Work Text:
i. for + give
He goes back for Stiles.
There are a hundred and two reasons why he shouldn’t have come back to Beacon Hills, but Stiles was the one reason he had packed his luggage at 1 in the morning and made the 11-hour drive from Tijuana, Mexico to Beacon Hills, running on six hours of sleep and four cups of coffee.
He had to.
The world was on fire, it has been since Kate Argent burned his family down. No one’s put it out, and Derek doesn’t have the energy to do it himself. It’s always been one supernatural disaster after another, losing people and gaining them and being afraid for the safety of those who were left, over and over again. He’s tired, fucking weary, and his edges have all been worn down.
He can’t fucking believe he’s going back.
. . .
Meeting Void was nothing like meeting Stiles; it makes him angry. Because Derek sees it, the evil. The bruises sitting so starkly under Stiles’ eyes it looks like it was burned like a brand there. The first time Derek had met him, all of three years ago, that felt more like five hundred, he still had the last dregs of childhood fat clinging onto his cheeks. Now he looked like death incarnate, ready to claim lives and drag them to hell. He talks like it, too.
Derek’s been informed that the metaphor wasn’t too far off.
. . .
He’s Stiles’ king. That’s what it says on the chessboard.
Chess never made sense to him. No one in his family had ever played chess aside from his father, and Derek never bothered to learn. He knows a grand total of three things: pawns are the first to go, the Queen is protected at all costs, and the King is the most powerful piece you have.
“What do you think he’s playing at?” Chris asks him, the grim expression on his face warped by thorough confusion.
Void must think Derek had any real control over this situation, any real influence over the land that once belonged to his mother’s bloodline. But even if Derek was hung by the ankles and shaken out of all his pockets, no one would be able to find what kind of hidden power they were looking for.
“Whatever it is, he’s got it all wrong,” he responds, sliding his forefinger on the White’s edge of the chessboard.
“Does that mean you know what he’s getting wrong, at least?” Chris quirks an eyebrow, intrigued.
He shakes his head. “Just one thing. He thinks he can manipulate me. He thinks he can hold this entire town hostage and I’d bend over backward to save it.”
“He’d weaponize you.”
Derek nods.
“Would you do it?”
He scoffs quietly and rubs a hand on his beard that’s a little too overgrown and unkempt for his liking. He’s been tired, sue him. “I’m not a utilitarian, Argent,” he mumbles into his knuckles, “I know you’ve never held a good opinion for my kind, but my family was. They built a life around doing good for as many people as they could.”
Chris opens his mouth, “Listen -”
“I’m not like my family,” he cuts him off. “I tried to be. I got jack shit for it. I buried people for it. So if he, or anyone else, thinks I’d rather let Stiles die than let this town burn, you’re all wrong .”
Chris doesn’t look surprised. He just crosses his arms and leans back against a table that makes an awful screeching sound as the new weight displaces it to the side. “I don’t think you should be telling me this.”
“What are you gonna do, then, hunt me?”
“No,” Chris rolls his eyes, “Help you, apparently. There’s no code for this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Let’s hope we never have to again.”
Because he's fucking tired and he hates this place, this tiny little town that somehow felt big enough to house every sort of evil in the world. This graveyard of a town with tombstones serving as the only thing left of his family.
He'll see to it that Void is gone. And fuck if he's ever coming back.
Chris regards him curiously. “You’d really choose that kid, over this land your family has owned before Beacon Hills was even Beacon Hills.”
Derek meets his gaze unwaveringly. “It’s him or nothing.”
. . .
Chris keeps his end of the deal. The silver arrows work quicker than an exorcist, and it all wraps up in what feels like the longest hurricane in Derek’s life.
He doesn’t stick around to witness Stiles’ recovery, but he visits him in the hospital once, just because seeing an arrow go through Stiles’ heart wasn’t something Derek could brush off. He doesn’t linger. He stays long enough to have the otherwise grating noise of the heart monitor assure him of Stiles’ life.
He leaves just as dusk settles well into darkness, but makes one stop, for very little reason at all, to retrieve the chess piece that had his name written on it and takes it back to Mexico.
Despite everything, if only for a few heart-stopping moments, he was powerful; in control. For a few heart-stopping moments, he was someone’s King.
. . .
ii. forgiven
Stiles was seven years young the first time he saved someone's life. Scott was six, and he had forgotten he left his inhaler in the cubbyhole back in the classroom during Outdoor time. But Stiles had remembered it, because he’s bad at remembering what kind of nuts he’s allergic to but he can remember strange things - things like where the daffodils grow between the cracks on Lander street, all the little nooks Dad leaves his keys at when he gets home, and things like Scott’s inhaler. His selective memory had saved Scott that day, but Stiles can’t remember what happened after he ran back to the classroom to retrieve it.
