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Derek considers himself a pretty stoic person. He's rolled with the punches that life's given him, and has only tried to curl up and die a few times, which, considering everything, is pretty damn impressive, if you ask him.
But there's a special place in hell for trickster spirits, and Derek is going to do his best to ensure that the trickster spirit gets set there as soon as fucking possible.
Because no one can be expected to just deal with the fact they've suddenly got telepathy.
"Erm," Scott says, "How strong is it, exactly?"
Derek glares. "Strong." He's trying to respect personal boundaries here, but he has no idea how to stop the constant influx of thoughts. "How do any of you ever defeat evil in between all the sex fantasies you're constantly having?"
Scott briefly covers his face with his hand, Kira turns pink, Allison grits her jaw, Isaac smirks a little, and Lydia cocks her head to the side. "Wait, do you hear thoughts or see them? This is a pretty unique opportunity to compare thought patterns..."
Derek shuts his eyes and breathes in deeply. It doesn't help; the constant barrage of thoughts just intensifies when he's not distracted by sight. "Can we just find the creature and..."
"What, punch it til it cries uncle and gives you your sanity back?" Isaac interrupts. "I don't think your usual methods are going to work this time."
Derek would be offended, but mostly he's trying his best to ignore the ode to Allison's short skirts that Isaac seems to be composing in his head.
"I'm willing to entertain any plan that means I don't have to hear anyone else's thoughts," Derek says. "So ideas. On the table. Now."
It was admittedly a poor choice of words, though he will give them all credit for including the table in their gutter-thoughts. Derek is really going to have to find acquaintances that aren't horny teenagers, because this is mortifying on several levels.
Apparently none of them are currently getting laid, and yeah. The hormones are working overtime.
Derek sympathizes, he really does, but mostly what he wants is to not have front-row tickets to five different fantasy sequences. None of which, he might add, involve him in any way, though Scott is surprisingly popular.
Not that he's cranky about not starring in people's fantasies. That would be immature and also ridiculous, and Derek isn't one to get upset about being left out.
"You know you just pink-elephanted sex, right?" Lydia stage whispers to him when no one provides any viable suggestions for intimidating or cajoling trickster spirits.
"Really? I hadn't noticed," Derek says grumpily.
*
If there's one skill that Derek Hale excels at, it's avoiding human contact.
He decides that it's a definite virtue in the first few days after getting whammied with telepathy. Texting and phone calls become -- well, remain -- his main source of communication, and he spends even more time at his loft than usual after he gets to hear the elderly lady at the grocery store's running mental commentary on how his ass fills out his jeans. Granted, he'd smiled at first, thinking her stray thought of I'd like to sink my teeth into those buns just implied a serious devotion to baked goods, but he'd been quickly disabused of that notion by her follow-up thoughts.
He almost invites Peter over at one point. He's always wondered exactly what's going on in Peter's Machiavellian brain, but really -- Derek's probably happier not knowing.
No, he's definitely happier not knowing.
So he spends a lot of time reading and catching up on Netflix and staring at his phone and basically doing his best impersonation of a middle schooler on summer break. Which is fine. Derek's a simple werewolf; he doesn't need things like interpersonal interactions.
He just needs to end this freaking telepathy thing, which appears to be getting stronger, and, disturbingly, more visual. The problem is that apparently his loft isn't isolated enough, because after two days, he starts hearing stray thoughts from the neighborhood, and yeah, they're all about one thing.
"Is everyone in Beacon Hills a nymphomaniac?" Derek tells his phone angrily.
On the other end, Scott stays quiet for a moment and then says hesitantly, "Stiles thinks maybe..."
"Maybe what?" Derek is maybe growling, but frankly, for someone as sexually frustrated as him that has had a front row ticket to the sexy thoughts of everyone in town... he's holding it together pretty well.
"Maybe you have like, sex-telepathy." It's Stiles this time, his voice coming out in an excited rush. "Like maybe you got turned into a incubus telepath. Or something."
"Are you saying that I'm magically making every teenager in town think about sex?" Derek says doubtfully. His teenage years aren't that far behind him; he can already see some serious flaws in the theory.
"Well," Stiles says, "I'm thinking maybe you're just, like... inspiring the worst in people. Like they see you and suddenly their brain is all about doin' it."
"But I can't even see the people I'm hearing now," Derek says. "It's getting stronger."
"It doesn't work over the phone, does it?" Stiles' voice is slightly panicked.
Derek wonders what in the hell Stiles Stilinski has to be embarrassed about. He hasn't actually seen Stiles in the flesh since the curse was laid on him, so he hasn't gotten a glimpse into his mind yet.
He's a little grateful; he doesn't really want to see Stiles' fantasies, too. They're probably all centered around Lydia.
"No," he tells Stiles, though he's bored enough that the actual sigh of relief that Stiles heaves is entertaining. "Any leads yet on where the trickster spirit's at?"
"Kira's got a lead," Stiles admits. "But you should probably stay away..."
"Tell me where," Derek commands. He's not an Alpha anymore, but he's spent a little time being a big brother now, and he's got the tone down pat.
...Not that Cora listens to him, but maybe Stiles will.
"No, I'm not telling him!" Stiles hisses, most likely to Scott. Then there's a brief tussle, and Scott comes on the phone.
"Come to the old train depot." The noises in the background indicate that Stiles is tickling Scott in retaliation, but Scott nobly manages to let Derek know that the lead is tenuous at best and probably they're just on a grumpkin hunt.
Which doesn't really explain why Stiles is so determined to keep Derek away, which, well, just makes Derek more determined to go.
Also he's kind of excited at the thought of seeing actual people again, even if he's going to have to put up with the technicolor nightmares that are their innermost thoughts.
