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When Derek hears it, he thinks that he’s finally lost his mind. He thinks, this is it, this is where his rope snaps, he has finally reached the limit of what he can take. Oddly, it’s not a bad day. It’s been kind of boring, really. He washed his car, did dishes, and he’s currently standing outside the apartment building with a bag of trash hearing things. Hearing crying, to be exact. And for a moment, he’s well and truly willing to admit he’s begun to hallucinate. Wouldn’t be the first time, although it would be the first that wasn’t caused by something that trying to kill him. Except the sound seems to echo almost like…
Derek closes the last of the distance between him and the Dumpster. He drops the garbage bag onto the ground next to it and hooks a hand and a foot on it to boost himself up to the edge. “Well, fuck,” he says when he sees it. At least he’s not hallucinating.
Ten minutes later, he’s gotten the thing out of the dumpster and into his apartment, wrapped up in a dryer-warmed towel because it’d been shivering. He stares at it as it burrows into the towel, completely lost as to what to do with it.
So he texts Scott. Could use some help here.
Scott takes nearly five minutes to reply, time in which Derek lets the thing nibble on his middle finger with small, sharp teeth. It doesn’t break the skin, but it’s not like he wouldn’t heal if it did anyways. Seems to like chewing on him, though. It’s probably hungry, but he has no friggin’ idea what to feed it.
Who’s hurt?
Derek prods gingerly at the thing’s sides and legs. It makes protesting noises at being disturbed, but it doesn’t seem to be in any pain, at least. Nobody. There’s a situation.
Can it wait? Stiles and I are doing stuff.
Derek frowns at his phone, frowns at the thing on his kitchen table. It’s distracted, trying to tear holes into his towel. Then he takes a picture of it and sends it to Scott. There’s a long pause while he waits for Scott to reply. Meanwhile, the thing decides to investigate and nearly falls off the table before Derek grabs it.
It’s small enough to fit in one of his hands.
He puts it carefully back onto the center of the towel and tries to make his racing heart settle.
Bring it to Deaton’s, Scott finally sends back.
“Well, she seems to be perfectly healthy. Somewhat underfed, but I’d put her at about eight weeks so fixing that shouldn’t be too complicated.” Deaton checks the kitten’s paws one by one, nodding. It’s mostly dark all over, with orange splotches a white chest, and pure, tiny white paws. “We’ll have to give her a flea bath and keep her overnight while we run a few tests just to make sure everything’s normal, but she should be able to go to the shelter tomorrow.”
Scott leans a hip against the exam table, grinning so hard his jaw goes more crooked than usual. He is enjoying this far too much, if you ask Derek. “You know, usually your situations are bloodier. When you said you had a situation, I was expecting vampires or witches or gnomes or something. Not… a kitty cat.”
Derek rolls his eyes so hard he’s surprised they don’t detach. “I found it in a dumpster,” he tells Deaton. “I couldn’t smell anyone around it, but tomorrow’s trash day so I wasn’t really trying to breathe too much anyways. But it tried to take a nose-dive off my kitchen table when I got it inside, too. It’s not hurt, right?”
“No, no,” Deaton says, chuckling. “She seems just fine.”
“Kind of an ugly thing, isn’t it?” Stiles asks.
Derek turns a glare on him. “Why are you even here?”
Stiles grins. “Because you plus a kitten is hilarious, Danny Zuko,” he says, reaching over and scratching the kitten’s neck.
The thing takes a swipe at him and takes a chunk of his arm with it. Stiles jolts backwards, trips over his own feet, and ends up on his ass on the floor.
Derek looks back at Deaton. “How would I go about keeping her?”
“There’s something really weird about you,” Stiles says, leaning into the open door of Derek’s car. He smells like soap and sleep and his sheets, and his hair is a mess. It’s three in the morning, but it’s also summer, so Derek is sort of surprised he’d been sleeping at all. Stiles is not exactly a morning creature when he doesn’t have to wake up for school. “I… honest to God, I really don’t know what to say about this.”