He’s saved Scott’s life every day since then. Stiles can’t keep in mind test dates, and sometimes has to sing Kesha’s song to remember how to spell an elementary word, but he knows how to save a life. He knows how to tread on over eight feet of water for an Alpha werewolf but failed his 7th-grade swimming assessment. He knows how to watch his father’s diet, has laid down his life for his friends more times than he should be able to lose count of, but he can’t remember the in-betweens: the important appointments, the medication schedules, the tricky acronyms his high school History teacher made up for all 50 states.
But tonight he remembers every step Scott took when he walked away from him.
Twenty-four, until Scott was out the door of his house. Twenty-four steps resounding in the cavern of his eardrums. The rubber under the soles of Scott’s shoes had squeaked unpleasantly on the floor; it sounded exactly like abandonment.
Something cracks inside of him, some childhood memory or other, of normalcy and safety and sense of right.
You shouldn’t have done it.
Shouldn’t he have? With more than his father’s life on the line, shouldn’t he have killed Donovan to save himself?
His blood is on your hands.
And Stiles was on his knees before a miracle of a murder happened. He’s - he’s not - he can’t put the blame on himself. He had just wanted to live, to go to his Chemistry exam the next day and tell Scott that they’ve got to watch their backs with even more alarmity. He hadn’t planned to kill him. He just wanted to live, by fucking god had he just wanted to live.
Nineteen years old, and the last place he had expected to be was inside a bathtub on a Saturday night. He’s fully clothed, and Dad would berate him for the absolute insanity of bringing his Converse into the bath, knees drawn up against his chest. One shoelace is untied, the aglet dipping into the drain. The toe scuffs against the porcelain.
Twenty-four steps. That’s all it took to walk out of a brotherhood of nineteen years, and Stiles wants to scream until his throat turns raw.
But he won’t. That’s going to be his act of penance. Stiles just wanted to live, and he will die on this hill swearing up and down he hadn’t meant to kill Donovan -- Donovan, who died with a last gulp of air, speared through a metal pipe. He didn’t even get to scream. The only sound that followed was the pounding of Stiles’ feet on the gravel as he ran away from the dead body and the school and the rain that he prayed to god could wash the blood from his hands.
He took Donovan Donati’s life much too quietly for the world to sound so goddamn loud as it crashes around him. And Stiles - he always knew how to save a life. He just can’t fucking remember how to save his own right now.
In his pocket is his phone and an unwrapped sleeve of watermelon gum. He dials a number he hasn’t contacted in months. It goes straight to voicemail.
“I’m not available now, leave a message.”
“Hi. Hi, uh, Derek,” Stiles’ throat clicks when he swallows down the trepidation lodged in it, “Sorry if this is...sudden. I just didn’t know who to call. I don’t even know where you are, but wherever it is I -” he hiccups on an unintended sob, “- I hope it’s good, man. ‘Cause things aren’t... good . Here, I mean. And I don’t know what to do. I’m all alone, and that - it fucking sucks, y’know? You’d know. I think and that’s sort of, why I called, I guess.”
He pauses when he feels a wave of grief grip his chest so greatly it almost makes him lose his hold on the phone.
“That’s it for now, I guess. Bye, Derek.”
The device clatters on the side of the bathtub as his body gets wracked with sobs. He claps both hands over his mouth, refusing to make a sound louder than the catching of his breath. He cries so violently he starts dry-heaving, stomach spasming and bile rising at the back of his throat. But he doesn’t scream. He refuses to.
The phone ringing loudly makes him nearly jump out of his skin. He turns the screen over with trembling hands, and the contact that flashes on the screen is from a different area code. He rejects it.
The call starts up again, and for a moment he’s scared it’s someone who knew Donovan, someone who knew what Stiles did and was now out to get him, but then a call ends and a text shows up on the notification preview:
It’s me. Pick up
He waits for the next call, and he follows the order.
“Derek?”
“Where are you?”
The sound of Derek’s voice makes him breath out for so long he almost gets light-headed.
“Home.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where are you?”
“Mexico. You know this. Answer me, Stiles.”
Stiles squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t know what to say, never actually planned to get this far with reaching out to the werewolf. He settles for, “I did a really bad thing. And I don’t think I wanna stay here.”
There’s a beat of silence. “For how long?”
“...just for now. For until I know what to do from here.”
“Okay.”
Stiles breathes out a withering chuckle. If nothing else, he could always count on Derek to be succinct. “Okay,” he parrots.
“I can come get you. Twelve hours, give or take.”
Stiles blinks. “What?”
“Just say the word.”
The prospect of leaving Beacon Hills stuns him for a moment. Could he actually - ?
“Are you being - is that a serious offer?”
“Yes.”
Stiles shakes his head disbelievingly. “You’d drive half a day, just to come get me.”
“Isn’t that why you called?”
“I didn’t actually plan to get this far.”
He hears Derek sigh into the receiver. “ I would. Stiles, look, whatever it is, you wouldn’t call just for nothing. If you’re in trouble, I’d get you out of there, no questions asked.”
“What if...what if I can’t yet.”
“Then you know where to reach me.”
He lets out a shuddering breath. “No takesies-backsies, alright man.”
“I promise.”
