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Stiles's phone rang while he was bringing groceries inside; he cast a quick glance back toward the Jeep, but he'd grabbed everything perishable for the first trip. Canned goods and cereal would probably survive whatever adventure he had to take them on if this was important. Stiles pulled the phone from his pocket. It was Scott, but that could go either way; he picked up and tucked the phone against his ear as he started dragging bags toward the fridge.
"Hey, Scott, what's--"
"We muted the phone so we can't hear anything from your end," Scott yelled. There wasn't any background noise; Scott apparently just thought that if he couldn't hear Stiles, Stiles couldn't hear him either. "Just please tell Derek I didn't know she was going to do that and I'm sorry and Lydia says it will wear off at sunset."
"And I did kind of know," Jackson said, loud and close to the phone and scared-sounding, but not actually shouting. "But I'm still really, really sorry! Really sorry, Derek! So if you could please not do any of that stuff with the rending and crushing that you said--"
"Both of you shut up," Lydia interrupted. Stiles mechanically put away milk and eggs and veggies and wished that he didn't know he had his own call icon on Scott's phone and the only person Scott could have been trying to call and accidentally gotten Stiles was his mom. "Stiles, just keep Derek there and don't let him hurt himself. Tell him it will wear off at sunset. I'm pretty sure, with the new moon, that should be enough to break it. Also, take notes, if you get a chance."
"What the hell did you do?" Stiles demanded, not that it would have done any good even if Lydia could hear him. "Also, Derek's not here."
"Really really sorry! Tell Derek!" Scott yelled again, and then the call ended.
Stiles set his phone down on the counter and looked around the kitchen.
"Derek's not here," he repeated, to no one, and it sounded even less persuasive. "Derek? Are you here?"
No one made a sound, not even a creak of movement from upstairs in Stiles's bedroom. His dad had a double shift today, which was why Stiles had given up and done the shopping himself. And Scott, Jackson, and Lydia had conspired to really piss Derek off, and for some reason they thought Derek had come here. And instead of coming after him or telling Stiles to get away, they'd just told him to tell Derek they were sorry.
"Awesome," Stiles muttered, and shoved his phone back into his pocket, for whatever protection it might be, as he started checking the house. He took a quick lap around the first floor--he didn't think Derek had ever even been down here--and then headed upstairs, straight to his bedroom. He spotted the crooked blinds first, and then realized the window hadn't been closed all the way. Both were weird; Derek was generally better at basic sneakiness than that.
Then Stiles looked around and realized Derek was curled on the floor in front of Stiles's dresser, half into Stiles's closet. He was gagged with something brown, and next to it his skin looked almost blue, it was so pale. Stiles remembered the way Derek had gone gray-white during the wolfsbane bullet ordeal, and he yelled Derek's name as he bolted over to him, dropping to his knees and ripping the gag away from his mouth. There was something purple between his slate blue lips, and Stiles didn't think, just stuck his finger into Derek's slack mouth to pull out a spit-covered bunch of crushed wolfsbane flowers.
"Oh, shit, no, what did they do to you," Stiles demanded, tilting Derek's head and pushing his mouth open wider, fishing around his teeth and digging out more of the little purple flowers. He didn't stop until Derek coughed, and then he yanked his hands away from Derek's mouth. Derek twisted onto his side and coughed for a while, ending with spitting out a couple more mangled little blossoms onto Stiles's carpet.
"Derek, what did they--do you need me to do anything? What the hell, man?"
"I did that," Derek said, dropping his forehead to rest on the floor. "It was the only thing I could think of, I just had to make it stop. Did you know wolfsbane flowers actually taste kind of sweet?" Derek lifted his head and glared furiously at Stiles, but he kept talking. "And purple. They taste more purple than anything else purple. When I was a kid my parents--"
"Whoa, okay!" Stiles yelled, reaching out again with both hands. He clamped one hand down on Derek's lips, pinching them shut, and slapped the other hand over it. "Um, don't say anything, just nod or shake your head--did Lydia give you some kind of potion that forces you to tell the truth even though you'd rather choke on wolfsbane and die?"
Derek's lips moved in Stiles's grip, but his glare eased a little. He nodded and didn't break away.
Right. That was why they'd muted the phone; if Derek had been talking anywhere in the house when they called, Scott and Jackson could have heard it through the phone, and obviously that just would have pissed Derek off more. That had probably been Lydia's idea.
"Okay, Lydia says it'll end at sunset, that's, like, an hour. And she also said not to let you hurt yourself, and I concur with that, so you're not putting the wolfsbane back in your mouth," Stiles said.
Derek was making a grumbling noise that sounded almost like words, and Stiles's hand was cramping.
