Archive of Our Own

-

All in all, it has not been that long since the supernatural world irrupted in Stiles’ life, turning it upside down in a hurricane of terror and hot people with unnatural abs.

Months.

And yet; this where he is now.

On a Tuesday’s night. In the middle of the forest. Again.

Even to his human nose, the air smells like split earth, rotten leaves and blood, flat and heavy in his lungs. The moon hangs low enough in the sky to impale itself on the treetops.

A few feet away from Stiles, a body is burning and werewolves are digging a grave.

This is what a usual looks like for Stiles now.

He is seventeen.

He is so tired.

Hot pulses of pain throb along his arm when he bends down to retrieve the obsidian knife. He tucks the shattered blade in his back pocket and inspects his forearm with detachment.

The dancing light of the fire is kind to his wounds, turning dirt, blood and blooming bruises into innocuous dancing shadows. The pain feels remote, trapped under layers and layers of exhaustion.

He knows –from experience— that agony is waiting to ambush him under the harsh lamp of his bathroom, in all its overexposed, saturated glory. He’s already too exhausted for it.

“Maybe –”

Stiles startles. Derek’s voice is hoarse, scratching the air like a match igniting. Stiles’ face wrinkles, remembering the creature’s claws gripping Derek by the neck; remembering blood spurting on the grass when it sent the alpha flying away from Kira.

“Maybe…” This time, Derek’s voice is clearer, but it still falters.

The pack zeroes on him, curiosity sharpening. Boyd stops with his shovel in midair. Derek is not one to hesitate often.

Derek looks back, gaze bouncing from one pack member to the next. He straightens, his casual posture fake-looking. His damaged arm is trying—and failing— to fit his hand in his pocket, his fingers slipping against his jean with a wet noise.

“You should come back with me tonight?” He interrupts himself, his eyes darting to the trees, shoulders hunching “I have enough space. My…my mother used to say that people bleeding together should heal together.”

The silence grows thicker. From the corner of his eye, Stiles can see Scott dragging the tip of his foot through a pile of leaves and Jackson staring at the dirt on the handle of his shovel.

So. ‘Derek talking overtly of his mom’ is apparently the long sought-after mute button for their pack of assholes. What an awkward timing for this discovery.  

“I have first aid kits for humans too?” Derek adds, obviously misinterpreting their silence.

Derek is wearing his “I can do this, I’m the Alpha” expression, with the determined eyes, raised chin and thin lips. It’s adorable and extremely sad, and it makes Stiles want to hug him in self-defense.

The silence drags on. The body burns merrily in the background.

The light dances over the planes of Derek’s face. When he frowns, a spark of humiliation creeping in the set of his mouth and shoulders, Stiles finally steps up.

“I will need all the food,” he only says, because he’s too drained to address the whole ‘dead family’ thing. Derek nods seriously. “Okay then. Lead the way.”

They still have to put the fire out first and burry the remains of the creature under a massive amount of dirt.

They walk back in silence, focused on the uneven ground and the branches clinging to their clothes. Allison fumbles and her knife clings against a rock, bouncing in a shard of reflected moonlight. Jackson bends down to pick it up and Allison smiles, worn-out but warm. Boyd leans a little heavily on the left and Erica naturally slips under his arm. Isaac is holding on Scott’s shirt like a kid afraid to get lost.

When Stiles trips over his third unseen root, Derek offers his good elbow without a word. Stiles would protest being assisted like a fainting maiden, but he’s too tired. And he doesn’t really care.

His fingers close around the unappealing wet-yet-grinding sensation of blood drying on leather. Under it, Derek is warm and steady.

Stiles clings to him and breathes.

---

Stiles’ head has always been too full. Full of ideas and images, flashing all over his brain like grenades, over and over and over.

It took him a while to realize that others think in a straight line. That their ideas follow each other in an orderly fashion, all flowing along in a logical stream.

But Stiles’ head is a constant firework; his neurons arsonists in a brain made of straw. Ideas spread through it all like oil spills, lighting up ten new concepts in their paths, each then imploding into thirty new pathways.

To Stiles, living is a precarious exercise in balance, of trying to contain the ever-expanding mess by spilling as much as possible from his mouth, stumbling over his own thoughts when the existing words are just not enough.

Drawing, he discovers early, is just opening the valves and letting the build-up flows away.

His dad still likes to tell the story of his debuts as a very small, chubby artist. How Stiles’ drawings used to invade the fridge, his desk and his wife’s office in bright splashes of colors and clumsy shaped figures. Up until they overflowed all the surfaces of the house and got relegated to thick binders. He likes to show off the wall on the first floor which got an impromptu relooking, outcome of a distracted babysitter and melted crayons.

But his dad generally stops talking of his exploits around the first time Stiles drew on someone.

On that particular day, Stiles is in a hospital chair, the plastic squeaky and uncomfortable. His feet can’t quite reach the ground so he’s batting them in the air, itchy and impatient and terrified. He has no paper to draw on but his brain is reeling, absorbing every sound, every word. They all stay stuck in his head, biting, twisting and rolling over each other, shaping for him infinite horrible scenarios and empty futures.

The toe of shoes drags on the ground. A machine beeps, another rumbles. There is a window looking over a cemented parking lot, the light sometimes pulses red from arriving ambulances. A machine beeps lower. His hands are twitching on the plastic of the chair.

Another beep.

Stiles leans down to grab the pencil on the nightstand, rushed and clumsy. One end has been chewed on and there is not a lot of ink left. When the tip touches his mother’s skin, she laughs, tickled. Stiles grins, sits closer to the edge of his chair and puts her hand down on his knee.

He uses her other hand as an example, staring directly at the needle for the first time. It’s big, almost horrific stuck there under her paper skin, ugly and bruising her pale yellows and greens after several weeks of treatments.

  Stiles draws the needle and the tape over it, but the tube he draws is empty of any drug. He fills it with stars, hundreds of them, small and packed. The star-filled tube runs all over her forearm and he lets it disappears around her elbow.

  When it’s done, he returns to the back of her hand. He places planets in concentric circles all around the tapes. The ones on the edges of her hand or her fingers are lonely, sad things. Just circles floating there. But closer to the needle, he puts more details in them. They have their own oceans and lands, with satellites and meteors.

He tells her all the stories of this awkwardly drawn universe, the circles made unperfect by the dry wrinkles in her skin. He describes the people who use marshmallow as a currency and their neighboring world full of Jedi and wizards fighting each other.

When he surfaces from his inspirational fugue, his mother is staring at him with teary eyes, a soft smile on her lips. She kisses his forehead, her star adorned thumb caressing his temple.

She never lets a nurse wash it away.

It starts to fade anyway, but Stiles draws them all back before she even has the time to look disappointed. He adds new planet for each of his stays. The small universe keeps reaching further, crawling slowly toward the meat of her hand and the vulnerable skin under her wrist. He brings colors back from home and colors the stars in the tube, one by one, using all the color.  

His father takes pictures every time, documenting the progression of their very own universe.

-

As an adult, Stiles finds the pictures in a box in a random drawer. Looking back on it, he can now see the clumsiness of his childish hands. The awful use of depth, how all the stars in the tube are misshapen, with an irregular number of branches and colors blending badly together.

He puts all the pictures side by side on his desk, and follows the shades of the skin beneath the ink, whiter and whiter, blue veins slashing through the universe.

On the very last one, the planets are everywhere, drawn on skin pale as a canvas.

--

Thing is, in spending his teenage years fighting to survive, Stiles forgot to plan for normalcy.

It’s been years now, since the woods and the terror and the blood. And Stiles went away.

He did the whole college-alcohol-party-boyfriends/girlfriends-breakup-roommate thing. He now has the framed diploma and horrible pictures on his fridge to prove it.

But even after all this time, normalcy still feels…hollow.

It’s terrible, because all of this should have been his reward. The perfect life filmed with an oversaturated filter and artistic blur at the end of the horror movie.

It’s been years, and Stiles’ life is good and normal.

And Stiles hates. Every. Second. Of. It.

He hates trying to get his coffee in the morning, only to suffer through petty people getting snippy at the cashier for a five minutes delay.

He hates the screeches of tires, motors rearing, kids screaming, dogs barking, people appearing to fast around corners.

He hates the parties, the drinks and the people he can’t trust. The bodies everywhere pressing on him. He hates the noise of it, the silence of his room.

He hates the ads in the street and how any splash of red, that always, always looks like gore for a heartbeat.

He hates doors and the anxiety they trigger in him; too vulnerable when they stay open, trapped when they don’t.

He hates the terror buried in his bones, crawling down his spine, shredding his lungs, buzzing in his brain.

He waits for things to get better.

He clenches his teeth and waits longer.

Waits harder.

But, slowly, his body turns into a thing to pilot. He feels as if there is too much skin and muscles and bones on his soul, and all of them grind again each other like rusty cogs. The world happens too much and too little and he just can’t dial his life at the right volume.

Stiles doesn’t know how to just be anymore.

He wants to crawl out of his skin, to carve himself out of this dull world before drowning in it.  

One day, he wonders if this is what life is really supposed to taste like.

One day, he wonders if this was all really worth fighting for.

One day, he wonders if this is still worth fighting for.

It’s the thought that finally stops him.

The very next day, he piles all his stuff in the jeep, waves back at his astonished former flatmates and heads straight back to Beacon Hills.

He drives just a little too fast, windows rolled all the way down to drown the buzzing silence.

He knocks on the door of his childhood house, hugs his bewildered dad. He tries to ignore how a smile feel more like muscles cramping in his cheeks than happiness now. He puts the messy boxes in his old room and doesn’t open them.

He tries to breath.

-

And in Beacon Hills too, the people grumble when the line is held back for a minute at the coffee shop

But Stiles also learns that he is the last one to come back. At a table in the back of a cafe, in the streets, at the gas station, he meets them once more. One by one, armed with shiny new diplomas and their very own hollow smiles.

Isaac fist bumps him but flashes fangs when a door bangs against a wall. Allison laughs too much or not at all over her iced coffee. Scott hugs too hard, too long, too often. Erica smirks are sharper than ever, her humor a bright light on a rainy Monday, and her fingers tear through the sugar bowl when a car drive by loudly. Lydia flinches without obvious reason. Jackson refuses to touch anyone except Lydia. Kira walks around even the smallest puddles. Boyd overtexts but talks even less than before.

Derek only seems able to breathe fully when he finally has them all in front of him at the same time.

Their old pack of brazen teenagers has turned into the mess of broken and twitchy adults promised by all these years of blood and loss. All of them thousands different flavors of tragedies.

But, still, together?

They fit.

Somehow, numbed by empty conversations and disposable friendships, Stiles almost lost that. The gritty talks, the horrible memories and the broken pieces of people. The inappropriate laughs, the morbid jokes and the bone-deep loyalty. The hours together in relative silence before parting ways. Understanding. Comfort.

Normal could never be enough now that Stiles remembers what real feels like.

Together, they go to movies and dinners, for ice creams and coffees. Matches, shopping trips, walks and road trips.

They meet all over Beacon Hills, get lost in small towns and big cities, gravitate around each other’s without planning for it, like an evidence. 

They are too loud, too raucous, too raw.

They get expulsed from a movie theater for screaming stupid comments at the screen, Boyd and Stiles sharing popcorn while Jackson and Kira try to argue with security.

They pay hundred dollars’ worth of fruits in a supermarket, Derek looking hilarious with his very serious adult face, money in hands and crushed strawberries all over his shoulders and neck. Allison tries to get berries out of her hair while Scott and Isaac collect the few salvable products from the ground. That night, they make homemade cocktails from beaten up fruits. Isaac makes small, colorful origami umbrellas. Erica puts too much alcohol in the cocktails and Kira ends up snoring on her lap.

They get banned from Beacon Hills’ most expensive restaurant in the middle of Erica’s birthday. Stiles cackles the whole way out, Erica piggy backing on his back and licking tiramisu from her fingers and his cheek. Jackson steals napkins, head held high. Isaac turns them into origami frogs and a crooked camel. Derek is smiling, small and pleased, ignoring the restaurant’s owner recriminations.

They start to look for places where they can exist as hard as they want without collecting judging glances.

They go back into the woods with all alcohol they can now legally buy and to Derek’s house with all the pizzas they can carry.

Stiles comes home late on a Monday, drunk on a Friday, happy on a Tuesday.

Derek’s new house is big and beautiful in a muted way, windows all over the walls and light everywhere, comfy chairs and old couches in every nook and cranny.

They gather there for hours, yelling at each other, playing games and discussing the more disturbing and stupid subjects. They bicker too loudly, order too much food, tips largely. Derek’s Netflix queue is a hopeless, entangled mess.

