SIAND - PDF - I could be there for you.pdf

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://download.archiveofourown.org/works/3308984. Rating: Archive Warning: Category: Fandom: Relationship: Character: Additional Tags:

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Explicit Graphic Depictions Of Violence M/M Teen Wolf (TV) Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale, Scott McCall, Allison Argent, Isaac Lahey, Lydia Martin BAMF Stiles, stiles is unappreciated in the pack, Stiles Leaves Beacon Hills, it's one of THOSE, Derek pines, Dual POV, kate argent mentions, and then he comes back GASP, Established Relationship, break-up, Angst, like...angsty ashell, I know I usually write humor but I don't think you'll crack a smile at this shit, Ableist Language, unhealthy relationship a bit, kinda up to you though, excessive alcohol use Published: 2015-02-08 Words: 20085

I could be there for you. by standinginanicedress Summary

Stiles got tired of being the human slowing them all down with his weak bones, fragile skin, and proclivity to be targeted for aforementioned weakness. He was the fucking Dawn Summers of the group (Stiles is in trouble; it must be Tuesday). So, he got good with his baseball bat. He learned which parts of the body would be damaged the most by a blow, figured out how hard to swing to crack something's skull open; essentially, he learned how to kill things, how to feel nothing. He learned how to bludgeon a thing to death, how to wipe the blood off his face, shrug, and say anyone want ice cream? He was good at it. It terrified him, to be that good at something so inherently fucking horrible. But everyone was always so impressed by it. So he just kept doing it. He kept showing up with his bat or a crowbar or a fucking line of pipe or a wrench to smack something over the head with, and he kept having to buy new clothes because of the all blood. or the one where Stiles becomes terrified of what he's capable of, and leaves Beacon Hills and Derek behind (until he comes back, of course)

Notes

First of all, this was more or less a req (and I say more or less because I was already writing the idea when it was req'd to me haha) and the only stipulation I didn't follow was the whole kid thing. Because I can't write kids for jackshit - I don't know what to do with kids in real life either lmao Second of all, this is dual point of view. Which as some of you may possibly know is kind of dangerous territory to roam into (mostly because I've never actually done one before?!!?) but what I was trying to pull off here is the two sides to every story idea – less just "here's what Derek thinks and here's what Stiles thinks", but more just straight up insight into the entire situation that you wouldn't get if only one of them was telling the story. Any time there's a break, the POV switches. The twist I decided to put on the whole "Stiles leaves then comes back years later" thing is...a pretty dark one lmao. It's also the reason for the "ableist language" tag, because, spoiler alert, the words "insane" and "crazy" are used a LOT in this fic. The jury is still more or less out on whether or not those are actually ableist slurs, but I just wanted to be safe so everyone feels comfortable.

See the end of the work for more notes

Derek always wondered what he would do if Stiles ever came back. He's played a billion different scenarios over and over again in his head, ever since the first day he woke up and there was nothing but cold air in the space where Stiles' body should've been. What he would say to him (things like, I never should've let you leave) what he would do (things like folding Stiles up into his arms and holding him against him with no plans to ever let go) what Stiles would do (things like crinkle his eyes up at the corners and say I never should've let you let me leave.) In a thousand different dreams, Stiles and Derek have met again. The images and feelings and words from his fantasies all curl like smoke around Derek's fingers most mornings – because Derek still reaches across his bed every now and again, rousing from the last tendrils of sleep, searching for Stiles. The second his eyes open, and he's back in a reality that Stiles is no longer a part of, he doesn't feel paralyzed anymore. He just grimaces, like looking at an old scar, remembering the pain associated with it, hating the reminder that he was ever hurt at all. Funny how he can despise the scar with everything he's got, hate it and loathe it and dream of smooth skin, but can't bring himself to hate the knife that caused it. Now, how pathetic is that? While Stiles has probably woken up beside at least one other person in the twenty one months that he's been gone, Derek is still reaching out for him in the darkness almost every single night, and the only person Derek hates because of all that is himself. And, still, he wonders. When he's at the grocery store he wonders if he'll turn the corner and find Stiles in the cereal aisle, pulling boxes of Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles off the shelves and saying the more sugar, the better, honestly, Derek – how can you eat that corn flake crap? Cereal is supposed to be fun. When he's standing at the gas station filling up his tank, he imagines the blue Jeep turning into the parking lot, slamming to a stop right beside Derek before Stiles himself sticks his head out the driver's side door, grinning and asking Derek if he wants a stick of beef jerky from inside the store. When he goes inside the Sheriff's station to pay off parking tickets, he expects Stiles to be stealthily trying to pick his way through forbidden case files behind his dad's desk, flicking his eyes up to Derek and hissing you can't see me. I am not here. Look away and act fucking natural! He knows that in Sheriff's office, there's an entire two years worth of postcards tacked up onto the bulletin board behind his desk – detailing whatever life it is that Stiles thinks he's living now. How easy it would be to sneak in late at night, to break his way into that office and just stand and read about how different Stiles is now. How separate and better off he is now. Derek is certainly masochistic enough to do something like that, of course. The only thing that ever really stops him is thinking about what Stiles' face would look like if he knew that he violated his privacy like that, or thinking about how if Stiles wanted Derek to know about his life, now, then he would've called and told him himself, or sent an email, or fucking flare

signaled or something. But there's been nothing. Like Stiles just ceased existing as far as Derek was concerned. It burns, sometimes, that silence. Almost two entire years have passed by since the last time Derek heard Stiles' voice or even laid eye on him in person instead of just bitter memory, and it still fucking burns to know that Stiles doesn't want to talk to him. Doesn't want him to know what's going on with him. Making it up in his own head is worse, Derek decided a few months into his absence. Imagining that there's some pretty eyed girl or boy out there that's touching Stiles the way Derek used to is worse than actually knowing what's going on. It doesn't stop him from thinking it, not at all, but acknowledging that it's shitty somehow takes the edge off a bit. He sometimes even gets petty about it. He thinks that anyone who he'd meet in LA wouldn't know how to touch Stiles right, wouldn't know that Stiles is best in bed after using a skateboard to knock the head clean off a zombie's body, or after ripping one of Allison's knives out of an already dead goblin to defend himself with without even batting a lash as the green blood oozed down his arms - they don't know what Stiles is like after he's fucking killed something. They don't know how much Stiles likes to fuck in the backseat of Derek's car, still sweaty and covered in blood, panting into Derek's ear. Scott gets Skype calls every week, locked away in his bedroom, and Derek has to physically restrain himself from lurking outside of Scott and Melissa's house in the woods and listening in to that conversation. Isaac has gotten a few phone calls, and Derek dutifully jumped out his own window every single time to avoid that. Lydia and Allison get long, neverending text conversations and every time one of their phones buzz Derek's entire body more or less short circuits as he watches their eyes scan the text, watches their lips curl up in a smile. They all get Christmas and birthday presents (and by all, yes, including Derek.) When the huge box addressed to Scott's house that arrived on December 20th was cut open with a claw, and the overwhelming scent of Stiles burst out of it like a fucking stink bomb going off, Derek wanted nothing more than to jump ship and hightail his way fucking out of there. But the first gift, placed carefully on the top of the pile inside of the box, was addressed to Derek. Scott held it out to him with a grin, and Derek curled his fingers around it, almost protectively. He never opened it. It's still sitting in the back of his closet, underneath a pile of old clothes he never wears. Along with the birthday presents – both still in the brown cardboard shipping boxes with a Los Angeles return address. He just...can't. He doesn't want to know what Stiles might've written on any card, doesn't even want to look at his familiar, comforting handwriting, doesn't want to see what thoughtful gift Stiles went out of his way to get him. He just fucking can't with that. Any of it. As much as he wants to know...he also doesn't. Something stops him every single time he rips open the back of his closet and pulls the gifts out, holding them in his hands almost reverently –

the barest traces of Stiles' scent still float around the edges, though most of it has been blocked out by Derek. He just stares down at them with a frown, for maybe five minutes at a time, before carefully placing them in their original spot. Time goes on like that. Time always goes on, even when Derek wants it to just fucking stop so he can have a second to catch his breath and get used to every thing rapidly changing all around him. So, sometimes, he goes inside his own head, and he imagines things are as they were over a year ago. In the early summer time of May, Stiles' bloody face lit up by the sunset, by the moon, his dirty fingers dancing over Derek's skin, his eyes bright even in the dark, even after watching Derek rip something's throat out; it's ridiculous, he thinks, how back then he didn't realize that one day Stiles wouldn't be there anymore. He thought it would last forever. Of course it fucking didn't. Stiles left to go get a life he actually deserves, without blood and guts and dead bodies, and all Derek can do is mope about it because he never prepared himself for it. And it's funny, how many times he's drifted away into fantasies of Stiles returning, of how great every thing would be, how awesome... That when Stiles actually does come back, it's nothing like Derek imagined, at all. He's standing at a gas pump. It's three o'clock in the afternoon on a brisk February day, drinking in the warmth of the sun before it starts fading away, as he fuels up his Camaro. He's thinking about gas prices, how high they've gotten, how he should buy gas cards for the pack with all that ridiculous money the Argents gave him in their private settlement, how he should probably get some new shoes as well, maybe go into the store and get a bottle of water – you know. Gas station thoughts. He hears the sound of a car pulling into the spot behind him, but he keeps his eyes trained on the numbers flying past on the tiny screen in front of his face, still thinking about water and shoes and money. A car door opens up, and he thinks that particular creak sounds familiar, sends an echo down his spine, but things like that have always been happening to him. Ever since his entire family was burned alive, hearing things that sound like memories are just something he's used to. He still doesn't turn around. Not until, “hey, Sourwolf.” The wind picks up right as Derek whips his head around; smacks him in the face with Stiles and Derek nearly extends his claws from surprise. Surprise feels like too light of a word, honestly, maybe a word more like...unmitigated horror better fits the bill, as he gets his first real, in person look at Stiles Stilinski in twenty one months. “You going in there to get some beef jerky?”

Derek honest to God thinks he's fucking hallucinating. How many times has he imagined this exact thing, played it over and over in his head, recalled the memory of Stiles' voice forming those words like he always used to do when he was still eighteen and riding around in Derek's car and teasing him, and now it's...back again? Back from the fucking dead, with the same smirk and the same crinkle of his eyes at the corners. This can't be fucking real. He blinks, furiously, but Stiles is still there, leaning out of the driver side door, looking at Derek. Stiles drops down out of the Jeep and slams the door behind him, crunching his sneakers along in the dirt to cross the fifteen feet over to where Derek is frozen still on the spot. He's the same, almost. Almost the exact same. His hair is maybe a little more styled than usual, but it's still the same dark brown mop that Derek used to run his fingers through – but other than that. It's just...Stiles. In a graphic tee shirt and jeans and converse sneakers, strolling his way over to Derek like nothing bad has ever happened between them. “Derek?” Stiles pushes, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Are you in there?” Derek blinks once more, shaking his head, looking back to see the gas has stopped pumping and his tank is full and he pulls the nozzle out of his car and shoves it back into its proper place. Mechanically, with a shaking hand, he closes the gas latch, feeling Stiles' eyes on him the entire time, and realizes that he has not said a fucking word. Stiles just stands there, almost like he expected this exact dead silence, but still has the grace to look moderately uncomfortable; scratching at his elbow and turning his eyes away to glare out into the sunlight. “I would've thought you'd buy a new car. With all that money.” Derek suddenly wants to grab him and shake him as hard as he possibly can. While in all his dreams, he was grabbing Stiles to wrap him up into an embrace, now all he wants to do is fucking shake him, wipe that idiotic smirk off his face, grab his jawline and force him to look directly into Derek's fucking eyes without cracking any jokes and just yell at him. Why the fuck did you leave? Why the fuck did you – leave me? I loved you, you fucking idiot! Since that would be ridiculously inappropriate and altogether out of the question, he channels his energy into something a little less aggressive but no less angry. “What are you doing here?” Stiles scratches at his cheek this time, turning his head to stare off at the horizon again. “I parked my car at a gas station. What do you think I'm doing here?” There it is. There it fucking is. Stiles' classic evasiveness, his classic fucking roundabout answers. “In Beacon Hills, Stiles, what are you doing here!” Again, Stiles gets this look on his face like he's honestly not surprised at how this conversation is going, and flicks his eyes back to look into Derek's face. At his lips, his nose, his forehead, but not directly into his eyes. “As it turns out, Los Angeles isn't as angelic as it sounds. I – I came back.”

