Archive of Our Own ^beta

Do not let my fickle flesh go to waste
As it keeps my heart and soul in its place
And I will love with urgency but not with haste

 --Mumford & Sons, "Not With Haste"

*

Derek doesn’t have time to investigate the smell when the door to the dive bar opens. He’s busy dodging fists to the face, putting on a good show for the drunken assholes outside the cage. After a few matches, he learned it’s better not to get hit in the face. People get suspicious when he doesn’t bruise, when the blood wipes off with no visible wound underneath.

He lets his opponent get in a couple good rib shots, almost hard enough to do temporary damage, before grabbing him by the front of his filthy tank top and slamming him into the bars of the cage hard enough to rattle his teeth. One left-handed blow later and the guy’s on the floor seeing birdies.

The drunken assholes cheer belligerently. Derek didn’t know Canada had so many drunken assholes, to be honest. Maybe Alberta’s just special.

Shaking his hand out like it actually hurts (it doesn’t), Derek makes for the cage door and descends into the bar proper to collect his share of the take as the officiator announces him the winner. Then, out of politeness, he orders an expensive drink, even though it won’t get him drunk, and tips well.

The newcomer’s sitting two stools down from him at the bar, hunched over in a red hoodie that’s not nearly warm enough for the season or the geography, holey gloves wrapped around a cup of coffee. Derek can practically smell the hunger on him. But there’s something else too.

He’s not quite human.

Derek can’t put his finger on how he knows. The kid’s not a werewolf—all Derek’s senses would be going haywire—and he’s not any other supernatural creature Derek’s ever come into contact with either. But there’s something to his scent, an extra charge, like ozone after a lightning strike.

It’s probably not a good sign, whatever he is. Derek thought he’d be safe in this shithole for another few weeks at least, but it looks like it’s time to move on.

Still. He doesn’t want to hit the road without as much intel as he can gather, so he orders a crappy overdone hamburger and some fries and waits to see if the kid will start up a conversation.

He doesn’t.

He does, however, stare at Derek. Or at Derek’s food, more likely, Derek revises once he hears the kid’s stomach rumble.

Derek’s paying so much attention to not looking like he’s checking the kid out—not in the sexual way, just in the what are you way—that he doesn’t notice the drunken assholes assembling until it’s too late.

Damn it. Apparently his opponent has accused him of using steroids, and he’s got the backup of one of the less lucky gamblers in the room. And at least one firearm, from the smell of gunpowder in the air. Derek thought Canada had better gun-control laws.

Well, at least his accusers don’t seem to know about werewolves.

By this point in his life, Derek’s gotten good at pretending to feel threatened. It doesn’t always work—he’s six feet tall and, as someone he prefers not to think of once put it, his muscles have muscles—but he knows how to put on the charm, how to make himself look smaller.

Too bad he just knocked out a guy with a single punch. Kind of ruins his unassuming nice guy face before he can even make it. He slides his plate away—pointedly toward the kid, because the fries might as well feed someone—and raises his hands as he steps off his stool. “I don’t want any trouble.”

There comes the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being cocked. God damn it, Derek hates buckshot. It makes a fucking mess, and digging out one bullet is bad enough. “Well, trouble’s found you, looks like.”

Forget it. If Derek has to leave, he’ll leave, but he’s taking his winnings and that asshole’s shotgun with him.

Damn if he leaves that kid in the crossfire, though. He backs up a step, and Dumb and Dumber fall right for it. The particularly stupid one raises the shotgun.

Derek unsheathes his claws and separates the barrel from the firing chamber before he can get a shot off, grabs the other asshole by the throat and throws him against the cage again, from the outside this time, with a greater measure of his full strength. The impact knocks him unconscious.

Shotgun pisses his pants.

Behind the bar, the lone bartender, a woman in her early fifties, doesn’t even look up. “You’re cleaning that up, Hal,” she says to Shotgun.

Shotgun curses and scampers out of Derek’s sight.

Derek figures he has a few minutes before anyone else wants to challenge him, but he’s definitely overstayed his welcome. He hits the head, pays for his meal, adds enough for a generous tip. When he looks over at the kid’s spot at the bar, the kid is gone, his coffee cup empty.

Hell.

*

Derek wouldn’t exactly call his lifestyle glamorous. A couple years ago he wouldn’t even have called it a life. Suffice it to say a lot has changed since then.

First his family burned, leaving Derek as a lone alpha. He was never meant to be alone, never mind in charge. Ironically, he’s now as ill-suited to being in good company as he once was to a solitary life.

Six months after he got his family killed, Kate caught up with him again. Only this time….

Derek flexes his hand. It took getting used to, the metal in his bones. He’s heavier than he should be—if he weren’t a werewolf, he probably wouldn’t be able to move at all—and the cold seems to chill him from the inside. Once upon a time, he never got cool enough to shiver.

But there’s no use dwelling on it. Kate’s dead, the facility’s gone, and he’s free—as long as he keeps running.

He can’t run with a tail.

Derek hits the remote starter on the pickup as he leaves the bar, wanting to be ready to go. The old-fashioned Slipstream trailer is quiet, but there’s a heartbeat in the bed of the truck, under the hardcover.

Shit.

Derek slides into the cab and puts the truck in gear. The thermostat in the rearview mirror marks the temperature at -27. And it’s only going to get colder.

Fucking Canada, Christ. Derek can’t afford to have a crisis of conscience. A single man fucking around in the Canadian wilderness doesn’t draw much attention. Derek’s got enough plaid in his wardrobe to make sure of that. Add a kid whose picture is probably in the dictionary under “jailbait” to the equation and he can kiss his anonymity good-bye.

Derek pulls over and puts the truck in park.

His boots crunch in the snow as he makes his way to the back of the truck. With a silent hope that he won’t live to regret this, he shoves the first layer of the hardtop back.

“Shit.” The kid from the bar tries to scramble deeper into the bed of the truck, like that’s going to make any difference. In his haste he bashes his head on the edge of the hardcover and swears again, and takes one hand out from where he had it shoved under his armpit to rub at the bump. His hood falls back at the movement, revealing unwashed brown hair sticking up in seventeen directions at once.

Finally he looks up and meets Derek’s gaze for the first time.

It’s a little like being gut-punched, like wolfsbane, like mountain ash. Jailbait. Yeah, that assessment was pretty on the nose. A snubby little turned-up nose, to be precise, under whiskey-brown eyes that are trying to be hard. The kid is pale-skinned, too bony, marked on his face and neck with a constellation of moles, and if every trucker north of the forty-ninth parallel hasn’t already taken advantage of that mouth, Derek’s a twinkle-toed fairy.

He reaches for his best alpha voice and comes up with “It’s warmer up front.”

The kid stares at him resolutely. “I’m not gonna blow you.”

His heart doesn’t skip. Well. Maybe Derek’s a fairy after all. “Wasn’t going to ask you to. Now hurry up. I want to make the next town before midnight.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it works.

“Oh my God heated seats,” the kid says reverently as he climbs in. “Can I?”

Derek smirks to himself. “Knock yourself out.” Kid’s ass’ll be burning in no time. Derek flicks his fingers over the climate controls, cranks the heat on the passenger side. “You got a name?”

“You got any food?” the kid counters hopefully, like Derek doesn’t know he has Derek’s leftover fries shoved in the pocket of his hoodie.

Derek rolls his eyes and opens the center console. There’s not much—a couple jerky sticks, half a bag of Twizzlers, some dried apricots. He has more in the Slipstream.

“Interesting choices,” the kid says, raising judgmental eyebrows.

“I thought you were hungry.”

“Shutting up now,” he says quickly, grabbing a jerky stick and the apricots.

That’s what Derek thought. “So. Name?”

The kid huffs. “Not gonna give up, huh?” He bites into the jerky with a vengeance, licks the salt off his lips distractingly. Derek forcibly returns his attention to the road. “It’s Stiles.”

“Stiles,” Derek repeats. “The hell kind of name is Stiles?”

“The hell kind of name is Wolverine?” Stiles counters around a dried apricot.

“A cage fighter’s name.” Derek taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s Derek.”

“Derek,” Stiles repeats. “Well, Derek, I’m Władysław. And if you can pronounce that, you’re welcome to use it.”

Derek quirks half a smile. “Stiles it is.”

Stiles spends the next five minutes stuffing his mouth with dried food before making a face Derek recognizes as too much salt. He reaches behind his seat and grabs a bottle of water. It’s frozen solid for the time being, but it’ll melt a little if they help it along. “Here.”

“Prepared for everything, huh?” Stiles says, taking the bottle with gloved hands and shoving it between his legs. “Thanks.” Then he seems to steel himself and says, “So, Derek, how long have you been a mutant?”

Ah. The last piece of the smell puzzle drops into place. A mutant. So that’s what Stiles is.

Derek shakes his head. “I’m not.”

Stiles snorts disbelievingly. “Sure you’re not. Come on, man. You threw a guy halfway across a room like he was a softball—left-handed when you’re obviously a righty. You took a couple good shots to the ribs in the cage and never even looked winded. Oh, and then you shredded someone’s shotgun with metal claws that came out of your fingertips. I think the ‘not a mutant’ ship has sailed, buddy.”

Derek hasn’t spoken this much to another person in far too long. The next thing that comes out of his mouth is “I’m a werewolf.”

“Holy shit, really? There are werewolves?” Stiles turns in his seat to regard Derek more fully. “Can you, like, turn into an actual wolf? Do you howl at the moon? How many of you are there?”

And just like that Derek’s not having fun anymore. He thinks of the metal coating on his bones and grits his teeth. “I used to—”

Before he can get any further, he has to slam on the ABS to avoid a falling tree. His hackles go up immediately and he reaches for his seat belt. “Stay in the truck.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll just—”

Derek slams the door behind him.

“—stay here,” he hears Stiles finish, muffled.

Derek gets his claws out.

Derek doesn’t know any other wolves. As far as he knows, he’s the last—Kate seemed to think so, when she was slicing him open to sear adamantium on his bones, crooning about how the other experiments, betas and omegas, succumbed to their injuries. About how Derek was their last hope for the ultimate weapon. But there’s a familiar scent on the wind, almost like—

He drops his fangs just as the omega leaps over the tree, snarling, fangs and claws out.

He’s young, hardly older than Stiles, from the looks of it, blue-eyed and fierce. Derek can’t tell if he was born this way or bitten, but Derek surmises from the kid’s stance that he’s got backup, and the eyes—well, Derek knows better than to judge on those alone, but that doesn’t stop a chill from running up his back. A killer at that age.

Derek scents the air and gets a hint of ozone with something more feminine. His ears tell him the female mutant is twenty yards behind him, on his right side.

Which means Stiles is between them. Crap.

The door to the truck opens and closes again.

“I thought I told you to stay in the truck!” Derek growls.

“Please,” Stiles tells him. “You’re not the boss of me. Besides, I thought I’d even the odds.”

By acting as a human shield? Derek thinks incredulously. But before he can say anything else, the omega leaps at him.

Derek really, really doesn’t want to kill what might be the only other werewolf left in the world. He mentally crosses his fingers, opens his mouth, and roars.

The omega looks just as surprised as Derek that it works. He drops midleap and cowers at Derek’s feet, face upturned, neck exposed. He doesn’t meet Derek’s eyes.

Derek’s never done this before, but he saw his mother do it enough when he was younger, and the instinct is there. He puts his clawed hand on the omega’s throat, firm but gentle.

Then a commotion to his right startles them both. Derek turns to see Stiles with one glove off, standing over the body of a blue woman. Come to think of it, Stiles’s fingers look bluer than usual too. Well, bluer than usual for a human, because Derek’s never seen Stiles’s fingers bare, but.

By the time Derek thinks to look back at the omega, he’s long gone.

“I’ll get her off the road if you get rid of the tree,” Stiles bargains.

That’s a deal. Dark is falling fast, and Derek wants to be anywhere these two aren’t.

*

They make it as far as the outskirts of the next tiny town, and Derek pulls into a lumber yard to park for the night. He fires up the generator in the bed of the truck and hooks it up to the Slipstream so they can run the space heater for a couple hours. He doesn’t like doing it—he knows it’s a fire hazard—but in all likelihood Stiles will freeze to death if he doesn’t.

Stiles fidgets as Derek sets up. “I don’t suppose there’s a working washroom in there.”

“Sure.” Derek sets the space heater on the table, reaches into one of the storage benches for a roll of toilet paper. He hands it over. “But it works better when the water in the tank’s not frozen solid.” It’s a chemical toilet, but the thing’s not made of antifreeze.

“Guess I’ll take a walk,” Stiles mutters, and Derek hands him a flashlight too.

“Stay in earshot.”

“That’s a really weird thing to say to a guy who’s about to take a dump,” Stiles says. “How far is that, anyway?”

The way Stiles breathes? “About three hundred meters.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you have to worry.” The snow’s knee-deep in most places. Derek’s not exactly looking forward to his own trip to relieve himself. But, well, needs must.