Erica leaves lipstick stains and claw gouges on the larger couch after wrestling with Jackson. Allison finds a chair where she fit perfectly, bent in five like a yoga master, and declares it hers forever. Isaac only really sits on the ground, much to Derek growing dismay. When buying new chairs doesn’t help, Derek starts to invest in hairy, ugly carpets and long, twisty pillows made for pregnant women.

Slowly, Stiles forgets to come home.

Food, drink, clothes, shoes, videogames invade Derek’s house. Things pop up everywhere like invasive species, on a windowsill, under the coffee table, on the chimney. Stiles starts a collection of ugly mugs in the first kitchen cupboard on the left and Lydia of old romantic books and science treaties on the main bookshelf. Isaac buys an array of weirdly shaped cacti and line them all along the windows. Jackson and Scott turn part of the garden into a crude lacrosse field. Derek crams more human first aid into the two bathrooms of the house.

Slowly, Stiles starts to wonder where home is.

Kira falls in love with the sunrise through one of the bedroom’s window, and ends up buying a bed for it. Erica and Boyd clean the attic up and forget to ever really leave it. Jackson brags about his beautiful flat but takes three days to realize that Scott hid his keys. Isaac unofficially moved in the big house months ago.

They don’t talk about it, but they keep bringing in boxes and pictures and mismatched furniture. Every time they cross the threshold, Derek’s shoulders loosen a little bit more.

One Sunday morning, Stiles wakes up in a room with crisp white sheets and violently purple pillows, goes down to fill his ugliest mug with already brewed coffee and leans against Derek’s shoulder on the lopsided couch. Isaac is munching on cereals, back against the coffee table, his greeting a fuzzy thing from under wild bed hair. In the silence of the living room, the beats of pop music make the ceiling vibrate and Kira’s voice filters from the open door of her bedroom, upbeat and offkey. Jackson is already yelling. Scott and Allison are giggling like teenagers in the kitchen and clearly burning something to a crisp in Lydia’s brand-new frying pan.  

One Sunday morning, Stiles wakes up at home and finally stops trying to leave it.

--

Domesticity is a fast, if rough, teacher.

Stiles has known these people for years. He’s seen them bleeding, broken, shifting, dying.

It’s sobering to realize that it never meant knowing them. And, after a few weeks in what is now the official pack’s house, it quickly becomes obvious that they are all so much more fucked up than Stiles ever feared.

Erica still flinches away from sudden lights or flashes during movie nights, her entire body going on lock down. She’s tense afterward, fangs showing up easily and looking for the most stupid fights.

Boyd and Isaac can both turn deadly silent, in opposite but equally dangerous ways to overlook. Boyd, disappearing like the kid that used to hide in the hope someone would look for him. Isaac, like the kid that used to hide and pray not to be found. Some days, Boyd’s hands shake when he sees kids with inattentive parents in the supermarket. Sometimes, Isaac’s shoulders stay locked up tight for hours until someone realizes that they left dirty dishes in the sink.

Domesticity on Derek is nothing like Stiles imagined. His edges are soft, too soft. He tends to walk on tiptoes if they’re not careful, so far from the abrupt alpha persona he used to adopt. He plays the game of chores easily. Too easily. Middle child, Stiles remembers sometimes. Not anymore, he always corrects himself, the thought like a punch.

Allison can’t stomach meat. Scott is paranoid of any strangers in their space. Lydia’s screaming nightmares make the walls of her soundproofed room shake. Jackson won’t admit that he can’t stand silence, but gets explosive if left too long alone. Kira is always, always cold.

Stiles turns into a non-breathing ball of anxiety if anybody leaves the house without their phone.

None of them are fine.

The whole experiment is a perfect recipe for a disaster. They have to try so hard to prevent their various edges from scraping against each other and blowing the whole pack into smithereens.

Somehow, it works.

Somehow, it lasts.

And, somehow, it gets easier.

And then.

Then, they get to discover all the good parts.

Boyd’s ridiculous underwear, with the stupid quotes and geeky jokes that Stiles adores so much. The little shimmy he will sometimes do in them in the morning just to make them laugh.

Erica’s epic love songs for the coffeemaker that Lydia likes to hum along with, off-key, shuffling in front of the frying pan in fuzzy socks.

Allison sometimes curling on Stiles’ bed in the mornings, a lovely weight against his shoulder, all sleep mussed and slow, petting his hair in the warm light of the room.

Isaac’s tendencies to wear the closest clothes available, pulling anything off with the aplomb of a seasoned model.

Jackson and Kira hilarious, identical tastes in music. Their intense bonding sessions, sequestered together in a room. How cozy they look, huge headphones on their ears, streaming concerts on Jackson’s shiny laptop.

Scott’s epic love story with the new beanbag. The phone calls he makes regularly to the house from the vet clinic in the hope of adopting the new broken animal of the day.

Derek’s delightful friendship with the little old lady living a few minutes down the road, the one that honest to God makes homemade jam and pats Derek’s cheek.

Stiles knows these people now. Learns to discover them a bit more each day, the broken and the shiniest parts, the old habits and the newly built routines.

So, he’s quite surprised it takes them almost two whole months to discover the whole drawing thing.

-

Scott is on his beloved beanbag, hugging it in his arms like a shapeless teddy bear. The bottom half of his body is dramatically splayed on the ground, legs everywhere and his face mashed against the tissue. He hasn’t moved in a while, eyes fixated on the movie. His shirt has ridden up during his slow collapse toward the ground.

The movie on screen is bland in the way only generic comedies can be. It’s not even bad enough to be funny, and before Stiles realizes it, he’s sliding towards the ground, grabbing a stray pen from the coffee table on the way.

He decides to sketch Cthulhu on Scott’s back, vaguely wondering if it’ll be wide enough for the number of tentacles he’s envisaging. The pen is a little bit thinner than he would prefer, but he’s too lazy to go find something else in his room.

Scott, used to it, doesn’t even twitch when the tips touches his skin, cold with ink.

It takes Stiles a long time to realize that the silence in the room has shifted from slight boredom to frozen disbelief.

“Did someone slip wolfsbane in the popcorn and am I tripping balls right now, or is Stilinski giving McCall a hentai tramp stamp?” Jackson’s voice sounds overly posh, as it always does when surprised.

“Please, if I were to draw porn, there would no place for doubt in your mind. When have you ever known me to be subtle?” answers Stiles, distracted, trying to rectify the shadow on a tentacle. Scott is chuckling, and it’s difficult to keep the shading homogeneous on a shaking medium.

“He has always done that. He’s great at it,” says Scott, voice muffled but unwaveringly loyal. Stiles pats him on the hip.

“Drawing porn?” insists Erica, a predatory rumble in her voice.

“Yes,” Stiles replies with a filthy smile in her direction. She grins back, delighted. Boyd shakes his head, lips curling up.

“Drawing,” corrects Lydia. When Stiles turns in her direction, head cocked, she waves her hand slightly, “you used to doodle on your arm all the times in school.”

Even years out of his puppy-love crush for her, Stiles is still immensely flattered that she took the time to notice.

“It’s good. You are very good,” Derek comments, voice soft. Something flutters in Stiles, because, well. Derek. “I like the tentacle. It has…personality.”

“It’s flipping Jackson off,” explains Stiles, his fingers tracing a path in the air between the dimples on Scott’s back and Jackson. Derek nods, smiling faintly.

“Hey!! Fuck you Stilinski!”

In the end, it’s that simple. From then on, they never single the habit out again.

But they never forget about it.

--

In the terrible years after losing his mom, he feels alone, lost, and his father is so, so slow to smile. Helplessness and anxiety become the monsters of his teenage years, eating at his life like acid.

The anxiety makes everything worse. Suddenly, his messy brain feels like a spaceship sent into self-destruct mode. Everything is flashing red, all the time, the noises too strong and the lights too bright and there is a sense of panic, of disaster, buzzing just under his skin.

Occasionally, his body decides to just stop. To push the self-destruct button. To leave him on the ground for his father to find, gasping through frozen lungs.

He sees the specialists. He talks, a little. He tries to explain, but the words are messy, hollow, unable to express the vast emptiness and chaos between his neurons. They give him all the scientific names, the breathing exercises, the meds.

He fakes smiles through it all. Nothing really changes.

The rest of the time, he draws. He draws on paper in his room, alone, then in the margins of his notes in class. He draws on his hand and his forearm and his napkin and his desk.

He draws on Scott. He draws their favorite superheroes and battle plans for their next video game night. He draws stick people and the bird singing outside. He draws spirals and fractals and mazes. He draws sketches of teachers, of slice of high school life. He writes number and notes and memos.

Scott is the obvious medium when Stiles runs out of space on his own body. He willingly offering himself Stiles starts to fidget, not even thinking about it.

It’s Scott, so it’s easy.

And it could have stayed something just between the both of them for years.

But Stiles had decided to go hunting for a dead body in the night. And, as always, Scott had followed.

--

There is a very peculiar weirdness to Beacon Hills Preserve, an atmosphere that keeps even old inhabitants of the town far away from it.

The hazy light through the leaves, subtly bending away from the path and never really reaching the undergrowth. The cold, biting smell clinging to the trunks even in the middle of the Californian summer. The sweet chirping of birds and the terrible, sudden absence of it. The low thrum of power through the trees, dull pulse beating slowly like the heart of an ancient creature.

Stiles has bled all over the Preserve’s dirt and rotten leaves. He has run, crawled, patrolled the Preserve so many times that he could recognize the feel of it blind.

And for years, it only meant fear and adrenaline and chaos to him.

But he’s a different Stiles now.

He has hours of Derek’s stories, young werewolves causing mayhem and running through the ancestral trees. He has countless nights under the stars, whispers in the cold air and black foliage an armor against the world. He has all the campfires and laughter soaking the air, moss damp under his ass but trunk sturdy at his back. He has days bathing in the sun, shadows of leaves dancing and soothing on his arms and legs.

He’s had months of it breathing, living through the windows of his house. Green, yellow, red, black, grey, green. Life flying and crawling and running in and out of it.

He knows the pulse of its magic, old and earth deep, resonating in his bones like an old childhood song.

He’s still wary of the Reserve, in the respectful way of humans facing old beasts.                                                                                                                                                          

But he loves it, in all its implacable beauty.

He pets the bark under his fingers, wonders at the grooves, so similar to his own fingerprints. He can feel the energy running through the wood, the sap, the roots, the neighboring trees. Magic is energy, always changing, morphing. And here, deep in the woods, it hums like a grid, running from root to root, tree to tree, life to life. On a magical level, bugs and trees and budding flowers and human and werewolves are just slight nuances of life. Just connection, fluid, calming. And, to Stiles, it sings.

"Stilinski, are you going to do some hocus pocus? Or are we supposed to wait here and stare at you angsting like a crazy teenage girl in a shitty vampire movie?” Jackson’s voice breaks Stiles’ focus and he sighs.

« You came back three seconds ago and clearly didn’t see any of the runes already in places, you failure of a wolf. Also, don’t makes fun of teenage girls. They are stronger than you. »

« Oh please, it’s too early for feminism » answers Jackson, an eye roll in his voice and flying over the insult with the ease of habit. Stiles turns his head away from the tree, eyes narrowing toward a shirtless Jackson.

« I know I did not hear you say that. First, because I know that if you really thought that, Lydia would never let you see her naked. Ever.” He points his chin towards Lydia, who nods. “Also, because I know Derek gave you the “respect women” talk, and it’s lethal. He talks about his mom, his sisters AND his grandmother. He calls her Nana. You can’t possibly want to go through that again. »

« Not everyone is as weak as you are for Derek’s backstory, Stilinski » Jackson grinds his teeth, but he’s balancing his weight from one foot to the other, and looking at the tree line from the corner of his eyes. Derek’s “respect women” talk is the kind one can only emotionally endure once.

« You tried to bought Derek cars the day after the talk. Cars, plural. » Reminds Isaac, appearing in the clearing barefoot and grinning. He somehow has leaves in his hair already and mud on his elbow.

« I’m rich! Filthy rich! I can buy cars to people if I want to! » Jackson is starting to get agitated, hands in the air and shoulders crawling toward his head.

« Please, Derek is richer than you, » reminds Stiles, still petting the bark. The magic flowing through the tree bends into his palm like a purring, friendly cat. His magic crackles over the tip of his finger, golden and fizzling in the air like tame lightning.

« Are we debating who would make the best sugar daddy again? » Asks Lydia, stopping her inventory to raise her head in interest. It’s one of her favorite topics for debate, and she tends to argue different sides for the intellectual challenge of it. Also, Stiles suspects, to makes Jackson’s face contort in that particularly offended way.

