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“Did you bring the mountain ash?”
Stiles ignores Derek—not easy, given that he’s parked himself, arms crossed over his chest, in the middle of the doorway. “Food’s getting cold,” he says, kicking Derek in the shin to get him to move, shifting the pizza boxes in his arms. It’s far from cold, actually, uncomfortably hot where the bottom of the box rests against his arms, but telling Derek that feels silly.
Derek glowers at him. “Mountain ash.”
“You think I wouldn’t listen to you?” He blinks at Derek, mouth dropping open in faux-outrage until it’s clear that Derek is not actually going to let him pass without an answer. Well, fine. He can play that game. “In the backpack, big guy, cross my heart.”
The look Derek gives him is scrutinizing and thorough, but he finally nods and steps to the side, enough for Stiles to push through, shoulder brushing against Derek’s as he goes to set the food down on the coffee table and drop his backpack with a thud by the couch. Derek seems to be waiting for something, so Stiles does what he does best and makes a show of toeing his shoes off and kicking them towards the front door, pulling the arms of his hoodie down because Derek likes to keep his house uncomfortably cold in the winter, and flopping back onto the couch.
“I’ll take something to drink,” he says, twisting his hand around at Derek, half a gesture to mosey on into the kitchen to be a good host for once in his life and half to hurry up and get to it a little faster.
“I’m not sure what you think you’re doing,” Derek says. He’s moved from the front door to the bottom of the stairs, arms still tight over his chest like he’s physically holding himself back from something. “Did you want me to stay upstairs?”
Ignoring the whole mountain ash issue clearly is not going to happen, but Stiles is still going to make Derek say it. He’d been vague on the phone a few days ago, reverting back to what Stiles affectionately calls pre-verbal Derek, but it hadn’t taken a genius to figure out what Derek intended when he’d told Stiles to bring over mountain ash the night of the full moon. Still—they’re doing it his way, not that Derek knows that yet. “Your house, dude,” he says. “Does that mean I have to get my own drink?”
It’s almost a victory when Derek lifts one hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Are you going to do this or not?”
“Sure, sure,” Stiles says, pressing his hands down on the couch to stand up, “we’ll get to it. After we eat and watch something. You seen the new Jack Ryan movie yet? It’s pretty badass, we can watch it if you want.”
“Fine,” Derek says, and that is a victory, so Stiles pumps his fist once as he passes by him to move into the kitchen. “We can watch whatever you want.”
He’s pleased to hear Derek following him in, opening the cabinets while Stiles pulls open the refrigerator and liberates the leftover chocolate cake in addition to sodas, and soon enough they’re sitting back on the couch, plate of pizza in their laps as Derek makes muttered comments about each of the movies Stiles hovers over as his scrolls through Netflix.
“Thought you said we could watch whatever I wanted,” he huffs, and is pleased to see Derek almost grin out of the corner of his eye. “Go back to being the strong yet silent type until after the movie is over, thanks.”
The peace lasts as long as the food does, but the moment he leans forward to flip the last box closed, Derek stands up despite the movie still playing. “Can you stop drawing this out now?”
Stiles sighs and sits up, groaning—he definitely ate a little too much, but Derek’s stomping up the stairs already, so he grabs his backpack and stands to follow him. He changes into sweats and doesn’t hesitate to lay down a line of ash on Derek’s window sills, then, just to get on Derek’s nerves, lazily tosses a handful of it at the door just before he drops backwards onto the bed. “Done. You wanna tell me what’s got you so freaked out now? We can skip the part where you growl at me to leave and I tell you no and you threaten me because it’s not happening.”
Derek’s eyes flash red, and Stiles laughs.
“Oh no,” he says flatly, scooting up to lean against the headboard. “Not the eyes. Better do what my alpha tells me to do.”
“Just once,” Derek says, but he’s more worried than angry—he sounds the same, sure, but Stiles hasn’t been studying him for nearly a decade without learning a few things, like how the corners of Derek’s mouth flatten out when he’s pissed off but turn down when he’s worried, or the eyebrow crease that grows more pronounced if he’s upset.
“Come on, Derek, we both know you’re not going to hurt me,” he says, tilting his head back a bit to track Derek’s pacing across the room. “Is it the wolf moon? It’s never been a problem before but I couldn’t find anything else in my research about why this cycle in particular would be an issue.”