Derek sighs and flexes his hands against the steering wheel. He should have seen this coming. He should have known Stiles wouldn’t let this go. “Just get in.”
Stiles grins. “Say the thing.”
“I’ll call you a loser all you want, but I’m not telling you we’re going shopping.”
Stiles throws himself into the car. “Spoilsport,” he says, slamming the door and slumping down in the seat. Pouting.
Derek tries really hard to resist the urge to reach over, open the door, and kick Stiles right back out of his car. He is not a strong enough man to handle this. “Put your seatbelt on.”
Stiles looks down at the kitten in his cupholder. “She doesn’t have a seatbelt.”
“She’s a cat. You’re a person. Put your seatbelt on or I’m kicking you out and leaving you on the side of the road.”
Stiles rolls his eyes, probably because the threat lacks a little heft when they're all of two blocks from his house, but does as he’s told – finally – and buckles himself in. He spends a moment moving and twitching because, well, he’s Stiles. Then, after a long moment, he begins to dig something out of his hoodie pocket. “I brought something,” he says, absently chewing his bottom lip. “I, uh, googled a bunch of shit and checked with the pet store so they should be okay for her. Can I give her one?”
He has a Ziploc in his hand of what look the same cat treats as Derek bought himself when he got cat food and everything else the pamphlets Deaton gave him said the cat needed. He shrugs. “Go ahead and try. If she scratches you again, don’t blame me. It’s not my fault that she doesn’t like you.”
“Well, she’s gonna have to learn,” Stiles says, fumbling the bag open until he can get a treat out. “What’s her name, anyways?”
Derek lifts an eyebrow. “Exactly why is she going to have to learn to like you?”
“Because I’m awesome.” Stiles holds out the treat to the cat. She gives him a mistrustful look like he’s done something to it just by being nearby, sniffs at it for a long moment, and finally eats it. “There we go,” Stiles says, grinning as he reaches over to scratch her neck. She hisses, twists, and it’s only by the skin of his teeth that Stiles avoids her claws. “Hey!”
“Bad cat,” Derek says flatly. “No. Stop that.”
“Asshole.” Stiles frowns at the cat. The cat meows back at him, slightly over-large ears going flat against her head. Derek reaches over an absent hand to stroke her back to soothe her as Stiles speaks again. “I think she needs a name. I need something to call her when I’m complaining about her clawing my skin off.”
“Honey.”
Stiles raises an eyebrow. “Uh… sweetheart?”
Derek takes a slow breath. He’s not going to kick Stiles out of the car. He’s not going to kick Stiles out of the car. He’s not going to kick Stiles out of the car. It’s just – it’s not fair when he does that. “I’ve been calling her Honey. Nothing else fit her.”
“Honey Hale. Wow. There’s a name.”
He’s not going to kick Stiles out of a moving car, Derek repeats silently to himself. He’s human. He’d go splat and there’d be a huge mess, and really, that’d just be cruel to do to some poor highway worker. “She doesn’t get – she’s a cat, she doesn’t need a last name.”
“Honey. Hale,” Stiles repeats, far too pleased with himself. “You named your cat Honey Hale.”
Derek rolls his eyes. “No, apparently you named her that.”
Stiles shrugs. “Could be worse.”
Derek waits, because Stiles will tell him. If it pops into his head, Stiles will tell him.
“Well,” Stiles says, grinning. “I still have a dog food bowl with Scott written on it.”
“I’m not even asking why,” Derek says, and pulls the car over to the side of the road. He turns off the engine and drops the keys into the empty cupholder. The cat watches the fall of them a little too closely, and, after a second’s hesitation, he tosses them onto Stiles’ lap. He really doesn’t need his kitten trying to eat his car keys. “Don’t run the engine unless you need to get out of here.”
