Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stiles parked his Jeep a couple of hundred yards past the sign for the Beacon Hills Preserve. That put it far enough in to be hidden from the road if his dad happened to be patrolling on his overnight shift, but still allowed Stiles to approach his target stealthily, on foot.

Like most Beacon Hills kids, he knew his way around the preserve. It wasn't even all the way dark, really, with all the stars blazing in the sky and the full moon up over the trees. Once he stopped being confused by the starkness of the shadows--which did trip him up a few times, leaving him with muddy knees and scraped palms--Stiles didn't have any trouble finding his way.

He'd been allowed to play alone in the woods when he was little, as soon as he was old enough to ride the bus. Scott had been the only kid who voluntarily played with Stiles, and Scott had asthma and wasn't allowed to go running around the woods with just Stiles for company, so Stiles's adventures in the preserve had been strictly solo. He hadn't minded being on his own, though. His mom gave him the same instructions that probably every kid in Beacon Hills got: if he got lost in the woods, he should go to the top of the nearest slope and yell at the top of his lungs, "I'm lost! I need help!"

If he did, his mom had told him, one of the Hales would hear him. Their house was practically in the preserve; their land ran into it without a fence to divide it from the woods that belonged to everyone. There were nearly enough Hales to fill up the big old house they lived in, and somebody was bound to hear him if he yelled loudly, stayed put, and didn't panic.

No one lived in that house anymore; it had burned to a shell six years ago. Stiles navigated toward it through familiar gaps in the trees rather than following the dirt track that was somewhere between a road and a driveway. As he made his way through the woods he remembered the handful of times he'd gone there as a kid.

Stiles had never gotten lost--or at least, he'd never been willing to acknowledge he was lost before he managed to find himself again. He'd strayed onto Hale property, or crossed paths with one of the Hales in the woods, plenty of times while playing alone. He'd met most of the Mister and Mrs. Hales that way, as well as the Hale cousins: Laura and Derek and Heather and Mark. Somehow they'd always seemed to spot him before he saw them. The grownups tended to call out and ask if he was lost. The cousins, all older than he was, mostly ignored him.

So he'd been curious about the big house and the big family, and once when it started raining he'd run to the Hale house to take shelter on the big front porch. Grandma Hale had been there, and she had gone inside to get some cookies and then sat watching the rain with him. He told her all about where he'd been in the woods and what he'd seen, and she listened patiently, just like his mom did sometimes when she wasn't too busy.

Stiles had gone back a few times, and Grandma Hale had always met him on the porch and sat with him a while before sending him out to play again. It hadn't been anything so special, just an old lady being kind to him in the way that plenty of grownups were; they all knew his parents, after all. After that summer when he was eight or nine, Stiles had moved on to other fascinations.

Then came the fire, when Stiles was ten. Grandma Hale and most of the grownup Hales and Heather and Mark had all died. Derek and Laura went away, and Peter Hale, who had once yelled at Stiles for picking little purple flowers in their woods, went into the hospital and didn't come out. After that there was no one to hear you if you got lost in the woods, just a burned-out house slowly crumbling while the yard around it became a forest clearing, weeds growing knee high.

Stiles stopped at the tree line and looked at what was left of the house, which threw deep but irregular shadows in the moonlight. He braced himself for what he'd come to do.

Less than a week ago, Peter Hale had been found in these woods, killed by an animal. Ever since, Stiles's dad had been working overtime, trying to handle the mysterious death and all the drama it stirred up.

On the one hand, apparently there were wolves in Beacon Hills: the medical examiner said at least two had attacked Peter Hale, judging from the two different sets of bite marks. That had everyone freaking out about wild animals, which technically weren't the sheriff's problem but which he heard plenty about anyway.

On the other hand, as far as anyone knew Peter Hale was supposed to be confined to a wheelchair and basically comatose, so the fact that he'd somehow gotten to the woods under his own power was a mystery all by itself. When they questioned his nurse--who had been fired for allowing her patient to go wandering off and was possibly facing criminal charges--she went off into some kind of crazy story about how Laura Hale must have been the one to kill him in the woods. Even when they told her it was wolves she insisted that that was just what Laura wanted the police to think.

Stiles's dad was trying to track down Laura--not only to find out whether there was anything to the crazy nurse's story, but to get her to come claim her uncle's body. It had been days now, but despite working all kinds of overtime he hadn't had any luck finding her or her brother. He was drinking too much coffee, not sleeping enough, and Stiles had decided to take matters into his own hands.

Stiles thought the woods were the obvious place to look for her. It was clear that something seriously crazy was going on. Peter Hale had not only concealed his recovery but went alone into the woods and then coincidentally got killed by wolves who weren't supposed to be anywhere near Beacon Hills? That was literally insane.

So why not listen to somebody who sounded crazy? Maybe nobody could find Laura Hale anywhere near her last known address because she was still hiding out in the woods.

Stiles remembered her, sort of. She'd been a high school senior when she left town, and Stiles had been in fifth grade, but he'd seen her in the woods a few times, even rode the same bus once or twice when she got on in a gang of impossibly grownup High School Girls. His memories were probably enough to recognize her from and, hey, if he met a dark-haired woman in the woods, that would most likely be her.

He didn't really think he was going to find her; the Hales all knew these woods even better than anyone else in Beacon Hills, and he doubted Laura would have forgotten now, if her life or at least her freedom depended on staying hidden. Stiles figured it was worth trying, though. He could check the logical places for a fugitive to camp out, starting with what was left of the Hale house.

If he could find Laura--or at least a good reason to think Laura was in the woods--he could make life easier for his dad. He could maybe even impress people at school; maybe Lydia would finally notice his existence.

Maybe Scott would remember that Stiles existed, or that there was anything in the world other than having just barely squeaked onto first line and gotten a date with the new girl in their class. Not that Stiles was wallowing in self-pity just because his best friend was off the bench and had finally found a girlfriend while Stiles was still on his own--more on his own than ever.

There was no wallowing here. This was the opposite of wallowing. This was a proactive attempt to solve his problems.

Granted, maybe instead of sneaking off alone into the woods armed only with a flashlight he could have gone to the post-scrimmage party and tried to talk to girls without repelling them completely. If Scott could make first line anything was possible, right? But Stiles had chosen the woods. At least he was doing something.

Stiles rocked on his heels, still standing under the trees and peering up at the black hulk of the ruined house.

He wished Scott were with him. Scott would be complaining about how dangerous this was, and pointing out all the ways it could go wrong. Stiles could argue with him then, and he wouldn't just be standing on the edge of the yard like a little kid uncertain of his welcome.

Stiles took a deep breath and then threw himself across the yard and up the porch steps at a sprint, but when he got to the front door he couldn't help hesitating again. He knew lots of kids his age and older who'd been brought to the Hale house when they got lost in the woods. He didn't know anybody who'd ever gone inside. But the whole front of the house was mostly intact, and it would be the obvious place to take shelter if you were an uncle-killing crazy woman--or, to be fair, a woman who might have had perfectly good reasons to kill her uncle and now was scared of being caught by the cops. Creepiness would be a great defense either way.

"And if you are here, you heard me coming half an hour ago and you're not here anymore, right?" Stiles said. "You don't need to kill me, you just don't want to get found. So you took off, and there's no danger now. I can just walk right on inside and look around."

Stiles stood there. He bounced on his heels. The house creaked and the trees shook in the wind, casting sharp, confusing shadows in the bright light of the moon.

"Right," Stiles said, because Scott wasn't going to materialize next to him, and neither was anyone else. "Right, here goes."

He pushed the door open and shined his flashlight inside. It looked sort of normal--charred and dusty and big, but it was recognizably a house. There was a staircase directly in line with the door. A landing at the top led off to hallways on either side. On this level there was a big open foyer with wide doorways leading to the rest of the first floor. This whole area was still roofed, so the moonlight and the shadows it cast only came in through the grimy windows.

There was no obvious sign of habitation near the door. Stiles remembered what he'd been told about getting lost: when you don't know where you are, find high ground.

He looked up the stairs. High ground was safe; high ground let you see what was coming. If Laura were here, wouldn't she be upstairs, where she could see all around?

Stiles braced himself and headed up the stairs, step by careful step. The stairs creaked, but they seemed solid underfoot, and he was up at the second floor landing soon enough. Looking around from up here felt like being at the top of a tree--he could see sky through some of the windows, and he could hear wind whistling. Stiles headed to the left, where he could see moonlight spilling through a doorway.

He stopped short at yet another threshold; he'd come to a place where the roof was gone, as well as the back wall. The room was enclosed on three sides, like a stage set, but it was open to the sky a couple of feet past the doorway and the whole back wall was skeletal, charred sticks of wood sticking up at regular intervals. He was looking out into the dark treetops now. There were drifts of leaves gathered in the corners, and it looked like little plants had taken root between the floorboards at the open edge.

Stiles shined his flashlight on them, and before he'd really decided to do it he was stepping into the burned-out room, picking his way across the floor toward the little sprig of green in his flashlight beam. He slipped halfway there--rotten leaves shifted under his foot with a familiar slick motion. He stumbled back and then forward, arms flailing as he tried to recover his balance, staggering and slipping again and again. He finally flung himself upright at the same instant he realized he was at the edge of the floor, and the flashlight flew from his hand as he caught at the few charred sticks of wood that showed where the wall used to be.

He thought okay, and then the wood under his hand cracked and he thought oh no, no, this is going to hurt and he was falling.

Ow, Stiles tried to say, but no sound came out. It was very dark, all of a sudden. He tried to think of what he was doing, what came next, but all he could think was ow, ow, ow. It didn't even mean anything, it was just the only word he had in his head. Ow.

His hands were under him; he was lying in the grass. He'd better get up. Coach was going to yell at him for just lying here like this. Where was Scott? He put his hands down--the grass was wet under his palms--and that hurt, his wrist hurt, but he pushed anyway. He had to get up.

He made it about an inch off the ground before the pain he hadn't quite felt before exploded through his head and his wrist. He let out a strangled scream that trailed off into a whimper as he fell onto his side, his left wrist pressed to his chest, his head lolling on the ground like it might fall off. He wished it would; nothing had ever hurt this much, ever.

"Ow," he wheezed, breath whistling like Scott's at the end of a practice. "Ow, ow, oh, fuck, ow, ow, hey, can I get some--"

He stopped short. Help. He blinked, squinting, and saw that he was lying facing a stone wall. A foundation wall.

He was at the Hale house. He was alone in the woods. And there was no one to hear him when he called for help.

---

Stiles kept getting confused about where he was. He thought he was at lacrosse practice--he thought he was in bed--he didn't know where he was but knew it was bad. Over and over he tried to get up, but even when he didn't try to put weight on his wrist, the pain was overwhelming any time he tried to move.

At some point he squinted at the wall and remembered he was at the Hale house. His wrist was probably broken, and he had to have a concussion. And he was cold. He was really cold, and the shivering rattled his whole body, sending spikes of pain through his arm and head and the rest of his body. He was going to freeze out here alone.

"No," he mumbled. He was making the kind of mistake he yelled at in movies. "No. Phone."

Stiles held his head and his left arm as still as he could and reached down his body to his pocket. His right hand was shaking badly and it hurt like hell--he kept making little helpless whining noises that he couldn't control--but he got his fingers to his phone and tugged it out.

Nothing happened when he pushed the power button. He shook the phone a little--half on purpose, half uncontrollable shivering--and shards of plastic fell down on his face.

"No," Stiles repeated, closing his eyes. "No, no, no, shit."

Somebody would find his car in the morning. They would search the woods. They would send out the K-9 units. They would find him sometime tomorrow. But he had to get through the rest of the night, and it was going to be cold, and Stiles was hurt and maybe bleeding. He couldn't even tell how badly he was injured.

And if he was wrong about Laura Hale, then wolves had killed Peter Hale, who probably hadn't been as helpless as Stiles was right now. If the wolves existed they were probably still in the woods somewhere, and Stiles was the definition of easy prey.

"Help," Stiles said, because he couldn't seem to scream. "I'm lost, please, I need help."

Even saying that much was exhausting. He went limp, his shattered phone slipping from his grip.

There was a sound behind him--nothing loud, just moving air or maybe the wind, except he knew that it wasn't. Stiles froze, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth against words or pained noises.

The sound came closer. It wasn't a person; a person would have said something by now. Even if they were going to kill him they wouldn't need to sneak up on him. He wasn't going anywhere.

Something made a doglike huffing noise, and Stiles couldn't help letting out a moan and trying to curl up small. His heart was thudding painfully in his chest and he knew he had to run and he knew he couldn't even stand up. He twitched a little and the pain of the involuntary motion was blinding.

"Oh, God, there really are wolves. Fuck. Please don't eat me, okay? Please?"

He flinched, choking back a scream, when something touched the side of his neck, just under his ear. It was cold and damp, like a dog's nose, and it sniffed down his neck and then along the side of his face. Stiles was suddenly aware that he was crying, that he had been for a while and his whole face was wet.

The wolf licked his cheek.

Stiles tried to turn his head to look at it, which hurt worse, but the wolf didn't lick him again. It shifted over him so that he could see its eyes--so that it was looking him in the eye. For just a second the wolf's eyes caught some strange reflection in the moonlight and seemed to glow red, and Stiles dropped his gaze as he flinched away.

The wolf gave another little huffing sound and nosed at his cheek, and when it pulled back again Stiles looked up. This time its eyes were a normal light translucent color, gray like everything in the moonlight. It just stared at him, and Stiles stared back, his panic receding as the wolf totally failed to bare its teeth or growl or make any kind of move toward killing and eating him.

It could be a dog, he thought, except that that was so obviously and totally wrong. It didn't look at him like a dog looked at a person. It didn't want anything, not a treat or a toy and not his tender flesh. It was just studying him, the way a person might study a stranger who'd just said or done something unexpected. The same way Stiles was studying the wolf, in fact, but it was hard to think about what the hell was going on with the wolf when his head and his wrist were nothing but throbbing pain and the cold was creeping into everything else.

Finally the wolf gave a little huff and dropped its head, sniffing at Stiles. It nudged his chest and then his shoulder, and Stiles said, "Oh, sorry, am I in your way?"

The wolf picked its head up again and looked him in the eye some more. This didn't make any sense, but then Stiles had just suffered an actual serious head injury. He was probably hallucinating, and the wolf was an EMT or a homeless person or nothing at all.

He might as well talk to it, whatever it was. "I guess it would probably be too much to ask you to go for help, huh? You're not really the Lassie type, are you."

The wolf snorted at that, like it was answering him, and then it turned its head and lowered its muzzle slowly down to Stiles's right arm. He tried to cringe away without moving, his right hand closing involuntarily into a useless fist.

The wolf closed its teeth very delicately on the sleeve of Stiles's shirt, not touching his actual arm at all. It tugged up, twisting its head, until Stiles had his hand raised as high as it would go. The wolf let go of his shirt and turned its head the other way, bumping against the inside of Stiles's elbow so that his forearm bent onto the wolf's neck and suddenly Stiles had his arm around the wolf.

"What," Stiles said, and the wolf huffed and bent its head again with Stiles's arm still around its neck; this time it closed its teeth on the unbuttoned edge of Stiles's shirt. It tugged up gently on the right side, and just the thought of being pulled upright made Stiles's heart start beating faster again, pushing away a fog he hadn't noticed creeping into his thoughts. "What, you want me to--"

And then the wolf lay down next to him. Stiles's arm followed it down, resting on its neck, and Stiles abruptly realized that the wolf was warm. No matter what he was cuddling up to, whether it existed or not, he couldn't resist the promise of heat.

Stiles pressed his left wrist hard to his chest as he tried to roll over without moving his head. He got the spins, and it hurt like hell, but he managed to do it eventually. The wolf just lay next to him patiently until Stiles had thrown his right arm and right leg over it, burying his face in its fur. He was still shivering, but the wolf was warm and soft and pleasantly fluffy, actually, like the teddy bear Stiles had definitely not slept with until an embarrassingly late age. Maybe that was what he was dreaming of, really. It was his very own giant teddy wolf to cuddle when he was in trouble.

"Yeah, that's better," Stiles murmured into its fur, feeling the foggy drowsiness roll in on him again. "You're the best wolf. You're way cooler than Lassie."

The wolf gave a low growl that Stiles felt against his face. He tightened his grip a little on the wolf, and then the wolf moved under him, sending a familiar shock of pain through Stiles's head and wrist that only got worse as the wolf straightened up--way up, it felt like, to a dizzy dangerous height, half-waking him into a sort of gummy awareness that he needed to be more alert and wasn't--

"Oh," Stiles mumbled as his mouth filled with saliva, "No--" and the rest was lost as he puked down the wolf's side.

The wolf stood completely still until he stopped, until he was leaning his forehead against it and mumbling, "I'm sorry, fuck, that was so gross, I'm sorry." The wolf started walking, carrying him away from the puddle and the Hale house. Away from everything.

It was a strange sensation, being carried like that, and it stank of puke and it hurt. Stiles couldn't think past the hurt to figure out what was going on, where the wolf was taking him or how it could be happening.

After a while the wolf was lowering itself to the ground again, but the ground was a neatly-laid sleeping bag, which Stiles could see, blurry and grayed-out, in the moonlight. Stiles shifted away from the wolf onto the soft, unmoving surface; he was instantly colder, but he had to get away from the smell of puke and he had to be still.

The wolf nudged him a couple of times and huffed, then trotted away.

"Thanks," Stiles mumbled after it, and thought that he should get into the sleeping bag.

He curled up instead, shivering until the fog in his brain turned to total blankness.

---

He jerked away when something wet pressed against his face, waking up into another explosion of pain.

Something smelled like wet dog but it was warm. Stiles curled close to it, pressing his cheek against it and throwing his arm and leg over it as well. It growled low, a vibrating rumble, and breathed warmly against his forehead, and Stiles made an agreeing kind of noise and went back to sleep.

---

Stiles woke up to a wet willy and squirmed away into a hideous headache and an even worse taste in his dry mouth.

"Not fair, Scott," he mumbled. "Hangover."

The wet probing touch moved across his cheek and he realized it wasn't a finger. It was a tongue, it was....

Stiles opened his eyes and stared. Either he was still hallucinating or this was really happening, somehow. "You're still a wolf."

The wolf made a low noise--more than a growl, less than a bark--like it agreed. Of course it did; it was obviously still a wolf.

"My head still hurts," Stiles told it, even as he rearranged his hands and legs for maximum warmth against its fur while also bracing his left arm so that his wrist didn't hurt worse than it absolutely had to. He knew, in some vague way, how crazy this was, but his head was an ocean of pain about to start leaking out of his skull and his fingers and toes were almost numb. "Can I go back to sleep now?"

The wolf huffed and laid its head down, and Stiles took that to be a yes. In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady shushing sound of rain outside the window. The white noise lulled him back to sleep.

---

He woke up to a gurgling growl and realized it was his stomach. Stiles was still wrapped around the wolf, but it had lifted its head and was watching him with its ears pricked, head tilted.

"I'm either gonna throw up again or I'm starving," Stiles muttered, closing his eyes against the gray morning light leaking into the little room through a high window along with the sound of the rain. His mouth tasted awful and he could smell himself, or at least he could smell something that smelled like rancid sweat and ashes and vomit, and that was probably him. "I can't tell which."

His head still throbbed, and so did his wrist, and he wasn't sure about his legs and feet and belly, either. He tried taking a deep breath and immediately decided to never do that again.

The wolf moved away from him and Stiles let it go, folding up into a little curl on top of the sleeping bag.

After a while he opened his eyes and squirmed over enough to watch the doorway, because he knew the wolf was coming back for him. Sure enough, pretty soon it came back into view with a bunch of plastic-wrapped things held in its huge toothy jaws.

The wolf dropped them in front of Stiles's face: an energy bar, a packet of Pop Tarts, and a stick of beef jerky.

"What is this, do I have to decide which one the pea is under?" Stiles muttered, squinting at the array. God, his head hurt. "Do I have to decide which one is the One True Breakfast Food? If I choose poorly will I die?"

The wolf dropped down to its belly on the other side of the food, letting out a long breath as it did, like it was exasperated or maybe a little bit amused.

Stiles shifted his squint to the wolf. It was huge, solid black, with eyes that were a pale gray-brown non-color, like river water. It seemed to persist in being a thing that existed, even though Stiles thought he was more or less really awake now, not all fogged in like he had been right after he fell.

The wolf watched him all the time and it had really big teeth and really big claws and it didn't make a sound when it walked around. And Stiles really didn't think he would die, barring cursed breakfast food, because the wolf....

The wolf had brought him breakfast food. The wolf had a room with a sleeping bag to carry him to. The wolf had woken him up in the night to check on him.

"Wait, were you checking that I hadn't slipped into a coma?" Stiles demanded, and then winced and reined in the volume. "Because I have a concussion? Scott's mom did that after he got a concussion in lacrosse practice last year."

The wolf just looked at him. After a few seconds where it didn't give him any kind of answer, it nudged each of the foods slightly closer. Stiles's mouth filled with saliva again, and when his stomach gurgled again he knew it was definitely hunger.

"Okay, okay, if you insist," he said, and reached for the Pop Tarts. He thought about sitting up to eat and then remembered that the last time he lifted his head more than two inches off the ground he'd thrown up from the pain. Lying down, it still hurt worse than most things he'd ever felt in his life, but not quite enough to stop him from being hungry. He dragged the packet over to his mouth with his good hand and ripped it open with his teeth.

He broke off a piece of Pop Tart and crammed it into his mouth. He made it through most of the first one--frosted blueberry, but he wasn't going to argue with the wolf about the one best flavor of Pop Tart, at least not with his mouth full--before his throat got too dry to swallow anymore. It felt all clogged with crumbly pastry and sticky blueberry filling. The sound of the rain outside was suddenly a cruel taunt.

"Water?"

The wolf opened its mouth wide, and Stiles coughed and swallowed laboriously.

"Okay, yeah, hard to carry. You don't have a bucket or something?"

The wolf huffed and tilted its head, and then it moved in and closed its teeth on the shoulder of Stiles's shirt--not nipping his skin at all, just the fabric--and tugged up.

"No, I can't, do you remember what happened last time? I barfed on you."

Just the thought of it made Stiles regret the Pop Tart he'd already eaten. The wolf snorted but didn't let go of his shirt, still tugging patiently.

"This is going to suck," Stiles mumbled, but he pushed himself up carefully with his good arm, keeping his left wrist cradled against his chest. He got dizzy again--he remembered that with sudden, nasty clarity from the night before--but the wolf moved so he could lean on it as he worked up to a sitting position. He managed not to actually hurl again even though the pain was making him sweat and making his eyes water, and it took a couple of minutes to be completely sure which way was up.

When he'd mostly mastered sitting up the wolf stood up and tugged on the collar of his shirt with his teeth.

"What, no more piggyback rides? Wolfy-back? Whatever that was last night?" Even to his own ears Stiles's voice sounded slurred and mumbling.

The wolf tugged again, growling a little bit this time, and Stiles pushed up as far as his knees with his good arm slung over the wolf's back. The dizziness was back, even worse, and he could hear himself panting from what seemed like a long way off.

Again the wolf just waited him out, and eventually Stiles was able to start shuffling forward on his knees, leaning on the wolf or hanging off it depending on which way he was swaying. The wolf patiently inched forward beside him, guiding him out of the room with the sleeping bag and into a dim stone-floored hallway.

Stiles didn't look around. He kept his eyes on the ground in front of him--that moved plenty--and just when he thought his knees would give out or his head would explode or he would heave up the damn Pop Tart, the wolf tugged him into a turn and through a door.

Stiles stared dumbly at the gleaming white porcelain in front of him: a toilet which was just the right height for him to fold over and hurl into, and a sink at eye level. He'd have to pull himself up onto it to get a drink. His throat went tight at the thought of water that close and that far away, and more tears leaked from his eyes.

The wolf tugged on his shirt with its teeth, and Stiles turned his head into more awful dizzy swaying. The wolf scooted out from under his arm and went to the other wall, and all of a sudden water was pouring out of a faucet on the wall, a trickle pattering down onto the tile floor.

Stiles fell forward onto his hands--screamed and jerked his left arm back up--and scrambled awkwardly forward until he collapsed under the stream of water. It fell down onto his forehead and his cheek, and he squirmed over so that it was running straight into his mouth, cold and rusty-tasting and delicious. He drank and drank and drank until he started to feel sick--sicker--and then he pushed himself awkwardly away from the wall.

The wolf stepped over him and pushed a handle with its paw, turning the water off. It was a lever instead of a knob--easy to operate with a paw or teeth--and it was about eight inches off the floor.

"That's for you," Stiles said, and looked over at the toilet and sink again. "That's for humans, but that--" he looked back at the faucet, noticed the gutter under it that ran to a drain, "that's for wolves."

The wolf huffed--yes, obviously--and trotted out of the room.

Stiles eyed the toilet longingly--now that he'd had some water he had to pee so bad it hurt, along with everything else that hurt. He wasn't sure he could actually lift himself up to sit on it, though, let alone stand. The rain against the window was the opposite kind of torture now.

The wolf trotted back in, once again carrying breakfast--the energy bar, the beef jerky, and the Pop Tart Stiles hadn't eaten yet, still inside the torn wrapper. The wolf dropped everything on Stiles's stomach.

"You're not actually a wolf," Stiles said, staring at it as it backed up a step.

The wolf opened its mouth, showing off its big teeth, and stuck out its long, wolfy tongue. It backed away from him and turned in a circle, holding its tail high and letting him see it--big, huge wolf, a boy wolf in fact--from every angle.

"Yeah, okay, you look like a wolf, you're totally a wolf, but you're not just a wolf," Stiles insisted. His head was throbbing and his wrist was sending shooting pains up his arm and he had to pee and might throw up any second, but this was worth focusing on. He'd always been able to focus on anything that was sufficiently interesting. He could do this.

"You're not just a wolf," Stiles said slowly, reasoning it out. "A wolf wouldn't have carried me in here. A wolf wouldn't do a little dance to prove to me that it was a wolf. You're a person. You're--"

He remembered the moon the night before, huge and round and shining nearly as bright as day in the clearing.

"Are you a werewolf?"

The wolf huffed again and sat down, watching him with those pale eyes that had seemed to flash red in the night.

"Wait, but it's the day after, the moon's gone, so why are you still--are you stuck? Are you stuck like this? Are you--"

And it all fit together, click click click, a werewolf who got stuck, the people no one could find. The Hale house. "You're--you're not Laura, you're a boy wolf. Derek? Derek Hale?"

The wolf tilted his head and made a little noise. Stiles could have sworn he was reluctantly impressed. It was an expression Stiles had had a lot of experience spotting.

"So that's a yes. You're Derek. And Peter's your--and wolves killed--you--" Stiles said, and the wolf--Derek--growled.

"Right, um, breakfast," Stiles said quickly, grabbing the other Pop Tart.

The wheels kept turning as he chewed: Peter had been killed by wolves, specifically by two wolves. They knew that because they could tell one was bigger than the other. His dad said Dr. Deaton thought they might have been a male and a female, by the size difference. Maybe a mated pair--or maybe brother and sister, Stiles thought, eyeing Derek, who sat there and eyed him right back.

Stiles scooted back toward the wall and hit the faucet to dump another drink of water down on himself.

"So you and Laura are both wolves, right? Werewolves?" Stiles said, wiping his splashed face with his good arm.

"And this is your house, this is where you grew up--this must be the basement. But we didn't come in through the house, did we? There must be some kind of back way that's easier to manage when you're a wolf. And this tap is set up for a wolf--and you all lived out here in the woods, away from other people. Was it your whole family?"

Derek didn't make a sound, just turned around and lay down with his back to Stiles.

"Oh," Stiles said. "Oh. Your--your whole family. I'm sorry, Derek, that was--sorry."

Whatever they were, Derek's whole family was dead, and however it happened his uncle was dead, too, and his sister was missing. If it was just that she was a wolf she'd have been here with Derek, wouldn't she?

Stiles finished the Pop Tart and started on the energy bar. Derek's ear twitched back toward him when he tore the wrapper open.

Stiles got another few drinks of water to wash it down before he pushed the beef jerky down onto the floor and curled onto his side on the wet, cold floor, trying not to think too much about how badly he had to pee. Short term solution, but maybe he would magically regain the ability to stand up without falling over or puking before his bladder actually exploded.

Derek suddenly loomed up over him and nudged the beef jerky Stiles had pushed away.

"No, man, I am not eating that for breakfast, it'll get all stuck in my teeth and it's seriously not breakfast food."

Derek stepped in closer to Stiles. He put his muzzle close enough to Stiles's face that Stiles held his breath, and then Derek moved down Stiles's body, sniffing him, maybe, until he got to the top of his jeans. Then he jabbed his nose precisely into Stiles's bladder, making him yelp and flail, trying not to piss himself and also trying to writhe away without lifting his head or shifting his left arm.

"What," Stiles demanded. "What, yes, I have to pee and I can't stand up, thank you for taking an interest."

Derek shook his head and then nudged Stiles's side and stepped over him. Stiles took the cue and rolled slowly and carefully onto his other side to watch. Derek was still standing nearly on top of him--there just wasn't that much space. He looked down at Stiles, and then over toward the wall as he lifted one leg and squirted a shot of piss into the gutter along the wall.

Derek stepped back and then jerked his muzzle toward the wall. Your turn.

"You're not seriously--" Stiles said, and Derek feinted his nose toward Stiles's belly again, making Stiles put his good hand down to cover himself. Derek stepped over him and sat down, politely facing away.

"Okay," Stiles said, closing his eyes and gathering his strength. "Okay. I don't even have to sit up, right? I can just do this from here."

He pushed himself closer to the wall, unzipped his pants and got his dick out, closing his eyes in bliss as he pissed into the gutter. It occurred to him, after the first rush, that he should see if there was blood in it, but as far as he could tell he was peeing a totally normal color.

What wasn't a normal color, though, was his hip where his jeans and boxers were pushed down. Stiles shook off and then pushed his boxers down further and pulled his shirt up, revealing a neat rectangular outline of his phone in the form of a hugely swollen black bruise.

"Ow," he said, although he couldn't actually feel it over the pain of his head and wrist, a vaguely sore sensation all over his body, the intermittent stab of his ribs, and the lingering crampy ache low in his belly from having to hold it too long before he could pee. He poked the bruise curiously and--ow, ow, ow--yes. That hurt too.

Stiles pulled his boxers and jeans back into place and then lay there just staring at the wall. There was probably something he had to do next, but all he could think of was that he would have to crawl back to the other room before he got too cold here, and that was more than he could fathom doing right now.

Derek nudged him, nosing at his shoulder. Stiles fell down slowly onto his back and looked up at him. Derek tilted his head, and Stiles looked over without moving any further and saw that Derek had gone and gotten the sleeping bag. It was laid out between the toilet and the sink, where the floor was still dry.

Stiles shut his eyes for a moment while they prickled with relief and gratitude, and then he started scooting himself over to the sleeping bag. When he was all the way on it, Derek lay down next to him again, and Stiles didn't even hesitate before throwing an arm and leg over him. He was dry and warm and generally awesome, and Stiles wasn't going to let go of him too easily.

"Seriously, the best," Stiles murmured, face pressed into the fur of Derek's shoulder.

There was a motion down by Stiles's leg: a very soft, furry thump. Stiles was nearly asleep before he realized that that must have been Derek's tail wagging, just once, while Stiles wasn't looking.

---

Stiles dozed on and off, but eventually he couldn't ignore the awful hot throb of his broken wrist. His whole left hand was starting to feel weird and tingly, and even through the continued pounding of his head he could think clearly enough now to realize that that was a really bad sign. He pulled away from Derek and held his left hand up to look at it, gingerly unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt for the first time.

"Ohhhh, fuck," Stiles moaned. His whole wrist was darkly bruised and so swollen his hand looked like a mismatched replacement part. He could see the stitching of his shirt pressed into his purple-black skin in creepily neat little lines.

Derek made a low noise, sniffing the air beside Stiles's wrist without quite touching it. He stood up and walked over to the toilet, ducking his muzzle into it. Stiles thought he was drinking from it, but then he straightened up, huffed, and came back to Stiles to close his teeth on Stiles's flapping shirt cuff. He didn't actually tug, just closed his teeth like he was about to, and then he went back to the toilet and made the gesture of dunking his head inside.

"You want me to stick my broken wrist in a toilet?" Stiles demanded.

Derek stared at him for a second, and then he pointed toward the toilet again with his nose and looked back at Stiles. He shook delicately all over, like he was shivering, although Stiles didn't think wolves shivered, and Derek definitely....

"It's cold?" Stiles said, finally recognizing the charade Derek was acting out. "Is that what you're telling me? The water in there is cold so it's like icing my wrist?"

Derek nodded.

"It's also a frigging toilet," Stiles yelled, and then regretted it, because his voice echoed horribly in the small, all-hard-surfaces space of the bathroom, making his head hurt worse again.

Derek winced and then came back to Stiles. He jerked his nose toward Stiles's wrist and then tilted his head.

"No, okay, no, I don't have any better ideas," Stiles muttered, and scooted himself painstakingly toward the toilet. He touched the porcelain on the outside of the bowl and then jerked his hand away--Derek was right, it was really cold. Probably cold enough to kill germs, like a refrigerator.

Stiles tried not to think about the stuff that he'd found growing in their fridge when he and his dad forgot to throw out leftovers.

"Anyway, I guess it's probably been six years since anyone used it, right?"

Derek huffed, looking amused this time, and Stiles elected to believe that that was agreement. Derek leaned over and pushed the seat up with his nose. Stiles hauled himself up to lean against it, wincing in anticipation of cold and grossness. He shut his eyes and plunged his hand into the water as far as it would go.

He hadn't actually looked before he stuck his hand in, but the shock of cold made him open his eyes. The water was totally clear, although the toilet bowl was ringed with layers of rusty mineral stains. Stiles had his fingers all the way down in the pipe at the bottom of the bowl, trying not to flex his wrist. The water was cold, but it felt good on his tight, feverish skin.

For about five seconds.

"Oh, fuck, fuck, that's really cold, shit--" Stiles tried to pull his arm back and Derek was suddenly there, leaning across his back, closing his teeth gently on the back of Stiles's upper arm.

Stiles froze. He could feel Derek's teeth, little points of pressure through his shirt and t-shirt. He could feel Derek's hot breath through the fabric. He was acutely conscious that he couldn't move with Derek there, huge wolf body pressing him into place. He shivered a little.

"Okay," Stiles said shakily. "Okay, I know it's for my own good and everything, right. You're just. Making sure I actually keep it in the water long enough to help, right?"

Derek let go of Stiles's arm so abruptly that Stiles almost pulled his arm back in reflex; he managed to only wobble his wrist a little, making the water slosh in the toilet. Derek set his muzzle on Stiles's left shoulder, nudging his nose against Stiles's throat and ear in what Stiles thought might be apology.

"Yeah," Stiles said, "No, hey, I wasn't scared, you just startled me, big guy. I just--"

Derek huffed in his ear, and Stiles sagged down over the toilet.

"Okay! Yes, you scared me, and also this is still really fucking cold."

Derek growled a little bit and stayed pressed up close to Stiles, holding him still without the use of his teeth. Stiles groped sideways with his right hand and buried it in the fur of Derek's hip. The contrast of dry, furry warmth and wet stunning cold was sort of surreal.

Stiles closed his eyes and told himself he wasn't going to fall down no matter how dizzy he felt. There wasn't much more down to fall, and anyway Derek wouldn't let him move that far.

Stiles wasn't sure how much time had passed when Derek tugged on the collar of his shirt, but it took him a few seconds to realize that he could move now. When he carefully eased his left arm out of the toilet his wrist was shockingly smaller--not normal-looking, and still all black and purple and red, but not nearly as grotesque as it had looked before. Derek tugged again, and Stiles scooted backward toward the sleeping bag and collapsed with his arm held carefully to his chest. He reached expectantly for Derek, but Derek trotted away, out of the room, leaving Stiles to stare at the doorway with his eyes half open.

It was seriously unfair how fast the numbness wore off and his wrist started throbbing again, feeling hot with pain even while the rest of Stiles felt cold and damp from dripping water. The pain was back to being worse than his head by the time Derek reappeared, carrying a bunch of stuff in his mouth again. He dropped it all next to Stiles's head and Stiles blinked at it, trying to sort it out without moving enough to touch it.

Derek picked up two sticks and dropped them closer to Stiles.

"What," Stiles mumbled, "now you want to play fetch?"

Derek growled, loud and harsh, and Stiles jerked and pushed up on his good elbow, then looked down at the sticks again. They were little flat slats, the same length. The ends of both of them were splintery and broken, but the flat faces were smooth. Stiles looked over to see what else Derek had brought, and realized it was a long continuous strip of torn denim.

"Splint," Stiles realized. "You brought me a splint."

Derek sat down and tilted his head approvingly, and Stiles dragged all the stuff toward him and rolled onto his back, holding his left wrist up. He tugged the sleeve of his shirt carefully back over his swollen wrist before he placed a slat against his arm. He could hold his left arm flat so that the slat rested on top of it, at least for a few seconds, but then he had to pick up the other one for the other side, and then he was totally out of useable hands, so....

Derek made a soft huffing sound and moved in. Slowly he opened his jaws wide, and he met Stiles's eyes as he moved his long sharp teeth closer to Stiles's broken wrist.

"Okay," Stiles said, his voice shaking. He could feel his heart hammering, throbbing in his head and in his wrist, but there really wasn't any other way. Derek had done nothing but help him so far, after all. Derek knew how bad his wrist hurt. "Okay, just--be careful."

There was a faint click as Derek's teeth made contact with the wood on either side of Stiles's forearm; Stiles winced, but there wasn't any pain, or not any more pain. Derek held the splints against Stiles's arm but he didn't press down one millimeter further.

Stiles picked up a strip of fabric and set it on top of the end of the wood in the palm of his hand, laboriously curling his fingers down to hold it there. It took a couple of tries to figure out how to make the loops hold down the end, and when he ran a loop below the base of his thumb, over the start of his wrist, he made an involuntary noise when he pulled it tight.

Derek scooted his teeth over a little bit so Stiles could keep wrapping. Stiles gritted his teeth and kept going, pulling each loop tight even as his hands shook and his vision blurred. When Derek didn't need to hold the slats to Stiles's wrist anymore, he pushed his head into Stiles's right armpit, helping him hold his arm up as he wrapped and wrapped.

He had to blink his eyes clear when he realized he was almost out of cloth, so he could see to make a knot. The tail of the denim slipped out of his fingers twice, forcing him to retighten it, and by the time he actually made the knot he was sort of sobbing as he cursed. Eventually he had his wrist splinted, and Derek let him lower his arm and lay down beside him, so Stiles could roll over and rest his splinted wrist on Derek's back.

Stiles wasn't asleep--just lying totally still and unsure whether he'd ever be able to make himself move again--when Derek leaned in and licked his cheeks clean. It made more tears leak from Stiles's stinging eyes, but Derek just kept washing them away until Stiles hid his face against Derek's neck.

---

Stiles had a nightmare that Derek made him undo the splint and soak his wrist again. He was still curled around the toilet with his arm in the water, resting his head on his other arm on the rim, when he realized he was awake.

He picked his head up too fast to look around for Derek, and got so dizzy he swayed wildly and banged his broken wrist against the inside of the toilet bowl. He halfway strangled his scream and Derek darted in from outside and growled at him, stepping in to crowd him back down.

"No, fuck you," Stiles yelled, his voice shaking, even as he clutched the toilet for balance, the pain in his head like thunder and lightning all at once. "That wasn't fucking fair, getting me to do that while I was asleep."

Derek huffed and waggled his head in an eye-rolling sort of gesture, and Stiles didn't even think. He whipped his right hand from its grip on the edge of the toilet and grabbed Derek's muzzle.

"No," he snapped, at the same time that he was registering that his fingers didn't go very far around Derek's jaw. "Bad wolf!"

For a second they were both totally still, and then Derek's eyes glowed red, and a growl rumbled in his chest like an earthquake. Stiles could feel it vibrating the bones of his fingers, his whole right arm, and he couldn't look away from Derek's red eyes. His stomach was shaking like the least fun bowl full of jelly ever. He realized he was swaying, with nothing but his grip on Derek to steady him, and then he realized he needed to let go.

Stiles yanked his hand back, leaving his arm in the air between him and Derek, as if he had any hope of protecting himself if Derek decided to take a step forward and chomp him. But Derek, after another long second of staring and growling, turned and bolted out of the room.

The adrenaline deserted Stiles and suddenly his head was pounding and he was dizzier than ever. He managed to slump back onto the toilet instead of falling onto the floor. He was whining a little on every breath but he kept his broken wrist in the water.

After a while he started counting, just for something to do, something to focus on instead of pain and cold and creepy crawly fear. He'd just stay still and count to a hundred. Five hundred. A thousand.

His voice trailed off after one thousand and twelve--somehow he couldn't bring himself to say thirteen again--and it occurred to him that this meant he'd kept his hand in the water for... a lot of minutes.

He drew it out slowly and looked at it; it looked less swollen again, and his fingers and palm were pale and wrinkled and dead looking. His fingers, when he flexed them, moved stiffly. Stiles couldn't quite feel them.

Stiles cautiously raised his head and looked toward the sleeping bag. The splint was lying there, the cloth still coiled around the slats. Stiles scooted cautiously over and found that he could slide his arm inside and only had to retighten the loops of cloth by himself. He managed it, even tying off the knot, before the numbness had entirely worn off.

When he finished that he managed to get inside the sleeping bag, but it was nowhere near as warm as having Derek with him. Stiles wanted to call for him, and was scared of him coming back, all at the same time.

He'd just let Derek decide. Derek was bound to come back, right? He wouldn't have spent all this time looking after Stiles just to leave him down here all alone to freeze or starve or just die somehow, trapped all by himself in the tunnels under the Hale house.

Lying there alone it occurred to Stiles for the first time to wonder if he could get out by himself. On the heels of that thought came the thought of being back in his own room, of his dad--

Oh God, his dad had to be looking for him. Stiles looked up toward the window and realized the light was already fading; it had to be midafternoon at least, and Stiles had been missing now all night and most of a day. It had rained for hours, so the dogs might not be able to find his scent. They'd be out searching for him, finding nothing--his Jeep, and maybe what was left of his phone--but not him. They wouldn't find him down here. They would never find him.

No, Stiles thought, even as his breath started coming short, no, no, no, not now. He tensed against the pain even before it came, shooting across his ribs as he strained to inhale, and he made a high noise that was almost a whistle on his next attempt to breathe. He knew there were things he was supposed to do and thoughts he was supposed to think and all he could actually think was no, no, please, no as the panic attack swallowed him up.

He opened his eyes and, oh, yeah, black sparkles all over the place. This was a bad one, this was really bad. He could die from this, from being scared. He could literally scare himself to death, of all the fucking stupid things to die from.

Derek made a gruff noise as he stepped into Stiles's line of sight. He pushed his nose into Stiles's chest a couple of times, and Stiles scowled. Stupid wolf, he would breathe if he could fucking breathe; telling him to breathe wouldn't help. Then Derek shoved his head right inside the sleeping bag and before Stiles knew what was happening, Derek's jaw was closing around his right wrist, teeth pressing down on his skin in little individual points of almost-pain.

"No!" Stiles yelled, and it turned out he could breathe after all.

Derek backed away quickly and lay down right in front of Stiles, head on paws. His eyes weren't glowing, and he wasn't growling. Stiles took a few deep, careful breaths and then reached out to touch Derek's paw with his good hand, the one Derek had almost bitten.

"I guess we're even?" Stiles whispered, his throat still all tight and scratchy, dizzy with adrenaline even as it made the pain fuzz out for a few light-headed seconds.

Derek huffed, but he flicked his tongue out to lick the back of Stiles's hand. Stiles wanted to argue--they were so even, that whole panic attack had been Derek's fault anyway--but terror was exhausting and so was pretty much everything else ever since Derek had found him. Stiles closed his eyes with his hand still on Derek's paw, making sure he didn't go anywhere.

---

Stiles woke up again to Derek nudging his cheek with his nose. Stiles told him a couple of times to go away, but Derek just kept at it until Stiles actually opened his eyes, at which point he realized the light was fading. The room was already shadowy, the colors leaching out of everything. Derek's eyes were just gray, now.

Stiles could just make out the shapes on the floor in front of him: beef jerky and more Pop Tarts. Derek nudged them closer and then sat back. Stiles sighed and nodded gingerly, not sloshing his brain around too much. He ate obediently, bite by bite by bite. He had to crawl over to the tap for water when he was halfway through the beef jerky.

While he was still curled on the floor by the tap, catching his breath before he started on the Pop Tarts, he asked, "Can I leave?"

Derek was lying right alongside Stiles's body, and Stiles felt him jerk at the question. He tilted his head, and then stood, backed away from Stiles and jerked his muzzle up a couple of times. Stand up.

Stiles actually tried it, more out of stubborn determination to rise to Derek's challenge than any actual delusion that he could do it. He reached up and grabbed the faucet with his good hand, and that helped him get to the point of sitting up against the wall, dizzy and with his head feeling like it would split open any second but grimly determined to keep going. He managed to surge up onto his knees, which made his stomach heave and his head feel like it was full of hammers and angry hornets while his sense of up and down went sideways in all directions.

Fuck it, he could totally do this. He got a foot down, sort of--his ankle twisted a little and his foot slipped into the gutter, and he pushed up at the same time he was falling down, which just made him dizzier.

He folded down over Derek's back, his breath going out of him on impact. Derek stood totally still while Stiles hung there, and eventually Stiles managed to slide down to his knees and hide his face in Derek's fur while he waited for everything to stop spinning and hurting so much.

It didn't stop, exactly, but he got used to it enough to slide the rest of the way down to the floor, with his head leaning against Derek's side. Derek stayed put until Stiles gave up and grabbed the Pop Tarts, and then Derek made a little gruff noise and curled around to nose gently at Stiles's head.

"Okay," Stiles said, when his mouth was full of sugary semi-cooked pastry and he felt like they'd agreed to put that totally humiliating display behind them, "but may I leave?"

Derek huffed and curled himself tighter around Stiles in a way that made Stiles stop chewing. It was too much like the way Derek had crowded him up against the toilet, and even if it was for his own good....

"Derek," Stiles said, his voice shaky, and before he could argue Derek huffed and pulled away, leaving Stiles to sag back against the wall. It was getting harder to see, but Derek wagged his head up and down in a big, exaggerated nodding motion, except he was also standing stiffly out of Stiles's reach, his tail sticking out poker-straight behind him.

"Derek," Stiles repeated, "can you--could you go get someone? Could you get my--"

Dad? The word caught in Stiles's throat, and he couldn't actually say it. He couldn't even think that far, because he would cry or panic again or--he took another bite of Pop Tart and focused on Derek.

Derek huffed and shook all over, and then trotted out of the room without looking back. For a second Stiles thought that was it, that Derek had gone to get help, and then Derek came back in.

Stiles squinted. He knew it was Derek, but all he could see was a silhouette, and what he saw looked weirdly dog-like, tail high and wagging, feet prancing like a cartoon dog, radiating an impossible air of canine friendliness. And then, in mid-bounce, Derek dropped, flung slightly sideways and down; Stiles looked away automatically, up toward the window, where the shot must have come from.

But there hadn't been a shot--no sound of breaking glass, no firecracker pop of firing--and when Stiles looked back, Derek picked his head up and made a gruff, irritated noise.

"You..." Stiles thought it through. "Even if you showed up looking like a friendly cartoon dog, they would shoot you. Because they think--because--wolves."

Because wolves killed Peter Hale, who was Derek's uncle, who had been burned so badly in the fire that orphaned Derek and Laura. Because Derek and Laura, after all these years, had come back to Beacon Hills and taken on wolf-shapes and killed their uncle, and now Derek was stuck like this. Now anyone who saw Derek would think he was nothing but an animal.

"I won't let them," Stiles said, and Derek looked toward him. He couldn't see Derek's eyes, but he'd bet Derek could see him just fine. His grip on his Pop Tart tightened, for lack of anything else to hold onto.

"I won't let anyone hurt you," Stiles repeated.

It was a stupid thing to say when Stiles couldn't even stand up and only had one working arm and Derek was a giant freaking magical wolf. It was obviously stupid, but it was true anyway. Derek had saved him, and Derek kept taking care of him, and whatever had gone down with Peter Hale, Stiles knew Derek wasn't the bad guy. He couldn't be. If Stiles had to stay put until he could walk out on his own two feet, if that was what it took to keep Derek from getting shot by an over-excited deputy, fine. Stiles would do his part.

Derek's eyes lit up, glowing red like embers. Stiles couldn't actually back away, but he pressed himself into the wall and stayed very still. Derek wasn't growling; he didn't seem angry. It was just his eyes glowing red all of a sudden. Stiles closed his eyes when those red lights came too close, but Derek just pushed his face against Stiles's. He rubbed their cheeks together, and then did the same on the other side.

Stiles leaned into it after a frozen second, rubbing his cheek against Derek's furry jaw. Derek pulled back a little and licked Stiles's forehead, startling him into a laugh.

"Okay, so, yeah, you won't let anyone hurt me either, huh? So now we're definitely even?"

Derek gave a laughing kind of huff and a little full-body shake that probably meant No, of course not. He ducked his head and nudged Stiles's hand, and Stiles obediently returned to eating his Pop Tart.

---

Derek didn't make him again, but Stiles soaked his wrist whenever it started to hurt too much. Once it was totally dark he couldn't see to put the splint back on, but as long as he kept mostly still that didn't seem to matter too much. For the--hours? minutes?--the times he managed to sleep in between trips to stick his wrist in the toilet, he laid his arm along Derek's back and tucked his face against Derek's shoulder and tried to sleep.

The second or third time, a little bit of moonlight was leaking in the window, and Stiles was thinking too much to fall asleep before the numbness wore off. Stiles found himself wondering again how Derek had gotten stuck as a wolf; he must have changed days before the moon to have bitten Peter with wolf-teeth, and he stayed that way in daytime, too. Now the moon had to be waning, but here he was.

And then Stiles's brain, as it usually did, jumped tracks, and he couldn't hold down the question that suddenly seemed like the only question he really needed to ask. It was the one that had brought him here, after all.

"Derek," Stiles said, turning his head just enough to say it without getting a mouthful of fur, "where's Laura?"

Derek tried to pull away and Stiles grabbed hold. "No, sorry, sorry, never mind, don't--"

Derek nosed at Stiles's cheek, shoving him down a little roughly--but without teeth, without growling--until Stiles pressed his face into Derek's fur. Stiles felt the pressure of Derek's muzzle against the back of his head, holding him still. He squirmed just enough to make sure he could breathe.

He didn't have to wonder what Derek meant, at least. This was a pretty easy one to decipher. Shut up. I don't want to talk about it.

Stiles skritched his fingers through Derek's fur in silent apology, and then concentrated on making himself go limp, though he knew he wasn't going to be able to sleep at all now.

---

Stiles woke up in daylight, alone, and felt like he was fully awake for the first time in a long while. His head was still pounding, and his wrist felt overinflated and like he had red-hot coals where his wrist bones were supposed to be, but he was actually clear-headed now, enough to realize how fuzzy he'd been before.

He stared up at the ceiling above him--joists and boards, black with sealant or age or smoke, with a few pipes and wires going across. He hadn't seen it before, and he didn't know whether his vision had been messed up or if it just had never occurred to him to look where Derek wasn't. The window was streaked with water, but the light was clear, so the rain had stopped.

Stiles lowered his gaze and looked all around the little bathroom. Derek wasn't here. Even before he could really try to worry about where Derek was--or whether his concussion-fuzziness had extended to hallucinating all of that--he saw the packet of Pop Tarts set out for him next to an energy bar.

"Thanks for breakfast, Derek," Stiles said, without really raising his voice. Wolves' ears had to be at least as good as dogs', and probably better; Derek ought to be able to hear him if he was anywhere nearby, and if he wasn't anywhere nearby there wasn't any point in yelling.

Stiles kept his left wrist tucked against his chest and scooted over to grab the food. He was halfway through eating his Pop Tarts before he realized that he was sitting half-upright and not throwing up or falling over. He got up onto his knees and made it safely over to the faucet for a drink, and sat down again to finish his breakfast.

Derek still hadn't turned up by the time Stiles was done, so he made himself soak his wrist for a while, trying not to think about all the germs he'd probably exposed himself to already. He could hold his head up while he did it--his head still hurt like nothing else, but being a few feet off the ground wasn't cripplingly painful or disorienting anymore.

On the other hand, it was way harder to make himself stay still or keep his wrist in icy frigging cold water. He gave up after a few minutes, and his wrist looked pretty much the same as when he'd stuck it in, even if his skin was superficially numb. He found the pieces of the splint and put it back on, which was ball-shrivelingly, nauseatingly painful, but made him feel weirdly protected once it was done.

There was still no sign of Derek. Stiles eyed the door for a while, considered his options, and then knee-walked to the doorway. He braced himself against it and slowly, carefully stood up. He got dizzy and his head pounded suddenly harder--he had to shut his eyes and cling to the wall with his good hand--but after a little while he could open his eyes and contemplate moving, maybe. He took a cautious step out into the hallway with his good hand still gripping the helpfully uneven stone of the wall.

Derek was standing about ten feet away. Stiles stopped short, swayed, and leaned into the wall. He did not take his eyes off the giant wolf standing in the dimly-lit tunnel, waiting for him.

"Holy shit," Stiles said weakly. "You're freaking huge, man."

His brain served up the obligatory That's what she said, but Derek just tilted his head and huffed impatiently.

"No, I mean, I knew that," Stiles agreed as Derek sauntered toward him. "I just--I guess I thought it was like forced perspective or the way your brain makes the moon look bigger when it's at the horizon, you know? I was always seeing you from down on the ground, but Jesus Christ, you are actually like--"

Derek just stood there, coming up to Stiles's hip like it wasn't a big deal. "You're like a small pony, here. Children could ride you."

Derek looked up at Stiles and growled, and Stiles gingerly waved his splinted hand, then stopped when that made it hurt startlingly worse.

"Okay," he said faintly, "okay, I mean, obviously no actual small children will try to ride you. That would be insane."

Derek huffed again and stepped in close, herding Stiles away from the wall, so that Stiles had to put his good hand down on Derek's shoulders instead. Stiles shuffled slowly down the hall, with his splinted wrist propped against his opposite shoulder and his head down, watching his feet. He had to concentrate on walking, and everything hurt, but he could do this, which meant he was getting better. He was going to be okay, he was--

They turned at a new, lower doorway, and Stiles had to lean heavily on Derek as he negotiated a couple of steps down. This room was dark, but once Derek had guided him to the bottom of the steps, he darted away and came back with a candle and matches. Stiles sat down on the step to work the matches--Derek helpfully held the candle in his mouth until Stiles lit it--and then Stiles held it up and revealed the small, shadowy room.

There was a dark shape on the dirt floor, and beyond it there was a hole.

That was all Stiles could make out for a few seconds, and then, between one blink and the next, the room came into focus: there was a black wolf lying dead on the ground, and there was a grave. Stiles got to his feet somehow; Derek propped him up, though Stiles already knew that should be going the other way around, even without looking closely. He stumbled over to the wolf, dropping to his knees with a jarring thump.

Stiles held the candle high, and the shadows jumped crazily as his hand shook. It felt wrong, but he looked between the wolf's legs. He saw both the absence there and the horrible gaping tear where her belly should be, packed with dirt where there was no fur or skin left to fill the space. This was a girl wolf, and she was very, very dead.

"Laura?" Stiles said, his voice already shaking.

Derek was just standing there, between Laura and the grave he must have dug. It was round and untidy, not all square and straight-edged, but a wolf couldn't use a shovel. He'd dug this with his own hands--paws--for her.

"You..." Stiles said, and then looked up and met Derek's wide, pale eyes.

He bit his lip and made himself think before he said anything else; Derek looked away first, turning and jumping down into the hole. There was a scrabbling, digging sound, but mostly Stiles was alone here with--with Laura.

Stiles folded down to sit, looking at her. There were other dirt-packed wounds on her body than the huge one that must have taken out most of her guts. She'd been in a fight, and she'd died. And she'd helped kill Peter, which meant--it had to mean she'd been fighting Peter and Peter had killed her. Peter had been found in the woods, but Laura was here. As far as Stiles knew they hadn't said anything about Peter's body being moved from where he'd been killed, so it had probably happened where he'd been found. But Derek had brought Laura back here, and he was digging her grave.

Stiles set the candle down, watching nothing but his fingers packing dirt around it to keep it upright while his brain churned through the implications.

Derek hadn't killed his sister. He couldn't have. Peter had killed her, and she'd killed Peter back--or maybe she'd nearly done it, and Derek had to finish the job. Maybe Derek had found them fighting and jumped in to defend her, or maybe....

Maybe anything. But Derek hadn't done anything wrong. Stiles was sure of that.

Derek leapt up out of the hole and stood there in front of Stiles. Stiles looked up at him, and back to Laura. He kept his eyes on her--trying to memorize her face, trying to see Laura and not just a wolf, an animal. He wished he could remember that dark-haired high school girl better.

He said almost steadily, "She was all you had, wasn't she? After the fire--she and--and your uncle--they were the only ones left. And now it's just you."

Derek stepped in close, shoving his head against Stiles's chest, and Stiles curled down around him, pressing his face between Derek's ears. He could feel Derek's breathing against his chest, and all he could smell was wolf and dirt. He wasn't really sure if hugging was okay, but he figured after a second that Derek could get away easily enough if it wasn't. He laid his arms gingerly over Derek's neck.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and it struck him with sick suddenness why people had said those useless, stupid words to him so many times after his mom died. There just wasn't anything else to say. And the words were ten times as stupid and useless to say to Derek, because it was his sister and his uncle and his whole entire family and now he was alone, stuck as a wolf and hiding in these tunnels.

Stiles kept his eyes squeezed shut and held on. "Derek, I'm sorry, I'm so fucking sorry."

Derek pulled back slowly and gently, so that Stiles uncurled from around him and let his hands slide down. He licked Stiles's face while Stiles blinked, trying to stop the tears. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the absence of his mom, at the same time that he knew that this was also the absence of Derek's mom, Derek's dad, Derek's everyone.

Stiles squinted at Derek through his tears, and for a minute he couldn't figure out how Derek could look so calm, how his gray-brown eyes could still be dry, and then he realized.

Wolves couldn't cry.

That seemed worse somehow, that Derek couldn't even do this. Stiles sobbed, and Derek huffed at him and pressed close again. Stiles hid his face for as long as Derek stayed there, but then Derek pulled away--all the way away this time.

He stepped over to Laura and sniffed along her body in a slow, deliberate way. Stiles couldn't really smell anything that smelled worse than he did--there was a vague sewer smell, but mostly just dirt. He somehow didn't think Derek was really sniffing for that. He was saying goodbye.

Stiles reached out his good hand toward her, and Derek picked his head up and looked, and then lowered his head again. Stiles set his hand carefully against the fur of Laura's face.

It felt like Derek's, stiff-soft, but she was cold and still. There was a slackness he could feel when he moved his hand over her fur. Stiles was suddenly, viscerally glad that he'd never really touched his mom, after. Looking had been bad enough.

"Goodbye," Stiles said, because he was the only one who could say it. His voice shook, but he swallowed and kept at it. "Goodbye, Laura Hale. Rest in peace."

Stiles looked at Derek, who was watching him, and tried to guess if there was more Derek wanted him to say.

"You were a good sister," Stiles tried, and Derek gave a soft woof that sounded like agreement. "And Derek loved you, and you were really brave. You must have been so fucking brave. And Peter Hale is dead, so you--you're avenged, Laura, and Derek's going to be okay. I'll make sure he's okay, just like he's been taking care of me. He won't be all alone, I promise."

Derek huffed softly and Stiles clenched his teeth to make himself stop talking. Derek made a few low sounds somewhere between a bark and a growl, almost like talking. Then he tilted his head back and made an eerie high sound that should have been a howl. In this little dark room underground it was small and sad, almost like singing, and all the hair on Stiles's body stood on end.

When Derek was done, he stepped over Laura and went into a corner of the room near the door, coming back with a folded bunch of rough burlap. He dropped it on the ground between Laura and the grave, and Stiles helped him spread it out flat, and then held down the edge while Derek dragged Laura onto it. Stiles bit his lip and let the tears run down his face while he helped Derek cover her with the cloth and tuck it around her.

Derek took another moment standing beside Laura, and then he whined low in his throat, lowered his head, and pushed her awkwardly into the grave. She landed with a thump that should have been sort of funny but just made Stiles's breath hitch painfully in his chest. When Derek leapt in after her Stiles felt as terrifyingly alone as ever. He grabbed his candle and scooted closer, leaning over the edge to watch Derek rearranging the cloth around Laura.

After a while he realized that Derek was just standing there, pushing his nose against the cloth without moving anything. He remembered, with a sick jolt, the way his dad had stayed next to the coffin at the last minute, not letting them close it for the last time until he'd fixed her hair one more time. One more. One more.

"Derek," Stiles said quietly, because no one else would and this time he couldn't just stand with Scott and stare at his feet. "Come on. Come out of there."

Derek looked up and snarled, his eyes flashing red, but Stiles held on to his candle and held his ground.

"Please," Stiles said quietly. "Come on."

Derek looked down, growling like an engine idling, and then he gathered himself and jumped, scrambling up and out on the opposite side from Stiles. There was a big pile of dirt there, and Derek started nosing and pushing at it, making it patter down into the grave, onto Laura.

Stiles set his candle in the dirt on his side of the grave and then crawled around to where Derek was, using his good hand to sweep and push dirt down. He was exhausted almost immediately, breathing hard against the occasional stab of pain from his ribs and powering through the pain in his head, but he kept at it because Derek was still working. It had to get done, and Stiles's hand was better for this than Derek's paw or nose.

The grave was halfway filled in--Laura was covered up completely--by the time Stiles got dizzy shoving some dirt over the edge and almost fell in. Derek caught him, of course, his jaws closing on Stiles's upper arm and yanking him backward. Stiles didn't even have time to be scared--shit, that would have hurt--before Derek had let go of his arm and was shoving him away from the hole, pressing his whole head against Stiles's chest.

Stiles scooted back to the wall, and even when he couldn't back up any more Derek stood over him, shoving at him. "Okay, okay, okay, I will stay put, I will just sit here and watch you do all the work and not try to help even a little bit, bossy wolf."

Stiles expected an answering growl, but Derek whined. He raised his head far enough to nudge at Stiles's throat, and then at his arm where Derek had caught him, which felt vaguely bruised but didn't really hurt.

"What," Stiles said, putting his good hand on Derek's shoulder. "What, hey, it's okay. I'm fine, man. I'm fine. I'm just tired. I guess I'm not up to manual labor yet."

Derek huffed. He darted in to touch the side of his muzzle to Stiles's cheek and then turned away. Derek went back to shoving dirt into the hole, raising a cloud of dust and getting himself even dirtier than he already was.

Stiles meant to watch--to stay with Derek through this even if he couldn't actually help--but at some point he blinked and suddenly the candle was shorter, and Derek wasn't so much pushing dirt into the grave as digging a new hole so he could pile dirt higher on top of the old one.

"Hey," Stiles said, and Derek stopped and looked at him.

"Derek, I have to--"

He couldn't actually say it, with Derek standing there on his sister's grave. His throat went tight and his eyes teared up again, thinking about his mom's funeral, about Derek's whole family and the burned-out house above them. Derek took a couple of steps forward, but there was something wary in his stance. He didn't come close enough to touch. He knew what Stiles was going to say.

"I promised," Stiles managed. "I promised Laura and I promised you and I mean it. I'm not leaving you alone and I won't let anyone hurt you, but, Derek, I--I have to. My dad is--"

Derek closed the distance just a little too fast for the eye to follow, and suddenly he was curled around Stiles, his nose against the back of Stiles's neck while Stiles leaned his forehead against Derek's shoulder.

"He's all I've got, Derek. And I'm all he's got. And he's so scared right now, because I've been missing for two days and he can't find me. I know he's searching for me, I know he's trying so hard, and he's not finding me and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know you brought me down here to keep me safe. He's--he's really scared...."

Stiles couldn't say anything else. He felt Derek's breath on the back of his neck, and he knew Derek's teeth were right there, but he knew he was safe with Derek. He just didn't know if Derek would let him go.

"I'll come back," Stiles whispered. "I will. I won't leave you alone out here. And I won't tell. But I need to go home, Derek. I need to see my dad and probably go to the hospital for a while, and then I'll--I promise I will come back, you have to believe me."

Derek growled at that, and Stiles laughed a little hysterically.

"Okay, yeah, you don't have to, but I promise, Derek. I'll come back. I just--right now, now that I can walk, I have to go, okay?"

Derek backed away and jerked his muzzle up, the same gesture from yesterday. Stand up. Prove it.

Stiles sat for a few seconds, bracing himself, and then he put his good hand against the wall and leaned into the corner as he pushed himself up to his feet. Derek backed up a step, but Stiles refused to be rushed, staying put until the dizziness passed and the pain leveled out. When he was ready he took a cautious step forward, and Derek backed up another step.

Derek led him all the way to the stairs like that. Stiles looked back at the burning candle and the mounded dirt that marked Laura's grave.

"Bye," he said quietly. "I'll come back. Ask my mom, I visit, I'm not one of those kids you never hear from again."

Stiles looked away from Laura's grave as soon as he was done talking; there was never an answer, and nothing to be gained from feeling like you were waiting for one. Derek was waiting for him on the top step, and he stayed there long enough for Stiles to lay a hand on his shoulders and steady himself as he climbed the two steps up into the hallway.

Derek walked next to him after that, leading him away from the bathroom he'd been camping out in. They passed another doorway, a few steps further on, and Stiles recognized the little high window and realized it was where Derek had first brought him. His epic journey to the bathroom, yesterday, had been all of about ten feet.

"I want a ribbon," Stiles muttered, looking down at Derek, whose ears flicked in a listening way. "Most improved."

Derek huffed and led him further down the hallway or tunnel, or whatever it was. It got darker and darker and went on for a long time; eventually Stiles realized it had crossed the line from dim to totally dark. He dug his fingers into Derek's fur, and Derek stopped and nosed at Stiles's thigh, making a few low sounds of reassurance.

"Yeah," Stiles said, taking a long, deep breath and wincing at the ache of his ribs. "Yeah, I'm good, I just--I'm good. Let's go."

