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"Will you miss me when I've gone?" Stiles asks. It's quiet and Derek's house is a little too chilly for the short-sleeved shirt that Stiles is wearing. If it's bothering him though he hasn't said so and Derek can't bring himself to focus on that. "It'll only be a few months out of the year, I know, nothing to get all melodramatic about."
Stiles chews on the corner of his mouth, a nervous habit that Derek knows well. Derek wants to tell him to stop, because the wound on his lip has not fully healed and Derek can already scent the faint metallic taste against his tongue as Stiles worries at the cracked and darkened flesh.
"But, you'll miss me? I mean, you'll wait? Until I get back and -" he cuts himself off.
Derek is silent but the words spill through his head until it's too loud to hear Stiles' breathing, soft and weighted beside him. And Derek doesn't have to think about the answer to that, he doesn't. Because Stiles is everything - he's warmth on cold terrible nights and safety when Derek doesn't know where to run to. Stiles is fragile and breaks so easily beneath Derek's crude, broad hands and yet Stiles smiles up at Derek and whispers More when Derek thinks that he's finally pushed too hard and broken him.
Stiles is something precariously frightening and yet Stiles is the reason that Derek's slowly boarded up the ceiling in his bedroom, although he still leaves a few patches open because Stiles likes to lay on his back beside Derek and look up at the sky and point out animal shapes in the clouds and constellations in the stars that do not exist (see that one right there? that's little red, you can see the shape of his cloak, like my hoodie, right? it's the guardian and companion to lupus. see, see? they're right beside each other if you tilt your head just right-). Stiles' fingers always know how to find his own and tangle in a way that chases all the anger skirting across Derek's skin and there is so much strength in those nimble bones and Stiles is not the reason why Derek came back to Beacon Hills but he's the reason that Derek's stayed.
But now Stiles is the one about to go. And he's waiting now, not looking at Derek but waiting still. And Derek thinks yes, yes of course yes, and Derek doesn't know how he's going to manage the months and days without Stiles.
Tell him, Derek thinks, tell him, a mantra that rolls across his skin and hums against his teeth even as the words fall silent on his tongue.