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“Stiles.”
Stiles’ head jerks up. The rustles and creaks of the woods had been easy enough to ignore but the glowering werewolf in front of him effectively rips him out of his thoughts. He’s almost tempted to thank Derek for the reprieve but he’d undoubtedly take it the wrong way, since the world was out to get him and he acted like it, too. He shifts on the porch steps, the boards giving a foreboding whine beneath him and Derek huffs, eyebrows jumping up impatiently.
Great. They were starting there. Why even try for civility, right? Better to get this over with, then.
He hops off the Hale house steps like he's jumping off the bench at a lacrosse game. Well. At least like he's imagined that would go. With determination and more than a bit of apprehension. He can't know for sure though, his high school sports career just another casualty of this whole lycanthropic mess.
He probably would've made a fool of himself on the field anyway.
His hand’s faintly dusted with charcoal, grimy from where it’d been resting next to his thigh and he wipes it too emphatically on his jeans. Which is when he thinks to check back in with Derek and his glowering expression. Because that’s like… ground-up people and sadness made dirt.
Specifically Derek’s people and sadness and… dirt.
He raises his shoulders in an awkward hunch, trying to convey with just his body language both apology and a lack of malice. Because that really hadn’t been designed to antagonize. That was nothing more than pure stupidity and, now that he’s thinking about it, that probably actually isn’t much better. From Derek’s expression, Stiles has probably only managed to look constipated anyway. Whatever. “Ah. Hey,” he says unevenly, both as a distraction technique and because he’s caught slightly off-guard. He’d all but given up on Derek ever showing. He’d stayed because he had nowhere else to go.
He looks back at the burnt skeleton of the Hale house and then to the disagreeable Hale in front of him and shrugs. “I thought maybe you’d given up wallowing in your own man-pain but I guess not.”
Derek’s jaw tightens and Stiles barrels on before he can start snapping out orders no one has any intention of following.
“Uh. Right. So I thought I could help?” Derek’s eyes widen and Stiles rushes in to explain how much Derek needs his help, before he can do something stupid, like deny it. “The whole Alpha thing, that’s new and exciting and unstable for everybody, right? And research kind of happens to be my thing. Even if it wasn’t though, you live in a place without a working electrical outlet. I win by default of us not even playing the same game. I am the major league baseball to your kiddie league t-ball.”
Derek doesn’t cede the point, because the only person he’ll admit to wanting around has been clear about not wanting him back. He rolls his eyes, is all condescension and unfounded confidence as he says, “Go home, Stiles.”
Except that’s not really an answer Stiles can live with. He can’t just go home. Not when there’s nothing to do there besides wait for a text from Scott that’s never going to come and obsess. And he’s been doing that, thank you very much. It’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. So. He’s going to help Derek even if he has to bully him into accepting it. And he probably will too, since Derek seems to be some kind of savant when it comes to choosing the wrong thing.
He’s still forming his argument, trying not to use the words, ‘dumb self-sabotaging loner,’ when Derek’s head tilts to the side and his nostrils flare. His face looks severe even when it’s nothing more than thoughtful, brow furrowing and mouth sloping downwards.
Stiles glares at him. It’s like Derek is allergic to having an actual conversation. No, he’d much rather sniff out body odor or sweat signals or pheromones than use his words. Maybe that isn’t just a Derek thing though, maybe that’s a born werewolf thing and they have a legitimate social handicap because they can scent people’s emotions, meaning they’ve never learned how to discuss them. It would certainly explain why Derek had no sense of tact or boundaries at least. “Okay, you with the nostrils?” Derek blinks in surprise. “No,” Stiles says firmly. “Don’t—don’t scent me, okay? If you want to know something, maybe ask me, not smell me.” Stiles isn’t going to tell him anything whether he goes about it like a human being or not, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Derek doesn’t even look bothered by the reprimand. Just annoyed that Stiles is still in his face, and critiquing him on top of it. “What’s it going to take to get rid of you?” he demands impatiently.
“Listen, just—Let me help you. Okay? Derek?” He uses the last two words like punctuation themselves, each its own full stop. “I went through a list of people who could actually use it and you are at the tippy-freaking-top so… take it, all right?” He had actually gone through a list, made a color-coded, searchable spreadsheet with varying fonts of all the people who were worse off than him. Derek was overwhelmingly the winner. He even beat out the drifter who hung around the video store. At least the clerk there slipped him a free bag of Twizzlers every so often.
