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Stiles can’t sleep. Atlanta airport is too empty and Dallas is too cold and Narita is buzzing with too much energy, and cheap, last minute reservations mean he’s always flying in at the wee hours of the morning when none of the shops and the transfer desks are open yet. He arranges himself over five leather seats, fluffs up his backpack as a lumpy but welcome pillow considering the state of his shoulders and neck and sets his alarm. He doesn’t bother adjusting the time zones—it’s not that he knows them by heart by now, he should, he doesn’t, but it’s all a matter of only one or two hours difference anyway and oh look at that, he’s got thirteen hours to kill dead.
His phone lights up before he turns to the back of the seats and clutch at it like a lifeline. It’s a text. From Derek. It says, I have a feeling you’re on the Nazi teddy bears case in Des Moines.
And because Derek is a philistine, before Stiles can type back something both tired and pithy he gets another text bubble.
They’re evil like Rainbow Monkeys, don’t go easy on them.
Stiles stays up and sends Derek too-long texts for an hour and half, giggling to himself until his eyes are bleary and he deletes XOXO for the sixth time, overcompensating with smiley faces and a thanks, you didn’t have to.
***
<<<<<<
They met in L.A. during a water shortage and amidst a record breaking year for forest fires.
In the last month there was also a flood, so there’s that.
Stiles was all for the possibility of a bipolar weather god until he tracks down a rain sprite going through his puberty. Derek was called in as free, local reinforcement somewhere along the line and he did indeed have to support Stiles who was on his hands and knees in maniacal laughter when they arrived, guns blazing, to see a bewildered but mostly sullen and love scorned teenager.
<<<<<<
***
Stiles pays for his own seat, so he’s forever flying coach, and he picks them when he’s one power bar away from total exhaustion, so it’s been a mishmash of airlines and a handful of never again, scared for my life in during the entire fucking two hours flight Post-Its on his Lenovo. His itineraries look plucked from an overrated Amazing Race season.
He can’t curl up on the seat like some impossibly petite Indian student next to him can, sparing his tailbone and sore ass, can’t even fire up the laptop under the seat to watch a Julia Roberts rom-com he downloaded through less than legal means over shitty wifi connection for the moment of catharsis at the end, in swelling orchestral music and high-key lighting and nostalgic saturation.
At least the snoring from behind him is barely audible through the engines and air recycling noise.
***
<<<<<<
When Stiles rid a Chinese family of five of the great grandfather’s ghost who had left long, deep gashes on the back of the sole daughter, heiress to an unpronounceable surname, he felt needed. When he broke news on the lost burials of a late 18th century witch scare, he felt important. It’s like nothing he ever got around to feeling at home.
He was being pathetic when he was home, because Scott went and found himself a true-love girl and Lydia moved to Boston and began talking to recruiters from CERN, add that to his mother’s death and suddenly Stiles could fill a book with his abandonment issues. He’d only been messing around with basic level stuff then, taking cues and testing myths from Charmed. First semester of his senior year, Deaton, apropos of nothing, mentioned going off and doing this for realsies and would you like to meet some of my colleagues over at Uganda, they’re having unprecedented success with juju.
Stiles stopped agonizing over which AP class to take. The rest was history.
<<<<<<
***
The teddy bears turn out to have manifested from creepy World War II photographs from some artist exhibition. There are black-and-whites with little glassy eyed children setting the bears up next to rifles or the children having AK-47s strapped on their shoulder themselves, and there are several with the drooping but somehow still precious stuffed fur balls held up at gun point, which, for the love of God, no.
The art exhibition is closed, has been for a month, but it’s not exactly an up-and-coming gallery so all the stuff is still there. Stiles sneaks in without lifting his finger to cast a spell because the gallery doubles as campus housing and he debates pretending to be a faculty member before he just gives up, waltzes in like he’s visiting his chess club buddies. Shut up, his face’s not that young. Baby fat, his ass.
He can’t deal with the bears, all five hundred and change of them just yet, so he calls his employer, an Erica Reyes, to tell her that he’s going to be staying for the next five days. She expects him to email her a minimum of two status reports for every hundred dollars he’s charging.