“You came back.” Derek repeats the words with little to no inflection, gripping his keys in his palm so hard he's sure he'll find blood in his hand later on. A quick glance back to the Jeep, overflowing with boxes and suitcases, a tiny blue chirping bird sitting in a cage in the passenger seat, and again, Derek wants to kick something. Stiles nods. “I was, you know...LA is really more of a scene than it is an actual place to live, dude. I guess I thought scenes are what I was into? Or something? It just didn't pan out the way I thought it would, so-” Derek clomps away. He swings around the back of his car without taking even a second glance in Stiles' direction, rips open his car door to the sound of Stiles' indignant, “Derek, hold on-” and drops himself down into the driver's seat. He starts up the car and zooms forward, only glancing in his rearview mirror to see Stiles standing there staring after him in a cloud of dust, frowning and scratching at his cheek again. Derek watches him sag his shoulders and slowly walk back over to his Jeep for as long as he's waiting at the stop sign, before peeling the fuck out of there and leaving Stiles behind. His phone is pressed up against his ear, and Scott is shouting an excited HEY on the other end, but Derek quickly cuts him off. “Why didn't you tell me Stiles was coming back?” He demands through grit teeth. There's a lengthy pause, nothing except the sound of dead air, and then Scott says, “Stiles came back?” “I just fucking saw him at the gas station, Scott. He had all his shit in his car and told me he hated Los Angeles.” A pause, and Scott still isn't saying anything. “Tell me you knew about this.” “I – I didn't know! I didn't know!” He doesn't sound defensive or upset or angry, like Derek is, he sounds delighted, and then there's the unmistakable sound of Allison asking what's going on in the background. “Stiles came back!” How fucking typical of Stiles to just show up. How absolutely unbelievably classic Stiles it is for him to impulsively decide he hates LA, throw all his shit into the back of a car, quit whatever shitty job he was working, and just come back, expecting open arms and smiles and awesome, Stiles is back! Judging from the sounds he's hearing on the other line of his phone, he can guess pretty well that's exactly what he's going to be getting from the rest of the pack, no questions asked. He'll probably have them all gathered around in a circle with a bottle of Smirnoff citrus vodka sitting in his hand as he details to them all the great, harrowing experiences he encountered in the big city, and they'll all eat up because it's Stiles. Derek hangs up the phone, presses on the gas, and takes the first exit off onto the highway. He had fantasized, dreamed, and longed for the return of Stiles for almost every night that he had

been gone. Maybe that was his big mistake. Building it up like that in his head, convincing himself that it would be amazing and that it was exactly what he wanted and everything would be perfect. In his head, Stiles always apologized, and explained to him that he made a mistake, and kissed him, and...he sure as fuck didn't just appear out of thin air with a smirk and a head tilt, avoiding Derek's eye contact with some story about yeah, dude, LA fuckin' sucked. He wanted I came back for you, and I've missed you. ---Stiles was born and raised in Beacon Hills. For eighteen years, he wandered around the same main street, ate at the same chain restaurants and mom and pop joints, drove the same route to school, and, eventually, dealt with the same dangers of the supernatural again and again and again. His whole life was a rinse cycle. Go to school, be warned about some danger soon coming their way, freak out, listen to Scott worry about Allison, make the correct assumption about what's really going on, get ignored by everyone, almost get killed because no one listened to him, save the day, receive no credit, wash, rinse, repeat. It's not hard to imagine how a person would get sick of that, after a while. Stiles was the fucking brains of the entire operation, because Lydia was a little too busy trying to figure out what the fuck her powers actually were to be the smart one anymore, and not a single person ever really acknowledged it. Sure, they like Stiles because he's amusing and tells a story well enough, but... He just got tired of being the human slowing them all down with his weak bones, fragile skin, and proclivity to be targeted for aforementioned weakness. He was the fucking Dawn Summers of the group (Stiles is in trouble; it must be Tuesday), constantly getting rescued and yelled at for not being careful enough, constantly spending sleepless nights researching just so he could make himself feel fucking useful – and even then, he would have to work tirelessly just to convince everyone that he was right. So, he got good with his baseball bat. He learned which parts of the body would be damaged the most by a blow, figured out how hard to swing to crack something's skull open; essentially, he learned how to kill things, and how to feel nothing about it. He learned how to bludgeon a thing's entire body to death, how to wipe the blood off his face, shrug, and say anyone want ice cream? He was good at it. It terrified him, to be that good at something so inherently fucking horrible. But everyone was always so impressed by it. Scott and Isaac stopped treating him like the pet of the pack, like something to be guarded at all costs, and Derek loosened up on his totalitarian desire to always leave Stiles sitting in the car. So he just kept doing it. He kept showing up with his bat or a crowbar or a fucking line of pipe or a wrench to smack something over the head with, and he kept having to buy new clothes because of the blood. After a while, though. After a while...he would look in the mirror and find blood on his neck. He

would scratch at his hair and dried blood would crumble into his fingers. He started having nightmares about drowning in an ocean of monster guts, and as hilarious as that might sound, actually closing his eyes at night and living through it was horrific by all counts. He started losing his grip on reality. Derek started looking at him differently. No one ever asked him if he was doing okay – because of course he was. He could kill things as easily as anyone else could! He was fine! He wasn't fine. He was fucking slipping. So, he graduated high school, defeated the giant raccoons that decided to crash the party, and at the after party (bleeding out of a head wound and pretending like it didn't hurt that much) took a shot of tequila, looked everyone dead in the eyes, and said, “I'm moving to LA.” It wasn't easy watching his best friend's face fall like that, or watching Allison and Lydia stare blankly at each other, and then look back to Stiles as if waiting for the punchline. It really wasn't easy seeing Derek tense up and close his face off, like showing any real emotion would humiliate him somehow. Like he had something to be embarrassed about. “To do what?” Scott had asked, befuddled and confused and sad. Stiles took another shot, slammed the glass down on the table, all while Derek watched his every single movement like a hawk. He always had a problem about Stiles getting too drunk, but it didn't seem like he was going to speak up on that front that night. “Something other than being everyone's annoying little sidekick.” A chorus of aww, no, Stiles broke out in the group, everyone shaking their heads back and forth. “You know that's not true, Stiles,” Allison had insisted, narrowing her eyes like he was being stupid. Except that it was true. It was so true that they valued everyone else more than they did him that they didn't even fucking notice how true that it was. What did he really have in Beacon Hills, anyway? His dad, who would make it along just fine without him, and Scott, who had been too preoccupied with Allison to pay him more than obligatory mind since those two met, a gigantic pile of bodies from things he killed, and... Derek. But that was something Stiles really didn't want to have to think about yet. If he thought about it, he knew he wouldn't go. He knew he could never walk out the door if he lingered too long on Derek Hale, so he just...didn't. He needed to go; no matter what he felt for the people he was leaving behind, no matter what. For his own sanity, he needed to get the hell out of here before he went completely off the deep end. Became like Kate or Gerard – merciless, cold, empty. He decided on not answering Allison, turning his back to grab another shot off the table, and then

Scott was grabbing at his wrist to stop him, pushing him back gently away from the table. “Can you stop drinking like that, please?” “Why?” Stiles demanded, reaching for the entire bottle instead and taking a big, fat, glug that burned on the way down. “Last night in Beacon Hills, might as well celebrate.” “You're leaving tomorrow?” Scott sounded like Stiles had just punched him in the gut, and the puppy dog eyes came out in full force. Stiles took another drink. “Why would you – why didn't you say something sooner?” Because they'd try to talk him out of it. Because they'd say oh, no, Stiles everything will be okay you'll be fine we can help and then everything would just go back to being exactly as it was before. Another drink. This one, longer. “You're drunk,” Lydia hissed, trying to pry the bottle out of Stiles' clenched fingers. Stiles dodged backwards, holding the bottle closer to him like a security blanket. The more drunk he got, the less shitty this whole entire thing would seem. “You're drunk and you're not thinking clearly.” “He's impulsive.” Derek corrected – the first words he'd spoken since the announcement. Stiles blinked over to look at him, found him hovering off to the side of the group, arms crossed firmly across his chest, not moving. He had no discernible emotion on his face whatsoever, and Stiles knew him well enough by now to know that meant he was hurt. Beyond hurt. He was devastated. In the back of Stiles' mind he thought, you know, maybe I should have had a one on one with Derek about this, because didn't Derek deserve that? Hadn't he deserved to be told beforehand, to get some sort of closure aside from Stiles drunkenly yelling at everyone about how they all treated him like trash? But, again. Stiles just couldn't have that conversation. It was shitty of him, he knew that even at the fucking time, to group Derek up with the rest of them, to not treat him like he was the exception (which he absolutely positively was) – it was shitty and selfish. Sometimes, though. And Stiles had been repeating this to himself ever since he got the idea a month beforehand. Sometimes you have to do things for yourself. It's selfish, but it's what has to be done – and Derek was never going to leave Beacon Hills. He was never going to leave his pack behind, leave the ruins of his family's house behind, or their graves. He had said as much to Stiles dozens of times – recalling New York and what a fucking disaster it had been. Derek was never going to leave. But Stiles had to. It happens – people reach a crossroads and break up. But...maybe Stiles didn't have to do it in the shittiest way possible.

