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“Derek, no stop. Derek. Derek!
“Oomph.
“Ow.”
Stiles falls silent and lays flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He likes to pretend that he wonders how his life got here, but he’s already tracked the progression. It’s a mix of falling into situations and navigating himself back out with a compass (it may or may not be a moral one) that only works about 30% of the time. The rest of it is some very dumb decisions, and in some cases, some very brilliant ones.
Maybe once in awhile Derek helps pull him out of the situations he’s fallen into, but mostly it’s Derek that puts him there.
This is one of those situations.
Derek’s stretched out beside him on the bed that is too small for the both of them and generally cramped when they both try to lay flat out. He doesn’t even look the least bit apologetic for having just elbowed Stiles in the sternum and practically knocking the wind out of him.
He has a thing about being touched. He doesn’t like it.
Well no, that wasn’t entirely true. Derek loves to be touched, the pack was always touching him. Even Stiles and Scott had gotten into the habit. Shoulder bumps and chest pats, knuckles brushing together in the dark and hands on forearms or wrists. But those were reassurance, those were grounding touches and ways to immerse each other in scents of familiarity and safeness and pack.
Derek didn’t like to be touched in the way that Stiles liked to touch, which was really just casual exploration of any part of Derek’s body that he could reach.
Stiles had a hard time keeping his hands to himself. Really he can’t be held accountable, or so he thinks. When Derek slips into his room at night and strips down to his t-shirt and boxers, just his boxers on particularly hot nights, and flops himself down in bed with the teen it’s hard to not want to touch.
They have been doing this sleeping together thing for three months now, off and on. On Derek’s whim it seems. They always wake up curled around each other or in a mess of limbs and sore muscles from sleeping at an odd angle on a small bed. But Derek still doesn’t let Stiles touch him, not when they’re just laying there like this. All things considered it’s fairly innocent, Stiles’ awkward morning boners aside.
Okay they’ve gotten less awkward and more desperate, but they don’t talk about it because then there’s feelings and when that happens Derek doesn’t come around for a few weeks. Stiles is loathe to admit that he’s gotten so used to sleeping with Derek that sleeping without him is hard now.
So they don’t talk about their sleeping arrangements or Stiles’ perfectly normal reaction to waking up curled against Derek’s back with his face pressed against his neck; and they definitely don’t touch at night even though Stiles really, really wants to.
They lay in silence and Stiles catches his breath and Derek decides it’s too hot to sleep with a shirt and takes it off.
“Oh come on.” Stiles says, exasperation clear in his voice as Derek lays back down. Derek is still quiet and only offers Stiles a raised eyebrow. Naturally Stiles elaborates. He starts by propping himself up on his elbow so he can look down at Derek, attempting to give him the most scrutinizing stink-eye he can manage.
“You come crawling in here, like, 4 or 5 nights a week. Which is basically the whole week. You get mad if I lock my window to keep you out. You get all comfy cozy in my bed and you’re practically naked and I can’t touch you? You just elbowed me in the chest, dude. I’m pretty sure that’s going to bruise. Look, I’m in an abusive relationship without the relationship part! Why can’t I just...”
Stiles trails off as his fingertips brush feather-light against Derek’s chest before he can be stopped. It’s a gesture intended to punctuate the point he was making.
“I don’t want you thinking this is something it isn’t.” Derek huffs, grabbing Stiles’ wrist. Although really it’s already something it isn’t, Derek just doesn’t want to admit to that.
“You also don’t want to eat your veggies. You just don’t know what’s good for you.” Stiles retorts cheekily as he wrenches his wrist out of Derek’s grasp. Defiantly he presses his open palm down against Derek’s chest, right over his heart. “My house, my rules. Remember?”
“Stiles...”
“Derek. Shut up.”
It’s tense for a moment, both staring the other down and neither wanting to cave in. Just as Stiles gets brave and starts to drag his palm across the bare expanse of skin, Derek rolls over and turns his back to Stiles.
