Archive of Our Own ^beta

“There’s nothing I’d take back, but it’s hard to say there’s nothing I regret.” - Silhouettes, Of Monsters and Men

1.

“Sometimes I wish I was never born,” Derek murmurs into Stiles’ hair, his hands still bloody and shaky and caught in the front of the boy’s shirt. 

Derek feels him nod into his neck, the tickle of his hair itchy mixed in with the black substance flaking in his stubble.

“Yeah. Me too.”

The thought of Stiles thinking so about himself haunts him.

2.

Derek wakes up several times in the middle of the night, teeth bared, blanket littered with holes from the previous times he caught them in his claws. Stiles’ hands soothe him down, half awake, comfortable in their routine. Derek thinks back to when their song and dance would embarrass him, make his cheeks flare like flames caught beneath his skin.

He leans into it now, throat dry, wondering how he got so lucky. Stiles’ mouth curves up against his bare shoulder at the way his heart races, at how their proximity sets him ablaze.

Outside, the night shifts like a kaleidoscope.

- 41.

There was a mother.

There was a mother, once, and she belonged to him the same way the forest didn’t belong to anyone.

Everyone seems to forget it, about her, but she was there. No father, though. No wind in the trees, no fangs to roar, no father to hear creeping around the house. He hit the road when he found his mother had him uncurling in her stomach, Laura said. She was the oldest and the most blunt and had heard how their father’s hands loved to bruise and how his words drowned their mother for six years. The one who knew better than to lie to him when he came to her room in the middle of the night, drinking his own tears.

After she said so, still too young for a girl that had seen so much, his sister held his face in her hands, told him, “You don’t have a daddy, but you have a mom. And she’s better than all the daddies in the world put together, you hear me?”

And he said, “Okay.”

3.

“Yeah. Me too.”

Derek kisses him hard when all the words have been said. Hopes it’s still enough to pull the sad away.

- 40.

“We’re predators, Derek. We don’t have to be killers.” His mother told him when he came home with teary eyes and bloody hands, claws trying desperately to be like his older siblings’.

Then she hugged him so tight he swore the bruises would break their own rules and linger just long enough for him to notice that this hug, these words, were different.

4.

Stiles takes his lip between his teeth and bites, gently. Exhales hard into his mouth like he can’t help himself. “Fuck, Derek.”

Backs press against the wall, hands slide against too-hot skin and aching bones. Stiles curses again as he trips over his pants and they go down laughing. Derek presses light kisses down his ribs, makes a ladder out of them, lets his hands slot into the sharp curve of Stiles’ hips.

He curls his hands into Stiles’ hair and tugs gently until he exposes his neck, playing connect-the-dots with his moles. The other boy grins and pushes his face away teasingly.

“C’mon, Der. The bed.”

“Why not here?” Derek murmurs into his skin, ducking around Stiles’ hands to suck at his collarbone. Stiles groans, eyes fluttering close as Derek’s hand works its way into his jeans.

- 39.

He always told Laura, after she lost her thousandth fight with their mother, “Why bother? You know you’re not going to win.”

And she would reply, consistently, “Because, Derek. In the beginning, I feel like I could.”

5.

Derek pauses long enough to pull the comforter off the bed and shove it beneath the line of Stiles’ body, languid and relaxed, if only to keep him from complaining in the morning.

Stiles sinks into it and waits to be gathered up.

6.

When Derek’s pants go flying, so does the necklace. It gleams against the carpet, utterly still, and finds itself forgotten.

7.

“Sometimes I wish I was never born,” Derek murmurs into Stiles’ hair, his hands still bloody and shaky and caught in the front of the boy’s shirt.

The witches were his fault. The fire was his fault. Everything is spinning out.

Derek feels him nod into his neck, the tickle of his hair itchy mixed in with the black substance flaking in his stubble. The chain feels heavy in his pocket.

“Yeah. Me too.”

And he suddenly feels light-headed.

- 38.

Once upon a time, his brother told him, “Don’t say things that you’ll regret.”

Renier grinned, pulling him into a headlock. Derek screeched elatedly, eleven years old, and lost the phrase among an ocean of other, more seemingly important ones.

8.

He wakes up alone.

Derek runs his hand over Stiles’ side of the bed, where it’s been warm for months, and finds it cold. Bunching the covers in his fists, his eyes flutter close. He thinks to himself, yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for. This is what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to find a better offer.

It sounds wrong even when it isn’t audible.

Refusing to stay in bed any longer, Derek makes it silently and slips downstairs. Tries not to scent the air, knowing almost instinctually he won’t find anything worth finding. He does it anyway, and can’t manage even a whiff of anything around his own rank desperation.

9.

Someone else’s things are in his living room.

Whoever has taken residence here left a note addressed to someone named Miguel (ironic, he knows) about being late for work and leaving them muffins on the counter. Derek takes one, because apparently someone has replaced all the furniture in his house.

(It occurs to Derek later that it was a naive thought, but there were muffins and he had woken up without Stiles for the first time in years. The coils of his mind were practically at a standstill.)  

Derek shuts the door quietly on the way out and sits on the stairs out front, knowing it’s futile to hope that somehow, a busted blue jeep is sitting in the parking lot.

He looks around anyway, just in case.

10.

When Derek finally gets himself together enough to lurch up onto his feet, he wiggles his toes against the concrete and finds his feet bare.

The ground wiggles back; against his skin, its sandpaper kisses are ill received.

- 37.

Where do you feel safe?

With the people I love.

Kate gave him a look that day, almost like she pitied him.

11.

How can you tell you’re in a dream?

12.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

All of Derek’s fingers, in perfect condition, laid out before him.

13.

He stumbles forward, head-spinning. The road is empty, thank god, else Derek is sure that would’ve been the end of him.

(For a fraction of a second, he thinks, good riddance. It would be a better conclusion to his story than anything, in his opinion.)

His chest is shrinking, ribs contracting, sternum cutting through his organs, collarbones sharp as knives. Derek’s breathing picks up slowly and he tries to remember what Stiles told him about controlling panic attacks.

Stiles.  

“Fuck.” He mutters to himself, takes his lip between his teeth and hopes that his eyes haven’t gone blue.

Outside of him and his blurred vision, he can feel someone’s hand on his shoulder, fingers tugging his chin down. Something clatters to the floor and the hands steady.

“Breathe with me.”

He knows that voice.

Scott’s exaggerated breaths, while ominously wheezy, calm him instantly and he wipes his sleeve over his forehead, letting Scott support him.

“Whoa, you’re really heavy.” The boy says, smiling.

Derek takes him in, the grey hoodie, the long tousled hair, the inhaler sticking out of his jeans pocket, eyes widening.

“Scott.” He breathes, “What - “

Scott gives him a blank look, head tilting in confusion. “Uh… sorry man, do I know you?”

“It’s me, it’s - it’s Derek, we - what’s going on - “ He can feel a pounding in his head as he replays everything that happened the night before. The fairies, the battle, the way Scott grinned at him as he left, the way he could barely muster the strength to smile back.

This Scott still looks perplexed, hand hovering over his arm. His eyes melt into something like concern as he catches sight of Derek’s feet. “Did something happen to you, sir? Are you alright?”

He doesn’t know any of Derek’s tells, any of Derek’s past. He still remembers when Stiles had to mutter about his family dying in a fire to Scott after they thought he was gone. “No… I’m sorry. I was at the hospital the other day. Your mom was my nurse. You just… look a lot like her. Thanks for this.”

“Oh. Yeah, I get that a lot.” Another vacant smile, the removing of his arm from Derek’s back, disregarding the obvious holes in the story. “No problem.”

He checks his watch. “I better get going. School’s gonna start in fifteen. I’ll see you around… Derek.”

Scott hauls his bike up off the road, checking the chains and readjusting his hood. He waves at Derek over his shoulder, taking a puff of his inhaler as he turns away and pedals down the road.

Derek stutters to a stop and watches him go.

- 36.

Scott was looking at him weird before they left, some two years prior, standing outside the Jeep. The forest’s edges loomed up around them, tangled and dark. Listening quietly for someone to say something. The other wolf clamped his hand over Derek’s forearm as he turned to pile himself into the Jeep, a wild color in his eyes.

“I’m glad we found you first.”

I’m glad we found you first.

I’m glad we found you first.

Derek swallowed hard around the thousands of words that were begging to rush out, wishing he could have said the same thing back to him. Wishing he could click release and with it, everything he wanted to say wouldn’t come out hurting people.

He thinks Scott got it though, because he grinned and let Stiles’ hand replace his.

14.

Derek stumbles away from where the wheel of Scott’s bike left a skid mark.

He thinks, staring down at it, that it’s the closest thing he has to a starting point.

15.

For some reason, his feet always lead him back to the high school in the event of a bad situation. He thinks maybe it’s because he wants to have a place to point the blame.

Settling himself on one of the benches outside, he stares out into the parking lot and tries to comprehend what just happened.  

16.

Jackson, for good or for bad, always ends up in the same frame as Derek.

Jackson, looking uncharacteristically sweaty, limbs wracked with a nervous shiver. Even forty minutes late, he manages to muster up a disdainful look as he slams the door of his porsche and pulls a twenty out of his pocket.

- 35.

“Why’d you pick me?”

“Because you looked scared.”

Jackson looked at him, elbows to his knees. “Is that why you chose…”

He didn’t want to say Boyd and Erica and Isaac, because Derek had lost them all, even Isaac, where it counted.

“No. I chose them because I thought they would make a good pack.” A good family.

“And what did you think I would make, asswipe?” Jackson snorted, but there was a sour curiosity there, a depressingly hopeful note.

“Once you got your head out of your ass? A good friend. You remind me a lot of me.”

Reassured, Jackson hauled himself off the porch and smirked. “Please.”  

Derek didn’t come to the funeral, when they buried him in the cemetery. Stiles found him after, clawing himself out of his own skin, and held his shaking body for hours on hours until the shaking made its way out of him, too.

Said, “It’s not okay, but goddammit, let us help you, you don’t have to do this alone.”

17.

This Jackson’s scarf bellows in the wind as he leans down and holds out the bill.

“Nice watch.” The teenager snorts. It’s a smarmy sort of sound that grates on Derek’s ears. “Buy yourself some shoes.”

Derek catches himself confused between baring his teeth or hugging him, the bill fluttering into his lap.

(Really, all he can do is stare at him until he turns away.)

- 34.

The watch was a gift from Stiles, a joke.  

He kept it, because the wolf howling behind the phases of the moon reminded him of his mother.

18.

The problem with drifting into different worlds - different universes parallel to his own - is that Derek knows it has happened before.

His uncle, after all, still hadn’t managed to find a way back.

- 33.

There was a house with a dusty attic and a draft and a presence Stiles defined as ‘vaguely supernatural’ at the end of their street.

(Derek didn’t know when he started calling the street theirs but he thinks he’s glad for the moment.)

While Derek knew better than to go against Stiles’ intuition, he couldn’t help but see himself through the curtains, Stiles’ feet in his lap, making a life for themselves. Making it separate. Making it something they could call their own.

19. 

Derek stays on the bench, listening to the bell ring and trying to figure out what to do with himself.

I’m in another universe.

I’m in a universe where I don’t exist.

He searches desperately through his mind, brain moving around the research Lydia and Stiles stayed up doing for night after night, attempting to remember something even the least bit useful. Tries not to let the situation crush him.

Solitude, he thinks, is something he should be used to.  

- 32.

“Ugh,” Lydia said over chinese one night, leaning into Allison’s shoulder. “They’re even starting to sound alike.”

Allison laughed, full and loud. “That’s not news. They always did.”

Derek realized vaguely that they were talking about him and Stiles. Couldn’t find it in him to care. Stiles nestled further into his chest from where he was seated in Derek’s lap, his own appendages dangling over the werewolf’s knees.

In the background, Hailee Steinfeld's country accent played like a soundtrack.

“Love you.” Stiles murmured, fingers gentle and sleep heavy, scratching at the sharp curve of his shoulderblade. It wasn’t the first time by far, but it made something in his heart scrunch up.

“Love you, too.”

Stiles made a contented sound around Lydia and Allison’s not-so-hushed cooing.

Derek nosed at his temple and hoped to God he wouldn’t screw this - them - over.

20.

Derek jolts when the last bell rings and students spill out of every crevice, pulling himself out of his thoughts, out of his own memories. Tries to stop missing people. Tries to stop correlating that longing with the one he made for himself, when he set his house ablaze.

21.

Here, Lydia - genius, problem-solving, always-in-the-know Lydia - doesn’t give him a second glance, even when he calls her name. The sound gathers in the silence she leaves him with.

22.

It occurs to him, only after she has walked away and nestled herself into the front seat of Jackson’s car, that Stiles, some young, mind-wiped version of him, is here. And if there is anything he knows about Stiles, it’s that there are some mysteries he can’t help but try to wrap his head around.

He scans the parking lot, slowly, his gaze doubling back over the spot Stiles’ usually parks in. He finds it empty. Hopelessness draws up inside him again and he scrubs his hands over his head. From the corner of his eye, he can see Scott, hands hovering over the handles of his bike, watching him curiously.

23.

Derek learns quickly that there is no Allison either, watching the parking lot empty out. He thinks that it fucks up the balance inside him just a little bit more and Derek wonders who Scott has in this world, if anyone at all.

24.