“He's impulsive, and he's going to do what he wants to do.” Derek's eyes were razor sharp, just barely hinting at whatever he was feeling underneath his calm and composed mask. “I've been thinking about this for a month, now,” Stiles slurred, pointing the hand with the bottle in Derek's general direction, taking a step forwards. “Oh, wow, Stiles,” Lydia tried to grab at the bottle again, but Stiles ducked her – laughing, like it was a game. “An entire month of planning a life changing decision! Really, really fucking fantastic plan you've got there.” Stiles was too drunk to really detect the biting sarcasm, but he reacted just as venomously. “That's what I'm talking about. That is exactly what I'm talking about. Because Stiles is just the stupid human with stupid plans and stupid ideas.” “Stiles, don't.” Allison shook her head. He was ruining the party. Well, technically, the giant raccoons came in and ruined the party, but Stiles wasn't exactly helping matters very much at all by getting progressively more and more drunk and by extension more and more angry. “You know what? Fine. I won't!” He slammed the bottle down onto the table and staggered forwards, fishing his car keys out of his pocket. “I'll just fucking leave, then!” “You're not driving, Stiles,” Scott grabbed his shoulder and used werewolf strength to hold him down in place, as hard as Stiles fidgeted – he snatched the keys out of his hand easily as taking candy from a baby. A very drunk, petulant baby. “I'll take you home.” “I'll do it,” Derek insisted instead, stepping forward and ripping the keys out of Scott's hand before he could get in a word in edgewise. He wrapped his huge hand around Stiles' upperarm and started unceremoniously dragging him off out of the loft, to the sound of the pack's hushed murmurs and whispering of is he serious? In Stiles' Jeep, with Derek in the driver's seat, neither of them said a single word. Stiles was slowly falling asleep in the passenger seat, and Derek just drove forward – slower than usual, maybe, possibly out of thoughtfulness to not rustle the car too much and make Stiles barf all over the place. When Derek dropped him off and climbed out of the car, dropping the keys down into Stiles' clammy hand, for a few seconds it looked like Derek was going to say something. Like, so...are we breaking up? Or maybe we can try the long distance thing... The problem was that both of them knew that wasn't going to fucking work. Long distance? Stiles and Derek? Right. Neither of them even had to say it out loud. The stupidest thing Stiles ever did was just turn around that night and go upstairs to his packed up room, dropping onto his bed and passing out. He wished, time and time again over the following year and a half, that he had said something. That he had done more, had given Derek

something that he deserved. But he didn't. And the next day, the pack came over to help him shove all his stuff into the back of his Jeep, stood around afterward saying their goodbyes. Everyone forgave each other and promised to keep in touch, and everything was fine and Stiles was excited to get on the road. He was looking forward to a place where he didn't have to worry about the best way to snap something's neck, the correct way to punch someone in the nose to break it. He was leaving his baseball bat behind, tucked into the back of his bedroom closet. The only person who didn't come was Derek. And Stiles knew he wouldn't be seeing the alpha again. Arriving in LA had been jarring, to say the least. Showing up at his apartment which looked about ten thousand times better in the pictures had been...jarring. It was a one bedroom, with a kitchen off to the side and a bathroom connected to it. The bed looked like the landlord had hawked it from an old Motel, there were weird stains on the walls, and the fridge would sporadically stop working in the middle of the night, spoiling his milk. He worked as a delivery boy at a flower shop – which was interesting, considering the number of times he delivered a bouquet of flowers from a spouse only to have the recipient try to flirt with the fucking delivery boy, their wedding rings tucked carefully away somewhere. As if Stiles wouldn't know; as if he hadn't been the one to clip the note onto the flowers. Delivering flowers to people who had infinitely more money than he did was also pretty unfortunate and not very fun; he would eyeball their couches and marble floors over their shoulders as they signed his clipboard, smell turkeys and steaks and probably homemade pasta cooking somewhere in the house. Everyone he met was one of those kids who had a shit job, a shit apartment, and detoxed the entire thing by pretending like they actually had fun getting shitfaced every Friday night at the same clubs again and again and again – Stiles joined the ranks seamlessly enough. He had a fake ID, a phone full of contacts, friends that would come over and trash his place, would go over to other people's places to trash them right back, zero run-ins with the supernatural, never killed anything, and in general convinced himself he was having the time of his life. He wasn't. He was hungover or drunk nearly half the time, and the other half he was either working or sitting at home with a bowl of ramen watching re-runs of old television shows. When he talked to people back home, like his skype calls with Scott or his texting with the girls, he emphasized the fun but downplayed the drinking and partying. He introduced them all to his light blue parakeet named George Blueny (a pun that only Scott appreciated), talked about how cool and trendy LA was, how cool the restaurants were (even though he couldn't afford any of them), how awesome being totally on his own was (some nights he woke up in the middle of a panic attack and had to calm himself out of it), and just how great it all was.

The one person he knew he wouldn't be able to lie to was Derek. Skype calls were fuzzy, and there was no doubt in Stiles' mind that the wolves wouldn't be able to hear the lies unless they really concentrated, but – Stiles just knew. One look at Derek in person and he would crack – break down, cry, start packing his bags. Go home. So, he never called. He never e-mailed. Nothing. But he thought about it almost every night, lying awake in bed, wondering what Derek was doing right now, if he was lying in bed too, if he was thinking of him too; he'd dream of him some nights, so vividly he was sure it all had to be real, and then he'd wake up alone. He put off going back to Beacon Hills until over a year later, even though he was ridiculously done with LA after nine months, because he couldn't handle the shame of being a failure. When he left, he really thought that he was on to bigger and better things, that he'd be happier, that people would respect him and like him more. None of that, however, came to fruition, and the people in LA were lightyears worse than any of his friends back in BH. It was too much for him to admit to all his friends; so he suffered through another eleven months, before finally snapping and impulsively packing his shit up and getting the hell out of there. Things were different now, he convinced himself. He was different now. He didn't have it in him anymore to kill, not like he used to. He was fine, now. He could fucking handle it. When he pulled off the highway and saw Derek standing at a pump, his reaction was knee-jerk. He instantly pulled into the lot without even thinking about, without considering the fact that they now had what most people would consider a history – and not a particularly great one, either. Or, it was great. It used to be great. That's the crazy thing about memories; after a while, even the good ones can become tainted by loneliness and regret and leave you with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. It was only after he had already popped his head out of the car and greeted Derek that he remembered they were tainted now. They couldn't just jump right back in to goofing around and being pals and making out in the backseat of Derek's Camaro; Stiles had ruined things. One look at Derek's face, and that was all he needed to see to know he had fucked everything up beyond all repair. ---The first time Derek kissed Stiles, the kid had blood all over his teeth. He had just turned eighteen a month ago, kept dangling it in front of Derek's face and reminding him with waggled eyebrows, and suggestive statements that could've been jokes or could've been serious, and Derek had gotten tired of it. Stiles got punched in the face a few too many times by an angry gremlin – it would've been funny, a thing that small overpowering Stiles' 5'11” frame, but they had proven themselves to be more than effective at beating the shit out of people. So, yeah, he got punched in the face, until Derek picked the thing up off of his chest and snapped its neck; Stiles didn't even fucking wince,

and Derek started yelling. “Didn't I tell you not to come?” Stiles sat up, spitting a wad of blood out onto the forest floor, and glared up at Derek. “When have I ever listened to you?” Never. Never once in his pathetic little human life has Stiles ever listened to his alpha. He grabbed Stiles by the wrist and pulled him into a standing position, raking his eyes up and down the teenager's body to check for any other injuries, and came up empty. “You could've been killed.” “Killed by a gremlin?” He grinned, flashing his bloodstained teeth at Derek, while behind them Scott screamed while one of the things chased him around a tree. “Ha! Yeah, right.” “Next time,” Derek growled, stepping right into Stiles' personal space bubble, trying to intimidate him. “You do as I say.” “Oh, yeah?” Stiles stepped even closer, so their chests were touching, breath fanning across each other's faces. “What are you going to do to make me?” Always willing to take a challenge when it's offered to him, Derek pushed his lips onto Stiles', ran his tongue over the kid's teeth and tasted his blood – could feel a dribble of it starting to form down on his own chin, and he didn't care, because Stiles was kissing him right back. In a big way, too; arms around Derek's neck, tongue pushing up against Derek's, while Derek pushed back just as hard, running his hand down Stiles' side. When they pulled back, Stiles smiled at his own blood on Derek's lips and mouth, raised his eyebrows, and said, “you into that kinda thing?” Derek smiled back – but before the make-out could continue, Scott let loose another ear-piercing scream; “a little help!” Stiles grabbed his baseball bat up off the ground, and Derek watched as he twirled the thing around in his hand effortlessly, as he approached the gremlin without a hint of hesitation and thwacked it with a sickening crack over the side of its head; he felt proud, amazed, and altogether inappropriately turned on. That was over two years ago. It's not exactly the kind of first kiss story you can tell everyone, but it's one that Derek is happy about, because it represents them so well. Almost perfectly, if you ask him. Stiles used to smirk and say shit like don't you think we're, like, Shakespearean? or don't you think we're fucking movie material – someone should make a movie out of us. It was true, Derek always thought. How insanely into each other they were, how fucked up their lives were, how many times Derek watched Stiles swing that stupid baseball bat and how many times Stiles

watched Derek snap some creature's neck and then they'd go back to Derek's loft and have insane sex – most of the time while Stiles was still bleeding somewhere on his person. He didn't care, though, he never cared, and that's something Derek liked the most about Stiles. How nuts he was. He'd grab Derek's arm while they were on the highway, and say, “can't this thing go any faster?” Derek would go ten miles above the speed limit, and Stiles would say, again, faster, twenty miles above the speed limit, faster, thirty miles, faster, until they wound up going a hundred miles an hour in a sixty-five and Stiles leaned over to give Derek a fucking blowjob. If Derek had been human, he would've absolutely shoved Stiles off him and slowed the car down. As it was, he had werewolf reflexes. He maneuvered through the cars on the highway as easily as if he was going under the speed limit, kept his eyes trained both on the road and Stiles' head on his lap. They did this more times than he could count, and it never, ever got old; not for Stiles, and not for Derek. Derek liked the crazy ones. He's always liked the crazy ones. With Kate, it was that undercurrent that he couldn't always understand, that didn't always come up to the surface, but just buzzed underneath her skin like electricity every time they touched. With Jennifer, it was more like a good girl until she isn't type of a thing, which Derek always found interesting and enticing and sexy and understated. Both of those were definitely what most people would call the bad crazy, though, if the death count on both of their hands is anything to go by. Stiles, though. Stiles wasn't undercurrents, and he wasn't understated. He was just fucking out there, in your face with it – like, crazy screaming fight at two in the morning, even crazier sex at three in the morning, baseball bat to Derek's car at four in the morning, more crazy sex at five in the morning, making Derek pancakes and bacon at six in the morning, all in the same fucking night. In the heat of all this, sometimes Derek would pull at his own hair and growl, “you are fucking insane,” and Stiles would grin, and say “and you like it.” And Derek did. He used to find his penchant for stupid, impulsive decisions attractive and endearing – but that was when the decisions were things like public sex and tattoos. Breaking up with Derek and moving six hours away? Not so attractive. Not crazy – just stupid. Showing up back in Beacon Hills right around the time Derek was finally starting to seal up the wound? Ridiculously stupid. For the first couple of days, Derek avoids him with every thing he's got. Every thing he's got totals up to him catching Stiles' scent a mile away and freezing in the middle of whatever he's doing (stopping dead in his tracks on the sidewalk, nearly dropping his coffee as the girl across the counter reaches to hand it over to him, foot lifting up off the gas as he tries to decide whether to speed up or slow down), and every single time he has a split second to decide if he's going to

keep going forward and if he sees Stiles no big deal, or turn around and run the other way. He turns around. Every time. It doesn't stop the icy-hot memories from crawling up the back of his neck. Stiles' scent mixing with familiar places in Beacon Hills sends wave after wave of past experiences he had been trying to shove deep down into the sand shooting right back up to the surface, like Stiles' return has given them buoyancy once more. He remembers the way Stiles used to trick the sixteen year old kid behind the counter to give him way more free samples than he was supposed to get when he passes by Stiles' favorite ice cream place, remembers how Stiles would always say he wanted to get his nose pierced when he passes by the tattoo/piercing place, Stiles laughing as he passes the movie theater, Stiles beating a witch within an inch of her life with a crowbar as he passes by the alleyway, Stiles Stiles Stiles every single place he goes, every single place he tries to avoid, everywhere. Scott's car breaks down, and he slides into the passenger seat of Derek's car, reeking of Stiles, grinning from ear to ear. He starts waving his hands enthusiastically around in the air as he details the totally awesome night he had with Stiles and just like old times and so glad he's back and have you seen him have you talked it out are you going to talk it out please talk it out and Derek just sits and drives him to work and offers him nothing more than a non-committal noise in the back of his throat. “I don't know why you always act like you're the only one he left behind,” the accusatory edge comes into Scott's voice, and Derek sighs. “Do you think it was easy for him, to just leave like that?” Yes, actually. Derek thinks it was the easiest thing Stiles has ever done, to just pack up and go and not give Derek a real goodbye and not call Derek and not speak to Derek for nearly two years. “You think you have him all, like, figured out.” Scott squints at Derek, like he's trying to search for something hidden underneath his skin; as if Derek keeps anything buried that close to the surface. “Sometimes I think you treat him more like an idea than a real person, Derek.” It's a surprisingly deep, thoughtful thing for Scott to say – so much so that his eyebrows raise and he has to actually stop and think about it for a second. “What exactly do you mean by that?” They're pulling into the parking of the vet's clinic, and Scott reaches down to unbuckle his seat belt, popping open his door as soon as the car has come to a full stop. His lips are pursed down into a thin line, eyes narrowed down – Derek recognizes this as the Derek is messing with Stiles face. Of course it was always Derek messing with Stiles, and never ever the other way, just because Scott has always been Stiles' friend first, Derek's beta second. Nevermind the fact that Stiles is about twenty times more emotionally manipulative, psycho, and argumentative than Derek could ever fucking dream of being. “He's not crazy,” like he's read Derek's mind, Scott says this. “He's an actual person with actual