Then there was Derek. Without a home or a family or Twizzlers. Stiles can’t just let that stand, not when he has nightmares, energy to burn and an overwhelming desire to do something good.
“Scott and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms at the moment,” Derek says with a tight scrunch of his mouth, eyes narrowing. It’s that thing he does when he’s trying to belittle someone else’s entire existence. “I doubt he wants you helping me.”
It’s astute but ultimately irrelevant. “One, dude? When have you and Scott ever been on speaking terms?” Stiles asks rhetorically, almost grinning, because that was on freaking point. He follows it up with a nonchalant shrug and admits, knowing Derek can hear the truth behind it because he hasn’t learned it’s rude to snoop on people’s heartbeats either, “Two… I won’t tell him if you don’t. You can look at this as the world’s smallest scale rebellion if you want but he’s, you know,” Stiles waves a hand, “he’s got Allison and he’s happy and I need something to—I just want to help.” There it is, the bare bones of the truth. He wants to move something forward, preferably in a direction that leads away from death and destruction. Fixing Derek, there’s a chance that could fix everything else. Peter’s dead, Scott’s with Allison, Derek’s an Alpha. It could work.
Apparently that’s too complicated a concept for Derek to accept though, because he’s all suspicion and intensity as he grinds out, “Why?”
“Because I burned someone alive.” Stiles doesn’t really know how you just… go back to regular life after that. Peter Hale had been a raging, murderous douche and he’d bitten Lydia, which accounted for strikes one through a thousand using Stiles’ score card, but his screams still haunted Stiles’ subconscious, kept him awake and making spreadsheets at three in the morning, looking for any good deed to offset homicide. He fidgets with his fingers, picking at the skin of a blister under his middle one, before forcibly pulling his hands apart. “I need something – anything – else to focus on. And so do you.”
In case Derek thinks this all hinges on Stiles’ selfishness. It doesn’t. This, right here, is a mutually beneficial arrangement, which is why Stiles is fighting so hard for it. If Derek would just stop being a stubborn idiot about it, they could help each other.
“You need people, Derek. Your uncle arranged the death of your sister and Kate burned the rest of your family alive and I don’t think you ever planned to be Alpha so much as you wanted to kill Peter.” He’s running down the boxes on his spreadsheet. And that’s not even half of them, just the ones truly worth noting. “I could help you figure it out. I mean, your instincts have got to be different now, right?” The sites Stiles had found had contradicted each other on almost every point but they all seemed to agree on that one.
Derek’s mouth sets in a frown and Stiles breathes out harshly, dragging a hand over the buzz of his hair, wondering what he’s going to do now after Derek’s refused this when Derek says, “Stronger.” His hands flex at his sides, fingers unfurling out clawed. “Harder to ignore.”
Stiles really, really hopes Derek isn’t referencing a homicidal one. That would be just their luck, trapped on a never-ending carousel of spree-killing werewolves. There had to be a way to do this Alpha thing without slashing people’s throats, though. “One in particular, I’m thinking,” he says slowly, trying to draw it out carefully and without sounding judgmental about it.
“Pack,” Derek says heavily, breathing deeply, like he’s transferred the weight he was carrying on his chest to his words. Stiles barely has time to quirk an eyebrow in question before he’s clarifying, “The urge to make one.”
Fuck. That’s better than the potential violent rampage Stiles had been envisioning, except that Stiles hadn’t even considered that as an answer. It makes perfect sense though. Of course Derek would be looking to juice up. The guy had been on some weird, drink-the-brotherhood-Kool-Aid kick since he found out about Scott and Scott wasn’t even his. Of course he wants to Bite his own crop of shitty baby betas.
A confident, “Derek,” cuts through the tension between them.
Derek turns and backs up a step, towards Stiles, claws out and crouching. He’s gone effortlessly into some protector-mode and Stiles’ eyes only stop snapping around for what he can use as a weapon when Jackson steps close enough that he’s no longer shrouded by shadow or foliage. He’s wearing his regular cocky, shit-eating grin and Stiles almost wishes he had found something in his assessment, if only so he could smack that look off Jackson’s face with it. He covertly notices the way Derek’s fingers curl in to form a fist at his side and thinks maybe he’s not the only one with a violent Pavlovian response when it comes to Jackson’s obnoxious… everything.
Jackson’s smirk falters when Derek shifts on his feet and he notices Stiles is standing behind him.
