Work Text:
Stiles uses his veto almost immediately after clocking in for his shift.
"No, Scott, come on, are you serious?"
Scott, glossy eyed and wobbly mouthed, whines pitifully from his foetal position on the sagging break room sofa. The dulcet tones of Bill Withers 'ain't no sunshine' is blasting over the speakers, Scott presumably mumbling along to the chorus.
The breakup anguish it seems transcends the 2 am blackout bar crawl of the night before, the one that has parts of Stiles' brain still submerged in cheap beer. Which means he shouldn't be sliding across the floor with such vigour, but needs must in changing the atmosphere of the Vinyl Vault from heart wrenching misery to support your local independent music store.
Gone and banished is Bill Withers, replaced with Le Tigre for that upbeat art punk feeling. Stiles drums his fingers on the top of the CD player, willing away the sloshing hangover through the power of Deceptacon.
"Scott, we've been over this, no breakup music that isn't angry or upbeat. It depresses the customers."
"They should be depressed," Scott moans, "life is depressing. Anyway, we aren't even open yet."
Stiles heads over to the coffee machine, smacking the side of it to get it to wake up. "You say that every time you and Allison break up and then life is sunshine and fucking roses again when you get back together."
Scott sniffles, hugging a pillow to his chest.
"Are you going to be able to close tonight, or has your breakup rendered you completely incapable?" Stiles asks, pouring two brown sugars and the last of the milk into the liquid heaven that is his coffee. He takes a long, refreshing sip.
"My life is over," Scott whimpers.
Stiles throws the milk bottle cap at Scott's head. It bounces off of Scott's temple and disappears somewhere on the break room floor.
The employee door swings open and Erica strides in, hair fluttering in the wind. Today's corset top is a black with burgundy to match the red wine leather trousers. She looks, as usual, capable of crushing someone's windpipe under her boots.
"What's his problem?" Erica asks, ruffling Scott's hair as she passes, "make me a coffee too while you're at it."
"We're out of milk. And Allison broke up with him."
"Fine I'll take it black. Also, again?"
"Again," Stiles confirms, pouring Erica's coffee. She accepts it gratefully, hanging her jacket up on its hook.
"How many times is this?"
"I stopped keeping count."
Erica shakes her head. "You're pathetic McCall."
Scott puts the pillow over his head and ignores her.
Outside the roaring purr of a Camaro coming into park signals Derek's arrival. He of surliness and furrowed brow, their esteemed manager shoulders his way through the door, catches sight of Scott on the couch and rolls his eyes so hard he's in danger of causing himself eye strain.
"Not today Scott. Kira is starting today. You promised you would show her the ropes."
"Not it," Erica yells, putting her index finger on the tip of her nose.
"Not it," Stiles says, doing the same.
Derek glowers at them. That look stopped being intimidating about a month after Stiles started working here.
"I'll get Boyd to do it, he's the only trustworthy one of you," Derek growls.
"That's why he's the assistant manager," Erica points out, "and we aren't."
#
Stiles has a cherry chupa chump in his mouth and is armed with the discount sale sticker machine. It is his solemn duty to shift that which is outdated and he glides along the aisles of the Vinyl Vault, stickering stock with the precision of a Olympic marksmen.
Erica is on the till, intimidating customers into buying her homemade badges with every purchase. TAX BIG OIL. WHAT'S SO INTELLIGENT ABOUT THE CIA? WOLFGIRL UNION. A TINY SPECK IN A RUTHLESS UNIVERSE. Despite Derek repeatedly asking Erica to make Vinyl Vault branded badges, she point blank refuses.
Derek has retired to his office with all the blinds down, which means he's doing the accounts and woe betide anyone who disturb him while he has a calculator in one hand, a pencil in the other, and the various spreadsheets loaded up on the ancient dell monitor.
Scott is pushing a broom around with lacklustre near the listening booths, occasionally sighing dramatically.
The only other employees on shift, Boyd and Isaac are arguing loudly about the ranking of Paramore songs in front of a politely grimacing Kira, who is clutching a box of All We Know Is Falling CDs. Kira seems nice, possibly too nice to work here.
"I can't even look at your face right now, that's how wrong you are," Isaac snaps, turning on his heel, his stupid scarf fluttering over his shoulder.
