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Stiles has known all of her life that she is gay.
It comes with the territory after announcing to your parents that you’re going to marry Lydia Martin when you grow up because she has pretty hair and smiles with her eyes.
She sort of figured that Lydia was the love of her life, her one and only, the one that was her meant to be, her happily ever after, because of the fact that her parents had met when they were in elementary school and started dating in middle school and fell in love in high school and got married the same month after they graduated and had Stiles the Spring after. Her parents had been in love forever, and she figured that it was going to be the same for her.
The only snag in this plan was that Lydia Martin was obviously not gay.
And when Stiles had revealed her feelings for her, Lydia had laughed, and then had looked guilty, and told her that she was sorry, but she doesn’t swing that way. And then patted her on the cheek and told her that she’d find someone.
It did nothing to the feelings that Stiles was harboring for her, but at least now she knew.
----
Stiles doesn’t like thinking about her mother’s death and the year that she was in and out of hospitals before they told her that they were sorry but that there was nothing else that they could do.
So she doesn’t remember meeting Derek for the first time.
She doesn’t remember the older girl who’d caught her crying in the empty hospital room when she’d overheard her parents talking about her mom’s prognosis. She doesn’t remember how Derek had sat down next to her, and held out her arms, and had let Stiles curl up in her lap, and cry on her shoulder until she fell asleep telling her that it was going to be okay. She doesn’t remember how the girl smelled sweet and weird like smoke and rubbing alcohol.
She does remember her dad finding her and waking her up with tears in his eyes and a relieved cry because he’d thought that he’d lost her.
She doesn’t remember meeting Derek, but that’s okay, because Derek doesn’t remember meeting her either.
----
After the whole revelation of feelings, and the letting down gently, Lydia decided that they should become best friends.
It didn’t take long for her to start hinting at wanting to give her make overs and have sleep overs and paint her nails and gossip with her and all of that.
For one whole year, Stiles was glad that she had a girl best friend as well as a boy best friend, because there were some things that he couldn’t tell Scott (like when she was getting her period and how much she wanted to buy that plaid skirt at the mall with the huge square metal buttons and red suspenders) and there were other things that she couldn’t tell Lydia (like that she fantasized about Mila Kunis and Olivia Wilde and how hot Lydia looked in a bikini).
For one whole year, Lydia took her shopping, and slept over and did her hair, and put make up on her face and showed her how to do all of that without her help, and showed her how to paint her toe nails without getting nail polish all over her toes, and showed her how to get tips from magazines.
For one whole year, Stiles pretty much ignored Scott, and let Lydia call her Gem.
And then Lydia began dating Jackson, and suddenly hanging out with Stiles wasn’t cool anymore.
----
Scott was there to pick up the broken pieces, and Stiles hung on to him so tightly, that they might have started becoming just a little bit codependent.
The first day of school freshman year, Lydia had glared at her, like if Stiles had somehow been her pet project and Stiles had ruined everything by returning to her old ways.
Stiles found that she didn’t care as much as she would have once, and it felt like a weight had been lifted from her chest.
Because while she was still positive that she loved Lydia, she also knew that she could move on from Lydia given the chance.
----
Stiles takes complete, and total responsibility for Scott getting bitten, because if she hadn’t convinced him to sneak out with her and try to find a dead body in the woods, then none of that would’ve happen.
It’s something that Stiles can’t really find it in herself to regret.
Because she got Allison out of it and Allison was a godsend.
Sure she had the initial crush on her, because Allison was pretty much gorgeous, but she was still hopelessly devoted to Lydia, and once Allison figured out that Stiles didn’t have a crush on Scott, and that they were pretty much a packaged deal, she opened up and became the most awesome person that Stiles has ever known. Not only is she kick-ass with the crossbows, but she lets Stiles raid her wardrobe when she starts wanting to look pretty.
Which actually doesn’t happen until after they kill Peter.
Which may have to do a lot with how it felt when she woke up the next morning to find that Derek was gone.
