Archive of Our Own ^beta

Stiles starts to notice gradually, somewhere around his seventeenth birthday.

The constant headaches, he thinks, are because of the lack of sleep he's been getting. The disoriented feeling when he wakes up and walks into the kitchen to find his dad rubbing at his face over coffee and case files well, that's probably just because he's not immediately in danger.

That sort of swing would be disorienting for anyone.

No one is downstairs when Stiles rolls out of bed a little after one in the afternoon, which is great because Stiles doesn't have to pretend he's not wincing around his headache with every step when he walks into the kitchen and he also doesn't have to explain 'summer rules sleeping' again, either. He pops a few ibuprofen and grabs the grocery list off the magnet in the fridge and heads out with it, determined to ignore his headache and enjoy the early-summer sunshine.

The headaches suck, though, bounce his focus all over the place when he gets them sharp and pounding in his temple. He’s halfway through the grocery list for the week when he almost runs into Mrs. Wells in the cereal aisle, after a long squinting match with the back of two boxes of almost identical oatmeal. He goes with the heart-healthy kind, even though it’s not written in neat cursive on his grocery list and he’s not sure they’ve ever had it in the house before.

Mrs. Wells glares at him, and shuffles past while Stiles apologizes. He’s not even sure she can hear him, and it’s not like he actually hit her. He shakes his head, clear of the splitting pain moments before, and tosses the heart-healthy oatmeal in his cart.

Stiles pushes his cart around the next aisle with more caution, just in case. One of the family-sized carts is taking up most of the space between the wall and the end of the in-between aisle; it's stopped at a crooked angle and piled high with food.

It's owner, Stiles surmises, is the bulk of leather-jacket clad guy peering contemplatively at two huge packages of ribeye cut meat in his hands, bent over the side of the meat cooler and weighing both between his hands.

People who look like that from behind do not usually show up in Beacon Hills. Part of Stiles, when he has that thought, immediately disagrees, makes Stiles feel like this is the sort of person Stiles sees all the time while doing the grocery shopping for the week. Which is ridiculous Stiles would definitely remember that ass, at least.

He's maybe been staring for a little longer than socially acceptable, because a young woman rounds the corner in front of him and looks at him and then the guy holding steak and laughs.

"Derek," she says, sing-song and still on a laugh, "you're blocking the entire aisle with the cart you asshole."

Derek. Derek. Stiles wracks his brain for why that name is so familiar. There's a kid named Derek in his Econ class this year, but unless he went all biological engineered super-soldier over the weekend, the Derek in front of him, now currently turning around and tossing one large pack of steak into the cart from a few feet away, is definitely not someone Stiles knows.

"Look at this poor kid, didn't even want to say anything," the woman continues. "It's the jacket, I'm telling you, there is no reason to walk around in a leather jacket in the summer unless you're actively trying to intimidate everyone you come across."

"I --" Stiles starts because he wasn't intimidated, he was, well, staring at Derek's leather jacket for different reasons.

Both of them ignore him. "Maybe that's what I want, Laura," Derek says, turning back to the cooler and tossing another package of meat into the cart.

The woman, apparently Laura, deposits an armful of fresh produce on top and as Stiles watches, Derek's face twists into an over-exaggerated scowl at the sight.

"Baby bro," Laura says, "you are as intimidating as a golden retriever."

Derek growls in a way that Stiles definitely finds a little intimidating, right up in Laura's face quicker than Stiles can blink, but she just rolls his eyes at him.

Stiles is still stuck halfway inside the cereal aisle.

Derek moves the cart out of the way a moment later, opening up enough space for Stiles to move into finally.

"Sorry," he says, grinning quick.

"It's really unsanitary to put produce on top of meat," is what Stiles blurts out instead of thanks, disarmed by the grinning.

"It's all packaged," Derek says, one eyebrow suddenly up.

"We'll be fine," Laura agrees. She sounds kind of amused about it, though Stiles can't really see how cross-contamination and bacteria are that amusing.

"Plastic wrap is porous," he says, and waves one hand up in down in an illustrative motion he only belatedly realizes makes no sense. Both of them are looking at him and he shrugs and turns his cart, heading toward the pasta.

He sees them once more, checking out two lanes over from him when he's done shopping. Laura stands with her arms crossed by the register while Derek unloads the cart, almost done by the time Stiles is halfway through his smaller amount of groceries.

He tries not to pay too much attention, the familiarity of Derek, someone he knows he doesn't know, feeling weird and hard in his throat, like he should say something. He catches bits of their conversation, a laugh from Laura and a snort from Derek when the cashier reads their astronomical grocery total.

"You have dad's card, right?" Laura asks, still mid-laugh, and Derek pulls a credit card out of his wallet and hands it over.

He must be younger than Stiles thought then, probably. He takes out his mom's card and pays a few minutes later, messing up the debit pin twice as he watches Derek and Laura choose, inexplicably, to carry all their groceries instead of taking the cart outside. They walk out loaded down with way too many bags in each hand like it's nothing, and when Stiles looks back at the second non-approved notice on the card machine he's pleased to note at least everyone else in his immediate vicinity thinks it's weird for two people to be carrying that much alone, too.

"Try again or run it as credit?" the cashier suggests, nodding down at Stiles' mom's debit, and Stiles nods back and tries again, this time with success.

\

Stiles wakes up with a headache and a dry mouth and the sudden need to throw up. He rolls over to lean over the side of his bed and swallows mid-gag when he catches sight of a pair of feet right in his sight line.

“Jesus,” he groans, flipping back up against his pillows to hold his head in his hands.

“I need to read something in the bestiary,” Derek says, instead of, oh, an apology or anything normal while Stiles squints at him through his headache and tries to breathe normally.

“Is anyone in immediate danger?” Stiles asks.

“No,” Derek says.

“You seriously need to get wifi,” he says. When Derek says nothing and sits expectantly in Stiles’ desk chair, Stiles slides back down the bed.

“I don’t know why everything has to be in the cloud,” Derek says. If he were the type of guy to do airquotes, there would definitely have been airquotes. As it is, he mostly looks like the ‘cloud’ is something that smells particularly bad. Though that could also be Stiles’ room. “Password?”

“The password is technologyalpha. Referencing me, if you were were wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” Derek says, typing with more force than is probably necessary, and that’s that.

Stiles can’t fall back asleep knowing he’s not alone, and he’s still trying to fight off nausea, so he spends an indeterminable amount of time watching Derek’s back while trying to wake up.

Derek breaks the silence eventually, pausing in his methodical mouse clicking from page to page. “Are you?” he asks. It seems to count as a full question.

“I’m fine,” Stiles says. “What are you looking up?”

“Nothing,” Derek says. “Something -- Laura said once, about the house.”

Stiles can count the number of times Derek has mentioned Laura out loud on one hand, and he’s too startled to say anything. He’s hit with a memory of her he doesn’t remember, laughing in the grocery store, and his head hurts. “Laura --” he starts, trying to place the memory, maybe share it with Derek, but he can’t figure out the context, doesn’t think it’s right at all in his head, like maybe he’s remembering a dream instead.