While Stiles is gone, Derek grabs a couple mostly thawed bottles of water from the cab of the truck, checks his supply of dry cereal. He has enough for a few bowls, and they can boil water for oatmeal in the morning if they go through it all, which Derek thinks they probably will. He makes sure the brake is set, and the extra stabilizing legs are down, and then he unpacks two pillows, three sleeping bags, and a couple of thick blankets from the space under the bed.

Last he checked, the thermometer in the truck read -40.

Stiles returns with the flashlight and roll of toilet paper, and Derek lets him into the trailer and stalks past him into the night.

When he gets back, Stiles has the tiny lamp over the table on and is sitting staring at his gloved hands. His eyes look almost yellow in the light, and for a second Derek considers biting him. There’d be two of them then, and they could look out for each other, and Derek wouldn’t have to be alone. Stiles wouldn’t have to be alone.

Stiles is probably better off alone, to be honest. Derek should get him where he’s going before they both get attached.

“Are we gonna talk about what happened on the road?” Stiles asks when Derek sets the toilet paper roll next to him on the table.

“The man was another werewolf. An omega.” Derek pauses. “It means he doesn’t have a pack.”

Stiles looks up at that. “Do you?”

“Not anymore.”

He nods, looking a little sad. “So you’re an omega too?”

Fuck, Derek hates talking about it. “No, I—when my mother died”—when my whole family died—“I became the alpha. That means I’m stronger. That omega, his instincts told him to submit to me.” He would have joined Derek, if Derek had asked. But Derek didn’t have a chance.

He takes a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me what you did to that blue girl?”

“Kali,” Stiles says, gazing down at his hands again. “That was her name.”

Derek wants to ask how he knows, but he waits instead.

“A couple months ago….” Stiles shivers, and Derek looks down and sees his jeans still have snow on them.

“Stand up and take those off,” Derek says. “We can talk in bed. You’re going to catch pneumonia or something.”

Stiles flattens his lips. “Do werewolves get pneumonia?”

“Not unless there’s something else wrong with us.”

Nodding absently, Stiles stands, brushes his hands over his jeans to shake off the worst of the snow before it melts. Then something seems to occur to him, and he says nervously, “Uh. Where do you want me to sleep?”

Derek looks at him, then at the bed. “You got something against sharing?”

“You might.” Stiles curls in on himself, hunching shoulders too broad for his skinny body. “You want to know happened to the girl in the road? I touched her skin. Bam! Instant coma. And apparently, in the case of mutants, a little case of I’ll-have-what-she’s-having.” His eyes flicker again, gold for real this time, and then scales rustle over his face until it’s like looking in a mirror. “Surprise.”

For a second Derek just blinks at him, openmouthed. Then he shakes himself and reaches for the closet. “Let me lend you some pajamas.”

“I don’t know why I came to Canada,” Stiles grumbles as he changes, his back to Derek. He leaves his socks and boxers on and steps into the pants, which sag horribly until he ties them. “I hate the cold.”

Derek realizes he’s watching like a creeper and turns around to step into his sweats. For safety’s sake, he leaves his socks too, grabs a sweatshirt, and tugs on a pair of thin gloves.

He pulls back the covers, such as they are, climbs in, and waits.

“You’re serious about this,” Stiles says doubtfully from a few feet away. “You realize I will literally kill you if you touch my skin for too long.”

“If you don’t get in here to share my body heat, you’re going to die of exposure,” Derek says. “Besides, I’m hard to kill.”

Stiles finally settles after wrapping himself like a worm in the thinnest spare blanket, muttering direly under his breath about dying of blue balls instead pressed up against that all night. Derek pretends he doesn’t hear, shoves at him until he’s comfortable, and curls an arm around him.

This would be easier if Derek could just shift. His fur would protect him, and he could still keep Stiles warm. But he’ll never shift again. He sighs against the urge and closes his eyes.

So of course that’s when Stiles decides to start talking. “They’re after me, you know.”

Derek freezes, then moves a little closer. He didn’t know, wasn’t sure they could even speculate. One werewolf and one mutant attacker—could have gone either way. One of the hunters’ turned wolves or…. “Did you learn that from her?”

“Kali, yeah.” Stiles shuffles. “I didn’t get much else consciously, but I might—dream a lot tonight. I can’t always sort out who’s who in my head right away.”

What a fucking life. “You’re not going to hurt me.”

“Dude, I can barely move. Just, if I wake up screaming or something… sorry in advance.”

Derek swallows. “Yeah, well.” He might hurt Stiles in his sleep, he realizes. He’s had a nightmare or two himself.

Then again, maybe not. Not with the way Stiles smells rolled up in Derek’s blankets, like he belongs there. Which is dangerous for entirely different reasons. “Ditto,” he finally says.

After all that, he can’t really be surprised when the tension goes out of Stiles’s body and he spills his guts in earnest. “It was a couple days after I turned seventeen. I—there was this guy. Danny. For two years we were friends, but we never, you know. He made sure I knew he didn’t like me like that. It’s not like it was a surprise. I mean, nobody liked me like that. And then suddenly, I don’t know, he changed his mind, and I thought I’d finally—I’d have my first kiss and get rid of my stupid V-card and stop being alone all the time.”

He shudders on an inhale, hard enough that Derek feels it under his arm. Derek clenches his teeth because he knows how this story ends. Seventeen, he tells himself, and vows not to forget it.

“Only we never got past kissing,” Stiles says, “because as soon as I—as soon as I touched him, he went cold, and then I could hear him, you know? In my head. Screaming. By the time I figured out what was happening and let him go, he was unconscious.”

Derek doesn’t have anything to say to that, so he tucks his face a little tighter to the back of Stiles’s hoodie-covered neck. It smells like sweat, like Stiles—a scent that’s already far too comforting.

“My dad—he was the town sheriff, he’d been paying attention to those new laws for mutants, you know? So when he saw…. He gave me a couple hundred bucks, as much cash as he had on him, and he told me to run.”

Christ, Derek thinks. “Sucks.”

When Stiles speaks again after a thick swallow and half a second’s pause, his voice is deliberately light. “Dude. I am supernaturally cockblocked. ‘Sucks’ doesn’t cover half of it.”

“Well, there’s always dry-humping,” Derek says before he can think better of it.

“Oh God,” Stiles moans. “You’re not an optimist, are you?”

Derek snorts and ends up with a noseful of teenage hormones. That’ll teach him to talk about sex with jailbait. “Not really, no.” Silence falls again, but it’s not uncomfortable. Still, if they’re baring their souls here…. “I got captured. There’s a group of humans who call themselves hunters; they hate my kind. They killed my family—parents, sisters, brother, uncle, cousins. I used to wish they’d kill me too, but they didn’t.”

Stiles goes very still. “What did they do to you?”

“Everything they could think of. Electrocution, waterboarding, experiments. They wanted to turn me into the ultimate weapon.” He spits the words, can only hear them in Kate’s voice now. “But the worst is this.” He works off his glove and extends his claws. Just enough moonlight filters through the window behind him for the metal to reflect ominously.

Stiles breathes in sharply. “Is that—”

“Adamantium. They coated my skeleton with it.” He exhales slowly. “It keeps me from shifting.” Keeps him human, or at least human-shaped. That’s how Kate would have put it.

“How’d you get away?”

“My captors got sloppy and put me in a cell with a brick wall. It’s amazing what you can punch through with some determination and a skeleton made of the strongest metal known to man.” Derek omits the part where he tore out Kate’s throat and burned the facility to the ground. The part where he vowed never to turn anyone so the hunters wouldn’t be able to take his pack again. Wouldn’t have subjects for their experiments. Maybe on the second date, he thinks darkly.

“You made that up just to impress me,” Stiles says, half muffled by the blanket.

Derek swallows the urge to smile—how many times is that today?—and changes the subject. “Where will you go?”

For a minute Stiles says nothing. Then: “There’s this place in New York. Westchester. I found it on the Internet. Well, sort of. It’s a school for people like me, I guess. Nobody’s supposed to know that, but. The signs are there if you know how to follow them.”

Derek nods. Westchester. They can make that in three days, if they push it. It would be faster if they could cross the border in Saskatchewan, but if they get denied, he wants to be as close to their destination as possible. “You got a passport?”

“In my backpack,” Stiles confirms. “Why?”

He should think about it before answering. It’s not a commitment he can just make on the fly, not something to be undertaken lightly.

But he knows he’s already made up his mind. “We could make it by Friday, if we push it, cross the border at Niagara Falls—”

Stiles’s heart hammers.

Derek pauses. “What?”

“You want to—take me…?”

There are any number of ways to finish that sentence. Derek focuses on the one he can handle tonight. “Somewhere safe.” Derek might not ever be safe—not unless the hunters of the world think they’ve exterminated werewolves entirely—but Stiles can do better than life on the road.

Stiles exhales long and ragged. “Okay,” he says finally. “Okay.”

*

They make the US border at Niagara at eleven in the morning on Friday, following a carefully executed plan.

Derek packs his clothes into the backseat of the truck. He shifts the generator to the side. Then, halfway back, he and Stiles start piling in the bulkiest items from the trailer: a cooler, the sleeping bags, a camping stove, a couple cases of water.

When they’ve finished, there’s a forty-centimeter-wide gap between the back of the cab and the nearest of the junk. Derek braces it all with two-by-fours, they line it with a heat-reflective thermal blanket, the pillows, and anything else that might help keep Stiles warm, and then Stiles climbs in.

“This is a terrible idea,” Derek tells him flatly. But with Stiles’s name maybe on a federal mutant watch list, it’s the only idea they have.

They leave the trailer in an empty parking lot off the 405 and hope for the best.

“Citizenship,” says the bored border guard when Derek pulls up to the booth.

Derek hands over his passport. “American.”

She checks her cameras, looks at the truck’s license plate. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Hale. What’s your business in Niagara Falls?”

Right now he just feels lucky his registration is up to date. “Thinking about moving to New York,” Derek tells her, trying a smile and doing his best to tune out the frantic beating of Stiles’s heart just a few feet behind him. He wishes he’d shaved the night before; he’s always less suspicious-looking when he shaves. “Heard it’s nice this time of year.”

That startles a laugh out of her. “Hope you brought your snowshoes, California,” she says and hands his passport back. “Drive safely.”

Derek tips an imaginary hat at her and continues onto I-90.

Stiles climbs out of the back at the second rest stop past the border, looking bruised and smelling nauseated but otherwise none the worse for wear. “Come on,” Derek says, gesturing to the McDonald’s, “let me buy you lunch.”

*

Alan Deaton’s School for Kids Who Can’t Mutant Good—that’s what Stiles is calling it in his head until someone proves the “gifted youngsters” thing; who even says “youngsters” anymore anyway—is parked on a huge plot of land at the end of a very long, very snowy road. It’s almost like they don’t want visitors.

“It’s exactly like they don’t want visitors,” Derek agrees from behind the wheel, expression inscrutable. “Are you sure you want to try this?”

Stiles didn’t come almost three thousand miles to turn back now. “No, but since I’m apparently being stalked by a rogue werewolf and a mutant skinwalker, I don’t think I have a whole lot of choice.” He bites his lip and looks over. A few days ago, he couldn’t hope for more than to ride a couple hundred miles in a warm cab with someone who didn’t expect him to put out. He’s still not sure he’s not dreaming. “You can drop me off at the gate if you want.”

Derek clenches his jaw. “I’m not leaving you here if it’s not safe,” he says, like the idea personally offends him.

Stiles tries not to feel pleased about that. He always thought he was one of those people who didn’t get attached easily. He’d bet actual money Derek is the same. Well, he would if he had any money. “My hero,” he says obnoxiously.

Derek rolls his eyes, but Stiles sees the corner of his mouth tugging reluctantly upward and counts it as a win anyway.

He really needs to get out of the truck and socialize with other people. Stiles has Stockholm Syndrome like nobody’s business.

Or, you know, not. Stiles has eyes and a teenage libido and Derek’s hot like burning, even three days unshaven and in need of a shower. Maybe especially then; being on the road has done terrible things to Stiles’s sense of appropriate hygiene. They haven’t had hot running water since the motel room Derek rented in Manitoba, where it was so cold the generator wouldn’t start.

Stiles stood under the crappy water pressure for three minutes debating whether he was going to do something about his boner. If Derek could hear him breathe at three hundred meters, he could definitely hear him jerk off in the shower. From the way Derek’s nostrils flared from time to time, Stiles thought he could probably smell it too.

In the end he decided he didn’t want to live with the mortification, and he’s been regretting that decision ever since.

From Stiles’s spot in the passenger seat, Deaton’s School looks more like a castle than an institution. Deaton must be loaded. Even Derek seems impressed.

“Holy shit,” Stiles breathes. Okay, so he’s completely over snow—he spent the worst of winter in the frigid Midwest and then in fucking Canada—but this place just looks… it looks like it could be home.

Derek parks the truck in a driveway loop that’s honestly a mile long, and they look at each other for a long moment. “We could still turn back,” Derek says finally.