Deaton, he thinks. Deaton, Deaton. Call Deaton. How many times in his life has he told someone to call Deaton?

(The answer is somewhere in Stiles’ brain, where Derek knows he started cataloguing it for himself, then for the two of them, in unison.)

25.

The building is in a more pristine condition, seeing as it hasn’t been so host to werewolf shenanigans as it was in his own time. Or own place, rather. Deaton himself reflects that, eyes brighter, stance less wary when he enters, shoeless, dishevelled, and obviously on edge. Maybe that’s how all worried customers come to him.

He steps forward slowly, setting the water bottle he bought at the 7/11 with Jackson's pity money down on the counter.

“Dr. Deaton,” Derek says first, not used to asking for his help. Not used to being the one talking for his own benefit.

The man turns to him and there is surprise hidden down somewhere in his eyes. Probably because he looks just like his siblings; probably because he’s a carbon copy of his mother.

“I’m Derek Hale. What do you know about parallel universes?”

- 31.

“Weirder things have happened,” Stiles started saying after every supernatural occurrence even if, no, they really haven’t.

26.

The book thunks onto the table and Derek groans.

He’s seen that thing a thousand times over and never, once, has it led to anything better than bad.

- 30.

His favorite thing about the loft is the window above the bedroom, the small one with the latch. Stiles liked to prop it open when it was raining hard, soaking the sheets, and Derek would say, “Close that thing, jesus fuck.”

And Stiles would reply, smug over who knew what, “Don’t front, Hale, I’ve seen you in the rain. You look like a five year old.”

“Do I look like one now?” Derek snapped his fangs at him.

A slow graze against his cheek, sometimes fingertips, sometimes the ghost of lips. “Yeah.” Faint. “Yeah.” A little more conviction.

They’d kiss like they had nothing better to do and then, the world - the windshield of a car and watching raindrops race and Derek’s eyes fluttering close, whispering, Stiles, Stiles like the scrape of the windshield wipers, back forth back forth back forth until his voice broke in time with the thunder.

When the lightening flashed overhead, they watched the droplets again, behind their eyelids, and said, faster, god, I’m so in love with you.

27.

“Usually, when things like this happen, there’s a reason for it. Even a time or object it’s centered around.” Deaton flicks through the pages aimlessly, as if waiting for something to jump out. Derek is mildly afraid something might.

“I wish you came by when my assistant was here. He’s been translating this for a month,” The man quirks his lip. “I’m sure he has it memorized by now.”

“Where is he today?” Derek asks curiously. Maybe there’s a chance he could help him - maybe there’s a chance he knew him. Deaton coughs.

“It’s his mother’s birthday. They have plans.” It’s not a lie.

It was Stiles’ mother’s birthday, too, in real time.

28.

“How long have you been here?”

Derek shrugs, rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Six hours at most, at least since I woke up.”

Deaton clucks and taps his pen against his mouth, a small smile. “To be honest with you, I’ve never seen anything like this before. Heard about it, but not - experienced it.”

Yes, you have, Derek thinks to himself, even though he knows they’re two separate entities, the Deaton here and the Deaton back home that helped Lydia send Peter into what he hopes is some kind of hell.

“Here,” Deaton thrusts a disposable phone into his hands. “I’ll call you, when I have more information. I’m afraid it would be quite tedious to have to you looking through all of them, even if you have seen my library before.”

Derek wants to stomp his feet and demand he get his information now, but Deaton’s right and they both know it. He takes the phone.

29.

Derek sleeps in the cave their family hollowed generations ago, their version of a pack tree house. Here, it’s bare and malnourished, but it’s something. Maybe it’s still in the making.

Derek runs his fingers over the triskele carved into the wall, then above it where his name and his brother’s would be, and ignores the feeling of sharp boulders digging into his back.

30.

As terrible as the sleeping is, the waking up is good. The smell of the forest is good, thick inside him.

And hearing his brother taking his morning run, watching his back retreat into the trees, kicking up branches and leaves and jumping into a wolf once he’s far enough away from people who could see him - Derek still isn’t sure if it was a dream or not.

31.

The disposable phone nearly breaks in his back pocket - he had forgotten it was there until it started vibrating, actually. He checks the settings and thinks Stiles would get a kick out of them being stuck on ‘heartbeat’.

32.

“So what is this, like, It’s a Wonderful Life or something? Please, tell me I’m not your guardian angel or whatever.”

It’s the first thing Stiles says to him in the new world, hands stuck in his pockets, hair standing wildly as if to greet him.

Deaton looks as though he’s barely repressing an eye roll. “Derek, this is my assistant - ”

“Stiles.” Hope balloons in his chest. It’s been doing that for a while now, when it comes to Stiles. Deaton gives him a considering look, but says nothing.

“Stiles, this is Derek.”

“I know.” The boy looks at him, as if he’s been punched in the face under all the posing.

“You do?”

Stiles studies him, shrugs lightly. His mouth tilts like the cord of a cable car. “A little. It’s weird.”

There is a small uptick in his heart, the kind that happens when he is omitting fragments of the truth. Barely noticeable. Derek is looking for it anyway.

“How much is a little?” He asks, before Deaton can beat him to it.

This Stiles looks younger. Less guarded and less vulnerable than Derek has ever seen him simultaneously.

The boy taps his finger against his lip, eyes narrowing. His eyes are like fireworks. “Depends on how you define it.”

- 29.

Derek was supposed to meet Stiles an hour ago.

When he finally tumbled his way into the bar, Stiles was sitting with someone else, head cradled in his palm. Curling his fingers in, he tuned into the conversation, slightly scared of what he would find.

This is where it ends, he thought to himself, staring hard at the blond listening, the expression on his face reluctant. It made Derek’s blood burn. Stiles waved his hands around, oblivious.

“...We’ve been together since I was seventeen. God, he’s great. Such an asshole though. I hate him. I mean, I love him, but I hate him. He drives me up the wall - and not in the hot way. Well, he does that, too.” Stiles paused, thoughtful, “He’s so sexy and smart and sweet and infuriating, the motherfucker.”

A huge, embarrassingly dorky grin spread over his face and he hooked an elbow around Stiles’ neck. Pressed his face there for a moment and breathed him in before pulling back.  

“I love you, too.”

Stiles’ eyes widened as he rounded on him. “You dick, I waited an hou - ”

Derek pushed their mouths together, swallowing the words on his tongue. He used to call it recycling, his syllables like beer bottles; broken glass taken from his teeth - crushed, melted, remolded.

33.

Deaton really does roll his eyes this time. “Stiles. The book.”

“Right, right, right, right, right.” Stiles says, like once isn’t enough to get his point across. Derek watches him helplessly as he settles a finger over the passage Deaton has open, muttering to himself.

“Um, I kind of skipped over a lot of this when I was translating? Something something parallel worlds that start with the same basic characteristics something about water and salt? Oh my god, this is like an episode of Supernatural.”

He flicks through the pages.

There’s a ring around Stiles’ eyes like raccoons. His eyes are whiskey, drunk from the sleeplessness, the restlessness, the noose made of comforters. Yeah. Derek knows that look well. Intimately, even.  

“You haven’t been sleeping.” He says in one small breath, accidentally, like he knows this one. It’s all that will come to mind aside from a prickly nervousness making his skin feel too tight.

Stiles’ whole body jumps a little when he straightens, limbs shifting back into place, bones locking downward. His lip twitches, like he’s trying to figure out what to say.

“So?” Is what he settles on, obviously still wondering if it’s something he should be irritated or not over.

He shakes his head minutely, waits for Stiles to continue. Deaton watches them, too. Watches them and waits. Derek remembers back to days when it was like this at home, when it was like war when they looked at each other how they’re looking at each other now. Stiles swipes the book off the table and strides out the door. He doesn’t check to see if Derek is following.

“We’re gonna head out, Doc. Me and Derek are gonna chat. I promise I’ll come in extra early tomorrow!”

Deaton’s smile gives Derek the shivers.

- 28.

“Do you ever shut up?” He remembers Isaac snarling at Stiles through elongated teeth, when he found them upset and flushed and had just stumbled miles through mud and grass to be on someone’s side.

Derek rolled his eyes, fighting down the irrational anger that builds up over his words. Why would someone want Stiles to shut up? Why wouldn’t they want to hear what he was saying when it was so damn interesting all the time?

“Research shows it’s hard to be creative in a quiet place,” Derek said, eyes shining bright blue through the rain and grime. Scott’s head snapped up from where he was torn between the two of them, watching helpless as they argued. “I think we should thank him for being unhelpful all the time.”

There was a pause, and then:

Stiles laughed his ass off in the middle of the forest while everyone else stared at Derek incredulously, face splashed with what looked like a mixture of dried blood and leaves, jeans soaked. He looked down at his boots, an inch into the ground, Stiles nearly meeting it when he slipped on the air escaping from his lungs. His hands - flying out to catch him, flying out to meet him between confidence and collision - laughed too.

Stiles says that’s the moment he fell in love with Derek. And Derek - that’s the moment he realized he had been in love for so much longer.

34.

“Where are you staying then, George Bailey?”

Derek doesn’t reply. There is a pitiful quality to saying, “Nowhere.” Even if he happened to be sleeping in the cave, it was likely he would be caught sooner rather than later. He didn’t exactly want a family reunion with a group of people that a. he would probably cry in front of and b. wouldn’t remember him.

Stiles rolls his eyes, as if sensing his answer. “Come on. Mom won’t mind. She’s always taking in strays.”

- 27.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Laura would ask him, years before the fire happened and he was still waddling around, unsure on his own two feet.

“Away from here.” Derek pouted up at her when she caught him around the waist, her laugh twinkling in his ear, rougher than bells but just as sweet.

“And why is that, wolfie?”

And his little cheeks would burn while he shrugged. Derek thinks he loved her so much because she didn’t push too hard, not when it mattered.

“Alright. Let’s just clean you up, okay? Momma’s got food at home. Let go of the rabbit.”

Derek drops the animal from his hands and lets her pick him up, carry him home.

35.

Mom won’t mind.

Derek sucks in a breath and follows him down the road to his car, staring at the fabric stretched over his shoulder blades and wondering where the hell he ended up.

- 26.

“Stiles?”

“Yeah?” The reply was drowsy. They were stuck chasing Yeti upstate in the deep recesses of mid-winter, frost crawling up the windows of the Toyota.

“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” Derek tried catching his eye in the rearview, watching Stiles down another sip of whiskey to keep himself warm.

“Anywhere?”

“Yeah.”

Stiles cracked up and Derek didn’t know why, but he wanted to, wanted to taste that sound, wanted to know if it would get him buzzed as the alcohol in Stiles’ veins.

He didn’t get an answer until they were standing over an emaciated lump of white fur stained in reds, after Stiles finished complaining about how none of the real life things look how they told ‘em in fairytales.

“If I could go anywhere,” Stiles said, mouth filled with ghosts. His teeth were red from where he had ripped out the yeti’s throat, letting Derek shred the binds on his wrists before he threw up when he spit it out. A shaking, pale hand ran over the area again, as if he could sense what Derek was thinking.

“If I could go anywhere, I’d go somewhere my mother still exists.”

36.

A moment later, he wonders if his own mother is alive here, too. It sends something scurrying in his chest. He doesn’t know if it’s exhilaration or alarm.

Stiles turns back toward him, hand hovering over the Jeep’s door handle. His grin is small, but there. “You coming or not, sourface?”

Derek stares out the window and resolutely doesn’t take his hand as the engine comes to life.

- 25.

Derek remembers the first time he saw Stiles and thought, just for a second, watching his hands scrub over his buzzcut and his lips drop open, how nice it would be to have him.

37.

Stiles plucks the post-it off the fridge when they get back to the house (colored different, a mint green), face falling gently.

“Another late shift.” He mumbles to himself, long fingers running over the curly handwriting.

Derek makes a small noise in the back of his throat and looks away. He surveys the mismatched cookbooks linings the walls, the photos stuffed between them of Stiles and his mother.

The ones turned toward the walls, Derek assumes, are the ones that include John. There’s a half-empty bottle of whiskey sitting on the table among scattered papers detailing the lives of his mother’s cases. Stiles eyes it for a long moment, before crumpling the post-it and shooting it at the trash, throwing his leg up and tossing it under. He makes it in.

He could never make it in before Derek taught him during his first year of college, all wrist and no aim. The divide in the Stiles from his memories and the one standing in front of him makes his head throb like a bruise.

Stiles turns to him. “I guess you mean that I have to cancel on Scott.”

His heartbeat slows. It’s weirdly nice to know that Scott’s a constant in all of Stiles’ lives and vice versa, even ones that he isn’t a part of.

“Don’t. I don’t have to stay - “

Stiles rolls his eyes. “And where would you go? The homeless shelter for troubled time travellers?”

“Maybe. At least they’d be hospitable.” Derek deadpans, thinking of unforgiving rock walls and what they might say, “I might even get a pamphlet. ‘Jumping universes and how to deal’. A copy of The Time Traveller’s Wife.”

Stiles snorts and grabs a bag of chips from the bottom cupboard. He claps him on the shoulder as he goes by and flinches, slightly. Derek watches him, bewildered.

The boy tries for a smile. It’s a watered down sort of thing that makes Derek’s guts twist. When Stiles turns away, there’s a flash of movement, as if he’s shaking out his hand.

“Thank god. I thought you were going to do the whole sad thing all night long or something.”

