Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first few days are hard.

Stiles wakes up in the middle of the night with a start, and he is briefly convinced that there’s someone else in the room with them, thinks he’ll be dragged out of his bed and beaten, shooting upright in the dark and panicking because he can’t see anything, thrashing in the sheets, until Derek wakes up.

“Baby,” he says, groggy, wrapping his big arms around Stiles and forcefully tugging him close to his body to still him. Stiles’ heart pounds, his body shaking, as he remembers that they’re in Derek’s house, on Derek’s property, where there is so much security and so many werewolves there’s literally not a chance that someone would be able to just waltz into the house, let alone the bedroom, without anyone noticing. No one can get in here. No one will try and take him away, try to hurt him, anything. He repeats this to himself like a mantra, but it won’t sink in. “What is it?”

Stiles curls into Derek, turning to hide his face. Sometimes, in front of Derek, he’s ashamed to be afraid of anything, because Derek is afraid of nothing, never gets scared, never gets rattled. They tortured him for hours and he wasn’t afraid. The door could come breaking down at any moment because the Sheriff doesn’t care about the law anymore and he’ll kill Derek just for being in a bed with his son, and Derek is not afraid. But here Stiles is, shaking, over nightmares. “…I thought I heard something.”

“It’s Isaac,” Derek promises him, lips pressed to the juncture where Stiles’ neck meets his shoulder.

Right. Isaac. Top ten weirdest person Stiles has ever met in his entire life. That makes him feel a whole lot better about the entire thing.

“He’s just a night owl.”

He’s utterly bizarre, is what he is. Stiles has seen more of him these past two days than he’s ever seen of any of Derek’s other betas. It’s like one second he wasn’t there, and the next, he was, all the time, constantly. He’s half mute. He speaks only to Derek, and even then, he talks quietly, almost murmurs, making sure always to turn his back to Stiles when he speaks to keep Stiles from hearing him as much as possible. He steals as many glances at Stiles as he thinks he can get away with, but the second Stiles notices and tries to meet his gaze directly, Isaac looks away like he’s ashamed of himself or something, shooting his eyes off into a corner somewhere as if he’s afraid of Stiles.

Which is hilarious. Stiles is having a hard time even getting out of bed in the morning. It’s a chore to just brush his teeth and make himself eat. He’s probably the least scary person on the face of the planet right now, sitting at the breakfast table with Derek and staring out the front window at the driveway, the grass, the woods, or hiding on Derek’s office couch while Derek does work and takes phone calls, or burrowing under the covers of Derek’s bed and disappearing altogether. He knows that Allison and Kate Argent have been banished from working on any further werewolf cases while some halfassed investigation into the Argent operations in Beacon Hills is conducted, but he also knows that that wouldn’t stop either of them from waltzing onto the property to try and kill Derek. Or take Stiles away. After all, it’s Stiles’ fault that their house of cards is coming crumbling down in the first place.

Stiles is afraid of their vindictive personalities. The kinds of things they might wish they could do to him.

“Nothing will happen to you ever again,” Derek promises him, kissing Stiles on the mouth lazily, half asleep, and Stiles clings to him as close as he can possibly get. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like there could be people in closets, like when Stiles tries to step outside someone will be in the bushes waiting for him, to grab him, hit him, slice his arm open. Stiles catches himself tracing the faint scarring on his arm, because as magic as Derek may be, he can’t fully erase the memory of it happening. He obsessively touches it. Stares at it in the mirror.

It really looks like a werewolf did this to him. For the rest of his life, will people see him and Derek together and assume that Derek hurt him? Will people make judgments on them forever? Can they ever really be together like other people are together? Or has Stiles sold his soul away to a lifetime of running away?

Stiles hides from his phone, lets it die, doesn’t even consider charging it. He would bet a million dollars that his father has tried to text him or call him, would bet the entire farm on there being scathing voice mail messages waiting for him, and Stiles is afraid of it all, so he just pretends like his phone does not exist.

He sleeps in Derek’s bed, eats at Derek’s dining room table and his kitchen island, catches Isaac staring at him, stares out the window, wiles his time away while Derek works. He insists on tagging along with Boyd and Isaac when they go to get his stuff out of his apartment with him, even though Derek suggests it is perhaps not a good idea for him to do that, and it turns out, Derek had been right.

They really fucking destroyed it. Ripped it apart. There’s police tape everywhere, blood all over his bedroom, some of it Derek’s, some of it Stiles’, none of it from any of the people who really deserved to be doing the bleeding. His bed is torn up, all his things combed through and strewn all over the floor, broken glass, broken windows, one of the French doors leading into his living room hanging off its hinges. The couch is salvageable, but Stiles just stands there staring at it as the other two work on packing up boxes for him, arms crossed, and figures he doesn’t really need this couch anymore.

Now, he lives with Derek. Derek has couches. He can buy all the couches in the world.

Still, this was his couch. He saved for it, picked it out, waited for it to arrive, rolled around all over it with Scott when it came like he was Scrooge McDuck because it was the first expensive grown up thing he ever bought all by himself. There’s no space for it in Derek’s house or Derek’s life in general, he reasons, and he leaves it behind. They discover that the Argents vindictively went into his art room and destroyed a lot of his finished pieces, maybe because of the subjects of them, maybe just because they hated that Stiles was sleeping with Derek, maybe they wanted to say that Derek actually had done it to pin more on him, make the crime look worse.

Standing there looking at all his work ripped up, torn to shreds, Boyd and Isaac picking through it to see what can be saved, he realizes the only person that has really gotten hurt this entire time is Stiles. Stiles has a feeble little human brain that is prone to things like, you know, PTSD, trauma, intrusive thoughts, haunting memories. Meanwhile, Derek’s brain seems to work just like a regular old wound would. His skin heals up just the same. He is ready to forget about the entire thing. Just what he always saw coming. He seems perplexed and unsure of what to do about Stiles’ abrupt and unmanageable melancholy. He hovers. He watches Stiles extra closely. He talks in his most dulcet, calm tone. He’s totally fucking clueless.

It's probably the first time that Derek has ever been utterly clueless about anything in his life. Apparently, he’s never really dealt with the full spectrum of human emotion. Stiles feels all abused and torn open and like his head isn’t on right, so he doesn’t want sex or sexual attention or even comments that he looks good, so Derek is at a loss. Maybe he’s one of the smartest people that Stiles has ever met, but he’s stupid about this particular thing.

In his defense. It’s not like Stiles has been very forthcoming about what’s going on inside of his head or what he’s thinking. It’s hard for even Stiles to know what he’s thinking in his own head. And, Derek is so busy. He works all the time, and Stiles never really knew just how much Derek worked, because Stiles used to have his own place to live. Now, he lives with Derek, and he’s around Derek all the time, and he sees how hard Derek works. Every day. He’s always on calls. He’s always at his desk. He’s always obsessing over some file or another, papers and post-its for days. Stiles used to have his own life where he did his own things, and now he feels like he doesn’t, anymore. Like it’s all gone up in smoke and now all he has is Derek. He feels like one of Derek’s toys.

This is not a healthy way to be thinking, but he can’t help himself. He just can’t.

At dinner after nearly ten days of being here, ten days past some of the worst days of Stiles’ life, Stiles furtively watches Derek eating out of the corner of his eye, as he pushes a brussel sprout around on his plate. The other thing about Derek is that silence is not weird to him. He’ll just sit there and think absolutely nothing of the fact that Stiles has not said a word in ten straight minutes. He may even prefer it, may even want Stiles to be quieter and less annoying, and Stiles purses his lips and pointedly puts his fork down with a clink. It gets Derek’s attention, and he looks up expectantly.

Stiles says, “…can I talk to you about something?”

Derek immediately puts down his fork and knife. He wipes his mouth with his napkin, his laser intense eyes right on Stiles and nothing else. “Anything, you know that.”

Does he? Stiles reaches for his champagne glass and downs half of it in one go, because he’s nervous, because he hasn’t said much of anything in so long it’s hard to talk at all, and Derek just watches him, no comment, no expression on his face. Maybe he’s trying his hardest to not react at all.

“Can I ask you something kind of fucked up?” Stiles begins, again, staring at his barely touched food.

“Yes.”

“Will you promise not to get angry at me?”

“Stiles, baby,” Derek tips his head, the way he does, when he thinks Stiles is being funny or cute or silly, “I’m never angry at you. Say whatever you like to me.”

Stiles finishes his champagne, puts the glass down. Immediately, because everyone in this house has ears like bats, one of Derek’s unnamed staff members materializes through the swinging door at Stiles’ left to refill his glass for him, and as it opens, Stiles can see, for just a split second, Isaac sitting at the kitchen island eating his own dinner, and they make eye contact. It feels pointed, heated, and intense, because everything about Isaac is intense. They’ve never even spoken. All Isaac does is fucking stare.

Derek knows he stares. He waves it off. Isaac isn’t like other people. But he’s always quick to change the subject, as well, doing his magic trick of touching Stiles or kissing him to distract Stiles so he’ll lose his train of thought.

Stiles watches as his glass is refilled for him, fizzing and bubbling up to the very tippy-top. Derek has been supplying him with champagne pretty much nonstop since Stiles got here. It’s part of the reason he feels the need to ask the thing that’s been on his mind for days, this evil, haunting question that keeps nagging at him, because Stiles trusts nothing, and no one. Not even Derek. Not all the way. Not one hundred percent.

The glass is full. Stiles says, “thank you,” and Derek is sitting there, still, waiting. The door swings open, shut, and Stiles sits and spins the champagne around and around in its glass. “Everything is just kind of fucked up, right now.”

“It is,” Derek agrees. Hard to deny, isn’t it?

“My whole life…I don’t know,” he takes another big sip. His heart is pounding and he knows that Derek can hear it.

“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Derek says, and he really does have just the faintest hit of begging in his tone, because for all the things he can do to Stiles, for all the things he can control about Stiles, for all he’s stronger and faster and smarter than Stiles…he still cannot read Stiles’ mind. Stiles knows it fucking kills him.

It kills him to know that Stiles has his own entire inner life and inner workings and things that Stiles keeps to himself, because Derek is an alpha werewolf, and he needs to control everything, know everything, see everything, make people do what he wants them to. That Stiles can simply shut his mouth and refuse to engage with him at all drives Derek fucking insane, and Stiles knows, deep down, Derek wishes he could grab Stiles, look into his eyes, flash his own all red, and command Stiles to just tell him everything, all of it, even if he doesn’t want to.

It is only because he promised Stiles that he would never do that again that he doesn’t.

Stiles wants to cry, but he won’t. Just like the other thousand times he’s wanted to and refused to, he just steels himself and keeps his eyes turned pointedly downward. “It just feels like you got everything you wanted.”

“What?” Derek’s confusion is genuine.

“You wanted me all to yourself, and you got it,” he is ashamed as the words come out. But it doesn’t make them any less true. He just refuses to look at Derek as he says them. “…is this all because you orchestrated it this way? That they’d ruin my apartment? That I wouldn’t have anything of my own? That I’d have to move in with you?”

Derek’s jaw ticks. He promised he wouldn’t get angry, and he doesn’t, but it’s clear that this does not make him happy. Stiles can tell even from just out of the corner of his eye, can tell from the stiffness of his entire body as the words come out of Stiles’ mouth, but all he does is inhale a deep breath, and then slowly let it out. He’s calming himself down.

“No,” he says. Then, again, more firmly. “No. Sweetheart, no. Why would you think that?”

“I’m just –“ Stiles puts both hands over his face and hides, as best as he can. There is no real hiding from Derek Hale, but he does his best. “My head is so messed up. The whole thing. It’s all so fucked up. They ruined my work.”

“I know. I would never do that to you.”

“I guess I know that, but I can’t…Derek, you know, the thing about me,” he takes his hands down and puts them in his lap, for him to stare at, neck bowed, still refusing to look directly at Derek, because he doesn’t feel he deserves to. “…I can’t trust anyone. It’s like a block in my head. I know that you and me are like…and I know that I let you do all kinds of shit to me and you’d think that I trust you after all that, but it’s just not how my mind works. And this entire situation is fucking weird.”

So fast that if Derek weren’t a werewolf he probably wouldn’t even be able to catch it, Stiles glances at him, once, then immediately looks away. He looks dumbfounded. Stiles has astounded him, like it completely and totally mystifies him that Stiles could ever, for even a second, think something like that about him.

“I didn’t do any of this shit on purpose,” Derek keeps his tone even and direct. “I didn’t know what they’d do to your apartment. If you want, I’ll pay to fix it all, I’ll buy you a new one, I don’t care about that.”

“But you want me here with you.”

“Yes,” he says slowly, like Stiles is being particularly stupid today. “I would prefer it that way. What I would really prefer is that you get what you want.”

