Archive of Our Own ^beta

It rains in Beacon Hills. Of course it rains in Beacon Hills, more precisely for the first three weeks he’s back in town, because this is Derek’s life and if there is anything to make him feel even worse than he does by default, it’s probably going to happen.

It’s a January Wednesday, edging towards the end, and the rain is finally starting to ease up a little. So naturally when Derek gets out of his car in front of the Beacon Hills Wolves martial arts gym and props his collar up, a passing car splashes water all over him.

By the time he's unlocked the door and climbed up the stairs to the lobby, his leg stiff and stubbornly not co-operating in the cold, he's shivering and hating Beacon Hills and his life with passion. He slips off his shoes, rolls up the reception booth grill and puts the coffee maker on before rooting through his uncle’s office for dry clothing. He's lost so much muscle after the -- the incident and its aftermath that Peter’s spare BH Wolves t-shirt does not only fit him but is actually loose. It’s been a long time since he’s been slim enough around his shoulders and torso to fit in Peter’s clothing.

He stares at himself for several minutes in the small, slightly distorted mirror hanging above the sink, and wonders if he should start lifting weights seriously again - just to get some of the bulk back and feel like himself again. His shoulders look narrow and his neck thinner, his eyes guarded, and the set of his mouth is petulant like child's, yet more mature than he remembers. In the low light he can see the light brown mark uncurling from underneath the safety of the cotton, climbing up his collarbone and sweeping below his ear to meet the grown-back hair and this, this is why he hasn’t looked at himself in the mirror for eighteen months.

Derek averts his eyes angrily and doesn't glance at himself any more. Despite his thoughts he already knows he won't start gaining muscle again the way he used to - there are already permanent brands of change on his body, so why try to pretend things are what they once were. He doesn’t really have any use for all the strength he used to possess, not anymore.
In the dim, quiet office Derek ditches his wet, dirty sweats and pulls on a pair of running tights and the black MMA shorts he finds lying around, resolutely not looking down at the leathery patches on his thighs or the ugly, twisted scars winding down his left calf. As soon as he's put his own clothes to dry, he flees the office.

Peter Hale is taking off his boots on the carpet when Derek gets back to the lobby. He’s bristling like a wet cat in his leather coat. “Hi D,” he greets. “Why have you stolen my clothes?”

There was a time, once, when Peter used to call Derek ‘cub’. It was his grand joke, tracing back to the years he spent in the ring calling himself The Alpha and later promptly naming his own club Beacon Hills Wolves. Derek still doesn’t know where his uncle’s weird passion for wolves is coming - but it was back then, when he was under twenty, and now, after everything that has happened Peter never says “hi, cub” to Derek anymore. He knows why. Secretly he's a little relieved, because it shows that despite everything Peter actually understands, at least somewhat.

“My own clothes are wet,” he replies and goes to switch the computer on and find himself a coffee mug. He's been manning the reception booth with Isaac a couple of nights per week since he came back, losing himself in sorting the training gear and clothes on sale, rifling through some of the paperwork Peter has no interest to do, and ducking to hide in the office whenever a too-familiar face comes up the stairs.

Most of the kids coming to the classes don’t know him and couldn’t care less about him which is a blessing and not really that strange, because let’s face it - seven years and four months is a long time. When Derek left for Salt Lake City, the gym had been running for five years which was enough to get a lot of established members, but not that many people stay with martial arts for almost ten years or more, after all. At least not in this town.

“Those look better on you now than on me ever,” Peter calls absent-mindedly after him, thinking already about something else, maybe the beginner kickboxing class and the most sadistic suicides he can make them run. He pushes his way through the office door, and then it’s quiet again.

Standing in front of the coffee maker in Peter’s clothes, Derek feels suddenly safe and oddly comforted. The shirt is dry and soft against his skin - he'd almost forgotten how the club’s shirts feel, the soothing familiarity woven into the fabric. The running leggings under his borrowed knee-length shorts keep his legs warm and hide the evidence. As he pours coffee into his mug, he realises that he indeed doesn't want to gain back the muscle he once had - Peter has accepted him like he is now, just the way he's accepted him always; once again understood and shown it in a short, seemingly unimportant sentence. His uncle’s clothes, fitting him for the first time in at least six years, are wrapping Derek in home better than any embrace could.

Isaac turns up around Derek’s second cup of coffee and fifth game of spider solitaire, Henry trailing behind him. The clock’s edging to six and some kids have already mumbled their sort-of-hellos to Derek on their way to the locker rooms with their enormous gym bags, shin guards sticking out and occasional loose hand wrap hanging from the end pocket.

Henry claps his hand on Derek’s shoulder across the counter and says, “How’s it going, kid?”

Derek almost smiles. It’s just a twitch of his mouth but Henry sees it and knows it. He laughs and pats his shoulder again, friendly and sincere, before disappearing into the office.

There are five trainers working for the club besides Peter: Henry and Anne coaching krav maga, Chris and Michael at MMA, Lena guiding normal and fitness boxing plus sometimes the kickboxing classes on Saturdays, and all of them have been around when Derek was still practising in here. They are the only “old” people Derek stands to see, because they don’t look at him like the only thing they see in him is how he was before, or avert their eyes when Derek shakes the stiffness out of his left leg. Henry and the others treat him like he has just been -- well, gone for seven years but is now back and nothing has happened. Maybe it’s because they are older, and they know loss. Maybe it’s because Derek grew up looking up to them like they were his blood like Peter, and they still think of him as something of their own. Maybe he is just weird.

More kids stream in, take off their shoes and move past Derek and Isaac, past the gate, downstairs to the locker rooms and the training area. The gym is just a warehouse with a third of a second floor built in to serve as the lobby and reception area, and it hasn't been renovated since it was opened, but it’s like home: Derek doesn’t want it to be renovated because he doesn’t want it to change. The only things different from seven years ago are the better computers in the booth and the office, the faster internet connection and the training gear like the mats, bags and pads that need to be replaced regularly. Otherwise it’s exactly the same as when Peter first opened it, and Derek both loves and despises it from the bottom of his heart - but if he's honest to himself (like he nowadays doesn’t really care to be; lying is easier), in the end he belongs here more than away.

At 6:25, when the lobby is once again empty, Peter and Henry appear from the office and go downstairs to start their intermediate classes in kickboxing and krav maga, respectively. It’s Isaac’s cue to plug his iPod in the reception’s speakers and fiddle with it until he finds the playlist he’s looking for, and then all Derek can hear is The National. It took only one night with Derek in the booth for Isaac to realise that if he wanted to have peace in the lobby, the best thing was to tune out any noises from the practise going on downstairs, just a few feet and a balcony railing away. Listening to other people follow Peter’s steady, clear instructions was driving Derek mad for almost two hours before Isaac accidentally clicked on a YouTube link, music drowned the sounds and his ramrod straight back relaxed. Isaac isn’t stupid, so he brings his iPod with him just in case Derek is working with him. It’s better - not fine, not just yet, but better.

It’s the same show again half an hour later when the beginner groups start to show up to ponder about the gear they need to buy, fumble with their hand wraps and wrestling shoes and ogle at the intermediates sparring. The new beginners started around the same time as Derek moved back, right after the new year, and they are still bursting with nervousness, bewilderment and especially questions. Isaac answers about a hundred of them, sells about two hundred ankle supports and mouth guards and reveals to a pretty krav maga rookie that none of the girls he knows are using groin guards because they make training awful. The girl looks mildly amused and deeply like she knows Isaac is trying to flirt with her, and buys the guard anyway.
Derek alternates between explaining about three hundred times the difference between 14 oz. and 16 oz. gloves and explaining about four hundred times why it actually is a good idea to wrap at least one hand before trying on the gloves. Then he has to sigh a little every time someone complains about the price and tell again and again that no, actually barely anything is going to his own pockets. Quality leather gloves are not cheap overall, no matter what the internet says, and the extra six or seven dollars they charge for a pair goes to running the gym. He leaves out the fact that he doesn’t even get paid for answering stupid questions.

Eventually the trickle of kids coming and other kids leaving dries out. Isaac has just gone out for a cigarette break and Derek is counting the glove sizes they have left, when someone coughs behind him and says uncertainly, “Uh, sorry, Peter -- err, Mr. Hale asked me to come to meet him today about some training. Isaac let me in.”

Derek didn’t hear anyone come in, but it’s not unexpected since they are still drowning out the rest of the gym with music. He turns around and reaches with his free hand to crank the volume down a bit. On the other side of the counter is standing a tall, long-limbed guy around his twenties, with dark hair and a vaguely familiar face.

“So should I wait here or --” The guy takes a look at Derek, his expression turns shocked and his eyes almost bulge out. “Derek?”

He blinks. Then he blinks again. Then it makes sense. “Stiles?”

Stiles Stilinski is suddenly beaming at him, leaning against the counter and looking half confused, half excited as fuck. He has filled in a little, grown his hair a little and is somehow looking like he finally has gotten his awkward, graceless limbs to work like he wants them to. He looks good, grown up compared to the lanky 16-year-old Derek remembers.

“Oh my god,” Stiles snorts, mouth tugging helplessly up in the corners like he's trying to restrain his wide grin. “Derek Hale, as I live and breathe. Long time no see, huh? I didn’t know you were in town, almost didn’t recognise you either.”

Words tumble out of him in a familiar roll, so he maybe has lost some of his awkwardness but his motor mouth is still definitely the same. Derek is a little lost with words, rubs self-consciously his neck and puts down his clipboard. He hasn’t even considered the possibility that Stiles could still be in Beacon Hills, after all these years.

“Err,” he starts smartly and clears his throat. “Yeah, I came back three weeks ago. Haven’t really seen anyone, actually.”

Stiles is definitely grinning now. “You've been avoiding everyone is what you’re saying, right? Because otherwise I would've totally known you’re back. Perks of being the sheriff’s son and so.” He tilts his head and peers at Derek’s face. “What has it been, seven years? How are you?”

Derek shrugs uncomfortably in response. "Something like that. I'm fine. You?”

He seems to indeed have lost even the tiniest small talk skills he had a couple of years ago. It just feels weird - what is he supposed to say besides “fine”? Talk about the weather? He isn’t fine and he knows it painfully well, hopes that Stiles doesn’t want to talk about Salt Lake.

“Great, man, just great. I’m working at the library, your uncle didn’t tell you? He came in yesterday to borrow flamenco music and chatted with me a moment, and then suddenly he asks if I’ve ever wanted to try kickboxing and I thought what the hell, let’s do it!”

Derek nods, bites his tongue until he tastes copper. Peter has always had the talent of randomly finding people who turn out to be naturally gifted in martial arts. That’s what he did to Derek, too, when he was 13 - looked at him for a long time when he was helping to carry things to the new gym, and asked if he wanted to give kickboxing a go. Derek did. The rest is history. But Stiles - Stiles is someone Derek had never pegged to be picked out by his uncle. He never cared about Derek’s passion to kickboxing, was all gawky and somehow endearing like a newborn giraffe, and it’s even stranger now when Derek hasn’t been around for seven years to influence him.

He clears his throat. “Peter's downstairs coaching a class, but he'll be free soon. You can go in to change and wait for him to finish, after you’ve signed the registering form."

Stiles nods, looking up and down at him, taking in his borrowed clothes and says, “Shit, you’re really slim nowadays, compared to how buff you were when you left. Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognise you first. You must have dropped several weight classes, right?”

Derek can taste the bile rising to his mouth. He makes an affirmative noise and doesn’t say anything, but instead pulls out the registering form and hands it over to Stiles. It’s easier to talk about the practicalities than himself. “You have to fill this before you go in - or well, at least fill in your name and contact number and sign it. It’s so that we have a proof that you’re here on your own will and recognise the possible injuries there might occur, even if Peter doesn’t make you actually do anything.”

Stiles grabs the pen from the counter and starts to fill in his seldom heard real name. In between his first and last name he writes carefully (Stiles). “I thought I’d never set my foot in here,” he confesses as he jots down his number. “Scott - Scott McCall, do you remember? - was always pretty keen on starting something here, MMA I think, but his mother wouldn’t let him over her dead body, so he picked lacrosse instead. He’s now studying in Pittsburgh for a reason I can’t understand, because seriously, Pittsburgh? Sure, it was Gotham once but I could never live in Pennsylvania knowing that the Philly cheesesteak doesn’t come from my city. Scott is an idiot.”

Derek listens to Stiles’ speech tsunami and tries to wrap his head around the fact that it's been years since he last heard it and it hasn’t changed at all. Quietly he agrees with Stiles there - it’s Philadelphia and the cheesesteaks or no Pennsylvania at all - but is so dumbstruck with the wave of familiarity drowning him that he can’t find his own voice. It doesn’t seem to discourage Stiles, who rattles on about Scott, not caring that Derek pretty much doesn’t give a fuck.

Isaac comes back just as Stiles has finally gotten the form signed and fallen quiet, watching Derek with a small smile and rolling the pen in his fingers.

“So you met Derek,” Isaac says and vaults over the counter to the booth, not bothering to use the door. “He’s gotten grumpier, hasn’t he?”

Grumpier. Right. Derek kind of wants to throttle Isaac, no matter how well they usually get on. Isaac started krav maga the year Derek left Beacon Hills, and during his absence became a permanent fixture at the gym, picking up boxing and a job at the counter. They never really knew each other, just by face and some small talk, but now they have gotten used to each other and are actually getting along.

“Maybe,” Stiles replies with the weird smile still on his lips. His eyes travel around Derek's face and widen when they stop at the burn scar on his neck. From the gym carries Peter’s voice as he goes through his normal end-of-the-practise speech.

“You should go down,” Derek grits out tightly, picks his clipboard up again and turns back to the cardboard boxes. “The guys’ changing room is on the right from the stairs.”

He resolutely doesn’t listen to Isaac and Stiles change a couple of words or the latter’s soft footsteps as they slip through the gate and away.

Twenty-three minutes later Isaac is counting the cash register and Derek cleaning the coffee maker with his right hand and reading a book with his left. It’s blissfully quiet apart the low-volume music and the distant murmur of Peter and Stiles talking.

“Derek!” Peter shouts then from downstairs. “Get down here!”

Isaac glances at him questioningly, so he shrugs, gets up, wiggles his leg a little and then goes through the gate and down the stairs. He forces himself to breathe regularly. This is not the first time he has to enter the actual gym, but each and every time feels somehow off anyway - he isn’t carrying an Ohio-sized sports bag full of ankle supports, helmets, shin guards and thai shorts. There's no excited bliss of a martial arts junkie, no sense of rightness oozing from the sweat-smelling gear and cracked mirrors on the far wall. Now it all seems oddly hollow, despite the fact that everything is like it was.

His calf aches dully as he descends the stairs - eighteen months and countless physiotherapy sessions later it still hasn’t adapted to stairs as well as Derek would like it to, and the cold, damp weather isn’t actually helping. It’s probably going to take another year until he can even think of going three flights of stairs up or down at the same go, or - god help - jogging. If he's painfully honest to himself, he might be waiting for the latter for the rest of his life.

Peter and Stiles are standing on the green mat. Derek runs his hand through his hair and tugs at the loose waistband of his shorts as he walks towards them. He can do this. “Yeah?"

Stiles is staring at him, mouth slightly ajar, and that’s when it hits him that Stiles indeed genuinely doesn't know. Stiles hasn't seen. He almost halts midway but grits his teeth and goes on. He can feel Stiles’ eyes glued to his mild but very, very noticeable limp and wonders what's been said in town about the incident - he knows that the whole Beacon Hills knows about the fire even though it happened in Salt Lake City, but he doesn’t know to what extent people are familiar with his injuries.

Peter waves him over and gestures at Stiles who for some reason looks unhappy, mouth pulled into a straight, tight line and eyes dark. He's grown up about two inches taller than Derek, but looks more well-rounded than he used to, his arms not anymore comically just too long for his body. In a well-fitting Star Wars t-shirt the breadth of his shoulders is accentuated in a way it never was in his layered flannels seven years ago. Derek feels small and sickly thin next to his healthiness and height.

“You remember Stilinski, right? He said you chatted a bit upstairs.”

Derek nods. He doesn’t know what to say and for a couple of seconds the silence is awkward, but it doesn’t seem to faze Peter. “I’d like you to take a look at him and say if you think we should give him private classes. I think he’s promising.”

Peter puts Stiles go through some basic moves he apparently has taught in the time they were alone in the gym. For a complete beginner he isn’t bad - his body adapts the fighting stance easily so that it looks natural and his weight is well split between his feet. The way he twists his back leg in crosses, keeps his balance in the front kick and dodges Peter’s right hook does have certain easiness in it that most of the beginners can’t find even after months of training.
Derek moves around him, frowning, measuring his feet, his stance, the position of his hands; all the time looking for the right places that belie the truth. He can see the muscles shifting under Stiles’ t-shirt and sweatpants, makes a mental note to point out that his back shouldn’t dip so far back at the front kick. Dissecting Stiles’ moves feel as natural as breathing, and for a moment he forgets about himself.

“He’s got potential,” he admits finally, “but he'll have to work hard.”

Peter nods thoughtfully, looking distantly pleased.

“Are you in shape?” Derek asks Stiles.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he says. “I was in the cross country team after I quit lacrosse, not long after you left. After high school I just kept on running and picked up some swimming, so my stamina is good.”

Derek nods. “Good. I’d still recommend you to lift some weights, hit the gym once or twice a week - not too much, just to get more power to your punches and kicks.”

Peter watches them with his head tilted to the side, clearly considering something. Then he speaks up. “Stiles,” he begins, “how about you trained with Derek?”

It’s a small wonder Derek doesn’t break his neck with the speed he whips his head to the right. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he demands, probably not as enthusiastic as Peter would hope. “You know that I’m not qualified to coach. My license expired when I turned 23 - and I took the test just in case you needed me to help with your classes before we left for Utah. You didn’t, so I have no experience.”

“Semantics,” his uncle laughs, and it’s the most annoying sound Derek has heard for a while. “You have your background to help you. We’ll get you licensed in a month or so, Stiles will attend the beginners’ classes until the first belt test anyway.”