« I maintain that Derek is kind of already ours, if you think about it, » Isaac argues devotedly once more, rubbing at the drying mud on his elbow.

« I am really, really not. »

Derek materializes from the shadows of the woods like the creature of the night that he is. He looks pained/sad, like he can’t believe he survived all these years of suffering, only to be inflicted this conversation for a third time.

Stiles chuckles, turning his focus back toward the tree. The voices squabbling in the background get muffled, his entire attention on the complex pattern of the bark.

It took him time, to really understand what the spark meant. To catch the electricity ricocheting in his brain, the exhilaration of possibility. All in all, magic is imagination escaping through his fingers to reach reality.

Stiles has known how to do that since he was a kid.

He pushes his fingers against the trunk and believes. The bark cracks when the rune appears, as if clawed slowly into the wood, long spindling lines tearing through the tree. The brand shines red, brilliant and viscous, like glitters dipped in blood. The air is too warm around Stiles’ hand but it bites at his fingers like crisp water.

Kira turns toward him when the glow becomes strong enough to reach them and she looks thrilled, as always. Her fingers are buried in Allison’s hair and she keeps braiding it expertly, even without looking. Allison’s eyes are closed.

Lydia’s hand curls around Stiles’ waist, her sharp perfume a wonderful contrast to the rich smell of the magic. She looks at the rune etching itself in the wood with an approving murmur. She was the one to find it, just a few days ago, in one of her numerous dusty books. Stiles is glad to know that his rendition is up to her high standards.

The runes finally get absorbed into the bark, the tree accepting the magic in a shudder of leaves. Stiles can feel the magic grid of the reserve shivers like a spiderweb hit by rain. It vibrates, changes, pulls tight for a second and releases on a slightly altered note, forming anew around them.

The werewolves raise their heads in the exact same movement, eyes flashing gold, blue, red.

Stiles smiles at them all, slow and promising. Lydia hums, her temple against his shoulder, basking in the satisfied rumble of energy in the air.

“Five minutes head start,” Stiles announces.

He hasn’t even finished talking that Erica has already hurled herself into the woods with a whoop of delight, Jackson and Isaac close on her heels and trying to body slam her into the trees. Boyd jogs calmly to the edge of the clearing, disappearing with a playful salute.

Allison stands up, brushing her knees and checking her shoelaces while Kira stretches, still grinning, arms held high over her head. Lydia plays with her pouch, passing it from hand to hand thoughtfully.

Derek is the last wolf to retreat, sending them one last look to make sure everything is alright.  Stiles shoos him off with his fingers.

“Clock’s ticking Derek. I would say…ten minutes today. Jackson first caught.”

“Two hours,” Derek answers, eyebrows raised in challenge, trotting backward toward the woods. “…maybe Jackson.”

“Homemade burgers and bragging rights?”

“Homemade burgers and bragging rights.”

Always a fan of dramatic exits, Derek jumps high into an unnecessary backflip, muscles twisting to land on four paws. The darkness of the Preserve swallows him instantly, the darkness of Derek’s fur made to melt into the shadows. 

“Show off,” mutters stiles, amused.

His only answer is a mocking bark from deep in the woods.

--

Erica is the first.

She’s waiting in Stiles’ room, a shadow in red skirt and darker lipstick leaning against his desk. She doesn’t talk, doesn't even look up when he enters. Her fingers play in silence with the markers on Stiles’ desk.

Stiles sits on his bed and waits.

She rips her top off suddenly and Stiles jumps, taken aback by the abruptness of the movement. Her hair is a wild mass in front of her face but she brushes them back with one hand, her eyes reappearing. When she looks at him, she’s defiant.

Stiles blinks at her, baffled. He has no idea what’s expected of him right now.

When Erica points to the flat expanse of her belly, he approaches cautiously. Her skin is pale over lean muscles, unmarred except for one tiny, ragged scar etched under her navel.

Stiles remembers the cafeteria, Erica convulsing on the floor just a few feet away, surrounded by students staring in silence. He remembers the sickening screech of broken glass scraping against the tiles under her. He remembers red spreading on the side of her shirt, the panicked looks in their teacher’s eyes. He remembers Erica’s desk, empty for two weeks afterward.

Stiles is still staring when Erica throws him one of his markers and raises her chin in a clear challenge.

Between Stiles’ fingers, the marker is blood red.

Stiles grins.

He ends up kneeling in front of her, pens and sharpies thrown on the floor all around them. All his weight is braced on her thighs but she never vacillates, her strength as unyielding as her gaze.

Under her bellybutton he traces the faint shape of a beetle, brilliant green like the one that fell on Jackson a few weeks ago, making him shriek.

  When Erica recognizes it, she laughs, just as she did in the forest. The heaviness in the air thaws.

Stiles smiles up at her, waggles his eyebrows and starts doodling a mantis on her flank in blues and purples. Its thorax is thin, easily breakable, but its forelegs are long, raised high enough for their spikes to graze her ribs.  

Just under her bra, he creates a specie with way too many wings, each ending in spines thin as blades. He colors it in cold greys and metallic sharpies.

Finally, his fingers brush the scar puckering her skin. She doesn’t tense, her body supple and trusting, leaning against him as much as he is against her.

With a few lines, he turns it in a grey black cocoon. Then, with and almost jerk of his wrist, he splits it in two.

When he draws the butterfly, in the deep red she chose first, Stiles is standing close enough for his nose to touch her belly. Erica’s hand close against his nape, soft and light. She doesn’t move away.

The butterfly is a tiny thing crawling out of its chrysalid, crumpled antennas first. His wings are still wrinkled, vulnerable.

But Stiles looks at it and thinks of chaos suspended on the flimsy edge of wings. He thinks of beauty and frailty giving birth to hurricanes.

Erica’s hand clamps tighter on his neck, solid and familiar.

When she grins, her teeth gleam like fangs and her eyes burn like wolf.

Stiles guesses she sees it too.

--

There is a language common to the people who had to leave parts of themselves buried in the dirt; a rhythm to their words, made of bitten off names, silences that weight too much and answers that ring hollow.

Stiles and his dad have been fluent in it for years.

So, he doesn’t need to be very alert to catch it in Derek’s voice that morning. Derek is only asking for the kettle, but his voice seems cored out, like sound reverberating oddly in a newly emptied home.

Stiles freezes like a hunted fox, head held low over his Erica’s Special Sunday Breakfast (eggs and bacon in a mug, spoon optional, washing up minimal). When he slowly picks his head up, it’s to meet Boyd’s frown. They both share a look when Derek leaves the kitchen, tea in hands and face blank. With only a faint nod for Boyd, Stiles rises up to follow, catching the mug full of coffee offered by Isaac with a distracted thanks.

He finds Derek on the old couch, computer open in front of him. He’s holding his tea under his chin with both hands but seems more intent on smelling than drinking it. Stiles settles beside him, close enough for their shoulders to touch.

Derek hums in his mug, absent but vaguely interrogative. He shifts a little to lean sideway against Stiles.

The computer screen is black. Derek keeps staring through it.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles murmurs, when Derek’s expression only keeps turning blanker. It makes Derek blink, his brows lowering. He stays silent.

“I know it doesn’t help, but, even after all this time, I’ve never found what I wanted to hear when things are…hard. So, you know, I don’t know what today is for you, but I’m sorry life sucks a bit more sometimes.”

Derek tenses at the word ‘today’, and presses harder against Stiles’ side for a second. Stiles doesn’t need more clues and his left arm curls a little bit around Derek, elbow on the back of the couch but fingers against his ribs. Present but not constricting.

Stiles drinks his coffee with his free hand, not looking straight at Derek but still observing from the corner of his eye. Derek hasn’t moved. From far away, Stiles follows the rise of noise indicating the arrival of other members of the pack in the kitchen, then decreasing after they all leave it. His ears are not good enough to know if they left the house or just went upstairs. Knowing Boyd’s tact, he would bet on the former to afford Derek some privacy.

The silence between them is soft, the world slowed down as if underwater, everything diluted except for a few bright points of hyper focus. Stiles is too aware of the dance of the morning light over the hardwood floor and the fingerprints on the corner of the computer screen.

“It’s—Laura.” Derek’s voice is smooth and a little dusty, fitting perfectly in the quietness of the moment. The name is a tiny blackhole wrapped in softness, infinite loss and love squeezed into too small a word.

Stiles turns his head a little, attentive but not pressuring.

“It’s her birthday and she—” Derek interrupts himself, swallows, breathes once more from his cup of tea. “Was her birthday,” he corrects and, for the first time since Stiles sit down, he fidgets, moving away but immediately pressing back against Stiles, harder, as if to ground himself by force. Stiles grips his waist and Derek relaxes slightly.

“Still is her birthday,” Stiles argues in a whisper. Derek heads tilts a little to the side in agreement.

“She…My mom I mean. She used to make tacos for breakfast on Laura’s birthday. And we would have to eat breakfast for dinner. It was…Apparently, it was hilarious to Laura as a kid, and the tradition stayed. I—We bought some in New York together after—after.” He turns toward Stiles with a small uptick to his lips, which Stiles refuses to count as a smile because of the eyes. “We ate them at 5 AM, on the fire escape before she went to work. I made a cereal and fruit cake for diner.” At Stiles’ raised eyebrows, Derek smirks a little. “Fruit loops. In a cake pan.”

“And how do you put candles in such a feat of cooking, dare I ask?” Stiles smiles.

“Put an apple in the center and riddle it with candles.”

“Ingenious, full of vitamins and theme compliant. I like your style, mister Hale.”

There is a flash of teeth, brief but amused. “Laura hated apples with a passion.” The name is lighter now, grief bowing for an instant under the simple happiness of the memory. “She used to say they were to fruits what shoelaces were to pasta.” His voice drops back to a lower note. “She ate the entire apple anyway, even the parts with wax on them.”

To Stiles, Laura Hale has always been half a corpse; pale skin or black fur and empty eyes contrasting against dirt and purple wolfbane.

She is mainly a part of Derek’s tragic backstory to him, something sad but not really tangible. Laura’s death is sad because of its effect on Derek, not in itself.

But Laura Hale the person apparently loved tacos, hated apples but ate them anyway to make her little brother happy.

Laura Hale used to be alive, before turning into this horrifyingly still thing in the ground. 

The realization shouldn’t be so surprising, but it squeezes around Stiles’ throat and ribcage anyway. 

“She seems like my kind of person,” he admits.

“She’d have adored you,” Derek answers, without any hesitation. Like he’s thought about it before. The pressure in Stiles’ ribcages warms, flutters a little. “She would have loved everyone in the pack, but you the most, I think. You are the same brand of assholes.”

Stiles snorts and Derek’s smile is a real one this time, crooked in the corner.

It looks like a smile that Derek could have learned from Laura, one he grew up staring up at, mirth in her eyes leading to a confident glint of teeth.

Stiles wonders how often they all met Derek’s family, without knowing. Where does Derek stop and his old pack start? Do they bleed up from the depth of Derek’s history and DNA in his hand gestures, in the way he tilts his head to smell the air or to explain one of his outdated expression? Are these his grandmother cheekbones or does he get his bunny teeth from his father? Is his fur the same color as his cousins? 

And did Derek ever meet Stiles’ mom back in the angles of his smiles? In the way Stiles’ words sometimes bite too deep when he’s hurting or the way he laughs too loud when he’s happy?

He hopes Derek likes what he sees of her.

“My mom used to sing me a song. For my birthday, I mean,” Stiles blurts, because he suddenly wants Derek to know that his mom was a real person too. “She was totally out of tune, and she knew it, but my dad always acted as if it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. They were huge dorks together.”

Derek leans down, one elbow on his knee, to put his cold tea on the table. Then he turns to face Stiles, one foot under his thigh, hands on his shin. Stiles’ hand ends up between the couch and Derek’s hip.

“What was the song?”

“Oh, you won’t know it. A polish singer, that she used to listen as a teen. I understand maybe twenty per cent of the lyrics, and mom sang the whole album to me for years. Fun songs though.”

“I… Well, I wouldn’t mind hearing it anyway,” Derek says, soft and smiling, “we can always google translate the lyrics.”

“Sure.” Stiles shrugs, and know that his fake nonchalance is completely see through. He hesitates an instant before making the leap. “We don’t have tacos but we do have bananas and boxes of Cheerios in the kitchen. Want to make a cereal fruit cake? I heard from an expert that it has a very short cooking time, making it the perfect snack. I don’t think we have birthday candles, but if wax is an important part of the experience, I can make do with Lydia’s scented candles.”