"I guess I could gag you again," Stiles offered, taking his left hand away and keeping the right firmly pinched down on Derek's lips. He tugged at the gag still looped around Derek's throat, and suddenly realized what it was.
"Oh come on, man, my I Support Single Mothers shirt? I love that shirt."
"Scott hates it," Derek said, jerking away from him. "Scott wants to punch you every time you wear it, because if you'd just think for a fucking second, you'd--"
Stiles cringed. He'd never thought about it like that, and Scott had never said a word. "It's not about Scott's mom," he said, but Derek just kept going.
"You're supposed to be the fucking smart one, Stiles, I came here for help and all I get is--"
"Okay just give me a second," Stiles shouted, standing up and looking around frantically. Obviously the gag wasn't doing much except keeping the wolfsbane in, and what the hell could he possibly use to gag a werewolf that Derek couldn't just chew up and spit out?
"I mean, sure, you want to help, you always want to help," Derek grumbled, and Stiles put his hands over his ears, and then realized that that was the answer.
"We're going about this backward," Stiles yelled, and leaned over Derek to turn on his iPod dock. He switched it to AM/FM and turned the volume up all the way; there were a few seconds of some announcer guy talking, so loud Stiles felt it like a punch in the face, and then he turned it to static. That still felt like a thousand angry bees in his ears, but he couldn't hear anything else at all.
He looked down, and Derek was curled into a ball, both hands over his ears.
"Right, sorry," Stiles yelled. "Worse with werewolf hearing."
Derek looked up at him and yelled something back, looking furious, but it was just a blur of angry noise and Stiles looked away, carefully not reading his lips. He skipped back and hurried over to his desk, digging around until he found the box of earplugs. They were just little balls of wax that you could fit into your ears and seal. He dropped two into his palm and then tossed the rest to Derek.
"Just try to talk quietly," Stiles said, remembering that he didn't need to yell himself. "And I won't look at you, so I can't read your lips, and it'll wear off at sunset."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Derek snatch the earplugs, and then Stiles said, "I'm going to go put away the rest of the groceries, just stay here, okay?"
He didn't look toward Derek, just went out into the hallway. He shut the door and then stood there for a second. With the earplugs in and the roar of static muffled behind the door it seemed suddenly totally silent, which made Stiles feel jumpy and off-balance.
"Okay," he said, and his voice sounded strange, both muffled and too-loud, echoing in his skull. "Okay, I can do this. Putting the groceries away and not thinking about the truth-telling werewolf in my bedroom. Right."
Stiles started humming and headed down the stairs. He was singing under his breath when he finished putting away the rest of the fridge stuff.
He turned around and shrieked loud enough to make Derek glare at him, but Derek's mouth kept moving. Stiles kept his eyes on Derek's eyes; now that Stiles had fallen silent he could sort of hear Derek's voice, a low angry rumble.
"Okay, sorry--oh, god, does it make you find someone to talk to? Is this your personal hell?" Derek nodded, scowling even more darkly, and Stiles shut his eyes, plastering his hands over his face. "Sorry! Sorry, I didn't mean to ask, okay, um, okay, we'll go back upstairs, I'll do some stuff on my computer, you can talk to the back of my head and I won't hear you. That'll probably be okay, right?"
Stiles peeked through his fingers just in time to see Derek rounding the island. He had one hand screening his mouth and the other reaching out for Stiles. Stiles squeezed his eyes shut and let Derek grab his wrist and pull him along, back across the kitchen and all the way into Stiles's room.
The wash of static didn't really sound like the ocean or the wind; it just sounded like this loud unvarying noise, like an overburdened air conditioner or a hair dryer or something. But it definitely blocked out the wordless growly sound of Derek's voice. Once Stiles sat down and opened his laptop, he could only see Derek as a vague figure reflected in his screen.
Derek paced back and forth, gesticulating furiously, but he didn't come near Stiles or even destroy any of Stiles's stuff. Stiles found a website with the exact time of sunset in Beacon Hills. It was also, within a few minutes, the time of moonset, and he was guessing that was what Lydia meant about the new moon making it strong enough to break the spell for sure. He set a countdown clock, making it a big obvious always-on-top display that Derek would be able to see any time he looked over.
Doing anything he had to listen to was out, so Stiles checked the baseball scores and then started reading sports blogs, losing himself for a while in the alternate universe where people could get really worked up about a sport being played in another time zone.
"Hey, Derek," he only half-heard himself say, turning his head, and Derek froze, staring at him. He wasn't glaring anymore, but he looked kind of worked up about something, red-faced and holding himself rigid.
"Never mind," Stiles said, wincing. "I'll ask later."
He wrote it down, so he wouldn't forget--Are any pro athletes werewolves? Would you be able to tell?