*
Kira and Isaac are standing outside the depot when Derek pulls up. Kira's thoughts turn to all the different ways she wants to make Scott smile -- the girl's creative, Derek will grant her that -- and Isaac seems to be entertaining a series of thoughts on what Allison and Scott must have looked like together and different ways he could have sandwiched his way in the center of that.
Stiles' theory seems to hold some water; Scott is adorable and all but Derek's pretty sure that no one should be spending so much time thinking about jumping his dick while there is possibly a monster a hundred yards away.
"Priorities," he growls at the both of them, while trying his best to block their thoughts from his mind. He figures it can't be that different from keeping the wolf under control, but none of his tricks seem to work.
"Your fault, dude," Isaac tells him, a bit too cheerfully. Isaac has apparently become shameless, and Derek is a little bit proud of him for that, even if Isaac's not his beta anymore.
"Must suck to be you," Kira says, patting his arm in commiseration. It makes her fantasies burst into full HD glory, and Derek quickly takes a step backwards.
"How sure are you that it's in there?" he asks quickly, wanting to smooth over any embarrassment.
"Not very, to be honest," Kira says, "but from Stiles' research, and what Isaac's sniffed out... It's looking like a possibility, at the very least."
"Let's go," Derek says, taking a step towards the depot. There's a back entrance that affords a silent entrance to the main lobby.
"Gotta wait on Scott," Isaac says, not budging. "He said."
Derek lets out an annoyed breath through his nose, but he waits with Kira and Isaac. After seven agonizingly long minutes, during which Derek got to be intimately familiar with both of their favorite kinks, something neither seemed particularly embarrassed by, Stiles’ Jeep careens into the parking lot.
Scott jumps out, and hisses back over his shoulder for Stiles to get out of the damn Jeep already.
The driver’s side door opens reluctantly. And then Derek is nearly bowled over by a barrage of images of himself, sweaty and naked, intertwined with Stiles.
He blinks rapidly a few times, oddly thankful for Kira and Isaac’s fantasies still running along in the background, giving him something to focus on that isn’t stupidly, ridiculously hot.
He valiantly hopes that his beard is thick enough to cover the blush he can feel heating up his cheeks.
“See?” he can dimly hear Scott telling Stiles reassuringly. “The world didn’t go crashing into the sun!”
“You don’t know that,” Stiles says, and looks anywhere but Derek.
“We can go in now?” Derek asks Scott, because yeah, it’s definitely time to take down this creature and restore Derek back to his normal werewolfy self. He’s no Professor X. This telepathy business is terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
He tries really, really hard to ignore Stiles’ fantasy about giving him the blowjob of his life.
“Yeah,” Scott says, and leads the way. Derek keeps clenching and unclenching his fist in an effort to keep his focus on what’s actually happening and not just on what’s happening in Stiles’ subconscious.
He very pointedly doesn’t look at Stiles; his thoughts are bad enough. Derek doesn’t need to see how flushed his cheeks are on top of that.
The trickster spirit is hanging out in the abandoned subway train. It’s almost like it’s mocking Derek, and he glares mightily while Scott manages to sweet-talk the thing into lifting the curse.
Derek’s not quite sure what Scott actually says to accomplish this; all he knows is that Stiles spends the time thinking about the way Derek’s hands flexed and imagining it on his dick, which in turn gave Derek some serious cause to contemplate what it would feel like to wrap his hand around Stiles’ dick.
He’s suddenly, desperately glad that Stiles had the foresight to avoid him for the majority of the curse.
The curse lifts with a tiny popping sound, and suddenly Derek’s alone in his head, though admittedly the echos of Stiles’ fantasies remain.
Scott offers to drive Kira and Isaac home, and Derek is distracted enough to hand over his keys, not realizing until he’s watching the taillights fade away in the distance that he’s left alone with Stiles.
“I’ll give you a ride back to your loft,” Stiles says after a moment. His cheeks are flushed pink, like he knows exactly what Derek saw in his mind.
“I can run,” Derek offers, but climbs into the Jeep anyway.
“So, um,” Stiles says once the engine is started, “I don’t know what you saw, exactly…”
“You don’t?” Derek asks. Apparently the telepathy really did reach into the subconscious, and he quietly vows not to tease anyone about what he saw.
“Well, I can guess,” Stiles admits. “Object of my affections and all that.”
“Object… what?” Derek says. Stiles always seems to be having a conversation with a version of Derek that’s twenty seconds in the future, leaving Derek feeling vaguely lost.
“You saw,” Stiles says, apparently choosing to not verbalize every thought for the first time in his life. Which was fair, Derek figures, since he just got to actually see Stiles’ thoughts.
And Stiles didn’t have any idea what his reaction was to those thoughts, and was trying to play it off with blithe indifference.
“Yeah,” Derek says, “I saw. Why did you come with Scott tonight?”
Stiles shrugs. “I had to see your reaction.”
It’s not quite what Derek expected; a denial, maybe, or a declaration of devotion to Scott leading Stiles into uncomfortable situations. But instead it was about Derek, about Stiles’ curiosity about him, about taking a chance.
And he stays silent until Stiles pulls the Jeep into the loft’s parking lot, and then he kisses the holy hell out of Stiles.
Stiles freezes at first, eyes comically large, but Derek rubs his thumb in a reassuring circle on the back of Stiles’ neck and after a moment, Stiles throws himself fully into the kiss.
He ends up sprawled uncomfortably across the gap between the seats, lips swollen and eyes dazed.
Derek feels the same.
“What was that for?” Stiles asks, voice oddly soft, like he’s bracing himself for rejection.
Derek isn’t thinking about the fantasies Stiles wove anymore; the reality of their kiss is overwriting the memory. He smiles and squeezes Stiles’ hand. “I had to see your reaction.”