Derek snorts, ungainly but genuine.

“Sounds good. I’ll bring the ingredients; you are in charge of the playlist.” He gets up, heading for the kitchen while Stiles pulls the computer on his lap.

“If you are a good boy, I could also show you the associated dance routine mom taught me. Just a warning, I haven’t done it since I was eleven, so I don’t know if I’m still flexible enough to do half of those moves. The eighties were a dark time man,” Stiles yells, fingers running all over the keyboard and not caring that werewolf ears mean he doesn’t really need to speak up.

“Can’t wait,” Derek shouts back, a laugh in his voice.

--

When Stiles first draws on Lydia, neither of them has slept in 36 hours.

 There is coffee between them and enough books to dwarf the huge dining table. Stiles is playing distractedly with the multicolored pencils in his case when inspiration hits, and he grips Lydia’s wrist without a thought. She looks at him, eyebrows raised high over eyes ringed in deep shadows, but she doesn’t take her arm back.

It may be the first time that Stiles has touched her for any reason other than a life-or-death situation.

It’s also the moment he realizes that he’ll never be in love with her again.

Before, she always felt like something too sacred to be touched, something only to be admired from afar. He dreamt of sleeping with her like believers worship, passion and love and a willingness to be changed if necessary; never expecting that change could go both ways.

Now Stiles looks at her, and she’s beautiful even with her hair all over the place and bags under her eyes, and her mind is still something to marvel at, but she’s a person like any other. She can change, and be changed.

He smiles at her, maybe a little bit sadly because falling out of love with her should have been painful but it never was.

Lydia smiles back and turns her hand in his to expose the vulnerable skin of her wrist.

Stiles wonders how long she’s known that he isn’t in love with her anymore. He wonders if it’s the reason she allows him to touch her so easily now.

The pencil tip touches her skin and follows the delicate curve of a vein. It crawls all over her forearm, spills on the side, curls around the bone of her wrist and spreads on the meat of her hand. While she keeps reading with her free hand, Stiles slowly, line after line, outlines a galaxy swirling on her skin.

But Stiles doesn’t draw stars anymore. No, on her the universe he creates is made of neurons.

Their long axons stretch, thin projections reaching others, connecting in a never-ending forest of complexity. He fills each neuron in hues of purple and cardinal blue, bleeding inside each other.

The dozen points of connection between them, he paints in white and blue, like the hottest fires. Against the saturated cells, the synapses shine like a fiery nebula.

He ends it all with a small heart on her pulse point, cheesy and too red, just to make her smile.

--

Human bones are the worst.

Stiles hops awkwardly along the hallway, left hand clutching the wall and cast sliding dangerously on their nice varnished floor.

The pain isn’t that bad –years of supernatural adventures have definitively fucked up his pain tolerance—and in only a few days he’ll be able to use his shiny crutches to move around at will.

The whole thing could have been a nonevent, and Stiles left with a thread of dignity, if Derek hadn’t been there when he got hurt. Of the both of them, Stiles had been the more relaxed. And he was the one with the ankle bent at a seventy-degree angle.

It’s been three days.

Still, Derek hovers.

The advices from the doctor have been turned into a precise bullet point list, taking all the space on their fridge door. Stiles’ crutches are hidden somewhere in the house, not to be restituted until the exact five days of total rest have been respected. Derek put alarms on his phone for all the different pills.

Derek is treating Stiles’ broken bone like it’s a deadly disease. It could have been hilarious, but instead it’s a little creepy and a lot heartwarming. It also makes avoiding to take advantage of Derek very difficult.

Derek carried him up the stairs yesterday.

Stiles was joking.

“Bed, Stiles,” says Isaac when Stiles finally reaches the living room. He’s sprawled on the floor, Allison’s head on his stomach, both of them browsing Netflix with the vacant intensity of the happily bored.

“Is that a naughty invitation? Because I’m so not that kind of boy.” Stiles hops around them, taking care not to crush any stray foot or hair under his cast.

“Yeah, sure,” scoffs Isaac.

Stiles collapses on the sofa head first with a heavy sigh. He’s exhausted after only ten minutes in a vertical position, sweat beading along his hairline. This whole healing process thing is a bitch.

He only missed faceplanting in Derek’s lap by a few inches, his forehead now resting on the outside of Derek’s thigh. His neck complains about the position almost instantly and his cast, too heavy, hangs from the side of the couch, twisting his knee. He weakly tries to use his thigh muscles to get his misbehaving leg up but the pain blooming in his ankle stops him. He grunts.

Above him, Derek sighs. He bends and picks Stiles’ damaged leg up to lay it carefully on the couch arm.

“Thanks,” says stiles, voice muffled against Derek’s jean.

When Derek leans back, Stiles raises his head to look at him, neck hurting a little more under the strain. He feels like a turtle trying to reach a piece of salad.

“You were supposed to be resting,” admonishes Derek, magnificent eyebrows frowning.

“I am resting. Look at me resting all over this couch!” Stiles uses the hand not stuck against the back of the couch to gesture at the entirety of his body. “My room was too boring and I needed to pee anyway. What are you doing?”

Derek stares at him for a second, clearly seeing through the attempted distraction. Still, he turns the book just enough for Stiles to catch a glimpse of the cover. It’s one of the numerous cooking book Melissa bought for them after hearing horrific stories of Jackson trying to cook pasta without water and Erica seriously considering to eat raw chicken.

Stiles often wonders if werewolves can catch scurvy.

“Does that mean they are sweet, cheese-filled experiments in our future?” He asks hopefully. On the ground, Allison and Isaac turns toward them with twin looks of hope. Derek’s lips twitch.

“Could be. After all, we are reaching almost one week without something major breaking in the house.”

“I’ll keep Scott away from the appliances for the day,” promises Allison, head thrown back and hand waving in the air dorkily.

“I will personally tie Jackson up until the deadline,” adds Stiles, free hand trying to reach his heart.

“Yeah, you so are that kind of boy,” mumbles Isaac.

The door of the house opens and closes loudly. Stiles, not being a badass werewolf or an Allison, startles violently, almost clearing right off the couch. Derek, predicting his reaction, keeps Stiles in place with one hand between his shoulder blades.  

The clattering of heels on wood and voices bickering pairs nicely with Stiles’ panicked heartbeat.

He’s only starting to settle down when someone lands on him, stretching all over his body. Stiles squeaks in surprise then hisses in pain when his leg gets jostled.

“Careful! His foot!” snaps Derek, alpha rumbling in his voice. The body on Stiles immediately settles, silence falling back on the room.

Stiles tries to turn his head but, buried in the soft couch and crushed under someone’s weight, his turtle metaphor has never felt more apt.

“Derek. Who’s on my butt?” he finally asks, hoping to distract Derek again before he decides that the living room is too dangerous an environment for Stiles and carries him back to his room.

Stiles is getting tired of the internet. He didn’t know this was possible.

“Not being a werewolf is no excuse to use none of your senses Stiles. You are human, not a rock,” berates Derek in his best alpha-teacher voice. Stiles wonders if this was how Derek’s mom used to sound like when Derek was a kid.

“Thank you Obiwolf. So useful.”

“Stiles,” Derek sighs his name in a way that is so achingly familiar that it tears a smile from Stiles, “didn’t you hear the high heels murdering our floor?”

“This is no clue in this house of madness,” Stiles turns his head, his cheek now resting on Derek’s thigh. He can see Derek from one eye like this. His cheekbone looks dramatic and beautiful even with limited depth perception. “Isaac is fierce in stilettos and you know it.”  

From the ground, Isaacs rumbles proudly. In Stiles’ field of vision, he can barely see Jackson’s head-tilt, taking his scarf off with a considering look down toward Isaac. Jackson finally nods to himself before falling to the floor over Isaac and Allison.  Someone yelps.

From Stiles’ back, a very feminine chuckle dances in the air.

After a few seconds of silence, Erica finally says “I bought tequila.”  

Stiles sighs and feels his ribcage digs deeper into the couch under her weight. He tries to move a shoulder half-heartedly but Erica rides the movement and only flattens herself more on him.

Derek does move a little, allowing Stiles to hook his chin over his thigh. The angle is much better for his neck, but he has to be very careful of his left eye wandering. Derek’s hand curl tighter around his nape, skin soft and warm, the tips of his fingers tangling in Erica’s curls. The dull, pulsing pain in Stiles’ ankle disappears and he breathes out, relieved.

He nuzzles Derek’s thigh in thanks, forehead and nose rubbing against the denim. When he breathes in, it smells like their shared laundry softener.

Erica’s arms close tightly around Stiles’ waist and she buries her head between his shoulder blades.

Stiles decides to follow the doctor’s order and to take another nap.

-

Of all the possibilities Stiles had envisioned when they all invaded Derek’s home, wild nights of drinking with half-naked people were very low on the list. Somehow, this seemed like the type of thing that could not happen under Derek’s roof.

It all started rather innocently, after receiving a gigantic crate of gifts from Cora’s new pack. There was food, books, alcohol and some types of herbs that made Derek pinch the bridge of his nose like a disappointed dad.

The food was amazing. The alcohol was better. The alcohol mixed with the mysterious plants? Was apparently awesome.

It could have stopped there, with Derek reading Cora’s Alpha’s letter out loud and the entire pack laughing and relaxed around the table.

But Erica’s hands had finally found the tequila bottle, her eyes lightening up, and Jackson, in an impressive feat of spontaneous telepathy, had immediately taken his shirt off.

Derek had been too distracted by the letter to immediately intervene and, when he had finally raised his head, Erica was already spreading salt all over Jackson’s collarbones.

No amount of alpha authority could have stopped the landslide after that.

The next morning, around a large, greasy breakfast, Friday drinking nights were established as official pack bounding time.

They only happen roughly twice a month, on weeks where they can all leave work early and buy enough alcohol for everyone. 

Jackson and Erica are always the first one to get their clothes off, because they both have negative levels of shame and abs that apparently requires regular appreciation to survive. More surprising, Lydia and Allison are also always game, and Stiles still doesn’t know if they are in it for the alcohol or the pleasure of watching everybody make asses of themselves. Boyd is easily convinced to join anything involving Erica in lingerie and Scott is unable to function as a werewolf when Allison has her top off. Kira and Isaac both like basking in the insane atmosphere.

Stiles is in it for all the eye candy.

Also, once, a drunk Jackson tried to sexy crawl across the bar and fell head first onto the ground.

Stiles is a man of simple pleasures.

But tonight, Stiles is watching everything unfolds from the plush sitting chair Boyd dragged into the kitchen for him. His cast is resting on a pillow in Derek’s lap, one of his hand cupped around Stiles’ ankle as if to monitor his pain level. Derek has one glass of spiked wine in his other hand, the only drink he will nurse tonight.

Stiles himself is sipping his third coke. Derek’s sobriety comes from a wariness of loss of control and vulnerability; Stiles is on painkillers.

Stiles still licked some soda off of Erica’s belly and salt from Boyd’s shoulder earlier.

He’s sober, not dead.

He does have regrets about this whole sobriety thing though. Some events should never be suffered without a dulled mind.

Everything had started as usual, with a shocking number of empty bottles and clothes all over their kitchen. Boyd and Erica had given a fascinating performance somewhere around their seventh drink, Erica manhandling Boyd into various poses in a filthy version of Yoga, showing off a suppleness Stile had no idea Boyd possessed. Stiles’ fingers had hitched for a pen and paper for a long time after, until Kira had started lighting shots on fire on the kitchen island with a manic grin.

After that, things had gone downhill. Fast.

Allison and Kira competing against Erica and Scott, trying to drink as many shots as possible without using their hands. Jackson laughing, Isaac sprawled against his shoulder and trying to mouth at the bottle in Jackson’s hands, sweet smelling alcohol spilling all over the floor. Erica melting over Derek’s shoulders, whispering things in his ear that made his cheeks redden just a little and Isaac choke on a glass of water. Boyd starting a drinking game that ended up with people being thrown in the air and a laughing Isaac hiding under the kitchen island. Kira dancing on the bar, Erica’s hands gripping her calves and her mouth licking salt from her knee to make her giggle.

The whole night was a whirlwind of things happenings too fast and laughter.

Lydia on the table, Erica with a new bottle of Tequila and salt and lemon. Kira trying to take a selfie with Isaac, who kept trying to make her twirl. Boyd and Jackson pillaging the fridge.

Then.

Allison had climbed on the table after Lydia, wolf whistles flying in the air. She had thrown her leg over Lydia, kneeling over her hips with one hand on her belly to steady herself. Then, with a toothy grin, she had bent her head.

Lydia had not hesitated, her hands bunching in Allison’s hair to drag her down into a kiss, groaning, the slice of lemon fast forgotten on the side.