“What?” Stiles fumbles at the seatbelt. “No, I’m coming with you. That’s why you brought me.”
“No, I brought you because you would have followed anyways. Stay here,” Derek says, his back teeth clenched. “I’ll call you or come get you if I need help. Call me if you see anything. Watch the cat.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Stiles says from where he’s sitting on the ground. And… okay, ‘sitting’ was a generous term for what Stiles had done when the last body had fallen. Derek doesn’t think he’s hurt beyond a few cuts and bruises, but he goes over to him anyways and checks, nudges the kid’s face up to better see the bruise under his jaw. “I swear, I didn’t do anything. I stayed in the car this time except that’s a bad idea, too, apparently.”
Derek frowns. “You hurt anywhere else?”
Stiles’ heartbeat skyrockets. Delayed reaction to the adrenaline, probably. It’s a pretty normal reaction for Stiles. He’s always calm through all of the action, right up until everything ends and he’s actually safe. Then his heart goes nuts.
After a moment, he shakes his head. “No. I’m fine. Except for your stupid wildcat scratched the hell out of me when I grabbed her,” he says, shoving Honey at Derek. She squawks at the mistreatment like the tiny drama queen she is. “Here, take her so she gets her freaking claws out of my wrist.”
Derek takes the cat with one hand – she’s still small enough that he only needs one to hold her – and catches Stiles’ hand with the other. He’s got long scratches gouged into his skin, deep enough to drip blood down his wrist. Jesus Christ. “Why didn’t you just leave her in the car, numb nuts?”
Stiles kind of jerks his chin at one of the bodies without looking directly at it. “Cliché remarks about sharpening his claws. You named the thing Honey Hale. She’s got enough problems in her life from that, she doesn’t need to be a werewolf chew toy.” Stiles shoves his sleeve up and makes a face, carefully flexing his fingers. “Ugh. Why didn’t you leave her at home?”
“It was just supposed to be an get-in, get-out, get-gone thing,” Derek says, gingerly turning Stiles’ hand over. “She gets lonely in the loft when nobody’s there.”
Stiles stares at him. “You’re fucking with me.”
Derek has half an ear out for the cat as he showers. The first time he showered after she came home with him, he kept the bathroom door partway open and the dumb thing had decided she needed to explore the shower. He’d had a nasty set of claw marks on his calves for a few minutes before they healed once she discovered she did not, actually, like the shower. So now he showers as quickly as he can while desperately hoping Honey doesn’t destroy anything because she’s a little hellion who shredded the crap out of his coffee table the other week.
He hears the squeaky brakes of the Jeep long before it even gets anywhere near his apartment and reminds himself to harass Stiles about getting those fixed. When the Jeep gets closer, he can feel Scott at the back of his head, vaguely. It’s not the same kind of connection he has with Isaac or any of his other pack members, but there’s something. They’re connected, but he doesn’t really… he doesn’t get it, honestly. But it’s there.
They let themselves in – Derek didn’t give either of them a key; Stiles just showed up one day and had one – as he’s finishing washing shampoo out of his hair. He closes the bathroom door when he gets out of the shower because Scott will bitch otherwise even if he’s downstairs. Derek’s not hugely modest, but he supposes it’s different when you grow up human.
Derek brushes his teeth as they bang around downstairs, probably helping themselves to whatever’s in his fridge. They’re both nineteen and starting their second years of college in a few months. They shouldn’t still eat like they’re trying to fill a hollow leg. Scott, okay, Scott has an excuse. Werewolf metabolisms run faster than a human metabolism so it burns calories quicker. But Derek has seen Stiles out-eat them all, including himself, especially when it comes to pizza or KFC.
“Get it, come on, you can get it!” Stiles shouts from downstairs and Derek pauses in the middle of brushing his fangs.
