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It is one thing to know that Stiles will one day have the capability to transform into a maybe-fire-breathing-maybe-not dragon, and it’s another thing entirely to see it happen.
Case in point: Training day for the pack. Stiles’ role now elevated to something slight more involved than his usual ‘live bait’ routine. Lydia is studying on the burnt out porch of the Hale house, large Latin texts spread over her lap (and a Cosmo magazine, because Derek had been buying groceries and she had sidled up to him with a look), while Erica, Boyd, Stiles, and Isaac dodge seamlessly through the mess of trees, trying to avoid Allison’s enthusiastic target practice. Yes, even Stiles. Because Stiles isn’t affected by the full moon, doesn’t fang-out or claw-out much anymore now that he has something – someone - to ground him. What he does have, is an even faster metabolism than before, enhanced speed, agility, and reaction time, and –
Stiles smokes. Sometimes. Not cigarettes, because the Sheriff would actually shoot him. But literal, actual, dragon smoke. Only when he’s upset, on one of his ranting, red-cheeked tirades, his eyes gleaming and his teeth flashing and his arms flailing (“Dude, eyes up here,” Scott usually snickers, elbowing Derek in his side, and Derek snarls and definitely does not blush) ---
And small tendrils of sweet gray smoke ribbon up from Stiles’ flared nostrils and the corners of his pink lips.
It’s enchanting, it’s eerie, it’s –
“So adorable,” Erica says, the first time Stiles does it in front of them, a shit-eating grin on her face and Stiles’ cheeks ruddy with embarrassment.
“Not a word.” Stiles snaps at Derek, who indeed had not uttered a single word, because he’s afraid what he would say if he did.
He may not be the Alpha anymore, but he has a reputation to uphold. Although by the way the local baker’s wife has taken to smiling and patting his hand every time he comes in with Stiles to pick up their wholegrain loaf for Sunday brunch with the Sheriff, he’s pretty sure that’s gone out the window already.
So Stiles is different. But not too different. He still talks too much and reveals too little, still smells of lanky teenager sweat and sugary drinks and too-little sleep. He’s just a little different. Underneath the thin skin and fragile bones, where a dragon heart beats, loud and hard. Sometimes Derek’s hand bumps when he rests it against Stiles’ fine ribs, feeling the powerful quake underneath his skin. It should make him feel threatened, make the wolf rear his head, tuck-tail and run. Instead he finds it soothing, rests his cheek against the noise and grounds himself to it.
Derek has started sleeping better.
“He’s doing great,” Scott says suddenly, hands on his hips as he watches the Betas – and Stiles – avoid Allison’s arrows. Stiles is panting with exhilaration, laughing and whooping every time he fluidly twists out of the way of a pointed tip, graceful in a way he was never before.
“You’re doing great, Stiles!” Scott yells, giving him the thumbs up, which of course, distracts Stiles long enough to only just avoid Allison’s arrow, which cuts across the bridge of his nose and embeds itself in the tree behind.
“Dude!” Stiles yells, throwing his arms out, “Way to throw off my game!”
“Scott!” Allison chides, shaking her mane of dark hair.
Derek, who refuses to acknowledge that he had lurched forward painfully when he saw the arrow cut close, smirks as he watches Erica creep up on Stiles, her claws out and a wicked grin on her face.
“What game?” Boyd smirks, and Stiles sticks up a finger meaningfully, grinning wildly and sweating hard.
Which is when Erica pounces on his back, shouting: “Gotcha!”
Which is when everything goes to hell.
“What do you mean you lost him?” The Sheriff yells down the phone, and Derek winces.
“Don’t panic!” Scott says, looking fairly panicked himself, waving his arms around even though the Sheriff can’t see him, “He can’t be too far away!”
“Or too hard to find,” Lydia quips, “what with being about eight feet long and six feet high. And a dragon.”
“Lydia,” Scott whines, and Derek pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Listen,” he says, sounder calmer than he feels, “don’t worry, Sheriff. We’re going to spread out and find him. He has to still be in the preserve somewhere. He’ll be home before nightfall.”
“I can’t fit a dragon in my house, Hale! I can barely fit Stiles in the house!”
“He’ll turn back,” Derek assures him, “he was just startled. He shifted instinctively. I’m sure once he’s around familiar faces he’ll ground himself back to normal.”