He snaps a photo on his iPhone 3 and sends it to Derek, with the caption the creepiest fucking thing ever or THE CREEPIEST FUCKING THING EVER?
***
<<<<<<
The next time there was a job for him in Northern California, he took it even if vengeful vampire ghosts were a little out of his comfort zone. Whittemore casually dropped Derek’s name like a leather clad vision of a promise it was and like the dick was sure it would bring all the girls to the yard, so sue him, Stiles took the road oft traveled for once and bit the bait. Practically five seconds in he determined that the vengeful vampires were kind of single targeting Whittemore. Apparently they’ve been seething at him for a while and the becoming a werewolf thing was the absolute last straw.
Stiles stuck around though, securing wards around Whittemore’s pompous mansion and slipping charms into the glove compartment of all of his muscle cars. He muttered softly wherever he went because Derek was always half a step behind and chuckling reluctantly—he’d told Stiles to call him up if he was ever in town, and Stiles’ periodic and clandestine fidgeting with a certain phone number on his contact list finally got a happy resolution.
It was 2012 and there was an invention called What’s App that meant Stiles was texting Derek about surprisingly decent airline food and the goddamned same programming on every flight, all for 1.99 instead of his whole paychecks.
<<<<<<
***
Seriously?, Derek pings back, two hours later while Stiles’ googling for a local bed and breakfast or a non-seedy motel.
I love Mr. Cutie Patootie, Stiles answers immediately, I wouldn’t falsely accuse his kind.
He’s plugging the motel’s address into Google Maps some obsessive price comparisons later, thinking Derek’s had some errands in his life beyond Stiles, when a baffling Stay somewhere with a good bed and eat $15+ a dish food or I’m driving up there, it’s not even a sixteen-hour drive, I swear to god, stops him cold.
No, Stiles fires back, because when his internal organs are doing mile-a-minute flip-flops he defaults to defiant, now why would that be a deterrent, exactly?
***
<<<<<<
New York was tentatively home base for a while before Stiles decided to suck it up and do the ass complicated shrinking spell, luggage edition, and no longer had to pay rent for the eleven months of the year he’s not there. He said a tearful goodbye to his glorified apartment slash terrible low hanging ceiling one-room of three years, Skyped up his dad so that they drink, but they drink moderately in company of equally stern each other.
Now he’s roughing it up and fielding increasingly incoherent international calls and feeling not just a little lost, like the dejected jigsaw puzzle that never found its last piece accumulating cobwebs in the crack between the bookshelf and the desk.
It’s not that Stiles doesn’t love his job, he does. He’s the best in this business. It didn’t start that way—the story like any other begins with clawing his way up with raw talent and restless nights poring over uncooperative books and making connections, hooking up favors everywhere he goes. There’s also a website he’s inordinately proud of with a long CV and a phenomenal slideshow.
It’s just—it’s a mixed bag of anthropology but only the good part not the boring part, of mystery and adventure and Buffy and reality TV and the dream life of hipsters around the world, or at least of the ones that aren’t as enamored with NYC. He used to pick up random waitresses and guys haunting the pool tables with just that, the story with Cambodian tribe man-eating Nagi snakes and the flaming sword or the one with the not-really hallucinations as he’s nodding off on a camel in the desert.
And then there was warm Californian sun and startled, blinding smiles that Stiles put there and an overly concerned, drily funny and desperately hot werewolf.
<<<<<<
***
It’s silence from the East Coast front as Stiles begrudgingly books a three star hotel room and makes sure to include at least half of the food groups in his meals. It’ll make the flights less unpleasant and disorienting and Stiles generally a better person, but good luck getting him to admit that to Derek who despite his threat didn’t show up to Stiles’ at three in the morning, looking thoroughly rumpled and all worry behind harried, fuming annoyance before he’s coaxed into sleepy good humor.
Stiles isn’t impressed with his own overactive imagination at the best of time.
So he works.
Stiles pulls up the map of the area surrounding the gallery where the stuffed animals are terrorizing dreams of seven-year-olds and seventy-year-olds alike, sketching out a rough blueprint of protective charm strongholds and scouting for deserted alleys where he would deal with the least interruption.