And Derek wasn’t known to not keep his promises. If Stiles knew how to save a life, Derek always knew how to follow through. Derek Hale will not humour you, but he will give you his word even if it meant burning the world to keep it.
It helps him breathe easier to have it again.
“Okay,” Stiles says, “I guess I’ll talk to you soon.”
“You’ll be fine?”
“I don’t know, Der,” he confesses, the moniker sounding foreign rolling off his tongue. He never felt close enough to Derek to ever treat him as a friend; he’s more comfortable throwing himself in the crossfire to make sure Derek doesn’t take wolfsbane bullet to the heart, but right now, in this bathtub with his shoes on, the imprint of his first breakdown still on the bath mat where he had first sank onto his knees down, Derek Hale might as well be his best friend.
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Okay.”
“And if I ever...need to go -”
“Then we’re going. No questions asked.”
Stiles nods his head incrementally before realising Derek can’t see the movement. “Thank you. Seriously. Thanks.”
Derek tells him, “You’d do it for me,” before ending the call.
. . .
Stiles never actually did get to leave, and he doesn’t get to pick up the phone the next time it rings.
. . .
iii. forgiving
Cora’s eighteen, and they’re at the only craft bar that serves supernaturals in Tijuana’s bar district, where Baja comes alive in an endless night for as long as people are getting sloppily drunk and singing in aimless groups.
Cora’s with her friends from the community college she attends, and Derek has sequestered himself away from her table, squeezed into a single booth and steadily going through buckets of cerveza artesanal in an attempt to help the night bleed through the morning.
Cora’s eighteen, which means Derek is twenty-five, and that - that makes his head hurt.
He’s twenty-five and he doesn’t know how to move on from the damage he caused at sixteen, or the life he created at twenty-one when he had to figure out how to fill Laura’s shoes in Beacon Hills. He has all this money, all these zeroes in his bank account with only a modest townhouse in Mexico and his sister’s fully-paid tuition fee to show for it. He’s got regrets that he tries not to think about every time he goes to bed, unfulfilled plans of getting a job that their two-person household doesn’t really need; he’d pay taxes without being employed if he could.
He’s twenty-five and his life has finally stopped spiraling out of control. But now that he’s finally planted his foot down on the ground, he doesn’t know how to move forward.
Maybe he’ll figure it out on Cora’s 19th.
. . .
He sends a mass text to his contacts in Beacon Hills, and by that he means the uncoordinated betas he’s abandoned to a barely-adult Alpha, and he hesitates on this action before Cora snatches his phone from him to send the text herself.
> Is everything alright there?
Derek doesn’t really expect a response, not with the way the guilt settles on his shoulders again about how he turned tail and fled. He had felt the pack bond to his betas be stretched and pulled taut the longer he stayed in Mexico in radio silence.
He tosses the mobile on the side of his bed and tries to sleep, fails, and ends up putting a claw through his mattress when he feels anguish about being the worst Alpha in the history of the Hale bloodline. His mother would have hated him.
. . .
Derek learns two things: Scott is doing well, and Isaac is thinking of not going to college. He learns this through a stilted text exchange with the two, spaced apart three days and awkward silences until he thinks of an appropriate response that Cora sometimes thinks of for him.
He had asked why Isaac didn’t want to go to college anymore, just to make conversation, but the kid told him Can’t exactly afford it , and suddenly Derek had one of the biggest epiphanies of his life. He calls his accountant on Tuesday, hires an attorney on Friday, and in no less than a month he’s got revocable living trusts set up for all the people he knows and gives a damn about.
The list of his beneficiaries come up to a grand total of nine, from Beacon Hills and Tijuana combined, and it includes: the Stilinkis, the McCalls, the Boyds, Isaac, Erica, Cora’s college best friend, and Mr. Alvarez’s family who run the produce store Derek shops at.
It’s Cora who tells everyone, because Cora doesn’t give a shit if people complain at her. Derk expects a barrage of angry phone calls from every single one (a measly amount, really) of the people he knows, in varying levels of offence taken at being handed too many thousands of dollars a month, but he’s surprised to only receive a delighted call from Scott saying most of it is going to vet school and charity, Isaac saying he’s going to NYU, and Stiles texting a single ‘?’ back. Erica and Boyd don’t bother responding.
It goes better than expected.
But he gets another text from Stiles:
Dad said thx but no thx. I know u tho, so ig i’ll just make the school build you a football field or something
Definitely better than expected.
Derek sinks back into his bed, letting a sigh escape him. That’s one step done, one step closer to something like...like absolution, or whatever. He doesn’t need that money, he needs the people he has left to thrive. He needs the kind of happiness he can live vicariously through them. He needs to be twenty-five and not feel like he’s stuck in Beacon Hills still at the age of sixteen.
His eyes flick to the calendar, May 14th. Her birthday is about to pass in a few days.
But Laura never did make it past the age of 24.
. . .
Stiles - 4:56 AM
> sometimes
> i wish u never left
> sometimes i wish i could tell u to come get me
Derek aches in an unfamiliar way. It’s daybreak, dusk barely just fading into dawn, and he aches the same way he wakes up - slowly, and then with alarming clarity.