Stiles uses the stumble to cut him off. Whatever reason he’s there, it’s probably not a good one. Or a particularly smart one, and Stiles really isn’t interested in hearing it. He raises his eyebrows at Derek, purposefully ignoring Jackson except to point back at him and say, “Not that one.”
Derek actually snorts, like he finds the very idea laughable. “I know that much, Stiles,” he says on a growl.
Whatever, sure he does.
“This is idiotic.”
Stiles glances up at Derek. He’s still standing next to Stiles’ window, arms crossed over his chest and staring around Stiles’ room like it’s all coated in a fine layer of wolfsbane he can’t see. Apparently he’s only comfortable in people’s bedrooms if they don’t know he’s there. Stiles blinks, forcefully shaking away that thought because he really can’t afford to get lost there right now. “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” he says with an unimpressed snort. “You keep badmouthing the plan, which – conveniently – keeps you from having to come up with one of your own. Did you notice that?”
Derek’s sneer says he probably did notice that, but was hoping Stiles hadn’t.
Stiles goes back to the book spread out in his lap, flips through another three pages of his classmates’ slack-jawed faces while chewing on a pen cap. Really they all look like they could use some superior genes. “I’ll remind you that you’re the one who said teenagers have the best chance of surviving the Bite.” He holds up the yearbook and shakes it. “And this is basically the take-out menu for what there is to chew on in this town.” He’s not even that butthurt about Derek’s immediate opposition to his plan. It’s too predictable and integral to the very fiber of his being (‘no’ to everything forever!) to be mad about it. He hums under his breath, adds, “Preferably ones like Scott.”
“Like Scott,” Derek repeats, like the words have left a bad taste in his mouth.
Stiles thrusts out his chin defiantly because, seriously, Scott is the best thing to come out of Derek’s whole post-New York life and pretending otherwise is fooling absolutely no one. “Yes, like Scott. Asthmatic until presto, change-o, the lung capacity of an Olympic swimmer?” Stiles makes a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat, balancing his yearbook on one knee, pen cap pressed to the corner of his mouth while he lightly chews on it. “I think Greenberg has some sort of… disorder. I’m putting a question mark next to him.” He pauses, decides, “I’m putting a couple question marks next to him.”
Derek steps close enough that he can peer over Stiles’ shoulder and actually participate in picking his own Pack. His nose wrinkles at the photo of Greenberg and, yeah, it’s not a great picture. He seems to’ve been caught mid-sneeze. “No.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Stiles warns, wagging his pen at him. He holds the yearbook up to Derek’s face and insists, “Come on, he’s at least question mark material.”
“No.”
Stiles sighs, crossing out Greenberg’s picture. He really hopes he’ll never have to explain any of this in the future.
He taps his pen against the glossy open page, leaving little tick marks behind, and tries to strategize some way to gently approach the issue of: “So. Listen. I feel like the whole, ‘tricking teenagers into your Pack,’ thing might go better if you weren’t living in your fire-charred old house where, you know, a bunch of people died.”
That definitely wasn’t it.
“I don’t live there,” Derek says crossly, eyebrows knitting like he has no idea how Stiles even came to that.
“Wow,” Stiles says, genuinely dumbfounded. He turns around, blinking at Derek. “Or a train car. I really have to say this?” He should not have to say this.
Derek goes from looking tentatively pleased with himself to scowling in seconds.
“You’re living… here? Why not, um, anywhere else? Like anywhere. Else.” Stiles would seriously consider organizing some sort of fundraiser if necessary just to get Derek someplace with indoor plumbing. ‘Help the Hairy Hapless Hale,’ maybe. Actually, that kind of had a nice ring to it.
“I never thought I was staying,” Derek says suddenly, gravelly. “I wasn’t planning on coming back here. I was supposed to be finding Laura, bringing her home. I didn’t expect her to be torn in half, killed by Peter and left as a trap to catch me by hunters.”
Right. That whole thing. Stiles didn’t really know how to address any of that with the sort of sensitivity it required, so he bypassed it. “You know you’re choosing that now, right? You start building your Pack here and here is where you’re settling down, at least for the foreseeable future.”
Derek fixes him with a long look and only says, “I know,” after he’s broken it.
“What do you know about this one?”