Ironically, that’s what gives Stiles the courage to reach for the door. “No way through but forward.” It’s something his dad used to say.

They don’t even have his bags out before a tiny redhead who looks to be in her early twenties appears at the massive front doors to the building. In spite of the weather, she’s not wearing a coat.

Stiles is just raising a hand in a wave when she screams and everything goes black.

*

“Motherfucking ow,” Stiles says through his pounding headache. He’s mostly aware of the bright lights on the ceiling, the hard metal under his back, and the very loud crashing noises coming from somewhere nearby.

He hears a snarl and smiles in spite of himself. Go get ’em, tiger.

“Your friend doesn’t think much of our hospitality,” someone says drily from a few feet to his right.

Stiles turns his head—carefully, because otherwise he’s gonna barf—and takes the redhead’s measure. She seems completely composed, perfectly made up, turned out like a business major. She’s sitting in the chair beside his bed, filing her nails.

“Yeah, well, you sonic screamed a werewolf into unconsciousness. What did you expect? Guy has supermassive trust issues.” Wow, Stiles feels awful. And apparently he’s spilling secrets that aren’t his left and right. He figures out the reason easily enough when he glances down at his arm and sees his sleeve pulled up, a fresh injection mark just below his elbow.

Yep, he’s definitely gonna barf. The redhead hands him a bedpan without looking up and doesn’t flinch as Stiles empties his McDonald’s into it. She does, however, grimace in distaste as she sets it down again.

“Did you drug me?”

“Truth serum,” she says mildly, standing up. In the next room, glass shatters. “Our resident telepath wasn’t available for a consult. Why did you come here?”

“I’m a mutant teenager with nowhere else to go,” Stiles says, yanking his shirtsleeve down. He feels naked. “Nobody touched my skin, right?”

“We know better.” She cocks her head to the side. “Why did he come here?”

And that question makes Stiles seethe. Maybe the truth serum doesn’t work on werewolves. “Because he wanted to make sure I was safe.”

The redhead’s lips purse, and a flicker of something that could possibly, given some time and a lot of growth hormones, grow into guilt one day. “Ah.” She crosses the room to the door. “Would you perhaps be willing to demonstrate how unharmed you are?”

“You’re just lucky nobody touched my skin,” Stiles mutters.

She obviously takes that as a yes, because at the next second, the pneumatic door opens. The redhead sidesteps neatly as a stainless steel tray whips through the air where her head had been. Suddenly everything’s a lot louder. Stiles and the redhead both cringe at the volume of Derek’s furious “Where is he?”

Stiles clears his throat as blood rushes to his face. “Derek, buddy. You okay in there?”

For a second there is silence. Then Derek stalks through the door, looking an equal mixture concerned, embarrassed, and enraged. He puts his hands on Stiles’s shoulders and squints at him—maybe werewolves have freakishly good eyesight too?—and then sniffs.

Then he makes a face, because yeah, Stiles probably smells like puke. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Stiles tells him. If his heart’s racing, it’s because he’s not used to people touching him, even through his hoodie. Never mind that Derek seems to do that all the time. He explained the second day that it was a werewolf thing, an impulse he had to work at controlling. “I had a bad moment when I thought someone might’ve touched my skin, but—”

Derek growls. Stiles tells himself firmly this is neither sexy nor cute, but he’s completely, absolutely lying to himself.

“Are you okay?” he counters. “You look kind of… flustered. Not that sweaty and heaving isn’t a good look for you.”

Oh fuck this truth serum bullshit.

Before Derek can answer, a door on the other side of the room whooshes open and a young man dressed in artfully distressed jeans and a plaid shirt basically skids in, tripping over his own two feet and almost knocking off his stylish red sunglasses. “Allison?”

A woman who must be Allison appears through the same doorway Derek did. She looks a little pale, her hair in disarray. Her white lab coat has a tear in the sleeve, and she’s casually holding a giant fucking knife in one hand. “I’m fine, Scott.” She rolls pretty brown eyes.

“What the fuck, why do you have a knife!” Stiles says. “You’re supposed to be the good guys! You’re wearing a stethoscope! Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath?”

Scott raises dark eyebrows his shades. “They give you trouble?” He sounds like he’s trying to come off as menacing, but he’s shorter than Stiles and has a jawline that looks like something Stiles would’ve drawn in third grade, so it sort of comes off as adorable.

“Derek thought we were playing a game of werewolves and hunters.” Allison flicks her hair out of her eyes, and suddenly the knife disappears. Stiles has no idea where it went; he never saw her move. “And he was concerned about our newest student.”

“I might be withdrawing my application,” Stiles says hastily. “This isn’t exactly the warm welcome I was hoping for.”

Scott’s face falls and his whole body just sort of deflates. “Man, I’m sorry. Things can get a little intense around here, you know? Especially with Magneto and his League of Extraordinary Bad Guys or whatever sort of trying to mutate the human population and the human population retaliating against, uh, us. Which sucks. I promise it’s not like this all the time.”

Stiles isn’t so sure about Allison or the redhead—they’re terrifying—but Scott doesn’t seem so bad. He takes a deep breath. “Trial period?” If nothing else, he can find out more about this Magneto guy, because the name rings an uncomfortable bell in the remaining echoes of Kali’s thoughts.

“Yes!” Scott whoops. “I’ll give you a tour. What’s your power?” He taps his glasses knowingly. “I shoot lasers out my eyeballs.”

The redhead makes a noise of pure frustration. “For the last time, Scott, they’re concussive blasts.”

“Whoops!” Scott says unrepentantly. “Sorry, Lydia. My bad.” Stiles gets the distinct impression he’s winking behind those red lenses.

“You could also ask his name before his mutant power,” Allison puts in dryly. She hasn’t moved much since she came in, and Stiles suddenly becomes aware that Derek’s watching her very closely. He still hasn’t quite relaxed.

Scott deflates again. “Man, Deaton’s never going to let me teach if I keep fucking—I mean screwing up like this.” He turns back to Stiles. “Hi. I’m Scott McCall, aka Cyclops, field leader of the X-Men. These are my associates, Lydia Martin, alias Banshee—you’ve probably figured out her power too—and Dr. Allison Argent.”

Derek growls a little. Scott continues, “Blood relation only to the Argent Hunter Alliance. No further affiliation. Swear.”

Jesus, no wonder Derek made such a mess. But he must believe Scott, because he seems to unclench a little.

Stiles licks his lips. Might as well go for it. “Well, I’m Stiles Stilinski. I suck people’s memories, life forces, and apparently mutant powers out through skin contact. And this is Derek….” He stops, flushing, when he realizes he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“Hale,” Derek says for him, and Allison puts a hand over her mouth like she recognizes he name.

“My self-appointed bodyguard,” Stiles finishes. “His powers are more, uh, supernatural than evolutional, though.”

Scott holds out his hand to shake. Derek ignores it. Apparently he’s reached his limit for the day’s niceties.

“Listen,” Stiles says, “we’ve been driving for three days solid. So maybe we could grab a shower or something?”

“Together?” Lydia asks with one eyebrow arched delicately.

Maybe Stiles would’ve been better off on the road. “Um. No,” he says, not daring to meet anyone’s gaze.

“Cool,” Scott says. “Let me just find a couple room keys.”

*

By the time he’s showered, napped, eaten, and been given a tour, Stiles is pretty much wiped out. All he really wants to do is sit in a quiet dark room with Derek and decompress. But he can’t stop asking questions about Deaton and how he knows Magneto, about the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants—and seriously, who names their organization something with evil in the title? Stiles thought Scott was exaggerating—about classes here and what Stiles can expect.

Derek doesn’t say much, just sits in the corner nearest Stiles and glowers at the door a lot.

He doesn’t move, speak, or get up until there’s a sudden displacement of air and three people literally materialize out of nowhere. Then suddenly he’s on the ground in front of Stiles, snarling, claws digging furrows into the polished hardwood floor.

The closest newcomer is a young woman in her early twenties, Stiles guesses, dressed in a white miniskirt and knee-high boots with four-inch heels. A halo of gold curls and a smear of red lipstick make her look like Hugh Hefner’s idea of an angel. Next to her is a very tall, very muscular scaly black-and-blue man with a tail. Under other circumstances the two of them might be very distracting on account of Stiles’s teenage hormones.

Right now he’s not paying them any attention, because just behind the scaly guy and to his left is—

“Dad,” Stiles says, and his voice breaks and his throat closes up and Jesus fuck he’s going to cry in front of a team of mutant superheroes. Somehow he gets around Derek and his dad gets around the X-Men and then they’re hugging, Stiles’s face pressing tightly into his dad’s shirt. His throat hurts and his nose is running and his face is wet and none of it matters, because his dad is hugging him back.

“Stiles,” he says fiercely.

Stiles hiccups. On some level he registers the room emptying around them, a couple of quiet murmurs. But before it can empty completely, he takes a cleansing breath and orders, voice raw, “Not you, Derek.”

The weird thing is, Derek stays. Even though this is going to be awkward as fuck.

When Stiles can bear to let go again, he pulls back and scrubs under his eyes with a glove. God, these things need to be burned; they stink. He wonders how Derek can stand it.

He doesn’t look his dad in the face right away. Stilinski tradition—they have to give each other enough time to pretend they’re not crying. Otherwise it’ll just escalate. It’s not pretty.

He looks at Derek, though, almost accidentally. Derek’s face is tight, and his eyes are sad, and Stiles knows he must be thinking about his own family. But he holds Stiles’s gaze until Stiles can clear his throat and say, “Uh, Dad, this is Derek Hale. He’s sort of been my hero the past couple days.”

And wow, that didn’t sound like an awkward meet-the-boyfriend introduction at all.

Luckily Stiles’s dad is too much of a sap to give him any real crap right now. Stiles gets off easy with a handshake and “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

Derek manages most of a smile, though not the one Stiles is used to seeing. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

And somehow that leads to the three of them talking until they’re hoarse—about Stiles’s father’s search for a new job, Stiles’s time on the road, the attack in Alberta. Stiles is getting to the part with Kali when the door rattles and the blonde from earlier comes in with a tea tray. “Thought you might be thirsty.”

Stiles’s dad smiles. “Thanks, Erica.”

“Welcome.” Erica smiles at him, then looks at Derek. “I brought your favorite. Your boyfriend’s too.” She jerks her head at Stiles. “But don’t let him drink too much of it or he’ll be up all night.”

She winks and saunters out without another word.

Stiles tries not to gape like a fish. When he looks to his right, he sees Derek is similarly affected. “Have you met?”

Derek shakes his head.

Stiles’s dad raises an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

Ugh, mortification. “First of all, no,” Stiles says, dropping his head into his hands to hide his burning face. “Second of all, just putting this out there, age of consent is sixteen in Canada and seventeen in New York, so you can put the shotgun away, jeez.”

Judging by the way Derek and his dad both stare at him and the really uncomfortable silence that follows, that wasn’t the right thing to say.

Stiles’s dad clears his throat. “So the other mutant and the other werewolf…?”

“Right,” Stiles says. Definitely a much safer avenue of conversation. At least until it comes to that night’s sleeping arrangements.

“You slept next to each other.”

Stiles needs to get over this whole verbal diarrhea telling-his-dad-everything problem, stat. Derek looks torn between fleeing and laughing, or maybe bashing Stiles’s head into the table. Or gagging him.

Nope, nope, nope, not thinking about that. “It was forty below in a trailer,” Stiles points out. “I would have frozen to death if we didn’t. Besides, Derek wrapped my poisonous self up in a blanket so tight I couldn’t have gotten a boner if I wanted to.”

Derek snorts in derision, and Stiles flushes. Apparently Derek’s nose is every bit as sensitive as Stiles feared. “Fine,” he amends, “I couldn’t have done anything about it if I wanted to.”

His dad smirks into his teacup.

About the time Stiles starts yawning, the door opens again and there’s Erica, dressed in track pants and a hoodie this time. The scaly guy is with her. “Thought it might be bedtime.” She jerks her thumb at her companion. “Boyd volunteered dish duty”—the man in question rolls his eyes at this—“so looks like I’m playing tour guide. Sheriff, I found you a room near Stiles.”

As Boyd sets the tray back to rights, Stiles’s dad stands. “Sure, thanks, that’s—”

There’s an almost silent pfft and Boyd and the tray disappear.

“Talkative guy,” Stiles says.

“Right?” Erica agrees without a trace of discernable irony. “You should hear him when the Giants are playing. I’m forever telling him to keep it down.” Then she narrows her eyes. “Have we met, by the way? I’m Erica. You’re Stiles. Sorry, telepathic precog and epilepsy go together like champagne and tequila. I don’t always remember things in the right order.”

“We met, but we haven’t been introduced. Nice to, uh, you know.” Stiles shakes her hand, wishing again for a spare pair of gloves.

“I’ll get Lydia on it, she knows all the best places,” Erica promises. “And you must be the famous Derek we’ve heard so much about.”

Derek shakes her hand too, an inscrutable expression on his face. “Hi.”