“What?”

“I wish I’d gotten to meet her,” Stiles says, and then winces.

Derek doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t type for a long time, either.

“What are you doing today?” Derek asks, a long time later.

“Uh,” Stiles says, disoriented.

“Want to map property line changes? Isaac and Scott might help.”

“Wow, that sounds like so much fun.”

Derek rolls back toward the computer, shoulders up.

Stiles rolls his eyes at Derek’s back. “Well, I’m not doing anything else. Why not.”

/

Stiles feels sore when he wakes up. He walked way too many miles mapping out the Hale property lines and playing catch-up with a bunch of tireless werewolves and he is never, ever doing something so thankless for Derek Hale ever again.

He rolls out of bed on a stretch that’s more of a slinky-slide to the floor and stays on the ground for a little bit with his head in his hands to try and press the headache he’s got going on out of his brain with his palms.

Eventually, though, he has to pee and his stomach aches in a less body-achey way and more of a hungry one, so he pitstops at the bathroom and then takes the stairs two at a time, thinking longingly of pancakes, maybe with real butter.

The thought seems wrong in his head, makes it ache a little more as he skips the last stair. Why wouldn’t there be real butter? But it makes him stop short entirely when he rounds the corner to the kitchen and sees his mom is already sitting at the kitchen table.

“Oh, so there wasn’t an elephant upstairs,” she says, looking up at him, half a smile on her face that falls away when she sees him. “What’s wrong?”

"Nothing," Stiles says, shaking his head at her and stepping into the room fully. "Just, for a second I thought dad --"

"Oh, honey. I think that sometimes, too."

It hurts his head to think about his dad and the way he can almost perfectly picture him sitting in the same place his mom is, reading the paper over black coffee, makes his temples pound. He thinks he should feel a little hollower at the mental images and wonders when that feeling went away.

“I think I’m going to go for a run,” he says, suddenly not hungry at all.

She smiles up at him from her coffee, something in her eyes that Stiles suddenly doesn’t want to look at at all. “Eat something first, and don’t forget your phone.”

Stiles swigs some orange juice from the carton in the fridge, weirdly unnerved by the way the pulp slides down his throat, and he eats an untoasted bagel on his way up the stairs and as he changes into something more suitable for last-minute running. He can’t find his favorite loose Batman shirt and it makes him anxious.

He breezes past his mom on the way out, lets her voice telling him not to get lost follow him out the door.

So, naturally, he gets lost about a half hour into running. He didn’t want to run on the road so he turned off into the woods about five minutes past the end of his street. He runs a deer path for a while before he can’t track it any longer and he slows to a walk, trying to find something familiar to point him in the right direction.

He walks for at least an hour, just starting to get anxious about it, when some branches crack behind him.

“Hey, grocery kid!”

Stiles swings around, nearly falls over a the root of a tree as he moves. Derek, from the grocery store, is jogging toward him.

“Hey,” Stiles says, vowel held out as he steadies himself in time for Derek to stop a few feet in front of him. “So, I’m kinda lost, here.”

“You’re on Hale property,” Derek says.

“I was running,” Stiles says, unnecessarily. He can definitely tell Derek was running; his shirt is sticking a little to his chest in a distracting way, and he’s wearing baggy shorts that stop just above his knees.

“Long way,” Derek says.

Stiles scratches the back of his head, feeling awkward. “Yeah. Maybe you could point me in the right direction?”

“The house is only fifteen minutes away,” Derek says, with a shrug. “I can drive you back.”

“I can just -- yeah, actually, that sounds better. I don’t get any service out here, anyway.” Derek doesn’t strike Stiles as the type of person who usually offers rides, for whatever reason, and Stiles’ bagel calories are already completely worn off, so getting home faster sounds like the better option, here.

“Hey,” Stiles says, right as Derek turns away to start walking, “isn’t there a stream somewhere around here?” He’s suddenly sure there is, maybe twenty yards away where the treeline dips down. He has a weird memory of marking it on a map and maybe getting pushed into it when he tried to push Derek into-- but that’s not right, and seems like a weirdly specific dream.

“Yeah, it’s up a little way,” Derek says, with one eyebrow raised.

“Huh,” Stiles says.

\

When Stiles jumps the last two stairs and turns into the kitchen he’s got his mouth halfway open around “Morning, Mom,” before his dad folds down his paper at the kitchen table to look at him.

“Oh, good, I thought maybe you’d brought a small elephant home in the night and it found the stairs.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and heads to the fridge so he can stick his head in and take a moment to breathe, feeling disoriented. “We’re out of OJ,” he says.

There’s a rustle of paper from the table, and the sound of his dad setting his coffee mug back on the table. “They only had the kinds with pulp, so I didn’t bother,” he says.

“Mom liked the kind with pulp, right?” Stiles says, after a pause. When he shuts the fridge with the milk in his hand and turns around, his dad is giving him a strange look over the top of the paper.

“She did, yeah. I drank it for years because it would have been pointless to constantly buy two kinds of orange juice.”

“Is it healthier?” Stiles will have to look it up; if his dad drank it for years and it’s healthier than the pulpless, he should go back to drinking it.

“Hell if I know, kid,” says his dad. “If you’re out later, see if you can get the list of stuff we need on the fridge.”

/

Stiles feels a sort of fuzzy and disorienting awareness when he wakes up and finds his mom in the kitchen the next day. It’s like a low-grade fever, over his skin and in his head, where he knows something is wrong but can’t figure out exactly what it is.

He takes the grocery list from his mom without complaint though, kisses her cheek when she leaves to go to her shift at work, and promises to have dinner for her when she gets home.

(“That’s a horrifying thought,” she says, smiling indulgently at him. “Just don’t burn the house down.”

Stiles stands in the driveway in front of his jeep for a while, trying to figure out what it means. He’s pretty good at cooking. He makes dinner all the time for his dad.

And, at that thought, he hops in his jeep and turns the radio all the way up for his ride to the supermarket.)

Stiles gets most of his grocery shopping done before he sees Derek in produce, and he goes up and down several aisles blindly before he doubles back to creepily watch him pick out avocados. He squeezes each one and then smells it, which sticks with Stiles oddly, and drags up a vividly clear memory that makes Stiles turn his cart around and almost knock over a canned soup display in his haste.

Feeling anxious and weird, with the same persistent little ache at the back of his head, Stiles waits by his jeep. Something clicks into place a little the more he stands there, thinking about his house and his mother and his father about Derek’s face, and he feels like he’s coming to a conclusion he already came to. Parallel universes. Stranger things, he immediately thinks, and then can’t immediately come up with anything stranger that’s happened to him.

Derek comes out into the parking lot with his cart overflowing with groceries and Stiles straightens up and leans away from his jeep.

"So," Stiles blurts, walking into Derek’s path. "You're a werewolf."

Derek spins around and Stiles is pressed up against the side of his jeep before he can say anything else.

"My brain to mouth filter is still developing," Stiles says with a little wheeze. He talks on autopilot: "It's fine, though, I'm not going to say anything. My frie-- I knew someone who was, once. I just thought I'd say something."