38.

They watch NCIS all night and Stiles complains about how only old people watch NCIS, even though he’s the one that put it on. Derek changes it until he finds some out of season hallmark movie and leaves it to see Stiles squirm.

He counts down in his head, waiting for Stiles to start complaining about the acting prowess, or lack thereof, but it never comes. Derek is left with a fresh, hollow feeling and a wrongness he can’t seem to put his finger on.

39.

At midnight, Stiles says, “Holy shit” and scrambles upstairs. Derek hears the water go on and smiles to himself.

He settles on Stiles’ mattress gingerly, hands running over the blankets. Same comforter, same posters on the wall. There’s a blank space though, where his investigation board would be, an empty slot in the plastic cabinet beneath his bed where the yarn would overflow.

“Blue is just pretty.”  

Derek flashed his eyes at him and grinned, rolling them over and untangling the yarn from Stiles’ hands. His lips skimmed over Stiles’ collarbones lightly, elbows pressed into the carpet beneath them. Stiles sighed and pulled him up for a proper kiss and they laughed when their teeth clanged -

Derek shakes his head, shoving the memories away before they eat him alive and focusing on the things beneath his hands. He slowly, purposefully, releases his grip on the plush swells of Stiles’ blanket. This bed, these things - they aren’t his to be reckless with anymore.

“Dude, I get that you’re having a rough time but I have school in the morning.” Stiles pushes himself off the doorframe, toweling his hair sporadically, as if he’s forgotten its still wet after several tugs.

Stiles stares at him for a moment and for once, the expression isn’t familiar, even though he’s seen it on his Stiles’ face a thousand times.

He wonders, idly, why that is.

The boy breaks eye contact first, tossing his towel at him with a cough. “Shower’s, uh, all yours if you want it. You look like you could use one. You’re all,” Stiles waves a hand at him. “Tense. Like, a big ball of tension. Not - not that that isn’t attractive or anything, I just, showers usually… help with that. Tension.”

Derek raises his eyebrows, unimpressed, before getting distracted at how pink Stiles’ ears go. He takes the towel, barely damp, and throws it in the hamper.

“Thanks, Stiles.” He claps a hand on his shoulder awkwardly. Stiles jerks away like he’s been burned.

40.

“Do you not have any other clothes?”

“I didn’t exactly pack a suitcase.” Derek rolls his eyes, but flushes slightly, forgetting who he was sleeping next to when Stiles’ eyes rake down his bare chest a third time.

“I’ll get you - something. Soon. After. Yeah.” Tongues over lips and lust in the eyes. Derek throws the towel at him and sheds yesterdays jeans.

41.

Derek doesn’t know when they end up in the same bed, but they do.

42.

That night, Stiles screams about flames in his sleep and Derek rolls over, throws the blanket over his own head, and waits until the screaming stops.

- 24.

“Let’s have babies.” Stiles was incredibly drunk when he started on his baby-rave their second New Year’s together as a couple, leaning back into Derek’s chest and taking another swig of whatever drink Lydia had cooked up for him.

“How many babies?” Derek said softly, if only to see how he would respond. Stiles laughed into his neck, light and airy, as if a cloud of hysteria was oozing through his lips like smoke.

“Lots of babies. New baby every day-be.” His dazed attempt at rhyming made Derek’s lip curl up.

“Okay,” Derek ran his hands along Stiles’ sides. “Let’s do it. What would we name them?”

“Laura.”

“Even if it was a boy?” His chest ached.

Stiles nodded determinedly. “Even if it was a boy. Or - or Renier. I know how much you loved them. I wanna love them, too, in whatever way I can.”

Derek caught his chin in his palm, said, “Sometimes you’re too good for me.”

“Shut up. Sometimes you’re too good for me.” Stiles paused. “But we’re both good, okay? We’re assholes, but we’re good. Remember that in the morning for me.”

Then he passed out in his arms, lips pressed sleepily against his cheek. Derek tightened his arms around him and watched the stars swim out of focus.   

43.

Bewildered, Derek sits up, pressing the heel of his palm into his eye. Stiles squawks from where he’s getting dressed, sleep shirt half off and tangled around his ears.

“You’re still in high school.” Derek states, as if he didn’t already know. It’s a strange thing for him to wake up to after so long. The other boy only stares at him, arms still stuck above his head. He coughs. “Stop freaking out. It’s not like I haven’t… seen you before.”

Derek rubs the back of his neck self-consciously when he realizes how bad that sounds, talking to a sixteen year old boy. Again, Stiles makes an indignant noise, face flushing like a blooming flower.  

“I’m just gonna - “ He stumbles into the door, eyes locked on Derek’s hair, cursing and rubbing at his neck with the hand he managed to free. The boy’s voice is strangled. “Change in the bathroom. If that’s cool.”  

Sighing, Derek throws the covers back over his head and lets himself linger between sleep and reality, ignoring the bumbling sounds of Stiles’ swearing as he knocks into the cabinets.

44.

Eventually, Stiles’ humiliation cools enough that he reemerges from the bathroom. Derek had listened to his quiet, panicky pacing and took a small amount of guilt with his amusement. It must’ve been strange for Stiles to hear that, even if he had known what they were to each other where he came from, had recognized the fondness in his looks.

(Scott told him, frequently, that he couldn’t seem to help himself when he was caught up in Stiles.)

“I swear to god I’ll help you research over the weekend, I am just dead tired during the week and I have about a thousand essays to do.” Stiles promises is as he leaves, feet falling over dead branches. Derek steadies him.

“Do you need helping getting out to your car?” He isn’t sure if he’s meant to be joking or genuine. Stiles rolls his eyes and takes it as the former, apparently.

“You just see if I help you now, Hale.”

The jeep roars away, spitting up on the asphalt, and Derek keeps on hoping that he’ll wake up - now, no? Okay really, now.

45.

Left to his own devices, he goes searching and finds that everything is just slightly out of place.

(It seems like everything is, around here.)

(There's a stack of clothing, waiting for him, underneath the desk.)

46.

The journal, though, that always stays in the same place, and he takes all the amusement from it that he can squeeze out.

47.

When Stiles gets home, he grins and says:

“Oh, Lydia Martin, you’re so smartin’

and I’m so smitten,

with your impeccable winter mittens

How are you so hot

We just don’t know

Scott, please, she won’t tell me that this time,

Yes, god, I’ll go!”

“That’s so not what it says, dickhead!” 

Derek laughs like it’s exploding out of him as Stiles tackles him into the couch and they grapple, Derek holding it away from their twisted limbs. He smells like sweat and grass and sugar, underneath. Scott, Marc Jacob’s Daisy, Jackson’s aftershave painted in aggression. Exertion and excitement, a rush, a shot of adrenaline, only gone straight up his nose like he’s snorting cocaine.

“I literally read it word for word!” 

Stiles falls flat on his ass, journal in hand, papers flying out everywhere. He huffs, pushing off his hands and collecting them without another glance.

“You’re making me pancakes for this, Hale!” He calls as he storms upstairs, reeking of mortification. A part of Derek is still riding the high of his laughter. Another wants to rush to placate him. He doesn’t, sinking back into the cushions instead.

“I meant it about the pancakes.” Stiles says, quieter, popping into the doorway thirty minutes later to find him still staring at the ceiling like it’s key to the world.

“I know.” Derek smirks, but doesn’t look away. His eyes are distracted. The specs in the paint are like an owl’s feathers.

“Lazy ass.”

“You can’t eat pancakes for dinner.”

“What.” Stiles’ tone is so flat Derek swears he could drive on it. “Breakfast food is made for all times of the day.”

“Whatever, Stiles.” Derek laughs, and hopes this one knows it means, you’re probably right and I’m more of a waffle guy, myself and I like when other you’s mouth tastes like syrup in the morning after we eat. Maybe not the last one. Maybe he can keep that one to himself.

- 23.

Stiles used to pluck the poetic parts out of him like they were feathers in his hair. Twisted the things he said into something romantic.

“I don’t have to twist it,” Stiles rolled his eyes. “You’re a sap. Accept your sappiness.”

He flipped through the worn out pages, grinning. “Oh, I like this one. Stiles, the miles my heart stretches for you, the things I’d do for you, the things I’d give to have you.”  or “Derek, Derek, is your heart still a tinder box under all the layers or claws and teeth?”

Derek didn’t answer. It was a weird time in his life, okay.

Stiles waved the journal around in his face, limbs flying everywhere, all bones and no curve. He batted his hands away, pulling him in and kissing him, if only to shut him up. Stiles’ hand went slack, the goddamned journal - and how did he even find that, jesus christ - falling from loose fingers.

He thinks that’s the moment he realized he was in deeper than he believed he could get. The moment he thought to himself, Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what I’ve been waiting to feel the entire time.

48.

Derek tugs the laptop out of his hands on Saturday, saves whatever it is Stiles is writing, and stows it under the desk. Stiles makes a noise of protest before he catches sight of the Blackforest bag, quieting as Derek pulls the styrofoam casing out of the plastic and tosses at him lightly.

“You - pancakes.” Stiles tries around a mouthful, syrup dripping down the sides of his mouth.

“No, I’m Derek.”

“No,” Stiles spits, swallowing down another pancake. “You’re a little shit.”

Derek laughs, unable to help himself, grabbing for the remote and shoving Stiles over with his feet as he sits down.

- 22.

The first time he shifted for Stiles, under the moon, it was late August.

The night was blue and still hot, the stairs creaking beneath them. He pulled his shirt over his head and placed his palms out like his mother told him, waiting. He still remembered the ritual, even if he had never been witness to a real one.

(Talia had done it for Cora and the neighbor wolf’s little kid ceremonies thousands of times. She liked to indulge when it came to love. Love and everything else.)

Stiles smiled at him, but it was a hesitant, murky thing. “You sure you want to do this?”

Derek turned to him and caught his cheeks, kissed the words out of his mouth, desperate and deep. “If there’s anything I want to do the right way it’s this, with you.”

Stiles, twenty here, tilted into him, the bite of his teeth hard against Derek’s palm. Hard enough to draw blood and to let it cover his bared teeth as he curled the wolfsbane rope over their collarbones like a necklace. Derek grinned, watching his skin glow, and the moon howled over the both of them.

The anchor - the formal one, at least, the one that began winding around them so tight they could feel their lungs contracting - stretched over the stars and pulled them up with it as his fangs dropped down into the clouds.

His fur rippled over four legs to make a throne for his king; a ruling place for Stiles, over his blood and his body and his bones.

49.

Deaton never specified a time to meet, after the third of finding nothing. It’s making him antsy, not having someone constantly churning out solutions, even if they were all mostly unhelpful.

50.

“I think we’re out of milk.” Stiles says pointedly, refusing to look away from his episode of Game of Thrones.

“And?”

Stiles gives him a look and he sighs.

51.

“Who gets the family size vaseline?” Stiles gives him a wild look from where he’s lounging in the cart, pushing said vaseline off his stomach. “Do I look like I use family size vaseline.”

“We could need it.” Derek actually doesn’t know why they get the family vaseline back home, but it feels like a step in the right direction, taking it off the shelf.

“Please, my skin is baby smooth, dude, and my lips never chap.” Stiles says, ripping open one of the candy boxes he pulled off the shelf. Derek rolls his eyes, used to his particular brand of…. lawlessness. “So, what are you even looking for anyway?”

“Weren’t you the one who wanted to come to the store?” Derek replies, bewildered. Stiles’ hands fly around in the air like pale, bony birds.

“I meant with the whole. You know,” His voice lowers and he gives Derek a scrunched sort of shape around the mouth, an obvious sign of when Stiles is trying and desperately failing at being subtle. “Parallel universes thing.”

“You that eager to get rid of me, Stilinski?”

“No! No,” Stiles throws a handful of dots into his mouth whole, before holding the box out to Derek. “You only like the red ones, right?”

Derek stares at the red dots he jiggles out into his hand, wondering why the memories are selective. There are things Derek knows this Stiles doesn’t know. But there are moments like this one, where it doesn’t feel any different at all and he has no idea why.

He shakes himself, tightening his edges until they’ve sharpened into something manageable.

“I just meant,” Stiles continues, popping more into his mouth. Derek never got why he always wanted to talk after he started chewing. “You know, if you made any progress or whatever, with Deaton and the stuff I translated. And I, for one, thought you would be pissing your pants to get home. I would be.”

Derek doesn’t know how to tell him that he is his home. “You were there the last time we talked about it?”

“The sparkly things in the jars always distract me. Figured with you there, I might finally get a finger in.”

Stiles is grinning up at him, eyebrows tilted in a manner that is both ridiculous and seductive - ridiculously seductive.

A footstep stutters to the floor and his head snaps to the blonde tousle of hair rounding the corner. It bounces in tandem with her slow, careful steps, a shaking hand gripped tight over the scratched red handle of the basket.

He knows better than to call out to her, after what happened with the others, but he wants to, still. There is a part of him that yearns to make amends with her, to plead for her forgiveness. To take back all the mornings he spent making her death bed.

Derek trails her silently and Stiles quiets, as if noticing his attention is elsewhere - somewhere he doesn’t want to be caught.

(Derek understands. He hates being stuck there, too.)