“Go to sleep, Stiles.”
Stiles lets out an overdramatic, frustrated groan and throws himself back down onto the pillows. After a minute he huffs and rolls onto his side so his back is to Derek as well.
He expects to wake up curled around Derek again, but all he finds is himself sprawled out across an empty bed.
--- --- ---
Stiles loses sleep, more out of annoyance than disappointment. He gets bags under his eyes and drinks enough coffee to make taking his Adderall sort of moot. He gets snappy.
He doesn’t think he misses Derek, he just thinks he misses having a warm body to curl up to. Someone to keep him grounded so his dreams don’t get too out of control. So he doesn’t feel completely isolated from the world because Scott spends too much time with Allison or Isaac and it isn’t that Stiles doesn’t like them, he just doesn’t like being the third wheel.
But after a month Stiles readjusts to his old sleeping habits. The caffeine intake decreases and the dark circles disappear and he manages to go a whole day without unintentionally making someone look like he just kicked their dog across the lacrosse field.
Stiles is nothing if not resilient.
--- --- ---
He’s tentatively touching the bandage covering his ribs when there’s a rapping on his window. He starts and presses too hard on the cut, hissing out a curse as he turns to glower at the window. Derek is there looking back at him impassively.
A flurry of thoughts make their way through Stiles’ head. Mostly he wants to know why Derek is sitting outside his window. He wonders idly if he’s just making rounds and checking up on the pack. Stiles has never considered himself a part of the pack, and the few times he did all he could do was make Dances with Wolves jokes to himself and everyone kept giving him odd looks because he’d start laughing at nothing. Regardless of whether or not he was pack, Derek always came to check on him after big fights. It generally ended in them crawling into bed together and awkwardly trying to find a comfortable position that wouldn’t press too much on any of Stiles’ wounds and bruises. Derek was oddly considerate in that fact, but by the time the sun rose it never mattered because Stiles was in an uncomfortable position octopussed around Derek’s body and usually woke up complaining of his aches and pains.
Stiles was still processing the fact that harpies were a real thing. Not at all pretty and a lot of claws and wings and general screechiness that was not a lot of fun. He didn’t have time to deal with Derek right now. He did, if he wanted to. But Derek decided to not come around for a good month and a half and suddenly he wanted back in. Stiles may have been an expert in rejection but that didn’t mean he had to take it from anyone except Lydia. So no, he didn’t want to.
Derek grew impatient with Stiles just standing there staring at him and rapped on the window again.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” Stiles quoted as he approached the window, “While I nodded, nearly napping, there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” He stops just short of the sill, within arms reach to unlock the window if he felt like it.
“Are you quoting Edgar Allan Poe?” Derek’s brow furrows. “Let me in.”
“‘Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.’”
Stiles is rather pleased with himself as he reaches out and draws the blinds shut. He can’t see Derek but he can still hear him. However he’s really good at playing deaf - selective hearing as his father calls it - and he doesn’t pay attention to the sort-of threats and the knocking on the window. Stiles isn’t stupid enough to think Derek couldn’t get in if he really wanted to, but he knows that he’s not the kind of guy who just breaks into people's houses while they’re still in them.
Least of all the Sheriff’s.
Stiles flicks off his light and yawns in a very loud and unnecessary manner before flopping down on his bed with a gratifying sigh.
He falls asleep feeling smug and sure that Derek got the hint.
--- --- ---
All in all, Stiles thinks he’s handling it pretty well given that he’s basically broken up with his pretend werewolf boyfriend. Not that it was much of a relationship to begin with. It was mutual sleeping, it was having the comfort of another person there during the night when things were getting hard to deal with. Stiles still wasn’t sure why Derek came crawling into his room when he had a whole pack of other teenagers that could do the trick. Probably better than him too seeing as he wasn’t a werewolf. But maybe that had been what Derek needed -- after all he didn’t just grow up and live with werewolves, there were humans too. Stiles had been aware of that, though the depth of what it meant never meant much to him.