Derek’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wait, what, are you still using a belt system? I thought you dropped that ages ago.”

Peter deliberately ignores him. “I really don’t have time for another trainee, Jackson and his inability to understand that it’s MMA, not some fucking pro wrestling with scripted matches is a time-consuming pain in my ass. And I doubt Stiles wants to spend his time with an old fart like me.”

Peter’s eyes are twinkling when he glances at their newest club member. He’s turning fifty in March, pretty far from ‘an old fart’ and very much an asshole in Derek’s opinion. But Derek hates his guts right now, so perhaps he’s slightly biased. Perhaps Peter actually is old, ugly and intolerable, so no wonder he’s still unsuccessfully trying to woo Melissa McCall. He's probably already crossed to the second decade of trying, because Mrs. McCall still seems to have some dignity in her.

“I think it would do both of you good, you’ll get some experience and he gets a coach with more free time than me. Stiles, you’ll need to pay the club membership fee and the training fee, but they are nothing excruciating. Sounding fine to you?”

Stiles is grinning. He doesn’t seem to mind having to stick with Derek for the unseeable future.

Isaac has fucked off for the night when they climb the stairs back up to the lobby. While Stiles pulls his sneakers on and wraps himself up, Derek shuts the computer and tries to keep his hands from shaking.

“We should totally catch up someday,” Stiles says as he straightens and lifts his backpack from the floor. “It’s been ages.”

Derek mumbles something that hopefully sounds a little more excited than he feels, but Stiles smiles at him in a way that tells he isn’t offended. It’s like their roles have undergone a partial reversal, partial maturing - Derek at eighteen was outgoing, confident and easy with his smiles. Stiles, two years younger, was the one carrying his mother’s death and dealing not so well with growing up, even though he plastered a goofy grin over it all. Derek at twenty-five hasn’t smiled properly since the fire and carries on his shoulders something heavier than just his mother; and Stiles at twenty-three, despite his rarely-shutting mouth, has shaped up into something that makes Derek utterly helpless. It’s in the curve of Stiles’ mouth and the way he pauses sometimes in his speech to just look.

He nods his goodbyes, and Stiles goes down the stairs to the door. “Derek,” his voice drifts up just when Derek is sure he's already gone. He sounds a little distorted, a little bewildered and a lot like he’s just found out something, connected the dots that solve a murder mystery. Derek dreads to hear what he has to say.

“Yeah?”

“Do you still fight?”

Stiles asks it carefully, but Derek doesn’t see his face and isn’t able to decipher what the tone means. Still the words hit him like a truck, and for a moment he can’t breathe. Something is restricting his chest, wrapping a cold steel band around it and squeezing. Stiles isn’t asking if he can still work out. He’s oblivious and asking about the most painful part: does Derek still climb up to the ring and emerge as a winner, use competing as his drug.

It’s quiet for a couple of seconds, and then he forces out the answer. “I can’t.”

Stiles makes a small noise, but doesn’t say anything. The door closes, and Derek drops his head into his hands. Fuck everything.

*

Derek doesn't see Stiles again for a week. He stays in Peter's house, occupies the reception at the gym on the nights when there are absolutely zero kickboxing classes, swims in Peter’s ridiculous inside pool and works his way through the battered collection of Russian literature in the living room bookshelf. Peter digs up the trainer qualification test materials and piles them up on the coffee table, but Derek doesn’t touch the papers, not just yet. He's still conflicted about the coaching - he has quite good a background for becoming a kickboxing trainer and he's already once passed the test, but on the other hand he doesn’t really want to, not yet. It’s difficult enough to spend time at the gym reception and beat bag alone after everyone else has gone home.

Isolation is both good and bad for his nerves: keeping to himself and minding his own business helps him to deal with Beacon Hills - or it would, if Peter’s walls didn’t start closing in around the end of the week. His first month back in town is coming to an end and he hasn’t seen anyone except the people at the gym or even ventured to the town. When he gets to the climax of The Master and Margarita just to find 40 pages missing, he finally has to suck it up, put on something else than a tracksuit and drive to the library.

He doesn't remember until he walks to the translated literature section and Stiles is there, shelving books and whistling quietly under his breath. His forest-green button-up and dark jeans fit him like they were properly his size, not two times too large like some of the clothes Derek recalls him wearing in high school.

He freezes for a second and is about to turn around and flee, when Stiles spots him and his face splits into a grin. It’s like he feels sincerely happy to see him. “Hey, Derek, you seem to have finally stopped being a hermit. Came to bask in my company?”

Derek actually snorts as he pulls the hardcover he’s looking for from the shelf and checks that it isn’t missing any pages. He doesn’t remember when was the last time he snorted. “As if. I came to borrow a book and get back to the house.”

“Nonsense,” Stiles huffs and waves his hand around. “Are you free now? My shift is ending and I could use a cup of coffee.”

Derek hesitates. The idea of spending time with Stiles doesn’t sound as bad as it could and it’s early afternoon so the city is quiet - but the thought of going into a coffee shop and accidentally running into somebody he knows doesn’t appeal to him.

Stiles seems to understand though, since he puts the last book back to its place, smiles and reassures, “We can grab something with us and go to a park, there’s nobody this time of the year. I want to enjoy the shit out of the first dry day in ages.”

“All right,” Derek mumbles, looks down at the book in his hands and realises something. “I think I need a library card.”

Stiles beams at him, half pleased, half amused. “Yeah, I think your old card expired, like, at least three years ago. But that’s why I’m here, right?” He grabs the cart and wheels it towards the info desk. “Follow me, I’ll make you a new card and grab my coat, then we can go.”

Derek hasn’t much of a choice than to wander after him.

The park is in a limping distance from the library, so they drop the Bulgakov off on Derek’s shotgun seat before heading off. Stiles ogles at his car, the sleek, black Camaro Laura bought with the inheritance and insurance money because they didn’t know what else to do with it.

“Wow,” Stiles breathes out and takes off his reading glasses to peer at the vehicle better. “This must be the sweetest car in Beacon Hills. I’m still riding my old Jeep, you probably remember it. If not, look to your right.”

Derek does remember Stiles’ cranky Jeep but glances anyway to where it sits in the corner of the parking lot. It looks, if possible, even worse, like it could just fall into pieces in the middle of a road. “That must be the shittiest car in Beacon Hills,” he jokes before he can understand what’s happening.

Stiles’ mouth falls open in a small, taken aback ‘o’, and then he laughs. The sound rings loud and bright in the clear air. “You got me there. But I like it, still. It’s faithful, the only thing that's stayed with me all these years.”

Derek doesn’t know if he should feel ashamed or not, and ends up getting angry at himself. In high school they weren’t friends, not really - there was just that one year they studied in the same building, and during that one year Stiles sometimes plopped down at his table in the cafeteria. He would let out a rant about Mr. Harris, the perfection that was Lydia Martin, Scott’s constant idiocy and life overall, and Derek talked about kickboxing like he always did, and that was it. They didn’t get teary-eyed when Derek graduated and moved away with his parents, left to pursue a dream Stiles encouraged but didn’t really care of.

They didn’t keep in touch and it was fine. He has no reason to be ashamed, and finds that in the end he doesn’t even have energy for it. Stiles might not have been able to keep his friends physically with him for past years, but Derek - Derek himself has lost so much that he's almost forgotten there once was something good to lose. It’s been a fight he hasn’t won.

They buy two black takeaway coffees from the deli in the next street corner and walk towards the park. Derek can’t move as fast and determined as he used to, but Stiles adapts to his pace without a word and their stroll down the empty street is surprisingly pleasant.

“How’s your sister? She’s still in New York, isn’t she?” Stiles asks, sips his coffee and almost spits it out. “Fuck, this is scalding. I never remember.”

Something like a smile tugs Derek’s mouth; maybe schadenfreude, maybe genuine amusement. “That’s right. She'll probably make partner soon unless she goes nuts and moves back here like she’s been threatening to.”

Stiles looks flabbergasted and wraps his fingers better around the cardboard cup. “Why does she want to come back to Beacon Hills? Do you Hales have a secret worshipping place in the woods you can’t stay away from? Ancient graves?” He winces. “Jesus, that wasn’t funny. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” It really is not okay, for the death of their parents is still a sore place, no matter how slowly but surely it's scabbing over. Peter arranged them to be buried in Beacon Hills where they had grown up, so their family indeed has graves in the town, just not ancient but too fresh instead. Still the distantly morbid joke doesn’t feel as bad when it flows out with Stiles’ normal way of talking as it would if made by anyone else.

“How come you didn’t go to New York, too?”

Derek had gone east, immediately after getting out of the hospital spiral, to keep his big sister together and let her keep him together, and to get a roof above his head. Leaving the city was a moment’s decision Derek's been fretting over and considering again for a month. In New York he could've built a new life for himself without kickboxing: going to school, getting a job, befriending new people, walking down the streets where nobody would glance twice at his limp and leaving behind his old self. Instead he grew tired of it and drove back to California, the town he grew up in, to the home of painful memories and into an almost masochistic past-time activity of helping his uncle at the same gym he once was the star of.

“I did,” he replies at last, choosing his words carefully. “I was there for ten months with Laura. Wasn’t my city, it was too huge and too crowded.”

“I can believe it,” Stiles agrees, still blowing into the tiny drinking hole in the lid of his coffee, hoping it would cool down. “I went to UC Berkeley for two years before dropping out, and the sheer amount of people was terrifying. I was so relieved to get back here.”

That’s something Derek has been thinking about, too - why is Stiles here, returned to a town most people want to escape from? It takes him a minute of companionable silence and their arrival to the park to ask. “Why did you drop out?”

Stiles shrugs as they sit down on a bench. “I applied since my dad wanted me to, but in the end I never really enjoyed the student life, although I thought I'd have the time of my life. And well, then dad fell ill so I had a legitimate reason to quit.”

Derek starts. “Ill?”

He gets a frown with a confused look. “Yeah, I thought you knew? He beat prostate cancer about two years ago. That’s partly why I never went back to get my degree but applied for a job in the library. We had to get money somewhere.”

“I didn’t,” Derek says. “Know, I mean. Sorry.”

“Nah.” Stiles waves his hand and dares to taste his drink. “He’s clean and enjoying his life more than ever, I’m happy to live here and happier to have a job I love, so there’s nothing to worry about. Besides, you’ve had other things to think of and it's not like we've been talking awfully lot for years.”

They are silent. The park is brown and soggy, leafless trees giving the woody area a semi-haunted atmosphere. Stiles is downing his coffee like his life depended on it now when it doesn’t burn his mouth anymore, but Derek's just turning the cup in his hands. Suddenly he's scared: scared of the winter-distorted park, scared of Stiles, and most of all scared of what he'll be asked next. He's already contributed to the discussion more than he thought he could, but now there aren't many things about his life during their separation they can talk about - if the topic is Salt Lake, it’s about kickboxing. If it’s kickboxing, it’s about his inability to do it properly anymore. If it’s his inabilities and injuries, it’s suddenly about the fire and devastation and death and Salt Lake City and the circle is complete.

For a second or two he wants to bend over, put his head between his knees and draw a deep breath. He doesn’t.

“Have you seen Jackson around the gym?” is finally how Stiles breaks the silence. It snaps Derek out of his moodswinging and makes him turn to look at his companion.

“Jackson?” he asks. “As in Jackson Whittemore?”

“The one and only,” Stiles grins. “Your uncle’s training him, he picked up MMA a year ago or so. Apparently he's pretty good at it since Peter’s giving him private classes. When I told Scott about it on Skype, he was seething. I thought he was going to burst through my screen and go to strangle Jackson.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Derek shrugs. “He’s probably training during daytime or the nights when I’m not at the gym. Peter doesn’t really talk about his trainees.”

Stiles nods, then it transforms into a sort of thoughtful head-bobbing. He’s clearly waiting for a right moment to ask something, and Derek doesn’t have to wait long.

“Are you okay with coaching me?” Stiles looks a little nervous and slightly embarrassed, too. “I mean I think it’s an awesome idea, because while Peter’s cool, I don’t think I could stand him that long, but you -- I don’t want it to be something you loathe.”

A bird flutters over their heads. It’s almost eerily quiet.

“I don’t loathe the idea of training you,” Derek confesses finally. “Just the idea of -- of --” He trails off, but Stiles seems to catch what he means.

“Just the idea of teaching someone else to do your job,” he finishes softly. Derek makes an agreeing noise and finally takes a drink just to give himself an excuse of not talking. Stiles checks his watch and jumps up.

“Shit, I promised to have late lunch with dad. We better head back.”

On their way back Stiles tells small, funny stories and anecdotes about the patrons in the library, talks about his fondness of finding anonymous notes between books and basically doesn’t shut up until they reach the parking lot.

“It was super cool seeing you,” he smiles at Derek over the hood of the Camaro. “We totally have to hang out again sometimes before you start coaching me. And enjoy your Bulgakov.”

Derek can only nod, and then Stiles is gone, climbing into his Jeep and waving cheerfully at him from behind the window.

After a second he waves back.

*

When Stiles sees for the first time Derek doing something else at the gym than just moping around the reception, it’s pretty fucking impressing.

It’s the end of February, and they are halfway through the beginner practise when Derek comes down to ask Peter something. First he tries to shout it from the balcony, but apparently Peter has either grown deaf or just wants to boss him around, because he ignores Derek completely and therefore forces him to limp down. Perhaps it’s some weird way to help him cope with the trauma. Stiles never really knows when it comes to Peter.

So down Derek comes, and that’s when Peter announces, “All right, everybody, let’s do a new combo next: moving in from far distance with a step, then a jab, a back-hand hook and a front leg roundhouse, then move off from the normal fighting distance with a step backwards.”

Usually Peter has gloves on when they are practising so he can demonstrate the combinations better, but for once he’s holding thai pads and gestures at Derek with them. “Hey D, put on some gloves and come help me.”

Derek shoots him a half surprised, half dirty look, but pulls Peter’s idle gloves to his hands and walks over. The group, almost comically, parts to make way for him. Stiles’ heart starts to beat a little faster when he watches the slight unbalance in Derek’s steps, and it takes him a couple of seconds to realise that he’s nervous for Derek.

They've been hanging out a couple of times since their meeting in the library a month ago: another coffee -- hangout, Stiles refuses to call it a date, and two semi awkward dinners Peter invited him to. Derek is still distant and a little wary, but slowly warming up to Stiles (and probably learning again how to speak more than two sentences at the time), so all in all it’s pretty safe to say they're getting along. Kickboxing has turned out to be a pleasant surprise to Stiles - he’s enjoying it more than he expected and, frankly, already waits for Derek to start training him.

But Derek is still looking conflicted every time the coaching comes up; hell, he’s looking conflicted every time somebody even hints at martial arts overall, and Stiles honestly doesn't want to see him fuck himself up over this just because Peter's a demanding jerk.

Peter raises his hands. “So move in, jab, hook, front leg roundhouse, move out.” He shifts the pads strapped to his arms to match the imaginary blows and the kick. “Derek here favours the right-foot-front fighting stance unlike most of you, since his left side is his dominating one. But he’s also experienced in using the more passive stance, so we have a great chance to demonstrate this both ways. Please follow closely, no matter what your own dominant side is, for it’s very useful to understand that your opponent might not have the same way of fighting than you. Let’s do the more common way first.”

Derek falls into the proper stance with practised ease, his left leg front, his right heel off the mat, and raises his gloves. He pushes his chin down to his chest and his shoulders forward just slightly, drops his weight down a little and places his elbows where they protect his torso best, and Stiles can suddenly see how much he has been doing this. His experience shines clearly through the way he just stands, and Stiles knows he isn’t the only one who sees it. If he was nervous for Derek a moment ago, he isn’t anymore. He’s fucking excited.

Then, unexpectedly, Derek moves. His feet are rapid and deft when he takes the step forward, moving on the balls of his feet, and the punches he throws are lightning-fast and hit the pads with satisfying, loud snaps. Before Stiles has even blinked, Derek has delivered a perfect roundhouse kick that would have sent anyone else but Peter sprawling on the floor, and moved away from the reach of Peter’s arms.

It’s dead silent in the room. Everybody saw Derek limping in, pale and expressionless. Nobody expected him to turn from a crippled reception guy to this agile, deadly quick creature, even less without warming up - and Stiles didn't either. Stiles briefly wonders if Derek ever actually became the kickboxing champion he aimed to be when he left for Salt Lake. He wonders why he never went to see Derek fight, even though they were sort of friends; wonders why he never cared to even try understanding the passion Derek held for kickboxing. But at sixteen Stiles had so many other things to think about - like keeping Scott and himself out of trouble while trouble seemed to seek them out, or his hopeless crush on Lydia Martin, or lacrosse, or how to get his dad eat better and drink less whiskey.

He still feels bad sometimes for taking Derek’s company for granted back then: their tentative friendship never grew into a proper one, mainly because Stiles only used him as a void where he could unload everything bugging him, took the advice and insights Derek offered him but never actually listened to Derek talking about himself. It was totally flippin’ cool that he was a kickboxer, because dude, Stiles was a teenage boy and kicking ass was the coolest hobby anyone could have, but beyond that - he didn’t care. Of course he said things like yeah, you totally should go for it when Derek spoke about his dream to leave Beacon Hills, get a good coach and become a professional, make a career out of his beloved sport, but under the surface he was always brewing his own problems.

When Derek’s parents moved to Salt Lake City due to his father’s new job and took Derek with them, Stiles was slightly upset for losing his company, but they weren't friends good enough to keep in touch afterwards. Stiles didn’t google him to check if he was making it. He probably didn’t even think of Derek for years, except fleetingly when Scott whined about his mom still saying a strict no to martial arts.

Until his dad came home one July evening, almost six years after the Hales moved away, exhaled deeply and said, I stopped Peter Hale for speeding this morning but let him go without a ticket. He was on his way to the airport. His brother’s house in Salt Lake burned down last night.