Stiles lets out a harsh breath through his nose, taps his fingers against his desk and doesn’t turn his head to look at Derek. “Oh, hey, Stiles, were you doing anything right now?” he asks himself in a mutter. “Actually, funny that you ask, Derek, because I was studying for my Chemistry test tomorrow as the world doesn’t revolve around you. Thanks for being in tune with that by the way, man. I really appreciate the fact that you don’t make unreasonable demands on my time.”
Derek grips the back of his chair and forcibly turns him around, shoving the yearbook he’s holding open into Stiles’ face.
Stiles sighs and snatches it out of his hand. “Which one?”
Derek points down at some curly-haired kid Stiles has never laid eyes on before. He frowns and would’ve said this ‘Isaac Lahey’ person didn’t even go to his school, except this is his yearbook so he definitely does. Huh. And apparently they’re in the same year, too. Stiles squints at the photo, holds it closer to his face and says seriously, “He doesn’t look familiar.” That’s weird, under the guy’s interests it says—“Huh. Lacrosse. I should—” He should definitely know this kid. Only it seems like he’s even better at flying under the radar than Stiles is.
“He smells hurt.”
Okay… Stiles doesn’t even know what that means. “First, it is so gross that you go around smelling people. I’m actively putting a moratorium on that particular lycanthropic quirk in my vicinity. Cool?” Derek rolls his eyes impatiently. “Second, it says here he’s on the lacrosse team, so maybe—”
Derek shakes his head, forehead furrowing like he’s trying to find a way to explain so Stiles will understand. “Deeper than that.”
Yeah, that’s not it. Stiles still has no idea what he’s talking about. “I’ll take your word for it,” he decides, betting this is something his totally normal human brain is never going to grasp.
He lifts his head to find Derek fixing him with a long look, eyes just barely searching his face.
“What?”
Derek blinks and his expression shutters. “Nothing.”
Stiles rolls his eyes. Whatever. “All right, well, I’ll track him down tomorrow and do some recon. Unless I fail this test, and then I think I’ve earned at least a day of moping. This week, though, for sure.”
Derek perks an eyebrow. “You’re going to ask him—”
“If he wants to learn the super-secret supernatural handshake?” Stiles finishes smartly. “Dude, I don’t even know if he’s double-jointed yet! This may all be moot.”
“I never have any idea what you’re talking about.” Derek looks legitimately pained.
“Okay, well, the point is, I have some tact.” Derek snorts. “Shut up,” Stiles throws at him, barely allowing it to interrupt his flow. “But, no, I’m not going to ask him if he wants to be a werewolf. I’m going to make sure he’s not a psychopath whose critical hit ratio you’d be upping by a thousand-and-ten percent first.”
Stiles scoots close to Isaac on the lacrosse bench, squints out at the meatheads – and Scott – running around with sticks. “Hey, buddy,” he says, friendly, drawing out the endearment.
Isaac glances over at him like he’s found the source of a particularly rancid smell. Awesome. “What do you want?”
Stiles scratches at the back of his neck, fishes and pulls up, “We’re brothers in arms, man, benchwarmers forever.” Ha, and he didn’t even need a dumb net to throw that out. “I mean, without us, this bench, right here,” he pats it, “would be cold. And that would just be… horrible?” He kind of ends on more of a question than a statement but, whatever, they’re bonding. They can begin the bond now.
Isaac’s eyes narrow and he lays out like it’s his trump card: “What’s my name?” He twists slightly in his seat as if to hide the back of his jersey.
“Isaac Lahey,” Stiles answers promptly and Isaac’s face crumples in a little, clearly not expecting the defeat. Stiles gestures between them. “Your intense doubt over my good intentions is not enabling our fledgling relationship to bud into the beautiful and meaningful friendship it wants to be.”
“You’ve never said a single word to me before.”
“Right back at ya.” Stiles finger-guns at him. “At least I decided to do something about it.”
Isaac sneers and Coach starts shouting about them all being massive disappointments who should go home and ruminate on today’s collective failure. “I don’t talk to you because I don’t want to talk to you,” Isaac mutters, snatching up his bag and practically jumping off the bench as they’re dismissed. In Coach’s unique fashion.
“I’ll break you yet, Lahey!” Stiles calls after him, nose wrinkling in distaste. He didn’t really figure out, well, anything about him. Aside from the fact that he’s pretty much perfect for Derek and his, currently nonexistent, Pack.
He pulls back the door to Derek’s and tosses his backpack down in a corner. Derek looks up as he enters, brows challenging, and working out in jeans. Like a total weirdo. “He’s a dick,” Stiles tells him summarily.