Maybe it meant something to Derek.
Not that Stiles lingers on those thoughts.
Nope, he just sits in bed and makes sure he’s not going to bleed on his sheets so his father doesn’t get suspicious, and he tries to relax. Because it’s summer break. Summer breaks are supposed to be relaxing. Except harpies.
He really didn’t like harpies and it was getting to the point where no one knew what the fuck was going on with them or with the town because Derek just kept getting angrier and angrier and trying to have any semblance of a meeting to organize themselves and get the damn things out of the territory was getting harder and harder.
Stiles had just sat down at his desk and was getting ready to pull an all nighter trying to solve the mystery himself when he felt the little hairs on the back of his neck rise. He couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t mean there was a werewolf nearby. He’s always been adamant about humans having a sixth sense, always being able to tell when they were being watched or when something was just not right around them. His evolved into a werewolf radar, and he turns to his window fully expecting to see Derek there and crawling in since he’d left it open.
But there is no Derek. Just the darkness of the night sky, stars and moon hidden by heavy clouds that might be indicative of a big storm, though the humidity hadn’t gone up at all.
Stiles pulls himself to his feet, wincing at the pull on his scabbed over wounds, and meanders to his window. Leaning out slightly, he scans the yard and then the neighbours yards as far as he can see. He thinks he might catch a gleam of eyes watching him from the dark, maybe Derek’s gone back to his stalking from afar tactics that he used before Stiles started to let him in.
There was nothing. Yet the lingering feeling remained.
It made Stiles uneasy, so he closed his window and locked it. He closed the blinds too, for good measure.
Even after he’d worked himself down to overpowering exhaustion, the kind that would see him passed out before his head even hit the pillow, he still felt it.
When he slept, it was fitfully.
--- --- ---
He pretends he doesn’t miss Derek for a few more minutes before he pulls himself out of bed. Today is not the day to be analyzing his lack-of-love life. Today is the day for coffee and cartoons because it’s rainy and he didn’t sleep very well. Maybe he’ll text Scott and ask him to come hang out. Hell, he’ll even invite Allison and Isaac and then Scott can be uncomfortably stuck in all of his strange romances and Stiles can feel smug in his retribution.
But also he just misses spending time with Scott, with or without his new found love life.
Which Stiles totally isn’t jealous of.
After shuffling around his bedroom for a bit, he heads to the bathroom. Then it’s down to the kitchen to brew some coffee and pour a bowl of the sugariest cereal he can find in the cupboards. He feels it’s a good compromise, pretending to be an adult while still being a teenager.
He sets down his coffee and his cereal and plops himself down on the couch. It’s still pretty early in the morning, but it’s a Tuesday which means his dad’s left for the station at 4am and won’t be seen until much later.
He actually manages to make it through 3 cartoons - or his whole bowl of cereal and two cups of coffee depending on how you’re counting - before things start to fall apart.
It starts with his werewolf senses tingling. Shut up, that’s a joke he’s allowed to make. He tries not to let it unnerve him too much, but he caves and decides that maybe he should text Derek and tell him to stop being such a creep. He gets up from the couch and peeks out the living room window before heading upstairs to grab his phone.
Stop creepin or I’m gonna get a lifetime supply of mountain ash from deaton.
He heads back downstairs as he’s typing out the text and sends it as he gets back to the living room. He freezes and nearly drops his phone when he looks back out the window. Looking back at him is one of the two harpies that had been terrorizing the pack for the past two weeks.
Stiles could not adequately describe the ugly if he tried. She was naked, or at least he assumed she was being that her entire body was covered in dark grey feathers. Her hair was matted and wild and her nose hooked forward in a beak like fashion. What skin she did have looked almost scaled in a similar fashion to her birds legs (that ended in big, scary talons by the way) but it was the same olive-tone common to the Greeks. The most unsettling thing, aside from the pointedly dangerous owlish eyes, was her smile. Thin, almost non-existent lips pulled back to reveal sharp fangs that would give the pack a run for their money.
