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It’s three-thirty in the morning and Stiles’ voyage downstairs and into the kitchen would be comedic if he weren’t half asleep. He’s so drowsy that walking is turning out exactly like those drunk-driving simulations that aren’t actually anything like driving drunk, they’re more like having someone grab the steering wheel and cover your eyes with their hands. Because you’re not actually drunk.
Maybe that’s just Stiles, it occurs to him like a revolutionary dawn on his brain, right as he collides with a wall. He continues on his way and finally succeeds in finding a contraption to fill with cold water. He thinks it’s a coffee mug. Nope, it’s a tiny porcelain milk pitcher. Finally, a use for this thing.
The journey back up the stairs is slightly smoother, but that’s not saying much. He paws at the door a couple times before he finds the doorknob. Settles onto the bed with a yawn. Takes a deep and refreshing gulp of water from his milk pitcher. Yes.
Derek’s hand gropes its way out of the covers and takes the thing from him. He’s too sleepy to be a dick about it, so he just lets Derek drink some of his water and put the pitcher on the bedside table.
Derek slides his arms around Stiles’ middle and pulls him down into the bed. “Do I do a good job providing for you?” Stiles asks, unfocusedly tucking his head under Derek’s chin. Derek hums affirmatively, also lacking the energy to be a dick.
Stiles loves being an asshole to Derek, but he still adores when they’re too tired to be mean to each other for sport, when the honesty that would be slightly too much in the cold light of day comes out, unbidden. Times like this Stiles thinks of Before, before he was with Derek, when he could have been with Derek, but he wasn’t. Tragically. “Stiles,” mumbles Derek into Stiles’ hair. “Love you.”
And, “Oh, my god,” Stiles directs, muffled, into Derek’s chest, “I love you so freakin’ much. Goddamn.” Because Past Stiles was such a freaking idiot. Derek was right there, and he was just like this. Dick werewolf during the day, and moonlighting as this impossibly sweet hugmonster with the ability to fix up Stiles’ jeep and a weird aversion to wearing socks to sleep in. But it’s too cold in the wintertime to walk around the house without socks on, resulting in Derek getting in the bed with them on, and then toeing them off under the covers, which Stiles doesn’t mind, except that whenever they pull the duvet off the bed to wash the sheets, there’s a tiny treasure trove of balled up pairs of socks that Derek addresses with cold indifference. It’s probably the funniest thing Stiles has ever seen. Scott thinks it’s gross. Never mind how Scott happened to be present while they were stripping their bed.
That they share. Because marriage and stuff. “I feel,” Stiles says slowly, “robbed. Of time with you.”
Derek mumbles something questioningly, curling himself around Stiles.
Stiles used to think about being in a relationship, because he’s never been the one-off kinda guy, he’s never wanted anything that wouldn’t potentially last. He spent years pining after Lydia. But he could never imagine himself dating Lydia. All he knew was that she was beautiful and smart and that her hair bounced in time with her footsteps and she walked places like she wasn’t traversing the world, but like the world was turning itself beneath her feet just for her, scenery moving past her and existing specifically for her pleasure. All he knew was that she was an enigma and a gift, and he wanted to touch that, some part of that. But he could never imagine being in bed with her, could never imagine eating breakfast cereal with her and whatever. It was impossible to imagine Lydia with her hair all jacked up from sleep or her face without makeup while she perused the editorials over coffee, and he suspects she probably put forth a lot of effort to make it that way.
“You said you liked me,” says Stiles. “Before?”
“Mm,” says Derek, hoarse, too tired to avoid bald sincerity. “Debatable.” Or not.
“Asshole.” Stiles sighs happily, because bedtime with Derek is mostly warmth just this side of too hot and Stiles mumbling nonsense in his sleep and Derek snoring against his neck and both of them waking up, rearranging the sleeping positions, and then sighing happily. They’re always sighing happily. “I think I liked you,” Stiles goes on. “Or I wanted you, anyway. And I hate that. Because I could have, we could have been—but it just never happened.”
“It did happen,” Derek tells him.