Derek huffed and edged away again, but he walked slower. Stiles shuffled along, feeling the floor with his feet now that he realized he couldn't see any potential obstacles. He closed his eyes and trusted Derek and told himself that the walls were definitely not closing in, which worked right up until Derek pulled out of his grip.

Stiles opened his eyes and discovered that he could see the walls and they were in fact barely wide enough for him to walk between. Furthermore, there were stairs rising in front of him. A lot of stairs.

There was light at the top, though. Light had to mean getting outside, where his dad--meaning the sheriff's department and the search dogs and whatever volunteers his dad had mobilized--could find him.

"This sucks," Stiles said, just lodging a formal complaint.

He put his good hand out to one wall, his elbow against the other, and raised his foot to the first step. Derek fell back, prodding him gently from behind, and Stiles knew that meant he wouldn't be able to fall. He kept his eyes on the prize, the little bit of light leaking in from somewhere above, leaning on the left wall when he had to stop to catch his breath. He felt like he was carrying a thousand pounds on his shoulders, the weight of exhaustion squeezing against his lungs and fighting every step, but he couldn't give up with Derek pushing him along.

He fell to his knees when he reached the top, which hurt--the floor was solid stone--but was also necessary, he realized after a moment. The light was coming in through an opening that was only chest-high even when he was on his knees. Derek brushed past him and squeezed through first, momentarily blocking out the light, and then Stiles had to put his good hand down and shuffle-crawl forward into a little cave with a narrow exit to open air, screened by plants but definitely usable. Stiles got back up to his feet and went for it, but Derek didn't follow.

Stiles looked back, only to find Derek peeing a neat line across the entrance they'd just come through.

"Marking your territory, huh," Stiles said.

Derek looked up, his whole body curling down slightly into a weirdly wary stance. Stiles realized it was the most animal-like thing he'd ever seen Derek do.

He summoned up a crooked smile and made it a joke, weak though it was. "Keeping out the riff-raff?"

Derek growled but stood tall again as he came back to Stiles's side. He led the way through the crack in the rock, past the tangle of branches and out into the watery winter sunlight. The ground outside sloped downward to the river, and Stiles froze. He knew right where he was. Just like that, he wasn't lost anymore.

"Are they--do you know, can you hear? Is anybody nearby? Dogs?"

Derek jerked his head up and down, looking toward the river. Stiles stumbled over to Derek and half-crouched, half-fell onto him, wrapping both arms around him.

"Thank you," Stiles whispered. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

Derek made an impatient noise, nudging Stiles away with his nose, and Stiles got awkwardly back to his feet and looked around. When you're lost, go to high ground. He moved around the tumble of mossy rocks that shielded the entrance to the cave--Derek peed there, too--and over to a gentler slope to climb. He got tired faster without Derek there to push him along; when he looked back Derek was just standing there watching.

Stiles made a shooing motion--this wouldn't work if Derek was still standing there when Stiles got found--but Derek sat down pointedly, waiting. Stiles turned back and went a few steps further on, until he reached a tree he could lean against.

He closed his eyes, wrapped his good arm around his ribs, and then stopped to stare at the splint.

"Oh, that would be bad," he said, looking back at Derek. "There's no way I did that by myself, not to start with."

Derek just sat there, waiting.

Stiles huffed and fumbled the knots open, unwinding the strip of cloth and letting the slats fall. He kicked dirt and leaves over them and then cradled his broken wrist against his chest, took as deep a breath as he could get, and whistled.

Half the police dogs in Beacon County had stayed with the Stilinskis at one time or another, and pretty much all of them had used Stiles's room to practice drug-sniffing (not, of course, that there was anything illicit-smelling in Stiles's room that hadn't been planted there for the dogs to practice on; if he'd ever had any ideas about keeping anything there, well, there had been a search dog checking the place out, on average, every two weeks since he was ten years old). All the dogs knew him. They probably hadn't even needed a scent object, just a Go find Stiles.

And Stiles had long since learned the one most important whistle-command. Work's done, come here and get your treats. He didn't have to wait to be found if any of the dogs were close enough to hear; they'd come running to that whistle.

Derek, meanwhile, was on his feet, head tilted. After a few seconds he turned and ran lightly down the slope, diving straight into the river and bobbing back to the surface almost out of sight. The splash had barely died away when Stiles heard barking, and he turned toward it, still leaning against the tree.

"Hey, buddy, yeah, come here, come here," Stiles called. "That you, Arnie? Bruce? Come on, boys, come and get me."

The barking got steadily louder, and Stiles thought he could hear yelling behind it. That was jarring for a second, hearing other human voices after two days alone with Derek. Then the dogs burst out of the trees. Arnie was in the lead with Bruce, Heidi, and Leroy close behind, and Stiles slid down to sit and let them swarm up over him. He hugged them and let them all jostle him, gritting his teeth against the pain of it, because he needed to be seen getting good and covered in dog hair before anyone asked why it was all over his clothes.

The shouting cut through a few seconds later, and the dogs all backed off him, suddenly reminded that they were on duty and it wasn't really playtime in the Stilinskis' yard. Plus Stiles had totally been lying about having treats. Stiles looked up past the dogs and saw a few deputies running toward him at full speed and--oh, God--and his dad, in jeans and a sweatshirt, rarely-seen off-duty clothes. He was red-faced and running faster than any of them.

"Oh God, please don't have a heart attack now," Stiles muttered. He tried to stand up and didn't quite make it. He settled for raising his right hand with his thumb up.

That didn't really slow his dad down at all, though Stiles was vaguely aware that the deputies peeled off, talking urgently to each other and their radios and leashing the dogs. His dad dropped to his knees next to Stiles, shaky hands hovering over Stiles without making contact. He was breathing too hard to talk, eyes shiny.

Stiles dropped his thumbs-up hand and put his arm around his dad's neck, leaning into his chest at an angle that kept his left wrist cradled safely between them. "I'm okay, dad."

"Okay," his dad repeated in a hollow gasp, arms going around Stiles gingerly and then tightening. "Okay. Okay, he says, after two days of--"

His dad cut off sharply, pressing his face into the top of Stiles's head, which made his headache worse in a way that Stiles could not have cared less about.

"I'm okay now," Stiles clarified, into his dad's sweatshirt. He smelled like home, like fresh laundry and sweat, a weekend spent doing chores around the house. Stiles would need to take the trash out when he got home; tomorrow was Monday and the garbage truck came before he left for school.

"It's okay," Stiles repeated, and closed his eyes.

His dad said his name, and kind of shook him. It wasn't that Stiles couldn't have answered, but he was really tired--all those stairs, and the walking, and the burying Laura, and leaving Derek, and everything. He just didn't want to get up yet. He just wanted to lie here for a few more minutes. He knew his dad would just go start the coffee and come back and tell him again when it was really time to get up, so that was okay.

Only then Scott was yelling his name, and Stiles jerked awake and tried to look for him, except when he tried to move his dad held him down, and also... a lot of other stuff was holding him down.

"Neck brace?" Stiles said, looking around as well as he could and not seeing anyone he could talk out of this. His dad was looking downright implacable, and the EMTs who must have strapped him down--and splinted his wrist--were out of his sightline.

"Seriously? Because I walked here. My neck is fine--"

"Stiles," Scott repeated breathlessly, lunging into Stiles's field of view, looking sweaty and the bad kind of pale.

"Inhaler," Stiles said automatically. At least if Scott had lost the thing there were EMTs right here for once.

But then Allison was there, leaning into Scott's shoulder and holding out his inhaler. Scott shot her a grateful smile--the one he used to give Stiles when Stiles knew where his inhaler was--and took a couple of quick puffs.

While Scott was doing that, Allison looked down at Stiles, giving him a grimace-smile: I'm glad you're alive but sorry you're strapped to a board with an option on you totally ruined my weekend. But apparently the first date had gone well, if she'd stuck around all weekend.

"We've been so worried," she said, nearly as earnestly as Scott would have. "We've been helping search. I'm so glad you're okay!"

Scott nodded frantically, inhaler still plugged into his mouth, and Stiles said, "Scott, have you gone through a whole one of those in the last two days running around the woods?"

Scott lowered the inhaler, shoving it hastily into his pocket as he said, "No, it's fine. Dude, where were you? You look awful. We found the Jeep and then they found your phone and your flashlight by the Hale house, but with all the rain the dogs couldn't track you, and no one could find a trace of you. We've been going through the woods in grid squares."

"I fell," Stiles said, because obviously, and then felt his way through the rest of the story. He just had to stick as close as he could to the truth without mentioning Derek. "I was up in the second floor of the Hale house and I fell. I guess I had a pretty bad concussion because I have no idea where I went, I just knew I had to find someplace where I could stay warm and out of the rain. It was like a little cave or something, and I just stayed in there. But today I woke up and I could actually think straight, and I realized I needed to come out and get found."

Scott looked like he had no problem with that story; Allison was frowning a little bit. Luckily that was when Stiles's dad squeezed Stiles's hand and said, "Okay, we're ready to go."

Scott and Allison disappeared and a few EMTs moved into their place, lifting Stiles up and--oh, hey, into an ambulance. His dad stayed right beside him, holding his hand, and Stiles figured it was okay to close his eyes again for a while.

Chapter Text

They didn't make him change into a hospital gown until after they'd done most of the other stuff: took the x-rays, asked him a lot of questions about precisely how much his head hurt, cut up his shirt to get a cast onto his left wrist, put an IV into his good hand because no hospital experience would be complete without one, and, eventually, administered painkillers. By the time they got around to the indignity of the hospital gown Stiles was both exhausted and marveling at how great it felt to have everything not hurt all of a sudden, which was amazing.

It almost totally made up for his dad and Scott's mom pretty much giving him a sponge-bath after getting him out of his clothes, which were, he agreed, totally gross. Cutting them away and putting them directly into the trash was basically the only answer at that point, and it did feel good to get cleaned up, even if it meant getting bathed like a baby.

Ms. McCall made little worried noises over his huge phone bruise and his battered knees, but no one seemed to notice the faint red double line of bruises on his upper arm, the marks of Derek's teeth catching him from falling into Laura's grave. When Ms. McCall left to get him some pudding to eat--he hadn't been able to come up with a plausible explanation for getting food over the last couple of days, so he had to say he hadn't eaten anything, which sort of freaked everyone out--Stiles raised his freshly casted arm and rubbed his fingers lightly over that spot, just under the sleeve of his hospital gown.

"Stiles," his dad said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and Stiles dropped his hand. He braced himself for questions about what had really happened in the woods, about that obvious bite-bruise on his arm, about where all that black wolf-hair had come from and the contents of his stomach.

"I'm really proud of you," his dad said. "You scared the life out of me and I don't ever want you doing anything like that again, but you kept it together and you got yourself found."

Stiles ducked his head, biting his lip against the impulse to say he'd had help and he would never actually have survived on his own. It was too awful to think about, and of course he couldn't say anything like that at all. His dad tugged him into another hug, and that was easier than thinking of the next lie, so Stiles went with it.

---

They kept him overnight for observation, which Stiles had no problem with. The hospital bed--even with the gown and the thin blankets and the IV and people checking on him and his dad snoring in an armchair--was the most comfortable place he'd slept in days.

Still, it was a definite improvement when he looked over and realized Derek was lying beside him in the bed, pressed up against the rails on that side. Stiles managed to move just enough to snuggle up, pressing his face into the warm fur of Derek's shoulder, laying his broken wrist along Derek's spine and propping his knee on Derek's back, and, there. Everything was right where it should be.

Stiles slept soundly after that.

---

Stiles woke up to a general feeling of wrongness. He opened his eyes on the wrong ceiling and recognized it instantly: hospital. He felt such a crushing weight of misery and grief and horrible anticipation that it was a relief to look down at himself and see his wrist in a cast (Beacon Hills maroon--they hadn't even asked him what color he wanted, just asked if he played a sport and then slapped it on) and the other hand with an IV taped down. He was the patient.

His eyes prickled with tears then, thinking of his mom and the nights he'd spent tucked into a hospital bed because he refused to go home without her. He turned his face awkwardly into the pillow to wipe his face without using either of his hands, and he stopped cold, looking at the bed rails, because--

Derek should have been there. The feeling of wrongness he'd woken up to had been the part where he was waking up alone. Derek had been there when he went to sleep, and now he was gone.

Stiles twisted a little onto his side, bringing his left hand over to tug gingerly at the blanket. No wolf hair on the pale blue blanket, none on the white sheets. Derek couldn't even have lain on that side of the bed without getting tangled in Stiles's IV, to say nothing of the nurses seeing him and freaking out, or....

Stiles looked the other way. His dad was still there, sleeping with his chin on his chest.

Yeah. His dad would have noticed a giant wolf sleeping in Stiles's bed. So there hadn't been a giant wolf in Stiles's bed.

Of course there hadn't. That was insane. Stiles had dreamed Derek last night; if it had felt really, really real it was because his concussion-rattled brain was full of nothing but memories of sleeping beside Derek for the last two days.

There was no good reason why knowing Derek hadn't really been there last night made Stiles feel all cold and hollow.

He was safe now. His dad was right here. His wrist was in a cast like it should be, and he could feel all his fingers and couldn't feel a bunch of other things. He was fine without Derek. He didn't need Derek anymore. He wouldn't freeze to death, wouldn't be lost alone, wouldn't starve.

It didn't change the fact that he knew as surely as gravity or his own name: Derek should have been there. Derek's absence was like sand in his shoe or an unscratchable itch. And there was no way Derek could get to him here, so the only way to fix it was for Stiles to do what he'd promised to do.

"Don't worry," he whispered to the empty space on the other side of the bed. "I'm coming back."

---

Scott showed up with Stiles's breakfast tray in one hand. The other hand was in Allison's hand; Stiles was starting to notice a pattern. They both had their backpacks on, ready to go to school after paying their visit. Stiles's dad had left him alone about two minutes before, going into the parents' lounge to shower and change clothes, leaving Stiles to stare at the cheerful cartoon decals on the wall. The pediatric ward had not been designed for sixteen-year-olds.

Scott kind of looked like a cartoon himself, with his impossibly sunny smile. Allison, too. They matched really well, all fluffy dark hair and brown eyes and dimples, like cartoons by the same artist.

"Breakfast!" Scott announced. "My mom says they're going to let you out today, but not soon enough for you to get to school."

"Doesn't that violate my patient confidentiality?" Stiles asked, eyeing his fruit cup dubiously. The nurse on shift when he got up this morning--thankfully not Ms. McCall--had been way too interested in the fact that he'd taken a shit this morning after supposedly not eating anything all weekend. It didn't inspire a big appetite for eating breakfast under their watchful eyes.

Scott shrugged. "You would have told me anyway. And she didn't say what's wrong with you, just when you're getting out. I think that's okay? What is wrong with you, anyway?"

Stiles waved his cast. "I broke a couple bones in my wrist, and I had a moderate to serious concussion but they think my brain's pretty much back to normal now."

"Whoa, so that'll be a new thing for you," Scott said cheerfully, right on cue. Allison huffed and smacked his arm while Stiles rolled his eyes, not bothering to hide a smile at the comfort of Scott teasing him like usual.

"And they're kind of freaked out about me not eating anything for a couple of days, but apparently I came through that like a champ. I think I can probably scam my dad out of a breakfast involving bacon and waffles once I get out of here, though, so."

Scott took the hint, and helped himself to Stiles's foil-topped plastic cup of apple juice. Stiles held his fruit cup out in Allison's direction, and she delicately picked up a grape from the top and said, "Thanks," before she popped it into her mouth.

"Speaking of my dad and diner food," Stiles added, "tell me the truth, he was eating total crap all weekend, wasn't he."

Scott shrugged. "He said he was burning enough calories running around the woods and searching for you that it didn't matter how much junk food he ate. They had pizzas for the searchers yesterday and the day before, but I never really saw him eat anything. He was always looking over the maps and stuff when he wasn't--"

Scott cut off abruptly, with a sideways look at Allison, and Allison rolled her eyes and said, "When he wasn't arguing with my dad. My mom's the only one who can get my dad to listen when he's sure he's right about something, and she wasn't out in the woods with us, so my dad was trying to tell everyone how to do everything the whole time."

Stiles's eyes almost crossed, trying to picture that. "Uh. You mean he was arguing with the Beacon County Sheriff's Department about how to search land they all grew up on and he's never seen before?"

Allison held up her hands in surrender. "Don't ask me, I was not involved. He's just all worked up about that wolf attack last week--he was sure the wolves got you, too. He's convinced they're still around. He wouldn't let us out of his sight when we were helping look for you, and he insisted on carrying a rifle the whole time."

Stiles made a high-pitched noise that he'd have liked to pretend was a laugh but sounded totally panicked. Scott and Allison both looked startled and then worried, and Stiles said quickly, "I never--I never even thought of that, oh, shit. It's like--you know, when something doesn't happen and then you realize it could've happened and that's when you get scared, like when you have a close call driving or--"

"Stiles," Scott said firmly, grabbing his right wrist and squeezing. "Slow down. Focus."

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, focusing on Scott's grip.

Derek was safe. Laura was--Derek was safe. Derek had already known he had to avoid humans who wouldn't understand. Derek had stayed hidden, and he would keep staying hidden for as long as he had to. All Stiles had to do was never mention him to anyone and Derek would be fine.

He'd known that, but he hadn't realized that anyone would include Scott. He couldn't ask Scott to keep a secret from Allison, though, and even if Scott could keep it from Allison he would probably crack and let something slip to Allison's bossy rifle-toting dad. So, okay. So Stiles couldn't tell anyone anyone, and he needed to start not telling right now.

"Sorry," Stiles said, and took another deep breath before he opened his eyes and came up with a smile. "I guess maybe that whole thing was more traumatic than I thought."

Scott's worried look gave way to a tentative smile, while Allison just looked more worried.

"I'm good, though," Stiles assured her, and then, in a burst of inspiration, he spread his arms wide and added, "And, I mean, that kind of proves there are no wolves, right? I was, like, perfect wolf-bait and I didn't get a nibble. If there was a wolf out there who liked to chomp on humans he'd have gotten me for sure--I was totally helpless, I was like the goat they left out for the T-Rex. So if I didn't get pounced on, there's no man-eating wolf out there, right?"

Scott was nodding cheerfully even before Stiles finished talking, totally willing to be swayed by Stiles's awesome logic. Allison didn't look as convinced, but it was hard for anybody to be as convinced by anything as Scott usually was by Stiles. Stiles started to lower his arms and was suddenly conscious that when he stuck his arms out like that, the marks from Derek's teeth--if they were still there, if they'd darkened into a real bruise instead of fading away--would have peeked out of the sleeve of his hospital gown.

Stiles put both hands in his lap and didn't look down or touch the spot.

"I don't think that'll convince my dad," Allison said with a shrug. "But it's good enough for me. Like I said, he's just freaking out about those wolves--he gets worked up about things sometimes. He's way overprotective."

Stiles looked over at Scott just in time to catch a wide-eyed look and furtive nod, and Stiles looked back to Allison with a friendly smile. "So did you guys just come by to see if I'm okay? I guess I don't need a ride to school."

"Yeah, just wanted to check in," Allison said, at the same time Scott twisted around to get into his backpack.

"Also," he said, coming up with a permanent marker, "it is totally finally my turn."

Stiles immediately moved his cast out of reach. "Hey, Scott, look, I was twelve--"

"And eleven," Scott said with an evil grin, "and eight."

"It is not my fault my bones don't break as easily as yours!" Stiles yelped.

"Yeah, but totally your fault you drew flowers all over my cast when I broke my leg. Come on, my turn, let's go."

"Scott, seriously, I'm begging you, leave me some dignity, here. Don't draw a--" at the last second he shut his mouth and didn't say dick, just looked over at Allison.

Scott blushed abruptly bright red, and looked shyly over to Allison, who said firmly, "Don't be mean, Scott."

"Okay, okay, jeez," Scott said, voice going a little high-pitched. Allison totally had him by the balls--figuratively speaking only, Stiles assumed, if they'd spent the whole weekend with Allison's rifle-toting dad and Scott still had balls--but she was using her power for good, so Stiles couldn't really object.

"I won't even draw anything," Scott bargained, "I'll just sign my name."

Stiles sighed and gave in, holding out his left arm to Scott.

Scott flashed him a bright smile, like there had been any kind of chance Stiles would actually hold out and say no. He gently steadied Stiles's arm on top of the bed rail and started writing his name in letters that took up the whole top of Stiles's cast. Stiles sighed and stared at the ceiling, waiting for him to finish; when he looked down he saw that Scott had crammed in a #11 under the crossbar of the second T.

"Thanks, that's good, wouldn't want anybody to be in doubt about which Scott signed my cast," Stiles said.

It was as close as he'd be getting to lacrosse this season, anyway. He wouldn't even be allowed to suit up and sit on the bench with a cast on, and a month from now when it came off--a month if he was lucky, the doctor had said--there wouldn't be any point at all.

Stiles shook off the thought and looked down, tilting his cast toward Allison. "Wanna sign? If you can find any room."

Allison smiled. "Sure, here, I can squeeze it in."

She signed her name in pretty, girly cursive, sideways between the two T's. It actually sort of made the SCOTT less obvious; if he could just find four or five more people to sign the empty spaces it wouldn't really be apparent at all.

Too bad that was four more people than Stiles could even pay to hang out with him long enough to sign his cast.

Too bad Derek couldn't--

Stiles stifled that thought and looked ostentatiously over at the clock. "Hey, you guys should probably get going, shouldn't you?"

"Oh!" Scott said, following Stiles's gaze. "Crap! Allison, come on--"

They were holding hands again as they went running out of the room and down the hall. Stiles heard his dad yell, "You'd better not be speeding like that when you get in your car, Scott."

Fading off down the hall, Scott yelled back, "No, Sheriff, promise!"

Stiles noticed that Allison had left the permanent marker on the tray with his breakfast, and he made a mental note to pocket that as soon as he had pockets again.

"So, hey," his dad said, leaning through the door. "Word is you're getting out of here soon. You want some real breakfast?"

---

His dad turned the wrong way out of the diner, and Stiles said, "Dad? Where are we going? Is my Jeep...."

"Your Jeep's at home," his dad assured him without looking over. "But I thought we'd just go on out to the woods and have a look around, maybe help you remember what happened."

"Uh," Stiles said. "No, I--I don't think--"

"And then whoever you promised you'd come back and see again wouldn't have to worry about you," his dad added, like that was a perfectly normal thing to say.

"What," Stiles said, "No, what...." He made himself stop without quite covering his mouth with his hand, mostly because he'd already punched himself in the face with his cast once this morning and he didn't need to do it again.

"Dad, what are you talking about?" Stiles managed, when his dad still didn't say anything. "I was alone, I didn't--who would I have promised--what?"

"I don't know how many times I have to tell you that you're really articulate when you talk in your sleep," his dad said, glancing over at him. "But you are. And very repetitive, in this case. I must have woken up ten different times and heard you promising to come back. So who were you talking to?"

"I--I--" Stiles searched frantically for a lie, found it, and hated himself even as he said it. "I was talking to you, okay?"

He turned his head to stare out the window, because it should have been true and it so, so wasn't. He'd hardly thought of his dad at all, the whole time he was with Derek. He was the worst son ever.

"I was all alone, and I was cold, and I was really scared and I thought I might die out there and you would never know what happened to me, and I--I hate being by myself so I talked to you, and to Scott, and, and other people, and I kept promising you I would get back."

His dad didn't say anything, but he put his hand on Stiles's knee. He also kept driving toward the woods. Stiles shut his eyes and leaned his forehead against the chilly glass of the window and pulled out all the stops.

"And I--sometimes I think I was talking to Mom, too, you know, promising her that I would--that I wouldn't leave you--"

"Stiles," his dad said, sounding choked. He finally pulled over, and tugged Stiles into a hug once they were safely on the shoulder.

Stiles hid his face against his dad's shoulder and thought Sorry, sorry, sorry, and didn't say a word.

---

His dad stayed home with him until after lunch. He made Stiles swear he was just going to stay home and do all the homework he'd missed doing while he was trying not to die in the woods, and then he went to work.

Stiles pulled his desk chair over to his bedroom window and triaged his homework, doing enough to look like he'd made a pretty valiant effort despite almost dying over the weekend, while also keeping an eye on the street. Two cruisers rolled by within the first half hour after his dad left, but it took nearly an hour--Stiles was practically completely caught up on his English reading--before a third one appeared.

"Yep, still home," Stiles murmured, watching the car slow down as it passed the house. Waving would have been overkill. The Jeep in the driveway was all his dad would have told them to look for. "Go on, call it in and get out of here."

He waited another five solid minutes before he dragged a hoodie on, fished his keys and wallet out of the bag of personal effects on the kitchen counter, and took off.

---

Stiles hadn't realized how much he used his left hand while driving, but he got the hang of it quickly enough. He drove scrupulously below the speed limit and stopped like an overcautious old grandma, just in case. The last thing he needed was to get caught crashing his Jeep when he was supposed to be safe at home. Plus any kind of sudden stop would probably make him burst into tears from pain at this point.

He hit the drive-thru first, because that was good and innocuous and he could totally get his dad to buy that he'd just really, really needed curly fries to make up for his ordeal in the woods. It was the middle of a school day, so nobody he knew was working; it was all the weird grownup fast food lifers right now, and none of them would know how weird it was that Stiles was ordering totally unhealthy food for two people.

He dropped the bag on the seat--he really wasn't actually all that hungry, although he couldn't resist nibbling a few curly fries--and then drove to destination number two. The cemetery.

He parked in the curve of a graveled drive and looked around, but a Monday afternoon in January wasn't really prime grave-visiting time. The grass didn't require much trimming at this time of year either, so there was no sign of the groundskeeper, Mr. Lahey. Stiles picked up the fast food bag and walked down the familiar rows of headstones to his mom's grave, and sat down close beside her marker. The stone was warm from the sun.

"Hi, mom," Stiles said. "I'm really sorry about this--about using you like that to shut dad up, and about coming here like this, just on my way. But I think you would understand, right? Derek saved my life, that would kind of make you like him, wouldn't it? You would totally be with me on saving him back. He doesn't have anybody left at all now. I'm the only one who even knows he's alive."

Stiles opened his mouth to say more, except it hit him all at once: he was the only person in the world who knew where--and what--Derek was. If anything happened to him--if he didn't get back to Derek--there would be no one at all to know that he was stuck as a wolf in the woods, no one, and--

Stiles curled down small, pressing his cheek into the warm stone of his mom's marker and thinking vaguely that it was a funny kind of progress, sitting by his mom's grave and having a panic attack about someone else. He panted helplessly, struggling for breath against the crushing feeling in his chest, the cold terror crawling down his spine. He tried to remember what it had felt like when Derek made him stop panicking a few days before, but he couldn't bring the feeling back, couldn't feel anything but stone and the cold hard ground.

A sharp sound made him pick his head up, but it wasn't until he heard it again that he realized it had been a bark, coming from the woods beyond the edge of the cemetery. Stiles unfolded, pushing himself shakily up to his feet, and the bark came again. Stiles peered through the trees and thought he could see something red, glowing. Derek.

Stiles shut his eyes and finally remembered to force himself to take a long, deep breath. It caught on the way out, almost a sob, but he opened and closed his hands, swinging his arms, and focused on breathing.

He did know how to do this. He didn't need a wolf threatening him to get him to do it right. When he opened his eyes again the faint red glow was still there, back among the trees. Stiles knelt again and touched his mom's gravestone.

"Sorry," he said hoarsely. "I gotta go see him, okay? I love you. I'm really sorry, I suck, I know."

He grabbed the bag of food and headed off across the cemetery, cutting through the rows toward the tree line, where those two red lights were waiting.

Once he got into the trees he could see Derek; the big black wolf kept pacing back and forth but didn't come any closer. When Stiles got within a couple of yards he could see that the ground was disturbed along the line Derek was walking, like he'd tried to dig in, like--

"Holy shit, you're trapped," Stiles said, running the last few strides to Derek's side of the magic line. Derek was immediately plastered against his side, nosing at his cast and then against his ribs. "No, I'm okay, I'm--here, look, I brought you some food, I thought you might miss people food."

Stiles sat down and Derek immediately moved around behind him, his tail over one of Stiles's shoulders and his head coming around the other. Stiles unfolded the top of the bag and reached in. "Come on, don't tell me you don't miss curly fries or I might have to reconsider whether you really are just a wild--"

Derek snapped a mouthful of curly fries out of Stiles's hand, and Stiles grinned and turned to rub his cheek against Derek's shoulder. "Okay, yeah, see? I knew you were totally a civilized human being deep down."

Derek swallowed and huffed, like he didn't believe an appreciation of curly fries was a pillar of normal human behavior. That just went to show he'd been alone in the woods too long.

"Hey, how long have you been out here?" Stiles asked as he tore open the bag of food.

Derek didn't make a sound, and when Stiles looked up and met his eyes, he was somehow managing to look distinctly scornful. He gave Stiles a few seconds and then opened his mouth and made a low growly bark, rar rar rar.

Stiles blushed and looked back down at the food, dumping out the fries into the torn bag and unwrapping the burgers, feeling like a jerk for asking Derek a question he couldn't answer. "Sorry, yeah, that was dumb. But are you--you're going to change back eventually, right?"

Another silence, and when he looked up this time Derek was just staring off into the woods. He didn't even look angry, really, just... like he was pretending not to have heard that question. Stiles remembered the way Derek had turned away when Stiles brought up his family. Okay, he could take a hint. Derek didn't want to talk about it.

Stiles cleared his throat and said, "Anyway, come on, have some burgers. I can't eat all this myself, man."

Derek turned back like he'd just been distracted for a few seconds, like nothing important had been said. He gave Stiles a wolf-grin and then knocked the top bun off the nearest burger and snapped up the rest in a couple of bites. Stiles had his hand within an inch of Derek's teeth before he realized maybe he shouldn't.

Derek went still, but when Stiles met his eyes they were brown-gray and calm. Stiles closed the distance, touching his thumb to Derek's muzzle. "You have mustard right, um--"

Derek's tongue curled out, over Stiles's thumb and over the splotch of mustard, and Stiles jerked his hand back with a breathless laugh. "Okay, yeah, there you go."

Stiles grabbed some more curly fries and Derek snapped his teeth toward Stiles's hand. He was nowhere near actually biting him, so Stiles crammed them into his mouth without fear. By the time he'd swallowed, the rest of the food was gone except for a couple of lonely ketchup-sodden buns.

Derek turned in toward him, licking the corner of Stiles's mouth before Stiles could move away, and Stiles laughed, startled, and wiped the back of his hand over the same spot. "I did not have mustard anywhere, you jerk, I was only eating fries."

Derek ignored him, naturally, nosing at his ear and the side of his neck. He zeroed in on Stiles's cast pretty quickly, sniffing and then tilting his head and huffing. Stiles turned his arm so the SCOTT was right side up. "He's my best friend. He had first dibs, sorry. If you had opposable thumbs I would totally want you to sign it, man."

Derek growled softly and opened his mouth wide, setting his teeth against the cast. Stiles remembered Derek holding the splints in place for him, a couple of days ago, forever ago.

"Hey," Stiles said softly, not trying to pull away. "Hey, yeah, but maybe teeth marks would be awkward to explain to my dad. What if you made a pawprint in the dirt, and I copied it? I can pretend it's just something I drew on there, but it'll be your mark."

Derek let go of Stiles's cast to raise his head and look Stiles in the eye. Stiles played that back in his head and bit his lip.

"I mean--you know what I mean, because you can't sign your name while you're like this. I would want you to," Stiles repeated. "I do want you to."

Derek huffed and then turned and trotted off. Stiles twisted to watch him until Derek stopped and looked back, and then made a come along motion with his muzzle. Stiles let out a wolfish sigh of his own, but he got to his feet and followed Derek deeper into the woods.

It wasn't too bad--he was sore, but nothing like he had been twenty-four hours earlier, thanks to sleep and food and prescription-strength drugs. Derek went slowly, too, picking an easy path through the trees. Eventually he reached a spot where there were no leaves on the ground. Derek turned and watched Stiles until he caught up, heaved a sigh, and then set one paw carefully down on the soft, bare dirt.

Stiles looked back and realized that, all the way they'd come through the woods, Derek hadn't left one obvious pawprint.

"Thanks, man," Stiles said, and Derek huffed and trotted a little way away. Stiles pulled the marker from his pocket and sat down next to the huge pawprint in the dirt--bigger than the palm of his own hand--and then folded down to lay his cast right next to it. He carefully outlined the pawprint, trying to get the exact size and shape of each pad and dotting in each little claw mark.

"Hey--" Stiles said, looking up, and then stopped short. Derek had come back and was lying right beside him, watching as he drew. Stiles held out his cast. "Here, is that right?"

Derek nosed at it for a minute and then turned his head and sneezed--marker fumes on a sensitive nose, right. Then he stood up and set his paw down on the outline. It was hard to tell with Derek's actual paw in the way, but Stiles decided it was a perfect match, and Derek made a gruff little noise that sounded like agreement.

When he took his paw away he lay down again, right up against Stiles's side this time. Stiles leaned into him while he colored in the pawprint, and when he was finished he capped the marker and flopped the rest of the way over, laying himself across Derek's back, face up to the sky.

Derek took a deep breath in, so that Stiles could feel his lungs inflate underneath him. He sighed it all out in a noisy gust, but he didn't growl, didn't twitch one toe to push Stiles off.

"I missed you, too," Stiles said to the tree branches and the clouds. "I dreamed you were there with me, in the hospital."

Derek made a weird noise somewhere between a whine and a growl and twisted under Stiles so that he could press his nose into Stiles's cheek. Stiles squinched up his face, enduring the cold, wet touch and the anxious sound for about thirty seconds before he rolled over and down, curling himself up against Derek with his broken wrist and one leg propped on Derek's back. Derek huffed and rested his muzzle on Stiles's cheek, holding him still.

"Yeah," Stiles said. "Yeah, it would have been better if you were really there. But--it was really real, you know? I thought you really were there, and then I could sleep because I thought you were with me and I was with you. Which is sort of weird, isn't it? I've known you for, like, three days, and my dad was right there and I've slept in that hospital way too many times, but you were the one I wanted there with me."

Derek twisted his head down, rubbing his jaw against Stiles's cheek, and Stiles remembered the way he'd done it--both sides, like French people in movies kissing hello--back down in the tunnels, when Stiles had said he wouldn't let anyone hurt him.

"Shit, that reminds me, you've gotta be careful, okay," Stiles said.

Derek huffed and raised his head, and Stiles looked up to see him looking as disbelieving as it was possible for a wolf to look.

"I know, I know you're careful already, but--Scott's girlfriend Allison's dad, she said he doesn't believe you're gone, and when they were looking for me he was out here with a rifle, and, just--be careful, all right? Don't get shot."

Derek huffed again, but he jerked his muzzle up and down in something like a nod, and then squirmed out from under Stiles, shaking him off and jumping to his feet.

"Okay, okay," Stiles sighed, rolling up into a sitting position. He looked down at his newly-decorated cast, Scott and Allison on one side, Derek, hidden, on the other.

"Hey," Stiles said, looking up at Derek again. He pointed to the pawprint and grinned. "Should I put your jersey number on here, too? Did you play lacrosse?"

Derek shook his head--shook his whole body--in an obvious, emphatic no.

"But, come on, you had to play something, right? I mean, everybody plays something, I'm on the lacrosse team even though they've never let me into a game. Even Greenberg's on the lacrosse team. Was it some crappy sport? Football? Basketball?"

Derek shook his head in a simple negation, no full-body rejection this time, so whatever he had against lacrosse, he didn't mind the sports that were perpetual losers....

"Oh man," Stiles said, with dawning horror. "You weren't on the swim team, were you?"

Derek just huffed, and then turned away from Stiles and trotted off, then turned and trotted back, head down slightly, in the exact dogged--ha!--posture of those crowds of guys who were always running down the side of the road in the drizzling rain.

"Oh!" Stiles said. "You ran cross country?"

Derek sat down and nodded.

Stiles frowned. "Do you guys even have jerseys? Or numbers?"

Derek shook his head slowly this time, looking amused.

"Well, fine, no incriminating jersey number, then," Stiles agreed, shoving the marker back into his pocket.

"I can hang out a while longer, though," he added, but even as he said it he was thinking about the odds of his dad or a deputy cruising by the cemetery, seeing his Jeep but no sign of him, and freaking out.

Derek came over to him and closed his teeth carefully on the collar of Stiles's t-shirt, tugging up.

"Okay, okay, fine," Stiles said, and got up to his feet. Derek let go of him once he got his feet under him, in favor of nudging him back the way they'd come. Which was good, Stiles realized, because without Derek pushing him he would have no idea which way to go to get back to the cemetery. But it didn't take long; within a couple of minutes he spotted the line that he thought must mark Derek's invisible boundary. Derek stopped a couple of feet short of it, and Stiles wanted to know--and didn't dare to ask--if it hurt Derek to run into it.

"Okay," Stiles said, looking down at Derek looking up. "So I'll come back as soon as I can, okay? And I'll, um...."

Stiles knelt and threw his arms around Derek's neck and whispered, "I'll dream about you, won't I? And you--if you're lonely out here, I hope you dream about me. I don't want to leave you alone."

Derek rested his muzzle on Stiles's shoulder and they stayed that way for a little while, until Stiles became conscious of the cold damp slowly sleeping through the knees of his jeans, and the ticklish softness of Derek's fur shifting against Stiles's arms as they both breathed, slipping under the edge of the cast to touch his skin. A few seconds later Derek took a backward step, pulling out of Stiles's grip, and darted his nose back in to nudge at Stiles.

"Yeah, all right, I'm going," Stiles said, getting back up to his feet, grabbing the trash off the ground. He headed back into the cemetery and didn't look back until he reached his mom's grave, and when he turned from that spot, Derek was gone.

"Mom," Stiles said, "That's Derek. He's complicated."

---

When he woke up that night and found Derek in his bed, Stiles blinked twice and then said, "I'm dreaming," even as he reached out to poke Derek.

Derek huffed and snapped his teeth in the general direction of Stiles's poking hand, but he didn't stop Stiles from prodding the real-feeling texture of fur over muscle over bone, all of it shifting with real-seeming breathing.

"So, fine," Stiles said after a second. "Real enough."

Derek licked Stiles's face in agreement and then settled down with his head on his paws, closing his eyes. Stiles rolled closer, cuddling up in the familiar way to Derek's familiar body, warm enough that he didn't need blankets in the comfort of his own home and his own bed. He wondered whether his dad would see him holding one arm and one leg Derek-high off the mattress when--not if--he checked on Stiles in the night, and then he wasn't even dreaming of being awake anymore.

---

His alarm clock woke him up, so he knew it was a school day; he was out of bed before he realized what the pain in his wrist was, and remembered that today wasn't just a school day but his First Day Back to School. He found that his dad had left plastic bags and tape in the bathroom so he could shower without getting his cast wet, and suddenly the thought of an honest-to-God hot shower was way more exciting than the thought of breakfast. Stiles stripped as fast as one and a half hands allowed, bagged his left arm and got in.

He inspected his bruises as he washed. There was no sign anymore of the teeth marks on his upper arm, and he turned over his cast to reassure himself that Derek's pawprint, at least, was still with him. The bruise from his phone was almost totally black, just starting to turn green around the edges--he was going to have to go buy a new phone soon, his dad wouldn't let him go long without one--and his knees were purple-brown.

He stayed in the shower until he couldn't stand the weird sensation of wet-not-wet on the bagged hand, and then he got out and made himself dry off before he tore off the plastic and tape. He could hear his dad down in the kitchen as he got dressed, but he didn't smell any delicious breakfast foods--or even coffee--as he headed down the stairs. Sure enough, his dad had set out cereal and milk, a bowl and a glass, and his bottle of ibuprofen, but nothing else.

Stiles opened his mouth to argue--yeah, okay, calcium would help his bones heal, but that didn't mean he needed a glass of milk on top of his bowl of cereal and no coffee, even if his dad was going to tell him that if he needed caffeine to handle school, that was what his Adderall was for.

His dad gave him a skeptical look before he could say a word, which was pretty usual. But Stiles froze, abruptly remembering his dream, the part of his dream that had seemed like going back to sleep, and the thought of what his dad would see.

Stiles shut his mouth and walked forward, watching very carefully as he poured his bowl of cereal so he didn't have to look at his dad as he spoke. "So, um, I guess you probably checked on me, like, a million times last night."

His dad was silent for a beat--that was not the opening gambit he'd expected--and then he said, "One or two. I sleep easier knowing you're safe."

Stiles nodded. That went both ways, and even if Stiles was way too old to go crawling into his parents' bed, he still went and looked some nights, when he'd been worrying about his dad for one reason or another. He set down the cereal box, and carefully unscrewed the cap from the milk before he picked it up with his good hand.

"Did you--was I...." Did I look like I was cuddling a giant invisible wolf?

His dad was silent again, and then he said, "You seemed all right to me--you weren't even talking this time. You having nightmares?"

Stiles shook his head, because whatever else Derek was, he was the opposite of a nightmare. Waking up to Derek in his bed was the very furthest thing from those dreams Stiles used to have of cold harsh light and running and running and not being able to breathe and never finding his dad or his mom or anyone else, alone forever.

"Not bad," he said, looking up to meet his dad's eyes, because Stiles needed his dad to believe him about this one absolutely true thing. "Just weird, you know? Complicated."

---

Scott biked over to ride to school with Stiles, arriving early enough to get a bowl of cereal as well as a lecture from Stiles's dad about not letting Stiles do anything to mess up his broken wrist. That was all pretty normal; their parents had been lecturing them about looking out for each other for years now. Stiles studiously ignored the lacrosse stick that Scott leaned up against the kitchen table, but his dad kind of ruined that strategy by saying, "Son, maybe you should let Scott do the driving."

Scott nodded quickly, looking all helpful and like The Good Kid.

Stiles opened his mouth to say No, it's fine, I've got the hang of it and then shut it again.

"Yeah," he said weakly. "Good plan."

Stiles was so preoccupied with being annoyed about being the passenger in his own car--and yelling at Scott for inattentive driving--that he didn't notice anything else until they were halfway to the school doors from the parking lot. That was when Stiles realized that this was actually happening, not in a dream or nightmare or overly-elaborate fantasy.

Everyone actually was staring at him.

Stiles put his head down and pressed his cast tight against his side, as if he could hide it, as if he might not be the kid whose face had been on the local news, whose dad had rousted out half the town to search for him all weekend. Scott bumped against his side, knocking their shoulders together, and kept perfect pace with him.

Stiles imagined for just a second that he felt a nudge against the back of his leg, pushing him forward. He realized then that the pawprint was hidden against his body--Derek's pawprint. No matter what a freak anyone thought he was, he was also the guy who knew Derek was alive.

He pushed his chin up as they reached the doors, and when Scott opened it for him he bounced through with a big grin and a wild wave of his arms. Even before anyone turned to look at him he yelled out, "Hi, everyone! Sorry my weekend is so much more likely to be turned into a movie than yours!"

After that they were definitely staring, but Scott was snickering beside him, and Stiles knew Derek would have rolled his eyes. That was enough to keep him going.

---

It had worn off by lunchtime, along with the ibuprofen. It was possible that his Adderall was still sort of working, or that he was just too tired to be distracted by anything ever. All of his teachers had had to make some kind of public reference to his weekend, and everyone who normally treated Stiles like he was invisible had stared at him, and all of a sudden when Stiles played like he didn't care, people were watching. It was exhausting.

He sat slumped down on the lunch table, his broken arm extended and his good arm tucked under his head. Scott and Allison had looked at him pityingly and offered to get him some lunch. That was who he expected, when someone sat down across from him, except it was... Lydia Martin.

She gave his cast a pointed look and Stiles jerked it back automatically, making a space for her to set her tray down. She looked him up and down as she took her seat, and Stiles folded his arms across his chest, tucking his cast under his good arm and slumping so they were both under the table. He should have remembered this: Allison sat with him and Scott now, and Lydia had chosen to bestow her friendship on Allison.

It was sort of funny, really, that four days ago he'd been hoping to get Lydia's attention by finding Laura Hale, and now Lydia was just one more person staring at him, one more person who he would never, never tell about Laura, about Derek, about any of this. She was still the most beautiful and perfect girl he'd ever seen, but he'd never thought he would feel so much like a bug on a pin if she looked back at him.

Everyone else arrived in a flurry--Lydia turned a sweet smile toward Jackson while Scott and Allison giggled their way up, balancing Stiles's tray between theirs like the sappiest, most unnecessary three-legged race ever. Danny and a few other people too cool to notice Stiles filled in the rest of the table, starting up their own conversations over and around him.

Stiles shook his milk carton grimly and didn't bother arguing with Scott over it--probably his mom had gotten to him about Stiles's calcium intake, even before Stiles's dad put in his two cents this morning. He looked at his cafeteria lunch and told himself sternly that he didn't wish it was Pop Tarts, because that was just stupid and this was a perfectly well-balanced meal--something deep-fried and a vegetable. He couldn't complain at all. He sucked hard at the straw, aiming to empty out his milk carton before the milk could get warm and weird-tasting.

He was in mid-suck when Lydia said brightly, directly to him, "So, did you use peyote, or something less traditional?"

He almost choked on the milk and managed to just splutter it all over himself instead, coughing frantically into his sleeve.

Scott climbed halfway over Danny to pound Stiles on the back, and from a long way off he heard Allison say, "You didn't see him out there, Lydia, he almost died. Don't even joke."

Stiles managed to bat Scott off and thought that he had always liked Allison.

"I'm not saying it didn't go horribly, almost tragically, wrong," Lydia said sweetly. "But obviously Stiles went on a vision quest in the woods. He discovered his totem is the wolf, that's why he's marked it on his arm. So I'm just wondering: peyote?"

And that was it, everyone was staring at Stiles again. Scott, frowning, looked down at Stiles's good arm, which was currently mostly marked with coughed-up milk. Stiles tucked his cast tighter against his chest and tried frantically to think of an unobtrusive lie. I just drew it would be the wrong thing, because of course Lydia thought he'd drawn it, she just thought he was being stupid and wolf-obsessed like everyone else who'd heard about the body in the woods, and he needed her to think that or Derek would die.

"Yeah," Stiles said, his voice coming out sort of hoarse from the coughing. He nodded vigorously to get his point across. "Yeah, a huge, like, brick of peyote. I was going to bake it into brownies or something but I decided to just eat it raw instead. Not recommended, it leads to falling off high things and then sleeping in a cave for two days."

Lydia looked less amused now that he wasn't humiliating himself with dairy products. She shook her head slowly as she said, "Such a disappointment to the sheriff, I'm sure, to hear his son is not only a drug user but a wildly incompetent one."

"Hey, no," Scott yelled immediately, loud enough for half the cafeteria to hear, "Stiles is not on drugs!"

That right there was the sensation of everyone in the room turning to stare at him. Stiles was getting to know it pretty well. He tried to be as subtle as he could about tugging the sleeve of his flannel shirt down over his cast, so none of them would see what he actually did need to hide.

---

Finstock kept Stiles after Econ to tell him what he already knew: with his wrist in a cast there was no way he could stay on the lacrosse team. By the time the cast came off they'd be well into the season, and there was no chance Stiles would be allowed back on.

Stiles nodded and stared at his feet and Finstock said heartily, "I know, it's a stupid rule--I mean, hell, it's not like you'd play worse with one arm, am I right?"

Stiles made himself smile, sort of, but didn't actually look up.

Finstock said in a more serious tone, "Anyway, you'll still be in the yearbook. You can put it on your college applications and no one will know the difference, it's not like you were going to get an athletic scholarship. And you can try something else in the spring, find your real aptitude. Maybe you're meant to be a swimmer!"

"Yeah," Stiles said, refusing to contemplate the indignity of the no-cuts swim team that hadn't been good for years. "Maybe cross country."

"Hey, yeah!" Finstock said brightly. "Yeah, not much coordination there. You could run cross country with no arms at all! But anyway--"

The bell for the next period rang, which meant Stiles was late for Spanish. That was awesome, because now everyone would be assembled and in position to stare at him when he walked in.

"Okay, you should go," Finstock said. "Good luck with some other sport, kid."

Stiles nodded and walked out. He turned left instead of right in the empty hallway and ducked into the library.

Mrs. Cartwright looked up when he walked in, and Stiles made a complicated gesture, pointing at his cast and the door, as if there were some sort of explanation but he wasn't shouting it across the room because this was the library. Mrs. Cartwright just raised an eyebrow and then went back to what she was doing, which was about what Stiles had expected. He knew that she was of the opinion that reporting a kid for cutting class to hang out in the library was a serious case of kicking somebody when they were down. Plus, she liked Stiles when he was on his own, i.e., quiet.

Stiles slipped into the stacks with a vague idea of not being visible from the door. He wandered up and down, eyes scanning the titles of grungy old much-handled books without settling on anything. He reached the last row of shelves by the windows and found he was staring at the collected BHHS yearbooks, all the way back to 1940.

He stood, blinking stupidly at them, thinking what he always thought and never acted on: his mom was in there somewhere.

So was Derek's mom, he thought, and then he realized with a jolt that so was Derek.

Stiles ran a couple of strides to the other end of the row, dropping to his knees in front of the most recent yearbooks. The fire had been six years ago, the winter of 2005, but school pictures were taken in October, so Derek should have been in the 2005 yearbook even though he'd left town after his parents died. Stiles flipped through the heavy glossy pages, scanning down the lists of names in the margins, and his breath caught when he saw it in the sophomore section: Derek Hale.

He looked around, but there was no one else in this aisle, and he was below the level of the windows. He dropped his backpack and sat down, propping the yearbook on his knees as he opened it all the way, and there was Derek, in black and white.

Stiles couldn't help smiling back at the bright white smile of the guy in the photo. He was wearing horrible, ugly glasses with--Stiles squinted at the tiny picture--tinted lenses, he thought. They looked awful. But he had kind of hilariously out-of-control black hair, which, along with the glasses, gave him a kind of Harry Potter look, minus the scar. His smile was....

Stiles really liked his smile. If this guy had been in his class, Stiles definitely might have considered trying out for cross country for the chance to follow him around.

Stiles looked around again, even though it wasn't like anyone could hear him thinking it, or see it just from the way he looked at an old yearbook photo. Stiles didn't talk about that, about liking guys, not like he was serious about it. Even in his own head it was easier to focus on Lydia than Danny, to be just like Scott in pining after the gorgeous girls. He wasn't faking it--Lydia was undeniably gorgeous, seriously brilliant and cool and out of his league--and if he had noticed that Danny was too, well, so he'd noticed. So he'd noticed Derek. That was all it was.

Stiles looked down and realized that he'd pushed the sleeve of his flannel shirt up again. He was rubbing his fingers over the pawprint in the crook of his arm.

It didn't matter what he thought of this picture. Derek didn't look like that smiling sophomore now. When he wasn't a wolf he'd be six years older than this, and Stiles didn't think he'd have much to smile about even if he could, not with Laura and his uncle gone as well as the rest of his family. Stiles pressed his fingers down beside the tiny photo, staring until he'd memorized Derek's face, and then he made himself turn the page.

He kept flipping until he saw Hale again and had to stop short. This time his eyes filled with tears and his throat went tight. He covered his mouth with his good hand, blinked his eyes clear, and made himself look.

There she was, second photo from the left in that row: Laura Hale. Her smile was a lot like Derek's, and he somehow noticed that even before he noticed that she was wearing awfully similar hideous glasses. She wore her dark hair long, and it fell in waves past her shoulders. She was wearing a necklace. Stiles wondered if Derek had found it near where she died, if he had that much of her human self to keep, or if it all vanished into the wolf and into the ground.

He sniffed loudly and wiped his face, roughly turning the pages to get away from Laura's picture, not slowing down until he got to the activities.

He paged through the sports slowly, pretending like he wasn't looking for anything. He stopped and looked at the lacrosse team picture, which had Finstock looking exactly the same, standing in the same spot in the team photo, the sticks and helmets arranged the same way in front of a bunch of guys who weren't Stiles's (former) teammates. It was a little bit surreal, like someone had just slipped in and replaced everyone Stiles knew with strangers.

But then Stiles turned the page and there was the team picture for cross country, and he didn't have to look for Derek, because Derek was on the end of the back row, face turned away from the camera, making a face and raising hands curled into claws--and at the other end of the row, Laura was looking toward Derek and doing the same. Neither of them was wearing glasses in this picture, but the way they were turned meant the picture didn't give a good look at their eyes.

It had to be deliberate, Stiles thought. It had to be some kind of werewolf thing, maybe like vampires not showing up in mirrors. That had something to do with silver, he'd read that somewhere--wasn't there silver in camera film, too? Silver was bad for werewolves; maybe they had to protect their eyes from cameras or something. Stiles glanced over the other pictures--there was one of Laura crossing a finish line, arms raised in triumph and head tilted back, just barely ahead of one of her teammates, and another picture of a whole group running, where Stiles thought that the dark tuft of hair visible between two runners was probably Derek's.

He squinted at the picture, trying to identify Derek's legs from the forest of limbs in the lower half of the picture, and then a shadow fell across the page. Stiles slammed the book shut, trying to scramble to his feet at the same time he looked up. He bobbled the yearbook and let out a weird incoherent yelp, and sort of tripped over himself at the same time he registered that it was Allison who had walked up to him.

Allison dodged backward to avoid his flailing arms and the flying yearbook. She bent down to pick it up as Stiles flung himself forward to grab it, so that they collided solidly, shoulder to shoulder. Allison fell back against the opposite shelf as Stiles dropped to his knees.

"Sorry," Stiles gasped, rubbing his shoulder and feeling more shaken than just the impact would explain. "Sorry, sorry, that was--sorry."

Allison waved it off. "No, I startled you, I should know better. I knew a girl in San Francisco who was always saying she wanted to hang a bell on me so she'd know when I was coming."

Stiles grinned and tried to be subtle about picking up the yearbook and putting it back with the others. But when he turned back to face Allison she'd settled in to sit on the floor by the opposite shelf, and she wasn't looking past him to see what book he'd put back. She was looking at his cast, where the sleeve was still pushed up to expose the pawprint.

"So Lydia was right about that part," Allison said softly.

Stiles shrugged stiffly and forced himself to tell a lie so massive he should have choked on it. "It's nothing, I was just bored and drew it on there."

"You keep touching it, though," Allison said. "Scott noticed, and you were doing it at lunch, too. It looks like a--" Allison frowned, and touched her own fingers to the crook of her arm, just below the elbow, "--you know. Harry Potter."

"Dark mark," Stiles supplied, even though it was the opposite in every way. "I definitely didn't join the Death Eaters, Allison. I was just thinking about the wolves when I was stuck at home yesterday. My dad had his deputies checking to make sure I didn't leave the house, he's as overprotective as your dad. I doodled on my cast, that's all it was."

He kept his hands in plain sight, so Allison could see him not crossing his fingers no matter how badly he wanted to, no matter how much a part of his brain was saying I'm sorry, Derek, I'm sorry, I don't mean it the whole time. It occurred to him for the first time that the mark wasn't on his actual arm, that in a month or so a doctor would cut the cast away and throw it out and he wouldn't have Derek's pawprint to carry around all the time.

He couldn't think about that now.

"You didn't see anything like that, though, did you?" Allison asked gently. "When you were in the woods--I know you said you never saw the wolves, but do you think you might have seen tracks? Could that be why you drew it?"

Stiles stared Allison down, keeping in mind every last thing he'd ever been told about not incriminating himself. She looked away first, cheeks going pink.

"Sorry, I don't mean to--I told my dad what you said, you know, about how if the wolves didn't attack you, that probably means they're gone. He started asking me all these questions about why I thought you said that, and...."

Allison looked up again, smiling sheepishly, and waved her hands. "Anyway. Never mind, I'm not enabling my dad's neurosis about the wolves that may or may not be in the woods. Even if you saw tracks they could have been old, and you had a concussion, so who knows what you saw."

"Yeah," Stiles said carefully, because it felt dangerously easy to have Allison give in like that and make the obvious excuses for him.

Allison nodded. "I should get back to Geometry. Scott texted me to ask if I could find you when you didn't show up for Spanish. You'll be okay here?"

Stiles nodded, and didn't answer exactly the same question he suspected she was asking. "Mrs. Cartwright won't turn me in."

Allison stood up and looked down at him quietly for a few seconds, like she was debating whether to ask if he was really okay.

Because he couldn't bear for her to ask, and because he couldn't hold it back anymore even though he knew he shouldn't give himself away like that, he said, "You won't tell your dad, will you?"

Allison's gaze dropped down to his cast, and she smiled as she shook her head. "Your secret's safe with me, Draco."

Allison walked away without another word, and Stiles spent the rest of sixth period staring at the shelves across from him and having an argument with some imaginary Allison--and, when that seemed too easy, an imaginary Lydia--about why he wasn't Draco, and whether Derek was more like Snape or Sirius Black. Stiles didn't think he was anything like Lupin, and he definitely wasn't Voldemort.

When the bell rang, Stiles got up and headed to Art History with his sleeves pulled all the way down and his hands tucked firmly into his pockets.

---

He kept his eye on the clock all the way through Art History and was actually convinced that he might be able to make a clean getaway. That idea died a quick death when he realized Allison and Lydia were waiting for him outside the classroom.

"You're coming with us," Allison said. "I know you can't play anymore, but you still want to support Scott, don't you?"

She gave him the sad-puppy eyes, and whether she was deliberately imitating Scott or not, Stiles could see the same look on Scott's face. He'd been happy for Scott when Scott made first line even though Stiles was still stuck on the bench--Scott had worked like hell for months to get into better shape and make the cut. Stiles was still happy for Scott now that he was stuck in the bleachers, but his dad was working the day shift today, and Stiles had exactly two and a half hours between the last bell and needing to be home for dinner. The pawprint was like an itch he was trying not to scratch, lying heavy in the crook of his arm.

On the other hand, Stiles knew the path of least resistance when he saw it. He let the girls escort him to his locker and then out to the field, and he sat between them on the bleachers and put on his best smile when Scott saw them all and waved, grinning.

Jackson looked up and smirked. "Aww, McCall's girlfriend and his boyfriend came to watch!"

"Jealous you don't have one of each?" Stiles yelled back, because, hey, he wasn't going to be naked in the same locker room with Jackson anytime soon. If he was already rumored to be crazy and/or a drug addict, he might as well go for broke.

Allison gave a startled laugh, and when Stiles looked over at Lydia, she was eyeing Jackson in a thoughtful way that Stiles was desperately glad not to be on the receiving end of. By the time it occurred to him to look down at Jackson, he'd pulled on his helmet and turned away, his shoulders hunched defensively.

Watching lacrosse practice and knowing he was off the team set off a dull, throbbing pain in the center of his chest that hurt with about the same intensity as a broken bone that had been healing for a few days, or a bruise just starting to change colors. It was warmer and smelled better up here on the bleachers, wearing his street clothes and sandwiched between two pretty girls in their fashionable coats. Stiles couldn't help fidgeting, though. He managed to play it up as shivers soon enough, sublimating the urge to reach up under his sleeve by rubbing the knuckles of his bad hand and cradling his broken wrist.

They were about a half hour into practice when Allison finally said, "Stiles? Are you okay?"

"I, uh, I think the cold is making my wrist hurt worse," Stiles said.

"Psychosomatic," Lydia said dismissively, without looking away from the field.

"Yeah," Stiles said sharply, letting himself sound more offended than he was. "Right, because almost freezing to death this weekend made me kind of crazy, how could I forget."

Allison started to say something apologetic, and Lydia actually started to turn toward him, but it was a pretty good exit line and Stiles wasn't going to waste it. He got up and stormed down the bleachers, calling back, "You can give Scott a ride home, right?" without looking.

He didn't look around until he was in the Jeep, until he had his palm pressed flat to the hidden side of his cast.

---

Stiles drove in through the preserve this time. He barely touched the gas once he was on the twisty, bumpy dirt road, letting the Jeep ease over every rut at practically an idle. He could have pretended--maybe, to someone, if anyone was there--that he was looking for Derek, but the truth was Derek was way too smart to run out in front of a car and Stiles had a throbbing headache and his bruises were all thumping along in time.

He thought he was keeping a pretty good eye out, but between one look and the next Derek was just there, running alongside the car at the driver's side.

Backwards.

When Stiles saw him Derek opened his mouth in a wide toothy grin, tongue hanging out, and started running in weird little circles while still keeping up with the Jeep.

"I know I'm going slow, asshole," Stiles said, grinning as he rolled his eyes. "My head hurts, okay? I don't want to shake my brain into another concussion."

Derek was suddenly clinging to the driver's side door, his head and front paws leaning through the window, and Stiles tapped the brakes to come to an actual stop. Derek leaned in further, whining a little as he nosed at Stiles's throat and then his face, pressing his cheek to Stiles's for a second.

"No, hey," Stiles said, reaching up and sinking his hands into Derek's fur. "It's not that bad, I'm okay."

Derek huffed and all of a sudden a river of black fur was flowing past Stiles's face as Derek hauled himself into the Jeep and across Stiles to the passenger seat. He immediately turned around, and before Stiles could make a joke about dogs turning three times, Derek flopped down with his head and one paw on Stiles's thigh.

"Uh," Stiles said, looking down at him, "if you think this is going to make me drive faster...."

Derek growled a little and pressed himself down against Stiles like a second seatbelt.

"Okay," Stiles said, grinning a little, the headache and bruises already seeming less overwhelming in Derek's presence. "But I physically cannot go slower without getting out to walk."

Derek tilted his head like he was considering it.

Stiles just shook his head, careful not to slosh his brain around too much, and started rolling up the dirt track again, through the woods to the Hale house.

Derek watched him closely as he got down from the Jeep and then closed his teeth on the flapping cuff of Stiles's left sleeve. He led Stiles toward the house at a slow but steady walk, not breaking stride as they shouldered through the door, not hesitating to lead Stiles up the steps. They were halfway up before it occurred to Stiles that he'd been here before and it had ended badly and maybe he could have been, should have been, scared to be back here. But there wasn't really time to think about it, and this time there was daylight and Derek's hulking, protective presence. It hardly even looked the same now.

Derek led him to the left when they got to the top of the stairs, but instead of going toward the place where Stiles had fallen, they doubled back to the more-intact front of the building. They went into a room where the windows had glass in the frames, even if some of it was broken. There was a nest built there on top of a bare mattress: Stiles recognized the sleeping bag he'd spent two days curled up in, but there were clothes piled up, too, including a pink hoodie that Stiles suspected had never fit Derek no matter what shape he was. He remembered the slim build of the girl in the yearbook picture, arms raised as she crossed the finish line. The walls were nearly the same color; this might have been Laura's bedroom, once.

Stiles turned, crouching down to face Derek so he could put his good arm around his neck without tugging his sleeve out of Derek's teeth.

"You're safe up here?" Stiles asked with his cheek against Derek's neck.

Derek huffed, but Stiles felt him nod, too.

"You're sure? Allison's dad sounds kind of nuts, and he's just the crazy person I happen to know about--there could be others, and my dad probably has deputies patrolling. You really don't look like a stray dog, man."

Derek didn't bother answering this time, just started crowding Stiles backward. He had to choose between moving and tipping over onto his ass, and if he fell he would no doubt be dragged to where Derek wanted him.

Stiles stood up and walked over with dignity, sitting down and scooting back across the mattress to put his back to the solid-seeming wall. If he didn't think about it too much they could be indoors anywhere on a chilly day, just hanging out together. Derek lay down across Stiles's legs, resting his head on a pile of clothes, with the pink hoodie under one paw.

Stiles rested one hand on the back of his neck and then, when Derek didn't object, started petting him. Derek touched his nose to the fingers of Stiles's left hand, and then brought his paw over to lay on them, like they were holding hands, the pads rough against Stiles's skin. They just sat for a while, and Stiles felt the awfulness of school drift away. This was where he belonged, hidden away with Derek.

"I looked you up today," he said quietly. Derek's ears, which had sagged in relaxation, pricked up. "I saw the pictures of you in the yearbook--the cross country team, your school picture. I wish you could tell me what was up with the glasses, and where you went when you went away. Did you change to another school? Did you even finish? Were you in college before you came back here?"

Derek turned his head and then curled himself more firmly around Stiles, tucking his muzzle against Stiles's ribs. Stiles closed his eyes and put both arms around Derek.

"I wish you could tell me if you remember Mrs. Cartwright, and which teachers you had that I have, and whether there's any way to get Harris not to hate me. I wish you could tell me what you think I'd be good at if I can't play lacrosse ever again. I don't--"

Stiles laughed a little and scrubbed his good hand through Derek's fur. "I wouldn't trade this for lacrosse, you know that, right? But I'm going to miss it, even though I sucked at it. I'm going to miss Scott. He's off doing everything without me, having a girlfriend, playing first line, which, I mean--I appreciate the irony, I'm the one with a secret magical friend in the woods, but still, it kind of sucks, you know?"

Derek dug his nose in against Stiles's side, and when Stiles opened his eyes the first thing he saw was Laura's hoodie.

"Shit," he said. "Sorry, I don't mean--"

Derek picked his head up and gave Stiles a withering look. Stiles abruptly remembered how, for months after his mom died, every time he and Scott were having some kind of totally normal conversation and then Scott complained about his mom, Scott would suddenly stop and look horrified. It had been the horrified look that had hurt the worst, because that look on Scott's face said your mom is dead, your mom is dead in a way that Scott whining about having to go to bed on time or do his chores never did.

"Sorry," Stiles said, because now he couldn't think of anything else to say, brain wiped totally clean of everything that wasn't the horror of what Derek had been through, everyone Derek had lost, the way Derek was stuck here living like a hunted animal with no one but Stiles for intermittent company.

"So, yeah," Stiles said haltingly. "Um. I'm off the lacrosse team. And if I don't get into another sport next year I'll have to join the chess club or something, and April Hollis still hasn't forgiven me for the way I publicly humiliated her in a Scrabble game in sixth grade so that would probably end really badly. I guess there's always the swim team, like, last resort, but I can't exactly practice for that now. They told me it's okay to get my cast wet, but I don't think that means I can swim laps."

Derek stood up and caught the open edge of Stiles's shirt, tugging until Stiles got up too. He let go when Stiles was on his feet and trotted downstairs and out of the house so that Stiles had to hurry after him to keep up. He winced as his steps jarred his arm but there was no way he was going to be left behind. When they got to the bottom of the stone steps at the front of the house, Stiles hesitated.

"Do you--is this--do you want me to go?"

Derek looked up at him, huffed, and shook his head sharply. Then he jogged away from Stiles and ran in a loop in the little bit of clearing that remained of the front yard, and it hit Stiles all of a sudden. "Oh, yeah, I guess I--cross country, right?--the thing is I actually, um, I hate running."