The vibrations from his phone snaps Stiles attention to it. Which may have been a stupid idea because harpy. Outside his window.
what are you talking about?
Stiles looks from his phone back to the window. The harpy was gone. Swallowing thickly he taps the top of his phone until the messages scrolled all the way to the top and hits call.
Derek answers on the second ring and Stiles has started for the stairs, hearing simultaneous banging on the front and back doors.
“What?”
“Harpies.” Stiles whispers, frozen to the third stair that he’d been ascending backwards when the harpy appears in the window again.
“Stiles?”
“Derek, the harpies are here grinning their fucking ugly ass mugs in my living room window and I think they’re about to break in and I’m going to die.” He punctuates the last word because yeah, hi. Dying is not an ideal situation for him today. Or any day.
“Stay where you are, I’m on my way.”
“Fat chance!” Stiles says, his voice on the edge of hysterical.
The harpy raises one clawed foot, still smiling that gruesome smile, and knocks on the glass.
The rhythmic tap, tap, tap chills Stiles’ blood and he drops his phone. For a week he’d kept his blinds closed, and twice he’d thought Derek had come by trying to worm his way back into his bed. Knocking on the window...
Tap. Tap. Tap.
There was a bang from the kitchen and a horrendous screech and Stiles didn’t even wait to see if it was a harpy or a wolf breaking down the back door. He just turned tail and ran up the stairs. Behind him was the sound of glass breaking and all Stiles could think was how the fuck was he supposed to explain that to his dad later on.
If he was alive later on. Because harpies. Fucking harpies, Stiles was so done with them.
He half slides across the floor trying to round the corner and get into his room, collapsing onto the floor in a mess of limbs but managing to right himself just enough to crawl the rest of the way into the room and slam the door shut. He leans back against it like somehow his weight will brace it from being burst down. He tries to focus on the fact that Derek will be there soon as werewolf-ly possible. He prays that the headstrong and reclusive Alpha remembered to call the others too.
Downstairs he can hear the harpies wailing and what sounds like wingbeats on the wall. Apparently stairs are not a thing that are so easily navigated by the creatures. Well, small miracles he supposes. While the damn things are trying to climb up after him Stiles takes a moment to scramble for his laptop, trying to recall what his research had lead him to.
Sadly there was next to nothing. Harpies themselves were just a footnote in Greek myth, their biggest appearance being in the story of King Phineas. Jason and the Argonauts had chased them off to their island...hell if he could remember its name. He knew more about the World of Warcraft version of the creatures.
There’s a screech and a sudden bang on his door and Stiles curses out loud when he jumps and drops his laptop. As long as they didn’t bust down the door, he’d be fine. Harpies didn’t have hands, doors were kind of a hinderance.
Stiles wants to take back that train of thought when the door starts to creak under the weight of assault.
It would be nice if things went exactly as they did on TV and suddenly there were werewolves showing up at just the right moment to fight off the ugly beasts and save the human from being torn open, but this was real life. So Stiles doesn’t put all his eggs in the ‘werewolf’ basket and instead makes for the window. He throws it open as the door cracks and chances a look over his shoulder. The door is barely hanging on and it’s split almost perfectly down the middle.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Stiles clambers out of his bedroom window and closes it behind him - because that’s clearly going to slow them down once they get through the door - and carefully ambles his way across the rain-slicked roof. He doesn’t have any crazy werewolf powers and there’s nothing to climb down the side of the house with, there’s no trees with branches leaning in just too close. The only way down is to jump.
He can do this.
Stiles gulps and remembers all the youtube videos he’s watched of people jumping off their roofs. They all survived. Yeah, yeah so could he. Inside the house he can hear his bedroom door break and shrieks of rage. Now or never, Stilinski. Stiles takes a deep breath and jumps.