The problem with the seizures, just like the problem with being in a parallel universe, is that they exist and they happen and they happen often when Erica isn’t howling. One moment, there is milk in her hands and she’s staring through the glass as if contemplating the rest of them. The next, she’s hit her head on the floor, blonde hair spilling out like blood. Derek leaves Stiles with the cart, falling next to her.

Her body jerks, a puppet on cut strings. Derek watches her helplessly but keeps his distance in case it panics her more. When the seizing stops, he props her gently on her side and glares until the people watching go away. Stiles hovers to the side of them, a water bottle in hand.

“I thought I could do it.” Erica tells him because she doesn't know who he is, but she hopes it's her father coming back for her, eyelids fluttering.

 Derek runs a hand over her hair, holds her hand tight, and says, “I know.”

- 21.

“I thought I could do it.”

Derek held her hand tight and said, “I know.”

Cora trembled, blood trickling down the corners of her mouth. Derek wrapped his other hand over the metal bar the elves had run through her stomach, pondering the least painful ways to pull it out of his baby sister.

“Any day now, Derek,” The words escaped through gritted teeth, all former vulnerability gone, mental or otherwise. “It’s not like I’m dying or anything.”

Her claws, though, dug into his hand hard enough to hit bone.

A clean slice.

52.

Erica’s eyes shine vibrant as he presses the bottle to her lips. He nearly breaks down at how alive she is, her own body trembling with the force of it against his arms. Stiles stays back, eyes wide, looking between them like he can tell he’s seeing her again for the first time in years.

“Sit with Boyd at lunch tomorrow,” Derek says in a hushed voice, looking around worriedly. Her foster mother might come by soon and that’s a woman he still doesn’t know how to deal with.

(The first time, he told Maeve that Erica was feeling better about herself after they talked, that the seizures should go away. She threw her head back and closed her eyes. The lidless trashcan was a graveyard for cigarettes. One dangled between her hands, the CD player scratched out: ‘I see you’ve got a husband now. Did he leave your pretty fingers in a wedding cake?’

The long drag of smoke, smoke that falls out again with the words, “Jesus, Pretty Eyes, I can barely make Erica talk, the damned thing. Can’t you make me feel better and take ‘er off my hands?”

So, he did.)

Erica doesn’t do more than blink up at him with big, wary eyes. He drags a helpless thumb over her temple.

“Don’t try and climb the rock wall during P.E. Tell Finstock that you have epilepsy. The only reason he’ll make you go is because he doesn’t know. Ask Isaac to sit too, maybe. If he let’s you. Do it slower than with Boyd though. Isaac and him aren’t the same. Isaac’s a little more afraid of what it means to be with other people. He covers up a lot of black eyes.”

Maeve is pushing a cart down the end of the aisle, blissfully unaware. Derek stands and offers Erica a hand. She takes it hesitantly.

“Who are you?”

Derek smiles into his shirt, drops her hand. Stiles’ lip is caught between his teeth, but it falls from when their eyes meet.

“No one. Have a good night, Erica. I hope things get better.”

53.

The scent in his nose is strong and angry and it makes his head pound. He goes to sleep with his back against Stiles’ and Kate’s perfume wafting around in pink clouds, fogging up his head.

54.

“She actually did it, you know.”

Derek startles, looking up from the dictionary. Stiles drops his lacrosse stick into Derek’s lap. He’s hit decadent. “What?”

“Erica. She sat with Boyd.” Stiles grins, looking down at his hands, uncharacteristically shy. “God, you should’ve seen the way he lit up when she asked if she could.”

His heart swells up like a balloon. He tries in vain to cover it up and curses the twitch of his lips through an otherwise stoic expression. “I’m glad.”

“Of course you are, you big lug.” Stiles nudges him, toeing off his shoes and shoving at his arm until he makes room on the couch. Licks his lips. “She’s dead isn’t she?”

Derek’s mouth goes dry. “Yeah. She’s dead.”

“How’d she die?” Stiles asks, not unkind.

“I killed her.” It spills out of his mouth, hot and heavy and dirty. Stiles’ eyebrows furrow.

“You - “

“Killed her.” He nods, looking down. He can feel his own eyelashes at the tops of his cheekbones, light as butterfly wings. “I let them go, even when I knew what was waiting for them out there.”

“I - “ His voice starts, sputters out, and stops.

Stiles doesn’t ask him anymore questions after that.

55.

“I’m going out,” Derek says simply, throwing on his jacket. The scent is making his head burn and he doesn’t know how to shake it, so he does what he always does - he follows it.

56.

The woods are always cold at night - unforgiving even to the people that have been raised in it, that have been buried beneath it. The roots want prey in the shape of ankles, the tree branches have a bloodlust that no battle can sate. The river runs red when the moonlight doesn’t strike it, then black, black, black.

Derek loves the woods. They have always reminded him of his internal atmosphere, of how the full moon makes him want in ways he never did before his family perished.

In the distance, Kate’s breath is harsh around the trigger of her gun.

57.

When the bullet hits his arm, Derek laughs and laughs and laughs as it burns, racing through his blood.

58.

He runs before she can catch up to him, even though he wants her to, wants her to get close enough that he can really, truly kill her. All thoughts of acceptance, or believing that he had gotten over what she stood for - well, they fly like the wind.

59.

The wound starts hurting only when the adrenaline runs down and the pain - god, he’d almost forgotten how it felt.

60.

The first thing Stiles gets his mouth around is, “What the fuck?”

Derek grits his teeth and rolls his eyes, going straight for the first cabinet above the stove. His hand freezes when he remembers where he is.

“Shit.” He turns back to Stiles, who is staring him with wild eyes. “You have to drive me to Deaton.”

“How ‘bout I take you to an actual hospital, maybe?”

Derek gives him a look, eyebrows furrowed. “You know better.”

“Obviously not.” His voice is comically high.

“Stiles.” He gestures at himself with his free hand, teeth grit against the pain. “Werewolf.”

“You’re a werewolf?”

“You didn’t know?” He knows his eyebrows have gone ‘judging know-it-all #12’. (Scott and Stiles spent a whole day naming his expressions by eyebrow placement.)  

“Stiles.”

“I visit my dad for a little while and you make a werewolf friend?”

They both turn to where the door is hanging ajar, Scott staring through it curiously. His eyes clear slightly and the scandalized expression on his face, as though Derek were suddenly some sort of novelty toy, disappears.

“Hey. I know you. Derek, yeah?”

Derek glares at him, hard, still clutching his arm. Scott seems to notice it and shrinks back. “Oh my god. Your arm - “

He huffs and walks past both of them. He can probably run there in time, the town isn’t all that big. Stiles unfreezes fast enough to throw an arm out and winces when a bit of Derek’s blood splatters against his wrist.

“Hey, hold on there, big guy.” Stiles looks like he’s trying very hard to compose himself. “I’m not letting you go out there on your own.”

Stiles holds up his keys, the stubborn set of his eyes relaxed slightly. “Scott, buddy, it’s great to see you. Go home, we’ll talk in the morning, promise. Derek? I’ll get you to Deaton’s.”

61.

Stiles says, “Thank god I have the key.” with a grinning and the small, squeaking turn of it in the lock.

Derek nearly takes his face off, having forgotten for a moment how infuriating he can be.

62.

“I wish my magic were better,” Stiles spreads his hands. “I can barely light a candle let alone heal a bullet wound.”

Derek tears through the package with his teeth when it refuses to come undone. The wolfsbane cuts into the enamel when he digs too hard and for a second it feels like the insides of his mouth are melting away.

“Good thing someone else already thought this through for you.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, trying for nonchalance as he leans both elbows on the table, but he watches him hawk-like, fear in his eyes. The lighter is sliding in his blood, slipping out of his grasp. His mind, too, is hazing over trying to get even a spark.

Stiles’ hand covers his own. “Let go.”

The fire starts up and he nearly loses it, the blood and the flame and a different Stiles. He grabs for them, ignoring the sting of flames at his thumb, presses the petals into his palm. They go up in smoke and he goes with them as he holds the handful to his arm.

- 20.

“I think he’s dead!”

It felt like an angel’s hands the first time, burning against his cheeks. The blow to the face reminded him that humans couldn’t be angels, though, no matter how they tried.

63.

He comes to on the examination table.

There’s dried blood on his hands, he can feel it. Someone else’s fingers are heavy on the one he can’t see. A pressure on his forehead and the light fixture swinging back and forth over his head as if flickers in and out of focus. Stiles’ hair, tickling the inside of his elbow and a line of drool pooling on the metal surface just beside.

Drowsy and warm, he watches the light and lets himself pretend that this is the same Stiles he left behind.

64.

“Stop watching me sleep.” Derek tells Stiles when he’s tired of keeping his eyes closed, but can’t seem to pry them open.

“Jesus - how did you even know.”

“Werewolf powers. Am I healed?” He manages to crack a lid.

Stiles grins when he catches his eye. “Mostly. I’m pretty sure your legs are still working, dude, you can get up.”

Derek huffs, but complies, slowly, extra slow if the expression Stiles is giving him is any indication. The pure elation makes his eyes roll, blues and whites, like the light fixture still swinging swinging swinging.

65.

“So,” Stiles starts, when they’re back in the house, morning in the windows, food finished and sitting out. Derek’s plate looks like a warzone. “Werewolf.”

Derek replies with, “What do you know, exactly?”

Stiles’ lips open and close, swallowing air like water. “Your name is Derek Hale. You wished you were never born. Some… inherited part of me, left over from your world no doubt, is in love with you. That’s it.”

His heart jumps like the engine of a car. Derek raises an eyebrow, stifling a rising panic.

Left over from your world, no doubt.

Left over.

“Or, that was it.” Stiles sighs, seeming to realize that he won’t be able to maneuver around the truth. “I - there’s other stuff that I get.” Stiles scratches at the back of his neck. “When I… touch you.”

“You recognized me when you saw me that first day,” Derek mulls over it, still suspicious. “Why?”

“I was,” Stiles sits, runs a hand over his hair. “Fuck. Um… I guessitwaskindofmyfault?”

His other eyebrow goes up and Stiles leans back in the chair, tense.

“I was out in the woods, alright? I found this...pendant thing. It was a little beat up, but it was nice. I thought I could bring it back to my mom for her birthday. Then it started burning and flashing so I threw it somewhere?” Stiles flips his hands over on the table.

Derek imagines it dropping into his palm and sees flashes of himself fighting alongside Stiles and Scott, of hearing Allison’s arrows land with a dull thud. Of Stiles ripping it off of the witch’s throat, of her blood landing on Derek’s hands.

“You… threw it somewhere.”

Stiles nods, hesitantly, one eye screwed shut. “Please, don’t kill me. I mean, if you tried to make a move, I’d pepper spray your werewolf ass, I still have a little bit of a preservation instinct, but then might just piss myself or pass out and it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Derek snorts out a laugh.

“So, what does being a werewolf entail, exactly?” Stiles asks, all apprehension gone as quickly as it showed.

“Can’t you find out yourself?”

“Someone ate the wrong rabbit this morning.” He grins at his own joke with half his mouth. “Why would I when I have a living breathing one right here to give me all the dirty secrets. Is it kinky during the full moon or something? Do you really turn into full wolves? Is there a whole bloodlust thing going on - “

He holds his hand out, hoping the jerky motion will silence him. “I meant - couldn’t you just touch me?”

“That’s inappropriate. This is where my mother eats her breakfast.” Stiles’ cheeks flare up through his mask of mock-scandal, but he tentatively does as told. Derek ignores the flush of arousal wafting over him and resists the urge to breath in, curling his fingers over Stiles’ near-gently.

Derek sighs.

“Maybe there’s something in my memory that can help you. Something I might have missed the first time. And maybe you can find whatever you want to about this weird werewolf fetish other you really doesn’t have.”

(That’s a lie, Stiles is really into him wolfing out during sex, but who has to know.)

It doesn’t feel like anything to Derek, except Stiles’ palm in his. It’s growing sweatier, but he doesn’t mind. It used to happen a lot, when they were first dating, when the touch burned into Stiles’ skin like matches to paper.

He starts shaking and Derek realizes a moment too late what’s happening. Derek wrenches his hand away and Stiles heaves.

“Breathe with me, Stiles,” He reigns in his hands at the last minute, from where they were going to touch Stiles’ shoulders. “Ready? In. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven - Out, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Again, okay?”

“I thought they were dreams,” Stiles sputters when he comes down, eyes consumed with smoke. “I didn’t know they actually - God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Derek - “

The legs of the chair scrape against the kitchen floor and Derek buries the panic under his organs like a murder weapon, like something to be guilty over. Stiles doesn’t follow when he goes upstairs.

66.

“I didn’t mean to freak you out.” Stiles murmurs, cotton shirt soft on Derek’s bare skin. He focuses his eyes on the ceiling, knowing that they’ve been glowing like coals for a while now. Stiles is visibly trying to constrain his fascination.

“I know.”

The silence, weighing hard on the caverns beneath his skin.

“Does the tattoo mean something?” Stiles asks, tracing it gently with his fingers. Derek represses a shudder.

“Pack symbol. How does the memory sharing work?”

His voice is soft when he replies. A bird twittering in a cage. “Whatever’s on your mind comes to me first.”

That wasn’t on my mind.

“Do you see you a lot?” He asks instead.

Stiles looks down at his hands. Derek misses holding those hands, the calloused, scarred versions, not the ones afraid to touch him. “I try to avoid it, if I can.”

The flush on his cheeks means he’s seen something too intimate to be comfortable with.