emotions. I sometimes think you forget what that's like.” Out the car he goes, slamming the door behind him – like an afterthought, he whips around, mouths thanks for the ride, and then stalks off to go examine dogs for six hours or whatever the hell it is he does at this place. For a moment, Derek just sits there gripping the steering wheel, jaw clenched in thought, rolling Scott's words around and around in his mind. Of course Stiles is a real fucking person. Of course when Derek thinks of him, he doesn't just think about some weird construction that he came up with inside of his own head, because he knows Stiles. He watched with his own two eyes as he literally smashed the headlights out of Derek's car with a baseball bat, all right? After having lived through that, Derek reserves every single right in the book to call Stiles fucking crazy. But, then again. Maybe it's about time he started admitting that he knew Stiles. Not that he knows him. And...when was the last time he was with someone who wasn't just lying through their teeth to him, using him for something, with someone who didn't use their emotions as the means to an end? Of course Derek has no idea what being with someone with no ulterior motive is like. Stiles, for all his highs and lows, for the fucked up rollercoaster ride he's dragged Derek along on, never used Derek for something. There was nothing Stiles was trying to get out of their relationship; when he wrecked Derek's car, when he would yell and scream at him and get drunk and make Derek think that this person he chose to fall in love with was more fire than person...it was always just because he was Stiles. Nothing more, nothing less. There was only honesty, and maybe Derek isn't quite sure what to do with that anymore. Derek wonders, more often than that, if Stiles was ever really a choice. If he's a choice, now. The great avoidance comes to a pretty dramatic ending when he gets forced (literally, forced, shoved into the back of a car and driven off) to go to Stiles' welcome home party at his house, and then he's standing in the same living room as Stiles, holding a red party cup while pressing himself as tight to the wall as he possibly can. Stiles has always been in his element at a party. Surrounded by people hanging on every single word of every single one of his stories, waving his hands around and drinking, satisfaction rolling off of him in thick waves – it was like he wasn't really happy unless people were looking at him, listening to him. Derek always chalked it up to the only child syndrome thing. Tonight, however, Stiles seems only half present. He laughs, and pals around with the pack, wrestles a little with Isaac (who holds back), listens to Lydia talk about school, high fives Allison fifty times, and hangs around Scott's neck pretty much all night long – but he's...quieter.

He keeps throwing drinks back like they're water, and instead of getting that excited drunk he used to get, bouncing all around the room and demanding the music get turned up louder, he gets more and more tired with every sip he takes. Every now and again his eyes flick to Derek, and Derek stares brazenly back at him – waiting for him to come over and talk to him and spew some drunk shit about how rude it was of him to just leave Stiles standing at the gas station like that the other day – but every time, Stiles just lowers his eyes and takes another drink. It goes on like that for a while, with the occasional shared glance between Allison and Lydia as Stiles grabs another drink - everyone is sober except for Stiles and it's starting to become glaringly obvious – and finally Scott asks the question probably everyone has thought of asking themselves. Mostly because Stiles is probably drunk enough to answer honestly, Derek guesses. “So,” Scott smiles, a forced, awkward thing, “how come you came back to Beacon Hills?” Stiles swallows, meeting Scott's smile with an equally uncomfortable upward curve of his lips. “You always sounded like you were having such a good time in LA,” Allison says, chewing on one of her nails as if she's nervous. “We kinda thought...” “That I'd never come back?” Stiles supplies, raising his eyebrows. No one says anything, save a few awkward glances, so Stiles sighs through his nose, looks down at the ground, and shrugs. “I just knew it was time to come back.” “Yeah, but...” Scott takes a step forward, and Stiles looks at him warily, like he knows what's coming and doesn't want to deal with it. “Why?” For a second, everyone is just standing there; Stiles staring down at the drink in his hand, swishing it around like he's mesmerized by the way the liquid moves in the glass, while everyone else just stands and stares at him. Derek's heart starts beating faster. The look on his face – Derek recognizes it good and well. It's the look Stiles gets when he has to admit something, or come clean, or apologize. And Derek – Derek hopes whatever he has to say, that it's about him. It's about him, and Stiles will look him right in the eyes while he says it. Look at me Derek's mind commands as he stares at the profile of Stiles' face, at his eyelashes resting against his cheeks. Fucking look at me, now, now, now – because even a glance in Derek's direction, however inadvertent, would speak volumes. It would say I missed you and I came back for you and I haven't stopped thinking about you and I realize now that I fucked up with you and “Lost my job.” Stiles shrugs through another long sip of his drink; and Derek hears the lie, loud and clear, like a bomb going off, but no one else does. Like Derek is the only one who remembers what Stiles' heartbeat is supposed to sound like anymore, like Derek is the only one

who's recalled the memory in echoes and heard it in his dreams. “Aw, man,” Scott pats Stiles on the shoulder, and Lydia and Allison give each other another glance like that explains the drinking, like every thing has just been fucking solved and there are no problems left. But Derek can tell Stiles is lying. He's not getting shitfaced and frowning and avoiding direct eye contact because he lost his job and had to come home in disgrace. Isaac challenges Stiles to an arm wrestle, Scott gets another drink, Lydia and Allison start chatting and laughing and Derek just stands back and feels like he's missing the fucking joke, here. The night goes on. Stiles hasn't even so much as said a single word to Derek all night, barely acknowledged his presence a all; and yeah, maybe some of that is because Derek basically snubbed him at the gas station, but Stiles doesn't get the fucking right to be mad at him anymore. All of this is just too much, and the alcohol tastes horrible and his head hurts, and he's sad and doesn't know what to say or do in this situation, so he bails. He throws his cup in the trash and ducks out the back door into the cool night air, breathing shallowly. Leaning back up against the side of the house, he looks up at the stars and tries to remember what it felt like to not be so tangled up inside his own head. Everything is a mess up there, right now, and for once it'd be nice to have a night where he could just relax and not think so much. He used to be able to have nights like that, with Stiles – nearly every single night he was with Stiles, actually. The back door bangs open, almost clipping Derek in the shoulder, and then Stiles is stuttering down the steps on shaky feet, slamming the door behind him, and glaring at Derek with his hands on his hips. Great. “What the fuck is your problem?” He demands, whiskey eyes glazed over and bloodshot. Derek straightens back up from the wall; wonders if he really feels like doing this right now. “You're drunk,” He says. “I'm not,” and never mind the fact that he's slurring his words and leaning slightly more to the right than he should be. “That's what you would always say every time I tried to talk to you about something. You're drunk, you're insane, you're-” “Because you fucking were!” “-and now you're just going to stand off at my welcome home party and act like you don't even fucking know me.” Derek sets his jaw, stares down at Stiles – and really looks at him for the first time since he came back into town. His eyes don't seem as light as they used to, and his hair isn't carefully done like it always used to be, and his clothes are wrinkled and smell like alcohol and

something unfamiliar, someone unfamiliar, and all around he looks like some alternative universe Stiles that's come to torment Derek, now; with dark bags under his eyes and alcohol running through his bloodstream on a constant loop. When Derek imagined Stiles coming back. This is not what he fucking imagined. He remembers, somewhat inappropriately given the situation, a time from two years ago when Stiles had brought Derek back here onto this porch after a catastrophically horrible dinner with the Sheriff. Derek was nervous, because Sheriff had been wised up to the goings on around Beacon Hills at that point and didn't just carry a gun anymore; he carried fucking wolfsbane bullets around with him, had some in his pocket right there at the table knowing full well Derek could smell them. Stiles, while he didn't know about the wolfsbane bullets, at least picked up on the tension – that Derek was twenty-four and Stiles was only a fresh eighteen, that Derek was once a murder suspect, that Derek drives recklessly and has been pulled over for speeding more times than a person could count on one hand, Derek was a college dropout, Derek was antisocial and gruff, Derek one time accidentally shoved Stiles too hard to get him out of danger and he landed too hard and fractured his wrist...and the list went on that way. The entire dinner was dubbed a disaster when Derek and the Sheriff started getting into one of those conversations, where they're talking about something else externally, something completely irrelevant and somewhat asinine, but internally talking about something completely different. (You know, I love chicken. Chicken is incredibly important – for a well balanced diet.) (Yeah? I love chicken, too. I love chicken a lot.) (You ever raised a chicken, son? Your own flesh and blood chicken?) (I know chicken incredibly well, sir, better than you think I do.) (And what the hell is that supposed to mean?) You get the point. Stiles got the point as well. As soon as the statements started getting more aggressive, less veiled, he slammed his empty milk glass down on the table, startling both other men, and rose. “Derek, come outside.” Derek, happy to be free from the piercing glare of the Sheriff, stood from his seat and followed Stiles out the back door to stand on this exact porch, to get grabbed by Stiles' hands and pulled down into a frustrated kiss, all hungry and desperate and hot – before he pulled back and jabbed his pointer finger into Derek's chest. “Be nice. Or I won't do that again.” That had been enough incentive to keep Derek docile for the rest of the night. Looking at Stiles, now...he just can't see that same spark anymore. That same person who'd do something like that, who'd get angry and then kiss Derek like that. “I don't know you.” Stiles blinks, takes a step back like Derek pushed him, nearly topples over but catches himself at

the last second. “That's fucking -” He lurches forwards again and shoves at Derek's chest, weakly. “That's fucking cruel to say to me, when-” “Cruel,” Derek repeats the word with a short laugh, shaking his head. “You want to talk to me about what's cruel, Stiles?” Stiles opens his mouth to retaliate, but Derek grabs his wrist; holds it in a vice grip, and Stiles is just drunk enough that all he can do is stare at Derek's tan fingers and weakly try to pull away from him. “After everything we've been through together...” Fighting, and killing things, and sex, and Derek wrapping Stiles' wounds and licking the blood off his skin, and Stiles clinging onto Derek in the middle of the night like he was afraid he'd wake up and find him gone – and all of it, every single second of it, all boiled down to fucking nothing, in the end. “You are the one who left, Stiles.” Stiles finally manages to rip his wrist out of Derek's fingers and he staggers backwards again – stumbling off to lean up against the railing of the back porch, supporting himself just barely. When he speaks, his voice is low, dangerous. The way it always used to get when Derek would, as Stiles put it, cross the line. The problem with that logic, Derek thinks, is that Stiles would respond to Derek crossing the line by fucking catapulting himself over the line into completely unfamiliar territory and say or do something a hundred times worse than Derek could ever think of. “I had to. I had to get out of here. I was – suffocating.” He's not being clear, or specific, or even saying what he really means. But Derek understands, loud and fucking clear, what Stiles is spitting out in between the lines, here. He had to get away from Derek. Derek was suffocating him. “This place was killing me. I – in LA, it was – I was away from -” “You weren't any better off in LA, Stiles!” He wasn't better without Derek. He wasn't. “Maybe everyone else is too busy yucking it up with you to fucking notice, but I smell it all over you.” Stiles looks about three seconds from throwing up, blinking his eyes rapidly like staying awake is taking everything out of him. “Smell what?” “You're not fucking happy. You didn't have any fun in LA. You're lying.” Stiles laughs. It's not a laugh that Derek recognizes very well. Stiles' laughter is usually light and carefree, loud or quiet depending on his mood, and genuine, most of all. This thing, though, whatever the hell it is that's coming out of Stiles' throat right now, is none of those things. It's forced, and drunk, and angry. “What's it fucking matter.” Before Derek can say that it does matter, it fucking does, because Derek could live with Stiles leaving him behind if it meant he was actually happier, and if he wasn't then what was the point, Stiles leans over the side of the porch and vomits into the yard, body quaking with the action. He

