Work Text:
Stiles isn’t exactly sure why he decided to do it. It wasn’t some premature midlife crisis or a misplaced teenage rebellion. And it certainly wasn’t an overwhelming need to wear a leather jacket. His zip-ups fit him just fine.
It was like Stiles felt constantly twitchy, hands thumbing the material of his shirt, clenching and unclenching like he needed to grasp onto something. He couldn’t keep still, tracing around the edges of his room, his house, his neighborhood.
It was summer and Stiles wanted to go. Go somewhere. Do something. He just needed to get out, out of this monotonous routine that had him digging his nails into his palms, carving out pretty little half moons there, pale against his red skin.
Maybe it was that he’d seen Top Gun too many times. Maybe Tom Cruise was just fucking crazy enough. Whatever the reason, he bought the clutch springs on a Saturday.
*
He bought the bike in pieces. A little here, a little there, keeping everything under the radar—from his dad, Scott, this town. He bought them from pawn shops a couple miles over or knockoff Craigslist applicants; couldn’t afford much more. Couldn’t afford much less.
It worked—for him, at least.
*
Stiles had a plan. A pretty sketchy plan but a plan nonetheless and he was humble enough to admit he couldn’t do this alone.
He needed a place to work, a place to ride. Most of all, he needed someone to teach him how to ride. Someone who didn’t care that he was illegal.
Stiles needed Derek.
Stiles hated needing Derek.
*
“You wear leather jackets right?” he asks.
Derek shoves his hands deeper in the pockets of his jacket from where he’s leaning up against the blackened beam of his porch.
“Right. You keep up with leather jacket clichés?” he asks.
Derek shifts his gaze a little to the left and Stiles follows it until he can see the side of a small garage peeking out from between the trees.
“WR 250X, off-road.”
“Can you teach me?”
Derek’s head tilts a hair.
“Why?”
“Because I held you up in a pool for exactly two hours and 12 minutes and you’re my only option.”
Derek looks at him hard, like maybe the force of his gaze could telepathically remove Stiles from his property.
“You’re not going to leave until I say yes, are you?”
Stiles grins.
“Fine.”
*
“I thought you said you had a bike?” Derek says when Stiles comes lurching into the garage with an impressively large box.
He drops it to the floor and watches as dust rises around it.
“I do. It’s from IKEA.”
“You’re an idiot.”
*
“You’re doing it wrong,” Derek says for probably the third time that day.
“How can I be doing it wrong?” He snarls. His shoulders ache and his pits smell like gasoline and metal. Grease plays a game of crisscross along his knuckles. “There is only one possible way to screw something in.”
Derek snatches the wrench away from his sweaty hands and does an impressive twist and turn until Stiles hears a distinct groan from the frame.
“There.”
“You’re pretty,” Stiles sighs, slumping to the concrete.
Derek ignores him.
*
“What are you doing?” Stiles hears Derek say.
Stiles smiles from where he’s sprawled outside the garage, legs stretched wide, soft green worrying his neck.
“Admiring the view.”
There’s a pause.
“Your eyes are closed.”
Stiles smiles a bit harder, teeth beginning to peek from beneath his upper lip.
It’s nice out here, the sun glinting from over the tree tops and casting shadows over the fields of grass and gravel— makes him think of barbeques from when he was a kid and that time his parents took him to the lake for his tenth birthday. If he breathes in deep enough, he thinks he can smell his mom’s perfume.
“I know.”
*
Stiles watches the curve of Derek’s shoulders through his Henley, the dark spattering of his eyelashes from beneath his lids.
Really pretty, he thinks and then feels stupid. Really stupid.
Derek glances at him over the seat of the bike and blinks sweat out of his eyes.
Stiles goes back to his work.
*
It’s been three weeks. The bike still looks like it belongs in a junkyard.
“What do you want to paint it?” Derek asks him a while later.
Stiles swallows around his BLT and thinks about it.
“Pink,” he says just to see Derek scowl.
*
Derek brings magenta acrylic the next day and Stiles doesn’t find this joke his funny anymore.
“You owe me thirty bucks.”
“You’re a fucking asshole.”
Derek doesn’t grin, but it’s a near thing.
*
“I think we should name it,” Stiles says.
They’re sitting on collapsible chairs and the sun is setting sometime on a Thursday.