Derek stopped short, sat down where he was, and stared at Stiles.

"Yeah, I. I mean I run at practice but it just always sucks," Stiles said, shrugging awkwardly and scrubbing his good hand over his hair. "I'm not really a natural athlete or anything, and I'm not ambitious about it like Scott. I don't actually care that much about getting noticed or whatever, I mostly just like being on the team. There's a reason I was never gonna make first line, and my tendency to hit myself in the face with my own stick is only, like, forty percent of it."

Derek opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then sighed and shook his head.

"That was--oh my God you just really wanted to make a stick joke, didn't you," Stiles said, grinning as Derek's lips pulled back in a wolfish grin, tongue lolling out.

Stiles couldn't help laughing for both of them. "You did! Yeah, man, I mean, my stick's as out of control as any dude my age, but I'm in no danger of hitting myself in the face with that one. Not unless I start doing yoga or something, and we don't have a team for that."

Derek shook his head again and trotted back over to Stiles, going around behind him to nudge the back of his thigh until he moved, walking and then trotting when Derek kept pushing at him; they were into the trees already before Stiles realized that they were running, like, going for a run.

"Wait, are we--" Stiles said, but when he tried to stop running to argue Derek growled and pushed him harder, so Stiles kept running even as he said, "Are we running? Did I not tell you that I suck at this?"

Derek's teeth snapped scarily close to his ass, an audible clack that set off a primal burst of adrenaline. Stiles half-laughed and ran a little faster, moving gingerly. It occurred to him that his headache had stopped while he wasn't paying attention, and his bruises weren't any worse than when he was sitting still. He laughed harder.

"Okay, yeah, you know, I always said I would run outside of practice or a game if something was chasing me, I just didn't expect, you know--you."

Derek growled, but Stiles was pretty sure it was playful this time, so he just smiled and kept running until he got a stitch in his side, the pain hitting so suddenly he almost stumbled. He pressed his hand to his ribs and stopped running, and Derek circled around him, grabbing the tail of his shirt and dragging him forward at a trot. Derek breathed in big, noisy heaves that Stiles couldn't help falling into sync with, and something about the deep breaths and the trotting pace Derek was forcing him to keep made the pain dissolve under his hand as abruptly as it had started.

Derek seemed to know when it was gone. He let go of Stiles's shirt and his breathing went quiet, but he stayed next to Stiles, keeping the same slow pace. Stiles obediently jogged along beside him, trying to step carefully so that he wouldn't trip or jar his arm too much.

The woods Derek was leading them through were pretty open, a smooth layer of leaves covering the ground between widely-spaced trunks. The ground was springy underfoot, easy to navigate, and after a while Stiles let Derek worry about where they were putting their feet and looked around. The forest was quiet and kind of peaceful. A lot of it was brown and dead, since it was January, but they were curving down toward the river, and Stiles could see it sparkling in the afternoon light.

Derek led them on a zigzag path more or less along the riverbank, speeding up and slowing down, uphill and downhill, and they'd been at it for a while when Stiles realized that he wasn't thinking about anything except keeping up with Derek and breathing in and out and trying not to jar his arm. He was just running, not worrying about anything at all. It was nice.

"Thanks, man," he said, only moderately out of breath. Derek was taking it pretty easy on him, and running wasn't actually so bad when you weren't making a futile attempt to keep up with--or keep away from--Jackson Whittemore.

Derek made a gruff noise that sounded almost like a sneeze, and Stiles grinned and ducked down without breaking stride to ruffle the fur between Derek's ears. Derek twisted around to snap at him, and Stiles laughed and dodged away, sprinting uphill. He looked around as he got to the top of the ridge and realized he had no idea where they were, and that the sun was nearly down to the tops of the trees.

"Oh, shit, what time--" No, stupid question, like Derek would know what time it was even if he could answer. "Derek, dude, where are we? I have to be home for dinner with my dad."

Derek paused for a second, raising his nose and looking around, and then he set off again at the same steady trot, heading down the opposite side of the ridge. Stiles followed him, trying not to trip and roll down the hill, and then puffing up the next rise. Derek kept a couple of strides ahead of him now, leading him along. Stiles didn't look around anymore, keeping his eyes on Derek. He watched Derek's ears tilt this way and that and the tip of his tail twitch here and there as he ran.

And then, all of a sudden, they were on level ground again, and Stiles looked past Derek toward a flash of blue: his Jeep.

"Yes!" Stiles yelled, raising his arms in triumph, like he'd just won something other than not being lost in the woods. The light was fading--he was going to be late--but he half-tackled Derek with a hug anyway, sweat-soaked and probably smelling awful. Derek squirmed around and then shoved his nose into Stiles's armpit, though, so he apparently didn't mind at all.

Stiles's legs protested when he stood up again, and he suddenly realized that he'd just run around the woods for something like an hour straight.

"Oh my god, what was that," Stiles groaned, and he limped over to the Jeep, Derek on his heels. He climbed into the Jeep, found that his keys were, thank god, still in his pocket and not bounced out onto the ground somewhere. Derek jumped up onto the door again and leaned through the window, and Stiles leaned toward him so Derek could press their cheeks together.

"Yeah," Stiles said softly. "I'll be back as soon as I can, okay. With practice clothes next time."

Derek gave a short bark that sounded like you better, and then pushed off from the Jeep and darted away.

---

His dad was waiting for him when he got home, already halfway through making spaghetti for dinner. He looked up when Stiles burst in, eyebrows raised as he looked Stiles over, and then he frowned. "You look like you've been at lacrosse practice."

Stiles tried to sort of nod and shrug and wave off the question all at the same time, except he saw the fridge and was suddenly horribly thirsty. He brushed past his dad, going for the milk.

"You smell like you've been at lacrosse practice." His dad scowled. "I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to be practicing with your arm in a cast. Am I going to have to go talk to your coach?"

Stiles gulped milk straight from the jug, hoping to deflect his dad onto a lecture about manners, but when he came up for air his dad was standing there watching him, wooden spoon in hand, looking unimpressed.

"Uh," Stiles said, and set down the milk so he could wipe his mouth with his good hand. He knew this, he knew this. Stay as close to the truth as possible, don't lie about anything they can check. "No, I'm off the team. I tried to go and watch Scott practice, I sat with Allison--uh, and Lydia, actually, Lydia Martin--but they were cheering for their boyfriends and it was just sort of depressing. So I left and went for a run. I figure I need to stay in shape for when I get this thing off, right?"

His dad's eyes narrowed. "You went for a run."

"Yeah, you know, it was actually sort of Zen after a while, my brain kind of shut off. It was nice. I think I'll stick with it."

"You voluntarily," his dad said, and then he shook his head and redirected. "I assume you went somewhere nice and well-lit and populated with other students who could help you if you fell and hurt yourself, right? You ran on the track, or the football field, or maybe in the city park, or around the neighborhood."

"You know, that's a good assumption, I think you should stay with that," Stiles agreed. "I mean, that would be the logical thing to do, right, because I just had a really bad experience with being alone in the woods, so obviously like any sensible person I will be staying in safe, non-woods places from now on. Yeah, that makes sense."

"Stiles."

Stiles threw his arms wide. "Yeah, okay? You caught me. I went and ran around in the woods."

"By yourself," his dad said. "You didn't go out there to meet anyone."

"Is this--Dad, I told you what that was about, and also I was talking in my sleep."

"Yeah," his dad agreed. "Well, if you're going to go run around the woods by yourself, you're keeping this with you."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny new phone, tossing it at Stiles. He almost managed to catch it against his chest with his cast, but it slipped away and fell--with a sickening inevitability that made his stomach lurch--and smacked onto the kitchen floor.

"Oh," Stiles said, "that's great, it's already--"

Except when he picked it up the screen was still glowing cheerfully at him. The phone was way heavier than it looked.

"Ruggedized," his dad said, sounding faintly amused. "I won't say you can't break it, but this one should at least put up a fight. So you keep it with you, okay? And you don't turn it off, and you don't let the battery run down."

Stiles looked up. "So you can GPS track me at will."

"Only when you give me probable cause, son," his dad said solemnly. When Stiles opened his mouth to argue, his dad grimaced and added, "And go take a shower, you smell awful."

Stiles knew enough to get while the getting was good.

---

Stiles dreamed of Derek again that night. He knew Derek was in his bed without seeing him: he opened his eyes and knew that Derek was lying behind him. Derek wasn't touching him yet, but he was definitely present, breathing softly, putting out the familiar comforting warmth. Stiles started to turn toward him, even though it would mean putting his bad arm down.

Derek touched his shoulder, stopping him.

It took a second for Stiles to figure out what was wrong about that. He knew--absolutely knew, the way you could just know things in dreams--that it was Derek behind him. But the touch on his shoulder was a hand holding him still.

Derek squeezed once, and made a soft noise, somewhere between a hum and a growl, not quite a human noise but not all wolf, either. Stiles heard the question in it. Is this okay?

And it was weird, but it was Derek, his magical secret friend. Stiles remembered the smiling boy, the one who made faces at his sister during their team photo, and it hit him that this was really real. He was all one person, his Derek who looked like a wolf and that Derek who went to his school and ran cross country. They were all this guy who was here with him now in his dream, this guy who wanted to stay close to him, who didn't want to be alone any more than Stiles did.

"Yeah," Stiles whispered, "come here."

Derek pressed close. It was something Stiles had never felt before, getting spooned, but it still felt right. It still felt like Derek, just instead of being all big and furry, he felt really... human, his body matching up with Stiles's, his chin hooking over Stiles's shoulder while his arm went around Stiles's chest. He rubbed his cheek against Stiles's throat, and Stiles felt a faint sandpapery scrape of five o'clock shadow. That was weird--it made sense, because Derek would be plenty old enough to shave by now, but why had his dreaming brain come up with that?

Derek's left hand slid up Stiles's chest until Derek's fingers hooked into the collar of his t-shirt, pressing against the bare skin of his collarbone. It took Stiles a couple of breaths before he could identify the weird sensation that started up with the touch, and then he laughed out loud at the strangeness of the absence of pain.

"Thanks, man," he said, laying his good hand over Derek's and giving it a squeeze. Why shouldn't Derek be even more magical in dreams than he was when Stiles was awake? If his brain could give Derek five o'clock shadow, why not superpowers? "You're the best. Or I'm the best. We're the best, definitely."

Derek huffed and squeezed him closer, and Stiles understood that just fine. Shut up and go to sleep.

Chapter Text

Stiles woke up already irritated with everything, growling at his alarm clock and fighting with the covers that had gotten all twisted around him. His morning hard-on was exactly as aggravating as the throbbing pain of his broken wrist and his lingering bruises. Stiles shoved his good hand into his boxers to deal with it as quickly as possible. He jerked himself fast and tight, too much friction without lotion or spit or something, but he didn't care. He just wanted to come.

He was right on the edge when he realized that he was annoyed because Derek wasn't in his bed anymore, because he didn't have Derek's arms around him and Derek's five o'clock shadow tickle-scratching against the side of his throat and Derek's warmth pressed up against his back. He came all over his own hand just remembering where Derek should have been. He had his eyes wide open, staring at his ceiling and seeing nothing.

"Oh," he said after a while, fingers twitching in the sticky heat of his boxers. "Oh, God. This is bad."

He hit himself squarely between the eyes with the edge of his cast when he tried to cover his face, and that seemed like no more than he deserved.

---

Stiles knew, logically, that nobody could tell that you'd jerked off thinking about them. If they could, Lydia and half the lacrosse team would probably have restraining orders against him, or at least would have slapped him across the face by now. But Derek was magic, and Stiles wasn't a hundred percent sure that his dreams of Derek were only dreams, which meant Derek might have some kind of supernatural access to his brain, to say nothing of wolf-senses. Stiles figured Derek had to have a better nose than a police dog, and Derek hadn't been rigorously trained to only sniff for guns and drugs.

So, okay, twelve kinds of vending machine food wasn't the world's smoothest distraction, but it was what he had. He sort of miscalculated, though, because Derek didn't let Stiles even get out of the Jeep before he got nudged and nosed and rubbed-up-against all over the place. He was probably kind of sweating when Derek stuck his nose into the palm of Stiles's right hand, but he didn't linger there any longer than he had on Stiles's left, and he pulled back after a second to touch his nose to the faint red mark on Stiles's forehead where he'd clocked himself with his cast that morning.

"Yeah, I'm a genius, you wish you were as awesome as me," Stiles said, and Derek huffed and backed off. Stiles got out and immediately sat down on the ground to dump out his backpack, littering delicious vending machine snacks across the ground. "Here, I brought stuff, I didn't know what you might--"

Derek pounced on the Oreos, shook them from his teeth and then stopped, obviously frustrated. Stiles reached over and plucked them out of Derek's mouth, ripping open the package for him.

"Here you go, man, that's a job for opposable thumbs."

Derek huffed a sound that might have been thanks. He ducked his head and delicately picked up one cookie and crunched it down, closing his eyes and wriggling all over with happiness.

"Oh, man, did I discover your kryptonite? Oreos? I'm gonna have to remember this for later. I'm never leaving the house again without Oreos in my pocket."

Derek shook his head and let his cookie-blackened tongue loll out before he snagged another cookie. Stiles just watched him eat, but after Derek swallowed this time he nudged Stiles's arm, pushing it toward the Oreos.

"What? No, man, these are for you. I can get cookies anytime, I don't need--"

Derek closed his teeth on Stiles's sleeve, leading his hand over to the Oreos and holding it there until Stiles picked one up.

"Okay, okay, we can share, that's cool too. You're big on manners, huh? Nobody's allowed to make jokes about you being raised by wolves?"

Derek growled at that, and he barely let Stiles finish his Oreo before he was herding him out into the woods for a run. This time Stiles's mind didn't go completely blank after he settled into the rhythm Derek set. This time he found himself watching Derek run a stride ahead and thinking It's okay, it's okay, I didn't ruin it.

---

Twice could have been a coincidence, but after three times Stiles was undeniably making a habit of jerking off thinking about the human version of Derek who shared his bed in his dreams. He'd never even seen the dream guy's face, but apparently the body tucked against his back, the arms that held him close at night, and the occasional touch of stubble were enough for him to be totally sexually obsessed with.

By the end of the week he was not only hiding Derek's existence from everyone else he knew, he was also trying to hide the fact that he had a persistent case of embarrassing boners for his secret magical werewolf friend, because apparently his life could always be more stupidly complicated.

On the other hand, Scott and Allison were going out on some kind of hideously awkward double date with Lydia and Jackson at the same time Stiles's dad was working an overnight, so he couldn't exactly complain that the universe was conspiring against him. He assured his dad that he was spending Friday night at Scott's, swore to Scott that his dad had switched around his usual overnight and would be home at midnight, and after school he loaded the necessities into his Jeep and hit the drive-thru. Dinner for two, with an extra order of curly fries.

This time when Stiles crossed onto Hale land Derek was at the side of the road, and as Stiles drove on Derek kept pace with him, a low black blur weaving in and out of the trees at the edge of the dirt track up to the house. Stiles pulled up almost to the foot of the porch steps and waved the takeout bag out the window before Derek could try to climb through and sniff him.

Derek took the bag, closing his teeth delicately on it right next to Stiles's fingers, and Stiles grabbed his cup of soda and followed him out. Derek was already perched on the top step of the porch, where there was still some sun coming through the trees to warm them up. Stiles sat down next to him and ripped open the bag, pushing Derek's share toward him and setting his own in his lap, leaving the extra curly fries up for grabs in the middle.

He waited until Derek had inhaled his burger before he said, keeping his own eyes on his knees, "You don't mind if I stay over tonight, do you?"

He should have asked before--he could hear his mom telling him how rude it was to put someone else on the spot by inviting himself anywhere--but he'd kind of been avoiding spending time just hanging out with Derek the last couple of days. He'd timed his visits so that they had time to run and eat junk food and not much else.

Now Derek was totally silent. Stiles finally had to look up, and Derek shook his head and leaned close enough to snap his teeth right in Stiles's face, which could have meant anything until Derek darted around behind Stiles to come in from the other side. He sprawled out over Stiles's legs where they were stretched out onto the lower steps, trapping him in place.

"Okay, yeah," Stiles said, grinning as he moved Derek's curly fries into easy reach. "Dumb question, you didn't want me to leave in the first place."

Derek snapped down the fries in two bites and then twisted to lay his head down on Stiles's thigh, and Stiles took a quick drink of his soda and then kept eating. After a minute he reached down to pet Derek behind his ears; he'd been trying to avoid touching Derek for the last two days, too, and now it seemed just as pointless as avoiding him in general did. Derek sighed and closed his eyes, wiggling and settling a little more of his weight onto Stiles's legs.

He couldn't figure out anymore if it was weird, or ought to be weird, or what. But this Derek, the Derek who was a wolf, could get all up in Stiles's personal space as much as he wanted; he was Stiles's friend and he was a wolf. It was something totally different from the guy who kept being in Stiles's bed at night, putting his arms around Stiles and taking away Stiles's pain with a touch and leaving Stiles hard every morning, to say nothing of the bedtime jerk-off sessions devoted to just anticipating his dreams of the other Derek.

But for now he was with--the real Derek? wolf Derek? this Derek--and it was what it was. Stiles skritched the top of his head and ate his burger and tried not to think too hard about it. He wound up eating almost all the extra curly fries, too. Derek would take them if Stiles held them up to his mouth, and licked the salt from his fingers, but Stiles wound up shoving most of them into his own mouth when Derek didn't seem too interested.

The second he finished eating, though, Derek jumped up and started trying to tug him toward the woods.

"Oh my God, we have to run on Fridays, too?"

Derek tugged harder.

"No, come on," Stiles put a protective hand over his stomach. "You have to give me some time to digest, dude, or we'll have to stop after half a mile when I puke up my dinner all over the woods. Come on, let's just relax for a minute, okay? I have to ask you something, anyway. It's important."

Derek let go of Stiles's sleeve and tilted his head slightly, looking worried.

"Yeah," Stiles said, looking down to ball up all the trash as neatly as possible. "So--I don't know if I ever told you, but my dad--he's the sheriff, I told you that part, right? He's looking for you. You and Laura."

Stiles gave a quick glance up, and Derek had stepped closer and was growling low.

Stiles shook his head. "Not wolf you, human you. Both of you. He has to find someone to notify about--about your uncle. He doesn't have probable cause to get warrants or anything like that--it's your business if you want to drop off the face of the earth, he can't do anything about that--but I can tell it's bothering him not being able to find you. And the thing is, Peter's body is still in the morgue. If the next of kin doesn't claim it, they're going to have to cremate it to make space."

Derek looked away this time. Stiles fell silent and waited until Derek gave a slow all-over shake, head to tail, that Stiles thought was something between a head-shake and a shrug.

"If you don't want them to," Stiles said. "I could make sure my dad hears from you before that happens."

Derek looked up sharply at that, and then gave a quick shake of his head and a short, harsh bark. No.

"It wouldn't get back to me, or you! See, I know all these people from gaming online, they live all over the world. So I could write something--we could do it together, we could do hot and cold until I got it right, exactly what you want--and then I could have someone print it out and send it from Ohio or Australia or something. They would do it for me, they trust me, and my dad could never trace it back if they just dropped it in a mailbox somewhere. We could fix the money if you wanted him buried with your family, or buried way the hell away from your family, or--"

Derek shook his head again and gave another bark, louder this time.

"Or... we don't have to do that. You--you're okay with it, then, just leaving him at the morgue?"

Derek nodded pointedly, an exaggerated up-and-down motion.

"You're okay with his body being burned?"

Derek twitched at that, but he nodded again, just as emphatically.

"Okay," Stiles said, reaching out his hands. Derek stepped up close, letting Stiles put his hands on Derek's shoulders. "I just--I had to make sure you knew you had choices, okay? Because if there's something I can help you with, I want to help. You know that, right?"

Derek huffed, but he pushed up higher on the steps to rub his cheek against Stiles's. Stiles went with it, but he closed his arms around Derek's neck and pushed in closer when Derek was done.

"I know you don't want to talk about it, but I have to ask," Stiles said quietly. "Do you--is there anything I can do to help? To fix you? If it's a curse or a magic spell or whatever, I'll do anything I can to set you free, you know that, right?"

Derek licked Stiles's ear and then pulled away, stepping back so he could look Stiles in the eye.

"Right, okay, um, yes or no questions?" Stiles asked.

Derek nodded, and Stiles's heart pounded with the sense that he was on the edge of something, a quest opening up before him.

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

Slowly but certainly, Derek shook his head.

"I--what? What kind of answer is that?"

Derek stepped back in, crowding close, and Stiles put his arms around Derek again as Derek repeated the cheek-to-cheek touch.

"Okay, I--if all I can do is keep you company I will, man, but it's going to get kind of complicated when I go to college if you're still stuck here. I mean, I'll commute, I'll make it work, but--"

Derek cut him off with an exasperated noise. This time he wouldn't take no for an answer and dragged Stiles out for a run.

---

It started raining halfway through their run, when there was nothing to do but run through it, although Derek hardly seemed to notice. When they got back to the house, Stiles quickly stripped his sweat- and rain-soaked clothes off and changed into the dry ones he'd brought to sleep in, and then brought out a Sterno can and a bag of marshmallows.

After s'mores--which were awesome even if Derek did stare at the Sterno can like it might explode at any moment--they watched stuff on Stiles's laptop for a while as the rain kept falling outside. First there was a South Park episode he wanted to show Derek and that reminded him of another clip he'd saved, and pretty soon he was just clicking through his video folder and narrating everything to Derek even though Derek could probably see and hear all of it better than he could.

Eventually Stiles realized he was half asleep with his fingers still twitching on the touchpad, and a while after that he felt Derek pressing the lid of the laptop down onto his hand. He pulled back to let Derek close it all the way and half-opened his eyes to watch as Derek moved the laptop gently onto the floor.

Stiles rolled onto his side and Derek settled in beside him on the mattress. Stiles snuggled close enough that the unzipped sleeping bag covered both of them. He dragged some of the piled-up clothes under his cheek for a pillow and was asleep even before he could wonder if he would bother to dream at all.

---

He did dream, though. He opened his eyes and found he was cuddled up to the other Derek. Instead of being spooned up behind Stiles, an invisible presence in the dark, Stiles could see him, though his face was still hidden. He was lying facedown, head tucked into his folded arms, and Stiles had one arm and one leg thrown across him. The sleeping bag had fallen back and there was light from the half-moon that had risen over the trees. It had to be after midnight now, for the light to be so bright.

Stiles shifted his arm and realized his fingers were trailing across Derek's bare skin. The light fell now on a weird swirling design inked on Derek's back, between his shoulder blades. Stiles slid his hand down to Derek's ribs and settled his cheek against the tattoo.

Stiles realized after a while that he was hard, that he was grinding slowly against Derek's hip where the sleeping bag still covered them both. He could feel the heat of Derek's body all down his front, could feel Derek breathing under his cheek. He just wished that Derek would get in on the action; it would be so much better if Derek would turn over, or even just turn his head and look. Maybe he could make Derek smile.

"Hey," Stiles gasped, hips shoving forward against the just-right resistance of Derek's side, "hey, Derek--"

And then he was awake for real, lying facedown alone on the mattress. He didn't have to look or reach out to know that Derek was gone; his face went painfully red as he smashed it against the makeshift pillow of clothes, trying to hide in the softness of something that felt like a t-shirt.

He was still hard. He could still feel the way that Derek's body had felt next to his. He still wanted Derek to be here with him, to be into this, except Derek was a wolf and so obviously not into this that he had fucking fled to get away from Stiles's sleep-perving.

"Sorry," Stiles muttered into the clothes under his face. Then, because he literally could not think of anything else to do, he shoved his good hand into the sweatpants he was sleeping in and jerked off awkwardly against the mattress, like Derek wouldn't know if he couldn't see it, wouldn't realize that Stiles was getting off on the shape and the feel of him, his broad muscular shoulders and the shadowed nape of his neck and the stark lines of that tattoo on his back.

He came right in the middle of feeling like the actual worst person in the world, a feeling that only intensified when he reached up without thinking and wiped his hand on the shirt under his cheek.

"Fuck," he muttered. "Sorry, Derek, I'm sorry, I suck, I'll--" he struggled to untwist himself enough from the sleeping bag to sit up. "I'll leave, I'm sorry, I--"

But Derek was there, furry and four-legged and pushing him back down to the mattress, facing the wall this time. Stiles propped his cast carefully against his stomach, and Derek lay down behind him, keeping him still long enough for Stiles's guilt to get swallowed up by sleep.

---

When he woke up again the room was full of sunshine and Derek was gone. Stiles was still clutching the t-shirt he'd wiped his hand on, and he could see now that it was a guy's t-shirt, plain gray. It had to be Derek's--his Derek's, the human Derek's. He shoved it into his backpack before he could think through what he was doing, and a few seconds later Derek came through the door with a packet of Pop Tarts between his teeth.

"Hey," Stiles said, with a cautious smile. "Breakfast. You're awesome, dude, thanks."

Stiles managed not to think about what Derek must have smelled on his hand when he offered him a broken-off piece of Pop Tart until he was halfway home. When he did he managed not to drive off the road, and he was counting that as a win.

---

Stiles was already in the shower--scrubbing frantically even as he pointed out to himself that it didn't matter what he smelled like now--before it occurred to him that he'd beaten his dad home. He'd done that a few times before after spending the night at Scott's, but it usually involved rolling in around noon on a day when his dad's overnight had extended into the middle of the afternoon. He hadn't stuck around at Derek's longer than it took him to snarf his Pop Tarts and shove his dirty clothes into his backpack; he wasn't sure if his dad's regularly scheduled shift was even over yet.

When he was done in the bathroom, Stiles leaned out and called for him, but the house was empty and quiet. Stiles got dressed and put away the stuff he'd taken with him to Derek's. He put Derek's shirt in the hamper with his own clothes and then took it out and stuffed it under his pillow, and then inside the pillowcase. He stood there looking at his bed for a moment, trying to decide if that was well-hidden enough, and realized that that was actually over the line. It wasn't even like he had wolf senses, so if he could smell anything at all on Derek's shirt was going to be his own jizz, which was nothing special or remotely attractive. He took the shirt back out, shoving it down into the middle of his hamper where he couldn't stare at it.

After that there was nothing to do but jitter around the house, trying to think of a good reason to be home early and failing miserably. He could make a big breakfast, or ostentatiously do homework at the kitchen table to try to throw his dad off the scent if he got home before Stiles ought to be there, but that would probably be too obvious. He finally gave up and sat down on the couch to play Call of Duty, ignoring the way his wrist throbbed as he clutched the controller.

Two hours later--when he'd almost totally learned to compensate for his left hand's wonky grip--his phone rang and made it obvious that his worrying had been for nothing.

"Hey, Dad," Stiles said, tucking the phone against his shoulder and playing on at an angle. "Did you get stuck working a double? I can bring you a nice nutritious lunch later."

"No," his dad said, and Stiles dropped his controller at the tense sound of his dad's voice. "Something came up. I just wanted to make sure you're not out running around the woods."

"No, I, what? Dad? No, I'm--I came home--from Scott's--I'm just playing video games."

"Are you by yourself? Is someone there with you?"

"No," Stiles said, and he knew it meant something important, and ominous, that his dad said someone and not Scott. "Dad, what's--"

"Stay in the house," his dad said, giving him nothing. "Just--stay home, keep playing video games. I'll be home as soon as I can."

"Okay," Stiles said, and then anxiously, the way he used to without fail every time his dad left for work, the year after his mom died. "I love you. Be safe."

"I love you too, son," his dad said. There was a little pause as if he was going to say something else, and then he hung up.

Stiles clutched his phone, because there was nothing else to hold on to. He thought about calling Scott, but then he would have to explain that his dad hadn't been home all night. He couldn't go over to Scott's, either, without leaving the house.

The urge to go out to Derek's was suddenly something he could feel in his chest like hunger or pain, a magnetic pull dragging him toward his Jeep, toward the woods. He would be safe with Derek; he couldn't be safer anywhere else than hidden away with Derek. He knew that like he knew which way gravity went.

But if he did that he might lead his dad--or whatever trouble his dad was dealing with, or both--right to Derek. If he were already there it would be different. If he'd just never left, if he'd gone down to the tunnels with Derek to say hi to Laura, if they'd gone for a run or just hung out for a few hours, he could just hole up with Derek and sit tight. But that wasn't an option now; he had to stay put and wait this out, whatever it was.

It probably had nothing to do with him. His dad had probably just called because he knew something was up with Stiles and it wasn't even a week yet since Stiles had come home from the woods. Of course he was more worried than usual.

The doorbell rang.

"No," Stiles said. "No, I refuse, that's ridiculous."

The doorbell rang again, the long tone of someone leaning against the button.

He was curious, though. And he couldn't get Derek, or his dad, into any trouble by just going to see who was standing at the door. If his dad had thought Stiles was in danger he'd have come back right away, or sent a deputy. And, honestly, it wasn't like Stiles was going to be able to just ignore this until whoever it was went away. Obviously he was going to look, so why put it off?

He walked slowly out to the entryway. He could see a car in the driveway, a bland light-colored sedan. Then the person on the front porch stepped directly in front of the window, looking right at Stiles and making him freeze.

It was a woman with long red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing a soft coat with the hood pushed back and had a piece of paper in her hand that she waved at him. Stiles felt himself relax as he looked at her.

He recognized her from somewhere, though he couldn't place her right away. She didn't work at the Sheriff's Department, but maybe at his school, or down at the middle school, or at the hospital. She definitely didn't look like she was going to lunge through the door and kill him. Stiles shook off his paranoia and went to the door.

As he opened it she was straightening up, lifting a banker's box and pushing it at him.

"I, um, I can't actually--" Stiles waved his cast, but even as he did he found himself sticking out his right arm. She set the box on it, leaving him to steady it with his left hand. "Hello?"

"I was what you are," she said, and whatever faint friendliness he thought he'd seen in her face was gone now. She looked tired and pale and old, but her eyes were intense; he couldn't look away from them. "You are what I should have been, when he had come into his power. It's up to you now."

All the hair stood up on the back of Stiles's neck. She turned and walked away, like you could just say that to someone and be done. The memory clicked as she walked down the driveway and he knew who she was: she was Peter's crazy nurse, the one who....

The one who insisted that it really had been Laura who killed him, even though it looked like wolves had done it.

"Wait," Stiles yelled after her, chasing her out onto the porch and down the steps. "Wait, do you know how--do you know why?"

She turned back, looking at him across her car. "Because no one can expect puppies to do a wolf's work, but now puppies are all that's left. Blood must be avenged--the pup already knows that, doesn't he? But there's worse to come for him if he fails his blood now."

Stiles just stood there, open-mouthed, as she got into her car.

"No," he yelled, as she started it up. "No, what the hell does that mean! What happened?"

She pulled away, leaving him standing alone in his driveway, barefoot, still balancing a heavy box on one forearm.

Stiles looked around, but there was no sign of any of the neighbors coming out to ask him what was going on. He hurried back inside, closing and locking the door--for all the good it would do now--and then he staggered over to the kitchen table and dropped the box. He shoved off the lid even as it occurred to him to wonder what the hell could possibly be inside, but it was just a bunch of neatly labeled file folders.

I was what you are, she'd said, and there's worse for him to come if he fails. That meant she knew--she knew about him and she knew about Derek. The pup. She knew that Derek was stuck as a wolf and stuck in the woods. And she still thought there was something that Stiles could, should, had to do now, in her place. Or in Peter's place. Or else Derek would suffer worse.

Stiles pulled out the first file and opened it, getting the chills again as he realized he was looking at long-distance photos, tracking a vaguely-familiar white-haired guy through his day, out of his house and into his car and then onto a school bus. He was a bus driver, right. Stiles thought maybe he'd ridden this guy's bus once or twice, maybe when he went to Scott's house back in middle school.

Stiles flipped past the photos, looking for the reason Peter was stalking the bus driver, and then he found it. There was a sheaf of handwritten pages, one after another, neatly printed notes with messier additions in the margins, circles and arrows and tiny sketches.

The bus driver used to be an insurance investigator. He'd worked on the fire at the Hale house. He'd declared the fire an accident.

Peter Hale had intended to kill him for it.

A wolf's work, she'd said. Stiles was starting to feel lightheaded with adrenaline as he flipped through the other files: meticulous investigations, dead ends, unanswered questions, and verdicts on three other men who they believed had set the fire--along with all the information they'd needed to locate and murder each one.

To get revenge. Which she now expected Stiles to do--Stiles and Derek. Blood must be avenged.

Stiles reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone with shaky hands, barely looking at it as he unlocked the screen and pressed the call button for his dad.

"Stiles? What--"

"Could you come home?" Stiles said, staring into the box. "Could you please, please come home right now?"

"Stiles--I'm on my way, just sit tight. Did she come to the house?"

"Yeah," Stiles said, not even bothering to wonder how his dad knew who it was. "Yeah, I'm sorry, that was stupid, I opened the door."

"Is she still there? Did she come inside--Stiles, did she hurt--"

"No, she's gone, she just," Stiles stared down at the papers.

"She said I have to," and then it occurred to him that he didn't know whether the papers said anything about werewolves, or anything about him or Derek. He started flipping through them frantically, chest going tight with dread at the thought that he was going to find another one of those creepy long-range photos of him and Derek running or sitting together on the porch or curled up on Derek's bed. "I'm okay, Dad, you just need to see this stuff."

"I'll be right there," his dad said. "I'm two minutes away."

Stiles knew better than to hang up before help arrived, but he kept flipping rapidly through the pages, wondering how he could hide the incriminating stuff fast enough if he did find it. There were notes that said things about wolves, but nothing about werewolves, nothing about him, nothing about Derek. There were some notes about Laura, and a creepy picture of a dead deer labeled with her name and address, but nothing in the box seemed to come from the last couple of weeks since Peter Hale had died.

The front door burst open with a bang that made Stiles jump. He was stumbling backward to try to get the table between him and the noise, clutching a file to his chest, even as he realized that it was his dad.

Stiles held out the file, gesturing toward the box, but his dad walked right into a hug, curling a hand around the back of his neck and hauling him in close. Stiles tossed the file toward the table and then closed his arms around his dad, hiding his face in the shoulder of his dad's uniform jacket.

He was safe here, too, with his dad. This had always been where he felt safest, until a week ago.

"I think," Stiles said, when he had to say something or he was just going to cling to his dad forever. "I think it's about the fire, the Hale fire."

"Well, yeah," his dad said wearily. "It would be."

"What?" Stiles jerked back, flailing free of his dad's arms. "What? How do you--"

His dad just gave him that you have the guiltiest face I have ever seen look for a second. He shook his head and pulled a photo from his pocket and tilted it toward Stiles.

It was the red-haired woman. Stiles nodded.

His dad put it away again. "Jennifer Wilson, Peter Hale's long-term care nurse. She stole his body from the morgue this morning and set her own house on fire about an hour ago. They've got the fire out and we found one body inside, in the bedroom. We're reasonably sure it's Peter Hale, but there's not much left to identify."

His dad's jacket had smelled like smoke, Stiles abruptly realized. He'd hardly noticed; he was too used to the smell of the Hale house.

"She brought me this stuff," Stiles said, waving toward the files, desperate to keep his dad from somehow seeing that on him. "I guess she's tying up all her loose ends or something. She said this was up to me now. They were investigating the fire. They didn't believe it was an accident."

His dad nodded slowly, reaching out to flip through the folders, reading the labels without opening them. "It never seemed like one, but that was the finding at the time."

"The insurance investigator was fired for fraud a few years later," Stiles explained, digging into the box to pull out that file. "They were planning to get revenge. They found all these people they thought were responsible for the fire--I think maybe they were still looking for more--and they figured out how to kill them."

His dad looked up sharply at that and yanked the file out of Stiles's hands, flipping rapidly through it. "Jesus."

"I think I know what happened," Stiles added, slightly before he realized that he could give his dad a theory that would explain things and keep Derek out of it.

"There are all these notes that mention wolves, she even said something about it being a wolf's work when she gave me that box. I think they were going to use wolves to kill these people, some kind of symbolic thing, like they actually got wolves from somewhere. And the wolves must have turned on Peter Hale that night in the woods and then escaped."

His dad looked up at him; Stiles could see the gears turning, see him considering more ideas than he could speak at one time, and then he said, "Do you have any idea why she brought this stuff to you, Stiles? Had you ever spoken to her before?"

Stiles shook his head. "She, I guess she...."

It was sickening, realizing that she must have spied on him and Derek in the woods, but he couldn't say that. He couldn't say one word about Derek.

"She must have seen me out in the woods. I've gone into the Hale house a couple of times, and I usually park there when I go to run. She must have thought I was interested in the fire. She said it was up to me now, like she was giving it up."

His dad's eyes narrowed. "You're saying you never met her in the woods."

"No! No, she's creepy, I wouldn't have kept going out in the woods if I knew she was there." He would have made Derek take him down into the tunnels, he would have convinced Derek to hide more. God, and he'd thought Derek only had to be scared of crazy people with guns.

His dad nodded slightly. "So you never had any contact with her, and yet she decides to hand over to you this conspiracy to murder all of these people? She just decides you look like someone she can trust to commit multiple homicide?"

"Dad! I don't know her, I don't--she's crazy, I have no idea why she picked me, okay!"

His dad nodded again. "You were really scared when you called me."

"Yes!" Stiles seized on that. "Yeah, she--she said it was up to me now, like she thinks I should go around killing all these people, she said blood must be avenged, who even says that? But she was serious, she said something bad would happen if I didn't do it."

His dad looked down at the files. "Did she threaten you?"

"I, I guess, I mean it was pretty threatening," Stiles gestured helplessly again, remembering how coolly she'd spoken of worse happening to Derek. "She didn't specifically say, you know, I will personally come and set you on fire if you don't do this, but it didn't sound like a good thing."

His dad pulled out the picture of the deer, the one that had Laura's name on it. Stiles's mouth went dry.

"Did she threaten anyone else?" His dad was still looking at the picture, which was good because Stiles had no idea what his face was doing.

He managed to swallow and shook his head. "No, she, she just gave all of it to me and said--she said it was a wolf's work, and something about puppies, but it was up to me now. That's it."

"And something bad will happen if you don't do it," his dad repeated, and then he tilted the photo toward Stiles, tapping his thumb on Laura's address. "Stiles, if you've been meeting someone else in the woods, if Jennifer Wilson saw you together--"

"No!" Stiles yelled, even as he couldn't help picturing what it would be like to just tell the truth. Yeah, she saw me hanging out with Derek Hale, that's why she chose me, she threatened Derek too. Oh, you want to talk to Derek about that? Sorry, he's a wolf.

More quietly he went on, "No, I never--there's no one else, Dad, how many times do I have to tell you--"

"Because if she thinks anybody who still cares about the fire has an obligation to get revenge for it, or else she'll do something bad to them, then that means Laura and Derek Hale are next on her list. That's if she hasn't gotten to them already," his dad said calmly, looking up and meeting Stiles's gaze, freezing him in place. "So if you know where Laura is, or where Derek is, and you don't help us find them so we can protect them...."

"I wish I could," Stiles said. He felt suddenly exhausted, his shoulders sagging under the weight of the truth in the middle of the lies. "Dad, I seriously--I wish there was anyone else, I wish I could tell you how to find them. But it's just me here, and I can't help anybody, okay. I've never met Laura Hale, or Derek Hale, or anybody else out in the woods. I've never met them anywhere. I'm sorry."

He saw his dad make the switch to off-duty, to seeing Stiles as his kid again and not an uncooperative witness; it was scary in retrospect, but mostly it was a guilty relief.

"No, I'm sorry," his dad said, shaking his head and squeezing Stiles's shoulder. "We spent all this time trying to figure out whether she was in the house when the fire started, where she could have fled to. Now I find out she's been at my house, threatening my kid."

Stiles swallowed his first impulse--if he told his dad he was okay, if he insisted she hadn't really threatened him, he'd just put himself under the microscope again. He looked over at the file box again.

"I think she really just wants this solved," Stiles said. "I mean--burning Peter's body, giving this stuff to someone else--I think she's walking away, you know? She just wants someone else to pay attention after she's gone."

"Yeah," his dad sighed. "And as much as I hate doing what some fire-starting lunatic wants, I'm going to have to reopen the investigation of that fire. There's too much here to ignore, even if it's going to be hell nailing down actual evidence after all this time."

Stiles nodded. "I could--"

"No," his dad said sharply. "You are not getting mixed up in this, Stiles, I mean it. You are not dropping by the station to see what's on my desk, you are not listening in on my phone calls, nothing. You're staying away from this."

"Dad, I--" Stiles couldn't even find words. "This didn't stay away from me."

"Yeah, and that's why," his dad said, shaking his head. "Last weekend I put myself on administrative leave and let Haines run the search for you, because I was too close to it. I'm this close to not being able to handle this investigation either. So I need you to tell me right now, if you know anything else, because if you show up in the middle of this case somehow--"

"I was ten years old when the Hale house burned down," Stiles protested.

"And yet we're investigating now, and here you are with a box full of evidence," his dad said, shaking his head. "This is going to be delicate. It's going to hinge on testimony, making the right arrests at the right time. You can't get involved in this, son. You can't even tell anyone what you already know; it could get back to one of these people and blow the whole case, or it could put you in danger. Do you understand me? This is serious. We're looking at investigating these people for eight murders, including children. If they think hurting one more kid would get them out from under it, they would do it."

Stiles opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again. What was one more set of secrets? He couldn't tell anyone anything anyway.

And if he promised his dad, it would give him an excuse not to tell Derek about any of this--not what Jennifer Wilson had said about worse things happening to Derek if they didn't get revenge, not the truth about the fire and the fact that the people involved might finally be caught, if everything went right. He could pretend everything was okay, and trust his dad to catch the bad guys and make things right.

Stiles looked up and found his dad watching him intently. He nodded. "I promise. Not a word, not to anyone."

His dad studied him for a few seconds longer and then added, "Until we close this I want you staying away from the Hale house. It's a crime scene, and I don't want anyone else who happens to be hanging around the woods seeing you there and thinking you're connected somehow."

"Dad!" Stiles made the protest with sheer volume, because he had nothing else to back it up with, not one argument he could make without betraying Derek.

His dad raised a hand, looking grim. "No. Unless you have some particular reason you want to tell me about why you need to keep going back there, you will promise that you're not going to go near the Hale house again."

Studying the look on his dad's face, Stiles realized that he was completely, utterly blown: his dad had to have figured out that he was meeting Derek or Laura in the woods. But he was letting it go instead of calling Stiles a liar in so many words, and Stiles had to either stay on the plausibly deniable side of the line or try to find a way to confess the impossible truth.

Or he could just come up with some excuse for not going near the house anymore. Derek couldn't argue with him or call him a liar, at least.

"I promise," Stiles said.

His dad's mouth went tight. "Don't promise me. Promise your mother."

Stiles stared blankly. For a second he couldn't even understand what his dad was saying, because those words were so impossible. They didn't talk about her, and they definitely didn't use her against each other.

Except that Stiles had, a week ago, and his dad probably knew it. But he wasn't calling Stiles out on that, either, and so Stiles couldn't protest when he did it.

"She would want you to be safe, Stiles. Promise her you won't tell anyone about this, and you won't go near the Hale house."

He felt panic edging in on him: he could lie to his dad and just hate himself for it. He might not even be able to tell the difference from how much he hated himself right now. He could lie to Scott and lie to everyone else he knew. He could lie to Derek and hope Derek never noticed.

He couldn't lie to his mom. If he promised her something, he couldn't go back on that, not ever, not for anything, no forgetting or bending the rules later on when it didn't seem too important anymore. And he was pretty sure his dad knew that; he was pretty sure that that was a sign of how freaked out his dad was over all of this.

Stiles scrubbed the palms of his hands over his face and then nodded, ducking his head and closing his eyes. He'd never meant to be the bad kid, the one who kept secrets that could get someone killed. He'd just... fallen into it, and here he was.

"Mom," he said, in a shaky voice. He had never talked to her in front of his dad; he'd tried one time, when they went to see her grave together a few weeks after, when her gravestone was put in. He'd just wound up sobbing himself into a panic attack.

"Mom, I promise I'll do what Dad says. I'll stay away from the Hale house until he's done investigating the fire, and I won't tell anyone what I know about it."

His dad exhaled a long breath. He put his hand on the back of Stiles's neck and tugged gently, but Stiles shook off his grip and stalked away without looking him in the eye.

---

Stiles went up to his room and slammed the door behind him, feeling stupid and petty even as he did it. He'd been maybe kind of threatened by a woman who wanted him to kill people--and as it turned out Derek's entire family had probably been murdered--and he was acting like his dad had just grounded him for not doing chores or something.

He was grounded, he realized, glancing toward his window, with its easy path to the lower part of the roof and the backyard below. His dad hadn't forbidden him to go anywhere, but if Stiles left now he'd be handing his dad a mountain of probable cause to track the GPS on his phone, if he wasn't doing that already.

Stiles thought for a reckless second about leaving and ditching his phone, but he realized how stupid that was even as the thought formed. He knew exactly how much trouble he could get into, and how badly he could need to call for help, even when there wasn't anyone running around town who might want to force him to kill people or punish him for not killing people or whatever else might be out there.

As the awareness sank in that he couldn't leave, Stiles felt again the sudden physical need to be near Derek. He stumbled over to his bed and sat down on it, wrapping his arms around himself and trying to hold himself still against the urge to run. He found himself bouncing slightly on the bed with the need to move, and abruptly he realized that he did have a way to get to Derek, even if he couldn't leave the house. After all, he saw Derek every night, right here in his bed. All he had to do was fall asleep.

He unfolded his arms, shaking them out and taking a couple of deep breaths. He was tired. He could feel the tiredness lurking under the adrenaline-wired tension racing through him. He was going to crash at any second. And he'd gotten up awfully early for a Saturday, and being menaced was exhausting. Worrying was exhausting. So all he had to do was lie down, and close his eyes, and go to sleep, and then Derek would be here with him. He'd be safe and he'd know Derek was safe. It wouldn't matter at all that he was technically all the way across town from where Derek technically was.

Stiles took his shoes and his belt off and flopped over on his bed. He dragged the covers up from their tangle and snuggled down into his pillow, getting perfectly comfortable. He would fall asleep and Derek would be there and everything would be okay.

Except he still didn't actually know, for sure, that his dreams really had anything to do with Derek. Maybe they were totally the product of his own brain, and when he dreamed about Derek, Derek was just dreaming wolf-dreams and having nothing to do with him. Brains could make up all kinds of weird and specific details, so there was no reason he couldn't just have made up Derek's tattoo and five o'clock shadow and superpowers, the same way he'd made up that whole complicated play he was supposed to be performing in that nightmare he'd had a couple of weeks ago, to say nothing of all the things he had dreamed of discovering underneath Lydia's clothes. He definitely did not share a psychic bond with Lydia Martin, so why should he imagine he shared one with Derek?

And even if the dreams really were a connection to Derek, it didn't mean he would have one of those dreams any time he went to sleep. Maybe it only worked if Derek was sleeping too, or if Derek chose to reach out to him. Derek might not, after last night. He might decide he needed to back off, he might avoid Stiles because Stiles had made things weird--it wouldn't be the first time Stiles had thought he was super-tight with someone until they started edging nervously away from him. Scott was basically the only person he'd ever met who didn't find him totally off-putting after more than a few hours of interaction, and even leaving aside the whole wolf thing, Stiles didn't think Derek was anything like Scott.

Stiles opened his eyes and glared at the wall. He was getting ahead of himself. He had to go to sleep and see what happened. Everything else was just speculation. He had to relax. He closed his eyes again and made himself take deep breaths in and out, which worked for maybe two or three minutes until he realized he was hyperventilating and on the way to working himself into a panic attack.

He shoved away the covers and turned over, pressing his palm flat on Derek's pawprint, and tried to think of sleepy thoughts. It occurred to him that the usual way he got himself settled down enough to sleep was to jerk off, but that thought just filled him with guilt and misery and more frantic thoughts about Derek and his dreams and what was real and what wasn't.

He twisted around on the bed again, trying to find a comfortable spot. He really did feel tired. The adrenaline was gone now, leaving total exhaustion in its place. Even breathing felt like an effort, but he was still nowhere near sleep. He wondered if he could get so tired he would just die from it, if he was this tired and couldn't sleep. His heart felt like it could just stop beating from sheer effort.

He opened his eyes and looked at the clock.

Ten minutes had gone by.

He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and tried again.

---

After four hours of alternating between frantic worry and leaden exhaustion, Stiles felt like he'd just been used as a tackling dummy for lacrosse practice. His whole body ached from tension and he was grimly convinced he was never going to sleep again at the same time that he felt so tired that his eyes were prickling with the constant, pointless threat of tears. His brain felt numb from constantly rehashing the arguments about Derek and his dreams, plus all the things he wanted to yell at his dad and then felt guilty for even thinking, and all the things he wanted to say to his mom that he knew he could never get out of his mouth in actual words.

Finally Stiles recognized that all he was doing was making himself hate his own bed so much that he was thinking longingly of setting it on fire. He rolled upright and staggered over to his desk. He felt fuzzy and disoriented and exhausted even though he'd done nothing but lie there for four hours. He opened up his computer and stared at it blankly, trying to remember what he wanted to do with it, and then a Skype request from Scott popped up. He accepted it automatically--he never said no to Scott--and then propped his chin on his hand as the window opened, even though he knew it meant he was kind of half out of the frame.

"Hey!" Scott said brightly, and then his face fell as he got a look at Stiles. "Dude, are you okay? You look sick."

"I'm--" fine, Stiles meant to say, except his throat went tight and his eyes were prickling again. He was the worst friend--he'd hardly thought about Scott at all, not for hours, Scott was none of the things he'd been freaking out about, lying there--and he couldn't tell Scott the truth about any of this.

Almost any of it, anyway.

"I had a big fight with my dad," Stiles said, because there was no other way to sum it up. "I think I'm kind of grounded, I don't know, we don't usually do this."

"You what?" Scott looked stunned. "Dude, you never fight with your dad, what happened?"

Stiles shook his head, wanting nothing but to put his head down on his arms and never talk about this, or anything else, ever again. Maybe he could go off to one of those monasteries and take a vow of silence. Some of those monks raised dogs, didn't they? He'd figure out a way to get Derek out, Derek could stay with him--

"Stiles?"

Stiles jerked awake and realized that he had just almost fallen asleep. A sudden, stupid fury rushed through him at the thought that Scott had woken him up just when he was about to finally go and find Derek.

Scott was giving him a genuinely worried look, though, and the anger burned itself out almost instantly.

"Sorry," Stiles said. "Maybe I am getting sick, I don't know. Probably doesn't even matter if I'm grounded."

"But you--you're going to come to the game tonight, right? You don't feel that bad, do you? Is kind of grounded, like, totally grounded? I could ask my mom to call your dad and tell him it's important. She can't make it to this one but I figured at least you would be there."

It turned out there was a further level of worst-friendliness that Stiles had now sunk to. "Uh, yeah, I don't--I mean--you don't have to--"

"Oh my god, you didn't even know there was a game today!" Scott looked more stunned than pissed.

"No, what, I knew, I totally knew, it's the away game against St. X, it's all you've been talking about for days." That was completely true, even if Stiles had been kind of spacing out on most of it because he was busy thinking about Derek, about when he could get away to the woods and whether it was creepier to jerk off after dreaming of him or in anticipation of it.

"I just--it just slipped my mind, dude, today has been so messed up. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone, okay, time has lost all meaning. It's not lacrosse Saturday over here in the Stiles Zone, it's just Totally Screwed Up Day."

Scott went back to frowning in concern. "Dude, do you... do you want to talk about it? How bad did you fight, are you okay?"

Stiles remembered with a sick jolt that "big fight with my dad" meant something kind of different for Scott.

He shook his head quickly. "It was--it's my fault, I just--I don't want to talk about it, it was stupid. I was stupid. My dad is probably right. He'll let me go to the game, I just, I don't want to talk to him right now, but I'll be there. I promise I'll be there."

If he snuck out just to go to St. X for the lacrosse game... that would be normal, that would be the old kind of trouble he used to get into sometimes. That would make his dad think he was a regular kid doing regular things. Stiles realized he was already halfway planning to sneak out and make his dad suspect him on purpose, just to give himself some cover the next time he needed to sneak out for real.

Stiles rubbed his eyes, shaking his head to get rid of that whole train of thought. He looked up sharply at Scott after a second, to see Scott still looking worried, and manufactured a smile. "Hey, so--how did last night go? Do you suck at bowling as much as you did when you were eight?"

Scott's concerned frown melted instantly into his besotted Allison-smile. "Oh, man, yeah, I sucked pretty bad at first, but then, uh, Allison gave me some coaching."

"Are you blushing?" Stiles heard the delight in his own voice and then realized it was genuine. He actually was happy for Scott, happy that Scott got to have this normal, uncomplicated life with a girlfriend and awkward bowling double dates. As long as Stiles kept his mouth shut, Scott didn't have to be dragged into the crushing insanity that Stiles's life had become. That was one good thing. It had to balance out some of his worst-friendliness, somewhere along the line.

"You're totally blushing, what kind of coaching did Allison give you, man?"

"She, um," Scott giggled and hid his face in his hands, and then peeked at Stiles through his fingers. "She said...."

---

Stiles went down to the kitchen first and ate a late lunch or early dinner or large and direly-needed snack. There was no sign of the files, or of his dad, anywhere on or around the kitchen table, but the cruiser was still parked out front and Stiles knew his dad wouldn't have left him alone.

Stiles went into the downstairs hallway, staying a good six feet from the closed door of his dad's office--look, I'm not sneaking, I'm not trying to eavesdrop--and called out, "Dad?"

His dad called something back, a single muffled syllable, and Stiles ventured a couple of steps closer before his dad opened the door. His dad looked as tired and awful as he felt--or maybe as bad as Stiles had felt before he spent half an hour talking to Scott about Allison and tonight's game.

Stiles forgot what he'd meant to ask in favor of, "Have you eaten anything today at all? Do you want me to make something?"

His dad shook his head, smiling slightly but still looking tired. "I don't have the stomach for anything right now. Thanks." He looked Stiles over for a few seconds and then added, "Did you need something?"

Well, now Stiles needed to know what hideously stomach-turning details he'd missed in those files, but he bit down on the question. "I was talking to Scott--he really wants me to be at his game tonight."

Stiles stopped there, and kept his mouth shut while his dad looked him over again, then glanced at his watch. "Away game tonight, right? St. X?"

Stiles nodded.

"You get a ride with somebody," his dad said firmly. "Allison's going, isn't she?"

Stiles managed to confine his protest to a single flailing gesture. This was how it was going to be now, and this was the least he deserved.

He looked away and nodded, swallowing before he trusted himself to say in a level voice, "Yeah, she is. I'll ask her."

"All right," his dad said. "If you want to spend the night at Scott's you let me know by ten."

---

Stiles texted Allison, who texted back Yes! Especially if you know how to get there, I have no idea.

He spent several minutes fondly imagining bonding with Allison over their road trip adventures on the twelve miles of county highways between Beacon Hills and St. X, and none at all anticipating what actually ensued, which was Allison's dad's SUV pulling into his driveway with Allison's dad behind the wheel. Allison got out of the front seat and slid into the back with him, making a wide-eyed apologetic face.

"Stiles, you've met my dad, right? He wanted to come see a game, he thought you'd be able to explain it to us since you've played and everything."

"I can do that, Mr. Argent," Stiles said in his best and brightest good-kid voice. "I'll be your native guide to lacrosse. Which is kind of an apt expression, because lacrosse originated as a game of ritual significance played by Native Americans nearly a thousand years ago."

"Is that a fact," Mr. Argent said, not sounding even a little bit interested.

"It is," Stiles confirmed solemnly. "The history of lacrosse was documented by Jesuit missionaries in what is now Canada, as well as being passed down through the oral traditions of tribes across North America, so it's all extremely factual."

Stiles gave Allison a sideways look, but she smiled encouragingly, so apparently she didn't mind hearing the entire history of lacrosse, or at least she minded it less than whatever her dad was likely to try to talk about.

Stiles could do the math here: Allison hadn't given her dad any information about whether Stiles had seen the wolves, and now her dad was taking the chance to try to get information from Stiles himself. That was fine. Her dad could have all the information he wanted.

As long as he wanted information about lacrosse.

"The local history of lacrosse is kind of funny, actually," Stiles went on. "It all started with Haverford Prep, which was founded in 1924 by people who really wanted a local alternative to New England boarding schools...."

By the time they got to the game Stiles had only stopped for breath a few times, and each time Allison had helpfully asked a leading question about lacrosse. Stiles had only gotten up through the vicious rivalries of the Eighties, pitting Beacon County's private and public schools against each other so bitterly that lacrosse games had required a police presence, and he'd really just summarized the very best of the many, many stories he knew or could extrapolate from things he'd heard somewhere.

Stiles rattled on through a specific scouting report for St. X as they walked from the parking lot to the bleachers, only stopping short at the sight of a familiar tumble of strawberry blond hair.

"Oh, Lydia!" Allison said brightly, and then called out, "Lydia! Hi!"

Lydia turned and bestowed a bright smile on Allison. Her expression stiffened slightly at the sight of Stiles, but thawed--and then some--when she looked at Mr. Argent, which was interesting. Or creepy. One of those.

"Come on up here," Lydia said, waving imperiously. Stiles watched her as they approached--she was evicting some other Beacon Hills fans with a diamond-sharp smile--and wondered whether he should try to sit next to her, or try not to. With Allison he felt like he had an ally in avoiding talking to her dad, but if Lydia got it into her head to interrogate him she'd pick him apart just for fun.

But he'd promised his dad--and his mom--that he wouldn't talk about the investigation, and he'd promised Laura he would look out for Derek. If it came down to it he would hold out against Lydia just like he would against Mr. Argent.

There was a weird amount of confusion and pushing--he wound up briefly pressed between Allison and Lydia, which was not where he'd imagined his day going when he woke up this morning oh god don't think about waking up this morning. When they were all sorted out he was on the end of the bleachers, next to the railing. Allison was beside him with Lydia between her and Mr. Argent, looking triumphant.

"This is going to be an excellent game," Lydia announced. "Last year it was close, but this year will be a blowout. Our goalie, Danny, he's way better than the starting goalie last year."

"Hey, come on, last year was close because we couldn't put in a second goal until the last ten minutes," Stiles insisted.

Lydia gave him a superior look, and Stiles shook his head, "No, come on, I was on the team, I think I know what happened in that game."

"I have seen the entire video of last year's game four times just this week," Lydia replied, with poisonous precision. "Goaltending is our biggest area of improvement from last year, and goaltending will make the difference."

"Hey, come on," Stiles said, even as some small part of him tried to absorb the fact that he was arguing with Lydia Martin about lacrosse, "the offense is going to be way more effective this year, they've got some good plays going--"

Lydia went into a beautiful tirade, nearly as unstoppable as anything Stiles had ever put out himself, covering every player on the first line and their strengths and weaknesses on offense; she went a little easy on Jackson, but Stiles realized that she was nice about Scott, too, letting Allison beam at his strengths and being diplomatic about his weaknesses. Stiles hardly had to argue anything at all to keep her going until the game was underway. Mr. Argent spent the whole time looking extremely stoic, his gaze fixed on the woods beyond the edges of the well-lit field.

Once the game got going Stiles launched into a play-by-play with special emphasis on what Scott was doing at any given moment. Lydia jumped in to drag Allison's attention to Jackson--or to Danny's superior goalkeeping skills--and they kept it going all the way through the game, spending every stop in play dissecting the last few minutes. Occasionally Allison asked questions and Lydia and Stiles argued their way through an answer, but it was all lacrosse all the time. Allison's dad was looking increasingly bored.

At halftime Lydia dragged Allison off to stretch their legs, which Stiles had to assume wasn't a euphemism because he couldn't imagine Lydia being willing to use the port-a-potties set up underneath the bleachers.

He got up to follow them and Mr. Argent caught his arm. "Oh, let the girls have some privacy."

Allison gave him an apologetic look back, but Stiles waved her on, resigned, and sat down when Mr. Argent tugged him back. Stiles propped his elbows on his knees and stared down at the field, mentally tracking where the team would be right now--where he would be if he were still with them: trooping into the locker room, Greenberg and Brian and Todd all yelling too much, Scott laughing brightly, Jackson snarling at everyone, Finstock giving random, emphatic pep talks as he circled among them.

"I wanted to tell you how glad I am that you were found safely," Mr. Argent said, and Stiles glanced toward him without turning his head. He sounded sincere; he was probably a perfectly nice person. If Derek were really just a wolf who'd killed a human, it probably wouldn't be such a bad thing for someone to want to shoot him.

"Thanks," Stiles said, because he could be polite. "Allison and Scott told me you helped with the searching, so thanks for that. And I'm sorry I disrupted everybody's weekend by being such a klutz."

"Not at all," Mr. Argent said, looking out toward the edge of the field again. "That's what community is all about, banding together in a crisis, protecting children from the dangerous things in the deep dark woods."

Stiles snorted. "Well, in my case the dangerous thing was gravity, but I appreciate the sentiment anyway."

"Oh, I think you and I both know there are much worse things than that out there," Mr. Argent said calmly.

"Sure," Stiles said promptly, "I mean, I could have gotten an infection--gangrene, or necrotizing fasciitis, or MRSA in the hospital, or--"

"Rabies," Mr. Argent said. "From a bat, maybe. Allison told me you said you holed up in a cave. Have you ever seen a rabid dog, Stiles?"

"No," Stiles said brightly, "but the bat population has really plummeted in the last five years--there's this thing they get called white nose--"

He barreled on without stopping, even when Mr. Argent tried to interrupt, even when the people in the two rows in front of him turned and made disgusted and annoyed faces.

By the time Lydia and Allison got back he'd covered the Milwaukee Protocol and launched into the history of vaccination. Allison passed him a soda and Lydia interrupted his soliloquy on Louis Pasteur to say, "Actually, Edward Jenner pioneered vaccination with his work on smallpox," launching another argument that lasted them until they could go back to debating lacrosse for the second half.

By the end of the game Stiles was getting a little hoarse and Mr. Argent seemed to have given up on getting a word in edgewise. He offered Lydia a ride back to Beacon Hills, and she took the front seat while Allison and Stiles sat together in back. Mr. Argent didn't even object to taking them to the high school to wait for the team to arrive on their bus, possibly because Lydia didn't ask so much as cheerfully assume that that was their destination. Stiles stood outside the SUV with Lydia and Allison and waved when the bus pulled in; the guys piled out and Scott ran right to them. He gave Stiles a quick one-armed hug before he squeezed Allison around the shoulders with a careful sideways look at her dad.

Stiles looked away, listening with half an ear and a smile on his face as Allison cheerfully and knowledgeably complimented some of the awesome things Scott had done that night to set up plays. The whole team was off the bus now and the bus driver was just--

Stiles recognized the bus driver, recognized the way he looked from a distance framed in the doorway of the bus, and had a sudden burst of panicky déjà vu that bloomed into sudden fury. It was the insurance investigator who'd become a bus driver, the one who'd ruled the fire an accident. Derek's whole family was murdered and you knew and you covered it up--someone should be hunting you--

"Stiles?"

Stiles blinked and shook his head, looking back to Scott, who was frowning at him.

"Sorry, I just--I was thinking about that call in the third quarter, that was such bullshit."

"Language," Mr. Argent said absently, and Scott winced even though he hadn't been the one who said it.

"Sorry," Stiles said, and then, because he had to keep himself from looking toward the bus again, "Hey, Scott, you mind if I come spend the night at your place? My dad's working tonight, something came up."

"Yeah," Scott said, grinning again with his arm still around Allison. "Sounds good. You can make sure I wake up on time to pick up my mom tomorrow. She's working a double, so she let me have the car for the game."

"A few of us were going to go out to the diner," Lydia added. "Lacrosse burns a lot of calories, all the guys will be hungry. You should come, Allison. Scott can drop you off afterward."

Allison turned wide, pleading eyes on her dad, who looked over all of them skeptically and then sighed and nodded.

"Just to the diner and then straight home," he added firmly, pointing at Scott. "You do not take her back to your house, and you have her home within the next two hours, is that absolutely clear?"

Scott nodded so fast he looked like his head was on a spring, and Stiles smiled a good kid's smile and didn't look anywhere but at his friends.

---

They both crowded into Scott's bed, just like they'd been doing since they were both a lot smaller. Stiles was wearing a pair of Scott's pajama pants and one of Scott's t-shirts that Stiles thought had actually started out as his; it fit him better than it could possibly fit Scott. They lay back to back for a while, talking sleepily about the game and about Allison and about how Scott thought he was actually starting to be sort of friends with Jackson and Danny, or at least Jackson was sometimes not a complete asshole to him.

Stiles was mostly just making mm-hm noises back at him with his eyes closed. He didn't even realize he was asleep until he felt Derek's nose against his cheek.

He opened his eyes and reached out at the same time; Derek was wolf-shaped and standing next to Scott's bed, ears tipped forward, every inch of him radiating worry. At the same time Stiles grabbed a handful of his fur, Derek was pushing closer, sniffing him all over. He shoved his head under the covers to press his nose against Stiles's belly and the old bruise on his hip. When he brought his head back up near Stiles's face he huffed and waved his muzzle around, like What is this, where are you, why are we here?

"Scott's house," Stiles whispered, leaning half out of the bed to get his other arm around Derek in a hug. Derek pressed his cheek to Stiles's, and Stiles rubbed back and forth against that touch, shaking with gladness to be back with Derek. Despite everything he couldn't say, he would always rather have Derek here than not.

"I missed you, man, this was the longest day."

Derek gave a low woof like me too, and Stiles had to be just dreaming that--today was probably just a regular day in the woods for Derek, after all. But it was his dream, and he could dream Derek however he wanted to. Of course he wanted Derek to be glad to see him.

When he squirmed back onto the bed, Derek pushed him down onto the pillows and then jumped up after him. Stiles looked over, but Scott was still sleeping with his back to them, and the mattress didn't even sink like it should have with two hundred pounds of wolf standing on it, balanced precariously on the edge.

Derek pushed Stiles with a paw on his shoulder until he lay down on his back, and then Derek had a paw on either side of his arms and settled down to lie directly on top of him, his head on Stiles's chest, his big, solid ribcage pressing into Stiles's belly. Somehow it didn't hurt, or crush the breath out of him; dreams were convenient that way. Derek didn't do anything but make him feel like he was being shielded and held in place at the same time. Stiles laid his arms around Derek's neck and let the dream dissolve into the dark with a smile on his face.

