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“So, what’ve you been up to?”
Derek looked up from the maps he’d been poring over and leveled him with a look somewhere between “shut up, Stiles” and confusion. As if he wasn’t sure he should default to rejecting all forms of non-relative conversation or puzzle over why Stiles was trying to initiate conversation in the first place. Which was, okay, fair, because Stiles was pretty sure he was fighting between a manic grin and rolling his eyes. It was probably somewhat off-putting. Having Derek’s actual attention wasn’t helping matters.
It totally wasn’t his fault he had absolutely no idea how to act around the guy anymore. After months of dealing with more werewolf bullcrap than most people get from marathoning 7 seasons of Supernatural and Buffy in a row, full of mutual life-saving and begrudging pseudo-teamwork, just to have Derek suddenly give up on his teenager stalking tendencies in favor of stalking Alphas in the shadows, away from fragile humans, Stiles had sort of gotten used to only having to deal with the occasional Beta wolf in the form of Scott and Isaac plus a few evil Alphas thrown into the mixture. He’d spent the first few weeks of this newest shitstorm waiting for Derek to jump in front of his jeep again, smelling like death and bleeding, or maybe showing up in his room unannounced to alternatively threaten him and demand cooperation. But, there was nothing.
Now Derek was back and sort-of-kind-of accepting his help in werewolf business, if only because he was an extension of Scott, acting as if he hadn’t disappeared for weeks on end and they were still the weird sort of almost frenemies who sometimes saved each other’s lives again. Stiles was a big fan of ignoring uncomfortable problems until they decided to go away, he really was, but fuck that, he had questions goddamnit and Derek could suck up his awkwardness for long enough to at least glare at him for a few of them.
“Well excuse me for initiating some small talk, dude. It’s not like I haven’t seen you for weeks while you’ve been lurking out in the woods trying to kill your problems until they go away, as if that’s never ended horribly before.”
Derek’s face spasmed slightly, as if he were holding back the urge to smile and grimacing at said past horrible decisions, and when it cleaned up his lips twitched slightly downward and his eyes narrowed, but without any heat behind them. It was as if he was suddenly looking at Stiles differently, as if he’d somehow forgotten the blunt sarcasm that came with the very human package, and, hello, how was that even possible? Sarcasm was one of his defining characteristics!
As if sensing that Stiles had seen some sort of actual emotion on his face that could lead to feelings and non-relevant talking, Derek quickly snapped his attention back to the maps he’d been so fully engaged in before, eyeing over boundary lines and the markers of the latest ‘animal attacks’ with his typical intense scrutiny. “Are you going to help me figure out where they’re hiding or not?”
Something about his tone of voice finally caused that grin to stubbornly begin its trek across his face. He wasn’t going to let this go, not by a long shot, but he could recognize the need to prioritize when it presented itself. Most of the time. “Hey, all you had to do was ask.”
If Stiles hadn’t turned his attention back to the map then, zooming in with laser focus as he started trying to connect the invisible dots, he might have noticed the slight spasm around Derek’s mouth or the way his fingers curled slightly, not quite forming fists. Because no matter how many times the kid tried to get it across, through action or words, knowingly or not, Derek still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the actual truth behind those stupid words.
Because they were true. He’d been wrapped up in the latest set of problems attempting to claw his throat out for so long that suddenly having Stiles right there again, casually saying false-but-true statements like that without even fucking realizing it, had it all hitting Derek all over again. His usefulness, the things he could do for people, the things he could teach people, those were his only selling points. That was all he had going for him. It had been drilled into his head, again and again, but whenever he’d use those arguments on Stiles in the past he’d been pissed. As if he would have helped Derek, saved his life, anyway, even if there wasn’t a kanima out there a human had no chance of fighting or snarling Betas half out of their mind on the full moon.
Derek didn’t know what to do with that. He still doesn’t know what to do with that and he sure as hell isn’t any closer to actually believing it enough to rely on it, even if some small, traitorous, suppressed part of him wishes it were true. So, he does what he has to do. He stops thinking about it, focuses, and gets back to trying to figure out how to make sure more people don’t die because of him and his stupid mistakes.