“Pile of shit?” Derek offers.
“Something that won’t make all the other kids bully him on the playground.”
“Really big pile of shit?”
“There you go,” Stiles says.
Derek chuckles.
*
“How’d you learn?” Stiles asks one afternoon.
Derek brings a knee up to his chest to better bend around the fender.
“Learn to what?”
Stiles gestures with his hands.
“To do all of this? Is it like a requirement? Like, once you own the jacket, you’d better learn the bike?”
Derek shakes his head and it’s an exasperated movement, but a bit fond too. Stiles doesn’t exactly know how he feels about that.
“It was a family thi—just— Laura,” Derek finishes.
“Oh.”
Stiles doesn’t ask any more questions that day.
*
It’s 2 in the afternoon. He’s been here since 10 am.
“Why do you want to learn how to ride a motorcycle, Stiles?”
Stiles winces at the question he doesn’t want to answer, because he doesn’t know the answer—at least, not yet.
He shrugs.
“I don’t know.”
Derek gives him a flat look.
“You’re a shit liar.”
And that makes him angrier than it should. He doesn’t even know why it makes him angry at all, actually.
But—
“You’re a shit alpha.”
Derek’s shoulders stiffen a little in his work shirt and he turns around so his back is facing Stiles. He’s quiet a moment and then, “Go home.”
“But—”
“I said, go home.”
It sounds eerily calm and Stiles hates himself in that moment, hates whatever made him feel like this, hates needing Derek, just hates— a lot of things, he hates a lot of things. His hands clench into painfully tight fists.
But he goes.
*
He doesn’t show up for three days.
They’re spent hauled up in his bedroom, with his head phones semi-permanently glued to his ears and a pathetic amount Mountain Dew cans scattered across, surrounding, and below his desk.
Pros: He catches up on a couple seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix and is able to fuck around on forums to his heart’s content.
Cons: He throws up from all the Mountain Dews and spends the last night on the cold bathroom tile. He misses Derek.
*
The garage looks the same. The bike looks the same. Derek still looks the same.
“I’m an idiot,” Stiles says.
It’s what he opens with. It’s fitting.
Derek turns around and looks him in the eyes.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know that too.”
“Good.”
“Yeah,” Derek says, the corner of his lips twitching upwards.
Stiles rolls his eyes.
*
They’ve gotten into a routine. And it’s strangely comfortable, just knowing. Like making a turkey and cheese sandwich every Sunday— except that it’s not every Sunday, it’s every single day and his sandwich is actually company. With Derek. And it’s not as tasty. Not that he would know, y’know, if Derek was tasty.
He just thinks about it sometimes—what it would be like— to trace with his tongue that thin line of sweat, the one that always travels down his neck and pools in the hollow of his collarbone. To tangle his hands in that pitch black hair and wrench back, back, back until his throat is bared so completely, his Adam’s apple threatens to burst forth from beneath his skin.
Stiles thinks a lot.
He doesn’t do much.
*
He should have known it wouldn’t last. Nothing good lasts.
Their routine gets broken, cracked, smashed with a sledge hammer until the blood soaks into the ground and all of the flowers surrounding it wilt.
Death. It does that. Creeps up on you like shadow that never leaves even after the sun is gone.
Because—
Boyd shows up. Takes their little routine and shreds it in his ebony hands, pricks his fingers on the pieces. He comes thundering in with big black boots, a multitude of cuts and bruises that should have healed—should have— Alpha pack, he says— a body, he brings a body and he rests it beneath Derek’s porch and his feet and the flowers wilt around it.
Nothing gold can stay.
*
He says it was a seizure. That they tortured her mind. Pressed electricity into the soft tissue until all the synapses fired off and she twitched and she twitched and they just left her.
“Couldn’t leave her— couldn’t just—”
*
Stiles presses a kiss to her headstone. He doesn’t cry. His eyes don’t work properly.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
It doesn’t reply.
*
Stiles feels raw—like the skin of his cheek after Gerard.
He doesn’t want to imagine how Derek feels.
But—
He stops showing up. He stops showing up and Stiles lets him. Works in the garage alone. Works as the weeks pass by. His hair grows longer. The bike gets finished and Stiles doesn’t have anyone to celebrate with.
He still hasn’t cried.