“Sorry.”

“Sometimes it’s nice, though,” The boy tries for a tentative smile. “Sometimes they’re my favorite dreams to have.”  

67.

Stiles leaves the jeep with him, like he’s still trying to apologize. The note on the steering wheel makes him smile, even if it’s only his own name.

68.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

Derek’s head whips around, nearly spilling the coffee he was sent out to get, but Laura isn’t talking to him.

She’s talking to Peter.

He isn’t sure if it’s a relief or a curse to be so close to his sister and to not need words he didn’t have anyway, hiding away half-baked apologies she wouldn’t understand without being dead. Shaking himself, Derek waits to turn the corner, hand against the brick wall they’re just on the other side of.

“ - don’t think your mother would be very proud of that attitude. Hm.”

Claws like a thousand little knives, the sound Isaac’s been perfecting for years. He never had it in him to ask him to stop, because it make him think of Laura practicing in empty parking lots as he tried to sleep.

“Don’t try it, Laura.” Peter’s voice is practically tickled. “I’m an alpha, remember?”

“Not for long. You just fucking wait, Peter.” They storm past and he flattens himself against the wall, cheek to brick, hair and sweat and fear sticky on his skin.

- 19.

Taste your paradise.

Stiles looked over his shoulder before Derek could hide the brochure, plopping down on the couch beside him. Snorted when he caught sight of the title.

“‘Taste your paradise’? That’s the best they could do?” Stiles plucked the glossy pages out of his hand with a scoff.

A week later, Stiles was calling Scott on the phone and proclaiming loudly, “Well you know what I had last night? Sex on the beach. I sure tasted my paradi - “

(He cut off when Scott hung up the phone.)

(Scott did eventually cave though, and called him back.)

(Derek has it under good authority that he’s “ultra bootylicious, scotty”.)

69.

He thinks about Laura, dreams about her in pieces and then her not in pieces, in full form, in living breathing form, and thinks, my dead sister is right down the road and I’m in bed with a teenage boy.

70.

Sometimes, Derek wants to ask Stiles things here so much that it nearly kills him.

71.

“Stiles?”

Silence.

Then, “Yeah?”

Derek fidgets, hands clenching and unclenching. He doesn’t know if he is allowed to ask this,  and of Stiles, but he wants to - oh, how he wants to - if only to see the stories match up like playing cards.

“How’d your father die?”

- 18.

“Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d your mother die?”

“Lung cancer.”

Their fingers caught and Stiles didn’t fault him for asking.

72.

“Lung cancer.” He breathes, slowly.

Derek shutters his eyes close and wishes he was wrong more in this universe.

73.

Derek hates when Stiles hiccups, because it’s always how you know he’s going to cry.

- 17.

“You’re really terrible at comforting crying people.”

“I know.”

There’s was pause. Stiles sniffled.

“You wanna know what my favorite quote is?”

Derek dragged his thumbs along Stiles’ hip. “Yeah.”

“‘You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.’”

“Figures you’d like that one.”

Stiles’ laugh was paper soaking through. “Stop acting like I’m predictable.”

“You are predictable.”

“Only to Scott.”

“To me, too.”

Derek took in his red eyes and his stuffy voice and his dangling feet. Pressed his forehead into his collarbone and tried to take away the emotional pain, even though he knew it was impossible.

(He and Laura tried a thousand times on each other and the pull of their death never went away.)

Stiles slumped against him, any weary, physical ache he had been cultivating melted away with a sigh.

“Burn the book.”

“What?”

“Burn the book.”

“No. I hate people who do that, it’s a destruction of literature.”

“I know. Burn the book.”

“Why?”

“It’s…” Derek hesitated, voice hurried and gruff, staring at the irritatingly blue cover. “It was something me and Laura used to do, even after the fire, when it made her sad. Burn the book. We can watch the all the Star Wars movies after.”

Stiles looked up at him, mouth wet, eyes still watery. “I’m in love with you.”

“I know.” Derek wrangled a grin out of him at the reference, took his hand, and pulled a lighter out of the coin jar.

74.

“How did your father die?”

“I don’t know. Horribly, I hope.”

The questions in his eyes, the did-he-leave-you’s tearing him into pieces; he guesses that makes them even. To this day, he doesn’t wear his father’s last name, and is freer for it.

75.

Stiles’ arm comes over his middle like a safety net, slow and precise. “I get it.”

Derek looks down, swallows once, twice, three times. “Yeah, I know.”

76.

Stiles is gone when he wakes up in the morning and it feels, oddly, like being a one-night stand, only he is the one that was brought home and he is the one that was left without a note goodbye.

(The space between his ribs and his abdomen is still warm though, and tingles when Derek prods at it.)

77.

Five hundred circles on his notebook paper, waiting for Stiles to come back. Five hundred pen marks. Four sloppy signatures, his and Stiles’. Scott’s name in bubbles, a wolf howling at the moon.

Two bottles of aftershave, one half finished.

In his Stiles’ house, it was two cases of lipstick he found under the bathroom sink, old, musty smelling. Burgundy Wine and Apricot Sun. He finds the same pair in Claudia’s bathroom, next to the toothbrushes with all the other lipsticks and mascaras and Marc Jacob’s Daisy.

Twelve towels in the closet, four dresses laid out on Claudia’s bed smelling new with the tags still on them. A shirt lying over the couch where Stiles must’ve changed before leaving as he watched Good Morning, America and ate cinnamon Life. Chopin’s Waltz Op. 69, No. 2 copied down in messy pen on top of the piano that he plays with reverence.

Inventory, Derek thinks, reveals a lot about a person’s life. When he went snooping around in his own, before Scott and Stiles and the whole Peter debacle but after Laura, there was nothing and it was very, very right.

- 16.

“How come they never nominate happy movies?” Stiles asked him one night, settling on some award show and chewing the handful of popcorn he stole from Derek’s bowl aggressively. They watched Matthew McConaughey take the stage, hair looking slightly lackluster.

“This could be happy.”

Stiles turned to him, eyebrows raised. “This is the one where he has aids, dude.”

“Didn’t you want to go see that?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.” He threw his hands up. Derek smirked, ran his knuckles over the curve of Stiles’ ankle. “The point is that sometimes I just want to see a movie where the good wins get the award.”

“The movie doesn’t have to be sunshines and rainbows for the good to win,” Derek said, kissing at side of Stiles’ neck, attempting to erase the perturbed expression bunching on his face. “A lot of things constitute as winning."

“Does that include death?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s rational. It’s real.”

Stiles threw himself back against the arm of the couch, grinning, saying, “Then I hate rational. I really hate when you’re rational. It makes me feel frazzled.”

And Derek leaned forward, flashing his teeth, hands sliding under his shirt, watching the shine of Stiles’ belt buckle intently. Kissed him messily for a long moment, messily enough to draw sounds out of both of them, messily enough to quicken Stiles’ heartbeat.

“Does it make you feel better that I rationalize because if I don’t, I’ll go crazy?” He whispered it against Stiles’ mouth like a confession, or a prayer.

Stiles drew his thumb over Derek’s wet bottom lip, curled it down and exposed his gums. His free hand drew hearts in his stubble. “I hate that even more.”

78.

A door opens and closes, heels clacking against the floor. Derek stops and holds his breath, waiting as they go up the stairs.

- 15.

“We’re gonna die out here, aren’t we?” Stiles asked, drawing his gun out of the holster.

Derek growled, snapped canine teeth, pawed at the ground until he kicked up enough dirt it could be found semi-impressive. Stiles gave him a long suffering look and cocked the pistol.

“Where are the others again?”

He didn’t get an answer, at least not one he was looking for. Derek thought he wasn’t expecting to. Earlier that night; claw marks down the door, Stiles saying “Oh shit, dude, not again,” darkness, darkness, darkness so suffocating. Stiles, though, Stiles could always breathe in the darkness and Derek never understood how, but he wished he did.

“If we are gonna die, you’re the most badass looking out of all of them, at least I go down lookin’ like a badass, too.” Stiles grinned, suddenly, a ray of sunshine. Maybe that was the secret. Enough sun to walk among the shadows, enough darkness not to drown in it like Scott and Allison did once.

Derek snarled, a stand in. (He couldn’t exactly say “fuck you” with a mouth full of relics. His teeth, he knew, would go on the hunter’s market for a fortune. Hale teeth, you guys, Hale teeth. Goddamn, the things we could do with Hale teeth, the magic in these things.)

“Derek. Famous last words right here, say something cool that doesn’t make any sense. Some ‘We’re going into glory’ type thing.” Stiles laughed and curled his fingers into the fur at his ears and dragged them into the cave, feet in front of feet like a nosedive.

79.

“Do you play?”

The voice, gentle and accented, startles him out of his reverie. When he looks up, it is into the face of Stiles’ mother.

She’s as beautiful as he described her and he takes a moment to blink away what he thinks might be tears. He’s heard too much about her to not cry.

(He doesn’t think he’s ever held back so many tears in his life until he got here.)

“Um,” Derek looks down at his hands, rubs them against his jeans once to rid himself of the sweat. “Yeah. My mom taught me when I was little.”

- 14.

“Underneath a concrete sky, Lucy puts her hand in mine. She says life’s a game we’re meant to lose, but stick by me and I will stick by you…”  

Laura used to sing that to him, after they were in New York, after they were crowded over by people they didn’t know. She said it reminded her of the ‘early days’ and Derek would swallow hard until it didn’t hurt so much, until he didn’t feel like she was referring to the deaths he caused.

Sometimes, Derek laid his head on her stomach as she warbled, hoping the vibrations would seep through his brain. He was never very good at the guitar, unable to make his hands fit around the wood right. Laura said it was because his fingers were made for keys, not strings. She was right, after all - he could never get himself to play anything other than the piano.

He thinks she knew he played in private, when she wasn’t home. Thinks she could smell the charge in the air that he always felt he left behind when he was done for the day.

Derek liked that she never brought up the papers under his pillow he knew she went through that were titled, “Mom” and “Cora” and “Ren,” but never “Laura.”

80.

Mrs. Stilinski smiles and clucks at him until he scoots over, enough to let her sit.

“Play something for me.”

“I,” Derek’s fingertips rest lightly on the keys. “I don’t know what to play.”

“What’s your favorite?”

The one I wrote for your son.

There are things you can’t say to a mother with a son. This is one of them. He buries his answer and shakes his head. 

“There was one,” Derek says hesitantly, “For my sister.”

Claudia gives him a small smile, a bittersweet one that is sympathetic but lacks pity. It makes him feel better, even if she thinks he’s referring to someone that’s dead.

(Which she is, in his mind, but it was a hard thing to wrap his head around again, when he saw her on the street just the other day.)

He thinks of Laura truly now, thinks of all the songs he tried to make for her. Presses down gently for her when Claudia doesn’t look away, only watches him and settles delicate hands in her lap. Her fingernails are pink laminated paper against her floral dress. Derek keeps playing, like he has something to prove.

He knows, with a faraway sort of understanding, that he’s mumbling lyrics under his breath. They’re sad and desperate, coming away in layers of “I miss you”, but his voice doesn’t shake and neither does his hands. His mind feels like an earthquake. When the melody stills into a large silence, it comes with a pleasant sense of surprise. A proud, I-finally-got-around-to-it.

“You’re very talented.” She says to him, a firm hand curling over his forearm. “I wish I were that talented in my youth.”

Her laughter shines like stars and beneath it, someone chokes loudly. Derek’s head snaps up at the same time Stiles’ mother’s does.

“Eavesdropping again, Szczepan?” Claudia smirks. He sees so much of her son in her that it starts to gnaw at him.

Stiles shoots him a pained look at the name, wincing and rubbing a hand over his head. “I was getting milk, mom.” He gestures to the carton in his hand and heads back up stairs.

Derek brushes a hand over the keys when he stands and follows him up.

When he finds Stiles, he’s starfished out on his bed, face down.

“It’s not like I haven’t heard your real name before.” Derek grins, sitting in the chair and spinning himself idly.

Stiles swallows visibly, flipping over, adam’s apple bobbing beneath its pale skin coat. “I... must’ve trusted you a lot then.” It tries to come out joking, but it’s mostly raw. “Scott’s the only other one.”

Derek sobers. “Yeah.”

- 13.

“She went crazy in that hospital.” Stiles shook his head, leaning on his shoulder. His gloved hand curled over Derek’s.

“I get that. I had hypothermia once, stayed in for three days.”

Stiles stared at him, before breaking out into a grin. “Shut the fuck up. Wait, don’t. How did you get - ?”

“Laura pushed me in the lake.” His voice took a grumbly tone. “Was still young, stayed under too long. Immune system wasn’t as strong. Mom freaked out for days.”

Stiles blinked the daze out of his eyes, teeth the color of snow. They leave the bouquet on the slushy dirt and walk through the gravestones quietly, as if their footsteps could disturb the dead.

81.

They talk a lot - Derek and Claudia. They talk about nothing, but it’s free and it’s motherly, and he misses his own family, the dead one and the one he doesn’t know how to get back to.

82.

“How do you make this?”

The older woman cranes her neck over his shoulder where the cookbook is lying open, where he has stopped cutting carrots to look at it, too. There’s a picture, unattached to anything else. The words underneath are what he assumes is Polish.