Derek’s brows inch up higher. “And?”
Stiles snorts. “That’s not enough to put you off?” He flops down on a couch that looks like it wants to flop down with him. It groans terribly as it catches his weight. He looks up and winks at Derek, who’s breathing hard, chest heaving, tank top soaked with sweat around the armpits and neck and Stiles promptly stops looking at Derek. Spreading his legs, he tries to think about Jackson and his next-door neighbor Mrs. Adelman and, for some reason, Swedish Fish before this can enter into some smell-o-vision hellscape. He breathes a sigh of relief, tracks down his train of thought and says, “There’s only room for one asshole in a Pack, okay, and you’ve been crowned Miss Asshole since, like, ’88.”—He’s guessing—“Congrats, man.”
Derek’s smirk turns his mouth down somehow. “I thought that title was reserved for you.”
Stiles freezes.
So does Derek.
“Okay,” Stiles starts awkwardly, swallowing, because he’s not going to say it, and there’s nothing to say anyway. It was—That was definitely nothing, a slip of the tongue probably. Derek doesn’t even have a Pack yet because Stiles definitely isn’t in one, or in his, because it doesn’t exist and they’re not—Whatever. He’s not in a Pack, that’s the thing. “So, let’s just.”
“Did you find out anything that would explain his scent?” Derek cuts him off. Good. Smart.
Stiles shrugs, feeling tense in a way he wasn’t before. He’s really missing the home-field advantage right about now. What had made him come to Derek like this was a thing they did? They didn’t do things. Because they weren’t a Pack or an… anything really. “I don’t know. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a dick,” Stiles points out. He really wasn’t. “We only had the one heart-warming conversation and that was about unicorns and internet cats.”
Derek’s jaw tightens and he throws down the cloth he was wiping his face with, passing Stiles on the couch with a curt, “Fine.”
Stiles struggles to sit up. “Where are you going?”
“To find out myself,” he growls out.
“Whoa, alone?” Derek quirks an unimpressed eyebrow at him and Stiles jumps up. “Yeah. That’s not happening. I’m going with you.”
“No,” Derek grinds out.
Stiles scrambles to stand in the way of the door and holds up his hands in front of Derek. “I don’t trust you not to go for the guy’s jugular, okay. You said the instinct to make a Pack is strong, right? Well I’m betting it’s only gotten more insistent. Plus, you’re just not a very good decision-maker, man. No offense.”
Derek stares him down, says angrily, “Really? No offense?”
Stiles taps incessantly on the knee of his jeans with all of his fingers, bites his lip and bemoans again, “This doesn’t even feel like a real stakeout without bitter coffee and junk food.”
“One, there’s no eating or drinking in my car.” Stiles stares. Is Derek… imitating him? Derek is totally imitating him. He might actually have, like, a sense of humor? Weird. “Two, this is not a real stakeout.”
Stiles snorts, trying not to grin stupidly. “Wow, it so is. I’m super sad for you that you can’t appreciate what’s happening right here. We are doing real, actual detective work and you’re not reveling in it, even a little bit. There is no revel in you. For shame.” He clicks his tongue judgmentally.
The down curl of Derek’s mouth almost looks like he’s suppressing a smile too. “There’s no talking in my car either,” he says after a minute. “I forgot to mention that.”
Stiles laughs out loud, catching himself and Derek by surprise.
Stiles is staring at a moth in the corner of his window, crunched up against the car door, cheek resting on his fist and opening and closing one eye to change his depth perception when Derek goes eerily tense next to him and throws open his door. “Derek,” Stiles blurts in shock. The way he jerks upright makes the moth fly off.
Derek’s already out of the car but he ducks his head back in long enough to command in a foreboding voice, “Stay,” and slams the door closed as though to ensure it.
Stiles stays tense and alert, eyes fixed on the door of the Lahey house, for the eight and a half minutes it takes for Derek to re-emerge. He’s got Isaac in tow when he does, large hand twisted up in the shoulder of his t-shirt and hauling him around. Stiles sits up straighter, fingers resting on the handle of his door and wondering if he shouldn’t get out and help somehow when Derek all but frog marches Isaac over after turning around and growling something at whomever is still inside.
“What the hel—” Stiles starts when Derek opens his door, pulls his seat back and shoves Isaac inside. Stiles swallows the rest of his words as soon as he catches sight of Isaac’s face, specifically the bloody lip and the bruising that’s already forming around his eye. “Oh,” he says blankly. “Okay. Well. We’re calling my dad.”
