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Stiles is on a mission – a goddamned mission to rid the house of every single mistletoe. He nabs it from every arch leading into the living room, he steals it from every door frame around the house, and he carefully yanks it off from its spot hanging off the ceiling at the top of the stairwell strategically placed for maximum efficiency just outside the second bathroom that’s perfect for ambush attacks (and also for falling down of but, werewolves – they don’t really care).
He spends well over an hour trying to get rid of all of the mistletoes in the house as inconspicuously as he can. In other words, he’s doing about as good of a job being discreet as Derek trying to be as non-creepy as possible.
Fail.
His pockets are laden with the stuff, leaves sticking out the top with garish ribbons decorating the sides of his trousers like a badly dressed elf. He's like the Christmas Grinch except without the green fur and tiny, tiny heart the size of a pea but hey, his mission is almost over: there’s only one more mistletoe hanging above the sliding door leading in and out of the house into the backyard but Scott’s just dragged Allison under it. He rolls his eyes and makes a face at them behind their backs because, um, hello, it’s not like they don’t kiss every minute of every hour of every day already.
Stiles is in the kitchen rummaging through the fridge for a can of soda that’s not diet (why the fuck even?), far enough from Scott and Allison as to not look too suspicious but near enough to close in on the last bunch of mistletoe once they leave him to it – if they’ll walk away from that spot long enough for him to get it.
Then finally, finally, they leave with a giggle and a blush because Scott’s tummy just rumbled loud enough that even Stiles can hear it above the music playing in the backyard, a punk-rock cover for the 12 Days of Christmas.
He sips at his drink nonchalantly, counting the seconds in his head and keeping his eyes and ears open for anymore interruptions before he sets the can of sprite down on the kitchen counter and jumps into action faster than a speeding bullet.
Stiles rips the mistletoe off its perch without any finesse and stuffs it into his pockets to join its fallen brethren, never minding the sticky-tape that’s possibly ruining the inside of his trousers. He twirls on the spot, checks to make sure nobody is paying the silly human with a mistletoe fetish any mind before he’s out; gone with the wind.
He books it out of the house as far as he can, anywhere he deems safely out of werewolf senses. By the time he gets to a snowy clearing roughly fifteen minutes away from the party he’s cold, shivering and wishing he wore a scarf before he hightailed it out of there.
Hightail, heh.
Stiles pulls the hood of his jacket over his head, cups his hands in front of his mouth and blows warm air to bring some feeling back into them, jumping on the spot to keep his body temperature up. It’s nice out here, he thinks as he pulls out the mistletoes, ribbons and all, puts them in a bunch right by his feet before taking out his trusty lighter he’s recently started carrying from the pocket of his jacket.
It’s a bit cold (understatement of the year) and the leaves are a bit too fresh and damp to really catch on fire, but once he’s got one of the ribbons going (and who knew sticky-tape burned so easily?) he’s got a small bonfire to keep him company.
He grins and laughs a bit maniacally, sitting hunched by the blaze (a very generous term) as the white berries sizzle and pop while the ribbons shrivel with the leaves until they’re nothing more than a blackened mess. It takes only a total of eight minutes for it all to burn out from start to finish and he’s feeling rather accomplished as soon as the last glow of fire winks out.
It feels warmer now (or maybe that’s just him) as he examines the exposed ground around the pile of charred twigs with rapt attention. There’s an inch of free space, a small circumference where the snow has melted and the surrounding air is steadily growing colder as the heat from the burned greenery is swept away with the calming breeze. He shivers when a strong gust stirs around him, blowing down between the gaps of his hoodie and shirt and he wishes he brought his scarf out with him (or at least a pair of gloves) before he left the warm house.