Erica claps her hands. “And now for the final leg of the tour.”

By the time Stiles gets out of the shower—again—he feels like he’s ready to drop, but he still has too much nervous energy to climb between the sheets, so he puts away his clothes, straightens his shoes by the door. He even washes his gloves in the sink, hoping to rid them of some of the smell.

Then he lies on his back and stares at the ceiling and counts his own heartbeats.

Nothing helps. Somewhere in the back of his brain, something restless has awakened, and it wants to be free. With one last, longing look at his soaking-wet gloves, Stiles shoves his feet in his shoes, pockets his key, and slips into the hallway.

Something is calling to him.

Of course, he doesn’t realize what it is until it’s too late.

The door to the room creaks open under Stiles’s touch and he takes three steps forward before he can think about it.

He doesn’t have words for the way Derek looks in the snow-plated moonlight, eyes closed, hair dark on a crisp white pillow, chest bare. But he doesn’t stay peaceful; as Stiles takes another step, he tosses his head back and forth and a grimace contorts his face, and his hands fist in the covers, claws protruding from his fingers.

Stiles swallows and risks another step forward. He can keep his hands to himself. “Derek,” he stage whispers. Then, louder: “Derek!”

Stiles hears the commotion from down the hall just as Derek sits bolt upright and grabs Stiles’s hand.

Oh fuck.

The pull kicks in half a second later, and Stiles goes to his knees beside the bed as the images overtake him: a smiling blonde woman who smells like gasoline; a family of beautiful dark-haired people laughing on a summer day; looking in a mirror as Derek’s changeling green eyes bleed to red; the inside of a bunker, rank with the stench of sweat and feces and dried blood; the sear of molten metal; the sting of branches underfoot while running naked through an unknown forest. The agony of being unable to reach for the wolf. A scent like a rainstorm—

Someone yanks hard on the back of his shirt and Stiles falls on his ass, dazed. When he can make his eyes focus again, Erica’s standing above him, prodding Derek with one sharp fingernail. “I told you not to let him drink too much tea!”

“Ow,” Derek says. At least he’s a little more resilient than Stiles’s other victims. Yay, werewolves.

“Sorry,” Stiles says miserably from the floor. His chest tightens up like it does when he’s about to have a panic attack, because that’s just what he needs right now. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—I couldn’t sleep and I—”

“Stiles.” Derek’s never used a tone that commanding before, and it washes over Stiles like a wave. “Relax. I’m not angry.”

It shouldn’t work, but the tension seeps out of Stiles’s limbs and the bands around his chest loosen. “Okay.”

“Can you stand?” Erica says. “If not, I could carry you back to your room hands-free style.” She wiggles her fingers and the alarm clock beside Derek’s bed floats a couple feet in the air.

“I will definitely barf,” Stiles says, getting his feet under him. “But thanks for the offer.”

“I hope you like late-night infomercials, ’cause you’re probably going to have his nightmares for a while.”

Stiles winces and looks at Derek. “I hope that means you don’t have to.” Derek’s been pretty quiet the past couple nights, or so Stiles thinks. He’s slept more soundly since he met Derek than he has in years, probably out of a soporific mix of exhaustion and trust.

Derek’s expression says he doesn’t hold much hope of sleeping well either.

Stiles sighs. “Well, you know how to find me if you want company. Just follow your nose.”

Derek shakes his head. “Good night, Stiles.”

Stiles does fall asleep this time, only to dream of blonde hair and smoke.

*

The inside of Derek’s head is a disorienting and mixed-up place filled with rage, guilt, regret, and longing. Needless to say, the nightmares suck. But in the end, they aren’t that different from Stiles’s own imaginings, scattered perceptions of parchment skin under his fingertips, flashes of his father mummifying in his hands. Stiles gets it. Life sucks, and then you dream about it sucking more.

What he wouldn’t give for one of Danny’s stupid sex dreams about his ex-boyfriend.

In the morning he meets Scott, Allison, and his dad downstairs for breakfast like he promised—“Erica and Boyd are giving Derek the X-team sales pitch,” Scott explains.

“Wouldn’t mind hearing it myself,” Stiles’s dad says, prying Stiles’s sleepy fingers off the coffeepot so he can pour himself a mug. “I don’t have any powers, but I can pull weeds and push a lawn mower as well as the next guy.”

Stiles doesn’t know who his dad thinks he’s fooling—not even a mutant would volunteer to mow that lawn with a push mower.

“Dad,” he protests for more than just concerns of his dad overdoing it. He hates this—his dad’s a great cop, and he loves his job, and he shouldn’t give it up just to be with Stiles. Stiles has ruined his life enough already.

“Kid, if you think I’m leaving you again, you’re not as smart as I give you credit for.” He turns back to Allison. “I’ll look for police work outside the school if I have to—New York’s a big state for that—but I’d rather stay close.”

Allison dimples at him, but it looks a little sad. “I understand. Talk to Lydia—she’s in charge of administration, and she knows everything and everyone. If she doesn’t have something for you, she knows someone who will.”

Stiles swallows thickly around a bite of breakfast. It’s starting to occur to him that he might get to keep not only his safety and some new friends who’ve gone through what he is but also Derek and his dad too. Please, please, please. Stiles is so tired of being alone.

Across the table, his dad frowns at him. “Since when do you eat oatmeal?” he says, and for the first time Stiles tastes what he’s been shoveling into his mouth.

“Ugh, Derek,” Stiles complains, setting down his spoon. “Gross.” At least Danny’s food-related transgressions only extended to pineapple on pizza.

Three sets of eyebrows rise in perfect synchrony. His dad’s the one who speaks. “I thought you said he hadn’t touched you.”

Wow, ominous. Fuck. Stiles reaches for his coffee to buy himself a minute and discovers the hard way that werewolf healing powers can’t be absorbed through his skin. “Um.”

“Stiles….”

Scott and Allison exchange glances and then excuse themselves without comment.

“I just went for a walk,” Stiles mutters, flexing his fingers in his still-damp gloves. “I washed these in the sink, but I figured it was late enough I wasn’t going to meet anyone in the hallway. I didn’t mean to go into his room, but he was having a nightmare….” He shrugs. He has no idea how he knew to go to Derek in the first place. Sure, Stiles is pretty intuitive, but…. “He woke up and grabbed my wrist. It wasn’t his fault. I probably scared the crap out of him.”

His dad rubs at his forehead. “Kid….”

Here comes the lecture, Stiles thinks, steeling himself. Derek’s too old for you. Maybe you should focus on you right now. Remember what happened with Danny.

“Just… be careful, okay?” he says, and Stiles looks up from the tabletop, swallowing hard. “I haven’t forgotten that this—Evil League of Evil or whatever is looking for you, and that Derek protected you. But if something happens… I just don’t want you to rush into something and be disappointed.”

Stiles swallows thickly. His dad is awesome. At least he has that. Even if—“Dad. I’m basically untouchable, okay? I don’t think you have to worry.”

He doesn’t know whether to be alarmed that his dad doesn’t buy that. “Stiles, when you kissed Danny, he was in a coma for two weeks. But Derek grabbed you yesterday and today you’re eating his oatmeal while he takes a tour of, I don’t know, the X-Men’s secret underground bunkers or something. Don’t try to tell me you’re not thinking about it, okay? Be safe.”

And holy shit. His dad has a point. Stiles’s mouth drops open. He never dared hope, not really, but maybe—

Of course, Derek would have to actually like him. Stiles is fairly confident Derek likes him about as much as he likes anybody, but that doesn’t exactly say romance.

“And on that note I think I’ll go shower,” his dad says dryly.

Stiles waves him off, absently shoveling in another spoonful of oatmeal. He’s still there twenty minutes later when Lydia—henceforth to be known as Dr. Martin, Stiles’s AP Calculus teacher, because the gods apparently still hate him a little bit—shows up for his orientation.

*

Stiles is so busy getting to know his new classmates that he almost doesn’t have time to miss Derek until they’re over. Being back in school is weird; he figured since they’re all mutants nobody would stare, but apparently the new-kid effect is in full force. That or they heard he showed up with a hot older werewolf and are dying for Derek’s number. Stiles wouldn’t blame them.

Nobody dares speak out of turn during Dr. Martin’s class, but in the cafeteria at lunch Stiles finds himself surrounded by new faces. The twins, Aiden and Ethan, have matching fire-and-ice powers. Kira can apparently walk through walls.

Isaac has actual honest-to-God wings and mad cheekbone game. And Stiles thought Erica looked like an angel. Stiles doesn’t know if the insanely attractive thing is a mutant trait or not, but an alarming percentage of the students here are smokin’ hot, so he figures it’s a fair bet.

They’re also, to a one, gossips. They cannot get enough of the story of Stiles and Derek’s daring escape from northern Alberta.

“So you just touched her and she, you know, went nighty-night?” Aidan raises his eyebrows and wiggles his fingers; apparently he’s skipping out on an interview with the guidance counselor to be here for this.

“Were you paying no attention to the much more impressive part of the story where Derek made another werewolf shit his pants?” Seriously. Credit where credit’s due. “But yeah. Hence the fashion show.” Stiles wiggles his own fingers, showcased in a pair of lacy ladies’ gloves. Stiles thinks they might be intended for drag queens, because otherwise he’s not sure how Lydia found a pair that would fit him, but he doesn’t care. They’re almost like not wearing gloves at all.

Maybe he’ll jerk off with them later, just to know what it’d feel like. You know, in case he ever gets his hands on Derek’s dick.

“I like the color,” Isaac says a little uncertainly.

Stiles flashes a rueful smile and drags his brain out of the gutter. “Well, my other ones were too thick to write with properly. Ms. Martin gave me a choice, and it was this or walk around all day looking like an actor from a really intense fisting porno.” Okay, so the gutter follows him and waits for inattentive moments. It’s not his fault.

Kira snickers and leans forward so far that she accidentally phases partway through the table before correcting. “Can you still hear them? The people you’ve touched, I mean.”

It’s kind of a weird question from someone he’s known all of five minutes, but Stiles doesn’t want to alienate any of his potential friends just yet. “Sort of? It depends. If it’s a brief touch, I only get surface impressions. Like, whatever they were thinking about when it happened, sort of thing. Sometimes if it lasts a few seconds longer, I get other stuff, but it’s hard to sort out.”

“So you don’t know what Kali wanted with you?”

Stiles huffs. “Trust me, if I did, I’d have told someone by now, you know? I’m not really keen on the idea of being someone’s guinea pig.”

“I think we can all relate to that,” Isaac says softly, and something in his tone makes everyone back off.

Someday Stiles is going to want context for that.

By the end of the school day, he has to concede that “gifted youngsters” is probably an appropriate moniker. He’s going to be doing extra-credit assignments to catch up for at least two weeks. Good thing he’s kind of a genius.

He could get started on that mountain of homework right now. Or.

Obviously Stiles goes with Or.

Maybe if Stiles had gotten a deeper read on Derek last night, he’d have been able to figure out where he’d go based on that. But he didn’t, so he has to rely on his impressions from the tour. He checks the garage first and the kitchen second and finds Derek on his third try, in the library, sitting in a massive wingback chair in front of a roaring fire. The setting rockets to the top of Stiles’s spankbank queue.

“Academic is a good look on you,” he says when Derek glances up.

“Don’t you have homework to do?” he counters.

Ouch. Stiles shrugs and drops into the opposite armchair. “Yeah. My number-one assignment is coercing you into joining the X-Men.”

Derek puts the book—The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—aside and quirks up one corner of his mouth. “Congratulations, you just got your first A at Deaton’s School.”

“Holy shit, really?” Stiles says, too loudly for a library. He immediately looks around guiltily, but they appear to be the only two here for the time being. Still: “Really?” he repeats at a lower volume.

Derek shrugs awkwardly. His gaze falls on Stiles’s right hand for a minute, and then he blinks and fixes it to the arm of Stiles’s chair instead. “It’s not… I don’t really have anywhere else to go. I’ve been running for a long time. I just… thought it might be nice to stop.”

“Good,” Stiles says, more bluntly than he intends. Story of his fucking life. “You should have nice things.”

Wincing, Derek meets his eyes again, hesitant. “Did you—the dreams…?”

“Yeah, those kind of sucked,” Stiles admits. “Also, I accidentally ate oatmeal for breakfast, and it was gross. Just FYI. At least put some butter and sugar on your cardboard. Oh, and your healing factor is not poison-skin transmissible. Which is too bad because I burnt myself on my coffee trying to explain to my dad that we weren’t doing any bad touching. Again.”

He can tell it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as he says it. Derek breathes in, a little too measured, and sits back in his chair. “Not because he wouldn’t be okay with it,” Stiles continues carefully. “Just because it’s not true.”

But maybe that wasn’t right either, because Derek shifts in obvious discomfort. “Stiles—”

“Anyway,” Stiles interrupts before he can hear anything approaching a rejection, “I just came to ask if you were staying. And now I have, so. Do you want to get dinner later? My dad’s busy talking jobs with Dr. Martin, and I got enough of the third degree at lunch.”