The whole room had ground down to a halt.

Stiles would never be able to bleach out of his brain the expression on both Jackson’s and Scott’s faces as they had frozen as one.

Jackson had started growling, loudly enough for Stiles to hear it. In a sexy way more than in a bloody way, thanks Jesus. Stiles had not been too keen on the idea of an honor-based death match between drunk werewolves.

Allison had then ground her hips down, pinning Lydia harder against the wood with one hand on her hipbone and Lydia had retaliated by licking overtly into Allison’s mouth.

Scott and Jackson had looked ready to jump straight onto the table. In a sexy way.

They were all going to defile the kitchen table.

Stiles was the one to choose this table. He liked it.

And now, ten minutes later, here they are.

Situation now firmly out of control.

Allison has moved herself to a nearby chair, Lydia on her lap with an arm thrown possessively over her neck. They are still missing some key clothes or buttons, looking as if they could not care less. Both of their gazes are riveted to the table where Jackson is now splayed out like an obscene offering. That man has never been able to let someone else upstage him for long.

Scott –Stiles’ brother Scott– has somehow been roped into this madness, and is currently draped all over Jackson with a salt shaker in his hand and the grin of a man discovering the marvels of a fluid sexuality.

Jackson is preening under him, all hooded eyes and demurely crossed wrists. He arches his back, slowly, to make the tequila rolls through his abs. Scott is clearly in way over his head, blinking and breathing too fast.  He seems to love every second of it.

Stiles wants to die, but, in all fairness, he kinds of understand. These are some pretty formidable abs.

Stiles chugs down his coke, hoping that a brutal sugar rush will erase the whole night from his memory.

Erica is now whistling so loudly that Boyd actually has to take a step back from her, wincing. Isaac is shaking his head but grinning and Kira, leaning against him, is filming the whole thing with her phone, her cup held between her teeth. She looks like she regrets not having enough hands free to clap in excitement.

From around Stiles’ foot, Derek sighs the sigh of the very tired.

Erica shouts something particularly vile and Stiles turns his weary gaze from the bottom of his cup toward the table.

Scott is now pinning Jackson’s wrists against the wood.

There is a lull of stillness, Jackson’s muscles obviously bulging while he tests Scott’s grip. The noise level lowers for a second and doubt pierces through the tipsy enjoyment all over Scott’s face. But he doesn’t have the time to backpedal before Jackson just gives.

His body softens, tension rolling out of his shoulders, his body one long line of sweat ending in a wild smile. Jackson bares his throat slowly, pointedly, eyes like a steel trap.

Scott falls onto him like a starved predator, mouth first, saltshaker and heterosexuality sent clattering to the ground.

Lydia’s head snaps up like a shark tasting blood in the water while Allison’s eyes turn dark, her whole body leaning closer.

Stiles tries not to gag.

He’s going to have to burn his table.

“Do I even want to know what you are smelling right now?” He asks Derek, trying but unable to tear his gaze away from the scene unfolding in front of his eyes. Every detail seems awfully sharp, shards burying straight into Stiles’ brain with the promise of a memory in Blu-ray-levels of definition. More than anything, Stiles wishes to never have known the noises Scott makes when Jackson ripples under him, in a move Stiles feels 30 years too young to witness.  

“I regret everything,” Derek answers simply, voice flat and hollow. Stiles smiles wanly at him.

“We could try to play the ‘Don’t make other pack members uncomfortable’ card; seems like a viable excuse to drown them in cold water.”

“As long as nobody tries to sex me up, I’m ok with them having fun,” Isaac intervenes, because nobody has any pity for Stiles’ sanity tonight. He’s an injured man, he deserves some mercy. “It’s kind of like viewing old statues? Or, like, paintings in a museum? Great view, no compulsion to lick it.” Isaac muses, his head tilting on the side and squinting at the disaster on the table like a scientist trying to categorize a newfound species of insect.

“Kind of see what you mean,” agrees Kira, words amazingly clear despite the cup between her teeth and the number of drinks in her stomach. She balances her phone from both hands to just one and takes her cup off her mouth. “Aesthetically pleasing yet disturbing. Like paintings of people having sex on rotten food or something like that.”

“You people don’t go to museum right,” Stiles says, frowning. He just heard the sound of a chair’s legs grinding against the tiles and has a horrible premonition of what’s going to happen.

Thing is, Stiles knows what his friends look like. He knows that he lives in a house that is just a few bad lines away from the introduction of a porn movie. He knows that Kira’s smile will grind his brain to a halt for a second certain mornings, that Boyd’s stretching will always make him stare despite himself, and remembers how hard he cried over Derek’s thighs that one time he drank the werewolf spiked beer by mistake.

Stiles’ friends are hot enough to make real, quality porn looks as dull as a documentary on tax reforms. It’s been his burden for years now. Stiles has made his peace with it.

That said, he draws the line at watching his brother engaging in a foursome on the kitchen table. While Stiles is stone cold sober.

He still looks toward the table to gauge the situation, cautiously, afraid of all the possibilities born from the moving chair. And, yeah, Lydia is now caressing the back of Scott’s thigh, her nails scratching against the denim. She’s smiling up at him, a world of possibilities blooming in the curve of her grin. Allison’s attention and fingers are on Jackson’s throat, pressing into the already fading bruises left by Scott’s mouth. Jackson is arching into the pressure like a shameless cat wanting to be pet.

They have clearly forgotten that the rest of the pack exists, despite Erica actually clapping her hands in glee and Kira’s loud giggles.

Just watching the four of them makes Stiles’ sexuality jump frenetically up and down the Kinsey scale, whimpering the whole way.

“I. Regret. Everything,” repeats Derek, looking almost upset. Stiles is so grateful for his own dumb human nose.  

Stiles bends down to pat him on the biceps. Then, after some reflection, pats it again despite the strain on his body because, well. Derek’s biceps.

“Come on guys,” finally tries Stiles, in what is definitively not a whine, “you know the chart. No sex outside the soundproofed rooms. You all signed it! I’m sure Derek could build you a bigger bed if that’s the problem. Or, hell, you can even take the table with you, god knows I’m never touching it again.”

“If you make them stop, I will claw you Stiles. I’ll be sad, but I’ll do it. Don’t take this away from me. I’ve worked hard on all these morons,” says Erica, not even trying to look away from the way Scott is now obviously mouthing at Lydia’s shoulder.

Erica is still in her panties and bra because who even cares anymore. Boyd, one arm back around her waist, is smirking. Stiles can feel the smugness of successful matchmaking in the air between them.

“You can follow them for all I care. Go immortalize the moment or whatever. Take pictures for keychains if it makes you happy. As long as I. Don’t. Know. About. It. Please stop telling me things. Stop showing me the things. I’m crippled and this is clearly a very inventive form of torture.”  

“I can’t make a bed.” The non sequitur escapes Derek in a breath. When Stiles turns back toward him, one hand frozen mid-flail, he continues with a serious face, “I’ve never worked with wood.”

“Oh. Well,” Stiles falters, “have to admit this wasn’t my main point, but that’s sad. You clearly have the hands for it.”

Derek looks down at his fingers, looking oddly flattered. The man is so easily pleased. It’s lovely. Concluding that Derek is the only rock of sanity left to him in this horrific situation, Stiles takes an executive decision.

“Derek, you remember this discussion we had about you not letting me abuse your werewolf strength?” Derek’s eyes refocus on him and he raises his eyebrows, amused. “Well. I just had a talk with myself. It was a very enlightening talk.”

“I’m sure it was,” Derek agrees, lips curling.

“I’m going to plead the emergency clause and ask you to take me far away from here. Please.”

“Can I hide with you?” Derek asks, already getting up. The noises in the background are turning more obvious and Stiles keeps his eyes strictly on Derek’s beautiful face. As always, it’s an easy thing to do. 

“Always. Let’s steal all the ice cream on the way. These savages deserve none of it.” 

--

Allison is sitting sideway on a chair, hair dangling over the armchair and feet resting against the couch. She’s striking even in pajamas and smiling at Stiles upside down, steel in her core, swimming between her blood cell.

Stiles falls on the couch and grasps one of her ankles, thin boned and fragile, carefully perching it over his knee. Allison looks curiously at him, her body contorted in what looks like an uncomfortable position. She stays put.

From somewhere in the hallway, Scott makes a joke about stealing their girl and Allison answers with a laugh and something biting. Stiles is not really listening, his mind dancing on the curves and angles of bones in her leg.

A shark, he decides.

It is slender and painfully detailed, wrapping all around her calf in shadows of greys. The point of its nose rests in the hollow on the side of Allison’s knee and the tail brushes the tendon in her ankle.

Under it, all over her ankle and foot, he draws water. It’s dark, almost oily, and under it he shapes terrible currents in hues of black.

He imagines the monsters there, predators with dead eyes and Kate’s smile. The shark could swim with them, safe and comfortable. Born to hunt, born to kill.

But on Allison, the shark’s jaws are closed tight. Refusing to hurt. Choosing to protect.

For that, it flies.

With pale sharpies, Stiles paints a sky in soft blue and deep orange around her knee and as much of her thigh as the pajamas allows. The colors stain Stiles’ hand and the chair, but Stiles is too focused to care.

Once dry, he shapes pink clouds wrapping around the shark’s body like cotton candy and tiny, tiny birds whirling all around it.

One of them, a small, colorful puff of feather, touches its beak to the shark’s nose, unafraid. Allison brushes her fingers over it, soft and delicate. The ink bleeds a little, and Stiles smiles and incorporate it in a longer-than-expected wingspan.

When Stiles lets Allison go, she unfolds herself and kisses him on the cheek, once, twice. She buries her head in his neck and her arms around his waist.

They stay there, breathing in silence.

---

Stiles finds them both outside in the garden, where the light from the porch dies and the edge of the woods begins. They are sitting close to one another on the ground, details erased by the distance and the darkness. 

With a sigh, Stiles tears himself away from the warm air of the house to join them. It’s a winter night like Stiles has rarely lived through in California, the air crisp in his lungs and frozen grass crunching like tiny shards of glass under his feet.

Allison smiles quietly when she sees him approaching, arms hugging her raised knees. She’s been smart enough to bundle in several layers of warm clothing, even if most of them are not hers. The boots are clearly Scott’s and Stiles could swear that the posh coat on her shoulders is Jackson’s. The colorful scarf is Lydia’s. Besides her, Derek is only wearing a sweater and jeans. The grass around them has melted and wet strands stick to them like algae. 

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks. Derek shrugs.

Stiles sits on Derek’s right side, immediately unwinding one of his scarves to wrap it around Derek’s neck. When Stiles’ hands withdraw, Derek buries his nose in the wool.

They all go back to stare at the forest in silence. There is something floating around them that Stiles can’t identify. It feels like a held breath. He can’t say if it’s pouring out of Allison and Derek or the trees or the earth, but the air feels the kind of sacred Stiles only found in his rare passages through churches and synagogues as a kid, under the hard looks of his grand aunts.

In the sky, the stars are bright and seem too close, contrasting with an unusually dark sky. He can’t see the moon.

“Nox atra,” finally breathes Derek. Stiles turns toward him and Derek stares back, eyes like an eclipse in the low light, only a thin circle of seafoam grey surrounding darkness.

“It’s an old tradition,” adds Allison in a quiet voice, resting her cheek on her knee to look at them both, “on the longest, moonless night of the year. Hunters can’t spill blood and werewolves can’t sprout fur.”

Derek hums, head raised toward the sky.

Sometimes, especially after all this time, Stiles forgets.

Because Derek and Allison are not the closest in their pack. They are friendly, but not in any special way.

It makes it easy not to think too deeply on them.

Easy to forget that they both come from families anchored in wilderness, myths and violence. That they were both born in a world in which Stiles and the others are only newcomers, ignorant of its rules, its past tragedies. That in their genes are generations of ancestors bleeding and fighting each other.

Stiles forgets that they were the bad guys in each other’s childhood stories, used to be each other’s monster under the bed.

Stiles often forgets that their simple friendship is a miracle.

He smiles at them. Allison grins back, dimples blinding despite the low light. Stiles doesn’t know what Derek smells on him, but one of his hands curls around Stiles’ knee, grounding.

The silence falls back over them, long enough for Stiles to lose all feeling in his ass and for his neck to start hurting from watching the sky.

Gradually, the rest of the pack joins them.

Kira looks surprised to find them out there too, and she explains her own variant on the tradition, of bonfires and animal pelts being burned.