He went back to reading Mets gossip on some weird, shady message board featuring way too much blue text on orange backgrounds. He'd have to tell Lydia she was right about that combination being horrible at least some of the time. Some things just shouldn't be put together for some purposes.
Like him and Lydia, actually, if the purpose was dating at any time in the foreseeable future. Even aside from Jackson, Lydia just kept getting more terrifying. It was probably Stiles's fault--well, Stiles and Allison and Scott's--for trying to keep her in the dark for so long. She was pushing back pretty hard now, trying to get answers about everything. No matter how she had to do it, apparently.
Stiles minimized the window and checked for Derek's reflection in his laptop screen, then turned to peek when he didn't see anything moving. Derek was sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, shoulders slumped, staring somewhere at the level of Stiles's feet as he talked.
Derek, on the other hand, had started out pretty much maximally terrifying, and then somehow became someone Stiles wanted to help and even... protect. And they actually worked pretty well together when there was some kind of problem to solve, although that wasn't any reason to think that they would work well together together. No matter how often Stiles had fantasized about it, and, wow, there was something he shouldn't think about with Derek in the room under the influence of some kind of mind-altering magic.
Derek looked up, and his frown this time looked confused; Stiles felt himself blush and turned back to his laptop, hunching his shoulders as he squeezed his eyes shut and typed total gibberish for a minute or so.
He opened his eyes and just stared at the countdown ticking down--less than twenty minutes, now--and then Stiles went for the mindless-occupation nuclear option. He typed tvtropes.com into the address bar and clicked on a random trope and then maximized all categories.
When the countdown flashed on zero, Stiles had a whole list of trope-related questions to ask Derek sometime when Derek had the option of just rolling his eyes or lying if he wanted to. He looked around just in time to see Derek stab a button on his iPod dock, shutting off the static; the sudden total silence was sort of scary, and Stiles immediately pried the earplugs out.
"So you're okay, now?"
Derek turned to face him and... laughed. He still didn't look happy--he didn't look a hell of a lot better than he had right after Stiles fished the wolfsbane out of his mouth--but he didn't look angry.
"Not really," Derek said. "I could still hear myself, even if you couldn't. Makes it hard to avoid thinking about things if you can hear yourself saying them and you know they have to be true."
Stiles's mouth opened and closed. "Are you sure it actually wore off?"
"I think this is just leftover momentum," Derek said, and as if to demonstrate he pushed off from the desk and walked all the way across Stiles's room until he came to a stop leaning over Stiles in the desk chair, one hand on the back next to Stiles's head.
"Uh," Stiles said, because Derek looked sort of tired and not-unhappy and Stiles didn't know where he was going with this and wasn't going to speculate, "Scott and Jackson said they're sorry, by the way."
"Not Lydia, huh," Derek said.
Stiles shook his head.
"I came to you," Derek said, and then, like one followed logically from the other, "I'm going to kiss you now, okay?"
"Oh," Stiles said, as all the blood abandoned his brain, "Uh, y--"
Derek didn't let him say another word. The kiss was awkward at first, trying to fit their mouths together and not touching anywhere else, Derek looming awkwardly over him. Stiles reached up and grabbed the front of Derek's t-shirt, tugging him down. There was every chance that the last of the spell would wear off and Derek would bolt out the window, but in the meantime Stiles was going to make the most of this.
Derek moved lower--the chair creaked ominously as Stiles felt the warmth and pressure of Derek's legs just outside his--and Stiles opened his mouth to Derek's. He could feel the kiss all through his body now, squirming as Derek's tongue slid over his, shivering at the faint sweet taste that lingered in Derek's mouth.
Stiles pulled away all at once. "You're sure this isn't the spell? Or the wolfsbane, or something making you just--pounce on whoever?"
Derek huffed and shifted back a little so he could look Stiles in the eye. "That shit Lydia gave me didn't tell me who to go talk to. I needed help and I chose you. And you could have done anything--could have found out anything you wanted to know and a lot of things you didn't--but all you did was try to help me, which is pretty typical of you. You're always trying to help, and I can't do any of this alone, I know that--and you're always watching me, and you--"
Derek shook his head. "I just spent forty-five minutes straight talking about you, don't make me do it again. I'm sure, okay?"
Stiles blinked. "About me? That whole time?"
"Toward the end there it was mostly brainstorming," Derek admitted, leaning down again. "It turned out there were a lot of true things I could say that started with I want to."
"Ohh," Stiles said, brain going blank with overload. "But none of them were break Stiles's desk chair, ri--"
Derek tugged him up into the kiss this time, onto his feet. Stiles got his arms around Derek and figured that was enough to go on for a while.