Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Danny is on a run when he sees Erica. Eight months ago, he wouldn’t have given a damn about seeing Erica Reyes in the backseat of a rusty Camry. Hell, eight months ago, he’d been aware of her only enough to pity her for her epilepsy. Admittedly, that pity had transformed into a sort of terrified awe after the midyear leather and lipstick makeover, but even then he wouldn’t have noticed the blur of her hair in the backseat of a car speeding through an intersection.

But, as far as Danny knows, no one has seen Erica since the spring. Jackson had had to go to the police station, had been asked to give yet another statement in a semester so full of alleged criminal activity that Danny hadn’t even been surprised to hear that his best friend was a suspect in the disappearance of a girl they’d both known since elementary school.

Months have passed, everyone says the investigation has grown cold, and now here she is, and Danny is the one to see her, so, yeah, he notices her. She whips around at the sight of him, presses her palms against the glass of the window, mouths frantic words at him through the smear of red her lips become as the car passes, and Danny stands still just long enough to make out the number on the license plate. Then he turns and runs.

He doesn’t go to the police station. He probably should. Even as he heads away from the center of town, even as he turns down residential streets and cuts through cul-de-sacs, a part of him is thinking he should go to the sheriff. A part of him is thinking he should pull his phone out of the sleeve on his arm and dial 911. He shoves that part down and sprints, flat-footed and tired, to Stiles Stilinski’s doorstep.

He falls forward, pounding fists against the door. He hasn’t even begun to recover his breath when the door opens and he stumbles, catches himself, and looks up to see Stiles standing in front of him, bleary eyed, hair messy, mouth partly open.

“What’s happened?” Stiles steps aside, voice croaky, and Danny shakes his head, gulps in air, and gets far enough inside for Stiles to close the door behind him.

“Erica,” Danny rasps, and Stiles’s eyes widen. He wakes up a little.

“Did you see her?”

“In a car by CVS.”

Stiles pushes him down the hall, one hand against the drenched fabric of his t-shirt, and into the kitchen. There are plates piled in the sink, a half a pot of coffee in the coffeemaker, a cereal box sitting open on the counter. Stiles pulls a glass from the dish rack and fills it with water, handing it to Danny while picking up his cellphone from the kitchen table and thumbing down the screen.

“Get over here,” he says into it. Danny tips his head back and drains the glass. “Yes, I know. No, I don’t care. It’s Erica. Yeah. I’ll call Scott.” He pulls the phone away from his ear for a moment. Danny refills his glass in the silence of Stiles scrolling through his contacts again, and then Stiles is saying, “Hey, get the gang together and go to the center of town. You don’t need to tell me it’s early, I fucking know it’s early. Call Allison. I know, I know, dude, but it’s Erica. Danny’s seen her.” He turns away from Danny, who’s getting a third glass of water. He takes this one slower, staring at the hole in the collar of Stiles’s shirt. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Scott. I told—yeah, Jackson will be over. Ask Allison to call Lydia. I’m not sure. I don’t know, I said. We’ll figure it out. Right now, though, Erica. By CVS. In a car. I don’t know what kind,” and Danny says, “late 90s Camry, white,” and Stiles says into the phone, “Did you hear that?” even though Danny’s voice is still quiet with the fastness of his run. Stiles hangs up without saying anything else, drops his phone in a loud clatter on the counter, and faces Danny again.

“So?” he prompts.

Danny rests his glass against his cheek. “She was in the backseat. She looked,” petrified, angry, vicious, crazy, “like she didn’t want to be there.”

“No fuck.” Stiles is so much less than the hyperactive kid he is in chemistry right now. He’s got his lip between his teeth and his hands pressed against the back of his neck and Danny feels confused, lost in this boy’s kitchen. Stiles takes up so little space here.

He hurries out of the room; Danny can hear his feet pound up the stairs. A door slams, and then there’s silence, and then Stiles is stampeding back down the stairs, shaking the stairwell as he careens into the kitchen, his laptop in his hands. He drops the computer in the same unceremonious fashion that he had dropped his phone, and, all right, it’s not the nicest machine in the world, but he should really be a little more careful.

“You don’t need to take this out on your computer.”

“She’s been through worse.”

Danny decides to ignore that. Mostly. He snorts a little.

Stiles doesn’t respond, just pushes open the computer and types in his password, then turns it (her?) to face Danny. “You’re hacking into California’s car registry.”

“No, I’m not.” Danny shakes his head, so fast the room blurs. “Definitely not.”

“You are,” and then there’s noise in the front hall, voices running over each other, and Stiles shoots Danny a hard stare, one that doesn’t at all fit the Stiles who falls off his chair in chemistry, the one who asks him questions about his sexuality, the boy Danny would have sworn he knew just yesterday, before heading down the hall toward the front door. Danny pulls out a chair and Googles the remote access site for California’s DMV.

Jackson and the absurdly built man Stiles’d once introduced to Danny as his cousin Miguel follow him back into the kitchen a few Google pages later.

Jackson nods at Danny, posture weirdly stiff and eyes skittering over the table and the fridge and everywhere but where he’s sitting at the table. Stiles waves at the man he’d made strip in his bedroom last year. “This is Derek.”

The man holds out his hand. “Not Miguel,” he clarifies. Danny shakes his hand, even though he’s half afraid this Derek will break his fingers just by touching them. Because, fuck. Even in the t-shirt he’s wearing, which is definitely looser than any of Stiles’s were on him, just damn.

But Derek lets go of him without breaking any bones, and Danny releases a nervous laugh as he sets his hand back on the keyboard.

Jackson jerks his head up. “Boyd,” he says, tone sounding like a warning, seconds before Stiles’s back door bursts open and their classmate throws himself inside.

Boyd used to be big but little, diminutive, easy to ignore for Jackson and Danny and their group because he didn’t matter to them, and, yeah, better by comparison to Jackson is not good, is not nice, Danny knows this even if no one else does. But now Boyd is huge, he fills up the room, gets up in Danny’s face with eyes wild, lips curled back, voice rough and deep and fucking desperate. “You saw Erica?”

Danny jerks back, and Stiles—Stiles steps around him as his chair scrapes on the floor and presses a hand against Boyd’s heaving shoulder. “In a car, he’s hacking the DMV, we’ll try to find out who it is, where they’re going.”

“Shouldn’t we be—?” Boyd takes deep breaths and Danny refocuses his attention on the computer, uncomfortable at the raw emotion, abruptly aware of how much more important this is than maybe anything he’s been involved in before. “Shouldn’t we be looking for her? If she was in town? Couldn’t we—couldn’t we just—shouldn’t we be able to find her?” All of these questions are directed at Derek, who collapses at Stiles’s table like he belongs there.

The questions are directed at Derek, but it’s Jackson who answers first. “I passed Scott on my way here. He said he and Isaac were tracking her. Lydia and Allison were supposed to be joining them, bring a car and…stuff.”

“Tracking?” Danny repeats, speaking to Stiles’s computer screen.

Jackson moves around the table, pressing into Stiles’s space. “I told you I didn’t want,” he begins.

“Don’t care,” Stiles tells him. “Really, dude, I don’t give a damn. Sorry, but this is important, and Danny can help. More than you can, right now. Besides, he’s in it.”

“He doesn’t have to be in it.” Derek’s voice is quiet, like he’s trying for calm but only just manages tired.

“I want Erica back.” Boyd sits on the other side of Danny, and Danny tenses, fingers still on the keyboard while he tries to ignore the solid presence beside him. He hasn’t felt—this is threatened, this feels threatened—he hasn’t felt this way since he and his last boyfriend broke up. “If he needs to be in it to get her back, then I’m with Stilinski.”

“He’s already in it,” Stiles repeats. “Like we all were. I was, from the start. Lydia, Allison. You can’t not be. He can’t not be.”

“Maybe someone should ask me what I want.” Danny has just cracked through the last password-protected portion of the remote-access site and numbers skim under his fingers, beautiful.

“If you answer wrong I’ll be so disappointed, dude.” And Jackson growls at that, an actual guttural sound, leaning over the table so his shadow looms across it, lengthens in the sunlight slanting through the windows over the sink.

“You have no right.” Derek’s voice is still exhausted. “No one’s forced you to tell your dad, Stiles. No one’s forced you to do anything. Let Jackson…this isn’t your business. Either of yours,” he adds, because Boyd has started speaking.

Stiles waves his hands around, and Danny is comforted by the movement, by the familiarity of it. “Fine.” Stiles sounds put out the way he does at lacrosse practice, when he’s been told to sit on the bench for one too many games. “I’m going upstairs. Let me know when you’ve decided.”

To Danny’s surprise, Boyd lifts himself out of his chair and trails Stiles out of the room. Derek leans in close to Jackson, saying something so quiet that Danny can’t make out more than a rumble of noise, before following the other two. Jackson doesn’t look at Danny. He doesn’t speak until there’s a sound of a door shutting loudly, slammed, upstairs, and then he settles in his seat.

“How’d you know to come here? When you saw her?”

“That’s not your question,” Danny accuses, typing the numbers in the search bar. He can’t remember the last two digits of the license plate, but he hopes the first five will get him somewhere.

Jackson presses his hands into the table. It creaks. The table fucking creaks.

“Your question,” Danny stares at Jackson’s hands for a solid few seconds before forcing his attention back to the computer screen, “is why I didn’t call you. Why I came to Stilinski.”

“And your answer?”

“Because I thought he was more involved in all of this than you. I thought,” Danny can feel success approaching, it’s buzzing in the keys, “you were more on the outskirts of all the craziness that’s happened this year.”

Jackson laughs. “Everyone underestimates me.”

“No, I thought you were too smart to get tied up in it.” Danny glances up from the computer screen. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Jackson still won’t meet his eyes. “Do you want to know what’s going on?” he asks, finally, and Danny, even though he has had half a year to decide whether he wants the truth, even though he has been thinking about this since Scott McCall made first line, since that weird night in the club, since the boy he’d been crushing on disappeared, since a fuck-ton of death got shoved into a few short months, since Jackson died but actually didn’t, since Stiles came to school with his face black and blue and Lydia had stood in the middle of a hallway and catcalled at him, and Stiles had laughed—not blushed, not flailed, but laughed—since the whole school turned on its head, Danny has been deciding whether he wants to know.

And now he’s got to do it, actually make a decision, and that is pretty damn hard.

“If I say no,” he says, and Jackson lets out a breath that sounds like relief, and so Danny repeats, “If I say no, will you run off and leave me here when I tell you that I just found out that the car was registered to a Ms. Umberta Smith of 56 Oak Street and that supposedly she is no longer allowed to drive it?”

Jackson shoves back from the table. “Good, that’s good.” There’s the sound of feet pounding on the stairs and Jackson tries to escape but Danny reaches across the table, snags onto the neck of his tee, and, fuck, Jackson’s glare has gotten a lot scarier in the last few months.

“That’s a yes, then,” Danny fists his hand in Jackson’s shirt, “which means,” the fabric darkens in his still-sweaty fingers, “that’s a yes from me, too. What the hell is going on?”

Derek and Boyd have reached the kitchen, and Stiles skids in just as Jackson takes his seat again and looks at Danny, really looks at him, for the first time that morning.

“We’re going,” Boyd tells him. “Derek and me. You catch up with Stiles when you can.”

“Wait,” Stiles says, and Danny’s glad he’s not the one who has to say it, because Derek and Boyd look like they’re ready to explode, to get away so fast they might break a wall, but they stop when Stiles tells them to. “First,” he’s speaking quick and crazy, voice high with tension, “you should be here for this. At least you, Derek, because you’re the start of it. And second, why would they bring Erica back? Why would they come back if they had her? Why after all this time? This is obviously a trap, right? We need to be careful not to spring it.”

“So?” Boyd growls, low. Jackson is still staring at Danny, still watching, waiting like he wants him to say that he takes it back, that he doesn’t want to know. “You want us to go slow?”

“I want us to go slower, and I want us to go together.” Stiles pulls out his cellphone and leans against the counter, touching rapid fingers against the screen. “Jackson,” he says without looking up from the phone, and Jackson, amazingly, lowers his gaze to his hands and opens his mouth.

He takes a deep breath, loud enough that Danny can hear it no problem, and then says, “First off, I guess it’s important for you to know that werewolves exist.”

Danny chokes back a laugh. This doesn’t seem the moment to laugh, even if it reeks of one of Jackson’s terrible practical jokes. Like, he’s beginning with werewolves but it’ll end up being a drug deal or an underground fighting ring. Something slightly—if only slightly—more believable.

“Werewolves?” Danny repeats. Stiles makes an agreeing humming noise behind him, and Jackson shoots his gaze up to Stiles, eyes glowing blue, bright blue, electric blue, fucking unnatural blue.

“Jesus.” Danny slides down in his chair, fisting his hands in his hair and trying not to think because this is insane, is what it is. It is ridiculous. This cannot be an actual conversation that he’s having in his life.

“Erica and Boyd and Lahey and McCall and,” he looks at his hands, looks over Danny’s shoulder again, looks over Danny’s other shoulder, at Derek, looks, finally, at Danny, “me.” Danny tries not to move, tries not to react. “We were all bitten. By Derek.” Danny tenses, moves slightly, an inch or two, over in his chair, closer to Stiles, further from Derek. “He offered, Derek offers. Except for McCall. McCall didn’t—”

“My uncle bit Scott,” Derek explains, voice soft, not that that makes any difference to Danny, he’s still hanging off his chair, getting as close to Stiles—the only other human in the room, fuck everything—as possible, “he wanted a pack, because pack means strength, and he found Scott and bit him without giving him a chance, without telling him,” and he trails off, seemingly unable to continue.