Erica’s head peeks out of the door before retreating. She comes back carrying all the snacks from their kitchen, while Boyd’s arms are full of beers and sodas. He bends to give Stiles a hot water bottle and Stiles hopes his look expresses the exact scope of his love for that perfect, perfect man.

Lydia appears in silence, seemingly between one breath and the other, her head on Allison’s shoulder and her fingers playing with frosted leaves. 

Jackson and Scott are turned into living heaters as soon as they sit down, Lydia, Allison and Kira burying between the werewolves like fluffed up birds.

Isaac, more wool than werewolf at this point, ends up stretched with his head on Scott’s knee, his butt on Allison and his ankles on Kira’s. He looks bewildered but happy of his fate, down under all the scarves.

Stiles, deciding that it’s also a human night after all, more or less crawl sideway over Derek’s lap. Derek rolls his eyes but he doesn’t try to get rid of him, one of his arms even raising to be used as a back rest. Jackson accepts Stiles’ feet with surprising grace, trapping them between his thigh and forearm.

Stiles buries his cold nose against Derek’s warm shoulder and listens.

Derek’s voice is quiet and smooth when he talks of a night to celebrate not being alone in the darkness. For blood and laughs and respect shared. How old packs and other old families used to join during these nights under a dark sky, no moon to differentiate hunters from wolves and emissaries and witches. A world in peace, for a few hours.

He talks of his sister, fifteen and caught kissing a fiery hedgewitch behind a bush, of his cousin that got tired and fell asleep in the wrong car and almost started a pack war with his “kidnapping”. Allison answers with embarrassing stories of her father and how her parents met. Kira talks of the rich colors and the soft discussion of adults in the night, the food at dinner she loved but the fire she saw burning outside her window and wasn’t invited to join as a kid.

Derek’s chest rumbles under Stiles’ cheek, comforting in its surprising familiarity.

When Stiles finally closes his eyes, it’s on the sun rising through the forest like a tidal wave, bathing the forest in gold and red intersected by the thin shadow of trees.

--

Drawing on Kira is an exercise in frustration for both of them.

She’s ticklish and tends to fidget so much that Stiles doesn’t think he’s ever made one straight line on her skin. She also can’t help but touch the drawings all the time. When it starts to blur and the colors melt together, she looks devastated for hours.

So, they search for other ways.

They buy some paints for her room. In the store, they behave like overexcited children, waving they favorites pots in the air at each other. They buy greens and blues and whites and glow in the dark paints. They buy glitter in all shades of the rainbow and some really tacky plastic foxes.

They grab too much stuff from the shelves and they wince when they get to the cashier; wince again when they have to carry all the bags into the jeep.

On her ceiling, Stiles first creates a night sky. A big, fat moon in soft pink and white in the middle and hundreds of constellations orbiting it. None of the constellations are real.

Kira lays on her back, babbling about anything and everything. Stiles creates the constellation matching the things she likes most. The constellation of the Forest touches the constellation of the Knives and the one of the Foxes. The Daffodils steals a star from the Incense, while the Pack galaxy spreads alone over Kira’s bed, visible with the light on and off.

They try to use paint bombs to make a space cloud and end up painting a part of the wall. Kira gets a face full of paint and almost falls off the ladder.

They paint all the plastic foxes and place them all over the room. They go from tacky to creepy fast, with terrifying smiles full of teeth, weirdly placed eyes and insidious, unending quantity of glitter. Kira loves them so much that Stiles goes to buy new ones the next day.

It takes the werewolves several weeks to stop wrinkling their nose at the smell of paint in the house.

Kira come to him one night, weeks later, silent as a mouse. She sits on his bed, stacks of paper between them.

“I want a tattoo. I want it to be yours.”

Stiles hugs her, tight. Then gets up to find his favorites pencils.

--

To Stiles, insomnia has been a long-time companion. Some nights passed drawing, watching too many shows or going too deep in weird corners of the internet; others in shameful binge-eating, creeping around his house like a ghost and staring at his ceiling with an intensity born in despair, a clock loudly keeping track of each agonizing second in the back of his mind.

All of his sleepless had been solitary things.

Living in a house full of broken, beautiful, fucked up people changed that too.

It took a few weeks of unfortunate meetings of red eyes, shamed faces watching their feet in the stairs, shadows darting in a corridor. A lot of awkward breakfast, of tense mornings, of doors barricaded at night.

Vulnerability showing teeth at the risk of being cracked open wide in front of witnesses.

But, slowly, they took the time to tame these other versions of their pack, with the bed hair and the silences and the empty eyes.

Infrequently, haltingly, they hovered around each other instead of crawling back to their room to lick their own wounds. Their started watching TV together, drinking tea, talking. Croaking voices in a dark kitchen. Silent support on the sagging couch. A hand on a shoulder, some breakfast left in front of a door.

Now, their house finds a second life at night, in between broken nightmares and insomnia. Rituals of trust and silence and support.

Allison likes to drink her herbal tea, so hot that Stiles has troubles even carrying her mug. Once done, she goes out to shoot arrows at trees, because she has weird copping mechanisms. She takes usually takes her bow and Erica under her arm. Erica always yawns big and ugly, curled over her own tea like a hot bottle, all crazy hair and infinite legs in Boyd’s shirt but she follows dutifully. Erica’s worst nightmares always come from inside herself, she once confided in Stiles, so she is soothed by the outside air on her skin and the quiet of the forest edge in the darkness. When Lydia joins them, she leans against Erica’s strength in an exhausted slouch, deep bruises under her eyes, her voice broken down by her screaming nightmares.

The arrows vibrate in the darkness with the precision of a metronome, and the three of them share the silence until they get tired enough to try for sleep once more.

Isaac appears in the living room with a face like a ghost, pale skin and vacant eye, like everything has been been purged out of him.

He always gravitates toward Boyd, who doesn't need to hear words to understand. He just engulfs him and lets him be small and fragile and protected for a while. On the worst nights, Isaac is even starting to be bold enough to go directly toward Erica and Boyd’s attic door, slowly accepting that he’s always welcome to join them to sleep.

Kira, less prone to nightmares but always so happy to share as much of her life with her friends as she can, often wanders into the living room just to snuggle all over Isaac and Boyd, leaching their heat off. She whispers them stories, gossips, rhetorical questions, half-forgotten movie synopsis. She falls asleep on them, all the time, and they never try to move her.

On his own bad nights, Jackson is too still, too silent. He craves self-control and can’t stomach violence or pressure. At night, Jackson is so very careful around Stiles, Lydia and Allison. His remarks try too hard to be snapping but lack any real bite. His hands always fall short of touching them.

On his worst nights, Jackson can’t even approach Lydia and Allison. He flinches and his gaze turns trapped. There is obviously something terrifying to Jackson in being half asleep, in losing control even in parts.

Scott is stupidly good at this part. He always crawls out of bed with them all, even if his nights are usually more peaceful than the others. He drags Jackson into playing funny, stupid games, deprived of violence. Scott knows how to dig just deep enough to anchor but never tight enough to trap. He knows how to talk to him always in choices, to never utter anything even close to an order.

They are bits of conversation sometimes, that start in bits and breaks, explanations that fade. Often, Scott lets one of his hand trails along Jackson’s knee or hip, light, even if it means getting destroyed in the game they are playing.

On the very bad nights, Jackson grabs back.

Derek at night is a heartbreak. Brittle and frayed at the edges. Eyes like a broken bottle and so, so silent. It takes the bad nights for Stiles to realize how much not silent Derek usually with them now. At night, Derek only communicates through body language to decipher.

He’s clingy in a very quiet, very discreet way, as if trying to be invisible. He follows them all from room to room, looking slightly defensive if anyone tries to engage him in conversation or take obvious note of his presence.

Mainly, he sits close and look at them all, extra-hard, like he’s trying to engrave everything about them inside his brain by sheer willpower. Like he’s completely baffled that they exist.

Stiles tries not to be too obvious in how much this Derek breaks his heart, but he can imagine just too vividly what Derek dreams off at night. 

Derek looks almost afraid to wake up, as if this is all a dream that would explose if he dared breath—exist—just a little too loudly.

So, Stiles wraps part of himself around any part of Derek available, and babbles about anything and everything, until Derek finally dares to reach back and breathe.

--

Would Stiles be harsher, or would he like Isaac just a little less, he knows exactly what he would draw on him.

A battlefield.

A war won -because Isaac won- with people laughing and hugging, in saturated colors. And under them, a field full of bones. Layers and layers of them, entangled in the ground. Because while Stiles knows that Isaac’s happiness today is real, he can’t forget how it was built on so many nightmares. Sometimes they overlook too easily how few months Isaac has lived in safety, and how long he grew up under siege.

They take the victory as granted, forget to look for the costs.

Stiles wasn’t Isaac’s friend at the time, but he remembers anyway. Remembers Isaac moving just a little bit too slowly when trying to get out of someone way in a corridor, one hand against his ribcage. Remembers the hunted look in his eyes after receiving a mediocre grade. Remembers all the school outings where Isaac had to be left behind.

There are difficult days, when Isaac curls away from them all. Days when Isaac shrinks at an unexpected gesture, turning himself into the smallest target possible. When someone in a movie raises a hand against a kid and Isaac goes the kind of quiet that sounds like white noise. When Isaac bumps Stiles’ shoulder in jest and sends Stiles flying to the ground, and his words are short and too low and horrified for hours.

Isaac won, and the scars remain, right there in his eyes.

  But Isaac won, Isaac survived, Isaac got away. And Isaac is theirs now, to keep happy and safe.

So, on Isaac, Stiles only draws softness, silliness, in sharpies and glitter.

On the days where Isaac’s shoulders are too tense, his eyes just that side of hunted, Stiles breaks out all the colors.

He draws longs curls of fairy light, and enlightens them with glow in the dark paint. He paints multicolored little paw prints and cartoon wolves with huge sunglasses and leather jackets. He writes stupid jokes in beautiful penmanship and fun comics of their pack shenanigans. He draws immense dragons and a multitude of stick wolves and tic-tac-toe grids.

He lets Isaac smiles and laughs guide his hands, observes the way his eyes crinkle before tracing any line.

On Isaac, Stiles only ever draws the only things that should ever had graced a child’s skin.

--

Derek doesn’t move when Stiles enters the room. It wrenches a stupid grin out of Stiles for a few seconds before he remembers his mission.

He starts opening the desk drawers, but he’s slowed down by the way his eyes refuse to be teared away from the bed for more than two seconds at a time.

The view, though not that unusual in their house, is still as spectacular as always.

Derek is asleep on the fluffed-up duvet, the one they heard him try to wrangle into its newly washed cover in a flurry of swears half an hour prior. His nose is buried in it, peacefully breathing the smell of softener that even Stiles’ senses can pick up. He’s wearing the “raised by wolves” hoodie that Kira gave him for Christmas, the burgundy of it almost swallowed by the white fluffy waves of the comforter.

Somehow, Stiles finally finds the keys in the drawer, mostly by touch. He tries to extract them in silence, but the tiny clinking noise of metal against metal causes what Stiles walking all over the room didn’t. Derek rouses abruptly, one eye half-opened under crazy bed hair.

“Wha?” he rumbles, more breath than word but still succeeding in expressing curiosity dyed in alarm.

“Nothing, shhh, go back to sleep,” Stiles immediately shushes, batting a hand in his direction as if he could erase the lasts seconds using only the strength of his mind. He crosses the room on light but hurried feet, Derek following his movements blindly by hearing alone, his eye already closing back trustingly.

Stiles almost throws the cabin keys at Lydia when he reaches the door, where she’s leaning with a very knowing smirk. Stiles raises his nose high, turns on his heels and dives onto the empty side of the bed. Lydia’s delighted laugh is muffled by the door closing.

Stiles stretches, rubbing his cheek against the soft duvet. Derek hums approvingly, his eyes still closed but a vague smile on his lips. When Stiles finally melts into the mattress, Derek rolls closer. Stiles takes it for the invitation it so obviously is and snuggles unashamedly.

The whole room is actually quite bright, light spilling from the window and bathing them from the waist down. Stiles is too warm in his jeans and plastered against a full-grown werewolf, but Derek seems already asleep again, one hand buried deep under Stiles’ pillow.

Stiles breathes happily and closes his eyes.

-

There is a crash somewhere in the house, a dull sound followed by things clattering and smashing on the floor. Stiles jumps up, heart beating wildly. The silence rings for a few seconds before a voice yells from deep inside the house “I’m okay!”.

“Can you smell large amounts of blood?” Stiles asks Derek, whose eyes are opened and attentive despite the rest of his body being still languid with sleep. Derek actually raises his nose a little and delicately scents the air.

“No.”

“Okay, I’m not moving.”

