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I
“Scott,” Derek says. He’s actually standing over their table in the middle of the cafeteria. Scott glances at Stiles for confirmation that this is happening—Stiles’ mouth is hanging open in surprise, which means it really is happening. Scott spots Erica a few tables away, falling over laughing—he’s fairly sure Boyd’s arm is the only thing holding her up. Isaac’s back is to Scott, but he can see him shaking, too. Scott lifts his eyebrows at Boyd in a silent question, and Boyd smiles slow. So that explains Derek’s 90’s sitcom outfit, at least.
“Uh, hey Derek,” Scott says, finally looking him in the eye. Derek does that heavy breathing thing he does when he’s starting to get mad, or impatient, or—actually he does it like, all the time, so Scott’s not sure he should take as indication of anything. It's still pretty funny though, especially with his backwards cap. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk.”
“Now?”
Derek frowns. “Yeah, now.”
“I’m kind of...,” Scott looks down at his mac and cheese. It’s the only good thing they sell in the cafeteria, and they only serve it on Wednesdays. He turns to Allison and makes a desperate kind of face at her. She makes a unsure face back, and shrugs. So it's Scott's call.
Derek sighs and looks back at his pack for a moment. When he turns to look at Scott again, he’s got what Scott guesses is his determined face on.
“Actually, I could just sit down. And talk to you. Here.”
“Uh,” Scott says. It must really be urgent if Derek is not only willing to come to the school in disguise but also offer to talk about it without finding a dark, secluded corner. “Yeah, sure. As long as it won’t take forever?”
Derek does sit down, but he doesn’t say anything for the rest of lunch. Stiles keeps making distressed faces in Scott’s direction, and mouthing, seriously, tell him to go for the entire time, too, until Derek kind of bares his fangs at him, and then Stiles just kind of slumps in his seat and angrily eats forkfuls of mac and cheese.
When the bell rings, Derek just gets up and says, “See you around,” like this isn’t the most surreal thing to happen in their circle of acquaintances and sometimes allies.
“What was that about?” Allison says when Scott finally lowers his hand to let them know it’s safe to talk.
“I seriously have no idea,” Scott says.
“Why did you say yes,” Stiles hisses at him. “That was terrible.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Scott says. “It was just so—I didn’t even know what to say.”
II
“That’s really nice, dude,” Scott says, when Derek is done reading, because it’s true. It is really nice. He’s always been kind of envious of people who are good with words, and poetry is like, a whole other level. “Is it old or did you just write it?”
“It’s—,” Derek pauses, and looks down at his paper like it’s offended him. “It’s Shakespeare, actually.”
“Oh,” Scott says. That makes sense, too—Derek is probably not the kind of person who sits around writing poetry when he could be using that time to do more pull-ups.
“My mom likes Neruda better,” Scott offers, and regrets it immediately, when he imagines Derek trying to read Neruda to him.
“I. Okay?” Derek says, like Scott is the one being weird here. He sneaks a look down at his phone to see if either Allison or Stiles have answered his frantic, one handed, derek readng me poetry???? ithink. what do i do text. Allison has. It’s just a laughing smiley.
III
Scott thinks he must be having a weird nightmare when he catches sight of Derek in the bleachers, holding up the other end of Allison’s GO #11!!! sign, but Lydia is sitting next to Allison, too, and throwing mistrustful looks Derek’s way, so he figures he’s not the only one who can see him, and also he’s definitely not sleeping. Allison doesn’t look that bothered about him being here, but Allison is honestly kind of a badass that way, so.
He grabs Stiles’ shoulder, pulling him up from his crouch to whisper in his ear. “Is that Derek?”
Stiles peeks around Scott, and straightens up real quick. “That sure is Derek. In the stands, holding up a cheering sign for you.”
Scott drops his head onto Stiles’ chest. He’s only gonna stay a second. “Why is he here?”
“I don’t know, man,” Stiles says. “I don’t know why Derek does anything. Shit. I think he can hear us. He is looking at us, Scott.”
“Okay,” Scott says. “Okay.”
He turns back and looks directly at Allison, trying his hardest to ignore Derek, but he swears Derek shuffles closer to her because he’s suddenly in his line of sight too. He’s just going to disregard that for a second. Scott gestures for Allison to come down, and she gives her corner of the sign to Lydia, who holds it up a little disdainfully for a moment, then lets it drop. Derek catches it.
Allison comes barrelling down the stairs and into Scott—they spin around with her momentum. She buries her face in his neck, and he can feel her shaking in laughter.