*
He finds him in the woods.
“I finished the bike.”
Derek turns his head at the sound of Stiles’s voice.
“You weren’t there so I had to name it myself. And ‘really big pile of shit’ was a bit long so I just named it Derek. We had a good time together, Derek and me. Great conversationalist.”
Derek stares at him a moment.
“I let her go,” he says.
Stiles’s head suddenly hurts.
“She wanted to go. It’s not your fault.”
“She was pack and I let her go and now she’s decomposing in a cemetery. So actually, yes, this is my fault,” Derek says.
Stiles runs a hand through his hair.
“She’s— she left, alright? She wanted to go. You let her go, do what she wanted. You’re not her father, you can’t ground her like a little kid. She was always going to go.”
Derek rounds on him.
“She was pack, don’t you fucking get it? I promised her things would get better, that she would be better and now she’s dead. I get to think it’s my fault. That’s my privilege.”
“Okay, okay, just—”
Stiles doesn’t know ‘just’ what but he knows he wants something.
“Could you come back? Please, just, come back,” Stiles says, “Boyd’s been stuck in that train car for days and he needs someone. So could you just—he was pack, yeah?”
Derek clenches his eyes shut.
“Yeah,” he says.
*
“You know when you feel jumpy in your own skin? Like, if you could take a knife to the backing and still live, you’d cut yourself open and step out of it and then you could finally breathe?”
“No,” Derek says.
“That’s what ADHD feels like. Like you could buzz right out of your own skin, but your body’s keeping it in and it’s this constant battle you can feel down to your nerve endings.”
Derek's eyebrows pull together.
“I don’t—”
“You asked, before. About why I decided to learn. I’m telling you,” Stiles says, “Helps to work with my hands.”
“Oh,” he is all he says.
*
“I killed my family,” Derek says, “Fucked a girl and then she burned down my house.”
“Killed my mom,” Stiles says, “Didn’t hold on tight enough. Let her slip through my fingers.”
*
“Sometimes I still get panic attacks.”
“I haven’t had sex since I was sixteen.”
*
“I’m a shit liar.”
“I’m a shit alpha.”
*
Stiles isn’t sure when it happened. It was sometime between the beginning and now, right now. As he stands in the pouring rain and realizes he wants something from Derek, realizes he wants everything from Derek.
He’d say he finally cries but the truth is it’s raining so hard he can’t really tell.
He just feels like shit.
*
He finds him in the garage. Looks him in the eye, and just knows. That this, whatever this was supposed to be ruptured long ago, flared up to heat his skin and his insides and his heart.
He somehow still gets gooseflesh.
*
Stiles wraps one hand into the back of Derek’s Henley and the other into his wet hair and pulls him forward until their noses are touching.
“Please. Tell me you want this,” he says and presses his mouth against Derek’s.
It’s a hard kiss—deep and unforgiving and he can feel an ache beneath his breastbone, down to his toes.
“Tell me you want this,” he says and kisses Derek’s mouth again, but this time it’s softer. “Tell me you want me—tell me you want this, all of this, tell me—”
He breaks off with a choked sort of sob as Derek brings up his hands and clutches Stiles’s face and now he’s being kissed back and fuck, it’s good, it’s really good, and he thinks he makes a sound. No, he knows he makes a sound, because it’s high pitched and needy and god, he just wants so much.
He wants Derek and his stupid fucking good looks and eternal 5 o’clock shadow. He wants to break him open and see what’s on the inside because he’s got to know—he’s just got to—if he’s just as fucked up as him.
He wants to press his lips to every inch of that beautiful skin and trace paths down his abdomen with a slick tongue, peppering bruises that bloom purple before they disappear altogether. He wants to make Derek shake and fall apart beneath him, he wants him to trust him, wants him to let him.
He wants to hear his goddamn laugh every single day because it sounds more beautiful than a fucking Disney princess’s voice. And he knows, he knows that Derek’s a wolf, a predator, but he swears he can hear those mocking birds sing every time Stiles makes him howl.
Because Stiles thinks he gets him, thinks he gets him better than anyone he’s ever known. And Derek gets him back and it’s far from fairytale and he’ll never hear any wedding bells, fuck there’s a chance he won’t even make it ‘til college, but everything seems to tilt when he’s with Derek. And that’s good, because Stiles has never been straight-line walking guy and his morals have always been a bit crooked and all Derek does is match him to a tee.