Stiles rubs at his face. He shakes his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Things are just so fucking weird and fucked up. This just isn’t my life,” he gestures around at the room, the expensive drapery and expensive dinnerware and the house and all the rooms. “I don’t feel like I fit in here. I feel like I’m just here, not that I really live here now, or like, I belong. And Isaac looks at me like I’m, you know, a total fucking interloper all the time.” Even knowing that Isaac is just on the other side of the door and can hear him loud and clear as if Stiles were looking right at him and saying it into his face, he says this.

Maybe to bury a smile, Derek runs his finger over his mouth. “If you don’t like the house, we don’t have to be here.”

“But you’re not listening to me,” Stiles throws his hands up in exasperation. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying. It’s not about the house. It’s about everything. My things, my life, I don’t have any of it anymore, and now everything is yours, and it makes me feel like I’m just like…” he searches for something on the table to demonstrate his point, and he sees it in the centerpiece. He grabs at one of Derek’s fancy crystal candlesticks and picks it up, waving it around in the air. “I feel like I’m just another one of your fancy things, like a thing you own. You have shit to do every day, and I don’t. You have an important job to do, and I have nothing to do. You have your pack and your family and I have nobody. I feel like I’m, like, an orphan you picked up from the side of the road or something.”

Derek sighs, long and hard, as Stiles thumps the candlestick back down on the tabletop. It probably costs more than Stiles’ couch back at his apartment did. “That’s not what I think of you like.”

“I mean, in your perfect fantasy world, I wear a collar and sleep in a cage. Admit it.”

“Stiles,” Derek says his name all exasperated and low, like he’s been offended, and Stiles shuts his mouth. He doesn’t mean to offend him. “That isn’t true. In my perfect fantasy world, I’m just with you. Have I done something to confuse you? Did I do something to hurt you?”

“No,” Stiles insists. “Everyone else did.”

Derek leans back in his chair. He assesses Stiles, head to toe, his serious face, like he’s in court, he’s looking at a case, and he’s trying to solve it, figure out how to talk his way out of it, perhaps. “I’m sorry that I don’t know how to be around human emotion.”

“It’s okay,” Stiles decides, because, you know, it is. Of course, Derek doesn’t get it. He’s not human. He doesn’t feel like this, ever. Depression is non-existent in his kind. PTSD, trauma, all of it, that’s nothing to him. It’s a human specific affliction. When bad things happen to Derek, he, like, files it away in a cabinet in his brain and only takes it out to look at it when he wants to get angry, or when he needs motivation to work harder. That’s it.

Still, Derek apologizes further, even though he doesn’t have to. “I’m sorry that they did all that to you. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I’m sorry that you’re so unhappy. I’m sorry that people have hurt you and that means you’re distrustful no matter what I do, but I’m not some master manipulator who destroyed your life so I could just have you to myself. First of all, I wouldn’t need to do any of that shit. I had you already. Second of all, I know you think all men are cruel even when they pretend they aren’t, but cruelty isn’t a tenant of my personality.”

Deep down, Stiles knows that’s true. He knows Derek. He has seen time and time again the truth about who Derek is, what he thinks about Stiles, how he loves Stiles, would never harm him, not really. Maybe Derek gets off on kinky sex shit, but it’s not the same as really hurting someone, and Stiles knows that, logically. In his mind, because he’s so twisted up and gutted lately, things get turned around. Things don’t seem how they really are. It’s a funhouse mirror.

Because he’s fucked up in his head, Stiles decides to soften the tension, and he smirks a big fake smirk, down at his plate. “But you like hurting me.”

Derek cocks his head to the side. “I do exactly what you want me to do to you. Nothing more, nothing less.”

This is true. Stiles is fucked up. He craves it. He’s starting to suspect he literally can’t get off without it, which makes him feel really demented and twisted.

Like he’s read the thoughts right out of Stiles’ head like a book, Derek says, “it’s not wrong to like it. It’s only because you like it that I do any of it.”

“Well,” Stiles sips his champagne. He shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t know what else to say. The conversation is moot. It’s all moot. “I am really unhappy, like you said. I’m fucked up in the head.”

Derek’s big solution to this problem is to insist that he take Stiles to Aspen, just like they had been talking about before all this stupid shit happened to them. Derek says that it’s too “hot” here, first of all, which Stiles knows to mean that the Argents and the cops are pissed off about how things wound up and there have likely been a great many news stories printed about this entire fiasco and Stiles is scared to leave the house because of it. So, yeah, “hot” is putting it lightly.

And he also says that getting out of Beacon Hills where all this bad shit happened to Stiles will make him feel better, to be far away, to be somewhere else, to be in a place he’s never been where none of the bad shit happened to him, it’ll all help him. Stiles can’t really argue with that logic, so he calls Scott from Derek’s phone and says everything is okay, but Stiles is running away. He’s just running away from everything. He’s doing the cowardly thing and just cutting and running, and Scott says it isn’t cowardly.

“I’ll never, ever look at your father the same again,” Scott proclaims this very seriously on the other end of the phone, as Stiles sits in Derek’s passenger seat and watches the big mansion disappearing in his rearview mirror. “I’ll never talk to him again. My mother despises him right now.”

“I don’t think anyone needs to despise anyone else,” Stiles insists, but Scott is resolute.

“What he did is unforgivable. He needs some serious therapy. And a good punch to his smug fucking face.”

Derek’s lips quirk, but he does not laugh, or say anything. He likely agrees with the sentiment, and would also really like to be the one to dole out that particular punch.

“Where are you two even going? I would assume Derek has properties everywhere.”

“Um, Colorado.”

“Oh,” he sounds disappointed. Like he was imagining Stiles would say Tokyo, or London, or even Los Angeles, someplace glamorous and incredible, like they’re going on holiday.

They are not going on holiday. Derek is literally pulling the final card out of his deck in a desperate bid to make Stiles feel better, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Vacation isn’t really the word that comes to mind, honestly. More like last resort.

“Aspen,” he supplies further, and this Scott seems to at least recognize as a resort town and a renowned beautiful place.

“I can’t imagine Derek skiing.”

For the first time in days, maybe even weeks, Stiles laughs. Just snorts, can’t help himself. “That’s because he doesn’t. It’s, like, a resort town. You know. It’s secluded and rich.” Honestly, Stiles doesn’t really know what Aspen is like. He’s only ever seen it in movies and television shows, and it does kind of seem like all there is to do is play around in the snow, which is something Stiles has never once in his life done and can’t really imagine. It’s snowed in Beacon Hills before, but just sprinklings that didn’t amount to much, certainly never enough to play in.

“How long are you going to be gone?”

This is a fair question. It’s one that Stiles has no answer to, so he just shrugs, and says he doesn’t know.

Derek drives them to the airport. Isaac is tasked with carrying Stiles’ bags, his backpack from college and his duffel that’s filled with the only things he has left to his name in this life, and Stiles feels bad and weird about it, but not enough to say or do anything about it. They don’t have to go through normal security, because they’re flying private, but Stiles’ bags are still searched and he’s still eyeballed by a TSA agent. All the same, they get let through, and they sit in a tiny room full of windows that overlook the tarmac for less than fifteen minutes before they’re called, and they walk out onto the runway.

It feels sacrilegious to be walking on it, but they are. And then there’s the private jet, the one that Talia had been referring to, and Stiles is getting on it, like an out of body experience. It’s small, but it’s fancy, with leather interiors, an honest to god stewardess who is only tasked with serving the three of them, but she grins with perfect white teeth and seems to know Derek and Isaac fairly well. She greets them by name, and then her eyes settle on Stiles.

She knows who he is. She says, “nice to meet you,” politely, and immediately hands him a glass of champagne.

Stiles says, “you’re always trying to liquor me up,” to Derek, who sits down and gives Stiles a bit of a look.

“No one is trying to liquor you up,” he corrects mildly. “I thought you liked champagne.”

“I love champagne,” Stiles says. “It’s just been the never-ending fountain ever since I came to stay with you.”

He sits down in the seat right across the aisle from Derek. Looks around. Isaac is in the furthest possible seat away from both of them, his eyes blue and deep as he locks them with Stiles’ like he’s always doing, and Stiles drinks his champagne, maintaining the eye contact to the best of his ability. Isaac’s cheeks flood, and he pointedly looks away, like he’s embarrassed, and Stiles rolls his eyes. Fuck’s sake.

“Would you like a charcuterie board?” The stewardess is leaning down and talking to Stiles like he’s a little kid, baby voice and everything, and Stiles kind of rears his neck back all offended, taken aback. Is that what all the werewolves in Derek’s orbit are going to think about Stiles? That he’s a little kid?

“Yes,” Derek answers for him when Stiles says nothing. “Thank you.” As she moves through the plane, down into some back part of it where the food is kept, Derek looks at Stiles and says, “I saw that.”

“Saw what?” Stiles feigns ignorance.

“That she pissed you off.”

“Oh, she’s great,” he waves this off. He doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble.

But, Derek gives him another look. He knows. He can read Stiles like a fucking open book. It’s not like Stiles was particularly subtle with how much that irritated him, so he just sighs, and admits it.

“…it was sort of the same with how your mother talked to me. I don’t know. Like I’m a baby.”

“In their defense, they don’t talk to a lot of humans.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t know how to talk to you. That’s all.”

“Well,” Stiles sputters, shaking his head. “Not talking to me like I’m ten years old would be appreciated.”

“Stiles, in the coming weeks, you’re going to meet a lot of werewolves like my mother, like June,” Stiles guesses from context that June is the name of the stewardess, “who have never spent any great deal of time around humans. Let alone a human like you.”

“Like me?”

“A young, particularly pretty human that sleeps with an alpha. Hierarchy is very important. Talking to you a certain way is just how they’re wired. It would behoove you to just try and understand their point of view.”

The plane starts to move, slowly, down the runway, getting in the taxi line to prepare for lift off, but Stiles barely notices, too preoccupied with this conversation. “What is their point of view? You’ve been very tight lipped about all this shit since the start.”

Derek thinks for a moment, glaring out the window and maybe asking himself why he got stuck with a human who can’t just take the champagne, take the private jet ride, ask no questions, demand no answers – why can’t Stiles just smile and say thank you? Honestly, Stiles wonders the same thing sometimes.

After a beat, he turns to look Stiles right in his face. “My mother is an alpha of alphas. Back home, she’s called mother-alpha, which I know is a term beyond your lexicon, but it means something very old world. It makes her one of the most powerful people in the world, if you’re a werewolf. It certainly makes her the most powerful person in this particular territory. But she’s the only person in my world who’s above me,” he points to his chest. “I’m the son of the mother-alpha, so that’s kind of like being…”

“…a prince?”

“We don’t really use terms like that,” he says, kind of evasively. Then, after a beat, “…but to help you understand, king would be closer.”

“King?” Stiles half shouts, and it’s loud in the tight space. “You’re saying you’re a king?”

“I’m saying that’s the closest human equivalent there is,” he corrects hastily, shaking his head. “To put it in perspective for you. If I’m the son of the most powerful person in our world, it makes me the second most powerful person in our world. In turn, that makes you…” he trails off, like he’s trying to find the correct word, or the word that Stiles would understand.

“Like, your pet. Court jester.”

“No,” Derek says this very seriously, like he’s trying to drill this point home to Stiles for the final, final time. “You are no pet, Stiles. If I’m like a king, that would make you like the prince.”

Stiles makes a face. “That would mean I’m your son, Derek.”

“I don’t know how all that stupid shit works,” Derek barks at him, losing his patience, but Stiles thinks it’s kind of funny to see him not understand something so rudimentary just because it’s from human world, so he works to suppress a smile. “I’m trying to say that to all these werewolves around me, you are a powerful person. Prince is close enough.”

Stiles thinks about this. He considers it, churning it over and over in his head. He finds it funny, so he laughs a little, in disbelief, taking another sip of his drink. “I don’t think I’m much of anything.”

“You’re sleeping with me. You have my bite on your neck. It means something. Just try and be aware of your own power over these people from here on out.”

“I thought your sister said this is just a love bite?” He pats the bite on his neck, and Derek laughs, true mirth, like Stiles has just said the funniest thing of all time. Stiles doesn’t get the fucking joke, so he just sits and blinks at him.

“Stiles. My mother and sister were using the humans’ own ignorance against them. Those men can’t speak or read Aanaric, so they had no idea what the book said, right in front of their faces. Your bite is a mating bite.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stiles bursts out, putting his champagne glass down pointedly, turning to face Derek all the way with his jaw half unhinged. “Derek. Do you have any fucking idea how illegal –“

“Yes,” he cuts Stiles off, lifting a single shoulder like it barely matters to him. “I also know that they wouldn’t know a mating bite from a hickey. So did my sister.”

“You told me it was a claiming bite.”

“It is,” Derek insists. “Words have many meanings.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Stiles accuses him, pointing his finger at Derek across the aisle. “You just fucking do things all the time and don’t tell me what any of it means, and then get all shocked when I start to feel like I’m being manipulated.”