Stiles picks up, “So Scott and me sorted out this ridiculous werewolf mystery and then it turns out that there are humans who know about it—not like me and Lydia, and now you, who sort of fell into it—but humans who call themselves hunters and, um, their mission in life—their family’s mission—is to kill rogue werewolves? Or not-so-rogue, if you’re crazy like a few of the Argents were. Not Allison.” All of this bursts in a rush and Danny feels as if his brains are about to fall out. “So anyway a lot of the shit that went down this year was us trying not to get killed by hunters—or me trying not to let Scott get killed by hunters. And also Derek’s uncle was sort of batshit crazy. He died,” and then Stiles falters because apparently he realizes he is really not helping matters much.

“He died,” Danny repeats. “Someone killed him?”

“It was a joint effort,” Stiles explains. “Really pretty complicated. This was before—everything, really—when Scott and Derek and Peter—Derek’s uncle—were the only wolves in town. And then Derek became the alpha and bit the rest and some shit went down that doesn’t really matter and then Erica and Boyd found an alpha pack—that is, a pack of alphas.”

Jackson cuts in, “Alphas are wolves who can turn you, like Derek. The strongest wolves.” And maybe no one else notices it, but Danny can hear the edge of jealousy in Jackson’s tone.

“We were found by an alpha pack,” Boyd interrupts, “and they messed me up but let me go, but they kept Erica and disappeared. We’ve been searching for her for months, but they somehow severed our pack bond, and now she’s back because you’ve seen her. And I’d really like to go get her now.” His voice drops several octaves and Jackson starts up without seeming to think about it. Danny cranes his neck around to look at the others. Derek has his hand on Boyd’s neck, fierce comfort, and Stiles is typing something into his phone again.

“Scott says they’ve followed the scent to the edge of town, over by the abandoned flea market, but that they don’t want to go on without all of us there. I’ve got the address for the owner of the car in my GPS—do we go to the others, or do we go there?” He looks at Derek.

“There?” Derek suggests, and Boyd propels from beneath his hand like he’s finally been unleashed.

“Slower, remember,” Stiles shouts after him, but they can already hear the sound of a car starting in the driveway.

Jackson and Derek hesitate in the doorway. “You don’t have to come,” Derek tells him. “As long as you swear not to say anything, you can go.”

“This is,” Danny clears Stiles’s Internet history and stands up, “it’s like—this is weird and fucking crazy, I guess, but I’m in. Like Stiles said. Plus, I was the one to see her. And that can’t have been a part of their plan. Maybe we’re, maybe because of me you’re ahead of them.”

“Great,” Stiles throws an arm around Danny’s shoulders, and he tries not to jump at the sudden contact, “let’s get going, then, otherwise Boyd will probably tear a hole in my car.”

Stiles doesn’t even complain about Boyd being in the driver’s seat as he climbs to sit between Jackson and Danny in the back. He leans forward and holds his phone out in the space between Derek and Boyd, directing Boyd to drive them down narrow and windy back roads that Danny hadn’t even known were still considered within Beacon Hills.

There’s no car in the driveway when they pull up to the ranch, just one falling-down floor with weeds growing through cracks in the driveway and over the bricks of the front steps. Boyd parks on the road so fast that Danny’s head bounces back against the seat.

Derek gets out, pushes his seat forward. “Boyd, you and Jackson stay here. Danny, Stiles, you two come on.”

“Is there anyone home?” Stiles asks, and Danny wonders how he expects anyone to know that, but Derek nods.

“Just one person. Human, but the place stinks of wolves.”

And Danny realizes that the only thing he actually knows, the only thing that is different about him at this moment, the thing that wasn’t his this morning, is this knowledge of werewolves. This knowledge that they exist, and that Jackson and the others are not human. He doesn’t know anything about what that means.

Stiles rings the doorbell, leans against it so it buzzes loud and obnoxious even to them, where they’re standing outside, and Derek mutters, “Stiles,” his voice gruff, and he lifts his finger, the noise fading. Danny feels so out of place that he’d almost rather be naked while guarding the goal in a lacrosse game.

“No one’s coming,” Stiles says after a few silent seconds, reaching out to press the doorbell again.

“Don’t,” Danny says, and Stiles’s finger hovers in the air.

“Someone’s coming,” Derek tells them, his body growing so tense beside Danny that it feels as if he’s pulling the air away from them, like he’s gotten heavier and his gravity is consuming. Danny shifts forward, his foot tapping against the heel of Stiles’s shoe as he moves. Stiles glances back and offers a weirdly stretched grin just as the door opens and—

And they’re looking at a tiny woman, shoulders delicate but hunched, hair so white it’s blue, eyes nearly lost in a maze of wrinkles, wrists so thin, just so thin, and it hurts to look at her because she is old age, she is what happens if you make it, she is weak and fragile and Danny can hear a growl beginning in Derek’s throat and that is wrong, because she is tiny and alone and the most unthreatening person he has ever seen.

Stiles starts talking before Derek can do whatever he’s planning, thank God. Stiles just goes, “Good morning. I’m a friend of your neighbor,” he gestures vaguely down the road, away from the Jeep, “and he mentioned to me the other day that you have a Toyota Camry? Said it never leaves your lot, although I don’t see it here now,” Stiles waves his hands, and Danny is stunned because he is good at this, good at lying, astonishing with the way he’s throwing his body into it, “And my friend here,” he points at Danny, who tries to look convincing, tries to look like—Stiles’s friend, like someone whose breath is not caught hard in his lungs, “is looking for precisely a model that year and I understand if you don’t have it anymore but if you do would you possibly consider selling it to him?”

“No one wants that car,” the woman says, her voice hoarse and husky. Maybe it wasn’t such a good lie, but Stiles did it so well that Danny would have believed him one second in, and he doesn’t get why this woman is still holding onto the door and glaring at them through wrinkled-over and watery eyes. “And my grandsons are using it. And no, I will not tell you where they are, because they and your pretty blonde friend do not want to be found.”

Derek’s growl bursts out, but it’s taken on Stiles’s name while lingering in his windpipe, and Stiles responds by stepping forward and taking one of the woman’s tiny wrists, before Danny can even blink, before the woman can so much as shuffle a step backwards. Stiles is holding a syringe, which he inserts where the woman’s shoulder meets her neck, and she lets out a sigh and falls forward. Derek has stepped around both Danny and Stiles, who releases the woman as she crumples. He caps the needle and pockets it, his hands steadier than Danny’s ever seen them. Derek catches the woman as she drops; he lifts her in his arms carefully, like a child.

“Close the door and come on,” he directs, heading back to the Jeep in a long-legged stride, and no one comes screaming out of their houses, no alarms go off, no cop cars zoom skidding from down the road. It’s all quiet, except Stiles just drugged a woman and Derek Hale, resident hottie with a tragic backstory, resident alpha werewolf, is lifting an unconscious woman into the backseat of Stiles’s Jeep. Danny can feel the panic he’s been keeping tamped down clawing at his throat as Stiles shuts the door to the house with a soft click.

“Ready, Danny?” He says it like they’re leaving chemistry together. He says it like it’s normal. He says it like Danny’s not taking scary deep breaths to keep standing.

“This is going to come across as sort of callous and awful and I’m sorry, but can you hold off on that until we get in the car? Because I only gave her enough to knock her out for like fifty minutes, and if we could get to her grandsons and Erica before she wakes up that would probably be good.”

“How’d you even—?” Danny manages, trying really hard to fight the burgeoning panic back. Really hard. Really fucking hard. Stiles takes his elbow, carefully, lightly, like he’s afraid Danny’ll blow up if he puts any real pressure on him, and tries to lead him down the steps. Danny lets him, but only because Stiles starts talking.

“The drugs are a cocktail given to us by Deaton—the town vet? He’s sort of, um, a werewolf whisperer, I guess? I don’t know what you’d call him, actually. But he helps sometimes. And the reasoning is,” he trails off because Danny has stopped again.

Danny takes two deep, deep breaths, so deep he imagines he can taste the hot tar and the sweat blistering out over his forehead and the sweat at his elbow, transferring from Stiles’s hand to his skin, and he breathes those two breaths and says, “The town vet is in on this?”

Stiles shrugs. “It’s all incredibly fucked up.” The Jeep’s engine revs from where it sits only a few feet away—a few feet, Danny can make it—and he looks up to see Boyd’s eyes flashing yellow behind the window. “But we’re going to hopefully use this woman to trade for Erica. Hopefully they’ll care enough about her. Family is pack, and Derek says this place smells like that pack, so chances are they’ll take the bait. If they don’t, at least we’ve got a bargaining chip. Now, please, get in the Jeep.”

And Danny does. Derek and Jackson are in the backseat, the woman between them with her head tilted back and a shiny string of drool slipping from her pale lips. Danny and Stiles squeeze together in the passenger seat, and Stiles’s left leg jiggles against Danny’s as Boyd takes off, wheels screaming against the road.

“You said by the old flea market, yeah?” Boyd asks Stiles over Danny, not even looking at Danny, and the air in the car is crazy, it’s full of tension and hope and a lot of other emotions. Emotions that feel out of proportion. Danny’s never felt love like this, this love the whole Jeep is full of, this love for Erica that’s driving all these people—even Jackson, somehow, Jackson is here and he has not argued once, he seems one hundred percent on board with this, and Danny doesn’t understand that—it’s driving all of them to—to drug an old woman, to threaten and posture and—this is insane.

Danny’s never needed to fight mythological creatures for somebody. He doesn’t know the lengths you go to when lives are on the line. Or he hadn’t known. Now, he realizes, as Boyd speeds through a four-way stop without even touching the brakes, now he knows. You go to whatever lengths you need to. You go the whole fucking distance.

He feels this niggling doubt, like, did they have to? Did Stiles have to drug her? Was this the extreme, was this borne of watching too many action movies as kids? Was this just how they thought they had to act? They were all so young, maybe—maybe there was a way out of it that wasn’t criminal. Maybe, but then Stiles is leaning into his shoulder, breath on his ear, whispering, even though from Derek’s comments back at the house Danny’s sure the whole car can hear, “Are you okay?” Danny nods, because he has to.

“Fine,” he says, voice stiff.

“He’ll freak out later.”

Danny doesn’t feel like Jackson has the right to make comments about him right now. Jackson has been lying for so long, about such important things, he can’t have the right—Danny doesn’t know, he doesn’t get it, any of this.

“Scott says,” Stiles speaks before Danny can react to Jackson, “that they’re at the flea market. The alphas left the car and took off into the woods. He thinks they know they’re there, but they haven’t done anything.”

“They didn’t leave a guard at their grandmother’s, either,” Derek says. “They’re either idiots or they’re planning something.”

“Or possibly both.” Stiles shifts so Danny has a little more room. “Which might be good. Idiots with a plan are easy to trap.”

They roll to a stop in the dirt parking lot of the abandoned flea market, where two cars idle at one end and the Camry sits empty at the other, parked among some dilapidated wooden carts.

Isaac and Scott get out of one car, Allison and Lydia appear out of the other, and they regroup in the middle of the lot, Jackson cradling the old woman, Stiles beside Danny with his hand somewhere around the small of his back, although it doesn’t settle on him.

Lydia gives him her usual look. Cool, calculating, considering. He hates that expression; he tries to smile at her. “So, werewolves,” he says, and her lips twist into a smirk.

“It’s absurd how long it took you to figure it out.”

“He didn’t.” Jackson speaks over the little old lady’s head. The little old lady has elicited exactly zero comments, no strange looks. Like Danny’s the piece that doesn’t fit in this equation. “We had to tell him.”

“To be fair, it’s not the first thing you’d think of.” Allison reaches into a bag hanging from her shoulder and pulls out a miniature crossbow—a crossbow!—and Derek shakes his head.

“We’re going in peacefully,” he tells her. “For now.”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Has that ever worked for us, Hale?”

“It might this time.” Jackson hefts the woman, like she’s a bag of lacrosse sticks, like she’s nothing.

“Let’s go.” Scott waves a hand toward the woods. Derek glances around at the others.

“Allison and Boyd, you should stay.” Boyd looks like he’s going to fight, but Derek says, “No, stay with the cars. You’re too volatile right now—which is understandable, but we need this to be calm. And Allison, you keep your weapons with you. Danny? Do you want to come?”

Danny looks at Allison, whose grip is white on the strap of her bag, and at Boyd, whose eyes are still glowing off and on, and he nods. Derek nods back, then turns to face the trees.

Danny keeps pace with Stiles as they approach the woods. Lydia is a few steps ahead of them, just behind Jackson, and Scott and Derek and Isaac are at the front, breaking the way through the branches and the weeds, not even bothering to try to be quiet.

The alphas have a camp set up about a half mile in. It’s just a half-circle of green and yellow tents, surrounding a fire pit full of charred wood and ashes, with a few pans sitting in a pile by the circle of rocks, and three alphas—a woman and two identical men, teenagers, standing in the same way, angry eyes locked on Jackson—all of them looking strong and terrifying. Like nightmares, with their eyes red and their teeth long. Danny’s heart goes crazy and Stiles reaches out and grabs onto his wrist, tugging on it until he tilts his head and Stiles hisses, “It’s fine,” like that’ll make a difference at all.

They don’t look surprised to see the woman in Jackson’s arms.