“Derek, tell me—I need you to tell me.”
Derek squeezes the back of his neck and guides Stiles’s face until it’s pressing into the small expanse between his shoulder and his neck.
Stiles breathes in. And he can smell the woods, and the garage, and the way the rain mixes with his skin and it smells like summer and all the time they’ve spent together and how everything’s the same and at the same time completely different. And he just kind of collapses into him, hand still tangled in the back of Derek’s shirt.
Derek’s holding him now, arms wrapped around his torso in a tight hug, and it feels a bit suffocating, but a good kind of suffocating, like if Derek presses him close enough, he could forget where his own limbs end and Derek’s begin.
“Breathe,” Derek says.
And Stiles inhales a shaky breath and lets it out and repeats the action, once, twice, three times until his chest is rising in unison with Derek’s. And maybe, just maybe, it’s some kind of sign, that like this, their ribs perfectly align.
“I need you to breathe for me.”
*
Breathe.
In.
I need you to breathe for me.
Out.
I need you to breathe.
In.
I need you.
Out.
*
Derek runs a warm hand up his spine and back down, cheek pressed to the top of Stiles’s head. And Stiles’s neck is at an extremely awkward angle like this, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t really want to move.
“Okay?” Derek asks.
Stiles nods.
Derek takes Stiles’s hand, the one tracing the stitching at the bottom of his shirt, and places it on the left side of his chest before covering it with his own.
“My body,” he starts.
Stops.
Begins again.
“My body like this is good. Human, strong heartbeat,” he taps Stiles’s hand twice, “But it has weak bones and fragile skin. I don’t have—I’m not really me, like this. It’s like, I’m only half of myself. Like, this is a shell, and a breakable one at that.
“With K—, with her, I always felt like this was the only part I could show. Like this was all she could possibly want. And I understand now, it was more than that, because now I know, I-I get it. Who she is, was.
“Being a wolf was never a travesty for me. I was born like this, my family was born like this. It was my entire identity, and when I met someone, I had to hide that. And it wasn’t easy. It was like trying to change the color of my skin by painting it, but she always saw through it, picked away at it, chip by chip. And I understand, now, I get it now.
“But I understand, I think, better than anyone, to want to be wanted, as an entire rather than by pieces. And I do, want that, I mean. You. As a whole.”
Stiles is standing in the middle of a musty garage with his face pressed into the warm neck of someone he’s about 98.5 percent sure likes him back and he feels a bit queasy, a bit anxious, and really fucking hopeful.
“Entire?” He asks into Derek’s neck, lips brushing against the skin there.
“Yeah. Entire.”
Goddamn, 1.5 percent has never felt so good.
Stiles untangles himself from Derek’s grasp so he can look him in the eyes.
“You make a good speech,” he says, “For a werewolf.”
Derek snorts, the corners of his lips turning upwards. He brings his hands back up to cradle Stiles’s face, thumbs brushing lightly across the flush Stiles can feel there, before leaning in and settling his forehead against Stiles’s. He closes his eyes.
“You make a good declaration,” Derek says after a moment, “For a human.”
Stiles scrunches up his face. “Thanks,” he says, sarcastically.
“No really, the whole kissing in the rain thing was very Hollywood. Nicholas Sparks would be proud.”
Stiles taps the back of Derek’s head with his hand.
Derek laughs quietly and presses his lips against Stiles’s forehead. And Stiles isn’t exactly sure how it makes him feel turned on and like a kid at the same time, but he doesn’t say anything.
For once he’s happy to say absolutely nothing at all.
*
Derek teaches him the proper way to work the bike, points to all the levers, which one’s the gas, the brakes. Tells him what the front pulser ring’s for.
Stiles watches and listens and follows Derek’s fingers with his eyes and can’t help feeling like everything he says is sexual.
He says 'rear valve unit' only once and Stiles bursts out laughing.
*
Stiles holds onto the back of Derek’s jacket as he straddles the bike right behind him and he can’t breathe.
This is it, he thinks, laughing when Derek’s revs the engine. This is it.
“Hold on tight,” Derek says before twisting his right wrist, as he and Stiles lurch forward.
His scream gets lost in the wind.