coughs for a few seconds afterward, before just dropping the top half of his body over the edge; probably dragging his fingers in his own fucking vomit. Derek has seen Stiles pretty drunk before, and has had to take care of him and hand him a glass of water and advil in the morning, has had to wrap his arm around his own shoulders and cart him off to the car, listening to Stiles' tirade of I'm fucked up, holy shit, I'm fucked up I'm so...fucked and Derek would say I know – but this? This shit? This is a little fucking much. Too much. With a heavy sigh, he bends down, flips Stiles over so he's on his back, slides one hand underneath his knees and the other around his side, and moves to pick him up gently from the ground – and Stiles starts gurgling in protest. “No,” he hisses, pushing feebly at Derek's face with his fingers; he follows it up with a slur that sounds a lot like put me down. “You're not sleeping outside in a puddle of vomit, Stiles.” Though that might be a pretty good revenge, Derek has never been that petty. Stiles, he thinks, might leave Derek out in a puddle of his own vomit, though, if the situation were reversed, because he's fucking vindictive that way. Derek raises up to a standing position, Stiles cradled against his chest, and takes his first step, much to Stiles' disgruntlement. “No.” Derek sighs, ignores Stiles' fingers prodding at his face and the constant stream of slurring and no, and pushes the back door open again to come into the kitchen, where the music is playing and the smells of Stiles' childhood house are all waiting. Allison and Lydia are there, eating pretzels and crowding around a cake that Allison brought like they're about to bring it out; their eyes widen when they see Stiles half passed out in Derek's arms. “What happened?” Lydia demands, eyes sliding to Derek like he's somehow to blame for this. Everyone's always been looking at him like that, ever since the day Scott walked in on Derek and Stiles vertical on the couch in his living room. “What do you think happened?” Derek sneers, maneuvering between them to get to the staircase, “he drank an entire bottle of vodka.” “But-” Allison starts, and Derek is already coming out into the living room, crossing the carpet, almost to the steps, when the front door opens, and in walks the Sheriff. And there's Derek. Holding an underage, passed out Stiles, reeking of alcohol, in his arms. Looking like the guiltiest person at the party, even though he wasn't even the one who brought the alcohol in the first place. There's maybe a second of dead air, where the Sheriff freezes in place and so does Derek,

before the front door slams closed. “Is my son drunk?” Derek glances down at Stiles, tries to think of a way to explain this, remembers that the empty liquor bottles are literally sitting in plain view on the coffee table. “Er...” “Less than a week back in town,” the Sheriff swoops over to where Derek is standing, peers down at Stiles' slack face and the dribble of vomit on the side of his mouth, “and you've already got him incapacitated.” Derek grits his teeth. Of course he'd get fucking blamed for this shit. Of course. “I didn't-” “It was my fault,” Scott says solemnly from somewhere off to the side, and instead of looking Sheriff in the eyes, he's just staring at Stiles' limp form hanging in Derek's arms. “I brought the alcohol.” Scott, at least, is actually twenty-one compared to Stiles' twenty; which would explain why the Sheriff's reaction is to just sigh, make some comment about turning a blind eye, and then fix his gaze directly back onto Derek. The man scrutinizes him with narrowed eyes, taking in the full sight of the wolf – the leather jacket, worn down from use, the stubble, the unkempt hair. “Hale.” He always fucking hated Derek. No matter what Derek did, no matter how much Stiles talked him up at the dinner table, the Sheriff just...despised him. Still does, apparently. Derek tilts his head carefully in greeting. “Sheriff.” Not entirely impressed or pleased, Stiles' father just waves his hand vaguely towards the stairs and says, “get him into bed.” “What about the cake?” Scott sounds disappointed, and Derek knows if he were to turn around and look at him, he'd find a puppy pout and a glare all directed at him. “He's passed out, Scott,” Isaac says as Derek retreats up the steps, and then the sounds of Lydia commanding everyone to pick that up and throw that out and straighten that up fade off into the background. Stiles' bedroom is eerie. Derek actually has to take a second and blink around the room, feeling uncomfortable and bizarre, when he first steps inside of it and flicks the lightswitch on. Something just feels wrong, here; different and alien from how it used to feel when Derek and Stiles were together. The smell of Stiles is stale and stagnant, getting overtaken by dust and that same unfamiliar smell that's all over Stiles' clothes and all the boxes lined up against the walls. There are strange things on the desk Derek has never seen before, like a fat scrapbook that smells like old flowers, and a bird cage chirping at him from the corner of the room with a name tag taped to the bars – George Blueny it reads in Stiles' messy handwriting, and Derek snorts.

All the same, Derek doesn't fucking like the way it feels in this room. It feels like tainted memories. He rips the blankets back and then drops Stiles carefully down onto his mattress and pillows, pulling the blankets back to gently cover him up. Stiles stirs, slightly, groaning something under his breath and smacking his lips together, rolling over so his face is hidden from Derek's sight. That, at least, is something Derek is familiar with. Taking a few cautious steps backwards, he turns the light off again. But he doesn't leave the room. He stands with his back against the wall, watching the steady rise and fall of Stiles' chest, tuning out the sound of anything that isn't the familiar, comforting breathing, and pretends for a second that it's two years earlier; that Stiles never left, and Derek never got angry, and everything was just blood and guts and sex all over again without all the unspoken words and cruel silences. ---The first time Stiles and Derek had sex, it was after Stiles literally beat the intestines out of a six foot tall lizard with his baseball bat. Stiles had been staying back during the fight for the most part, per Derek's insane request – and it would mark probably the first time in his entire life he ever actually listened to Derek Hale. Maybe he felt like, now that they were dating, he had to at least put out the pretense of following his instructions, just to avoid an argument in the car after everything was said and done (or in the ambulance on the way to the emergency room). He kept his baseball bat in one hand, grinding the handle of it down into the dirt, and huffed. It was completely and totally not fucking fair to the be the only useless human left in the wolf pack. Lydia got to tag along and scrape her nails across chalkboards or whatever the fuck she felt like doing on any given night and give the pack clues and lead them all in the right direction, and Allison had her knives and her crossbows and her insanely perfect aim; and what the hell did Stiles get? Stiles got stay back, Stiles and stay in the car, Stiles and don't get near the lizard, Stiles, you're a weak pathetic human and that thing will tear your throat clean out of your body. Stiles had already gone back and forth with Derek about how involved Stiles was to be in pack matters; and Derek's stance on the subject was always that Stiles had to be kept at least a hundred feet away from anything and anyone supernatural until its intentions were made clear. The lizards' intentions, of course, were to scoop Stiles up and take him to their lizard den to eat his flesh and suck the marrow from his bones. So, maybe, in a very true sense, Stiles staying back was the right choice. Maybe. It didn't piss Stiles off any less to be standing off to the side like a fucking useless invalid while everyone else got to actually fight and help. But, getting the opportunity to stand back and watch Derek fight from a distance was always a bit

of a thrill for Stiles, though he'd never admit it to Sourwolf's face. Watching Derek slice things open with his claws, or break a bone all the way through with just a firm enough press of his fingers, or get blood splattered all over his face after a particularly gruesome kill...something about that shit just really got Stiles fucking going. Like, the way girls in old movies fawn and coo over boys that are tough and strong and beat the captain of the football team up. That's how Stiles felt about Derek. He was always this fucking protector, and no matter what, Stiles knew that when everything boiled down, knew that if the day ever came where the pack would fucking lose and fail, Derek would fight to his absolute last breath to keep Stiles safe. It was, in a word, pornographic in Stiles' mind. This particular night, however, would not be the night the pack was to lose. Mostly because Stiles was about to step in and save the entire day, like he did most of the time anyway, despite what Derek had to say about it. Stiles watched from the sidelines as Scott got knocked clean out (like, immobile on the ground, ass in the air, passed out), as Allison had her bow snapped in half and was left backed up against a wall alongside Lydia with a lizard hissing its tongue out at them, as Isaac got a claw full of poisonous venom in his neck and was left writhing against the dirty ground trying to heal it out, until all that was left was Derek. Cornered by three very hungry looking lizards, Derek actually looked somewhat nervous. Stiles thought that was the first time he ever saw that particular expression on the alpha's face; so he knew that this was serious shit. If he didn't do something, he'd be fucking done for. The only thing he could think to do was pick up a rock, and throw it at one of the lizards' heads. The thing hissed, confused, turning around to glare its reptilian eyes in Stiles' general direction. Stiles threw another rock, clomping it right on the side of its head. “Stiles,” Derek growled as the lizard turned its full body to stare at Stiles with intent. “Stop.” Another rock; this one almost smacking the thing directly in the eyeball. “Nice,” Stiles hissed, reaching down to paw at the ground for another. The lizard started slithering its way closer to him, much to Derek's protests – but it's not like Derek could actually do anything about it; he had two of his own lizards to worry about, and no one to fucking help him, and all he could do is try fruitlessly to bypass them, to stop the thing from getting any closer to Stiles. It was useless. Stiles threw his rock, hitting the head again, wondered if he should maybe actually start playing baseball, before looking down and realizing he was out of rocks. The only things he could find were tiny little pebbles, and a deep impending sense of doom washed over him – as did the looming shadow of the lizard as it straightened up to its full height, blinked its

yellow eyes down at the human, and stared. Like Stiles was its pathetic human bride or something, the thing just stared him up and down. This was not good. Not good whatsoever. Derek kept calling Stiles' name, telling him to run away but where the actual fuck was he going to go? If he tried to run, it'd probably just wrap its tail around Stiles' ankle and drag him off into the fucking swamp somewhere. He took a deep breath, raised his baseball bat in the air, and glared back up at it. Daring him to make a fucking move. “Well?” He spat out, cocking the bat like getting ready to take a pitch. “Come the fuck on.” The lizard didn't look impressed. It looked down at him like a mother looks down at its unruly child – like oh, kids, haha, what can you do? Like it knew that anything Stiles would try to do would be fucking useless and stupid anyway, like the way the rest of the pack always looks at him, like the fucking pathetic little weak skinned, fragile boned human. Stiles grit his teeth. He wasn't pathetic. He wasn't useless. He cracked his neck, and swung the bat as hard as he could. He wound up getting the thing directly in the side of the neck. Wound up cutting off its fucking air supply, sending it staggering the three feet Stiles needed to swing around and not be cornered up against the wall anymore, and then Stiles suddenly had the upper hand. He swung the bat once more, nabbing the thing in the side of the head with a crack, and again, the end of the bat jabbing the left eye, leaving it swollen shut, and again, and again, and again, until it was motionless on the ground. Stiles didn't stop. He could hear that Derek was only down to one lizard himself, was gaining the upper hand on his own fight, but he didn't fucking stop. Crack, crack, crack, as each pound of the bat into the lizard's limp body broke bones, cut through flesh, exposed his fucking internal organs (slimy, green, yellow, disgusting) to the open air. Stiles had no clue for how long this went on; all he knew is that when Derek finally grabbed him and pulled the baseball bat out of his hands, his arms were exhausted, his breathing labored, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. “It's done,” Derek said to him, one hand out the way a person might approach a wounded animal. “You finished him, it's done.” Stiles, huffing and puffing, glared around the cave – Isaac still had a yellowish tint to his skin, but he was standing upright, and Scott was awake and blinking at Stiles with wide eyes, and the lizard that had cornered Allison and Lydia was lying dead on the ground with three of Allison's knives sticking out of its body. It was fucking over. “I'm not weak,” Stiles growled around his labored breathing. “I'm not fucking helpless.”