“That’s how you want to play it?” The woman asks, hair long and shiny brown, hands on hips, elongated teeth making her words come out lisped, come out silly, and it’s crazy that the sound makes Danny want to laugh.

“One of your pack for one of ours,” Derek growls. He hasn’t transformed. Yet, he hasn’t transformed yet, and Danny is scared, nervous about seeing a werewolf on this side. One of the supposed good guys, one of the guys he’s standing with. A monster.

“I don’t know,” the woman draws the words out. “I don’t think your threat is all that serious. Would you really hurt a defenseless old lady? Really? Aren’t there hunters around here? Wouldn’t that,” she raises her hands, her fingers ending in claws, and it’s so ugly that Danny wants to turn and run, “upset them?”

“Not necessarily,” Derek says. “Not if she doesn’t stay human.”

The twin to the right of the woman growls. “That’s my grandmother. I can assure you she very much wants to stay human. Your hunters won’t appreciate you biting her.”

Derek chuckles. “You give our hunters too much credit. As a werewolf sympathizer, she’s at risk. And if I bite her, well. I think we can probably make Argent understand.”

“His daughter will understand, anyway,” Scott’s using Allison like a chess piece in a bad heist film, “and she’s the one who matters these days.” Danny feels how ridiculous this is, feels it even as the three alphas glance at each other.

“You wouldn’t bite her. She’s old,” the twin to the left says, and as Danny adjusts to how nightmarish the man looks he can hear the thread of worry beneath his lisped words.

“She’ll either die or she’ll live longer, get stronger.” Derek doesn’t seem to care, and Danny doesn’t know him well enough to know if this is an act. He doesn’t know any of them, it’s occurring to him. Maybe Jackson a little. Not Stiles, not Lydia. Certainly not Isaac, and not the others back at the cars, and not the girl they’re trying to save. What, he wonders, what is he doing here?

“You won’t.” The woman steps forward, claws out, teeth out, eyes inhuman, and Derek steps forward, too, and Danny can’t see his face but his ears are suddenly pointy so he must be wolf-like, too, animalistic, wrong. Or is it right, for him?

“Are you willing to risk that?” His words are lisped, but only just. “Give us Erica back.” There’s a command underlying the words, and Danny feels a tug in his chest. If he had Erica, he’d hand her over right now.

“She abandoned you.” The woman seems entirely unconcerned. “She ran away and found us. Why do you want her back? She doesn’t want to be back with you.”

“Liar,” Jackson accuses, sounding satisfied. Sounding proud of himself.

The twins throw up their hands in unison, all their similarities striking and disconcerting as they move. The woman shifts forward an inch. “Maybe so. But it is true we don’t want to give her to you.”

Jackson steps forward, aligning himself beside Derek. The old woman’s left arm is swinging limp. He shifts her weight and settles himself towards Derek. “Derek can bite her. Easy.”

“Do you really want your grandmother to belong to another pack?” Stiles speaks up for the first time, and three red gazes lock on him.

“You’ve got liabilities, Derek,” one of the twins says the words like they taste sweet. They rumble from his throat and smooth out into the air.

“As do you.” Derek’s hand snaps out and catches at the old woman’s hanging arm without looking away from the faces in front of him.

“You want Erica?” The woman shrugs. “Bring her out.” Her voice is barely louder at all, but two men come out of the far tent, one wearing sunglasses, his steps a little like shuffling, but his lips tensed in a dangerous smile. The other has a shaved head, his stride an easy predatory movement. Their clawed fingers wrapped around the wrists of the blonde-haired girl. A girl Danny once pitied.

They stop behind the first three and Derek’s head jerks back. “What did you do?” He drops the old woman’s wrist and makes like he’s about to leap forward, but Isaac and Scott grab onto his shoulders, and he stops moving. He just stands still, as Erica raises her face to them, looking over the shoulders of the twin on the left and the woman in the center. She looks devastated, wrecked. Her lips are garish red, her hair is wild and long and tangled. Her eyelids are dark and her leather jacket is dirt-smeared and scratched. They did that to her, made a mockery of all her badass posturing.

But that’s not why Derek’s standing the way he is, why all the wolves have suddenly frozen around them.

Because Erica’s eyes are red, glowing bright at her old pack.

“She didn’t like killing, much. We expected her to take to it. I, personally, was a little disappointed.” The woman smirks at Derek, smirks around long teeth, and Danny watches as he shrinks, his shoulders drawing up around his jaw.

“Erica.” Isaac’s voice is quiet, so quiet, “do you want to come home?”

She looks at him, her red eyes disconcerting and wrong, and nods like she’s not hopeful.

“Jackson,” Derek says, and that’s it.

Jackson holds out the old woman. One of the twins takes her, weirdly gentle with his teeth still long and his eyes still red. His clawed fingers barely brush the fabric of her blouse.

The two alphas holding Erica release her, and she moves skittishly, shoulders drawn in, steps short, around the alpha pack. She doesn’t turn around when she stops beside Derek, facing away from the campsite, towards the woods. Stiles moves from beside Danny to reach out a fist to her. She stares at it, then slowly lifts her fist to bump against his. He doesn’t get a smile out of it, but her eyes darken, lose their glow. Look bloodshot but nearly natural.

“She’ll wake up in ten minutes,” Stiles tells the alphas. “It was good doing business with you.”

The alphas don’t speak as Derek and his pack and Danny turn and head back through the woods. They don’t make it far before there’s the sound of crashing leaves and Boyd appears before them. He skids to a stop at the sight of Erica and takes in two harsh and fast breaths before slowly lifting his chin, baring his throat, and Danny hears a sigh escape Derek’s mouth as Erica very gently presses her nose against the bump of Boyd’s Adam’s apple. They stand still like that for long enough that Danny considers moving on on his own.

Finally Erica steps back from Boyd and they all continue on in silence. Allison is sitting on the hood of her car when they reach the parking lot. She looks at Erica and nods, and she shifts closer to Stiles, so he’s almost sandwiched between Erica and Danny. Allison’s smile tightens, and she slides from the hood and opens her car door without another word.

They break apart quickly. Isaac and Scott and Derek and Boyd and Erica squeeze into Scott’s mom’s car, and Jackson comes over to Danny and looks at him, just looks at him. “You all right?” he asks.

Danny shakes his head, then nods. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll drive you home,” Stiles tells Danny, and Jackson looks relieved to be excused the task, which—doesn’t hurt, really, because if they were alone right now Danny would probably yell at him, and Jackson has to know that. He’ll want to give him time to cool off.

Jackson leaves without another word. Lydia brushes her lips against Danny’s cheek and says, “Call me when you decide what you want to do.” And Danny nods, because he can’t do much else when faced with werewolves.

Then it’s just him and Stiles and Stiles’s Jeep and that white Camry, which Danny very badly wants to key. Stiles crosses the parking lot, kneels down beside one of the broken-down stands from the flea market, and starts digging through his pocket.

“What’re you,” Danny’s voice comes out rough, “What’re you doing?”

“Getting rid of evidence.” Stiles sticks the syringe in among the weeds and the dirt beneath the stand. “It’s dangerous to leave one of these out here, probably, but it’s more dangerous to throw it away, and I don’t want to go over to Deaton’s to dispose of it properly. He’s away this week and Scott is a little—preoccupied—and so I’d have to break in, which, probably not a good idea. Plus, my dad is super suspicious these days.” Danny doesn’t say, “Understandably,” but he wants to. Stiles jerks to his feet and wipes his hands on his thighs, leaving a light dusting of dirt on the fabric of his jeans. “Want waffles? Or something?”

“Not. No, not today.” Danny walks back to Stiles’s Jeep.

Neither of them says anything else until Stiles pulls up outside of Danny’s house. “If you need to talk,” Stiles unlocks the door, “or anything, you have my number, right? I get that it’s…this is all a lot.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Danny opens the door and then he looks back in and says, “I mean, just…Erica’s back. That’s good.”

Stiles flashes him a grin so bright it’s almost too much. “That’s really good, man. It’ll be fine. It’ll be good.” His grin fades even as Danny lingers, half in and half out of the Jeep. “Except.”

“Except?”

“She’s an alpha now, I don’t know…I don’t know how that’ll go.”

Danny shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“You know,” Stiles cocks his head, looks at him with eyes that don’t leave his face for a second, expression considering, “I don’t really understand, either. But Erica is back. And that is good, no matter what else.”

“Okay.” Danny takes a breath. “Okay. See you later, then?”

“Later.” It doesn’t escape Danny’s notice that Stiles waits until he’s inside his house to pull away.

That night, the local news stations have a new feature story. The photograph of Erica that’s been plastered all over the Internet and the town and the shitty Beacon Hills papers is shown in full color on every station. The reporters are celebrating, practically popping champagne bottles on screen.

“She showed up at the police station, completely out of it, saying she didn’t remember anything,” Danny’s dad says as he shells shrimp for the risotto he’s making. “Or that’s what I hear from George. Said she just walked in looking like hell and broke down into tears. Said it was so sad she almost had the whole department going, even the sheriff. And you know how tough Stilinski is.”

Danny thinks of the way Stiles had buried a syringe in an abandoned flea market and muttered about his dad and suspicions. He thinks about Erica’s red eyes. He thinks about Derek’s sigh, and the way Jackson had said, “You’re lying,” like he won a trivia contest, and he thinks about Stiles smiling and saying it would be okay. He thinks about Stiles’s steady hands.

“You knew her, right?” his dad asks, and he shakes his head.

“She’s in my year,” he stresses the present tense, the fact that Erica is still here, is here again. “But we don’t really have the same friends.” Is that changing? Does he want that to change?

His dad makes a considering sound. “Well, anyway, I hope they’re able to find out what happened to her.”

You really don’t want to know, Danny thinks, setting out forks on the table and pouring water into glasses with aggressive shoves of the faucet. He almost wishes he didn’t know. But then there’s this part of him that wouldn’t take back all of this morning’s ignorance for anything. And that’s terrifying.

Danny goes to bed that night feeling tense but almost okay. He wakes up the next morning feeling like he’s been stretched out, all his joints tight and muscles sore, his jaw aching from the way he was grinding his teeth through the night, and does not move from his bed for two days.

That’s a lie. He moves to go to the bathroom. He doesn’t shower. He eats chips and pretzels and drinks so much Mountain Dew that his mom threatens to cut him off. Julia, his little sister—who’s fifteen, God, and so not so little—tries to get him to tell her where he got his fake ID. Repeatedly. For two days. And still he doesn’t leave his house.

On the third morning after he saw Erica in the backseat of a car and flipped his world on its head, he rolls out of bed at seven in the morning and puts on running shorts and a t-shirt. He starts out with no clear idea of where he’s going, just a latent restlessness in his feet that keeps him moving.

It keeps him moving until he’s outside Stiles’s house. Once there, he hesitates, jogging in place at the end of the walk before going up the front steps and knocking—not pounding, this time, nothing frantic—at the front door.

The sheriff answers it, which is probably something Danny should have expected but didn’t, and he looks at Danny for a few silent seconds before saying, “Mr. Mahealani,” and Danny remembers being thirteen and being stared down by those eyes, but he stomps on that memory and smiles his practiced unassuming smile.

“Good morning, Sheriff. I was looking for Stiles?”

The sheriff steps back and lets Danny inside. Danny stands in the entranceway, sweat starting to pool at the base of his spine, and watches as the sheriff glances at the stairs. “It’s a little early to expect my son to be out of bed. What’d you want him for?”

“Oh,” Danny says, feeling suddenly stupid, because of course Stiles isn’t going to be up at a quarter after seven on a Thursday in the summer, who would? He wouldn’t even, except that he spent the last two days trying to erase vivid images of werewolves from his brain. “Right, sorry. I just was out for a run and passing by and I thought he might want to join? We’re all doing cross country in the fall, thought it might be good to get a head start on training.” And the sheriff brightens, his lips splitting into a grin.

“You know what? That sounds healthy and normal and not at all like Stiles. I will wake him up for that.”

“You don’t,” Danny begins, but the sheriff is already up the stairs, moving fast up them the way Stiles had three days before, when he was running around because Danny had seen Erica. Erica, who’s fine. Erica, who’s a werewolf.

Danny’s new world is going to take some getting used to. He’s not entirely sure that he’s going to ever be able to make it seem normal.

The sheriff comes down the stairs much slower than he went up them. “Of course,” he mutters, “of course he’s not there. I’m so,” and then he looks up, seeming to remember Danny, and grimaces. “Sorry, son, looks as if Stiles has yet to return from wherever the hell he went last night.”

The sheriff is pulling a cellphone out of his pocket, and Danny’s heart is seizing. Because what if the alphas came back for revenge? They could have. They would have. If they haven’t yet, they probably will. What if they got Stiles? What if—and this is selfish—what if Danny is the one who has to break it to the sheriff? What if he has to shake up Stiles’s dad’s world the way Jackson and Stiles and Derek and Boyd did his?

But the sheriff has his phone to his ear and is speaking into it, speaking loudly, and Danny knows that if he weren’t here that would probably be a yell. The volume on the sheriff’s phone is up loud enough that Danny can just make out Stiles’s responses as he sputters at his dad’s accusations.

“Sorry, Dad, sorry, I’m at Scott’s, we lost track of time, I fell asleep, I’m just at Scott’s, I promise.”

“Why is your car in the driveway? Why didn’t you leave me a note? Or call?”

“Allison picked me up, and I didn’t think I’d be staying the night. I told you, I fell asleep. Accidentally. It was an accidental sleepover, I swear.”