Just another shift at this hallowed music sanctuary that Stiles calls a job. He's worked here for five years at this point, starting his last year of high school and continuing when he realised that he wasn't sure what he wanted to do at college. Now he's been taking classes at the community college on sound design, with the hope that Derek will let him convert part of the back area into a recording booth. He's not been brave enough to bring it up yet, but he has a pitch document ready to go when his courage truly manifests.
Scott makes another melancholy noise, so Stiles stops stickering vinyls to make his way over. He throws an arm around Scott's shoulders, taking the lollipop out of his mouth with an audible pop.
"Scott, my man, light of my life, my spiritual brother, you have got to get it together."
"You wouldn't understand," Scott says, scuffing his sneaker on the floor. "Allison is my soulmate."
Erica fake retches at that comment. Stiles kind of agrees with her, but flips her off out of solidarity with his wounded bird of a bro.
"Scott, do I have to lock you in a listening booth with the best of Billy Ray Cyrus?"
Scott pales, having war flashbacks to his last breakup with Allison, where Stiles did just that and wouldn't let him out till two hours past closing.
"Please don't do that again."
"You should do it again on principle," Erica calls to them before turning back to the customer, "of course you want a badge that reads have you hugged a clown today, here I am, have you seen what you're wearing?"
Stiles removes his arm from Scott's shoulder. "Buddy, you're trapped in a vicious cycle. Maybe it's time to see whether there are other fish in the sea."
"Allison is my only fish," Scott replies doggedly.
Stiles rolls his eyes and stickers Scott's forehead, marking him half off.
#
Stiles is using the copy machine to make posters for the Halloween bash the store will be throwing on that haunted day, when Peter comes in. Peter does not work here. Peter works in a fancy lawyer's office downtown, doing mergers and scamming old people out of their pensions or something of that nature. Stiles doesn't know, he makes it a point not to care. Not that Peter dresses like a lawyer, with his v-necks and motorcycle jackets and criminally tight jeans.
"Stiles," Peter says, tilting his sunglasses down his nose to give Stiles a once over. "Are ironic t-shirts all you own?"
Stiles screws his face up in fake laughter. His t-shirt has a black lineart illustration of a fish with a 1920s style gun and fedora, surrounded by text that reads 'I partied with the Mobb, 1997 IBC Convention, Richmond Virginia'.
"You might as well not be wearing a shirt given how low that v-neck is."
Peter's lip curls in amusement. "Looking at my body, are you?"
"What? No? Shut up!"
"Eloquent as usual, is Derek in?"
Stiles presses the copy button with more aggression than required. "He's doing the accounts. Not to be disturbed."
Peter hums, taking his sunglasses off and hanging them from his shirt. "I see, well, he'll make an exception for family I'm sure. Until we meet again."
Peter heads off to Derek's office, not bothering to knock and striding right in. Stiles clicks his tongue, pushing the inappropriate thoughts he has about Peter back in the box in his mind where he wishes they'd stay. For a number of reasons, it is unwise to pursue that line of thinking and Stiles is not in the mood for unnecessary mess. He still has open wounds on his heart from Lydia Martin's vicious rejection.
He has the benefit of hindsight that he was being a bit much when it came to his crush on her. Having his heart ripped out, stomped on and then set on fire was valuable in the long term, he's grown as a person, but it was deeply embarrassing. Stiles listened to a lot of Dessa for three months straight and considered moving to Detroit and taking a job as a factory line worker. Lustful thoughts for Peter will only lead to an even more vicious rejection, namely because Peter won't stop when he's dead. He is not thinking about Peter's face or shoulders or that he's recently grown a decent beard.
The copy machine beeps, demanding more paper. Stiles refocuses on the task at hand.
#
Stiles is stapling the posters to the notice board next to the till when Erica gets on the tannoy system
"It's eleven, ten folks, you know what that means, one full minute to the tornado."
The regulars shudder and start to either rush the till to purchase and get out, or duck for cover in a section they know is less likely to be tornado alley. Casual perusers watch the whole affair with bemused suspicion.
"What's the tornado?" Kira asks. She's dutifully been holding the posters in place so Stiles can staple them.
"To see it is to believe it," Stiles replies, twirling the staple gun around his finger.
"Thirty seconds," Erica announces into the tannoy.
"Batten down the hatches," Stiles says, stapling the last poster in place. He carefully manoeuvres Kira to a safe position just behind the counter, somewhere she can see but won't get swept up.
