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When Stiles wakes up, he’s alone in bed. He’s surprisingly okay with that. He doesn’t know what’s going on between him and Derek, but there’s definitely something, and he needs time to think it out. It’s amazing and disconcerting at the same time, this new side of Derek.
Stiles is used to Derek being angry and aloof, but last night it was like someone had gone and sanded down all Derek’s rough edges, leaving Stiles with a softer, quieter Derek, who’d held Stiles when he needed to be held and stayed when he’d asked him to stay. Stiles had liked that Derek.
There’s a knock on his door.
“Stiles, you up?” his dad says. “Breakfast in ten minutes!”
“Kay!” Stiles shouts back, and gets out of bed to scavenge his room for clean clothes.
His dad’s made waffles. Stiles heaps cut-up fruit and syrup onto his and digs in.
“How’d you sleep?” his dad asks casually, after they’ve been eating in silence for a couple of minutes.
Stiles shrugs. “Fine.”
“Do you have plans for the weekend?”
“Not really.”
“Why don’t you invite Scott over?”
Stiles stops eating and pokes at his waffle with his fork, like it might tell him what to say if only he prods it at the right angle.
“We kind of had a fight,” he admits.
“Over lacrosse?”
Stiles gapes at his dad.
“Don’t think I hadn’t noticed you stopped going to practice. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Stiles opens his mouth to say something, he doesn’t know what, and his dad cuts him off.
“I hope you’re not about to lie to me, Stiles.”
“I thought if I told you, you’d be mad,” Stiles says. It’s not the whole truth, but it’s part of it, and that’ll have to be good enough.
His dad looks hurt, and fuck, that is not what Stiles wanted.
“Why would you think that?”
“It’s just…I dunno, dad, it’s like all I ever do these days is get in trouble, right? And then at the lacrosse game, when I scored those goals, it was like I’d finally done something you could be proud of. I couldn’t tell you I’d quit. I just couldn’t.”
His waffle is a flattened, misshapen lump under his fork. He pushes the plate away; he’s lost his appetite completely.
“Stiles, I am always proud of you. Whether or not you play lacrosse.”
“I got you fired from your job,” Stiles whispers, and it’s like poking an open wound. He can’t even look at his dad.
“I’m, I’m just gonna-” he says, and clumsily pushes back from the table.
His dad catches his wrist as he tries to walk past. Stiles tries to tug free.
“I’m sorry,” he says, when his dad doesn’t let go. “I’m so fucking sorry.” His voice cracks embarrassingly, and then his dad is standing up and pulling him into a hug. Stiles hooks his chin over his dad’s shoulder and holds on.
“You’ve done a lot of stupid shit,” his dad tells him. “But I don’t love you any less for it.”
Stiles’ eyes are stinging. He blinks, hard. “Okay,” he says, and if his voice comes out kind of soggy, well. Waffles can do that sometimes.
His dad claps him on the back and releases him, holding him at arm’s length.
“You all right? I didn’t intend to interrogate you over breakfast.”
“’s okay.”
“Get out of the house today, all right? It’s not good for you to be holed up in here by yourself all the time.”
Stiles nods and flees upstairs, where he definitely doesn’t cry.
---
He drives aimlessly around town for a while before he ends up at the abandoned subway station. He’s kind of uneasy about seeing Derek because of last night, but he’s tired and he can’t afford to waste any more money on gas and he needs somewhere he can be alone and there isn’t anywhere else.
Derek appears at the bottom of the stairs as he’s standing at the top, debating whether he’s actually going to do this.
“Oh,” Stiles says. “Um. My dad’s tired of me being a hermit, or something. So I’m trying this new thing? Leaving the house? Only I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. Do you mind if I crash here for a couple of hours?”
“Isaac’s here,” Derek says, and it might be a warning. Isaac did try to eat him that one time after all, and Stiles has been a little wary of him ever since.
“But I can stay?”
“If you want.”
“Yeah,” says Stiles, and walks down the stairs, brushing past Derek. They’ve gotten a bunch of raggedy old couches from somewhere and grouped them together in one corner. He heads over to them and plops down on one. It’s lumpy, but it’ll do. There’s a blanket draped over the back of the couch. He pulls it off and tucks it around himself. He digs his phone out of his pocket, sets the alarm to go off in an hour, and curls up into a ball.
Derek’s watching him.
“What? I’m tired.”
“You came here to sleep?”
“That’s the plan.”
“We set up some mattresses in the train cars. If you’d rather sleep on a bed.”
Stiles gets up, blanket draped around his shoulders. “Lead the way, sir wolf.”
“You won’t need that,” Derek says, and plucks the blanket off of him and drops it back onto the couch like it’s something offensive.
Stiles makes an affronted noise, but Derek’s already striding ahead into the train car, not paying any attention to him at all. He hurries to catch up.
The seats have been pulled out of some of the cars, and mattresses set up in their place. Isaac’s lounging on one of them, flipping through a magazine.
“Stiles!” he says, and a hopeful smile spreads across his face. “Hey, man.”
“Hey, Isaac,” Stiles says, trailing after Derek. “Really like what you’re doing with the place.”
Derek leads him all the way to the end of the train.
“Here. You can sleep here. I’ll… be around.”
“Gotcha,” Stiles says. He crawls into the messy nest of blankets and arranges them to his liking. This train car seems more personable than the others, somehow, and he’s idly glancing around trying to figure it out when his eye alights upon Derek’s leather jacket, slung over a chair.
Oh.
This is where Derek sleeps.
Stiles is in Derek’s bed. Derek wanted Stiles to sleep in his bed.
That’s-
It’s nice. He pushes his face into the pillow- into Derek’s pillow- and closes his eyes.
---
He wakes up a few hours later feeling groggy and disoriented from a dreamless sleep. He checks his phone to find out why the alarm never went off and discovers he set it to a.m. instead of p.m. Great.
His stomach rumbles. It’s late afternoon now and he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Time to go home.
Isaac’s gone, but Derek’s sitting on one of the couches, reading. He doesn’t look up when Stiles approaches.
“Derek?” Stiles says, and Derek looks over at him. Impulsively, he reaches out and lightly touches Derek’s shoulder. “Thanks for letting me stay. Um…”
Derek’s just patiently watching him, so Stiles plows ahead. The uncertainty of not knowing is making him anxious, and he’s always been the kind of guy who prefers to rip Band-Aids off rather than peel them away centimeter by centimeter.
“Why did you let me sleep in your bed?”
Derek shrugs.
“You needed somewhere to sleep.”
“Yeah, but I totally could have slept on the couch. Or on one of the other mattresses. Or, I don’t know, somewhere other than your bed. Look, tell me if I’m wrong, but last night was- it was good, and I…I thought maybe…”
“You’re not wrong.”
“I’m not?”
Derek looks at him steadily. “No.”
“Oh. Okay.” What does he do now? What does that even mean, he’s not wrong? He’s not fluent in Derek-speak. That could have a million different translations.
“You’re hungry. Go home and eat,” Derek tells him. “We’ll talk later.”
“Okay,” Stiles agrees, and heads for the stairs on autopilot. He’s halfway there when something occurs to him and he turns around. “Wait. How did you know I was hungry?”
Derek gives him his patented are-you-really-that-idiotic face, the one he mostly uses on Scott.
“You’re always hungry.”
Stiles doesn’t even dignify that with a response. Okay, so maybe Derek’s seen him overdose on curly fries once or twice. So what? He’s a teenager! He’s supposed to eat a lot!
He leaves.