He misses Stiles. He misses Beacon Hills, the Betas he left behind, the decrepit house sitting forlornly in the Preserve. He spent so much time trying to save it all, and he did, he did, he’d have given up everything if it meant keeping the pack afloat. It’s just that it wasn’t an option for him to stay any longer.
He doesn’t know what to text back, or if he should reply at all. But in the end, the answer’s always been simple: there’s never been a time Derek hasn’t jumped head-first into unknown mortal peril for Stiles, so he might as well respond to a goddamn text message.
You - 6:23 AM
> just say the word
A response comes, which he hadn’t expected. Stiles must have gotten zero sleep that night.
Stiles - 6:24 AM
> wish i could
> i dont wanna cause more hurt
You - 6:24 AM
> who would you be hurting?
Derek waits for hours, has one ear open to catch the sound of a notification while he goes out for his errands and circles back to the house to start on the dishes he and Cora had left to pile up. He feels unsettled in his skin, itching to do something, get out, go help, do something that isn’t just waiting for a text message that doesn’t come.
So it doesn’t surprise him that by midnight, he’s halfway out the door, a gym bag full of items slung over his shoulder, and Cora only looks up from her college textbook to ask him, “When are you coming back?”
He stops in his tracks and holds onto the door frame, “I don’t know,” is said truthfully.
“ Why don’t you know?” She narrows her eyes at him, not unkindly, but calculatingly. Derek doesn’t bother responding, just taps his foot restlessly in the divider between the foyer and the welcome mat outside.
“Who is it for, this time,” Cora asks demurely, closing her book and laying it on her lap. She looks so much like their mother Derek feels his barriers slowly fall down.
“It’s...he’s not doing so well.”
“ Who?”
“Stiles. I have to make sure he isn’t having a relapse.” It’s a lie. He knows the nogitsune isn’t the problem here, but it’s the one Cora’s going to let him off the hook for even if she could probably hear his pulse jump.
“Der,” Cora starts, “you’re going to have to make up your mind at some point. You know I don’t mind living alone again. You’ve never been able to stay away from Beacon Hills and it -” her eyes flick to his luggage “-it really shows.”
“I’ll be back soon.”
“I’m okay here, y’know that, right?” Cora says softly, gaze turning soft on him, and continues, “But you don’t seem to be.”
He nods his acknowledgement, tells her he loves her and to lock up after him, then heads out the door and into the Camaro. Not for the first time, he goes back for Stiles.
. . .
“I had to make sure,” Stiles’ quiet voice fills the loft.
Derek looks back, and he’s so surprised to see how absolutely sleepless Stiles looks.
“Took me long enough, right?” He sits on the edge of the table he’s got his items unpacked and strewn around on. Stiles smiles faintly and laughs like he can’t quite believe Derek’s here, like it’s inane to think that Derek wouldn’t rush back to Beacon Hills at the drop of a hat and an unanswered text message for Stiles.
But he would, he did. And then Stiles is charging forward, red-rimmed eyes trained on him, and the world tilts when Stiles barrels into him into a hug that makes them pitch backwards, items clattering to the floor and the ineffability of holding Stiles close to his person crashing into him like a landslide. His heart skips a beat, then his breath stills, and for a moment he thinks all the oxygen in the room gets sucked out and filtered into Stiles’ breath that fans against the side of Derek’s neck, where he’s got his chin hooked on Derek’s shoulder.
The world settles, and Derek’s so fucking terrified to be back in this hell-town, but this is the closest feeling he’s ever gonna get to coming home.
. . .
iii. forgiveness
Once, when religion was still a thing babcia taught him to subscribe to, Stiles had prayed on his knees for his mother to recover. Twice, he prayed the rosary to keep his father safe at work, stained the wooden beads with ugly sobs that he used to believe was a form of offering. He must have gone through three thousand Hail Marys before he stopped believing in God.
Now he’s attending Heather’s wedding in the only chapel in town, the stained glass painting the entire congregation in hues of magenta and blue. Heather looks radiant and pure , like nothing in this world could touch her on the happiest day of her life. Stiles had turned up in a black dress shirt and suit.
There’s a certain cognitive dissonance that truly fucks with his head that comes with living two lives. Not three days ago they had to put down an Omega who almost ripped out Boyd’s throat, which would have taken Erica’s soul, but now the two are happily sitting next to each other on a church pew, rice grains stuck in their hair, looking longingly at each other like they’ve already gotten the next step of their lives planned.
Stiles wonders if that’s how mercy looks like. The sacrificial nature of the lives they live, thanklessly endured, and rewarded only with the chance to continue living it . He looks up at the statue of Christ above the altar, which follows a direct line of vision under it where Heather is sealing her matrimony with a zealous kiss, and Stiles prays for the first time in a very long time, for pardon.
. . .
The third Omega of the month finds him first.
