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“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Derek pants into Stiles’ shoulder the third time Stiles takes his shirt off and pushes against him, all tongue and soft corners, “Stiles. Stiles.”
Derek's fingers still where they’ve dug into that soft place under Stiles’ jaw, insistent, and he lets him up from under the weight of his body leaning the two of them against the bedroom door. Stiles makes a low sound in his throat and grabs wildly for where Derek was a second ago.
“Hey, hey. Not so fast.” He murmurs when he catches him, “I’ve got you, remember?”
His eyes are soft and wanting and he’s been waiting two months to do this. There’s a trail of dark bruises lined up on his collarbone like toy soldiers, all the shape of Derek’s mouth, his teeth, his hands. Derek brushes his fingers over one slowly, remember, pomegranate red and blotchy and then puts his lips there because he can’t fucking help himself, can he?
“Yeah,” Stiles repeats, tipping his head back in relief, “I’ve got you.”
-
The first time they kiss it's in his sister’s old bedroom with their feet hanging through the broken floorboards and Stiles’ hand around his neck. He has orange paint on his knuckles from a stray roller. There’s plaster in Derek’s hair and he smells like smoke and dirt. His hand is on Stiles’ chest.
“Oh,” Derek says when his brain catches up, stuttering backwards and trying to catch his breath.
He wants to say more, but Stiles follows with his mouth open, hungry. His fingers grip the downy hair at the back of Derek’s neck and Derek thinks, oh, then he stops thinking at all.
-
It isn’t the last time it happens, but it should be.
Stiles comes back to the house again a week later with two bagels in a brown paper bag. Derek stares out at the Jeep’s boxy blue body from the porch steps, listens to him cut the engine and step out onto the grass, a long, loping thing with cheeks too sharp and a bruise still fading from the top of his cheekbone that makes something dark and ugly flare up in Derek.
Stiles takes a while to cross the lawn and once he does, he’s quiet and doesn’t say anything to him, doesn’t even look at him, just pushes through to the front door. There’s a wolf keychain on his ring that Isaac picked out for shits and giggles on a beach retreat with another pack and it’s quivering in Stiles’ hands. Derek grabs it when he leaves the keys in the door like always and follows along silently.
The inside of the house looks good at least. There’s color on the walls and the floor has been replaced and Erica picked out marble for the kitchen but the shell is the same old shell with all of its same old holes. He tries not to relate too heavily. Stiles is fiddling with the microwave with his back turned and it smells like burnt popcorn from a week ago when Boyd smoked out the house because the voltage was too high.
“Stiles,” Derek tries, but the kid still won’t look at him and he’s starting to feel every inch the monster people make him out to be. “Look, I’m - ”
“Forget it, Derek.” Stiles says. He’s trying to be - nonchalant, maybe, but it just comes out hurt.
Derek wants to say okay, wants to never bring it up again, but Stiles looks like he’s splitting apart at the seams and his skin is pulled too tight around his bones and his body is so fragile now despite the sinewy line of muscle just below the surface of his arms, all down his legs. His teeth are blunt and white against a chapped bottom lip and he deserves to get what he thinks he wants.
Staring at Stiles’ scrunched up shoulders, his frustrated jamming of the microwave buttons, Derek sighs. Then, he moves into Stiles’ space because what other choice does he have? Stiles smells salty sad and Derek knows what’s making him restless, he knows about the nightmares and the anger and the anxiety and all the lying and he -
Well.
Derek smoothes a hand across the back of his neck, presses his mouth there slowly and catches the skin over a knobbly spinal bone between his teeth. Stiles has gone completely still, statue-like, but his skin is hot beneath Derek’s fingers and his heartbeat is going jackrabbit fast, teenager-with-a-crush fast.
“I’m trying not to hurt you,” He murmurs. “I’m,”
Stiles turns in his grip and kisses him and that’s the second time.
-
Boyd and Isaac won’t bring it up but Erica mentions it to Stiles every now and then when Derek’s in earshot.
“What mauled you, Stilinski,” She giggles when he walks through the door, not really a question.
Her eyes flicker over to where Derek’s standing on the dining room table and fiddling with light fixtures, wire guts all spilled over the sides. He doesn’t say anything and tries to keep his body from tensing up. Behind him, he can hear Stiles snort.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I would, actually.”
“Guys,” Isaac interrupts.
“Look at his neck!”
Stiles throws the Mission Impossible DVD box set at her head and groans when Boyd snatches it out of the air before it can connect.
“I could’ve gotten her with that one, Vernon, do you hate me?”
Boyd says, “Yes,” and it makes Derek laugh so he steps down and leaves the lights for another day, steering Stiles to the couch on his way back to the living room.