He manages to twist himself to land on his shoulder and he cries out because it fucking hurts. He’s pretty sure it’s dislocated, but not broken, hopefully. His legs are still functioning though, and the adrenaline has spiked it’s way through him so he doesn’t even wait to catch the breath that’s been knocked out of him. Instead he manages to get all his limbs coordinated enough to get to his feet and he takes off running.
He’s skidding out of the back yard - nearly falling again because it’s still raining and it’s muddy - and onto the street when he hears glass smashing and enraged bellows from behind him. He doesn’t have his phone or his keys - one dropped somewhere in the fray and the other still sitting on the table by the front door - so he runs. He’s running as fast as his legs will carry him, cradling his useless arm with his good one, and chancing looks over his shoulder to see harpies rising over the roof of his house and dive for him.
He doesn’t see the car that swerves dangerously around the corner onto the street, but he hears it. Not in time though, no because Stiles is having the shittiest day imaginable.
At least when he runs into the damn thing it’s stopped. There’s a thud and then Stiles is laying on the ground, again, and has the wind knocked out of him, again. He decides that maybe the ground is a good place to be right now because there are werewolves so he doesn’t have to figure out how to fight off the harpies anymore (not that he was really doing an effective job on that to begin with) and his shoulder is throbbing.
He’s not entirely sure what happened but there’s a lot of roaring and screeching and even though he’s just laying there he still somehow ends up covered in harpy blood.
Which is a kind of opaque white and really viscous, in case anyone was ever wondering.
Stiles vows not to repeat the experience.
When he does dare to open his eyes, Derek is standing over him looking at him like he’s an idiot. Stiles may have protested the look if he wasn’t sure he’d get the blood of the nastiest mythological creature to date in his mouth. Seriously, those things filled their nest with rotting carcasses. And then ate them. And then filled it with more nasty shit.
“Stiles!”
Derek was shoved out of the way by Scott in his haste to get to his friend still laying on the wet cement of the road. He grabbed him to pull him up, jarring Stiles’ dislocated shoulder.
Stiles cried out and then proceeded to puke all over Scott’s shoes because the blood tasted just as bad as he imagined it would.
--- --- ---
Actually explaining away the damages to the house had been solved by Derek and Isaac who had managed to fell a couple of trees and arrange them to look like they’d fallen onto and partially into the house. Insurance would cover everything, but Stiles was sure that his neighbours were either really, really stupid, or scared into staying quiet about watching two men moving trees around like they were carrying a couch or something.
That’s how Stiles chooses to imagine them doing it, he really doesn’t want to think about it.
Trying to explain his shoulder had been a little harder because it hadn’t occurred to him that he should lie about it. Trying to think of a reason as to why he jumped off the roof proved to be a little difficult so he’d shrugged his good shoulder and said he didn’t know. Either the Sheriff really didn’t want to know, or he was chalking it up to teenaged stupidity and Stiles’ current pain meds because he’d accepted it and Stiles had gotten away with nothing more than a stern talking to about how lucky he was not to have broken anything.
Three days later and Stiles is still in a sling.
He lays in bed and huffs as he stares at his ceiling. His phone is resting on his chest because he’d been texting Scott, but it had stopped vibrating, like, twenty minutes ago. He’s bored, Stiles hates bored. What’s worse is he’s lonely. Scott had put in the effort the first day, and Stiles had appreciated it. He doesn’t think less of Scott for not coming around as much still though, it wasn’t for lack of closeness but rather the fact that Scott still works over the summer when they’re not fighting monsters. And, unlike Stiles, Scott has other friends who like to actively spend time with him because Scott isn’t as much of an asshole as Stiles is. They have scheduled video game nights though, Stiles doesn’t mind waiting another two days to hang out again.
