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After the Alpha pack had been taken care of (thanks to Team Human + Derek since the rest of the pack weren’t allowed to kill due to the fact that they would then gain Alpha rank), Beacon Hills had actually been pretty quiet. There hadn’t been witches or kanimas or even a mis-aimed Omega in the territory. So the Pack helped Derek move temporarily into a loft the summer before their senior year, Boyd and Isaac going with Derek for a weekend to New York to pack up the rest of Derek’s things out of storage and drive a moving truck all the way back to California.
They’d spent all summer together on the Hale land, clearing out a new stretch for the new house, deciding to leave the old one where it was as a sort of gruesome monument to Derek’s family. The wolves did most of the work at the beginning, hauling away trees and laying down the foundation. Somewhere in the time it took Stiles and Derek to draw up the blueprints for the house - Stiles did the drawing because that’s where he’d finally found his groove as he’d put it - and actually building the house, a relationship had bloomed there. Suddenly it wasn’t a master bedroom and Stiles’ bedroom, it was a master bedroom and a guest room just in case. But then Stiles, Allison, and Lydia got to join in, putting up the skeleton of the house and slowly giving it muscle and skin until the house had a touch of everybody.
The Pack gathered there most nights, everyone had a room there to sleep over if they needed - the couples all doubling up (Scott and Allison, Erica and Boyd, Isaac and Danny, Stiles and Derek) and Lydia getting her own room even though everyone knew she wouldn’t stay.
They had weekly movie nights every Friday senior year, spent endless hours lounging on the floor in the living room going over college applications and essays and scholarship applications before the acceptance letters started coming and they all had to decide.
It was no surprise to anyone that Lydia was off to MIT; everyone had known when she left she wouldn’t be coming back. Isaac and Danny went off to the University of Texas; Scott and Allison down to UCLA; Erica just five hours away at Berkley; and Boyd skipping higher education altogether to work as a carpenter for Beacon Hills’ only construction company. Between Stiles’ stellar SAT scores and the personal essay he’d written about his mom, it was no surprise to anyone but him that his acceptance letter had come along with a full four year ride to Stanford.
Being in such close proximity with the the people you care about most has the advantage (or disadvantage sometimes) of knowing everythign about them. Like that Allison loves almonds with a passion but she turns up her nose at walnuts, or that Isaac has to have cinamon pancakes every Saturday because his brother used to make them for him before he went off to war, or that Scott loved peanut butter almost as much as he loved Allison, or that if you even tried to touch Boyd’s books he’d bite your arm off and the same with Danny and his computer, or the fact that Derek had this strange all consuming passionate affair with mini-marshmallows.
So when Stiles came home again after graduation, stuck the key in the lock and turned it, he only smiled fondly when he heard his boyfriend yelling angrily from the kitchen, “Who ate all the mini-marshmallows?” Stiles laughed and shook his head, closing the door and going into the kitchen to toss the new bag of marshmallows onto the counter and kiss Derek hello for good.