“Hey,” Stiles says easily.
Derek swallows, staring at the marks along his neck, under his jaw, feels pleased and sick at the same time.
“Hey yourself.” He says.
Stiles looks happy with his answer and plants himself next to Boyd to argue about Tom Cruise’s acting abilities while Isaac slides the disk into the DVD player and Erica motions him over to braid her hair and deep in that warm place in his chest Derek can admit it feels a little like having a family again.
-
Stiles is eighteen. Stiles is eighteen and he likes it when Derek leaves hickeys on the soft inside of his thighs, likes making bad decisions, plays with Derek like he’s board game and not a fucking nightmare waiting to happen.
“Derek,” He gasps, moving his hips up into Derek’s insistent hands, lays his palms out flat against Derek’s cheeks and stares up at him.
He’s beautiful, is the thing. His gangly boyish body and the soft pale lines of his shoulders are intoxicating and Derek thinks the kids at his school are damned stupid if they can’t at least see that and he thinks, he should be doing this with someone his own age, and he thinks, I’m ruining him, I’m ruining him and then accidentally says it aloud.
Stiles says, “Yeah, yeah, ruin me.”
Derek shakes his head and attempts something like gentle because he’s trying, he’s trying to be decent but he still can’t quite manage to cut Stiles out of his life completely. He buries his head at Stiles’ neck and kisses him there, once, twice, tries to stomp out the guilt burning him up from the inside.
“Come here,” Stiles says when he comes, guiding his face down and snaking a hand into his jeans.
Derek groans into his mouth, all worked up. The boy in his bed is orgasm-slack and his knuckles are soft on his hip every couple seconds, worked into a rhythm. He stares at Stiles’ collarbone and makes a high keening sound when he spills over their connected fingers then he collapses over Stiles’ body, their combined heat too stifling to be comfortable.
Stiles draws a pattern along his back with those stupidly big hands, pushes his mouth at Derek’s sweaty hairline, coaxes him out of his jeans and holds him close like he needs it.
“Mine,” Stiles murmurs quietly, half asleep, and Derek needs it.
-
Derek’s the one that digs him out of the dirt after he finds three witches in the basement of a comic book store out north that tell him they buried Stiles in an old cat graveyard in exchange for a little of Derek’s blood.
There’s a lot of soil and Erica’s hand is hovering over his shoulder like she wants to tell him to give it up but Derek snarls and howls until she and Isaac and Boyd all recoil visibly. The place stinks of fur and piss and rotten branches.
“He’s here,” He maintains helplessly, desperate, and then his fingers connect with the jutting bone of a wrist and it’s easy after that except Derek’s eyes are cloudy and he can’t breathe right and Erica gasps as Stiles’ body resurfaces, limp and pale. Isaac runs off the get the car and Boyd calls the hospital and asks for Melissa McCall.
Derek says, “Stiles, Stiles, Stiles,” and tugs the flannel out from around his mouth and pushes their foreheads together to breathe him in. If he focuses he can hear a thin, reedy heartbeat pattering away like rain in a tin can and it sounds like heaven on Earth to him.
“Derek,” Erica says, brushing a shaking hand over Stiles’ forehead, “the car.”
They load up and drive back to Beacon Hills Memorial twenty miles over the speed limit with Stiles in Derek’s lap, stroking his hand along Stiles’ hairline and trying not to panic. Melissa has to pry Stiles out of his frozen hands when they get there just so that Derek will put him on the gurney they have waiting.
“He’ll be alright. He’s a fighter that one,” She reassures him, squeezing his bicep gently, and then they’re gone through swinging doors with Stiles in an oxygen mask.
Isaac, Erica, and Boyd are waiting behind him, lost and wet from the rain. He motions for them to sit in the plastic waiting room chairs and Erica takes his hand before she goes and he gives her his jacket. Boyd puts a hand on his knee and he thinks, Stiles is gonna make it out of this alive and they’re gonna finish renovating the house and then they’re gonna be okay.
-
The Sheriff comes as soon as he can with Scott in tow, looking sick with worry and exhaustion. Melissa speaks to them quietly. It’s been a couple hours.
“You should go home,” Derek murmurs to Boyd, careful not to jar Erica’s head where she’s sleeping against his shoulder. “Get some rest. I’ll call if anything happens.”
Isaac replies for him, says, “No way. He’s our pack too, you know.” He pauses, rubbing his eyes and stretching, “I’m gonna get us coffee.”
Erica makes a soft sound against his shoulder and Boyd nods, tilting his head and listening into the Sheriff’s conversation. Derek does the same, except he stares at his shoes, afraid to look Stiles’ family in the face.
