Work Text:
To say that Scott and Stiles are surprised when Derek manages to turn into a wolf – a big one, an actual real-sized wolf that probably weighs twice as much as Stiles on a good day – would be an understatement of the highest caliber, but even so, they’re not half as surprised as Derek himself.
“Holy shit,” Stiles says, watching as Derek’s eyes go wide, stunned, before he glances down at himself, where he’s standing in the remains of his own clothes, now split at the seams.
Stiles should feel bad, maybe, at the fact that his immediate reaction, following sheer dumb shock, is to start laughing hysterically at the sight of Derek, who has turned into a fucking wild animal, kind of wearing Derek’s shirt and having some trouble with his outrageously too-tight pants (Stiles doesn’t really give a shit what Derek wears, but those pants are, like, the quarter-life crisis equivalent of a sports car or a huge shiny pickup truck; it would be impossible not to notice them).
Derek scowls – it’s good to know he can still scowl, in wolf-form – but Stiles just keeps laughing.
“I thought I was supposed to be the true alpha,” Scott mutters next to him, looking woebegone and slightly sullen. “He’s not even an alpha anymore at all.”
“You wanna turn into a dog?” Stiles manages, still kind of wheezing. He might have a stich in his side. Fuck, he needs to work out more. “You wanna play fetch?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Scott says, but his lips are twitching. “Fuck off or I’ll sic Isaac on you.”
“You wouldn’t,” Stiles says, kind of weakly. “You wouldn’t,” he says again, to Isaac this time, who’s flat-out smirking, and who raises one perfectly shaped eyebrow in a way that makes Stiles worry about both his long- and short-term health and safety.
“You little shits,” he says. “I really gotta get some wolfsbane mace, or something.”
Scott’s making a disgusted face at the thought when Isaac – poor, unfairly beautiful Isaac, who would probably feel very few compunctions about strangling Stiles with his scarf if given a decent reason – says, “Wait, where’s Derek?”
The clothes are in a pile on the floor, the pants dragged slightly closer to the door. When they get outside both Scott and Isaac rear back instinctively, and even Stiles can sort of smell it.
“What a little bastard,” Isaac says, sounding almost admiring. “He fucking scented it.”
“Does that mean what I think it means,” Stiles says, watching as Scott pinches his nose.
“He pissed all over everything,” Isaac confirms, and Stiles lets out a low whistle.
“Well, you’ve gotta hand it to him,” he says. “He doesn’t do anything by halves.”
*
They don’t see Derek for three days after that. Stiles neither worries nor cares, particularly. He’s gotten pretty good, over time, at not bothering about whatever Derek is doing. Shit has been pretty bad lately, but now that Stiles’ dad has got Deucalion and his latest minions carefully locked up at the station, in Mountain Ash-lined cells, Stiles is feeling cautiously optimistic. His dad is, too; he’s even letting Mr. Argent come in and run interrogations, for a few days at least.
“I don’t know why he thinks he’s intimidating,” he muses to Stiles on the second evening. “He takes himself way too seriously for me to take him seriously.”
“He’s insecure about his masculinity,” Stiles tells him, parroting Lydia, who knows about these things, and his father raises his eyebrows.
“You some kind of psychologist now?” he asks mildly.
“I’m just saying,” Stiles mutters, “he really seems to like his guns.”
“We need Hale to come in,” his dad says the next day, and Stiles makes a face.
“Ew,” he says. “Why?”
“Stiles,” his dad says. “I need a werewolf in there to help with the interrogation, and it’s not like I can ask a minor to do it without risking losing my job.”
“Okay,” Stiles allows, grudgingly. “That sounds reasonable.”
His dad rolls his eyes. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“Probably his apartment,” Stiles says. “Where, you know, he lives.”
His dad sighs. “We’ve looked there. Up by the old house, too. No sign of him.”
“I dunno,” Stiles says, and the second his dad’s car is all the way down to the end of the road he hops in his jeep and drives over to the old train station.
Nobody has ever actually been able to explain to him what the fuck the station is doing in their town, since there are certainly no trains now, or even the remnants of tracks, but there it is, at the outskirts, behind a huge warehouse that’s been abandoned for years. It’s fucking unsavory, is what it is.