For the first time in a month and a half, he lets himself miss Derek. It’s so stupid, and he knows it. There’s nothing there, they’re not friends, not really. When they lay in bed they don’t talk about the monster of the month, or their personal lives. Stiles doesn’t tell Derek about school and Derek doesn’t tell Stiles how the reconstruction of the Hale house is going. (Stiles especially doesn’t tell Derek that he thinks it’s a sign of growth that he’s rebuilding the house and being able to move on.
Just like he doesn’t imagine Derek telling him that he thinks it’s a sign of growth that he’s growing his hair out and being able to move on as well.)
Derek just always kept Stiles from feeling too lonely, that’s all.
That’s all.
Fuck.
Stiles maneuvers himself to his feet, phone in one hand, and stands at the end of his bed for a good minute having an internal debate with himself. He loses - or wins it really depends on how optimistic or pessimistic you’re being here - and grabs a hoodie to pull on as he heads downstairs.
“Where you headed?” His father asks, not looking up from the TV. Stiles can hear the scores for the current basketball game being called.
“Scott’s.” He says without skipping a beat because ‘Derek’s’ is so not a conversation he knows how to have with anyone.
“This late?”
“I think he and Allison got into a fight, he sounded kinda wrecked. So, you know, video games and b-horror for the rest of the night.” He trails off for a moment before speaking up again with a more meek sounding voice, “That alright?”
“I don’t like you driving with one arm incapacitated.” The Sheriff is looking at Stiles pointedly now and Stiles knows he was lucky as hell not to be grounded for his unexplainable stunt of jumping off the roof. Although he’s sure Melissa’s explanation of Scott ‘helping’ and making it worse helped ease that up. True brohood there, fuck up your friend beyond belief and still know you’re his best friend in the whole world.
“I’ll be careful. I think I learned my lesson for the contrary.” Stiles says, gesturing towards the sling half hidden under his hoodie that’s just hanging off his shoulder.
There’s a quiet moment where father studies son before nodding. “Have fun, don’t get too rowdy.”
“Will do.” Stiles agrees with a two-finger salute before toeing on his shoes, grabbing his keys and heading out the door.
He sits in his Jeep for another two minutes trying to decide if this is a good or absolutely terrible idea. But he’s already lied to his dad and there’s no way he’s going to be able to sneak back into the house. He’s kind of screwed himself on that one. He shoves the key in the ignition and starts the Jeep, gripping at the steering wheel until his knuckles are white and he feels a little bit like Cameron after Ferris called him to hang out.
He sighs at himself and backs out of the driveway. He can’t fiddle with the radio or check his phone (never mind that that’s sort of against the law) or do any of his usual fidgety things because he’s only got one useable arm and it’s currently on the steering wheel. So the drive up to the Hale house is long and nerve wracking because Derek had left and then Stiles had turned him away when he tried to come back.
He has to keep reminding himself that Derek only came back once and the other times were the harpies and he’s not sure if it’s supposed to comfort him because it doesn’t. For so many reasons on so many levels. He’s going to go with the harpies thing though, and not the Derek giving up after one try thing.
Pulling up to the half renovated house, Stiles parks and cuts the engine and then just sits for a moment, looking up at the house through the windshield. He actually hasn’t been by in a while so to see the progress is impressive. The side to the left of the front door is walled off with temporary dry-wall so they could start building the right side of the house up first. It included the kitchen and one of the main living spaces. It was almost surreal seeing a house that was half new stucco and paint and then half burnt out shell, a ghost of what it once was.
But it was progress and Stiles is impressed.
He steps out of his car and heads up the front steps. If Derek was home, he’d know he was here by now. His heart beats a little faster but he’s not afraid. Nervous, but not afraid. The door isn’t lock and Stiles rolls his eyes at that. Big bad wolf too badass for locked doors. Or maybe he’d just heard the Jeep rumbling up and left it like that for Stiles.
Nah.
