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I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.
It's mostly on the bloody evenings, when they've all gone limping back home, rusted and red and covered in bitter relief, that Derek will get to the Sheriff’s house to find Stiles clambering out the window.
Derek always looks in on everyone in the pack (even those who don’t consider themselves pack) of idiots. It’s difficult to sleep otherwise, and he doesn’t have the luxury of time and lies anymore. Those first few months when he could afford to toss and turn and tell himself he didn’t give a shit, they were burned out by the summer. Now there’s a pack of Alphas and a family of hunters at civil war in Beacon Hills. So it doesn’t matter if Scott and Stiles don’t want his help, or think they don’t need it, Derek’s job is to look out for them. There’s no one else.
Every night Derek makes the rounds. He visits Boyd and Isaac and Erica, lets Scott catch a glimpse of him out the window. Then Stiles. Stiles is the last one he comes to. And this is why.
Whenever Stiles is hurt, or restless, Derek will catch him scrabbling like a moron onto the roof to watch the stars. The climb is dangerous. It’s pointless. Stiles’ room is on the second floor and the porch roof is three feet to the left of his window and one foot down. To get there he has to crawl all the way outside and cling to the framing and the drain pipe, edging himself to the left until he can stretch out his foot and reach.
Derek usually finds himself standing in the shadows of the yard with the taste of inconvenient concern in his mouth, waiting for the inevitable crack and drop. Once or twice Stiles does slip, or misjudge the distance (Derek is already in motion by then, sprinting to the edge of the moonlight) and ends up hanging from the drainpipe, legs kicking. He’s hasn’t managed to actually kill himself yet, but the distance to the ground and the terrified thumping of Stiles’ heart (that Derek can hear from two hundred yards away like angry wings in his ear) and the tingle in Derek’s own fingertips when it’s all over, makes Derek wonder what the hell drives Stiles up there in the first place?
But he’ll be there for hours, a hunched figure framed against the sky with his arms around his knees. And he won’t move. He becomes some frozen, backwards photograph of the fidgety kid named Stiles. He’ll look up, keep looking, and his heart will beat like soft and distant thunder in the night.
Idiot.
Stiles is glued together wrong. That’s the best that Derek can figure. Everybody in this town has their issues and people still whisper about “that poor Stilinski kid” who lost his mom to cancer. (They whisper about “that Hale boy” too, but Derek tunes those whispers out, he finds a nearby television or buzzing radio to listen to instead.) Stiles probably started out as selfish and contented as everyone, and then after his mom died someone must have botched the re-assembly.
The real sense of wrongness doesn’t even come from nights like this one, when Derek slips out of the trees and watches the dumbass almost break his neck right after having the shit kicked out of him by monsters. And it isn’t that Stiles stands around when he should run and runs when he’s supposed to stay still and be quiet. It’s deeper than that. There’s something flipped around and upside down behind his ribs. Something all tangled up in his organs. At some very basic level, Stiles is not the way he should be.
Derek will never understand him.
The night is mostly cloudy and everything is wet because it rained all day. All the shadows and shapes of things are skewed by the interrupted light of the moon. Stiles is on the roof, has been an hour already, a motionless and banged up silhouette. And Derek knows (because he was there) that there’s a black eye blooming on the left side of Stiles’ face and that his right ankle will be swollen and stiff by now. But he sits up there, shivering and damp in the wind with his chin tipped up to catch a few fleeting glimpses of the stars. And why? Why?
Idiot.
The silhouette moves. Derek’s phone rings. He answers it.
“Why are you in my yard?” Stiles asks. His voice is hoarse.
“Why are you on the roof?” Derek growls back. When he opens his mouth, like always, the air tastes like ash.
Derek imagines, rather than sees, the disinterested shrug of Stile’s shoulders. Stiles doesn’t know how many times Derek has been privy to this ritual already, has no idea that when Derek finds him like this he stays until he sees Stiles is safely back inside. He can’t know that Derek’s been around to hear him humming off key or muttering old poetry to himself, and has sheltered further into the dark when once or twice he stumbled across the sound of gentle sobbing. He still wouldn’t know, except that Derek is feeling careless tonight, and he stood where the light could refract in his eyes.
“Just a sucker for panoramic nightscapes I guess,” Stiles croaks after a minute. He sounds wrecked. Derek wonders what Stiles told the Sheriff, and how he plans on climbing back in with that ankle.