After a stunned silence, Stiles’ first, mildly panicked question was just Derek?

He had probably never loved his father as much as when he gave a grim little nod and told, The only one to get out.

And now Derek is back in Beacon Hills, so different from what he once was - guarded, unsmiling, troubled, but Stiles is pretty sure that underneath it all still sleeps the boy he couldn’t claim he knew. That might be one of the reasons why he now feels the desperate need to connect with Derek, and this time do it properly. He doesn’t only want to correct his old mistakes but finally get to know who Derek Hale is and what’s going on in his head - it's probably drastically different from high school, but silently Stiles thinks that maybe they weren't meant to be friends back then, not just yet. Pretty fucking awful that what they needed for a reunion was the death of Derek’s parents, but maybe now they have a chance to really be there for each others.

Derek changes the stance, looks slim, beautiful and dangerous even is his t-shirt and sweatpants. He;s even quicker on his more natural side, but Stiles can see the fleeting grimace on his face when he has to shift his weight to his left, injured leg for the roundhouse. Suddenly he understands better what Derek is going through; what he's been going through for past nineteen months: he didn’t lose only his parents and his health, but the light of his life overall.

Derek kickboxed for over ten years before the fire. Stiles realises that he doesn’t know if Derek ever had anything as constant in his life as his family and his sport were. Now they're both gone, at least the way they once were.

Time seems to slow down for a second or two. Then Derek turns, drops the gloves back to the side of the ring and limps away without a word. Stiles wants desperately to run after him, tell him how fucking incredible he was; tell him that he thinks he understands now, but he doesn’t have a chance to do so. So he raises his own fists as his partner puts the pads up, and keeps in his mind Derek’s strangled voice saying I can’t almost a month ago.

"Some of you will get very good at this if you work hard and meticulously," Peter says half an hour later, when they're all standing in a row, sweaty and full of post-practise bliss. "Some of you are more promising than others, but rest assured - none of you is going to be as good as Derek was before he got injured. Even with a busted leg he's better than probably anyone in this gym will ever be."

Stiles' mouth tugs with pride for Derek and amusement for Peter. There are several people in the group who still look uncomfortable with their coach’s eccentricities.

"So if I were you, I wouldn't feel crushed over how great he was - Derek started young and was exceptionally talented from the beginning. It can of course work as encouragement to some of you to push harder, but the rest can console in the thought that Derek’s level is so completely out of your league that you don't have to try to reach that."

It's definitely the oddest cheer-up speech Stiles has ever heard, but he's known for a long time that Peter Hale is just slightly off with his head. And as long as he keeps praising Derek, it’s totally fine.

By the time he gets out of the changing room Derek is long gone, and Isaac is shrugging at him from the other side of the counter.

*

Derek drives to San Fransisco to do the trainer qualification test at a bigger, better known martial arts club on the second week of March.

It turns out to be a walk in the park: he goes in and ticks through the questionnaire about techniques, rules and styles in fifteen minutes. Then he slaps his kickboxing resumé on the table and watches people go round-eyed at his record in middleweight: five amateur and one professional national championships, five amateur world championships, and his proudest moment, the first pro world championship he had scored less than a year before the fire. They ask some questions about his athletic career and then put him through a short physical test to see how his techniques work, and then it’s over.

Hands are shaken, papers are signed and then, just before Derek bolts out of the door, an unknown man stops him with a hand on his elbow and says, “I used to follow your career, Mr. Hale. I’m happy to see you haven’t dropped out of the kickboxing world or given up - because in my opinion you are one of the finest kickboxers America's ever had. It’s an honour to meet you.”

Derek manages to blurt out a stuttering thanks and quirk his mouth into a slightly forced smile for a picture with the guy, shakes more hands, and flees.

After he's stopped shaking in his car, Derek shoots off quick texts about passing the tests to Peter and Stiles and then lets out a deep sigh. It feels strange to be praised to his face after two years of slowly falling into the group of forgotten athletes. Without being arrogant Derek is pretty sure that somewhere in the internet people are still discussing him, even though he’s been out of the picture for almost two years.

He vaguely remembers it being big news in the world of martial arts when his coach announced he would quit his career, after being professional for only eight months and despite the expectations of snatching his second professional world championship next year. There's still a box of unopened fan letters and printed-out emails sitting somewhere in Peter’s garage - they came flooding to his Salt Lake gym and his coach when he was in the hospital, and Derek saw only one or two, filled with mourning about his career and begging for him not to stop. Even after his coach let out a press release, very shortly after the previous one, stating that he was seriously and permanently injured in circumstances not related to kickboxing and therefore unable to keep competing, the letters kept coming. So people at the gym gave up, started stacking them in a box and finally gave it to Derek when he moved to New York. He sent the box to Peter to keep, not having the heart to throw them away. He still is pretty sure he can never read them.

Stiles texts him back just as he's starting the car. Awesome, congrats! Meet me at Gallows in four hours? I’ll buy you a drink! :-)

He taps a short affirmative reply, takes a deep breath and hits the road for the long drive back.

The Gallows Bird has been in Beacon Hills longer than Derek's been alive and is still looking like it probably did when it was opened; a bizarre, dusty Irish pub in a Californian town. He's never been there for he was underage back then, but he's passed it numerous times due to its location in the same block as the gym.

Stiles is sitting in a booth when he gets in, drinking something that looks suspiciously like a coke. “I realised on my way here that we’re both with car,” he explains sheepishly, when Derek slides to the bench on the other side of the table and lifts an inquiring eyebrow. “You can have whatever you want, I don’t want to leave my car to the parking lot.”

Derek shrugs. “I’m fine with coke.”

Stiles grins and gets up to go to the counter. “Coming up!”

“So,” he says when they're sipping their totally cool and adult pub drinks under the amused glances of the bartender, “how does this training stuff works, then?”

“First you need to finish the basic course and pass the belt graduation.”

“I know, I know.” Stiles gestures lazily with his hand. “What’s the belt system anyway? Is it like in karate?”

Derek frowns and taps the side of his glass. “In a way, yes. It’s a way to keep count on the progress of your skills. Peter's used the belt graduation since he opened the gym, but a lot of people universally don’t think they are necessary - mainly because there isn’t a fixed system. The kickboxing organizations can choose to use it and establish their own skill levels.”

“What's Peter’s system like? He hasn’t talked much about it.”

Derek shakes his head. “I’m not sure if he's changed it, but when I still trained with him, the scale was from the lowest to highest something like this: yellow, orange, green, blue, brown and black. There are also six different ranks of black belts for those who have been developing and bringing the sport out to public. But some gyms have, for example, a purple belt, and even its placement on the scale varies.”

Stiles is listening intently, making small sounds of understanding as he goes on. It’s surprisingly easy, recounting the basics of the kickboxing world to him. “What belt do you have?”

Derek shrugs. “My gym in Utah didn’t use a belt system, so the last graduation I did was for the blue belt. Now I probably would have brown, maybe black if I had more experience of training someone.”

“Well, soon you do!” Stiles laughs and claps him on the forearm. “I knew you would kick their asses at the qualification test. If there’s someone to train the new hopes of our country, it’s you.”

A small smile sneaks to Derek’s face. The test was easy to him, that much is true. But he hasn’t been succeeding in anything for past almost two years, and while the cement to training someone else should be painful and awkward and terrifying, he is proud of himself for the first time since he can’t remember. And all that just because Stiles says dumb, harmless things like that, acts like a decent human being would: by being happy for his coach-to-be’s success. Company of normal people might after all not be so completely overrated, at least if said person is Stiles.

“So when I pass the test and the course, how are we going to continue?”

Derek taps his jaw with his index finger, thoughtful. “I haven’t yet given it a proper thought, but most likely you'll keep on going to the intermediate practise at least two times a week. The sparring doesn’t usually start until April with those who started in January, but you and I will start it earlier, since you have a good grasp on the basics already. I'll come to keep an eye on you to the intermediates, and we’ll meet once or twice a week and go through the techniques you need to hone.”

Stiles purses his mouth, nods and twirls his straw in his coke. The act makes him look at least ten years younger than the twenty-four he's approaching. “So you’ll plan it out like I was a boy scout and you were my leader, thinking ahead what I should learn?”

An involuntary snort escapes from Derek’s mouth. “If that makes you happy. In reality it’s just like every teaching session ever.”

“Nah,” Stiles says. “I'm going to have such awesome moments picturing you as a scout leader while you're teaching me to punch people.”

Derek stares at him, incredulous, until he cracks and starts to laugh.

March brings more changes, but for once they are for the better - Stiles aces the yellow belt test and starts training with Derek, who finally mans up, rents an apartment and moves out of Peter’s house. His apartment consists of a living room, a small kitchen and an oversized cupboard that's supposed to be a bedroom, but it’s in good condition, close to the preserve and his, and there most definitely isn’t Peter around, so all in all, it’s a pretty good catch.

Stiles grins like a loon when Derek mentions it to him, claps him on the back and cheers a little. “It’s about time you ditched your uncle. I would've gone mad with him in two weeks, seeing him in the practise three times a week has almost been enough to do the trick. I’ll help you carry your stuff.”

And that’s the problem - for the first time in his life Derek has to actually buy furniture. There's also the fact that he owns next to nothing due to the fire, just some clothes, books and the kickboxing memorabilia like his championship diplomas he got back from his gym. When he adds to the pile the various knick-knack he's needed while living in the corners of his sister and uncle, “his stuff” Stiles offers to carry ends up being two duffel bags and two cardboard boxes. Instead Stiles gets to drag Derek out to buy such trivial things as plates and sheets and a bed, for which he has to hire his dad to help hauling, since Derek’s physiotherapist threatens to kill him if he even thinks of carrying furniture.

Stiles’ dad is pretty much the same, at least compared to how Derek remembers him, and he pats Derek’s shoulder and says as he leaves, “It’s good to see you again, son.”

It sounds slightly wistful, sounds like it’s good to see you alive like he's thinking of Derek’s dead parents - while Derek himself wasn’t really acquainted with the Stilinskis, his parents were. They even attended the funeral of Stiles’ mom. In return the Sheriff paid his respects in the burial of Derek’s parents, or at least that’s what Laura told him - he wasn’t there, but laying half delirious in the hospital with a fever so high he was sure it would burn him alive, the way the fire didn’t.

When they've put the new pans and dishes to the kitchen cupboards, folded Derek’s clothes into his drawer and sat down on his sinfully comfortable second hand couch with beers, Derek looks around and admits, “It still looks pretty empty.”

Stiles stretches out and puts his feet across Derek’s lap to get comfortable, places his bottle on the floor and folds his arms under his head. “That only means I need to spend so much time here that you don’t even notice that it’s echoing in here. I’m going to watch so many nature documentaries and episodes of Doctor Who on this heavenly couch that I’ll grow roots.”

It doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Derek probably needs to buy a tv first, though.

Stiles does become a permanent fixture in his living room with his dvd boxes and David Attenborough documentaries, bringing takeout and babbling about his days in the library, and oddly enough, Derek doesn’t mind at all.

*

“Move your feet,” Derek scolds. “This isn’t slow dancing in a prom. You have to be fast with your movements so you can defend yourself. If you’re too slow, you don’t have time to sidestep or block fast enough.”

The gym around them is empty in the late Tuesday morning, which is usually the ideal time for individual training, whenever possible. They are testing Stiles’ moving with an uncoordinated mix of side-jumping, dodging and light sparring without gear, and while his footwork is technically great, he is helplessly slow. He needs to gain a lot of speed, but Derek feels pretty hopeful about it - he used to be slow once, too, when he was still honing his technique. It’s definitely better if Stiles takes his time to perfect the theory and then starts to get faster than being quick but sloppy from the beginning.

They've been training together for a month, and it’s both painful and great to see Stiles getting better and better with a speed Derek wouldn’t have pegged him for. He's already probably months ahead of the rest of the ex-beginners, even though he started three weeks later than them.

“Quicker,” he urges and Stiles curses at him, sweat gathering on his forehead and collarbones.

“I can’t be any fucking quicker!”

Derek sighs and then unexpectedly shifts his weight to his right foot and aims a dirty, whip-fast low kick on the inner backside of Stiles’ left thigh, just above his knee. Stiles’ knees buckle, he loses balance, and with a surprised yelp and flailing hands drops to all fours.

“I told you to move them,” Derek states calmly, but something akin to smug smirk is tugging his mouth. Stiles gasps for breath, rolls over to sit on his ass and looks up. There’s a red blotch in his thigh where Derek’s ankle hit. He's going to have a wicked bruise there.

“What the everloving fuck was that?”

Derek sits down with him. “A low kick. Used to cause... well, exactly that. Or at least a sudden slip in the opponent’s balance, after which it’s easier to try and drop them with a punch, for example. Hasn’t Peter taught them to you?”

“Yeah, he has.” Stiles wipes the sweat from his brow to his hand wraps. He’s starting to grin. “But not like that, to the inner thigh. Just the normal one to the outer side. Pretty cool, man. I didn’t expect that.”

Derek grins back, just a little. He's slowly forced himself to keep coming down to the gym on mornings and afternoons when it’s empty, to practise by himself on a bag or sparring with Peter in between all the business stuff they need to do. It’s good for him, both mentally and physically, and it helps him to slip into Stiles’ imaginary shoes better - the inner thigh kick is something so obvious to him that he probably wouldn’t have even thought of teaching it to Stiles, hadn’t he used it with Peter.

“Let’s do front kicks for the rest of the time,” he says instead, going to grab a large kicking pad and his timer. “Three two-minute matches, one-minute breaks in between. I’ll advance repeatedly towards you, and you try to hold me as far away as possible with your feet. Remember to keep your weight on top of your pelvis and your back straight. Ready?”

Stiles smirks, gets up and shakes his limbs, pops the joints in his neck. “Bring it on.”

“So how does the competitive kickboxing work?” Stiles asks when he climbs the stairs up to the reception half an hour later, fresh from the shower.

Derek looks up from his papers which are all over the lobby coffee table. “Sorry, you were saying?”

“Competitive kickboxing,” Stiles repeats as he flops down next to him. “Are there different styles or what?”

“There’re several different styles, depending on how you want to see it,” Derek says, leans back and stretches his feet under the table, picks up his coffee. “Generally the five most used sets of rules are for full contact, low kick, light contact, semi contact and K1. The skill level and experience of the kickboxer often determine what rules are used in the competition.”

Stiles gets up and pads to the coffee maker, steals Isaac’s mug and pours himself some. “What’s the difference between all of those?” he asks over his shoulder. It’s eleven a.m., and in half an hour Stiles is going straight to work from the gym. Derek doesn’t want to know how much coffee he will consume before eight p.m. if he starts now.

“Mainly how hard you're allowed to hit and what scores you points.”

“Wow, Derek,” Stiles snorts as he makes his way back to the couch. “Never would’ve guessed.”

Derek’s lips twitch in amusement. “The thumb rule is this: no low kicks are allowed, unless there's a beforehand agreement that they are okay. Sweeps to calf muscles are fine. In light and semi contact, the main focus is in the cleanness and the control the fighter has over the techniques. The fighter gets points based on successful, light strikes.”

He adjusts his reading glasses, reaches for a pen and makes a crude rank list on a blank sheet of paper, semi contact in the bottom and K1 on top. "The main difference between light and semi is that in semi contact the match is interfered by the referee when someone scores a point, and the opponents are sent back to their respective corners for a new start. In light contact the match continues uninterrupted.“

Stiles is nodding, obviously trying to keep up. His fingers are twitching like he wants to write it down and study later. “And the rest?”

“Full contact is the most used style by far. The fights usually end with knockout or abandon, or in some cases, disqualification. Low kick is pretty much what the name says: essentially full contact with low kicks allowed. But for example WKA USA, one of our kickboxing associations, calls low kick kickboxing, which is sort of confusing to some people. Wait a sec.”

Derek gets up and limps to the office, roots through some drawers and unexpectedly even finds what he’s looking for - the organized chaos is Peter’s way to stay on track of his business. “Here,” he tosses a small, thick pamphlet to Stiles. “The WKA rules are all in there, so you can read it if you want to know the rules more closely. There’s only so much I can explain without you getting hopelessly lost.”

Stiles laughs. “So you noticed, huh? Thanks, I’ll have a look at this in the boring hours at the checkout desk.” He glances at Derek’s list. “Care to explain K1 for me? I think I can still handle maybe four sentences worth of information.”

Derek’s mouth turns upwards in a half-smile. “I don’t know much about the semantics, but basically it’s full contact with knees allowed. The end of the story.”

“Well, that much I can take, I guess,” Stiles laughs. “So you use full?”

“Mostly,” Derek nods. “Light and semi contact fights are usually just between two amateurs who are starting competing. I actually like the low kick style the most, even though most of my matches have been full contact.” His hand makes a sweeping motion in the air. ”It measures your skills in a very versatile way - you need to know how to protect your whole body and attack your opponent in a wider range.”

Stiles raises his eyebrows. “You really have been thinking about this.”

He shrugs. “I’ve had thirteen years to figure out what I like the most.”

“Fair enough,” Stiles grins, looks at the clock on the reception booth wall and polishes his coffee off before standing up. He stretches a little and goes to rinse the mug, then comes back to toe on his chucks and pick up the rulebook and his bag. “I’ll see you tomorrow in intermediate, huh? Don’t get too engrossed in those papers, they look nasty.”

Derek grins back, just slightly, and says, “Peter is going to look nasty if I don’t finish these. But don’t worry, I don’t intend to sit with these for the whole day.”

“That’s good, otherwise I would’ve ordered a pizza for you,” Stiles smiles and waves a little. “See you.”

“Yeah,” Derek says and watches him disappear. The door opens and closes, and then it’s almost annoyingly quiet.

*

Stiles calls him one morning in May and says, “Hey, listen, are you free right now? My car broke down and I kind of need a lift.”

Derek's at the empty gym, beating a bag, and extremely happy nobody saw the way he fumbled his gloves off when he saw who was calling. “If you don’t mind that I smell,” he replies and Stiles barks out a short, surprised laugh.