---

Scott wound up being the one to wake Stiles, shaking him out of sleep at a quarter to noon. "Hey, I'm going to get my mom. There's cereal and stuff if you want breakfast. Or lunch or whatever."

"'Kay," Stiles mumbled, and as soon as Scott let go of him he rolled over and went back to sleep. He dreamed it was Derek who nudged him a couple of times and then huffed and let him be.

The next time he woke up, Stiles actually came all the way to the surface, possibly because this time he could smell food. He hit the bathroom and then stumbled down to the kitchen, where Scott was making his mom a fried egg sandwich while she sat at the table with her chin in her hand, watching Scott with a faint smile.

"Hey, Ms. McCall," Stiles said. "Sorry I didn't come--" the rest got lost in a yawn, but she smiled and waved him toward a seat at the table.

Scott put more bread in the toaster, and Stiles yawned out a thank you as he sat down. There was orange juice on the table and two empty glasses, so Stiles filled both, pushing one toward Ms. McCall and sipping from the other.

"Scott tells me you won last night."

Scott gave a quick look over his shoulder, but Stiles didn't bother to point out that he wasn't on the team anymore. Beacon Hills had won, that was good enough.

"I contributed some quality commentary," Stiles agreed. "You should've been there, it was great. Allison and her dad are totally up to speed on lacrosse now."

"Oh, God," Ms. McCall said. "That poor man."

She gave Stiles a thoughtful look, like she was going to say more, but Scott brought her sandwich over and then headed back to the stove to start another one. She shook her head and started eating, and Stiles took the chance to say to Scott's back, "Hey, you want to go running later?"

Scott nearly cracked an egg onto the floor as he looked over at Stiles. "You want to?"

Okay, so he'd objected pretty strongly when Scott tried to get him to join the Make First Line This Year training program. Stiles shrugged. "Yeah, I'm thinking I'll go for cross country once my arm heals. It'll be too late to get back on the lacrosse team."

Stiles watched Scott's face go from wincing and apologetic at the reminder that Stiles was off the team, to thoughtful, to pleased. "Yeah! Yeah, we can totally go running, that'd be awesome."

---

Scott had a tendency to forget he was running with Stiles. He would get twenty feet ahead and then look around and double back, but Stiles mostly managed to maintain the slow-and-steady pace Derek had been drilling into him all week, running softly so he didn't jar his arm too much. He also managed to choose their path, turning his steps toward the edge of town. Scott didn't seem to notice anything until Stiles slowed to a halt at the beginning of the fence around the cemetery.

Stiles made sure to look in the direction of his mom's grave, to avoid checking the tree-line too obviously. He didn't see any red eyes looking out, but Derek would know he wasn't alone. Derek would be careful.

"Do you mind if I," Stiles said, waving toward the gate, and Scott shook his head with that uncertain look he usually got when Stiles mentioned his mom these days, like he wasn't sure how sad he was supposed to be now that it had been a few years. They walked side by side to the gate, Scott pulling out his inhaler to take a hit along the way.

Scott stopped short at a bench a few rows away from Stiles's mom's grave. "I'm gonna, um, just do some stretches and stuff, okay?"

Stiles smiled. "Yeah, it's fine. I just want to say hi."

Scott nodded and turned his back, raising his arms over his head. Stiles didn't bother pretending not to look for a dark shape among the trees as he walked the rest of the way over to his mom's grave. He saw something moving back and forth, too big and too deliberate to be anything but Derek trying to get his attention. Stiles nodded, not risking a wave. He knelt down by his mom's grave and turned half toward the woods, hoping Derek's ears were as good as he thought they were.

"Hi, Mom. I guess you know Dad's kind of freaking out about me going into the woods so much, and he made me promise not to go back to the Hale house anymore because I might get hurt again."

The shape in the trees went still. Stiles looked down at his mom's grave.

"I mean, he made me promise you, because he knows I won't lie to my mom, so of course you know. But you know the stuff I haven't told Dad, too, about Derek, about how I promised not to leave him alone, and how he saved my life and I owe him so much. You know he's really important to me, and you know I won't stop going out to the woods to see him, right? I'm just going to have to be a little more careful about it right now, because Dad's keeping such a close eye on me, and I did promise to stay away from the Hale house. You even understand why I came out here, why I'm visiting you just to get close enough for Derek to hear me without Scott realizing what I'm doing."

Stiles looked up after that, training his eyes on the trees. He heard a rustling that could have been the wind, glimpsed a flash of red that could have been just an afterimage on his eyes, and then the woods were silent again, and Stiles was sitting alone by his mother's grave.

"You're the best, mom," Stiles said, and pressed his cheek against the stone. He could almost imagine his mom's smile, the way she would have winked and tapped her nose, conspiring with him about some silly secret. That was the only kind of secret he'd had before she died.

"I'll bring flowers next time, I promise."

---

They hung out at Scott's afterward--Stiles messed around with Scott's spare stick, cradling one-handed and trying some throws--until Stiles realized it was four o'clock Sunday afternoon and he hadn't even looked at his homework yet. Scott got all wide-eyed and horrified too, but he drove Stiles home instead of tackling it right away.

His dad wasn't there when Stiles got home. He fought down the automatic impulse to do something stupid--I could I could I could--and sent his dad a text. Home from Scott's, lots of homework to do.

He made sure the doors and windows were all locked and didn't even think about opening the door to his dad's office (which meant he stood outside the door and thought about it for a solid few minutes, but he kept his hands behind his back the whole time). After that he went up to his room and got all his books out, sorting through them to find what he needed for Monday. He started up his computer and made sure he was logged in to Skype, too, in case Scott needed to talk out word problems or argue about how dumb a poem was or anything.

He opened up a Google tab and searched for how far can wolves hear just to reassure himself that Derek had really definitely heard him at the cemetery and understood why he couldn't come to the house anymore. Once he found out that wolves could hear things six miles away he pulled up a map of Beacon Hills and tried to figure out where Derek couldn't hear him from--give or take noise-interference from traffic and other people, but then again who knew if werewolves had the same senses as regular wolves....

A few minutes later Stiles was trying to figure out how to search for real werewolves in a way that didn't get him a lot of crazy people who thought they were werewolves but weren't. Filtering out the porn and Harry Potter and Twilight stuff was pretty straightforward, but that left a lot more than could possibly be real.

Then he stopped and went back and tried to figure out how he could actually tell the difference between real werewolves and crazy people on the internet. The difference, he suspected, was that real werewolves wouldn't tell the internet one single thing about being a werewolf, while crazy people were more than happy to share at length, with horrible color combinations and clip art and weird capitalization choices. Every time he saw a message signed with a pawprint he put his hand to his cast defensively.

By the time he heard his dad's cruiser in the driveway he was frustrated and angry and miserable. He was also no closer to knowing anything about werewolves other than Derek. He closed all his search tabs and deleted his history and cookies like he'd been looking up how to make meth.

When his dad came up to his room a few minutes later Stiles was glaring at his chemistry book and writing out the first problem for his homework, pressing down too hard with his pencil.

"Hey," his dad said, sounding kind of tired, and Stiles looked up quickly. His dad had just had to work the whole weekend on a gruesome mass murder case and now it was dinner time, and Stiles hadn't thought about food at all.

"Hi," Stiles said cautiously. "How's it going?"

His dad grimaced but stepped inside. "You have a good time with Scott last night? I heard they won."

Stiles nodded. "Mr. Argent drove me and Allison, and then a bunch of us--mostly guys from the team and girlfriends and everything--went out for food after."

His dad raised his eyebrows, showing a little ghost of a smile, and said, "I also heard you spent the whole game talking to Lydia Martin."

Stiles narrowed his eyes, trying to remember. Angie, one of the dispatchers, had a kid who went to St. X, although his dad tended to pick up gossip about Stiles from everywhere. Everyone knew the sheriff's kid.

"Not like that, Dad, she's totally in love with Jackson. We just argued the whole time. We were trying to explain stuff to Allison."

His dad nodded slowly. "Pretty sure it wasn't too long ago that you would've done something pretty drastic to get Lydia to pay you enough attention to argue with you for two hours."

"Yeah, well," Stiles said, not even trying to find a way to sell it, just glad he could more or less tell the truth for once. "Scott's dating Allison, and Allison and Lydia are friends. I'm kind of getting to know her now instead of just idolizing her. It turns out we argue a lot."

His dad nodded again, looking down as he said, "Your mom and I were like that, you know, especially when we were first dating. We'd fight about fighting when we ran out of other things to argue about."

Stiles bit down hard on his lip. He couldn't remember the last time his dad had said something like that, something about his mom that wasn't about her being dead. They hardly ever talked about her at all, and it was unexpectedly nice to just hear something like that, about what she'd been like.

It was also kind of an apology, Stiles realized, for his dad using her against him the day before. That would make it awkward to insist that he really honestly wasn't trying to steal Lydia away from Jackson, that his years-long crush was on hold. Especially because then he'd be left trying to explain that without mentioning who he'd moved on to, which Stiles didn't even want to think too hard about himself.

He just nodded, instead, and his dad looked up at him and sighed. He came over to sit on the corner of Stiles's bed, beckoning Stiles closer. He spun in his desk chair and scooted it over to face his dad, and his dad leaned in and tugged him in until their knees almost touched.

"We found out some things today," he said quietly, looking Stiles right in the eye. "I need to talk to you about a few of them. Do we need to go over why this has to stay secret again, before I tell you anything new?"

Stiles shook his head, holding his dad's gaze steadily. "Eight murders, really bad people. I won't say a word, Dad, I understand."

His dad nodded. "First of all, it looks like Jennifer Wilson has left the area. Rangers found her car in a state park up in Oregon. There were some marks in the back--claw marks and bite marks--that they think are consistent with wolves. So you might have been right about how the wolves that killed Peter got into the woods here."

You are what I should have been, she'd said, talking about Stiles and Derek, herself and Peter. She'd set her house on fire and walked away from her whole life, away from her car that had had a wolf in the back, and if it hadn't been Derek or Laura it must have been Peter. She'd left everything behind and gone into the woods....

Stiles forced himself not to look back at his computer. He hadn't had any luck finding werewolves online, but Jennifer Wilson had had a lot more time to search, and she'd had a real live werewolf who could talk to her, who could maybe just tell her what she needed to know--what if she'd found others? What if now that Peter was gone, she'd gone to meet them? Did that mean the next nearest werewolves to Beacon Hills were up in Oregon?

"Which park," Stiles began, and his dad was already shaking his head.

"You don't need to know that. They're looking for her, but people disappear for good every year in the mountains. The point is, it seems like she isn't hanging around to follow through on those threats, so I'm a little less worried about your immediate safety. No one else associated with the fire has any reason yet to know that you know anything about it."

They hadn't really been threats, though, had they? It had been more like a curse, like something would happen to him and Derek if they failed--something worse than whatever had already happened to Derek to get him stuck as a wolf and bound to the land. Blood must be avenged.

Still, there was an upside here. "Does that mean I can drive myself to school tomorrow without a police escort?"

His dad gave him a stern look--too flippant, right--but then nodded. "As long as I don't have reason to be concerned for your safety, I'll trust you to look out for yourself like usual. But you keep your phone with you and turned on, and you keep your eyes open, right?"

Stiles nodded.

His dad sighed. "Okay. We've been looking into the fire. Not just the files you had, the old evidence, some other sources. It looks like none of the people Peter Hale identified were the one who actually planned the fire."

His dad leaned in a little, looking into Stiles's eyes, and Stiles told himself to sit still, keep breathing. He was already trying not to give anything away, even without knowing what his dad was going to say next.

"It looks like there was a woman, probably from out of town. She'd be about thirty now. She was in her early twenties at the time. Tall, blonde, pretty, very persuasive. I need to know if you've met anybody who might fit that description, or if you've heard about anyone who does."

Stiles sagged with relief as he shook his head. He didn't know what he'd been afraid his dad would say--Derek did it? Laura did it? a scrawny ten-year-old kid did it, was it you?--but he could tell the truth. "No, I don't know anybody like that. No idea."

His dad shifted his weight again, keeping his gaze on Stiles. "You're sure."

Stiles nodded and then shook his head. "Yeah, I'm sure. Nobody like that."

His dad sighed and nodded. "All right. If you meet anyone, if you hear anything, you don't go off on your own, you don't try to talk to her or ask questions or find anything out yourself, have you got that? Whoever this woman is, she may have deliberately killed an entire family. You don't mess with her. You call me the second you hear anything."

"Yeah," Stiles said, "Sure, but Dad, it was six years ago. Whoever she is, she's long gone, right?"

"Right," his dad said, but it didn't sound like agreement at all. "Now, I'm ordering pizza, and you're not going to argue with me about toppings."

"I'm not going to argue with you about toppings as long as they're all vegetables," Stiles agreed, because he had his priorities.

---

He left early for school the next morning and swung by the grocery store to pick up flowers; a promise was a promise. He picked out a bunch of flowers with plenty of different colors in it, and then he saw a bunch of tiny pink roses, and hesitated. He grabbed them, and then another multicolored bunch, and headed for the checkout.

At the cemetery he parked by his mom's grave and hurried over to it.

"Hi, Mom. I brought these for you like I said I would. I wish I--" he swallowed and then stopped.

He'd mostly trained himself out of wishing things after his mom died, but he wanted to be able to see her face when she took the flowers from his hand. He thought he must have given her flowers before she died, dandelions or daisies he picked himself, flowers his dad picked up for her birthday, but he couldn't remember any particular moment. He couldn't remember what her face had looked like when he handed them to her, and it hurt not knowing.

He took a deep breath. "Dad told me something about you yesterday, just a random thing. That's good, right? It's good if we can talk about you a little bit. It was because I was hanging out with Lydia. I know you thought Lydia was kind of awesome, you totally agreed with me about her. But I think you would agree with me about Derek, too. I just--" wish you could have met him.

But Stiles couldn't say that, and he shouldn't be drawing that comparison when Derek was probably listening.

"Okay," Stiles said, and cleared his throat. "Good talk. I gotta go, I have to make a couple more stops before school. I love you."

He stood up quickly and took the other two bouquets with him as he walked away down the rows, away from his Jeep. He looked around for the big stone he'd noticed before but never paid any attention to.

HALE, two rows over from his mom, three rows up. It was a big black stone, the carved words whitened so they stood out. Under the family name there were two columns of names, each with its own dates. All of them ended in 2005, except Peter, who had been engraved at the bottom of one column without a date of death.

"Hi, everybody," Stiles said, laying down the other multicolored bunch of flowers. "Uh, wow, you're probably having the most awkward family reunion ever in the afterlife, if Laura and Peter are both there. But I guess Grandma Hale can probably keep everybody in line just like always, right? I just brought these because Derek can't, and I don't know if anybody visits you anymore. I wanted to say hi. Um, hi. I'm Stiles, and I'm kind of friends with Derek now. I'm trying to look out for him and make sure he doesn't get too lonely out in the woods. And if there was anything I could do to help him, I want you to know I would, okay?"

Stiles hesitated, like he might actually get an answer this time, but the only answer he got was a soft woof from the woods. Stiles stood up and looked around. He realized belatedly that maybe leaving flowers at the Hales' grave was just as obvious as going to their house--and just as bad an idea, if he didn't want to catch the attention of anyone who'd been involved in the fire--but there was no one in sight.

He turned and ran into the woods, clutching the last bouquet of flowers, and didn't stop until he was flinging himself down on Derek, who rolled over beneath him, dragging Stiles down and sniffing him frantically. Stiles put his good arm around Derek's neck and went limp, still half on top of him.

"I'm awake now," Stiles mumbled. "I'm awake and you're real and you're here. I missed you, man, I missed you so much."

Derek shoved his wet nose into Stiles's ear, which he took for agreement. After another minute Derek wriggled under him, and Stiles pushed off and picked up the only slightly crumpled bouquet of flowers. He waved them at Derek and set them down again more gently.

"I, I don't know if this is totally dumb, but I brought these for Laura, to apologize for not being able to visit her like I said I would. They're pink like her hoodie. Could you take them to her, and tell her why? I will come back when I can, but you heard what I said yesterday, right?"

Derek looked up from nosing at the flowers and nodded.

"So, yeah, I can't break my promise--I can't come to your house anymore. And parking at the cemetery's too conspicuous to do very often. I'll look at a map, though. I'll figure out where else I can meet you. Maybe today if I can. My dad's on day shift, but I'll have a couple of hours after school. I can come and run with you if I figure out where to park."

Derek opened his mouth and made a low noise, then shook his head and sighed.

Stiles winced. "You could totally tell me exactly where to park, couldn't you."

Derek nodded, and came over to nudge at Stiles again.

"Whatever, it's fine, I'll map it on my phone. I don't care if you can't talk, okay?"

Derek snorted and jabbed his nose into Stiles's side, and Stiles laughed, startled.

"What, no, it's totally not just because I like to do all the talking, you're getting a completely skewed version of the Stilinski experience, okay? I totally let other people talk when they're not wolves. Or dead. I swear."

Derek snorted again, and this time he got the seam of Stiles's pants between his teeth and tugged, turning Stiles around.

"Okay, yes, off to school. I'll see you later, man." He sank his hand into Derek's fur one more time, one last touch to carry with him through the day, and then he headed back to his Jeep.

---

When Stiles got to school on Monday he found out that he was no longer the most notorious screwup in the school, because a handful of seniors had been involved in something at a party Saturday night that was variously rumored to have involved everything from group sex to an attempt to run for the Mexican border. The whole school was involved in debating orgy configurations and whether it was better to try for Canada instead.

Stiles was once again barely visible to anyone, although he still had a significant fraction of the first line sitting at his lunch table. He found himself carrying on a mostly civil conversation--well, argument, but mostly without personal attacks--with Jackson about offensive strategy, which was possibly the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him in his life. That distinction lasted until Lydia agreed with Stiles in a candy-sweet tone of pure passive-aggression, and then winked at him when Jackson glared down murderously at his mixed vegetables.

It was nice, after all that, to be on his own in the Jeep, finding his way onto a dirt road off the county highway on the far side of the preserve. He was winding cautiously through the trees, trying to guess where the river was, when Derek suddenly appeared by the side of the road, mouth open in a big wolfish grin.

"Ha!" Stiles yelled. "Told you I'd find it! Yeah!"

He slowed down and Derek jumped in through the passenger window, twisting around to get his front paws on the dashboard. He directed Stiles a half-mile further, to a place where he could pull off and park behind a screen of bushes, invisible from the road. Stiles laughed in delight when he walked fifteen feet away and his car just vanished.

"Dude, that is awesome! You are the king of the woods, clearly."

Derek gave another wolf-grin at that and snapped lazily at Stiles. You know I am.

---

That night--after a run with Derek that actually felt sort of good after a while, and dinner with his dad, and homework over Skype with Scott, and even an hour of gaming while he was doing laundry, just to make sure his guild knew he hadn't fallen off the face of the earth--when Stiles slept, Derek was human again in his dream. It felt like the cherry on top of the day, like a reward for getting things right.

And then Derek plucked at the t-shirt Stiles had put on fresh and warm from the dryer and huffed a breath against the back of Stiles's ear. Stiles squirmed a little, searching hopelessly for words to defend going to bed wearing the shirt he'd stolen from Derek. But before he'd had time to feel really bad about it, Derek rubbed his cheek against the side of Stiles's throat, making a low friendly noise with hardly any growl in it. Derek's chest was solid against his back, and Derek's arms held him close. Stiles sighed and relaxed into it, accepting Derek's acceptance and resolving not to worry about how his dick reacted to any of this. Derek was here; that was all Stiles needed.

And then Derek tucked his hand up under the bottom of the t-shirt, low on Stiles's belly, and the lingering soreness of his legs melted away along with the dull aches of his bruises and the nagging pain of his broken wrist. Stiles's eyes popped open, and he had one hand on Derek's wrist before he thought about it, though he didn't go as far as pulling Derek's touch away.

"Derek, what," Stiles said, but he didn't know what to even ask, and after a second he felt stupid. It was just Derek's hand on his stomach, Derek making everything stop hurting in his dream. That was all.

Derek rubbed his chin against Stiles's throat and made a little shushing noise--not quite a human shh, just breath pushed out through teeth, but Stiles got the idea. Derek's other hand was over his heart, outside his t-shirt, and Derek patted him there and wriggled all over, snuggling in. Stiles resigned himself to guiltily jerking off to the memory of this for the foreseeable future and closed his eyes again.

Chapter Text

By the end of the week, Stiles found himself settling into the bizarre new routine that was his life. He figured out how to get an hour or two with Derek each day (on top of the dreams and the jerkoff sessions). He ate lunch with kids who were light years more popular than he was. He teased Scott about Allison and conspired with Allison to manage Scott. He didn't give his dad new reasons to worry about him.

He got takeout to share with Derek on Friday, and it already felt like a tradition, even if Stiles wasn't sleeping over this time and the food was Chinese instead of burgers. They sat on a big flat rock on the edge of the river, where the late afternoon sunshine made it kind of nice to be sitting outside.

Derek made a disgusted noise at the bright pink sweet and sour sauce but snarfed down the shrimp fried rice, sticking his nose straight into the carton. Stiles lectured him on manners with his mouth full, and Derek snorted into the rice and kept eating. Stiles got within about a foot of balancing an eggroll on Derek's nose before Derek snapped it out of his hand, and when Stiles pulled out the fortune cookies, Derek knocked both of them into the river before Stiles could even open the wrapper.

After they'd demolished all the food, Derek got up like he was going to go off running, but it was totally half-hearted.

"No, man, you know the rules. Now we have to hang out for a while and digest. I don't have anything horrible to ask you this time, we'll be cool."

He didn't, either. There were some horrible things he could have told Derek--his dad had warrants for four arrests but he was biding his time, because they were still no closer to identifying the ringleader--but that was a secret, and Stiles was keeping his mouth shut. About that, anyway.

Derek lay down beside him with a huff, curling half around Stiles, and Stiles summoned up some non-horrible things to talk about instead.

He talked about his weekend homework, and about the odds of Beacon Hills beating Sturgis in tomorrow's lacrosse game, and meandered into the continuing weirdness of knowing Lydia's opinions on strategy. He started on a kind of tortured Jersey Shore analogy for their semi-friendship and stopped in the middle of it as a thought occurred to him.

"Oh man, you can't watch any TV now! Are you missing your shows? Do you need me to update you on anything? Do you care about football? The Seahawks lost last week, it's all teams out east now. I don't know if I'm rooting for any--"

He actually saw Derek's hackles go up even before he heard the low growl rumbling out of him. Stiles froze, and Derek put one paw on his thigh, tucking his head in close to Stiles's belly and nudging at him. Keep going.

Derek had heard or scented something and wanted Stiles to play it cool, which had to mean there was something--someone--creeping up behind them, and Stiles couldn't look back. He just had to trust Derek--well, he did trust Derek--so all he had to do was keep talking.

"I don't actually watch football, though," Stiles said, resting his hands on Derek's back for the reassuring warmth, refusing to think that this might be one last touch before something horrible. "I'm more of a baseball fan. And lacrosse, obviously, but there aren't as many pro leagues as you would expect for such an awesomely manly and entertaining--"

Derek knocked him flat and disappeared, and even as Stiles rolled over onto his side to see where Derek was running, he heard an extremely familiar yelp.

"Stiles!"

He was up and on his feet a second later, already yelling back as he ran. "Derek! Don't, hey, don't--"

Derek had already tackled Scott, and Stiles threw himself to his knees beside them, shoving the flat of his hand between Derek's snarling mouth and Scott's terrified face.

"Derek!" Stiles yelled, directly into Derek's ear, but he might as well have been seven miles away; Derek kept growling. He had Scott pinned to the ground and, oh God, his eyes were glowing red. Scott was making tiny whimpering sounds like a lost puppy.

"Hey, Derek! Don't! This is Scott, he's my friend, he--"

Stiles took his hand away from Derek's mouth long enough to shove the sleeve of his shirt up over his cast. He held it out directly in front of Derek's eyes, showing him the SCOTT side. "Scott! This is Scott, he's my best friend! Scott, like it says right here, okay!"

Stiles saw the fur drop down to normal over the back of Derek's shoulders, and his eyes stopped glowing, but he shoved Stiles's cast aside with his nose and growled directly into Scott's face.

"Oh my God, stop being an asshole! He's my friend, he probably followed me because he's worried about me going off by myself all the time."

Stiles shoved at Derek's shoulder, and Derek huffed but stopped growling. Scott was still staring at him with his eyes cartoon-wide, but after a second he shifted to staring at Stiles.

"Stiles," he whispered, eyes darting back and forth from Stiles to Derek--specifically Derek's teeth, which were still bared. "What the fuck--"

Stiles rolled his eyes. "He can hear you, dude. He heard you a mile away."

Stiles shoved at Derek, who had not quit looming menacingly over Scott. "Actually, hey, when did you hear Scott? Why did you let him get that close if you thought he was--"

Derek snorted and shifted aside, his body language relaxing all at once. Stiles couldn't help a startled bray of laughter, and whacked Derek on the shoulder with his cast.

"Derek! You are such a jerk, you were fucking with--" Stiles redirected down to Scott, because Derek was just looking pleased with himself instead of sorry. "He was just fucking with both of us. I'm sorry, I guess he's forgetting all his social skills out here."

"Uh," Scott said, and pushed cautiously up onto his elbows. "What social skills? He's a wolf."

"Scott, seriously, did you hear anything I just said? He's not a wolf!"

Derek snorted again, sat back and howled.

"Derek, shut up--okay, yes, obviously he is a wolf," Stiles said, flapping a hand at Derek's ostentatious display of wolfliness. "But he's a wolf who's usually a human. A person. He's Derek Hale, he's just--enchanted or cursed or something. He's stuck like this, it's a thing, he doesn't like to talk about it."

Scott stared at him blankly, like none of that had been English.

"Derek Hale," Stiles repeated slowly. "As in the Hale house? This is Derek, and he's a werewolf, but he's stuck like this. Scott, he saved my life when I was hurt. He found me and took care of me for two days until I could stand up and walk enough to get found."

Scott looked back and forth from Stiles to Derek. This time Derek raised one paw and flapped it up and down, the closest a wolf could get to waving.

"You--what--but--werewolves are a real thing?"

Stiles grinned so hugely his face hurt. "Dude, I know, right? Welcome to my life!"

Scott laughed a little, incredulously, even as Stiles realized the truth of that: this was the biggest, weirdest, most awesome thing that had ever happened in his entire life, and for two whole weeks he'd kept it from Scott. Now he didn't have to anymore. Now he couldn't if he wanted to.

"Dude, Scott," he repeated, more seriously. "Welcome to my life. I missed you."

Scott frowned, pushing all the way up to sit with a wary look at Derek. "You--is this why you have a pawprint on the bottom of your cast? His pawprint? This is where you've been going all the time, to hang out with him?"

Stiles's mouth hung open. He knew, logically, that that look on Scott's face and that tone in his voice and all those things he was saying meant Scott was jealous, but he couldn't actually fathom that that was where Scott was going with this. Werewolves were a real thing, Derek was the most awesome magical being either of them were ever going to meet, and Scott was annoyed that he wasn't the only one who got to sign Stiles's cast?

Stiles opened and closed his mouth, making a little string of cut-off vowel noises.

He didn't know how to make Scott understand, especially without giving away secrets--he couldn't bring up the fire at all, and he probably shouldn't mention Laura, and anyway he wasn't going to play the Derek's whole entire family is dead and I'm all he's got card with Derek sitting right there.

"I couldn't," he finally said. "Scott, I couldn't tell you about him! Do you remember Allison's dad? With the rifle? I didn't want you to have to lie about knowing there's a wolf in the woods!"

"He wouldn't--" Scott started, but he didn't even get the whole word out before he was looking dubiously at Derek. Stiles could see him calculating just how long Mr. Argent would hesitate before shooting the Big Bad Wolf because he might actually be a person. He winced, and Stiles figured he had come up pretty close to Stiles's estimate, which was zero point zero zero seconds.

Scott frowned in thought. "Are you really, really sure he's an actual person and not just a--a really nice wolf? Or a stray--"

Derek growled, and his eyes flashed red again.

"Yeah, see, stray dogs don't have magical glowing eyes, and they don't understand when you insult them by calling them stray dogs," Stiles pointed out. "Scott, I've spent a lot of time with him, okay? Please trust me on this. He's a werewolf, he's Derek Hale, we're buddies, and now that you know you need to help me keep him a secret. My dad's figured out that I'm coming out here to meet someone, he--"

Scott got a guilty look on his face.

"Scott!" Stiles said, his voice pitching up at the betrayal. "Tell me you did not follow me out here because my dad asked you to."

"No!" Scott said, but his outrage evaporated instantly. "Well, I mean, he talked to me about it, but I'm not going to go tattle on you to your dad, Stiles, jeez, I would never."

Derek snorted and tilted his head, and Scott looked toward him, affronted. "I wouldn't! He was worried, and I was worried too, but I'm not going to tell on Stiles!"

Derek tilted his head back and forth, making a low grumbling noise that sounded like a parody of speech. Talk, talk, talk.

Stiles realized that Derek didn't believe Scott, and he wondered if that was Derek being reluctant to trust a stranger with his secret--although if he really hadn't wanted Scott to know he should have taken off while Scott was still too far away to hear them--or if Derek actually could tell. A person with a human brain and a wolf's senses would probably be a pretty good cold reader or interrogator, picking up on all the little tells people gave off.

Stiles squinted at Scott and considered what Scott might not be saying, and then it was obvious. "You would, though."

Scott looked back at him, edging toward angry again, and Stiles shook his head.

"Not in a bad way. If you thought I was in danger, or I was meeting someone who might hurt me. You'd tell my dad if you thought it was the only way to help me."

Scott looked startled for a second and then ducked his head.

"Okay, well, this isn't an after-school special," Stiles said, glancing back and forth from Scott to Derek and gentling his voice.

"Derek's not getting me hooked on crack and he's not, you know," Stiles made himself say it evenly, and wondered what Derek might read off of him as he did, "sticking his hand down my pants or anything."

Scott rolled his eyes like Stiles was the one missing the point, and Stiles pressed on.

"You remember what I said at the hospital? If wolves didn't attack me when I was hurt that means there are no killer wolves? That was true, Scott, because if Derek had wanted to hurt me he had two solid days when I literally could not stand up on my own, and all he did was bring me food and make sure I stayed warm. He helped me splint my wrist so I wouldn't mess it up worse. He did everything he could to help me, and now we hang out and eat junk food and Derek makes me go running every day."

Scott gave a short, startled laugh, and looked back and forth between them. Derek turned back toward them at that, grinning open-mouthed. "Seriously? So it really does take a monster chasing you to get you to run?"

Derek darted toward Scott and snapped his teeth just short of Scott's belly, and Scott scrambled backward and up to his feet.

Stiles grinned. "He's not a monster, you jerk. He's a really good coach. Come on, you're coming with us today. Unless you were actually telling the truth about having dinner with Allison and her parents tonight?"

"Yeah, no, that was a total lie," Scott agreed. "Dressed like this, though?"

"Monsters don't wait for you to put on your gym clothes," Stiles pointed out, getting up to his feet, and Derek darted toward him with a playful growl, waving his tail as he did. Stiles turned and ran into the trees with Scott at his side and Derek on his heels.

---

Derek led them back to their cars toward the end of the run, when the sun was sinking into the trees. When Scott's--not hidden, just pulled over on the side of the narrow dirt road--was in sight, Scott stopped and bent over, hands on his knees as he panted. Derek pushed close to him, tilting his head so that his ear was almost pressed to Scott's ribs.

Scott flapped a hand at him and gasped, "I'll have--good posture--when I'm running--I promise."

Derek backed off a little, giving Stiles a look. Stiles shook his head and picked Scott's pocket. He pulled out Scott's inhaler and waved it in front of Scott's face until he took it.

"That wasn't coaching, dude, he's listening to your lungs. Scott has asthma," Stiles explained to Derek while Scott took a puff. "He doesn't let it get him down, though. He made first line this year and everything."

Stiles tilted his cast and pointed significantly to the #11 next to Scott's name. Derek licked Stiles's sweaty elbow-pit--Stiles jerked back with a startled laugh--and then Derek nosed at the cast again.

"What?" Stiles said, and then, when he saw exactly where Derek was pressing his nose, "Oh, that's Allison."

"Allison!" Scott echoed, sounding suddenly kind of panicked.

Stiles looked quickly around the road, expecting her to pop out of the trees, or out of Scott's car. There was no sign of her, though, and when Stiles looked down at Derek he wasn't growling like there was someone else around.

"What about Allison?" Stiles asked. "Were you supposed to call her or something?"

Scott shook his head. "No, I'm--she thought it should just be you and me tonight?"

Stiles nodded cautiously. "Okay. So no Allison problems right now then."

"But what am I going to tell her?" Scott demanded. "Am I supposed to tell her you're hanging out with a--"

Scott didn't even get to say the word werewolf before Derek growled, snapping casually at Scott's throat. Scott straightened up in a hurry, yanking his arms in against his chest.

"No," Stiles said, mostly unnecessarily except that Scott was incredibly bad at subtext and sometimes needed these things spelled out.

"You can't tell anyone about Derek, especially not Allison. If you tell her then she has to lie to her dad, and that's the best case. Probably she'd think you were crazy or lying, okay? I mean, you had a hard time believing me and you've met Derek."

Scott gave Derek a dubious look and said, "I still don't--"

Derek flashed his eyes red and upped the growl to something that sounded like it ran on diesel.

Stiles stepped between them, shoving Derek aside with his hip, so he could look Scott straight in the eye. "Scott, look. The easiest thing to get someone to believe is the thing they already want to believe, okay? So all you have to do is tell Allison exactly what she expects you to tell her about following me into the woods."

Scott's face crumpled into a pathetic expression of confusion. "But how do I know what she expects?"

Stiles threw his hands up. "You talked to her, right? If she said she thought tonight should be just you and me, that means you told her you were coming after me, right? Because I was going off into the woods by myself all the time?"

Scott's face relaxed into the expression he usually got when he trusted Stiles to explain something to him. He nodded.

"So...." This should be easy; he already knew that Scott could recite almost every word Allison said to him on any given day as well as saving every single text they exchanged, which on any given day could be dozens.

Scott went back to looking puzzled.

"So what did she say?" Stiles demanded.

Scott threw up his hands this time. "She didn't! She kept sort of starting to say something and then she would just say, like, 'Oh, it's obvious what Stiles is upset about,' and then she would look sad! So I just said yeah, but I don't know what that means."

Stiles looked down at Derek, because he needed to know if someone else was hearing this. Derek looked back at him, shook his head slightly, and then turned and walked away into the trees, like he wasn't even willing to be part of this conversation anymore.

Stiles looked back to Scott, who was frowning after Derek.

"Scott. Allison thinks I'm upset about her. The whole you-and-her thing. That's why she's sad about it."

Scott stayed puzzled for about five seconds and then looked like he couldn't decide between embarrassment and outrage, mouth hanging open while his face went back and forth.

Stiles shook his head. "Not like that, dude. I don't want to be dating Allison. Or you. But you were, you know--we've been best friends since we were eight years old, okay, so for half my life I kind of had you all to myself, right? No one else wanted anything to do with either of us, but we had each other. But now you've got Allison, and you made first line, and Lydia Martin talks about you like you aren't something she found on the bottom of her shoe. I'm the weird kid who got lost in the woods for two days and can't play spring sports and thinks peyote is something you make into brownies."

Scott tilted his head, frowning. "What's peyote--"

"Oh my God, not the point," Stiles yelled, startling himself into silence as much as Scott. He took a breath and rubbed his eyes.

"The point is, if you don't know that I have the coolest secret magical wolf friend ever, my life looks pretty sad right now. Allison thinks that I'm bummed out because you spend all your time either hanging out with her or playing lacrosse, so I'm going off to be lonely and depressed and vaguely self-destructive in the woods. So you tell her you followed me, you found me sitting down by the river, and we had a whole long talk about feelings and how I feel bad about being kind of jealous of you having a girlfriend and being on the team and everything, because I'm happy for you but it sucks for me, and now we're okay and you're going to make an effort to hang out with me more."

Scott looked worried to the point of actually being in pain. "Do we actually need to talk about that stuff?"

"No," Stiles said firmly. "Never."

Scott nodded. "But I really am going to hang out more. Just," he glanced into the trees, where Derek had disappeared. "Maybe not in the woods."

Stiles shrugged. "Derek will calm down, dude. He grows on you."

"But he's--he's yours," Scott said. "Like--I mean, I want to, you know, be alone with Allison sometimes and--"

Scott's face went straight to horror with no intervening steps when he realized what he was implying, and Stiles laughed. He knew he was laughing too hard, too long, but it was so horribly close to the tense little knot of worry in his chest, the fear that Derek wouldn't forgive him if he knew, tied up with the guilty but persistent hope that Derek already knew and it could be all right.

"Yeah," Stiles finally gasped. "Yeah, okay, Derek is my friend and not yours. But, I mean--you'd hate it if Allison and I didn't like each other, right? That's why Allison was sad when you were talking, because she was worried that you would feel like you had to choose. I want you and Derek to like each other, too. Or at least be able to hang out without all the growling and glaring and everything. Okay?"

"He's really scary," Scott said, the words bursting out of him like he'd been holding them back for the last hour. "He's a wolf, Stiles. I mean, I have handled some huge dogs at the vet clinic, but even if they're being bad you can tell they're tame."

Stiles opened his mouth to argue--Derek wasn't an animal, wild or tame wasn't how you talked about people--but Scott got a stubborn look and kept going.

"But I can see you're not scared of him, and he saved your life, so--if you like him, then, okay. He's your friend, and I won't say anything to anybody."

Stiles remembered being eight and already knowing he was the weird kid who talked and fidgeted too much, asked too many questions, knew too many things. He remembered the simple, definite way Scott had said, "I like you," and never wavered from it in the eight years since. Stiles lunged forward to hug him, nearly tackling Scott to the ground, and Scott laughed and held on.

"I really like him," Stiles muttered, and it shouldn't have felt like a confession.

"Well, I guess somebody has to," Scott said, and then let go of Stiles to edge toward his car. "You're spending the night at my house, right?"

It wasn't really a question, Stiles knew. He nodded. "I'm just gonna say bye to Derek and go get my car out of the weeds. I'll be right behind you."

Scott nodded and got into his car; when he started it up Stiles looked around for Derek and realized the light was starting to fail. "Derek?"

There was a flash of red and a sound of motion in the trees, and Stiles waved toward Scott and stepped off the road. Derek came out far enough to herd him into the trees, and they both stood still until Scott pulled away.

Derek turned away, trotting off purposefully, and Stiles sighed and followed him. "Derek? Are you not speaking to me?"

Derek snorted and stopped, letting Stiles catch up. This time he moved at a walk, staying directly at Stiles's side until they reached the place where the Jeep was hidden.

"Oh, right. Thanks."

Stiles turned to lean against the Jeep as he reached into his pocket for his keys, and Derek suddenly, for the first time ever, jumped up on his hind legs, dropping his front paws heavily onto Stiles's shoulders. They were eye to eye like this, and Derek's gaze held Stiles perfectly still as much as Derek's weight.

Derek growled, very softly, and tilted his head.

"You're... not happy with me," Stiles interpreted.

Derek nodded.

"About Scott," Stiles added, because that wasn't a very big guess. Even as Derek nodded again, Stiles realized how it might look.

"Dude, I didn't--you know I didn't tell him to follow me," Stiles said, keeping his eyes steady on Derek's and bringing his hands up to Derek's shoulders. If Derek was such a good cold reader, he'd know Stiles was telling the truth.

"I didn't hint, nothing--I had no idea he would do this. I figured him out right away because we've known each other half our lives, but Derek, I swear, I had no idea he would follow me. I would never tell anyone about you, and if I wanted Scott to know I wouldn't have just sprung it on both of you like this."

Derek huffed, nodded again, and dropped down onto all fours. Stiles followed him down, falling to his knees and reaching for Derek, pushing his face against Derek's. Derek sighed but rubbed his cheek firmly against Stiles's before he nudged Stiles back up to his feet and pushed him toward the driver's door.

---

That night Stiles dreamed of Derek standing next to Scott's bed, wolf-shaped as he had been the last time Stiles slept over at Scott's. He had his ears pricked forward and his tail sticking straight out behind him as he glared red-eyed across Stiles to Scott.

"Oh, don't you even," Stiles whispered, wondering whether Derek being jealous too made this more or less likely to be a figment of his deranged imagination. "You can share."

Derek closed his teeth in the sleeve of Stiles's t-shirt and tugged, trying to pull Stiles out of the bed. Stiles shook his head and shoved Derek's nose away.

"No," he whispered, nearly loud enough not to be a whisper at all. "I am not sleeping anywhere but in this nice comfy bed. You fit just fine when you wanted to last week. It is not my problem if you don't want to sleep in Scott's bed."

Derek huffed and put his muzzle on top of Stiles's right hand where it rested flat on the bed. He sat down on the floor and leaned against the side of the bed, keeping Stiles's hand trapped under his jaw.

"Weirdo," Stiles muttered, but he closed his eyes and got comfortable. He was perfectly happy to let Derek hold his hand all night, and they both knew it.

---

Saturday's lacrosse game was at home, but Allison texted and asked him for a ride. When Stiles picked her up she gave him a sad, cautious smile, and Stiles figured that that meant Scott had told her about their imaginary talk. He gave her an uncertain smile back.

"Hey," Stiles said carefully, and realized abruptly that he really, seriously cared about not making her sad. She was Scott's girlfriend, but she was something to Stiles, too. He wasn't sure Allison was actually his friend, but she was definitely important. He didn't want her to feel unsure around him, because of him.

"Um, did Scott talk to you? I'm sorry if I...."

He waved his hand. There was no way to end that sentence, and the trailing off would cover a lot of what Scott might have--ought to have--said.

Allison nodded quickly, her tentative smile stretching a little wider at the mention of Scott. "Yeah, we had kind of a long talk about it. I'm sorry if that's weird. But I guess he probably talks to you about me, too."

"You are his very favorite topic," Stiles agreed, and Allison's smile went rigid for a second.

Stiles winced. "Sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like--it's fine, I'm happy for you guys, I really am."

Allison shook her head. "It's okay. I get it, don't worry about it."

Stiles focused on driving for a few minutes, but when he looked over Allison was staring a little too fixedly out the window.

"Hey," Stiles said. "Hey, Allison, what--"

Allison shook her head, but she sniffed quietly as she turned to face him, and her smile was completely fake.

"Anyway, you might not have to share him with me much longer," she said, her voice brittle and almost angry.

"What," Stiles said blankly, staring. "You're--tell me you're not breaking up with him over this, please, because he's--"

Allison shook her head quickly and turned to look out the window again.

"I just--my parents haven't said anything, but I think we're going to move again soon. There are all these little things they do. I can tell when it's coming."

Stiles faced front, trying to think of what to say. On the one hand, Scott would be wrecked if Allison left. On the other hand Mr. Argent leaving town would probably reduce the odds of Derek actually literally dying.

Allison made a little despairing noise--not quite one of Derek's whines, something closer to a sob--and Stiles looked over to see her hiding her face with her hands.

"No!" Stiles said quickly, feeling a stab of panic at the thought of making her cry. "Allison, no, sorry, I just--that's awful! That's the worst."

Allison shook her head and didn't uncover her face. "It's fine, it would be easier for you if I wasn't around. I get it."

She definitely sounded close to tears now, and Stiles was really, really glad that he knew all the streets between here and the high school well enough to drive without really looking where he was going. He put one hand on Allison's shoulder, squeezing tentatively.

"Allison, come on, seriously, if you move away I won't actually get any more time with Scott. He'll still be just as glued to his phone and Skype as he is now, and he'll be sneaking off to meet you somewhere every weekend."

Allison snorted, but at least she looked up, running her knuckles across her cheeks in quick, angry-looking motions. "Long distance never works, everyone knows that. I knew better than to date anyone--they promised we wouldn't move more than once a semester anymore, but I should have known--I just--Scott is...."

"Hey, I know," Stiles said, taking his hand from her shoulder to wave that away. "Scott's the best friend I've ever had. He's practically the only friend I've ever had who wasn't just somebody I hung out with because we were in the same grade, okay? I know how hard he is to resist, although in my case I mean that in purely platonic, fraternal kinds of ways."

Allison smiled for a second, and then looked away again, shaking her head. "He deserves a girlfriend who's actually here, he shouldn't--it wouldn't be fair to ask him to wait, and he probably--he's on first line, girls will...."

"Allison, seriously, are we talking about the same Scott McCall? He's a one-girl guy. If you lost him on a vacation in the Smoky Mountains he would turn up on your doorstep two weeks later wagging his tail and all footsore and skinny and smelling kind of gross because he's been eating out of rest stop trash cans--"

Allison actually laughed at that and Stiles grinned. "Okay, yeah, that metaphor got away from me. But don't write him off just because you might be going away, okay? And, seriously, if you ever actually want to break up with him, tell me, because you're going to need a restraining order and I can get the paperwork from my dad."

"I don't," Allison said. "I don't want to break up with him. I don't want to move away! I just--God, I just want to be a normal teenage girl having a normal life in one place for a while."

Stiles nodded vigorously because, oh, man, normal would be nice right now. Not so nice that he'd trade Derek for it, but nice. He tried to imagine for a second what he would do if his dad shipped him off to live with his mom's cousins in Portland or something to keep him out of the way, but it was too horrible to contemplate.

"Maybe you will," Stiles said, trying to crowd out the awful thought. "Maybe it won't happen--maybe you're just freaking out because you want to stay so much. Did they say something?"

Allison shook her head, pressing her knuckles against her mouth like she wanted to bite her nails. "Nothing direct. I actually just--I talked to my aunt today, my dad's sister. He was our age when she was born, and my grandma died when Kate was just a baby, so my dad practically raised her--it's more like Kate and I are sisters. Kate always comes to visit if we're going to be staying somewhere for a while. When I was in fifth grade we lived for a whole year in Lawrence, and Kate came and stayed for almost a month. But today she said she can't come visit anytime soon. She says she's busy with work."

"Correlation doesn't actually...."

Allison rolled her eyes and looked away.

"Sorry, sorry. They're your family, you're the expert. But... maybe it's nothing, right?" Stiles gave her a hopeful look. "Maybe it really is just work, and she'll come visit when she's done with whatever."

"Maybe," Allison said dubiously, as they pulled into the school parking lot. She pulled a tiny mirror out of her bag and examined her makeup before she got out of the car, dabbing around her eyes with the backs of her fingers, although Stiles couldn't really tell the difference.

She gave him a sudden bright smile as she put the mirror away. "You won't tell Scott, right? I don't want him to freak out."

"Sure," Stiles said, smiling helplessly back. What was one more secret?

---

Scott had to work the early animal-feeding shift at the vet clinic on Sunday, but afterward he went out to the woods with Stiles. They took lacrosse sticks and a few balls and played catch--Stiles cradling and throwing mostly one-handed, although using just the fingertips of his left hand to steady the stick wasn't bad. After a while Derek either got bored or noticed that Stiles's arms were getting tired; he snatched the lacrosse ball out of midair and ran away with it. Scott and Stiles chased him for a while, using their sticks to extend their reach, but Derek dodged them easily, leading them down to the river to sit on the rocks.

Derek placed himself pointedly between Stiles and Scott, and Stiles just rolled his eyes and settled his cast on Derek's back. He skritched the fur between his shoulders while he and Scott talked about Finstock's precise brand of crazy and how it applied to their Econ homework, and then moved on to Harris and exactly why he hated Stiles so much.

Derek stood up suddenly, moving to Stiles's other side and curling around him, his head and one leg across Stiles's lap. Stiles frowned down at him and then looked over at Scott and saw that he'd frozen with one hand in the air over the spot where Derek had been.

"What the fuck, dude?" Stiles demanded.

Scott yanked his hand out of the air and shoved it into his lap, leaning forward slightly like he could hide the fact that he had hands at all. "I just thought...."

"He's not a dog, Scott," Stiles snapped.

"You pet him!" Scott snapped back. "You're petting him right now."

Stiles opened his mouth to yell and then looked down and realized that, yeah, his right hand was snuggled into the fur at Derek's shoulder. Derek looked kind of amused, and then he closed his eyes and turned his head toward the river. Stiles decided that moving his hand was admitting some kind of defeat. Plus, Derek was lying halfway across Stiles's lap and obviously he didn't intend to move.

"I'm Derek's friend," Stiles snapped, even as some deeply unhelpful part of his brain pointed out that he really didn't touch Scott anywhere close to as much as he touched Derek and maybe friend wasn't the word he wanted. "He doesn't mind it from me. It's not the same from you!"

Scott rolled his eyes. "Fine."

"Dude!" Stiles couldn't let this go. "I'm serious, you can't just do whatever you see me do! I don't try to make out with Allison just because I've seen you do it!"

Scott opened his mouth to yell back and stopped, giving Stiles plenty of time to think about what he'd just said and wonder which thing he least wanted Scott to latch onto there. To say nothing of Derek, who was keeping perfectly still. Stiles could barely even feel him breathing.

The silence went on for a while; Scott shut his mouth and looked out at the river, frowning. Stiles looked up at the sky because he really, really couldn't look down at Derek, although he knew he should apologize for talking about him like he wasn't right there, among a lot of other things. He tried desperately to think of something to say and all he could think of was Allison with her hand pressed against her lips like she was holding something back. All of his secrets hovered in his mouth, too many to breathe through, too many to swallow.

He said, "Speaking of Allison--" at the same time Scott said, "Anyway, I--" and they both stopped.

"What," Scott said, instantly focused. "What about Allison?"

"Nothing, it's nothing." Stiles shook his head, squinting out over the river, bouncing his heels off the bank.

"It's never nothing with you, and now it's Allison," Scott insisted. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Stiles lied, knowing he wouldn't have fooled anyone but Scott, but unable to keep from trying to do something for someone in the whole stupid tangled mess of his life. "She just--when we were at the game last night, she seemed bummed out about something, that's all. She was having fun watching you and everything, but whenever she wasn't cheering she just--she seemed sad. I think something's going on."

Scott looked instantly horrified. "Do you think I did something? Oh, no, what did I do, Stiles? How do I fix it?"

Stiles couldn't help looking down at Derek, who just huffed and tilted his head from side to side without looking up at Stiles.

"I don't think it's you, man," Stiles said. "Like I said, she was happy to be watching you. It's probably something else. It just seemed like she could use some cheering up. You should do something nice for her."

Given a new direction to panic in, Scott didn't ask him anything else about what Allison was sad about or how he knew. They sat and debated the exact parameters of "something nice" and when Scott might be able to pull it off until Derek bullied them both back to their cars.

---

His dad was still working day shifts and Scott had lacrosse practice after school, so Stiles had Derek all to himself for a few days. They ate Oreos and went running in the woods, rain or shine. Derek chose a different route each day; Stiles never had a chance to get bored.

In the hour or two they spent together each day Stiles never ran out of things to talk about that weren't the fact that he was jerking off twice a day and spending half his classes willing away inconvenient hard-ons because Derek was human in his bed every night, with the arms and the stubble and the spooning up silently behind him. He thought he was even doing a pretty good job of not staring creepily at Derek's face, trying to picture him human.

Waking up hurt less every day, in the strictly physical sense. His wrist was healing and his bruises were fading, although the phone bruise on his hip was still a pretty spectacular array of colors. But waking up meant the dream of Derek going away, and that felt worse every time it happened.

On Thursday his phone started vibrating thirty seconds after the bell rang for the end of math. He looked around the room as he dug out his phone--Scott was right there, and he'd just seen Allison--and then he saw it was his dad. He had to steady himself against his desk with one hand as he hit the answer button with the other.

"I'm okay," his dad said first, and Stiles exhaled harshly, grabbing his bag and hurrying out into the hallway without looking around for Scott.

"Don't do that, you scared the hell out of me," Stiles said. "What's going on, did something--"

"I'm fine, Stiles," his dad repeated. "Rodriguez's kids have the stomach flu and I think it's in everybody's best interest if he stays home tonight, but it means I work the overnight for him."

"Oh," Stiles said. This used to be routine, text message or note-on-the-fridge stuff, but his dad hadn't worked a weeknight shift since Stiles's adventure in the woods. "Yeah, okay. I'll be fine."

"You'll be home," his dad said firmly. "I'll stop by around ten and you will be at home in bed."

"That's--ten, seriously? I have a lot of homework tonight, I might be--"

"At home," his dad repeated. "In bed."

"Fine, yes, okay, I'll see you at ten," Stiles said, doing his best imitation of giving in reluctantly at the same time he was thinking of all the hours with Derek he could fit in between the last bell of the day and the last minute before he had to leave to get home at 9:59.

---

Stiles dragged a shopping bag out of the Jeep with him and said, "So, hey, is there anywhere safe to have a tiny, totally controlled campfire?"

Derek looked skeptical, but Stiles waved the marshmallows at him and Derek sighed and turned away, trotting into the trees and leaving Stiles to follow him. They headed toward the river, but pretty soon they started going uphill where Derek had always led him down before.

They reached level ground again pretty quickly, but the trees started to thin out. Stiles could see the sky up ahead, so he knew that they were heading toward the area where the river cut a ravine through the woods. Stiles had only seen it from the bottom, on a Cub Scout canoe trip that had subsequently included him and Scott clinging to an overturned canoe.

He also remembered that the cliffs had seemed to go up forever, and he hung back from the edge, keeping Derek between him and it. Derek looked up at him and bared his teeth, touching them to Stiles's belt.

"Oh, you'll catch me, huh?" Stiles grinned.

Derek huffed agreeably and led him onward. Stiles took the precaution of sliding his fingers into Derek's fur.

He looked everywhere but over the edge as they walked along, keeping an eye out for a good rocky patch of ground, maybe a little way back from the edge. Then Derek stopped sharply, turning his head against Stiles's thigh so he would stop too. Stiles looked down at him and then looked at the ground ahead of them. He realized that he'd been acting like he did when he ran with Derek in the woods, eyeing the scenery and letting Derek worry about the ground underfoot.

Not six feet away there was a crack in the ground ahead of them, extending from the edge almost all the way back to the trees.

When Derek started forward again Stiles stayed behind him, watching the gap in the ground like a snake that might jump up and bite him. He stopped when Derek suddenly dodged around him, but Derek just took the shopping bag from his hand. Derek trotted over to the crack, stepped over it at the narrow end like it was nothing, and then walked up to where it was wide enough that he'd have had to jump across. He turned and met Stiles's eyes and dropped the shopping bag.

Over the constant rushing of the river, Stiles barely heard the soft thump of the bag hitting bottom. He raised his eyebrows.

"So I guess we're going down there?"

Derek grinned and jerked his muzzle. Come here.

Stiles came over, stepping cautiously across the narrow end of the crack like Derek had, and walking down the other side. He knelt beside Derek to look down, putting a hand out to hold on to him again. He had a bad dizzy moment remembering that teetering moment before he'd fallen from the Hale house, but Derek was here and Derek wouldn't let him get hurt.

He could see the grocery bag at the bottom, white against the dark ground. They actually were about as high up as he'd been in the second floor of the Hale house.

Derek dropped down to his belly and scooted up to dangle one leg over the edge.

"What," Stiles said, but it wasn't like Derek was going to explain. Stiles lay down flat on the ground and reached out, putting his hand next to Derek's, extended to the opposite wall of the fissure. His fingers slid smoothly into an indentation in the rock.

Derek gave a low little bark, and opened his mouth in a grin.

"Are you saying--there are handholds? Like a climbing wall or something?"

Derek nodded.

Stiles grinned, and then looked over at his cast. "Uh, is this...."

Derek made a noise that could only be described as a scoff.

"Oh, it is on," Stiles said. "If you have to catch me I will say I told you so all the way down."

Derek replied by squirming away from him and sliding right over the edge. Stiles reached after him automatically, trying to catch him--did catch him, because Derek had stopped right there. He was barely an arm's length away, somehow holding himself up a couple of feet away from the handhold he'd shown Stiles. His head and tail stuck out at ground level, and Stiles had no idea what he was holding on to, but he was doing it.

Stiles sat up and swung his legs over the edge, feeling lower with one foot and then the other, until he had the first two footholds. He leaned forward and grabbed the edge on the other side, shifting his butt off the ground and putting his weight on his feet and one hand. He took another cautious step down, bringing his head level with Derek's, and then looked over and realized that Derek wasn't holding on to anything: he had his front feet and hind feet braced against opposite sides of the crack in the stone, holding himself between them. Past him Stiles could see the sky, and the tops of trees on the other side of the river.

Stiles stared for a second, torn between awesome view and Derek is magical and oh shit we could both plummet to our deaths.

Derek nudged Stiles's shoulder with his nose, and Stiles nodded and took another step down, hooking the fingers of his left hand into a notch at shoulder height. His wrist mostly didn't hurt anymore, but the cast made it hard to grip, so he couldn't really trust his weight to that hand. It was enough to help him balance, though, while he shifted his right hand down to the grip on that side, and then he shifted each of his feet in turn.

This really wasn't so bad--he'd climbed the rock wall in gym. Granted at school there were ropes and harnesses and mats on the floor and he wasn't allowed to do that with one broken wrist, but he had Derek spotting him, which had to be better than being supervised by Finstock.

He got into a rhythm, easing himself down, and Derek kept making little encouraging growly noises beside him. Then Stiles stuck his foot out and found nothing, no notch, not even smooth stone, just empty space.

He yelped, startled, and then there was a soft thump beside and below him--and a totally ordinary crinkle of plastic--and Derek barked. Stiles looked down for the first time, and realized that Derek was standing on the ground, his head level with Stiles's shin.

Stiles kicked his other foot free, dropping down to dangle from his hands. He barely had time to realize that his broken wrist didn't hurt much at all before he let go and slid the last couple of feet down to the ground. He landed softer than he expected to--it was sandy dirt underfoot, not rock.

They were standing on a little slice of beach that was basically a cave--the crack in the cliff widened out, and the opposite wall sloped away, making a roofed space half the size of Stiles's bedroom. There was a little firepit there, with some flat rocks and chunks of wood arranged like seats around it. There was old charred wood still in the center, but there were waist-high tiny trees growing up out of it, brown dead leaves still clinging to their branches. There hadn't been a fire here in a long time.

Derek had walked down the little slope to the edge of the river, and Stiles followed him. The river was mostly screened by reeds and something that couldn't decide if it was a bush or a tree, which would explain why people weren't constantly tying up their canoes here and hanging out. Stiles would totally have tipped the canoe that much earlier trying to get a better look at a cool hideout like this. Derek sniffed along the water's edge, and circled the firepit, sniffing each of the seats, while Stiles stood and watched him. Then Derek looked up, so Stiles looked up too.

The rock that roofed the little space was blackened in a wide swathe where smoke had gathered. Stiles squinted at it, studying the vague patterns, and then all of a sudden Derek was there, clinging to nothing that Stiles could see, just dangling upside down off the rock.

"What," Stiles said, mouth hanging open as he watched Derek look around at the rock he was hanging from.

Derek did some kind of full-body pull-up, pressing himself flat against the stone, wriggled, and dropped. He twisted in mid-air, landing on his feet like a cat, and trotted over to Stiles, making an up, up gesture with his muzzle.

"Uh, no," Stiles said, staring wide-eyed at Derek.

That had been more magical and impossible than anything else he'd ever seen Derek do. Sure, a wolf who was also a person was magic, but apparently the person Derek also was was Spider-Man.

"No magical werewolf acrobatics from me, dude, I can barely handle the climbing wall."

Derek huffed and pointedly turned his head to look where he'd just been. Stiles followed his gaze automatically.

There was a cleared patch in the soot now, wiped clean by Derek's fur, and visible in the middle of it was a word. Stiles pulled his phone out of his pocket as he moved to stand right under it, holding up the light.

DEREK.

The curves of the D and the R were jagged, coming to points, like they had been scratched into the rock with more power than precision. Stiles realized that the reason he could see the carving so well now was that the scratches had filled with soot, still visible when Derek wiped the surface layer away to show the lighter stone beneath.

Stiles looked down and found Derek looking up at him, grinning open-mouthed and looking ridiculously pleased with himself.

"That's you," Stiles said. "You--you knew right where it was, and it's been covered up with smoke for years, so you couldn't have done it since I met you."

Derek tilted his head.

"You really are Derek Hale," Stiles explained, and he dropped a little too fast to sit on one of the rocks by the firepit. "You--this is the first time you could ever tell me your name, instead of just sort of agreeing when I called you that. You really are, though, you're really Derek Hale. For real, like--concrete evidence. I cannot possibly be making this up now. You're Derek Hale, and you're a werewolf, and you brought me to your secret beach cave hideout so you could tell me your name."

Derek huffed and shook his head and trotted away, leaving Stiles in the midst of his adrenaline rush or minor nervous breakdown--they could quibble about definitions when Derek wasn't abandoning him. There was a rustle of plastic and Derek came back, dropping the shopping bag at his feet.

Stiles laughed. "Right! Yeah, what was I thinking, you're a werewolf and you brought me to your secret beach cave hideout because it's the best place to make s'mores. Got it."

Derek bounced away again, coming back with some broken-off tree-bush branches to use for skewers and dropping them on top of the shopping bag.

"Okay, right," Stiles said, shaking his head to try to get rid of the weird feeling of his head cracking open and too much stuff pouring in all at once. "Right. I guess first we need a fire."

He uprooted the little saplings from the firepit and set fire to them with the lighter he'd swiped from one of the smokers' hangouts at school, adding some broken-off twigs and leaves stripped from the marshmallow sticks. When there were a few tiny flames going he belatedly looked around to see if there was anything to burn other than the big, unwieldy chunks of wood that served as seats. There was a neat stack of firewood piled up along the back wall; Stiles got up and piled a few logs into his arm and came back to the little flickering almost-fire, which Derek was watching just as intently as he'd watched the blue flame of the Sterno can the first time Stiles had made s'mores with him.

Stiles eased a log in among the charred lumps and the tiny flames, breaking off pieces of bark to light and strategically spread the fire around. He scorched his fingers a couple of times, but the fire was mesmerizing and Stiles barely noticed. By the time he made sure the first log had caught and added another, his brain had quieted down and it didn't seem so earthshattering anymore that Derek was exactly who Stiles had thought he was.

Stiles settled back onto a rock and brushed off the knees of his jeans. Derek took his eyes off the fire just long enough to bring Stiles the grocery bag and the stripped sticks.

"Yeah, okay, but we have to eat some actual food first," Stiles insisted, pulling out the package of hot dogs. "Look, I brought condiments and everything. No buns, you seemed kind of anti-carbs."

As it turned out, Derek preferred his hot dogs raw, and made little disgusted noises while Stiles ate his blackened with packets of ketchup and mustard squeezed over them.

Derek also worried at a packet of pickle relish until Stiles ripped it open for him. "Dude, you do not even get to criticize if you're eating that."

Derek just stuck out his tongue--still half-covered in little green bits--and Stiles stuck his out right back.

When they'd demolished the hot dogs and assorted condiment packets, Stiles sat back for a while, listening to the river outside. The fire hissed and snapped. Derek, lying beside him, watched it like he was going to start a fight with it at any second. It was nice here, hidden and quiet and peaceful.

Stiles lasted about two minutes and then he poked Derek. "My ass is going numb."

Derek snapped at his poking hand, but then stood up and trotted down to the river again. Stiles followed him, looking back to keep an eye on the fire when he noticed that Derek wasn't. Derek looked around, circling the space without stopping to sniff anything; Stiles realized he was thinking and kept quiet.

Finally Derek stopped by the woodpile and made another up, up motion. Stiles walked over next to him and pulled his phone out again, noticing that it was almost totally dark back here now. He held the phone up, shining the light on the wall up above his head. Derek jumped up and smacked his paw next to a series of scratches that Stiles recognized in the next second as a name. LAURA.

The U was almost a V, but her R was a little more curved than Derek's. Stiles tilted his phone back and forth, looking, because where there were two....

The next one he saw was PETER, which made his heart thump strangely in his chest. But there were other names too, names he knew from their shared gravestone: both of Derek's parents, and one of his aunts. It took him a minute to realize that EUGIE--with an awkward, angular G and a U that looked just like Laura's--was short for Eugenia. Grandma Hale.

Stiles looked back at the fire, and now he saw the eight seats around it. This hadn't just been Derek's hideout, or Derek and Laura's. This had been his family's place for generations.

Stiles looked back up at the wall, and then backed up and shone his phone on the ceiling near Derek's name. There were a few names scratched into the stone that he didn't recognize, but there were names missing, too.

"Derek," Stiles said, without looking down at him, because he wasn't sure he was allowed to ask. "What about Heather and Mark? Why aren't they here?"

Derek didn't make a sound, just tugged on Stiles's shirt. Stiles lowered the phone and let Derek tug him back out to the crack where he'd climbed down. The wall he'd come down curved in a little bit too, right at the bottom, which was why the steps didn't go all the way to the ground. The space it covered was small, though, a kid's hidey-hole. Even Derek couldn't stand upright in it. But he dropped to his belly and crawled in, so Stiles got down and followed him.

Derek rolled onto his back and Stiles followed suit, holding up his phone again to light the stone overhead.

Heather was written neatly on the stone in purple marker. Mark was in green. Their parents were there, too--Thomas in black, printed with the same childish carefulness, Angela in blue, an adult scrawl. There were a few other names, too, but not as many as on the other side.

Stiles reached up to touch the names, and Derek squirmed over and touched his nose to Stiles's fingertips. He wasn't pushing him away or telling him to stop, he was....

Stiles drew back his hand and Derek tapped his nose against the ends of Stiles's fingertips, then touched the spot where Heather had written her name--written, not scratched.

"They didn't have claws," Stiles realized. "They weren't werewolves, is that it? Some of the people in your family were just regular people?"

Derek nodded.

Stiles stared at the marker and wondered how old Heather and Mark had been when they were sure they'd never be able to carve their names into stone with their own hands and did this instead. He'd always had them in his head as Big Kids, older than him, but neither of them had lived to go to high school.

I wonder if she knew she was killing regular kids, he thought.

It was only then that he realized he'd had it in his head for a while now that the mysterious woman from out of town who'd arranged the Hale fire might have done it because she found out that they were werewolves. For a second he was excited--he'd figured out motive, he had to tell his dad, that could help narrow down who the woman was--and then he realized that of course he couldn't tell his dad that. He couldn't tell his dad about Derek, or about the rest of the Hales, even if there was any chance his dad would believe him.