“What? Sekacz?” She smiles and reaches over to pats his cheek. “Polish Tree cake. Very hard to make, kochanie. I only make it for Stiles’ birthday in the neighbor’s kitchen. Bunch of freaks, I'm still not sure why they have a spit in their house.”

He remembers Stiles experimenting with it in the kitchen, vaguely. The clarity comes with Derek holding him on the tiled floor, flour everywhere, telling him it’s okay to forget things.

“I know. Can you show me anyway?”

Her fingers hover over the book before turning several pages. She taps her nail against the title. “Schichttorte is easier for you. You don’t need a spit, at least, or any crazy next door neighbors.”

Claudia copies down the recipe meticulously and smiles when she sticks it in his front pocket.

“When you get back to where you’re from,” Claudia says, hands clasping his face, holding it like its worthy enough, like its precious enough to warrant cautionary handling. “When you get back, and you find that person you’re missing, bake this for them.”

He panics mildly, replaying their interactions, trying to find where he slipped up in his pretense of not having anyone to go back to. She seems to notice and grins as she falls back against the counter.

“Mother’s intuition, Derek. I know love in the eyes when I see it.” The woman grins and he flushes. “Tell me about him?”

“How did you know he’s a ... he?”

Claudia snorts again, hand on her hip. “Honestly, child, don’t you ever listen. Mother’s intuition. You must’ve had a mother. I can see that in the eyes, too.”

She levels him with her eyes, drawing an invisible line between their gazes in the space with her index finger.

“He’s,” Derek sighs, feeling weary, “I don’t know. Sometimes I wake up and I think, ‘what the hell have I gotten myself into?’ and then I remember that I got myself into him. And I don’t think there’s anything better than getting lost like that.”

From the stew pot, her lips curl, eyelids fluttering. She has Stiles’ eyes and the tilt of his nose, has his eyebrows and his depth and his darkness under all the light. Has his dainty hands and his strong bones. Derek thinks he knows exactly why the Sheriff could never love anyone else, not after this, not with his wife’s eyes staring him in the face when Stiles came home from college.

“There is. There always is when it’s with the person you love. Now, come help me with this. It’s making me sweaty.”

At his back, he knows Stiles is watching them intently, brow furrowed, before turning away.

- 12.

Back home, he and the Sheriff barbecued and talked football.

Derek commented once that he was a Pats fan even though he lived in New York. The Sheriff snorted, said he used to play in college, that he didn’t get the big deal about lacrosse. Derek agreed, because he went to school when basketball was what his year was good at.

Stiles, twisting his lacrosse stick in hand in both hands, only nineteen years old, cringed away from the both of them.

83.

They slip into bed wordlessly that night, Stiles’ head filled with visions of inadequacy and guilt. Derek’s hand lingers over his shoulder, as if the press of his touch will give Stiles comfort.

A moment of hesitation.

The shoulder, too, slides away.

84.

Derek decides to take a drive when Stiles starts mumbling in his sleep about princes and wolves.

He wonders how much of that dream is truth. Shakes it out of him and turns his face into the sky. Derek knows places to clear his mind; there’s a 24-hour bakery forty minutes away and a night with a star-pierced tongue that’s eager to lap him up.

85.

It’s hours before he climbs back through the window, when the sun starts to outline the moon and the stars begin to fade into dust. He sets the keys on the hook downstairs, and takes another shower in the dark, the water trickling over his toes like a game of footsie.

- 11.

Fourth of July weekend. Fireworks, high in the sky, Scott yelling something at Isaac, Lydia’s head on Jackson’s shoulder.

Stiles, eyes reflecting. Derek, eyes reflecting Stiles. Them, the noise booming, the light fading into the water. Stiles, hand over his heart, grinning, making some joke about patriotism. Derek, hand over his heart, hating who it’s started beating for.

The stars, burning, even when they’re outshone. Derek, burning; Stiles, high in the sky.

86.

“Dude. It’s the middle of the night.”

The clock says three. Stiles’ hair is soft and his sweatpants pool over his feet onto the ground in a grey puddle of fabric.

“Technically it’s the middle of the morning.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. The rings of sleeplessness are back and Derek feels guilty that the cure isn’t in his fingers for this one.

“What are these?”

“Apology donuts.” Derek remembers Stiles telling him the same thing after they fought for the first time, the bright pink box smiling at him like a stop sign.

“I may not know this you, but I knew a version of you.” He shakes his own fingers out like he’s jangling keys. “And we had this problem with your dad.”

“I’m not mad at you.” Stiles’ eyebrows furrow around a yawn.

“Yes, you are.” Derek looks him in the eye, pinning him there. “She doesn’t like me better than you, okay?”

Stiles takes the donuts reluctantly, his eyes shallow, but forgiving. “Okay.”

He likes to believe he’s fluent in every dialect of Stiles and here, it means, I’ve never had to share her with anyone else. It means, I’m sorry that you have to apologize for me being selfish.

Derek thinks he has every right to be selfish, just this once.

87.

They sleep until noon the next day, regardless that it’s Wednesday, regardless that Stiles bitches about make-up work over stale donuts. Stiles pokes his toes into Derek’s ribs and lays down with them shoved between the spaces, as if somehow he can shoehorn his way into his body.

88.

“Tell me what it’s like in your world.”

Derek rolls over, drowsy. The pink box is empty and they’re too lazy to draw the blinds even though they’re both squinting from the sunlight. He clears his throat. “What do you want to know?”

“How did we get together?”

“You,” Derek’s smile falters slightly when it sounds too weird. “He wrote the most ridiculous poem about me. And Lydia threw it at me after he got it back, dragging him along, and told us that everyone was annoyed we weren’t together.”

“I’m friends with Lydia?” Stiles whistles. “I must seriously love you to give up on her when I could actually have a chance.”

Derek feels his cheeks heat up, looking at his toes. Wiggles them against the blue comforter and  tries to smirk. “I guess she just turned you down so many times that you had to choose me.”

It’s almost nice having somewhere several people wouldn’t jump to reassure him. Still, this Stiles freezes before saying:

“Dude, look at me."

Derek does. His brain has been programmed that way, to follow that voice everywhere.

There is a strange, guarded look in Stiles’ eyes. “Lydia’s been rejecting me for years. And I bet money the other Stiles’ experiences with her were the same as mine. Letting her go for someone else meant that… It must’ve meant that they were it. You’re it for- for him.”

“Thanks, Stiles.” His voice is low, rough, pseudo-dangerous. Stiles grins softly and nudges him with his nose before hauling himself up. There’s still sugar around his mouth, powdered like snow.

At the door, he says, “No problem.”

- 10.

“I - Fuck. You can keep doing this, Derek.”

He looked down at his hands curved into claws. Stiles let out an angry huff and pulled their dry erase board from behind the cabinet. The legs drag against the floor with a grating noise.

On it, Stiles scribbled in large letters that were nearly unreadable. When he moved out of the way, Derek gave him a confused look.

BAD HABITS TO KICK - STILES AND DEREK EDITION

“Number one,” Stiles said, his irritation still clear as water. He wrote as he spoke. “Derek trying to sacrifice himself for everybody when they don’t want him to.”

Stiles plucked a different colored marker from their box and threw it at his head, hard. “Your turn.”

Derek rolled his eyes and grabbed the marker from where it had bounced off. “Number two. Stiles not caring enough about his own damn safety.”

“Number three. Derek thinking he can control me.”

“Number four. Stiles thinking I’m trying to control him instead of actually being too scared of - “

Derek let the marker drop, slowly, smearing down the board. He didn’t want to put a confession on display where everyone can see it. He took the eraser and watched the words disappear beneath his fingers. He placed it down and turned to Stiles, who was staring at him, bewildered.

“What were you going to write?”

Derek hesitated. “I - “

“Derek.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t live with myself if I killed someone else.” His hand hovered over Stiles’ arm, knowing how wrecked he sounded, even trying to cover it up. “Stop getting hurt, okay?”

Stiles softened slightly and pulled him in. “You can’t use that as an excuse for this, alright? Not with me. I can’t not get myself into things and you know that.”

“I know.” Derek murmured, resting his forehead against the hollow of Stiles’ throat. Because Stiles has him, has him in a way that no one else has him, and he’s selfish enough to admit he doesn’t want to lose Stiles when all of Derek would die in his hands, would wither away into a still heart.

“I miss them.”

Stiles’ hands pet over his hair, t-shirt crumpling in his fist. “Me too.”

“You didn’t know them.” His voice isn’t even angry anymore. Only resigned.

“But I know you and if they’re anything like you,” Stiles tilted his chin up. “They’d give me hell and I’d love ‘em for it.”

Derek grinned at the thought of Laura ripping Stiles to shreds and him releasing his own claws and snarling right back, of Ren being their calming force and Ansel’s laugh falling over them at night like ice and rainwater. The thought of his mother and Stiles in the same room.

Derek wound his arms around the other man and trembled quietly, afraid to let the daydreams go. Stiles seemed to get it, because he kissed his hair and dreamt with him.

89.

Deaton calls the house at four in the afternoon, telling them to come right over, that he thinks they might have a lead. Derek’s heart thrums up and Stiles, oddly, looks almost disappointed.

90.

“This is Peter Hale. He’s allowed us to use his personal library for our studies.”

Derek stumbles back, slightly, hand tight over the doorframe.

“Pleasure doing business, as always.” Peter’s smile sends tremors up his toes. The smile tips toward him, widens with a leer. Derek thinks he’s going to be sick. “Your clients are always so pretty, aren’t they?”

Gross.

Deaton looks a little queasy, too, for his usual calm facade. Peter either doesn’t notice, or refuses to care as he sweeps out the door. His hand is a little too friendly, and Derek barely makes it out without a passing touch.

He waits until he’s heard his uncle’s car hit the road before he leans his forehead against the closest metal surface he could find and tries not to throw up. Stiles’ hand is on his back and he thinks, no, no, no, I don’t want you to see what my family can be.

Stiles doesn’t seem to mind much though, because Derek feels it there, even as he pulls himself back together again.

91.

They scan the books for hours and the only thing that Derek’s eyes catch on are the word, ‘acceptance,’ littering every single one.

92.

He and Stiles leave with nothing but a number for the good Thai takeout place so that they can order ahead while they drive and the distinct knowledge that there's a key piece they're missing.

93.

His sister liked girls. Everyone knew his sister liked girls. And no one minded, because everyone loved his sister.

Everyone also loved Kate Argent, before she burned his house down. He understood, he had been charmed by her, too. The fluttering eyelashes, the glossy hair, the smile saying, “come in come in, I swear I’ll listen.” In fact, the only reason his family didn’t freak out about him dating her was because she was so good at what she did.

He thinks, sometimes, that he wasn’t the only one that was dealing with her. Derek caught her and Peter in corners of the house, talking, as if they were planning, and wonders which one of them was plan b to her.

Derek sees Laura kissing her against the wall of the Thai restaurant as he’s heading back to the Jeep, food in hand. They’re both uncaring of the dumpster next to them, or the homeless man watching with a perverted curve to his face. He hates the way Kate smiles into her mouth and pulls back like she’s saying she loves Laura, like she has some sort of conviction in her words.

Derek walks away, quickly as he can, and tenses when he hears Kate moan, the way she used to with him. He wonders if that’s the only way you can tell when she’s being fake.

He doesn’t want his sister to be a plan - a, b, or c.

94.

Laura walks like she’s burning a warpath into the ground. The trail is always hot and it has never been one that was hard to follow.

95.

“Who the hell are you?”

Derek doesn’t know she’s talking to him until Laura becomes a crowd.

“You’ve been following me around for a week. You think I wouldn’t notice?” Her voice lowers and she throws her hair over her shoulder. “You a hunter? ‘Cause I could rip you limb from limb.”  

“I’m not a hunter and you know that.” He flashes his eyes at her and she recoils, slightly, as if in shock. Derek has never been able to surprise her in his life and it goes down like rusty nails.

(He thinks it’s the blue, that gets her, deep deep down. She shouldn’t cringe away from it though, hers would be blue soon too, if she were gunning for anyone but Peter. Anyone but an alpha.)

“You should’ve been able to smell it.”

Derek wrings his fingers and thinks of what Stiles used to say, his long arms tight along Derek’s waist, sliding under his t-shirt, talking him down. It wouldn’t make any difference, going back. Telling them.

“You’re a bit of an asshole, you know that?” Laura’s face is so fierce he nearly cracks a grin.

Nearly.

“Yeah. But I’m a smart asshole.” He shakes his head and pulls his sleeves and thinks, fuck it, I can do whatever I want in this universe, just this once. “I’m an asshole that’s alive.”

Laura rolls her eyes and bares her teeth. “I could handle a hunter.”

“Yeah? Is that why you’re dating one?”

His sister recoils as if he clawed her in the face. “What did you just say to me?”

“Your girlfriend,” Derek says, not without malice, not without a sad sort of pleasure that comes with knowing something she doesn’t. “She’s an Argent.”

No, she’s a Sawyer. I’ve seen her come out their house a thousand times. They're fuckin' next-door neighbors.

Derek knows what she’s thinking. He’s said the words before to the mirror, dumb with youth and love and heartache over the first blonde woman that lifted a glance in his direction. Laura was always more stubborn than he was though, and she raises a fist to his calm expression before deflating. Derek doesn’t know why, only that Laura gives him the finger and takes off without a word.

