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It started, like a lot of Stiles’ greatest disasters these days, with TikTok.
They were sitting on the couch. Well, Derek was sitting. Stiles was draped across him like some overgrown cat, legs slung over the armrest, his head tilted so far off Derek’s thigh it was like he was trying to hang upside down without committing. His phone was in his hand, the volume low, muffled by the fold of the blanket covering his chest. The room smelled like popcorn and sandalwood and the faint sharpness of lemon from Derek’s fancy new cleaner. It was disgustingly domestic. Gross. Yet perfect.
Derek had a book in his lap, Wolves and the Ecology of Fear, and Stiles had been ignoring it for the last hour in favor of giggling at meme compilations and videos involving raccoons stealing snacks.
And then because Stiles couldn’t help himself, he asked:
“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”
There was a beat of silence.
No dramatic music. No swelling romance. Just Derek flipping a page, not even glancing down.
“No.”
Stiles blinked.
He propped himself up on an elbow, squinting at Derek like he’d just misheard the man say he wanted pineapple on pizza or enjoyed karaoke.
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
Derek didn’t look up. “Exactly what I said.”
“You wouldn’t still love me if I was a worm?”
Derek finally closed the book with a heavy thump and glanced down at him, brow arched like Stiles was being the dramatic one(which in all fairness, he was).
“You’d be a worm, Stiles.”
“Yeah, but like a cute worm.”
“You’d be a worm,” Derek repeated, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Slimy. Legless. You don’t even like dirt.”
“I’d be a wriggly little cinnamon roll of a worm!” Stiles defended, hand flailing with the kind of conviction usually reserved for arguing about Star Wars continuity or the best flavor of Pop-Tarts.
Derek just stared at him.
“So, what? You’d just chuck me in the backyard and forget me?”
Derek snorted. “I’d put you in the compost pile.”
Stiles sat up fully now, scandalized. “You absolute monster!”
Derek shrugged, completely unbothered. “You’d want to be useful, wouldn’t you?”
“Useful?! I’d want to be loved!”
“You’d have no brain capacity to even understand the concept of love.”
“Excuse you! Worms have hearts!”
“Five,” Derek muttered.
“So technically, you’d be breaking all five of them!”
There was a pause.
And then Derek muttered, with deliberate dryness:
“That’s a you problem.”
Stiles sulked. Loudly. With great ceremony. He flopped onto the other side of the couch, rolled himself into a burrito of betrayal, and muttered under his breath like a Victorian ghost with a vendetta.
Derek didn’t apologize.
He just leaned back and said, “You’re lucky I love you as a human. That’s already enough emotional labor.”
Stiles made a high-pitched noise. “Oh my God, you're such a dick.”
“Yet somehow you’re still here,” Derek pointed out.
“That’s because I know you’re full of shit,” Stiles snapped, still cocooned in blanket. “You’d cry. You’d cry over Worm-Me. I can see it now. You, shirtless in the rain, holding me, tiny, slimy, tragic in the palm of your hand, whispering about our love being eternal.”
“I would not cry over a worm.”
“You’d be devastated. You’d write poetry. You’d post it on Reddit.”
“I don’t even have Reddit.”
“You’d make an account. Username WolfBoySad1988. You’d write, ‘My boyfriend became a worm. AMA.’”
Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. “You need to sleep.”
Stiles poked his head out of the blanket like a judgmental meerkat. “You’d read worm haikus.”
Derek deadpanned, “I would feed you to a bird.”
Later that night, Stiles lay in bed, his legs tangled with Derek’s, scrolling through his phone again with a wounded sigh every few minutes, each louder than the last.
Derek, bless his soul, kept reading. Ignoring.
Until Stiles whispered:
“You know, Scott would’ve said yes.”
Derek closed his book and rolled on top of him, pinning him to the bed with the full weight of all his supernatural mass and a smirk that spelled trouble.
“Then you should’ve dated Scott.”
Stiles grinned, all teeth. “Jealous?”
Derek kissed him once. Roughly. Then softly.
Then whispered against his lips, “You’re lucky I’m not a bird.”
“Oh my God,” Stiles muttered, wrapping his arms around Derek’s neck.
A week later, Derek came home with a shoebox.
Inside it? A squishy gummy worm.
The tag read: In case you ever get cursed into your final form.
Underneath that?
A sticky note that said:
“Still no.”
—Love, the Monster Who Doesn’t Date Worms.