Danny shifts, stepping back toward the door, and the sheriff waves at him. “The reason I even realized that you weren’t in your room was because your friend stopped by.”

“Friend?” Stiles sounds, God, confused, as he continues, “Everyone’s here, who…?”

“Danny Mahealani.” Danny has never heard so much meaning packed into his name. It’s a question and a statement so full that it sounds heavy as it falls from the sheriff’s mouth. The sheriff offers him a small smile as he says it, as if to soften the weight of it.

As soon as Danny’s name is out, his phone starts buzzing. He doesn’t glance at the screen as he pulls it from the sleeve around his upper arm. “Yeah?” he says into it.

“Danny.” It’s Scott, voice quiet so that the sheriff wouldn’t have been able to hear even if he hadn’t been distracted by saying something about responsibility to Stiles. “Is everything okay? Did something happen? The alphas didn’t—”

“No, no, no,” Danny hurries, and he feels an unfamiliar flush rushing up his neck. He’s not used to this, reaching out and finding nothing. “No, I just was on a run and stopped by to see if Stiles wanted to join. Cross country, you know?”

“Oh,” and then Scott’s voice comes from further away, “Hey, Stiles, Danny wanted to know if you want to go on a run.”

And Danny can hear Stiles’s response through his dad’s phone, and this is so weird, definitely among Danny’s most awkward moments. Not that he has a list. “Oh, that’s why he came by? A run? Ew, um, ow, Jacks—Okay, yeah. Yeah, I’d like to go for a run.”

“He’ll go. You can come by? I’ll text you the address.”

“Sure,” Danny tells Scott and hangs up as the sheriff is saying into his phone, “You come home straight after your run and I swear to God, Stiles, we are going to have a serious discussion about responsibility and how much it will suck for you if you don’t keep me updated on your life.”

“Dad,” Stiles protests, and then says, “Fine, whatever, have a good day at work,” and the sheriff hangs up, shaking his head.

“Do you need a ride over to Scott’s?”

But Danny’s already stepping back toward the door. “No, it’s fine. He’s only a mile or so away. Stiles isn’t exactly in top shape yet, it’ll probably help that I’m a little worn out.”

The sheriff huffs. “You should run a marathon first. I haven’t seen him do anything since lacrosse ended.”

“He’ll be great. He’s got a runner’s build,” and then Danny flees, because what a weird thing to notice about someone and seriously what an awkward thing to say to their dad.

He doesn’t look at his phone until he’s halfway down the block, and he’s not exactly surprised to see that the address Scott texted him is that of an apartment a mile and a half across town, in the opposite direction from Scott’s neighborhood. He cuts through someone’s backyard and starts back the way he came.

The apartment complex consists of three rows of double-storied identical miniature houses, complete with balconies lined with white picket fences, shiny white-lined parking spaces, neatly trimmed hedges, and golden numbers nailed to the doors. It does not look like the sort of place where anyone involved in this werewolf shit would fit.

But there Stiles is, sitting on the curb in front of the first row of apartments when Danny jogs in, his knees up around his chin and wearing a pair of basketball shorts rolled a few times around his waist. “Derek’s,” he gestures at the shorts when Danny comes to a halt in front of him. “Also Derek’s,” he gestures at the apartment directly behind him, number 15. “Just in case you need to know sometime.”

Danny nods. “Am I not allowed in now?”

“Do you want to go in now? I mean, we can. Almost everyone’s there.”

Danny looks at the closed door of the disconcertingly nice apartment and shrugs. “I’ll see them later. Did something happen last night?”

Stiles pushes to his feet, adjusting the too-big shorts—and does he knows what it means to wear someone’s clothes, the belonging that implies?—and shakes his head. “We’re just trying,” he glances over his shoulder at the door, everyone must be listening, “I mean we figure the alphas will be coming to get us, so we wanted to plan.”

Danny nods, and turns toward the exit. “Danny,” Stiles whines, a few steps behind him. “Do we really need to do this? Can’t we get breakfast or something? Want to go discuss puppies and magic over eggs and bacon?”

Danny just starts running, keeping his pace slow until he hears Stiles’s footsteps behind him. He speeds up a little then, and Stiles matches his strides, his breath steady, managing to keep up for a while in relative silence.

“So I imagine you have, like, questions,” Stiles says between breaths about ten minutes into their run.

“We’re running,” Danny replies, breath starting to come in faster bursts, “but this afternoon you and me are going to go get you new shoes and then we’re going to have a conversation.”

“I don’t need,” Stiles begins, but Danny just kicks out slightly and his foot lands on the straggling end of one of Stiles’s brown shoelaces where it trails from the ratty Nikes, which are dirt-stained and grass-smeared and probably have a few holes in the soles.

“Those’ll give you shin splints in a week. They look like someone ate them, spat them up, and then you wore them while running through a swamp.”

“Well, the last is true,” Stiles admits, voice coming fast, “there were kappas involved. I can’t be held responsible.”

“We’re replacing your shoes. You’re keeping these ones for chasing monsters.” Danny tries not to think about kappas. He thinks they were mentioned in Harry Potter. He doesn’t think they were friendly.

“If my dad ever…lets me out again,” he directs them down a shady side-street, “I will go shopping with you.”

“Sorry about that,” Danny feels a twist in his gut. “I didn’t think.”

“You shouldn’t have had to think. And it’s not the first time, don’t worry about it. Not your fault at all.” He looks over at Danny, a quick twist of his head before he faces the road ahead of them again. “I don’t get why you stopped by, though?”

“I wanted someone to run with, and everyone else is apparently a supernatural creature. Plus, I was passing your house. Plus, you had said you wanted to do cross in the fall. Not an easy sport to jump into.”

“Yeah,” Stiles wheezes, and underneath the breathing he doesn’t exactly sound displeased.

The run continues on in companionable silence, and Danny feels almost normal. Except that, apparently, he and Stiles Stilinski are now sort of friends. Something. They’re something, and Danny’s not exactly sure how he feels about that. It was his doing, though. He knows that Stiles would have left him alone after they got Erica back, knows that the last two days of silence were a respectful signal that if he wanted to ignore all of this, he was allowed to.

“I want in,” he says, as they reach Stiles’s doorstep, having taken a much more circuitous route to get back than he had originally taken to get to Derek’s apartment.

Stiles cocks his head, looking up from where he’s leaning over with his hands on his thighs. “Yeah?”

Danny nods. “Yeah.”

“All right. I’ll text you about shoe shopping, if I still have access to my phone.” He wipes a hand across his sweaty forehead and looks over his shoulder at his house. “Thanks for the run. It was, um, good? Something. Do you want a ride back to your place?”

“Nah, I’m good. Expect me tomorrow at seven.”

“Danny,” Stiles whines again, and Danny just turns and waves a hand over his shoulder.

“It’s happening, Stilinski.” He slows his pace considerably on his way back home, but he doesn’t stop running.

Stiles texts him later that afternoon. My dad says yes to shoe shopping, yes to running, but no to everything else. I think he thinks you’re gonna be a good influence. Wanna get me a good fake ID? Jungle Friday?

Danny stares at the screen of his phone and shakes his head. Slow. Pick you up at 3. Good. No. Absolutely not. The last time you were there some freaky shit went down. Which you will be explaining.

There’s no response, but Stiles comes out as soon as he pulls up outside of his house, like he was watching for him.

He looks a little twitchy as he slides into the passenger seat. “Look,” he begins as soon as Danny pulls away from the curb, “there are some things that I can tell you about all of this. How it started, how we got involved, some of the more recent stuff that happened. But there’s some things…it’s not my place, okay? And you need to talk to whoever was involved because I’m Google, I’m the wolfsbane and the mountain ash and the contact person, but I’m not—I’m not at the center of any of this. So you can ask questions, and I’ll tell you what I can. All right?”

Danny signals to pull onto the entrance ramp to the freeway. “You realize I don’t understand anything, right? I know, like, literally zero percent of what’s been going on. Maybe, maybe, point zero one percent. So everything you just said—sure, I’ll agree now, but can you just give me a basic rundown of what we’re dealing with here?”

By the time they’ve bought Stiles a new pair of running shoes and are sitting in the food court eating Wendy’s burgers and curly fries, Danny knows more about werewolves than he really wanted to. Stiles is smooshing his last fry in ketchup and staring at the two large Cokes sitting between them, refusing to meet Danny’s eyes.

“Those’re the basics,” he says, “but there’s something else you should probably know. Everything else, like I said, you should talk to Jackson and Scott and Derek about. And Lydia. Partially Lydia for this too, I think, but you should know,” he inhales, deep and slow, and continues, “you know how we said that Derek’s uncle…um, passed on?”

Danny rolls his eyes. Like anything else Stiles has said in the last two hours has been even passably sane by any potential eavesdroppers’ standards. “Yeah,” he answers, when Stiles kicks his leg under the table.

“Well, he, er, undid that.”

He undid that. “He undid that?” Danny lowers his voice. “Is he a zombie?”

“What?” Stiles jerks back, salt-covered fingers flinging up. “No!”

“Well then what?”

“He’s just, um, back. Normal, like. Or as normal as an insane undead formerly-alpha murderous werewolf can be.”

“Jesus Christ,” Danny swears, and Stiles grins at him like he’s told a great joke. “Don’t,” Danny warns. “This is absurd. How?”

“That’s a Lydia thing, I think, like I said. But she doesn’t like to talk about it. Maybe with you. You’re special.”

“Gee, thanks, Stilinski.”

“No, it’s a good thing.”

They sit in silence for a while, Stiles slurping from his Coke and Danny not eating, staring at his food and trying to force his worldview to change to accept resurrection as an actual thing that happens.

“Is he around? Like, does he live with Derek?”

Stiles shakes his head. “He and Derek reached some sort of an agreement, I think. I don’t know the details, but he lives a few towns over. I haven’t seen him in weeks. He’ll probably be around more now, because the alphas are back. But then, it’s been a few days and no one’s really mentioned him.”

“Okay.” Danny watches Stiles as he shifts, fingers playing against the table. “I don’t think I’ll get that through my head, like, ever, so I’m just gonna ignore it. What about Erica?”

Stiles shrugs. “They’re still working that out, I think. Right now, she’s trying not to be—she’s—not good. And her parents aren’t really letting her out of their sight, so it’s hard. But the pack is trying to get rid of the alphas and trying to keep her out of it but she’s not the sort to sit out and also, she’s an alpha now, so if she could harness that power than that could be useful in beating them, but, like—I don’t know. This is not necessarily something she wants to be involved in, is Derek’s argument. Mine is that she’ll be good, helpful.”

Danny nods, spinning his Coke cup in wet rings over the patterned plastic of the tabletop. “And what about Derek?” Because he knows about Derek Hale, knows his story, but Stiles and the rest seem to really know him, and that confuses Danny. Maybe not for Boyd and Isaac and Jackson, because Stiles says some connection comes with the bite, but for Stiles and Scott and Lydia and Allison—Allison, who, according to Stiles has every reason to hate Derek, who has every reason to hate her right back—but they still seem to know him. Stiles, especially.

“Scott and I got him arrested a couple of times,” Stiles has already admitted this, but this time the confession has a sort of amused stretch to it, “and then we realized that he just had no clue what he was doing, and neither did we, so after some, um, drama of a lizard-ly nature, we managed to come to a compromise. He’s okay, just really messed up. I think he’s getting better.”

Stiles has been dropping hints about lizards all afternoon, but Danny really doesn’t want to know. He thinks that’s something he was involved in, on the periphery, and something Jackson was at the heart of, and he doesn’t know if he’s ready for it. If he’s not, though, he does know that he shouldn’t have told Stiles that he was in. He decides to ignore the lizard part of Stiles’s statement and asks, “But what about you and Derek?”

“Me and…?” Stiles trails off, gaze jerking from Danny’s cardboard container of fries in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“You were wearing his shorts yesterday.” Danny pushes his fries a few inches towards Stiles, and he reaches in without looking away from Danny.

“Because you wanted to go for a run and I only had jeans with me.”

“He listens to you.”

“They all learned that listening to me is sometimes a good idea the hard way.” Stiles stuffs three fries in his mouth. “No, dude, look, it’s not like I’m not attracted to him, because I do have eyes, and I think he’s a—not a good person, but I like him, most of the time, you know?—but I would never in a million years go there. Not ever. Not that he would have me. I’m pretty sure he’s like ninety-five percent straight, at least. But in this weird alternate universe you’re imagining where he would, no. I just do not think that would be a good idea. I don’t think it would end well.”

Danny nods. “Okay. So if I wanted to test your theory on his straightness?" Stiles’s eyes widen and his lips part and he looks so ridiculously surprised that Danny can’t keep a straight face. He laughs into the straw of his Coke and Stiles throws his head back, his whole body shaking.

“You’re such an asshole,” Stiles says when he settles back into his chair. “God, just picturing what Derek would do if you came onto him.”

“He would probably just growl at me. I get the feeling growl is all these guys do.”

Stiles tilts his head like he’s actually considering that. “Sometimes they roar. I don’t know if he’d be pissed enough, but wait until you see it. It’s pretty funny. Or alternatively terrifying, if it’s directed at you.”

“Maybe I’ll try it out, just to see how he’d react.”

“I’d love to see that.” Stiles stands and pushes his containers into the swinging door of the trash can. Danny follows him and the two weave among the overwhelming number of preteens to get to the mall exit.

