Chapter Text
Stiles gets a text from Allison on a Tuesday evening while he’s TRYING to focus on his calculus homework so he doesn’t fail his exam and failing miserably, tapping his pencil against his desk, swivelling in his chair, and just generally getting nothing done whatsoever.
From Allison Argent: I’m coming over.
Oookay. Allison took Gerard’s death pretty hard and she’s been waffling between wanting to be part of the pack and outbursts of anger, like she hasn’t accepted that her grandfather was some sort of vengeance-fueled psycho-killer who tried to kill all her friends. Stiles understands denial and loss, especially of your mother, so he’s been maybe a little more friendly to Allison than the others have, but what else could he do? He’s a nice guy.
She arrives just as Stiles is walking down the stairs to wait for her on the porch. His dad is sitting in the living room and waves him past when Stiles says, “Allison’s coming over to work on calc with me,” while holding up his textbook, notebook, and calculator.
Before he can even say, “What’s up,” Allison has him by the arm and is dragging him to the opposite side of the porch from the closed living room window. “Woah, okay, pulling me is cool, too,” Stiles says, earning him a look. He takes a moment to pity her future children if Allison looks at them like that. Actually, he thinks he read something somewhere about guys instinctively being attracted to girls that remind them somehow of their mothers, and that look is Melissa McCall to a tee. Figures.
“What’s going on?”
“I thought you guys needed to know that some hunters came into town today to talk to my dad.” The words came out in a tumbled rush and she was obviously nervous.
“Do you know why?”
“You know my dad tries to keep me a little more in the dark now about things, after… after everything, but I heard them asking questions. About the attacks. Stiles, you’re sure it wasn’t one of them?”
“Allison, of course it wasn’t. We don’t know. Derek says there’s no other packs in the nearby area at all and that this isn’t the work of a wild animal, so we’re just as stumped as your dad.” Stiles is exhausted and doesn’t have the time or mental energy to deal with Allison’s mistrust of them. He wouldn’t lie to her and she ought to know that by now. He’s a terrible liar.
“Well… I just wanted you guys to be on your guard, because you know they all think it’s Derek who’s causing it, even if they don’t want to.” She turns away as if to leave but stops and puts a hand on Stiles’ arm. “Stiles… Just… Make sure everyone’s safe. When I was a kid, two of these guys and their dad showed up. The older one was around our age then and he and his dad helped my dad out with a hunt. They’re good, Stiles, maybe the best, and they won’t give up. I just want everyone to be safe.” For once, Stiles doesn’t hear the unspoken “especially Scott” in her voice and it makes him happy to know that she genuinely does want all of them to be safe.
“If you could pass the information on to Derek for me… I know he wants to talk to me as little as possible and I don’t want to worry Scott by telling him there are more hunters in my house.” Stiles nods and lets Allison walk away from his porch and slide into her car. He waits until she pulls out of the driveway and disappears around the corner to walk back inside.
“Allison’s gone?” His father looks up from the TV when Stiles walks in.
“Yeah, turns out she couldn’t help with what I needed.” He shrugs. “I’ll ask Lydia for help during lunch tomorrow.” His dad obviously doesn’t really believe him, but something in his eyes says he’s not going to question it. “I think Allison mostly offered so she could get out of her house for a while. She and her dad haven’t been getting along as well since… You know…” Stiles lets his voice trail off and his dad’s face softens entirely. Stiles hates himself for using Allison’s grief and loss to make his dad feel bad for her, but he suspects it might be the truth.
As soon as he gets back to his room, he tosses his books onto his desk and flops onto the bed and starts to compose a text to Derek.
To Derek Hale: Allison says there are some new hunters in town.
To Derek Hale: She says they’re here about the attacks.
Before he can send another text with the rest of the information, his window is shoved open and Derek hops in. “Holy shit!” Stiles clutches a hand to his chest and almost falls out of his bed. “What the hell?”
Derek shoots him a look and holds up his phone. “What the hell is this?” He asks. Stiles heaves a heavy sigh, pulling himself into a sitting position on the edge of his bed.
“Allison came by just now,” he began. “She said there were some new hunters in town that were asking her dad about the attacks. Says she met them once when she was a kid and that they’re maybe the best hunters there are.”
Derek nods and puts a hand on the window. “Chris will probably send them to you because you’re Scott’s best friend.” Stiles’s heart kicks up a notch. He doesn’t want to be the only one standing between hunters and his best friend, even if Scott hasn’t been around so much recently. Derek shoots him a look and disappears into the night just as Stiles opens his mouth to say something.