He thinks he would’ve gotten worse, if she didn’t see her own eyes in his face full of resignation and a steady heartbeat in his chest.

96.

When he picks Stiles up from school, his scent is colored something sour.

They sit in the car and Stiles cracks the silence open like an egg. His words, “Jackson Whittemore is an asshole,” spill out like yolk, pieces of dejection caught like shells. There’s a bruise on the side of his face that’s purpling and throbbing near-visibly.

Derek tilts his chin toward him so he can see it better, prods at it gently with his thumb. Stiles winces, and then sighs as Derek’s veins run liquid poison.

“How d’you do that?” He’s nearly slurring and Derek pulls away, forgetting how addicting it can get for people who don’t have it in their blood.

“Magic.”

Stiles grins. “Nah. I’m magic. Card tricks and everything. You’re - you’re,” He frowns. “You’re something else.”

Derek raises an eyebrow as he pulls one of the keys off the ring before shoving the right one into the slot. The engine purrs underneath him. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s a good thing.” Stiles nods resolutely, as if he won’t let if be anything else. His eyes zero in on the single key, detached from the rest.

“You’re not.” The teenager is obviously trying to repress a grin. “You’re not. Oh my god, dude, you’re gonna get the shit beat out of you.”

He shakes his head and flashes his teeth. “Snakes don’t bite wolves.”

Jackson is getting into his car, pill bottle in hand.

Derek sticks his arm out the window and drags it along the side of the porsche with a loud screech and hopes everyone in the goddamned town can hear his battle cry on Stiles’ behalf. Jackson’s argument dies in his mouth when he sees the glint of an elongated fang and puncture wounds running alongside the marks of the key.

Stiles laughs until he cries, and then laughs some more, warming him from the belly up.

97.

“Why did Jackson punch you anyway?” He knew that Jackson could be cruel, vindictive even, but he wasn’t more than venomous words and empty threats in Derek’s world.

“He said something about my parents, so I said something about his. For a second, I think we forgot they were dead.”

He wonders what it was, that riled them up so much. But then he remembers how death can control fists like commanders and their armies and leaves it alone.

98.

“He’s on steroids, you know.” Stiles says, bringing the conversation back to life as he changes, shirt coming over his head. He’s glad to see the damage doesn’t extend to anywhere else. (He didn’t think it would. It’s still Jackson, after all. Guilty, guilty Jackson.)  

Derek’s surprised, except he really isn’t. He’s more surprised that his Jackson hadn’t tried, long before he ever offered the bite.

99.

Stiles settles into him the moment he’s in pajamas and falls asleep instantly. His head is pressed against Derek’s chest and several times throughout the night Derek’s worried his heartbeat will rouse him.

Derek runs a hand over Stiles’ wild hair and his swollen face. If he presses a small kiss to his temple, one that makes Stiles sigh into and open his face to him like a window, who does he have here to tell?

100.

He doesn’t notice the date.

Instead, Derek wakes up happy, despite the churning feeling in his gut.

No, in fact, he doesn’t notice the date for the first time in years.

101.

Stiles comes home in his mother’s squad car and Derek realizes then that everything has gone wrong.

“Derek,” Stiles’ hands are held up in front of him, as if he’s afraid. Stiles has never been afraid of him before, not like this. “Derek. You need to stay calm, okay?”

It’s the flash of his eyes, quick as lightning, that tip him off. He always looks where he’s not supposed to when he’s lying. Derek turns, unthinkingly, to the calendar. Sound roars up inside him, white noise and crackling of flames.

102.

“You can’t go out there, Derek, you can’t - “ Stiles’ hands are grappling desperately with his coat as he walks out the front door, voice cracking. The bruise on his face is still so dark, so deep. “Derek.

“How long?”

“What?”

Derek turns, slightly, like the answer could change his mind. “How long has the fire been going?”

“They - they don’t know yet. I mean it, you can’t go. Derek, there’s nothing you could’ve done - ”

There is, though. There is. (They both know that.)

He takes off into the forest, shedding his skin. When he chances a glance back, there is nothing but his tail behind him, his tail and the trees against the wind.

103.

Stiles was right. He shouldn’t have gone.

The smoke comes into his nose long before it comes into site. He’s glad he changed, before, maybe he isn’t, because he would’ve turned back a long time ago.

(He doesn’t know if it’s a lie or not.)

He thinks he can feel it as he gets closer - the flames, the press of his mother’s hands on his face, his brother’s hand over his eyes as he hoists him onto his shoulders at Disneyland, Cora’s little fingers around his thumb. Derek’s grandmother, hugging his mother close as they let her go. Laura, her long curls falling over his shoulder as she tries to punch him in the crotch.

With panicked reluctance, Derek changes back. He can’t help it, not when he’s thinking of them.

104.

When he falls into himself, it’s like tumbling in slow motion.

The scent, the burning, the sound of them screaming, of Ren scorching his hands trying to break the bars.  

“Kate!”  Derek knows he screaming to no one, hands tangled in his own hair. His throat feels like it’s bleeding into the word, like he’s opening up the wound fresh as the day he actually lost them.

He knows she’s not there anymore, that she’s already halfway to Seattle to let an old man decide her fate. Pride or Prison, is what she said she said, holding up the sliver of a claw charred black.

Derek howls, long, low. Only one person answers him - Cora in the cave, unsure of who the person howling is. Cora, who he remembers finding on the doorstep, thinking her so so small, how could anyone leave her behind? How could anything be so tiny?

It makes the tears come faster, hotter, dirt water on his face. The wolfsbane line extends far enough that he can’t make it to the porch without cringing. He’s no Scott and there’s nothing that he can do, just like Stiles said.

He didn’t think it was possible to lose them again.

105.

Derek realizes something as he watches his house burn, the police car cradling his last sister rolling up to the smoking building while he slinks back into the shadows, tears dripping sporadically like a leaky faucet:

In his space, somehow, his sister became him.

106.

“Derek, come on. We have to get out of here.”

Distantly, he realizes someone is tugging frantically at his shoulder. The fire blazes up in his brain and he can feel it, burning him through, end to end.

- 9.

“What does it feel like, to die?” Derek asked Peter in a fit of curiosity, aiming for something that resembled a tenuous forgiveness.

(Despite the fact that he and Stiles lived for holding a joint grudge, Scott told him he deserved the peace, at least for a night.)

Peter laughed and it sent chills down his spine the way it always used to seeing Peter watch his mother with an envy he could taste in his mouth.

“Good,” Peter told him, crossing his legs. There was a slick sincerity in his eyes.

(Derek still couldn’t tell when he was lying or not, even after years of living with him, years of listening to his heartbeat stay the same and, eventually, stop.)

“I almost didn’t want to come back.” His smile spread so wide Derek recoiled. His breath, hot and dark, said, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, and you won’t want to come back at all.

107.

“Derek, come on. We have to get out of here.”

He detangles his fingers from themselves and he seeks out Stiles. The boy’s hand guides him up and away from smoke filtering into the sky. Still, from the corner of his eye, he sees the moment Laura falls to her knees and recognizes Kate’s scent in the ground and doesn’t let it hurt him as much as it should. He’s hurt so much he’s gone numb with it.

Stiles’ hand falls over his and they drive until they can’t drive anymore, until the gas pedals down, until the stretch of road winds them home.

- 8.

This first time he ran, his mother had a hand on his back and a smile on her face and was saying, “Let the moon take you, wolfie.”

Because she knew he needed the slow dip into it as if testing the waters, knew that he was gentler than his siblings, that he didn’t take and take from her the way his brother and his sister had, barely flashed his fangs in the womb. Because she knew that he was soft belly and skinny legs and human in the eyes, even at age seven she knew that’s all he would be. That he would always need to be coaxed into a wolf, rather than guided away from its pull.

He, having read too many versions of Little Red Riding Hood, replied, “What if it swallows me whole?”

“Claw your way out.” Talia’s eyes shined with pride, flashing blood and cherry. “The moon isn’t something to fear, pup. It is our guiding star.”

She pet her claws against his heart, beating bright in his chest, flowing with blood and love and desperation. “You’re a wolf and it is where you will always find yourself.”

She howled until he shook in his bones and did as she told, letting himself be pulled from his skin.

108.

“I think I’m dead, Stiles.” Derek says, leaning back into the seat of the car as the vibration dies and the road does, too. “I really, truly think I’m dead.”

“Sucks for me.” Stiles murmurs gently. His thumb brushes across the back of Derek’s hand, but they don’t look at each other and he’s grateful for it. A long time passes and the street lights come on and a little shiver goes through him. It’s almost a relief, feeling something pass through his body. Feeling anything at all.

“Here,” Stiles says suddenly, wiggling out of his sweatshirt and throwing it over Derek head. It’s large, so it’s a good enough fit, if a little tight around the chest. Derek looks down at it, rubbing his hands over the worn cotton, before turning to Stiles.

“Why - ?”

“Ghosts get cold, too.” Stiles tries for a grin and misses the mark by a mile. Derek likes the expression anyway. The boy tugs at his own fingers. “And it’s my favorite one. Was Dad’s. So. Let its magical juju or whatever make you feel a little better - cleaner, I don’t know.”

Derek sinks into it and feels like he’s been covered in a band aid. It’s comforting, even if he knows he’ll have to rip it off sometime. Stiles opens the car door, and they step out, Derek maneuvering around the gearshift, not bothering with the passenger side. Derek thinks, for a moment, that Stiles is scared of letting him go.

109.

He can’t think, he can’t think, he can’t think.

Not about anything else.

110.

When he finally manages to slump out of the shower, it’s in the shape of a wolf. Stiles looks up from where he’s sitting on the bed, hair wet, feet bare. His mouth falls open slightly at the monster pacing over his carpet, so massive with its shoulders up and its teeth out. Derek can feel eyes on him and it makes him nervous, prickly.

He watches the moon for a long, long time after Stiles turns out the lights, trying to avoid that gaze. And, maybe, a part of him is hoping to see his mother’s outline there, curled up reading in the sliver of it.

It’s a quiet little struggle, scrabbling up onto Stiles’ bed and trying not to poke holes in his sheets. The boy instantly curls around him, even though he is too large to fit into the curve of Stiles body, and holds his hands flat against Derek’s neck, the only place that the fur bleeds white.

Derek whines into his touch and feels small against the weight of it.

- 7.

“We can’t let it hold us down forever.” Laura said, staring up at the buildings as they walked along.

“No,” Derek replied, nudging her off balance and grinning. She shoved him, harder, and he went toppling into someone’s bed of flower pots.

“Let’s recover.” She tells him, hauling the fallen duffel bag over her shoulder as she helps him up. They’re five towns to albuquerque and their mother’s car has broken down at a gas station twelve miles back. They leave it behind, to spite whoever thinks that the remains of her scent can run them to the ground.

“Okay.”

Laura’s eyes shine scarlet as headlights quick as the sun going down. He lets her throw an arm over his neck and pull him in with a laugh, a pseudo-howl, if only for the night.

- 6.

They meet the Camaro in El Paso, Laura grinning, hair longer than he’s ever seen it, a dreamy dust in her eyes.

“I’ve always wanted one, Der.”

She didn’t, actually. But their mom did and he doesn’t want to pass that up either.

“Then buy it.”

“How much cash do we have on us?”

“Enough to buy Texas.” Derek snorts and her grin, impossibly, widens.

111.

Laura, of course, has already hit the road, alone. Alone, only in the real world. In his memories, she lives with the others and he doesn’t know which is worse.

Which is why he’s surprised when Stiles leads her to him.

He’s sitting out on the back porch, feet dangling over the railing where he’s perched, staring at the tree bark and the birds that take flight every now and then.

“Hey, broodmaster,” Stiles calls, hands buried in the pockets of his hoodie. “You’ve got a visitor.”

He knows the scent and the heartbeat and the flash of dark hair over green eyes better than his own. Laura pulls herself up onto the rail beside him.

“Hey, asshole.”

“How’d you find me?” Derek replies in lieu of a pleasantry.

“Everyone knew you were staying with the Stilinskis. This town isn’t so big, you know that?”

That makes him smile a little bit. “I do.”

“Which is why you know that my family burned a week ago.” Her voice goes hard, but unassuming, even if her previous statement was anything but. It’s a very Laura quality.

“Yeah.” Derek doesn’t know if this Laura can tell when he’s lying or not. She can, if the way she looks at him is anything to go off of.

“I talked to Deaton before I left. My mom said to, if anything happened. And he said something that stuck with me, something I thought about all the way down to LA.”

“So you came back.”

She nods. “So I came back. Only for a little while, though. Long enough to get answers.”

Derek shifts his weight from one arm to the other and waits. Laura is quiet for a long time.

“You’re my brother, aren’t you?”

“Not here.” It sounds simple coming out of his mouth

“But somewhere?”

“Somewhere.”

A bird squawks, somewhere in the distance. “Is somewhere better than here?”

Derek shakes his head, meets her eyes. “Nowhere’s better than anywhere. Different, more comfortable, but not better.”

“Could it get any worse?”

“In some ways.” He thinks of Scott’s empty glances and Lydia’s distaste, of having the version of Jackson that he hated.

Laura gives him a long look, like she gets it. It makes him feel naked and vulnerable and he’s missed it so much he can feel his fingers trembling where they’re grounding him to the porch.

“Do you want to come with me?” She says suddenly. There’s surprise in her voice, as if she hadn’t meant to let it slip.