“I don’t mean to do anything manipulatively,” he says, earnest as he ever is, and Stiles does really believe him. He doesn’t mean to be anything. He just does what he wants all the fucking time. Because apparently, he’s a king, and he behaves like one. “I only do things in your best interest.”

That’s it, then. Stiles leans back in his seat, right as the airplane is beginning to charge down the runway, take off into the sky, the whole thing rattling and shaking until they’re up in the air and the wheels come up, and Stiles is flying away from his home, the place he’s lived his entire life, and he has no fucking clue when he’ll be back, if he ever will be. He has a backpack and a duffel bag with all he has left in the world. He had abandoned his phone at home because Derek promised to get him a new one with a new number that no one else knows.

Is he stupid? Is he fucking insane? What is he doing? Does he know Derek at all? Does he have any clue whatsoever what he’s getting himself into?

Stiles doesn’t want to be a prince. He doesn’t really want money. He doesn’t want big houses or private jets or endless champagne. All he really wanted out of this entire thing was Derek.

Turns out, Derek has strings attached to him. More than Stiles even realized.

Once they’re in the air and coasting, June comes back, leaning down and smiling at him in that big friendly way from before. She is holding a meticulously crafted charcuterie board, just big enough to sit on the tiny table in front of where Stiles is sitting, and she sets it down gently for him. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I just gave you a little of everything.”

She sure did. It’s like a Pinterest charcuterie board, with a little flower made out of some kind of sliced meat, perfectly cut strawberries, nuts, three different kinds of cheese. Stiles is on autopilot when he says, “thank you.” He isn’t sure what to say to her, knowing what he knows now. He doesn’t want to be rude, but he’s uncomfortable with how she looks at him.

“Do you like it?” She presses him, gesturing to it. His answer seems to be of the utmost importance to her, like her entire life revolves around him liking her work, so he sits up straighter and looks at her, right in the eye, for the first time.

“It’s beautiful,” he informs her plainly. “I love it.”

She grins, pleased, and then straightens up. “More champagne?”

“Um, no, thanks,” he curls his near empty glass closer to himself. “I’ve had plenty. Thanks.”

“If you need anything,” she says, gesturing to herself. Then, she turns and goes, back to her own private area in the back, and Stiles watches her go.

He looks at the food. Looks at Derek, who makes this face at him, like see what I mean?

Stiles nearly does see what Derek means. That this is how people are going to treat him from here on out – like he’s some powerful person who could make their lives harder if they made a single move he didn’t like, or spoke to him in an unkind tone, or didn’t bend over backwards to give him exactly what he wants. This is not how the werewolves in Beacon Hills have treated him his entire life for being pretty; most werewolves were either just nice to him or treated him like a little toy to mess around with.

The werewolves that work for Derek, that are underneath the direct hand of Talia Hale and the Hales in general? They’re all going to treat him differently. Stiles is uncomfortable with it, because, you know, he’s just a little prole person who used to sleep around for money and wound up with Derek by sheer happenstance and isn’t worthy of being treated any better than anyone else. And he doesn’t understand it.

This is not his world. And here he is, flying directly into it. Literally.

The flight to Aspen is a relatively short one, and they land before the afternoon is even fully spent. It’s sunny, but covered in bright white shiny snow, so Stiles has to put his sunglasses on when they step off, lest he get snowblinded. It’s freezing, but beautiful, particularly downtown, where it looks like Barbie’s Dream Mountain Town, like a picture out of a Christmas book, and Stiles is enamored with it pretty much instantly. The cars are all shiny and expensive. The sidewalks are littered with people doing Christmas shopping, the restaurants and bars busy, the mountains so close it’s like he could reach out and touch them.

Derek is reading him, again, like he loves to do, and as they drive through the main street, he makes an observation out loud : “you like it.”

“It’s like one of the made-up towns in a Lifetime Christmas movie,” Stiles says, and Derek smiles with all his teeth. He’s pleased, because Stiles is pleased.

They drive out of downtown maybe a mile or so, into a wooded residential, and then they turn on a long road that goes up a bit into a mountain, where they have to drive slowly so they don’t go skidding off the road on a patch of ice or something. The snow is deep. The trees are huge.

They come to a gate that’s manned by a werewolf that must be under Derek’s charge, hired specifically to work the security probably, and they exchange pleasantries.

The man leans down, into the window, so he can look directly at Stiles. He smiles, and his teeth are sharp. Stiles is taken aback. He says nothing to Stiles, just grins at him, and then the gate is opening up for them, and up the driveway Derek goes.

When the house comes into view, Stiles immediately decides that Derek was right. This was a great fucking idea.

It is not some ridiculous over-the-top mansion in the woods like Derek’s house back in Beacon Hills. It’s probably half the size of that house, which is still fairly big when compared to a normal person’s home, but it’s twice as beautiful, in Stiles’ opinion. It’s the exact idyllic Aspen house you would see in a magazine, covered in snow, built with wood and stone, but Stiles’ eyes can’t take it all in before Derek is driving them into the garage. The light turns on automatically, but there’s not much to see in here : just the usual garage type shit, another car with a tarp over it, a garden hose coiled up, some shovels leaned up against the wall.

Stiles unbuckles his seatbelt fast, because he’s dying to get into the house and see what it looks like on the inside. He leaves Isaac behind in the dust with his bags, and goes with Derek to the door inside, up a short set of steps, and then they’re in the house. It’s already lit up, because there’s staff already here, waiting for them, and it smells like a fire, because there is one, burning and crackling in the living room fireplace. There are windows everywhere, overlooking mountains and the woods and snow, for miles and miles, and from another side of the house, you can see the town down below, like someone’s little figurine Christmas town. It’s expensive, but cozy, nothing ostentatious about it, a big comfortable couch, a kitchen with people already making food, and through the back windows, Stiles sees a hot tub.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Stiles immediately goes for the window and pulls open the drapes. They turn out to be doors that open up onto a balcony, and Stiles immediately unlocks them, opens them, and steps outside.

The air is freezing, but it’s fresh, clean. It smells like the woods and ice, and he hugs his arms against himself, standing out there and staring down the mountain, at the town, the famous slopes visible from this angle, and he feels Derek’s warm body come up behind him. Derek snakes his arms around Stiles’ waist and pulls him close, leaning in to press kisses to Stiles’ neck, trailing them up to Stiles’ ear, where he asks, “do you like it here?”

Stiles nods. “It’s not Beacon Hills.”

“It certainly isn’t.”

“It looks like a picture out of a book.”

“Do you like it more than my terrible mansion that you hate?”

Stiles snorts a laugh in spite of himself, sniffling against the cold. “I wouldn’t say I hate it…”

“You would. I can tell you don’t like it. It’s okay. I can build you another house on the land, if you want.”

Stiles turns around, so he can look at Derek right in his stupid face. He’s only in a t-shirt, but he doesn’t look cold at all, his nose and cheeks not red at all, his arms not covered in goosebumps like Stiles can feel his own are underneath his flannel. “You would just build me another house?”

Derek shrugs, like it’s nothing. “We own all of that land, and most of it is undeveloped. I’d be happy to build you a house there. If you wanted me to.”

“So…we are going back to Beacon Hills eventually?”

Derek smiles, like Stiles is being amusing, and he punctuates it by reaching out and cupping Stiles’ cheek in his big warm hand. It feels good. Stiles leans into it. “Yes, of course, we are. That’s where my work is. And my work is the second most important thing in the world to me.”

Just from how he says it, Stiles knows that he’s implying that the first most important thing in the world to him is Stiles, what Stiles wants, where Stiles wants to be, and Stiles ducks his head and feels his face get hot even in all this cold air.

“I just thought you needed some time away for a while. This place is a vacation town, so it feels almost liminal, sometimes.”

Stiles knows what Derek means, and he’s barely even been here for ten minutes. It feels like a daydream, or like the most perfect place on planet earth, and places like that can’t really exist, so Aspen doesn’t exist. It’s in the space between being asleep and being awake, almost, and Stiles didn’t realize just how miserable Beacon Hills was making him, but now that he’s here, breathing in fresh air that smells nothing like home, he thinks, or at least, he hopes, he can start to decompress. Process. Understand what happened. Why it happened.

Why things have to be like this.

Abruptly, scaring the ever-living holy shit out of Stiles, Isaac is there, right there, on the balcony with them. He says, out of nowhere, “the house is secure.”

Stiles jumps out of his skin, startling almost right out of Derek’s arms, but Derek grips him to keep him in place. To Isaac, hovering there and doing his usual nonsense of looking at Stiles without really looking at Stiles so he won’t get caught looking at all, Derek says, “thank you. Maybe don’t sneak up on Stiles like that.”

Isaac’s eyes drop to the ground. He mumbles an apology and then zips back inside, vanishing into the house to go and do god knows what. Stiles watches him go, furrows his brow, and then looks up into Derek’s face. “Can we have a real conversation about what the fuck is wrong with him, now?”

Derek sighs, beginning to corral Stiles back into the house with him, and he closes the door behind them. He draws the curtain closed halfway, so there’s still some sunlight spilling inside, and then he goes for Stiles’ bags, putting them on top of the bed, and unzipping the duffel bag to begin pulling things out and neatly folding them. “Yes. We can. Isaac is a little different.”

“No duh,” Stiles intones, watching Derek fold up one of his ripped up pairs of jeans, setting it onto the bed on top of a small pile beginning to form. “Why? Your other betas aren’t like that. I mean, Boyd refuses to speak to me, and Lydia wants to see me drawn and quartered, but those are things I can handle. Whatever is going on with him,” he jerks his thumb over his shoulder, in the general direction of where Isaac had scurried off to, “I have no idea how to deal with.”

Derek puts Stiles’ pants away for him, in a dresser off to the left of the king-sized bed. “I know that Erica told you a little bit about why what happened with the werewolf at your house on Thanksgiving happened at all.”

“She did,” he admits, slowly, not seeing what that has to do with anything. “She said there are, like, other werewolf factions that aren’t fans of your family.”

“There are different packs. All over the world. Here in the United States, there are dozens of packs, but there’s only two particularly large ones,” he puts Stiles’ shirts away, one by one, “my family, and another.”

“And that werewolf was from the other pack.”

“Yes,” he nods his head, back turned, slowly closing the second drawer of the dresser. His shoulders are tense. It’s like he doesn’t want to talk about this, but that’s tough shit for him, because Stiles is sick and tired of all the half truths and all the half answers. It is difficult for him, though – he inhales a deep breath, like he has to get himself ready to say any of this at all. Then, he turns around, and he sits down on the edge of the bed, directing Stiles to come over and sit with him. Stiles does, parking himself right beside Derek, facing the doors overlooking the balcony, and he waits for Derek to say something more.

“There is bad blood,” Derek agrees carefully. “To say the least. My mother, her pack, all of us believe certain things. We are also overwhelmingly born werewolves. That makes us different. Do you understand?”

“It’s like pure blood,” Stiles says, and Derek tips his head, like Stiles is only half right.

“To a point. It’s not like we only breed within the bloodline. But we don’t believe in changing humans into werewolves unless it’s a dire circumstance, because it can go…poorly.”

This, Stiles knows. It’s one of the biggest talking points of the anti-werewolf human community, that the changing bite will kill humans, that if you get bitten by one, you’ll die slowly and painfully, that it’s the worst possible thing that can happen to you, on and on. Stiles always knew it was one of those things that was half true, and half not. He knows the bite is painful, but not every human who gets the bite dies, and anyone with half a brain knows that, because bitten werewolves exist, walk among us all over the place.

“My mother doesn’t believe that humans are a lesser class that need to be changed to be like us. This other pack - they believe that explicitly. They think that humans are…” he tries to pick his words carefully, here, inhaling and exhaling before he finally settles on the way he wants to say it, “…for their enjoyment. Either they’re toys, or they become wolves like them. Do you remember what we talked about the second time you came to see me? And you asked me if I thought that werewolves are better than humans?”

“Yes,” Stiles says, nodding. That was the night that Derek said all that crazy stuff during the scene like how Stiles is so much more pathetic than him and on and on – the memory kind of makes Stiles roll his eyes, now.

“And I said I know that wolves like that exist? Well, they do. You probably haven’t met very many in Beacon Hills, but they are real, and there are a lot of them. They hate my family, my pack, my mother, and I can guarantee you, now that word has spread, they are not very impressed to hear that the second in the Hale pack has taken a human for a partner. They probably find it funny, to tell you the truth. And they would probably like nothing more than to find you, capture you, and use you against me. Maybe even…” another deep inhale, like it’s hard for him to even think about this, let alone say it out loud, “…turn you. Become your alpha. Poison your head against me.”

“Oh,” Stiles murmurs.