For a second he’s afraid Derek will push him away, but then he smiles a little tiredly. “Sounds good. Seven okay? I had a late lunch.” He rolls his eyes. “McCall wouldn’t shut up about his motorcycle. I think he thinks he’s Batman.”

“He is way too fluffy to be Batman,” Stiles says, amused. “Okay, I better get some homework done. God knows what they do to you if you fail your classes here.”

“Shovel the driveway, maybe,” Derek says darkly.

Stiles shudders. “Like I said. Homework.”

*

Derek debates about joining the team for less time than he thought he would. On the plus side, he’ll have a home. He can put down roots. He can keep an eye on Stiles and his dad without it being weird. He won’t have to run anymore and he won’t be alone.

On the down side, he won’t be alone anymore. He’ll have to relearn how to play with others—something he hasn’t done since his family died. Possibly worst of all, Scott McCall will be his supervisor. That grates. The kid is an actual pup.

At least the uniforms are reasonable. Derek looks good in leather. He signs his name on the dotted line, and then Erica smiles in that slightly vacant way she has sometimes when she’s speaking out of order and tells him he should finish his master’s if he wants to take over Marin’s history class when she goes on maternity leave in September.

The idea of having plans come September is terrifying, but in a good way. Mostly.

It takes him a couple of days, but Derek settles into a routine: workouts in the gym in the morning (he longs nostalgically for the pool, but he knows damn well he’ll sink like a stone); training with the other active X-Men in the afternoon; dinner with Stiles in the massive mess hall. In the evenings he reads up on course offerings while Stiles does homework, or sometimes, if Stiles is watching TV with his dad or out with his new friends, he plays chess with Boyd.

Two nights of this convince Derek Boyd should be the team leader, because the man is fucking sharp.

“So what you’re saying is you’re bad at chess,” Stiles surmises with a smirk. He didn’t come to dinner tonight, for whatever reason, but he showed up at Derek’s room around seven and made himself at home on Derek’s bed, spread his calculus homework across the comforter. Derek didn’t question it. His bed will smell like Stiles later. Stiles probably knows that. Maybe it will stave off the worst of the nightmares. He really needs to get used to sleeping alone again.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he sulks, but it’s mostly for show. Chess has never been his game, but he enjoys the mental exercise. “I’m saying Boyd is good.”

“He should play my dad,” Stiles says, deriving something with fractional exponents. “He has trophies.”

Lydia took one look at Mr. Stilinski’s employment history and his track record raising his kid, and promptly gave him Erica’s job as school guidance counselor. Derek doesn’t know what they were thinking with that one, because what kid is going to voluntarily see a counselor who can actually read their mind? Even if, according to Boyd, it’s usually because she can’t help it?

“Your dad is the most terrifying human I’ve ever met,” Derek tells him. Derek has met a lot of terrifying humans, but none of them had the combination of brains, creativity, and fierce loyalty that would make them do the things he suspects Stiles’s father would do if Stiles were in danger.

Stiles smiles to himself and it catches at Derek, just a little snag. If Stiles pulled that thread Derek thinks he might unravel completely, but he never does. “Yeah, he is.”

Derek had been sure Stiles would drift away from him once they arrived. He’d make friends his own age, spend time with his father, be busy with school. And those things have happened, but Stiles just makes room for Derek too, like he knows Derek needs him.

Maybe he does. After all, he’s seen inside Derek’s head, though Derek’s never asked how much. He never expected to have any betas at all, never mind a human one, but it’s… nice.

“So listen,” Stiles says finally when he gets to the end of his homework.

Derek looks up from his course catalog and gestures for him to continue.

Stiles squirms. “So there’s a new Star Wars movie out and a bunch of us wanna go, but you know. Rules.” He wrinkles his nose. “Lydia says we need a chaperone. And I know you like science fiction anyway, so I thought maybe….”

“You thought I might be willing to give up my Saturday to a bunch of teenagers and their hormones?” Derek supplies dryly, but he’s not hurt. He does like science fiction, and he knows Stiles didn’t mean it like that.

Stiles looks up at him from under his eyelashes. “Please?”

Fuck. Derek’s mouth goes dry, and he realizes with absolute clarity that he’s going to be jerking off to this later, to Stiles lying in a bed that smells like both of them, looking like that, flirting. Asking nicely.

Well, in Derek’s fantasy he’ll probably be begging.

“Yeah,” Derek says, pretending to be put-upon to camouflage his racing pulse. “Sure. I didn’t have any plans.” He doesn’t love the idea of Stiles in the city, but he knows Stiles can’t stay in the mansion forever. Derek’s getting cabin fever himself.

“You’re the best,” Stiles tells him. “Dad does not understand about Star Wars.”

Stiles’s dad probably doesn’t want to ride herd on teenagers on his day off from riding herd on teenagers, Derek thinks, but he’s too nice to say it out loud. His ears burn at the compliment.

Barely two weeks with this kid and Derek’s gone soft. And the worst part is, he doesn’t even mind.

*

By four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Derek regrets all his life choices even more than normal. Taking four teenagers to see a popular movie in a crowded city that reeks of humanity is Derek’s idea of hell, even if he is irrationally fond of one aforementioned teenager. Taking them in his own truck? Worst. Idea. Ever.

“I want McDonald’s!” Kira shouts from the backseat.

Derek winces at the volume.

“I could go for a milkshake,” one of the twins puts in. They smell different, but Derek hasn’t bothered learning to tell them apart. He thinks this one is the pyromaniac and not the Jack Frost wannabe.

“Chicken nuggets!” the other twin adds from Kira’s right.

Derek holds in a sigh and cuts a sideways glance at Stiles, who’s biting his lips and staring at his knees in the front passenger seat, like he doesn’t want to ask for anything even though he’s obviously invested in Derek’s answer.

Derek hates that—both that Stiles doesn’t ask and that he feels like he has to impress his new friends—more than he hates having given in to this errand in the first place. So he just follows the sign for the next McDonald’s and says, “Stiles?”

“McFlurry?” he says hopefully, all doe eyes, like Derek’s done something incredible instead of just consigning himself to ten more minutes in the car with four ticking hormone bombs.

“It’s February,” Derek protests, but that’s never really stopped him either. He resigns himself to finding napkins shoved down the pockets on the back of the seats and paper cups jammed underneath and rolls down the window for the drive-through.

Stiles’s shy smile does not in any way make Derek’s heart beat a little harder.

They’re forty-five minutes early for the show, which turns out to be a good thing, since it’s opening weekend and the place is packed. Even more irritating with a werewolf nose. Kira and the twins set out to reserve seats together while Stiles hems and haws over what toppings to put on his popcorn.

“Why would you—dill pickle is disgusting,” Derek says vehemently. “You’re disgusting.”

“You love me,” Stiles teases, holding the flavor can over the popcorn bag but not tipping it over just yet. “I’m—”

Derek goes cold all over, but by the time he realizes why, it’s too late.

“Ah, Mr. Hale,” a smoothly accented voice says from behind him. “Aiden’s told us so much about you.”

He can’t move. All he can do is watch as someone dressed in the theater uniform saunters up behind Stiles and sinks a needle into his neck.

No.

Stiles’s eyes flutter closed and his heartbeat slows and Derek is frozen. He can’t even turn around.

This must be Magneto—Deucalion. The man who sent Kali and the omega to find Stiles in Alberta.

“Such an interesting specimen,” he intones. Derek hears his footsteps coming around the side, interspersed with an odd metallic click, and smells a familiar scent. When the man finally comes into view, Derek is startled by the sunglasses and walking stick—but not by the omega werewolf standing behind one using them. “Tell me, how did they get the adamantium to adhere to your bones like that? They must have poured it on.”

“Go to hell,” Derek gets out through gritted teeth.

“Funny you should say that.” He leans in closer and tugs down the glasses, meeting Derek’s gaze with eyes a shade of milky red. “I’ve already been.”

Then, with a flick of his hand, he sends Derek sprawling into a concrete girder. For the second time in two weeks, Derek’s vision goes black.

*

“Derek? Derek! Come on, you have to wake up.”

 He inhales sharply and opens his eyes, quickly taking in the scene. A crowd has gathered around him, people snapping pictures with cell phones, others alerting the authorities. But probably not the right ones. This is bad.

In front of him on her knees is Kira, pale and shaking, her heart beating a solid hundred and forty beats a minute. Derek shakes his head and groans. “Where are the twins?”

“I don’t know. I just—they got up to go to the bathroom and they never came back and then the whole building shook—”

Derek winces and stands up. He feels like his spine needs to be realigned, but even if he could manage it with the adamantium, it’d have to wait. For now, he reaches into his pocket and grabs his keys. “Did you call Deaton?”

She nods frantically. Her cell phone is still clutched in her hand.

Derek huffs out a breath. “Good.” He takes her other hand and curls her fingers around the keys. “Take the truck and get out of here. Go back to the school. Don’t stop, not even for Aiden and Ethan. Keep going and don’t stop unless you’re going to cause an accident. A bad one. Got it?”

She nods again.

Hell. Derek thinks she might actually be fine. “Okay. Good girl.” He cracks his neck as best he can and flexes his hands. Under his skin, his claws itch, wanting to be buried deep in Deucalion’s flesh. And that’s just where Derek intends to put them, freaky metal manipulation abilities or not.

“Derek?”

He turns back to Kira.

“What are you doing to do?”

He flares his nostrils, closes his eyes. There.

Maybe if it were just Stiles, he wouldn’t be able to do it. Maybe not yet. He’s out of practice, after all.

But Stiles, four other mutants, and an omega werewolf? Derek could follow that trail with clogged sinuses and two broken legs. “I’m going after them.”

Deucalion has a head start on his side and he knows where he’s going, so he has a distinct advantage over Derek. All Derek has is his own senses, his claws, and his desperation to get Stiles back in one piece. He was supposed to be looking after him. He was supposed to be responsible.

Of course, he didn’t know he had to keep Stiles safe from their own people, but he can beat himself up over that later. Once Stiles is safe again. Once he’s home.

Derek runs through the early Saturday evening crowd as fast as foot traffic will let him. More than one person curses him as he shoves them out of the way, but he doesn’t have time for politeness. Stiles’s life could literally hang in the balance.

He runs until his lungs burn, until his feet have blistered and healed a dozen times over. Sweat dampens his T-shirt under his jacket. Every muscle strains with the need to go faster.

He swings left, then right again, sprints down Broadway toward Battery Park.

With a sinking feeling, he realizes exactly where this trail is heading. Derek reaches the ferry terminal in time to see a small speedboat jet away from the dock. The wind is blowing just right: it carries a hint of a rainstorm overlaid with dill pickle seasoning and crappy soft-serve.

No.

He’s too late. Even if he commandeered the ferry, he’d never catch up, and he can’t swim. Not with a metal skeleton weighing him down. All he can do is stand at the dock and watch as the boat gets smaller and smaller in the distance. As he loses his pack again.

His ears fill with the sound of rushing wind, so loud it hurts; his throat closes up and he knows his eyes are bleeding red. He feels empty. He feels—

Like the wind is about strong enough blow him over.

Derek looks up to see the Blackbird holding steady twenty feet above his head. The rear hatch is open and Erica’s standing in the gap wearing the standard X-Men leather bodysuit, shouting, “Get in, loser. We have a rescue mission.”

After Boyd—Nightcrawler; they’re supposed to use code names when they’re on missions—takes him inside, Derek makes a beeline for the cockpit. Argent’s flying, with McCall beside her reading the instruments. “Does somebody wanna tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Magneto’s got a machine to turn humans into mutants and he put it on top of the Statue of Liberty,” Erica says from behind him.

“Poetic,” Derek snarls. “Aiden and Ethan are working with him.”

Everyone jerks a little at that, and then Erica scowls. “No wonder those little bastards have been skipping out on their counseling sessions.”

Frankly Derek doesn’t give a shit about their education right now. “What does Deucalion want with Stiles?”

No one speaks. The silence says everything it has to. Whatever they know, it’s bad. “McCall!” Derek barks.

McCall looks up from the instrument panel, a grim expression on his face. “Erica was able to get an impression of some of the blueprints. We think….”

“What?” For God’s sake, can’t he just spit it out? The not knowing is just making it worse—

“The machine needs constant contact with someone who can manipulate magnetic fields,” Erica says, taking over. “The level of concentration and energy it’s going to take could easily be fatal. We think they want Stiles as a battery.”

The bottom drops out of Derek’s stomach as Argent puts the Blackbird down on Liberty Island. “But Stiles can’t manipulate magnetic fields.”

“Not naturally,” Argent agrees, standing. She’s armed to the teeth with ceramic throwing knives strapped everywhere, and she has a 9mm on each hip. “But he will if Magneto touches him long enough. And if Stiles is unconscious when it happens, Erica thinks Magneto will be able to take control of his body—”

Derek pops his claws and drops his fangs as Boyd lowers the ramp. “You come loaded for werewolf? Magneto has at least one omega on his side.”