Stiles says, “Yeah, I’ll be back later,” and Scott waves.
Allison is still laughing, but she gets out a, “Later, Stiles,” before he leaves.
“It’s not that funny,” he tells her, after maybe thirty seconds of listening to her trying to get herself under control.
“It’s a little funny,” she says.
“It’s really not. Allison,” Scott says, but now he’s laughing too. It takes a minute for him to sober up. “Why do you think he’s here?”
“Maybe he wants to make friends,” Allison says, finally looking at him. One corner of her mouth is still quirked up, and Scott sighs, leaning closer to her.
“I don’t really wanna be friends with him,” Scott says. He wants to tell her that she doesn’t have to be friends with Derek either, or even sit with him on the bleachers, but he knows she wouldn’t like him saying something like that, on account of she can make her own decisions. If she hasn’t moved from where she’s sitting, it’s because she doesn’t want to, and there’s not much Scott can do to change her mind.
(“McCall,” he hears Coach Finstock say, “stop cuddling your girlfriend, the game is starting soon.”
“Coach,” Stiles says. “I think something happened to my stick? Looks like a spider took out the net and built a web in it.”
“Jesus, Bilinski, that’s a disgusting mental image,” Coach says. “Fine, wait a second.”)
Allison steps back, and Scott keeps holding her hand just barely, by the tips of her fingers.
“I don’t know,” Allison says, and she glances back to her seat for a second, “You know he’s not my favourite person, but it might not—what is Derek doing?”
Derek’s put down Allison’s sign, and he’s holding up a new one. There’s a lot of glitter.
“Is that—is that a dick?” Allison is covering her mouth, and her eyes are crinkling again, because that does seem to be a really glittery dick at one of the corners. Derek’s mouth tightens and his hand moves along the sign to kind of cover it.
“Oh, wow. That is not—how does Derek even know that word in Spanish?” Scott says. He only knows it because his brief phase of trying to learn Spanish was mostly him and Stiles looking up curse words and stuff, and he didn't even remember it until just know. “Oh, wait. Maybe—”
“Erica?” Allison says.
“Yeah, I guess,” Scott says. “Or Google Translate?”
Derek abruptly drops his sign and shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, like he can just pretend that didn’t just happen.
“Maybe I should—,” Scott says.
“Nah,” Allison says. She lets go of his hand and adjusts her hat, grinning. “I can handle this. He better not have wrinkled my sign.”
IV
There’s this bouquet lying in front of the door when he gets to work, and Scott stares at it for a while, wondering if it’s for Deaton, before he remembers there’s probably a card. And there is, it just—doesn’t say much. Scott decides to think about it inside, where it’s warm, after he’s taken care of the data he needs to organize.
Deaton comes in not ten minutes later, passes Scott a muffin, and gets a muttered, Thanks, Dr. Deaton for his troubles. He takes a sip from his coffee and sighs in satisfaction, then seems to spot the flowers. He asks, smiling slightly, “Allison?”
Scott must make some sort of face because Deaton’s eyebrows go up and he says, “Not Allison, then.”
“The card just says for Scott,” he tells him. Deaton looks close to laughing for a few seconds, and then it’s gone, replaced by something like mild concern.
“Can you smell anyone on them?”
“No one I know,” Scott says, sullen.
“They’re very nice,” Deaton says, fingering the petals on one of the roses. “And they don’t look harmful.”
“I guess,” Scott says, glancing at the flowers again. Deaton nudges them in his direction, and Scott sighs, and grabs them. He puts the flowers in a vase, and the vase on the front desk, because there’s no sense in letting them just rot away.
He gets the next one at home, and he’s about to start teasing his mom about it when he notices the card. For Scott, with his name underlined three times.
He goes to the kitchen to find something to put them in, but his mom intercepts him before he gets to the sink, grabbing the flowers out of his hands. She smiles, looking like she’s definitely thinking ah, young love.
“Are these from Allison?”
She turns the card over for some sort of clue, and Scott looks at it again, too, like it will have changed in the last minute.
“It doesn’t look like her writing,” Scott says.
Mom lifts an eyebrow. Scott shrugs.
“Who knew you’d turn out to be such a heartbreaker.”
“Mom,” Scott whines. “I’m not.”
“At this rate,” she says, eyes gone wide with exaggerated alarm. “I’ll have to start beating the suitors off with a stick.”
“Mom. Please.”
“...and everyone keeps thinking they’re from you,” Scott finishes.
