
Sometimes, though, when it’s late enough at night, Derek gets to see Stiles stripped down to just his plaid pajama bottoms and a well-worn Wonder Woman tee that’s so large it nearly reaches his knees. It’s Derek’s favorite of Stiles’ shirts because it hangs so soft and loose on his lanky frame, showing off the lean cords of muscle in his arms and giving Derek a tantalizing glimpse of his collarbones and the hollow of his throat.
That’s Derek’s favorite thing to fantasize about, Stiles in nothing but the Wonder Woman t-shirt. Just thinking about it always sends a low swoop through his belly, like the drop in a roller coaster.
Still, it’s not like anything’s going to happen. Poland is almost six thousand miles away, a number so huge it boggles Derek’s mind. It’s the very definition of impossible.
Derek just has to keep reminding himself of that.
Sometimes Derek entertains himself imagining absurd scenarios. Moving into a Sims house with Stiles in place of a real one. Marrying Stiles over Skype, both of them holding up their rings in different countries, kissing the screen to seal the deal. Texting each other flower emojis every Valentine’s Day, cake emojis every anniversary. Derek, one hundred years old and in a nursing home, nearly blind but still crouched over his (now ancient) laptop and skyping a wizened, grey-haired Stiles in a bathrobe and slippers.
It’s kind of depressing.
*
Sometimes they talk in Polish, more often English.
Polish is a giant headache, written Polish even more so, but after a certain point, when Derek finally got the spelling rules down and stopped worrying so much about grammatical nuances, it started to feel easier.
Derek likes to switch over to it if he’s talking to Stiles in public, or around his family. It makes the conversation more private, and thus more infuriating to his eavesdropping sisters, but… Honestly, it’s mostly just so he can impress strangers. In his experience, most people can’t even tell what language he’s speaking. One girl in Derek’s history class spent close to a year thinking Derek was fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
(“How does that even happen,” Stiles laughed when Derek told him.)
Most of the time, though, they stick to English. Stiles’ English is, annoyingly, a lot better than Derek’s Polish. Sure, Stiles still has an accent—it’s especially noticeable when he talks fast or gets really worked up—and sometimes he mixes up a word or two, but his grammar and grasp of slang are practically native level by this point, just like his knowledge of American pop culture. Stiles illegally streams a ton of American shows and movies, way more than Derek, who would usually rather shoot hoops with Cora than watch TV.
Derek, meanwhile, speaks Polish like a child.
No, probably way worse than a child.
He didn’t start trying to learn it until he and Stiles started getting more serious about the pen pal thing around their middle school years, whereas Stiles has been learning English as a second language practically his whole life. Derek flubs a bunch of his endings, because it’s pretty much impossible not to, and flounders along with an accent so thick that Stiles inevitably spends half the conversation just mimicking his pronunciation and laughing at him.
“’S'not your fault, dude,” Stiles said once. Derek thought he was going to follow it up with something reasonable, like how Stiles has had a shit ton more opportunities to practice his English than Derek does with Polish, but instead Stiles had just grinned smarmily, reaching up to scratch his messy hair under his backwards baseball cap, and said, “I was obviously just born smarter than you.”
“Fuck you,” Derek had grinned, flipping him off. “And fuck your language and all its stupidly complicated grammar.”
“Wow, it’s like you’re not even familiar with the giant ‘fuck you’ that is the English language. Do you realize how hard it is to keep all the irregular shit straight in my head?”
Yeah. They have a lot of debates about whose language is harder or more ridiculous.
Privately, though, Derek does think Stiles is smart. Brilliant, actually. It’s just one more thing Derek is never going to tell him about how he feels.