He won’t even look at the bears yet, even though he suspects that dismantling the creepy displays will do the deed, simple as anything. He doesn’t fly by the seat of his pants anymore, down that road lay a singed Stiles and a hysterical Scott, and he’s going to figure this thing out and avoid the probably crying or delighted motherfucker of an artist. Depends on what day of the week it is or how many times Stiles had used the God’s name in vain that morning.
***
<<<<<<
On his fifth trans-Atlantic flight Stiles missed home impossibly. Small town people aren’t meant for endless white tiled floor or escalator walkways and artificial lighting, they want to bitch about the midday sun and feel morose because it’s raining cats and dogs.
He’d just started filling up his schedule with legitimate gigs. He didn’t take a break.
Then people were emailing and offering advance payment, maintenance contracts and memorably, an administrative seat in their new coven. He stopped reporting exotic locales on Facebook after the mother of a werewolf he hooked a human girl up with—it turned out he already got the fiancé pregnant, it’s complicated—waylaid him in the mountains of West Germany.
After, he makes a point of mailing postcards from everywhere to Derek, things he couldn’t confess in bytes because that’d be too weird, things he’s too chicken about getting an actual answer to, casually intimate things that might be misconstrued as family correspondence to the curious mailman. He doubts they read the card though—the background checks and interview process for that job’s ridiculous.
There’s one postcard of the ceiling in one of Rome’s museums with naked babies and women with only one breast bared like the most soft-core pornography in the world. Stiles sweated his body weight in the mid-August heat, bent over and scribbling profanities on the card and wondering what the hell he was doing.
Derek replied to his card in a text, once, did you really think of me, and sent it again three times when Stiles studiously ignored him. In Bombay an owl found its way to Stiles’ window with damp stationary in its beak. Stiles could just make out the same question in the stiff handwriting of someone who’s typed on a hundred keyboards but hadn’t held a fountain pen in his life, and he wrote back, recommended a pigeon instead because no, that shit in Harry Potter was not real, and included instructions for water repellent and heat insulation spells.
The next letter was dry as bone and still carried by the same chestnut barn.
<<<<<<
***
Derek’s short Where are you staying? makes his heart skip a long beat. It’s take-no-prisoner and radically unlike the shy year of flirting they have under their belts, a lightning rod across clear sky and Stiles types him the name and address and detailed directions before he can think better of it.
He signs the text XOXO, which is so painfully high school on a level that doesn’t bear thinking about.
***
<<<<<<
Stiles didn’t get anymore gigs in Cali, but they both make it to the Supernatural conference in Singapore.
Apparently there was a lot of confusion with the name.
He had a talk on setting up your own base of customers and moving around, about the odd spells that helped and about the normal “life cheats” that did the same thing, because he’s all about practicality. The apprentice kids hung onto every word, the challenges and anecdotes grounded in day to day life making the wizard vagabond life suddenly more real than the fantastical ever did.
He only stumbled a little on keeping some herbs dry and some fresh when Derek took a back seat in the crowded room, looking like he got off a late flight and wanted to catch Stiles being good with teenage loose canons of wizard apprentices at all costs.
Derek did, he told Stiles later over dim sum, eyes refusing to meet his but lips quirked up in pleased knowledge that Stiles could tell whenever he entered the room and sucked all the breaths out of it.
Stiles munched on his food, a tiny apparently 36-fold delicate thing instead of devouring it like his stomach demanded him to, because he wanted the lunch to last. He began telling Derek stories he usually kept for himself, afraid they’ll lose their shine once he got them out of his system, but they only became more textured with Derek’s delighted laughs and bright eyes, with his soft white shirt against an open jacket that he shrugged out of somewhere between ordering and third course.
There was the time, Stiles smiled fondly at the memory, when Florence was converted into a watercolor, warm palette in the day and more somber in the evening, but always shimmering with the effort to not wash away. The motorcycle gang of firestarters in either Montana or Missouri pissing off the local centurion population who never approved of those roaring engines replacing good old hooves streaking dirt. Derek chimed in with B-movie references from time to time, his authority on rightly forgotten by time horror exploitation a well to be plumbed.