Argent fingers the weapon on her right hip. “I got this,” she assures him.

Derek can’t spare the energy to doubt her.

He starts running the second his feet hit the ground, all senses on high alert. He doesn’t know who or what to expect, but if anyone comes between him and Stiles, he’ll rip their throat out.

“Jesus,” he hears Erica murmur behind him, and her footsteps stop.

“What?” he asks before he can take another step.

Then he follows her gaze to the top of the statue, where a light has begun to glow.

Stiles.

“He could affect half of Manhattan from up there.”

He could die alone up there, Derek thinks, and that’s what spurs him back into action. “I’m going in.”

Since they probably lost the element of surprise when they showed up in a giant fucking jet plane, McCall doesn’t bother trying to sneak them in. He levels his visor at the doors and blows them twenty feet inward.

“Subtle,” Erica says. “I like it.”

“Go,” McCall says grimly. “We’ve got your back.”

Boyd slinks into the shadows. Derek follows him.

When he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can count the heartbeats. Argent’s, completely steady. Deadly. Trained. McCall’s, rabbit-quick, though his breathing is even. Erica and Boyd fall somewhere in between them, though Erica’s breathing is shallow and quick.

Derek only counts four other heartbeats, only smells four other scents. Deucalion’s isn’t among them. Neither is Stiles’s. They must be up top, or maybe Deucalion’s taken off by now. Maybe he’s such a coward that he’s left the island to make sure he stays safe.

Derek can deal with that later. Right now he’s busy following the closest of the enemy heartbeats, which seems to be up half a flight of noisy metal stairs. He catches McCall’s eye before gesturing, and McCall nods understanding.

Figuring there’s no way to get up the stairs without being heard, Derek just bolts for the doors. With some luck, whoever’s waiting for him will think he’s being reckless and underestimate him. He doesn’t have a lot of hope, but he holds tight to what he has.

He only gets to the top of the landing before a familiar voice says, “Derek?”

And suddenly there’s Stiles. His lip is split and bleeding and there’s a hell of a bruise on his cheekbone. “Derek—”

Derek grabs him by the neck and throws him into the nearest wall. Or tries—he never makes it, pivoting in midair and dropping to a defensive crouch.

“Wondered how good your sense of smell was,” Kali says idly as she straightens again. “Apparently your kind isn’t as extinct as we’ve been led to believe.”

She only looks like Stiles, Derek reminds himself. She doesn’t smell like him. Her heartbeat is wrong. And the way she moves his body is—

Distracting.

Derek ducks a kick too late, and Kali scratches sharp toenails across his face. He never even noticed she was barefoot. He stumbles backward into a wall and hits his head on the emergency fire box, raising a hand to catch a blow that doesn’t come.

“Aiden was right, huh?” she taunts. “You do have a thing for his jailbait ass. That’s adorable.”

Derek grits his teeth and lashes out with his claws. He only manages a glancing blow across her midsection before she flips away, smirking. On the level below, he hears Allison discharging her weapon, the roar of one of Aiden’s fireballs.

“Tell me, did he give it up for you? I hear he’s a creative guy, I bet he could find a way around the whole no-touching thing.”

She’s doing it to get to him. He knows that. But the words cut at him anyway, worse than the already healed gash on his cheek. As Kali charges again, Derek roars and drops his fangs.

She’s fast, but he’s ready for her. He lets her kick him in the stomach, ignoring the hot burst of pain as her nails slice through muscle, and grabs her ankle, twisting as he digs in with his claws. He feels her Achilles tendon sever under his fingers, and she cries out as she hits the ground and rolls away.

Still she gets to her feet and sneers at him with Stiles’s face. “Then again, maybe not,” she says. “You are kind of pathetic, you know, a werewolf without a pack. It wouldn’t exactly be surprising if he didn’t want anything to do with you.”

Finally she smirks and reaches behind herself. When she brings her arm back, she’s holding an electric cattle prod, the kind that will prevent Derek from using any of his werewolf powers. “Not that it matters either way, since neither one of you is going to make it off this island alive.”

No. Kali might be right about Derek being pathetic. She might be right that he’s in love with Stiles. She might even be right that Stiles could never love him back. But he isn’t going to let Stiles die.

He smashes his hand through the glass on the fire box and hauls out the ax.

Two weeks of training with Argent and McCall and Derek has learned to wait for the opening. Kali darts in on her good leg to electrocute him with the cattle prod—

And Derek takes her hand off at the wrist. Then, before she can recover, he buries the head of the ax in her face.

In Stiles’s face.

Derek fights down a wave of nausea and books it back to the stairs. His hackles are up, and he can almost taste an electric current in the air that isn’t coming from that stun stick.

He meets Ethan on the stairs, looking pale and irresolute. “Get out of my way and I won’t kill you,” Derek snarls through his fangs.

After only a second’s hesitation, Ethan steps aside to let him pass. Derek knocks him unconscious and pushes him down a flight of stairs, but he’ll live. Probably.

When Derek finally makes it to the crown and throws open the door, the wind is howling. It’s late enough at night that it should be dark, but the glow from the top of the statue’s head makes it almost as bright as day.

Stiles’s screams are audible even over the roar of the wind.

Before Derek can do anything, he hears footsteps on the stairs behind him and Boyd and Erica appear. Derek meets Boyd’s eyes. “Can you get me up there?”

He shakes his head. “No healing factor. At that distance, the radiation from the machine will kill me.”

“We have to go anyway,” Erica says grimly. “Lydia found where Magneto’s hiding. We’re backup.”

So taking care of Stiles is up to him. “Good luck,” Derek tells them, and digs his claws into metal.

Before he’s gone five feet, he understands what Boyd meant by the radiation. Something in the wind burns at his skin, and it blisters and heals on an endless loop, filling his nostrils with the fetid stench of blood and smoldering flesh. Derek’s gorge rises in his throat, but he grits his teeth and claws his way upward, pushing his discomfort away. He focuses on the pain he heard in Stiles’s voice, the way he suddenly goes silent, and his scent underneath the rot.

When Derek reaches the top, he’s already exhausted. His shirt is soaked with his own blood, and the skin around his claws is raw, enflamed.

Stiles is on his knees on a small platform, his wrists cuffed to two metal stands that remind Derek of Tesla coils. His hair stands straight up and his eyes are open but unseeing in the garish halo that surrounds him. Derek can just barely hear his heartbeat through the calamity, thready, inconsistent. He’s barely breathing.

Derek slices through the cuffs and everything stops. The wind. The glow.

Stiles’s pulse.

Gagging on his fear, Derek lays Stiles out on his back, careful to avoid touching him too much. His clothing is intact but the skin on his face is burned, blistering. His bare hands are worse.

Please, Derek thinks, lowering his head, listening desperately. Please.

Thump.

Derek shakes with it.

On the floor of the platform, Stiles opens his eyes. “Derek?”

“Yeah,” Derek says. “It’s me.” He wants—he wants to take Stiles’s hand, wants to take his pain. But he can’t. It isn’t fair. Touching Stiles won’t help him. All it will do is rob Derek of the last few minutes they’ll have together.

“You found me.” Stiles’s voice sounds dreamy, but then he hacks a cough, and blood flecks his lips.

“I’ll always find you,” Derek chokes, unable to keep himself from pressing one hand to the center of Stiles’s chest, over his hoodie, no matter how much it hurts.

Stiles takes a shaky breath as his heart skips, and emotion gathers in Derek’s throat. “I don’t wanna die,” Stiles says brokenly, and something inside Derek rips open. “I don’t want to leave you, Derek, don’t let me die—”

The sound that tears out of Derek’s mouth then isn’t human. It’s a pure, raw, animal cry of grief and helplessness. His fangs cut through his gums. He promised himself he’d never do it. But he has to try.

As gently as he can, he lifts Stiles’s bloody hand in his own. The draw of Stiles’s power is immediate, and Stiles tries to pull away, but he’s too weak. He doesn’t understand yet. His eyes are already closing.

Derek sinks his fangs into the flesh of Stiles’s wrist.

The taste is acrid and horrible, letting him know just how badly Stiles’s body has been poisoned. The wound hardly bleeds with the sluggish beat of Stiles’s exhausted heart. Then Stiles’s mutation kicks into high gear and Derek loses control of his body. He can’t pull away from Stiles, can’t retract his fangs. All he can do is hold perfectly still and hope.

Please, he thinks as his vision goes gray.

Please.

*

Stiles wakes up to the smell of antiseptic and the sounds of a hushed conversation.

“—how he’ll react to the bite. We need to keep him under close observation—”

“He’s a werewolf, Allison,” Lydia’s voice whisper-snaps. “He needs to be surrounded by familiar scents, things that remind him he’s safe—”

Stiles opens his eyes to ask where Derek is so he can be there, but the infirmary room he’s in is empty apart from him. He blinks.

The voices are coming from the other side of the door.

He looks down at his arm and pushes up the sleeve with one latex-gloved hand. The last time he saw it, the skin was blistered, sloughing off in chunks from exposure to radiation. Now it’s smooth, unblemished.

For a second he wonders if he’s dead. If he is, the afterlife is a pretty big let-down. He was expecting his mom at the very least. But he figures there wouldn’t be a reason to have him hooked up to a heart monitor in the afterlife, and he definitely wouldn’t still need the full-body clothing thing.

He yanks off the heart monitor and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Other than having to piss like a racehorse, he feels fine. He wishes he could remember what happened—

I’ll always find you.

The words are louder than an echo ought to be, and Stiles stumbles a little and catches himself against the wall. Okay. Well. He did just get up after God knows how long. He should probably take it easy.

Actually, he probably shouldn’t even be able to walk. Something weird is definitely going on here. But right now—peeing. He yanks off his gloves and sets them on the side of the sink. God, emptying his bladder has never felt so good.

He’s almost afraid to look himself in the mirror when he washes his hands afterward. But when he gathers his courage and meets his own eyes, he looks the same: same moles, same snub nose, same wide mouth. It’s eerie. Like nothing even happened.

Then he looks back down at his hands again—

And pulls the sleeve up around his left wrist. Because that, that crescent-shaped array of divots—that scar is new.

Stiles runs his fingers over it reverently.

“—thought you said you hadn’t moved him yet?”

Stiles startles at the sudden intrusion of his dad’s voice into his thoughts and looks up. This time, when he catches his own gaze, it’s burning amber.

Holy shit. Derek bit him.

“I didn’t,” Allison replies. Then she knocks on the door. “Stiles? Are you in there?”

No fucking wonder he’s hearing conversations he isn’t meant to hear. “Yeah,” he says, watching as his eyes flicker and go back to brown. Good. That’s—he doesn’t want to freak out his dad any more than he already has. He reaches for a paper towel to dry his hands. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

But he takes his time. He needs a few extra seconds to collect himself, to take the edges off.

Finally he can’t delay any longer, and he opens the door to the bathroom to find his dad and Allison waiting for him. Allison’s wearing scrubs and a lab coat, a stethoscope slung around her neck, but his dad—his dad hasn’t changed clothes since the last time Stiles saw him on Saturday afternoon.

“Hey, Dad,” he says, burying his face in his dad’s shoulder just as he did a two weeks ago. This time, though, he can focus on his dad’s scent, earthy and familiar and comforting. He can hear the steady beat of his heart.

His dad pulls back first and holds him at arm’s length. “How are you okay? Erica told me what happened—”

“Maybe not everything that happened,” Allison amends.

She left out the part where Stiles got turned into a werewolf? Seriously? What kind of school is this?

“Derek… saved me,” Stiles says, because on second thought, maybe he’s not ready for his father to know either. “I think.”

And then a terrible thought occurs to him, sparking panic up and down his spine, and his hands clench into fists and—ow. “Where is Derek, anyway?”

*

“It could have been a lot worse,” Lydia tells Stiles as he slumps down in the armchair next to Derek’s infirmary bed. His new senses let him track the thump-thump of Derek’s heart even without the monitor’s echo—now that he’s identified it he could probably hear it from several corridors away—but it isn’t enough. He needs the warm, earthy scent of him in his nose, needs to be able to see Derek is fine with his own two eyes.

He’s also still sulking because he had to tell his dad everything right away after all.

Stiles looks up from his spoon bending, just lets the thing hang there in the air and wait for him. “What do you mean, it could have been worse?”

Erica has already explained what happened: that Deucalion forced Stiles to soak up his intent and his power, that he knew the radiation poisoning would almost certainly kill him. That Derek must have known turning Stiles into a werewolf would help him survive.

“If you hadn’t already started fighting Deucalion’s hold over you,” Lydia elaborates. “Your mutation helped you use Derek like an antibiotic to boost your immune system. If he’d had to do all the fighting for you….”

Stiles would have drained him completely, and Derek would have died. And then Stiles would have had to learn how to be a werewolf all by himself.

Even with Derek asleep, Stiles has learned a lot. Derek’s surface thoughts from the Statue of Liberty are pretty jumbled, an emotional rat’s nest Stiles isn’t ready to untangle, but some things are easy to figure out. He’s calmer when Derek’s around and edgy when he isn’t. He’s suspicious of strangers—he popped claw at one of the nurses earlier—and irritated by the smell of secondhand smoke on clothing.