“That’s why I wanted you to come to Aspen with me, when I heard about one of them finding you, seeing you. Out here, the werewolf population is nearly double what it is in California, and those are all wolves that are loyal to my family. To me. Being loyal to me, means being loyal to you. They’d do anything to protect you from those other werewolves, Stiles. The only place safer than Colorado is Wyoming, now, for you. If they ever got their hands on you. It would be bad. My paranoias are not unfounded.”

“Okay…” Stiles trails off. Truth be told, he’s having a hard time imagining it. He’s been to the east coast before, when he was a kid on a trip with his parents, and again when he went to DC on a school trip in high school, and honestly, all he remembers is thinking that there were less werewolves out there than on the west coast.

It never occurred to him that that may be because many of those eastern werewolves keep to themselves, sequestered, away from human populations, because they don’t like humans. This is not the kind of shit they taught him in school, and there seems to be no end of things that Stiles, and most humans, just don’t understand about what’s going on in werewolf world. He didn’t know it was like this.

“What does this have to do with Isaac?”

Derek smiles, a bit ruefully. “Isaac is a bitten werewolf.”

“Oh.” Oh. “So he’s…”

“He was bitten when he was seventeen, by the alpha of that other pack I was telling you about. He doesn’t really remember being human. He doesn’t remember a lot of things. His time spent with those werewolves was…dark. He was brainwashed for a long time to think he never was human, that humans are playthings, that he’s better than them. But they were very cruel to him. Cruelty is sort of how that entire pack operates. Pain, suffering, those are seen as virtues to them.”

Stiles listens, silent, eyes big in his head.

“They are evil, evil people. What they did to him are things I can’t really repeat. But all this is to say that when he ran away from them and came to us, he was a very, very damaged person. He had a very backwards way of looking at the world, even if he knew that most of the things they taught him were wrong. He just wasn’t taught how to control himself. He was, more or less, feral.”

“Feral?” Stiles repeats quietly, in disbelief.

“For lack of a better word. They just churn out these uncontrollable beasts who do unspeakable things to humans every chance they get. Isaac has done some things he’s not proud of.”

“Like what?”

Derek looks him right in the eye. “These are not my stories to repeat.” He says it so seriously, Stiles can only take him at his word, and his imagination is vivid, so he can color in the lines for himself. Stiles imagines that perhaps Isaac has tortured people, killed people, maybe even did worse things than that to people. To humans. “But you can imagine he hasn’t spent a great deal of time around humans in a civilized way. He was taught to hate them. At best, he was taught to mess around with them.”

The hairs on the back of Stiles’ neck stand up on end, but he nods his understanding. Even if he can’t picture it. His imagination might not be that great, after all.

“Being around you is very strange for him. First,” Derek reaches out and cups Stiles’ face with his hand, lips lifting up just barely in a smile, “you’re very beautiful. I know he’s attracted to you because he does a horrible job at hiding it. Second, you’re a human, and he’s been taught to not trust humans. And third, you’re his alpha’s mate, and he has to respect you. I’m sure you could understand it being an impossible situation for him to navigate, mentally.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to say. He bites his lip for a moment, and then he rubs the back of his neck and says, “…he’s attracted to me?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Derek waves this off, like it barely matters. “The most important thing about Isaac that you need to know is that I trust him, implicitly, like a son. He would never do anything to you. Never. He’d sooner kill himself than hurt you, Stiles, because of all his personality traits, loyalty is the greatest. Loyalty to me is, by proxy, loyalty to you. It doesn’t matter what happened in his past, what things he’s done, and it doesn’t matter that you look like that. He’d never lay a finger on you. I need you to know that.”

Stiles nods his head, turning his eyes away, down to the floor.

He tries to imagine Isaac as vicious, as cruel, as someone who would hurt another person just because he doesn’t know how to exist or how to be because no one ever taught him how to live with all these new powers he has. It’s hard to visualize. Isaac has struck Stiles as strange, yes, and squirrely, for sure – but never once as cruel, or as untrustworthy, or like he’s scheming. Sometimes his gaze lingers, yes. Sometimes he stares and his eyes are like daggers into Stiles’ skin, and Stiles has had the passing thought that perhaps Isaac would like to sleep with him, but those are the kinds of looks he’s been fielding from werewolves for all of his life. It’s not unusual.

All the looks Isaac has ever given Stiles, one that suggests he would ever do anything to actually harm Stiles has never crossed his face. He’s just…damaged, maybe.

“There’s nobody I trust more with your safety,” Derek tells him, putting his arm around Stiles’ shoulders and kissing him on the top of his head. “He would kill anybody for getting too close to you.”

Stiles imagines that’s because killing people is not an issue to Isaac. The thought disturbs him a bit, and really this entire thing, everything Derek has said, is a little disturbing to him. He marinates on it, trying to fathom what it might be like to take the bite, to come out the other side surrounded by people who train you to be cruel and to hurt people, to be scared, scared enough to run away to the other half of the country to people who might have killed you just for being from another pack.

He tries to think about what it might be like in some of those werewolf towns on the east coast. He can’t imagine it. It escapes his understanding.

“All those things my father believes about werewolves,” Stiles begins, “…it’s true about some of them?”

Derek’s lips purse. “Yes.” It gives him no pleasure to confess this. “This is why I spend so much of my life trying to help werewolves who have been put away unfairly. The more of us there are, if we could outnumber them, we could be rid of them. Control them. Change the narrative. Not all of us want to be like that. Most of us don’t.”

That, Stiles knows to be the truth.

Derek was right about coming to Aspen. The distance between him and Beacon Hills, where all of that horrible shit happened and where everyone looks at him because they know what happened and know who he is and who he sleeps with and they judge him for it, really helps him to begin putting things into perspective. He wakes up on the first morning there and he sits and looks out at the snowy mountains, sits there for fifteen straight minutes just staring at it, and getting relief, just knowing all of that shit that’s made him so miserable is miles and miles away.

Everything is so cozy, here. Everything is smaller, more comfortable, and they keep the fire burning in the fireplace literally all the time, and Stiles sits in front of it for hours at a time, sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, idly sketching doodles on Derek’s legal pads. After two days of being here, Derek surprises him with real sketchpads and paints and a handful of canvasses, and Stiles is ecstatic, because the change in scenery and the time away from everything has begun to inspire him, finally giving him back that familiar itching he gets in his hands to make things. He sits in Derek’s little office, and as Derek sits at his desk and does some remote work, Stiles stays in front of the windows, drawing, everything, anything. He’s not really trying to make any specific piece, and not really trying to finish anything, either.

He's just creating for the sake of it. It feels like forever since the last time he did this, and he could honestly cry at how much better it makes him feel. He draws whatever he sees, whatever comes into his head, even long after Derek gets up to take a break, leaving Stiles alone in the fading sunlight to keep working.

More than once, he’s been deeply absorbed, with his neck bowed, in his own universe, and heard floorboards creaking right outside the cracked open door. It stops him every time, and he freezes, but when he tries to look over his shoulder to see who’s there, it goes silent, still, and there’s no one there at all. Stiles knows it’s Isaac. It creeps him out, from time to time, but it’s not the first time he’s been watched by a werewolf, and it will also not be the last, so he just lets it go most of the time, and returns to his art therapy.

It’s anyone’s guess what Isaac actually thinks concretely about Stiles. That he’s untrustworthy? That he’s suspicious? That he’s attractive? That he’s strange? Does Isaac find Stiles interesting, or does he watch Stiles because he doesn’t trust him, like he’s been taught to never trust any human no matter what?

Stiles wakes up extra early one morning, sitting up at barely six in the morning, Derek still fast asleep, and he gets up and starts his day for no reason at all. When he’s coming out of the bathroom all showered with his teeth brushed, towel around his waist, Derek is only just sitting up, looking perplexed to see that Stiles is already up and going. Lately, Stiles has been staying in bed for as long as he can get away with. It’s the first time he’s been awake before Derek since…well, pretty much since they started dating. Stiles begins talking Derek’s ear off, already half a cup of coffee deep as he drops his towel and gets dressed, how many squirrels there are around here, if they’ll be able to see a mountain lion at some point, if bobcats live here, what kind of meat is going to be at breakfast this morning, if maybe they can go downtown to the used bookstore that Stiles noticed when they were coming in, on and on and on.

Honestly, he’s being incredibly annoying. He can hear himself being annoying, but he can’t help it, sometimes, it’s just how he is.

But, Derek just gets up out of bed, cracks his knuckles like he always does, and interrupts Stiles’ incessant chatter by walking right up to him and kissing him on the mouth. He ruffles Stiles’ hair affectionately, and he says, “it’s nice to see you acting like yourself.”

Stiles is surprised. People don’t usually like him first thing in the morning. His father, for example, used to go nuts on him when he’d start running his mouth off first thing in the morning when he was a kid, so now Stiles has learned that his personality can be grating. Derek is also famously grouchy and can be rather short tempered, from time to time, but he’s never really lost his temper on Stiles, before. And he’s certainly never lost his temper on Stiles over Stiles doing something as mundane as just trying to talk to him.

The truth is, no one has ever really been as nice to Stiles as Derek is to him. Not ever. Whether Stiles has weird trust issues or weird trauma or whatever else is wrong with his fucking head, Derek always treats him better than anyone has ever treated him. He’s patient. He puts his hands all over Stiles, softly, kisses him all over his face and his neck, always eats every meal with him, takes him through the drive-thru for coffees in the morning, comes in and looks at Stiles’ stupid artwork and says it’s amazing, no one is more talented than him, tells Stiles he’s the most attractive person alive every single day, and even when Derek has to work, when he’s on the phone, reading something, sometimes, he’ll pull Stiles into his lap and just hold him there, feeling his body with his free hand, kissing him, just being near him, giving him as much attention as he can in the situation.

After nearly two weeks in the mountains, Stiles is beginning the process of trying to move on. He is starting to let go of the idea of his father being in his life anymore, and starting to process what that means for him. He is starting to understand that just because he might not have a dad anymore and as much as that might hurt, that doesn’t mean he has no one in the entire world, or that no one cares about him – Scott does, and Melissa, and Derek. He knows that Derek didn’t want things to be like this.

But he also begins to realize that this is what his life is, now. His life is being folded into Derek’s, swept into it entirely, and there’s so much about Derek’s life that Stiles doesn’t understand yet, there’s so much he’s never known about werewolf culture and how they talk to one another, their ancient language, their hierarchies, their practices and customs and their history. Less than three weeks ago, it was fucking terrifying, his apartment ruined, all his things gone, and the thought of starting over totally paralyzed him. He had built his entire life with his own bare hands, and the thought of having to do it all over again was scary, because unsurety, and change, aren’t things he generally does very well with.

Now, thinking about it all, it doesn’t feel so scary anymore.

Stiles just wants to be with Derek. He just wants to foster the relationships he actually has that don’t make him feel like shit. He just wants to try and start over. Like Derek said, this house in Aspen is a liminal space – it’s the place between before and after. It’s the place between what was and what is going to be.

And Stiles is in love with him. Stiles sits with his chin in his palm and watches the snowfall out the window, mindlessly sketching one of Derek’s eyes, all the chips and lines and flecks in them, catches himself doing it, looks at what he had done, and laughs at himself, holding it up. He’s never been this obsessed with anyone. It feels good to be obsessed with him again, instead of worried that he’s going to be killed or tortured at any given second, and he puts his sketchbook down and immediately goes hunting for him.

When he comes through the living room, out into the hallway, Isaac is there. He’s hovering. In the shadows, Stiles can’t quite make out his face, but he can always see Isaac’s blue eyes, like ice, and when Stiles looks directly into them, Isaac drops his hastily. He ducks his head and moves out of the way so that Stiles can walk past him, but he says not a word.

Stiles thinks he should say something. Maybe he should try being nice to him, or assuring him that there’s no reason to be so afraid of him, or so weird around him, but words totally escape him. He has no fucking clue what to say to someone like Isaac, let alone what to say to make Isaac feel more comfortable around him, so Stiles just says nothing, lowers his own neck and walks by him.

Stiles goes up the stairs, down the hallway, and he finds that Derek’s office door is cracked open, so he peers inside. He sticks his head in first, sees Derek heard Stiles coming and is looking right at him, and then Stiles comes all the way in, smiling.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Derek parrots back to him. “You know, I can smell you from all the way up here.”

Stiles walks right up to his desk, right next to him, and leans up against it, crossing his arms over his chest. Derek looks up at him, and Stiles looks back, and they meet eyes. “You can always smell me.”

Derek ducks his head, laughs, like something is funny, and then he looks back up to Stiles’ face. “I meant, I can smell that you’re turned on.”

The thought occurs to him, totally unbidden, that if Derek could smell that Stiles is sort of horny, then, certainly, Isaac could smell that, too, and Stiles doesn’t know what he thinks or feels about that. Especially considering he knows, because Derek told him, that Isaac is sexually attracted to Stiles, perhaps in the most twisted possible way because of what he’s been through. Something about it just makes his skin prickle, like he’s doing something wrong by existing and wanting to have sex with his boyfriend in the same general vicinity of Isaac.