Derek with his eyes a little faraway told him about his family, hit-or-miss Thanksgivings and dumb stunts on a board with fewer wheels than reasonable parents are comfortable with and a sarcastic uncle-sister tag team he wouldn’t trade for anything. Derek was a writer. His punch lines were well-timed and his jokes self-deprecating and he looked at once overwhelmingly touchable and a galaxy out of Stiles’ minor league.
When they finally stood to leave Stiles’ legs were jellies. He knew what attraction looked like, but he had never been physically gravitated toward a warmth he didn’t know but was certain had to be everything he’d been looking for.
The thing was, Stiles was still never going to quit his job and he was always going to be on the road and he was leaving the next morning for Tangier, and it was still unfair. So when Derek’s hand found his fingers and pulled him in, he ducked his head, made things awkward for five long seconds. Made Derek pay. Left.
He lasted all of a week before caving like a wet napkin, texting Derek overenthusiastic exclamations and trying to stay away yet aching to be close, a moth drawn to unexpectedly kind flame.
<<<<<<
***
Stiles planned on powering through waiting out Derek’s excruciating long drive on nothing but hotel coffee and HBO. He thought he’d argue himself to death with Derek’s not really driving out just to make sure you don’t accidentally contract pneumonia, and maybe you should call him, actually, put both of you out of your miseries.
Thirty-seven minutes into the Game of Thrones episode the teddy bears converge on the hotel, all fluid movements through paintings and wallpapers and freaking out the staff. He has to lure them into a cornfield, summons five separate spirits thereby owing five more separate favors.
He zaps the living daylight out of the adorable motherfuckers.
The receptionist wants a word when he comes back, but Stiles escapes to his room before he can be properly kicked out. He’s already snoring as his back hits the mattress.
So he has all of one minute—between the call from downstairs, asking if he wouldn’t mind if they sent up a Mr. Hale, and the terse knocks with a hesitant “It’s me,”—to blink himself awake and brace for the most important moment in his life.
He wrenches the door open.
It’s only until Derek, as harried and rumpled as in Stiles’ fantasies but better because he’s real, is staring him up and down and frowning that Stiles remembers he’s got scratches and blood running along his arms and chest.
“Hi,” Stiles says, breathless. He wonders whether he should act guilty about the blood or play them off.
Derek’s still silent and taking the sight of him in, but Stiles possibly can’t hear anything beyond the pounding in his own ears anyway.
Then Derek cups his face, firm and sweet and kisses him.
Stiles grabs onto his jacket, too rigid and cold for Iowan winter maybe because he’d just jumped in the car and drove, and out of all things it makes Stiles desperate. He mouths Derek’s jaws frantically, pressing his own body heat into Derek, who should never, ever be cold. But unlike him Derek’s not past the point for words, growls out “Stop running away,” and “I can’t keep chasing you anymore,” when he’s not gasping, harsh and sharp.
“Okay,” Stiles agrees, unthinking. He can’t continue dancing around the vacant room in the attic like someone’s made a reservation and he kept the seat open but barred the man at the door, either. He’s mixing analogies, he knows, but the airports are lonely and stretched out and it feels like it, like he’s waiting and running and running away, at the same time, and now Derek’s arms are around him, bunching up the back of his sweater and crushing their heads together and he’s held down, enveloped, made known.
They have to stop deliberately missing each other by two towns and then going on cross country road trips to meet. They have to. The sexual frustration is not doing anyone any favor.
“Really,” Derek pulls back, startled and disbelieving, because apparently he decided to torture himself via endless cornfields to come here and be rejected.
All Stiles wants to do is kiss the tragic furrow from his eyebrows and quite frankly be thoroughly debauched before the night’s over. He reels Derek back in by both arms over his neck and grinds their hips together, hoping Derek gets the message.