He imagines a life with her, traveling beside her and telling her all the things they did before. Doing them over, making the memories better. Not fighting when he knew they did before, in a different world.

He thinks it would weigh on him too hard, never finding his way back. Never having the chance to try.

“I’m sorry.” And Derek is. He’s so sorry that he can’t give her what they had.

“I thought you’d say that.” Laura gives him a knowing smile and lurches forward. They try an awkward attempt at hugging; it comes out a lot more natural than he assumes they both thought it would.

She doesn’t say goodbye when she leaves, but she shoves a wrinkled envelope into his hand as they reach the Camaro. The look in her eyes, the strength of her voice - it means that Peter’s dead for real this time. His body is a road map to stolen things. He figures Laura must’ve nicked it, and whatever else he was hiding, off him before they could haul him off to Beacon Memorial.

A part of him wants to tell her not to come back because he knows what happens when you leave Peter unattended to, even six feet under. But he can’t dictate her life, not when he turned down her offer to let him be a part of it again. Derek thinks she’s different, here, though. Harder. Strong enough to do this on her own and not look back.

Derek slides his hand over the door reverently when he shuts it and thinks about taking it out of his garage again when he gets home, thinks about not letting it be soiled with regret any longer.

Watching her speed off down the road, it feels like he’s stopped falling down the hill after her, still attached to her by some invisible string spanning worlds and reaches. It feels like a little bit of forgiveness, as he slid to a stop and the cord, finally, shakingly, terrifyingly snapped.

- 5.

“I’ve gotta go, wolfie. You know that. I can’t just leave him.”

“Why? We left everyone else.”

“Because,” Laura’s voice was still soft, still gente. She still had her kid gloves on him, after all that time. “Peter is family whether you like it or not. You don’t just leave family behind like that. Not when they need you."

“How do you know it’s even him?” Derek was harder than he should’ve been. Hard enough to cut glass, to shear right through it.  Hard enough to clamp down on the desperate, immature, “I need you” threatening to topple out of his lips.

“How do you know it’s not another - “ Kate. He cut off before he could dirty his mouth with her name.

“Not everything’s a war, Derek.” She gripped his face tight in her hands, knocking her forehead against his like their mother used to. He breathed out hard against her nose, holding her wrists in his hands, keeping her there for as long as his moment allowed him to.

“It feels like it is.”

“I know. God, I know it, Der.” Laura pulled away, not-quite-smiling, but her mouth was doing something softly enough to make him fearful. She slipped into the front seat of the Camaro and grinned, pushing her hand up against the glass, rolling it down just a little and curving her fingers over the rim. “Don’t go catatonic while I’m away, alright? I can’t lose you too.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “As if. Peter would mock me so hard when I got out of it.”

“‘Been there, done that.’”  They said at the same time, mouths twisting up sourly before they dissolved into giggles. The window came down a little more and suddenly Laura was contorting to push her upper body out the window.

“One last hug for the road?”

Derek pulled her in and breathed until her scent overwhelmed his own. Her heartbeat clanged against his like thunder; when she pulled away, it was lightning, seeing it against her pulse points, but not feeling it under his own skin.

“Don’t be scared, little bro.” Laura laughed like the world was hers. It was his favorite thing about her. “What’s the worst he could do? Talk to me?”

His last memory of her - her hair in the wind, hands pale on the steering wheel, nail polish chipping, sunglasses pushed high. Laura, his sister, his last person, driving away and away and away.

- 4.

“We live and we die.” Lydia told him the first time she killed another being, heels sinking into the mud where the corpse had been. “That’s a little bleak, isn’t it?”

Derek shakes his head. “Only because you make it sound that way.”

“Sometimes things are the way they sound, Derek.”

He cracks a small smile. His sister said nearly the same words to him in nearly the same place.

“And sometimes things surprise you.”

Lydia gives him the ghost of a smile and curls her hand around his wrist, loose and brief.

One moment of vulnerability. Derek swears he could see the fortress she’s built for herself go back up the minute she tossed her hair and flounced away.

112.

Derek gives the pendant to Deaton, still in the envelope, and rattles when the chain does.

113.

Stiles buys him a kitten calendar that they hang up in the living room and he hates, hates, the permanence in it.

114.

Claudia loves him like a son of her own and he thinks, even though he didn’t have a father, he had more than one mother, and they all worked him right until the pieces fit back together.

115.

Derek still drives Stiles to school everyday, still hits the grocery store with him and watches NCIS to midnight, but something in the air is different. Stiles looks at him sometimes, with such intent that his hands curl up into themselves and he has to wipe his own blood off on the couch.

He’s never wanted to kiss someone so badly in his life.

116.

He thinks the feelings are leaking over.

His head is starting to get foggy, and it’s harder and harder to remember which places the memories belong to, or if they’re memories at all.

117.

They lay in bed for a whole day because Derek doesn’t want to get up and Stiles doesn’t want to get up and they both ignore the fact that it’s the Sheriff’s birthday. The door at the end of the hall doesn’t open and the crying isn’t loud enough for Stiles to hear, but it is for Derek.

The box opens with shaking hands and Stiles pulls the photos out to show him. “I know you already know him, but he was different here, to me.”

Derek leans his cheek against the back of his neck and lets him paint a picture.

118.

He thinks this is what their relationship here is made up of - lazy days, bad conversation, wondering. Measuring themselves up to the people in Derek’s head.

- 3.

“Come on, rookie,” The Sheriff grinned, his first day on the job. “What’re you waiting on, a blue moon?”

Derek laughed until he cried, because after all his practice in loving golden moons, he was and he was and he was.

(Stiles fumbled into the shooting range and the gun, steady in unsteady hands, went off without a hitch. The smoke whistled from the hole - dead center.)

119.

Derek misses home with a fervency he doesn’t think anyone else understands.

120.

Stiles is gone for a whole day and he comes home exhausted. A chain, rattling in his pocket.

121.

“Why do you really recognize me, Stiles?” He asks, quiet, twenty six after Laura leaves. His head is pounding with the question and letting it out seems to be the only chance at making it stop.

“I told you I don’t know.” The uptick.

“You’re lying.”

Stiles’ teeth flash in the dark. Derek wonders if what kind of smile it is, if a smile at all.

“Okay.”

They wait, and Derek doesn’t mind taking his time. Nothing is so pressing, at the moment. Nothing needs attending to, or saving.

“It is a little like It’s a Wonderful Life. But it was also an accident at first. At least, I thought it was.”

The blankets rustle. Derek’s fingers stretch along the sheets. Stiles’ sigh feels like a balloon deflating against his back.

“I realized after a lot of,” Stiles looks slightly embarrassed from the high color on his cheeks, “Touching. That I’m here, remembering you alone, because I’m the only one left that would be left to do the job.”

- 2.

“Hey, fucker.” Stiles said, when he picked up, voice hushed. Derek fought back a smile, rubbing at tired eyes.

“Why are you calling me at four in the morning?” He sounded irritated, he knew. It was part of the act, after all.

“Maybe I’m lonely, Derek.”

“Be lonely alone.”

“Aw, was wolfie having a good dream?”

Wolfie.

Derek looked away, as if Stiles could see him, as if Stiles was in the room watching his reactions, poised to see which words hurt him the most.

“...Derek?”

He breathed out hard, through his nose, wished there were a way to be quieter about it. He was always the loud one, in the family. Always the one that stepped on too many leaves, a stray branch. He was always their damn wolfie and he misses it more than anything else, because being that to someone meant something.

“I want to be with you.”

“You’re already with me.” Stiles laughed. There was rustling on the other side of the phone.

“I know that.” He rolled his eyes and Stiles’ laughter brightened. “I just want to be with you right now.”

“Then come be with me.” He sounded nervous all of a sudden, as if he was about to make excuses for letting that slip. “I’d never pass up a chance to have you crawling through my window. I mean, have you seen yourself?”

When Stiles whistled down the line, his heart contracted.

“I’ll be there in ten.” He said with resignation and he hung up. Replayed it in his mind until it was his favorite memory of them, together.

To him, the normalcy Stiles provided was like uncurling his hands from his ears. To him, it was like coming out of the trenches for the first time in years.

122.

“I’m the only one that would be left to do the job.”

And Derek says, dumbly, “Only one left?”

“The only one left to be messed up.” Stiles sighs and sits up, turning the knob on his lamp. It skitters to life. “Not dead, exactly, but close. I guess that’s why I’m here instead of anyone else. There was Isaac, too, but I think it chose me because I’ve seen my future without you a thousand ways.”

He doesn’t ask what it is. Derek already knows, thinking of the envelope Laura gave him, her last goodbye. Instead, he imagines the pack, his face niggling something in the back of their mind as if he’s only a forgotten grocery list, an unfinished homework assignment. Tries to take that in as gently as he can.  

“But Isaac? He’ll meet Scott in a few weeks. They’ll hit it off. Scott will be pulled a lot of ways. He’ll be busy. I’ll get mad at him. I won’t have you to make friends with. Lydia will never look at me without the use of magic. Peter will kill her in a parking lot, last, in the creepiest way possible after using her to bring himself back. I’ll watch him, after everything else goes down.

“Allison won’t move here for another year. When she does, she’ll bring the werewolf stuff with her. She’s already a hunter, will catch Scott in her crossfires. Shoot him down. Will go crazy because she broke their code, killing an innocent teenage boy. Your sister will come back, even though she’s stronger here, alone. Get herself killed the same way she did before. Cora won’t return from Argentina, because she knows better. She dies in a territory war twelve days after Laura does. I get the bite and it ruins me.”

Derek swallows hard. Tears burn in his eyes. Stiles’ fingers circle his wrists, stark against his skin and his eyes clear, as if he’s returning from somewhere far away.

“In the right world, you gave your mom purpose. Your siblings learned how to love something small when you came along. We didn’t get lost, because you were there. I never would’ve known someone could look at me the way you look at me. You gave Isaac, Erica, and Boyd a home. You gave Jackson a friend. You saved Cora and Scott and even Lydia. You saved me.

“Do you get it now? This is how you get back. By realizing that our world would be so messed up without you. You’re important, Derek. ” His voice lowers and he tilts his head closer. “You’re important to me. I wouldn’t be what I am without you. None of us would be.”

This is a different Stiles, Derek realizes, than the one he first met in this world. Practically a carbon copy of his own in this moment. His voice is thick and when hands run up the sides of his face, the contact is broken by a pendant pressing itself into his cheekbone insistently.

“You were good to me,” Derek tries. “Thank-you, I mean it, thank-you. I couldn’t have done this - “

Alone.

“Go home, Derek.” Stiles face softens, his eyes dull again, the world goes bleak. “Go home.”

123.

The world burns away in whites and blues.

Inside of all of it all are people he loves, people he once loved, people he’ll never see again, burning within him, alongside him.

Stiles shines gold and holds out his hand.

- 1.

They went to the beach once together, all craggy peaks and dark sky.

Derek said, “This is the shittiest day to go to the beach, who even chose this.” and Stiles threw his feet up onto the dashboard of the Toyota on the drive there, shoved his hand into the lunch they were supposed to save, got smucker’s grape jelly on Derek’s favorite paperback.

(It was the first book his mother ever gave to him, the only one he managed to save - To Kill a Mockingbird.)

Stiles laughed at something and pointed it out and Derek smiled at the faint underline of pencil beneath the jelly and the char of the pages at the corner. It was one of the lines his mother found right before she wrapped it.

(He could tell she did so the night before because one page was entirely smudged with pencil from her wiping a hand over it by accident and not having the time to erase.)

It fit right in Stiles’ hands, the paperback. It fit right, and that’s how he knew and Derek still doesn’t know why that’s how he knew, but it is. He pulled the car over.

The rest of the pack driving by. Stiles’ confused expression in the rearview mirror. The tires, squealing to a stop.

“Derek, what - “

It was the first time Derek told him that he loved him. The sky grumbled and he laughed, harder than he had laughed before. They were ridiculous, weren’t they.

Stiles, of course, was enticingly bewildered and the expression on his face - god, Derek could paint it from memory. It was the first time that they ever did that thing they’re famous for; catching in their own world and kissing - kissing and kissing, so much of that.

Kissing, and not looking back.

1.

“Sometimes I wish I was never born,” Derek hears himself murmur into Stiles’ hair, his hands still bloody and shaky and caught in the front of the boy’s shirt.

Derek feels him nod into his neck, the tickle of his hair itchy mixed in with the black substance flaking in his stubble.

“But you wouldn’t have met me.” Stiles grins, teeth flashing in the dark the same way it did before, nails scraping over his cheekbones in a futile effort to rid him of the grime.

“Yeah,” Derek says, smiling, settling back into his own skin.

He unhooks his hands from Stiles’ torn shirt. Wraps his arms around Stiles’ waist, ignoring Scott’s knowing grin over Allison’s head. Looks around until he finds Lydia talking furiously at Isaac, Cora lounging against his side.

He thinks of Laura and Erica and Boyd and his mother, of the father he never needed. Thinks of his brothers, his aunts, his cousins, his family. His pack. Thinks of Kate’s bad intentions. Remembers them all and lets them live in his eyes, playing out their parts and blowing themselves to smithereens.

“You’re right.”

Stiles squeezes the back of his neck. “I’m always right, dude.”

Derek thinks, without all the first confusion of the first time he thought it, that it’s the closest thing he has to a starting point.