“Nope, just get here at some point, I’m at the Wal-Mart parking lot. The towing company said they have problems and it’s going to take forever for them to arrive, and I have two bags of groceries with me.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen.”

“Great, thanks! I owe you.”

After he disconnects the call, Derek stuffs his gloves back into the same locker he claimed almost thirteen years ago, and slams the door shut. Technically the lockers have always been just for the staff, but Derek was already an exception when he started out, and Peter kept the locker empty all the years he was away. And, well, now he is properly staff, too - he stopped manning the booth for free after Peter made a part-time coach out of him and hired him to do all the paperwork for the gym, so that Peter himself could concentrate on the sports store he owns in the town center. It’s the first proper full-time job Derek has had in his life.

When he stops next to Stiles’ Jeep and gets out, Stiles starts to laugh. He frowns. “What?”

His friend almost howls. “You know, I remember you said you would smell, but have you seen yourself? You look like somebody’s wet martial artist dream, man. Came straight from the gym?”

With a deepening scowl Derek glances down at himself. Running leggings and MMA shorts as always, his dark grey wifebeater clinging to his sweaty skin. Only now he realises he forgot to undo his hand wraps and that his hair is probably sticking to every possible direction. Huh. It’s a lovely, warm day and he really didn’t think about his appearance when he just threw his Vans on and left to find Stiles. A soccer mom loading her bags to her car opposite them is glancing at him weirdly.

“You called when I was practising. What did you expect?”

Stiles has calmed down and is merely grinning now. “I don’t know, but seriously you could be ripped straight out of a fireman calendar. Or whatever it would be for kickboxers.”

Derek snorts, then looks at the Jeep. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Dunno,” Stiles shrugs and pats the side of the car. “It worked fine when I drove here, but didn’t start when I wanted to get home. I called the towing truck company, but ironically enough they're having some technical problems. So it was either sitting here for hours with groceries and waiting for them to show up, or trying to bum a lift and drop off my keys to their office on the way. Dad just went to bed two or three hours ago, so you were my only hope. I chose you like a pokémon, as you see.”

“All right. Get in and leave the pop culture jokes outside.”

Stiles puts his grocery bags in the Camaro’s trunk, locks the Jeep and lets out a pleased sound as he slides onto the seat of the air-conditioned car. “Even though I love my baby fiercely, I gotta admit that a working air-condition is pretty fucking nice,” he says as Derek starts the car and steers it towards the town. “Can you drop me off at my dad’s after we’ve delivered the keys? I promised to cook for him because he’s working the night shift for the whole week.”

Derek nods, and Stiles beams at him.

“It’s almost like having my own driver,” Stiles says when he gets back to the car in the parking lot of the towing company. “Except you aren't dressed like Alfred Pennyworth and this ain’t Lamborghini, although pretty damn sweet nevertheless.”

“Dressing like a butler would be a hell in this temperature,” Derek retorts as they head to Stiles’ childhood home. “Besides, you’re not looking very Bruce Wayne either.”

“A fact I shall mourn until the day I die,” Stiles laments. “Hey, is there any chance you could maybe give me a lift to the gym for a couple of days? I can cycle to work, but the gym’s a bit tricky with all the gear and the distance. And you know how non-existing the BH public transportation is.”

Derek shrugs. “Fine by me,” he says. “I’ll probably need to go through some stuff with Peter before your practise today, so I’ll pick you up 45 minutes before that, ok?”

“Sure! Thanks, I’ll buy you shitloads of beer sometimes,” Stiles grins and then pulls his cell phone from his pocket and starts typing furiously, like he has just realised he hasn’t given a situation report to his sleeping dad.

Stiles’ Jeeps ends up being such lost a cause that the mechanic gives only vague promises of getting it fixed “in two weeks or so”, so Derek finds himself driving Stiles to practise and back for more than just a couple of days. At the beginning of the second week Stiles buys him a t-shirt with a suit print on the front and laughs until he cries next day, when Derek shows up wearing it and a smug grin.

Slowly, bit by bit, Derek’s life gets better.

Derek's managed to avoid crossing paths with Jackson Whittemore for the whole winter and spring, which is a sort of a miracle. Or then it isn’t, because he promptly copies Jackson’s training hours from Peter’s calendar to his own and stays out during those, officially because he doesn’t want to train Stiles when there’s another lesson going on. He has heard Jackson a couple of times through the door of the office, and apparently he's exactly the same as in high school - being a dick and insulting everybody he can in as little time as possible, and for some reason which goes completely over Derek’s head, he's still tolerated. His gym in Salt Lake City had a no-bullshit policy - people who repeatedly were assholes were eventually kicked out from the club for spreading bad atmosphere.

Sometimes Derek thinks that Peter keeps Jackson around just because he's good. It’s not unheard of: Peter's enough of a dick himself to tolerate him and make everybody else suffer from Jackson’s douchebag antics just to have him bringing fame for the gym.

The good luck never lasts when it’s about Derek, and so Stiles and he run into Jackson one late Friday afternoon, when he turns up unexpectedly as they're leaving the gym. The lobby is moderately crowded with people who are lounging around, waiting for the open sparring hours to start and doing arrangements for the upcoming MMA tournament. It’s probably the reason why Jackson is here, too.

“Look who’s that,” Jackson drawls, his high school bully attitude still going strong. “Isn’t it the own boy of Beacon Hills, the great Derek Hale himself.”

Derek lifts an eyebrow at him but doesn’t give him the pleasure of an answer.

“I’ve been wondering where are you hiding, when I hear little kickboxing rookies singing your praise left and right. Did you help them to master limping?”

Stiles snorts without humour next to him but keeps quiet.

“What do you want?” Derek asks mildly, trying to keep from getting provoked. He never really had to deal with bullies in school, mostly because he could deliver a meaner punch than anyone else, even though he also spent most breaks with his nose in a book and was naturally good with numbers. It's really not a hardship to see that Jackson is still riling people up because he’s lonely and unsure of himself, just like seven years ago. Nevertheless, his words are still hitting a bit too close to the target.

“Oh, nothing really. Burnt down any houses lately?”

Derek feels blood rush from his face and he has to clench his hand into fist to keep himself from kicking Jackson in the groin.

“Shut up, Jackson,” Stiles suddenly retorts, easily, and Jackson turns to him.

“So you’re the unlucky guy who got teamed up with the “own hero” of Beacon Hills, Stilinski?” he sneers. “Man, I feel sorry for you, I wouldn’t want to train with a cripple.”

Derek grits his teeth and Stiles frowns. “Wow, what crawled up your ass and died this morning? Is it envy? You’ll probably want to dig it out, it doesn’t look good on you.”

Jackson flushes a little. “Just because you think his sorry ass is a catch doesn’t mean everyone else agrees.”

People hanging around the lobby have turned to follow the discussion, and Derek is ready to end it before it spirals totally out of hand. It takes a low, fast sweep with his left leg, and Jackson is on his knees on the carpet. For a supposedly talented MMA fighter his reflexes are pretty fucking slow - but to be fair, Derek's always been brilliant with his feet.

“Derek!” comes Peter’s mock-scolding voice from somewhere, actually sounding more smug than annoyed. Perhaps Jackson has had a lesson waiting to be given for a long time.

“This sorry-ass cripple,” Derek says calmly, a hint of danger creeping into his voice, “is a sixfold US champion and a triple world champion. I would shut the fuck up if I were you.”

Then he nods at Peter, turns around and leaves under the widened eyes of their audience. Stiles, torn between being dumbstruck and delighted, grins at angry, confused Jackson and wishes him a pleasant day before bolting after Derek.

“What a douche,” he scoffs when he catches him in the stairs to the front door. “Hey, did you plan to tell me at some point that you've won a fucking world championship? Or, in fact, three of them.”

Derek blinks. “Uh, probably not. I thought you would've googled it if you were interested.”

“I’ve been respecting your privacy,” Stiles sniffs, mock hurt. “Guess I won’t anymore.”

They step outside to the cloudy, humid summer day, and Derek stops in front of his car, starts ticking off with his fingers. “I won the national WKA USA amateur championships for five years in a row, and the national ISKA amateur champs three times. The first time was a year after I left Beacon Hills.”

Stiles blinks.

“The year I turned 21, I got accepted into the national team for amateur world championships. I won in low kick but came second in full contact.” He rubs his neck. “Next two years I won both world champ titles in my weight class, which was middleweight back then. Then I finally got a professional contract and somehow managed to pull off the ISKA full contact national championship and the world champ the same year. So actually I have six world championships in three different leagues. That’s it, no big deal, no need to google.”

It’s the first time he's openly talked about his titles to somebody who isn’t Peter, Laura or Billy, his coach in Utah - even for a talented and successful athlete he's always been pretty shy of speaking about everything he's achieved. He wasn’t ashamed, but mostly slightly insecure and not wanting to brag. But now, after Jackson hinted he was practically next to nobody, he has the right to sound slightly smug.

Stiles stares at him for a long time, and bursts into loud, joyful laugh. “Man, that’s - that’s amazing. I’m surprised Peter didn’t boast it around the town.”

The corner of Derek’s mouth curls up into a smile. “He’s a bit superstitious. Probably thought I'd stop winning if he told anyone.” He unlocks the Camaro and opens the driver’s door, looks up at Stiles. “You wanna come over? I’d like to show you something.”

Stiles tilts his head to right, curiosity clear on his face. “Sure,” he agrees and throws his bag onto the back seat.

Their drive to Derek’s apartment building is quiet. Stiles is fiddling with the radio and Derek's contemplating the decision he made as he heard the defensive tone in Stiles’ words to Jackson; tone that belied his pride of being trained by Derek, even when he didn’t know exactly how good his coach once was. They've been reunited for almost five months and there are still so many things he hasn’t shared - but hearing Jackson mocking him for being a cripple made him realise that he needs to show his injuries now or he probably never will. He has to do it now, when he's still driven by anger and humiliation, to make Stiles understand better - especially after the skeletons of his titles have finally fallen out of the closet, too.

When they get in, Derek gestures towards the couch and tells Stiles to make himself home (like he hasn’t been making himself home here for ages). “I’ll be right back,” he says, clears his throat a little and disappears to the bedroom.

Behind the closed door he strips off his sweats and clenches his jaw, breathes through his nose to trample down his urge to hide, and pulls on the shorts he borrowed from Peter and never gave back. It’s now or never.

Stiles is sitting on the couch, flipping through a literature magazine, when Derek comes back from his bedroom dressed in loose MMA shorts. He looks up, when Derek sits down and lifts his left leg up, bent so that Stiles can see his calf. “This is why I am a cripple,” he says roughly.

Stiles stares at the long, wild-looking scars crisscrossing in between patches of clearly grafted skin; looks slowly up and down, from the burn scars on Derek’s thighs to the slightly deformed shape of the muscles of his left calf. He knew there were some sort of scars, of course, but seeing them up close is very different from being aware of their existence.

Slowly he reaches out and touches lightly at the burnt skin. Derek flinches, maybe more from the idea of being touched than actually feeling, since the thick, leathery texture tells Stiles clearly that there isn’t any tactile sense left. He moves his fingers, traces down the stitch scars. They look like zippers, pulling Derek together to keep all the ugly memories underneath his skin.

“How did this happen?” he asks softly, looking up to his friend. He knows the fire was an arson, that much he dug up after the first news hit, but how Derek survived is a mystery.

“I slept upstairs,” Derek begins and swallows. His voice seems to come from somewhere far away and his downcast eyes grow distant. “My leg went knee-deep through the stairs when I came running down. The fire had hollowed the wood out or something, so when I stepped on it with my whole weight, it gave in. It tore the muscles and I couldn’t get out at first. When I finally did, the fire had already reached me and I had to go back to the second floor hall, break a window and jump down.”

He clears his throat a little, blinks like trying to ease his stinging eyes. Stiles waits, holding his breath. “The fall broke my shinbone but saved my life. My -- my parents slept in the first floor, in the front corner of the house. That’s where the fire was started.”

Stiles stares at his own hand resting on Derek’s bare calf. He can’t even imagine the panic and terror Derek must've gone through, stuck in the stairs while his home was burning, maybe shouting his parents’ names in vain, maybe already knowing they wouldn't answer. He shifts closer to gather Derek’s legs in his lap, then starts again trailing his hand up and down the mutilated left leg. There's a small but unmistakable bump in Derek’s shinbone where it must've been broken and not properly set, and Stiles slides his warm palm over it, then strokes the place on Derek’s thigh where the skin is the deepest brown. Also his right shin, while otherwise seeming to be fine, looks like it’s gone under lots of skin-grafting, a network of fine scars rounding out the areas.

“You crawled?” he asks quietly. Derek's curled up sideways against the couch, his shoulders hunched. Stiles is pretty sure this is the first time he's willingly shown these marks to someone who isn’t his family, and his heart swells to the point of aching at the thought of Derek trusting him enough to open himself up like this, naked and vulnerable.

“No,” Derek says in a hoarse voice. “Shuffled on my knees, dragging the injured leg behind me.”

Stiles makes a soft, small sound, still touching Derek’s legs like he tries to scrub the scars away with his palm, and says out loud what he's been thinking for past two years. “I’m so fucking glad you are alive.”

Derek scoots closer to the couch and mumbles, “Yeah, me too.”

It gets dark but neither of them moves to turn on the light. Even with a scruff and a body of a twenty-five-years-old Derek resembles a child in the twilight, his face and neck a pale, stark contrast against the darkness of his hair and the deep blue colour of the couch. Stiles looks at him and thinks how early he had to grow up under Peter’s guidance and start competing, and how much less haunted he's started to look lately.
He keeps his hand on Derek’s knee, and they sit in silence for a long time.

Stiles stays the night, sleeping on the couch and dreaming of the fire. He snaps awake every couple of hours to see if Derek is still breathing in the bedroom, still looking the same and not burned beyond recognition. If he has this kind of nightmares just from hearing what happened and fuelled by his wild imagination, it’s terrifying to wonder how bad it must've been for the one of them who actually experienced it all.

At five a.m. Stiles sits on the edge of the bed, awoken from another bad dream, his trembling fingers hovering over the nape of Derek’s neck. Derek sleeps on his stomach, his face crammed in the crease between two pillows, so the only thing Stiles can see is his unruly hair and the brown scar on his skin, ending up underneath his ear. It looks like a brand, perhaps from a falling piece of the ceiling. It almost makes Stiles want to throw up, because fucking fuck, how the hell has Derek been carrying all this inside him and on his body for this long?

He needs to touch, shakes with the overwhelming urge and hesitation, just to make sure he isn’t imagining and that Derek is actually still in front of him, not trapped in the burning house like he was in Stiles’ mind just minutes ago. Carefully he lays his hand on the sleep-warm skin and sinks his fingers in the soft hair, closes his eyes and breathes through his nose to squash down the relief that explodes in his chest. It’s all right. It’s all right.

Derek makes a soft, sleepy sound and shifts under his touch, mumbles, “What?”

“Go back to sleep,” Stiles whispers, combs his hand through his hair, and Derek does, shifting towards the wall like he's making room in the bed.

After a short inner battle Stiles climbs in, curls up and presses his back against Derek’s. His sleep is blissfully dark and free of nightmares.

In the morning he wakes up and Derek is making omelettes out of the four eggs, one tomato and wishful thinking in his fridge, and he isn’t wearing long trousers, his scars out in the open. Stiles eats his ridiculously delicious albeit slightly burnt breakfast and tries not to burst with all the trust he's been awarded with. It’s easy after he takes a swig of the mug Derek set out for him. Derek’s instant coffee is hilariously shitty. He drinks it anyway because fuck yeah, survival.

*

Just before the midsummer Stiles turns up to one of their training sessions looking pissed and being uncharacteristically quiet. Derek bears with him because everybody has their off days; tries to get his mind off of whatever is upsetting him by making him work extra hard. Still it’s pretty clear it isn’t working - Stiles stays wrapped up in his thoughts and not paying attention, only starts to look more sour by every passing minute.

They are honing the attacking and defending hooks, which Stiles has been struggling with, but Derek can basically see how his advice is going in through the left ear and out through the right. The hooks stay sloppy, his elbow still not on the proper level and his body mass not giving the power to it. Stiles’ weight keeps on falling too much on his leading foot instead of being evenly balanced, so he’s stumbling slightly and therefore not able to grasp the rhythm of the left hook-right roundhouse combo. They’ve been at it for fifteen minutes, and Derek’s leg is starting to ache with the constant leaping front and back and dropping his weight down a little to catch Stiles’ roundhouses.

“All right, stop,” he orders finally, when Stiles fucks his roundhouse up and almost breaks some small bones in his foot by kicking the pads from the wrong distance. “Spill.”

“What?” Stiles grimaces and sits down on the mat with an annoyed huff.

Derek rolls his eyes and unstraps the pads from his forearms. “You are distracted and frowning, so there’s pretty fucking clearly something bugging you. You have not listened to anything I say or even tried to correct your faulty technique, and I’m not wasting my time with that. It’s no use for you or me to do anything half-assed, so we’re not continuing until you tell me what’s eating you.”

Stiles tugs off his gloves and drops them on the floor, rubs his foot and resolutely doesn’t look Derek in the eye. He waits patiently.

“Scott called this morning,” Stiles says then. He sounds petulant. “He said he probably isn’t going to come to Beacon Hills at all this summer. Got a job at a local vet clinic, and apparently for his week-long holiday they are going camping with Allison’s father. Usually he would come to work with Dr. Deaton and see his mom and me. But I guess things are different, when he’s engaged and such.”

Derek nods, starting to see where this is going. After the winter Stiles hasn’t really talked about Scott, and it’s easy to figure out that they are growing apart, probably have been for a long time - no matter how inseparable they once were, there are now bigger things between them, like Scott’s girlfriend and studies.