She’s a young werewolf, beaten and bloody and beyond bruised, and Stiles doesn’t know who she is or who did this to her, but he suddenly had the weight of the entire universe sitting on his shoulders. In the depths of the preserve, the pack is fighting something, some thing or other that tried to attack him , and he’s all alone on this side of the land, with a dying werewolf in his arms and so much internal turmoil.
Her breaths warble out like she was breathing under the ocean. There are Autumn leaves glued onto the blood that rings her forehead like a crown. Stiles knows a dying person when he sees one.
He thinks, briefly, of fighting to save her, this ten-something year old who deserved this kind of end the least. He thinks of calling for help, of pulling a miracle out of his ass and somehow getting to save this kid’s breath until tomorrow.
He thinks, God, forgive me, when he brings a Swiss Army knife down to her jugular.
. . .
Stiles’ favourite Bible story from all the years his Polish grandparents would make him and his cousins go to Bible study groups was Samson and Delilah’s.
He never really understood the moral of the story, but he was fascinated with Samson’s inhuman strength. Now, he never could actually snap bowstrings like snow peas or rip rope like single threads, but he could do something Samson couldn’t: cut his hair. So he had asked Mom to give him his first buzz cut. After seeing it all shorn down, Stiles had looked into the mirror, all of eight years old, and proclaimed he was stronger than Samson.
Eleven years after, he still clings onto that belief like he clings onto the belief of Hell.
He’s at the loft’s only functioning bathroom, Derek’s razor heavy in his hands.
Derek himself is leaning against the door frame, looking at him with worry. Don’t worry about me, Stiles wants to tell him, because he’s lucky, isn’t he, to have survived and lived to tell the tale behind all the blood on his hands.
Instead, he says, “If you’re just gonna stand there, you might as well cut it for me.”
Derek wordlessly walks inside the bathroom, tracking dark mud on his clean tiles. He takes the electric razor from Stiles and wraps a big hand on the side of Stiles’ skull.
Stiles’ eyelids flutter shut as the buzzing starts, and then there’s the familiar feeling of a metal comb running through his scalp. One moment he’s indulging himself in the comforting warmth of Derek’s hand cradling his head, his jaw, as the weight of his hair lands on the floor around them, and the next he’s staring at his reflection in the mirror, tears springing to his eyes. He looks weathered and worn down. Christ , how can Derek even recognise him at this point?
As he stares at his image in the mirror, he quotes, “The Philistines are upon you.”
Derek frowns incrementally. “What?”
“Nothing,” Stiles rubs the grief from his eyes, brushes the hair off his shirt and the back of his neck. “Thanks, Delilah.”
“It’s Derek, actually,” the older man says, reaching out to rub off stray hairs out of Stiles’ face, and something about the tenderness of this action cracks Stiles open. He squeezes his eyes shut, because a part of him wants to burst out crying in full force, to sink down to the bathroom floor and atone for his sins. He feels himself start to rattle in his own skeleton.
He says, “You can’t keep saving my life.”
Derek says, “For as long as you’re risking yours thoughtlessly,” and leaves it at that; not even a full sentence, leaves it at a misplaced modifier hanging in suspension the same way Stiles holds his own breath.
Finally, he whispers, so quietly not even the acoustics in the bathroom had the chance to echo it, “ I killed her.”
Derek tells him, “You took pity on her.”
“I felt her pulse give.”
“You showed her mercy.”
Stiles shakes his head, minutely surprised with the newfound weightlessness to it. “I’ve seen what mercy looks like, Derek, and it doesn’t - it shouldn’t look like that. It shouldn’t have been mine to...mercy didn’t belong to me to give it.”
He doesn’t know when it happens, but he gets bundled into Derek’s arms like a child. And he’s crying, he must be, because Derek’s making these shushing noises and intentionally making his chest rumble soothingly enough that he eventually stops, and then there’s just the two of them, stuck together on the bathroom floor, and Stiles randomly remembers calling Derek in desperation inside a bathtub so many months ago. And it hits him with a slow, creeping understanding.
He mumbles into Derek’s neck, “Mercy is you running back for us. Back here.”
Derek brushes the hair away from his face, mumbles right back, “No, that’s pity. Maybe guilt, too. Mercy is you accepting me like I never left.”
“Why shouldn’t we? You made us millionaires out of guilt.”
“That’s justice. The money...it made sense. My family always had plenty, and we always gave as much as we could back to the people who’ve looked after us. Continuing that legacy, that’s my version of at least some justice. It’s the way I want to remember them.”
They’re quiet for a while, until Stiles brings up again, “If killing her was an act of mercy then why do I have so much guilt?”
“It always looks different from the other end of the line.”
“Mercy is nothing without forgiveness.”
“She forgives you.”
“She’s dead, Derek. The last sound she made was an exhale.” The same way his mother died silently, with the haunting beep of a flatlined heart rate following after; the same way Donovan died with the pattering of rain.
Derek holds onto him tighter, presses into the crown of his head, “ She forgives you,” but Stiles can’t quite grasp anything about this conversation, the entire bullshit metaphysical commentary of it all, so all he offers next is, “Mercy is coming back for me. Because I couldn’t leave with you. Or is that pity?”