That sounds ominous. Like the time they broke his only lamp, a window and Isaac’s leg in ten minutes because they tried to play football with the spiral stairs. Derek hastily towels dry and pulls his jeans on, skipping a shirt because he so doesn’t trust those two to be alone with nothing to do. He takes the stairs two at a time, towel in hand to dry his still-dripping hair.
And then freezes at the bottom.
Stiles is perched on the back of his couch, cheering on Scott, who’s waving around some sort of wand attached to a mouse on a string. A pink mouse. With pink and purple feathers. That his cat is currently, gleefully, trying to kill.
“The hell are you two doing?” he asks in disbelief.
Stiles falls off the couch.
Derek sighs and begins roughly towelling his hair dry.
“We brought toys so she won’t tear up your couch or get eaten by monsters,” Stiles says from the ground.
“You can’t keep driving around with her in your cupholder,” Scott says, still playing keep away with Honey. “It’s kind of weird, for one thing. And she’s gonna get too big soon anyways.”
“So you got her a pink mouse?” Derek asks, raising an eyebrow. He’ll admit her apparent enjoyment of it is sort of adorable. She keeps leaping for it and landing, paws slamming down just on tips of the feathers, before Scott pulls it away again.
Scott frowns. “And purple. And pink’s cool, dude. Don’t be a dick.”
“I think I broke my back,” Stiles says, still on the floor. “You could have warned me, Scott.”
Scott shrugs, the feather wand-thing moving with him, swinging in Stiles’ direction.
The cat dives for it and pounces on Stiles’ face.
Stiles has a black eye, a broken rib and a sprained ankle. He didn’t explode, though, so Derek is considering it a successful night. And okay, the black eye is about a week old and from Derek's cat, but everything else is from tonight. But he's alive. And at least he didn’t explode. “I’m so fucking pissed at you.”
Derek shoves his head into his pillow and groans. “Can you go be pissed somewhere else?”
Everything’s too loud. He got caught in the worst of the blast when Scott passed out and couldn’t get himself out of the warehouse Lydia, Stiles, and Danny were trapped in. The healing from that is hard and slow and everything’s too bright and too loud and too sharp.
“No, you owe me, asshole,” Stiles says, his fingers working the edge of Derek’s sheet. It’s bunched up between them since Derek’s only recently grew back large amounts of his skin and it’s still too new and sensitive to have anything touching it. The only thing he’s wearing is boxers and that’s only because Scott bitched. “You almost stuck me with your stupid cat. And she doesn’t even like me yet. You can’t die until she learns to like me.”
“Who says you get my cat if I die?” Derek mumbled into the pillow. He would really, really like to be asleep right now, okay? He dislocated his knee, broke his arm so badly he’s pretty sure he’s going to end up with bone pieces working their way through his skin in a few days, and there was that thing where he was on fire a few hours ago. He wants to go to sleep for a few dozen hours, eat about half a cow’s worth of steak when he doesn’t feel like he’s going to puke at any moment, and then sleep some more. He really, really doesn’t want to be having this conversation right now.
“Me.” Stiles shifts, hissing out a sharp breath. “Boyd gets your car. Isaac gets the loft. Scott gets nothing. I get your dumbass cat. But she has to like me first, otherwise this’ll be miserable for everyone.”
Derek snorts, curling tighter into himself when it hurts. “Nice to know you’ve planned for my inevitable death.”
Stiles reaches down and touches the back of Derek’s neck. “Remember the time with the hunters from Utah?”
“Not much of it.” He got shot that time with some sort of weird strain of Wolfsbane. By the time the others found him, he was delirious.
“Boyd said it while you were doing the thing you do when you almost die. You laughed. It was kind of gross because you were coughing up blood and black goo, but you laughed.” Stiles inhales slowly. “Isaac gets the loft because you own it and he has nowhere else to go, so you wouldn’t leave him in the lurch like that. Scott gets nothing because you don’t like Scott. I get the cat because you like the cat.”