“You can come see him,” Melissa says, and she’s talking to Derek too. “He’s still sleeping, but it’s always nice to see that he’s breathing.”
Scott and the Sheriff are led down the hall and Derek wakes Erica gently. They wait for Isaac to come back with the coffee and Derek downs the entire styrofoam cup even though it scalds his tongue because he has no idea how he’s gonna face Stiles after this.
“Come on,” Erica mumbles. Her voice is sleep heavy. “We were here first anyway.”
Derek lets her guide him around the hospital until they find Stiles, pale and sweaty and hooked up to too many tubes but breathing. He nearly falls to his knees in relief and Boyd’s hand hard around his wrist is the only thing that keeps him upright. Through the window, they watch Scott rub his eyes and the Sheriff take his son’s hand and Derek presses his forehead to the wooden door and tries to match his breathing with Stiles’.
“Let’s go,” he says abruptly.
“Go? We just got here.”
“Aren’t we going inside?”
Derek shakes his head. “Not today. We can come back. He’s alive. That’s all we needed to know.”
They look reluctant but there isn’t any room for argument and they know it, the sound of his voice familiar and old and commanding.
-
“I’m sorry,” Derek finds himself saying the next morning with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. “I didn’t know that, uh,”
Erica is giving him a wide eyed look because he’s fidgeting and his cheeks are burning red and Boyd’s already halfway to the door where the Sheriff is standing with a blank look on his face that Derek can’t decipher. Melissa said this was when John had a shift, but he must’ve passed it off to one of his deputies, used his emergency leave. On the bed, Stiles is as pale and still as he has been for the last hour but his eyes are finally starting to flutter open.
“Hey,” Stiles says in a broken voice, all doped up, “Der’k. You came. I told ‘em you’d come.”
He tries to sit up and Derek shushes him gently, puts a hand on his shoulder until he settles. John comes around to his other side and he looks old here in the fluorescence, the lines of his face exaggerated and his eyes worn and soft.
“Son,” John says quietly. “Stiles.”
Stiles has bruises around his left eye.
“Dad.”
“You’re alright?”
“I’m alright.”
John wants to say more, Derek can tell, but he doesn’t, just strokes his thumb down along Stiles’ shoulder through his paper gown with watery eyes the way Laura did when she found him on the border of California and Arizona half-dead and vibrating out of his skin. He swallows down that thought and the ones that are surfacing of Stiles in his underwear making eggs at five in the morning and kissing all his hard edges until they smooth over, the kinds of things he feels sick for wanting when he has to face Stiles’ father, their relationship so bogged down already. He slinks back into the corner of the room with his memories and looks to Boyd who’s waiting with raised eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Derek says in answer, motioning to Isaac and Erica who give Stiles a longing glance before following them out of the room.
They don’t say goodbye. John’s staring at them through the room window and Derek lowers his chin to the floor the way wolves do when they’re submitting. He doesn’t expect John to get it, but Stiles will when he remembers.
-
He sneaks into the hospital while Stiles is still sleeping and closes all the blinds. Stiles has a soft face despite his body and his brain, has long eyelashes like butterfly wings. Derek holds his limp hand and when he snuffles, Derek smiles a little bit, involuntary, sits with him until the sun comes up and the nurses switch shifts.
“I’m sorry,” He whispers as he’s going, knows this’ll be the last time for a long time, “I'm sorry, I'm really sorry.”
-
Derek busies himself with the house when Erica and Isaac and Boyd go to visit Stiles in town after that, buys a handful of miscellaneous flower seeds from the farmer’s market along with peaches and blueberries and carrots in a basket he borrowed from his mother’s old tool shed. He digs a place out by the front porch for the flowers, gets rid of stray weeds and places the seeds into the row, covers them with fertilizer he bought from Lowe’s the way his mother used to except without any gloves. He likes the feel of the dirt, and the smell.
He replaces the shingles on the roof, pries the old ones off with a garden shovel and leaves them in a pile on the porch stairs, digs stray nails up with a hammer. It’s easy work and the house is starting to come together, different than how it used to look when he was a kid, bigger, but more familiar than anything else he’s lived in.
“I want three rooms,” Erica told him when he first laid the new blueprints on a moldy picnic table in the train depot. “and a shoe closet that I could sleep in.”
“I can do that,” Derek had said and it made her smile the way Cora used to smile, so it was worth it.
Once the outside is in working order, he starts looking for things to replace old couches and burned out mattresses that are still lining some of the rooms. He’s considering different kinds of shelving at Home Depot the day Scott corners him, waving a finger in his face. Derek bats him away easily and goes back to listening to how the white dresser in front of him creaks when he applies pressure.
“Hey,” Scott says, affronted. “I need to talk to you.”