“Stiles,” Derek shivers, half-heartedly trying to detangle himself, not meeting Stiles’ insistent thrusts but still a solid heat against him and that still works. But then suddenly his lips make a pop, they’re yanked off of Derek’s jaw—which they were sucking, and Stiles feels like jumping of his skin wanting to be closer because there’s half a foot of space separating them.
“Tell me you won’t run away,” Derek’s arms are shaking with the effort of keeping Stiles back, “Tell me there isn’t going to be any of that hot and cold routine, and think about this please, because I can’t take it. We’d be making a step and then another and then you would back off to right where we started, and I never know where I am with you, there’re lines that only make sense in your demented brain and I’m a little scared that I could understand them. And I’d be waiting for your text after a case and imagining the many horrible ways in which you could have died.”
“Wait,” Stiles says, gripping hard on Derek’s shirt, “I can’t quit my job. Sometimes it’s dangerous but that’s just the risk we run, and even if we do this—“
“I don’t want you to quit your job,” Derek says firmly, “I want to be there when your ass is in trouble and be able to do some fucking thing about it,” and that, that’s what makes Stiles’ knees go weak, and Derek’s arms are no longer keeping him at bay, they’re braced, holding him up where he tries to melt into Derek.
“God,” Stiles marvels, “are you even real,”
Derek chuckles, “You said that before about my abs.”
“And I meant it,” Stiles confesses, “but yes, to everything you said,” and when Derek sweeps in for another kiss, a bruising one, Stiles can tell, it’s him who struggles to maintain distance this time, “are you sure, I mean, I can be a massive asshole, and not to gripe but my life on the road is hard, which I’m not even factoring in the sexual frustration because that’s kind of self—“
Derek cuts him off, as people are wont to do every time Stiles finds himself in the middle of one of his rants and not entirely sure how he got there. They don’t do it by sticking their tongue in his throat though, which, they might reconsider seeing how effective it is.
Stiles thinks it’s a yes, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life, (you lovely imbecile.)
***
Derek makes jobs into vacations and settles them down for periods of five months or more, because now Stiles’ oddly missing the changing scenery and the national chain that’s trying too hard. In Chicago he’s spoiled by a mart right across the street, where he goes for midnight snacks and groceries that Derek pointedly didn’t put on the list and they go to Chinatown for the myriad of herbs he needs every week, holding hands and oohing and aahing at the roasted ducks but never going in. In New York again, he sweats behind a facemask before he’s used to the heavy, prickling air. In Brighton they mix up couch and sofa and football and soccer hopelessly. In Vientiane they wean themselves off of first-world conveniences like English and public transportation and frozen pizza.
Stiles has a mild panic attack thinking about how he could ever wean himself off of Derek, but it doesn’t last and neither does the thought. Derek has set up a joint account—besides turning into a wolf and running into hellfire for him—after all.
They split their first Christmas, Derek at Laura’s making nice and Stiles at his dad’s, and they’re both pining so hard that Stiles’ laptop crashes twice over Skype. It’s followed by frantic long distance calls and an agreement to never do that again, you fucker, c’here, I missed you. They’re intermittently bickering over who gets Christmas and who only gets Thanksgiving throughout the rest of the year. The travel plans change from week to week, assignment to assignment, but Derek’s got them frequent flier miles through his own kind of witchcraft—I’ve got an agent, Stiles, he’s nice, no he’s not a descendent of Merlin.
In London Stiles accidentally proposes over almost dying. They deal. Stiles insists on getting hitched in Iowa because that’s where it happened and they’ve had it legalized there for years before New York gets its head out of its ass.
Des Moines is unseasonably, un-supernaturally hot because while the people are sentimental, the cities aren’t. Stiles pays his dad’s first class ticket, Scott, Allison, Lydia, and surprisingly Deaton all make it with practically no mortifying international incident because accidentally pressing the call button for the stewardess ten times doesn’t count, everyone goes through that.
Running his palm slyly down Derek’s $3000 rental, Stiles says his wedding vow, “’Tis better to have—“
“If you finish that sentence,” Derek bites Stiles’ lips lightly to the choked cry from Scott and the scandalized stoicism of their Midwestern minister, “I’ll make you read Tolstoy until your eyes bleed.”
-End