Work Text:
- Tent
“What?” Stiles had just answered his father’s question with the same question. He hoped that maybe his father hadn’t actually heard his earlier statement and his ‘what’ didn’t mean that he wanted a full explanation as to—
“—why our tent is in the back of Derek’s car. Derek Hale?”
“Derek Hale? Why would Derek have our tent?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” John said arching an eyebrow at his son. He had suspected that his son was secretly dating someone and had a very bad feeling that he was about to find out who.
“I have no idea, Pop,” Stiles shrugged and smiled and prayed it wasn’t coming across as fake as it really was.
“Stiles!”
“Okay, so maybe I let him borrow it when he and the pups needed to do some wolfy bonding in the woods.”
“And werewolves would need a tent because?”
Stiles could usually talk his way out of anything, even with his father, but today the speech gods were not with him. He was tongue tied, he was stammering and he couldn’t keep a clear thought in his head. Well except for that one thought of Derek’s claws ripping his sleeping bag to shreds because Stiles was showing off his newly learned deep-throating skills. It had been so fucking hot to see Derek naked and half wolfed out. The only thing keeping a lid on the animal within him was his fear of hurting Stiles. He loved that he could drive such a hardcore control freak like Derek mad with—
“So am I to understand that I’ll need to buy you a new sleeping bag as well as a new tent?”
Stiles jerked back to reality when his father’s voice cut through his thoughts. The look on his father’s face was a scary combination of upset, disturbance, and possibly fury. “I said that out loud, did I?”
John crossed his arms over his chest and nodded, “Yup.”
“Fuck!” he whispered to himself. “So...would it be too much to ask for you not to arrest him...again?”
John stared his son down for several minutes trying to decide what to do. His initial thought was to go over to Hale’s loft, unload a clip into his chest and then wait for him to heal so he could haul him off to jail. But he was the sheriff, and even though no one would blame him for it—or even know he did it—he couldn’t so blatantly break the law. So he thought of what Claudia would do if she were here.
He softened, but only a little. “I expect him here by 5:00am tomorrow morning with a new tent and sleeping bags—plural. Tell him to be ready for 'family' camping.”
Stiles watched as his father turned on his heel and went inside the house, leaving him standing outside the open garage wondering if all three of them would make it out of the woods at trip’s end.