Derek made a little whining noise, nudging him like he could tell Stiles was upset about something. Stiles looked over at him, heart sinking lower. He couldn't tell Derek, either.

Even if he hadn't promised his dad he wouldn't say anything about the reopened investigation, he couldn't say any of that to Derek. He couldn't tell him that the supposedly accidental fire that killed his whole family might have been not only murder but genocide. Derek didn't need more reasons not to trust humans, and it might not be true, anyway. Even if it was, there was no reason to upset Derek with it before they knew for sure, when there wasn't anything Derek could do. Even if he remembered some suspicious woman from six years ago, it wasn't like he could give a description or pick her out of a police lineup.

Stiles looked back up at the writing on the ceiling and swallowed all his secrets, trying to get his breathing under control.

"This is--this is a big deal, isn't it," he said, because he had to say something. He ran his fingers over the names. "You bringing me here, I mean. This place was just for your family, wasn't it?"

Derek crawled half on top of him to press his face to Stiles's, rubbing their cheeks together in the way that Stiles was beginning to understand. Because this place was for Derek's family, and he'd brought Stiles here. Stiles wasn't just some kid Derek hung out with because he refused to go away.

Stiles hooked his arm around Derek's neck and said, quietly, "I could bring a marker next time, if that's okay with you. I could put my name up here."

Derek didn't respond at all for a few seconds, long enough for Stiles to replay everything that had just happened and try to figure out how he'd gotten it wrong. Then Derek pushed even closer, laying down half on top of him, his head tucked close against Stiles's. Stiles put both arms around him and ignored the cold, damp sand under him. His ass could go as numb as it wanted, this time.

The screen of his phone went dark, leaving them in the gloomy darkness of late afternoon. The fire was still hissing away, and Stiles could see the light of it jumping on the stone wall across from him, but Derek blocked his view of the fire itself. Stiles closed his eyes, settling in, taking slow breaths and resisting the urge to fidget. It was easier with Derek planted on his chest.

Derek growled suddenly, a low ominous rumble Stiles could feel vibrating in his own ribs. He opened his eyes and pushed up on his elbows as Derek lifted off him. Derek's eyes were glowing red and his hackles were up. He backed out of the hidey-hole and stood looking up. Stiles scrambled out after him and looked up too, although there was nothing he could see; it was getting close to dark even up on top of the cliff.

Derek huffed and moved toward Stiles, nudging his arm. It took Stiles a few seconds to realize that Derek was specifically tapping against the outside of his cast.

"Scott's up there?"

Derek nodded and then wagged his head as he made a low, plaintive howl, his whole body radiating annoyance that contradicted the sadness of the sound.

"Calling for us," Stiles translated.

Derek huffed and jabbed his nose into Stiles's belly.

"Calling for me," Stiles allowed. "Sorry, Derek. I haven't hung out with him in a few days, I guess he figured he'd come say hi after lacrosse practice. He must have realized my dad was working late tonight."

Derek tilted his head, giving Stiles a sharp look.

"Oh," Stiles said. "Uh, yeah, so my dad's working late tonight, so I was going to hang out for a couple more hours, that's why..." Stiles waved toward the fire and the s'mores they hadn't gotten to make yet.

"We can go up, I'll put out the fire--or I can go tell Scott it's not a good time, or--"

Derek huffed, shaking his head. He nudged Stiles toward the fire, and then tapped one forefoot pointedly on the ground in front of himself and gestured, up.

"You're going to--dude, you don't have to bring him down here just because he showed up in the woods, I know you don't like him that much."

I want to be the only one, Stiles didn't say. I want this to be just mine, I want you to be just mine.

But Derek huffed and shook his head and pushed Stiles toward the fire again, and before Stiles could argue any further, he made an impossible leap upward and vanished.

Stiles went and sat by the fire, adding another log and watching the sparks fly up. There wasn't much smoke; it would take a long time for Derek's name to be hidden again.

He stood up again once the fire was going well and went to stand looking up between the walls of rock. Pretty soon he heard Scott's voice calling his name, sounding worried.

"Scott," Stiles yelled back. "Is Derek being an asshole?"

There was a moment of silence--Stiles could picture them stopping dead in the trees to glare at each other--and then he heard Scott's running feet.

Stiles remembered what he hadn't seen from up there and his heart slammed into high gear. "Scott! Be careful, don't--"

Scott's face appeared above him, and Scott's windmilling arms, and then Scott was jerked backward.

"Tell Derek thank you," Stiles yelled. His brain felt like it was full of bees, buzzing and bright.

"Let me go," Scott snapped. "I see it now! I won't fall!"

"Tell him thank you," Stiles repeated, pressing a hand against his racing heart. He could see it with awful clarity, Scott falling, maybe slamming against stone on the way down, and the sick solid final thump at the end, his head bouncing....

Derek stuck his head out over the edge and barked once, sharply, and Stiles waved and nodded, forcing himself to take a deep breath. Derek was safe, Scott was safe, he was safe. Nothing bad had happened. No one had fallen.

"You can climb down," Stiles called up, when he tore his eyes away from Derek and realized that Scott was looking down at him, too. "It's just like the rock wall at school. Derek will spot you."

Scott looked over at Derek, and then looked down again. "Uh. Sorry. And thank you. And... please?"

Derek huffed and jumped down to do his bridge thing again, and Stiles watched Scott turn around and stick his legs over the edge. It was like holding his finger over a flame; when he couldn't take it anymore he went and sat down by the fire with his back to them and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

He breathed in and out, in and out, listening only to the sound of the fire. After a while Scott's hand was on his shoulder and Derek was nosing at his throat from the other side.

Stiles picked his head up, dropping his hands. "Hey, guys, you made it! Awesome, now it's a party."

"Stiles," Scott said, giving him a gentle shove.

Stiles looked up at him, conscious of Derek's steady, persistent presence on his other side. Scott was giving him the you're not fooling me look, which stung. But he couldn't actually fool Scott on much of anything when Scott decided to pay attention.

"I'm sorry, okay?" Scott said. "I didn't mean to freak you out like that. I heard you talking to your dad, and I figured you were going to try and stay out until the last second. I thought we'd better be able to say I was in the woods with you if your dad found out you were out here tonight. But if you want me to go, I'll go."

"Scott, no, I don't," Stiles said immediately, because he could feel the mean temptation to say yes, go, get out squirming in his chest. "God, you're making me feel like a bigger asshole than Derek."

Derek growled softly next to him, snapping his teeth next to Stiles's ear, and Stiles just flapped a hand at him. Scott still looked uncertain.

"Stay," Stiles repeated, more firmly. "We were gonna make s'mores. You can toast the marshmallows for Derek's, he likes them like you make them."

"Oh, can I?" Scott said, with a wry smile just like his mom's. "Lucky me."

But he was already going to dig the marshmallows out of the shopping bag and wipe off the sticks Stiles had left by the fire, so Stiles figured he'd gotten through that all right.

Derek nudged him, and when Stiles looked over Derek pressed his cheek against Stiles's. Stiles closed his eyes and leaned into it, saying lightly, "You really will like Scott's better, he's completely anal about marshmallows. Not like me."

Derek huffed and stepped back, and when Stiles looked over at Scott, he was staring steadily at the marshmallow he was holding above the fire. Stiles realized he was deliberately not looking.

He felt a weird twist of embarrassment even though there was nothing to be embarrassed about; he and Derek had basically just been hugging. Stiles moved around the fire to grab some marshmallows for himself. Derek moved around the fire in the opposite direction, sitting on the other side of Scott and watching the marshmallow he was toasting.

Scott had a steady-handed patience with this that Stiles was sort of impressed by at the same time that he found it totally unfathomable. While Scott carefully rotated a marshmallow above the flames to get it perfectly, impossibly light brown all over, Stiles stuck a couple of them on a stick and then waved them through the flames. They caught fire after a few seconds, and Stiles blew them out and then waved them around a little more before he started eating them.

Derek made a disapproving noise, and Scott said, "I know, right? Gross."

Stiles bared his marshmallow-y teeth at them both, and Derek snorted while Scott just shook his head and took his marshmallow away from the fire, offering it to Derek, who bit it delicately off the skewer.

"You guys aren't allowed to gang up on me," Stiles announced after he'd swallowed, and Scott just swatted his hand away from the marshmallows and took a couple more to toast. Derek, still licking marshmallow off his teeth, gave Stiles a skeptical look.

You're not allowed to like him better, Stiles thought, and it was stupid, but... everyone liked Scott better. Derek was supposed to be Stiles's.

Derek gave a short, sharp bark, and Stiles looked at him across the fire. Derek just huffed and shook his head again--no, you idiot--and Stiles ducked his head, smiling. He dug in the grocery bag for the graham crackers and chocolate, so he could have them ready before he made more marshmallows.

It got kind of easy, then. Scott and Stiles talked in little bursts between s'mores, catching each other up on stuff they hadn't talked about in the last few days--mostly Scott's alarmingly elaborate date plans for tomorrow night and cool places Stiles hadn't known existed in the woods until Derek made him run past them. Stiles's hands were in the air, sketching the shape of this awesome tree that grew halfway out into the river, when Scott suddenly started laughing and Derek got up and trotted around the fire to Stiles.

"What--" Stiles said, and Derek huffed in his ear and then licked the side of his head.

Scott laughed harder, waving at his own hair. "You have marshmallow...."

Stiles tried to shove Derek away, but Derek snapped his teeth loudly beside Stiles's ear and went back to licking the marshmallow out of Stiles's hair in hard, wet strokes.

Scott's laughter hitched as he folded down over his knees, shoulders shaking with the force of it, and Stiles said, "Scott, inhaler."

Scott nodded and waved his hand at Stiles, giggling wheezily and digging in his pocket.

Stiles gave Derek another shove. Derek stood his ground, but let it go after another lick or two. He walked around Stiles to cock his head in Scott's direction as Scott shook his inhaler and then took a huff between giggles.

Stiles ran his fingers over the licked-clean spot on the side of his head, wiped his hand dry on his pants, and then reached for a few more marshmallows. He decided to be calm and dignified and try just toasting them instead of setting them on fire, but before they even started to brown, he heard Scott shake his inhaler again. He looked up and watched Scott take another puff, and then looked over at Derek, who was sitting very still, staring at Scott intently.

"Scott?"

Scott pocketed his inhaler and shrugged. "No big. Happens sometimes."

Stiles's marshmallows burst into flame, making him jump, and he jerked them away from the fire and blew them out. His stomach turned at the thought of more sugar, though, and he snapped off the end of the stick and threw it into the fire, and then broke the stick into pieces, feeding them in one by one.

When he looked up, Scott was staring into the fire with a frown of concentration, mouth pressed tightly shut, nostrils flaring on every breath. Derek was still sitting like a statue, watching him, and Stiles had a feeling that that meant he could hear what was going on in Scott's lungs and it wasn't good.

"Scott," Stiles said, the sick feeling in his stomach going cold.

Scott shook his head. "I'm okay."

Even just those two words sounded breathless, though.

"Say the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," Stiles said, as gently as he could when he wanted to scream.

Scott glared at him. "That's for. Typing."

But they both heard the break in just those few words, and they both knew Scott couldn't say a whole sentence without gasping for breath. That was one of the danger signs Stiles had been taught when he was eight, before Scott's mom would let Scott play at his house.

Scott looked away again, scowling into the fire. Stiles made himself take a deep breath, to remember that he could.

"Scott, I gotta at least call your mom, if not dispatch."

Scott shrugged stiffly without looking away from the fire. Derek stood up and took a couple of hesitant steps closer to Scott, and then sat down again with a little space still between them. Scott didn't look at Derek, either.

"Okay," Stiles said. "Okay, your mom first, we'll see what she says."

Stiles pulled his phone out and hit the power button, lighting up the screen. Even as he unlocked it his eyes went automatically to the battery meter which was, shit, less than half....

And he had no signal. Because he was in a fucking cave in a ravine in the middle of the preserve.

"Fuck," Stiles muttered, popping up to his feet and walking down to the river, holding his phone up and leaning out into the reeds. Nothing. He walked over between the rock walls, where he could see the sky, holding his phone up overhead. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He tried dialing anyway, staring at Ms. McCall's dubious face and the little blinking dots that indicated the phone was trying to connect. She had never let Scott come out and play in the woods when they were kids; that was why Scott had never met Grandma Hale or any of the other Hales before the fire.

The screen went black. Call failed.

Derek barked, and Stiles went back over to the fire. Scott was leaning forward now, mouth open, and Stiles could hear him wheezing on every breath.

"Scott, slight problem, I have no bars. Lemme see your phone."

Scott shook his head. "Dead."

Stiles made a strangled noise totally beyond his own control, sort of a wail colliding with a growl.

Scott snorted. "Battery, Stiles."

"I know you mean the battery," Stiles snapped, "I just, Scott--can you try your inhaler again? Can you--we have to do something. This is bad."

"I know," Scott rasped, but he took his inhaler from his pocket and took another huff. He made a face, shaking his head and spitting. "Yuck. Tires."

Stiles gritted his teeth, letting only a deranged hum escape his mouth instead of Scott, no, don't say that, your last words can't be 'yuck, tires.' Because that was what was happening here: they were alone in the woods and Scott was having an asthma attack. If it didn't let up then Scott could die. Scott could die right in front of him.

"Okay, no," Stiles said, his voice coming out shaky--bad enough, apparently, to steal Derek's attention from Scott for a second, although he only turned his head.

Stiles shook his head and stood up. "I'm going to climb out and get to where I can call for help."

"No," Scott gasped, pushing up onto his feet. Stiles and Derek both lunged in to keep him from toppling over as his face went a horrible gray-beige like concrete, even in the warm light of the fire.

"Don't," Scott said, closing both hands in Stiles's shirt even as Stiles took half his weight. "Don't go."

"Scott, I'll be back in like, five, ten minutes tops--"

"Long enough," Scott said, and Stiles knew exactly what he meant. Long enough for Scott's breathing to stop completely. Long enough for Scott to asphyxiate.

"Derek will stay with you," Stiles tried desperately, glancing down at Derek, who was pressed up against their legs. "He's good at taking care of people, I'm good at calling for help. It's a logical division of labor."

"Don't leave me." Scott's voice was just a hollow whisper. "With a wolf."

Even with Scott clinging to him, even knowing exactly how scared Scott was, Stiles couldn't help saying, "He's not a wolf, he's Derek. He doesn't b--"

Stiles's teeth snapped together. It made a much duller sound than the click of Derek's teeth when he did that. He looked down at Derek, who looked up at him and then took a couple of deliberate steps away from Stiles and Scott and sat down.

"Is that," Stiles said to him, which was dumb, because of course he knew that, everyone knew that was how it worked. That was how werewolves worked. If anybody had asked Stiles anytime in the last three weeks he'd have said he knew that: if a werewolf bit you, you turned into a werewolf. He knew that about werewolves. He'd just somehow managed not to know that about Derek until right now.

"Derek, if you bit Scott--"

Scott flailed against him, rocking back briefly onto his own two feet before Stiles caught him and eased him down to sit. His whole face was contorted with horror as he looked back and forth between Stiles and Derek.

Derek backed up a few more steps, shaking his head, and he barked sharply.

"Okay, okay, you're not biting Scott," Stiles agreed, kneeling beside Scott, who was still clutching his shirt. "But, hypothetically, if you bit someone who was okay with it for whatever reason, would that turn them into a werewolf?"

Derek huffed and wagged his head back and forth.

"Maybe," Stiles translated. "So, what, either it works or it doesn't?"

Derek snapped his teeth, eyes flashing red, and then went down in a heap.

"That means dead," Scott whispered.

Derek stood up again and nodded.

"Oh," Stiles said, blinking, reshuffling the possibilities in his head. "Okay, so. Maybe dead, maybe a werewolf, but--if somebody was--if they were gonna--could it help? Is there a chance it could help?"

Derek huffed, seeming to slump a little, and tilted his head back and forth uncertainly.

So maybe. Maybe it could help, if someone was going to die anyway of something that a werewolf wouldn't suffer from--like, say, asthma.

"Scott," Stiles said, looking him in the eye. He looked less horrified now, but he was back to stubborn.

"No," Scott said--whispered. There was barely any breath behind it.

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against Scott's cheek. "I don't know what else to do, dude. This is really bad, and I can't call for help, and even if I could they might not get here fast enough, because we are in the middle of fucking nowhere. And there's no way you can climb out like this, and I can't carry you and I don't think Derek can give you a piggyback ride when he's doing his Spider-man thing, so--we have to do something."

"No," Scott whispered again, pushing against Stiles's chest.

Stiles let Scott push him away, even though there wasn't enough force in Scott's arms to free him from a determined kitten. Stiles sat down exactly arm's length from Scott, and Derek came and pressed up close by his side, keeping Stiles between him and Scott like one of them needed to be protected from the other.

Scott looked away from them, but Stiles could see the quick shallow motion of his breaths.

He couldn't bully Scott into this, and he couldn't force Derek to do anything, so he was just going to have to talk them both around. Somehow. Stiles looked over at Derek, who seemed like the easier one to persuade right now. If Scott lost consciousness, if it was a last resort--he had to have Derek convinced, at least.

"Do you remember when I had that panic attack?" Stiles asked, glancing over at Derek and then fixing his gaze on Scott's hands, which flexed in and out of fists with every breath. "I thought you were going to bite me that time."

Derek nodded.

"You... you might have?" Stiles asked. Scott twitched at that. "You almost did?"

Derek nodded again, more emphatically.

"Almost. But you didn't," Stiles said. "Because I was okay? Because I really could breathe?"

Derek tilted his head back and forth and then moved in until he could tap his nose to Stiles's chest, and then drew back just enough for Stiles to see him shake his head.

Stiles stole a glance toward Scott, who looked paler than ever and had his face tilted away in that pretending not to listen way that Stiles had seen on him sometimes, back before his dad left. When he didn't want to hear what he was hearing but knew he had to know what was going down.

"Because I said no," Stiles translated, not bothering not to say it to Scott. "I didn't understand, though. What it would do."

Derek huffed and nodded.

Stiles looked back at Derek. "So you--you don't bite people who don't want it, or don't understand. But you would have? If I hadn't started breathing again, if I'd really...."

Derek nodded, and pressed his cheek to Stiles's.

"You wouldn't have let me die," Stiles said softly, hearing the ragged gasps of Scott's breath around his own words. "You would have done everything you could to save me."

Scott moved abruptly, folding down over his knees again. Stiles dropped onto his knees, shoving Scott half-upright. He looked paler, like he was fading into grayscale. He didn't try to speak, but he still met Stiles's eyes. He was conscious and he'd been listening. Stiles pulled his phone out and shone the light on Scott's face.

"Scott, your lips are blue, you're--Scott, fuck, please."

Scott looked scared now, all the stubbornness gone. He was panting now but he obviously wasn't getting much air.

"Please tell him it's okay, please. He's all we've got here. I don't know what else to do," Stiles whispered, feeling strangled himself.

Scott looked over at Derek, and his mouth moved around something that Stiles couldn't hear.

He realized then that Derek hadn't actually said yes to biting Scott even if Scott wanted him to, but when Stiles looked, Derek was walking over to them. He touched his muzzle to Scott's cheek and Scott nodded. Stiles adjusted his grip on Scott, scooting in closer to take Scott's weight, and Derek pressed his cheek against Scott's and then lowered his head, nosing at the bottom of Scott's hoodie.

Scott reached down and grabbed the bottom of his shirt, tugging it up to let Derek get at him, and Stiles put his hand over Scott's, lacing their fingers together. Scott's whole face was screwed up in a flinch of anticipation, and Stiles looked down to find Derek not looking much happier, just standing there with his nose an inch from Scott's side, his whole body straining away from what he was about to do.

"Derek," Stiles said. "Please, hurry."

Derek didn't look up; he just darted in.

Stiles didn't see the actual bite, which was hidden by his and Scott's hands and the bulk of Scott's shirts, but he felt it in the jerk of Scott's body against his.

Stiles held his breath, waiting for magic, or Scott to suddenly inhale and sit up, or--

"Oh, shit, is he going to turn into a wolf, too? Is he going to be stuck like you?"

Derek picked his head up and looked back and forth from Stiles to Scott and gave the I don't know shake that stood in for a shrug.

Scott, leaning against Stiles, said nothing. He didn't even twitch.

"No," Stiles whispered, closing his hand more tightly on Scott's, and took his other hand away from holding on to Scott to press clumsily against his throat, the edge of his cast digging in. There was a frantic pulse there, but Stiles couldn't tell if it was Scott's or his own, pounding in his fingers. Stiles felt horribly cold, all of a sudden. He had to put his arm back around Scott to keep hold of him as he started to shiver.

"Oh, fuck, Derek, what if--fuck, Scott, don't die, don't die, please don't be dead, please, you can't die on me--"

Derek stepped in, curling around them both, his tail following Stiles's arm around Scott, his muzzle on the back of Stiles's neck, pressing his head down. Stiles hid his face against the hood of Scott's sweatshirt, clinging tightly to him and trying not to actually sob while he listened desperately for Scott's breathing.

It had been too long, by now. It had to have been too long; in a minute he was going to have to let go and lay Scott down and realize that he'd just let his friend die--just got his scared, dying friend bitten by a wolf. What was he going to tell Scott's mom, what would he tell his dad, oh God....

Scott's hand squirmed away from his and Stiles looked up in time to see Scott frowning as he prodded his side and mumbled, "That really freaking hurts."

"Don't poke it, you dumbass," Stiles said, choking down the bubble of hysterical laughter he could feel in his chest. "Are you--holy shit, dude, are you okay? Are you a werewolf?"

Scott sniffled and then took a breath deep enough for Stiles to feel it. Derek uncurled from around them and ducked his head to nose at the bite, and Scott twitched away, coughing and shoving at Derek. "Ow, that tickles."

Derek lifted his head and growled, eyes flashing red.

Scott went very still, pressing back against Stiles, and Stiles said, "Derek, don't be a jerk, he just almost died."

Derek huffed, but his eyes went back to gray and Scott didn't twitch when Derek ducked his head to look at the bite again.

"So?" Stiles said, when neither Scott nor Derek said anything else. "Verdict? Is my best friend a werewolf now?"

Derek gave another I don't know shake and sat down next to them, studying Scott, who shrugged and didn't seem inclined to jump to his feet, or even support his own weight, anytime soon. "I'm not dead. I guess maybe I feel less like ass than I usually do after a bad asthma attack?"

"Yeah, speaking of," Stiles said, tugging his hand away from Scott's to poke Scott in the center of the chest. "Since when is your inhaler not working a thing that happens sometimes? Or--don't tell me that thing was empty, you're not that dumb."

Scott shook his head. "The last few weeks, it's happened a couple times. Not that bad, just it didn't go away as quickly as it usually does. Lacrosse, I guess."

"Just lacrosse?" Stiles prodded, because even without wolf-senses he could hear Scott not saying something.

Scott shrugged again, ducking his head. "The first time was, uh. In the woods."

"When you were looking for me," Stiles finished for him. "Dammit, Scott, you shouldn't--"

"Shut up," Scott snapped. "No way was I not going to help look for you, so just shut up."

Derek punctuated that with a snap of teeth, and nosed Stiles's poking finger aside to press his face against Scott's chest and then his cheek to Scott's cheek.

Stiles stared for a second--that was his, that was the way Derek touched him--and then he huffed and tilted his head back. "Crap. Now you two are going to be ganging up on me and you're both werewolves."

"Whatever," Scott said, and finally did sit up straight, tugging his shirts down to cover the bite. "I think we both know Derek still likes you better. And I definitely still like you better than I like Derek. No offense, Derek."

Derek huffed and shook his head, but he also pushed in past Scott to press his cheek against Stiles's. Stiles put his arms around Derek's neck, squeezing his eyes shut, because, holy shit, all of that had just happened, and....

"Crap, what time is it?" Stiles said abruptly, pulling back and yanking his mostly-useless phone out of his pocket. "Scott, is your mom expecting you home?"

"Nah, she's working a six-to-six. She's got the car. Danny dropped me off at the preserve gates after practice and I put my bike in the Jeep. I figured you could give me a ride back?"

"Back to my house," Stiles said firmly. "You may or may not be a supernatural creature who may or may not be about to transform into a full-on wolf, you're not staying home alone tonight."

Derek nodded emphatically at that, growling for emphasis, and Scott put his hands up in surrender. "Not arguing, you guys! Not arguing. Jeez."

---

Derek wouldn't let them try to climb out for nearly an hour after Scott was bitten. By that time Scott was breathing and moving around normally, and Stiles's hands had pretty much stopped shaking. Derek spotted both of them all the way up the wall, Scott first and then Stiles. Stiles found the cast more obnoxious going up than he had coming down, but he had apparently passed beyond the ability to feel fear at some point in the last few hours. It occurred to him that he might fall because he couldn't hold on properly, but he couldn't believe it would actually happen on top of everything else, and it didn't.

Derek kept circling them as they walked through the woods toward Stiles's Jeep. He would sniff at each of them without breaking stride and then go a little way ahead or double back, only to come racing up to circle around them again.

Halfway back they came to a break in the trees that showed the half-moon hanging in the sky ahead of them. Stiles stopped short and looked over at Scott. Scott stopped and looked back at Stiles, frowning in confusion, and then up at the moon. Stiles saw realization break over his face, stark in the moonlight, and he looked back to Stiles with a slightly pained thoughtful expression.

"I don't know," Scott said. "I don't feel any different."

Derek huffed behind them and then snapped his teeth, first at Stiles's heels, and then at Scott's. They both darted forward a few steps before falling back to a walk with Derek marching along between them.

When they did get to the Jeep, Stiles dug out the first aid kit and a flashlight. Scott pulled up his shirts to show him the bite, and Stiles turned the flashlight on and tucked it into Scott's fingers, bracing it against his side to shine in the right direction.

Stiles hadn't looked at the bite before. The oval ring of punctures in Scott's flesh was sickening; Stiles winced and turned his face away for a minute. Derek trotted into his line of sight and just stared at him, patient and implacable. Stiles exhaled and nodded and straightened up. Derek came to stand against his hip as Stiles ripped open an antiseptic packet and wiped the blood off of Scott's skin.

There was gummy half-dried blood caked over the bite itself, and a few lines of blood that had trickled down to Scott's jeans, but that was all.

"This is weird," Stiles said, frowning and looking down at Derek.

"Isn't this weird? Shouldn't it have bled more? I never even thought to put pressure on it. He should have been bleeding all over the place."

Derek gave yet another I don't know shake, and something finally crystallized in Stiles's brain. He stared down at Derek until Derek looked up at him.

"Stiles?" Scott said. "I don't know why it didn't bleed that much but I'm getting cold and this flashlight is heavy, so could you just put the bandage on already?"

"Yeah," Stiles said, grabbing the biggest gauze pad in the kit. "Sorry, here."

He got the gauze taped down to Scott's skin and let Derek sniff around the edges of the bandage before Scott let his arm down, dropping his shirt and letting the flashlight dangle in his hand, casting a pool of light on the ground.

Scott didn't try to shove Derek away this time, though, just offered his empty hand palm-up and said, "Derek, can I get in the car now?"

Derek touched his nose to Scott's hand and huffed, then herded him into the passenger's seat of the Jeep. He jumped up after Scott to nose at him once he was sitting down, supervising him while he put his seatbelt on.

When he finally jumped back down to the ground Stiles slammed the door on Scott and said, "I gotta ask Derek some questions, okay? I'll be back in a minute."

Scott just nodded, tilting his head back against the seat.

Stiles turned and walked off, not looking down to check whether Derek was with him.

Derek stopped him about ten feet into the trees, closing his teeth on Stiles's jeans. As usual, Derek used teeth on Stiles's clothes but not his skin. Derek had always--almost always--been so careful not to bite him by accident.

Stiles pushed his nose away and Derek let go long enough for Stiles to turn and crouch down to look him in the eye.

"You were born like this, weren't you," Stiles said, because he'd kind of known that. "You and Laura."

Derek nodded.

"And Heather and Mark and your aunt and uncle, they were born human, and they stayed human. There were people in your family who were human," Stiles said.

Derek nodded again, looking warier.

"Nobody in your family was bitten, were they," Stiles said, not really a question.

Derek tilted his head back and forth but then nodded.

"Not quite but close enough," Stiles translated. "And you never bit anyone before, did you?"

Derek shook his head without hesitation.

"You've never been close to somebody who was bitten," Stiles filled in. "You have literally no idea what's going to happen to Scott. Not when it'll happen, or what he'll do, or whether he'll get stuck as a wolf like you, or--anything."

Derek tilted his head again, sighed, shook his head.

"Okay," Stiles said, leaning in and wrapping his arms around Derek. "So, this is cool. I'm glad neither of us know what the hell we're doing with the maybe-supernatural-creature who I'm taking home to sleep in my bed. This is going to be awesome."

Derek growled a little bit, sounding more anxious than angry, and Stiles pulled back to look him in the eye again. "Oh, no, dude, I know I should be freaking terrified, I just used it all up when I thought Scott was dead. Now I'm totally Zen, it's great."

Derek growled for real this time. His eyes flashed red and everything.

"Yeah," Stiles said, shaking his head. "That works better on Scott, dude, sorry. I'll be careful. If anything happens I'll drag him back out here and you can deal with him, but right now we have--" Stiles peeked at his phone, "--thirty-two minutes to get home before my dad, so if we're lucky he won't be pulling us over for speeding on the way there. Keep an ear out for us."

Stiles hugged Derek one more time and ran back to the Jeep, looking over at Scott with a grin as he started it up. "So, how do you feel?"

"Stiles," Scott said, without opening his eyes. "If I turn into a wolf, you have to tell--"

"This had better be about your mom, Scott," Stiles said, pulling out onto the dirt road and hitting the gas as hard as he dared.

"You'll think of what to tell my mom, she'll be okay," Scott said, opening his eyes and shaking his head.

"But Allison! I'm supposed to take her out tomorrow to cheer her up and if I just disappear, it's gonna be the worst. And her dad will be convinced wolves ate me and he'll probably lock her up or something to keep her safe and she'll be even sadder!"

"He'll lock her in her room right before he comes out to the woods and shoots you," Stiles pointed out. "Scott, seriously, how is the biggest problem here whether it's going to make Allison sad? What if you turn into a wolf and you have to live in the woods as a wolf?"

"Derek will be here," Scott pointed out. "Derek won't let me get shot, and you'll come visit us. I'll be fine. But Allison won't have a Derek, she'll just have you. You have to tell her something, if I can't--if I'm--you have to do something, okay? You have to make it okay for her."

Stiles laughed helplessly. "I'll try, dude. And if you turn into a wolf I'm bringing your mom and my dad out here to see you, so be prepared to somehow prove that you're really you, okay? I am not getting blamed for this shit if you disappear because you’re a wolf now."

"Technically it was your idea," Scott pointed out cheerfully. "Just bring a Ouija board."

"Scott, we are not even talking about you dying--" Stiles's throat went tight. Could that still happen, after everything? Should he be rushing Scott to a hospital? Derek hadn't seemed that worried but Derek didn't know.

"No, dude, what are you saying? I mean I could point to letters and stuff, so I could spell things for my mom--you know, so she could ask me questions only I know and I could answer."

Stiles looked back and forth as quickly as he dared from Scott to the winding road through the preserve. "You could--you could tell us your name."

"Yeah, but that's easy, anyone might know that," Scott said, waving that away. "I could tell her what mushy nickname she called me when I was a little kid or something."

Stiles opened and closed his mouth a few times, keeping his eyes firmly on the road as he navigated through a couple of forks to get them back to the county highway.

When they were on asphalt again and doing exactly four miles over the speed limit, Stiles said, "Leaving aside the whole fact that we're not really trying to filter out other sentient wolves impersonating you, I mean I should have thought of that weeks ago, so Derek could actually tell me things other than yes or no."

"Oh!" Scott said. "Oh, yeah, he could probably have told you all kinds of stuff. Dude, why did I think of that before you?"

Stiles scowled at the road. "I guess I've been distracted."

---

Scott stepped through the door of Stiles's bedroom and said, "Oh, bed," like it was some kind of revelation. Stiles stood to one side and watched while Scott stripped down to his boxers and crawled into Stiles's bed on his usual side, arranging the tangle of covers over himself and stealing the best pillow.

Stiles plugged his phone in and then headed to the bathroom to wash up and brush his teeth. He scoured his tongue, mixing the bitter-metal taste of adrenaline with artificial mint until he nearly gagged on it. When he stepped back into the hallway his dad was there, frowning as he looked through the open door of Stiles's bedroom.

All the terror that Stiles had thought he'd gone past feeling swamped him at the sight of his dad.

Stiles was suddenly aware of what Scott might be, hidden in the shadows from his dad. He was suddenly aware of what could have happened, of what he might have had to tell his dad right now if Derek hadn't been able to save Scott. What he might still have to tell his dad, and Scott's mom, if anything else went wrong.

"Dad," Stiles said, his voice coming out high and small like a little kid's.

His dad turned toward him immediately, his frown deepening. "Stiles, what..."

Stiles lunged toward his dad, grabbing his jacket to haul him into a hug, hiding his face against his dad's shoulder and inhaling the familiar smell of gun oil and the Sheriff's Department. After a couple of seconds his dad's arms went around him, squeezing him painfully tight. Stiles gritted his teeth and didn't make a sound until his dad let up, pushing firmly on his shoulders.

"Come on, deep breath," his dad said in a familiar tone of patient command. "You can do this, count it out."

Stiles inhaled, counting automatically to four as he did. He flexed his hands on his dad's jacket as he held it and then breathed back out just as slowly, just like his dad had learned to coach him to do when the panic attacks were bad. A second later he actually opened his eyes, meeting his dad's worried gaze.

"Hey," his dad said, raising one hand from Stiles's shoulder to rub over his hair. "What is this, Stiles? I haven't seen you that panicked in a long time."

Stiles nearly choked on the thought of lying to his dad, and had to close his eyes and count off a few more breaths. Tell as much of the truth as you can, he reminded himself. Just leave out Derek. And werewolves.

"Scott," Stiles said, opening his eyes as he nodded in the direction of his bedroom. "We... we went out to the woods tonight...."

He trailed off long enough to let his dad give him a look for that, and his dad came through, his lips pursing and eyebrows lowering. It was easier to lie to his dad like this, when he looked suspicious and disapproving, than when he just looked worried.

"Scott had an asthma attack while we were out there," Stiles said, and his dad's face shifted toward something between horror and fury.

"It was okay!" Stiles said quickly, feeling his face heat and knowing the lie--this part of the lie--was going to be obvious.

"It wasn't a big deal, he had his inhaler. But I realized I didn't have cell signal where we were. I just, when I saw you, I thought about what could have happened."

"Oh, now you think about it," his dad hissed, glancing back toward the bedroom door. "Not when you dragged Scott out into the woods--"

"He wanted to, it was his idea," Stiles insisted, because he at least knew better than to say he followed me, I didn't want him there.

"He didn't want to before last week," his dad said sharply, jabbing a finger into Stiles's chest. "This is you, Stiles, this is on you. If something had happened to Scott tonight--"

His dad stopped short of actually saying it, and Stiles looked away, his eyes stinging. They'd come right up against the truth anyway, and it hurt worse to have it hanging between them in silence.

"It would be my fault," Stiles said quietly. "I know. I didn't--I know, Dad. That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm scared of. I know."

Something could still happen to Scott tonight, after all, and if it did it would be Stiles's fault. It had been his idea.

He realized, standing there, unable to even look at his dad, that if Scott died--if Scott even changed into a wolf and got stuck that way--Stiles would have to ask Derek to bite him, too. He wouldn't be able to face anyone who understood what he'd done less than Derek would. He wouldn't be able to stay behind if Scott and Derek were living in the woods full time, and if Scott was--if Scott was gone--then he'd have no one but Derek. His dad would know that what had happened to Scott was his fault, and even if he pretended to forgive Stiles, or still love him, Stiles wouldn't be able to stay. So either he would die the same way Scott had, or he'd become a wolf and stay with Derek forever.

It didn't help to know what he would do. It just felt like being backed into a corner that he could see in really perfect detail.

His dad sighed and pulled him into another hug, like it was okay, like it could possibly be okay. Stiles was too frozen to resist.

"So keep on knowing it tomorrow, okay?" His dad shook him gently without pushing him away. "Don't just forget this and go right back to the same thing."

Stiles laughed unsteadily, still hiding his face against his dad's shoulder. He shook his head. "No. Not going back to the same thing, I promise."

"Good," his dad sighed, giving him a pat on the back. "In that case, I believe you're supposed to be in bed."

Stiles kept his head down, letting his dad turn him and steer him back to the bedroom. He stumbled over to the dresser on his own to grab pajamas, and hesitated with his hand was hovering over the plain gray t-shirt, telling himself his dad wouldn't know what it was.

He only realized his dad had followed him in when he heard him say, "Hey, Scott."

Stiles turned around to see his dad had turned on the lamp and was crouching next to the bed with one hand on Scott's bare shoulder, shaking him gently.

Stiles just stood there, frozen, waiting for something awful to happen--Scott to change suddenly into a monster, his dad's voice to shift into alarm because Scott had stopped breathing.

Scott just moaned and tugged the blanket higher over himself, burrowing down into the pillow. Stiles tried to exhale quietly.

"Scott," his dad repeated, more sharply.

"Sheriff?" Scott managed to blur the word into a single sleepy syllable, turning his face just slightly out of the pillow.

His dad touched Scott's face, tugging one eyelid open. Scott blinked quickly as he pulled back, making a face.

"How are you feeling?" His dad asked. "Do you want me to bring you over to your mom?"

Scott shook his head. "Just tired. I'm okay, Stiles took care of me."

His dad glanced back at him. Stiles gave him an uncertain smile, clutching his pajama pants to his chest.

"I'll tell her where you are, then," his dad said, ruffling Scott's hair before he shut the lamp off again. "She'll be coming by to get you when she gets off shift, so you boys had better get to sleep now."

Stiles nodded quickly. Scott was already snoring as his dad turned away, but Stiles didn't even exhale all the way until he heard the front door close behind him.

---

Stiles threw his arm and leg automatically over Derek's back, pressing his face into the warm fur of Derek's shoulder. Just when he'd gotten all comfy he suddenly remembered: Scott.

He jerked away and half-upright, pushing himself up to look over Derek's back for Scott. Derek was lying down the middle of Stiles's bed, his tail reaching almost to the end of the mattress. Now that Stiles was fully aware he realized he could feel a humming tension in Derek's body; Derek was wide awake, looking over at Scott.

Scott was lying just the way Stiles's dad had left him, on his side facing the edge of the bed, the blankets pulled up to his shoulders.

"Scott," Stiles said softly. "Hey, Scott, look who's here."

Scott grumbled something vague and annoyed-sounding and mashed his face farther into the pillow, and Stiles felt Derek shift anxiously under him.

"No, hey, he's always like this," Stiles murmured, and draped himself more fully over Derek to reach out and tug the blanket off of Scott.

"Dammit, Stiles," Scott muttered, groping backward for the blanket.

Stiles yanked it out of his reach, though, and after a few seconds Scott huffed--a thoroughly wolflike noise--and squirmed over onto his other side, scooting toward Derek's warmth. He didn't hold on to Derek the way Stiles usually did, but he curled in close, tucking the top of his head against Derek's shoulder.

Derek turned his head down to touch his nose to Scott's hair, huffing softly against the top of his head.

Scott nodded and tucked himself a tiny bit closer as he settled down into sleep.

Stiles nodded back and lay down again properly himself, mostly on the mattress with his arm and leg over Derek, just a few inches from being able to touch Scott on Derek's other side.

On the edge of sleeping again Stiles felt Derek exhale warmly against the top of his head, and he smiled. "Yeah, you're stuck with both of us now."

Chapter Text

Stiles woke up when the mattress rocked as Scott bounded out of bed. Stiles made the disgruntled noise that level of early-morning energy deserved, and cracked one eye open to see Scott stretching gratuitously. Stiles squeezed both eyes shut, grimly determined to get back to sleep.

A second later he realized what he'd seen and pushed himself up to sit so fast he got dizzy. Scott was peeling the bandage away from his side.

Stiles scrambled out of bed to stand with him, staring down as the tape and gauze pulled back to reveal... nothing. Under the bandage was smooth, perfect skin, so totally unmarked that Stiles almost couldn't believe there had been a big ugly awful bite there the night before.

He remembered cleaning the blood off; he remembered the lemony smell of the antiseptic wipes and the gumminess of the half-dried blood. It had happened. He knew it had happened. Either it had happened or Stiles had gone totally psychotic in a fairly improbable way, and somehow taken Scott with him.

Stiles reached out, but stopped just short of touching Scott's side. His fingers curled back instinctively before they could make contact with that weirdly normal patch of skin.

"There isn't even blood on the bandage," Scott said, sounding equally shaky. "Stiles, why isn't there blood on the bandage?"

Stiles blinked rapidly, latching on to the maybe-answerable question. "It had pretty much stopped bleeding already. Also apparently it healed completely in the night."

He looked up and met Scott's wide eyes. "Does this mean--this means you're a werewolf now, for sure. You have accelerated healing, dude--holy shit, you just manifested your first superpower."

Scott grinned, his eyes lighting up, like it hadn't been true until Stiles said it, but--holy shit, his best friend had superpowers now. Stiles found himself grinning back.

"Is anything else different? Senses? Do you feel wolfy? You don't look any hairier than usual, but I guess that won't kick in until the full moon."

"No, I can change anytime," Scott said. "It's just harder to resist at the full moon."

Stiles frowned. "How do you...."

Scott frowned too, shook his head a little, and then looked up at Stiles hesitantly. "I think I... I think Derek was kind of in my head last night. Like, I dreamed about him, and he told me a bunch of stuff. He wants me to skip school and come down to the woods today to practice changing, so I'll know how to control it before I'm around a lot of people."

Stiles was suddenly, horribly glad he'd never told Scott that he dreamed about Derek, or that he thought the dreams might mean something. "He told you stuff? He, like--he talked to you?"

Scott nodded and then made a face and shrugged. "Not like--" he held his hand up, miming a flapping muzzle.

"Not like All Dogs Go to Heaven or something, like talking-dog talked, he just--we looked at each other and then I knew stuff I didn't know before. He can do it because he's my alpha, the bite connects us. He can help me stay in control, and he can reach me in my dreams. Alphas can change all the way like that, and they can give the bite. Derek thinks I won't get stuck like him because I'm a beta. Most werewolves are betas. Derek used to be one, it's just kind of normal. For werewolves. There are omegas, too, but that's the worst thing, that means being all alone with no pack."

"Yeah," Stiles said, looking away. He stared at his alarm clock. The numbers didn't make any sense. "That would suck."

Scott dropped down to sit on the bed, and then fell backwards. "I can tell my mom I still feel like crap from the asthma attack. She'll let me stay home and then when she goes to sleep I can go down to the woods. Meet me by the river?"

Stiles blinked and looked down at Scott. He lay there looking implausibly physically perfect, radiating strength and health. Stiles thought that it was a lucky thing Ms. McCall was as big a pushover as Scott was, and all the time there was this knot in the center of his chest growing denser and heavier and it was stupid, because he did know Scott wanted him there, he knew Derek cared about him, but....

"I can't," Stiles said, and Scott picked up his head and looked baffled.

Stiles pressed his lips together for a second to keep from screaming and shook his head. "I can't, Scott. I can't skip school, they'd tell my dad and he'd GPS-track my phone in a second. I probably wouldn't even get to the woods before he caught me, which is good because otherwise I'd lead him right to you and Derek."

"But you," Scott said, face crumpling anxiously. "Dude, we...."

But there wasn't any actual end to that sentence. Stiles forced himself to smile, forced his voice to be light as he said, "You don't need me for this, Scott. Derek's the one who can teach you this stuff. I'm gonna just--"

He waved his casted arm--his stupid broken feeble non-superpower-healed arm--toward the door and turned away without another word. He hurried toward the shower he needed to take because he needed to go to school because he was a regular human kid with regular kid responsibilities. He definitely didn't need to go down to the woods to learn to use his superpowers.

He didn't bother wrapping his arm in plastic. He didn't really have to, it just felt gross if the inside of his cast got wet, but he needed to get into the shower, needed to hide, because...

Scott had dreamed of Derek, and Derek had told Scott things. Real things, verifiable things, actual things. Derek could reach into Scott's dreams because he had bitten Scott and now Scott was as magical as he was. Not like Stiles, who was human, who'd just been having perfectly fucking normal human dreams all this time about the magical creature he was obsessed with.

Stiles put his cast up against the shower wall and pushed against it--didn't bang it, didn't make a noise Scott could hear--just pushed until the fiberglass edges were cutting into his hand and arm and the pain was enough to explain the stupid prickly feeling of tears in his eyes, because of course his dreams were just dreams. Of course they were.

He still had two awesome magical friends. He didn't have one goddamn thing to cry about.

---

The school day started with Allison cornering him in the hallway to ask if Scott was okay, because he'd texted her that he was staying home from school sick after an asthma attack. Stiles had to ride the fine line of assuring her that Scott was okay while also assuring her that Scott wasn't just blowing off their date.

Next up was Lydia cornering him to demand medical details of Scott's condition, because Scott being out sick on a Friday meant Scott couldn't play in Saturday's game, which was going to have a small but not unimportant impact on their odds of winning. Lydia didn't want to see her boyfriend's team lose. She said some ominous things about malingering before she stomped off with a toss of bouncy strawberry-blonde curls that would have been the highlight of Stiles's day, last month.

When Scott started texting him during second period, Stiles just silenced his phone and tossed it in his bag. He didn't really need a blow-by-blow report on how awesome it was learning how to be a werewolf. Scott had Derek to look after him, and if he needed help from a human, well, Stiles was stuck at school for the next five hours. Scott was just going to have to suck it up and call someone else. Stiles wasn't looking at his phone.

Still, he could feel it vibrating against his leg every fifteen minutes or so, and that was as reassuring as it was annoying. At least he had proof of life.

---

After school Stiles looked at the last few texts from Scott in reverse order--Come over tonight?? Yr dad's working right? Mom too. and Fine ill tell you in person and Come onnnnnnnnnnn--which was enough to know that Scott was fine. After a whole day of distracting himself by at least pretending to pay attention in school Stiles felt a little more even-keeled.

He'd realized that there was no point feeling all sad about Derek not being able to talk to him. He'd just have to do something about it.

He drove straight home after school, which felt weird after weeks of heading to the woods as soon as he could, but he needed to do this right. It didn't occur to him until he turned onto his own street and saw his dad's cruiser in the driveway that his dad had worked the overnight last night, and was working the overnight tonight, and therefore was home right now. Stiles just sat for a minute after he'd turned his car off and figured out his strategy. When he'd decided on his next few moves, he slung his backpack over his shoulder and trotted into the house.

His dad wasn't actually in sight, so Stiles moved on with his totally innocent and non-paranoid plan and tossed his backpack on the kitchen table before he headed down to the basement. There were a lot of unlabeled boxes down there, whole stacks that he knew better than to touch, but the board games were just piled up on a high shelf, and... yes.

The old faded box he remembered was there, holding a Ouija board that he was pretty sure had been his mom's when she wasn't much older than he was now. Stiles and Scott had played with it sometimes in middle school, but right around the time Stiles had had a reason to want to contact spirits for real he'd boxed it up and brought it down here. He'd stashed it with Candy Land and Connect 4 and other stuff he never wanted to play with again but couldn't bear to get rid of.

Now Stiles grabbed the Ouija board and a few slightly more plausible games for camouflage--Monopoly and Scrabble and Battleship--and took them all upstairs. His dad was at the kitchen table, taking things out of Stiles's backpack and piling them up neatly on the table. Stiles considered at least pretending to be outraged, but not only had he been resigned to random bag searches by the time he was twelve, he'd put his bag there in the hopes that his dad would search it and therefore not pay too much attention to what Stiles was up to in the basement. He'd kept his phone safely in his pocket, so there wasn't anything incriminating in his bag.

"Anything interesting?" Stiles said, setting down the stack of games on the counter. "Let me know if you see my Chemistry notes, I can't find them anywhere."

"Right here, they were folded up inside your math book," his dad said, tapping his fingers down on them without looking at Stiles. "Out of curiosity, if you highlight a whole page how do you know which parts of it are important?"

"The book does all the work, the important words are already in bold and sidebars and everything," Stiles said. "The highlighter is just to mark that I read it."

"Uh-huh," his dad said, sounding dubious. "What are the games for?"

"Taking them over to Scott's. He stayed home sick today, which means no going out with Allison tonight and no lacrosse tomorrow, so I figure the least I can do is pretend like we're ten years old and have a good old-fashioned sleepover."

"That's very thoughtful of you," his dad said absently, and then tossed a t-shirt down on top of the stuff from Stiles's backpack.

The t-shirt hadn't been in his bag, he knew. It was a Mets shirt he'd found at a thrift store a couple of years ago, old and distinctively worn. Lately Stiles only wore it under a minimum of two other shirts because it was too small and kind of transparent, but he loved it too much not to wear it whenever it didn't smell too bad. He hadn't been able to find it anywhere, not since--

Suddenly he knew exactly where he'd lost it, and exactly where his dad had found it. Stiles had taken it off after he went running with Derek two Fridays ago, when he got wet in the rain. That was the night he'd slept over at the Hale house. The night he'd dreamed of seeing Derek human and....

He'd changed into the dry shirt he'd brought to sleep in and never noticed it wasn't with the other shirts he'd peeled off with it when he fled the next morning.

Stiles kept his eyes on the shirt and felt his face heat up like a neon sign of self-incrimination. The fifth amendment wouldn't do him any good when his dad could just take one look at him and know--except that his dad wasn't going to get this quite right, no matter what he saw. No sane person would leap to this conclusion.

"I wound up working overtime this morning, because the CBI arson specialist was finally able to come out and take a look at the Hale house and give us an official second opinion on the fire. We went all over the house, looking at all the fire damage, trying to determine how it happened. And in addition to what we were able to see about the fire, we found some evidence that at least one person has been squatting in the house. There was a mattress up in one of the bedrooms with a sleeping bag and a variety of clothing. Including, to my surprise, my son's favorite t-shirt. Unless you'd like to tell me that this isn't yours?"

His dad put out a hand to hover over the shirt, and Stiles knew that if he lied right now he would never see that shirt again and his dad would never trust him again.

He wasn't even sure which one made him lunge forward, grabbing the shirt as he said, "No, it's mine! It's mine."

"Stiles," his dad said, and then nothing, until Stiles finally had to look up and meet his eyes.

His dad raised his eyebrows, waiting for an explanation.

"I'm not," Stiles said, trying not to sound too defensive and coming out uncomfortably close to pleading. His hands opened and closed helplessly on the shirt.

"I lost this a while ago, Dad. If I'd been back there since I said I wouldn't, I would have found my shirt, right? I promised I wouldn't go back there and I haven't."

His dad nodded slowly. "And the reason your shirt was there in the first place, on a mattress with other people's clothing...."

Stiles shut his eyes. "Dad, it's not--I'm not having sex with people in the woods, okay. Or anywhere! Or anyone. It's not that."

He opened his eyes again when his dad didn't say anything; after a long silent look his dad sighed and shook his head and said, "No, that would be too easy."

There wasn't anything Stiles could say to that. He looked down, laying the shirt on the table and folding it neatly. When it was a perfect little square, he said, "I'm going over to Scott's, okay?"

His dad sighed and nodded, neatly repacking his backpack for him as Stiles grabbed the game boxes off the counter and headed for the door.

He was nearly there when the arithmetic of what his dad had said caught up with him. He turned back to see his dad still standing there with one hand on his backpack, and had to clear his throat before he said, "Did you get any sleep?"

His dad looked up, totally nonplussed.

Stiles huffed. "Dad. If you worked overtime after a double this morning, did you have any time to sleep? Are you working again tonight?"

"I got enough," his dad said, sounding awfully tired now that Stiles was paying attention. "I'm fine."

"Did you eat any actual food today?" Stiles persisted, coming back into the kitchen as the guilt and concern twisted around each other in his stomach. "I can make something--there's spaghetti in the fridge, I can heat it up for you."

"I can heat up my own leftovers," his dad insisted, coming over to the fridge, and Stiles stepped back to let him pass, standing there with his hands still full of game boxes while his dad dug through the fridge for the right Tupperware. When he straightened up he stopped for a few seconds, looking at Stiles while Stiles looked back, frozen in place.

"It's okay," his dad repeated, with a worn-out sort of gentleness that made Stiles's chest hurt with everything he couldn't confess. "Go on, have fun with Scott."

Stiles nodded wordlessly and turned away again, and this time he didn't turn back.

---

Stiles parked at the cemetery, which was the only approach to the woods that was at all plausibly near Scott's house. Before he got out of the Jeep he pulled out his phone and sent a text. If my dad calls, I'm there. If my dad shows up, I went to the store to buy snacks.

Scott texted back almost immediately. C u later. Tell D hi for me!!!

Tell him yourself, Stiles thought, but he didn't send that back. There was no point being jealous of Scott for something that Scott hadn't even wanted.

Stiles gingerly opened the box of the Ouija board instead, lifting out the wooden board and leaving the other little accessories in the box. He tucked it under his arm and set out across the cemetery at a jog, not even looking aside to see any of the headstones where he might otherwise stop to say hello.

Derek wasn't waiting for him, but he came running out of the trees as Stiles trotted across the magic line. He looped around Stiles before heading off again, leading Stiles deeper into the woods.

Stiles followed him to a little clearing he hadn't seen before. There were a few big smooth rocks to sit on, and enough open sky that there was actual sunlight. Derek turned on him as soon as Stiles stopped, shoving his nose against Stiles's belly until Stiles folded down to his knees and let Derek sniff and lick him. Derek kept up a low grumbling growl the whole time, like he was muttering to himself, which forced a smile onto Stiles's face.

He pulled away from Derek and set down the board on the rocks, waving at it like a magician who'd just done a trick. "Here, I brought this for you. I should have thought of it sooner, but--now you can tell me stuff."

Derek hopped up onto the rocks, putting his head level with Stiles's. He sniffed the board and then just stood over it, tilting his head back and forth. He looked from the board to Stiles and back, and then he huffed and shook all over and raised a paw.

Stiles held his breath.

Derek moved his paw delicately, not laying it down flat to obscure the letters, just tapping his claws against one after another. He went at a steady, deliberate pace, long enough for Stiles to follow him but not hesitating.

"T, O, O," Stiles read out. "--Took--Y-O--you, Took you--L-O-N-G, E-N--Took you long enough?!"

Derek stepped back from the board, greeting Stiles's squawk of outrage with a wolf-grin, tongue lolling out and everything.

"I'm sorry I was distracted," Stiles said, hands flailing out. He was vaguely aware that he was being kind of loud, but all of the everything inside him was threatening to break through in his voice because the idea that he'd let Derek down was just too much to bear on top of all the rest of it.

"I'm sorry! I didn't know you--"

Derek stopped grinning and jumped over the board, banging his shoulder into Stiles's chest. Stiles had to throw his arms around Derek just to keep from being knocked over, and Derek rubbed his cheek roughly against Stiles's.

It didn't matter, Stiles realized. He hadn't thought of it, and Derek had never made him think of it, because they didn't need it.

"Okay," Stiles said, pressing back into the hug. "Yeah, okay, good point. I just--"

He tucked his face down against Derek's neck, keeping his arms around him, and said quietly, "You have Scott now, and he said you can tell him things, and I just... I thought...."

Derek gave a brief, loud growl and pulled away from Stiles, going back to the Ouija board to tap out words that Stiles read in silence.

You. Were. First.

"Oh," Stiles said, feeling his face go hot, feeling warmed by the reassurance at the same time he felt pathetic for needing it. "But I'm not--"

Derek didn't bother with letters; his eyes glowed red and he growled, low and ominous. Stiles still wasn't scared of him, but he understood deadly seriousness when he saw it, and he shut his mouth with a click of teeth.

Derek's eyes faded back to their usual color, and he gave a low, faintly apologetic whuff.

"No, I. Yeah," Stiles said, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Me too. I mean, not--you know what I mean."

Derek snorted this time, cautiously amused, and Stiles looked down at the Ouija board as he said, "So, um--how did Scott do today?"

There was a brief pause while Derek marshaled his thoughts, and then he spelled it out. Fine.

Stiles looked up. "That's it? Fine?"

Derek nodded.

"Fine," Stiles repeated. "That's all you have to say. Dude, it was his first day as a werewolf! He sent me like eight hundred text messages!"

Derek tried very hard to roll his eyes at that, which, okay, yeah. He had probably been aware of exactly how many text messages Scott was sending while Derek was trying to teach him stuff.

"I'll, um. Remind him about phone manners," Stiles offered hesitantly, and Derek nodded again.

"So is there anything else..." Stiles asked, waving vaguely at the board.

Derek tilted his head and then set his paw down firmly on the word NO.

"Okay," Stiles said, trying to wrap his brain around the idea of having nothing to say. "Right. Well, good talk--"

Before he could descend into terminal awkwardness, Derek jumped down from the rocks and hooked his nose into the back of Stiles's knee, tugging him away from the rocks and then out of the clearing on a barely-visible path. Even after Stiles actually found his stride, Derek kept herding him along for a few hundred yards, until they were firmly settled into their run together, just like the good old days.

Like, the day before yesterday. Wednesday. Wednesday had been nice.

---

Derek looped them back to the same clearing at the end of the run. Stiles sagged onto the rock that the Ouija board sat on.

"Do you, uh, do you want me to leave this?" He waved at it.

Derek gave him a sort of amused look and then started tapping out letters. What would I do with--

"Okay, well, I don't know!" Stiles said, swatting Derek's paws away from the letters, but he was smiling now. He felt settled again after the run, sure of himself and Derek and the way they fit together in perfect rhythm. "Whatever, fine, I'll take my toy and go home."

Derek gave a satisfied huff and sat down, and Stiles stood and stretched, feeling the damp drag of his shirts over his skin. He stared up at the sky and considered what to do. He couldn't ask Derek if he wanted this--some people probably could, but not Stiles. And he couldn't leave without offering somehow, so that just left doing it.

Stiles started unbuttoning his plaid shirt and shrugged out of it, then pulled his henley and the t-shirt under it off together. He peeled them apart, wiped his face on the driest part of his t-shirt, and then dropped it on the rock behind him before he pulled his henley back on.

He turned around to pick up his button-down and Derek froze, caught with the sweaty t-shirt dangling from his jaws.

"Yeah," Stiles said. "That was what I meant. Sorry about the other one--that was my dad who took it. Hide this one better, okay?"

It wasn't until the words came out of his mouth that he realized what it implied: if Derek not only had kept his t-shirt but kept it in plain sight, it meant he wanted to have it available, maybe wanted it to be the thing he rested his head on, or....

Stiles picked up his shirt and shrugged into it, keeping his eyes on his hands as he said, barely a whisper, "I wear the one I took. Every night."

Derek let out a short, sharp whine, startling Stiles into looking up. When he did Derek was right there in front of him, leaning in to sniff along the line of his jaw. Stiles turned his face toward Derek's neck, inhaling the warm-wolf smell of his fur and rubbing one thumb just behind Derek's ear.

Derek pulled away after a while. He went back to Stiles's t-shirt, deftly grabbing the edges with his teeth to fold it into a neat bundle before he picked it up in his mouth again. Stiles grabbed the Ouija board, and Derek walked quietly beside him all the way to the magic line at the edge of the cemetery.

---

When he got to Scott's he had a moment of déjà vu: the unexpected car he should have expected in the driveway, and the moment he took to brace himself before he went inside. Allison answered the door when he knocked, and when Stiles stepped inside he saw Scott sitting, sheepishly blanket-wrapped, on the couch. There was an empty soup bowl on the coffee table in front of him.

Allison seemed genuinely pleased to see Stiles, and Scott gave him a hopeful, excited look, so Stiles came in and sat down on Scott's other side. Allison, obviously enjoying her Florence Nightingale thing, took Scott's bowl into the kitchen.

"Dude," Scott whispered, as soon as she cleared the doorway. "Today was amazing, I changed, not all the way like him but I still changed, and I can run really fast, and--"

He stopped just before Allison came back in, and wagged his eyebrows up and down as if to say See what I did there? Stiles couldn't help but smile; if Scott had a tail he'd be wagging that instead.

Stiles made a mental note to ask Scott if he had a tail.

They finished the movie Scott and Allison had been watching: The Princess Bride, whether to complete the sick-in-bed theme or for straightforward romantic purposes, Stiles couldn't guess. There was a pretty obvious Westley and Buttercup thing going on next to him, maybe right down to true love enduring long separations, if Allison was right about having to move away. He wondered if that made him Inigo--but no, Derek would have to be Inigo, wouldn't he? Stiles stared at the credits and contemplated the idea that this made him Fezzik. Fezzik and Inigo were buddies, so that seemed pretty okay, all in all.

Allison excused herself and Scott leaned over and whispered, "Derek says you need to come train with us tomorrow. I have to learn to play with humans before my next lacrosse game."

Stiles nodded. He didn't have a chance to feel good about being able to actually help Scott with something important before Scott gave him a pleading look and glanced toward the door.

Stiles opened his mouth to say you're not serious, except of course he was serious. Allison was over, no parents were around, and it was Friday night. She probably didn't have to be home for hours yet. Playing nurse was great and everything, but they obviously wanted to move on to playing doctor.

"You owe me forever," Stiles whispered as he stood up, and then Allison came back in and Stiles launched into a cheerful, plausible lie about needing to go meet his dad for dinner on his break.

---

Stiles went straight to his computer when he got home. He logged in for some gaming for the first time in way too long and found a raid to get in on as quickly as possible. He didn't have to think about anything for a while, not Scott or Allison or Derek or his dad or what would happen when he went to sleep and what it would mean if it did.

He made a couple of trips down to the kitchen for snacks, checked all the locks like his dad had taught him to, shut most of the lights off, and eventually it was three in the morning and he could barely keep his eyes open. When he felt a hand on his shoulder he just nodded and got up, shutting the lid on his laptop without bothering to log out properly.

He grabbed his pajamas and changed without really opening his eyes--no point in the dark--and climbed into bed, turning onto his side automatically. It was only a few seconds later that he felt Derek settle in behind him, Derek's arms closing around him like usual. Derek's nose brushed against the side of his throat, and then there was the stubble-prickle of Derek's cheek. Stiles smiled sleepily and was almost all the way under when he remembered.

This was just a dream. Not some mystically-connected dream, not a magic dream like Scott had, just a dream-dream. His dream. And if it was his dream he could do whatever he wanted, right?

Stiles twisted, trying to turn over. Derek's hands tightened on him, but they weren't really Derek's hands, they were just aspects of Stiles's subconscious not letting him have what he wanted, so screw them anyway. He wanted to turn over, he wanted to see Derek's face and touch him and have an actual normal sex dream, if that was what he was going to do.

Stiles pushed at Derek's hands, struggling harder. He knew Derek wouldn't hurt him, not even some dream of Derek, so sooner or later he was going to have to let go. Stiles flailed and shoved and kicked and then, just like Stiles knew he would, Derek released his grip. Stiles succeeded in flipping over to face--

Derek, who was a wolf, and was giving Stiles a deeply disappointed look.

Stiles blinked.

"Uh," he said. "Oh. Um. Sorry? I guess that was rude."

Derek huffed and shook his head in a way that obviously meant you are such an idiot or possibly I can't take you anywhere.

"Are you--" Are you real, then, or is my subconscious just really, really into fucking with me?

But if Derek was really just part of his subconscious Stiles didn't have to ask out loud, and if he wasn't there was nothing he could say that would prove it.

"...Tired?" Stiles offered. "I'm really tired, man. Let's just go to sleep."

Derek waved his nose around as if to point out that Stiles was already asleep, hence the whole dream thing.

Stiles rolled his eyes and said, "You know what I mean," and since Derek hadn't given any sign that he was going to hold a grudge, Stiles cuddled up to him, hiding his face in Derek's fur. The last thing he was aware of was Derek heaving a sigh and then settling down.

---

His dad was already home when Stiles stumbled down for breakfast the next morning. The nagging sensation of letting everyone down was more intense than usual, although he didn't remember that he'd managed to screw up having dreams about Derek until he was halfway through his bowl of cereal.

He stopped for a second, scowling down into his Lucky Charms, and then sighed and took another bite. Derek hadn't seemed mad, at least, and Stiles still had no idea what any of it actually meant anyway.

His dad set down his coffee mug with an audible, deliberate click, which made Stiles look up and realize that his dad was here, and had caught him sleeping here. Stiles smiled weakly.

His dad raised his eyebrows and said, "Sleepover didn't work out, huh?"

Stiles looked down. "Scott and I kind of, um--"

Stiles tried to imagine something he and Scott could plausibly have fought over that wasn't Derek or werewolves. His mind was a blank.

"I pulled Allison Argent over for speeding on her way home last night," his dad said blandly. "She was rushing to make her curfew."

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut and didn't look up.

"Son," his dad said gently. "I know you must be feeling kind of left out--"

Stiles laughed so hard that he had to get up from the table to wipe his streaming eyes and blow his nose.

---

Scott arrived at the Stilinskis' house less than an hour after Stiles got up, with his lacrosse gear strapped to his backpack and a hopeful expression on his face. Stiles changed into practice clothes and spent a few minutes packing a bag--mostly snacks, including an entire package of Oreos--and then told his dad he and Scott were going to the park. They took off before his dad could ask any questions or try to have a Talk with Scott about Allison.

They took the long way into the preserve--the same way Stiles had driven in on Thursday. About a hundred yards short of where Stiles knew Derek's magic line was on the dirt road, Scott said, "Oh, there's Derek."

"What?" Stiles demanded. "Where--"

Scott waved up ahead and grinned over at Stiles. "Waiting for us, by the road. I think he wants to trade spots with me."

Stiles slowed down, frowning, and Scott just grinned wider and took his seatbelt off. Before Stiles could yell at him not to, he'd opened the door and jumped from a moving vehicle. They must have crossed the magic line while Stiles was distracted, because Derek jumped in and dragged the door shut behind him with one paw. When Stiles looked over again, Scott was running alongside the Jeep.

"Come on, I can go faster than this!" Scott yelled.

Stiles looked over at Derek, who grinned and nodded.

Stiles shook his head and muttered, "Werewolves, Jesus," but he hit the gas again.

Scott kept up. Stiles could only steal little glances at him, because the dirt road went around a few curves here, but he could see that some change had come over Scott. Not only was he easily running beside the Jeep at twenty miles per hour, but he had changed. Dark hair had spread down the sides of his face, and he had pointed ears, and when he looked over at Stiles his grin had fangs in it and his eyes flashed golden. No sign of a tail, though.