Allison nods very seriously, and takes another sip of her apple juice. “Would you like me to send you flowers?”
“I—well,” Scott says, because he kind of has been thinking about it, and it would be nice. “I really wouldn’t mind, but, I think—”
Scott stops himself, catching sight of Danny walking towards them, a bouquet in his hands. Scott is flattered for a second, before he realizes the flowers actually reek of Derek. Which is a little disconcerting, because he would have expected them to smell like flowers, but as Danny gets closer he realizes that they still kind of do smell like flowers, under the whole Derek smell.
Danny presses the bouquet into Scott’s hands.
“Stiles’ cousin Miguel told me to give these to you,” Danny says, lifting an eyebrow in Stiles’ direction, because he can’t pass up an opportunity to bring it up. Stiles like, slides down his seat until his eyes aren’t visible above his notebook. He is literally never going to live that one down. “And he said to tell you specifically that they were from Derek.”
“Uh,” Scott says.
“So, Scott, I’m giving you flowers. From Derek Hale,” Danny says. He looks like he’s waiting for Scott to say something to make it less weird, but Scott can’t think of anything.
“Yeah,” Scott says. “Thanks, man.”
Danny sighs heavily, but nods. “He gave me a tip, it’s cool.”
Scott means to thank him again, even though he doesn’t really want the flowers now that he knows they’re from Derek, but he sneezes instead. Then he sneezes again. His neck feels kind of itchy.
“Uh oh,” Stiles says.
So that’s how Scott finds out that being a werewolf doesn’t cure all of your allergies.
V
Scott’s already thinking of what to make for dinner when he comes through the door, something quick and easy, but then he realizes there’s an extra person in the house, and it’s a person who should definitely not be here.
“Mom?”
“In here,” his mom calls. He follows her voice to the kitchen. She’s sitting at the table, drinking a glass of wine. She lifts it in greeting.
“Hi, Scott,” she says.
“Hi, mom,” Scott says. Then, “Derek.”
Derek is wearing his mom’s Kiss The Cook apron.
“Scott,” Derek says. He turns back to the stove to flip something.
Okay. Derek is standing in their kitchen, wearing his mom’s Kiss The Cook apron, and apparently making chicken.
“It’s glazed balsamic chicken,” Derek recites, his back still to Scott, like he’s memorized it out of a cookbook. He probably has. It’s also like, the friendliest Derek has sounded since they met.
“Nice,” Scott says. He sits heavily in the chair across from his mom.
“You want wine?”
“What, mom, no,” Scott says, even though he kind of does. It wouldn’t work on him, but he wants to drink some anyway and see if it would help deal with this.
“You better not want wine,” his mom says, and pulls the bottle out of his reach. They sit there staring at each other for a few seconds, and then his mom sighs.
“It’ll be ready in about six minutes,” Derek says.
“That’s great, Derek,” his mom says. “Could you give us a minute?”
Derek glances back at the chicken like something terrible will happen if he abandons it, but nods, and leaves the room. Scott lets his head fall into his hands.
“I’m so sorry, mom, I swear to God I didn’t tell him to come here.”
His mom waves his concerns away. “Oh, I know that. I was the one who let him in when I came home. God knows how long he was standing out there. I just wanted to know if it’s going to be a thing.”
“I really hope not,” Scott says, a little surprised that Derek didn’t just barge into the house and start cooking before anyone got home.
His mom looks kind of crestfallen.
“Mom,” Scott whispers furiously.
“It’s just—it smells really good,” she confesses. “And you were gonna make pasta again, weren’t you?”
“I—no, I was definitely going to make...something that isn’t pasta,” Scott lies. Not very well, obviously, because his mom snorts, and stares him down over the rim of her glass before taking another sip of wine, and sighing again.
“So just tonight, then,” she says mournfully.
“Oh my God,” Scott says. “I’ll ask for the recipe if you like it that much.”
His mom brightens up. Derek chooses this moment to come back into the kitchen to flip the chicken again, and when he’s done, he says, “I could write it down.”
“Oh,” Scott says. He knows that means Derek was listening in, and he's still not cool with that, but his mom wants that recipe. “Yeah, sure. Thanks, man.”
(VI, or, the time it wasn’t derek, and they promised to talk about it)
Scott stares blankly at the ceiling for a while, trying to get his breathing to sound normal, and not like he just had really great sex with his girlfriend. He embarrasses himself enough in front of her as it is.
“Did I tell you Derek came over the other day and made dinner?”