But, he shakes it off. He really is horny, after all, and he came up here for a specific reason, and he tries to just forget about Isaac altogether, like he doesn’t exist, like nobody else does, other than Derek and Stiles.

Stiles looks at his feet. His cheeks go hot and pink and then deep red, because he’s embarrassed, and also, it’s been a couple of weeks since Derek and Stiles have been intimate with one another, because of all the bullshit and Stiles’ messed up head, so it comes awkwardly to him, now. But, he knows that Derek will always give him whatever he asks for so long as he asks for it, and Stiles really wants it, so he steels himself and he just comes right out with it. His voice is low, more shy than he ever normally is, but he says it. “…will you tie me up and play with me?”

Derek is surprised, for just a moment. Stiles isn’t usually so forward or specific with what he actually wants. Most of their scenes have been Derek doing what he wants and Stiles going along with it, and Stiles has almost never actually asked for specifically what kind of play he wants to do; Stiles asking for something like this so plainly has taken him off guard.

It does not displease him, though, not at all. He takes Stiles by his hips and pulls him down bodily into his lap, kissing him hard, their teeth knocking together, and Stiles hadn’t realized just how badly he had been missing this kind of intimacy. He hasn’t had time to think about it, hasn’t had time to even have the passing thought of sex, but now that they do have time, now that his libido has come back, he’s starving for it, crawling all over Derek desperately, grinding his hips down into his, opening his mouth to let Derek tongue-fuck it, which he does, like he always does.

They pull apart, briefly, panting. Derek is touching him, all over him, and he presses his lips gently to Stiles’, murmuring, “I fucking love you so much.”

For a while, they just make out, all insane and frantic, the only sounds in the room their clothing rustling, their lips locking, hands and skin and whatever else is there to touch. Stiles leans back and bares his neck, mostly because he wants kisses there, but also because he knows what he’s doing, and he knows what baring his neck to an alpha werewolf means – it is no surprise that Derek goes fucking nuts at the sight of it, leaning in fast and biting, immediately. Not hard. Not hard enough to break the skin. But hard enough it hurts, and then feels good as Derek sucks at it, and Stiles drops his mouth open in a silent moan, gasping, bucking his hips against Derek.

Desperately, he says, “I need you to touch me, please, I want my clothes off –“

“You want me to touch you?”

“Yeah,” Stiles pants, as Derek bites him, again, harder, eliciting a sharp inhale from Stiles. “Can we go to the bedroom, can you take all my clothes off, put a collar on me, make me all yours.”

“Oh, baby,” Stiles can hear the smile in Derek’s voice, and is proven right when Derek takes his face out of Stiles’ neck to look him in the eye, and he’s grinning, his big wolf grin, teeth so white and sharp and menacing, but Stiles is not scared of it, never has been, not even once. “You’re never not all mine.”

But Derek takes him to their bedroom anyway. He takes off his expensive watch, and dumps it on his bedside table, as he directs Stiles to take all of his clothes off, and Stiles’ body is electric and tight like a rubber band that’s about to break as he does as he’s asked. Being told what to do again like this has him so hard he could come just from the sight of Derek’s broad shoulders, just from watching Derek bend down and open one of the low drawers to begin rifling around, because of course, he brought toys with him. Even here. Even in the circumstances. Even if he was likely thinking to himself that Stiles might not be in the mood for scenes for a little while.

He’s Derek. He brings toys with him everywhere he goes.

Stiles stands and waits for more instruction, and Derek rolls the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. His veiny forearms. His big hands. Stiles’ mouth goes dry. Fuck, he wants it so bad.

“Come here,” Derek directs, pointing with his index finger at the bed. “Sit down.”

Stiles does. He sits down right on the edge of the bed in front of where Derek is standing, looking up at him, and Derek’s lips quirk, a smile, barely there. It’s more pleased than it is happy, but his eyes are full of mirth, because he’s getting exactly what he wants. He has Stiles’ red collar in his hands, the one with the jingling bell on it, and as he fits it onto Stiles’ neck and begins fastening it, he does not break eye contact with Stiles, not even for a second. They stare at one another as the leather settles against Stiles’ skin, and it feels more profound than it ever has before, as Derek’s fingers inadvertently brush against the bite on the back of Stiles’ neck, as the leather of the collar presses onto it, layers of ownership, inescapable, undeniable.

It's the first time Stiles ever says it without being prompted to say it. He looks right into Derek’s eyes and he says, “you own me.”

Derek takes Stiles by his chin, tilts his head back, climbing half on top of him, bracketing him in, so Stiles has nowhere to go, couldn’t get away even if he wanted to, and kisses him more. Open mouthed, Stiles moaning, Derek holding his neck and squeezing, Stiles spreading his legs open wider, breathing, and then, for only the second time since they’ve met, Derek accidentally cuts Stiles’ lip with one of his fangs.

Derek pulls back. His eyes are red. His teeth are long, fangs pronounced, and Stiles should be afraid, but when his heart starts to pound, it’s not from fear. It’s from desire. Want. His heart goes crazy because he wants to be fucked that badly, by Derek, and not by anyone else in the world.

Stiles’ lip is bleeding, and it drips down his chin, just a little bit. Derek watches the droplet go down, down, down, bit by bit, until all the spit it’s mixed with sends it sliding down Stiles’ neck, streaking red across Stiles’ pale skin. Derek leans down, and he licks the blood up, from Stiles’ neck all the way up his chin, back to his mouth, where he swipes his tongue at the origin of the cut and heals it over, and Stiles knows better, but he can’t help himself.

“Please touch me,” he begs, hands going for Derek’s belt frantically. “I need you so bad, I need –“

Derek corrals Stiles’ hands away, but not roughly. He just gently gathers Stiles’ wrists into one of his bigger hands, pushing them away and shaking his head, clucking his tongue as he does so. “What have I told you about begging?” He lays Stiles down on his back, standing over him, hand still pinning Stiles’ wrists down, and he pushes his body in between Stiles’ open legs. He raises his other hand, and does what he has always done, every single time Stiles has begged out of turn – he slaps his palm very firmly on Stiles’ erect cock, his drawn up and sensitive balls, and Stiles cries out, frantically trying to close his legs, but Derek’s big body is in the way, and he can’t. Derek smiles, his sadistic little smile, pulling Stiles’ body closer to him, because he’s bigger and stronger and Stiles is powerless against him, as he rains down a quick but firm barrage of pats to Stiles’ balls.

Stiles is beyond shame, at this point. His cries are loud and turned on and pained and pleading and almost begging for more, because he does want more. Derek said, many times over, when they first met, that he was going to turn Stiles into a slut who begs for pain and asks to be hurt and won’t be able to get off unless there’s a little bit of torture involved, and he had been right about that, too, like he’s right about everything.

He does want pain. He likes it. He likes Derek controlling him and dominating him and punishing him and turning him into a whining mess underneath him. He wants it.

When Derek is finished, he leans down and kisses Stiles some more, deep kisses that taste like ownership. “Who’s my good pet?”

“Me,” Stiles breathes at him, smiling, bemused, and Derek tips his head in agreement, because there’s no one else on planet earth that could possibly ever be a better pet for Derek than Stiles. They have got one another figured out, by now. They know which buttons to press, and both of them press as many of them as possible, whenever their clothes start to come off. Stiles has never felt so sexually compatible with anyone else he’s ever met; like Derek can reach inside of him and start pulling on his strings like a marionette.

The evil voice in the back of his head – the one that commands him to trust nothing and no one, that insists everyone has an agenda, be it money or power or status or control – whispers to him that it’s not because Derek really cares about him, or really loves him, but is only because Derek saw something inside of Stiles that he knew he could control. Maybe Stiles is just pathetic. Or maybe he’s just screwed up. Or maybe he has too many daddy issues. Maybe Derek likes that Stiles is all broken and fucked up in his head, because that means Stiles is easier to manipulate. Sometimes, when Stiles is feeling particularly masochistic, he goes back to the start of their text thread and reads their first few interactions. How Derek spoke to him. What he said in plain black and white he wanted from Stiles.

Someone to hurt, throw around, use, and then toss aside. It hurts, but this is what Stiles is used to. What if Derek got bored of him? What if Derek threw him away? Where would he go? Is it a mistake to let Derek take over this much of his life? To pay for everything?

Derek swears all he wants to do is take care of Stiles. But Stiles has never been taken care of, and he’s suspicious of it. He can’t help it. Anytime he feels himself giving himself over entirely to Derek, the voice comes back. He wish it wouldn’t. It does.

Later at dinner, when Stiles has rope burn on his wrists and bites and bruises all over his body, Stiles examines Derek like he’s a specimen in a lab. They’re sitting at the table in the kitchen in front of a big wall of windows that don’t need to be hidden behind drapery because no one is going to see them, here, and even if anyone did, they know who Derek is and they don’t care if he’s sleeping with a human. The snow is glittering in the setting sun, and even as they’re eating, they hold hands on the tabletop, and Stiles stares at Derek’s hand in his. Does it look normal? It doesn’t, he decides, because Derek’s hand is huge and strong and does important things that matter all the time and Stiles’ is all pale and bony and useless.

“What are you thinking about?” Derek says, startling Stiles into looking up at him mid-bite.

He swallows. “How different our hands are.”

Derek lifts an eyebrow. “Is that bad?”

“Well,” Stiles shrugs. He eats some pasta. “My dad used to say my hands are artists’ hands. You know. Never done a real day’s work in my entire life.”

After a beat, Derek puts his fork down, and looks Stiles right in the eyes. “Your art is work. Just because he doesn’t think so, that means nothing. You know that, right?”

Stiles takes another big bite to give him some time to think of something to say, and as he chews, he decides he doesn’t know that at all. But he doesn’t want to admit this out loud because it’s embarrassing and he’s ashamed of it, so he keeps quiet, chewing, looking at Derek’s hand some more. When the silence goes on, Derek squeezes Stiles’ hand extra hard, brings it up to his lips and kisses the back of it, and Stiles can’t help but smile, the way Derek always figures out a way to make Stiles smile.

“I was just thinking, you know, how you’re a big important man and I’m just like, some kid you’re shacked up with.”

Derek’s laugh is short and abrupt. “Shacked up with? Stiles, I’m in love with you. You’re also not a kid.”

Well, Derek has to say that. He’s having sex with Stiles. It’d be pretty weird if, in his head, he thought of Stiles like a kid, wouldn’t it be? “I know I’m a grown up. I guess sometimes I just feel like I never got past sixteen, or something.”

Derek’s eyes are perceptive, serious, analytical. He considers this, like he’s dissecting each and every word that Stiles just said and taking them apart and trying to ascertain what it is that Stiles is beating around the bush about. There is no one on earth that’s smarter than Derek, Stiles is certain of it – except for maybe his sister Laura. “Sometimes when bad things happen to us, it’s like we get trapped at that age forever.”

Stiles stares at him. The words hit him. They make Stiles want to cry. Because that’s what it feels like. It feels like Stiles will forever be the sixteen-year-old who wanted daddy’s attention and love and for dad to like him, to think he’s smart, to think he’s good, and it feels like Stiles will never be good, ever. Like he gave it all away. Like he has nothing left.

Stiles does not want to feel sixteen forever. The thought of it, being that way, this way, forever, makes him want to scream.

But, he doesn’t. He sits and lets the words wash over him, and he remembers how he thought that Derek was stupid about Stiles’ emotions and inner-workings, but of course, not even that is true. Derek can’t be stupid about anything. He knows everything. He sees everything. He’s perceptive and he’s hit the nail on the head, again, just like he always does.

“Do you ever feel like that?” Stiles asks him, leaning in a little closer, holding his hand harder.

Derek smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sometimes.”

Maybe, every now and then, Derek feels like the ten-year-old kid who wasn’t allowed go to normal school with everyone else. Maybe he remembers how it felt to be told he can’t play with other kids, that he’s different, to be reviled and kept away from other people, to be told he’s a monster, to have to watch horrible things happen to people like him. It makes Stiles’ whole body just hurt, to think about Derek being young, to think of him going through the things that made him so hardened and intense and dedicated, driven, determined to change the world, because he refuses to let the world do to other children what it did to him.

“But I also think it’s important to not hold onto things too hard.”

Stiles sighs. He shakes his head, mostly at himself. “Does it ever bother you that you got stuck with someone with so many issues?”

“No,” Derek says, so quickly and firmly it could only ever be the truth. “I love taking care of you.”

“You have to say that.”

“I don’t have to say anything,” he cocks his head to the side. “I’m the alpha. Why would I say anything if I didn’t mean it?”

He has an iron-clad determination to just keep repeating things, and repeating things, like eventually, if he says it enough times, it’ll sink into Stiles’ thick, dumb fucking head. It may never happen, and Stiles may always secretly think Derek is pretending, even if twenty years go by, but Derek will keep saying it. He just will. He’s Derek. He doesn’t quit.