On the drive back to town they come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas to get Derek shirtless again, and by the time they pull up to Stiles’s house they’re both blinking back tears from laughter.

Stiles bites his lip, hesitating before he gets out of the car. “I know you probably don’t want my advice,” he says, staring at where his dad’s car is parked in the driveway, “but I really think you should talk to Jackson. And I’m happy you’ve decided to join this—not least for the effect you have on our resident douche-bro, no offense—but I also want to make sure…this is dangerous, you know? It’s really dangerous and it’s hard, keeping it a secret, and it’s scary at times and it’s interesting as hell and it can be absurdly fun, God, but it’s not exactly…it’s probably not healthy.”

“I’m in,” is all Danny says, and Stiles nods.

“All right, then. See you way too fucking early tomorrow.” He slams the door too hard when he gets out, but he pats a hand against the hood as he passes, as if to make up for it.

Danny doesn’t call Jackson until four days after he and Stiles go shoe shopping, four runs after their first run, each of which begins with Stiles mumbling nonsense at him and ends with Stiles telling him to talk to his asshole of a best friend.

The fourth day, Danny says, “Fine, okay, all right,” and Stiles nods, like he expected that.

“If you need to talk after, I’ll be here. Grounded. Except for in the mornings, when my dad lets me out to get tortured by you.”

Danny flashes him a grin, but his gut is already twisting with nerves, and Stiles must see some sign of that on his face, because he stops on his front step and faces Danny. “Look, what Jackson’s going to tell you, it won’t change a thing about how everything is right now. Everything will stay the same, it’ll just be—you’ll just understand more.”

“It’ll change how it is for me,” Danny says, knowing this without question, “Thanks, though, Stiles.”

Stiles shrugs and opens his door. He disappears inside his house and Danny gets into the car, driving home and inventing all the various ways that the lizard problem could fit into this horror story he’s wandered into, fits into Jackson’s life, fits into his life.

It ends up being worse than even the worst thing he thinks of.

He and Jackson are sitting in his bedroom, Danny on the bed and Jackson on the chair in the corner, and Danny doesn’t say anything for a long time after Jackson finishes telling him about the kanima, about being the kanima.

The idea of Jackson killing is not as absurd as it would have been before he found out about werewolves. After all, if Stiles Stilinski can tell him that killing a person, werewolf, whatever, was a “joint effort” involving Stiles himself, then clearly anyone can be a killer.

But for Jackson to kill without agency, without remembering it—that probably shouldn’t be the part that scares him, but it is. For him to be controlled by Matt, that means that there are things in this world that are even more dangerous than werewolves and hunters and Stiles’s brief mention of kappas. That means that there is a chance that Danny’s own choices might get taken away from him, and that is not—that is just not okay.

“Danny.” Jackson finally breaks the silence, and Danny shakes his head.

“No, no, don’t worry. It’s just, man, that sucks, that that happened to you.” Understatement of the freaking year, seriously, and Danny feels a little ashamed for having said it. “It doesn’t change anything. This morning, Stiles said that everything was the same whether I knew or not and that’s true,” it’s not, it’s not, like Danny knew it wouldn’t be, but Jackson doesn’t need to know that. He might tell Stiles, later, just how wrong he was, but Jackson can believe this.

“You’re lying,” Jackson tells him. He rests a finger against his earlobe, smirks half-heartedly. “I can tell. But…thank you for saying it.”

Danny flushes. He should’ve known that. “What else do you know?”

“A lot. Derek’s good at cataloguing things. Right now, it’s more overwhelming than anything. Eventually I’ll be able to distinguish scents, heartbeats. I can already tell you’ve been spending more time with Stilinski than usual. I know most of the pack by smell.”

“That is disgusting.” Danny shakes his head. “No, really, that’s nasty, Jackson.”

“It’s not like everyone smells bad.” Jackson looks affronted, eyes flashing bright before he calms a little, then his lips loosen in a full-on grin. “Except Stilinski. He stinks.”

Danny chucks his pillow at his friend. “Shut up.”

“Hey,” Jackson catches the pillow out of the air, drops it on the floor, “you don’t want me to push, I won’t push. Just don’t expect McCall to be as considerate. He’s been oozing jealousy everywhere since his bestie started hanging out with you.”

Danny feels something tighten in his chest. “Look, it’s not…you know what, never mind. Do you want to play a game of lacrosse? Get out of here, get some people together?”

“Who?” Jackson asks, already pulling out his phone.

“The rest,” Danny suggests, and Jackson makes a grumbling noise, but when they get to the lacrosse field Scott and Isaac are there, and Boyd, and even Stiles, who says that his dad is at work and he hitched a ride with Scott, so he probably won’t get caught.

Erica drives up just as they’re splitting into teams, and everyone except for Jackson stops talking when she gets out of the car dressed in Nike shorts and a tank top and comes toward them. “Think you boys can keep up with me?” Her tone is so close to natural that Danny starts wondering if maybe she’s not as broken as he was starting to think she was.

“I know I can’t.” Stiles tosses her Jackson’s extra stick from where it was lying on the grass by his feet, and she bares her teeth at him as she catches it.

The teams are uneven now, but that doesn’t matter at all. They fall into laughing heaps as they crash into each other, the wolves colliding at rates of speed that would break Danny and Stiles’s to pieces, and Stiles and Danny leap out of their way as they careen towards them.

They end up sweaty and covered in summer-dead grass, not leaving until late in the afternoon, just as the air is starting to cool a little. Stiles waves at Danny and calls, “See you tomorrow,” as he climbs into Scott’s car, making something deep inside Danny really ridiculously happy.

It’s not a feeling he’s ever expected to be directed at Stiles, and Jackson shoots him a look as they get into his car, like he’s biting his tongue to keep from pushing, like he said he would.

Exactly three weeks after Erica’s rescue, Stiles calls Danny at seven in the evening and says, “Pack meeting at Derek’s stat,” before hanging up.

Danny had thought, naively, he knows, that the silence from the alphas might have meant that they’d gotten bored with Derek’s pack, that their attempt to fuck with it by fucking with Erica had failed and so they’d moved on.

He drives to Derek’s, foot heavy on the gas pedal, and berates himself. Because maybe the alphas were dumb, maybe they were, but they could not possibly have been that dumb. And so now he gets to see what it actually meant when he told Stiles that he wanted in.

Shouts of “Come in,” meet his single knock, and he pushes the unlocked door open to find everyone crowded into a tiny living room. Boyd and Erica are pressed together in an armchair in the far corner of the room, and Derek is sitting in a La-Z Boy in the other corner. The rest are squished on a couch, except for Stiles, who sits on the floor, leaning against the Wal-Mart style cart carrying a smallish flat screen TV. Peter isn’t there, for which Danny is grateful, even though he’s sure the undead wolf’s absence doesn’t have anything to do with him.

Stiles moves over a little so Danny can rest his back against the TV stand too. It’s only after he sits that he notices that Jackson had had a small space beside him on the couch, and when Danny settles on the floor Jackson gets closer to Allison as everyone on the couch moves to fill in the space that was supposed to be Danny’s. No one says anything. He’s not sure yet exactly why he gravitates toward Stiles these days, but he’s been noticing it more and more, and he thinks it’s something he needs to sort out soon. At least before Jackson breaks his uncharacteristic silence on the matter and decides to be either weirdly nice about it or begins acting like an absolute dick.

“What’s happened?” Danny asks, trying to avoid Scott’s gaze, because Scott is staring at him, eyes narrowed, head tilted towards Isaac beside him.

“The alphas left town for a little while. They just got back last night,” Derek explains. Everyone is avoiding looking at Erica so much that they may as well be staring at her. “I was running out in the woods over where their old camp was, and their scent is all over the area again.”

“And we still have no fucking clue what they want.” Stiles’s hands are in fists, tapping against his thighs. Danny watches them.

“Erica, maybe?” Jackson suggests, cueing a growl from Boyd and a light smack to his shoulder from Lydia. “Not that we should give her up. But, that’s what they wanted last time.”

“No it’s not. They didn’t want me. They just got me.” Her voice is rougher than Danny’s ever heard it, and he keeps staring at Stiles’s hands because he imagines her eyes are red. Erica with red eyes is more unnatural than Derek. She looks sad every time she lets them surface, like she’s got the whole process, the whole kidnapping and murder and whatever else happened while she was gone, playing on a loop in their color.

“Do you know what they want?” Stiles asks, even though Boyd is growling again, a warning sound that makes Danny want to shift a little closer to Stiles.

“Territory, of course,” Lydia answers for her.

“I don’t know if it’s that simple. I do know that they think that it will be easy to get whatever it is they want. We’re vulnerable.”

“They think.”

“We sort of are, Stiles.” Scott shrugs. “We aren’t exactly set up to defend much of anything, let alone defeat a pack of alphas.”

Derek glances along the couch, at the betas and the humans, and then his gaze lands on Erica and Boyd. “Is it worth trying to talk to them?”

“Possibly.” Erica picks at a hole in her jeans, her eyes their normal color.

Derek sighs, a long sound in a tense room, and then asks, his voice extremely diffident, “Would you recommend talking to them? Say, if Isaac and I went? Would you say that was a good idea?”

Even Danny sees what this is. Derek wants to have Erica making decisions. He wants her to be an alpha in practice. According to Stiles, he’s only just learning himself, and now he wants to train her too. It is really unexpected and also, Danny thinks, although he can’t be sure, a really good sign.

Erica is still for so long that Danny half expects Derek to repeat his question. But then she nods. “Yes,” she says, voice soft. “Yeah, I think that would be a good idea. You and Isaac, just to get a feel for what they’re thinking. I wouldn’t expect much from it, but it’s better than—they should know that we know they’re here.”

“Okay. We’ll do that, then.” Stiles shifts, and Danny glances over at him. He’s got his phone out, is scrolling through a Google search on the screen. Derek continues, “Allison, is your father aware of this?”

The room goes breathless, the reference to hunters sucking the air from it. “No.” Allison’s voice is quiet. She’s sitting between Isaac and Lydia, and both of them move towards her enough that Danny notices from where he’s sitting. Allison looks at Erica, who’s staring at her hands as if entertaining the possibility of letting claws rip out of them. Allison keeps talking, her voice wavering a little. “I know I’m not trustworthy. I know I lost that, and I know that you don’t understand why I did…what I did. I’m not asking for forgiveness, I’m never going to ask for forgiveness. But I don’t want everything in my life to be based on some decisions I made because I thought I lost my whole life,” Erica growls at that, and Allison nods, like she understands. “I know I’m not unique in that. But I want—will you consider what I have to say?”

Scott shifts where he sits on Isaac’s other side, and Stiles shakes his head just a tiny bit as Isaac sets a hand on Scott’s knee, and then the whole room stills, waiting on Erica.

“We’ve all suffered.” Erica pins Allison with a glare. It’s human, but it’s still earth shaking in its intensity. “You’re right that that’s not yours alone. What is yours, unfortunately, are the hunters. So give us their perspective, Argent. What do you want to say?”

“We don’t tell the hunters about this. We don’t let my dad in on it. We meet with the alphas, we try to negotiate an agreement. They’ve done terrible things, but my family has done worse. You all know that.” Her gaze skitters, fast, from Erica to Derek, and lands on Stiles. His knee, which had been jumping as the conversation carried on, stops against Danny’s thigh. “And will continue to do worse, if my dad becomes aware of this—he’s sworn off of hunting, but an alpha pack? I don’t think he’d let that go. If he calls in the rest of the family, they’ll come. And if they come, they won’t leave once they’re finished with the alphas. Allying with the alphas—that will probably go better for this pack, in the long run, than allying with hunters. At least so far as I understand werewolf politics. So if my dad can’t stop himself, if he starts snooping, if the wolves get too active—we need for them to know that they can’t draw attention to themselves.”

“Not letting the hunters in is something I can get behind.” Erica leans her head against Boyd’s shoulder, looking at Allison in consideration. “But you’re going to need to be careful, too. Isaac and Derek, they can warn the pack, tell Deucalion and Kali and the rest that the Argents aren’t gone. But your dad won’t just ignore what you’re doing. He thinks you’re out of it, too, doesn’t he?”

Allison nods, twisting a few dark strands around her finger. “I have ‘new friends,’ they’re great, they’re really fun. I go over to their houses all the time.”

“They sound really awesome, I really want to meet them.” Lydia’s voice is flat, completely without inflection, and Allison smiles, a little embarrassed.

“I don’t know if he believes me, but he hasn’t been following me anywhere, which is an improvement.”

“Erica’s right, though. You’re going to need to be careful around your dad, if you think—and obviously you’re right—that it’s a good idea to keep the hunters out of this.” Derek’s voice is careful; they’re all talking around things, and Danny doesn’t think that Stiles gave him the whole story on any of this, but what Stiles did give him is enough to build the tension in the room to a breaking point.

“I will,” Allison nods, “I’ll be careful.”

“But what if,” Stiles glances at Erica, then at Derek, “what if the alphas don’t want to negotiate? They’re clearly strong, stronger than us. And while I don’t want the Argents involved, no offense, Allison, just, your dad is okay and you’re obviously great but everyone else? Sucked balls. A lot.”

“Your point, Stiles?” Scott growls, and Stiles’s shoulder brushes against Danny's as he straightens his back and starts speaking directly to Scott.

“They’re stronger than us. You said that, earlier, and everyone knows it. They took Boyd and Erica no problem.” Boyd nods, his chin brushing against Erica’s cheek as her hands tighten on her knees. Danny looks away from them. “What if the alphas just decide to kill us all, to get it over with? They’ll get injured, maybe one or two of them will get seriously hurt, maybe, maybe, one will die, but will it be that big of a loss for them?”