The pressure of Derek's arm against his chest leaves, but he stays close, caging Stiles against the car.

"You can't just go shouting that around in parking lots," Derek says. "Your friend must have been an idiot."

"Hey," Stiles says, not sure who to be offended for, himself or his out of nowhere -- imaginary? real? -- friend, "And I know that! I just wanted to let you know that I knew."

"Why?" Derek asks, stepping back even more.

Stiles shrugs; he hadn't really thought that far. He just wanted to know if the Hales were a pack here, too. In this parallel universe, or whatever.

"Do you want the bite?" Derek asks, suddenly looming a little predatory. "It's not just something you get on a whim, kid. It's a --"

"Gift?" Stiles cuts in, shaking his head. He almost wishes he could make a joke about the people Derek's given the bite as an alpha, but a pain flares up in his head when he even thinks about it, remembering more and more at once. "I'm good. I have no desire to be turned, thanks."

Derek steps back again, looking blatantly curious. Stiles wasn't lying, has a lot wrapped up in that choice, and even if Derek doesn't know any of that about him he can tell it's not a lie.

"Anyway, you couldn't, you're not an alpha," Stiles says, smirks a little. Saying that to the other Derek would not go over very well, probably.

Derek raises one eyebrow towards him. "How do you know?"

“Just a feeling,” Stiles says. “I’m having a lot of them, right now.”

Derek stares him down for a bit. Stiles stares unabashedly back, tries to figure out why, exactly, Derek’s clean-shaven face is throwing off the general picture. Regardless, Derek is definitely attractive, and if he doesn’t say anything soon, Stiles feels like the more he stares the more likely he is to blurt it out.

“You should come to dinner,” Derek says, finally.

“I -- what?”

Derek shrugs. “Do you want to, or not?”

\

Stiles wakes up, rolls over until his face is smashed in his pillow and goes over every detail he can remember about having dinner with the entire Hale family.

It kills his head, the more he thinks about it, but he can’t stop thinking about it, either.

Can’t stop thinking about two rooms of people over for a traditional family dinner night, about being delegated to the kid’s table with Derek and a bunch of much younger cousins and a few siblings, even though Derek protested about guests and being an adult and mom with his eyebrows while Stiles shook from holding in laughter at the absurdity of it all while Laura took the last seat at the adult table with a satisfied looking plop into her chair.

He can’t stop thinking about how weird it was, about how good the food was, about how happy the family seemed, about how Derek ate with a weird sort of precision and deftly intercepted two pea-launch attacks from one of the younger ones across the table.

He can’t stop remembering how loose Derek’s shoulders were the whole time, how many expressions his face went through, how he still smiled a little less and talked a lot less than everyone else in the room, he --

Stiles’ dad knocks on his door and interrupts, “Stiles, you up, son? I’m headed out.”

“Yeah,” Stiles calls, muffled by his pillows. “All awake.”

When he finally rolls rightside-up and shuts his brain off long enough to stop hurting, he realizes he has to go to Deaton. This supernatural-adjacent stuff is really awesome, sometimes, but right now it’s annoying and full of headaches and only one person who might know shit and will probably definitely be vague enough about it to give Stiles a bonus headache.

The door to the vets office says closed with a call number when Stiles gets there an hour later, but the lights are on and the door swings forward when he presses on it, so Stiles goes in anyway and calls out.

“Just a moment,” Deaton calls, so Stiles leans on the counter and waits.

"Stiles," Deaton says when he walks around to the front counter, peeling off surgical gloves. "I wasn't expecting you." He doesn't look unsurprised to see Stiles at all.

Stiles taps his fingers on the counter, tries to figure out how to phrase what he wants to say without sounding like a lunatic, still not entirely convinced he's not just having a series of vivid dreams.

"Alternate realities," he settles on, blurting it out. "Do you know anything about those, like, existing?"

Deaton hums for a drawn out period of time, looking neutrally over the wall past Stiles' head.

"I think the term you're looking for is parallel universe, and they exist, yes," Deaton says.

"What do you know about them?"

Deaton thinks on that. "People can exist in both," he says, "it's been documented, but not extensively. Once the person realizes it, notable in anyone who began to document the experience, it becomes... difficult for one to exist in both with that realization."

"Difficult how?" Stiles asks.

"Stiles," Deaton says. "Are you experiencing something like this?"

"Difficult how?" Stiles repeats.

Deaton shakes his head. "Headaches, blackouts, various other head-related trauma, mostly. Disintegration of function, sometimes, if the person can't block one universe. Stiles?"

"I don't know if I --" Stiles starts. "I'm just noticing. Sometimes I wake up and it's my mom in the kitchen and Scott's parents never divorced and the Hales are --"

"Ah," Deaton says, and then trails off. "You're very special, Stiles."

Stiles snorts. His head hurts.

"You'll have to choose," Deaton says. "Eventually. Soon. You're already experiencing side-effects, aren't you?"

"Choose?" Stiles asks. "What, like pick one? Either one?"

Deaton nods. "One," he says.

"What happens to the other?"

"That is less documented," Deaton says. "I am not sure anyone knows entirely. There are just guesses."

“But both exist? How is that even possible?”

Deaton hums and doesn’t answer.

There are a hundred things Stiles needs to know. "How much time do I have?" Stiles settles on.

Deaton looks at him, looks through him, it feels like. "It will get worse," Deaton says. "Not unlivable for a while, pain-wise, but maybe in other ways. Come to me when you've made your choice, Stiles. The Hales will know where to find me in the parallel, I suspect, if you choose to stay there."

/

Derek works in the coffee shop with the cookies Stiles’ mom really likes.

“You have a job,” Stiles blurts, when he looks up from the display case of various baked goods to Derek’s greeting.

Derek raises an eyebrow at him.

“Weird, whatever,” Stiles says, mostly to himself, and goes back to looking at baked goods.

“Get one of the cream cheese brownies,” Derek says. “If all of them sell today, they become a regular menu item.”

“What, did you make them?” Stiles tries to think of something better to say, really, but when he looks up again Derek is casually leaning over the display case with his arms testing the seams of the cafe-branded polo he has on and it shorts out Stiles’ brain a little.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, “you cook?”

Derek raises an eyebrow again. “Is this twenty questions, Stiles?”

Stiles’ head hurts again, the persistent dull ache at the top of his neck flaring up. An echo of Deaton’s words float around, remind him he doesn’t have much time here, with this Derek. Unless -- unless he stayed here.

“If I buy a brownie and a few of those red velvet cookies, can it be?”

Derek snorts. “Only if you get decaf, too,” he says. “I have a feeling twenty questions might be unbearable with extra caffeine in you.”

“Hey,” Stiles says, but he forgets to be offended a little later after his first bite of brownie.

/

After a few more days, Stiles finds it harder to be sure of where he wakes up. When he wakes up where his mom is alive and everything is different, it feels like he wakes up wide awake from a nightmare. On the other side, he remembers everything clearly about his time here; on this side, everything seems sort of fuzzy when he tries to remember -- the hard edges of Derek, Scott’s unquestioned presence in his life.

