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Stiles talks as much as he ever did.
He says even less.
--
Sometimes Stiles thinks back to that first moment, when he’d looked across the leaf litter and seen that scowl looking back for the first time. He remembers the weight of the realisation, of ‘that’s Derek Hale’, but he hadn’t known, couldn’t possibly know, what that simple fact would mean for him.
Sometimes Stiles thinks of that, and he wants to laugh long and loud, until the air in his throat grows thick and he can choke himself on it.
--
He thinks of Ms Morrell and Winston Churchill and God and Hell. He thinks that they’re all full of shit.
Hell isn’t other people. It isn’t something you can go through. It isn’t somewhere you’re sent. It isn’t something you can force on anyone else.
Hell, Stiles thinks, is knowing everything that you did wrong, and knowing it too late.
Hell is knowing who to blame, and knowing it’s you.
--
Sometimes Stiles will see a lacrosse stick or a boy with floppy hair and happy brown eyes or a pale redheaded beauty or a Sheriff’s uniform and it’s all he can do not to scream at Derek until it all just comes crashing around them.
--
They’re in Minnesota in October, which is a terrible idea, if you ask Stiles.
“Do you have some kind of cold fetish?” Stiles grumbles, kicking up his feet onto the dash of the shitty old Chevy pick-up they’d swapped a Le Baron for in Oklahoma. “An icicle in your pants we need to have an awkward talk about? Jonesing for a romp in the frost? Shall I leave you and the next ice machine alone?”
Derek doesn’t even blink, just takes a sip of gas-station coffee and holds his hand out, palm up. Stiles glares at him, but breaks his redvine in half and gives Derek the longer piece.
“I’m just saying, I hear New Mexico is nice this time of year. We could try Arizona again. Hell, even Texas. I’m down for a two-step, know what I mean?”
Derek exhales a little louder than normal. That’s as good as a roll of the eyes.
“Oh, come on. You loved that place in Redington. Don’t lie, I saw you bust a move to that Chris what’s-his-name song.”
“No, I didn’t,” says Derek, and surely he knows better than that by now. Denial to Stiles is better than a red flag to a bull, and Stiles is off.
“Sure you did. It was at that bar behind the Academy mega-store, and that girl – Julie? Jeannie? She did blink kind of fiercely – anyway, Jeannie or whoever, she dragged you out on the floor for that song about the dress and ripping it off.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Derek says, cool and detached, but Stiles knows him too well to fall for that now. He sees the tension in Derek’s lip, the tiniest of lines at the corner of his eye, and it’s like a smirk on anyone else.
“Liar! You loved it, don’t even pretend you didn’t.”
“Really, Stiles, I think your overactive imagination is something we need to discuss.”
“Oh my god, Derek, just admit you liked a cheesy country song about getting naked already.”
“When did we last get you some Adderall?”
“About when we ran out of your sense of fun.”
--
The road streams behind them, mile upon mile until Stiles can’t say where they even started, and Stiles talks so he won’t have to remember.
--
Stiles stops wanting Derek to hurt, but he can’t remember when it happened.
When he realises, he pulls over to throw up. Derek doesn’t ask him why, and Stiles doesn’t tell him.
That night, Stiles dreams that Scott and Allison and Melissa and Jackson and Lydia and all of them tear him to pieces, and Derek looks on and smiles.
--
Derek raps on the door while Stiles is showering and trying very hard to pretend that the motel doesn’t make him think it must be run by a Bates relative.
“Calm down, there’ll be plenty of hot water left for your mangy pelt,” Stiles says, not bothering to lift his voice above the noise of the spray.
He can feel Derek’s eye roll. “Construction team a few streets over, short a carpenter. Five weeks.”
Stiles bites his lip, trying to think. “Should be fine. I’ll check it out.”
“Right. Pick me up at six?”
“Sure.”
Stiles doesn’t hear Derek leave, and he’s out of the room in thirty minutes himself. Michigan in the winter is icy and windy and all around unpleasant, but the community college library is warm. Derek has the short end of the stick today.
He checks the usual sources, but the county seems quiet for the moment. He fiddles around until the clock hits five, checking out the areas nearby for anything that gets his spidey-sense tingling, and then he’s back in the Chevy.
Derek looks wind-blown and miserable when he climbs in. “So?”
Stiles shrugs. “No red flags. I’ll try get something, too. We should be okay for a couple of months.”
--
They’re not.
--
The Chevy dies an ignominious death, sinking to the bottom of a partially iced-over lake with claw-marks gouged into its bed. Stiles and Derek watch it sink.