The door clicks shut behind him and Stiles marches through the house more sure than he feels. Up the new staircase and past the first two bedrooms to the new master suite Derek’s remodeled from what Stiles can only assume was his old room if only because it had seemed smaller before the renovations got into full swing. The door is mostly closed, but still ajar just enough that Stiles doesn’t feel bad nudging it open another couple of inches so he can squeeze in.
The moon is only a waxing crescent, there’s no new threats to be told of (yet, anyway) and everyone else is at home doing normal things with their friends or their families. So naturally Derek’s laying in bed at a decent hour because, like Stiles, he doesn’t really have much of a social life and eleven o’clock on a wednesday night is just not that exciting for him.
Stiles really expects to be told off as he kicks off his shoes, but Derek is quiet with his back to Stiles. It feels so weird to be the one coming to him instead of the other way around, but maybe that’s just the sort of thing he needs to.
Stiles shakes the thoughts from his head and moves across the room almost blindly because the only light is the too-faint glow of the moon and the stars. His knees hit the edge of the bed and he crawls up and wobbles a bit before collapsing on his good side next to Derek. If he was asleep (which Stiles really doubts he was), he was awake now. But still it’s quiet.
Stiles rolls onto his back and stares up at the inky blackness of Derek’s ceiling and finds himself incredibly less weighed down by it than his own brightly lit one. He doesn’t wonder if that means anything and just starts talking instead.
“For a week I kept my blinds closed because I was mad at you for taking off before I woke up.”
Derek doesn’t stir.
“I thought you kept coming back,” Stiles carries on, and lets out a sort of bitter-but-amused laugh. “I thought I was showing you by locking my window and closing my blinds shut. But you kept coming back and tapping on my window and I almost thought ‘Well maybe I’ll let that stupid fuck back in for a while and then kick him out when he’s just getting comfy’ or something like that. But I didn’t. Turns out it wasn’t you though, it was the harpies.” Stiles waits a beat and Derek shifts a bit so he knows he’s awake and listening to him.
“So hey, maybe you being a complete dick actually saved my life. Who knew.”
“You started it.” Derek ground out and Stiles straight up laughs at him.
“Wow, you’re five. Seriously, you’re pulling that on me? I started it? May I remind you who comes crawling in who’s window at all hours of the night to take a nap with them. You got mad because I attached emotion to it and I hate to break it to you but not all of us are emotionally cut off werewolves. You chose me, not the other way around. There are at least three other seventeen year olds you could harass into cuddling with you at night.”
Stiles still remembers the first time Derek had come in, didn’t listen to a word of Stiles’ protests. Just collapsed onto the bed and passed out. Stiles had whined and huffed and tantrumed but had caved and crawled in next to him and actually slept. Well. Which was why he’d never complained when it continued.
Sleeping in the same bed with someone on a regular basis made it hard to resist feeling something for them -- aside from the general lust that came with being a teenager around ridiculously good looking people.
There’s a stretched silence, Stiles is still staring at the roof and Derek still has his back to him.
“The harpies were knocking on your window?”
Leave it to Derek to bypass anything resembling a conversation about emotions.
“Yes.” Stiles sighs. “I only realized it the day that they attacked me. One was in my living room window and she knocked and Jesus. I don’t think anything’s been so terrifying in my life. I think after the night we fought them they saw you do it. They were probably emulating it to try and get me to open the window. I don’t really know anything about harpies but they’re tools of vengeance and they’re unnecessarily cruel so I guess causing me emotional turmoil before trying to eviscerate me is sort of logical. I can only guess they came after me because I was the only one who still had a fresh blood trail. That and I tried to set one on fire.”
Stiles grins at the memory. He’d had a makeshift torch with a lighter and bug repellent, which he thought was totally hilarious at the time. Even if all he’d managed to do was singe a few feathers and piss off the ugly assholes.