Even though it’s the scariest thing that Stiles has ever said in his entire life, he knows that it’s the truth, and if he knows if he doesn’t say it, it will feel wrong. The words will curl up in his throat and stay there until he says them, so with his eyes on his plate, his shoulders straight as an arrow, he spits it out. “I love you,” he confesses, for the first time. It feels so monumental, there should be a swell of music and lights coming on from over their heads, but there isn’t. It’s just the two of them, alone, eating dinner, and Derek smiles at him.

“I know that,” he says quietly. Stiles picks his fork back up, and returns to eating, and Derek does the same, holding Stiles’ hand still. Quiet. Comfortable silence.

The only reason that Stiles knows Isaac comes into the room is because the cook greets him, and Stiles turns his head, and finds, unsurprisingly, that in the entire room, the first thing Isaac wants to look at is Stiles. Stiles tries to hold his gaze, again, and Isaac drops his eyes, nodding silently when Sarah asks him if he’d like something to eat. Stiles watches him, turning his back, facing the stove as Sarah explains to him what’s available, opening up the pot of pasta on the stove and showing him what it is.

His shoulders are rigid. He’s uncomfortable. His hands are balled into fists at his sides.

Stiles looks at Derek, who’s in la la land. It doesn’t seem to bother him at fucking all that one of his betas is so uncomfortable in this situation, or maybe he’s just used to it, but Stiles isn’t, and it does bother him, a lot. He doesn’t want someone to be this fucking irked by Stiles’ existence, and maybe lots of things have happened to Isaac, and maybe he did even more things than that to other people, but there’s no reason for him to be afraid of Stiles, like this.

Fear might not even be the right word. Stiles has no idea what the right word is. He just knows it’s a bad one. And he can’t live with it.

When Isaac is handed a plate piled high with food, he moves to go eat somewhere else, like he’s the family dog or something, banished from the table, and Stiles clears his throat. To Derek, he says, “he can eat with us,” and the second the words are out of his mouth he sort of regrets it, but Derek smiles at him. Like Stiles has done something to please him.

“Isaac,” Derek says, and Isaac freezes in the middle of going out of the room altogether, likely to freedom, in his mind. “Stiles has invited you to come eat with us. Come here.”

Isaac is still. Like, statue still, back turned, slowly turning his head over his shoulder. It’s like he’s been invited to dine with Voldemort and Bellatrix, for real, but he turns all the way around, and he starts coming over, step by step. As he gets closer, Stiles notices that his plate is literally shaking, because his hands are shaking, and Stiles wonders all at once if he’s done something horrible, or if he’s being mean to him, and he doesn’t intend for that to be the case at all. Stiles sits up straight and he tries smiling, to impart friendliness, but Isaac refuses to look at him.

He sincerely goes to sit at the furthest possible seat at the table from where Derek and Stiles are, but Derek snaps his fingers and points at the chair right across from Stiles.

Isaac hesitates. He perhaps has no choice. He comes over, and when he puts his plate down, he sort of fumbles it, so it’s loud, clattering, his fork scattering across the tabletop before he hastily grabs it with a pale hand.

As he reaches, the sleeve of his shirt rides up just enough that Stiles can make out scarring on his arms. It surprises Stiles enough that he tries to get a better look, leaning forward and cocking his head to the side – he has never seen a werewolf with scars before. Frankly, he was under the impression they couldn’t scar.

Maybe, particularly bad and deep wounds can leave scars on wolves. Stiles didn’t know that.

What did they have do to him to leave scarring like that?

Isaac gets his shit together and sits. He’s like a ghoul over there, hunched over, not looking at anyone, fork clasped in his hand like he’s thinking of stabbing himself in the neck with it instead of eating. Derek seems used to this behavior, just sitting there eating without a care in the world, but Stiles is unnerved by it. It’s like Isaac has no idea how to eat at a table, how to use his fork, how to exist at all, and Stiles clears his throat. He tries to talk to him, directly, for the first time since they’ve met.

“What have you been up to, today?” Stiles asks him. You’d think Stiles just asked him for the secrets of the universe, for how he reacts to it, looking up with his lips parted like he cannot believe that Stiles is addressing him, looking at him, waiting for his response. He looks at Derek, frantic, like he needs permission to say anything to Stiles at all.

Derek gestures his hand, like, go ahead.

Isaac seems to be at a loss. He pokes his fork at his food. Keeps his eyes down, and nowhere else. “Nothing.”

Nothing. Okay, great. Stiles looks to Derek, who looks back at him, his gaze cool. Maybe there really isn’t very much for them to talk about.

As Stiles returns to eating his pasta, half drowning in the awkwardness and tension in the room, regretting having invited Isaac over at all because he’s clearly miserable over it, it occurs to him that, because there is no soundproofing in this house, and because the house is so much smaller than Derek’s back in Beacon Hills, Isaac likely heard them having sex. The whole staff probably heard it, including Sarah over there, including the driver, including everyone, and it’s sort of embarrassing, even though Derek assures him they’re all so used to it, they just tune it out and mind their own business. Werewolves have selective hearing, Derek always says, because they have to. It’s a learned skill.

Isaac is a bitten werewolf. He may not have this skill. And even if he did, did he tune it out? Is that why he can’t look Stiles in the eyes? He catches Isaac shooting an anxious glance at Stiles’ wrists, the reddened rings there from being tied up, and then looking away, back at his food. What does he think about it? Stiles genuinely can’t tell.

Isaac has no table manners. He leans over his plate like he’s suspicious someone is going to come over and take his food away from him, chews with his mouth open, keeps glaring around himself with shifty eyes, and he holds his fork strangely, like he would prefer to not be using one at all and does only because he knows Derek expects him to.

“Do you want champagne?” Stiles tries, valiantly, once more, to engage with him.

Mouth full, Isaac answers him kind of curtly by saying, “I don’t drink human alcohol.”

“Oh,” Stiles is surprised.

“It tastes like piss.”

“Oh,” he repeats, and the intensity with which Isaac says it sort of makes him want to laugh, but he doesn’t want Isaac to think he’s being laughed at, so he covers his mouth with his hand to stifle it.

“Wolfsbane liquor is all the rage where Isaac is from,” Derek explains to Stiles, laying his fork down on his empty plate neatly, because he’s finished. “Once, I gave him a normal glass of wine, and he spit it out all over the table.”

“It’s shit.”

“Right…” Stiles agrees, barely hanging on by a thread at keeping his laughter at bay. “Well, I’ve never had wolfsbane liquor –“

“And you won’t,” Derek assures him pointedly. “Not for humans. Trust me. You’d have a psychotic break.”

Isaac chews, loudly, looking between Derek, and Stiles, over and over. Like he’s doing a math problem on them, or something. But he says not a word.

“A psychotic break? From a cocktail? I find that interesting.”

Derek gives him a look. “Take my word for it.”

“I’ve seen humans try it,” Isaac tells the tabletop. “It’ll make your head come unscrewed.”

“When have you seen humans try wolfsbane liquor?” Stiles challenges him, eyebrows up. “Last time I checked, it’s, like, super illegal to serve it to humans anyway.”

Isaac is uncomfortable with the question, clearly, and Stiles looks at Derek the longer the silence goes on with his question unanswered, and finds that Derek is clearing his throat and shifting in his seat a bit.

Oh. Probably, what Isaac means, is he’s seen humans forcefully given wolfsbane liquor so that werewolves could do whatever they wanted to them without them being able to scream and carry on. This truth comes to Stiles immediately, and it settles in between the three of them like a pall.

Stiles wonders if Isaac has ever done something like that, to a human.

“For me, I like it,” Isaac changes the subject, a bit. “It tastes better.”

Well, there you have it. Stiles doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore, so he goes quiet, nodding his head and returning to finishing his plate of food in front of him, although it’s hard, because Isaac is right across from him eating live a caveman who’s never sat at a table before. He has a harshness to him, and a brusqueness. He’s crass. He talks in short, clipped sentences. He’s nothing like the other wolves in Derek’s pack, who are all, even at their worst, still very well mannered and buttoned up.

Isaac is different, just like Derek had said. And that’s putting it lightly.

Derek’s phone buzzes where it’s sitting face down on the table next to his place, and he flips it over, and then sighs. “It’s my mother,” he says to Stiles, as he begins pushing his chair out, standing up, and Stiles doesn’t need to be told that a call from his mother is a call he always has to take, so Stiles isn’t surprised or put out, nodding his head. Derek leaves the table with a swipe of his hand across Stiles’ back affectionately, and he leaves the room, putting the phone to his ear right at the doorway and answering the call.

Then, Stiles realizes, he is alone with Isaac.

Not entirely. Sarah is right over there, loading the dishwasher, packing up the leftovers in Tupperware, but she’s always silent unless asked a direct question, minds her own business and does her job, so she’s barely here at all.

It’s just Stiles, and Isaac. First time ever.

Isaac seems to realize this, as well, because he’s stiff, wound up, tight, like he’s going to snap at any given second. He eats, but it’s like he’s not even tasting it, how fast he’s eating it, eyes pointedly facing downwards.

Stiles is not very good at uncomfortable silences, so he does what he always does when faced with them, which is to start talking. Even though he probably shouldn’t, he cannot help himself. He sits up straight, and he clears his throat, and he tries, for the third time, engaging in a normal conversation with Isaac, at his own peril. “Do you like Italian food? I love it. I think Mexican food is my favorite, because I love spicy food, but Italian is a close second.”

Isaac is direct, to a fault. Rude, also. So, he says, with kind of an unfriendly little snort, “meat should be the only food there is. Who cares how it’s prepared.”

“Well…” Stiles wants to burst out laughing again. It’s like talking to a cartoon of a werewolf. “What’s your favorite meat, then?”

Isaac seems surprised by this question. He stops eating, for just a second, pausing in his shoveling, to sit up and look at Stiles. It’s a little hard to take him seriously, because he has food around his mouth, but then he raises his forearm and wipes at his mouth with it lengthwise. They stare at one another, for just a second, Isaac’s lips parted, Stiles just sitting there, expectantly, waiting for an answer. “…beef.”

“Oh, duh,” Stiles nods his agreement.

Isaac stares. His eyes shoot to the doorway, the one that Derek left out of, and he swallows. Then, he looks back to Stiles. He leans over the table a little, and he says, “you’ve never had fresh.”

“Fresh beef? Well, I mean –“

“Humans take nature out of everything. Eating cow killed by a machine.”

Holy shit. Stiles can’t really deny this, but he doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.

“I think if they could, they’d kill werewolves with a machine, too.”

“Um…” the conversation has taken a wildly insane turn, and maybe this was always the natural conclusion to directly engaging with him. Stiles can hear Derek’s voice just down the hallway, and he also turns to look at where he disappeared, because he’s begging for Derek to come back, be here, breakup whatever is going on here, but he doesn’t. “…well, I wouldn’t like to see that happen.”

Isaac stares, the way he does. Icy eyes, deep, blue. There’s something about them that gives Stiles a far seeing stare, like the way kids were coming back from World War One after trench warfare, like he’s shellshocked, not all the way there. Cruelty and trauma has perhaps made him unlike anybody else, have perhaps scooped out the things about him that used to make him normal. Someone who could’ve had a conversation.

Now, Stiles understands what Derek had meant when he used the word “feral.”

Abruptly, Isaac puts his fork down with a loud clatter. And he bursts out, like he’s been dying to say this for days but hasn’t had an opportunity, loudly, “I know what Derek told you about me.”

“Yeah, but, I don’t really –“

“I know probably that makes you not like me.”

“I never said –“

“I’m not like that anymore,” he insists, deathly serious, tone severe. Stiles rubs the back of his neck, his bite, and Isaac watches him do it, cocking his head to the side. Stiles has seen werewolves do that so many fucking times, but he’s never seen someone do it the way Isaac does. Like a real dog.

“Okay…”

“I’d rather cut my hand off than use it to hurt you.”

This conversation is so much fun. Stiles shifts uncomfortably and clears his throat, glancing at Sarah, who’s got her back turned, scrubbing at the stove. Stiles is on his own.

“I’m different, now. Derek helped me when no one else would. I wouldn’t ever betray him.”

And then Derek is back in the kitchen, thank fucking god, and he comes over fast, like he could hear this conversation and knows it was going off the rails, and first thing, he puts his hands on Stiles’ shoulders. “Isaac, if you’re finished.”

It dangles there, and Isaac is likely used to being dismissed, because he barely flinches. He just gets up and leaves, his empty plate left behind, his chair not pushed in, moving on quick feet out of the room to go and lurk or hover in shadows or whatever it is he actually does with his time, and Stiles watches him go. Then, he looks up at Derek.

“I told you,” Derek says to him, and Stiles guesses that Derek, did, to a point, tell him.