“That makes no sense,” Derek says, shifting restlessly. He finally settles, close up against Stiles’ hip, because the kid is stupid warm and he lost a ton of blood and it always makes him cold when he loses so much. He’s not really used to be cold, at least not when he’s not hurt. “Honey doesn’t even like you.”
“I’m working on that,” Stiles says, digging his fingers into the back of Derek’s neck. “I think she’s starting to associate me with treats.”
“You’re gonna make her fat,” Derek mumbles, reaching an arm across Stiles’ thighs.
“I’m going to make her like me.”
“Mmhm,” Derek says and passes out.
Derek looks slowly from the ugliest thing he’s ever seen to Stiles and back again. For a long, long moment, he has no words for this situation. And he knows he’s not the most verbose person in the world, but this, this is beyond him.
Then, finally, he finds them. Or it, really.
“No.”
Stiles flails with basically his entire body. Derek has a moment of concern for the life of his rug versus the bucket of coffee in Stiles’ hand. “You can’t get rid of it! She likes it. She hasn’t liked anything I’ve picked out. This is an important step in our relationship and you can’t make me take it away.”
“Your relationship... with my cat.”
Stiles starts to tick things off on his fingers and Derek – Derek absolutely does not lose focus for a second staring at them. “She didn’t like the lizard. She tore the squeaker thing out of the mouse I got her and hid it under the couch. When I tried to get her to chase a laser, she just attacked me. She lost a tooth on the chew toy I got her, dude.”
Derek shrugs. “It’s normal for kittens her age to lose teeth. Usually they just swallow them.”
“Except she doesn’t trust it anymore,” Stiles argues, running the fingers of one hand through his hair. “So that was a failure.”
“She likes the frozen washcloths. That was a good idea.”
Stiles waves him off. “I saw that online, it doesn’t count.”
Derek crosses his arms over his chest. “You told me about it. She likes that. I’m not having a giant ass fish staring at me in my bedroom. That’s just weird, Stiles.”
“You drove around with your kitten in your car’s cupholder for a month. I’m pretty sure she qualifies as a weird cat. Or you qualify as her weird owner.” Stiles rolls his eyes, draining the last of the giant coffee cup he was carrying. He’s more settled than he usually is on the weekend, no smell of Adderall under his skin, so it’s probably not his first. Derek tries not to think about how weird it is he knows that as Stiles sets the empty cup down on his coffee table. “C’mon, what’s the big deal?”
“She likes to sleep in my room.”
“So?”
“So how the hell am I supposed to sleep with that thing staring at me?” He’s already doubled the amount of times he jerks off in the shower because he feels weird about locking her out of his bedroom to masturbate. It’s weirder when she’s in there, though, even if he’s sure she’s asleep. He’d only made that mistake once. He is not masturbating with that thing watching.
“But she likes it,” Stiles says, his voice oddly upset.
Derek rubs his hand over his eyes. It’s too early for this. He doesn’t even know where Stiles found a giant fucking orange and blue fish-shaped cat bed at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. He’s not sure he wants to know. “Why do you even care so much if she likes you or not?”
Stiles blinks and drops his eyes, a muscle in his jaw working. “Because.”
Derek waits a second, then frowns, and tries to soften his voice. Stiles isn't joking. Possibly fucking with him a little, because that's just what Stiles does, but he's not acting like he's joking. “Because why?”
“Because we’re – because you’re – argh.” Stiles shakes his head, closes the distance between them, grabs Derek’s T-shirt – and kisses him.
Derek groans and wraps his fingers around Stiles’ jaw, because finally, finally. Stiles flirts, in that weird, obnoxious, obvious way he does when he likes someone, the way Derek watched him do it with Lydia, and then that girl he liked in his junior year, then had been shocked to realize Stiles was turning on him midway through his senior year. Stiles is going to be a sophomore in college after summer and Derek has waited for him to make an actual move for months.
