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The first movie night at the loft is Lydia's idea, which means it happens whether anyone agrees or not.
She shows up with a Blu-ray copy of The Notebook and drops it on the kitchen counter like she's filing paperwork, and by seven o'clock there are wolves on every available surface.
Nobody is happy about this except Lydia, who is happy about it in the particular way she's happy about things she knows will irritate people.
Stiles complains for approximately eleven minutes on the drive over and then doesn't bring it up again because Lydia had looked at him once and that was that.
The loft, however, is not a movie-watching space. No coffee table, no curtains, no television. Who doesn’t own a television? Stiles had asked. Derek just glared. They end up with Boyd holding the laptop, while everyone tries to watch on the limited size of the screen.
Stiles is wedged between Scott and Derek on the secondhand couch Derek acquired at some point without anyone asking questions about it. Stiles is pretty sure he got it from some curb. Stiles is curled on his side and pressed half across Scott’s legs and boneless against his side, which is just how they are. They’ve been like this since kindergarten.
Scott's phone buzzes about forty minutes in.
He checks it. Buzzes again. He makes a face that Stiles knows too well: mom. Scott gets up, and Stiles shifts off him automatically, barely registering it, eyes still on the screen.
And then, without any apparent decision about it, he tips the other direction. His knees find Derek’s thigh first, then his head lands against his upper arm while his own arms snake around the man’s elbow and lower arm.
Derek goes still. Because Stiles has suddenly attached himself like a baby koala, or barnacle. Derek can’t decide which is worse.
So he shifts his shoulder trying to shove the boy off, but Stiles just moves automatically with the motion.
Derek tries again. A more deliberate shift, angling his shoulder down.
Stiles slides with it like water and ends up somehow ends up more settled and more on Derek than he was before.
Derek looks across the couch at Scott, who has come back at some point and is standing at the armrest with his phone in his hand and an expression Derek has no framework for. It's not amusement exactly. It's the face of someone who learned something a long time ago and is watching someone else start to figure it out.
"He does this," Scott says quietly. Not an apology or explanation. Just information, offered plainly, and then Scott sits back down. "You'll get used to it."
Derek nods and thinks he’s been relieved of Stiles duty. That Stiles will naturally shift back to Scott.
He does not.
Derek looks down at Stiles.
Stiles is watching the movie. His arms are still around Derek's elbow. His heartbeat is even and slow in the particular way it gets when he's regulated, when whatever his nervous system is doing has quieted down into something manageable. He looks, Derek realizes, genuinely comfortable.
He glances at Scott who shrugs, “Doesn’t mean anything. He’s just a cuddler.”
Derek looks back at the screen.
Ryan Gosling is in a rowboat. There are swans. Derek has no idea how they got here narratively and doesn't care enough to reconstruct it.
Stiles shifts slightly, getting more comfortable.
Derek lets him as he stares at the swans.
The movie ends the way these movies end. Lydia looks satisfied. Stiles surfaces slowly, blinks, untangles himself from Derek's arm without comment and stretches his back and immediately says something about the ending that Lydia dismantles in two sentences. People find their shoes.
The loft empties in five minutes.
Derek sits on the couch for a while after.
It's a terrible couch.
He thinks about Stiles' heartbeat. Even and slow compared to his normal fast staccato.
Then he thinks about the rest of the room.
Isaac staying the whole movie instead of finding a reason to escape.
Boyd holding the laptop for two hours without complaint.
Lydia content and making sparse commentary despite being on the cold, hard floor.
Scott unbothered by all of it.
And Derek realizes it didn’t bother him either. Not really. Not like he thought it would.
He leans over to the laptop and opens it back up. Pulls up Netflix and continues watching a documentary about Penguins he was only half way through.