“It would be,” Erica says, completely confident. “That’s how it works, the alpha pack. They’re unnatural. The one thing that keeps them as a pack, that lets them borrow from each other’s strength, that bonds them—it’s affection, loyalty. They won’t betray each other. They have such absurd challenges to get in—becoming an alpha, willingly, not like me, it’s just the beginning. To lose someone, they wouldn’t consider it.”

“So that’s why,” Derek mutters, and everyone in the room turns their gaze to him. He shrugs his shoulders, dark shirt shifting as he lowers them. “I was wondering what the point of the whole kidnapping exchange was. I’m still not certain about everything—but they wanted to see how far we were willing to go with the grandmother.”

“They were testing us.” Danny gets it, the way the alphas had looked when they showed up in the woods.

“Playing with us,” Stiles mutters. “I don’t like that.”

“Who would?”

“But the question is,” Stiles continues, ignoring Jackson, “is it good or bad that we went for their grandmother?”

“I don’t know,” Derek looks at Erica, who shakes her head.

“I’m not sure. They never…I wasn’t really in their pack. I was kept alone most of the time. I picked up some things, but I couldn’t figure everything out. I’m still not sure what they wanted with me. I don’t know what they’re looking for.”

“They called us liabilities,” Danny remembers, and Stiles nods.

“That means you should avoid going anywhere they might find you alone,” Derek says, tone rough.

“Or that we’ll make really excellent bait.” Lydia lays a hand on Jackson’s leg when he starts growling.

“Excellent and dangerous bait.” Stiles grins, pressing his hands together like he’s plotting.

“Aren’t you still grounded?” Derek raises his impressive eyebrows at Stiles.

“Tonight is my last night of grounding.” Stiles doesn’t look worried.

“So you’re celebrating by sneaking out,” Danny says.

Stiles waves a hand. “He’s working a night shift, it’s fine.”

“But he’ll notice if you come home torn to pieces because you were playing stupid,” Scott points out.

“I didn’t say we were going to get hurt.” Stiles manages to sound annoyed, but his legs are shaking again. Danny thinks he probably expects to get hurt. He probably expects that daily.

“Be careful, Stiles. They’re not as dumb as you think they are.” Boyd settles an arm around Erica’s waist, and Stiles nods.

“But they haven’t attacked Danny and me while we’re out running. I don’t get that, if they’re at all interested in getting the pack.”

“Maybe they’re biding their time the way we’ve been, trying to figure out what we’re doing. Maybe they got worried when we took their grandmother. Realized we’d go pretty far.”

Derek nods at Danny. “I think that’s a good possibility.”

“So we’re both circling each other? Who’s going to strike first?”

“No one,” Derek growls. “Isaac and I are meeting with them, remember? Peacefully, like we talked about seriously five minutes ago.”

“Yeah, but after that all goes to shit?” Jackson earns himself a Derek-patented glare. “Who’ll attack then?”

“Us, probably, because that one bit a bunch of teenagers.” Stiles gestures towards Derek, and Danny tries not to think about the two alpha twins, who were also teenagers, who looked a hell of a lot more dangerous than any member of Derek’s pack, including Derek himself.

“I have no idea what the fuck I was thinking.” Derek’s muttering is loud enough for even the humans to hear as he pushes himself to his feet.

“I wonder that literally all the time,” Erica calls after him, her tone miraculously teasing.

Derek returns with two bags of tortilla chips and tosses them on the coffee table. He sets down an open jar of salsa beside them and says, “There’s soda in the fridge if anyone wants some,” as he reaches for the remote and flicks on the TV. Stiles twists around, lying back on the floor with his feet lifted slightly on the TV stand, and Danny mimics him. They watch reruns of Seinfeld until Scott rolls off the couch, stretching.

“I told my mom I’d be home by midnight.”

Everyone stands in stages. Derek’s fallen asleep in the chair, and Erica takes a ratty blanket from the back of the couch and tosses it over him.

They leave the apartment in silence, lingering outside for a few minutes before breaking up to get into their separate cars. Danny doesn’t see Stiles’s Jeep, so he offers, “You want a ride?”

Stiles glances over at where Isaac and Scott are leaning close together against Scott’s mom’s car, and he nods. “That’d be good, thanks.”

They don’t speak for a minute or two, as Danny follows Lydia and Boyd and Erica out of the parking lot, and then Danny says, “Want ice cream?” possibly because it’s the first night he’s been out since he went to Jungle the weekend before he found out about everything, when Jungle suddenly became insignificant, and possibly because he really doesn’t want the night to end. What he wants is to keep being surprised by this boy in his passenger seat.

They get Blizzards at Dairy Queen—Stiles’s overloaded with pieces of candy, Danny’s just plain Oreo—and sit on the hood of the car, the red and white sign glowing over them, yellow headlights speeding by on the road behind them.

“Bet this wasn’t what you expected to be doing with your summer.”

“It wasn’t,” Danny agrees.

“So what were the plans of the great Danny Mahealani before he fell into the world of supernatural freaks?”

Danny thinks about that. “Going to Jungle. Getting drunk. Sleeping a lot. Pissing off my little sister. Honestly, this is better.”

“Just wait till you almost die. You won’t be saying that then.” Stiles bumps his shoulder against Danny’s, like he’s meant it as a joke, but Danny hears the honesty cutting under Stiles’s words.

He looks over at Stiles in this fake soft light and thinks about how easy it would be to kiss him.

Stiles is looking down into his cup of ice cream, scraping the side to get some sort of candy on his spoon, and so he doesn’t notice the way Danny’s looking at him. Even if he had, Danny doesn’t think that Stiles would get it. That’s one of the reasons Danny doesn’t reach over and angle Stiles’s chin towards him. He also thinks that after the kiss—and there would be one, Stiles would kiss him back, he’s sure of that—but after it, he thinks Stiles still wouldn’t understand.

He thinks Stiles would assume that Danny was just thinking about Jungle and how he hasn’t been in a while, that Danny was wanting and Stiles was there. Danny doesn’t think Stiles would realize that Danny wants him. Danny doesn’t think that thought would even cross Stiles’s mind. And so Danny doesn’t kiss him because he doesn’t think Stiles would understand, but also because he’s not sure if he understands quite yet, and he doesn’t want to promise something while sitting here on the hood of his car, touching under this stupid light, with both their mouths sticky with sweet ice cream—Danny doesn’t want to give Stiles something he is unsure of.

“Haven’t I already?” Danny asks, and Stiles glances over at him, spoon halfway to his mouth. “That first time, with the alphas? Didn’t we almost die?”

“Oh,” Stiles sticks his spoon in his mouth and waves both his hands around, keeping his spoon in place with his lips. It’s obscene, even more so for the fact that Danny wouldn’t have thought anything of it a month ago. “That wasn’t almost dying. That was like, mildly threatened. You’ll know almost dying.”

Danny nods, digs back into his Blizzard so he doesn’t have to look at Stiles anymore. “Do you ever regret it?”

Stiles leans down and sets his cup on the ground, then falls back so he’s stretched on the hood, knuckles rapping against the outside of the windshield, t-shirt rucking up a little so Danny can see a tiny centimeter of skin and the elastic top of his boxers. Danny pushes himself back to lie beside him, listening to the beat of Stiles’s restlessness. “I try not to think about it much,” he finally says. “I guess I regret leading Scott into the woods the night he got bitten. I regret Scott becoming one, because he never wanted it, and he never would have wanted it. I like—I don’t like the near-death, but I like what it’s brought me.” He laughs, a little sardonically, and Danny feels a little tense, like he’s suddenly somewhere he doesn’t think he wants to be. “I guess you know that I never really had friends other than Scott. I like that I do now. I like that I have a lot of people who would die for me, people I would die for. I don’t regret that.”

“You’re good,” Danny tells him, after the silence has stretched so long it’s bound to snap, “you’re really good at taking care of things. At knowing things. I’m impressed by how you do it all.”

“It’s just what I do. But thanks.” Stiles keeps his hands moving, drumming against the hood. “The worst part is the lying.”

Danny can’t keep himself from saying, “You’re really good at that, too.”

Stiles laughs again, the sound abrupt. “God, a year ago you’d have been laughed out of town for saying that. I can’t believe how easy it is now. Not like I tell good lies, just like—it’s more natural to lie than to tell the truth. When I was telling you about all of this, I had to keep stopping myself from sticking stuff in that didn’t happen, or leaving stuff out—it was really hard to just tell you the truth straight out. I never expected that when I got involved with all of this.”

Danny hums in acknowledgment. They’re silent a little while longer, and then he asks, “What did you expect?”

Stiles shrugs, Danny can hear his t-shirt brushing against the glass beneath his shoulders. “Staying alive, keeping Scott alive. Always being Robin.” He says it like a joke.

“Erica calls you Batman.” He’d noticed it that night, when they were saying goodbye outside of Derek’s. Had thought it sort of cute and sort of odd, but in a nice way. Which is the way he’s starting to think about everything to do with Stiles.

“Erica’s the best.” Stiles sighs, sitting up, limbs flailing as he regains purchase on the car. He turns to look down at Danny, face wide open and excited. “Hey, Derek was great tonight, with the deferring to Erica thing, wasn’t he? The pack might not need to break up.”

Danny doesn’t want to sit up yet. “You thought that might be a possibility?”

“Well, yeah. Two alphas? Derek’s already got to deal with Scott not really being ‘his,’ and then there’s Peter—he doesn’t need another member of the pack questioning his authority. But if they can do co-alpha-ship, or whatever, that’d be great. Derek seems to want to. I bet Erica’ll go along with it.” Stiles turns back around, head tilting to the side as he looks at the glass windows at the front of the Dairy Queen.

“Stiles,” Danny looks at Stiles’s back, his shoulders, the angle of his neck, “did you ever want the bite?”

Stiles’s back tenses. Even if Danny hadn’t been studying it so intently he thinks he would have noticed. “Nah.” His pause is too long for the nonchalance that word carries. “I like having an exit strategy. That’s a little too permanent for me.” He turns his neck so quickly it cracks. Danny winces, but Stiles doesn’t even seem to notice. “Why, are you thinking about it?”

“I’ve only known for like three weeks, dude, I’m definitely not thinking about it.”

“Okay. But in a few months, a year, do you think you would?”

Danny shrugs, completely unsure. The thought is foreign, but he doesn’t know if that’s because it’s new, or because he definitely would never want to be a werewolf.

“If you do start, talk to Scott.”

“Why? Because he’ll talk me out of it?”

Stiles makes a noncommittal humming noise.

“What,” Danny pushes against the car, sitting up so his face is inches from Stiles’s, suddenly curious, “why would you care if I became a wolf?”

“It’s not just,” Stiles holds his hands up, makes them into claws, bares his teeth, “physical. It’s all of you. It’s a whole-person change. And yeah, basically you’re the same. But there are things you get with the bite, instincts you’re given, and they’re not you, they’re the wolf, and I don’t—you’re good, Danny. You’re just—change isn’t always for the better.”

Danny stares at his shoes, where they hang off the car. The words sound almost panicked, but they warm him. It’s crazy, the fact that Stiles not wanting him to change makes him feel so secure. “Hey, don’t worry.” He kicks his foot against Stiles’s. “I said I’m not thinking about it. And I promise if I ever do, I’ll talk to Scott.” He holds out his pinky, and Stiles looks at it a moment before chuckling and linking his little finger with Danny’s.

“A lot classier than a spit handshake.”

“Just as binding, though.”

Stiles takes Danny’s Blizzard cup from where he’s set it between them and attempts to lob it into the trashcan at the end of the row of cars. It lands in a spiral of melted vanilla a few feet short, and Danny shakes his head, hopping from the hood and picking up Stiles’s cup from the ground on the way to pick up his own.

Stiles grins at him when he returns. “Never said I was a basketball star.” Danny laughs and reaches out, unthinkingly wiping his sticky vanilla-ice-cream fingers on the front of Stiles’s t-shirt. Stiles glances down at his hand and then up at his face, cheeks suddenly flushed, and Danny feels an answering blush running up his neck.

“Ass,” Danny mutters, breaking the awkward moment by shoving the offending hand against Stiles’s shoulder.

Stiles laughs, nervous, high, then rushes, “I should probably get home. My dad is supposed to be off his shift at three, I wouldn’t want to risk getting grounded as an encore to my prior grounding.”

“Sure.” Danny unlocks the doors, waiting until Stiles is sitting inside before sliding in himself. Stiles lifts his feet to press against the dashboard. Anyone else would be abandoned at Dairy Queen for that move. Danny just reaches over and shoves Stiles’s feet down. He puts them back up as they’re turning out of the lot, and Danny doesn’t react at all.

Julia is sitting on his bed when he gets home that night, his laptop open on the comforter beside her.

“Your Facebook is woefully lacking in juicy gossip these days,” she informs him as he drops his keys and wallet on his desk.

“Sorry to disappoint.” The current juicy gossip of his life is enough for a soap opera, but it’s definitely not something he’ll be sharing with his little sister. She’s going to stay way the hell out of all of it.

He sits down on the end of his bed and tugs off his shoes. Julia kicks her bare foot against his leg.

“No, seriously, what have you been up to? You haven’t been tagged in any scandalous photos, no one’s posting on your timeline congratulating you on older conquests made at Jungle, and everyone’s been asking me where you are whenever I go out.”