Isaac is like no other werewolf that Stiles has ever met in his life. All of the others he has spent any good deal of time with have worked at least a little bit to meld themselves into human culture, to act how humans act, to follow their cues, to take their notes, to just try and be invisible, likely to escape persecution. Isaac doesn’t seem like he cares very much if humans find him pleasant or decent company. He doesn’t seem to care for human culture at all. He has no interest in being polite.

He's more wolf than he is human. Being that way is dangerous, where Stiles is from.

Later on in the same night, Stiles gets sucked into a book that absorbs all of his attention, on the couch in front of the fire, and he looks up when his eyes are getting tired to see that Derek and Isaac are outside on the back porch together. He can see them through the glass door that leads out to the hot tub area, their faces lit up only by the lights inside.

They’re sharing a cigarette, passing it back and forth in between drags, and having a conversation. Derek nods his head, but it’s like he can sense that Stiles is looking at him, because he turns over his shoulder and sees Stiles, says something to Isaac and hands him the cigarette for the final time, and opens the door to come inside.

Cold air blasts and Stiles burrows deeper under his blanket, scowling, but Derek just smirks at him, sliding the door closed and leaving Isaac out there to finish the cigarette alone. “A bomb could go off when you start reading, and you wouldn’t know a fucking thing,” Derek tells him as he comes closer, and Stiles closes said book with a piece of paper stuffed inside to hold his spot.

“What were you two talking about out there?” Stiles asks.

Derek sits down on the couch next to him, picks up Stiles’ legs, and lays them across his lap, cradling Stiles’ ankle in his fingers gently. “The phone call I had with my mother earlier,” Derek says, and Stiles raises his eyebrows.

In all the weirdness with Isaac, Stiles kind of forgot about the entire reason he got left alone with him in the first place, which is because Derek took a call from his mother. “What did she say?”

Derek strokes Stiles’ ankle, and looks a little apprehensive for a moment, as though he’s not quite sure how Stiles will react to this information and is trepidatious about bringing it up at all. He says, “she wants me to come and stay in Wyoming for a while, until things calm down.”

Stiles puts his book down in his lap. That’s not what he had been expecting to hear.

“Specifically, she wants me to bring you there.”

“Me?” He raises his eyebrows and presses his hand against his chest.

“I’ve been sheltering you,” he confesses slowly, lowering his eyes to Stiles’ legs underneath the blanket, before finally looking back up to Stiles’ face. “But things are a little strange right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember when we left the police station, there were reporters, people taking pictures.”

Oh, Stiles has only been having anxiety nightmares about that memory for weeks, now, so sure, yes, he remembers that. He nods.

“It’s a bit of a big deal that you and I are together. You haven’t been looking at the internet at all since it happened, so you wouldn’t know, but…people know about you. People I’d rather didn’t know about you.”

Stiles swallows a lump in his throat, as the fire crackles and pops across the room from them, as Isaac smokes outside the door and might be watching them, like he always is. “…like werewolves?”

“Things are just a little too intense, and there’s too much attention on the situation. Your father, the Argents, conservative humans, traditionalist werewolves, all these people. It’s too much. Wyoming would be a good idea. It’s very safe there. Nobody would be able to get to you out there, my mother’s property is like Fort Knox.”

Stiles realizes that Derek is trying to sell it to him, trying to convince Stiles that it’s a good idea at all, which means that he also agrees with his mother. He also wants to take Stiles to Wyoming, and he is concerned that Stiles might dig his heels in and say he wants to go back home, like Derek promised to take him.

He said he was going to go back because he needs to get back to work. He said this just days ago, and now everything is changing, and Stiles doesn’t know what to think about it. He’s never really thought about being in Wyoming before; at least, not concretely. Only abstractly. He’s thought about horses, and the big property they likely live on with all the mountains and rocks and…well.

Stiles doesn’t know. He has never even seen a picture of Wyoming before, beyond a handful of pictures of the Hale family property.

“What are you thinking?” Derek asks him, eyes trying to stare through Stiles’ head to read his mind again, and Stiles shakes his head, as he realizes he was just sitting there all still and not saying a word, and he clears his throat.

“I’m just – wrapping my head around it. That’s all.”

Derek takes a beat. He waits. Then, he can’t wait anymore, and he presses the issue. “Do you want to go?”

“Do I have a choice?” Stiles asks before he can stop himself, even though it’s rude, even though he doesn’t mean it like that, but Derek blinks and frowns in the wake of it, like Stiles has offended him.

“I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to,” he says plainly. “It’s not like we’ll never go back to Beacon Hills. It’s just for a while. I happen to agree with her, that’s all. People are insane.”

Isaac comes in through the back door, more cold air blowing in, and then closes it gently behind himself, eyes on Derek and Stiles, but Derek keeps his eyes on Stiles and Stiles alone, like Isaac isn’t even there at all, and Stiles thinks for a moment more.

“Are you worried about me?” Stiles asks Derek, and Derek, who is normally so unflappable, who always says that things will be fine, don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it, nothing bad will happen to you, I’ll protect you, it’ll all be okay…his face goes closed off, and he purses his lips.

“Yes,” and it comes out like it’s being forced out of him, like he doesn’t want to have to admit it, like he does not want to scare Stiles, but can’t help but to tell him the truth. “I am very scared about what these people might do to you if they were able to get to you. People are fanatical. And my mother…she has already made it her life’s work to piss off people who think that humans and werewolves shouldn’t be together. Her son winding up with a human has thrown gasoline onto that particular fire. Things are very charged, right now. The Argents aren’t the worst people in the world. There are crazier people. Trust me.”

Stiles thumps his book down onto the coffee table, loud, and he pulls his legs out of Derek’s lap, turning to sit up, all the way, feet on the ground. He puts his forehead in his palm, and rubs it, over and over, breathing, in disbelief. “I think, sometimes, your favorite thing in the world to keep things from me,” Stiles says to Derek.

“In my defense, you’ve been very sensitive lately. I didn’t want to –“

“I get it,” Stiles cuts him off, practically biting his head off. He does get it. Stiles has been off his rocker for weeks, and it’s only been in this past week that he’s been getting his shit together, finally beginning to get his head around what happened, and now, of course, Derek is throwing him another massive curve ball. It’s what he does. Withholding. Keeping things to himself. Controlling what information Stiles or does not get, just like he controls everything fucking else.

Isaac is hovering by the fire. He just stands there, watching, because he has no fucking sense of the fact that Derek and Stiles are either having an argument or are about to have an argument, or he just doesn’t care and doesn’t think it’s weird that he’s standing there listening, and it’s freaking Stiles the fuck out, his blue-eyed staring, and Derek does his all-seeing eye thing and senses that Stiles is agitated by it. He waves his hand at Isaac. “Isaac, that’s enough.”

Like every other time Derek says anything to him, Isaac just turns tail and disappears, diving down the hallway into the darkness of the rest of the house.

“Jesus Christ, this entire thing is so god damn freaky,” Stiles says this into his hand, staring at the fire, in complete and total disbelief that is his life. “I thought we were going to stay in Colorado for a while and then go home to Beacon Hills. That’s what you said.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Derek tells him, moving closer so their shoulders are touching, so he can put his hands on Stiles and work his bullshit that he always works whenever Stiles gets upset with him. He wraps his arm around Stiles and hugs him against his side, kissing him on the side of his face. “I’d never make you do anything you don’t want to do,” he reiterates this point, again, but Stiles knows the truth.

Derek is a type of man. He’s a type of werewolf, too.

He would drag Stiles kicking and screaming to Wyoming. Stiles just fucking knows it, he can tell, he knows how Derek operates even if Derek says he’s not like that, he’d never do that, that’s not him. Derek stalked Stiles for months. He had other people following him around for months, too. He watches Stiles and makes sure he eats, makes sure he’s not on his phone too much, makes sure he has clothes and a roof over his head and that he does what Derek wants him to do.

If there’s really a chance that Stiles could be kidnapped and, like, tortured by rival packs, or made an example of by anti-werewolf groups, or used to get to the Hales, or as blackmail, as a bargaining chip, any number of things, then there’s no way in fucking hell that Derek is taking Stiles back to Beacon Hills. It doesn’t really matter what Stiles thinks or what Stiles says. It doesn’t really matter what Stiles wants, because Derek knows what’s best for him even if Stiles doesn’t agree with it, and he’ll take Stiles to Wyoming either way. It’s the thing about him that makes him not like other people. It’s the thing about him that makes him a “bad guy.”

He is possessive, controlling, and he is used to being able to make people do what he wants them to.

“You’ve already decided we’re going,” Stiles tells him, no question in his tone, and Derek tips his head, away, lowering his eyes, like he doesn’t want Stiles to see them right now. “You were out there talking to Isaac about how we’re leaving, because you’re taking me there, either way. Just admit it. We don’t have to even really talk about it, but you could at least admit it.”

“You have to understand,” Derek starts, putting his hands together almost in a pleading gesture, like he’d ever have to beg Stiles for anything, “There just isn’t anywhere else on earth that I could take you where I could let my guard down, even for a moment. There are too many people who want to fuck with me, and now they all know the exact way to fuck with me. You have no idea just how much of a sitting duck you really are, Stiles. You don’t know how it all works.”

“I believe you,” Stiles tells him, because he does. This is not a machination or a manipulation to just take Stiles to Wyoming because Derek wants to take him there for fun.

He is being honest. It’s a matter of safety. It’s a matter of curling around Stiles like a dog and growling at anyone who gets too close. Stiles gets it.

“I just thought we were going home,” Stiles says weakly, shame in his tone as he looks away, putting his arm up on the end of the couch and stuffing his chin into his palm, willing himself to not cry. “I just thought everything would go back to normal.”

“Sweetheart,” Derek puts his arm around Stiles, again, firmer. He squeezes Stiles as close to him as he can get him, and he leans in, and into his ear, he whispers, “…nothing will ever be normal again.”

Stiles is beginning to see that, now.

“I guess deep down I was harboring this, like, idiotic fairytale of going back home to Beacon Hills and my dad eventually coming around and people seeing us together and thinking – you know. Wow, humans and werewolves really can be together. And it not being a big deal. And all the Argents going to prison forever.”

Derek turns Stiles’ face with his fingers, and kisses him on the mouth. But he doesn’t say anything. Probably because he can only tell the truth, and the truth is that, yes, that is, and always was, a fairytale. That was really foolish, and really naïve of Stiles to ever think. That was stupid. That was never how it was going to go.

Stiles has been blaming the Argents and the police for coming into his apartment, for finding him out, for going into his life and blowing it all up to hell. He’s been blaming Allison, and Kate, and even his father, for all of it, everything. For his paintings being ruined. For his life not being the same anymore.

But, the truth is, Stiles is the one who threw that grenade into his own life. He did that the second he started taking Derek seriously, the second he started going to him more and more and more. He did it himself. He ruined his own life, the way it was, all of it. His apartment. His art. His relationship with his father. All of that was destroyed by his own choices, and he sees that, now.

Even when he does go back to Beacon Hills, he’ll never really be going back.

Stiles gave up everything to be with Derek. It is worth it, he knows it is, and he knows that Derek might be psychotic, and he might think differently than a human man would and that means him being freaky in more ways than one, but Derek is his person. That’s all there is to it. Derek loves him. Derek only means to protect him. Derek isn’t doing any of this to hurt him, or really, doing much of anything at all. This is just the hand they’re being dealt. Derek is playing with those cards. Stiles keeps trying to shuffle the deck, to no avail.

“It’s beautiful there,” Derek tells Stiles, because the conversation is over, now. There’s no more arguing, or Stiles digging his heels in. They’re going to Wyoming. Stiles has not agreed. It doesn’t matter. “You’ll love it. I promise you. Everyone will love you, there. I’ll get you anything you want, whatever you want, whatever will make you happy, I’ll do anything to make you happy.”

This, Stiles knows is also the truth. He wipes at his eyes, traitor tears that are pooling up in his eyes, as he comes to the traumatizing realization that his life as he once knew it is over and over for good and there is no going back no matter how hard he begs and claws and screams.

The future looms in front of him all long and winding. He has no idea what’s coming next.

“Can we stay here for a while more, please?” Stiles asks, throat tight. “I like it here.”

“Yeah,” Derek agrees, rubbing circles on Stiles’ back. He is perhaps only agreeing because Stiles is upset. “We’ll stay here a while longer.”

When all is said and done, Stiles announces he wishes to be alone, and Derek is disappointed and he furrows his brow, but he allows it all the same. He just sits and watches Stiles get up, eyes following his every movement, but he does not get up to follow him.

Stiles wipes at his eyes as he cries more because he can’t help it, going down into the hallway, darkness, and he turns and goes up the stairs, step by step, and every stair he climbs, he feels everything slipping away from him, disappearing into the black. His whole life is being replaced by something Derek is building for him.