“Derek?” Stiles calls out as he walks inside. “Derek, I gotta tell you, it really seems like you’re courting the sex offender vibe deliberately by choosing to hang out in places this creepy with a bunch of teenagers. You gotta think about your choices sometimes, dude.”
At first he thinks there’s nobody there – and that’s when he sees him, curled in the corner, almost entirely in the dark.
“Derek?” he says again, and the dog’s ears flick once, twice.
“Holy fuck,” Stiles says. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack. Change back, I need to talk to you.” But the dog – the wolf, really; Stiles is nothing if not precise – just huffs and rearranges its paws under its head.
“Are we seriously going to play this game?” Stiles asks. “You want me to bait you, or some shit? Here boy, heeeeere boy?”
Derek growls. Stiles snickers.
“Who’s a good boy?” he says, in that dumb dog voice, but Derek doesn’t keep growling, just sets his head back down and closes his eyes.
“Fuck you,” Stiles says. “My dad needs to talk to you. Alpha intimidation, or something, although I guess you’re not as intimidating anywhere, what with not being an alpha, and all.”
Derek opens one eye and somehow manages to stare at him witheringly despite being a large animal. Stiles isn’t sure whether he’s impressed or irritated.
“Whatever,” he says. “You’re still, like, big and bulky and intimidating, and you can turn into that, so you can’t be entirely powerless. At least you could, I don’t know, listen to their heartbeats or do whatever other werewolf mojo you’ve got going on.”
Derek yawns, and doesn’t move.
“Fuck you,” Stiles says. “Seriously, fuck you, you asshole. My dad’s the one in there trying to fucking – keep people safe, okay, don’t – Christ.”
The whole drive home he grips the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles go white, but he doesn’t slam his head on it, which he counts as a victory.
*
It thunderstorms, a couple of days later, and Stiles comes home from Scott’s house to find Derek huddled against his back door, soaking wet and looking sort of terrified.
“What, you’re scared of thunderstorms?” he says when he opens the door and Derek spills in, and tries very hard not to find the sight of him on the tile floor in front of him, legs splayed, fur sopping, ears hanging dejectedly, even remotely endearing. Derek is an asshole, and Stiles is still pissed off at him, but really: wet dogs are sort of sad-funny, always, with almost no exceptions, unless they are actively trying to eat you while being wet and sad, which Derek doesn’t seem interested in doing.
“I’m sorry, this is just really funny to me,” he says when Derek glares up at him. “I never claimed to be a good person, buddy.”
Derek shakes in retaliation, so Stiles winds up smelling like wet dog, which is really less than ideal.
“Can you fucking change back and take a shower, please, this is disgusting,” Stiles says, but Derek just ignores him, and Stiles narrows his eyes.
“Wait,” he says. “Are you – are you stuck?”
The look Derek gives him this time is so withering Stiles is surprised he hasn’t expired from shame just on instinct.
“Nod for yes, shake your head for no,” he says anyway, stubborn. “Seriously, dude. Come on. It’s kind of pressing.”
Derek ignores him, and walks past him toward the stairs.
“Derek, stop,” Stiles shouts after him. “You are – muddy, and wet, and – Christ –”
The pawprints, he figures, he can deal with later, but Derek is headed like a homing pigeon to his room, and Stiles will be damned if he gets on that bed in this state.
“You fucking wait,” he hisses, and grabs his towel from the back of his door. Derek looks over his shoulder with what might be contempt; Stiles is no longer sure that he actually cares.
“I’m rubbing you down,” he says. “I’m pretty sure you’ve already ruined our carpet.”
Derek huffs but allows it, stands still while Stiles rubs him off as aggressively as possible, so that when he’s finished the towel he’s holding looks completely disgusting and Derek looks like bedhead all over. He can’t help from snickering; Derek lashes him with his tail.
“Ow,” Stiles says, and Derek actually – actually! – rolls his eyes.
“Fucker,” Stiles mumbles. Derek jumps up onto the bed, turns in a circle a few times, and settles down. He appears to be asleep in minutes.
“Great,” Stiles says. “Just great.”