“No,” Isaac half-shouts immediately from the backseat.
“Stiles,” Derek starts.
“You’ll just make it worse,” Isaac says in a shaky voice that’s trying, and failing, for commanding.
“Look at your face, dude,” Stiles says, and he’s shaking too, but for an entirely different reason as he angrily punches his fingers into his phone, “it is worse. My dad can help and you need help.”
“Stiles,” Derek tries again, communicating with only his eyebrows.
Stiles shakes his head, phone already to his ear and ringing. “No,” he says fiercely, “without anything else, he is not going back into that house.”
No one argues after that.
Stiles sets his lunch tray down across from Isaac at the otherwise empty table. Isaac sneers but doesn’t meet his eye. “I don’t need your pity,” he spits.
Stiles points at him with his milk, leans back and says like it’s some unattainable treasure Isaac’s after, “Um, you don’t have my pity. And it’s not up for grabs either, so suck it.”
Isaac frowns but he doesn’t look half as angry as he did when Stiles first sat down. “Go away, Stilinski.”
“Hm, nope,” Stiles says with faux-thoughtfulness, popping the ‘p.’ He’s still masticating some apple when he adds, “By the way, Derek – the guy with the scowly face who broke into your house last night, he has something he wants to talk to you about.” Scott chooses that moment to show up, still staring at Allison in the lunch line like being this far apart from her is potentially unsafe for the both of them. Stiles catches him by the back before he can walk into something and guides him into the seat next to him. He snaps his fingers in front of Scott’s face and he refocuses with a doofy, semi-apologetic grin. Stiles makes sure to gesture in Scott’s eye line so his head will actually turn in the direction he’s indicating rather than stay fixed on Allison. “Scott, this is Isaac. He warms the lacrosse bench with me while you run around like a total chump on the field.” Scott beams at him and Isaac offers an uncertain twitch of his lips.
It’s progress.
Stiles shows up at Derek’s two days later and doesn’t bother to raise his voice as he sloughs off his backpack at the foot of the couch and collapses onto it. The sad, slouching thing is really growing on him. “So you offered?” he asks. He and Isaac talk at lunch now, with the happy buffer of Scott between them, and sometimes on the lacrosse bench with nothing but their own not-very-complementary assholeishness between them. So far not about anything of import though. Which includes both Derek and Isaac’s dad.
Derek rounds the train car into view and nods.
Stiles smirks. “Did he accept your rose?” Derek’s eyebrows knit together and Stiles glowers at him. Trust Derek to ruin his brilliance at every turn. “It’s a—never mind. Is he in or what?”
“He’s weighing his options,” Derek says carefully, mouth tight.
He’s clearly not happy over the fact that Isaac didn’t immediately jump at the offer. Best to get his mind off it, then. “You know how to do this though, right?”
“I’ve seen it done before,” Derek grunts.
“Okay,” Stiles draws out because that was a complete and total non-answer. “Evasive, well done. Do you know how though?”
Derek lifts his shoulders. “It should be instinct once I—” His eyes narrow on Stiles as he pulls his phone out of his shirt pocket and starts texting away furiously. “What are you doing?” he demands.
“Canceling all my plans and replacing them with werewolf research,” Stiles tells him without looking up. Obviously.
“I don’t need—” Derek starts growling.
Stiles flicks his eyes up and interrupts sternly, “Hey, help, you’re accepting it, buck-o, remember?”
Stiles can’t quite curb his excitement when Derek climbs in through his window later that night. “Dude,” he exclaims, bombarding him before he’s even got both feet inside, hands flailing, “you are just a walking saliva-born virus, did you know that?” Derek glares at him as he straightens up. Stiles ignores it. This is like living in a fucking X-Men comic and Derek and his sour face are not going to ruin that for him. “You don’t even need intention behind the Bite,” he tells him eagerly, because for a supernatural virus it follows surprisingly scientific rules. Derek seems to be waiting for the point, not even half as interested as he should be, and Stiles cuts to the chase. “Okay, so the only real concerns I found had to do with pressure and location. Sometimes the Alpha would get overeager and kill the person they were trying to turn before the lycanthropy virus could infect them,” he explains. “‘Exercise caution in application of force,’ is what you wanna do basically,” he rattles off from the site he still has up.
“Virus?” Derek repeats bitterly.