And he’s learned most of that sitting in this chair. “Why isn’t he waking up?” Stiles has been up for hours, and he knows Derek is stronger than he is.

“I don’t know, genius, maybe because he fought off two mutants and extreme radiation poisoning before sticking his teeth in you and letting you sap his strength?” Lydia flips a page in her magazine. “Give him a break. Why don’t you go to bed?”

Stiles tried that an hour ago, when his dad finally gave up the pretense of not being tired and went back to his own room. But it was too loud, and it didn’t smell right, and his brain got stuck in a loop about the omega werewolf Allison incapacitated, the one who’s sleeping off an electric shock in a cell downstairs, and—

Stiles recognizes the overheated whirr of his brain needing to recharge. Maybe he’ll try again.

“Fine,” he mutters. “I can see when I’m not wanted.”

He doesn’t have to look to know Lydia’s making a face behind her magazine.

*

Derek has some seriously fucked-up sex dreams.

Not that a sample size of two is a lot to draw conclusions from. Danny’s feature mainly his ex-boyfriend, which Stiles would’ve liked to know before he ended up with Danny inside his head. As far as he can tell, he didn’t pick up any latent urges from Kali or Deucalion, so that just leaves Stiles’s own dreams for comparison, and, well. There isn’t one.

For one thing, Stiles is perfectly aware he’s dreaming. For another, he seems to be dreaming in smell.

Maybe Derek just isn’t a very visual guy. Maybe it’s a werewolf thing and now that Stiles is one, he’ll start dreaming like this too. Actually, he doesn’t quite know how he knows this is one of Derek’s. But all he can see is a close-up of pale skin on white sheets, not even really in focus. It’s soft under the rough scrape of Derek’s stubble, which feels strange on Stiles’s dream face. The skin pinks under the onslaught, and a smile pulls at his mouth. It’s a nice image, if a little vague for a sex dream.

But the scent.

The skin under his nose smells like a spring thunderstorm, wild and electric and clean, and like—well. Like sex. Stiles knows that smell pretty intimately, and this is not exactly how he would’ve liked to confirm Derek is interested in guys, but he’ll take it.

He buries his face in the soft flesh of stomach and inhales deeply, like he’s committing this to memory. Like nothing could be more important than this. There’s a steady, quickening heartbeat audible beneath the skin, and it sings in his ears; he can trace the flow of blood south from sound alone.

When he presses his open lips to a bare hip, his partner gasps, almost familiar. “Derek.”

It’s like the voice is coming through distorted, like Stiles should recognize it. He’s too blissed out to care, though, trailing his lips up, biting with gentle human teeth at the side of a ribcage, dancing his fingers down his partner’s arm, over his chest, teasing at his thigh.

His partner makes a noise of impatience and fists a hand in his hair. “Get up here.” The smile in his voice is audible.

Derek-Stiles can’t help but return the smile as he allows himself to be drawn up, up—

To meet his own whiskey-brown eyes, light with amusement.

Stiles thinks, Oh.

This—this is how Derek sees him?

Dream Stiles teases, “You missed a spot.”

“My mistake,” Derek says seriously, and suddenly some barrier in Stiles’s brain breaks down and he can feel the things Derek feels, the things he associates with this almost-memory. Derek leans up and presses their mouths together, and it’s tender and open and sweet and Stiles hates every second of it, because it can’t ever be like this. Even if—even if, Stiles still has poison skin. Derek will never touch him like they both want him to. This dream is everything Derek wants from him and Stiles can never give it to him.

He could wake up, probably, but if this is all Stiles will ever have, he wants to soak in every second.  

It’s not a particularly explicit dream. There’s kissing, and then dream Stiles and dream Derek link their hands and stroke off together. Dream Stiles comes first, breaking away from Derek’s mouth as he does, and Derek pushes his face against Stiles’s neck and breathes in heavily as he follows, drinking down the scent of their sex.

Stiles wakes himself up before the dream can taunt him further.

He opens his eyes in Derek’s bedroom and curls his knees up to his chest. No wonder he dreamt Derek’s dreams here, in Derek’s bed, where it smells like Derek and Stiles from Friday when he did his homework. Where it smells like—God, now that Stiles is paying attention, he can still smell a faint hint of Derek’s come. Stiles is harder than he’s ever been in his life, but it’s probably vain to jerk off to a sex dream about yourself, and paradoxically, he’s never been less in the mood.

A glance at the clock shows it’s seven in the morning anyway. He’s had a few hours’ sleep. He can get up.

Stiles stumbles to Derek’s shower, takes Derek’s towel without thinking about it, then turns on the water without actually touching the tap.

He stares at the metal knob for a minute before turning it off again, also without using his hands. Then he sticks his head out of the shower and into the bathroom and unscrews the hinge on the window, flushes the toilet, and separates the blades on Derek’s electric razor.

Jesus Christ.

Stiles rushes through his shower and scrambles into the nearest clean clothes he can find—they’re Derek’s because he didn’t think to bring his own—before bolting for the infirmary. “Allison!” Ah crap, he should probably call her by her title. “Dr. Argent! Dr.—”

One of the heavy wooden doors down the infirmary hallway opens and Allison pokes her head out. Her hair’s a disaster, there are dark circles under her eyes, and she appears to be wearing pajamas.

Oops.

“Stiles?” she says sleepily, rubbing one hand over her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

“Um.” Okay, this is embarrassing, but Stiles is gonna roll with it. “Derek. He’s still unconscious?”

She yawns. “Yeah, last I checked. Erica thinks another twelve hours or so.” Then she freezes midstretch. “I mean, I can try to wake him up earlier if it’s a, um, werewolf thing?”

“What? No.” Stiles waves a hand. “I’m fine. Peachy. I have this sudden urge to eat like seven bowls of oatmeal, but I think that’s Derek-specific, not, um, werewolf. I should probably be craving bacon or something, right?”

Allison doesn’t say anything. Stiles realizes belatedly she’s waiting for him to get to the point.

“Look, this is going to sound crazy, but.” He reaches out with his borrowed power and Allison’s doorknob comes off in her hand as the screws float over to Stiles. “I don’t know how long this is going to last. I know Derek’s unconscious, I know he can’t—” Can’t okay major fucking surgery. That’s kind of a problem.

Allison drops the doorknob.

Stiles swallows. “He hates it,” he says thickly. “Believe me. I know him, Allison, and every time he uses his claws he thinks of her and how he got this way, and he can’t swim, and sometimes he can’t get warm, and he can’t—he can’t shift—”

For a second she just stares at him. Then she disappears into her room. When she comes out again a minute later, she’s dressed in a fresh pair of scrubs, her hair pulled back in a severe bun. “This isn’t a yes,” she cautions him. “It’s just a consult.”

“Sure,” he agrees, nodding. “Of course. I understand.”

Twenty minutes and a lot of demonstrations later, Stiles is starting to worry that Allison will never say yes, never mind if Stiles can use his powers to unwrap a Ferrero Rocher at twenty paces—but then the door opens and Lydia and Erica burst in, Lydia with a folder pressed to her chest. She hands it over to Allison, who opens it and then her mouth in surprise.

“He signed it when he joined the team,” Lydia says promptly. “Standard procedure, though his choice is maybe a little unorthodox.” 

Finally Allison smiles tightly and lets the folder fall to the desk. “Okay. I still don’t like it, I think it’s too risky, but okay.”

Stiles slumps back in his chair in relief. “What the hell was in that file?”

“Legal documents,” Lydia tells him, and pushes it closer so he can see. “Derek’s power of attorney.”

Stiles blinks down at the page, at Derek’s neat signature next to Lydia’s and Boyd’s as witnesses, and then lets his gaze flicker to the top. Władysław Stilinski. “That asshole,” he says out loud. Because if Derek figured out how to spell it, dark Ls and all, he probably could’ve pronounced it just fine.

And also because Stiles loves him kind of a lot, but he’s not going to go around saying that to other people before he says it to Derek.

“Come on,” Allison says. “We’d better scrub in.”

*

Stiles listens with his full attention as Allison runs him through the procedure one more time.

“We’ll have Erica there in case he starts to wake up,” she assures him, because like hell is Stiles putting Derek through this when he’s awake. He’s got enough nightmares from the first time. “I have some supplies that will work on werewolves to keep him under, but I don’t want to drug him unnecessarily since they’ll also affect his healing.”

Stiles nods for her to go on and continues shoveling in his third bowl of oatmeal. It’s terrible but comforting at the same time, and he’s going to need to keep his strength up. Allison estimates the surgery will take six hours.

“When you’re ready, I’ll make an incision and use a retractor to expose the bone. We’ll start with a claw to minimize the damage in case something doesn’t go according to plan and to get you used to the process. If that goes well, we’ll move on to the femur, tibia, and humerus, in approximately that order. We’re going from biggest to smallest to make sure you have the fine control needed when you get to things like fingers and toes.”

Nothing like being reminded you could accidentally cripple the man of your dreams, Stiles thinks crazily. Holy crap, he’s really going to do this.

“Sometimes a bone might fracture or break when you coax the metal off. Don’t panic. I’ll extract any fragments and you just worry about the metal. Broken bones will heal. Okay?”

Stiles nods and finishes the last of his oatmeal, feeling suddenly queasy. He wishes he hadn’t eaten so much. “Okay.” He lets out a long breath. “Let’s do this.”

Allison shows him how to scrub in, Stiles covers himself as best he can in offensive-smelling latex, and then they’re in the OR with Derek unconscious on the operating table, draped in a sterile sheet. Erica stands by his head, pressing her fingers gently to his temples. Someone has marked his skin with Sharpie or something, to point out where Allison will need to cut. Two nurses Stiles doesn’t know, a mutant and a human, stand just behind Allison, awaiting instructions.

For one dark second, Stiles is absolutely sure he’s going to puke. But then he takes a deep breath and Derek’s comforting scent fills his nostrils, and when he reaches out he can feel the metal on his bones.

The metal has to go. Stiles nods to Allison and she picks up Derek’s hand, presses on his wrist until his claws extend. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Yeah, right, Stiles thinks. But he concentrates until he’s created a fissure in the metal of Derek’s index claw, all the way down, and then he just peels it off. Underneath, the claw itself looks sickly, and it cracks a little as the metal comes away.

But Allison lets out a sigh that sounds like relief and says, “Good. Now again.”

Stiles drops the metal into the tray offered by the mutant nurse and stretches out his powers again.

Stiles degilds all ten of Derek’s fingers before Allison makes the first cut. The human nurse provides suction for the blood so Stiles can see what he’s doing, but even so, the scent almost overwhelms him. He feels his teeth growing, and his claws want to puncture the ends of his latex gloves.

Allison shoots him a worried look.

Stiles knows the wound won’t stay open easily or for long. Fighting back his instincts, he splits the cast covering the bone in rings, then bisects those. The top halves come away easily. The bottom halves need to be rotated, and Stiles feels the resistance when they pull against tissue. But he gets it all eventually—he can sense that much—and he looks up at Allison and nods.

“Still okay?” she asks as she pulls the retractor out. The nurse uses forceps to push the tissue back together, but the skin is already knitting closed.

“I’m still good,” Stiles says. “Let’s do this.”

Even though Stiles doesn’t have to do anything physically, it’s agonizing work. If he had any delusions that he might be a doctor one day, they disappear in the face of how lightheaded he feels when Allison uses a retractor to crack open the skin covering Derek’s ribcage. After that, Stiles can’t decide what the worst part is: the fastidious, intricate pull of metal against Derek’s vertebrae, or the scalpel slicing into the skin of Derek’s face, or the incisions on the bottom of his feet.

Derek only stirs once, when Erica has to move away from him so he can be turned. “It’s the touch,” Erica explains in a murmur without looking up. “Werewolves need the comfort of touch, especially when they’re hurt.”

Stiles only spares himself half a second’s pity before he returns to his task.

By the time it’s all over, Derek’s a mess of drying blood, Erica is swaying on her feet, Allison looks like a walking corpse, and Stiles is slumped down against the wall because his legs won’t hold him up. Only the nurses seem unaffected. Stiles thinks maybe they might both be superhuman after all.

“We’ll get him cleaned up and back in his room,” one of the nurses says, and the rest of them take their leave.

Stiles slumps against the tiles in the infirmary shower and lets the hot water pour over him. He feels like his bones are made of jelly, and he can’t seem to get warm, no matter how high he cranks the temperature. Finally he shuts the water off and climbs out, dresses again in the pajama pants and sweatshirt he stole from Derek’s room earlier.

But he doesn’t even try to sleep in his own bed. He goes back to Derek’s room in the infirmary, pulls the armchair as close as he can, and sits down.