“I’m out on patrol,” the Sheriff sighs, “if I hear one word of some giant creature eating the local neighborhood cats or something--”
“One time!” Isaac protests.
“I understand,” Derek swears, “we’ll find him, I promise.”
He hangs up, tossing the phone from hand to hand, staring out into the expanse of trees before him.
“So he’ll turn back if we find him, then,” Erica nods, “sounds good.”
“What?” Derek asks. “No, I was just telling the Sheriff that so he wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Derek!” Scott snaps.
“Do you have a better idea? Listen, we’ll spread out, like I said. His scent has to be amplified, it shouldn’t be too hard to track down a…” Derek clears his throat, feeling stupid even as he mutters: “a dragon.”
“And then what?” Allison queries, holding her bow a little too warily for Derek’s taste.
“And then, uh,” Derek digs in his pockets, coming up with a loose handful of change, “I guess we show him something shiny.”
“Wow,” Lydia stresses.
So they split up, and as it turns out, Derek doesn’t make it more than half an hour into his area of the preserve when he realizes that something is watching him. He sniffs the air, but nothing seems out of sorts, which makes him really start to worry.
“Stiles?” He calls, gazing out onto a sea of orange and red leaves, black tree-trunks and fallen bird nests. “Stiles! Can you hear me? Are you there?”
In the far distance, his ears pick up the sound of Isaac rattling some coins together, plaintively whining: “He-e-e-re, dragon, dragon, dragon,” and he stops his slow pace and looks to the sky with pitiful exasperation.
Then Stiles strikes.
At first, Derek thinks a bomb has gone off. The forest floor explodes with leaves and dirt and twigs, and what he had taken for a mound of earth in the distance reveals itself to be – well – a dragon.
And as a dragon, Derek has to say Stiles – well – Stiles looks weird.
He has no wings, for starters. And, like Stiles’ human body, he doesn’t seem quite grown into his limbs yet, his body long and sleek and lanky. His snout is tapered and fine, his tail seems to go for miles, and his hide is a smattering of bronze, gold and pale cream. He’s still half-hidden in a coat of autumn leaves, and he looks so awkward – Derek supposes the teenage years transcend all magical races – and so magnificent.
Stiles, amber eyes glimmering in the evening sun, sticks his rump up and lolls his tongue out from between inch-thick fangs, and garbles something at Derek. Then he tips his head to the side, snaps the air with his deadly, deadly teeth, and does something similar to a grin.
Derek is known to have a bit of a guilt-complex, and the mandatory emotional therapy classes the Sheriff ushered him to have started to help him come to terms with the fact he takes responsibility for more bad things than he really should, and so Derek channels the self-affirming lessons from Mr. Powel, puts his hands on his hips, and says confidently:
“I do not deserve this.”
Stiles-the-dragon yaps something, and then bounces to one side of Derek, rump still stuck in the air like an excited dog.
“And you are a terrible dragon.” Derek says, and hates how fond he sounds.
Stiles scampers closer, only marginally smaller than a tow-truck, and licks one long, disgusting stripe up the side of Derek’s face. Derek would be offended except that, the past few full-moons, he’s pretty sure he may have done the same to Stiles when he was in full-shift, so really, he only feels sort of touched, and then embarrassed, and then a little pleased.
“You idiot,” he sighs, and gingerly rests his palm on Stiles scaly cheek.
“Hey guys!” Erica yells, exploding into the clearing with a look of awe and uncontrollable excitement, “Derek found Stiles! And he’s still a loser!”
Which: rude. And Derek is 50% sure she’s referring to Stiles, but then the other 50% tells Derek that yes, Erica is that much of a dick to mean him, as well.
So really, he’s only a little shocked when at the sound of her voice, Stiles rears up on his hind legs, scaly lips pulled back, and emits a horrifying, eardrum-shaking territorial shriek. Birds burst from the trees around them, hollering up into the sky, and Erica’s face goes white all at once.
“Uh oh,” she says.
And then Stiles’ tail sweeps out from where it was hiding under a bed of leaves, and sends her flying into a tree.
So Erica gets roused from unconsciousness, the pack all make a show of giving Stiles and Derek some space, and Derek finds himself herded – actually herded! – back to the burnt-out Hale mansion, where Stiles pushes him unceremoniously onto the porch and then flops over him. His underbelly is surprisingly soft and plush, warm like a heated blanket – and, oh, also – he weighs a ton.