Derek is rather confident that’s one of the reasons why Stiles hangs out with him. Loneliness is not a joke, because Beacon Hills is steadily middle-aged as all the young adults are fleeing the town for a better life somewhere else, only to return in ten or fifteen years to raise their own kids in the town they grew up. There are probably a handful of people in their mid-twenties in the whole town, if Derek and Stiles are not counted, and most of them are people they went to school with but never really interacted with. Or like Jackson and Isaac, people who either get stuck in town because they have nothing else, or try living somewhere else but end up back where they hail from.

“It’s just -” Stiles starts and breaks off with a frustrated noise, runs his hand through his hair. “I guess I’m kind of jealous, in a way. He’s got everything figured out, and I have only dad and the library and this gym and you.”

In theory Derek knows that Stiles doesn’t mean it, but still can’t help feeling hurt at the bitter tone he spits his list out with. His expression shutters at the imminent, slightly panicky reaction - that maybe he really isn’t a friend good enough for Stiles with all his troubles, that maybe Stiles really needs someone else who isn’t Derek. He sits down next to him anyway, looking away and trying not to seem upset himself. There is a dull throb in his head that matches with the one in his calf.

"Sometimes I wish I hadn’t dropped out of college,” Stiles sighs, fiddling with the hem of his thai shorts. “Not that I don’t like it here. I have never really been ambitious - I've only wanted to become a good son. To be there for my dad, you know. He’s had a lot of trouble with me." He glances at Derek. “But still it kinda would be nice to have at least a finished degree.”

Derek makes a sort of an agreeing sound, staring at the old event posters on the wall. There is his face in one of them, for the national pro championships two years ago. He has never noticed the poster before. It’s framed, like all the others, but it’s carefully placed in a spot which is clearly visible from every corner of the gym. His heart aches a little at the thought of Peter and Henry and Lena putting it up there, proud of the boy they helped raising. He suddenly wishes he could have stayed in Beacon Hills back then, made the world familiar with the Wolves.

“How about you?” Stiles’ voice sounds small, like he somehow has picked up Derek’s mood.

He is quiet for a moment, watching his own serious face on the wall. “I used to have ambition, but it was directed strictly to becoming a professional kickboxer,” he finally answers. “After I lost it, I lost my thirst for anything.”

Stiles turns properly to look at him. From the corner of his eye Derek can see his eyebrows rising. “Hold on, you didn’t go to college?”

He shrugs, uncomfortable. “Not really. I was a business major for a couple of years, at least namely. Found my way through some courses now and then, but dropped out to make room for full-time practise and a part-time job when I got accepted for the nationals. I was maybe sixty-five percent through with the undergrad.”

“And you never went back?”

Derek shakes his head.

“Oh.”

Stiles mulls over something for a long time. Then he says, “Thanks. For listening.”

“You’re welcome,” Derek shrugs and gets up, offering his hand to Stiles. “Now, you make ten laps around the gym.”

His mouth falls open and he seems to be about to protest, when Derek holds his hand up and continues with a small grin, “And then we go to my place, order pizza and watch nesting penguins until you forget you were upset in the first place.”

The laughter that echoes in the gym as Stiles jogs off is infectious.

Stiles’ bad mood starts to creep back three hours later, when they are lounging in Derek’s living room, indeed watching a nature documentary about said penguins. It turns out that not even the sickeningly adorable and fluffy baby birds can distract him enough: he gets fidgety and fiddles with the hem of his shirt, not paying that much attention to the tv. “We should do something else,” he says suddenly and snatches the remote to turn the tv off.

Derek raises his eyebrows. “All right. Suggestions?”

“I don’t know,” he huffs, irritated and twitchy, and throws his hands up. “We’re always either here or at the gym. We should get outside, go running or something.”

“Stiles,” Derek says slowly, “You know that I can’t run, right? I can jog for fifty yards before I have to stop and sit down.”

That earns a brief, confused expression, but then Stiles is looking sour again. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m just trying to make up something new for us to do. It was an example. In figurative sense.”

“Why?”

Stiles turns to look at him, half annoyed, half questioning. “What do you mean, why? No offense, but there are actually other things in life than just sitting in front of the tv and punching somebody, you know? Besides, it’s fucking summer and we’re sitting inside.”

Derek sighs. Apparently all of Stiles’ frustration towards Scott and therefore the loneliness he is feeling is now trying to find a way to get out, so he channels it through the only permanent thing in his life outside of his dad and job: Derek. “Okay,” he says. “What do you wanna do?”

“What do you want? I said us, not me, damn it.”

It’s starting to sound like Stiles is ready to pick a fight just to get some action, like he doesn’t get to quarrel enough at the gym. Derek abruptly stands up and limps to the kitchen, wrenches the ventilation window open and finds his emergency cigarettes from the drawer. He has never smoked, not really: he wrinkled his nose at the habit when he was a teenager, too conscious of its effect on his athleticism, and while after the fire he started carrying cigarettes in his pockets, since the knowledge of their existence was enough to calm him, he seldom lit up. But now he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands, so he pulls a Lucky Strike out of the pack and closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the flame of the lighter.

Stiles joins him a couple of minutes later, when he is staring out of the window and trying not to think about anything; holds his hand out wordlessly and Derek passes him the cigarette.

“You can’t take Scott out on me,” he says curtly when Stiles takes a drag. “If you feel like picking a fight, go find somebody else. I’ve had enough of them.”

“I know,” Stiles sighs. “Sorry. I just... get cagey.”

They smoke in silence, passing the rest of the cigarette back and forth.

“How do you feel about hiking?” Derek asks finally, when Stiles flicks the stub out from the window. “I should be able to do that.”

Stiles turns to look at him, surprised. “Actually, that would be great. Wanna go for a short round at the preserve? I think fresh air would be good for both of us.”

They end up making a two-hour stroll through the woods to Derek’s childhood home and back. There is nobody living in there, and the windows look sad and empty, but at least it isn’t charred like the house he last left behind. Technically, it’s his property - the house was never sold and his parents were wealthy enough to leave it to wait. It’s been almost eight years, and the house is still on paper his and Laura’s, a part of their inheritance. It’s a small miracle, probably Peter’s courtesy, that the house is even standing and not inhabited by wildlife. Maybe he should start to look for a real estate agent actively, or just put up some fucking bulletins on the billboard at the Wal-Mart. It’s way too big for him to habit on his own, once meant for a family of four.

Stiles is quiet for most of their hike, lost in his own thoughts, and Derek doesn’t disturb him. The weather is beautiful and fresh air usually does miracles to thinking processes, so it’s an easy decision to let Stiles mull over whatever he is digesting and concentrate on the sounds of the woods instead.

“Thanks,” Stiles says at the parking lot when they finally come back to Derek’s place. “I needed that. We should go again sometimes.”

Derek’s leg is aching mildly, but his head is blissfully quiet. “Yeah,” he replies, tipping his head back and tilting his face up to the sun. “Let’s.”

*

The backyard of the Stilinski house gets sunny and almost unbearably hot on July afternoons. They are lying in the shade of the tree, Stiles flipping through a magazine, keeping up a small monologue, and Derek just staring listlessly to the sky. Even in the heat he is wearing jeans that cover up his legs: a stark contrast to Stiles who is lounging around in a t-shirt and skimpy running shorts, an epitome of summer in California. For two months Derek has almost been waiting for Stiles to strike out an all-night barbeque with paper lamps on the porch and the endless, lingering summer night stretching out to dawn.

The heat presses down on his chest like somebody was sitting on top of him - he has been enjoying the summer but dreading for this inevitable day to fall upon him with its suffocating weight. It’s been two years, and the loveliness of the summer day seems somehow faded, the colours less bright. Stiles’ mindless chatter is flowing past his ears, unheard.

He snaps out of his haze with Stiles’ hand waving in front of him. When he turns to look, his friend has sat up and is watching him with a frown, an intent expression on his face.

“What?”

“I asked if you wanted water or juice. I’m going to get some.”

“Oh. No. Thanks.” He starts to stare at the sky again, but Stiles’ head pops into his view almost immediately.

“What’s going on?” Stiles asks, eyebrows furrowed. He looks concerned. “You’re awfully quiet. Or well, even more than usually.”

“I’m fine,” he lies, sitting up.

Stiles sighs. “No, you’re not. Tell me.”

“There isn’t anything to tell.”

Discomfort and uneasiness are starting to creep up his spine. Last year he spent this day holed up in his room at Laura’s apartment, batting off phantom flames on his legs, tossing and sweating in terror. Laura held him through the long hours of nightmares and self-blame and wept with him, kissed his cheek in the morning and made him coffee. But she is on the other side of the country now, and Derek sincerely hopes that this year will be easier - it already has been a lot less terrifying with Stiles around. His PTSD is also shitloads less severe than it was so there is hope, but this date will probably have an effect on him for years to come.

Stiles purses his lips together and looks pissed. “All right,” he huffs. “If you want to be childish, feel free.”

Derek grits his teeth and stays stubbornly quiet. He knows he is acting like a kid, but he just can’t fucking help it. The day is crushing him more heavily with every hour of its progress towards the night, towards the memory of fire and fight and helplessness and guilt and -- and this, this is something he doesn’t know how to share.

He gets up. There is a lump in his throat, a pair of invisible hands reaching to strangle him and press burning fingers on his chest, his collarbone, his neck. Sweat is starting to gather on his temples.

“I gotta go,” he croaks.

Stiles’ mouth falls open and he looks almost stung. Then after a pause he stands up, too, and laughs, short and bitter. “Fine, whatever. I thought that we could maybe, you know, talk like adults do, like friends do. If I remember correctly, your mom was always telling my dad to talk about his feelings and not to bottle them up, whenever we ran into her in town.” Stiles looks at him up and down, something resembling a sneer on his face. “She’d be pretty fucking proud if she saw you now.”

The world around Derek comes crashing down. He falls a step back like Stiles threw a punch at him: stares at him, struck, and struggles to remember how to breathe. It’s like he is suddenly trapped underwater, his ears full of seaweed and lungs burning for oxygen.

His mother is screaming in his ears over the crackle of flames; a sound he doesn’t remember but can hear nevertheless.

He does the only sensible thing to do: stammers out a choked apology, whips around and half-runs, half-hops to his car as quick as he can; not hearing Stiles shouting after him, not stopping until he has slammed the door closed and fucked off, like a startled animal. Stiles tries to call, once, twice, thrice before he reaches home and turns his cell phone off, throws it somewhere and falls back to his couch, leg aching and chest heaving. The ceiling is spinning, and he can already feel the trickle of the ghost fire climbing up his ankles. The screams of his mother have quieted to frantic, desperate pleading.

He can’t stay inside.

Hours later Derek is sitting on the low brick wall surrounding the cemetery, keeping his back to the graves of his parents and his eyes in the woods. He doesn’t know how long he has been there - the baking hot day has cooled down into a lingering warmth in the evening twilight and the cemetery is silent. It’s not creepy like Derek would have thought. Instead the company of the dead is somehow comforting, because at least they don't judge him for sitting here for hours, curled up to himself and his solitude. In a couple of hours it will be exactly two years since he came home from the gym, kissed his mother goodnight unaware that it would be the last time, and went to bed, just to wake up at two a.m. to a permanently changed world and loss too large for words.

Footsteps crunch down the gravel, and then Stiles hoists himself up on the wall next to Derek, facing the cemetery. Neither of them speak for a long time. Derek watches the unmoving forest in the thickening dusk and feels Stiles stealing glances at him. For the first time it occurs to him that if Stiles’ dad attended the funeral of his parents, maybe Stiles did, too - it would explain how he knew to look for Derek from the graveyard.

“You weren’t home or answering your phone. Figured you’d be here.”

Derek nods, hollow and sullen. He remembers weeping uncontrollably for over half an hour, bracing his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands, but it must have been over two hours ago. His eyes don’t feel dry and puffy anymore, and there is an eerie calmness inside him.

“Sorry for the earlier. I -- I really shouldn’t have said that or let you run, least today.” Stiles sounds like it’s a huge relief to see Derek, like he has been truly worried, but Derek can only muster a noise from the back of his throat as a reply, and then they are silent again.

“Did you know that they suspected me first?” Derek asks five minutes later, and Stiles turns his head to shoot him a questioning look. He is glad it’s getting darker.

“What?”

“When I woke up after the first surgery the cops came in and told me I was suspected for hiring someone to burn my own parents alive. While I was lying there with a fucked-up leg, pumped up with drugs, not knowing if I’d ever even walk again and having just lost almost every fucking thing I held dear.” His voice goes rougher with every word he forces out.

Stiles sucks in a long breath. “But that’s -- that’s awful. Why?”

Derek shrugs. His throat feels parched. “I was the sole survivor and my parents were wealthy. They thought I was after the inheritance. Wondered if Laura was in it, too.”

“Jesus,” Stiles mutters. “I had no idea.”

“Weird,” Derek says and his mouth twists into a bitter sneer. “Because it was all over the papers in Salt Lake. When they found the real arsonist three days later and confirmed I wasn't involved, I was already branded.”

They fall into a stunned silence. In a way Derek feels bad unloading all the shit to Stiles like this, for what if he has misread and, despite to what Stiles said earlier, they aren’t that good friends yet? This isn’t the kind of history you can go telling around at the dinner table. He thinks of a Banana Yoshimoto book he read last year and an excerpt which has stayed with him through all these months: When someone tells you something big, it’s like you’re taking money from them, and there’s no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.

Suddenly this feels like a very bad idea.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says. He sounds painfully sincere. “I didn’t know. I think nobody in Beacon Hills knew.” A pause. “Except Jackson. Of course.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Derek mumbles. “Better for me. Peter sued the papers who hinted that the cops were right about me, and won. I’m not that sure.”

Stiles frowns. “What do you -- fuck, Derek, it wasn’t your fault.”

He stares down at his hands. With the same hands he had fought his way to the top and then fallen down by pushing himself out of a burning house. “I know,” he says finally. “But sometimes I can’t help but wonder what if. Had I rented my own apartment and not lived with them, my parents wouldn’t have had to give me space upstairs. They would have been sleeping there themselves, not downstairs in the front corner room.”

Stiles wraps his arm around Derek’s stomach and pulls him closer, so that they sit flush, thigh to thigh. Then he leans closer and puts his chin on Derek’s shoulder, right next to the scar on his neck. He smells familiar and a little like home.

“It’s useless to think of what ifs when everything has happened and you honestly are not to blame. But I really am sorry,” he murmurs into his ear. “For your parents and for you.”

“Don’t be,” Derek chokes, curls his hands into fists in his lap and rests his aching head against Stiles’ shoulder. “It’s been two years.”

Stiles sighs and tightens his hold a little. “It doesn’t mean I can't be sorry for all the shit that you had to go through, or for being a dick earlier,” he tells, and that’s when Derek starts to tremble.

There have been so many people who have pitied him, for his parents, for his injuries, for his lost career; who have wanted him to unload the baggage he has been carrying to therapists, psychiatrists or at least to someone. Stiles is the first person whose mouth doesn’t make those words sound hollow.

Stiles angles himself better and wraps his free arm around Derek’s back, boxing him in the comforting safety of his broad shoulders, and Derek feels suddenly very young and very small against him. He is turning twenty-six next month and can’t remember the last time someone embraced him.

His fingers twist into Stiles' shirt, and Stiles holds him for a long, long time.

After that July evening Derek finally, finally starts to breathe easier.

*

Laura Hale sweeps into Beacon Hills in August, enjoying her first summer holiday as the new partner in a successful law firm. Stiles hasn’t seen her since the funeral of her parents, so compared to that it’s easy to say she looks lovelier and more radiant than he remembers, when he shows up to Derek’s apartment and she opens the door.

“Hi, Stiles,” she greets with a smile that feels like a million-watt lamp. Stiles blinks, suddenly overwhelmed by how much Laura and Derek resemble each others, all dark hair and unfairly gorgeous faces and tall, lean builds and the most perfect teeth in the universe.

“Hi,” he blurts. “Wow, when did you come back in town? You Hales are just popping up without a notice.”

She laughs, a bright and beautiful sound, and lets him in. “Less than an hour ago, actually, and not permanently. Derek had to go to drop something off at the gym, probably more of that never-ending paperwork Peter is paying him to do, but he should be back soon. Get in, Stilinski, and grab some coffee. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“How’s New York?” Stiles asks when they are sitting on the couch, their bare feet propped up on the coffee table and steaming mugs in their hands. “I heard you made partner, so I believe congratulations are in order.”

Laura grins. “Yes, I did! It means better pay and finally getting to pick my own cases, so I’m not complaining.”

“Derek said in the winter that you had considered moving back here, too.”

“He told you that?” she cocks her head to the side, and her grin turns into a strange, small smile. It looks pleased. “That’s true. But now I don’t think it’s necessary anymore, at least not at the moment.”

Stiles lifts an eyebrow at her, confused and questioning, and her smile becomes suddenly smug. “Care to tell me why have you swapped my brother for an extraterrestrial?”

He gapes. “Sorry?”

Brushing her hair off her forehead, Laura leans back on the couch and toys with the sleeve of her thin sweater. It’s surprisingly chilly for an August morning, the rain bringing colder air. “When I last saw Derek, he was a ghost. Now I come here, and at the airport I am greeted by an actual human being who looks like my brother should, the first time in two years. And somehow I doubt I should thank my uncle’s lack of tact for it.”

Caught aback, Stiles opens his mouth but doesn’t have a chance to say anything before the lock rattles and Derek comes in. He doesn’t really look surprised to see Stiles there even though he didn’t call ahead.

“Hi,” he says, closes the door and toes off his shoes. Stiles is pretty sure he caught the habit of taking off his shoes from the gym as a kid and never really grew out of it, because he’s doing it everywhere. But he’s not complaining - it’s Derek’s house and Derek’s rules and it’s actually kind of nice not to sit with his shoes on all the time. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the library?”

Derek is wearing navy chinos and a light grey henley that looks great against his tanned skin. It’s a relief to see him not so sickly pale anymore, even though still whip-thin. Stiles will probably feel weird about that forever, or at least until he gets used to the idea of Derek as naturally slim. All the muscle can apparently throw a guy off for years - just like he recalls always being the shorter one, and suddenly it’s the other way around.