“You’re not supposed to go out.” Danny shoots her a glare. “Seriously, you’re like twelve. No boys, no girls, no alcohol for another ten years at least.”

“Too late, bro. But I’m really tired of having all of my conversations start with questions about you. I shouldn’t have to be your babysitter. For one thing, you’re older. For another, it’s not like you’re my ticket in to these parties.”

“Who is your ticket in?” Because Danny would really like to talk to whoever the hell has allowed his sister into his social scene. Talk politely, with minimal fists involved.

“Myself,” Julia declares, waving a hand at her face, which is made-up to Lydia-like levels of perfection. Danny snorts. “Well, okay, originally Britta—senior, varsity volleyball?—invited me. But I have held my own. Except you had to go and be all mysteriously missing since summer started, so now you’re like all anyone talks about.” She tugs at a few dark strands of hair that have escaped the pile on top of her head. “Well, you and Jackson and Lydia, obviously. Do you have any insights for me?” She reaches into the pocket of her shorts, pulling out her cellphone, and Danny feels suddenly on edge.

“Why does it matter?” he asks, shifting at the end of his bed.

“Because,” the screen of Julia’s phone lights up, “I got a text from Ian tonight, asking me why you were hanging out with Stilinski at Dairy Queen when there was a wicked rager going on at Ryan’s house.”

The truth is, this shouldn’t bother Danny. Stiles, he’s coming to find, is way more fun to hang around than at least eighty percent of the people who frequent summer’s repetitive house parties. Also, near-death-by-werewolf is way more important than perfecting his game of beer pong—which is pretty damn near perfect, anyway. It’s not that he doesn’t miss the loose easiness of drinking warm beer in a room with a good portion of his high school class, because a part of him does miss that, a little bit, but the supernatural shit feels heavy and significant, something he needs to be a part of. It shouldn’t require that he defend his friends to anyone, let alone Julia.

“What’d you tell him?” he asks her, instead of saying any of this.

“That I am not your keeper.”

Danny nods. “And what’d he say?”

“Oh, that’s not all I told him. I told him that if you wanted to expand your social circle, then that was entirely your business. I told him that the way he has treated Stiles in the past is despicable. I told him that he had better never fail a history class, because Stilinski will be the first person they ask to tutor him, and if he thinks that he will pass on the opportunity to torture him back, then he is dead wrong.”

Danny doesn’t try to fight the grin that spreads across his face at that. “And what’d he say?” he repeats.

Julia waves a hand. “Something rude, it’s fine. He’s an asshole.”

Danny lets all of that sink in. “Thanks, Jules.”

“Hey, what’re sisters for?”

“Usually? To make my life miserable.”

She hops off his bed, jostling his computer dangerously near the edge with the movement. “That’s coming, don’t worry. I’m still curious about him. He’s not exactly your type.”

“He’s an asshole a lot of the time,” Danny points out, “he’s actually exactly my type.”

Julia’s answering grin is gleeful. “You do like him! You want to kiss him and ask him to prom and have little adopted babies with him!”

“Oh, get out.” Danny chucks a pillow at her. It hits her in the shoulders as she leaves, and he’s surprised at how weird it is to not have the initial reaction to flying projectiles be instant werewolf-borne catching skills.

He dreams about Stiles that night, and it’s innocent, something weird about being stuck in a Nordstrom’s with him while werewolves throw collared shirts around, but when he wakes up to a splash of cold water across his face he feels just as shaken as he would have if he had had been dreaming of Stiles naked and in his bed.

Julia’s standing over him, a water glass tipped on its side in her hand. He reaches up and tries to catch the dribble of water in his palms. Julia smirks. “Stilinski is downstairs.”

“What?” Danny waves his hand in the air and attempts to hit her, but meets her hand where it holds out his cellphone instead.

“Dead,” she tells him. “Your phone is, I mean. He says you said you were going running this morning, but that you didn’t show up and didn’t answer your phone. He didn’t say that he was worried, but it was implied.” She leans in close over him, water glass tilted at a dangerous angle again, and hisses, “It is totally true love.”

“I hate you.” Danny drops his traitorous phone on the floor and rolls out of bed. “Tell Stiles I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Will do.” She practically skips from his room, and he calls after her, “Don’t you dare say anything embarrassing to him.”

Stiles is sitting on his couch when Danny comes down, hands loose between his knees, his toe tapping out an offbeat rhythm against the carpet. Julia leans against the wall by the TV, watching Stiles but not saying anything. It is among the strangest scenes that Danny has ever walked in on.

“Hey, guess what,” Stiles says, as soon as he notices Danny, “I’m not grounded anymore.”

“Congratulations, that’ll change so much about your everyday life.” Danny shoots Julia a glare as he speaks, and she holds up her hands.

“You said not to say anything embarrassing. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So, silence.”

Stiles stands, shaking his head. “I was thinking you were trying to kill me with your mind.”

“Sorry, no superhero powers here.” She grins. It’s terrifying. Danny is seriously starting to be afraid of his little sister. “It was good meeting you, Stiles. Next time you decide to break curfew with my brother, can you give us a little something more to gossip about than what flavor of ice cream you both had?”

Stiles turns red. It would be hilarious if Danny’s entire consciousness wasn’t focused on wanting to kill Julia.

He reaches for Stiles’s wrist and drags him toward the door. “We’re going running now. If you never talk again I’ll buy you Starbucks every day for the rest of the summer.”

“Tempting, Daniel, but I cannot be bought that easily,” she calls after them.

“Your sister is scary,” Stiles tells him, as they stop at the end of the walkway to do some quick stretches.

“I think she’s been taking lessons from Lydia. It’s literally the worst thing that could have happened in my life.”

Stiles reaches his arms behind his head, pulling his shoulders back. “And that is saying something, considering your recent supernatural-related adventures.”

“Right?”

They start off on their run, Danny leading the way because the streets in this part of town are more unfamiliar to Stiles, allowing the fast pace they’ve set to prevent conversation for a while. Danny is pretty sure that what Julia had said about gossip is still sticking in Stiles’s head the way it is in his, and he’s also pretty sure that Stiles wants to discuss it about as much as he does, which is to say not really at all.

After the silence has stretched so long between them that even Danny is starting to feel uncomfortable with it, he asks, “What’s on the agenda for your first day of freedom?”

Stiles shakes his head, taking a few more breaths before responding. “I didn’t really have any plans.”

“Not going to go sit out in front of the sheriff’s office and wave at everyone who passes you?”

“Definitely not.” Stiles breathes out a laugh. “My dad would probably be confused enough by that to sit me down and a have a talk, which is something I’m decidedly not interested in participating in.”

Danny nods. “Want to stay at my place after the run, then?”

“Yeah, sure.” Stiles is grinning, Danny can hear it in his voice.

It becomes a thing. They go for runs, take hurried showers, and then hang out at whichever house they started out at until the afternoon, sometimes early evening. After a week Danny’s got clothes in both his room and Stiles’s, and one of Stiles’s sports bag is kicked behind his bedroom door. He really only notices it when the door is shut, but Julia gives him a narrow-eyed look the first time she sees it.

“He’s basically moved in,” she informs him. “You should probably just make it official. Even Dad’s starting to ask me about him. Although I don’t know why the entire world thinks that I have the answers to all questions regarding your private life. Like, seriously, why will they not ask you?”

“Because I’ll never tell them what they want to hear, and that’s all you ever tell people. Aside from me.”

“Oh, come on. I’m telling you right now: Stiles Stilinski wants you badly. I have it on good authority. And that is definitely what you want to hear.”

Danny twists around in his chair, raises an eyebrow. “Who’d you hear that from?”

Julia shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, it’s totally true.”

Danny drops his head to his desk and shakes it. Julia makes a considering noise behind him.

“You really like him, don’t you?” Her tone is softer, more like it used to be, before she hit high school and painstakingly learned deflection and sarcasm.

Danny nods his head, feeling the spiral binding of a notebook bump against the skin of his forehead.

“And you’re, what? Afraid he doesn’t like you back? Because, seriously, Danny, you cannot be that blind.”

“He likes me back. I know that.”

“So? You have a problem, what is it?”

“There’s a lot going on. In Stiles’s life, in mine.” At least, he realizes, lifting his head a little, he and Stiles are no longer in entirely separate circles. He doesn’t really care what people like Ian and Britta and all of the others his sister’s been hanging out with this summer think. He and Stiles have friends in common, and they’re all tied together by something pretty unshakeable—at least he knows he would never need to explain Stiles to people who matter. Everyone who matters realized that Stiles was important even before Danny did. “I don’t want to complicate things.”

“Daniel.” He looks at Julia. Her dark eyes are narrowed at him, her arms crossed, her lower lip sticking out a little. “You are in high school. You are a teenager. Life is meant to be complicated right now. This is when you start figuring stuff out.”

Danny bites on his right index finger to stop the hysterical laughter that bursts up at that. Life isn’t meant to be complicated the way his life is, he doesn’t think. Julia raises her eyebrows. “Seriously? Danny, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing, it’s just—Stiles hasn’t done this before.”

“So? Just don’t be an ass to him. It is not that hard.”

What if it is, though? What if Stiles pisses him off—because Stiles can, because Stiles does, because sometimes he is an obnoxious little bastard—and what if Danny reverts to treating him the way he did before the start of this summer? He knows Stiles well enough to know that that would hurt him, even if he didn’t make it obvious. And what if—and this is likely, too, weirdly likely—what if Stiles chooses the wolves over him? What if he decides Danny isn’t in it enough, what if he decides Danny shouldn’t be in it? Will he just abandon him—temporarily or otherwise?

“What if it is, though?” he asks Julia, because he has to know.

“Hard to not be an ass?” Julia cocks her head at him. “You’re usually not, you know. Most people like you because you’re nice.”

“I’m nice compared to Jackson,” Danny corrects.

“Don’t,” she holds up a palm, a scribble of pen blurred across it, a phone number, he imagines, and that makes him feel dead old, “don’t even start with that. You are good, and nice, and kind, most of the time.”

Danny looks at her for a long moment. She shifts from one foot to the other, sticks her hands in her pockets. She’s still little, he reminds himself. She’s still his younger sister. She doesn’t know everything. But she might be right about this, maybe, because most of the time when he’s with Stiles he just wants to figure him out, and when he figures something out and is disappointed by it—by the fact that Stiles’s derision for Jackson hides nothing more than more derision—Danny doesn’t want anything more than to find something else out about Stiles, something that he likes. And he always does. He’ll be pissed or disappointed one second, and then next he’ll be impressed or happy or relieved, because Stiles pisses him off sometimes but he never stays that way.

“So what do you think I should do?” Danny asks Julia.

“Kiss him, is my suggestion. Preferably before you get all sweaty from your run, or after you shower—unless you’re into that?” Julia waves her hands around, turning on her toe in his doorway. “You know what, I really don’t want to know. Please just, don’t ever say anything to me about this ever again. Go get him, leave me out of it, etcetera etcetera.”

“You’re all right, Julia.”

She’s already down the hall, but he’s pretty sure she hears him.

Scott sends out a mass text that night, declaring a pack meeting at his place. Stiles picks Danny up, even though it’s not at all on his way, and he sits in the driver’s seat, left hand tense on the steering wheel, resting his right hand against his lips during the long stretches that he doesn’t need to shift, chewing at his fingertips. Danny tries not to notice any of this, because it makes his stomach twist.

“Dude, what’s going on? You’re acting weird,” he finally asks, because he hasn’t seen Stiles this nervous in ages.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, sorry, seriously.”

“What?” Danny turns in his seat, undoing his seatbelt, knowing that if Stiles were at all himself he’d be upset by the undoing of the seat belt, because he is still a cop’s kid, murder and werewolves aside, but Stiles doesn’t yell at him because he’s staring straight ahead, barely paying attention to Danny, and that’s not normal.

“Scott’s selling this like a pack meeting, but it’s just a cookout, and his mom’s gonna be there, and he invited everyone, and it’s just—damn,” Stiles slams his palms against the steering wheel and lets out a tense laugh, “he’s normalizing it.”

Danny ducks his chin. “Normalizing?” he repeats.

“Yes. Normalizing.” Stiles lets his foot off the gas a little, Danny can feel it in the way the Jeep slows as they take a corner. “We’ll get there, and Mrs. McCall and Isaac and probably Derek will be grilling steaks, and Scott will be trying to get Erica to help him chop vegetables, and Boyd and Allison will be doing things like, like setting the table and washing dishes, and Lydia and Jackson will be directing things, and it will be—it will be normal, except for how everyone’s a werewolf and Mrs. McCall knows.”

Danny reaches a hesitant hand out to touch Stiles’s shoulder. Stiles glances at him, gaze sharp and quick, and then he turns his eyes back to the road and Danny drops his hand, feeling awkward.

“What?” Stiles waits for the silence to grow tight before he asks. “What was that look for?”

Danny thinks Stiles probably thought he looked pitying. It’s probably true. “Scott’s just trying to make this into a real friendship. Not just pack, not just life or death. He wants it to be something better, something that’s good for everyone, that works for everyone.” Except Peter, Danny reminds himself, because occasionally he needs to remind himself that there is an undead werewolf in this equation, one he hasn’t met yet. “That’s not the problem. You shouldn’t have a problem with Scott wanting all of you, all of us, to be friends. You really don’t, do you?”

He doesn’t expect Stiles to respond, and so is neither surprised nor disappointed by Stiles’s continued unnatural silence. His hands tighten on the steering wheel, though, Danny watches as his fingers whiten around the black cover.

