Chapter Text
The sun was about to go down, Stiles was desperate, high school boys were immature and disgusting (Yes, Scott included. She knew way too much about her best friend’s hygiene habits. While they were better than most, since he was born with asthma and his mother was a nurse who had intimate knowledge of the mechanism of disease, meaning she’d kill him for not not taking proper precautions, he was still gross. There was a reason she’d only ever seen him as a brother, and never considered the possibility of something more between them.), and life was cruel.
Even if she’d been willing to touch one of her unwashed classmates, none of them would give her so much as a second glance. Guys with too many brains in their heads, ADHD, and big mouths, they could kind of tolerate. Girls who fit that description were social pariahs. Especially when their fathers were in law enforcement.
But the bodies kept dropping, and her pesky little v-card still hadn’t been punched, so here she was, trying for a Hail Mary even though both her parents had lapsed years ago, well before she would have been christened into the Catholic Church. And the famous Virgin Mary probably wouldn’t be too impressed by Stiles invoking her name for this anyway.
She sucked in a deep breath, staring at the gloomy door to Derek’s new loft with dread and determination, feeling about two inches tall. She wasn’t even ready for this, in spite of some of the claims she’d made to Scott once he and Allison started getting hot and heavy several months back, but she was even less ready to die like her friend Heather had, so. Needs must, and all that.
Before she could bring herself to bang on the door with her usual verve, it opened, revealing its owner’s skeptical but concerned face.
“What are you doing here, Stiles? I could smell your panic from a mile away.”
“Well,” Stiles started, starting slowly and then picking up speed, the last few words almost incomprehensibly fast, “it may have escaped your notice, given everything you’ve got going on right now, ‘cause you know, it’s a lot, but someone’s out there sacrificing virgins, and I need someone to help me get taken off of the psycho’s list. Preferably now. As in right now.”
Derek’s face cycled through about a million different micro expressions in the time it took Stiles to speak her piece, none of them encouraging.
“No,” he stated, offering zero room for argument and starting to shut the door in her face.
Stiles stuck her foot in the remaining gap, knowing that he wouldn’t risk breaking her bones by closing it regardless of the appendage keeping it ajar.
They’d had a long, exacting discussion on the importance of not squishing the human a few weeks after he’d slammed her head into her Jeep’s steering wheel last winter. Derek had actually apologized, his expression screwed up as though he’d coated his tongue in lemon juice. There’d been humans in his pack, but time and trauma had erased a lot of the lessons about how to be gentle with the more vulnerable members of the family.
“It’s not happening.”
“Oh, come on, Derek, why not?” Stiles asked, trying and failing not to sound like a whiny kid, since she knew that would only serve to weaken her case.
“Aside from the fact that you’re just a kid and your father’s the sheriff, who’s not exactly my biggest fan? No, Stiles, I can’t think of any good reasons to say no,” Derek snarked, which, okay, somewhat valid.
But still. She couldn’t give up. Her life was too precious for some creepy supernatural murderer to end it now.
Her dad deserved better than to have to bury his only daughter not that many years after having to bury his young wife. She felt like, in the face of that potential fate, violating a few statutes was more than reasonable.
“Is it about the whole potential pregnancy thing? Because condoms are a thing that exists, dude.”
She didn’t give him a chance to respond to that, pressing on by asking, “Is it the buzz cut, ‘cause I’m growing it out. It’s really more of a pixie cut these days, and anyway, you know, there’s wigs. And hats. I could totally rock a wig or a beanie for this, just please don’t keep saying no.”
Derek rolled his eyes, and for the first time since he opened the door, Stiles realized that he looked tired.
No, scratch that, he looked completely and utterly exhausted. The bags under his eyes had bags, which was impressive because, you know, werewolf.
She couldn’t imagine how he must feel, finding out his little sister had been alive all this time, right on the heels of finding out that Erica was dead, but she suspected his apparent sleeplessness stemmed from one or both of those revelations. And then, of course, there was the alpha pack. Couldn’t forget about that delightful bit of news.
“It’s not about your hair, Stiles. It’s about you thinking that this is somehow going to save you, when all it’ll do is leave you with a lifetime of regrets.”
He looked away and then looked straight into her eyes, saying, “You can stay here, and I’ll watch over you, but that? Is not happening. Don’t ask me again.”
“You’d really let me stay here? Even with Cora here?” Stiles asked, her desperate bravado replaced with the far more genuine vulnerability she tried so hard to suppress, especially when it came to all things supernatural.
“Yeah, of course I would. You’re… a good ally. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
She huffed a soft laugh and shook her head at him, feeling some of that faithful fake-it-til-you-make-it confidence coming back, now that she had the promise of at least some protection.
Two hours trapped in the high school pool, miraculously holding up his dead weight in spite of her noodle arms came to mind, along with the call she’d placed the day after everything went down with Gerard and Jackson, asking Derek if Boyd and Erica had made it back to the train station safely. They hadn’t, of course, which had led to Stiles and Derek (and Peter and Isaac, unfortunately, although weirdly, Peter was starting to grow on her - like fungus; she didn’t trust him any further than she could throw him, but he had an actual personality underneath all that oozy charm and carefully chained rage) spending an awful lot of the summer combing the woods and the county for any signs of the wayward betas. It still burned, how tragically that situation turned out, and would for a long, long time, she expected.
Electing not to abrade still-fresh wounds, she simply told him, “Pretty sure I’m a good deal more than an ally at this point, but either way, I appreciate it.”
“Well, we’re not pack. Scott made that perfectly clear last spring.”
“You’re right- he’s not,” she agreed easily, before adding, “but I never said that I wasn’t. I just wanted him to have the freedom to choose.”
Derek was gruff and brooding and rough around the edges, and he’d been a complete idiot about building his own pack, but his intentions were always good. He had protected her even with all the stuff she had put him through in the months since they first clashed personalities in the woods near the old Hale house, and sometimes he looked at her as though her thoughts actually mattered. A rare enough thing that Stiles considered it valuable enough to continue seeking him out, regardless of how often Derek pushed her away, and how Scott still privately blamed him for being bitten.
She knew who was ultimately to blame for Scott’s transformation, and it wasn’t Derek, nor even Peter, given the state of his sanity at the time. It was Stiles. Someday, Scott was going to realize that, and she didn’t know what would happen to their friendship when he did.
But Derek had already recognized the absolute worst that she had to offer, and he still, in his stand-offish way, cared.
That mattered.
That mattered a lot.
“You’re his packmate. You’re part of what’s keeping him stable without an alpha. He needs you - especially with whatever is going on with him and the Argent girl. You have to know you can’t be in two packs at once.”
Ignoring for now that he really needed to be having this discussion with Isaac, who seemed bound and determined to steal her best friend, Stiles grinned, her teeth bared in an expression fit to make any werewolf proud.
“Watch me.”