Work Text:
The first few weeks after Stiles is turned are unnervingly easy. Derek anticipates a tide of rough full moons, bloodlust and base instincts, but these growing pains ebb almost immediately, and a beta more even keeled than any of his others breaks the surface. It’s as though Stiles has taken every manic impulse and focused them entirely on self-control. He’s insistent, brave, loyal and smart, qualities he always possessed now amplified, turned up to maximum volume and calling to Derek like a serenade outside his bedroom window. He tracks Stiles’ movements with his eyes, his ears. And it’s because of this close monitoring that he notices the deafening silences before anyone else catches on.
Human Stiles is a cacophony, a wave of noise smacking you in the face, dragging you under. He’s butchered song lyrics and inharmonious humming, he’s drumming fingers and tapping toes. Werewolf Stiles is contemplative stares and controlled intensity, head cocked, listening for answers to questions he hasn’t asked. There’s a swelling of pride in Derek’s chest when he looks at Stiles, and a jolt of wild unease. Something is unnervingly familiar about his behavior, but every time he tries to pin it down, it slips through his fingers. After all these years, Derek is fluent in Human Stiles, can translate every flail and facial tic with authority, but Werewolf Stiles breaks his confidence. His silences communicate at a decibel too low for Derek to comprehend. They quietly suggest a lacunae, slyly offer him teasing glimpses of things he can’t comprehend.
The only thing loud about Stiles these days is his thundering heart.
“Has becoming a werewolf finally shut you up?” The words are spoken as a joke, but not a joke at all. Stiles spreads his hands in response, a gesture of...what? Defeat? Concession? Repudiation?
It’s like the nogitsune all over again, something just below the surface darkly thrashing, only this time around Stiles is the epitome of perfect physical health. Gone is the sickly pallor and bruised, gaunt eyes, replaced with hardy muscle, lupine grace and a blushing glow. He is palpably the same man, the planes of his face intensely familiar and as eye catching as always, but something is off enough to sets alarm bells shrieking inside Derek’s skull.
So he follows Stiles, a regression to the early days when he camped out in the woods alongside the high school lacrosse fields or behind Stiles’ bedroom door. This time he leaps to Stiles’ rooftop, lingering above his cracked bedroom window, listening for signs of life within. He hears shallow breathing, then Stiles’ amused tone. “Just come in, Derek. I know you’re there.” And pride rears up again, sinking sharp claws into his heart. It would have taken the other betas hours to notice he was there.
He swings down, sliding the window open and leaving it at half-mast behind him, allowing the world outside to filter in. A lone bee travels the overgrown lilac bushes two feet below the windowsill, wings humming at a low frequency. In the woods behind the house a fox takes down a rabbit with a choked-off scream, and car tires continuously buzz down the highway a few miles away.
Inside the room, Stiles is sitting on the carpeted floor, an unopened glass mason jar laying next to him, half eclipsed by the baby-blue dust ruffle of the bed. These days Derek is a pendulum, swinging wildly from culpability and guilt to gratification and relief each time he sees the flash of golden-yellow, always so similar to Stiles’ whisky-brown irises. Does he hate me because I turned him? He’s alive, that’s all that matters.
“What’s wrong, Stiles?” Derek is not a natural sounding board. It’s one—of the many—ways in which he falls short of his mother and Laura. When people talked to them, they listened , the kind of uncommitted listening that produces a sense of catharsis. Derek chafes against that form of therapy; he’d rather act, find a remedy. But for Stiles, he will be a confidante. He will do whatever needs to be done, and he always will.
Stiles sighs. “I keep coming back to this .” He shakes the jar, jostling the contents—powdered, formless, but obviously significant. Derek sits cross-legged on the floor in front of Stiles, offers out his hand. Stiles places the cool, heavy glass in Derek’s outstretched palm, and when he holds it up to the light he sees the dark gray power is mountain ash.
“Peter was right, about me.” It takes Derek a few seconds to recognize Stiles is referring to Derek’s uncle. He’s not used to the name being spoken so plainly, without a mockingly offensive nickname or colorful obscenities attached.
“What did he say?”
“That I wanted this, to be a werewolf. That I wasn’t allowing myself to acknowledge it.”
“When did he tell you that? Where? Why?”
“When I was sixteen. In a parking garage. And why not? For once, he wasn’t lying.”
How has Derek gone so long without knowing about this conversation? For someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, Stiles is awfully good at smoke and mirrors. Derek racks his brain for why Stiles is looking at the mountain ash with a mixture of longing and dislike.
“Would you rather I…” Derek stops, clears his throat. “Do you wish I never turned you?” His entire body revolts against the thought of the burning flame being snuffed from Stiles’ eyes.
“No,” Stiles answers, heartbeat strong and steady. “I’m glad you did. It’s just...stupid.” He averts his eyes. “It’s childish and ungrateful. But when I laid a line of mountain ash I felt useful , I felt different, but in a good way. That magic, it was coming from inside me , my belief, my brain, which had always seemed like such a spastic failure.” He reaches over, plucks the jar from Derek’s fingers, holds it to his face and studies the contents that are now dangerous, a tool to be used against him. “This transformation has granted me a wealth of riches, and a sharp deprivation.”
And now Derek finally recognizes it, the ghost that has been hovering at the corner of his eyesight, dispersing into mist when he looks too closely at Stiles: grief. Stiles feels like he now has everything, and nothing at all. It’s so obvious . How could he not have known? This whole time, he thought Stiles was speaking too quietly for him to hear, but he’s been screaming.
“I was born like this,” Derek reminds him. “It’s all I’ve ever known. I can’t ever hope to understand, but I’ll help you however I can. However you’ll let me.”
Stiles shoves the jar under the bed frame, out of sight. “May I?” he asks, eyelids lowered and shoulders braced for rejection, though Derek never would. He holds out his arms, and Stiles crawls into his lap, nudging Derek’s chin, running his nose along Derek’s neck and breathing deep. Stiles sighs, content. Satisfaction wells up again, at how tactile Stiles is, his fearless physical expressions of devotion and intimacy.
“It will get better. Things will get easier,” Derek consoles, sure that, together, there is nothing they can’t overcome.
“I know,” Stiles answers, breath hot and wet against Derek’s neck. “I can take care of myself, but knowing you’re here, your strength, your friendship…” Your love. The words aren’t spoken aloud, but they will be. Someday. “It helps. More than you could ever know.”
Outside these four walls the lone bee is joined by a few friends, working tirelessly to gather pollen to transform into sweetness. The fox shares her kill with her hungry growing cubs, and an endless parade of cars continue on their journeys to destinations unknown.
Time marches on, and so will they.