“That’s sacrifice,” Derek corrects, “I couldn’t have stayed away if I tried. Even Cora knew.”
“Because of the guilt?”
The man shakes his head. And it takes a while, but he eventually answers, “Because when it comes down to it, the only thing I know about mercy is being at yours.”
. . .
v. forgave
This wasn’t how he imagined the world to end for him. There should’ve been a warning, really, maybe neon lights would have helped. All he knew was that one moment there was light traffic in California, and the next the Earth was splitting apart.
His first thought was, oh fuck, and his second was, I should shepherd these people. But what he does is guns the Camaro’s engine, all of its 275 horsepower going off-road when it has the chance to, and he makes a shortcut to Scott and Stiles’ neighbourhood where he can already hear their thundering heartbeats from a mile away. The ground rumbles beneath, and for a moment Derek’s stomach drops when he sees a tree collapsed on the side of the Stilinski’s house where Stiles’ room is.
There’s something truly terrifying about mother nature turning against you. Derek barges in the house, adrenaline making his hands pop out claws that get in the way of opening a fucking door knob , and he’s so angry about his body’s fight response (what is it supposed to fight? A fucking earthquake?) that the door flies out of its hinges, and then he’s running up the stairs to race into Stiles’ bedroom.
The sporting equipment in the room is collapsed on a heap in front of the door where Derek has it thrown open. And Stiles is - Stiles is asleep.
Good god would he be the only person to sleep through the end of the fucking world .
He leaps over all the items strewn on the floor - books, pens, the entire contents of Stiles' study area. He doesn't think twice, just scoops Stiles' sleeping form against his chest, and it's supremely uncomfortable when Stiles starts flailing awake and his long limbs fly out in all the directions it can go in. But his instincts have narrowed down to escaping to safety , wherever that is, and he was never prepared for this, but he knows how to pull someone out of a burning house and this doesn’t feel any different.
When they’re finally out in the street, the asphalt cracks dangerously below them, he starts losing his grip on his panic. Stiles is dialing his father on his phone, and they get instructions to head to the only evacuation centre in Beacon Hills. Something in Derek’s head doesn’t immediately understand that they weren’t going to die, even when Stiles is shouting at him to “Derek we have to go, we have to leave, PLEASE,” but his limbs are frozen, his breath has stilled in his lungs, and the world is ending.
The world is ending and he’s wasted his life doing everything wrong.
“Derek, you gotta snap out of it, dude. For me? For - for gods sake, Derek listen to my breath, I know you can hear it.”
The tremors in his limbs follow the Earth. Quick sand sinks people in the same way, is that what’s going on here? Is that why he can’t just move ?
There’s a hand on his chest, and Stiles commands, “ Let go,” and the burn in his lungs whooshes out, thick and hot, like lava. His knees buckle and he stumbles to the ground, catches his pinky finger in a fresh crack on the road, and Stiles catches half of his fall. In the middle of an Earthquake, Stiles tells him, “We’re going to be okay,” and it sounds clearer this time, not like it was a sound playing in the background of a dystopian movie, “You’re having a panic attack. You can pull through. I’ll get us to the centre, you just gotta hang on and trust me, alright?”
Derek gets back on his feet and trips on a crack twice, before his brain gets with the program and Stiles has him rushing to and buckling back in the Camaro. The world speeds past them and Derek barely registers it when they arrive at the evacuation site. Stiles hurriedly clambers out of the car, and Derek sees how bloodshot his eyes are when he opens Derek’s side of the door for him. Everything still feels like it's muted, and Derek’s still half convinced it’s the end of everything even when he spots the Sheriff heralding people to a building that was built to withstand a disaster like this.
Deputy Parrish greets them by the entrance, wild-eyed and customarily checking for injury. He tells Stiles, “Your dad just sent me out for you.”
“I’m here now,” Stiles responds, clutching onto Derek’s hand. Parrish’s eyes flick to it momentarily before nodding and informing them, “Everyone’s okay,” before moving on to the flux of people just coming in.
Inside the centre, there’s a makeshift hospital corner where a medical team along with Melissa and Scott are tending to the less fortunate. Stiles leads the both of them to a vacant bench where they collapse like the strings holding them upright has finally gotten cut.
Outside, the Earth is still shaking. But in here, Derek only feels the slight rolling of the foundations along with it.
“We’re alright,” Stiles whispers, and Derek hears it louder than anything else. “Thank you.”
Derek grips the edge of the bench. “I panicked. I could’ve gotten us hurt.”
“You saved me .”
“I thought -” Derek scoffs, swallowing around his trepidation, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. Worst case scenario unfulfilled.”
“It’d be the first time,” Stiles tries to smile at him. But Derek can smell the fear on Stiles, and the overshooting of adrenaline having no foe to face, and maybe this is what made Derek think the world was ending, too. They’re not used to natural disasters, not in Beacon Hills. It’s always been one life-threatening situation after another for them, especially for Derek, whose life turned upside down and shrunk into survival and endurance the day Kate Argent swan-dived down into his life and sort of burned everything he had.