He’s still trying – futilely – to get mud stains out of the carpet on the stairs when his dad comes home and finds him there.
“Do I want to know?” he asks wearily.
“Derek Hale turned into a wolf and won’t turn back and he’s asleep on my bed,” Stiles says. “Also I think he’s afraid of thunderstorms.”
His dad doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“I think I’m gonna need a drink,” he says finally, sounding haggard.
“Me too,” Stiles mumbles, and his dad whacks him on the back of the head.
They order a pizza and dick around for a while, watch a couple old episodes of Seinfeld, and when Stiles finally heads back upstairs, he finds Derek still curled up on his bed, tail tucked under his nose, fast asleep.
“Out of my bed,” Stiles says, and turns out the light. “Out of my bed, you dick,” he adds, creatively, when Derek doesn’t move, or react in any other way.
“I’m going to sleep in there,” Stiles says. “Which means you are out.”
It’s still pouring outside, though the thunder and lightning stopped not long after Stiles got home.
“You can sleep on my floor,” he says magnanimously. “But seriously, this isn’t going to happen. I’m not going to allow it.”
Derek blinks his eyes blearily and just stares at him.
“Out,” Stiles says, and grabs his pajamas to change in the bathroom.
He comes back with clean teeth and ready to get in bed. Derek is curled up on the floor, looking much smaller than he did the other day, when he changed in front of them, eyes wide and confused and terrified. Stiles gets in bed and turns toward the wall, stares at it for a while before closing his eyes and pretending like he’s anywhere close to falling asleep. He can hear Derek breathing, even over the rain, which is – weird, and then when there’s a flash of lightning and, a few seconds later, and he can distinctly make out a kind of – whimper.
He rolls over, and there’s Derek, curled into a tight little ball, quivering.
“Oh, fuck you,” Stiles says wearily. “Get on the fucking bed.”
Derek just looks at him for a long moment, clearly suspicious, so Stiles leans over and slaps the covers. “Come on,” he says, and Derek does.
He stands there for a moment, clearly uncertain, and Stiles rolls his eyes before burrowing down into his pillow. “Do whatever you want, dude,” he says, and closes his eyes, though he can feel Derek slowly creeping up next to him, agonizingly slowly, until he settles down with his snout not very far from Stiles’ own face. Stiles cracks an eye open and he’s really – unsettlingly close.
“This is weird,” he mumbles. “I just want you to know that this is really fucking weird on, like, multiple levels.”
Derek starts to shift away from him, closer to the wall, and Stiles sighs.
“It’s whatever,” he mumbles. “I just want it, like. Established. That it’s weird.” He yawns, jaw cracking. “It’s weird that you’re a werewolf and that you turned into a wolf and are sleeping in my bed. It’s a weird situation. I was not anticipating having to deal with this situation, in my life.”
Derek huffs.
“Go to sleep,” Stiles mumbles, closing his eyes. “It’s late, okay. Just go to sleep.”
When he wakes up Derek’s back is to him, his four legs stuck out in front of him, toward the wall, and his long pink tongue is hanging out of his mouth.
“Eww,” Stiles says, with feeling, but still scratches him along the ribs instead of getting up right away, listens to the low rumble in Derek’s chest, watches as his lower leg kicks out reflexively, his tail thump on the mattress.
“Fucker,” Stiles mutters, scratching him one more time, and rolls out of bed.
*
When he comes home from school the next day Derek is at the back window, looking outside – Stiles isn’t sure whether he’s got an expression on his face; it’s kind of hard to tell.
“If you wanted to go out, you could, you know, have opened the door,” he says. Derek ignores him.
“Seriously, dude,” he continues. “Are you stuck that way? Do we need to talk to Deaton?”
Derek turns and looks at him with an expression of such disdain that Stiles actually raises his hands up defensively.
“Jeez, fine,” he says. “No Deaton. Could you, like – could you actually tell me, though? If you’re stuck like that. Cause that’s – that’s kind of an issue, dude. I know you’re a stubborn asshole, but I’d really, um. Like to know.”
Derek huffs, resettles his weight.