"Fifteen seconds!"
On the mezzanine floor above, where the cassette tapes and extremely rare, priceless vinyl is, Isaac is lounging over the railing, holding up a tape player that is screeching out a recording of a tornado warning alarm.
"FIVE," Erica yells, deliberately lowering her voice to sound like a NASA launch. "FOUR. THREE. TWO!"
The clock strikes eleven, eleven and Coach Finstock swings the door open with so much force the shop bell nearly vibrates off its roost.
"Bilinski," Finstock snaps, "you look terrible."
Stiles grins. "And the same to you Coach."
"Bah!"
Every Saturday, at the exact same time, Coach Finstock brightens their day by barking insults at them and searching through the new stock with brutal inefficiency. For some reason, after Stiles left high school, Finstock decided to take up pirate radio as a hobby. Half shock jock, half album review, his show broadcasts on a Sunday at 2pm, wherein he takes calls from locals to let them air their gripes (complete with insults from the host), and spends the other half of the time playing an album all the way through, critiquing each song as he goes. He never plays an album twice.
"The tornado is in the building," Erica says through the tannoy, holding the microphone at just the right angle to make her voice reverb.
"Stop calling me that," Finstock barks, whirling around in the jazz aisle, grabbing things at random and discarding them in a different place. "Your lipstick doesn't match your outfit."
Erica laughs. "Like you would know anything about that."
It will be an hour of this. Of the store displaced. Of the original soundtrack to Twister played over the speakers. Of Finstock's running monologue of lacrosse statistics, musical judgements and begrudging respect for the existence of the physical.
"I gotta go Julia, we got cows," Stiles quotes as Finstock scares two teens, probably his current students, who were hanging out in front of the indie rock section. They scuttle away like hermit crabs.
"So this happens regularly?" Kira asks.
"Like clockwork," Erica confirms. "We let him blunder around until he's ready to pay. Anyway, Kira you haven't picked three artists for your id. It's important, you will be judged."
Kira looks down at her employee ID badge, her own xeroxed face smiling back at her.
"I'm still thinking, it's hard to pick three. Well two, Carly Rae Jepson is my top pick for sure."
"Solid choice," Stiles says, sorting through Erica's badges just to have something to fiddle with, "captures that eighties nostalgia but with an earnest undertone that is not often matched in other pop music."
Erica hands Kira a marker pen to scrawl Carly Rae Jepson on her badge. She studies her own badge intently before recapping the pen. "These recommendations aren't permanent right?"
"A lady reserves the right to change her mind," Erica says.
"I change mine halfway through the shift most of the time," Stiles offers, reaching for the marker pen. He rubs out Fall Out Boy with his thumb to replace it with L7.
"Bilinski!" Finstock yells from across the store, "who the hell is Cheekface?"
#
Stiles eats lunch on the roof. He forgot to ask for no olives in his falafel wrap. He's picking them out and chucking them off the roof at Isaac, who is supposed to handing out the Halloween party flyers and instead is dodging olives and creatively swearing at Stiles.
"Stiles, I swear to God, I'll fucking strangle you."
"Only in your dreams Lahey."
Stiles tosses the last olive, cackling when it bounces off of Isaac's forehead.
"Could you, for once, get through a shift without pissing Isaac off."
Derek has graced the roof with his presence, eyebrows doing their unique exasperated fondness formation that is for Stiles alone. He comes to sit beside Stiles, loosening the top button of his shirt and removing his tie. This suited and booted look is unusual, Derek kind of looks like a teenager attending a wedding.
"Why the fancy duds?" Stiles asks, lifting the end of the tie and letting it fall.
"I had to go to the bank," Derek says, "to get a loan."
Stiles nods, swiping his tongue along some escaping hummus from the bottom of his wrap. "Did you get it?"
"I did," Derek confirms. "I also bought this place."
Stiles looks at Derek, his own eyebrows knitting together in confusion. "Wait this place was up for sale?"
Derek rolls the tie up, putting it into his suit jacket pocket. "Sort of. The landlord is looking to reconfigure his portfolio of properties and was hoping to offload this one."
Stiles wrinkles his nose. "Disgusting sentence, hate that."
"I made a convincing offer, now no one can kick us out. Peter went in for half, so he's technically a silent partner."
"You could have told us, we'd have helped out."