Derek shifted his gaze between the horrific, mangled body of the lizard down on the ground, at the yellow blood stained all over Stiles' wooden bat, and then to Stiles' face. For a moment, they're just staring at each other; Derek calculating something, or trying to understand Stiles for the billionth time, even though Stiles knew he never fucking could. “No,” he finally said, holding the bat back out until Stiles' fingers wrapped around the handle. “You're not.” Stiles knew, though, that he didn't win that fight because he was actually some incredible superhero with super strength who was an awesome fighter with awesome reflexes. He won because he capitalized on the lizards' assumption that he wasn't going to put up a fight, that he was just going to lay there and take it because he was fucking human. It didn't matter. A win was a win, and Stiles won. Outside at the cars, the pack scattered. Everyone eyed Stiles a little warily, as if they all thought that he had completely gone off of his fucking rocker back there in the cave by literally massacring the dead body of an evil lizard, and went off to their own cars. But Derek followed Stiles back down to the Jeep, his own car keys dangling out of his fingers. “Stop fucking bossing me around,” Stiles hissed as soon as he was within earshot (technically, Derek is nearly always in earshot), whirling around as he threw the baseball bat into the backseat. “Just because we're dating, that doesn't mean you get to treat me like your little doll that you have to watch over, all right?” Derek didn't say anything for a few moments. He fiddled with his keys in his fingers and flicked his eyes up and down Stiles' body. “If you hadn't thrown those rocks, I'd probably be dead.” Stiles blinked. This was not the direction he thought the conversation was going to go. He forced himself to swallow down his litany of stop treating me like the pack's burden and had to send his mind down another path altogether. “Three against one didn't seem...fair.” The alpha took a step closer to him, face as unreadable as ever. “You could've been killed.” Stiles tilted his neck back, his jaw upwards, as Derek got close enough that he had to look up to look into his eyes. “You could've been killed.” “I wouldn't know what to do if you got hurt, Stiles.” “Likewise back at you.” He narrowed his eyes, tilted his head to the side just slightly so Derek could see the long, pale expanse of his neck, and smirked. “I can handle myself.” Derek's voice was hoarse, controlled around the yeah he murmured back. “Can you handle me?” The question sent a visible reaction down Derek's spine – he fucking shivered, or quaked, and maybe Stiles didn't have fucking werewolf senses, but he could tell as plain as day what he

would be smelling in the air if he did. Arousal. Thick, heavy, unmistakable. Derek's eyes flashed red, and a low growl started up in the pit of his throat. Everyone had already driven off, at that point. There was nothing left behind of the pack aside from a few clouds of dust and the distant sound of Scott's shitty car bumbling down the mountainside road. Derek was close enough, now, that Stiles could buck his hips just slightly forward, knocking himself against the lump in Derek's pants, and that was that. Derek grabbed Stiles and pushed him over the front hood of the Jeep, holding him steadily in place to make sure he didn't go sliding down off the side, and started undoing his pants. “Like this, huh?” Stiles hissed at him, feeling fingers begin to press at his entrance. “Out here, like this?” “Yeah,” Derek snarled close to his ear, finally probing two spit slicked fingers inside of him, and Stiles groaned. “Thought you'd like it like this.” Stiles grinned, pressing his cheek against the cold blue paint on his car; he'd been wondering what kind of shit Derek would say in bed, and had always suspected he'd be absolutely fucking filthy with it. Now he was finally finding out just how true that would end up being. “I do, Derek.” At the sound of his name, Derek's fingers stuttered a bit, and then pulled out completely; while the sound of Derek's own pants coming undone sounded out alongside the noises of the forest surrounding them. He kept one strong hand on Stiles' back, still holding him up, and Stiles liked how warm it felt; how steady, and sure, and strong. Stiles knew he was covered in lizard juices and lizard guts, knew he was sweaty and dirty and reeked of the putrid vomitous smell of the rotting bodies that were piled up in that cave; his hair was a mess, he had been crying only ten minutes earlier, and there was nothing sexy about any of that. But Derek. Derek, for whatever reason, was so unbelievably fucking turned on by Stiles beating the organs out of a dead lizard that he couldn't stand to wait until they got back to the loft or Stiles' house. He was willing to fuck Stiles up against the side of Stiles' Jeep, which he hated, in the middle of a forest outside of a cave where a pack of dead lizard bodies was sitting. It was fucking insane – it was exactly the way Stiles liked it. He pushed backwards against Derek's hand; and Derek immediately retracted it, as if worried Stiles was changing his mind. Stiles whirled around, met Derek's eyes with a cool gaze, and said, “do you love me?” The question froze Derek in his place, hand on his own dick, eyes huge and wide under Stiles' steady stare. “If you say no, you can still fuck me. I just want to know.” Derek licked his lips, searched Stiles' face for a second. The way he always did whenever he considered whatever Stiles doing to be what he called fucking insane. Every time he'd yell a

little too loudly, or make a stupid decision, or throw himself headfirst into danger, Derek would give him that look. As if he was trying to figure out whether or not Stiles was kidding, or if Stiles has a few screws missing, or if he really wants to do this all over again. By this, of course, Stiles refers to Derek's bizarre penchant for landing himself with the polar opposite of himself. Derek is steady, and control. He likes things within the lines. He likes to wake up every morning at seven am on the dot, do pushups, eat a huge breakfast of eggs and bacon and pancakes, shower at eight. That's his morning, every. Single. Morning. Structure and balance and evenings spent sitting on the couch watching CSI. That was Derek. Kate Argent was guns and fire and probably wild backseat sex in the high school parking lot. Jennifer Blake was dark magic and nightmares and revenge. Stiles could recognize the different parts of them easily enough, could understand if not sympathize with them, saw them for what they truly were. But Derek. He just boiled them both down to crazy bitches and tried to fucking move on with his life. Maybe because he thought that if he lingered too long, if he thought of them as actual people who fucked with him, who drew them in with their deceitful grins and that spark of darkness and instability that got Derek off somehow, then he wouldn't be able to hate them so much. And then, what the fuck was Stiles, then? Stiles was baseball bat wielding, public sex, hyperactive late nights, less-than-four-hours-of-sleep a night. And just like both times before, Derek fell for it. “I think I might,” he said back, finally, fisting his dick and staring at how Stiles was just fucking standing there with his pants around his ankles demanding to know if Derek loved him. Stiles laughed, because he knew – he knew he had a tendency to do things other people wouldn't, to jump where others would stagger back, and he knew that Derek fucking liked it. “Fuck me, then. I'm getting bored.” Derek did. He really, really fucked Stiles, like he thought it was going to be the last time, or something – but Stiles knew it wouldn't be. It couldn't possibly be. Something that fucking good, like the first drop on a rollercoaster or the first time someone kisses you, has to be fucking repeated. Stiles came all over the side of his own car and he laughed; Derek went into his own car and fished out a bottle of water to rinse the come off, with, and Stiles laughed again, and Derek kissed him – said, you're fucking insane, and Stiles met him eye for eye and said and you like it. Now, though. Stiles doesn't know if Derek likes anything about Stiles anymore. Stiles is, to put it pretty lightly, a fucking mess at the moment. And not the sexy mess covered in blood and guts that used to kill things at Derek's side, but a fucking drunken, exhausted, sad, mess. The way Derek looked at him last night, as fuzzy and blurry as the memory is... Stiles never thought he'd see that look on Derek's face, aimed at himself. It was disappointment,

and it was horrible, and Stiles woke up in the morning feeling like a pile of absolutely disgusting trash, not just because of the hangover. “I'm not drinking anymore.” He says definitively to George Blueny as he pours a pile of pellets into his food trough. “LA Stiles drank a lot and made an ass of himself every night.” George pecks at his food, paying no mind to Stiles whatsoever. “Beacon Hills Stiles doesn't do things like that.” What Beacon Hills Stiles does do is spend copious amounts of time trying to prove his worth to everyone and show the entire world that he can more than handle his own in any situation he finds himself trapped in. Last night...was not a very good display of independence. If he remembers correctly, his exboyfriend had to carry him up the stairs and tuck him into bed like a little baby because he drank too much. Stiles straightens up, sighs through his nose and repeats the phrase to himself in his head. I'm not drinking anymore. Drinking bad. Drinking very, very bad. That's a lesson he should've had drilled into his brain years ago, honestly; probably after the second time he launched himself out of a moving vehicle because he saw a dog being walked down the sidewalk. At least, he thinks, he didn't wind up curling himself into a ball on the floor crying hysterically, begging everyone for forgiveness and admitting that LA was an absolute shit pile and a mistake and that Stiles was a fucking idiot and he left because he was terrified he was turning into something he couldn’t control. Honestly, that day will have to come at some point, he knows. Because lying to his friends is not just hard, but impossible. Eventually they'll tune into his heartbeat and figure it out, and that will be fucking terrible. So, basically, it would be better for everyone involved if Stiles just came fucking clean with the truth. He gets the opportunity when Scott comes over, twiddling his fingers in his hands and looking sullen in Stiles' bedroom. “Sorry for last night,” he says, and Stiles wants to launch himself through a window. “How in the hell is last night your fault, Scott? I was the one who got into a drunken bickering match with his ex-boyfriend and vomited everywhere.” Scott scratches at his forehead, stares at the bird for a second as if to give him something else to do. “I was the one who dragged Derek along, though. I – I guess I just thought...” Scott thought he could fix things. The way he tries to go off and fix everything for everyone, to make everyone be friends and like each other and get along and save the day together; in Scott's perfect world, no one ever breaks up. Especially not two of his closest friends. “I know,” Stiles says, avoiding eye contact. “I know. But too much time has passed, and we don't know how to talk to each other.” Not that they ever did in the first place.

His best friend stares at Stiles like there are a million things he'd love to say right about now, but isn't sure if he should even bother. Something tells Stiles that Scott has already had some variation of this exact conversation with Derek, and it went just as badly as this one is going; probably worse, actually. A slammed door was definitely involved. “You two are both stubborn and dumb.” Stiles sighs through his nose, puts his hands on his hips. There's no stopping Scott once he starts going off. “You know Derek hasn't even been with anyone since you left, right? You know he's just been moping around like he's had his heart torn out for two years, right?” “It's funny, though,” Stiles scratches at his eyebrow, tries to keep his voice even, “that I don't remember ever getting a call from him.” “What's funny is how you went out of your way to talk to every single other member of the pack. Except Derek.” Stiles grits his teeth, to keep the truth from spilling out of his lips. That he couldn't call Derek. That if he called Derek, he'd have fucking thrown everything away to come running back home to him. If he says anything even remotely like that, anything remotely resembling the truth right now, Scott will get doe-eye and get a pitying look on his face. And Stiles fucking hates being pitied. “We broke up!” He yells instead, making Scott snap his jaw shut with a click. “We fucking broke up, and I didn't have anything to say to him anymore! Now, he fucking hates me, so what does it matter?” Scott closes the distance between himself and Stiles until they're only a foot away; and he cocks his head to the side. “What happened between you two, Stiles?” Stiles clenches his jaw, doesn't meet his eyes. “Before you left you two were fine. At graduation – you...you were fine.” Stiles wasn't fucking fine. He was barely hanging on by a thread, back then. Maybe no one else noticed, because Stiles acting jittery and getting a little too addicted to killing things wasn't anything that was out of the norm for him. He was scaring the shit out of himself, the way he didn't even feel anything after cracking a witch's head open with a crow bar – the way Derek had to pull him up and away from her before he fucking killed her, the way Stiles thrashed and demanded to be let down, his fingers still wrapped tightly around the bar. She was human. For all intents and purposes, she was human, and Stiles nearly fucking killed her. And he didn't feel anything; except to try and shove Derek up against the wall of the alleyway, to fumble around with the clasp of his belt and his jeans, trying to shove his hand down into the alpha's pants.