It’s close to half an hour now and he knows if he runs he can make it to the house in half the time it took for him to get there, hopefully before anybody really notices that he’s gone, but when he turns around to make a running start he ends up bumping (read: crashing) into a solid build. A whoosh of breath and a curse escapes his lips as he makes a stumbling step back. It takes him just a split second for his mind to recall to him a strange sense of déjà vu and his conscience to go, oh shit, because, really, burning stuff around a victim of an arson attack is a really huge no-no.
‘Hello!!’ Stiles greets a bit too enthusiastically and stands to block Derek’s line of sight of where, he assumes, the charred mistletoes are. ‘Felt like getting some fresh air, too, huh? There’s nothing like the smell of forest and snow and wind,’ wind?! ‘and stuff.’
Derek’s glare intensifies as he sniffs the air pointedly and pulls the sleeve of Stiles’ jacket towards him so he can see what’s on the ground. ‘What did you just burn,’ he asks without asking as his frown deepens at the blackened ground with its melted snow. He eyes the small pile of sooty ash to the teen back to the ground and back to Stiles again.
‘Nothing,’ his voice absolutely does not crack as he sweeps some clean snow over the (so very, very dead) mistletoes with the toe of his shoe and hides his lighter back into his pocket before its noticed. He only just barely manages to hold down the smirk at having triumphed over a good one and a half dozen bundles of greenery wrapped in a pretty bowtie.
‘Why do you think lying to me is a good idea?’
Stiles isn't sure what gave it away – was it the skip in his heart or the squeak in his voice? Probably both.
‘It’s nothing important,’ he rephrases and ignores the way Derek’s fingers are tightening over his bicep.
‘Still lying.’
He rolls his eyes and fights letting out a noise of dismay as he lightly slaps at Derek’s hand until he lets go. ‘It’s nothing important to you,’ he tries again as he smoothes the sleeve of his jacket and shakes out the last of the wrinkles (not that it even makes the slightest bit of sense), jostling the hood from his head as he does so.
The older man pauses, his glare leveling out to display a curious expression as opposed to his default “I want to rip your throat out” look he usually wears. His attention strays to the ground and stays there a moment before he turns back to Stiles. The expression only lasts for another mere second more before the glare is back full force. ‘Fine.’
Stiles almost jumps in surprise; it’s not very often that Derek would concede and let sleeping dogs lie, hehe. But the surprise, much like the inquisitive expression earlier on Derek’s face, doesn’t last for very long either.
‘Maybe it’s not important to me, but why is it important enough to you that you needed to come all the way out here to burn it?’
‘Guh,’ he replies eloquently and throws his hands up in defeat. ‘They’re just mistletoes, dude.’
‘And?’
‘I was totally doing you a service. I mean, one of them was outside the bathroom on the second floor where the stairs are. That’s, like, a complete and total health hazard waiting to happen! What if I’d been the one to fall down and break my neck because someone couldn’t keep their hands off me? Never mind the fact that my point strayed from doing you a service to the safety of my own health.’
Derek chuffs in amusement. ‘And?’
‘What? What?!’ He snaps without any bite. ‘I’m allowed to have a say in your Christmas house decorations, too, and mistletoes are, like, so 16th century and half of them didn’t even have any berries in them which, by the way, you’re supposed to include because traditionally you’re supposed to pluck a berry from it after a kiss until they’re all gone at which point people stop kissing under the mistletoe, not that the youth of today even gives a shit about history anymore.’
Derek’s eyebrows are raised, looking like two individual eyebrows instead of a fuzzy caterpillar while his lips are pursed in a flat, flat line as though he’s trying to bite back a remark, though Stiles doesn’t know why Derek would hold back this time when he’s never bothered to do so before. He holds his stare until color flushes back into Derek’s lips and he opens his mouth to ask again, ‘And?’
‘Oh my god, stop it,’ he groans and finally gives in with a huff before turning away and stomping back in the direction of the house. ‘Fine! I’ll buy you back some mistletoes, happy?!’
‘Why did you even take them down in the first place?’ He begins to follow after him, easily minimizing the distance between them until they’re side by side trudging through the snow.
