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Derek was not worrying. Or pacing because of that worry. He wasn’t. He was just… restless. There hadn’t been time to go out to the woods and get in a good run for a few days. Of course he was restless. It was only natural. And yanking the door open the second he heard the heartbeat outside of it – the heartbeat he’d been waiting to hear for hours – was perfectly natural, too.
Stiles blinked at him, shivered, and gave the most pathetic wave Derek had ever seen.
“You’re an hour late,” he snapped before looking closer. “And you’re soaked. God, get in here, Stiles. Come on.”
He practically yanked Stiles into the bathroom and jerked his wet shirts off. And, okay, maybe a couple seams got sacrificed to his efforts, but whatever. He’d buy Stiles new ones if he wanted.
“Don’t know what the hell you were thinking,” he muttered as he wrapped a towel around Stiles’ shoulders. It wasn’t warm because he hadn’t stuck it on the bathroom radiator when he realized how bad it had gotten out there. He hadn’t. “You’re soaked and fucking freezing.”
He threw a towel over Stiles’ head because his hair was soaked and he’d heard something once about humans losing body heat through their heads, not because Stiles’ eyes were cutting into his soul.
“And what the hell were doing out there anyways?” Derek dragged the towel roughly over Stiles’ head, glaring down at him. “You knew it was going to storm, you utter idiot. Your jeep isn’t exactly winter-ready. What if you’d slid and crashed? How would anyone even know where to look for you?”
“Mms bmmduh.”
Derek paused in his towelling. Maybe he was drying the kid off a little too hard. He relented, lifting the towel off Stiles’ face. “What?”
“Mom’s birthday,” Stiles said, staring over Derek’s shoulder.
And damn it, he didn’t have it in him to keep berating the kid now. Bad enough before, shivering and half-blue with cold, looking more miserable than Derek had ever seen him look. But this – this was something he knew too well himself.
“Next time – next time just tell somebody when you’re going to do something this stupid,” he said, shoving the towel into Stiles’ hands. “Tell me. I’m your Alpha.” He sighed. “Go change. Get in bed.”
The kid just nodded and that was just wrong. Sometimes Derek thought Stiles lived to argue with him.
Derek walked into the kitchen of the apartment. He could make Stiles something hot to drink. That’d be good. Warm him up from the inside out. And then maybe he wouldn’t feel so fricking guilty about yelling at him. Yeah, he could do this. No coffee, though, that’d keep him up all night and he could probably use sleep. Derek liked tea better than coffee, really, but Stiles didn’t enjoy it much. But there might be…
He opened the cupboard and found a can of the hot chocolate Stiles liked. And then another. And another. The first had Stiles’ name on it, scrawled in the kid’s messy writing on the lid and the second was blank, but the third had “STILES” written on it in… probably Isaac’s handwriting, Derek thought. It was underlined three times, thick and bold.
Somebody must have… yeah, the one with Stiles’ handwriting was nearly empty when he checked it. Somebody must have used it when it was almost gone, then Isaac got annoyed at them or guilty and replaced it. Maybe Stiles had bitched about it.
But the others knew they weren’t supposed to eat Stiles’ food. Derek didn’t care if they ate his food. He had the money for it, had the money to take care of them. He’d told them that he’d buy them food, give them cash to buy food, and yes, that included him, Scott, now could he take a fifty so Derek could stop feeling bad every time he met Melissa McCall’s eyes because feeding a teenaged werewolf on a nurses’ budget was probably impossible?
Stiles’ food, the guilty pleasure food that he hid from his dad, the things he mainlined doing research for them, the things he craved after a fight, those were supposed to be off-limits. The Sheriff didn’t want Stiles working during the school year and sometimes Stiles couldn’t afford to replace the things the pack ate.
Derek shrugged to himself as he stared at the kettle and waited for it to boil. At least somebody had bought a new one this time, although he worried sometimes about how it was usually Isaac. Still, better than the Starburst Incident.
If Stiles made it, Derek would drink it, but to be honest, he wasn’t really a huge fan of hot chocolate either. Laura had been a tea person, loose tea, custom blends, steeping instructions beyond throwing a bag into a cup of hot water. He’d learned because of her, because she was damned lazy in the mornings, because most of the things she mixed up at least smelled good, because she was his best friend.
He read the instructions on the back of the can twice, then dumped in three times as much powder as it said to because the one time Scott had made Stiles hot chocolate, he’d put in ridiculous amounts of it and Stiles had hummed with happiness over it.
Yeah, he could do this.
Stiles was in his bed when he walked into the bedroom, wrapped up in a way-too-big Henley. Derek could smell himself on it from across the room, and a low flicker of contentment curled in his stomach. That, at least, was right.
“Here.” Derek shoved a mug of hot chocolate into Stiles’ hands. “You still look frozen. I’m actually surprised right now that you haven’t managed to lose a toe or something.”
Stiles rolled his eyes, but he was too busy burning his tongue on the hot chocolate to reply.
Derek sighed and took the mug away again, setting it down on the nightstand. “My mother used to put ice cubes in it for us. Would that stop you from trying to remove the skin from the inside of your mouth?”
Stiles shrugged without saying anything. No sarcastic remark, no quick reply, nothing.
Derek frowned, replaying the words in his head and – oh. Yeah. He hadn’t meant to say something like that. Not today.
He shoved Stiles over closer to the wall and crawled into bed next to him. Then he wrapped his arm around the kid and pulled him in close and tight.
“Sorry,” he said against Stiles’ hair. “I’m not good at this. I’m really, exceptionally, very bad at this, actually. I’m kind of an asshole.”
Stiles sighed, slowly relaxing against Derek’s side. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Just stay. Or, I mean, let me stay because this is your apartment.”
Derek rubbed his chin over the top of the kid’s head. “You can stay as long as you want.”
“Okay.” Stiles sniffled, just once. “You wanna watch movies all night and then have sex in the morning?”
“Yeah,” Derek said, and didn’t mention the hot tears against his neck. “Yeah, we can do that.” Gently, he nudged Stiles with one shoulder. “Hey. Next time you need to do this, I can drive.”
“Alright.”
“You kind of scared the hell out of me,” he admitted quietly. “Just call, okay? So I know where you are and if I need to kill someone.”
Stiles snorted, leaning over Derek to grab his hot chocolate mug off the nightstand. “Right. You over-protective asshat,” he said fondly and settled back against Derek’s side. “This is good hot chocolate, by the way. Better than Scott’s, even.”
Derek absolutely did not gloat.