It wasn’t like she expected Derek to stay and eat breakfast with her, and tell her what was on her mind, because she might be a teenager, but she wasn’t stupid. Derek was about as open as the Chamber of Secrets, and Stiles wasn’t too adept at Parseltongue.
The point was that she felt a tug on her heart, and that’s when she realized that sometime during the last two months while she busy was running around trying to keep Scott from getting himself killed, and Derek was running around somehow always arriving in the nick of time to keep Stiles from dying, and she was there offering to (or more truthfully, getting threatened to) cut off Derek’s arm, and pulling her out of the way when the hunters were shooting Wolfsbane tipped arrows at them, she had fallen in love with Derek.
----
To be honest, Stiles knew that she had a crush on Derek.
She could admit that Derek was hopelessly attractive.
She had the most impressive rack that Stiles had ever seen, and her legs went on for miles, not to mention the abs and the toned arms, and her waist. But also her eyes which were a sort of blue-green that was more green than anything, and her shiny long black hair, that seemed to always be perfect in spite of the amount of time she spent rolling around in the forest floor, and her full lips, and the perfect cheek bones and the jaw, and the way sweat collected in the hollow of her collarbones when she worked out, and her long fingers.
And she rocked that leather jacket better than anyone she’d ever seen.
Stiles could admit that she found Derek attractive. Blind people found Derek attractive.
But finding someone attractive was in a whole different ballpark than being in love with them.
Being in love with someone meant that there were aspects of their personalities that you found intriguing and worth knowing, that that person made you laugh and cry and smile and shout. It meant being terrified, but trusting completely. It meant that there was something about that person that did more than attract you, it made you want to stay.
And the only person that Stiles could talk to about it was Allison, but Allison was still pissed at Derek for taking Scott’s chance to become normal.
Stiles didn’t bother telling either of them that Scott wouldn’t have changed, he’d just turn into the Alpha, and that was something that she didn’t want to think about.
Especially after seeing what it had done to Derek.
----
She finds out from Scott that Jackson had been bitten, and from the way he scrunches up his nose and says and that’s not the only thing that she gave him she knows that Derek slept with him.
Stiles won’t be naïve and act like if she didn’t know that Derek slept around.
She knows, she’s witnessed on more than one occasions Derek slipping out of some of her male neighbor’s windows.
Objectively that should’ve convinced her that falling for Derek was a bad idea.
But she also knew how much Derek had been hurt.
She knew how much Derek loved her sister Laura and how much she missed her twin, even though she had never spoke of him by name until the night that Peter died.
She knew that Derek sucked at relationships and that her communication skills were so rusty that they were deteriorating.
She knew that Derek used her sexuality as a weapon, because she’d seen the way she’d used it against Scott, and the way that she’d used it against Kate when the psycho hunter had trapped Stiles and had promised to take real good care of her if she did everything that Kate asked.
She knew so many things about Derek that Derek had never told her because she was observant, and she knew what to look for, because she was just as broken as Derek was.
So she saw the way that Derek initially flinches away from male contact, and she saw the way that Derek relaxes around her before she growls and throws her against the wall and grips her wrist tight enough to bruise and threatens to kill her slowly if she doesn’t leave her alone.
She knows it’s all a front, a huge brick wall that she’s built around herself, and that Stiles is close to breaking if that night when they slept curled together was any indication.
But she also knew how prickly and defensive Derek was, that if she thinks that Stiles is getting too close she’s going to do something that’ll make Stiles want to hate her.
Little did she know that biting and having sex with Jackson was just the beginning.
----
Isaac Lahey had always been one of those kids that Stiles kept in her peripheral vision.
She talked to him sometimes, and maybe she wasn’t as subtle as she thought she was with the slipping of the Parental Abuse Pamphlets in his pockets.
But she felt like if she had to do something about it.
And Isaac had made her swear on her mother’s soul in heaven that she’d never tell anyone, especially not her dad.
So she kept his secret, and sometimes when he was really hurt she’d drag him to the library, and help him cover his black eye and wrapped gauze around his bruised ribs.
It’s mostly Isaac’s fault that she knows how to do first aid like a pro, something that comes in handy when you’re best friend turns into a werewolf.