Stiles seeks out Derek when he can, in this universe. It helps that this Derek seems to not mind when he’s around, laughs openly but with a little bit of surprise, and still doesn’t mind flaunting his werewolf power by elbowing him into various surfaces.

Stiles tries to Skype with Scott, once, but the call is quick and Scott seems happy but confused at the contact, talks mostly about how his dad is teaching him to surf and a girl he met on the beach.

So Stiles ends up at the cafe more often than not, and he and this Derek, with the same eyebrows but the easier laugh, start having lunch together.

(Stiles doesn’t remember how it happens, exactly, only that he memorizes Derek’s schedule at the cafe and shows up multiple times around the half hour Derek has to take his break and he shows up one day only to meet Derek at the front door.

“I don’t work every single day, Stiles,” Derek says.

Stiles, feeling caught, maybe gapes at him a little bit. “I wasn’t -- the cookies are really good! Maybe I’m addicted and have a problem, and you’re just trivializing the --”

“Do you want to go to lunch or not? I just spent an hour waiting for you to show up and I’m starved.”)

\

Stiles spends mornings he wakes up slowly with his face pressed into his pillow, trying to remember as much of his time in the other universe as he can and refusing to feel irrational about it.

Time feels kind of blurry, in the mornings, when Stiles’ head is aching and he’s putting off making the choice he knows he has to.

Derek is in his room when he wakes up the morning after Stiles spends his time with the other Derek trying to get him to win a record amount of arcade tickets at the tacky pizza place in south Beacon Hills. This Derek is typing away at Stiles’ computer with his shoulders hunched over, and he spins around when Stiles sits up against his headboard.

“Good, you’re awake, I can’t get into the thing,” he says.

Stiles squints at him. “Boundaries,” he complains around a yawn, tugging his blanket up a little further. “And you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Just come over here,” Derek says, and spins back around.

Stiles watches his back some more, thinks about the two Dereks he knows until he has to put his palms against his eyes. “Hey,” he says, in a rush, “want to go get lunch with me?”

“What,” Derek says. “It’s 8:30 in the morning, Stiles. Why would we get lunch?”

“It’s eight in the morning?” Stiles says. “Go away, jesus.”

“Fix the thing first,” Derek says.

I like the other you better, Stiles doesn’t say. (He also doesn’t say: I like the other you.) He does, however, roll out of bed after a few more minutes and restart his laptop for Derek, reaching over Derek’s body and pulling the bestiary back up on the screen.

“There,” he says.

“Go back to bed,” Derek says.

Stiles’ head hurts and his mouth feels dry and he’s tired, so he does. When he wakes up, it’s a little after one in the afternoon and Derek isn’t in his room, definitely not around to go out for lunch. Stiles blames the disappointment he feels on residual feelings from the other universe.

/

It’s sunny out, and they’re eating in the park across from the burger place Stiles never lets his dad eat at. Here, his mom brings home burgers after her shift at work and eats her curly fries extra spicy. Stiles squints up at Derek from where he’s currently sprawled lengthwise on the picnic bench, head only a few inches from Derek’s thigh.

"Our Uncle Peter's here for most the month," Derek says around his mouthful of fries.

"Ugh, I hate him," Stiles says, automatic before he can stop himself or even realizes the connection.

Derek swallows his mouthful and gives Stiles a weird look. "You've never met him," he says slowly. "I mean, I'm not his biggest fan or anything. Laura adores him, though, so don't think of saying that around her. He always brings her things from his investment trips in Europe."

That stings, the bleed-over of the history Stiles knows that doesn't exist here. If Laura felt that way there, too, and Peter Stiles' shakes his head to get rid of the oncoming instant headache and laughs instead, entirely too self-conscious.

"I just hate people named Peter," he says, a stupid cover-up.

Derek snorts. "You are so weird," he says.

Stiles elbows him in the thigh as best as he can. “I’m aware,” he says. “Thanks.”

Derek reaches out to abort another jab, hand wrapping around Stiles’ forearm below his elbow. He keeps it there, eats the rest of his fries one-handed, and Stiles watches him upside-down with his eyes-half closed and his body warm and his head blissfully pain-free.

They start having lunch at the Hale house, too, after a week and half into the whole accidental-on-purpose lunch ritual when Stiles is running low on pocket money and orders a water from Derek at the cafe.

There’s sun streaming in every window and no one home, so Stiles hops up on the counter and watches Derek move around the kitchen, gathering stuff for sandwiches.

“Do you think you have all the ingredients for brownies, too?” Stiles asks hopefully.

Derek shoots him a glare. “You know when I’m not at work I like to actually enjoy being not at work.”

“Hey,” Stiles says, but he can’t muster the right kind of offended, because Derek just kind of said he enjoys not being at work with Stiles. Kind of. “I’ll tip you?”

“I need at least a full thing of cream cheese,” Derek says, with an over-heavy sigh.

Stiles hops off the counter and the momentum briefly presses him against Derek’s back.

“I’ll check,” he offers, closer to Derek’s ear than he means to.

After a still moment, Derek nudges him toward the fridge with his hip. “I’m not promising anything.”

“And yet I see brownies in my future,” Stiles says, opening the fridge and hiding his grin behind the door. He spots an unopened bar of cream cheese easily. Everything here feels easy, he thinks, still grinning, and he grabs the bar and throws it at Derek’s head.

\

“When you have to make a tough decision -- and I’m talking like, the closest thing to life and death without any actual death involved, probably -- what do you do? Lists? Dice? Coin flip?”

Stiles’ dad looks up from his paper, folds it neatly and opens his mouth to say something before shaking his head. “You know,” he says, “I actually don’t want to know what this is about.”

“Hah,” Stiles says. “No, but seriously.”

“I guess it depends, kiddo. You’re growing up pretty okay, and you mostly make good choices. You’ll figure it out.”

Stiles makes a face. “Wow, you really haven’t had enough coffee this morning, have you? Good choices? Pod person?”

His dad gives him a rueful grin. “I could use another cup,” he agrees.

Stiles pours him another cup of coffee and pops some toast for himself in the toaster.

“You know if you need help, though, I--” his dad starts.

“I’m good, dad, thanks.”

He’s not, though. He heads upstairs with his toast and does all of his summer homework. All of it, straight through his dad’s double shift, until he passes out still-clothed in his bed to the first early-morning birdsong of the next day.

/

Stiles spends the next day he wakes up with in the other version of his life with his mom. She sleeps until the afternoon, and he watches her make lasagna when she wakes up. He sits on the counter even though he’s too big to really pull it off, but she just grins at him and pats at his knee as she moves around.

Stiles groans around his first mouthful of lasagna. He hasn't had it in so long and all the flavors are still the same, the ricotta just the right texture, the sauce baked into the bottom and top layers of noodles with a day-old perfection.

"So good," he says, and his mom slips off her oven mitts and wipes her hands perfunctorily on her thighs before sitting across from him. "You're going to burn your mouth," she says. "You're seventeen now, do I really have to tell you that every time we have lasagna?"

