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All Derek can see is fire.
Licking treacherous flames up the walls, stinging his eyes with smoke-filled air, his breaths coming out in choked-off gasps. All around him are violent bursts of red and gold and orange, waiting for him to burn as well.
Suddenly Laura is beside him, face ashen and long dark hair flying wildly about her face. “We have to get out of here!” she screams, her hazel eyes widening in horror. Derek nods, forcing himself to ignore the hell around them for an exit. He knows this place like the back of his hand, it’s their living room, and if they can just get to the kitchen-
There’s an agonized howl, followed by another. They all vary in sound, and something in Derek’s heart breaks as he realizes some of them sound like his younger cousins, all under the age of seven.
They have to get out, they have to get out, but the others… they have to save the others.
Laura’s fingers wrap tightly around his arm, claws digging into his too-hot skin. “Der, come on, we can’t just stand here,” she yells over the roar of the house falling apart around them, splintering under their feet.
Derek shakes his head violently. “Laura, the kids, our parents! We can’t just-” his panicked words are abruptly cut off, for something large and what was probably a part of the ceiling crashed down on him, turning his vision black.
He’s not sure what happens next, except now he’s outside, opening his eyes to see the night sky with its glittering stars and ominous full moon beaming down. He’s standing, watching as a house, his house , is burning to the ground, the faint sounds of sirens blaring in the distance.
Derek looks at his hands, and they aren’t stained gray with ash and debris. In fact, nothing of the fire looks to have affected him at all. He’s perfectly unharmed.
His eyes narrow in confusion because he was just inside, he was just there , trapped under whatever the hell fell down on him.
He has to go back, he has to try and save them, his family, the only pack he’s ever known. Derek starts off to run, feeling his features shift into something more lupine than human when the same hand from earlier wraps around his wrist.
“It’s too late. We can’t- there’s a boundary of mountain ash, and we can’t get in. We can’t save them, Der,” Laura manages to say, the words sounding as if they were ripped out of her throat.
No. No no no no no nononoNO!
Derek twists back to look at his older sister, listens intently to her heartbeat. What he finds is a pair of unnaturally red eyes staring back him, tear-stained, and a steady thumping heart.
He wants to crumple to the ground and punch the sky.
He wants to wake up.
This isn’t real, this isn’t real.
God, this can’t be real. How… how could she do this. How could she do this?
The young werewolf tugs his arm out of his sister’s grasp and shoves his head in his hands, squeezing his eyes shut. “My fault,” he mouths to himself.
My fault.
“Derek, Derek, babe, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re okay," a voice, familiar but one that shouldn’t be here, not at the source of Derek’s destruction, tries to soothe. In response, Derek shakes his head, grits his teeth.
“It’s not, it’s not okay,” he growls and hates how it comes out sounding more like a whimper.
The voice comes back, this time with hands that taper into long, skinny fingers touch the planes of Derek’s face softly. “It’s not your fault. It was never, ever your fault,” the voice says, quietly and full of a belief so strong that it makes a traitorous sob escape Derek’s chest.
Derek opens his eyes and sees a young man with disheveled brown hair and eyes that can’t decide whether to be brown or gold, staring at him with so much love it makes Derek want to crawl inside them and never, ever leave.
The young man gives him a crooked smile and rubs a thumb over Derek’s cheek. “Wake up, babe. Wake up,” he tells him. And Derek does.
It scares him, at first, how quiet it is. It’s still night, and Stiles is hovering over him, straddling his waist. His hands are on his face, just like in the dream, except now Stiles’ fingers are brushing gently through his hair.
“Hey, big guy,” Stiles whispers shakily in the dark, the faint outline of his face just barely noticeable in front of Derek. Without a word, Derek reaches up and crushes Stiles into him tightly, one of his arms wrapping around the younger man’s back while his other hand curls around the nape of his neck.
Stiles lets out an “ oof! ” of shock that’s muffled into Derek’s bare shoulder, before sinking into him completely. Derek turns his head to nose along Stiles’ hairline, taking deep lungful breaths of his scent. Stiles smells like sugar and lightning and a home that Derek thought was lost to him forever, and it makes him hold on tighter.
After a long moment, when Derek’s heartbeat has slowed and he doesn’t smell the acrid stench of smoke, he pulls back a bit to get a look at his boyfriend’s face.