And Stiles melts back into the bed.

He’s warmer than when he fell asleep and he sends a hand behind him, encountering the familiar shape of Boyd’s head.

“You’re all spiky,” he says through a yawn, taking a few seconds to let his fingers scratch against the short hair. Boyd rubs his head against Stiles’ neck and Stiles jumps a little, tickled.

From behind Derek, Erica’s head appears, startled by the noise but with a delay. Her irises burn a fierce gold. Stiles pets her forehead approximatively.

“No shifting during nap time,” he admonishes.

“I knew you would be boring in bed,” says a disembodied voice. Stiles blinks.

“Jackson? Are you— are you sleeping on the floor?” A pointed silence answers him. “Did Erica kick you out of the bed?” The silence gets pointier.

Erica smiles, fangs peeking out from under her lips. Stiles sighs.

“At least take a pillow, dumbass, or we are gonna spend another evening hearing you complain about neck cricks that are physiologically impossible for werewolves,” Stiles blindly throws his pillow on the side of the bed and a hand juts out in the air to catch it in midflight. There are no thanks but, then again, it’s Jackson.

Stiles is still too warm and dissolving into the sleep sodden haze of the room and the softness of the bed to get up, so he just flops a little bit on the right to invade Derek’s pillow.

Derek turns to Stiles, head tilted, nose buried in his elbow. His eyes are half open, the color so clear its almost unreal. His left-hand comes to rest on Stiles’ neck, thumb against his jaw and the tip of his fingers curling in Stiles’ hair.

Derek is not smiling, but he is not not-smiling either. He looks beautiful half-asleep, mussed and slowed down and syrupy, no line on his forehead, not a frown to pinch his eyebrows. He keeps touching Stiles, lightly, like it’s a selfish thing. Stiles leans into the contact and turns his head to bury his nose in Derek’s palm.

Behind him, Boyd shuffles closer, draping one arm tighter around Stiles’ waist, his hand against Derek’s belly. On Derek’s side, Erica hides her head deeper in Derek’s hoodie, breathing so slow she can’t be awake.

Stiles hums, too warm and a little bit crushed and perfectly content.

---

In a surprising twist on top of the maelstrom of surprises Stiles’ adult life is turning out to be, Boyd is slowly becoming is main friend in the house.

Erica is a solar flare, too bright and dangerous and protective, and being privileged enough to have her close always seems as marvelous to him as approaching a wild tiger and hearing him purr at you. Scott is his oldest friend, obvious in the way only people who’ve known you all your life are. Scott is a part of Stiles life as much as his dad is, of the people that witnessed everything in your life and kept on loving you with the same steadiness. And Derek, well. Derek is something else, something evident and too bright and outflowing any type of category.

But Boyd. Boyd is a surprise.

Boyd sees things and Boyd cares. Boyd actually went to a psychiatrist in town to bring back pamphlets on panic attacks for Stiles, and even tried to teach him some yoga moves despite Stiles being a minus 20 in flexibility. He loves to trash talk stupid movies and he laughs all in breaths and he hugs easily. There is a calm acceptance in Boyd, a love that never judges, a strength that can't be shaken. There is also a healthy dose of snark which Stiles adores.

Boyd gave Stiles his favorite jogging, thin and soft and with the word “bite me” in bold and black all over his ass. They made Jackson grudgingly high five him, Derek blink owlishly and Danny do a double take at the supermarket.  

Boyd is good and whole and precious in ways Stiles is not sure any of them really deserve, but he loves him and will see him taken from his greedy hands over his dead body.

-

They are on the couch, and Stiles is trying to ignore the mangled mess of Boyd’s leg and the flat smell of blood in the air. He’s trying to forget the sensation of Boyd’s fingers closing around him and throwing him away, to safety, only to fall to the ground in a gush of blood.  Boyd is stoic, nothing in his face betraying the mess of broken tendons and bones his body is currently trying to arrange back into a limb.

They have nothing to do, except stay quiet and wait, so Stiles breaks out the paint. Boyd stares at him then sighs, with a ghost of a smile, and lowers his head. Stiles jumps behind the couch to access the wide span of his shoulder and nape.

Boyd’s skin is beautiful, flawless in the grey light of the morning, and Stiles spends long minutes looking at it before making any decision.

He draws branches. Old trees with their branches interwoven, complex patterns in gold and white and silver.

He starts high on his neck, white paint running over muscles in thin outlines. When he has sketched everything, he gets out his metallic paints. He paints in ocher and gold, blending them in places and separating them neatly in others by naked strip of skin. After an hour, Boyd’s back, shoulders and biceps are covered in complex patterns coiling inside each other and rolling over his body. He draws a thick rope of knots running over his spine, locking around his bones and colors melting into each other.

When Boyd finally gets up and limps to a bathroom, one hand softly squeezing around Stiles’ hand for reassurance, the sun catches the design and it glows fiercely.

Like Stiles thought, it looks like a knight’s cape. 

--

When Erica enters the kitchen, she’s a mess of golden curls and wrinkled shirt. When she reaches Stiles, she stands up on her tip toes and peck him softy on the mouth before faceplanting in his chest, yawning. Stiles laughs, kisses her forehead. When she mumbles something against Stiles’ breastbone, he hums, lips on her forehead and nose in her hair. She smells like Allison’s hippie shampoo.

Stiles leads her to the table where she drops on the chair near Boyd, her body automatically leaning against his and almost clearing right off her chair in the process. Boyd pushes a coffee cup under her nose and curls his arm around her while she noses under his ear.

Lydia is still on phase one of three coffee-wise, which means that her social interactions are not completely operational yet. She’s curled on the counter, her traditional place between the coffee machine and the cupboards.

Allison has dragged her chair toward the counter when they arrived, insinuated her shoulders between Lydia’s legs and smashed her face against the inside of Lydia’s thigh. Once Lydia had started carding her fingers through her hair, Allison had let a groan of pleasure out and stopped moving. The coffee on her lap is probably cold. She may be asleep again.

Judging the number of technically awaken people adequate, Stiles starts getting bowls out of the cupboards.

Isaac, with his supernatural instinct for knowing when food is coming, enters the kitchen at the same instant. Stiles does a double take.

“New crop top?”

Isaac yawns, and Stiles admires the play of muscles on his body. He nods to himself. The view is good in this house first thing in the morning.

“Erica gave it to me the other day.”

The crop top is black and claims in bold white letters “Touch my butt & buy me pizza”. A big “DON’T” has been added before the ‘touch’ using some of Stiles metallic paint.

“You look good in it,” remarks Boyd from the table. Isaac smiles brightly.

“Of course he does,” agrees Erica, half-swallowed by her coffee mug, “I made it.”

Stiles nods again.

“I will pay you actual money if you can make Derek wears a crop top. I’m not too picky on the actual message. I’m even ready to lose at Mario kart against you in front of Jackson.”

“I could try to play the scent marking card. I have a one that would look amazing on him, all tight and green,” she mumbles, still half asleep.

“Erica, please forgets everything I have ever said in my life; I was clearly confused by some horrible curse. You are the only love of my life and we should be wedded as soon as possible.”

“If you marry Erica, you won’t be able to admire Derek’s abs in a crop top. She would unscrew your head from your spine,” reminds Scott, entering the room and making a beeline toward Lydia and Allison. Lydia bends her head for a kiss, humming.

“Gross. Graphic,” winces Stiles, putting all the ingredients for the batter on the counter.

“True,” adds Allison, apparently not asleep after all. Scott bends down to kiss the crown of her hair.

“Excuse you?” in her indignation, Erica suddenly seems more alive. “I would not. Should Stiles and I to be wed, we would admire Derek’s abs together, like the civilized people with a taste for fine art that we are.”

Stiles sends her a flying kiss. “You complete me.”  

“If you marry Erica, Boyd will make a sad face,” argues Isaac, climbing on the counter between Lydia and the bag of flour.

“I will,” agrees Boyd, nodding calmly. The corners of his mouth are quirking up and he looks at Stiles through his eyelashes. Boyd has magnificent eyelashes. “The saddest of faces.”

Stiles sighs theatrically, fumbling with the almost empty carton of milk. “Erica, love, I’m sorry but this thing between us has to end. Our passion was beautiful while it lasted, but I have to think of the greater good. I hope you’ll find the strength to forgive me.”

“It’s ok. Boyd is a better cuddler anyway.”

“Excuse you?” Stiles turns, the wood spoon in his hand dripping milk on the tiles, “he is not. I’m ready to accept that my sexual and romantic prowess will forever be doubted and criticized in this supernatural brothel that I have to call home. But I won’t accept any slander regarding my cuddling abilities. I’m the master. I am the alpha of cuddles.”

“I don’t want to know” says Derek as he enters the kitchen, in running shorts and a tank top. Behind him Kira grins at them all, looking absolutely too perky and healthy when half the people in the house look one cup of coffee away from death.

“You are an excellent cuddler,” confirms Kira brightly, because she’s too precious for this crazy world.

“Paper,” announces Jackson, ignoring the entire conversation. Of course, he went running half-naked, and of course, his hair is still as perfectly styled as usual after more than two hours in the wood.

Lydia raises an imperious hand and Jackson brings the paper to her without protest. He also kisses the top of Allison’s head and the side of Lydia’s wrist before she opens the paper, before slowly migrating toward Scott.

Lydia throws the politics to Erica –who lets it hit the side of her head, without even trying to catch it— and the crosswords to Boyd who smiles faintly at her.

Stiles can’t understand people reading the news on paper. He hates the noise, the way it crinkles under his fingers and how it’s impossible to fold back without a PhD in origami. The internet exists for a reason. Lydia argues they need to support journalists by actually paying them.

“Did you get the paper all by yourself?” Stiles asks, turning from the enormous bowl of pancake dough to look at Jackson “Who’s a gooood boy?” He croons.

“Eat me.”

“Sexy! Still not my type, but congrats for putting yourself out there,” answers Stiles, jumping on the side to dodge Jackson’s foot. He bumps into Allison’s chair and she raises her head from Lydia’s thigh with an adorable frown.

“I could maul you Stilinski, you know. It would do wonders for my nerves.”

“No, you could not,” answers Derek distractedly.

“Werewolves don’t eat humans,” points out Allison, in a sleepy version of her father “trust me I’m a hunter” voice.

“That’s not what you told me last Friday,” says Erica, head half buried in her elbow but with a visibly filthy grin.

In the ensuing ringing silence, Stiles whispers “I raised you so well Erica. So well.”

“She’s five months older than you.”

“So well…” he repeats, brushing off an imaginary tear. “Easy opening, my ass,” he mumbles a few seconds later, distracted and fighting a recalcitrant packaging, “Isaac?”

Isaac opens his mouth and lets his fangs drop. They gleam under the kitchen light, deadly and sharp. Stiles rips the plastic against it, in one, smooth gesture.

“Thanks buddy,” Stiles pets the side of his neck absently and Isaac smiles, full of pointed teeth and dimples.

“Millions of years of evolution to create an apex predator and we end up used as a vulgar pocket knife. Generations of werewolves are rolling in their graves,” comments Jackson.

“First of all, you are not being used as anything. You are useless. And second, you have no werewolf ancestors, you caught werewolfness like others catch STDs. You are the apex of nothing,” answers Stiles distractedly, measuring a precise quantity of chocolate chips. After a second of thoughts, he shrugs, and adds more directly inside the bowl.

“Bitten werewolves are valid werewolves, Stiles”, intervenes Derek from the living room. His voice is detached but firm, and it sounds a lot like an old rehearsed mantra, “and lycanthropy is not a disease. It’s a gift.”

“Yes Dear,” Stiles yells back.

“You are so whipped Stilinski,” snickers Jackson.  

Stiles looks at him, and ponders the pleasure of pissing off Jackson against the level of caffeine currently running in his veins. He sighs.

“Sometimes I wonder why the universe wasted some perfectly good atoms on you when they could have been used to build a waffle iron instead,” he deplores.

Isaac has stolen the rest of the chocolate chips and is snacking on them, looking between Stiles and Jackson as if following a tennis match.

“Kids, behave,” Lydia says distractedly, eyes glued to the news and coffee in her hand. Her feet are batting in the air and Allison’s head bobs up and down with the slight movement of her knee.

Stiles saves the chocolate chips from Isaac’s grips and put werewolf’s strength to good use by making him grind some almonds into powder.

Erica starts snoring, face squashed on the table.

--

While Jackson is draped on the floor, arms everywhere and eyes almost closed, whining because Wii-sport can apparently be too much for werewolves—Stiles calls bullshit on the werewolf stamina theory—, he takes a sharpie and draws a line on Jackson for the first time.