Stiles just tilts his fork to cut another bite and groans around it.

"Dad and I could never figure out how to make it like this," he says when he swallows, and then freezes when he sees his mom's face.

She smiles softly at him. "When did you two try and make my lasagna? I don't remember that."

"Once or twice," Stiles lies, and the look on her face turns into a sad sort of fond that Stiles has to look away from. "Clearly we had to throw away the evidence of how terrible it was."

Stiles had tried a few times to make it on his own, to have it ready for dinner when his dad got off shift, but he could never get the texture right, burned two tries because he was sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets, staring blankly at the oven with no sense of time as he pictured his mom making dinner.

"It's really good," he repeats, watching her absently chew her own bite, looking wistfully far-away from this particular dinner table. "Thanks."

"You can take some for lunch tomorrow, if you want. I’m going to take some for the overnight shift, but I’ll pack a few containers away."

"Sold," Stiles says. He nudges her ankle under the table when she grins at him, rolls her eyes.

She looks more present, after that. Stiles couldn't feel further away unless he was actually at the table with his dad.

-

Stiles can't focus on his research. The laptop is too hot on his thighs and the beam he's sitting with his back against on the porch is rough and splintered in places.

Derek and Scott are really going at it out on the lawn, which doesn't help with Stiles' focus. Their tentative truce is based on nothing near trust, which Stiles can understand at a base level, even if he thinks they should both get over themselves. He winces at the crack of the bones in Scott's arm; Isaac rushes over and gets thrown back by Derek for his efforts, and Scott is on his feet in the second it takes Derek to move his attention toward Isaac.

At least Scott is learning something, then. Stiles definitely isn’t learning anything right now.

Stiles gets up after a few more seconds of watching, feeling vaguely nauseous the longer he stares at Derek fighting, face twisted up and wolfish. He's careful with his claws, which Stiles thinks is both stupid and a nice gesture, knowing Scott won't heal as fast with all the alpha-mojo.

He catches himself in a half-crouch, starting to blur images together in his mind; Derek fighting Laura claw-to-claw in this same yard, with Stiles wincing at each new sickening crunch of bone or wet tear of flesh. The images get all twisted up, the adrenaline-fueled grin on Derek's face as he threw Laura bodily to the ground mixing up with his brow furrowed concentration with each blow at Scott.

Stiles isn't sure what Scott would do if Derek started grinning and laughing each time he landed a hit, but he's pretty sure he wouldn't laugh back and hit harder, like Laura.

Stiles' head hurts, a blinding white pain behind his eyes and he crumples back against the porch beam before he can catch himself.

The fight, he notices with only the barest of awareness, stops almost instantly in front of him and Scott is bleeding all over the porch in front of him when he opens his eyes again.

Derek is on the bottom step, watching, and Stiles makes eye contact with him first. Sees the draw of his eyebrows, the set of his mouth, the line of his shoulders; not the other Derek. Not even close, and it makes Stiles head hurt again, less intense, more like the throb of a real headache.

"I'm fine," Stiles says, waving off Scott. "Too many gore-y sound effects or something, I'm just going to go inside."

Derek attacks Scott from behind when Stiles gets over the threshold and into the house and the grin he shoots at Stiles is entirely self-serving, but Stiles smiles back anyway, leaving enough space for Derek to pause when he catches it and Scott to get a momentary advantage, tumbling them both down the front steps.

Stiles watches them for a moment more before turning into the house and shutting the new front door behind him. He can see all the way to the backyard from the front door, out of a hole in the wall a few yards away.

He hasn't been in the burnt out shell of the Hale house that much, and definitely not since he suddenly had hazy memories of the way it looked before.

This probably isn't the best place to be if Stiles wants to get rid of his headache. He makes it a few steps in, watching his feet, picturing the black and white tiled floor in the entranceway, the way it spread out to the right and into the kitchen. He stops at the foot of the stairs and sits at the bottom most one, leans his head on his hands and closes his eyes.

Derek shakes him back into awareness some indeterminable amount of time, later. Stiles feels like he might have been on the other side, with the other Derek, but he can’t call back the memory.

“You okay?” Derek asks. “Scott got called home and Isaac went with him.”

Stiles doesn’t particularly want to lift his head, so he nods into his knees in response.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but maybe Deaton--”

“Deaton already knows,” Stiles says, muffled. He doesn’t mean to sound as distressed as he does, but he’s tired and kind of wants to pass out again.

Stiles can feel Derek sit down on the bottom step next to him. “So something is wrong,” Derek says.

Stiles lifts his head up a little. “I should go,” he says, but his head falls right back down against his knees without his permission.

Derek doesn’t say anything, just sits next to him in silence. It’s not as uncomfortable as it should be, and Stiles wonders if that’s because of how comfortable he feels with the other Derek.

Stiles sits up fully after a few minutes and stares out the open front door. “There used to be black and white tile up to these stairs from the door,” he says, and turns to look at Derek.

“And the kitchen cabinets were white,” he adds, and then he can’t stop: “The one white chair by the window in the living room -- how did that even stay clean, with so many people? And there were so many windows, with gauzy drapes, so everything felt close to the outside, and everything felt so --”

“Stiles,” Derek says, weighted, a few minutes into Stiles tour of his now-burnt down house.

“Shit,” Stiles says. “I have to go.”

“Stiles,” Derek repeats, and grabs Stiles’ wrist when he tries to stand.

Stiles laughs, nervous and overwhelmed. Derek is looking at him, expressionless.

“There’s another universe,” Stiles says. “Where everything is different. The house --” he waves an arm “-- and everyone. Only me, right?”

“What? How did you get there?” Derek asks.

Stiles thinks he means: How do I go there, but this Derek is harder to read than the Derek Stiles has spent hours trying to learn to read.

“I’m dealing with it,” Stiles says.

Unexpectedly, Derek turns toward him on the stair. “Do you need help, Stiles?”

“No,” Stiles says. “I just have to make a choice. Easier than it sounds.”

They keep sitting on the stair until Stiles feels clear-headed enough to stand up. He’s not sure why Derek stays sitting with him, but he does, and he follows Stiles out to his jeep and watches him pull out and down the driveway.

/

The next time Stiles wakes up and finds his mom in the kitchen pouring over manila files, he feels off. Not just like he’s going to throw up, or like his head wants to explode, more like he’s being pinched inward. It’s not a good feelings.

“Hey,” he asks his mom, “do you know anyone named Deaton?”

She doesn’t look up from her paperwork. “No, honey, why?”

Stiles watches the way her hair falls around her face. He remembers her cutting it short, before he and dad lost her. He remembers her without any hair at all, and it aches in his stomach. She’s healthy, here, smiling as something as she flips a page. Stiles likes that she’ll never have to cut her hair, if she doesn’t want to.

“I’m going to go to the cafe,” he says. “Do you want me to bring back one of those cookies?”

She looks up, then. Smiles at him. “Definitely. Say hi to Derek Hale for me, too, won’t you?”