“Could you bark if you can turn back?” Stiles asks wearily. Derek huffs again, and barks. Even his wolf voice is higher than Stiles would have expected, it kind of sounds like a yip. He decides not to say anything, because he’s just glad Derek’s cooperating.
“Okay,” he says. “So you’re just… staying like that. Because you feel like that.”
Derek glares.
“Could you bark again?” Stiles says, and hates everything.
Derek rolls his eyes – or his whole head, really – and yips again.
“Do you need something from me?” he asks, and Derek doesn’t do anything at all. “Like, um. Is there a reason you’re here. Is what I was wondering.”
Derek shifts his weight again, but otherwise doesn’t react.
“Wait – have you eaten?” Stiles asks. “Cause I’m not buying dog food, dude.”
Derek glowers and stalks off into the family room.
“Whatever,” Stiles mutters. “I’m not feeding you!” he shouts. “You’re on your own, buddy.”
But of course when his dad comes home, he takes one look at Derek curled up on the couch and rolls up some cold cuts and sliced cheese and takes them over on a plate.
“Dogs like cheese,” he tells Stiles, calmly, as though that explains everything.
“You’re encouraging him,” Stiles grouses, watching with morbid fascination as Derek scarfs down the plate of food.
“I guess I probably shouldn’t pet him, huh,” his dad says, and Stiles sighs as theatrically as possible.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me, you’re the one domesticating him and shit.”
His dad doesn’t touch Derek, thank god, but Stiles doesn’t miss, later, when he’s doing the dishes and his dad’s poring over paperwork at the kitchen table, glasses on and looking older than Stiles likes to think about, that Derek creeps in from the family room, hides in the doorway like some kind of giant creeper (which is what he is, of course, Stiles thinks sourly) a few feet away from where Stiles’ dad is sitting, just – staring. He looks hungry, Stiles thinks, and tries not to think about what, exactly, it is that he’s hungry for, because he’s pretty sure it’s not food.
His dad notices the wolf in the doorway after a while, because who wouldn’t, and Stiles has still got his hands wrist-deep in sudsy water when he looks up and says to Derek, “You hungry? You want me to get you something else to eat?”
Derek just kind of twitches.
“Well, you don’t have to hide over there,” Stiles’ dad says reasonably, and Derek creeps forward so slowly he barely looks like he’s moving at all.
Stiles’ dad shows him the picture of Deucalion he’s got on the table, characteristically grim mug shot. “I think you’re familiar with this guy,” he says. Derek doesn’t respond.
“We’re having a hard time getting him to crack,” he continues, tone mild. “It’d be a great help to us if somebody else could come in, somebody who gets him better that we do.”
Derek just stares at the picture.
“No rush, of course,” he says, even though Stiles knows perfectly well that there is a rush. He has never been as patient as his father.
Derek inches forward a little farther and very, very carefully, lays his head down on Stiles’ dad’s leg. Stiles dad stares down at him for a second before scratching him behind the ears, and Derek’s eyes close.
That night, Stiles keeps his door closed until he hears the scratching outside, and then gets out of bed (where he hadn’t been sleeping) to open it. Derek is huddled in the doorway, looking pathetic, gazing up at him.
“I thought you had a new friend,” Stiles says – sneers, really – and Derek huffs, tries and succeeds to push past him into his room.
“Sleep on the couch,” Stiles says as he crawls into bed, turns the light off. He doesn’t hear Derek move for a while, and when he turns over to see, Derek’s curled up on the ground again, like the night before, watching him with eerie eyes.
“This is pathetic,” Stiles says. “This is really fucking sad, okay, you need to fucking deal with your life.”
Derek pushes himself forward on his belly until he’s close enough to push his head under Stiles’ dangling hand. Stiles grips his fingers in the fur behind his skull, hard enough that he thinks he hears Derek make a little whine, high in his throat.