Derek sits on the bed at his knees, almost tentatively. “It’s—I think it’s me. I haven’t felt like this since I was a teenager.”
Stiles frowns, taking in the way Derek keeps his hands held tightly in his lap and gaze trained at the ground. “And ‘like this’ feels—what? Out of control?”
The sigh Derek lets out is enough for Stiles to know that whatever he’s about to say, he knows Stiles will jump on it. “Itchy.”
Just this once, he decides, he can let go of the obvious dog joke, but only because there are more pressing issues. “That’s what’s freaking you out? Pretty sure Scott still feels like that sometimes, dude. Not sure if it should really count as a ‘come surround me in mountain ash so I can’t terrorize the townsfolk’ situation.”
Derek just shrugs. “I’d rather be safe,” he says, and finally glares up at Stiles, “which means you on the other side of the line.”
“Look,” Stiles says, choosing to ignore the unintended insult—like he can’t handle himself around a werewolf, please—and soldier on, “I know you’re occasionally prone to slipping back into your creep-o sourwolf personality, but you asked me to come help and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not just gonna let you brood and mope in the dark, alright? You can brood and mope right here next to me while we watch the rest of the movie.”
He pats the bed next to him and waggles his eyebrows until Derek rolls his eyes and crawls right over him—he can’t believe he’s sacrificing all these good jokes tonight, they’re bursting on his tongue—and sits down, leaning against the headboard but still keeping himself arms length away.
They finish the movie in silence—well, Derek does, Stiles talks over most of it, but Derek’s never seemed to mind—and when it’s finished, Stiles yawns and stretches before he looks over at Derek. “So,” he says, “wanna fess up? I know what you’ve been hiding.”
He’s not exactly expecting Derek’s head to slowly turn to face him, face going a little pale. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, but he clears his expression a little too slowly, and Stiles grins.
“Yeah you do,” he says, “I figured it out when you called me.” Like he wasn’t incredibly familiar to the sound of someone playing Call of Duty—he’d known what Derek was doing the second he heard the gunfire. He’s not sure how it had taken him so long to figure out that Derek was a secret video game junkie, but once he knew to look, he’d been able to find the stash of games hidden pretty quickly the last time he was over.
“And you’re—okay with that?” Derek asks slowly, still not moving, and Stiles takes a moment to wonder how Derek is still the biggest drama queen he knows when he grew up with Jackson Whittemore.
“Dude, it’s awesome,” he says, because seriously. Scott’s too busy with his job and family to have game nights with any regularity anymore, but Derek’s still unattached, so it’s basically perfect. They’ve come a long way from Derek slamming his head into the steering wheel of his jeep, and Stiles might be getting a little too excited over the prospect of more bro-dates with Derek.
“Oh,” Derek says quietly, sounding a bit awed, and before Stiles can figure out why adds, “so, I could take you on a date sometime?”
Stiles blinks, opens his mouth and closes it, and just as Derek shifts slightly and starts to slide off the bed, manages to push past the part of his brain that had screeched to a halt to say, “so we were talking about two different things but—sit down, Derek, don’t—”
“Please go,” Derek says, and it’s too damn soft, too quiet. “Just—go.”
There’s a part of him that wants to, that wants to avoid this whole awkward, uncomfortable moment and leave, but the ache in his chest tells him that if he walks out the door, that’s all Derek’s ever going to remember. He thinks about arguing for a moment—he’d never even said anything, hadn’t even had a chance to get his brain back online before Derek was asking him to leave—but even humans could read the emotions that Stiles usually had written across his face. He takes another breath instead and lets it out slowly. “Let me stay,” he says, rushing on, “Derek—give me a minute to just think—”
“You’re not interested,” Derek says, “and I don’t need your pity—”
“I never thought of you as an option,” Stiles interrupts. He can’t stand Derek’s tone, the self-deprecating, resigned quality in his voice. “So just—give me time to consider it, you deserve an answer, but let me stay. Just in case you need something.”