Derek recoiled, shoved Stiles' hands away easily, and pinned his wrists together with one hand. “Stiles.” Stiles blinked, confused. “What? You don't want to?” The wolf's eyes flicked to Stiles' hands, covered in dark red blood – the witch was coughing and sputtering behind them on the ground. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Towards the end there, Derek had stopped saying that like it was sexy. He stopped saying it like he found it endearing, or attractive, or fuckable, or even like he liked it, at all. He started saying it like he honestly believed it. As if he truly and honestly believed that Stiles was losing his mind. Crumbling under the pressure put on him by the pack, cracking around the edges and turning as hard-edged and rough as someone like Gerard Argent. It wasn't easy for Stiles to admit that maybe he couldn't quite handle it. It was never easy for him to accept anyone's help, to even ask for it in the first place. He put on this whole show with his baseball bat and his hard eyes and I can take fucking care of myself that he became so terrified for even a second to admit that he was losing himself to something he didn't even understand. So, he didn't. He packed up and left, instead. Maybe if he'd told Derek the truth, things would've gone differently. In fact, he knows things would have. Derek would have been understanding, would've hugged him and said you don't have to come along, you know, Stiles, until you're comfortable again and it would've been sweet and nice and nothing that Stiles deserved after the things he'd done. He tried not to think about that, though. LA Stiles gets drunk all the time. Beacon Hills Stiles kills things. Which is better? “You don't want to tell me,” Scott says, breaking Stiles out of his thoughts, “that's fine. You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to. But you and Derek better figure out a way to at least be civil to one another, because we all have to work together.” Stiles resists the urge to roll his eyes. Sometimes he thinks Scott would be a much better alpha than Derek could ever hope to be – Derek lets people come and go at whim, mopes about it, maybe at the most. But Scott will stand tall and demand that everyone get along and stay put exactly where they are so everything can get worked out and they're all a great big happy family. “What, like you want me to go talk to him?” Scott pinches his face like he just ate a lemon and huffs. “Or don't. Whatever keeps the peace, Stiles.” As if Scott would ever be satisfied with that; what he wants deep down is for Stiles and Derek to run off into the sunset as the credits start rolling and the music swells. Maybe he's just trying

to be a little more realistic, these days. “I didn't come here just to apologize,” he starts, and Stiles internally goes cold. The only time Scott ever says something like that is if... “I came to invite you to a pack meeting.” So, what Stiles has been dreading the most about return home has come to fruition, and Stiles pretends like it's all like it used to be. Like all he's thinking about is how much time he has to devote to research, how much sleep he'll be getting tonight, how many energy drinks he needs to make it through a sleepless night. If Scott notices the uptick in his best friend's heartbeat, he must attribute it to excitement or perhaps the natural anxiety that comes along with hearing that something evil is lurking around BH. At the actual meeting, Stiles relaxes back into the familiar leather couch in Derek's loft, doesn't think about the number of times he and Derek have had sex here, just focuses intently at a spot beyond Derek's head as he talks on and on about whatever it is that's come back around to try and kill them this time. Jackals, Derek says. Half demon-wolf half human hybrids that come up from the actual pit of Hell for no other reason than to get their shits and giggles raining down pain and misery on humanity. Stiles thinks about The Exorcist, thinks about how they're all going to look like bad movie CGI, and pointedly doesn't think about the way Derek doesn't look at him, either. “Not a big deal,” Isaac cracks his knuckles and grins, genuine excitement all over his face. “We've had worse, right?” “Their biggest problem,” Derek begins slowly, his eyes sliding in Stiles' general direction, “is that they won't be as interested in us wolves as in any humans.” Stiles waits for it. He waits for so, Stiles, you're staying behind or Stiles, you wait in the car or Stiles, go home and wait for us to call you. But Derek just looks away again. “So be careful.” ---Derek kind of figured Stiles would be able to handle himself. Remembering all the times Stiles swung whatever blunt instrument he had in his hands with that fucking detached facial expression, his arms loose and his form sloppy but fatal to anyone on the other end of it. All the times Stiles shoved Derek away when he tried to help him, whiskey eyes burning. All the times Stiles emphatically hissed about I can do this fuck off and...he did do it. He did it every time. Towards the end, before he left, Stiles had started to turn borderline feral in the way he would handle himself in the heat of a battle. He would hop out of his car before it had even come to a complete stop, grab his baseball bat out of the back, swing it around in his hand – painting the

single most threatening picture of a human Derek had ever seen. The way he'd walk forwards without waiting for anyone else, face a blank slate, hands tightening on the handle of his bat. He got to the point where he could pretty much lose control on anything. A fucking fairy, malicious and cruel but beautiful all the same, begging for Stiles to stop, stop, please, stop in a tiny voice, and he didn't. So Derek had to pick him up and toss him away, like he's had to do a dozen other times. “Get a fucking grip,” Derek snarled, bending down to find the fairy dead and lifeless, silver blood everywhere – including all over Stiles' clothes and weapon. “That thing tried to rip your fucking head off, if you remember that!” Stiles pointed the bat at Derek, accusatory, splattering blood all over the ground. “It would've killed me just as easily. What,” he raised his eyebrows and threw the bat out again, shaking even more of the blood in Derek's general direction, “you going soft on me, alpha?” Derek would always stand back and stare, wide eyed – he didn't know what this fucking was. He wasn't sure what kind of road Stiles was going down, and he really wasn't sure if it was a good one. Allison would sometimes give Stiles long looks after a particularly gruesome kill, recognition painted all over her features, but she never said a word. Case in point, after a certain number of supernatural kills and wins on Stiles' hands, he sort of started believing him when he said he could take care of himself and not need Derek to watch over him the entire time. When Stiles pulls up in his Jeep, beside Isaac's car at the end of the line, the last to arrive for the first time in who knows how long, he slowly climbs out. There's nothing in his eyes; none of that determination or anger or hatred pulsing behind the irises. He swallows thickly, reaches into the backseat of his car to pull the baseball bat out. He doesn't swing it. He just holds it by the handle limply in one hand, like he's not sure what to do with it anymore. That probably should've been Derek's first clue that something was wrong, there, something was horribly, terribly off; but instead, he chalked it up to Stiles being angry at him, and let it drop. Into the woods they go, Stiles trailing along beside Scott, and Derek doesn't worry about him. The jackals show up, and Derek doesn't worry. Derek kills one, snaps its neck easily enough – because jackals, while vicious and merciless, aren't as strong as they make themselves out to be. They're easy kills. Derek doesn't. Fucking. Worry. He spots Stiles lingering at the edges of the fight, his lips set in a grim line, and Derek thinks he's probably just warming up, or something. Nothing to worry about. Some delusional part of Derek's brain is still convincing himself that Stiles is fine, even though the night before Stiles was blacking himself out drunk.

The few jackals left out of the pack finally catch a whiff of Stiles standing there off to the side, and all three of them turn their heads simultaneously to stare at him. Derek stands back himself, and lets his pack deal with this all on their own. Scott grabs at one, and Isaac another, while Allison is busy off to the side picking up all the arrows she lost in the heat of it. This is normal. This is how things always go – it's not a big deal for Allison or Derek to leave Stiles alone to handle his own fucking monster, because he got so good at it. Everyone expects Stiles to do what he does best. The last jackal stalks toward Stiles, dog-like muzzle pulled back in a growl, saliva dripping out onto the ground. Stiles, for his part, just stands there – he doesn't make any moves to charge at it, or make some snarky comment. Nothing. Finally, when it's five feet away, he raises the bat, and Derek can tell that his fingers are shaking. He's holding the thing like he's never used it before, out from his body at a strange angle, his hips not lined up, everything a fucking mess. His eyes blink rapidly, his breathing comes out ragged and hoarse, and he doesn't swing the bat. Not when it's within range, not when it's two feet away, not when it's less than one foot away, not when it's on top of him, grabbing his fucking neck and squeezing. Like his entire body just went slam. Paralyzed. The bat clatters from Stiles' hands, as he claws uselessly at the furry hand wrapped around his neck, choking him out. The only reason it takes Derek so long to do something, to act, is because he's startled. He can't believe what he's seeing, truly, he's fucking shocked. The last time he saw Stiles this vulnerable, the last time Stiles was in danger like this...that was years ago. Finally, Derek springs into action, slashing the back of the Jackal's neck, sending it sprawling to the ground before slamming his foot down on its neck with a crack. Stiles falls to the ground and gasps for breath – sputtering and coughing, on his hands and knees on the ground, baseball bat forlorn next to him on the ground. The rest of the pack looks on, in just as much shock as Derek. No one knows what to say or do, and Stiles isn't laughing or making some witty remark like he normally would. He's shaking. “What the fuck was that?” Derek demands, and Stiles pulls himself up to his feet, hands shaking as he paws forwards towards the baseball bat on the ground and rubs at his neck. “I -” he grabs the bat, pulls it close to himself like a security blanket; in his eyes there's a disturbing look of terror, unmitigated and unchecked. Like he's too shaken to do anything but stare vacantly at no one and nothing in particular. “I'm – I'm sorry, I -” Without another word, he's turning around and staggering back off towards where the cars are parked at the edge of the tree line, still holding the bat tightly against himself. Derek stares after him in disbelief, and looks to his pack for some sort of confirmation that that actually just fucking

happened. He actually just watched Stiles don't fucking help me Stilinski nearly get choked out because he couldn't even move, he was so afraid. “He's rusty,” Scott says immediately, in a hurried, rushed tone of voice before Derek or anyone else can say a word. “That's all. He's just rusty, he's all right.” Allison doesn't look convinced, but Isaac is already nodding his head in agreement with Scott. “It's probably been a while since he's seen anything like that.” Bullshit. Derek remembers the very first time Stiles saw something like that. He remembers all those times when Stiles was just a gawky sixteen year old nerdy kid, the way he would chase Scott down even on the full moon, daring to get close to him without even so much as blinking, or when Peter in his alpha shift was standing right outside the school doors and Stiles leaped out into the direct line of danger to grab the pipe cutters to lock the door closed, Stiles glaring in at him through the window and hissing I'm not afraid of you. Whatever the fuck that shit was? That just wasn't Stiles. Plain and simple. Derek growls under his breath and chases after Stiles at a full run, to catch him before he gets into his car and drives away, before Derek has the chance to make sure he's not critically injured in any way. “Hey,” he calls to Stiles' back as he's dropping the baseball bat into the backseat of his car. Stiles doesn't turn, makes like he's going to ignore Derek and just run off. “Hey!” Grabbing onto Stiles' shoulder, pushing him back against the window of his Jeep. Stiles stares up at him, and he has tears in his eyes. Big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. And he's still shaking, still has that fucking glazed look in his eyes. Derek decides to soften his tone, at the last second. “What are you – are you all right?” Stiles swipes at the tears on his face, clears his throat – rimmed in red and starting to bruise – before answering in a rasp. “I almost just got choked to death.” The alpha scans Stiles over once more. “Because you stood there and let it happen.” Something about that statement wakes Stiles up, like a slap in the face would. He straightens up, stops shaking, and glares directly into Derek's face, the way he always used to. “It's been a while since the last time I was attacked by a fucking hell demon, Derek.” He moves to open up his door, but Derek pushes it back, slamming it closed effectively. Stiles gapes at him. “Stop playing games with me, Stiles.” “Let me get into my own car, Derek.” “There's something wrong with you,” he growls, pushing Stiles back harder against the car to get a better look at him. “You're not acting like yourself.”