“Damn it, Derek!” He mutters, but goes back to his math homework, even though he can’t stop thinking about werewolves and hunters and maybe he should stop trying but Mrs. Green waits for no man, werewolf, or hunter, and Stiles would like to get into college. He doesn’t realize his heart is going a mile a minute until hands come down on his shoulders and he almost screams.
“Oh, my God!” He gasps out, whirling around his chair. “For fuck’s sake, Derek, can you not?”
“Your heart rate was going through the roof. I wanted to make sure you were alright.” The older man shrugs it off like it’s nothing, but Stiles is touched nevertheless.
Stiles stares at his unexpected houseguest. He means to say, “Thanks,” or maybe “I’m fine,” but it comes out as “Are you sick?”
Derek actually looks down at himself for a second as though to check if he’s sick or not before glaring at Stiles. “Next time I think you’re in danger, I’ll just leave you there to die, then,” he grinds out.
“No, dude, hang on,” Stiles says when Derek goes to leave again. “Got plans for tonight?” It hurts a little, how actually surprised Derek looks at the question, as though no one ever bothers to ask what he’s doing. He rubs a hand over the back of his neck and Stiles would almost swear that he blushes a little.
“Nothing concrete,” Derek hedges, and Stiles might not be a werewolf and he might not be a great liar, but he knows Derek’s lying through his teeth as surely as he knows that he’s not going to think about vectors and ships and knots one more time tonight, except with mild regret that he didn’t get more work done before getting distracted. This is unacceptable, though. Derek’s probably going to spend the night in his empty apartment or wandering around town all night, apparently listening to the heartbeats of humans in his pack and just generally being a creep.
Stiles stands up and shoves his hands in his pockets, looking down at the grey toes of his socks for a second before rocking back on his heels and saying to Derek, “Wanna hang out? Watch a movie? I was probably going to watch a couple episodes of MythBusters or something…”
And that’s how Stiles ends up spending the evening watching MythBusters with Derek Hale, trying not to attract the Sheriff’s attention by laughing too hard. Stiles laughs with his whole body and Derek ends up holding the laptop because of the time Stiles almost kicks it off his lap. It’s… nice. In the morning, Stiles will have to get up and possibly stand between his best friends and a group of hunters who might, like Gerard, not hesitate to kill them, with the pressures of high school and the pressures of the pack, but for now, he’s a regular eighteen-year-old, without a care in the world beyond which episode to watch next.
The laptop is on the desk when Stiles wakes up and he panics for a second, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands and trying to remember getting up and putting it on his desk. Usually he’ll just set it down on the floor beside his bed if he falls asleep while watching something. The hoodie he’d pulled off and tossed at the foot of his bed is draped neatly over the back of his chair, too, and he’s under the blankets. There’s no sign Derek was here at all.
School drags by incredibly slowly and yet it’s over too soon. He doesn’t mention it to his friends, but he just has a feeling about this afternoon. They know something’s wrong and, when Allison corners him between physics and calc, he knows she’s worried about the same things he is. Well, most of the same things. She doesn’t know that Derek apparently tucked him in last night, but he’s trying to forget about that and ignore how... nice, it seems. Besides, they have bigger problems at hand right now.
“I heard my dad tell them that two of them should talk to you and two should go talk to Peter,” she says in a rushed undertone. “Have you seen anything?”
Stiles shakes his head. “Derek hasn’t texted me, either,” he’s quick to reassure her. “Why Peter and not Derek?”
Allison shoots him a look as if to say the last two years haven’t made him any smarter and the answer should be obvious. That girl should stop hanging out with Lydia for a while. Stiles really doesn’t need the only two women in his life able to make him feel like an uneducated cretin with just a raise of the eyebrows and a specific tilt of the head. No wonder Allison has Scott wrapped around her little finger, though. The woman is a menace.
“Because Peter’s an adult, a complete bastard, and slightly less likely to try and rip their throats out than Derek is,” Allison explains. She finishes just in time for them to hear the bell signalling the end of passing time and the start of the last period of the day.
“Shit! Allison, I’ll text you if I meet them,” Stiles promises while grabbing his bag and darting off in the direction of calc and Mrs. Green’s aged wrath.
“You’re late, Mr. Stilinski.” The woman has a voice like someone punched a frog with emphysema in the throat and looks like someone took a rather corpulent person and sucked all the body out of them and left behind a skeleton covered in a skin that was three sizes too big, or maybe like someone left her in the bathtub too long and her whole skin got as wrinkly as her fingers.
“Er, yeah. I, uh, my locker wouldn’t open,” he hedges. She looks at him over the rims of her tortoise-shell glasses and purses her lips, causing about a thousand new wrinkles to appear across her already-heavily-crevassed face.
“Detention, Mr. Stilinski. Two hours.”