“Hey, it is a virus,” Stiles says defensively. It’s not an insult, just a fact. And a friggin’ cool one, too. “You should seriously see this thing at the molecular level,” he adds enthusiastically, nerding out a little. “You just annihilate normal healthy cells.” He mimes an explosion with his hands and makes appropriate kerplooie noises under his breath. Derek stares at him, completely unimpressed with his entire existence and Stiles clears his throat. “Anyway, don’t crush the trachea, break the ribs and puncture the heart or drain the femoral artery and you should be good. Go for something fleshy but sturdy.”
“Stand up,” Derek says sharply. Stiles does through nothing more than the command in his tone and then frowns over having followed the direction. Derek reaches out for his shoulder and drags him closer. He tilts his head to the side, seems to be strategizing something as his eyes jump over Stiles. Finally, he pulls Stiles’ shirts down off his shoulder and taps his pale skin with a forefinger. “This?” he asks aloud, but it almost sounds rhetorical.
He leans in, hovers his mouth over the ball of Stiles’ shoulder for a half-second before pressing down, pressing in, and fitting his teeth to skin. His hand curls over the back of Stiles’ neck, thumb slowly brushing up and down the length of it and prickling Stiles’ hair. The fingers of his other tentatively butt up against Stiles’ waist. “Derek,” Stiles bursts out, breathy and entirely independent of his brain. His own hands clench into Derek’s leather jacket for lack of anything better to do.
Derek looks up at him through lowered lashes, fingers twisting up in Stiles’ shirt at his hip, knuckles bumping up against his torso. He asks with a knowing smirk, “Is it too hard?”
Fuck. Something is. Derek pushes closer and Stiles spreads his legs and this is not how this should be going. The first person to touch his dick is supposed to be Lydia, in two years, after he’s convinced her he’s not a complete freak, gotten her to toss out Jackson where he belongs and proven he can keep up with her future award-winning brain. Or that he mostly can. That’s how the ten-year plan goes. It most certainly is not supposed to be Derek Hale’s thigh sandwiched between his legs and pressing up against him while he pretends to bite him. Stiles scrabbles at his shoulders before he can rock into it because they’re in some nebulous arena where they both somehow know the score, where they both know that actively encouraging this means they’ll have to acknowledge it. If they stay just like this though, then—then nothing really has to change. Right? “You’re going to leave a mark,” Stiles gasps out when Derek’s teeth press in harder.
Derek sucks against his skin, pulls back only far enough that his lips are still brushing Stiles’ oversensitive flesh and only long enough to give an unapologetic: “Yes.”
Isaac’s eyes are still glowing gold when he sits down next to Stiles on the Hale house steps. He taps his fingers together, head tilted at an unnatural angle like he’s listening to things Stiles can’t hear. Stiles has no idea where Derek is, feels like he needs a cold shower and is just contemplating going home to get one when Isaac says, “Really lucky I don’t have any unresolved feelings towards you or I’d be freaking out right about now.”
Stiles wishes he could say the same about the not-freaking-out. That was… intense. And it hadn’t even been happening to him. He tries on a grin and quips, “Methinks he doth protest too much.” It doesn’t fit and he fights off a shiver. Derek had—He’d bitten Isaac’s shoulder just like he’d mimed on Stiles the night before but he’d never broken eye contact with Stiles while he did it. He’d positioned Isaac between them, locked his jaws around him and stared into Stiles while he bit down, blood gushing up to meet his mouth. Stiles coughs into his fist and says, in case Isaac missed it, “That was hilarious, by the way.”
“There was a lot of… stuff in that,” Isaac says, words and expression encouraging, beseeching almost. Stiles has no idea what he’s talking about though, and it must show on his face because Isaac huffs and tries again. “Charged stuff.” He raises his eyebrows purposefully. “Not my stuff either.”
“Stuff?” Stiles repeats. That’s, like, the least descriptive word in the English language.
“Stuff that was kind of intensely focused on you,” Isaac clarifies, or not-clarifies, impatiently. He shrugs his shoulders. “When he bit me, it felt—I don’t know, like he was really biting you.”
“Oh.” Oh.
Stiles is pacing when Derek shows up. He hadn’t said goodbye, just left Isaac on the porch without another word and tried not to think too hard about anything.
“Are you—” Derek starts.
“I don’t want the Bite.”
Derek blinks, says slowly, “I know.”