And this. This really pisses Stiles off. He thrashes, shoving at Derek's hands to get them off of him, shoving him back until he gets the upper hand and Derek is the one who's taking two cautious steps back from him as the human stalks closer to him with a sneer. “What? What is it Derek? Are you mad because I'm not that fucking – that fucking concept you wanted me to be anymore, huh? That fucking crazy person who would kill things for you and have wild sex with you afterward? Is that what you want?” Derek remembers what Scott said the other day in the car – that he always treated Stiles more like an idea than an actual person. “Like Kate?” Derek flinches at the name, taking another step backwards, only to have Stiles close the distance yet again – daring him with his entire body to fucking do something. Derek doesn't know what to do, at all; it used to be that he would grab Stiles, shake him a couple times and yell at him to snap him out of whatever tirade he was about to go on. But now, here, with the entire pack watching from the treeline, Derek doesn't know what to do. “I'm not like Kate,” Stiles growls, his voice low, threatening. Derek blinks. “I never thought you-” “I can't just fucking kill things like that, okay? I can't be like that, I'm not like that, I don't – I don't do things -” he scrubs his hands down his face, breathes shallowly in between the cracks in his fingers. “I'm not like that.” The fact of the matter is, Stiles was like that. For a while. Like Derek said, he more or less started getting off on the kill, on the way it felt to just fucking destroy something with his bare hands and have that blood all over him, to feel like he's done something so invincible as take something else's life. He practically thrived on it. All the best sex he ever had with Stiles happened after the kid managed to kill something, and back then, Derek didn't think much of that. He knows the adrenaline rush better than almost anyone else. He got off on it as much as Stiles did, because, for the first time, he was with someone whose darkness he actively understood. Until he didn't anymore. Until it got out of hand. Until Oh. Oh. Derek looks at Stiles; and for the first time since he's been back, he's really seeing him. Because now he gets it. Now he understands why Stiles left. Any last dregs of anger that Derek had been feeling towards Stiles dissipate into the air, because he realizes something that he should've realized years ago. Stiles never left because of Derek. He never wanted to leave, in the first place. He left for exactly the reason he said - because he fucking had to. He had to. And Derek - holy shit, Derek feels so fucking stupid for every thing, for how much went over his head, to how little he understood Stiles all along. And Scott was right. Derek

never saw Stiles as anything more than just another one those crazy people he was always getting fooled by, and he treated him as such. Stiles, in the present moment, is whirling around and heading back to his car, Derek standing there stock still, unsure if he's supposed to go after him or not. He doesn't. ---Allison gives him a long, measured stare. She's not smiling at him, and it makes him uncomfortable to not see the dimples on her face – it makes him uncomfortable to be stared at like he's done something wrong. Although, at this point, the number of things he's done wrong is so high that every single person he knows should be giving him this exact fucking look. “You could've talked to me.” She says, finally, staring directly into Stiles' eyes. Stiles scrunches his face up, not understanding. “Why would I...” Allison runs a hand through her hair and lets out a long exhale, crossing her legs on the couch across from him. “When my mom died. After – after that all happened and I was really angry.” Stiles remembers that pretty well. Mostly, Scott in completely and utter disbelief that Allison could ever do such terrible things and Isaac getting stabbed a zillion times and how fucking detached she was all the time. “Up to that point, I had spent most of my time having people tell me that, for my own good and protection, there were things I just didn't get to know about. People were lying to me, and keeping me out of things, and I felt really invalidated.” Stiles swallows. He can sense where this is going. “So when my mother died, I more or less...snapped. After all those lies and the way people treated me like I was so weak and helpless all the time, I was determined to have control over myself, my actions, my life. I wanted to prove something. I wanted to, you know, avenge my mother, but really – I wanted to show everyone I wasn't some helpless little girl.” She fixes him with another long stare. “I get it, Stiles. In my quest to find control, I lost it. I did terrible things. I wasn't myself.” Staring down at his hands to avoid her steady gaze, he tries to see things from Allison's perspective. In a sense, he guesses, they are more alike than he previously would've thought. Both of them were treated as the weakest link for so long, as something to be bossed around for their own protection, and both of them cracked underneath the weight it put on top of their shoulders – to carry the burden of being the burden. “Your mother died, Allison. I think you had a pretty good reason to start stabbing people.” Allison smiles just slightly, barely noticeable. “And your life hasn't been drastically changed by

what you know now? Your father hasn't been put in danger more times than you could count because of it? Your friends? Derek?” All of that has happened, has continued to happen, on a constant neverending loop, will probably never stop happening. And everyone else around him had things they used to deal with it – Scott and Isaac their claws, and Lydia the voices she hears, and Allison her weapons and her family. What did Stiles have? A baseball bat, and a merciless streak inside of himself to prove something to everyone. “You should've talked to me, Stiles. I could'ved helped you.” Stiles blinks up at her, tilts his head to the side. “How'd you wind up snapping out of it?” Allison laughs now, throwing her head back with it. “Finding out my grandfather was an evil piece of shit kind of hurried things along, for me.” Unfortunately, Stiles doesn't have that. He doesn't have some great big reveal of betrayal, he doesn't have anyone else to blame everything on, someone else who's been pulling his strings this entire time and convincing him to do all these things. The only thing he ever had was his own reflection in the mirror – and his way of coping with that was to pack up and run away. Of course that was a mistake, of fucking course it was, he sees that now; he probably even saw it way back then. But he figured that anything, anything at all, would be better than going down the path he was going down. Becoming one of those hunters that can't see the lines between good and evil anymore; that doesn't care how innocent a creature or person is. That believes everything that isn't a human being deserves to be fucking beaten to death. "One thing I've learned, that's definitely helped - control is overrated. I let go of trying to be tough. I let go of trying to be stronger than I really am. If something's too much, I say so, and stand back." She rolls his eyes down his body. "You should try that, sometime. Is that really the whole reason you left?” “That's about the size of it, yes.” Allison gets a sour expression on her face – something akin to disappointment, or maybe even annoyance. “Derek had nothing to do with it?” For the first time in a very long time, Stiles decides to tell the truth. Because, Derek might've goaded him forwards with calling him crazy, with painting him up like his new Kate or Jennifer, but he never did it on purpose. Derek just happened to like what Stiles was emitting around the exact same time he was closing in on himself. He liked having sex with a bloody Stiles and he liked fucking a Stiles that was just as eager to fuck him right back, pumped full of adrenaline. He didn't know, he had no fucking idea what Stiles was going through internally. “Derek would've been the only one who could've talked me into staying, Allison.”

---“I never thought you were like Kate.” It's the first thing Derek says when Stiles swings his front door open. He's still in his pajamas, a pair of boxers and a white t-shirt, because Derek had been up all night pacing back and forth across the floor of his loft and hadn't gotten a single wink of sleep. Counting down the minutes until Stiles would be awake and he could come over and talk to him and...and work some shit out. Fight their way through the miscommunications, finally speak the unspoken, and just get it all out and see what comes out of it. Derek wants that. He needs that. He's tired of avoiding Stiles, of being angry at him for hurting him; mostly because, now, he understands what Stiles had to do what he did. He doesn't blame him. He doesn't. “You treated me like her,” Stiles says, leaning up against the side of the doorway, not inviting Derek inside. “You think I'm crazy.” Derek has a lie forming on his tongue; a way to get out of this conversation so they can just hurry up and make up and have sex, like he's been fucking fantasizing about for years, but...no. He can't do that anymore. That's not what people in healthy relationships do. “Yes, I do.” Stiles huffs out a breath, sounds like a laugh. “But, not like...her. Never like her. Stiles, I -” He waits expectantly, eyebrows raised, but Derek can't think of what to say. How to explain this, this fucking mess he got them both into by being so thoughtless all the time, by not just talking to Stiles and expressing the way he felt. It's after a full ten seconds of dead silence, Derek not saying a single fucking word even though Stiles is waiting, that Stiles just speaks up for him. “You don't have to apologize to me, you know.” “Yes, yes I fucking do, I'm the one who-” “I messed up.” Stiles cuts him off, takes a step downwards so that he's on the same level as Derek, standing on the front porch in the early morning breeze. “I really – I fucked up. I messed everything up, with – with everyone, with everything...with you. I just thought - if I went someplace else I could be happy? If I went somewhere else I could become someone else, not get sucked into the same world that Kate did.” He scratches the back of his neck, ashamed. “It took me a while to learn that people don't really work that way.” Derek understands. When he ran off to New York with Laura, he expected the ghosts to stop haunting him, to stop whispering in his ear – he expected the primal drive to seek revenge and rip someone's fucking throat out would fade away if he went someplace new. But, like Stiles

says. People don't really work that way. You are who you are, and you drag your shit in a suitcase with you everywhere you go, no matter how hard you try to leave it behind. “You killed evil things, Stiles,” Derek takes a step closer. “You never killed anything innocent, you were just – you were doing what I told you to do.” “You told me to stay behind.” “But I dragged you along every single time.” Because he couldn't stand leaving Stiles alone, behind, to fend for himself in anything happened. “Didn't I?” Stiles purses his lips, looks away. Doesn't say anything else. Derek takes that as a sign that he won this round. “Stiles, hey,” he reaches his fingers out and gently pushes at the side of Stiles' face, to turn his jaw until his eyes are looking back into Derek's. “You think I don't know what it's like to have something inside of me that I can't always control?” Whatever it is that's inside of Stiles, it's the same kind of thing that's inside of Derek. A primal urge to feel bones crack underneath his hands, to get blood in between in fingers all hot and fresh, to fucking rip something to pieces because he can. It's not pretty. It's not romantic. But, somehow, Stiles and Derek make it so that it is. When Stiles speaks again, his voice is small, breath fanning out onto Derek's fingers where they still sit perched on his chin. “I don't want to be like Kate.” “You're not, Stiles. You're not.” He takes a leap of trust, here, and wraps his arms around Stiles' body – feels, for the first time in two years, what it's like to have Stiles pressed up again him like this. His warm and smooth skin, the way he smells, his spiky hair brushing against Derek's neck. “You are nothing like her. You're just Stiles.” It takes a few seconds, but Stiles wraps his arms right back around Derek, huffing out a sob into his shoulder; dampening Derek's shirt and making small whimpering sounds in the back of his throat. Derek rubs soothing circles on his back, doesn't know what to say anymore, so he doesn't speak. He just lets Stiles cry into his shoulder, lets him hug him so tightly that if he were human, he'd be short of breath by now. “I'm sorry.” The words are small against Derek's neck, muffled. “I never should've left. I fucked up – I got scared. I didn't know what to do so I just...I – I never should've left.” Derek sighs through his nose. “I never should've let you leave, Stiles.”

End Notes

The song that inspired the title is I Could Be There For You by Eisley~ also, I spent a really long time trying to decide if that's where I wanted to end it. It kind of feels like it's too soon to end it, but then again, there's really no place else I could go from there except into flashes of Stiles and Derek getting used to each other again - not anything with an actual plot. I think I'd be doing this fic an injustice if I just forced more in when I've got nothing left

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