A simple line, in sharpie, sectioning his biceps. Jackson jumps like a startled cat and rolls away, frowning. But after months of living under the same roof, Stiles is starting to get how Jackson works now, in a way that will always feel like a foreign language. With its own logic that can feel painfully obvious one second and alien the next. Something that needs to be learned, always. Frustrating but also rewarding, when things get just right.

And Stiles knows that sometimes words should not be trusted with Jackson. That he took years to create a persona that won’t allow for any perceived weakness. To understand Jackson, Stiles needs to be always watching. And he was, and he saw the look in his eyes when Stiles drew on Allison yesterday and Scott on Monday.

So he waits, patiently, in silence. Jackson frowns at him for a long time and looks around, something almost worried in the shape of his face. When he finally tends his arm toward Stiles, wriggling back closer, it’s with an expression of long suffering inhabited by greedy eyes.

On Jackson’s arm, Stiles draws other lines. Rows and row of them, thick and straight; the bars of a cell. He traps the muscle under them, ensnares it in ink. Under it he draws a puddle of black, dripping thickly into the hollow of his elbow.

Satisfied, Stiles nods and pushes the short sleeve out of the way, to start back on his shoulder.

He draws a little boy there.

The boy has precisely gelled hair but a hazily drawn face. The boy also has wolf ears and a smooth tail and a patch of scales like a bad rash on his arm.

And the little boy is hoping from one bar to another as if crossing a river on rocks, unafraid of the cage and darkness under him. He skips over the trap with a blurry smile on his mouth, and his eyes never looks down.

The boy looks straight ahead, and his feet are a blur in their speed.

----

Stiles is only a few minutes away from climbing all over the walls, his body filled to burst with nervous energy. As often, there is no clear reason for the itch under his skin, the spiral in his brain screaming at him to run, to rip off his bones until the anxiety fades. It’s a well know pressure from deep inside his brain, a fight that will never be won, only postponed just for a while longer.

Stiles rolls the pen between his teeth, his legs bouncing up and down against the table. He doesn’t realize that his eyes are wandering on Isaac’s shoulders on the other side of the room when a hand appears in his field of vision. Stiles startles.

At the end of the hand is attached Derek.

Stiles blinks at him, nose wrinkled in curiosity, his brain instantly focusing on Derek with the swiftness of an angry swarm of bees.

Derek shrugs and only answers with a weird tilt of lips, something that tries but fails to be a smile. He looks at the pen, then at his hand, then at the pen again. He flops his hand closer to Stiles, as if trying to entice a frightened animal.

Stiles freezes. The pen clatters on the table.

He stares at Derek’s hand. It’s big, with long fingers and perfect nails. The part of Stiles’ brain that refuses to stay on one track wonders if werewolves’ nails regenerate like bones when they are broken. All the others parts of his brain are pulsing, on red alert.

Over these past months, Derek has seen the splashes of color appearing and disappearing under shirts and pants, always changing, on their entire pack. He has smelt paint and ink woven with their smell, day after day, on all of them.

All, except him.

His eyes are smiling, open and soft, and his eyebrows are raised, teasing, to lighten the impact of the gesture.

Stiles is still frozen in shock, anxiety buzzing under his skin.

Stiles had fell in love with Lydia like people do with art pieces, heart-stopping and full of longing. But she’d been someone to admire, to project onto. Stiles loved the idea of Lydia, but he had to fall out of love to learn to know her as a person.

But Derek. Derek.

Derek.

Stiles didn’t fall in love with Derek. Stiles didn’t wake up one morning and had a moment of enlightenment.

Loving Derek was an answer long before Stiles knew there was even a question. Being in love with Derek and loving Derek and being Derek’s friend, they are all just one big feeling that can’t be dissected into neat, separate parts.

Stiles doesn’t know how to be Derek’s friend without loving him. Stiles doesn’t know how to be Stiles without loving him.

Because Derek’s smile. Derek’s jokes. Derek’s hair on a pillow. Derek’s grumpiness. Derek’s eyes. Derek’s voice in the night. Derek’s arm against Stiles’ cheek. Derek’s shy little head tilt.

Everything about Derek is evidence to him, familiar and dear down to the deepest parts of his marrow.

Derek Hale exists, so Stiles loves him. Simple as that. Terrible as that.

Loving Lydia had been sharp and gut-wrenching, painted in rejection, crawling under his skin and ready to make him bleed.

And of course, loving Derek hurts sometimes, at random moments of the day and deep into the night. Of course, some of Derek’s smiles will always dig too deep, some teasing words will always cut just a little too much.

But it’s an easy pain, one Stiles has long been numbed against. Because loving Derek may be painful, but it’s never been sad. It’s just melancholic, like memories of things he’s never known, nostalgia for things he will never discover. And sometimes that’s hard.

But it’s also Derek.

The shape of Laura’s name on his lips in a room that tastes of sorrow. The weight of him leaning against Stiles, heavy and trusting and too warm. The angles of his fur drying in patches around his muzzle after rainy nights. The smiles that exist just for Stiles, soft all over the eyes spiced by a mouth hovering around a smirk; always on the edge of a laugh, always on the edge of fondness.

Derek, safe, here, happy, good. It’s enough.

Stiles touches him all the time, because it’s Derek.

But Stiles doesn’t touch him, because it’s Derek.

Derek is not an easy person to love right. It’s an eternal fight, a ballet of closed doors in parts of Stiles’ brain to keep himself in check, not to slip to deep. He had to train himself not to clutch, not to be greedy, not to take more than offered. Train himself to turn away from the curve of Derek’s fingers around a pale coffee cup or the reassuring pace of his socks on the floor, to break down his dreams to quiet and manageable pieces.

So, if Stiles starts touching him, he has no idea how he could convince his hands to ever let go. 

Stiles doesn’t want to doodle on Derek and let go. Stiles wants to mark him everywhere; with everything he’s ever made and more. He wants to learn the topography of him with his hands, to remember him from thousand miles away, thousand years away. Stiles wants to be selfish, and greedy, and he wants to plant his own teeth in and buries himself so deep Derek will never be able to get rid of him.

Stiles looks at Derek’s hand on the table, looking innocuous and like a hand, and he feels completely helpless. His brain is tearing itself apart, flying off in every direction, bowing under the weight of all his wanting.

When he finally looks up, Derek’s face has broken into something horrible. Tight. The smile has left his eyes for his lips now but it’s wavering, as if ready to shatter at any moment. More than all, it looks resigned and not really surprised.

Like Derek was hopeful but braced for disappointment.

Stiles panics, because this is the most terrible thing to ever happen to him, and almost claws at Derek’s hand when he tries to bring it closer. He keeps his fingers clamped around Derek’s wrist while fumbling blindly for his pen.

In blue ink, hands trembling in panic, he draws a little star.

It’s been years since he has drawn a star and this one may be worse than the ones he used to make swim around his mother veins. It’s shaky, uneven, one branch not even perfectly closed.

Somehow, it feels more revealing that drawing a string of hearts would have.

When he looks up at Derek, Derek is looking right back. His eyes are hesitant, waiting for explanations. Stiles would bet that Derek knows to the minute how long Stiles worked on one of Erica’s butterfly’s wing or on the shading on Allison’s calf. But he doesn’t seem disappointed by the simplicity of his design, just curious.

Stiles wonders if his erratic heartbeat has given him away; if his smell has betrayed him.

Stiles tries to link their fingers, rushed, as if afraid they could disappear. It feels as if they have too many of them and Stiles finally fold their hands together in a clumsy mess of twisting fingers and damps palms.

He clings to Derek, the angle awkward and uncomfortable. Derek squeezes back, confused but trusting.

After a short lull, Stiles changes his mind and raises Derek’s hand to observe the star from up close, taking in all its flaws. He breathes deeply, trying to quiet the shard of panic striking all over his stomach and biting at his ribcage.

He pauses, his mouth close to Derek’s skin and it’s maddening how much he can crave such a small thing. But consent is always important and can be a minefield with Derek, so Stiles looks up. Derek’s eyes look a little rounder than usual and there is something like a small smile trapped under hesitation. He looks calm, and expecting and disbelieving and trustful.

So, Stiles lowers his head and kisses the star.

One of the branches smears over his lip, the ink still wet in places. The taste is metallic on his tongue.

Derek’s breath hitches. His hand turns slowly to caress Stiles’ jaw with the tip of his fingers.

Stiles, hesitation forgotten, half crawls over the table to kiss him, messy and grateful and greedy.

In the background, Isaac whoops cheerfully and Jackson groans like a grumpy teenager. Stiles gives him the finger blindly, smiling against Derek and kissing him harder, hips digging painfully against the table and his hand still gripping Derek’s.

Derek smiles back, angles his head and nips at Stiles’ bottom lip. Stiles wonders if Derek can taste the ink on it.  

---

Drawing on Derek is a long trial in restraint for Stiles. It's also a study in letting go. 

There is so much of Derek at his disposition, beautiful skin, hollows and angles everywhere to play with.

Most days, he wants to draw on Derek like they used to bleed people to get rotten blood out, hundreds of years ago. Like he could replace all the hurt, all the betrayal, and force happiness and love and hope and belonging straight into his vein, osmosis through the skin. Like Stiles could bury all the dreams and hopes he has for him straight down, tattoo colors all over his life. There is so much to do, so much of the things bouncing in his head that he wants to see through the prism of Derek.

He paints his claws with the patterns they both admired in museums, old swirl branded in metal and leather on the scabbards of stunning swords. Derek keeps one hand shifted for the entire day, even when it makes every usual task infinitely more complicated.  

Stiles draws his own pattern of moles on Derek, placing them carefully. At the end it looks a little goofy on him, but Derek stares at them in the mirror with soft eyes and touch them with the tip of his fingers.

He draws on his toes and on the top of his foot, trace the bones under the skin and colors them one by one with the brightest inks.  

On Derek’s forearms, he draws shopping list and cartoonish illustrations and runes found in dusty books.

Stiles even draws strings of hearts now. Anatomically perfect hearts straight up from google image and silly, cheesy ones quickly thrown on the back of his hands on a particularly emotional day.

He draws around and inside the tattoo on Derek’s back. Draws silly monkey clinging to one arc with stringy arms or perch tiny birds on it. He draws phases of the moon in the arcs. He incorporates it in a long fresco running all over the top of Derek’s shoulder in stark black and soft curves.

There is a tree one day, that takes him hours. The bottom of it is rooted deep, and the trunk goes straight along Derek’s spine. On his lower back, the bark turns dark, burnt. After the scorch marks, they are others. Scars, where the bark had been peeled off or cut open to exposed its core. They are broken branches and timid buds cut off. But the tree goes on and on, and the scars disappear. They are branches everywhere, with bright green leaves. At the top, the foliage is dense and vibrant, full of color and reaching for the sky. They are some flowers in there, small and red and fragile. 

And on the days where Stiles feels so fond of him that it may as well burst out of him, he locks their bedroom door and buries his hands in Derek like an artist in clay.

He digs his fingers in Derek’s waist, feels the muscles bend under his fingers. He clamps his hands around the meat of his shoulders, drags his palms on his waist, dances along his ribs, the delicate arch of his spine, massage into his thighs. He bites his hipbone, sharp enough to make Derek growl and arch, sucks on the muscle trembling over it.

He licks off the morning sunshine cascading down the column of his throat, pooling around his collarbones and puts his mark right there with his stubble, his mouth.

All the while, he greedily watches the traces his body leaves on Derek. The white, bloodless trails that fills red, a ghost of his touch anchored under Derek’s skin for just a second.

He paints with his mouths, his nails, his teeth. He leaves bruises that disappears in minutes. He scatters them like crumbs all over his body, uses them to make his own constellations.

He paints over the bruises to make them stick; He slowly leans how to blend purples and reds on Derek skin to perfectly render the shape of his mouth, of his fingers.

He doesn't know what he loves the most about it: the way Derek will trace them with the tip of his fingers in the morning, looking in the mirror with an absent smile, or the way Jackson’s face contorts in pain every time. The paint is easy to get rid of, and Stiles knows that Derek takes great pains to protect it in the shower, bending his body away from the water to keep it as long as possible on his skin.

And, on Derek’s heart, every morning, Stiles draws a star.

He draws them like he did all these years ago, with a broken black pen in a white room, on white skin. Childish, too simple, without any color. Just a star, in pencil.

Sometimes, the tip is bent because he’s laughing too much, sometimes the lines are crooked because he’s too busy staring at the lines of Derek’s smile, sometimes they are blurred by sweat and friction after deciding to fall back together into the sheet.

And, every morning, Derek steals back the pen and draws a small star right back.

 --