Derek’s reaction—standing up abruptly and pulling his shirt off roughly over his head before reaching for the button on his jeans—doesn’t make sense to Stiles until he’s staring at the furry shape of a jet black wolf climbing back onto the bed, and he can’t help but grin.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Stiles says, and because he knows Derek, puts his upturned hand between them on the bed until Derek scoots his way over and rests his head against it. He rubs his fingers over the coarse fur idly and closes his eyes, letting himself drift as he rewinds their friendship in his head and looks at their interactions through a different lens. “I was talking about video games, you know. I know you’ve got a few good ones hidden away, I figured we could go a few rounds. Scott’s been too busy to play lately—well, he’s been too busy for everything—”
Actually, he can’t remember the last time he hung out with Scott one on one. They’d hung out at New Year’s and Christmas but that was as a pack, and Scott hadn’t really left Kira’s side. Stiles had helped Derek decorate for Christmas, and then helped him redecorate to Lydia’s exacting expectations for New Years, and they’d spent most of their time at the party together, too. Derek had made sure Stiles had gotten a seat in the armchair he liked best and then leaned against the side, and now that Stiles is thinking about it, they’d been walking through the Preserve together at midnight, and Derek had handed over his jacket even before Stiles complained about being cold in only his hoodie. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time—their interactions are and always have been peppered with eyerolls and scoffing, occasional bursts of physical violence and name-calling. But that doesn’t mean things haven’t changed between them—Derek trusts him now, even if he’s never said the words, and he seeks Stiles out to spend time with, and—
“I call you first now,” he says, dropping the volume of his voice when it sounds too loud in the quiet room. “Not just because Scott’s busy—and I call you, because you don’t like texting, and you know how much I hate the inefficiency of calling someone on the phone—” he stops and scratches at Derek’s neck when he feels him moving, sighing. “I know you did this so you wouldn’t have to engage in this conversation and I’m just letting you know now that you’re going to pay for that later. You know I think better when someone is arguing with me, and that’s usually your job.”
He also thinks better when there’s something to distract him, so he stretches for the remote and skims through Netflix, picking a show he knows Derek likes because he is actually capable of being considerate, especially, he thinks, when it comes to Derek. “Having all kinds of realizations over here tonight,” he says, but he hardly thinks he can be blamed. He’d labeled Derek as off-limits as a teenager and had tried not to think about it again; obviously, Derek is objectively attractive, and Stiles has always had a healthy appreciation for beauty of all types. And sure, maybe as a sixteen year old who was being pressed up against walls with Derek’s hand fisted in the front of his shirt, he’d had some thoughts, but they’d gone away because he’d moved past the stage where he fell in love with everyone he’d never have a shot with.
Sixteen year old Stiles never had shot with Derek. He’s sure of that—he’ll have to wait until Derek is capable of talking to get more information, but he knows without a doubt that Derek wasn’t interested in him back then.
Twenty-six year old Stiles is apparently a different story.
The more he thinks about it, though, the more they make sense together. Derek’s immune to Stiles’ proclivity for sarcasm and acerbic humor, Stiles is proficient at reading Derek’s body language when words fail him, and both of them have learned when to back off and when to push forward. It’ll take work, but he finds that when he lets his mind drift and tries to imagine them together, it’s not all that difficult, not even when he stretches his thoughts into the future and pictures them twenty or thirty years down the road.
“We’re going to have to learn to communicate more,” he says, sliding his hand around to Derek’s side and stroking down the length of him. “No—none of this, you can’t just shift when we fight until we decide to ignore it. You’ll have to talk to me, and I’ll have to—probably talk a little less, actually. Not be so quick to try to talk my way out of things.”
Stiles looks down at him when Derek’s head lifts off the bed, meeting his gaze. “I’m saying yes,” Stiles says, one corner of his mouth turning up into a smile. “To a date. And trying a relationship. As long as you’ll actually talk to me and try to make it work.”
Derek’s head nuzzles against his arm, and Stiles figures that’s as good as he’s going to get tonight, so he sits back and focuses his attention on the movie, keeping one hand on Derek. He chatters about the movie as he watches it—Derek’s eyes are closed, but Stiles can tell he’s still awake—and when the picture fades into credits, he turns the television off and yawns. “Come on, big guy,” he says, lifting up the edge of the blanket after he pulls it back and climbs under. “Let’s get some sleep. Stay like that if it’s helping, but just to clarify, I said yes to a date with the intention that you’d eventually be able to kiss me, so you’re on a time limit.”
He really should have been expecting the lick to the cheek.
“Just for that,” he threatens, slinging an arm around Derek, “I’m gonna make you talk so much.”