Derek climbed into Stiles’ window. He froze because everything felt wrong. Stiles wasn’t sitting at his computer flipping through a million tabs. Or doing homework. Or playing videogames. No, he was lying in bed. Doing nothing. Still. Derek had never seen Stiles be so still. So used to Stiles’ frenetic energy. All flailing limbs and enthusiasm. Not to mention the smell in the room. It was heavy. None of the brightness Derek was used to....
People always ask if it’s hard dating Derek. Stiles gets it. He does. Derek is a broken man. His life too filled with loss and pain for him to be anything else. Stiles can’t even pretend that the love a good man will heal him. (He’s the good man, btw.) He can’t even pretend that time or whatever trite platitude will heal Derek. Stiles saw how the loss of his pack broke Peter....
“Look, Scott, the whole soul mate thing is total bullshit. Destiny or whatever puts some random mark on you and some other people and, bam, that’s the person you should spend your life with? Hard pass. What about free will, man?” Stiles is ranting and flailing so he doesn’t notice the dude he bumps into. Not until he feels is soul mark flare and he realizes that, shit, he just found his soul mate during a rant about how soul mates are bullshit....
It’s only been a few weeks since the nogitsune was given its eviction notice when Stiles shows up at Derek’s door clutching his pillow. Stiles knocks. It’s the first time he’s ever knocked when he knew Derek was home. To Derek, this is, perhaps, one of the biggest signs of how deeply the possession has impacted Stiles. In the past, Stiles never once hesitated to barge in, regardless of how Derek felt about it....
Stiles was a ghost. Or invisible. Or something. No one could see or hear him. He couldn’t interact with the world. The problem was that he didn’t understand how he’d arrived at his current non-corporeal—or was it intangible?—state. It was odd. Not to mention somewhat distressing. He could remember yesterday. He’s pretty sure he went to bed but can’t quite remember. Stiles also doesn’t remember waking up—he’s not dreaming, he totally counted his fingers....
Stiles tells people that he ‘used’ to have panic attacks. As if it were past tense. It isn’t. He still has them. He just learned how to have them quietly so that he wouldn’t worry his dad anymore. After his mom died and his dad lost himself to grief for a while, Stiles didn’t want to add anything more to his dad’s plate. So after he’d been pushed into therapy, he pretended that they went away....
Stiles once told Derek that sarcasm was his best defense. He hadn’t been lying. Problem was, that sarcasm wasn’t a really good defense against people (hunters) willing to torture ‘human traitors’, aka Gerard Argent. All his life, Stiles had been told to ‘shut up’. To be quiet. That he was noisy and annoying. All his life. It was why Scott was his only friend. Even Scott, though, got fed up once in a while....
Stiles is a virgin. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows because he whines about it at any given opportunity. He thinks it’s especially unfair given that he has a smoking hot werewolf boyfriend. So far, though, Derek refuses to sleep with him. Stiles would think it was about his age, except they kill people/creatures on a semi-regular basis. Fucking his hot twenty-two-year-old boyfriend when he’s seventeen just doesn’t seem all that bad in comparison....
1 His chest is heaving and he feels panic clawing at his control. Everything inside of him is screaming at him to keep running. Derek hasn’t seen Kate since the day before the fire. Well, in person at least. He’s seen her in his nightmares often enough. That scene back in the burnt-out shell of his house could’ve been taken straight out of his nightmares. He can’t help but shudder at the things she’d said…...
Stiles runs away on a perfectly ordinary day. He leaves a note for his father: I want to live. Sorry. It’s a perfectly ordinary day when Mischief returns to Beacon Hills. Mischief knows no one expected him to come to his dad’s funeral. He’s the kid who ran away. Broke his dad’s heart. The heartbreak is what really killed him, they say. He stands tall. Ignores the whispering. Doesn’t give a eulogy....