Stiles felt himself grinning back as he steered around the last curve onto the straight service road that ran along this stretch of the river, and he pushed the pedal down a little farther. Scott, when he glanced over, seemed to be actually working at keeping up, and then he suddenly seemed to vanish, only to reappear ahead of Stiles in the road, running bent over on all fours in a way that didn't look like it should work. It did, though. Scott was running away from the Jeep.

And then, suddenly, he wasn't running; he was falling, tumbling forward, rolled over and over by his own impossible momentum. Derek let out a howl that sounded like pain, leaping out the window, and Stiles slammed on the brakes, throwing himself against his seatbelt and slewing the Jeep to one side to be sure he wouldn't run Scott over. He barely remembered to put the Jeep in park and pull out the keys before he was out the door and running to where Derek was already standing over Scott.

Stiles dropped to his knees and was reaching out for Scott before he saw. When he did get a look at the injury he recoiled, pressing his face into his own arm and swallowing against the sudden urge to throw up. He'd thought the bite was bad, but Scott's arm was broken like a snapped plastic toy, with blood everywhere and bones sticking out at an angle, and oh, God, this was really, really bad.

"Hey," Scott said, sounding shaky, and Stiles turned back toward him automatically, reaching gingerly for him again.

Scott was pale but still smiling bravely, and Stiles put a hand on his shoulder and said, "It's gonna be okay," only to have Scott say it with him at the same time, sounding much more sure.

Derek huffed, and Stiles looked down again, trying not to look at the wound--but he couldn't help watching Derek tug on Scott's hand with his teeth, yanking Scott's arm out straight. Like a movie playing in reverse, Scott's blood flow back into his arm. Stiles caught a glimpse of the shattered ends of the bones fitting back together before muscle and skin closed over them, leaving no trace of injury. Stiles's mouth was still hanging open, his stomach was churning and his heart was pounding, but Scott's arm was already as good as new.

"Dude," Stiles said. "What--I thought we were going to have to put you down like a racehorse."

Scott grinned and wiggled his fingers. "Superpowers, man! That was faster than when I got hurt yesterday, though. It's better when the whole pack is together, that makes us all stronger."

Stiles blinked. His mouth fell open, but he didn't get a word out as he looked from Scott to Derek. Derek growled and shook his head a little, and Stiles looked back to Scott, who was frowning at whatever he saw on Stiles's face.

"Stiles, are you saying--that was like the first thing Derek ever told me, was that you're older than me in the pack. We're brothers now, and you'll always be my big brother even though you're human or even if you decide later that you want the bite, because you were in the pack for weeks before I even knew. You had to know you were."

Stiles shut his mouth and looked down at Scott's perfect arm, because that was too many things to process all at once. He was pack. Derek had told him, hadn't he? He'd said it yesterday: you were first. Stiles had been in the pack first.

And he was Scott's brother now, apparently, which--oh God. "Does that make us, like, Derek's ki--"

Stiles looked up as he said it and stopped short at the look of total horror on Scott's face, which matched the cold, sick fear in his own stomach.

"No," Scott said emphatically, his expression hardening into a determined scowl. "Derek's not--Derek's our alpha. Not our dad."

Scott, of course, had whole other reasons for not wanting to think of Derek as a second dad--but okay. That worked for Stiles, too.

"Good to have that oldest thing settled," Stiles said, trying not to think too much about if you decide later that you want the bite. "But whatever, man, we were already brothers, we swore that like five times just in fourth grade."

Scott smiled. "Yeah, but now we're pack, too. I'm serious, Stiles, you are. You're pack. Derek, tell him."

"He can't," Stiles said, and then stopped short and looked, because of course Derek could tell Stiles things if he wanted to, even if it wasn't the way he told Scott.

He kind of expected Derek to growl at him for being so stupid, or at least flash his eyes red, but Stiles didn't even make eye contact before Derek's cheek was pressed up against his. Stiles threw his arms around Derek's neck, sinking his fingers into Derek's fur.

"Oh," Stiles said quietly. "You were--that's what you were telling me, huh. Every time."

Derek huffed and scrubbed his jaw harder against Stiles's face and, yep, Stiles was an idiot. But he was an idiot with a pack, at least.

"I bet the healing works on you, too," Scott said. "Not as fast, because you're human, but Derek told me last night that he thought you probably healed faster from getting hurt because you were with him. Because you had your pack, even if it was just you and him."

Stiles jerked back and looked at Derek, who met his eyes for a second and then sniffed at Stiles's cast. Derek raised his head and looked at Scott, tilting his head toward Stiles.

Scott frowned in concentration and curled one hand around Stiles's elbow, above his cast. He tucked the fingers of his other hand against Stiles's palm. He ducked his head and sniffed, pushing against Stiles's arm from both sides as he did.

Stiles had an instant of expecting Scott's touch to make it stop hurting, and then he realized that it had already stopped hurting a while ago. Now his arm just felt itchy and vaguely sore, probably from being trapped in the stupid cast.

Scott looked up with a grin. "Ready to take this thing off and do some lacrosse drills with me?"

Stiles looked back and forth from Scott to Derek again. "Do I want to know how--"

Scott raised one hand with a triumphant look, showing off his claws. Stiles looked down at Scott's other hand, still holding his, but those fingers were entirely human, and Scott hadn't grown fangs or anything.

"Dude."

"You should've come yesterday," Scott said as he lowered one claw to the edge of Stiles's cast. "You would've laughed your ass off. Derek just sat there and made me change back and forth a million times--one hand, one foot, just the teeth, everything. I must have looked ridiculous."

"Next time," Stiles promised.

Scott glanced over at Derek, who poked his muzzle in right next to Scott's hand, and then Scott looked up at Stiles, who nodded. Scott wouldn't hurt him, and Derek would stop Scott if he was about to screw this up. Plus, now that Stiles knew it was an option he wanted the cast off yesterday.

Slowly, Scott dragged his claw down the length of the cast, cutting through the fiberglass with a crackling sound that made Stiles want to shiver all over. Scott's other hand held him still, though, and pretty soon he was at the end. He switched hands--claws disappearing from one and appearing on the other--to make another cut down the opposite side of the cast.

"Okay," Scott said, taking his hands away and holding them up to show ten blunt human fingertips. "Here we go."

Stiles grinned and held his arm out. He probably could have done this part by himself, but he let Scott rip the halves of the cast apart. The soft fluffy lining on the inside of the cast came apart in Halloween-cobweb shreds, exposing Stiles's left wrist after three weeks hidden away.

Scott reached out to touch it, but even before he made contact Stiles instinctively jerked his arm away. He pressed it against his chest and raised his right hand to shield it.

Scott's eyes went wide and he leaned back. "Sorry, did I nick you? Does it still hurt? Derek--"

Derek huffed and nudged Scott backward, another few inches away from Stiles.

"No, it just," Stiles lowered his right hand and held his arm out a little farther from his chest, looking down at it in half-disgusted fascination. "It just feels really naked."

It looked paler than his right arm, which was funny because it wasn't exactly like Stiles was rocking a tan--but it looked weird and wrong, though the bruising was all gone now. It was just his wrist, but it was so strange to actually see it without the maroon bulk of the cast. Stiles flexed his hand up and down cautiously, but it worked, and it didn't hurt.

He grinned and looked up at Scott--he really was all healed up--only to find Scott wrinkling his nose.

"What," Stiles said, looking down at his arm again. "What, is it--"

"It smells weird," Scott said. "All... musty, or something. Cooped up."

"Well, sorry, it was kind of hard to wash--" Stiles cut off sharply because Derek suddenly leaned in and licked him from knuckles to elbow, right down the outside of his arm, a long soft slide of damp tongue over skin that hadn't even felt air moving over it in three weeks.

"Uh," Stiles said, because his heart was racing, and he was trying so hard--so desperately--not to think. Derek was already going back for a second pass, licking another stripe up his arm beside the first and leaving Stiles's skin slightly damp, chilly in the cool air. He didn't dare look over at Scott to see what he thought of this; Stiles was pretty sure he might actually die if he accidentally made eye contact with Scott right now.

Derek kept licking him, nudging his hand to make him turn his arm so Derek could get at it, covering every newly-naked inch. When he was done he pressed his nose firmly into the crook of Stiles's elbow where his pawprint used to be. Stiles shivered, staring down at Derek, who was a wolf, absolutely totally a wolf and nothing else and so he was just licking and smelling because--

Derek looked up, looked him straight in the eye, and Stiles let out a small, strangled sound.

Derek turned away and loped off, and then Stiles had to look around to see--but Scott was way over by the Jeep, digging around in the back. Derek reappeared beside Stiles, jerking his head in command, and Stiles automatically held his left arm out again. Derek raised a paw and pressed it down, cool and wet, on the inside of Stiles's forearm, and then dashed off again with his mouth open in a grin.

Stiles looked down at the muddy pawprint he left behind on the pale skin of his left arm. It tickled like crazy, but Stiles didn't even consider wiping it away.

He stood up instead, just in time for Scott to come trotting back from the Jeep with two lacrosse sticks and a ball. He tossed a stick to Stiles when he reached him and grinned as he said, "Come on, I have to practice not being better than everyone all the time."

"Uh," Stiles said, turning to follow him, flexing his left hand cautiously as he gripped the stick. "I mean--you're still allowed to be better than me, right? Because otherwise you're going to get thrown off first line."

"Better than you but not too much better. That's why I have to practice," Scott explained, and Derek set out ahead of them, leading them to the nearest good clearing at a run Stiles could keep up with.

---

Stiles considered it a pretty great feat of stealth that he was in the house for nearly half an hour before his dad noticed. Stiles glanced up from washing his hands in the kitchen sink--it was awesome, he was never going to take washing his hands like a normal two-handed human being for granted ever again--and his dad was just staring. He still looked tired.

"Oh," Stiles said, "Um."

"Went to the park, huh," his dad said, skeptically.

"The thing I want you to know, first of all," Stiles said, "is there were no power tools involved, and second, Scott did not illegally use the vet clinic x-ray machine on a human. Plus it doesn't hurt at all, it feels totally fine."

His dad didn't say anything, just held a hand out and beckoned with his fingers.

Stiles offered his still-dripping left hand. His dad closed both hands around Stiles's, sliding one down to his wrist and squeezing gently, then manipulating his hand. He watched Stiles's face the whole time and Stiles looked back, focusing on the fact that he wasn't, at least, lying about this: it actually didn't hurt, and his dad wouldn't see pain on his face.

"My follow-up appointment was scheduled for Friday after school. You're on day shifts all week, so unless you want to take me to the urgent care tonight or tomorrow because my wrist isn't broken anymore, that's really the first chance to take me to see a doctor. And you know we'd just sit in triage for hours. Dad, I swear, it's fine. It's totally fine, I would not be pretending it didn't hurt if it did, I promise."

"You promise," his dad sighed, letting go of his hand.

Stiles opened his mouth and then shut it. The weirdly naked feeling of his wrist had mostly worn away with an afternoon of lacrosse drills, but it came back now, almost painful.

"Yeah," Stiles said quietly. "I promise."

His dad looked away, shaking his head and rubbing at the back of his neck. Stiles couldn't tell what he was thinking at all, and he was suddenly sure that this was the last straw, that he'd lied to his dad for the last time. Here he was again, caught red-handed not being where he'd said he'd be, doing something entirely other than what he'd said he'd be doing.

"Is this," probable cause, but Stiles couldn't bring himself to invite that on himself. If his dad wasn't already determined to start using his phone like a tracking collar Stiles couldn't suggest it. "Are you going to ground me?"

"From what," his dad demanded, turning away completely, like he couldn't stand to look at Stiles. There was a strange note in his voice, not outright anger and not the weariness of their last few confrontations. "Your own arm?"

Stiles shrugged helplessly. He knew that something had to give, sometime, and he had no idea what would happen when it did. He wasn't about to make a suggestion.

His dad shook his head again and turned to face him, and Stiles saw that his eyes were shiny and that he was fighting a smile. "I just--God, you're your mother's son, kid. She made me do that for her once, when you were two or three. The two of you were in a car accident--"

"I remember that," Stiles said, the picture forming suddenly in his mind's eye. He hadn't thought about it in years. "I remember Mom getting me out of the car and standing by the side of the road with me, and the front of the car was all crumpled up and it was raining--"

"And her arm was broken, but she held you anyway until I got there and convinced her to let go of you and get into the ambulance," his dad put in. "And three weeks later she'd had just about enough of that damn cast. You were down for a nap and she woke me up--I was on nights then--with a hacksaw in her hand, and made me cut the thing off for her."

His dad actually laughed a little. "Once I realized she wasn't planning to use the hacksaw on me I was pretty willing to do whatever she said."

Stiles grinned. "And she was okay, right?"

"She said it didn't hurt," his dad allowed, the humor going out of his voice and his gaze sharpening. "But then she said that about holding you after the accident, and she...."

Stiles's throat went tight. She'd said it in the hospital, too. She'd said it at the end, long past the point where it couldn't possibly have been true.

He wanted to tell his dad he really was fine, except... he was spending all his time with two werewolves and the truth was that he could get hurt again easily enough, running around in the woods with friends who had superpowers, who could only maybe sort of help him heal faster than average. He realized, as he stood there in silence, watching his dad watch him, that his dad only knew that he was sneaking around doing things he shouldn't, that they were probably dangerous.

His dad had to be scared for him, in pretty much the same way Stiles had been scared for his dad ever since he was old enough to understand what his dad's job really was. The same way Stiles had been scared for his mom after she sat him down and explained about cancer.

"Well, I think we both know I'm a way bigger wuss than Mom," Stiles said, summoning up a smile. "Really, Dad, it doesn't hurt at all. You can ask Scott, I managed to sting him with a couple of passes."

"Oh, well," his dad said, the smile coming back into his eyes. "If you're healed enough to play lacrosse then I guess I'll have to eat all that ice cream in the freezer, because you clearly don't need extra calcium--"

"Whoa, hey!" Stiles flung himself across the freezer door even as his dad reached for it. "Let's not be hasty here, I'm a growing boy."

---

Training with Scott was exhausting, and Stiles barely made it to eleven--a shameful and pathetic hour for sleeping on the weekend--before he put his pajamas on and crawled into bed. He was asleep almost instantly, and even when he felt Derek's presence in the bed he didn't open his eyes right away. Stiles made an incoherent welcoming noise and scooted closer, throwing his arm and leg over Derek as usual. For a minute he just lay there with his forehead against the smooth skin of Derek's shoulder, his newly-accessible left palm flat against Derek's side.

It was only when he started rocking lazily, rubbing his half-hard dick against Derek's hip, that he realized what he was doing and woke all the way into the dream with a cold rush of adrenaline. But he didn't wake up out of the dream; Derek was still there, human, lying facedown in front of Stiles in his bed even when Stiles pushed away from him, sitting up and taking his hands away.

Derek just lay there. Stiles could see him breathing, but Derek didn't make a sound, and Stiles couldn't read anything from the back of his head.

"Okay, see, we did this before," Stiles said. "Or--I did this before, and I was pretty sure I fucked it up, except--you're here again now. And you--"

He remembered that night at the Hale house on Derek's mattress, the same burst of shamed panic he was feeling now. "You didn't let me leave. And you had to have known what I did but you didn't seem mad. And you kept my shirt, and you didn’t mind that I kept yours. And all of that was while I was awake, so even if it wasn't really you in my dream, you knew, and you didn't mind me jerking off in your bed and everything."

Stiles waited, watching the black swirls of Derek's tattoo rise and fall with his breaths, and then Derek nodded.

But he still didn't make a sound, or move, or reach for Stiles. Last night, Stiles had tried to look at him and Derek had become a wolf again, and he'd looked disappointed. Like changing back hadn't been his idea, like maybe there were rules, or limits. Maybe Derek was stuck in his wolf-shape nearly as much in dreams as in the real world. Maybe this was some kind of loophole. Stiles could see Derek like this and touch him as long as Derek didn't show his face or make a sound. Or Derek could cuddle up to Stiles and make those wolfish noises as long as Stiles didn't see.

But Derek could nod, apparently, which had to mean he could shake his head, too. Stiles needed to know he wasn't screwing this up again.

"Derek, it's not--Jesus, it's not that I don't want you here like this, but--everything before was just about you, and if it's just me by myself jerking off thinking about you it's enough if it just doesn't make you mad, but this is--if I...."

Derek just lay there, very still. Totally still, Stiles realized after a minute. Like he was holding his breath, waiting for what Stiles would say.

"I'm not going to do this with you unless you actually want me to," Stiles said helplessly, because Derek was gorgeous, but if he was just going to lie there and take it, Stiles wasn't even going to have a problem with inconvenient boners, because that was just creepy. "I--I need you to still like me tomorrow way more than I want to get off, okay? You don't have to do this for me, I don't even want you to if you don't--"

Derek reached back and grabbed Stiles's left wrist, and Stiles forgot how to breathe. The naked, oversensitive feeling of the skin there was back again, and Derek's hand was big and warm and tugging Stiles closer. In one sharp motion that probably couldn't have worked if they were real people outside a dream, Stiles was yanked right onto Derek's back, his dick resting in the cleft of Derek's ass, his chest pressed against Derek's back. Derek didn't let go of Stiles's wrist, but he adjusted his grip so he was holding on to Stiles's hand, his fingers between Stiles's fingers. He pulled Stiles's hand under his chest, pressing Stiles's palm against his ribs.

He could feel Derek's heart beating, nearly as fast as his own. Not the same as his own--he could feel his own pulse throbbing as his dick filled with blood, he could hear his heartbeat rushing in his ears, and the thump of Derek's heart against his hand was distinct from those. Derek was excited too, even if he wasn't allowed to speak or show it. Derek wanted him here--if he was really Derek, if, if--but never mind that. Stiles had permission now and he wasn't going to waste the best dream ever, wherever it came from, on an existential crisis, not when he could be getting off with Derek Hale.

"I'm just gonna," Stiles said, and used his free hand to shove his boxers down, managing to kick them off without kicking Derek. He thought for a second about taking off his t-shirt, too, but he'd have to take back his left hand to get it off all the way, and anyway--it was Derek's shirt. He liked the idea of leaving it on for this.

Stiles took a breath, flexed the fingers of his left hand against Derek's chest, and then lowered himself back down, pressing his naked dick against Derek's equally naked ass, his breath shuddering out of him at the contact. He felt Derek shake too, Derek's hand tightening on his.

"This is awesome, right," Stiles said to the back of Derek's neck. "I mean, sorry, probably not quite as awesome for you--is your dick off limits, too?"

Derek nodded emphatically, but squeezed firmly on Stiles's hand.

Stiles wasn't actually going to be discouraged by anything short of Derek pushing him away now, because, "Oh, my god, your ass, your ass is amazing, skin is amazing--"

Stiles held himself up a little bit with his free hand as he rocked his hips, grinding his dick against Derek's ass. There was enough streetlight-shine coming through his window that he could see Derek's tattoo, stark against his pale skin, flexing as Derek breathed. Derek's heart was pounding under Stiles's hand. Stiles squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at the sheets as he thrust against Derek's skin, all hot and just sweaty enough to make it easy. He was vaguely aware that he was still talking, but whatever he was saying Derek didn't seem to mind.

Still, he should probably shut up before he said something stupider than usual. Stiles bit his lip as he lowered himself over Derek, just enough to rest his forehead on the back of Derek's shoulder, flicking his tongue out to touch the edge of his tattoo. Derek shivered at that, out of rhythm with Stiles's thrusts--shivered at the way Stiles had touched him, and in the next second he was pushing back, shoving his ass up against Stiles's dick, because of Stiles, because he wanted Stiles.

Stiles came just like that, gasping, "You're here, you're here, you're here--"

He collapsed against Derek after that, lying there all wet and messy, draped over Derek. Derek's heartbeat slowed gently into sleep, but he never let go of Stiles's hand.

---

Stiles thought waking up alone was the worst thing, except then there was the moment when he looked at the obvious dried-up wet spot on the sheets. For just a second he thought about getting a DNA test kit and checking it to find out if Derek had gotten off, too, despite his dick being off-limits. Then he pressed his knuckles to his eyes and reminded himself that Derek had been in the woods the entire time. There had never once been wolf-hair on his sheets; Derek's jizz wasn't going to show up either, even if they did have some kind of psychic dream connection, even if Derek had liked dreaming about Stiles getting off on him. Literally.

But even that wasn't the worst moment, because then there was the moment when he was in the Jeep with Scott, halfway from the vet clinic where Scott had had to work that morning to the woods. That was when Stiles realized that he was going to be face-to-face, nose-to-muzzle, with Derek in a few minutes, with Scott standing right there.

There was no way he could ask Derek if that had really happened, even if he could get rid of Scott. What if Derek said no? What if Derek, who was stuck in wolf shape, said yes? What if he just freaking shrugged, because this was one more weird thing he didn't understand either?

"Whoa," Scott said. "Your heartbeat just went crazy, are you okay?"

"Yeah, just remembered I have this quiz tomorrow in Spanish," Stiles said, hoping that he was already too far off normal for Scott to detect the lie.

---

Derek took them running, and made Scott run literal rings around Stiles, which cut out all the opportunities for awkward silence. Derek was somehow managing to push them both equally hard in proportion to their abilities, so neither Scott nor Stiles could talk, and Derek was busy coaching in nudges and snaps of teeth.

Stiles was glad for the excuse to slow down when he saw an unexpected flash of color a few yards away from the path while Derek and Scott were off looping around him on the opposite side. As he trotted into the sheltered space between a few trees, he realized that he'd seen the little purple flowers before. He looked up to ask Derek if they were special somehow, only to have Derek start barking and come barreling toward him, Scott on his heels.

"What?" Stiles said, freezing in place. He was right, then. These had to be the same flowers he'd picked here as a kid, only to get yelled at by Peter Hale until he dropped them all and ran for home. "What is it?"

Derek stopped back on the path he'd had Stiles running, and he turned and got his teeth into Scott's shorts, keeping him close. Stiles took a step toward them, and stopped again when Scott dropped to his knees and folded forward, hands in the dirt.

"What," Stiles repeated, even as Derek lifted a paw to the back of Scott's neck. "Derek, don't! It wasn't Scott's fault, it was--"

"It's okay, it's just--" Scott's breath caught and Stiles darted in close enough to see Derek's claws dig into Scott's skin, blood trickling down Scott's neck. "Stiles, don't!"

Stiles jerked his hand back from where he'd been reaching for Scott.

"It's just--this is how he can tell me things when I'm awake, it's o--"

Scott grabbed Stiles's leg and pulled him back, moving him around to the other side of Scott and Derek from the flowers. Derek backed away, letting Scott stand, and Scott pushed Stiles into the trees on the opposite side of the path while Stiles stared at the blood. It was still trickling down his neck, not rewinding into the claw marks on Scott's skin.

"Scott, why aren't you healing?"

"I will, it just takes longer if Derek does it. But he showed me--that's wolfsbane, Stiles. It's poisonous. More for us than you, but it can kill you, too, if you handle it too much or eat it."

Stiles looked back at the flowers, which didn't look irresistibly appetizing. "That stuff can kill you guys? Okay, I can--I'll get a shovel, and some gloves, and maybe some lab goggles, I can--"

"No," Scott said, and then looked down at Derek, who nodded and sat down almost on top of Stiles's feet, keeping him in place.

Stiles watched Scott and Derek stare at each other, and then Scott looked up and said, "He gave me some stuff he remembers about it, but it's all kind of jumbled together, so I have to figure out which parts are important and how to say it. It's--the flowers aren't so bad unless we get really close to them, so if we just leave them alone we'll be okay."

Derek nodded.

"And we wouldn't want to get rid of it," Scott continued slowly. "Because it's like--it's poison but it can be medicine, too, if you know how to use it?"

"Like foxglove," Stiles offered. "Digitalis."

Scott blinked. "Uh, yeah. So it could actually be useful for some stuff, if we knew how to use it, so we shouldn't get rid of it in case we want it later. And also we... can't?"

Scott looked down for confirmation, and Derek nodded again.

"We can't. Wolfsbane follows wolves. It's blooming now because there are werewolves on the land again, when there haven't been for so long. Even if we ripped it all up, it would start growing somewhere else in our territory, because..." Scott waved his hands. "Magic."

Stiles opened and closed his mouth and then looked down at Derek. "Because magic?"

Derek gave the shake that stood in for a shrug and then nodded. Close enough.

"Because magic," Stiles muttered. "Okay, so--so we just leave the poisonous magic flowers alone, then. Is there anything else growing in the woods that we should stay out of? Do werewolves get poison ivy?"

Derek's shake was longer and more emphatic, this time, like he was trying to shake the feeling right off his skin; when he took off running this time it was with a whole new purpose. Their things-not-to-step-in tour of the woods lasted nearly until dark. By the time they were done the back of Scott's neck had healed, and so had all of his scratches from thorns and low branches. Stiles had a few new scrapes and welts, and his legs felt ready to secede from his body, though he knew Derek and Scott had been taking it easy on him for hours.

When he went to do his homework he realized he hadn't actually lied to Scott; he did have a quiz in Spanish on Monday. But after a full day in the woods, he was much too tired to lose any sleep over it.

---

On Monday morning, Scott texted to say he didn't need a ride to school. Stiles lingered in the parking lot, waiting for him to show up, worrying a little that he wouldn't. It was his first day back at school as a werewolf, and later on he would have his first lacrosse practice. Maybe Derek had decided Scott wasn't ready, or maybe Scott had freaked out, or....

Two minutes before the first bell Scott came racing in on his bike. Stiles jogged over to the rack to meet him and Scott flashed a tired-looking smile as he locked it up.

"Hey, you okay?" Stiles asked.

"Yeah, I'm good," Scott said, hurrying toward the doors, Stiles half-running to keep up. "Derek woke me up in the middle of the night and made me work out for a few hours. He said it'd be easier to stay in control if I was worn out, so."

The doors opened and Scott froze on the threshold. Stiles looked around, but it wasn't like his own return to school; the only one who seemed to notice anything weird was him. Well, and Scott himself. Stiles watched him take a few deep breaths through his nose, and knew he was scenting the air.

"God, that's a lot," Scott muttered, rocking on his heels like he wanted to turn back. Then, like a switch had been flipped, he relaxed and walked inside, Stiles once again hurrying to keep up with him.

"What are you--"

"It's fine," Scott hissed, but he rubbed at the back of his neck as he said it. "It's--Derek's helping. It's fine."

Stiles kind of wanted to argue about that definition of fine. On the other hand, Scott didn't seem to be actually mind-controlled in a bad way, and neither of them could afford to be tardy to English again.

---

Stiles sat with Allison and Lydia to watch Scott's lacrosse practice. They both looked surprised, but not displeased, to see him there again, although he obviously brought whatever they'd been talking about to a complete halt.

It didn't last long, though. For a few minutes Stiles watched the team stretching, trying not to think about how much faster his wrist could have healed--about if he decided later. But once the guys started running laps, Lydia started up again.

"Like, are you putting-stuff-in-boxes sure, or just don't-buy-a-dress-for-the-spring-formal-yet sure?"

Stiles looked over at Allison, who shrugged miserably. "I never really took everything out of the boxes in the first place."

Stiles winced. Lydia shot him a sympathetic look while Allison was staring down at her toes.

"You can stay with me for the rest of the year," Lydia said decisively, but Stiles was too busy watching Scott run to picture it. Scott was keeping up with the small, skinny guys, the natural sprinters, and starting to pull ahead.

"We have plenty of space, and obviously it's better for your social and educational continuity--"

Allison looked out at the team and shook her head. "They'd never--did you see that?" Allison jumped to her feet as Scott went down. "Scott?"

Stiles was a half-second behind her, but Scott was already getting up, laughing and shaking his head.

"Did he trip?" Lydia asked, still demurely seated.

"Someone tripped him," Allison said, frowning, still watching Scott. "Except I didn't see anyone do it. It didn't look like anyone was close enough."

Stiles bit his tongue. Derek had been close enough. Derek could reach out and control Scott from anywhere.

When Scott started running again, he stayed right in the middle of the pack.

---

Stiles didn't hang around for Tuesday's practice. Scott promised that he had things under control enough--not that Stiles could do much about it if he didn't. Anyway, Stiles had stopped dreading the possible awkwardness of being alone with Derek and started longing for one-on-one time.

They ran for a while, and then, all of a sudden, Derek stopped short and shook his head with a little growl.

"What," Stiles said, looking around for something he wasn't supposed to touch or something he'd done. Derek shook his head again, and touched his nose to the back of Stiles's left wrist. Scott's name wasn't written in big letters there anymore, but Stiles got the idea.

"Oh, right." Derek was still keeping an eye--ear? magical alpha sensory organ of some kind--on Scott at lacrosse practice. "Do you need to concentrate?"

Derek huffed, and then nodded. Stiles looked around and realized they weren't far from the little clearing where he'd first shown Derek the Ouija board (which was still in the backseat of his Jeep, just in case). Stiles tilted his head that way, and Derek nodded and let Stiles lead the way. Stiles sat down on one of the rocks, and Derek jumped up to sit curled around his back.

Stiles leaned back against Derek and settled one hand in the fur at the back of Derek's neck. He tilted his face up toward the trees, enjoying the stillness for a few minutes, and then he looked down at Derek.

"You're not making me hold still, are you?" If Stiles was pack just like Scott, then Derek was his alpha, too. Maybe Derek could control him; maybe he could get into Stiles's head in other ways, too.

Derek huffed and shook his head, and Stiles didn't need a Ouija board or Scott to translate that. I wish.

Stiles grinned and settled back, but he couldn't help knowing that that was a strike against the dreams being real. He still couldn't be sure, and he still wasn't going to ask, not if Derek didn't bring it up first somehow. He'd given Derek an opening, when he'd brought him the Ouija board, but Derek hadn't said anything about dreams. Scott hadn't said anything about Derek saying he talked to Stiles--or did anything else with him--in dreams. And Derek couldn't control Stiles the way he could control Scott. Even the idea that Stiles healed faster because he was part of the pack was just a guess; his mom had gotten her cast off after three weeks, which was the same amount of time Stiles had taken, and Stiles was pretty sure his mom hadn't been part of a werewolf pack.

Stiles opened his eyes and stared up into the trees, wondering if his mom had known the Hales--or how well she might have known the Hales. She must have known them at least a little; it was a small town. He kind of wanted to ask Derek, except Derek couldn't exactly tell him, and he didn't want to bring up Derek's family. Also, Derek needed to concentrate on Scott.

Stiles fidgeted, wishing he'd brought his homework or something, and then pulled his phone out of his pocket and started up Fruit Ninja.

Derek curled closer to peer at it and Stiles leaned half over him to hold it in front of his face and play, so the glare wasn't so bad. Derek made an amused noise and then wriggled free, leaving Stiles half-lying on the rock with Derek pressed up next to him. It was almost the way they slept in Stiles's dreams--almost the way they'd lain when Stiles was first hurt--and it felt totally normal.

Stiles cycled from Fruit Ninja to Angry Birds to Space Invaders to a chain of Wikipedia articles that started with Roswell and ended up at Chateau Frontenac. Stiles looked up to ask Derek if he'd ever been to Canada and Derek was suddenly on his feet, growling as he stood over Stiles on top of the rock.

Stiles looked up at him, and then followed the direction of his gaze; a few seconds later he heard the crashing thuds of someone running impossibly fast. Stiles pushed up on his elbow as Scott became visible, running through the trees. He was hairy-faced, his eyes glowing gold and his fangs bared, and he looked furious enough that Stiles tried to draw back under Derek.

Derek jumped down off the stone, stalking slowly toward Scott and putting himself between Scott and Stiles. Scott wasn't slowing down.

He threw himself right at Derek as he yelled, "You killed them!"

Stiles jumped to his feet as Derek roared, bowling Scott over, but Scott didn't give in. He fought back, yelling and snarling incoherently, while Derek fought in silence.

After a few seconds Stiles realized that Derek could have ripped Scott to shreds anytime; he was fighting without using his claws or teeth. He kept butting Scott with his head and trying to get a grip on him with his paws or pin him down, but letting go if Scott struggled too much. Derek was being careful not to hurt him.

Stiles also realized what Scott had said.

A second after that, he saw Scott swipe at Derek's belly with his claws, and the sudden, awful memory struck him: Laura's still, cold body, and the wounds packed with dirt, the torn-out place where her guts should have been.

"Scott," Stiles yelled. "Stop!"

Scott roared, and Derek twisted and got under him enough to fling Scott halfway across the clearing. He landed with a solid thump and a whoosh of lost breath that had Stiles running to him without a thought.

Derek got there first, though, planting both of his front paws on Scott's back. Scott was still struggling, and Stiles yelled, "Don't," at both of them, and then Derek jammed one paw down on the back of Scott's neck, digging his claws in and drawing blood.

Scott stopped all at once. Stiles looked up at Derek just in time to see him take his paw from Scott's neck and turn and walk away.

"Scott?" Stiles grabbed his shoulder and rolled him over and then froze. There were tears running from Scott's eyes. "Scott, what did he--"

Scott sobbed, sitting up in a sudden curl, and Stiles grabbed him as he tried to lunge toward Derek, who was all the way on the other side of the clearing, sitting with his back to them.

"Derek," Scott yelled, his voice clogged with snot, "I'm sorry, I didn't--I heard someone talking about Peter and I figured it out and I just--I was scared for Stiles, I didn't know--I'm sorry!"

Derek didn't move, and Stiles fought down the dumb warm feeling of knowing Scott had been worried about him even if he'd been completely wrong. "Scott, shut up, don't--he doesn't like to talk about it."

Scott actually looked at him then, swiping a hand across his eyes. "Did you--did you know?"

"I know he was one of the wolves who killed Peter, if that's what you were yelling about," Stiles said. "And I know about Laura, I helped him--" Stiles's breath caught, but he got the words out. "Bury her."

"He didn't kill her, he was just trying to help," Scott said, sniffling. "I thought--but I didn't know. He showed me. He didn't...."

"I know, I know he didn't." Stiles looked over his shoulder. Derek was lying down now. But he'd told Scott, so he couldn't want to keep it a total secret.

"What happened, exactly? He couldn't tell me all of it."

"Laura," Scott said, sniffed and wiped his face again. "Laura was the alpha after the fire. It was just the two of them, because they didn't think Peter would ever get better. That's why they went away. But then something happened a few weeks ago, and Laura told Derek she had to come back here. She said she thought there were werewolves here again, maybe bad ones. Derek was worried about it, but she didn't want him to come--but she was driving, so he flew and then got a car and beat her here, and he hid down in some tunnels."

There had been a sleeping bag, and people-food and clothes. Derek had been camping out before he'd changed.

"He thought Laura would find him first, but he didn't even know she was there until he heard them fighting. He ran out to find them, and it was Peter--Peter was a werewolf, too--"

"I know," Stiles said, remembering Peter's name, carved into the rock with his claws, and the claw and bite marks in Jennifer Wilson's car.

"He wanted to be alpha. Peter did, I mean, but he was doing it wrong. He didn't talk to Laura about it. In a pack, a family, sometimes the alpha gets old or someone else just thinks they would be better at it, and you can talk about it and decide. There's still a fight, but it's just--it's not like that. But this was a fight like strangers, like enemies. Peter must have just attacked her, with no warning.

"Even so, Derek thought Peter would stop once he won, or if Laura won. But Peter wasn't stopping, even after he--he ripped--"

Scott made a gesture at his stomach and Stiles winced and nodded, remembering.

"She was going to die. He didn't have to do that. You're not supposed to kill your own family, your own blood."

Blood must be avenged, Stiles remembered suddenly. He managed not to say it.

"But Peter wasn't stopping, and Derek just--he didn't mean to win like that, it wasn't because he wanted to be alpha, but he had to stop him."

"I know," Stiles said, looking toward Derek again. "I know he was just trying to help. He had to protect Laura."

"But Peter was already hurt, and he wasn't alpha yet, and Derek killed him," Scott said. "And Laura died anyway, and Derek became alpha, but it was all wrong. Derek is cursed, Stiles."

Stiles looked over at Derek, a black shape curled small on the ground. He'd known that, he'd known Derek was under some kind of spell or something, but he'd never thought Derek was being punished.

Blood must be avenged, Jennifer had said. And she'd said that worse than this would happen to Derek if he didn't. Was it just a matter of time before Derek suffered another curse that did something worse to him? If his dad couldn't find the mystery woman soon, Stiles was going to have to tell. Derek had to at least know what was coming.

"He doesn't know for sure," Scott went on, "If it's because he interfered in an alpha fight and won by killing someone who was already wounded, or because he killed the last of his own pack. Or both. But that's why he's stuck. He thought it might even get me, because I was his beta, but it didn't. It's just him."

Scott sniffled, and then yelled abruptly in Derek's direction, straining against Stiles's grip again, "But you were just trying to help! It isn't fair!"

Stiles winced, looking back at Derek. There was a silence, and then Derek heaved a sigh that even Stiles could hear from across the clearing. He got up and trotted over to them, and stood looking Scott in the eye for a moment. Finally he shook his head and rubbed his face against Scott's.

It wasn't fair, but it was what they had. Derek had killed a murderer--and Peter would have tried to murder so many other people, but Stiles couldn't tell them that. Not yet. It might still be okay; Stiles's dad was on the case, and Stiles believed he could crack it. He definitely wasn't going to tell Derek he was supposed to kill people or he might get cursed even worse, not when he was trapped in the woods and already busy trying to manage Scott.

Scott was whispering frantically to Derek, apologizing for jumping to a half-right conclusion, but Stiles couldn't say a word. He didn't dare, when he had so many secrets to keep.

He leaned against Derek's side and closed his eyes as he listened to the thump of Derek's heart. At least they'd both heal faster with him close by. Stiles could do that much for his pack, if nothing else.

---

Stiles expected Derek to be wolf-shaped that night. He had been the last couple of nights, and Stiles was pretty sure this time that it wasn't because he'd done anything wrong in the sex dream, even though Derek hadn't been human-shaped since then. It was probably easier for Derek to be wolf-shaped. He needed to pay attention to Scott, too, and that would be easier if Stiles wasn't distracting him. Derek kept coming back--and that one dream had provided Stiles with plenty of jerk-off material, to say nothing of the novelty of being able to use both hands. Stiles had nothing to complain about.

Stiles was kind of looking forward to being able to hug the hell out of him that night. Derek had put up with Scott and Stiles feeling bad for him for about as long as it took Scott to stop bleeding, and then made them go running.

He really didn't like talking about it. Stiles understood that more than ever now, but he was looking forward to being able to sneak in a few more cuddles while they were sleeping. So, of course, he opened his eyes that night at the feeling of Derek pressing up against his back and Derek's arms folding around him.

"Hey," Stiles said on a yawn. He wanted to roll over and hug Derek, but that wasn't allowed, so, fine. He could work with this. He settled his own arms over Derek's and hugged the shit out of Derek's forearms, snuggling back against him as he did, until he felt what he thought must be Derek laughing against his back.

When Stiles relaxed his grip, Derek rubbed his sandpapery cheek against the side of Stiles's throat, and gave Stiles a little squeeze hello. Then he shifted behind Stiles, scooting back slightly, and nuzzled at the back of Stiles's neck.

Stiles remembered the slow-healing punctures in the back of Scott's neck and bowed his head, wishing--but Derek didn't have any claws in this shape, and he didn't need claws to tell Scott things in dreams.

"Yeah," Stiles said softly. "I wish you could tell me too."

Derek huffed out a sigh, and Stiles felt him nod.

They lay there for a while, maybe a minute, before Stiles started squirming around: trying to push closer to Derek than he already was, trying to get the angle of his neck just precisely right on the pillow, reaching down to fiddle with the blanket and then settling his hands over Derek's again.

Derek put up with it for a while and then tightened his grip on Stiles, leaning into him to pin Stiles half-under him against the mattress.

Stiles went still, and Derek rubbed his cheek against the side of Stiles's throat again, making a soft inquiring noise that was barely a growl at all.

"Oh," Stiles said, flexing up against Derek's weight as his dick got harder. "Yeah, this is--"

Derek's hand slid down from his belly to the top of his pajama pants, and Derek made the same noise again.

Stiles couldn't breathe for a second at the thought of what Derek was offering, and then he nodded frantically.

Derek eased his fingertips under the elastic and made the same noise again.

"Oh my fucking god, if you're mocking me for making sure you were okay with it the other night, just please make fun of me later and put your hand down my pants now," Stiles burst out.

He felt the breath of Derek's laughter this time, gusting out against the back of his neck. Derek's fingers crept down another fraction of an inch.

"You are such an asshole," Stiles huffed, even as he pushed back against Derek and took hold of Derek's hand to push it down. Derek's hand twisted in his grip, though, grabbing Stiles's pajama pants to pull them down instead. Stiles was willing to cooperate with that, and kicked helpfully until he was pants-free and spooned up against Derek.

Derek's hand settled at the top of his thigh first, his thumb tracing the angle of Stiles's groin. Stiles couldn't help wiggling into the touch, trying to twist down to grind against the mattress. Derek made a hilariously perfect tsk sound and held Stiles against himself, but he also shifted his hand down and wrapped his fingers around Stiles's dick.

Stiles made a desperate, high-pitched noise and bit down hard on his lip, trying not to come. This was--this was new, this was different from the privilege of rubbing himself off against Derek's ass. This was someone else--Derek--touching him. Derek's hand was broader than his, with a tighter grip than Stiles usually used on himself. Stiles pushed into Derek's fist, and that was almost, almost enough, but Derek made a frustrated noise and let go all of a sudden.

"What," Stiles gasped, "what, no, we can--I'll--" he was on the verge of promising anything--not that he had any idea what needed to be fixed--when a dizzying whirl of motion shut him up. Suddenly he was lying on his left side and Derek was rearranging them, so that he could now close his right hand around Stiles's dick.

Stiles couldn't help grinning. "Let me guess, you're not left-handed either."

Derek huffed against the back of Stiles's neck and gave Stiles's dick a fast, too-tight stroke. The startled noise Stiles made this time wasn't entirely pleasure. Derek made an anxious noise and opened his hand, so that just the palm pressed against the underside of Stiles's dick.

"Please," Stiles said, when Derek held still there, hitching his hips to rub his dick against Derek's hand. "Just, go easy."

Derek nodded against the back of his head and moved his hand carefully, too gently, his thumb finding the head of Stiles's dick and tracing around the rim.

"Yes," Stiles said, "What, come on, I know you have--"

Derek closed his fingers carefully around Stiles's dick and jacked him slowly while Stiles was staring into the dark, realizing that maybe Derek didn't have the same equipment. Maybe Derek wasn't cut. Stiles had watched enough porn to know that changed the mechanics of jerking off.

"Wet," Stiles said. "Helps if it's--"

Derek took his hand away again, and Stiles just had time to make a frustrated noise before Derek's palm was pressed against Stiles's mouth. Not shushing him, he realized when he felt a soft, wet touch at the back of his neck. Derek's tongue.

Stiles whimpered and then opened his mouth and licked Derek's palm. He could smell his own dick on Derek's skin. He couldn't really taste anything but the salt of sweat, but still, he had to reach down and grab his own dick as he did it, because he was licking Derek.

He felt Derek's breath stutter behind him, and Derek took his hand away from Stiles's mouth, swatted Stiles's hand away, and started jerking him off. Still awkward, but better now, all wet-slick noises and just enough friction. Stiles wrapped his hand around Derek's, guiding him, and if it was a little bit fucked up that he loved holding Derek's hand as much he loved Derek's hand on his dick, well, he already knew this was fucked up.

It didn't take long after that before Stiles came, losing his own grip as Derek stroked him through it, his head tilted back as he gasped for breath. He could feel Derek breathing fast against his jaw, and then the stubble-prickle of Derek's cheek against his throat. Derek was making those little not-quite-human shushing noises as he peeled his hand away from Stiles's dick.

"Here," Stiles muttered, grabbing Derek's wrist and guiding his hand over to wipe the mess on Stiles's t-shirt. He could wash it tomorrow.

He felt Derek shake his head a little, and another brief touch of tongue against the back of his neck, but Derek settled his hand over Stiles's chest and left it there until Stiles fell asleep, still trying to decide if awkward sex was, by definition, real sex.

---

Stiles's dad wound up working late the next few nights, which allowed Stiles to sneak in some extra training time with Derek and Scott after school, whenever Scott had spare time between lacrosse practice and his job. The full moon was coming, and Derek was drilling Scott on staying under control.

Stiles mostly just sat back and watched, although one time--more frustrated with the drilling than anything else--Scott, already shifted, turned and lunged at Stiles. Derek gave a full on red-eyed roar and Scott dropped to his knees, human before he hit the ground. Stiles hadn't even had time to realize that Scott might actually jump him before it was over, but Scott and Derek had both been apologetic afterward.

All in all, though, Scott's training seemed to be going well, and the coming full moon didn't seem like nearly as big a deal to Stiles as the possible second curse hanging over Derek's head. To say nothing of the murderers still not brought to justice and all the secrets Stiles was keeping from his pack.

He needed to know if he was going to have to give up and tell Derek about the real cause of the fire, but it wasn't exactly something that would be easy to slip into casual conversation. Stiles barely even saw his dad long enough to try until Friday, when he walked out of school and found his dad's cruiser waiting for him.

Stiles sighed and got in without arguing, and his dad said blandly, "Didn't want you getting sidetracked on your way home," as he put the car in gear.

"Wouldn't want to be late for finding out my wrist's not broken," Stiles agreed.

His dad ignored the bait and asked him how school had been, and Stiles launched into a long description of everything that was wrong about the essay he had to write for English this weekend that carried them all the way to the doctor's office. His dad got to sit down for about five minutes before his phone went off. He gave Stiles an apologetic look but didn't hesitate before he headed outside to take the call.

Stiles dug through his backpack for homework to get started on. Scott's first lacrosse game as a wolf was tomorrow night, the full moon was on Sunday, and between the two Stiles didn't expect to have a lot of calm, collected time for doing homework in the next two days.

The nurse came out and asked for him before his dad came back, but she waved off Stiles's explanation of where his dad had gone and took him back to get an x-ray. His dad was waiting for him when they took the lead apron off him, and they sat together in a little exam room until Dr. Varghese came in with the films, frowning.

"I see you already have your cast off, but according to your file it's only been four weeks. Do I have that right?"

"Four weeks today," Stiles agreed, although it seemed impossible that everything that had happened since he went out to the Hale house had only taken four weeks. "I, uh, got impatient with the cast. It felt a lot better already."

"Well, I can see why," Dr. Varghese agreed, putting up two x-rays on a light board and flipping the switch. They both showed Stiles's left hand, and the difference was obvious even before the doctor pointed it out. The fractures in his wrist were clearly visible in the film on the left, sharp black lines through the white bones.

In the one taken today, there wasn't a trace.

"You've healed remarkably well," Dr. Varghese said, sounding a little baffled. "We would normally expect to still see signs of the fracture at this point--even after the bone has knit together there is still more healing to do, and it would normally leave a scar--but as you can see, there's nothing left. If the handedness weren't obvious I'd think we might have x-rayed the wrong side."

Stiles struggled to keep the smug grin off his face. My pack did that.

Beside him his dad shifted in the plastic chair and then said cautiously, "Is this... abnormal?"

"Oh, no!" Dr. Varghese looked startled and then shifted quickly to a soothing expression. "No, no--unusual, but not abnormal. Stiles is just on the lucky end of the range. Every injury heals a little differently, and some people naturally heal more quickly than others. It's surprising, but it's not a cause for concern."

Stiles did grin then, but Dr. Varghese gave him a stern look and said, "This doesn't mean you're indestructible, Stiles. Repeated breaks could cause cumulative damage; that's certainly the case for head injuries, for instance."

Stiles made his face blank and nodded quickly. "No, I know. I remember how much it hurt, believe me, I'm totally okay with never breaking anything ever again."

But if he did, he'd have to make up some kind of excuse to go camping with Scott in the preserve. He was already half-planning it--to say nothing of the next full moon, which wasn't going to be conveniently on a weekend, and the next one after that--while Dr. Varghese gave him a few more words of caution and then took the opportunity to check his dad's blood pressure and ask after his eating habits, which Stiles completely approved of.

His dad, of course, didn't see it that way, and they were out of the doctor's office pretty quickly after that. His dad muttered defiantly about his blood pressure all the way across the parking lot, though he went quiet again when they got into the car.

The scanner was silent, and his dad didn't even check in on the radio, which Stiles knew meant he was trying his best to be really off-duty for a few more hours. He'd be working tonight and probably some kind of weird split shift tomorrow--weekend schedules were always complicated verging on bizarre--and then Sunday was the full moon, so whether his dad was home or not Stiles was going to have to go to the woods for the night. If he had to sneak out to do it he'd just have to hope he could patch things up with his dad by being in school on Monday even if he had to take a triple dose of Adderall to keep himself awake until school got out.

Basically, there was no time like the present. Stiles cleared his throat as his dad pulled out of the parking lot, and his dad looked over, raising his eyebrows in a something you want to tell me? expression.

Stiles faced front. "I was just wondering--I know you would have told me if anything big happened, but--are you getting any closer? On the--the fire, I mean. The Hales."

His dad was silent, and Stiles glanced over to see his dad looking tired all of a sudden, rubbing his face with one hand.

Stiles winced and looked down, because that was a no, that was....

"I know you probably have a lot of other priorities," Stiles said, turning his head to look out the window, forcing himself not to imagine what the next curse might do to Derek, what it would be like to have to tell him what had been done to his family when he couldn't talk, couldn't cry, and, oh yeah, couldn't even get out of the woods to get revenge if he wanted to. "I get it, I don't--"

"Hey, no," his dad said sharply, and Stiles was startled into looking up.

"It's a hard case to crack," his dad said. "We can't just trust Peter Hale's conclusions. We have to come up with actual admissible evidence, and any evidence that might exist is six years old. We've got an opinion from the Bureau that points strongly to it being arson, we've got reason to at least pull in that insurance investigator for questioning, and that could go a long way, we--it just takes time, Stiles."

His dad sighed, shaking his head. "We still don't have any solid evidence pointing to the ringleader, so it's risky to bring people in and try to make it work solely on testimony, especially when that might scare off the one we really want. Trust me, the only mass murder in the town's history is not a low priority, okay? We're taking this seriously, and we're going to get these people. We're going to do this right."

"Oh," Stiles said, and looked away again quickly. He couldn't explain to his dad the overwhelming relief of that, the gratitude he felt. Derek would be safe, he and Scott would be safe; everything would be okay. His dad would catch the bad guys--and woman--and Stiles and Scott and Derek could get on with being an only slightly cursed werewolf pack. They'd be okay. They'd make it work somehow.

Stiles stole another look at his dad, who was looking back and forth from Stiles to the road with a worried expression Stiles couldn't quite read.

"That's good," Stiles said, forcing out the words past the habit of careful silence. He could feel his dad watching him, and he wondered when he'd gotten so quiet, but then again he knew. Four weeks ago today.

He turned to look straight at his dad, meeting his eyes with a smile that stood for all the thank you and I think it's going to be all right that he couldn't actually say. "Hey, you know what this calls for? I think this calls for pie."

His dad looked over at him skeptically. "What, some vegan pie made of kale and--"

"No, come on, actual pie, diner pie, with ice cream and everything. I mean, seriously!" Stiles waved both hands. "I have some kind of mutant healing factor! That's cause for celebration, isn't it?"

"I can't believe I'm saying this," his dad said. "But you do remember the part where the doc said your mutant healing factor isn't an excuse to behave irresponsibly, right?"

But he was smiling as he said it, already signaling the turn down Main Street that would take them to Sal's.

---

Stiles spent the night at Scott's--actually at Scott's, and not out in the woods with or without Scott, because Scott's mom was home Friday night. She was working the early shift on Saturday, so she could come to Scott's game. She looked in on them before she left, while it was still dark outside. Derek was lying between Stiles and Scott while Stiles blinked sleepily toward her as she stood in the doorway.

Scott was semi-awake, too. He mumbled something at his mom and flapped one hand. Derek had turned his head to watch her, quietly alert.

She whispered, "Oh, God, go back to sleep, I wish I was still asleep," and waved at them before she left.

Stiles obeyed, but the next time he opened his eyes it was barely any lighter outside. This time Scott was dragging him out of bed, already talking brightly about all the things he needed to practice one more time before tonight's game. Stiles clung to his pillow, but it was no good; Derek was gone, which meant he was really awake this time.

---

After training in the woods for most of the morning, Stiles staggered home for a nap, sleeping too hard to do much more than register Derek's presence. After that, disoriented and half-awake, he forced himself through as much of his homework as he could manage before his dad knocked on the doorframe and said, "Hey, you want a ride to the game?"

Stiles blinked at his dad, still dazed. "You're home."

"Yeah," his dad said, smiling a little. "You were sleeping when I got in. You and Scott up late last night?"

"Up early," Stiles said, looking back down at his Chemistry book and realizing he was going to have to do all of it over tomorrow, because he didn't remember anything he'd just done. "Uh, yeah, a ride would be good. Thanks."

He stood up and grabbed a jacket, and let his dad steer him through the house and out to the car with a hand on the back of his neck; he at least managed to get in without his dad's hand on the top of his head. He'd been twelve years old before he figured out that was a cop thing, not a dad thing.

They were halfway to school when Stiles's stomach growled, and he remembered that he'd had a sandwich when he got home from the woods that morning, but nothing since. His dad, without looking away from the road, said, "Guess we'll have to do dinner at the concession stand."

Stiles argued with him on autopilot, fuzzy and half-awake, like the whole day had been a dream and he was still lying in Scott's bed with his pack. By the time they were walking across the parking lot, Stiles had gone off onto some kind of rant even he didn't totally understand about trichinosis and keeping kosher.

Allison was standing by the entrance to the field, grinning hugely and looking around excitedly. When she saw him she waved, bouncing in place. Stiles snapped his mouth shut and made a beeline for her.

He didn't realize his dad was on his heels until Allison's smile shrank down to a nervous look. "Hi, Sheriff. Hi, Stiles."

"Allison," his dad said, in that yep-I'm-the-sheriff voice he used when he particularly wanted to embarrass the crap out of Stiles in front of his classmates. "You drive yourself here tonight?"

Allison actually blushed, and Stiles abruptly remembered his dad telling him about her getting pulled over last weekend--oh God, his dad had pulled Allison over last weekend. Allison just shook her head. "No, my dad dropped me off. I was kind of hoping I could get a ride back with Stiles?"

"Sure, we can give you a ride," his dad said, and clapped Stiles on the shoulder. "I'll even put Stiles in the backseat so you can ride up front."

Stiles rolled his eyes, but then his dad said, "See you kids inside," and walked away, so apparently there was some mercy in the world.

Stiles turned toward Allison once his dad was safely out of earshot; her grin was back, and she reached up to fix her hair--

All traces of fuzzy dreaminess vanished in a cold wash of adrenaline at the sight of the purple flower Allison had tucked behind her ear.

"What--Allison, what is that?"

He just managed not to grab it and throw it on the ground, but he couldn't help remembering what Scott had told him from Derek. Wolfsbane. It can kill you, too.

"Oh--" Allison was still smiling, a little sheepishly now, but she took the flower from her hair and twirled it in her fingers. "My dad gave it to me. He found it growing in the woods today and he thought it was funny that it was blooming out of season."

Stiles remembered to breathe in and out and didn't knock the flower out of her hands. "Do you know what it is?"

Allison was frowning, and now she looked down at the flower thoughtfully. "I don't know, just... a flower, I guess? I'm not great at identifying plants."

"I'm pretty sure those are poisonous," Stiles said, because somehow saying wolfsbane felt dangerous, like it would be telling too much. "When I was a kid I used to play in the woods and the little purple flowers were, like, super off-limits. Even touching them too much is dangerous, you can absorb it through your skin."

Allison's eyes went wide, and she dropped the flower and then rubbed anxiously at the back of her ear with her sleeve pulled over her hand.

Stiles made an apologetic face. "Probably one flower won't--anyway, sorry, you were going to say something."

Once again Allison's huge smile came back--she was literally beaming, her wide white smile and her sparkling eyes actually seeming to emit light. "Oh my God, Stiles, I had to tell you first--you were right! My Aunt Kate is coming to visit, and my parents have started talking like we're going to stay!"

Stiles grinned back automatically, swept up by Allison's excitement, and he leaned in to give her a quick hug even as the implications hit him. Derek--and Scott--would still be in danger from Allison's dad, who was apparently taking walks in the woods inside Derek's magic line, if he'd managed to find wolfsbane blooming.

They would be fine, Stiles told himself. Derek already knew it wasn't safe for humans to see him, and he'd make sure Scott was careful when they trained together.

Stiles had a smile firmly in place by the time he stood back from the hug. "Dude, Allison, that's awesome, Scott is gonna be so glad! That's--that's great!"

Allison was nodding like a bobblehead, grinning hugely. "My mom's talking about getting a job--maybe subbing at school, which," Allison rolled her eyes, and Stiles grimaced in totally unreserved sympathy. DARE with his dad had made him want to crawl under his desk every Tuesday afternoon in fifth grade.

"Still," Allison said, putting her chin up and smiling again like she couldn't stop, "it means staying, at least through the end of the school year! And Kate's going to visit, this is going to be so great! She's so cool, I can't wait for you guys to meet her."

Stiles kept his smile in place, trying to picture what the mysterious older version of Allison would be like.

"She has some work stuff to wrap up down in Arizona this weekend, but next week, Tuesday or Wednesday," Allison was saying, while Stiles glanced toward the lacrosse field.

"Should we..." Stiles tilted his head toward the stands.

"Oh, yeah," Allison said, taking his arm to turn them towards the entrance. "Lydia's saving seats, I just. One other thing."

Allison's smile went almost all the way off her face now, replaced by a nervous expression beyond even what Stiles's dad had provoked. Stiles frowned.

"It's just--Lydia's been saying--" Allison rolled her eyes, like she already knew she shouldn't listen too much to Lydia, but she went on. "About Scott's asthma not being totally under control and everything, she keeps saying maybe it would be better if he weren't on first line. He's seemed fine in practice, but I know you guys have been working out together, and you've known him longer--is he going to be okay out there?"

Stiles grinned without having to try this time, thinking of Derek drilling Scott over and over this morning so that he wouldn't jump higher or run faster than a human kid possibly could.

He patted Allison's hand. "Oh, yeah. This one time, Lydia is totally wrong. Scott's going to be just fine."

Chapter Text

"And then!" Scott went on. "Did you see when I--" he looked around, but he and Stiles were safely into the woods now, with no one around to see. Scott jumped into the air, repeating that midair change of direction that Stiles seriously would have thought was only possible with help from bullet-vision and a bunch of special effects.

"Yeah, I saw, everybody saw," Stiles said patiently, not for the first time. "Derek is seriously going to kick your ass--that was straight-up superpower shit, right in front of everybody."

"But I totally saved it!" Scott insisted, trotting backwards while Stiles trudged along the path. "I fell down after I made the pass! Allison was all worried that I hurt myself and nobody else said anything about it. And Brian missed the shot anyway, so no one's going to remember that I made the sweetest pass ever."

"Except me," Stiles pointed out, hoisting up his backpack and looking around for Derek. It was weird to have walked in this far from the cemetery without seeing him. "Because you will never let me forget."

"He's at the house," Scott said, and Stiles stopped walking and looked over at him.

"Derek," Scott elaborated unnecessarily. "You were looking for him. He meets us at the border if you're here, but he makes me find him. He's at the house."

Stiles hesitated, considering. Both their parents were working tonight--his dad just until midnight, Scott's mom all night--so Stiles had been able to claim he was spending the night at Scott's.

Best case scenario, they could get back after sunrise before Scott's mom noticed them missing. They'd left the Jeep in the driveway at Scott's and hooked up a lamp in Scott's bedroom to a timer, so it would look like they were there if his dad did a drive-by.

Stiles had turned his phone off while they were still in Scott's bedroom; if his dad checked the GPS, it would show his last known location, and that would be totally plausible. Scott had left his phone behind so he couldn't Hulk out and break it or, more likely, lose it somewhere.

Stiles had considered leaving his, too. He'd have Scott and Derek with him if he got hurt, after all. If Scott got out of control, Stiles wasn't going to call 911 on his werewolf best friend, both for Scott's sake and because he wasn't going to call his dad or any of his dad's deputies to face a werewolf during the full moon. They'd have Derek and each other; that should be all they needed in case of emergencies.

Still. Stiles wasn't going into the woods without his phone.

So he'd bent the rules about his phone pretty far already, and now Derek was at the house, and staying away from the Hale house wasn't just a rule. It was a promise. Stiles couldn't break a promise to his mom, and he knew all the reasons he shouldn't go, but if Derek insisted....

Scott tilted his head and said, "Here he comes. I think he was down in the tunnels."

"Oh," Stiles said, wincing as he realized. "He must have been visiting Laura."

Scott looked sheepish and enlightened, but before he could say a word Derek trotted into view and then stopped, eyes flashing red as he shook his head.

"I told you he was going to kick your ass, dude," Stiles said, sidestepping away from Scott.

"Come on, it was fine," Scott insisted. "No one even noticed that. And I got that goal totally fair and squa--"

Derek jumped him, licking Scott's face as he bowled him over, and Scott went down flailing and laughing. Stiles watched until Derek let Scott roll him over. When he was sure that they were mostly playing, he knelt and opened his backpack.

Most of it was logical, necessary stuff--comic books, lighter, flashlight, Oreos, Pop Tarts, beef jerky, first aid kit--but he'd also brought along one kind of questionable item. He didn't think Derek would refuse, or even laugh, but he still felt kind of stupid for wanting it so much.

He pulled the ink roller out of his bag and stood up to watch Derek and Scott playing around some more. He'd barely straightened up when Derek flipped Scott over decisively and jumped off him. He trotted right over to Stiles and shoved his nose against the little plastic bottle.

Stiles tilted his hand to show him, and Derek looked up and met his eyes. They flashed red, and then Derek nodded decisively, touching his nose to the inside of Stiles's left arm, just below his elbow. So, yeah, Derek knew what he wanted. Stiles stripped down to the short-sleeved t-shirt he was wearing under a few other layers, dropping them all in a heap on top of his backpack before he sat down.

Scott came over just as Derek offered Stiles his paw, and Stiles uncapped the ink and started rolling it onto the pads.

"Oh, your pawprint, yeah," Scott said, and sat down next to Stiles. "Gotta have you marked for the pack tonight. D'you think I could have one, too?"

Stiles shrugged and didn't answer, concentrating on spreading the ink over every part of Derek's paw and dotting it onto his claws. Then he offered Derek his arm, palm up.

Derek sniffed the skin first, then licked it a couple of times, quick flicks of his tongue that Stiles didn't have time to react to before Derek settled his inked paw in place. It was huge, wider than Stiles's forearm, and Derek rolled it from side to side to lay down the mark.

When he took it away Stiles caught his breath at the rightness of Derek's print on his skin, the real thing that the Sharpie-drawing on his cast had only been a rough sketch of.

"Dude," Scott said, leaning in, oblivious to the way Stiles was mesmerized by it. "That is awesome. Hey, Derek, where--oh, man, I'm never going to be able to get a tattoo now, am I."

Stiles followed Scott's leap easily, and didn't even look up from the pawprint as he said without thinking, "There must be a way. Derek has a tattoo and he's always been a werewolf."

"Oh, cool," Scott said, totally unfazed.

Stiles realized what he'd said and looked up to meet Derek's eyes as Scott said, "What's it look like?"

Derek was staring at him. Stiles thought that somehow Derek was managing to look as shocked as Stiles felt, his gray eyes wide and his mouth hanging open slightly.

"Guys?" Scott said hesitantly.

Derek shook himself and took a couple of steps away from Stiles. But it wasn't a no shake or even the I don't know, it was... Derek shaking himself awake.

"It, uh," Stiles said, watching Derek. "It's three spirals joined together."

"Oh!" Scott said, excitedly. "Yeah, the triskele. That's the Hale family emblem, it's a symbol for the way things can change, like--alpha, beta, omega, any of us can be any of those no matter where we start out."

Stiles nodded, but he wasn't really listening, because Derek kept looking at him and then looking away and then looking back, like he couldn't bear to hold eye contact but he couldn't stop checking that Stiles was real, or that this was real.

Holy fuck, it was all real.

Stiles was suddenly grinning hugely, giddily. He wanted to launch himself at Derek and--

His brain crashed to an abrupt halt, because Derek was a wolf now, and, fuck. This was going to be awkward.

Derek sighed and nodded and sat down.

"Where is it?" Scott asked, and Stiles blinked and looked over at him.

"Derek's tattoo," Scott repeated patiently, like he thought Stiles had just gotten distracted as usual. He didn't have any idea what it meant. "Where is it?"

"On his back," Stiles said, stealing a glance at Derek again. Derek met his eyes for a second and then looked away. "Between his shoulder blades, not, like, a tramp stamp."

Scott grinned again and totally failed to ask how Stiles knew that. "That sounds hardcore. Derek, can I--"

But Derek shook himself again and snapped at Scott, sending him running. Stiles barely had time to shove the ink back into his bag and grab his shirts before he was following them deeper into the woods.

---

Stiles hung out alone for a while in the river hideout, poking a campfire and eating his Pop Tarts while Derek and Scott spent the first hour of the full moon getting their own dinner. Stiles didn't have a problem with hunting deer for food, in theory, but he wasn't quite ready to join in on it werewolf-style.

After a while he went over to the humans' side of the cave and studied the names written there again. He had a Sharpie in his backpack, but he wasn't going to use it while Derek and Scott were gone. Maybe in the morning, after they'd all survived a full moon night together--although there was still that niggling voice in his head that said if you decide later. Stiles didn't know what to make of that.

But even that was easier than thinking about the fact that the dreams were real, that Derek--Derek who was stuck in a wolf's body--Derek had been really-for-real in his dream the other night, in his bed, with his hand on Stiles's dick.

It was a huge relief when he heard Scott yelling his name from up above. He kicked sand over the fire and climbed out, getting about two feet off the ground before Derek was there to spot him. Derek had a huge wolf grin on, and Stiles was just glad he waited until they were on solid ground at the top of the cliff before he put his paws on Stiles's shoulders and licked his face.

On the bright side, if his breath smelled more like deer than usual, Stiles couldn't tell the difference.

Stiles looked over at Scott, who was wolfed out completely, and said, "Hey, you've got a little--"

Scott actually went for it, stepping in and letting Stiles reach out and flick him on one wolfy ear. His eyes flashed, but he was grinning as he turned his head to snap his fangs in the direction of Stiles's fingers.