Stiles would've never described Derek as petite, especially after finally watching some of his matches from YouTube and seeing him with all that early twenties bulk, but his figure indeed is not exactly sturdy. Even though his shoulders are still naturally broad, the V of his back is a lot steeper without the Hulk-esque muscles in his upper torso, and his wrists and hands are surprisingly delicate. It’s fascinating, somehow, to see how Derek has shaken off the most obvious kickboxer looks and transformed into someone else.

“Summer holiday,” Stiles says smugly. “Started yesterday.”

“Oh,” Derek frowns, just a little, more out of confusion than anything else. Stiles knows that the gym is on summer break for two weeks, too, and Peter has surprisingly taken most of the business stuff to himself so that Derek can get some free days.

“Then,” Laura announces, “you are free to join us for breakfast at the diner. I’ve been craving for a greasy Beacon Hills special for ages.”

Derek wrinkles his nose at the mention of the special, probably for its unhealthiness since he mostly seems to get by with protein shakes, coffee and vegetables. Stiles tries not to laugh.

“How’s your dad?” Laura asks as she opens the driver’s door of Derek’s car. After a short sibling squabble Derek has agreed to let her drive. Stiles thinks he did it to make her shut up - she seemingly adores the car and earlier waxed poetics about it for nearly five minutes.

“He’s doing great.” Stiles slips to the back seat and tries to fold his long limbs at least a little gracefully. “Never stops praising how fun fining people and putting them to jail is nowadays. I think he would like to see you. Both of you, actually.”

“That’s nice,” she smiles. “We should grab dinner together while I’m here, what do you think?”

Derek nods, and Stiles pulls his phone out to text his dad. “Dad’s in regular shift this week, so any day is fine. I’ll ask him if he has any preferences.”

“You do that,” Laura agrees. “I’m here for a week and we don’t have any plans so far, except driving down to San Francisco. I can’t remember the last time I was there.”

“Ugh,” Stiles groans, “I still do. I don’t think my ass has ever been as sore as after the last time I went.”

Laura snorts loudly, and he belatedly realizes how wrong his words can be taken. His ears feel hot, like they are turning bright red. “Wow, no, Scott just wanted to walk everywhere,” he stutters as Laura cackles and even Derek cracks a grin.

“Whatever you say,” Laura says sweetly and her eyes meet Stiles’ in the mirror before glancing pointedly at her brother, who is staring out, oblivious. Stiles clears his throat and sinks a little on the seat.

Stiles notices the ring when they are seated in a booth and scanning through menus. Laura is tapping the table with her left hand, and the fluorescent light catches the metal.

“So that’s why Derek looks so inexplicably pleased this morning,” he jokes and points at the engagement ring. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

“Huh?” Laura asks and follows his finger. Then she laughs. “Oh, right. Stephen, we’ve been dating for three years. He proposed a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to keep it from Derek until I could see his face.”

“More congratulations, then,” he grins. “This guy wasn’t with you when you... last visited, right?”

Derek tenses a little next to him, but Laura shakes her head. “Nope.” She shrugs. “We’d been serious for just a couple of months by then. I didn’t want to bring him.”

The waiter appears next to their table, cutting their conversation off. Laura does order the special, and Stiles has the privilege to see her wolf down an awful amount of food compared to how slim she is. He maybe stares a little.

“Are you sure there isn’t an alien growing inside your sister?” he asks Derek, who has finished his eggs and oatmeal ages ago and is now taking shameless advantage of the free coffee refills. He looks tired and a little sleep-deprived, which is understandable, since he probably has been up since ass-o’clock in the morning to drive two and half hours to Oakland to get his sister.

Derek shrugs and gives him a rueful little grin. “If so, then it’s not exactly in a hurry. Laura has eaten like that since she was a kid.”

“Fast metabolism,” Laura smiles around her hash browns. She’s eyeing Stiles’ lonely leftover pancake, and he pushes his plate over the table so that she can stab it with her fork. “I’ve got to enjoy it while I still can. I’m almost thirty, it will slow down very soon.”

“Or then you’ll just have to tell me you’re pregnant and therefore still eating like a teenager?” Derek suggests drily, and Laura rolls her eyes.

“Trust me, little brother, you will notice when I’m preggers.”

“Please never say ‘preggers’ in my vicinity again.”

Stiles snorts. Laura huffs a laugh and stuffs the pancake to her mouth.

Lydia flies from Massachusetts to California for a couple of days, mainly to see Stiles, but he is pretty sure she is dying of curiosity to meet the Hales, after he has been talking about Derek so much. They end up driving to the nearby lake, all four of them, on a gorgeous summer morning. Laura and Lydia bond unnervingly quickly over something that goes completely over Stiles’ head and spend the majority of the day tanning themselves on the beach, ranting about ‘girl stuff’ (like quantum physics, if Stiles knows Lydia at all), while he and Derek are mostly floating in the lake.

Derek is wearing knee-length swimming shorts and a black calf support made of some elastic fabric, probably to keep his leg warm and hide his awful scars. There are not too many people on the beach which suits Stiles fine in any case - and he has learnt to be grateful for things like that for Derek: it’s already a pretty fucking big improvement that he isn’t wearing a full wetsuit, and the lack of people must be making him feel better.

“So you like water?” he asks finally when they have been at the lake for three or four hours.

Derek turns to look at him from where he is floating on his back, watching the sky. “Pardon?”

“I said, ‘so you like water?’”

He smiles, a small but genuine thing that makes Stiles smile back. “Yeah,” he says. “Swimming is one of the few sports that don’t suffer from my limp. And, well.” He visibly hesitates, and Stiles waits patiently. “When you are afraid of fire, it’s easy to like its opposite.”

Stiles hums agreeingly. “You’re not afraid of drowning?”

Turning his gaze back to the sky, Derek frowns as he mulls it over. “No,” he replies then. “At least it’s kind of quick.”

Stiles thinks of how his parents burned alive, and suddenly wishes fervently that they lost consciousness before they even awoke properly. It’s something they don’t talk about. He reaches out and closes his fingers around Derek’s wrist, and they float side by side, watching the clouds pass.

“You’re in love with him,” Lydia says later matter-of-factly as they sit on their towels, watching Laura and Derek wrestling for something on the waterfront. Derek seems to be winning, and they both are grinning so hard that it’s a wonder their faces are not splitting in two.

Stiles starts and turns to look at her. There’s a warm, amused look in Lydia’s eyes, her mouth turned upwards in the corners. “Is it that obvious?”

“No,” she shrugs. “I just know your tells. How long?”

He wants to stretch down on his back, but his eyes find the Hales again; find Derek’s open, unmistakably happy face, and he can’t look away. “Since he started trusting me.”

“Is it bad?”

Stiles clenches and unclenches his hand while following as Derek hauls Laura up. “Not yet, just... sort of small and careful. But it will be.”

Lydia nods, pursing her mouth. She taps her fingers to her knee, then flashes a smile and reaches to pat his shoulder. It’s bizarre to think that this same girl used to ignore him completely in high school. “You will figure it out, when the time comes.”

He desperately wants it to be true.

On her last day in town Laura takes both of them out to eat. It’s Derek’s twenty-sixth birthday and while he doesn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about getting older, he does look pleasantly surprised when Stiles gives him a present. It’s just a book Stiles caught him eyeing in a bookstore, but on the card he has drawn crude stick figures of Derek in a Scout Leader uniform and himself as an overly excited Junior Woodchuck. When Derek sees it, he snorts so hard that he almost gets hiccups, and Stiles bursts out laughing, relieved to see he remembers the joke dating back to March.

“You are an idiot,” Derek tells him as he unwraps the present and his lips quirk up to a small, pleased smile at the sight of the book. “And a terrible artist. But thanks.”

“Hey,” Stiles protests as Laura practically howls at the card. “I’ll have you know that I am excellent in everything.”

“Feel free to think so,” Derek says, “but seriously, don’t try applying to an art school.”

They have a weird, comfortable dinner in an Italian restaurant downtown, and Stiles enjoys every minute of it. Partly because Derek opens up in the company of his sister and his (totally best) friend like a plant turning towards the light: he smiles and jokes and generally is so fucking normal that Stiles almost wants to weep a little. They’ve come a long way from the pale, troubled guy in the gym reception.

When they are waiting for the dessert and Derek limps off to the bathroom, Laura turns to Stiles, looking completely serious for the first time that evening.

"Thank you," she says, and when Stiles looks confused she adds, "For taking care of Derek."

"Oh," he blinks. "You're welcome?"

Laura’s mouth twitches. "I was worried when he announced he would leave for Beacon Hills for a while, because I would be stuck in New York, and you know Peter. He genuinely cares for us but has dubious ways of showing it, or is so deep in his own stuff that he forgets he still has a family. And then there was the gym and all the meaning it holds to Derek, so I can't say I've been the most relaxed woman this year."

Stiles doesn't know what to say, if anything at all, so he nods.

She sighs, twists her engagement ring around her finger. "He has always been a loner, but after the fire he fell so deep into his solitude that I was at loss. Especially because he probably still blames himself for mom and dad. So I'm really, really grateful that you have managed to drag him out of the fog he's been walking in for two years. You can't imagine how amazing it feels to see him smile again."

Stiles thinks of the first time he saw Derek grinning openly after their reunion, after long months of listless, joyless face of someone who does not know how to pull himself out of the pit. He thinks of the sudden, almost violent joy and wonder he felt, and the way his life has been without a warning full of Derek since January, filling the void inside him. “Actually,” he says, “I think I can.”

Laura smiles at him.

*

September rolls over and Derek finds suddenly his hands full of work. Peter is pushing more and more of the gym’s business to him, so he spends his days shuffling through the endless paperwork. Beacon Hills has had a flood of new inhabitants during spring and summer for a reason unknown, and there are surprisingly many new members in the club. They have full groups of beginners in all four sports they offer, and also new intermediate or expert-levelled people who are looking for a martial arts club so they can keep practising, so the business is blooming. They even get so many inquiries about other training times than the evening that Chris and Lena start giving a daily open morning practise.

Peter has been talking about expanding their selection to BJJ in the winter, and spends most of his time finding a coach for it and researching the practicalities, being bossy at the store in downtown, making other people coach his own classes and nagging at Derek. The latter is extremely annoying, since Derek never actually asked to have the gym completely to himself on top of instructing most of the kickboxing classes and training Stiles, and he’s still getting paid the same amount as in the spring, even though his workload has probably tripled.

Finally in the second week of September Derek snaps. He announces Peter that he is hiring Isaac to run the business with him and someone, maybe two people, to man the booth, and Peter better give him a fucking raise or he’s walking out. To his surprise, his uncle agrees to everything without another word and even lets him to settle his salary to ‘whatever he finds appropriate’. Sometimes Derek really, really wonders how the hell Peter has managed to keep his trade from going bankrupt all these years.

So Isaac gets a full-time job because he’s got a head for business, and since he passed the krav maga instructor course in August, he starts filling in for Anne and Henry at the practitioner classes, too. They hire two high school kids to occupy the reception in the evenings, and rearrange the office to suit the two of them, since Peter shows up less and less and has kind of stopped caring about it.

Stiles starts to hang around even more on the days he has an evening shift, and goes as far as commenting that the gym could use a little renovation - namely, fresh paint to the walls and perhaps some new equipment. To Derek’s surprise Peter gets super enthusiastic about the idea and starts planning it with viciousness that is slightly terrifying. But it distracts him enough so that he stops fretting about the store and the BJJ coach and lets Derek and Isaac do whatever they want, so it’s fine. And, well, the walls really do need painting.

Stiles’ 24th birthday falls on a Friday in the end of September. They have agreed on taking the afternoon off from work to go hiking on the mountains for an overnight, and Peter is too occupied by deciding what shade of white he wants the walls to be painted to bitch about Derek skipping work. Peter strolls around the gym for the whole morning, sampling paint swatches against different walls and the mats, Henry trailing long-sufferingly behind him. When they finally come upstairs, the clock is edging close to eleven and Henry looks like he needs a stiff drink, or maybe three.

"Peter," Derek calls from the reception booth where he is checking the new sales software with Isaac. "On my desk is the last month’s financial report you asked about, and the signup list for next weekend."

"Yes, yes, thank you and all that jazz," Peter waves his hand distractedly, engrossed with his notes and paint samples, and then promptly walks headfirst to a wall. "Jesus!" he says, confused. "Where the hell did that wall come from?"

"It's been there for over thirteen years, Peter," Henry grins. “You should apologise, it was here first.”

That's when Derek's mouth starts twitching. The dumbstruck look on his uncle's face and the angry muttering when he stalks off to the office are full of schadenfreude at its best. As the punchline Peter yells for Henry to ‘stop plotting with the damn wall’ and come to help him ‘defile the minors’, which hopefully means sorting through the signups for the upcoming krav maga camp.

Henry pats the wall with his palm like he is thanking it, says, “Good job, bud,” and then Peter’s head is sticking out from the doorway.

“Fuck that wall,” he says menacingly. “Get in here, or I’ll rip a hole in it when we start renovating. With my teeth.”

“You already almost did,” Isaac pipes up with a smirk, making Henry crack up.

Peter looks like he is contemplating a triple homicide, and suddenly the amusement boiling inside Derek bubbles up to the surface. He leans to the counter and laughs and laughs and laughs, Isaac chuckling next to him. It's oddly freeing, and that’s when it really hits him that he still has a family, only in the form of his co-workers.

During the spring and summer Isaac and Derek have (slowly but miraculously surely) bonded over their shared exasperation towards Peter and mutual love for Indiana Jones, shitty Dutch beer and Norse mythology, what the hell. Isaac has even come over on his free time to participate in the bromantic hangouts at Derek’s place, watching Stiles’ favourite gross documentary about weird fungus that grow inside insects in Amazon, and keeping up his never-ending argument about Grolsch vs. Heineken with Derek. To put it shortly, they have become friends, oddly even better ones after they started working together full time.

The thought only manages to make him laugh harder - more out of happiness instead of just amusement over his uncle’s dramatics. He doesn’t remember being this happy, not for a long, long time.

That's what Stiles comes in to, dressed for hiking, and he stops at the top of the stairs, surprised and enthralled. Laughter transforms Derek into something solid and reachable, brushes away the last remnants of the ghost he was in the winter and flashes to Stiles a glimpse of the boy he was eight years ago. He is lovely, and Stiles aches for him impossibly.

“Holy crap,” he says, starting to grin. “Isaac, do you think I should get better glasses? I think I’m seeing Derek laughing.”

“Behold,” Isaac says with flourish, “Derek is now a real boy.”

“I hate the pair of you,” the apparently-ex-Pinocchio Derek says, but his words are somewhat deflated by his huge smile. Seeing it feels amazing.

"Happy birthday to me," Stiles sighs dreamily. "He's got no strings, so I'm going to steal him now. You fine with that, Isaac?"

"Congrats," Isaac grins. "Please take him away, I'm already freaked out by his happiness. And we're almost done, anyway."

Derek should probably feel offended, but he waves at Stiles and turns back to the computer and his notes. "Sit down, I'll be ready in five minutes or so."

"What were you laughing at?" Stiles asks when they get in his Jeep and Derek throws his backpack to the back seat. There is already Stiles’ backpack with a suspicious roll attached to it - a bright red, tightly packed thing that Derek dreads is their tent. At least the terrible colour will hopefully keep the bears out. He really isn’t that familiar with the natural behaviour of wild animals.

"Peter," he grins and Stiles snickers.

“How come I’m not surprised. Even though I am wounded that none of my hilarious jokes succeeded in that.”

“I laugh at your jokes inwards,” Derek assures. “I just don’t want to bloat your ego any more than necessary.”

“Careful,” Stiles warns and starts the Jeep, steers it towards the road that will take them out of the town, “I might swoon.”

“Please don’t, you’re driving and I value my life.”

The grin Stiles throws at him is blinding. The wiggling eyebrows spoil the effect pretty well, though.

“So,” Derek starts after a short, companionable silence, “what’s the plan?”

“Lassen,” Stiles answers and clicks on the signal to turn to the Wal-Mart parking lot. “I checked the map and asked around for some recommendations. Dr. Deaton told me that there’s a good trail up to a peak of some mountain from Juniper Lake. We could camp there for the night, maybe take a short hike in the morning and drive back to Beacon Hills tomorrow. That’s the outline I gave to dad, said we’ll be back around the afternoon.”

“Mount Harkness,” Derek nods. “I’ve been there, the route is great.”

“Really?” Stiles’ face brightens. “Sweet, I hope the weather is as good in the mountains as here. Deaton said it’ll take maybe three hours normally, so for us it’ll probably be 45 minutes or so longer.”

After loading the Jeep with enough groceries to last for two days and stuffing enormous sandwiches in themselves, they head off to Lassen. Their two-hour drive is relatively quiet: Stiles fiddles with the radio and sometimes babbles about the new books they have in the library, funny stories from the station his dad has shared and how Lydia told to say hi to Derek when she called earlier. Derek listens half-heartedly, gazing out to the forest they are cutting through.

It’s been several years since he was in the Lassen National Park, but now and then they pass something he recognises: a turn of the road, a twisted, ancient tree, the dusty flat-roofed houses in Chester. Stiles’ Jeep clangs and makes unnerving sounds as they bump down the gravel road to Juniper Lake, but in the end they make it there in one piece. Derek wishes that the car will co-operate on their way back, too.

The clock is quarter to two p.m., when they pitch their tent up under the evergreens, only a couple of feet from the shore. The camping site is almost empty - there is only one tent in the other end of the site, so they basically have half of the area to themselves. The air is crisp and clear and it’s so quiet that Derek can hear the rapid staccato of a woodpecker coming from the other side of the lake.

“I think we’re set to go,” Stiles announces when their humble abode looks like a tent and not just a heap of bright red fabric. “It gets dark earlier up here and we have almost four-hour hike ahead.”