Not sort of. She most definitely did.
But sort of everything, because now he has this pack, this dysfunctional band of twenty-somethings ready to burn the world for each other.
And Derek was so fucking scared because he couldn’t be bereft of everything for the second time and live through it.
Stiles’s smile loses its withering spark and he hides his face into the meat of Derek’s shoulder. They hold each other for a long time, with Derek keeping his instincts tuned into the sound of his pack’s heartbeat around him. Eventually the trio finds them, and they crash into a heap near Stiles and Derek. Not even next to them, just on the floor of the bench, limbs sprawled out.
The sound of machinery whirrs in the background as the medics busily check on newcomers, and the Sheriff’s voice booms the loudest as he instructs people to remain calm and contact their family members. Erica has herself flacepanted onto Boyd’s chest, who’s leaning against Isaac’s back. Stiles tangles their hands together, and the world doesn’t end.
The world doesn’t end.
. . .
vi. forgive
Derek could possibly pinpoint the moment he stopped begrudgingly surviving and started fighting to live.
It’s just that right now wasn’t that moment.
“Make your choice, Hale,” the demon hisses behind the chapel doors, the only thing keeping it away from him and his pack from being possessed or slain. He doesn’t actually know what this demon wanted to do, just that it wanted one more innocent dead for the glory of fucking Satan or some other ungodly piece of shit.
The heavy double doors rattle viciously, the echoes of it seemingly making the entire church shake on its own foundations. And the thing is, the demon wasn’t asking for much, just one life. Just the one. Not even all of theirs. And the other thing is he doesn’t know what to do, because Deaton’s maybe-dead after he was possessed briefly during the first altercation at the Vet’s, his pack is doused in holy water, and Stiles is holding a wooden stake for some reason.
But he’s seen what the demon could do. And he’s - he has a choice here. He could take a chance and see if all his abuelita’s prayers can still protect him and ergo, his pack. Or he could stay inside the only chapel in Beacon Hills and let the demon move on and kill someone else.
Derek hesitates to reach over at the brass rings.
“DEREK!” Erica wails from the altar where he’s instructed everyone to grab a holy ornament. They didn’t have a plan, but they did know how religion worked. Kind of.
“Don’t you dare open that door.” It’s Scott this time, letting a bit of his Alpha command bleed into his tone.
But Derek is an Alpha himself.
When he grabs ahold of the metal to wrench the doors open, Stiles seems to barrel into his back, making his forehead crash into the wooden facade. Hands grab at his shoulders, forcing him to turn back and look at Stiles’ wild eyes. His resolve deflates at the sight of them.
"Derek ," Stiles spits out his name like it's blasphemous, tells him, "If you for a second think I won't follow you out there, then you don't fucking deserve this pack."
His breath rattles in his chest. "Maybe I don't."
"And that's where you're wrong," Stiles responds immediately, coiled tension shaking the vowels his mouth forms. "I'd take a bullet for you, I'd go into fire for you. I'd cut off your arm if it meant keeping you alive because you're my Alpha and you'd die for me even if it was some two-bit demon who asked you to."
"Without question."
“Then let me do this for you,” Stiles exhales desperately. “This asshole’s got nothing on us, on me. We burned out the nogitsune before. That thing outside there may be fucking terrifying, but I’ve had worse inside of me. I can do this.”
“You listen to me,” Derek growls, “You’re not doing this again. Not if we have another option. Not you, Stiles, never fucking you.”
The younger man’s haze hardens, and then his mouth slackens to mutter something under his breath.
Smoke then starts to fill Derek’s vision, milky-white streams that obscure his view in alarming opacity. An intangible force knocks him to the side and onto the marble of the chapel’s floor. He didn’t have more than three seconds to react before the sound of the heavy doors reverberates as it opens, and a demonic shriek tears the air and breaks open all the windows.
. . .
But the world still doesn’t end.
. . .
Jesus Christ saves them, literally. That’s what Boyd tells him anyways. Stiles did his spell, and the statue of God’s son had flown from the alcove and into the heart of the demon, vanquished point-blank and without much fanfare into hellfire and then - nothing.
All they had to do was clean up the dead bodies after.
A mass funeral is held for the fallen victims of the unnamed “sickness” that swept the town. Derek overhears it on the news that the WHO and California’s Department of Public Health wants to look into it, and he can’t believe this is finally what’s going to put Beacon Hills on the map: a tragedy covered up with a fake case of terminal quick-acting virus, that some poor team of Scientists are gonna lose their minds over cracking.
They all attend the funeral. Or funerals, plural. They even stay for the mass held after for the bereaved families.
“I’m so fucking sick of this,” Stiles mutters right next to him. He’s in a pressed black dress shirt and the jeans he had on when he performed that exorcism. It’s even a little bit signed on the cuffs.
“Preaching to the choir,” Derek responds, folding the pamphlet of hymnals they give at the doorway four times. He keeps it nestled in his palm when he reaches over to grab ahold of Stiles’ hand, and it crinkles as it gets squished between them.