They don’t say anything. It’s a low point, even for them, and Stiles feels like they live their lives in nothing but a series of devastating troughs, peaks a far away and distant dream.
--
Stiles ends a night of bussing tables in a ratty motel bed beside Derek, the same as a thousand nights before. Just the same as always, he wants to reach out, to pull Derek into him and enfold him so he’ll never be alone. Just like always, he doesn’t. He listens to Derek breathe into the quiet air, heavy with the things that they don’t say.
--
Someone recognises him in DC.
Stiles is having a moment at the Library of Congress of what he calls scholastic appreciation and Derek calls a nerd-gasm.
Derek is out on a road-crew for the day, pretending to be an El Salvadorian called Miguel. In any other world, Stiles would find that hilarious. In this one, it makes him sad.
Of course, what doesn’t?
Derek is on his lunch break and they’re doing their half-day check-in over the phone when it happens.
“—and the section on natural history alone, oh my god, do you even know how useful this would have been?”
Derek grunts his affirmative grunt, the one that means, ‘oh how interesting, Stiles, tell me more’, ‘certainly, Stiles, I’m listening to these fascinating things you are saying’ or ‘yes, Stiles, you are so very right’ depending on the situation. Stiles chooses to interpret it as the last on this occasion.
“I know, right? Anyway, I was reading this thing on—”
“Hey, I know you. Aren’t you that kid? That Sheriff’s kid? Beacon Hills, right?”
Stiles’ mouth shuts with a snap that makes his teeth ache. Or maybe that’s the pounding terror. Derek is shouting down the line suddenly, but Stiles can’t hear what he’s saying. All he can see is this twenty-something guy pointing and saying his name, asking him where the hell he’s been.
He stammers something out and runs.
Derek pulls up at the curb and Stiles jumps in, and they’re off again, little Ford coupe speeding south over the river.
--
He’s okay with not hating Derek anymore. He can look at Derek’s face in the mornings, golden light playing on stubble and cheekbones and skin for once slack without worry lines, and feel fond. This is personal growth. This is maturity.
--
The worst thing is that he knows his dad will never give up. Not until Stiles’ body is lying on a slab in front of him for him to see with his own two eyes. It will take Stiles’ corpse, cold and blue and there to touch, for his dad to give up on him. That’s what makes these moments so much worse. He imagines that guy from the library calling someone who knows someone in Beacon Hills who works with someone who’ll tell his dad, “Hey, someone saw Stiles last week. Maybe he’s still out there somewhere.”
And Stiles’ dad will nod, face so sad and grim, and say, “I know he is.”
Stiles doesn’t cry when he thinks of this. He thinks he ran out of tears a few states back.
--
Stiles is only nineteen, and he feels old down to his bones.
They’re camping by the Mississippi, lying on grass by the water, crickets singing in the bushes and the half-moon beating down on their backs.
“How long do you think we’ll be able to keep doing this?” he whispers, and Derek closes his eyes.
“As long as we can,” he replies, and Stiles turns into him. Leans his head on Derek’s chest, like he’s never ben brave enough to. Or maybe he’s just never been this tired. Derek lifts a hand to his back, and it feels like a tether to a world he left behind.
“Do you remember what it’s like not to be afraid?”
Derek’s hand tenses on his back, but it’s to keep Stiles close, not push him away. “No. I don’t.”
--
Stiles looks in the mirror one night after a long shift pulling beer and Cuba Libres, and his first thought isn’t to smash his face into the mirror.
He’s shaky for days.
--
They start touching more, and then it becomes a habit. It’s slow and awkward but soon it’s normal, even as Stiles laughs to himself at the idea of anything being normal.
“Why don’t you hate me anymore?” Derek asks him one morning when they’re stretching awake. Vermont, and it’s late summer. Soon the leaves will start to turn, and they’ll begin their annual cold versus freezing winter debate. Stiles thinks it’s his turn this year.
Stiles rests his head on Derek’s chest and just listens to the constant beat of his heart. “You’re all I have left.”
Derek runs his hands through Stiles’ hair, and they wait for the world to turn.
--
Stiles wins. They head south.
--
Sometimes Stiles thinks of the ways this could have ended differently.
If Stiles had never heard of a body in the woods, and Peter had turned someone other than Scott, leaving the two of them to bumble along the normal high school road until they left for college and jobs and real life.
If Derek had picked different Betas to turn, people who weren’t broken and desperate, people with strength to lend him instead of leeching off what little Derek had left.
If the Argents had listened, and had stood with them against the Alphas instead of leaving everyone to be picked off one by one.