“You shouldn’t have been---”
“Oh shut up Derek, we’re all tired of this act. I’m Mr. Tall, Dark and Brooding, I’m going to be the aloof hero with a moral grey area because killing things and people is okay but don’t let the teenage human get hurt. Which I can’t even say that because you wanted to kill Lydia that one time. I shouldn’t have been there, I shouldn’t have been a lot of places. But me being places general works out in the long run. If you don’t count the fact that Scott would be the only werewolf dumb enough to fall in love with a Hunter’s daughter and then keep seeing her despite all the near death experiences and general knowing about her family.”
Derek finally rolls onto his back and Stiles rolls onto his side(slowly because it’s his hurt side and resting all his weight on it is still a little difficult) to look at him better in the dim lighting. They stare at each other for a moment and then Stiles rolls forward until he’s almost laying on Derek so he can trace his fingers down his chest.
“Just admit that you like me already so we can go back to sleeping decently. Just let me fucking touch you for once without having to worry that you might not talk to me for like three weeks. Did you know this is the most conversation we’ve had ever when this is happening.”
He can’t gesture but Derek gets the sense that if he could his arm would be moving about to indicate them. This. In bed. It was just supposed to be for sleeping. It wasn’t supposed to be anything else.
But Derek’s always been good at lying to himself and Stiles has always been better at calling him out on his bullshit.
He doesn’t say anything but he sighs and his whole body relaxes under Stiles’ touch and Stiles takes it for what it is. He wiggles and worms his way a bit closer and Derek closes his eyes as Stiles traces his fingers over the curve of his ribs.
--- --- ---
Derek is ticklish on his left side but not on his right. He breaks out in goosebumps if you touch above his navel with feather-light touches but is otherwise unaffected normally. Touching the dip of his collar bone and the swell of his pecs, when traced over in a distinct pattern, make him growl, though Stiles still isn’t sure if that’s a voluntary thing or not. His lips are actually really soft and pliant. The line of his jaw is strong and sure, and when he’s tense touching the strip leading from his forehead to the bridge of his nose right down to the tip soothes him.
The curve of his hipbones are Stiles’ favorite thing to touch in the whole world.
They lay in bed and Stiles touches every part of Derek like he’s never actually been able to before. He drinks in every part of Derek that is presented to him and relishes in it. It’s an obsession now, but he thinks it’s more the fact that Derek gave him the power to do this instead of pushing him away again. He still wakes up with the occasional morning erection and they still don’t discuss it because they’re not quite there yet.
But it’s a new moon and Stiles is draped over Derek with Derek’s arm wrapped loosely around him and it’s comfortable.
“When school starts I’m not going to be around as often.” Derek says quietly. Which, wow, he must have been sitting on that for a while because while talking has also become a thing that’s involved with laying in bed it’s always Stiles’ doing all the legwork there.
“I honestly don’t think you’re going to distract me from my studies any more than you have since we met and I was made research boy.”
“You made yourself research boy.”
“Schematics.”
Derek’s pretty sure that’s not quite the right use for the word but he doesn’t say anything. Stiles is quiet for a moment, tracing geometric shapes across Derek’s clothed chest instead.
“I need something to make up for your absence then. I’ve already gotten used to this, making me go back to sleeping alone again is just cruel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Admit you like me.”
“What?”
“Admit. That you. Like me.” Stiles repeated, punctuating his word unnecessarily.
“I don’t see what that has -- “
“Derek.”
Derek lets out an exasperated sigh. “I like you, Stiles.”
Stiles smirks and worms his way up a little bit and presses a quick kiss to Derek’s lips. Derek is appropriately stunned as Stiles speaks again. “That’s all I need.”
Derek snorts and nudges Stiles off him so he can roll over onto his side with his back to Stiles. Stiles just grins and cuddles closer, throwing an arm around Derek since he doesn’t have to wait until they’re asleep to do it anymore.
When he wakes up in the morning, Derek is still there and snoring softly.