So you could say that she more than keeps him in her peripheral vision. It could be said that she and Isaac are sort of friends.
Which is probably why she’s inexplicably hurt when Scott pulls her aside after he finishes lacrosse practice to tell her that Isaac had been bitten to.
She had licked her lips and had spilled out the question if he’d fucked her too.
And Scott had given her a weird look before scrunching his nose again and saying no.
She stomps away to find Isaac, not really wanting to address the feeling of relief that spreads through her at that, but when she finally finds Isaac, he’s losing control and he grabs her and slams her against the lockers hard enough to bruise. He chokes her lifting her off the floor with one hand around her neck, and lifts his other hand claws out ready to slash across her face.
But suddenly the pressure is gone and she slips to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut off, and takes deep gulping breaths of precious air. And looks up ready to thank Scott for coming to her rescue, only to see that it’s not Scott.
It’s Derek, who in a whirlwind of leather (leather jacket, leather pants, leather boots, leather corselet or whatever it was called, she was really giving cat woman a run for her money, and Stiles was seriously contemplating whether or not she had a leather fetish because DAMN) knocked Isaac on his ass, and then freaking roared, and Isaac scrunched up into himself like a terrified five year old.
Stiles managed to get enough air in her lungs to ask Derek how she did that. Derek turned around and her eyes flashed red and she stated in a voice so powerful that Stiles felt goosebumps, “I’m the Alpha.”
And then she drags Isaac out not even pausing to make sure that Stiles is okay.
----
She spends her Saturday morning reading up on Pack Dynamics, and buying several books at the bookstore. This is all an excuse to just talk to Derek, because ever since she’d become the Alpha, Stiles had a hard time tracking her down to ask her about this stuff, and then there was the fact, that she had apparently vacated the Hale House. Which on some level was a relief, but on another level it was truly terrifying.
She’d found Derek’s new hiding place completely by accident.
She used to spend hours after her mom died at the abandoned warehouse. It had been like her secret hiding place, and it wasn’t until one day her dad had found her and had yelled and had told her to never go there again, that she stopped going.
But she needed a place to hide out because her dad was looking at her in the way that he did whenever she reminded him too much of her mom, and she didn’t want to have that conversation, the one where he got drunk and told her how much he misses her, and how much he wishes that god had taken him instead because he didn’t know what to do with a sixteen year old girl, and Stiles really didn’t want that conversation to happen. And Scott and Allison had been making out on top of his bed when she’d gone over, and that had put a damper on things.
She just wanted be someplace where no one would question her reading choices and where it would be peaceful and quiet.
So she went to the warehouse.
She hadn’t even made it out of her car, before Jackson was there acting like if her personal space was his personal space, and growling.
Stiles really wasn’t in the mood for this either.
So she pushed him back, “Personal space. Look up the definition because you obviously need to brush up on it.”
“What are you doing here Stiles?”
And she turned to Derek’s voice almost as if she was tuned to it, and there she was leaning against the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest and eyeing her like if she had somehow offended her.
Stiles let out a sigh, “It’s actually great that you’re here. Is this your new hiding place, by the way? Can’t say that I agree too much with it. The house was at least a house and there was a comfy couch and everything. I’m pretty sure this building is condemned. Anyway I’ve got about ten books that I need you to look through, because there are some things that Scott is doing that confuse me, and I just want to know what I have to break to him before he accidentally wolf marries Allison or something.”
Jackson and Isaac, who apparently was competing with Jackson’s shadow looked from her to Stiles and back again like if they didn’t understand what Stiles was saying.
And that’s when she got it.
“You didn’t tell them,” she says in a quiet voice and tries to keep the heartbreak out of it, but she knows that it is futile around wolves.
Derek uncrosses her arms and looks startled for a second, and Stiles sees the abortive gesture she makes with her hands before she clenches her fists and sneers at Stiles, “It didn’t seem like something that was important.”
And that was more than a slap to the face.
It was a punch, added with a knife through her heart and the rubbing salt against the wound just for fun.
Because even though Stiles knew that this was just a defense mechanism, it still fucking hurt.