Immediately, Stiles finds his mouth and kisses him, once, twice, then a very extended third that has Derek thinking of doing other things than going back to sleep.
All too soon, Stiles and his ridiculous mouth that Derek could kiss forever leaves, only to track his lips lightly over Derek’s cheeks. Derek shuts his eyes, a deep, contented sound escaping him as Stiles presses a kiss to each of Derek’s eyelids, before dropping a final one on his forehead.
“So, I’m guessing that dream of yours wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, huh?” Stiles’ mumbles against his skin.
Derek groans as he trails his fingers up and down the smooth slope of Stiles’ back. Touching Stiles makes things real, makes things safe, makes his nightmare feel like a frightful impossibility that never happened.
“You’re a genius,” Derek grunts back after a moment, lost in the warm feel of Stiles' skin and the comforting, grounding weight of his body on top of him.
Suddenly, Stiles shifts, settling his wiry arms on top of Derek’s chest and resting his chin there, giving him an almost perfect view of his boyfriend’s face.
Stiles twines his legs with the werewolf’s, and studies him for a moment, down to the angular, bearded cut of his jaw to the thick furrow of his brows.
Sometimes Stiles forgets that Derek is his boyfriend, because someone so incredibly good looking doesn't spare a glance at Stiles and want to jump his bones. However, Derek is more than the abs and the chiseled features; he's a moody, witty asshole that Stiles can't imagine ever letting go of. And he won't, because he loves Derek so much it scares him sometimes.
“Want to talk about it?” Stiles asks quietly and watches as his boyfriend’s face slips into a myriad of emotions in the moonlight. They shift from sadness to frustration, guilt to anger, before finally settling into a grief that looks heartbreaking no matter what angle Stiles has seen it before.
It makes Stiles reach out a hand to brush his knuckles across Derek’s cheek, and the hand that isn’t pressed firmly into the small of Stiles’ back comes up to grab his own. Derek twines their fingers together and moves Stiles’ hand so that it rests over his mouth. He kisses the soft, fragile skin there once, twice, before settling their intertwined hands by his ear.
Derek tells him, in words that are whispered so fiercely and so sadly that Stiles squeezes the hand that’s wrapped around his own every so often, hoping to relieve just a tiny bit of the hurt that’s locked in Derek’s voice.
By the time Derek finishes, his voice has gone cracked and hollowed, his eyes open and staring at nothing. Stiles sighs heavily and wishes that he could take it all away, wishes that he could kill Kate Argent before she could ever wreck havoc on the people he loves.
But, more than anything, he wishes that Derek wouldn’t have these nightmares of memories that have branded him with an earth-shattering sadness, one that Stiles can only love him through, and tell him every day that it was not his fault his family burned to death. It wasn’t.
Stiles believes that and their whole pack does.
Maybe one day, Derek will too.
“Hey,” Stiles mumbles sleepily, tugging lightly at the hand still wrapped around his. His boyfriend releases a gusty breath and looks down at him, his frown going soft. Stiles doesn’t quite smile, but the look in Derek’s hazel eyes does something in his heart that causes it to race crazily.
The younger man uses the leverage that Derek’s hand gives him to pull himself up until they’re face-to-face, brown meeting greenish-gold.
“I love you. “Stiles whispers into Derek’s mouth, and a rumbling noise that always lets Stiles know whatever he’s done, it’s made Derek happy, emits from the werewolf’s throat. Derek licks into Stiles' mouth, kissing him in such a desperate way that has Stiles giving the best he can, trying with lips and teeth and tongue that Derek deserves a whole lot more than he thinks.
“Love you back,” Derek whispers when the two pull away to catch their breath. Stiles finally smiles, always, always feeling like he’s the luckiest person in the whole goddamn world when he hears those words.
The two fall asleep later, with less clothes on than they went to bed in, and maybe the sun’s starting to come up, and they have things to do in the morning, but for the next few hours, they’re going to put it off as much as possible.
And when Erica and Lydia stop through and open the door, full of annoyance that the couple hasn’t answered their phones, they’ll see Derek curled on top of Stiles, his boyfriend’s soft snores filling the room, and the girls will shut the door.
They make coffee and wait for them in the kitchen, deciding that maybe another twenty minutes of them sleeping wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.