“I’m coming up.” Derek says. There’s no good reason for it, other than now that Stiles’ knows he’s here it seems stupid to stand in the dark alone.
The windows of Stiles’ house are dim and hollow, and the dappling shadows of healthy trees mottle the white siding, making it burned and gray in patches.
“Whatever, dude,” says Stiles and hangs up. There’s no joke about Derek’s penchant for B&E. No surly diatribe. Derek sees him slip his phone in his pocket and then tuck his arms into his lap.
For a minute Derek stands in the overgrown hedges along the house reminding himself that he doesn’t actually need to be here. Stiles will be safe for the night if he doesn’t topple off the second story, and he’s never fallen before.
Then the wind stirs up and tips over the roof. It brushes down to him the scent of a beat-to-hell sixteen year old boy.
He smells like fear.
Derek climbs up the wall and swings himself onto the roof.
Stiles doesn’t look at him. He’s sitting in damp pajama pants and his red sweatshirt. The moonlight makes the circle around his eye look black—(charred).
“Fancy meeting you here,” he grumbles. Derek sits down next to him and the smell of his fear is dense. It’s not unusual, they’re all afraid. Derek can even catch the stench of it on himself sometimes, when he rolls over to wake up in the morning, when he lies down alone at night. It’s stress and bruises, old blood trapped in stagnant tissue.
Stile’s fear smells different. On most people fear is rank and sour. And it’s sudden; it comes and goes with adrenaline. Where Stiles—
(a tree creaks; the sound of the floors giving out overhead)
Stiles wears his fear all the time. Everywhere he goes. And it’s a soft, sweet smell. Full of heavy blues.
Derek watches Stiles and Stiles watches the stars.
Thirty minutes go by. And then an hour. The clouds fade to wraiths and two o’clock in the morning comes creeping along. Derek folds his legs and waits for Stiles to give up and decide to go to bed. But Stiles doesn’t move, or speak. So they just sit. They sit so long, doing nothing, that Derek’s un-restful nights catch up and his mind starts to wander. They sit so long he has time to remember that life wasn’t always this (fighting, clinging, ‘laying low’). They sit so long, he’s almost comfortable.
He’s thinking about music when Stiles’ voice cracks into the stillness.
“So how about,” he says in a wavering, unused whisper, “some of those stars are already dead?”
“What?” asks Derek, mostly because he’s surprised and less because he gives a shit about a Stilinski style lecture in astronomy.
“Well, light only goes so fast, so even though they croaked, like, a million years ago, their light is still traveling to get here. So to us it looks like they’re totally fine. But really,” Stiles mimes an explosion with his hands and blows a raspberry, “star dust.”
Derek doesn’t answer.
“Also,” Stiles goes on, “we’re seeing some of them twice.” His hands fall into his lap and his forehead crinkles up. “Because black holes bend light, and if a star is in the right place on the other side of a black hole, the light gets split going around it, and then reaches us from two different, uh, trajectories. So we see the same star in two different parts of the sky.” He bites his lip. He can probably still taste the blood of his gums on it. “Which, y’know, is fucked up,” he concludes softly and falls back into his tired silence.
Derek doesn’t know what Stiles is trying to say. But he can see his arms are trembling, and under the smoky wisps of his chill is that heavy fear. It’s stronger now that he’s spoken. And it’s backwards, like instead of radiating out from the center it’s gravitating inward, worming into Stiles from the outside.
“What are you so afraid of?” Derek asks. Stiles is naïve and fragile and annoying as hell, but it’s late and the night is strange and Derek can’t help but recognize that he gives a damn.
Stiles looks at him. And then he keeps looking, like he’s taking stock. When he answers at all it’s a surprise. They aren’t friends; on a good day they’re barely allies, but perhaps there just comes a point where even Stiles is too tired for sarcasm. The last few months have been tough on all of them.
Derek has started to see the white knuckles of Stiles’ hands, the hiccups in his cynicism, the way that he tends to charge forward when he’s most afraid. Derek wonders, exhausted and suddenly undefended under the scrutiny of brown eyes, what Stiles is seeing in him?
“I guess I’m afraid they’re all already dead,” Stiles says on the tail of a long inhale, answering at last. His brown eyes shine and he’s looking at Derek. “That they’ve all gone out and all I see are ghosts.” He shrugs. And maybe Derek knows exactly what he’s saying.