“Is this payback for that time I snuck into your nest fully-shifted,” Derek wheezes, “because the message is received?”
He hears a phone shutter go off, and squeezes his eyes shut in mortification.
“Please tell me you did not just take actual photographic evidence of a real life dragon.”
“…I did not?” Allison hedges.
Stiles, typically, does nothing except release an enormous sigh (smoke included) and garble something again in his weird, dragonish tongue.
“I think he’s trying to talk to us,” Scott marvels.
“Hey, yeah,” Derek says, losing feeling in his legs, “I think he’s trying to say: piss off, Scott.”
“No,” Scott sounds like he’s grinning, the little shit, “I don’t think that’s it.”
The Sheriff’s cruiser pulls up, and although Derek knew he would one day die of actual, crushing embarrassment, he had thought the crushing part would be a lot less literal. The dragon is also sort of a surprise.
“Sheriff,” he grunts.
There goes the phone shutter again.
“Allison!”
“No, no,” the Sheriff says, “that one’s on me.”
At the sound of his father’s voice, Stiles raises his head from the burnt-out floorboards of the porch and yaps excitedly, long tail thumping hard against the already crushed wall.
“Yeah, hi to you too, buddy,” Sheriff seems torn between amazement and exasperation, “look at you, Jesus. Your mum was never this skinny.”
He seems to hesitate.
“You have her colours, though.” He adds, and Derek tastes a sourness in the air. Stiles is curling up towards his father, enormous reflecting eyes looking watery and sympathetic. Derek realizes that Stiles must be able to read his father’s mood as easily as he does in human form, and he isn’t liking what he’s seeing.
“Stiles, come on,” the Sheriff seems to rouse himself from whatever he was remembering, “you’re crushing Derek there. I’m sure he appreciates the sentiment, but you really need to shift back now, okay?”
“Yeah,” Derek wheezes, “come on, Stiles. Self-control, remember?”
Stiles garbles something mournfully, and looks down at Derek. Derek should probably be more concerned that teeth longer than his fingers are currently aimed directly at his face, but then, he was raised by Talia Hale.
“Stiles,” his dad says soothingly, running a wrinkled hand down Stiles’ ridged, scaly spine. “It’s time to go home, okay?”
After that it seems easy. Although certainly not fast. Over twenty or so minutes Stiles alternates between wriggling uncomfortably and moaning low in his throat, and then, eventually, Derek has his arms full of naked teenager boy – who still has bright eyes and sharp teeth, unfortunately – and his armed father staring down at them.
“Hey,” Stiles mumbles, patting Derek’s cheek, “I will never be angry about you sniffing my butt again.”
“I never--” Derek splutters, but the Sheriff mercifully ignores that little chestnut of information, and gathers Stiles up and onto his feet.
“Grey hairs, kid,” he swears, putting his coat around Stiles’ shoulders, “so many of them.”
“Oh man,” Stiles swears, eyes wide, “everything was so wow, you know?”
“I know,” The Sheriff says, placating, ushering him towards the cruiser, “cover your privates, son.”
“What? Oh – shit – Erica! Stop looking!”
Derek is still sprawled on the porch. He feels a little blindsided. Maybe he’ll just rest here a while, let all the Betas leave without him, gather his thoughts.
“I’m not sorry for licking you!” Stiles yells out the window of the car as it pulls away from the house.
Or maybe Derek will just die here, instead.
So sometimes Stiles turns now. That’s a thing. Only in the preserve, where there is actually room for him, or on a few rare occasions in his nest, where he contorts his long thin body into unbelievable shapes so he can sleep restfully beneath his mountain of blankets and stolen goods.
Sometimes Derek shifts too, pads in on all fours and steps gingerly over a scaled tail or talon, noses up into Stiles’ soft belly and huffs his way to sleep.
They usually both wake human, and well-rested, and Derek’s eyes might sometimes still be blue and Stiles’ teeth might sometimes still be fine and sharp. They gorge themselves on bacon and eggs and try to find wherever Stiles hid his laptop this time, watch pirated TV shows in the nude – Stiles playing with his talons when he can make them come out – and sleeping away long rainy days.
“Ugh, calculus,” Stiles mutters over homework, and Derek sees a single silver scale still nestled in the pale skin of his lower back. He puts his rough cheek to Stiles’ shoulder, breathes in, and listens to Stiles’ heart, thumping steadily, loudly, over all the worries in his head.