Derek changes his clothes and laces his hiking boots while Stiles puts their groceries and excess stuff to the tent. They are taking only a small backpack, filled with a couple of water bottles, long-sleeved extra shirts for both of them, and their snack bag, which Stiles insists is a ‘super-secret Stilinski surprise’. At the peak of the mountain is a lookout Derek remembers, the perfect spot to have an afternoon snack break.

Stiles puts a small padlock to the zipper of their tent and smothers himself with sunscreen, then grabs the backpack and hefts it to his shoulders. He makes a shooing movement with his hand as Derek tries to protest and slaps the bottle to his outstretched hand. “You have only one and half working legs, I don’t have to concentrate as much on not tiring myself out. We can swap on the way back if you insist, but for now I’m carrying this.”

Derek rarely likes to hear comments like that about his health (or the lack of it) and definitely never wants to be babied, but Stiles does have a point. It’s an almost four mile hike up the mountain and back and marked as ‘strenuous’ in the map, so Derek is going to have enough work even without the extra weight. So he shrugs, smears some sunscreen on his cheekbones, neck and nose and puts on his baseball cap, before plopping the bottle to the side pocket of the backpack and nodding at Stiles.

“Ready?” Stiles asks, rocking on his heels, looking excited like a kid.

“Yeah,” he laughs, “let’s go.”

“By the way,” Stiles says that evening when they are reclining on a bench on the lakeshore, sipping beer and watching the stars come out. The nights are getting cooler, especially on the mountains, and Derek’s stocking feet feel cold where they are shoved underneath Stiles’ thigh. “You never told me whether you liked the Bulgakov or not.”

Derek lifts his head from the armrest of the bench to look at Stiles, then drops back and hums thoughtfully. “I usually enjoy more contemporary literature, but it was good. It felt timeless.”

Stiles makes an agreeing noise, and they are quiet for a while, before he speaks again. “I read it for the first time after dad got sick, when I was still in Berkeley.”
His voice is small and somehow private. “I was pretty down because of dad and the fact that I couldn't be in Beacon Hills because I had a huge exam coming up and dad insisted I should do it. Instead of reading for that exam, I went to the library and borrowed the first thick book I could find."

Derek makes an understanding noise in the back of his throat. Escaping to piles of long books had been his coping mechanism too; a way to push the reality away because it was unbearable. It was also the only thing he could do for a long time, stuck in bed. He has lost count of how many novels he has read in past two years. "It has a plot that takes you far away from everything else," he agrees, and Stiles nods.

“I read it maybe three times before dad got better, but after that I haven’t touched it. Brings back awful memories.”

“I know the feeling,” Derek murmurs.

His calf hurts a little as he extends his left leg over Stiles’ lap, ankle resting on the armrest of the bench. Their hike was surprisingly easy for him - he managed to soldier through the steepest parts without help, and their regular breaks resulted with a leg that is aching a lot less than he feared it would. They didn’t burn their pasta-in-tomato-sauce dinner on the little portable gas stove, the lake water wasn’t too chilly for swimming, and their tent is still standing, so hopefully it won’t crumble on them during the night. The beer has cooled down to a perfect temperature in the makeshift fridge they fashioned out of some rope and a plastic bag, plunged into the lake. Derek’s muscles are pleasantly sore and he knows he will sleep like a log once they hit their sleeping bags. Stiles seems extremely content with his birthday.

All in all, life feels pretty fucking good.

It’s almost dark, and the starry sky is spreading over them, deep blue canvas with thousands of tiny silver stitches all over it. The couple occupying the far end of the campsite is there, but barely an occasional murmur comes to them. Derek can’t really think of a better end for their day.

It’s eerily quiet, until water carries to them a soft, hooting sound that resembles a howl.

Stiles starts. “What was that? Was it a wolf? Please tell me there ain’t any wolves in California.”

“There isn’t,” Derek replies lazily and picks the can with his blunt nails. “It’s a Common Loon. They can sound a lot like wolves.”

“Huh,” Stiles says. “I’ve never heard anything like that. Sort of creepy, reminds me of Pet Sematary.”

Derek snorts a little and flattens his voice to a careful, bland tone. “You may hear sounds. Sounds like voices. But they are just the loons, down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It's funny.”

Stiles shivers and punches his thigh. “Stop it, you fucker, I hated that line. I want to sleep tonight, thank you very much. It’s bad enough with that asshole bird howling, I don’t need a flipping wendigo on top of it.”

Derek chuckles and takes a swig of his beer. “I like it. We’re lucky to hear it, loons are rare here. Mostly they stick to Northern U.S. and Canada, but there are some sightings at Lake Almanor now and then.”

“Uh-huh.” Stiles taps an absent-minded rhythm on Derek’s shin with his fingers. “How do you know all that?”

"I used to come here with my dad," Derek says.

Stiles’ silhouette turns to look at him. “You did?”

He nods and peers at Orion, picking it easily out despite the endless number of stars visible. “We would drive here for a weekend, go hiking on the mountains and in the evenings dad would teach me the constellations and the voices of different birds. We heard loons sometimes, too. Dad loved it.”

Stiles squeezes his leg softly and then lets go, but rests his palm on Derek’s knee, like he is afraid Derek will fall into a bout of self-blame and misery. He is mostly fine, though - somehow listening to the lone loon on the lakeshore with Stiles, sipping beer and sharing small, private details about their lives feels like a tribute to his dad. He is suddenly abruptly glad they came to Juniper Lake - even though he constantly misses his father and the ‘boys’ things’ they did together, the grief isn’t crushing and the surroundings are not making him sad. Nostalgic, perhaps, but it also feels like some sort of a closure: one step on the long path of accepting and moving on.

They brush their teeth and crawl to the tent, trying to figure out in the beam of the flashlight which identical blue sleeping bag is which - they are, in fact, both brought by Stiles, but apparently there is a difference to him. After the sleeping bag crisis is solved, they spend good three minutes trying to arrange themselves so that neither of them has any tree roots or pine cones poking their backs.

“Let’s do this again next year,” Stiles murmurs sleepily through the darkness when they have switched off the flashlights. “This was the best birthday I’ve had since I was twelve. And that was when my mom was still alive, and Scott ate all the gummi worms and then laid on the couch for three hours and complained that his stomach was crawling. So I made him play Wormz with me, and he threw up.”

Derek falls asleep with a smile.

When he wakes up in the morning, Stiles has wormed his way out of the bag and is star-fishing on his back: left arm over Derek’s stomach, left leg over both of his, right arm and leg thrown as far as the tent fabric allows. His mouth is open and he is still out cold, thankfully not drooling.

The birds have started to sing outside. Derek reaches for his phone, snaps a picture and sends it to Isaac. As he contemplates on the message to go with the picture, Stiles snorts in his sleep, pats Derek’s abs clumsily and mutters, “No, dad, I hate frutti di mare.”

Derek types that under the picture and hits ‘send’. Only a couple of minutes later Isaac - the fucking early bird, it’s barely eight o’clock on a Saturday morning - sends back You two are so gross.

It’s all kinds of beautiful.

*

Scott McCall finally comes for a couple of days to visit his mother and Stiles in late October, and makes it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t like Derek at all. He looks slightly wistful when Stiles drags him to watch the intermediate practise on Wednesday night, probably because of his old wish of getting involved with martial arts, but as soon as he sees Derek, his eyes narrow.

There is obvious suspiciousness in the way Scott is watching him, both as they are introduced (again) by Stiles, and as Scott stays upstairs and stares down at them from the balcony. Derek tries his damnest not to care about it, even though Scott’s unnerving stare is making his neck prickle. It’s pretty fucking hard to concentrate on wrestling his way out of a head lock or executing a neat hammer or elbow strike, when Scott is judging him from above.

He has picked his krav maga up again, after a long pause, around when he hired other people to help him with the gym. It’s convenient, since the P2-5 level classes are at the same time as Stiles’ - Derek can keep an eye on him and do something himself simultaneously. He is now ten years older than the teenager who first attended Henry’s krav maga beginners class, and finally truly realising how much he likes it: it molds around his injuries in a way kickboxing never could, never-endingly flexible to be individually modified to how his body moves. It’s a beautiful system, mostly because it’s so useful.

Isaac and he have taken to a habit of sparring together once or twice a week. They take a break from working, don on their training trousers with the official level patches, do a short warm-up and then spend forty-five minutes trying to outsmart each other. Isaac is an instructor and three levels higher than Derek and it shows, especially since he hasn’t been actively practising for almost four years. But Derek is still quick and has lethal feet, so they balance each other pretty well.

It’s relaxing, to have something of his own in between of running the business, coaching the kickboxing classes and training Stiles, like Isaac has his boxing.

Stiles tries to make him come to “a bonding hangout” to his place with Scott after practise, but Derek politely declines - partly because Scott is scowling at him and partly because he doesn’t fancy being the third wheel. He drives over to Isaac’s, instead, who forces him to play Wii bowling for two hours and then orders too much Chinese, all the time looking like he wants to say something.

“So Scott came to visit the gym,” Isaac cracks finally, when they have stuffed themselves with fried rice and shrimp and fortune cookies and Derek feels like his belly is exploding. “I ran into Stiles yesterday and he told me he would bring Scott over.”

“Yeah,” he shrugs and scratches the label of his root beer bottle with his fingernail. It’s almost eleven thirty p.m. and normally he would be thinking of having to work in the morning, but being your own boss has its perks. He doesn’t really want to go home yet, and besides Isaac is ridiculously easy to convince to sleep in and do a shorter day. “He sat in the lobby and glared daggers.”

Isaac snorts. “You charmed him with your beautiful personality?”

“I said hi and stood awkwardly there.”

His friend laughs out loud. “So you went with your gift with words instead. Congrats.”

Derek can’t suppress a tiny smile that’s making its way to his face. “Have you ever tried to free yourself from a choke hold when somebody is judging your whole existence?”

“I can’t say I have,” Isaac responds, amused. “He was probably just curious. I’ve heard that Stiles can get pretty emotional over martial arts when he’s drunk and watching your old championship matches from YouTube.”

Derek blinks. “What?”

"Yeah, that is apparently a newly surfaced Stiles thing.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Isaac shrugs and stretches on the couch a little, rubs his toes against the carpet. “I skype with Scott sometimes. He kind of bitches a little about all the misspelled texts Stiles sends him. He typed some out for me, and they were all ‘oh my god wow how can anyone move like that DUDe his feet are nimble like some motherfucking deer’. The whole thing was pretty much TMI.”

“Uh-huh,” Derek agrees, frowning. “A deer?”

Isaac chucks the remote at his head.

When Derek finally gets home around one a.m., he plops down on his bed and on a whim pulls up YouTube in the browser of his laptop. He types cautiously derek ha into the search bar and is awarded immediately with keywords others have searched; derek hale kickboxing, derek hale championship, derek hale fire as the most popular ones. He clicks the second one, and there, on top of the results page is a video of his first and last pro championship finals. Derek Hale vs Dennis O’Malley FC ISKA world championships 2010 has almost 100 000 views.

It’s not the first time he has watched himself fighting - his coach in Utah, Billy, used to record most of his matches and make him watch the videos over and over again afterwards. Billy would point out the moments his technique was faltering even slightly, ask him how it could be corrected, how his training plan should be modified to cover those flaws, and then he’d proceed to drill every misstep out of him with strenuous training.

This time it’s different, though - now that there is no Billy (or Peter, before that), Derek is able to watch himself like he was a stranger, and it’s striking to realise how fucking good he has been. He doesn’t actively remember the fight, all blurred together in adrenaline high and stress and desire for the win, but the video tells him everything he needs to know. His footwork looks awesome, he is appallingly elastic - there really is no other way to describe it based on how high his kicks can reach, O’Malley is at least three inches taller than him - and some of the combinations he uses are simply brilliant.

He kind of can see why Stiles would wax poetics about him. He also realises why the hell Billy kept calling him ‘the goddamn Hermes’, even though he hated it - his feet do seem like they have wings in them.

He might be a bit too tired, too, if he’s comparing himself to a Greek god.

The reality crashes down on him the next day, when Isaac leaves to change at home before his boxing class and Derek limps down to the ground floor, digs out his gloves and skips rope for six minutes to warm up. Usually he would have a coaching session with Stiles, but they have agreed to cancel it for Scott, so maybe he is trying to make up for it to himself, but lingers mostly still in the weird haze of seeing himself as that terrifyingly fast and talented thing in the ring.

He thinks back to some of the combinations he used in the video and after a brief stretching gets to work with the bag - dodge, uppercut, front-leg roundhouse to head, cross, jab. It works out just fine if he uses the right-leg-back stance; moderately well when he falls into his favoured stance but switches legs for the kick, mainly since the rhythm of his weight shifts goes to hell; and absolutely shitty when he has to drop his weight down on his left leg. He is still flexible, thanks to all the stretching he does while watching tv, but nevertheless it’s the truth that his busted leg can’t take his weight properly.

He tries some other combinations and then spends ten minutes with just mindless, lazy beating, going with the instinct and what feels good. When he starts testing side kicks, his pelvis feels loose and warm after the roundhouses, so the balls of his feet strike exactly where they are supposed to hit, and for a moment it feels like fucking hell, he still has it.

Then he spins around to do a back kick, his left foot slams into the swinging boxing bag from the wrong distance and a sharp burst of pain shoots up his calf, making him gasp, lose his balance and scramble forward ungracefully. It hurts like a bitch and for a moment he fears that he has fucked it up the second time and has to go through the painstaking rehabilitation and physiotherapy over and over again. But the pain dulls to an ache as soon as he slumps down to the side of the ring, and there he is, once more: a futureless, limping man who is worth nothing in kickboxing any more.

Derek leans his elbows to his knees and presses his head to his hands. The lights of the gym are off but from the narrow window slants the October sun, and Derek is vividly reminded of the afternoons he used to spend at the gym after school, sometimes biking straight from PE classes to work out some more. Finstock used to even let him skip PE sometimes before tournaments: despite being an eccentric bastard, Finstock was the only person in Beacon Hills who wasn’t a Hale and still gave a shit about Derek’s blossoming kickboxing career. He wonders briefly whether Finstock is still traumatizing new students in Beacon Hills High or already retired with too much craziness in his head; if he ever heard what became of the kid who skipped his classes for martial arts.

After a moment he sighs, stands up and on his way back upstairs shoots a vicious roundhouse at the bag. The surprised, abused creak the bolts give as the bag swings helplessly away is immensely satisfying.

Derek goes to visit Stiles’ apartment in the Saturday evening, to give him back the library staff ID one of the new kids found from the gym locker room. He is just about to press the doorbell, when he hears voices arguing inside, and after he hears his own name he just can’t walk away. So instead of acting like a normal person he stands there in the hallway, listening to Scott and Stiles talking inside.

“I get that you’ve been lonely, but why him?” Scott’s voice asks, sounding frustrated. “You only liked his company in high school when I was being a dick, and now you are suddenly best bros?”

“It’s not like I have any other people to befriend here,” Stiles snipes, and Derek winces slightly. Because yes, that is very much true and also a fact he resolutely tries not to think about, when he feels like wallowing in self-hate. “Besides, he’s surprisingly funny and interesting when you get past his surly face and the fact that he used to beat people for living. And be awesome at that.”

Derek can almost imagine Scott’s sigh. “I don’t doubt that. It’s just... Matt said once that he, uh, you know...” Scott trails off.

“Killed his own parents to get their money?” Stiles fills the sentence, and Derek’s knees almost buckle underneath him. Fucking fuck, not this again.

“I will cut Matt,” Stiles’ voice says, full of cold, calm anger. “I don’t care that he’s in fucking Austin, I will kick his ass so hard that he flies back to the douchebag land where he came from.”

Scott is quiet, and Stiles sighs audibly. “Listen, dude, Derek isn’t a murderer. He is a guy who lost his parents and his future. I know that you are concerned, but he’s my friend, all right? Jesus, I should be lucky that you didn’t see him when he first came back. You would have thought he was a zombie.”

“What?”

“He kind of looked like he had come back from death, that’s all.”

Derek supposes it’s true - he didn’t actually spend time admiring himself in the mirror back then, but he still remembers his sunken cheeks and dull eyes, the resignation he faced his life with - like he actually didn’t want to be alive at all.

“Stiles,” Scott pleads, “I don’t know what is going on with all the drunken texts you send me, but you just can’t, I don’t know, fucking crush on him because he used to be good at kickboxing or because you pity him.”

“Drop it, Scott,” Stiles snarls back. “I don’t fucking pity him. I admire him for going through so much shit and still being in one piece. Sure, he was a brilliant kickboxer, but his character turned out to be better.”

Derek backs away from the door as quietly as he can, slips to the elevator and goes home. He sends a text to Stiles about his ID and spends the rest of the night drinking A&W and staring at his living room ceiling. He doesn’t really know what to think and tries to think about anything else instead. Occasionally he picks up a book from the coffee table - it’s his fourth or fifth round through The Shipping News, and usually he would enjoy every page. But now his concentration is shit, and after every one or two pages he gives up and stares at the ceiling for next twenty minutes before trying again. It’s slow process, and when he goes to sleep that night he can’t even remember which chapter he was reading.

Stiles turns up next afternoon, coming to get his ID, looking so calm and relieved that it’s not hard to guess he made up with Scott. Derek tries not to be jealous. He is glad that Stiles has gotten his best friend back, but there is always the overwhelming sense of worthlessness that comes with the realisation that apart from Stiles, everything he has in Beacon Hills is Isaac, and Peter, to some extent. He doesn’t have old high school friends or buddies from college - even those friends he made in Salt Lake took their distance when he was spiraling down after the fire, a sickness after sickness after sickness, the hopeless, endless days in the hospital. Without the two friends he has managed to make he will be utterly helpless and alone, possibly forced to slink back to New York, to Laura’s apartment, no degree or job under his belt.

Stiles is radiating contentment and good mood, and something cold and heavy settles into Derek’s stomach as he steps aside to let him in. It is a stupid thought, but he can’t help but dread for a moment that this is the end of their friendship as it was - that Stiles doesn’t need his company as much anymore, now that the air between him and Scott is cleared. That despite the defending words Derek overheard last night, Stiles will grow to side with Scott about Derek and his dubious effect on him.