"Whatever, we totally washed up," Scott said cheerfully. "We were just gonna hang out for a while--" Scott yawned, and then went on. "Turns out werewolves get food comas too."

Stiles grinned. "Yeah, let's go find somewhere to relax. I'll rub your belly."

Scott just huffed and rolled his eyes. "Rub Derek's, man, you're the one who's allowed to pet him."

Stiles opened and closed his mouth and then looked down at Derek just as Derek pressed himself up against Stiles's hip. Stiles settled his hand in the fur over Derek's shoulders--just where his tattoo was, he realized. Stiles skritched cautiously, like he'd never touched Derek before.

Scott shook his head and turned on his heel, and Derek gave a laughing little huff and led Stiles after him. They walked along the clifftop for a while--with Derek between Stiles and the edge--until they came to a spot where two logs formed a wide vee, looking out over the forest on the other side of the river. Scott was already stretched out on one log, so Stiles sat down on the other. Derek immediately lay down along it at Stiles's side and put his head in Stiles's lap.

There were clouds scudding across the moon, but the weather reports Stiles had checked called for the rain to hold off until morning. They could go down to the hideout if it rained, and sleep cuddled together in the sand just like they slept in Stiles's bed.

"It's real," Stiles said softly, not bothering to whisper. Scott would hear him anyway, or would smell it on him, or had already smelled it on him days ago.

Derek turned his head to lick Stiles's other hand and then settled again with his head on Stiles's thigh.

They sat still for a while. The moon crept higher, making the clouds glow iridescent around it. Scott started to make little rhythmic growling noises that Stiles thought might be werewolf snores, which was kind of ridiculous and adorable.

Stiles was starting to seriously consider tipping over and trying to nap stretched out on top of Derek when the wind changed, suddenly hitting the back of his neck and making him shiver despite the layers of clothes he was wearing.

Derek tensed, and a second later Scott flailed suddenly awake and leapt to his feet. Stiles was startled into a freeze as his heart thumped into overdrive.

"What," he said, and Derek made the not-quite-human shushing noise Stiles had only ever heard in his dreams.

Derek got deliberately to his feet, walking toward the trees, into the wind. He was putting himself between Stiles and Scott and whatever was in the woods. Scott was standing utterly still, half-crouched. Stiles just pivoted without standing up, watching his pack hear things he couldn't hear, smell things he couldn't smell. Sweat was running down his sides and his spine, cold on the back of his neck and along his temples.

Just when Stiles didn't think he could bear to keep still another second, Scott darted over and crouched beside him.

"There are people in the woods," Scott whispered. "Hunters with guns, talking about wolves and coming this way."

Suddenly it wasn't hard not to move at all. Stiles felt actually frozen, coldness running through his veins.

Derek turned and came to them, pushing them apart to step between them. He tapped his nose against Scott's thigh and then gestured westward, downriver. The access road was that way, a winding route that would eventually return to civilization. Stiles took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long looping run, but Derek turned toward Stiles and caught the sleeve of Stiles's shirt between his teeth. He looked up at Stiles without giving further instructions.

"He wants us to split up," Scott whispered. "We should, Stiles. I can get away fast enough, and Derek can keep you safe."

"Scott--"

Scott leaned in and hugged Stiles, quick and hard, and then said, "They're coming, just listen to Derek."

He turned on his heel and was gone in an impossible burst of speed, racing on all fours along the cliff.

Derek tugged Stiles the other way, into the trees, and Stiles couldn't do anything but follow. Derek kept them to the familiar trotting pace, letting Stiles step lightly through the trees as he led them southeast. Stiles realized he knew exactly where they were: they were headed along the shortest route back to the cemetery, which would come pretty close to a couple of the preserve roads along the way.

The overwhelming cold terror ebbed away as he trailed Derek through the woods. His body settled into the familiar exercise, stepping softly and holding his arms in close to his body, following automatically in Derek's footsteps. The fear ebbed enough that he wondered if Derek had been training him all along for this exact moment, just in case he needed to run silently through the woods without tripping or worrying about getting lost. He wanted to ask, but he knew better than to speak out loud.

Derek swung his head this way and that as he trotted steadily through the woods, allowing Stiles to deduce that the hunters were somewhere ahead and slightly to the right, while Scott was behind them and farther right. Derek was tracking both, and suddenly it made perfect sense that Stiles and Derek were running toward the hunters.

Derek was strongest, and Stiles was safest. Stiles could talk his way out of this; Stiles was a harmless kid, the sheriff's kid. Between the two of them they would keep the hunters busy while Scott, who would be in danger of revealing himself, ran for safety and stayed hidden.

Stiles nearly tripped over Derek when he stopped suddenly, turning himself across Stiles's path. Stiles caught himself with both hands on Derek's back and slid down to crouch beside him, making the smallest possible silhouette while he waited for Derek to decide what they were doing next. Derek kept turning his head one way and then the other, listening or scenting the air. Stiles wiggled his toes and bounced on his heels, ready to go. They were pretty close now to one of Derek's magic lines, cutting across the preserve road. The edge of the woods at the cemetery, with streetlights and other humans on the other side, was an easy ten-minute run from here.

Derek twisted under Stiles's hands and pressed his face against Stiles's, rubbing one cheek and then the other. Stiles swallowed against the sudden awful sense that Derek was trying to say goodbye.

Derek wouldn't be able to follow him out of the woods. Stiles wrapped his arms around Derek's neck, nodding vigorously into the touch, and then Derek yanked away from him and started running.

Stiles was up and after him in the same breath, sprinting now. Derek was still leading him, staying a few strides ahead; Stiles knew that Derek could lose him if he wanted to, so Derek wasn't running away, just setting a faster pace.

There was no way to be quiet at this speed. Stiles thought he heard voices over the sound of his own crashing and stomping, between his heaving breaths and the thundering beat of his heart, but he wasn't sure what or where. He just followed the black shadow that was Derek racing ahead of him, looking around every few strides to mark their progress. They'd have turned there--or there--to get to the clearing with the big rocks, but now they were angling away. The cemetery had to be less than a mile from here; Stiles could almost run this route blindfolded.

Between one stride and the next, Derek vanished. Stiles ran faster for a few strides, looking for him, then stumbled to a stop and whirled around. He couldn't call out, but he knew Derek wouldn't have abandoned him, which meant--

He turned back, jogging lightly and trying to quiet his breathing.

He saw the hunters first. There were three men. Stiles saw the glints of weapons, and the shine of moonlight on their eyes and teeth. Two were white, pale faces shining in the monochrome light, and one had darker skin. None of them were talking now. One had a rifle propped on his shoulder, but the others held their weapons lowered, ready to use. One of the white guys wasn't holding a gun. The thing in his hands was something else, weirdly shaped, and Stiles couldn't make out what it was in the shadows.

Stiles was walking now, almost tiptoeing, picking his way from tree to tree. They didn't see him, but they knew something was close; they were standing still, their backs toward each other as they looked around.

Stiles stopped when he caught sight of Derek. He was on the far side of the hunters from Stiles, crouching low, blending right into a couple of bushes. If Stiles hadn't known the shape of every tree and shrub in this patch of the woods so well he might have missed the addition of Derek there. Derek turned his head and looked right at Stiles, and Stiles understood.

It wasn't that Stiles and Derek were going to draw off the hunters from Scott. Derek was going to draw the hunters away from Scott, and away from Stiles, too. He was going to show himself and distract them so that Stiles could get away clean. He'd been saying goodbye because he was prepared to let them shoot him, maybe kill him, if that was what it took to let Stiles escape.

Well fuck that.

"Hey!" Stiles yelled, waving his arms and crashing forward as loudly as he could.

All three hunters swiveled toward him, which meant away from Derek. All three turned their weapons toward Stiles, too.

"What are you doing, there's no hunting--"

A few things happened all at once. The moonlight brightened suddenly--a cloudbank clearing--and Stiles recognized Allison's dad, and also recognized the thing in Mr. Argent's hands: a crossbow. Mr. Argent recognized him, too, and he didn't look surprised at all to find Stiles in the woods yelling at him.

He looked satisfied, and he raised the crossbow.

Stiles stopped, throwing his arms out wide--no stop my hands are up--and a what the fuck turned to a wordless strangled scream in his throat at the same time that a shocking amount of pain stabbed through his arm. He looked over, stunned, and found that there was a fucking arrow sticking out a few inches below his elbow, pinning his arm to a tree. His blood looked black in the moonlight, spreading out in a blotch over the plaid of his shirt.

Stiles turned his head to look at Mr. Argent--ow ow what the fuck how could you I'll tell my dad ow ow ow--to find him frowning, like shooting Stiles with an arrow had somehow not worked out precisely as he'd intended. And then, behind Mr. Argent, there was a pale blur of motion and one of the hunters was flying through the air, the rifle glinting as it spun off in the opposite direction.

Mr. Argent turned, and Stiles blinked, dazed. Another blur, another hunter flying off--there was a definitive-sounding thud this time. When Stiles dragged his gaze back to where Mr. Argent had been, there was no one there.

Stiles looked back at his arm and, stupidly, tugged. He choked on the fresh wave of pain, but managed not to scream this time. When he looked into the clearing again, blinking tears from his eyes, Derek was standing there.

He had his back to Stiles, of course, as always. But even in the harsh moonlight, out of the familiar context of his bed, Stiles recognized that dark messy shock of hair, the breadth of his shoulders and the stark swirling lines of his tattoo. He'd never gotten this good a look at it before, but he was definitely acquainted with that ass--dat ass, he couldn't help thinking. He gave a slightly crazed giggle at thinking it here, now.

Derek started to turn and Stiles shut his eyes, turning his face away. He knew the rules, and he didn't want to force Derek back into wolf-shape, not now, not when Stiles needed him. He felt sick with the pain, now that there was nothing to distract him from the sensation.

Derek said, in a worried voice Stiles had never heard before and recognized instantly, "Stiles?"

"I'm okay," Stiles lied automatically, his voice coming out high and light. It occurred to him that it was a really bad sign if he'd passed out already, if he was that far gone.

But Derek had said his name. Derek had never talked to him before.

"Stiles," Derek said, much closer, and Stiles could feel the warmth of his body a second before there were fingers--fingers, Derek's fingers--on his cheek, turning his head toward Derek. "It's okay. You can look. I'm really here."

Stiles turned his head, pressing his cheek against Derek's fingers at the same time he cautiously opened his eyes. He peeked through his eyelashes first, and then his eyes went wide, because it was true. Derek was standing in front of him, Derek with five o'clock shadow and gray eyes surrounded by long black eyelashes, black slashes of eyebrows on a pale forehead wrinkled with worry.

"Holy shit," Stiles said, because the yearbook photo had in no way prepared him for how stupidly gorgeous Derek was, and that was really the least of it. "Derek. You're--you--the curse--"

"Yeah," Derek said, looking down at himself disbelievingly and then back to Stiles with a hesitant smile. "The second you were hit."

Remembering the second he'd been hit, Stiles started to look around, but Derek said, "They're gone. Running for cover. But you're hurt."

Derek reached for Stiles's arm and Stiles made a wordless sharp no stop noise, pressing his arm and his whole body back against the tree.

Derek yanked his hand away but said, "Let me help, Stiles."

"No," Stiles said, and the shock of the pain was wearing off, settling into a steady, relentless blanket of red taking up most of his attention. Still, he remembered the important stuff. "You can't--you can't pull the arrow out, it'll just bleed more."

Derek jerked his hand back farther, eyes going wide. "Shit. Sorry. If you were a werewolf it wouldn't heal until the arrow was out."

"It's okay," Stiles panted, and he watched without flinching away as Derek reached out again slowly, settling his hand over the little bit of space between the arrow and the crook of Stiles's elbow. Stiles made a helpless noise--it didn't exactly hurt more, but it felt like it might be about to hurt more, and that was a strange way to experience something he'd wanted so badly for so long: Derek actually touching him with his actual hand.

Derek turned his head to meet Stiles's eyes and then, just as gingerly as he'd moved toward Stiles's injured arm, he put his other arm around Stiles and pressed his cheek to Stiles's cheek. The familiar pack-touch was sandpapery instead of furry now, and Stiles had an armful of naked Derek, but that was less important than the desperate way Derek's fingers dug into Stiles's back and the fine shiver Stiles could feel throughout Derek's body. Even the red-hot pain of his arm wasn't as important as that.

"Hey," Stiles said softly, rubbing his cheek gently against Derek's, stroking his free hand clumsily up and down Derek's bare back. "Hey, it's okay. I'll be okay. You totally kicked their asses, and let me just point out: curse broken."

Derek shook his head but stayed pressed up full-length against Stiles. He spoke softly into Stiles's ear. "You're such an idiot."

"I..." Stiles said, feeling half-drunk on all the unexpected body-contact and stubble. He couldn't exactly enjoy it properly when his arm was screaming, but he wasn't dead, either.

Then he realized what Derek had said, and replied indignantly, "Excuse me, I'm pretty sure you were about to get way more shot than this! Anyway, I promised."

Derek pulled back far enough to frown at him for that, though his hands didn't leave Stiles. "You promised."

"I promised I wouldn't let anyone hurt you," Stiles said, summoning up a grin that wasn't a lie, even if it was mostly gritted teeth. "And I didn't. I keep my promises, Derek."

Derek sounded exactly like his old wolfy self when he snorted. His hands flexed on Stiles--one at the small of his back, one bracing his right arm against the tree, a wave of sensation that didn't quite hurt in the midst of the unrelenting pain. Derek's gaze dipped down to Stiles's mouth.

"Stiles," Derek said, and his eyes darted back up to meet Stiles's. His lips twitched in a tiny, shy smile that made Stiles's heart thump with a whole different kind of adrenaline, and his head felt light in a whole different way. "Can I--"

Stiles nodded frantically, and he didn't even have time to be terrified that Derek meant something else before his hand came up to the back of Stiles's neck, tilting his head. Derek kissed him, a dry press of lips that still made Stiles's brain explode. First kiss first kiss first kiss.

Stiles made a helpless breathy noise, tilting after him when Derek's mouth left his. There was a second kiss and a third, a whole series of soft, darting kisses until Stiles lost count. Derek's lips were there and then gone over and over, parted now, a little wet. There was going to be tongue any second.

Stiles made a little impatient noise and leaned into Derek, vaguely aware that Derek was changing his grip on Stiles's arm to keep it braced. He earned himself an actual full-on open-mouthed kiss, the flick of Derek's tongue against his, and a snap that reverberated through Stiles's right arm exactly like a bone breaking.

Derek's mouth pressed down hard on Stiles's, muffling the reflexive scream until Stiles managed to pull away, leaning limply against the tree he'd been pinned to. Wasn't pinned to anymore. Derek kept his grip on Stiles's right arm, just above the half of the arrow that still protruded from it, broken off from the part embedded in the tree.

"Dude," Stiles gasped, when he could speak without sobbing. "What the fuck was that?"

Derek gave a wolf's smile, all dangerous-looking teeth for all that none of them were fangs now. He let go of Stiles's arm to slice through the sleeves of his layered shirts with a claw that vanished as soon as he was finished with it.

"It would have hurt more if you'd known I was going to do it."

Even as Derek said it he got a grip on Stiles's bared arm, and the pain in Stiles's arm turned to pins-and-needles and an awful, thudding pressure. He could almost feel the pain--it was looming just beyond Derek's fingers somehow--but for the moment it didn't quite hurt. He looked down to see Derek's fingers indenting his arm with the force of their grip, just above the arrow. "That feels a lot nicer when I'm dreaming about you."

"I didn't need to stop the bleeding when we were dreaming," Derek said, frowning at Stiles's arm like it was personally offending him by having an arrow stuck through it. "You're lucky I can reach the nerve at the same time as the vein. Where's your Jeep?"

"Uh," Stiles said. He and Scott hadn't explained their not-getting-found plan to Derek, and he was starting to detect a flaw or two in it.

"It's at Scott's. And even if it wasn't, my keys are in my backpack. Which is in the hideout down by the river."

Derek's lips pressed flat and he ducked his head, nostrils flaring and eyebrows drawing down; Stiles could see the effort he was making to swallow a few more repetitions of you are such an idiot. He wondered if that meant Derek was worried about him, and grinned shakily again.

Derek's face cleared after a couple of deep breaths. He looked up and nodded. "My car, then."

Stiles blinked, processing. It somehow wasn't easier with the weight of the almost-pain crowding in around him instead of the actual pain. If Derek had been camping out here, and no one had ever found his car--and no one had, Stiles definitely would have heard about evidence that Derek was in the woods--then it was still here. Right.

"What about Scott?"

Derek turned his head, and Stiles could see the wolf he'd just been in the way he listened.

"Scott's fine, he made it to the county road and--" Derek scowled for a minute, eyes lighting up red, and then he shook his head. "And now he'll be careful not to be seen. He'll go home. We can go get him once your arm is taken care of."

Stiles envisioned the hospital trip, and trying to explain this to his dad, and winced.

"Well, you can go get him, anyway," Stiles offered.

Derek frowned a little and leaned back in to Stiles. "I won't leave you. This is my first full moon as a real alpha, as much as it's Scott's first as a wolf. I need my pack as much as Scott needs me."

"Well, the ER is full of mandatory reporters who have my dad on speed dial, including Scott's mom, so just keep that in mind," Stiles said, but he couldn't help smiling as he said it.

Derek needed him. The curse was broken and Stiles was a helpless human with an arrow in his arm and Derek still needed him.

Derek took a half step back and squinted, looking Stiles up and down. He turned his back, crouching slightly, but kept his hold on Stiles's arm, dragging it up over his shoulder. "Hop up."

"I," Stiles said, staring once again at the back of Derek's head and his tattoo. Derek's ass was pressed against his thighs, and he couldn't process that or anything else. "What?"

"I can run faster than you can, and you're hurt," Derek said, looking over his shoulder. He reached back with his other hand and grabbed Stiles's hip, tugging him in. "I'll carry you. Come on."

"I thought you were opposed to being ridden like a pony," Stiles said, but hooked his free arm over Derek's shoulder and cooperated with Derek to wiggle himself up onto Derek's back, legs wrapped around his waist. Derek switched his hold on Stiles's arm to his right hand; there was a brief awful flare of pain and then the pins-and-needles and the pressure were back.

"Occasionally I make exceptions," Derek said, and then he started running, werewolf-fast.

Stiles tightened his left arm across Derek's chest and tucked his chin against Derek's shoulder, squinting into the breeze generated by Derek's speed. His heart was pounding, and the pain came through in flickers as Derek's grip tightened and loosened.

They came to a little thicket like the one Derek had shown Stiles to hide the Jeep, and Derek slowed to a walk.

"Did your family plant these instead of building garages?" The words were out of Stiles's mouth before he could consider whether that was really the first question he wanted to ask Derek when he was capable of answering.

But Derek didn't sound put out or even out of breath. "Forest management. We shape the land to our purposes. Including car storage."

Then Stiles forgot all about his question, because Derek came around the edge of the enclosure, and the car hidden there was a sleek black Camaro, looking brand new and pristine in the thorn-bush shadows. "Please, please tell me we're going to make out in the backseat."

"Right now?" Derek replied, looking back with his eyebrows raised as he eased Stiles down to stand on his own feet.

Derek braced him for a moment while Stiles convinced his legs that there was nothing wrong with them and they worked fine. Derek opened the fuel door and retrieved the car keys, then towed Stiles around to the back and got the trunk open, all without ever letting go of Stiles's wounded arm.

Not now wasn't a no, so Stiles didn't feel too presumptuous about draping himself over Derek's back as he bent to look into the trunk. Plus, he was starting to feel pretty dizzy.

Derek pulled out a shirt from a duffel bag in the trunk and pushed Stiles gently down to sit on the bumper.

"I have to let go," Derek said, looking intently into Stiles's eyes. It was darker here; Stiles could barely make out Derek's face, but he was pretty sure that Derek could see just fine.

"I have to bandage your arm, and then I have to drive. It's going to hurt."

Stiles nodded, taking a couple of deep breaths. "I know. I'll be okay."

Derek looked down and took a breath and then let go, moving at werewolf-speed again as he wrapped the shirt tightly around Stiles's arm, bracing the arrow and putting as much pressure on the wounds as possible. A whimpering kind of noise leaked out between Stiles's gritted teeth. Stiles saw Derek flinch, but his hands kept moving steadily, tying a knot and yanking it tight above the arrow. It wasn't nearly as effective as Derek's grip, but it felt good somehow, not unlike the first time he'd splinted his wrist.

"Could be worse, right," Stiles said, his voice shaking. "I could have a concussion."

"Could be worse," Derek said, settling Stiles's arm gently against his chest. "He could have gone for the head shot."

Stiles made a horrified spluttering noise and then realized he could feel the sounds vibrating through the arrow and fell silent.

Once he let go completely Derek went into motion so fast he seemed to blur, pulling jeans out of the duffel bag and dragging them on with a shake of hips. The sight would have been even more mesmerizing if Stiles had not been putting all his energy into holding his right arm steady and not falling off the bumper of the car.

Derek yanked a t-shirt on and then said, "Okay, let's go," and tugged Stiles up with an arm around his waist, guiding him over to the passenger side of the car. He was really warm. Stiles leaned into him and closed his eyes.

Derek guided him into the passenger seat, putting one hand on Stiles's elbow to make sure he didn't whack his arm--or the arrow sticking out of it, which Stiles was carefully not looking at--on the doorframe. Stiles was reminded, weirdly, of his dad, and while Derek got his seatbelt fastened Stiles tilted his head back and stared at the roof of the car, trying to breathe shallowly enough not to jar his arm. He was going to have to explain this to his dad on top of everything else, and--

Stiles's door slammed, and a second later the driver's door opened.

"Fuck," Stiles said as Derek slid into the driver's seat. "It was bad enough when my dad just pulled Allison over for speeding, but now he's going to arrest her dad."

Derek froze in the process of putting the keys in the ignition, going so sharply and totally still that Stiles automatically tried to duck. It flashed through his mind that there had to be a hunter taking aim again, and his heart lurched into a faster rhythm that drove the pain to more vicious heights. Derek grabbed his shoulder, holding him still, and then with stiff but gentle movements he lifted Stiles's wounded arm and propped it on the headrest. Elevating actually did help somewhat, though it took a minute for his heartbeat to slow down enough for him to notice. Derek held his wrist until Stiles relaxed a little, accepting the slightly-less-agonizing level of pain.

The whole time, Derek didn't actually look at Stiles. He kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the center console between their seats. When Stiles was breathing evenly again, Derek let go and said quietly, "That was Allison's father who shot you. Scott's Allison."

"Yeah," Stiles said cautiously, pressing two tingling half-numb fingers into the headrest to brace his arm. "Yeah, that was Mr. Argent, he--"

"Argent."

Derek didn't yell, but there was something in his voice that made Stiles want to freeze or duck or hide.

Alpha, Stiles realized, suddenly understanding the way Scott just gave in when Derek turned the red eyes on him. He'd never done it to Stiles before, not like this.

Stiles nodded cautiously.

"That was an Argent in our woods tonight. Scott's been dating an Argent girl all this time?"

Stiles nodded again. "Yeah, so I'm getting the vibe that that's--oh fuck me."

Derek looked over and his eyebrows quirked up a little. Despite the dawning understanding of just how bad this was and the pain swamping everything, Stiles could see that Derek was still kind of entertained by his single entendre.

Stiles clung to his shredded dignity and forged on. "They know about werewolves, don't they? Argent means silver, and he's been obsessing over wolves in the woods this whole time. He kept asking me what I saw when I was lost out here. He even gave Allison that wolfsbane flower--that was probably a test, or at least protection for her. When I made her get rid of it he probably figured I was one. That's why he shot me, he thought I was a werewolf."

The little amused look went away. "He's been suspecting you all this time, and you never said anything?"

"I didn't know!" Stiles tried to flail and Derek's hands shot out, catching both his arms before he could move enough to hurt himself worse, though he could feel his pulse throbbing again.

"I didn't know anybody else knew, man, I didn't think any sane adult was going to jump to the conclusion that there were werewolves in the woods and that I might be one."

Derek took his hands off of Stiles and started up the car. "I wouldn't depend on him being sane. He's an Argent."

Derek threaded the car through the trees, making for the nearest dirt track, and after the third jolt Stiles shoved the fingers of his left hand into his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Almost there," Derek said, putting a hand on Stiles's thigh and squeezing. "Hang on."

There was one last slow-motion jolt and then they were on one of the dirt roads, relatively smooth. Derek sped up to maybe ten, fifteen miles per hour. Stiles opened his eyes and unclenched his teeth, and put up his left hand to steady his right arm.

"So," Stiles said, because he had to think about something that wasn't the pain, even if his words came out breathless and unsteady. "Hey, how bad an idea is it going to be for me to tell my dad to arrest Mr. Argent? I mean, I am learning that a crossbow is not a weapon to take lightly, but my dad does have a gun...."

"He'd be taking on a private army," Derek said flatly. "I've never heard of an Argent or any other hunter being arrested for the things they do to us. I have no idea what they would do to humans who wanted to treat it like an ordinary crime."

"There is no kind of crime that gets a special pass," Stiles insisted, digging his fingers into the headrest to keep his hands still; he found himself stomping his foot instead, but that jarred his arm too. "Just because he thought I was a werewolf, and werewolves actually do exist, that doesn't make shooting me with an arrow okay!"

"Nothing would make it okay," Derek said, with a growl rumbling through the words. "But they're right. It's not a matter for the police. It's a matter for your alpha. I can drop you off at the hospital--"

"Oh hell no," Stiles snapped. It hurt like fuck but he could take it, and he'd do it all again if it meant staying with Derek. "I am not leaving you alone with them, and you had definitely better not be thinking about some eye-for-an-eye bullshit--"

"I will protect my pack," Derek snapped, and there was that alpha voice again, stealing Stiles's voice long enough for Derek to go on, quietly, "But I can also do that by taking you with me to see them. We can show them that you're human. They're not supposed to harm humans--they're an old hunting family, they claim to have a code. That may give us a little leverage over them, especially if we can take this to their doorstep. Hunters stay under the radar the same as we do, but with you in the picture they're one word away from more trouble than they're likely to want. They probably won't risk hurting you, or hurting me with you there."

"Probably," Stiles repeated, flexing his tingling fingers, trying to guess how much blood he'd lost and whether the shirt Derek had tied on with werewolf strength was acting as the bad kind of tourniquet. "That is super reassuring."

Derek tilted his head and shrugged. "I could lie. Or I could drop you off at the hospital and go alone."

Stiles glanced up at his arm. He couldn't see the arrow at this angle, but he could feel it shift inside the meat of his arm, could feel the sticky seep of blood. The pain persisted as a breathtaking constant. But Derek would be safer with him there, and even with the evidence of his own body, Stiles couldn't believe Mr. Argent was actually going to murder either of them.

"Could we try for getting to the hospital in less than forty-eight hours this time?"

"I promise," Derek said, in a level, unhesitating tone that was almost scarier than the arrow. "Which way?"

Stiles realized they'd reached the county road outside the preserve.

"Left," Stiles said. "They live in that neighborhood off of Hillcrest that got built up like ten years ago."

Derek nodded and pulled out onto the road, accelerating smoothly and saying nothing for a while. Stiles tilted his head against the window and stared up at the huge full moon in the sky, counting his breaths and telling himself it was necessary, it would be over soon, he could bear it a little longer, as long as he had to, for Derek.

Stiles stole a look over at him and found Derek driving with one hand on the wheel. He was holding his right hand up, turning it back and forth and flexing his fingers, and Stiles lowered his left hand without thinking, circling his fingers gingerly around Derek's wrist.

"Are you okay? Did you--" He wondered, for a wild, dizzy second, if his injury was somehow transferring to his alpha, if being near him in this much pain was hurting Derek by association.

Derek shook his head and tugged his hand out of Stiles's loose grip, only to tangle their fingers together. In the low light Stiles could just make out the smears of his blood marking both their hands. "It's just weird being in this shape again. I didn't think I ever would be."

Stiles snorted and squeezed Derek's hand, managing to speak in an almost really nonchalant tone through the pain. "We were gonna find a way to fix it sooner or later, dude. Curses are for breaking."

Derek shook his head, but he smiled a little and he didn't let go, so Stiles didn't bother to argue.

Derek's smile faded, though, and he said, "So, the Argents. How long have they lived here? I know Scott said some things about how he met Allison, but I tuned out a lot of it."

"That's the only way to survive," Stiles agreed, and focused gratefully on something that wasn't his arm. "Allison started school with us at the start of the semester, after Christmas break. They moved to town right around then--"

Derek's fingers tightened hard on his, and Stiles realized that that meant they had come to town right around the time Peter's body was found. They had known what it meant. They had always been looking for Derek.

"How many?" Derek asked. "Allison, her father...."

"And her mom," Stiles finished. "That's it, no brothers or sisters or anything."

"Just those three?" Derek said, his voice grim but steady. "There were two others with him in the woods tonight--they could be hired guns from outside the family, but hunters from the old families stick to their clans."

Stiles's stomach twisted, and he was suddenly aware of the beating of his heart and the way the pain in his arm pulsed in time to it. "Allison said that they move around a lot, and the only way she knows they're going to stay a long time in one place is if her aunt comes to visit. And she's supposed to come next week. She was doing something else this weekend but now she's going to come visit."

Tonight, Stiles realized. The full moon. Allison's Aunt Kate was somewhere in Arizona--or wherever she really was--hunting other werewolves, tonight, and when she was done with that she would come have fun with Allison, who was excited about that because it meant she didn't have to break up with her boyfriend. Who was a werewolf.

Derek's fingers tightened down harder on Stiles's hand; it hurt enough that it nearly balanced the pain in his right arm, but he didn't make a sound and he didn't pull away. Derek breathed through his nose so evenly that Stiles could almost count out the breaths, and still there was a faint growl coming from the back of Derek's throat like distant thunder.

"Her name," Derek said.

Stiles bit his lip. It wasn't hard to see badness coming here, but he had no idea how bad this really was. "Kate."

Derek let go of Stiles and slapped both hands down on the wheel at ten and two, gripping tightly enough that Stiles could see the muscles bunching in his forearms. He was suddenly totally silent, not even seeming to breathe. Stiles kept completely still and counted out his own breaths in his head, slow and steady, like maybe Derek would remember how if Stiles showed him.

After a long silence, as sharp and stark as a wound, they came to a stop at the light on Hillcrest. Derek tilted his head to the right.

Stiles nodded, and Derek looked both ways and eased through the turn before he accelerated again.

"I've met Kate Argent," Derek said, his voice coming out low and effortful, like it was the most awful confession he could make. "I don't--I don't want you to meet her. Ever. You or Scott. If she does come to town after this, I want both of you to stay far away from her. She's the most dangerous of all of them."

Something sparked at the back of Stiles's brain, but then Derek said, "This? Here?" and Stiles pointed out the entrance to the Argents' neighborhood, the turn onto their street, their house.

Derek parked the Camaro across the street, pocketed the keys, and then looked over at Stiles.

He was going to say something really important, Stiles realized, and he kind of wished he weren't so distracted by pain and creeping numbness and the weird dizzy tiredness of blood loss, because this was probably going to be an important moment. Derek's lips parted, and he reached out and cupped Stiles's cheek, touching his thumb to the corner of Stiles's mouth.

Stiles opened his mouth to say that Derek should get on with it because they were parked right in front of the Zidlickis' house and Mrs. Zidlicki was always at those meetings his dad had to organize neighborhood watch groups. She was totally going to notice a strange car parked at her curb.

Derek's mouth fell open and his eyebrows drew down, and what he actually said, before Stiles could get a word out, was a harsh, frantic whisper of, "What the hell is Scott doing here?"

"Allison?" Stiles said, without thinking, because that was the explanation for at least 75% of Scott's behavior in the last month.

Derek's expression hardened into a scowl and Stiles said quickly, "No, come on, it makes sense--he never saw the hunters, he has no idea it's Allison's dad. All he knows is there's danger and, I mean, instinctively, he'd want to protect the people he loves, right? He figures I'm okay because I'm with you and you're okay because you're The Alpha, so he goes to Allison."

Derek's mouth flattened out into a line that suggested that Stiles was right and Derek was still pissed, which was fair.

"Where is he, anyway? Are they, like--"

Derek tilted his head but didn't look back toward the Argents' house. "It sounds like he's on the roof. She's inside, upstairs. Probably her bedroom. They're not speaking, but I can hear her heart beating. She sounds scared."

"Possibly because there's some dude lurking on her roof?" Stiles offered. "Or, shit--some werewolf?"

"She sounds nervous, not terrified, and he's not shifted," Derek said, his irritated look fading into concentration. "He's...."

Concentration changed to weary resignation. Derek closed his eyes. "He's using her as an anchor, to keep himself human despite the moon. If she weren't an Argent it would be a good instinct."

"Oh," Stiles said. His heart ached with every beat now, and the pain of his arm was close to being white noise. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, testing his thumb against his bitten-down fingernails. Everything felt a little bit farther away than it should, like he had a glove on. He tried to think about Scott and Allison, the Argents, Derek, to figure out what he was supposed to fix first. "That's... not good."

"No," Derek agreed, not seeming to notice the understatement. "We have to get him out of here before he's seen. If they find out what he is when he's been so close to Allison all this time...."

Stiles winced, searching for words, for a plan, but Derek's door was already closing behind him. Stiles got his seatbelt off and his door open with his shaky-but-functional left hand.

Derek turned around, looking weirdly surprised, to make No stop it stay there gestures at him from where he stood in the middle of the street. Like Stiles wasn't going to come along for this; like Derek wouldn't need Stiles to deal with Scott when Allison was right there. Stiles ignored Derek and eased his arm out of the door and then cautiously stood up, keeping a firm grip on the roof of the car.

"Don't! You're bleeding--dammit," Derek hissed, and then he turned sharply back toward the Argents' house and said, almost too quietly for Stiles to hear but with that alpha oomph, "Scott, come down from there. Quietly. We need you."

Stiles saw Scott appear, inching down to the edge of the Argents' roof. Stiles couldn't see his face very clearly, but he'd known Scott a long time; he saw the moment when Scott paused, saw his shoulders move with a deep inhalation.

He realized that Scott had smelled his blood and saw the disaster coming a second before Scott straightened up to his full, unstealthy height and yelled, "Stiles!"

Scott jumped down. Stiles knew he was going to land shifted and he knew Mrs. Zidlicki was watching from her window. He threw himself forward, chasing after Derek, who was already running--Derek who Scott had never seen before in this shape, Derek who Scott might perceive as an enemy.

Stiles kept his eyes fixed on Scott, saw his eyes flash gold and his face darken with hair, fangs coming out. The pain in his arm was like a siren, loud and red and flaring with every footfall. Stiles nearly collapsed against Derek when he reached the place on the edge of the Argents' driveway where Derek stood, not intruding past the very edge. Scott was almost in the bushes by the house, claws extended, growling.

"Scott," Stiles gasped, "don't, we have to get out of here--"

"It's me," Derek was saying at the same time, flashing his red eyes even as he put one arm out to brace Stiles. "Scott, listen, they did this to Stiles--"

"Who," Scott snarled, and as if on cue there was a flash of headlights and a familiar black SUV pulled into the driveway. Derek lunged into its path, dragging Stiles with him, to grab hold of Scott and put himself between both Scott and Stiles and the man getting out of the truck without turning the headlights off.

Stiles squinted into the light. Mr. Argent was still holding the crossbow, and there was blood on the shirt under his jacket--not Stiles's, he'd never gotten close enough. It had to be from the other hunters. He just stood there, eyebrows slightly raised.

Stiles heard the scraping sound of a window opening above them, and he dared a glance up to see Allison looking out.

"Honey, get back inside," Mr. Argent said without looking away from Stiles's pack.

"Dad, I heard--Stiles? What's going on?"

Stiles would have waved, but Derek had a death grip on his left arm and his right, pressed to his chest, was not cleared for non-emergency movement. He looked over at Scott only to find Scott's human face looking back in total bewilderment; Derek was gripping Scott's arm with a shifted hand, and he'd sunk his claws into Scott's arm. Apparently that had gotten Scott's attention well enough to shift him back, or maybe he was just that scared of Mr. Argent.

"Dad?" Allison repeated. "Stiles, what--who is that guy, why did they--"

Scott, Stiles realized, was too close to the house for Allison to see from her window.

"Enough," Mr. Argent snapped, shifting the crossbow in his hand, and Allison yelled, "Dad!" in total horror.

Stiles looked up at the sound of footsteps, and watched Allison leap down from the roof by her window, landing smoothly about six feet from Scott, whose arm was still bleeding under Derek's grip.

"Scott?" Allison's eyes were huge, and she looked from him to her dad to Stiles to Derek. Mr. Argent looked kind of like Derek had when he realized Scott was at the Argents', and Stiles wasn't even going to risk looking at Derek's face now.

He hardly dared to breathe, but his pulse was pounding in his ears and the pain in his arm was fading in and out with every beat, going beyond hurting to something he couldn't even grasp. Everything was teetering, balanced on Scott's momentary silence, Allison's shock, Derek's grip on them both, Mr. Argent's hand on that crossbow.

The front door opened, and Stiles looked over to see light flooding out around the shape of Mrs. Argent holding a shotgun pointed down at her side.

"Why don't you come inside," she said calmly, and it was in no way a question. "Before we wake all the neighbors."

Stiles did look at Derek then. Going inside was what they had wanted when they came here, except that Scott was here and Stiles was kind of reconsidering not going to the hospital right now. On the other hand there were a lot of weapons in play; turning around and leaving probably wasn't an option.

Derek looked cornered, but more angry than scared, Stiles thought. After a few seconds Derek nodded and herded Scott and Stiles toward the door--shifting to keep himself between them and Mrs. Argent, Stiles noted, rather than staying between them and Mr. Argent.

"I bring my pack to meet you under truce," Derek said formally.

Mrs. Argent's eyes narrowed, but after a few seconds she nodded.

In a slightly less stilted voice, Derek added, "You people owe Stiles some first aid. You must know more about patching up humans than I do."

"What do you--" Allison said, at the same time Scott said, "You shot--" and Mr. and Mrs. Argent and Derek all snapped in unified reply, "Quiet."

Scott's head jerked back in surprise at that--Stiles didn't feel up to looking around for Allison--but he shut his mouth.

Derek towed them up the steps to the front door. Mrs. Argent backed up from the threshold, but as Stiles stepped through she moved in again, making a tsk sound as she reached toward his arm. Stiles couldn't help flinching away, pressing himself up against Derek's back.

"That's tied too tight," she said. "We need to get it off your arm and deal with the arrow or his whole arm is in danger. Kitchen, now."

Stiles winced and then Derek turned and the world swung dizzily. Stiles gave a yelp that was as much surprise as a fresh wash of pain at the sudden movement, and his head thumped down on Derek's shoulder as he settled into Derek's grip. His left arm was tucked across his body, landing almost on his right hip, and Stiles felt the hard shape of his phone in his pocket.

"Lay him on the island," he heard Mrs. Argent's voice say, but Stiles was focusing all his attention on hooking two fingers into his pocket and pressing down on the power button on his phone. Just in case.

There was a vague distant babble of other voices--Allison's was briefly clear above the others, saying Humans? but no one said werewolves back.

Stiles was turned, his legs stretched out on a hard flat surface, but Derek's arms were still around him. His head fell back against Derek's shoulder. He moaned when the shirt was unwrapped from his arm, blood and pain flooding back in. His hand almost hurt worse than the arrow as sensation suddenly returned, and then, suddenly and impossibly, nothing hurt at all.

Stiles opened his eyes and looked down. Derek's right hand was curled around Stiles's right elbow. Derek's fingers were gently pressed to the inside like Derek was trying to find his pulse. There was something on--no, something inside--Derek's fingers, black veins standing out under his skin, and they writhed their way up his hand, up his wrist.

And Stiles wasn't feeling any pain.

"Holy shit," Stiles said weakly, remembering the dreams where nothing hurt when Derek touched his skin. "That's real, too?"

Derek huffed in his ear, the familiar not-quite human noise from behind him, and Stiles turned his head enough to see that Derek was almost gray under the bright, ordinary kitchen lights, sickly pale, as if he were in unbearable pain. An arrow through the arm, maybe.

"No," Stiles said. "Derek, don't--"

"I'm your alpha," Derek said through gritted teeth. "Hold still and let them fix it."

Stiles remembered that they weren't alone, and looked around. Mrs. Argent had laid down her shotgun on the counter by the sink and was studying Stiles's arm; Mr. Argent was still holding the crossbow in one hand and had an open first aid kit the size of a toolbox cradled in the other arm.

Allison was standing by her parents with both hands pressed to her mouth. Scott was standing next to Derek, frowning as he studied the place where Derek was holding Stiles's arm.

"Is that an alpha thing? Can I learn to do that?" Scott asked, and Stiles felt Derek sigh against his hair. Stiles patted Derek's left hand with his own.

"What do you mean, alpha?" Allison burst out as her mother turned to the sink and started scrubbing her hands. "What are you doing to Stiles? How? Who are you?"

Derek rested his head against Stiles's, hiding his face. Mr. Argent opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again, tilting his head and waiting to see how Derek would answer.

Scott, always helpful, said, "He's taking the pain from Stiles's arm. He can do it because he's an alpha werewolf. I'm a werewolf too, but a beta, so there's some stuff I can't do."

Allison blinked, frowning, and looked around at everyone else in the kitchen like she was waiting for someone to deliver the punch line.

"Were--" she said, as she looked back at Scott.

Scott shifted his face, smiling close-mouthed so that she only saw the kind of goofy-looking parts of the change: no fangs, no claws, just the pointy ears and weird nose and the rearrangement of hair. She blinked, staring, and then extended a hand toward Scott.

"That's enough," Derek said sharply, raising his head.

Scott shifted back just as Allison's mom turned around and said, "Allison, put some gloves on and brace his arm."

"Also the Argent family are werewolf hunters," Stiles pointed out, in the interests of balance, as Allison worked her hands into sterile gloves. "Which is why I have an arrow in my arm."

Allison's hands went still, and her eyes darted from Stiles's arm to her dad. "Are you--"

"Nope, human," Stiles said, carefully watching Allison instead of looking to see what her mom was taking from the first aid kit. "But I may have given the wrong impression by hanging out with Derek in the woods all the time."

Stiles felt Derek's left arm tighten around him, helping him not to jerk away from the cold sensation of something wet on his arm around the arrow.

Derek said, evenly and loudly enough for everyone to hear, "If Stiles had been a wolf, shooting him that way would have been like grabbing his arm to keep him still. He'd have healed as soon as the arrow was out."

Stiles felt a line of pressure--and a weirder relief-of-pressure sensation--and couldn't resist looking down at his arm to see that Mrs. Argent had cut down the ridge of the arrow under his skin. As he watched, his skin pulled back around it. Derek shifted his grip, pressing down hard in a couple of spots on Stiles's arm. Mrs. Argent lifted the arrow away and Stiles stared into the wound in his arm. It looked like raw meat on the inside, and Stiles looked away. That meant looking at Scott, who was watching with a little frown of concentration--but maybe he'd seen this kind of thing at the vet's, and it wasn't as weird to him. Plus it wasn't his arm.

"He's not healing," Derek said in a low rough voice Stiles would have described as a growl from anyone he hadn't heard actually growling. "He's human. Stitch him up."

"We have to clean the wound first," Mrs. Argent said, perfectly calmly. "He was shot through his shirt, there could be cloth in the wound."

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut, but Derek said, "Scott, eyes and nose. Make sure it's clean."

Scott leaned across Stiles, and Stiles felt something cold and wet being squirted against the exposed meat of his arm. Scott said, "There's a thread there--yeah, that's it. Now it just smells like Stiles."

"Thanks, man," Stiles said as Scott straightened up, and Scott grinned.

There were some sensations Stiles didn't want to think about too much, to say nothing of the tiny noises, and then Mrs. Argent said, "Let up the pressure, now," and Stiles tensed. Derek made a quiet shushing noise behind him. The pain didn't come back, but Derek stopped pressing down so hard.

He'd been clamping a blood vessel, Stiles realized, when he dared another look down and saw a few tiny drops of blood slowly well up around the stitches holding together something that had to be a vein. He made a tiny horrified noise. This was way more of his own interior workings than he'd ever wanted to see.

"Move your fingers," Mrs. Argent directed, glancing up from her handiwork to meet Stiles's eyes with her icy pale blue ones. Stiles dropped his gaze to his hand and flexed his fingers, telling himself it was just like Luke's robot arm. His hand still worked, anyway.

"Good," Mrs. Argent said, and Stiles felt the push of a needle into his flesh and realized she was going to sew everything up now. He fixed his gaze on the ceiling and squeezed his left hand on the back of Derek's. Derek shifted his left hand to cover Stiles's, and Stiles had to consciously hold himself still against the impulse to turn and press his cheek to Derek's.

He tried to keep count of stitches instead, but he'd come up with a really improbable number by the time Mrs. Argent said, "There," in a satisfied, finished tone.

Stiles looked down. There was a neat black row of stitches across the inside of his forearm, going crooked like Joker's smile at either end where the actual arrow-punctures were. His skin was smeared with something too orangey to be blood--iodine, he thought, even as Mrs. Argent started wiping it away.

"Go ahead and bandage it, Allison," Mrs. Argent said, turning away to take the gloves off and wash up again.

Allison pulled out a big roll of gauze and smiled cautiously as she said, "I know how to do this part."

Stiles glanced over and, to his total lack of surprise, saw Scott watching Allison with obvious admiration for her bandaging technique.

Mrs. Argent turned back with an Advil bottle. "Scott, get Stiles something to drink, he needs fluids."

"Oh, yeah," Scott turned and looked around, then went to the pantry and found a bottle of red Gatorade and uncapped it for Stiles. By the time he offered it to Stiles, Mrs. Argent had four Advil in her hand. Stiles gestured vaguely with his left hand, already holding the bottle, and Derek solved the problem by reaching around him to take the pills from her hand and putting them into Stiles's mouth when it dropped open in surprise.

Scott took away the Gatorade and stuck an energy bar in his hand next, and Stiles ate that, too. A couple of bites in he became acutely aware that he was reclined in the middle of the Argents' kitchen, on the counter, propped against Derek's chest in a moderately cuddly way, with Scott and all three Argents gathered around him.

"Should we, uh," Stiles looked down at his arm, now tidily bandaged under the torn-open sleeves of his layers of bloodstained shirts. He couldn't help squirming in the direction of sitting up properly, but Derek held him mostly still. "Adjourn? Can I get down?"

"Finish that, then you can try," Derek said, and Stiles remembered Derek as a wolf looking skeptical when Stiles tried to stand. He took another bite of the energy bar before he reached for the Gatorade to wash it down.

"You," Mrs. Argent said, with a slight, commanding sharpness in her voice as she looked at Mr. Argent, "can clean up this mess."

His mouth went tight, but Mr. Argent nodded. He'd put down the crossbow at some point, and now he set down the first aid kit--urgent care clinic in a box, apparently--and waved Mrs. Argent and Allison out of the way. They both went to wash up at the sink as he started cleaning up all the blood. Stiles focused on chomping down the energy bar and didn't look. He didn't really need to see how much of his own blood was getting mopped up.

He peeked as he was knocking back the last of the Gatorade, just in time for Mr. Argent to straighten up and look him directly in the eye.

Stiles realized that, bizarrely, Mr. Argent was looking up to meet his eyes where he was propped on the counter. Before he'd processed that, Mr. Argent straightened his shoulders, obviously bracing himself. Stiles sat up slightly in automatic response, and Derek's hands moved with him, keeping him from going too far.

"Stiles," Mr. Argent said. "I apologize. Whether you were a werewolf or not, I had no reason to think you deserved to have harm done to you. We have a code: we hunt those who hunt us."

Derek, behind Stiles, made a small but unmistakably skeptical noise, and Mr. Argent's gaze skipped past Stiles to Derek for a second. His mouth tightened in irritation, but he met Stiles's eyes again and went on in the same formal, polite tone. "It was wrong of me, and I'm sorry. I hope you heal well and quickly."

Stiles nodded cautiously, very aware of Derek behind him obviously distrusting every word. "I've spent enough time around my dad's deputies that you're not the first person to want to shut me up by means of a projectile weapon."

Mr. Argent's irritated look deepened.

Stiles realized that this was a serious thing that he was supposed to take seriously. Derek had said he brought his pack into this house under truce, and this whole visit had to be a kind of diplomacy between wolves and hunters. It was their best chance to negotiate safety for Derek and Scott.

"I mean, thanks," Stiles said. "And I accept your apology."

Mr. Argent nodded shallowly, and Stiles could see him deciding not to do anything as crass as ask whether that meant Stiles wouldn't mention it to his dad. Stiles decided not to make any promises.

"Allison," Mrs. Argent said, "go get Stiles a clean shirt to borrow, his are a mess."

"No," Derek said sharply, and took his left arm from around Stiles. His car keys jangled loudly in the quiet kitchen as he held them out to Scott. "The Camaro's parked across the street. There are clothes in the trunk, bring a shirt for Stiles and my jacket."

Scott looked Derek up and down as he took the keys, but he just nodded and trotted off toward the front door.

"All right," Mrs. Argent said. "Stiles, you can try to stand up again now. We'll be in the dining room."

All three Argents headed toward the door, Allison being firmly towed between her parents and looking over her shoulder at Stiles all the way.

Derek rested his head on the back of Stiles's shoulder, and Stiles finally dared to reach back with his left hand and touch Derek's hair. Neither of them moved for a few seconds, and then Derek pushed Stiles forward, so that he was sitting up on his own. Stiles braced his good hand on his knee, ducking his head and breathing deeply, and the first wave of dizziness passed.

"Okay," Stiles said, looking toward the edge of the counter. "Um."

"I have to switch hands," Derek said, moving around to Stiles's side and slipping his left hand into place next to his right. Stiles watched the blackness of pain fade from Derek's right hand as it seeped into his left, and Derek took his right hand away and shook it out like he'd caught a ball bare-handed and stung his palm.

"I'm sorry I couldn't do it sooner," Derek said quietly. He was still terribly pale, his skin a stark contrast to the blackness of his stubble, but he looked calm and focused.

"My parents taught me and Laura to do this for our cousins when we were kids, but the rule was we couldn't take their pain until the bleeding was stopped, or until they were getting proper care, if it was bad. It's dangerous for humans not to feel that they're wounded, you could hurt yourself worse and not know."

"You tried, though, didn't you," Stiles realized abruptly, remembering times over the last few weeks when Derek had tried to get a paw or his nose on Stiles's bare skin. "Before, I mean--when you were wolf-shaped. You tried sometimes."

Derek nodded, looking down again to swing Stiles's legs around to dangle off the counter. "Hands are required, apparently. I'm sorry."

"Dude, don't apologize because your superpower has limits," Stiles scolded.

Derek was startled into a little smile as he looked up.

Stiles grinned, and before he could think about it he pushed himself forward, like jumping into cold water. He slid down to stand in the almost nonexistent space between Derek and the counter, letting them both hold him up. Derek radiated heat along the full length of his body, and Stiles was aware of how neatly they fit together; they were almost perfectly eye-to-eye as they stood there. Derek leaned in and pressed his cheek to Stiles's, and Stiles let go of the counter and slung his left arm around Derek's neck, holding him there, until the front door slammed and Scott's footsteps clattered down the hall.

Derek straightened up and took a half-step back. Scott was already talking as he came into the kitchen, and didn't seem to notice anything weird. "I brought you some socks and shoes, too, dude. This is a shoes-on house, you can put them on here."

"Thanks," Derek said. "Stiles, are you...."

Stiles nodded, taking a deep breath to brace himself. "You can let go."

Derek backed up another half-step as Scott dumped everything he was holding on the counter and came around it, reaching for Stiles. Derek swatted his hand away.

"Help him get dressed first, then you can try. You won't be able to take it all away, but you might be able to help. A little."

Scott nodded eagerly and settled one hand on Stiles's shoulder to steady him while Derek slowly eased one finger away, letting Stiles feel the edge of the pain. It started as a deep aching throb and filled in like water being poured into a glass, getting sharper and more intense, taking up more of his attention.

Just when Stiles was bracing himself to take the worst of it, Derek stepped away and around him to grab his clothes from the counter, and Stiles realized that was as bad as it was going to get. He took a few deep breaths against the pain, marveling for a few seconds at the way he could feel the sting of the stitches and the heavier woundedness of the original injury all at the same time.

Scott was already stepping into Derek's place, helpfully unbuttoning Stiles's shirt. Stiles focused on standing up straight and breathing while he let Scott do it for him. He stole sideways glances as Derek pulled himself up to sit on the opposite counter and pulled on socks. It was a weirdly mundane thing to see Derek's feet disappear under plain gray socks, just like anyone's.

Scott pushed Stiles's shirt off and tugged up the long-sleeved shirt beneath it, and Stiles raised his left arm cautiously above his head, letting Scott take the shirt off him like a little kid. When his head was free of it Derek was standing again, a boot in his hands, his gaze fixed on Stiles's left arm. Stiles looked up and realized the pawprint was still there, stark in black ink, and he smiled cautiously.

Derek's eyes flicked down to his, holding his gaze for just an instant before Derek looked sharply away. He occupied himself with putting his boots on while Scott helped Stiles into the gray henley he'd brought in. The shirt was still cold, but Stiles could smell it as it passed over his face. He got a whiff of the interior of the Camaro, which meant it smelled like Derek, and he would smell like Derek. That was worth the wave of goosebumps from putting on a cold shirt.

He eased his bandaged arm carefully into the sleeve and experimented with his range of movement. Derek and Scott both flinched almost before Stiles felt the extra stab of pain when he pushed too far, and Scott firmly guided his arm to settle against his chest.

Scott started to push Stiles's right sleeve up, and Derek, shrugging on his leather jacket, said, "Not yet, Scott. You can try when we're sitting down. They're waiting for us."

Scott frowned but nodded, and prodded Stiles along in Derek's wake as Derek headed into the dining room, now all in black from head to toe, looking much closer to the black wolf he'd been than the pale, barefoot, t-shirt-wearing guy of a few minutes ago.

The Argents were already seated at the dining room table, all arranged so that they were facing the kitchen door. Mrs. Argent sat at the head, with Allison at her right hand and Mr. Argent next to Allison.

Derek broke stride just enough to make it obvious he was deciding where to sit, and then he nodded and moved toward the chair at the foot of the table, opposite Mrs. Argent, which put him at Mr. Argent's right hand. He waved to the two remaining seats on the long side of the table. "Stiles, Scott."

That was the way it had to work, to put Stiles's right arm within Scott's reach, but it also meant Stiles was safely sandwiched between two werewolves, as far as possible from the reach of either of the Argents.

It also meant that Scott and Allison were directly across from each other. As he carefully took his seat Stiles watched them exchanging desperate gazes. They looked like they were trying to psychically communicate everything that had happened during the three minutes they'd just spent apart.

It was sort of funny until Mr. Argent broke the settling-in silence by gesturing between Scott and Allison and saying, "First of all, this is over. You will not continue to date my daughter."

Scott looked outraged but also looked over at Derek rather than immediately arguing.

Derek looked back and forth from Scott to Allison and then said, "Scott, be useful."

Scott nodded jerkily and reached for Stiles, and Stiles laid his arm gingerly on the table where Scott could reach his wrist; after a few seconds of Scott's fingers poking around like he were trying to find Stiles's pulse, the pain eased to a dull thumping ache.

"Mr. Argent," Derek said. "You can't forbid my beta to do anything. You can forbid your daughter to date him all you want, and you'll be the one to judge whether she's likely to fall into line when you do. But I know the lengths a sixteen-year-old boy will go to keep seeing a girl he thinks he's in love with, even if she's dangerous to his pack."

There was an edge in Derek's voice like that wasn't just a stereotype talking, but Stiles was busy watching Scott's expression waver between pain and stubbornness, and Allison's between stubbornness and fury.

Derek went on, "So I'm not going to bother telling Scott he's not allowed to see Allison."

Scott burst out in a startled grin, and Stiles turned to look at Derek.

"However," Derek said, directly to Scott. "I am your alpha, and you already know I can keep tabs on you more effectively than anyone ever has before. So when I tell you that I will be supervising you any time you're with Allison outside of school, you know that I mean all the time."

Scott went from relieved and hopeful to horrified and stubborn in a twitch of shoulders.

"And we'll have a talk later," Derek added, "about the sometimes unexpected fertility of male werewolves, and the dangerous complications human women face when impregnated by them."

Scott made a strangled, horrified noise and looked like he didn't know whether to blush or turn pale or crawl under the table; his grip on Stiles's wrist tightened for a second, and the pain in Stiles's arm faded almost all the way out before flooding back in as Scott backed off to his original cautious hold.

"Of course if you permit it as his alpha, Scott will be welcome to visit Allison here in our home," Mrs. Argent said coolly.

Stiles stole a look at Mr. Argent, who didn't actually contradict his wife. The look on his face suggested, though, that any visiting Scott did would involve Mr. Argent and a few weapons sitting in.

Mrs. Argent went on, "I will also be discussing with Allison the particular heritage of the Argent family which makes it dangerous to be too close to werewolves."

"The curses, you mean," Derek said, just as coolly, "laid down by generations of dying werewolves on all the descendants of their murderers."

"Okay!" Allison burst out, putting both hands down on the table. "So Scott and I shouldn't have sex, thank you all for deciding that for us. Especially you, whatever your name is, I've never even met you."

There was a brief pause while no one argued with that.

"My name is Derek Hale," Derek said finally. "I'm the last surviving member of my family, thanks to your family."

Stiles felt his heart clench in his chest; it almost seemed to stop beating for a second. Scott looked baffled, Allison defensive, and Mr. and Mrs. Argent looked identically irritated, just the way Mr. Argent had when Derek had seemed to disbelieve Mr. Argent's apology.

"Derek, listen," Mr. Argent said. "If our being in Beacon Hills doesn't do any more good than this, at least we can get one thing straight: We didn't have anything to do with the fire that killed your family."

Derek, Stiles remembered, was a good cold reader, practically a lie detector; if the Argents knew anything about werewolves they probably knew that. So Mr. Argent, saying it, was letting Derek figure out on his own the truth of the statement. He wouldn't risk saying it if it weren't true.

Even as Stiles looked toward Derek to see what he thought of it, the pieces were slotting together in his head: Derek had thought the Argents were responsible for killing his family. Derek had already known the fire wasn't an accident. He already knew that his family had been murdered because of what they were.

Stiles's dad was looking for one woman from out of town who had come to Beacon Hills six years ago and planned the fire. Derek had said--had confessed as if it were something terrible--I've met Kate Argent.

Stiles jerked his wrist out of Scott's grip, hoping the flare of pain would cover the sudden racing of his heart from Derek. He wasn't paying much attention to Stiles anyway. Derek was staring at Mr. Argent, looking baffled.

Because Derek knew, of course--he knew for sure that it had been Kate as much as he now knew for sure that it hadn't been Mr. and Mrs. Argent. He'd obviously thought that all the hunters had to be working together. But Kate had been one woman, pretty and persuasive, working only with the local people she'd recruited in Beacon Hills and then left behind to take the fall or get away with it.

Stiles worked his phone out of his pocket and started tapping out a text message left-handed under the table.

"You had nothing to do with it," Derek repeated slowly, and looked to Mrs. Argent. "You're telling me you didn't arrange it, you didn't have any knowledge--"

"We were in no way involved," Mrs. Argent said firmly, and Stiles risked looking down to be sure he had the message right before he hit send. "We abide by the code, Derek. We hunt those who hunt us--not peaceful, established packs, and not the children who live in their households."

"Human children," Derek emphasized, but he was looking back and forth between the Argents.

Stiles turned off his phone. It had been on long enough.

"You really don't know," Derek said, staring at them. "You really...."

And then he just stopped, while Stiles sat there braced for the explosion, the accusations and recriminations and maybe blood on the walls. Derek just didn't say a word. Stiles tried not to look directly at anyone, flexing his arm a little to make the pain worse again, distracting himself with the red hot waves of it.

"Why are you here, then?" Derek demanded, ostentatiously rude, and then it was safe for Stiles to look up and watch him. "If you haven't decided to hunt my family to complete extinction, what were you doing in the woods tonight?"

"We've been looking for you," Mr. Argent said impatiently. "We'd gotten reports of activity in the woods for weeks before your uncle's death. It seemed clear that there was some kind of rogue wolf here, maybe an omega or a fledgling pack looking to take over your family's old territory. But your uncle was found almost the same time we got to town, and then it was fairly obvious that you and your sister had been involved--except neither of you turned up, so we still had two werewolves, one of them an alpha, unaccounted for."

"Laura isn't going to turn up," Derek said shortly.

"We're sorry for your loss," Mrs. Argent said. Her tone was softened from her usual briskness just enough that it was obvious that she intended to sound sincere.

"And a new alpha always leads to a certain amount of instability," Mr. Argent added, not bothering to appear sympathetic. "Which concerns us. Young, isolated alphas tend to take new betas in a hurry, for example."

"Stiles didn't want to be bitten and hasn't been. He won't be any time soon, even if he changes his mind," Derek said. "I protected him when he was lost in the woods and took him into my pack as a human."

"And Scott?" Mr. Argent challenged.

Derek, unlike Mr. Argent, actually looked at Scott at the mention of his name. "Scott, are you done helping Stiles?"

Scott said, "No, he--sorry."

He grabbed Stiles's wrist under the table, and the pain faded a little again, although Stiles was high enough on adrenaline right now that it wasn't so bad anyway. He didn't know how everyone else could be so calm, how they didn't realize the bomb they were sitting on.

"Why don't you tell Mr. Argent about how you became a werewolf," Derek directed, still focusing on Scott instead of Mr. Argent.

Scott looked from Derek to Mr. Argent to Allison, who was watching him with an intensity that Stiles couldn't put a name to.

"It wasn't Derek's idea," Scott said. "It was Stiles's, I guess, but I was okay with it. I asked him to do it. It was last week--"

"This is your first full moon?" Mrs. Argent asked sharply.

"Yeah," Scott said. "It's okay, Derek helps me stay under control."

His eyes went to Allison as he said it, wildly unsubtle, but no one jumped on that.

"Anyway, it was last week. I went out to the woods to see Stiles because I knew he'd be hanging out with Derek. Derek and I didn't like each other that much, but we got along okay. And then I had an asthma attack, and it was really bad--like, I guess I could have died. And Stiles figured out that Derek might be able to save me by biting me, and when it got really bad, and I thought I might really die, I asked Derek and he agreed.

"It wasn't that bad," Scott added, directly to Allison. "I mean, it didn't hurt that bad, and it was healed by the time I woke up the next morning. That's why I stayed home from school--so Derek could start teaching me how to control it, so I wouldn't wolf out and hurt someone by mistake. He made me practice all kinds of lacrosse stuff so I wouldn't mess up during a game. He's a good teacher.

"He's a good alpha," Scott ended defiantly, looking back and forth between Mr. and Mrs. Argent.

Mrs. Argent nodded slowly. "We have no reason to think otherwise, except that he's new to this."

Turning her attention back to Derek, she said, "We were concerned first when you seemed to have withdrawn entirely into the woods, and more concerned when we began to see evidence that you had been joined by a young beta. Werewolves who entirely avoid human society tend to be dangerous when they do encounter it. And since there was some evidence that you were keeping primarily to your wolf shape, we didn't want hunters who didn't realize what you were to come poaching in the preserve."

Scott opened his mouth, and Stiles kicked his ankle, hard. Derek hadn't mentioned being cursed, and the Argents, who were apparently deciding whether Derek was trustworthy enough not to hunt to the death, didn't need to know about it. The curse was broken, and their little pack would be just fine now.

"The pack will be as stable as I can make it now," Derek said, echoing Stiles's thought. "Laura and I were effectively a pack of two for six years. As long as we're not under threat, I won't need to add numbers to my pack. I can take my time teaching Scott to control his changes."

"You are not under threat," Mrs. Argent agreed formally. "We will stay another few full moons--"

"Mom, until the end of the school year, you promised--"

"Although if our daughter seems to be having difficulty abiding by our rules, she may leave before us to attend boarding school closer to my family," Mrs. Argent continued.

Allison shut up sharply even before Mrs. Argent elaborated. "In Wisconsin."

"We've already established that your daughter is none of my business," Derek said calmly. "The other hunters in the woods tonight?"

"Both alive," Mr. Argent said. "I dropped them off at the hospital. They've had a valuable learning experience about staying on their guard in the presence of an alpha werewolf. You were protecting Stiles; I won't hold that against you."

Derek nodded, and looked back to Mrs. Argent. "Then we have a truce?"

"We have a truce," Mrs. Argent agreed.

Stiles looked down guiltily at his phone. Derek's attention focused sharply on him, just in time for the sudden loud knock on the front door.

Mr. Argent frowned and stood, going to answer it.

Stiles turned toward Derek, who was starting to scowl, and said quietly, "Okay, so, uh, the thing is...."

He darted a look over at Mrs. Argent, who was staring at him as intently as Derek. He reminded himself that Derek and Scott would protect him, that there was a truce, that no one could blame Derek for what Stiles had done.

Stiles focused on Derek again. "The thing is, my dad's been investigating the fire. He'd already figured out that there were some local criminals involved but it was one woman, from out of town, who was behind it."

Derek's lips parted, and then he looked sharply over at Mrs. Argent. She hadn't moved or said a word, but Derek said furiously, "You knew."

She raised her hands, palm out. "I didn't know. Kate never said a word--I thought she couldn't have resisted bragging, if it was her. I thought--it could have been a coincidence. An accident, like they said. We didn't know."

"Wait, Aunt Kate...?" Allison said, sounding small and lost.

"Killed eight people," Stiles said quickly, like ripping the band-aid off. "And put Peter Hale in a hospital for basically the rest of his life--"

"Stiles," his father said from the doorway. "Those are some serious allegations you're making."

"Oh," Stiles said. At the sight of his father he felt suddenly, certainly safe for the first time since Mr. Argent raised that crossbow. "Hi, Dad. Did you, uh...."

"Track the GPS on your phone after you texted me Kate Argent did it and then turned your phone off? Yes, I did."

His dad looked around the room. "I'm here primarily to collect Stiles and Scott, who are not where they're supposed to be tonight. But if anyone has any factual information they'd like to share about the fire at the Hale house six years ago...."

Stiles looked at Derek, who was sitting with his back to the door, head bowed. Derek was looking at Mrs. Argent, who was looking back and saying nothing.