If Stiles had told his dad the truth from the beginning.
If Isaac hadn’t turned on them.
If Melissa’s car hadn’t broken down.
If Allison’s bow string hadn’t snapped.
If Scott hadn’t stumbled.
If Derek hadn’t pulled Stiles back at that final moment.
If Stiles had been better.
If any of these things hadn’t happened, everything else might be different. He and Derek might not be the only ones left.
It doesn’t help.
--
“Are you going to punish yourself forever?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Are you?”
--
He doesn’t know who kisses who, but it’s a lazy spring evening in Florida, cumbia floating in through their open window, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to let Derek in.
The current he always felt back in high school, the thrum when Derek touched him or looked at him or growled at him, is back in full force and Stiles tears at Derek’s shirt. He scrabbles for bare skin, tears his mouth away to run his teeth down Derek’s neck, desperate to mark him, to make this a thing that can’t be torn away.
Derek lets him. He’s pliant and foggy-eyed beneath Stiles, gives Stiles whatever he demands, just like he always does.
It’s hot and it’s messy and bitter and wonderful. They lie tangled together after, sweat-sticky and tired, trading kisses until they fall asleep to the sound of guitars.
--
It’s been nearly a year since they felt someone hunting them, and neither of them can even think about mentioning it.
--
Stiles turns twenty-one in New Hampshire.
Derek takes him to a bar with a dress code and buys him a martini. Stiles hates it, but he drinks the whole thing down. He’s been in and out of bars in state after state, but this is the first time that his ID is legitimate, the one with the real name that he keeps hidden in his shoe most days, and this is the nicest place he’s been, ever.
It kind of creeps him out. Derek looks strange in the light of antique sconces, and Stiles feels like an imposter in his thrift-store tie. When he finishes the martini, he drags Derek downtown to a sports bar. They drink Coors Light and Derek hustles pool until they get thrown out.
He presses Derek against the brick outside, takes him right there where anyone could see them, and for a moment he can breathe.
--
“Come on. You’re being unreasonable.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. The answer is still no.”
“If you’d just look at this from my perspective—”
“Is ‘no’ really that hard a concept? No. Means ‘not happening’.”
Derek growls and throws up his hands, and Stiles lets himself smile. Just a little.
“Do you remember when you used to boss me around?”
Derek shoots him a long-suffering look. “With fondness.”
--
Time creeps by, and Stiles’ spidey-senses stay quiet. They stay longer, and it’s not until he looks at the calendar and realises they’ve been in Louisiana for four months that Stiles feels like he can maybe think that this could be it.
Derek shoots him looks out of the corner of his eyes, but they don’t talk about it. Stiles talks about everything else, and Derek breathes his words into Stiles mouth, his skin, his hair, under the light of the ever changing moon.
--
“I don’t blame you anymore, you know.”
Derek doesn’t say anything back, but he curls around Stiles in the dark, pressing his face to Stiles’ back.
Stiles doesn’t mention the wetness he feels running down his skin, or the shaking in Derek’s arms. He just strokes Derek’s fingers slowly, lingering on each tip where the claws come out.
He pulls them to his mouth and kisses them, one by one, slow and sweet, and Derek trembles around him.
--
They wait until they hit the two year mark before they cross from Nevada into California.
They’re both jittery and their tempers are short, but Stiles thinks that they’ll be fine. For the first time in a long time, Stiles thinks he’s okay with that.
Somewhere he stopped wanting them both to suffer, and he’s too relieved at the loss of that weight to be mad at himself.
--
They’re standing outside the Sheriff’s office and Derek looks over at him.
“You ready for this?”
Stiles shakes his head, but he’s smiling.
Derek takes his hand, and they walk in together.
--
It’s hard, and sometimes awful, but one day Stiles looks over and sees his father smile at Derek like it’s normal.
Derek smiles back. It’s his small, real smile, the one that doesn’t want anything in return. Something untwists inside Stiles and he can breathe again.
--
He looks over at Derek, who is fighting with the plumbing under their sink, scowl etched deep into that so often frowny face, muttering about S-bends.
“We did okay, right?”
Derek hits his head on the way out of the cabinet, and there’s smelly gunk sticking out of his hair.
“Yeah. I think – I think they’d be proud of us.”
Derek looks uncomfortable the second the words are out of his mouth, like he wishes he could call them back and bury them deep, but Stiles is tired of being angry. He hasn’t been for so long, and pretending isn’t worth it.
He grins, and watches the answering smile spread across Derek’s face like spring thaw.
“Yeah. Me, too.”