“Which one is real?” Derek asks. It shouldn’t matter. Derek doesn’t care about philosophy and Stiles’ weird-ass metaphors. Survival is his only priority. But for some reason the idea gets stuck under his skin; that he’s looking up at a sky he thought he knew and it’s lying to him.
“Hmm?” asks Stiles.
“Which star is real?” Derek repeats patiently. It must be the time that’s getting to him, those fucked up middle of the night hours seeping inside and drugging him soft.
“Uh,” says Stiles. “Both I guess. Or neither. I mean if it could also be long dead and gone, how real is it just cuz we see it? But one is usually dimmer than the other. More like,” a brief, complicated gesture of twisting wrists, ”phantom-like.” Stiles make an expression with his mouth that could almost be a smile. “I don’t know.”
Heavy blues. Sometimes dark greens. Stiles always smells like rain. He never smells like fire.
“You’re afraid to be the last man standing,” says Derek. His chest is aching.
Stiles opens his mouth and looks like he’s been hit.
“I…huh?” he squeaks. Derek doesn’t repeat himself, he waits. Stiles swallows. “Yeah,” he croaks. Then he frowns and shrugs and looks down into his lap. “Maybe I am. I don’t...I hate being left behind. I mean, I know it’s a fact of the universe that existence implies an observer but I hate that that’s my job. I hate standing on the outside and watching.”
You don’t though, Derek thinks. Stiles is always in the middle of everything. In the middle of everyone. Derek has never met someone who could change the way things happen (or what things mean) as fast as Stiles. But that’s not really the point.
Derek opens his mouth and the air tastes like the dumbest things. Like dew and nighttime. Like wet cotton and Stile’s shampoo. He recalls stuff he hasn’t thought about years. Things that don’t have anything to do with life or death, like standing in a kitchen that smells like warm tomato sauce.
“It means you must exist,” Derek slowly says. “If by watching things you make them exist, then you must be real.”
“What?” says Stiles, clearly shocked.
“And if you’re real then someone must be watching you.”
Stiles shakes his head. “I wasn’t worried about not existing.”
“No, you’re worried being left alone. And I’m saying you won’t be.”
Stiles is quiet. He swallows, shakes his head, and there’s the shine again, wet stars along his eye lashes. Stiles has always been afraid, just never of the right things. “Man,” he says.
Derek feels suddenly reckless and buzzed. He’s also a little bit angry, which is not unusual, but he’s angry for Stiles and not at him and that is. And he’s unsteady. He’s lightheaded and lost because if Stiles isn’t alone then that means Derek isn’t either.
Derek reaches out, realizes how close they’ve been sitting all this time, and pulls Stiles’ hood up over his head. His knuckles brush soft hair and temple. Stiles doesn’t even flinch, but he tracks the progress of Derek’s eyes.
Which means he sees it when Derek’s eyes betray him and flicker down to Stiles’ lips. Derek pulls his hand back and thinks that he should leave. Now.
“This is weird,” Stiles says. He’s staring at Derek’s mouth. “Right?”
“I should go,” says Derek.
Stiles breaks into a grin. He rises onto his knees and crawls the short distance between them.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t leave me alone?” he teases. There’s still blood in his teeth. His smile falls when Derek doesn’t answer. When Derek can only breathe and look at him because Stiles is right, he did promise that, and there’s no reason it should feel like such a big deal.
“Hey,” says Stiles, frowning and sitting on his feet. He touches Derek’s shoulder.
Derek puts his hands on the sides of Stiles’ neck and cards his fingers up into his hair. He runs his thumb along the back of Stiles’ jaw and studies that ugly black eye.
“Go to bed,” he says and makes it a command. He starts to rise but Stiles catches him, fist in his shirt.
“Derek,” he insists, pulling Derek back down and making it clear with his expression that there’s something else that supposed to happen first. Derek props himself on one knee. It’s a bad idea, he knows. He doesn’t have time for things like this, and in the morning he’ll be able to remember all the reasons why.
He goes to Stiles, lowers his head and brings their mouths together.
It’s soft. And he makes sure it’s not too much. Pulls back when Stiles gets a little bit too eager.
“Bed,” he says again.
Stiles gets up. Derek stands at the edge of the roof and helps leverage him into the window. “Um,” says Stiles before Derek can jump down, and Derek stops to wait. “You won’t either,” his voice breaks and he clears his throat. “Get left alone, I mean.”
It rained all day, but already Derek can smell tomorrow’s fires.
“Goodnight, Stiles,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Stiles. “Night.” His gaze flickers up for one more glance at the stars.