Derek raises an eyebrow. "This isn't a movie Stiles."
Stiles huffs, taking a large bite of his falafel. He concedes Derek's point. He chews obnoxiously for a bit, glad that this problem he didn't know about has solved itself, but kind of wishing Derek was less bottled up in his emotions and felt that he could tell Stiles there was a problem in the first place.
"Does that mean he's going to be around more?" Stiles asks. "Checking on his asset?"
Derek lets out an exasperated sigh. "Whatever is going on between the two of you-"
"Hey, nothing is going on between us. I do not like your weird uncle. I resent the implication."
"I don't want to hear about it, it's hard enough having to listen to Peter talk about it."
"There's no it!"
There might be an it. Since Stiles started working at Vinyl Vault, they've been circling each other like sharks, coming up to the line of flirting without crossing. Peter's approach is adjacent to negging, which Stiles returns with equal spite and the whole thing comes across as horny distain. There have been a few moments, touches on the border of indecency, shared looks at parties that could tip into longing. The last summer bash, standing outside the store when the streetlights came on, sharing a secret I won't tell if you don't cigarette. Putting their mouth to the same place, an indirect kiss.
Stiles will never go there, thinks it's tantamount to holding his fingers to a hot stove.
"Aside for allegations that I will not rise to, if you own the place now, does that mean there's potential for some rearranging of the space so to speak."
Derek tilts his head in that puppyish way of his. "How so?"
Stiles finishes his wrap, balling up the paper it came in. "I have a proposal. It's like a whole presentation, an actual pitch."
"A pitch?"
Stiles throws the balled paper up in the air, catches it with the other hand. "Yeah, a pitch. But I don't think I can just rattle it off here. I have like a real vision."
Derek ducks his head, the way he always does because he's loathe for anybody to catch him actually smiling. "How about first thing Monday?"
Stiles grins. "Monday works for me."
He goes to throw the ball at Isaac, but Derek catches his wrist before he can let go.
#
Stiles only smokes socially. Which is to say, he only smokes actual cigarettes socially, weed exists in a separate category. Not that he would ever admit that to his father. The point is, he's had enough lectures-slash-threats from Scott's mom about the dangers of smoking, so he only ever accepts cigarettes when they are offered to him at parties. A minor bad habit.
At the summer bash, air thick with the smell of less than legal kerbside grilling and the the steady thrum of club music, Stiles had stumbled out into the twilight, needing a moment to let the drunk animal of his body reorient itself. It was still warm, but not sticky heat, the pleasant warmth of late summer in California. The streetlights weren't on yet, the street illuminated only by shop displays and the neon green Vinyl Vault sign, buzzing as loud as the crickets.
And Peter, leaning against a streetlight, hand cupped around his cigarette as he lit it, the flame casting shadows on his face.
Stiles, emboldened by cheap beer, ambled his way over, hands in his pockets and grinning.
"Stiles," Peter said, like it was an important word. A word imbued with rich meaning.
"Peter."
Peter took a drag, blew a perfect smoke ring, before offering the cigarette to Stiles. Stiles accepted, fingers brushing. He put his mouth to the filter, breathed in and turned his head to exhale. No smoke rings for him.
"So," Peter said, accepting the cigarette back, "when are you going to let me get you out of all that flannel? In the interest of improving your wardrobe of course."
Stiles snorted. "Odds on that are extremely low."
"I guess I'll have to try another approach. Maybe over dinner?"
The cigarette back between his fingers, standing closer to Peter, noticing the height difference between them skewed in his favour, just a bit. The back of Stiles' neck was extremely warm.
And then the streetlights came on. Being bathed in the sodium glow made everything seem very real. Stiles became hyper aware of his blood alcohol level.
"Maybe ask me again when I'm a bit more," Stiles said, making a weird hand gesture to indicate sobriety.
But Peter hadn't. And Stiles, forever the coward in affairs of the heart wouldn't.
#
Everyone spends the day vetoing Scott's choices, even Isaac, who can be a weak link when it comes to giving into Scott.
"Isaac you used your veto already on Erica," Scott complains, focusing his puppy-dog eyes on Isaac like a deadly manipulative laser.
"Isaac if you give in you're out of the band," Erica says as she uses the broom to swipe at Scott's feet. Scott backs up, hands in the air knowing he's lost.