Stiles lets out an uneven breath, allowing some of his tension to go with it. “Okay,” he says, relieved, “because I turned it down with Peter and he said I was lying but I—”
Derek’s in his space in a second, snarling. “Peter tried to Bite you?” His nostrils flare but Stiles doesn’t think he’s smelling him, he thinks he’s just fucking furious.
“No,” Stiles says quickly. “He… offered. Like a hot towel or turn-down service,” he adds awkwardly. Derek takes a step back, eyes still narrow, and Stiles chews on his lip uncertainly before deciding to just say the thing. “Isaac seemed to think—”
“Isaac doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Derek cuts him off harshly.
Stiles swallows, nods once, not sure if that was actually what he wanted to hear or not. “So, just to confirm, you don’t want to Bite me?”
“No,” Derek snaps.
Well. Then. Okay. That’s that settled, Stiles guesses. He’s not sure why he feels so blindsided when that’s what he wanted. Really. He doesn’t want the Bite, he knows that about himself, so he genuinely has no idea why he feels so crushed that Derek doesn’t want to give it to him. That’s nonsense if he’s ever heard it. “Cool, so we’ll just—”
“I want you in my Pack.”
“I am,” Stiles says automatically and that’s why that had hurt. Because he’d started thinking of them as a Pack, him and Derek and Isaac, and Derek not wanting to Bite him had made him think maybe he was alone in that. “I mean, I don’t know what all goes into it,” he admits, “but I kind of thought we’d reached, like, an understanding here.” Around the time that Derek had felt and smelled his hard-on in werewolf surround sound and stayed put. “That I am in it.”
“For as long as Scott’s ignoring you and then what, Stiles?” Derek demands angrily, voice raised and challenging, unloading like he’s been carrying this around for far too long. “This is all just a way of distracting yourself—from Peter and Scott, from whatever else your problems are. I can’t count on you to stay.”
Stiles takes offense to that. He’s not a guy who deserts people. He sticks around, he helps out. To the point where it’s almost a frickin’ compulsion. “I’m not going to just up and abandon you, dude.” He kind of can’t believe Derek’s been walking around waiting for that particular shoe to drop either, assuming there was an expiration date on his company.
“Unless Scott needs you,” Derek mocks. “Because he’s your Alpha. However that works.”
Stiles frowns. Well, yeah. But that doesn’t exclude Derek, at least not the way Stiles understands this. “Putting all the werewolf mumbo jumbo aside for a second, that’s pretty much always going to be true. If my dad calls and needs me, I’m going to run to his side too. I think the Pack thing doesn’t mean that you come first. It means that—that you come running with me, that we don’t separate, that we’re a… Pack.”
Derek gazes at him for a long moment, steps close again and says in a low voice, “Isaac’s not going to be enough.”
Stiles’ lips twitch uncertainly, not sure if he’s supposed to be lightening the conversation or not. “Yeah, well, lucky for you, I’m in this too and I foresaw that. I’ve got a few other candidates already picked out.” Derek hasn’t stopped staring at him, expression searching, and Stiles asks uneasily, “What?”
“You still don’t feel like mine,” Derek answers, voice thin – almost croaky – but determined.
Stiles swallows. “Okay. Because of Scott?” he guesses. Derek makes a noncommittal sound and presses in closer, looking almost like a werewolf possessed. “What do you want to do?” Stiles blinks, snorts, makes a joke because it’s all he knows how to do. “Pin me or something? Oh fuck, I meant like—” He meant like a guy from the sixties asking a girl to wear his pin and it was already a terrible reference that upped the awkward factor by some alien number.
“Yes,” is all Derek says and then his large hand is coming up to cup the back of Stiles’ shaved head, the other pushing at his hip and walking him back into his desk, pressing him up against it.
“Yes to—?” Stiles feels like he’s going to swallow his tongue or something equally improbable when Derek bites down on his jaw, not hard but enough that Stiles can’t mistake the pressure. “Oh—kay,” his eyes are threatening to roll back and he stupidly notes, “this counts as biting.”
“I won’t slip,” Derek says into his skin.
“Wasn’t actually worried about that,” Stiles tells him. “I am now, though.”
Derek bites down, firm, as closed mouth as he’s willing to make it and then he’s drifting up, dragging his lips against the corner of Stiles’ mouth, brushing over his upper lip, saying on a breath against his skin, “Pack.”
Stiles swallows, clenches his hands over Derek’s back and breathes, “Yeah. Yes.” He digs his fingers in. “I am.”