Derek closed his eyes, exhaled, and then stood, turning to face the sheriff. "Kate Argent was behind the fire. I never said anything, but I always knew she'd done it. I was sixteen at the time. I didn't think anyone would listen to me."

Stiles stood, too. Scott stood up with him, and Stiles watched his father's eyes move from Derek to him to Scott and back.

"Derek Hale," the sheriff said slowly. "Can I assume that you know my son better than he's been letting on?"

Derek didn't look back and didn't hesitate. "We never actually spoke before tonight, but I'd seen him in the woods and he'd seen me. I've been camping out there ever since my uncle was killed. I couldn't face dealing with any of this without Laura, and I think she--her body--must still be in the woods somewhere. She was coming to Beacon Hills, and I haven't heard from her since. I had a camp set up in one of the old tunnels near the house, and at one point when there were suddenly a lot of people in the woods I was careful to hide. Afterward I could tell that someone ate some of my food and used my sleeping bag for a couple of days...."

Derek did look back at him then.

Stiles tugged his hand out of Scott's grip to give his wince extra verisimilitude as the pain washed back in. "Sorry, man. I just--I felt like I owed you my life. That campsite saved me when I was hurt, but it was obvious you didn't want to be found, and then I was so curious about you, why you were hiding out there. After that first time I saw you--"

"After you chased me," Derek said. Stiles saw his dad putting it together, why Stiles suddenly went running through the woods, why he'd been so secretive and obsessed.

"I got hurt running around out there with Scott tonight," Stiles said, focusing on his dad again. "Derek helped me out, and we got to talking. I mentioned Allison's Aunt Kate, and he said she was bad news, and--anyway, we came over here so he could talk to the Argents, and they bandaged my arm for me," Stiles waved his arm, because he might be able to hide the stitches but his dad was going to notice he was hurt.

"And when I realized Kate did it, I told you right away!" Stiles finished triumphantly. "Just like you told me to."

His father gave him a tired, quelling look and Stiles shut his mouth. "Mr. Argent, Mrs. Argent, do you have any knowledge relating to these accusations or Kate Argent's current whereabouts?"

"No," Allison said, sounding on the verge of tears. Stiles winced and didn't look back at her. "No, she can't--"

"Yes," Mr. Argent said with a grim steadiness. "Kate did live in Beacon Hills at the time of the fire, and... it's possible."

Allison made a wounded, animal noise and began to cry. The sound was muffled after a couple of seconds, as if her mother had pulled her close. Stiles still didn't look back.

Mr. Argent also kept his eyes trained on the sheriff. "I know the general area she's in now, but not her exact whereabouts; I can give you details about her truck. She's planning to come here to visit us in the next few days."

"I'm going to need you to come down to the station," Stiles's dad said, gesturing behind him, and a pair of deputies stepped up from the hallway into the dining room. "You as well, Mr. Hale. Scott--"

"I'm staying with Allison," Scott said immediately, and Allison said, tear-clogged, "Mom, you can't--"

"Allison will come with us," her mother said firmly. "She shouldn't be alone right now. If Scott wants to sit with her, I suppose that's fine."

"I'll be calling your mother to come get you," Stiles's dad said. "Stiles, you come with me."

Stiles nodded and darted toward his dad, only looking back toward Derek when his dad's hand came down on his shoulder. But Derek just gave him a completely straight-faced little nod, and said, to no one in particular, "Thank you."

The sheriff nodded, and then turned and steered Stiles out--not before Stiles got an unwanted glimpse of Mr. Argent and Scott both standing by helplessly, watching Allison cry into her mother's shoulder--past the two deputies who'd walked up behind him. There were two more who were waiting in the hall, and two more waiting on the porch.

Stiles managed to keep silent until he was in the car, trying not to use his right arm too much in the process of putting on his seatbelt. When the door was shut behind him and his dad was beside him, Stiles finally said, "Did you seriously bring everybody who was on shift? If somebody holds up a gas station--"

"If somebody holds up a gas station you will stay quiet while I call in the highway patrol to deal with it," his dad said tiredly. "You've done enough crime-fighting for one night, kid."

"No, I--" Stiles raised his hands and then thought better of it and lowered them gingerly. "I'm all set. Thanks for coming to get me."

"Stiles," his dad said, looking over at him. "Do you remember when I told you the Hale fire wasn't a low priority?"

Stiles nodded. Of course that made sense--this was the biggest murder case the county had ever had, of course his dad would bring every deputy he had for that.

"Neither are you," his dad said firmly.

Stiles ducked his head and didn't say a word, and his dad squeezed his shoulder and let his hand rest there, driving one-handed.

They'd gone far enough for Stiles to realize his dad was taking him home before his dad said, "So this has all been about you chasing Derek Hale through the woods, all this time."

Stiles nodded cautiously. It was a good story. It fit pretty neatly. It had the advantage of being mostly true in the essentials.

His dad looked over at him and then said, "I can't help noticing that you started to chase Derek around the woods at the same time you stopped obsessing over Lydia Martin."

Stiles opened his mouth and then closed it, absently cradling his right arm with his left as the pieces fell into place. That was also a good story, and it would also explain some things, and if it wasn't exactly true it wasn't untrue either.

"Yeah, I--Dad, I--I've been kind of freaking out over this, but I think I...."

"Stiles, your mom told me you were probably bisexual when you were ten years old. It's okay."

"She what?" Stiles demanded, not having to feign the startled outrage. "I don't--I wasn't--why didn't she tell me, that would have explained a lot of things!"

He hadn't been freaking out about it this month, but that information would have made the summer vacation after eighth grade way less stressful.

"I'm sure she would have," his dad said soothingly. "She probably meant to sit you down and have that talk with you when you were old enough for it to be relevant. But you were so fixated on Lydia, and I think she knew you wouldn't have listened to her if she told you you might ever be interested in anyone else, let alone someone on the other team."

"Same team," Stiles corrected, and then frowned. "Or--anyway, let's leave the sports metaphors out of it."

"Sure," his dad said. "But she told me, so she probably thought I wouldn't screw it up this badly when the time came."

"Dad, you didn't--that was me. I was the one figuring out my orientation by chasing a guy through the woods, okay."

"Yes," his dad said. "And since you're still two years shy of the age of consent, that had better not be a euphemism for anything."

"Come on, it's not," Stiles said, trying not to think about his shirt in Derek's bed, or Derek in his, or that kiss, or Derek naked, or anything else which would lead to his dad arresting his... alpha.

"Uh-huh," his dad said skeptically, and Stiles couldn't help adding, "Also, one year and ten months."

"Also, need I remind you Derek Hale is already in a squad car," his dad replied firmly.

"That would totally be harassment or police brutality or something, Dad, he--he's had a really hard time."

His dad sighed. "I know that, believe me. But that doesn't mean he gets a free pass. Do you...."

His dad made the turn onto their street and looked over at Stiles as he coasted toward their driveway. "Do you have any idea why he never told anyone that it was Kate Argent?"

As soon as his dad asked, Stiles realized he did know.

I've met Kate Argent, Derek had said, like it was something shameful. I don't want you and Scott to meet her. She's the most dangerous of the Argents. I know what a sixteen-year-old boy will do to see a girl he thinks he's in love with. Even if she's dangerous.

Stiles shook his head, looking away. That wasn't his secret to tell; it wasn't even his secret to know, unless Derek decided to tell him. "We didn't really talk about it. I kind of pieced it together from other stuff he said. I guess you'll be asking him that for his statement though, right?"

"Yeah," his dad sighed, pulling up. He put the car in park but didn't turn it off.

"Stiles, you are going to go inside and go to sleep, is that understood? And tomorrow you're going to a doctor to get that arm looked at."

"Okay," Stiles said, because that was the path of least resistance. There was a pretty good chance that the whole process of tracking down Kate Argent would distract his dad for long enough that Stiles might just heal before anybody could freak out over what had happened to his arm. If he could get any time with his pack, anyway--his dad was bound to be keeping an eye on Derek, and Scott was probably going to be grounded until Ms. McCall forgot to be mad about having to leave work and pick him up from the Sheriff's Department.

Stiles got out of the car and walked up to the door, and then looked back when he realized he didn't have his keys. He mimed unlocking and turned his hands up. A second later his dad shut off the car and came up to let him in. "Are we going to be bringing your Jeep in from the preserve again?"

"No, um," Stiles said. "It's at Scott's."

His father gave him a deeply dubious look and pushed him gently but firmly inside, pulling the door shut behind him and locking it again from the outside.

"Good night," Stiles called through the door. "Be safe."

"Turn your phone on and then go to sleep," his dad called back. "And do not leave this house unless the 911 dispatcher directs you to do so."

Stiles nodded obediently. He turned his phone on as he toed off his shoes, and pocketed it as he turned away from the door.

He sat down on the couch and stared for a while at the clock before he grasped that it was, in fact, not even ten o'clock. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off he was so unbearably tired that he felt like sunrise had to be getting close, but there were still hours and hours of full moon to go.

He hoped Scott would be safe. Maybe Ms. McCall wouldn't be able to come and get him right away, and he would have enough time near Derek or Allison or both to keep himself under control. Derek would take care of it, somehow.

Stiles slumped sideways on the couch and thought really hard about going upstairs to bed or at least taking his shoes off. He thought fuzzily that his arm, throbbing with every beat of his heart, hurt too much for him to fall asleep.

He never noticed he was sleeping, because he didn't dream at all.

---

Stiles woke up sharply and completely and then didn't know why. He was on the living room couch, and the house was dark and still around him. The clock on the cable box told him it was just after two in the morning.

For a second he lay still, thinking about getting up and going to bed properly, so his dad wouldn't find him on the couch when he got home. He moved his right arm unthinkingly to push himself up, and when the ache of it flared into real pain he remembered everything.

Kate Argent, his dad, that summit over the Argents' dining room table. Derek. It all seemed surreal and impossible, but there was enough light from the streetlights outside for Stiles to look down and see the unfamiliar shirt he was wearing. He gingerly traced the shape of the bandage wrapping his right arm, and pushed up the left sleeve to see the dark shape of the pawprint. It had all really happened.

Stiles stood up--waited out a momentary head rush--and decided to get something to drink. He reached over as he got to the fridge, turning on the light over the stove so the house wouldn't be dark when his dad got home. He looked away from the light as it came on, blinking in the sudden brightness.

Stiles froze. Derek was standing at the back door.

Stiles just stared, mouth hanging open in what was probably a deeply unattractive way. It was one thing to remember that Derek was real, that the curse was broken and Derek was human again and Stiles could look all he wanted; it was another to suddenly have Derek right there. He was still wearing his leather jacket, and his hands hung open at his sides. He must have knocked, Stiles realized. That must have been what woke him. Now Derek just stood outside the door, watching Stiles watching him.

Finally Stiles shook himself and lunged across the kitchen to unlock the door and shove it open. "Come in, oh my God, what are you doing here, my Dad--"

"Shhh," Derek said, shutting the door behind him and then grabbing Stiles in a hug. He didn't bother getting his hand on Stiles's arm this time; as soon as his fingers touched the back of Stiles's neck the pain evaporated.

Stiles made an embarrassing relieved noise and tucked his face against Derek's throat, clinging to him. He mostly just smelled leather and sweat, but it was Derek. Derek was here.

"Your dad told me to get a room for the night," Derek said quietly, not loosening his grip on Stiles at all. Stiles could feel the vibration of Derek's words in his own chest. "I checked in at the motel down past the preserve and my car's still parked in front of my room with the TV on inside. Nobody saw me go out the window, and I stayed out of sight on my way over here. My alibi's set, and your dad's going to be busy arranging an interstate manhunt for a few hours yet."

Stiles winced, but Derek sounded completely calm about it now. "How, um. How's Scott?"

"Under control," Derek said. "And grounded, although that didn't seem to worry him nearly as much as Allison refusing to speak to him. Her parents had a big, public screaming fight with her about the fact that Kate is a murderer and she's dead to them. I think that was mostly about establishing their position for the benefit of the authorities, but Allison didn't take it well."

Stiles winced again, trying to imagine how he would feel if someone had told him that his dad or Scott or Derek were a murderer. Not taking it well would be the understatement of all time.

But if the Argents were being so careful to be seen turning on Kate.... "So they're not going to--you said, if anyone went after a hunter--"

Derek shifted back at that, looking away. Stiles closed his left hand in Derek's jacket and held on, not letting him go too far, and Derek's pain-stealing hand stayed put at the nape of his neck.

Derek was scowling, but Stiles thought it covered confusion. He was going to have to learn to read Derek all over again, eyebrows instead of ears and tail.

"I don't understand it. It's hard to believe they're this serious about their code, that they'd let one of their own go to prison for violating it."

Murdering eight innocent people wasn't exactly a minor infraction, Stiles thought, to say nothing of whatever Kate Argent had done to Derek in the process. Still, if the Argents were as ruthless as Derek seemed to think....

"Maybe that's the punishment for getting caught," Stiles offered, the words falling out of his mouth as they occurred to him. Derek's eyes jerked back sharply to meet his.

"You said they stay under the radar. Maybe they do that by throwing people under the bus if they screw up and draw attention to themselves."

Derek's mouth tightened and he nodded. "That, or they're not cooperating as much as they're pretending to, in which case we're all in danger and that truce is just a way to keep us off our guard."

Stiles flinched. "I like my idea better."

"I," Derek said, and he looked away again, frowning a little less this time. "Didn't come here to talk about the Argents."

Stiles felt his face flush, and heat raced over the surface of his skin as he realized what Derek had come here for. His heart was beating fast, and he shifted his weight toward Derek even as Derek's hand moved around from the back of his neck to the front. Derek kept two fingers pressed to the notch between Stiles's collarbones and rested his palm against Stiles's chest, holding him in place while he backed up to a full arm's length.

"Not that," Derek said, but there was a tight little smile on his face as he said it, and he was staring determinedly down at the floor. That looked more like not yet.

Stiles swallowed and put his hands carefully into his pockets. He rocked back on his heels, making Derek's hand follow him.

"I need you to do something for me," Derek said, looking up through his eyelashes.

Stiles nodded. There wasn't much he wouldn't do for Derek.

"Stop telling people you owe me your life because I saved you in the woods. You don't. You were the one who saved me."

Stiles's mouth fell open, his eyebrows pulling together in bafflement. "I--what? I'm really pretty sure I would have, like, died of exposure, at least. And I didn't, because of you, so...."

"There's no debt," Derek insisted, putting his chin up and looking at Stiles directly. "You saved me from the curse a month ago, even more than you did tonight."

Stiles opened his mouth and shut it again. Derek didn't look at all like he was joking or making fun of Stiles.

"Laura and I heard warning stories about bad alphas from the time we were children. Like fairy tales, except we don't pretend they're not true. The bad alpha kills his own pack, or becomes alpha through an unfair fight, and he is cursed to stay in his alpha form. He lives only as a wolf; he's unable to change even under the moon, and eventually he forgets he ever was human. He's imprisoned on the territory of the pack he betrayed, unable to seek out other werewolves. Ordinary wolves see him as an enemy, humans see him as an animal, and he is completely alone. He forgets language. He forgets his own name. He loses everything but the alpha power he was so determined to have.

"None of those stories have a happy ending for the bad alpha. It's not a curse made to be broken. It's a living hell for an alpha who turns on the ones he's supposed to protect."

Stiles raised his left hand and covered Derek's hand on his chest.

"You saved me from that," Derek went on relentlessly. "With Laura and Peter dead, I wouldn't have fought it. I was ready to retreat into the woods and forget everything. I was ready to die as an animal so I wouldn't have to remember that I had lost everyone I ever cared about. By the night of the full moon I was three days into forgetting I'd ever walked on two legs. But you called for help, and I remembered what my parents taught me when I was a kid: we never ignore anyone who's lost on our land. When I found you--I was a beast, but you weren't afraid. You trusted me. You let me help you, and you treated me as something more than an animal. You told me my name."

"Derek," Stiles whispered, overwhelmed. He couldn't doubt that Derek was telling the truth, couldn't believe this was some strange flattery. He'd been broken and helpless and human, and because he was exactly that, he had saved Derek without even knowing it.

"I knew you didn't know what it meant, when I made you my pack," Derek said. "But you acted like pack anyway. You kept your promises. You came back. You let me teach you. You kept me sane. You made me remember what I am. And tonight, you sacrificed yourself to hunters to protect me. You didn't even think about it, you just did it."

"I proved that you're a good alpha," Stiles realized. "You have a pack who cares about you. You wouldn't if you were the bad alpha, so that meant you didn't deserve to be punished anymore--dude, I'm like your Orpheus."

Derek nodded shallowly. "I didn't know I could come back, and even if I'd known, it wouldn't have meant anything if I'd asked you to do it. But you saved me again. So you don't owe me anything, okay?"

"Pack," Stiles said, because he couldn't say yes or no to that question. He pushed against Derek's hand, and Derek closed the distance, pressing his cheek to Stiles's again and wrapping his other arm firmly around Stiles's back.

"Pack," Derek agreed, and then his cheek pressed against Stiles's at a slightly different angle, and Derek's lips brushed his throat, just below his ear.

Stiles sucked in a breath and tilted his head, inviting more as a shiver ran down his spine. Derek shifted so that their cheeks weren't pressed together. Stiles felt only the touch of Derek's breath on his throat as he spoke.

"I know you're only sixteen, and I know the dreams were just dreams--"

"They were real, though," Stiles insisted, feeling the rush of delighted wonder all over again.

"I was never sure I was really getting through," Derek admitted. "An alpha can reach his pack through their dreams more easily than any other way, but the curse made it harder to reach you. Humans are more difficult to communicate with anyway and I never knew if you could tell they were more than just dreams. I didn't know if you even remembered. You never said, after the first one."

"Oh, I remembered," Stiles breathed. He'd remembered in minute, desperate detail, every time he jerked off. He was remembering right now, with every inch of his skin.

"If you want," Derek said, still holding his mouth just off of Stiles's throat.

"Yes," Stiles said, skipping ahead, twisting in Derek's grip to try to find Derek's mouth with his, but Derek eeled away from him.

"I won't ask you to do anything you're not ready for," Derek insisted, sounding slightly breathless but entirely serious. "I need to--"

"Yes, yes," Stiles had both arms around Derek and pressed his mouth to Derek's throat, too busy talking to press his lips down in a proper kiss, "what part of my enthusiastic consent is not--"

Derek's hand on his chest slid up and closed around his throat, and Stiles froze as Derek shifted backward enough to let Stiles see his eyes glowing red.

"I'm your alpha," Derek said firmly, although not quite in that irresistible tone of command. "I'm trying to be an alpha who deserves your loyalty. I need you to know that you're safe with me way more than I need anything else you can give me."

Stiles nodded slowly. He did know that.

"And I've spent the last three weeks smelling it on you," Derek added, his eyes fading to gray and his voice going a little ragged. "You've been jerking off two or three times a day and I've had paws and a dick that didn't respond to humans. You've been driving me crazy, and I thought I was never going to get a chance to touch you outside of dreams. If you say yes one more time--"

Stiles had the breathless sensation of being suddenly at the top of a roller coaster with the first big drop just coming into view. He knew he was safe with Derek the same way he knew he wouldn't actually die on a carnival ride, but he was still flooded with adrenaline and anticipation way beyond just wanting to get off. His heart was pounding, his skin too tight to contain him. He wasn't just going to get off, he was going to get Derek.

"Yes," Stiles whispered.

He barely got the word out before Derek's mouth was on his and Derek's body was up against every inch of his, driving him backward all the way to the kitchen counter. He was pinned between the hard line of the countertop and Derek's hips as Derek's tongue pushed between his lips, tasting him. Stiles's contribution was mostly hanging on and making enthusiastic noises into Derek's mouth, but that seemed to be enough.

His dick was hardening in a dizzy rush of blood, and he could feel Derek's erection pressing against his hip. The pain in his arm flickered in and out, like Derek's grip was unsteady even though his fingers stayed pressed against Stiles's throat. The unpredictable waves of pain and relief only heightened the other sensations, the drag of Derek's lips against his and the wet muscular heat of his tongue. Derek's fingers flexed against his skin as Stiles pushed his dick against Derek's through all the frustrating layers of their clothes. Derek still had his jacket on, slick-soft under Stiles's clutching hands.

Derek's mouth pulled away from his, leaving Stiles to gasp and whimper in the open air while Derek licked and nuzzled his way down Stiles's throat. He'd had no idea that the skin there was directly connected to his dick, but he could feel every little touch transmitted instantly.

"Can we," Stiles said.

Derek froze, just like that, like Stiles had screamed no, stop and pushed him away.

"Hey, we're good--" Stiles kissed the part of Derek nearest to his mouth--the top of his cheekbone. "Just, I want to see you, and I want you in my bed, and maybe we could not do this in the kitchen because I eat breakfast here with my dad sometimes and I don't want to think about this while he's sitting across from me."

"You will, though," Derek pointed out with a smirk.

Before Stiles could retaliate--ugh, now he would think of it, every time--Derek was already moving, pulling and pushing Stiles away from the counter and across the kitchen. Even when they were climbing the stairs, Derek somehow managed to stay pressed up against him without either of them tripping and without taking his hands off of Stiles.

Derek stopped short in the doorway of Stiles's bedroom, his arms going rigid. Stiles looked quickly around his room, but it seemed perfectly normal in the wash of streetlight and moonlight from the window. His dad hadn't even had an opportunity to toss the place since Stiles headed over to Scott's before sunset.

"What," Stiles said softly, turning his head to peer over his shoulder at Derek.

He had his eyes closed, and his fingers flexed against Stiles when he spoke. A few seconds later he opened his eyes and leaned in, plastering himself against Stiles's back and looking over his shoulder into Stiles's bedroom. Stiles could feel him taking deep breaths.

"I know this place," Derek said softly. "I dreamed it with you. But I could never smell it before. I couldn't hear all the little sounds. I didn't know what the air tasted like here."

Stiles remembered the moment when he'd shut his eyes, thinking he still wasn't allowed to look at Derek. He grinned and leaned against Derek's grip, dragging him forward as he took a step inside.

"It's okay, man. You're really here this time."

Derek's smile was wide and toothy. He rocked his hips forward, pressing his dick against Stiles's ass, and then spun Stiles around without letting go of him. They ended with Derek holding Stiles's left hand and cradling his right elbow, and Stiles grinned and said, "Dude, you've got moves, we are so going da--"

"Clothes off," Derek interrupted in a low, definite tone that could have been a direction or an announcement. He just stood there for a few more seconds, eyes narrowed as he looked Stiles up and down in a not-entirely-sexy way.

Stiles realized that Derek was trying to figure out how to get them both naked as quickly as possible while keeping one hand on Stiles's bare skin at all times.

Stiles shook his head. No matter how werewolf-graceful Derek might be, Stiles was going to turn that into a game of Twister and then a pratfall of some kind.

Derek raised his eyebrows at Stiles's headshake, meeting his gaze again.

"Just let go, dude," Stiles said. "I'll get my clothes off, you get your clothes off, no one gets my elbow in their eye."

Derek frowned again. "I don't want you hurting when--"

"No, seriously, if you're in the process of taking your clothes off to have sex with me I will be feeling no pain."

Stiles jerked out of Derek's grip as he said it, before he could anticipate it too much. He saw his wince mirrored on Derek's face--like it hurt Derek more to know he was in pain than to take it on for him--but it wasn't unbearable, just startling when it came back all at once. "Dude, come on, pants off."

It was Derek's turn to shake his head, but he walked over to Stiles's desk chair and started stripping, laying his leather jacket neatly on the back of the chair before he looked back at Stiles and raised his eyebrows. "Were you going to leave yours on?"

"Yeah, right, no," Stiles agreed, and looked down, yanking Derek's shirt off and then peeling the tighter t-shirt beneath it up and off; he looked over at Derek just in time to catch Derek staring--like Stiles's bare chest was the one worth ogling here. Derek looked away quickly when Stiles caught him; it was hard to tell with the bedroom lit only by the moonlight leaking in through the blinds, but Stiles thought Derek was blushing.

He swallowed everything he wanted to say about that and looked down, undoing his own jeans and shoving them down along with his boxers before he could think too much about it. He kicked them off and stumbled backward to sit down, peeling off his socks before he dared to look up at Derek again.

Derek was standing by his desk chair, naked, and for a while all Stiles could see was Derek's hard cock, darker than the pale belly it stood up against, contrasting with the black hair around it. When he finally dragged his eyes up to Derek's face--he felt himself blushing, too, so he had no room to mock--Derek was staring back. His hands were at his sides, but Stiles was pinned in place by Derek's dark eyes and hungry expression, and he wondered whether he should have had Derek maybe outline his exact intentions before he said yes so many times, because he kind of felt like he was about to be devoured.

On the other hand, he'd have said yes to anything; he was as hard as Derek was, halfway to coming just from the way Derek was staring at him. Stiles dropped back onto his elbows and gritted his teeth to keep from actually saying my body is ready out loud. He jerked his chin up instead, trying to sort of motion Derek closer without using either hand. He had a feeling it came out looking more hey how you doin' than do me now, because Derek's intensity cracked a little. He was smiling again as he walked over to Stiles.

Stiles grinned back, his nervousness vanishing into exhilaration. This was it, this was really it, he was tipping over into the unknown of Having Sex with Derek.

Derek leaned over him, his hands landing on Stiles's hips, hot and big and strong, as Stiles realized when he instinctively tried to push up toward Derek and only managed to grind his hipbones against Derek's palms without moving an inch. His dick jerked at that, feeling suddenly harder, pounding with blood. Derek's smile widened as he leaned the rest of the way down to kiss Stiles.

"Got you," he murmured, right before his lips pressed down on Stiles's. Stiles managed to kiss back for about five seconds, maybe, before he grabbed at Derek and fell back flat on the bed.

Derek pulled back from the kiss before Stiles could get his hand into Derek's hair. "No. Arm behind your head."

It was definitely a command that time; Stiles knew mainly from the way his right arm was already curled behind his head on the mattress before he had a chance to think about it.

"Keep it there," Derek said firmly. "You can't feel how much it hurts, and you'll break your stitches if you use it like you're going to want to."

Stiles glanced down and saw blackness winding up Derek's left hand and wrist, and realized that Derek had started taking his pain again and he hadn't noticed, which kind of proved he was right. He opened his mouth to say something about that, but all that came out was a broken, hungry noise.

"Mm-hm," Derek agreed, bending down over him again. But after a quick brush of a kiss, Derek's mouth wandered off; Derek licked the line of his jaw back to the side of his neck, just under his ear. Stiles moaned and arched uselessly under Derek's hands. The fingers of his right hand were digging into his palm, but his left hand was free, and Stiles finally threaded his fingers into Derek's hair.

Derek turned his head, pressing his nose and then his lips into the crook of Stiles's arm--the pawprint, Stiles realized. Derek went right back to the side of Stiles's neck, and Stiles let his hand slide down to Derek's shoulder and then his arm. Stiles could feel the way Derek's muscles bunched when Stiles pushed up enough to make Derek hold him down, which just made him struggle more.

His legs came up instinctively, hooking around the backs of Derek's thighs and trying to pull him in. Derek retaliated with a blunt-toothed nip on the top of Stiles's shoulder.

Stiles gave a helpless startled-and-turned-on noise, his dick jerking, and he could feel his balls getting tight. "Derek, so help me God if I come before you even touch me--"

"Already touching you," Derek muttered into Stiles's chest, nuzzling toward Stiles's exposed right armpit. Stiles let out a strangled laugh at the way Derek's fingers fluttered on his hips, or the anticipation of being tickled, or all of it. But it wasn't ticklish at all: not Derek's face pressing, just for a second, into his pit, and not Derek's teeth dragging delicately up the underside of his arm. There was an artery right there, he was pretty sure, and if Derek decided to bite down....

But he didn't, of course. He licked, while Stiles sweated under him and all the blood in Stiles's body pounded into his dick. Derek's hands were moving now, shifting up from Stiles's hips to press down on his sides. Stiles had a second to thrust his hips up uselessly into the air before Derek was pushing him back down.

"Okay but my dick," Stiles managed, because seriously, he was going to come and he really wanted to be sure he'd gotten to third base before that happened.

Derek folded down--not onto Stiles, but to kneel between his splayed thighs. Stiles almost sobbed and squeezed his eyes shut tight.

"I'm going to come on your face," Stiles warned Derek frantically.

Derek made an mm-hm sort of noise against the top of Stiles's thigh and then licked the crease of his hip.

Stiles gave his own best shot at a growl and wrapped his left hand around his dick. He shuddered all over at the tight, perfect grip, and he'd barely gotten a chance to move his hand before Derek was pulling it away.

Stiles had to open his eyes again, making an outraged noise as he did. He was rewarded with the sight of Derek watching his own hand intently as he closed it around Stiles's dick.

It occurred to Stiles suddenly that Derek very possibly hadn't done this with a guy before, that he was literally feeling his way through this. Stiles whimpered and tried to hold still.

Derek's gaze shifted to meet his, and he couldn't read the look Derek gave him. It didn't last more than a second, whatever it was, and then Derek leaned in and brushed his lips over the head of Stiles's dick. He flicked his tongue out--tasting--as he stroked his hand, too carefully, up and down Stiles's dick.

Stiles tried to say tighter, but it was just a two-syllable gasp as Derek licked him again, more thoroughly, down to his fingers and back up. That was fucking it, Stiles was coming on Derek's tongue.

Derek gave a pleased growl that vibrated against Stiles's dick, and Stiles watched helplessly as Derek kept licking, kept jerking him off, while Stiles's come splashed against his lips and ran down over his fingers. Stiles had to close his eyes again; it was almost painful to be coming and be getting freshly turned on all at the same time.

"Stoppit," he mumbled, when the drag of Derek's tongue and the slick slide of Derek's fingers against his softening dick got to be too much. He waved his hand around, aiming to push Derek away without too much danger of poking him in the eye. Derek wiped his hand on Stiles's stomach, and Stiles opened his eyes to glare just as Derek wiped his mouth against Stiles's stomach. Derek's stubble prickled against the skin there, making him shiver.

Stiles hear the sleepy slur in his own voice as he said, "Well, at least if you leave stubble-burn there no one will see it."

Derek looked up with a wickedly amused look, and rubbed his cheek deliberately against the skin just above Stiles's pubes, making him writhe. He didn't quit until Stiles pulled his hair. When he jerked his head up Stiles said, "Come up here, your turn."

Derek froze for a second, but before Stiles could wonder what he'd said wrong Derek was moving, crawling up onto the bed, bracing himself over Stiles.

He kept one hand on Stiles the whole way, and Stiles flexed the fingers of his right arm, still tucked behind his head, and said, "You can let go of my arm now, it's okay."

Derek frowned, and Stiles lifted his head enough to kiss him.

"Your turn," Stiles insisted. "Even if you are the alpha, this part shouldn't hurt."

Derek shut his eyes at that and laughed a little, but it was a tense, short sound. Derek was holding himself carefully out of contact with Stiles except for the pain-taking hand.

"It's helping me keep control," Derek said quietly. "It's harder as an alpha and this is--"

"You won't hurt me," Stiles interrupted, with absolute certainty. "I know you won't, not in any shape. And I know you're not going to change back to a wolf before you get off. Stop hurting yourself, it's okay--"

Even as he said it, the pain flowed back into his arm and Derek shifted lower, pressing his face against Stiles's throat. His dick was a hot, hard line against Stiles's stomach. Derek didn't move for another minute, and Stiles could feel a faint shudder going through him as he held himself back.

Stiles rubbed his cheek against Derek's temple, reaching down to grab his ass and pull him in, and Derek's control broke far enough to make him move. He opened his mouth against Stiles's skin--no teeth, just wet heat and fast, ragged breaths--as he started thrusting against Stiles. His hips snapped steadily at first and then sped up into a flurry Stiles couldn't track, pressing down onto him with a force and friction that wasn't quite painful.

Stiles hooked one leg around Derek's, digging his fingers harder into Derek's ass just to hold on, and Derek's breath caught as he came.

He gave a handful of further thrusts against Stiles, getting slipperier each time as the mess between them got messier. His next breath was a moan. After a minute the tension finally went out of him, and Derek sagged down on top of Stiles, heavy and sweaty-hot and seriously in need of cleanup.

Stiles took a couple of careful, deep breaths, staring up at the ceiling. He realized his face hurt and then realized it was because he was grinning so hard. "Dude, that was...."

"Mm-hm," Derek said, and licked the side of Stiles's throat again, like he just couldn't resist.

"Yeah," Stiles agreed. He closed his eyes, but he didn't stop smiling.

Chapter Text

Stiles shoved his hands into his pockets as he walked through the woods. It was a little chilly, and he only had a t-shirt on, but he wanted his pawprint to show. It marked him for the pack.

He heard rain start to patter softly against the leaves higher up. It wasn't coming down hard enough to really reach the ground, but he took his hands from his pockets and started to run in the direction he'd already been headed. The Hale house had always been a good place to get out of the rain.

Stiles didn't hesitate when he reached the edge of the yard. He ran right up onto the porch where Grandma Hale was sitting, perched on the side railing instead of her usual chair.

She smiled. "I can't visit today, sweetheart."

She nodded over the side of the porch, and Stiles came over to stand by her and looked.

Peter was kneeling in the dirt beside the foundations of the house, digging out a hole with his hands--probably for the rosebush that was waiting on the ground next to him. It was already flowering, covered in little pink buds.

Laura was standing over him. She had her hands in the pockets of her pink hoodie and her elbows sticking out aggressively. "Not that far! It's small!"

"I have done this before," Peter said, sounding like he was gritting his teeth. Stiles knew that his hands, filthy and kept out of sight, were clawed.

"Well, this one is mine," Laura said. It was obviously an argument they'd been having for a while.

Stiles looked back to Grandma Hale. "Actually, I was looking for Derek."

She nodded and waved toward the front door. "You know the way, dear. Go on in."

Stiles gave a little wave goodbye and opened the front door. He paused on the threshold to inhale the smell of the big, busy house. It smelled mostly like bread and soup right now, good food for a rainy day, but there was also the indefinable familiar home-smell of the Hale house.

Stiles heard a laugh and looked over to see Mark and Heather shoving at each other, the Ouija board they'd been playing with lying in front of them on the coffee table. They were just kids, Stiles noticed. They were younger than him. He couldn't remember why he'd thought they were older. He didn't call out to them, just shut the front door behind him and stepped farther in.

He'd nearly made it to the stairs when someone called out from the dining room. Stiles hesitated with his hand on the banister.

Mrs. Hale--Derek's mom Mrs. Hale, not one of his aunts--smiled and said, "Did you want to call home first?"

Stiles leaned sideways so that he could see into the kitchen. Derek's dad, sleeves rolled up and splotched with flour, stepped into the doorway and held out a cordless phone.

Stiles could call his mom, he realized, and tell her where he was and what he was doing. But he would have a lot to tell her, and it would take a while, and....

Stiles glanced up the stairs and then back toward Derek's mom. "Nah, I'm good."

She chuckled. "Go on, then. Remember we can all hear you, though."

Stiles blushed, but he nodded and waved goodbye to Derek's mom and dad and his aunts and uncle, who were sitting at the table with Mrs. Hale. He ran up the stairs before anyone else could slow him down.

Derek's room was up on the second floor, at the back of the house. Stiles turned left at the landing and Derek's room was right there, the door standing open welcomingly. There was plenty of light coming in from the windows, despite the rain pattering against the glass.

Derek was sitting at the desk with his back to the door, probably doing his homework. Stiles grinned and leaned against the doorframe. He looked around for a minute, letting his eyes trace over the posters on the walls and books on the shelves, and then he said, "Hey--" and Derek started to turn.

"Derek," Stiles finished, blinking as he woke up. Derek was looking at him from across the width of his pillow.

Stiles was aware more or less simultaneously that he was naked and that Derek was naked and that he didn't feel nearly sticky and gross enough for the way he'd fallen asleep. Derek must have cleaned them up. Stiles was lying on his back with his right arm cradled on his chest. Derek had one arm around him, keeping his injured arm still, and one leg thrown over his legs.

Derek nodded slightly. "Moon just went down."

There was enough light in the room to see clearly, Stiles realized, although all the colors were muted. When he listened he realized he could hear rain against the glass. The sound of it had gotten into his dream.

"My dad's not home yet?"

Derek shook his head. "I've been listening for his car. We'll have some warning, but I should go soon. You have school today."

Stiles nodded. Neither of them moved.

"Your arm..." Derek frowned slightly, his gaze dropping down to Stiles's arm. He flexed his fingers against Stiles's bicep and then looked back up. "It smells like it's healing well. Not infected."

"Are you--let me feel it?"

Derek shifted his hand away from Stiles's arm, but the pain was just a deep, dull ache now. "Oh, wow. It feels a lot better already."

Derek nodded.

"My dad wants me to see a doctor about it," Stiles added, making an uncertain face. "I don't know how I'm gonna explain...."

"There's a guy in town who knows about us," Derek said. "About werewolves. Not a hunter--Dr. Deaton."

Stiles blinked. "Doctor--Scott's boss Dr. Deaton? The veterinarian?"

"Stitches are stitches," Derek said, smiling a little and lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "And I can tell him to expect you."

Derek's smile fell away. "Laura told me about him once. He was sort of an adviser to our family, and I'm going to need some advice."

Stiles winced. "There's... a lot going on, yeah."

Derek nodded. "The sheriff told me about how the investigation got started. That woman who came here after you."

"Peter's nurse," Stiles said. "Hey, do you know--she went up to some park in Oregon or something--"

Derek nodded. "That's in the territory of a pack we were friendly with. They'll probably give her the bite if she wants it."

"That's..." Stiles said, and remembered Peter on his knees with his hands in the dirt, digging a hole for Laura as she stood over him, supervising. "Good?"

Derek shrugged again, one-shouldered. His gaze slipped down, settling somewhere around Stiles's collarbone. "He also told me that he--you--thought Peter was going to kill all of those people. And probably Kate Argent, once he figured it out."

Derek didn't say anything else. There was a little frown line between his eyebrows. Stiles lifted his right hand gingerly and pressed his thumb against the spot, which at least made Derek look up at him.

"You did the right thing," Stiles said, knowing Derek would hear how sure he was. "You're a good alpha."

Derek just reached up and grabbed his hand, guiding it back down to his chest.

"I have to talk to Deaton about what happens next, whether to tell your dad what I am," he said, like Stiles hadn't said a word, but he didn't let go of Stiles's hand.

"The Sheriff's Department didn't know about the pack before, but as close as you and Scott are to him, it's probably best if we tell him instead of waiting for him to find out in the worst possible way."

Stiles winced. "Oh, um. Yeah."

Derek smiled slightly and added, "It might explain why you're hanging out with me in a way that makes him less inclined to rest his hand on his gun whenever he talks to me."

Stiles winced harder, picturing the night before. "I... might have told him I figured out I was into guys while chasing you around the woods, so that may not reassure him."

Derek gave him a glare at about 25% power. Stiles smiled apologetically.

"I'll take that into account," Derek said, and squeezed his hand before letting go. "Your dad just turned onto the county road headed this way."

Stiles rolled onto his side as Derek got out of bed, watching him get dressed. Derek picked Stiles's boxers up off the floor and tossed them at him. "Come on, you need to lock up behind me."

Stiles sighed gustily, but he got up and dragged them on, and followed Derek down to the kitchen door. Derek turned back before opening it, gave Stiles a quick close-mouthed kiss, and pressed his cheek to Stiles's as he said, "Go see Deaton after school. Don't forget."

Stiles nodded into the touch. Derek turned away before he could say a word, opening the door and running across the backyard in the rainy gray almost-morning. Stiles locked the door behind him, and heard his dad's cruiser pull in as he walked across the kitchen.

Stiles looked down at himself and then headed for the stairs; he made it to the top before the door opened, wincing at the sound of his own loud footstep.

"Stiles?" His dad called out.

Stiles folded his arms across his chest and said, "Hey, Dad."

He heard the door close and lock, and then his dad came into view at the bottom of the stairs, frowning and exhausted. "What are you doing up?"

Stiles wanted to gesture, wanted to run a hand over his hair, but he kept his arms folded--hide the bandage, hide the pawprint--and shrugged. "I had this weird dream."

His dad grimaced. "I guess that's no surprise. Go back to sleep, you've got another hour before you need to be up for school."

Stiles nodded. "Are you home for the day?"

His dad sighed. "We'll see. We arrested all the local accomplices, and three of them positively identified Kate Argent in a photo lineup. We got an arrest warrant for the murders, and there are BOLOs out for her truck in six states."

Stiles winced. "Yeah, that's gonna help me sleep."

His dad actually did kind of laugh at that, rubbing his face wearily. "Well, if you want coffee you need to put some clothes on."

"Deal," Stiles agreed promptly, and didn't look down again to see the pink patch of stubble burn peeking out of the top of his boxers before he took off for his bedroom.

---

Stiles spent most of Monday watching Scott stare sadly in Allison's direction--whether she was in the room or not, sometimes--and watching Allison look actually sick with misery. The highlight of the day, by far, was his backpack. He'd last seen it the night before in the river hideout, but it appeared in his locker sometime before the third period class change. Stiles stood there for a few seconds staring into his locker with a huge grin on his face, and maybe hugged his backpack a little as he pulled it out. He shoved his books into it, leaving his tattered freshman-year backpack in its place.

After that, though, was a lunch period spent exiled to the farthest corner of the cafeteria from Allison, Lydia, and most of the first line. By the time he'd endured four more hours of Scott's moping, Stiles was glad to abandon him to lacrosse practice and escape to the vet clinic.

Stiles hesitated just inside the door. The bell was loud in the quiet of the little clinic, and there was no one in sight. Stiles suddenly felt sure he was in the wrong place, that Derek had gotten the names mixed up or something and he was about to have a really awkward conversation with Scott's boss.

Dr. Deaton came through the door from the back and gave him a look that wasn't exactly happy to see him, but wasn't at all surprised or confused, either.

"Stiles," he said quietly, already turning away again. "Come on back."

Stiles put his hand gingerly over the bandage on his arm as he followed. Deaton sounded like he was going to tell Stiles it wasn't just infected, it was cancer.

The thought went out of his head as soon as he stepped through and saw Derek. He was sitting in the corner of the little treatment room, slumped in a folding chair with his hands in his lap.

Stiles bolted over to him, dropping to his knees at Derek's side and reaching for his hands. "What--"

He stopped short when he realized Derek was holding a cell phone.

"The sheriff called," Derek said. There was a strange, dazed tone to his voice. Stiles looked up into his face, but Derek had a thousand-yard stare on. "She's been arrested in Arizona. They're extraditing her here, probably tonight."

"Oh," Stiles said, and looked over to where Deaton was standing by the table, still looking unsurprised, and then back to Derek. "So... the Argents meant it, at least."

Derek's mouth turned up at the corners, and a few seconds later his gaze tracked over to Stiles. "Yeah. Come on, your arm."

"Yeah, dude, you're not going to distract me that easily," Stiles insisted.

Derek stood up and dragged him over to the table. Stiles hopped up to sit on it and held out his right arm to Deaton even as he grabbed for Derek's phone with his left. "I'm putting my number in your phone, come on, hand it over."

Derek snorted, but he gave Stiles his phone. He didn't even object while Stiles typed in #1 Pack Member for his name, so it would be right at the top of the list even if Derek never called him. Deaton was pushing Stiles's sleeves up, and Stiles focused on typing in his number while the bandage was unwound.

Deaton said, "Hm."

Stiles looked over sharply, and Derek's hand closed on Stiles's over the phone. The black stitches looked nasty, but the red line of the cut beneath them looked like nothing but a bad scratch, although the jagged ends were worse.

Deaton looked up, looking back and forth between Derek and Stiles. "You said this happened less than twenty-four hours ago?"

Stiles nodded, looking over at Derek, who was frowning. "Does it smell wrong?"

Derek shook his head, looking at Deaton first and then Stiles. "No, it's fine."

"You're healing very quickly," Deaton said. "The humans in the Hale pack used to heal like this, before the fire; that was a good-sized, established pack with a very strong and experienced alpha. It isn't what I'd expect from a pack as young and small as yours."

"We might be small," Stiles said, straightening his shoulders, "but we're concentrated."

Deaton looked back and forth between them with a weird little smile. "Yes. I suppose you are."

---

Stiles looked up from his breakfast cereal in total confusion when the phone on the wall rang. He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard it do that, let alone at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning.

His dad was already picking up before Stiles had gotten as far as thinking that maybe he should. "Stilinski."

His dad raised his eyebrows at the reply and shot a look at Stiles. "Good morning, Mr. Hale."

For a second Stiles remembered Derek's dad, standing in the kitchen with flour on his shirt, holding the cordless phone. It seemed perfectly reasonable that Derek's dad was on the phone with his dad--

But Derek wasn't sixteen anymore, and Derek's dad had been dead for a long time; it was Derek himself who was on the phone with Stiles's dad. Stiles realized--twice as disconcertingly as it would have been if he hadn't just been thinking about Derek's dad, too--that his dad was standing against the same counter Derek had pushed him up against to kiss him.

Stiles looked down fixedly at his cereal and shoveled another spoonful into his mouth so that he couldn't say anything incriminating.

His dad said, "I understand. I'll bring him and Scott. I'm sorry for your loss, Derek."

Stiles looked up again, eyes wide, as his dad hung up.

"You've been invited to a funeral," his dad said, coming back to the table. "Or a burial, anyway. Peter Hale's ashes are being interred with the rest of the Hale family this afternoon."

Stiles chewed and swallowed, and still didn't have time to think of something better to say than, "Are you seriously going to chaperone me and Scott at a funeral?"

His dad raised his eyebrows. "Are you trying to imply that you and Scott couldn't possibly get into trouble at a funeral?"

Stiles opened his mouth and then closed it without saying a word.

His dad shook his head. "Wear something decent. I'll pick you up from school and we'll go straight from there."

---

All things considered, Stiles wasn't that surprised when he got out of last period and found he had a text from his dad that just said Can't make it to the funeral. Stay out of trouble, be respectful, be home for dinner.

Stiles pulled his suit jacket from his locker and shrugged it on, pocketing his tie to put on later. Scott, wearing a black button-down, walked up with his head turned over his shoulder so he could stare at Allison as she stood at her locker.

"Just you and me, dude," Stiles said. "Apparently my dad trusts us to attend a funeral by ourselves after all."

"Do you think--"

"No," Stiles said firmly. "Hell no, dude, you cannot ask Allison to come attend the funeral of a guy her aunt has been arrested for setting on fire six years ago. Give her a few days to calm down and then ask her to eat lunch with us, okay?"

Scott sighed heavily but nodded, and followed Stiles out of the building.

"Oh, hey, Derek's here," Scott said, sounding entirely unsurprised as the black Camaro pulled up to the curb directly in front of the doors.

"In an incredibly unsubtle way," Stiles added, right before the passenger door popped open.

"In the car, now," Derek called out, and Stiles watched everyone flooding out of school look around to see who was getting into that car.

Scott didn't hesitate; he grabbed Stiles by the arm and towed him over to the Camaro. Scott got in first, climbing into the backseat while Stiles looked back to gauge the reactions of their classmates. Of course, in the one second of the day that Scott wasn't actively staring at Allison she stepped out of the doors with Lydia.

Stiles, on some stupid, stupid reflex, raised his hand in a wave. Allison looked sharply away, her hair falling like a curtain to hide her face; Lydia looked terrifyingly speculative. Stiles turned and threw himself into the car. He barely had the door shut before Derek was pulling away.

"Dude, thanks for announcing our illicit three-way to everyone at Beacon Hills High, but I actually drove myself this morning, so--"

"I needed to know where you were," Derek said, reaching over to rest his hand on the back of Stiles's neck. There was a tension in his voice and touch that let Stiles know that need was in no way an exaggeration. "The sheriff called--"

"Yeah, he can't make it, I know--"

Derek's hand tightened a little and then quickly released. "Did he tell you why?"

Stiles shook his head and looked back at Scott, but Scott was, of course, turned backward and staring out the rear window. Watching for Allison again.

"Chris Argent visited Kate in jail a few hours ago," Derek said. "After he left, she waited about an hour and then asked for paper and pen to write out a confession. Apparently it's taking some time."

"She--but that's good, right?" Stiles asked, looking over at Derek, who didn't let go of him and didn't relax. "That means--she'll probably plead guilty, right? You won't have to testify, you won't have to talk about--"

Derek looked over at him sharply and Stiles froze.

Derek put both hands on the wheel and looked straight ahead. "I don't like it. I don't--I just needed to know where you were, both of you. That you were nowhere near her."

"Do you think--" Stiles's heart tripped straight into overdrive, heading toward panic with almost no intervening steps. "Derek, do you think she's going to try something? My dad is--"

Derek said, "Stiles--fuck--" but he didn't reach for Stiles again or tell him to calm down. He made an abrupt turn to head toward the Sheriff's Department, flooring it.

"Are you thinking the Argents are in on it?" Scott said from the backseat, and Stiles jumped. He'd half-forgotten Scott was there. "Because they just picked Allison up from school and they're going the same way we are."

"Hunters," Derek snarled, like it was the worst swear word he knew. He hit the gas a little harder.

Stiles considered pointing out that maybe it was a bad idea to do seventy in a forty-five on the way to the Sheriff's Department, except his dad was standing between Kate Argent and whatever she was about to try. Of course it couldn't have been that easy--of course she was going to try something--of course the Argents had only been pretending.

"Breathe," Derek and Scott demanded, in unison.

Stiles shut his eyes, tilted his head back, and counted. In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.

Derek's hand settled on his thigh, Scott's on his shoulder, and Stiles knew his pack wasn't going to let him have a panic attack any more than they were going to let the Argents hurt his dad. Derek slowed down nearly to the speed limit once they were on the same block as the Sheriff's Department. He pulled into the parking lot with barely a squeal of tires, parking neatly and sharply in a visitor's space.

Stiles was scrabbling his seatbelt off almost before he'd finished being thrown against it by the sudden stop.

Derek said, "Scott, stay out here, don't let them come in," which meant he wasn't going to waste time arguing about Stiles not coming in.

They ran across the parking lot to the front doors, and Derek stopped short just outside. Stiles stopped with him, even though his dad was inside, because Derek was wide-eyed, staring, listening to something Stiles couldn't hear.

"What?"

Derek shook his head a little.

"I can hear her heart," he said, which meant I know her heartbeat well enough to pick it out, but Stiles couldn't think about that right now. "It's racing--she's worked up. She was always calm when she--I've never heard her like this."

"So...."

"So this is worse," Derek said, his eyes snapping to Stiles's, and Stiles knew that meant worse than plotting to kill Derek's entire family.

They turned and pushed through the doors together, and Stiles yelled out brightly, "Hey Ms. Morales, just gotta see my dad for a sec--"

She stood up, coming after them, but then Stiles heard a shout, doors slamming, and suddenly a woman's voice was audible, a furious shout.

"What about this, big brother," she screamed.

Stiles ran toward the sound with Derek at his side. The door was standing open on one of the outer observation rooms and Stiles made for it as she went on.

"Is this enough for your Argent honor?"

Stiles managed, somehow, to be first through the door, so he had a perfectly unobstructed view of the observation room. The big window into the brightly-lit interrogation room showed what was happening inside like a TV screen.

Deputy Carey stood there with her hands in the air, and Deputy Hollis had his hand on his gun, but both of them were frozen. The spray of blood arced through the air as Stiles registered the sound of a gunshot muffled against a skull, and Kate Argent was crumpling to the ground, already dead as Deputy Carey's gun fell from her hand.

Stiles was pressed up against the glass by the time Kate Argent's body went still. He saw the red-black darkness of blood staining the swirl of her golden-blond hair, her limbs splaying out like a broken toy in bright orange coveralls.

"Stiles, don't look," Derek's voice said, far away.

There was a hand on his shoulder and another on his face, turning him away. Stiles grabbed Derek's jacket and leaned into him. Derek kept one hand on the side of Stiles's face, cupped beside his eye like a blinder to keep him from peeking.

Stiles squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn't help: he could still see the body, the spray of blood, the dead random helplessness of the way she lay. Stiles opened his eyes and looked over instead, trying to replace the sight of Kate Argent's death with the fact of Derek standing with him, warm and alive and holding on tight.

Derek had gone gray-pale like he'd grabbed hold of a mortal wound. He was staring fixedly toward the window. His eyes were wide, his mouth hanging slightly open, and he looked suddenly young. For the first time Stiles noticed that Derek was perfectly clean-shaven, wearing a white dress shirt under his leather jacket. He looked like the boy who hadn't quite turned around in Stiles's dream. Like the one who'd known Kate Argent six years ago.

He still loved her, Stiles thought, with sudden, sharp clarity. Derek could pick her heartbeat out of a hundred, and now he had heard it stop.

Stiles tried to say Derek's name, but nothing came out of his mouth, and Derek didn't notice. Stiles raised his left hand and turned Derek's face toward him, shielding his peripheral vision the same way Derek shielded his.

Derek blinked, dazed, and Stiles said, "Don't you look, either."

Derek shook his head a little, like he was trying to clear it, but at least he was looking at Stiles now. Derek's thumb stroked along Stiles's hairline and he tilted his head into Stiles's hand. His wide-eyed stare relaxed toward actually seeing Stiles and his hand on Stiles's shoulder moved in to rest on his chest, over his heart, which was still racing wildly.

Then Derek froze, and Stiles knew what it was even before he looked over Derek's shoulder.

His dad was standing in the doorway, watching them.

He looked exhausted, and not really surprised, grimacing as he beckoned silently. Stiles tugged Derek with him as he headed for the door, trying not to give him a chance to look back.

His dad stepped back into the hall when they reached him, and he said only, "Get out of here, both of you. You'll be late."

---

Mrs. Argent stepped through the inner doors into the reception area just as Stiles and Derek came out from the back. She looked grim in a way that made Stiles realize that Scott, out in the parking lot, had probably heard what happened.

She stopped short at the sight of them, her eyes going to the empty front desk before she said, "Who did it?"

Stiles opened his mouth, tempted to lie without any idea what to say, but Derek said quietly, "She did it herself."

Mrs. Argent nodded, her lips pressing together, and said, "I thought she'd manage it."

Stiles shut his mouth with a click of teeth, and Kate Argent's last words echoed in his brain. Mrs. Argent was suddenly far more terrifying than he had ever suspected.

Stiles pointed back the way he and Derek had come, and said, "Second door on the left."

Mrs. Argent nodded again, striding quickly past them, and Derek tugged Stiles into motion, towing him out the doors.

As soon as they stepped outside, Stiles could hear Allison screaming, just as full-throated and furious as her aunt had been a minute before. Stiles didn't need Derek's hand on his arm to hurry him toward the sound.

"You said I could see her! I wanted to see her! You did this to her!"

Allison was standing more or less equidistant between her father and Scott, holding them both back with sheer radiant anger. Mr. Argent stood still, head slightly bowed, hands at his sides, but Scott had his hands out and was trying to creep closer as Allison railed at her father.

He'd almost made contact when Allison whirled on him, knocking his open hand away with a fist. "Don't you touch me! Don't you dare touch me, you--you--"

Stiles was barely aware that Derek had let go of him before he was lunging into Allison's space. He caught her wrists, startling her into silence before she could scream any incriminatingly specific insults in the parking lot of the Sheriff's Department.

"Allison," Derek snapped, his voice so full of alpha command that Scott back-pedaled with his hands clutched together and Stiles froze. Even Mr. Argent stiffened, looking up sharply.

Allison stopped fighting long enough for Derek to say more gently, "Allison, I...."

For an awful, teetering second Stiles thought Derek was going to tell her about whatever had happened with him and Kate six years before and expose to all of them what Stiles had glimpsed on his face in the dim observation room.

But when Derek went on he said, "I had an uncle. My father's youngest brother."

The brief shock of being grabbed wore off and Allison started fighting Derek's grip on her wrists, but Derek countered every move easily, talking the whole time as they circled so smoothly it looked like dancing.

"He was a teenager when I was born. I was his oldest nephew and the only one like him. I was his favorite and he was mine--not just my favorite uncle, my favorite person. I idolized him. And about the time I started high school, he started really treating me like an adult, like we weren't just relatives. We were friends."

Allison's struggles slackened, and she stared at Derek with wide, tear-shining eyes.

"He meant everything to me," Derek went on softly. "I would have done anything for him. And last month he tore my sister to pieces right in front of me. When I tried to stop him he turned on me. He would have killed me, too, if I hadn't managed to kill him first."

Allison's mouth fell open, and Stiles saw the shiver that went through her, but she didn't make a sound.

"He turned out to be a monster I could never have imagined," Derek said, releasing Allison's wrists, letting both their hands fall. "And I would probably forgive all of it if I could have him back."

Allison raised a hand to her mouth, and her whole body heaved as she sobbed. Stiles could see Derek shifting his weight backward--Mr. Argent and Scott were both stepping in, ready to take over comforting her--when Allison abruptly threw her arms around Derek, putting her face to his shoulder and wailing like a lost child.

Derek shot Stiles a wide-eyed, startled look.

Stiles made a quick, incoherent hand gesture that he hoped conveyed you brought this on yourself, now be nice. Derek looked down at Allison and settled one hand cautiously on her shoulder, ducking his head to murmur something Stiles couldn't hear.

Allison's crying turned quieter after a minute, and Derek said something else, which made Allison nod. Derek gave her a gentle push, and Allison turned to her dad and said as she wiped her face, "I want to go with them."

Her father reached out cautiously and took Allison's hand, raising his eyebrows in silent question and flicking a slightly dazed look toward Derek, Scott, and Stiles before he looked back to Allison for an explanation.

"To the cemetery," Allison said firmly. "To bury Peter Hale."

---

The Camaro was doubling as a hearse, as it turned out. When they got to the cemetery Stiles and Scott stood waiting beside the car while Derek went around to the trunk and got out a wooden box about the size of a stack of DVDs.

"Is that," Scott whispered.

Stiles nodded. "Ashes."

They fell in behind Derek as he walked stiffly toward the Hale family grave. Mr. Argent and Allison followed them, and they were nearly there when Stiles realized that Deaton was already there, waiting for them. Weirdly, Isaac Lahey was standing beside him, looking as pale and miserable as Stiles felt.

Isaac shifted his weight and Stiles realized he was leaning on a shovel, and then it clicked. Mr. Lahey was the cemetery groundskeeper, and Isaac apparently had the worst under-the-table part-time job in Beacon Hills. As they got closer, Deaton put a hand on Isaac's shoulder, and Stiles saw Isaac flinch before Deaton whispered something to him. Isaac nodded quickly, shouldered the shovel, and turned away, heading toward the maintenance shed in the back corner.

Deaton was standing by the left side of the big Hale family gravestone, and Derek walked around to the right. Stiles trailed Derek, and Scott stayed with Stiles even when the Argents peeled off to stand by Deaton. They separated onto their respective sides of the grave, Pack and Not Pack. Between them was the neat square hole Isaac had dug for the little box, with its little pile of dirt and a perfect square of cut-out sod beside it.

Derek stepped around so he was facing the headstone, between his pack and their tentative allies. He met Stiles's eyes first, and then each of the others in turn, his controlled expression unchanging from Scott to Deaton to Mr. Argent to Allison.

"Thank you all," he said stiffly. "For being here."

Then he looked down at the box in his hands for a few seconds, like he was trying to think of something to say. Stiles remembered helping Derek bury Laura, when Derek couldn't speak or cry. He tried to think of what he could say about Peter; he wondered if Derek would repeat what he'd said to Allison, which was about the best eulogy Peter could hope for.

Then he realized that the words Derek was hesitating over weren't words at all. There should have been a howl for the loss of a pack member, as Derek had howled for Laura. But he wouldn't do it now, not in front of the Argents, not with strangers in earshot. Some other time, maybe--at night, when it was only the pack.

After a long, waiting pause, Derek said, "Goodbye, Peter Hale. Rest in peace."

He knelt and lowered the box into the waiting hole, and Stiles remembered Peter kneeling by the house, getting ready to plant Laura's rosebush. He remembered the way Laura's body had thumped down into its grave. The box of Peter's ashes touched down without a sound, and Derek drew out his hands and looked up at Deaton expectantly.

Deaton had a little black bag in his hand. He stepped forward and upended it over the little grave, letting a rain of purple flowers fall out to cover the box.

"This is a Hale family tradition," Deaton explained, and Stiles mentally translated Hale family to werewolf. "The graves of those who die by violence are protected with wolfsbane, so that no further violence will follow them."

Derek nodded and muttered another, "Thank you."

Derek reached over and grabbed a double handful of dirt, pouring it into the grave. Stiles thought of Laura again, and before he'd really thought it through he was kneeling beside Derek. Stiles dragged handfuls of dirt into the grave, his hands crossing Derek's as they worked. Derek didn't say anything, and the motions of his hands didn't hesitate, like it was what he expected. Anytime he had to bury a family member, Stiles would be there to help.

This time Stiles actually had the use of both hands and no concussion slowing him down, and Peter's grave was about a twentieth of the size of Laura's. It only took a couple of minutes before Derek gently swatted Stiles's hands away so that he could neaten the pile of dirt, smoothing it into a tidy curve.

He kept going for a while, into some level of geometric precision that might have been detectable to wolf senses but just looked like an unwillingness to be finished to Stiles. He remembered that from Laura, too, so he reached out and grabbed Derek's wrists. He felt Derek jerk at the touch, but he didn't fight Stiles's grip. Derek sat back onto his heels and curled his fingers into toward his palms. Stiles didn't let go.

He didn't say another word and didn't move, and Stiles didn't want to look at his face. He looked up, instead, at the people still standing around them.

Mr. Argent cleared his throat and looked over to Scott. "Why don't you come home with us," he said, and it didn't really sound like a question. "Allison could use some company."

"Ye--" Scott started, and then stopped short. "I mean, if you want me to, Allison. If you'd rather hang out with Lydia or something...."

Allison gave a quick shake of her head and darted around behind Derek to get to Scott without stepping across the fresh grave. Scott gave Stiles an apologetic look even as he closed his arms around Allison, but Stiles shook his head. They were done here. Derek wouldn't mind Scott leaving.

Scott and Allison headed back toward the Argents' SUV, and then Deaton stepped over, crouching down to look Derek in the eye. He put one hand on Derek's shoulder, and in his peripheral vision Stiles saw Derek nod. Deaton nodded back, as though that had meant something, and stood up and walked away without a word.

After that it was just Stiles kneeling with Derek on his family's grave, still holding Derek's wrists. He could feel Derek's pulse beating under his fingers, and he could hear the hitching rhythm of Derek's not-quite-silent breathing. Looking around, he realized he could see his mom's gravestone from here. He smiled a little, thinking that she'd been present for yet another installment in the bizarre drama his life had become in the last month.

A few minutes after the cars had pulled away and everything had gotten silent--long enough for them to be out of even a werewolf's earshot, maybe--Derek tugged free of Stiles's grip and wiped the back of his wrist across his face.

"Come here," Derek said, getting to his feet, and Stiles stood up and followed when Derek turned and walked into the woods. There was still a visible line where Derek's magical boundary had been, where he'd dug up the earth trying to get to Stiles a few weeks ago. Neither of them broke stride when they passed it now.

They were headed to the little clearing with the big rocks. The one where Derek had spelled out a few words on a Ouija board. The one where he'd made Scott share his memory of how Peter died.

"That boy who dug the grave," Derek said as they walked, sounding almost normal, and Stiles finally looked over at him. He had a streak of dirt across one cheek, and he was frowning thoughtfully.

"Isaac?" Stiles said. "He's on the lacrosse team, but not first line. He's better than I used to be, though."

Derek gave him a sideways look and didn't say any of the things Stiles had left himself wide open for there, although his frown eased slightly. "I'll ask Scott about him, then. He smelled wrong. Hurt."

Stiles nodded, remembering the look on Isaac's face, the way he'd flinched from Deaton's touch.

"Do you..." Derek said, and Stiles looked over at him again, but Derek was staring off into the trees. "Do you need to get home soon?"

"Oh, no way," Stiles said, shaking his head. "You're coming with me, man. I am not facing my dad alone after he caught us all up in each other's personal space in his workplace."

Derek looked over without turning his head, and Stiles barreled on.

"Seriously, I am putting my foot down on this. You're coming to dinner and we're telling my dad that we're both saving ourselves for marriage."

"Oh," Derek said, stopping short. "Is that what we're doing."

Stiles remembered, abruptly, that Derek was having a horrible day and maybe now was really not the time to inflict that particular awkwardness on him, but Derek turned toward him before he could take it back. His eyes were warm as he stepped into Stiles's personal space again, and he looped an arm around Stiles's neck, holding him still as he rubbed his dirt-streaked cheek against Stiles's.

Stiles laughed halfway through, shoving ineffectually at Derek. "You're doing that on purpose, aren't you, now I'm gonna--"

Derek turned his head, catching Stiles's mouth in a kiss, and that was the end of that protest. Stiles had enough presence of mind to put his dirty hands on Derek's jeans, instead of his white shirt, and that was the last clear thought he had for a while. He was out of breath, lips somewhere between tingling and raw, when Derek broke the kiss and pressed his forehead to Stiles's.

Stiles smiled a little at the fact that Derek was breathing hard too, though he got it under control before Stiles did.

"Do you," Derek said, and then pulled back a little farther, looking Stiles in the eye with his arm still hooked around Stiles's neck to keep him close. "Do you mind if I go back for a little while?"

Stiles honestly didn't know what Derek meant by go back for a minute--to his car? To the cemetery? To the Sheriff's Department?

"Oh," Stiles said abruptly. "Wolf-shaped? Do what you want, man. Your body, your choice. At least for the next two hours, and then you have to come face my dad with me."

Derek darted in for one quick, hard kiss and then turned and ran the rest of the way to the clearing. Stiles followed him more slowly, figuring Derek might want a few seconds of privacy. By the time he caught up Derek's clothes were lying on a rock.

Derek was standing beside it, furry and four-legged. Stiles couldn't help grinning at the sight of him. It was easy like this.

Derek gave him a wolf-grin back, tongue lolling out.

Derek barked and trotted over. He circled behind Stiles, giving him a hard nudge in the back of one thigh.

"What--no, you're not serious, dude, not today. Look at the shoes I'm wearing."

Derek snapped his teeth just behind Stiles's heel, and Stiles jumped forward reflexively, and then sighed and kept going. Monsters didn't wait until you changed into your running shoes, after all. Derek snapped his teeth a few more times, just to make his point, but once Stiles hit his stride Derek took the lead.

Stiles followed him into the woods.