Stiles splutters, just a little, caught off guard. His mom has a little twinkle in her eye.

“Mom,” he says, for lack of anything else. She just hums and goes back to her paperwork.

When he gets to the diner he feels more wiped out from the short walk than he should be, but Derek is coming out from around the counter and untying his apron from around his back.

“Why do you have to wear the polos and the aprons?” Stiles asks.

Derek rolls his eyes. “I just work here,” he says.

“Nice comeback.”

“Go for a walk?” Derek asks, and the expression on his face is so open, jarring, when Stiles tries to compare it in his head.

Stiles groans and is suddenly overcome with the realization he has to throw up.

“Raincheck,” he says. “I think I have to head home.”

He passes out on his bed and pretends the slight fall to Derek’s expression isn’t the last thing he can focus on before he sees black.

\

It’s getting bad, past the point where Stiles can ignore the pain and the dizziness and the sort of blurry-quality to everything he thinks about. He’s just not ready, he can do a few more days, maybe even a week. He tells himself that for a week, until he’s throwing up every morning and looking up meditation tips up on the internet in his spare time.

Scott makes up his mind for him.

They’re playing Mario Kart at his house, this overly-violent three player split screen game with Isaac, all of them shoved toward the middle of Scott’s couch for the best vantage point.

Isaac is winning by a mile, the jerk, and Stiles sees his opportunity when he rounds a bend. The consequences mean he won’t win himself, but if Scott wins it at least means Isaac won’t win for a sixth fucking time in a row.

“Come on,” Isaac says, when he gets blown off track.

Scott cruises in on the last lap to win and throws his controller down in a combo-move with a fist pump.

Stiles laughs at him. “You’re welcome,” he says.

“What would I do without you, man?” Scott crows, pulling Stiles into a one-armed hug.

“Probably lose a lot of things more often,” Stiles says, but he grins into Scott’s shoulder anyway. It’s just Mario Kart, but it clicks something a lot more important into place, something Stiles already knew.

In this universe, Stiles is needed. Scott needs him, and his dad needs him more than his mom. This Beacon Hills needs him more, too, Stiles knows. The other -- it’s more whole. The Hale pack is whole. Beacon Hills is better, and the cafe closest to Stiles’ house makes the best brownies and cookies, which is irrelevant.

Isaac slumps back against the couch, knocking Stiles backwards and out of his too-deep-for-videogame-night thoughts. “New game,” Isaac says.

“No way,” Scott says, dropping back down on Stiles’ other side. “Not after that. Vote!”

“Aye,” Stiles says, raising his hand.

“Two to one,” Scott counts, so they play more Mario Kart and Stiles tries to not feel like he made a life-changing choice while sitting smushed in-between too werewolves on the McCall’s new couch.

He has a bandaid on his index finger from a particularly nasty papercut the other day, and it’s throwing off his controller skills. He complains about it the next round after losing spectacularly. “It’s on my knuckle hair, too,” he says, waving his hand around.

“Excuses, excuses,” Scott says, jabbing him with his elbow.

“Just rip it off,” Isaac suggests. “That’s what you’re supposed to do with bandaids. Get it over with.”

So, Isaac helps make up Stiles’ mind, too.

/

Stiles wakes up and doesn’t know which version of his life he’s in. He runs out of an empty house, not knowing if his dad has a late patrol or his mom has an overnighter. He realizes, halfway to his destination, that he could’ve just looked in the master bedroom. He never goes in there, never thought to, but he’s suddenly aware how different it would look between universes. All the little things that would be inside, his mom’s favorite perfume maybe almost full on the dresser instead of nearly empty from all the times he snuck in to spray it in the room and lean back against the dresser to remember her when he was younger.)

The glow light on his watch says 3am when he gets close enough to make out the Hale house in the distance, standing completely whole in it’s natural tree clearing, one of the bottom windows glowing grey-orange from a light left on.

He bends over and leans on his own knees, trying to catch his breath. He hears the front door to the house open and winces, mind going blank and headachy when he tries to quickly think of a reason for being where he is.

"Stiles? What's wrong?" Derek's voice makes Stiles jump, even though he expected it.

"Nothing," Stiles lies. Derek makes a face at him, seeing right through it. He's lit up by the yellow light on the front porch, half his face in shadow, but the half Stiles can see is grinning at him.

"Nothing important," Stiles amends, breath steadier, and that will have to do.

"Nothing important at 3 in the morning, Stiles? You ran here." Derek is close enough that Stiles can see the half-aborted motion he makes, reaching toward Stiles’ shoulder but not close enough to close the distance.

"Want to go for that walk?" Stiles asks, conscious of how close they are to the house and how many people are inside.

"And watch you trip over your own feet on every root? Wouldn't miss it," Derek says.

Stiles wants to tell him, thought maybe he might find a way to say something. It's irrelevant, here, though. The longer they walk in silence through the woods, Stiles picking his way slowly and deliberately over the ground, he realizes he can't say anything at all.

On the other side of all this, that Derek knows. He's aware that this universe or whatever exists for Stiles and he probably understands what it means. This Derek, even if he believed Stiles and Stiles brought him to Deaton to explain or did any of the other half-assed things he thought might help, he wouldn't really understand. Stiles doesn't even especially want to explain to Derek that somewhere else, on some other timeline, Derek has no family, has barely a shell of their house, has his own delinquent and sorry little pack.

Stiles doesn't want to explain that somewhere else, he and Derek aren't friends. Or, maybe they are, if only the beginning of the definition is applied. Not like this, though. Derek doesn't casually reach out to touch the small of Stiles' back, balance him as they walk deeper into the woods, until Stiles can barely see where they are and Derek doesn't move his hand away.

"Seriously," Derek says, some time later. "What's wrong?”

"Just thinking too much," Stiles says. That, at least, is honest.

"Well, stop," Derek says, and his hand on Stiles' back scrunches into Stiles' shirt, yanking him back just enough that he loses balance and topples back into Derek’s chest.

“Seriously?” Stiles groans, and jerks out with his elbow in retaliation, grinning at the audible noise Derek lets out when Stiles connects with his stomach.

“It’s on,” Derek says.

“Unfair werewolf advantage,” Stiles yells, darting out of Derek’s grip. “I can’t see for shit at night, come on.” He runs, anyway, because this is -- less work than thinking, than realizing he’s made up his mind. Derek tackles him within a minute, when Stiles almost runs into a tree, and falls backwards so Stiles lands on top of him.

“Jesus,” Stiles says, and is promptly rolled the other way around, his back connecting with ground and the rest of him connecting with way too much Derek Hale weight.

“Happy?” Stiles says, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah,” Derek says.

"You are happy," Stiles says, mostly for himself as he squints up at Derek with a pain behind his eyes, letting his face come into focus.

"Am I not supposed to be?" Derek asks, grinning down at where he has Stiles pinned and not looking away.

Stiles lets his head drop down onto the grass when he looks away.

"Hey," Derek says. "You're not, though."

"I am," Stiles says. He is.