‘We have a longstanding history, mistletoe and I,' he starts off his story with a sigh. 'It began one Christmas Eve when I snuck out of my bed just before midnight so I could catch Santa in the act of consuming our store-bought gingerbread men that’s more ginger and bread than cookie.’ He catches a look thrown his way from his periphery but he doesn’t let it stop him. ‘We didn’t exactly have a chimney and I wanted to make sure Santa got in okay. And that’s a totally valid reason for a 5-year old to have, man; don’t look at me like that.’
Derek scoffs while Stiles buries his hands in his pockets to save what little warmth he can. The tips of his fingers are numb but the house is nearby: he can hear the others singing along to whatever’s playing through the sound system, though most of it sounds like a jumble of words and a butchery of the English language. For shame.
‘So, anyway, I creeped down the stairs with a level of practice even you would be proud of and made sure to skip the fourth step down because it squeaks like a serious mo-fo then sat at the foot of it looking into the living room and there he was – this skinny looking guy with an obviously fake beard wearing standard police-issued boots.’
The older man snorts and Stiles resists the urge to push him into a tree for laughing at his tale of woe but he lets it go and proceeds towards trying to make a point.
‘My mum was probably in the kitchen or something because she sure as hell didn’t sneak up from behind me to get into the living room. Anyway. She pulled him under the mistletoe after he’s eaten all the cookies I saved for the real Santa. Being the nosy brat I am I only stayed long enough to figure out their hanky-panky pretty much equaled to adultery, not that I figured what that word meant until I was, like, 13 or something and associated it with that particular memory. I mean, at the time I didn’t know it was my dad but…yeah.’
‘You’re ridiculous.’
‘Shut up,’ he sneers half-heartedly and gives in to the impulse of pushing Derek into the path of a tree. Not that he could do very much with it because the guy was built like a brick wall while he, himself, looked like a stick insect standing next to him. ‘In the year after that I made sure to hide all the mistletoes in the house and throw them out into the trash only when New Years comes around. We only usually had about two so it was easy as pie to find them but we stopped putting it up after mum died,’ he resolutely does not choke on the last word. He clears his throat in an over-the-top cough and shrugs. ‘And, well, it sort of stuck: the habit of getting rid of every mistletoe I see.’
‘You’re ridiculous,’ he repeats, his tone softer this time.
Stiles makes a face at him as they near the house, the singing in the backyard having now progressed to full-on blaring and screaming. He wonders how any of the werewolves can seriously put up with this amount of tone-deafness. He shudders when he hears a particularly high screech (why, Scott, why?) and decides to hide away inside the house until they can start eating or something but before he can take more than two steps away from the front door a hand closing around his forearm stops him.
‘Dude, I am so not joining the scream-fest that’s happening in your backyard. Unlike you, my hearing most definitely will not recover from that travesty.’ He tries to pull away into the house again but the grip on his forearm tightens slightly, enough for him to notice and turn around to raise a bemused eyebrow at Derek who’s dragging him back towards him until his spine is aligned with the door jamb which, by the way, is not comfortable at all. His mind supplies him with another sense of déjà vu but the feeling stops when, instead of being inflicted bodily harm on his person, Derek kisses him full on the lips. It’s there and gone in less than two seconds, barely any time to register or react at all and he can’t help giving the older man a wide-eyed stare because, fuck, that was his first kiss.
Rather than apologize for stealing said kiss Derek nudges his head upwards and Stiles follows until his eyes settle on a familiar bunch of green hiding under the Christmas wreath that’s been wrapped in a generous amount of red ribbons and sticky-taped to the wall just a few inches over the front door.
‘You missed one,’ he says as he reaches above him, plucks off a single white berry and eats it with a growing smirk on his lips before walking away to join the others behind the house.
Stiles continues to gape like a fish out of water before his mind successfully reboots enough for him to shout at Derek’s retreating back, ‘You’re not supposed to eat it!!’