Because Derek was saying that she didn’t find Stiles important enough to tell her new Betas. That saving each other’s lives and spending almost every Friday and Saturday night going over books and making plans to stop the Alpha had meant nothing to her. That that night when she’d curled on top of Stiles and had told her in a voice so soft and broken about her brother had meant nothing.
And Stiles might know that this was all a front, but she wasn’t a masochist.
“Fine,” she says rocking back on her heels. “It’s better this way, anyway. Maybe I’ll actually get some sleep now that I don’t have to worry about you appearing in my bedroom while I’m sleeping.”
And before she could say anything else, she got into her car, and left.
----
Stiles got epically drunk that night all by herself in her bedroom after her father had gone to sleep.
She took one of his bottles of Jack and had climbed out of her window and up to her roof tried to drown her sorrows in liquor.
She’s downed more than half of the bottle and is lying back on the roof trying and failing to count the stars when something blocks her view. She squints at the blurry image, and then laughs, because of course it’s Derek.
Derek grabs her around her jacket collar and practically throws her inside of her room, before leaping through and shutting the window.
Stiles is sprawled on the floor and she leans up on her elbows to pout at her, “You didn’t let me finish the bottle.”
Derek looks up to the ceiling like if god is trying her patience and then glares at Stiles, “Do you even know how dangerous that was? You could’ve fallen off the roof!”
Stiles laughs so hard that her stomach starts to hurt. She lies back on the floor and looks at her ceiling before chuckling again and saying, “Like you’d care. It would probably be the highlight of your life so far. Stupid Stiles. Finally gone somewhere where she can’t bother me ever again.”
Before she knows it Derek has her up from the floor and pressed against the wall right beside her bed and she’s gripping her arms so tight that Stiles cries out in pain, and it only serves for Derek to tighten her hold even more, “Don’t you fucking dare tell me that again! I do care!”
Stiles looks at her and tries to sneer, but she’s pretty sure she does a really bad job at it, “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
Derek growls, honest to god, like a fucking animal, and then her mouth is on Stiles and she’s biting hard against her lips and drawing blood with her human teeth, and she’s sticking her tongue down Stiles throat, and licking everywhere like if she wants to memorize Stiles mouth, and her fingers tighten even more, and Stiles is pretty sure that there are going to be bruises. Fingershaped bruises that are going to be hard to explain. She may have to wear long shirts for the next week or until they start fading. It’s going to be difficult to explain the bloody mess that Derek is turning her mouth into, but she thinks that it’s worth it, when Derek whines low in her throat and presses closer. She slips on leg between Stiles, and Stiles shivers at the way her leather covered thigh feels against the naked skin of her inner thighs, and she rubs against her pressing closer, and Derek purrs into her mouth as though she’s doing exactly what Derek thought she’d do, and that’s when her thought process catches up to her current actions, and where this is clearly heading.
And she moves her head to the side.
Derek pulls away, and Stiles is momentarily distracted by her mouth and the fact that it’s covered in blood, and she could feel the sting of the bite marks against her lips, and she knows her mouth is going to be so fucking swollen tomorrow.
Derek licks her lips slowly and smirks.
Stiles struggles against her hold.
“Why are you trying to get away?” Derek asks honestly confused. “You’re enjoying it. And I can tell that you want it.”
And she smirks and it’s the same fucking smirk she used on Kate when she sashayed into the holding cell and hypnotized her with her hips.
“Just because I want it,” Stiles snaps tugging her arms away from Derek’s hold and pushing her back. “Doesn’t mean that I want to be just another notch on your bedpost.”
And Derek flinches like if Stiles had slapped her and Stiles can’t stop herself from thinking, good!
Derek looks at her, and there is this look in her eyes that only lasts for a second, but it’s so broken, and open, and Stiles can’t figure out what it means, because then her face hardens and she growls threateningly, “If I ever catch you drinking on top of your roof again, I am going to tear you limb from limb, got it?”
She didn’t even wait for Stiles to answer before she was sliding her window open and then slamming it down so hard that the glass rattled.
Stiles sunk down to the floor and finally cried.