He's lying outside in the middle of the night with Derek over top of him in the grass, he's breathing hard from the chase and the fall and Derek is half-grinning at him, hand flexing over both of Stiles' wrists like he's not sure if he should let go. Stiles feels pretty selfishly happy right now, when he lets everything else fall to the wayside.

"Hey," he says, quiet, "don't like, werewolf punch me in a second, okay?"

He wiggles one of his wrists out of Derek's grip and Derek lets him, watching him almost predatorily, catching each movement. Stiles feels like his heart is suddenly racing, can't imagine what it's like to Derek.

He reaches up to loop his free arm around Derek's neck and pulls at him, arching his own neck up in the process. He gives Derek a moment's warning, breathes out on the tiniest brush of their lips, and then surges up the rest of the way.

Derek makes a low noise, rolls them over before Stiles can even get out of his own head and start actually kissing Derek.

Stiles ends up in a sort of half straddle, half sprawl over Derek's hips, with Derek catching his eye just briefly before pushing up and kissing him, all slick heat, nothing held back, and Stiles groans with Derek's bottom lip between both of his own and kisses back with everything he's got rolled up inside of him, experience in this particular area not even mattering with all he wants to get across.

He's not sure Derek understands the intensity he probably knows Stiles is feeling; he doesn't have to, though, licks over Stiles' lips and into his mouth as good as he's getting, even better, and stretches out Stiles' shirt with his hands all up and down Stiles' spine.

They break when Stiles can't breathe, eyes watering with how much he doesn't want to lose this moment, but Derek shoves him back and sits up to catch his weight, both arms looping around Stiles' back.

"I am going to get so much shit from Laura about this," Derek says, nuzzling into the tip of Stiles' neck.

"He's just a kid!" Stiles mimics, in a butchering of Laura's voice.

"This is what you call trying out a healthy relationship?" Derek mocks, voice pitched ridiculously high, higher than Laura's.

"Ouch," Stiles says. "Left turn into self-depreciation-ville."

Derek rolls his shoulders back and laughs, dragging Stiles back down with him.

Stiles wakes up over-warm from the morning sun and Derek pressed against his back.

Derek's nose presses against the back of Stiles' neck when he shifts to get out from under his arm. "Early," Derek says, voice gritty with sleep.

"Outdoors," Stiles counter, turning to look at Derek as he rolls out into a graceless sprawl over the matted down part of the grass where Stiles' body just was.

"I have to get home," Stiles says. Derek throws an arm over his eyes to block out the sun and Stiles shakes his head, breathing out a fond sort of noise through his nose that wants to escape his throat instead.

"Stay," Derek says. His free arm reaches out blindly until he gets to Stiles’ arm and his fingers wrap loosely around Stiles’ wrist.

"I have something important to do," Stiles says.

Derek grunts, but Stiles can see the shape of his smile under his forearm. "You'll come for the barbeque later right? Peter’s leaving."

At that, Stiles snorts. "A celebration barbeque, then?”

Derek's arm slides off his face so he can actually grin up at Stiles. It's disorienting, makes Stiles' head hurt. "Something like that. You'll be there?"

Stiles nods, because a nod can't be a lie and he's not even sure what will happen over here after everything with Deaton, now that he’s made up his mind. Derek reaches out, presses his thumbs into Stiles’ cheeks; they must be apple-red from sleeping in the sun, they burn under Derek’s fingertips.

Stiles rolls up into a kneel, kisses Derek's mouth where his face is tipped up against the sun before he stands all at once, afraid if he lingers a second longer he won't ever leave. Derek laughs, warm, as Stiles jogs out of the clearing, and Stiles feel his lips tingle with phantom pressure on the entire walk back to the edge of the Hale property and his jeep.

Stiles speeds on the way home, sneaks in the front door to find his mom sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the paper.

She looks at him, catches his obvious deer the the headlights expression, and laughs.

"I'm not going to ask," she says, and Stiles can't figure out if she's aiming for stern or amused, so he gives her a wary smile. "If it happens again, though, we're talking full out interrogation, you hear me? And I learned from the best."

Stiles walks the rest of the way in and kisses her forehead, lingers a little too long and inhales.

"Hey," he says. "What did you say the secret ingredient to your lasagna was?"

She pats his arm as he pulls away. "I don't think you deserve that knowledge right now."

"Please?"

"Lemon zest," she says, with an indulgent smile. "Now go to bed, you teenage hooligan. I'll be home for dinner."

"Thanks, mom," he says. “You’re the best, you know that?”

She laughs, head tipped back, and Stiles turns for the stairs before he can get caught up in just looking at her for too long.

\

"Now," Stiles says into his phone, barely half-awake. He’s practically still fumbling for a good grip on it.

Deaton hums slowly on the other side of the line. "Are you sure?" he asks.

Stiles' head is throbbing and his eyes feel dry and raw. Maybe in some third universe he let himself cry before he woke up again, to sounds of the radio scanner downstairs and his dad calling up the stairs at him. Right now he doesn’t have time.

"I'm sure," he says.

Deaton doesn’t press any further, which Stiles is beyond thankful for, even half-awake. "I'm assuming you'd rather do it at the Hale house than your own?"

The other common ground between both of Stiles' lives. He rolls his shoulders back into his pillow and sits up with his phone in one hand and agrees. His dad doesn't need to walk in on a parallel universe exorcism, or whatever. There are other reasons, too, but that's the one Deaton's probably thinking, so Stiles thinks it, too.

"I'll have the things ready in an hour, Stiles," Deaton says.

"Great," Stiles says and lays heavily back down when Deaton hangs up.

-

Scott is there with Deaton, and Derek is a few feet away from them both at the farthest edge of the porch, watching Stiles walk up to everyone.

“I still don’t really get it, dude, but I’m here for you,” Scott says when Stiles gets up the steps.

Stiles knocks their shoulders together and nods at Deaton, jaw set. “Ready when you are.”

“This may hurt you,” Deaton says.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Of course, why wouldn’t it?” he says, but no one else seems to think it’s as funny as he does.

“And it is a one time choice,” Deaton continues, calmly. “Are you quite sure you --”

“I’m sure,” Stiles says, as much hardness as he can muster behind it.

Deaton gestures for all of them to step inside and Stiles pauses after Deaton and Scott have gone in to turn to Derek.

“You don’t have to be here,” he says.

“It’s my house.”

“I mean during this,” Stiles says.

Derek doesn’t say anything for a few moments. “If you don’t want me to be here.”

“It’s fine,” Stiles says, “I don’t actually care, you can stay.” It comes out of his mouth quickly and not fully with his consent; once he says it, he realizes he doesn’t actually want Derek to leave.

Derek stares at him for a moment longer and then gestures with his arm at the door, a you first sort of thing, and Stiles steps inside.

Deaton has things laid out in a circle and Scott is unpacking more things from a leather satchel by the stairs.

“What do I need to do?” Stiles asks. He waves his hands a bit. “Any archaic Latin to chant? What part of my body do I need to knife?”

“None of that,” Deaton says, while Scott looks torn between laughter and worry behind him. “All you need to do is lay there and think of being grounded to this world.”