He still can’t get warm. He shivers himself to sleep…

… and snaps awake he doesn’t know how many hours later, bleary, heart pounding because—

Derek leaps out of bed with nothing approaching his usual grace. He puts so much force behind the jump that he actually hits his head on the ceiling, denting it, before succumbing to gravity and landing on his ass on the floor. The scrubs the nurse wrangled him into have baby ducklings on them.

It’s probably a good thing Stiles falls out of the chair in shock. If he fell out of it from laughing, that would be bad form.

“Uh,” he says. Fuck, his ass hurts. “Welcome back.”

Derek stares at him. “You’re alive.”

Stiles flushes. “Um. Yeah. Thanks to you.”

The uncomfortable stare continues for a minute longer before Derek shakes himself and says, “What the hell is wrong with me?”

Stiles stands and offers him a gloved hand up off the floor, not quite able to stop the smile that wants to spread across his face. “Uh, well, Deucalion’s little science project left me with some extra unexpected mojo, so. You might be feeling a little light in the loafers. Like, literally.”

He wonders what Allison’s going to do with two hundred pounds of adamantium. That shit is expensive.

Derek stares for another few seconds. Then he raises a hand to his face and unsheathes his claws. They look better than they did in the OR—the cracks have filled in and the color mottling is gone. They even shine a little. He licks his lips. “You did this?”

“Well, Allison helped—” Stiles cuts himself off as Derek drags his scrub top over his head. “What are you doing?”

Derek pulls his pants off without answering, which doesn’t help Stiles’s focus any. “Uh—”

And then suddenly Derek’s not Derek anymore. Or at least not the Derek Stiles knows. Instead he’s a furry black monster with green eyes and a barrel chest and—

And a very cold nose, which he shoves against Stiles’s neck. Which he can reach, because he’s standing on his hind legs, holy God he’s huge. “Uh, should you be—” Stiles starts, but there’s no pull. His skin doesn’t react to the wolf’s.

Stiles has never pulled his gloves off so fast in his life. “God, okay. Okay, I hope you’re good with me petting you like a dog, because I’m not gonna be able to help myself—”

Derek cuts him off by licking the side of his face, and Stiles can’t even think it’s gross. He sinks back down to the floor with Derek’s huge body more or less in his lap and buries his fingers in Derek’s fur. “You’re gonna teach me how to do this, right?” Stiles asks, rubbing vigorously as Derek nudges so hard into his touch he knocks Stiles onto his back. It’s fine, he thinks, it’s natural—this is Derek showing his new beta wolf who’s boss. Stiles gets it. On the other hand—

“I will not be held responsible for my reaction if you sniff my crotch,” Stiles warns him. “Or my butt.”

Derek snorts at him like this comment is somehow offensive.

“Sorry. I’ve only been a werewolf for one day and my alpha’s been unconscious; I don’t exactly know the etiquette—”

Derek paws softly at his face and Stiles follows his instinct, pushes up on his elbows so he can rub his nose under Derek’s chin. “Better?”

Derek lets out what Stiles can only describe as a full-body sigh, and just sort of lays on him for a few seconds. Then—

Then he shifts into human form, puts a hand on each of Stiles’s cheeks, and kisses him.

Stiles freezes, his first instinct to pull away. But then nothing happens. Nothing happens, and Derek’s lips are soft against his own, and he tastes kind of awful because his mouth is dry but fuck that. Stiles is kissing Derek, and Derek isn’t dying.

When he can bear it, he pulls away to open his eyes, to make sure—but no. His hands are on Derek’s face now, and Derek’s nuzzling into his palm like his skin is just as hungry as Stiles’s.

Also, he’s still naked, Stiles realizes, and his dick goes from a decided “this is inappropriate but I can’t help it” half-chub to full-on “let’s play” literally faster than humanly possible. Werewolves, holy crap. He exhales a shuddery breath. “Is this a bad time to point out that we’re on the floor in the infirmary?”

Derek smothers an honest-to-God laugh that crinkles the skin at the corners of his eyes. It’s mesmerizing.

God, Stiles has it bad. Stiles has it the worst. He lets his head drop back against the floor. “Ugh, okay, put your pants back on”—he can’t believe he’s saying this; what is his life—“so we can tell Allison you need to be discharged, like, stat. And I mean that in every way possible.”

He can practically hear Derek rolling his eyes. “I can’t believe I like you.” But when Stiles sits up, he’s putting the scrubs back on, so that’s something.

“You love me,” Stiles corrects, a sincere echo of his words at the theater, and catches Derek’s soft smile before he can turn his face away.

It turns out Derek’s not the only one who has to meet with Allison. Apparently unexpected developments re: mutation also require medical tests. Luckily no one seems to expect Stiles to let go of Derek’s hand any time soon, because that is not happening. Stiles has gone without real contact for months, and his skin is starving.

Erica sticks her head in halfway through Stiles’s consultation and bowls over Allison’s plans for experimentation with “It’s a werewolf thing!”

Allison purses her lips, and for the first time, Stiles senses there might be some underlying tension between the two of them. He wonders what that’s about. Maybe it gets annoying trying to prove things with science when someone else can seemingly grab answers out of thin air. “How can you know—”

Erica lets her fingers hover a few millimeters above the skin of Stiles’s neck. “I can feel the energy.”

Stiles can feel it too—the hair on the back of his neck is standing up. “If I promise to let you play guinea pig later, can we go now?” he says plaintively. Derek squeezes his hand. “Seriously, Allison. I’m a seventeen-year-old virgin who hasn’t been able to touch another human being in months and for some reason this guy wants to get naked with me. Can the inquisition wait?”

Erica snorts and pats him on the shoulder. “Get it, Stiles. See you later, Allison.”

Derek makes a noise of despair and the tips of his ears go pink, but he doesn’t let go, so Stiles figures he can’t be that mortified. “Hey, you bit me, you’re stuck with me.”

“Oh God, get out of here,” Allison finally says with a reluctant smile. “And Derek?”

He raises his head a little defiantly and meets her eyes.

“I’m glad you made it back.”

“Aww,” Stiles says, standing and basically pulling Derek with him. It works better than he expects it to—new strength, probably—and they end up stumbling a little in their haste. “Welp, see you later!”

The door shuts behind them, but he can still hear Allison’s choked-off laughter.

*

Stiles has Derek pinned up against his own bedroom door the second it closes. That lasts for three blistering hot seconds of malleable, pliant Derek under his hands and tongue before Derek switches their positions. Stiles’s head rattles the door in its frame, but he doesn’t even feel the hurt.

“Stiles.”

Uh-oh, that sounds like a serious voice. Stiles opens his eyes and licks his lips.

Derek drops his gaze for a second like he can’t help himself, then meets his eyes again. He looks like he can’t believe he’s this lucky. Like he can’t believe Stiles would actually want him.

Stiles chokes out “I love you” before the words even register in his brain.

Whatever serious conversation they were going to have has apparently been tabled for later. Derek makes an impossible sound and plasters his body back to Stiles’s, sealing their mouths together before licking inward. He tastes minty. Apparently he also used his break between waking and their appointments with Allison to brush his teeth. Stiles approves.

Derek doesn’t have to say it back right now. Not when Stiles can hear the echoes from last night in his head. Please (don’t leave me). Please (don’t die). Please (I’ll do anything).

Please (I love you).

Besides, his mouth is better occupied sucking a trail down the side of Stiles’s neck. He’s breathing Stiles in, rucking his hands under Stiles’s borrowed sweatshirt, running human nails up Stiles’s back.

Stiles shudders and gathers the strength to push Derek away long enough to tear the shirt over his head. Then they stumble toward the bed, tearing at the rest of their clothes. The seams on the ducky scrub top tear audibly as Stiles yanks on it, and he has to pull back for a second to look, because claws have sprouted from his fingertips.

Well. “That could be inconvenient,” Stiles says breathlessly as Derek shoves his pants down and insinuates a bare thigh between Stiles’s.

Derek laughs and gathers his hands, pins his wrists to the bed so he can’t do any harm. “Remind me to tell you a story sometime.”

As if Stiles is capable of remembering anything but the unfettered movements of his body against Derek’s. Derek’s erection is making a sticky puddle at Stiles’s hip, and the smell of it makes Stiles’s mouth water, makes his own cock leak against Derek’s thigh. The scrape of Derek’s chest hair over his nipples makes him crazy with want; everything is so good and nothing hurts; Stiles feels drunk with it, with the knowledge that he can have this.

Derek catches his mouth again and Stiles lets him, feeding on his desperation. But he can’t take not being able to touch for long, so he squirms in Derek’s hold until he’s free, until he can run his palms down Derek’s ridiculously muscled sides, careful of his claws. “Derek.”

“Hmmm.” Derek licks down his chin, over his neck, across his collarbone. Stiles has a pretty good idea of where this is going if he leaves Derek unchecked—namely, a lot of sniffing and scent marking and then a mutual hand job that will utterly annihilate his brain cells—but God, God, he wants more than that.

“Hey, Derek.” Derek licks his nipple and Stiles almost comes on the spot. “Remember how I said I wasn’t gonna blow you?”

That gets his attention. When Derek looks up from mouthing down Stiles’s chest, his eyes are glowing red.

Stiles says, “I lied.”

Derek looks about ready to protest for half a second, but then he seems to think better of it. “Me first.”

Stiles’s brain is still hanging on how best to show his support for this idea when Derek wraps a firm hand around the base of his cock and then follows up with a sloppy lick across the head.

“Oh my God,” Stiles says faintly. He can’t decide what’s hotter: the visual, the scents, or the way Derek’s tongue feels on his dick. No, that’s a lie, it’s definitely the last one. This is it. This is how he’s going to die: with Derek sucking his dick. “Just FYI, this is going to be over embarrassingly soon.”

Derek smirks. Just when Stiles thought he couldn’t get any more attractive. “No, it’s not,” he says. “Werewolves have great recovery time.”

“That’s not even a fair thing to say,” Stiles pants as Derek licks his crown again, slower this time. “I mean I’m completely down to go from blushing virgin to werewolf sexpot overnight but—”

Derek finally stops teasing him and takes Stiles in his mouth, and the utter perfection of it breaks the connection between Stiles’s brain and his lips. All he can do is breathe deeply and try not to choke Derek in his enthusiasm.

Derek must sense his desperation, because he moves his hand from around Stiles’s cock and braces it over his hips instead as if to hold him still. Then, holding Stiles’s gaze while he sucks, he brushes the index finger of his other hand over Stiles’s balls and back.

When Derek teases across his opening, a whisper of a touch, Stiles manages a breathless “Coming now” and arches. Derek moves the arm holding him down to jerk him off instead and pulls back so he can watch Stiles come all over himself.

Or Stiles assumes he’s watching, but it’s all too much for him. He has to squeeze his eyes shut and tilt his head back and just let go, let the wave wash over him.

He comes back to himself with Derek leaning over him, pupils blown. He swipes a hand through the mess on Stiles’s stomach and brings it to his own erection and—yeah, that’s a new kink, that’s Stiles’s alpha marking himself with Stiles’s come. Stiles hasn’t even gone all the way soft yet and he’s already getting hard again; apparently that werewolf refractory period thing isn’t a joke.

He swallows, his mouth suddenly dry. “I was going to suck you.” He means it as a complaint, but it comes out a little breathless.

“You will,” Derek promises him, and reaches for Stiles’s hand, joins it with his own.

Stiles knows Derek well enough to guess what he wants, so he uses his grip on Derek’s cock to maneuver him closer. “I dreamed about this,” Stiles confesses, entranced by the smooth motion of their hands. “About having your scent on me—”

Derek cuts him off with a brutal snarl and obliges, spattering hot come over Stiles’s cock and stomach before collapsing to the bed beside him.

Stiles turns his face until his nose brushes Derek’s and kisses him like his life depends on it. For all he knows right now, it does.

Then Derek pulls away, the sweetest, tiniest smile on his lips. Stiles is hard again, but not to the point where he’ll let it distract him. “What?”

Derek pulls Stiles closer, so he’s lying with his head on Derek’s shoulder and his left leg over Derek’s knee. His skin feels saturated with Derek, and he loves it, loves the gentle steady thump of Derek’s heartbeat in his ear. “The day we met, I told someone I didn’t want any trouble,” he says, tracing a finger down Stiles’s nose. “I must’ve been crazy.”

Flushing, Stiles shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. It’s a little bittersweet, because he knows how much Derek wants a quiet life. Deaton’s School is a lot of things, but Stiles doesn’t think quiet’s ever going to be one of them.

“There’s more than one kind of trouble.” He punctuates the statement by rubbing his come-sticky hand through Stiles’s hair.

Stiles doesn’t even bother with retaliation. There’ll be plenty of fresh ammunition in a few minutes anyway. “And what kind am I?”

Derek laughs beneath him and flicks him in the ear. “Quit fishing for compliments.”

“Never. You’re still not the boss of me, you know.”

“No one who’s met you would ever think that,” Derek says dryly.

Stiles waits. He has all day.

Finally Derek gives in with a sigh and rolls them both over, bracketing Stiles’s head with his forearms. “The best kind,” he says, long-suffering, and seals it with a kiss.