“You’re pathetic,” he says. “Do you get that? You can’t even protect the people you’re supposed to be protecting, you don’t have the balls. What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”
Scott and Isaac and Allison, Stiles knows, have been out at night for weeks, ranging all over Beacon Hills, exhausting themselves, coming back with blood on their hands sometimes, trying to keep everybody safe. He saw Allison cleaning off her knives once, in his downstairs bathroom, while Isaac sat collapsed in the family room, Scott still out there, doing god only knew what. They looked like zombies in school most of the time, now, but with a kind of evangelical light in their eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Stiles asks, and doesn’t realize that he’s loosened his grip on Derek’s fur until Derek turns his head to lick his palm, the insides of his fingers, the delicate skin of his wrist.
“Fuck off,” Stiles croaks, and curls his hand around to scratch the skin behind Derek’s ears, watches his eyes roll back a little before closing, mouth sagging open.
He wakes up like that, half-spilling out of the bed, arm curled around Derek, whose dog breath is blowing gently across his face, and doesn’t smell nearly as terrible as it should.
*
For a few days, Stiles keeps thinking Derek is going to change back: any second, now, it’ll happen, he thinks. Any day I’ll come home from school and he’ll be back to normal. But it keeps – not happening. Nothing is happening.
His dad keeps treating Derek like a dog – like a real dog, not like a person who has turned into a dog, which Stiles thinks is creepy and weird, although at least he isn’t making weird dog sounds at Derek but is still talking to him like a normal person. Derek seems to be simultaneously abjectly terrified of his father and intensely invested in being in the same room as him, whenever he’s at home. Even after days and days have passed, he keeps lurking in corners, always waiting for Stiles’ dad to make the first move.
It is, Stiles thinks with considerable disgust, kind of like really incompetent dating.
Before his dad gets home from work, though, Stiles does his homework in the kitchen, or sometimes in the family room, and Derek sits next to him, or at his feet, or curled up on the other end of the couch, dozing. Derek sleeps a lot, Stiles thinks, for a dog; aren’t cats supposed to be the ones who sleep all the time? He never got to have a real pet – his mother was allergic to cats and dogs – only a hamster one year, when he was five, which died very quickly of mysterious causes.
Scott comes over a couple of days into the whole mess and stops dead in his tracks when he sees Derek sitting on the couch next to Stiles.
“What the fuck,” he says, which Stiles figures is fair enough, since there isn’t actually anything remotely normal about the situation.
“Derek’s communing with his wolf body,” Stiles tells him. “He’s on spiritual walkabout.”
Derek huffs.
“What,” Scott says again, “the fuck.”
“Dad’s adopted him,” Stiles says. “He bought him steak the other day. I think he’s getting some kind of vicarious pleasure from watching him eat it, because he knows better than to try to have any himself, in front of me.”
“I thought he wasn’t using Derek in his investigation because he couldn’t find him,” Scott says. “Not because he’s a dog.”
Derek growls.
“Derek is a wolf,” Stiles tells Scott, as dryly as possible. “He is of noble heritage. Don’t sully his name. Oww,” he yelps, when Derek snaps at his elbow. “Fuck off.”
“This is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” Scott says. “I’m taking a picture.”
Even Scott’s entreaties to Derek to turn back to talk to Deucalion don’t work, despite the fact that Derek has a giant obsessive platonic boner for Scott and always has (he may think he’s being subtle about it, but Stiles is no fool), although that probably has something to do with the fact that nothing much has been happening in Beacon Hills the past week. Nobody has gotten seriously hurt since Stiles’ dad locked Deucalion and his second-hand man and woman up in jail, and as far as they all know, nobody has gotten hurt at all in the last couple of days. Derek is an asshole of the highest order but Stiles likes to believe that he would get over himself if people were getting murdered left and right.
After that, Stiles pretty much accepts his fate, and pretends he doesn’t care that Derek seems to prefer his father’s company to his – he appreciates it, he tells himself; he doesn’t need Derek kicking around, bothering him all the time. He needs his private time, to waste time on the internet and read weird shit about the supernatural – although he’s stopped jerking off anywhere other than the shower, because Derek can smell literally everything like this, and the one time Stiles gave that one a shot, Derek came into the room an hour later and looked like he might be violently ill at any moment.
He still slept in Stiles’ room, though, which Stiles thinks is probably significant in some way.