Vague, but Stiles can work with it. Deaton is looking expectantly at the space he’s cleared in the middle of the floor, but Stiles is stupidly and suddenly wary to step inside. All he wants to run through in his mind, contrary to what Deaton’s asked, is the best things about what he’s severing ties to: his mother’s smell, the laugh lines on her face, the smell of her perfume lingering in each room of the house, the Hales and --

“Will he forget everything, from the other?” Derek asks, cutting into Stiles’ thoughts.

Stiles can feel Derek looking at him from behind, but he looks at Deaton expectantly instead of turning around.

“As far as I can tell, with what little documentation is available, the other memories will fade gradually, though the awareness of the actual event will remain.”

Stiles steps into the circle and lays down without saying anything, catches an odd frozen moment of a glance when he has to turn to face where Derek is standing. “Okay,” he says.

Even when Stiles closes his eyes, he can feel Derek watching intently. Once his eyes are shut the awareness feels almost grounding. Stiles focuses on his father’s face, on Scott’s presence in the room, and on the burnt ash and wet pine smell that lingers in the room, nothing like warm, lived-in smells of the same space in the other universe.

-

"Everyone left?" Stiles asks, sitting up gingerly.

"Deaton had to get back to the vet and Scott had that Argent dinner thing," Derek says, crouched down to peer at him.

"I'm fine," Stiles says. "Nice and refreshed." He's not that fine, and he's not even sure if it will need to register in his heartbeat for Derek to know it's a lie.

"Stiles," Derek says, as Stiles stands up slowly and starts making his way toward the door.

Derek follows him, which Stiles doesn't really want right now.

"Stiles," Derek repeats. "When you were unconscious. You kept saying my name, asking for me."

Stiles stills; the door to outside is wide open. He continues a few feet and sits down on the top step of the porch. "Not you," he says, with what he can manage of an awkward apologetic grin.

Derek sits down next to him, stretches his legs out where Stiles just pulls his knees up and closer.

"I'm sure that -- universe?" Derek starts, pausing in question.

"Sure," Stiles says, nodding into his knees.

"I'm sure it didn't just cease to exist because you left it," Derek says. "Deaton didn't make it sound that way."

Stiles makes a noncommittal noise.

"And you probably didn't just disappear when you fell asleep," Derek adds.

He doesn't seem to want to elaborate, but Stiles gets the gist of it; he's still in that universe, living his life, maybe living it with Derek and Derek's family and his mom's absent singing and amazing lasagna and Derek's wide toothy grin.

"Look," Derek says, after a long stretch of silence. "If you think you made the wrong choice, maybe Deaton can help you reverse it."

"Maybe he could," Stiles says and Derek moves a little next to him. "But I made up my mind. I'm here."

"This where you wanted to be? Over that?"

Stiles thinks about wanting to be here, on this porch, with Derek next to him. He could have that in either choice, at it's barest; just the action of sitting in this place with Derek next to him, nothing else in consideration. He understands why Derek would question the choice, though, and the reason makes something sink down heavy into his gut. If he had been able to give the choice of universes to this Derek somehow, instead, he would have in a heartbeat.

"I'm needed here more," Stiles settles on. It's what made up his mind. "My dad needs me more than my mom, and Scott needs me, here."

"The last remaining sane member of the Hales will probably benefit from it, too," Derek says.

Stiles turns to look at him and laughs, startled, kind of painful. "Understatement of the century," he says. "Who else is going to save your ass?"

Derek rolls his eyes.

"The other Derek," Stiles says, after a pause. "He had everyone else, there." It’s a selfish statement; he’s sure this Derek doesn’t need the reminder, but it makes Stiles feel a little better to say out loud.

Derek's expression drops, just slightly. "He probably appreciated you more, even with everyone."

Stiles wants to laugh again, burst the little hot bubble in his chest at that, the insight of it, all the things underneath that Derek isn't stating out right but Stiles thinks he understands at some base level. Instead he shrugs, the motion brushing his shoulder against Derek's.

"Were you and I -- you and him?" Derek asks.

Stiles looks away from him, looks out at the shadows stretching out over the front yard, the dead trees still standing tall, new summer growth at the tops, still green with the last rays of the sun.

"Maybe," Stiles says. He tries to remember it clearly, the way Derek's mouth and hands felt, the way he laughed, the way he stuffed his face with way too much food at once and let Stiles sit on the hood of the camaro, hand on his back as they walked through the woods and preserve, talking, the feel of Derek's thumbs pressing into the apple of Stiles' cheeks to feel the red sunburn there, how heavy his body felt with Derek rolling over him. It's all hazy around the edges, like Deaton said. Like a dream. "Just last night, really."

"It was different, easier," he adds, when he can feel Derek's stare.

"I think you made the right choice," Derek says. "Staying here."

"It wasn't a hard choice," Stiles says, though it's mostly a lie and he knows Derek can tell.

"I would have made the selfish choice," Derek says, a confirmation Stiles didn’t need. Derek stands all at once, brushing his hands off on the back of his thighs. "If I had all of that. I wouldn’t blame you."

"That wouldn't be selfish," Stiles says. "To have your whole family again? That would just be the obvious choice."

"You, too," Derek offers, detached from Stiles' train of thought.

Stiles stands, stretches on the middle step. He's not sure what to say to that or how to take it.

Derek turns and looks at him, a shade too intense, making Stiles overly conscious of the stretch of his body and the things Derek doesn't know about it. This Derek.

The only Derek, really.

"I'm making lasagna tonight," Stiles says, jumping up and physically shaking his body out. "Want to grab groceries with me?"

"Do I get some of the lasagna out of this?" Derek asks.

"And leave me with nothing to serve my dad when he gets home? Contrary to appearance, I know for a fact you can pack away a whole lasagna under those abs, buddy."

"So make two," Derek says, like it's obvious. "I'll help," he adds, looking less sure.

"You can buy the ingredients," Stiles says, nodding. He starts off in a jog toward the jeep, almost expecting Derek to stay behind, but he's sliding in the passenger side of the jeep before Stiles even has a leg up. “Actually, you can make some brownies.”

Derek looks dubious, halfway to sitting, and Stiles laughs at his expression. "I'll run home after," Derek says, buckling. There's a tentative curve of something not quite a smile on his face, like he's as unsure as Stiles is if this is okay.

"You're gonna throw up all over the woods, running after you've stuffed your wolfy face with the deliciousness that is going to be this lasagna. It's my mom's recipe, it'll blow your mind," Stiles says.

"I'll let it settle first," Derek counters, which Stiles translates as Derek hanging around after dinner for a little while. Stiles isn't sure what they'll even talk around, with this Derek being the one Stiles is much less practiced in casual conversation with, life-threatening situations in the clear, and Stiles being pretty talked-out over parallel universe emotional upheaval, but he kind of wants to find out.

He feels a little disoriented when he pulls out and onto the long drive out of the Hale house, but there's no headache accompanying it, just a sort of bone-heavy summer warmth as he runs through the list of ingredients in his head out loud on the way to the grocery store, with Derek beside him.