“Thanks for taking care of the ID, I don’t know if they would have let me to work tomorrow without it,” Stiles jokes and laughs, because they both know that Beacon Hills is too small a town for actual need for job IDs. Everyone knows everyone anyway.

“No problem,” Derek replies as he closes the door and trudges to the kitchen to retrieve the card. “You seem happy,” he says, because he has always been bad at leaving things alone.

Stiles smiles, toes off his shoes and flops down on the couch. “Scott and I finally talked about things. We’re fine now. Or not fine yet but a lot, lot better.”

Derek hands him the card and somehow musters a sound that is bland and dispassionate even in his own ears. “That’s good,” he tries to patch his lack of enthusiasm, but it falls just as flat as the hum he first made.

Stiles’ eyes snap to his face, his brow furrowing, as he tucks the card into his jeans pocket. “You look tired, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Derek shrugs. “Just headache.”

At least he isn’t lying - the dull throb behind his eyes has been there since the moment he woke up, exhausted for no reason after a full night’s sleep. Maybe he has a flu coming, and his depressing thoughts are not really helping.

Stiles looks concerned. “Do you want me to leave? Because I had an ulterior motive of ordering takeout and watching Amazing Race marathons with you when I came over.”

He shrugs again, shakes his head a little. “It’s fine, you can stay if you want to. I might not be as good company as Scott, though.”

Stiles blinks at him. “Dude, I don’t mind if you’re quiet, I’ve gotten used to it. And Scott basically bitched about you and Beacon Hills and his shitty job in Pittsburgh for the whole time he was here. We only really had good time last night after we had fought, and then this morning. What does he have to do with anything?”

He doesn’t say anything, but limps to the kitchen to put the coffeemaker on.

Stiles follows him, braces his hip to the doorframe and crosses his arms over his chest. “Derek?” he prompts.

Derek stays silent, measuring the coffee grounds and water with a concentration he usually directs to his job.

Stiles taps his foot impatiently until stills, suddenly, like he has realised something. “Derek, are you jealous?” His voice is soft and not mocking like it usually would.

Derek’s gut reaction is to deny it, but what good would it do - they both know what the answer is. “More terrified than jealous,” he replies, steadfastly keeping his back to Stiles even after the coffeemaker has spluttered into life and he is just leaning to the counter.

“Why are you terrified of me?” Stiles asks carefully, keeping his voice low, like he is talking to a spooked animal.

“I’m terrified you will go.”

There is a long, tense silence, and then suddenly Stiles collides to his back and his arms are tight and warm around Derek’s waist. “You fucking idiot,” he says fondly, muffled by Derek’s hair. “You’ll never get rid of me.”

Derek almost prays for it. Instead he closes his eyes, places his hand on Stiles’ arms wrapped around his stomach, and concentrates on Stiles’ steady, warm breath against the nape of his neck. Never sounds pretty great.

*

In November some kid plays with matches and accidentally sets Stiles' apartment building on fire.

Derek hears the sirens when he’s doing pushups and watching tv in his living room. It’s a quiet Sunday evening and one of the weird-ass reality tv shows Stiles loves is on, but when the fire truck wheezes past his window, his stomach drops, and he just can't stay away. There is a churning sense of knowledge in the pit of his gut, so he follows the sounds and the smell and almost drives off the road when he realises whose building it is.

He has been flinching away from fire and sparks in any form for months and months, from lighters to candles to July 4th fireworks. Still he doesn't even feel the terror of the flames striking out from the fifth floor window, because Stiles is right there, sitting on the back of an ambulance looking coherent. There's a respiration mask on his face, but otherwise he doesn't look hurt, maybe upset and bewildered, and he is alive.

Stiles' round eyes light up when he sees Derek and he pulls the mask off to rasp out, "Hey, what are you doing here? Seriously, my house is on fire, what the everloving fuck?"

It's absurd but it's Stiles, who is bright and blazing and alive and if he didn't say everloving fuck the world would probably fall off its hinges or crack open like an egg.

Derek grabs him and presses his face into Stiles' hair, inhales the vague smoky smell lingering on top of his normal scent. "Shut up," he chokes half-heartedly, because he thirsts for nothing else but to hear him talk and know that he is still breathing. "You have an oxygen mask, use it."

“As if,” Stiles croaks and winds his arms around Derek’s middle, pushes his forehead against the dip between his collarbones. “The medics say I’m in a shock so there really is nothing else for me to do except talk and seriously, seriously, Derek, if I am this shocked, how fucking terrified were you back then? My apartment isn’t even burnt, just some smoke damage and I was afraid like a kid. My dad is probably going to kill me. But what the hell and why are you here, you are afraid of fire, god damn, Derek.”

Derek holds him and doesn’t really pay attention to what he is saying, relief filling him slowly until he is almost bursting with it. Stiles is alive. Stiles is alive, not (burning, screaming, asphyxiating, dying dying dead) leaving Derek the same way his parents did.

“You know, Derek, you should write an autobiography. You could start it like Bill Bryson in The Lost Continent, that travel book about small towns. ‘I come from Beacon Hills. Somebody had to.’ It would be glorious.”

Stiles has babbled weird, unrelated things like that against Derek’s henley for almost ten minutes, placing his respiration mask from time to time back on his face. Derek hasn’t listened to most of it, and this is the first thing that actually catches his attention. “Why on earth should I write an autobiography?” he asks, mouth twitching. “I’m twenty-six and definitely not Bill Bryson.”

“Because you’re Derek and you’re awesome,” Stiles states matter-of-factly. “Duh.”

Derek can’t help but let out a breathless little laugh. “It wouldn’t be much of a book,” he muses. “Don’t autobiographies always contain some sort of epiphany that explains why the authors wrote them? I wouldn’t have one, and the plot in the book would be just bouncing around without a good ending.”

“Like one of those little metal balls in an Indiana Jones pinball game,” Stiles agrees. Sometimes Derek wonders what the hell is going on inside his brain.

“I think it would be super, though,” Stiles continues. “You leave Beacon Hills, become a sixfold world champion, lose your parents and your career and then you end up back in Beacon Hills. You could always write that you found the love of your life from here. Autobiographies always are about the loves of people’s lives, one way or another.”

“I did,” Derek smiles. “But thirteen years ago. Kickboxing is the love of my life.”

“Wow,” Stiles says and looks up, grinning. “That was sentimental, and oddly sweet. I think I need some oxygen. And a game of Indiana Jones pinball.”

“Peter has one.” What Peter doesn’t have, seriously, his house is a fucking Neverland.

But Stiles is already puffing away with his mask, so Derek probably has to invite him to play pinball some other time.

Then the Sheriff turns up and swoops Stiles into a not-exactly-professional, tearful hug. Derek tries to edge off to give them room and maybe properly fuck off, too, because the house is still on fire right next to them, but Sheriff Stilinski huffs, “Where you think you’re going, son?” and promptly pulls him into a group hug. It’s hands down the weirdest moment in Derek’s whole life, but he rolls with it, just for the joy of a happy ending. It feels pretty damn good.

Later, when the medics have given their consent to Stiles leaving, Derek watches him sleep in the safety of his childhood bedroom, back in the Sheriff’s house. He is breathing with a slow, steady rhythm and Derek can almost swear he hears his heartbeat in the dark. It terrifies him, how closely together they have entwined in the past months, but as he stands in the doorway and listens to Stiles’ dreams, he knows he wouldn’t change it for the world.

He thinks of Stiles’ disarming smile, the twinkle in his eyes and his sure, steady hands, long fingers tapping the library computer; the lilt of his voice and the easy openness he inhabits Derek’s life with. Stiles made a place for himself almost eleven months ago, and the place has grown bigger and bigger by every month they spend together.

Derek might be in love with him.

Perhaps this is the epiphany he has unconsciously been waiting for.

When he finally goes home, the Sheriff shakes his hand and says, voice full of emotion, “Thanks. For getting there so early. And being there for him.”

He nods, hesitates and pushes the words out. “I owe him a lot.”

“Probably less than you think,” Stiles’ dad replies, gently. “He isn’t so alone anymore.”

“Neither am I,” Derek says, and leaves.

The November night smells of autumn and smoke, but it doesn’t make him back away anymore. For once fire was generous and didn’t take anything more away from him, so maybe, maybe one day Derek can make peace with it.

In the end of the month he goes over to Peter’s house to have dinner and a couple of drinks with his uncle. He dreads it, first, but it all goes well: the food is good and the Riesling they are drinking is better, and they end up sitting on the couch, flipping through old photo albums and thinking of Derek’s parents, whose proper mourning they both have denied from themselves. Derek confesses how much he still blames himself for their death, and Peter squeezes his shoulder until it hurts, repeats over and over again, You couldn’t prevent it, it’s not your fault in any way.

“I was jealous at Thomas for many years, you know,” Peter mentions to him when they are staring down at a clipping from Beacon Hills Gazette, after lots of wine. In the picture is Derek’s smiling face when he had won his first state youth championship. It’s a small article, but it’s pasted on the first page of a scrapbook named ‘Cub’, and Derek hurts all over at the thought of his uncle putting the book together over the years.

“I wished you were my son, especially when you reached puberty and wanted to try kickboxing,” Peter muses and drags both of his hands through his short hair. “Lisa thought it was weird and a little gross that her father earned his living by fighting and teaching other to fight, and I wanted nothing more than somebody taking up my legacy and turning it into their own.”

Peter turns the pages. He doesn’t talk about his daughter often - her mother left Peter when she was twelve and fucked off to North Carolina. It’s been nine years, and Derek isn’t sure if Peter has seen her since. She is his cousin, and he hasn’t heard a word from them.

Peter sighs and looks up from the book. His eyes look shiny, but, thankfully, dry. “You were the best thing I ever helped shaping,” he says. “I have never been as proud as when you said you wanted to follow my footsteps to professional fighting - and I’m enough of a man to confess that I cried when you won the first championships and wore our shirt afterwards.”

He turns to the page where there is a photograph of Derek, a bruise on his cheekbone and the tacky national championship belt on his waist, beaming like a sun and wearing a black t-shirt adorned with the orange logo of BHW. The shirt is one of the numerous things that burnt in the fire. He has a new one, now, the one he was wearing the night Stiles walked back into his life, and he isn’t sure which is better - that it doesn’t bear the phantom of victory or if it did.

His uncle flips the pages back and front. The album is full of pictures and titles, each bigger than the previous, and Derek doesn’t know what to say.

He calls Stiles when he is going to bed in the guest room of Peter’s house, too drunk to drive. “My uncle just opened his soul to me,” he says when Stiles picks up, groggy and confused. “It was disturbing.”

“I’m pretty sure he loves you,” Stiles mumbles back. It’s almost two a.m. “Are you drunk? You sound drunk.”

“Yeah,” he breathes and tries not to collapse on the bed, exhausted and overwhelmed by emotions. “We had the bonding evening for Men Who Have No Family Except Each Others and Laura. MWHN-- never mind, I don’t remember the rest of it. I think we cried a little.”

Stiles chuckles, low and warm and familiar. “You’re a dumbass,” he says fondly and stifles a yawn. “Go to sleep, you wino, I had just fallen asleep when you decided to have your Peter crisis. You’re lucky I love you.”

“Uh-huh,” Derek agrees, too tired and tipsy to pay attention to anything else than the fact he woke Stiles up. “I am. You too.”

There is a pregnant pause, like Stiles is waiting for him to say something more. He yawns and crawls between the sheets, feeling warm and sleepy and happy. “I think I’ll sleep now,” he murmurs. “Sorry for waking you up.”

“It’s fine.” Stiles sounds like he’s smiling. “You should call me more often. Sleep tight.”

Derek does.

*

Stiles attends his first competition just before Christmas. They drive down to Sacramento for it, a one-hour trip in the crack of Saturday dawn.

“Why did you want to start kickboxing?” Derek finally asks, when they are cutting through the suburbs, his fingers drumming the Camaro’s steering wheel nervously.

It’s going to be the first competition event he is participating in almost three years, and this time not as a fighter. Still, he isn’t that nervous about himself, though, and actually not even about Stiles’ success - the most restless he feels over the thought that he has lived in Beacon Hills for almost a year and it doesn’t feel that bad anymore.

The town has grown on him gradually: in January he hated it to the bone, in March he was cautiously displeased with it, in July he was torn between the want to stay and the want to leave, and in September he suddenly realised he didn’t mind it so much anymore. Mostly it is because he has found something in the town he doesn’t want to leave behind: the gym, Stiles, Isaac, even Peter in all of his ridiculous glory.

Still he feels somehow off - it terrifies him how his life is moving on, step by step, and deep down he dreads the day he will wake up and it won’t hurt anymore. Because it feels like that morning will be the one when he forgets: forgets the fire, forgets his parents, forgets the career he never got to have. He knows that going on with his life doesn’t mean he won’t be carrying his past with him every day, but still it frightens and saddens him, to think that life will go on and his parents won’t be there to see it.

Stiles seems to hesitate. Then he says, “When I heard about the fire, I thought for thirty seconds that you were dead. It was enough for me to realise that I had been missing your presence for five years.” He fiddles with the strings of his hoodie and is frowning when Derek glances at him. “I thought pretty much about you for those last eighteen months or so. When Peter suggested kickboxing to me, I thought that maybe I could get at least a little piece of you back by trying out your thing. I never even considered the possibility you actually would come back to Beacon Hills, so it was quite a shock to see you.”

Derek is quiet for a long time. Then he concludes, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Stiles echoes, and he shrugs.

“I don’t know what else I can say.”

“Are you going to stay?” Stiles asks, staring straight ahead. The bland winter sunshine is highlighting the auburn hues in his hair, and there is something very young and very vulnerable in his voice. He is so beautiful that it makes something inside Derek resonate.

Derek thinks of the endless, bustling days of New York City, Laura’s engagement and all the happiness she deserves in her life; the spring wedding she insists to take place in Beacon Hills; the empty house on the outskirts of the preserve she silently wants to fill with new life. He thinks of the freshly renovated gym and Isaac’s easy smile and his unbeatable head for business; Peter’s stupid basement pool and how he has been talking about transferring the gym to Derek’s name; the drunken confession his uncle made in November after one glass too many, the I wish you were my son, you were the best thing I ever helped shaping, I have never been as proud, I cried when you won.

He thinks of Stiles, shelving books in the library, blocking his kicks at the gym, spreading his arms like he wanted to hold the scenery from Mount Harkness in his lap, drinking beer in the Sheriff's porch swing. He thinks of the epiphany he had on the threshold of Stiles’ childhood bedroom, the need he felt to go to him and push the floppy hair from his sleep-warm forehead.

“Yeah,” Derek says, clicking the signal on for their intersection. “Beacon Hills is my home now. There isn’t anywhere else for me to go, and I don’t want there to be.”

“Good,” Stiles says, reaches over and presses his warm, dry hand against Derek’s bare forearm for a second or two. He has a tiny, pleased smile on his lips. “Me neither.”

At the parking lot of the host gym, in the safety of the car, Stiles leans over, ghosts his cold fingertips over Derek's face and the scar on his neck, and kisses him on the mouth, long and sweet. He tastes like confidence, like patience and life among the ruins, and he smiles as he assures, "Trust me, it will be fine."

“I’m sorry,” Derek mumbles to him, his lips tingling with ache that has been living inside him for months now, blatantly ignored. “I think I’ve been kind of an asshole this year.”

Stiles grins and kisses him again, and Derek believes him.

Two hours later Derek watches him climbing to the ring. Stiles shakes his limbs a little, jumps on the balls of his feet to check that his muscles are warm and loose. Then he turns to grin at Derek, excited, ready and only namely nervous, and suddenly Derek realises that there really isn't only one way to love something. He cannot devote himself to kickboxing like he used to, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t allowed to give anything to it or take anything from it anymore. He can still spar if not compete, he can still coach and watch people like Stiles growing fond of the love of Derek’s life. He can still give his everything to the sport, just not how he once imagined he would. It’s not the end of the world, after all.

We make do with the love that is given to us, he thinks, and suddenly it all makes sense, and suddenly it applies to everything.

He thinks of Stiles who took what he could to quench his odd longing for Derek, picked up his hobby to get at least somewhat closer to the idea of him - and in the end got more than he bargained for, got Derek with all his baggage instead of hunting the ghost of him. They are not that different. Haunted and trying to struggle with the loss Derek took what he was offered, took the slow rehab and endless hours of physiotherapy to be able to at least practise; he took the Beacon Hills Wolves’ gym reception and coaching and standing in the corner of the ring because it was better than nothing. And what it came down to was finding a friend, finding a home, finding Stiles.

They both made do with what they were given, and that’s what Derek is going to keep on doing. He smiles back and gives Stiles thumbs up, and then the bell rings for the first round.

The guy Stiles is fighting, a twenty-something who is inhumanly tall, leaps in with a cross immediately. Stiles makes the perfect U-dodge and lands a neatly executed right hook on his opponent. His front-leg roundhouse is a little slow, but there is certain tender preciseness in the way the muscles of his bare back work, when he patches it up with an uppercut and a jab, and Derek knows he’ll win. It’s been less than 30 seconds, and he still will win.

Derek watches the match and jots down notes, a small intimate smile in the corner of his mouth, right where Stiles pressed his lips earlier in the locker room. His future spreads in front of him, close and solid and real: life went and will go on, he survived and he will live, with himself and with his past and with pride, too, one day. Stiles will win the fight and come beaming down from the ring, slowly appearing bruises on his arms and shoulders, bristling with happiness and adrenaline and all the love he has kept under the wraps until now because he was waiting for Derek to not sway on his unsteady feet.

He will slip through the ropes, throw his long arms around Derek and say something stupid and a little sappy, lisping through the mouth guard, and Derek will owe him everything, love him impossibly. They deserve it, and they will take it in with confidence.

It will be fine.