Derek gives him a shit eating grin because the kid’s like a little brother to him in all the ways the other betas aren’t.
“Can’t promise I’ll listen.”
“What kind of game do you think you’re playing with Stiles? Because he keeps waiting for you to show up and you’re here, what, looking at furniture?”
Derek shrugs.
“Thought you’d be happy. You’re not exactly my number one fan.”
“I don’t like you,” Scott says and then sighs, “but Stiles does and he deserves an explanation.”
Derek looks at him then, really looks, and when he finds what he’s looking for he says, “Stiles deserves to be safe, Scott, and contrary to popular belief I don’t actually like torturing people. This is for the best.”
“Yeah, we’ll see,” Scott replies quietly, because even he can admit there isn’t really an argument to make here.
-
Stiles
[9:29 PM]
Hey, whatever Scott said to you today, ignore it okay?
Stiles
[9:30 PM]
Are you alright? Erica says you haven’t been eating
Stiles
[9:31 PM]
Derekkkkkkkkk
Stiles
[9:31 PM]
You can’t ignore me forever you know
Stiles
[9:32 PM]
Derek, I will hold the children hostage
Stiles
[9:33 PM]
Is this about my dad? bc dude
Stiles
[9:40 PM]
We’re watching the new Pixar movie this weekend you can’t just not show up you love animated movies
Stiles
[9:41 PM]
Derek?
Stiles
[10:00 PM]
You know, whatever. asshole.
Stiles
[12:45 AM]
I miss you.
-
“Stiles is walking again,” Erica says over dinner a week after Derek deletes all of Stiles’ texts except for the last one. “He’s probably gonna come by, knowing him.”
Derek twirls spaghetti around his fork and keeps his head down like she’s not talking to him. Erica makes an annoyed noise and throws a napkin at him and Isaac laughs, a big happy sound that he cuts off at the root because he’s afraid of getting in trouble, and Boyd levels Derek with a knowing look.
He straightens up and says, “What?”
“Stiles.” She repeats, rolling her eyes. “God, you’re fucking hopeless.”
Derek makes a face, but there’s nothing to say so he finishes up while they talk around him and then he does the dishes and then he goes outside to check on his plants.
The flowers have sprouted in the yard, green little heads peeking up through the dirt. Derek named the big one Talia. He presses his index finger to the soil around its base and sighs.
“I’m right,” He says to the plant, “I’m doing a good thing.” and he wraps his hands around his knees. The plant doesn’t answer and neither does his mother.
-
Stiles appears in the driveway the next morning after Erica and Boyd have gone out for groceries and Isaac has disappeared for a run in the woods with his headphones in. He’s skinny around the ankles and the wrists and his hair is freshly buzzed. Derek cuts the lawn mower and turns to look at him. He smells like lupines and lever soap and his fingers are toying with the edge of his t-shirt, nervous and angry.
“Square one, huh?” Stiles says.
Derek glares at the ground, his bare feet, the half finished grass, doesn't answer. He feels turned inside out.
Stiles makes a disgruntled noise and waits.
“They took you because of me, Stiles. They wanted a bargaining chip and they took you.”
“Yeah, well - ”
“Well, what?” Derek snarls, changing tactics. “I can’t have a relationship with a child. You were a mistake.”
“A mistake,” Stiles says, hollow in his voice and his throat and his shaking hands.
He looks like he’s actually considering it, looks devastated and Derek did that, Derek hurt him, but it doesn’t matter. Better now than when he gets himself killed. Better now than when he throws himself in front of one of them like a goddamned human shield.
“You love me,” Stiles says as a last ditch resort and his hands are clenched into quivering fists. “You’re being an asshole, but you love me.”
Derek clenches his jaw.
“Get out of here, Stiles.”
“That’s not a no.”
“I don’t love you. There.”
“You’re lying, you motherfucker, you - ” He breaks off, looks at Derek with eyes like a christmas morning and suddenly he’s slowing down all lit up again, says, “You deserve to be happy.”
“What?” Derek asks.
“You deserve to be happy,” Stiles repeats. “I can make you happy.”
Derek looks at the house, looks at the white outside and his little garden and his porch furniture, the hot pink lawn chair Erica picked for him. He thinks of Kate Argent and the way her lipstick felt on his cheek and it hurts to look at Stiles so he closes his eyes and fights back the nausea rolling through him.
“You’re eighteen. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“I know you. You’re not her, Derek.”
“You can't be sure about that.” Derek says, looking at the ground.
Stiles takes his hand gently, leaves no room for argument, says, “Just trust me on this one."
Derek swallows and waits for the sick feeling in his stomach come back.
It doesn't.