And his mouth is quite possibly the most sweetly torturous thing Derek has ever experienced, soft and hot and kind of amazing. He tastes like the bitterness of black coffee, the sweetness of some sort of candy – and it’s seven in the morning, why is he eating candy so early? – and something that is just – just Stiles.
Stiles pulls back a bare few inches, his fingers encircling Derek’s wrists. He blinks a few times and clear his throat. “That’s – that’s kind of why.”
“I figured.” Derek rubs his thumb across Stiles’ bottom lip. He wants to leave that lip kiss-swollen and red, wants to see how much he could mark up the long, pale expanse of Stiles’ throat, wants to just touch him everywhere he can. “God, I’ve been wanting you to do that for ages.”
“You knew?”
“You’re kind of obvious when you like someone, Stiles.”
The kid turns so red it’s almost concerning and stumbles a step backwards. “Why didn’t you say something? You could have – you knew? You should have told me.”
Derek frowns, his hands suddenly nowhere near Stiles. “It’s – I’m kind of the worst person you could have feelings for. I thought you’d grow out of it at first. And then I tried to ignore it because you were just… you were so young, and I didn’t want to – and then I didn’t want to ignore it anymore.” He scrubs his palm over his jaw. “But you were still – you’re still young. It was… I thought it’d be better if you made the first move. So I wasn’t pressuring you.”
“I think that’s the most words you’ve ever said to me,” Stiles says and leaps onto Derek, arms around his shoulders and legs going around his waist.
Derek stumbles backwards, his back colliding with the wall as he finds himself pressed up close and personal with Stiles. Okay. That’s – he can work with that, he thinks vaguely, feeling Stiles’ erection pressing against his, and then he's not thinking about much at all anymore. “I… Stiles–”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, rolling his hips down suddenly. “Yeah, I know.”
Derek presses his fingers into Stiles’ hips, hissing in a breath. “Uh. I – we’re not doing this in front of my cat. It’s too weird, trust me.”
“I – I am not in any shape to reply to that in the way I normally would. I’ve got a catnip mouse stuffed in my backpack,” Stiles says breathlessly. “Wanna get her kitten high and fool around while she’s distracted?”
Derek laughs into the curve of Stiles’ neck.
“Okay,” Stiles says, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. “You liked the fish bed. You seemed to enjoy massacring the catnip mouse. You liked the washcloth thing, I heard. You like the cat treats. I have provided things you like. We can be bros now, right?”
Derek rolls onto his side, using one arm to pillow his head. The actual pillows are… somewhere. Not across the top of the bed where he’s lying, that’s for sure. He’s not even entirely sure how he ended up here exactly… but he’s comfortable, and there’s a Stiles and a very small kitten who thinks she deserves to take up far more space than she needs spread out across the rest of his bed. He’s not giving up what little space he’s claimed.
He stretches, back arching as he pops his neck. “You scratch really hard, you know. Try not doing that.”
Stiles glares at him. “You could have told me that weeks ago.”
Derek grins, slow and content. “I didn’t know until you clawed my back up when you came.”
Stiles gapes for a moment, faux-offended, then shakes himself and reaches out to stroke his hand down Honey’s back. She purrs and snuggles down deeper into the sheets. Derek is somewhat convinced she’s still goofy from the catnip, but Stiles is grinning like she hung the moon, so he’s not saying anything.
“There we go,” Stiles says, grinning. “See. I told you that you were gonna like me.”
Derek shakes his head and reaches over to tug at Stiles. “C’mere, you dork.”
“If I’d known you’d be this touchy-feely, I would have taken advantage of you a long time ago,” Stiles says, flopping down against – well, mostly on top of Derek, really, leaning back against his torso like he’s a freaking chair.
Derek runs a hand through Stiles’ ridiculous sex hair and tries not to let on how much he enjoys it.
Stiles turns his head to look at Derek. “You know why she has to like me now, right?”
“I’m getting the idea,” Derek replies.