"This is deeply unfair," he grumps, but turns the trademark charm back on for a middle-aged Mom trying to find a limited edition Abba vinyl for her daughter.
Stiles watches all this from the mezzanine, fiddling around with the spare tape player that's started to chew up tapes with a vengeance. His lets his legs swing idly over the edge, which is technically discouraged for safety reasons, but Stiles is not a customer. He has the special privilege of a work ID.
He smells Peter's rich, woodsy cologne before Peter sits beside him. Peter wears the same scent all the time, that undercurrent citrus curl.
"Who knew you were so adept with a screwdriver," Peter murmurs. His arm brushes against Stiles, that tiny meeting of skin electrifying.
"Aren't you supposed to be at work? Or have you come to spy on the lackeys now you own half the building," Stiles says, carefully prying apart the inner workings of the tape player.
Peter chuckles. "I've never been a micromanager. Besides, there's only one lackey I've taken an interest in."
"That so?"
Peter tilts his head closer to Stiles. "Come on now Stiles. I thought you were the smart one."
Stiles fiddles with the tape player. "You never brought it up, after, you know, summer. And now it's the middle of September."
"You have a skittish quality to you, I felt the need to coax you towards the idea."
Peter traces a line along in soft skin of Stiles' forearm.
"I'll take dinner plans in my future for eight hundred Alex. Ah fuck."
Stiles retracts his fingers, skin smarting. The tip of his index finger wells with blood. Peter leans forward, wolfish grin, and sucks the blood clean from Stiles finger. Stiles' brain goes offline for thirty seconds.
"You are such a weirdo," Stiles says when Peter pulls off Stiles' finger with a sultry pop.
"And yet, you're still having dinner with me," Peter replies. "I'll pick you up when you clock off. Until then."
Peter kisses Stiles. It's chaste, but hints at something darker. Dirtier.
"Your ears are very important to us," Erica says over the tannoy, "here at Vinyl Vault, we pride ourselves on providing music for every mood. This one goes out to our very own Stiles Stilinski."
Robert Palmer's Bad Case of Loving You blares out across the store. Stiles puts his head in his hands. Peter laughs, fingers tracing the nape of Stiles' neck as he goes.
#
Stiles takes a micro-break to dash across the road to the vintage store to get himself clothes worthy of a dinner date. Or at least, a shirt without a mobster fish on it. He settles on a nice navy blue dress shirt that's in decent condition and importantly only five dollars.
Skidding back into the break room, he vaults off the couch and by extension Kira, who is nibbling at a packed lunch and squeaks when he lands.
"Sorry, I have a hot date," Stiles says, ferreting a loose clothes hanger from the junk pile beside the personal cubby holes. He hangs the shirt up, smoothing out the odd wrinkle.
Kira swallows her satsuma slice. "That's nice. With the guy who kissed you earlier."
"The very same."
Kira peels apart another satsuma slice, considering the pieces between her fingertips. "Scott just broke up with somebody right?"
Stiles turns on his heel, intrigued by this sudden hand break turn. "Yes, they're very on again, off again."
"Oh," Kira says mournfully. "So he probably wouldn't want to go out for pizza sometime."
Stiles loves Scott dearly, but he will never understand his effect on women. "He's my best friend but he is quite dense, you'd have to tell him it was a date. But uh, I could put in a good word."
Kira brightens. "Would you?"
Stiles, newly blessed by the God of Love figures what the hell. It might even do Scott good.
#
Blessing Scott will have to wait. Stiles splashes water on his face in the employee bathroom and runs his fingers through his hair to make it more styled and less, I was electrocuted minutes before speaking to you.
"I'm clocking out," Stiles hollers, buttoning up the dress shirt, "also going on a date with your uncle Derek, don't be weird about it."
"I don't want to know!" Derek yells back.
Stiles clocks out, though it takes him a minute to insert his slip the right way into the ancient machine because his palms are sweating.
Peter is waiting for him, leaning against the door of his flashy lawyer money car. Stiles, in a fit of brave insanity swoops in for a kiss. Peter guides it into something deeper, putting his hand on the small of Stiles' back and pressing them together. The beard scratches against Stiles' face but it's a good scratch. It makes him want to commit acts of public indecency.
"I want to commit acts of public indecency with you," Stiles says when they part. Peter grins.
"Lets see where the night takes us, shall we?"
Stiles can get down with that.