It’s getting slowly colder, but Stiles hasn’t had to turn the heat on his room yet, because Derek’s body is huge and furry and a fucking furnace. He stays pretty aloof during the days, doesn’t seem to give much of a shit what Stiles is doing aside from following him around from room to room, but at night he burrows against him like – like a dog, really, but in the best way, loose and pliable and comforting. It’s not just difficult to imagine Derek like this as himself, it’s outright impossible. It just wouldn’t happen.
Stiles finds that he likes to lie in bed for a while before sleeping, Derek curled against him, scratching his neck, up and down his flank, running his ears through his fingers, carefully touching the silky inside-parts because he’s too curious, can’t help himself. Derek twitches a little but allows it. Sometimes, Stiles just buries his hand in the dark grey fur, feeling the heat of Derek’s body under his palm, the rise and fall of his ribs as he breathes.
“I don’t even like you,” he whispers. “I don’t even like you at all.”
Derek, unsurprisingly, doesn’t say anything.
*
Later, Stiles will wonder how long he would have stayed like that before changing back of his own will, whether he would ever have changed back, whether he would have just stayed like that forever, the Stilinskis’ weird new dog, a huge thing, that looked kind of like a wolf. He might have done it. It’s possible.
As it happens, Deucalion et al escapes from jail – because of course they do, of course – and Stiles’ dad has to go chasing after them, and Scott and Isaac come hurtling into Stiles’ house and practically collapse in front of him.
“Derek,” Scott says. “Derek, there are only the two of us, plus Allison, we can’t – we need your help. Do you – we need your help. You have got to fucking – this is useless, you being like this – it’s useless, it’s not – you need to stop. You need to stop.”
Derek stares up at him for a moment, frozen. He’s sort of shrunk into himself, made himself look smaller than Stiles knows he is.
Eventually he turns and looks up at Stiles, who’s sitting on the edge of the couch, tense. His hands, he realizes distantly, are shaking; he knots them together. Derek’s looking at him almost desperately, like he wants an out, an excuse, and the sick thing is that Stiles kind of wants to give him one. But there really isn’t one to give.
“My dad’s out there,” he says instead, croaking a little, and Derek stares at him for a long moment before taking one huffing breath after another, and then shuddering, and then – oh. Oh.
He really needs to shave.
Also, he is really extremely naked.
“Oh, dude, gross,” Scott says, because although Scott is growing and maturing as a person, he still kind of doesn’t have a brain-to-mouth filter in times of stress.
“I need,” Derek starts, and swallows. His voice is hoarse, and it kind of sounds like the voice of someone who’s learning English for the first time. He’s very pointedly not looking at Stiles. “I need clothes.”
“I’ll go – yeah,” Stiles mumbles, and runs upstairs to try to find clothes that might fit Derek, and comes up with a pair of old sweatpants that are too big on his own hips and a big t-shirt.
“Here,” he says when he gets back downstairs, carefully avoiding looking at Derek’s face. “They’re – I hope that’s okay, that’s what I’ve got.”
Derek turns around and so does Stiles, Scott following a moment later. Isaac, leaning in the doorway, just watches.
Isaac, Stiles thinks, is really fucking weird.
“Okay,” Derek says from behind them, and when Stiles turns around he accidentally winds up – staring at him, straight in the eyes, although he thinks it’s probably technically Derek’s fault since Derek was the one looking at him first. “I’m ready to go,” Derek says, still staring at Stiles, like he thinks he’s being deported or taken away to prison or something.
“Don’t die,” Stiles says, meaning all of them, but – well, he’s looking at Derek, isn’t he?
“Come on,” Scott says, because Scott is a good friend who will rescue Stiles from all sorts of terrible situations, and they’re out of the house in less than thirty seconds, leaving Stiles all alone.
“Fuck,” he says, with feeling, before collapsing back onto the couch. Fuck Deaton, he thinks bitterly, and all his stupid fucking rules about emissaries-in-training not getting into combat situations without any way of defending themselves. Fuck his stupid human body. Fuck everything.
He gets exactly nothing done for hours, until a car pulls into the driveway and Derek, still wearing ill-fitting Beacon Hills High sports apparel and no shoes, helps his father in through the front door, and Stiles can’t quite decide whether to be relieved they’re both alive or to have a heart attack over the fact that Derek is helping his father over the threshold of his own home.