Over ahead, the priest is delivering the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and there’s the outline of Jesus at the cross where the statue is missing. God knows where it went after Stiles used it to save their lives.
The crowd disperses after the mass, and Derek finds himself walking slowly out of the chapel with Stiles trailing along behind him. They lean against the Camaro for what feels like an eternity, watching people get into their cars and drive away as the parking lot slowly but surely empties out, and next thing they know sunset is upon them, and Derek still feels like he hasn’t caught his breath after almost an hour of waiting around.
It’s Stiles who breaks the silence; he always is. “You think this is ever gonna get any easier?”
“This?”
Stiles shrugs, hands shoved in his pockets. “The guilt. The omniscience that comes with working behind the scenes of every shitshow that’s ever gonna happen in this town.”
“Not really.”
“But you still do it?”
Derek smiles mirthlessly. “Who else would?”
“That’s martyrdom.”
“No, that’s just... repentance, I guess. I don’t know. I let evil into the place once, and apparently, the payback is having to drive it away for the rest of my life.”
Stiles huffs, pushing off the back passenger’s door and standing in front of Derek. “Self-pity. You never deserved any of that, of this. It’s just a thankless fucking job we do, ‘cause even if we’re clueless, our little Scoobydoo gang is still better off doing it rather than the next guy,” he cocks his head to the side.
“So you’re complacent?” Derek raises an eyebrow.
“I’m dog-tired. I’m furious and - and I’m burned out, dude. And I’m so, so angry at you, y’know that?”
“Why?”
“Because!” Stiles runs a hand through his close-cropped hair. “Because you keep running head-first into danger like you have a birthright to being a fucking martyr! And you think I don’t notice? How you’ve gone and decided at some point that my life was more important than yours ?”
“That’s a hasty generalization.”
Stiles narrows his eyes. “Chris Argent told me what you did. You were his first call when I got possessed. How are you any Argents’ first call?”
Derek swallows, hears his throat clicking uncomfortably. He’s been out in the sun for so long without water. “You don’t have to ask questions you’ve already got answers to, Stiles.”
The younger man shakes his head. He wets his lips, and it glistens in the remaining daylight. “You never hesitated to die for us, Derek. That’s the thing. And that shit you pulled three days ago?” Stiles pauses, his stare burning into Derek. “Do you know what would happen to me if you had gone out there and died like a fucking idiot?”
His tone is acerbic, but Derek could almost feel the tremors running through Stiles’ body in the air. The werewolf pushes up to place two hands on Stiles’ hips in hopes of grounding him, and Stiles doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t pull away at all.
And so Derek says, “I’d do it again,” and then they’re kissing, something that feels so soft and incredibly overdue under the setting sun.
Almost immediately, he tastes Stiles’ tears on his tongue, and he drinks it all in: the grief, the desperation, the fear of almost losing each other. He does this again and again and again as they gravitate forward to meet in between, his belt buckle hitting Stiles’ navel, Stiles’ hands scrambling for purchase on the meat of his lower back. And Derek doesn’t care if they’re kissing in the parking lot of a church after burying so many bodies, not when the feeling of Stiles’ mouth is the next best thing to something holy Derek’s ever gonna have. Stiles pulls back, leaving a short kiss on the space above his upper lip, like a blessing, and when he whispers, “ Derek, ” it’s said so quietly that Derek can’t tell apart a prayer from a name.
They breathe out, and breathe each other in. They wait until the sun sinks low into the horizon, sweating uncomfortably in their starched formal wear. They wait well into the early evening before they leave together in the Camaro, at which point Derek decides it wouldn’t hurt to drive around for a bit somewhere farther from home, somewhere farther from all the crime and the townspeople and the guilt.
Stiles wears his sunglasses and eats the stash of Doublemint Cora keeps in the glovebox.
And it takes a while before they drive back home.
.
.
.
.
.
“I didn’t know that would work, you know. The statue vanquishing that discount demon.”
“Divine intervention?”
“True mercy right there.”
“So you making up that whole I-can-do-this speech, that was a lie?”
“ That was sacrifice. Better me than you or the pack. Two Alpha werewolves can stand a better chance at saving more people than one and a measly spark.”
“You’re never doing that again.”
“Wow. That’s so fucking hypocritical of you.”
“No, that’s a promise. You’re not doing that again.”
“I feel like you don’t know me at all.”
“I do.”
“And I know you.”
“You do.”
“So that means I don’t have a hell’s chance in keeping you from your hero complex? You think I’m destined to be Lois Lane and Mary Jane rolled into a hundred fifty pounds of sarcasm?”
“No, I think you’re going to fight me on this for a long time.”
“Try forever.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Yeah, well suck it up. That’s love.”
“It is?”
Stiles turns to look at him.
“What else could it be, dude? We went past ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ and straight into ride or die.”
“Huh. So it is.”
“Are you...good with that?”
He reaches across the gear shift to place a hand on Stiles’ thigh.
“It’s you or nothing.”
.
.
.
fin.