He’s actually not sure why he says it—he's pretty sure it qualifies as like, the worst topic to bring up. The chicken had been pretty tasty though.
“Seriously?” Allison huffs out a laugh. “Derek is so weird.”
“I know,” Scott says.
“Was it like, part of the whole thing he’s been doing?”
“Yeah,” Scott says. “I think?”
“I wonder if sending people flowers and making them dinner is like, standard, for trying to get them into your pack,” Allison says.
Scott shrugs. “Maybe it’s a Derek thing. Since he’s, you know, a total weirdo.”
They stay quiet for a while, and Scott even starts considering talking about this new TV show his mom and he started watching, now that his breathing is even, but he doesn't get the chance.
“You know,” Allison says lightly, “wolves are supposed to be in packs.”
She’s mumbling into the pillow, but she turns her head a little to look at Scott. He skims a hand along her spine, and she smiles, and reaches out to push his hair back from his forehead. It’s kind of matted there with sweat.
“So you think I should—.” Scott waits for her to finish that for him, because he wants to be sure of what she’s trying to say. Her hand hovers on his cheek, and jaw, but comes to a stop at his neck.
“I’m not saying you have to join Derek’s pack,” Allison says. She knows all his reasons for not wanting to do that better than anyone, except maybe Stiles, but he’s never outright listed them for Stiles like he’s done for Allison. That had been a nice night, the sky clear and a blanket spread over the hood of Allison's car. “But I’ve seen what happens to Omegas.”
She’s frowning like she’s picturing it happening to him. Scott’s seen what happens to Omegas, too. Had to stay and watch, because Derek grabbed him and made him, and maybe it was an important lesson, but he still thinks Derek could have been less of a dick about it. Allison knows that, too. He turns her hand on his neck just enough that he can tangle their fingers.
“I have a pack,” Scott says. “Derek said. It was...ages ago.”
It can’t have been that long, but it really does feel like it was ages ago. Allison nods. Her eyes go wide, though, like she’d forgotten hearing that. Scott hasn’t forgotten, mostly because he kind of loves the idea that Allison and Stiles are part of his pack.
“We’re human, though,” Allison says quietly.
“But it’s not, um,” Scott says, “I think you can have human members, in packs. I think it’s good.”
Allison’s face clears, and he thinks maybe she gets that this is important to him the way keeping his job at the vet is important, or taking the time to have dinner with his mom every once in a while is important. Scott’s gotten used to being a werewolf—he’s had to, for himself, and for his friends and his mom, but he’s never going to love it; it’s never going to feel right, the way it must for Derek.
“Okay,” Allison says, and she pushes herself up on her left elbow to kiss him.
“But I’ll think about it,” Scott says, when she draws back. He can tell this is important to her.
“Only if you want to,” she says, biting her lip and ducking her head, like she sort of regrets bringing it up, and that’s not what he wants at all. Scott would like to think they can talk about anything. That’s probably like, wishful thinking, but it’s okay that they talk about this, at least.
“Hey,” he tells her, hooking his chin over her shoulder. She looks at him, and sighs—it kind of tickles his nose and he wants to reach up and scratch it, but they’re in the middle of something. “It’s okay, I get it. You’re worried about me.”
“I didn’t—,” Allison says. “I didn’t think about how it would make you feel if I brought it up. I know you hate it.”
Scott bumps his forehead into her cheek. It helps, a little. “Yeah, but it’s better that we talk about it. Seriously, it’s fine.”
“Okay,” Allison says. “Fine, but if I ever, if I ever say something...you have to let me know. Like, if I—.”
Scott kisses her jaw, and she tilts her head to the side to give him better access.
“Oh,” she says. “God. Yeah, you know what I mean. Come here.”
She grabs his face—like, just straight up grabs it, he loves that about her, and he crawls over to her side of the bed.
“You can’t distract me with kisses,” Allison says, between kisses. “I’m actually trying to apologize.”
“You did,” Scott says. “I said it was fine.”
Allison pulls back, and narrows her eyes at him.
“It totally counted,” Scott tells her.
“You were just saying how we should talk about stuff,” Allison says.
“We did,” Scott says, and Allison keeps looking at him. He relents. “Okay, we can talk about it more now if you want.”
Allison wrinkles her nose and kisses him again. “Not now. Later. We can talk about it later.”
“Okay,” Scot says, laughing when Allison flips them over. She grins down at him, pressing his wrists to the bed, and his heart skips a beat. That happens a lot around her. He's starting to get used to the idea it might never stop happening.