“But it could have happened sooner.”
“Maybe.” Derek tangles their feet up together. His feet are bare. Stiles grins. “Maybe not. It happened when it was supposed to happen.”
Stiles never thought he believed in fate until his mom died. He wasn’t really a kid anymore at that point, but he was still young enough that losing her was like losing this infallible rock he’d always chained himself to. Suddenly nothing made sense, and he could have gone either direction with that. Because on the one hand, if moms could shrink into nothingness and your own brain could try to kill you, nothing had any meaning at all. Or, everything had meaning, anything could be real, and whatever happened was supposed to happen.
Werewolves were real. So what? So was death.
But of course he was a teenager, and he never talked about it with anybody because he never wanted to be that guy with a blunt and a worn copy of Catcher in the Rye, having impossibly pretentious conversations about free will and predestination inspired by Philosophy 101. He never even really thought about it, just accepted it as this new truth beneath everything else he knew.
Until he was lying on the floor of the police station, surrounded by death and magic and failure and hearing Derek say that the universe always balances itself out.
Maybe Derek’s right. Maybe fate is real, and he and Derek were fated to do this. It would make sense; if the universe always balances itself out, Derek’s life needed some serious overhaul when they met. If anyone needed balancing out, it was Derek. His childhood was sort of bleak—too many siblings, an irritating personality, an unmatched ego—and peaked with the death of everyone he’d ever loved. Adulthood started out pretty nasty, too. The universe owed him a few decades of happy sighs and 4am milk pitchers full of ice water.
He’s Derek, though, so he took that idea into an entirely different direction than Stiles would have. Where Stiles assumed Derek’s shitty experiences were his tab, and the two of them making love in the jeep during a thunderstorm was the universe finally paying its goddamn bill, Derek was under the impression that the first twenty-four years of his life were retribution from some past life of his wherein he committed atrocities or some shit.
“Maybe I was, like, a dictator or something,” Derek mused once in an aquarium, and Stiles couldn’t even look at a tiny family of clownfish while Derek was over by the coral thinking he deserved to be punished for something completely out of his control.
But Derek wouldn’t be Derek if he wasn’t unequivocally pessimistic, he’d be someone else entirely. He’d be, like, Joe, or something. And Stiles doesn’t love Joe. He loves Derek. All of him. Freakishly negative postulations, stockpile of sockballs, and secret fondness for chocolate milk included. Stiles wouldn’t change a hair on his head. You couldn’t pay him.
After that, though, Derek was all like, “Or, I’ll have to pay for this eventually,” and Stiles went ahead and put a stop to that line of thinking, because what the hell, Derek. What the actual hell.
Stiles will accept fate, and he will accept Derek’s uncalled for self loathing, and he will even accept Firefly being cancelled, but he will not accept any future for Derek that is anything less than bliss. Because Derek deserves bliss. If he ever suspected Derek would be better off without him, Stiles would be gone the next morning. He supposes they have that in common. But he’s staying, because for one thing, Stiles is selfish and he wants to hoard Derek and keep him in his house in a shoebox and peek at him at random intervals during the day, and for another thing, they’re good together.
They’re a team, really. Stiles solves the crimes and Derek brings justice. (Sometimes.) Good cop, bad cop. Derek does the laundry and Stiles does the dishes. They take turns topping, for fuck’s sake. Last week, Stiles bent Derek over the hood of the Camaro, and a few days later, Derek threw him on the kitchen table. It’s win-win, it’s good. Balanced. Everything is balanced.
Whatever. It’s too early to be thinking about this. Derek’s not asleep yet, judging from the absent patterns his fingertips are tracing on Stiles’ biceps, but he’s getting there. Stiles should catch up with him. Once they’re better rested and they’ve brushed their teeth, they should have sex again. Whose turn is it to top? Stiles doesn’t care whose turn it is, he wants Derek to top.
“In the morning,” Stiles says drowsily, and then yawns, huge. “In the morning,” he goes on, “you should fuck me in the shower.”
“Yeah,” Derek says. “Good.”
Good.