When he gets upstairs, he turns to go down to the left where the master bedroom is, and he comes nearly face to face with Isaac.

Stiles would say that Isaac has startled him, but honestly, he’s getting used to turning every corner and having to see Isaac there, lurking, like he’s a ghost that haunts every place he occupies, is down every hallway, is behind every door, is always there, always. Stiles stops in his tracks, still crying but trying to hide it, pointlessly, because he knows that Isaac can tell whether the tears are there on Stiles’ face or not.

Isaac looks at him. He’s tall, so he has to look down, and Stiles can’t meet his eyes. He feels ashamed. Isaac has been, like, tortured and shit, and crying in front of him over something so stupid like this makes him feel like he’s a little kid, or like he’s pathetic or something, but Isaac doesn’t make fun of him, or scoff at him, or anything like that.

He says, frankly, almost toneless, “don’t be sad. Derek is right.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m sad,” he laughs, an unfunny little laugh.

“Everything is so sad to humans all the time,” he says dryly, cocking his head to the side the way he had at the dinner table, that odd, dog tic. “It would be sadder to get your face cut off.”

It’s such an absurd thing to say, Stiles bursts out laughing, hysteric, hands going over his eyes as he shakes through his laughter, in total and utter disbelief. Holy shit. This is his life, now. These are the kinds of people he gets to deal with, now.

When he takes his hands off and begins to calm down from the psychosis, he finds that Isaac is staring, like he usually is, but for the first time since they’ve met one another, he’s not scowling, or looking petrified, or like he’s about to bolt and run for the hills. He has the faintest smile on his face, and in the shadows of the dim lights, it’s almost a bit creepy, the way he smiles, like he doesn’t know how, or something.

“I can’t argue with you on that one,” Stiles agrees, finger gunning at him and everything.

“I’ll be there, too,” he offers, like this is meant to make Stiles feel better. “I’ll kill anyone who tries to touch you.”

This is another thing Stiles just knows is the truth.

About an hour later, when Stiles is lying in bed half buried underneath the pillows, Derek finally has had enough of not being with Stiles, coming into the room and shutting the door quietly behind himself. Stiles knows it’s him, so he doesn’t sit up or anything, just keeps lying there like a lump on a log, totally dead to the world. The bed dips. Derek puts his hands on Stiles, the way he does. He grips Stiles’ hips and flips him over, turning him so he’s right side up, and they look at one another in the face.

Derek’s serious eyes, his hard jaw, and his big hands. He puts his fingers underneath Stiles’ t-shirt so he can feel his bare skin, and he doesn’t say anything, not for a while. He just touches Stiles, feels him, and Stiles watches him, breathing.

“I’m sorry that I can’t make things go the way you want them to,” Derek finally says, and Stiles knows that he really is sad, and that if he could somehow make the world a different place, and make things not this way, then he would. But he can’t. That’s not how it is. “I’m sorry I’m like this.”

Stiles sits up, all the way, and he shakes his head, firmly. “Don’t say sorry for things like that,” he insists. “I’m sorry. I’m a big baby.”

“No, you’re not,” Derek strokes his hair, slow passes of his fingers that send tingles up and down Stiles’ spine, feels good enough Stiles could close his eyes and start falling asleep if Derek kept doing it. “You’re idealistic. There’s nothing I want more than to give you this perfect idea you have in your head, and it kills me that I can’t give it to you. That I have to drag you all over the place.”

Stiles looks down. Cautiously, he asks, “…would they really cut my face off?”

He knows that Derek heard he and Isaac’s short exchange in the hallway, because Derek hears everything. Derek does not smile, or laugh, like Stiles had, and his eyes are hard, and far away. Maybe he’s thinking about it. Imagining it. “You’re very beautiful,” Derek says for the thousandth time since they’ve met. “Making you not very beautiful would certainly be a way to try and get to me. Isaac knows more about what they do to humans than even I do. He’s not imaginative and he doesn’t make shit up. He says only what he knows.”

Jesus Christ. Stiles is afraid. He does not want his face cut off, believe it or not, and Derek hugs him, immediately, because he can feel that Stiles is afraid, petrified, actually, terrified for his very life, and Derek pulls him in close and holds him.

He wonders if Isaac has ever cut anybody’s face off. He wonders if he’s currently sharing a living space with someone who’s killed a great deal of people, before, and if he should be afraid of Isaac, too.

“He shouldn’t have said that to you.”

Well…no. He certainly should not have. “He doesn’t seem to have a very good compass regarding what to say and what not to say,” Stiles murmurs over Derek’s shoulder, and he feels more than hears Derek laughing in response to this, before they pull apart and Stiles can see the faint smile on his face.

“But he’ll never let that happen, just like I won’t. You know that.”

Yeah. Stiles knows that. He does. It’ll all be okay. He inhales, exhales. This isn’t what he realized that he was signing up for, when he decided to be exclusive with Derek, all that time ago. Other people his age get boyfriends and don’t have to go through all this shit, but, well, Stiles is Stiles. And Derek is Derek. This is their life.

“…will your family – um…will they know? About me? And what I used to…?”

Derek’s brow furrows, and he puts his hand on Stiles’ face, cradling it gently. “Stiles, werewolves don’t think about sex the same way that humans do. No one in my family cares.”

“So, they do know.”

“I can’t really lie to them,” he smiles ruefully. “In werewolf culture, paying for sex is a lot more normal than it is in human culture.”

“This is humiliating,” Stiles moans, throwing himself back on top of the pillows and covering his face with his hands again. “So, they know you’ve paid me thousands just to fuck me.” They probably also know exactly what kind of kinky shit that Derek is into, too, which makes Stiles clam up hard, totally shut up tight, and he wants to drop dead. Just die. “And I’m supposed to be able to look these people in the eye?”

“Baby,” Derek pulls at Stiles’ wrists, to be able to look him in the eye. “You’re thinking too much about all this. It doesn’t matter to them. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Oh, yes, it does,” Stiles scoffs up at the ceiling. “You hate that I’ve fucked other werewolves, and a lot of them.”

“Because I’m jealous. Not because I’m judgmental.”

Stiles purses his lips. There’s no way for him to not be humiliated over this, no matter what Derek says about it, no matter how different werewolves think about the concept of sex work as compared to humans, it just doesn’t matter. He’s embarrassed. He wishes he were some great genius, or an engineer, or a lawyer like Derek, something that Derek could tell them all so he could be proud of what Stiles is.

Instead, Stiles is a recently unemployed whore who makes only half decent art. Great.

“Everyone will love you,” Derek reiterates, and Stiles just shakes his head. It doesn’t feel like that.

Stiles has never really been loved by people, before. Only Scott and Melissa. He’s not someone that people take home to meet their families. He’s not someone to be impressed by.

“…when do you think we’ll go back home?”

Derek sighs. “When things die down.”

“Okay…which will be…?”

“I don’t know, Stiles,” Derek tells him the truth. “I don’t know.”

“I know Beacon Hills is terrible and everyone sucks, but it’s my home,” Stiles tells him, voice cracking a bit. “My mother is buried there.”

“I know.”

“I have to go back. It’s where I belong.”

“We will go back,” Derek promises him, voice severe and intense. “We will. You have my word. Things will change. They’ll get better. You’ll see.”

Stiles has been waiting a very long time for things to change, and for things to get better. For his whole life, he has waited for that to happen, and it’s been twenty-two years, and it hasn’t. It just hasn’t.

“You’re going to like Wyoming. I’ll make sure of it. Plus, we’ll be celebrating your birthday very soon, won’t we?”

Stiles blinks at him, taken aback by him saying this. “How the hell do you know when my birthday is?” They have never, not once, talked about it. Stiles doesn’t even know when Derek’s birthday is, because, once again, they really only barely just met and know one another, in spite of the intensity of their feelings for one another.

“It’s my job to know when your birthday is,” Derek tells him with a shit eating grin on his face. “Also, it’s a pretty hard one to forget.”

“Oh, you’d be very fucking surprised, trust me,” Stiles snorts, laying back into the pillows and crossing his arms over his chest defensively. Stiles is not a very big birthday person, on account of the fact that he was born on December 25th. So…yeah. Many, many birthdays have gone by where people have forgotten, where it’s just been swept away in the holiday bullshit, and Stiles has gotten used to it. His birthday does not exist. He has Christmas. That’s it.

Derek frowns at Stiles saying this, because he knows that Stiles means that the Sheriff in particular has forgotten Stiles’ birthday more than once. And he has. Like, ten cumulative years of forgetting.

“At least when people forget, I still sometimes get presents and there’s still a party. Just…not always for me.” Stiles smiles.

“Well, rest assured, my mother lives and breathes to throw parties.”

“Oh, it would humiliate me if she threw me a birthday party. Please don’t let her do that.”

“It’s not really up to me.”

“Derek,” Stiles sits up, and grips his wrist in a vice, looking him dead in the eye. Derek smiles, like it’s funny. “Please tell her not to do that. I’ll kill myself.”

“I’m sorry that you’re not used to being treated as important as you really are, but there’s not a chance you’re getting away with not having a birthday this year. Or any other year for the rest of your life.”

“Okay,” Stiles glares at him. “Fine. Then, when’s your birthday? So, I can torment you right back.”

Derek shrugs his shoulders. “Go ahead. I don’t mind having cake or getting drunk or getting gifts or having a party. It’s on June 22nd.”

“Drunk?” Stiles repeats, eyebrows flying up. He moves his hand from gripping Derek’s wrist, to pushing into his fingers, lacing them together and holding it. “I’ve never seen you drunk.”

“It happens,” he shrugs, like it’s no big deal at all whatsoever. “I’m an adult. I can get drunk if I wish to.”

“Well, sure, but, you’re so…you’re just so adult and serious to me, it’s hard to imagine you, like, letting loose. Having shots.”

“It’s a bit asinine,” Derek agrees, “but a few too many is all right every now and then.”

“Will you get drunk at my birthday party, then? Because, otherwise, I don’t want to go.”

Derek kisses Stiles on the lips, with a smile on his face, and shakes his head. “Of course I won’t.”

“But what if I want you to and I ask you to? Then you have to do it, because I asked.”

“Why do you want me to get drunk so bad?” Derek pulls Stiles close, on top of his lap, nudging his nose against Stiles’ cheek, his jawline, his neck, sniffing at him, the way he likes to do. “So you can have blackmail to use against me?”

“Exactly. In another life, I think I was a DC villain, you know, blackmailing people, embezzling money, running bank jobs, having goons, this that and the other thing. I think in another life, I could be really evil.”

“Is that so?” Derek doesn’t seem to think so, not at all, because he smirks at Stiles like he thinks Stiles is being cute.

“For sure. Other people grow up like me, have the childhood I had, and then sleep around with werewolves for money and see the things I’ve seen, they turn into the Joker.”

“You don’t seem like the Joker to me,” Derek murmurs against Stiles’ neck, pressing kisses up and down the column of Stiles’ throat, and Stiles huffs a breathy laugh, because it tickles.

“Well. I never had the funds. Or, the means.”

“Or, maybe,” Derek looks up into Stiles’ eyes, “you’re just not evil. Maybe you’re just a good person who’s been handed an unfair lot in life.”

Stiles looks away. Yeah. Maybe.

“That’s all over now, you know that, right?” Derek asks him, using his fingers to turn Stiles’ face to look him in the eye. “Now, you don’t have to scrape to get by, or go to the bad part of town, or desperately try to get someone to love you. You have all the money you want, and someone to always remember your birthday. It’s what you deserve.”

“I don’t know,” Stiles ducks his head sheepishly and shrugs. It’s hard to imagine him deserving much of anything – let alone a fortune, let alone beautiful things and beautiful houses and expensive cars and a staff and a whole family of people to throw him a birthday party. It just doesn’t feel real to him.

Where’s the catch? There has to be one. There just has to be.

Of course, there already is one. His happy ending happens to be with a werewolf. And many people out there in the world don’t think that’s a very happy ending at all – his father, for one. The Argents. Other anti-werewolf groups, all over the world, who work tirelessly to roll back any progress that happens in society to make things better. All of these are people who will stop at nothing to keep Stiles and Derek apart.

Not to even mention the other werewolves in the world who hate the Hales, who hate humans, who would do things to Stiles that Stiles can’t even imagine, just because he’s human, just because he’s with Derek.

But those people, all that bullshit – that’s why Stiles follows Derek’s lead, and does what Derek wants him to do. He packs his things up, and gets on the jet, and he leaves Colorado. He does not go home, like he wanted to. He does not think he really has a home anymore, at least, not a brick-and-mortar home, not a real place he can always go back to, nowhere physical.

His home is wherever Derek is. They could be happy anywhere, so long as they were together. This is what Stiles tells himself.

He goes to Wyoming. He goes to start the rest of his life with Derek, no matter what anybody else thinks about what kind of ending that is for him.