“What – what happened, what’s going on, what –” Stiles says, and his dad huffs out a sigh.
“I’m fine, Stiles,” he says. “Just a sprain. Melissa already checked it out.” He holds out his ankle, which is indeed in a brace.
“Oh,” Stiles says in a small voice. Derek lets his dad go when they’re close enough to the table that his dad can lean on that, which he does, and gestures to Stiles to come forward. He grabs Stiles by the back of the neck when he gets close enough and pulls him in, close, and Stiles clings to him for as long as he thinks he can manage without actually crying.
Derek hangs back, looking at his feet, until Stiles steps back, and then says, without looking up, “Do you need me to do anything else? Sir?”
Stiles’ dad looks at him for a moment and smiles a little, but Stiles thinks it looks wrong, sad.
“Not right now, son,” he says. Derek nods once, decisively, and then turns and walks out of the house.
Stiles stands frozen for a moment, staring after him, incredulous for reasons he can’t quite grasp.
“Stiles,” his dad says, and Stiles nods absently and follows Derek out into the front yard. He’s walking down to the road – the car in the driveway is Stiles’ dad’s cruiser.
“Hey,” Stiles shouts. “Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, you fucker.”
Derek stops but doesn’t turn around right away. When he does, he looks more exhausted than Stiles noticed, inside. The bottom of his t-shirt is blood-stained.
“What,” he says wearily, looking at the middle of Stiles’ chest.
“Um,” Stiles says, because he’s not actually sure what it is that he wants to say, only that he definitely needs to say something. “Where are you going?”
Derek does look at him, then, in the eyes, blinking sort of incredulously. “Home,” he says, stretching the word out, as though Stiles is a small child.
“You could have gone home three weeks ago,” Stiles points out, and he thinks – it’s hard to tell, with the beard, but he thinks – that Derek blushes.
“What are you trying to say, Stiles?” he asks, probably trying to sound intimidating. He doesn’t, so Stiles asks the thing he’s been wondering for the past three weeks.
“Why did you come here?” he says. “Why did you – what were you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Derek says dully. “I don’t know.”
The sad thing is that Stiles is pretty sure he’s not lying. He really doesn’t know.
His beard is really dark, against his pale skin; it’s gotten thicker than Stiles has ever seen it in the past few weeks.
“Does it feel different?” he asks. Derek shrugs a little, shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
“Yeah,” he admits, under his breath.
“How does it feel?” Stiles asks, pushing, because that’s what he does.
“I don’t know,” Derek says, sounding frustrated. Derek, Stiles knows, is not good with words.
How incredible, he thinks, that people can be so completely different from each other, and not actually that different at all, when you get down to it.
“Can you do it again?” Stiles asks.
“I guess,” Derek says.
“Come on,” Stiles says. “Let’s go to the back."
Derek follows him to their fenced-in backyard mainly because he doesn’t seem to know what else to do – he is not very good, Stiles thinks, at saying no.
“I’ll turn around,” Stiles says, and does so, waits a minute. “Ready?” he says, and when he doesn’t hear anything, turns back around and looks down at the wolf in front of him.
Derek is staring at the ground, shoulders hunched. He looks, Stiles thinks, like somebody preparing to be mocked.
Stiles gets down on his knees in front of him and puts his hands on his face, smoothing back the fur of his cheeks, his throat, in-between his eyes.
“Your eyes are exactly the same when you change, you know,” he says. “Exactly the same.”
Derek looks at him for a long time, and Stiles doesn’t move his hands away from his face until he moves forward, hesitant, and lets his big furred body slump against Stiles’.
“You’re all right,” Stiles whispers to him, curling one arm around his neck and rubbing his hand down his side, until the fur below his fingers slips into something smoother, warmer, just as easily broken or burned away. “You’re all right,” Stiles says again, fingers splayed out over Derek’s back, which is smooth and perfect, marred by none of the scars that should be there, chronicling his long hard history.
“Shhh,” Stiles whispers against his temple, and closes his eyes, the pulse of Derek’s heart steady beneath his fingers.