“But Scott’s mom is going to be there.” Stiles shakes his head as Danny pauses, and then he flicks on his signal and the Jeep rolls to a stop on the shoulder. Late afternoon sunlight falls through the leaves of the trees that hang over the road, drawing webbed shadows on Stiles’s hands.

“No one’s ever told me I can’t tell my dad.” He says the words fast, like they’re meaningless, unimportant. Like he’s said them to himself so much they don’t matter anymore.

“So why don’t you?”

Stiles shakes his head, still looking out the windshield, not at Danny. “I don’t trust him.”

Danny blinks. He had not been expecting that.

“No, that’s not it, really.” Stiles is back to talking fast, back to talking like he’s got so many words they won’t fit in his mouth. “I don’t trust him to trust me enough to understand that I actually know what I’m doing for once. You know? This is, this is me and Scott and Derek and Erica and you. This is all of us. It’s not about whether or not the adults approve, no one needs to approve, because we do what we need to to take care of whatever shit’s going down. And,” he drums his palms flat against the steering wheel, high-energy slaps that leave the car humming, “you said I’m good at this. You meant that, right? You meant that I’m actually good at taking care of things.”

“You’re superb.” Danny thinks that word should come out sarcastic. He thinks he should be embarrassed when it doesn’t. He isn’t.

“So I won’t tell my dad for selfish reasons. Even though it might help in his job. Even though it might help him be safer just as much as it might make things more dangerous for him. I don’t want to lose this.”

“That makes sense.” Danny looks out the side window instead of looking at Stiles. “And, you know, even if you’re not doing it for necessarily the right reasons, it still might be the right thing.”

“Right,” Stiles doesn’t sound like he agrees, but Danny won’t push it. Stiles drops his hand to the gearshift, and Danny watches as he pulls them back onto the road. He can’t think of much but Stiles’s hands and the way he touches everything, like it’s not real until he’s held it.

“Do you want to skip tonight?” he asks, instead of telling Stiles that he wants his hands on him, instead of telling Stiles that he thinks he’s ready, instead of asking Stiles whether he’d understand if Danny kissed him now, whether he’d know that he means it.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, but he’s still driving towards Scott’s.

“Seriously, Stiles. We don’t need to go. You text Scott, I’ll text Jackson, say we can’t make it. We don’t need to explain ourselves. We don’t need to do anything.”

Stiles glances at him. “I want to take you up on that. Really badly, I do. But Scott—I can’t do that to him right now.”

“Why not now?” Danny asks. They’re on Scott’s road. He’s pretty sure they’ll be within hearing distance of the wolves soon, although the rumbling of Stiles’s Jeep will probably block much of what they’re saying.

Stiles shrugs, a full-body movement. “Something’s off. He put a lot of effort into planning this, I’m not gonna be the one to fuck it up.” He grins at Danny, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

Danny thinks about what Jackson said about jealousy as he and Stiles get out of the Jeep and go around to the back of the Scott’s house, where, just like Stiles guessed, Isaac and Derek and Mrs. McCall are standing over a grill, arguing about the best way to cook steak. It’s surreal.

The whole night is actually surreal, and what Stiles had been saying about Scott wanting to make everything normal makes a lot more sense. Normal seems a lot stranger after he’s watched Derek pick corn out from between his front teeth with a finger, after he’s heard Isaac and Jackson get into a serious argument over whether it’s worse to overcook or undercook your meat, after Lydia and Allison and Mrs. McCall gang up on him and Jackson and get them to wash the dishes. The only technically abnormal thing about the whole night (even if the whole thing feels really fucking abnormal, if Danny’s honest about it) is the way Scott and Stiles are not speaking to each other.

Mrs. McCall spends a good five minutes quizzing Stiles on where he’s been all summer, Stiles going evasive and talking into his plate, mumbling about groundings and running, and Scott sinks further and further into his chair the more they talk. They nod at each other when they both reach for the bowl of macaroni salad at the same time, neither of them taking it, the awkwardness stretching until Erica reaches in and takes some for herself, passing the bowl to Stiles when she’s done, who gives it to Derek, who gives it to Scott. Lydia says something to Stiles about how she’s excited to see how Danny and he do in cross country, and Scott shoots her a look that seems almost challenging. The whole thing feels like a mess. Danny wants to shake both of them until they realize that whatever they’re doing is really childish. Like middle school, except he, like everyone else in Beacon Hills, knows that Scott and Stiles never fought in middle school.

Jackson goes silent while he and Danny are at the sink, taking the rinsed glasses Danny hands him and placing them so carefully in the top rack of the dishwasher that they don’t make any noise. Danny nudges him with his shoulder, and Jackson jerks his head toward the side, toward the screen door. If Danny narrows his eyes, he can just make out the shapes of Scott and Stiles, standing at the very edge of the dim light thrown across the back deck from the kitchen.

Danny raises his eyebrows at Jackson, who nods, like that’s an answer, and reaches for the next glass.

When Scott and Stiles come back inside, they’re both shuffling their feet a little, and Scott refuses to look at either Danny or Jackson. Stiles glances at Danny fast and then away, cheeks red, and Danny has no idea what’s going on, but Scott and Stiles are talking to each other normally again, so that, at least, is an improvement.

Derek leaves first, and soon after Erica and Boyd trail out, Erica gripping onto Boyd’s hand. Allison leaves, and then Jackson and Lydia share a significant look and get up. “Come on,” Lydia says to Danny.

But Stiles reaches out and grabs onto Danny’s wrist. “No, I’m taking him home.”

“It’s on our way,” Lydia points out.

“It was for you to bring him, too,” Stiles replies.

Jackson nods at Stiles, a strange and sort of polite bow of his head, and wraps an arm around Lydia’s waist. “See you losers later.” He doesn’t specify that Danny isn’t a loser, which makes Danny feel good, for some reason. Like he’s been lumped with Stiles (and Scott and Isaac, but whatever) and that’s a good thing.

Stiles stands after the lights from Jackson’s Porsche sweep across the windows. “I’ll text you tomorrow,” he tells Scott, and Scott chucks a pillow after them, which is weird but, finally, not unusual.

Stiles doesn’t say anything until they’re at the stop sign at the end of Scott’s road. “My dad’s working tonight,” he says, and it means something, the way he says it. “Want to stay over?”

“Yeah.” There’s not really much to say, after that, and Stiles takes the few streets between his house and Scott’s as Danny tugs his phone out of his pocket and texts his mom to let her know he’s staying at a friend’s house. He says it just like that. She texts him back, a simple Be safe, and he’s sure he has reasons to resent his parents, but he legitimately can’t think of any at the moment.

They don’t talk at all as they get out of the Jeep and Stiles unlocks his door, and they head through the house to Stiles’s bedroom. They don’t say anything in the doorway to Stiles’s room, or as Danny leans against the wall by the desk and Stiles opens dresser drawers noisily.

Danny thinks about what Julia said earlier. “Did Scott think I was being an ass to you?”

Stiles starts, jerking around from his drawers with a t-shirt in one hand and a pair of socks in the other. “No?” Danny raises his eyebrows. “Well, sort of. He said I didn’t understand what was going on. He said that if I didn’t understand what was going on then I should probably start hanging out with him again. He said a lot of stuff. I think he was,” Stiles rolls his lip between his teeth, “jealous? Which is dumb, because he picked Isaac first.”

Danny wants to address that last part, but he wants to address the first part more. “Do you understand what’s going on?” he asks, and Stiles releases his lip, his mouth falling open a little.

“Yeah,” Stiles’s voice is rough. He’s never sounded that way before, and it hits Danny right in the gut.

When they kiss, because it takes only tiny seconds for Danny to get from Stiles’s desk to Stiles’s place by the dresser, when they kiss, it’s hot and messy, lips and teeth and tongue. It’s loud, because Stiles moans like he’s got something crazy in him. Danny wants his hands everywhere, but he wants Stiles’s hands everywhere more, and they’re just settled on the small of his back, like he’s something precious, not to be undone yet, and he bites at Stiles’s lower lip because he can.

They don’t do much that first night. Or, they do a lot of kissing. They push each other into Stiles’s bed and web around each other. Danny doesn’t let his hands drift under Stiles’s shirt, because Stiles’s hands stay firmly on cotton, not even moving over denim. He’s not sure what it is that’s setting up boundaries for them—he trusts Stiles enough to want him to touch every bit of him. He wants Stiles everywhere.

But while Stiles’s hands are hesitant, his mouth is open and wanting and wet, and Danny pushes into that, takes everything he can from Stiles’s lips, and when they finally drift into a tired and hazy tangle, Stiles’s mouth finds a place on Danny’s neck and stays there. And so the slowness of his hands, the softness with which he touches the hem and collar of Danny’s t-shirt, that seeming reluctance is completely belied by the urgency of his mouth. Danny hasn’t done this in a long time, this learning thing, this kissing thing. He hasn’t met someone outside of Jungle in so long that he’s forgotten if he ever even knew the way this sort of thing feels. He knows that Stiles isn’t just looking for sex, and neither is he, and that, somehow, has completely undone everything Danny thought he knew about relationships, about love and lust.

His hand is tucked beneath Stiles’s shirt when he wakes up, hot against the smoothness of Stiles’s back, going there in their sleep when he respected boundaries awake, but Stiles doesn’t seem to care. They roll away from each other, limbs tight and uncoordinated, and Stiles rubs at the back of his neck and Danny scrubs a little at the spot of dried spit on his throat, and then Stiles says, “Run?” and Danny nods, says, “Then breakfast?” and everything is back to normal, except it’s all a little better.

Danny is surprised to come home after the run and the breakfast and a little more soft maple syrupy kissing to find his room empty. He had thought that Julia would be sitting on his bed, ready to taunt him about spending the night at Stiles’s, because of course she’d have assumed that’s where he was.

But she’s not there. The house is empty, both his parents off at work, Julia somewhere, and he finds himself with a lot of time to overthink.

He’s into round two of what if it’s just a friends with benefits thing would that be bad should it be something more or should we start off there or should I call Stiles or how much, really, has changed, when Lydia texts him.

How was your night last night? she asks, and he turns bright red without anyone there to see him blush, turns bright red even though nothing happened except kissing, turns bright red even though he is not the blushing type, except, apparently, where Stiles is concerned. He got his first kiss at fourteen from a seventeen year-old at a lacrosse party he and Jackson snuck into, a senior who had no idea that he was just an incoming freshman. He got his first hand job that same year, first blowjob the year after, first time with someone inside him when he was still fifteen, just barely, after a really terrible series of tequila shots and poor life choices, from a man who kissed his shoulders when he came and made it—if not good, if not right, if not what Danny would have wanted when sober—then all right, he made it okay.

Danny is not a blusher, and he’s blushing at a fairly innocent question with a mostly innocent answer. There’s more insinuated in his silence than there will be when he texts back, Good. We kissed. A lot. so he lets the question hang unanswered while his blush fades.

When he finally does respond to Lydia, she makes him wait a good fifteen minutes for a reaction, and then she sends a Finally. The sexual tension was literally painful to witness, and Danny turns his phone off so he can go back to freaking out about what this means in peace.

It occurs to him sometime in the mid-afternoon that Stiles may be having just as much of a crisis as he is. Possibly more of one, considering that Danny is fairly certain Stiles has never done anything before. He’s actually pretty sure Stiles believed that he was straight up until at least their freshman year, and so this may be even more confusing for him.

He turns his phone back on and finds a few missed texts from Jackson, congratulating him and then begging him not to give any details, one from Derek saying that they’re having a pack meeting (an actual one, not a cookout) in two nights, and one from Stiles, just saying, Text me when you get the chance.

He calls instead.

“What’s up?”

Stiles’s intake of breath is enough to bring the night before back in full force, and Danny wishes he’d never left Stiles’s house that afternoon.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Stiles says, after a few seconds of them breathing into each other’s ears, “and I know it’s probably not cool to admit that or whatever but you know me, I think, and you also know that this is, like, super new territory for me. We’re talking uncharted, so.”

“Stiles,” Danny tries to interrupt, but Stiles’s voice keeps boiling.

“Are we actually doing something here? I mean, like, obviously we did something, but are we going to continue doing…that? I know I told you that I understood what was going on and I did, I sort of did, I did enough to know that last night was in the cards, but is it still in them?”

Danny thinks about asking what Stiles wants. But he’s not sure if Stiles will tell him, and he’s not sure if he’ll believe him if he does. So he says, “I want it to be.”

“You do?” Stiles’s voice is tentative.

“Do you?” Danny is impatient, suddenly, and he knows that that’s unfair. But he had left Stiles’s house feeling confident, and something in the last six hours has thrown both he and Stiles into mirroring pits of self-doubt, and that is really unacceptable. And he knows it’s because this is so new, so unexpected—well, not recently. Recently, he’d expected it. But the newness is making it all seem shaky, when he and Stiles, well, they’re really not all that shaky at all.

“Well, yeah. Obviously.”

“What do you mean, obviously?” Danny sits still, listens to Stiles breathe on the other end, thinks about all the ways Stiles could answer that question.

“Danny, I’ve been falling over you all summer. I will take almost whatever you want to give me.”

“Almost?” Danny fixes on that word. “Say we say we’re dating. Is that something you’ll take?”

It sounds like Stiles’s lungs empty in one breath. “That,” he says, “that I will definitely take. No question.”

“All right, then.”

“All right,” Stiles agrees.